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to Roman Catholicism. Famous and feted at the age of
25, Waugh continued with the drunken hedonism he
had begun in his Oxford years. He was indeed one of
the feckless “bright young things” he wrote about. His
growing horror at the spiritual emptiness he saw in this
gadddabout life was what spurred him into the arms of
the Church, which he saw as the most Eternal of institutions,
a haven amongst the creeping chaos.
In the views of Waugh, we see in sharp relief the
antagonism between the heart of Conservatism, and the
capitalism that it defends. Margaret Thatcher herself
for instance, would have been personally shocked and
repulsed if she spent any great time in the company
of her shock troops, the coked up young yuppies of
the 80s, as they lined it up on the toilet tops. Waugh’s
contempt for the fly by night shallowness of the young
rich sat ill at ease with his support for of the Tory Party
without which their lives of philistine luxury would be
unsustainable. Hence his impotent railing against clocks
going forward. The real establishment of England was
once Catholic of course, back in the 15th century, an
age so long ago as to have lost all contemporary meaning.
His Catholicism therefore was a very real sense
of clinging to a past so elusive as to be nonexistent,
grasping at a phantasm.
In his novels, the Faith emerges as the still at the
centre, the calm amongst the inferno. This can be seen
most clearly in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s
BUY Graham Greene books online from and
agnosticism is set against the Faith of the Marchmain
family, or in The Sword Of Honour trilogy, wherein the
aristocratic Crouchback’s represent even more clearly
the valiant rearguard action of the Church, and indeed
old England itself, against all the forces of modernity.
In other novels the Faith’s talismanic status is subtler.
Tony Last, the cuckolded husband in A Handful Of
Dust, is presented as belonging to the past, underlined
by his church attendance, however vague minded that
may be. His humiliation by non churchgoing wife
Brenda and the vulgar (key word) social climber John
Beaver shows once more the clash between the (virtuous)
old and the (degenerate) new. It is a mythological
battle between Old England, the rural, certainty, tradition
and social cohesion, against the New World, the
urban, capitalism, dynamism, change, hedonism, class
conflict and progress. In Sword of Honour, Waugh sees
Guy Crouchback, when he still thinks he is fighting
against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany both, claims
“The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful,
all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms”.
It’s an internal battle the Right will never resolve.
That Catholicism is no longer the religion of the ‘establishment’
serves Waugh well. As he sees the massed
ranks of modernity triumph, as he surely knows they
will, he can psychologically cast himself in the role
of the king over the water, exiled valiant victim and
patrician overseer simultaneously. Such was the source
252
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