Waugh the Catholic

Evelyn Waugh?s genius was nurtured by Tridentine Catholicism. He loved its rigidities while transcending them. This portrait marks the centenary of the novelist?s birth

EVELYN Waugh lived to see the Second Vatican Council. For him, that was a misfortune. He died in 1966, a year after the council concluded its proceedings. ?The buggering up of the Church?, he wrote to his friend Nancy Mitford, ?is a deep sorrow to me?. It is well known that Waugh?s principal objection to Vatican II was the replacement of the Tridentine rite with the new vernacular liturgy. Waugh?s feelings were, of course, not at all unusual at the time; but what is interesting is the peculiar nature of his own sense of loss.

Waugh?s novels tend to revolve round the jobs the characters do (or fail to do). He was fascinated by the craftsmanship of a job well done, however absurd or fraudulent the job might be. Thus The Loved One (1948) is a satire on the Californian burial industry, which makes its author?s unconcealed admiration of the art of Mr Joyboy, the senior mortician, all the more striking. Waugh himself never wanted to be a writer; it was the work he resorted to only when all else had failed. His ambition was to be a graphic, not a literary, artist. His real love was drawing, decorating, designing and illustrating, not writing. As a writer, he was insistent that he was simply a craftsman who employed words as his materials.

Waugh was received into the Catholic Church in 1930 by the brilliant Fr Martin D?Arcy at the fashionable Jesuit church in Farm Street, Mayfair. Fr D?Arcy?s later account of the instruction he gave Waugh emphasised how Waugh ?never spoke of experiences or feelings?, being simply interested in the exact doctrines he was required to believe. Now as a theological ?craftsman? Fr D?Arcy was obviously far superior to the unintellectual English Jesuit missionary, Fr Mather, whom Waugh met on his travels in British Guyana, which are recounted in his travel book Ninety-Two Days (1934). And yet the portrait of this unknown Jesuit encountered by Waugh in the desolate savannah suggests that Mather, not D?Arcy, had the decisive influence on Waugh?s Catholicism. For just as Catholicism did not become real for Graham Greene until his experience of the persecution of the Church in Mexico which led to his masterpiece The Power and the Glory (1940), so too Waugh?s experience of mission life had a tremendous impact on him, as he also acknowledged.

What was special about Fr Mather was that he was an extremely accomplished craftsman: ?He was at work in his carpenter?s shop when we arrived and came out to greet us, dusting the shavings off his khaki shirt and trousers, and presenting a complete antithesis of the ?wily Jesuit? of popular tradition? He is a skilled and conscientious craftsman.? In what was not a particularly happy life the days on Fr Mather?s mission stand out: ?They were peaceful and delightful days. Mass at seven ? then Fr Mather would go off to his workshop.? Fr Mather?s little church made of tin and thatch, with his scanty congregation kneeling on the mud floor, was another world from Farm Street, but it seems that it was there that Waugh first saw the priest as a craftsman above all.

He explained his view of the Church?s liturgy in a letter written at the time of the changes. ?I was not attracted by the splendour of her great ceremonies?, he remarked, but by ?the spectacle of the priest and his server at low Mass, stumping up to the altar without a glance to discover how many or how few he had in his congregation; a craftsman and his apprentice; a man with a job which he alone was qualified to do. That is the Mass I have grown to know and love?. It was symbolic that Fr Mather followed his divine master in the craft of carpentry as well as in the ?job? he was commanded to do in memory of his master.

Waugh had a divided temperament: his innate tendency to anarchy and chaos was matched by his longing for order and routine. Craftsmanship brought form to formless materials and the divine craftsmanship of the priesthood brought order to the disorder of life. The usual complaint about the new liturgy compared with the Tridentine Mass is that there is a loss of mystery. But that was not Waugh?s complaint. No liturgy has more a sense of the numinous than the Eastern liturgies but Waugh?s comments on the Ethiopian liturgy in his travel book Remote People (1931) are totally unsympathetic. Certainly, the Mass was a mystery, but it was not meant to mystify. As opposed to the iconostasis, Waugh hailed ?the classic basilica and open altar as a great positive achievement, a triumph of light over darkness?. Instead of ?obscure sanctuaries?, ?the clarity of Western reason? had created ?the great open altars of Catholic Europe, where Mass is said on a flood of light?. As opposed to Eastern mystical theology, Western scholasticism was ?the science of simplification by which nebulous and elusive ideas are ? made intelligible and exact?. And in the same way the Tridentine Mass had brought definite and specific shape and form to the liturgy. This is fundamentally what appalled Waugh about the new rite which, in its flexibility and lack of detailed rubrics and exact ritual, struck him as incoherent, formless, and shapeless, introducing anarchy and chaos.

Waugh did not care about mystery, but what he did care about was the loss of the straitjacket of the rigidities of Tridentine Catholicism. Routine, mechanical practice, moral and canonical inflexibility, cut and dried theology, ex opere operato sacramentalism, were the very things that Waugh loved about Catholicism and which the council seemed to threaten, if not destroy.

Waugh hardly lived long enough to witness the arrival of ?open? confession, but it would probably have horrified him even more than the new liturgy. For Waugh, the beauty of confession was that it was nothing more than a list of sins to be presented before the priest who, as at the Mass, has a definite job to do according to the exactly prescribed rules and ritual. In his masterpiece, The Sword of Honour trilogy (1952, 1955, 1961), the confessional appears several times as part of the order of the supernatural world which is juxtaposed against the chaotic world of war. Waugh glories in its cut-and-dried routine: the list of sins, the abrupt question (?How many times??), the penance, and the absolution ? and the total absence of any attempt at spiritual direction. When Guy Crouchback?s divorced wife decides to become a Catholic and goes to confession, the author notes with satisfaction, ?The recital of half a lifetime?s mischief took less than five minutes?.

?For me Christianity begins with the Counter-Reformation?, Waugh once wrote. If so, it would seem to follow that Christianity would end with the end of the Counter-Reformation. And since the Second Vatican Council did in a very real sense bring to an end the Counter-Reformation, it is hardly surprising that Waugh?s world began to collapse in 1962. Whatever our view of Waugh?s religion, the fact remains that Tridentine Catholicism not only perfectly met his need for order and definition and form, but also played a significant role in his fiction in the Catholic novels. In fact, it is an essential element in the achievement of The Sword of Honour, the greatest literary work to come out of the Second World War apart from T.S. Eliot?s Four Quartets.

But there is another very surprising side to Waugh as a Catholic novelist, and it transcends Tridentine Catholicism. In his book on Milton, C.S. Lewis argued that ?the ?good? characters are the least successful? in literature. If so, a fortiori one would expect that characters intended to be holy would be even less successful. To convey holiness without also conveying na?vet? or priggishness would seem an even more difficult feat than conveying goodness. And yet Waugh, for all his own manifest and self-acknowledged lack of holiness, did succeed in the attempt in two of the characters in the Catholic novels. In Brideshead Revisited (1945), the pious Lady Marchmain is ?popularly believed to be a saint?, but Cordelia makes the necessary distinction: ?she was saintly but she wasn?t a saint?. Waugh fully understood that holiness is all about love, and this Lady Marchmain for all her piety and virtues lacks. And of her children it is not the Jesuitical Bridey, who acts as the family theologian, nor Cordelia, whose matter-of-fact Catholicism is so attractive to her author, who is the saint. Rather, it is the alcoholic Sebastian who is the real saint, as Cordelia recognises. She explains to the astonished Nanny Hawkins (?Brideshead was one for church, not Sebastian?): ?I?ve seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God.? Sebastian has by now entered a monastery in Tunis as a lay brother but is still suffering from alcoholism: ?One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is ? no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering.? The non-Catholic narrator Charles Ryder had equated religion with morality, but now he understands that holiness is not the same as virtue.

The holy Sebastian remains little more than a persuasive sketch at the end of the novel. But Waugh attempts a more ambitious and extended portrait of holiness in The Sword of Honour. The fact that Sebastian is still a flawed figure makes it easier to portray him without implying anything priggish or sanctimonious, whereas in the later trilogy Guy Crouchback?s father is to all intents and purposes without faults. And yet he remains an intensely human and lovable character. The key to Waugh?s triumph is to make Mr Crouchback?s faith entirely real, so that his holiness is not perceived as coming from his efforts ? it is not his achievement, but God?s. One way for the novelist to convey holiness without sounding sanctimonious is to introduce a note of na?vet? but there is nothing naive about Mr Crouchback. On the contrary, he is fully aware of himself ? but that does not lead to pride because ?as a man of prayer he saw himself as totally unworthy of divine notice?. And when we are told that to Guy ?his father was the best man, the only entirely good man, he had ever known?, we do not feel we are being manipulated, because that is how we feel too.

When we think of the early Waugh of Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), we realise how much Waugh developed and matured over the years, in a way that his friend and fellow-convert Graham Greene never did to anything like the same extent. And part of that development is the deepening of his religious understanding. After all, how many other writers have been able to depict holiness so convincingly?

Ian Ker is a parish priest and tutor in theology at Campion Hall, Oxford.