WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.940 Welcome to The Debate. Today, we're dissecting 00:00:02.940 --> 00:00:05.440 the life of a man who possessed, well, perhaps 00:00:05.440 --> 00:00:08.240 the sharpest pen and the sharpest tongue of the 00:00:08.240 --> 00:00:11.460 20th century. We are talking about Evelyn Waugh. 00:00:11.720 --> 00:00:14.580 To the literary world, he's a titan, you know, 00:00:14.580 --> 00:00:17.140 the mind behind Brideshead Revisited and Scoop, 00:00:17.160 --> 00:00:19.980 a stylist whose sentences were just these architectural 00:00:19.980 --> 00:00:22.969 marvels. But to the people who actually had to 00:00:22.969 --> 00:00:25.350 sit across from him at dinner, he was often something 00:00:25.350 --> 00:00:28.609 else entirely. His contemporary, James Lees Milne, 00:00:28.710 --> 00:00:31.550 famously called him the nastiest tempered man 00:00:31.550 --> 00:00:34.250 in England. Honestly, based on the evidence, 00:00:34.530 --> 00:00:37.009 Lees Milne might have been holding back a little. 00:00:37.609 --> 00:00:39.770 It's a pleasure to be here, though. We've got 00:00:39.770 --> 00:00:42.109 a heavy lift today. We're looking at a figure 00:00:42.109 --> 00:00:45.189 who is just incredibly difficult to pin down. 00:00:45.409 --> 00:00:48.530 On one side, you have this devout Catholic convert 00:00:48.530 --> 00:00:52.600 and a brilliant satirist. On the other, you have 00:00:52.600 --> 00:00:56.219 a man accused of profound snobbery, anti -Semitism, 00:00:56.380 --> 00:00:59.539 and a cruelty that seemed to go far, far beyond 00:00:59.539 --> 00:01:02.179 simple grumpiness. And that's the tension we're 00:01:02.179 --> 00:01:05.079 here to explore. The central question for this 00:01:05.079 --> 00:01:09.019 session is this. Was Evelyn Waugh genuinely a 00:01:09.019 --> 00:01:12.000 misanthropic monster whose work just reflects 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:15.989 a disdain for humanity? Or was that famous crusty 00:01:15.989 --> 00:01:19.549 colonel persona actually a protective mask worn 00:01:19.549 --> 00:01:22.510 by a deeply sensitive moralist who was frankly 00:01:22.510 --> 00:01:25.549 terrified of the modern world? I'm arguing for 00:01:25.549 --> 00:01:27.989 the latter. I believe Wall was a misunderstood 00:01:27.989 --> 00:01:31.530 figure who used performance and humor to shield 00:01:31.530 --> 00:01:34.730 a fragile self and that his work is a serious, 00:01:34.750 --> 00:01:37.730 even desperate search for grace in a chaotic 00:01:37.730 --> 00:01:41.269 world. And I'm taking the opposing view. I think 00:01:41.269 --> 00:01:44.319 the mask theory is a... A convenient fiction 00:01:44.319 --> 00:01:46.920 we tell ourselves so we can enjoy the books without 00:01:46.920 --> 00:01:50.040 feeling guilty about the author. I'll be arguing 00:01:50.040 --> 00:01:52.459 that Waugh's brilliance simply cannot excuse 00:01:52.459 --> 00:01:55.780 his genuine cruelty. I intend to show that the 00:01:55.780 --> 00:01:58.900 mask wasn't hiding anything. It was magnifying 00:01:58.900 --> 00:02:01.519 the truth. His character was marked by a fundamental, 00:02:01.859 --> 00:02:04.260 uncharitable hostility toward his fellow man. 00:02:04.540 --> 00:02:06.980 I understand why you'd say that. I mean, the 00:02:06.980 --> 00:02:09.680 stories about him are legendary. But to really 00:02:09.680 --> 00:02:12.120 get Waugh, I think you have to start with the 00:02:12.120 --> 00:02:14.930 wound. You cannot understand the bark without 00:02:14.930 --> 00:02:18.110 understanding the bite he took early on. We have 00:02:18.110 --> 00:02:21.229 to look at 1929. He's married to Evelyn Gardner. 00:02:21.330 --> 00:02:23.629 They were known as he Evelyn and she Evelyn. 00:02:23.909 --> 00:02:27.169 And by all accounts, he was completely besotted. 00:02:27.629 --> 00:02:31.229 Then she confesses she has a lover. The marriage 00:02:31.229 --> 00:02:33.990 implodes. And it wasn't just a breakup. It was 00:02:33.990 --> 00:02:36.909 a total shattering of his reality. It was certainly 00:02:36.909 --> 00:02:39.409 a catalyst, I'll give you that. But plenty of 00:02:39.409 --> 00:02:41.509 people get divorced without becoming, you know, 00:02:41.550 --> 00:02:44.259 tyrants. But for Waugh, it was the foundation 00:02:44.259 --> 00:02:47.659 of his entire worldview shift. It was right after 00:02:47.659 --> 00:02:51.520 this betrayal in 1930 that he converted to Catholicism. 00:02:51.599 --> 00:02:53.860 And later he wrote something that I think is 00:02:53.860 --> 00:02:57.180 the key to his entire psyche. He said life was 00:02:57.180 --> 00:03:00.699 unintelligible and unendurable without God. Now 00:03:00.699 --> 00:03:02.500 that is not the statement of an arrogant man. 00:03:02.699 --> 00:03:04.800 That's the statement of a man hanging over an 00:03:04.800 --> 00:03:08.180 abyss. His biographer, Selina Hastings, made 00:03:08.180 --> 00:03:10.300 this brilliant observation about his belligerence. 00:03:10.669 --> 00:03:13.349 She suggested his hostility wasn't pure malice. 00:03:13.370 --> 00:03:16.849 It was boredom and fear. He was terrified of 00:03:16.849 --> 00:03:19.909 the age of the common man, this rising tide of 00:03:19.909 --> 00:03:22.110 mediocrity that he felt was swallowing beauty 00:03:22.110 --> 00:03:24.710 and tradition. He was defending the fortress. 00:03:25.129 --> 00:03:28.389 See, that paints him as this sort of, this tragic, 00:03:28.530 --> 00:03:32.150 romantic figure defending civilization. But if 00:03:32.150 --> 00:03:35.409 we look at the timeline, the nastiness predates 00:03:35.409 --> 00:03:37.650 the heartbreak. You want to talk about the age 00:03:37.650 --> 00:03:40.030 of the common man? Let's talk about the age of 00:03:40.030 --> 00:03:42.590 the schoolboy. At Heathmount Preparatory School, 00:03:42.770 --> 00:03:45.550 long before any wife betrayed him, he was already 00:03:45.550 --> 00:03:48.789 a bully. He tormented Cecil Beaton, the future 00:03:48.789 --> 00:03:52.090 photographer, relentlessly. Beaton said he never 00:03:52.090 --> 00:03:55.169 forgot the cruelty. Now that is not defending 00:03:55.169 --> 00:03:57.830 a fortress against mediocrity. That's a child 00:03:57.830 --> 00:04:00.050 -deriving pleasure from the pain of a weaker 00:04:00.050 --> 00:04:02.860 child. Children can be cruel, though. Projecting 00:04:02.860 --> 00:04:05.159 the man onto the child is a bit risky. But the 00:04:05.159 --> 00:04:07.939 line is unbroken. When his diaries were published 00:04:07.939 --> 00:04:10.219 in the 70s, which, by the way, destroyed his 00:04:10.219 --> 00:04:12.800 reputation for a whole new generation, they didn't 00:04:12.800 --> 00:04:14.879 reveal a secret heart of gold. They revealed 00:04:14.879 --> 00:04:17.180 a man who was deeply intolerant, anti -Semitic, 00:04:17.180 --> 00:04:19.519 and sadistic. Even his friends, the people who 00:04:19.519 --> 00:04:22.199 loved him, noted a shift. Christopher Sykes said 00:04:22.199 --> 00:04:24.300 a new hardness and bitterness took over after 00:04:24.300 --> 00:04:27.040 the divorce. It wasn't just sadness. It was aggression. 00:04:27.500 --> 00:04:30.399 And as politics, these are not witty paradoxes. 00:04:30.730 --> 00:04:32.910 He opposed the welfare state. He supported Mussolini's 00:04:32.910 --> 00:04:34.990 invasion of Abyssinia because he thought it was 00:04:34.990 --> 00:04:37.490 a savage place that needed taming. That isn't 00:04:37.490 --> 00:04:39.889 a mask. Those are deeply held problematic convictions. 00:04:40.269 --> 00:04:42.610 I think we have to be careful about reading 2020s 00:04:42.610 --> 00:04:47.870 morality into 1930s politics. But let's look 00:04:47.870 --> 00:04:49.850 at where those convictions actually manifested. 00:04:50.069 --> 00:04:52.889 The work. Because this is where the snobbery 00:04:52.889 --> 00:04:56.250 accusation usually lands. And it lands squarely 00:04:56.250 --> 00:04:58.970 on Brideshead Revisitant. Oh, it has to. Brideshead 00:04:58.970 --> 00:05:01.350 is the elephant in your room. Published in 1945, 00:05:01.649 --> 00:05:03.990 it's his most famous book. But it's also the 00:05:03.990 --> 00:05:05.930 one where his mask slips in the wrong direction. 00:05:06.550 --> 00:05:08.670 Critics like Connor Cruz O 'Brien absolutely 00:05:08.670 --> 00:05:11.810 savaged it for what he called mystical veneration 00:05:11.810 --> 00:05:14.439 of the upper classes. Waugh fell in love with 00:05:14.439 --> 00:05:17.079 the Ligon family at Madras Field Court, and in 00:05:17.079 --> 00:05:19.699 the book, he just conflates the aristocracy with 00:05:19.699 --> 00:05:22.180 holiness. It's as if he believes God only truly 00:05:22.180 --> 00:05:25.399 operates inside a gated country estate. He was 00:05:25.399 --> 00:05:27.360 so blinded by the glamour of the Flight family 00:05:27.360 --> 00:05:30.240 that he lost his satirical edge. He started worshipping 00:05:30.240 --> 00:05:32.420 the very people he used to mock. I think that 00:05:32.420 --> 00:05:34.860 is a very superficial reading of Brideshead, 00:05:34.980 --> 00:05:37.019 though I admit many critics shared it at the 00:05:37.019 --> 00:05:40.360 time. But look closer. Is he worshipping them? 00:05:40.800 --> 00:05:43.660 Sebastian Flight is a severe alcoholic who ends 00:05:43.660 --> 00:05:46.399 up destitute in North Africa. Lord Marchmain 00:05:46.399 --> 00:05:48.699 is an adulterer living in sin who essentially 00:05:48.699 --> 00:05:51.639 abandoned his family. These aren't role models. 00:05:52.180 --> 00:05:54.899 Waugh isn't saying aristocrats are better. He's 00:05:54.899 --> 00:05:57.540 saying that divine grace is so powerful it can 00:05:57.540 --> 00:06:00.160 penetrate even the thickest walls of privilege 00:06:00.160 --> 00:06:03.079 and sin. Waugh himself said the book was about 00:06:03.079 --> 00:06:06.500 the operation of divine grace. But he treats 00:06:06.500 --> 00:06:08.860 their sins with a romance he denies the lower 00:06:08.860 --> 00:06:11.850 classes. I mean, the deathbed scene of Lord Marchmain 00:06:11.850 --> 00:06:14.389 is treated with his profound solemnity, whereas 00:06:14.389 --> 00:06:16.569 the failures of common people in his books are 00:06:16.569 --> 00:06:19.689 just played for laughs. I disagree. Compare it 00:06:19.689 --> 00:06:22.870 to vile bodies or decline and fall. In those 00:06:22.870 --> 00:06:25.970 early books, the bright young things, the aristocrats, 00:06:26.009 --> 00:06:29.810 are portrayed as vapid, empty, and futile. He 00:06:29.810 --> 00:06:32.769 saw through them completely. The shift in Brideshead 00:06:32.769 --> 00:06:35.529 isn't about worshipping money. It's about mourning 00:06:35.529 --> 00:06:38.589 the loss of a specific type of beauty. And let's 00:06:38.589 --> 00:06:40.550 look at who the real villain is in Brideshead. 00:06:40.689 --> 00:06:44.509 It's Hooper. Exactly. Hooper, the young middle 00:06:44.509 --> 00:06:47.250 -class officer. Waugh treats him with absolute 00:06:47.250 --> 00:06:50.709 dripping contempt. But why? Not because Hooper's 00:06:50.709 --> 00:06:54.230 poor, but because Hooper has no soul. Hooper 00:06:54.230 --> 00:06:57.750 represents the standardized man. He has no connection 00:06:57.750 --> 00:07:00.750 to history, no connection to the land, no connection 00:07:00.750 --> 00:07:04.790 to faith. He's plastic. Waugh hated Hooper because 00:07:04.790 --> 00:07:07.569 Hooper represented a world where nothing mattered 00:07:07.569 --> 00:07:10.129 except efficiency. You see the same thing with 00:07:10.129 --> 00:07:12.829 Tremor in the Sword of Honor trilogy. Waugh wasn't 00:07:12.829 --> 00:07:15.089 attacking their bank accounts, he was attacking 00:07:15.089 --> 00:07:18.149 their spiritual mediocrity. He feared a world 00:07:18.149 --> 00:07:20.310 where everyone was Hooper, where the concept 00:07:20.310 --> 00:07:23.569 of honor or beauty was obsolete. But that's exactly 00:07:23.569 --> 00:07:27.370 my point. His definition of spiritual depth is 00:07:27.370 --> 00:07:31.240 conveniently tied to having a family crest. It's 00:07:31.240 --> 00:07:34.540 an exclusionary theology. It implies that if 00:07:34.540 --> 00:07:37.079 you don't have ancestors in the peerage, you're 00:07:37.079 --> 00:07:40.120 spiritually vacant. And this brings me to the 00:07:40.120 --> 00:07:43.040 biggest hurdle I have with Waugh. You talk about 00:07:43.040 --> 00:07:46.560 grace and faith and the operation of God. How 00:07:46.560 --> 00:07:49.300 do you square that with his behavior? He was 00:07:49.300 --> 00:07:51.980 a devout Catholic, attended mass faithfully, 00:07:52.100 --> 00:07:55.430 yet he was undeniably mean. There's that famous 00:07:55.430 --> 00:07:57.990 story with Nancy Mitford. I know the one. She 00:07:57.990 --> 00:08:00.529 asked him, point blank, how he could behave so 00:08:00.529 --> 00:08:02.569 abominably while claiming to be a Christian. 00:08:02.790 --> 00:08:05.810 Right. And his response? He said, you have no 00:08:05.810 --> 00:08:08.970 idea how much nastier I would be if I was not 00:08:08.970 --> 00:08:12.069 a Catholic. Without supernatural aid, I would 00:08:12.069 --> 00:08:15.029 hardly be a human being. It's a brilliant line. 00:08:15.269 --> 00:08:19.009 It's witty. It's self -deprecating. But is it 00:08:19.009 --> 00:08:21.350 true? Or is it a get -out -of -jail -free card? 00:08:21.930 --> 00:08:24.810 It feels like he used his Catholicism as a way 00:08:24.810 --> 00:08:27.949 to say, oh, I'm trying, while continuing to be 00:08:27.949 --> 00:08:31.329 awful. It's almost a rhetorical trick to deflect 00:08:31.329 --> 00:08:34.950 criticism. I believe he meant every word of it. 00:08:35.070 --> 00:08:37.570 While viewed his own nature as a battleground, 00:08:37.789 --> 00:08:39.970 he suffered from what he called a dryness of 00:08:39.970 --> 00:08:42.909 soul. He didn't like himself very much. He knew 00:08:42.909 --> 00:08:45.590 he was prone to cruelty. The church gave him 00:08:45.590 --> 00:08:48.210 a structure, a cage, if you will, to keep the 00:08:48.210 --> 00:08:51.230 beast contained. And he was generous, you know. 00:08:51.600 --> 00:08:53.879 He gave a lot of money to Catholic causes, often 00:08:53.879 --> 00:08:56.559 anonymously. He housed priests. He supported 00:08:56.559 --> 00:08:59.779 converts. But even his generosity had a cynical 00:08:59.779 --> 00:09:02.620 edge. Look at how he handled his own children's 00:09:02.620 --> 00:09:05.399 inheritance. He set up a trust fund to avoid 00:09:05.399 --> 00:09:09.000 taxes, which is fine, practical. But he named 00:09:09.000 --> 00:09:12.340 it the Save the Children Fund. He appropriated 00:09:12.340 --> 00:09:15.419 the name of an actual charity for a tax dodge. 00:09:15.659 --> 00:09:18.539 That's a joke, sure, but it's a cruel one. It 00:09:18.539 --> 00:09:21.500 suggests he viewed moral obligations as something 00:09:21.500 --> 00:09:24.379 to be gained. It was a dark joke, absolutely. 00:09:24.799 --> 00:09:27.960 He refused to take the state seriously. He viewed 00:09:27.960 --> 00:09:30.000 the modern government's attempt to replace the 00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:32.720 church's charity as a usurpation. But if we want 00:09:32.720 --> 00:09:34.960 to talk about his faith, we have to talk about 00:09:34.960 --> 00:09:37.320 the end of his life, the Second Vatican Council 00:09:37.320 --> 00:09:40.419 in the 1960s. This is where the monster narrative 00:09:40.419 --> 00:09:42.539 really falls apart for me, and you see the broken 00:09:42.539 --> 00:09:45.460 man. When the church switched from Latin to English? 00:09:45.720 --> 00:09:49.460 Yes. To many, that was progress. To Waugh, it 00:09:49.460 --> 00:09:52.159 was a catastrophe. He wrote to Nancy Mitford, 00:09:52.379 --> 00:09:54.639 The buggering up of the church is a deep sorrow 00:09:54.639 --> 00:09:57.779 to me. He wasn't just being a snob about language. 00:09:58.000 --> 00:10:00.340 He felt that the mystery was being stripped away. 00:10:00.620 --> 00:10:03.399 He felt his lifeline to God was being severed 00:10:03.399 --> 00:10:06.399 by bureaucrats. That is not the anger of a bully. 00:10:06.659 --> 00:10:09.039 That's the panic of a man whose sanctuary is 00:10:09.039 --> 00:10:11.960 being demolished. Or it was the complaint of 00:10:11.960 --> 00:10:13.899 a man who treated the church like an exclusive 00:10:13.899 --> 00:10:17.019 club. He wanted the Latin mask because it was 00:10:17.019 --> 00:10:20.000 aesthetic, because it was elite, because it separated 00:10:20.000 --> 00:10:23.620 the initiated from the common. It's the same 00:10:23.620 --> 00:10:25.700 reason he collected Victorian furniture before 00:10:25.700 --> 00:10:29.720 it was cool. It's all about curation. And that 00:10:29.720 --> 00:10:32.860 brings us to the persona itself. You say it was 00:10:32.860 --> 00:10:36.419 a mask. I look at that famous BBC face -to -face 00:10:36.419 --> 00:10:40.320 interview with John Freeman in 1960. Hmm. It's 00:10:40.320 --> 00:10:43.799 a painful interview to watch. It is. Waugh sits 00:10:43.799 --> 00:10:47.220 there, puffing his cigar, affecting this pose 00:10:47.220 --> 00:10:50.580 of world -weary boredom. He refuses to engage. 00:10:50.940 --> 00:10:54.299 He treats Freeman like an insect. By the end 00:10:54.299 --> 00:10:56.960 of his life, he refused to drive, refused to 00:10:56.960 --> 00:11:00.059 use the telephone, hated the radio. That isn't 00:11:00.059 --> 00:11:02.980 a mask protecting a sensitive soul. That is a 00:11:02.980 --> 00:11:05.720 man who has retreated into a fantasy world because 00:11:05.720 --> 00:11:08.519 he cannot cope with reality. He became a caricature 00:11:08.519 --> 00:11:11.740 of himself. I see it differently. I see it as 00:11:11.740 --> 00:11:15.000 consistent aesthetic conservatism. Waugh was 00:11:15.000 --> 00:11:18.100 an artist. He curated his life just as carefully 00:11:18.100 --> 00:11:20.539 as he curated his sentences. He bought William 00:11:20.539 --> 00:11:22.879 Burgess furniture and Victorian paintings when 00:11:22.879 --> 00:11:25.340 everyone else was buying modernism. He was living 00:11:25.340 --> 00:11:27.860 in a world of his own creation because the actual 00:11:27.860 --> 00:11:30.600 world had become ugly to him. It was a form of 00:11:30.600 --> 00:11:33.519 protest art. But the protests often look like 00:11:33.519 --> 00:11:37.110 madness. Or worse, inhumanity. Let's compare 00:11:37.110 --> 00:11:39.669 two incidents, and I think this really nails 00:11:39.669 --> 00:11:44.309 down why the mask theory fails. 1925. Young Wa 00:11:44.309 --> 00:11:47.629 attempts suicide. He walks into the sea, leaving 00:11:47.629 --> 00:11:50.470 a quote from Euripides on the beach. High drama. 00:11:50.730 --> 00:11:52.590 And he turns back because he gets stung by a 00:11:52.590 --> 00:11:55.009 jellyfish. It's a moment of bathos he would have 00:11:55.009 --> 00:11:57.929 put in a novel himself. Exactly. It's human. 00:11:58.129 --> 00:12:02.110 It's funny. But fast forward to 1958. His son, 00:12:02.289 --> 00:12:05.509 Oberon, is serving in the army in Cyprus. He's 00:12:05.509 --> 00:12:07.429 critically wounded in a machine gun accident. 00:12:07.629 --> 00:12:11.509 He nearly dies. Waugh's reaction? Radical, icy 00:12:11.509 --> 00:12:14.730 detachment. He doesn't fly to Cyprus. He barely 00:12:14.730 --> 00:12:17.830 reacts when Oberon eventually returns. He maintained 00:12:17.830 --> 00:12:20.850 stiff upper lip that bordered on sociopathy. 00:12:21.129 --> 00:12:23.850 A father who curates his life to exclude the 00:12:23.850 --> 00:12:26.809 suffering of his own son isn't shielding a sensitive 00:12:26.809 --> 00:12:30.710 self. He is simply cold. That is a hard charge 00:12:30.710 --> 00:12:33.649 to answer. Waugh's relationship with his children 00:12:33.649 --> 00:12:37.360 was... well, Victorian, to put it mildly. He 00:12:37.360 --> 00:12:40.320 was distant. But I would argue that this detachment 00:12:40.320 --> 00:12:42.600 was the only way he could function as a writer. 00:12:42.899 --> 00:12:46.360 He viewed writing as an external craft. He had 00:12:46.360 --> 00:12:49.120 to separate the man from the artist, or the emotion 00:12:49.120 --> 00:12:52.320 would overwhelm the prose. He famously said, 00:12:52.519 --> 00:12:55.519 Man is a creature of the fall. Only the artist 00:12:55.519 --> 00:12:58.759 can achieve perfection. But can we separate them? 00:12:58.899 --> 00:13:01.990 That's the ultimate question of his legacy. George 00:13:01.990 --> 00:13:04.250 Orwell, who Wall actually admired, ironically, 00:13:04.450 --> 00:13:07.490 put it best. He said Wall was about as good a 00:13:07.490 --> 00:13:10.690 novelist as one can be while holding untenable 00:13:10.690 --> 00:13:13.649 opinions. We cannot just ignore the fascism in 00:13:13.649 --> 00:13:16.470 Wall and Abyssinia. We cannot ignore the racial 00:13:16.470 --> 00:13:19.450 prejudices that his biographer, David Weix, cataloged. 00:13:19.549 --> 00:13:22.570 These aren't just quirks. They seep into the 00:13:22.570 --> 00:13:27.129 ink. They are there and they are ugly. I won't 00:13:27.129 --> 00:13:30.340 defend the prejudice. But I will defend the utility 00:13:30.340 --> 00:13:33.120 of his perspective. Because he stood outside 00:13:33.120 --> 00:13:35.460 the modern world, he could see its cracks clearer 00:13:35.460 --> 00:13:38.210 than anyone else. Look at the loved one. His 00:13:38.210 --> 00:13:41.509 Hollywood satire? Yes. He visits Forest Lawn 00:13:41.509 --> 00:13:44.649 Cemetery in Los Angeles. He sees the makeup on 00:13:44.649 --> 00:13:46.970 the corpses, the commercialization of grief, 00:13:47.090 --> 00:13:49.529 the total denial of death, and he writes a savage, 00:13:49.590 --> 00:13:53.169 brilliant satire. He exposes the artificiality 00:13:53.169 --> 00:13:55.970 of American culture. He saw that without a grounding 00:13:55.970 --> 00:13:58.830 in spiritual reality, specifically the reality 00:13:58.830 --> 00:14:01.690 of death and judgment, society becomes a grotesque 00:14:01.690 --> 00:14:04.450 carnival. That insight is more relevant today 00:14:04.450 --> 00:14:08.100 than it was in 1948. We need that nasty voice 00:14:08.100 --> 00:14:11.120 to prick our balloons. I grant you the loved 00:14:11.120 --> 00:14:14.659 one is a masterpiece. But why is it a masterpiece? 00:14:15.320 --> 00:14:18.840 V .S. Pritchett called it the beauty of his malice. 00:14:18.919 --> 00:14:22.039 My argument is that the malice is the engine. 00:14:22.460 --> 00:14:24.960 He didn't write the loved one to save America. 00:14:25.139 --> 00:14:28.519 He wrote it because he despised America. The 00:14:28.519 --> 00:14:31.759 hate was the fuel. His worldview was fundamentally 00:14:31.759 --> 00:14:34.980 exclusionary. He wanted a hierarchy with him 00:14:34.980 --> 00:14:38.279 at the top looking down. That energy drives the 00:14:38.279 --> 00:14:41.120 humor and scoop and black mischief. It's the 00:14:41.120 --> 00:14:43.500 humor of the bully who is smarter than everyone 00:14:43.500 --> 00:14:45.940 else in the room. That is a compelling argument. 00:14:46.200 --> 00:14:49.059 Malice is fuel. But I would argue that in his 00:14:49.059 --> 00:14:52.600 very best work, that malice turns inward. Look 00:14:52.600 --> 00:14:55.759 at the ordeal of Gilbert Penfold. He fictionalized 00:14:55.759 --> 00:14:58.340 his own mental breakdown. He wrote about hearing 00:14:58.340 --> 00:15:01.159 voices, about being paranoid. He told his friends, 00:15:01.340 --> 00:15:04.600 I've been mad. Clean off my onion. A man with 00:15:04.600 --> 00:15:07.159 zero self -awareness, a man who is just a bully, 00:15:07.299 --> 00:15:10.700 cannot write pinfold. He dismantled his own ego. 00:15:10.879 --> 00:15:14.139 And in Sword of Honor, the protagonist Guy Crouchback 00:15:14.139 --> 00:15:17.399 starts the war thinking it's a crusade and ends 00:15:17.399 --> 00:15:20.240 up realizing it's just a sweaty tug -of -war 00:15:20.240 --> 00:15:23.700 between teams of indistinguishable louts. Waugh 00:15:23.700 --> 00:15:26.360 dismantled his own romanticism. He was a man 00:15:26.360 --> 00:15:29.139 in constant spiritual combat with himself. And 00:15:29.139 --> 00:15:31.500 yet, looking at the end of his life, it feels 00:15:31.500 --> 00:15:35.850 like he lost that combat. He died in 1966 on 00:15:35.850 --> 00:15:39.350 Easter Sunday, which is poetic, I suppose, but 00:15:39.350 --> 00:15:41.990 he died isolated, railing against the changes 00:15:41.990 --> 00:15:44.750 in his church, estranged from the culture. I 00:15:44.750 --> 00:15:47.309 find it fitting. He died in the Latin rite he 00:15:47.309 --> 00:15:50.029 loved, in the home he curated, having finished 00:15:50.029 --> 00:15:52.750 his work. So where does that leave us? I look 00:15:52.750 --> 00:15:54.830 at the diaries, the treatment of his family, 00:15:55.029 --> 00:15:57.649 the political tracks, and I see a man who was 00:15:57.649 --> 00:16:00.190 undeniably a genius of the English language, 00:16:00.330 --> 00:16:03.399 but fundamentally unpleasant. The mask defense 00:16:03.399 --> 00:16:06.480 fails for me, because if you wear a mask of cruelty 00:16:06.480 --> 00:16:09.480 for 40 years, eventually it fuses to your skin. 00:16:09.779 --> 00:16:12.480 His tragedy was that he could describe the world 00:16:12.480 --> 00:16:15.080 perfectly, but he couldn't find a way to love 00:16:15.080 --> 00:16:17.919 the people inhabiting it. And I maintain that 00:16:17.919 --> 00:16:21.299 Evelyn Waugh was a man flayed alive by his own 00:16:21.299 --> 00:16:24.700 sensibilities. He was a perfectionist in a fallen 00:16:24.700 --> 00:16:28.559 world. His malice was a survival mechanism, a 00:16:28.559 --> 00:16:31.669 way to keep the dark disaster at bay. As Nancy 00:16:31.669 --> 00:16:34.169 Mitford said, everything with him was jokes. 00:16:34.409 --> 00:16:37.809 We mistake his desperate, defensive humor for 00:16:37.809 --> 00:16:40.750 pure hatred. He remains the grand old Mandarin, 00:16:41.009 --> 00:16:43.570 a man who took the chaos of the 20th century 00:16:43.570 --> 00:16:46.370 and imposed upon it the order of a perfectly 00:16:46.370 --> 00:16:49.309 constructed sentence. We can certainly agree 00:16:49.309 --> 00:16:53.289 on the sentences. They are perfect. They are. 00:16:53.470 --> 00:16:56.809 And perhaps, in the end, that has to be enough. 00:16:57.389 --> 00:17:00.230 Wa represents that collision between exquisite 00:17:00.230 --> 00:17:03.909 artistic control and messy, often ugly, human 00:17:03.909 --> 00:17:06.710 chaos. A collision that leaves the reader to 00:17:06.710 --> 00:17:10.170 decide if the beauty justifies the malice. Indeed. 00:17:10.309 --> 00:17:12.269 Thank you for joining the debate.