The majestic patriarch of Catholic letters—a genius of immense authority—had invited Waugh...

 In everyday life, Waugh was constantly casting acquaintances and friends into fantastic roles, and generally turning the people he met into characters in a private charade; often he would use this myth-making talent to hilarious effect. A good illustration is provided, for instance, by his visit to the great poet Paul Claudel. The majestic patriarch of Catholic letters—a genius of immense authority—had invited Waugh and Christopher Sykes to have lunch in his Paris apartment. This is how Waugh related the meeting in his diary:

The old man was deaf and dumb. All his family—wife, sons and daughters-in-law—sat round the table. He greeted me by putting into my hands a newly printed édition de luxe of some   verses of his. A present? I began to thank him. He took it away and put it on a table. I had the impression it was to be my prize if I behaved well. Lively conversation mostly in English. Every now and then the old man’s lips were seen to move and there would be a cry: “Papa is speaking!” and a hush broken only by unintelligible animal noises. Some of these were addressed to me, and I thought he said: “How would you put into English potage de midi?” I replied: “Soup at luncheon.” It transpired that he was the author of a work named Partage de midi. His tortoise eyes glistened with hostility. After luncheon there was a great deal of fuss among the womenfolk as to whether or not Papa was to have cognac. He got it, brightened a little, called for an album and made me sit by him, as his arthritic fingers turned the pages . . . Anything that caught his fancy had been pasted [in the album]. Some were humorous, some not. There was a group of the Goebbels family. “That’s funny,” I said, feeling on safe ground. “I think it very sad,” he mumbled . . . When we left, he came to the drawing room door and laid his hand on the édition de luxe, gave me another look of reptilian hate, and left it on its table. Next day, he told a daughter-in-law that both Christopher [Sykes] and I were “très gentlemen.”

Christopher Sykes, however, gave a completely different account. Not only had Claudel been perfectly hospitable, genial and lively, but virtually none of the grotesque incidents mentioned in Waugh’s narrative did actually take place. In particular, Waugh’s horrible gaffe was pure fiction. One would have guessed as much: it is very difficult to believe that Waugh, who admired Claudel, would not have known even the title of one of his masterpieces: “It transpired that he was the author of a work named Partage de midi . . .” It transpired indeed! (One is reminded of Philip Larkin’s tranquil impudence: “Deep down, I think foreign languages irrelevant.”) Shortly after the encounter with Claudel, Sykes was astonished to hear Waugh describing for the first time this fictitious incident to a common friend; he stuck to his invention after that, as he obviously had come to believe it sincerely. Perhaps it was not simply one more instance of the novelist’s instinct   at work; more exactly, “the novelist’s instinct” was itself an expression of a deeper defence against the threats which reality was directing at his self-esteem: from Sykes’ testimony, we know that, immediately before the visit, Waugh was virtually paralysed with nervousness—a most uncharacteristic and humiliating condition for a man whose powerful personality usually inspired fear in all those who approached him. (On their way to Claudel’s apartment, Waugh insisted that they first stop in a church to pray for success; and then during the entire visit, he feigned total ignorance of the French language, for fear of making mistakes and bringing ridicule upon himself.) Obviously, meeting Claudel had momentous meaning for him, and he was desperately eager to make a favourable impression on the grand old man. Yet, things did not work out the way he would have wished; as Sykes observed, “he somehow detected that Claudel, for all his geniality, did not like him.” In Waugh’s version, however, the mot de la fin was provided by Claudel commenting the next day to his daughter-in-law: “Waugh is très gentleman.” Actually this is probably a clue for the deep wound which may have triggered the entire fiction: according to Sykes, Claudel’s impression was precisely the opposite: “Later, Claudel told a friend of mine that he had been very interested to meet Evelyn Waugh, ‘Mais,’ he added, ‘il lui manque l’allure du vrai gentleman’ (‘he does not look like a real gentleman’)!”

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.

From THE HALL OF USELESSNESS

Simon Leys