EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 39, No. 2 Autumn 2008 Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess: Some Parallels as Catholic Writers by John J. Stinson SUNY Fredonia A brief essay of mine on the affinities between Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess was published in this newsletter in 1976 (Vol. 10, No. 3: 11-12). Obviously, much has happened between then and now. Burgess died of lung cancer in London in November 1993, age 76, the author of some sixty-five to sixty-nine books, depending on how one counts. Auberon Waugh was one of two eulogists (the other being the novelist William Boyd) at a memorial service held at St. Paul’s (Anglican) Church, Covent Garden (the “Actors’ Church”). Auberon Waugh himself died in 2001; Graham Greene had passed in 1991. When Muriel Spark died in 2006, all four of the major English (Roman) Catholic novelists of the mid-to-late twentieth century were gone. Interestingly, only one, Burgess, was a “cradle Catholic.” This he often cited as a matter of pride, along with the claim that his was a recusant family who had successfully resisted Protestant conversion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Burgess identified himself as a traditional but also non-practicing Catholic. The “traditional Catholic” writer classification allies the two men in the public mind and was undoubtedly one of the reasons Burgess was drawn to Waugh’s writing. His only quarrel with Waugh’s brand of Catholicism had to do with the way Waugh characteristically represented it in association with the English aristocracy. The Augustinian view of humankind that emphasizes our propensity to sinfulness because of the inheritance of original sin was heavily subscribed to by both writers and is easily detectable in their fictions[1]. Burgess highly regarded the work of the older writer, an admiration readily apparent in numerous essays, reviews and occasional pieces turned out over the years by the prodigiously prolific Burgess. In fact, he brings into his very last creative work, the verse novel Byrne (published posthumously in 1994), the outstanding English Catholic novelists of Waugh’s time—Greene, Spark, and Waugh himself. In this stanza, the narrative voice tells us about confessions once heard by Tim Byrne, a doubting priest: He’d even, on a long-dead eve of Christmas, Confessed the dubious Catholic Graham Greene. He recognized him through his rhotacismus.[2] The sins were quite conventionally unclean Though glamourised by an exotic scene. Evelyn Waugh’s transgressions though had been Mere scruples, Tim was saddened to remark. It was too late to hear the sins of Muriel Spark. (Byrne 93) This is not the best stanza of the 600 ottava rima of Byronic style in this generally well-received novel, but since all male members of the Byrne family have definite quotients of Burgess himself in them, the author hopes to make absolutely sure, by placing himself alongside the other three in this scene, that he is remembered among those Catholic novelists that he thought most distinguished of the previous fifty years. Because, though, of a falling out, Burgess denies his own esteem for the work of Greene, so we earlier have these lines: In regions where mosquitoes bite, heat prickles, Humidity is high and spirits low, Concupiscence sporadically tickles, And white men go to pieces, as we’ve seen file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_39.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:55] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD In overlauded trash by Graham Greene. (Byrne 39) Waugh and Greene are revealed in their correspondence as men who became friends largely because of their common faith and who, over time, developed real affection for each other even though the relationship was sometimes tested. Burgess too came to know Greene, and a casual friendship developed but soured after a while. Although the root cause of their public falling out remains unclear, Norman Sherry, in Vol. 3 of The Life of Graham Greene, devotes a whole chapter to the ensuing feud which he titles “Boxing with Burgess” (753-64). No evidence exists that Burgess ever met Waugh or corresponded with him, but the two men, despite real and pronounced differences, did have much in common. (The Harry Ransom Center lists 139 boxes of Burgess papers, but Evelyn Waugh is not in the index of correspondents. Graham Greene is, though, as is Auberon Waugh.) Both Waugh and Burgess condemned the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), especially those regarding the liturgy, particularly the demotion of the Tridentine Mass, the celebration of which soon came to require special ecclesiastical approval. Waugh was equally fearful of what he saw as deep doctrinal changes affecting faith and morals being pushed by modernists at the Council. Both men seemed to deplore these changes as part of a general leveling and vulgarization that they saw in twentieth- century society, a main thematic thrust in the oeuvre of both, inherited in part from the strong and provable influence that Eliot’s The Waste Land had on each of them. In the late summer and early autumn of 1962 Waugh learned about changes being proposed to the Council. While he had been a liberal Catholic of outspoken views, he became an even more dedicated champion of conservatism who argued formidably and often, but more or less respectfully and succinctly, against what he saw as the catastrophic undermining of the Church by those now called progressives or modernists. He wrote a cogent essay titled “The Same Again, Please,” which argues firmly, but concisely and with a tone of sharp-edged reasonableness, against the feared and impending changes (Essays 602-09). The essay was published in the Spectator in England on November 23, 1962, and in America in National Review on December 4th of the same year (Essays 602). Other tart polemics appeared in print, causing him, quite properly, to be regarded as one of the chief lay spokespersons for conservative Catholics. Those who were in the habit of identifying the traditional Church with political and social reaction were inclined to find Waugh’s repositioning a logical development. Waugh engaged in more vigorous argument at the beginning of the pontificate of Paul VI, who succeeded John XXIII upon his death in 1963. As Douglas Lane Patey indicates, Waugh wrote a long letter to the editor of the Catholic Herald about matters before the Council, “Changes in the Church: Questions for the ‘Progressives’” (Essays 628-30), and replied in print seventeen times to opinions expressed by others (Patey 360). In the opening year or so of the Council Waugh’s arguments found favor with two English prelates who were quite active participants, Archbishop (later Cardinal) John Heenan, and Bishop George Dwyer of Leeds, consecrated Archbishop of Birmingham in 1965 (Patey 360). Anthony Burgess, a “step-cousin,” as he puts it, of Dwyer, was present at the consecration of this extremely well-read and sophisticated bishop who engaged with him over the years in literary and theological conversation (You’ve Had Your Time 115-16). Waugh’s disappointment grew as he began to see that he was defending a mostly lost cause. He kept his anger in check, though, even when Cardinal Heenan and perhaps other prelates gave assurances that they agreed with him but later took a different line in the Council (Letters 624n). If there were, though, ambivalences and seeming paradoxes in Heenan’s positions, there were also some in Waugh’s and even Pope John’s. In 1965 and 1966, Waugh’s letters to friends contain terse but heartfelt expressions of pain. On March 9, 1966, just a month before his sudden death on Easter morning, April 10th, Waugh had written to his friend Diana (Mitford) Mosley that he “had become very old in the last two years…. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me” (Letters 638). He wrote to her again on March 30th that “Easter used to mean so much to me. Before Pope John and his Council—they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy…. I now cling to the Faith doggedly without joy. Church going is a pure duty parade. I shall not live to see it restored” (Letters 639). file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_39.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:55] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD Waugh’s feelings about Pope John appear to have been genuinely ambivalent. Early in John’s pontificate Waugh, in writing to friends, mentioned that he had a “crush” on the new, very affable pope. Waugh had a sense of grievance against John’s predecessor, Pius XII, because of alterations in the Holy Week liturgy, and he suspected that the already elderly John would not have a bent for innovation, even though he was known to be an ecumenist, which was not at all to Waugh’s taste. Waugh was surprised at John’s calling of the Council, which Waugh felt was ill-advised and naïve; soon after he felt that forces of change in the Council were outmaneuvering or steamrollering the traditionalists, irrespective of where John stood himself. When John died in 1963, the Saturday Evening Post commissioned a piece from Waugh; it was published as “An Appreciation of Pope John” in the July 27th issue of that year. Waugh praises John for his “warmth,” his “spontaneous affability,” his “charity, prudence, and humility.” He claims to have found him a “man of hope,” “youthful in mind” although nearly 77 at the beginning of his pontificate (Essays 614-18).