PREFACES
ONE
While at Combe Florey, Evelyn Waugh wrote prefaces to several of his earlier novels. In 1959, he wrote one for Brideshead. In 1961, Decline and Fall was given one. Black Mischief was prefaced in 1963. And both A Handful of Dust and Vile Bodies got theirs in 1964.
Chapman and Hall was issuing a new edition of his work, and was re-setting each novel. Many books Evelyn chose not to touch, perhaps feeling that there were no corrections needed and nothing left to say. But I think it's worth considering the changes he did make to Brideshead and his first four novels.
First Brideshead: 'This novel, which is here re-issued with many small additions and some substantial cuts, lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers.'
Waugh goes onto to say that the privations of 1944, when the novel was conceived and written, caused him to compensate, and to exaggerate pre-war luxury. He also points out that he departed from realism when writing about scenes involving the death of Lord Marchmain and the faith of Lady Julia. Many of his changes involved dampening down all that. (There's a Ph.D. in there, surely. To compare line for line the text of Brideshead in 1944 with the slightly cooler text in the revised edition which appeared in 1960.)
Evelyn's last paragraph in his 2-page preface suggests that in 1944, the English country house seemed doomed, so he piled it on rather. However, as he points out, the heritage industry had succeeded in preserving many of the great country houses, so he needn't have been so concerned. He also notes that the advances of Hooper and his lot (the working class) has not been as fast as he had feared.
The last sentence of the preface: 'It is offered to younger generation of readers as a souvenir of the Second World War rather than of the twenties or thirties, with which it ostensibly deals.'
Really? Surely not. The book will always be loved for the timeless portrait of Charles and Sebastian messing around at Oxford and Brideshead.
As for the cover, well you'd think Chapman and Hall were still adhering to war time practice. It might as well have stamped 'PRODUCED IN COMPLETE CONFORMITY WITH THE AUTHORIZED ECONOMY STANDARDS' on the back of the dust-wrapper. 
Hitler was dead for God's sake! Lighten up, Evelyn. Lighten up, Chapman and Hall. Employ a designer, and make the most of one of the best things that came out of the Second World War!
TWO
It was in 1937 that Evelyn got Chapman and Hall to print 12 copies of each of his first four novels on large hand-made paper. The books weren't being reset, so all it meant that there were wider margins round the print block and that the book would be luxuriouslyy bound. But one gets the impression that Evelyn loved giving these special books to close friends and to squirrel a few away in his library.
The fact that Waugh wrote prefaces for these same four books from 1961 to 1964 suggests to me that, to some extent, he saw them a a tetralogy. The decline and fall of Paul Pennyfeather, Adam Fenwick-Symes, Basil Seal and Tony Last, respectively. And thank-you very much Evelyn Gardner and Baby Jungman for all the inspirational grief.
Not that Evelyn even hints at this in the prefaces. The one to Decline and Fall is less than a page long. Waugh points out that 33 years before, a few changes were made from the manuscript for the sake of decency (Duckworth had rejected the book for this reason and Chapman and Hall had only agreed to publish it with alterations) and that he was reinstating the original passages.
The new preface to Black Mischief is equally brief. He tells us that the novel was written after a winter spent in East and central Africa after which a travel book was written. He then discusses the similarities between Debra Dowa and Addis Ababa and between emperors Seth and Haile Selassie. The third paragraph states 'Thirty years ago it seemed an anachronism that any part of Africa should be independent of European administration. History has not followed what then seemed its natural course.'
Another page is all it takes to update Vile Bodies. Waugh tells us that at age 25 he didn't plan his books, just set a few characters on the move and wrote 3000 words per day. Then comes the killer sentence: 'The composition of Vile Bodies was interrupted by a sharp disturbance in my private life and was finished in a very different mood from that in which it was begun.'
He then discusses the book's success. He concludes: 'It is not a book I enjoy re-reading but there are one or two funny scenes which redeem it from banality.' He mentions Colonel Blount in particular, though doesn't point out that he himself has evolved into a Colonel Blount-like figure.
I've just read the preface for A Handful of Dust and have realised that it requires going up a few gears and starting a new section. I suggest you prepare yourself for action, dear reader. But first this visual:
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THREE
My copy of the Combe Florey issue of A Handful of Dust is a library book that was withdrawn from stock of Bradford-on-Avon library in June 1993. I hope it entertained a host of readers for the twenty years of its public life.
Some of those readers may have been confused that the preface crops up on the front flap and again after the title-page and list of contents. If I hold the book in certain way then you can see both at the same time. There is no other blurb for the book or the author.
Basically, the preface tells us that after his trip up the Amazon, Waugh published a short story, 'The Man Who Liked Dickens'. Then he set about writing a story (the novel) telling how the protagonist of the short story found himself in the predicament he did.
Waugh ends by saying that prior to publication of A Handful of Dust, the novel came out as a serial in Harper's Bazaar in both New York and London. But it couldn't use 'The Man Who Liked Dickens' as the climactic chapter for copyright reasons, so Waugh wrote an alternative ending for the serial publication. The way I read this was that he took out the 20 pages of part six and seven, 'Du Cote de Chez Todd' and 'English Gothic III', and inserted the nine pages of 'Alternative Ending'.
So I thought about that. And I read it. And it seemed to me to work really well. Tony somehow survives being lost in the jungle, returns to England where a crestfallen and disillusioned (with John Beaver) Brenda awaits him. They go back to Hetton together, Brenda gives up her London flat which Tony, unbeknown to his wife, carries on the renting of for himself. The implication is that it will be his illicit love-pad. He has been changed by his experience in the jungle.
And then I remembered something. Back in September 1934, when the book came out (the serial came out in Harper's Bazaar in five parts from May to September, 1934), Evelyn's then close friend, Henry Yorke, the best man at his 1937 wedding, wrote a letter to Waugh. Let me quote almost as much as is quoted as a footnote in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh:
'I feel the end is so fantastic that it throws the rest out of proportion. Aren't you mixing two things together? The first part is convincing, a real picture of people one has met… But then to let Tony be detained by some madman introduces an entirely fresh note and we are in a fantasy… you spent far too much time on the trip. You have 348 pages, roughly 100 of these are concerned with Tony running away… my whole mind is clouded by the Amazon.'
To this Evelyn replies: 'I think I agree that the Todd episode is fantastic. `it is a 'conceit' in the Webster manner - wishing to bring Tony to a sad end I made it an elaborate and improbable one…. But the Amazon stuff had to be there. The scheme was a Gothic man in the hands of savages - first Mrs Beaver etc and then the real ones, finally the silver foxes at Hetton. All that quest for a city seems to me justifiable symbolism.'
I hadn't thought about it before, but I see clearly now that they were both right. The Amazon stuff has to be there. But there is 80 pages of 'In Search of a City' and then 20 pages of 'A Cote de Chez Todd'. The 80-page section is absolutely superb. Dr Messanger is an idiot pseudo-scientist, deceiving himself about everything. He is a comic extension of the self-deluded Tony Last. Messanger keeps interpreting the behaviour of the forest and the Indians all wrongly, the poor booby. Eventually it costs him his life.
I can see why Evelyn wanted to keep in the Todd section, 'The Man Who Liked Dickens'. Not only was the short story the starting point to his thinking through his new book, it was conceived and drafted when he was holed up in Boa Vista in the middle of the Amazon jungle waiting for a boat that might never come. But perhaps he should have left it out,. Meaning that the Brazilian episode would culminate in those scenes after the death of Messanger, when Tony is lost in the jungle and his predicament is juxtaposed with Brenda's difficulties with life back in London. Next, Tony is hallucinating about Brenda and his sense of sorrow and loss is palpable and made so tragic and so funny. Finally, both Tony and Brenda are alone, crying into their pillows. Epic. So just miss out 'Du Cote de Chez Todd', and don't even think of adding 'Alternative Ending' and you have a tightly written masterpiece, ending with the irony of 'English Gothic III' and the gravestone that Tony's distant relatives, the new owners of Hetton Abbey, have erected in his memory.
'Anthony Last. Born at Hetton, 1902. Died in Brazil, 1934.' Hilarious. A Handful of Dust manages to be so sad and so funny, almost on a line by line basis.
Then I remembered something else. 'Alternative Ending' was published in 1936 in Mr Lovejoy's Little Outing and Other Stories, under the title of 'By Special Request'. It's second up in the list of contents and its given a preface of its own:
Why would Waugh want to cut out chapter V of the book, 'In Search of a City'? I can see that this is what happened in the serial, because the narrow-minded publisher wanted a shorter work so as to fit the work into a five chapter, five-month sequence. But Evelyn Waugh was completely correct when he wrote to Henry Yorke that the Amazon part of the story was essential.
Back to 1964 and Evelyn Waugh in his study at Combe Florey. What was he doing in providing the text of 'Alternative Ending'? Why didn't he feel able to draw upon the additional thirty years of experience as a writer and validate a new edition of A Handful of Dust by simply omitting 'The Man Who Liked Dickens' aka 'Du Cote de Chez Todd'? Then the literary world could have argued for decades which was the superior version of the book: the original 1934 book or the astonishingly reset 1964 volume.
In two of the three possibilities under consideration, the book ends with 'English Gothic III', which I have recently memorialised with the help of an illustration by Alasdair Gray:
OUTRO
This essay takes a different approach to many of the others in the Combe Florey section of this site. Rather than focus on a short period of time in which something intense happens, it collects similar things that Waugh did throughout his time living in Somerset. The next essay is back to the former kind, but it does make reference to one of the books mentioned in this piece.
