Here’s the story as I first heard it—as, perhaps, you’ve heard it as well. Evelyn Waugh, the great stylist, the great humorist, and the less-than-great human being, was appallingly rude at a party. “How can you behave so badly,” the hostess asked, “and you a Catholic!” To which Waugh, who would have been great on social media, shot back, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”
It’s a neat anecdote, one that transmutes Waugh’s rougher qualities into an appealing, rakish image. You can imagine him as living out life inside one of his own novels, a charming scoundrel like Basil Seal. Christopher Hitchens dismissed it as “a nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny.” And yet the story feels right, a fitting Waugh story in the tradition of great English writers making quips—Samuel Butler’s “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four,” or Oscar Wilde’s supposed last words: “Either those curtains go or I do.” There’s even something nicely flattering about it. “And you a Catholic!” suggests an era when Catholicism enjoyed higher expectations than it does now. But the story is, in a rather important way, a subtle lie.
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