Helena
By Evelyn Waugh

264 Pages • $12.95

Helena
By Evelyn Waugh

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

Evelyn Waugh’s historical novel Helena tells the story of the saintly mother of Constantine the Great, who is honored for journeying to Jerusalem in the fourth century AD and recovering the True Cross, on which Jesus died.

Helena is unlike the other novels that cemented Waugh’s reputation as one of the great satirists and prose stylists of the twentieth century. The jubilant malice of Vile Bodiesand The Loved One is absent, as is the elegiac splendor of Brideshead Revisited.The style of Helena is unusual. It has the form of a historical novel, but the language, dialogue, and sensibility are that of the post-Edwardian upper-class British society of the author’s youth. Helena has often been neglected by fans of Waugh, yet it was the author’s favorite novel of all his works. He wrote, “Technically, this is the most ambitious work of a writer who is devoted to the niceties of his craft.” His daughter Harriet says that Helena was “the only one of his books that he ever cared to read aloud to the whole family.”

Waugh probably made fourth-century Romans speak like twentieth-century Londoners because he aimed the book directly at the spiritual malaise of his times. Helena is Waugh’s most intentional statement about the truth of Christianity. Two questions lie at the heart of the story: What is true religion, and how does one become a saint? 

These are the concerns that drive Helena on her epic journey from the household of a British chieftain to an honored place in the imperial court of Byzantium. Helena is an exuberant, “horse-mad” young woman who is married to Constantius, a Roman officer who rises to become co-regent of the empire in the west. Constantius divorces Helena for a more politically advantageous marriage, but not before she gives birth to a son, the future Constantine the Great. When Constantine succeeds his father as emperor, he recalls his mother from exile and installs her at court.

All along, Helena is determined to find the truth of things. She converts to a Christian faith that is firmly rooted in the teachings of the apostles and the facts of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Her faith is contrasted with the hollow gnosticism of her husband and her son. The arrogant Constantine strikes a modern utopian tone when he scornfully takes leave of Pope Sylvester before departing for his new capital: “You can have your old Rome, Holy Father, with its Peter and Paul and its tunnels full of martyrs. We start with no unpleasant associations ….”

Helena is drawn precisely to these “tunnels full of martyrs.” For her, and for Waugh, Christianity rests on the tangible historical reality of Jesus and what he did. She journeys to Jerusalem to find the actual cross of Christ. Its location is revealed to her in a vision, and its authenticity is verified by a miraculous healing. This visible, physical construction of wood testifies to the truth. Without it, Christianity is just an appealing idea; with it, a window opens on the supernatural. God does not save us by delivering us from our humanity, as the gnostics say. Rather, he saves us by entering our world and embracing it.

This lifelong quest for the truth makes Helena a saint. The poet John Betjeman complained to Waugh that in the novel, Helena “doesn’t seem like a saint.” Waugh replied that everyone has his or her own form of sanctity. “It is no good my saying, ‘I wish I were like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross.’ I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh.” He continued:

I liked Helena’s sanctity because it is in contrast to all that moderns think of as sanctity. She wasn’t thrown to the lions, she wasn’t a contemplative, she didn’t look like an El Greco. She just discovered what it was God had chosen for her to do and did it.

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About the Author

Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903 in London to Catherine Waugh and Arthur Waugh, a publisher and critic. Evelyn’s family was Anglican, but from an early age he expressed great interest in the High Church, or Anglo-Catholic, practices introduced to him by an aunt. Even at age eleven, he had erected an arrangement of candlesticks, flowers, and statues of saints in his nursery, before which he burned incense.

Waugh’s intense religiosity ended a few years later while he was away at Lancing College. Waugh linked his loss of faith to one teacher in particular, who taught the boys a theological modernism that had the consequence of emptying Waugh of any faith at all. (The teacher, incidentally, eventually became an Anglican bishop.)

Oxford was Waugh’s next step. He read history and engaged in, to his own account, a lifestyle of excess—primarily drinking. While at Oxford, he had contact with many Catholics and soon-to-be-Catholics. The conversions of two of his friends, in particular, got Waugh’s attention, as he both argued with and was intrigued by them. As a result, he encountered the writings of such important Catholic figures as G. K. Chesterton and Ronald Knox.

After leaving Oxford, Waugh began a brief teaching career in Wales. He lasted two years and reached such a point of despair during this time that he halfheartedly attempted suicide by swimming into the sea.

In 1928, having moved back to London, Waugh married Evelyn Gardner, a young woman of aristocratic background. Upon leaving teaching, Waugh had determined to find success in writing, and he did, with his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928). As he was starting his second, he was struck by unexpected news: his wife wrote him a letter informing him that she had fallen in love with another man.

Waugh managed to finish the novel, Vile Bodies (1930), a satire of the “Bright Young People” populating frantic London society of the 1920s, and in the wake of his divorce, he began exploring Roman Catholicism. He was received into the church on September 29, 1930.

Waugh’s next three novels followed in the satiric vein of his first two: Black Mischief (1932), about a revolution in Africa; A Handful of Dust (1934), inspired by his unfortunate marital experience; and Scoop (1938), a devastating satire of journalism. Along the way, and for the rest of his life, he also wrote a great deal of travel literature, reflecting his own journeys throughout the world. In 1935, Waugh published a book expressive of another part of his life: Catholicism. Edmund Campion is the beautifully written story of the great English Jesuit martyr.

In 1937, Waugh married again, this time to Laura Herbert, with whom he had six children. When England entered the Second World War, Waugh, at the age of thirty-six, enlisted in the military. During the war, he served in the Royal Marines and the Special Air Service, doing intelligence work in various locations, including Senegal, Crete, and Yugoslavia.

On leave during the last years of the war, Waugh wrote what many consider his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited (1945). He traveled to the United States to discuss the possibility of a film version of the novel (which never came to be), and the fruit of that visit was another darkly comic novel, The Loved One (1948), a satire of the California funeral industry.

Over the next decade and a half, Waugh continued to write and publish novels, including Helena (1950); The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957 ), an autobiographical novel rooted in his experience of a nervous breakdown; and the Sword of Honor trilogy (1952–61), centered on a Catholic aristocrat, Guy Crouchback, and his service in the military and subsequent disillusionment (clearly based on Waugh’s own experience during the war).

Evelyn Waugh died on April 10, 1966.

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Links for Evelyn Waugh

An Evelyn Waugh Web site

“Literary Scamp Evelyn Waugh,” by Arthur Jones

“Deadly Satire, Saving Grace: The Faith & Work of Evelyn Waugh,” by James E. Person Jr.

“St. Evelyn Waugh,” by George Weigel

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