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Editor’s note: 'Helena' is one of many wonderful reads on Aleteia’s 2024 Summer Book List. We asked the novelist Suzanne M. Wolfe, author of the acclaimed Confessions of X and other novels, to introduce our readers to Evelyn Waugh’s fascinating historical novel.
The 20th-century British novelist and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) is known primarily for his biting, funny, and profoundly satirical novels. One famous exception, of course, was the romantic saga set between the world wars, Brideshead Revisited (though along with the drama it still contained a share of social satire).
When he published his novel Helena in 1950, however, many of his readers were taken aback. Unlike Brideshead and his satires of modern life, here is a book set in the ancient world. It chronicles the life of St. Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, and discoverer of the True Cross of Christ.
What is it about this relatively obscure Catholic saint that induced Waugh to attempt a very different sort of novel — one that he took great pride in?
An obscure but beguiling saint
Like many women of the early Church, very little is known of St. Helena apart from her name, the likelihood of her humble origin, the fact that she was the mother of Constantine, and the belief that she traveled to Jerusalem and discovered the True Cross.
Although the comparative anonymity of such a remarkable woman as opposed to her male contemporaries is unjust and irksome, this very paucity of historical fact makes many female historical figures especially beguiling to novelists. After all, the fiction writer cares more about the truth than about facts. Or, as Evelyn Waugh put it in his Preface to Helena:
The novelist deals with the experiences which excite his imagination. In this case the experience was my desultory reading in History and Archaeology. The resulting book, of course, is neither History nor Archaeology.
Life not legend
If the historian allows the historical facts to shed light on the historical figure, then the novelist allows the historical figure to shed light on the facts. The result is fiction where the shadowy figures of history are revealed in living flesh. This is certainly true of Helena.
We first see Helena as an adolescent girl sitting at a window listening to her tutor read from the Iliad. After reading a particularly fulsome passage concerning Helen (of Troy)'s beauty, noticing his pupil is more interested in what is occurring outside than his lesson, he says, “Do you think I read this to amuse myself?” Helena replies: “It is only the fishermen…coming up from the sea for tonight’s beano [party].”
Immediately we have a sense that Helena is more interested in life than in legend. And, indeed, she goes on to question her tutor about the veracity of the story. Of the walls of Troy, Helena says:
“Nothing left, Marcias? Nothing to mark where they stood?”
“The world is very old, Helena, and full of ruins.”
“Why don’t people dig?”
This delightful exchange perfectly captures Helena’s practical nature and, of course, prefigures her eventual search for the True Cross. As a convert from paganism to Christianity, she will seek proof not of Helen of Troy but of Jesus of Nazareth.
Shining with integrity
For me, one of the most endearing aspects of Waugh’s characterization of Helena is the fact that she remains herself throughout her long life. The wife of a Roman aristocrat and mother of an emperor, she refuses to give herself airs and graces. In fact, she has a healthy distaste for the imperial court, regarding its fabulous wealth as wasteful, its court intrigues as immoral, and its values as materialistic and superficial. All this before she ever converts.
Helena’s character shines with integrity. When she does hear the Gospel, she embraces it as the truth she was hunting for all her life.
In a 1960 interview, Evelyn Waugh says of Helena:
It wasn’t about her sanctity I was writing; it was about the conditions of 4th-century Rome…and [Helena] putting her finger at once on what was wrong with imperial Rome at the time, which was that they were losing the sense of actuality [emphasis mine].
In search of humble things
For Helena, power is not the most important thing; instead, what’s crucial is the ability to stay in front of reality. We see this clearly at the beginning of the novel when she is more interested in the fishermen than the story of Troy.
Although she would no doubt avoid theological terminology, Helena’s vision is deeply incarnational. This down-to-earth woman — who has known only the lavish theater of power and greed in the imperial court — senses intuitively that God’s grace (the ultimate fullness of reality) must be communicated through the humblest of everyday things: bread, wine, water, oil—and wood. That’s why she needs to hold the Cross in her hands, to kiss the wood upon which Jesus died. She is wholly interested in God-made-man (the opposite of the emperors who were men trying to become gods).
I suspect that St. Helena, were she miraculously to be transported in time to the 21st century, would similarly have a bone to pick with the various ways we attempt to make men into gods even today. No doubt she would call this perennial bit of human folly, using a phrase Evelyn Waugh was fond of, “complete bosh.”
Suzanne M. Wolfe is the author of The Confessions of X, a novel about the life of St. Augustine’s concubine. She has also written a historical fiction series set in the reign of Elizabeth the First of England.
