Decline and Fall / Evelyn Waugh
Categories: Travel , Rediscoveries , Fiction
Paul Pennyfeather, an industrious third-year student at the College of Scone, Oxford, and the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, innocently crosses paths with members of the posh Bollinger Club. Naturally, the next thing that happens is that Oxford administrators unfairly "send him down" for "indecent behavior," and Paul is forced to take work as an instructor at a Welsh preparatory school. Since the novel is a dark comedy, Paul quiets his first class by offering a prize to the student who can write the longest essay, regardless of merit.
Interestingly, although Waugh certainly does not mean for us to respect Paul's teaching ability, this writing-instruction technique is quite popular among contemporary English composition instructors, including me.
A university friend of Paul's suggests a different writing-instruction tool:
There is a most interesting article in the Educational Review on the new methods that are being tried at the Innesborough High School to induce coordination of the senses. They put small objects into the children's mouths and make them draw the shapes in red chalk. Have you tried this with your boys?
Clearly, Paul is better off befriending his new teaching colleagues: a former priest who had to leave his parish when he began questioning why God had bothered making the world at all; and a dipsomaniac scoundrel who just misses out on a lucrative new job as a beer taster.
Obviously, Paul's life deteriorates before it improves. (This is probably the case with most protagonists' lives.) Decline and Fall is Waugh's first novel, and if you like a happy ending, or are new to Waugh, you might want to start with this one, because by most standards, things do improve.
I recommend this approach in the same way that I recommend a person who wants to get into E.M. Forster--a writer whose humor is more subtle and with whom a reader might not even associate humor particularly--start with A Room With a View. There's a wonderful movie version also. Before you show it to your class, you'll want to note the brief nude scene (about half way through, while the guys are in the pond). On the other hand, if you're a student, you should complain if a teacher makes you put chalk of any color into your mouth, because it would be a form of abuse.
