On the same day late last week, two interesting and provocative articles were posted, both of which revolve around Waugh and his fictional characters. The first is entitled “Waugh Warned Us”. It was written by Paul Bauman and appeared in the religious/political magazine Commonweal. Here’s an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:
…In trying to make sense of [Donald] Trump’s preposterous and perilous ascendency, I have at last come to the realization that it bears an uncanny resemblance to the career of Rex Mottram, the ambitious businessman, playboy, and opportunistic British politician in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Mottram’s political cynicism, like Trump’s, recalls Henry Adams’s famous description of democratic politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds.”
The article then continues with what appears to be a fairly exhaustive and lively comparison of how closely Waugh’s character from the 1930-40s comes to resemble today’s American politician. The closing is quoted in full below:
…When the revelation of Mottram’s earlier marriage and divorce prevents his Catholic marriage to Julia, he sounds exactly like Trump in thinking that every problem has a financial solution. “All right then, I’ll get an annulment,” he declares. “What does it cost? Who do I get it from?”
“You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see,” Julia tells Ryder.
“He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.“
And now his doppelganger sits in the White House, counting his gold, gilding his walls, and subjecting the rest of us to his stunted vision of the world.
Like all great novelists, Waugh saw clearly an aspect of the future hidden from most of his contemporaries. Eighty years ago, in a moment of great triumph for liberal democracy, he understood the dangers of casting aside the past and every traditional moral sentiment in pursuit of fame and fortune. He warned about a future where every difficult question will be answered with a snort: “Quiet, Piggy!” He warned us not to give the Rex Mottrams of the world our attention, or our votes.
The complete article is available here and is well worth reading.
The other article is somewhat shorter but equally interesting. It is written by Dwight Longenecker and appears in yet another religious/political journal, The Imaginative Conservative. It compares another character from Brideshead Revisited to a character in a roughly contemporary American novel. The article is entitled “Nick Carraway and Charles Ryder: Characters of Delusion and Decadence”. Here are the introduction and opening paragraphs:
One comes away from both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” with an acute sense of the emptiness of the jazz age and the despair at the heart of all our delusions and decadence. One also can’t help but compare the lives of the authors themselves.
On re-reading The Great Gatsby (thanks to Ignatius Press’ newly published critical edition) and meeting again F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, I couldn’t help being reminded of that other observer of delusion and decadence: Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder.
Carraway—a simple bond salesman from the midwest is drawn into the glittering world of the seemingly sophisticated socialite Jay Gatsby. Charles Ryder—a modest Oxford student is drawn into the opulent champagne and strawberries world of Lord Sebastian Flyte. Both stories unfold in a sumptuous setting: Gatsby’s fantastic mansion in West Egg and Brideshead Castle—the ancestral pile of the Marquess of Marchmain. Carraway observes the decadence of 1920s American “new money,” while Ryder is drawn into the decay of 1920s English “old money”. Whether the money is old or new, and the characters archaic or parvenu, the delusion and decadence compare…
There follows a brief, well-written comparison of the two characters and a discussion of their historical significance. The article concludes with this:
…Waugh manages his moral neatly with a poetic “twitch of the thread”. Where Fitzgerald fails Waugh succeeds by placing a beacon of hope at the end of his tale: the darkened chapel heavy with incense and the flame of the sanctuary lamp re-lit before the beaten copper doors of the tabernacle.
As with the earlier article, this one is available on the internet and well worth reading in full.
