“But,” said Paul Pennyfeather, “there is my honour. For generations the British bourgeoisie have spoken of themselves as gentlemen, and by that they have meant, among other things, a self-respecting scorn of irregular perquisites. It is the quality that distinguishes the gentleman from the artist and the aristocrat. Now, I am a gentleman. I can’t help it: it’s born in me.”
EVELYN WAUGH, Decline and Fall
Paul pennyfeather, the supinely good protagonist of Decline and Fall, contends that gentlemen, the backbone of the English middle classes and the imperial nation, are defined by their commitment to honor. Pennyfeather’s idea of honor, however, is a “scorn of irregular perquisites,” a narrative stroke that is masterful in its irony: the grand and chivalric idea of gentlemanly honor is reduced to a refusal of tips (54). We have here the quintessence of the early and most beloved Evelyn Waugh, celebrating and damning a way of life within the same brief conversational moment with little to no editorial or narrative commentary. In a move that similarly scales down the grand ethical traditions of the gentleman, William Boot in Scoop (1937), potential country squire and accidental journalist, is so unworldly that he does not recognize when the editor of Beast, in a most ungentlemanly manner, attempts to bribe him. Instead, childlike, he can only insist that his dearest wish is to “go on living at home” and continue writing his little nature column (43). Boot’s feebleness and naïveté undercut the ideal of the proud assertive independence of the gentleman. Boot and Pennyfeather’s attitudes reveal the gap between an inherited grand tradition of the gentleman and its current diminished state.
Waugh, one of the more serious members of the Bright Young People, established himself as a novelist by virtue of this ability to represent with precise wit and absurdist style the rupture between gentlemanly ideals and their practice.1 Waugh’s narrative, in both instances, deflates a national-cultural paradigm—the whole frame of tradition—through deft “structural” wit, where wit emerges from the structure of the narrative rather than being imposed from without (“Firbank” 57). Both the style and the subject of the above examples inform almost every single one of Evelyn Waugh’s works. Many of his novels (with the possible exception of the Basil Seal novels) render the story of the good but passive English gentleman as he travels through the world, but the travails of the principled yet ineffective gentleman protagonist is wittily told through the perspective of a detached, urbane English gentleman. The narrator and the protagonist, as this chapter will show, through its analysis of Scoop, are antithetical representations of the English gentleman out of joint: affected by post–World War I destabilization of hegemonic ideals of masculinity, imperial shifts (rise of nationalist anti-colonialist movements across the empire), and the impending doom of World War II. As E. M. Forster puts it, the Englishman, though admirable in many ways, is now an “incomplete person.” Indeed, his incompleteness is metonymic of the imperial nation in transition.
The languages and history of the English gentleman structure Waugh’s “balanced interrelation of subject and form,” rendering his work historically apposite and specific to the mid-century.2 Indeed, Evelyn Waugh’s entire oeuvre—from Decline and Fall (1928) to the epic saga about English involvement in World War II, The Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61)—explores the demise of the gentleman within the context of dying traditions and changes in the empire. The broader history of the gentleman is not only the focal point of his thematic explorations of Englishness and modernity but also shapes his distinctly satirical style.
In Scoop, the gentlemanly and urbane narrative voice that ostensibly casts a dispassionate eye over the world does not really see or commit to any stable world order. It produces and derives pleasure and amusement from the ironic representation of the world it observes. The narrator, in his ability to see outrageous things with equanimity and irony, spins dizzily within the urbanity and detachment that he condemns. His detachment comprises simultaneously an implicit moral center from which to judge and an amoral inhumanity that enables laughter, resulting in a “radical instability” (Waugh, Vile Bodies 183). This narrator looks upon all spaces—the modern metropolis, the sacrosanct English countryside, the manor house, the imperial periphery—with the same degree of distance and skepticism. To fully parse the dual models of gentlemanliness and the workings of Waugh’s narrative detachment in Scoop, I begin by situating Waugh’s distinct style and focus on the gentleman in the late imperial moment, and elaborating on the relationship between Englishmen, gentlemanly disinterestedness, and empire.
Waugh’s textual and formal engagement with the state of the gentleman emblematizes the ambivalences inherent in what Jed Esty has termed the “cultural turn” mediating between narratives of disintegration and of salvaged core. The 1930s were, according to Esty’s suggestive argument, the moment of an “anthropological turn,” when the wholeness and totality usually ascribed to primitive and colonial cultures in opposition to the mobile, metacultural, composite nature of imperial Englishness were repatriated to the metropolitan center. In the 1930s, Esty argues, England was “refigured as the object of its own imperial discourse,” subject to its own anthropological “documentary gaze,” a phenomenon evidenced in Mass Observation (40–41). While Esty focuses on the anthropological turn in the later works of modernists such as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and E. M. Forster as they endeavored to reimagine a national totality via hoary country traditions, I read Waugh’s urbane satires as being structured by the same discursive turn. Waugh’s mobile satires direct the dispassionate self-universalizing “anthropological” gaze of the Englishman back on the English and Englishness itself, particularly evident in the representation of the country and the country house in Scoop. The narrative, multidirectional in its wit, parodies and ironizes everything that it observes and describes, even as the English gentleman always constitutes the focus and the lens. While it seems counterintuitive to connect Waugh’s surreal farces designed to entertain to Mass Observation’s realist documentary-style observations, both are motivated by the ethnographic gaze come home to roost. However, the key difference here is that while Mass Observation’s language of ethnography presumed a national totality through its intense focus on bounded, domestic, regional minutiae, Waugh’s novel deliberately takes the wider, imperial view as the narrative observes, situates, and examines a nation within its imperial web. At the same time, the narrator is detached from everything that he observes: the empire, the metropole, the country, the city, and his own kind, that is, the upper-middle-class English.
Waugh’s disaffected narrator engages the historical and cultural dimensions of the gentlemanly voice that is a function of a gendered “metropolitan perception” (R. Williams 46). Raymond Williams’s explanatory framework for modernism is appropriate here. The metropolis as delineated by Williams—a place that develops out of the “magnetic concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitals and the simultaneous cosmopolitan access to a wide variety of subordinate cultures” (44)—structures the gendered narrative style. This style, in turn, is determined by the narrative perspective of the English gentleman.3 The narrative voice is the voice of the gentleman—a classed, gendered, culturally, and institutionally produced perspective. In other words, the ambivalent cosmopolitanism and ironic detachment that shapes Waugh’s freewheeling narrative style is produced by, and within, the historical and cultural specificities of Britain’s long imperial history.4
This mobile panoptic eye, I contend, is a product of an English imperial detachment, which Matthew Arnold traced through English literature and culture. Arnold propounds the trait as a quintessentially English, upper-class universal standard of judgment, or what Anthony Easthope in his study of Englishness has termed the “voice of the poised empiricist subject, detached, critical, not self-deceived, confident of submitting the world to a controlling gaze” (185). As I have already argued in the previous chapter, Arnoldian detachment, constitutively gendered and raced, described and prescribed a universalizing Englishness through an emphasis on what it lacks (essence). Amanda Anderson, in her analysis of detachment in Victorian practices of the self, argues that the ideal of detachment was always conceptualized as “a dialectic between detachment and engagement, between a cultivated distance and a newly informed partiality” (6). Though various writers of the Victorian era articulated detachment and the cultivation of distance differently, the rhetoric of moral ennoblement underpinned the various formulations of detachment. The Arnoldian formulation of Englishness is that the poised gendered subject who is confident of submitting the world to a controlling gaze is dialectically produced through empire. Indeed, altruistic responsibility and detached empiricism are mediated through the structure of a self-universalizing standard of English gentlemanliness produced by the fact of empire.
Forster rearticulates the pragmatism and disinterestedness of the English national character as embodied in the public-school-educated Englishman. He echoes Arnold’s emotionally tempered and pragmatic Englishness when he argues that the Englishman’s primary concern is the ethics of governance, of self and other; the Englishman’s religion demands that he be “just,” “merciful,” and “protect what is good.” The Englishman’s religion is an ethical code of chivalric benevolence.5 The Englishman, he contends, has an “innate decency,” always “thinking of others rather than himself. Right conduct is his aim. The argument underlying these scattered notes is that the Englishman is an incomplete person. Not a cold or unspiritual one. But undeveloped, incomplete” (“Notes” 9–10).6 Forster then emphasizes the inherent altruism and detached justice of the Englishman, even as he foregrounds how they slide into indifference and arrogance: “But the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface—self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. It is the machinery that is wrong” (13). The complacency, lack of sympathy, and reserve read as the vices and uncertainties of a privileged and conquering race. Seen in the light of Arnold’s delineations of the English character, they are negative interpretations of Arnoldian positives: detachment, pragmatism, and reserve. When the “machinery” is geared to create a culture and character designed for imperial governance, then detachment and superiority are absolutely crucial ingredients of national character.
The public school gentleman, for all his virtues, according to Forster and Waugh, is dysfunctional and inadequate in post–World War I England, because the purpose and reasons for which he was created have shifted.7 In other words, the technology of the gentleman is obsolete in a changing world. I situate the transformation of the universalized gaze and detachment evident in Waugh’s narrative style within the larger destabilization of the gender ideal. The horrific loss of men’s lives and the effects of trench warfare in World War I buffet and undo the code of the gentleman; the effects of the war were only partially appropriated by the hegemonic code. The trauma and loss of young male lives during World War I destabilized the ideals of imperial gentlemanliness and the nation. In the wake of the almost incomprehensible number of dead and the level of neurasthenia among the survivors, there was a period of profound uncertainty, reassessment, and reconfiguration of the ideals of gentlemanliness that propelled the imperial British nation (Roper 343). At the same time, Joanna Bourke and Allen Frantzen demonstrate how the gender code now incorporated issues of pain, fear, and sacrifice, even as its tenets were increasingly questioned, while Michael Roper argues that the Great War occasioned the shattering of the externally oriented code of manliness, and the movement to an interiorized understanding of the self. Many novels of the interwar period represent these profound shifts and ambivalences in post–World War I structures of imperial gentlemanliness, because the effects of World War I can only be fully understood within the context of empire. As I have examined elsewhere, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) explore the separation of the personal-ethical code of gentlemanliness from the ethno-national code of imperial gentlemanliness in empire, in tandem with imperial unrest and the increasing destabilization of imperial authority.8 These strands had originally been fused together to create the Victorian/Edwardian imperial gentleman. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931), Peter, Hugh Whitbread, Richard Dalloway, and the perennial absent presence, Percival, variously represent the disintegration, reconfiguration, and mythification of the imperial Englishman. Mrs. Dalloway, in fact, connects the fate of the shell-shocked, lower-middle-class soldier Septimus Smith, whose life has been determined by the discourse of hegemonic English masculinity, to Peter Walsh, the failed colonial bureaucrat, who doesn’t quite live up to the expectations of the imperial gentleman, as they crisscross each other in the metropolitan center. Both men, in different ways, represent the fissures in hegemonic imperial gentlemanliness. Even so, what these novels reveal is that gentlemanliness with all its historical weight and hegemony continued to hold sway as a gender ideal even as it fractured. Waugh’s narratives are a part of this larger cultural focus on the state of the Englishman/gentleman: he traces both the reconfiguration and the marginalization of the gender ideal. Indeed, like Woolf’s, his representation of the English gentleman is multifaceted as it attempts to trace the various alterations of gentlemanliness in such wide-ranging characters as the dissolute Basil Seal, the honorable Guy Crouchback, the ineffectual Paul Pennyfeather, and the insidious Charles Ryder.
The distanced gentlemanly narrative voice of Waugh’s early novels, I argue, is a representation, among many others, of these shifts in gentlemanliness. Waugh’s focus on the gentleman inflects his narrative style and voice; that is, the indifferently amused narrator who defines Waugh’s distinct style is a gentlemanly voice molded by imperial detachment and the erosion of the gentlemanly code. It produces “the external method” or a reconceptualization of the humanist notion of character.9 The “external method” that defines Waugh’s early narratives necessarily demands a perspective from a carefully cultivated distance. Here, narrative detachment is a function, and an almost inhuman perversion, of the altruism and disinterestedness of the imperial gentleman necessary for the appropriate practice of governance: the distanced and empiricist view from the outside prevents any overt sympathetic or empathetic affective attachment. The careful dialectic between gentlemanly engagement and detachment breaks down to become amoral disengagement and amusement that constitute Waugh’s distinctive style.
Waugh’s expansive and unapologetically disengaged narrative perspective, which looks both outward and inward in order to comprehensively mock the English gentleman at home and abroad, is nowhere more evident than in Scoop. Published in 1937, Scoop is his last truly anarchic satire before he shifts gears to a nostalgic realist form, and it is the final hurrah of the ambivalently detached gentleman narrator. In his later novels, the narrator’s sympathies and prejudices, still shot through with irony, are fairly straightforward in comparison to his earlier unrelenting black humor. Based on Evelyn Waugh’s own experiences as a foreign correspondent in Abyssinia, Scoop was primarily intended as a satire on the mendacity and power of the press. Moving between the equally “far away” places of Ishmaelia and the English estate of Boot Magna, as well as that crucible of madness, London, enables Waugh to indulge in an expansive satirical project that includes financial global imperialism, the free press, Communism, Fascism, colonial modernity, a dying gentry, and a primitive English countryside. Interestingly enough, the circular plot of Scoop—where the decent Englishman after his ordeals in a savage chaotic world retreats to the cocoon of “civilization” to begin again—rehearses the circularity of Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, written almost a decade earlier. The final reiteration of this narrative circularity signals the exhaustion of this particular form to tell the story of the gentleman as the world and the gentleman’s place in it had radically altered. The beginning of World War II, Britain’s dissipating financial and political power, the full knowledge of the horrors of Nazism, the opportunism and bureaucratic bungling of the British ruling classes (gently satirized in The Sword of Honor Trilogy) rendered this particular brand of detached, absurdist humor an impossibility. His later, more serious narratives were threaded through by his trademark irony, but they never again displayed the same level of anarchic playfulness; nor did the dissolute indifferent gentleman narrator reappear to function as the governing narrative consciousness.
To briefly summarize Scoop’s plot: William Boot, resident of Boot Magna, reclusive country squire, and minor nature columnist who writes “Lush Places” for the national daily, the Beast, is mistakenly shipped off to Ishmaelia as the paper’s foreign correspondent to cover the political and national upheavals of that country. The third-person narrative perspective describes Boot’s adventures in the confusing and confused offices of the Beast, in the streets of London, and the chaos of Ishmaelia as he searches for the scoop to end all scoops in the company of an international (European and American) corps of professional journalists. Bewildered, inert, but not entirely stupid, Boot encounters old prep-school friends, international financiers, and falls in love with a con artist. Through a stroke of blind luck, Boot is the first to break news of a revolutionary coup. He flies home to discover himself an international success. However, he decides to retreat from the chaos of fame, success, and, most important, the city, to the decay of Boot Magna and resume writing his nature column.
The bored distance of the gentlemanly voice in Scoop is evident through his representations of foreign and domestic spaces. The urbane, cosmopolitan, gentlemanly voice describes and creates the world it sees, drawing the reader into the ambit of his knowledge and points of reference. This is illustrated in an extended narrative introduction to the country of Ishmaelia:
Various courageous Europeans, in the seventies of the last century, came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft treaties and flags of the nations which they have been obliged to leave. They came as missionaries, ambassadors, tradesman, prospectors, natural scientists. None returned. They were eaten, every one of them; some raw, others stewed and seasoned—according to local usage and the calendar (for the better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh, uncooked, in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop). (106)
The tone is matter-of-fact, dry, and all-seeing. The narrative voice, from its carefully cultivated distance, views everyone with the same dispassionate eye. It mocks European attempts to conquer through the tried-and-true con of exchanging land for trinkets. Slipped in among the worthless detritus of European culture are the totems of colonization: draft treaties and flags. Moreover, the people who arrive in Ishmaelia (or near it) are those who establish the Foucauldian power/knowledge nexus: professionals who map, classify, name, and colonize. The passage also mocks the Ishmaelites and their savage ways, again recited as a series of boring facts with no hint of horror at the layering of cannibalism and Christianity, the religion of the civilized.10 This is Waugh’s satire at its best—apparently empirical description with no editorial comment, an omnipotent and omnipresent narrator who knows it all and has seen it all. The only hint of the potentially non-empirical in this extended description is the careful note on how the Europeans were eaten—raw, stewed, or seasoned. The narrator is wryly amused by the shenanigans of both the conquerors and those who refuse to be conquered; however, his pleasure in the chaos becomes particularly pointed when he mentions how the stew made from European was seasoned.
Offering a different facet of imperial gentlemanly detachment, the narrative voice is also comfortable in, knowledgeable about, and yet distanced from all the sites that he inhabits and observes. This is clear from his authoritative, succinct, and highly skeptical account of Ishmaelia’s long and complex history. He sounds like a British imperial bureaucrat surveying his domain. Geographically protected by swamps, forests, and deserts “from those more favoured regions which the statesmen of Berlin and Geneva have put to school under European masters,” Ishmaelia comprises “an inhospitable race,” who “pass their days in the perfect leisure which those people alone enjoy who are untroubled by the speculative and artistic itch” (105). The narrator notices the tactics of the imperial powers (citing the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and the Scramble for Africa) that infantilize, parcel out, and “school” those commercially viable regions of Africa—exploitation for profit veiled by the rhetoric of the civilizing mission. In the very next sentence, he comments on the Ishamelites, acknowledging their independent spirit and barbarism. He notes that the Ishmaelites are “inhospitable,” a euphemism for their refusal to buckle to European might. He also casually observes that they are able to spend their days in endless leisure because they lack the evolutionary development to pursue either technological development or art, which he reads as markers of humanity. This description is understated and veined with irony. Ethical standards are implicit in the passage, and neither the conquered nor the conquerors meet those standards: the Europeans are money-grubbing tradesmen, while the Ishmaelites are self-contained savages incapable of progress. The narrator, of course, dispassionately surveys and judges the Europeans and the Ishmaelites from his position on high; his is the universal objective perspective, while those he surveys muddle through their petty lives.
This tone of detached irony, a product of gendered imperial and racial discourses, becomes markedly less empirical in his description of the sprawling Jackson family that rules over Ishmaelia: “A pious old darky named Mr. Samuel Smiles Jackson … was put in as the first President. … A Mr. Jackson Rathbone held his grandfather’s office in succession to his father Pankhurst, while the chief posts of the state were held by Messrs. Garnett Jackson, Mander Jackson, Huxley Jackson, his uncle and brothers, and by Mrs. ‘Teeny’ Athol (nee Jackson), his aunt” (107). The narrative tone shifts in and out of different voices. The narrator seems to channel the racist colloquialism of Corker, the lower-middle-class journalist professional, when he calls Samuel Smiles Jackson “a pious old darky,” but without comment, hence incorporating the idiom and endorsing it. However, the matter-of-fact listing that follows is in keeping with the narrative style, which implies rather than states the obvious: the Ishmaelian government is a dynastic, though ragtag, nepotistic affair, gesturing toward the idea that democracy is a foreign and underdeveloped concept not indigenous or suited to a people who are incapable of understanding the nuances of modern political systems. The process of listing also reveals that the Jacksons do not have the competence or background for running a government; it is merely through manipulation and playing on the weakness and stupidity of the people that the status quo is perpetuated. Ishmaelia is a failed state and conglomeration of accidents.11 Indeed, the narrative represents the civil war between Communist and conservative/Fascist factions in the government (the events that journalists in Ishmaelia are expected to cover) as a farce, of Africans mindlessly aping two European ideologies that are already absurd. The Young Ishmaelites, a not very veiled reference to the secular and modern Jeunesse d’Ethiopie, are shown as attempting to bring an alien modernity and egalitarianism to a clearly barbaric nation.12 The narrator, par for the course, mocks the modernized youth—they are “natty young negroes” (217)—the old guard who are shambolic and primitive, the journalists who report on this news, and the newspapers who publish them. Once again, the irony emerges from the discrepancy between what the detached narrator represents and the inherent standard implicit in his descriptions. The narration, structured by disengagement, enables both the reader and the narrator to always engage with events from a distance. The humor emerges from this unsympathetic detachment and a deliberate disconnection from that which the narrative describes. The narrator’s privileged raced, classed, gendered, and imperial location produces this distinctive sophisticated, unsympathetic satire.
The gentlemanly narrator’s detachment in Scoop (and other novels) wavers between an Arnoldian imperial ethical framework, the “powers of distance,” and its obverse, where distance, as delineated by Forster, produces an uncomfortable lack of sympathy and disengagement from the life observed. Georg Simmel’s theory of the sophisticated metropolitan blasé attitude is apt here. Simmel points out that the blasé person “experiences all things as being of an equally dull and grey hue, as not worth getting excited about, particularly where the will is concerned” (Philosophy 256). I would argue that being blasé is not only a metropolitan, modern privilege but also a state that is differently determined across gender, class, and national lines.13 The blasé, apathetic gentleman is culpable as a national failure. In his failure to be a disinterested ethical gentleman who acts for his country and his countrymen, the blasé gentleman is a perversion of the ethical ideal and represents the decadence of the imperial nation. The apathy of will, the lack of desire to act or to govern either the self or the other for the public good, marks the breakdown of gentlemanly detachment. Waugh’s narrators are caught within this duality: the disinterestedness required for imperial governance and the apathy produced by that very superior detachment in the absence or impossibility of a functional ethical frame. The narrator is aware of, yet not quite committed to, the traditional frames of a meaningful existence. This is Forster’s “incomplete” Englishman, a product of the trenches of Flanders and the imperial exhaustion of a gargantuan and ever uncontrollable empire. The narrator’s unsympathetic detachment is not limited to the savage periphery but is turned, with equal precision, on the metropolitan center. This is evident in the narrative rendering of the modern commercial press and how they report or produce news. The satirical humor derives from the discrepancy between the absurdity of journalism and journalists and the standards of normative civilized behavior.
Much of Scoop’s narrative is taken up with the unethical behavior and pervasive mendacity of the press. In the early part of the twentieth century, the state of the press was a subject of much debate, between those who believed that the press modernized and democratized by media barons such as Lord Northcliffe (proprietor of the Daily Mail) was a symbol of revolutionary change, and those who believed the increasingly commercialized press was an agent of linguistic, cultural, and national decline.14 It is not surprising that the critiques far outpaced any celebration of the popular press—though the modern press’s astronomical growth is indication enough that the critiques did not impact the industry in any way. Most of the critiques, as summed up in a 1929 Fortnightly Review commentary, claimed that “the gigantic newspaper organizations of to-day are prospering on the weaknesses of the public mind and are deepening them by subtly obscuring the boundaries between fact and fiction” (Hedderwick 76). In Scoop, foreign correspondents are shown to frequently make up stories for copy: Wenlock Jakes “scooped the world with an eye-witness account of the Lusitania four hours before she was hit” (92). Newspapers are fleeting and fictional, driven by the profit motive and the need to entertain, rather than any serious desire to inform and educate on world or national affairs, which in turn determines the modes in which journalists operate to “procure” news.
As Corker, Boot’s journalistic guru, points out, “News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead. We’re paid to supply news. If someone else had sent a story before us, our story isn’t news” (91). The press corps out to cover the coup in Ishmaelia lionize and spy on Wenlock Jakes, the most powerful and well-known foreign correspondent, “syndicated all over America,” who shot to fame through an entirely concocted revolution simply because he had overslept and got off at the wrong station in the wrong Balkan country. Following the American lead, every “special” in Europe is rushed out to the unspecified Balkan country where they proceed to shore up Jakes’s “thousand words of blood and thunder a day,” as “it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so” (93). The effect: “Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny,” and a Nobel Peace Prize for Jakes. Corker, who tells the story, celebrates this as an example of “the power of the press” (93). Meanwhile, the narrative voice renders this story without comment. Waugh’s irony emerges from the narrative tone: the narrator is, once again, disengaged, merely observing empirical facts and not really bothered by it. The absence of any outrage is what makes this deviation from an implicit normative ethical standard so humorous. The absurdity of the situation, of course, originates precisely in the wholesale inversion of the expectations of professional and ethical conduct—of the sullying of a liberal profession by money-grabbing entrepreneurs. Implicit in this wry recitation of observed events is the “empiricist” standard of ethical professionalism from which these celebrations of fiction as news so starkly depart.15
Journalism’s shift from profession to commerce was part of the debate that raged around the degeneracy of the press. Kennedy Jones’s reviews of 1920 in Fleet Street and Downing Street caused an uproar because he addressed this opposition, pointing out that the “the daily Press … is a commercial organization” (305–6). In another piece he argued that it was more “trade” than a “profession,” as the latter implied “the existence of certain fixed principles, ascertained facts, codes of conduct, knowledge of which can be acquired by study,” none of which journalism purported to practice (qtd. in Collier 24). The narrative further elaborates on this particular conflict, whether journalism is a profession or a trade, through the conversations between William Boot and Corker. Though William Boot, the inadvertent journalist, is mocked for being unschooled in the ways of the world, as a public school man, he is well versed in the ideals of the disinterested professional service ethic, where veracity and integrity of a news report are of importance. Meanwhile, for Corker, the news is a trade. The exchange between Boot and Corker on the role of news agencies makes this particularly clear:
“And all the papers have reports from three or four agencies?”
“Yes.”
“But if we all send the same thing it seems a waste.”
“There would soon be a row if we did.”
“But isn’t it very confusing if we all send different news?”
“It gives them a choice. They all have different policies so of course they have different news.” (90)
Boot’s commonsense perspective, the idea that there can be only one set of facts, is shot down by Corker. News, Corker argues, is entirely dependent on the policies of the newspapers, which determine the type of story that will ultimately become news. Facts, as such, do not exist, only stories that will entertain and generate profit. Corker and the other journalists do not uncover facts; they fabricate stories that are shaped by particular policies of different newspapers, whose policies in turn are determined by the profit motive. The narrative here focalizes both the implicit professional standard and the unabashed “trade” deviation through the dialogue of two opposing characters: Boot, the naïve gentleman, and Corker, the lower-middle-class mercenary journalist-for-hire. On the one hand, while it appears that sympathy and common sense are with Boot, he is nevertheless painfully and ridiculously anachronistic and hence the object of narrative amusement. On the other hand, while Corker is seen as crass, materialistic, and a callow agent of profit, nevertheless, his energy and enthusiasm are notable in contrast to Boot’s passivity. The narrator is not so wedded to professional integrity and sincerity that he does not note Boot’s lack of energy and inertia of will. The shock/outrage of the deviation from ethical norms does not overwhelm the gentleman narrator, who occupies a space of simultaneous outrage and amusement. This is the crux of the irony in Waugh’s novels. He mocks both Corker and Boot, representatives of the degenerate commercial press and emblem of passive gentlemanly integrity. In this amused but cinematically precise depiction of the event, the narrator has a privileged, doubled perspective: bored yet judgmental, detached but sympathetic, modern yet traditional English gentleman.
Waugh’s wit emerges through the structure of the narrative and the ethics of gentlemanly detachment. The gentleman narrator can observe and measure against the ethical standards of public-service professionalism that the press so flagrantly repudiates, but at the same time he is too blasé to be affected by such an abuse of ethics and, in fact, derives amusement from it. The devolution of detachment into boredom signifies the collapse of the balance of ethical detachment that distinguished the imperial gentleman. While the gentlemanly code meant a very careful cultivation of affect in the practice of good governance, the absence of will to engage indicates the dissolution of the detachment ideal. His amoral detachment and blasé attitude enable him to dissociate from local investments and ethics. Everything is equally appalling and chaotic: Ishmaelia, the modern press, and, finally, even the sacrosanct country are targets of the narrator’s dispassionate eagle-eye.
In Scoop, the narrator’s calculated ironic depiction of the inhabitants of “England’s green and pleasant land” is a deliberate send-up of cultural compulsion to celebrate the country as the essence of Englishness. It fits in with his apathetic and amused perspective on everyone and everything. The idea of the countryside as the “true England” was fairly well worn by the thirties, but as Raphael Samuel’s monumental historical and cultural work demonstrates, there was a more concerted rural turn in the interregnum between the two world wars.16 The countryside, “pastoral as England,” functioned as a cultural national trope for authentic Englishness, as evidenced in such works as Edmund Blunden’s The Face of England (1932) and Henry Williamson’s The Village Book (1930). Unsurprisingly, the novel mocks these salvage maneuvers by satirizing the English gentry and peasantry.
The Boot family is an unrelenting caricature of the ineffectual country family living off a decaying estate. The very English Boots parallel the Ishmaelite Jacksons. The long list of relatives and their particular occupations deliberately echoes the cataloging of the Jacksons and their positions. The narrator describes the general trivialities that preoccupy the Boots, young and old. The household consists of William, “who owned the house and estate”; his widowed mother, “who owned the contents of the house and exercised ill-defined rights over the flower garden”; William’s “widowed grandmother who was said to own ‘the money’ ”; Uncle Roderick, “the least eccentric”; Uncle Bernard, whose life of scholarship “had received little recognition”; and the innumerable old servants who occasionally wait on the family. Uncle Theodore, the aged uncle who used to be the cad-about-town, introduces the house, singing, “Change and decay in all around I see” (20). The house signifies decay rather than change. The narrative voice cinematically reveals the hopeless state of the estate, sweeping over the “tastefully disposed” trees now shot through with rot and suffering from “old age,” and the man-made lakes flooding pastures because the “secret” of sluice-gates died with “the old man from the lodge” who knew its workings (20–21). It points to the progressive and inevitable decline of the estate, foretelling the impossibility of its renewal.
Waugh’s novels are particularly ambivalent about the estate as an undying symbol of Englishness: while they celebrate the elegance, wealth, and noblesse oblige of the aristocracy, they condemn the manor, because in the absence of a dutiful lord of the manor, there is no hope of redemption. Boot Magna in Scoop is a magnified version of Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust and presages the countryside and the houses in Put Out More Flags and Brideshead Revisited. While these houses invoke the cultural and national significance of the estate and the tradition of the estate novel, they only do so to illustrate how the tradition itself is fundamentally broken. Whereas earlier in the novelistic tradition, the house (metonymic of England) in crisis is restored to order and civility by some judicious characterological and architectural maneuvers, Brideshead, Hetton Abbey, Malfrey Park, and Boot Magna are all dysfunctional and obsolete, because there is no patriarch. The lord of the manor is either missing or unwilling to fulfill the functions of the head of the family and estate, thereby unbinding the intimate relationship between the lord and the land. In the absence of the family patriarch, there is no organic relationship between the manor and the adjoining countryside; the possibility of a völkisch tradition overseen and maintained by the squire and his family does not exist. The country gentry are not the repository of all things English.
The narrator’s privileged and detached perspective enables him to note the difference between the ideal of what the estate represents and what it actually is in the case of Boot Magna. While the Boot family is harmless, their pointless and self-involved existence is a severe fall from the manner in which the estate ought to function. Yet, once again, while the narrator’s representation illuminates the discrepancy, the amusement far outweighs the sadness or outrage. The narrator is removed from any ethical investments in Englishness, just as he was removed from any engagement with the rhetoric of the imperial burden with the Ishmaelites, even as his detached perspective was shaped by that imperial English discourse. The narrator does not care, but at the same time, he cares and sees enough to note the distance between what is and what should be.
This narrative view extends to the countryside as a whole, though it shifts perspective to the timid, decidedly suburban city professional, Salter—to whom “there was something un-English about ‘the country’” (34). Salter visits Boot at his estate after his successful scoop in Ishmaelia to make sure that Boot does not sign with the rival paper, the Brute. The narrative tone matches the description of Boot’s trip into and through Ishmaelia. The irony here, quite expectedly, is double-edged. It mocks both the suburban Salter and the barbaric country. The savagery begins almost as soon as Salter leaves the confines of the city. The natives on the train shock him: instead of screening themselves behind newspapers like civilized people, they “stared at him fixedly and uncritically and suddenly addressed him on the subject of the weather in barely intelligible accents” (285). This representation of England as primitive—foregrounding the fact that the primitive is not inherent to the colonial periphery—becomes even more marked when Salter encounters the estate farmhand who has been deputed to collect him from the station. Described as a “cretinous native youth” who seems unable to carry on an intelligible conversation, the country native is emblematic of this alien space within England (285). Salter’s conversation with the boy closely parallels an earlier exchange between an Ishmaelian driver and British journalists. This attempt at simple communication, too, is shot through with misunderstanding, language problems, and cultural unintelligibility.17 By the end of the visit, in which Salter has been subject to the individual and collective eccentricities of natives of both rank and file, he feels justifiably and characteristically victimized and alien.
Resonating with echoes of Conrad’s representation of England as one of the dark places of the earth, the narrative describes Salter’s feelings on his country jaunt: “He was in a strange country. These people were not his people nor their laws his. He felt like a Roman legionary, heavily armed, weighted with the steel and cast brass of civilization, tramping through forests beyond the Roman pale, harassed by silent, illusive savages, the vanguard of an advance that had pushed too far and lost touch with the base … or was he the abandoned rearguard of a retreat; had the legions sailed?” (304). If the earlier sections of the novel set in Ishmaelia mocked the African nation’s attempts to imitate European modernity with its conflict between the Red Fascists and the Black Communists, its foreign missions and rival passports, then this passage reveals that the heart of darkness resides in the very core of deep England. It is significant also that Salter sees himself as a Roman legionary. Rome, as a symbol of civilization, is itself suspect here, since the Roman empire collapsed because of excess, barbarity, and decadence, which London and the offices of the Beast exemplify.18 Even as the narrative emphasizes the barbarity at the very heart of Englishness, at the same time, it invokes rather explicitly the Conradian idea that England itself was once the outpost of another empire. Though the narrator corroborates Salter’s perspective of “cretinous youths” and savage locals, he nevertheless is also the object of mockery in his desire to see himself as a Roman legionary.
The narrative reveals that there is no originary or linear progressive modernity that is then taken up and imitated badly in the colonial periphery. Rather, all places are isomorphically savage. Though undoubtedly a surrealist farce, what the narrative illustrates is that there is no home: every space becomes an Othered space of nightmare and discomfort. While on the one hand, London scenes of socialite lunches and the chaotic workings of Lord Copper’s Beast, which precede descriptions of Boot Magna, only seek to accentuate the decline of Boot Magna and the savagery of the countryside, yet on the other, London itself hardly functions as the center of order and civility. Both modernity and the atavistic country are chaotic, a chaos that the detached narrator is able to survey but not control or change, and from which he derives a disengaged amusement. Waugh’s clear-eyed, imperial narrator deliberately and methodically blurs the distinction and forces the reader to ask, to quote Mariana Torgovnik, “What’s ‘primitive,’ what’s ‘modern’? What’s ‘savage,’ what’s ‘civilized’? Increasingly it becomes difficult to tell” (37–38).19
The narrator from his cultivated distance ridicules everything. The countryside is as barbaric and uncouth as the anarchic African country. He is at home everywhere and nowhere, as he can survey and classify the foibles of every site without any commitment. He finds everything amusing and unsurprising. It is a formal gentlemanly engagement with a world gone wrong juxtaposed with a narrative examination of the belated gentleman’s, or William Boot’s, place in this modern world. National change fragments the certainty and power of the English imperial man, and while one can argue that the apparent certainty of the narrative voice indicates wholeness, the devolved blasé subjectivity of the gentlemanly voice emerges formally in the lack of empathy and ethical outrage. This, then, is the gentlemanly subjectivity that has morphed from distance in the interest of governance and ethical administration to an inhuman, urbane, and urban detachment. The gentlemanly narrative voice that delineates the world as grotesque, full of flat caricatures who have no control over their lives and the world, is a gentleman gone wrong—a gentleman emotionally unmoored from the ethics of governance and responsibility. Gentlemanly disinterestedness cultivated in the interest of service and necessary to the art of governance, of both self and other, here becomes a sophisticated disengagement from the world. The flip side of this unsympathetic mocking gentleman is the obsolete and ineffective gentleman as embodied by William Boot.
Heir to Boot Magna, William Boot is of the same genetic type as Tony Last in A Handful of Dust: passive because he adheres to a code of honor, integrity, and chivalry that is obsolete in an amoral world, not to mention empty of any moral or religious conviction. Safely ensconced in a slow, eternal, dead-end manorial routine focused around great-aunts, great-uncles, and grandmothers, he is on the margins—culturally, ideologically, and geographically. Significantly, though the heir, he does not fulfill any responsibilities of the squire, because he does not seem to have emerged from his “minority.” Indeed, he seems to be entirely unaware of any such duty or function. Infantilized and protected by, and in, his life at Boot Magna, all he wants “is the best possible excuse for remaining uninterruptedly in the country” (25). He even needs Nannie Bloggs’s permission and money in order to go to London on business. Nor does he want to venture beyond the estate, and “the atrocious city” of London, especially, is akin to a foreign land (30). The country gentleman is not a redemptive force of Englishness. Indeed, as the narrative is at pains to show, the country gentleman is an anachronism and has no purchase in the modern world.
William Boot, the emblem of the country gentry who would ordinarily save England, is shown as childlike and ineffective at home. This childlike naïveté is exacerbated but less culpable when he is thrown into the world of mendacious self-promotion and shifting allegiances—a world of airplanes, parachuting financiers, mini-cars, and press telegraph speak.20 Boot is reactive (most of the time, not even that), bewildered by what he sees around him, and unable to position himself either for or against London and the world as he subscribes to a set of archaic rules that run counter to technology, the modern, and its corollary of opportunism and shiftlessness. His response to the signifiers of modernity, which the narrative voice takes so utterly for granted, is a clear indication of the difference between the belated, passive gentleman of the estate and the urban gentleman narrator. Anything outside the confines of Boot Magna is classified as a “foreign and hostile world” (29). Boot is overwhelmed and bemused by the anarchy of the offices of the Beast, the unending streams of people, and the pace of the multiple lifts operated by “Caucasian lift girls.” Boot wanders around in a “daze,” while the narrative voice is unconcerned by the rush of visual, aural, and tactile stimulation (51).
Boot’s accidental foray into the city only emphasizes his alienation. The ersatz, hostile metropolis prevents any understanding on Boot’s part. The narrative, focalized through his perspective, emphasizes this through its description of the hotel room in which Boot stays. It is likened to an artificial, air-conditioned box with no reference to the natural world as understood either by Boot or even by the narrator—though the narrative voice seems to be fully conversant with the mechanics of modern rooms, and Boot is not: “The room was large and faultless. A psychologist hired from Cambridge had planned decorations—magenta and gamboges; colours which—it had been demonstrated by experiments on poultry and mice—conduce to a mood of dignified gaiety. … A gentle whining note filled the apartment, emanating from a plant which was thought to ‘condition’ the atmosphere. … Presently, a valet entered, drew back four or five layers of curtain, and revealed the window—a model of ingenuity, devised to keep out the noise of traffic and admit the therapeutic elements of common daylight” (48–49). In opposition to the organic dilapidation of Boot Magna, the London hotel room is carefully crafted for maximum efficiency. Its décor, furniture, and upholstery are deliberately manufactured to create artificiality, to remove it as far as possible from natural sound, air, or even light. It is not for nothing that Boot’s only occupation is to write a column called “Lush Places” about the English countryside. This occupation emphasizes Boot’s displacement. In the hotel room he is as far as can be from his natural habitat. Boot’s discomfort and sense of disorientation in this hotel room is simultaneously a testament to his dissociation from ersatz and unpleasant modernity—the narrative’s matter-of-fact tone illustrates the hideousness of both the color scheme as well as the psychological reasons behind it—and evidence of his inability to function within and fulfill the demands of contemporary English life.
His response to another classic symbol of modernity, the airplane, accentuates the difference between the gentlemanly narrative voice and himself, and this illustrative difference further reveals his inadequacy as a modern man. The contrast between the “austere economy” of the description of the airplane’s ascent into the sky and Boot’s responses to finally flying is striking (“Firbank” 57): “The machine moved forward, gathered speed, hurtled and bumped across the rough turf, ceased to bump, floated clear of the earth, mounted and wheeled above the smoke and the traffic and very soon hung, it seemed motionless, above the Channel, where the track of a steamer, far below them, lay in the bright water like a line of smoke on a still morning” (73). The narrative description of the plane’s struggle to ascend is precise, staccato, matter-of-fact, and picturesque for that very reason.21 The narrative voice harnesses wonder to reference the quotidian—the picture postcard, smoke on a still morning—while Boot’s response is extravagant, euphoric, and above all tied to nature and the English country: “William’s heart rose with it and gloried, larklike, in the high places” (73). The narrative describes and connects while Boot feels overwhelmed—one is empirical, observant, and disassociated while the other is awed and enraptured. The narrator is the too-distant, gentlemanly, calculating, sophisticated intelligence who is not charmed, while Boot is the naïve, insular country gentleman swept away, in this case, by the wonders of the modern world. Boot’s inability to process modernity and its signifiers is primarily illustrated through his unwitting entrenchment in the world of the press. To put it mildly, the fact that Boot is thrown into the vicious pit of the fourth estate—which, if anything, embraces capitalist modernity with enthusiasm—only serves to underscore Boot’s dislocation.
As already indicated, Boot inadvertently joins a nest of professional journalists who are little better than parasites. Though not engaged in any profession, Boot as a public school gentleman is keenly aware of ethical conduct and professional integrity; he is both a neophyte and a latecomer to the corrupted idea of professionalism in the press that is determined by the entrepreneurial (trade) ideas of profiteering, competition, and celebrity culture, rather than any gentlemanly ideas of truth and public service.22 His inability to duplicate the language of the telegraph, invented by the press for inexpensive express communication, marks his incompetence as a correspondent and his unwillingness to descend to the levels of absurdity and profiteering demanded by the job. In an apparent effort to evolve the most cost-efficient method of filing stories and sending instructions, the international press corps has developed its own language.23 These telegrams also become comedic moments in the narrative, as they are so patently ridiculous.24 One of the first telegrams that Boot receives from the London offices of the Beast seems utterly incomprehensible, a feeling the reader shares as the narrative does not clarify its meaning, signifying new and strange languages of modernity: “OPPOSITION SPLASHING FRONTWARD SPEEDILIEST STOP ADEN REPORTED PREPARED WARWISE FLASH FACTS BEAST” (94). Indeed, the only thing that Boot understands is “stop aden.” It is only after Corker explains it that both the reader and Boot begin to grasp this invented language. Corker, quite typically, only explains after he has found out that his news agency and the Beast are pooling their news sources, and he and Boot are no longer competing for the same scoop: “‘Opposition splashing’ means that the rival papers are giving a lot of space to this story. ‘Frontward Speediliest’—go to the front as fast as you can—full stop. Aden is reported here to be prepared on a wartime footing; ‘Flash facts’—send them the details of this preparation at once” (96). The structural juxtaposition of Boot’s innocence, Corker’s competitive survival instinct, the telegrams, and their interpretation reveals the narrative’s implicit mockery of all three. While Boot learns to decipher press cables, he is incapable of replying to them in a similar manner: “NO NEWS AT PRESENT THANKS WARNING ABOUT CABLING PRICES BUT IVE PLENTY MONEY LEFT AND ANYWAY WHEN I OFFERED TO PAY WIRELESS MAN SAID IT WAS ALL RIGHT PAID OTHER END RAINING HARD HOPE ALL IS WELL ENGLAND WILL CABLE AGAIN IF ANY NEWS” (173). Boot’s telegrams negate the capitalist sensationalism of the press, the melodramatic quality of winning and losing scoops, the equation of not just news with money but words with money as manifest in the telegraphic language. His telegrams reveal his inability to engage with modern commercial life itself. Boot’s cables, like Bertie Wooster’s in P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, pay attention to the niceties of polite English conversation while ignoring the price value of words. These amusing telegraphs function as multidirectional critiques: on the one hand, they speak to Boot’s ignorance and privilege, sheltered as he is from the realities of financial hardship. On the other hand, Boot’s cables are more English than the incomprehensible messages concocted by necessities of journalism, in that they follow the classed civilities of social interaction. They might be meandering, but their idiom is straightforward and accessible to everyone. More important, they do not indulge in hyperbole or sensationalism. They are gentlemanly, straightforward, and understated.
Boot’s only deliberately positive act also turns out to be truly symptomatic of his gentlemanliness, his ex-centricity, and his inability to engage with the modern world: he falls in love with Katchen, a young German woman—prostitute, femme fatale, and victim. While several unrelated characters point out Katchen’s true intent to Boot, he steadfastly refuses to consider it. Not only does Katchen take advantage of Boot—although it is possible to read her sympathetically as someone who has to make use of whatever is at her disposal in order to survive—but in doing so she becomes the archetypal “figure of the consuming [modern] woman” with a voracious appetite for material goods. Rita Felski has argued that the consuming woman was “a semiotically dense site of cultural imaginings of the modern and its implications for the relations between women and men” (Gender of Modernity 65). Katchen’s association with modernity, artifice, performance, and the trope of the femme fatale is marked right from the moment of her introduction, when Corker refers to Katchen as “the Garbo” (149). On discovering that Boot is paid for his expenses, she offers to become his news-gatherer; and because he “likes” her more than fellow journalist Jakes likes his retainer, Paleologue, she charges him a hundred dollars a week for her services, in addition to buying her clothes, a new hairdo, and assorted consumer goods.
Boot’s old-world chivalry reads like admirable idiocy in a situation where the woman in question, with her carefully crafted childishness designed to manipulate Boot’s gentlemanliness, symbolizes the worst of capitalist modernity. The materialist and callow modern woman is a recurrent trope in Waugh’s fiction; she is always shown to be the downfall of the unsuspecting chivalric gentleman—Margot Metroland and Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall and Tony and Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust are but two examples. The telegraphed trope illustrates the relationship between traditional gentlemanliness and modern femininity in a world gone awry, where men are out of their depth and the inherent shallowness of women allows them to crest the waves of modernity. Boot chivalrously pays not just for Katchen’s dresses, gloves, and hats but also for her and her German lover’s safe passage out of Ishmaelia. The narrator implicitly derides Boot’s naïve adherence to a chivalric code when the lady herself is revealed as a confidence artist whose goal is to survive in an unethical world. Boot’s gentlemanly ideals of chivalry and integrity are belated as opportunism, profit, and pleasure drive the imperial center. The narrative clearly, if amusedly, sets up the dichotomy between Boot’s insular idealism and the modern world in which he lives. In contrast to Katchen’s careful pragmatic manipulations where she suggests that Boot should buy her husband’s stones for twenty pounds to keep them safe, Boot’s love is described in metaphors laden with emotion and sincerity: “Now for the first time he was far from shore, submerged below wind and tide … in submarine twilight. A lush place” (181). In a move similar in tone to his responses to the experience of flying, Boot’s experience of love is steeped in a romantic otherworldliness, while the woman with whom he is in love uses him for her own ends: a juxtaposition of romantic chivalry and modern, rationalized quotidian. As is evident from the above discussion, the narrator and Boot function as the antithesis to each other. The narrator sympathizes with Boot, but also condescends to him. He is sympathetic to Boot’s ethics but condescends precisely because Boot is determined by them, and is unable to survey and comprehend the modern world in all its contradictory capaciousness.
In contrast, the narrator, with his scrutinizing all-seeing gaze, flattens the trials and tribulations of characters such as Boot, Salter, and Katchen. The narrative’s “external method” renders these characters as caricatures since they are not fully realized or rounded humanistic characters. As David Lodge argues, the narrative voice does not “bend his verbal medium to fit the contours of his characters’ sensibility,” as the characters are never really shown as anything other than one-dimensional types (Evelyn Waugh 5). We are never shown the internal thoughts of any character, not even the protagonist, whose passive meekness we see through his interactions with other characters. Everything is related as a matter of course, and the misunderstandings, miseries, disasters, and pratfalls emerge through the scene rather than in the telling, in the manner of the cinema.25 All the characters are flattened out and echo one another in the narrative’s sophisticated know-it-all English cosmopolitan perspective.
There is, then, an interesting paradox in terms of the form and content of Scoop. While Boot’s naïve gentlemanliness is equated with “deep” yet routinized, dead pastoral England and can only survive if it returns to its native petrified setting, the urbane, ironic, detached narrative that comments on Boot and submits the world to its controlling yet amused vision is also gentlemanly. This doubled perspective of and on gentlemanliness is made evident when, for all its detachment from and mockery of William Boot, the narrative voice seemingly aligns itself with him. Boot is hapless and helpless, more so than everyone else, and yet, through the reliable working of the old prep school/public school network, it is Boot and not the seasoned experts who unwittingly breaks the scoop of the minute from Ishmaelia. Boot’s childhood friend “Moke,” vice-consul to the British Consulate in Ishmaelia, is able to offer William “Beastly” Boot confidential information that he gathers as a “hobby” over dinner and glasses of port. The use of nicknames, the hail-fellow-well-met casualness of the old-boy network that thoroughly and naturally excludes the lower-class Corker, is the means through which Boot accidentally gets the scoop of the day. Both Boot’s privilege and innocence are on display here—a privilege that the narrative voice shares.26
The narrative cautiously mourns Boot’s chivalry, integrity, and commitment to gentlemanly values even as it illustrates and predicts their demise; he, in fact, is either too good or too stupid for this world, or both. Boot decides not to return to London to be honored at Lord Copper’s feast because he does not want to look like “an ass,” or rather because he is unwilling to take credit for something he did not do (303). Boot is fully cognizant of the fact that his success has nothing to do with his competence as a journalist and has everything to do with luck, especially in knowing the right people in the right places. His gentlemanly ethics prevent him from accepting praise that he does not deserve, even as he is tempted by the idea of celebrity. Boot, then, at this moment in the text is an ethical, assertive gentleman. Boot finally takes an independent stand: he decides against participating in the farce of celebrity culture and the modern press. On the one hand, Boot symbolizes the Englishman to be mourned proleptically, for the future belongs to financiers like Mr. Baldwin, the chameleon-like, unethical venture capitalist and globetrotting maverick. Baldwin is able to avert a national disaster in Ishmaelia by negotiating with the European powers who want to exploit Ishmaelia’s mineral deposits and the Ishmaelian national government. And yet the unempathetic narrative returns Boot, his naïveté and gentlemanliness, back to the bosom of his deathly family that most emphatically does not symbolize “deep” England as demi-paradise. He retreats to the cocoon of paralysis, comfort, and death.
In contrast to Waugh’s gentleman in retreat, in the next chapter I consider George Orwell’s representation of the troubled Englishman in transition. I connect these disparate writers together, because though they are from opposite ends of the political spectrum, together they explore the state of England and empire through the journey and perspective of young gentlemen. Though Waugh focuses exclusively on the upper-middle-class/middle-class gentleman, Orwell studies the young Englishman at the lower rungs of the middle-class ladder. Interestingly, the gentleman’s struggles as he accommodates to a “shrinking nation” in the 1930s shape the very different styles and formal experiments of Waugh and Orwell. If Waugh catalogs the gentleman’s increasing marginalization, George Orwell reworks and shifts the narrative of Englishness and gentlemanliness from hierarchical imperialism to suburban compromise and, ultimately, allegories of hopelessness.