Throughout his novels, Evelyn Waugh is consistently pessimistic about the future of modernity. Those characters who are most modern are also the most heartless, for they have the least to lose. Like Tony and Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust or Mr. Joyboy in The Loved One, the modern man for Waugh had no reason to honor family, religious, or moral customs. Further, since ultimate meaning had been stripped from life, any normal sentiments and pleasure were no longer there to be had. In the modern world, sex is painful (and unproductive), war is pointless, the art of today will be forgotten by tomorrow. Even the death of a child doesn’t warrant a few tears from his parents.
Confronted with this bleak waste land, the modern man becomes like Adam Fenwick-Symes or like Hooper. Either he gives himself over to meaningless entertainment and frivolity, or he becomes a passionless victim of ennui (which is, ultimately, what Adam Fenwick-Symes succumbs to)....
All these thing are evidence to Waugh of modernity’s self-deception. The impending threat of war hangs over the Bright Young Things in both Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited. As Waugh sees it, the writhing, pleasure-seeking mass of vile bodies are merely trying to find a diversion when they know in their heart that they are living in a pre-cataclysmic world. Like in the days Noah, men were eating and drinking and carrying on while Noah was constructing his great ark. They lived in its shadow. Everyone knew what that ark meant, what prophecy it spoke without need for words. This is why Waugh, in the epilogue to Brideshead Revisited, alludes back to the words of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” For Waugh, this is modernity in summation. This is the Age of Hooper—the age when the modern project was made “desolate and the work all brought to nothing.” One of the first things the Preacher sought to justify life was pleasure. It was also the first thing to disappoint:
I said of laughter, “It is mad,” and of pleasure, “What use is it?” I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine....I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun (Ecclesiastes 2:2-3,10-11).
Compared to Vile Bodies, Brideshead Revisited is much more hopeful. The object of satire is the same in both books, but his conversion deeply colors the latter (the very reason that critics like the Amises disliked it compared to his earlier works of satire). While the impending war acts like a threat of judgment in both novels, Waugh offers his readers an Ark in Brideshead Revisited where he leaves them to drown in Vile Bodies. George McCartney illustrates this:
Ryder is an artist who makes his living by painting ancestral homes just before they are torn down, and his career becomes an elegiac mission to record the remains of a dying civilization lest it disappear without a trace. Waugh seems to have thought his fiction would perform a similar function. In 1946 he remarked portentously that he foresaw “in the dark age opening that the scribes [might] play the part of the monks after the first barbarian victories.” The monks “were not satirists,” he reminds us, but chroniclers of civilization’s decline. That would be his role also: a sardonic scribe recording the negligence with which the West was letting itself slip into ruin.
This association of modernism with barbarism was a common one for Waugh. Shortly after his conversion, he wrote an article for the Daily Express in order to explain why he had converted to Rome. He wrote: “It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos. It is much the same situation as existed in the early Middle Ages.” The barbarianism which Waugh associates with modernity would destabilize the entire “moral and artistic organization of Europe” and give way to a mechanized culture which has no aesthetic feeling and which will inevitably give itself over to a despotism like already existed in communistic Russia.
This, then, is the heart of Waugh’s polemic against modernity. According to Waugh, the great modern project which began four hundred years ago had reached a crisis point in the early 20th century. Man had inoculated himself against the work of divine grace, and in doing so had unintentionally killed both his nervous and immune system. He was now unable to feel anything or to ward off any vile epidemic that was circulating. Man viewed the world like a machine, and was now surprised that he lacked any trace of passion. Man had exiled God back to where he came from, and now had nothing left to protect himself against himself. So now man would don such deliberate disguises to mask from himself the world that he had created—to distract from the hollowness in his own soul.
