An Observation of E. Waugh, Man of Letters

By Hugh Pedro McGreevey

There is something about the works of Evelyn Waugh that makes them all read like fairy tales for intelligent adults. It was the bad luck of Waugh, like Malcolm Lowry, the far greater writer, to have what is known as microphallus. Both were well-documented small-cock men, and, hence, took great pains to write cleverly or magnificently about things other than fucking, which both were loath to discuss.I’m getting ahead of myself: The discovery of Waugh as fairy tale writer for intelligent adults is the thing. It all began when my wife insisted that I attend her older sister’s baby shower. It took place in my wife’s family home, in central New Jersey. I was to baby-sit the kids, my six-month mold girl and three year old boy, while my wife conducted the ceremonies. My mother-in-law booted my son and I from the premises, giving us no choice but to seek refuge elsewhere. Fortunately, my brother-in-law, a due-diligence apparatchik at a minor investment fund, was exiled as well. Now, besides vetting brochures that are distributed at turnpike rest stops and veterans’ hospitals, Uncle Abbot possesses a scholar’s interest in locomotives. It is an interest that exceeds even that of my own son, who has himself no mean knowledge on the topic, though, unlike his Uncle, he may not yet have the communication skills to speak about it at length and in scrupulously un-actionable prose. And so it was suggested that Uncle Abbott and I take young Hogan to a nearby train museum. That was exactly what I did. I dropped the two of them off at the train yard. Instead of finding a place to park the car for free (a thriftiness admired by poor, constricted Uncle Abbott) I drove off to the Irish pub I had spotted a few blocks distant.

I was in the corner booth drinking a glass of whiskey and reading Waugh’s Handful of Dust. It gave me a moment of guilt when I read about Tony Last and his obnoxious son, John. My son behaved much better than this brat in the book and yet I had left to him out in the cold and wind, snot streaming down his nose while being lectured to by a self-purporting train expert. Clearly, I was a worse father than the asshole English lord, who left his son with the horse-trainers and groundskeepers. Yet I read on. Waugh got good and vicious. The characters began skewering each other at every turn. Each sip of my whiskey seemed more delicious. These people really knew how to treat each other. Waugh was definitely for adults, intelligent adults, who should prefer a glass of alcohol and a dose of literature in a bar to fumbling around train yards with toddlers and risk-managers. As I read on I couldn’t help but notice two ladies slouching against the bar: a self-conscious blonde, slightly overweight, and her worse-for-the-wear companion, certain to be a current or recent addict. The two seemed waiting for something or someone, and it was most likely not a choo-choo train. I walked over, put Handful of Dust on the counter, and bought them a round. The older of the two mentioned my wedding ring immediately. I felt creative and cruel today from the Waugh and maybe the whiskey. I gave them something other than my usual pat: She passed, lymphatic, two years ago.

“She left me,” I said instead. “To party with a bunch of rich lesbians. A baby shower.”

They were waiting for a ride. It turned out that I was the ride. Ten shots later, bleary, blurred but not blind, we pieced together a path to the hotel where they lived. We brought along tequila and limes. The room smelled of piss and air freshener. They were mother and daughter, I had learned in the course of things. The mother was a heroin addict and a prostitute. Her daughter was coming up in the world by way of stripping. She had taken her mother in—for the week. The perfume scent turned out to emanate from a swath of Secret deodorant smeared on the wall above the queen-sized bed.

The scene was Fielding and Boswell and Bukowski as opposed to Miller and Burroughs. There was bawdiness abounding with two-tongued, two-generation, simultaneous mother-daughter fellatio harlotry. Fielding could’ve appreciated the farting sounds and the doggy-style spread of the stripper daughter. The pig in Charlotte’s Web could not have provided a better image of white-mooned assery. Boswell, in his Scotch thrift, would have recognized the inherent usefulness of the much-deflated boobs and withered brown band-aid nipples that the scabiesed and addicted mother planted in my tequila-slobbering mouth. Bukow, finally, would have applauded the room, a Central Jersey and pitch-perfect approximation of circa-1950s skid row L.A.

There was no Burroughs buggery or come-drenched alien corpses. Neither for that matter was there any fat-nosed Henry Miller foisted passion or false bohemian toilet paper prose. It was what it seemed. A day that had much potential, wasted. When finally I drove myself back to the family home and the expensive, pampered beauties of the baby shower drunk in the living room; my blameless children, innocently asleep upstairs; and my resentful brother-in-law, fuming in the ancestral den, I reflected that the thing is this: The literary thing, of course, is that Waugh can inspire the will to behave as an adult. But because he will not write of it, he cannot inspire the desire to screw, which is the context of this essay. And so we say Waugh was a writer who did not see truly the desire of this literary endeavor and for that we say he wrote not literature BUT fairy tales for adults.