To Joe Pearce

Many thanks for the latest issue of StAR, and congratulations (as usual) on such a fine issue!  I had no idea that we are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of Waugh’s death on Easter Sunday 1966.  It was so appropriate for him!  I heard him once at Oxford in 1954, when he came and gave a lecture to the Catholic students next-door (to Campion Hall).  He had been asked to give his lecture on “The Catholic Novel”, but true to his rude self, he denied there was such a thing as a Catholic novel but only a novel that happens to have been written by a Catholic.  Only all the articles in this issue of StAR go to disprove his statement.  If he hadn’t been a Catholic, he couldn’t have written such novels as Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honor. 

 Of the illustrations by far the most charming is that of the Waugh family on page 11, but usually Waugh didn’t set out to charm.  The picture on page 12, showing the BBC microphone, again reminds me of Waugh’s studied rudeness, as when he was asked by the commentator why he responded this once to an invitation for an interview, he simply replied, “I need the money!”

As for my customary comments on the articles, I really enjoyed yours on “Revisiting Brideshead”, with your comment on Cordelia that she surely comes out of Shakespeare’s King Lear.  And her loyalty to the Old Faith, in contrast to her dysfunctional family, provides the author with the turning-point of his study.  That reminds me of another episode concerning the author’s studied rudeness, maybe during the above-mentioned BBC interview, “Mr, Waugh, why in spite of being a Catholic are you so rude?”  He replied, “Well, just imagine how rude I might have been if I wasn’t a Catholic!”

Secondly, I was pleased to find the article by my good friend Frank Brownlow, who once invited me to give a lecture to his students at Mount Holyoke College.  Since coming to Japan in 1954, I have been surprised, yet pleased, to find that for the Japanese the English are a nation of gentlemen.  Only that impression has been spoilt, as Frank correctly observes, by “the likes of John Lennon and Mick Jagger”.  I also warmly applauded his mention of “those well-funded hothouses, the universities”.  Yet even in Japanese universities I have met not a few elderly professors whom I might well describe as “gentlemen”, if in subconscious imitation of the English variety.

Two points I might mention about Lux Kamrath’s article on “Redeeming the Times”. First, there is his statement on page 26, “One day he would get a chance to do some small service which only he could perform, for which he had been created.”  What a wonderful thing to say!  And I am sure it has already been said somewhere by John Henry Newman, perhaps in his Apologia.  The other point is the distinction between Christianity and Christendom, which is merely touched upon on page 27.  The latter word is naturally conjoined with “medieval”, so as to mean the comity of Christian nations, ideally (as in Dante’s De Monarchia) under the spiritual rule of the Pope and the temporal rule of the Emperor.  But that ideal was irrevocably broken by Henry VIII with his claim to be Supreme Head of the Church in England, and the breach was gradually spread among the Christian nations, leaving only “Christianity” without “Christendom”.

Now I find, intervening between the two parts of the above-mentioned article a poem I really admire, by Mark Amorose, with its perfect scansion and rhyming and its rhythmic content.  It deserves a place beside anything of T. S. Eliot’s.

With Kevin O’Brien’s article on Hamlet I am afraid I cannot wholly agree.  The Ghost doesn’t put the sword of Justice into the prince’s hands, as if it is for him to set his country aright by punishing the crime of Claudius.  “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” is the teaching not only of the Old Law (Deut) but also of St Paul in Romans. That leads me to doubt if he is really a Catholic ghost from Purgatory, and not rather a Protestant ghost or devil, abusing Hamlet to damn him, or else a Pagan ghost from Seneca.  As a result of the play-within-the-play Claudius comes close to repentance, while it is Hamlet who becomes the villain in aiming to send Claudius down to hell. But the whole play, like the prince himself, is so muddled, and for all its fame it is definitely inferior as a drama to King Lear.

Finally, let me express my whole-hearted agreement with the two book reviews, one on Contraception and Persecution, by Charles Rice, and the other on The Coup at Catholic University, by Peter Mitchell.  As the latter well points out, the eminence grise behind the coup was Charles Curran with his organization of American moral theologians against Pope Paul’s prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae.  As the author well remarks, “The overwhelming tide of postconciliar theology would sweep an entire generation of American Catholics away from the traditional Catholic faith” – and, I would add, from the traditional Catholic morality.