Evelyn Waugh's Reception into the Church

The train from London pulled into the station just after noon, and I stepped down with the others into the thin September light. I had come on assignment for a small weekly, the sort that still printed long columns on conversions and church affairs. My editor wanted a line on what the novelist was doing with himself now that the rumors had started.

I had known Evelyn Waugh slightly from earlier years, enough to nod in a club or share a drink after one of his pieces appeared. He had already published two novels that made people laugh and then look away. On the platform I saw Father Martin D’Arcy waiting with another priest. They spoke quietly, then turned toward the waiting motor.

Waugh arrived later that afternoon in a hired car. He carried a small case and wore the same dark coat he had worn through the winter. He shook hands with D’Arcy without ceremony and followed him down the path to the house. I stayed back with the other visitors. No one asked me to leave.

The room where the instruction took place was plain, two chairs, a table, and a window that looked onto the garden wall. Waugh sat with his hands folded for most of the first hour. D’Arcy spoke of the claims of the Church, the same claims he had written about for years. Waugh asked few questions. When he did speak it was to repeat a phrase he had already settled on in his own mind. He said the Roman Catholic Church was the only genuine form of Christianity and that Christianity itself was the essential and formative constituent of western culture. D’Arcy made a note on a pad and said nothing more that afternoon.

Three days later the same room was used again. The baptismal water had already been prepared. Waugh knelt. The words were said over him in the ordinary way. I stood near the door with two other men who had come to observe. No one raised a voice. When it was finished Waugh rose, accepted the towel offered him, and walked out into the corridor as if he had completed an ordinary errand.

Outside, the press notices had already begun. The Daily Express ran two leaders before Waugh’s own piece appeared. One asked how an ultramodernist could become an ultramontanist. The other wondered whether the author of Vile Bodies had simply grown tired of his own jokes. Waugh read the cuttings in the house library and set them aside. He told D’Arcy he would answer in his own time.

On the twentieth of October the Express gave him a full page. The headline ran across the top in heavy type: Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened To Me. Waugh wrote that he had been born into the Established Church and that his family tree carried Anglican clergymen on every branch. He described the school where he had once spoken of chasubles and Erastianism, and the Oxford theologian who had come during the war and quietly removed the inherited axioms of belief. He said he had shed that faith as lightly as an outgrown coat. The paragraph ended with the date of his reception.

The replies came quickly. A Protestant politician wrote the next day. A Jesuit contributed an article asking whether Britain was turning to Rome. Letters arrived at the house for several weeks. Waugh answered none of them in print. He returned to his desk and continued the novel already under way.

In the months that followed I saw him twice more. Once at a lunch where he spoke of the ordinary demands of the faith he had entered. He mentioned the daily offices and the requirement of confession without adding any special emphasis. The second time was at the same house where the reception had taken place. He was reading proofs. The manuscript pages lay open on the table beside the window. He did not mention the earlier controversy.