welcome to the 11th episode of the lrb close readings podcast on satire with me CLA Bucknell and with me Colin burrow and we're both fellows of All Souls and we're contributors to the paper and today we arrive in the 20th century which is really scary for me particularly from where we're sitting sitting in my 15th century study you know it's a wild futuristic Adventure today and our subject is the novel a handful of dust by EVN War published in 1934 which was less than a century ago I mean it's that's was yesterday yesterday yeah um and W took the title and in fact the epigraph to the novel from lines in TS Elliot's poem The Wasteland I will show you something different from either your Shadow at morning striding behind you or your Shadow at evening rising to meet you I will show you fear in a handful of dust so that sets the tone it's a different kind of satirical novel from anything we've talked about so far is yeah I mean we've we've had Lawrence Stern's life writing satar in trist Shandy we've had Jane Austin's delicate but devastating satar on social manners in Emma but I suppose War's obje of attack was the age an entire age yeah the 20th century which uh he called the century of the Common Man Yeah well he didn't mean that nicely I'm afraid um and I suppose you might remember that the Roman sauris juvenile looked around late Imperial Rome and he concluded that these days it's difficult not to write Saar um well e War who never did things by halves went several steps further according to him the century he lived in was so degenerate that you actually couldn't saiz it yeah so he he says this in an essay of 1946 satire is a matter of period it flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards so the early Roman Empire 18th century Europe it is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy it exposes polite cruelty and Folly by exaggerating them it seeks to produce shame all this has no place in the century of the Common Man where Vice no longer pays lip service to Virtue the artist's only service to the disintegrated Society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own and that was how he saw things by 1946 but I wouldn't say it's necessarily a complete guide to the satirical novels of el war in some ways actually it isn't even a very good description of satar in general yeah because part of what he says about SATA just isn't true um we've tried to show that Sati likes to create the illusion that it sits on a stable moral Foundation but often what it ends up showing is that the satirist is on that same shaky moral ground that everyone else sits on and it's also actually really risky to tell anything that war said entirely straight because he sort of he liked to be deadly serious in a way that looked ridiculous and to be ridiculous in ways that might then explode into something Ultra serious but I suppose we ought to dwell on his claim that SATA is a matter of period because his own writing did change a lot between 1928 when he published his first novel Decline and fall um and 1946 after he published Brides had Revisited which was his big success yeah and also after World War I in which he had a fairly undistinguished career because of his sort of uncontrollable desire to piss off his superiors he was really good at that he was really good at that he seems to have thought of it as a as a sort of crazy sherard and let everyone know that he thought of it like that yeah yeah yeah and and that was important because the second world war in theory was a war fought in defense of an abstract nation of civilization but on the ground as War experienced it it looked like a sort of massive series of cock-ups and mad schemes and bizarre events like exploding mobile toilets which memorably happens in Wars uh War novels and and War's war was almost as disillusioning and turbulent as the war experiences of of guy crouchback who is the hero and also Wars alter ego very definitely in the sword of Honor Trilogy which which he wrote from 1952 to 61 which tells basically the story of Wars War experiences and then after the war sort of dug himself into this Persona of violently offensive conservative Catholicism um he' converted to Catholicism back in 1930 and then by the mid 40s he is convinced that the Catholic church is the only way to save Western Civilization though you know probably it's too far gone to be saved yeah and he also believed that the war had Unleashed a kind of Madness or or I suppose actually accelerated the spread of a kind of Madness that was already there which was set to destroy what he thought of as traditional culture and uh no surprises that meant terrible things for a wealthy novelist socialism taxation oh my God what terrible things yeah I mean both of those things were very high on on War's list of of truly terrible things that happened in the century of the Common Man because he got extremely rich after the publication of brides head and and became a Serial tax evader really in order to fund his um Habit in art cigars wine and the rest but the culture that he thought was destroyed by the war and which even in the 1930s he thought of as being more or less Dead on feet meant lots of things but at its core I think was a religious ideal really an ideal of a grand true Universal Church grounded in ritual and permanence and moral values and all those good things but the problem was that in his fiction post-war the ideal often manifests itself as a snobbery basically doesn't it as it so often does even today yeah yeah indeed so culture comes to mean big stately homes occupied by dearly Catholic Aristocrats who you know live in this world of gentleman's clubs Clara burgundy cigars smart parties like like in brid said which sort of looks back to this fake spray painted golden age before the war yeah and in that world the PRS largely keep quiet the common man you know or serve one's drink or polish one's shoes so nanny sits in the Attic of brides head remembering Sebastian's happy childhood and reciting her rosary and she doesn't really do anything else at all you know she has no life apart from being a nanny and almost all the servants in in eling Wars novels are like this yeah so that there is no disguising the massively reactionary conservatism which increasingly underpins his fiction and which he probably thought of as that stable moral ground that he the right-minded satirist needed to to launch his attacks on the world and that's despite his claim that there was no such platform in the let me give you the phrase again CLA cuz you like it so much the century of the Common Man happy to happy to have it back yeah I I mean you know we've seen this before the kind of satire that represents its own times as crazy is often historically nostalgic it's politically conservative um think of Pope or Swift yeah absolutely but but I think I think War's best writing and again this is like Pope and Swift really is actually energized by the objects of his attack so it gives you a sort of swirl of crazily disconnected and random things that usually happen to a hapless and usually nerveless hero yeah so like like guy Crouch back in the sword of Honor whom we mentioned around whom the war sort of unfolds as this series of of cock-ups brought about by mad officers yeah and The Madness of mity was something that war was really good at representing and I think he was good at representing it partly because he was almost mad himself yeah so in 1954 he had this awful breakdown um precipitated by binging on sleeping pills and booze which will do it to you kids don't do it you heard it here first yeah so he's on this boat trip to uh sonon and he and he hears voices that he believes comes from inside the wiring of the ship and that's those voices were screaming abuse and sort of murmuring conspiracies at him and he fictionalized that fit of persecution Mania in a novel called the ordeal of Gilbert pinfold but I think it's pretty much a directly autobiographical transcription of what he experienced yeah so perhaps I mean like other sists we've met he needed the world to be mad to respond to a Madness that he felt living in it yeah and his descriptions of the madness around him tend to they tend to amplify into a very distinctive blend of the hilariously anarchic actually which is remarkable for an authoritarian thinker really uh but also something that's that's often very deeply Sinister okay anarchic and Sinister that takes us nicely to a handful of dust does um so let's look at it through the lens of what war says about Satur in 194 4 6 he says the artists only service to the disintegrated Society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own so can we use that to backtrack through his career up to the mid 1930s when he writes a handful of dust uh I think we could do that um and I think that Wars claim that the sauris creates those little independent systems of order of his own you know it sounds curiously like Oscar wild doesn't it I mean the artist is a is a creator of beautiful things that stand autonomously and they entirely outside the world yeah I mean that is absolutely very wild yeah and I think it helps to think of War particularly the pre-war early War that's terribly difficult to say but you know you know what I mean as a belated citizen of the 1890s so 1930s war is basically living in the 1890s I feel like you're trying to provoke us Conan the usual story about this period centers on World War I doesn't it the giant Cosmic rupture of the War so the war shook the foundations of British culture it made the young lose faith in their elders and then the 1920s hoay brings in lots of Daring new artistic ideas and forms like jazz and all that jazz and all that jazz which you know make everyone feel very modern and very detached from the previous generations so I don't know what you're banging on about the 1890s well no okay it's sort of true that the first world war made a difference but I think it's at least partly false because as I was suggesting when I adopted temporarily the Persona of Oscar W at the end of the last podcast there's really nothing very special about the 20th century it was effectively invented by Oscar wild in the 1890s and I will I go to my grave um the hill you die on okay well yeah I mean wild certainly was all about being modern about being an agent of cultural change at all costs I I'll take I'll agree with you that far and there are other very very important similarities between war and wild I think CLA I mean let's take that absolutely crucial component in both their writing which is English muffins y uh I mean Tony last in a handful of dust has a positively wildan preoccupation with muffins when he entertains A lady called Jenny AB Abdul abbar at his Country House ah Here Comes tea at last said Tony I hope you'll allow yourself to eat muffins so many of our guests nowadays are on a diet I think muffins one of the few things that make the English winter endurable and and Jenny who's trying to get off with him says muffins stand for so much and it's not clear she knows why she thinks this but she is a c right you know muffins do embody a particular way of aristocratic life you have a butler who brings them to you and a set of attitudes and without all those things um you know the whole world would crumble and I don't mean apple crumble CL has made me hungry well no I mean I I don't think you can viably build a history of 20th century British SATA on muffins or crumble I think it is too soft a foundation for such a story but okay all right I'll be serious I mean wild and War were both Oxford undergraduates and they were both from middle class or professional backgrounds um and both of them wanted to go Galloping off into decadence with the aristocracy but basically they couldn't afford it in the any way they could do it by not paying their tailor poor tailor and they played really at being fantasy Aristocrats when neither of them were and I think that is really important because it gives their satar the sense of occupying really fragile bubble of beauty and absurdity and and awareness that that bubble just at any moment could go pop um and so they're representations of these impeccable English country houses with their Butlers and their muffins and their crumbles that sort of stuff I mean those are projections of their social aspirations right rather than anything like the world they were really part of they were precarious self- inventors who learned to perform and act yeah and primar at Oxford we blame here as everywhere Oxford yeah it is to blame for so much it is um so the Oxford that comes through in Wars writing mostly in Decline and fall as we said at his first novel and then later in brideshead is a place which has still got flavors of the sort of 1870s aestheticism of of wild and Peter yeah although I suppose by the 1920s that aestheticism was deliberately taken to excess but particularly by the extremely wealthy tonians with whom War mostly mingled who were you know they they'd form clubs called things like the Hypocrites club and they would dine and they would drink and then they would spew liberally um and expect the um uh their Butlers to clear it up or their SC nannies yeah yes absolutely and and War was not an aonian his father was a publisher this household was literary but not modernist or cool Reggie um he grew up in the middle class suburbs of Hamstead and gold as green he got a scholar ship to Oxford which he needed cuz he couldn't afford it but increasingly he's mingling with these flamboyant wealthy undergraduates and when you say flamboyant you means sort of rich and openly gay I do mean that yeah yeah I mean there were men who spent most of their time at Oxford pretending to be East seats and they sort of walk cats and big baggy trousers and had yellow button holes and you know all that kind of thing and War was the sort of student we both of us have met clever lazy self-regarding allergic to the library you know meant to be reading history didn't much history um earned a bit of money not enough to pay his tailor um by designing book plates for rich friends and he wanted to be an artist after he came away from Oxford with a gentleman's third yeah and actually the fact that his father was a publisher makes that wish to be somebody who dealt with the visual arts rather than the verbal Arts um another sort of rebellion against his Origins actually he's wanting to go to the pur art form I think so you can see here and his dad didn't really get on and his Oxford career I think is is a was a way to get out of the Suburban middleclass world of his upbringing his biographer Martin stanard says that his infatuation with the aristocracy had begun as a reaction against his father's middleclass frugality he had escaped from gold as green to the ordered extravagance of adult nurseries the rits and the great London and country houses and adult nurseries you know there is a kind of infantalism actually in that in that world yeah and and that's why he tended to represent Oxford in his fiction Through The Eyes of a of a partially excluded Outsider rather than just straightforwardly as an idial that he's fully part of and and it's a position that takes us back to one of the recurrent ideas I suppose of this series that that the saturnist tends to be a sort of Insider come Outsider who's got a perspective on things that's not quite part of them thanks for listening to this extract from on satire a close reading series from the London review of books to listen to the full episode and all our other close readings series sign up to our close readings subscription at lb. me/ Clos readings or click on the link in the description