Drinking with Waugh

Amy, one of the few souls to have slogged through Book Two in its entirety (and who gave very helpful feedback), has gone and given it a shout-out. I'm happy to oblige. This was the original Chapter One:

I missed Mass on Holy Thursday of 2004 because I was drinking in a hotel bar with the grandson of Evelyn Waugh. The grandson was Alexander, son of Auberon; the hotel was the Best Western Island Palms; the weather was overcast and cool – San Diego can be cruel to cloud-sick visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous SoCal sun.

I had been nervous about meeting Alexander. His grandfather Evelyn was among my very favorite writers; I loved the black wit of his early satires, the weary wisdom of his war novels, and even the explicit (if complicated) piety of Brideshead Revisited, the book that had brought him the most praise and blame of his career. Perhaps most of all, I loved the writing. The following bit is from the unfinished novel Work Suspended, narrated by a man who writes detective stories (go ahead, read it aloud):

“I despised a purely functional novel as I despised contemporary architecture; the girders and struts of the plot require adornment and concealment; I relish the masked buttresses, false domes, superfluous columns, all the subterfuges of literary architecture and the plaster and gilt of its decoration. A tenth of my writing or more – and some of the best of it – went on stage effects; sudden eddies of cold air would stir my curtains, candles guttered, horses lathered themselves into a frenzy in their stalls, idiots gibbered; my policemen hunted their man in a landscape of crag, torrent, ruin, and fallen oak.”

To top it off, Evelyn Waugh was a Catholic. Besides the obvious (and not-so-obvious) Catholicism in Brideshead, there were biographies of Edmund Campion and Ronald Knox. There was Helena, a novel about the wife of Constantine, and in his book on Mexico, Robbery Under Law, a straightforward account Our Lady’s appearance at Guadaloupe. This brilliant storyteller, so sardonic and cutting when it came to modernity, so wise to the deceptions forever at work in the world, could nevertheless recount this Marian apparition with the sincerity of a child. We were in the club, Evelyn and I; we enjoyed the solidarity that so annoyed poor Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. We shared the open secret that the stories were true.

I was nervous about meeting his grandson for two reasons. One, Alexander was a writer himself, and it was just possible that he was sick to death of talking about his grandfather’s work at the expense of his own. But not mentioning Evelyn would be ignoring the Englishman in the room, especially given reason number two: Alexander’s book, succinctly entitled God.

I had read God, and it was clear from the outset that we were well outside the genial confines of the Catholic clubhouse. There would be no sincere piety in Alexander’s attempt to paint a portrait of God – to, as he wrote, “seek him out from all sides at once, to blitz him, if you like, from every conceivable angle…” One critic said the book made “mincemeat of theism.” Whether or not that claim was entirely accurate, the blitz was enough to win Alexander an invitation to cross the Atlantic and address the 30th annual convention of the American Atheists, a group of nonbelievers founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair. I feared the grinding of axes, the settling of scores with Grandpa Evelyn and his crackpot faith.

My fears, happily, were groundless. Alexander wandered amiably into the hotel lobby, frizzy-haired and rumple-suited but still wonderfully English and correct in comparison to the bamboo and T-shirts all around us. We shook hands and headed to the bar. He started with beer, but soon joined me in ordering Knob Creek bourbon. I took it as a good sign.

“People do like to be spoon-fed a bit,” he said when I asked him about the mincemeat quote. “I think some people would have liked the book to say, ‘This is a Catholic book,’ or, ‘This is an atheist book.’ It’s not. I hope it makes people think. I hope it broadens anyone, whatever position they come from. It’s a starting point. I’m aware that people are going to say about this or that subject, ‘Hang on, there’s a crucial point you’ve missed here.’ But that was part of the nature of it; it was a seeking thing.”

It turned out that Waugh had been a bit anxious about meeting me. I was there to interview him for the San Diego News Notes, a lay Catholic newspaper, and he feared I might be in attack mode, playing the role of Defender of the Faith instead of humble journalist. “Just after the book came out, I went to a party at The Tablet, which is a famous Catholic paper in England, and had a miserable time. I was introduced to people who asked, ‘Are you that guy who just wrote a book on God?’ When I said yes, they just turned and walked away. Catholics in England felt rather betrayed by the whole thing. I think they thought, ‘He comes from a famous Catholic family. Great – a book on God by a famous Catholic; it’s going to be a big thumbs-up for our version of events.’ They got rather tense about the book.”

He pondered the reaction, and it dawned on him that the Catholics he knew – even the very funny Catholics – didn’t joke about Catholicism. “There was simply no tradition in Catholicism where you could laugh at these things. There is one in Judaism. To the Jews, God is like sort of a friend, a chum you barter with. With the Catholics, absolutely not.”

At first, he found this puzzling, since it was the Old Testament God that came in for much of his scrutiny and cajoling. But then, he supposed, Jews were not freighted with the baggage of the philosopher’s God: perfect, unchanging, eternal, all-good, all-knowing – things Catholics have to affirm even as they read about a God who gets mad enough to wipe out His chosen people, then repents of his anger when Moses argues with him.

Catholic or atheist or something else, God is certainly an irreverent book. God comes off as very human, something like a monogamous Zeus. He’s faithful to his chosen people, but still not above letting them suffer the occasional crushing blow for their sins. He gets angry. He breaks his promises, or at least holds off on fulfilling them. He makes bets with Satan about his upright servant Job. He toys with Pharaoh, hardening his heart and prolonging the drama of Exodus. And that’s just for starters.

“There are times when I’m chuckling,” admitted Waugh, “because I think something is really silly. But I’m not sneering or scoffing. I’m just saying ‘This is funny because it’s incongruous, and there are things that don’t work, and we’re all striving to get answers to this.’ I had this curiosity that was led neither by a desire to ridicule God nor a desire to praise Him.” (Christianity, which comes in for rather a rhetorical drubbing, may be another matter.) “I simply wanted to answer an interesting question: ‘Who is God? What’s He like?’ It’s never answered, and I suppose the main reason is that people get very, very hung up on the faith question. If you can’t get past the question of ‘Does God exist?’ you get unbelievably stuck.”

The resulting portrait was messy, contradictory, and outrageous – but not, thought Waugh, offensive. “It’s no slight to any priest or any religion or to God Himself, whatever I say in any book. As long as you’re being honest and trying to find out what you want to find out, it’s harmless.” It was, as he said, the work of a seeker, someone who wouldn’t accept the label “agnostic,” because he found it intellectually idle. It was the work of someone who wanted answers.

“You cannot have a religion that carries around all this baggage under its arm and won’t discuss it. It’s just maddening. The Catholic answer has been, ‘Don’t worry about God, because Jesus is God. Look at Jesus. Don’t panic over anything you read in the Old Testament.’” Waugh wasn’t satisfied – he had read the Old Testament (and a bunch of books, such as the Book of Jubilees, that didn’t make the canonical grade), and if it hadn’t made him panic, it had left him starved for answers. “I don’t want to throw aside all religion,” he told me after a while. “I want to find a priest who can answer the questions.”

I was grateful that Alexander wasn’t out to kill God. Alexander was grateful that I wasn’t out to flay him. Our mutual relief made for a delightful afternoon. And as the gray sky faded to black and round three of our drinks gave way to round four, the talk drifted toward the personal. I brought up Evelyn, the Englishman in the room. As it turned out, Alexander was in the final stages of a book on the Waugh fathers and sons, and was happy to talk about the family, Grandpa included. And in talking about family, we got back to that question he had so scrupulously avoided in God – the question of faith.
“Almost the most crucial thing,” he said, “rather than just looking at God the way I did, is that element of how your knowledge of God came to you. Was it your father? Was it your teacher? Who told you all this? How did it filter in?”

* * *

Auberon Waugh was Alexander’s father, and Evelyn was Auberon’s. Evelyn was a convert, and he burned with a convert’s zeal. But in Alexander’s view, that zeal crossed the line into obsession. “My grandfather was really, really obsessed, to the point of madness,” he said. “I think cradle Catholics are much healthier. Evelyn Waugh got so immersed in his Catholicism that life itself began to mean nothing to him. Everything was beyond that – it was all to do with Jesus and the afterlife.” When Auberon was injured in Cyprus after accidentally shooting himself while trying to repair a machine gun, Evelyn didn’t visit him. “He very nearly died. He was in the hospital for four months, and Evelyn didn’t bother to go and see him. He said, ‘If he dies, I’ll go and come back with the coffin.’ The only thing that impressed Evelyn was that Auberon was whispering the De Profundis in the ambulance.”

Long before that accident, Evelyn had brought his zeal to bear on Auberon’s inculcation in the faith. “When Grandpa went to Church every week with his children, he would say from the front of the car, ‘Now, Auberon, what are we going to celebrate this Sunday?’ If Auberon didn’t get it right – ‘The fourth Sunday after Pentecost’ – he would be made to cry about it.” Relief came in the form of Auberon’s Catholic nanny, who began coaching him before he got into the car.

Alexander’s praise for cradle Catholics like myself fascinated me. I had always envied converts, and not because they had enjoyed some portion of life outside the strictures of the faith. (“Dude, you got to get it on before getting in!”) I envied their zeal, their delight at having found the pearl of great price. I envied the way they were able to see everything fresh, to wonder at their discoveries. In some cases, I envied their learning. By reading their way into the Church – its doctrine, its theology, its history – they had dug deeper than I ever had, than I had ever felt inclined to. I understood why my own father loved to read conversion stories: they gave him new eyes through which to see the faith.

But conversion can mean upheaval and uprooting – a break with loved ones, the sacrifice of a common culture, the crucifixion of old, familiar habits. And to hear Alexander tell it, conversion could mean a skewed vision that threw things out of proportion. If there was a cradlish tendency to treat the faith as just another part of life, it seemed there was a converted tendency to treat it as the only part that mattered. And such a tendency could take its toll.

Being the son of a convert, said Alexander, “unbalances you in a way that I think is not good. My father was very religious…no, that’s wrong. My father was very irreligious, but he believed in God.” When Alexander was born, Auberon had him baptized, and even saw him confirmed. But “he was very irritated by the Catholic Church. Like many, many people, he felt, ‘I want to maintain faith, but I cannot glue myself like a Yes Man to the Church.’ His brain didn’t tell him that it was all rubbish, but his brain did tell him that the Church was a bunch of loose cannons. It happens to everybody to different degrees. We all have personal problems about God. Most people of any single intellectual effort have queries.”

But whatever a man hears from his brain, there is still the rest of him to contend with. “I saw my father wrestle with problems for a long time. People who discard childhood religion on the basis of logic feel a hole that’s been emptied, that needs to be filled with something else. That hole has been created in them. My father was spiritually lost, and I really think it was because he was brought up so fervently in his belief.”

It was hard to hear all this about my literary idol, but it didn’t make me love him less. There may be other, more sympathetic accounts of the man; I don’t know. But I didn’t love Evelyn Waugh because he was a good Catholic, or even because he was a good man. (Though I suppose, to the extent that he was either, I loved him all the more.) I loved him because he saw so well, and wrote so well about what he saw. Some of that sight, I think, arose from his Catholicism, but excellent vision does not always, or even often, promise excellent activity. The convert can offer no assurance that he will never sin again, that all his old habits will be washed off by the baptismal waters. He cannot cheerfully assume that the very temperament and understanding which made him burn for the faith will not prove dangerous when he attempts to transmit that faith to his children. The embrace of Catholicism is not a cure-all. A man’s entry into the life of faith may transform him in some essential way, but that faith remains bound up with who he is.

Was Waugh horrified by modernity, and did that horror provide the edge to his satire? How much more horrified must he have been when he saw modernity – or at the very least, what he saw as modernity – come creeping into the Church he loved with such sincere devotion? Small wonder that, according to his grandson, Evelyn Waugh “was in a desperate state about the changes in the Catholic Church” following the second Vatican council. “He went to church and he sat in the back row, moaning really loudly – everybody could hear him. He couldn’t bear what the priest was saying.” Waugh was still Waugh, and now his enemy had breached this ancient stronghold. It makes his death – on Easter Sunday, just hours after attending a specially-allowed Old Mass – seem like mercy.

And if the embrace of faith is not a cure-all, neither is its practice. The longtime Catholic cannot say with confidence that he is free of vice simply because his guilt has been removed in confession. Often, the vice remains; often, it endures. There should be no wonder in this. “Don’t ever be surprised by sin,” one of my teachers once told me. “Rather, be surprised, delighted and grateful when sin is overcome.” The wonder, it seems to me after just thirty-odd years of living, is that there is any hope for change, that nature and grace may so conspire as to lift a man out of the ruts he has dug for himself. The movement, if my own attempts are any indication, can be as dramatic as any conversion. The difference is that there is no moment of transformation – no waters of baptism, no graceful words, no welcoming community of faith. Just ground reclaimed, gradually and painfully, from the unsleeping enemy.

* * *

As the last bit of daylight drained away into cloudy darkness, Alexander and I arrived at the question of what keeps a man holding on, what makes belief possible in the face of everything that argues against it. Alexander answered that “a good priest can come up with answers that mean something without being totally driven by logic. He answers the question and shuts the wise up.” He mentioned an analogy a priest once made between St. Thomas Aquinas’ five proofs for the existence of God – none of which Alexander found satisfactory – and five arrows launched at a target. No one of them hit the bullseye, but together, they surrounded it. They gave some indication that the bullseye – the existence of God – was in fact there. Though I disagreed with his take on Thomas, I didn’t argue; the Five Ways are not what keep me believing.
Instead, I gave him my own answer – that the holy people I have known had a love for something real, that they could not have loved an illusion the way they loved God. “That’s very good,” he said, nodding. “I’ll remember that.”

Towards the end of our conversation – we were well past the point where it could be called an interview – Alexander made the following observation: “There is a difference between you and me. You will say to yourself, ‘I know that my faith will grow and change, but above all, I must keep the faith. Faith is important. It’s the most important thing.’ Whereas I will say to myself, ‘If faith proves too crumbly and wrong, I’m going to jump off and find something else.’ But even if I do that, I still have that problem – there’s that hole that needs to be filled.”

He was right; we were different. I think we differed on what had filled the hole in the first place. I suspect Waugh would have argued for a more earthly substance – the truth as handed down by Dad. I would’ve granted his point, but held out for an admixture of something else, something divine that gave particular weight to Dad’s teaching. Still, he was right about me and keeping the faith. I must keep the faith. If I lose the faith – if I can no longer even say with the centurion, “I believe, help my unbelief!” – then it will all be to me waste and horror. It’s not that this world doesn’t matter to me, or wouldn’t – if anything, it matters too much. But if God isn’t behind things, if love doesn’t undergird the world, then I will lose heart.