Evelyn Waugh and JRR Tolkien on World War II
There has been something of a controversy on X, ever since Tucker Carlson released an interview with Darryl Cooper, aka ‘Martyrmade’.
Cooper and Carlson did the unthinkable. They criticized Winston Churchill.
I did the same thing years ago, generally along the same lines as Cooper, with both of us largely inspired by that old lion, Pat Buchanan.
I will not repeat the argument about Churchill and World War II, suffice to say it is interesting how in today’s world it less offensive to criticize Jesus than Churchill.
What I would like to do is point out the contrived nature of the Churchill cult and the World War II mythology, by simply presenting the views of two ‘traditionalist’ English writers, JRR Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh.
Both writers were Catholic, but neither are considered ‘radical’, and their books remain acclaimed and widely read by people of all political stripes.
Tolkien served in World War I and trained as a cryptographer for World War II. His son was in the RAF.
Waugh saw action in World War II and wrote one of the greatest war novels of all time based on his experiences, his Sword of Honour trilogy.
For decades, many have assumed The Lord of the Rings is somehow some kind of allegory of World War II, with Sauron as Hitler (Hitler is, after all, worse than Satan). Tolkien himself stated that his work was not an allegory at all, and if it were, he would have written it completely differently.
From his foreword to LOTR:
Tolkien seems to be suggesting here that hobbit-like people would be enslaved in the post-war world, and that the allies became evil themselves to defeat evil.
Would Tolkien be despised by modern conservative types today? How dare he question the righteousness of the war!
He apparently even wondered out loud during the war if a victory leading to American-dominated global cosmopolitanism would be better than defeat. He also often mocked Churchill directly.
In 1956, he went further, disdaining ‘sacred democracy’ and suggesting slavery was present and on the way in England:
I am not a 'democrat' only because 'humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some orc gets hold of a ring of power - and then we get and are getting slavery.
Evelyn Waugh was even more direct in his attack on the war mythology.
In Sword of Honour, his protagonist, Guy Crouchback, leaves his self-imposed exile in Italy to attempt to join the British war effort, on the day Hitler and Stalin announce their Non-Aggression Pact. Here was a chance to find some kind of heroism, by taking up the sword against both communism and fascism, in homage to the crusaders of old.
He is quickly very disillusioned when he wonders why Russia is so quickly given a pass by Britain:
Russia invaded Poland. Guy found no sympathy among these old soldiers for his own hot indignation.
'My dear fellow, we've quite enough on our hands as it is. We can't go to war with the whole world.'
'Then why go to war at all? If all we want is prosperity, the hardest bargain Hitler made would be preferable to victory. If we are concerned with justice the Russians are as guilty as the Germans.'
'Justice?' said the old soldiers. 'Justice?'
'Besides,' said Box-Bender when Guy spoke to him of the matter which seemed in no one's mind but his, 'the country would never stand for it. The socialists have been crying blue murder against the Nazis for five years but they are all pacifists at heart. So far as they have any feeling of patriotism it's for Russia. You'd have a general strike and the whole country in collapse if you set up to be just.'
'Then what are we fighting for?'
'Oh we had to do that, you know. The socialists always thought we were pro-Hitler, God knows why. It was quite a job keeping neutral over Spain. You missed all that excitement living abroad. It was quite ticklish, I assure you. If we sat tight now there'd be chaos. What we have to do now is to limit and localize the war, not extend it.'
Is Waugh suggesting that the war effort had nothing to do with justice, but rather some kind of internal communist sympathy?
The comment by Crouchback’s politician brother-in-law, Box-Bender, about localizing the war is deeply ironic. By the end of it all, half of Europe and China would be communist, and Japan would have been nuked.
Later in the book, the English king displays a sword in Westminster Abbey as a gift and tribute to the steel-hearted Russian army. Crouchback is repulsed by the numbers of people lining up to pay their respects:
Guy Crouchback drove past the line of devotees on his way to luncheon. Unmoved by the popular enthusiasm for the triumphs of ‘Joe’ Stalin, who now qualified for the name of ‘Uncle’… he was not tempted to join them in their piety.
By the end, Crouchback is posted to Yugoslavia (as Waugh was, in the company of Churchill’s son, Randolph) where he is appalled by the British-supported communist partisans, who are about to take over the country and are already persecuting Christians. Crouchback is shocked to discover his fellow officers openly support the Soviets.
Waugh was by all accounts a courageous, if eccentric and difficult, soldier. Yet this is how he concludes his comedic epic on the war: with a deeply depressed English Christian wondering why on earth his own government is supporting people who hate his own faith.
Sword of Honour was not Waugh’s only war novel. His most celebrated work, Brideshead Revisisted, has an important World War II frame. The manor house, Brideshead, is revisited by the protagonist Charles Ryder when it is expropriated by the government as a military training ground.
Ryder’s adjutant at Brideshead during the ‘revisit’, is Hooper, who is symbolic of the new Englishman. He has no real cultural education. His history knowledge is nothing but ‘a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change.’ He disparages the very existence of Brideshead and its chapel. Waugh presents the coming age as the age of Hooper - hardly the sentiments of Churchill who was busy waxing lyrical about ‘Britain’s finest hour’.
One of the great hollow men of literature is Waugh’s character Rex Mottram, an MP who had married into the Brideshead family prior to the war.
After the marriage fails, Julia, his wife, describes him thus:
"Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally," she said. "It's just that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn't there…
"...Oh, Rex's parties! Politics and money. They can't do anything except for money; if they walk round the lake they have to make bets about how many swans they see... sitting up till two, amusing Rex's girls, hearing them gossip, rattling away endlessly on the backgammon board while the men play cards and smoke cigars. The cigar smoke... I can smell it in my hair when I wake up in the morning; it's in my clothes when I dress at night. Do I smell of it now? D'you think that woman who rubbed me felt it in my skin?”
Not many readers have noticed, however, that Rex is also presented as being a key member of the Churchill wing of the Conservative Party. Years after his marriage, he and his set are described as:
…politicians, "young conservatives" in the early forties, with sparse hair and high blood-pressure; a socialist from the coal mines who had already caught their clear accents, whose cigars came to pieces in his lips, whose hand shook when he poured himself out a drink; a lovesick columnist, who alone was silent, gloating sombrely on the only woman of the party; a financier older than the rest, and, one might guess from the way they treated him, richer; a woman they called ‘Grizel,’ a knowing rake whom, in their hearts, they all feared a little.
Their conversation at their parties mirrors the sentiments of Churchill exactly; they support the disgraced Edward VII prior to his abdication, and they call for ‘a strong line’ in Europe.
"All that's wanted is a good strong line."
"A line from Rex."
"And a line from me."
"We'll give Europe a good strong line. Europe is waiting for a speech from Rex."
"And a speech from me."
"And a speech from me. Rally the freedom-loving peoples of the world. Germany will rise; Austria will rise. The Czechs and the Slovaks are bound to rise."
"To a speech from Rex and a speech from me."
"What about a rubber? How about a whiskey? Which of you chaps will have a big cigar?"
Later, we hear that Rex’s fortunes, political, financial, reputational, are all in decline, and that only a war can put them right. Those who know Churchill’s biography may wonder just what Waugh is implying.
Once the war is in full swing, we learn that the war has done exactly that. Rex is in Churchill’s cabinet, his reputation restored.
But Brideshead is desecrated, except for its chapel, where Ryder ends the novel in prayer.
Tolkien and Waugh. Two titans of modern English literature. Both Christian, but otherwise very different. They did not admire each other’s work.
Yet neither saw fit to write panegyrics to Churchill or the war effort or the world that was born after.
Why is that?