Evelyn Waugh

The Mexican Object-lesson

Robbery Under Law

Gavin

[Mexico is] a foreign country where I spent a day or so under two months... Superficial acquaintance is one of the materials of our trade. Other professions are equally culpable; the barrister spends an evening or two studying his brief, pleads in court as though he had never had any other interest in life than the welfare of the litigants, and, over his luncheon, forgets... everything about them. The medical specialist gives his diagnosis in an hour on a patient he has never seen in health and of whose life history he knows no more than a few routine questions will elicit. Compared with them a journalist is less presumptuous. 

A bought polemic against nationalization ("when a rich and essential British industry was openly stolen in time of peace") - journalism with a foregone conclusion (as usual) but even more sordid. So I expected to find it sick, but Waugh is of course fizzing and charming. (As so often, the trouble is the shill is actually honest - he believes everything he's saying; the money did not in fact get him to change his views. The corruption, such as it is, happens before, when he was picked because they knew he'd say the right thing on his own.

  At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the moon, or some such place, to recapture the excitement with which one first landed at Calais. For many people Mexico has, in the past, had this lunar character. Lunar it still remains, but in no poetic sense. It is waste land, part of a dead or, at any rate, a dying planet. Politics, everywhere destructive, have here dried up the place, frozen it, cracked it and powdered it to dust...

Having read this brief summary of the political opinions I took with me to Mexico, the reader who finds it unsympathetic may send the book back to her library and apply for something more soothing.

(Written in 1939 - checks out.)

Surprisingly little of it is about the oil nationalisation. ("in common speech and in historical fact, Mexico is the tableland—the Mesa Central de Anahuac, a vast, rocky, temperate area tilted towards the Pacific, 1,500 miles long by 500 or 600 miles in width. It is superb country, mountainous, volcanic, cracked and pitted with green cultivable valleys and wooded slopes rising above the snow line, into angular shining peaks ; graced, every few miles, by the domes and facades of the conquerors’ churches ; when the clouds lift, everything is a shade sharper and brighter in the thin, dry air of the highlands than seems natural to Northern eyes.")

Waugh is conventional in an extremely unconventional way, and idiosyncracy is the first if not the only requirement of literature. 

  It is a long abandoned belief that tourism, like competitive athletics, makes for international friendship. The three most hated peoples in the world — Germans, Americans and British— are the keenest sight-seers. There are very few English villagers who have seen an Egyptian; very few Egyptian villagers who have not seen an Englishman ; the result is that the English generally are well disposed towards Egypt, while the Egyptians detest us.


  Some of the Mexicans in the government party have realized that the tourists do not come simply to exercise their motor cars or, now that Prohibition is more or less over, to drink imported whiskey... that if you want some proofed canvas to patch a roof it is cheaper in the long run to buy a piece, than to clamber onto the altar of the village church and cut a Cabrera out...


  Americans undoubtedly feel a sense of responsibility towards Mexico... not so much kinship as proprietorship... His was the attitude of the nineteenth century Englishman towards Ireland... he overlooked the one vital difference — that Mexico was a foreign country. His attitude, I think, is still in the main that of the State Department at Washington.


  Besides the holidaymakers and the sentimentalists there is a third rapidly increasing group of foreign visitors to Mexico. These are the ideologues ; first in Moscow, then in Barcelona, now in Mexico these credulous pilgrims pursue their quest for the promised land ; constantly disappointed, never disillusioned, ever thirsty for the phrases in which they find refreshment. They have flocked to Mexico in the last few months for the present rulers have picked up a Marxist vocabulary


(What is it with Mexican art and propaganda? See also The Fire and the Word and Fuentes and Greene and Kahlo and Rivera.)

Robbery Under Law The Mexican Object-lesson