DECLINE AND FALL

Author: Evelyn Waugh

A Review

Novel Contents:

PreludePart One

Chapter 1 – VocationChapter II – Llanabba CastleChapter III – Captain GrimesChapter IV – Mr. PrendergastChapter V – DisciplineChapter VI – ConductChapter VII – PhilbrickChapter VIII – The SportsChapter IX – The Sports – continuedChapter X – Post MortemChapter XI – Philbrick – continuedChapter XII – The Agony of Captain GrimesChapter XIII – The Passing of a Public School Man

Part TwoChapter 1 – King’s ThursdayChapter II – Interlude in BelgraviaChapter III – Pervigilium VenerisChapter IV – ResurrectionChapter V- The Latin-American Entertainment Co., LtdChapter VI – A Hitch in the Wedding Preparations

Part ThreeChapter 1 – Stone Walls do not a Prison MakeChapter II – The Lucas Dockery ExperimentsChapter III – The Death of a Modern ChurchmanChapter IV – Nor Iron Bars a CageChapter V- The Passing of a Public School ManChapter VI – The passing of Paul PennyfeatherChapter VII – Resurrection

Epilogue

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DECLINE AND FALL

A Review:

INTRODUCTION

Decline and Fall is a novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928.

It was Waugh's first published novel. The novel is based in part on Waugh's schooldays at

Lancing College, undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a

teacher at Arnold House in north Wales. It is a social satire that employs the author's

characteristic black humour in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s.

Waugh's satire is unambiguously hostile to much that was in vogue in the late 1920s, and

"themes of cultural confusion, moral disorientation and social bedlam...both drive the novel

forward and fuel its humour." This "undertow of moral seriousness provides a crucial tension

within Waugh's novels, but it does not dominate them." Waugh himself stated boldly in his

'Authors Note' to the first edition: 'Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE

FUNNY.'

PLOT SUMMARY

Explanation of the title. Decline and Fall' implies that the main character during the

story gets into trouble and ends in the gutter, while Paul Pennyfeather, the main character of this

book, gets indeed in all kinds of trouble, but finally gets back to the right road again. Mrs.

Margot Beste-Chetwynde, is a popular, rich woman from the Upperclass, who enjoys a lot of

respect in society. This changes during the story, her popularity is declining, until she has to fit

in, in the rest of society to save her good name and her place in the Upperclass. The author

describes the whole high society of Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. The

whole story makes the English Upperclass laughable.

Overview. The story starts at Scone College, Oxford, on Bollinger evening. On this

evening the Upperclass members of the so called Bollinger Club have dinner together, drink a lot

and finally behave more and more outrageous. Paul Pennyfeather, a Middleclass student in his

third year Theology becomes a victim of this lot, with his suspension from the school as result. His

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guardian is not willing to help Paul with the trouble he came into completely innocent, and that is

why he needs to go to find himself a job. He goes to a scholastic agent and a mister Levy of this

agent gets him a job at a school in Wales. Although he has no experience whatsoever, Paul is

accepted as the new junior assistant on Llanabba Castle. His colleges captain Grimes and mister

Prendergest make that he feels at home quite soon and so he starts his life as a teacher. One day

the school organizes a sports day. There will be some of the most eminent parents to watch the

students during the games. Margot Beste-Chytwynde, a widow, is one of them. Paul falls in love

with her. When she asks him to join her and her son Peter during the holidays to tutor Peter, Paul

immediately agrees. And so Paul gets to know Margot better and better. He knows she wants to

get married again and one day he has the courage to ask her. She is content and agrees, although

she wants to ask Peter for his opinion. When the boy reacts enthusiastically, she tells Paul she will

make her decision in the morning. Of course she decides to marry him - she liked him from the

start - and so Paul gets engaged with one of the richest women of High Society. Margot leads a

business in South-America. At first it is kind of vague what kind of business it is, but it turns out

that it has to do something with slave trade. Three days for the wedding there are some problems

in Marseilles with a couple of girls Margot send to South-America as entertainment girls. Because

Margot is very busy with the wedding she sends Paul to solve (whatever that is) the problem. All

goes well and on the morning of his wedding Paul returns in London. But when he, his best man

and Peter have a drink just before they go to the church, an inspector of Scotland Yard comes in

and arrests Paul for mingling in Margot's dark business. And so Paul ends up in jail; he is

“committed to seven years' penal servitude for traffic in prostitution”. In the period he is in jail,

Paul meets Prendergest, Philbrick - the butler of Llanabba Castle - and Grimes again. Prendergest

is murdered after a while by a physically ill prisoner, Grimes escapes from the prison no one ever

escaped. Paul himself is rescued by Maltravers, the man Margot married in the meanwhile.

Because he would save her reputation and it would give Paul a change to get out of prison; he is

the Home Secretary and can get things like that done. They fake a needed removal of Paul's

appendix, so Paul can die (only on paper, of course) during the operation. After that he spends a

while at the villa of Margot at Corfu and when some time has passed he gets back to Oxford,

where he starts with the theology study again. So at the end, things turned out quite all right for

Paul Pennyfeather.

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Characters. The main character of this novel is Paul Pennyfeather, a young man

somewhere in his twenties who at first seems to have a talent for bad fortune. He is a quiet, kind

man, who wants to act the right way and always thinks twice before acting. He is honest and

intelligent. An example of his good character is his dilemma about answering the question about

his leaving university: 'I understand, too, that you left your University rather suddenly. Now - why

was that?' This was the question that Paul had been dreading, and, true to his training, he

resolved upon honesty. `I was send down, sir, for indecent behaviour'. Another example is his

doubt after the guy who is responsible for Paul's suspension, offers him money for sort of

damages: `If I Take that money', he said to himself, `I shall never know whether I have acted

rightly or not. It would always be on my mind. If I refuse, I shall be sure of having done right. I

shall look upon my self-denial with exquisite self-approval. By refusing I can convince myself that,

in spite of the unbelievable things that have been happening to me during the last ten days, I am

still the same Paul Pennyfeather I have respected so long. It is a test-case of the durability of my

ideals. Other characters who are more or less important to the story are Doctor Fagin, Captain

Grimes, Mister Prendergest, Mister Philbrick and Margot Beste-Chytwynde. There are more

characters, but I don't find them important enough to the main theme of the story to explicate here.

Doctor Fagin is the principal of Llanabba Castle and a little bit weird. There is not really much to

tell about him. He is very Upperclass-minded and for this reason he dislikes Captain Grimes in a

way and he loves the boys who come from the `better families'. Still, he seems to me a friendly

man, who, like Paul, wants to do the right thing. He doesn't care about diploma's et cetera, he just

want the teachers in his school to have `vision': `I understand you have no previous experience?'

`No, sir, I am afraid not.' `Well, of course, that is in many ways an advantage. One too easily

acquires the professional tone and loses vision. But of course we must be practical. I am offering a

salary of one hundred and twenty pounds, but only to a man with experience. I have a letter here

from a young man who holds a diploma in forestry. He want an extra ten pounds a year on the

strength of it, but it is vision I need, mister Pennyfeather, not diplomas.' Captain Grimes is also a

weird kind of man. He always `gets in the soup', but always he finds a way or a helping hand to

get out of it again. He can be quite cynical, but is always in for a laugh and a drink with his

friends. He and Paul become soon after Paul's arrival good friends. Grimes is engaged with one of

the two daughters of Doctor Fagin and after his marriage he becomes depressive by the way Fagin

is treating him [Note the fact that Fagin prefers the Upperclass, of which Grimes is no part]. He

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simulates a suicides, but some weeks later he turns out to be still alive, asking Margot for a job in

South-America. He ends up in jail a while later, but finds a way to escape. After that he

disappears. Mister Prendergest is clergyman who got doubts and is really depressed about that.

He left the church and now teaches at Llanabba Castle, but isn't able to handle the boys. They

make fun of him because of his wig and his way of acting. Not long after Paul left with Margot he

finds out that there exists something called `the modern churchman', this offers him the change to

work for the church without feeling guilty about his former doubts. That is how he became

chaplain in the same prison Paul was locked up after his trial. But as a chaplain he neither can

manage, he seems quite unhappy to me. Then one day he is murdered by one of the prisoners.

Mister Philbrick is the butler of Llanabba Castle and it is quite difficult to tell the right story about

this man, because he tells everybody an other story about his live. He is not very trustworthy. Still

though, I find him kind of sympathetic. He, too, ends up in jail where he gets himself the best job

there is, reception cleaner, and he manages quite well. Morgot Beste-Chytwynde is at first the

most distinguished woman of Upperclass England. She is very modern in her ideas and she is a

well seen woman in High Society. And she acts like it, rules are not made for her, she lives

conform her own ways. But after Paul is imprisoned and she turns out to be a slave trader, her

good name is in danger and she has to choose a saver road by marrying Maltravers, the Home

Secretary. She really loved Paul, though and after her marriage she uses it to help Paul out of

prison, this, to me, shows her affection to the younger man she should have married when things

had turned out like they had to.

Time. The story plays in the twenties of the 20th century. Between Paul's suspension and

his return to Scone College about a year passes.

Structure. The story is told chronological. There is a great continuity, without flashbacks

or great gaps in the time passing. The end is closed, of course there is a lot that still can be told,

like what happened to Captain Grimes, but the story of Paul Pennyfeather has an obvious end in

his return to Scone College.

Location/Situation. The first part of the story is situated in a Upperclass-minded

environment (Llanabba Castle), where the difference between the social classes in the English

society becomes clear. After Paul's departure to Margot's manor it is chiefly the High Society that

is in sight, after Paul's imprisonment we get to see life in prison. Geographically the story is

situated partly in Wales and partly in and around London.

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Theme. The social classes is a main theme in this book. The ephemerality of the

Upperclass, even a woman like Margot isn't able to preserve her good reputation. With this novel

Waugh gives a comical account of an innocent plunged into the sham, brittle world of high

society. It has no deeper message although the author maybe likes to point out the laughable

character of a class society.

The intention of the writer. This novel has no deeper message, although the author likes

to point out the laughable character of a class society. It is written to amuse the public and to

provoke the patrons of social classes, and especially the Upperclass.

Part One. Paul Pennyfeather gets de-bagged by the toffs in his Oxford college and is sent

down – so far down, that he ends up in a two-bit school in the middle of nowhere teaching stuff he

knows nothing about. The school, somewhere near Llandudno, Welsh, is a waste of space. It

employs plenty of teachers including a) Grimes, lurching from job to job as he constantly gets

himself ‘in the soup’, only saved by a kind of idiot optimism and his old Harrovian status; and b)

Prendergast, former vicar rendered useless by Doubts. They’re both comic turns – Grimes with his

juvenile determination to have a good time, Prendergast with his wig and the impression he gives

that he really was born yesterday. There’s the head, only keeping the place going because his

daughters are a lot more competent than he is, and the butler, another comic turn. The education

line of the school suggests that after one lesson one gets bored with that and focuses on the

ridiculous stuff. There’s the boys’ routine over-familiarity with all the staff. There’s the head’s

gloom, occasionally enlivened by a crackpot idea for raising the school’s profile. And there’s

Philbrick, the butler with a past… which he describes to Paul in all its Dickensian splendour. He’s

my favourite, bold and in your face enough to make anybody believe anything. It turns out he’s

told completely different stories to the others – and when the police do eventually track him down

it’s to arrest him for doing what we’ve seen: pretending he’s someone he isn’t and living off it.

And when the cops arrive he’s already left. The biggest set piece is the sports day. It’s a farce, but

lady Circumference the appalling snob and Margot Beste-Chetwynde the society fashion-plate

don’t notice. Prendergast gets drunk at the mere whiff of alcohol at the local and shoots Lady

Circ’s son in the foot with the starting-pistol. And Mrs B-C’s escort is a Black American who

gives Waugh all the opportunities he needs to send up Black Americans. How we laughed.

Anyway, Paul is making his way and actually seems to be gaining something from the experience

– which is a lot more entertaining than his thin existence at Oxford. This isn’t the sort of novel to

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have the young, inexperienced teacher tortured by the boys: he, and they, come up with a

satisfactory modus vivendi almost from the start. He even seems to have discovered lurve –

although he doesn’t recognise it even when he trips over it: Grimes has to spell it out for him in an

absurd Q&A session. But… Grimes doesn’t do so well and, to extricate himself from the soup

again, he marries one of the head’s daughters. Disaster. The last trace we see of him is a pile of

clothes on the beach and an apparent suicide note in which he seems to accept that retribution has

finally caught up with him.

Part Two. The satirising of the public school system and moves us to Margot Beste-

Chetwynde’s stately pile. Except it’s not a stately pile any more: she had it knocked down and

replaced with a Modernist statement. If anything, Paul is even more of an innocent abroad: Margot

has invited him to be her son’s tutor for the Easter holidays, and within about a week she’s got him

to propose, and she’s had him give a demonstration of his credentials in the bed department.

Everything’s fine, since you ask: in this world it seems a woman with nearly two decades of

sexual experience can be satisfied by a cloistered virgin like Paul. Throughout these chapters

things simply happen to Paul – all of them at Margot’s instigation – and, Paul, we’re a bit bemused

by the way stuff happens. Margot feels like demolishing her house, a uniquely untouched Tudor

national treasure. She wants to replace it with a satire on Modernism designed by an autistic

egomaniac. No problem. So when Paul becomes her next fad, now that she’s bored with the

Black American, we’re as happy to accept it as he is. Throughout this section, as things become

darker and darker, the character where resolutely describes in terms that make sense to the

innocent Paul. The white slaves Margot is exporting – we’ve guessed by now, even if Paul hasn’t

– get stuck at Marseilles. She sends Paul to sort it out with a bit of bribery and corruption and, he

was arrested shortly after his arrival back in England, on the morning before his wedding. He

should have been warned by the way Margot’s rich-woman vagueness disappears when she

interviews the girls for the venues that make her money in South America. Paul seems to have

been born yesterday when it comes to understanding the ways of the world – but unlike Prendy, he

never asks himself difficult questions. He blithely lets it all happen and, just as the wheel is about

to give a great lurch downwards, he drinks to ‘Fortune, a much-maligned lady.’ Silly boy: he

doesn’t realise he’s in a novel by an author who only pretends not to care. As for Margot, she

planned to have Paul so comprehensively shafted – the lavish wedding preparations are real

enough, after all – but, well, she’s one of the Fitzgerald rich: she leaves a trail of destruction

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behind her as she does one thing after another on a whim. Suddenly the destruction of the house

makes complete sense: that’s what the super-rich are like.

Part Three– to the end. Venue: prison cell. As ever, Paul takes it utterly in his stride. He

puts himself through the absurdities of both the strict regime of Standard Regulations – as when

he’s bopped on the head with his own shoes when saying sorry, because he was speaking out of

turn – and of the equal and opposite absurdities of the new governor’s liberal policies. Paul knows

where he stands – against the pointless rigours of bread and water – he satirises the new regime

and the governor, with his degree in sociology, from a university in the midlands. Paul is fine

with it. He loves solitary confinement and asks for another four weeks of it after the statutory four

he gets when he arrives. But that’s not allowed, and the new gov forces unwanted company on

him – culminating with a murderous psychopath. Their forced strolls around the prison yard are

pure absurdist farce, as the guard responds to any silences with barked orders to talk. And so on.

The psycho’s finest moment comes when the gov allows him carpenter’s tools to bring out his

creativity: he cuts off the padre’s head – the padre being poor old Prendergast, who has discovered

that atheism is no barrier to a career in the modern church. It seems arbitrary – until you remember

that he did shoot a boy in the foot, which over many chapters has gone through the stages of

gangrene, amputation – and, eventually, death. So it goes. Paul did not suffer much, he sets up a

typically absurd escape plan. He’s turned up in a thinly-disguised Dartmoor, where Paul gets

moved to, and lets the guards tie themselves in knots in the fog as he leaps on one of their horses.)

Margot hasn’t forgotten him, and he soon stops being surprised by arrivals of caviar and high-class

novels. But… well, she’s been seeing rather a lot of the very toff who de-bagged Paul all those

months before – and she’s had a proposal from the other idiot who looks set to become the new

Home Secretary. If she marries him he’ll probably find a way to get Paul out. It all works like

clockwork as Waugh shows how none of the normal rules apply in Toff-land. Lucky old them –

and lucky old Paul. The wheel – and there’s a neat reference to a fairground wheel that sends

everybody spinning off unless they’re canny enough to be at the centre – has come full circle.

Paul get back at university, back doing what he wants: despite his apparent lack of any workable

moral code (he wonders about Margot’s guilt and, well, simply accepts that she couldn’t possibly

be sent to jail) he’s studying to become a priest. He’s all right – but in the last chapter we meet

someone who isn’t. I haven’t mentioned Margot’s son Peter, the one Paul was pretending to teach.

He’s always been the most grown-up character in the novel, dispensing advice and cocktails

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whenever necessary…. But by the time he’s old enough to go to Oxford himself he’s an alcoholic

wreck, a member of the same mindless set that did all the damage in the first chapter. Another

wheel has come full circle and…

ANALYSIS USING CHARACTERIZATION

This is Waugh's first book, and one of his finest. This is an absurd story of a young man,

expelled from Oxford for indecent behaviour, who obtains a job as a teacher at a less than

salubrious third-rate public school in Wales and is then entrapped in a series of bizarre events

that take him on a rollercoaster ride through upper-class circles. The central character, Paul

Pennyfeather, is a naive soul, full of gusto and enthusiasm, but lacking in common sense. The

use of the term "sent down from Oxford" to describe his "decline" is lightweight in comparison

to his subsequent "fall". The expulsion from Oxford is the true fall in his life.

I was a little disappointed by the latter half of the book, the rollercoaster speeds up, and it

does feel rushed and a little too contrived by the final chapters. But this is Waugh's first novel, so

a minor issue in the overall context of the amusing storylines and entertaining characters. In a

little foreword to this novel the author entreats us to bear in mind throughout that his book is

meant to be funny, and we have, though at times somewhat strenuously, to take him at his word.

The author affects to tell the story of a varsity man who was sent down, but the story is, as it is

intended to be, so very silly that he has had merely to interest himself in its superficial

presentation, and he manages this so extremely well. But anyway "Decline and Fall" is a great

lark; its author has an agreeable sense of comedy and characterisation, and the gift of writing

smart and telling conversation, while his drawings are quite in tune with the spirit of the tale.

The plot is presented with a maximum of economy and a studied will to shock. The hero,

a product of the public-school and academic systems, is an innocent marked as a victim of the

corrupt world into which he is unwillingly thrust. Paul Penny feather lets things happen to him;

he “would never have made a hero, the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of

events of which his shadow was witness.” Returning from a meeting of the League of Nations

Union, he is “debagged” by members of the Bollinger Club, who are having their annual dinner

and greatly enjoy being riotous and destructive, and as a consequence he is sent down for

indecent behaviour. He becomes a schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle, where Dr. Fagan, a cynical

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but not too exacting headmaster, assures him that “he has been in the scholastic profession long

enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious

to conceal.” Paul falls in love with Margot Best-Chetwynde, the mother of one of his pupils, a

millionairess who runs a chain of brothels euphemistically called “The Latin-American

Entertainment Co. Ltd.” She introduces him into Mayfair society and involves him in the white-

slave trade without his knowledge. He is arrested on the morning of their marriage and sentenced

to seven years’ imprisonment. He spends a few months in prison and is rescued by Margot, who

arranges to have him sent to a nursing home headed by Dr. Fagan, M.D. After a mock-operation

he is alleged to be dead and allowed to disappear from the social scene. He returns to Oxford and

resumes his studies in theology.

Paul’s incursions into various spheres of English society are so many encounters with the

irresponsibility, amoralism, corruption or sheer madness discernible in many aspects of English

life. Whether at Oxford, in an employment agency in London, in a public school in Wales, in a

country house, a prison, or a nursing home, people act with the same carelessness and

unawareness of the real implications of their actions. Paul’s experience with the Bollingers is

only a rehearsal for his experience in the world: he is ill-treated under the eyes of the Junior

Dean, who does not intervene because Paul is not important enough. Actually, the

representatives of authority implicitly encourage the destructiveness of the Bollingers because of

the highly prized port that is only brought up from the cellars when the college fines reach fifty

pounds. Similarly, Paul is unjustly condemned and sent to prison, while Margot Metroland

escapes punishment. Paul’s innocence and naivete contrast with, and emphasize, the outrageous

behaviour of the other characters. On the other hand, his passivity and lack of insight into human

character not only reveal the inadequacy of his education but also his incapacity to discriminate

between good and evil. In a way, Waugh is more contemptuous of the people who, like Paul,

stick to the rules without understanding them than of the rogues who deliberately defy society or

disturb its order and get away with it.

Though none of Waugh’s early characters is capable of a responsible, mature, or simply

humane, attitude, some appear to have in his eyes a kind of saving grace which is not unrelated

to the superb aplomb with which they take their pleasure in complete defiance of all moral

judgment. Margot Metroland belongs to this category: beautiful, attractive, and rich, she makes

the most of what life has to offer without troubling in the least about right or wrong. Very

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skillfully, Waugh provokes at once indignation and tolerance for the people of her kind. Yet she is

an impostor like Grimes, Philbrick and Dr. Fagan. These characters’ success in life is

proportionate to their impudence; no representative of traditional institutions, whether in justice,

education, or religion, performs his task with integrity and a sense of responsibility. Grimes, an

unscrupulous rogue, is “always in the soup”; yet he is never “let down” because he is an ex-

public-school man. Philbrick is a swindler and a criminal who ends up as opulent as he has

always pretended to be. Fagan, a cynical impostor on a grand scale, will do anything provided it

is remunerative. He is twice an agent in Paul’s change of personality, once when Paul becomes a

schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle and a second time when he presides over Paul’s mock-death.

For both he and Paul this event is the beginning of “a new phase in life,” i.e., of another round of

swindling for the one, of another period of dull and unrealistic initiation into life for the other.

After his departure from Oxford Paul meets the same characters playing the same parts in

different spheres of society: Llanabba Castle, Mayfair, Egdon Prison. Wherever he goes,

inefficiency, madness and dishonesty prevail. Prendergast, the unhappy and unauthoritative

schoolmaster, who left the Church because he had “doubts,” is seen at Egdon as the prison

chaplain. His doubts are a source of disorder even in prison, where his incapacity to impose

discipline lands him into trouble with prisoners as it did with pupils. By a cruel irony, his head is

sawn off by a visionary maniac, a man who has appointed himself “the sword of Israel: the lion

of the Lord’s Elect.” Philbrick imparts the news to Paul in chapel:

‘O God, our help in ages past,’ sang Paul.‘Where’s Prendergast to-day?’‘What, ain’t you ‘eard?’ e’s been done in.’‘And our eternal home.’‘Damned lucky it was Prendergast,Might ‘ave been you or me!The warder says – and I agree – It serves the Governor right.’‘Amen’

The gruesome humour of the song leaves no doubt as to the way in which this piece of

savagery should be interpreted. Prendergast’s weakness marks him as a victim. He had left the

Church then gone back to it after discovering “that there is a species of person called ‘Modern

Churchman’ who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to

any religious belief.” Sir Lucas-Dockery, the governor of the prison, is a caricature of the

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modern reformist who applies literally and without understanding them the new methods of

psycho-analysis. He is more concerned with the success of his method than with the welfare of

the prisoners under his care and will blindly go to any length to prove his optimistic conviction

that “almost any crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.” (p. 177) He gives

carpenter tools to the mystic criminal who kills Prendergast. The episode is turned into an

inhuman farce which derides the lunacy, not of the inmates, but of those who are chosen to

ensure the working of institutions. Clearly, it is a mad world which trusts a Fagan to educate its

children, a Lucas-Dockery to see to it that criminals are fit to return to society, and a Prendergast

to officiate as a representative of the Church. Yet each episode is treated with apparent levity and

a non-committal fake-seriousness which demystify society as well as the people who take

themselves seriously or distort the ideals they pretend to be serving. Society is a sham, which

Waugh exposes with insolent gusto, bringing to light the disorder created by well-meaning

incompetent fools. Scoundrels are not more harmful because they at least know what they are up

to.

The heartless and barbarous world of Decline and Fall is pictured with a disconcerting

but calculated detachment which makes it all the more shocking. The Junior Dean who

witnesses Paul’s “debagging” does not protest when he is sent down. Neither Margot nor Peter

can be bothered about Paul’s unjust condemnation. Potts, Paul’s best friend, is the main witness

for the prosecution at his trial and is even commended by the court for his unshakeable attitude.

Paul takes this general callousness for granted. Apart from his youthful infatuation for Margot,

he himself seems hardly capable of genuine feeling. He is not unattractive as a character because

he is a victim who never retaliates, a convenient scapegoat. The main character is also static in

a different sense, for his experience in the world leaves him almost unchanged. He acquires a

sense of humour, which is perhaps an indication that he understands a little better what goes on

around him, but he behaves much as he did during his first stay at Oxford. He joins again the

League of Nations Union and acquires a new friend called Stubbs, with whom he develops the

same kind of relationship as with Potts. The only lesson Paul has learned as a future clergyman is

to avoid Prendergast’s mistake. Order in the Church must be preserved at all costs, which

suggests that social order should also be enforced if necessary. Paul’s failure to achieve maturity

is typical of Waugh’s pre-war heroes and no doubt implies that maturity and real understanding

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of traditional institutions are non-existent in contemporary society. The academic world is not

more reliable than fashionable London. Lady Circumference’s moral code is a mere set of

conventions and prejudices: though a representative of the landed aristocracy, she is not more

aware of the values traditionally connected with her class than the newly-made peer Maltravers,

who was born in a slum. Left to themselves the young drift into debauchery. Society is only a

gathering of unattached individuals easily adaptable to any situation because nothing really

matters. The reckless and shameless pursuit of excitement has become the only recognizable law,

but it doesn’t lead to happiness; apart from Philbrick and Fagan all the characters are

disenchanted, even Grimes, the “life force.” Margot regains respectability by marrying

Maltravers, and takes Alastair Trumpington as a lover to shake off the boredom of her new

married life. Her son, Peter, Waugh’s first Bright Young Thing, is disappointed in Paul and in his

mother, who shows him the way to irresponsibility.

In scene after scene madness, greed, irresponsibility and selfishness are displayed as

normal behaviour in Church, in prison, at school, or among London fashionables. There is no

room for reason or humaneness in this savage world. The opening scene at Scone is fairly typical

of what happens in Waugh’s novels: the social élite destroy the symbols of culture and

civilization, breaking a grand piano, smashing China, throwing a Matisse in a water-jug or

destroying the manuscript of a poem. The novel ends, as it began, on the evening of the

Bollingers’ annual dinner; they play their game of destruction with the same gusto as their

predecessors. Yet, obviously, Waugh feels more sympathy for them than for the social outsiders

who occasionally cross their path and whom he slightly despises for their tediousness, their lack

of style and of charm. He combines satire of an unprincipled social élite with a hardly concealed

admiration for them, which adds to the ambiguity created in his early novels by the absence of

implicit standards.

CONCLUSION

Evelyn Waugh's famous first novel lays waste the "heathen idol" of British sportmanship,

the cultured perfection of Oxford and inviolable honor code of English upper classes. The novel

was so received by the public that it meant Waugh’s consolidation as writer. Most critics agree

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that Decline and Fall is a clever, funny novel in which language is used as a masterly instrument

for criticism.

Paul Pennyfeather, innocent victim of a drunken orgy, is expelled from Oxford College,

which costs him a career in the church. He turns to teaching, frequently the last resort of failures,

and at Llanabba Castle meets a friend, Beste-Chetwynde. But Margot, Beste-Chetwynde's

mother, introduces him to the questionable delights of high society. Suddenly, and improbably,

he is engaged to marry Margot. Just as they are about to say "I do," Scotland Yard arrives and

arrests Peter for his involvement in Margot's white slave-trading ring.

Modest and unassuming theology student Paul Pennyfeather falls victim to the drunken

antics of the Bollinger Club and is subsequently expelled from Oxford for running through the

grounds of Scone College without his trousers. Having thereby defaulted on the conditions of his

inheritance, he is forced to take a job teaching at an obscure public school in Wales called

Llanabba, run by Dr Fagan. Attracted to the wealthy mother of one of his pupils, Pennyfeather

becomes private tutor to her boy, Peter, and then engaged to be married to her—the Honourable

Mrs Margot Beste-Chetwynde who later becomes "Lady Metroland". Pennyfeather, however, is

unaware that the source of her income is a number of high-class brothels in South America.

Arrested on the morning of the wedding, after running an errand for Margot related to her

business, Pennyfeather takes the fall to protect his fiancée's honour and is sentenced to seven

years in prison for traffic in prostitution. Margot marries another man with government ties and

he arranges for Paul to fake his own death and escape. In the end he returns to where he started at

Scone. He studies under his own name, having convinced the college that he is the distant cousin

of the Paul Pennyfeather who was sent down previously. The novel ends as it started, with Paul

sitting in his room listening to the distant shouts of the Bollinger Club.

Works Cited

Bradburry, Malcolm. Evelyn Waugh. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyed, 1964

Davis, Robert Murray. Evelyn Waugh, Writer. Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1981

Heath, Jeffrey. The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writings. London: Weidenfel

and Nicholson, 1982

Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical heritage. London: Rougtedge and keagan Paul,

1984

Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall 1928. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1937

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