Literary Giants Literary Catholics (30 page)

26

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Douglas Lane Patey’s Biography of Evelyn Waugh
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N
OT FACTS FIRST
Truth first.” These words, scrawled by G. K. Chesterton into a notebook sometime around 1910, should be pinned in a prominent position above the desk of anyone writing biographies. The principal concern of a biographer should be to discover who someone is, rather than what someone did. The latter represents the facts of life, whereas the former embodies its underlying truth. The facts are merely indicators, the tools by which the truth can be discerned. It is the failure to adhere to, or to comprehend, this golden rule that has led to the failure of many modern biographers to shed light on their subjects. This deep-rooted problem is most evident in the failure of agnostic or secularized biographers to understand the Christianity of their subjects. The books may be well researched, but the facts bestow only knowledge, not understanding, and, still less, wisdom.

“It is utterly futile to write about the Christian faith from the outside”, wrote Maurice Baring.

A good example of this is the extremely conscientious novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward called
Helbeck of Bannisdale
. It is a study of Catholicism from the outside, and the author has taken scrupulous pains to make it accurate, detailed and exhaustive. The only drawback is that, not being able to see the matter from the inside, she misses the whole point.

What is true of Christianity in general is true of Christian writers in particular. So often they are misunderstood by their biographers to such an extent that their portraits are two-dimensional at best or, at worst, are misleading caricatures. Few Christian writers knew this better than Evelyn Waugh, who considered that all life outside the Faith was itself “an absurd caricature”.

The paramount importance of Waugh’s conversion and his Christian faith are evident from this succinctly sublime sentence, and any biographer of Waugh should have this epigraph attached securely beside Chesterton’s before daring to proceed. Unfortunately, few have paid it due attention. Martin Stannard’s two-volume study was full of facts but largely devoid of truth, so that its claim to be “definitive” was a mockery. It failed to define Waugh’s being in any way that Waugh himself would have countenanced and failed to understand the metaphysical realities that were the prime movers and motivators in Waugh’s life and art. It is, therefore, refreshing that the jacket notes to Douglas Lane Patey’s new
Life of Waugh
claim that Professor Patey “explores the nature of Waugh’s Catholicism and examines how his religious beliefs began to guide his novelistic practice.” It is also encouraging that the notes insist that Patey’s book “works to redress the bias against its subject that is so representative of Stannard’s two-volume study.”

After being suitably encouraged by the promise of the cover blurb, it was even more refreshing to discover that the book itself largely lives up to its billing. Patey possesses a firm grasp of the philosophical foundations upon which Waugh built his life and places these metaphysical realities at the center of his study. Whereas other studies would have lingered on Waugh’s evident love for gossip, Patey considers it more significant to point out, for example, that Waugh took Jacques Maritain’s
Introduction to Philosophy
and a volume of Aquinas as reading matter during a trip to British Guiana in 1932. According to Patey, the choice of such reading material “attests a desire not only to educate himself in his faith but also to clarify his stance as a writer.” The extent to which Waugh became
au fait
with the Church’s philosophy can be gauged from an essay entitled “Sloth” that he wrote in 1962 for a series in the
Sunday Times
on the seven deadly sins. Again, it is significant that Patey considers this particular essay worthy of quotation:

What then is this Sloth which can merit the extremity of divine punishment? St. Thomas’s answer is both comforting and surprising:
tristitia de bono spirituali
, a sadness in the face of spiritual good. Man is made for joy in the love of God, a love which he expresses in service. If he deliberately turns away from that joy, he is denying the purpose of his existence. The malice of Sloth lies not merely in the neglect of duty (though that can be a symptom of it) but in the refusal of joy. It is allied to despair.

Patey is also good at placing Waugh within a wider network of minds. The influence of Belloc, R. H. Benson and Christopher Dawson is discussed, and Waugh’s concept of Christendom and his initial attraction to Belloc’s Europe of the Faith are considered at length. Other important figures in the Christian literary revival also figure prominently as influences on Waugh, including the Jesuits Philip Caraman and Martin D’Arcy, Ronald Knox, T. S. Eliot and, of course, Chesterton.

Patey is to be commended on the whole for his treatment of Waugh’s alleged reactionary politics. Patey quotes Roy Campbell, another writer who has been vilified for his political views, who complained that “anyone who was not pro-Red in the Spanish War automatically became a fascist.” This was echoed by Waugh, who wrote of the Spanish civil war that he was “not in the predicament of choosing between two evils.” Unfortunately, Patey’s otherwise temperate discussion of this potentially volatile area is marred by an insinuation that Chesterton was a fascist or at least a fellow traveler. The insinuation arises from a selective quotation from Chesterton’s
The Resurrection of Rome
that overlooks the explicitly antifascist conclusion that Chesterton eventually arrives at elsewhere in the same volume. After stating his own preference for “a real white flag of freedom” in opposition to “the red flag of Communist or the black flag of Fascist regimentation”, Chesterton gives “the logical case against fascism”, namely, “that it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite”. In this pyrotechnic epigram he not only rejects fascism but gives, in a flash of inspiration, the most brilliant and pithy putdown of fascism imaginable.

Apart from this one faux pas, Patey’s study excels—particularly in placing Waugh within the wider context of the Christian literary revival. This revival spawned numerous works that were acts of subcreation reflecting the glory of Creation itself. As Waugh himself put it: “There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.” What is true of art is true of the artist. Any biographer who fails to understand this bedrock reality will fail not only to understand the life he is writing but, more crucially, will fail to understand the life he is himself living. Thankfully, Patey is very much alive and, in consequence, so is his subject.

27

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The Quest for Graham Greene

M
ORE THAN A CENTURY
after the birth of Graham Greene, questions remain as to his enduring legacy. Although few would question his place as one of the most influential and enigmatic writers of the twentieth century, it is equally true that few would agree as to the exact nature of his influence or as to the peculiar quality of his enigma. The fact remains that Greene is not only one of the most important writers of his generation but is also one of the most elusive. Indeed, it was Greene’s view that one cannot understand a man without understanding “the man within”. As such, the quest for Graham Greene involves a pursuit of the Greene-eyed monster that haunted his luridly vivid imagination. Greene’s novels, and the characters that adorn them, are riddled with angst and anger. Simultaneously confused and confounded by a deep sense of guilt and failure, his characters are informed and sometimes deformed by a deeply felt religious sensibility. The oppressive weight of the real presence of Christian faith, or the terrible emptiness of its real absence, turn Greene’s novels into a fascinating and unforgettable conflict between the fertile and the furtive. The depiction of a drunken priest in
The Power and the Glory
and also in the play
The Potting Shed
exudes Greene’s morbid preoccupation with human folly and failure, as well as exhibits his belief in the remnants of human dignity even amid the deepest degradation. At other times, as in
The Comedians
, he squirms amid the squalor of sin and cynicism, or, as in
Brighton Rock
, he squeals in the sadistic self-indulgence of the psychopath.

Greene’s fiction is gripping because it grapples with faith and disillusionment on the shifting sands of uncertainty in a relativistic age. His tormented characters are the products of Greene’s own tortured soul, and one suspects that he was more baffled than anyone else at the contradictions at the core of his own character and, in consequence, at the heart of the characters that his fertile and fetid imagination had created.

From his earliest childhood, Greene exhibited a world-weariness that at times reached the brink of despair. In large part this bleak approach may have been due to a wretched childhood and to the traumatic time spent at Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster. His writing is full of the bitter scars of his schooldays. In his autobiographical
A Sort of Life
, Greene described the panic in his family after he had been finally driven in desperation to run away from the horrors of the school: “My father found the situation beyond him. . . . My brother suggested psycho-analysis as a possible solution, and my father—an astonishing thing in 1920—agreed.”

For six months the young, and no doubt impressionable, Greene lived at the house of the analyst to whom he had been referred. This episode would be described by him as “perhaps the happiest six months of my life”, but it is possible that the seeds of his almost obsessive self-analysis were sown at this time. Significantly, he chose the following words of Sir Thomas Browne as an epigraph to his first novel,
The Man Within
: “There’s another man within me that’s angry with me.”

In later years, the genuine groping for religious truth in Greene’s fiction would often be thwarted by his obsession with the darker recesses of his own character. This darker side is invariably transposed onto all his fictional characters, so that even their goodness is warped. Greene saw human nature as “not black and white” but “black and grey”, and he referred to his need to write as “a neurosis . . . an irresistible urge to pinch the abscess which grows periodically in order to squeeze out all the pus”. Such a tortured outlook may have produced entertaining novels but could not produce any true sense of reality. Greene’s novels were Frankenstein monsters that were not so much in need of Freudian analysis as they were the products of it.

Greene’s conversion in 1926, when he was still only twenty-one years old, was described in
A Sort of Life
, in which he contrasted his own agnosticism as an undergraduate, when “to me religion went no deeper than the sentimental hymns in the school chapel”, with the fact that his future wife was a Roman Catholic:

I met the girl I was to marry after finding a note from her at the porters lodge in Balliol protesting against my inaccuracy in writing, during the course of a film review, of the “worship” Roman Catholics gave to the Virgin Mary, when I should have used the term “hyperdulia”. I was interested that anyone took these subtle distinctions of an unbelievable theology seriously, and we became acquainted.

The girl was Vivien Dayrell-Browning, then twenty years old, who, five years earlier, had shocked her family by being received into the Catholic Church. Concerning Greene’s conversion, Vivien recalled that “he was mentally converted; logically, it seemed to him. . . . It was all rather private and quiet. I don’t think there was any emotion involved”. This was corroborated by Greene himself when he stated in an interview that “my conversion was not in the least an emotional affair. It was purely intellectual.”

A more detailed, though hardly a more emotional, description of the process of his conversion was given in his autobiography. “Now it occurred to me . . . that if I were to marry a Catholic I ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held.” He walked to the local “sooty neo-Gothic Cathedral”, which “possessed for me a certain gloomy power because it represented the inconceivable and the incredible” and dropped a note requesting instruction into a wooden box for inquiries. His motivation was one of morbid curiosity and had precious little to do with a genuine desire for conversion. “I had no intention of being received into the Church. For such a thing to happen I would need to be convinced of its truth and that was not even a remote possibility.”

His first impressions of Father Trollope, the priest to whom he would go for instruction, had reinforced his prejudiced view of Catholicism: “At the first sight he was all I detested most in my private image of the Church”. Soon, however, he was forced to modify his view, coming to realize that his initial impressions of the priest were not only erroneous but that he was “facing the challenge of an inexplicable goodness”. From the outset, he had “cheated” Father Trollope by failing to disclose his irreligious motive in seeking instruction, and he did not tell the priest of his engagement to a Catholic. “I began to fear that he would distrust the genuineness of my conversion if it so happened that I chose to be received, for after a few weeks of serious argument the ‘if’ was becoming less and less improbable”.

The “if” revolved primarily on the primary “if” surrounding God’s existence. The center of the argument was the center itself or, more precisely, whether there was any center:

My primary difficulty was to believe in a God at all. . . . I didn’t disbelieve in Christ—I disbelieved in God. If I were ever to be convinced in even the remote possibility of a supreme, omnipotent and omniscient power I realized that nothing afterwards could seem impossible. It was on the ground of dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard. It was like a fight for personal survival.