First Things RSS Feed - Matthew Walther https://www.firstthings.com/author/matthew-walther en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:32:42 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/matthew-walther 60 To Hell With Notre Dame? https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2025/01/to-hell-with-notre-dame https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2025/01/to-hell-with-notre-dame Mon, 20 Jan 2025 06:00:00 -0500 I first visited the University of Notre Dame du Lac (to use its proper inflated style) in 2017 as a guest of some friends in the law school. By then I had already hated the place for more or less my entire life. For me, Notre Dame was synonymous with the Roman Catholic Church as I had known her in childhood: dated folk art aesthetics (has anyone ever written about how ugly the buildings are?), the Breaking Bread missalette, the so-called “Celtic” Alleluia, the thought (though not the actual writings) of Fr. Richard McBrien, jolly fat Knights of Columbus in their blue satin jackets, avuncular permanent deacons named Tom, Pat, or, occasionally, Dave. At the age of twenty-seven, I expected to find preserved something of the religious atmosphere of the middle years of John Paul II’s papacy: the quiet half-acknowledged sense of desperation, the all-pervading horror of unbelief that could never be allowed formally to take shape among the grandchildren of European immigrants who had done well for themselves in the professions—perhaps too well.

Continue Reading »

]]> The Last Great Homilist https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/06/the-last-great-homilist https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/06/the-last-great-homilist Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400 Ronald Knox:
A Man for All Seasons
 edited by francesca bugliani knox
 pontifical institute of medieval studies, 416 pages, $65

Continue Reading »

]]> ​Stardust to Stardust https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/05/stardust-to-stardust https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/05/stardust-to-stardust Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400 I’m at the corner of Broadway and West 73rd Street trying to decide whether the security guard at the building next door dislikes me. Earlier he was giving me dirty looks when I bent down to study the sign in front of the church he is guarding. With apologies to a man who is just trying to do his job (though I confess I have never been to a church with a security guard before), it’s sort of hard not to linger over an advertisement for Ash Wednesday service that features an image of a swirling nebula emblazoned with a cross that looks more like two partially torn Band-Aids. Then there’s the slogan: “We are Stardust.”

Continue Reading »

]]> Champagne for All https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/04/champagne-for-all https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/04/champagne-for-all Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400 A Scent of Champagne: 8,000 Champagnes Tasted and Rated
 by richard juhlin
skyhorse publishing, 400 pages, $95

Continue Reading »

]]> A Reality Novel https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/11/a-reality-novel https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/11/a-reality-novel Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0400 The Once and Future King
by t. h. white
penguin galaxy, 736 pages, $30

Continue Reading »

]]> Ghost of a Rose https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/06/ghost-of-a-rose https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/06/ghost-of-a-rose Wed, 01 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0400 Sir Thomas Browne: A Life
 by reid barbour
 oxford, 552 pages, $125

Continue Reading »

]]> Deathless Truths https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/12/deathless-truths https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/12/deathless-truths Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0500 Scholia to an Implicit Text: Bilingual Selected Edition
by nicolás gómez-dávila
villegas editores, 392 pages, $24

Continue Reading »

]]> Orwell’s Deathbed Misreading of Evelyn Waugh https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/01/orwells-deathbed-misreading-of-evelyn-waugh https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/01/orwells-deathbed-misreading-of-evelyn-waugh Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:11:00 -0500 Of the reissuing of classic British fiction, there seems to be no end”at least not this year. Lucky Jim and The Old Devils are finally back in print. A Dance to the Music of Time is out on Kindle. The Overlook Press continues to roll out volume after volume of its Wodehouse Collector’s series. Even poor neglected Barbara Pym has begun to wend her way daintily back onto the shelf, perhaps in advance of her upcoming centenary. But the real jewels in the crown are Little, Brown and Company’s new editions of Evelyn Waugh: fourteen novels and one collection of short fiction, all in hardcover, trade paperback, e-book, and MP3.

After spending the last two weeks rereading the whole of his output, from “The Balance” to Basil Seal Rides Again , I have become somewhat frustrated with those who insist that early novels like Decline and Fall are the apex of Waugh’s achievement, and that his 1930 conversion to Roman Catholicism, if it did not ruin him as a novelist, led him to produce some frightful tosh.

Probably the first person to make this argument was George Orwell, who, reviewing Brideshead Revisited on his deathbed in 1949, wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.” (This is sometimes misquoted with “unacceptable,” a faintly Stalinist adjective that I doubt Orwell would have ever used, replacing “untenable.”) Orwell did not live to complete his essay, but this single line from what survives of his notes has become an urtext for a host of anti¬- Brideshead partisans and Helena haters, whose ranks include the late Christopher Hitchens, a decrier of Waugh’s “sentimental and credulous approach to miracles or the supernatural,” and the otherwise adroit Brooke Allen, who has called Brideshead Revisited “so deeply flawed that it cannot be considered anything but a second-rate effort.”

These critics assume a divide between the early Waugh and the later one of “untenable” faith. Yet everything that Orwell et al appreciate in Waugh’s early novels”the sometimes antiseptic moral pyrrhonism, the champagne prose, the game at romps plotting”is just as present in the later fiction, nowhere more so than in the loathed Brideshead .

How can this have been missed? From the bumbling eugenicist Hooper to the black-hearted dandy Anthony Blanche, Brideshead Revisited contains some of Waugh’s most memorable, and memorably comic, minor characters. The ten or so pages that follow Charles, Sebastian, and Boy Mulcaster from charity ball to low-rent brothel to choky to Rex Mottram’s sitting room represent one of the most effectively sustained comic sequences in English fiction. Charles’s conversations with his father are all so painfully funny that I find it difficult to select my favorite. Here is one that takes place just before Charles leaves to join Sebastian at Brideshead for the remainder of the summer:

Continue Reading »

]]>