“The Golden Boy” is the title that Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn and son of Auberon, in Fathers and Sons, his family history, gives to the chapter on Alec Waugh. Golden he may have seemed to his father but rather a zinc dud he must have seemed to his younger brother. While at Sherbourne, the public school of choice for the males in the Waugh family, Alec was caught in a homosexual scandal that made it impossible for Evelyn to attend the same school, and so he had to attend Lancing, a public school a step down on the status ladder.
The young Waugh was also less than enamored of his first name, with its sexual ambiguity. His first book, Rossetti: His Life and Works, published in 1928 when he was twenty-five, was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement under the assumption that its author was female, the reviewer referring throughout to its author as Miss Waugh. This was another annoyance in a life that seemed to be filled with annoyances. He was early and perennially a victim of boredom; in his uncompleted novel Work Suspended he speaks of “ruthless boredom.” His friend Douglas Woodruff noted: “He was constantly suffering from ennui, which ought to be recognized as a major affliction more wearing and painful than most physical disabilities.” One ready-to-hand weapon in the combat against boredom, according to Woodruff, was to be found in his readiness “to say the disconcerting thing in the hopes of making something happen or getting a rise, or in some other way breaking the monotony of all too easily predictable social exchanges.” In Yugoslavia, for a notable example, Waugh put it about that Birkenhead was having a homosexual affair with an Istrian intellectual and had also become a drug addict through the use of morphia. And, one must understand, he rather liked Birkenhead. Such free-floating malice evidently helped him get through the day.
As early as his school days, Evelyn Waugh’s terror of boredom and taste for the ridiculous days combined to make him a figure of subversion. Max Mallowan, later an archeologist and husband to Agatha Christie, remembered him at Lancing as “popular among the boys for he was amusing and always ready to lead us into mischief, but had a way of getting others into trouble and himself invariably escaping.” Mallowan adds that “he was courageous and witty and clever, but also an exhibitionist with a cruel nature that cared nothing about humiliating his companions as long as he could expose them to ridicule.” Philip Eade tells of a fellow student who made the mistake of using the word “preternatural,” for which he paid the price of being known as for ever after as “Preters.” Cecil Beaton, who first encountered Waugh at Lancing, remained terrified of him all his life.
Waugh won a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, where he continued his hijinks, with heavy drinking and homosexuality added. He spoke of the “aesthetic pleasure of being drunk,” by which one gathers he meant the glow of giving way without hesitation to his social effrontery and inherent outrageousness. As for homosexuality, “everyone was queer at Oxford in those days,” the poet John Betjeman remarked. Waugh’s great homosexual flame was a young man named Alistair Graham, one of the figures upon whom he partially modelled his Brideshead Revisited character Sebastian Flyte, and through whom he gained his first entrée into the upper-class English world he later portrayed in Brideshead. Harold Acton, who read Eliot’s The Wasteland out of a megaphone from the window of his rooms at Oxford, was another university connection. Never at all serious about study, Waugh finished Oxford with a disappointing third-class degree.
His first ambition was to become a draughtsman, and so after Oxford he went off to the Heatherly School of Fine Art in London. He also briefly tried his hand at cabinet making, until he realized, as he put it, “that there was nothing for it but to write books; an occupation which I regarded as exacting but in which I felt fairly confident of my skill.” In the meanwhile he spent his nights drinking and bonking about town among the Bright Young Things, gathering material, though he may not have known it at the time, for Vile Bodies, his novel about the young dissolutes of the day.
Having shed his homosexuality in the way public-school Englishman of the era seemed to do, Waugh played a wide field of women, and, when it came to marriage, chose Evelyn Gardner, perhaps the ditiest of them all, who had been previously engaged no fewer than nine times, sometimes, it was said, simultaneously to more than one man. He was twenty-four, she twenty-three, and in the spirit of the times he proposed marriage by saying, “Let’s get married and see how it goes.”
“I saw a young man,” Evelyn Gardner noted of her first impression of Waugh, “short, sturdy, good-looking, given to little gestures, the shrugging of a hand which held a drink, the tossing of a head as he made some witty, somewhat malicious remark. He was easy to talk to and amusing.” Diana Cooper described Gardner as “though very pretty not much else.” A friend of Evelyn Gardner—now, to distinguish her from her husband, called Shevelyn—noted that “I don’t think she is wildly in love with E. W., but I doubt if she is capable of sustained passion.” The friend was correct. The marriage lasted less than two years, broken off when Shevelyn began an affair with a man of negligible significance named John Heygate, whom she later claimed never to have loved. At the breakup of his marriage, Waugh was twenty-six. His own comment on the marriage was that “fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one should be happy for long.”
Not long after his marriage ended, Waugh underwent what his father called his “perversion to Rome.” Much evidence exists that the breakup of his marriage was not the sole cause of his religious conversion, though it must have weighed in heavily on the decision. In his autobiographical volume A Little Learning, Waugh notes that he had much earlier attempted suicide by drowning, and was only stopped from completing the job by the incessant biting of jellyfish. In Vile Bodies, a novel he felt he had botched, Waugh more than suggests the emptiness of life among the higher bohemia of Bright Young Things, his social milieu of choice, that was decadent London society between the wars. Modernity itself became an affront to him. Catholicism was the spar he chose to grasp against its choppy seas.
The Jesuit Father Martin D’Arcy, who oversaw Waugh’s religious instruction, remarked that he came to Catholicism through his revulsion with the modern world and its faithlessness, hoping, as D’Arcy wrote, that through it he could regain “a recrudescence of hope and even gaiety.” T. S. Eliot, in The Wasteland, claimed to show “fear in a handful of dust.” Evelyn Waugh, before his conversion, already knew that fear. A Handful of Dust is of course the title of what many find Waugh’s most perfect novel.
On September 29, 1930, Evelyn Waugh was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Why Romanism? Because he felt it was the oldest, and hence most fundamental version of Christianity. Philip Eade quotes Waugh as saying that “Catholicism was Christianity, that all other forms of Christianity were only good insofar as they chipped little bits off the main block.” In an essay titled “Conversion to Rome,” Waugh wrote that he saw the world as essentially a struggle “between Christianity and Chaos,” and Christianity represented order. Did his conversion alter his behavior? Not, apparently, outwardly. Hilaire Belloc told Mary Herber, the mother of Waugh’s second wife Laura, that “he has the devil in him.” Waugh himself told John Betjeman that he was “by nature a bully and a scold.” After witnessing his rudeness to a French intellectual she introduced him to, Nancy Mitford asked him if it weren’t a contradiction that he was so rude a man and yet he claimed to be a practicing Catholic. “You have no idea,” he replied, “how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” He might have added, as he wrote in his essay on his conversion, that “the Protestant attitude seems often to be, ‘I am good; therefore I go to church’; while the Catholics is, ‘I am far from good; therefore I go to church.’”
Evelyn Waugh didn’t like being labelled a Catholic writer, in the way that Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, and J. F. Powers were. Saul Bellow and Philip Roth similarly chafed at being called Jewish writers. Such
labels do not make a writer seem minor so much as parochial. Yet Waugh led a very Catholic life. His closest friends—Greene, Christopher Sykes, Ronald Knox—were Catholics, and he was himself Mass-going, confession-giving, legalistic on theological matters, observing of all ritual, deeply disappointed by the loosening of Church doctrine and practice proposed by Vatican II. Catholicism ultimately changed the kind of novelist he was, taking him beyond comedy while never really abandoning it.
Comical all Waugh’s novels indubitably are, often riotously so. He may be the only modern novelist in whom one remembers secondary characters and comic bits as vividly as anything else in his books. Who can forget the vicar in A Handful of Dust who continues to give sermons originally written during his time in India, citing tropical conditions and colonial distance, to his congregation gathered in wintry England. Or in the same novel the bit in which the friends of Tony Last’s adulterous wife search out a mistress for Tony to divert his attention from his wife’s betrayal, and one suggests “Souki Foucault-Esterhazy,” to which another responds: “He [Tony] isn’t his best with Americans.” Or the prostitute with her out-of-wedlock child who, despite her lowly station, is not above a touch of anti-Semitism. Or, in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s quite balmy father; or Anthony Blanche “ageless as a lizard, as foreign as a Martian”; or the voice of a London hotel receptionist that sounded the note of “hermaphroditic gaiety.” Or Major Athorpe in Sword of Honor who never travels without his own portable water closet; or, in Scoop, the definition of “the news” as “what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.”
Evelyn Waugh’s was the comedy of detachment, both in his fiction and in his life. His grandson Alexander claimed this detachment came as a reaction to his father’s sentimentality. Who else but he could write of his first-born child, his daughter Teresa: “I foresee that she will be a problem—too noisy for a nun, too plain for a wife. Well standards of beauty may change in the next 18 years.” In Yugoslavia, his reaction to a German stukas bombing raid was to compare it to German opera—“too loud and too long.” He did deadpan in prose, no easy literary maneuver. He could nab a character in a single sentence, or phrase, such as the younger sister Cordelia in Brideshead Revisited, who “moved in the manner of one who has no interest in pleasing.”
In a Paris Review interview three years before his death, Waugh remarked:
I regard writing not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech, and events that interest me.
Precise, pellucid, flawless in usage and deployment of syntax, confidently cadenced, Waugh’s was perhaps the purest English prose written in the past century.
Evelyn Waugh has been viewed as chiefly a comic writer. V. S. Pritchett noted that Waugh was always comic for serious reasons, and he distinguished his earlier from his later books by making the distinction that the former “spring from the liberating notion that human beings are mad,” while his later ones, especially his war trilogy Sword of Honour, “draws on the meatier notion that the horrible thing about human beings is that they are sane.” Even these earlier books, though, spoke to a yearning for a steadier, more stable world.
After his conversion to Catholicism, Evelyn Waugh found a theme—the emptiness of life without faith. For some this theme diminished him and deprived his writing of interest. Of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s most unremittingly Catholic novel, Isaiah Berlin noted that it “seems to start so well and peter out in such vulgarity,” and referred to Waugh as “a kind of [Charles] Maurras—a fanatical, angry, neurotic, violent writer, thoroughly un-English in most ways.” In his diary, Noel Coward lamented the infusion into Waugh’s novel Unconditional Surrender of “long tracts of well-written boredom. The whole book is shadowed by a dark cloud of Catholicism, which suffocates humor and interferes with the story.” Edmund Wilson, who in 1944 considered Waugh “the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw,” two years later, on the occasion of the American publication of Brideshead, found himself “cruelly disappointed,” the novel “more or less disastrous,” the work a failure of taste, “mere romantic fantasy,” its author’s snobbery “shameless and rampant,” with Waugh’s hitherto laudable style gone “to seed.” Wilson would later sketchily review Waugh’s The Loved One, his satire on American funerary rites, and exclaim that “to the non-religious reader, however, the patrons and proprietors of Whispering Glades [the posh California cemetery mocked in the novel] seem more sensible and less absurd than the priest-guided Evelyn Waugh.”
Edmund Wilson, always a bit of a village atheist, a man readier to believe in revolution than in God, suffered a want of sympathy for writers—Conrad and Kafka among them—given to spirituality. Myself a bit of a village agnostic, I find Evelyn Waugh’s delving into questions of faith elevated his fiction. One doesn’t have to be Catholic, or consider conversion to Catholicism, to be interested in the theme of faith—understanding it, finding it, retaining it under difficult conditions. The drama of faith, Waugh’s ultimate subject, went directly against the grain of a secular age, but in taking it up in his novels Evelyn Waugh, the brilliant humorist, became a major writer.
J. F. Powers
(2013)
When James Farl Powers died in 1999, the New York Times headline on his rather brief obituary read, “J. F. Powers, 81, Dies; Wrote about Priests.” His Wikipedia entry describes Powers as “a Roman Catholic American novelist and short story writer who often drew his inspiration from developments in the Catholic Church and was known for his studies of Midwestern Catholic priests.”
Sounds narrow, provincial, claustral, unpromising. Not, it turns out, so. In the American priesthood J. F. Powers found a subject that, through his talent for telling detail, irony, and humor, he mined to produce some of the most striking fiction of his day, fiction that holds up well in ours.
That day—the 1940s through the early 1960s—was for American Catholics very different from today. Catholic life in those years provided a distinct culture within America. For Catholics, the Church, capital and small letter C, was both the center and periphery of life. Catholicism had an authority and hold on American Catholics that has long been leaching away and now seems much less firm, if not tenuous.
In the very Catholic city of Chicago, where I grew up, Catholicism was a natural part of the cityscape. Priests in clerical collars, nuns in full habit walked the streets, rode public transportation, bustled about in libraries, were in evidence everywhere. If one were a Catholic, one sent one’s children to Catholic primary and secondary school—parochial schools, they were then called—where they learned Latin, took courses in theology, and studied under the lash of unremitting discipline. The likelihood of children going to Catholic schools mixing with public school children was slight. Voluntary segregation by religion was the order of the day.
An impressive group of Catholic intellectuals and artists was active, men and women for whom Catholic theology was at the center of their thought. Its international roster included Evelyn Waugh, Father Brian D’Arcy, Graham Greene, Father Ronald Knox, Jacques Maritain, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Fremantle, Thomas Merton, Padraic and Mary Colum, and many more. The conversion of Protestant artists and intellectuals was not uncommon. Robert Lowell became Catholic, though did not remain so for long; so did Allen Tate and other of the writers and critics known as the Fugitives. The Catholic Worker, Commonweal, and America, and others provided a serious Catholic intellectual press.
This rich Catholic culture provided both background and foreground for J. F. Powers’s life and career. Powers was a devout but never pious Catholic, allowing himself a certain latitude for criticizing those things in the Church he felt coarse, such as the Index Liborum Prohibitorum, or list of books and movies the Church censored. So serious was his Catholi
cism that on Christian grounds he was a conscientious objector during World War II, for which he served thirteen months in prison and another eighteen months on parole working at drudgery jobs in hospitals.
Powers wrote two novels and three books of stories. Each of the novels, Morte D’Urban (1962) and Wheat That Springeth Green (1988), is about a remarkable priest, Father Urban Roche and Father Joe Hackett, respectively, neither of whom is devoted to the saving of souls or the work of aiding the poor but rather to the humdrum everyday business of keeping the Church running. His short stories, thirty of which are in The Stories of J. F. Powers (New York Review Books), are preponderantly about priests, certainly the best ones are.
Powers tells a straight story, usually in an enclosed space. Often his priests never leave the parish, or even the rectory. They do their jobs, deal as best they can with bishops, curates, housekeepers, pets, occasionally whacky parishioners, and, later, radical changes in the Church. They are fond of food and sometimes too fond of a drink or perhaps three. Crises of conscience sometimes arise, but it is the quotidian detail, the daily rhythm of priestly life, that absorbs and fascinates in Powers’s fiction. As Father Joe Hackett tells his young curate:
This [the Catholic Church] is a big old ship, Bill. She creaks, she rocks, she rolls, and at times she makes you want to throw up. But she gets where she’s going. Always has, always will, until the end of time.
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