This account may seem cynical and unfeeling, but in the years between The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair I felt myself used and exhausted by the victims of religion. The vision of faith as an untroubled sea was lost for ever; faith was more like a tempest in which the lucky were engulfed and lost, and the unfortunate survived to be flung battered and bleeding on the shore. A better man could have found a life’s work on the margin of that cruel sea, but my own course of life gave me no confidence in any aid I might proffer. I had no apostolic mission, and the cries for spiritual assistance maddened me because of my impotence. What was the Church for but to aid these sufferers? What was the priesthood for? I was like a man without medical knowledge in a village struck with plague. It was in those years, I think, that Querry was born, and Father Thomas too. He had often sat in that chair of mine, and he had worn many faces.
I have often noticed that Catholic and Marxist critics are more perceptive than others, their criticism less subjective. I was not a famous Catholic figure as Querry was in the novel, nor had I abandoned my Church and my old mode of life as Querry had done. But there were new elements in this book, whether it was a failure or a success. The critic who saw in it nothing but the old crosses on the Easter eggs (he was referring to Querry’s fable) was more at sea than the Marxist critic in Poland who welcomed the novel as a renunciation of the Catholic Church, or my dear friend Evelyn Waugh, who realised that Querry was a redraft (perhaps a less satisfactory one) of the old French Catholic writer in my short story ‘A Visit to Morin’ and was grieved by the book.
I wrote to the Communist paper that as a Catholic I considered myself able to treat loss of faith just as freely as discovery of faith, and I trusted that if I were a Communist writer in his country I would be able to take as a character a lapsed Communist. I asked that the fee they owed me for their extensive quotations, which were mainly from Querry’s fable, should be sent to the repair fund of Warsaw Cathedral.
Evelyn Waugh had written to me: ‘I know of course how mischievous it is to identify fictional characters with their authors, but … this novel makes it plain that you are exasperated by the reputation which has come to you unsought of a “Catholic” writer. I realise that I have some guilt in this matter. Twelve years ago I gave a number of lectures here and in America presumptuously seeking to interpret what I genuinely believed was an apostolic mission in danger of being neglected by people who were shocked by the sexuality of some of your themes. In fact in a small way I behaved like Rycker [an unattractive character in the novel]. I am deeply sorry for the annoyance I helped to cause and pray that it is only annoyance, and that the desperate conclusions of Morin and Querry are purely fictional.’
I replied more frankly to Evelyn than to my Communist critic. ‘With a writer of your genius and insight I certainly would not attempt to hide behind the time-old gag that an author can never be identifed with his characters. Of course in some of Querry’s reactions there are reactions of mine, just as in some of Fowler’s reactions in The Quiet American there are reactions of mine. I suppose the points where an author is in agreement with his character lend what force or warmth there is to the expression. At the same time I think one can say that a parallel must not be drawn all down the line and not necessarily to the conclusion of the line. Fowler, I hope, was a more jealous man than I am, and Querry, I fear, was a better man than I am. I wanted to give expression to various states or moods of belief and unbelief. The doctor, whom I like best as a realised character, represents a settled and easy atheism; the Father Superior a settled and easy belief (I use easy as a term of praise and not as a term of reproach); Father Thomas an unsettled form of belief and Querry an unsettled form of disbelief. One could probably dig a little of the author also out of the doctor and Father Thomas.’
Evelyn Waugh replied: ‘I was not so dotty as to take Rycker as a portrait of myself. I saw him as the caricature of a number of your admirers … who have tried to force on you a position which you found obnoxious. You have given many broad hints which we refused to recognise. Now you have made a plain repudiation. You will find not so much “hostility” among your former fellowship as the regrets of Browning for his “Lost Leader” – except, of course, that no one will impute mercenary motives … I don’t think you can blame people who read the book as a recantation of faith. To my mind the expression “settled and easy atheism” is meaningless, for an atheist denies his whole purpose as a man – to love and serve God. Only in the most superficial way can atheists appear “settled and easy”. Their waste land is much more foreign to me than “the suburbia of the Universe” [a snobbish phrase I had used in my letter for some Catholic attitudes].’
‘Must a Catholic’ – I returned to the argument on the lines I had taken with my Communist critic – ‘be forbidden to paint the portrait of a lapsed Catholic? Undoubtedly if there is any realism in the character it must come from the author experiencing some of the same moods as Querry, but surely not necessarily with the same intensity … If people are so impetuous as to regard this book as a recantation of faith I cannot help it. Perhaps they will be surprised to see me at Mass.
‘What I have disliked in some Catholic criticism of my work, particularly some of the books which have been written about it in France, is the confusion between the functions of a novelist and the functions of a moral teacher or theologian.
‘I will match your quotation from Browning with Bishop Blougram:
All we have gained then by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt:
We called the chessboard white, – we call it black.’
I felt the discussion was becoming too serious. Evelyn’s reference to the Lost Leader had surprised me and even shocked me a little, for had I not always regarded him as my leader? To bring the correspondence to a close I sent him a flippant postcard – I think one of Brighton pier – ‘My love to Milton, Burns, Shelley and warn them that Spender and Day Lewis are on the way. I shall be grateful for all your coppers. A voice from the Rear and the Slaves’ to which he replied in kind, ‘Mud in your mild and magnificent eye. Hoping for a glad and confident morning.’ The cloud had passed. Browning had served us both well.
It was very true all the same that Evelyn Waugh and I inhabited different waste lands. I find nothing unsympathetic in atheism, even in Marxist atheism. My waste land is inhabited by the pious ‘suburbans’ of whom I had too carelessly written – I had not meant the piety of simple people, who accept God without question, but the piety of the educated, the established, who seem to own their Roman Catholic image of God, who have ceased to look for Him because they consider they have found Him. Perhaps Unamuno had these in mind when he wrote: ‘Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God Idea, not in God Himself.’ I would not look for Querry in that waste land; I would seek him among those – Unamuno describes them – ‘in whom reason is stronger than will, they feel themselves caught in the grip of reason and haled along in their own despite, and they fall into despair, and because of their despair they deny, and God reveals Himself in them, affirming Himself by their very denial of Him’.
Querry like my other character Morin was a victim of theology. Morin said to his non-Catholic interviewer: ‘A man can accept anything to do with God until scholars begin to go into details and the implications. A man can accept the Trinity, but the arguments that follow … I would never try to determine some point in differential calculus with a two-times-two table. You end by disbelieving the calculus … I used to believe in Revelation, but I never believed in the capacity of the human mind.’
I had not known Unamuno’s A Tragic Sense of Life when I wrote ‘A Visit to Morin’ or later A Burnt-Out Case, but when I came to read his book, I found there the same distrust of theology that Morin fe
lt: ‘The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the individual soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempts to rationalise it by means of dogmatic theology fail to satisfy the reason. And the reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life.’ And again, ‘The traditional so-called proofs of the existence of God all refer to this God Idea, to this logical God, the God by abstraction, and hence they really prove nothing or rather they prove nothing more than the existence of this idea of God.’
Thirty years before I had read Unamuno’s Life and Death of Don Quixote with no particular interest – it left no memories. But perhaps the book which I so quickly forgot had continued to work its way through the cellars of the unconscious; in the life of which I was fully aware I was making my way with passionate curiosity through works of theology. Yet The Heart of the Matter offended the moral theologians, The End of the Affair, The Living Room, The Potting Shed caused some uneasiness among those of my faith, and at the end of a long journey, without knowing myself the course which I had been taking, I found myself, in ‘A Visit to Morin’ and A Burnt-Out Case, in that tragicomic region of La Mancha where I expect to stay. Even my Marxist critics shared a characteristic with Waugh – they were too concerned with faith or no faith to notice that in the course of the blackest book I have written I had discovered Comedy.
4
Alas, it was the last dispute I had with Evelyn Waugh. His death in 1966 came suddenly, without warning, and it was the death not only of a writer whom I had admired ever since the twenties, but of a friend. It was a curious and in a way macabre death, which almost symbolised his work and his problems. It was Easter Sunday; he had been to Communion, he was lunching with his family, a priest was in the house – this can all represent the Catholicism to which he was so deeply attached – and he died in the lavatory: which represents his satire and the comic savagery with which he sometimes describes the deaths of his characters, and brings to mind Apthorpe’s thunderbox in Men at Arms.
There was always in Evelyn a conflict between the satirist and the romantic. I suppose a satirist is always to some extent a romantic: but he doesn’t usually express his romanticism. Perhaps romanticism was a weak point in Evelyn’s life and work, and in the end it helped to kill him. He had too great expectations: too great expectations of his fellow creatures, and too great expectations even of his Church. I think the old expression ‘a broken heart’ comes near to the truth, when one thinks of his reaction to the changes in the liturgy of the Catholic Church.
The disillusionment was not only with his Church; it was also a disillusionment with the Army. He had been a very courageous officer, but not a successful one; and he expresses that disillusionment in his war trilogy, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender. At the end – or what, to my mind, should have been the end – of Officers and Gentlemen (and perhaps even should have been the end of the trilogy) he wrote: ‘He was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in the Holy Land of illusion – in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors, and his country was led blundering into dishonour.’
I would date the satirist, and the serious undertones to his most amusing books, from the break-up of his first marriage. In his early books he himself was thoroughly enjoying what he satirised. Decline and Fall, Evelyn’s first book, which I admire as much as any – I must have read it half a dozen times at least – is, to me, pure fun. So is the less successful Vile Bodies. He made fun out of the ‘bright young things’ of the twenties, but he was one of them himself. He doesn’t take his characters seriously enough to satirise them. Perhaps with Black Mischief – the tale of a black emperor’s attempt to modernise his country, based on Evelyn’s experience in Ethiopia – the serious satire begins to be visible below the fun. In A Handful of Dust, his most painful book, there is no fun at all.
A writer of Evelyn’s quality leaves us an estate to walk through: we discover unappreciated vistas, paths which are left for our discovery at the right moment, because the reader, like the author, changes. And I, for one, had been inclined to dismiss Brideshead Revisited. When he had written to me that the only excuse for it was Nissen huts and spam and the blackout I had accepted that criticism – until the other day when I reread all his books, and to my astonishment joined the ranks of those who find Brideshead his best, even though it is his most romantic. I had always remembered a passage at the beginning, describing the railway journey of the young officer to the place where he is to be billeted – Brideshead. I used to think that was the best part of the book; but when I came to reread it, I found that the railway journey only took up three pages. This, I’m inclined to think, is genius.
My earlier favourite was that very courageous book, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: a novel based on the time when he himself went temporarily off his head. It happened after writing Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen. I remember walking with him in his garden and asking him why it was that on the jacket of Officers and Gentlemen he had not repeated the fact that this work was intended to be a trilogy, and his reply was, ‘It’s because I don’t know if I shall ever write the third book. I may go off my head again.’
In Pinfold he draws a character study of himself. It reminds one a little of Freud bravely doing his own self-analysis: ‘He had made no new friends in late years; sometimes he thought he detected a slight coldness among his old cronies. It was always he, it seemed to him, who proposed a meeting; it was always they who first rose to leave. It sometimes occurred to Mr Pinfold that he must be growing into a bore. His opinions certainly were easily predictable. His strongest tastes were negative – he abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz; everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindlings of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom …’
But in this strange book he has left out all his fine qualities: physical courage, private generosity, loyalty to friends. Pinfold, I think, shows him technically almost at his most perfect. How well he faces the problem of linking passages between the scenes. There is almost a complete absence of the beastly adverb – far more damaging to a writer than an adjective. These are points a novelist notices, but one can’t underestimate what Trollope calls in his autobiography ‘the unconscious critical acumen of the reader’. What the novelist notices the reader probably notices too, without knowing it.
Evelyn’s diaries have been joyfully exploited by the media, a word that has come to mean bad journalism. Journalists have always been intent on transforming a fine writer into a ‘character’. If they succeed the legend will supersede the work. The ‘character’ will be safely mummified: the actions and remarks which once offended will now amuse because they form part of the fictional character. Robert Louis Stevenson received this treatment, helped by the letters from Vailima, though in his day literary journalists were of a rather higher standard. Conrad suffered the same fate and D. H. Lawrence too, until the writers were rescued from legend by Dr Leavis. Who will save Waugh, the writer?
So I write unwillingly of the ‘character’. I was for many years puzzled by his reputation for rudeness and cruelty – I must have known him well for nearly a dozen years without seeing any example to justify it. I had even stayed with him several times in the country (a feat regarded as extraordinary by some of his friends) and had seen only an excellent and witty host, one who disguised his own inner torment in drollery rather than disturb his guest.
It was not until the middle fifties that I saw the cruel Evelyn in action. We were dining at Carol Reed’s house and our fellow guests were Alexander Korda and the young girl he was later to marry. Suddenly Evelyn leaned across the table and launched an attack on Korda of shocking intensity, killing all the conversation around. Korda bore it with exemplary patience and courtesy. Next day Evelyn and I were sharing a taxi and I demanded an explanation, fo
r I was very fond of Alex. ‘What on earth induced you to behave like that?’
‘Korda,’ he said, ‘had no business to bring his mistress to Carol and Pempe’s house.’
‘But I was there with my mistress,’ I said.
‘That’s quite different,’ he replied, ‘she’s married.’ Fornication more serious than adultery? It was not the orthodox Catholic view. I gave the problem up, and we were driven on in silence.
But those who have built Evelyn up as a sort of sacred monster have left out the other side: they have ignored the man who gave up from work which was essential to him time to stay with the dying and no longer amusing Ronald Knox in the kind of hotel and the kind of resort he hated, who attended the deathbed of his friend Alfred Duggan and against all obstacles brought him the help he needed. When I come to die, I shall wish he were beside me, for he would give me no easy comfort. Our politics were a hundred miles apart and he regarded my Catholicism as heretical. What indeed had made us friends? He wrote to me in October 1952, ‘I am just completing my forty-ninth year. You are just beginning yours. It is the grand climacteric which sets the course of the rest of one’s life, I am told. It has been a year of lost friends for me. Not by death but wear and tear. Our friendship started rather late. Pray God it lasts.’ It did.
A few years ago I reread his letters to me – a sad memorial – and for the first time I realised what a lonely man he had been. Over and over again he suggests that I visit him and only three times I responded. It was always impossible. I was travelling, I was otherwise occupied, no, it was impossible this month … I regret the lost occasions now.
Ways of Escape Page 23