Modernist at heart …

… Waugh Revisited by Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr. | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In Patey’s reading, the modernist crisis reflected in the early novels is at heart a crisis of the rootlessness, alienation, and disorientation of British youth coming of age in the 1920s, in the aftermath of World War I. The institutions and conventions that gave direction to the manners of Edwardian England had been discarded, leaving nothing to fill the void but the vertiginous excesses of Waugh’s Bright Young People. But even in these pre-conversion novels, Waugh sees the jettisoning of traditional Christianity as the immediate cause of the crisis.