Waugh discovers America.

At the center of his new book Stannard devotes a chapter to Waugh's "American Dream" - his brief preoccupation with the United States, and particularly with American Catholicism. Waugh's work had been widely published and reviewed here from the beginning of his career, but not until Brideshead Revisited was selected by the Book-of-the Month Club in 1945 did he find a large American readership. Flush with his popularity, he traveled to Hollywood to negotiate film rights, and on a tip went to a nearby pet cemetery. and then to "its elaborate counterpart for the defunct plutocracy," Forest Lawn. These, of course, were the models for The Loved One's Happy Hunting Ground and Whispering Glades, which Waugh depicts as the "reductio ad absurdum of the humanist belief in life's prefectibility, the dead fruit of the American Dream." Unexpectedly, The Loved One, like Brideshead, became a stateside best seller, and with royalties from the two books Waugh morbidly refurbished his West Country manor, Piers Court, in order to make it "the opposite of Forest Lawn." (Waugh's stewardship of his U.S. profits, involving a series of adroit tax-evasion schemes, is a source of continuing comedy in Stannard's The Later Years.)

In 1948, Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter became an American best seller, and Waugh took the occasion to anoint his Oxford contemporary and coreligionist as an authentically Catholic writer. After a comical meeting at Mass - "Greene had just emptied his pockets into the box for African missions, and Waugh had taken him to the Ritz for a cocktail" - he wrote a long, laudatory review of the novel, reasoning around its supposed heterodoxy. Having opined that "many Catholics... will gravely misunderstand it, particularly in the United States," he urged his agent to place the review in the U.S. It appeared in Commonweal in July 1948; three years later Commonweal published Waugh's positive review of Greene's The End of the Affair.

Also in 1948, Waugh was sent a copy of Thomas Merton's the Seven Storey Mountain, which a friend planned to publish in Great Britain. He wrote a foreword and trimmed the text by a third, as well as cleaning up the book's "linguistic imprecision" - a service that Merton welcomed, as he needed criticism "the way a man dying of thirst needs water" - and the two became friends. (Correspondence recently shown at Columbia University captures their different circumstances: to a letter he wrote to waugh on plain, creased brown paper, Merton received a reply on a gilded, full-color card featuring pop-up cherubim and seraphim).

Monk and squire would meet the next year, when Waugh began a project that Stannard calls both "the most serious journalistic assignment of his life" and "the oddest of his life." He signed on to write, on the most lucrative terms, a long piece about American Catholicism for Life. In two more U.S. visits, he met with key American Catholics: Merton, J.F. Powers, Jacques Maritain ("It quickly emerged that philosopher and novelist had little in common beyond their faith"). In New York, he went to Harlem to see Father Divine ("the nigger who has proclaimed himself God"), dined with the Stravinskys (who had read his books, but spoke only Russian), and took a Cadillac to the Bowery to lunch with Dorothy Day (who asked him to "forgive my class consciousness"). He lectured on Greene, Chesterton, and Ronald Knox at Catholic colleges and met members of the U.S. hirerachy.

In New Orleans for Ash Wednesday, he delighted in the Jesuit church where, across from a touristcrammed hotel, "the old grim message was being repeated over each penitent: "Dust thou art and to dust shalt thou return.' One grows parched for that straight style of speech in the desert of modern euphemism...."

In the article, "The American Epoch in the Catholic Church," published in September 1949, Waugh offered insights that have since become commonplace assumptions about the American church - remarkably, considering his "superficial" knowledge of the U.S. and his lack of any one text on American Catholicism. Despite this country's "psychopathic antagonism to paternity and all its symbols," he found American Catholics "in certain ways the most lively branch of the Catholic church in the world." Though tempted to generalize "that American Catholics care little for doctrinal niceties or the ascetic life; that they exalt the natural virtues above the supernatural, and consider good fellowship and material generosity the true ends of man," he observed bishops pronouncing damnation and contemplatives saying the Office. He praised "the heroic fidelity of Negro Catholics," the efforts by which Catholics "have covered their nation with schools." and the "fermentation" represented by magazines like Commonweal, while remarking that "the American church up to the present time has produced few illustrious heroes or heroines." In sum, he optimistically took American Catholicism as an example of the life of American Christians generally, which "is point-for-point opposed to the publicized and largely fictitious [American] way of life dreaded in Europe and Asia. And that, by the grace of God, is the |way of life' that will prevail." Given the developments of the past forty-three years and his loathing of the Second Vatican Council, one thinks Waugh would have come to disavow such a conclusion. But Stannard's biography shows that the man, like the church he wrote about, was full of surprises

Paul Elie, a regular Commonweal contributor, is writing a collection of short stories.