Memorial Day/Bank Holiday Roundup

Posted on May 26, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Garden Museum in Lambeth, London, has opened an exhibit called “Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party.” This was described in a recent article in The Observer by Vanessa Thorpe:

…The strong horticultural influence on Beaton’s work is recognised now in an exhibition, Cecil’s Beaton’s Garden Party, running at Lambeth’s Garden Museum from [14 May], and it celebrates the importance of both the dilapidated properties that the great photographer and designer renovated in south-west England.

The advanced degree of dereliction of, first, Ashcombe House, and then Reddish House, were in fact strong selling points for any self-respecting Bright Young Thing of Beaton’s generation, and the gardens quickly became romantic stage sets for his social gatherings.

The most renowned of Beaton’s fancy dress entertainments was a fĂȘte champĂȘtre of 1937, for which he designed the majority of the costumes. Garlands of net flowers bedecked the gowns, while a trademark trail of ivy ran down the front panel of the pale pink satin dress which is now on display in Lambeth, made for the actor Wendy Hiller. Other guests wore DalĂ­-inspired rabbit masks and coats smothered with roses or, perhaps, a shepherdess costume. The aim was to look as if the disguise had been thrown together quickly, but with great aplomb. So foil was better than real silver, and cellophane, newly invented, was better still…

The article concludes with this:

…Beaton’s near-contemporary, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who as a schoolboy had bullied him from the safety of the year above, also viewed the English aristocracy with the fascinated amusement that came with a little distance. Waugh’s response was to create Brideshead Revisited, while Beaton orchestrated his flamboyant, masked parties and revelled in the counterfeit splendour of the theatre. Both men managed to seed an enduring vision of the indolent rich that still holds sway. It was certainly there, for instance, in the fancy dress debaucheries of the hit film Saltburn.

Among the standouts of the Garden Museum show are the dress Fonteyn wore in the ballet Marguerite and Armand with Rudolf Nureyev. The well-known publicity stills from 1963 show the prima ballerina in a white tutu with a garland of white flowers in her hair. But the actual stage costume is black net with dark velvet bodice topped with silk roses on the shoulders.

In an exhibition like this the scenery clearly matters, so Emma House asked the Beaton enthusiast Luke Edward Hall to decorate the display rooms with 1940s-style, freehand sketches of lavish canopies of flowers. In one corner visitors will also meet Hall’s full-length outline of the casually elegant Beaton, looking on, paint palette in hand, admiring his own work.

The exhibit continues through 21 September. Details are available at this link.

–On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Anthony Eden’s premiership,  The Oldie has reposted what was the final interview of his wife, the former Clarissa Churchill. This was conducted by Hugo Vickers in 202o, the year before she died. Here is the opening paragraph:

At the age of 98, Lady Avon was awarded a distinguished prize by the Oldie Magazine – The Oldie Who has seen it all Before and Worse Award.

She was surely the last intimate survivor from the world of Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, Lord Berners, Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, Nicolas Nabokov, Edith Sitwell and Orson Welles. I could list dozens more. When she was young, she had the exceptional advantages of being beautiful, extremely intelligent and well read. Being a Churchill, by name if not by temperament, and niece to Winston, she grew up surrounded by the most interesting men and women of the day. She studied philosophy in Oxford, was tutored by Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer and Lord David Cecil. She worked for Alexander Korda, and George Weidenfeld in the worlds of film and publishing…

The entire article is available here.

—The Harvard Crimson, for no particular reason, has reposted the text of a review of Christopher Sykes’ biography of Evelyn Waugh. The review is dated 4 February 1976 and is written by Paul K. Rowe. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Virginia Woolf once divided writers into two categories: those she would have liked to have dinner with, and those with whom she would have preferred not to. Now that Christopher Skes has written what will remain for the foreseeable future the definitive biography of Evelyn Waugh, it is clear that Waugh falls into the disinvited category. The man was a social sadist; he drove a war cripple into psychoanalysis in the course of a single weekend by verbal brutalization. Waugh knew it himself. “Without supernatural aid,” he said, “I would hardly be a human being.”

Sykes’ book is an unusually stereoscopic one, scrupling not at all about boundaries between “biography” and “criticism.” His book belongs to a genre which, he recognizes, is currently out of fashion–the critical biography. “A convention has grown up,” he notes in the kind of obiter dictum that grows more frequent as the book progresses, “that biography and literary criticism are separate activities which must never be associated.” The biography, certainly, is all there. But I, at least, would have liked even more lit crit than Sykes provides. There is precious little serious comment on Waugh, and when Sykes does turn to the nuts and bolts of criticism he proves himself both competent and perceptive.

Sykes tends to tell his story from inside; he knew Waugh well and, was, indeed, among his closest friends in the later years. He figures, under various disguises, in several of Waugh’s novels. On the whole this problematic relationship between author and subject is exploited only for good reasons. Sykes’s indentifications of the real identities of Waugh’s characters (and almost all his books have a large dose of roman a clef in them) are much more convincing as he makes it clear that he knew them all personally. The only area of restraint caused by his close relationship is Waugh’s marriage, a subject on which he sheds almost no light, aside from denying that Laura Waugh was a “doormat.”…

The entire review can be accessed at this link.

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Roundup: Handful and Helena

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Several Spanish language papers have reported a new Spanish translation of A Handful of Dust. This is by Society member Carlos Villar Flor who has participated in several EWS events. Here’s an edited translation of the announcement:

Professor of English Literature at the University of La Rioja , Carlos Villar Flor, has written the new translation of the novel A Handful of Dust , by the British writer Evelyn Waugh, now published by the publishing house Impedimenta. The work, written in 1934 , is considered one of the most representative novels of 20th-century English literature . In it, Waugh creates a sharp satire of the British aristocracy of the interwar period , marked by decadence and moral decay.

Carlos Villar Flor not only completed the translation but also wrote the prologue to this new edition. This marks a new milestone in his career as a translator of Waugh, an author to whom he has dedicated a significant portion of his academic and literary career. Waugh’s previous works translated by Villar Flor include Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender, Scott-King’s Modern Europe, and Put Out More Flags, published between 2003 and 2012 by various publishers.

The English title of the work translated into Spanish as Neutralia is Scott-King’s Modern Europe.

–Here’s a biographical sketch of the new Pope’s mother based on reports that appeared in the Chicago Tribune:

Mildred A. Martinez Prevost (mother)

Raised in Chicago with five sisters — including two who became nuns — she graduated from Immaculata High School for girls in June 1929, according to Chicago Tribune archives.

The contralto was a soloist in a 1940 Mundelein College performance and as a competitor in the 1941 Chicagoland Music Festival. Mildred Prevost obtained a graduate degree from DePaul University’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences in February 1947 and a master’s degree in education in 1949.

Her post-college exploits all appear to be rooted in faith. In December 1950, Mildred Prevost presented a book review of “Helena” by British author Evelyn Waugh to the Chicago circle of the International Federation of Catholic Alumnae. The book chronicles the life of Helena of Constantinople, whose son was Roman conqueror Constantine I. In October 1951, she was a member of a committee that produced a concert by the Gay Twins, dual pianists and nuns who were sightless since birth. Described as a homemaker in March 1952, Mildred Prevost participated in a forum called “The Catholic Woman in the Professional World.”

As president of the Mendel Catholic High School Mothers Club, Mildred Prevost organized a spaghetti dinner in April 1967 and presided over a hootenanny in September 1968 that featured Father Gale White and the Firemen. She also served as a librarian at the school, the Archdiocese of Chicago said.

Mildred Prevost died in 1990. Her death notice in the Tribune requested that contributions be made to the Augustinian Mission in Peru in lieu of flowers.

–The Collegium Institute has scheduled four internet reading group sessions on Waugh’s novel Helena. Here are the details:

The British Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh once described his historical novel Helena (1950) as his personal favorite among his works. The novel explores the life of Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine and discoverer of the True Cross. Waugh follows Helena from her humble origins in Roman Britain (an invention by the author) to her central role in Christianizing the Roman Empire. Waugh artfully explores faith, politics, and the nature of history in this imaginative novel.

Undergraduate and graduate students are invited to join us for the Summer 2025 Faith in Fiction virtual reading group in which we will read Evelyn Waugh’s Helena. We will meet virtually via Zoom on Wednesday evenings in June.

Date: Wednesday evenings in June

  • June 4

  • June 11

  • June 18

  • June 25

Location: Virtual via Zoom

To register, click the button below. All participants will receive a free copy of Helena by Evelyn Waugh. Questions? Please contact Quinn Moore ((click to email)).

It may be the case that this is open only to registered students.

–Finally, the editors of the journal First Things have made a list of their recommendations for summer reading. One of them (by Claire Giuntini) relates to Helena:

I wish I could say that I was amiably receptive when beginning Evelyn Waugh’s Helena, a fictionalized account of Helena of Constantinople’s quest to find the relics of the True Cross, but I anticipated being soured. As a friend once said, Waugh likes to crush your soul, and I don’t particularly enjoy having my soul crushed. Helena, his only historical novel, is full of Waugh’s characteristic hopelessness, but also didactic smugness. Waugh himself called the book didactic in the BBC interview with John Freeman appended to my copy. He also said it was his favorite work, though no one else’s.

I despise didactic novels, and I despised the didactic elements in this novel, which I had suspected and resented from the start. It would be unfair of me, however, to say I disliked the book entirely. It was, of course, humorous, if often darkly. As a classics major, I enjoyed how he rendered ancient Roman culture and society understandable and relatable. His skill in fabulating aspects of Roman culture and effortlessly familiarizing them made it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction; a beneficial attribute for a novel, a hindering attribute for one interested in accuracy.

Historicity, however, wasn’t Waugh’s goal. He said in the preface that he made up a great deal of the plot and details, mostly because he was writing a novel, which is an exercise of the imagination, but also because we don’t really know anything about Helena or the finding of the True Cross. His last introductory remark is that “[t]he story is just something to be read; in fact a legend.” Zoomers out there, what he means is, “this is fan fiction.” Don’t forget it’s “didactic” fan fiction. If that interests you, I recommend you read it.

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Three Longer Waugh Articles

Posted on May 17, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A copy of a 2017 article by Waugh Scholar Naomi Milthorp has been posted on the internet by Amazon Web Service. This is a PDF file and is entitled “The Materials of Which I Am Made: Evelyn Waugh and Book Production.”  It originally appeared in an issue of Script & Print (No. 41:4). Here’s the opening paragraph:

…Two particular clusters of archival material, dated in the years 1963–1965, provide clear evidence of Waugh’s role in the production of his books: those centred on the production of the Ă©dition de luxe of his final work of satire, 1963’s Basil Seal Rides Again: or, The Rake’s Regress, and those concerned with the setting of the ordinary edition of his autobiography A Little Learning.  In examining the Huntington Library’s archival materials Waugh’s professional interest in bibliographic matter is emphatically revealed. Moreover, both books’ textual concern with self-fashioning—whether openly ironic, or apparently serious—is reflected in their material form, the flamboyant luxury of the one answered by the prim sobriety of the other…

The full text of the article is available at this link.

–The second article, also in an academic journal, is actually about Cyril Connolly’s 1944 “word cycle” The Unquiet Grave. This is by Denis Topalovic and was published recently in the journal Textual Practice. But the author’s analysis frequently mentions Waugh’s reading of the work as explained in these introductory paragraphs (footnotes omitted):

In 1971 the University of Texas at Austin invited Cyril Connolly, then one of Britain’s leading literary critics, to inaugurate an exhibition enticingly entitled ‘One Hundred Key Books’. With its rich display of manuscripts and first editions drawn from the collections of the Harry Ransom Center, from Joyce’s Ulysses to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the exhibition was based on a book Connolly had published some years prior, in 1965, similarly entitled The Modern Movement: 100 Key Books from England, France and America, 1880–1950. Halfway between private list and authoritative compendium, the book corralled many of the widely acknowledged masterworks belonging to what Connolly had long been in the habit of apostrophising as the ‘Modern Movement’, and which more or less coincided, in both style and periodisation, with what English departments were then in the process of canonising under the general rubric of literary modernism.

Among the modernist totems put on display in 1971, however, was also one slim volume that did not officially feature in Connolly’s select pantheon of literary greats, but which enjoyed an intensely brief spell of notoriety during the last months of the Second World War: namely, Connolly’s own The Unquiet Grave, an eccentric book of pensĂ©es and aphorisms published in 1944 under the pseudonym ‘Palinurus’. It was, to be sure, Connolly himself who had insisted that The Unquiet Grave be included in the Austin exhibition: for while ‘some find the U.G. a mere common-place book’, he pleaded with the exhibition’s organisers, ‘others see in it, with its three movements and epilogue, a “chasse spirituelle”, a beautifully constructed and harmonious whole’. Evelyn Waugh’s personal library at the Harry Ransom Center happened to include a copy of The Unquiet Grave, and so the organisers readily obliged: The Unquiet Grave was proudly displayed among the major works penned by the modernists, many of whom Connolly had known and even published in their lifetime. Having asked to take a closer look at Waugh’s copy of the book, however, Connolly was much less flattered to discover that his long-time friend had filled the book’s margins with a number of disparaging comments, censoring him as a ‘drivelling woman novelist’, a ‘hack highbrow’ who ‘read Freud while getting a third in Greats’. A sharp question had also been jotted across the title page: ‘Why should I be interested in this book?’…

The full article is available at this link.

–Finally, Duncan McLaren has kindly sent a copy of his latest posting which is an article comparing the work of Evelyn Waugh and Scottish novelist and artist Alasdair Gray. Duncan uses for comparative purposes materials in both writers’ archives to which he has been given access.  He also prominently mentions materials in the UT Humanities Research Center.  And as usual, he provides several original and often remarkable illustrations of what he is describing. Here’s a link.

 

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Mother’s Day (US) Roundup

Posted on May 10, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A post on the website thinkinghousewife.com has this cite for its Mother’s Day offering:

IN HIS unfinished autobiography A Little Learning, the British author Evelyn Waugh remembered fondly his own mother:

“My mother was small, neat, reticent and, until her last decade, very active. She had no special literary interests, but read a book a fortnight, always a good one. She would have preferred to live in the country and from her I learned that towns are places of exile where the unfortunate are driven to congregate in order to earn their livings in an unhealthy and unnatural way. She had to be content with walking her dog on Hampstead Heath and working in the garden. She spent hours there, entirely absorbed; not merely snipping off dead heads but potting, planting, watering, weeding. (A man came one or two days a week to dig or mow or roll.) When my father in middle age, after the fashion of the family, chose epitaphs for himself and my mother, he directed that on his side of the gravestone should be inscribed: ‘And another book was opened which is the book of life’ and on my mother’s ‘My beloved is gone down into the garden to gather lilies’; but her flowers did not interest her more than fruit and vegetables. There was nothing pre-Raphaelite about my mother. I associate her less with lilies than with earthy wash-leather gloves and baskets of globe artichokes and black and red currants.”

–The New Criterion has an article by David Platzer that discusses a current art exhibit in Paris. This is “Matisse and Marguerite: Through the Father’s Eyes” at the Musee d’art modern de Paris. Marguerite is in this case Matisse’s daughter. Here is an excerpt:

…In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Anthony Blanche dismisses English art as “simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.” The same can be said for much of French art. In White and Pink Head (1914–15), Marguerite modeled for Matisse’s version of Cubism, sweeter than anything Picasso or Braque produced, even if the bars and stripes make her look as if she’s in a cell. In early 1918, while war raged in France, Matisse began to spend more time in Nice. Miss Matisse in a Scottish Plaid (1918) showed “Margot” sitting on a balcony over the blue sea, bundled up against the cold. She seems more of a bright poppet than she did a few years before. Back at Issy-les-Moulineaux in the summer of 1919, she is very much a young woman, posing with a family friend in The Tea…

–An article posted by David Roman discusses Waugh’s war trilogy Sword of Honour.  This is entitled “The Best WW2 Memoir Actually is a Novel.” The introductory paragraphs are available on the internet. Here is an excerpt:

Most British writers who spent World War II in uniform contributed to the military effort as translators, assistants and publicists. When the famous Evelyn Waugh tried to enlist for the front lines at the age of thirty-six, with no military experience and a poor attitude, he had to use a lot of contacts to end up in a commando unit where his twenty-something colleagues treated him and others of a certain age like cranky old men.

It’s no wonder that Waugh’s military experience was so shocking, valuable, and absurd at the same time that it inspired him to write the best series of wartime novels: a trilogy called “The Sword of Honour,” a quasi-memoir in which he recounts his own adventures in a fictionalized and merciless way. Waugh’s WW2 is unlike anything you ever saw before….

The Sword of Honour is many things. First of all, it’s Waugh’s best novel, with all the virtues he displays in “Brideshead Revisited” in full exhibition, and a much more complex story with more characters and locations. That’s enough to make the book the best about World War II.

This may sound like a risky thing to say. I just ask the reader: name me a better book about WWII. A book that is better written, that has more truth to it, that shows more theaters of action, that deals with more human foolishness and reflects on the entire war more deeply than this trilogy. I don’t think you will find that book…

Access to the remainder of the article requires a subscription.

–The latest issue of Literary Review has posted an article by Frances Wilson entitled “All Yesterday’s Parties”.  This contains several references to Waugh who was, in his day, quite a party goer. Here’s an excerpt:

…In Evelyn Waugh’s story ‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’, the party gets no further than a list of names because Miss Fleace, waiting with a dance band, a cooked dinner and twelve hired footmen for her guests to arrive, has forgotten to post the invitations.

Parties end not when the guests have gone home but when they have composed their narratives of the night. The essayist Logan Pearsall Smith reflected after a soirée that it had been

a delightful evening 
 the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and French philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squealing. But soon after, ‘God, it’s awful,’ I muttered, ‘I wish I were dead.’

The silent-film actress Brenda Dean Paul, one of the Bright Young People satirised in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, mythologised the debauchery of the Bath and Bottle party, held in a municipal swimming pool in 1928, with an image of the morning after: ‘turgid water and thousands of bobbing champagne corks, discarded bathing caps and petal-strewn tiles as the sun came out and filtered through the giant skylights of St George’s Baths, and we wended our way home’…

The full article is posted on this month’s Literary Review website. Here’s the link.

–Duncan McLaren after years of avoidance finally read Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox. He was pleasantly surprised by what he found and has posted an illustrated review of the book. Here is the opening:

A 2025 Revelation. Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox is a great book. Why was I so sure that I wouldn’t like it that I’d never tried to read it before this week?

Firstly, I wasn’t that impressed with Waugh’s earlier biographies. Rossetti is all right, but uses too long quotes from Rossetti, steals from other biographers (including the book’s first sentence) and has little of the zest of Waugh’s early novels. His biography of Edmund Campion and his novel, Helena, are drolly dull for the most part, and the main reason for writing them, I reckoned, was to do with the author’s Christianity. I thought the Knox biography was another book written mostly out of duty, the duty being to plug the Roman Catholic Church. Secondly, the cover art of the first edition was so awful. …

The remainder is posted on Duncan’s website and can he accessed here. Among other things, he offers his own version of an improved Ronald Knox cover.

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May Day Roundup

Posted on May 1, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times newspaper has published an article by Max Hastings on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII. In it Hastings explains:

Almost five decades after publishing my first book about war, I am no longer much interested in generals. Instead I study the doings of humbler participants, some of them sensitive enough to try to say sorry when they shoot people. My new book, Sword: D-Day — Trial by Battle, focuses upon the experiences of infantrymen, commandos, paratroops, engineers and tank crews in one corner of the D-Day landing areas.

Hastings also offers this contribution from one of Waugh’s books about the war:

…The dream of most soldiers was not to win glory but instead to return to their old lives in offices and factories, homes and schools, on beaches where they might build sandcastles with the children they dreamt of fathering.

They had been plucked from mostly humdrum but at least sheltered lives, jobs and families to experience sun, rain, snow and mud in hutted encampments or on wasteland training areas, often in the company of men with whom they had little sympathy.

Tobruk and Alamein, Stalingrad and Kursk, Sicily and Salerno came and went, yet in England men repeated the same routines, fatigues, exercises, drills. “Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,” says an officer in Evelyn Waugh’s fictional 1942 portrait, Put Out More Flags…

Hastings makes much the same point in a “Diary” article in this week’s Spectator entitled “Bring on the Trump protests” quoting the same Waugh passage.

–Hastings also takes part in another Times WWII literary exercise. Along with William Boyd and Antonia Senior, they were asked to choose the best WWII novels. Boyd and Hastings each chose 5 and Senior, 4. They somehow agreed that no novel would appear on more than one list and this must have involved some haggling. Boyd included Waugh’s Sword of Honour on his list and also wrote an introductory discussion in which he noted that if one were dealing with WWI’s best literary works it would discuss poetry rather than novels. Here’s what he says about Waugh’s selected war novel:

…Many classic novels emerged from [WWII], written from lived experience on many fronts and in many dimensions. Evelyn Waugh was a commando officer in Crete in 1941 and wrote about the debacle of the defeat and the subsequent shambolic evacuation in his Sword of Honour trilogy. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day is about London during the Blitz and the unmasking of a Nazi spy. HH Kirst in his drily brilliant sequence of Gunner Asch novels details the mundane travails of a lowly private in an artillery regiment on the Russian front; Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead is a grim GI’s view of the war against Japan in the South Pacific.

All these authors were, in effect, transforming their autobiographical experiences of the war into fiction. The novel provided the perfect template. Waugh’s trilogy could be subtitled as: “What Evelyn Waugh did between 1939 and 1945.” His wartime experiences are seen through the eyes of a diffident Catholic gentleman called Guy Crouchback — a man who went to war with high ideals but finds them repeatedly dashed and compromised.

Waugh’s example is significant. If there is anything that unites the novels written out of the Second World War experience it is a form of remorseless demythologising. The tone is disillusioned, cynical, clear-eyed. Anything heroic, gung-ho or worthy is banished. War is intermittently hellish and randomly terrifying; otherwise it is mindbogglingly boring and frustrating, not to say surreal and absurd…

Here’s a link to the article.

–Annie Kapur writing in the website Geeks discusses Clive James’s views of Waugh’s writings as published in James’s Reliable Essays. Here is the opening paragraph:

I don’t know whether I’ve explained this before but Evelyn Waugh is perhaps one of the most perfect examples of separating the art from the artist. We can’t deny that Brideshead Revisited is one of the best novels of the 20th century but we can also accept it was written by a man who was probably not in his right mind most of the time. Clive James starts this same analysis off with the fact that all Waugh novel fans love: his hatred of the telephone. James sets up Waugh’s hatred of modernity as part and parcel of expanding his personality into the depths of his letters. It is clear we are dealing with an ageing Evelyn Waugh who is less in his right mind than he was before:

“Here is yet one more reason to thank Evelyn Waugh for his hatred of the modern world. If he had not loathed the telephone, he might have talked all this way.”

The full article is available at this link.

–An essay about how Waugh’s Brideshead relates to “Dark Academia” is published on the website TimesNowNews. This is by Girish Shukla and opens with this:

Long before “dark academia” became a celebrated aesthetic — all moody libraries, tweed jackets, whispered Latin, and philosophical brooding — there was ‘Brideshead Revisited’ by Evelyn Waugh. Published in 1945, it was a massive bestseller, capturing the imagination of a generation dealing with the aftermath of war. Yet today, when people talk about dark academia, they often forget that Waugh had already written one of its earliest, most haunting masterpieces.

‘Brideshead Revisited’ wasn’t just popular; it was a phenomenon. Readers were drawn to its lush prose, its melancholic nostalgia for a lost aristocratic England, and its depiction of intense, complicated relationships forged in the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford University. In many ways, it offered the full dark academia package decades before the term even existed: privileged but crumbling institutions, emotional decay beneath a veneer of sophistication, an obsession with beauty and tragedy, and young intellectuals lost in a maze of ideals, guilt, and longing…

Here’s a link.

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Easter Week Roundup

Posted on April 25, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

British journalist Eleanor Doughty, well known to our readers, has made a revisit to Castle Howard. What she finds is described in an article in the Times newspaper. Here is an excerpt:

There is nowhere on earth like Castle Howard. There’s the dome and the fountain, and the anticipation of that great long driveway. “It’s a world within itself,” says its custodian, Nick Howard. This great North Yorkshire Whig palace, built for the earls of Carlisle by Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, is still best known as Brideshead, the stately home at the centre of Granada’s 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited.

Its starring role paid for work to be done in the Garden Hall, but the restoration of Castle Howard has been a story 85 years in the making. In 1940, a fire ripped through the house, leaving a third of the building roofless. The heat caused its famous dome to collapse and liquid lead to flow into the hall below.

After the Second World War its owner George Howard battled with trustees to repair the damage. With his wife, Cecilia, he restored the dome in 1960. But a custodian’s work is never done. Tomorrow the current generation of Howards, Vicky and Nick, unveil the next stage of the house’s restoration, the Tapestry Drawing Room. This was gutted in 1940 and has stood as a shell ever since… The Howards asked Simon Thurley, who was once head of English Heritage, what to restore next. Thurley suggested the Tapestry Drawing Room because it interrupted the otherwise beautifully appointed visitor route.

On the day we visited in early April with the Howards’ architect, Francis Terry, one of the freshly conserved Vanderbank tapestries depicting the four seasons, woven for the room in 1706, was being hung. For Terry, primarily an architect of new-build Georgian-style country houses, this was “the dream commission”, he says. “For my generation, Castle Howard is Brideshead Revisited, just the iconic country house. I’m a huge Vanbrugh fan and this was [a chance] to do a Vanbrugh room, to get into his shoes and keep walking.”

The room has a new ceiling, a new floor and its bespoke tapestries back in their rightful place. Terry has reconstructed the room from its bare brick with a new chimney piece and overmantel, dado, skirting, window surrounds and wall panelling. There is an exquisite ornate entablature based on an Ionic example by the 16th-century Italian architect Vignola, whose work influenced Vanbrugh…

Doughty avoids any suggestion that Waugh primarily based his description of the fictional Brideshead Castle on Castle Howard, but has noted in the past that it certainly contributed to the one Waugh constructed on paper. It was in fact the film makers of the two adaptations who created the impression in the public’s mind that Waugh’s Brideshead was a copy of Castle Howard.

–The Evening Standard has compiled a list of books recommended for reading this summer. One of those selected is Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Here’s the description:

Described by Stephen Fry as Britain’s The Great Gatsby, Evelyn Waugh’s novel takes place in the years following the First World War, otherwise affectionately known as the Roaring Twenties.

It follows The Bright Young Things of London’s Mayfair – capricious yet intelligent, sophisticated yet highly unsavoury, rich with experience yet increasingly poor in funds – a motley collection of characters who are bold, hilarious, anxious and fabulous.

The full list can be viewed at this link.

–New York University has posted details of an exhibit at its Florentine campus in La Pietra. This relates to the Oxford days of Harold Acton, the estate’s former owner:

Leaving one’s home and going to college is a moment of self discovery, an adventure in which we come to recognize our future self. Harold Acton writes in his Memoirs of an Aesthete, “Oxford set me free  [. . .] In many respects I was an un-English production but in one I was singularly English: I was adaptable [
]  and gradually entered a circle of lifelong friends.” (p.29)

Sir Harold’s intimate sitting room with its objects, photos and books leads into his bedchamber and private bathroom, a fitting location to display some of his personal effects from his college days. Considering the room’s location within the house, characterized by its southern exposure to the garden and its direct access to the children’s day nursery, it is likely that this was formerly the bedroom of the Acton boys.  At the end of his life, Harold spent his final days here surrounded by his  memories and mementos.

On display one can see a selection of Sir Harold’s personal effects. On the right side of his four poster bed, is a framed photo on the wall of the young Evelyn Waugh and his first wife, Evelyn Gardner.  In addition, eight selected photographs show a young Harold Acton with three of his best mates from Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford University – Robert Byron, Brian Howard and Evelyn Waugh…

The full description is available here.

–Penguin Books in the UK is celebrating its 90th anniversary. This is being marked by the release of 90 short booklets which contain excerpts from the books of its prominent authors. Here’s the description:

“In celebration of our 90th birthday, Penguin Classics have delved into the archives to create a new series of 90 short paperbacks. Each title features its own unique cover design in red foil, described by Penguin Classics art director Jim Stoddart as a “love letter” to Penguin’s design heritage.

From a Japanese tea ceremony to the mean streets of New York, from ancient battlefields to haunted graveyards and into outer space, the Penguin Archive series brings together a rich, eclectic range of some of the greatest, most transporting stories, ideas and poetry ever written.”

A link to the complete list together with copies of the red and white covers is available here. Conspicuous by its absence is any excerpt from any of Waugh’s books. These have been published in the UK consistently by Penguin since 1937 when it issued Decline and Fall as its No. 75 orange fiction paperback. We can only hope that it has something else in mind to commemorate its long association with Waugh.

 

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Piers Court Update

Posted on April 13, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

A notice posted several weeks ago indicates that Piers Court, Waugh’s former residence near Dursley, Gloucestershire, has been repurposed into high-end countryside accommodations. Here is a description of what is on offer:

Piers Court is a unique and enchanting English country house, overflowing with elegance, history and a serene charm. We offer exclusive, stylish and inspirational personal retreat accommodation for individuals and couples looking to take some time out from the pressures of life—to relax, reflect and reconnect with themselves and with nature.

Piers Court is a historic Grade II* listed Georgian & Elizabethan country house located on the western edge of The Cotswolds, in Gloucestershire, England, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).

The former home of celebrated novelist Evelyn Waugh—who penned some of his most well-known works here, including Brideshead Revisited [sic], Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen—Piers Court is steeped in literary heritage and set within 23 acres of beautiful gardens and woodland.

After falling into a state of some disrepair over a number of years before it was acquired in 2023, Piers Court is now being lovingly and sensitively restored as a holistic wellbeing and creative retreat space.

They might want to note that Brideshead Revisited was written while the house was occupied by a convent school to which Waugh had rented it during the war. But his next novel The Loved One was written while he was living at Piers Court, as were Robbery Under Law, Helena, and Love Among the Ruins. After several pages describing and displaying photographs of the redecorated accommodations, the invitation of the new owner appears along with her photograph:

Hello—I’m Vanessa, and I’m very happy and thankful to introduce myself to you as the new owner of Piers Court. In 2023, I had the privilege of acquiring this remarkable manor house with a vision of creating a unique and inspiring countryside retreat for people interested in deeper wellbeing, life balance and creative fulfilment.

If you would like to find out more about the exclusive accommodation we now have on offer—or have any questions about this exciting project—then please do get in touch via the form on this page.

The full text of the property’s attractive web site is available at this link.

Another interesting but apparently unrelated website has been reposted with detailed and illustrated information about Waugh’s residence at Piers Court. This originally appeared on the website House and Heritage in June 2018. At that time the house was on offer by real estate agents Knight Frank. The buyer of the house at that time apparently sold it to the current owner (directly or through an intermediary) who has posted the new description. Here is the opening from the 2018 website:

The selling point for Piers Court, on the market at Knight Frank with a £3 million guide price, is its connection with Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited, who lived here between 1937 and 1956.

Notwithstanding, Piers Court at Stinchcombe, near Dursley, has a history going back much farther. The Grade II* listed house stands on the site of a medieval manor of that name burned down by Parliamentary troops searching for Prince Rupert on his march from Cirencester to Berkeley Castle (about six miles away) in 1645. Piers Court, a safe house for Royalists, was owned by the wealthy land and mill owning Pynffold family who remained for 150 years.

According to Historic England, the remains of the earlier building were incorporated into an 18th century property which is the house we see today.

There follows an interesting and accurate description Waugh’s purchase (ÂŁ3600 in 1937) and sale (ÂŁ9700 in 1956) of the house as well as how his feelings about the house altered over time. A full text is available here. The 2023 sale was discussed in previous posts.

 

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Tax Day (USA) Roundup

Posted on April 12, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in the Times newspaper, Johanna Thomas-Corr comments on Queen Camilla’s appearance in public wearing her wedding dress.  Thomas-Corr thinks that this is a good practice and one in which she herself has engaged. Here’s the conclusion:

…I often wonder if I should see what I can get for [my wedding dress] on Vinted or one of those many online sites that barely existed when I bought it second-hand. Would it fetch enough for a weekend away — or a new mattress? Or should I keep it hanging in my wardrobe ready to pass down to a niece or daughter-in-law? Another idea is to just liberate it, allow it a more fun fate. I’m inspired by a comment in Evelyn Waugh’s letters in which he describes how in the 1960s, his daughter Margaret got married in a dress of her great-grandmother’s “out of the acting cupboard, used in countless charades”.

Why not, then, throw it in a family dressing-up box? Perhaps one of my male descendants can squeeze into it for some sport? I envisage a glorious afterlife for my wedding dress in which it lives as fully and undemurely as I have.

—Tatler magazine devotes a substantial part of its latest issue to the Mitford family, several of whom were close friends of Evelyn Waugh. Here is their description of the magazine’s display of Mitfordiana:

‘If one can’t be happy,’ Nancy Mitford once wrote, ‘one must be amused,’ And how better to beat the blues when life gets dulling than sitting down with a copy of Tatler? Nancy herself would certainly approve: the May issue is full of more Mitfords than the Black Cat Club itself. Cover star Bessie Carter may not actually be part of the family dynasty herself – though with parents like Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter, she’s close to British theatre royalty – but she tells Tatler just how she transformed into the Pursuit of Love author for the upcoming Mitford biopic Outrageous. …

And while the Outrageous days of Nancy, Diana, Unity, Deborah, Pamela, and Jessica may be behind us, their legacy lives on in the hotspots of Britain’s new Bright Young Things. Just ask Lady Gina Hope, who has followed in the footsteps of Nancy (as well as her own grandmother, Lady De La Warr) by selling books to the cognoscenti at the storied Heywood Hill bookshop.

In the Tatler May issue, she takes readers behind the scenes at the shop that Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh once stalked – and where Nancy’s ghost might still have a thing or two to say to slacking shelf stackers. With the shop now owned by Nicky Dunne, son-in-law of Nancy Mitford’s nephew, Stoker Cavendish, 12th of Devonshire, today’s customers are just as discerning: A Second World War biography with ‘only planes, no boats’?…

The Last Mitford: on the anniversary of her birth, discover the magical world of Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire in one of her final ever interviews. Revisit one of the final ever interviews of Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, published in the March 2010 issue of Tatler

–The Financial Times has a story by Charles Spencer about the origin and recently renewed interest in country house “attic sales”.  After describing the experience of such a recent sale at Holkam Hall,  the story continues with a description of one held several years ago at Castle Howard and concludes with this:

…James Miller, for 25 years in charge of Sotheby’s attic sales, says: “[The success of such sales] didn’t go unnoticed by those with historic houses who had lots of bog-standard stuff knocking about.” Indeed, when, in 1991, Miller was asked by the owners of Castle Howard to select one of their pictures for disposal, he recommended an attic sale instead.

It was all cleverly curated. Castle Howard had achieved fame as the setting for TV series Brideshead Revisited, based on the Evelyn Waugh novel. Aloysius, a lead character’s teddy bear, became the motif of the sale, and the recent appetite for aristocratic Englishness — identified and commercialised by Ralph Lauren — was deployed by Sotheby’s marketing department.

The behind-the-scenes reality of the Castle Howard attic sale was rather less refined; some lots were hoicked out of their castle cubbyholes at the last minute. Miller remembers how “the ceramics came out last, were shoved into an industrial washing machine, then passed down a line of my assistants, some wielding a hairdryer, others a glue gun”, before being presented for sale. The key to successful sales was found to be keeping estimates reasonable. …

Britain has … moved on from the Brideshead days, when ancestral mansions were viewed as bastions of a distant but still relevant past. Now, many of the great historic houses have little to sell: their attics have long been cleared out.

Here’s a link to the full story.

–Finally, The Spectator has an article by Ameer Kotecha exploring whether there has been a return of the “Young Fogey”. The article is headed by a photo from the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. The story opens with a discussion of the origin of the Young Fogey concept:

…The term Young Fogey was popularised by Alan Watkins in a Spectator diary in 1984. Attempting to put his finger on this curious breed that he encountered at the Spectator offices and among most of his friends, he mused that it was a conservative type defined by his politics (‘libertarian but not liberal’), but also by his aesthetic and interests:

“He is a scholar of Evelyn Waugh. He tends to be coolly religious, either RC or C of E. He dislikes modern architecture. He makes a great fuss about the old Prayer Book, grammar, syntax and punctuation. He laments the difficulty of purchasing good bread, Cheddar cheese, kippers and sausages – though not beer, because the cause of good beer has been taken over by boring men with beards from the Campaign for Real Ale. He enjoys walking and travelling by train. He thinks the Times is not what it was and prefers the Daily Telegraph.”

So does he exist today? Young men’s drift to the political right is well-documented. And that social and cultural conservatism is cultivating what has been described as a ‘right-wing retro revivalism’…

The story continues with an exploration of the characteristics of the renewed variety, but there is no reference to their interest in Evelyn Waugh novels or those of any other writer. Their reading material seems to consist of magazines in which they are likely to find discussions of examples of contemporary Fogeydom. A copy of the article is available here.

 

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Evelyn Waugh, d. 10 April 1966, R.I.P.

Posted on April 10, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times newspaper in its regular  “On This Day” column includes this memory of Evelyn Waugh’s death along with a photo of Waugh in a tweed jacket, holding onto a picket fence in one hand and a cigar in the other:

…[I]n 1966 Evelyn Waugh, the author of Decline and Fall (1928), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Brideshead Revisited (1945), died aged 62, after attending a Latin Mass, a liturgy close to his heart.

Here’s a link.

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Roundup: Single-Sex Schools, The Mitfords, and Tales from Amazonia

Posted on April 6, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–In last week’s Sunday Telegraph, Rowan Pelling had an article entitled “When single-sex schools die, will we all be poorer?” Here is an extract:

…I can’t help wondering how the shelves of children will look in 20 years after all the upheavals in the private education sector. Surely the subject of single-sex boarding schools will be firmly relegated to the realms of fantasy, if it informs literature at all.

This week The Telegraph revealed that Labour’s imposition of VAT on school fees has had a particularly brutal effect on single-sex independent schools, which are closing or going co-ed at a rate of knots. Once boys public schools littered the land, including many ropey ones (think of Evelyn Waugh’s Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, teaching at Llanabba Castle School). Now there are only four all-boys boarding schools left in the UK: Eton, Harrow, Radley and Tonbridge. Meanwhile, all-girls establishments are racing to take boys, despite studies showing girls do best when educated separately.

Not only will children’s shelves be changed by the upheaval, adult literature will be transformed too. So many books I’ve loved unlock British history and our national temperament – in particular our stiff upper lip and fortitude – by taking an unsentimental look at boarding school life. Jane Eyre wouldn’t linger long in the imagination had she not triumphed over the hideous deprivations she endured at Lowood School. Logan Mountstuart in William Boyd’s Any Human Heart has a life underpinned by the friendships and rivalries he establishes at public school.

More chilling is Sebastian Faulks’ fine novel Engleby, where the working-class anti-hero is at an “ancient university” after winning a scholarship to Chatfield, a public school for the sons of naval officers. During his schooldays he was hideously bullied and called “Toilet Engleby” for the heinous crime of not saying “lavatory”, like his posher classmates.

If you think that sounds off-putting, then I can only say that literary memoirs like Charles Spencer’s A Very Private Education and Antonia White’s Frost in May are darker still. But they’re also beautifully written, salutary reminders that a late 20th-century revolution in the field of child psychology served to revolutionise private education, introducing the previously alien concept of well-being.

Not all boarding-school lit is grim.

Look at James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr Chips, a tear-jerking love letter to the finest teachers, while many women would kill to take refuge from modern life at Angela Brazil’s St Chad’s. The sad fact is these time-honoured avenues of escapism will slowly disappear, along with the schools themselves. Future generations, schooled by AI, will never know the worlds of nuance summoned by the phrase “chiz-chiz”. It will all be another country…

This week’s edition of The Sunday Telegraph has an article by Felicity Day entitled “Five literary houses that have been lost to history”. One of those is Plas Dulas in Wales which she notes had been visited many times by Waugh when he was teaching in a single-sex school nearby (or possibly in the house itself), as mentioned above and described in Decline and Fall. According to the Telegraph:

The author visited and dined in the house on many occasions during the six months he spend in Llanddulas in 1925 when he was teaching at the nearby Arnold House school. It is thought that it was an inspiration for Llanabba Castle, home for the boy’s school where hapless Paul Pennyfeather is employed after his expulsion from Oxford in 1928’s Decline and Fall. Waugh may have even written parts of the novel at Plas Dulas itself.

More details on this are available in a previous post.  The Telegraph article posted in Yahoo Entertainment is dated Sat, April 5, 2025 at 11:15AM so may have appeared in that day’s edition of the Daily Telegraph or the next day’s edition of the Sunday Telegraph or a later issue.

—The Tatler has an article by Ben Jureidini about filming of the Downton Abbey grand finale in the country house known as Highclere Castle in Hampshire. Here are the opening paragraphs:

When writer Evelyn Waugh arrived in Georgetown, British Guyana, he was probably in need of a break. The journey overland had been exhausting, and the recently divorced writer was probably still languishing in the throes of unrequited love for socialite Teresa Jungman. This 700-mile psychomachia in the Amazonian rainforest would go on to inspire A Handful of Dust, one of Waugh’s most sinister novels. Clearly, though, between scorpion-ridden mattress, soporific rum swizzles and vampire bats, Waugh found himself in suitable comfort to employ one of his most exclusive of adjectives. ‘Darling Blondy and Poll,’ he wrote in a letter to Lady Mary Lygon, the niece of the Duke of Westminster on whom Waugh would base Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, ‘I am back in Georgetown and all the world is Highclere.’

So enamoured by Highclere Castle was this most caustic of high-society cartographers that Waugh would employ the name of the seat of the Earls of Carnarvon to describe any country house or weekend of partying that he deemed to be sufficiently luxurious. Almost a century later, its Jacobean towers and Capability Brown gardens attract thousands of visitors, who make the pilgrimage from climes as far flung as Tennessee to spend a day at the ‘real Downton Abbey’…

A branch of the family of Waugh’s second wife Laura Herbert lived at Highclere, but I have never seen any reference to Waugh’s having visited there.  If anyone knows of such a visit, please send a comment.

—The Tatler also has an article anticipating the release of a new dramatic TV series based on the Mitford sisters. This is by Clara Strunck. Here are some excerpts from the article:

New drama Outrageous will delve into the lives of the Mitford sisters, promising to ‘bring the full, uncensored story’ of the family’s scandalous exploits to life, according to the show description. The series – which will be based on Mary S. Lovell’s biography, The Mitford Girls – features Tatler cover star Bessie Carter (best known for her role as Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton) as the much-loved author, Nancy Mitford; other cast members include Anna Chancellor as the Mitfords’ mother.

The article goes on to offer photos and brief biographies of each sister.  Waugh was a close friend of Nancy and also knew Diana and Deborah quite well.  His friendship with Diana is mentioned:

Earning plenty of column inches for her political affiliations, Diana made a name for herself not just as an author and reviewer (at one point, she even contributed to Tatler and Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel, Vile Bodies, is dedicated to her) but for her controversial marriages. Although she initially wed Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, the partnership ended in divorce as Diana was pursuing a relationship with Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.

In 1936, she married Mosley at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as a guest of honour. Her choice of husband strained relationships with her family, particularly Diana’s younger sister Jessica, who became permanently estranged from the couple in the later 1930s. Nancy’s novel, Wigs on the Green, satirised Mosley and his beliefs and, after it was published in 1935, relations between the sisters were even more frosty…

They might have mentioned that Waugh dedicated both Vile Bodies and his travel book Labels to Diana and her husband, while his novella The Loved One was dedicated to Nancy.

–Finally, a TV review in The Sunday Times by Rod Liddle finds a BBC TV series that had an ending reminiscent of a Waugh novel:

… There were plenty of laughs to be had on the box this week if you were prepared to look for them — for a start, Tribe (BBC2), which had me howling with mirth. The format is simple. Take a simpering, endlessly credulous amateur anthropologist and shove him somewhere really remote — among a tribe of Lost People Who Have Never Encountered Civilisation, say — and see how he gets on. It was a scream.

The dupe was a wide-eyed Bruce Parry who, 20 years after his adventures in the first series, was deposited among the Waimaha (who hate outsiders) in the Amazonian rainforests of Colombia. His task was to be allowed to take part in the tribe’s “magical” ceremony, where they dance around a bit and get blitzed out of their skulls on yagĂ©, a hallucinogenic plant extract. […]

It was a neat conceit for a comedy, unveiling the epic condescension that lies at the heart of these non-judgmental liberals. It seems to have been based on the final chapters of Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust, in which poor Tony Last ends up marooned in the Amazon. One can only hope that at some point Parry is captured by a madman and forced to read aloud the entire works of Dickens. It would be a brilliant ending 
 I think next week’s episode is set in Sheerness.

UPDATE: 8 April 2025 relating to Telegraph article re Plas Dulas.

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