–A review by Frances Wilson in The Spectator discusses a recent book by Melanie McDonagh. This is entitled Converts. It may have been mentioned in previous postings. Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:
…The 12 conversions explored by Melanie McDonagh in this absorbing study are less Halloween and more slo-mo than this, the result of a gradual accretion of faith which cannot, as Cardinal Newman said of his own defection to Rome, be ‘propounded between the soup and the fish’. Several are defined by a wearisome matter-of-factness. ‘I felt no emotion about it,’ shrugged Oscar Wilde’s former lover Lord Alfred Douglas, who converted in 1911 after reading Pope Pius X’s Encyclical Against Modernism. ‘In some ways I felt that to become a Catholic would be a tiresome necessity.’
Evelyn Waugh’s conversion, which he rarely talked about, was similarly devoid of emotion. ‘What little he did tell,’ said his friend Christopher Sykes, ‘indicates a rational approach to the faith.’ The poet John Gray, who converted in 1890 after stumbling upon a mass consisting of six peasant women and a slovenly priest in a ‘small wayside chapel’ in Brittany, went through his instruction ‘as blindly and indifferently as ever anyone did’. The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe discovered her Catholicism, aged 15, while reading The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton, himself a convert. ‘It came to me that I believed in God and ought to pray,’ she said of the experience. McDonagh focuses less on the conversions themselves, given their largely non-verbal nature, than on their influence on the life and work of the converts…
The review briefly discusses the motivations for various conversions, coming back at least once to Waugh: “If the Protestant position, as Waugh said, is that ‘I am good; therefore I go to church’, the Catholic position was ‘I am far from good; therefore I go to church’.”
A copy of a 2001 article regarding Waugh’s conversion appears on the website of the Catholic Education Resource Center.
–In another article (this one by Will Yates and entitled: How to make universities appeal to the working class), The Spectator again quotes Waugh:
…The idea of university as an investment in one’s future earning potential has become an increasingly normalised way of framing its benefits. Almost a century ago, when describing his own experiences at Oxford, arch-defender of the university experience Evelyn Waugh said: ‘as far as direct monetary returns are considered, our parents would have done far better to have packed us off to Monte Carlo to try our luck at the tables,’ deriding this as ‘a narrow and silly way to view education.’ But in recent years, it has become received wisdom that the benefits of a university education to individuals and society are primarily or solely economic. Our polling shows that the public agree that people should have to pay for the earning benefits that university education can offer, and the recent Post-16 White Paper reaffirmed the economic impact of the higher education sector, which runs to more than £250 billion…
…Harper’s Magazine is celebrating its 175th anniversary. This is recalled in a special edition of the magazine which includes links to 4 articles, apparently by Waugh, that appeared in the magazine:
“The biggest aspidistra in the world” (9/30/1947) (October)
“The cold Waugh on the literary front” (5/31/59) (June)
“Evelyn Waugh…novelist” (3/31/65) (April)
“The rudiments of teacher education” (1/31/86) (February)
None of these appear in the Waugh bibliography or collected articles (at least not with these titles and dates). It is possible that these appeared in UK publications under different titles. That may explain the 1947 article which originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph as “Why Hollywood is a Term of Disparagement” and the 1965 article which appeared in the October 1964 edition of Harper’s Bazaar as “A Secret Man”. The 1986 article must have been published posthumously, but the 1959 article is a mystery. The internet posting claims that PDF files of these are available to subscribers.
