Evelyn Waugh Revisited: Of Dickens, Gibbons, and Catholicism

By David Wykes | Sunday, June 11, 2006

Editor’s Note: This year marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Evelyn Waugh, one of the preeminent English novelists of the 20th Century, perhaps best known for Brideshead Revisited. The following piece is excerpted from the introduction to Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life, by Dartmouth English Professor David Wykes.

“I am not I; thou are not he or she; they are not they.”

(Author’s note, Brideshead Revisted)

In July 1957, Evelyn Waugh was reluctantly present at a Foyle’s Literary Luncheon to open the publicity campaign for his new novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. The book was so evidently autobiographical that it would have been impossible for him to have gone through the charade of warning his audience not to associate Pinfold with Waugh. He declared the book to be based on his own experience of going “off my head” three years earlier. The dust jacket said the same thing less bluntly. Pinfold was Waugh. As Martin Stannard remarks, the novel “has always been read as autobiography rather than fiction” and its author did nothing to discourage that reading. In his diary, he referred to the book as his ‘novel,’ his quotation marks indicating the dubious applicability of the term. What is really remarkable in this open admission is the implication that fictionalized autobiography was a novelty in his writing. Nothing previously, it is true, had been autobiographical in the manner of Pinfold. There Waugh claimed to be transcribing reality, putting a thin coat of fiction—perhaps so that he could call it a ‘a novel’—over an exact account of what had happened to him. But there was nothing new about autobiographical experience as the foundation of his fiction. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is fascinating for the manner in which it both admits and denies this truth.

‘Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age,’ the opening chapter, defends Mr. Pinfold’s objectivity and impersonality as an author quite as vigorously as Waugh generally defended his personal privacy. “He regarded his books as objects which he had made, things quite external to himself to be used and judged by others.” Pinfold envies painters to whom are permitted forms of repetition forbidden to novelists: “painters…are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties.” Pinfold as a novelist, however, seems to differ markedly in some respects from his creator. Waugh himself did return again and again to certain themes (the unfaithful wife and betrayal in all its forms are conspicuous examples), but there is one way in which he seems an exact counterpart. Like Waugh, Pinfold takes his personal experience as matter for his fiction. This is a large subjectivity, and one that Waugh usually did his best to conceal or deny. In Pinfold he owns up. In this last chapter of the novel, Pinfold is shown seated at his desk, looking at the manuscript of the novel he left unfinished at the beginning of his lunacy. “The story was still clear in his mind. He knew what had to be done. But there was more urgent business first, a hamper to be unpacked of fresh, rich experiences—perishable goods.” And he writes the title of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. The drug-induced episode of schizophrenia that was the foundation of Pinfold was welcomed by the novelist as a “gift,” an extension of personal experience suitable for use in fiction. (The discovery of the Forest Lawn burial ground on his trip to Hollywood had been an earlier “gift” of this type, resulting in The Loved One.) Unlike, say, Henry James, Waugh could not build a novel on an anecdote told to him about someone else. His dependence on his own history was nearly total.

Waugh was not very good at invention, but he was unsurpassed at embroidery. His experience reappears transformed, imaginatively made over and artistically perfected in his fiction, but he denied his genius for embroidery. He claimed—absurdly but irrefutably—to be a fundamentalist of empiricism, an objective recorder of his own experience. Indeed, he went to the extreme of claiming that his transcriptions of reality had to be toned down to make them ‘probable’ in the literary sense.

My problem has been to distill comedy and sometimes tragedy from the knockabout farce of people’s outward behaviour. Men and women as I see them would not be credible if they were literally transcribed…People sometimes say to me, “I met someone exactly like a character out of one of your books.” I meet them everywhere, not by choice but luck.

His claim to be simply the recorder of human behaviour is so logically unassailable as to undermine the logic of empiricism. He says he put down what he saw; how can that claim be refuted? It is one of his most artful teases, and one of its concealed effects is to emphasize the importance of what happened to him. If we wish to do more than enjoy his novels, to understand something of his process of creation and measure his skill, then one very valid approach is through his life story. All his writing has an autobiographical source, sometimes more, sometimes less, yet none of it is simply autobiography, and that goes for his autobiography too.

Waugh died in 1966, but his reputation has never slumped. His books are kept in print and there is every sign that he will become a classic of our prose. The academic and institutional signs are particularly plentiful: his books are ‘set’ for examinations; a scholarly journal (the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter) is devoted to his life and works; no general history of the twentieth-century English novel can omit him; academic careers are advanced by dissertations and monographs on him. Yet this academic Waugh industry has a paradoxical element in that its subject was the least academic of novelists. It is true that his novels are elaborately allusive; quotations, references and parodies abound, and annotators do good business with them. His fierce cultural conservatism has meant that his biographers have been able to work almost exclusively with documents in the traditional academic form. (His hatred of the telephone has added many pages to the three full-length biographies of him.) But in the great fundamental of academic procedure, in the writer’s study and awareness of his predecessors in the English novel, Waugh was willfully and creatively uneducated. Certain writers were acknowledged by him as ‘influences’, but their effect and stature were limited. (Ronald Firbank and Hilaire Belloc are good examples.) In Waugh’s imaginative ancestry—that is, in the form of influence that Harold Bloom has invented and investigated—there were two great figures, Dickens and Gibbon, and Waugh perhaps proved himself a Bloomian ‘strong’ novelist by publicly denigrating both. Without these two English writers, he would have been a novelist of different formation, but he implied as firmly as he could that it was otherwise, that he was not in their debt.

Dickens stood in a paternal role of Waugh the novelist, but then fatherhood always had elements of antagonism in his life. Waugh adopted Dickens’ style of autobiographical fiction, developed in David Copperfield and perfected in Great Expectations. Gibbon, denounced obliquely but unmistakably in Chapter 6 of Helena, supplied Waugh with a model of literary behaviour. In the Helena denunciation, and in his later career in general, Waugh tried to limit Gibbon to the role of stylist, but this was in fact a late development. In the earlier novels, it is of course Gibbon’s irony and especially his relationship to his narrative that Waugh found valuable and often adopted.

Style and irony are the obvious borrowings for a novelist who surreptitiously follows Gibbon, but there was in Waugh’s case a more intangible and even less-acknowledged debt. Gibbon’s greatest value in Waugh’s eyes was that he was a model historian, a model adoptable by a novelist. And that is the role—the novelist as a historian—that comes closest to describing his imaginative conception of himself. Pretending to look forward to books that his brother Alec was to write, Evelyn in 1930 gave a definition of historical writing: “[Alec’s] narrative poem, his story-teller’s instinct for significant detail, his ability to sort out tangled chains of motive, to assess probabilities, to render incidents dramatic and memorable, seem to me all to fit him for the role of historian.” Evelyn introduces this list of what could assuredly be the abilities of a novelist by saying that Alec is “growing out of novel-writing.” But amid tease and bewilderment, one thing is clear: history and the novel share family features, and the historian is a novelist as the novelist is a historian.

Gibbon described the decline and fall of a great civilization, and did it with a style and attitude that embodied what was lost. He had no heroes. For much of his career, Waugh’s appreciation of those qualities in Gibbon far outweighed the splashier idea that Gibbon ‘blamed’ Christianity for the decline and fall. When Waugh came to feel that he had to denounce Gibbon for his irreligion, it was because Waugh no longer modified his definition of the novelist as historian and was no longer the writer he had been.

Satire and Roman Catholicism are the bookends of much that is written about Evelyn Waugh. His own attitudes towards these twin supports of his academic reputation differed. He declined to agree that he was a satirist, and insisted on his Catholicism to a degree that sometimes brought him close to denigration of his earlier, non-Catholic novels. He never did repudiate his younger literary self, but a compliment paid to one of his later books, particularly Helena, would receive a warmth of welcome quite different from the tight-lipped acknowledgement of an enthusiasm for an earlier one.

It is the belief of the article you are reading that Waugh was right about satire—not that it matters much—and most understandably wrong about Catholicism as it concerns his literary reputation.

Satire first. ‘Fan-fare’ includes Waugh’s most direct rejection of ‘satire’ as a description of his fiction, and since this was 1946 he means what are here called his ‘earlier’ books, pre- Brideshead.

Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards—the early Roman Empire and eighteenth-century Europe. It is aimed at inconstancy and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue.

By basing his definition of forms of society and ideology that no longer exist, Waugh asserts the historical impossibility of his being a satirist, and then he goes on to suggest for himself and any like him another historical role. “The artist’s only service in the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own.” The next sentence shows that he does not mean by this art for art’s sake. “I foresee in the dark age opening that the scribes may play the part of the monks after the first barbarian victories. They were not satirists.” They were, however, primitive historians. If what they recorded seems excessive, it is because they chronicled the deeds of barbarians, persons of habitual excess, but their accounts share the perspective of a religious affiliation. The little systems of order will not therefore be independent of each other. Waugh is defining the role of the novelist as (Catholic) historian, although in 1946 he had modified and would continue to modify as he had played it up until the war. He is misleading only if his fans infer that the role he describes is new for him. He had played it from the start of his career.

The debate among Waugh’s students and devotees as to whether he was satirist has not been triumph for academic criticism. The outcome seems to be that one accepts or rejects his refusal of the role according to the thesis one is pushing. My emphases, therefore, fall on the self-evident delight Waugh takes—in the earlier novels—in the misdeeds and character deformities that he chronicles. Satire is notoriously paradoxical in that writing that is supposedly trying to exterminate something has to be in love with that something if it is to succeed as art. How barren Pope’s world would have been without dunces! Waugh, however, goes beyond the satirists in his evident gusto. He liked things to go wrong. There is in his work not a trace of sincere Utopianism. Human life can never be anything but exile, and the fantasy of an earthly paradise or El Dorado—or even of life on a lightly improved model—is the product of a grave misunderstanding of human nature. (The later Waugh would make it clear that this misunderstanding can be explained only by theology.) The behaviour that Waugh’s novels depict is to him the assurance that he was religiously right, and so that behaviour gets the support of his artistic of his artistic intelligence.

It would indeed by possible to argue—and to flirt with paradox—that true satire entered Waugh’s fiction for the first time only with the appearance of Atwater/Hooper/Trimmer, the embodiment of the Age of the Common Man, the inheritor of the future. Waugh evidently hates this figure and hears him, and real fear, however deeply buried, seems to be the one indispensable quality of real satire. It is usual to say that Waugh’s later novels are diminished in comedy; it is as much to say that they have increased in fear. Any biography of him must try to relate this development of his thought to his art and life, to show how Waugh learned fear.

He became converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930. There is no doubt that in his own eyes this was the single most important fact in his life, but if one confines oneself to matters of literary importance, a fact may rank for the biographer more or less highly than it does or did for the subject of the biography. In Waugh’s case, Catholicism has far more importance in his writing in 1945 and afterwards than it ever had before. Yet the later novels, most of which can fairly be called ‘Catholic,’ are—in the unashamedly evaluative judgment of this book—of less value than those written before Brideshead.

Waugh became Catholic soon after Vile Bodies (1930); Black Mischief (1932) was his next novel. Catholicism thus stands at least in the background of his fiction in 1932, but the judgments and attitudes detectable in the two earlier novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, seem to be quite in conformity with those that are present after the conversion. What really happened is that Waugh found a church and a doctrine that provided a sustaining framework for ideas about human life and society that had been forming in him for quite some time. Becoming a Catholic meant dropping some ideas and attitudes that he had toyed with experimentally, but mostly it meant he could underline, emphasize, and explain a group of beliefs that carried over fundamentally unchanged from before to after. The Catholic Church was a new spiritual home for Waugh, but his social, political and historical address did not have to be changed; he could continue to live where he had lived for years already.

This is almost, but not quite, to say that given the elements of the secular ideology that underpins the earlier novels, Waugh could have written his pre-Brideshead novels without religious faith. It is possible that had he not found Catholicism, he would have lost the will to continue as a novelist, so in that sense, religion may have been essential for fiction. I think it is also true that the alternative implied to the life depicted in A Handful of Dust can only be religion, but undifferentiated religion, not necessarily Catholicism. These exceptions apart, Waugh’s religion becomes of literary importance only when his work enters its lesser phase, and a short biography must reflect that judgment.

Waugh’s tombstone bears the one-word description, “Writer,” for novels are only part of his work. Once he had a reputation as a novelist, he used it to build and expand a market for several kinds of journalism. He wrote three biographies and an autobiography, and half a dozen travel books. His diaries and collections of his letters have been published. He declared that “I wanted to be a man of the world and I took to writing as I might have taken to archaeology or diplomacy or any other profession as a means of coming to terms with the world.” This would suggest that it did not much matter what he wrote, and the list of his works superficially bears that out; a book on wine, commissioned by a firm of wine merchants and paid for in kind, stands next to The Loved One. But any notion of mere professional facility, of a hand that could be turned indifferently to anything, is mistaken. Waugh was a novelist who used his lesser literary talents to help him live entirely by his pen, as Robert Graves wrote fiction and much else to support his poetry habit. Waugh’s novels were good sellers, but there were only so many novels that his life story offered him to sustain the life-style he demanded. Hence his large non-fiction output. Much of his pot-boiling was in fact distinguished writing; it could be tedious, though rarely, for it was very hard for Waugh not to be entertaining. Everything he wrote sounds like him and makes a good fit, in ideas and attitudes, with the rest of his work, even (or perhaps especially) Robbery Under Law , the 1939 book that is the least-known large item in his list (least known since he wanted it that way). The travel books, for further instance, could be discussed advantageously from the angle of Waugh’s metaphor of history—the traveler as historian. The situation, however, demands selectivity. The novels must have precedence and the other writings have to agree to let themselves be used as evidence in the enquiry that is the only real justification for a biography of Evelyn Waugh: How did this life support this fiction?

Evelyn Waugh Revisited: Of Dickens, Gibbons, and Catholicism

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