–The Daily Telegraph has posted an article by Juliette Bretan entitled “To understand the world today, read books from 100 years ago.” The examples she offers are several books by Evelyn Waugh. Here are the introductory paragraphs:
Just prior to being brusquely stripped of all of his clothes in a college prank and subsequently sent down from Oxford, the feckless Paul Pennyfeather – the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall (1928) – attends a meeting of the League of Nations Union, for a talk on “plebiscites in Poland”, which he finds “most interesting”.
The novel is a satire of high society – Pennyfeather ultimately has to forfeit his inheritance for his wrongdoings, and becomes embroiled in ever-more farcical events through the novel. Yet it also shows Waugh’s pointed criticism of the impotence of international institutions at the time he was writing. The League of Nations Union was the largest and most influential British peace movement organisation, formed in 1918 in Britain, and was based on the tenets of the League of Nations – an international body established following the First World War to maintain world peace.
Waugh, however, preferred tradition – and lambasted the international order of the modern age. Whilst the League of Nations was touted as an answer to global conflict, Waugh saw the reality: that its promise of collective security would not work without active measures, and that aggression had not been prevented at all. He stated, in his autobiography, that he did “not find much in common” with those who joined the union. Instead, he painted an image of modern society which was profligate, ineffectual, and flawed – and international institutions were at the heart of these issues…
She goes on to discuss Waugh’s views on foreign affairs as reflected in Scoop, Waugh in Abyssinia, and Sword of Honour. The full article can be accessed on Yahoo.com under it’s title. Here’s a link.
–Another Daily Express article is posted on 10 April 2026 (the 60th anniversary of Waugh’s death). This is by William Cash, former editor of the Catholic Herald. Here are some excerpts:
…Sixty years after his death, Waugh remains one of the most important English writers of the 20th century. His novels matter today, more than ever. He was a counter-cultural, modernist visionary seeing that the idea of Western civilisation existing as a morally rooted culture secured by the anchor of shared Christian belief had become puerile and an anomaly. Now nearly all of us accept that we live in a post-Christian age and culture.
But Waugh was so ahead of his time. Even by 1929, during his brief and wretched marriage to an It girl, also called Evelyn, he was writing in The Spectator about his Bright Young Things contemporaries being a “crazy and sterile generation”…
Waugh’s best novels are viscerally counter-cultural in that his cast of heroes, social villains, club bores, debutantes, officers, snobbish dons, saints and sinners – from Guy Crouchback to Julia Flyte – come into their own when they step outside the modern material world and look at it through the lens of an outsider.
As editor of the Catholic Herald, I used to enjoy quoting a few lines from Waugh that he wrote when the paper sent him off in 1938 to cover a rather dull-sounding Eucharistic conference in Budapest. “In England we [Catholics] are always a minority, often a very small one. There is a danger that we look on ourselves as the exceptions, instead of in the true perspective of ourselves as normal and the irreligious as freaks.”
The full article is available here.
–Finally, earlier this week, K. E. Colombini posted an article on Waugh’s visits to America in the late 1940’s. This is also on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Waugh’s death. He begins with the first visit in 1947 which was centered on California and resulted in his 1948 satire of America (or at least that part of it) in The Loved One. He goes on to discuss Waugh’s lesser known subsequent visits in 1948-49. Here are some excerpts:
…Waugh’s second trip to America would yield decidedly different fruit, and he rightly avoided California in his return visit. He was traveling for another purpose, researching a long essay for Life magazine on the state of the Catholic Church in America. Waugh’s article, “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church,” would appear in Life in September 1949.
Waugh focused his late 1948 visit on Catholic communities and leaders across the East Coast, the South, and the Midwest. Postwar America experienced a boom for Catholicism, and Waugh did not just capture it but sought to put it in perspective. Given American history, it was ironic that a country so anti-Catholic in certain ways would eventually see the Catholic Church become the largest religious group in the country…
Waugh was not wrong in his assessment. In America, he saw a Catholic Church in remarkable postwar growth. Waugh visited the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and dined with Dorothy Day in New York City. Of special interest, he met with Thomas Merton at his Kentucky abbey. Waugh edited Merton’s best-selling 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, into a slimmer volume for U.K. readers, and the two corresponded into the 1950s.
Now, a quarter-century into the new millennium, it is easy to be touched with some sadness looking back at Waugh’s essay, for the American Church he celebrated at that time has become greatly reduced in stature, starting with the massive cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The American Trappists whom Waugh esteemed so highly are also in straits. Among the signs of that distress, St. Benedict’s Abbey in Snowmass, Colorado, founded in 1958, is closing and selling its 3,700-acre property to a tech billionaire for $120 million.
We may be thankful that Waugh would not live to see the decimation of the Church in America. As someone who satirized the modern world so effectively and understood its transitory nature, he saw the Church as a bulwark against the insanity he enjoyed mocking. In America, he encountered the best of both worlds for a Catholic writer – much fodder for his satire and some bright rays of hope for the Church he loved.
This is a thoughtful and well written description of Waugh’s second venture to America based on the Life magazine article. But it fails to mention that there were two back-to- back journeys: the first (on his own) in late 1948 for purposes of research for the Life article and the second (with his wife, a month later) in early 1949 to continue his research and to deliver lectures at various Roman Catholic academic institutions in the eastern portion of the U.S. The article above tends to conflate the two later journeys but is overall quite accurate. For example, the visit to Notre Dame University took place on the 1949 lecture tour while that to Thomas Merton in nearby Kentucky occurred on the 1948 research tour. Here’s a link to the article which appears in The Catholic Thing and is entitled Evelyn Waugh’s America. A final, briefer trip took place in 1950 in connection with the US publication of his novel Helena.
