however ironically in Persuasion or Our Mutual Friend, has gone – a casualty of war
and ofthe author’s temperament. His acceptance of Catholicism was a reasoned one.
He sought a fidelity and clarity which life rarely offers. In A Handful of Dust,Tony
Last inherits Hetton, a Gothic stately home which is a memorial of Victorian
chivalry. Another hero-victim, he is an honourable but feeble anachronism. His wife
Brenda leaves him for Beaver, a drone. Tony telephones her in London, but is
answered by Beaver. ‘Oh dear’, says Brenda, ‘I feel rather awful about him. But what
can he expec t,coming up suddenly like this. He’s got to be taught not to make
surprise visits.’ Tony leaves for South America, where he is enslaved by a Mr Todd,
who makes him read Dicke ns aloud.Tod is German for death, and Tony’s surname
is also allegorical. As well as eschatology, Waugh wrote hagiography – with dash in
Campion, with humility in Ronald Knox.Helena is a witty historical romance about
the saint who found the True Cross in Jerusalem.
Like Auden, Waugh travelled, to Africa, South America, Abyssinia. He married in
1937 a member of the Herbert family, and set up as a West Country squire, playing
outrageous practical jokes.Brideshead Revisited (1945) is a romantic novel about a
Catholic noble family and the operation of divine grace. The former is the outward
and visible site of the latter. The agnostic artist Charles Ryder is charmed by the old
Catholic family of an Oxford friend Sebastian Flyte, nearly marrying his sister Julia,
who is recalled to her original marriage vows by her father’s good death. The bitter
situations ofA Handful ofDust are reversed; the novels are poles apart, as are their
critics.Wartime deprivation, its author later conceded, lent enchantment to this
dream of hierarchical England as it ought to have been, a purple incarnation of
Eliot’s Four Quartets.Sebastian’s final innocence is presumed in circumstances
which earlier would have been treated mercilessly. Waugh’s war service in the
Marines informs Sword of Honour (1965): Guy Crouchback, from another old
Catholic family, joins up on hearing of the Nazi-Soviet pact but is disillusioned in
three volumes.This ambitious trilogy begins in a more tired mood than Powell’s
corresponding trio of war novels, but sustains its themes with real subtlety and an
increasing depth, peppered with scenes of outrageous farce, the most memorable of
which takes place on the Hebridean island of Mugg.370 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55
Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), young author with
pipe – early 1930s. © Bettmann/Corbis.