Two Satirists are Better than One
by St. Clair Carr, literary editor, NEW IMPROVED HEAD
Reviewed in this article:C. H. B. Kitchin, Streamers Waving
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and FallAnother article on this site explains my admiration for C. H. B. Kitchin’s novel The Auction Sale. My admiration naturally led me to look for copies of other novels of his, and thanks to the internet I have been able to find some sources of his books. Earlier this year I read two other novels of his, one of which was Streamers Waving, written in 1925.
Streamers Waving, a satire about British society of the 1920s, disappointed me. It was well written and entertaining enough, but I couldn’t see much point to it.
Then late in the year I decided to resume my acquaintance with Evelyn Waugh. In my youth I read a few of his novels and was not impressed. They were amusing, but ultimately seemed to have no point other than encouraging the reader to feel superior to the characters. However, now that I am in the early phase of old age I have been discovering that my youthful opinions are often highly questionable – I was impressed by Middlemarch when I first read it, for example. So I decided to give the old boy another chance.
The book I chose to read was Decline and Fall, his first novel (published in 1928). I was quite taken with it. Waugh displays dazzling literary skill. His characters are striking and well-drawn, their actions are engrossing, Waugh’s style is elegant, and the plot moves along quickly and compellingly.
However, the book is – or at any rate is widely considered to be – a satire of British society of the 1920s, and although it is stylistically brilliant its criticism of British society doesn't amount to much. Waugh had observed that people with a lot of money had a lot of influence in society. His satire amounts to portraying their influence as total control of society, and then depicting them as either utter buffoons (if they are aristocrats) or utter criminals (if they are businesspeople).
Depicting people in authority as vicious and stupid is a classic comic formula, of course, and one which we could probably use more of these days. However, as a satirical device it is wanting. Ultimately, Waugh’s “satire” is toothless; no one could possibly take his burlesque as a serious examination of the follies and vices of the world. The book is more of a situation comedy than a satire – a naive young man is put among a collection of larger-than-life reprobates, and you can imagine the fun that ensues!
One thing Decline and Fall did for me, though, was remind me of Kitchin’s Streamers Waving. As I have noted, Streamers Waving is also a satire of British society of the 1920s. As soon as I had finished Decline and Fall I understood why Streamers Waving was a good book.
Kitchin's approach was different from Waugh's. Although Kitchin's characters are exaggerated slightly for satirical purposes, they are still treated as human beings rather than as caricatures. Unlike Waugh’s characters, they account for their actions, and they make choices between courses of action. Waugh’s characters are simply anthropomorphic forces careening around society and every now and then colliding with each other.
Although we are not meant to approve of the decisions made by Kitchin’s protagonist, Lydia Clame, we can sympathize with the human failings which led her to make the wrong decisions and understand why she made them. Waugh’s characters, on the other hand, are simply incomprehensible. In fact, they are not intended to be understood. They are stock characters and clearly intended only to be butts of humour.
Because Kitchin’s characters are presented as human beings, his satire is more effective than Waugh's. For example, an outrageously flirtatious conversation between the rich Princess Vayadère and the man with whom Lydia Clame is infatuated says more about the position of the rich and influential than Waugh's scene of Margot Beste-Chetwynde implausibly administering her international white slave ring in front of his protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather, who is infatuated with her. Few of us are acquainted with the inner workings of white slave rings, but we all know about flirting, so Kitchin's scene cannot be dismissed as a burlesque. Although the Princess's conversational tactics are, for the time, outrageous, they are still believable, and she is only able to use them with impunity because she is an aristocrat.
Waugh depicts the powerful figures of British society as morally bankrupt, but in a way which prevents this observation from being taken seriously. Kitchin depicts the entire range of English gentility as subject to the same folly and lust for self-justification as the rest of us. The observation that the privileged are the same as the rest of us is of course a more subversive generalization than Waugh's description of the denizens of the highest reaches of the British upper classes as either fools or criminal masterminds.
The difference in approach between the two books may account in large part for the greater popularity of Decline and Fall. Waugh's targets were a very small segment of society, and the shots he took at those targets probably gave great pleasure to those among the bookreading classes who were envious and resentful of aristocrats, captains of industry, and cabinet ministers. Kitchin's book, on the other hand, is about the bookreading classes, and it argues that they have the failings that all human beings have.
In the end, Streamers Waving gives us more interesting things to think about than Decline and Fall does. Lydia Clame’s futile life, for example, gives us some pretty good ideas about why the type of life she led did not survive the next war. Decline and Fall, on the other hand, gives us no clue as to why the life his characters led did not survive the war, either. After all, why should people with the power Waugh describes them as having ever have to change?
But you don’t have to believe me about the relative merits of these two books. You can perform the experiment yourself. I recommend that you read both books, Waugh first and Kitchin after, on the principle of the whirlwind preceding the still, small voice. The strengths and weaknesses of each book are more apparent when you read them close together, and your appreciation of both books will be heightened. To me, Waugh is great fun and Kitchin is trenchant, but you of course can draw whatever conclusions you want.
[Streamers Waving is out of print, but copies of cheap recent editions can be obtained through the internet – even with shipping they cost less than the average new novel down at the big box bookstore.]Two Satirists are Better than One © John FitzGerald, 2001
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