Evelyn Waugh and The Diary of a Nobody

Evelyn Waugh annotates the 'Diary'

Published in EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES

Vol. 36, No. 1

Spring 2005

Evelyn Waugh did not enjoy his Christmas of 1946. It was the second after the war and the national mood was sombre. Troops were still being demobilized and the food rationing was worse than ever. As a Christmas “bonus” the government had allowed an extra eight pence worth of meat (half to be corned beef), but bread and potatoes were about to be rationed for the first time. To top it all, the weather was deteriorating and the winter 1946-7 would be the worst in living memory.

Waugh, then in his early 40s, was en famille at Piers Court, and that was always a trial in itself. And he felt beleaguered. New houses were encroaching on his land, the socialist “grey lice” were in government, taxes were punitive, and he was thinking of emigrating to Ireland. He tried to stay in fairly good humour on the day itself, for the sake of the children, but without much success. He was disgusted by his children’s shoddy presents and the general disorder. Their lunch was cold and ill-cooked. His wife had given him some caviar, but he had eaten that the week before. All in all, it was a “ghastly” day. He had already told his diary that he was looking forward to his forthcoming stay in hospital, for an operation on his hemorrhoids, to get away from them all.[1]

The one bright spot of the day was his mother’s gift: a copy of George &Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, the seventh edition (J. W. Arrowsmith, 1924), with an introduction by Sir John Squire.[2] Why did she choose this particular book? We surmise that it was because of her son’s fond employment of the Diary in his novel Brideshead Revisited, published the year before. There he had made Sebastian Flyte’s mother, Lady Marchmain, read it out loud of an evening. With her “beautiful voice and great humour of expression” she solaces her family as they try to come to terms with Sebastian’s alcoholism. She reads from it “with great spirit until ten o’clock,” and continues on a later evening.[3]

Kate Waugh would surely have been touched by this scene in Brideshead, for it is a piece of reworked biography. Waugh had known the Diary since earliest childhood. It had figured among those theatrical reading sessions in Arthur Waugh’s study which were such a prominent part of the early imaginative lives of both the Waugh brothers. According to Alec Waugh’s account, these readings went on well into Evelyn’s teenage years. The latter’s own late account (censored of all anti-paternal feeling) says: “For some eight years of my life for some three or four evenings a week when we were at home, he read to me, my brother and to whatever friends might be in the house, for an hour or more from his own old favourites. … Often it was pure entertainment; Vice Versa or The Diary of a Nobody.”[4]

The influence of these sessions eventually went deep, but at the time the youthful Waugh reacted against them with growing embarrassment and disdain. Whether he initially found the Diary as amusing as his father did is questionable. Arthur Waugh may have found it truly comical, but the first reviews had ranged from the indifferent to the downright hostile. “A photographic representation of middle-class boredom and horseplay,” snarled the Athenaeum, accusing the Grossmiths of vulgarity, snobbishness and—unkindest cut of all—of being not funny enough.[5]

It is clear that the Diary was a “sleeper” which started to hit its stride among the wider public only about the time of the First World War, and it did so at first among people who were distinctly anti-Modernist in their sympathies. Admiring the Diary, even singing its praises excessively, made a convenient gesture of defiance. One might celebrate its charm while patronizing it too. The characteristic note is struck by the conservative essayist and journalist D. B. Wyndham Lewis, writing in the early 1920s. According to Lewis, admirers of the Diary at that time were the “salt of the earth,” by which he meant men of the legal and political Establishment; people like “Lord Rosebery, Mr Augustine Birrell, Mr Hilaire Belloc, one of H. M. Ambassadors, and at least one Abbot of Benedictines”: in short, middle-aged men of sentimental tastes who were nostalgic about the Diary’s values and possibly enjoyed a chuckle at the expense of the lower orders, as represented by the Pooter family.[6] As the very type of the Georgian litterateur, Arthur Waugh fitted perfectly into such a group. According to his son he “always referred to himself as ‘incorrigibly Victorian’” even though he outlived the Victorian age by forty years. He regarded the emerging geniuses of Modernism with blank incomprehension. Eliot and his circle he regarded (again, according to his son) as absurd, and he spoke of D. H. Lawrence as a writer whose imaginative powers had been abandoned on a midden.[7]

Contemptuous though the young Evelyn Waugh was of such aesthetic conservatism, he did eventually come to share many of his father’s literary tastes, including his appreciation of the Diary. In 1930, when his career as a novelist was gathering pace, Waugh wrote a column on diaries as a literary form and made there his bold claim:

I still think that the funniest book in the world is Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody. If only people would really keep journals like that. Nobody wants to read other people’s reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting, and will become more so as conditions change with the years.[8]

This comment should be understood for what it was. Waugh was not engaging in serious critical debate; he was scribbling copy for the Daily Mail at the rate of £30 per 800-word column. He was being paid to air provocative opinions, not to make finely nuanced observations. But his judgment on the Diary was apparently sincere, and certainly he put his finger on one of its appeals, which makes it an important social document: it deals with the routines of lower-middle-class Victorian urban life in a way that ought to be boring but is actually funny and fascinating.

It is worth considering that Waugh learnt more from the Diary than that. At this time he was refining his early aesthetic goal, which was to pare down his narrative to the barest bones of dialogue and action. He would surely have been impressed by the Grossmiths’ ability to conjure up so economically episodes of sublime absurdity. A fictive diary is in its nature one of the sparsest kinds of narrative. It occludes the author to the limit, by removing most narrative exposition—or (very important to Waugh) any overt judgments. Furthermore, just like Pooter, Waugh’s early leading male characters—Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, William Boot—seem stranded in an earlier era, lost in some Victorian dream among predatory modern forces: they are simple, trusting, loving, innocent, and therefore blameworthy. (There is evidence that the Grossmiths too intended to pass a more severe criticism on their hero than the modern reader can easily perceive.) Take for example the scene where Pooter naively records his loved ones’ reaction to his literary pretensions:

Another thing which is disappointing to me is, that Carrie and Lupin take no interest whatever in my diary.
I broached the subject at the breakfast-table to-day. I said: “I was in hopes that, if anything ever happened to me, the diary would be an endless source of pleasure to you both; to say nothing of the chance of the remuneration which may accrue from its being published.”
Both Carrie and Lupin burst out laughing.[9]

Is there an echo of this, at least in tone, in A Handful of Dust (1934), where the hero-victim Tony Last, landowner and cuckold, returns on Sunday morning to his house and to his adulterous wife’s horrible female friends?

Tony left the church porch and made his accustomed way to the hot houses; a gardenia for himself; some almost black carnations for the ladies. When he reached the room where they were sitting there was a burst of laughter. He paused on the threshold, rather bewildered.

“Come in, darling, it isn’t anything. It’s only we had a bet on what coloured buttonhole you’d be wearing and none of us won.”

They still giggled a little as they pinned on the flowers he had brought them.…

They left early, so as to reach London in time for dinner. In the car Daisy said, “Golly, what a house.”

“Now you can see what I’ve been through all these years.”

“My poor Brenda,” said Veronica, unpinning her carnation and throwing it from the window into the side of the road.[10]

Of course, Tony Last is miles removed socially from Charles Pooter, and the Grossmiths’ mode is comedy whereas Waugh’s is biting satire. But, as character types, the two do have one thing in common: we are invited to see both of them as nearly extinct beings, doomed to be supplanted by a new and pushy generation operating on quite different moral principles. And, as a very self-conscious literary artist, what Waugh surely took from the Diary and applied to his own ends is its severely disciplined style, its delicately modulated tone and timing, and the subtle tricks whereby characters can be made to expose themselves in monologue or self-reported dialogue.

It should also be noted that not all the Diary is couched in a lightly humorous mode. It cuts quite deeply in places. Some of the dreadful faux pas, more painful than comic, recorded so naively in its pages would not be out of place in one of Waugh’s satires. One thinks of the episode where Pooter reports that he has told the owner of a portrait drawing that there is “something about the expression of the face that was not quite pleasing. It looks pinched.” The mournful reply: “Yes, the face was done after death—my wife’s sister” (142). It is no accident that comedy based on such excruciating embarrassments as these first arose at the turn of the century, because it is essentially metropolitan comedy of the kind Waugh perfected himself: the comedy of a world where we are constantly involved in circumstances where incomplete knowledge makes it easy to misjudge or misinterpret.

So, sixteen years later, Waugh found his mother’s gift very acceptable, not only because he had long been an admirer of the Diary but also because it gave him an excuse to retreat to his library and give the little book some close attention. He did much more than re-read it, and to understand what he did do with it, it is necessary to look a little more closely at the origin of this comic masterpiece.

The Diary of a Nobody, the fictional diary of Charles Pooter, a clerk in late-Victorian London, first appeared anonymously in Punch, or the London Charivari. It consisted of 26 short episodes published intermittently in the issues between 26 May 1888 and 11 May 1889. Nothing is known about what Punch readers thought of the serial, but its reception must have been such as to persuade its creators to go further, for in July 1892 a longer version appeared as a book from the Bristol publisher J. W. Arrowsmith. The authors were now identified as the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith, famous as actors, song-writers and playwrights.

The book was different in many ways from the Punch serial. The Grossmiths divided the existing text into 17 chapters and then added seven new ones. The first entry of the new eighteenth chapter is dated “April 8,” or two and a half weeks after the last entry in Punch, to which it connects seamlessly. They also revised the existing Punch text, by adding, substituting and (rarely) deleting material. Finally they added the 32 witty pen and ink sketches by Weedon Grossmith, which in mood and style now seem so integral to the whole.[11]

What Waugh did with his present on that Christmas Day was to read it very carefully against the serial, presumably using the 1888/9 volumes of Punch from his library. As he went along, he annotated his copy with all the significant changes he could discover between the two versions. He added some marginal remarks, both to the text and to Squire’s introduction. Finally, at the end of the book on the flyleaf he added further comments as an aide memoire, some of them extraordinary in their attention to minutiae.[12] One example will suffice: it reads, cryptically, “Jackson frères Lupin’s introduction, not grocer’s brand, but slip later.” This refers to a scene where Lupin tells his parents he has secured them some quality champagne from an irreplaceable source. In the Punch version, it is identified as the highly dubious brand “Jackson Frères.” Yet the next time the same brand is mentioned, much later, we see it is freely available from the corner grocer. Trying to avoid the contradiction, and perhaps to mute the impression that Lupin is a liar, in their revision the Grossmiths removed the brand name in the first scene, but they left in the later phrase “the same as we had before.” This is the meaning of Waugh’s “slip later.”

Unlike many editors since, Waugh understands that the Grossmiths had been careful to ensure that the dates of the entries were real dates in the 1888/9 calendar, and that they had maintained these dates even when they revised and extended the text in 1892. So, against the editor, Squire’s, cosy (and wrong) remark that “The date is, shall we say, 1891; the site is Holloway,” Waugh puts a pained notation “1888” (8). He could not have thought much of Squire's accuracy, because he also picks him up over his claim that the character Mr. Padge is never allowed to say anything but “That's right.” Many commentators since have claimed the same, but Waugh remembers and notes that much later Padge says more: he drinks Carrie Pooter's health, “coupled, as he said, ‘with her worthy lord and master’” (134).

Waugh also spots that the entry which in Punch is dated, correctly, “Sunday, November 4” was accidentally re-dated “November 5, Sunday” in the book version, an error which caused the rest of the entries up to the end of the year to be one day out.[13] For example, the very next entry is “November 6,” which was a Tuesday in 1888, yet it is clearly intended to be a Monday, the day when Lupin attends Mr Perkupp’s office to find out about his job offer. Waugh recognizes this, because he writes in all the original and correct Punch dates to the following entries as far as the one for 19 November. The Grossmiths forced the dates back on track when they correctly labeled the entry for 30 December 1888 a Sunday. But they did not notice, nor does Waugh, that if 26 November is a Sunday, and it is so described, then 30 December cannot be one as well.

Waugh was conscientious and careful, but not infallible. In Punch, the Grossmiths had allowed the Pooters and their friends to play the game Consequences on successive Saturday and Sunday evenings (2-3 June 1888). Worse, the second time Gowing, typically, had “over-stepped the limits of good taste.” When they realized this, for the book they shifted the two occasions back a day, to the Friday and Saturday, but Waugh fails to pick this up. Then there is the question of whether Daisy Mutlar’s brother (he who has the useful skill of playing a tune on his cheek with a knife) is called Harry or Frank. In Punch, he is called “Harry” in the entry for 8 November and “Frank” after that. In Waugh’s edition the error is continued. In fact, it is perpetuated. For the book the Grossmiths again named “Harry Mutlar” as the “low comedy merchant” in a new passage with which they supplemented the original Punch entry for 15 November, but Waugh does not notice. Nor did any editor until well after Waugh’s death.

It was an odd way to spend Christmas, one might think, even for a misanthrope. Why did he do it? Waugh’s self-imposed task has two aspects: first, as a biographical detail, and second, as a careful enquiry by a technician of comedy. Under the first aspect, the task was both an act of piety and exorcism. For the Diary carried a powerful emotional charge for Waugh. Charles Pooter’s excruciatingly mundane transcript of his days surely reminded Waugh only too exactly of his own parents’ middle-class suburbanism, which it was the prime object of his early life to escape. According to biographer Selina Hastings, “looking back years later Evelyn observed that his parents’ life reminded him of Diary of a Nobody, with Arthur and Kate as Mr and Mrs Pooter.” She adds that it was “undeniably true” that “there were Pooterish elements in the home life of the Waughs.”[14] Certainly the Waugh parents’ social life and domestic activities in Evelyn’s early years, as revealed in Kate Waugh’s diary (“Tried to make pastry. Very funny. Roasted pheasant”) do indeed bear an eerie resemblance to the fictional records of the Pooter ménage (“It does seem hard I cannot get good sausages for breakfast. They are either full of bread or spice, or are as red as beef.” [119]) So do Arthur’s poems about cycling. He had them printed privately as Legends of the Wheel, and they could easily have filled a column in the fictional Bicycle News, that gruesomely cheerful, pun-laden periodical, invented for the Diary.

Further, we know that the dynamics of the relationships in the Diary, especially that of reckless young Lupin Pooter towards his elders, reminded Waugh of his own relation to his brother Alec and of his own position as an unappreciated younger son. It was a family joke that Evelyn was in his youth very much like Lupin Pooter. In his journal, Alec Waugh mentioned that he and his wife “roared over Lupin’s resemblance to my brother” when they read the Diary together in 1935.[15] Forty years later, in March 1976, Alec again commented that no one had pointed out the resemblances between Waugh and Lupin Pooter, adding that “we, as a family, were always aware of this, and I remember EW’s delight at his first reading of it. ‘But Lupin’s me,’ he cried.”[16]

Taken at face value, this implies that Evelyn recognized something of himself in Lupin even as a child. Certainly by the time he reached the age of Lupin in the story, he would have had more reason to do so. Lupin Pooter, at twenty, is the prodigal son, back at home after being sacked from his uncongenial job. He scorns his father’s suburban existence and seeks to escape from his class. “I am not going to rot away my life in the suburbs,” he cries (288). He is improvident and disrespectful. He smokes and drinks too much and drives too fast. His slang is impenetrable, his friends noisy and bohemian; he is attracted to older women with dubious reputations. But basically he is a shrewd social climber. He plans two means of escape from Holloway. The first, by making a career out of sailing pretty close to the wind as a share broker, or, as he calls it, “biz—good old biz!” was certainly not Waugh’s way. But the second is to escape into a higher social sphere and to marry an heiress, “Lillie Girl,” on whom ten thousand pounds have been settled.

Waugh surely identified particularly with the way Lupin is badly underestimated by his father, yet triumphs in the end. It is true that Lupin is the only son of the family, whereas Waugh as a teenager was caught up in a three-way tangle with his father and his elder brother Alec, the favourite. But in fact that is paralleled by the relationship of the brothers Grossmith themselves. George, the elder, was far more successful and creative than Weedon, especially in their early days. Weedon failed as an artist and only took to the theatre as an alternative career. The character of Lupin Pooter is based on that of the young Weedon. Some of the more laughable incidents, for example the one where Pooter delivers a stern reproof to his son and then catches his foot in the mat as he exits, actually happened to Weedon, who seems to have been something of a scapegrace compared with his perfectionist brother. All this was a matter of common knowledge. Both brothers, especially George, were household names in the years when Waugh was growing up, and both published volumes of autobiography: George in 1910 and Weedon in 1913.

Second, if Waugh had thought of the Diary as “the funniest book in the world” at the outset of his career, he might well have been keen, at Christmas 1946, to see if it still had any aesthetic lessons for him. Judging from the type and depth of his annotations it is conceivable that he had some creative purpose in mind. After all, the peculiar possibilities of the fictive diary are of perennial interest to comic writers. The Diary’s technique of ingenuous self-revelation was pushed further by Anita Loos in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady(1925), and, of course, the Diary has been overtly imitated, with the same range of cultural reference and modish concerns, in Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole (1982) and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones (1996), not to mention Keith Waterhouse’s two clever pastiches, Mrs Pooter’s Diary (1983) and The Collected Letters of a Nobody (1986). For a century the Diary has been fertile ground which has germinated many seeds, so why not for Waugh? In 1946 he was in a restless mood. The triumph of Brideshead Revisited was behind him; The Loved One was not yet on the horizon. For the moment his creative energies seemed to be flagging: he had written little recently that satisfied him. Did the Diary induce in him the feeling he would soon be ascribing to Dennis Barlow, in The Loved One?

His interest was no longer purely technical nor purely satiric. . . . In that zone of insecurity in the mind where none but the artist dare trespass, the tribes were mustering. Dennis, the frontiersman, could read the signs.[17]

Perhaps, briefly, during that Christmas, Waugh perused the Diary as a frontiersman and felt the tribes mustering. He told his friend Diana Cooper, “I spent Christmas studying Diary of a Nobody and comparing it with the original serialized version in Punch with some very interesting discoveries resulting.”[18] But what exactly he meant by the last phrase will never be known. The Diary was laid aside and the tribes dispersed, not to assemble again until Waugh arrived at the Forest Lawn cemetery in the following year.

Notes

[1] Entry of 23 December 1946. Michael Davie, ed., The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1976), 668.

[2] The history of the early book editions of the Diary is tangled, due to the unwillingness of the publisher to distinguish between an edition and an impression (reprint). The edition of 1910 was at first called the fifth, then the third, and finally the fourth.

[3] Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945. London: Chapman & Hall, 1960), 149.

[4] A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography (London: Chapman and Hall, 1964), 71.

[5] Athenaeum, 13 August 1892: 223. The publishers tried to correct the reviewers’ judgments by printing in later editions a set of short commendations from public figures.

[6] D. B. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Panegyric of a Hero’ in At the Sign of the Blue Moon (London: Andrew Melrose, 1924), 199.

[7] A Little Learning, 64, 76-7.

[8] “One Way to Immortality,” Daily Mail, 28 June 1930. Reprinted in Donat Gallagher, ed., The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (London: Methuen, 1983), 84-6.

[9] The Diary of a Nobody (Bristol / London: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1924), 158-9. Further citations from Waugh’s copy are in the text.

[10] A Handful of Dust (1934. London: Penguin, 2000), 83-4.

[11] Not all editions reproduce all of Weedon’s drawings. Waugh’s edition does not, as he noted at one point: “drawing of Pooter with umbrella?” This perhaps implies he checked his copy against another edition in his library.

[12] The copy is now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, PR 6013 R795 D5 1924 HRC WAU Evelyn Waugh Collection. The dedication reads: “Evelyn with love from Mother Xmas 1946.” On the title page Waugh noted: “Text collated with original serial version in Punch1888-89. E.W. Christmas 1946.”

[13] Waugh’s is the first known record of this error. The first Diary editor to note it was Alan Pryce-Jones (Collins, 1968), but he did not explain how it had come about.

[14] Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 12-13. Waugh’s observation explicitly comparing his parents’ life to the Pooters cannot be located now. Information from Selina Hastings, 3 Mar. 2005.

[15] Cited by Hastings, 12.

[16] Alec Waugh’s comment is in a MS page of corrections which he made to the Sykes biography of his brother. Information from Alexander Waugh, 19 Feb. 2005.

[17] The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (London: Chapman & Hall, 1948), 68.

[18] Writing from hospital on 17 Jan. 1947. Artemis Cooper, ed., Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper (London: Sceptre, 1992), 130-1. Italics added.