The Letters of Evelyn Waugh/Ways of Escape:
McConnell, Frank
Books: TWO KINDS OF FAITH TRUST the tale, not the teller: D. H. Lawrence's advice is probably the best we are likely to get about reading fiction. And like most good advice, it is almost impossible...
...Waugh, of course, we will always remember as a satirist...
...I doubt if my friend on the radio would allow either Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh into his own special fold, or if they would consider joining it, given the choice...
...Within the year he divorced his wife and converted to Roman Catholicism...
...Greene has said on a number of occasions, and repeats here, that he found himself convinced of the truth of the Catholic faith intellectually, though not emotionally...
...Thus, when we open The Letters of Evelyn Waugh or Ways of Escape, Graham Greene's second volume of autobiography, we do so-like it and admit...
...The very clever Mark Amory has selected 840 of those letters, claim the publishers, out of a possible 4,500...
...and the even cleverer Evelyn Waugh must have ensured, in the act of writing them, a number of selections made...
...He did not marry again till 1937: within the church, this time, and therefore forever, according to his lights...
...Much more intelligent, and one suspects a lot less cozy than Waugh, Graham Greene has spent literally a lifetime writing stories, visiting strange countries, and all the time looking for something or someone to bring the stories and the countries together in a reasonable simulacrum of order, grace, charity, or the peace of God...
...Quite a bit of this book has already appeared, in the form of new prefaces to the Collected Novels of Greene now being published in England...
...Frank McConnell toughness, an "evidence," as the Methodists used to call it, of their special, election...
...Greene, born 1904, is a novelist who converted to Catholicism...
...But there are alsofe host of loving, touching, and immensely human letters to Laura-and to Nancy Mitford, Sir John and Penelope Betje-man, Henry Green, and Graham Greene, to name only a few...
...Long after even the faintest memory of educated, nihilistic England in the twenties has died out, A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited will retain some of the flavor of that self-hating, gay generation...
...it or not-to ask questions we probably shouldn't ask: what are (or were) these men really like...
...No writer, perhaps, has written an autobiography that reveals less of the man behind the works...
...Waugh, the master of ridicule and of studied frivolity, seems the more serious, even the more solemn in his frantic espousal of Catholicism as the one sure thing in a world he otherwise loathes...
...The marriage did not last, though-against all odds-the conversion did...
...It isn't, I think, that great writers suffer more greatly than the rest of us...
...The great crisis in Waugh's life was in 1929, when he was betrayed by his wife, Evelyn (Freudians may putter as they like about the similarity of names...
...We are not just readers, that is...
...Since the publication of his Diaries, those very private communications, a few years . ago, Waugh has enjoyed a dubious celebrity as a kind of sacred monster of selfishness and snobbery...
...and yet we keep wanting to hear news about what has moved the tellers of the tales that move us...
...While Greene has continued to wander, visiting future international trouble spots with nearly barometric accuracy, settling down nowhere, a man almost as restless and nervous as his prose...
...Beyond it there can lie charity...
...Greene, one feels, is never capable of that particular kind of rigidity...
...Nevertheless, these are essentially private communications, full of warmth, the affection, and at times the bitterness and silliness of a man writing, however selfconsciously, to a circle of friends...
...And like most good advice, it is almost impossible to follow...
...It may not sound like much of a difference, but it is...
...Greene became a Catholic about the same time Waugh did, but in order to marry his wife...
...Nevertheless, Greene's conversion seems to have been a charter for wandering, for a kind of perpetual exile, just as Waugh's conversion was, one feels, the discovery of a way home...
...His autobiography is much more story than it is autobiography, beginning with a disclaimer about all the proper names he is not empowered to mention and concluding with the possibility that, all along, he has been telling the story of a "Graham Greene" who is not the real "Graham Greene...
...And Greene, the man who sees more deeply into the hopelessness of the human condition, the better connoisseur of chaos, is perhaps also the writer better able to control his own sense of himself through a saving sense of irony...
...Who-except a Frankenstein's monster of a graduate student-could buy James Joyce a drink and turn the conversation away from what Ulysses means...
...If Waugh's letters reveal, happily, resonances we had already suspected, Greene's autobiography happily revels in a reticence we have come to expect...
...how did their lives-as or more messy than most of ours-issue in stories, language, so much better than most of ours...
...Or that particular kind of faith...
...His sense of the absurd, and the precision of his talent for hatred, were too finely tuned for happiness...
...Ways of Escape is the perfect title for this book, since it is not only "about" the ways of escape from the tedium of life that are Greene's collected novels, but is, itself, a way of escape from the responsibilities of self-revelation implied by writing an autobiography...
...Waugh was a great letter-writer, and like all great letter-writers must have kept an eye at least half-aslant to the eventual, posthumous publication of what he wrote...
...What emerges from the Letters of Waugh and Ways of Escape by Greene is a curious fact...
...Waugh is a solemn Catholic: he is even capable of writing to John Betjeman that refusal to accept the ' doctrines of Rome is tantamount to self-damnation...
...This difference, at least, is caught in the very postmarks of the two men's lives...
...Ways of Escape, indeed...
...A fundamentalist preacher I once heard on the radio observed that all Christians are either Good Friday Christians or Easter Sunday Christians...
...Both men, of course, were for years the favored "Catholic authors" of a sect and an educational system eager to find instances of people who could hold religious belief in the twentieth century and still not be fools...
...However that may be, the division makes sense...
...what do they, about whom we think so seriously, finally think of themselves...
...He was not- perhaps could not find it in himself to be-a happy man...
...WATS Or ESCAPE Graham Greene Simon & Schuster, $10.95, 256 pp...
...Indeed, who has read D., H. Lawrence's own novels and not tried to learn something of D. H. Lawrence's life...
...Of course, from the man who called his previous autobiography A Sort of Life, and ended it with not his first significant success but his first significant failure, what else could we expect...
...He hasn't found it yet: and if he hasn't, it is unlikely that anyone else has...
...A number of Waugh's most serious and most affectionate letters are to Greene...
...But happiness-as Greene suggests at the end of The Ministry of Fear and Waugh suggests at the end of Brideshead Revisited-may not be the point...
...But if they don't suffer more, writers, we like to think, survive their suffering better than most of us do...
...We all know that we should take novels for the independent works of art-well-wrought urns or verbal icons-they really are, and not as encoded confessions by their authors...
...The satirist can be a satirist because of the firmness of his faith, and the tragedian must be a tragedian because of the insecurity of his own...
...Waugh converted to escape a failed marriage: Greene converted to make one...
...Waugh, born 1903, was a Catholic convert who wrote novels...
...It's not that easy being Greene...
...That is the single clearest message of Ways of Escape, and probably of the novels as well...
...f only imagined strongly enough...
...And Greene, in his autobiography, devotes four pages to a very touching elegy for his dead friend Evelyn Waugh...
...Their writing itself is a certificate of their THE LETTERS OF EVELYN WAUGH Edited by Mark Amory Ticknor & Fields, $25, 673 pp...
...Nothing in this new book clarifies or expands upon that extraordinary observation: though Greene's comments upon the evolution of his fiction from melodrama through tragedy back through comedy to melodrama may have a lot, finally, to do with it...
...After the cataclysm of the Second World War, in which they both served with distinction, it was Waugh who more and more limited his field of endeavor, until finally he was firmly ensconced in Combe Florey House, making only occasional "raids" on London for genteel debauchery...
...But Ways of Escape is a fine record of his long, diffident search for that magic kingdom-and of its present inconclusiveness...
...And marital infidelity and Roman Catholic belief were to play a permanent, and nearly indissoluble, part in all of his fiction after that time-which is to say, almost all of his fiction...
...Fond as Greene and Waugh may have been of one another, however, the fascinating thing about the almost simultaneous publication of their two books is the way in which it underscores their difference...
...The great advantage of having these two important books published almost simultaneously is that it allows us to see again that both the tragic and the comic response are allowed within the dimensions of the Faith: and that neither is enough, and that either can be enough if only imagined strongly enough...
...And what is new here is more-beautifully-of the same...
...But to say this much is to utter cliches and caricatures...
...For, finally, what emerges from these two books-these two particular violations of privacy, the one willed, the other half-willed-is a division between two kinds of faith, two senses of the peculiar rele- vance of moral concerns to the everyday business of living and the everyday business of storytelling...
...A curious fact about these two books is that their authors were so fond of one another...
...The marvelous thing is that Greene remains, in the midst of the quest, a storyteller...
...There are unfeeling letters to his second wife, Laura, and nasty letters about Jacques Barzun, Randolph Churchill, and others: Waugh was a good son of Adam and capable of pettiness...
...The desert places of an Evelyn Waugh or a Graham Greene may, in fact, be less arid, less terrifying than yours or mine or those of the next person you share an elevator with...
...We are accomplices in a more or less That more or less is important...
...The Power and the Glory, Brighton Rock, and The End of the Affair preserve a special urgency, a special panic-the panic, say, of the thirties-regardless of the decade in which the novels themselves appeared...
...The Letters should correct that misapprehension-at least for those who want it corrected...
...in Waugh's case all the more valuable and real because so bitter, so difficult of attainment...
...And Greene, I suppose, we will always think of as a "serious" writer: maybe, as the only authentic English existentialist...
Vol. 108 • January 1981 • No. 1
