Amy Welborn has been busy. She's been acquiring printing rights of old books, as the editor of Loyola Classics.
That Helena book by Waugh looks especially inviting. George Weigel writes:
In fact [Stannard] suggests that the character of Helena, the mother of Constantine to whom tradition ascribes the discovery of the True Cross in Jerusalem, is the key to grasping both Waugh's sense of himself and his mature vision of the Christian life in the world...in its spare narration and crisp dialogue, in its deceptive simplicity, in the ongoing collision between myth and history that gives rhythm to the narrative line-in sum, in its subtle deprecation of literary realism as a mode of discerning the truth of things-Helena was, Stannard concedes, "a vital technical experiment, neither modernist nor realist, but postmodernist, metafictional."
But Helena was also Waugh's most intentional statement about the truth of Christianity and about vocation as the heart of Christian discipleship. As Stannard puts it, the satire of the early Waugh had been characterized by a "jubilant malice" that reappeared, to the applause of the critics and the crowd, in The Loved One. But even before the war the author himself was being driven by other concerns. "Purgatory obsessed him," Stannard writes, "the painful road toward his destiny as St. Evelyn Waugh."
For that is what Waugh had discerned he must become: a saint.
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