Helena – Evelyn Waugh, 1950 ★★★½

Something Better than History

History stops for no one, but occasionally makes detours. Helena tells of one such detour brought on by an old woman which changed the world.

Helena was the ex-wife of one emperor and the mother of another. More to the point, as Evelyn Waugh presents her, she crystalized the dawn of the Christian era in Europe with an act of faith that magnified the role of religion in the future of the West.

Imbued by the spirit of the Magi, Helena offers up a simple prayer: “For his sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

Among the novels of Waugh, Helena is an outlier. A historical fiction, it is set not in Great Britain but the Roman Empire. Waugh’s ready satire is for once not accompanied by a blisteringly caustic tone. And is any other work of his told even partly from a female perspective?

More than any of this, though, is how the author’s Christianity is put front and center. He also did this with his later “Sword Of Honour” trilogy, but in Helena, it is a religion not born into but to be earned with considerable pain. On re-reading it, I found Waugh’s view closer to Christian existentialism than the more comfortable Anglo-Catholicism with which Waugh is associated.

St. Helena, as depicted in the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, one of the first printed encyclopedias. She is depicted holding the crossbeams of the Cross. "She was one seed in a vast germination," Waugh writes of her.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena,_mother_of_Constantine_I

It does work, though, and in a way Waugh fans eager for his usual bevy of social send-ups will enjoy.

Though the author rated it highly, Helena is not the most critically popular of Waugh’s novels. It wears its religion too proudly. As with his biography Edmund Campion, he is writing about an actual saint, in this case one about whom very little is known. Waugh explains in a preface that his Helena by necessity differs some from what scholars think her to be. This allows him latitude.

Waugh’s playful handling of the historical record is charming. For one thing, he gives Helena an English origin, as the pampered, horse-mad daughter of King Coel, of “Old King Cole” fame. [Actual historians place her as likely being lower-class and Greek.] In the novel, she lives amid wanton luxury, which Waugh describes with humor and a little salt:

High and thin and heartless sang the fiddles and the chanter; deep and turgid and lachrymose sang the bearded choristers. Lax and supine sprawled the soldiers; rigid and erect sat the royal women. Softly the page stepped from couch to couch with the mead bowl; heavily the district commander stumbled once more to the vomitorium.

When a mysterious Roman named Constantius comes calling, looking to advance his claim to the Empire, he spots Helena as a fetching bride, which is how her known story as the mother of the Emperor Constantine, who Christianized Rome, begins.

The Roman Empire under Constantine the Great, circa 312-337 A. D. While much diminished from its period of greatest strength, with more territorial losses in its near future, the empire would last over a thousand years more, in part because of Constantine's reforms.
Image from https://cdapress.com/news/2020/oct/11/history-corner/ 

The other part of Helena’s known story, and more important from Waugh’s perspective, is as the discoverer of the True Cross, upon which Christ was crucified, in Jerusalem. This quest dominates the last third of the book, though before it, we get a lot of romance, betrayal, and intrigue; served up in a fresh, non-antiquated way that reminded me a lot of Robert Graves’ novel I, Claudius and the subsequent miniseries.

“There are secret societies everywhere in Rome. You never know who you’re talking to; the man next to you at dinner may be a member. Every class is mixed up in it. Women, too. Slaves and eunuchs and senators. They’re out to destroy the empire; God knows why. Aurelian says it’s the Christians…”

Ah, the Christians. They are of course at the heart of the novel, yet despite Helena’s reputation, it doesn’t become primarily about the Christians until two-thirds of the way in. Before that, the focus is on Roman politics and customs, and how to survive them.

This is no easy thing. For one thing, Constantius’s lust for power burns hotter than his attraction for Helena, making her expendable once he is offered the hand of another woman with connections to the Imperial family. Helena looks to the compensation of their son, Constantine, whose active qualities cheer her, but she is denied custody.

Constantius keeps a hard-faced mistress, whose grisly fate portends much danger in Helena’s future. No wonder she chooses a life farming her estate in out-of-the-way Dalmatia, and urges the same of her son:

“Keep out of history, Constantine. Stay and see what I have done, the clearing and draining and planting. That is something better than history.”

On the eve of a battle, Constantine had a dream of a cross in the sky which impressed him so he ordered it painted on his troops' shields as he led them to victory. Waugh presents him as more impressed by the cross as personal emblem than religious icon.
Image from https://www.ancientpages.com/2017/09/29/strange-dream-roman-emperor-constantine-changed-history/

Constantine chooses history, though, and becomes one of the last great Roman emperors, perhaps the greatest since Trajan. But Waugh’s treatment of him is complex. He is presented not as conquering hero or beneficent ruler, but rather as moody despot, easily misled and more than a bit mad in the Nero/Caligula way.

At one point, caught up in delusions of godhood, he is reminded he is human: “I know I am human,” he replies. “In fact, I often feel that I am the only real human being in the whole of creation.”

For a time Constantine is lorded over by his wife, Empress Fausta, a formidable and ruthless adversary to anyone she deems a threat. Helena finds herself in that category after not very long.

Fausta is also a Christian, but of a very modern sort. She takes up her religion as a combination weapon and Easter bonnet, and urges a pragmatic, shallow faith on those around her:

“The church isn’t a hole-and-corner thing anymore. It’s the official imperial religion. What they were taught may have been all very well in the catacombs, but now we have to deal with a much more sophisticated type of mind altogether.”

Waugh’s handling of Fausta is the part of the book that reminded me most of I, Claudius: clever, quick, and more than a bit brutal. It is the highlight of the entire book, which centers afterward on Helena’s quest.

In the middle decades of the Roman Empire, even well-liked emperors died hard, like Probus (above). Waugh writes of his troops: "One warm day, the men got bored, chased the emperor up a tower, and murdered him on the summit."
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probus_%28emperor%29 

And what of Helena? Despite being the title character, she is left as something of a mystery in the novel. Her conversion to Christianity is handled offstage, her motives for converting unexplained. Like for Waugh himself, it seems to have been a gradual thing that happened all of a sudden, like a sunny day less to be talked about than grateful for.

There is an existential element to it all, of grace that comes not of itself but through hard labor and blind faith, from a God that may be a detached watchmaker after all. Once Helena explains her desire to find the Cross of Christ’s Crucifixion, she is discouraged by everyone, including some of faith as sincere as hers.

Her counterargument is not one of logic, but emotion, and rather pathetic in isolation: “But how do you know he doesn’t want us to have it – the cross, I mean? I bet he’s just waiting for one of us to go and find it – just at this moment when it’s most needed.”

By this point, Helena is a very old woman, with ample worldly power but failing physical and mental strength. Finding answers eludes her, to the point where she starves herself and has visions, a situation not unfamiliar to readers of the New Testament.

Basically, the Cross serves as a physical manifestation not only of Christ’s redemptive power but of God’s active interest in mankind, something that she found lacking in other religions she sampled in her youth. Waugh is quite moving in the way he writes of Helena’s struggle, but he also chooses to leave a lot of things unsaid, perhaps because he hopes it will encourage the reader to formulate their own answers.

I wasn’t convinced by the story, but I enjoyed Waugh’s take and the chance to see his characteristic writerly flair employed in the genre of speculative historical fiction, which I enjoy.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, ordered built by St. Helena to mark the burial place of Christ. In the novel, Helena is able to locate the spot of the grave with help from an old man she encounters in a dream.
Image from https://cdapress.com/news/2020/oct/11/history-corner/ 

Characters speak in colloquial English, using British slang terms like “beano” and the like. Constantius finds himself “put on the shelf” when he is made to stand down while others take their shots at battlefield glory and the throne.

Ample digs are taken at then present-day affairs, with the false Christians played up like social-climbing Anglicans. Waugh had a famous loathing for modern art, which he references when Constantine finds himself trying to have a sculpture made of him with artists who shy away from anything that smacks of “representational” work. They prefer abstract design, which sends Constantine on a rant:

“The empire’s bigger and more prosperous and more peaceful than it’s ever been. I’m always being told so in every public address I hear. But when I ask for a little thing like the arch of Trajan, you say it can’t be done.”

Once the novel settles into the religious story, it becomes more a celebration of one woman’s faith, or really one man’s, that being Waugh himself. Because Waugh’s faith, strange and choked in anger and bile yet limned by love, is a thing of great interest to me, I found this part of the reading experience worthwhile, but it won’t be as welcome to people who prefer a more secular and materialist Waugh, who do have a number of other books of his to choose from.

Helena stands out for being unique, and for managing to be both entertaining and devout, if seldom simultaneously. A pleasant read whatever your leanings; probably more so if you happen to be Catholic.