The Roots of Honor

Re-reading Evelyn Waugh’s Crouchback trilogy, just published here in England as a single long novel, one sees that it is a great modern work, a classic of our time. In it Waugh has succeeded in disciplining his energies by means of a complex over-all design, and so can establish meanings more ambitious than he had attempted before. As far as its religious themes are concerned, the novel completes the development begun in Brideshead, and it will give no comfort to critics who assert, rather hooperishly, that Waugh confuses Catholicism with Burke’s Peerage. It is also the novel about the Second World War, the one which best assays its actual meaning.

There is some advantage in returning to this novel while living in England, for Waugh has dramatized and so made explicit something you can sense even in casual conversations here, and on the Continent, and which goes far toward explaining those European attitudes (as on Vietnam) which we—justifiably—find so infuriating. There is a fragile prosperity here, and everywhere the potential means of well-being; but everywhere, too, one feels the presence of those two wars. Their cost to America, economically and culturally, was picayune in comparison with their cost to Europe. These countries would fight again, in a pinch, but the sense of having been had is widespread, if not always fully conscious. The political results of both wars were—and are—atrocious; the costs in every area of life have been enormous; and the wars themselves, in sober retrospect, exude self-deception, fraud, and comprehensive absurdity.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Re-reading Evelyn Waugh’s Crouchback trilogy, just published here in England as a single long novel, one sees that it is a great modern work, a classic of our time. In it Waugh has succeeded in disciplining his energies by means of a complex over-all design, and so can establish meanings more ambitious than he had attempted before. As far as its religious themes are concerned, the novel completes the development begun in Brideshead, and it will give no comfort to critics who assert, rather hooperishly, that Waugh confuses Catholicism with Burke’s Peerage. It is also the novel about the Second World War, the one which best assays its actual meaning.

There is some advantage in returning to this novel while living in England, for Waugh has dramatized and so made explicit something you can sense even in casual conversations here, and on the Continent, and which goes far toward explaining those European attitudes (as on Vietnam) which we—justifiably—find so infuriating. There is a fragile prosperity here, and everywhere the potential means of well-being; but everywhere, too, one feels the presence of those two wars. Their cost to America, economically and culturally, was picayune in comparison with their cost to Europe. These countries would fight again, in a pinch, but the sense of having been had is widespread, if not always fully conscious. The political results of both wars were—and are—atrocious; the costs in every area of life have been enormous; and the wars themselves, in sober retrospect, exude self-deception, fraud, and comprehensive absurdity.