More Waugh

Fr Tim Finigan has posted a link to this interview with Evelyn Waugh on his blog. It's full of wonderful one-liners, mainly because he seems to go out of his way to avoid two-line answers. The only time he really gets carried away is when talking about Helena and the True Cross.

I particularly enjoyed his answers about Oxford.

When asked why he chose to go to Hertford College, he replied: "They paid me."

When asked why he got a bad Third he gave an even briefer answer: "Sloth."

"What did you do at Oxford?" the interviewer asked. 

"Enjoyed myself," he replied.

Edmund Campion: Scholar, Priest, Hero, Martyr

The novel is the genre of our age, so much so that other forms of writing are often quietly ignored. However, it was not all that long ago that literature meant so much more than fiction. So, for example, I wonder how often Waugh's wonderful biography of Edmund Campion appears on reading lists alongside Brideshead Revisited and The Sword of Honour trilogy (which, incidentally, is BBC Radio 4's current classic serial).

In his preface, Waugh writes: "There is great need for a complete, scholar's work on the subject. This is not it. All I have done is select the incidents which strike a novelist as important, and relate them in a single narrative." For Waugh himself, there seemed to be little difference between his work as a novelist and his work as a biographer.

But what of the book itself?

There are some wonderful passages, as you might imagine. Take this one on Pope Pius V's excommunication of Queen Elizabeth: "It is possible that one of his more worldly predecessors might have acted differently, or at another season, but it was the pride and slight embarrassment of the Church that, as has happened from time to time in her history, the See of Peter was at this moment occupied by a saint."

Or this one describing Campion's prayers in the moments before his execution: "They called to him to pray in English, but he replied with great mildness that 'he would pray God in a language which they both well understood.'" The glory of that put-down is Campion's rather than Waugh's but it could so easily have been a phrase used in a Waugh novel.

In the edition of the book which I have, the subtitle is "Scholar, Priest, Hero, Martyr". I see that's been changed to "Jesuit and Martyr" in the Penguin Classics edition. The former follows the pattern of Waugh's chapter headings. I wonder which subtitle is the one Waugh would have wanted.

Waugh, Wine and Brideshead Revisited

Arguably the most interesting magazine currently being published in the UK is Standpoint. April's edition, which I'm still working my way through, was particularly fascinating. I won't go through the main articles but just want to draw attention to one piece that is tucked away at the end of the magazine.

It's an article about the use of wine in Brideshead Revisited, an apparently insignificant topic that reveals quite a lot about Waugh and his great novel. Though the article's anonymous author doesn't quite spell out the link with the Eucharist, it is clear that wine has a sacramental value in the novel that takes us far beyond mere social commentary. There's a great deal to mull over here, perhaps with glass in hand.

Fr Tim Finigan on Evelyn Waugh's 'Vile Bodies'

As so often, Fr Tim Finigan has an amusing and informative post on his blog, this time on Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies.

More Thoughts on Catholicism and the Novel

As I mentioned in a previous post, Georg Lukács famously claimed that the novel was "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." But does this stand up to examination?

It's easy to assume that 19th Century Realist novels (and their 20th Century Modernist successors) define the genre. With their focus on the individual in this world alone, Eliot, Hardy, Woolf et al certainly seem to have written epics of a world abandoned by God.

However, it doesn't take long to find another way of looking at the novel. We have, for instance, just celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens, an author who (according to G.K. Chesterton) was heir to a different tradition that stretched back through Shakespeare to Chaucer and other great pre-Reformation authors.

As Flannery O'Connor once wisely noted in 'Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction': "All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality."

I would argue that some of the novelists of the 19th Century did a wonderful job of describing this world but only at the cost of restricting their vision of reality.

So where are the novelists to whom Flannery O'Connor's words apply? Muriel Spark, a Catholic convert, is a good example.

According to one critic: "[It] is as parables concerning the nature of reality that her novels must be read. In them reality exists simultaneously on several different planes. Most often and most easily observed is the naturalistic level, a term used here to refer to the ordinary or commonplace world characterized by unremarkable people who lead routine lives. The naturalistic level is presented with absolute clarity and reality. Less easily understood is the author's presentation of the supernatural level, which frequently interrupts and alters the naturalistic plane."

And later she adds: "Muriel Spark … emerges as a novelist whose themes are religious, even if they are not always couched in traditionally religious terms…. [The] author is acutely aware not only of the world of man, but also of the world of God and the incongruity between the two. The world of man is represented by the naturalistic surface of her novels which realistically depicts the commonplace lives of the characters. The world of God is represented by the extraordinary and inexplicable happenings which disrupt that surface. Both are quite real. They are complementary parts of a whole and rich reality…."

It is perhaps no surprise that Muriel Spark still does not receive the acclaim she deserves. Unless writing about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, many commentators simply don't know what to make of her. She doesn't quite fit into the tradition of the novel as popularly conceived.

But, of course, she's not alone. There have been plenty of other novelists who wrote about what Evelyn Waugh called, in his 1959 preface to Brideshead Revisited, "the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters".

It's also worth pointing out that the world of the novel has changed out of all recognition since Lukács wrote The Theory of the Novel in 1920 (and even since Leavis wrote The Great Tradition in 1948) Both Magic Realism and Postmodernism in their different ways have disrupted the Realist tradition. Novelists now have to be open to wider possibilities, even the possibility of faith.

Waugh in Context

There's an interesting article by Paul Johnson in the January/February edition of Standpoint on 'Novelists at arms'. It dwells slightly too much for my taste on the inspiration for Waugh's characters in The Sword of Honour trilogy, but it does at least put Evelyn Waugh's novels about World War II in some sort of literary context.

I'd want to take this contextual analysis further. Johnson doesn't mention Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse 5, for example, let alone the perspective of other nationalities. Mo Yan's Red Sorghum (and even J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun) gives a much needed Chinese perspective on the wars of the 1930s and 40s. But you can't have everything and what he gives us is well worth reading.

Evelyn Waugh and the Mass; OUP and the Catholic Tradition

There have been some interesting reviews in the last two editions of The Catholic Herald. In the December edition, Joseph Pearce wrote a review article on the updated edition of A Bitter Trial, Evelyn Waugh's responses to the liturgical innovations of his last years. As I wrote last year, Waugh now seems remarkably prescient and this book sets out his views admirably.


And then, in the Christmas edition, Aidan Nichols favourably reviewed a new anthology of English Catholic writing, published by Oxford University Press and edited by John Morrill, John Saward and Michael Tomko: Firmly I Believe and Truly. 

This looks like a great book and my only reservation is the start date: 1483. I understand the practical constraints - the anthology runs to over 700 pages as it is - but, nonetheless, many centuries of Catholic England and many great Catholic writers go unexplored in this, as in so many other, anthologies. But I mustn't be churlish: this looks as though it's a must-have anthology.

Evelyn Waugh's Short Stories

Evelyn Waugh's short stories are a little patchy in quality but they are still definitely worth owning and teaching. Some, like 'The Man Who Liked Dickens', are rightly regarded as masterpieces but others are less well-known.

'Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future', for example, is not his best story but its subject matter is incredibly relevant in contemporary Britain and, as you would expect from Waugh, it has some great satirical moments.

The story follows Miles Mountjoy, an orphan brought up by the state and subjected to "Constructive Play" and psychonalysis every Friday, who becomes a pyromanaic. Fortunately for him, in "New Britain ... there are no criminals. There are only the victims of inadequate social services." He is therefore rehabilitated rather than punished, before being given a plum job with the Department of Euthanasia:

"Euthanasia had not been part of the original 1945 Health Service; it was a Tory measure designed to attract votes from the aged and mortally sick. Under the Bevan-Eden Coalition the service came into general use and won instant popularity. The Union of Teachers was pressing for its application to difficult children."

In the department he falls in love with Clara, an ex-ballet dancer whose sterilisation has had unexpected side-effects (she has grown a beard) and he slowly learns to become human:

"For Miles, child of the State, Sex had been part of the curriculum at every stage of his education; first in diagrams, then in demonstrations, then in application, he had mastered all the antics of procreation. Love was a word seldom used except by politicians and by them only in moments of pure fatuity. Nothing that he had been taught prepared him for Clara."

Events start to spiral out of control at Santa-Claus-tide (because Christmas, of course, has been abolished) but I won't spoil the ending here.

Evelyn Waugh is sometimes characterised as a conservative throwback, a man who was out of touch, but, in fact, as this story shows, he was not just remarkably acute but also remarkably prescient. 

Another story which now now seems more visionary than it would have done in the years immediately after Waugh's death is 'Out of Depth', which was written shortly after his conversion. Drawing upon the tradition of H G Wells and Conan Doyle and, more directly, on John Gray's Park, it tells the story of two men who, after a drunken night out, are sent back and forward in time to "recover the garnered wisdom which the ages of reason have wasted."

The story follows Rip Van Winkle, the man who travels into the future, to a London which has returned to primitivism. Londoners now live in mud huts, travel by canoe, and move "with the loping gait of savages." However, in a twist familiar to readers of Park (then) and Noughts and Crosses (now), these white savages are ruled by a noble black race. Rip gradually gets to learn about their way of life before coming across that garnered wisdom:

"And then later - how much later he could not tell -something that was new and yet ageless. The word 'Mission' painted on a board; a black man dressed as a Dominican friar... and a growing clearness. Rip knew that out of strangeness, there had come into being something familiar; a shape in chaos. Something was being done. Something was being done that Rip knew; something that twenty-five centuries had not altered. [...] The priest turned towards them his bland, black face.
   "Ite, missa est."

It may have been difficult to appreciate Waugh's understanding of the hermeneutic of continuity in the years following his death in 1966 but now his insights are coming back into their own. Perhaps his short stories, as well as his wonderful novels, could also put in more of an appearance in the classroom too.

Journeys and Pilgrimages

One A Level coursework option currently on offer is 'Journeys and Pilgrimages'. Teachers and students are given a free choice of texts so I have been wondering which books might be worth studying. It's hard to think of much literature that doesn't contain a journey of some kind, so what makes this option intriguing is the reference to pilgrimages.


There are some fairly obvious choices, like The Canterbury Tales, but there are other pilgrimages which don't stand out so readily. H.R. Stoneback, for example, has pointed out that:


"Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway's religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs. Pilgrimage variations in his work range from individualized quests to places that are sacralized by the achieved journey, to traditional pilgrimages long held sacred by centuries of pilgrims. Most notable in the latter category of pilgrimage is Hemingway's longstanding devotion to the specifically Catholic Pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela." 


And while we're on the topic of Santiago de Compostela, I have to mention Neil Curry's sadly out-of-print Walking to Santiago. The good news, though, is that his Other Rooms: new and selected poems does contain a good selection of the Santiago poems.

Another recent book which addresses similar territory is Christopher Howse's A Pilgrim in Spain while a recent movie is Emilio Estevez's The Way.

The focus of much recent literature about Journeys and Pilgrimages - like Cormac McCarthy's The Road - is the journey itself. However, an exhibition that has just opened in London reminds us that the destination was also pretty important, even if that destination then pointed the way to a far greater destination. 


The British Museum's Treasures of Heaven certainly looks as though it will be worth a visit. Some interesting events have been organised by the curators and the associated book looks wonderful. There are some interesting books now available on the topic of relics - such as Holy Bones, Holy Dust - but Evelyn Waugh's Helena remains one of the most fascinating.


That's probably enough to be getting on with but I'm sure there are plenty more texts out there which would fit beautifully into this unit of work. Any thoughts?

Evelyn Waugh interview

There's a great interview with Evelyn Waugh here. It's not exactly breaking news, I realise, but it's still a great interview.

A few thoughts on the Gothic in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘A Handful of Dust’

I was surprised to discover Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ in The Penguin Book of Horror Stories the other day. Waugh is not by any stretch of the imagination a horror writer, though it is true that he transformed his masterly short story into a novel which is, in many ways, dominated by the idea of the Gothic.

The Gothic of A Handful of Dust seems to be, at first glance, a merely architectural feature with three of the novel’s seven chapters being entitled ‘English Gothic’. However, there is more to it than that: Gothic pretensions are constantly undercut (or covered over) in this novel.

“Between the villages of Hetton and Compton Last lies the extensive park of Hetton Abbey,” the county Guide Book tells us. “This, formerly one of the notable houses of the county was entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style and is now devoid of interest.”

In fact parts of Hetton Abbey suffer the ultimate indignity of being clad with white chromium plating in the course of the book. And yet the Gothic remains for Tony Last an ideal. When he discovers the extent of his wife’s treachery, his mind became “clearer on many points that had puzzled him. 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...” The Gothic is more than an architectural style: it is an ideal, a moral guide, a symbol of a golden age.

This is why he does not abandon his ideal, even after the Gothic world “had come to grief”. Rather he pursues it across the globe. When he sets sail for Brazil, his mind is “occupied with the City, the Shining, the Many Watered, the Bright Feathered, the Aromatic Jam. [You have to read the novel to get the joke.] He had a clear picture of it in his mind. It was Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton, pennons and banners floating on the sweet breeze, everything luminous and translucent; a coral citadel crowning a green hill-top sown with daisies, among groves and streams; a tapestry landscape filled with heraldic and fabulous animals and symmetrical, disproportionate blossom. / The ship tossed and tunnelled through the dark waters towards this radiant sanctuary.”

It is, of course, an illusion, a handful of dust, for Waugh was no Gothic novelist. Perhaps, instead, we should see A Handful of Dust as a wry commentary on the Gothic pretensions of Horace Walpole et al. Frank Kermode has written about the way in which great houses become “by an easy transition types of the Catholic City, and in this book the threatened City is Hetton.” More convincing is Douglas Lane Patey’s argument that in A Handful of Dust Waugh actually offers us a critique of Hetton as a great house and, by extension, of the Gothic as an ideal.

Evelyn Waugh and Universae Ecclesiae

It is, in my view, time for a re-evaluation of Evelyn Waugh. He has been too often derided as a conservative and yet, in one respect at least, his time has now come.

At a time when Universae Ecclesiae has just been promulgated it may be worth recalling the comments Waugh made both in his diaries and in a letter to the Catholic Herald  (which can be found in A Little Order, a selection of his journalism to which I shall return in a few days):

"When I first came into the Church," he wrote in his diary during Easter 1964, "I was drawn, not by splendid ceremonies but by the spectacle of the priest as a craftsman. He had an important job to do which none but he was qualified for. He and his apprentice stumped up to the altar with their tools and set to work without a glance to those behind them, still less with any intention to make a personal impression on them.

"'Participate' - the cant word - does not mean to make a row as the Germans suppose. One participates in a work of art when one studies it with reverence and understanding."

In the letter to the Catholic Herald on 7th August 1964 he argued that: "'Participation' in the Mass does not mean hearing our own voices. It means God hearing our voices. Only He knows who is 'participating' at Mass. I believe, to compare small things with great, that I 'participate' in a work of art when I study it and love it silently. No need to shout."

He finishes the letter by again adapting, and significantly adding to, the words of his earlier diary entry: "I am now old but I was young when I was received into the Church. I was not at all attracted by the splendour of her great ceremonies - which the Protestants could well counterfeit. Of the extraneous attractions of the Church which most drew me was the spectacle of the priest and his server at low Mass, stumping up to the altar without a glance to discover how many or how few he had in his congregation; a craftsman and his apprentice; a man with a job which he alone was qualified to do.

"That is the Mass I have grown to know and love. By all means let the rowdy have their 'dialogues', but let us who value silence not be completely forgotten."

These views may have seemed curiously old-fashioned in 1964 but, during the current pontificate, they seem prescient. It might well be time to return to Waugh's words now that the Roman tide has turned.

11th November

It is perhaps worth pointing out that I don't believe that it is the job of the Catholic English teacher to give priority to books by Catholics. However, I do believe that Catholic authors have something special to offer and that it would be curious at the very least if Catholic English teachers and Catholic schools did not draw attention to the work of their co-religionists.

War literature is a case in point. I shall be teaching or recommending many war novels and poems this week, most of which have very little if any connection with Catholicism. However, I am heartened by the fact that some of the finest novels about World War II, the Sword of Honour  trilogy, were written by Evelyn Waugh and deal explicitly with issues of faith. 

Another Catholic author who has been making a name for himself recently (and winning prizes) is William Brodrick, a former Augustinian friar, who talks about his life and work here. His 2008 novel, A Whispered Name, is a very welcome addition to the corpus of First World War literature.

Evelyn Waugh, Postmodernism and 'Helena'

Postmodernism is a popular A Level option for all sorts of good reasons but what might be called the Catholic Postmodern rarely gets much of a look in. However, I would argue that authors like Ian McEwan and John Fowles could quite happily be joined by Muriel Spark, Antonio Tabucchi and Evelyn Waugh. 

Yes. Evelyn Waugh.

According to Martin Stannard, what Evelyn Waugh regarded as his best book - and how that irritated the critics - was "Helena [which] can be seen to be a vital, technical experiment, nether modernist nor realist, but postmodernist, metafictional." Brideshead Revisited it is not but Brideshead was never what Waugh meant it to be. 

In his preface to Helena, Waugh writes that he simply wishes "to retell an old story", that "this is a novel" rather than "History or Archaeology", and finally that "the story is just something to be read; in fact a legend." However, in between these claims of fictionality, Waugh also sets out the historical facts about Helena and her discovery of the True Cross as far as they are known.  The novel is a legend but it's based on truth. There is nothing in the book that is "contrary to authentic history", though there are "certain wilful, obvious anachronisms". He plays with us and then hands over to the equally postmodern narrator.

The narrator starts his story twice, firstly as legend and then as history. He skates over events of apparently huge historical significance and focuses on the life of a clearly anachronistic figure, a horsey girl from the British provinces who becomes Empress Dowager and a modern seeker after truth. 

It is this search for truth and, more importantly, the solid reality of the cross which holds the novel together. The postmodern trickery is not designed, as in The Name of the Rose, to cast doubt on the Church's understanding of the world, or even on the very nature of truth itself, but to tease the reader into asking the right questions, into becoming a pilgrim.

The image of the pilgrim is perhaps the most important in the book. Helena is a traveller - from Colchester to Rome to Jerusalem - who begins her travels not knowing where she is going or why but who ends the novel by being led, we assume, by a greater author who works through and with the narrator and his characters. This is postmodernism as written by a Catholic.

Indeed it is only if we take this postmodern mixture of playfulness and hardheadedness seriously that we will be able to appreciate Helena. What Waugh gives us is not history and certainly not hagiography but a carefully constructed (and funny) novel about a piece of "wood which has endured". As Helena herself put it: “just at this moment when everyone is forgetting it and chattering about the hypostatic union, there’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against.”