Evelyn Waugh
Stannard, Martin
BOOK REVIEWS Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh was famous for so many things—his drunkenness, his snobbery, his clown's wardrobe, Brideshead Revisited—that it is sometimes possible to forget that he was...
...Who'd ever want to live in the main house when he could have this charming gatehouse instead...
...The only thing Waugh might not have liked about it was that it happened not in the library or in the rose garden but in the toilet...
...What was going down here...
...It was as though the Big Bopper himself had just dropped in, as, in a way, he had...
...He was a recklessly brave soldier, but a useless officer...
...The Christian duty to be charitable and (though in moderation) sober seems to have defeated him...
...Still, let's not feel sorry for him...
...He was bloody-minded to a fault...
...We immediately abandoned the radio in the corner of St...
...death and tributes...
...Who these days, for example, gives a damn about Hooper...
...But as he himself saw, it would yield, was yielding...
...This really is delightful...
...As it is, fear of apostasy was compounded by decay and debilitation...
...John Waugh was famous for so many things—his drunkenness, his snobbery, his clown's wardrobe, Brideshead Revisited—that it is sometimes possible to forget that he was also a great prose writer, possibly the greatest England has produced this century...
...Yet Waugh's own influence—as distinct from the influence of the things he loved (such as the Church) and the things he invented (such as country-house Catholicism)—grew stronger by the day...
...requiem and burial...
...After the Russians become our allies, Waugh did not rejoice at Allied victories...
...Who, for that matter, can read the death of Lord Marchmain without sniggering...
...I can tell you exactly why," said the man...
...Thatcher and her Manchester school liberalism...
...His friend Philip Caraman, SJ, had said Mass in the old rite at the local church, and after returning home Waugh was felled by a massive stroke...
...By the time he reached his late fifties, Waugh was an old man, and a sad one...
...Heonce wrote that to aim for anything less than sanctity was not to aim at all, but he couldn't have hit a barn door with a rosary...
...It is true that he was not best pleased when his eldest daughter married an American and he was always irritated by Americanism—of Randolph Churchill, in Yugoslavia in 1944, he wrote: "[His] American slang, his coughing and farting make him a poor companion in wet weather...
...His daughter Meg doted on him and he on her, which was hard cheese on poor James...
...Waugh's misbehavior on this occasion may have had something to do with the fact that Life was an American publication...
...He had an important job to do which none but he was qualified for...
...He was widely loved...
...enquiries about not attending Mass...
...For Waugh, as for Guy Crouchback, World War II began as a crusade for civilization, a battle against Nazism and Nazism's ally, Communism...
...And has been for more than thirty years...
...How contemptuous he would have been of Mrs...
...Stannard is impatient with Waugh's politics and snobbery, but his book is all the better for being in some measure hostile: there has been far too much toadying to Waugh inrecent years, and Stannard, who teaches English at a provincial university, has upset what one might call the politically correct conservatives...
...it ended with civilization retreating in the face of Communism and liberalism...
...In spite of his hatred of socialism he took some satisfaction in 1945 from the defeat of Churchill's Conservative party at the hands of Clement Attlee's Labour party...
...EVELYN WAUGH: THE LATER YEARS 1939-1966 Martin Stannard W.W...
...It was a death that dreams are made of: fast, painless, and full of grace...
...Norton/503 pages/$25.95 reviewed by STUART REID 54 The American Spectator September 1992 He no more belonged in the army than he did among the aristocracy...
...the liturgical vandals were already marching on Rome...
...Yet it would not be entirely right to call Waugh anti-American...
...His book is, however, just, and ultimately sympathetic...
...He was brought up in Golders Green, a middle-class Jewish suburb in North London...
...He was right, of course, although it is unlikely that he would have had a better war if he had continued to believe in the cause...
...The snobberies and taboos of English society remain firmly rooted in the prejudices Waugh championed...
...He liked to alarm decent folk (agnostics, Anglicans, Americans), which is why, for example, during Lent he would take scales with him to restaurants and ostentatiously weigh his food, lest he take a gram more fish than the fasting laws allowed...
...He hated the Conservatives as only a true conservative can...
...It was not all warts, though...
...We were triumphalists, and insufferably smug...
...Waugh had what we might today call an "attitude problem" towards Americans...
...He was, for example, almost indifferent to the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge...
...teeth removed...
...The Vatican Council, the agape that gave the sixties a kick-start, depressed him deeply...
...Waugh's politics could be as deranged as his snobbery...
...In the summer of 1958 Waugh visited Ampleforth College, in north Yorkshire, where I was then a 15-year-old schoolboy...
...He edited The Seven Story Mountain for the English market and wrote a fulsome (if patronizing) foreword...
...Catholic circles...
...I The American Spectator September 1992 55 "Because no one wants to speak to me," said Waugh...
...When he visited California in 1947, he went to a party at Louis B. Mayer's house and, surveying its gaudy luxury, declared sweetly: "How wise you Americans are to eschew all ostentation and lead such simple, wholesome lives...
...He was a contrary sod...
...Waugh was generous, especially to the Jesuits and Poor Clares and to pals down on their luck...
...It is written with grace, wit, and authority, and covers what, to me, is Waugh's most interesting period: the years after the "People's War," when, in spite of decline and despair, he hurled energetic abuse at the "so-called twentieth century" and at (among others) Churchill, Stalin, Tito, and Eden...
...He craved membership of clubs," Stannard writes, "was fascinated by their etiquette and their 'language,' observed them with a scrupulousness approaching lunacy, but was too intelligently disruptive (or just plain rude) not to smash up the furniture now and again...
...W augh also feared that he would lose his faith...
...and it now extends far beyond Stuart Reid is assistant features editor of the London Sunday Telegraph...
...He spent a week getting publicly drunk at White's and then wondered why he was not asked to lead men into battle...
...He could not be house-trained...
...There must be some explanation for it...
...It's not easy to see quite who the joke is on all these years later...
...He was an artist and an aesthete, not an officer and gentleman...
...That said, the second volume of his biography (the first, published in 1986, covered the years to 1939), is perhaps a little pious at times...
...Oswald's Common Room (tuned to the American Forces Network) to look out the window...
...opposes liturgical changes...
...He made it intellectually and socially smart to be an RC...
...He was too much of an anarchist for the military life...
...Waugh had a horror of genteelisms, perhaps because there was something genteel about his own background...
...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...
...perhaps it was the penance of the whole Church...
...He would have found the quest easier if the Church had left him with the familiar tools...
...There below us, unless I am imagining all this, was the diminutive Waugh, puce of face, terrible of eye, with an ear trumpet tilted aggressively towards the respectfully lowered head of his black-robed companion...
...I don't think I can have achieved my object...
...No memories of the evening...
...religious depression...
...The reactionary position is untenable, and even as a joke it becomes a bore...
...Because you sit there on your arse looking like a stuck pig...
...Merton, at any rate, was one manifestation of the future of American monasticism, and it was a future that, when it arrived, must have appalled Waugh...
...f there was something heroic about Waugh's lone stand against the modern world, there was also something absurd about it, and tiresome...
...he was powerless to control himself, especially when prudence demanded that he do so...
...He neglected his wife...
...Waugh had no trouble with the rubrics, but he had great difficulty in establishing a coherent spiritual life...
...CI 56 The American Spectator September 1992...
...He was particularly unhappy about the destruction of the Latin (more accurately, Tridentine) Mass, and in his diary for Easter 1964 wrote what was for many a perfect evocation of the ancient rite: When I first came into the Church [he converted in 193011 was drawn, not by splendid ceremonies but by the spectacle of the priest as craftsman...
...Perhaps the Vatican Council was Waugh's penance...
...the man has mocked the Master...
...on the contrary, he viewed them with profound misgivings...
...But he nonetheless championed the anti-Communist United States of the 1940s, seeing it as the guardian of monasticism, even as a defender of the faith...
...His son James said that life with him was "utter hell...
...He was ashamed of his father, a publisher, less ashamed of his mother, a relative of Lord Cockburn of Cockpen...
...The story of Waugh's later life," writes Stannard, "is the story of his agonised spiritual quest towards compassion and contrition...
...He blamed others for his own failures...
...sometimes it was sublimely comic, as when it appeared in The Sword of Honour trilogy, Waugh's finest achievement after A Handfill of Dust...
...To most people, Waugh is much more than the sum of his books: he is a way of life, an attitude, a fashion statement, a style guide...
...Yet Tories in general, and Thatcherites in particular, claim Waugh as one of their own, just as, even more ludicrously, they claim George Orwell...
...His life was littered with failed resolutions and apology notes...
...There was much in Waugh that was, to use Stannard's description of Brideshead, "yellow with hatred and self-pity...
...Sometimes the abuse was knockabout, as when it was delivered at the bar of White's...
...For example, such was the fierceness of his hostility to Non-U (non-upper-class) words—among them "toilet," "perspire," "serviette"—that even today, as Jilly Cooper has observed, aspiring upper-class mothers would rather their children came home from school saying "f---" than "toilet...
...Yet he was aware of his own yellow hatreds, and played on his own absurdities...
...Death came, obligingly, like a thief in the night...
...Whoever won, he felt, Europe was already lost...
...There was, to be sure, nothing of the long-necked goose about Waugh, but we knew he was a class act all the same...
...The last entries in Stannard's index under "Waugh, Evelyn" .tell the story: "Health decline...
...There seemed no chance to us then that Waugh's world would ever yield to change...
...Rebuked by his CO for being drunk in the mess one evening, he replied that he "could not change the habits of a lifetime to suit a whim of his...
...Merton's spiritual journey from the Trappist ascetic of Kentucky to the bedenimed anti-war hippie who electrocuted himself at an ecumenical gig in Bangkok in 1968 is one that has given rise to much earnest reflection...
...Martin Stannard does not entirely approve of Waugh, but then neither does anyone in his right mind...
...He was full of fear: not of death, which he longed for, but of becoming a bore, alas with some reason...
...in fact, at lunchtime on Easter Day 1966...
...Religion came into it, too, I suppose...
...He was alone in White's one night in March 1962 when a member asked him why he was on his own...
...In 1953, having quarreled with Life, he attended a party given by the magazine in London...
...I had decided to go as a means of making friends with them," he recorded in his diary...
...He could never quite persuade himself that they were from the same gene pool as the Europeans...
...The word went round that the Great Man was down on the Penance Walk with one of the better-connected monks...
...The only certain lesson it leaves us with is that one should never mess with a faulty fan after taking a shower...
...He was a humbug, and at times grotesquely selfish and cruel...
...will...
...He did not want The Loved One to be published behind the Iron Curtain because he feared it would encourage hostility to the United States...
...What was the karma...
...Once, unable to control his boredom during a lecture, he asked whether it was true that "in the Romanian Army no one beneath the rank of Major is permitted to use lipstick...
...Waugh's enthusiasm for what he called "religious Yanks" was inspired by Thomas Merton...
Vol. 25 • September 1992 • No. 9
