Welcome to The Debate. Today, we're dissecting
the life of a man who possessed, well, perhaps
the sharpest pen and the sharpest tongue of the
20th century. We are talking about Evelyn Waugh.
To the literary world, he's a titan, you know,
the mind behind Brideshead Revisited and Scoop,
a stylist whose sentences were just these architectural
marvels. But to the people who actually had to
sit across from him at dinner, he was often something
else entirely. His contemporary, James Lees Milne,
famously called him the nastiest tempered man
in England. Honestly, based on the evidence,
Lees Milne might have been holding back a little.
It's a pleasure to be here, though. We've got
a heavy lift today. We're looking at a figure
who is just incredibly difficult to pin down.
On one side, you have this devout Catholic convert
and a brilliant satirist. On the other, you have
a man accused of profound snobbery, anti -Semitism,
and a cruelty that seemed to go far, far beyond
simple grumpiness. And that's the tension we're
here to explore. The central question for this
session is this. Was Evelyn Waugh genuinely a
misanthropic monster whose work just reflects
a disdain for humanity? Or was that famous crusty
colonel persona actually a protective mask worn
by a deeply sensitive moralist who was frankly
terrified of the modern world? I'm arguing for
the latter. I believe Wall was a misunderstood
figure who used performance and humor to shield
a fragile self and that his work is a serious,
even desperate search for grace in a chaotic
world. And I'm taking the opposing view. I think
the mask theory is a... A convenient fiction
we tell ourselves so we can enjoy the books without
feeling guilty about the author. I'll be arguing
that Waugh's brilliance simply cannot excuse
his genuine cruelty. I intend to show that the
mask wasn't hiding anything. It was magnifying
the truth. His character was marked by a fundamental,
uncharitable hostility toward his fellow man.
I understand why you'd say that. I mean, the
stories about him are legendary. But to really
get Waugh, I think you have to start with the
wound. You cannot understand the bark without
understanding the bite he took early on. We have
to look at 1929. He's married to Evelyn Gardner.
They were known as he Evelyn and she Evelyn.
And by all accounts, he was completely besotted.
Then she confesses she has a lover. The marriage
implodes. And it wasn't just a breakup. It was
a total shattering of his reality. It was certainly
a catalyst, I'll give you that. But plenty of
people get divorced without becoming, you know,
tyrants. But for Waugh, it was the foundation
of his entire worldview shift. It was right after
this betrayal in 1930 that he converted to Catholicism.
And later he wrote something that I think is
the key to his entire psyche. He said life was
unintelligible and unendurable without God. Now
that is not the statement of an arrogant man.
That's the statement of a man hanging over an
abyss. His biographer, Selina Hastings, made
this brilliant observation about his belligerence.
She suggested his hostility wasn't pure malice.
It was boredom and fear. He was terrified of
the age of the common man, this rising tide of
mediocrity that he felt was swallowing beauty
and tradition. He was defending the fortress.
See, that paints him as this sort of, this tragic,
romantic figure defending civilization. But if
we look at the timeline, the nastiness predates
the heartbreak. You want to talk about the age
of the common man? Let's talk about the age of
the schoolboy. At Heathmount Preparatory School,
long before any wife betrayed him, he was already
a bully. He tormented Cecil Beaton, the future
photographer, relentlessly. Beaton said he never
forgot the cruelty. Now that is not defending
a fortress against mediocrity. That's a child
-deriving pleasure from the pain of a weaker
child. Children can be cruel, though. Projecting
the man onto the child is a bit risky. But the
line is unbroken. When his diaries were published
in the 70s, which, by the way, destroyed his
reputation for a whole new generation, they didn't
reveal a secret heart of gold. They revealed
a man who was deeply intolerant, anti -Semitic,
and sadistic. Even his friends, the people who
loved him, noted a shift. Christopher Sykes said
a new hardness and bitterness took over after
the divorce. It wasn't just sadness. It was aggression.
And as politics, these are not witty paradoxes.
He opposed the welfare state. He supported Mussolini's
invasion of Abyssinia because he thought it was
a savage place that needed taming. That isn't
a mask. Those are deeply held problematic convictions.
I think we have to be careful about reading 2020s
morality into 1930s politics. But let's look
at where those convictions actually manifested.
The work. Because this is where the snobbery
accusation usually lands. And it lands squarely
on Brideshead Revisitant. Oh, it has to. Brideshead
is the elephant in your room. Published in 1945,
it's his most famous book. But it's also the
one where his mask slips in the wrong direction.
Critics like Connor Cruz O 'Brien absolutely
savaged it for what he called mystical veneration
of the upper classes. Waugh fell in love with
the Ligon family at Madras Field Court, and in
the book, he just conflates the aristocracy with
holiness. It's as if he believes God only truly
operates inside a gated country estate. He was
so blinded by the glamour of the Flight family
that he lost his satirical edge. He started worshipping
the very people he used to mock. I think that
is a very superficial reading of Brideshead,
though I admit many critics shared it at the
time. But look closer. Is he worshipping them?
Sebastian Flight is a severe alcoholic who ends
up destitute in North Africa. Lord Marchmain
is an adulterer living in sin who essentially
abandoned his family. These aren't role models.
Waugh isn't saying aristocrats are better. He's
saying that divine grace is so powerful it can
penetrate even the thickest walls of privilege
and sin. Waugh himself said the book was about
the operation of divine grace. But he treats
their sins with a romance he denies the lower
classes. I mean, the deathbed scene of Lord Marchmain
is treated with his profound solemnity, whereas
the failures of common people in his books are
just played for laughs. I disagree. Compare it
to vile bodies or decline and fall. In those
early books, the bright young things, the aristocrats,
are portrayed as vapid, empty, and futile. He
saw through them completely. The shift in Brideshead
isn't about worshipping money. It's about mourning
the loss of a specific type of beauty. And let's
look at who the real villain is in Brideshead.
It's Hooper. Exactly. Hooper, the young middle
-class officer. Waugh treats him with absolute
dripping contempt. But why? Not because Hooper's
poor, but because Hooper has no soul. Hooper
represents the standardized man. He has no connection
to history, no connection to the land, no connection
to faith. He's plastic. Waugh hated Hooper because
Hooper represented a world where nothing mattered
except efficiency. You see the same thing with
Tremor in the Sword of Honor trilogy. Waugh wasn't
attacking their bank accounts, he was attacking
their spiritual mediocrity. He feared a world
where everyone was Hooper, where the concept
of honor or beauty was obsolete. But that's exactly
my point. His definition of spiritual depth is
conveniently tied to having a family crest. It's
an exclusionary theology. It implies that if
you don't have ancestors in the peerage, you're
spiritually vacant. And this brings me to the
biggest hurdle I have with Waugh. You talk about
grace and faith and the operation of God. How
do you square that with his behavior? He was
a devout Catholic, attended mass faithfully,
yet he was undeniably mean. There's that famous
story with Nancy Mitford. I know the one. She
asked him, point blank, how he could behave so
abominably while claiming to be a Christian.
Right. And his response? He said, 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. It's a brilliant line.
It's witty. It's self -deprecating. But is it
true? Or is it a get -out -of -jail -free card?
It feels like he used his Catholicism as a way
to say, oh, I'm trying, while continuing to be
awful. It's almost a rhetorical trick to deflect
criticism. I believe he meant every word of it.
While viewed his own nature as a battleground,
he suffered from what he called a dryness of
soul. He didn't like himself very much. He knew
he was prone to cruelty. The church gave him
a structure, a cage, if you will, to keep the
beast contained. And he was generous, you know.
He gave a lot of money to Catholic causes, often
anonymously. He housed priests. He supported
converts. But even his generosity had a cynical
edge. Look at how he handled his own children's
inheritance. He set up a trust fund to avoid
taxes, which is fine, practical. But he named
it the Save the Children Fund. He appropriated
the name of an actual charity for a tax dodge.
That's a joke, sure, but it's a cruel one. It
suggests he viewed moral obligations as something
to be gained. It was a dark joke, absolutely.
He refused to take the state seriously. He viewed
the modern government's attempt to replace the
church's charity as a usurpation. But if we want
to talk about his faith, we have to talk about
the end of his life, the Second Vatican Council
in the 1960s. This is where the monster narrative
really falls apart for me, and you see the broken
man. When the church switched from Latin to English?
Yes. To many, that was progress. To Waugh, it
was a catastrophe. He wrote to Nancy Mitford,
The buggering up of the church is a deep sorrow
to me. He wasn't just being a snob about language.
He felt that the mystery was being stripped away.
He felt his lifeline to God was being severed
by bureaucrats. That is not the anger of a bully.
That's the panic of a man whose sanctuary is
being demolished. Or it was the complaint of
a man who treated the church like an exclusive
club. He wanted the Latin mask because it was
aesthetic, because it was elite, because it separated
the initiated from the common. It's the same
reason he collected Victorian furniture before
it was cool. It's all about curation. And that
brings us to the persona itself. You say it was
a mask. I look at that famous BBC face -to -face
interview with John Freeman in 1960. Hmm. It's
a painful interview to watch. It is. Waugh sits
there, puffing his cigar, affecting this pose
of world -weary boredom. He refuses to engage.
He treats Freeman like an insect. By the end
of his life, he refused to drive, refused to
use the telephone, hated the radio. That isn't
a mask protecting a sensitive soul. That is a
man who has retreated into a fantasy world because
he cannot cope with reality. He became a caricature
of himself. I see it differently. I see it as
consistent aesthetic conservatism. Waugh was
an artist. He curated his life just as carefully
as he curated his sentences. He bought William
Burgess furniture and Victorian paintings when
everyone else was buying modernism. He was living
in a world of his own creation because the actual
world had become ugly to him. It was a form of
protest art. But the protests often look like
madness. Or worse, inhumanity. Let's compare
two incidents, and I think this really nails
down why the mask theory fails. 1925. Young Wa
attempts suicide. He walks into the sea, leaving
a quote from Euripides on the beach. High drama.
And he turns back because he gets stung by a
jellyfish. It's a moment of bathos he would have
put in a novel himself. Exactly. It's human.
It's funny. But fast forward to 1958. His son,
Oberon, is serving in the army in Cyprus. He's
critically wounded in a machine gun accident.
He nearly dies. Waugh's reaction? Radical, icy
detachment. He doesn't fly to Cyprus. He barely
reacts when Oberon eventually returns. He maintained
stiff upper lip that bordered on sociopathy.
A father who curates his life to exclude the
suffering of his own son isn't shielding a sensitive
self. He is simply cold. That is a hard charge
to answer. Waugh's relationship with his children
was... well, Victorian, to put it mildly. He
was distant. But I would argue that this detachment
was the only way he could function as a writer.
He viewed writing as an external craft. He had
to separate the man from the artist, or the emotion
would overwhelm the prose. He famously said,
Man is a creature of the fall. Only the artist
can achieve perfection. But can we separate them?
That's the ultimate question of his legacy. George
Orwell, who Wall actually admired, ironically,
put it best. He said Wall was about as good a
novelist as one can be while holding untenable
opinions. We cannot just ignore the fascism in
Wall and Abyssinia. We cannot ignore the racial
prejudices that his biographer, David Weix, cataloged.
These aren't just quirks. They seep into the
ink. They are there and they are ugly. I won't
defend the prejudice. But I will defend the utility
of his perspective. Because he stood outside
the modern world, he could see its cracks clearer
than anyone else. Look at the loved one. His
Hollywood satire? Yes. He visits Forest Lawn
Cemetery in Los Angeles. He sees the makeup on
the corpses, the commercialization of grief,
the total denial of death, and he writes a savage,
brilliant satire. He exposes the artificiality
of American culture. He saw that without a grounding
in spiritual reality, specifically the reality
of death and judgment, society becomes a grotesque
carnival. That insight is more relevant today
than it was in 1948. We need that nasty voice
to prick our balloons. I grant you the loved
one is a masterpiece. But why is it a masterpiece?
V .S. Pritchett called it the beauty of his malice.
My argument is that the malice is the engine.
He didn't write the loved one to save America.
He wrote it because he despised America. The
hate was the fuel. His worldview was fundamentally
exclusionary. He wanted a hierarchy with him
at the top looking down. That energy drives the
humor and scoop and black mischief. It's the
humor of the bully who is smarter than everyone
else in the room. That is a compelling argument.
Malice is fuel. But I would argue that in his
very best work, that malice turns inward. Look
at the ordeal of Gilbert Penfold. He fictionalized
his own mental breakdown. He wrote about hearing
voices, about being paranoid. He told his friends,
I've been mad. Clean off my onion. A man with
zero self -awareness, a man who is just a bully,
cannot write pinfold. He dismantled his own ego.
And in Sword of Honor, the protagonist Guy Crouchback
starts the war thinking it's a crusade and ends
up realizing it's just a sweaty tug -of -war
between teams of indistinguishable louts. Waugh
dismantled his own romanticism. He was a man
in constant spiritual combat with himself. And
yet, looking at the end of his life, it feels
like he lost that combat. He died in 1966 on
Easter Sunday, which is poetic, I suppose, but
he died isolated, railing against the changes
in his church, estranged from the culture. I
find it fitting. He died in the Latin rite he
loved, in the home he curated, having finished
his work. So where does that leave us? I look
at the diaries, the treatment of his family,
the political tracks, and I see a man who was
undeniably a genius of the English language,
but fundamentally unpleasant. The mask defense
fails for me, because if you wear a mask of cruelty
for 40 years, eventually it fuses to your skin.
His tragedy was that he could describe the world
perfectly, but he couldn't find a way to love
the people inhabiting it. And I maintain that
Evelyn Waugh was a man flayed alive by his own
sensibilities. He was a perfectionist in a fallen
world. His malice was a survival mechanism, a
way to keep the dark disaster at bay. As Nancy
Mitford said, everything with him was jokes.
We mistake his desperate, defensive humor for
pure hatred. He remains the grand old Mandarin,
a man who took the chaos of the 20th century
and imposed upon it the order of a perfectly
constructed sentence. We can certainly agree
on the sentences. They are perfect. They are.
And perhaps, in the end, that has to be enough.
Wa represents that collision between exquisite
artistic control and messy, often ugly, human
chaos. A collision that leaves the reader to
decide if the beauty justifies the malice. Indeed.
Thank you for joining the debate.