Roundup: Fogeys and their Habitat

Posted on July 12, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The religious journal First Things in its current edition (August/September) has a feature length article entitled ‘Waugh Against the Fogeys’. This is written by Jaspreet Singh Boparai. Here are the opening paragraphs:

On June 17, 1953, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote to a friend: “I am now preparing a booklet which I hope (but perhaps it is too much to hope) may cause a paralytic stroke to my old enemy Evelyn Waugh.” The “booklet” in question was a historical study meant to make the Catholic Church look ridiculous. He eventually abandoned the project.

Trevor-Roper loathed Catholics in general but cultivated a special scorn for Waugh, with whom he carried on a feud that began in 1947, when Waugh attacked Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler, and ended only with Waugh’s death in 1966. As late as 1986, Waugh was still on Trevor-Roper’s mind. Trevor-Roper told his protĂ©gĂ© Alasdair Palmer:

‘I forgive him a great deal because of his genuine love of our language. His wild fantasy and black humour are aspects of his genius, as well as of his warped character.’

Yet his overall assessment was far from favorable:

‘He was, I believe, utterly cold-hearted: all his emotions were concentrated (apart from his writing) upon his social snobisme and his Catholicism, which was a variant of it, or rather, perhaps the ideological force behind it. He was a true reactionary—not just a troglodyte . . . but a committed, believing, uncompromising, intellectually consistent reactionary like (say) [Joseph] de Maistre.

He picked a quarrel with me in 1947—wrote me, out of the blue, a very nasty letter, attacked me in The Tablet, and then in other papers. I bit back occasionally, and then he became, as it seemed to me, somewhat paranoid. I heard many stories of his wild, and often intoxicated, denunciations, and since his death his published (and unpublished) letters have given further evidence of his hatred of me. He evidently regarded me as a particularly poisonous serpent who had slid into the garden of Brideshead and was corrupting its innocent Catholic inhabitants; which perhaps, to a certain extent, I was—or, as I would prefer to say, was provoked into being. In the end I tried to make peace with him, but my civil letter received only a curt formal acknowledgement.’

The “nasty letter” was not in fact “out of the blue”: Trevor-Roper admits that it was provoked by “an admittedly injudicious remark by me about Jesuits.” Perhaps he saw in retrospect how it might have been offensive to claim (in The Last Days of Hitler) that Joseph Goebbels learnt his skills as a propagandist as the “prize pupil of a Jesuit seminary,” especially given that Goebbels had not in fact been educated by the Jesuits. But such details were omitted; Trevor-Roper preferred to fixate on Waugh’s alleged vendetta:

‘since his death, I have seen letters from him which attacked me well before that publication, so I no longer know the original cause of his hostility. The general background to it was certainly ideological.’

No evidence has so far been published to corroborate Trevor-Roper’s claim that Waugh was aware of him before the middle of 1947. But he was right to suggest to Palmer that there was an “ideological background” to all this. As Trevor-Roper fancifully portrayed the situation:

‘During the war, and throughout the 1950s, a group of very articulate, socially reactionary Roman Catholics— all, or nearly all, converts—pushed themselves forward and evidently thought that they could be the ideologues of the post-war generation. They established themselves, by patronage and infiltration, in certain institutions (the British Council, the Foreign Office) and they wanted to establish themselves in the universities.’

Perhaps there really was a modest Catholic resurgence in England prior to the Second Vatican Council. But Trevor-Roper overstates it to the point of paranoia…

The article is available at this link but full access may require a subscription or registration. Thanks to our reader Dave Lull for sending a copy.

–There is a podcast discussion of Waugh’s novel Scoop on YouTube which continues in its second episode. This involves Matt Taibbi and and Walter Kirn who may, in the course of the discussion, mention the whereabouts of the first episode.  It continues for about 45 minutes. Here’s a link. 

–The New York Times has an essay by its columnist David Brooks entitled “When Novels Mattered”. As the title suggests, he thinks they don’t matter any more (or at least not as much as they used to). Here are the opening paragraphs:

I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counterreviews and arguments about the reviews.

It’s not just my nostalgia that’s inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publishers Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find works by Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find books by Mary McCarthy and John O’Hara. From a recent Substack essay called “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction” by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” was the best-selling book of 1975, Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was No. 3 in 1958 and Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” was No. 1.

Today it’s largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982. Yingling reports that no work of literary fiction has been on the Publishers Weekly yearly top 10 sellers list since 2001. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace?

I’m not saying novels are worse now. (I wouldn’t know how to measure such a thing.) I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life and that this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture. There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, “The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.”…

—History Today has an article by Nicola Wilson about the Book Society that flourished in Britain just before and after WWII. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs:

In October 1929 thousands of members of Britain’s Book Society received a new hardback through the post. Whiteoaks, by an unfamiliar Canadian writer, Mazo de la Roche, was the seventh monthly ‘choice’ of the society, Britain’s first subscription book-of-the-month club, begun in April that same year. The novel confirmed the club’s taste for entertaining page-turners; books that were worth investing time and money in, though not too complex or ‘highbrow’. ‘No selection that the Book Society has made has given me so much pleasure as this one’ wrote the head of the selection committee, bestselling novelist Hugh Walpole, in the Graphic.

For almost 40 years the Book Society served tens of thousands of readers worldwide, choosing nearly 450 titles overall from a variety of publishers (judges assessed writers’ manuscripts pre-publication, with readers receiving the publisher’s first edition). Set up to boost book-buying when Britain was still ‘a nation of book-borrowers’ (according to Freddie Richardson, head librarian of Boots Book-lovers’ Library, which charged an annual fee to borrow new books), the aim was to help readers, support debut authors, and challenge some of the snobbery around who had access to new books. Thirty to 40 per cent of the society’s members lived overseas, many in what were then parts of the British Empire. Book Society collections have been discovered in homes in Canada, Tanzania, and India…

When the club collapsed in 1968 – partly due to a better public library service and the take-off of postwar paperbacks – its archives were lost, and its story forgotten. But the Book Society contributed to the success of many well-known titles, including Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949), and Thor Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1950).

–The BBC has posted a review of the new book by Seth Alexander ThĂ©voz entitled London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious. Here are some excerpts:

…It all started with coffee. In the second half of the 17th Century, when coffee drinking was first introduced to England, coffee houses were a welcome alternative to taverns and became associated with good conversation. Samuel Pepys wrote in December 1660 of his evening at the “Coffee-house” in Cornhill: “I find much pleasure in it through the diversity of company – and discourse.”

In 1693, an Italian migrant to London, Francesco Bianco (who anglicised his name to Francis White), opened an establishment that served both coffee and hot chocolate; he called it Mrs White’s Chocolate House. Patrons flocked to St James’s Street, not only for the hot beverages, but for the gambling room – the site of illegal, high-stakes card games – tucked away at the back of the premises. White’s is still operating, and is London’s oldest club. Only men are allowed to join. (King Charles counts among its 1500 members; he held his stag night at White’s before his 1981 wedding to Princess Diana.)…

Ian Fleming was a member of Boodle’s, upon which he based Blade’s club in his James Bond books. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, protagonist Charles Ryder gathers with friends at Bratt’s, most likely inspired by Pratt’s, a small supper club in St James’s founded in 1857, and owned since 1926 by the family of the Duke of Devonshire. In 2023, this most conservative of establishments surprised many by admitting women for the first time…

Waugh was a member of White’s and at least one other club mentioned in the article, the Savile. The full review can be accessed at this link.

–Duncan McLaren has advised us that the “Combe Florey” chapter of his online posting of Waugh articles is now complete. Here’s a link to the index. He doesn’t mention the most recent additions, but I think one of them (Photo Session August 1965) is newly added. It is in any event worth a look and can be found in the index linked above. It is of a piece with the other photo shoots described and identified as such.

 

 

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4th of July (USA) Roundup

Posted on July 4, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The most interesting item this week is a short essay posted on the literary website Dappled Things by Geoffrey Smagasz. This is called “Orphans of the Storm” and is based on the chapter of that name in Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Probably a thousand articles have been written in praise of Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited—about the expertly-limned characters, about the spot-on dialogue, about the resolution of each character’s story arc. I’m going to heap on the thousandth-and-first accolade by showing the precise way that Waugh handles the rolling of the ocean liner crossing the Atlantic during a storm while Charles pursues and consummates his adulterous relationship with Lady Julia Flyte.

Charles, the narrator, lays it on thick as he gives us his excuses for committing adultery in the chapter, “Orphans of the Storm.” We find out that he’d married; that his wife, with whom he is traveling, had previously committed adultery; that his marriage is loveless; and, by coincidence, that Julia is on board. Soon, he runs into Julia, he looks into her eyes, she’s at the peak of her beauty, and he’s hooked like a trout. Cut to the beginning of the storm…

The full article is worth a read and is available at this link.

—Reason magazine has posted its summer travel issue that includes this:

…Travel is not merely an industry or a leisure activity. It is a human imperative, a manifestation of liberty. It is to claim membership in the great, messy project of humanity. It makes bureaucrats with stamp fetishes nervous, for good reason.

In his memoir Labels, Evelyn Waugh, that most elegant and misanthropic of English travelers, described the strange joy and self-discovery made possible by arriving in a place where nothing makes immediate sense: “I soon found my fellow passengers and their behaviour in the different places we visited a far more absorbing study than the places themselves.” Waugh’s travel writing is peppered with complaints, to be sure—about delays, discomfort, fellow passengers, and the prevalence of garlic—but beneath the surface there’s something else: curiosity, humility, and a recognition that being a stranger can be a deeply moral experience…

The quote is taken from an article by Katherine Mangu-Ward.

–The religious website Aleteia has posted an article about Graham Greene’s 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter. Here’s an excerpt:

…The great Catholic novelist, Evelyn Waugh, went so far as to claim that Scobie, the novel’s sinful protagonist, was a saint. Others disagreed.

“Scobie commits adultery, sacrilege, murder (indirectly), suicide in quick succession,” one correspondent wrote. “In three of these cases he is well aware of what he is doing
. He takes communion in mortal sin because he can’t bear to hurt his wife’s feelings. This isn’t the way a saint behaves.”

This view was echoed in an unfavourable review of the novel by a priest, Father John Murphy. Describing Scobie as “a Catholic with a conscience of the highest sensitivity and insight,” Fr. Murphy then blames Scobie’s “weak will” which had led him “to adultery, sacrilegious Holy Communions, responsibility for a murder” and ultimately to suicide:

“How can you account for the fact that a man commits suicide in order, among other things, to avoid making any more bad Communions? But the answer is obvious: Because he despaired where he should have repented?”

The confusion sown by the novel was not the intention of the novelist himself. In a letter to Evelyn Waugh, Greene insisted that he “did not regard Scobie as a saint, and his offering his damnation up was intended to show how muddled a mind full of good will could become when once ‘off the rails.’”…

–The website Bloomsbury.com has posted an article about the award of this year’s “Pleasure of Reading Prize” to novelist Robert Harris. Here is an excerpt:

…On being chosen as this year’s recipient Harris said, “I keep a quotation on my desk from Evelyn Waugh: “It cannot be said too often or too loudly – that all Art is the art of pleasing.” I don’t think Waugh meant by this that all novels must have happy endings – most of his don’t – but that they should stimulate, engross, entertain and generally engage the reader from beginning to end. That is not an easy task, but it has been my overriding ambition. It is therefore a particular honour to be given this wonderfully-conceived prize, that aims to celebrate the delight of reading, and to join such an impressive list of previous winners.”

The judging panel commented, “Robert Harris is one of Britain’s most deeply and repeatedly engaging novelists, known for his strong storytelling, sharp eye for history and canny take on politics. His breakthrough book, Fatherland, imagined a chillingly plausible world in which Nazi Germany had won the war, and set the tone for a career marked by fiction that has been consistently intelligent and driven by an ever-alert ear for suspense. From the intrigues of Ancient Rome in the Cicero Trilogy to the Dreyfus affair in An Officer and a Spy, Harris has a talent for turning complex historical events into page-turning narratives. His journalism taught him clarity and his political engagement subtlety. Nothing is more enticing than sitting down with a new Robert Harris to hand and opening that first inviting page.”…

–Finally, Larry Barnett, writing in the Sonoma Valley Sun, a free newspaper distributed in Northern California, has an article containing his thoughts on life and death. Here’s an excerpt:

…Life and death are two sides of a coin. At some juncture we still do not fully understand, chemistry becomes biology; lifeless chemicals and minerals become living systems, reversing entropy for a little while. This may be commonplace within the universe, although we’ve yet to discover life anyplace else other than here on Earth.

As Bob Dylan wrote and sang, “he not busy being born is busy dying.” It’s true; life will kill you. This fact underlies the naming of AimĂ©e Thanatogenos in Evelyn Waugh’s book The Loved One; her last name literally means “Born dead.” So it is for us all…

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End-of-June Roundup

Posted on June 29, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times newspaper has a story by Magnus Linklater about the recent gift of a substantial book collection to the charity Christian Aid in Edinburgh. Here are some excerpts:

…Among the books collected over a lifetime by Halla Beloff, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and her husband John, were first editions of novels by DH Lawrence, WH Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Muriel Spark, and also works by the German satirist Bertolt Brecht and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Many of the books are inscribed by the authors personally to Beloff, who died this year at the age of 95 …

“Halla and John were both sophisticated urbane Europeans who moved between the US and the UK, so there will be great interest in America,” [according to Dr. Ried Zulager who has extensive experience with Christian Aid sales]. “They bought very carefully, and everything they collected was worth having. Some may be worth only ÂŁ50, but others could go into the multiple thousands.” He pointed to books by Virginia Woolf, some of which had a limited print run, and the early novels of Kingsley Amis as examples of first editions which command high prices. One current catalogue has Woolf’s novel A Room of One’s Own at ÂŁ7,500, and Amis’s Lucky Jim at ÂŁ5,400. “Since there are more than a hundred boxes, and each one has between 30 to 40 books, there are a lot to go through,” he added.

Determining the overall value of the collection will require many hours of research and the market in first editions fluctuates widely. John Atkinson Books, the rare books specialist, is advertising a first edition of Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, [another copy of] which is included in the Beloff collection, at ÂŁ115; however, a signed first edition of Decline and Fall — which is not — is on offer at ÂŁ30,000. One of the US first editions in the Beloff collection is Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. Estimates vary from ÂŁ25 to ÂŁ1,500…

–Alexander Larman writing in The Spectator reviews the new TV series about the Mitfords in an article entitled “Why television cannot depict the posh”. Here are excerpts from the opening paragraphs:

In her 1954 essay ‘The English Aristocracy’, the author Nancy Mitford popularised the descriptions ‘U’, i.e. upper-class or aristocratic, and ‘non-U’, to denote household terms. Although she did not coin the phrase (that credit belongs to the otherwise forgotten linguist Alan S.C. Ross), she brought it to wider public attention. When her friends John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh added their own contributions, the result was the 1956 book Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry Into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy.

Language termed ‘U’ included ‘loo’ rather than ‘toilet’, ‘vegetables’ rather than ‘greens’, and saying ‘what?’ rather than the apparently more polite ‘pardon?’ Although a few examples have now dated – I can’t imagine anyone unaffected saying ‘looking-glass’ instead of mirror – it’s undeniably true that Mitford’s once-U, and therefore exclusive, language has proved more enduring than the non-U equivalent. Sofas are ubiquitous in the homes of England’s middle classes, rather than settees or couches, and most would refer to a ‘dinner jacket’ rather than a ‘dress suit’.

If the average middle-class Englishman speaks in a more elevated – and indeed pleasant – style of language than we might otherwise have done, they owe a significant debt to Nancy Mitford, who is also responsible for two of the funniest 20th-century British novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. This makes the new drama about Nancy and her family – the unimaginatively titled Outrageous – a disappointment, swapping the Mitfords’s love of language and wit for something decidedly prosaic…

The greatest flaw in Outrageous is common in contemporary British television drama: it doesn’t know what to do with the posh other than caricature them. Even on its own terms, the programme contradicts itself. It begins with a lavish, champagne-fuelled lunch at the Mitfords’s bucolic country estate, complete with heavenly-looking swimming pool – Instagram-worthy heaven, decades before even the (decidedly non-U) concept of an influencer poisoned society. Then, a couple of scenes later, James Purefoy’s splenetic patriarch David is telling his outraged children that, because of a decline in his investments, they will all have their allowances cut by half. It therefore becomes incumbent upon them – including Bessie Carter’s novel-writing Nancy – to marry advantageously and further their fortunes accordingly…

–Author and Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan is interviewed about his career in the Guardian. Here is an excerpt:

The book I could never read again
On being asked to talk in Italy on my favourite comic novel I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. It had corked badly. My fundamental disappointment was with myself, as if I had just lost an arm or a leg, and if I simply looked around it would turn back up. It didn’t.

–The New York Times has published a profile of Usha Vance, the wife of the Vice President. Here is an excerpt:

…Ms. Vance has just made her way through “Sword of Honor,” the trilogy of novels by Evelyn Waugh based on his experiences as an army officer in World War II, according to her account on the Goodreads website. She is currently reading “Trust” by Hernan Diaz, an intricate novel about a secretive New York financier and his wife. During the 2024 presidential campaign, she was frequently spotted with the scholar Emily Wilson’s celebrated 848-page translation of the “Iliad.”

The reading challenge, she has said …, is a “bite-sized component of a larger project to continue expanding access to literacy.” The goal “is to roll out little things bit by bit and see which ones work and which ones don’t and then try to expand the ones that work. As a former lawyer, I get really bored if I don’t have projects.”…

This is consistent with Ms. Vance’s report on the Goodreads website, but unfortunately she has not included her opinion of the book or its characters. She presumably liked it or she would not have read the entire volume.

–Lovestruck Books in Cambridge, Mass. has announced a program at its premises that may be of interest. This will be on the evening of July 16 at the bookshop at 44 Brattle Street. It will include a discussion with writer Lois Cahall, author of the recently published book The Many Lives and Loves of Hazel Lavery, mentioned here in a previous post. Here is some more information:

Join author Lois Cahall at Lovestruck Books on Wednesday, July 16 for a night of scandal, secrets, and captivating history celebrating The Many Lives & Loves of Hazel Lavery ! A story that uncovers the  jaw-dropping life of Lady Hazel Lavery, the Boston-born, Chicago-raised Irish society queen whose real-life story is juicier than Bridgerton and bolder than The Gilded Age. Think royal portraits, revolutionary lovers, and DRAMA—Hazel’s love triangle with Sir John Lavery and Irish rebel Michael Collins is the stuff of legend (except in this case, it’s all true)….

In the heart of tumultuous times, amidst the grandeur of Victorian opulence, there existed an American socialite whose influence altered the course of the Anglo-Irish treaty: Lady Hazel Lavery

Boston-born Hazel ascended from her Irish roots to become the quintessential Society Queen of Chicago, and later London, where she lived a delicate dance between two worlds: one with her esteemed husband, Sir John Lavery, a portrait artist to royalty, and the other with Michael Collins, the daring Irish rebel whose fiery spirit ignited her heart. Together, they formed a love triangle that echoed through the corridors of power at 10 Downing Street, London.

Hazel’s wit and charm touched the lives of the who’s who of England, including Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Evelyn Waugh. The image of her memorable face graced the Irish note for close to half a century…

Full details and booking information are available at this link.

 

 

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Summer Solstice Roundup

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Literary journalist and novelist D J Taylor has a review in the 21 June 2025 edition of The Spectator. This relates to a new book by Nicola Wilson entitled Recommended! The Influencers Who Changed How We Read where she discusses book clubs and subscription services that became popular between the wars. Its primary focus is on the Book Society and its so called “Watch Committee”. Taylor gives several examples of how the 6-member selection committee worked and the results of  its activity. Here are two examples:

…There were times, as [Nicola] Wilson acknowledges, when a selection could save a writer’s career. Graham Greene, in lowish water after the failure of his second and third novels, had his prospects transformed by the surprisingly narrow (three votes to two) emergence of Stamboul Train (1932). Even then there was a corking row when [J B] Priestley, by this point no longer a selector, read a proof copy and imagined himself libeled by the portrait of the bluff, Dickens-obsessed northern novelist Mr Savory. Thirteen thousand bound copies had to be unstitched so that Greene could make the necessary changes.

And then this:

…Daniel George caught something of the changing [post-war] atmosphere in his review of Brideshead Revisited in the [Book] Society’s newsletter of May 1945. Evelyn Waugh, he noted, ‘seemed determined to wring our hearts with lamentations for a past shared by a precious few.’

Taylor concludes that the book is “an engaging piece of publishing history” notwithstanding  a few examples of the author’s irritating habits noted in his conclusion. A full copy of the review is available here.

–Among the several reviews of the new TV series Outrageous (about the Mitford family) there is no mention of an appearance of a character named Evelyn Waugh, but in Radio Times this discussion appears:

Who is Joss? Joss, who develops a friendship with Nancy, is based on several real-life people.

“It was originally going to be [writer] Evelyn Waugh, then writer Sarah Williams thought it’d be interesting to make him Jewish, but not very openly,” he said (via The Mirror). “He’s also gay, but that’s never really talked about in the show.”

–An interview of Stephen Fry by Scott Keller for the New York Times weekly “By the Book” column includes this:

Do you think any canonical books are widely misunderstood?

What an interesting question. Evelyn Waugh thought “Brideshead Revisited” misunderstood. People mostly think “Brideshead” is a nostalgic, almost sentimental, farewell to the great country houses and grandeur, grace and careless wit of prewar Britain. Waugh, a devout Catholic convert, insisted it was about “the Operation of Grace.” My feeling is that he is the one who misunderstood it.

–Dominic Sandbrook has an essay in The Times entitled “They can never cancel the English gent.” After several paragraphs considering the history of that concept, he concludes with this:

…So when did the English gentleman breathe his last? The mid-1960s seems the obvious answer, perhaps some time between January 1963, when the MCC abolished the distinction between Gentlemen and Players, and the general election of October 1964, when Sir Alec Douglas-Home (Gentlemen) lost office to Harold Wilson (Players).

The future Sir Mick Jagger did his best to keep the flame alive, joining the Country Gentlemen’s Association in the spring of 1968, the year of the barricades. But it was no good. Today, there is only one workplace in which people can greet their colleagues as gentlemen without fear of reproach, namely the House of Commons — and that’s not much of a recommendation.

Still, if readers are tempted to revive the old ideal, they should remember three crucial rules. As a member of the Jockey Club once told Evelyn Waugh, “no gentleman ever wore a brown suit”. To quote the late Lord Curzon, “no gentleman has soup at luncheon”. And above all, as the comic writer RS Surtees reminded his readers in 1858, there is the unshakeable, “infallible rule” of life. “The man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one.”

–MP Danny Kruger has written an article about the “Early Dying” bill which was repeated in many newspapers. The original may be the one quoted below from The Spectator:

‘Now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ After last week, I feel like Evelyn Waugh at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. The politics of ‘progress’ has found its fulfilment in the union of two total malignancies: the campaigns to abort babies at full term and to kill old people before their time. Here is our enemy, all disguise cast off…

The quote comes from Waugh’s war novel Sword of Honour.

NOTICE (23 June 2025): The final entry above has been modified to provide a more complete and accurate source.

 

 

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Simon J. James (1950-2025) R.I.P.

Posted on June 21, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has advised that literary scholar Prof. Simon J James died earlier this week. He was active in the EWS and was editor of the Decline and Fall volume of the  OUP’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. This would be volume 1, not yet published. According to Duncan, Prof. James also wrote the introduction to Penguin’s 2022 edition of Vile Bodies. Here is an excerpt from the announcement issued by Durham University where he taught:

Simon passed away peacefully surrounded by his wife Kate and close family, having been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer just over a month ago. He faced these last few weeks with grace, courage, and characteristic good humour. The sense of loss and shock will be profound and lasting.

We knew Simon as a brilliant critic, an inspirational lecturer and teacher, and an illuminating supervisor, mentor, and friend. He was a leading authority on H. G. Wells, late-Victorian literature, and the modern novel.

In every way, he was utterly committed to what he did – to our discipline, his students and our department, which he served for 25 years, including as Head of English Studies, and to worlds beyond academic life…

The Society joins the University in extending its condolences to the members of Prof. James’ family.

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Juneteenth Roundup

Posted on June 18, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–This week’s Sunday Telegraph has an article entitled “The books that every 16-year-old boy should be reading.” This included short selections by several writers, including Simon Heffer who recommends Waugh’s Decline and Fall:

When I was 16 and thinking of trying to get into Cambridge to read English, my marvellous English master gave me a pile of novels, plays and poetry to consume, reaching far outside the English A-level course. Hidden away among the heavy novels was a slim volume called Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh. I had never read anything like it; jokes on every page, many of them quite offensive, ridicule of the aristocracy, the Church, the penal system and, above all, schools, and all told in a relentless drive that caused me to finish the book in two or three hours. I had within weeks read everything else Waugh wrote, and I doubt I was the only youth on whom he had that effect. His style is magnificent and his appeal irrestible.

Heffer doesn’t tell us the year in which his binge-reading took place. His online biography says he was born in 1960, so he would have been 16 in 1976.  At that age he would have been able to read all of Waugh’s writings published in his lifetime, as well as the diaries which were published that same year.

–An article entitled “Let slip the dogs of Waugh” was recently mentioned as appearing in the Baltimore Sun. This was written in 2018 by the Sun’s then long-time literary editor John McIntyre. The article opens with this: “Even that prickly person Evelyn Waugh, never shy about parading his opinions, was quite aware that the things people complain about in language and usage are generally idiosyncratic preferences.” It seems to have been published in the edition of 12 June 2018 but a search of the paper for that date on both my library subscriptions failed to turn anything up.  It may have been reprinted on 17 June 2025, in which it seems to have been mentioned, but a subscription search of that edition was equally unsuccessful. What little can be read of the article on the search page sounds promising so perhaps one of our readers might be able to access it and report on the contents in a comment as provided below.

–A reviewer identifying as “Jim” has written and posted a review of Waugh’s Robbery Under Law on the website goodreads.com. Here is a copy:

Just because a writer is an exceptional novelist, it does not follow that he or she is also an astute economist or politician. Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery under law: The Mexican object-lesson” is a rather objectionable hatchet job. In his book, Waugh is so outraged by Lazaro Cardenas’s nationalization of the Anglo-American oil industry in Mexico that I cannot help but think he was an investor who lost money.

I read a little more than half the book before I decided I had better things to do than finish the book, including clipping my toenails. Poor Mexico has been hauled over the coals by too many foreigners who have never bothered to acquaint themselves with the country or its people.

Consequently, I will continue to love Waugh’s fiction, but I will have my head examined before reading any polemics written by him.

If the reader had possessed a bit more background, he might have usefully continued his reading. He seems to have been unaware that Waugh wrote the book under a contract to a disappointed British investor who was looking for just such a hatchet-job. Waugh was not proud of the book and never authorized its republication during his lifetime. The second half of the book is a more thoughtfully written description of the history and position of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico which, in the 20th century, was perhaps comparable to that of private investors in the Mexican petroleum industry.

–The Mitford family is enjoying a good deal of press and broadcast coverage in anticipation of the debut this week of a new TV series about them entitled Outrageous. One of the more interesting articles appeared in Women’s Wear Daily which put together a survey of its previous articles relating to the family, several of which also involved Evelyn Waugh and his family:

…Hatty Waugh, the daughter of novelist and social satirist Evelyn Waugh, was the subject of a 1978 profile in WWD’s Arts & People column. At the time, Waugh refused to pay $1.50 to purchase a magazine that had published a favorable review of her second novel “Mother’s Footsteps.” Her debut novel, “Mirror, Mirror,” was panned when it was released in the U.S. “Critics said that I was a pathetic writer just cashing in on Daddy’s name,” Waugh told reporter Valerie Wade. “Somebody even bought it because it got the worst review he’d ever seen. Actually, I thought the book was a laugh a line.”

In 1985, WWD writer Christopher Petkanas profiled controversial Mitford sister Diana Mosley, nee Guinness, on the publication of her book “Loved Ones,” which included portraits of her social circle including Evelyn Waugh and Mosley’s husband, and British fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. Asked about the popular interest in her family, Mosley — who was imprisoned during WWII for her close ties to the Nazi regime — said, “The press decides on certain families and writers about them without much reason, really. They force one to the front of the stage, then say, ‘How boring.’ So, you see, they have it both ways. What Shakespeare said is so true, really: The appetite grows with what it feeds on.”

The following year, Marybeth Kerrigan reported on the filming of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel “Scoop” in London, based on her experience as a war correspondent in the 1930s. “We’re hooked on nostalgia in this country — we’re addicted to it,” said film star Nicola Pagett. “We will not let go of the great days gone by. Of course, we do it well — our energies and emotions are there.”

In 2004, Stephen Fry discussed “Bright Young Things,” his screen adaptation of Waugh’s novel “Vile Bodies,” which he first read as a teenager. Fry directed the film, which starred Emily Mortimer and Stephen Campbell Moore. Fry mulled the modern day version — or lack thereof — of “bright young things,” and how the golden age of parties was long past. “They’re all vulgar commercials funded by the studios or sponsored by Grey Goose and Tattinger Champagne. I never, ever accept an invitation to something that has the name of a luxury goods company on it,” Fry told WWD writer Marshall Heyman. “You can’t ever be a Bright Young Thing,” he added. “You can be a youth with a zest for life and a love of language and nothing that is part of a commercial. You musn’t be selfish. You musn’t be thinking, ‘Look at me.’ If you find yourself following, just go ‘Baaa.’”…

–Finally, an ambitious website contributor has posted all pages of the so-called “Victorian Blood Book” in Waugh’s book collection at the University of Texas. This is on the website flashbak.com. Here’s a description:

The book’s decoupage (paper and card stuck on the page) was created from hundreds of engravings, many from collections of etchings by the writer William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) and other early nineteenth-century books. There are images from nature (flowers, insects, animals and the same image of a bird on every page – a large drop of blood-red India ink dripping from each of its wings) and Christian identity (the crucifixion and crusaders – all apparently dripping blood). For added depth, the book’s maker has added religious commentary.

The first if the book’s 41 plates (above) contains a short table of contents and the title “Durenstein!” – DĂŒrenstein is the Austrian castle at which England’s King Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199), known as Richard the Lionheart, was held captive on his way back from the Crusades.

The title and the theme of many of the plates relate to the spiritual battles encountered by Christians along the path of life and the “blood” of Christian sacrifice.

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Roundup: From Lytham Hall to Combe Florey

Posted on June 12, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Lytham Hall is cited in a recent article as having inspired or influenced the country house setting of Brideshead Revisited. This is in a feature-length article by David Slattery-Christy in the Sunday Express. The author thinks that both the owner (Harry Clifton) and house in Lancashire contributed to Sebastian Flyte and Brideshead Castle in the novel. Here is an excerpt:

…When Waugh introduces us to Flyte’s rooms in Brideshead Revisited they are, like Harry’s, at Christ Church. Interestingly, Violet Clifton used to indulge Harry by sending him groceries in season when he requested them, sometimes driven by the chauffeur all the way from Lytham to Oxford. So Flyte’s demand for Plovers Eggs and Champagne on a whim had echoes of this eccentric and indulged behaviour. “The truth is,” declared Waugh, “that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.”

Sadly Harry never did. As the 1930s progressed, Harry spiralled into more absurd and bizarre behaviour. He was cross that the estate had to pay death duties that initially curtailed his lavish spending. He enjoyed London life and as a result took a permanent suite at the Ritz Hotel, the family home in Mayfair having been sold. To add to the already sizable costs he also took a room at Claridge’s. When asked why he had both, he airily declared: “If I go for a walk and need to rest, I have somewhere to go.”

If this seems eccentric, Harry also dined once a week at the Ritz with the “White Goddess” – who he claimed was his mentor, friend and spiritual advisor. Nobody else could see her, but the waiters served her and Harry spent the evening chatting with her while other diners looked on bemused. All this while squandering money and selling off prime assets to finance his adventures. Violet [Clifton] was in despair and worried he would destroy the dynasty. She was right to believe so. It became so desperate she even attempted to get a Harley Street doctor to certify Harry as insane so the estates could pass to his younger brother, Michael…

After a photograph of Waugh, the text continues:

…Waugh visited Lytham in the 1930s. The surviving letter [24 June 1935, Letters, 94-95] he wrote to Lady Katharine Asquith gives us an idea of what he thought of Harry [Clifton’]s extended family and Lytham Hall: “A very beautiful house by [William] Kent or someone like him with first-class Italian plaster work
 large park entirely surrounded by trams and villas. Adam dining room
 a lap of luxury flowing with champagne and elaborate cookery
 all sitting at separate tables at meals”…“Two or three good pictures including a Renoir
” Waugh’s opinion of Harry and his siblings was less than enthusiastic, however. He wrote: “Easter (or so she seems to be called), Orsa [Avia], Michael, a youth seven feet high with a moustache who plays with a clockwork motorcar and an accordion
 The Cliftons are all tearing mad
”

By this time Waugh had published Decline And Fall and Vile Bodies, both designed to shock and at times mock the ruling elites. This did not go unnoticed by Violet Clifton who declared she never read “cheap novels”, no doubt to Waugh’s amusement.

By then, Harry had bought at eye-watering cost at auction two Imperial Faberge Eggs – the Rosebud Egg and the Renaissance Egg – much to the horror of his mother. He had also met Lilian Griswold, a penniless American socialite, at a drunken party in London. They went on a drinking bender together and woke up married. Both seemed to be bemused at how it had happened, but it didn’t last.

Waugh had started work on Brideshead Revisited, the novel that would change his fortunes, by the late 1930s [sic] but it was put on hold because of the outbreak of the Second World War. When the novel was finally published in 1945, 80 years ago, it sent shockwaves through society.

But it secured Waugh’s success as an author, gave him global fame and made him financially secure for the rest of his life. Violet however described Waugh as “that awful man” and declared to never speak to him again for what she saw as his betrayal. Harry drifted along in a fog of fantasy, oblivious to anyone’s needs but his own…

There is no surviving correspondence thus far published referring to any close relationship between Waugh and Harry Clifton as there is with other models cited for Sebastian Flyte: Alastair Graham and Hugh Lygon. Indeed, the author of this article relies, as have others, on Waugh’s report on his visit to Lytham Hall to Katherine Asquith. But you can make what you will of how the visit to Lytham Hall and Harry Clifton’s lifestyle may have influenced Waugh’s novel. The family circumstances and the house do seem to be quite like those other influences more traditionally cited. Waugh did not start writing Brideshead Revisited until early 1944 (10 years after his visit to Lytham Hall) but seems to have started thinking about it several years before that.

–The new biography of Pamela Berry by her daughter Harriet Cullen (mentioned in previous posts) is reviewed by Simon Heffer in the Sunday Telegraph. This includes discussion of an important chapter of the book that involves Evelyn Waugh:

…Cullen describes how her mother took her and her siblings to France on a beach holiday, but blew all her foreign currency on objets d’art in Paris on her way there, and had no money left to feed the children.

To make matters worse, she had invited Evelyn Waugh, without first ascertaining that there was somewhere for him to stay, and Waugh – who was not of the rosiest disposition at the best of times – not only had to endure inferior lodgings, but also had to save the Berry children from “malnutrition”.

Cullen describes, commendably neutrally, her mother’s lack of interest in most of her children, partly because of her obsession with society and, for a decade, because of her affair with Malcolm Muggeridge, and how it strained their relationships with her. As a result, she has created a truly fine biography – and an object lesson in how to do it properly.

–A new biography of novelist Muriel Spark has been published in the UK. This is entitled Electric Spark and is written by Frances Wilson. Here is an excerpt  from a description of the book by the author that appeared in the New Statesman:

…Spark made an art of beginnings and endings. We see it in The Girls of Slender Means, which begins and ends with the line “long ago in 1945”, and in her use of flash-forwards, so that the manner of a character’s death is revealed at the start. The schoolgirl Mary McGregor, for example, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, “who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame
 at the age of 23, lost her life in a hotel fire”. Lise in The Driver’s Seat, who selects a stranger to murder her, will be “found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.”

The Driver’s Seat might be seen as the blueprint for the game Spark set in motion with [Martin] Stannard, whom she handpicked after reviewing the second volume of his biography of Evelyn Waugh. Stannard, Spark wrote, was “a literary critic and a scrupulous scholar”, who understood the relationship between a writer’s life and his work. When she first invited to him to her home, Stannard assumed it was to interview him for the job, but Spark had decided already that this stranger was the man she wanted…

The book has been reviewed favorably in The Guardian, The Spectator and Financial Times. It will be published in the US in September.

–Duncan McLaren has added several articles in his Combe Florey section before announcing that he is going on a break. These can all be accessed from this link. I most enjoyed the ones on the second visit of the photographer (“Photo Session: October 1963”) and the writing and publishing of Basil Seal Rides Again (“The Last Loved One”). The final article, recounting the various versions of Waugh’s death (“Easter Sunday 1966”), is also of particular interest.

 

 

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Alastair Graham: An Interesting Offer

Posted on June 10, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

One of our readers (Hartley Moorhouse) has sent an interesting auction listing relating to communications between Evelyn Waugh and his Oxford friend Alastair Graham. This is explained in Hartley’s comment:

You and other EWS Newsletter readers may be interested in this rather extraordinary item of Waviana coming up for sale at Dominic Winter Auctions later this month (hope this link works): https://www.dominicwinter.co.uk/Auction/Lot/807-waugh-evelyn-1903-1966-a-shropshire-lad-inscribed-by-the-author-1914-embroidered-stool-etc/?lot=418238

Two questions and an observation:
By describing himself as ‘A jonquil, not a Grecian lad’, is Waugh effectively saying his homosexual days are over?
The cataloguer first describes the embroidery as ‘probably made by Alistair Graham, who enjoyed needlepoint’ and then, apparently gaining in confidence, ‘almost certainly executed by Graham’. But does an auctioneer’s ‘almost’ certainty carry any legal weight and/or significance? Is this tantamount to a warranty?

One slightly nerdy observation: EW’s early handwriting and indeed signature seem quite different from his later hand. As the sharp-eyed Duncan McLaren has spotted, around the time of the Hevelyn/Shevelyn bust-up, just a few months after this inscription was written, the E of Evelyn went from being loopy to square (why?) and here is a beautiful example of loopy Evelyn. Early Waugh seems to render his lower case r as an upper case R (FoR AlistaiR’, ‘ChRistmas’, etc.); later he gets his Rs in order and goes along with convention.

Here’s a link to the auction catalogue which includes several photos.. In case you are unable to connect to the auction catalogue, the text is copied here:

Waugh (Evelyn, 1903-1966). A copy of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, London: Printed by The Riccardi Press for Philip Lee Warner, publisher to the Medici Society, 1914, original grey boards, 8vo, one of 1,000 numbered copies, with signed presentation inscription from Evelyn Waugh to his one-time lover, Alastair Hugh Graham (1904-1982), one of the principal inspirations for the character of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, inscribed in ink to front endpaper ‘For Alastair from “A jonquil, not a Grecian lad”, Evelyn, Christmas 1928’, together with a four-legged stool with an embroidered seat (probably made by Alistair Graham, who enjoyed needlepoint) depicting a naked youth with outstretched arms looking back at Graham’s home, Wern Newydd in Cardiganshire, plus a 1930’s valet set in leather case, a pack of playing cards in original painted wooden box, two small printed visiting cards for Alastair Graham, as AttachĂ© Honoraire Ă  la LĂ©gation de S. M. Britannique, AthĂšnes, and Honorary AttachĂ©, The Residence, Cairo

(Quantity: 4)

Critics and biographers of Evelyn Waugh largely agree that Alastair Graham (1904-1982) was the model for the character Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, a claim that was verified by Auberon Waugh. Graham went up to Brasenose College, Oxford in the autumn of 1922 where he met Evelyn Waugh and in early 1923 the two young men began a relationship. Thereafter Waugh was a regular visitor to the Graham family’s country house at Barford in Warwickshire. In a diary entry Waugh writes: “Alastair and I had tea together and went back to Barford where we dined in high-necked jumpers and did much that could not have been done if Mrs Graham had been here.” After Oxford Graham joined the diplomatic corps and was posted by the Foreign Office to Athens from 1927 to 1929 (where Waugh visited him), and later Cairo until 1933. Graham’s homosexual exploits led to his being advised by the police to leave London or risk prosecution, and so he purchased Wern Mansion, set in 40 acres five miles from New Quay, Cardiganshire, in 1936. He became known for his parties to which his glittering friends were invited, including Waugh, the painter Augustus John, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, and architect Clough Williams-Ellis.

Evelyn Waugh said that Alastair was “the friend of my heart”. Waugh’s presentation inscription in this copy of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad given to Alastair quotes from one of the poems, ‘A jonquil, not a Grecian lad’, with all its overtones of doomed love. Earlier in the same year (1928) Evelyn had married Evelyn Gardner (the two Evelyns wittily renamed ‘Hevelyn’ and ‘Shevelyn’) but the marriage rapidly foundered. The embroidered stool, almost certainly executed by Graham, may have been styled on a nude photograph Graham sent Waugh of himself near a waterfall, asking Waugh to ‘Come and drink with me somewhere’.

The seller is Dominic Winter Auctioneer, Cirencester, and the auction is scheduled for 19th June. Details are in catalogue. Thanks again to Hartley Moorhouse for sending this along.

NOTE (10 June 2025): Duncan McLaren kindly adds this comment relating to the above posting:

This sharp-eyed reader is sure that the dedication says ‘1923′. Which makes a lot more sense. Which means that the copy of Shropshire Lad was given by Evelyn to Alastair when their relationship was at its height.

The quote is from one of the poems in Shropshire Lad, the one that begins with the line: Look not in my eyes, for fear
.

The second verse reads:

A Grecian lad, as I hear tell,
One that many loved in vain,
Looked into a forest well
And never looked away again.
There, when the turf in springtime flowers,
With downward eye and gazes sad,
Stands amid the glancing showers
A jonquil, not a Grecian lad.

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Early June Roundup

Posted on June 6, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent issue of the Daily Telegraph reports the death of Roger Cooper. This includes a discussion of Cooper’s extended imprisonment in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran:

Roger Cooper, who has died aged 90, was a British journalist and businessman who was arrested as a spy on a visit to Iran in December 1985 and spent more than five years in prison, under sentence of death.

For most of that time he was incarcerated in the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran, often in solitary confinement. Nevertheless, he did not court sympathy when he was finally released: “I can say that anyone who, like me, was educated in an English public school and served in the ranks of the British Army is quite at home in a Third World prison.” […]

In February 1987 he was transferred to the notorious political prison in Evin, 10 miles from Tehran. “Shouting and cries of pain are often heard,” Cooper recalled, “only partly drowned out by religious chants and prayer ceremonies played endlessly on a tape recorder in the corridor.”

He was ordered to provide his captors with a detailed run-down on key figures in British intelligence. Having no knowledge of the subject, he invented a cast of personnel based on characters in the works of Evelyn Waugh, including a Secret Service legend called Colonel Dick Hooker, inspired by Waugh’s Brigadier RitchieHook. He amused himself in his cell by composing a poem: “Brigadier RitchieHook/ Is a character in a book./ My Colonel Dick Hooker/ Should have won me the Booker.”…

–The Wall Street Journal has an article by Witold Rybczynski who frequently writes on architectural themes. This is entitled  “Five Best: Fictional Homes That Steal the Show”. The first on his list is Brideshead Revisited:

Evelyn Waugh wrote “Brideshead Revisited” during World War II while recuperating from an an injury…”It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house,” Waugh reflected later, noting that “it seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoiliation.”… Waugh’s admiration is palpable, as is his sense for a disappearing age.

The other “Fictional Homes” books chosen were Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, Echo House (1997) by Ward Just, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) by V.S. Naipaul, and Master and Commander (1969) by Patrick O’Brian.

–Raptis Rare Books has on offer a letter from Evelyn Waugh to an unidentified addressee. It is dated “Oct 16th” (?) but no year or addressee is identified. Here is the text:

“Oct. 15th [sic] Dear Sir, My thanks for your letter of yesterday. I notice that the promise given to any writer’s books in your exhibition depends on his publisher’s arrangements of their stall,  [unreadable] of whether he makes a speech or not; also that the special publicity devoted to the speakers has to be divided among thirty four. It seems to me that in the circumstances only someone fanatically devoted to public speaking could reasonably be expected to accept. I dislike it very much and only attempt it for charity or clear personal gain. I hope the exhibition is a great success & that your thirty four orators have their audience spell bound – but please excuse me from competing with them. Yours thankfully, Evelyn Waugh.” In fine condition.

Anyone able to offer additional insights as to the year or subject matter is invited to comment. A copy of the original text is available at this link.

–The website Art.com has posted an offering of a color reproduction of a photograph of Waugh dated 1963 and taken in the library at Combe Florey. It is not accompanied by any background information, but I can recall other photos of Waugh wearing that suit in that setting, if not perhaps that particular pose.

 

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Roundup: Books, Paintings and Photographs

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The latest edition of The Oldie contains an article that may be of interest. This is by A N Wilson and is entitled “Great War Stories”. Here is the opening paragraph:

WWII inspired Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning

The coming of VE Day and VJ Day each year is always poignant. The numbers who took part in the fighting, and who still survive, have diminished to a heroic few. The numbers of books about the Second World War, however, continue to swell. Most of these books, in so far as I’ve sampled them, are stultifyingly boring and badly written…

The remainder of the article is behind a pay wall, but one can assume that Wilson finds the war novels of Waugh, Powell and Manning to be an exception to the rule he sets down in his opening. [See Comment below.]

–Eleanor Doughty writing in the “Rereading” column of the The Times has reviewed an early Waugh novel. This is entitled “Evelyn Waugh has captured the futility of the Bright Young Things in Vile Bodies.” Here are some excerpts from the opening paragraphs:

Vile Bodies is a book in which very little happens. A couple gets engaged, then unengaged, before the woman leaves the man for someone else; their friend has a car crash, and then ends up in a mental hospital. But it is also the definitive satire of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s — aristocrats and their hangers-on, jiving to the sound of their own futility in London’s swankiest nightclubs…

I first read Vile Bodies when I was at school and was hooked by the dedication — “with love to Bryan and Diana Guinness”. My teenage self wondered who they were. I had already become fascinated by the British upper classes so the brewery heir and his wife, a Mitford, turned out to be right up my street. With that dedication, the couple had been branded for posterity as the de facto leaders of the Bright Young People. The couple were great friends of Waugh and had showed him enormous kindness after his wife left him.

The original typescript of Vile Bodies contained a warning — and a red herring: “Bright Young People and others kindly note that all characters are wholly imaginary (and you get far too much publicity already whoever you are).” But as in other Waugh novels, in Vile Bodies an interested reader can match up its characters with their real-life counterparts. The socialite Elizabeth Ponsonby appears as Agatha Runcible, and the owner of the Cavendish hotel, Rosa Lewis, the Duchess of Jermyn Street, appears as the proprietress Lottie Crump at the fictional Shepheard’s Hotel on Dover Street, while two incidental travellers are named Arthur and Mr Henderson after the foreign secretary of the day…

The article also mentions an upcoming book publication that will be of interest: “Heirs and Graces: A History of the Modern British Aristocracy by Eleanor Doughty. This is published in September (Hutchinson Heinemann ÂŁ30).”

—The Times also has an article about an art exhibit which has a Waugh/BYP connection. This displays the works of Edward Burra who is described as “one of the most overlooked artists of the 20th Century.” This is a detailed review by Nancy Durant who describes both Burra and his works. Here’s an excerpt:

…“He is the product of two banking dynasties, of about seven generations of totally conventional people,” Jane Stevenson, author of the biography Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye, told BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives. “They must have been fairly amazed to find this sort of changeling in their midst.”

It doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. “The family’s very, very right-wing,” Stevenson says, and “one thing you can say that he gets from this is tanklike confidence: ‘I’m going to say what I like and do what I like and be what I like.’”

It must have stood him in good stead with the Bright Young Things, a loose group of wild young bohemians with whom the papers were fascinated during the Twenties, and which he, Barbara Ker-Seymer and their Chelsea Polytechnic chums Billy Chappell and Clover Pritchard were considered part of (it also included socialites such as the Sitwells, some Mitfords, Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton, hence the tabloid interest). Their particular brand of sexually fluid, performative hedonism was highly appealing for someone with such a determined lust for life, even if Burra’s own sexuality was seemingly not put into physical practice…

The exhibit is at the Tate Britain and extends from 13 June to 19 October. The article is also very well illustrated and is worth a look. Here’s a link.

–Duncan McLaren has also posted three more essays in his new Combe Florey series. The first is about the writing and publication of A Tourist in Africa, the second, about the Mark Gerson photoshoot of the Waugh Family at Combe Florey in 1959, and the final, about the writing and publication of Auberon Waugh’s first novel, The Foxglove Saga. I particularly recommend the Mark Gerson article, both for its written discussion on the event and its detailed photos, some of which I do not recalling seeing previously. The articles are all linked through the first one that is available here.

–Finally, this letter appeared in a recent issue of The Economist:

Holy waters

I enjoyed your article on the increasing number of young men in Britain who are turning towards Catholicism (“Altered minds”, May 10th). You referred to Graham Greene’s faith. Britain’s other great 20th-century Catholic novelist was Evelyn Waugh, and the article mentioned Farm Street Church in Mayfair. In “Brideshead Revisited” this is where Rex Mottram is sent for Catholic instruction. Discussing papal infallibility, the priest asks Mottram what would happen if the pope said it was going to rain, but it didn’t? Mottram replies, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.”

Paul Ferguson
Englefield Green, Surrey

COMMENT (2 June 2025): Our reader David Lull has kindly provided a copy of the article by A N Wilson in The Oldie mentioned above. Wilson’s discussion of Waugh’s WWII works is relatively brief. He notes that “Waugh’s Brideshead and his Sword of Honour trilogy are among the best things he wrote, if not the best.” There is no mention of Waugh’s Put Out More Flags that was both written and published during the war (1941-42). Brideshead was written during the months preceding D-Day in 1944 and published the following year. The war books by Manning and Powell were all written afterwards, as were those in Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. There is a more extended discussion of the books by Manning whose works are deemed even more impressive than those of Waugh and Powell and “stand comparison with War and Peace.” Thanks to Dave Lull for sending the text.

 

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