Roundup: Fogeys and their Habitat

–The religious journal First Things in its current edition (August/September) has a feature length article entitled ‘Waugh Against the Fogeys’. This is written by Jaspreet Singh Boparai. Here are the opening paragraphs:

On June 17, 1953, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote to a friend: “I am now preparing a booklet which I hope (but perhaps it is too much to hope) may cause a paralytic stroke to my old enemy Evelyn Waugh.” The “booklet” in question was a historical study meant to make the Catholic Church look ridiculous. He eventually abandoned the project.

Trevor-Roper loathed Catholics in general but cultivated a special scorn for Waugh, with whom he carried on a feud that began in 1947, when Waugh attacked Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler, and ended only with Waugh’s death in 1966. As late as 1986, Waugh was still on Trevor-Roper’s mind. Trevor-Roper told his protégé Alasdair Palmer:

‘I forgive him a great deal because of his genuine love of our language. His wild fantasy and black humour are aspects of his genius, as well as of his warped character.’

Yet his overall assessment was far from favorable:

‘He was, I believe, utterly cold-hearted: all his emotions were concentrated (apart from his writing) upon his social snobisme and his Catholicism, which was a variant of it, or rather, perhaps the ideological force behind it. He was a true reactionary—not just a troglodyte . . . but a committed, believing, uncompromising, intellectually consistent reactionary like (say) [Joseph] de Maistre.

He picked a quarrel with me in 1947—wrote me, out of the blue, a very nasty letter, attacked me in The Tablet, and then in other papers. I bit back occasionally, and then he became, as it seemed to me, somewhat paranoid. I heard many stories of his wild, and often intoxicated, denunciations, and since his death his published (and unpublished) letters have given further evidence of his hatred of me. He evidently regarded me as a particularly poisonous serpent who had slid into the garden of Brideshead and was corrupting its innocent Catholic inhabitants; which perhaps, to a certain extent, I was—or, as I would prefer to say, was provoked into being. In the end I tried to make peace with him, but my civil letter received only a curt formal acknowledgement.’

The “nasty letter” was not in fact “out of the blue”: Trevor-Roper admits that it was provoked by “an admittedly injudicious remark by me about Jesuits.” Perhaps he saw in retrospect how it might have been offensive to claim (in The Last Days of Hitler) that Joseph Goebbels learnt his skills as a propagandist as the “prize pupil of a Jesuit seminary,” especially given that Goebbels had not in fact been educated by the Jesuits. But such details were omitted; Trevor-Roper preferred to fixate on Waugh’s alleged vendetta:

‘since his death, I have seen letters from him which attacked me well before that publication, so I no longer know the original cause of his hostility. The general background to it was certainly ideological.’

No evidence has so far been published to corroborate Trevor-Roper’s claim that Waugh was aware of him before the middle of 1947. But he was right to suggest to Palmer that there was an “ideological background” to all this. As Trevor-Roper fancifully portrayed the situation:

‘During the war, and throughout the 1950s, a group of very articulate, socially reactionary Roman Catholics— all, or nearly all, converts—pushed themselves forward and evidently thought that they could be the ideologues of the post-war generation. They established themselves, by patronage and infiltration, in certain institutions (the British Council, the Foreign Office) and they wanted to establish themselves in the universities.’

Perhaps there really was a modest Catholic resurgence in England prior to the Second Vatican Council. But Trevor-Roper overstates it to the point of paranoia…

The article is available at this link but full access may require a subscription or registration. Thanks to our reader Dave Lull for sending a copy.

–There is a podcast discussion of Waugh’s novel Scoop on YouTube which continues in its second episode. This involves Matt Taibbi and and Walter Kirn who may, in the course of the discussion, mention the whereabouts of the first episode.  It continues for about 45 minutes. Here’s a link. 

–The New York Times has an essay by its columnist David Brooks entitled “When Novels Mattered”. As the title suggests, he thinks they don’t matter any more (or at least not as much as they used to). Here are the opening paragraphs: