Put Out More Flags (Penguin Modern Classics)

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larger part of the action turns: Ambrose Silk, Basil Seal, his sister, Barbara, and his mistress, Angela Lyne. In 1928 he married Evelyn Gardiner. She proved unfaithful, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Waugh would derive parts of “A Handful of Dust” from this unhappy time. His second marriage to Audrey Herbert lasted the rest of his life and begat seven children. It was during this time that he converted to Catholicism. The characters are aristocratic dilettantes. The setting is WWII England. The competition for the most extravagant and memorable of the colorful cast is easily won by the 30-something Basil Seal. Basil is a favorite character of Waugh. He is the adult upper-class British equivalent of Tom Sawyer. Basil does well out of the war, up to a point: he unhesitatingly takes advantage of his sister's latently incestuous attraction for him—the scenes in which this attraction surfaces, played out in chilling nursery talk between Basil and Barbara, are among the best expositions of sibling love I've ever encountered—makes money and finds a temporary mistress out of a scheme in which he must find a country billet for three appallingly uncouth évacué children, and earns himself a reputation as a spy-catcher for the War Office by turning in poor Ambrose, now the editor of a literary magazine, as a crypto-fascist.

Poppet Green is a feather-brained ‘artist’ who follows whatever the latest fad happens to be – which in 1939 was surrealism. Her subjects are:

Sir Joseph would have liked to say that there was no next step in that direction; that the best Basil could hope for was oblivion; perhaps in a month or so when the luncheon was forgotten… Now, it’s not that Basil’s family is impoverished by any means. On the contrary, his mother provides him a generous allowance for his personal indulgences, but still finds herself frequently paying off his debts when they become over-indulgences. Accordingly, the allowance is suspended. In terms of war heroism, Basil only thinks of achieving this without actually doing anything remotely dangerous or life-threatening—soldierly trench warfare, for example. And so he begins his creative endeavors. The financial modelling community is in broad agreement that you answer the question “when?” with a flag. But how do you model them? Dedicated to Randolph Churchill, who found a service commission for Waugh during the Second World War, the story is set in the first year of the war. urn:lcp:putoutmoreflags0000waug_n3x5:epub:ce8a7dd9-b5ef-42d3-9ce6-5c65e943bea8 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier putoutmoreflags0000waug_n3x5 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2q6wj24336 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780241261699

Like in all of Waugh’s novels, we get a perfect glimpse into the decayed social structure of the pseudo-intellectuals (i.e., Marxists) in Britain. The novel is not necessarily happy, few of Waugh’s are, but its wit is razor sharp. For reasons one can’t fathom, Basil is often in the company of the avant-garde Marxists. He tells one surrealist painter who is frightened by the war, “You know I should have thought an air raid was just the thing for a surrealiste; it ought to give you plenty of compositions--limbs and things lying about in odd places you know” (Waugh 32).

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What were the “three rich women” thinking about? The following passages are revealing. First, an exchange between Basil’s sister Barbara Sothill and her husband Freddy, a serving officer: Ambrose writes about his lost love for Hans, a German brown shirt youth in Mr Bentleys new magazine The Ivory Tower. Basil persuades Ambrose to change his memoir, making it more pro-German. He then reports him to the War Office as a Nazi sympathiser.

IMDB recently updated the archival information in its database relating to two little-known BBC TV adaptations of Waugh’s works from 1970. These are Vile Bodies and Put Out More Flags. Both were 90-minute productions on BBC2, but some archival information is still incomplete. With the outbreak of WWII, the opportunistic Basil states his objective early on: "I want to be one of those people one heard about in 1919: the hard-faced men who did well out of the war." It would be a terrible eight weeks for them, isolated by a massive snowfall, at the end of which they rush to freedom – so does the paying guest they had had and the two maids, as did everyone else in the path of these commando children – and he wants to talk with the sister of the enemy, but it is Basil who says to him ‘you do not want these poor little ones to be killed in an air raid’, only to get what sounds like a mirthful, if dark answer – ‘there is nothing I would love more’- followed by an arrangement proposed by the Machiavelli of the countryside, who suggest that poor families would look at a sum of money and accept the atrocious guests, if the overwhelmed, destroyed host would like that…there are 30 pounds in this transaction and this devilish character continues with his enterprise, during which he has an affair with a woman who had just been married (!), before her husband would join some military unit…

But the joys of Put Out More Flags do not reside entirely in its major characters, male and female, drawn at full length; for each of these, there are a dozen vignettes of people and places, sketched, it would seem, in a For him there was no ‘they’. England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington was at war. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But he could not put this into words