Here’s the story as I first heard it—as, perhaps, you’ve heard it as well. Evelyn Waugh, the great stylist, the great humorist, and the less-than-great human being, was appallingly rude at a party. “How can you behave so badly,” the hostess asked, “and you a Catholic!” To which Waugh, who would have been great on social media, shot back, “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 neat anecdote, one that transmutes Waugh’s rougher qualities into an appealing, rakish image. You can imagine him as living out life inside one of his own novels, a charming scoundrel like Basil Seal. Christopher Hitchens dismissed it as “a nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny.” And yet the story feels right, a fitting Waugh story in the tradition of great English writers making quips—Samuel Butler’s “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four,” or Oscar Wilde’s supposed last words: “Either those curtains go or I do.” There’s even something nicely flattering about it. “And you a Catholic!” suggests an era when Catholicism enjoyed higher expectations than it does now. But the story is, in a rather important way, a subtle lie.
On May 17, 1950, the novelist Nancy Mitford (whose husband, Peter Rodd, was the actual model for Waugh’s lawless rascal Basil Seal) contemporaneously described the incident in a letter to Pamela Berry like this:
So I had Evelyn from Friday morning to Monday & still love him though at one point I felt obliged to ask how he reconciles being so horrible with being a Christian. He replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible (difficult) & anyway would have committed suicide years ago.
The general contours of the story are the same but, in terms of tone, we’re in a different moral universe. The delight in wickedness is gone, as is the infamous wit, replaced with the mundane—a human being acutely aware of his own failings, of his inability to overcome them, and of his absolute dependence on grace for any glimmer of hope. The Waugh we see here is less of a character and more of a Christian.
Learning of the discrepancy in the accounts—the way a moment of Waugh with his guard down had been transformed into Waugh wittily armored—unsettled me. At first I chalked it up to anxiety about modern technology and literary form. Like many writers, I spend too much time on social media, where the quip is its own art, a compressed style of address blending humor, irony, and cruelty. Henri Bergson declared that the comic mode requires “something like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart,” which must “impose silence upon our pity.” As I write this, a Catholic candidate for vice president, J. D. Vance, has spread false rumors of Haitian migrants eating cats, and in response to the outrage about spreading racist conspiracy, told his followers to ignore the “crybabies in the media” and keep spreading “cat memes.” In other words, keep making jokes that turn your brother or sister in Christ into a grotesque object of mockery—it doesn’t matter if it’s true as long as the cruelty makes us laugh. A good quip is a closed form, complete and self-contained, inviting no further inquiry after the delightful shock at the end. It silences not only our pity but also our curiosity. One of the many sins of social media is the way algorithms have convinced writers and pundits that low-grade snark is a substitute for an actual essay responding to work or ideas they don’t like.
But upon reflection I think what actually unsettled me was the way the story shifted my approach to Waugh. I like the Waugh of the quip, not only because he’s more fun to think about but also because he’s easier to dismiss in precisely the way that Hitchens did. I love Waugh’s novels, especially the ones without too much Catholicism in them. Brideshead Revisited stays with me far less than A Handful of Dust, which I first read in fits and snatches during officer candidate school, or the Sword of Honour trilogy, read after I’d been to Iraq and come back with more appreciation for military satire, or even Put Out More Flags, one of the most purely pleasurable novels ever written.
Waugh’s style, his humor, his joyful enthusiasm for puncturing modern delusions, I’ve gleefully gulped down, but his Catholicism—dovetailing as it did with his revulsion toward the modern world, his dismissal of jazz and modern art, his wish to have been born centuries earlier—I’ve held at a distance. I don’t lament being born into a secular age; the medieval world, with its murderous religious zeal, holds no appeal for me. And I look warily at my modern coreligionists who, sometimes with an edgy, Evelyn Waugh–inflected sense of humor, embrace the faith as a repudiation of the world we inhabit. “New York’s hottest club is the Catholic Church,” declared Julia Yost in the New York Times, before sketching out the reactionary subculture that features “Trump hats and ‘tradwife frocks,’ monarchist and anti-feminist sentiments” and whose “ultimate expression...is its embrace of Catholicism.”
Many of these folks are converts. “I grew up Evangelical,” a young college student told me at a conference. “But I recently converted to Catholicism.” I told him that was wonderful and when I asked why, I did my best not to let my face fall as he told me he converted “because of the trans stuff.” No, he was not referring to transubstantiation, but to the collective freakout over gender that had become the latest frontline in the American culture war. The millennia-long intellectual history of the Church, he felt, was a bulwark against the forward march of progressivism. Likewise, when the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali publicly announced her conversion to Christianity, her first rationale was that “Western civilization is under threat” and atheism seemed insufficient to defend it. In an article responding to Ali’s announcement, Tyler Cowen approvingly quoted one of his commenters: “Lots of otherwise smart, successful, secular people I know have been going religious, but it’s not in the same way people used to go religious. It’s much more cultural now, and less about belief.”
It’s an ugly thing, to judge someone’s reasons for conversion rather than to embrace their entry into the Church. Especially for a cradle Catholic like myself, whose entry into the Church involved no study, no effort, but merely the commitment of my parents on my behalf when I was still in diapers. Still…the kind of militantly triumphalist Catholicism that’s so eager to conquer secularism one way or the other feels quite different to me from the kind of faith that invites one to repent and take up one’s cross.
Nor can I help worrying about the changing nature of the Church in which I’m raising my children. A recent survey of priests ordained since 2020 noted that a majority describe themselves as politically conservative, with less than a tenth describing themselves as liberal. When I was growing up in the eighties, the proportions were roughly balanced: a solid number of liberals, a solid number of conservatives, but also a large proportion of moderates. These days, if a young priest steps up to sermonize, I’m never quite sure what I’m going to get. At one recent Mass, a young priest vigorously denounced a rapper he’d seen driving around Queens in a van, blasting out Christian rap music, because unlike our homilist, the rapper was not a priest in the one true Church. What followed was an enthusiastic but exceptionally repetitive declaration, taking nearly thirty minutes, of his own authority as a priest and the respect he was due as a member of the clergy. By the grace of God, my youngest pooped himself in the middle of the homily, so I didn’t catch every variation on the theme. A few weeks later, we got a lovely (and far shorter) sermon on social sin—the sin we all share in as members of a society in which the poor and needy suffer. How nice, for a liberal Commonweal Catholic like myself. But the bishop delivering this beautiful homily was so old and frail that the light practically streamed through his fingers’ papery skin.
And so, as my theologically and politically conservative friends worry about Pope Francis leading the Church away from orthodoxy as they understand it, I worry about a sociological move in America leading in the opposite direction. The faith in which I was raised, and in which I found deep inspiration from fellow believers of all types, of whatever political persuasion, remains the same faith, even as the Church itself goes through cultural permutations, here and abroad, that occasionally fill me with a sense of impending doom.
Which brings me back to Waugh, who, toward the end of his life, declared, “I now cling to the faith doggedly, without joy. Church-going is a pure duty parade. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me.” From my perspective as a partisan of a more liberal theology, I can look at Waugh here with a winner’s smugness. But this ignores the way in which I find myself like him, adrift in cultural currents I dislike and allowing that to enervate the one thing I need when I genuinely face despair. “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics,” Charles Péguy observed, and the bitterness of the political struggle has a way of leeching the faith that grew during its mystical beginnings.
“Conversion,” Waugh wrote to Edward Sackville-West, “is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made.”
Most days I dwell in the Looking-Glass world. It’s comfortable there, and the real world God made, though more beautiful, can also be shattering. In the Looking-Glass world, Waugh is a clever sophist, not to mention a racist, snob, and antisemite, his Christianity bound up with his abhorrent opinions. In the real world God made, well, Waugh is at times all those things, but at other times, like the moment recounted in the Mitford letter, he’s something else, something that has little to do with either his opinions or his genius. In that letter, he’s a Christian—not because he’s a good person, or full of wisdom and knowledge, but because he’s broken, and he knows it.
Most days, I don’t feel broken, in need of grace and forgiveness. Which means the Waugh of that letter, wicked but remorseful, acknowledging his human failings and his soul’s helplessness, is perhaps closer to God than I usually am. Which is strange to think about, since by all accounts Waugh could be a giant asshole.
Stranger still to think how often the polished version of that anecdote has been repeated and repeated, generally by admirers of Waugh, often by serious Catholics like the one who told it to me in my second year of high school. The Looking-Glass world is fun. And, provided it doesn’t leave you so enervated you consider suicide, easier to deal with.
A few years ago, a young military veteran told me, “I stopped believing in God after I got back from Afghanistan. Because it made it easier. Because it meant there were questions I didn’t have to ask.” As conversion stories go, it’s not the most inspiring for Christians, since it goes in the wrong direction. But over the years I’ve often thought of that veteran and what he could have meant. I think he faced the real world God made, and made his own decision about what he saw there. So should we all.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
