On June 17, 1953, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote to a friend: “I am now preparing a booklet which I hope (but perhaps it is too much to hope) may cause a paralytic stroke to my old enemy Evelyn Waugh.” The “booklet” in question was a historical study meant to make the Catholic Church look ridiculous. He eventually abandoned the project.
Trevor-Roper loathed Catholics in general but cultivated a special scorn for Waugh, with whom he carried on a feud that began in 1947, when Waugh attacked Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler, and ended only with Waugh’s death in 1966. As late as 1986, Waugh was still on Trevor-Roper’s mind. Trevor-Roper told his protégé Alasdair Palmer:
I forgive him a great deal because of his genuine love of our language. His wild fantasy and black humour are aspects of his genius, as well as of his warped character.
Yet his overall assessment was far from favorable:
He was, I believe, utterly cold-hearted: all his emotions were concentrated (apart from his writing) upon his social snobisme and his Catholicism, which was a variant of it, or rather, perhaps the ideological force behind it. He was a true reactionary—not just a troglodyte . . . but a committed, believing, uncompromising, intellectually consistent reactionary like (say) [Joseph] de Maistre.
He picked a quarrel with me in 1947—wrote me, out of the blue, a very nasty letter, attacked me in The Tablet, and then in other papers. I bit back occasionally, and then he became, as it seemed to me, somewhat paranoid. I heard many stories of his wild, and often intoxicated, denunciations, and since his death his published (and unpublished) letters have given further evidence of his hatred of me. He evidently regarded me as a particularly poisonous serpent who had slid into the garden of Brideshead and was corrupting its innocent Catholic inhabitants; which perhaps, to a certain extent, I was—or, as I would prefer to say, was provoked into being. In the end I tried to make peace with him, but my civil letter received only a curt formal acknowledgement.
The “nasty letter” was not in fact “out of the blue”: Trevor-Roper admits that it was provoked by “an admittedly injudicious remark by me about Jesuits.” Perhaps he saw in retrospect how it might have been offensive to claim (in The Last Days of Hitler) that Joseph Goebbels learnt his skills as a propagandist as the “prize pupil of a Jesuit seminary,” especially given that Goebbels had not in fact been educated by the Jesuits. But such details were omitted; Trevor-Roper preferred to fixate on Waugh’s alleged vendetta:
since his death, I have seen letters from him which attacked me well before that publication, so I no longer know the original cause of his hostility. The general background to it was certainly ideological.
No evidence has so far been published to corroborate Trevor-Roper’s claim that Waugh was aware of him before the middle of 1947. But he was right to suggest to Palmer that there was an “ideological background” to all this. As Trevor-Roper fancifully portrayed the situation:
During the war, and throughout the 1950s, a group of very articulate, socially reactionary Roman Catholics— all, or nearly all, converts—pushed themselves forward and evidently thought that they could be the ideologues of the post-war generation. They established themselves, by patronage and infiltration, in certain institutions (the British Council, the Foreign Office) and they wanted to establish themselves in the universities.
Perhaps there really was a modest Catholic resurgence in England prior to the Second Vatican Council. But Trevor-Roper overstates it to the point of paranoia.
Waugh and Trevor-Roper mirrored each other in ways that may have helped sharpen their mutual spite. Both came from professional-class backgrounds and fell in love with Oxford, and there became enamored of the aristocracy; later, both married into the upper classes; they shared a taste for luxury, grandeur, and the high life; but the greatest romance of both their lives was with their old university. Waugh and Trevor-Roper were both famously witty, combative, and flamboyantly reactionary (albeit in crucially different ways). Savage in print, they could be kind and generous in private. At heart, each was as sensitive as a poet.
Nevertheless, Waugh and Trevor-Roper had incompatible visions of reality. Trevor-Roper declared late in life that, though he had some sympathy with religious attitudes, “I also dislike 90% of Christians and Christianity.” Waugh, of course, was received into the Catholic Church (on September 29, 1930). Fr. Martin D’Arcy, in his 1976 essay “The Religion of Evelyn Waugh,” notes how easy it was to instruct Waugh in the run-up to his conversion. He had already made up his mind about the truth of Catholic teaching and taken the trouble to inform himself in some detail about what he believed. On October 20, 1930, a month after he was received into the Church, Waugh published an article in the Daily Express, “Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me,” outlining the less spiritual elements in his conversion:
The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequent lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanised state, already existent in Russia and rapidly spreading south and west.
It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilisation and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests. As the issues become clearer, the polite sceptic and with him that purely fictitious figure, the happy hedonist, will disappear.
The fundamental conflict in the West, he concluded, was between Christianity and chaos, and he rejected chaos.
For Waugh, Edward Gibbon epitomized a kind of glibly smug atheism that attracted clever adolescents. He knew it from personal experience; luckily he had managed to outgrow it. Not everybody did. As a schoolboy, Trevor-Roper became infatuated with Gibbon’s grandly sonorous style and mischievous skepticism. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains monumental even now as a work of scholarship; throughout his life, Trevor-Roper dreamed of equalling it in literary as well as historical terms.
Trevor-Roper’s unpublished writings of the 1930s record his inner turmoil in some detail. Despite his anti-Christian prejudices, he began his career as a church historian. Part of his research involved studying centuries-old commemorative brass plaques of the sort that could be read only if you laid a sheet of paper upon the surface and then rubbed a crayon over it to make a legible copy. According to his diary (December 5, 1938), he spent a jolly lunchtime laughing with a friend about the sorts of people who go to ancient churches to take brass rubbings of monuments; the next day, the same friend caught him on his knees in a church, taking a brass rubbing.
Trevor-Roper shared Waugh’s compulsion to write, but he dissipated most of these energies in private journals, his voluminous correspondence, and extensive notes for books that never got past the outline stage, on subjects including the Puritan Revolution, the Elizabethan moneylender Thomas Sutton, the succession crisis of the Elizabethan era, seventeenth-century Anglo-Spanish relations, the relationship of Protestantism to capitalism, and Oliver Cromwell. For decades he talked of putting together an ambitious multi-volume study of the English Civil War; this never materialized.
Some of his colleagues became concerned that he would waste his intellect. Wallace Notestein, professor emeritus of English history at Yale, repeatedly reminded him that his vocation was academic history, not trivial gossip: “The trouble with controversies is they will take your mind away from history. Historians need leisure and quiet almost as much as poets.” Xandra, Trevor-Roper’s future wife, had told him in 1954:
I feel you get waylaid by all the other small commitments of your life and pass by the main commitment of your life—I realise you must write—I could take pride in encouraging you to do this and in creating an atmosphere that would nourish your writing.
Only Xandra spelled out the truth:
After all, you must admit that you have not much output to show, so far—Archbishop Laud (which you won’t let me read), The Last Days of Hitler, some essays for The New Statesman and History Today, an unfinished pamphlet and an introduction to some very unedifying letters . . . As soon as your sabbatical year starts, you are to start writing—I am going to force you.
But not even she could find a way to make Trevor-Roper fulfill his promise; he would never equal the achievement of The Last Days of Hitler, his first, and only, real success.
The Last Days of Hitler, published in March 1947, boasts a verve and lightness of touch that are missing from the rest of Trevor-Roper’s published work. It was based partly on his wartime experience as an intelligence officer; this is the secret to its freshness and imaginative breadth. His character sketches of Hitler’s inner circle are often deft and evocative; his account has never been seriously challenged except on points of detail and interpretation. Yet some of Trevor-Roper’s passing claims about Catholics amounted to malicious slander. He drew direct parallels between the Jesuits and the Nazis: In addition to the false claim about Goebbels’s Jesuit education, he compared Heinrich Himmler to St. Robert Bellarmine. The same passage featured a gratuitous sideswipe at Cardinal Newman.
Among the Catholics outraged at Trevor-Roper’s unprovoked attacks was Evelyn Waugh. He wrote to Trevor-Roper privately and then—more bluntly—to the Tablet:
There was not the smallest reason why Mr Trevor-Roper should introduce Catholic theologians into his nasty story. They are dragged in ignorantly, maliciously and irrelevantly. Mr Trevor-Roper had a sensational subject. Apparently he thought it too good an opportunity to be missed for giving wide currency to his prejudices.
Waugh was barely a decade older than Trevor-Roper, but by 1947, when this first clash took place, he had already been famous for two decades as the most stylishly funny writer of his generation.
Waugh is arguably the greatest Anglophone novelist of the twentieth century. His peers include Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and V. S. Naipaul; he is the finest stylist of them all. Among American writers, perhaps only Ernest Hemingway has anything like his ability to evoke a scene vividly with a few choice words; but Waugh has a classical grace and elegance all his own. He mastered all the technical innovations of the Modernists whilst shunning self-conscious literary experimentation. His role as an entertainer is inextricable from his conception of his art.
He stands with T. S. Eliot and Paul Claudel as one of the foremost Christian artists in modern literature; yet his depictions of sin and vice can look suspiciously gleeful. His anarchic sense of humor often seems deployed against the forces of good and innocence; you wonder whether he is positively rooting for the most wicked, vicious characters he has created. Other Catholic novelists agonize about the Problem of Evil; Waugh shows you just how much fun evil can be. This seems true even in less hilarious books like A Handful of Dust (1934), where he makes undeniably clear where sin and vice always lead.
Waugh’s best-known book is Brideshead Revisited (1945), which is usually read as a nostalgic elegy for a Catholic, aristocratic, hierarchical world destroyed by modernity and the Second World War, at least by those who hurry through the last chapters, or radically misread the ending. Yet the novel points ultimately toward hope, albeit of a sort that bewilders or repels those who reject Christian teachings.
On December 5, 1953, Trevor-Roper published a review in The New Statesman that would later be reprinted in his collection Historical Essays (1957) under the title “Sir Thomas More and the English Lay Recusants.” The prose is high-pitched, denouncing “the modern priestly biographers of the recusants,” who lament the sixteenth-century persecution of Catholics without realizing “that a society at war has the right to protect itself not only against traitors, but against their dupes.” Trevor-Roper sounds angrily constipated, as he usually did when discussing Catholicism, all the way to his final insult:
Dead as mutton, the recusants can still serve to bait a priestly trap. Come unto us, say the Roman clergy, come into the Church, says Mr Evelyn Waugh (for in the intellectual emptiness of modern English Catholicism only the snob-appeal is left) . . .
Of course he was expecting a response; but he baited his trap less expertly than he realized. Waugh wrote to his friend Fr. Philip Caraman, S.J., (1911–1998) on December 7:
Have you read Roper in this week’s New Statesman? I spotted four errors in the first three lines and have written about them. I seemed to find a dozen others. I am sure that someone better-educated than I am could find a hundred. Would it not be a good thing to employ one of your learned friends to go through the articles with a fine comb and expose them all in a long article? It is time Roper was called to order and this article seems a happy opportunity.
Waugh’s first letter to the editor of the New Statesman (December 12, 1953) begins sharply:
Why does this contributor write so very often about the Catholic Church, a subject on which he is conspicuously ill-informed? Sometimes one has to read three or four paragraphs before striking the howler which reveals the quality of his scholarship. This week three lines suffice.
After two minor corrections, Waugh supplies a major one:
Among men of education “recusant” has a limited and useful meaning. It has nothing to do with high treason and the denial of the monarch’s spiritual supremacy; it simply means refusing to attend Anglican Church services. But even in Mr Roper’s loose employment, he has got his facts wrong . . .
The ending is harsh:
Later, among the strange jumble of speculations and misstatements, Mr. Roper truly remarks that in the last century the English Catholic bishops were chary of encouraging men of their faith to take University degrees. Can he wonder at this when he himself presents the spectacle of a tutor in Modern History who clumsily and offensively attacks the Catholic religion?
On December 26, Trevor-Roper’s reply to Waugh was published. He conceded two errors, but refused to back down on the term “recusant”:
I am far from my books, but I think that if Mr Waugh will take a little trouble before screaming about my “howlers,” he will find that before 1570 the word “recusant” was generally applied to those who refused the oath of supremacy; it was only later that it acquired its meaning of non-attendance at church.
Waugh responded by quoting the dictionary’s definition of “recusant” as “one, especially a Roman Catholic, [. . .] who refused to attend the services of the Church of England.” Amid other corrections, he also got round to addressing Trevor-Roper’s initial taunt:
Mr Trevor-Roper’s position as a tutor to Christian undergraduates seems to me dubious. In the essay under discussion he wrote: “In the intellectual emptiness of modern English Catholicism only the snob-appeal” (where do young dons pick up their vocabulary?) “is left.”
This is to insult not only Roman Catholicism, but all forms of Christianity. No one can doubt that we possess the Scriptures, the Creeds and the Fathers. We claim much else beside. The sane Christian criticism of Roman Catholicism is that we are too full and have enriched the original deposit of faith with legends and opinions. If we are empty then what does Christendom contain?
By now, as Waugh noted in his diary, “My dispute with Roper in the New Statesman becomes tediously pedantic.” Trevor-Roper issued another lengthy, irritable reply, claiming superior knowledge of the term “recusant” on the grounds that his forebears, unlike Waugh’s, remained Catholic until the mid-eighteenth century. Waugh shot back: “I cannot accept the theory that because Mr Roper’s family apostatised more recently than mine, he has inherited a superior insight into the proper use of language.” He also reiterated that Trevor-Roper misused the term “recusant” more than once, defended himself unconvincingly even by his own logic, and did not, despite his training as a church historian, understand how cardinals were appointed; in addition, he got the date wrong of St. John Fisher’s execution, as he himself grudgingly admitted. Trevor-Roper toothlessly snarled in response: “May I recommend to Mr Waugh a period of silent reading?” The editors allowed him the last word; but he had obviously been defeated.
In 1957, Trevor-Roper was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, at the age of only forty-three, and immersed himself enthusiastically in administrative intrigues and academic catfights that ended only in 1980 when he left Oxford to become Master of Peterhouse, which was then the most traditionalist of Cambridge colleges. Here too his time was consumed with endless petty rows that once again got in the way of serious scholarly work.
Lucrative journalism turned out to be an even bigger problem. In spring 1983, Trevor-Roper was asked by the Sunday Times to authenticate a set of documents that a German magazine claimed were Hitler’s diaries. He might have quite literally written the book on Hitler’s last days; but he spent little time in archives and, as he once confessed, did not “read German with ease or pleasure”; in short, he had no surefire means of evaluating the diaries. After claiming they were authentic, Trevor-Roper belatedly had second thoughts; but by the time he retracted the claim, it was too late; when they were revealed to be obvious fakes, he was publicly, internationally, universally humiliated.
Trevor-Roper carried on at Cambridge for a few more years, showing remarkable kindness to young men who approached him for guidance. One of them, Blair Worden, his literary executor, has worked tirelessly to make Trevor-Roper’s unpublished work available to a wider readership; Richard Davenport-Hines has done a truly exemplary job editing Trevor-Roper’s letters and diaries; Adam Sisman’s 2010 biography Hugh Trevor-Roperv is unexpectedly absorbing. To have men of this quality as advocates, Trevor-Roper must have done something right. And yet the question remains: Does his life deserve to be remembered, except as a cautionary tale?
Trevor-Roper was the quintessential example of a Young Fogey, a subspecies of dandy that emerged in the twentieth century as England began to lose her power, confidence, and grip on her empire. Young Fogeys are rarely members of the British ruling class; they merely dress and speak as though they were. The illusion they cultivate is not always self-conscious (or successful); even so, Young Fogeys can become genuinely dangerous if they are mistaken for the real thing and begin to gain authority on that account.
Young Fogeys aspire to professions—academia, diplomacy, the civil service, the bar—that might in theory allow them to write books in their spare time; but these days the more successful among them spend their twenties as researchers at think tanks, or as “spads” (special advisers) to Tory MPs, if not in some area of the financial services industry that has direct influence over the Conservative Party. A select few relieve their frustrated literary ambitions through journalism (usually on financial or political topics as opposed to anything that might be interesting to read). But most prefer to daydream about “being a writer.”
The Young Fogey is a divided soul. He has a taste for the art, literature, music, architecture, and clothing of the past, particularly when they originate from a hierarchical, aristocratic culture. But the Young Fogey isn’t in a position to trust his instincts, because he is uncomfortable in his own body as well as in the society in which he lives. He feels isolated and alienated from others by virtue of his intellect, even when he isn’t particularly intelligent.
His intellect is the most important thing about him; and yet the Young Fogey is ashamed of it and seeks other means of demonstrating effortless superiority. In the absence of beauty, inherited wealth, or noble birth, the most obvious form of unearned status is age. The nineteen-year-old Young Fogey dresses and talks as though he were forty-five because he has no other obvious means of claiming status. He could show his exam results, but most people don’t care.
Evelyn Waugh was never a Young Fogey. True, from the age of forty-five he had the cardiovascular health of a man at least twenty-five years his senior. A self-consciously reactionary persona gave him some means of coping with the fact that by the time he was fifty, a single flight of stairs could reduce him to a wheezing, sweaty wreck. And in his “Art of Fiction” interview for The Paris Review (autumn 1963), he famously claimed:
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.
Yet even here he was not a Fogey. Fogeyism is above all an expression of impotence. There is no such thing as an artistic, creative, or generative Fogey: Fogeyism is morbidly parasitical on the past. Hugh Trevor-Roper represents the archetype of the kind of Young Fogey that has come to dominate the British Conservative Party since the early 1950s: the Reactionary Whig Fogey.
Fogey Whiggery arose after the collapse of the Whigs’ political home, the British Liberal Party, which once had been the Conservative Party’s main rival for power, but tended to win between six and twelve seats in parliament in the decades following the Second World War. Self-described Whigs like Trevor-Roper avoided the Tories’ new opponents, the Labour Party, out of principled resistance to socialism or tribal allegiance (or simple snobbery). Instead, these Whigs held their noses and began to ally themselves with the Tories, whom they continued to despise as their intellectual inferiors.
Whigs who gained influence over the Conservative Party sought to refashion it along progressive, egalitarian, materialist lines that suited their enlightened theories. Most wanted to release it from the influence of the Church of England, whose leadership remained unpalatably conservative as late as the 1970s. But undercover Whigs could not do any of this openly, so they covered up their quiet revolution by pretending to be reactionaries, until they were duped by their own deception.
Reactionary Whig Fogeys dress and talk like old-fashioned defenders of the throne, the altar, the landed classes, and traditional British culture; but they are merely play-acting as Victorian-era grandees. At heart they are no different from private-equity asset-strippers in their fixation on short-term benefits and their sheer incompetence at ensuring the survival of any institution with which they are entrusted.
The old British ruling class maintained their empire with impressive efficiency; their replacements, Reactionary Whig Fogey impostors with degrees in politics, philosophy, and economics from Balliol, can scarcely organize an effective replacement bus service for a broken-down commuter train. Look at what they have achieved, after fourteen years of controlling a Conservative Party–led government. It is difficult to identify positive accomplishments—just consistent disappointments and the occasional administrative catastrophe, alongside a steady decline in quality of life. Reactionary Whig Fogeys have talked tough about immigration policy while consistently failing to control national borders, or even keep an accurate count of who enters or leaves the country. This failure in particular has alienated a high enough proportion of once-loyal Tory voters to be fatal for the entire party. Why would anybody want to be ruled by people so treacherous, inept, and intellectually mediocre?
In Trevor-Roper’s generation, the other major writers among Reactionary Whig Fogeys were the philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer (1910–1978), the historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), and the historian Richard Cobb (1917–1996). All were professional academics with pretensions to essay-writing. None has left anything of abiding interest or value.
Fogey Whiggery grew from an attempt to reconcile a nostalgic aesthetic stance with a progressive, materialist intellectual position that radically contradicts it; with such an unstable foundation it was inevitably doomed to failure, defeat, and humiliation. In many ways, being doomed is the point. Fogey Whiggery is rooted in a sentimental attraction to aristocratic hierarchy, High Church ritual, ancient traditions, high culture, and civilization itself. None of these elements coheres with the Reactionary Whig Fogey’s oft-stated principles of political economy. Indeed, if put into action, those principles would destroy all of it, for they leave no room for anything that cannot instantly be monetized or reduced to a numerical value: art, music, architecture; the immortal soul; God himself. There is no substantial difference between the beliefs of the Reactionary Whig Fogey and those of the postwar technocrat who reduces people to interchangeable economic vectors whose sole purpose is to help achieve economic growth. At least the technocrat is honest with himself about what he really holds sacred.
And so despite all their pretensions to “culture” and “enlightenment,” the Reactionary Whig Fogeys have left behind no monuments. The closest thing to a memorial for twentieth-century Fogey Whiggery is Wolfson College, Oxford, whose main building was completed in 1974. Here the principles of Fogey Whiggery are embodied in cheap concrete that is not only unsightly and degrading, but also unsuitable for the damp local climate. Wolfson College is too pitiful to be meaningfully ugly.
Waugh had no elaborate vision for the future, just a good idea of what the future would hold. His entire post-conversion oeuvre meditates implicitly on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. If you miss this aspect of his narratives, then you will think of him as cruel, nihilistic, and occasionally sentimental. You might also misinterpret the sanctuary lamps that continue to be lit in the chapels of great houses even after the families who built them are gone, in Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952–1961): the flames signal that the Body of Christ is present in the tabernacle on the altar. Our traditions, our culture, and our civilization itself depend on that continuing presence, which is not merely a symbol.
In 1928, not long before his conversion, Waugh wrote a biography of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and writer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who harvested (or plundered) Catholic traditions and symbols to reuse them in his work. Waugh could see that Rossetti was “a Catholic without the discipline or consolation of the Church,” and recognized that
there was fatally lacking in him that essential rectitude that underlies the serenity of all really great art. The sort of unhappiness that beset him was not the sort of unhappiness that does beset a great artist; all his brooding about magic and suicide are symptomatic not so much of genius as mediocrity. There is a spiritual inadequacy, a sense of ill-organisation about all he did.
In other words: It isn’t enough to copy the great artists of the past: you must share the essential elements of their faith. As Waugh grew into his vocation, he began to see how he might need more than talent to succeed. What really matters is a writer’s ability to discern reality and reflect or illuminate it for the reader. Waugh is often praised as a stylist, but style is merely a vehicle for communicating the truth. Waugh saw the truth clearly and had an effective means of sharing it with others. This is why his work will survive for as long as the English language continues to exist: because he told the truth.
