The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh: Faith and Art in the Post-War Fiction by D. Marcel DeCoste (review)

The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh: Faith and Art in the Post-War Fiction. By D. Marcel DeCoste. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4094-7084-7 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-4094-7085-4 (ebook). ISBN 978-1-4094-7086-1 (epub). Pp. viii + 188. £62.99. ‘‘Do not say that a Christian art is impossible. Say rather that it is difficult, doubly difficult—fourfold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another: for it is a question of harmonizing two absolutes’’ (Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. Joseph W. Evans. University of Notre Dame Press, 1974, 65). The subject of this engaging study is Evelyn Waugh’s endeavor, in the second half of his career, to harmonize Maritain’s ‘‘two absolutes,’’ which in the words of D. Marcel DeCoste are the two ‘‘vocations’’ to faith and art. The first vocation is theological and universal: God’s summoning of humanity to a life of faith, hope, and love. The second, also of divine origin, is private and personal: each of us is commissioned by God with a unique task, probably not spectacular, but still important sub specie aeternitatis. Waugh discusses these general and specific callings in various writings, referring for instance to the ‘‘all-wise God who has a particular task for each individual soul, which the individual is free to accept or decline’’ (qtd. in DeCoste 4), and he understands his own special vocation to be the composition of works of literary art. Maritain’s observation about the difficulty of Christian art is especially apt when, like Waugh, the artist is drawn to l’art pour l’art, a theoretical position which DeCoste terms ‘‘Aestheticism.’’ DeCoste convincingly shows the harmonization of the two vocations to be a major dynamic and theme of this substantial but diverse series of novels, nine works composed over twenty years, from Brideshead Revisited (1945) through Unconditional Surrender (1961), the final volume in the Sword of Honor trilogy (rev. 1965). DeCoste is perfectly at home with his subject. His evidence comes from a variety of sources beyond the novels, including Waugh’s essays, letters, and diary entries; as well as manuscripts, book reviews, and the works of spiritual mentors such as Martin D’Arcy and Ronald Knox. Thankfully, these sources do not crowd out the novels themselves; the dominant element of every chapter is thoughtful, detailed literary analysis. Perhaps DeCoste’s most important secondary source is Waugh’s essay ‘‘Fan-Fare’’ (1946), published in Life magazine shortly after the runaway success of Brideshead in America. Waugh writes, ‘‘[I]n my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular: a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his relation to God’’ (The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher, Penguin, 1986, 302). For DeCoste, these lines constitute a ‘‘manifesto’’ for Waugh’s postwar novels as well as an early formulation of the two vocations of his thesis, designated throughout the book as faith and art, Catholicism and aestheticism, and (once, stretching a point) the sacred and the profane. 340 Christianity & Literature 66(2) The first chapter begins in the right place, because especially in comparison with the prewar novels, style and religion are the hallmarks of Brideshead Revisited. DeCoste argues that vocation, in both the general and the individual sense, is the interpretive key to the novel, explaining the central plot and almost every subplot. ‘‘The novel offers a serial study of vocations fled, thwarted, repudiated, and found’’ (19). DeCoste shows that in the very writing of his memoirs the protagonist Charles Ryder completes his conversion by finding and accepting a new and explicitly Christian artistic vocation. His good cheer in the final lines of the novel thus represents two forms of Christian joy, or rather two aspects of a single Christian joy, for he has found satisfaction for both his soul and his hands. It is a perfect...