Helena by Evelyn Waugh

reviewed by Roy Peachey

Evelyn Waugh irritated more than one critic by claiming that his best book was not Brideshead Revisited or the Sword of Honour trilogy but Helena. Bafflement at how Waugh could have regarded this slim book about the mother of the Emperor Constantine and her discovery of the remains of the True Cross as his favourite has continued ever since.

Waugh’s preface to the novel simply adds to the enigma. He writes that he simply wishes “to retell an old story”, that “this is a novel” rather than “History or Archaeology”, and finally that “the story is just something to be read; in fact a legend.” However, in between these claims of fictionality, Waugh also sets out the historical facts about Helena and her discovery of the True Cross as far as they are known. In other words, he plays with us. The novel is a legend but it’s based on truth. There is nothing in the book that is “contrary to authentic history”, though there are “certain wilful, obvious anachronisms”. If he had been a novelist writing in a later age we might have called him a postmodernist.

In fact, it is only if we take this postmodern mixture of playfulness and hardheadedness seriously that we will be able to appreciate Helena. It is not history and certainly not hagiography but a carefully constructed (and funny) novel about a piece of “wood which has endured” and which, in enduring, brought about the victory of Christianity in a pagan world.

Nevertheless, perhaps the most striking aspect of the book on first reading is how little of it deals with the discovery of the Cross, how little of it, in fact, is about Christianity at all. It is not until page 89 (of 159) that Helena is baptized and even then her conversion is mentioned almost in passing. The change of course takes place offstage and entirely undramatically. Despite its title, Helena is not a novel which delves deeply into its central character’s psyche but a book which uses her journeys through the empire, and her journey through life, as means by which to explore what were, to Waugh, matters of the deepest importance.

Take this passage, for instance, in which Fausta, one of the least sympathetic characters in the novel, describes the Council of Nicaea: “You see none of the Western bishops have got a new idea in their heads. They just say: ‘This is the faith we were taught. It is what’s always been taught. And that’s that.’ I mean they don’t realize they’ve got to move with the times.” Nor is this the only gloriously anachronistic moment in the book. A few pages later the narrator describes a witch brought to Rome to prophesy for the emperor: “Music, unheard by the three watchers, was sounding in the girl’s heart, drumming from beyond the pyramids, wailing in the bistro where the jazz disc spun. She had stepped off the causeway of time and place into trackless swamp.”

What Waugh does throughout the book, in other words, is to challenge his readers. How do we read history? What is the truth? What is fiction? How – and this is the crucial question for any Catholic author – can fiction lead us to truth? The answer, reached through dozens of playful digressions, is the solid reality of the cross. “And there alone,” as the narrator puts it at the very end of the book, “lies Hope.” Brideshead Revisited it is not but Brideshead was never what Waugh meant it to be.