In Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930) and A Handful of Dust (1934), Evelyn Waugh has a preoccupation with sound. The ‘confused roaring’ which opens Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, focusses attention on the chaotic din of all his early satirical novels. In the period in which he was writing, often dubbed ‘The Age of Noise’, urban and domestic spaces were transformed by a faster pace of living and the changing nature of sound. Waugh’s assault on the ears reflects the increasing noise of the twentieth century – a new world was being formed, pushing out the old-fashioned and thrusting in a period of dramatic technological advancement, bringing with it an altered soundscape. With his characteristic wit and economic use of dialogue and description, Waugh depicts societies overcome by noise neglecting morality and tradition in favour of raucous hedonism. Attuned to these sounds of modernity and new technology, he explores a complicated relationship with modernism, using the noise of modernity against itself in order to satirise his contemporaries.
Like in many periods of cultural instability, satire thrived after the Great War. Disillusioned by the traditions of society in the wake of the destruction and devastation of the war, authors found themselves torn between the polarisation of the age – Whigs and Tories, progressive and non-progressive, tradition and modernity. Satirists such as Huxley, Orwell, Lewis and Waugh took advantage of this culturally divided moment using techniques such as exaggeration, parody, caricature, irony, farce, invective, word-play and dark comedy. Waugh claims in his 1946 essay ‘Fan-fare’ that ‘Satire…has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue’, yet two decades earlier this certainly was his mode, choosing to expose the follies, foolishness and absurdity of his contemporary society. Satire as a genre developed from the ideas of writers of Ancient Greece and Rome and serves to correct human folly and criticise people’s stupidity. It has long been an important strand in English culture, running through the Renaissance era with Jonson, Dryden and Pope, continuing on to the Victorian era with Wilde and Dickens and on to a resurgence of the genre which took place in the inter-war period. Yet questions do emerge over whether satire works in this hedonistic society where moral distinction are no longer immediately apparent after the confusion of the First World War.
Sound is crucial to Waugh’s satires. He once wrote in his diary, ‘One had heard all the world has to say, and wants no more of it.’ For him the world was screaming out: horse-drawn carriages were replaced by the noise of car horns and combustion engines; communication was advanced by the popularity of telephones; aeroplanes could be heard overhead; music was noisier, with gramophones and radios blaring out brass-heavy Jazz; urban living was noisier, with dense populations living in flats; even women were noisier, in both an aural and political context. Although sound and noise have been used synonymously the two have distinct characteristics. Sound is ‘that which is or may be heard’- as an adjective it implies health and security, as a verb (‘sounded’) it suggests a specific impression conveyed. Naturally an overlap exists with noise being a sound yet lacking the same form. It alludes to disturbance and discordancy, inharmonious music, rumour or slander, controversy and has political implications. It seems that noise, defined with these implications in mind, is especially used to amplify and exaggerate the hollowness that Waugh depicts and satirises. It highlights a lack of control and an absence of repression, which, in his view, was to the detriment of society. The noise of his imagined societies reflects a backlash from the silence and restrictions of the previous decade and the new hedonistic era.
The noise of new techniques of recording, producing and broadcasting sounds, along with the loud din of hedonism, epitomized everything Waugh despised about modern society. He used sound as a direct attack on modernity. Many authors reacted to this cultural and political turmoil of the inter-war period by rejecting traditional literary methods as ill-fitting in modern society, seeking unique and innovative methods to express themselves. Although he borrowed modernist devices including authorial narrative neutrality, counterpoint and cinematic devices, Waugh condemned many modernist ideas and had a dislike for everything from sunbathing to Picasso, from talking movies to Jazz music. He saw contemporary writers such as Proust, Woolf and Joyce as failures simply engrossed with the satisfactions of the present. Instead, Waugh was determined to articulate his hatred of modernity in his novels and struggled to reassert the importance of history and tradition in society. Along with this came his staunch Catholicism, after being received into the Church on 29th September 1930. This was a great surprise to his contemporaries and perhaps also strikes modern readers as bizarre having read his bitterly cutting satires, however his choice was made due to his romantic nostalgia for historic English religious values.
Like most authors just starting out, Waugh transformed important events in his life in his first novel, Decline and Fall: his student days at Oxford until 1924, his experience of teaching in a Welsh school and real life acquaintances. Yet these events are made farcical and the characters are exaggerated. This novel is a cohesive sequence of controversial and outlandish incidents following the protagonist Paul Pennyfeather. Despite the serious satirical undertones targeting the upper-classes, education and those committed to modernity, it is full of wit and humour. In the Author’s Note of the first edition, Waugh writes ‘Please bear in mind throughout that it is meant to be funny.’ The reader is invited to laugh at this world of sensation whilst never wandering from Waugh’s implicit moral standard which includes explicit hostility to so much that was in vogue at the time. This ‘confused roaring’ is apparent throughout the entire novel, originally detailing the pleasure-seeking destruction of Oxford’s Bollinger Club who unjustly cause Paul to be sent down for indecent behaviour, setting him on a humorous path of farcical and absurd situations. This scene is full of references to noise with ‘A shriller note … heard rising from Sir Alastair’s rooms’ and ‘the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass’. The word ‘sonorous’ is also used implying both the fame ‘of name and title’ and the noise of the guests.
In many ways Decline and Fall is scandalous and unsettlingly for a modern reader, not least due to Waugh’s unambiguous racism. The negative portrayal of jazz musician Sebastian (‘Chockey’) Cholmondey, fraught with obvious racial prejudice, in particular is controversial. It also introduces the influences of American culture on the soundscape of the novel along with the popularity of films, revues, dance bands and the gramophone. Black American singers and jazz and ragtime musicians enjoyed a soar in popularity in the 1920s, sometimes even named the Jazz Age, usually said to have been introduced with the British tour of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. Such popularity continued to grow throughout the 1930s with tours by notorious American musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and the influence of artists such as Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson’s band who played at the fashionable London venue Café de Paris. Although Waugh’s social set embraced these cultural changes, he cannot be said to have felt the same. His attitude to race was more aligned with the opinions of the older generation, associating Jazz with youth and a riotous lack of restraint.
Later on in the novel, Margot Beste-Chetwynde, then Lady Metroland, takes oblivious Paul as her lover by her own machinations, involves him in white slaving and allows him to be arrested and go to prison for her. She continues to control the direction of his life following this by faking his death, thus rescuing him from prison and returning him to where he began at Oxford University. Margot was clearly one of Waugh’s most striking characters, reappearing in Vile Bodies, and is far more engaging in her callousness and eccentricity than passive Paul. Reflecting increased female independence, the women in Waugh’s novels are anything but quiet, guiding several of the plot arcs and often dominating the men surrounding them. The changing soundscape of the 1920s and 1930s certainly must include the increase of noise from women. Not only had the First World War had a positive impact on women’s independence, but also the 1928 ‘Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act’ was signed giving them more political and financial freedom. The cinema and stage were dominated by the bold female presences of Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Myrna Loy and Tallulah Bankhead, whilst much of the literature of the day contained equally beautiful, adored and confident women such as Daisy Buchanan or Waugh’s own Brenda Last. In fact, Christopher Sykes, the author of Waugh’s biography, wrote that all of Waugh’s ‘attractive women had been bitches or idiots or both’.
It was the publication of Waugh’s second novel which was his first real success and launched his glittering literary career. Amusingly, before publication, Waugh told a friend how much he dreaded his verdict, because ‘when anyone says they liked Decline & Fall I think oh how bored they will be by Vile Bodies’. It tells the story of Adam Fenwick-Symes and his debauched society and begins with its own ‘confused roaring’ of a rough Atlantic crossing causing nauseating dizziness for both the characters and the reader as Adam attempts to make it home to Britain. The noise of muddled conversations and people vomiting stresses the commotion of the characters, whilst the confused dialogue and quick introduction of characters can serve to unease the reader. Yet when these ‘Bright Young People’ depart from the boat their lives remain unsteady and unsettled. In fact, the world which they return to is equally loud and hectic with their incessant lavish parties. Waugh writes:
‘(…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies…)’
This list creates a sense of a monotony of opulent parties focussed on hedonism with the title phrase portraying these party-goers as base animalistic beings led only by carnal pleasures with an emphatic sense of passivity. Waugh’s use of the word ‘repetition’ here is certainly reflected as a stylistic device with the dialogue and narrative carefully manipulated to create this recurring feeling. The refrain ‘let’s get married soon’ and Adam’s repeated concern with finding the one thousand pounds he is owed gives the sense that these characters are always back where they started. Coincidentally this is exactly what happens to Paul in Decline and Fall.
The noisiest part of Vile Bodies is the motor-race, attended by Adam and his friends Miss Runcible, Miles and Archie Schwert in Chapter 10 -‘The sudden roar of sixty-power engines rose from below…one by one they shook themselves free and disappeared around the bend with a high shriek of acceleration.’ Here, Miss Runcible’s hedonistic life reaches its climax and the character becomes a reflection of all the other Bright Young Things hurtling towards their ruin. Drunk, she gets behind the wheel and is involved in a devastating crash which leads to her fatal delirium. When her friends visit her in hospital, she tells them, ‘“… all that time when I was dotty I had the most awful dreams. I thought we were all driving round and round in a motor race and none of us could stop, and there was an enormous audience composed entirely of gossip writers and gate-crashers and Archie Schwert and people like that, all shouting to us at once to go faster, and car after car kept crashing until I was left all alone driving and driving – and then I used to crash and wake up.”’ F L Beaty argues that ‘her foolhardy entrance into the race, with its perils and repetitive circularity, has to be seen as a parallel to her social set plunge into aimless amusement. Her hallucination after the crash of driving faster and faster without being able to stop – represent the group, headlong rush toward destruction…’ Their lives here are boiled down to a raucous, loud and accelerating race towards death in pursuit of entertainment.
Professor Silenus’ analogy of a turning carnival wheel in Decline and Fall has similar connotations of a frenzied repetitive existence. He tells Paul:
‘At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh, and you laugh too. It’s great fun… You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There’s generally someone in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance…Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle!…They can’t escape that – even by death, but because that’s inevitable they think the other idea of life is too – the scrambling and excitement and bumps and the effort to get to the middle. And when we do get to the middle, it’s just as if we never started.’
Life is made out to be a relentless fairground ride or a game and whether you blindly participate or simply watch as an onlooker, it is all the same. The mouthpiece of this view is Professor Otto Silenus, Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s young architect who caught her eye through a rejected design for a chewing gum factory. Silenus reappears in Chapter VII ‘Resurrection’, seeming to be disenchanted with life and tells this speech to the resurrected Paul. How far he is ventriloquizing authorial belief, rather than simply a parody, is hampered by his farcical and ridiculous nature. Yet this speech forms a sort of moral center in this chaotic narrative. The name Silenus is enriched with allusions to Greek mythology, as the companion to the God of wine Dionysus who was said to possess mysterious knowledge and the power of prophecy, perhaps adding emphasis to the legitimacy of the seriousness of his speech. Interestingly, in reference to the discussed topic, it also recalls the word ‘silence’. The novel informs a satirical portrait of the architect who articulates everything Waugh hates about the modern world. He intends to modernise and reduce individuality in everything, sweeping traditions away as an inconvenience and even finding buildings in Greece ‘unspeakably ugly’ – ‘“The problem of architecture as I see it,” he told a journalist… “is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men.”’ The newly modernized King’s Thursday, once ‘the finest piece of domestic Tudor England’, is contrasted with the other great buildings of Waugh’s novels, from Brideshead to Hetton Abbey, which for tradition and stability.
In A Handful of Dust, Waugh adopted a more serious approach to his satire with a more sympathetic hero as the moral centre. The novel portrays the particularly shallow and repetitive existence of Tony Last and his wife Brenda and their eventual divorce. Waugh was inspired by his own fruitless marriage, filing for divorce in September 1929 (having it annulled in 1936) from Evelyn Gardner after discovering she was in love with a mutual friend John Heygate. Tony alone is deserving of our sympathy. In fact, he takes being a gentleman to an almost farcical extreme. Such is his love for Brenda that he chooses, at least originally, to accept all blame for the divorce, even engineering a staged affair with Winnie. He is comically dutiful and respectful on this encounter, especially highlighted by the humorous repetition regarding the ‘two breakfasts’ which he is forced to eat. The other anti-heroes of Paul and Adam seem superficial, lacking depth of character creation, fitting with a satirical objective to distort characters so as to prevent empathizing. Waugh’s use of caricature forces characters into types such as ‘Shameless Blonde’ and ‘Drunk Major’ with two dimensional character traits to serve as a medium for humor along with a multitude of eccentric characters from Mr. Outrage to Captain Grimes. In ‘Fan-fare’, Waugh wrote that ‘The failure of modern novelists since and including James Joyce is one of presumption and exorbitance. They are not content with the artificial figures which hitherto passed so gracefully as men and women. They try to represent the whole human mind and soul anil yet omit its determining character—that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose.’
Interestingly, much of Brenda and Tony’s relationship takes place on the telephone, a crucial modern component of this new buzzing and humming world of technological progress and corresponding noisy soundscape. Waugh used this addition to literature to his satirical advantage, interested in the comic and emphatic potential of a device which allows the characters to communicate without anything visual. Telephones were to accelerate conversation, collapsing distances and enabling more immediate contact. In this novel, however, it seems to do the opposite. The superficiality of the societies is epitomized in their telephone conversations creating relationships which lack any particular depth of feeling. In A Handful of Dust, Beaver routinely waits to be called by acquaintances and the noise of the buzzing telephone is a recurring sound of gossip spreading – ‘The morning telephone buzzed with the news of her and Beaver’. Meanwhile, in Vile Bodies, Adam and Nina conduct a large portion of their relationship over the phone and both take it in turns to end their relationship in this way too, while the aptly named Mr Chatterbox, who changes character frequently throughout the book, relays his gossip column in this way. D Lodge in his The Art of Fiction dedicates an entire chapter to the narrative potential of the telephone. He writes that ‘Waugh has chosen to let the context comment on the speech acts of his characters, encouraging us to sound their words in our heads, and make our own assessment of their vanity, cruelty and pathos.’ This especially allows for comic exploitation by highlighting the disparity between what they are saying and what they are doing. Clandestine affairs in particular play out in this way. In A Handful of Dust Brenda receives phone calls from her husband whilst entertaining her lover John Beaver. The dialogue then flits between Beaver and Tony’s conversation, Brenda and Beaver’s exchange and then Brenda calls Tony herself with little guidance from the narrator. Loaded with dramatic irony, the ordinary and prosaic prose used in Waugh’s characteristically economical dialogue serves to heighten the humour.
After these telephone conversations Waugh’s use of the word ‘sounded’ is emphatic. Jock says to Tony that Brenda ‘sounded annoyed’, whilst Tony tells John Andrew that ‘she sounded very well’. Waugh offers his reader very little description of how Brenda reacts to her telephone calls, with few adverbs, verbs of speech or insights into her mind, so we, like Jock and Tony, must make our own assessment of how she ‘sounds’ and how she is feeling. The noise of these novels serves to emphasise what is not said. Made particularly apparent in Waugh’s exploration of dialogue, is his lack of physiological investigation, something other writers of this period were concerned or focussed on. These novels are deprived of interior monologues and overhearing of internal thoughts. The reader is left to fill in the gaps as to inward motivations without the techniques usually used to fashion characters. In this way they seem to lack independent thought, if any thought at all, concerned purely with their aimless pursuit of enjoyment and ignoring any intellectual pursuits or difficult complexity of feeling. The characters do not like silence. Dissatisfied with her life at Hetton Abbey with her husband Tony and her son, Brenda seems to crave a noisier life moving into a flat in London and bringing home with her parties of her companions in order to save her from having to confront the issues in her life and marriage. Included in this party is Mrs Beaver a parallel to Professor Silenus with her attempt to modernise Hetton and the exotic Princess Abdul Akbar.
In many ways A Handful of Dust is darker than those which have gone before, with a more bitter satirical voice. Brenda, for instance, is damned to the point that she even neglects her motherly duties. In fact, when John Andrew dies she is relieved to find it is not her lover John Beaver – ‘“John … John Andrew … I … Oh thank God …” Then she burst into tears.’ The banal repetition of the inane telephone conversations can also be seen after John’s fatal accident. ‘Nobody’s fault’ is emphatically repeated as is the phrase ‘the habit of loving and trusting Brenda’ both ironically serving to increase the reader’s sympathy for Tony and assassinate his wife’s character further. Deaths also occur in the other novels. In Vile Bodies Miss Runcible dies due to the psychological trauma of her accident, whilst another woman dies from falling from a chandelier at a party. The noise of this novel allows for these deaths to almost go unnoticed as the silence of death is not something the other characters wish to dwell on with their only concern being to have a good time. On the Luna Park carnival wheel of life there is no time to consider the fatal ending of the repetitive chaos.
Intriguingly, the title of A Handful of Dust is a quotation from Eliot’s The Waste Land – ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ This serves as a chilling emblem of mortality in this fragmented and shifting poem and implies issues of humanity and impermanence embedded in Tony and Brenda’s society. Like Waugh, Eliot also seems embroiled in the debate between tradition and modernity. In fact, ‘Early New Critical readings of the poem canonized the poem as the exemplar (even origin) of a kind of high modernism that powerfully depicts and rejects modern life… an orderly past over a chaotic present.’ Its respect for tradition and literary allusions is paradoxically compounded with an equal lack of regard for this tradition and poetic method. Similarly, the poem shifts between various voices, including turning to cutting social satire and critique of human life. In this way, The Waste Land is a distinctly noisy poem packed with different voices and languages, varying direct speech and perspective. The soundscape of the poem is, at points, not unlike that of Waugh’s with London full of ‘the sound of horns and motors’ and music on gramophones. Meanwhile, the comment of ‘“I never know what you are thinking. Think”’ again sets up the difficulty in interpreting others, a theme explored by Waugh. Clearly Waugh’s preoccupation with sound manifested itself in a different direction allowing him to satirize and condemn modernism, however Waugh and TS Eliot had a similarly conservative relationship with modernity.
At the end of the novels, sound continues to be significant. In Decline and Fall, the cyclical nature returns Paul to his original soundscape – symbolically restarting his life at Oxford, despite his existence is certainly quieter without the interference of the Bollinger Club. Although the last chapter is called ‘Resurrection’, Paul undergoes no spiritual or religious journey or transformation. This last chapter ends with Paul’s theological studies, ‘There was a bishop in Bithynia, Paul learned, who had denied the Divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, the existence of good, the legality of marriage, and the validity of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction! How right they had been to condemn him!’, whilst the epilogue ends with a mention of the Ebionites. Religion in all three books is in fact debased or ignored as these societies depicted are spiritually bankrupt. Tony sees religion as purely a cultural adornment, not wishing to find solace in his church after the death of his son, and Mrs Ape’s singing group is hardly a sympathetic portrayal. Religion has been degraded by noisy materialism and, for Waugh, civilization has lost its bearing and humanity has been reduced to a superficial existence. In his essay ‘Converted to Rome: ‘Why it Has Happened’, Waugh writes ‘Civilisation – and by that I do not mean talking cinemas, tinned food, nor even surgery and hygiene houses, but the whole, moral and artistic organisation of Europe- has not in itself the power of survival’. Waugh believed that society needed the structures which Roman Catholicism provides, with moral foundations and a depth of meaning. Announcing his divorce to his brother he said – ‘The trouble about the world today is that there's not enough religion in it. There's nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.’ For him, the meditative silence of the Catholic Church offered an escape from the incessant noise and intrusive sound. A year later, he was received into the Catholic Church, believing Christianity to be ‘essential to civilisation.’
A Handful of Dust also ends with an altered soundscape. Tony not only leaves the loud chaos his wife brought with her from London but also the repetitive silence of Hetton. He escapes his life by travelling but falls ill, experiencing visions of an unlikely assemblage of Brenda, Reggie, Polly, Milly and Winnie at the County Council Meeting. The sounds of the voices he hears are a distorted and confused echo of his earlier life and the ‘confused roaring’ has clearly reached a climax. His delirium then alters to one of a city – ‘…Tony saw beyond the trees the ramparts and battlements of the City; it was quite near him. From the turret of the gatehouse a heraldic banner floated in the tropic breeze…the sound of music rose from the glittering walls; some procession or pageant was passing along them…The gates were before him and trumpets were sounding along the walls, saluting his arrival’. The previous confusion is suddenly jolted by a magnificent scene as his imagined city rises up before him full of majestic sound and music. The realist aspects of the narrative are entirely overtaken here by fantasy. What Tony sees as an awesome city is in fact another kind of barbarism as he meets Todd, the symbolic representative of the joining of civilised and primitive societies with an English father and Indian mother. The reader leaves Tony with his malicious saviour to continually recite the works of Dickens what George McCartney calls a nightmare ‘in which the eye is held hostage to the ear’. This unique and repetitive misfortune is perhaps not as different as a sentence to spend the rest of his life in the mind-numbing London society.
Ironically, Jock’s comment ‘“The whole world is civilized now, isn’t it”’ seems to elicit the answer: no. In fact, nowhere seems to be, not even in Tony and Brenda’s own monotonous society, priding themselves on their modern civilisation. All three of these novels discuss this issue of culture and what it means to be civilised. Influenced by warring ideologies, the rise of Fascism and the opportunities provided by the reconstruction of Europe, these novels implicitly confront the disparity, and blurring of lines, between civilisation and barbarism. The title of Decline and Fall obviously references Gibbon’s The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire detailing the fall of the beginning of the civilised world, whilst Vile Bodies especially reflects theses tensions. Mr Outrage speaks of the hedonistic generation which developed:
‘I don’t understand [children], and I don’t want to. They had a chance after the war that no generation has ever had. There was a whole civilization to be saved and remade – and all they seem to do is to play the fool. Mind you, I’m all in favour of them having a fling. I dare say that Victorian ideas were a bit strait-laced. Saving your cloth, Rothschild, it’s only human nature to run a bit loose when one’s young. But there’s something wanton about these young people to-day.’
Vile Bodies represents a chronic misunderstanding between age and youth and even between family members. Despite Ursula’s plea that she does not want to be married, her mother, the Duchess of Stayle, feigning to understand, acts as if the marriage is to go ahead saying ‘“It’s a real joy to see the dear children so happy.”’ The name Stayle indicates no longer fresh foods suggesting she is out of touch with her daughter’s values. The satire is not exclusively reserved for aggressively critiquing the younger crowd but points out flaws throughout society at every level. Father Rothschild’s own defense of modern youth is fraught with flawed reasoning and irrelevance, arguing ‘I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. I think all these divorces show that. People aren’t content just to muddle along nowadays… And this word “bogus” they all use… They won’t make the best of a bad job nowadays.’ This ‘fatal hunger for permanence’ does not seem to ring true. These characters have a complete disregard for anything lasting and unchangeable. With a blasé attitude, they are only pursuing pleasure and excitement. This emphatically highlights the need to make religion responsive and relevant to this community. In 1929 Waugh wrote in an article entitled ‘Too Young at Forty’, discussing ‘ex-Captains and Majors’, ‘how they laugh and slap their thighs and hoot their horns of their little two-seaters cars. I don’t suppose that I shall be heard at all when I diffidently whisper that there is a younger generation.’ It is interesting that Waugh chooses to use imagery of noise here to stress a need for the youth to be heard. Yet in Vile Bodies these Bright Young People are anything but quiet, even if what they are saying is vapid. These misunderstandings epitomize the issues of the modern day failing to understand the past and traditions which have gone before them, choosing instead to eradicate history in favour of the noisy chaos of modernity.
Vile Bodies ends with the soundscape of a very different decade. The novel has given us a picture of the inter-war period of Britain and finishes with guns, explosions and sirens, predicting the coming of an apocalyptic world war. The last line of the novel is ‘the sounds of battle began to return’ as the reunion of the characters is drowned out, a surprise after the gradual depopulation of the novel. Clearly Waugh believes that this assault on silence, depicted in all three of these novels, is detrimental to the longevity of peace in society. His attack of the noisy existence of modernity highlights the need for this silence to return. The raucous noise of his present day, he believed, made it impossible to see the vision of the past which was what one should be attempting to emulate and respect as a crucial component of civilisation. Instead, the sound of disorderly hedonism is replaced by the noise of this destructive struggle on ‘the biggest battlefield in the history of the world’.