Beyond Brideshead.

THE BRILLIANT English television production of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, recently reshown in America, has no doubt confirmed in the public mind the impression that this most popular of the novels by the great English master of satiric comedy was also his most significant work of fiction. But in fact it isn't, having been considerably superseded by his comparatively unknown masterwork, Sword of Honor (1965), the recension of the trilogy that was published at intervals during the previous decade under the separate titles Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlement (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961). Although Waugh's publisher in this country (Little, Brown) has curiously chosen to reprint what is known as the War Trilogy in these separate versions, it is the one-volume edition of Sword of Honor that is the most powerful representation of Waugh's masterpiece and the one he wanted to present to the public.

There are probably very sound and at the same time subtle reasons why the superb dramatization, in Brideshead of a noble English Roman Catholic family in dissolution should once again engage the contemporary sensibility. Only some four decades ago, American Catholic criticism was emboldened to suggest that Brideshead Revisited was our Roman Catholic epic in the modern trimphalsim of a Church that few could have known was even then at the end of the preconciliar age. This was an understandable and yet seriously flawed reading of Waugh's nevertheless great novel. Brideshead Revisited is still highly readable today precisely because, rather than a self-fulfilling example of triumphalism, it was actually a prophetic account of such a thorough disintegration of the social order as would almost simultaneously result in a similar decline of the spiritual order. The world of Subaltern Hooper was about to take over--and it did. Perhaps Waugh died from knowledge of this, as the novelist Graham Greene suggested shortly after the death of his friend in 1966.

All that is left at the end of Brideshead Revisited is the tentative guttering of the crimson vigil light in the chapel and the hint that Captain Charles Ryder, the narrator of the novel, will have emerged at last from his own life of cynicism and barely tolerant angosticism into the richer mystery and more sustaining life of the Catholic Church. But Captain Ryder will also become Captain Guy Crouchback of the War Trilogy, much less a snob than Ryder, and yet much more an authentic aristocrat both at heart and in fact. The aristocratic Crouchback is an ineffably sad portrait of the middle-class Waugh himself. But if he was a man for whom both church and state were now only the shadows of their former glories, he was also a man whose sense of honor still acknowledged the vestiges of all that he had once held most dear and lasting and true--indeed, most dear and lasting only because true.

Sword of Honor has deeper dramatic integrity as a novel than Brideshead largely because Crouchback himself has more integrity of character than Ryder had in his role as an all but impassive observer. Crouchback suffered defeats and humiliations that Ryder did not know. The War Trilogy is Waugh's last and greatest statement, and in fact we misread all the novels if we do not take them as genuine re-creations of the author's own continuing experience. It was once presumed that the earlier satiric novels (of which Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies may be the typical examples) were the products merely of an outrageous imagination; but as with all his novels, they came more or less directly out of Waugh's own equally outrageous experience. His books were the transformation of that experience into a beautifully cadenced art of fact and fiction. This can be said even more truly about Sword of Honor than about any of his other works--excepting, of course, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) and A Little Learning (1964), the latter an exquisite fragment of autobiographical writing.

It becomes immediately clear, on reading even the initial episodes of Sword of Honor, that is comedic element is at once of a more mature and melancholy kind than the glittering and effervescent humor in the pages of, say, Decline and Fall. The mildly desperate and pathetic figure of Apthorpe and his portable thunder-box (or chemical toilet) in the original "Men at Arms" section of the War Trilogy is far removed from the all too predictable high jinks of the Oxford under-graduates and the slightly depraved indulgences of the Bright Young People between the wars. The comic invention of Waugh has here become universal; the farcial is now subsumed in the poignantly ironic elements of reality itself.

It is always difficult to have knowledge of the truth and yet see the world make a botch of things for lack of it. Nothing much has ever been made of the fact, especially in the acceptable literary criticism of our time, that Evelyn Waugh was the only major novelist who saw painfully through the alliance with Stalinism and the Soviet Union during the Second World War--and, more importantly, what this unholy alliance would mean after the war. If the one-class society and the new technology of the computer age do not take us over first, Waugh's War Trilogy may someday be recognized as the finest depiction of the moral conscience operating under extreme stress that has come out of the writing of novels since World War II. The more generally recognized war novelists of the period, such as Norman Mailer and James Jones, are by comparison only mad little children playing at war games. They have presumed that combat is all there is to war. Let us by all means have our Stephen Cranes and Ernest Hemingways, but states ofwar are infinitely more like those described in Sword of Honor than any of the others. It is not only that Waugh was more intelligent and politically astute in his commonest perceptions, he possessed a moral vision of the world that the others sadly lacked.

This is nowhere more clearly seen than in the Yugoslavian episode in the "Unconditional Surrender" section of Sword of Honor. At this point, an historical reflection may prove helpful. Against the then-common belief of the American people that Prime Minister Churchill was the most dependable of the Allied leaders during World War II, the historian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn says, in his definitive study of Leftism (Arlington House, 1974), that this simply was not the case: "The responsibility for the switch from Draza Mihajlovic to Marshal Tito was also due to Churchill, not to Roosevelt," though Mihajlovic clearly "represented by far the lesser evil." This was the moral situation in which Waugh/Crouchback found himself at a particularly crucial moment in modern Eastern European history--and which he could not dismiss, as Churchill had, by telling a military adide that if you were not going to live in Yugoslavia after the war, then it made little difference one way or the other.

It is given to Guy Crouchback to witness all this as he attempts to rescue the Jewish refugees from the pervasive hostility of the partisans, to dislodge these survivors of the Nazi concentration camps from the interminable regulations of the local Communist bureaucracy, before he is himself shipped out to Bari. He becomes acquainted with the Kanyis, husband and wife, who are the most resourceful of the displaced Jews. Guy is attracted to Madame Kanyi's superior intelligence in an utterly mindless environment and attempts to befriend and help her, not realizing how powerless he is in the face of the partisansh hostility and his own government's indifference. The day Guy seeks out Madame Kanyi to tell her that he is being recalled to Bari, they spot the ridiculous but sinister spy, Bakic, lurking in the sparse roadside shrubbery. Madame Kanyi realizes that any hope she had had of safety is gone, and she asks: "Is there any place that is free from evil?" She indicts all those who had something to gain from the enormous tragedy of the war itself, all the obvious gainers, and even those good men, she adds, who "thought their private honor would be satisfied by war." Many felt this way, she said; "Were there none in england?" Guy responds, "My God, I was one of them."

This seemingly elusive glimpse of self-knowledge in Guy Crouchback is what makes him so different from most of Waugh's other main characters and particularly different from Charles Ryder. Crouchback in the end is more than merely decent, he is a man of the most subtle and touching compassions, though again the forms of this compassion are more elusive than demonstrative. Some are nevertheless obvious, such as Guy's remarriage to Virginia Troy after the former hair-dresser, Trimmer, had left her pregnant. The episode of Virginia seeking the services of an abortionist, in a bombedout section of wartime London, is one of the high points of postwar fiction--as is the exquisite luncheon conversation between Virginia and the wistful Uncle Peregrine.

It is as if Evelyn Waugh himself, in his last great work, had reached a new level of both human and humane understanding. In the role of Guy Crouchback, he was severely chastened--as were all true Englishmen--by the debacle on Crete. Though still loyal to the beneficent figure of Roger of Waybroke, an English knight killed on his way to the Second Crusade, Guy learns bitterly that all victories are hard won and that some, in the end, are sorely lost again. This is why it is analogically absurd to say, as many of Waugh's critics have been eager to say, that Guy Crouchback is Don Quixote tilting against the windmills of the Modern Age. There was nothing quixotic about Guy Crouchback. He suffered no illusions and indeed suffered all the more because of that.

No contemporary author, perhaps, has written so heartbreaking a preface to his own work as Waugh's to Sword of Honor, which states in the last of its only three paragraphs:

On reading the book I realized that I had done something quite outside my original intention. I had written an obituary of the Roman Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries. All the rites and most of the opinions here described are already obsolete. When I wrote Brideshead Revisited I was consciously writting an obituary of the doomed English upper class it never occurred to me, writing Sword of Honor, that the Church was susceptible to change. I was wrong and I have seen a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent. Despite the faith of many of the characters. Sword of Honor was not specifically a religious book. Recent developments have made it, in fact, a document of Catholic usage of my youth.

Still, it is much more than only that. If Evelyn Waugh could never come to terms with the modern world, in Sword of Honor he at last came to terms with himself.