Catholic Fiction

Reviewed by Debra Murphy

(order from Amazon: Evelyn Waugh: A Biography)

This 1975 biography of Catholic convert and novelist Evelyn Waugh, one of the luminaries of the so-called “Catholic Literary Revival” of the first half of the twentieth century, was written by Waugh’s contemporary, friend and fellow Catholic, English writer Christopher Sykes. In the relationship between the two men lies this particular biography’s strength and weaknesses. As friend, Sykes knew most of the people Waugh knew, and was able to give first-hand (or at least second-hand “from-the-horse’s-mouth”) accounts of many of the telling incidents he relates. The downside of this equation, for the student of Waugh’s life and writings, is that Sykes seems on more than one occasion reluctant to speak with candor about mutual acquaintances (many who were no doubt still alive at the time of writing), and even, perhaps, about Waugh himself.

Though one of the great Catholic novelists stylists in the English language, Waugh, as Sykes owns up, was also capable of almost legendary bouts of drunkenness, rudeness, coarseness, cruelty, bigotry, snobbery, and something very like madness of the paranoid variety. (“He is possessed” was Hilaire Belloc’s assessment upon his first meeting with Waugh.) To the frequent charge of hypocrisy, given his propensity for writing on religious themes, Waugh himself frequently and famously replied, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” That’s all well and good, and Sykes hardly seeks to gloss over it, but this is largely a literary biography, and a reader seeking more in-depth details or analysis of this dark side of Waugh’s life, character, and opinions may need to look elsewhere.

In spite of friendship, however, Sykes’ accounts of Waugh’s conversion, literary development, literary successes, and literary flaws all come across as balanced and even-handed, and very much worth reading for fans of Catholic fiction in general, and the English Catholic literary revival in particular. Sykes’ rendering of the intellectual and social milieu within which Waugh lived and worked is also telling: Portions of the narrative are especially useful as a reminder that, while Waugh is now on almost every Catholic’s short list of great Catholic writers, and his Brideshead Revisited is in particular regarded as a classic novel of conversion and the role of faith in the midst of twentieth century confusions, Waugh, like many a prophet before him, was not universally welcomed, not even by his own. Not only did the secular critics of the day grieve when one of their most promising writers was lost to the “superstitions” (literary and theological) of Catholicism, on more than one occasion, as recorded by Sykes, Waugh’s dark comic propensities were blasted as offensive, immoral, and un-Catholic by the editor of Britain’s influential Catholic newspsper, The Tablet. A planned MGM movie adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was scotched in the late 40s in part because of objections to the adultery theme—objections forwarded by the Catholic Legion of Decency.

Speaking of which, my own favorite section in the biography is the chapter discussing the writing and publication of Brideshead Revisited, the essential subject of which, in spite of its loose-and-lavish trappings, is not, Sykes says, “youthful irresponsibility, youthful and mature love, the pageant of fashion, the splendour of aristocratic society, but certain Last Things: how to face death, the Christian Truths, the world-wide claims of the Catholic Church.” Sykes goes on to add:

The book had a boldness and originality of theme less easy to discern now than when it first came out. Not since the time of Robert Hugh Benson and his brother Arthur Benson, over thirty years before, had novelists of high ambition taken Christian religion as the main subject of a fiction to be treated without scepticism. There had grown up a literary convention whereby religious faith was only referred to in a novel, if at all, as a detail of the background or of character-sketching, or as the object of ridicule or attack, but never treated with implied or explicit respect. (Maurice Baring was an exception.) To write seriously, as a believer, in a novel, was felt to be, in the slang of the period, ‘shy-making’. Graham Greene’s use of a Roman Catholic theme in Brighton Rock was acceptable because the story, being about criminals, implied an equation of religion with psychological abnormality, and added to the horror of the tale. The same author’s use of a central religious theme in his great book The Power and the Glory (published) in 1940) was again acceptable to the prevailing convention, because the story was set in an exotic scene. But Evelyn was doing something which seemed in England to have gone out of fashion for ever; he was making religion the central point of a story about contemporary Enlgish life, and approaching his theme with respect and awe. If Evelyn had been a French writer he could have written a French equivalent of Brideshead Revisited within a living tradition. As an English novelist he was exploring neglected territory, and if he sometimes went astray in his handling of his main theme, it was chiefly for that reason.

Since 1944 several writers including Graham Greene have attempted serious unsceptical treatment of orthodox Christian religion in novels, notably Iris Murdoch among Anglicans in The Bell. I think they all owe rather more to the example of Evelyn’s novel than is commonly recognized.