Evelyn Waugh

Fictions, Faith and Family

Michael G. Brennan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441100344
• eBook ISBN: 9781441135032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family is a wide-ranging survey of the prolific literary career of one of the most popular English writers of the 20th century. Michael G. Brennan here identifies three major themes as central to any understanding of Waugh's work: Catholicism, society and the concept of family. From Decline and Fall (published in 1928) to his final writings, this book draws not only on the major novels and short stories but also Waugh's substantial journalistic output, his private journals and correspondences and unpublished draft manuscripts. Through this comprehensive and systematic exploration, Brennan demonstrates the sustained creative importance of Catholicism to Waugh's literary work. In addition, the book goes on to consider how Evelyn Waugh's descendants - his son Auberon and his grandson Alexander Waugh - have echoed and developed these literary concerns in their own writing.

1

The early years: 1903–28

Childhood and World War I

One of Arthur Waugh’s favourite sayings was that all good men should revere the Bible, Shakespeare and Wisden’s Cricketing Almanac.¹ Evelyn loathed cricket, his observations on Shakespeare were sporadic and he preferred the violence and mental disturbances of John Webster’s revenge dramas. But the Bible and religious ceremonials were an entirely different matter. His parents were Anglicans and attended Sunday High Celebration at St Barnabas’s, Golders Green, and then at St Jude’s, Hampstead Garden Suburb. At least once a year Evelyn also visited the vicarage of his mother’s step-father, the Revd Raban. Evelyn’s childhood nurse, Lucy, was a devout chapel Christian who read the Bible daily from Genesis to Revelation on a six-monthly cycle, and took him on Sundays to the North End Rooms for low-church hymns. After her departure in 1910, Evelyn accompanied his parents to St Jude’s where they took comic delight in the flamboyant gestures of its Anglo-Catholic vicar, the Revd Basil Bourchier, whose brother was the actor-manager Arthur Bourchier. Evelyn soon grew to regard his antics – switching on a bright red electric cross over the altar at Communion and sprinkling salt over his congregation and calling them the ‘salt of the earth’ – as memorably preposterous. The Revd Bourchier provided an early example of one of Evelyn’s most familiar fictional character-types – an individual whose diligent professionalism is habitually imbued with unintentional farce.²

During his childhood and youth Evelyn alternated between pious seriousness and boorish Bohemianism. Religion may have first attracted Evelyn as a childish means of engaging more closely with his father since his elder brother Alec took no interest in such matters. Alexander Waugh explains: ‘Whether wilfully, or subconsciously, Evelyn’s early interest in religion helped him to feel a part of Arthur’s world, not just an appendage to it’. At Evelyn’s request, Arthur ensured that his family and servants met each morning for communal prayers until the outbreak of war in 1914. He was also a prolific compiler of devotional verses for his family and local churches. Sadly for the adolescent Evelyn, his father’s religious devotions were already firmly fixated on Alec, whom he regarded as a unique and loving gift from God Himself. His letters to Alec when a schoolboy were often suffused with religious iconography and he churned out childish verses for elder son, such as ‘A Boy’s Prayer’ (written 29 June 1906), which imagined Jesus always alongside his beloved eldest son.³

As he grew older, Evelyn’s boyish devotions were nurtured by his relatives into a more genuine passion. When staying each year at Midsomer Norton with his father’s maiden sisters, who ran Bible classes at their home on Sundays for the local children, he enjoyed accompanying them to Evensong at the local church. He befriended its young curate who taught him to be an altar-server and became aesthetically immersed in the rituals and church decorations of Anglicanism, sketching angels and saints in notebooks. He was delighted one year to be invited to decorate some carved angels in Clandown church, close to Midsomer Norton. Back home at Underhill, Evelyn designed in his bedroom a shrine with incense, statues and brass candlesticks so that he could theatrically play-act, like the Revd Bourchier, at being a priest. He proudly described this shrine in his diary as a twelve-year old and noted that he wanted his confirmation (29 June 1916) to be marked by the gift of a crucifix.⁴ He also greatly enjoyed exploring country churches during holidays with his mother at Brighton and Westcliff-on-Sea.

For his father’s fiftieth birthday (24 August 1916), Evelyn composed some precocious holy verses in tetrameters, ‘The World to Come; A Poem in Three Cantos’, modelled on Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, tracing the journey of a soul after death towards God. Arthur was delighted by his twelve-year-old son’s poetic efforts and had several copies privately printed and bound. Although Evelyn’s early devotions bear the signs of an earnest schoolboy’s fascination with an all-absorbing hobby, he was beginning to cultivate more seriously the idea of becoming (like many of his relatives) a Church of England minister. Recalling the stifling vicarage piety of her own childhood, his mother Kate was overtly unsympathetic, as Alec recalled, only to be sternly rebuked by Evelyn that her besetting sin was a ‘lack of faith in Catholic doctrine’.⁵

Coupled with this unusually intense absorption for a child in religious affairs was Evelyn’s precocious ability, in terms of both word and image, with the pen. Thanks to his father, a naturally vivid imagination was nurtured by the wide range of his childhood fictional reading. He once earned a rare punishment from his father when, inspired by Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, he initiated secret excavations within a boot-cupboard at Underhill. Aged six, he began what he grandly termed his first novel, ‘The Curse of the Horse Race’, a racy tale, laced with violence and murder, warning against the pernicious effects of gambling. He also sporadically kept a personal diary from the aged of seven, with its first entry in September 1911 characteristically blending literary and religious matters in his observation that his father’s office ‘looks a offely dull plase’ and his fears on such a blustery day: ‘when I go up to Church I shall be blown away’.⁶

With some local children, Evelyn formed the Wyldesmead Underhill Dramatic Society (WUDS), for which he wrote various sketches and reviews, with titles such as ‘The Sheriff’s Daughter’ and ‘The Man from Downing Street’, and designed the programmes with cast photographs. Always the leader in childhood games, he formed a militaristic ‘Pistol Troop’, with the avowed purpose of repelling any German invasion – a genuine fear prior to the outbreak of World War I. In 1912 the group’s first magazine was ‘published’, typed by Arthur’s secretary and bound in red morocco with a gold coat of arms specially designed by Evelyn stamped on the cover. Alec contributed a story about racing and Evelyn’s six-page tale, ‘Multa Pecunia’, focused on a professional thief called Smith who masquerades as the butler in the household of a distinguished bibliophile, Sir Alfred James. Heroically, Sir Alfred’s plucky son, Tom, foils Smith’s crime and ensures that he ends up in Dartmoor.⁷

Despite a later disdain for his father’s literary sentimentality, Evelyn remained an avowed admirer of his dramatic renditions of selections from Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, Browning and Tennyson, once remarking that only Sir John Gielgud was Arthur’s superior in reciting poetry. From the age of eleven onwards, Evelyn also had to come to terms with his elder brother’s literary triumphs. In 1914 Alec won, to his father’s immense delight, the English Verse Prize at Sherborne. He habitually solicited advice on his poetry from his father who, in turn, had some of his best verses published. One of Alec’s poems was accepted in August 1915 by the Chronicle, with others appearing in the Poetry Review, along with an article, ‘The Public School in Wartime’, in the Evening Standard. He passed into the Royal Military College Sandhurst, in August 1916 and his ‘The Poet’s Grave’ (completed, January 1917) poignantly expressed his fears that probable death in the trenches would terminate his chances of literary immortality. The bereaved mourners stand around his grave and commemorate his illusory heroic reputation, taking consolation in the thought that even when the body dies, the soul lives on. But beneath the clay, the dead poet sadly smiles in the knowledge that he has left behind him only a world of cynical disillusionment. Alec’s most powerful poem, ‘Cannon Fodder’ (originally ‘Carrion’ but revised at his horrified parents’ request), was written in September 1917 at Flanders where he serving as a machine-gunner on the front-line at Passchendaele. It bitterly contrasts the proliferation of severed body-parts and rotting corpses, an everyday experience for Alec, with comforting delusions back home over the heroic nobility of a soldier’s death.⁸ These mournful poems, which the Waughs at Underhill would have read with horrified fascination, remain a sombre but now almost entirely overlooked influence on Evelyn’s later fictional responses to the morally confused worlds of 1920s high society.

The superficial and callous activities depicted in Evelyn’s early novels can be interpreted, on one level, as merely a satiric response to the vacuities of ‘bright young things’ during the 1920s. But the true origins of their underlying sense of social nihilism and human vulnerability may also be specifically traced back to the wartime experiences of the Waugh family. In late-summer 1914 Arthur was laid off by the Daily Telegraph as a reviewer, thereby losing virtually half of his annual income. This prompted him to cease morning prayers at Underhill because they now seemed pointless. By Christmas 1918, with Alec returning on 5 December from his prisoner-of-war internment after the horrors of the trenches, the world of middle-class England had irrevocably changed. Although just too young to be called up for military service, Evelyn and other near-contemporary writers – George Orwell (b.1903), John Wyndham (b.1903), Malcolm Muggeridge (b.1903), Graham Greene (b.1904), Anthony Powell (b.1905) and Samuel Beckett (b.1906) – spent the next two decades responding, both implicitly and explicitly, to the enormous social, political and religious upheavals engendered by the World War I. Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows (1938) suggests that young men in this category, ‘had experienced a sense of guilt and inadequacy at having missed the Test of Manhood’; and Alexander Waugh observes of his grandfather: ‘Those, like Evelyn, who were too young to fight felt a greater estrangement from the previous generation than those who had seen action’.⁹ In Brideshead Revisited ‘Boy’ Mulcaster laments to Charles Ryder during the 1926 General Strike that they had both been too young to fight in the last war but now they had a chance to show that they too could fight heroically. Ryder (born, like Waugh, in October 1903) agrees, insisting that he has come from overseas to defend his country in its ‘hour of need’ (198).

Like Evelyn – who aged thirty-five joined the Marine Infantry Brigade (as their oldest recruit) and then the commandos – these writers readily immersed themselves in their World War II service. Orwell, a Spanish Civil War veteran, was declared unfit for active service and instead worked in BBC propaganda; Wyndham joined the Royal Corp of Signals and the Normandy landings; Muggeridge, the Military Police, Intelligence Corp and MI6; Greene, the Ministry of Information and MI6; Powell, the infantry in Ulster and the Intelligence Corp; and Beckett, the French Resistance (receiving the Croix de Guerre). Evelyn’s insistent preoccupations in his fictions with honour and dishonour, service and charlatanism and the essential randomness of mortality may be traced back to the teenage boy who avidly followed the unfolding of the World War I, the experiences of his elder brother Alec and the irreparable damage of the war to his own generation. In 1921 he wrote presciently of his desire to clarify the major influences over his generation, noting: ‘I think that . . . I shall find that the war is directly responsible for most of us’.¹⁰ For that select group of authors born between 1903 and 1906, the idea that the world remained in a perilous state of potential anarchy seemed an entirely logical concept.

Schooldays

Alongside his family’s literary activities, Evelyn was also attracted as a youth to their accomplishments in the visual arts. Although irritated by Edmund Gosse’s fussy old-worldliness, he was impressed by the artistic skills of his grandfather, Thomas Gosse, a miniaturist and portrait painter. Evelyn’s grandmother, Annie (Morgan) Waugh, was a skilled watercolourist and his father’s younger, seafaring brother, Alick (d.1900), produced exquisite watercolour sketches of various exotic locations, along with a series of naval charts which confirmed his skills as a cartographic draughtsman. As a child, Evelyn had developed his artistic eye by endlessly copying interesting images, whether from Froissart’s Chronicles or his comics, and he came to view sketching, especially cartoons, as a pleasurable relaxation.¹¹ Indeed, many of the most vivid caricatures of his fictions, such as Apthorpe and Ben Ritchie-Hook in Sword of Honour, owe much to his early aptitude for creating essentially cartoon-like impressions of exaggerated human behaviour.

In later life Evelyn admired and collected Victorian narrative painting. But the chaotic social atmosphere engendered by World War I turned him, like many of his generation, towards a search for self-conscious newness and radical alternatives to all that now seemed outmoded and irrelevant in England’s long-established artistic traditions. He eagerly espoused Clive Bell’s modernist manifesto, Art (1914); and in 1917 the journal Drawing and Design published his precocious essay, ‘In Defence of Cubism’.¹² With W. W. Jacobs’s culturally voracious daughter, Barbara (later Alec’s first wife), Evelyn eagerly visited galleries and exhibitions and developed a passion for all things ‘modern’, especially the Post-Impressionists and the Futurists. They studied together Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), later satirically echoed in Vile Bodies, and converted the former day-nursery at Underhill into an artist’s studio, boldly daubing their own cubist creations onto its walls.¹³

Marinetti, a fascist and later supporter of Mussolini, insisted that Art could only grow from violence, cruelty and injustice. He viewed war as the world’s only true instigator of social hygiene, and advocated the closure and destruction of all libraries, museums and other institutions commemorating the past. The iconoclastic madness of such unquestioning modernity was soon rejected by Evelyn, who by the mid-1920s was publishing panegyrics of the Pre-Raphaelites. Nevertheless, Marinetti’s relentlessly dehumanizing aesthetics left a lasting impression on his satiric vision as a novelist, chiming in perfectly with the barbarous architecture of Otto Silenus in Decline and Fall, who absurdly sees only factories as the perfect buildings since they cater for machines rather than for people.

Waugh’s formal schooling continued the diversification of his artistic and literary interests. In September 1910, a month before his seventh birthday, he began attending a local preparatory school, Heath Mount, primarily because its headmaster, J. S. Granville Grenfell, had known his father Arthur at Sherborne. His father walked him to school each morning since it was on his route to Hampstead Tube Station. It was on these trips that Evelyn later claimed that he first began to get to know his father and enjoy his company. Through the influence of an enthusiastic English teacher at Heath Mount, Aubrey Ensor, Evelyn discovered in the writings of H. H. Munro (‘Saki’) an attractive blending (later much in evidence in his own writings) of social satire, cruelty and the macabre. He also edited in 1916 a newly founded magazine, The Cynic, intended as a rival to the official Heath Mount Magazine. In May 1917 he started at Lancing College near Brighton, a High-Church establishment apparently chosen by Arthur in order to test out Evelyn’s much professed Christian piety.

Lancing, with its gigantic gothic-revival chapel, recalls Paul Pennyfeather’s ‘small public school of ecclesiastical temper on the South Downs’ (11) in Decline and Fall. At first, Evelyn marked himself out as a non-conformist oddity by his theatrical piety, kneeling at chapel during the Creed while others stood and at night kneeling deep in prayer in the dormitory. But, gradually, he was drawn into the diverse cultural life of the school. He joined the newly formed Dilettanti Debating Society and headed its Art section, reading on 11 November 1919 a paper on ‘Book Illustration and Decoration’. He harboured vague ambitions of making a career as a draughtsman and won two first prizes for ‘illuminated prayers’ in school competitions. His housemaster, E. B. Gordon, granted him access to his own small printing-press and introduced him to a local aesthete, Francis Crease. He lived on a private income at nearby Lychpole and from January 1920 gave Evelyn lessons in calligraphy. These experiences were later reflected in his 1945 fragment, ‘Charles Ryder’s Schooldays’ (published, 1982). His ever-supportive father responded by gaining some commissioned work for him from Chapman and Hall to design book jackets. He also arranged for Evelyn to visit Eric Gill’s Roman Catholic arts and crafts community at Ditchling, close to Brighton, where he met the renowned calligrapher, Edward Johnston.

Evelyn’s literary tastes at Lancing were considerably enriched as he delved into the works of late-Victorian and Georgian poets, including Walter Savage Landor, Hilaire Belloc, Ernest Dowson and A. E. Housman, each of whom fed his boyish appetite, respectively, for anarchy, Catholic controversy, decadence and classical poetry. Such literary eclecticism spurred on his own...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The early years: 1903–28
• 2 Catholicism and the professional writer: 1928–34
• 3 Campion, second marriage and war: 1934–45
• 4 The acclaimed author: 1945–50
• 5 A dysfunctional author trapped in a dystopian society: 1950–5
• 6 The last years: 1955–66
• 7 Posthumous reputation and the literary Waughs
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index