Scribe of the Dark Age

Evelyn Waugh is a devout Catholic. He is also a devout esthete and a devout snob. This week, in LIFE, he wrote an open letter to U.S. readers of his best-selling Brideshead Revisited (TIME, Jan. 7), which showed that these three traits are inseparable parts of his fastidious revulsion from the godless, uncivilized age in which he finds himself. He also revealed that--as some critics of Brideshead had sug-rested--his literary motivation is basically religious:

"Like a shy waterfowl who has hatched out a dragon's egg, I find that I have written a 'best-seller.' 'Unseasonably,' because the time has passed when the event brings any substantial reward. In a civilized age this unexpected moment of popularity would have endowed me with a competency for life. ... As it is, the politicians confiscate my earnings and I am left with the correspondence. . . ."

Even You, Mrs. Schultz. "A lady in Hempstead, N.Y. asks me whether I consider my character 'typical.' No, Mrs. Schultz, I do not. It is horrible of you to ask.

"A novelist has no business with types; they are the property of economists and politicians and advertisers and other professional bores of our period. . . . The Common Man does not exist. He is an abstraction invented by bores for bores. Even you, dear Mrs. Schultz, are an individual.

"... Another question: 'Are your books meant to be satirical?' No. Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards--the early Roman Empire and 18th-Century Europe. ... It -is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue. The artist's only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little . . . systems of order of his own. I foresee in the Dark Age opening that the scribes may play the part of the monks after the first barbarian victories. They were not satirists. . . .

"Nor am, I worried at the charge of snobbery. Class-consciousness, particularly in England, has been so much inflamed nowadays that to mention a nobleman is like mentioning a prostitute 60 years ago. The new prudes say: 'No doubt such people do exist but we would sooner not hear about them.' I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best."

Godless Novelists. " 'When can we expect another Brideshead Revisited?' Dear ladies, never. ... I have already shaken off one of the American critics, Mr. Edmund Wilson, who once professed a generous interest in me. He was outraged (quite legitimately by his standards) at finding God introduced into my story. I believe that you can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions. . . .

"The failure of modern novelists since, and including, James Joyce is one of presumption and exorbitance. They are not content with the artificial figures which hitherto passed so gracefully as men and women. They try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character--that of being God's creature with a defined purpose.

"So in my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular; a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing: man in his relation to God. . . .

"One criticism does deeply discourage me. A postcard from a man . . . says: 'Your Brideshead Revisited is a strange way to show that Catholicism is an answer to anything. Seems more like the kiss of Death.' I can only say: I am sorry, Mr. McClose, I did my best. I am not quite clear what you mean by the 'kiss of Death,' but I am sure it is gruesome. Is it something to do with 'halitosis?' If so I have failed indeed and my characters have got wildly out of hand once more."

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