There is an instinct shared by writers, critics and readers to select two authors whose lives and works present an evident congruence and yoke them together in a symbiotic relationship that often becomes permanent in public perception. This tendency extends beyond writers coupled by collaboration, such as Addison and Steele or Somerville and Ross, to authors who worked independently, but whose oeuvre and, sometimes, biographies suggest an affinity. Exceptionally, this association can reach across centuries, languages and cultures, where one author’s work is derivative from another, as in the case of Virgil and Homer.

English literature supplies several instances of the twinning of writers. Keats and Shelley, as paradigms of the Romantic poets, are obvious examples; likewise, to a lesser extent, Dickens and Thackeray, or Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton. In the niche market of pseudo-Catholic kitsch, one might similarly combine Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo with Ronald Firbank. George Bernard Shaw took the concept to its ultimate conclusion by merging GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, to confect the pantomime-horse identity of ‘Chesterbelloc’.

The two 20^th century authors who offer the most credible prospect for creating a literary symbiosis are Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. The two men, though distinct in their inspiration and style, had a remarkable amount in common.

The first trait they shared was that neither of these men, regarded as quintessentially English novelists, had his ancestral roots in England: Waugh was Scottish (or ‘Scotch’, as he would have preferred to phrase it) in terms of his forebears; Powell was Welsh by descent. That descent was established in minute detail, as a consequence of Powell’s consuming interest in genealogy. He successfully traced his bloodline back through Rhys ap Gruffydd, Prince of Deheubarth in the 12^th century, to Gwyriad ap Elidyr, in the late eighth century, descendant of the semi-mythical King Coel the Old, as recorded in the genealogies preserved in Jesus College MS 20.

On presenting his evidence to the College of Arms in 1964, Powell’s pedigree was officially recognised and he was granted the use of the ancient Powell arms – sable, an eagle displayed argent – whose simplicity testified to their antiquity. Powell was, however, half-English, since his mother was a Dymoke, descended from the Dymokes of Scrivelsby, who hold the hereditary office of King’s Champion by inheritance from the family of Marmion. The 35th Dymoke of Scrivelsby officiated in that office at the coronation of Charles III.

Evelyn Waugh had a not dissimilar, if less meticulously chronicled, background. Frequently pilloried by denigrators as ‘snobbish’ and obsessed with the aristocracy, it gave critics satisfaction to emphasise that his father was a publisher, not a nobleman, who lived in middle-class, suburban Hampstead. It was even more gratifying to discover that his more remote ancestors had come from humble farming stock in Berwickshire. This impression, however, was misleading.

Waugh’s ancestry was more variegated than Powell’s, embracing English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and Huguenot roots. The fact that one of Evelyn Waugh’s great-great-grandfathers was Lord Cockburn, the polemical Whig judge and diarist, rather discredits the image of the family’s ‘humble’ origins. In fact, the Waughs farmed their own land, at East Gordon in Berwickshire, which, apparently, was fairly extensive. It was reputed to have been sold in the 19^th century for £20,000 (more than a million pounds in today’s money), though that figure cannot definitely be established.

The Waugh genealogy is dominated by Evelyn’s great-great-grandfather, Alexander Waugh, a minister of the Secession Church of Scotland, due to the Victorians’ obsession with celebrity divines. It was he who first moved to England. The length of the Waughs’ residence at Gordon is evidenced by the marriage there of Evelyn’s five-greats-grandfather Thomas Waugh (b.1630), son of John Waugh, in 1652.

The Waugh family tradition links them to Robert de Waugh, of Heip, Roxburghshire, who signed the Ragman’s Roll in fealty to Edward I in 1291. The family of Waugh (Walgh, Walugh) allegedly held the lands of Walugh in Roxburghshire from the ninth to the 17^th century. Evelyn Waugh’s ancestors claimed a coat of arms (azure, a garb or, in chief two mullets argent) identical to the Wauchopes of Dumfriesshire, from whom they possibly descend, with the motto ‘Industria ditat’.

The reason it is worthwhile to analyse the genealogical patrimony of the two novelists is that, in both cases, it exercised a considerable influence on their lives and writing. Powell researched his ancestry methodically and proved his descent to the relevant authorities. Waugh, who seems to have been largely ignorant of the details outlined above, ignored his background until his income became sufficient for him to buy a country house, when he wrote to his brother Alec, expressing his reawakened interest in ‘the validity of our coat of arms & crest’.

Waugh’s interest was desultory, whereas Powell’s was focused. Waugh should have taken the trouble to investigate an ancestry that displays the classic symptoms of younger-son-of-younger-son descent from a noble house established for centuries in the same locality; if he had proved his ancestor John Waugh, circa 1600, had legitimately used armorial bearings, he would have been eligible to be received as a Knight of Honour and Devotion in the Order of Malta, a noble institution in which he placed three of his characters, in Brideshead and Sword of Honour.

Both men were driven by a desire to join, or re-join, the landed gentry. Both entertained the ambition to own a country house with a gate lodge and both achieved it: Waugh at Piers Court, his home in Gloucestershire; Powell at The Chantry, in Somerset. They also married into the titled nobility, Waugh twice and Powell once. Waugh’s first wife was the daughter of a baron; his second, Laura Herbert, the granddaughter of the Earl of Carnarvon. Powell’s wife, Lady Violet Pakenham, was a daughter of the Earl of Longford.

Waugh and Powell attended different schools (Lancing and Eton, respectively), but their paths crossed at Oxford, where, though not intimates, they knew each other. Both men made their early reputations with short, comic or satirical novels that, in the 1930s, sat well with the Zeitgeist. Over a decade, beginning in 1928, Waugh produced Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and Scoop, which secured his reputation as a comic novelist. A Handful of Dust, written after the failure of his first marriage, exhibited an underlying darkness that revealed Waugh’s bitterness and disillusionment.

One passage in particular savagely portrays the extravagant selfishness of an unfaithful wife, Brenda Last. After her little boy is killed in a riding accident, she is told ‘John is dead’ and mistakenly thinks this refers to her worthless lover, who shares the same Christian name; when the mistake is clarified and she realises it is her son who is dead, she utters an involuntary ‘Thank God!’

Over the same period, Powell similarly produced five novels: Afternoon Men, Venusberg, From a View to a Death, Agents and Patients and the unsuccessful What’s Become of Waring. These novels were largely set in the artistic, bohemian circles of 1930s London. While they are well written and entertaining, giving some portent of the author’s future capabilities, they were a notch below Waugh’s productions. Nevertheless, they had a similar sense of humour. In Afternoon Men, while portraying a bohemian party involving fancy dress, Powell writes of one character: ‘He was wearing a false nose, which lent him an unaccustomed dignity.’ That line is fully equal to Waugh.

The defining moment in Waugh’s life was his conversion to Catholicism in 1930. Throughout their careers, Waugh and Powell augmented their incomes with prolific journalism and book reviewing. Though not uncritical of each other’s works, the two shared private jokes when naming characters; in his later years, Waugh claimed the only thing that kept him alive was waiting for the next volume of Powell’s Dance. Waugh also produced travel books and biographies. The Second World War provoked a hiatus in the work of both writers, Powell more so than Waugh, since he considered it impossible to write in wartime.

Waugh was initially too preoccupied with his military duties, which included service during the Allied disaster on Crete in 1941, that would furnish him with rich material for later literary invention. In 1943 he published Put Out More Flags, an entertaining portrait of some of his characters from the piping days of peace embroiled in the chaos and absurdity of total war. That volume conformed to his prewar canon; but a major transformation in Waugh’s writing was about to occur. The outcome would be Brideshead Revisited.

The most interesting passages in Waugh’s diaries are those that record his writing of his great novel, interrupted by army intrusions (he was still a serving officer). His early enthusiasm for the war had been quashed by the Allies’ collaboration with the Soviet Union and by disillusionment with the military life. On 31 January 1944, while staying at an hotel in Devon, Waugh wrote: ‘Today, Monday, I came to Chagford with the intention of starting on an ambitious novel tomorrow morning. I still have a cold and am low in spirits but I feel full of literary power which only this evening gives place to qualms of impotence.’

Those qualms were dissipated the following day. Waugh’s excitement over the project, quite different from any of his previous novels, is undisguised. Between 1 February 1944 and early June, he recorded the progress and frustrating interruptions in the writing of his novel. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, as British troops were scrambling ashore in Normandy, Waugh completed the closing chapter of Brideshead – Lord Marchmain’s death scene. Two days later, with the epilogue added, he sent the final version to be typed.

Although Waugh implausibly claimed his favourite among his novels was Helena, that was almost certainly a defensive ploy to conceal his pride in Brideshead Revisited. His diary entries betray his nervous state while writing it: ‘am in alternate despondency and exultation about the book… Thank God I think I am beginning to acquire a style’. The novel was published on 28 May 1945 and sold out within a week; the reviews, as Waugh noted, were ‘adulatory except where they were embittered by class resentment’. It was Book of the Month in America, earning an immediate £10,000. Waugh had to make urgent tax arrangements to cope with his new wealth.

In purely literary terms, Brideshead is Waugh’s masterpiece, though it is run very close by Sword of Honour. The hostile criticism, as Waugh noted, on the eve of the Labour landslide election of 1945, was largely provoked by its aristocratic context. Equally provocative to the sensibilities of the English intelligentsia was its Catholic inspiration, alien to a coterie bred in the materialist climate of Oxford and Cambridge, its voice the BBC and heir to the post-Reformation, Whiggish black legend of popery in England. Kingsley Amis, who hated the book, absurdly claimed it would have been better had Waugh not written it.

The two passages most singled out for attack are Lord Marchmain’s deathbed reconciliation with the Church and the brief love-making episode between Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte in a storm at sea. So far from being implausible, Waugh had actually witnessed the identical deathbed repentance of Hubert Duggan, brother of Alfred Duggan, the historical novelist; Hubert was also the inspiration for the character Charles Stringham in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

The love-making passage, so far from being ‘bad sex’ writing, is an expedient contrivance to inform the reader that intimacy took place, in a perfunctory way: ‘It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.’ It is a detached, metaphorical device for making clear the transformation of the relationship between Charles and Julia.

Waugh had indeed acquired a style. In doing so, he again moved in parallel with Powell. Both authors’ early work had displayed economy of language, occasionally almost telegrammatic in Powell’s case, while the telephone dialogues in Waugh’s Vile Bodies are so terse that a single word sometimes supplies a line. Waugh evolved into the lush style of Brideshead, with rococo evocations of Oxford in the past, ‘irrecoverable as Lyonnesse’, as he unleashed the full richness of the English language. Powell became more prolix, employing long, convoluted sentences to philosophise over a topic such as Widmerpool’s overcoat, in a style that verged on the Proustian.

Waugh admitted that wartime nostalgia for peacetime luxury drove him to indulge in extravagance; but interwoven with it was the underlying theme of the novel, explicitly stated by Waugh himself as being ‘the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters’. The principal character in Brideshead Revisited is not Charles Ryder or Sebastian Flyte, but God; none the less omnipresent for being unseen.

Soon after, Anthony Powell embarked on his ambitious project, a 12-volume roman fleuve with the overall title A Dance to the Music of Time. It is a classic and will repeatedly re-enter and exit popular taste for generations to come. One towering achievement is paramount: Powell secured his own immortality by creating Widmerpool. Kenneth Widmerpool is an eternal character, in any society in which the state and its bureaucracy is spreading like Japanese knotweed, as is the case with all Western countries today.

The perennially impecunious Uncle Giles, obsessed with the family trust, is a comic creation of genius; so is X Trapnell; the comedy turns dark through the agency of Pamela Flitton, nemesis of both Trapnell and Widmerpool, and one of the most rebarbative female characters in English literature since Somerset Maugham created Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage. Literature is a kind of echo chamber. Is there an echo, in the relationship between Charles Stringham and Miss Weedon (‘Tuffy’), of Steerforth and Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield?

As each volume of this massive oeuvre came out, readers were relieved to discover no diminution in quality. Until, unfortunately, the twelfth and last volume Hearing Secret Harmonies, which saw Powell fall at the final hurdle. It somehow does not work. Scorpio Murtlock and his New Age followers are an attempt by Powell to develop the novel sequence in harmony with each successive period. The final volume, published in 1975, covers the turbulent years from 1968 to 1971, but Powell failed to bring it off. It hardly detracts from the massive achievement of the overall work, but it is a pity.

Waugh, too, embarked on a longer work in his later years, the trilogy Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender, later merged into one volume as Sword of Honour. If Powell produced Widmerpool, Waugh created Apthorpe, an equally immortal character and just one among a cast of marvellous inventions. Again, the theme is Catholic, more prominently in the foreground than in Brideshead, with Guy Crouchback, last of a Recusant gentry family, deserted by his wife and unable, under canon law, to remarry: the fate that had threatened Waugh until the annulment of his first marriage.

It has been said that Sword of Honour, taken in conjunction with the seventh to ninth volumes of Powell’s Dance, furnish the best literary encapsulation of Britain’s experience of the Second World War. Yet Waugh’s trilogy was more than an evocation of that period. The character Trimmer, a more aggressive embodiment of the Common Man than his forerunner Hooper in Brideshead, having impregnated Guy’s ex-wife Virginia, whom Guy chivalrously remarries to legitimise her child, has created a sequence of events whereby the boy, though the son of a ship’s barber, will one day inherit the ancient Crouchback name and estate.

After Virginia’s death, killed by a ‘buzz bomb’ following her conversion to Catholicism, Guy marries a woman from another Recusant family and has children of his own, construed by some readers as a happy ending. Those children were deleted when Waugh revised the book for the Penguin edition. As he explained in a letter to Powell, regarding the ‘happy ending’: ‘That was far from my intention. I thought it more ironical that there should be real heirs of the blessed Gervase Crouchback dispossessed by Trimmer but I plainly failed to make that clear. So no nippers for Guy and Domenica in Penguin.’

At the social level, Waugh was epitomising, in a parable, the usurpation of tradition and heritage by the brutal new postwar order, enthroning the Common Man; but at the spiritual level he was doing precisely the opposite, legitimising the supplanting, genetically, of a noble Recusant succession in pursuit of a greater good, in the economy of salvation, again due to the working of divine grace. That discredits the accusations of ‘snobbery’ levelled at Waugh by superficial critics.

That is why, despite the innumerable circumstantial parallels between him and Powell, there is one insuperable incompatibility: the absence of any religious sensibility in Powell’s work. In 2018 Allan Massie wrote an article for the Catholic Herald, entitled ‘Why A Dance to the Music of Time features little Catholicism but a lot of mumbo-jumbo.’

Massie was struck, despite the vast range of the 12-volume sequence, by ‘the strange absence of Catholic characters’. He contrasted that with the treatment of Mrs Erdleigh, a medium and fortune teller, who augments the comic presence of her associate, Uncle Giles, but apparently accurately foresees events in the futures of the materialist Quiggin and Pamela Flitton. Massie pointed out that this awarded Mrs Erdleigh credibility, though, in fairness, it could be justified under the authorial right to create ambiguity. Dr Trelawney, based on Aleister Crowley, is another would-be magician. Massie was also critical of the Scorpio Murtlock episode.

The criticism is that a 20^th century materialist, with only remote Welsh Druidic traditions to draw on by way of metaphysical resources, exhibits this poverty in an otherwise imposing work. It is an important issue. Western intellectuals routinely invoke ‘Enlightenment values’. Evelyn Waugh’s counter to that would have been that the sole Enlightenment vouchsafed to mankind occurred at Pentecost and the pseudo-Enlightenment’s repudiation of divine revelation brought darkness rather than light.

The significance of this, for literature, is that the rejection of the metaphysical has left novelists deprived of an entire dimension that was available to their predecessors. ‘Magical realism’ is no more an adequate substitute than Mrs Erdleigh. The increasing banality of literature and the visual arts testifies to the vacuum left by the exclusion of the spiritual dimension. The current obsession with experimentation with literary form smacks of a need to employ innovations as a substitute for profundity.

That a novelist as talented as Anthony Powell should be criticised for the banality of the quasi-supernatural components of his work demonstrates the penalty paid by modern novelists who have jettisoned an entire dimension of existence, straitjacketed by the empiricism of the Enlightenment setting bounds to the imagination. It is not only in terms of style and creativity that Evelyn Waugh, even if narrowly, outshines his friend Anthony Powell.