Robbery Under Law

by Evelyn Waugh

In Robbery Under Law, subtitled 'The Mexican Object Lesson', Waugh presents a profoundly unpeaceful Mexican situation as a cautionary tale in which a once great civilisation - greater than the United States at the turn of the twentieth century - has succumbed, within the space of a single generation, to barbarism.

Genres: Travel, History, Nonfiction, British Literature

286 pages

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers; it was all we were taught, really.” He went on to Hertford College, Oxford, where he read History. When asked if he took up any sports there he quipped, “I drank for Hertford.”

In 1924 Waugh left Oxford without taking his degree. After inglorious stints as a school teacher (he was dismissed for trying to seduce a school matron and/or inebriation), an apprentice cabinet maker and journalist, he wrote and had published his first novel, “Decline and Fall” in 1928.

In 1928 he married Evelyn Gardiner. She proved unfaithful, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Waugh would derive parts of “A Handful of Dust” from this unhappy time. His second marriage to Audrey Herbert lasted the rest of his life and begat seven children. It was during this time that he converted to Catholicism.

During the thirties Waugh produced one gem after another. From this decade come: “Vile Bodies” (1930), “Black Mischief” (1932), the incomparable “A Handful of Dust” (1934) and “Scoop” (1938). After the Second World War he published what is for many his masterpiece, “Brideshead Revisited,” in which his Catholicism took centre stage. “The Loved One” a scathing satire of the American death industry followed in 1947. After publishing his “Sword of Honour Trilogy” about his experiences in World War II - “Men at Arms” (1952), “Officers and Gentlemen” (1955), “Unconditional Surrender" (1961) - his career was seen to be on the wane. In fact, “Basil Seal Rides Again” (1963) - his last published novel - received little critical or commercial attention.

Evelyn Waugh, considered by many to be the greatest satirical novelist of his day, died on 10 April 1966 at the age of 62.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_W...

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Let me, then, warn the reader that I was a Conservative when I went to Mexico and that everything I saw there strengthened my opinions. I believe that man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth; that his chances of happiness and virtue, here, remain more or less constant through the centuries and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives; that the balance of good and ill tends to revert to a norm; that sudden changes of physical condition are usually ill, and are advocated by the wrong people for the wrong reasons; that the intellectual communists of today have personal, irrelevant grounds for their antagonism to society, which they are trying to exploit. I believe in government; that men cannot live together without rules but that these should be kept at the barest minimum of safety; that there is no form of government ordained from God as being better than any other; 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. I believe in nationality; not in terms of race or of divine commissions for world conquest, but simply this: mankind inevitably organises itself into communities according to its geographical distribution; these communities by sharing a common history develop common characteristics and inspire a local loyalty; the individual family develops most happily and fully when it accepts these natural limits. I do not think that British prosperity must necessarily be inimical to anyone else, but if, on occasions, it is, I want Britain to prosper and not her rivals. I believe that war and conquest are inevitable; that is how history has been made and that is how it will develop. I believe that Art is a natural function of man; it so happens that most of the greatest art has appeared under systems of political tyranny, but I do not think it has a connection with any particular system, least of all with representative government, as nowadays in England, America and France it seems popular to believe; artists have always spent some of their spare time in flattering the governments under whom they live, so it is natural that, at the moment, English, American and French artists should be volubly democratic."

With this credo, Waugh ventured briefly into Mexico in 1939 to write about life there under the Leftist government of President Lázaro Cárdenas. The recent expropriation of British and American owned oil companies, which triggered Britain's suspension of diplomatic relations, was only one of the subjects under Waugh's critical lens. With brilliant rhetorical skill, he makes contentious, and at times chauvinistic, arguments for the merits of Spanish imperial rule over the "lawlessness" of Mexican independence, the beneficence of Catholicism over indigenous "paganism," and the economic progress of the Porfirato over the "corrupted" ideals of the revolution.

This is a polemical book that reveals as much about the author as the country he visited; it is witty, judgmental, arrogant, consistent with his conservative credo and quite fascinating.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just because a writer is an exceptional novelist, it does not follow that he or she is also an astute economist or politician. Evelyn Waugh's Robbery under law: The Mexican object-lesson is a rather objectionable hatchet job. In his book, Waugh is so outraged by Lazaro Cardenas's nationalization of the Anglo-American oil industry in Mexico that I cannot help but think he was an investor who lost money.

I read a little more than half the book before I decided I had better things to do than finish the book, including clipping my toenails. Poor Mexico has been hauled over the coals by too many foreigners who have never bothered to acquaint themselves with the country or its people.

Consequently, I will continue to love Waugh's fiction, but I will have my head examined before reading any polemics written by him.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

[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.)

[Graychin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in the late 1930s, with WWII on the horizon, this is less a travel book than a political screed and a case study in social decline. While I generally agree with Waugh’s politics, I have to say this doesn’t make for the most enjoyable reading. Perhaps I came to the book with the wrong expectations. Even so, I think I learned more about Mexican history from a single chapter of this book than I was ever taught in school, which points out some embarrassing gaps in my education.

[The American Conservative]

'It could plausibly be argued that the whole of Russell Kirk is contained in a single section from one of Waugh’s supreme masterpieces, Robbery Under Law, where he holds up to his most blistering ridicule the Jacobin gangster regime that had already terrorized Mexico for a generation.'

Read the full profile, "Casualties of Waugh," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Adam DeVille, Ph.D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the very few of Waugh's books never to be reprinted in his lifetime. He was not much interested in it afterwards in part because its subject, politics, was one that bored him relentlessly. Still, the book is worth reading if only for the introduction where Waugh lays out a compelling "Augustinian" anthropology and political imaginary the truth of which have only grown since the early 20th century when he first wrote.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

Passages of prose that are well up to Waugh's normal altitudinous standard are weakened by long tiresome discussions of the oil industry.