Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

by Evelyn Waugh

(Book Jacket Jacketed)

In honor of the hundredth anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s birth, four of the master’s most wickedly scathing comedies are here brought together in one volume.

Black Mischief is Waugh at his most mischievous–inventing a politically loopy African state as a means of pulverizing politics at home. In Scoop , it is journalism’s turn to be drawn and quartered. The Loved One (which became a famously hilarious film) sends up the California mortuary business. And The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a burst of fictionalized autobiography in which Pinfold goes mad, more or less, on board an ocean liner.

Here in four short–very different–novels are the mordant wit, inspired farce, snapping dialogue, and amazing characters that are the essence of everything Waugh ever wrote.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Literature, Humor, Literary Fiction

622 pages, Hardcover

First published June 19, 2003

About the author

Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers; it was all we were taught, really.” He went on to Hertford College, Oxford, where he read History. When asked if he took up any sports there he quipped, “I drank for Hertford.”

In 1924 Waugh left Oxford without taking his degree. After inglorious stints as a school teacher (he was dismissed for trying to seduce a school matron and/or inebriation), an apprentice cabinet maker and journalist, he wrote and had published his first novel, “Decline and Fall” in 1928.

In 1928 he married Evelyn Gardiner. She proved unfaithful, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Waugh would derive parts of “A Handful of Dust” from this unhappy time. His second marriage to Audrey Herbert lasted the rest of his life and begat seven children. It was during this time that he converted to Catholicism.

During the thirties Waugh produced one gem after another. From this decade come: “Vile Bodies” (1930), “Black Mischief” (1932), the incomparable “A Handful of Dust” (1934) and “Scoop” (1938). After the Second World War he published what is for many his masterpiece, “Brideshead Revisited,” in which his Catholicism took centre stage. “The Loved One” a scathing satire of the American death industry followed in 1947. After publishing his “Sword of Honour Trilogy” about his experiences in World War II - “Men at Arms” (1952), “Officers and Gentlemen” (1955), “Unconditional Surrender" (1961) - his career was seen to be on the wane. In fact, “Basil Seal Rides Again” (1963) - his last published novel - received little critical or commercial attention.

Evelyn Waugh, considered by many to be the greatest satirical novelist of his day, died on 10 April 1966 at the age of 62.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_W...

Reviews

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh



Instead of a spoiler alert- this could give you little information about Black Mischief and some idea about the thoughts of this reader when encountering the African emperors and characters of this book.


There is a tendency in all amateur reviewers to go beyond writing about someone else’s book and put in script personal emotions and feelings. That could make the difference between a resume and a review. There is also graphomania to consider and the tests that prove writing to be a good activity for the brain, unless of course you produce Mein Kampf, The Capital, or other disgusting BS.



Black Mischief is appreciated by one of the best comedies ever written, by the Guardian scholars. It is on their site, in the section best 1,000 books, in the comedy area.

Evelyn Waugh got married to…another Evelyn, which confirms my suspicion that this is a name which sounds feminine. They were actually called: “He- Evelyn and She-Evelyn”.

He-Evelyn has written three books that I loved – Brideshead Revisited, Scoop and A Handful of Dust. From then on, it went downhill for me with Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and now Black Mischief.

Black Mischief has many hilarious moments and I am sure you could consider it a gem, even I may find it exhilarating, upon another reading that could give it a completely different aura.

With this encounter though, I failed to get the best of the book and in the words of Maugham, I cannot afford to take the chance to miss reading a good book, by keeping occupied with a lesser one…which Black Mischief may not be.

The emperor Seth is quite often funny, but the cruelty of his majesty and his subjects puts me off. The Empress is called by Seth and then others- The Black Bitch, which I could have found comical, but it impressed upon me some obnoxious feeling.

Seth is set (h) upon modernizing some of his country- that is imposing some of his own ideas of progress. One such path is naming streets after his preferred characters, and it is a good thing the narrator states that Seth is not into psychoanalysis.

He has a tank, which the emperor thinks will determine his victory upon his enemy, even if the tank is obsolete.

The primitivism of the foreigners can also be “admired“: at one point, the reader is shocked to learn that the British envoy aka charge d’affaires has very little idea who Seth or indeed anyone is. This British pompous ass takes the phone off the hook at some point in the evening and has little interest in what is going on around him.

There is a lot of embezzlement and stealing, which goes on in the Africa of today- look at Jacob Zuma and the $ 20 million of public money he spent on his private ranch.

One of the aides of Seth runs away with a crown, gold and other loot, only to be apprehended by the chief of police, who takes most of the stolen goods for…himself.

There is a frenzy connected with birth control, and then we have the cruelty towards animals- never stopped: I recently learned about a big pack of elephants poached by poisoning the water.

There are no banknotes for a while, because the ruler did not like the look they had.

Come to think of it, there have been plenty of passages, perhaps the whole book, where the entertainment could be glorious…only I missed much of it. I hope you will enjoy the book and come back to point out to me some of the good laughs that I failed to enjoy.

[Dr G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Black Mischief is Evelyn Waugh’s third novel and it is quintessential Waugh: every character is pilloried as a representative of a type. This is Waugh at his most brutal.
I suspect a good many readers would dislike the book, or feel uncomfortable with it, because, amongst its targets is post-colonial Africa and the Africans are presented with no romanticism at all: they are illiterate, gullible, primitive. However, if that picture is unfamiliar to twenty-first century readers, the balance is there with the portrayal of the Europeans whose faults are different but no less ridiculous. Prudence, the daughter of His Britannic Majesty’s minister in Azania, Sir Courteney, perhaps shows the nadir of ignorance, unmatched by any other character, African or European, when she asks her mother, “‘Mum, how soon after the birds mate are the lambs born?’” She well deserves, and is suited to, her final fate.
It must be said, though, that Seth, “Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors”, is not much better equipped intellectually. The main thing Oxford seems to have given Seth is the certainty that he is infallible. Modernism will make Azania great and all examples of modernity must be adopted immediately. There is a certain irony in Seth being a graduate of Oxford, and in Oxford being the shining example of modernity!
Seth decides that the RSPCA is part of the modern world and is pleased when two of its representatives visit Azania. These ladies see goats and humans co-habiting and worry about the deleterious effect on the goats of this arrangement. However, the RSPCA’s mission is misconstrued, with Azania’s glorification of its cruel treatment of animals.
Seth’s greatest flaw is in lacking any understanding of the simplest economic reality. He promises that the troops’ wages will be paid, but he has no way of achieving this; to keep the troops happy, he states that all privates will be promoted to corporal. Before long, as he buys more items, he runs out of money, so he prints an Azanian currency. “All these on this shelf are for a thousand pounds each, and now that the plates have been made, it is quite inexpensive to print as many more as we require. You see there were a great many things which needed doing and I had not a great many rupees.”
Evelyn Waugh’s brother, Alec Waugh, was reviled by his old school, Sherborne, when he used it as the basis of the school in Loom of Youth. I wonder how the masters at Oxford felt when they saw in Black Mischief how Seth used his Oxford degree. It was no doubt true that Azania needed to modernise; the problem is that Seth tried to carry out the process by randomly identifying features of modern countries, rarely the essence of their modernity but more likely incidental superficialities, and attempting to impose them without thought of practicalities. He was struck by the concept of birth control and decided one of the major streets he would build after demolishing a building (the cathedral) which did not fit his plan, would be named Place Marie Stopes. Birth control would be adopted as a result of a propaganda campaign. However, the posters showing the benefits of having fewer children and thus more wealth and leisure are misinterpreted by the locals as showing that birth control causes idle women and impotent men.
We don’t meet many other Africans in the book. We are introduced generally to the incessant tribal warfare, and to the arcane inheritance structure for national leadership, and to some unorthodox eating behaviours. And there is the virulently anti-birth-control Earl of Ngumo. “This nobleman, himself one of a family of forty-eight (most of whom he had been obliged to assassinate on his succession to the title), was the father of over sixty sons and uncounted daughters. This progeny was a favourite boast of his; in fact, he maintained a concert party of seven minstrels for no other purpose than to sing at table about this topic when he entertained friends. Now in ripe age, with his triumphs behind him, he found himself like some scarred war veteran surrounded by pacifists, his prestige assailed and his proudest achievements held up to violent detraction. The new proposals struck at the very roots of sport and decency and he expressed the general feeling of the landed gentry when he threatened amid loud grunts of approval to dismember any man on his estates whom he found using the new-fangled and impious appliances.”
By and large, though, Seth is the African targeted by Waugh.
By contrast, European idiocy is shown in profusion.
If the Earl views birth control from a personal bias, so does at least one of the Christian leaders: “No one could reasonably accuse the Nestorian Patriarch of fanatical moral inflexibility – indeed there had been incidents in his Beatitude’s career when all but grave scandal had been caused to the faithful – but whatever his personal indulgence, his theology had always been unimpeachable. Whenever a firm lead was wanted on the question of opinion, the Patriarch had been willing to forsake his pleasures and pronounce freely and intransigently for the tradition he had inherited.”
Then there is the Armenian businessman, Youkoumian, whose instinct for survival is so acute that he escapes a hanging sentence with the noose already around his neck. And in revenge, he ignores Seth’s instruction and facilitates the murder of the man who revealed his defection plans. He uses every trick, obviously including theft and bribery, to sustain his business, and is happy to move his wife to the mule carriage when he can sell her train ticket to a cash-paying buyer; he even manages to become Financial Secretary to the High Commissioner and Comptroller General in the Ministry of Modernization, from which position, he is even better placed to activate his corrupt practices. In a lovely touch, Waugh shows him at the end of the book, still prospering in a later generation of Azania, with the new (still European) elite agreeing what a “useful little fellow” he is.
The protagonist in Black Mischief is Basil Seal, a self-indulgent wastrel who is tired of London and so bored with its prospects that he walks out on an apparently certain parliamentary seat and whimsically heads to Africa. Basil is penniless so he finances the trip with a mixture of furtive begging and downright thievery. However, he knew Seth at Oxford so it is not surprising that he is soon heading the emperor’s modernising program. (The old boys’ network is not limited by geography.) He is, in fact, evidently the only agency keeping the regime even remotely upright, despite his previous record of incompetence, naivety and indolence. Somewhat like Youkoumian, he manages to slip out of tricky spots and ends up in London, although his old chums there are bored whenever he threatens to recount any of his extraordinary exploits.
The rest of the British are lazy dilettantes. Sir Samson Courtenay “was a man of singular personal charm and wide culture whose comparative ill-success in diplomatic life was attributable rather to inattention than to incapacity.” In previous appointments, he was distracted by hobbies, model building and cycling. Each time, his uncles in the foreign office would move him. He focused on having a road built to the legation; work was started with convict labour and rocks but then the US commercial attaché who had business interests in heavy machinery suggested a heavy roller and work was stopped while a decision was made.
“The Oriental Secretary, Captain Walsh, alone maintained certain reserves. He suffered from recurrent malaria and was known to ill-treat his wife. But since he was the only member of the Legation who understood Sakuyu, he was a man of importance, being in frequent demand as arbiter in disputes between the domestic servants.” (To what more fruitful exercise could a speaker of the indigenous language put his learning?)
The Bishop asks for news and is given a catalogue of gossip, so asks explicitly about the war but no one can help because the cipher book has been lost. They are all irritated with the war because of its impact on their personal lives, their gardening and knitting and so on. Meanwhile, no one in London is vaguely interested, having no idea where Azania is; uniformly, they are pompous, racist snobs
The French, paranoically assume the British have sophisticated secret plans in operation. The British legation’s security is so lax that Sir Samson’s butler brings the French daily reports on British activity. Both nations’ intelligence is caught out by a message which appears to be indecipherable code but is actually the next move in a chess game.
Black Mischief is a funny, clever, well-written satire on just about everything. It will not restore a reader’s faith in the human race but it will temper the pain with laughter.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming in at 620 pages, this book is a large omnibus collection of four of the author's works published by Everyman's Library, which has done a good job at preserving Waugh's work for later generations.  To be sure, some of these books are hard to find--this was the only place I was able to get Black Mischief in my library system, which is not a surprise given how politically incorrect the book is--more on that later.  As someone who is pretty familiar with Waugh's novels [1], I had already read and reviewed Scoop, so I skipped that novel in this collection and read the other three.  When I was an undergraduate making my first acquaintance with Waugh's writings I read The Loved One, and thought it was worth reading again, and it was.  Given the large amount of material here, I thought that the best way of writing about it would be to take a paragraph and deal with each work on its own in some depth.  If you are reading a book of this size, the odds are pretty good that you are either familiar with the author's work already or that you want to be, and that is something that should be encouraged.

Black Mischief is the first novel in this particular collection, and it is pretty easy to see why this book was such a success when it was first published, even if its reputation has fallen upon hard times as of late because contemporary strands in political correctness do not like what the author has to say about the fads of progressivism and their effect on the part of the world that adopts them slavishly.  The story was taken in large part from Waugh's travels to Ethiopia as a correspondent and shows a great deal of cynicism about the lack of interest in obscure parts of the world by the English public, the high levels of corruption that can be found in those countries, and in the way that barbarism and civilization are both full of a great deal of atrocities and ironies.  The author's portrayal of the cynical Basil Seal, General Connolly the Duke of Ukaka, as well as the naive Emperor Seth (a stand in, although the author stoutly denied it, for the last Emperor of Ethiopia).  If you are tolerant of the author's frankly racist language and are fond of a farcical novel about Africa that includes some references to cannibalism, there is much to enjoy in this novel and its savage skewering of political cant.

The Loved One is a novel that I enjoyed upon first reading it and that is well worth reading again.  It is a short novel, which many will appreciate, and it tells the story of the English expatriate community in Hollywood during the early middle of the 20th century.  The hero of the story, one Dennis Barlow is a poet who works at a pet cemetery that tries to copy Whispering Glades (Forest Lawn), and who finds an alarmingly large number of people around him committing suicide even as his job leads to his social ruin and to the destruction of his relationship with a beautiful and suicidal young woman.  In this short book the author manages the impressive task of sounding a lot like Wodehouse's Mr. Mulliner stories about Hollywood, themselves rather impressive, simultaneously taking expatriate English writers who considered themselves to be something special in Southern California down a few pegs while also skewering the American denial of death and the travesty made of death and the rituals of death in the United States.  This is done in such a lighthearted and funny fashion that the book's conclusions may not register because one finds the plot to be so ridiculously entertaining.

The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold demonstrates the fundamentally autobiographical nature of Waugh's writing in a way that serves to deepen and complicate one's appreciation of his writing.  At the beginning of Waugh's novels, he commonly stated that there was no relationship between the novel and reality, which always seems like a lie designed to avoid lawsuits for libel.  In this novel, though, the author is even more autobiographical than usual, portraying himself as a craftsman of limited skill who liked to go over the same subjects and plots over and over again, and who in a sickness brought on by prolonged insomnia and some bad drug interactions, takes a vacation to the Middle East and India that results in some terrible hallucinations.  The result is a Kafkaesque exploration of aging and the unreliability of memory and the horrors of modern medicine with a hero who seems very much like the author, and who ends up using his sleeping drug-induced nightmares as a way of poking fun at the way that he was viewed by the literary critics of his time, and afterward, who are obsessed with politics and sexuality and the author's bluntly honest and opinionated nature as being offensive to their sensitive ears.  This novel is one that ends happily, ultimately, but that has a darkly melancholic edge to it.

What these four books serve to do as a combined set is to demonstrate that the author was inspired by his own life and surroundings but that he had more than just a couple of novels inside of him.  All of the novels deal in some way with travel--two of them focused on Africa, one on the United States, and the other on the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.  The course of the novels demonstrates that the author was more savagely witty at the beginning of his career than later as he aged, but that he always maintained a cynical and critical attitude to what was often falsely called progress.  Indeed, it is the author's misfortune that this essentially backwards looking skepticism (similar to that of, say, the late Tom Petty concerning the hippie aesthetic) was confused with mere misanthropy rather than being a genuine and serious approach to the world in which Waugh lived.  In these novels we see the heart of a man who is more generous-minded than he is often made out to be, and someone who anticipated how he would be viewed by an unfriendly world, a tragedy that is all the more acute for having been a genuine prophecy.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

[Charles Vilina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly the king of literary satire. Waugh shocks and awes his way into your heart!

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have also read Black Mischief and Scoop. Neither quite as biting and sad as The Loved One, nor as funny, I thought. But still very good. I shall keep the collection at four stars.

I read The Loved Ones in this collection so far. It was really great, I wasn't sure what to expect (I think I expected some sort of love story, which I sort of got, but not really). Quite funny and biting and a little bit sad. Those Brits, they can be so clever.

[patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting, semi-autobiographical account of Waugh's descent into hallucinatory madness due to drug and alcohol abuse.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

SCOOP and PINFOLD are particularly brilliant. Waugh's prose drips with beauty, and is hilarious to boot.

[Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admire "Black Mischief" (June 4, 2006) for Waugh's hilarity. Read it and you'd like his dark humor.