About a week or two ago, I found a series of interviews, done in the 1950's, with a variety of well known thinkers and writers. One was Bertrand Russell; another Edith Sitwell, and then another, the man pictured above, Evelyn Waugh, known likely for the book "Brideshead Revisited", that more than once has been made into a television mini-series. The story follows two primary characters, Charles Ryder, a middle class Englishman who becomes friends with and effectively joins the world of Sebastian Flyte when he attends Oxford University, a place of education, history and the debauchery of excess drink and sex. Sebastian is one of the children of an aristocratic Catholic family, the Marchmains, and he carries the excesses of student life into his adulthood, along with rebellion against the Transcendence of his faith, which tugs at him always. Ryder is consumed by the family and fascinated by its fitful faith, the "twitch upon the thread" of both men's consciences.
Now, the interview was both interesting, and a little uncomfortable, in that the host seemed to be grilling an adversary, and the respondent, Waugh, was reacting in a most prickly manner. I found some other interviews after that, and while he was less prickly in them, he was not, by any means, particularly charming. I found an extensive documentary on the man and while he had loyal friends, many people, famous and infamous, simply did not like him.
I have only read three of his books, Brideshead, of course, a biography he penned about the Catholic priest Ronald Knox (very much in the style and conscience of a Newman or Hopkins, but less well known in these days), and the Ordeal of Gilbert Penfold, which was about a man who takes an extended cruise and is delusional the entirety of it. It turns out that this book is somewhat non-fictional in that the very same thing happened ot Mr. Waugh on a similar sort of trip.
The satirical writing was sharp and sometimes laugh out loud funny. I guess I am not surprised that this was aI difficult man, and one who did not suffer fools. But with Brideshead, and commentaries on it, I sensed a complicated depth which always attracts me to read journals, if the person happened to keep one.
Well, Mr. Waugh did keep a journal. He never sought to publish it, and my sense from reading about him, he never intended the diary to be published (though one can argue about journal writers, and as one, I am aware of the contradiction, he might well have wanted in his heart of hearts that it might be after his death). He began it when he was about seven years old and kept it until about a year before he died at the age of 66. There were multiple gaps of a year or two or three in the product, possibly because certain sections he destroyed (like the period of his first marriage).
I started reading with relative thoroughness, but the first half, nearly, was indeed, as professional critics have noted, repetitive. He drank a lot, he went out a lot to eat, he went to a great deal of theatre, and he wrote his books and reviews in between. Oh, and of course, just as in Brideshead, at college (and possibly at many other times) there was a lot of sex in all its polymorphous dimensions.
As the years passed, there was more and more travelling. He was a prodigious traveller, and from what I can tell, a very brave one, able to put up with a great deal of discomfort. And there was World War Two and a full, if contentious, military career. He taught some.
He went to Church, both as an Anglican, and then, after he converted, as a Catholic. As it happens, I was interested to know, one of the Catholic Churches he attended when he was in London was one I attended when I was visiting England in 2013. So, I can literally say (and I admit to a great deal of pleasure in it) that I trod the same Church aisles as did Mr. Waugh. I like it when my little history touches a bigger one. I suppose I expected as to the conversion, as I did related to anything else he wrote about privately, a bit more substance, detail, explanation of his intellectual road, his emotional state. Even when he spoke of his children, he was detached. I have read about him, that while his children loved him dearly, he was rather indifferent to them. Now that was a bit of a trend in "those days", but he even, in his diaries, characterizes most of his children with irritation if not disdain.
By the time I was into the second half of the diaries, I admit I had begun to skim. To be fair, I will do that in other books if something is not specifically interesting (to me). I think it is an element of my impatience to get to a point. I am a bit ashamed of this trait, as it probably causes me to miss the development and nuances of the exposition, but there it is.
Then I found that among his articles was an essay written in 1930, just after Waugh became a Catholic, "Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me", and the depth I craved and had found in Brideshead, but not in his diaries. I also think I might have read somewhere that Waugh did not like journals or diariI hes in which there was a more psychological bent.
I don't currently have access to the whole article, but only to a portion printed by Aleteia ( within an article byTod Warner) to which I provide a link:
https://aleteia.org/2016/08/22/christianity-or-chaos-the-life-changing-choice-of-evelyn-waugh/
To me, his explanation of becoming and remaining Catholic, even after the wholesale changes in the liturgy in the 1960s, which he loathed (and boy is he not alone in that as the return to either a more reverent Novus Ordo and an exodus to the Tridentine Mass show today) speaks not only to 1930's Europe, but 2019 America.
He was, arguably, another in a line of prophets, that without Christianity, specifically from his view, Catholicism, the alternative was chaos.
So, in this particular case, it is the public, the creative Waugh who exhibits more depth than the diarist. Perhaps this is a case where it would have been better for the world, and for Waugh's legacy, if his second wife and his son, the late Auberon Waugh, had not sought to publish these diaries.
As I conclude, I wonder if there was not a bit of "Daddy Dearest" in the motivation rather than an effort to promote Evelyn Waugh. It's certainly too late to ask Auberon.
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