In terms of the breadth of his popularity, Evelyn Waugh has probably not fared as well as some of his literary contemporaries who achieved distinction in the mid-20th century. This may not have surprised him, given how much time he spent bemoaning the societal changes which were accelerating in the decades before his death in 1966. These changes included the decline of the aristocratic way of life, the elevation of politics and secular political ideologies to a position of pre-eminence, and, above all else, the decline of the Christian religion which alone had given hope to an author who was permanently plagued by melancholy and misanthropy.
Occasional revivals in popularity due to adaptations of his work—most notably, that which followed the release of the glorious ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited in 1981—will always continue. But there is far more to Waugh than first meets the eye, and no matter how great the gulf between his era and ours, readers who delve into his work can discover not only a supremely gifted literary craftsman, but an extraordinary soul and intellect as well.
Man as an exile
The novels which made the young Evelyn Waugh famous, namely Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, continue to attract much admiration, and yet they are the products of a very different mindset to that which emerged following his conversion to Catholicism in 1930.
Born into an upper-middle class family and given the conventional private education common to his class, Waugh’s college career at Oxford was more noteworthy for his social exploits than any academic accomplishments. The stories told within his first two novels are an exaggeration of his own frivolous early life, including his undistinguished spell as a schoolmaster and the raucous and routine gatherings which dominates the story in the book which marked his full emergence as a literary star, “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John’s Wood… all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies.”
It is hard to know the extent to which disillusionment with a life of socialising and social climbing led to this change in his outlook, and the degree to which it was a result of the collapse of his marriage after his wife’s affair. Despair and ennui were already firmly established aspects of his personality long before this public humiliation: so much so that his early memoirs conclude with a failed suicide attempt.
There is a dark, biting satire in all of Waugh’s work, and though it never vanished completely it is all the more obvious in his first two works where characters traffic prostitutes across the Atlantic and where a London gossip columnist decides to gas himself after failing to gain entry to a major party.
Those who know of Waugh’s personality are often prone to exaggerate his acidic temperament, but there is no doubt that he was difficult to live with. The infamous story of Waugh delightfully consuming his family’s entire supply rationed bananas in front of his open-mouthed children is much-publicised, as is the fact that he organised parties to celebrate his children’s return to boarding school at the end of each holiday.
For the protagonist in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, one of the most heavily autobiographical figures in all his work, the children’s holidays were a traumatic time when a liberal amount of alcohol and medication was called for—for there was “a special need for unconsciousness at night and for stimulated geniality by day.”
Less amusing are the words in Waugh’s own diary entry in 1946:
The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression. I do not see them until luncheon, as I have my breakfast alone in the library, and they are in fact well trained to avoid my part of the house; but I am aware of them from the moment I wake.
His acceptance of Catholicism—Waugh wrote that ‘acceptance’ was a better word than ‘conversion’ in explaining how he had come to Rome—affected his writing in significant ways, including the injection of a greater moral seriousness. Not only did the stories he wrote change, so too did how the characters behaved. Upon his reception into the Church, Waugh himself wrote that he saw mankind’s choice as being between “Christianity and Chaos,” and after an atheistic and hedonistic youth he had decisively chosen the former. As English Literature Professor Michael Gorra has written, “Catholicism for him made the world comprehensible. It redeemed man from his spiritual poverty and gave him the soul Waugh’s characters had so conspicuously lacked.” Waugh’s gloomy disposition did not change dramatically, however, as is obvious both from the accounts of his life and from any examination of his work.
When preparing to write his most political book, Robbery Under Law, Waugh travelled to Mexico. What he saw of the revolutionary socialist government filled him with contempt. Surveying the damage which the regime had done to both the religious and economic wellbeing of the Mexican people, Waugh proclaimed his belief in that novel that “man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth.” No earthly ideology or programme of reform could fix this essential problem.
Unlike so many of the leading novelists writing during that period—like his friends Graham Greene and George Orwell, or the American writers Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck—he was never tempted to embrace socialism of any variety. And he was similarly unimpressed by the UK’s Conservative Party, and refrained from voting.
Politics itself, or more specifically the view that salvation lay within it, was the frequent target for his ire. At the beginning of Waugh’s extraordinary World War Two trilogy, Sword of Honour, the depressed Catholic aristocrat Guy Crouchback is living in self-imposed exile in Italy. Though he knows that Nazi Germany is evil, he cannot muster any enthusiasm to take part in a fight where Soviet Communists would be Britain’s allies. Everything is clarified by the news that Hitler and Stalin had come together to assault Poland, and now all that was wicked in the modern world could be fought against at once.
“[S]plendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome, there was a place for him in that battle,” Waugh wrote.
What sets this semi-biographical account apart from other novels set against the backdrop of the war is that the hero’s sense of disillusionment increases as the story moves closer to Britain’s victory, on account of how both Waugh and his alter ego viewed the occupation of Eastern and Central Europe by the Communists as a betrayal of entire nations which was nothing to celebrate. This failure to achieve real progress through military or political struggle hardly surprised him
Waugh’s disdain for politics is seen even more clearly in Helena, which was Waugh’s favourite novel. In it, the mother of Emperor Constantine finds herself living at the centre of her son’s great empire. Instead of being impressed, this convert to the Faith was utterly appalled by the power politics preventing her son from doing as she had done and seeking baptism. Here, Waugh is at his most shamelessly didactic, as Helena provides a warning that chimes perfectly with his own criticisms of 20th century politics:
I have a terrible dream of the future. Not now, but presently, people may forget their loyalty to their kings and emperors and take power for themselves. Instead of letting one victim bear this frightful curse they will take it all on themselves, each one of them. Think of the misery of a whole world possessed of Power without Grace.
To the author’s disappointment, Helena was not the success he believed it would be—possibly due to the more direct approach of an author firmly making a point with which his readers likely did not concur. Yet the point is well made nonetheless. Just as the heroine departs the Imperial capital searching for the True Cross in order to refocus society’s attention towards the truth, Waugh saw the Cross as the only source of hope and was determined to direct his readers towards it.
Seeing the world through Catholic eyes
Catholic writers are sometimes criticised for bringing their religious views into their writing to an excessive degree: George Orwell, for example, was harshly critical of G.K. Chesterton for this reason. This was a charge that Waugh was familiar with, and which he acknowledged was partially true, explaining in his coreligionists’ defence that “the Catholic’s life is bounded and directed by his creed at every turn and reminders of this fact may well prove tedious to his Protestant or agnostic neighbours.”
Punctilious in his religious practice though he was, Waugh’s temperament brought with it challenges when it came to the communal aspect of his religion: as he wrote self-critically of Gilbert Pinfold, the “tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion, sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom.”
That being said, from his conversion on, Waugh consistently highlighted the persecution of the Church, and some of his best and least appreciated work focuses on this topic. In 1935, Waugh’s biography of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion brought renewed attention not just to the priest who would eventually be canonised, but to the history of the Elizabethan persecutions.
Brilliantly structured and written with a convert’s zeal, rather than questioning the need for outright resistance to Protestant rule as others had done, Waugh provided a strong defence of the uncompromising approach adopted by Pope Pius V in excommunicating Elizabeth I, arguing that this Pope perhaps understood “that it was only through blood and hatred and derision that the faith was one day to return to England.”
Anti-Catholic persecution aroused Waugh’s indignation just as the experience of those undergoing such treatment attracted his sincere admiration. A student of history, he clearly recognised that however painful, measures to repress the Catholic Faith tended to bind together the community more closely while often purifying it from within.
In 1939, British businessmen who had suffered due to the nationalisation of Mexico’s oil industry paid Waugh to travel to the country and write about the situation there. While diligently carrying out his work in criticising the government’s economic policies, Waugh’s Robbery Under Law zoned in on what he saw as the real problem: the government’s campaign to stamp out Catholicism by attacking the priesthood and discouraging Mexican families from raising their children in the Faith.
As in Campion’s day, Waugh saw that this was having the “normal result of producing a priesthood of intense devotion,” and this was supplemented by a lay-led underground movement which continued to shield priests and direct the campaign of disobedience in resisting government propaganda.
In Campion, Waugh had already argued that the Reformation had brought about a lasting change in the Church, whose leadership came to differ greatly from that which existed in the Renaissance era. “The Popes were no longer patrons of art;” he wrote, “their revenues were directed into strictly practical channels, to build missions and to subsidise theological colleges; their entourage ceased to be courtiers and connoisseurs, but was composed, instead, of soft-footed, bureaucratic clergymen; no buffoon was kept in the Vatican after the Council of Trent to remind the Pontiff of his human follies, instead at his elbow there was always a confessor.”
Waugh’s critics occasionally take aim at his outright admiration for the upper-class, and his two greatest works—Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour—focus on that rare breed of English Catholic aristocrat. In Waugh’s memorable phrase, the small group of distinguished recusant families had “suffered for their Faith and yet retained a round share of material greatness.” This is important: Waugh admires their wealth and high culture, but there is something more to them, and it is that—not their money—which makes the Marchmain family in Brideshead and the Crouchback family of Sword of Honour so compelling.
Waugh’s war trilogy blends fact and fiction very appropriately when it comes to the religious issue. Like his alter ego Guy Crouchback, Waugh served in a liaison role in Yugoslavia towards the end of the war, and he did all he could to raise the alarm at government level about Marshal Tito’s Communist partisans. His report on “Church and State in Liberated Croatia” accurately predicted what would unfold if they came to power, and perceptively noted the difference between how Eastern Orthodox churches would fare under the new regime (given their long history of subservience to Caesar) compared to the Catholic Church.
In his preface to a new edition of Edmund Campion, published after the war, he directly linked Campion’s experience to that of the priests of Croatia and other countries undergoing “the transformation of great territories of Christendom into atheist police States.” He continued: “The haunted, trapped, murdered priest is our contemporary and Campion’s voice sounds to us across the centuries as though he were walking at our elbow.”
Much the same could be written today, and Waugh’s Catholicism was never more obviously felt than when he was acting on behalf of others enduring oppression, as just like Guy Crouchback, he could never escape his sense of obligation towards them and the need to act in their defence.
Given the depth of his religious feeling, it is not surprising that Waugh’s Catholic novels contained a level of literary genius which exceeded that contained in his other works. Brideshead Revisited was an enormous success when it was published in 1945, including in the United States, where there was strong interest in adapting it for the big screen. Though offered a considerable sum for the rights (and though always eager for revenue to support an excessively lavish lifestyle), Waugh declined the opportunity, complaining that those who would be involved in the screenwriting and production process saw Brideshead “purely as a love story,” and adding that “[n]one of them see the theological implication.”
Waugh’s wisdom in insisting on a faithful adaptation or no adaptation at all was proved correct fifteen years after his death, when ITV produced an 11-episode series which received critical acclaim and brought Brideshead to a new generation and audience. Its extraordinary success—The Guardian later ranked the show as the second greatest TV drama of all time—was down to many factors, including the brilliant cast that included Jeremy Irons and Laurence Olivier, the stunning cinematography, and the beautiful score.
The producers of the television series were also fortunate in the timing of the series. Brideshead is a deeply nostalgic drama which Waugh conceived against the backdrop of wartime deprivation, where the narrator reflects on the beauty and plenty of the pre-war era in abnormally ornate language. When the television series was aired in the midst of major social and economic strife in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, it struck a chord with a public eager to reminisce about a time when Great Britain was great indeed.
But above all else, Brideshead Revisited was a stunning success because of how those involved in the project faithfully adhered to the text of the story as written by the creator. Gifted with world-class prose, they chose to leave this precious material intact, and the dialogue in many of the scenes is taken almost verbatim from the novel. By doing this, they preserved the central theme of the story as succinctly described by Waugh himself: “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.”
Even in a much more secular age than that in which the story was first written, the makers of the 1981 series had the humility to adapt a religious story without inserting their own beliefs where they felt the author’s ones had grown outdated. Compare this with the 2001 television movie adaptation of Sword of Honour, starring Daniel Craig. Even allowing for the difficulties in compressing a much longer novel into a much shorter space of time, this mediocre production was to a significant extent the result of the filmmakers deliberately distorting Waugh’s text to minimise the religious element of the story.
In this movie, Guy Crouchback’s listlessness before the war and disillusionment with the war’s outcome is not properly portrayed, and his motivations in wishing to fight Nazism and Communism together are not accurately explained. Major parts of the narrative involving confessional scenes, Guy’s wife’s conversion, and the intensification of his nephew’s religious devotion whilst in captivity are left out, and much of this has nothing to do with spatial constraints.
Consider the scene in the first novel when Guy meets his ex-wife, Virginia, who deserted him, and when she enquires as to why he never remarried:
“Catholics can’t remarry, you know,” Guy says.
“Oh, that. You still keep to all that?” Virginia asks.
“More than ever,” Guy replies.
In the film, Virginia’s question about whether Guy still adheres to his religion is answered quite differently: “Well I haven’t had much of an option.” There is no good reason for this change. It mutilates Waugh’s text, but on a deeper level, it and all the other watering down which was done rewrite the entire story: changing it from one in which Catholicism is fundamental to one in which Catholicism is merely incidental.
Twenty years on, we can still hope that Sword of Honour will be brought to the big screen, but aside from the challenges involved in such a large-scale production, there is little prospect in the current climate that Waugh’s trilogy would be brought to a mainstream audience in a manner that did justice to his creation. For now, we can only rediscover the story in literary form, and this is more than enough.
Order’s abandonment
Waugh’s final years were marked by ill health of both a physical and mental variety, but there was another darkness which crept in during his last decade which darkened those years considerably. Even before the Second Vatican Council was summoned into being, Waugh had observed with growing concern changes taking place within the Catholic Church, beginning with changes to the Easter liturgy—the most sacred of all Catholic liturgical events—under Pope Pius XII.
In his biography of Monsignor Ronald Knox, published in 1959 within two years of the priest’s death, Waugh reflected on the changes which Knox himself had seen take place: “He lived to see the Roman Church abandon many of the features he emulated as an Anglican. He saw the relaxation of the eucharistic fast and the irruption of the laity into the liturgy; he saw ecclesiastical architects turn their backs on the Mediterranean and follow the stark proletarian fashions of the north.”
In the years that followed this, the pace of change accelerated with Mass in the vernacular quickly becoming the norm, to the horror of Waugh. Before considering why this disturbed him so greatly, it is important to examine what drew the previously non-believing Waugh towards the Roman Church, and away from the Anglicanism in which he was raised and schooled.
Though a self-described aesthete, the beauty and ceremony which attracts some converts were not high on Waugh’s agenda. He had flirted with Anglo-Catholicism in his boyhood, but the ease with which he had abandoned these beliefs suggested such considerations were relatively unimportant. As Waugh himself wrote, in England it was the Protestant established church which was the more visually and culturally attractive.
“In England the pull is all the other way,” he explained in an essay titled Come Inside. “The medieval cathedrals and churches, the rich ceremonies that surround the monarchy, the historic titles of Canterbury and York, the social organisation of the country parishes, the traditional culture of Oxford and Cambridge, the liturgy composed in the heyday of English prose style—all these are the property of the Church of England, while Catholics meet in modern buildings, often of deplorable design, and are usually served by simple Irish missionaries.”
Moreover, as a Catholic, Waugh demonstrated little affection for elaborate ecclesiastical ceremonies. As his friend and biographer Christopher Sykes noted, he tended to become bored at High Mass and would opt for a Low Mass alternative where possible. He had little interest in music and he disliked Gregorian chant. Yet long before he converted he had believed that the Catholic Church was uniquely important. “It was possible that all were wrong, that the whole Christian revelation was an imposture or a misconception. But if the Christian revelation was true, then the Church was the society founded by Christ and all other bodies were only good so far as they had salvaged something from the wrecks of the Great Schism and the Reformation,” Waugh wrote.
Changes to the Mass as it had been celebrated for centuries—changes which appeared to water down the distinctions between Catholicism and Protestantism, which Waugh always seemed to regard as a risible social ritual—disturbed him greatly, and this disturbance can be viewed in the context of his two most memorable creations.
At the end of Brideshead Revisited, the narrator finds that though Brideshead Castle is deserted and the family scattered, the chapel is once more in use, with a small red flame burning before the tabernacle. Likewise, at the beginning of Sword of Honour, the reader is also presented with a similar image of a great Catholic family whose social position has declined, before being reassured that the “sanctuary lamp still burned at Broome as of old.”
The importance of this constancy extended far beyond the recusant minority in his own country. In his 1930s travel book Remote People, Waugh expresses joy at encountering a convent in Uganda: “this little island of order and sweetness in an ocean of rank barbarity… they were singing the offices just as they had been sung in Europe when the missions were little radiant points of learning and decency in a pagan wilderness.”
This was not a backward-looking belief, but one centred on a vision of an ever-lasting Church placed within a decaying world. In a short story entitled Out of Depth, written in the early 1930s, Waugh had even imagined a character being transported forward to a 25th century London, where he wandered about in an unrecognisable environment before finally encountering a priest saying Mass. Here at last was familiarity, “something that twenty-five centuries had not altered, of his own childhood which survived the age of the world.”
These changes were playing out in the 1960s against the broader societal backdrop of major cultural changes which filled Waugh with unease and disgust. Not only did the liturgical changes turn mere attendance at Mass into what he called “a bitter trial,” but the Council Fathers’ broader intention to open the Church up to the world was not welcomed by an ageing and ever more solitary author.
Before the Council even began, Waugh put it best in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold when he wrote that “when the leaders of his Church were exhorting their people to emerge from the catacombs… Mr. Pinfold burrowed ever deeper into the rock.” Regardless of whether the Mass had been changed, for good reasons and bad, he would likely have felt that an opening up of the institution he so cherished to a world which he often despised was at best a dangerous and unwise process.
A lifetime away, and yet so near
There is no bad time to read a truly great novelist. In some minor respects, Waugh’s work does appear outdated on a superficial level, as in some ways it did during his own lifetime. Looking back at Brideshead years after its release, Waugh reflected that much of the book felt like “a panegyric preached over an empty coffin.”
The world had changed, but not nearly as much as he had feared it would change when he was writing Brideshead at the close of the war. Crucially though, in the years since 1945, the story told in Brideshead had lost none of its importance. The same is true now for all of Waugh’s work, and it will be true for all time.
