Thirty-five years later I now know the answer to that question but I could never have foreseen just how intense my relationship with the works and the man would become. Its latest manifestation is the four-hour adaptation of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and for which I wrote the script. This is the second time I have adapted Waugh’s work for the screen. The first was Scoop, a two-hour film for LWT, made in 1987. In 1982 I was TV critic for the New Statesman and wrote at length about John Mortimer’s epic adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. But by then the embroilment was well underway: I had read all the novels, of course, and had even taught them to undergraduates at Oxford. I had started searching second-hand bookshops for first editions. My Waugh obsession was fully developed.
Waugh, more than any of his peers, provokes this level of interest. The obvious reason for this is that the works endure so well and provide such great rewards. But the other explanation must be that we know so much about the man himself. I own four biographies, not to mention several other memoirs by family, friends and acquaintances. The juvenilia have been published and so have the travel books and the complete journalism; then there are the notorious journals and the collected letters and other additional volumes of correspondence between Waugh and Nancy Mitford, Waugh and Diana Cooper. Almost every public and private word the man wrote has been published and he’s not been dead forty years—we have all the information on Evelyn Waugh we could possibly want.
And this is what informs and charges our reading. Waugh is the most autobiographical of writers—even the grotesque and outlandish comedies—Vile Bodies, Black Mischief—are solidly rooted in the details of his life. This tendency to recycle his own experience is nowhere more evident than the trilogy of novels Waugh wrote about the Second World War—Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961)—which he collected together, somewhat revised, under the general title of Sword of Honour, first published in a single volume in 1965.
The central figure of the trilogy is Guy Crouchback who, at the outbreak of war in 1939, is thirty-five years old, almost the same age as Waugh at the time. There all similarity breaks down: Guy is, in effect, an almost fantasy alter ego for the author—a cradle Catholic from an ancient aristocratic family, an independently wealthy single man living in Italy. Everything, so the uncharitable view would go, that Waugh himself aspired to and yearned for in his life.
But the course that Guy Crouchback’s war follows is, in almost every degree, that of Waugh’s. Waugh eventually managed to secure a commission in the Marines and was later transferred to the Commandos. The glamorous resonance of these names belies the mundanity and relentless frustration of Waugh’s military experience. Like Guy, Waugh’s first brush with action was a mission to Dakar in West Africa. Then in 1941 he was sent to Crete with the Commandos to try and repel the German invasion, just managing to escape before the British forces surrendered. Then, after a period of inactivity (during which he wrote Brideshead Revisited), Waugh was dispatched to Yugoslavia in 1944 to be part of a military mission liaising with Tito’s partisans.
Waugh was hugely discontented as a soldier. He was a brave man (quite fearless under fire during the Crete debacle) but he was difficult and unpopular. No commanding officer wanted Waugh in his force and he was routinely shunted from command to command as patience ran out and tempers erupted. He was rude and truculent: a wealthy and famous novelist, he was a malign and prickly presence in the officers’ mess. I remember once meeting Fitzroy Maclean—with whom Waugh served in Yugoslavia—and I asked him what he thought of Waugh. Maclean said he had never known an officer more loathed and detested by the men who served under him. Maclean and Waugh cordially disliked each other so the opinion has to be treated with some caution. But, after Crete, Waugh’s disillusion with the army and its values was profound.
The section of Sword of Honour that deals with Crete is a magnificent and chilling tour de force. As a chronicle of military incompetence and absurdity it rivals Catch 22 as a bitter indictment of men at war. It is also a fascinating example of Waugh’s method, of how he turned his experience into fiction.
Waugh, like Guy Crouchback, arrived in Crete as the British and Empire forces were in full and shambolic retreat from the invading German army. The Commandos were ordered to provide the rearguard to protect the embarking men on the beach head. Under almost constant air attack somehow large numbers of the army were taken off by the navy. Waugh and the Commandos watched with alarm. As the clock ticked down it was apparent that there was not enough room on the boats and many would have to surrender.
Waugh’s commanding officer—whom he revered—Colonel Robert Laycock, dictated a false statement and had Waugh write in the war diary that he had ordered his men to evacuate Crete, “in view of the fact that …there was no enemy contact.” This was patently false: serious fighting was still going on in the hills, but Laycock ordered his men to abandon the rearguard positions, embark and thereby escape. After their departure many hundreds of soldiers were captured by the Germans. Waugh was complicit in this blatant disregard of orders and he felt the shame deeply, talking of “my ignominious flight,” and “my bunk from Crete.”
In the novel everything is subtly different. First, the character based on Laycock—Colonel Tommy Blackhouse—conveniently breaks his leg on a destroyer approaching Crete and never even lands on the island. Instead the man who ignominiously flees is the idealized, aristocratic warrior, Ivor Claire, whom Guy idolizes. Guy refuses to disobey orders and escapes in a small boat rather than surrender. But learning later of Ivor Claire’s desertion brings about Guy’s potent disillusion with the army. Ivor Claire bears all the guilt that Waugh felt himself at his duplicitous escape from Crete. Guy behaves with honour throughout but, when he learns of Ivor’s cowardice, his love affair with the army and all things military is effectively over.
As always with Waugh, he was brutally honest with himself. When Officers and Gentlemen was first published Guy’s last day on Crete is described as “fatal”—the day on which he resigned “an immeasurable piece of his manhood.” This makes no sense: Guy has done nothing wrong, but the words represent the true measure of Waugh’s own feelings about the incident. The sentence was excised from the later omnibus edition.
When Officers and Gentlemen was published (dedicated to Laycock) Waugh’s inner circle knew the facts. Ann Fleming, a close friend, waspishly telegrammed to Waugh “Presume Ivor Claire based Laycock dedication ironical.” Waugh denied this absolutely: “if you suggest such a thing anywhere,” he wrote back, “it will be the end of our beautiful friendship … Just shut up about Laycock. Fuck you. E. Waugh.”
The autobiographical facts—and Waugh’s personal agony—underpin the fiction and explain its particular power and vehemence. Guy Crouch-back, like Waugh, wanted to go to war—it was a just war and he was zealous for battle—but everything he experienced resulted in bitter disillusion and disappointment.
It is this element in Waugh—his fundamental and unsparing honesty—that I find so compelling and admirable. The various poses and images of himself that Waugh presented to the world were deliberately provocative, not to say deliberately preposterous. Whether he is acting the choleric Tory squire, or the Victorian paterfamilias, or the Pall Mall clubman; whether he is expounding on his hatred of all things modern or displaying his near-manic adherence to the Catholic Church and the aristocratic values of county house life—almost everything is calculated to challenge and offend, to draw down, it would seem, the inevitable accusations of social-climbing, class-hatred, snobbery and affectation.
But nobody was more aware of the sham and the bogus than Waugh. His late self-portrait in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold proves beyond doubt that he knew himself better than anyone. And the same unblinking candour informs his dark, comic vision also. He saw the world and its denizens with absolute clarity and devastating unsentimentality—nowhere more so than in Sword of Honour—and displayed the nature of the human condition with almost g
leeful ruthlessness. This is what makes him, I think, an enduringly modern spirit—however paradoxical that adjective might seem—and explains why his books have lasted so well and will continue to survive.
2001
The British Caff
There’s a fine, near-classic example behind King’s Cross Station, and there’s a particularly austere—brutally austere—one in Hounslow. If you’re looking for down and out seedy there’s a beauty on the Old Kent Road, guaranteed to set the soul in a slow slide of despair. For pure grease, however, the air peppery and astringent with fat fumes, there’s one I frequent in Notting Hill and on the Gray’s Inn Road there’s a monster—London’s version of La Coupole, as it were—with a venerable history of some few decades.
I’m talking, of course, about that great, possibly obsolescent British institution—the Caff. “Cafe” seems far too classy an appellation, too foreign. “Greasy spoon” somehow recalls the 1930s American Depression to me, or a truckers’ halt—the semantics is not quite right. We say, don’t we, “I’m off down to the caff,” or “See you in the caff in half an hour” and the word seems just about perfect—bluntly anglicized, demotic, accentless, unpretentious, apt. Whether you’re in Aberdeen or Guildford, Norwich or Durham, you know exactly, precisely what you’re going to get—in terms of ambience and nourishment—when you call a place a “caff.”
Forget pubs, the British caff is our true and enduring culinary landmark. You can find a flawless replica pub in Prague or Barcelona, these days. Pubs have gone up-market, are franchised, themed. The caff resists this gentrification doggedly and triumphantly. They exist nowhere else, indeed no other country in the world would want them. They remain irreducibly ours. Ignored, despised, avoided, unrecorded, unclassified, guide-free, the caff clings on in all corners of our cities and towns, an enduring testimonial to our indifference to comfort, our bad taste, our appalling eating habits and our complete lack of savoir-vivre.
When I was researching my latest novel, Armadillo, which is set entirely in London, my travels around the city took me to many of these bleak estaminets, these gloomy watering holes, and I spent long hours in them, observing the traffic of customers, gingerly eating and drinking, making notes. I went into them initially in a spirit of anthropological curiosity, but the more time I spent, caff-dwelling, the more a form of creeping affection for them grew in me. Feelings of hygienic distaste, of mild shame, gave way to sneaking admiration, of almost pride. Who else could have evolved such a dauntingly rebarbative institution? What did it say about us as a people, a nation? Surely, I reasoned, here was some form of pure objective correlative for us, the British, one untouched by hand of marketing man, design team, tourist board or whatever. Here lay—in gustatory terms at least—a small quintessence of our national psyche.
This increasing familiarity with and affection for the caff grew into a near-obsession. I started seeking out more and more examples, subspecies and hybrid types, started pestering my friends for their local variations. I even gave my central character in the novel—who also spent a lot of time caff-bound—a similar fixation. He started—let’s be honest, I started—to evolve a crude taxonomy, writing prime exemplars down in a notebook under the rubric “Great British Caffs.” Like some latter-day Linnaeus, my protagonist set about distinguishing the true from the bogus, steadily evolving criteria for a more exact classification, beginning to understand what fitted the bill—what was an echt-caff, an über-caff—and what fell short of the archetype.
Months of experience, of diligent patronage, have led me to some basic definition of the key constituents. I think I can now describe what I would term the exemplary British caff—the Platonic Ideal—with some accuracy.
First of all the question of location—irrelevant. Some of the most authentic caffs thrive in the trendiest purlieus, indifferent to the modish frenzy around them, but, in truth, the real aficionado prefers mean streets. Litter, graffiti, urban decay, gasometers, a palpable sense of fear—a rubbish-clogged canal or railway marshalling yards nearby add a certain je ne sais quoi. That the caff flourishes in such an inhospitable domain is part of its essential appeal.
Second: size. The smaller the better. One room contains all—food and drink preparation, counter, tables and chairs together in the same rectangle. There is an argument to be made for a rear area—dingier, darker, redolent of the lavatory—but one room remains a key criterion.
Third: decor. The essential factor here is absence of decor. Charm lies in charmlessness. Lino, Formica, plastic cladding, melamine, stainless steel, aluminium, glass, styrofoam tiles, cork (at a pinch)—these are the materials out of which the Platonic caff is constructed. The only exception to this austerity is kitsch. Extreme kitsch is self-justifying—bad murals, clashing paint schemes, bric-a-brac and the rest. There is one caff I know whose decor revolves around a Union Jack theme (the owners are very patriotic). The flag motif overwhelms, is overabundantly in your face—no one in their right mind would want to see so many Union Jacks in one small room—which is why it works. We will allow also the odd calendar, a poster or two, a stray bit of never-to-be-removed Christmas bunting, an occasional pot of struggling moribund greenery—spider plants or parched geraniums, preferably. Otherwise an almost total Bauhausian form-and-function, abhorrence-of-the-decorative ethos should prevail.
Fourth: food. Again, the idea of a few central ingredients endlessly re-combined is the dominant concept. Eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, chips, bread, mushrooms, peas, black pudding, gammon, tomato sauce, brown sauce, vinegar and so on. Quality is irrelevant. Indeed, the true connoisseur wants bad food—high gristle quotient in the sausage, nothing but margarine, over-generous salting everywhere, maximum water content in any cooked veg—but in fact it is fine if the food is tasty: no problem. The crucial factor, nutritionally, is the unhealthiness package. Baked beans are the only fibre admissible; a high saturated-fat content is a sine qua non, massive cholesterol intake is vital. Soft white sliced bread, everything pan- or deep-fried rather than grilled, a mix of carbohydrates that would defeat the training programme of an olympic athlete—bread and fried bread and chips and a pie, say, to accompany bacon and sausage and black pudding. The list is not long and any attempt to add something exotic (curried baked beans just pass muster) excludes the place from true caff classification. Any spaghetti, lasagne, any fish, chops, etc.—any salad, for heaven’s sake—move it into the sphere of pseudo-restaurant. Sandwiches are allowed but again must be strictly controlled—we want no hint of Marks & Sparks or Pret à Manger, no sesame seed baps or wholemeal baguettes. The bread is white—period—the whiter and more taste-free the better. The fillings are limited—ham, cheese, roast beef (just), chicken or turkey roll (nothing off the bone) and tomatoes and cucumbers which must be sliced transparently thin. One caff I know offers—year round—only egg, tomato, ham and cheese. On no occasion must the filling even approach the thickness of the bread slice. Tuna is allowed as long as it is mashed with vinegar to achieve a near-fluid state. Egg can be rendered similarly deliquescent with the addition of salad cream—never mayonnaise.
Drink. Firm rules apply here. Tea or coffee, milk—a glass of milk, an almost vanished drink these days, is regularly consumed in caffs—tins of cheap gassy colas (unrefrigerated) and that’s it. You might get a carton of juice and no caff is ever licensed to sell alcohol. Refinements on the hot drink agenda include tea being served from the pot (a real bonus) and, amazingly, there are some caffs still using Camp Coffee (the liquid mix, for those with long memories) but normally the coffee must be instant and unbranded. As soon as there is a Cona machine or a Gaggia then we are in espresso bar territory and caffdom is lost, irretrievably.
These are, I think, the essential defining factors of the Platonic caff. There are variations and some enthusiasts may argue for alternative necessities. But, as any regular caff-goer realizes, there are other more elusive, harder to define qualities that make the places and the experience of being in them so distinct and memorable. Thin
k of pre-eminent factors such as condensation and cigarette smoke. To have a plate-glass window that one can see through seems entirely wrong (indeed, ideally one wants condensation and a diamond mesh security grille). Also, a non-smoking caff seems oxymoronic. A purist would insist on roll-up cigarettes only. A badly tuned transistor radio (Radio 1, Capital Gold) also adds to the ambience as, of course, do the patron and his staff and their various attitude problems (whether raucous or sullen, suicidally depressed or irredeemably sloppy). All these elements contribute immeasurably to the aggregate of features that makes the places unique.
But there is something higher, more intellectual and philosophical that makes caff-life so addictive in its special way. I think it is because caffs are not, fundamentally, social places. They tend to favour the solitary or the untalkative; indeed, they have to be uncrowded in order to function best. You sit there in a corner alone with two or three others. The old geezer with his tightly folded tabloid; the seventeen-year-old mother-of-two smoking herself to death; the tattooed youth with his face full of iron. You don’t want to share a table, you don’t want to talk, you’re not (unless you happen to be a novelist) even curious about these strange folk and they in turn are deeply incurious about you. There is something wonderfully solipsistic about being in these places, provoking a mood of melancholy reflection, of indulgent soul-searching, of escha-tological ponderings. You feel in a kind of social and moral limbo—you can’t even see the outside world because of the condensation and you can’t imagine what sort of a city contains these curious denizens eating their extraordinary food. But then, you ask yourself, what are you doing here, caff-haunter? Eating, drinking, hanging out. What does that say about you?…