The Lost, Unlovable Evelyn Waugh

Illustration by Lilli Carre.

Tory, class apologist, snob, born-again Catholic, anti-Semite, admirer of Mussolini and Franco, employer in the mid-1960s of a Victorian ear trumpet, and general Pooterish misanthrope, Arthur Evelyn (?Eve-? like ?Christmas Eve?) St. John (?Sin-jin,? like in Mad Men) Waugh (?waw,? as a British person might say ?war?) is a difficult man to love. And yet his novels?with one notable exception?have never been out of print. In fact, they are being reissued this very month in print, audio, and, for the first time, digital editions. Just in time for America to revisit Waugh?s warm appraisal of the British upper crust before reigniting our own love of same come January, when Downton Abbey?s third season is set to air.

Waugh?s career is generally divided in two: the satiric and somewhat more cynical work of his early years, and the ?Catholic? work of his later, with Brideshead Revisited the purplish dividing line between. He?s lauded for his humor and for the stylishness of his prose, which is precise and elegant even when parroting the idiom of the day (?shy-making,? ?wet,? ?shaming,? ?righto,? and so on). But these plaudits usually come with an asterisk, thanks to Waugh?s snobbishness and dogmatic beliefs. ?Add to this the fact that he?s been effusively praised by some of the wrong people (Clive James, William F. Buckley) and criticized by some of the right ones (Edmund Wilson, George Orwell), and Waugh?s endurance seems almost surprising. ?

But style and substance aren?t as separable as some might hope: Inside the grotesquerie, energy, and wit for which Waugh is admired hides the despair that prompted his less than attractive temperament. At base, Waugh was out of sympathy with the modern world. His ideal society was located earlier, somewhere in the 13^th century or thereabouts, while around him?as he despaired in A Handful of Dust??a whole Gothic world had come to grief ? there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled.? So Waugh retreated into two types of eccentricity: romanticism, and the stabilizing force of Catholic dogma. The first made him merely an anti-modern snob?looking backward even as Modernism demonstrated what was ahead?and is, to readers today, more or less forgivable. The second, ensuring in his later novels a sense of supernatural as fact and insistence on salvation, is not.

Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930, shortly after the annulment of his unfortuitous marriage, to Evelyn (?Ev-? like ?every?) Gardner, but the decision was intellectual: He claimed to find the world ?unintelligible and unendurable without God.? (He?d attempted to drown himself at sea some years earlier, but was stung by a jellyfish and turned back.) He also reportedly enjoyed the limits religion imposed on behavior?for he had been a bit of a Bright Young Thing himself. ?Conversion,? he wrote to Edward Sackville-West, ?is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made.? It was this real world he sought to document, while modern novelists, he thought, tried ?to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character?that of being God?s creature.?

Conversion was fairly common in the England of Waugh?s day, as were Catholic novelists?though many, with the exception of Waugh and his close contemporary Graham Greene, have been forgotten. Today, Catholic writers?those with a good reputation as writers among both Catholics and non-, and who write ?openly? as such?are rare. Even the writing of Catholics like Hilary Mantel, David Lodge, and, I guess, Dean Koontz, isn?t much occupied with ?being God?s creature.? (Marilynne Robinson is an extraordinary exception.) There are several reasons for this. Not only has Catholicism positioned itself as an antagonist to culture generally, retreating more and more into conservative and untenable positions, but a largely secular intellectual culture has arrived at the reasonable consensus that religious morality is just too simplistic for art. Religion imposes undue limits on literature, and religious fiction, where it exists, too easily becomes garish, saccharine, or just plain bad. Perhaps because belief in the novel?as James Wood has suggested?must be contingent where that of religion is absolute, and this, perversely, is what makes fiction ?believable??that it doesn?t demand to be believed.

Even in Waugh?s time, Catholics were political and cultural outsiders in England. By electing to become one, Waugh both cemented and justified the outr? position he?d built himself through satire. Brideshead is his first novel in which Catholicism?especially through Ryder?s conversion, suggested at the end?is presented as a way out of the modern. By attaching himself to something ancient, Waugh was able to remain conservative even as Modernism, as he saw it, led the rest of history astray. (Joyce ?ends up a lunatic,? he once said; he abhorred Picasso, plastics, and jazz.) A man committed to the defense of a nonexistent world, he loved nothing so much as a unicorn.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=e4e6f30a89c8b8c6e71f935ef16eb31d

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