Put Out More Flags (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers; it was all we were taught, really.” He went on to Hertford College, Oxford, where he read History. When asked if he took up any sports there he quipped, “I drank for Hertford.”

After a single date flag: the data series contains consecutive “ 1”s that start only once a single date is reached. All prior cells contain zero. Used to identify periods starting after a single event e.g. post-operations period flag.So, amidst all the absurdity and tomfoolery in the rest of the novel, Waugh displays a mature touch as a writer in creating characters who change in time, who are not two-dimensional or vehicles for fun. Another example is Alastair Digby-Vaine Trumpington. He first appeared in the very opening scene of Decline and Fall, a Hooray Henry at Oxford, and he has lived a very conventional upper-class life ever since. Very rich, slightly naive, yet maintaining a ‘schoolboy’ sense of honour: 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. I really enjoy Evelyn Waugh, and this witty satire set at the start of WWII and focusing on the lives of several members of the social upper class was the perfect antidote to some of my recent more contemporary (poorly written and boring) reads. In between failed attempts at money-making and war heroism, Basil’s dalliances include amorous flirtations with a wealthy, lonely woman, estranged from her husband, and a frivolous Bohemian artist. In one particularly dastardly deed, he borrows money from the former woman to indulge the latter. They whirl around trying not to get their fingers burnt, but eventually the war calls out to them, and even the reprobate Basil Seal volunteers for a commando posting. What starts out as a comedy ends up with several characters rolling up their sleeves and deciding that they better get along with it.

Poppet Green is a feather-brained ‘artist’ who follows whatever the latest fad happens to be – which in 1939 was surrealism. Her subjects are: I recently read, and very much enjoyed Sword of Honour, like this book, Sword of Honour is a satirical novel about World War Two.Alastair Trumpington endures the petty bureaucracy of life in the ranks. Ambrose Silk is working at the Ministry of Information, worried that even fellow-travellers might be at risk. Angela Lyne has shut down her home and is enduring a lonely existence in a Grosvenor Square flat. Alastair Trumpington is involved in absurd training exercises. It is generally and uncritically accepted these days that A Handful of Dust (1934) was the greatest of Evelyn Waugh's novels, fulfilling the early promise of Decline and Fall (1928), and that his career as a writer gradually ran downhill from there. There is some truth to this, but it falsifies the value of a writer whose creative life, unlike that of so many twentieth-century writers, possessed not only a first act but a second and third as well. The first act, whose theme was a dazzling, sardonic irreverence toward the crumbling Empire between the wars, came to an end in 1942; the second, more dourly preoccupied with the Second War and its fatal consequences for the English upper class -- with the striking, farcical exception of The Loved One (1948) -- ended with the completion of The Sword of Honour trilogy in 1962; the third, short and glorious, overlapped the second, including the brilliant Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) and the unfinished autobiography, A Little Learning (1964). Chapter II. Basil goes to stay with his sister at Malfrey, where three delinquent evacuee children are forced onto them. Basil pretends to be a billeting officer and dumps the children onto a retired couple in their beautiful old home. When a few days later they are at their wits end, Basil charges the couple money to take the children elsewhere.

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." Basil represents the intersection of the decline of British Empire with the chaos of WWII. The absurdity of the elitist arrogance of the British upper class as it faces the very real threat of defeat at the hands of Germany is brilliantly presented. Basil's mother stubbornly ignores sheltering during the blitz of London. Basil's wealthy mistress's husband vaults headlong into enemy fire more concerned about paperwork than death. An inept aristocratic navy officer named Cedric Lyne does his best to avoid any real wartime responsibility only to fail at his first test of leadership. Waugh provides many examples of the affluent British characters laughably failing to adapt to wartime conditions. Waugh worries about the softness of the British nobility and leaders as they encounter the gritty challenges of 20th century globalism and more urgently the war with Germany. 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…Angela's husband visits her with their child before embarking with the ill-equipped and ill-organised British forces for Norway, where he dies in combat. For a projected literary magazine, Ambrose Silk writes about his lost love, a Brownshirt named Hans who is now in a Nazi concentration camp. Basil persuades him to leave out Hans' fate, so that the article appears to praise the SA. He then shows it to his boss as evidence of a cell of allegedly dangerous fascists. The publisher is jailed, but Ambrose escapes to neutral Ireland, disguised as a Jesuit priest. Basil takes over his luxurious flat and adds to it Susie, his boss's luscious secretary. The incorrigible Basil Seal is typical of many of his class, a fellow dilettante like the pompous Alastair Digby-Vaine Trumpington, they are ‘networking’ and using connections being kept busy seeking cosy sinecures, or commissions into respectable regiments as long as they don’t get posted overseas or anywhere likely to see front line action. Their amusing escapades make enjoyable reading and Waugh writes elegantly and with breathtaking ease describing their mishaps, like when Basil Seal seeks to exploit the opportunity to billet some insufferable and undisciplined working class children on local gentile society. He is not amiss to some nefarious wartime profiteering..and as with all Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant satires there is plenty of absurdity and jiggery-pokery, and tom-foolery, and lampooning, but also some poignant melancholia, for instance the pathetic and diminishing Mrs Angela Lynne, forced to return from the South of France at the outbreak of war, and let down by her lovers, she descends into alcoholism. Ambrose Silk visits the Ministry of Information where memos are exchanged regulating the display of personal effects in government offices. As an aesthete and a well-known left-wing sympathiser, he is concerned about his safety in the event of a German invasion. Basil is in the same building, promoting the idea of annexing Liberia. Basil] is a man for whom there will be no place in the coming workers’ state; and yet, thought Ambrose, I hunger for his company. It is a curious thing, he thought, that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilised taste. Nanny told me of a Heaven that was full of angels playing harps; the communists tell me of an earth full of leisure and contented factory hands. I don’t see Basil getting past the gate of either” (69-70).

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. larger part of the action turns: Ambrose Silk, Basil Seal, his sister, Barbara, and his mistress, Angela Lyne. 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. 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. They were both silent, and in the silence Angela knew, by an intuition which defied any possible doubt, exactly what her maid was thinking. She was thinking, “Supposing Mr. Seal gets himself killed. Best thing really for all concerned.”

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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. Basil’s attempts at war heroism are far less successful than his money-making endeavors. When he flunks an interview for a privileged position in the army (“arranged” by his mother begging a favor of a prominent government official), Basil tries to interest the Ministry of Information into the strategic wisdom of annexing Liberia. When that too fails, he finagles a job in the War Office. But the job is without promise, so Basil executes a plan to persuade a close friend to write material resembling German propaganda—and then betrays his friend to the authorities. However, guilt then compels Basil to effect his friend’s escape to Ireland. 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). So what is a flag? Also known as a mask, a flag is a data series corresponding to a timeline that contains in each cell either a “1” or a “0” . Multiply your underlying data (answering the question “how much?”) with a flag and the result will either be: