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Spring 2004
72
In Defense of Christian “Snobbery”:
The Case of Evelyn Waugh Reconsidered
by Adam A. J. DeVille
T
he year 2003 marked the cen-tenary of the birth of Evelyn Waugh, acclaimed as one of the great writers of the twentieth century and arguably the greatest Catholic novel-ist of his time. Numerous events were organized to commemorate his birth. For Waugh aficionados, this is a sign of a healthy interest by the current generation in a writer who deserves not to be forgotten and who was, in his own generation, widely celebrated  – but also widely suspect.Those suspicions continue unabated, as recent articles in both the popular and academic press have made clear. Confessing an interest in Waugh immediately divides a room  – much as mentioning a love of Wag-ner does. People either find Waugh and his views abhorrent or they adore him. When they find him abhorrent, they invariably mean that they find his purported snobbery abhorrent. This charge of rank snobbery is one of the most frequently encoun-therefore a very bad Christian.However, as we shall see, in the vast majority of cases Waugh was
not 
, in fact, a snob as that epithet is often carelessly used. Instead, he was a sardonic opponent of modernity’s all-too-common  propensity for  bogus equality and meretricious mediocrity, and a fierce defender of certain moral, theological, and aesthetic standards. Prop-erly understood, what Waugh was accused of is in fact a virtue, a  balance between what we might call the two vices of homogenized egalitarian-ism on the one hand and harshly critical intolerance on the other. Waugh needs to be invoked today as a patron saint of sorts for orthodox Catholics who can learn from him to “be not afraid” to stand against the vulgarizing tendencies by means of which the once-beautiful Roman rite has been destroyed in the name of mass appeal, doctrines gutted in the name of “relevance,” and socialism  propounded in the name of charity. His example can give us courage to  be properly contrarian, going against the tide safe in the knowledge, as Chesterton said, that only a dead fish swims with it. Northwestern University professor of English Joseph Epstein recently wrote a best-selling book called
Snobbery: The American Version
. Epstein’s is a winsome and witty handbook that does much to explain this phenomenon and to enable us to recognize it, not least in ourselves. Snobbery is not an exclusive product of English public schools or cultured Parisian salons. It is, in fact, common in every social stratum; it is found on the left, the right, and the murky middle; it even exists in a hubristic fashion among “anti-snobs.” Though he does not really acknowledge its  presence in religious contexts, we know it exists there, too. If snob- bery is such an ecumenical phe-nomenon, so to speak, it must be easily recogniz-able. But in fact, Epstein tells us, snobbery is sometimes hard to define and is very often mis-taken for other  phenomena. George San-tayana, as Epstein quotes him, tells us that snobbery “is a very vague description but a very clear insult.”
This charge of rank snobbery is one of the most frequently encountered accusations against Waugh, not least because of his vigorous defense of the Latin Mass and his criticisms of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, whose progress Waugh regarded with great, and greatly prophetic, gloom.
tered accusa-tions against Waugh, not least because of his vigorous defense of the Latin Mass
and his criticisms of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, whose progress Waugh regarded with great, and greatly prophetic, gloom.
This charge is often unquestioningly taken (usu-ally on wildly misunderstood evidence) to be true and, since true, to be
 prima  facie
 evidence that Waugh was
Literature
 
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Spring 2004
In Defense of Christian “Snobbery”
 Literature
 Nevertheless, Epstein is able to edge toward a “working definition”:
I take the snob to be someone out to impress his betters or depress those he takes to be his inferiors, and sometimes both; someone with an exaggerated respect for social position, wealth, and all the accoutrements of status; someone who accepts what he reckons to be the world’s valuation on people and things, and acts – sometimes cruelly, sometimes ridiculously  – on that reck-oning; some-one, finally, whose pride and accomplishment never come from within but always await the approving  judgment of others.
Let us straightaway admit that, under this definition of snobbery, there are certain aspects – some real, but many more badly misinterpreted or even apocryphal – in Waugh’s life and works that do lend some credence to the standard indictment against him. Prescinding from his fictional characters and novels (which we lack the time to examine here fully), we can say that there
is
 material in Waugh’s letters, diaries and essays that
could 
 be taken to support this charge. George Weigel, in a generally sympathetic portrait ten years ago, offers two of the funnier ones:
Despite his undisputed personal  bravery, Waugh’s anarchic personal-ity made him an impossible military officer. At one intelligence briefing during his early days in the Royal Marines, Waugh inquired whether it was true that “in the Romanian army no one beneath the rank of Major is  permitted to use lipstick.” In 1940, Waugh was charged with neglecting his duties during a training exercise;  part of the charge filed against him was that he had been seen smoking a cigar and drinking claret. When  pressed on this during a Court of In-quiry in 1945, he admitted to having  been smoking a cheroot and drink-ing Burgundy, but demanded of the Court why he should  be “run in by an officer so ill-bred that he could not distin-guish between these totally dif-ferent things.”
On such questions as class Waugh deliberately entertained highly unfashionable views, typically stated in the most  polemical and hyperbolic terms as a way of resisting what he saw as the creeping socialism of postwar Britain; on questions of religion he was equally out of step with the times.
 
In a century of increasing seculariza-tion, he was a convert to Catholicism un-afraid to write about God in his novels (in, for example, the
Sword of Honour 
 trilogy and then most clearly in
 Helena
, which Waugh regarded as his real magnum opus). It was in
 Brideshead Revisited 
, however, that his writing about the Catholic faith of an aristocratic fam-ily was to garner him both tremen-dous popularity as an author and also tremendous criticism, most famously from Edmund Wilson in a review of
 Brideshead 
 for
The New Yorker 
 in the mid-1940s. Wilson had previ-ously praised Waugh’s comic novels  but this time unleashed his fury in a charge that would be repeated like a mantra for the rest of Waugh’s life. “For Waugh’s snobbery, hitherto held in check by his satirical point of view, has emerged shameless and rampant…. His cult of the high nobility is allowed to become so rap-turous and solemn that it finally gives the impression of being the only real religion in the book.Wilson’s charge stuck. Other sto-ries grew up around Waugh and were routinely repeated by critics who sought to discredit him as a writer and dismiss him as a man. Waugh was usually untroubled by the stories  because he knew their proper context and intent. Since his death, however, most of these stories have been repeated widely, thereby discrediting a masterful writer and dismissing his art. In seeking to exonerate Waugh of the charge of snobbery accord-ing to Epstein’s first definition, we must bear in mind five things. First, many of the comments made  by, or attributed to, Waugh are nothing more than occasional rudeness and do not rise to the level of snobbery as Epstein first defines it. Waugh himself knew of his failings in this regard and his letters and diaries are replete with notes about the many hostesses to whom he sent flowers apologizing for being drunk or for saying beastly things at their dinner parties. He himself once admitted, “I always think to myself:
…Waugh was not, in fact, a  snob as that epithet is often carelessly used. Instead, he was a sardonic opponent of modernity’s all-too-common  propensity for bogus equality and meretricious mediocrity, and a fierce defender of certain moral, theological, and aesthetic standards.
 
Spring 2004
74
‘I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.’”Second, the vast majority of the stories in circulation
were told by
 
Waugh himself 
 against himself, thus violating, in one stroke, a central tenet of snobbery as Epstein defines it. We see this most clearly in the example of his novel
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold 
.
 
Transparently based on Waugh’s own life and experience,
 Pinfold 
 is a novel whose main char-acter goes temporarily crazy. When it was published in July 1957, it was not only immediately recognized as heavily autobiographical, but Waugh himself also cheerfully confessed it to be so (“I’ve been absolutely mad” and “clean off my onion!” he said to friends in letters explaining the novel). Based on a voyage in which Waugh became clinically paranoid and mentally disturbed through a combination of pharmacologically  primitive sleeping potions liberally taken with large splashes of crème de menthe, the novel invites numerous laughs by Waugh against himself: clearly not the behavior of a social sycophant seeking to impress his  betters.Third, there is a case to be made  – a case that could be made only in the past few years, in fact – that on numerous questions, Waugh, far from  being a snobbish conservative or reactionary crank, is actually an ally of many who have otherwise heaped scorn on him for his political and social views. It is not well known that Waugh was highly critical in a number of essays on questions such as urban planning, modern archi-tecture, the decline of the arts under the onslaught of Hollywood mass media, the triumph of homogeniz-ing bourgeois “good taste” (putting the contemporary reader in mind of Martha Stewart), and numer-ous other phenomena that are now lumped together under the rubric of “globalization” or what Waugh called the spread of “drab uniformity.” The charge of being a stuck-up country squire unconcerned with the “real” issues is thus heavily undermined.Fourth, we have Waugh’s words in his own defense. Following Wilson’s critical review
 ,
 Waugh’s almost immediate rejoinder was to say, “Nor am I worried about the charge of snobbery. Class-consciousness,  particularly in England, has been so much inflamed nowadays that to mention a nobleman is like mention-ing a prostitute 60 years ago.” Shortly thereafter, in a letter to the editor of
The Bell 
 (an upstart Irish periodical that had slavishly imitated Wilson’s criticism), Waugh replied, “I think  perhaps your reviewer is right in calling me a snob…but I do not think the preference is necessarily an offense against Charity, still less against the Faith.” Fifth and most important, the “snobbery” of which Waugh was accused was noth-ing more than an elaborate act that he put on, largely to annoy the ascen-dant political left in postwar Britain. (This point is very well grasped by Douglas Lane Patey, by far the most capable and outstanding biog-rapher of Waugh.) As Randolph Churchill and oth-ers in the 1950s first realized, Waugh was fond of “corrective snobbery” over and against the “proletarian snobbery” (an unctuous romanticiza-tion of the lower classes that was then engulfing the Labor government that Waugh called the “Atlee ter-ror”). As his son, Auberon, would describe it shortly after his father’s death, Evelyn “nurtured a romantic attachment to the aristocratic ideal [especially] when he discovered how much it annoyed people.” This point is especially well understood by Arthur Lunn:
Once, when we crossed the Atlantic together, Waugh, who was of course traveling first class, accepted an in-vitation to dine with me. I was trav-eling second class and, as he entered the dining room, he sniffed and said, “Curious how one can smell the  poor.” This amused me but some of those to whom I have told this story were not amused. And it was that kind of person whom Waugh delighted to shock by particu-larly outrageous  performances in his favorite comic role, the supers-nob.
This de-liberate and conscious role-playing was known to others as well. His friend Ann Fleming tells this story:
Some may have  been permitted to telephone Evelyn, to me it was forbidden, though I once broke the rule. Some hours after he left our house in Kent for a hotel nearby, a telegram arrived for him; it seemed to me urgent…. I telephoned and was crushed. “Your manservant should have delivered it,” he said reproachfully and rang
In Defense of Christian “Snobbery”
Literature
 Waugh needs to be invoked today as a patron saint of  sorts for orthodox Catholics who can learn from him to “be not afraid” to stand against the vulgarizing tendencies by means of which the once-beautiful  Roman rite has been destroyed in the name of mass appeal, doctrines  gutted in the name of “relevance,” and socialism  propounded in the name of charity. His example can give us courage to be  properly contrarian….

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