On the 60th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh's death, Mark McGinness salutes his masterly writing about dying in his novels
Sixty years ago - on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966 - Evelyn Waugh had just heard Mass, celebrated in the ancient Tridentine rite by his favourite Jesuit, Fr Philip Caraman SJ, at St. Michael's Chapel Wiveliscombe, 5 miles from his country seat, Combe Florey, in Somerset.
As the family gathered for lunch, Waugh could not be found. A search found him in the downstairs lavatory - dead, aged just 62, with a gash on his forehead. His daughter Margaret’s nanny attempted the kiss of life; then Fr Caraman administered conditional Absolution.
The cause was coronary thrombosis but for a time there was a bizarre suggestion (from his old friend and fellow convert, Graham Greene) that he had drowned with his head in the lavatory bowl. It was the sort of event one might find in his Letters (1989).
But what a day to meet his Maker - the Feast of the Resurrection. And while he may have preferred to exit from his much-loved library, his God had chosen to take him from Waugh's other sanctuary. It wasn't quite as dramatic as the exploding thunder-box that almost did in the squatting Apthorpe in Men At Arms (1952) but it was still a very Wavian passing - a mixture of the sacred and the profane.
Waugh had always done an eclectic anarchic line in death in his fiction.
His first, novel deaths were in Decline and Fall (1928) where Mr. Prendergast, the clergyman-teacher is decapitated with a saw by a crazy prison inmate. And young Lord Tangent, heir to the Earl of Circumference, shot in the foot by a teacher at Llanabba school whose death is reported almost causally.
This is so starkly different from John Andrew Last, the most poignant of all Waugh’s deaths. The only son of Tony and Brenda killed in a fall from a horse during a hunt in A Handful of Dust (1934). And that moment when Brenda on hearing John was dead, feared it was her lover, John Beaver, and when told it was her son, exclaimed “Thank God”; then immediately regretted it and burst into tears.
The two deaths in Vile Bodies (1930) were almost inevitable. Agatha Runcible dying in a nursing home after driving drink in a car race. And Simon, the Earl of Balcairn, the gossip columnist, Mr. Chatterbox, who, facing social disgrace, took his life by putting his head in the oven.
The most Wavian death appears in Black Mischief (1932) - Basil Seal’s girlfriend, Prudence Courteney, daughter of the British Minister in fictitious Azania, who is unknowingly eaten in a stew by Basil. Frau Dressler’s husband in Scoop (1938) appears to have endured a similar fate - "presumed eaten".
Then there is the elderly empress, the saintly heroine of Waugh’s favourite novel, Helena (1950), who dies peacefully in God’s grace (‘faith amid decay’), having discovered the true Cross, with her son Constantine beside her.
The most macabre was poor Aimee Thanatogeno, the cosmetician at Whispering Glades, who committed suicide by injecting herself with embalming fluid in the workroom in The Loved One (1948). It got worse – Barlow, employed at the pet cemetery, Happier Hunting Ground, had them cremate Aimee’s body and registered Joyboy, the Glades’ senior mortician and master embalmer, for the annual postcard service. So every year Joyboy would receive a card "Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you."
As more than 40,000 lives were lost in the Blitz, the deaths of Guy Crouchback’s wife, Virginia, and his uncle Peregrine in an air raid in Unconditional Surrender (1961), the last of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, was not an inconceivable tragedy. In the same novel, the fearless, ferocious, one-eyed commander of Hookforce, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, meets his intended heroic (but meaningless) death in his solitary charge on a Germann-held pillbox in Yugoslavia - one final ‘biff’ to the enemy.
But of course the most memorable death in all Waugh’s fiction, was the death of Lord Marchmain with his family and Fr McKay in the Chinese drawing room at his bedside at Brideshead – so brilliantly enacted by Laurence Olivier in the famed Granada adaptation of Waugh’s magnum opus in 1981:
“The hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross. Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.”
Waugh had been inspired, having witnessed the death only a few years earlier of his old friend, Curzon’s son-in-law, Hubert Duggan, who reconciled to his Faith as he died. He wrote to Lady Mary Lygon: “…… human lives are so planned that usually there’s a particular time -- sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed -- when all resistance is down and Grace can come flooding in.”
Waugh’s own death was not as dramatic as Hubert’s or the marquess’s but for him it was timely and much longed for.
