Last month, I drove to Michigan and back on consecutive weekends. Roadtripping comes easily for me, especially with a good audiobook. During the winter, I saw an article on the Imaginative Conservative website about Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, and since I haven’t read anything by Waugh since Brideshead Revisited in 2011, it seemed like a solid choice.
In case you don’t know (I didn’t): Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh is a British man; an author, journalist, and book reviewer; a World War II veteran; and a twice-married convert to Catholicism. Sword of Honor comprises three separate novels published in chronological order: Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961).
The books trace the wartime story of Guy Crouchback, the only surviving son of a once well-to-do Catholic family in England, who is floundering after his beautiful but promiscuous wife leaves him for another man (and another, and another) in the early days of World War II. Despite being older than most recruits, he joins the Army to escape his loneliness and reassert himself as a man—God willing, to do something meaningful with his life.
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Last night I finished Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which Venerable Fulton Sheen described as “a Twentieth Century form of the Confessions of St. Augustine” and which has entered my list of favorite books, perhaps in the top ten. Unlike some religious autobiographies written under inspiration or strictly under obedience, The Seven Storey Mountain is written by a writer, a craftsman and a poet. It is beautiful—honest and heartbreaking, profound and inspiring. It also provides a window into “enlightened” American culture between the world wars, providing a strong and particularly Catholic rationale as to how we got to this point.
Archangel Stomp 