Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was hailed as Britain's finest satirical novelist of the first half of the twentieth century. His representative works include the novel "After the Storm in the Old Garden", "Exclusive News", "Decline and Disintegration" and so on.
Decline and Disintegration
Author: Evelyn Waugh
Translator: Gao Jihai
Edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
April 2013
"A Dust Scrap"
Edition: People's Literature Publishing House
January 2018
In 2011, Penguin Publishing launched a 24-volume hardcover collection of Evelyn Waugh's collections, belonging to the most conclusive "Penguin Classics" bibliophile series. In the penguin society's complex system of reprinting European and American literary classics, only Nabokov has won this honor for many years, and it is listed with it.
As we all know, when English literary works are published in the United States, they are often supplemented and revised. When reprinted after many years, in view of the changes in universal values, social fashion, literary and artistic trends and other factors, it is also necessary to adjust the original published text. Evelyn Waugh's many works, especially the later works, have a strong religious speculative flavor, and the plot of the novel often appears criticism and ridicule of domestic current politics, class, and world situation. Thanks to the efforts of later generations of compilers and the gossip left over from the author's circle of life, today's readers have the opportunity to form a three-dimensional and comprehensive view of Evelyn Wohl's life path and creative trajectory.
Find the true face of Evelyn Waugh
A gentleman who was disgusted by British intellectuals
Evelyn Waugh is a typical British gentleman writer, from his 1928 debut novel Decline and Disintegration to his 1965 Sword of Honor trilogy, a total of more than ten novels in a long creative career of forty years. The last work of independent fiction should be The Painful Experience of Gilbert Piford, published in 1957. Since then, Evelyn Woe has not published any new novels.
Evelyn Waugh, who had entered the age of flower nails, was in poor health, and obesity, bronchitis and deafness plagued his life. According to biographer Martin Steinard, the late-life Mr. Writer looked like a "weary drunkard." As for the photo of him suffering from a chronic illness in 1960 and being interviewed on television at home, it is almost malicious to "explain the problem". In fact, photographer Mark Gerson, who in 1959 took many color photographs of Evelyn Waugh and his family, showed that Evelyn Waugh was energetic and energetic in his fifties, matching the image of any English gentleman of his age: stubborn, unyielding and restrained. From The Guardian to The Times, British literary critics have long harbored a certain ambiguous malice toward Evelyn Waugh's public imagemama, with tabloid cynicism that followed him almost for the rest of his life. The reason for this, even to the shame of British intellectuals: Evelyn Waugh's novel writing continues to expose, on an ideological level, the collapse of the British spirit of sublimeism after the First World War, the collective collapse and unsustainability of the "English gentleman" identity.
Zola wrote in I Accuse: In Paris, the truth that conquers the hearts of the people is moving forward, and we all know very well how this expected storm will break out. It was the conscience cry in the Aurora newspaper in 1898 about the anti-Semitic core of the Dreyfus case. In London in 1930, another gentleman stepped forward and, in the form of a novel, showed his compatriots the "decline and disintegration" of the old national character of Great Britain after the World War. The 1930 book The Evil Flesh is the most straightforward indictment: set in the post-war twenties of Britain, the characters are old and new Generations of Britons, and the focus of the depiction falls on the so-called "demonized young celebrities" who have fallen for spiritual and material reasons, and the mass bankruptcy of the old aristocracy has spawned a group of deformed people who have nothing but young passions. Class and social injustice make young people like the little people in Charlie Chaplin's comedy, the protagonist of "Evil Flesh" Adam is an anonymous literary youth, the hard-to-finish manuscript is burned clean by the customs, he abandons himself, insensitively participates in the cocktail party to buy drunk, signs an unfair publishing contract for 50 pounds, but wins a thousand pounds with an advance gambling, and this huge amount is quickly cheated out... This typical satirical comedy plot is not hilarious to read, but only absurd and desperate. Evelyn Waugh's tone was bizarre and ahead of its time in terms of the state of the literary scene, as was the joking phrase in his 1964 autobiography, One Half-Know: Autobiography Volume I: "One reaches the age of writing an autobiography only when one loses one's curiosity about the future." ”
But is this really the truth? Having read more than a dozen of Evelyn Waugh's novels, I am more inclined to think that this sentence is actually a perfunctory perfunctory act of his compassion for the mediocre. The unspoken subtext is: I have no curiosity about the future, and everything we experience is dark and lost.
Trace the tragedy and accusations of Evelyn Waugh
Unjustifiable despair and sorrow
The original penguin edition of A Dusty Book has a quote:
A Dust Scrap is a relentless judgment by Evelyn Wohl on the polite dying struggles of the upper classes, and with a provocative smile he describes the comically ridiculous picture of a group that racks its brains to advocate the polite order of society. According to their rules, any evil can be tolerated as long as it serves high taste.
Not only In a Dust, all of Evelyn Waugh's novels follow a similar paradigm: there is absolutely no salvation for what is decaying.
Here, ignore his secret history of alcoholism and dropout experience as an "Oxford talent", and do not care about the influence of Dickens and Gauguin's works on him. If we look only at his novels, especially his later novels, it is not difficult to see the deep sorrow of a staunch opponent of ecclesiastical reform for the earthly depravity.
Where did Evelyn Waugh's lifelong, unpretentious sadness and despair come from?
From 1960 onwards, publishers began to re-edit their important works of fiction and publish anthologies. The first reprint of the anthology, After the Storm in the Old Garden, is also one of the three most important and influential works recognized by Evelyn Wohl in the history of English literature. In his later years, Evelyn Woe adopted this formulation in his preface, saying that he was "trying to return everything to its original inversion" in his writing. Unfortunately, the reference to "standard" is less of a satire than a complete indictment.
"After the Storm in the Old Garden" was created in wartime, from material to human nature, everything at that time was scarce.
In September 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, and Evelyn Waugh, who was about to celebrate her thirty-sixth birthday, offered to join the army. As a celebrity at the time, he entered Chatham Naval Base to conduct military training to become an officer in the Royal Marine Corps. However, a series of formal trainings made him "stiff and painful even when he picked up a pen". In April 1940, he was appointed captain and became an unpopular officer who had not accomplished anything for several months. After a series of "bloody incidents at the expense of honor" was sent to the Mediterranean, where he carried out a number of successive failed military operations that eventually withdrew in a hurry, and was "appalled by the chaos and loss of discipline".
In 1943, his father's death tormented him, and he missed the Husky Operation when the Allies invaded Sicily, and could not experience the slightest "joy of victory". Before the end of the war, he was sent to Yugoslavia on civilian duty, during which he also suffered various setbacks, as he was injured and hospitalized due to the crash of the plane. Bureaucracy within the force and successive failures led Evelyn Wo to focus on the issue of seeking the right to exist after the war for the Croatian Catholic Church. However, the British Foreign Office's selfish desire to maintain relations with the Yugoslav government led to the writer's last efforts in vain.
"After the Storm in the Old Garden" was created and published in such a state.
This six-year-long military experience has also been transformed into the material for the "Sword of Honor" trilogy. Similar to many previous novels, the protagonist of the trilogy, Guy, is set as a descendant of a declining family, and the last one, Unconditional Surrender, mentions the writer's personal experience of going to Yugoslavia, being injured by parachuting, and the death of his old father. At the end of the trilogy, Guy utters a sentence of "God forgive me," and honor quickly becomes a decaying thing.
By the time Unconditional Surrender was completed, Evelyn Waugh's novel writing career officially entered a summative period, and from "Black Prank" to "A Dust", all the revisions and prefaces of past works were completed in the last five years of the writer's life. The writer also experienced a crisis of trust in the last two years of his life and was not forced to sign a number of book contracts, including writing a biography of the late Pope of Rome (which was often expensive in the year), writing a bestseller on the theme of the Crusades, and a sequel to his autobiography, Half-Know- None of these things are really what the writer really wants to do, and his own physical and psychological state is no longer competent for these tasks. On June 7, 1965, in a letter to John McKendaugell, Evelyn Waugh said that he was "toothless, deaf, suffering from depression, unable to type, unable to eat, dazed in his head, and lazy in body." Ten months later, on Easter Day, sixty-two-year-old Evelyn Wohl died of heart failure.
Forty years ago, Evelyn Wo, in his early twenties, was working in Pisa, Italy, and handed over the novel he was writing to Akton for correction. Akdon's reply was extremely cold, and Evelyn Waugh burned the manuscript in anger and tried to commit suicide by jumping into the sea, but was startled by the jellyfish attack and quickly fled back to the shore. Next, he lived for several years as a poor literary youth, and in addition to writing short stories for money, he also accepted a clearly unequal "manuscript saving" contract from a London publisher.
As early as that, the journey of decline and disintegration in the heart of the young Evelyn Woe had officially begun; since then, his life's work can be reduced to summaries and accusations.
□ Wenzel