A Find: Evelyn Waugh's Helena

I picked up my copy of Evelyn Waugh's Helena -- I don't know where, probably in Palookaville's premier used bookshop. I guess I thought it was a leftover, an afterthought. I assumed it was out of print. Silly me. First off, it is in print (link). Second, apparently it was Waugh's own favorite.

I guess I can understand why: Waugh was a Catholic of the take-no-prisoners variety. Helena here is the mother of Constantine, she of the True Cross. Waugh here working hard at the top of his game and he must have assumed he had achieved a triumph of apologetics.

Thing is though, he is far too good a novelist to let mere apologetics get in the way. What he has produced is a swift, entertaining--and in its own way, deeply perceptive--little jeu d'esprit.

As a character, Helena of Helena is more or less cardboard. But no matter, Waugh's strength lies elsewhere. He's a satirist, of course, and more generally, a great comic. But he is best understood as a political novelist: Black Mischief ranks as one of the great political novels of all time; Officers and Gentlemen is best read in the same vein, and Scoop is not far behind. The great virtue of Helena is the way it captures the temper of its time--the great tectonic shift from the ancient world to the medieval.

Waugh is second of all a master of the elegaic---think Brideshead Revisited--and his knack for here succeeds in completing the historical framework. Helena does, indeed, get to Jerusalem and she does (or does not) find the true cross. But she's past 80 in the novel (as indeed, apparently she was in real life). It's a few pages at the end, and it's about the only place where Waugh really lays on the Christianity with a trowel. In terms of structure, they provide a fit conclusion, but the truth is that for sheer enjoyment, you'd be almost as well off if somebody tore those last pages off and threw them away.

Helena is at her best as a hot-blooded young tomboy on the Britannic frontier, as an enduring wife and a resourceful castoff in the provinces; and late in life, as a baffled matriarch in the snakes and ladders of political Rome. Here as a taste is Waugh's Helena in mid-career, left behind in Dalmatia while her husband pursues a life of action:

For thirteen years Helena lived alone. Her hair lost its fierce colour and, scorning dyes, she wore it always wound in a silk shawl. She thickened in limb and body, held herself firmer, moved more resolutely, spoke with authority and decision, took careful count of her possessions, gave orders and saw them obeyed. She had moved, on Constantius's elevation,from Government House to his villa, purchased and enclosed a large estate and made it thrive. She knew every man and beast on the place and the yield of each plantation; her wine commanded a high price in the market at Salona. Westward in the rough sea-face of the sheltering islands the great waves struck and splattered; eastward, in winter, the high Dinaric forests were torn by blizzards which the people on the plain never heard; nor saw save as a smudge of indigo on the moutain crests and in the wreckage which drifted on the tideless channel and lay there, barely stirring, for the boys to pick. Here among oleander and myrtle, lizard and cicada, Helena gently laid down the load of her womanhood. Here, it seemed, far from home, she would in full time die.

Evelyn Waugh, Helena 70 (Penguin Books ed. 1963)

Now, if only could find my copy of Jacob Burkhardt's Age of Constantine the Great.

Postscript: Haven't found Burkhardt, but I did find my copy of Waugh's letters. I checked to see if he wrote much about Helena. He wrote a bit, of which this from a letter dated 15 January 1946, to Penelope Benjamin (wife of John) is perhaps the most interesting:

I describe her as hunting in the morning after her wedding night feeling the saddle as comforting her wounded maidenhead. Is that O.K.?

Penelope must have approved; it's in the book.