Rhode Island Library Commemorates Waugh’s 1949 American Visit

Posted on March 8, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The St Thomas More Library of the Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island has mounted an exhibit commemorating Waugh’s visit to the school 75 years ago in March 1949. This was part of his lecture tour of Roman Catholic schools and universities in that year. Here’s a link to the notice posted on the internet. The written notice on the exhibit reads:

On March 20, 1949, the English writer Evelyn Waugh and his wife Laura, spent the night on our campus in the Manor House. This year marks the 75th anniversary of that visit which benefitted the Portsmouth Priory School.

Commemorative t-shirts were made in 2012 for the Evelyn Waugh Conference held in Baltimore, one of which is in the P. A. S. Library Archives. The t-shirts in this case are copies which feature Waugh’s self-portrait on the front, along with a tour  style listing of lecture dates on the reverse, showing Portsmouth/Providence as the final stop.

The visit to what is now called the Portsmouth Abbey School and the lecture which was delivered in nearby Providence were described in an article about the lecture tour published in Evelyn Waugh Studies. Here is the relevant text:

“Providence/Newport, Portsmouth Priory School, 20 March 1949. This lecture was sponsored by Portsmouth Priory School (now Portsmouth Abbey School), a Roman Catholic preparatory school near Newport, Rhode Island. It was announced in the Providence Journal on 20 March (“What’s Going On?” 2) and reported in the Providence Evening Bulletin on 21 March under a photo taken at the lecture (“Waugh Lauds Catholic Influence on British Writers,” 4). On 23 March, the lecture was reported on the front page of The Cowl, the student newspaper of Providence College. Waugh spoke on Sunday evening at Hope High School Auditorium, a public school on the east side of Providence. Dom Damian Kearney, OSB, came to Portsmouth Priory shortly afterward and gives this account of their visit:

The Waughs were met at the train in Providence by one of the monks, who was surprised to find Mrs. Waugh carrying the suitcase and offered to take it from her, only to be told by the author that she always carried the luggage, or words to that effect. When he was introduced at the lecture [by the Rev. Joseph Bracq, editor of the diocesan newspaper], his name was mispronounced, sounding something like “wawf”, which must have been disconcerting, but Mr. Waugh took it in good stride. Mr. Waugh stayed in guest quarters in the Manor House, which served as the main building for administration, guest facilities and reception rooms. [The Assistant Headmaster Francis Brady and his wife] presided at tea given in one of the reception rooms on Sundays and special occasions such as the Waugh visit. At the tea Mr. Waugh was on his best behavior and was most cordial; a number of the monks were present as well as several lay faculty. Also present was Mrs. Waugh.

Waugh’s visit is also mentioned in the memoirs of Sally Ryder Brady (A Box of Darkness, 2011). The Brady family, later to become her in-laws, were much taken with the Flyte family of Brideshead and “knew the book almost as well as they knew their Gospels.” One of the Brady children, Ellen, recalls meeting the Waughs:

As I remember (and I could be wrong, since I was fifteen at the time) the school wasn’t in session, which might explain why there isn’t any record of his visit. I clearly remember having breakfast at the high table on a Sunday morning with Dom Aelred Wall, … the then headmaster, Evelyn Waugh, and, I think, Mrs. Waugh and nobody else. The great man was surprisingly charmless. He carried a huge stick and smoked a huge stinky cigar and conversed rather rudely. Mrs. Waugh was quite plain and didn’t talk much. I clearly remember him walking away through the empty school dining room with his ridiculous stick, which he seemed to need for walking.

Waugh was also entertained in Newport by a family connected to his English Catholic friends. Edward Joseph Eyre was married to Pelline (née Acton, 1906-1998), granddaughter of Lord Acton (1834-1902), the famous historian and Liberal politician. Waugh’s friend Daphne Acton, the patron of Ronald Knox, was Pelline Eyre’s sister-in-law. Waugh later visited Daphne Acton and her husband John in Southern Rhodesia in 1959, as described in A Tourist in Africa (1960).” [Footnotes omitted.]

After the Providence lecture, the Waughs went back to New York where he had already lectured twice. They returned to England from New York, arriving in Southampton on 31 March 1949.

UPDATE: Paragraph added to library notice.

 

 

 

 

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Editing Merton

Posted on March 5, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The Jesuit magazine America has posted a brief retrospective article describing Robert Giroux’s early professional coup with his 1948 publication of Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. This is written by James T Keane. Evelyn Waugh played a part in the story. Here are the opening paragraphs of Keane’s article:

He edited Flannery O’Connor. Virginia Woolf, too. Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac (for a while) and Walker Percy. Donald Barthelme. William Saroyan. Elizabeth Bishop. Katherine Anne Porter. Oh, and T.S. Eliot and John Berryman and Robert Lowell, too. And he had a rather distinguished cadre of external readers for his authors’ manuscripts. When a young Trappist monk and former college chum sent Robert Giroux his memoir in 1946, Giroux asked a few literary friends for advice. Who were they? Graham Greene, Claire Booth Luce, Archbishop Fulton Sheen and Evelyn Waugh.

That’s a lot of literary firepower, and I haven’t even named the monk in question yet: Thomas Merton. The book would become The Seven Storey Mountain, published in Great Britain (with Waugh as the editor!) as Elected Silence. It would remain on The New York Times’s best-seller list for over a year (The Times originally refused to include Mountain on the grounds that it was a “religious book”) and has sold more than four million copies since…

America also helpfully reposts its 1988 memoir by Giroux in which he recounts in somewhat greater detail Waugh’s participation in the project. Here is a relevant excerpt:

…there remained minor editorial polishing throughout—cutting out excess verbiage, repetitions, longueurs or dull patches. I must say that Merton was very responsive and cooperative about all these emendations, which were too numerous and unimportant to record. Writing to Sister Thérèse about these cuts—and if it were not for her scholarly interest in the matter, I would have been unable to throw much light on the editing since I kept no notes— Merton told her: “Really, the Mountain did need to be cut. The length was impossible….The editor at Harcourt was, is, my old friend Bob Giroux who comes into the book for a line somewhere. He did a very good job….I am perfectly satisfied to see anything go out of a book….When you hear your words read aloud in a refectory, it makes you wish you had never written a word. Fortunately, the Mountain was not read here. I would never have had the virtue to face such an ordeal!”

One irony is that I persuaded Merton to add five-and-one-half printed pages to the text. I had sent an advance galley proof to my friend, Professor Francis X. Connolly of Fordham University, who liked the book enormously. Merton had just published an article in Commonweal about America discovering the contemplative life, and Dr. Connolly thought this would fill one of the gaps in the book—the relevance of Merton’s vocation to the modern world. Merton agreed, and it occupies pages 414-19.

This interpolation also occupies the same number of pages in the London edition of The Seven Storey Mountain, which was edited by no less a light than Evelyn Waugh. I had sent him galley proofs, hoping for a quote but not really expecting one, and he wrote at once: “I regard this as a book which may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience. No one can afford to neglect this clear account of a complex religious process.” (I had also sent galleys to Graham Greene, Clare Boothe Luce and Fulton Sheen, all of whom responded in equally superlative terms. It was at this point that Harcourt, Brace increased the first printing from 5,000 copies to 12,500.)

If Sister Thérèse felt that my editing was too severe— and I’m afraid she did—I wonder what she thought of Evelyn Waugh’s. To begin with, he changed the title, the image of the mountain of purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which Merton considered “literally and physically accurate” for his book. Waugh found an English source in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “Elected silence, sing to me/And beat upon my whorlèd ear,” and his edition was brought out by Hollis and Carter in 1949 under the title, Elected Silence. In his preface, Waugh stated, “Nothing has been cut out except certain passages which seemed to be of purely local interest.” For example, following Merton’s moving account of the wartime death of his only brother Paul, whose bomber crashed in the North Sea, I ran Merton’s fine elegy in verse. Waugh threw it out. But surely it has more than local (by which Waugh of course meant American) interest. He also cut out parts of the Columbia College section, including Merton’s account of our first meeting at the Columbia Review. The English edition comes to 375 printed pages, 50 less than the American, a reduction of nearly 10 percent.

When I met Waugh in New York, on his way to Hollywood and later to Gethsemani, he told me how thoroughly he had edited Merton’s text. “Yes,” I agreed, “you edited me out of it.” “Really? I never noticed that,” he replied. At one point he described J. F. Powers, whose work he admired, as “a Southern writer.” When I said “Midwestern writer” would be more correct, he said he regarded Illinois as a Southern state. I was also amused by Merton’s report of Waugh’s visit to the monastery. He told Tom he found Hollywood dull; he had expected to find glamour and jewels and parades of elephants but found only businessmen doing business. He said the only real entertainment in Hollywood was at the Forest Lawn Cemetery, which he visited every day. He did not send Merton a copy of The Loved One because “it is not proper material for your refectory.”…

Sister Therese was a nun living in Milwaukee to whom Merton entrusted management of the details of the book’s editing and publication. Apparently he did not have an agent, so she appears to have fulfilled some of the functions an agent would have performed. Waugh met her in person later in the following year when he lectured to the students at Marquette University. For the record, J F Powers, a young Roman Catholic writer with whom Waugh also met on his 1949 North American lecture tour, was living in St Paul, Minnesota, not Illinois, when Waugh met him there. Try as one might, one cannot think of Minnesota as a “Southern” state.

 

 

 

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Another Look at Penguin Hardbacks

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

A 2011 article from The London Magazine by Paul Williamson recently became available on the internet. This is his review of the first 8 volumes of Evelyn Waugh’s books as published by Penguin Books in that year. Penguin at that time published the complete list of Waugh’s books in a uniform hardback edition. Williamson explains this at the conclusion of the TLM article:

…Penguin and Waugh have an association stretching back to the 1930s when Penguin published cheap reprints of several of Waugh’s early novels. These fell out of print during the Second World War, but in 1950 Penguin proposed to reprint all of Waugh’s fiction, in paperback, with a view to reaching a mass audience. To celebrate George Bernard Shaw’s ninetieth birthday Allen Lane had commissioned a reprint of ten of Shaw’s works in a print run of a hundred thousand. Works by H. G. Wells and Agatha Christie were issued in comparable numbers, and a year after the Penguin sets appeared none of these authors had sold less than a million books. Waugh was advised by his agent, A. D. Peters, to accept the deal and in 1951 Penguin published ten of Waugh’s novels in the mass-market format…

At the time the 10 Penguin volumes of Waugh’s fiction were issued simultaneously in 1951, 6 volumes had already been issued in Penguin paperbacks previously, starting with Decline and Fall in 1937 (Penguin No. 75). The 1951 batch included first paperback Penguin editions of The Loved One, Brideshead Revisited, When the Going Was Good, and, in a single volume, Work Suspended and Other Stories/Scott-King’s Modern Europe. Williamson’s article continues:

…By contrast, Penguin’s latest [i.e. 2011] edition, in the Penguin Classics imprint, is hardback and rather expensive – a set of books-as-objects of relatively austere design, intended to provide an aesthetically pleasing alternative to e-books. The set will look handsome on a bookcase, but there are details that could have been improved upon. For a luxury edition, the paper could perhaps have been a fraction heavier and greater care could occasionally have been taken with the inter-word spacing, which is sometimes extremely tight. (The map in my copy of Ninety-Two Days is extremely blurred, but that could be a one-off problem.) A greater drawback is that the texts are presented without introductions, textual notes or any other scholarly apparatus. For the moment one can mostly still read the novels without such aids, but Rossetti would certainly benefit from an introduction placing Waugh’s study in the context of ideas about art that were current in the 1920s. Similarly, although the travel books are undoubtedly an enjoyable read, that enjoyment could only be enhanced by the addition of explanatory notes.

Waugh seems to have been quite pleased during his lifetime with Penguin’s production and sale of his UK paperback editions. There was some suggestion at the time of the 2011 hardback reprint that Penguin were a bit put out by the choice of OUP rather than Penguin as the publishers of Waugh’s complete works and that this set of Penguin hardbacks was their response. I believe that, at about the same time, Penguin published a similar  hardback edition of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, so their decision to print this edition of Waugh’s books may have been a bit more complicated than was suggested. In any event, there seems to have been no later reprint of the original 2011 format. The hardback Penguin volumes were not sold widely in the US market, although several of the 2011 volumes appear to have been remaindered here. Penguin recently, however, reissued six of the novels in a uniform hardback edition with colorful uniform dust-jackets. See previous post. These appear to have used the printed texts of the 2011 editions, although they differ from those earlier printings in that they each have introductions by Waugh scholars (as Williamson had suggested in his 2011 review). As was the previous hardback run, these hardbacks are available for sale in the UK but not the US market.

The complete text of Williamson’s article (‘Evelyn Waugh’s First Eight Books’), including his discussions of the content of the books, is available at this link from The London Magazine website.

 

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Roundup: Letter, Exhibit and Two Recommendations

Posted on February 24, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–A letter from Evelyn Waugh is on offer on the internet. The description and text appear in this posting by the seller Rooke Books:

An autographed signed letter from Evelyn Waugh to Eileen Mayo, in the original envelope.

Envelope is postmarked the 30th March 1936, addressed to ‘Miss Eileen Mayo, 8 Eton Road, London N.W.3’.

Letter reads as, ‘Dear Miss Mayo, thank you so much for your letter. I love your picture – but alas I am not allowing myself the luxury of keeping it. I have bought it as a present for my young god-son, Jonathan Guinness. I think it is so important for him to have really good + unaffected pictures round him. Yours sincerely, Evelyn Waugh’.

Dame Eileen Mayo was an artist and designer who worked in many mediums, including tapestry, woodcuts, lithographs, and silk screening. She studied at the Slade School, and designed a platypus stamp for Australia, and six stamps of moths and fish for New Zealand.

The godson Waugh refers to in this letter is Jonathan Bryan Guinness, the 3rd Baron Moyne, who was born in 1930. He was the son of Bryan Guinness and Diana Mitford; this letter was written just seven months before Diana married Oswald Mosley. Waugh had been infatuated with Diana, dedicating his novel ‘Vile Bodies’ to her, and claiming that her beauty “ran through the room like a peal of bells”. The pair were fast friends, moving in the same literary circles, with Waugh living with the Guinnessess for extending periods in 1929 and 1930; however, there was a rupture in their friendship in 1930, with the pair becoming more distant and meeting infrequently. Waugh was likewise a good friend of Nancy.

Letter is written on letter headed paper from the Queen Hotel, Chester. The Chester Queen Hotel opened in 1860, and also saw Charles Dickens and Cecil Rhodes among its guests.

Here’s a link to the post which includes sales details and a photo of the letter and envelope.

–Novelist Philip Hensher writing in The Spectator reviews the catalogue of a new exhibit at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The exhibit is called Write, Cut, Rewrite. Hensher’s article opens with this:

The early stages of a literary work are often of immense interest. It is perhaps a rather tawdry kind of interest, like paparazzi shots of a Hollywood starlet taking the bins out before she’s put her make-up on. Of course it’s extraordinary to think that some of the most famous characters, events and lines in literature weren’t as we now know them but had to be struggled towards. Sometimes these efforts have the anachronistic but unavoidable sense of somebody getting it wrong.

Textual bibliographers have carefully classified the different steps a work takes from manuscript to first edition and subsequent versions. Perhaps we could go further in search of a writer’s progress. There are the inchoate thoughts, remote from any conscious intention – perhaps a sound, a mood, a phrase, a voice, a movement. Then some words that might merit being written down, even though no coherence is discernible. (But writers work in such different ways that none of this is universal.) Soon we start to have more consecutive writing – a few lines, or even a scene. A draft follows, which could be modified in any number of ways. At some point, eyes other than the author’s fall on the manuscript. Suggestions are made, changes might even be enforced, and agreement is reached on a final manuscript, which is sent to the printer and out to an audience.

Some or none of these stages may be preserved for the curious investigator. Occasionally we have everything, from the first jottings to the last authorised text. In many cases, however, writers have destroyed all other versions apart from the one first published, either by conscious decision or just custom. Sometimes even in these instances we still have signs of the author’s thoughts and decisions, because the work appeared in a subsequent rethought form. The differences between the first and second versions of The Dunciad and Brideshead Revisited tell us an enormous amount about the way Alexander Pope and Evelyn Waugh thought and worked…

Whether any of Waugh’s draft versions are displayed in the exhibit is not discussed in Hensher’s article or in the Bodleian’s announcement:

…The exhibition offers a peek behind the scenes into the writers’ workshops, drawing upon the Bodleian Libraries’ unparalleled collection of modern manuscripts from the 18th century to today, to reveal little-known literary revelations. It features abandoned works, such as Jane Austen’s The Watsons, and cases of censorship, such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It also touches on the revisions and rewritings of famous books, offering a unique chance to look over the shoulder of literary greats at the moment of creation.

Highlights include discarded ideas, fundamental changes, deletions, additions, notes and scribbles from great authors such as Mary and Percy Shelley, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Samuel Beckett, and John le Carré.

I am not aware of any Bodleian holdings of Waugh’s drafts or edits unless there may be some edited texts from his very early efforts as a student journalist.

—The Times newspaper has complied a list of the best “luxury films” to provide what its columnist Chiara Brown calls “Ultimate Escapism”. One of these is the 2008 film of Brideshead Revisited (not on everyone best film list):

Based on the 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited stars a very young (and very attractive) Matthew Goode. Goode plays Charles Ryder, an army officer in the Second World War awaiting his battle orders at a temporary camp at the Brideshead estate. But this isn’t the first time he has been to Brideshead. Cue misty reveries about his first visit, before the war, as a guest of the wealthy Flyte family, who own the estate. Ryder had been invited to stay by his Oxford chum, Sebastian (Ben Whishaw). Sexual, class and religious tensions abound. There is much lolling on lawns and many longing gazes across the crystal.
Watch the trailer here

Others on the list include the 1956 film High Society and the 2023 partial remake of Brideshead called Saltburn. The Times “recommend[s] watching this one with anyone but your parents.”

—The Catholic Times includes a Waugh novel among its lenten reading recommendations:

In Evelyn Waugh’s experimental novel, Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine sometimes talks like a flapper in 1920s London, while her father (King Cole) anticipates the brilliantly crusty Leo McKern in Rumpole of the Bailey. Beneath the Wavian  humor, however, is another literary reflection on the drama of vocation: the life-long project of discerning what God is asking of us now, and then configuring our lives to that summons. The final sections paint a striking portrait of fourth-century Jerusalem.

I do not recall previously seeing that novel described as “experimental”.

 

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Presidents Day Roundup

Posted on February 19, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–Ben Dowell reviews  a new TV serial about Coco Chanel’s life in wartime Paris. The title of the review tells much about the story: “New Look Review–Nice Dresses: Coco Chanel–pity about the Nazi boyfriend”. The article in Saturday’s Times newspaper opens with thus:

‘Nazis! I hate these guys!” If we are going to imagine how we would respond to life in the Second World War, most of us would probably like to think our response would be the unimprovable one uttered by Indiana Jones. Still, what about the actual business of getting by? In the many stories about ordinary lives caught up in this epic conflict, from Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, the sheer random cruelties and helplessness of those years have been superbly realised on the small screen.

But what if you are the celebrated designers Christian Dior and Coco Chanel? Well, we actually know a fair bit about how they operated and that is the subject of Todd A Kessler’s The New Look, the latest lavishly funded epic drama from Apple. The first three episodes dropped this week and they’re spent in occupied Paris…

—Financial Times also reviews another recent TV series with a nod to Evelyn Waugh. The review is by Jo Ellison. Here’s an excerpt:

I hate to be the one to disappoint, especially in Valentine’s week and in the fugue of romance that tends to befall us at the time of year. But we must disabuse ourselves of the cultural preoccupation that hot, dumb posh boys with crowds of buddies fall for smart, caustic, socially awkward girls. The latest manifestation of this pervasive brain/brawn romantic fiction, One Day, started streaming on Netflix last weekend. A 14-part adaptation of David Nicholls’ rabid bestseller, first published in 2009, it follows a will-they-won’t-they-ever-get-their-rocks-off friendship over decades via an annual check-in — the perfect episodic structure for a TV adaptation in this binge-drama age…

At a time when wage inequality has become a burning issue and opportunity stagnated, it’s perhaps inevitable that we might press our greasy noses to the window to perve at the super-rich. We may frown at nepo babies, but we still fawn over Succession offering a small glimpse into that world. One Day echoes the same themes of class, aspiration and opportunity best explored in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It’s presumably no coincidence that the famous TV adaptation of that 1940s drama first aired at another time of huge inequity, and the rising tide of Thatcherism, in 1981. …

–David Slattery-Christy describes his recent biography on the website Great British Life. This is about Harry Clifton who lived in Lytham Hall, a stately house in Lancashire. Waugh is mentioned in the book’s title: Flyte or Fancy–You Decide: Evelyn Waugh meets Harry Clifton on the Road to Brideshead. Here’s an excerpt:

…[Harry Clifton] went to Oxford to study Modern History at Christ Church in 1926 at the insistence of his father. This is where he found his wings and experimented with life and sex. Although we know that Evelyn Waugh visited Lytham Hall in the 1930s, and much speculation has evolved that he became an inspiration for Waugh’s character Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, it’s fairly certain that Harry and Waugh would have met at Oxford in the private drinking clubs that were for the time so hedonistic and sexually liberated. Interestingly, Sebastian Flyte in the novel Brideshead Revisited also had rooms at Christ Church and was, like Harry, a spoilt, petulant and rich young man.

After a visit to Lytham Hall in the 1930s, Waugh wrote to Lady Asquith to say the Cliftons were “all tearing mad” but also made some complimentary remarks about Lytham Hall, saying it was “a very beautiful house by Kent or someone like him with first-class Italian plaster work. A lap of luxury flowing with champagne and elaborate cookery. Mrs Clifton, Easter (or so she seems to be called), Orsa [Avia], Michael, a youth seven feet high with a moustache who plays with a clockwork motor car and an accordion.”

The Cliftons were Catholics, and Waugh would convert to Catholicism in the 1930s, but his opinion of the places of worship was less than complimentary: “Five hideous Catholic churches on the estate.” Waugh then went on to say: “Large park entirely surrounded by trams and villas. Adam dining room…all sitting at separate tables at meals. Two or three good pictures including a Renoir. Appalling heat. All sitting in sun with a dozen aeroplanes overhead and the gardens open to the public.”…

The quote is from a letter of 24 June 1935 (Letters, 94-95).  The book is available from Amazon.co.uk and can be shipped to America. Here’s a link.

UPDATE (20 Feb 2024): Citation to Letters added and misspelling of book title corrected.

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OUP Announces New Waugh Volume

Posted on February 18, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford University Press has announced a new volume in its ongoing Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh series. This will be CWEW Volume 10: The Loved One: An Anglo- American Tragedy. Its tentative UK release date is 23 April 2024 and the price is £130 (although a reduced price is also listed). Here’s the description:

‘A wicked book’, one reviewer called it. Evelyn Waugh’s eighth novel, The Loved One (1948), represents a return to the pungent satirical manner from which its predecessor Brideshead Revisited, three years earlier, had deviated. The prospect of Brideshead being turned into a film took its author to Los Angeles, where he became more interested in Forest Lawn Memorial-Park and its funeral rites than in Hollywood and its dreams of immortality. Or rather, ‘obsessed’ (his word) about the relations between them. Around these twin industries he spun a macabre fiction about an English poet and failed scriptwriter, an ingenuous young American beautician, and the master mortician for whom she works. A strong supporting cast features the English ex-patriate community and the Hollywood Cricket Club, the movie moguls and their henchmen, and the devotees serving the fictional ‘Whispering Glades’. The resulting story is one of Waugh’s funniest, yet it harbours an underlying gravity about the way the world (or the West) was going in the aftermath of global war. The Loved One is deeply coloured by memories of war. It may be concerned with the world of appearances to which Hollywood and Forest Lawn were dedicated, but this does not make it superficial. On the contrary. Waugh subtitled it ‘An Anglo-American Tragedy’, but it can be just as well understood as the most mordant of comedies, closer to the world of Samuel Beckett than of P. G. Wodehouse. Or better, an improbable combination of the two.

The book was edited by Prof. Adrian Poole who also wrote the introduction. Here’s his biography from the OUP posting:

Adrian Poole is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College. He has strong interests in the traditions of tragedy from the Greeks to the present day and in the afterlives of Shakespeare. His books include Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction and Shakespeare and the Victorians. He has also written extensively on nineteenth-century novelists including Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Stevenson, and James. He is one of the General Editors of the Complete Fiction of Henry James; his edition of The Princess Casamassima won the 2020 MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition.

Here is a link to the OUP announcement with full ordering details.

 

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Valentines Day Roundup

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The BBC has reposted a 2022 episode of its art series Fake or Fortune. This involves a drawing said to be by the painter Modigliani that was owned by Waugh’s friend Sacheverell Sitwell (brother of Edith and Osbert). Here’s an excerpt from the BBC’s summary:

Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould investigate a delicate sketch depicting a mother and child, purported to be by one of the modern art world’s most famous names, Amedeo Modigliani. Its owner, Henrietta Sitwell, inherited the work and always believed it to be genuine. However, a leading auction house recently cast doubt on its authenticity. If the work is genuine, it could be worth up to £100,000. If not, just a few hundred.

Henrietta inherited the sketch from her father, who had inherited it from his father, the writer and art collector Sacheverell Sitwell. Sacheverell was, along with his two siblings Osbert and Edith, a central member of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and a key figure in the world of British art. A direct connection to such an established and respected name might normally be enough to guarantee the authenticity of a work but, with an artist as regularly forged as Modigliani, it’s not so simple…

Fiona [Bruce, co-presenter] delves deep into the extensive Sitwell family archives to find any hard evidence for the picture’s provenance. The family story is that Sacheverell bought this work sometime after the First World War. Can we find any written proof of this? The picture is dedicated to ‘Zborowski’ – the name of Modigliani’s friend and art dealer Leopold Zborowski. Why would Sacheverell have owned a picture dedicated to someone else? Travelling to the Montmartre streets where Modigliani lived and worked, Fiona outlines the connections between the artist, his dealer and Henrietta’s grandfather.

Back in London, we recreate the 1919 exhibition Sacheverell, his brother and Leopold Zborowski held of modern French artists at Heal’s, the famous department store – an exhibition where dozens of Modigliani sketches were on sale for a few pennies each. Could this have been the moment when a Modigliani sketch, dedicated to his art dealer, found its way into the hands of the Sitwell family?

The program can be viewed on BBC iPlayer,  A UK internet connection is required.

—Country House magazine has posted an article by John Goodall entitled “Inside Madresfield Court, the house that inspired Evelyn Waugh’s novel ‘Brideshead Revisited'”. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Hanging just inside the front door of Madresfield Court is a framed notice in the form of an exquisitely illuminated manuscript page … It presents erstwhile visitors with a summary of all they needed to know during their stay. The times of prayers and meals take pride of place and, beneath them, are the telegram address and telephone exchange number of the house. Across the top of the intricate foliage border are the figures of saints and the name of the nearest railway station, Malvern Link; at the bottom the arms of Earl Beauchamp. To the sides are four vignettes — a view of the moat, gardens, dining hall and chapel — and portraits of a dog and cat.

The notice is a relic of Madresfield’s busy social round in the years leading up to the First World War, when it was the home of the Liberal politician and discerning patron William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, who had inherited this ancient family seat in 1891 aged 18. The story of his remarkable life and fall from grace, as well as the links between the house, his children and the novelist Evelyn Waugh, are central to Jane Mulvagh’s acclaimed history Madresfield: The Real Brideshead (2008)…

The article is accompanied with several detailed and relevant photographs. These include some of the chapel which was the part of the house that Waugh had particularly chosen to describe in his novel.

–Bridgeman Images has posted a 1959 photo of Waugh and his wife outside their then relatively new home Combe Florey. This is from a photo shoot of the couple and their children that is widely circulated, but this one has less often been reproduced.

—The Oldie  has posted a review by Geoffrey Wheatcroft of two new biographies of Winston Churchill, a man not admired by Evelyn Waugh. Here’s an excerpt:

…examples of Churchill’s judgement were seen in his choice of friends and advisers, notably Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken. They were what Evelyn Waugh had in mind with his brisk phrase just after Churchill’s death, ‘always in the wrong, always surrounded by crooks’.

Bracken was a man of most unlikely origin who attached himself to Churchill and made himself very useful as his financial factotum, a role he performed even while holding government office. And Beaverbrook was bully, a liar and altogether a scoundrel, to whom Churchill was strangely addicted even when ‘Max’ was betraying him…

—The Sunday Times has posted an article containing what two of its book critics consider the best “boozy books”. These are defined as “… literary adventures brimming with piss-ups and lonely bar stools with moments of elation and dreadful hangovers.” Here’s one by Evelyn Waugh nominated by Laura Hacket:

Evelyn Waugh wrote Decline and Fall, his first novel, at 24. Disgusting. But it’s fantastic — small, simple and perfectly formed. We begin in Scone College, where the Junior Dean and Domestic Bursar are sheltering from the wild excesses of the annual Bollinger dinner (no prizes for guessing the drinking society Waugh is gesturing towards here). Less successful in hiding from the evening, in which “a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles”, is poor Paul Pennyfeather, a scholarship student reading for the Church. Thanks to a school tie that unfortunately resembles the Boller tie, he is captured and forced to run away in his pants — an incident so “flagrantly indecent” that he is sent down and forced into employment at Llanabba school, where the story proper begins.

—The Observer asked novelists to choose their favorite love songs. Here is Alice Winn’s selection:

Music gives me a headache. Evelyn Waugh once called music “physical torment” and I agree with him, although possibly Waugh was only pretending to hate music in order to hurt Stravinsky’s feelings at a dinner party. Still, I’m very grateful to the sparse selection of music that doesn’t make me want to shut myself in a quiet, darkened room: I think Rachmaninoff is the most wildly romantic composer, and I love him with my whole heart. As to outright love songs – I’m very fond of Wouldn’t It Be Nice by the Beach Boys. I distinctly remember, as a teenager, wondering how married people could behave so normally when they got to live with the person they loved, when they could sleep every night in the same bed! What bliss it seemed! To have the exquisite privilege of privacy and a person to share it with – nothing could be more wonderful. Wouldn’t It Be Nice reminds me of that feeling, and makes me appreciate what I have, and how badly I wanted it.

I don’t think Waugh was pretending to dislike music when he turned down Stravinsky’s invitation to attend a debut of a new composition. Waugh genuinely found it painful to listen to music and, to be fair, even normal music lovers will find some of Stravinsky’s work at least a wee bit pain inducing.

 

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Groundhog Day Roundup

Posted on February 2, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

—The American Spectator has posted a story that analogizes an American political phenomenon to an Evelyn Waugh novel. Here are the opening paragraphs of the story entitled “The Heartbreak of the Brideshead Republicans” by Karl Pfefferkorn:

If you are a novelist, you may abandon inconvenient reality for richly imagined fiction. Consider Evelyn Waugh, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930. Rather than embrace the low-born majority of his new fellow congregants, he wove the richly tragic Flyte family and their Brideshead Castle out of the thin threads of the surviving Catholic aristocracy in England. It must have been a great comfort to Waugh to spend his spiritual life among his creations rather than what Anthony Burgess called  “Maynooth priests with brogues.”

Unfortunately, political hacks cannot conjure up their preferred adherents with the ease of a great writer. When Donald Trump won the 2016 election and delivered to the Republicans the working class in the industrial heartlands, the response of the Republican brain trust in DC was abject panic. Rather than celebrate the fact that the GOP had seized the traditional core constituency of the Democratic Party, self-anointed party intellectuals like Bill Kristol and Max Boot, along with the entire staff of National Review recoiled in horror at the boorishness of the new champion of rust belt voters…

The story goes on to describe how the hopes of these so-called “neocons” to convert the Republican party into something more appealing to their Washington-dwelling colleagues have been thwarted:

…The decades of intellectual labor devoted to the transformation of the Republican Party into something one could claim open allegiance to at the Sidwell Friends PTA turned to dust in the hands of the neoconservatives. Their fondest dream, that the tax-paying Babbits of middle America would be led by conservative elites as brilliant and charming as any Democrat simply collapsed, trampled by an electoral stampede of Walmart shoppers.

Rather than continue the hard polemical graft of their predecessors, and attempt to tutor these recent arrivals on GOP shores in the ways of Washington and the importance of American leadership, the likes of Kristol and Boot indulged in an epic hissy fit that rendered their criticisms of the Trump Administration indistinguishable from a Rachel Maddow opening monologue. They were now stuck in a party with the American equivalent of the Irish laborers and Maynooth priests disdained by Evelyn Waugh but unlike him, they couldn’t simply invent an alternative…

To be fair, I think the author may overstate the importance his “neocons” had ever achieved within the pre-Trump Republican establishment or the likelihood of its ever remaking the party into something more acceptable to the Washington elite. To the same extent, it seems unlikely that Waugh’s description of the miserable lives of the Flyte family (or at least most of them) ever converted large numbers of his readers into Roman Catholics. Although unlike the neocons, such conversions may well have not been Waugh’s intent.

—The Economist has posted its list of eight of the funniest novels ever written (not necessarily the eight funniest). Here’s is the top of their list:

The Loved One. By Evelyn Waugh. Back Bay Books; 176 pages; $16.99. Penguin; £9.99

The greatest comic novelist in English is Evelyn Waugh. But which is his funniest book? Many people favour his first, “Decline and Fall”; others tout “Scoop”, a satire of mid-20th-century journalism. But for sustained comic brilliance our vote goes to “The Loved One”, published in 1948. During the previous year Waugh had visited California, at the invitation of Hollywood studios. Tiring of agents and producers, he became fascinated by the local mortuary and embalming business. “The Loved One”, set in the Whispering Glades Memorial Park, was the result. The story concerns a doomed love affair between a failed poet, Dennis Barlow, and a prim funerary cosmetician, Aimée Thanatogenos. It’s a hilarious dissection of the English in Hollywood, of American business ethics and of Hollywood itself.

Snippet. The first description of Aimée:

“Her full face was oval, her profile pure and classical and light. Her eyes greenish and remote, with a rich glint of lunacy.”

–The website of St Edmunds Hall Oxford has posted a profile of one of its “Old Aularians” as its alumni are known. This is John Theodore Waterman Greenidge. After a discussion of his career, the author of the article comes around to this:

Contact with the University Archives drew my attention to John’s brother, Terence Lucy Greenidge; one of the Assistant Keepers there suggested that I google him, and I found that he was a friend of Evelyn Waugh from their time together at Hertford College. The brothers, Waugh and a Rugby friend called John Sutro made a silent film called The Scarlet Woman: an ecclesiastical melodrama, in which a scheming Cardinal tries to use the Dean of Balliol to convert Britain back to Roman Catholicism by seducing the Prince of Wales, who is saved by falling in love with a stoutly Protestant cabaret actress. The real-life Dean of Balliol was the man who closed down the Hypocrites Club of which Waugh and Terence Greenidge were members. (Waugh seems to have been fond of this sort of literary revenge. He fell out with his Dean at Hertford, Charles Cruttwell, and his novels are peppered with appalling men with the surname Cruttwell. One of Waugh’s biographers felt that this bullying caused Cruttwell’s mental health to break down, and he died in a neurological hospital in Bristol).

In The Scarlet Woman our man John Greenidge played the Prince and Elsa Lanchester played the actress. She went on later to find fame in Hollywood as The Bride of Frankenstein. The Waugh film is perhaps not top quality, splicing in what looks like tourist footage from Rome (which John had visited as an architectural student) with scenes shot in Hampstead. If you are interested in British silent films with slightly amateurish production values and performances of a naïve (aka hammy) nature, the film can be found on the BFI Player from the British Film Institute. (Thanks to the staff of the BFI Player for their help in accessing this). [UK internet connection required]

I am not sure which is the bigger surprise, the fact that the film has survived or the fact that John Sutro went on to a successful career in films as a producer and production manager. And I wonder what did Waugh, who converted to Catholicism in 1930, make of his youthful, very anti-Catholic folly?

Waugh prominently mentioned the Greenidge film in his autobiography, A Little Learning (London, 1964, pp. 209-10) and included a full page of stills from the film (facing p. 214). Thanks to Dave Lull for sending a link.

–A 30 minute podcast discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s life and work has been posted by Roman Catholic convert and journalist Joseph Pearce. Here is a description:

Delve into the life of 20th century novelist Evelyn Waugh, his loss and rediscovery of faith, and the profound influence of Catholicism on his greatest work, Brideshead Revisited. This episode weaves through Waugh’s tumultuous experiences, his conversion, and concludes with his poignant death on Easter Sunday after a traditional Latin Mass, mirroring the themes of divine grace prevalent in his novels.

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Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Film: The Scarlet Woman, Newspapers, Podcast, The Loved One | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Groundhog Day Roundup

End of January Roundup

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The BBC has reported an exhibit that may be of interest:

Much-loved teddy bears with their own unique stories have gone on public display.

The cuddly toys are part of a new exhibition at the council-owned Oxfordshire Museum, in Woodstock, which features 20 stuffed animals from families across the county. The exhibition, called Archie and the Poet, focuses on Uffington poet John Betjeman and his teddy bear, Archibald Ormsby-Gore, who is now 114 years old. It will run until 25 February.

Together with Jumbo the elephant, now aged 92, Archie was adored by the Poet Laureate. As a little boy, Betjeman was often very lonely and Archie was his constant companion. Archie was used as Betjeman’s alter ego and later became the model for Aloysius, who was owned by Lord Sebastian Flyte, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Archie and Jumbo were reportedly in Betjeman’s arms when he died in 1984…

–Political commentator and Waugh fan Charles Moore writes in the Daily Telegraph that the Conservative Party seriously needs a rethink of its policies but not a change of leader just now. Here’s an excerpt:

…Earlier this week, the third item in a “grid” supposedly designed by Tories wishing to overthrow Rishi Sunak was reported on a newspaper front page. The story was that a former special adviser to Rishi Sunak had joined the plot to depose him. His Shakespearean name was Will Dry.

I had not previously heard of Mr Dry, 26. Further reporting revealed that, in his short life, young Will had originally been a Leaver, but then turned into a sort of Nellie Wet, becoming the co-founder of Our Future, Our Choice, a Remainer group campaigning for a second EU referendum. Now Mr Dry has re-repented, living up to his name and making life difficult for his former boss.

It is aeons since I worked as a lobby journalist “conveying”, in Evelyn Waugh’s phrase of Randolph Churchill, “political gossip on whiskyladen breath”.  So I may be misjudging the situation, but it does seem to me that if Mr Dry – versatile though he is – is considered a stand-alone item in a political assassination plot, then this is a comedy and Mr Sunak need not lose much sleep…

–The New York Times has posted its 11 April 1966 obituary of Evelyn Waugh. It was unsigned. Here are the concluding paragraphs:

Mr. Waugh, though of only middling height, was an impressive figure as he walked along the fashionable streets and squares of St. James’s, one of London’s most elegant neighborhoods. In the clubs of that section–he was a member of White’s and St. James’–he was thought a dandy. He wore well-cut suits and in London topped them with a bowler hat. In later years, he added bulk to what had been a slender frame.

He had a round face, a short broad nose, a squarish chin and fair hair–curly in his youth, slicked straight in his mature years–which he parted on the left. He wore metal-rimmed round spectacles for reading and for a time in his middle years had a military mustache.

A portrait done by Henry Lamb in 1926 shows him with a pipe in his mouth, a beaker of ale in one hand and a wide, florid, spotted necktie. What rivets the attention to the picture is the eyes, which stare out at the world like a malevolent eagle’s.

The eyes matched the judgments he often made of men and mores. In an aphoristic view, he once said: “Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.”

He had a deep suspicion of things mechanical. He never learned to drive a car, and he disliked using the telephone.

The entire obituary may be read online without a subscription at this link.

–Actress Jane Asher is interviewed in a recent issue of the Cambridge Independent. Here’s an excerpt:

…The mention of Lady Kitty [a character she is playing in a current performance of Somerset Maugham’s The Circle] and her lover running away to Italy brought to mind the character of Lord Marchmain from Brideshead Revisited, who in the novel was living in Venice with his mistress, Cara.  Jane appeared in the much-loved 1981 television adaptation of one of Evelyn Waugh’s most popular works, as Charles Ryder’s wife Lady Celia Ryder (Charles, of course, was famously played by Jeremy Irons).

“That was a lovely character too,” reflects the experienced actress. “I mean in some ways she was vaguely similar to Lady Kitty, although I think Celia was probably more genuinely shallow than Lady Kitty because Lady Kitty actually has much more depth to her than we at first see.

“But Celia I think was very socially-minded and a really annoying woman – but I loved playing her. The thing about playing somebody like Celia, who is really irritating, is that you’ve got to like her yourself, you’ve got to see her point of view, and I got really annoyed about the fact that my husband was flirting with this other woman on board the QE2, or whatever it may be, and it’s really good to get into a character and see the side of it from their point of view, which I think you have to try and do.”…

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Bloomsbury Announces Two New Waugh-Related Books

Posted on January 20, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Bloomsbury Books in London has announced the upcoming issuance of two new books with substantive Waugh content. The first is entitled the Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives.  This has the following article relating to the archives of Evelyn Waugh:

 ‘Will Future Editor Kindly Omit…’: Evelyn Waugh in Conversation with his Archives, Barbara Cooke (Loughborough University, UK) and Naomi Milthorpe (University of Tasmania, Australia)

Both authors are well known to the EWS community and have presented several papers and articles as well as books relating to Waugh’s works. Here is Bloomsbury’s description of the book:

Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and ‘non-canonical’ authors and networks within the ‘New Modernist Studies’.

This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism.

The Handbook will be published in July and will appear in digital format only: Ebook (PDF).

The second book will follow in August and is written by James A W Heffernan. It is entitled Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II.  This book will appear in hardback, paperback and digital formats. Here’s the description and Table of Contents (emphasis added):

Mining the borderlands where history meets literature in Britain and Europe as well as America, this book shows how the imminence and outbreak of World War II ignited the imaginations of writers ranging from Ernest Hemingway, W.H. Auden, and James Joyce to Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, and Irène Némirovsky.

Taking its cue from Percy Shelley’s dictum that great writers are to some extent created by the age in which they live, this book shows how much the politics and warfare of the years from 1939 to 1941 drove the literature of this period. Its novels, poems, and plays differ radically from histories of World War II because-besides being works of imagination– they are largely products of a particular stage in the author’s life as well as of a time at which no one knew how the war would end.

This is the first comprehensive study of the impact of the outbreak of the Second World War on the literary work of American, English, and European writers during its first years.

Table of Contents

Prologue: History and Literature

1. Hitler, FDR, and the Partisan Review in 1939

2. The Spanish Civil War and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls

3. Prague after Munich: The Plight of Refugees in Martha Gellhorn’s A Stricken Field

4. Jan Karski, Patrick Hamilton, and W.H. Auden: Variations on September 1, 1939:

5. Bertolt Brecht, The Svendborg Poems-with a Side Glance at

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

6. The Invasion of Poland and Brecht’s Mother Courage

7. The Phony War and Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags

8. Exodus and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française

9. War, Fire, and Sex: The London Blitz in Henry Green’s Caught

Epilogue

 

 

 

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