The depressing thing is this. When Evelyn Waugh, the greatest Catholic novelist of the 20th century, was my age, he had been dead for ten years.
This month is the 60th anniversary of Waugh’s death from heart disease on Easter Sunday in April 1966. Over four decades, he had written about 15 novels, abundant short fiction and sketches, several travel books, and a handful of biographies.
Graham Greene, another great mid-century writer, called him “the greatest novelist of my generation.” For what it’s worth, three of his novels were included in the Penguin Random House list of the 100 best of the 20th century and one in a similar list in The Guardian.
But like me, he was slighted by Le Monde – not even mentioned. There’s a reason for that. Initially, the attraction of Waugh’s books is the brilliance of his style. It would be impossible to replicate that in a French translation.
The Australian-British critic Clive James – no slouch himself – wrote: “Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English; he stands at the height of English prose; its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.”
A big claim, but he could be right. Most first-time readers guffaw at the comedy, but what keeps his words afloat in the stratosphere is the brilliance of the words. The 1981 Granada production of Brideshead Revisited is TV at its zenith, but for me the highlight is Jeremy Irons reading voiceovers from the novel.
To venture a comparison, Waugh is the soul of Flannery O’Connor channelled through the pen of PG Wodehouse. Or the comic novels that TS Eliot would have written if he had a sense of humour.
Because Waugh was ultimately a theological novelist. After a dissipated lifestyle as a young man and a failed marriage, he became a Catholic in 1930. Years later he explained that his conversion followed the realisation that life was “unintelligible and unendurable without God”.
He discovered that, painfully, for himself. He was a difficult person, damaged goods as we might say today, although he managed to have a loving second marriage and seven children after his first marriage (to a woman – you couldn’t make this up – also named Evelyn) was annulled.
There may be as many stories about his rudeness as about his kindness, although I’m sure much of this gruffness was a mask to conceal his struggles.
Lord Longford, the Catholic peer, recalled a lunch with Waugh and Sir William Beveridge, the architect of the UK’s welfare state. Towards the end, Waugh asked: “How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?” Beveridge replied, “I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it”. Waugh said, “I get mine spreading alarm and despondency” – mind you, this was at the height of the war – “and I get more satisfaction than you do”.
Or when novelist Nancy Mitford asked him how he could possibly be such an ogre and a Christian at the same time, Waugh replied that “were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible”. But of course, to a genuine ogre no one could pose such a question.
Waugh’s novels of the 20s and 30s portrayed the lives of papier-mâché characters who stumble on without the slightest awareness of their dignity as children of God or even simple human integrity. The side-splitting absurdity of the lives in Decline and Fall, Scoop, or A Handful of Dust provokes one to ask, isn’t there anything more?
In the 40s, Waugh wrote novels which replied, Yes, there is.
Brideshead Revisited is the finest example of this – the story of how God’s grace finally blesses the tormented lives of a dysfunctional upper-class English family. He allows them to stray into failed marriages or despair or hyper-religious righteousness – and then gives “a twitch upon the thread” to draw them back to Himself.
Although the absurdist comedy surfaces again and again, the prose is ravishingly beautiful. I plucked these lines almost at random from Brideshead Revisited:
“On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine – as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together – and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.
“‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’”
Pope Francis would have blessed Waugh, had he met him – the novelist of the church as a field hospital for our brokenness.
