When the Going Was Good!

Our book today a neat little 1946 banquet of travel-writing, When the Going Was Good, by Evelyn Waugh, that pomaded prince of the Seasoned Pro class of travel-writers. The book is a crushed compilation of four earlier works: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and – Waugh stressed the title wasn’t of his choosing – Waugh in Abyssinia, here cut up and mashed together by their author, who rummaged among their Tables of Content for the best bits, the stuff he thought at least slightly worthy of preservation (even prior to 1928, he’d already written reams of stuff he was content to see sink into oblivion, and some of it has). These slim books were the record of a professional traveller’s days and nights, and Waugh sums them up with his usual brusque self-evaluation:

From 1928 until 1937 I had no fixed home and no possessions which would not conveniently go on a porter’s barrow. I travelled continuously, in England and abroad. These four books, here in fragments reprinted, were the record of certain journeys, chosen for no better reason than that I needed money at the time of their completion; they were pedestrian, day-to-day accounts of things seen and people met, interspersed with commonplace information and some rather callow comments. In cutting them to their present shape, I have sought to leave a purely personal narrative in the hope that there still lingers round it some trace of vernal scent.

When the Going Was Good covers a lot of ground. In its pages, Waugh travels all over the Mediterranean – Cairo, Athens, Malta, Constantinople – and he journeys to Abyssinia (you know you’ve chronicled the death of an empire when the country names change in your lifetime) to chronicle the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie. He goes to Kenya, Capetown, Zanzibar, and the Congo, and there’s a digression to Brazil. And through it all, Waugh captures the people he meets – traveling companions and strangers – with a merciless but not always unkind squint at details. His quips about places, however, are almost always unkind; like most British travelers of his (all?) time, he was a connoisseur of discomfort, ranging all the way from cutting jokes:

All the hotels in Egypt are bad, but they excuse themselves upon two contradictory principles. Some maintain, legitimately, that it does not really matter how bad they are if they are cheap enough; the others, that it does not really matter how bad they are if they expensive enough.

… to more grandiose-seeming pronouncements:

Constantinople is by no means warm. The site was chosen for its political and geographical importance rather than for the serenity of its climate. It is exposed to cold winds from the Steppes, and snow is not uncommon. Yet, in the five centuries of Turkish occupation, it seems never to have occurred to the sultans, with vast wealth and unlimited labor at their disposal, to provide any kind of covered corridor between the various rooms of their chief residence. Their highest aspirations towards physical luxury were confined to sprawling among gaudy silk cushions and munching sweetmeats while the icy wind whistled through the lattice-work over their heads. No wonder they took to drink.

(The whole great verbiage of which is merely a tetchy wordsmith’s way of saying the hallway at his hotel was drafty)

Readers familiar with Waugh from his fiction rather than his nonfiction will be comforted by certain stylistic similarities. My own favorite of these is the unpredictable way some insight will strike our author and prompt a digression of soaring beauty and density. You never quite know when such moments will come over Waugh, but I’ve always loved the way he surrenders himself to them rather than rein them in (such surrenders, when done in his novels, have prompted more than a few complaints from readers over the years, to which I say: relax – it’s not heart surgery). Out of many possible examples, let’s just take one, from a moment of insight that struck Waugh while he was attending Mass at the Abyssinian – er, sorry, Ethiopian – monastery of Debra Lebanos:

At Debra Lebanos I suddenly saw the classic basilica and open altar as a great positive achievement, a triumph of light over darkness consciously accomplished, and I saw theology as the science of simplification by which nebulous and elusive ideas are formalized and made intelligible and exact. I saw the Church of the first century as a dark and hidden thing; as dark and hidden as the seed germinating in the womb; legionaries off duty slipping furtively out of barracks, greeting each other by signs and passwords in a locked upper room in the side street of some Mediterranean seaport; slaves at dawn creeping from the grey twilight into the candle-lit, smoky chapels of the catacombs. The priests hid their office, practising trades; their identity was known only to initiates; they were criminals against the law of their country. And the pure nucleus of the truth lay in the minds of the people, encumbered with superstitions, gross survivals of the paganism in which they had been brought up; hazy and obscene nonsense seeping through from the other esoteric cults of the Near East, magical infections from the conquered barbarian.

Naturally, he follows this up with another Wavian signature, the perfectly-pitched combination of triumphalism and priggishness this author mastered as no other writer in English has since:

And I began to see how these obscure sanctuaries had grown, with the clarity of Western reason, into the great open altars of Catholic Europe, where Mass is said in a flood of light, high in the sight of all, while tourists can clatter round with their Baedekers, incurious of the mystery.

Waugh was of course wrong to attempt the patchwork censorship that is When the Going Was Good; authors of books ought to have no more control over those books post-publication than any of their readers do. As the Roman poet Horace understood two thousand years before Waugh was born, books go out into the world much as travelers do: unprepared but, we hope, able to find friends and make their own way. They should no more be chaperoned and brace-fitted than should any tourist just off the dock at Khartoum. But it’s hard to disapprove of the result in this case: here, as always, Waugh made a durably wonderful book out of materials to hand.