‘He became a Catholic knowing it would be necessary for him to modify his literary manner, and so probably lessen his income.’

A FORGOTTEN WAUGH

The literary feud of the century.

By R.J. Stove

American literary feuds: meh. So Gore Vidal called Bill Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”? So Buckley retorted, “Listen, you queer, I’ll sock you in the goddamn face”? Kids’ stuff. John Updike gunning for Tom Wolfe? A mere gentlemen’s disagreement, old fellow.

Norman Mailer denouncing Mary McCarthy for, um, terminal femaleness? That was much ado about nothing (or, more precisely, it resembled Beatrice and Benedick).

No, if you want a real X-rated literary feud, as opposed to a playground spat, there are only two nations you need study. One of these nations is France. Read, sometime, the letter that Paul Claudel (convert to turbo-Catholicism) wrote to André Gide, having discovered Gide’s homosexual tastes. Sartre versus Camus, François Mauriac versus Jean Cocteau, Léon Daudet versus everyone: all bare-knuckle stuff, some of it involving pugilists old enough to have acquired their training wheels during the Dreyfus case. (Yep, pugilists acquired their training wheels in a baptism of fire over the skeletons in the French political closet. Mixed metaphors are on special at Walmart this week.)

The other nation for great literary feuds is England. Not the England of Cool Britannia, Blaircameroncleggboris, Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger, and demands that 10 Downing Street’s domestic staff address 1997’s electoral victor as “Tony.” No, this is the England of the Great Depression, when Old Etonians tramped the Road to Wigan Pier; when Liverpool had not the Beatles yet, but merely “trams going whining down long sad roads” (an unexpectedly poetic phrase from J.B. Priestley). The England of Jarrow hunger-marches and Mosleyite fisticuffs and the Oxford Union’s assurance that “This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country.” Also—most relevant to our purpose—the England of resurgent literary Catholicism, of a whole younger generation of Catholic writers uneasily absorbing Newman’s influence; grateful to, but a little patronizing about, the Chesterbelloc; finding, to their astonishment, publishers in the popular press.

This may set the scene for the 1933 literary feud between the twenty-nine-year-old Evelyn Waugh, who needs no further introductions, and the sixty-five-year-old Ernest Oldmeadow, editor of the Tablet, who certainly does need them. What Commentary later was for American Jewish intellectuals, so the Tablet then was for British Catholics. Every British ambassador, whatever his religion, read it. Every British bookstore owner respected it. The Archbishop of Westminster—at this time Francis Cardinal Bourne—owned it. They do say that the only men in the world who predicted Alfonso XIII’s 1931 downfall were Pius XI, the nuncio to Madrid, and the Tablet’s office manager. (Certainly this downfall caught by surprise Whitehall, the Quai d’Orsay, and the State Department, not to mention Alfonso XIII.)

What gives the Waugh-Oldmeadow title fight its particular significance, unrepeatable in our egalitarian epoch, is its gentlemanly language. The combatants exhibited an ire that would not have been out of place on cage-fighters in a Bangkok brothel. But they expressed their ire in the lexicon of Downton Abbey. Could this joust acquire a fresh import in an age awash in religious scandals?

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