The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Evelyn Waugh: the cubist years
The novelist’s spiky visual art was part of his war on dreary English good taste, finds Michael Bird
There was a time in England when the names Picasso and Matisse were routinely uttered with the kind of contemptuous topspin that is now sometimes applied to the word Brussels. It was around this time that the teenage Evelyn Waugh scandalised his father by painting cubist murals all over the nursery walls in the family home in Golders Green.
Not even Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or Blue Nude can have caused more genuinely heartfelt horror. This was during the First World War, when Evelyn’s older brother, Alec, was missing in action in France. For a patriotic parent shredded by anxiety and primed for grief, it felt like a calculated slap in the face. Which was exactly how Waugh intended it. Oedipal fury and sibling rivalry aside, this wasn’t a gratuitous act. Waugh was seriously interested in modern art. In 1917 his schoolboy essay “In Defence of Cubism” was published in the journal Drawing and Design. His diaries of this era are full of references to visiting exhibitions, and vividly illustrated with his own drawings.
By his early 20s, he’d built up quite an impressive portfolio. While at school at Lancing College, West Sussex, he designed book jackets for his father’s publishing firm, Chapman and Hall. At Oxford he was known among his aesthete chums as a witty draughtsman rather than an aspiring writer, contributing illustrations to the student magazine Cherwell.
In one of these, The Intolerable Wickedness of Him Who Drinks Alone, the Hogarthian figure of a dog-in-the-manger drinker is executed as a crude, confident woodcut (Waugh was also a handy carpenter). It reminds you of Lancing’s proximity to the artists’ colony at Ditchling, which was presided over by Eric Gill, whose modern exercises in woodcut book illustration often had the added subversive frisson of frank
eroticism. After abandoning his Oxford degree, Waugh enrolled at Heatherley’s Art School in London, hoping to become an illustrator but finding little to engage him in academic art training. At some point he must have realised either that he didn’t have much new to say as an artist (his figures are wooden silhouettes, his layouts eyecatching but conventional), or that he had more than enough to say as a writer. Yet, even after his first books were published in 1928 – a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the novel Decline and Fall – he kept his hand in as a designerillustrator for another 15 years or so, producing occasional book illustrations and jacket designs.
Antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros’ selection from Waugh’s copious artistic output includes his Cherwell contributions alongside later commercial work, such as the jacket for Vile Bodies, with its vorticist-inspired racing car graphic. There’s an illustration from Decline and Fall in which the German modernist architect Professor Silenus presides over a building site resembling a demolished temple. True to his cubist roots, Waugh understood what the avant-garde knockersdown of hallowed traditions were about. Modernism might be unfriendly or pretentious, but it was nowhere near as drearily deadly as English good taste.
This is made beautifully clear towards the end of Brideshead Revisited, when the topographical painter Charles Ryder is soaking up success at a private view of his “barbaric” new jungle paintings. Ryder’s old Oxford contemporary Anthony Blanche isn’t impressed. “We know, you and I,” he confides, “that this is all t-t-terrible t-t-tripe.” The sensational wildness, so titillating for the gallery’s stupid socialite clientele, adds up to no more than “simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers”.
Waugh could not have written this scene – one of the most incisive in all his novels – without an insider’s understanding of what it means to fall short as an artist. Though his designs and illustrations feel very much like by-products of a bigger talent, they point to the importance of Waugh’s visual sensibility in his work as a whole.
Waugh quit Oxford for art school, hoping to draw for a living