The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh

Faith and Art in the Post-War Fiction

D. Marcel DeCoste

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317012511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Arguing against the critical commonplace that Evelyn Waugh's post-war fiction represents a decline in his powers as a writer, D. Marcel DeCoste offers detailed analyses of Waugh's major works from Brideshead Revisited to Unconditional Surrender. Rather than representing an ill-advised departure from his true calling as an iconoclastic satirist, DeCoste suggests, these novels form a cohesive, artful whole precisely as they explore the extent to which the writer's and the Catholic's vocations can coincide. For all their generic and stylistic diversity, these novels pursue a new, sustained exploration of Waugh's art and faith both. As DeCoste shows, Waugh offers in his later works an under-remarked meditation on the dangers of a too-avid devotion to art in the context of modern secularism, forging in the second half of his career a literary achievement that both narrates and enacts a contrary, and Catholic, literary vocation.

Chapter 1
Deplorable Design, Divine Providence: Brideshead Revisited and the Callings of Charles Ryder

I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new! … You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lowly things of your creation … The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have had no being at all.

Augustine, Confessions

The artist’s desire runs ahead of his clear understanding; he is drawn on by a fever and reaches to he knows not what; longing for beauty which is incarnated in imperfect realisations, and learning by his imperfect sketches that he has not yet reached his goal.

Martin D’Arcy, The Nature of Belief

That Brideshead Revisited marks a sharp departure from Waugh’s earlier fiction has been all but universally acknowledged. From the time of its first appearance, such reviewers as the New York Times Book Review’s John K. Hutchens recognized in it something new, an attempt at a “bigger and richer” fiction (Stannard, Heritage 242).¹ Much later, Kennedy captures the scope and suddenness of this break more fully: “Previously known to his readers as a purveyor of ironic, apparently nihilistic black comedy … Waugh emerges in Brideshead Revisited as the author of a Catholic apologia whose dominant mode is that of realism” (23). Gone was the hilarious inconsequence of Decline and Fall or the arch satiric eye of Black Mischief. What took their place was, in Bradbury’s words, “a much more Catholic, much more romantic and in some ways rather more stylishly snobbish book than its predecessors” (166). In terms both of its craft and of its substance—the romantic tale it has to tell and the newly three-dimensional characters whose tale it is—Brideshead has always been seen as a watershed. Indeed, Myers dubs it sui generis, maintaining Waugh never again wrote anything quite like it (68). Clearly, for whatever reason, Waugh at the end of the Second World War was moved to reconsider his writerly practice, modifying technique so as to relate for the first time in his fiction a story of believers like himself and presenting, in Calvin Lane’s words, “a carefully developed apologia for Catholic dogma” (91).² If, as I argued in my Introduction, the period of Brideshead’s composition sees Waugh newly embracing the role of writer, then it is also the case that this affirmation had to do with more than just the acquisition of a style or a change in genre; it was rooted in an attempt to bring the manner of his art to bear upon the matter of his Christian vocation.

Thus it has been a critical commonplace to deem Brideshead what Waugh himself would have called a “climacteric” (see Essays 302). Yet such unanimity in taxonomy has not been matched by unanimous critical approval. As Waugh writes in his Preface to the revised 1960 edition of the novel, it “lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries” (7).³ This book which transformed Waugh’s career, not least by becoming a transatlantic bestseller, has, as Davis notes, always been more popular with the common reader than with scholars or reviewers (Past 11). For the latter, the book may well be judged impressive in its novelty, but it is often seen as a failed experiment. As Sykes fairly remarks, the critical wisdom on Brideshead depicts “an ambitious book which some believe to be his masterpiece, others believe to be a magnificent failure, and others believe indicated the decay of a talent” (237). Yet if the Spectator reviewer in 1945 could herald the novel as Waugh’s best (Stannard, Heritage 238), most critics have cast their lot with the latter two camps. For some of these, the book’s failures stem from its seeing this writer, so noted for the ironic detachment of his narration, move to an earnest didacticism. So, for example, as early as its TLS review, Brideshead was being upbraided for featuring Waugh as “very much the Catholic apologist,” so committed to catechizing his readers that he sacrifices his stylistic gifts in the process (Stannard, Heritage 234, 236). More than 50 years later, Wykes makes much the same point, calling Brideshead a novel at war with itself, attempting to preach a Catholic lesson while succeeding in generating readerly sympathy only for the Arcadian pleasures of its early evocation of 1920s Oxford (140).⁴ For such readers, then, the text marks a betrayal and diminishment of his craft in service to another, less than strictly aesthetic, agenda.

That critics might balk at too bald an intrusion of sectarian interest into a work of literary art is perhaps unsurprising. More remarkable is the still widespread critical view which denies this tale of loss and conversion any status as a Catholic novel at all. On this account, Brideshead features but a “false religiosity” (O’Hare 310), professing no creed but snobbery, proclaiming no Lord but those of the English aristocracy. Powell, for example, denies Brideshead can properly be deemed Catholic at all (56), and Hepburn asserts the novel is better read as a “comedy about social climbing” since “[n]obility is Charles’s true religion, whatever his protestations to the contrary” (245, 254). While this reading of the novel as a study less of faith than of class idolatry resounds, with Hepburn’s 2007 essay, into the twenty-first century, it too has its seeds in the earliest critical reception, and most particularly, in Edmund Wilson’s 1946 review in the New Yorker.⁵ Calling the text “a bitter blow” for himself, an early champion of Waugh’s work (Stannard, Heritage 245), Wilson denounces its abandonment of black comedy in favor of a religious plot that is both “extravagantly absurd” and inauthentic, given the fact that it is clear that admiration of the upper classes is “the only real religion in the book” (246). This verdict by one of America’s premier literary arbiters proved, if not powerfully influential, then at least remarkably prescient, for it articulated at the time of the book’s debut what would become standard criticism for decades to come: namely, that Brideshead Revisited marks the forfeiture of Waugh’s true calling as satirist and his disastrous turn to a fawning upon privilege masquerading as religious belief. Rather than marking Waugh’s transformation of his art in service to his faith, for many Brideshead signals only his “shift from youthful dandy-rebel … to mature country gentleman in awe of the aristocracy” (Berberich 50).

Yet to so dismiss the novel’s meditations on faith, and on how it might be reconciled with the call to art, is to radically misconstrue this work and to miss the kind of climacteric it in fact provides. Apart from the fact that such charges of peer-worship mesh rather poorly with the actual text—as Hollis observes, the Flytes of Brideshead themselves “are not an edifying family” (“Introduction” x)⁶—they also overlook the novel’s genesis in Waugh’s craft and life both. The book in manuscript proclaims from the start the centrality to its conception not just of Waugh’s religion, but also of his conviction that we must be oriented toward something more than worldly glory. Under the working title “A Household of the Faith/A Theological Novel,” Brideshead initially bore the following epigraph: “Non hic habemas manentem civitatem” (“Brideshead” 3). Drawn from the Letter to the Hebrews, this translates as “Here we have no lasting city” (13:14), indicating that the emphasis in this work will lie more on enduring faith than on temporal households, however noble. More than this, Waugh was, on his own account, moved to write this narrative by a real-life incident. In October 1943, he visited Hubert Duggan, a Catholic friend from Oxford, long apostate and now dying of tuberculosis. While there, Waugh insisted upon a priest, so that Duggan might be absolved of his sins and receive last rites. His diary of October 13, 1945, records Waugh bringing a Father Devas to Duggan’s bedside: “he gave Hubert absolution. Hubert said, ‘Thank you father,’ which was taken as his assent” (Diaries 552). As Byrne notes, having so served a fellow soul on his return to the Church and his passage to eternity moved Waugh profoundly; he not only felt he “had witnessed the operation of Divine Grace,” but further resolved to use this event as the climax of his first Catholic novel (288). As he relates in a 1945 letter to Ronald Knox, he wrote Brideshead “about that scene” (Letters 206), which becomes in the book the conversion of Lord Marchmain.⁷

What Waugh hoped for, then, in his attempt to acquire a new style, to complete “this book which [he] regard[ed] as [his] first important one” (195), was to have its newly explicit Catholicism say something not just about his own vocation, but about how divine providence frames individual earthly lives in terms of vocation. As a book seeking to enact as well as to consider art as a Christian calling, Brideshead makes a significant departure from his earlier fiction and, far from being an exercise in insincerity, becomes a matter of keen personal importance to him: “I have a deep interest in the welfare of this book,” he wrote to his wife (197). Brideshead was, in its Catholicism, intimately linked in his mind to the kind of Christian artist he now understood himself as called to be. Ultimately, the book’s theme is not simply, as Waugh describes it in his Preface, “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters” (7). It is also how that grace operates by directing worldly lives toward God-given vocations by means of what Cordelia dubs the “twitch upon the thread” (Brideshead 212), and how art itself, like any other merely worldly good, may thwart or serve such grace depending on the artist’s readiness to heed this twitch. The novel offers a serial study of vocations fled, thwarted, repudiated, and found, a study which, by way of its focus on narrator-protagonist Charles Ryder, comes to ruminate primarily on the proper and improper ends of that vocation that Waugh, with this very text, avows: that of artist. Through its story of the aptly named Flyte family, the novel details how the flight from God, as a refusal of the Christian vocation of belief and service, works to breed moral and aesthetic ugliness.

This matter of faith and flight, of beauty and its reverse, comes more starkly to the fore in the tale of Ryder’s own life, for that story is deeply implicated with the matter of art itself. Like the Augustine of my first epigraph, Ryder comes to love and beauty relatively late. Introduced to both by Sebastian, he finds his calling, through love, in the pursuit of beauty with his paints and brushes. Yet his life story is also about the thwarting of this calling by art, about that frustration and imperfection D’Arcy details. So long as Ryder remains satisfied to love the world and to make art alone his purpose, he remains incomplete, increasingly loveless, and barred from true inspiration. He must come, Waugh makes plain, to seek that Beauty, “so ancient and so new,” that is author and source of all the beauty he has loved. In Brideshead, then, we see what Heath calls Waugh’s “conviction that behind contingency there stands a design which reveals itself when individuals exchange their self-centred perspectives on the world for a God-centred perspective” (7). This is Waugh’s understanding of providence, something Ryder’s love of human design disastrously obscures, but which affords a role for, and a perfection of, his work nonetheless. When, at the deathbed of Lord Marchmain, he finally comes to love this Beauty, Ryder is made ready to avow art as part of his call to a Christian life. Ultimately, that vocation is fulfilled only through the work of art his “Sacred and Profane Memories” themselves constitute. As Su argues, in Brideshead “the full significance of events can only be perceived retrospectively” (559); only thus, to put it differently, can the eyes of faith see the work of providence and the nature of personal vocation. As Reichardt observes, the novel seeks to demonstrate how memory itself is an essential, God-given gift, “revealing to us in hindsight the divinely guided pattern of our lives” (135). Ryder’s art is redeemed from ugly errancy as faithful memory permits him to discern and to depict just this pattern. Thus Waugh, in this first testimony to his lived belief, offers examples both of art’s temptations from and of its potential service to his own Christian calling.

Brideshead does not delay in foregrounding the question of vocation as a central concern; even in the most profane of settings, its characters crave lives of clear purpose. This is established in the far from pious milieu of the novel’s wartime Prologue. Here a disaffected Captain Charles Ryder is mired in the middle of a war that has yet to send him into battle, that has yet to engage him in any work but that of serial relocation from one home-front posting to the next. In the midst of another such move, Ryder and his men are heartsore with a sense of their own futility. As Ryder’s platoon-commander Hooper puts it, “Seems so silly somehow, all this drill and training if we never go into action” (Brideshead 17). Even in the midst of the war’s daunting enterprise, then, Ryder and his men long to play their part in a larger plan and to fulfill some purpose therein. Indeed, Ryder’s own midlife despair derives from the army’s having disappointed his hopes of finding a vocation in the services, a point made clear by the conceit of the unhappy marriage, of the misjudged lifelong pledge, he uses to capture his disillusion: “She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly” (12). This yearning for a meaningful life’s work is so deep that even the onerous chore of unloading their transport train is welcomed. The drudgery of moving stores is transformative because it has the whiff of a real calling: “presently, as they found themselves doing something with an apparent purpose in it, [the men] got more cheerful” (20).

The novel, then, opens by speaking, even if only in secular terms, to the question of the proper use of a life, of the deployment of one’s labors and talents to a significant end, as well as to the consequences attendant upon the thwarting of such a vocation. But for Waugh, these mundane aspirations and disappointments betoken a more spiritual truth, even for his least spiritual characters. As his friend Knox writes, “[t]o the Catholic mind the supernatural world is … something which even now intersects and impregnates the world of sense” (Belief 153). Thus even simple impatience for military action reveals a proper orientation toward a life engaged in meaningful action that transcends merely local and personal designs; already this betrays a need for vocation, for that which is, in Waugh’s view, the universal calling, humanity’s “natural obligation which is to approach God” (Letters 233). This link between the search for a satisfying life’s mission and the faith Waugh here treats for the first time in his fiction is established through Ryder’s memories of coming to know the Flytes of Brideshead Castle some 20 years before. Ryder says of his younger self, “I had no religion” (Brideshead 83), and he professes himself an “Agnostic” when the question of his faith is taken up by the Flyte family (89).⁸ He has been reared, as Cousin Jasper and his tips for Oxonian success make plain, in a family guided by a decidedly worldly wisdom. “[S]teer clear of all the religious groups,” Jasper tells him; “they do nothing but harm …” (28). Ryder thus sees Sebastian’s religion as an oddity, a kind of accessory, external to and detachable from his identity: “almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance word in his conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, but I took it as a foible, like his teddy-bear” (83). For the young Ryder, then, faith has nothing to do with one’s conduct or calling in the larger world.

Yet for Waugh, this is fundamentally to mistake the Catholic understanding of belief. “[T]he Catholic’s life,” he wrote in 1938, “is bounded and directed by his creed at every turn and reminders of this fact may well prove tedious to his protestant or agnostic neighbours” (Robbery 206). While reminders of this fact do, indeed, prove exasperating for Ryder (see Brideshead 90, 140), personal identity and purpose are for the Flytes, even “half-heathen” ones like Sebastian and Julia (86), inescapably bound up with their Catholicism. Significantly, when Sebastian spirits Ryder away for his first visit to Brideshead, he does so to introduce him not to its grounds and galleries, but to Nanny Hawkins, with her rosary in her lap and her “oleograph of the Sacred Heart over the mantelpiece” (38). Though Ryder responds to his friend’s complaints against the faith with the consolation that it is all nonsense, Sebastian demurs: “Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me” (84). This scene is replayed 15 years later with Julia. Though she has long since “shut her mind against her religion” (182), still she cannot dismiss it, as Ryder would have her do, as “bosh” (276). The Flytes remain, even in attempted apostasy, a household of the faith, never able to view their search for meaning from anything but a spiritual perspective. As such, they begin the novel’s work of rendering the matter of vocation in more Christian terms. Indeed, this very word is introduced to the narrative in just this sense by Sebastian’s youngest sister, Cordelia. She speaks of her desire for a call to the religious life, of her wanting to be a nun, but casts this in terms of God’s ineluctable plan and so as a matter of serving His will and not of asserting her own: “If you haven’t a vocation it’s no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can’t get away from it, however much you hate it” (213). As was evident even in Capt. Ryder’s dispirited troops, Waugh’s characters long to respond to some worthy call, to a vocation that need not be to the cloisters. But that this is a response to something that transcends the world of strictly human hopes is inherent in the very notion of calling. For Waugh, we are called to God’s work and so to relation with Him. This being the case, Waugh’s characters can never altogether outpace their calling, however much they wish to refuse this relationship. As Cordelia says of her errant siblings, “God won’t let them go for long, you know”; they will always feel his twitch upon the thread (212).

This is, in fact, true of the two Flyte children who never flee the Church: eldest son Brideshead and Cordelia herself. Though each is thwarted in their search for their wished-for vocation, both ultimately reveal Waugh’s sense of this term as something personal, particular, and far from restricted to the clerical or monastic life. Brideshead is, when Ryder first meets him, in a kind of limbo, frustrated in his pursuit of the calling he wishes to hear. As Sebastian tells young Ryder, “He’s all twisted inside. He wanted to be a priest, you know” (85). This longing, however, has borne no fruit in him, for as Cordelia can see, he lacks a religious vocation (213), and after taking his degree, he flounders, uncertain of his life’s work; he considers the military, the parliamentary, the married life, but can settle on none (86). This aimlessness persists, so that he is “completely without action in all his years of adult life” (266). Yet, though his will is frustrated, Bridey’s faith is not broken. In the end, he finds his place in marriage to the widow Beryl Muspratt, a matter of laughter for Charles and Julia, of déclassé scandal for his father, but, for him, the proper, if unexpected, form of his life’s work. Similarly, the Cordelia who dreamed of becoming a nun comes to speak of herself as “thwarted” (294), as someone “who can’t quite fit in either to the world or the monastic rule” (293). Yet, again, this frustration does not end in futility; keeping the faith, she takes up the specific works of charitable service that are available to her, works befitting of a Christian vocation, in Waugh’s view. While Ryder looks upon her womanhood, on her return from years of nursing the casualties of the Spanish Civil War, as wasted—“all that burning love spending itself on serum-injections and de-lousing powder” (286)—this less cloistered form of charity is scarcely valueless in her eyes or the Church’s. Indeed, it prepares her for a more personal form of witness, her tending as nurse to her dying father upon his return to England. In this role, she offers not just palliatives for his ail...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Post-War Vocations of Evelyn Waugh
• 1 Deplorable Design, Divine Providence: Brideshead Revisited and the Callings of Charles Ryder
• 2 The Plasticity of the Human: The Death of Art in The Loved One and Love Among the Ruins
• 3 “A Single Peculiar Act of Service”: Helena and the Stylish Pilgrimage of Factual Faith
• 4 The Man of Letters in Middle Age: Secular Perdition and Ecclesial Art in Scott-King’s Modern Europe and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
• 5 “It’s sauve qui peut now”: Art’s Death Wish and Charity’s Vocation in the War Trilogy
• Conclusion: The Late Art of Evelyn Waugh
• Bibliography
• Index