satire – Kate Macdonald

The 1938 Club! Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop

This special podcast scripts recap from Why I Really like This Book, is on Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s magnificent satire about newspaper journalism. Scoop is also a member of The 1938 Club, a week of book reviews and blog posts about the reading of 1938, that’s taking place between 11 and 17 April 2016.

British journalism changed radically at the beginning of the 20^th century, with an increasing population growing in literacy and demanding more and more newspapers to read. The practices of gathering news, and what you did with it, also changed, which is what the pointedly satirical Scoop is all about. Evelyn Waugh is a byword in English literature for being rude and offensive, and as the author of the utterly nostalgic Brideshead Revisited, and of the Sword of Honour trilogy, which is so bitter about the experience of trying to be a soldier in the Second World War that reading it can be a very depressing experience. Before the war, Waugh was less bitter, and less despondent, and more fun, while still being terminally exasperated with the stupidity of almost everyone. This jaundiced view of life, and humanity, is easier to enjoy when it is still relatively positive. In Scoop, his hero, William Boot, is a thoroughly admirable and decent chap, and nothing bad happens to him. Had Scoop been written 15 years later, Boot would have suffered far more than he gets away with in the relatively innocent and optimistic 1930s. And as I enjoy a novel so much more when the lead protagonist is not made to have a ghastly time, I really enjoy Scoop. It’s a story of decent values triumphing over the false gods of media megalomania and dishonesty, and the pursuit of truth as opposed to the invention of false news.

But set beside these admirable, up-beat, positive values, there is the inescapable fact that Waugh wrote about people who were not white, or western European, in a way that we cannot tolerate in writers of today. Here comes my mini-lecture on anachronism, and racism in fiction: if a novel was written before the age of political correctness, which means the 1980s, we have to ignore words and sentiments that we categorise as racist today, and that includes the names given to black people. If the novel was published before the Second World War, we also have to remind ourselves that Jews were routinely referred to then in ways we could not possibly use today, because then the Holocaust had not happened, and casual, unthinking anti-Semitism was simply a part of how Europeans and Americans thought and expressed themselves. If we insist on applying the social and political views of today onto the novels written in a past epoch, we’re just making arguments where there aren’t any.

Not all authors of the 1920s and 1930s were racist. If the more sensitive, intelligent and politically advanced authors who had actually thought about offensiveness, and stereotyping, and the damage some words do, wanted their characters, contemporary to their own time, to sound normal and authentic, they used the words we don’t use today, but in the dialogue of the characters. They kept the narrative voice away from the dubious language. Evelyn Waugh does not do this: his narrative voice in Scoop does use the words we don’t use now, and we just have to accept it. If this affects your enjoyment of the novel, well, I’m sorry about that. It’s a pity, because it is possible to have politically acceptable beliefs now and still enjoy fiction that ignores that kind of thinking. In Scoop, which is largely set in Ishmaelia, an invented north African country, there is plenty of scope for Waugh to be offensive and unpleasant, but, cleverly, he is mostly offensive for a good reason: to show up the stupidity and greed of almost all the characters, black and white. And at that point I’m going to stop excusing him and just tell you why this novel is good.

First, it contains a great portrait of a megalomaniac newspaper proprietor, Lord Copper, who appears to have no news sense at all, but a good strong feeling about what will sell. His underlings are so terrified of him that good news stories suffocate in the underlings’ quite understandable desire not to be sacked. Second, most of the novel is a superb extended satire on how journalists create and suppress the news, what they think news is, and how they fight to get on top of or ahead of each other. Fiddling expenses is a large part of this. Thirdly, Waugh creates spectacularly funny characters. Mrs Stitch is a society lady and political wife of great influence. Her opening scene, in which she is encountered sitting in bed in a face mask, speaking on the telephone, while simultaneously dealing with her secretary, daughter, visitor and maid, having five different conversations at once, is just the wittiest piece of dialogue. She drives a tiny black car that is small enough to nip up the kerb and onto the pavement whenever she thinks she has waited too long in a traffic jam. Later in the book she spots someone she’s been meaning to speak to for weeks, and follows him into the public lavatory, in her car, down the steps, and gets stuck there. The world needs more characters like Mrs Stitch. Her purpose in the novel is to wield influence that goes absolutely nowhere because she doesn’t explain quite enough about the person she wishes to gain a favour for, and so someone else gets the favour instead, whom she doesn’t know and never will know. Thus there is a pretty strong attack in Scoop on how influence is wielded by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, with futile results.

Jumping back to the journalists, they’re working in a world where sending a foreign correspondent to Ishmaelia will take three weeks. Filing copy is done by post that also takes three, or more, weeks, and urgent news stories are despatched by telegram. The telephone doesn’t seem to be involved, and if the telegram office is shut, or closed by the government on whom you wish to report, well, the story just has to sit there and wait. Waugh has a fun time inventing messages in mad telegraphese, which William Boot, and the reader, isbemused by, and needs to translate. His own telegrams are very expensive, because he writes them as a polite social letter, with wordy self-deprecating English politeness. There are a nice collection of journalist types: the French are a joke, the professional American writer is derided, and the professional Big Cheese journalist is so arrogant about his nose for news that he leaves Ishmaelia just before the biggest news story of the decade erupts there. The British reporter is caricatured as a tale-bearer with rights, and his news-gathering habits are robustly despised. In a fragment of long-lost period detail, film crews on the hunt for news to make their cinema newsreels are far too fond of dressing the part. But above all this, the international press are depicted, unlovingly, as an invading imperialist force with no more interest in or respect for the non-white nations than the British Empire. The local Ishmaelites, on the other hand, may have a more direct understanding of how to get money out the whites, than the whites might like, but Waugh does enjoy himself characterising the whites as very easily diddled. The white journalists don’t stay long enough in a country to learn anything about it, and treat all foreigners as the same.

Compared to Waugh’s far less jolly travelogue Remote People (1930), Scoop is a riot of pleasantness and the love of human frailties. It’s certainly one of Waugh’s least uncomfortable novels, though the prickles are there.

For other 1938 novels that I happen to have blogged about in the past, see This Publican by Dornford Yates, and Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh. Later this week I’ll return to the mini-series on political fiction, coincidentally a work from 1937, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I know it’s not a novel, but it’s an excellent, political, contrast to the fiction of 1938.

Karel Čapek’s War With the Newts

I needed to read Karel Čapek’s RUR, his 1920 play in which he invents the robot, so I bought it in the SF Masterworks edition. The other half of this edition is an extraordinary novel called War With the Newts, which was an unexpected pleasure. It was almost the last thing Čapek published, in 1936, since he died only a few years later, just in time not to be persecuted by the Nazis when they invaded Czechoslovakia. However, he gets in a good few cracks at the Nazi regime in this novel, which is a superb satire on capitalism, totalitarianism, the Hollywood system, and human fallibility.

The Newts are discovered by Captain Van Toch, a merchant seaman, on an island near Java, in the Indonesian archipelago. They crawl out of the sea, they fish for pearl oysters in return for small gifts, such as knives, and they are masterful underwater builders and architects. They start to learn speech from the captain, who becomes uncommonly fond of these strange amphibious sea-creatures. He quietly amasses quite a large pearl fishery from his trading, but then he spoils it all by going back to his home town in Czechoslovakia to talk big business there to G A Bondy, the most entrepreneurial, go-getting moneyman in town. Van Toch wants to expand the exploitation of the Newts – in a humane, managed way under his personal administration – to other areas of the ocean, to use them to find even more pearls. Bondy develops the Newts into a worldwide industry of indentured and slave labour.

Beginning as a curious Joseph Conradish sea story, Čapek has a riot with different modes of writing and satire in this excellent novel, telling the Darwinian rise of the Newts unto the near-annihilation of Man. In a pastiche of the naïve-but-honest Anita Loos style, a party of young rich Americans on a cruise encounter the Newts on a beach and attempt to film a glamour swimming shot with the Newts as supporting cast. The resulting newsreel of course makes the Newts a craze among bright young American people with money and leisure, and trained teams of sea-racing Newts drawing clam-shell chariots become fashionable among rich young women. The Newts’ sexual behaviour influences a new dance called the Salamander Dance, protested against vigorously by the church and older generations. A scientific report describes how the Newts are undoubtedly an evolutionary dead-end that has been restarted, since the Newts are beginning to show evidence of intelligence, learning ability and higher cognition. They learn to speak. On the death of Captain Van Toch, Bondy’s conglomerate decides to begin selling the Newts as underwater construction teams, effectively enslaving them. They are traded freely, trained and graded for global marketing, tests are made to determine whether their bodies yield any useful components for human use or consumption, and the more competent among the Newts are given names. Whether they give themselves names is not something the humans trouble to find out.

concept art for a film of the novel, by Daniel Spacek, at his site

The careful reader will see that this is turning into a pointed parable about slavery and rampant greed, with the fantastical element of the Newts opening up marvellous new possibilities for satirising the depths of human iniquity. The satire begins to turn into a nightmare when the Newts show how worryingly competent they are in almost every human field (even mountaineering), and in many of their own that humans cannot touch. It starts to dawn on the coastal regions of the world that the Newts are in fact a terrible threat, since they are beginning to take land back to the sea for their own increasing population (they are not deep-sea dwellers). And what are the Newts doing with all the humans’ undersea earth-moving equipment and explosives?

War With the Newts is a tremendous story, perfectly pitched between the improbable and the impossible, and has enough variety in how Čapek tells the story to keep the lack of a leading narrative character from being not that much of an omission.

A G Macdonell and England, Their England

Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book’s podcast script rerun is M. A G Macdonell’s England, Their England, from 1933, is a satirical novel about English society, and has long had a grip on my understanding of the English. I was (am) a hybrid Anglo-Scot, never quite accepted by my Scottish school-friends or my English cousins as fish, fowl or nationally categorisable red herring. I used to borrow England, Their England about once a month from the city library as soon as I was old enough for an adult reader’s ticket. It fascinated me, because it was very funny, and beautifully written, and also had a great deal in it that I knew would be funny, if I only I could understand it better. I was a teenager desperate to understand.

Archibald Gordon Macdonell was born in India, and went through a public-school education while also being brought up in Scotland. He was a gunner in the First World War, worked for the League of Nations and tried to get elected as an MP. These experiences are all reused joyfully in the book. He wrote detective novels under various pseudonyms, and became what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls a pugnacious drama critic on the London Mercury, an important review newspaper of the 1930s. England, Their England was his first novel, and was an instant success, becoming required reading in schools during the 1930s and 1940s. The title is a parody of D H Lawrence’s short story collection England, My England of 1924. England, Their England made Macdonell’s writing success, and he published much more satire, fiction, and plays. I’ve read two or three of his other novels, but they aren’t as good. England, Their England is a first-novel yell of frustration and affection from the heart, and has the knockout power, and sincerity, that comes from exasperation and emotion.

The story linking the satirical episodes together is that of the Aberdonian farmer Donald Cameron, who suffers shell-shock during the First World War, thus qualifying for a war pension, which allows him to live in London and observe the English so he can write a book about them. Macdonell then brings in a large collection of English shibboleths that he can knock down gleefully with hard-hitting satire. The first for a savage ribbing is the conduct of the English military authorities in running the war and dealing with shell-shocked soldiers (which leans heavily on the treatment of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen). He goes on to lampoon modern journalism, modern novels, the English country-house weekend, modern art, the habits and dress of modern young women, and makes a surprisingly rude joke about Americans, and an even more off-colour set of jokes about rape and Latin Americans. Apart from the endemic jokes about the English which are on every page, the Americans are the most joked-at nation in the book.

The chapters become set-piece satirical feasts. Donald is sent into a new English milieu to observe it and become a hapless victim of its silliness. He is invited to an English country-house weekend party, and meets a fine collection of parodic stereotypes. He is invited to play in a cricket match in the country, during which Macdonell indulges himself in some really splendid lyrical sarcasm in the English summer countryside and its inhabitants. This cricketing chapter was apparently packed with recognisable characters from the literary and journalism world of the time, which undoubtedly helped his sales. Just imagine everyone buying the book eagerly to look for themselves and their friends and enemies, and then writing gleefully about their discoveries. Macdonell was a cunning anthropologist of the London literati.

Donald is taken to play golf and rediscovers his passion and skill at the game (which he hasn’t been able to afford to play since he left Scotland), and beats his English friends without even trying. The English friends don’t actually play golf as much as wave their clubs around: their interest is in the magnificent club-house, their magnificent clothes, the exceptionally large and liquid lunches, and the ludicrous prices they enjoy paying for new golf clubs. It is all pleasingly familiar, since this is the 1930s social landscape we see in the immortal works of E F Benson, Nancy Mitford, Angela Thirkell and P G Wodehouse.

Macdonell draws on more personal experiences when he sends Donald to work at the League of Nations as an MP’s assistant for a month. This chapter is a companion piece to Rose Macaulay’s Mystery at Geneva (1922), in which she savages the League of Nations in the early 1920s. It might also be instructive reading for present-day European Parliament stagiares in Brussels and Strasbourg. Donald also assists at a general election: again, I doubt whether anything much has changed in the brutal traditions of local English democracy. He becomes a theatre reviewer, and a critic of modern novels, and has a bewildering time staggering under the pretensions and preoccupations of the 1930s literary scene. Macdonell even takes Donald back to his old school. Winchester, but this final chapter is a bit overdone, with rather too much fond glorification and not enough bitter wit. What does work as satire in this last chapter is a really vicious attack on 1930s fox-hunting, and the arrogance of the modern youth who attend the meet. This is where the satire turns in on itself to produce some unexpected home truths. The hardness of character that makes 1930s fox-hunters so obnoxious, selfish and offensive, is very closely connected with the hardness that made it possible for some people to survive the war, as combatants and as nurses. There is a lot in here about rapidly changing English society: it’s a very revealing piece of writing.

What I like best about this book are the sly running jokes, particularly the ones about Aberdonians and their carefulness with money. This is a standard joke in Scotland, but I was oblivious to it until quite a late age. I like the deliberately difficult Scottish historical references, which are a mash-up of Sir Walter Scott and jokes about tartan. In fact, this book, written by an ex pat Scot, spends a lot of time laughing at the propensity of the English to romanticise the Scots, particularly in their expectation that the golf professional will speak like a music-hall caricature, and that at Hogmanay you have to pretend to be Scottish to enjoy it properly.

I also like watching the hapless career of Donald as he is swept up by one helpful Englishman after another, dumped into situations over which he has no control, and with little understanding of what is going on. He is a stranger in a strange land, which is packed with marvellously silly stereotypes that suggest a nicely lunatic portrait of 1930s English society. Macdonell is best at writing scenes of action, rather than static description. The game of golf, and the game of cricket are a joy to read, but the self-consciously lyrical descriptions of England in the winter and in the summer are a bit too syrupy. He also overdoes the gloopy sentiment when he describes the four elderly English countrymen in the pub who lament the loss of the younger men in the war, every war, going back to Waterloo.

When Macdonell keeps his edge, his sense of irritation, his satire really, really works. He sends Donald to Danzig by ship for a week so he can escape Christmas in England (no, I don’t know why either, let’s skip the reasoning). Donald he thinks he will have a miserable time, but actually enjoys himself watching the winter sea and the traffic on the Kiel Canal. He also meets what Macdonell would like us to think is the epitome of the practical English engineer, a monomaniac inventor whose kind we last saw in Kipling’s military engineers a generation earlier. This is the kind of man who will make you anything you want out of steel, brilliantly imagined and executed, but he will also bore you to death for days telling you all about how it works. It’s important to feel annoyed when reading satire, to be shunted towards anger and indignation, otherwise the satirical intent won’t work. Donald as Everyman, the reader’s representative, is too mild-mannered, he is so passive, so easily led, that quite often we want to shout at him, to make him start thinking for himself, to make his own decisions, to get away from these mad people. But he likes them.

Actually, we learn to like them too. I am particularly fond of Esmerelda D’Avenant, English film star and formerly plain Jane Jukes from a country parsonage, who has the most expensively insured legs in the world. I love the Major-General who is always shuffling around drawing-rooms to get a better look at Esmerelda’s legs, and is expertly controlled by his wife, Mrs Major-General. I don’t like the wickedly provocative socialite Mr Harcourt, who causes social outrage wherever he goes, just for the hell of it, but I do like angelic Bobby Southcott, successful society novelist and perfect dresser, who I think is a caricature of Noel Coward. Most of all I like Donald, who really needs someone to look after him. This book is a joy: go find a copy.

Rose Macaulay’s Potterism

I wrote this podcast for Why I Really Like This Book for a miniseries called Fictions about Newspapers. Journalism is something I’ve dabbled in enough to know that I’m no good at it. I can write reviews, but I have no nous when it comes to news, and I am not hard-boiled. But I do like reading about journalists who know how to ask hard questions and can anticipate the value of information received. British journalism changed radically at the beginning of the 20^th century, with a population growing in literacy demanding more and more newspapers to read. The number of newspapers on the British market doubled during the First World War, and new technology made them easier and faster to read. The practices of gathering news, and what you did with it also changed. This is why I find this novel by Rose Macaulay so enjoyable.

Potterism, from 1920, is about arrogance, snobbery and egotism. It’s a perfect exposure of a world where writing for the newspapers was simply normal for a certain class of society who expected to have the right to express their views for the benefit of the paying public. This class was, of course, made up of people from the upper classes who went to university (for which read Oxford or Cambridge: no other university, for Macaulay’s class, existed), and who emerged with ideals and expectations quite different to those held by those who bought the papers they deigned to write for. You can tell I don’t like them very much: it’s difficult to like many of the characters in this novel since nearly all of them are satirical portraits created by Macaulay to vent some spleen. She herself was an upper-class, well-educated and well-connected member of the literati, but she never took herself as seriously as the monsters she created in this novel. She wrote hundreds of articles and book reviews, as well as poetry and novels, and had earned her living by writing since before the war, yet, or, perhaps because of this, her writing never betrays the pompousness or greed or self-deluding emotionalism in which the characters in this novel are drenched.

Mr Potter is a newspaper proprietor, and is the nicest and most admirable character in the novel: hard-working, honest, reliable, and principled. He is married to Mrs Potter, also known as Leila Yorke, for she is a novelist, though she calls herself an artist, and everyone else would call her a hack writer. She churns out the same stuff year after year for a cheerful public who just want to read the same thing book after book. She began her career writing romantic novelettes for late Victorian fiction magazines like Forget-Me-Not, and this is one of the reasons I like this novel so much: Macaulay wraps her invention up in real-life publishing history, since Forget-Me-Not really existed. Mrs Potter is in the ranks of the second-rate and the trashy, whether she likes it or not. She is a crashing snob, and a casual, careless anti-Semite. This unpleasantness emerges quite easily and naturally in her chatter whenever she has anything to do with the Jewish hero of the novel: Arthur Gideon. He is so opposed to what the Potter newspaper empire is doing to the minds of the masses that he sets up the Anti-Potterism League in an idealistic effort to combat what he thinks are their wrong values. Gideon stands for the first-rate and the hard-won-by truths that he thinks the public need to know, whereas Mr Potter is happy to publish the second-rate and the products of sloppy thinking because that is what the public want and will pay for. Gideon follows his dream by setting up his own newspaper, a rival to the products of the Potter empire, called the Weekly Fact, which is just that: facts, and no opinions. Mr Potter knows that it won’t last, because the egos of those who write for it will be lured by more money for writing trash, and will never be able to withstand the temptation to strut about in public.

Also recommended: this biography of an erratic and eccentric, but very successful Edwardian novelette writer, by her daughter, the engraver and artist Clare Leighton — Also recommended: this biography of an erratic and eccentric, but very successful Edwardian novelette writer who published her novels exclusively in the Daily Mail, by her daughter, the engraver and artist Clare Leighton

Two of the Anti-Potterism League’s keenest supporters are two of Mr Potter’s own children, the twins Jane and Johnny Potter. This says quite a lot about their characters, for it is a brave thing to publicly deny, and also sneer at and criticise, the works of the business that paid for your education and give you a private income while you’re still thinking about taking a job. These twins are simple and straightforward; they want what they can get, and their lives are constructed about seeing that they get what they want. When Jane doesn’t want to see someone who also visits her friend Katherine, she simply tells Katherine to ask that someone not to visit her any more, so Jane can carry on visiting. So simple, when you have no scruples. After the war ends, Johnny finds work easily, while Jane has to make do with a secretarial job at her father’s office, where she meets the assistant editor Oliver Hobart, with whom her elder sister Clare is in love. Jane hardly notices what Clare might be thinking: she sees Oliver as an opportunity for rising in the world, and decides to marry the important young assistant editor when he asks her. Macaulay is careful to let us know, several times, that Oliver was exempted from serving in the war due to his nationally important work on the Potter press. In the work of most novelists writing at this time, this would be character assassination, but with Macaulay, her satire being both so delicate and blunt, we are not quite sure what we are to think of him. It is indicative enough that he is a disposable character.

Arthur Gideon is the hero, since he has most honesty and sticks most firmly to his principles. He is also the most interesting character, since he has most to struggle against. His own family, though pleasant, are a mixed blessing, since his father is a Russian Jewish refugee with terrible memories that he won’t tell his son about, and his mother, like Mrs Potter, is a casual blonde English anti-Semite who blithely calls her children Yids, and lazily objects to her daughter marrying another Russian Jew. Outside the family circle, Gideon struggles against lazy thinking and lazy-mindedness, and endures being accused of pushing Oliver Hobart down the stairs because he is shielding someone else. He doesn’t realise that he is loved by yet a third person, because his eyes are dazzled by his own love for someone unworthy. Oh, it’s a tangled mess that he makes of his life, but he is most admirable in his stoicism and qualities of endurance, and in his conduct towards another family of Russian Jews. His missing foot, lost in the war, is barely mentioned, but this is as strongly symbolic of his character – in this period of fiction, any man with a war wound was automatically a hero – as Oliver’s lack of a war record is of his.

The Anti-Potterism League fails, in the end, because Gideon learns to like Mr Potter while despising his works, and then events overtake his plans of reforming the newspaper world. But we have not been much interested in the posturing of this self-appointed league of university graduates with more attitude than sense. We are far more interested in the ghastly attitudes and manipulative deviousness of Mrs Potter, who Macaulay satirises by using her diary as a means of telling part of the story. Every half-truth is revealed. Every evasion and self-delusion is set out neatly, and Mrs Potter stands revealed as a loathsome egotist. She talks to a medium about a murder, comes away with a vision of the man she had first wanted to be suspected as the killer, and promptly sets about slandering him up and down the town, based on no evidence at all. She recalls all she has heard of this man in her diary, and interjects slurs and suppositions in between the facts: she really is a writer of fiction, and does not notice or care that her fiction is intruding in real life.

Throughout all this, Mr Potter’s papers sell to the public what the public want to read, and do very well out of it, as does he. Gideon’s paper sells facts, and nobody, in the end, really wants to read facts. They just want to read about a bride’s suicide or the death of a baronet. There’s no accounting for taste, only human nature.

If you fancy trying a related Rose Macaulay novel after this one, have a go at the savage and bitter Crewe Train. Where Potterism is about newspapers, Crewe Train is about celebrity culture and the gossip that ruins people lives being used for a little momentary gain at a party. People feed off other people in Crewe Train, all for the sake of personal gratification, and to make sure no-one breaks free of this goldfish bowl way of life. Not much has really changed in the London literary world.

Tag: satire

Rose Macaulay’s Potterism

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