By K.E. Colombini
This month marks 60 years since the death of the British author Evelyn Waugh, known both for his superb satires on the modern world and for his ability to convey the beauty and goodness of Catholicism. For this reason, a sharp irony marked his life. Satire is not the most charitable of forms, and it influenced his ambiguous attitudes toward the United States of America.
For years after World War II, Britain suffered severe privations, as rationing not only continued but tightened in some respects, even into the 1950s. Waugh found an escape route when he received a generous payment for a trip to Los Angeles in 1947, funded by MGM, to discuss the filming of Brideshead Revisited.
The Brideshead project did not prosper; the studio’s producers and screenwriters did not understand the true meaning of the story and wanted to turn it into a more conventional romance. Perhaps that was for the best because Brideshead, possibly one of the best Catholic novels of the 20th century, would have had to be censored, ironically due to a film production code created with strong Catholic influence.
On this trip, Waugh grew tired of the studio meetings and his creative thoughts turned elsewhere after discovering Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which he studied with a morbid fascination. For a writer with the gift of satire, it was perhaps the perfect counterpoint, and thus his short novel The Loved One was born.
Subtitled «An Anglo-American Tragedy,» the book tells the story of Dennis Barlow, a young British poet who failed as a writer in the film industry and, not wanting to return home in shame, accepts a job at Whispering Glades, a pet cemetery and funeral home.
When his roommate takes his own life and Barlow is tasked with arranging the funeral, he becomes enamored with a precursor to the Valley Girls—»with greenish and distant eyes, with a rich glint of madness»—who works as a cosmetologist at Whispering Glades, a famous Hollywood mortuary for the rich and famous, faithfully modeled after Forest Lawn.
He hides his humiliating job from her and offers her love poems brazenly copied from the classics. They soon become engaged, but her discovery of the plagiarism and Barlow’s true position, and her subsequent rejection, propel the story to a hilarious conclusion; hilarious, of course, for those of us with a dark sense of humor.
At the same time, the little book skewers its many targets with breadth and accuracy: Hollywood, pet owners, the enclave of British expatriates, the luxury mortuary business, sensationalist journalism, and America’s indigenous religions. In essence, Waugh runs his satirical sword through the entire modern United States as it was lived in postwar Los Angeles.
It was understandable. For Waugh, traveling to America from a country still under rationing and rebuilding from the war, and seeing how even the dead were treated with such luxury, must have been a shock. In a letter, he noted that the story «should not be read as a satire on undertakers, but as a study of the Anglo-American impasse with the mortuary as a festive setting.»
Later that same year, Waugh’s second trip to America would bear decidedly different fruits, and he wisely avoided California on his return visit. He was traveling for another purpose: to research an extensive essay for the magazine Life on the state of the Catholic Church in America. Waugh’s article, «The American Age of the Catholic Church,» would appear in Life in September 1949.
Waugh focused his late 1948 visit on Catholic communities and leaders on the East Coast, the South, and the Midwest. Postwar America experienced a boom for Catholicism, and Waugh not only captured it but sought to put it in perspective. Given American history, it was ironic that a country so anti-Catholic in certain respects would come to see the Catholic Church become the largest religious group in the country.
Waugh cited the Founding Fathers’ opposition to the Quebec Act and noted the «individual qualities» considered peculiarly American: «their endemic revolt against traditional authority, their respect for success and mere activity, their belief that progress is beneficial, their welcome of novelties, their suspicion of titles, uniforms, and ceremonies, their aversion to dogmas that divide good citizens and their love of generalities that unite them, their resentment of discipline… all this is antipathetic to the habits of the Church.»
And yet, he believed that the mid-20th century marked the «American age» for the Church, perhaps in the same way that, today, many Catholics look to Africa and Asia to see a place where the Church is alive and expanding.
Waugh was not wrong in his assessment. In America, he saw a Catholic Church with remarkable growth after the war. Waugh visited the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and dined with Dorothy Day in New York City. Of special interest was his meeting with Thomas Merton at his Kentucky abbey. Waugh edited Merton’s 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, a bestseller, into a slimmer volume for UK readers, and the two corresponded into the 1950s.
Today, a quarter of the way into the new millennium, it is easy to be moved with a certain sadness when rereading Waugh’s essay, for the American Church he celebrated back then has been greatly diminished in stature, starting with the massive cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The American Trappists, whom Waugh so esteemed, are also going through difficulties. Among the signs of that distress, St. Benedict’s Abbey in Snowmass, Colorado, founded in 1958, is closing and selling its 3,700-acre property to a tech billionaire for $120 million.
We can give thanks that Waugh did not live to see the decimation of the Church in America. As someone who satirized the modern world so effectively and understood its transitory nature, he saw the Church as a bulwark against the madness he enjoyed mocking. In America, he found the best of both worlds for a Catholic writer: abundant material for his satire and some brilliant rays of hope for the Church he loved.
About the author
K. E. Colombini writes from St. Louis, Missouri. He has published in The National Catholic Register, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, First Things, The Front Porch Republic, The American Conservative, and other outlets.