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| Evelyn Waugh (far left) amongst friends |
“I went with
Alastair to Mass at a church in Hampstead—very ugly” (155). In 1924, Evelyn Waugh was feeling
particularly pouty (my words, not his) about the Roman Catholic Church. Much to
his annoyance some of his close friends were leaving their skepticism behind
them and converting to Catholicism. Hardly a stranger to Christianity, as a
child he served at the altar of his Anglo-Catholic parish, but his late teens
and early twenties were marked by an embracing of modern
theology, which warmly recommended the agnosticism of questions without
answers. He and his classmates fell into religious apathy, and it was the
twenties after all. The Great War was over, and now, it was a time to not
learn or remember but to drink and drink more. Life swirled with college dormitories, occasional classes, plenty of gossip, and booze. So when his friends began to drift out of their drunken
college and university haze, several of them professed a desire for something
more filling than the vast quantities of beer, wine, and champagne that they
had gleefully downed. However, these newly anointed Catholics, while
still Waugh’s friends, began to irritate him to no end. He described one Catholic-focused
conversation as, “of incredible inanity, which lasted with brief breaks from 6
to 12 and nearly drove me mad…I did not know Chris [Hollis] had it in him to be
such a bore” (153) Probably because he remained friends with these young converts,
over time his feelings toward the Church did mellow. Even if his satirical wit always remained sharp.
Not to be turned
out of his atheism/agnosticism too quickly, he read voraciously from G.K. Chesterton's short stories to William James’s The Varieties of
Religious Experience. It seems though that for a little while Waugh permitted
himself distraction from his interior thoughts. Critics praised his first book,
and glamour beckoned her little finger. He and his fresh new wife of 1928 were
the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of London society. Charmingly referred to as
He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn (Evelyn Gardner), they acted as one another’s eye
candy. Have you seen my beautiful wife? Have you read my husband’s bestseller?
They acted as one another’s accessories, and the adorable She-Evelyn, who knew that all accessories are changeable if not entirely replaceable, promptly had
an affair. The divorce went through quickly enough, but the pain lingered, and Waugh's next novel Vile Bodies took a rather dark turn in its descriptions of the interior emptiness of people despite their physical jewels. Referred to as an "exorcism", the publication of the book enabled him to first examine himself and secondly to begin the search for depth--to find the thing that would satisfy his soul (151).
The old friends were still there, but it was a recently converted ex-girlfriend and and an articulate priest that seemed to finally give Waugh the inspiration and answers he needed to enter the Church. One of Waugh's contemporaries, Muriel Spark used to tease him, "He could never make up his mind between suicide and an equally drastic course of action known as Fr. D'arcy" (161). This priest was known for appealing to the intellectuals of England and having great success in moving them towards Catholicism. Fr. D'arcy gave Waugh three months of instruction, called him a star pupil for his extreme focus on truth, and accepted him into the Roman Catholic Church in September 29,1930. Right before his conversion and forever afterwards, Waugh wrote and spoke of life as "unintelligible and unendurable with out God" (163). Therefore, keeping God close to his heart, Waugh used his youthful experiences and conversion to make his Catholic masterpiece Brideshead Revisited into an echo of his own memories and trials from those years of sorting through Catholicism.
Sources: Pearce, Joseph. "Waugh and the Wasteland." Literary Converts. Ch. 14.
The old friends were still there, but it was a recently converted ex-girlfriend and and an articulate priest that seemed to finally give Waugh the inspiration and answers he needed to enter the Church. One of Waugh's contemporaries, Muriel Spark used to tease him, "He could never make up his mind between suicide and an equally drastic course of action known as Fr. D'arcy" (161). This priest was known for appealing to the intellectuals of England and having great success in moving them towards Catholicism. Fr. D'arcy gave Waugh three months of instruction, called him a star pupil for his extreme focus on truth, and accepted him into the Roman Catholic Church in September 29,1930. Right before his conversion and forever afterwards, Waugh wrote and spoke of life as "unintelligible and unendurable with out God" (163). Therefore, keeping God close to his heart, Waugh used his youthful experiences and conversion to make his Catholic masterpiece Brideshead Revisited into an echo of his own memories and trials from those years of sorting through Catholicism.
Sources: Pearce, Joseph. "Waugh and the Wasteland." Literary Converts. Ch. 14.
This was helpful for my understanding of the novel, and where Waugh was coming from. We know that Waugh was a convert to Catholicism, and I read somewhere (maybe in the Preface?) that the book was considered to be an attempt to express the Catholic faith in a secular, literary fashion. I think the reader is supposed to resonate with Charles Ryder (an agnostic audience), and the book seems to criticize his secular beliefs that fall drastically short of the spirituality of the Catholic faith, at least as presented in the novel. It's clear that Waugh's own experiences played an enormous role in how he would portray Catholicism to a largely unreligious audience.
ReplyDeleteI think many comparisons of society's need for religion can be drawn from the the 1920s and today. I feel that today's technology and has drawn many people away from the church. It is sad but also reassuring to know that people have been sacrificing their faith for that long because of increasing technology. Reassuring because I am glad that Catholicism has persevered through adversity. I believe the first paragraph of this post could be applied to today's college students with only a few alterations. The "Great War" has been over for a while but nonetheless many young people continue to live for pleasure. I find it fascinating the comparisons that can be made with students our age who were in school 90 years ago.
ReplyDeleteThis blog helps to shed some light on the overall inspiration for "Brideshead Revisited." It is clear, now, that Waugh was deeply connected to the story and the struggle of Charles hits pretty close to home. I think telling the story from Charles' perspective was necessary to avoid making the story too "religious." Although there are clear religious references (i.e. Sebastian and Charles' discussion of the bible stories, Lady Marchmain's insistance on religion, and Charles' conversion at the end) the story itself avoids being, for lack of a better word, "forceful." Waugh makes sure not to force the reader into thinking one thing or another by pushing simply one opinion onto them, rather, the reader is able to see multiple forms of religion and how people treat it very differently.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point I hadn't really thought about before; Waugh does show many different relationships with the Catholic Church, and even Ryder's conversion is up for debate, leaving his relationship with the Church up to debate as well. This open-ended view of Catholicism for the different characters of Brideshead Revisited gives the reader the opportunity to interpret the different faiths and even evaluate the reality of each character's faith for himself.
DeleteI think this helps illustrate the plight that the characters in Brideshead were dealing with. They had just come out of a tumultuous time and had no sense of direction. The Church gave Waugh that direction, and that direction helped him write his witty literature.
ReplyDelete