When the Going Was Good

Rare is that generation which, easing through middle age, does not believe that in their youth they went to the best parties, saw the most unspoiled places, and had the most vivid experiences. The gentle one-upmanship of travel chat is irresistible. "Well, I don't know what it's like now, but when I went to... (Guatemala, Tehran, Zimbabwe, etc.) back in... (the days before you were old enough to have a passport) it was... (totally unspoiled, exotic and delightful, without a single other soul on the entire beach, etc.)." Evelyn Waugh, perhaps more than most, may have been justified in naming his selected travel writings When the Going was Good. For one thing, he put the collection together at the end of World War II, when the world as he had known it was truly in disarray. The great European powers had proved themselves to be as destructive and violent as any of the savage backwaters he had visited a decade or more earlier. The war trashed any lingering notions of the genteel colonialism Waugh so enjoyed skewering in his novels. Whereas the first war had prompted a redistribution of colonies, as if Africa's countries were nothing more than playing cards to be shuffled and redealt by the great powers, the second war led directly towards independence and the dissolution of the colonial enterprise as such. "Never again, I suppose," writes Waugh in his introduction, "shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport (itself the first faint shadow of the great cloud that envelops us) and feel the world wide open before us." Waugh fails to anticipate the magic of the ATM. But, more chillingly, he declines to travel in a declining postwar world populated by "the great army of men and women without papers, without official existence, the refugees and deserters, who drift everywhere today between the barbed wire." Their numbers have only grown since. In part, of course, what Waugh means is that in the early 1930s, when he made his most impressive voyages, it was possible to go far, and to find comfortable lodging and gin and tonics across much of Africa, just by dropping the names of the right London socialites. But the modern traveler, armed with a decent list of facebook friends working for NGOs, would manage just as well to find today cold beer and a guest bedroom in the poshest neighborhoods of any of the African capitals. Waugh sadly anticipates a war-torn post-colonial era in which nobody sensible would leap into a truck in Khartoum and hitchhike south through the Congo and Zimbabwe, much less manage such a journey by rail as was more or less possible in his era. The going may have been good, but it wasn't easy, especially once Waugh really got off the beaten track, taking paddle steamers west across Lake Tanganyika towards the Congo, or chafing in the saddle along the Brazilian -- Guyanese border. These are still some of the most remote and difficult bits of the tropics to travel. Waugh goes to Ethiopia to report on the coronation

This book is a 'Must Read' for the following lot of people:1) Those who have an appreciation for Waugh's fiction.2) Those who have an interest in colonial Great Britain just before the fall of the British Empire when, arguably, it was at its height.3) Those who have traveled well beyond the "It is Tuesday, this must be Bangkok" scheme of things.4) Those who enjoy social satire mixed with dry wit, and enlivened by a wonderful sense of the absurd.5) Connoisseurs of the English language in its written form.'When the Going was Good' is five travel episodes written in a period from 1929 to 1935, as abridged by the author for inclusion in this book. These episodes range from a casual, meandering cruise of the Mediterranean Sea in 1929 to reportage on the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy in 1935 presaging the Second World War. In between are the coronation of Emperor Haille Salasie Ras Tafare(the first Rastafarian), some random "Globe-trotting" beginning in Aden running through the Zanzibar coast and then down to the Congo, and finally an attempted trip from British Guyana down through Brazil.Obviously, the really beautiful thing about any book by Evelyn Waugh is the concise, incisive, succint and often surgically precise use of the Queen's English. What makes these gems particularly precious is that they are set in conditions that were considered laughably backward and dangerously primitive even for the standards of the early part of the 20th century. Any such journey into the Dark Continent, and into the New World promises to be fraught with dangers and difficulties almost beyond description. Fortunately for the world of literature these were met by an author who was up to the task of describing these incidents in a way that makes them interesting, funny, and illuminating. Waugh has an uncanny ablity to use the slings and arrows that life sends one's way as weapons of satire and delight. Perhaps the most delightful vignette in this book filled with delightful vignettes is his description of his adventures with the well-meaning but misinformed American theological professor who is the leading authority on the Ethiopian form of Christiantiy, and who meanwhile is totally confused by its religous rites. Their time together takes them from the midst of the royal coronation to a field trip trek through wilderness to that church's holiest shrine in the company of a multi-talented fly by the seat of the pants Armenian chauffeur and an Ethipioan urchin whom they pick up along the way. Suffice it to say that the material Waugh got in that one trip was of the sort that one could write an entire short book from, and indeed this is just what he did in the novella titled 'Black Mischief.' Yes, that's correct, Waugh fans, the stuff of some of his books was captured right here on these pages during these travels and herein lies a treasure trove of details that one finds later played out in the novella mentioned above, in 'A Handful of Dust' and even 'Brideshea