BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "Robbery Under Law"
The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 24: Robbery Under Law. Ed. by Michael G. Brennan. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198836391. civ + 212 pp.
Another interesting book by Waugh on a subject that I knew almost nothing about and which I probably wouldn't have read if not for the fact that it appeared in the series of Waugh's collected works that I'm slowly in the process of reading. As an example of my complete ignorance on the subject: I had no idea that Mexico even had an oil industry! It turns out that “[b]y 1914 Mexico was the world's third producer of oil” and by 1920 the second largest after the U.S. (editor's introduction, p. xxx); it was a particularly important supplier of oil to Britain (p. xxviii; which didn't have any oil on its own territory, unlike e.g. the USA and Russia).* Much of Mexico's oil industry had been developed by British capital, especially by an engineer and industrialist named Weetman Pearson. In fact President Díaz, in the late 19th century, had specifically encouraged British investment as a way to counterbalance U.S. influence in the country.
[*Mexican oil was still important for Britain on the eve of the WW2, due to concerns that developments in the Mediterranean might make it impossible for Britain to get oil from the Middle East; p. lxii.]
The Díaz administration was followed by a long period of instability known as the Mexican Revolution — again something of which I had been only very vaguely aware. Eventually, in 1938, President Cárdenas nationalized the oil industry, including Pearson's “Mexican Eagle Company”. This had been in the the hands of the late founder's son, Clive Pearson; and this is where Waugh comes into the picture: he signed a contract with Pearson to write and publish a book about Mexico. Pearson paid him £1500 plus travel expenses for Waugh and his wife, in return for which Waugh had to let him see the manuscript before publication and to keep the whole arrangement a secret. The whole contract is published in this book in the editor's introduction (pp. xxxii–iii). It is not known whether Pearson actually requested any changes to Waugh's manuscript before publication (p. xlviii).
So, some people have a sugar daddy, but Waugh had an oil uncle :D I don't know whether to laugh or cry; I was mostly just shaking my head in disbelief. It's one thing when Waugh contrived to get himself appointed as a foreign correspondent so he could travel to Abyssinia; it's easy to smile indulgently when he wangles free passage on a cruise ship in exchange for mentioning the company favourably in his book about Africa; but a secret contract with an oil baron? Really?...
At least one has to admit that Waugh regarded his prostitution with good humour. He jokingly refers to Pearson as “Uncle Clive” in his letters to his agent (pp. xxxviii–ix, xli, xliv–v), and describes his book self-deprecatingly as “[l]ike an interminable Times leader of 1880. People will say well Waugh is done for, it is marriage and living in the country has done it” (p. xliv). And he may have been a whore, but at least he wasn't a cheap whore; we see him trying to use Uncle Clive's travel insurance to pay for the cost of his wife's appendicitis operation several months after their return from Mexico :] (p. xxxix; admittedly her problems had already begun while in Mexico).
And one also has to admit that Waugh probably didn't have to betray any of his principles for the sake of this book and of Uncle Clive's oil money. His existing beliefs and commitments — zealously Catholic by religion, politically conservative with a deep dislike of meddling governments and complete distrust in their schemes to improve people's lives — were quite enough to ensure that he disliked the Cárdenas government (and its predecessors) and nearly all of its policies, and that any book that he might have written about contemporary Mexico would have been be no less favourable to British oil interests than Pearson would have wished. Probably the main effect of Pearson's oil money was not on the content of Waugh's book but on the fact that it got written at all — otherwise Waugh wouldn't have travelled to Mexico and wouldn't have written a book about it.
Waugh also tried to get some material from this book published in American magazines, but with very little success (“too much from the British angle”; see p. xliii for a list of magazines that rejected him).
The editor's introduction in the present volume has a long section about reviews of Robbery Under Law in the press. It was widely reviewed but for the most part not very favourably; Waugh was said to have “failed to communicate much beyond his own anger [. . .] the book was veiled ‘in sad clouds of disgust’ ” (p. lxxi); Waugh “glories in his misconceptions” (p. lxxxiii); he has a “Waughped view” (p. lxxiv). He “expresses very well the contemporary attitude of the angry minority of Mexican conservatives [. . .] whose land had been taken away and had suffered persecution because of their religious beliefs. [. . .] the only Mexicans he met were disgruntled members of the upper class, who hated Cárdenas not only for economic but also for religious reasons.” (P. lxiv.) One reviewer wondered “why, when the persecution of the church reached its height in the last years of the nineteen-twenties, two devout catholic converts like Messrs. Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh should wait until the year after the expropriation of the Mexican oilfields to expose those horrors.” (P. lxxxii.) :))) (Greene's book about Mexico was The Lawless Roads, published in 1939, same as Waugh's Robbery Under Law.)
*
Although Waugh took a trip to Mexico in order to write this book, it isn't really a travel book, and he says as much at the outset (“This is a political book; [. . .] The succeeding pages are notes on anarchy”, p. 2). He likewise openly admits to his conservative biases, which he says were only strengthened by his visit to Mexico (p. 9). Indeed there is a fine concise summary of his political views on p. 10: “I believe in government; that men cannot live together without rules but that thes should be kept at the bare minimum of safety; [. . .] that the anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole-time task to keep the peace. I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination; that men naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes; that such a system is necessary for any form of co-operative work, more particularly the work of keeping a nation together.” Yuck :( but at least he is honest.
Nevertheless he does have a chapter about “Tourist Mexico” (pp. 11–28). Overall you get the impression that the country was in a fairly shabby condition, especially once he got out of the areas most commonly frequented by tourists. Waugh comes across as a patient and sympathetic tourist, and I couldn't help wishing that the whole book had been about travel rather than politics.
Waugh continues with a chapter about Mexican history, which I found interesting as it was mostly new to me. He clearly thinks very highly of the Spanish colonial period in Mexico, and says that the country was then more advanced in many ways than the British colonies in North America (pp. 71–2; “the predominance of the U.S. in the New World is quite a recent development”). After independence it began to fall behind, and its history in the 19th and early 20th century was characterized by instability, civil wars, rebellions, revolutions and the like. Apparently much of the 19th-century instability was due to Masonic secret societies :)) (p. 74; though one wonders if Waugh as a Catholic may have been a bit biased about this). Moreover, the United States did their fair share of meddling, the effect of which was mostly to strengthen the “disorderly side” of Mexican politics (p. 96).
Mexican political leaders took turns plundering the country before ending their terms in exile or death (“Now and then a politician gets across the border in time”, p. 40). The only notable exception to this pattern was the administration of Porfirio Díaz (president in 1884–1911), which Waugh describes as a period of stability and prosperity, thanks in no small part to foreign investment (much of it British), which Díaz encouraged. Judging by the wikipedia, Díaz' administration was a near-dictatorship in which economic technocrats ran the country for the benefit of big landowners and rich foreign investors. In fact, Waugh doesn't particularly deny that Díaz was autocratic,* but seems to think it a good tradeoff in exchange for security; he sort of shrugs resignedly, and cynically, as he describes how the Mexicans who “knew the boredom and inevitable abuses that grow in an autocracy, [. . .] wished to see their country conforming still more closely to the contemporary fashion”, and so “party politics were reintroduced [. . .] The result has been twenty-five years of graft, bloodshed and bankruptcy. [. . .] The only difference between the Mexican system and the Fascist is that the nation has sacrificed its political liberties without getting internal security or foreign prestige in exchange.” (P. 40.) “A whole generation [. . .] has known nothing but pillage, graft and degeneration.” (P. 44.) It is unsurprising, of course, that Waugh as a rich and conservative person would prefer the stability of an autocratic system, even a fascist one, over the turbulence of a revolutionary period. But in my opinion the solution to this is not to reintroduce autocracy, but to continue the revolutions until the political system improves :]
[*He remarks elsewhere, in what is simultaneously an admission and a defense of Díaz' autocracy: “It is characteristic of Mexican history that at almost any period one looks at there are abundant reasons for deploring the existing regime; one turns the pages and one realizes that one was wrong; the cure was always worse than the ill.” (P. 80.)]
The party that seized power during the Mexican Revolution was called, reasonably enough, the Revolutionary Party of Mexico; in Waugh's time, it was led by General Cárdenas (president in 1934–40). The party had Marxist leanings and did not shy from policies of nationalization and confiscation. Waugh, as befitting a man of his politics, spends much time ranting about the supposedly immoderate demands of Mexican workers, the frequency of strikes, and you can practically see him holding his breath as he tells you — hoping you will be as shocked as he is — that the right to strike extends even to schoolchildren, who are able to get unpopular teachers replaced that way (pp. 35, 117)! The poor, poor employers are afraid to hire people, knowing they won't be able to fire them (p. 35)! The nasty, nasty unions have such immoderate power that janitors end up working as museum curators (p. 36)! Won't you shed a tear for the unfortunate, beleaguered upper classes of Mexico?
He has an interesting theory — and is honest enough to admit that it is no more than a conjecture — that relations between labour and employers follow a cyclical pattern: labourers get exploited for some time; start standing up for themselves; but gradually their demands grow excessive, class war ruins the country and paves the way for the rise of fascism or something like it; war and ruin follow, and the cycle is ready to start anew (pp. 43–4). The ‘rise of fascism’ part, he suggests, is where Mexico might go next. In fact he seems to have, much like many right-wingers today, a stubborn but nonsensical idea that far left and far right systems have much more in common than they really do (since WW1 “two forms of proletarian rule have appeared, Nazism and Communism”, p. 162), and that the sort-of-Marxist sort-of-dictatorship of Cárdenas could easily turn, at any moment (perhaps through a coup), into something like fascism or nazism.* In fact, Waugh says, Cárdenas is already cooperating just fine with the Axis powers: after he nationalized foreign oil companies, Britain and America refused to buy Mexican oil, so he started selling it to the Axis powers through barter agreements (p. 69). Evidently Waugh thought that these commercial links could easily develop into closer political alignment as well, and in fact late in the book he has some impressive fearmongering about the supposed spread of German influence all over Latin America (p. 162). This was, of course, a common enough concern at that time, one that many authors liked to write worried articles and book chapters about, but as far as I can tell this supposed influence in Latin America did not do Nazi Germany even an iota of good. I suspect most of this influence existed only in the minds of the fearmongers.
[*In an outline of his book for an American publisher, Waugh wrote similarly that the present Mexican “regime is an odd mixture of Nazism & Communism representing most of the worst features of both systems. In the next few years, perhaps months, it is likely to throw in its lot definitely with one or another of the two extremes.” (P. xlvi. Another of his many failed prognostications.)]
*
Considering that this book owes its very existence to Uncle Clive's oil money, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it actually dedicates no more than one chapter (pp. 45–69) to the Mexican oil industry and its nationalization. I liked his summary of the different political attitudes to the issue: on the one hand you have English extremists “who believe that the world was created to supply the English with physical comforts”; on the other hand you have Mexican extremists “who believe that the soil of the country and anything on or below it, was ordained for the exclusive use of the heterogeneous peoples who have been born there; that this possession is inalienable and that any use made of it by a foreigner is an act of theft.” (P. 50.) I for one am happy to side with the Mexicans here, but Waugh argues for a middle course where the case should be judged on its merits, and spends most of this chapter defending the foreign oil companies from various accusations.
He points out that oil companies had been established in Mexico with the full encouragement of President Díaz; that large investments are needed before you find sufficient oil deposits and develop them into a profitable venture; hence having big oil companies do this is the best option. He denies that they meddled in Mexican politics, except for yielding to various demands for bribes without which they wouldn't have been able to operate at all during the turbulent times of the Mexican Revolution. If oil has an outsized role in the Mexican economy, it is (Waugh says) because the unwise policies of Cárdenas and his predecessors have already ruined all the other branches of the economy (p. 57). Waugh insists that the oil companies “paid high wages and high taxes; the workmen misspent the wages and the politicians misspent the taxes, with the result that the country did not benefit as richly as it might have done had it been differently inhabited” (p. 59). In fact wages and working conditions in the oil industry were better than in other branches of the economy (pp. lviii–ix, 63).
Officially, nationalization was the government's response to the failure of the oil industry to negotiate with the trade unions; but Waugh says that this was only a pretext, the unions' demands (pp. 64–66) were deliberately impossible, and at any rate the lot of the oil workers did not in any way improve with nationalization. The deeper reason, according to Waugh, is simply that to the Mexican politician “wealth is, in fact and in theory, the product of theft” (p. 60).* In the nineteenth century they had looted the Church; then more recently the big landowners, with an agrarian reform dedicated to expropriating their estates rather than at opening up more land (of which Mexico had plenty) to farming; and now the oil industry was the last thing left to loot.
[*He wrote similarly in a synopsis of proposed newspaper articles about Mexico: “For century [sic] Mexican economy based on theft.”]
Even if all this is true (and it may well be; I simply have no idea), I still think it's better if each people develops its own resources, at its own pace, with its own abilities and capital, even if foreign companies would do it better and sooner. Every form of trade is unequal; one party or the other always gets screwed over. Here the foreigners got their oil, “paid high wages and high taxes”, the Mexicans pissed away the money, and in the end had nothing to show for it; so it would have been better if the oil had stayed in the ground instead. The Mexicans would still have had nothing, but at least the foreigners wouldn't have profited from their oil. I do agree, however, that it would have been more decent if the Mexican government had been forthright about its goals, rather than pretending that this is all because of some sort of labour dispute.
*
Cárdenas's government also announced a “Six Year Plan”, with much fanfare and clumsy, heavy-handed propaganda; but it was hardly a plan at all, certainly nothing like the detailed four- or five-year plans of the Nazis or Soviets (p. 98), and not much of it was likely to get implemented (p. 119).
Apart from the nationalization of oil, Cárdenas's most notable efforts seem to have been in land reform. Most of the land, according to Waugh, had always been in the hands of big landowners — under the Aztecs, under the Spaniards, and after independence. Now the government was dispossessing them, on the basis of (often fake) petitions by local peasants (p. 106). The better your estate, the sooner it would be expropriated, which discouraged owners from trying to improve anything. With the land now split into small holdings, farming was mostly less efficient and production fell (p. 109). Waugh presents some pretty reasonable ideas of his own as to what a more moderate land reform might look like (p. 111).
This seems to be another good example that land reforms should be done carefully and gradually; before you kick the old owners out, you should make sure that you have other people ready with the necessary skills to run their farms. Zimbabwe is a more recent example of the same problem (and I guess revolution-era Haiti was another).
*
Unsurprisingly, there is also a long chapter about the plight of the Catholic Church
in Mexico — a subject that Waugh didn't need any oil money to be interested in.
Apparently many accusations were being circulated about the Church being rich and greedy,
the priests being immoral, etc., but Waugh insists this was mostly exaggerations of isolated
cases — slander spread by the Mexican government who just wanted an excuse to rob
the Church (p. 125). The persecution of the Church had already started under
the Reptilians “Liberal-Mason-Agnostics” (p. 139) of the 19th century, and had
lately been intensified by the communist-leaning governments in the wake of the Mexican
Revolution.* The 1917 Constitution
of Queretaro contained very harsh anti-Church provisions (p. 140); at the time
of Waugh's writing, he says that the Church was in practice tolerated to a somewhat greater
extent than before, though this varied from region to region (p. 141).
Cárdenas himself was not particularly fanatical (“He is more interested in
pleasing the people than in following any logical policy”, p. 144), but
some of his supporters were.
[*Waugh puts the roots of this conflict still farther back: it is a “conflict with merciless, fanatical atheism—an atheism that at the moment adopts Marxist language, just as in earlier generations it used Liberal language, but which antedates either; the atheism of the impenitent thief at the crucifixion.” (P. 122.)]
Meanwhile, the bulk of the Mexican people were deeply attached to the Church. Waugh even says he met an organization of laypeople working in secret to “train and maintain teachers [. . .] counteract the official atheism [. . .] facilitate the movement and concealment of the priesthood; [. . .] organize study groups” etc. (p. 149), but he is vague about the details (understandably so, I guess).
There's also an interesting section about the Virgin of Guadalupe, of which I was only vaguely aware until now. Mary appeared to a recently converted Indian in 1531, and an image of her, with Indian features, miraculously appeared on his cloak. Waugh, of course, defends the authenticity of the miracle, and emphasizes its social consequences: the Spanish colonialists at the time had been having some doubts about the policy of baptising the Indians; but now here was “a Virgin with an Indian face; a thing no painter would have dared to do without incurring the charge of blasphemy. And the Spaniards accepted the miracle. The important feature is not the repugnance it aroused but the fact that the repugnance was overcome. The nobility of the country, from the Viceroy down, solemnly prostrated themselves in the new shrine”. It proved to everyone “that the religion of the Spaniard was equally the religion of the Indian” (p. 133). (Incidentally, there has been a new development since the time Waugh wrote about this: Juan Diego, the man to whom the Virgin had appeared, was canonized in 2002.)
Another interesting passage in this chapter was about a small community of nuns that managed to exist in hiding for some seventy years, from the time religious orders were banned in the mid-19th century until 1935 when they were discovered (pp. 145–7). I never quite understood why so many regimes were opposed to monasteries (e.g. Henry VIII shut them down as soon as he turned protetant). If you tolerate regular priests, why not monks and nuns as well? If anything, they have less of an impact on the outside world since they are mostly shut in their monasteries, so there's no harm in allowing them to continue.
*
Waugh concludes the book with some speculation about Mexico's future. He suggests that
if the Mexicans grow disappointed with Cárdenas's socialism, they may well end up trying
something along the lines of Nazism or even National Bolshevism (pp. 153, 163). Moreover,
Mexico might get destabilized by all the anarchists, communists etc. who sought asylum there
from their defeat in the Spanish Civil War (p. 156). There could be a civil war;
an anti-Cárdenas coup; Mexico might join the Anti-Comintern Pact (p. 162).
He warns against growing German influence in Latin America, and suggests that the
nationalized Mexican oil fields may soon be in Nazi hands (p. 157). He even suggests
that, since the example of the U.S. fighting in Europe in WW1 proves that waging a campaign
across the Atlantic is now possible, Germany may soon do the same: “South America has
become accessible as a battle-ground while at every point the German-Japanese alliance
threatens vital American interests.” (P. 162.) Or perhaps now
that Franco has won, Spain might rise again as an imperial power (p. 157–9).
Or perhaps a pagan cult might re-emerge amongst the Indians (p. 159). Or
perhaps pigs will soon fly over Mexico City... no, wait, he doesn't mention that one,
but it's scarcely less probable than some of his other ideas.
As you can see, no scenario is too ridiculous or too far-fetched for Waugh to entertain, and I think we can pretty safely conclude that he has proven to be a complete and utter failure as a prognosticator of the future. As far as I can tell, what actually happened in Mexico was: absolutely nothing dramatic; or at least nothing dramatic enough that someone like me, living some 80 years later and one ocean away, would have much reason to care about it.
Another prediction: “I believe, in fact, that within a hundred years Mexico will form part of the U.S.A.” (P. 38.) There's some 15 years left before we can judge that one, but I don't think it's likely to happen :) But I guess he was just extrapolating from past experience; he says later that in the time of Díaz, some “statesmen were openly claiming that the natural boundary of the United States was the isthmus of Panama” (p. 40).
More interesting than his wild speculations is the last paragraph of the book (p. 164), where he suggests that the ongoing collapse of Mexico can be a warning to all: “Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all. [. . .] Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. [. . .] we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent. [. . .] The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. [. . .] There is nothing, except ourselves, to stop our own countries becoming like Mexico.” (P. 164.)
I found that paragraph very interesting as another fine summary of Waugh's conservative views, where civilization is just barely hanging on and we're always just one step away from barbarism and anarchy. But it seems to me that civilization is a good deal more robust than these people give it credit for. World wars, great depressions, momentous social transformations and the like have been tearing at the fabric of society for more than a century, and the damn thing just won't collapse! Any kind of chart you care to look at just goes up, up, up all the time. Any collapse you might get is very localized, such as when a country gets a particularly bad government, and is sooner or later followed by the inevitable recovery when its regime changes. Even outbursts of barbarism are short-lived and surprisingly half-hearted: people are at each other's throats for a war or two, do a bit of genociding, but then ten years later they are friends and neighbours and trading partners again, and listen to each other's popular music and visit each other for vacations. The conservatives always feel as if we were in 5th-century Rome, facing a flood of barbarians about to plunge our world into the dark ages for the next thousand years — heck, often enough I feel that way myself — and yet it's hard to see just how you can justify such views with objective facts. Actually these feelings are probably mostly borne of internal factors; it would be more honest to say: eh, you're just mildly dyspeptic, the world is mostly OKish and will keep hobbling along much the same as hitherto; very far from perfect to be sure, but hardly in any real danger of imminent collapse either.
In any case, I don't want to sound too critical of the book. It was an enoyable enough book to read, written in the same pleasant style as all of Waugh's works, with plenty of sarcastic and humorous passages, and as long as you take his opinions with a grain of salt, keep his political biases in mind, and pay no attention to his efforts to speculate about the future, you can still learn something little about 1930s Mexico and have a good time while doing so.
Miscellaneous
Waugh in a letter about his voyage from the U.S. to Mexico: “New York was 93° and felt like 193°. The Siboney packed with jewesses.” :)))
Waugh in a letter some ten years after his visit to Mexico: “The food is very nasty—an awful kind of tough pancake with a sauce that takes the skin off the tongue is the main dish—called I think ‘tamales’.” (P. lxx.)
Before settling on Robbery Under Law, Waugh intended the book to be titled Pickpocket Government (p. xlv). Even with the new title, his American publisher was “somewhat afraid of this title” and changed it to Mexico: An Object Lesson for the American edition (p. xlix).* Waugh didn't seem to mind: “They can call the book the Giant Panda for all I care.” (P. l.) :)) Another change was that some passages critical of Henry Lane Wilson, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico in 1909–13, were toned down in the U.S. edition (p. liv). There were also many minor changes in spelling and capitalization (p. 181; notably, the U.S. ed. prints acute accents on Spanish names while the U.K. ed. doesn't).
[*Editor's note 133 on p. xcii suggests that this was because Britain had by then broken off diplomatic relations with Mexico (due to the nationalization of the British oil companies) but the U.S. hadn't.]
Robbery Under Law was reprinted in 1940 by the Catholic Book Club, despite the fact that Waugh pokes fun at book clubs in his preface: readers, he says, have lately “banded themselves into book clubs so that they may be perfectly confident that whatever they read will be written with the intention of confirming their existing opinions” (p. lxxxv). :)
Waugh has some doubts whether tourism promotes international friendship: “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.” :)) (Pp. 3–4.)
About the loss of old architecture: the Mexicans “have been rather frivolous in their vandalism; they have stolen and neglected and put things to unsuitable uses, but there has been none of the systematic extermination of good architecture the Londoners have enjoyed” (p. 16).
He mentions some people who “drink cokokola” (p. 23) — a sign, I guess, that this brand was not yet known in Britain at that time. In the U.S. edition it is spelt correctly, “Coca Cola” (p. 184).
Waugh is skeptical about the Aztecs: “When I read accounts of the splendour of lost civilizations, I always remember the descriptions with which the world's press was lately full of the Imperial court at Addis Ababa.” :] (P. 29.)
He has several sour comments to the effect that Mexican nationalization of British oil provoked comparatively little protest amongst the British public because it was done by a left-wing and not a right-wing regime. “If the Japanese, or Nationalist-Spaniards, or Germans or Italians had taken our oil, then there would have been a series of meetings in the Albert Hall; but the Mexicans had a Left Book Club vocabulary.” Cárdenas's regime may have been autocratic, but “when the Mexicans saluted their bosses they raised the arm with clenched first, not with extended fingers. So they were all right; they were democrats, like ourselves and the French.” :))) (P. 46.) Waugh, like I suppose most right-wingers, refuses to recognize that left-wing totalitarianism is fundamentally good, even if horrible in practice, while right-wing totalitaranism is fundamentally evil, and that this difference is important.
“The General [Cárdenas], too, is, like all revolutionary leaders, in a somewhat ambiguous position with regard to revolutions. The crown of Spain might logically claim that all rebellion was of its nature, wrong; no subsequent government of Mexico has that right.” :)) (P. 57.)
A pleasantly cynical view of elections: “There are, in various parts of the world, various means of securing election; the candidate may buy votes in the old English way of ready money down, in the new English way of promises to pay from the public funds when elected; [. . .] the Mexicans, for the most part, prefer to leave the voting papers uncounted and draw from the lists made up at the party headquarters.” (P. 79.)
“Just as the United States earned the gratitude of the world by ‘trying out’ prohibition, so the Mexicans may be said to be trying out Marxism.” :)) (P. 80.)
When visiting the Exhibition of the Six-Year Plan [Plan Sexenal]: “Some no doubt were misled by the name Sexenal and having heard lurid stories of sexual education in the schools, were there in the hope of being shocked.” :)) (P. 98.)
Waugh remarks that “[t]his is true nearly everywhere; a great proportion of militant communists are or have been teachers [. . .] partly because there is something about the work itself which sensibly inclines the mind to bigotry” (pp. 113–14). He had worked as a teacher early in his career (1925–27); I wonder if he speaks from experience?
“There are only a few thousand native whites in Mexico” (p. 159). I guess that his ideas of what counts as white were narrower than today, but that still strikes me as an unusually small number.
The editor of the present volume provided a “Glossary of Names” with short biographies of nearly everyone mentioned in the book. I was interested to see that Cárdenas (p. 190), in spite of Waugh's gloomy, near-apocalyptic predictions, retired from office without any fuss when his term as President of Mexico expired, and had a fairly un-dramatic life for another thirty years before dying in 1970.
Two tidbits from p. 198, illustrating the instability of 19th-century Mexican politics. The biography of José de Salas (President of Mexico in 1846 and 1859) consists of a single sentence: “He did not die violently.” :)) On the same page we learn that Santa Anna was “President of Mexico on twenty-two non-consecutive occasions from 1833”.
Errors
Here are a few I've noticed:
“10s 6d” (p. xxxiv) — it makes no sense to typeset “d” as a superscript here.
“upt us” (p. xxxvii) should be “put us”.
The “Vichy malice agent” (p. li) was probably just a police agent. Perhaps a Freudian slip? :)
“that of outstanding interest” (p. lxvii) is missing an “are”.
“lamps, contain” (p. lxviii) shouldn't have the comma.
“ ‘padded ’ ” (p. 32) shouldn't have the space before the closing quotation mark.
“Chihuaha” (p. 82).
“Spanish legionnaires who had crossed into France during this period were interred.” (P. 178.) Let us hope for their sake that this is a misprint for “interned” :))
“Mactezuma” (p. 196) should probably be “Moctezuma”.
“The Russian imperial family from 1613 until 1917” (p. 198) shouldn't be in bold italics, as it isn't really a part of the name.
Not exactly an error but a deplorable editorial decision: the first edition of this
novel “italicizes Spanish words and following punctuation (e.g. ‘hacienda;’); in these cases the punctuation has been silently revised to roman” (p. 182).
Why??? Setting a punctuation mark in italic type after an italic word is exactly the way it
should be done in good-quality typesetting; unsurprisingly this practice is less common nowadays
since typesetting, like most other things, has gone down in quality. But here they had a
good example from a better age that they could have followed, and instead they've gone out
of their way to make things worse
ToRead:
• The editor's introduction lists a number of books about the Mexican oil industry and its nationalization (pp. lvii, lxiii), but it is not known whether Waugh consulted them in writing his own book. At any rate most of them seem to have been published after 1938, so they would have appeared too late for him to use.
• One book he did use was Ernest Gruening's Mexico and Its Heritage (1928), but it seems to have been a lot more favourable to Mexican revolutionary governments than Waugh was (p. lvi).
• He also used F. C. Kelley's Blood-Drenched Altars (1935), about the persecution of the catholic church in Mexico (pp. lxv–vii).
• D. H. Lawrence: The Plumed Serpent (1926). A novel depicting “the revival of a pre-Christian religion with Aztec overtones” by Mexican revolutionaries (p. 166). Mentioned by Waugh on p. 6. I had some bad experiences with Lawrence's travel writing many years ago (see my post from back then), but perhaps I should give his fiction another chance.
Labels: books, Evelyn Waugh, nonfiction, travel
posted by ill-advised at 8:42 PM
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