In Our Time - Decline and Fall

Episode Date: February 21, 2013

David Bradshaw, John Bowen and Ann Pasternak Slater join Melvyn Bragg to discuss Evelyn Waugh's comic novel Decline and Fall. Set partly in a substandard boys' public school, the novel is a vivid, often riotous portrait of 1920s Britain. Its themes, including modernity, religion and fashionable society, came to dominate Waugh's later fiction, but its savage wit and economy of style were entirely new. Published when Waugh was 24, the book was immediately celebrated for its vicious satire and biting humour.With:David Bradshaw Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, OxfordJohn Bowen Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of YorkAnn Pasternak Slater Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in May 1928, the Times Literary Supplement published a long review of a new book about Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The reviewer wasn't terribly impressed by the work of the poet's 24-year-old biographer, who was referred to throughout the article as Miss Evelyn Wall. It's a mistake that would never be made again. Within a few months, Evelyn War was a household name, the latest sensation of literary London. The book that made him famous was not the Rosetta biography,

but a comic novel published shortly afterwards. Its title was Decline and Fall. It was immediately hailed by reviewers, including Arnold Bennett, and it sold in prodigious quantities. Centres on the misadventures of a young man, Paul Pennefeather, decline and fall abounds in dark humour, cruel satire, and memorable caricature.

It launched the career of one of the 20th century's best known and best novelists, but also prompted accusations of obscenity and immorality. With me to discuss Evelyn Wall's novel Decline and Fall are David Bradshaw, Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford, John Bowen, Professor of 19th Century Literature at the University of York, and Anne Pasternak Slater, Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. David Bradshaw, can we begin by talking a bit about war himself before the novel? What about his early life?

Yeah, he was born in West Hampstead in 1903, He was the son of Arthur War, who was then managing director of Chapman and Hall, great literary publisher of Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray. His brother, Alec, was also a novelist and travel writer, but more in a kind of sub-Somerset Mour mode. And at an early age, we have evidence of the age of six. He wrote a piece called The Curse of the Horse Race, which sounds like it's addressing our equine.

anxieties, but in fact it was written in 1910. And after that, we have evidence of him dressing up as an altar boy and rearranging his bedroom as a sort of shrine. So, you know, in view of his conversion to Catholicism in 1930, he was a very pious man. His brother and his father both went to Sherbourne School in Dorset, but in 1915, Alec was expelled from that school because of some homosexual incidents and in 17 he wrote a book called the Lume of Youth in which he recounted all his experiences

at Sherban much to the embarrassment of the school. This caused a sensation so when Arthur was looking around for school for Evelyn he chose Lansing College in Sussex which was famous for its high Anglican piety and it was there that

war went in 1917 and throughout his school years and throughout his time at university he was always seen as a very skilled draftsman somebody who was very interested in history of painting and you know was really interested in graphic design towards the end of his time at lansing war founded a corpse club for those as he said who were sort of bored stiff with life but mainly we know we have this view of really been quite a model pupil. He ended up getting a scholarship to Hartford College, Oxford, to read history. And he left Lansing in December 1921 and went up to Hartford in 1922.

Before, he was 24 and decline and fall was published. Had he written anything of significant... I mentioned the Rossetti in the introductory. What else had he written of Signatory? He'd written a lot of stories as an undergraduate. He'd started a novel called the Template Thatch, Thatch being a country house, which was abandoned when Harold Acton was very negative about it. He wrote a very interesting story called The Balance, which very much draws on cinema and is extremely avant-garde, really, given the fact it was published in something called Georgian Stories.

A Georgian story, it isn't, but just so happened his brother was editing Georgian stories that time. he also wrote a film called Scarlet Woman which is about the Dean of Balliol's attempts to convince the King of England to become a Catholic again and moving on to the Rosetti book this was a very significant thing because following eminent Victorians in 1918 writing biography in the 20s couldn't have been more modish

1928 the year that Rosetti comes out as the same year that Orlando comes out. So it's a very interesting choice that his first book is a biography. It's in its treatment of the Victorian man is, of course, it's very anti-heroic. Rossetti is to war like a marionette, just as Paul Pennefer.

There's a puppet in the hands of Evening War. John Byrne, can you give us a brief outline of decline in form? Okay. It's a story about a very nice young man called Paul Pennyfeather, who's reading quietly for the church at Skone College in Oxford. He drinks a pint and a half of beer every day, smokes four ounces of tobacco. And one evening he's coming back from a very interesting meeting, and he meets the Bollinger Club, who are drunken, uncouth, aristocrats, shady young men from London. Based on the Bullington Club?

Yes, exactly, which has many eminent members. And they debag him. and he runs across the courtyard and for this he is expelled. They take up his trousers for those who don't immediately get debanked. Yes, they take off his trousers and being smashed over various other people's rooms

smashed up a grand piano, put a piece down the lavatory and so on. Yes, anybody, someone who has black sheets, they attack him too. So then Paul is expelled and so he decides to become a schoolmaster because that's the only available job and goes to the most dreadful school

full of lunatics and eccentrics in Wales called Lannaba Castle. There, one of the boys that he teaches is called Peter Beast Cheating, who has an extraordinarily glamorous and beautiful mother called Margot. And then Paul goes to be his tutor, and they fall in love.

And Margot and he are about to get married. She's extraordinarily rich, I mean, unbelievably rich. It just has to be mentioned because of what follows, yeah. But her wealth comes from brothels in South America and there's a problem with these dancing clubs or brothels

and Paul is sent to sort them out on the very eve of his wedding, the very morning of his wedding he's then arrested for white slaving and is sentenced to seven years in prison he then goes to prison where he meets many of the strange characters that he'd already met in school who somehow had emigrated into

either being a prison chaplain or a prisoner At the very end of the novel, after all these adventures, Margot arranges his escape, and he returns to the very place that he began as an undergraduate reading for the church. And disguised as his cousin. Disguise as his cousin. Because he's officially dead.

It's been fixed by Margot. Exactly. He seems to be able to fix most things. What are the literary influences on decline and fall? It's interesting. They're both negative ones and positive ones. I think he's learning. a lot from an author like Hemingway.

He says he's very interested in the way that people speak when they're drunk in Hemingway. So it's not the macho side of Hemingway, but the technical side. There's an author not much read now called Ronald Furbank, who writes these rather camp novels, full of fantasy,

but also he's very good at writing dialogue where people don't quite meet in their conversation. I think war is very influenced by him. And negatively, he's reacting against a whole tradition of Victorian humour, which he sees as sentimental. he thinks humour should be not be soft at all that you shouldn't feel sympathy or empathy for the characters

and so satire which the Victorians had been very sceptical of had tended to be rather weak in the 19th century apart from one or two exceptions and so with war you see the return of a much sharper toothed satire into the English novel but he did he does seem to be influenced by Dickens and very aware of Dickens. He is.

And in the caricature, in even the names, Lady Circumference and her son, Little Lord Tangent, and even in the names, we're in Dickens' territory, aren't you? Yes, and Vagan too. And, of course, it's very important to him because his father works for Chapman and Hall, who were Dickens' publishers. And so he, in a way, becomes the most important

Chapman and Hall author after Dickens. But what he says he likes about Dickens is the character and the fantasy, and he hates the moments where Dickens gives you all the emotion. So the death of Joe, the crossing sweeper he loaves. He thinks that the novelist should give you the character

the action and the sequence and leave it to the author, to the reader to infer the emotion. So that's part of the kind of callousness or brutality or impersonality of the way that he writes. Some of this might be surprised to know that he also studied Ulysses, James George Ulysses,

very closely through a commentator on Ulysses and took notes from that. It's very interesting. Late in life, he's extraordinarily dismissive of Joyce. He says, dismissive of Joyce, he likes He eulses. He dismisses of what Joyce did afterwards. Yes, he says it's gibberish. The Americans bribed him to write gibberish.

That's right. He says that. And you can see him going mad page by page, he says. He starts off quite interesting. And so I think Joyce is a big rival to him in a way as the great comic novelist of that period. And so that's why later in life he feels he has to be so dismissive of him. But clearly he's interested in those technical developments at the time. And past an axe later, what other influences do you think? We've mentioned a few of the authors, there's Huxley as well, might have influenced him, people

but what other influences are apparent in the book? Well, I think that everything I wanted to say has been touched on, but very briefly. I think that the use of cinema is very important in the way he writes and the film that he didn't just write he made,

the Scarlet Woman which is set in Oxford. He plays the Dean of Balliol in a blonde wig and he also doubles as a dissolute young lord with a burnt corp moustache. And this use of hats, wigs,

you know, wooden legs as a creation of character is something that goes over into decline and fall. And the technique of the film, the quick cutting, the speed of the narrative, all of that, is then used again in his short story,

the balance, which is where he really comes into his own and finds his voice. And it is written as the a story of a silent film and it has a narrative that's in three layers

and they're distinguished in typographical terms so that the main narrative is in ordinary Roman type and the captions are in bold and they give the essential bits of dialogue and narrative so it's very very compressed

and then there's also an italicised commentary from two housemaids and a pretentious Cambridge undergraduate in the audience. So it's extremely modern in the way that it splices together three different narratives and in its brevity and concision.

War once said that he thought every good novel could be written on two postcards and you can see that capacity for compression and tactful omission even in the balance. And one of the other important

things about the influence of Furbank on him was that he said, He said that Fairbank liberated novelists from the, from being fettered by the chain of cause and effect. It looks as though there is no rationale to what happens. And at the same time, the fragments of dialogue that Furbank scatters like bright plumage across his texts, actually, if you look at it, the obscurity, he says, turns into radiant lucidity, and you recognise an outrageous submerged narrative. Submerged narrative, but you draw attention to in the case of Little Lord Tangent.

Exactly. We hear four tiny references to him from his foot being grazed by the starter's pistol in a race at this dreadful school that we're going to come to, and then the foot goes black later, just half a sentence. Then half a sentence the leg is amputated, and then throw away way deep in the book, he's dead. Yes, that's right. But we fill in the gaps quite easily.

Yes, but we probably don't fill in the gaps quite so easily of the story of the schoolmaster Grimes and one of the other schoolboys, Clutterbuck, which War was only able to tell fully in his autobiography, right at the end of his life. We haven't said quite enough about war's time at Oxford. David Bradshaw took us there to Hartford College where he started very modestly and well,

and then all hell broke loose when he met a lot of rich aristocrats in Christchurch and fell in with them, with hedonism and drinking and high living of various sorts. Yes, I mean actually I don't think that that is so important for decline and fall.

This gay life or this riotous life is something that... He uses gay and awful lot in the old sense, doesn't it? Yes, he does. One has to be careful. You get it very vividly at the very beginning of decline and fall with the dissolute lords and the

sort of Scottish nobility from lads from granite hovels and the rest of it all rolling into Oxford for the Willingdon all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for the Beano he says it's a tremendous anti-climax at the end of

the paragraph which is a characteristic rhetorical motif in the novel. Bring a demotic word at the end of this great Augustine sentence. Yes but actually what I think is more interesting is the influence of his time

at the school, and Lanabur Castle, well, it was called Arnold House, but it becomes Lanabur Castle in Decline and Fall. And War was very interested in the way that he used his autobiographical material for his novels. He said that it's not just a matter of listening to conversations behind a screen and jotting them down. You have to go through absolutely everything in your life. A great rubbish tip of smoking and dusty. and you rummage in it for dented valuables. You pull them out, you polish them up,

and you set them in a coherent order. And one of the things that was really interesting to me was that in his letters and his diaries and finally in his autobiography, he picks out the stairs in the school where he was teaching, which the school is built on the side of a hill. So if you go in at the ground floor and go up two flights, you find yourself on the ground floor again

and this pattern of rise and fall is something that happens all the way through the novel Can we David Bradshaw take up that and talk about beginning with the school talk about the way he went through the rubbish of his experience but also plucked out characters who appeared in the novel and he had to disguise them quite heavily and changes he had to make early on against possibilities of liable

although he admitted not admitted He just opened up about it later on in his life. So any of the characters you can, just a few, you can pick out for listeners to know who they might have been based on and why that's important. If it's not important, let's move on. Well, one of the first I think we should mention

is the dean of Hartford and his tutor, Crutwell, with whom he developed an implacable enmity. This is a man who despaired of war, the more kind of dissolute his life became during this hedonistic phase. and in novel after novel he Crutwell reappears as an ignominious

or foolish or idiotic character Well poor El Crutwell Well poor L Crutwell died in 1941 A premature death insane At some sort of asylum near Bristol So I mean I think That's the question It really got to him

So Crutwell appears in decline You're not suggesting he died insane Because war had pursued him through his novels I think he waited with deep anxiety for every war book came out. He appears in at least seven of them after Declan Four. He's a burglar.

Is there a violent burglar in Decline 4, then a Conservative MP? So there's Crutwell, and one of the people he meets at Flanabar Castle is Dick Young, who he calls monotonously pederastic. And it's this character who's possibly the most engaging

figure in the whole book who keeps coming back from the dead and is always in the soup, but nevertheless is kind of uncrushable. I think he and War used to go to Mrs. Roberts' pub in Clanaba of an evening, and of course that's what Paul and Grimes do in the novel. So Dick Young, I think, is a very important source. Philbrick was the name of a bailiol undergraduate

who wore took an extreme dislike to when he was a student. He seems to profited by people he disliked. Yes. I mean in literary times. Beast cheating or Best Chapman. These are two names he saw on a new college staircase, which came back. It is a kind of Romano Clay like a lot of his novels are. So Mr. Jack Spire of the London Hercules is J.C. Squire of the London Mercury.

David Lennox, the photographer. Little David Lennox is Cecil Beaton. So he is of somebody who combed his life continuously. in it for his fiction. But I think probably Grimes is the most important one. Lady circumference was Alex. He was gay in our sense of the word as well as a doctorate. I think one of the great loves of his life was Alec,

Alistair Graham, and his mother, is Jesse Graham, as the original of Lady's Circumference. She was very sort of cross sort of person who was very high mind, lots of opinions as well. so Lady's circumference is Oter comes from When she comes to the sports day corrects everybody about everything

and is always right but always ignored She's terrific about flowers The ladies like ladies circumference Are just implacable about flowers John Bowen People call it a comic novel I call it a common novel But it's different from the comic novels

Being written a few years earlier And it sets the turn for a lot of comic novels written since I mean Joseph Heller for example I thought it was the most wonderful novel and the most inspirational novel that he'd read for his books and on it goes. So, what was new about it? Well, I think it's the move from humour to satire, so it's recovering a whole tradition

that's there in the Augustan period in the 18th century, like Swift in particular, or fielding, say. So that the Victorians felt constantly they had to feel sympathy with characters. Whereas part of the joy and pleasure of reading a war novel is the sheer delight in destruction in the fact that King's Thursday gets destroyed or that King's Thursday is a modernist house built by this fabulously ritual

she knocks down the most magnificent Tudor residence and the perfect Tudor residence she raised it to the ground and we'll come back to it in a minute who built it but a thoroughly modern place which everybody loves and there's a glee in that destruction so at the very beginning of the novel the dons are watching out of the window

as the Bollinger Club do their worst with a real excitement and pleasure in that. Beying for the sound of broken glass. And they're going, please God, make them attack the chapel. So they'll get more port. And then they get more port.

So they can be fine. And we get lined up with that, I think, so that we start to enjoy the pleasure in destruction too. And the Lord Tangent Death, you could tell it in much more sentimental ways, but there's no sentiment in the way that war tells it. So it's a comedy that, in a way, he'd be a great stand-up comedian.

He's got the ability to, he's got the aggression, he's got the kind of face, he can do the funny voices, he can... Everybody tells stories, don't they? In the case of Sir Solomon Filbric, he tells different stories about himself on about nine occasions. Absolutely. It's a fantasy novel about fantasists. There's all these mad monologists in the novel who keeps stopping Paul and telling him, you know, telling him these extraordinary life stories. So either dialogue is very banal or it's suddenly changed. charged with this amazing fantasy life that those characters have been. And mimicry too. And high mimicry. High mimicry. I think it's important, Melvin, that

you know, that tangent is shot with Philbrick's service revolver because it's one of these legacies of the war in the book that Prendi, when he's running the heats for the school sports, says that sending the boys out, of course they don't come back, they all hide in the trees, is like sending troops over

and hardly any of them came back. And that sense of a world where everything's fallen apart, there is no permanence and that the older generations failed it is kind of counteracts the knockabout farce in the book and gives it the sort of substance which makes it, I think, very

which accounts for it sort of surviving as a text. Sorry, the sense of great emotion being held back all the time. Prendi is Prendergast, another school teacher who had doubts by him being a clergyman and he had doubts, he didn't know,

Emily Wood who was here at all, and he became a schoolteacher instead, and he had a game to a terrible end, which we will talk about in a moment. But Anne Passenaclite is often described as a satirical novel. Indeed, we have around this table. What were the main objects of his satire? I've already talked about the Welsh in the trial, and I don't want to give even more grief to John Humphrey's, but they were one of the objects of this. Well, there are very obvious and clear object as his satire like the prison reformer Lord Wilfrid Lucas Dockery, who is based on a double-barreled

AGM governor of prisons who wrote a book about prison reform in 1927, so it's just before DeLanan Fall. And Lucas Dockery is interested, not in the old rules of punishment and discipline, but in psychoanalytical experiments and trying to provide prisoners with creative opportunities. which turn to terrible effects which will come to. And similarly, he has a clear target in the League of Nations,

which was pursuing the white slave trade in women and children. And they brought out a report in 1921, which is what leads to the South American brothels that Mago runs. It's an interesting that keeps happening. he is on the side of those whom he suspects or goads, those who thinks he's on the wrong side. Instead of being for Potts, the League of Nationsmen, who's a contemporary of Paul,

who's trying to do good and stop the white slave trade, he's clearly on the side of the white slave trade and of the women employed in it. He does that all the time, doesn't it? Yes, Grimes' first wife is fulfilling a career, the only career that nature fitted her for in becoming one of these ladies. But I think that war is always

quite schizophrenic in his his gusto in the illicit and his moral objections to it so that John was saying how we all enjoy the Bollinger Club running wild at the beginning of the novel but actually at the same time I think we're appalled when Paul is sent down for indecency

when he's the victim of this and immediately his guardian disinherits him because he's now no longer a respectable person. He's not allowed to continue to live with his guardian because the guardian has a young daughter. And what I think is actually important about the novel is that is not the minor objects of his satire,

but the general sense that this is a world in which there are no lasting, no durable ideals. The actual phrase comes up more than once. And it's not only, it's pre-Catholic. As I think David pointed out, he doesn't convert to Roman Catholicism, although there's a piety in his deep background until a few years later.

But there's no morality either, really. He's turning everything on his head. But can we move on to the idea of modernism, David Bradshaw, which will surprise some of the listeners who think that even was set back there. He's pickled in conservatism. But he took on modernism in his writing, and then he also attacked it with this architect Cailinus,

who built the new modern house on this place of the beautiful Tudor Manor house, Can you tell us about him and why he interests war? Yeah, I think he's based on Lecabousier. One of Lecobuzier's mantras was the house of a machine for living in. It's very anti-humanistic, and Otto Cilinus is a kind of strangely repellent figure in the book. And as you say, what he does, because, of course, Kings Thursday that he creates

is also knocked down again. So the idea of the impermanence of these modernist creations in sort of rubber and aluminium and glass is contrasted with the long-standing heritage of the Marion Tudor House. So he's attacking that sort of fashionable interest in modernist architecture. I think the really interesting is an attack on psychoanalysis. Sir William Lucas Dockery is very interested in this modern penology where the, the criminals are encouraged to bring out their deepest repressed instincts. And of course, this is disastrous for Prendi, who has his head soren off.

And I think he's also attacking... While we're here, we might... We've mentioned that title on rambling it. Prendigast also got sent to prison, Mr. Prendergast. Yes. No, he doesn't get sent to prison. Sorry, sorry. He's a prison chaplain. He becomes a prison chaplain as a modern churchman.

He can't go back in church and go into prison. And a religious maniac, yes. Your psychoanalyst chap says, So he really is basically a carpenter. We must give him back the creative tools of his trade. And when he goes, well, Mr. Prenderg, he has a hammer and a saw, and he saws Mr. Prendergast head off in the cell. And there we go.

So he's a Calvinist, and Prendi's a kind of mild and feeble Anglican. And I think this kind of, you know, Protestant interneissine struggles are quite interesting, given the move. I mean, I see it as quite a sort of Catholic novel, you see. I think its relationship, the relationship between decline and fall and Bridesheader you visited is like the relationship between the Wasteland and say Ash Wednesday.

Do you think that, I'm the person that related, do you see a connection with books coming out, we've talked about the connection with Ulysses, but there's T.S. Eliot's the Wasteland. You see connections there. He refers to the Wasteland, doesn't he? Not in this, but in there. Yes, he bought Elliot's poems in 1926

and says, you know, they're fantastic, but very difficult to understand. He uses a semi-quote from the wasteland in the title of a handful of dust. I see fear. Yes. I think that there's a strong influence, a modernist influence, in the idea of vegetation myths and cycles of birth, death and resurrection. In modernism, in the wasteland, and also very significantly in,

a handful of, in decline and fall. And actually, I myself don't see it as Catholic at all. I see it as completely fortuitous and what war would later have called humanist. The novel is ruled by Fortune, a much maligned lady. The Wheel of Fortune. Generally, the Wheel of Fortune is seen to make people drop from high estate to low, but she's maligned,

because in the novel, people are constantly being recreated, those that are capable of it, like Grimes. And briefly, Paul, with Margot's help, and Margot. Margot says that on the eve of her second, at least, marriage to Paul, she feels, my dear, just too, too virginal, you know, positively debutante, she's refreshed in the most miraculous way. She comes to check the night before the marriage, she comes in the middle of the night,

to check that everything is really going to be okay. Yes, so we know that she isn't that fresh either. So in wars handling, I think that the idea is that actually it's completely fortuitous, whether you rise or fall. It depends on whether you're dynamic or static. And that is why there are so many stories in the novel of people recreating themselves, particularly Philbricks. Would you like quickly to comment a little more on the absence of or the presence of,

or the presence of religion and morality in that John Byrne. Yes, I mean, I think in some ways for war, it's not so much whether things are good or bad, it's whether they're exciting or boring, that people are always bothered that they're going to be bore people. And so you see religion crops up all the way through the book so that there's a paper on sex repression and the religious hypothesis that they go to Oxford,

that Grimes seems to have a completely, the peddraaf seems to have a completely safe and secure sense of his own faith. I think the sense, in the bit at the end, where the religious maniac cuts off Prendi's head, is either you've got too much religion or not enough. There's no mean or norm in there. And war, as always, is interested in the extremes because they're more exciting.

And I think that's my sense of where the religion keeps popping up in the book. It is a long way from Bridesheader, revisited, though, isn't it? No, but they both begin, that scene in Oxford, with somebody with a posh person being sick, or taking your trousers off. Do you want to say something? I'd like another question to you.

I absolutely accept what Anne says, but I think that desire to get to the center of the big wheel at Luna Park is a kind of metaphor for religious desire for religious certainty. Sorry to be a bit more, but can you just say a bit more about that big wheel at Luna Park? This is, Otto Siles, I'm sorry, yes. Otto Scyllinus mentions this to Paul when they meet on Corfu. And he says life is like this big wheel at Lunar Park. It spins round and everybody's trying to get to the centre

and occasionally somebody does but everybody's really just being thrust off. Now, I think the book is about the meaninglessness of such a world and there is a kind of undercurrent that's a latent desire for certainty. It seems to me if somebody's going to be a satirist, they have latent values and I would say that you can't call them Catholic at this stage

but that's what they amount to very soon after this book. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that he's looking for permanence. But at this point in his life, he's much more aware of impermanence. And the great wheel at Luna Park spins and people try to climb on and they get thrown off. And in the novel you have people like tangent who cuts the wheel at a tangent. He hardly touches it and he's gone off and is dead. And his mother is called Ladies'Conference, which is very sort of telling.

Yes, sorry. No, no, I'm interrupting you, just I want to cram so much in. Go on. And while we move to you now John Boone for a moment, we haven't explained probably the significance of decline and fall. People will associate it with Gibbon. Why did he take that? Well, it's a grand Augustine title.

Yes. And his, I mean, the thing about war is, he writes about, you, Nietzsche has a distinction between the Dionysiac and the Apollonia, and war writes about dynesiac events all the time about sex, perversion, violence, eroticism. But he does so in this very Apollonian, this very pure, reasonable style. And I think he's already signalling,

well, with decline and fall, a certain allegiance to those values of poise and balance that you see all the way through his writing, but also the sense that we've declined and fallen from the decline and fall title. There's also, of course, Otto Spengler's book, the famous Decline of the West, which I think is also part of the reason why it's there.

Originally, he's going to call it Untoward Incidents. There's also Dickens, where he reads declining and falling. Yeah, absolutely, in Silas Wegg. Absolutely, yes, Saliswagon. A man with one leg, where the wooden leg, that might be something good there, too. Yeah, well, they're fascinated by bodily deformity. You've either got a wig or a wooden leg or your death in war. Can we, and pass next later, can we tell, can you talk a little bit about the way that people,

apparently they disappear or they pass or they even are seen to or thought to die and come back again. That's another aspect. I think it's very telling actually because it is the metaphor of the Great Wheel. And in the case of Paul and Captain Grimes, both of them go through a suicide or a death and then in Grimes' case two resurrections out of many. What you have in the manuscript... War attempted suicide then gave up and... Yes, he did. Went up to sharp hill to life after he came out of the sea,

having been troubled by jellyfish, so given up... Yes, that's right. And what is interesting to me is that in the manuscript you have... We're calling these chapters which recount the deaths of Paul and Grimes and Prendergast as the death of eggs. But in the final published version, in Paul's and Grimes,

this case, these are called passings because they are on the real. The passing of a public school, man. Yes, that's right. So the audience in the wings can see this great wheel spinning and passing, going round and round is Grimes, never getting thrown

off, and Margot, she doesn't even sort of... Stays on? Yes, he stays on, and at the very end of the novel, he's seen in a large limousine, and Paul has asked who's that, and he says it's Arnold Bennett. It's another reincarnation, so that I think

all of that is an expression of this durability of the spirit of these dynamic people. There's a positive eulogy to have drawn. David Bradshaw, how would you talk about his influence at the time? I said in the beginning it was a terrific success from the beginning.

I said at the start of this break, it was terrific success from the time as published. It was more or less, wasn't it? And can you give us some idea of the reaction to it? It was huge. hugely successful. Arnold Bennett gave it one of his rave reviews in his highly influential evening standard books section and said it was a brilliantly malicious satire. Winston Churchill makes it his key Christmas present for 1928, so that must have been wonderful. And from then on, of course, he's no longer mistaken for Miss Even War an 1860 spinster. People know who he is.

and, you know, he's able to sign up for labels, his first travel book, and he gets married and disastrously. But people like Graham Green and later Kingsley Amos, and many writers were very much influenced by his work from then on. But it was a huge success. There was no dissenting, really, in the reviews of it. They all saw it was a work of comic genius. Can we talk a bit, this is possible to talk a bit about the prose?

And you refer to it about what had happened on the manuscript between the first, second, so however many drafts he had. And it's very tight and sentence after sentence, it's just, wherever he's going for, whether he's going for a perfectly sort of ordinary in inverted commas observation, he gives it a twister a word that makes it memorable and on we go. It's maddening reading it for this programme because you want to quote so many things.

And you can't because you aren't allowed even to bring your quotes in with you. we didn't say that we normally not that strict but for instance this morning I was just noticing that when Paul goes to prison and he's being questioned about his past and he said so what standards did you

what standard did you reach when you left school and Paul says oh I don't think we had standards at my school that kind of little dig education is part of a much larger canvas and it is continuous and at the same time, war is a brilliant realist

so that he could describe things in a way that is immediately recognisable. He's also very varied too, isn't he, so that he can do rather kind of purple patches at time. So when Grimes dies, it's very like Walter Pater's description of the Mona Lisa, as this immortal figure, and to describe this pederastic schoolmaster. And so he can imitate the voice of a judge, for example. So he's wonderfully plural. in his voicing and can move from this very spare or steer writing

to these rather grand purple patches. But as War said very emphatically, it is meant to be funny, funny in capital letters, and the description of the Lanaba silver band, the Sports Day, and the experiments of Sir William Wilford Lucas Dockery in Blackstone Jail, they are, you know, they're side-splitting. I defy anybody to read them and not have to reach for some sort of inhaler, you know, at the end of it.

it's just so funny and remains so with every reading. It does, doesn't it? I didn't have something to say that. I thought you were looking as if more quotations have come to your head. I was enjoying the praise of war. I think that the main thing to sort of get across to your listeners is that this is a very funny novel and they should read it. It does provoke the question.

How did this great sunburst? Where did it come from, given we had the Rosetti. We'd had interesting short stories. we'd had him you'd read, says it's cool on cubism and so on, but it's suddenly... Well, I think he was immensely playful

all the way through his undergraduate years. He was writing constantly and writing little short pieces that were, you know, very funny but also wonderfully childish. He says that at Oxford he was reborn into full youth and he became a child in a nursery

enjoying silly games and funny jokes and then it becomes more serious. The resistance in which almost everybody's attacked except aristocratic, privileged people whom are clearly some sort of social, intellectual, even love affair with. They do wrong, but they do know wrong as well. I wouldn't say so, Melvin.

I think lady circumference is a sort of heartless, cruel woman and I think her sort of lack of, lack of compassion is probably symptomatic of a criticism of the governing elite that he's making. But he makes her so funny that she's sympathetic. Well, she's so funny, but yeah, but she's certainly no model citizen, I've said. Nor is Margo, you know, she's a white slaver. Yes. So, no.

There's too late in the programme. Nobody gets off. But he loves Margo, even she can be a white slaver as long as she likes. She must never be allowed to go to prison, Paul says. It's unimaginable that you should be. So he takes the rap for her. It's not if he thinks she's good. he thinks she's just very exciting.

So the fact that they're uncouth and illiterate all the aristocrats at the beginning, but they're still excitingly so, and that's better than being boring. Yes, and she abandons Paul Margot does, and tells him that's just one of those things that happen. And I think that that's the morality of this novel. It is something that happens.

Paul has to go to prison and she doesn't. She abandons him. And nevertheless, you can still sort of live on the circle of the Great Wheel. And she abandons him for the man in whose rooms the Boller Blind began. Yes, there's lots of plotting. We've got to go. I'm awfully sorry, you've got to go.

Thank you very much, Sue. And pass next later, David Bradshaw. And John Bowen, next week what we're talking about? Augustus Pitt Rivers. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.com.