Phantom voices.Evelyn Waugh was a strange bird: the sort of upper class British snobbism that has been washed away; the reactionary conservative with an almost paranoid fear of the “other” with particular emphasis on Jews, who, based on his own compartmentalized, logical world view were innate subversives that challenged and mounted the parapets of what he considered to be a utopia of medieval Christendom. Such a repressed and narrow world was a hothouse of prejudice of all stripes, and begat such fruitless quests on his part as searching for information on the Wandering Jew. But being a Catholic in Britain with social aspiration was a fragile perch, so maybe there was a need for invidious comparison. But the “other” in general, were like the two Englishmen in Kinglake’s Eothen who, traveling in opposite direction in the Sinai desert in the 1850′s, passed one another without uttering a single word….
On the steps of White’s Club, Evelyn Waugh impatiently awaits a taxi; this caricature was drawn by his friend Osbert Lancaster. Image:http://www.abbotshill.freeserve.co.uk/Exit.htm
Hitchens: Permanently injured by the flagrant adultery of his first wife, and almost certainly a badly repressed homosexual, he made a living example of Cyril Connolly’s “Theory of Permanent Adolescence,” whereby Englishmen of a certain caste are doomed to re-enact their school days. The vices of the boy are notably unappealing in the grown man, and Waugh was frequently upbraided for the apparent contrast between his extreme nastiness and his ostentatious religiosity. To this he famously replied (to Nancy Mitford) that nobody could imagine how horrible he would be if he were not a Catholic. A nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny. In at least two cases—his support for the Croatian Fascist party during his wartime stint in the Balkans, and his animosity toward Jews—there was a direct connection between his spleen and his faith. And in at least two of the novels, Helena (which is based on the life of the early Christian empress of that name) and Brideshead, the narrative is made ridiculous by a sentimental and credulous approach to miracles or the supernatural. This is what Orwell meant by the incompatibility of faith with maturity.Read More:http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2003/05/hitchens.htm
Waugh simply could not comprehend the idea of Jewish essence; and the idea of messianism and repairing the world was both heretical and disturbing.Emanicipation was not really taking the Jewish out of the Jew despite efforts to enter general society. The Jewish idea of the mind and emotion not being truly distinct, forming something of a symbiotic relationship where one engenders and validates the other without compartments was equally repelling to Eliot and Greene, and inability to wrap emotion into a neat package that could be translated into the mundanes of the living rather than being vague abstractions. The Jewish view of the mind, heart and hand being sequential, associated and integrated without each having its little drawer was a kind of chaos theory without hope for reconciliation for Waugh…
ADDENDUM:
Hitchens:The long and didactic closing stages of Sword of Honour are amazingly blatant in the utterance they give to this rather unutterable thought. Guy Crouchback regards the Yugoslav partisans as mere cyphers for Stalin, sympathizes with the local Fascists, and admires the discipline of the German occupiers. We know from many published memoirs that Waugh himself was eventually removed from this theater of operations for precisely that sort of insubordination. We also know that his first writerly trip after the German surrender was to observe the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He left the city after only two days, “finding the reality tedious,” in the words of his biographer Selina Hastings. So it is slightly unsettling to find Guy Crouchback performing an act of mercy and piety, which his creator never even attempted. In a protracted and sentimental episode at the close of Sword of Honour he devotes himself to the rescue of a group of displaced Jews, and persists in this quixotic policy despite every variety of British official discouragement. The Jews themselves are never represented except as extras—as Guy’s rather bedraggled objects of charity. There isn’t any color or life or dignity to them. Is it then mistaken for one to suggest that they are included as a makeweight, or as a clumsy atonement many years later for Waugh’s actual views at the time? Whatever may be the case, the passage is one of the most bogus and leaden things he ever wrote, fully materializing Orwell’s earlier misgivings. And in this instance it is the suspect politics that directly occasion and condition the bad writing—which is to say, they negate the whole genius of Waugh in the first place.
…any literary careers are doomed to go on slightly longer than they should, and to outlive the author’s original engrossing talent. Waugh himself lived to lament the Second Vatican Council and to deplore the abolition of the Latin mass—which meant that he became not more Catholic than the Pope but more curmudgeonly than his own confessors and more conservative than the Church itself. This has the accidentally beautiful result of making Sword of Honour into a literary memorial not just for a lost world but for a lost faith. In Catholic doctrine one is supposed to hate the sin and love the sinner. This can be a distinction without a difference if the “sin” is to be something (a Jew, a homosexual, even a divorcée) rather than to do something. Non-Christian charity requires, however, that one forgive Waugh precisely because it was his innate—as well as his adopted—vices that made him a king of comedy and of tragedy for almost three decades. ( ibid.)
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