Helena by Evelyn Waugh
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I Want My World Back

I doubt that a recognised talent like Waugh would spend time on an historical fantasy like Helena without a purpose. So reading the book one is constantly searching for his intention. Piety? Whimsey? Correction of historical perceptions? Who knows for sure. But there are some clues worth nothing.

The Roman Empire had its founding myths; but it had no ideology, no coherent theory of itself, and therefore no real culture except what it borrowed from Greece. Instead it had an economics which functioned practically as such an ideology. Its economics depended crucially on expansion. As long as the Empire grew, the excess and ‘idle’ wealth accumulated by those it conquered could be confiscated and put to work, mainly in building the city of Rome itself, but also in creating a physical and governmental infrastructure. This booty, like that of black slavery in the 18th century British Empire built on sugar, ‘capitalised’ non-earning assets. It was a self-sustaining system; but only so long as hoards of potential capital - precious metals, agricultural land, enslavable people - were available. Once the Empire accepted borders, it’s very being was threatened.

Helena hints at this recently occurring condition when she questions her new husband Constantius about his political manoeuvring to become Caesar. ‘Why not think bigger,’ she essentially says to him, ‘and expand more broadly rather than merely defending what you have? He calls her a silly girl. And rightly so. She doesn’t understand the situation. There are no more plums to be picked at hand. The Empire now needs walls to protect itself from those who have no assets worth seizing but rather see Rome as itself the great plum tree ready to be picked at leisure. Helena has intuited two things: the limits of economics, and the lack of any other conceptual reasons for continued imperial rule.

I think Helena’s intuition is the key to Waugh’s intention for the book. It is obviously not an historical novel. He admits in his preface that Helena’s life is legendary at best. Neither is it romantic fiction - the characters are cardboard cutouts from a Boy’s Own adventure with lots of commentary on the strange local customs of the day. Nor is it strictly speaking an apologia for the Christianisation of Europe in the manner of someone like Tom Holland in his book Dominion which conceives the official adoption of Christianity as the civil religion of the Empire as something of existential import, a sort of spiritual breakthrough for humanity. What Waugh craves is order not religious faith.

Waugh wrote Helena in 1950 during the political transformation of Britain into an aspiring socialist state, which he despised; and at a period of the apparent loss of the chivalrous ideals of the war years, which he mourned. The Empire that had brought English values to half the world was wobbling. His traditionalist sensitivities were deeply offended, as they would continue to be until his death in the Britain of the Swinging 60’s. As in Helena, the world appeared to have substituted economics for culture. And for Waugh culture literally meant tradition, just as he portrays in his description Helena’s inner state. Even his conversion to Catholicism (and his intense opposition to the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council) seem motivated by the rigidity rather than the content of Catholic doctrine.

Long before Waugh became a religious enthusiast, he was an aesthete, and a member of English country house society. The ‘normal’ progression from Sherborne School to Oxford to the Guards was sabotaged only by his elder brother’s homosexual affair at Sherborne, which forced him into an ‘inferior’ public school. Otherwise Waugh fit snugly into the machinery of the English establishment. After a somewhat dissolute university career (due mainly to aesthetic adventuring) and a rather unsuccessful early teaching career (he seduced one of the school matrons and was sacked), he found his feet as a novelist and correspondent. Whatever else he was, Waugh was a snob. He refused a CBE in 1960, believing that he should have been awarded a knighthood.

It is this deeply held but unconscious snobbery, a perhaps inevitable consequence of his background, that is the real motive force behind Helena. As in the 4th century, the world was once again being destroyed by lack of vision and taste. This contributed to his insomniac depression and made him increasingly dependent not only on drugs and alcohol, but also on the institutional certainties provided by the Catholic Church. Without the Church as a symbol of the reality of Tradition as it was defined, Waugh had no foundation for his aesthetics, his social position, or, ultimately, his life’s work.

Waugh considered Helena his most important novel. That no one else did suggests strongly that it was entirely personal rather than a religious or political work. It is, for me, his statement of what the world should look like if it were to accommodate Evelyn Waugh adequately - more or less the one that existed in 1935, of chaos coming down from Oxford for long weekends of meaningful discussion about art, and travel, and how things must surely remain the same for the benefit of humanity.

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