Waugh at Peace

...Nonetheless, among the pieces collected in A Little Order is an important essay entitled "The American Epoch in the Catholic Church...

...Stationed in Yugoslavia toward the end of the war, Waugh saw Allied policy favor the Tito who had betrayed his own countrymen and, so soon as the Russians invaded, fled the Allies to join forces with his Kremlin masters...

...When I wrote Bndcshead Revisited I was consciously wriiing an obituary of the doomed English upper class...

...In 1953, Tito came on a state visit to England, and Waugh mounted a campaign of protest, one sample of which is to be found in Donat Gallagher's collection of his journalism.* Waugh felt that "an imposture was being attempted on the British public by representing Tito as a gallant ally when in fact he had been a treacherous enemy and as a liberal statesman when he was in fact a doctrinaire Marxist persecuting the Church in a way of which the general public was kept ignorant...

...No wonder that Waugh reacted as he did to Tito's state visit to Great Britain which, in his mind, consolidated the confusion and made a mockery ofthe war to which he had gone off as a middle-aged crusader...

...A bit of wartime nostalgia...

...The imposture proved all too successful both in Britain and the United States...

...A writer who can make Dickens an instrument of torture has more than talent...

...It was without any doubt Waugh's Catholic religion which enabled him to see the tragedy World War II became and, if it was that same faith which provoked his criticisms of postwar society, it would be tragically wrong to think that he was motivated by mere nostalgia for a lost social order...

...All in all, it is a surprisingly rosy picture Waugh paints of a future of American hegemony within the Church...

...Bride shead Revisited is Waugh's first Catholic novel and his characters are not members of the "Old Catholic" families but rather, like himself, converts...

...Josip Broz and Yugoslavia are oddly central to Waugh's ultimate assessment of World War II and the peace that followed it...

...A struggle that had commenced as a crusade against fascism and developed into a questionable alliance with Stalin against Hitler, ended by romanticizing and systematically upgrading the role of the Russians until the aim of the war seemed to be to further the ends of Communist Russia...

...Merely a backward look at a lost peace, gone alas like our youth too soon...

...He was appalled by Vatican Council II and especially by the liturgical changes it effected...

...Long lines formed to pass by this monument to confusion...

...Gilbert Pinfold, the hero of Waugh's most autobiographical fiction, is thus put before the reader: "There was a phrase popular at the time, 'It is later than you think.' It was never later than Gilbert Pinfold thought...

...The chapter ends with Todd saying, "Let us read Little Dorrit again...

...But any reader who can liken Scott-King 's Modern Europe with Goodbye Mister Chips needs punishment rather than instruction...

...On reading the book I realized that I had done something quite outside my original intention...

...It never occurred to me, writing Sword of Honour, that the Church was susceptible to change I was wrong and I have seen a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent...

...As it was, he seems to have been fully ready to depart this Vale of Tears when, on April 10, 1966, Easter Sunday, returned from Mass and Communion, he suffered a heart attack and died...

...Like his attractively inept hero Scott-King, the classics professor caught up in contrived celebration in a police state, Waugh believed that it was all but sinful to prepare the young in such a way that they would fit into the modern world...

...Would Waugh have taken some comfort from the rise of Margaret Thatcher and of Ronald Reagan...

...His novels sold fifteen thousand copies in their first year and were read by the people whose opinion John Boot respected...

...Surely the prologue is one of the most successful things Waugh ever wrote and the novel, save for a few lapses into luxuriant self-indulgence, holds to the promise of its prologue...

...There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep...

...It may be that the estimate of some whose opinion he valued proved contagious...

...Sword of Honour was not specifically a religious book...

...He did note, somewhat wryly, that American prelates "speak as though they believed that representative, majority government were of divine institution...

...This simplification of the man has shown up quite often in reviews of the diaries and, more recently, the letters.f That Waugh had contempt for politicians is certainly true but it did not approach Belloc's who had sat twice in Parliament...

...Waugh's attitude toward the United States involved a goodly measure of the usual English loftiness.1 In the Letters, his references to the American who married his eldest daughter and to those Americans who arrived at his door with all the bumptious naivete of the New World, presuming on his willingness to devote unscheduled hours to titillating them, make for wild entertainment...

...Perhaps...

...Waugh's prefatory remark to the final version of his war trilogy, Sword of Honour (1962) is pertinent here...

...Like his creation Boot, Waugh had published a biography-of Dante Gabriel Rosseti-as well as travel books...

...May he rest in the peace no war disturbs and earthly victory does not bring...

...Evelyn Waugh's debut as a writer did not suggest that he meant himself to be taken seriously on any score...

...This was not the case while he was writing it, as the letters of the time attest...

...His fourth novel, published in 1934, took its title, A Handful of Dust, from T.S...

...Between novels he kept his name sweet in intellectual circles with unprofitable but modish works on history and travel...

...I had written an obituary of the Roman Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries...

...All the rites and most of the opinions here described are already obsolete...

...He was concerned to show that Americanism is something quite different from what many in Europe and Asia dread...

...Recent developments have made it, in fact, a document of Catholic usage of my youth...

...Eliot and revealed a bit of skull beneath the grin...

...In the end, his religion proved to be as testing for Waugh as his citizenship...

...Oh yes," said Mr...

...His mild amusement at American prelates would have altered to something darker if he had lived to hear the romanticization of the Left, the seeming partiality for Marxist-inspired sedition in South and Central America, and spokesmen for the American bishops speaking of guerillas in El Salvador much as British politicians had once spoken of Tito's partisans...

...His first novel, Decline and Fall (1928) was a lovely jeu d'esprit which owed more to P.G...

...I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign in her choice of servants...

...Ronald Firbank and P.G...

...Don't you believe it...

...Waugh might hope for the success of the Conservative Party, but he did not vote...

...He had published eight books (beginning with a life of Rimbaud written when he was eighteen, and concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians), of which most people who lunched with Lady Metroland could remember the names of three or four...

...You will have time to finish it, my friend...

...The chapter entitled "Du Cote De Chez Todd,'' in which the hero Tony Last is condemned to read and reread the works of Dickens (as whom this chapter is as funny), causes a frisson as well as laughter...

...Perhaps Waugh would have revised his opinion again...

...Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief'(1932), along with Decline and Fall and Scoop, made Waugh's name as a novelist, but it was the sort of name Scott Fitzgerald made with This Side of Paradise: chronicler of the new generation of Young People, antinomian, gay, irresponsible...

...Brideshead Revisited(1945), written during the war, was the first book of Waugh's I read and I was surprised to find, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1981 in the Letters, that he considered it less than a success...

...A reader could be forgiven for thinking that Waugh was one of his own characters and that the frothy surface of his novels summed up his own outlook on the world...

...It is true that their titles are suggestively odd as well as funny, but they could easily be interpreted as ironic...

...Waugh felt that the United States would exercise an increasing importance in Church affairs and he argued that this was all to the good...

...Guy Crouchback, who had gone off to what he considered a just war, came to think that the struggle had turned into one between two indistinguishable gangs of louts...

...The reverent tone with which telecasters sent Tito on the way to his Particular Judgment suggested that this butcher had been one of the architects of victory in World War II...

...Christopher Sykes, in his biography of Waugh, makes the interesting point that by taking religion seriously in a novel set in England, Waugh opened the way for others, Greene and Iris Murdoch among them...

...The trilogy can be called, if not a religious, a political novel, though its political outlook is inevitably shaped by the faith of its author and of many of its characters...

...I hope 1 shall be able to finish it before I go...

...Dismayed by Welfare State England, Waugh had thought of moving to Ireland, but in the end decided o stay in his native land when he realized life could be tolerable there if he pretended he was a tourist...

...The standard whereby Waugh judged the modern world will be missed by anyone who does not take his Catholicism seriously...

...After Bleak House, Tony goes on to read for his demanding host Dombey and Son, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit, and Oliver Twist...

...When Tito finally died, following his limbs into limbo or worse, and the predictable prepared appreciations appeared on page and screen, I considered it a sure sign of God's mercy that He had not permitted Evelyn Waugh to live into these dark days...

...Guy Crouchback, the hero, goes off to war with the sense that, like his ancestors, he is embarking on a crusade, that the powers of light are on one side and the powers of darkness on the other...

...Wodehouse than to Gibbon...

...Wodehouse had never done that and it became possible to suppose that Waugh was engaged in something other than mere diversion...

...Despite the faith of many of the characters...

...Todd...

...From the start there was the masterly command of language...

...One of the great gathering symbols of the war trilogy is the Sword of Honour, a great weapon redolent of chivalry, product of a national subscription, and enshrined in Westminster Cathedral as England's tribute to the people of Stalingrad...

...Now that we know that Stalin was at least the equal oppressor with the Nazis during that historic siege, the irony is even sharper...

...A just war, then, and one worth fighting...

...Waugh, who once said that all fates are worse than death, was regarded in his lifetime as a disgruntled curmudgeon, an eccentric who flourished an ear trumpet at table, as one who dearly loved a lord and was nostalgic for a time when nobles led lives of extravagant waste while the vast majority of the citizenry was consigned to grubby oblivion...

...Waugh might have been depressed by this but I doubt that he would have been surprised...

...His signed first editions sometimes changed hands at a shilling or two above their original price...

...While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters...

...The confiscatory taxes of the Socialist State enraged him but he did not, as so many English authors did, escape taxation by going abroad, there to pay lip service to the "progress" being made at home...

...He says, in Ways of Escape (with its moving memoir of his friendship with Waugh), that a reieading of Brideshead convinced him it was Waugh's best novel...

...The fact that, at this time, Waugh lived in daily association with Randolph Churchill, a long-time friend/enemy, gave him an objective correlative for what he felt was the British desertion of a just cause to do business with types whose hands were as bloody as the original enemy's...

...The novel records the death of that illusion and the emergence of Waugh's conception of the postwar world...

...Do not disturb yourself about that...

...This passage from Scoop (1938) not only is illustrative of style but also gives us something of a self-portrait...

...One day, running his thumb through the pages of Bleak House that remained to be read, Tony said, "We still have a lot to.get through...

...Graham Greene revised his...