Evelyn Waugh's Labels - traveling "with a mind as open as the English system of pseudo-education allows"

Since I was complaining that I read too many great books, I will poke at a couple of not so-greats I recently enjoyed.

The pleasure in Evelyn Waugh’s Labels: A Mediterranean Journey (1930) is in the voice, the jokes and use of adjectives and I guess the vision of life, although compared to his novels from that time the latter is watery here.  Mild* Waugh.

The author claims that the idea was to write a book about the Soviet Union, but he does not make it there, or anywhere especially close, and instead wanders the Mediterranean on a cruise ship, writing about places “constantly and completely overrun with tourists” (11), with the hope of “investigating with a mind as open as the English system of pseudo-education allows, the basis for the reputations these famous places have acquired” (12).  See, there is one of signature Wavian those adjectival jokes.

Perversely, Waugh writes almost nothing about Athens or Venice, instead going on endlessly about Port Said (“Few people stay in Port Said except for some rather dismal reason,” 91).  But since all that matters is the voice, who cares where Waugh wanders.

William Pritchard, in his study of the English literature of the 1920s and 1930s (Seeing Through Everything: English Writers 1918-1940, 1977) uses Labels as a way of isolating Waugh’s style from his content, since the content of the travel book is so obvious.  For example (Waugh is in Palestine):

The driver of our motor car was a restless and unhappy man.  He smoked “Lucky Strike” cigarettes continuously, one after the other.  When he lit a new one he took both hands off the wheel; often he did this at corners; he drove very fast and soon outdistanced all the other cars.  When we most nearly had accidents he gave a savage laugh. (78)

The description goes on for a page more, with most of its sentences featuring something as surprising as “restless” or “savage” or those semicolons.

A new edition of Labels has appeared in England, and Kaggsy read it a couple of months ago, choosing a number of quotations that I wanted to use, especially the one with the bed stuffed of skulls.  I will just borrow some of it from her:

My next hotel was remarkably less comfortable. It was exactly facing into the Metro, where it runs very noisily above ground, and the bed was, I think, stuffed with skulls. The only furniture was a bidet and a cupboard full of someone else’s underclothes. There were some false teeth under the pillows, and the door opened oddly, being permanently locked and detached from both hinges, so that it could only be moved at the wrong side just far enough to admit of one squeezing through. (10-11)

We are in the tradition of Mark Twain’s travel books, and Bill Bryson’s.  Labels is not as good or funny as The Innocents Abroad (1869), which in fairness invented this genre, but is maybe comparable to Following the Equator (1897).  I have never read an entire Bill Bryson book.

I actually read the original American edition, retitled A Bachelor Abroad for some reason, possibly because of the surprising number of times Waugh visits brothels, just to describe them for the book and have a drink.  Look, it’s none of my business.  I am just saying who knows how the page numbers line up with any other edition of the book.

Look at all those words.  I guess I will write about Emmanuel Bove’s novel Mes Amis (1924) tomorrow.

*  Vile Bodies (1930), Scoop (1938), those are full-strength Waugh.