Both in his own lifetime and in the forty years since his death, Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) has triggered violent emotional reactions—ranging from adulation to revulsion—in those who encounter his writings. He is in fact one of those rare figures who often manages to evoke positive and negative responses within the same individual. He has been called a Fascist, a snob, a reactionary Catholic, and “one of the three nastiest writers in the twentieth century” (the other two being Wyndham Lewis and Bertolt Brecht). When his diaries were published ten years after his death, the reviewer in the London Sunday Times concluded that the books constituted “a portrait of the artist as a bad man.” Yet he is commonly acknowledged to be a comic genius and one of the masters of English prose style. All but one or two of his thirty books remain in print, and three recent films made from his novels have appeared to critical acclaim (Brideshead Revisited, Bright Young Things, and A Handful of Dust).
Of course, as you may already suspect, Waugh relished controversy and is undoubtedly looking down on the ruckus which attends his literary reputation with the deepest satisfaction. Waugh’s taste for provocation went beyond his outrageously funny satires upon a veritable rogue’s gallery of imbecilic aristocrats, petty African dictators, and social climbers. In his later years, he would attend public functions dressed in loudly-checked suits, sporting “a Victorian ear trumpet which he would raise when talking and lower when spoken to,” according to one of his recent biographers.1 He was not averse to making a scene when the mood came upon him.
This same biographer, Martin Stannard, recounts an incident which typifies Waugh’s flair for offensiveness. In 1960 the BBC got Waugh to agree to a rare television interview. His interlocutor was a man named John Freeman, whose skills at probing intimate personal matters would easily rival those of Jerry Springer or Geraldo Rivera.
Soberly dressed, a carnation in his buttonhole, with the inevitable cigar and a quizzical glare of amused condescension, [Waugh] answered all the questions designed to reveal psychological instability with devastating brevity. When pushed for details, he mixed fantasy and truth at just the right pitch of levity to confuse and deflate his inquisitor. At last, somewhat desperate, Freeman managed to pin Waugh to a definite statement. The novelist agreed that the best he could hope for was that people should ignore him. “You like that when it happens, do you?” “Yes.” “Why are you appearing on this programme?” “Poverty,” came the reply, “We’ve both been hired to talk in this deliriously happy way.”2
Pleasant as this story is, there is perhaps another anecdote which cuts closer to the heart of Waugh’s personality. In the early 1930s, Waugh—his reputation already established—had the opportunity to meet Hilaire Belloc, the aging, crusty Catholic controversialist. When the meeting took place, Waugh remained uncharacteristically shy and reticent; he was then a recent convert to the Catholic Church and felt awed in Belloc’s presence. After Waugh had left, Belloc was asked about his impression of the young man. His answer was not what Waugh’s friends had expected. “He is possessed,” Belloc said.3
What Belloc meant by that mysterious comment was not that Waugh was—literally speaking—a hostage to the Devil. Rather, the old man was paying tribute to Waugh’s capacity not so much to outrage others as to be outraged by the sins and follies of his time. In short, Waugh felt himself to be plagued by the demons of the modern world; his writings were to become acts of exorcism that would cast out the things that so thoroughly galled him.
A Personal Debt
As I reflect on my personal debt to Waugh’s literary and spiritual vision, I realize that it is this fierce inner struggle that accounts for his greatness and the fascination he holds for me. The figure in literary history to whom he seems closest is Jonathan Swift, the eighteenth-century wit who also blended venom and comic inventiveness into a potent satirical mix. Like Waugh, Swift was accused of snobbery, reactionary politics, and, above all, hatred for his fellow man. But critics have rarely understood that compassion and principle can coexist with stinging ridicule—particularly when they have felt the lash of the satirist’s wit themselves.
Perhaps those who place themselves in the role of prophet suffer from the occupational hazard of confusing righteous wrath with wrath, pure and simple. Swift’s epitaph, which he composed himself, read: “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” (Where savage [or fierce] indignation can no longer tear his heart). The prophet and the satirist inevitably appear to be negativists—they are always calling down the thunderbolts of vengeance upon the wicked.
But the most convincing prophets and satirists have never been loose canons firing indiscriminately at whatever happens to irritate them at the moment. In fact, the true satirist is not a pure cynic, but one whose idealism has been wounded by the vision of how far men fall short of their potential. In the crucible of their art, great writers like Swift and Waugh refine away personal grudges and vendettas; their savage indignation, in the end, is the bitter herb which is intended to violently purge the sickness of a world which is truly “fallen.” Or, to put it another way, the doctor’s knife appears menacing, but it is used to restore health. And without a notion of what constitutes a sound body, there can be no healing.
What I discovered, in time, was that Evelyn Waugh’s “possession” was precisely his greatest gift. Yet the more of his fiction I read, the more I was convinced that behind his satirical wit—which was what had attracted and delighted me at first—there also lay a coherent and profound worldview. Waugh’s public persona may have been marked by exhibitionism and querulousness, but his fiction spoke to me with the force of prophetic insight.
I began to read Waugh in graduate school, during what proved to be a turning point in my life—between my youth and my mature career as a writer, editor, and teacher. My adolescence had been both rocky and lonely: the experience of living through my parents’ separation and divorce deepened a natural tendency toward non-conformism and isolation. Going off to college, I felt not only the normal exhilaration of independence, but also the sense of joining a cause. I had chosen a school that had a national reputation for its ties to the conservative intellectual movement. The late 1970s were bracing times for conservatives, who were advancing toward the political victory of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.” Wordsworth’s famous lines about his enthusiasm for the fledgling French Revolution perfectly describe my mood at that time. As a budding conservative, I felt, on a deep emotional level, that I belonged to a community. It was a new family.
But even as I progressed through my undergraduate years and the euphoria among conservatives grew in intensity, I became troubled and divided. Many of my professors had introduced me to classic works of history and literature which, far from supporting political triumphalism, spoke of the “tragic sense of life,” original sin, and the limitations of partisan politics. The strain of American conservatism embraced by Ronald Reagan, a form of messianism going back to the Puritan conviction that America was the “shining city on a hill” that would lead the world to peace and prosperity, struck me as arrogant, unhistorical, and downright dangerous.
Another set of misgivings soon complemented my intellectual difficulties. As I became more deeply involved with the public institutions of the conservative movement, I found them riddled with hypocrisy, corruption, and greed. At the foundation where I worked immediately after graduating, the phones seemed to be ringing off the hook with conservatives desperate to get high level positions in executive-branch bureaucracies they were committed, in principle, to abolishing. (These same conservatives soon began talking about their departments as “agents for constructive change.”) In one sense, of course, my youthful idealism was getting its inevitable battering; I was growing up. But it was no longer possible for me to seek comfort in an ideological family. I went off to Oxford for graduate work in English literature, once again relieved to be away from a painful environment, but no longer so anxious to “belong.”
In the long vacations between the grueling eight-week Oxford terms, I read through the entire Waugh canon, starting with the early romps, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, and ending with his much-underrated World War II trilogy, Sword of Honour. What these novels gave me—apart from sheer delight, which is, after all, the one prerequisite for good art—was a way to organize my experience. As a Christian in the late twentieth century, I needed to find a way to address the spiritual crisis of the modern West without falling into either apathy or the ready-made answers of ideology. I found it, in part, in Waugh’s tragicomic vision. That vision, with all of its stylistic brilliance and complex ironies, was fueled, not by personal malice or childhood trauma, but by an unshakable conviction that civilization could only be held together by religious faith.
The Stiletto in the Ribs
Waugh’s novels are excruciatingly funny—in a very literal sense. The essence of Waugh’s comic genius is his ability to cause the reader to feel both pleasure and pain. No sooner are you laughing at some bizarre caricature or piece of knockabout farce than Waugh suddenly inserts the stiletto between your ribs. In Black Mischief, an early satire of the crumbling British Empire set in an African nation, the young innocent abroad shares a meal with some natives only to find that he has just digested his girlfriend. Rather than an isolated piece of grotesquerie, an episode like this fits into a tautly constructed whole. As Waugh explained:
[Black Mischief] deals with the conflict of civilisation, with all its attendant and deplorable ills, and barbarism. The plan of my book throughout was to keep the darker aspects of barbarism continually and unobtrusively present, a black and mischievous background against which the civilized and semi-civilized characters performed their parts: I wished it to be like the continuous, remote throbbing of those hand drums, constantly audible, never visible, which every traveller in Africa will remember as one of his most haunting impressions.
What he doesn’t say here, but worked out in the novel, was the nearly complete reversal between civilization and barbarism—the colonial British are slowly revealed as the true barbarians.
In short, I came to see that Waugh’s deft constructions and thematic seriousness set him above the mere humorist and put him in the same class as the two most devastating satirists in our literature: Juvenal and Swift.
The key to Waugh’s irony is absence. What is missing from the world he depicts is religious faith, with its attendant stress on moral and cultural standards. There are, to be sure, regular church attendees and even American revivalists in his novels, but religion has become nothing more than a social habit. For Waugh, civilization is a precarious artifact, not a natural condition. Without the inner ordering which a living faith in a transcendent creator entails, he believed, the external ordering of society would become brittle and collapse into fragments.
Interestingly, many of Waugh’s early readers were unaware that his novels had any serious “point.” In some ways, they can hardly be blamed. There is in his fiction none of the direct castigation of society’s ills such as can be found in Juvenal’s philippics.
Most readers follow the anarchic whirl of events in these stories in a state of breathless exhilaration. It should be no surprise that Waugh was, by temperament, an anarchist with a heightened sense of the absurd. As Martin Stannard puts it, Waugh’s art was “an anarchic defence of order.”4
Human institutions, like anything under the sun, inexorably decay; as William Butler Yeats put it: “The centre cannot hold.” In 1935, before Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago, Waugh published a manifesto which contained these lines.
Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all.… Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy.5
The greatest danger, Waugh continues, is not anarchy itself, but the establishment of tyranny to fill the vacuum of disorder. “[A]narchy is the nearer to right order, for something that has not developed may reach the right end, while something which has developed wrongly cannot.… The disillusioned Marxist becomes a Fascist; the disillusioned anarchist, a Christian.”6
Waugh was himself a disillusioned anarchist. He had gone about with the Decadents and Aesthetes at Oxford, and later with the riotous young aristocrats in London, known as the Bright Young Things, at the height of the Roaring Twenties. He married quickly and thoughtlessly and was divorced in little over a year. And while his novels unquestionably capture some of the thrill of the anarchic social and moral conditions of the post–World War I years, they all contain the retracted stiletto blade, which eventually springs out to remind us that we are all potential recruits for barbarism.
A Handful of Dust: The City and the Jungle
Nowhere is Waugh’s irony more lethal than in A Handful of Dust, arguably his greatest work and made into a film. Tony and Brenda Last live in a decaying country house called Hetton. The house, though on the site of the ancient family seat, is a Neo-Gothic monstrosity built in the Victorian era. Tony, as his surname implies, is the last of civilized men. His love for Hetton is genuine, but his weak aesthetics are the clue to his fatal flaw. He is unaware that this vulgar Victorian imitation of the integrated medieval order is not grounded in the vigorous faith of that earlier age. Tony is a romantic in an age of cold, hard calculation and barbarous passions.
Brenda loathes Hetton and pines for the social life of London. She meets John Beaver, an amoral sponger, and soon moves into a London flat in order to carry on an affair with him. Tony, who enjoys pottering about Hetton, playing the role of country gentleman, remains ignorant of the affair. Beaver’s mother is an interior decorator much in demand in London high society. When Mrs. Beaver visits Hetton, she concludes that various rooms should be remodeled in chrome and sheepskin. She, like her son, lives parasitically off the rot of the English ruling class. In her barbarism, she would enclose the remnants of Western art in abstract, antiseptic metal.
Tony’s Sunday church attendance is nothing more than a social ritual. “Occasionally some arresting phrase in the liturgy would recall him to his surroundings, but for the most part that morning he occupied himself with the question of bathrooms and lavatories, and of how more of them could be introduced without disturbing the character of his house.”7 But the vicar, the Reverend Tendril, isn’t really “there” either. An elderly man, he has spent most of his life as a missionary in the far-flung British Empire. He continues to preach as if to a military garrison in Afghanistan or India. His Christmas sermon provides an example: “Instead of the glowing log fire and windows tight shuttered against the drifting snow, we have only the harsh glare of the alien sun.… Instead of the placid ox and ass of Bethlehem … we have for companions the ravening tiger and the exotic camel, the furtive jackal and the ponderous elephant.”8
Reverend Tendril’s sermon returns us to the theme of the perennial conflict between civilization and barbarism. Waugh makes this explicit in the novel’s conclusion. Tony, the last to learn of Brenda’s infidelity, emerges from his passivity (too late, of course), deciding to file for divorce as the injured party and thus refuse Brenda any financial settlement. On impulse, he agrees to accompany a crackpot explorer, Dr. Messinger, on an expedition into the South American jungle to find a mythical city, a lost paradise. Dr. Messinger, who utterly fails to comprehend the natives, meets an untimely end, while Tony comes down with a nearly fatal fever. In Tony’s delirium, Waugh presents a richly suggestive phantasmagoria. At first Tony thinks he has seen the mythical city; it is a glorified but sentimentalized version of Hetton, all Gothic turrets and banners. Later he thinks he is addressing John Beaver:
You would hear better and it would be more polite if you stood still when I addressed you instead of walking around in a circle.… I know you are friends of my wife and that is why you will not listen to me. But be careful. She will say nothing cruel, she will not raise her voice, there will be no hard words. She hopes you will be great friends afterwards as before. But she will leave you. She will go away quietly during the night. She will take her hammock and her rations of farine.… Listen to me. I know I am not clever but that is no reason why we should forget courtesy. Let us kill in the gentlest manner. I will tell you what I have learned in the forest, where time is different. There is no City. Mrs. Beaver has covered it with chromium plating and converted it into flats.9
Instead of the City of God, glimpsed through the highest achievements of Western art and civilization, there is only the jungle. But the new jungle in London will be more inhospitable to man than the Amazon for the simple reason that it denies the essence of humanity itself. As Waugh said on more than one occasion, man without God is less than man.
Nowhere in A Handful of Dust is there any representative of traditional Christian faith. Waugh requires the reader to follow the lines of his irony back to the missing element in the equation. In this use of absence, Waugh is actually close to the aesthetic techniques of the modernist writers—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. In works like Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses, the reader is set down in a bewildering world where he must make his own way, taking his bearings from the relationship of the parts to an unstated whole. The great advantage of the modern style is that it requires the reader to weigh various interpretations and make his own judgments. Though few readers will be able or willing to engage in this process of discovering meaning, an encounter with modernist literature can be exciting—the opposite of passive reception. Waugh’s fiction cunningly allies modernism in technique with a Christian vision of the world.
The Problem of Standards
My realization that Waugh, for all his public stuffiness about modern art, had mastered some of the stylistic achievements of literary modernism, was also important. It had become increasingly clear to me that the Christian writer in the twentieth century could not merely hearken back to happier ages when the faith was publicly endorsed. We cannot “ring the bell backward.… Or follow an antique drum,” Eliot reminds us in Four Quartets.10 That would be an exercise in sentimentality and irrelevance. No, the modern Christian artist had to speak to his age in the language and forms of his time. With breathtaking artistic genius, Waugh had managed to use the anarchic and frenetic state of modern society to reflect the poverty of a culture severed from its roots in the cult, the Christian faith.
In reading Waugh, I had started where any good reader of fiction should begin: I tried to take in the unique flavor of his style. I had, in short, accustomed myself to the particular kind of aesthetic lens, with its specific tint and magnification, through which the author wanted me to see the world. But two questions soon obtruded themselves. There was, in the first place, the problem of standards; the satirist has to launch his salvos from a fixed position; the only alternative being a thoroughgoing nihilism. What was the source of the norms against which Waugh measured human folly and evil? The second question involved my curiosity about Waugh’s theological background. What strand of Christianity did he find the most satisfying?
As it turned out, both questions had the same answer: the Roman Catholic Church, to which Waugh had converted in 1930. These were not academic questions for me, but urgent, burning issues. Like many young Christian writers in the 1970s, I had come from one of the “Low” churches to embrace the Episcopal Church, or what I preferred to call the “Anglican Communion.” My literary heroes, C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot, had been Anglicans, and my immediate Christian mentors, Thomas Howard and Sheldon Vanauken, were shining beacons along what has been called “the Canterbury trail.” I was intoxicated by the language of the King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer; Evensong with an Anglican boys’ choir was, I was sure, a direct preview of the heavenly consort. Sacraments, ritual, priesthood—all of these elements of “Catholic” Christianity became like richly colored stained glass through which I basked in the light of God’s grace.
But there was soon trouble in paradise. When I looked to the Episcopal Church for clear and unambiguous teaching on the crucial moral issues of the day—marriage and divorce, abortion, homosexuality—I found a Babel of conflicting voices. It was impossible for me simply to “transcend” these problems which centered on the family, the one institution that most clearly stood between civilization and anarchy. Nor could I accept that these were private matters, part of a legitimate “pluralism” within the church. So the question of the teaching authority of the church became paramount. As I stood on the steps of a beautiful Neo-Gothic Episcopal church, I gazed across the street to a hideous roller-rink style Catholic church, envying not the aesthetics of its parishioners, but the force and clarity of their church’s teachings.
Because my childhood experiences of Christianity had been in what I call the “Transcendentalist” tradition—Christian Science and liberal Congregationalism—I never had the dogmatic frame of mind that relied on elaborate logical and Biblical proofs. For me, the measures of truth were much more concrete and specific, hence my interest in art and morals. In my own search for a home within the Christian community, therefore, works of the imagination, such as novels or paintings, were not only admissible but essential guides. Evelyn Waugh’s early novels, such as A Handful of Dust, do not confront the experience of faith directly. But his most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited, was about the Catholic Church and the way it shaped and affected its communicants.
Brideshead Revisited: The Operation of Grace
Brideshead marked a new phase in Waugh’s fiction. His conversion in 1930 had been a relatively intellectual affair, primarily an assent to the dogma of the church. But during World War II, Waugh came to believe that in his personal life, and in his art, he ought to make the church an active force. The ambitious goal he set for himself in Brideshead was to show “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.”11
Ironically, the reaction of many readers, including a good number of Catholics, to Brideshead can be summarized by a letter received from an American reader soon after its publication: “Your Brideshead Revisited is a strange way to show that Catholicism is an answer to anything. Seems more like the kiss of Death.”12 A plot summary would certainly seem to support that contention. The agnostic painter, Charles Ryder, witnesses one member after another of the Catholic, aristocratic Flyte family die or fade away in lives which appear largely futile. Early in the novel, Ryder’s intimate friend, Sebastian Flyte, explains:
So you see we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated—and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want.… I wish I liked Catholics more.13
By the end of the novel, Sebastian and Cordelia are also living sad, stunted lives. But, as happens so often in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh, a throw-away phrase contains the core of the novel’s meaning: “happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.”14
For Waugh, the notion that the life of faith ought to lead inevitably to worldly prosperity and what the pop psychologists call “wellness” is both unrealistic and dangerous. In a fallen world, afflicted by evil and stupidity, happiness can never be a gauge of fidelity to God—and our own deepest needs. To think otherwise is to confuse happiness, with its bourgeois connotations of comfort and freedom from any burdens, with blessedness, or what Catholics call the “state of grace.”
Waugh’s depiction of the mysterious presence of grace in suffering and adversity is not unique: I found it in the other major Catholics novelists of the twentieth century: Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Flannery O’Connor, and Shusaku Endo.
Catholics, Waugh believed, have always clung to the foot of the cross, profoundly and intuitively aware of what the Spanish philosopher Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life.” Though several of my closest Protestant friends had told me that the Catholic preference for the crucifix, rather than the unadorned cross, was morbid and obscured the “triumph of Christ,” I never had that problem. When Julia Flyte, one of the “half-heathens,” reaches a moment of crisis in Brideshead Revisited, it is the unexpected memory of the crucifix on the wall of her nursery that shocks her into a recognition of how far she has drifted from God.
As the characters in Brideshead enact their “fierce little human tragedy,” it becomes clear that they are all in some fashion struggling against God and his church, symbolized by Brideshead Castle, that magnificent baroque backdrop to the novel’s action. Thomas Howard has spoken of the church as the “unseen” character in the novel.15 Even the fervent adherents to the church, such as Lady Marchmain, can’t avoid abusing their faith. Lady Marchmain’s spiritual intensity and unthinking manipulation drive both her husband and her son Sebastian to drink and exile. When Charles falls in love with Sebastian’s sister Julia, the lovers awaken in each other a passion for life that they felt they had lost. After failed marriages, Charles and Julia seem at last to be on the verge of happiness. But when Lord Marchmain returns home to Brideshead, and to the church, on his deathbed, Julia realizes that in denying the church (by remarrying after divorce) and trying to seek out happiness on her own terms, she is condemning herself and Charles to a life of alienation from God.
I’m convinced that Waugh deliberately intended to make the church look like the “kiss of death”—not out of perversity, but because he understood it to be a “sign of contradiction.” The sufferings that it seemingly inflicts, because of its laws and absolute claims, are the bitter herbs through which the disease of sin is purged. On closer inspection, the lives which the characters lead at the end of the novel, while not “happy,” are in many ways “blessed.” Sebastian is a holy fool, a drunken porter for a monastery in North Africa. When he learns of this, Charles asks Cordelia: “I suppose he doesn’t suffer?”
Oh yes, I think he does. One can have no idea what the suffering might be, to be maimed as he is—no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him… . I’ve seen so much suffering in the last few years; there’s so much of it coming for everybody soon. It’s the spring of love.16
Cordelia, who has worked for an ambulance service in the Spanish Civil War, returns to this work with her sister Julia in World War II. They and their brother Brideshead are all stationed in the Holy Land. Symbolically, they become true aristocrats, who go to the Holy Land, not for the ambiguous aims of a Crusade, but to suffer with and for others and to defend the remnants of Christendom. The novel ends with Charles Ryder’s first hesitant steps to embrace the faith he for so long misunderstood.
An Indelible Stamp
One of the key themes in Brideshead is that the church has the power to actually form one’s identity, to stamp it, in an indelible way. For the Flyte family, the church had impressed its archetypes in childhood, as even the half-heathens, Julia and Sebastian, discover. Indeed, the Flyte family itself, though its members cause each other enormous pain, is intended by Waugh as a metaphor for the church. The church, like the family, is foundational: you can never really leave it, wherever you go. This was a difficult concept for me to fathom, coming from the Protestant tradition, where there is so much shopping in the religious supermarket for the right denomination, church, and set of theological propositions. The very notion of “protest” implies that the association of believers is voluntary, and can be dissolved or divided when members disagree.
At one point in the novel, Lady Marchmain reads from a Father Brown story by G. K. Chesterton, in which the priest detective says of the thief: “I caught him with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”17 This is a metaphor for the church, which is a family, not a voluntary association; one’s relationship to it has nothing to do with the will. Hence its inexorable claims.
While I was studying at Oxford, I soon had an unexpected confirmation of the Catholic Church’s ability to form not only the conscience, but the whole person. My English girlfriend (now my wife) had begun to return to Christianity through my influence. (She had been, in her words, a “collapsed Catholic.”) She willingly attended Anglican services with me and never once attempted to proselytize for the Church of Rome. But as her faith strengthened, I watched in amazement as her Catholicism emerged naturally and unselfconsciously. Soon she realized that she was outside of her home, that she needed to be reconciled and to get inside where it was warm and where she would be fed. Charles Ryder witnessed the same process in Julia Flyte; for them, however, it meant a tragic parting.
Brideshead Revisited is a work of fiction, not a tract. It is a dramatic rendering of “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.” Its cumulative effect on me was to suggest that the Catholic Church, far from being an external, bureaucratic and oppressive structure, is a channel of grace, the living and undivided body of Christ. Once again, Waugh was forcing his readers to supply the missing answer. If the church appears as an arbitrary and demanding mother, it is because the characters have been wayward and ill-disposed toward their parent. It is the Bride, sullied at times and often unworthy of Christ, its Bridegroom and Head. It is our Mother. At least, this is what Waugh believed and what his novel implies.
I came to agree with him. On the Feast of Corpus Christi, 1983, I was received into the Catholic Church, a family to which I could belong without tensions or regrets. Evelyn Waugh had played a role in that decision. To celebrate the event, we went off to a pub outside of Oxford, situated in a charming Cotswold village. Later I found out that the pub was once a favorite haunt of the outrageous Mr. Waugh.