Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Put Out More Flags

Put Out More Flags (1942) is an often very funny satire by Evelyn Waugh about a bunch of silly, upper-middle-class Brits not quite facing the coming war (WWII). I understand that many of the characters appeared in other Waugh books, including the mc Basil Seal, who is one hilariously annoying nitwit with a self-serving edge. I laughed aloud at times, and enjoyed it thoroughly throughout, though it may not be quite the best book I have read from him, but it is still funny and relevant to today. And as a picture of naivete facing disaster, at the advent of the Blitz, it could be a group of apolitical, naive twits from any country.

And don't you just love that title: What do the upper-middle class do to prove they are patriotic? Put Out More Flags!

Basil Seal is in his early thirties, and without work or direction. He is having an affair with a rich married woman who--like his mother--bails him out on a regular basis. And there are many other women with whom he has had affairs. He's a fun guy, a party guy. Mum wants him to get a good cushy job in the coming war that might set him up for some kind of “future,” but of course no person in this class wants to actually go into combat, nuh uh! Basil weasels himself into the Ministry of Information, specifically Military Security, though he knows nothing about these things and none of us would trust him with buttering our toast, much less helping with military security. One thing Seal is assigned to do is to help find support for refugee children, so when he finds three brats, he uses them to extract money from people who pay him not to be forced to house them.

Plenty of artists and intellectuals, who talk a great game, get satirized, including an avant-garde artist, Poppet Green, and two poets, Parsnip and Pimpernel, meant to be W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who both left the country at the war’s outset for the U.S. Waugh makes fun of many blowhards who insist they know that Hitler will never attack England, and so on. They called it the Bore War, or the Phony War, in 1939.

But of course things get more serious very quickly when Hitler goes all in and Neville Chamberlain declares war, and all the buffoons have to finally begin shutting up. Even Basil seems to change his tune, in a way; as he says to his mother,

“There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.”

Uh oh! Watch out, Hitler! Basil's coming!

A funny book in our time of endless war. Bertie Wooster with a more serious political edge.