Put Out More Flags

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The books that comprise the Sword of Honour trilogy were written in the 1950s and 1960s when Evelyn Waugh was able to put World War Two into some kind of perspective. Sword of Honour also happens to be one of Evelyn Waugh's masterpieces.

The characters are aristocratic dilettantes. The setting is WWII England. The competition for the most extravagant and memorable of the colorful cast is easily won by the 30-something Basil Seal. Basil is a favorite character of Waugh. He is the adult upper-class British equivalent of Tom Sawyer. Ambrose Silk visits the Ministry of Information where memos are exchanged regulating the display of personal effects in government offices. As an aesthete and a well-known left-wing sympathiser, he is concerned about his safety in the event of a German invasion. Basil is in the same building, promoting the idea of annexing Liberia. Many years ago, I started a little handbook which I kept near me when I was reading, in which I added words that I read that I previously didn't know the definition to (or at least not well). This has lain dormant for a while, but this book caused it to be reactivated. A couple of examples: Clever as always, Mr. Waugh can characterize a person merely by giving him a patronymic. Take the two proletarian poets of “Put Out More Flags,” for example. This precious pair, Parsnip and Pimpernel, are as fake as their names.All efforts were made toward letting the original jokes do the work and pulling any extra punches, or punch lines, that might have distracted. The result was a sluggish pace and an air of 1939-45 gloom, as faded as it was visually precise…[I]n this careful production, too many of the lines were spoken with an awed and therefore misplaced reverence. Basil’s attempts at war heroism are far less successful than his money-making endeavors. When he flunks an interview for a privileged position in the army (“arranged” by his mother begging a favor of a prominent government official), Basil tries to interest the Ministry of Information into the strategic wisdom of annexing Liberia. When that too fails, he finagles a job in the War Office. But the job is without promise, so Basil executes a plan to persuade a close friend to write material resembling German propaganda—and then betrays his friend to the authorities. However, guilt then compels Basil to effect his friend’s escape to Ireland. I really enjoy Evelyn Waugh, and this witty satire set at the start of WWII and focusing on the lives of several members of the social upper class was the perfect antidote to some of my recent more contemporary (poorly written and boring) reads. The novel opens with Basil Seal’s sister, Barbara, trying to maintain a sense of normality in her two-hundred-year old country manor house. The servant class, on which her family’s privileged comforts have depended for generations, is melting away in the face of better employment prospects elsewhere. “Edith and Olive and me have talked it over and we want to go and make aeroplanes”. Besides the incongruity of British elites and WWII demands, Waugh dives deeper into Basil's personal life. Many years after writing the original novel, Waugh released a delightful addendum "Basil Seal Rides Again" to revisit the ne'er-do-well antihero. In the original book, the bond between Basil and his sister Barbara is especially close. His sibling connection is arguably stronger that that for his mother or his mistress and future wife Angela. In "Basil Seal Rides Again" he and Angela's now adult daughter Barbara (yes, named after his beloved sister) has fallen in love. Without giving away the ending, a parallel and reconsideration of Basil's love of his sister Barbara is reasserted.

Put Out More Flags is classic Evelyn Waugh in terms of his signature satire and farce among the social elite—which he does so well. Furthermore, fans of Waugh’s earlier novels will rejoice to know they will meet up again with one or two characters from those earlier works. In his own preface to this book, Waugh admits of those characters, “I was anxious to know how they had been doing since I last heard of them…” In between failed attempts at money-making and war heroism, Basil’s dalliances include amorous flirtations with a wealthy, lonely woman, estranged from her husband, and a frivolous Bohemian artist. In one particularly dastardly deed, he borrows money from the former woman to indulge the latter. Basil is frivolous, mischievous and incorrigible. His antics are also indulged and even grudgingly admired by his closest friends and connections. But the joys of Put Out More Flags do not reside entirely in its major characters, male and female, drawn at full length; for each of these, there are a dozen vignettes of people and places, sketched, it would seem, in a Dunkerque with a raging desire to become Commandos. Believe it or not, Alastair Trumpington though he was making a great contribution merely by training to defend the British coast. But as time wears on the mere waiting commences to boreEvelyn Waugh, considered by many to be the greatest satirical novelist of his day, died on 10 April 1966 at the age of 62. larger part of the action turns: Ambrose Silk, Basil Seal, his sister, Barbara, and his mistress, Angela Lyne. A pansy. An old queen. A habit of dress, a tone of voice, an elegant, humorous deportment that had been admired and imitated, a swift, epicene felicity of wit, the art of dazzling and confusing those he despised - these had been his; and now they were the current exchange of comedians; there were only a few restaurants, now, which he frequent without fear of ridicule, and there he was surrounded, as though by distorting mirrors, with gross reflections and caricatures of himself.

out of a war is the opportunity to solve your problems without an enemy pointing a pistol at your head. You must fight for that without illusion, lest you fall prey to the post-war cynicism that ruins everything. The people who fight the about a war for democratic collectivism, or a war for infinite optimism, or a war for ten pounds every Thursday, you might think that war itself can solve problems. Mr. Waugh is against this transcendental view; he knows that all you get

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And true to his principles, whilst the other characters are all trying to scuttle into cosy government sinecures or soft commissions as officers, Alastair volunteers to join the ranks. He endures the miseries of basic training without complaint (although he makes sure his wife Sonia has booked a comfortable nearby hotel for weekends). And in the end he is volunteering for Special Services – though it does seem to be the Boy’s Own Adventure prospects which appeal to him. But he is a character who develops, and he obviously represents what Waugh sees as the remaining strand of decency in upper-class values. I recently read, and very much enjoyed Sword of Honour, like this book, Sword of Honour is a satirical novel about World War Two. Now she had a son to offer her country…Basil—her wayward and graceless and grossly disappointing Basil, whose unaccountable taste for low company had led him into so many vexatious scrapes in the last ten years…who had stolen her emeralds and made Mrs. Lyne (Basil’s mistress) distressingly conspicuous—Basil, his peculiarities merged in the manhood of England, at last entering on his inheritance. She must ask Jo about getting him a commission in a decent regiment. So, amidst all the absurdity and tomfoolery in the rest of the novel, Waugh displays a mature touch as a writer in creating characters who change in time, who are not two-dimensional or vehicles for fun. Another example is Alastair Digby-Vaine Trumpington. He first appeared in the very opening scene of Decline and Fall, a Hooray Henry at Oxford, and he has lived a very conventional upper-class life ever since. Very rich, slightly naive, yet maintaining a ‘schoolboy’ sense of honour: Now, it’s not that Basil’s family is impoverished by any means. On the contrary, his mother provides him a generous allowance for his personal indulgences, but still finds herself frequently paying off his debts when they become over-indulgences. Accordingly, the allowance is suspended. In terms of war heroism, Basil only thinks of achieving this without actually doing anything remotely dangerous or life-threatening—soldierly trench warfare, for example. And so he begins his creative endeavors.

Ambrose eventually morphs into a slightly tragic figure – exiled in Ireland – which rescues him from being a two-dimensional character. The same is true of Angela Lyne, Basil’s ‘so-called’ lover. She is estranged from her husband the dilettante architect Cedric, and at the outset of the novel she is returning from the south of France where she has been fruitlessly waiting for Basil. With the outbreak of WWII, the opportunistic Basil states his objective early on: "I want to be one of those people one heard about in 1919: the hard-faced men who did well out of the war." IMDB recently updated the archival information in its database relating to two little-known BBC TV adaptations of Waugh’s works from 1970. These are Vile Bodies and Put Out More Flags. Both were 90-minute productions on BBC2, but some archival information is still incomplete.They whirl around trying not to get their fingers burnt, but eventually the war calls out to them, and even the reprobate Basil Seal volunteers for a commando posting. What starts out as a comedy ends up with several characters rolling up their sleeves and deciding that they better get along with it. hardest when the chips are down and keep the peace the longest in the intervals are those who know that the only thing worse than war is a lost war. To them, the Spanish Civil War was “contemporary” and glorious, but when the same struggle reaches the Thames they manage to be living in New York. Poppet Green, the disciple of Dali, patronizes people who work for the Ministry Very few male novelists can draw women well; Waugh is a towering exception. His Angela personifies all the vain (in both senses) smartness of the years between the wars; the waste of her life symbolizes the waste of the old values of upper-class England; her words when Basil tells her, in proposing, that he will be a terrible husband forecast the future of that class and place: "Yes, darling, don't I know it? But you see one can't expect anything to be perfect now. In the old days if there was one thing wrong it spoiled everything; from now on for all our lives, if there's one thing right the day is made."