Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Among Waugh’s works, The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox —a biography of the scholarly priest who translated the Vulgate into English — is probably one of the less read; the author had intended it essentially as an act of pietas to the memory of a deceased friend. Yet nothing written by Waugh is indifferent; at the very beginning of this book there is an episode of haunting power, which although bearing little relation to the main topic, must obviously have affected Waugh in a very personal way. In a few memorable pages, he describes the death of Knox’s maternal grandfather, an Anglican clergyman who ended his missionary life in Zanzibar in a state of total poverty, loneliness and dereliction, under the indifferent and uncomprehending eyes of the natives. This seems to have been a theme that presented special meaning for Waugh. Earlier on, for instance, he once summed up the subject of A Handful of Dust as “the civilised man’s helpless plight among savages.” The interesting twist in the latter description is that, if indeed the main character of the novel ends up as a captive in the Amazonian jungle, this final mishap occurs merely as a sort of epilogue — actually the true savages who destroyed his life with mindless cruelty were smart members of fashionable London society.

Those who bear witness, staunchly and faithfully, to a spiritual tradition are reduced by the modern world to a condition of “aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot at leisure, so that things may be safe for the travelling salesmen.” Modern man, who moves with the times and seeks power without grace, is finally a much greater menace to human integrity than tattooed cannibals. Thus, in Brideshead Revisited , we are told that Rex Mottram, politico and tycoon, epitome of worldly success (he is still very much alive among us today, forever aspiring to become our leader), “wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce: a tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.”

What is wrong with “the age of the common man” is not that it might endanger elitist privilege but the fact that it is built upon a false premise — for there is no such creature. In a memorable BBC interview, a journalist who thought he would cleverly expose Waugh’s social prejudices merely revealed his own incapacity to shed trendy stereotypes:

Journalist : You have not much sympathy with the man in the street, have you, Mr. Waugh?

Waugh : You must understand that the man in the street does not exist. He is a modern myth. There are individual men and women, each one of whom has an individual and immortal soul, and such beings need to use streets from time to time.

But there are also more insidious forms of intellectual perversion — those which borrow a religious disguise to subvert religious values. The phenomenon is not limited to progressive-minded Christians who do not believe in Christ, or to enlightened theologians who preach atheism; it consists more broadly — as Desmond MacCarthy described in his perceptive comments on The Loved One —in the entire “silly optimistic trend in modern civilisation which takes for granted that the consolations of religion can be enjoyed without belief in them, and seeks to persuade us that there is nothing really tragic in the predicament of man.”

At the end of his life, with an anguish that came close to despair, Waugh witnessed the dreadful invasion of shallowness and puerility which began to undermine and destroy some of the most precious and venerable traditions of the Church. He confessed to a friend: “The buggering up of the Church is a deep sorrow to me,” and in the privacy of his diary he went further: “Pray God I will never apostatise but I can only now go to Church as an act of duty and obedience — just as a sentry at Buck[ingham Palace] is posted with no possibility of his being employed to defend the sovereign’s life.”

As he sank even further into a pathological state of melancholy, he reviewed the bleak landscape of his soul — his spiritual dryness, his emotional loneliness, the dreariness and boredom of his family life, the wretchedness of his own foul temper, the general aridity of his soul[2] and at the end of a desolate litany of failings, doubts and despondency, he pondered that even the saints did not seem much better off, and yet concluded: “But to aim at anything less than sanctity is not to aim at all.”

He did not derive much comfort or consolation from his faith: he simply knew it to be true, and that was that. As he explained in a letter to a friend: “Praying is not asking but giving. Giving our love to God, asking for nothing in return… Do you believe in the Incarnation and Redemption in the full historical sense in which you believe in the battle of El Alamein? That’s important. Faith is not a mood.”

Only his religion could — quite ruthlessly — put this proud man in his humble place; he realistically accepted that, in a theological perspective, his unique talents in the end did not amount to much: “I cannot think of a single Saint who attached much importance to art… The Church and the world need monks and nuns more than they need writers… A youth who is inarticulate in conversation may well be eloquent in prayer… The Church does not exist in order to produce elegant preachers, or artists, or philosophers. It exists to produce Saints.”

After reading Helena , John Betjeman confessed to him a certain puzzlement: “Helena did not seem to me like a saint.” Waugh replied: “Saints are simply souls in Heaven… and each individual has his own peculiar form of sanctity which he must achieve or perish. It is no good my saying ‘I wish I were like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross,’ I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh — after God knows what experiences in Purgatory.”

On the question of purgatory, it should merely be observed that the meanest judges in this world were not even able to keep him for one single day in their literary purgatory; as to the other one, God’s sweet mercy will have taken good care of that.

*Review of Martin Stannard: Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939–1966 (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1992).

CIORAN wondered how the perspective of having a biographer never discouraged anyone from having a life. We should at least ask ourselves how the perspective of having to provide posthumously the topic of an academic eulogy does not discourage more people from becoming academicians. In Simenon’s case, perhaps, he believed that he had sufficiently succeeded in concealing his tracks, and thought that the false candour of his many confessions would always be protection enough against our indiscreet admiration.

Samuel Johnson said: “Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” I am not sure if this sort of experience would have been of much use to Simenon’s biographer — or to any other great writer’s, for that matter. Isaac Bashevis Singer once observed (forgive this abundance of quotations, it is not pedantry — simply, the fact is that, for the last fifteen years, I have been frequenting books more than people; furthermore, why should we attempt clumsily to reinvent what good writers have better said before us?) that, even if Tolstoy were living next door, instead of paying him a visit, he would rather stay home and read Anna Karenina again. This is elementary wisdom. The encounter of geniuses is not always an occasion for sublime exchanges. The only meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust is a good example: these two giants of modern literature once shared a taxi, but they spent the entire time arguing whether to open or shut the window. (This anecdote must be true, since it was invented by Nabokov.)