Confessing Compassion: Waugh’s Penitential Performance in Sword of Honour

The primary obstacle to straightforward autobiography is not the fallibility of memory but the difficulty of confronting the moral consequences of one’s actions.

james o’rourke
Sex, Lies, and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession

Our religion is not simply the avoiding of evil; rather does it present the positive character of a system of love.

claude jean-nesmy
Conscience and Confession

Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) openly advertised itself as a tale from the author’s life. As a prefatory note confided, “Three years ago Mr. Waugh suffered a brief bout of hallucination closely resembling what is here described.”¹ Thus cued, critics have been “prompt to treat the book as a confession rather than a novel.”² On this view, the voices that torment Pinfold are penitential “externalizations of [Waugh’s] own self-hatred.”³ Yet Pinfold, restored to lucidity, asks why, if his conscience were the source of the voices’ charges, he did not prepare a more devastating indictment: “I mean to say . . . I could make a far blacker and more plausible case than they ever did.”⁴ As I have argued elsewhere, this unanswered question works to subvert the assumption that this tale is an exercise in self-accusation. The novel neither depicts Pinfold’s confession nor enacts Waugh’s own. What it exposes is the falseness of critics’ stock reprobation of Waugh’s putative sins. No humble penance, Ordeal is a sustained critique of the damning fiction of Waugh that reviewers had substituted for evaluation of his art.⁵

Yet Waugh’s postwar oeuvre does feature an act of novelistic contrition, namely in the World War II trilogy redacted and issued in a single volume as Sword of Honour (1965). While Sykes claims the autobiographical element in Waugh’s fiction grew “ever smaller as he matured,”⁶ I hold that it is in this final fiction that he makes his most personal literary confession. For it is here that he most openly admits to sins against his faith, particularly to his having put first the war effort, and then his writing, ahead of the Christian call to service. If Sword’s confession has received less attention than Ordeal’s, this is perhaps because its rehearsal of autobiographical error is no more straightforward than my first epigraph would suggest. Though Foucault defines confession as “a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement,”⁷ this is obviously not how fictional acts of authorial confession operate, least of all in a novel that eschews the equation of writer and hero that Ordeal mischievously invites. Instead, Sword makes its most specific confessions indirectly, using minor characters esteemed by protagonist Guy Crouchback, but ultimately condemned by the narrative, to atone for failures of Christian charity definitive of Waugh’s own war. Through the characters of Apthorpe and Ludovic, Waugh admits to having made idols out of the army and his art, respectively. If these characters’ resemblance to the wartime Waugh and their exposure as frauds suggest penitence on his part, this is confirmed by Crouchback, who concludes his war by begging God’s pardon for taking soldierly sins as his highest goods. Thus Waugh concludes his career not by confessing to crimes retailed by hostile reviewers, but by seeking atonement in a tale of compassion for what he saw as deadlier faults.

Based on Waugh’s wartime service, Sword is “more closely autobiographical than any of his work to date.”⁸ Indeed, by so hewing to the facts of the author’s life, this text pursues the kind of confession critics were quick to discern in Ordeal. As Patey remarks, Sword foregrounds the act of confession in a way no other Waugh text does.⁹ Three times we follow Crouchback into the confessional: in Italy, before he heads home to England to enlist;¹⁰ in Egypt, prior to his experience of defeat and dishonor at the fall of Crete (SH...