At the end of his life, with an anguish that came close to despair, Waugh witnessed the dreadful invasion of shallowness and puerility which began to undermine and destroy some of the most precious and venerable traditions of the Church. He confessed to a friend: “The buggering up of the Church is a deep sorrow to me,” and in the privacy of his diary he went further: “Pray God I will never apostatise but I can only now go to Church as an act of duty and obedience — just as a sentry at Buck[ingham Palace] is posted with no possibility of his being employed to defend the sovereign’s life.”
As he sank even further into a pathological state of melancholy, he reviewed the bleak landscape of his soul — his spiritual dryness, his emotional loneliness, the dreariness and boredom of his family life, the wretchedness of his own foul temper, the general aridity of his soul[2] and at the end of a desolate litany of failings, doubts and despondency, he pondered that even the saints did not seem much better off, and yet concluded: “But to aim at anything less than sanctity is not to aim at all.”
He did not derive much comfort or consolation from his faith: he simply knew it to be true, and that was that. As he explained in a letter to a friend: “Praying is not asking but giving. Giving our love to God, asking for nothing in return… Do you believe in the Incarnation and Redemption in the full historical sense in which you believe in the battle of El Alamein? That’s important. Faith is not a mood.”
Only his religion could — quite ruthlessly — put this proud man in his humble place; he realistically accepted that, in a theological perspective, his unique talents in the end did not amount to much: “I cannot think of a single Saint who attached much importance to art… The Church and the world need monks and nuns more than they need writers… A youth who is inarticulate in conversation may well be eloquent in prayer… The Church does not exist in order to produce elegant preachers, or artists, or philosophers. It exists to produce Saints.”
After reading Helena, John Betjeman confessed to him a certain puzzlement: “Helena did not seem to me like a saint.” Waugh replied: “Saints are simply souls in Heaven… and each individual has his own peculiar form of sanctity which he must achieve or perish. It is no good my saying ‘I wish I were like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross,’ I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh — after God knows what experiences in Purgatory.”
On the question of purgatory, it should merely be observed that the meanest judges in this world were not even able to keep him for one single day in their literary purgatory; as to the other one, God’s sweet mercy will have taken good care of that.
*Review of Martin Stannard: Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939–1966 (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1992).
THE TRUTH OF SIMENON
All writers are monsters.
CIORAN wondered how the perspective of having a biographer never discouraged anyone from having a life. We should at least ask ourselves how the perspective of having to provide posthumously the topic of an academic eulogy does not discourage more people from becoming academicians. In Simenon’s case, perhaps, he believed that he had sufficiently succeeded in concealing his tracks, and thought that the false candour of his many confessions would always be protection enough against our indiscreet admiration.
Samuel Johnson said: “Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” I am not sure if this sort of experience would have been of much use to Simenon’s biographer — or to any other great writer’s, for that matter. Isaac Bashevis Singer once observed (forgive this abundance of quotations, it is not pedantry — simply, the fact is that, for the last fifteen years, I have been frequenting books more than people; furthermore, why should we attempt clumsily to reinvent what good writers have better said before us?) that, even if Tolstoy were living next door, instead of paying him a visit, he would rather stay home and read Anna Karenina again. This is elementary wisdom. The encounter of geniuses is not always an occasion for sublime exchanges. The only meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust is a good example: these two giants of modern literature once shared a taxi, but they spent the entire time arguing whether to open or shut the window. (This anecdote must be true, since it was invented by Nabokov.)
People are often surprised when they realise that, in life, great writers do not bear much resemblance to the image they had formed of them while reading their works. For instance, with naïve astonishment they may discover that a fierce polemicist, whose fire and violence had filled them with awe, actually is a quiet, shy and retiring man; or again, the orgiastic prophet of burning passion, who had stirred their sensual imagination, proves in fact to be a eunuch; or the famous adventurer, who set their minds dreaming of exotic horizons, wears slippers and never leaves his cosy fireside; or the aesthete from whose exquisite visions they drew so much inspiration eats from plastic plates and wears hideous neckties. They should have known better. Quite frequently, an artist creates in order to compensate for a deficiency; his creation is not the joyous and exuberant outpouring of an overflow — it is more often a pathetic attempt to answer a want, to bridge a gap, to hide a wound.
Hilaire Belloc admirably described this divorce between the writer and his writing:
I never knew a man yet who was consonant to his work. Either he was clearly much greater and better than his work, or clearly much less and worse… In point of fact it is not the mere man who does the thing: it is the man inspired. And the reason we are shocked by the vanity of artists is that, more or less consciously, we consider the contrast between what God has done through them, and their own disgusting selves… When the work is of genius, he is far below it: he is on a different plane. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent him from outside.
Simenon granted countless journalistic interviews. In his free time (that is, when he was not writing novels) he would entertain journalists sometimes as often as twice or three times a week. The media found him to be a golden topic. With apparent good will, but not without shrewdness, he complied with their many requests; in front of television cameras, he performed his old routine with well-oiled smoothness; he deftly fed his numerous visitors all the humbug they wished to swallow, in the same fashion as, at the zoo, one throws peanuts to the monkeys.
He enjoyed worldwide celebrity. His fame can be conveniently encapsulated in a series of figures which, though often quoted, never cease to amaze: his books have been translated into fifty-seven languages and published in forty countries; he wrote some 450 novels — the exact figure, which may possibly constitute a world record of fecundity in the history of literature, still escapes the investigations of the most diligent researchers, as in his youth he produced countless pot-boilers (adventure stories, soft pornography watered down with sentimental romance) that were issued in cheap, obscure and short-lived serial publications, under twenty-seven different pen-names. In his early period, he would sometimes turn out one or two novels in the course of a single day. As success came, he began to travel restlessly; at the same time, he became a compulsive landlord, setting up for himself thirty-two successive residences. And also, naturally, let us not forget the 10,000 women with whom, according to his own computations, he managed over the years to have sexual intercourse.