Customer Reviews

Put Out More Flags

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This is one the great comic novels of the history of the world. I would expect it would not be quite the work to start out with, but for people aware of what Britain was like during the first days of WWII, this is pure pleasure.
The book, like most of Waugh's satires, contains a number of secondary characters who are often quite amusing. In this Waugh is the equal of Dickens (a comparison Waugh might not have appreciated), in his celebration of the English eccentric. From a technical execution the novel is rather interesting in that its main character, its anti-hero, Basil Seal, is somewhat of a character himself.

Basil Seal originally appeared in the work "Black Mischief" is a trickster, eternally on the lookout for a way of earning a dishonest living. Basil's life is complicated by the outbreak of war and the insistance by the women in his life to play a hero's part in it (preferably dying while do so, in the case of his mother).

Possessed of considerable guile he hotfoots it off to the country where he runs a profitable extortion racket involving three very undesirable war refugee children. These obnoxious brats manage to destroy most of the stately cottages of, if not the upper classes, then the upper middle classes.

Another central character in the book is Ambrose Silk. Silk wishes the war would go away and at the same time wonders what his role should be. Eventually he settles on publishing an arts magazine, whose most notable work celebrates his love for a German soldier is twisted into Nazi propaganda by Basil working as a counterespionage agent.
Though filled with topical humor, "Put out More Flags" manages to transcend the time in which it was written. It contains a number of thinly disguised portraits of famous people. If anyone is curious as to the various identities, I would recommend Humphrey Carpenter's excellent work, "The Brideshead Generation."

The work is also interesting for fans of Waugh as
well. It is the second to last of his "funny" books. The next books would take on a more serious tone. Waugh's next book would be Brideshead Revisited. With the exception of "The Loved One" Waugh's later works would take on a seriousness which ultimately would set him apart from his contemporaries. I also recently read "The Sword of Honour" Trilogy and it is interesting to compare this work with "Put out More Flags." The themes are similar, but the approach is markedly different. This book shows Waugh as a writer who had already conquered many worlds, but at the same time was preparing to take on new challenges.

Not even the traumas of World War II could put Evelyn Waugh's delightfully satirical pen on hold; the horrors of war expose the grimness beneath his humor and invite a new kind of irreverence. Consider a scene in "Put Out More Flags" (1942) in which a woman's husband has just been killed in combat and the man with whom she's been having an affair wastes no time in proposing marriage. Her lackadaisical response to this most solemn of requests: "Yes, I think so. Neither of us could ever marry anyone else, you know."

Like Wodehouse, but with greater subtlety, Waugh finds an underlying silliness in all types of characters and sets them up to be knocked down like ducks in a shooting gallery. In "Put Out More Flags," he dredges up some characters from previous novels and introduces them into comic situations within the context of the incipient European war (1939-1940). Foremost among them is Basil Seal, a thirty-six-year-old who is as unemployable as a six-year-old. His mother tries to help him get a prestigious position in the Army, but he blows it when he unintentionally and unknowingly insults the Lieutenant-Colonel of the Bombardiers. Fortunately, he is able to get a job with the War Department where he discovers that the secret to success is to level charges of Communism and Nazism against his (mostly) innocent friends and inform on them.

Basil's friends and family also make the most of war time. Ambrose Silk, a Jewish atheist, takes advantage of his job at the Religious Department of the Ministry of Information to start a fustian periodical. Alastair Trumpington, a pampered aristocrat, dutifully enlists as a soldier because he believes that "he would make as good a target as anyone else for the King's enemies to shoot at," while his wife Sonia waits for him in the car outside the training camp like a mother picking up her kid at school. Meanwhile, Basil's sister Barbara is allowing the use of their country estate as a shelter for poor people evacuating London for fear of German bombing raids; among them are a trio of insufferable brats named the Connollys who provide Basil with the fodder for an irresistible extortion scheme.

Waugh's great insight was the immediate recognition of the potential humor of the war's impact on the British class conflict, and therein lies his brilliance. His books are funny, but more importantly, they're every bit as intelligent, perceptive, and well-written as any "serious" novel, whose level of social consciousness they rival. The twentieth century needed an Evelyn Waugh, and we certainly could use one now.

It's vintage Waugh, standing halway between the farcical funny ones and the serious ones. He's unique in being a satirist of the idiocy of war who can also deal with patriotism and courage.
This is set in that strange time when Britain had just gone to war but France had not fallen. You meet some characters from his other books. This added to the pleasure for me but I don't know if it's the one I would recommend to someone who'd never read any Waugh before. It also helps if you know something about the 1930's British literary scene and can recognize who is being satirized. Parsnip and Pimpernell are presumably Auden and Spender. I've heard of various candidates fir being Ambose Silk.

In this novel, Waugh brilliantly satirizes the English middle and upper class reactions to World War II. From the men who dress up in uniform and play soldier like little boys to the rogues who try to profit from war-time hysteria, Waugh finds plenty of targets. This book reads like a more socially-conscious P.G. Wodehouse. Quite funny, with a lot of truth hidden behind the laughs.

Please note that this review refers to specific passages in the book.

As a Waugh aficionado this novel disappointed me. Its main protagonist is a roguish maverick named Basil Seal who appeared first in Black Mischief, Waugh's excellent and entertaining novel set in the fictional state of Azania. In Black Mischief, Basil Seal was depicted as a charming and irresistible chancer. In POMF, there is nothing in his amoral conduct to support this reputation, other than baseless faits accomplis. Previously, Waugh masterfully used dialogue to delineate character; in my view, he conspicuously fails to achieve this here with Seal. Telling the reader that Seal has overpowering personal magnetism is no good unless the narrative backs up such a claim: the characterisation must be seen as congruent (Bob Hoskins as Withnail, anyone?).

The episode of the Connolly children (apparently a sly reference to Cyril Connolly), where Seal extorts payment from houseproud home-owners to avoid the billeting on them of three seriously delinquent siblings, is a contrived and unfunny set-piece which shows him to be an unsavoury and vindictive individual. There is no apparent basis for humour: no parody, social mores are not ridiculed; this scam appears to have been introduced solely to demonstrate Seal's creative nastiness. The violation of people's sensibilities and their homes, and blackmail, in this context, is simply obnoxious.

In Waugh's previous novels, despite his tracing the lives of a range of different characters and developing disparate scenarios, there is a coherent narrative thread; this is largely absent in POMF. The plot is a potpourri of barely disguised concepts and clippings from previous novels loosely thrown together, supplemented with laboured 'rite-of-passage' and non-sequitur incidents. The Ministry of Information is an ill-explored opportunity for lampoonery; references to the war are piecemeal and incomplete - all this adds to the patchwork feel of the book. The desultory course of the novel is not engaging and there is no urgency to discover what happens next; a page-turner it most certainly is not.

I believe Put Out More Flags is simply substandard work. Apparently, it was largely drafted in seven weeks while Evelyn Waugh was on a troopship travelling from Egypt to Britain in the summer of 1941. Some scholars and biographers of Waugh have suggested that a major reason for the production of POMF was his reduced financial position, his primary income at the time being an army salary (re-prints of his novels constrained due to the war-time paper shortage). Waugh hoped that a new novel would be more favourably received than proposals to re-print previous works; he was said to be surprised how quickly it was published by Chapman & Hall (1942).

Worth (skim) reading, possibly, if you are a dedicated fan of Waugh. In my view, though, Decline and Fall and The Loved One are the best of his satirical works.

The eight months between the declaration of the Second World War in September 1939 and the German invasion of France in May 1940 were referred to, even at the time, in Britain as "the phony war." Military conscription began, blackouts and food rationing were imposed, and many families with children were evacuated from the cities, but there were no air raids and no major deployments of British forces overseas. So many wealthier people who had shut up their London houses in the autumn returned there for the winter season. Evelyn Waugh's satirical account of the period, written only a couple of years later, deals with a group of upper-class Englishmen and women for whom the whole period was mainly a matter of dressing up as soldiers, and "doing one's duty" was an opportune antidote to boredom.

This is a very funny book, but it may not be accessible to everyone. Here, as a kind of litmus test, is a passage from the beginning of the book. One of the characters, a society hostess, has just heard the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announce the declaration of war over the radio:

"It was quite true, thought Lady Seal; Neville Chamberlain had spoken surprisingly well. She had never liked him very much, neither him nor his brother -- if anything she had preferred the brother -- but they were uncomfortable, drab fellows both of them. However, he had spoken very creditably that morning, as though at last he were fully alive to his responsibilities. She would ask him to luncheon. But perhaps he would be busy; the most improbable people were busy in wartime, she remembered."

That "most improbable" made me laugh loud enough to disturb several neighboring diners, but I recognize that the patronizing understatement is a very British sort of humor. If you find this passage funny, then by all means read the book; it is a masterpiece. Otherwise, be warned. It is not just the humor that may be impenetrable, but the large cast of characters, whose social status and interconnections are indicated in the most subtle ways, by the kinds of names they are given or the addresses at which they live. This is a book that really cries out for an annotated edition, giving lists of characters and family trees, explanations of the historical events taking place offstage, and notes on the numerous cultural matters that are referenced obliquely; the leftist poets Parsnip and Pimpernell who have emigrated to America, for instance, must surely be a sly dig at Auden and Isherwood. And yet the novel would sink under the weight of such an apparatus criticus; it is a soufflé of frivolity topped with meringue.

But not quite a soufflé. Reviewing Waugh's A HANDFUL OF DUST (1934) a year or so ago, I remarked that a book which began with the farcical doings of a group of upper-class drones who might have come straight out of P. G. Wodehouse changed half-way to develop something of the moral weight of Graham Greene. Hearing PUT OUT MORE FLAGS talked about, I expected a similar tragicomic trajectory. The book does indeed get more serious as it goes on, but in a less obvious way which I think makes it the greater novel. The reader knows that the war will not remain phony for long, and this makes the melodramatic events that produced the climax in the earlier book quite unnecessary here. Secondly, even in its frivolous early stages, the book shows a breadth of cultural awareness, nicely balanced between real-world events and dinner-table conversation, that gives it dimension from the start. Thirdly, there is the moral element; Waugh, another Catholic, is as much of a moralist as Greene, only with a lighter touch. As they are affected by the war, many of the characters take surprising turns which reveal them as moral individuals, sometimes weaker than we had thought, but often stronger, and always more sympathetic. Or almost always; Waugh maintains a rather disturbing sense of moral ambiguity. Basil Seal, the cheerful sponger antihero of the novel, is as much fun as Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, and the war gives him opportunity for increasingly audacious schemes. But by the end, real people are getting hurt by them. You root for him, you laugh at his successes, but then you wonder if you should be laughing.... I am still working that one out.

Basil Seal, familiar to readers of Black Mischief (1932) as the man hired by one of his Oxford friends, the ruler of an African nation, to modernize it, has returned to England, his ludicrous efforts at modernization for naught. It is the autumn of 1939 (in this 1942 novel), just as war is breaking out, and Basil, one of the "bright, young things" on whom Waugh casts his satiric eye and biting wit, is bored. Penniless, he accepts his sister Barbara's suggestion to help her to place urban children with rural families to protect them from the incipient bombings. Soon he has turned this in to a profitable business--country house residents are more than willing to pay Basil NOT to bring three especially monstrous children, to live with them.

Strong on character, grim humor, and satire, and short on overall plot, Waugh has created in this novel characters who represent the worst of upperclass young people--their shallow interests, indifferent education, frivolous behavior, lack of long-term goals, and seeming absence of any values except pleasure. Basil has had a long affair with Angela Lyne, but dallies with other women. Angela's cuckolded husband Cedric enlists in the war effort, while she, lonely, turns to drink. Ambrose Silk, half-Jewish and openly gay, works to establish a literary magazine until he runs afoul of the censors (in the person of Basil). Two writers, Parsnip and Pimpernel, reputed to have been modeled on W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, run off to the States to avoid the war completely.

As the novel moves from autumn, 1939, to the summer of 1940, when the mobilization is fully underway, Waugh skewers the naivete of his subjects and their universal desire to use the war to get ahead. None of them take the war seriously, nor do they realize that the very fabric of their country is at stake. Basil and friends want to be among "the hard-faced men [of 1919] who did well out of the war." Image is more important than reality, which they seem determined to ignore.

The last of Waugh's satiric novels (since his later novels become far more serious), this one is full of ironic humor directed at the (usually) wealthy young people who allow life to happen to them, assuming that they will always be able to make lemonade from lemons. In the course of the novel, all will come to new understandings, and when France falls, the scene is set for reversals and revelations. Fun to read and historically important for the attitudes it records among this group, Put Out More Flags is classic Waugh satire. n Mary Whipple

Black Mischief
The Loved One (Penguin Modern Classics)
Brideshead Revisited

This is Waugh's satirical look at England at the beginning of WW II, with two characters in particular receiving his sharp and witty arrows of reproach: Basil Seal, a military big-shot wannabe who ends up relocating London slum children when the army rejects him; and Ambrose Silk, an aesthete, who gets a job with the religious division of the Ministry of Information representing Atheists. Silk becomes a dupe in an anti-fascist scheme of Seal's that is hilarious while at the same time being pathetic. This was the time of the so-called "phony war," when things were yet relatively quiet in England and some people (the Basils) were only "playing" at war. Waugh lampoons this attitude and these people mercilessly in this novel. In this book, as usual, Waugh is "the first-rate comic genius" critics declared him to be.

This was a real good read. Interesting how Waugh blended the sad, the ridiculous, the funny and the affecting all into one short book. The satire is rapier-like, and in many ways this invokes the English homeland from the fall of '39 through the spring of '40."

This is the fourth of his books I've read, deliberately choosing to start Waugh with his comedies. This is an odd book, caught halfway between great comedy and potentially powerful drama. While sporadically very funny, the book isn't nearly as outrageously funny as his comic masterpieces: Black Mischief, Scoop, or The Loved One. I suspect Waugh's mood during the dire days and dark depths of WW II, especially as Britain battled alone against Germany for nearly a year and watched her resources and empire start to wither away while America's juggernaut rose to displace it, influenced him. By 1942, the relatively non-combative "phony war" of 1939 and early 1940 was long over, replaced by the complete brutality of 1941 and later. The book has some very funny parts (e.g., as the scoundrel Basil Seal blackmails rural inhabitants by deliberately loosing the horrible Connelly children on them and only relieving their suffering once they pay him to remove them), but often the mood is rather somber and the characters are caught uncomfortably between humor (someone whose hatred of literature is overcome by a comfortable prison stay) and pain/loss (hiding alcoholism from one's social class). Basil is much funnier in Black Mischief.