EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 35, No. 2
Autumn 2004

Evelyn Waugh, A. P. Herbert and Divorce Reform
by Tony Lurcock
St Clare's, Oxford

      To the end of his life Evelyn Waugh kept quiet about his first marriage.  He had met Evelyn Gardner in 1927 and they married in June 1928.  She was well-born, pretty, modern (cropped hair) and intelligent.  Many of their friends thought, at least in retrospect, that the marriage had been unconsidered. Within a year 'she-Evelyn', as she was known, had fallen in love with another man and begun an adulterous affair.  Two months later Waugh sued for divorce.
     To Laura Herbert, soon to be his second wife, he spoke dismissively of his ‘mock marriage', and more than thirty years later he brusquely told the Paris Review interviewer that he ‘went through a form of marriage.'  ‘His friends,’ wrote Martin Stannard (1986), ‘soon learned never to mention [his first wife's] name.’  Waugh even expunged references to her from his diary.
     The humiliation of being cuckolded and the misery of separation and divorce changed Waugh’s life radically.  ‘From 1928 to 1937,’ he wrote in the Preface to When the Going was Good (1946), ‘I had no fixed home and no possessions which would not conveniently go on a porter’s barrow.  I travelled continuously, in England and abroad.’  It seems to have been an English equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion.  His travels were directly reflected in the novels from this period.  After Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), set principally in Mayfair and fashionable English country houses, Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938) all drew extensively on his experiences in Africa and South America.
     The effects of the failed marriage have been noticed by students of Waugh’s novels; at the most obvious level the betrayed husband becomes a recurrent figure.  This reiteration of the subject in the novels is in marked contrast to Waugh's complete silence on the subject of his own actual betrayal.
     In A Handful of Dust both the public and private effects of the divorce are very evident.  The most obvious parallels between Waugh's experiences and his novel are the geographical ones in the last section, set in Brazil, which draws on his own travels, described in Ninety-Two Days (1934).  Most memorably, the sinister hospitality of Mr Christie is transmuted into the chilling courtesy of Mr Todd.  On a more private level, the novel may be seen as a direct response to his failed marriage, holding in Waugh's oeuvre a position similar to that of Jude the Obscure in Hardy's.  Tony Last, living innocently in the rural isolation of Hetton Abbey while his wife Brenda cuckolds him in London with John Beaver plausibly duplicates Waugh’s experience, rusticated to write in Beckley while his wife betrays him in London with John Heygate.  Selina Hastings makes much of these parallels in her biography of Waugh (1994).  David Wykes, in Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life (1999), even claims that 'John Beaver is a brilliant literary libel on John Heygate.'
     A Handful of Dust can be compared to Great Expectations as a sublimation of personal suffering into art.  Waugh's first marriage was his blacking factory.  Like Dickens, he could not bear to mention it, yet could not leave the subject alone.  Like Dickens, too, he combined personally painful material with hilarious comedy.  One episode in particular, Tony Last's weekend in Brighton, challenges Apthorpe and the thunder box as the funniest episode in all of Waugh's writing.

     '...My marriage was an ideally happy one,' she read, 'until shortly before Christmas last year when I began to suspect that my husband's attitude had changed towards me.  He always remained in the country when my studies took me to London.  I realised that he no longer cared for me as he used to.  He began to drink heavily and on one occasion made a disturbance at our flat in London, constantly ringing up when drunk, and sending a drunken friend round to knock on the door.  Is that necessary?'
     'Not strictly, but it is advisable to put it in.  A great deal depends on psychological impression.  Judges in their more lucid moments sometimes wonder why perfectly respectable, happily married men go off for week-ends to the seaside with women they do not know.  It is always helpful to offer evidence of general degeneracy.'

The speaker is Brenda Last's divorce solicitor.  Her meeting with him follows immediately in the novel the episode in which her husband, Tony, has indeed spent a weekend in Brighton with a strange woman in order to supply the evidence for his adulterous wife to divorce him.
     Staged discoveries by waiters or chambermaids in hotel bedrooms may read today like laughably lame variations on 'What the Butler Saw', yet well within living memory these curious machinations were actually the only effective way of circumventing the legal requirements for divorce when neither party had committed adultery.  The ludicrous antics which the divorce laws sometimes gave scope for offered a sitting target for satirists, although it is arguable whether writers could actually make the situations more fantastical than sometimes they actually were.
     Tony Last goes to Brighton for a weekend with a hired nightclub hostess in order to provide Brenda with the evidence to divorce him.  This is the sort of happening which will to future ages--indeed, perhaps already to the present one--seem as bizarre and obscure as Shakespeare's Beatrice leading the apes in hell.  Here is the key sentence: ‘It was thought convenient that Brenda should appear as the plaintiff’.  Neutral and detached, it yet conceals several assumptions.  To begin with, it seems to go without saying that Brenda should not be identified as an adulteress and taken through the law courts. There is, too, an assumption that ladies, at least those of Brenda’s rank (she is the daughter of Lord St Cloud) were either not capable of wickedness, or were exempt by birth from its penalties.  When (in Decline and Fall) Paul Pennyfeather goes to prison for crimes committed by Margot Beste-Chetwynde, her son Peter remarks simply ‘You can’t imagine mummy in prison, can you?’  A closer parallel is in L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between(1953), set at a traditional English country house in 1900.  Lord Trimingham used to say that ‘nothing is ever a lady’s fault’; he married Marion although he knew that she was pregnant by a tenant farmer.  Tony Last is living in the fag-end of this tradition.
     The weekend in Brighton is central to the nightmare world of A Handful of Dust.  Tony is no longer just an innocent abroad.  At Victoria Station he discovers that Milly, his hired companion, has brought her small daughter along.  He remarks presciently 'This is going to be Hell.'  He finds himself in a crazed, five-star Inferno, a surreal world where he can make no sense of anything.  He fraternises with the detectives who are (at his expense) observing him, finds himself all at sea conversationally when dining with Milly, and manages to miss the whole point of the weekend, having to be sent back to bed by the senior detective to enable the hotel servants to witness his infidelity.  For the only time in the novel, Waugh forsakes his carefully controlled neutrality:  

... no outrageous circumstance in which he found himself, no new, mad, thing brought to his notice, could add a jot to the all-encompassing chaos that shrieked about his ears.

The nightmare concludes on the Sunday morning, when Tony is hounded along the sea-front by a vigilante crowd vociferating ‘There’s a man who’s eaten two breakfasts and tries to drown his little girl.’  The whole Brighton episode, apparently a piece of gratuitous farce, is actually crucial to the plot: when faced with selling Hetton Abbey 'to buy Beaver for Brenda' Tony for a moment sees things straight.  'The evidence I provided at Brighton isn't worth anything...,' he tells her brother.  'I shall divorce Brenda without settlements of any kind.'
     The response of Brenda’s fashionable friends to Tony's volte-face develops the satire further, casting her as the victim and him as the villain: ‘Now I understand why they keep going on in the papers about divorce law reform,’ remarks one of them.
     Divorce law reform was certainly in the air in 1934, but why Waugh should have felt any concern about it at all then or indeed at any other time is a bit of a puzzle.  This part of A Handful of Dust, at least, is distinctly not autobiographical.  Waugh received the confessional letter from his wife late in July 1929, and on 3 September he filed a petition for divorce against her.  The dates speak for themselves. There were no legal complications, no question of ‘doing the decent thing’ as Tony Last did, or of her expecting him to.  Waugh lived a more mundane life than some of his characters did.
     In the four years which had elapsed between the separation from his wife and the publication of A Handful of Dust (September 1934) Waugh had travelled in Africa, South America, Greece and Norway, had published five books, and had been received into the Roman Catholic Church.  Why, then, did he backtrack, and make so much of the arcane and archaic mechanics of divorce, inventing an episode which had no resemblance to his own experience?  I think that it has little to do directly with Waugh’s life, and a great deal to do with what they kept 'going on in the papers about.'
     The Matrimonial Causes Act was passed into law in 1937, after many years of agitation.  The subject had been brought to particular prominence in April 1934 by the publication of A. P. Herbert’s novel Holy Deadlock, just as Waugh was finishing his own novel.  Like the Brighton episode in A Handful of Dust, this is a satire on the unreformed divorce laws, under which the only normally allowable grounds for divorce  were the admitted and proven adultery of one of the parties.  This meant that if a couple's marriage had simply failed, one of them was obliged to commit adultery, or to perjure himself (it was usually the man) by swearing that he had.  Waugh could hardly have been unaware of the issue.  He may not have read Holy Deadlock, but his employment of a well-known solicitor, E. S. P. Haynes, to handle his divorce had put him in contact with Herbert’s major ally in the reform movement.  Haynes was a family friend whom Waugh had first met  in 1924, as he recorded then in his diary:

He is a highly intelligent man so corpulent that he has to bear the weight of his belly upon his shoulders by means of a patent truss....  He gave us to drink a bottle each of vintage burgundy, two different kinds of port, and an infinite amount of 1870 brandy.

Incidentally, Brenda’s brother, Reggie St Cloud, has been seen as a portrait of Waugh's Oxford friend Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford, who died in 2002), but Waugh's description sounds very like Haynes:

He was prematurely, unnaturally stout, and he carried his burden of flesh as though he were not yet used to it; as though it had been buckled on to him that morning for the first time, and he were still experimenting for its better adjustment.

There is no evidence that Waugh and Herbert ever met, but I suspect that Haynes may have provided, perhaps for both novelists, the idea of Brighton and the wilder absurdities which the unreformed divorce laws had given rise to.
     Waugh, like Herbert, was not coming fresh to the subject of divorce in 1934.  He published several articles on marriage and divorce between 1928 and 1935; Donat Gallagher, who has studied them from a theological as well as legal perspective, concludes that Waugh was, even after his conversion to Catholicism, ‘committed to liberal divorce laws’, and advocated ‘dissoluble civil marriage’.  One could hardly dispute Gallagher’s conclusion that ‘in the light of the early journalism A Handful of Dust should be read as a novel that, in satirising infidelity, implies commitment to fidelity, but [...] at the same time ridicules oppressive divorce laws with a view to their reform.’[1]  But Waugh does more than this: his dramatisation of the Brighton episode reveals how different his intentions are from Herbert’s.  As well as the hilarious black comedy there is the plot imperative that Brenda should not get her divorce.  Milly’s daughter, dubbed by Tony’s friend Jock ‘The Awful Child of popular fiction’, actually lives up to both aspects of her sobriquet since she becomes the plot device by which Tony is able to nullify the evidence he had provided of his infidelity.  The fact that Waugh’s attention was not principally on legal matters is further seen in his simplifications of the law here; as Gallagher points out, Tony’s revelations about the actual happenings at Brighton would have made him liable to ‘charges of collusion, conspiracy, attempting to pervert the course of justice, and of aiding and abetting perjury’.[2]
     Holy Deadlock was not simply an opportunistic comic novel by a professional writer who had found a topical theme.  It was one of several markers which Herbert (who had read Law at Oxford although he was not a practicing lawyer) had been posting in Punch and elsewhere as his part in a largely uncoordinated campaign to reform the divorce laws.  His opportunity came in the following year when he was elected to parliament as the ‘Junior Burgess’ for Oxford University.  Divorce reform had been a principal plank in his electoral platform despite his constituency containing, as he put it in his maiden speech, 'more parsons to the square vote than any other constituency beside.'  Herbert arrived at Westminster with his Marriage Bill in his pocket.  It was passed in less than two years.  The story is told in one of Herbert’s most engaging books, Independent Member (1950).  Herbert's election is linked to Waugh by two curious details: one of his major campaign supporters was Frank Pakenham, then a young don at Christ Church, and the Conservative candidate he defeated was C. R. M. Cruttwell, who had been Waugh's tutor at Hertford College.  Waugh persecuted Cruttwell cruelly in several of his novels; in A Handful of Dust his name is given to Brenda's osteopath.
     By the time the bill became law Waugh had been three months married to Laura Herbert.
     Holy Deadlock went through several editions quite quickly, and has made no lasting literary impact, but Herbert, in his Introduction to the Penguin edition (1955), claimed for it ‘a modest place in political history, for it helped, I believe, to change the law of the land.’  It opens with John Adam, a respectable publisher, in a first-class railway carriage, travelling to Brighton for the weekend with 'a strange young woman.'  As he muses on the events which have brought this about, we learn about him and his wife, estranged after seven years of marriage, and of their experiences with the arcane and bizarre laws which prevent either of them from becoming free to remarry.
     John has offered to behave as a gentleman, and to provide the evidence of adultery which will enable Mary, who has not committed adultery herself, to marry Martin, a BBC announcer who had, in those days of Lord Reith, to be sheltered from the breath of scandal.  (John Heygate was forced to resign from the BBC because he was cited as co-respondent in Waugh’s divorce.)  Mary is a successful actress (as they were then called) and her father is an elderly clergyman (predictably, in Sussex).  John’s repeated failures to provide the necessary evidence put a heavy strain on his relationship with Joan, his own new love.  All four people concerned are very decent and sincerely wish for the others' happiness; the novel chronicles in crushing detail how the law defeats them at every move.
     In principle Holy Deadlock is a satire, but Herbert seems to ignore or even turn his back on the sorts of comic possibility which Waugh seizes on, although he has ready-made material in John Adam, who, like Tony Last, is an innocent abroad.  His most imaginative touch is the failure of the Brighton weekend to provide the required evidence because the dotty chambermaid at the hotel has taken a shine to John, and therefore, in court, believes that she should clear him of the accusation that he was in bed with Miss Myrtle.  The best satirical element is the Brighton hotel manager, torn between resentment at the seedy use which is being made of his establishment and his commercial instincts to encourage the purchase of champagne.  'In the winter the business was roughly divided between divorce and tuberculosis.'  As, with medical advances, the number of consumptives dwindles he considers 'run[ning] the hotel openly as a branch of the Divorce Court.'  But fantasy is not Herbert's forte, and this is all a long way from Waugh's black comedy; more Galsworthy than Kafka.
     Despite the differences, there are a number of similarities in the details of the two satires; both writers expose the absurdities of the divorce laws, and both make hilarious capital out of Brighton.  Champagne features in both Brighton episodes, drunk by Waugh's detectives and by Herbert's Miss Myrtle.  Lawyers in both novels warn against trusting anyone, especially a former spouse.  There seem to be some standard formulae: Brenda's solicitor has her testify 'I began to suspect that my husband's attitude had changed towards me,' and Mary's advises her to recall that she had 'noticed a cooling in his attitude towards [her].'  Lawyers in both novels point out the dangers of failing to make staged adultery look convincing: 'a single night used to be sufficient,' says John's solicitor, 'but the President has been tightening things up, and we generally advise a good long week-end today.'  The King's Proctor, much reviled by Herbert and Haynes, is a menacing figure for all who wished to divorce; it was his role to uncover collusion in divorce applications.  Tony Last's lawyer warns him 'I gather Lady Brenda is being far from discreet.  It is quite likely that the King's Proctor may intervene.'  Being Brenda, though, she is not caught in her flagrant collusion.
     There is one revealing little difference between the novels.  A Handful of Dust, I think uniquely among Waugh’s novels, has no dedication.  Holy Deadlock is dedicated ‘To Mrs. A. P. Herbert on the nineteenth anniversary of her wedding.’  No one could suspect Herbert of incorporating his personal life in his fiction!
     Let me return to an earlier question: were the unreformed divorce laws, like the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, an absurdity beyond the reach of satire?
     Shortly before the Matrimonial Causes Act became law, there was heard at Ipswich the case of Simpson v. Simpson, one of the last divorces to be granted under the old law.  The papers have recently been released, and were reported in The Guardian on 30 January 2003. 

     Mr Simpson duly went with a friend, Mary Raffray,--named at the hearing as E. H. Kennedy--to the Hotel de Paris in Bray, Berkshire, where waiters saw them in bed together on two successive mornings.  Wallis Simpson wrote to her husband saying: 'I am sure that you realise that this [is] conduct which I cannot possibly overlook....  I am instructing my solicitor.'

The transcript of the hearing shows Mr Justice Hawke was not quite up to speed:

     'What I have in my mind is as you know--what is it I have in my mind Mr Birkett?'
     Mr Birkett (for Mrs Simpson): 'With great deference, I think it was what you might call the ordinary hotel evidence….  I think that was what was in your lordship's mind.'
     Mr Justice Hawke: 'It is.  I thought there was something.'
     Mr Birkett: 'Decree nisi with costs, my lord?'
     Mr Justice Hawke: 'Yes.  I suppose so.'

     A. P. Herbert is best known for his Misleading Cases--hilarious fictional legal reports based on real points of law.  It is doubtful if he ever in fiction surpassed this account of the divorce of Mrs. Simpson, who was soon to marry King Edward VIII.

Notes:
     1.) Donat Gallagher, "Holy Deadlock and A Handful of Dust: A. P. Herbert, Evelyn Waugh and Divorce Law Reform in the 1930s," in J. Neville Turner and Pamela Williams, eds., The Happy Couple: Law and Literature (Sydney: Federation Press, 1994), 137, 143, 144-5.
     2.)  Gallagher, "Holy Deadlock," 144.

A Kinder, Gentler Look at Rex Mottram
by David Bittner

     Since my last rereading of Brideshead Revisited, I have been particularly struck by the character of Rex Mottram.  I would like to make a case for Rex as a basically good character whom some other characters, including Julia, Lady Marchmain, and Father Mowbray, are too hard on.
     In describing one of Rex’s good qualities, it occurs to me to turn to another of my favorite novels, The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham, in which the character of Elliott Templeton is described by means of the French word “serviable.”  Maugham says the equivalent word “serviceable” is archaic in English but that “serviable” is still a perfectly good French word, which means “helpful, obliging, and kind.”  This is a good description of Rex.  Lady Marchmain admits that Rex is a “kind and useful friend” whom she “almost likes,” and Julia tells Charles that Rex has never been unkind to her intentionally.  Rex actually makes himself useful to his in-laws in several important ways.  He is ready to help the Flyte family make their money “work for them” instead of just “sit quietly.”  If not, he fears, they will be in for a financial jolt.  When Charles says he doesn’t know which is worse, Celia’s Art and Fashion, or Rex’s Politics and Money, I think the answer is that all are necessary, a couple of them perhaps necessary evils.  Art is a worthy thing, and fashion has been a hallmark of civilized humankind since Adam and Eve donned fig leaves in the Garden of Eden.  In almost any facet of society, there is politics, including pecking orders, and we all need money.
     Rex is also “serviable” in getting Sebastian off the hook with Judge Grigg after his automobile accident (although he fails to keep it out of the papers), and when he tries to take Sebastian to the clinic in Zurich.  He goes out of his way in Paris to look up Charles and see whether Charles is hiding Sebastian, after Sebastian has given Rex the slip.  He also knows “just the man” (the doctor) for Lady Marchmain after learning she is so ill.  The family asks Charles to go to Morocco to fetch Sebastian, when they otherwise would have asked this favor of Rex if he had not been so busy organizing the gasworks.
     True, Rex isn’t faithful to Julia, but then he is hardly alone in the novel when it comes to adulterous love affairs.  There is also the example of Lord Marchmain and Cara, of course, and Julia takes up with Charles as well as with an unidentified American lover in New York.  It would be wrong to condemn Rex for this reason.
     I think Father Mowbray fails to correctly size up Rex when he tells Lady Marchmain he doesn’t correspond to any degree of paganism known to the missionaries.  Rex’s answer to Father Mowbray about being too sinful to see the rain falling spiritually is actually a good answer to a tricky question, and let’s not forget the narrator’s comment that Rex actually took a “keen interest” in the Catholic Church.  Rex “likes a girl to have religion,” says a man needs religion too, and takes the trouble to discuss his religious concerns with a “pious and well-educated” Catholic—Cordelia—when he thinks Father Mowbray isn’t being “straight” with him and is letting him find out too much by himself.  It is not Rex’s fault that the mischievous Cordelia gets him even more muddled as to what is actually in the catechism and what she has invented herself, such as sacred monkeys in the Vatican.  When Rex learns that his first marriage to Sarah Evangeline Cutler (Simon Jones mispronounces the name as “Clutler” with an extra “l” in the television production) will prevent his marrying in the Catholic Church, he is still determined to wed in a Christian ceremony of some kind and turns to the Protestants.  If Julia had her way, as she says, she would just have slipped into a registry office and gotten it over with, with a couple of charwomen as witnesses.  I see nothing wrong with Rex wanting bridesmaids and orange blossoms and the wedding march.  As any gerontologist can testify, religious ritual is a basic need on the part of many people as they go through life and a perfectly valid reason why people value religion.
     Rex is lastly a gentleman.  He treats Lady Marchmain “masterfully,” admitting that he does not pretend to be a “very devout man” or much of a theologian, and agreeing (near the end of the novel) to give Julia a divorce if she insists on having one, although she couldn’t have picked a worse time.  Cheerfully he serves on the committees of Julia’s pet charities.  He makes a good impression on Lord Marchmain as a “rough, healthy, prosperous” fellow who keeps good company.  He is thus both a lady’s man and a man’s man.  He is also a connoisseur, evincing a number of gentlemanly interests.  He hires the most expensive firm to furnish and decorate his house and shows at dinner with Charles at Paillard’s that he knows something about food and liquor.  In another of my favorite novels, The Conscience of the Rich by C. P. Snow, the narrator, Lewis Eliot, describes a childhood friend as a “cheerful and knowing little boy.”  I think “knowing” is a word that aptly describes Rex also, and Waugh almost uses it when he says Rex daily surprised Julia with the things he knew, such as gemology in the jeweler’s back room in Hatton Garden, and what he did not know.
     I may have contradicted some things I have said about Rex previously in Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, but I would emphasize the importance of keeping an open mind.

     Alexander Waugh, on behalf of the Estate, has kindly given 'ready maid productions', a London-based theatrical production company, permission to adapt and perform The Loved One as a play.
     The play will run for two weeks from 26th October to the 5th November 2004 at The Little Angel Theatre in Islington, London, UK.
     This is a very sympathetic and true adaptation by J. G. Darcy that retains Waugh's dark, satirical humour.

Book Reviews

And so the sick mind continues to infinity, creating groups then dispersing them again, heaping up diverse similarities, destroying those that seem clearest, splitting up things that are identical, superimposing different criteria, becoming more and more disturbed, and teetering finally on the brink of anxiety.
--Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences

Mrs. Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly backward and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, interrelated . . . then [she] drew them towards her into a heap, haphazard once more and without meaning. (87)

“In no case can [Catholics], strictly speaking, form an English Literature.”  John Henry Newman

One of the first things which liberated people want to know is the truth about their past. 
--Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (198)     

     Philosophically and explicitly indebted to the work of Hans Blumenberg, David Adams perceives the modern West as bereft of Christian theology, though irritatingly the questions posed and answered by former dependence on a theological episteme tarry.  Blumenberg “remains committed to the ‘legitimacy’ of modern thought” (70), but stresses that the latter must not be forced into ontological corners, lured by the possibility of a replacement utopia.  Instead, it must acknowledge that “fundamental questions, like answers, are not constant” (181), and its excesses must be restrained.  Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, and most significantly the colonial odysseys of modernist fiction between 1890 and 1940, are all recast as prone to such excesses, to the neo-Christian process of “‘reoccupation’” (5) or “secularization” (160), and are therefore propaedeutically determined to fail.
     This failure is manifested, in the order in which they appear, in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Forster’s A Passage to India, Conrad, and Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.  On the heels of romanticized late-Victorian adventure stories, the likes of She and Tarzan, which present “imperialism not as an aspect of modern civilization but as an antidote to it” (20), a “substitution of empire for theology” (5), the travelers in these modernist texts attempt seemingly outward, imperialist journeys, in the hope of encountering some semblance of Homeric nostos, an intelligible meaning, that is lacking at home.  The journey, of course, is ultimately inward, of the self, and contact with empire only reflects or indeed amplifies the domestic void.  Rather than a renewed nostos, there is but thanatos, a confirmation of modernity’s inadequacy that ends in death.  Specifically, despite Tony Last’s expectations of the Latin American city, “. . . part El Dorado, part projection of Tony’s neo-Gothic ideals, (and thus ‘a transfigured Hetton’ [222]), part City of God” (6), the illusion is reduced to bathos, to the absurdly prosaic, as he “is apparently destined to spend the rest of his life reading the works of Dickens repeatedly to Mr. Todd” (7).  Similarly, Kurtz’s eventual horror is that of a European, self-made deity who recognizes the vacuity of his modern-cum-imperial power.  These “reoccupiers” are not at home anywhere.
     The study’s force derives from its metaphysical constant.  It is not that the periphery exhausts the West, but rather that the West’s teleology has exhausted itself, and cannot escape “its own haunting past” (30).  Geography is only relevant in that by 1890 there is “no more nova terra” (81), no other opportunity for Kurtz, Marlow or indeed Conrad to redeem or “reoccupy” themselves, to “accomplish the superhuman task of transmuting all suffering into meaning” (92).  Whether Waugh captures Latin America is of little consequence, for it is Waugh’s projection of English faltering that counts.  Via the novels’ thwarted quests, Adams defines the supposedly static center as precariously dynamic, superstitious, unstable even in its own terms, “the product of a dramatic decentering” (46).  The novelists do not unwittingly betray this instability, as if they were merely the representatives of some monolithic Orientalist structure that was beginning to show its cracks, but self-analytically exhibit its failure.
     The above may sound familiar.  While both Paul B. Armstrong of Brown and Stathis Gourgouris of Columbia shed their anonymity as the Press’s readers in order to volunteer paratextual waxings on originality, the latter is surely overstated.  Two obvious intertexts, particularly given Adams’ penchant for spectral terminology, are Dennis Porter’s Haunted Journeys, which presents the foreign as a Rorschach test for the traveler’s own trauma, and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which critiques Marx’s attempt at “secularization” yet consolidates his suspicion of meaning as a welcome to alterity.  Neither even appears in the bibliography.  Implicit in such theoretical omissions lies the ever-increasing concern that this is a predominantly secondary text with tertiary aspirations, a piece of Conradian literary criticism masquerading as something more.  Disregarding occasional references, A Handful of Dust receives a sparse four pages, and Conrad a densely-footnoted eighty-seven. Is there some stigma attached to books on Conrad alone?  Leaving aside a fundamental quandary that although Marx, Nietzsche and Freud propose secular totalities, they are all less snivelingly redemptive or “reoccupying” than Adams’ glibness would have them, and that his problem may be tied less to these individual manifestations than to modern thought more generally, even if we accept his definition then where would an alternative, more modest, Blumenbergian modernity lead us?  Despite the promise of more, just as Conrad recognized his inability to satiate “the father-shaped vacuum” (173) yet “does not a devise a way to dispense with the underlying impulse” (175), this same impasse is re-presented, time and again, in Adams’ own discourse, as if his reader must endure a similar jejuneness, repeatedly reading Dickens to Mr. Todd.  In short, for much of the book, the philosophical perception is frustratingly limited to that of the authors, when Adams’ counter-argument should be more engaged.
     If there is a response, an out-clause to the modernist paradigm, it mirrors Woolf’s, who is credited with having dispensed with the colonial odyssey after The Voyage Out, favoring, in Adams’ paraphrasing, “a globe compacted, not extended; it represents a wholeness without totality, a wholeness specific to a scene, a few people, a moment of being” (204), “Transformed from moral imperative to some need of one’s own” (207).  In Woolf, such contraction is associated with “health of mind” (cited, 201), an escape from the burden of the past, and Adams reincorporates it as “a diminished episteme” (202) that “offers the individual the dubious attraction of inhabiting a less rich, less capacious world” (202), though a world that is nonetheless desired here.  The response, then, is a reduced philosophy and a philosophy of reduction, a “philosophy-lite” if you will, which is in fact the aim, the “cure,” of modern thought, including that of Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx.  While it is presented in Colonial Odysseys as “a relatively modest form, . . . open to the alien, recognizing the alien within itself” (225), and the book ends with the timid words “What next?” (225), this is a false modesty, not least because the study concludes with 1940 and we therefore know what’s next, but also because any thought that is less reductive would be cast as naïve.  In retrospect, it is unsurprising that A Handful of Dust receives but a few pages, for Waugh is described as “determinedly anti-modern” (9), and is thus a danger to Adams’ supposed health. The alien’s belief systems would no doubt meet with a similar fate.  Perhaps I am the victim of my own nostalgia for “reoccupation,” but as Iris Murdoch knew, I am not, long after 1940, alone.

Works Consulted
Derrida, Jacques.  Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New     International.  Trans. Peggy Kamuf.  New York: Routledge, 1994.
Murdoch, Iris.  Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.  London: Penguin, 1992.
Porter, Dennis.  Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing.   Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

     “Like it or not, we come to life in the middle of stories that are not ours.  The way to knowledge, and self-knowledge, is through pilgrimage.  We imitate our way to the truth, finding our lives—saving them—in the process” (472).  So says Paul Elie at the end of An American Pilgrimage.  In this remarkable book, Elie weaves into one narrative the careers of four of the most prominent American Catholic writers of the twentieth century: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor.  The result is an intriguing blend of biography, cultural history, and literary criticism, an exploration of the ways reading and writing can mark out paths for persons of faith to follow.
     O’Connor, Merton, Day, and Percy never existed as a literary school (despite Caroline Gordon’s mid-century efforts to organize a “School of the Holy Ghost”), but Elie’s selection of these four is far from arbitrary.  They are united by their writing careers, their correspondence, and their Catholicism, but also by the American-ness of their experience: a reality upon which Evelyn Waugh presciently remarked in 1948.  “[A]lways Providence has another people quietly maturing to relieve the decadent of their burden,” he wrote; and, after encountering Day and Merton firsthand, he asserted that “Providence is schooling and strengthening [American Catholics] for the historic destiny long borne by Europe” (169).  “I’ve more despair for Europe than America,” he told Harvey Breit in a 1949 interview in New York.  “There’s much more wrong there than here.”  Day and Merton might not have agreed with Waugh, but the arrival of this English Catholic on the American scene colorfully points up one of the more compelling sub-themes of Elie’s book: the triangular relationship between Roman Catholicism and its manifestations in Europe and the Americas.  Although Waugh has much in common with his American Catholic counterparts—feeling, for instance, “both native and alien” to his home country—Elie illustrates that the “pilgrim” character of the American authors’ lives is meaningfully tied to their nation’s and American Catholicism’s own fitful processes of self-realization (343).
     Of the four, only O’Connor was raised a Catholic.  The rest were converts.  It has often been remarked, notably in recent books by Patrick Allitt (Cornell, 1997) and Joseph Pearce (Ignatius, 1999), how overwhelmingly the work of converts dominates the Catholic literature of the past 150 years.  Elie, however, renders this distinction relatively unimportant compared to the overarching idea of pilgrimage that unites his four subjects and is his real theme.  Elie’s special contribution to the study of Catholic literature is to have grouped his writers in a new way and chosen a new means—the pairing of nationality and pilgrimage—for teasing out insights.
     As fluid as Elie’s plan for the book is, its structure at times seems unable to contain all that the author intends.  Although thematic chapters (“Experience,” “Seeking the Real,” “Convergences,” et al.) are offered as guides, they are often insufficient to make the constituent pieces cohere, in part because the narrative cuts constantly and rather arbitrarily from one life story to another.  The sense is of reading snatches of four biographies concurrently.  Some interesting “convergences” do emerge, but the reader loses something perhaps more satisfying than Elie’s efforts at unifying thematization can provide.  In a way, the book demonstrates how “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (the title of another O’Connor story), in that it focuses on the elements of the four lives that rise readily toward its theme of literary pilgrimage, but the reader is occasionally aware of how much falls away in the process.  Large and important chunks of the subjects’ lives—the families of Day and Percy, for instance—are all but invisible.
     Such difficulties are inherent in such an ambitious undertaking, but they are at least partly redeemed by the idea of pilgrimage, which, Elie explains in the Prologue, “is a journey undertaken in the light of a story” (x).  Reading this book does feel like a journey, and the author has provided a story, without being heavy-handed about it, to lend it direction and shape.  An American Pilgrimage does not take the risks nor reach the critical heights of Paul Giles’ American Catholic Arts and Fictions (Cambridge, 1992).  Elie’s is a humbler undertaking, a “nice read,” a tad sentimental, but not without its considerable rewards for the reader.

     Why apologize indeed, the authors ask, when the court of the Inquisition was “the most humane and impartial one of its times,” when it “prevent[ed] the persecutions of innocent people” (including Jews and Muslims), when, “judged by the standards of its times, the Spanish Inquisition was neither unjust in its procedures nor cruel in its punishments,” and when, to boot, the English Reformation under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I was immeasurably worse?
     This pamphlet, from the “Militant Sons and Daughters” at Miles Jesu, may be of some interest to those looking for a rough-and-ready counter to the most brazenly anti-Catholic accounts of the Inquisition.  The level of scholarship in Why Apologize, however, falls far below that of Simon Whitechapel’s Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, and slightly above the flyer handed to me at a St. Patrick’s Day parade, arguing that the Irish patron was, in fact, not a Catholic but a Baptist.  It is certainly striking to read that the Inquisition executed only 3,000-5,000 people in its 350-year life, while “150,000 witches alone were burnt for heresy in the rest of Europe,” slightly less so to hear the “kitty-cat” of the Inquisition compared to the “killing monster of Communism.”  Such revelations bring a reader little nearer to the kind of critical recontextualization of medieval Spanish Catholicism that would seem most useful.  These polemical pages will speak best to the already converted and those receptive to partisan histrionics.  Readers of other kinds will likely be better rewarded elsewhere.

Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, 1920-2004
     Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, passed away on 3 May 2004.  He was 84 years old.
     Andrew Cavendish married the Hon. Deborah Mitford in 1941 and became the 11th Duke of Devonshire upon his father's death in 1950.  In 1959, "in his cups," the duke called Evelyn Waugh "a sponger," and Waugh found that "It rankles" (Letters 521).
     The duke is survived by his wife, the last of the famous Mitford sisters, and three children, Lady Emma, Lady Sophia, and Peregrine, who has succeeded to the title of 12th Duke of Devonshire.
     At the seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, there is an exhibit honoring the centenary of Nancy Mitford, sister of the dowager duchess.  More information is available at www.chatsworth-house.co.uk.

Davis, Robert Murray, ed.  Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice: The Early Writings, 1910-1927.  (hardcover, 1985).
Davis, Robert Murray.  Evelyn Waugh, Writer.  (paperback, 1981).
Davis, Robert Murray.  Mischief in the Sun: The Making and Unmaking of The Loved One.  (hardcover, 1999).
Doyle, Paul A.  A Reader's Companion to the Novels and Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh.  (hardcover, 1989).
Greenidge, Terence.  Evelyn Waugh in Letters.  Ed. Charles Linck.  (paperback, 1994). 

     Charles also has several other titles on sundry subjects.  Please contact him, Charles Linck, at P.O. Box 3002, Commerce TX 75429, USA, or Linck@tamu-commerce.edu.