A Funny Thing Happened

Last weekend I was in Austin, Texas, when something unexpected happened.

I was attending a conference for British historians at the University of Texas. Most of the attendees were graduate students locked into the tractor beams of the school's several prominent British historians, whose specialties are the diplomatic and economic history of the British Empire, and so most of the papers were hard-nosed empirical studies of political relations amongst Britain's various dominions, colonies, and dependencies, though there were a few squishier papers (and I say this fondly) about the cultural and literary history of the British Empire. I didn't manage to attend much of the conference - teaching obligations kept me away for the first two days - but I was present on the final day, when I delivered my paper and attended some other talks, including the closing lecture by an eminent historian of British political thought.

The title of this lecture, as printed on the program, was something like, "History, Politics, and Thought in Britain," which is the sort of title that you give to a conference organizer if you haven't decided what you want to talk about yet. So as we gathered in the smallish seminar room overlooking the sunny campus, none of us, I believe, quite knew what to expect.

Now, I have been to many, many such talks in my life, and few of them have been memorable, or even especially enjoyable. They are usually rather dry and technical, especially when academics are the only audience, and they are rarely very funny. (The humorless nature of academic history writing is a serious problem that I've been pondering a lot lately. Not only do historians rarely write about their subjects with wit or humor, they also very rarely write about funny things that happened in the past, when there are, in fact, many quite funny things happening all the time. This is especially true of the British Empire.) So when this eminent historian began talking about how we might use novels to shed light on the prevailing assumptions and prejudices of a historical period, I began to slump a little in my seat. But then she said the name Evelyn Waugh, and I perked up a bit. And then she kept right on saying Waugh's name for the next hour and more, until, by the end, she had delivered a whole lecture - a funny, funny lecture - on the man who was my brother's favorite author.

Anybody who knew Joey and has read Waugh will immediately recognize the affinity between the two. Waugh was a satirist whose books eviscerated, with mordant humor, the smug and the self-congratulatory. He was a man of many prejudices, which he flourished freely and remorselessly, but usually in such a way that you knew not to take them too seriously, for prejudices are funnier when their arbitrariness and irrationality are made clear. He was an elitist who detested the vulgarity of modern life but had few nice things to say about the elite themselves (or about anyone else, for that matter). He was a romantic whose principal critique of his own society was that there wasn't enough nobility or beauty in it, but he was also a wanderer who traveled the world looking for, but rarely finding, beauty and nobility elsewhere (usually he simply found more things to mock). If Waugh's books were not books but were, instead, facial expressions, they would be one continuous series of smirks, with perhaps a trace of wistful nostalgia about the eyes in the case of Brideshead Revisited.

The smirk, of course, was Joey's own most practiced expression.

I don't want to suggest an exact equivalence between Evelyn Waugh and my brother. By most accounts, Waugh could be a most unpleasant person, given to misogyny and anti-Semitism, a poor father, a bully, and a snob. Joey was much gentler than Waugh, and he wore his own prejudices (against things like Baptists, woman novelists, Applebees, and the campus of the University of Notre Dame) much more lightly and employed them more consistently for comic effect, not out of deep conviction. But it's easy to see what he liked about Waugh. In addition to being a fellow smirker, Joey was a great Anglophile, and there are few authors more Anglo than Waugh. He also liked the old-fashioned, sophisticated-sounding expressions that Waugh's characters used, especially the phrase "hard cheese," which means something like "tough going" and is in the title of chapter three of A Handful of Dust ("Hard Cheese on Tony"). This phrase was part of Joey's repertoire of Joey-only phrases and sayings, which he peppered into conversations to make people feel that they were in on some kind of joke, even if they didn't quite get it themselves. This was a skill that Joey and Waugh shared: the ability to draw other people into complicity with their smirking world-view.

The lecture in Austin, as any lecture about Waugh should do, drew many laughs, and in most cases it was Waugh himself - his characters, his plots, his words - who earned the laughter. As I sat there, surrounded by strangers (Kate had come to Austin with me, but she was off exploring the city on her own), I noticed that the only empty chair in the room was the one beside me. And as I listened and laughed along - and, when not laughing, smirked - I felt closer to my brother than I had since I last saw him alive, nearly a year ago now.

During the discussion after the lecture, someone asked the speaker what drew her toward this topic, which is not, after all, within her usual bailiwick. She replied that she liked reading novels, and so she wanted to write about them. This is a sentiment with which many historians can identify: we get drawn into the profession because we like to read, but then we become obliged to read dense, academic histories instead of the things that we enjoy reading. I've struggled with this dilemma for years, and lately I've been feeling not only that life is too short not to read what you want to read (which is a sentiment with which my law-student brother, voracious reader of novels and avoider of law books, would wholly sympathize), but also that I want to write what I want to write. This doesn't mean abandoning academic writing, but it does mean a) writing something else, something more literary and less technical, on the side, and/or b) working in a different, less technical vein in my academic writing. If you're reading this, then you know that I'm already doing a). As for b), well, I did win an award at the conference - for the best paper presented - so I'm taking that as an endorsement of the current path that I'm on with the academic stuff. My aspiration in that latter respect is to become a storyteller rather than a technician, which is what so many in my profession are. It is also to try to find a way to write about something funny that once happened, or at least to tell about something serious that once happened, but to tell it with a half-smile.