Spring
Books
Why
Waugh continues to be the loved one
THE LIFE OF EVELYN WAUGH By Douglas
Lane Patey Blackwell, 440 pages, $47.50
By ARTHUR JONES
In the London of the 1920s, the
Bright Young People -- Britains youthful rich and shallow -- had a
communal voice. The voice was arch. It was fun. It was empty.
Among contemporaries who were also their observers, a few had a
variation on this voice. Seemingly shallow, it was knowing. And literate. Noel
Coward wrote and sang with it. W.H. Auden sometimes rhymed with it. Evelyn
Waugh was the master of it.
But all that was 70 years or so ago. Why do we care? We care
because of Waugh, and Douglas Lane Patey reminds us -- as readers, as
Catholics, as people searching for God -- how right we are to care.
We also care, one, because English well-written (so often the
province of the Irish) is not only a joy in itself, it is the essence of our
culture, be that culture British or American. When words perform their function
precisely, the musicality is wit. Wit as in ha-ha! Wit as in aha!
When that withering wit is at the service of morality, as in
Waughs case, when the entertaining tale is a morality tale wrapped in
cracklingly light literate transparencies, the object lesson comes through
refracted, and were not bludgeoned with a novelists thump.
(Waughs bludgeoning phase came later, much to the dismay of many
readers.)
Two, were attracted to Waugh -- we must be because most of
his novels are still in print in the United States -- for his fine,
funny-if-frightening storytelling. Hes the guest who doesnt leave.
Readers tend not to dump Waugh into the Friends of the Library box but keep him
to reread. He wears exceedingly well.
Three, theres his Catholicism. His conversion at 27 was a
private matter the prolific writer never publicly expanded on -- he instead
more-or-less eked out the explanations through a lifetime of novels. He was
always pious. As a young Anglican he had thought of entering the
priesthood.
And four, and here Waugh is very well served by biographer Patey,
there is the deepest Waugh of all. From the first novel, Decline and
Fall, Waugh is proselytizing every step of the way. So hilariously the
reader never notices.
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born in 1903 in Hampstead,
London. He was the essential English writer writing for, and about, those he
knew -- and who knew him. He drew from a very small world. His Oxford
generation. The Bright Young People his Oxford friends were or married.
Boys schools where he taught. The army in which he served. The titled
hostesses in town. The landed families in the country who welcomed him into
their homes (not all did).
He wrote for a living, a journalist with a mission. He looked at
his generations empty lives, their meagerness -- in the final analysis --
of material possessions and declared (very skillfully) that the only source of
true fullness is God.
The United States -- and its publishers -- took to his novels from
the start. Two of his late, great successes also were American. There was
The Loved One, his damning, funny 1948 novella about Hollywoods
way of burial. Then, two decades after his death, Americans were transfixed by
the imported television serialization of Brideshead Revisited. So
riveted were we that Manhattan hostesses had to arrange dinner parties around
its airing; otherwise no one showed. The taped Brideshead has
remained a feature on most videostore shelves ever since.
To the generally informed reader, its obvious that who and
what Waugh was, he was from the start. In his first novel, Decline and Fall,
the English author laid out his characters and themes.
Thereafter, in everything that flowed from his pen -- he wrote in
ink in a small, tight, rather ladylike hand -- he stuck to them.
Decline has the confused young man struggling with his
faith, innocence lost or never understood, Oxford, Catholics as amiable
sinners, lower orders (class consciousness and its capitol --
Londons Ritz Hotel), army officers (incompetence raised to a fine art),
heterosexuality at one remove (sometimes awfully cleverly), homosexuality just
offstage (always campy), blistering attacks on modernity, Negroes, sly jibes at
Anglicanism, a longing for a past that never quite existed, the worship of
great country estates run like clockwork with armies of servants, Hollywood,
crime without punishment. And Jesuits.
The only element missing from the first novel that became a later
feature, the Americans, he introduced in his second novel, Vile Bodies,
in the shape and voice of the Packard-driving, hard-drinking, crowd-pleasing,
seasickness-banishing evangelist, Mrs. Melrose Ape (shades of evangelist Aimee
Semple McPherson). Only chapters later, theres the exquisitely drawn
American judge in Lottie Crumps parlor, a hilarious send-up.
Certainly, in Decline and Fall, the black man, Sebastien
Chokey Cholmondley, is undoubtedly American. But his portrayal --
offensive at times in the manner of the 1920s, yet not always, for Chokey has a
sardonic way with words -- has far more to do with his blackness than his
presumed American-ness.
When Waugh, the skilled society entertainer of the printed page,
turns to the serious topic, the same writing skills serve beautifully. As the
Italians say: La persona che non sa ridere non e una persona seria. (The
person who cannot laugh is not a serious person.) Waugh has both dimensions --
he is a seriously comic writer.
In his biographies of the artist Rossetti and the English Jesuit
and martyr Edmund Campion, the reader is informed about the faith at lightning
speed through penetrating insights by a skilled practitioner who at that time
never forgets that the popular writer is an entertainer. (He did forget later,
in his other Catholic biography and worst book, Monsignor Ronald
Knox.)
Rossetti (1928), published two years before Waugh became a
Catholic, is thoroughly Catholic. The deep exploration of guilt and repentance
as an adjunct to the description of Rossettis painting
Arthurs Tomb is so subtle the readers cannot be offended --
they dont have time to realize they are being preached to.
In life, alas, Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh at times was not a
very nice man. He was incredibly self-indulgent and a periodic binge drinker.
He could be extremely rude, wielding words as dangerous weapons. He cruelly cut
people who offended him or his strange sense of Catholic propriety.
Graham Greene tells of Waugh at dinner at the home of the film
director Carol Reed. The movie mogul Alexander Korda was present with his
mistress -- who later became Mrs. Korda. Waugh was horribly rude to her all
evening. Later, Greene remonstrated with Waugh, saying, but Evelyn, I
brought my mistress.
Waugh replied, Thats all right, your mistress is a
married woman.
Waugh was not even a very nice father, and frequently -- indeed
preferably as far as he was concerned -- he was an absent one. As a husband --
oh dear, though a faithful one. He would say only, in explanation if not
self-defense, that were he not a Catholic he would probably be a much worse
person.
He was, finally, possibly first and finally, a rather sad man who
lived to entertain and lived by entertaining. That may have been how, as a boy
small in stature, he survived in the polite-in-appearances jungle of a British
boys school.
Had I been inured to the hardships and violence of school
life, he later wrote, I might have been less forlorn when I met
them at the age of 13.
Forlorn, at times, he seemed to remain. Except in the deeply
hidden relationship with God.
He wanted his generation to understand that without such a
relationship, they were indeed forlorn.
To save them, Waugh played a trick on them.
He opened his first book, Rossetti, by telling them,
Biography ... has usurped the place held in recent years by the novel,
and before that by poetry, as the regular metier of all those young men and
women who, in every age, concern themselves with providing the light reading of
their more cultured friends.
Thats what his cultured friends wanted to hear and believe.
So he let them. Instead, Waugh spent his entire life, Patey assures us, writing
to convert them.
If, for thousands upon thousands of readers, rereading Waugh is an
amiable hike along a familiar trail, Patey is the guide who as botanist,
biologist, geographer, climatologist, celestial navigator and cosmologist
suddenly reveals all. From the tiniest bio-systems of Waughs immediate
world to the secular sweeps embracing its period, Patey briskly -- he has much
ground to cover -- does what a biographer is supposed to do.
He has us seeing the familiar differently, and in its
entirety.
How differently.
This is a big book. Before we set off with him, Patey fills our
knapsacks with essentials. How Waughs first love was art and
architecture, and his eye never wavered. How the search for love drives us, and
if we let it, drives us toward God. How Catholic was central to the
life, central to the books, central to the search. How Waugh ranks among the
greats of English writing, with Chaucer and Hardy. Indeed Patey is
responsible for Waughs inclusion in this series of critical biographies
of English writers.
The Smith College English professor is able to reveal what he
wants to show us, a Waugh even more skilled as a writer than we had already
given the author of Scoop, and A Handful of Dust and the Sword of
Honour trilogy, much-deserved credit for being.
Patey is a crisp and detailed writer who pays Waugh (and the
reader) the greatest tribute of all -- he stays out of the way and gets on with
the story.
Faults? $47.50 plus typos.
For $47.50 one can buy a first edition of Officers and
Gentlemen.
Fortunately, The Life of Evelyn Waugh is coming out in
paperback.
Buy it.
Arthur Jones is NCRs editor at large.
National Catholic Reporter, February 5,
1999
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