The sentence ("This war began in darkness and it will end in silence") is spoken by Lt. de Souza in Men at Arms, the first volume of the Sword of Honour trilogy, Waugh's opus about World War II. de Souza is a minor character but a sybelline one. Waugh uses him as a saucy intellectual who expresses fears that the definitely non-intellectual Guy Crouchback, Waugh's hero and stand-in, is reluctant to face.

Crouchback (like his creator did) goes to war to defeat the Nazis, who stand for all that is worst in the modern world. But the irrationality and moral insanity of life in His Majesty's forces make Crouchback fret that the very cause in which he enlisted to fight will only feed the dragon he dreads. Britain will, he worries, emerge from this war with all that he holds dear wrapped even tighter in the dragon's coils. Crouchback is, of course, quite right. That is exactly what happened. The question, for us, is whether Waugh was a bloody fool for ever expecting otherwise. But one might ask this same question of any nation that goes to war: what on earth did you expect? Did you honestly think that what you went to war "for" would have anything to do with what came out in the end?

Camille Claudel was the only poster who correctly identified the source. But since she has, to my certain knowledge, been having a posthumous affair with EW, I'm afraid she can't be awarded any laurels. She never was lucky at love, poor thing.

Inkberrow raised the question whether Waugh should be called a "genius." That is thought-provoking. Waugh's critical reputation was very, very high in his own day, but he hasn't aged so extremely well. Even I, who was raised to revere Waugh, would admit that he comes across as a bit of a niche author now. He's extraordinarily skillful, always a great pleasure to read, but the sensibility he represents, while it rang truer in its ugly day that present readers can appreciate, seems almost mythic from our present perspective. Waugh traded on nostalgia for a world that was already gone when he wrote; he seems to have cultivated it deliberately, as a kind of what we now call "retro." I suppose that's an acquired taste. I'm glad I acquired it, though.

He rejects the notion of "genius", but thinks instead that what made him interesting is that he was genuinely fascinated with what he mocked.

There is the view, you know, that great artists chose to depict that which they knew existed, but could not grasp themselves. Auguste is an example. He was fascinated with the emotion of love and its outcroppings, but...... ah well.

Arthur, similarly, was exclusively fascinated with the upper class. It moved him to write as love moved Auguste to sculpt.

Just a thought from the grave...

probably get more argument about that than in Waugh's day. (Of course, that may readjust later---even Milton spent long periods on the windward side of the anxiety of influence.) Part of it is Waugh's sheer popularity while he lived, and much of that deriving from sendups that now seem dated or over-topical (to many). And perceived lack of scope as a "comic" novelist, too? Can't get more topical than "War and Peace", but we supposedly get insight on the human condition Entire from Tolstoy, as opposed to that of the early 20th English leisure class. Yet Proust's place, for instance, is assured even though he's content sipping tea in a Paris salon.

Waugh's "scope" is there, though, in my opinion, in the obvious agony of "Brideshead"; in prescient insights on societal trends in "The Loved One" and "Scoop", e.g.; and especially for me (and, I suspect, for you Fritz) in his lifelong tilt with Catholicism. Then, the sheer fun with Waugh is almost incomparable, from the character names and lightning dialogue, to excruciating setpieces like the fate of Tony Last in "A Handful of Dust". Genius. But I myself have a bias for British authors of that period spanning the wars, those that they represented the best of what could still be produced by the traditional English public school and socio-political structure---by Empire, damn it all---even as they faced what they realized was the shockingly inhumane end of a epoch which fancied itself humane as none before it. I'm thinking of Waugh, Orwell, Huxley, and Graves especially---unjaundiced, even brutal eyes, but despite themselves still loving Britain qua Britain, and old-school liberal education for its own sake, before the Angry Young Men and subsequent empire-guilt revisionists and deconstructionists took over letters and the academy, and it became fashionable to loathe Dickens and Churchill.

Although, I can't imagine why socialists or the writers called The Angry Young Men, who followed after Waugh and Green and Snow would loathe Dickens, he was one of the very first authors to write about the plight of the poor and downtrodden, wasn't he... He would have been a forerunner of Marx and Engels.

I gather Churchill and Waugh were terrible snobs. I don't know about the others I'm thinking about.
I always wondered why Evelyin Waugh always seemed unhappy and depressive. I know I thoroughly enjoyed every word he wrote.

It's been years, about twenty, since I read every author from that era, tried to imagine London and England as it might have been in their era and hoped just breathing the air would seep into my DNA, like osmosis or something and make me more like them or something like that.

I think Fritz Gerlich's quote could have come from Graham Green just as easily as from Waugh.

thank you Ellen. I'll stick with Dickens to this extent---though Trollope, e.g., would be a better example of an "establishment" Victorian novelist---Dickens for all his genuine social conscience became over time, largely by dint of his overwhelming contemporary popularity, the emblem of English bourgeios sensibilities, of a "respectable", i.e., sentimental and decidedly non-radical, liberal bent. Perhaps "forerunners" generate more animus from their successors in certain connections than do the reactionaries almost taken for granted by history. The forerunner may be blamed for misguidedly insufficient, accomodationist positions---more anxiety of influence---as with, say Booker T. Washington among today's African-American cognoscenti, or even Martin Luther King had he avoided the assassin's bullet. For the Angry Young Men, et al, there was simply far too much much comfort and joy in Dickens, too much negus, and too many British of all walks of life acquiescing proudly to do their Duty, which too often consisted of accepting one's place, class, and fate without demur. Example of that dynamic----not a great deal of time is spent in Austen, for example, detailing the struggles of poor servant and workmen characters' families to eat and live. They are permitted, though, to agonize over whether Miss _____ will have enough for a new lace shawl for the Season after a particular inheritance falls through.

How I misspelled Graham Greene's name I'll never know ....

Again, what wonderfully written, interesting and insightful observations on at least 159 years of British history you have written.

I've never thought of Dickens as deliberately setting out to change the way the world sees injustices and change it for the better actually, quite in the same way that Anna Sewell did with "Black Beauty" or Harriet Beecher Stowe did with "Uncle Tom's Cabin".
His empathy and sympathy did make people aware of the miserable conditions people lived in, no one could read him and not become aware of their poverty and suffering, but hardly to the degree that they actually existed.
You're right, Jane Austin's world doesn't come close to the reality of the times for most people, although, not one character in her novels was truly evil and cruel that I can recall, and her heroines even managed to roll up their sleeves and do for themselves from time to time.