Waugh and Modernity

Throughout his novels, Evelyn Waugh is consistently pessimistic about the future of modernity. Those characters who are most modern are also the most heartless—and they have the least to lose. Like Tony and Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust or Mr. Joyboy in The Loved One, modern man had no reason to honor family, religious, or moral customs. And since ultimate meaning had been stripped from life, any normal sentiments and pleasure were no longer there to be had. In the modern world, sex is painful (and unproductive), war is pointless, the art of today will be forgotten by tomorrow. Even the death of a child doesn’t warrant a few tears from his parents.

Confronted with this bleak waste land, modern man becomes like aimless Adam Fenwick-Symes or like pragmatic . Either he gives himself over to meaningless entertainment and frivolity, or he becomes a passionless victim of ennui (which is, ultimately, what Adam Fenwick-Symes succumbs to).

All this is evidence to Waugh of modernity’s self-deception. The impending threat of war hangs over the Bright Young Things in both Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited. As Waugh envisioned it, the writhing, pleasure-seeking mass of vile bodies are merely trying to find a diversion when they know in their heart that they are living in a pre-cataclysmic world. As in the days Noah, men were eating and drinking and carrying on while Noah was constructing his great ark. They lived in its shadow. Everyone knew what that ark meant, what prophecy it spoke without need for words. Summoning up this futility, Waugh in the epilogue to Brideshead alludes back to the words of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” For Waugh, this sums up modernity. This is the Age of Hooper—the age when the modern project was made “desolate and the work all brought to nothing.” When the Preacher in Ecclesiastes sought in order to justify life he first sought pleasure. And like the modernists, he found it was also the first thing to disappoint (Ecclesiastes 2:2-3,10-11).

Compared to Vile Bodies, Brideshead Revisited has a more rewarding promise and hope. The object of satire is the same in both books, but Waugh’s conversion deeply colors the latter novel (which is the very reason that critics like the Amises disliked it compared to his earlier works of satire). While the impending war acts as a judgment in both novels, Waugh offers his readers an Ark in Brideshead Revisited where he leaves them to drown in Vile Bodies. George McCartney illustrates this:

Ryder is an artist who makes his living by painting ancestral homes just before they are torn down, and his career becomes an elegiac mission to record the remains of a dying civilization lest it disappear without a trace. Waugh seems to have thought his fiction would perform a similar function. In 1946 he remarked portentously that he foresaw “in the dark age opening that the scribes [might] play the part of the monks after the first barbarian victories.” The monks “were not satirists,” he reminds us, but chroniclers of civilization’s decline. That would be his role also: a sardonic scribe recording the negligence with which the West was letting itself slip into ruin.

This association of modernism with barbarism was a common one for Waugh. Shortly after his conversion, he wrote an article for the Daily Express in order to explain why he had converted to Rome. He wrote: “It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos. It is much the same situation as existed in the early Middle Ages.” The barbarianism which Waugh associates with modernity would destabilize the entire “moral and artistic organization of Europe” and give way to a mechanized culture which has no aesthetic feeling and which will inevitably give itself over to a despotism like already existed in Russia.

This, then, is the heart of Waugh’s polemic against modernity. According to Waugh, the great modern project which began four hundred years before had reached a crisis point in the early 20th century. Modern man had inoculated himself against the work of divine grace, and in doing so had unintentionally killed both his nervous and immune system. He was now unable to feel anything or to ward off any vile epidemic that was circulating. Modern man thought himself a machine, and found that pleasure was not something easily automated.