scarcely human
Beneath and beyond all his quirkiness, Evelyn Waugh, as he understood himself, was a Christian pilgrim - a Catholic with an intensely sacramental apprehension of reality, a craftsman with a profound belief that writing was his vocation, not simply his career. Waugh himself admitted that he was a very bad Christian, a man to whom neither prayer nor charity came easily; as he was famously reported to have said to a society matron who had complained about his boorish manners, “Madame, were it not for the faith, I should scarcely be human.”
from the intro to Helena, a fairly unknown work of Waugh’s, which however was the only one he read aloud to his children. i’ve only cracked it, looking forward to digging in.