BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "Helena"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 11: Helena. Ed. by Sara Haslam. Oxford University Press, 2020. 9780199685240. xcii + 285 pp.

I'm not sure where I first heard of Evelyn Waugh; looking back through the posts on my blog, Waugh is definitely mentioned in Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, and probably in one or two other books that I've read and that have something to do with British literature and history in the first half of the 20th century or so. A number of his works sounded intriguing to me, but I've never actually got around to reading any of them until now.

A few years ago I noticed that the Oxford University Press was starting to issue a collected edition of Waugh's works in 43 volumes; I was naturally impressed by the massive scale of this undertaking, but also couldn't help wondering a bit how these things are decided. Waugh is a notable writer, to be sure, but I strongly suspect there exist writers more notable than him that do not have a 43-volume collected edition of their works yet. Anyway, I decided I would read a few books in this series if and when something interesting appeared, but this time I'm borrowing them through interlibrary loan rather than buying them like I'm doing with Wilde's works. (Speaking of interlibrary loan, the book ended up coming from a library in Constance, Germany — very apt, since the town is believed to be named after Constantius, Helena's husband, who also appears as a character in this book.)

Thus, Helena is the first book of Waugh's that I've read so far. It is a short historical novel based on the life of Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great (and also the namesake of the famous island to which Napoleon got exiled). The subject matter was more or less completely new to me since I knew or remembered almost nothing about Helena's life except for the fact that she converted to christianity before Constantine did. I must have read more about her in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but that was a long time ago and I've forgotten all about it.

Waugh says, in an interesting brief preface to the novel, that when it comes to Helena's life, the historical record is actually fairly incomplete, and he did not hesitate to fill the gaps with more or less plausibly invented details. In a few instances he incorporated details invented by earlier writers, such as the idea that Helena was of British birth, which had first appeared in the work of medieval English authors.

*

As the novel opens, Helena is a young woman, the daughter of a Celtic chief in Roman Britain (his name, king Coel, seems to be a reference to an 18th-century nursery rhyme). A somewhat mysterious Roman officer named Constantius visits the place, and they fall in love with each other and get married. He is related to various recent emperors, and he gives the impression of being fairly confident that he will eventually reach that position himself, and of probably having some sort of scheme going on towards that purpose, though we don't get much detail of this.

So Helena leaves Britain with her new husband; after staying at Ratisbon (present-day Regensburg) for some time while he is off on a campaign, they eventually settle at Nish. That general area of the Balkans seems to be where Constantius is originally from, and he is serving as some sort of governor there. Incidentally, I couldn't help being slightly annoyed at Waugh's use of modern forms of geographical names, as this has a tendency to look anachronistic. You know perfectly well that Romans wouldn't have called the place Nish — they didn't even have the sound sh in Latin; Naissus would have looked better in a historical novel set in the Roman times. Similarly, every time I saw Trèves mentioned (Helena lived in it for some time later in life), that grave accent reminded me that the word is French, and French is some centuries in the future. (Mercifully, a mention of Obrovac, which appears in Waugh's manuscript of the novel (p. 191), did not make it into the final version. The wikipedia tells us that the earliest mention of this town in written sources dates back to 1337 — a good thousand years after the time in which this novel is set.)

It is plainly a turbulent period in Roman history, and the average life expectancy of an emperor is so short that I couldn't help wondering why Constantius is so keen on becoming one in the first place (he wasn't the only one, though; see the long list of rivals on p. 35.) He is often away on campaigns, and seems to be closely associated with emperor Aurelian, but his goal still eludes him for a long time. He becomes governor of Dalmatia, and moves to the Adriatic coast with his family, where at any rate the climate is much nicer. Years pass; he and Helena live separately by now, he takes up a mistress, but later discards her and has her drowned. He becomes a keen believer in Mithraism; Helena, to her credit, reacts with commendable skepticism when she hears him spouting his nonsensical religious mumbo-jumbo (p. 43). And yet you can't help remembering, of course, that in the end she would end up converting to Christianity and believing in mumbo-jumbo every bit as nonsensical as that of the Mithraists. Of course, Waugh wouldn't have thought of Christianity as nonsense — he was apparently quite a fervent Catholic himself — so perhaps he deliberately wanted to set up a contrast between Helena's earlier skepticism and her later espousal of religion (which would have seemed like a step in the right direction from Waugh's perspective, though not from mine).

Finally Constantius does become one of the two junior emperors in Diocletian's system of tetrarchy which was by then in place; but this is hardly good news for Helena: he divorces her so he can marry the daughter of one of the other emperors, and he takes their son Constantine away from her as well (p. 45). She continues to live in Dalmatia, alone and apparently fairly content, vaguely hoping that her son will retire there one day, “if only he keeps clear of politics” (p. 49). Eventually, however, Constantius becomes the senior emperor of the West, and Helena is obliged to move to the western half of the empire as well to be safe from his rivals.

She settles at Trèves (Trier), and a few years later she is joined there by Constantine's ex-wife Minervina, whom he has divorced for the sake of a new political marriage when he became emperor after Constantius's death. Minervina is heavily into new-agey religions, and there is a very funny scene when both ladies attend a lecture by a popular Gnostic teacher; it turns out to be none other than Marcias, Helena's former tutor from her childhood days in Britain, who has since then specialized into serving up pseudoreligious spiritualistic mumbo-jumbo to bored upper-class women. Minervina is entranced by his lecture, while Helena, still her usual skeptical self, observes bluntly that “it's all bosh” (p. 59).

The novel skips ahead a few years again. At the time of Constantine's Edict of Milan, Helena is not yet a christian (p. 62), but she does convert at some point after that. Finally, being by then more than seventy years old, she travels to Rome at Constantine's invitation as he is celebrating twenty years of his reign. However, his court hardly proves to be a happy place. Rumours and suspicions abound, Constantine is a paranoiac with a regrettable tendency to have people killed over doubtful suspicions of being involved in conspiracies against him (his own son Crispus is one of his latest victims), and his wife Fausta is happy to encourage his paranoia until at last she falls victim to it herself. (Another funny passage there; early on, Fausta remarks how much she likes her baths: “I could die there quite happily.” (P. 70.) I had a bad feeling about this, and sure enough, her wikipedia page confirmed that Constantine eventually had her killed in the bath. Later we actually see this here in the novel, p. 87.)

Constantine is also prone to bouts of self-pity and depression, likes to whine about how he sacrifices himself by working hard to run the empire (ever heard of delegation, you numpty?!), and, although he hasn't got himself baptised yet, is nevertheless something of a christian religious nutjob, and holds lengthy sermons for the imperial household (p. 79). And, of course, he has his grandiose plans for building a new capital city in the East (which Helena doesn't particularly approve of).* On the whole, he really doesn't come across looking good at all.

[*Speaking of which, there's a funny reference to the (in)famous donation of Constantine. The emperor concludes his tirade about his ‘new Rome’ by saying to the pope: “ ‘As for the old Rome, it's yours.’ ” Later we hear two prelates remarking: “ ‘But I rather wish we had it in writing all the same.’ / ‘We will, monsignore, we will.’ ” (P. 92.)]

There is, however, one nice scene where I sympathized with Constantine. He wants to build a triumphal arch with sculptures and friezes, similar to that of Trajan from two hundred years earlier. However, we find him arguing (pp. 77–8) with the empire's best architects and sculptors, who protest vehemently that this style is completely out of date and in any case nobody in the empire could do it that way now. The only thing they want to do, and the only thing they know how to do, is simplistic-looking modern(ist) stuff. (Eventually Constantine flies into a rage and tells them to simply remove some statues from Trajan's arch and transfer them to his own.) It is not hard to imagine that Waugh, writing about 1950, must have been similarly exasperated about the artists and architects of his own day, and alas, things have not really improved since then. It is now well over a hundred years since the artists have refused to create beautiful things any more. They insist on making things ugly and unpleasant for the audience. Sure, they may give the excuse that they are doing it for the sake of social criticism, or to make people think or whatever, but personally I think it is a mix of laziness, incompetence, and (most of all) an assertion of power, by withholding from the audience precisely what the audience wants.

At one point, Helena learns from the pope that nothing is known about the fate of the cross that Jesus had been crucified on, and she resolves to travel to Jerusalem and try to find it. It may seem like a peculiar thing to get a bee in her bonnet about, but it makes a certain sense in context (p. 94): as she explains, finding the cross would be something solid and tangible, unlike the endless and pointless abstract debates that were raging amongst the theologians of her day (e.g. homoousion-vs.-homoioousion).

Jerusalem turns out to be a hubbub of activity: Macarius, the local bishop, had applied to Constantine for support in restoring the Holy Sepulchre, but the emperor's imagination was fired and he gave orders for a much more ambitious project of grandiose construction (p. 100), with the unsurprising but sad result that this first christian emperor would do more damage to the actual early christian sites than any Hadrian or Diocletian had ever done.

Anyhow, Helena throws herself into her new quest with zeal, but without much luck at first, until the location where the cross had been stored is revealed to her in a dream by none other than the Wandering Jew. I was vaguely aware of this character before, but never knew the details. Apparently he was a shopkeeper in Jerusalem and had treated Jesus unkindly when the latter passed his shop on the way to the crucifixion; for which Jesus cursed him to “tarry till I come” (p. 112). According to Waugh's preface, it was his own idea to add the Wandering Jew into the story of Helena, as they had not been connected before (p. xcii).

Helena directs her workers to dig at the spot indicated to her in her dream, and soon they find not only Jesus's cross but also those of the two criminals who had been executed alongside him. (They recognize the right one by its miraculous healing properties, of course :]) The story ends pretty quickly after that. It is as if her quest had been the only thing keeping her going; now that it's over, her health begins to fail and she dies soon afterwards. The relics she found are distributed to various places, and Constantine himself is delighted to add some of them to his growing collection, which includes such treasures as “Noe's adze—the very one he used on the ark—and Mary Magdalen's alabaster box” (p. 118). :))

*

The novel is fairly short (a fact which was in fact remarked upon unfavourably by some people upon its publication; one reviewer called it “an insultingly slight offering”, p. lxviii), only 120 pages in the present edition (which, admittedly, is quite economically typeset, and in the original edition it seems to have been something more like 260 pages), or about a third of the volume.

Of the rest, by far the biggest amount is taken up by an appendix of variants from Waugh's manuscript of the novel; unfortunately, very few of those were interesting to me, and only in a very few places was there any interesting material not present in the final version of the novel. Here's one tidbit that I liked from the manuscript, about Constantine's paranoid security measures in his palace at Rome: “There were three doors to pass, each with an officer-sentry; each sentry came from a different province and spoke only his own language. They were chosen by lot and never served twice in the same duty.” (P. 230. I wonder why Waugh cut this out from the final version; perhaps because it sounds like something that would fit better into a fairy-tale or a fantasy novel than a historical novel?) — And another one, where Helena is trying to persuade Constantine to keep away from politics: “A lot of history. Do you know what it consists in? Simply of wicked victorious men trying to justify themselves. I saw a little history once. Keep out of history, Constantine.” (P. 205. Only the last sentence made it into the printed version.)

There are also some thirty-odd pages of explanatory notes, which I found interesting and not excessive, and an eighty-page introduction by the editor, which I wanted to like but couldn't quite get into it the way I usually manage with the introductions in the OUP edition of Wilde's works. Perhaps the problem is simply that I'm not as familiar with Waugh, his work and his life and times, as I am with Wilde's, and so many things in the introduction just flew above my head. Still, I enjoyed e.g. the section about the critical reception of the novel (pp. lxvi–lxxii), and was interested to hear that another novel about Helena had appeared shortly before this one, The Living Wood (1947) by Louis de Wohl, a German-American author (p. lxxv).

Another very interesting thing in this book is an appendix with Waugh's “Notes on translating Helena” — a rare peek behind the scenes of how translations of novels appear. Apparently Waugh was concerned that Helena was “a frightfully difficult book to translate” (p. 280), and wrote these brief notes for the benefit of his translators. Mostly they point out what sort of language this or that character speaks, and what he tried to achieve with this. Indeed the way many characters speak in this novel often bothered me. He tried to indicate their social standing and personality by their language, which is of course good and commendable, but the kind of language he adopted for this comes across as anachronistic. “Helena in the early chapters speaks the slang of a slightly old-fashioned, aristocratic school-girl” (p. 281),* Constantine's wife Fausta “speaks ultra-fashionable 1930 slang” (p. 282), “the Wandering Jew talks lower-middle-class, slightly Americanized slang” (p. 282) etc. Some of his choices were more reasonable, e.g. the military-style language used by Constantius and other characters who are military officers.

[*A few examples of Helena's slang: “beano” (for a party; p. 2), “What a lark! [. . .] What a sell! [. . .] Oh, what sucks!” (P. 7); “What a spread! [. . .] What a blow-out!” (of a sumptuous meal; p. 8), and, of course, her favourite: “bosh!” (pp. 25, 59, 105).]

*

Much as in the OUP edition of Wilde's works, the present volume also contains a few errors that any half-way decent proofreader would have easily caught, so I can only assume that they did not employ a proofreader at all. Here are the ones I noticed:

• the title of Augustine's book is misspelt as De Citrate Dei (p. 130);
• “peaches of mincement” (p. 34) should surely be “mincemeat”, not that I quite see what that has to do with peaches; is it supposed to be simply a kind of meatballs the size of peaches?
• their effort to put a dot on the capital I in “İzmit” failed spectactularly, resulting in “I˙zmit” (p. 133);
• the Sava is described as “a tributary of the Bosphorus” (p. 136), which isn't even a river, and the Sava is a tributary of the Danube;
• the text mentions the Sarmatians on p. 37, but the editorial note to that passage on p. 136 mangles the name badly: “Samartians] The ancient district of Samarta lay between the Vistula River and the Caspian Sea. In the third century, the Samartians occupied Dacia” etc. How bizarre.
• a note on p. 140 refers to “Helena's examination of the youthful Constantine after he had visited the Mithraeum”, but clearly it's actually Constantius that she has been examining (“[s]he pressed her husband for information”, p. 43);
• “Homoosians” (p. 144) is missing a u.

*

Overall, this was a pleasant and enjoyable novel to read, but there were also a few things that I disliked about it. It often skips several years of Helena's life, perhaps because nothing of interest happened during that time (or at least nothing is mentioned in the few scant historical sources about her, and Waugh perhaps understandably didn't want to make up too much out of whole cloth); and as a result, it feels a bit like a series of separate vignettes rather than a single unified story. My favourite part was the early chapters about Helena's youth and the early days of her marriage to Constantius. Later the story grows more sombre and overall Helena's life doesn't strike me as particularly happy. It was sad to see that Constantius abandoned her so soon and lived apart from her; and even more sad to see that he then divorced her upon becoming emperor, and took their son Constantine away; and when she saw Constantine again more than twenty years later, he was a paranoid wreck of an emperor with whom it was impossible to have a meaningful relationship again; and Helena's dear grandson Crispus was murdered due to Constantine's paranoia. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that she became something of a religious zealot in the end. After all, what else did she have left? Her life had been a series of losses and tragedies.

Nevertheless I couldn't help feeling that the transition from her earlier skepticism to her zeal in the final chapters of the book was not adequately explained. We see her regard Constantius' mithraism and Minervina's gnosticism, very appropriately, as “bosh” — but surely christianity is bosh of the exact same sort, so what was it that prevented her from realizing *that*? Waugh mentions her conversion in passing without giving any details of how her thoughts and opinions on this subject developed. At first I almost had the impression that her accepting christianity was mostly just a matter of going along with what was by then coming to be the prevailing trend in society, but that wouldn't explain why she turned so zealous afterwards as to embark upon her quest for the True Cross. Perhaps Waugh, being religious himself, didn't think the matter needed explaining, that it was simply a case of Helena finally coming to realize the obvious truth; but that doesn't help a non-religious reader such as me.

Another thing that somewhat spoiled the mood for me as I read this novel is that the Roman Empire in which Helena lives is very obviously on a downward trajectory. Its glory days are far behind, its name an empty boast, though still with some little power to move and inspire people (pp. 50–1); its picturesque native religion is clearly dying out under the relentless assault of a plethora of eastern cults, christianity chief amongst them; its artistic ability is dying too, as we can see from the scene where Constantine finds it impossible to build an arch to rival that of Trajan, built two hundred years before (pp. 77–8); its emperors are little more than ambitious generals, a number of whom seem to exist at any given moment and spend most of their time waging war on each other; Diocletian has just recently transformed the idea of emperor from a notional ‘first among equals’ to a full-blown oriental-style despot, with grotesque court ceremonial to match (p. 44); and the city of Rome itself is increasingly irrelevant politically, and few emperors even bother visiting it. And from the perspective of Helena's time, several lifetimes' worth of continued decline was still ahead of them, to be followed not by a revival, but by a final collapse, a thousand years of darkness, and then a renaissance of a civilization very different from that of Rome's heyday. From the perspective of Roman civilization, decline was permanent and irreversible. And this is a very grim prospect, considering that we ourselves are in the early — or perhaps not quite so early any more — stages of our own civilizational decline now.

So, to conclude, I enjoyed this book, but couldn't help wishing that someone would write a novel set in the days when Rome was on the upswing rather than on the decline (actually, probably such novels do exist, I should just take the trouble to find them). I'm looking forward to reading more of Waugh's books if and when they get published in this series.