—The Times has the review (dated 2 Dec.) of a book by Waugh biographer Paula Byrnes that may be of interest. Here are the opening paragraphs:
In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder remarks that Catholics appear “just like other people”. He is corrected by Sebastian Flyte: “My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not … they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life.”
Evelyn Waugh places this exchange like a hinge in the novel, signalling that Catholicism in the modern world is not a mere private devotion but a fully formed, alternative moral and metaphysical order. Melanie McDonagh’s Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholics in the 20th Century examines precisely this: the men and women for whom Catholicism provided not only sanctuary but an entirely different way of seeing…
Her choice of case studies is wide and arresting, not only literary converts such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark, but artists like Gwen John and David Jones, and figures on the margins of notoriety and piety alike, from Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), to John Henry Newman, the former Anglican theologian canonised in 2019.
After a thoughtful consideration of McDonagh’s book (which is also mentioned in previous posts), Byrnes concludes with this:
…for all its breadth and insight, Converts has one curious gap. McDonagh mentions Brideshead Revisited only in passing, as though reluctant to linger over the most significant English conversion novel of the 20th century. For Waugh, Catholicism had arrived not as consolation but clarity. Father Martin D’Arcy observed: “He had convinced himself very unsentimentally that … he must save his soul.”
–In another article later in the week (6 Dec.), Times journalist Beatrice Scudeler considers Waugh in the context of her celebration of Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary this month. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Jane Austen is the reason I am a Christian. Growing up in rural Italy in the 2000s, cultural Christianity was all I knew. There was a crucifix on every classroom wall, but my parents were “Christmas and Easter Catholics”. At 14, I chose not to be confirmed — disappointing my poor grandmother, who had already had to fight my parents to get me baptised.
That same year, I fell in love with Jane Austen, who was born 250 years ago this month. Pride and Prejudice became my moral compass. Its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, is strong-willed and stands firm in her principles; she cares more about distinguishing between right and wrong than respecting social conventions. I devoured the rest of Austen’s novels within months.
I reverted to Catholicism halfway through my university years, to my family’s shock. It was a literary conversion that had at least something to do with reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, as is often the case. But it may never have happened if my love of Austen hadn’t predisposed me to return to Christianity…
The full article is available here.
–The American Spectator has an article by S. A. McCarthy suggesting that the Vatican may have under consideration broader usage of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). It was Vatican II’s restriction of the TLM that clouded the final days of Waugh’s life. This is recognized in the Spectator’s article:
It is…fitting that this news [on possible broader useage of the TLM] emerges from England. When the Second Vatican Council was still ongoing, the English author and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh wrote a series of letters to his bishop, Cardinal John Carmel Heenan, expressing his concerns over the potential abrogation of the TLM. Waugh recounted the long history of English martyrs, whose devotion to the Mass led them to give their lives for the Catholic Faith:
“This was the Mass for whose restoration the Elizabethan martyrs had gone to the scaffold. Saint Augustine [of Canterbury], St. Thomas à Becket, St. Thomas More, Challoner and Newman would have been perfectly at their ease among us; were, in fact, present there with us…. Their presence would not have been more palpable had we been making the responses aloud in the modern fashion.”
–The New Statesman in its latest edition has produced a a list of the best books of the year selected by several of its journalists. Here’s a selection in which Tim Parks refers to Waugh:
Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s Shibboleth (Europa) is a daring, surprising and, above all, funny novel. The premise is simple. Edward, a young Oxford undergraduate, hasn’t appreciated the magical traction of having family from the African archipelago of Zanzibar, until, that is, an assortment of crazy and colourful friends encourage him to milk the fact for all it’s worth, which turns out to be quite a lot. Lambert has all the ebullience and sometimes the wit of early Evelyn Waugh. I can’t think of anyone who’s made such joyful hay out of the gloomy solemnities of identity politics.
Parks might have mentioned that Waugh himself used Zanzibar as the setting for his 1932 novel Black Mischief. He renamed it Azania but included a map in which it sits in much the same position as Zanzibar with respect to the nearby African continent. He also milked it for satirical comedy in much the same way Parks describes the use of Zanzibar in his selected novel.
