Waugh and the Octopus

In 1928 Evelyn Waugh published his first novel, Decline and Fall. In the same year Clough Williams-Ellis, architect and writer, published a book with the singular title England and the Octopus.[1] Williams-Ellis's book deals with modern building and development; he writes with distaste of the destruction of the great house and its replacement with filling stations, villas and bungalows. England and the Octopus is in the collection from Waugh's personal library in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.[2] Waugh's bookplate is inside the front cover; his copy contains marginal markings in pencil that indicate the book was read with care. Waugh met Williams-Ellis at a dinner party in 1930 and reported in his diary that the writer was "very jolly and chatty. He kept producing little books from an attaché case and showing me underlined texts. 'The Artist alone is the legislator' - that sort of thing."[3] Waugh produced some underlining of his own in England and the Octopus; marginal markings reveal that the two writers had some common concerns. The publication of England and the Octopus at least two months before the publication of Waugh's first novel [4] suggests an intertext for one of Waugh's oddest images, the captive octopus, which first appears in Decline and Fall, again ten years later in Scoop, and in Waugh's sixth novel Put Out More Flags.[5] England and the Octopus provides a valuable context for Waugh's opinions on architecture. There are, moreover, parallels between the book and Waugh's essays which illuminate recurring concerns for Waugh: the negative consequences of liberty and the need for restraint in safeguarding civilization.

England and the Octopus is intended as a cure for the aesthetic disease plaguing England. The polemical foreword is couched in opposing dichotomies of attack and defence, pain and pleasure, disease and cure. Williams-Ellis writes of causing "discomfort" for readers in order to "give warning of damage or ill-health" (viii). The foreword mimics a standard apologia of satire, the use of punishment and pain to cure the plagues of society, and anticipates a passage in Waugh's 'The War and the Younger Generation', published in 1929: "The muscles which encounter the most resistance in daily routine are those which become most highly developed and adapted. It is thus...