A few years ago, I spent a week in County Galway at a country house hotel popular with fishermen during the high season, and with eccentrics in every other. I found myself in the company of a fragile lady novelist, an unladylike sculptor on the hunt for ‘famine artefacts’, and an ungentlemanly film-maker, drunkenly mourning the fact that his wife had run off to the Amazon jungle with a crackpot shaman who prospered on the moral failings of rich Americans. I bonded with the lady novelist over books and a mutual antipathy for another guest, a white Zimbabwean recently exiled to Belfast, who pursued us both, apparently in the hope of some sordid thrashing between the freezing sheets. As the Zimbabwean appeared to have an allergy to thought and silence, I took refuge in the library, reading, for the first time, Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags.
Preoccupied with the ‘Phoney War’, from declaration to the fall of France, or what Waugh described as the ‘Great Bore War’, Put Out More Flags was his sixth novel, and although it was a great success on first publication in 1942, it seems to be one of his few novels that people don’t know today. Waugh readers tend to fall into two camps, usually on either side of Brideshead Revisited (1945), with some reading only the ‘mature’ books, others sticking fiercely to the early comedies. Put Out More Flags is perhaps under-loved because it falls, both chronologically and stylistically, between these two recognizable periods in Waugh’s fiction.
Like Vile Bodies, the novel consists of a series of loosely linked episodes, following the lives of half a dozen characters but focusing on Ambrose Silk, a gay Jewish ‘aesthete’ writer, and Basil Seal, the irrepressible rake last seen innocently eating his girlfriend at a cannibal feast in Black Mischi
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Subscribe now or Sign inA few years ago, I spent a week in County Galway at a country house hotel popular with fishermen during the high season, and with eccentrics in every other. I found myself in the company of a fragile lady novelist, an unladylike sculptor on the hunt for ‘famine artefacts’, and an ungentlemanly film-maker, drunkenly mourning the fact that his wife had run off to the Amazon jungle with a crackpot shaman who prospered on the moral failings of rich Americans. I bonded with the lady novelist over books and a mutual antipathy for another guest, a white Zimbabwean recently exiled to Belfast, who pursued us both, apparently in the hope of some sordid thrashing between the freezing sheets. As the Zimbabwean appeared to have an allergy to thought and silence, I took refuge in the library, reading, for the first time, Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags.
Preoccupied with the ‘Phoney War’, from declaration to the fall of France, or what Waugh described as the ‘Great Bore War’, Put Out More Flags was his sixth novel, and although it was a great success on first publication in 1942, it seems to be one of his few novels that people don’t know today. Waugh readers tend to fall into two camps, usually on either side of Brideshead Revisited (1945), with some reading only the ‘mature’ books, others sticking fiercely to the early comedies. Put Out More Flags is perhaps under-loved because it falls, both chronologically and stylistically, between these two recognizable periods in Waugh’s fiction. Like Vile Bodies, the novel consists of a series of loosely linked episodes, following the lives of half a dozen characters but focusing on Ambrose Silk, a gay Jewish ‘aesthete’ writer, and Basil Seal, the irrepressible rake last seen innocently eating his girlfriend at a cannibal feast in Black Mischief (1932). It is Basil Seal, ‘wayward and graceless and grossly disappointing’, a man ‘whose unaccountable taste for low company had led him into so many vexatious scrapes’, who provides the book’s best comic interludes, and the thread which stitches the stories together. Tempering wry comedy with a reflection of Waugh’s first experience of war, Put Out More Flags contains a strong hint of the accomplished war writing that reached maturity in The Sword of Honour trilogy, his last work of fiction. Reviewing the book in the New York Times in 1942, John Chamberlain ungenerously likened its style to ‘the wicked Saki . . . trying to make his peace with Hugh Walpole’. This is most unfair; rather, it is a novel that reflects the slow settling of sobriety on a largely superficial society awakened to the realities of war. Waugh himself called it a ‘minor work’, one he ‘dashed off to occupy a tedious voyage’ home from active service in the summer of 1941. ‘Minor’ is perhaps a rare moment of false modesty on Waugh’s part. Put Out More Flags is a book of ‘good bits’ such as a ‘half incestuous relationship’ between Basil and his sister, Barbara, who is the billeting officer for her district and wife of Freddy Sothill. Barbara believes a war is just what her brother needs to give himself some direction: ‘He’s not meant for peace . . . He’s always been a soldier manqué.’ Unlike most men of his class, and indeed unlike his brother-in-law, Basil never bothered to join the Territorial Army or the Yeomanry. An ‘obstreperous minority of one in a world of otiose civilians’, Basil has clear ideas about what kind of war he wants: ‘I want to be one of those people one heard about in 1919; the hard-faced men who did well out of the war.’ As everyone scrambles to find something remotely official to keep them occupied, Basil half expects to be summoned to work for the Ministry of Intelligence. When no such invitation arrives, and it becomes clear that no other position is going to present itself (at least no position that Basil would condescend to accept), he retreats to Barbara and Freddy’s country house, where his sister is saddled with three impossibly horrid evacuee children, Doris, Mickey and Marlene Connolly. Doris, the eldest, takes a grotesque fancy to Basil, flirting and begging him to pull her hair when she isn’t ‘rubbing herself on a pilaster like a cow on a stump’. Basil sees an opportunity, and armed with Barbara’s address book, sets about systematically placing the children in the homes of the people least likely to want them but most able to afford them. When their temporary hosts can take no more, he goads them into paying to billet the Connollys elsewhere, making himself a tidy profit. Basil’s first victims are an elderly artistic couple, Mr and Mrs Harkness, who have advertised for other ‘elderly or artistic people wishing to avoid war worries’ to join them as paying guests, ‘highest references given and expected’. Hiding the Connollys in his car, Basil approaches the wisteria-covered Old Mill and allows the unwitting Harknesses to show him round their corner of paradise. Mr Harkness is keen to emphasize his home’s quiet delights: in summer, there are ‘meals under the old mulberry tree’ and ‘Music. Every week we have chamber music.’ All these accumulated ‘imponderabilia’, Mr Harkness insists, ‘have their market value’, of precisely six guineas a week. Basil seizes the moment, and Waugh’s description of the assault is perfection:This was the time for the grenade he had been nursing ever since he opened the little, wrought-iron gate and put his hand to the wrought-iron bell-pull. ‘We pay eight shillings and sixpence a week,’ he said . . . Here it comes. Bang! ‘Perhaps I should have told you at once. I am the billeting officer. I’ve three children for you in the car outside.’ It was magnificent. It was war.The Harknesses protest: ‘you’ve seen for yourself this lovely old house and the kind of life we live here. Don’t you feel that there is something different here, something precious that could so easily be killed?’ Basil is unswayable and, inevitably, a heavy snowfall cuts off the Old Mill for eight days, stranding the couple with the children. When the roads are cleared, Harkness, a ruined man, comes to plead with Basil for mercy:
‘I thought of giving them weed-killer,’ said Mr Harkness wistfully. ‘Yes,’ said Basil, ‘that would be one way. Do you think Marlene could keep it down?’ ‘Or hanging.’ ‘Come, come, Mr Harkness, this is mere wishful thinking. We must be more practical.’ ‘Everything I’ve thought of has had Death in it; ours or theirs.’Harkness finally agrees to pay Basil £30, and the Connollys are once again his to exploit. The scam hits a snag, however, when Basil tries it on a Mr Todhunter, the billeting officer for the neighbouring district. Forced to explain the mechanics of the scheme to Todhunter, Basil sells him the Connollys and decamps to London. Pretending to be a member of the fictitious mi13, he then bluffs his way into the War Office, where he persuades the Assistant Deputy Director Internal Security, Colonel Plum, to give him a uniform and an unpaid job as a Second Lieutenant in the General Service List, assigned to monitor communists and ferret out fascists. Running parallel to Basil’s exploits is Waugh’s surprisingly tender treatment of Ambrose Silk. Modelled on Brian Howard, the Old Etonian poet and notorious aesthete who had a long-term German boyfriend (and whose own story is the subject of Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster’s Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure), Ambrose is the ‘sole representative of Atheism in the religious department’ at the Ministry of Information, and editor of the Ivory Tower, a highbrow literary review modelled on the Yellow Book. Ambrose is also the magazine’s sole contributor, hiding his authorship behind the unlikely pseudonyms ‘Hucklebury Squib’ and ‘Tom Barebones-Abraham’. The centrepiece of the first issue is ‘Monument to a Spartan’, a fifty-page homage to Hans, Ambrose’s German ex-boyfriend. Basil, an old but by no means faithful friend of Ambrose’s, sees in Ivory Tower another opportunity for his own advancement. He persuades Ambrose to edit ‘Monument to a Spartan’ so that it reads, without its author realizing it, as a paean to the Hitler Youth. Basil passes an edited copy to Colonel Plum, who orders Ambrose’s arrest, believing him to be a fifth-columnist. Feeling a twinge of delayed remorse, Basil disguises Ambrose as a Jesuit priest and sends him, on a stolen passport, into exile in Ireland, while Basil takes up residence in Ambrose’s abandoned flat. In his dedication to Randolph Churchill, Waugh concedes that the book deals with ‘a race of ghosts’, characters who ‘are no longer contemporary in sympathy’ but survive ‘delightfully in holes and corners and, like everyone else,’ are ‘disturbed in their habits by the rough intrusion of current history’. The currents of history have a way of intruding roughly into settled habits, and Put Out More Flags offers an often hilarious reminder that one must laugh even amid dark days, even when a society finds itself forcibly shaken into sobriety. Waugh would perhaps be satisfied to know that his race of ghosts still survives in holes and corners, not least in country house hotels in the west of Ireland, where, like Ambrose Silk, lady novelists, ungentlemanly film-makers and ex-Zimbabweans seek a harbour from the currents of contemporary history.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 9 © Patrick Denman Flanery 2006
About the contributor
Patrick Denman Flanery is finishing a doctorate on Evelyn Waugh at Oxford. The currents of history alarm him.