The Master’s Lodge, Peterhouse
Dear Alasdair
Yes, I am better, though it took a long time, and I must still be careful.2 It mortified me to see those beautiful autumn days and not to be able to go out and enjoy them. But your handwriting on an envelope always cheers me.
I sense that you need to be cheered too, so I am glad that Bernard Williams3 is so encouraging. I sympathise with people in your state, especially when, as now, I have just read 133 applications for 2, or at most 3, research fellowships. With my mind’s eye I see them all, 133 slaves in a Roman quarry, or mine, or treadmill, of whom only half-a-dozen, in the end, will be emancipated—if it is emancipation and not a more comfortable but more deadly slavery that they are seeking … Let us not ask too many questions about that. Dons, and supervisors, are very critical—it is their occupational disease—and sometimes very negative and do not, in the poverty of their spirit, appreciate the agony of those who are still going through the process which has given them their petty doctorates.
How can I boost your morale? Only, I fear, in a somewhat egotistical way—since I cannot comment on your work, only on your letters—by saying, truthfully, that I find in you, and in them, qualities which I admire: a warmth, a vitality, an intelligence, a love of literature; and that I value your friendship and hope to keep it; and that if your philosophy does not exclude or suppress these amiable qualities I shall willingly be converted to it.
You write about Evelyn Waugh. My relations with him were curious. I contrived never to meet him, which required some ingenuity, for we had many common friends and fashionable hostesses sometimes sought to trap me into a confrontation. But I was determined to avoid him because I genuinely admired his writing but knew that he would be offensive and did not want to be involved in disagreeable scenes. He picked a quarrel with me in 1947—wrote me, out of the blue, a very nasty letter, attacked me in the Tablet, and then in other papers. I hit back occasionally, and he then became, as it seemed to me, somewhat paranoid. I heard many stories of his wild, and often intoxicated denunciations, and since his death his published (and unpublished) letters have given further evidence of his hatred of me. He evidently regarded me as a particularly poisonous serpent who had slid into the garden of Brideshead and was corrupting its innocent Catholic inhabitants; which perhaps, to a certain extent, I was—or, as I would prefer to say, was provoked into being. In the end I tried to make peace with him, but my civil letter received only a curt formal acknowledgement.
Now that the dust has settled, what do I think of him? I think he was a writer of genius, and I forgive him a great deal because of his genuine love of our language. His wild fantasy and black humour are aspects of his genius as well as of his warped character. He was, I believe, utterly cold-hearted: all his emotions were concentrated (apart from his writing) upon his social snobisme and his Catholicism, which was a variant of it, or rather, perhaps, the ideological force behind it. He was a true reactionary—not just a troglodyte like the Peterhouse mafia but a committed, believing, uncompromising, intellectually consistent reactionary like (say) de Maistre.1 I wonder if he had any friends. He kept up a regular correspondence with Nancy Mitford,2 much of which has been published, but she (whom I knew well) was equally, behind a witty, entertaining persona, a cold-hearted selfish person, chiefly interested in malicious private gossip. After his death a volume of essays about him was published—I can’t remember the editor, some ‘Mayfair Jezebel’, I think (to use Logan Pearsall Smith’s phrase).3 Most of the essays were thin and worthless, but there was one which was splendid. It was by the late Lord Birkenhead who had found himself living, during the war, in German-occupied Yugoslavia, with Tito’s partisans, in the company of Waugh and Randolph Churchill. The essay was wonderfully funny and wonderfully good-tempered. I wrote to Birkenhead about it and received a letter which I treasure. I enclose a copy of it; but please destroy it when read: I don’t want even a whiff of it to reach the one person mentioned in it who is still alive (and dangerous)!4
Evelyn Waugh’s original offensive letter was provoked by an admittedly injudicious remark by me about Jesuits in The Last Days of Hitler,5 and I assumed at the time that this was my initial offence. However, since his death, I have seen letters from him which attacked me well before that publication, so I no longer know the original cause of his hostility. The general background to it was certainly ideological. During the war, and throughout the 1950s, a group of very articulate, socially reactionary Roman Catholics—all, or nearly all, converts—pushed themselves forward and evidently thought that they could be the ideologues of the post-war generation. They established themselves, by patronage and infiltration, in certain institutions (the British Council, the Foreign Office) and they wanted to establish themselves in the universities. They behaved in a very aggressive, boastful manner: their public line was that there was no alternative to them: there is no culture except Catholic culture, there are no English novelists except Catholic novelists, there is no political thought or system, in the discredit of Nazism, fascism, communism, except that of the neo-Catholic. Frank Pakenham, now Lord Longford, used to ‘teach’ his pupils that modern thought is dominated by ‘the three Ms: Marx, Mannheim1 and Maritain;2 and the greatest of these is Maritain’. Frank, of course, was not one of them, having become a socialist; but as a fellow-convert of Father D’Arcy3 he was an ally in religious zeal, and his mind was sufficiently muddled, not to say chaotic, to entertain any jumble of inconsistent ideas. Graham Greene was similarly one of them ideologically, though different in political orientation. Their spiritual centre was the Jesuit Church of Farm Street in Mayfair. In his controversies with me, Waugh used to write to the Jesuits there for ammunition (I have seen one of his letters seeking such ammunition and have a copy of it).
All these people regarded me as a dreadful enemy—I sometimes think (but this is vanity) as public enemy no. 1. The reason was that I was thought to be influential in Oxford, and particularly in Christ Church—precisely the places which they were most eager to conquer. ‘You are not going to send your son to be taught by that dreadful man?’ Evelyn Waugh exclaimed to a Belgian friend of mine; and then, turning to the company, ‘Does this poor foreigner know what he is doing?’ And on another occasion he would say, rather unrealistically, that the prime objective of himself and his friends was to have me removed from Oxford. Graham Greene once walked out of a restaurant in Abingdon simply because he saw me there. In my old age I regret having aroused such feelings in such distinguished literary men.
Time and events have made that phase of history, or biography, seem very remote, and the internal contradictions of what then seemed a solid party have disintegrated it. Waugh sank into abject, total, eccentric reaction. Greene found himself supporting Castro (I remember a letter from him, published in the Times, protesting that Castro was not a communist but a romantic radical Catholic, like himself) and Philby (whom he praised—after his defection and exposure—as the modern equivalent of the Elizabethan Jesuit martyrs like Edmund Campion, the hero of Evelyn Waugh1). The Papacy of John XXIII was a body-blow to them—although I suppose that Greene has found some ingenious way of compromise with Latin American ‘liberation theology’. Frank Longford, of course, has long been insulated from reality by unlimited vanity and unqualified love of publicity. But Waugh remains a cult-hero to a little band who live in an imaginary mini-Brideshead.
I would love to come and dine on 30 Oct. and meet your friends. You know my problem: I have to go out occasionally in the evenings—Governing Body nights, guest nights, House of Lords—and Xandra doesn’t like being left alone too often; but I will try to ration myself next week so that I can come on Thursday. It will be a great pleasure to see you again.
yours ever
Hugh