Imitating Evelyn Waugh
On “Brideshead Revisited”
A couple years ago, when I was at a socialist labor conference in Chicago, Evelyn Waugh came up in conversation with a couple of nationally prominent trade unionists, one of whom (of my generation) said “Oh, I’ll never read Waugh.”
The other trade unionist, a Scot a generation older than us, asked why.
“Well he’s a fascist, and I don’t read novels by fascists,” my generational comrade said.
Astute readers of this blog will have noticed that I don’t really care about whether a given writer is a fascist. It’s politically inconvenient for some anglophone left-wingers that a whole cohort of reactionaries—Waugh, Malaparte, Celine, Juenger—turned out to be very good novelists around the time of the last general war.
I think this attitude of dismissal is almost excusable for Americans younger than about fifty, because our own reactionary novelists emerge individually, rather than from whole aesthetic movements. This is because American reaction in the present is a movement whose highest aesthetic aim is to replicate Thomas Kincaid paintings. The occasional dissident from that impulse is usually unsupported and seems barely capable of matching Gen X shock jock sensibilities. And most of the critical output of American reactionaries these days consists of careerist whining about undeserving so-and-sos. Undignified! Getting pressed about Vatican II sixty years post-facto doesn’t make you Evelyn Waugh, it just makes you annoying. (An American Malaparte would be in Gaza embed with the IDF right now).
Of course popular authors are an exception to this: America has never had a paucity of Fascist militarists when it comes to cheap military novels and crime thrillers. (Cozy fiction (including Cozy Genre Fiction) is actually America’s great innovation in contemporary Fascist letters, but no one, least of all me, is ready for that essay.)
But I digress. To some, Waugh’s politics may make him repulsive as a writer. But not me! I find the idea of a literate reactionary charming, considering the stunted and malformed aesthetic impulses of our present right-wingers.
So anyways my friend told me I had to read Brideshead Revisited this semester. So I did. I liked it! I wrote a short imitation of one passage, appended below. But first, some words about why I liked this book.
One of the most interesting bits of Brideshead is how neatly it anticipates the evolution of literary subgenres of the later 20th century. The book contains the core of the Campus Novel, the Fancy House Novel, the Travel Novel, and the Addiction Novel. It’s always refreshing to read a book from before the TV Tropes era. There’s even a nice class struggle bit where Charles Ryder takes a break from trying to bang Catholic aristocrats to help suppress the 1926 General Strike and finds the English Working Classes too docile for proper Bolshevism.
The novel, courtesy of the gay affair in its first half and the tragicomedy of its second half, has become a rather talismanic book in the last decade and a half with occasional spells of virality on TikTok and special issues replete with sentimental cover art and deckle edged pages. Obscurity or fetish display are the fates of great English novels in the New World, and Brideshead is well into its tenure as status symbol. The novel as a category of fetish object is gradually being subsumed into fashion, as Seth Wang has argued, and Waugh’s work is one of those signifiers of an arch aesthetic sensibility, with a vague disaffiliation from politics and a little fear for modernity. Whatever.
I enjoyed it. I especially loved Waugh’s ability to characterize whole periods in people’s lives. When, midway through the novel, Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte are set to begin their affair, Charles relates to the audience what Julia told him of her courtship by Rex Mottram, a pro-war Tory. I found that description to have a particular dynamism and I chose to imitate it this week, transposing it to the story-world of my novel project, [Burgerreich AmeriKKKa]. The narrator of that project, Katherine, describes the courtship of her sister Jean-Marie, a transgender woman, by Antiochus Campbell, a livestreamer specializing in looksmaxxing and military propaganda. Katherine and fellow conspirators use Jean-Marie as a honeypot to undermine Antiochus and other pro-war actors within the federal government.
This imitation ends rather abruptly because I am sticking hard to the page limit imposed by Bennington on this particular assignment. I hope you enjoy it. I’ll be back to talk about Curzio Malaparte soon and then probably also The Odyssey and maybe a video game about the Trojan War.
Imitating Brideshead Revisited
There is proverbially a mystery among internet microcelebrities, how they gained their first hundred thousand subscribers; it is the qualities they showed then, before they became significant, when the strictures of public morality still bound them, when they had no hope of grandeur and could count on anonymity alone as their protection, that make them, if they survive their ascent, successful as lovers. Antiochus, in the paranoia of Washington, barraged Jean-Marie with attention and with money; he abandoned the Virginia suburbs for a permanent room at the Navy Yard Continental, where he paid extravagant sums to install her in a suite of her own; he wooed her friends, both in New Hampshire and in the capital, banishing his loutish retinue from their dinner parties; he offered her a no-show job with his streaming firm and paid for her health insurance; he offered to meet her family and her sister (and was there rebuffed); he expressed a keen interest in the trade union movement until he found that this was no way to Jean-Marie’s heart. He took French classes and tried to adopt an Acadian accent. He was always ready to put the vast resources of the National Action Legion at her disposal, buying her encrypted burner phones and a girlish .32 Walther, complete with papers, she could carry in her handbag. He arranged vacations for her and her confidants, scheduling so that they overlapped during his recruitment tours and his international duties, a night in Las Vegas, a weekend in Wyoming, three days in Paris for the Bastille Day parade, a room on Capri where he went to pay homage at the Casa Malaparte; and virtually every time he saw her he slept with her. Yet all this had to be done in half-secrecy. They met by coincidence and by covert means, keeping their affair from the other streamers who tracked his moves, from the political fixers who maintained his standing with the White House. From being a curiosity, he became the central figure of her life; from having been bemused by his politics she came to tolerate them, so by summer’s end she found a charm in him. And then, without the least desiring it, she found herself in love.
It came to her, this hateful and embarrassing revelation, one evening in August, when Patrice asked her to put a bug in her handbag and thereby record her conversations with Antiochus. She refused to betray him so badly. Patrice told her that she was in for more than a penny and couldn’t meaningfully refuse; I sat with her while he put wireless microphones in the lining of her clutch bag and then her shoulder bag.
That night, as we listened to her table talk with Antiochus, she could barely keep up their conversation, and she rebuffed his advances and fled as soon as she could to her room a floor below his and bolted the door and refused to speak with him. When, finally, he went off to film his midnight politics stream, she cried for a quarter of an hour, then left her bag in the room and went down to catch the metro crosstown to Chloe’s apartment, where she holed up for some days refusing to see me or Patrice and bitterly rebuking us both as “foul traitors.”
When she breakfasted that weekend at the Three Stripe Saigon Cafe over by the zoo, Antiochus found her, likely by intuition. She refused to acknowledge his presence for some while and he stood dumbly by her table, with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, until they called her order number and he retrieved it for her.
“Was it something I said?”
“I only felt myself off-kilter,” she said. “Maybe it’s that I like being with you more than I respect myself. I shouldn’t be with a man who keeps me a secret. It’s almost like I’m not a woman to you.”
“If you’re angry we can’t be seen together, there are ways to legitimize—”
“Legitimate, Antiochus, is the proper verb form. Legitimize is a dreadful neologism.”
“Legitimate things. If we were married perhaps no one would object. Are there records under your old name, we might find a way to alter them.”
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