It was February 24, 1949. A bitter winter rain battered the Notre
Dame campus. Unconcernedly striding through it, despite water
streaming over the brim of his bowler hat and saturating his serviceable
tweed coat, was Evelyn Waugh (pronounced EVE-lin war).
Writer of the U.S. best sellers Brideshead Revisited (1945)
and The Loved One (1948), Waugh had arrived first-class
to examine the church of immigrant Catholic Americans who had
made the same trip from Europe traveling steerage. During his
two-part winter of 1948-49 reporting trip for Life magazine,
it is unlikely Waugh actually met an immigrant, unless one happened
to wait on him in a restaurant or on a train.
Half-a-pace behind, and equally wet, was Ken Thoren, intrepid
reporter for Notre Dame's weekly, The Scholastic. This
was Thoren's sole opportunity to buttonhole Waugh, who had addressed
the crowded Navy Drill Hall on campus the previous evening on
his eminently repeatable topic, "Three Convert Writers" -- referring
to his fellow Englishmen G.K. Chesterton, Father Ronald Knox and
Graham Greene.
Waugh's choice of topic was deceptively easy -- Knox and Greene
were personal friends, and he knew Chesterton fairly well. He
spoke entertainingly, with wit and without notes, according to
one young priest present that evening, Father Theodore Hesburgh,
CSC. However, his visit to Notre Dame and other U.S. Catholic
colleges was something of a charade. He was not in America to
sell himself but to indulge himself. He'd been in the United States
the year before with his wife, Laura, on a luxurious trip to Hollywood
underwritten by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which wanted to make Brideshead
Revisited into a movie.
What he sought in 1948 was another excuse to escape from a war-torn
England and his five children, all younger than 11. He didn't
like the company of children. Nor did he like England's socialist
government and its policies, which he referred to as "Welfaria."
In Britain, everything that was essential was rationed: food,
fuel, clothing, even travel money. The British were limited to
a mere 20 pounds ($100) British currency foreign travel allowance.
Waugh, therefore, laid his America plans carefully.
Early in 1948, Loyola College of Baltimore, Maryland, wrote
to announce it had conferred on him an honorary doctorate. The
honor set his mind thinking. Eight years earlier, as a Royal Marines
officer candidate, Waugh acquired the essential military dicta
the British Army taught its junior leaders: "What is my intention?
Is there more than one way of achieving it?"
His intention was to wallow in luxury for a month or two at
someone else's expense. His travels could include a speaking tour
of Catholic colleges, so he could stop off in Baltimore to collect
his doctorate. But speaking fees could not match his anticipated
expenses. Luxury, he decided, could be achieved only through a
lucrative writing assignment.
He took aim at Life magazine. (In the 1940s, having
Life underwrite a major freelance reporting project would
be like having NBC underwrite one today.)
Waugh had already written several articles for the magazine.
One, in April 1946, was "Fan-Fare," about the impertinence
of readers who, wrote Waugh, for the price of the book believed
they also had purchased the right to pry into the author's private
life. It was followed in September 1947 by "Death In
Hollywood."
That article gave him background for The Loved One, his
ironic fictional novella based on several visits to Los Angeles'
Forest Lawn cemetery. The popularity in America of The Loved
One added a fillip to his reputation with the broader U.S.
public and was ammunition for his assault on the coffers of Time,
Inc.
Through his pal Randolph Churchill, son of Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, Waugh wangled an introduction to Clare Booth Luce.
She, like Waugh, was a convert to Catholicism. More useful still,
she was the wife of Time's founder and publisher, Henry R. Luce.
Waugh proposed to Clare Luce that he write an extended essay
for Life on American Catholics. This, at the time, was
quite a daring idea. Catholics were an underclass, confined primarily
to big city ethnic "ghettoes." Waugh was sufficiently wily to
realize that as a new Catholic, Clare Luce might welcome an opportunity
to see her new religion explained and popularized. Her Protestant
husband was smart enough to realize that as Catholics were 21
percent of the U.S. population, such an article could be a sound
marketing ploy.
Before long, Waugh sent a note to Randolph: "thanks to your
kind offices I am off to USA as soon as the Luce family can get
me a cabin."
Waugh pretended his examination of U.S. Catholics would be part
of some grander work he had in mind. This suggestion was a mere
bargaining fiction. What wasn't fiction was to have Life meet
all Waugh's speaking-tour travel costs, on the grounds he'd be
doing his research at the Catholic colleges he addressed. Life
agreed to pay him $1,000 for the article and some $4,000 in expenses
(in all, more than $35,000 in today's dollars).
The scheme was unveiled in a letter to Father Francis X. Talbot,
S.J., president of Loyola College, Baltimore. "I don't seek to
make any money. Nor do I want publicity. What I do want," he wrote,
"is to get to know American Catholics. I am coming to the United
States to learn, not to teach. But I wish to pay my way by telling
you something about us and our particular qualities."
The Englishman was then honest enough to get to the nub of the
trip: "I explain also that by long and deplorable habit my 'way'
is a luxurious one. I don't want to take a penny out of America
but I want to travel and live there in fat style. I think that
defines the aim."
At Notre Dame, on the dismal February morning following his
talk, Waugh sat back in a leather chair in the students' dining
hall, puffed on a cigar and talked informally with 15 or so students.
(In Life magazine he referred to America's young Catholics
as a "Catholic proletariat.") Father Leo L. Ward, CSC, moderated
the discussion. The dining room conversation was ended by a telephone
call that advised Waugh he must leave for the train station. As
the English writer departed, he let hang the answer to the students'
final question, "What do you think of America?"
The Waugh who addressed the Navy Drill Hall audience was unabashedly
anti-American. Much of it, but not all, was a pose. Unlike his
deliberate rudeness to people he did not know, Waugh's anti-Americanism
waned with the years.
Now, striding through the rain, Waugh tackled the "America"
topic by addressing the unavailability of alcohol in the university
cafeteria, "I should think," he told Scholastic reporter
Thoren, "you would have great tankards of wine or liquor at the
end of your [cafeteria] lines instead of those teetotaling liquids.
One should consume great quantities of wine while eating."
At which point Father Ward caught up with the wet duo and began
to explain University regulations regarding alcoholic consumption.
Waugh would have none of it. "I still maintain," he said, "that
[wine and beer in the cafeteria] is better than having them take
swigs of gin in their lodgings. Which they probably do, don't
they?" Waugh's question provoked no response from Father Ward.
Meantime another man arrived with a black umbrella.
Waugh wouldn't let the topic go. He turned to the trio and asked
if they knew what Chesterton had to say about drinking. They admitted
they did not. So the three stood in the rain as Waugh, under the
umbrella and showing off, faced them and recited:
Feast on wine or fast on water
And your honor shall stand sure,
God Almighty's son and daughter
He the valiant, she the pure;
If an angel out of heaven
Brings you other things to drink,
Thank him for his kind attention,
Go and pour them down the sink.
And with that he disappeared into the infirmary to await the
University chauffeur.
* * *
Waugh was impressed by the piety of Notre Dame's students. He
said, "the number of churches and the great amount of daily communions,
it's all quite wonderful." But had the Waugh who disappeared into
the infirmary re-emerged to explain his experiences and beliefs,
the Notre Dame students in the dining room would have been goggle-eyed,
rather than doting or amused. At Oxford, and in the years immediately
afterward, Waugh was homosexually active and a borderline debauchee
at orgies, the excesses of which only the ex-GI's among the Notre
Dame
students could have guessed at.
Post-Oxford, brothels and stinging jellyfish were responsible,
in part, for giving Waugh direction. In the early hours of December
29, 1925, the 22-year-old Waugh, who'd recently been fired as
a teacher at a private school, emerged from a dingy all-male brothel
on to a dirty, cold, pre-dawn Paris sidewalk. "I took a taxi home
and to bed in chastity. I think I do not regret it." He told his
diary he left because he couldn't afford the grotesque debauch
he'd orchestrated.
There's reason to think otherwise. The brothel incident was
the only graphically sexual scene he left in his diaries when
he later removed all other traces of his libertine life. As with
everything Waugh did, the diary entry remained for a purpose.
It seems to have been a turning point.
Five months earlier, he had emerged naked from the frigid Welsh
coast waters following a failed suicide attempt. He had been driven
back to shore by an attack of stinging jellyfish. If the did-he-intend-it-or-didn't-he
suicide attempt was a tentative turning point, the night in the
brothel confirmed it.
Three years later, in 1928, he was the toast of London for his
book Decline and Fall. Two years after that he was receiving
plaudits in New York as the daring, entertaining, witty, delightfully
ironic chronicler of the era's Bright Young People.
On a far deeper level, Notre Dame's Catholic students would
have admired -- or been mystified by -- what Waugh was currently
up to as a Catholic: deliberately sacrificing his career and glowing
future.
For the laudatory reviewers had recoiled when Waugh became a
"Catholic" writer. Waugh fully understood. He wrote that his Catholic
novel Brideshead Revisited had cost him "the loss of
such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries."
The esteem had been real enough. The pre-eminent American critic
Edmund Wilson, in the 1930s had described Waugh as "the only first-rate
comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw."
In 1945, however, when Brideshead Revisited appeared,
with its unhappy family of committed, fallen away or newly attracted
Roman Catholics, Wilson scoffed, "It is a Catholic tract," and
"as the author's taste fails him, the excellent writing goes to
seed."
In 1947, Waugh turned down the most money he'd ever see in his
life, roughly $1 million (in today's dollars), by refusing to
let MGM film Brideshead Revisited -- because he wanted
to retain control of its Catholic message, its "theology."
After 1948's The Loved One he would place his pen at
the service of the church -- though on his own terms -- and get
along as best he could. He would return to the path he'd set himself
on with Brideshead Revisited; he would write books about
Catholic Christianity not aimed at Catholics.
The parallel lines and crossovers between Waugh the Catholic
man and Waugh the Catholic writer are worth a brief explanation.
Waugh, essentially, was an unhappy young man bleakly seeking
God. A pious child -- he had a the requisite couple of years as
an atheist in high school -- he left his childhood Anglicanism
for Rome after his first wife, Evelyn Gardner (they were known
as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn), cuckolded him within months of their
1928 civil marriage.
The marriage foundered on Waugh's selfishness and inabilities
in the marriage bed. Evelyn Waugh's troubles with heterosexual
sex spilled over into the book he was working on during the break-up,
Vile Bodies, and even into his newspaper columns. There
he wrote that too much was made of the role of sex in marriage.
Waugh got the hang of things following his second marriage in
1937; he and his wife, Laura Herbert, had six children live beyond
infancy.
In 1929, however, the tormented 26-year-old abandoned writer
desperately needed something to cling to. Something unshakeable.
He found it in the unchanging Roman Catholic Church. This yearning
for something constant was mirrored in Waugh's reactionary political
views. He called himself an "Old Tory." That phrase meant the
Tory orthodoxy of George III -- reforms based only on practical
expediency; not too much emphasis on democracy; a leading role
for the monarchy; society ordered by the existing social system;
social change discouraged. Waugh never voted, despised Britain's
Conservative Party and loathed its Labour Party.
Socially, heading for Roman Catholicism was not rare among the
Brideshead generation. Several of his Oxford friends had gone
the same route during college. His lover, Alastair Graham, was
one. Many close friends were Catholic, not least his dear friend,
the poet Harold Acton (think Anthony Blanche in Brideshead
Revisited).
Auberon Waugh said his father, Evelyn, was probably clinically
depressed. Further, Waugh had an addictive personality, and not
just to alcohol and narcotics. He seemed to be addicted to strong
personalities -- the first was Acton. Next came Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet who was the subject
of Waugh's first real book, Rossetti (1928).
The morose, brilliant Rossetti, an alcohol and chloral-addicted
fallen-away Catholic, and the effete, polished Acton seemed to
occupy opposite corners of Waugh's personality. Acton had a genuine
impact on his generation's artistic perceptions, but particularly
on Waugh's. Evelyn was a skilled if minor artist who illustrated
Acton's Oxford magazine, The Broom.
It was as if Waugh absorbed Acton and Rossetti and
Roman Catholicism into his persona out of his need to bolster
his strengths with theirs.
One girl he quite unrequitedly fell in love with was Olivia
Plunket Greene. Her mother, Gwen, loaned Waugh letters she had
received from her uncle, Baron Friedrich Von Hugel, a leading
Catholic theologian who was trying to convince Gwen to convert
to Catholicism.
There's no evidence one way or another that Waugh ever finished
the letters. But he did ask Olivia to "find me a Jesuit." The
rather bewildered Rev. Martin D'Arcy, S.J., who received Waugh
into the church in 1930, said "few converts can have been so matter-of-fact;
firm on intellectual conviction but with little emotion."
The idiosyncratic Catholic could bewilder his Catholic friends,
too. Sir John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole of the Bailey
series, recalled Graham Greene's account of Waugh behavior at
a famous British film producer's home. At the gathering, Waugh
was brutally cutting to the producer's young mistress, a starlet
the producer later married. Greene later remonstrated with Waugh.
"But Graham," explained Waugh, "she was his mistress."
"Evelyn," said Greene, "I was there with my mistress."
"I know," replied Waugh, "but your mistress is a married woman."
Waugh's incredible verbal cruelty and bullying attitude toward
people weaker than himself continued to disturb his friends. When
rebuked, Waugh retorted, "if I was not a Catholic I'd be much
worse."
The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) shook Waugh's Catholic
foundations. He was blistering in his ridicule of "hootenanny
liturgies," anxious as he saw slip away much he'd depended on
in Catholicism. In 1964 he wrote, "When I first came into the
Church I was drawn, not by the splendid ceremonies but the spectacle
of the priest as a craftsman. He had an important job to do which
none but he was qualified for. A kind of anti-clericalism is abroad
which seeks to reduce the priest's unique sacramental position.
Pray God I will never apostatize but I can only now go to church
as an act of duty and obedience. Protests avail nothing."
He died on Easter Sunday, 1966, at age 62, after he'd attended
a Latin Mass.
Despite his 1935 biography of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion,
Waugh did not let his religion drive his work until Brideshead
Revisited.
After Rossetti, Waugh the ironist played lightly with
religion in Decline and Fall (1928) -- the anti-hero
was a divinity student. In Vile Bodies, he introduced
a strange character, the Jesuit Father Rothschild, and executed
an excruciatingly entertaining parody of the American evangelist
Aimee Semple McPherson, who appeared around London in those years.
The English novelist's conversion was fairly rapid. He inserted
a hasty apology into his 1930 travel book, Labels (published
in the United States as A Bachelor Abroad). His views
had changed between the writing and the publication: "So far as
this book contains any serious opinions they are those of the
dates with which it deals, eighteen months ago. Since then my
views on several subjects, and particularly on Roman Catholics,
have developed and changed in many ways."
In these years his friends the Lygons, a Catholic family, exposed
Waugh to the stately home life in which everything functioned
like clockwork, thanks to a highly organized army of servants
dedicated solely to that task. A Lygon death-bed scene provided
Waugh with Lord Marchmain's death-bed return to the faith in Brideshead
Revisited.
Campion came about because in 1933 Waugh had met the
18-year-old Laura Herbert and was smitten. Waugh had triple problems
-- Laura's family was Catholic, the Herberts were aristocrats,
and his first wife, She-Evelyn, was part of the Herbert clan.
Desperate in love, Waugh wrote a fine biography of Campion as
a calling card to prove his Catholic worth. The Herberts otherwise
regarded him as a social upstart with dubious claims as a writer.
Waugh then set about having his first marriage annulled. He persuaded
She-Evelyn, who was not Catholic, to perjure herself by attesting
the couple had not intended to have children. She-Evelyn later
suggested such was not really the case.
Before and after his 1937 wedding Waugh continued traveling
and writing; British Guiana (Guyana), Africa, North Africa, Abyssinia,
Mexico. His fiction included A Handful of Dust in 1934,
which many consider his best novel, and Scoop (1938),
his send-up of war correspondents. Slowly forming, however, was
Brideshead, written and produced under circumstances
to baffle the modern imagination. A serving officer with the Royal
Marines, Waugh was given time off during World War II to finish
it. He was back in uniform in Tito's Yugoslavia when the galleys
were parachute-dropped to him so he could do final revisions.
The galleys returned to London in a diplomatic pouch.
Brideshead is a novel of unhappy people, and deals
with their relationships with each other and their connections
to their Catholic faith. The setting is the stately home, Brideshead.
The book is about belief, about the paradoxical tenacity yet tenuousness
of belief, and the chance involved in the gift of faith.
With Brideshead, Waugh firmly committed his writing
to evangelical work. He knew this would infuriate the critics,
which is possibly another reason he wrote The Loved One
-- to show he could still turn out fine irony whenever he chose.
Or chose not to. He regarded Helena (1950), his fictional
biography of the saint who discovered the True Cross, as his finest
work. Few agreed. The Sword of Honor trilogy (published
in 1965) with the Catholic Guy Crouchback was meant to persuade
as much as entertain.
Waugh knew what he was doing. He played tough, although he was
easily hurt and brooded mightily over slights. Clare Booth Luce,
the Catholic convert who wangled his 1948 writing assignment,
is an example of someone who needled him. He once wrote to Randolph
Churchill that "I spent my first evening with your friends the
Luces, but it was not a success . . . she complained later to
others that I lacked heart." The dig was on target.
Waugh was having mixed emotions over his attitude toward Americans.
He increasingly found he liked some of them. Waugh penned a note
to the novelist Nancy Mitford, "I am bound in honor to write a
long article for Life magazine whose money I have been
spending like a drunken sailor, on the state of the Catholic church
in America, and there is nothing to say except that Americans
are louts and that Catholic Americans are just a little better
than panglossist Americans."
In August 1948, he'd read a manuscript written by a 33-year-old
American Trappist monk. This was Thomas Merton's soon-to-be published
The Seven-Storey Mountain, the account of his conversion
to Catholicism.
The Englishman was more impressed by Merton than by his overwritten
book, which he later trimmed by 20 percent for publication in
England as Elected Silence. Merton was the man Waugh
most wanted to meet during his American trip. The two did meet
and then developed an intermittent correspondence.
For the eventual Life article, Waugh depended heavily
on meeting other writers -- always a journalist's shortcut.
One was Dorothy Day. Wrote Waugh in a letter home: "To the slums
to see Dorothy Day, an autocratic ascetic who wants us all to
be poor, and her young men who are poor already and have a paper
called The Catholic Worker." Waugh wanted to take the
simple-living Worker volunteers to lunch at Le Chambord, which,
he told Laura, was the "best restaurant in the world."
Day demurred. So "I gave a great party of them luncheon in an
Italian restaurant in the district & Mrs. Day didn't at all
approve of their having cocktails or wine but they had them and
we talked till four o'clock."
Day's version is that she received a telegram from Life
magazine at the Catholic Worker house on Mott Street with a request
to meet Waugh at the Chambord that week. Jack English, a Catholic
Worker member, laughed heartily at this, she wrote, and told her:
"People like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor eat there. The place
is famous for its wines. If you go there Life might very
well carry a picture of the breadline next to one of you and Evelyn
Waugh feasting, with the caption 'No soup for her.'"
Said Day, "We would impute no such malice to Life magazine,
but Jack's devilish imagination had painted a picture that caused
me concern. Out of politeness I telegraphed hastily: 'Forgive
my class consciousness but the Chambord appalls me as Mott Street
does you.'"
The crack about Mott Street "evoked an immediate response from
Mr. Waugh, who telephoned personally. He would meet me anywhere
I suggested. So he came first to Mott Street, and then we went
on to an Italian restaurant on Mulberry Street, where I am afraid
the prices were way too high and the food not too good.
"But Mr. Waugh was kind," wrote Day, and said to her, "'It's
the austerity regime in England. I just wanted a good meal, which
was why I suggested the Chambord.'"
Day wrote that since that dinner "he sends us checks every now
and then, always made out to 'Dorothy Day's Soup Kitchen.'" Mr.
Waugh, she said, "does not recognize the anarchist-pacifist Catholic
Worker as anything other than a movement that has to do with feeding
people. And perhaps he is right. Food and the land, and the work
which coordinates them, are indeed fundamental."
Waugh was determined to overlook the anarchist-pacifist
element in favor of the soup kitchen. In a postcard to Ammon Hennacy
at the Catholic Worker he wrote: "Many thanks for your card. I
shall explain that I am an old fashioned Tory without any sympathy
for your political views. I greatly admire the corporal works
of charity you do among the destitute of New York. E.W."
* * *
Arthur Jones is editor-at-large of the National Catholic
Reporter and author of the biography Pierre Toussaint.
He has been European bureau chief of Forbes magazine
and is an international political and financial journalist and
broadcaster.
(Permissions: I am indebted to the late Auberon Waugh for
permission to quote from his father's works; to Orbis Books for
the excerpt from Dorothy Day's Loaves and Fishes. The
description of Evelyn Waugh's "Old Tory" political views is based
on Oxford historian D.C. Somervell's definition.)
(October 2003)
