At least a couple of times, probably more often, Anthony Burgess declared that Evelyn Waugh wrote ‘too well for a novelist’. ‘Sour grapes’ you may say, remembering that in his own novels Burgess often wrote in clumsy and slapdash style, and that he was perhaps himself a better reviewer than novelist. But it wasn’t just sour grapes. There was an argument behind the opinion. He believed that writing a novel ‘should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey’.
Compare [he suggested] Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End with Waugh’s Sword of Honour. Ford is often clumsy; his sentences stutter; deliberate banalities jostle with brilliant felicities; the prose is struggling to cope with the mysterious and unpredictable. Waugh’s book . . . is created, as it were, out of a known position — that of orthodox Catholic morality — and the style — witty, terse, controlled — corresponds.
These are fair judgments, even acute ones. One wouldn’t dissent from them. They don’t, however, quite make Burgess’s point; or rather, the point is clear, but may not convince. I have sympathy with the suggestion that the novel should be a voyage of discovery for writer as well as reader, though of Ford’s novels The Good Soldier is perhaps a better example of this than Parade’s End. One follows its narrator through the twists and turns of the story as he strives to understand why it turns out as it does. Burgess preferred to take Parade’s End because he thought that Sword of Honour ‘very nearly does for Waugh’s class and generation what Ford’s undoubtedly did for his own’; an interesting judgment, yet not necessarily relevant to the style of either novel.
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