Waugh Contra Mundum

Brideshead sets about giving the case for the prosecution in this rampant epoch of democratic feeling. The book is as rife with purportedly worthy prigs and cranks as it is with hat tips to Chesterton himself. Lady Marchmain reads Father Brown stories in the drawing room of her lavish but empty estate, and one in particular furnishes the metaphor that Cordelia later remembers to Charles and also titles Book Three of the novel: “a twitch upon the thread.” This refers to the inexorable pull of the divine acting upon even the most far-flung and recalcitrant soul, and it is meant to account for how Sebastian, Lord Marchmain, and Julia each return to the faith–circumstances of plot, and floridities of description, which critics have clucked at as a stampede of silliness in its own right. Martin Amis said that there was “something barefaced, even aggressive, in the programmatic way that the novel arranges for its three most unregenerate characters to claim the highest spiritual honours.” Sebastian winds up a pestering monk’s helper, a drunk living half in and half out of grace in North Africa. Marchmain makes the sign of the cross at the very edge of the grave and accepts the holy sacrament from a patronizing priest, but only after spending the better part of a marriage in a state of Byronic extravagance and apostasy in Venice. Meanwhile, Julia, who has hitherto evinced little if any emotion toward her estranged parent, is so moved by his passing and so instantly appalled by her own life of sin that she forsakes the one thing she really loves–Charles–because to her suffering is synonymous with redemption. Waugh’s main characters are not round so much as rotund.

The subtitle of the Brideshead is “The sacred and profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder,” and it is divided into two parts, the first being cheerfully pagan (the “hot springs of anarchy”), the second lugubriously religious (“living in sin”). But sometimes the two overlap and conflict with manic-depressive brio, which makes the reader wonder if Waugh hadn’t intended to write two separate novels at once. Charles, still a stubborn agnostic, laments his own sorry generation by claiming that “the Catholic squires of England,” i.e., Lady Marchmain’s brothers, had to be killed off “to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the traveling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures.” The traveling salesman is the salient image of this oft-cited and much giggled over sentence (it’s as if emperors and czars had no say in the matter of World War I). But we can’t discount the countervailing image of “aborigines.” Waugh returned frequently to the colonial metaphor in Brideshead–yet it was always, oddly enough, to embellish the plight of the ruling class. Foretelling his own denouement, Charles sees himself as an Eskimo lodged in an igloo awaiting the lethal avalanche. At one point he compares Sebastian to a Polynesian, his mind “happy and harmless” until the “grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist” disturbs his psychic tranquility. Trader, administrator, and tourist are in keeping with the supposed ravages of modernity–but missionary? What’s that doing in a pejorative light in roughly the same section as those slain Catholic squires? Similarly, before Marchmain submits to the heavenly temptation, while he’s still a good and angry anti-clericalist, he talks of his family’s declension from the knights of Agincourt.

The infamously stilted “Languor of Youth” soliloquy Charles delivers in Chapter IV concerns a “romantic” English friendship between two boys, a vignette somewhat awkwardly analogized to the Beatific Vision. The first rendering of Brideshead‘s only articulated sex scene–the doubly adulterous and doubly sinful one between Charles and Julia on the ocean liner–went like this:

When Waugh revised Brideshead in 1959, cutting out some of the passages of “elegiac afflatus,” as his fellow Catholic Conor Cruise O’Brien memorably derided them, and toning down other grandiloquent offenses, he changed the above allusion from one of transcendence to one of transaction. Instead of an ancient rite of solemn meaning, taking Julia on the rollicking waves became a “deed of conveyance,” the “first entry as freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.” The artistic improvement here may be slight but it is still perceptible, both in terms of tone and association. Insofar as Charles can be seen as an arriviste, materialism is a better metaphor than liturgy.

And this of course brings us to the reason Waugh’s earlier novels were more coherent and fleet-footed black satires. Apart from their economies of language, their author was impervious to having his worldview called into question. He reveled in snobbery, pure and simple and secular. If he had cared at all what the intelligentsia thought of his work, he might have defended himself by arguing that at least he was universal in his contempt for all things “modern.” The distinction, after all, between a reactionary and a revolutionary politics as it works its way down to the cultural level is one almost without a difference. How many Jewish socialists in New York were inspired by the poems of an anti-Semitic royalist named T.S. Eliot? Integral to Waugh’s genius was his intuition that wastelands do not discriminate in their choice of victims; heroes, such as they exist, are there to be punished. Consider this dripping of egalitarianism: He harbored a Rousseau-like hatred of the disruption of lesser Arcadias of the lower orders, such that the only true innocent in Brideshead is the senescent Nanny Hawkins.

The criticism that rankled Waugh the most about his first “serious” novel was that its spirituality was too ornate to be of any metaphysical value. Edmund Wilson thought the humor in Brideshead was as good as in any of the previous books, but shrewdly observed that the sacred theme came off as a rank imposter: “The upstarts are rather crudely overdone and the aristocrats become terribly trashy, and his cult of the high nobility is allowed to become so rapturous and solemn that it finally gives the impression of being the only real religion in the book.” Nothing can have upset Waugh more than to give just this impression. Even his fellow Catholics assailed him for swirling the faith of their ancestors around in goblets of brandy Alexander. To be rich and entitled is one thing, but to claim divine license for being rich and entitled is quite another. O’Brien thought Brideshead “dark and defeatist” in its handling of Catholicism–not to mention heterodox in its spiritual anointment of only wellborn subjects. Frank Kermode cuttingly remarked, in another notice that slightly disturbed Waugh, that he was only preoccupied with salvation of people who said “chimney-piece,” or the “enviable poor.” The adjective that usually modifies “poor” is “deserving,” so why “enviable”? Because even noblesse oblige is treated as a self-parody of Tory pomposity. Here is Lady Marchmain explaining Biblical economics to Charles:

Waugh wasn’t disapproving of the core sentiment behind such questionable hermeneutics; it was his own. And Lady Marchmain only continues to stifle our intended sympathy for her as the suffering matriarch of a collapsing dynasty. Her vain attempt to suborn Charles in rescuing Sebastian from himself is understandable in light of her desperation. Take away her wealth and title and she’s still just a single parent trying to raise four children. Others allude to her far more than she actually appears in Brideshead, and even where her reputation is blackened–most tendentiously by Anthony Blanche–she still has the makings of a tragic heroine. But then she opens her mouth and makes a hash of the one attribute designed to soften her character and dramatize her plight–her devotion:

An ironical atheist couldn’t have put it better. Alice in Wonderland is a fairy tale. Is this really the best way to “make a Catholic” of Charles, whose agnosticism, though worn a bit too heavily in the earlier chapters, is at least affirmed without similar condescension? This is what Wilson was getting at when he wrote, “the religion that is invoked to subdue [sin] seems more like an exorcistic rite than a force of regeneration.” As Communism might have been elsewhere, Catholicism is a procrustean bed in which no one in Brideshead truly feels comfortable lying.

Elsewhere, wealth and piety war against each other in alternating breaths. “It would be very wicked to take a step like this without believing sincerely,” Lady Marchmain informs Rex Mottram about his wish to convert for the sake of marriage. Yet his mercenary pragmatism is enough to scuttle this admonition a second later: “A man needs a religion. If your Church is good enough for Julia, it’s good enough for me.” That satisfies Lady Marchmain. High comedy is then achieved with Rex’s “instruction” at the hands of a befuddled priest, Father Mowbray, who gets in a few mordant asides about the poverty of modern education and the sham worldliness of the young. But it’s to be the crash of the candelabrum and the fart at the pulpit going forward. The hilarious nonsense Rex regurgitates after being fed it by the devout but mischievous Cordelia–she tells him Catholics must sleep with their feet pointing East, the better to walk to heaven if they die in the night; that one can purchase the damnation of one’s enemies; that “sacred monkeys” are holed up in the Vatican–doesn’t just lampoon his gullibility and ignorance, it claims real Catholic dogma as collateral damage. Would an initiate to the faith find the Assumption of Mary and the handing out of indulgences more or less plausible than Rex’s bogus catechism? Bertrand Russell might have parodied Christianity the way Julia’s “primitive savage” does when he replies to Father Mowbray’s question on Papal infallibility. If the Holy See predicts rain though the skies remain dry, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.”

“One cannot really be Catholic and grown-up,” claimed George Orwell in an unfinished manuscript about Waugh and Brideshead. Whether or not one agrees with this assessment tout court, it surely applies to the varied case studies in arrested development on display in the book. Sebastian, for instance, can’t keep a straight face explaining his own pangs of confessional conscience:

Waugh is straitjacketing himself here. He was genius at insinuating acts of gruesome or barbarous violation, often as plot movers. Pederasty begins the carnival of disgraces in Decline and Fall. Cannibalism calls down the curtain in Black Mischief. Prostitution is the hinted pastime for Uncle Theodore in Scoop. And Sebastian only befriends Charles after vomiting copiously through his ground-floor window at Oxford. But now witness the golden child whose fall is supposed to be lamentable, pouting his way through his Augustinian dilemma only to be drawn back to earthly temptation by transcribed acts of pedophilia and abortion. News of the World was a Victorian scandal sheet that specialized in vice prosecutions. It might be taken as the complementary text to Waugh’s apocrypha. “Beware of the Anglo-Catholics,” Charles’s pedantic cousin Jasper warns him when he arrives at college. “They’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. In fact, steer clear of all religious groups; they do nothing but harm.” A less percipient guide than Virgil through this inferno, but a good master of ceremonies for Anthony Blanche, the most finely turned out invert in Waugh’s oeuvre (a close second is Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags). At first we’re meant to suspect Anthony because of his Levantine features, his Freudian stutter, and his “cosmopolitan upbringing;” he has the look of the “Wandering Jew.” But then it’s disclosed that he, too, is a Catholic, who was expelled from public school “under what is called a cloud.” Anthony is not just a witty and withering Ganymede; he is the novel’s internal critic. “English charm” is what he warns Charles against at Oxford, and then mildly rebukes him for exhibiting in his Gauginesque paintings later on. The portfolio represents a “very naughty and very successful practical joke.” Charm is what “spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.” What can it do to gothic piety?

Of the two best Catholics in the book–Lord Brideshead and Cordelia–only the former demonstrates a working knowledge of the tenets of his church, and, as Charles tells him, “If I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense.” So he does. The preceding was a rejoinder to Bridey’s rationalization of Sebastian’s alcoholism: “There’s nothing wrong with being a physical wreck, you know. There’s no moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live to walk ten miles at eighty.” In a different context, this might be attributed to sibling schadenfreude; here it’s merely the stock response from a banal, matchbox-collecting man-child. The beautiful are the damned, and the homely aren’t much of anything. Cordelia aims to be a severe, self-denying Romola, confirmed in her allegiance to God, but her evolution from an “enchanting child” (Charles’s term) into an ungainly nurse, who tends the wounded and dying Fascists of Spain, serves little purpose other than to allow a conduit for the latest news about Sebastian abroad. Compare Cordelia’s saving grace to that of her fellow bedside spinster and closest contemporary analog in English fiction, Briony, the reformed brat in Ian McEwan’s secular novel Atonement.

What is the use of mourning decay–be it of architecture, breeding, the chivalric code, or anything else–if one believes that fatalism governs all sub specie aeternitatis? “All fates are ‘worse than death,'” noted Waugh in his Diaries. Redemption under these circumstances is a feint. One begins to appreciate O’Brien’s point about darkness and defeatism, and why other critics darkly suspect that Brideshead was one long rap sheet on the inauthenticity of Waugh’s fideism. This was an unfair judgment. The Diaries and the Letters furnish ample evidence that he was not just sincere in his belief but a complete bore about it, the type who agonizes volubly over the condemned souls of friends like poor John Betjeman, forever trapped in Anglican “schism,” with a teddy bear and sexual confusions of his own. Waugh did, however, notice the irony of his electing to join a denomination that prides itself on forgiveness; religion, he claimed for his alter ego Gilbert Pinfold, provided the “tiny kindling of charity” that warmed a preternaturally cruel heart. Fiction’s smirking Torquemada.

Brideshead, for that reason, is not just what Martin Amis calls a “problem comedy,” it’s a problem drama. Its author took the Book of Job to be the funniest tale ever told, and he simply couldn’t stay serious about the one thing he meant to be serious about. Waugh’s least remembered works are Helena, an historical novel about the eponymous Christian empress, and his brief biography of Edmund Campion, the Elizabethean Jesuit martyr, a book so ashen-faced in its sectarian propaganda that it led Edmund Wilson to conclude, “If we had no source but Mr. Waugh, we might assume that the Society of Jesus had always consisted solely of mild-spirited servants of God, who had never had anything to do with rigging racks or lighting fagots for their enemies.”

Here is another irony of Waugh’s votive excesses. The most numinous occurrence in Brideshead is the naming of Charles’s children–Johnjohn and Caroline. So the most famous English novel about the decline of a made-up Catholic family unwittingly presages the rise of an actual Catholic family across the Atlantic. The great snob loathed the United States like jazz, Picasso, and sunbathing, despite enjoying an ardent league of American admirers and would-be emulators. Waugh died in 1966, which meant he lived long enough to see a co-religionist elected president and cut down, a nuclear missile crisis averted, and Europe physically and symbolically bisected by a wall on one side of which fell godless communism and on the other side the fully realized age of Hooper. He also likely knew who John F. Kennedy was before the rest of us did–Waugh and his wife had socialized with the Marchioness of Hartington, Joseph Kennedy’s eldest daughter, who, from notoriously low Irish origins, married into a blue-blooded English family in a way the parvenu par excellence might have admired. Though that would have been all he admired about the Kennedys. The Marchioness earns the clan’s sole passing reference in the Diaries, and Waugh recorded no substantive observation about the rest of them, at least as far as I’ve been able to uncover. This must be counted a great missed opportunity for both politics and literature. It would have been worth sitting through the new film adaptation of Brideshead a second time to learn what Waugh made of the only American phenomenon ever to outdo his magnum opus in kitsch and stage-managed legend: “Camelot.”

Michael Weiss is a writer living in New York.