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A contribution to: Critiquing Criticism

Edited by Sophie Corser and Lucy Russell

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 10

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  Evelyn Waugh was an indefatigable reviewer, but his reviews fail to receive the critical attention they deserve. The novelist’s reviews of his contemporaries’ works, both fiction and nonfiction, provide insight into his own writing; they also illuminate his, and his generation of writers’, complex relationship with high modernism. Henry Green’s Living (1929) was considered by Waugh in his review entitled ‘A Neglected Masterpiece’ as ‘modern in the real sense of the word’. Notably, Green experimented with ‘the ‘‘novel of conversation’’’, or what I prefer to call ‘talk fiction’, which, for Waugh, was pioneered by Ronal Firbank. Waugh’s exteriority parallels what Wyndham Lewis in Satire and Fiction (1930) termed the outside method of fiction, as opposed to the inside method of Woolf and Joyce. Waugh reviewed Lewis’s book and found the discussion about the two methods particularly interesting. Reviewing Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948), Waugh claimed that ‘[n]ow it is the cinema which has taught a new habit of narrative.’ Cinema was essential to Waugh, as part of his outside method, and Greene because they were the first generation of writers – to borrow a term from David Trotter – ‘in the First Media Age’. Examining Waugh’s reviews of Green, Lewis, and Greene, I explore how Waugh, with a strong generational sense and ‘in the advance guard’, understood the idea of being modern as privileging exteriority over interiority, particularly talk over thought. I argue that Waugh, with some writers of his generation, departed from high modernism and made it new by what I call ‘exterior modernism’. Waugh’s reviews not only helped him crystallise his own version of modernism but also contributed to its promotion.

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