Two British “W’s” have captured my attention of late.
First, there’s Evelyn Waugh, whose Brideshead Revisited I first read around two years ago, then re-read before ordering a spate of Waugh’s books, of which only The Loved One has been read. More recently, indeed only in the last month, I have become acquainted with P.G. Wodehouse and his Wooster-Jeeves novels. Right Ho, Jeeves; The Mating Season; and Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, without exaggerating, have kept me in stitches.
What’s more, if George Weigel and Jody Bottum are to be believed, Waugh and Wodehouse constitute as faithful and forceful a pair of Christian writers amidst the dessicated remains of modernity as one might fine. And this reality, I believe, is all the more admirable knowing that it is behind, amidst, and beyond the consummate artfulness of their prose. To be formed by reading the right kinds of authors is paramount. We cannot help having our imaginations shaped by the lives, ideas, and communities in which we vicariously participate when reading. Who, then, and what, must I read? Waugh and Wodehouse?
Among the gems cited by Weigel in his First Things essay (“St. Evelyn Waugh”) is this extract from a letter Waugh wrote to John Betjeman:
Saints are simply souls in heaven. Some people have been so sensationally holy in life that we know they went straight to heaven and so put them in the calendar. We all have to become saints before we get to heaven. That is what purgatory is for. And each individual has his own peculiar form of sanctity which he must achieve or perish.
Weigel comments on this passage: “What counted was sanctity. Moreover, what counted was to discover the vocation by which God had determined how the individual was to be sanctified.”
Our vocations differ, in one sense, but they are united in another, far more profound sense–we bear our callings for the sake of a sanctity that brings us to God, or else we perish. Shall I be made a saint through my service to Baylor, or shall I perish? Is it herein that I have found my vocation, and thus herein that I must labor patiently until Christ returns or my body fails? As Waugh puts it, “It is no good my saying, ‘I wish I could be like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross.’ I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh–after God knows what experiences in purgatory.” I can only be St. Douglas Henry, after God knows what travail–and rest and peace and prayer and singing–in this life and upon the Mountain that I too must climb.
