Waugh in the time of COVID
/
Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) on set for his 1960 interview on “face to Face”
From Evelyn Waugh’s interview on the BBC program “Face to Face,” an interview Waugh suspected—with some justification—of being a setup by political enemies. In the words of his biographer Selina Hastings, while the interviewer, a former Labour MP, “was exquisitely courteous . . . he was also perceptive and persistent, and the results were memorable, Waugh’s instinctive hostility only just restrained by a carefully assumed pose of world-weary boredom.”
I’ve written about this interview here before. It’s full of good stuff, especially where Waugh corrects his interviewer’s assumptions about his religion—and religion writ large. But I revisited it the other day while doing some chores around the house, and the following may well be my favorite exchange:
BBC: Looking at yourself—as I’m sure you are a self-critical person—what do you feel is your worst fault?
EW: Irritability.
BBC: Are you a snob at all?
EW: I don’t think.
BBC: Um, irritability with your family, with strangers...?
EW: Absolutely everything. Inanimate objects and people, animals, anything.
Waugh is my spirit animal.
If you’ve ever read anything by Waugh his answer is probably not a surprise. How one could read Black Mischief or Scoop or The Loved One or even Sword of Honour and not come away impressed with the author’s sharp eye for stupidity, absurdity, and humbug and respecting his ability to ruthlessly, even gleefully skewer them is beyond me, but I’m sure it’s happened. That irritability proved one of his artistic virtues. But, as Waugh owns in that interview, it is not a purely positive trait. Far from it.
I’ve actually reflected on that first question and Waugh’s almost immediate reply quite a lot—I am a generally irritable person, usually at the low level of frustration with daily inconveniences, which is its own problem—but I’ve meditated more deeply on it recently. Forget coronavirus—the pandemic of my soul this year is irritability. I’ve been irritated almost continually for months, an aggravation of a preexisting condition. I suffer excess of choler, which cannot be prevented by a mask or social distancing and for which there is no vaccine. Far from worrying about the pandemic, shutdowns, electoral politics, riots and mindless vandalism, and the oceans of cliche and sentimental cant that pass for conversation today, I have worried most over the utter contempt with which I now view almost everyone, including people I used to respect.
I recognize this is a flaw—a sin. So did Waugh.
BBC: Yes. Have you, uh, do you remember—if I may put a Catholic question to you out of the catechism—do you remember the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost?
EW: I should do. I don’t.
BBC: Well, they include charity, joy, patience, benignity, mildness—
EW: Yes.
BBC: Do you, do you fall short in these?
EW: Yes.
One question slightly later in the interview is suggestive of a partial solution. The interviewer is probably fishing for some kind of gotcha statement about the Labour Party’s socialist welfare state, of which Waugh had been sharply critical, satirizing it in such stories as Love Among the Ruins, but Waugh deflates the question in a way that I think hints at a way forward from mere repentance, which after all is only the first step:
BBC: How high in your scale of virtues do you put the Christian duty of service to others?
EW: It isn’t for me to make these scales. Um, my service is simply to bring up one family.
This reminded me of something else I’ve written about here before, from a Catholic and near contemporary of Waugh’s, but a very different kind of man: JRR Tolkien. In The Return of the King, Gandalf says that “it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know.” Waugh’s duty, as he sees it, is best performed by limiting his scope to those things within his God-given ambit.
Of course, keeping within the bounds of that ambit is the challenge, especially now. Modern media—especially social media—have widened our scope. That’s the challenge.
You can watch the entirety of Waugh’s “Face to Face” interview on YouTube here. It’s well worth your while—even if Waugh is cagey with his interlocutor, he still says a lot of things worth consideration, or a laugh or two. And you can read about Waugh’s death, which was worthy of any of his novels, here. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go. After all, humility is good for the soul.
