When Evelyn Waugh died, only a bold man would have bet on his
reputation. 1966 was the apotheosis of “Swinging London,” but
Waugh, while a Londoner born and bred, was the antithesis of
swinging. Waugh was, in modern parlance, a snob, a racist, and a
sexist. He was a self-styled “craftsman” who loathed proletarian
culture. He was a political reactionary, and a lonely and anguished
opponent of the Second Vatican Council that was soon to render
unrecognizable his beloved Catholic Church. He was a man of the
past.
Of course anyone who had bet on Waugh then could easily retire
on his winnings now, in the year of the centenary of his birth.
That bold man Tom Wolfe was perhaps sailing close to the wind when
he predicted that Waugh and D.H. Lawrence would be the only
20th-century English-language writers to survive — and he wasn’t
sure about Lawrence. But Scottish novelist Allan Massie is surely
correct that “Waugh’s novels are as popular now as they have ever
been, and his critical standing is higher than it was for most of
his lifetime.”
Waugh’s literary achievement was secure enough to survive the
1981 filmed adaptation of Brideshead Revisited —
described by his son Auberon as “Granada TV’s multimillion-pound
gay extravaganza” — and the lamentable Teddy Bears for men craze
it inspired, now of a piece with other such risible enthusiasms of
the decade: yellow “power” ties for men, Bronco-Nagurski padded
shoulders for women, A Flock of Seagulls. And it will doubtless
survive the upcoming remake starring Colin Farrell and Jude Law
that proposes to “excise” Charles Ryder’s conversion to Rome, which
is rather like excising the monster from Frankenstein.
The Waugh revival is irksome to many. Not least to Christopher
Hitchens. Not least because Waugh was condemned by the highest
authority Hitchens recognizes — not Rome, of course, but another
English writer born 100 years ago. In an essay in the Atlantic, much as a theologian
might cite Augustine or Aquinas, Hitchens cites his secular saint
George Orwell:
One cannot really be Catholic and grown-up…Waugh is
about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today)
while holding untenable opinions.
Waugh had his own view of which was the more grown-up,
Christianity or materialism. In a letter to Orwell thanking him for
the gift of a copy of 1984, Waugh chided Orwell for his
despair:
It was false, to me, that the form of [Winston Smith’s]
revolt should simply be fucking in the style of Lady Chatterley
—finding reality through a sort of mystical union with the Proles
in the sexual act…The Brotherhood which can confound the Party is
one of love, not adultery, still less throwing vitriol in
children’s faces. And men who have loved a crucified God need never
think of torture as all-powerful.
This is the crux of the dispute between Waugh and his
detractors. The Christian recognizes that man has been exiled from
Paradise; the materialist is always joining some Party with the aim
of invading it. Materialists like Hitchens (Kingsley Amis was
another) always praise his early, purely anarchic, novels at the
expense of his later, forthrightly Christian, ones. Waugh remained
an anarchist after his conversion, but he matured into a Christian
anarchist. Never a respecter of persons, he came to understand
reality from under the eye of eternity. Waugh’s humor, once callow,
became suffused with melancholy.
Auberon Waugh once wrote that his father lived above all to tell
jokes. He also noted that the world is divided into two camps:
those who love jokes and those who fear them. Included in the
latter camp are the progressives of all stripes. They dislike
Evelyn Waugh because his jokes expose the folly of their hopes.
Especially with regard to race.
Richard Brookhiser, in his New York Observer column, accuses Waugh in Scoop and Black
Mischief of “indifference to the fate of dusky peoples,” of
“treat[ing] different races as different species and consign[ing]
some to eternal darkness.” While Christopher Caldwell, in Slate, accuses him of
a “deeply felt (if always jolly) racism.” He explains, “Waugh is
not blind to the ways decadence can become indistinguishable from
barbarism, but you really need to tie yourself in political knots
to give the laurels of savagery to anyone but the Azanians —
‘black, naked, anthropophagous,’ as Waugh describes them at one
point.”
And one would have to tie oneself into politically correct knots
not to see that Waugh’s African novels reserve their savage
indignation for those arrogant Westerners who seek to replace the
old barbarism (cannibalism, paganism) with the new (birth control,
animal rights, Bauhaus architecture).
Waugh did not treat different races as different species; he
merely treated them as different. This does not make him a
“racist,” only an enemy of progressives. And so he is a true
modernist, certainly in the sense T.S. Eliot understood the word,
while Hitchens, Brookhiser, and Caldwell and their utopian
materialism are as fusty and Victorian as Charles Dickens.
