Similar examples of bizarre incidents abound in Waugh’s life and make his biography remarkably colourful. (Stannard’s work, which is masterful and seems definitive, should not make us neglect the earlier study by Sykes, with its wealth of anecdotes; and more recently, in his autobiography, Auberon Waugh has produced a portrait of his father which, in its utterly unsentimental truthfulness, is deeply affecting.[1]) There was, however, a dark side to his imaginative power: he had suffered from recurrent bouts of persecution mania since his early twenties, and after his first wife’s traumatic desertion he exhibited symptoms of schizophrenia. In late middle age, his most frightening slide into hallucinations and lunacy was faithfully chronicled in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Eventually this latter breakdown was diagnosed as having resulted from a progressive poisoning induced by his protracted abuse of strong sleeping drugs; yet it is interesting to note that at first he consulted a priest, as he wondered if he was not possessed by the Devil. (Some twenty-five years earlier, when Belloc first met the brilliant young novelist, Waugh’s future mother-in-law asked the old sage’s opinion of Waugh, and Belloc made the startling reply: “He has a devil in him.”)
While in the army during the war he had been forced to submit to a psychological examination, because of his erratic and impossible behaviour: “The doctor appears to have been told that Waugh was a drunkard and tried to impute to him (with some good reason) unhappiness and frustration through adolescence. Waugh suffered ninety minutes of this and managed at last to turn the tables: ‘You have been asking me a great many questions. Do you mind if I now ask you one?’ The psychiatrist offered no objection. ‘Why then,’ Waugh asked, ‘have you not questioned me about the most important thing in a man’s life — his religion?’”
There is no doubt that religion was indeed the most important thing in Waugh’s life. Any biographer who failed to recognise this would be wasting their time — and ours. Such a reproach was directed at Stannard by one critic, but seems to me unwarranted. Stannard not only provides a wealth of inspiring quotes from Waugh’s writings, but has also unearthed impressive evidence of charitable deeds which Waugh secretly performed as a form of spiritual cultivation, and which bear eloquent testimony to the absolute seriousness of his commitment. If he sometimes brought to the everyday practice of his Catholic faith some of the eccentricity which also characterised most other aspects of his life (for instance, as an acquaintance recalled, during Lent, when having lunch in a restaurant, he would produce miniature scales at the table to weigh out precisely the quantities of allowable food!), his faith was not a matter for posturing; it cost him too dearly, in every respect, for its sincerity to be questioned. In his remarkable correspondence, whenever the subject of religion is being discussed, he relinquishes his usual whimsicality and writes with simplicity, depth, gravity and a most touching sense of urgency. For all his gluttony and drunkenness, his passionate attachment to all things of beauty, his selfishness, his impatience, his unkindness and anger (a close friend once asked how he could reconcile his generally beastly behaviour and his Christianity; Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being”), what he derived from his Catholicism was a fundamental ability not to take this world too seriously. Stannard shows a sound grasp of this central issue in his choice of a subtitle for the second and final volume of his biographical study, No Abiding City—a reference to St. Paul (Hebrews XIII, 14): non enim habemus hic manentem civitatem, sed futuram inquirimus (“For we have here no abiding city, but we seek one that is to come”), which Waugh was particularly fond of quoting. Chesterton had already observed: “The Church is the only thing that can save a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of one’s own time,” but for Waugh, the Church not only secured liberation from the world, it also provided a force and an inspiration to go against the world—contra mundum.
Among Waugh’s works, The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox—a biography of the scholarly priest who translated the Vulgate into English — is probably one of the less read; the author had intended it essentially as an act of pietas to the memory of a deceased friend. Yet nothing written by Waugh is indifferent; at the very beginning of this book there is an episode of haunting power, which although bearing little relation to the main topic, must obviously have affected Waugh in a very personal way. In a few memorable pages, he describes the death of Knox’s maternal grandfather, an Anglican clergyman who ended his missionary life in Zanzibar in a state of total poverty, loneliness and dereliction, under the indifferent and uncomprehending eyes of the natives. This seems to have been a theme that presented special meaning for Waugh. Earlier on, for instance, he once summed up the subject of A Handful of Dust as “the civilised man’s helpless plight among savages.” The interesting twist in the latter description is that, if indeed the main character of the novel ends up as a captive in the Amazonian jungle, this final mishap occurs merely as a sort of epilogue — actually the true savages who destroyed his life with mindless cruelty were smart members of fashionable London society.
Those who bear witness, staunchly and faithfully, to a spiritual tradition are reduced by the modern world to a condition of “aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot at leisure, so that things may be safe for the travelling salesmen.” Modern man, who moves with the times and seeks power without grace, is finally a much greater menace to human integrity than tattooed cannibals. Thus, in Brideshead Revisited, we are told that Rex Mottram, politico and tycoon, epitome of worldly success (he is still very much alive among us today, forever aspiring to become our leader), “wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce: a tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.”
What is wrong with “the age of the common man” is not that it might endanger elitist privilege but the fact that it is built upon a false premise — for there is no such creature. In a memorable BBC interview, a journalist who thought he would cleverly expose Waugh’s social prejudices merely revealed his own incapacity to shed trendy stereotypes:
Journalist: You have not much sympathy with the man in the street, have you, Mr. Waugh?
Waugh: You must understand that the man in the street does not exist. He is a modern myth. There are individual men and women, each one of whom has an individual and immortal soul, and such beings need to use streets from time to time.
But there are also more insidious forms of intellectual perversion — those which borrow a religious disguise to subvert religious values. The phenomenon is not limited to progressive-minded Christians who do not believe in Christ, or to enlightened theologians who preach atheism; it consists more broadly — as Desmond MacCarthy described in his perceptive comments on The Loved One—in the entire “silly optimistic trend in modern civilisation which takes for granted that the consolations of religion can be enjoyed without belief in them, and seeks to persuade us that there is nothing really tragic in the predicament of man.”