Several papers have posted remembrances of the anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s death 60 years ago on 10 April 1966. Here are excerpts from the best two.
–The one by Alexander Larman appeared in the Daily Telegraph and was reposted in several other papers. It begins with this:
Evelyn Waugh died 60 years ago. The grand master of 20th-century comic writing expired on April 10, shortly after returning home from an Easter service.
With grim appropriateness, he expired on the loo. Few of us can die in exactly the way that we would choose to, but although Waugh may not have wished to be remembered in that particular manner, the black humour of his end is one that is of a piece with his writing, which took no prisoners and rejoiced in the absurdities of life, and death.
It is also fitting that Waugh died at Easter, because his work is so closely bound up with religion. He converted to Catholicism in 1930 and described it as the defining moment of his life, calling his faith “the normal state of man from which men have disastrously exiled themselves”.
He crossed swords with his friend and literary and theological sparring partner Graham Greene, who was also a Catholic but one given to rather more doubts about the faith than Waugh was, and his Oxford contemporary John Betjeman, whose sincere but cheerfully anarchic Anglo-Catholicism was, as he admitted himself, something of a fudge. The poet and church-crawler wrote in 1954:“Though I frequently lapse and am rarely exalted, I am conscious of being under divine providence, to use a bit of jargon for which I can think of no clearer substitute, and thankful that I was brought up by Christian parents.”
This comforting but fundamentally unchallenging view of religion was at odds with the far more uncompromising incarnation expressed by Greene and Waugh. In Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism prevents lovers Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte from being together: the key dramatic moment, which generations of (non-Catholic) readers have found unconvincing, comes when Julia’s father, the sinful Lord Marchmain, returns to the faith on his deathbed, accepting the Last Rites and, by doing so, convincing Julia that to marry Charles would be wicked…
–Mark McGinness writing in The Oldie opens with many of the same points about Waugh’s own death but then goes on to discuss how Waugh deals with death in several of his novels:
…Waugh had always done an eclectic anarchic line in death in his fiction.
His first, novel deaths were in Decline and Fall (1928) where Mr. Prendergast, the clergyman-teacher is decapitated with a saw by a crazy prison inmate. And young Lord Tangent, heir to the Earl of Circumference, shot in the foot by a teacher at Llanabba school whose death is reported almost causally.
This is so starkly different from John Andrew Last, the most poignant of all Waugh’s deaths. The only son of Tony and Brenda killed in a fall from a horse during a hunt in A Handful of Dust (1934). And that moment when Brenda on hearing John was dead, feared it was her lover, John Beaver, and when told it was her son, exclaimed “Thank God”; then immediately regretted it and burst into tears.
The two deaths in Vile Bodies (1930) were almost inevitable. Agatha Runcible dying in a nursing home after driving drink in a car race. And Simon, the Earl of Balcairn, the gossip columnist, Mr. Chatterbox, who, facing social disgrace, took his life by putting his head in the oven.
The most Wavian death appears in Black Mischief (1932) – Basil Seal’s girlfriend, Prudence Courteney, daughter of the British Minister in fictitious Azania, who is unknowingly eaten in a stew by Basil. Frau Dressler’s husband in Scoop (1938) appears to have endured a similar fate – “presumed eaten”.
Then there is the elderly empress, the saintly heroine of Waugh’s favourite novel, Helena (1950), who dies peacefully in God’s grace (‘faith amid decay’), having discovered the true Cross, with her son Constantine beside her.
The most macabre was poor Aimee Thanatogenos, the cosmetician at Whispering Glades, who committed suicide by injecting herself with embalming fluid in the workroom in The Loved One (1948). It got worse – Barlow, employed at the pet cemetery, Happier Hunting Ground, had them cremate Aimee’s body and registered Joyboy, the Glades’ senior mortician and master embalmer, for the annual postcard service. So every year Joyboy would receive a card “Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.”…
He goes on to mention deaths in Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour and concludes with this:
Waugh had been inspired, having witnessed the death only a few years earlier of his old friend … Hubert Duggan, who reconciled to his Faith as he died. He wrote to Lady Mary Lygon: “…… human lives are so planned that usually there’s a particular time — sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed — when all resistance is down and Grace can come flooding in.”
Waugh’s own death was not as dramatic as Hubert’s or the marquess’s [in Brideshead] but for him it was timely and much longed for.
–Alexander Larman also has an article in The Spectator about the career of novelist David Lodge, late President of the EWS. Here are the opening paragraphs:
When most readers think of the late novelist David Lodge, it is his peerlessly funny and incisive campus novels, such as Changing Places and Small World, that immediately come to mind. While his satires on progressive academia are indeed some of his finest achievements, this is down to Lodge’s Catholicism, which was not merely a religious faith but a central guiding principle of his writing – if you were being pretentious, you might say ‘a calling’ – and his life. He may have called himself ‘an agnostic Catholic’, and from a religious perspective, this may have been true, but it remained a vital part of his literary career.
While many, perhaps lazily, think of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene as Britain’s pre-eminent Catholic novelists, it is Lodge who dealt with the faith in a far more engaged (and, dare one say it, funnier) fashion than the loquacious ironies of Brideshead Revisited or the almighty guilt trip of The End of the Affair. In his first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), Lodge explored the tension that arose between a group of young, educated Catholics, finding their ways in the world, and their reluctant adherence to a doctrine that seemed, even in those bygone days, to be both proscriptive and antediluvian. (The issue of birth control, or the lack of it, is one that looms large in Lodge’s writing.)…
–Finally, several papers note the disappearance of a well-known and much loved (formerly at least) English foodstuff. Here’s the story from the Daily Express with a contribution from Evelyn Waugh:
An iconic British food is set to disappear after its manufacturer confirmed production of it has ceased. Gentleman’s Relish – officially referred to as Patum Peperium – is a spiced version of potted anchovies. It has been a staple of kitchen cupboards for many decades, after being created in 1828 by John Osborn. Recently, creation of the paste has been overseen by parent firm AB World Foods, which suggested it no longer has a wide enough appeal…
Evelyn Waugh, in his novel Vile Bodies, described a luxurious breakfast featuring “hot buttered toast and honey and gentleman’s relish and a chocolate cake, a cherry cake, a seed cake and a fruit cake and some tomato sandwiches and pepper and salt and currant bread and butter”…
