MLK Weekend Roundup

Posted on January 13, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The independent book publisher Sutherland House has posted a brief article entitled “Why Waugh Drank”. This is by Kenneth Whyte and begins with a quote from Waugh’s diary (8 Dec 1924, pp. 189-90) about a drink-fueled Oxford day spent in and out of the Hypocrites and New Reform Clubs, from the latter of which he was barred twice. The article then discusses Waugh’s difficult childhood as described in Alexander Waugh’s biography Fathers and Sons and concludes with this:

…Evelyn responded to his circumstances in a clever and self-protective fashion, defining himself against his brother and father. By adolescence, he had an inkling that he was smarter and funnier than both. They could keep their mawkish outpourings of emotion toward one another; he would be hard of head and sharp of tongue. By his early teen years, he was confiding to his diary that Arthur was a fat and “ineffably silly” Victorian sentimentalist. He considered both Alec and Arthur philistines. “Terrible man, my father,” Evelyn said to a schoolmaster. “He likes Kipling.”

To the extent that his parents thought about Evelyn, they were disturbed by his dark moods and lassitude, and intimidated by his cynical wit. Both Alec and Arthur were threatened by Evelyn as a potential literary rival. When Evelyn, in what was becoming a typical act of rebellion, ran up an expensive restaurant tab and had it sent to an outraged Arthur, Alec said: “You know father, if Evelyn turns out to be a genius, you and I might be made to look very foolish by making a fuss over ten pounds, seventeen and ninepence.”

So you can perhaps see how young Evelyn Waugh developed an enthusiasm for drink remarkable even in an undergrad, and why the rare characters killed in gruesome fashion in his fiction tended to be fathers…

The article closes with a quote from a recent essay in the New Statesman discussed in an earlier post which Whyte thinks may evidence some renewed interest in Waugh and his writing. Thanks to David Lull for sending a link.

–Several Spanish-language book sites are listing what looks like the upcoming publication of a Spanish or Castilian translation of Waugh’s 1935 biography to be entitled Edmun Campion jesuita y matir. There is no information about the translator or publication date, but the price will be €16, and the publisher is apparently to be Editorial Didaskalos.  According to Amazon.es, Waugh’s Edmund Campion is currently available to its customers only in English language editions.

—The Spectator has an article by John Oxley in its current edition entitled “The Tory Party’s Empty Legacy.” The article opens with this:

It was Evelyn Waugh who dismissed the Tories as having ‘never put the clock back a single second’. Now, even the party’s own MPs seem similarly sceptical, with Danny Kruger lamenting the last 14 years of power as leaving the country ‘sadder, less united and less conservative’. It’s one thing for a parliamentarian to bemoan the party for dropping in the polls, but unusual for one to be so scathing of an entire period of government. In fairness to the Conservatives, their record is not as hopeless as current polling might suggest…

—YouTube has posted a reading by Tobias Menzies of a letter of Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford about his fans. This was dated 27 July 1952 and appears in Letters pp 376-77. It is presented in a series called Letters Live. It’s worth a look-in even if you are familiar with its contents. Here’s a link.

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Roundup: Podcast, Public Domain and Plas Dulas

Posted on January 7, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books has announced its annual program of monthly literary podcasts for the coming year. This is called Close Readings. One of these wil focus on satire and will discuss, inter alia, Evelyn Waugh’s early novel A Handful of Dust which many critics consider his best book. Here’s the text for this particular series:

Close Readings, the LRB’s acclaimed programme of year-long literary courses, returns with three new series. Subscribe to the podcast to listen to them all (as well as all past series) next year, or sign up for a full Close Readings Plus course: you’ll still get podcast access to everything but also a host of other features to transform your reading in 2024.

In which Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow attempt, over twelve episodes, to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in all of English literature. What is satire, what is it for, and why do we seem to like it so much?

Other books to be considered in that series include Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington and Jane Austen’s Emma. Here’s a link to the announcement which includes sign up details of this and other series.

–In what may be the first announcement of a publication of Waugh’s work issued under the public domain now effective in the United States, a website called Standard Ebooks is offering a free copy of Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall. See this link. After describing the story, the website provides this explanation:

Waugh issued a new edition of Decline and Fall in 1960 that contained restored text that was removed by his publisher from the first edition. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the first edition.

READ FREE

This ebook is thought to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. It may still be under copyright in other countries. If you’re not located in the United States, you must check your local laws to verify that this ebook is free of copyright restrictions in the country you’re located in before accessing, downloading, or using it.

Here is some background information on Standard Ebooks:

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.

Standard Ebooks is organized as a “low-profit L.L.C.,” or “L3C,” a kind of legal entity that blends the charitable focus of a traditional not-for-profit with the ease of organization and maintenance of a regular L.L.C. Our only source of income is donations from readers like you.

–Several Welsh papers announce that the long-planned but delayed demolition of a notable Waugh landmark is about to commence. Here is an excerpt from the news website  NorthWales Live:

The demolition of an historic mansion look set to move ahead shortly. Plas Dulas mansion on Pencoed Road, Llanddulas, was built in the 1840s as a summer retreat. Its famous guests included writer Charles Dickens, playwright Noel Coward and novelist Evelyn Waugh, with the grand house said to have been the inspiration for the boy’s school Llanabba in his 1928 novel Decline and Fall.

Despite planning being in place the building has remained standing – keeping alive the slim hope it could be saved. But the developer Alex Davies Construction has just submitted a construction method statement detailing how the building will be demolished and the site cleared ahead of the new development.

They state that the demolition process for the “old stone building at Plas Dulas will be planned with a focus on sustainability, safety and compliance with regulatory requirements”. They outlined how they would protect any bats that may be roosting at the site and also how they would minimise noise and disruption for local residents.

Mark Baker, architectural historian and Chair of Gwrych Trust, had campaigned against the demolition decision.

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New Issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies Posted

Posted on January 4, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

A new issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies, the Society’s journal, has been posted. This is vol 54.2 (Autumn 2023). Here is the summary by the Society’s Secretary Jamie Collinson:

I write to provide you with Evelyn Waugh Studies 54.2 which I can honestly say is my favourite edition to date. That’s due not least to a very readable and brilliantly insightful essay on A Handful of Dust, by Martin Stead. Stead makes a convincing case for religious symbolism in the novel, which I for one hadn’t picked up, and an equally compelling case that Tony Last isn’t quite as innocent as he might seem. I hope you’ll enjoy the essay as much as I did. For my money, the ending of A Handful of Dust is one of Waugh’s most breathtaking achievements, and new light is shed here.Also included is a review of the latest edition in The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Edmund Campion, edited by Gerard Kilroy and reviewed for EWS by D. Marcel DeCoste. DeCoste examines Kilroy’s thesis that writing Campion inspired a fruitful new creative direction for Waugh.Finally, our own Jeffrey Manley reviews Thoroughly Modern: The Pioneering Life of Barbara Ker-Seymer, Photographer, and Her Brilliant, Bohemian Friends, by Sarah Knights. This book has been picking up coverage for its detailing of a very interesting life, and one that intersected with Waugh’s and the Bright Young Things.

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New Years Roundup

Posted on December 31, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The website LibraryThing.com has posted a review of the Folio Society editions of Black Mischief of which there have been three. Here’s the text:

[Black Mischief] is a quite politically incorrect farce set in 1930 in the mythical country of Azania which occupies a large island in the Indian ocean off the coast of Somalia and Kenya. Waugh portrays this African kingdom as being run by incompetent and corrupt Negro natives, the European residents are depicted as being arrogant and inept, the Indians are incorrigible traders in stolen goods and the Arabs watch on while smoking their hookahs in a hashish haze. Every characteristic of these races is exaggerated to make everyone look ridiculous and you can just imagine some individuals at the extremes of their depiction actually acting in these ways.

It is an amusing 206 page book that has 19 pen and ink sketches by Quentin Blake integrated into the text. It has a rather long (for a small book) nine page introduction by William Deedes. The book is bound in black cloth with a double medallion design of an Azanian medal in gold by Blake on the cover while the gilt spine title runs from bottom to top. The yellow endleaves are printed in black with a map of Azania, the page tops are stained yellow and the pale brown textured slipcase measures 23.1×14.5cm.

The Folio Society published two subsequent editions of this book. In 1999 it was one of a set of six comedies by Waugh, and in 2016 another edition was published in a different binding as one of the short-lived Folio Society Collectable editions. Both these editions had the same content as the 1980 edition reviewed here.

Attached to the post are photos of all three editions followed by photo copies of several pages from the 2008 edition showing the drawings of Quentin Blake, who also drew the covers for the original Penguin Modern Classics editions from the 1960s. Here is a link to the posting.

–The film Saltburn (discussed in several recent posts) is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime. I watched it on Amazon.com and assume it is available to subscribers in the UK and other English-speaking countries on their various Amazon websites. The film’s reviewers may have oversold the film’s connections to Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. The early scenes in Oxford certainly do seem to have been inspired by Waugh’s novel. There is obviously some connection between the novel’s  characters Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte and the film’s Oliver and Felix. There is also a character in the film called Fairleigh who seems to share some elements with the novel’s Anthony Blanche, in my opinion one of Waugh’s finest creations.

In case you may miss it, that debt to Waugh’s novel is explicitly mentioned by the film’s characters near the end of the Oxford segment. But one shouldn’t expect many more Brideshead themes to crop up once the film moves to the country house of Felix’s family. One that I did notice was a fleeting mention of the teddy bear that had belonged to Felix’s father. But the relationships between Oliver, on the one hand, and Felix and his family, on the other, as well as those between the family members themselves and between them and the house bear little or no resemblance to Waugh’s novel.

–Max Hastings in Saturday’s issue of The Times recalls the political career of William Joynson-Hicks (“Jix” for short) who had a habit of making himself the most conservative voice in the room:

…In 1924, when reactionaries were stricken with disgust at the perceived extravagance of the Roaring Twenties, postwar immorality and the jazz age, Stanley Baldwin made the preposterous Joynson-Hicks home secretary. Jix (the nickname by which much of Britain mocked him) was thrilled. He had been presented with a truncheon; a chance to wind back the clock and reassert decent morality.

He embarked on a war against foreigners– “undesirable aliens”. He denounced perceived pornography and modern art; secured the banning of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Evelyn Waugh satirised him in Vile Bodies. When a customs officer at Dover confiscates the manuscript of aspiring author Adam Fenwick-Symes, he says: “Particularly against books the home secretary is. If we can’t stamp out literature in this country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.” …

–A recent issue of The Guardian has an article about the continuing success of “cosy crime” writings as a British literary genre. Here’s an excerpt:

…[Agatha Christie] wrote laughs aplenty, especially when it came to Poirot; her contemporary and fellow queen of crime, Ngaio Marsh, excelled at badinage. GK Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, written in the early 20th century, have a profound and gentle humour – or not so gentle in the barbed parody The Absence of Mr Glass, which pokes fun at Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle also made space for jokes amid the pea-soupers and arch villainy, not just in surreal escapades such as The Red-Headed League, but in the everyday interactions of Holmes and Watson. And there are links between the generations: as a producer on Radio 4’s classic adaptation of Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey series, Brett revisited the pinnacle of comic crime from the 1920s and 30s.

In Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, the aristocratic Catholic family at its centre turns in times of crisis, not to sermons, but to Father Brown stories. Read aloud by the matriarch, the scene is at once absurd, touching and completely understandable. Part of the solace stems from the benign humour of the tales, and that explains why comic crime is resurgent today – amid planetary and economic crises, that promise of escapism is more beguiling than ever. Especially at this time of year. From Hercule Poirot’s Christmas to PD James’s Mistletoe Murders, authors as well as readers have been drawn to fatal festivities…

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Christmas 2023 Roundup

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–An article posted by the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain has announced that beginning in January 2024, some books written by Evelyn Waugh will be out of copyright protection in the United States. Here’s an excerpt explaining the situation:

On January 1, 2024, thousands of copyrighted works from 1928 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1923. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. This year’s highlights include Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence and The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman and Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, and a trove of sound recordings from 1923. And, of course, 2024 marks the long-awaited arrival of Steamboat Willie – featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse – into the public domain. That story is so fascinating, so rich in irony, so rife with misinformation about what you will be able to do with Mickey and Minnie now that they are in the public domain that it deserved its own article, “Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle.” Why is it a love triangle? What rights does Disney still have? How is trademark law involved? Read all about it here.

Here is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2024… They were first set to go into the public domain after a 56-year term in 1984, but a term extension pushed that date to 2004. They were then supposed to go into the public domain in 2004, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit another 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over.

The list that follows includes Decline and Fall which was published September 1928 in the UK  but appeared in the United States in 1929. Whether that later US publication date has any significance is not addressed. Waugh’s first book Rossetti: His Life and Work was published earlier in 1928 in both the US and UK and would also be in the public domain in the US consistent with this article. What may be the situation in other countries than the US is not much discussed. I do recall reading that some of Waugh’s works were in the public domain in Canada a few years ago. According to one internet site, in the UK, copyright of a novel would continue until 70 years from the writer’s death. Since Waugh died in 1966, that would seem to extend the copyright protection in the UK until 2036. Here’s a link to the Duke University article.

–An article by Adam Douglas in this month’s Literary Review is entitled “To Brideshead Born” and begins with this:

My parents burdened me with two middle names. Three forename initials were commonplace once – sported by the captain of an MCC touring side in the 1920s, say – but nowadays they are a nuisance. Official forms allow for only one middle name, although if there is space I shoehorn both in, somehow feeling I am not myself without them.

The two middle names are Charles and Sebastian. My mother told me that one was chosen from each side of the family. But she misled me. They are the names of the leading characters of my father’s favourite book.

I now own the copy of Brideshead Revisited my father gave my mother as an engagement present. Raised Anglican, he went over to Rome, as the saying was, in 1959. Whether he did so purely to marry my mother, whose family tree boasted Jacobites out in the risings of both 1715 and 1745, as well as a couple of recusant bishops, is a moot point. But my father certainly drove his Morris to his second baptism with the lush cadences of Brideshead fresh in his mind.

The copy he gave her is not valuable. It is a third edition, confusingly described on the title verso as ‘New Impression 1952’. I would look it up, but there is no Evelyn Waugh bibliography…

Unfortunately, the remainder of the article is behind a paywall, but it might at least be worth mentioning that there is a bibliography of the works of Evelyn Waugh published in 1986. This was written by 5 well-known Waugh scholars headed by Professor Robert Murray Davis. That work cites (pp. 14-15) several editions of Brideshead, but the only one issued in 1952 was a reprint of the Penguin edition first published in paperback in the previous year. There is no UK hardback publication mentioned between a 1949 Readers Union/C&H edition in 1949 and a C&H “Reset” edition in 1960.

–A website called Letters of Note posted an article entitled “Christmas is a rotten hype & all we can do is ride it out: Letters of NoĂ«l”. The first of several entries is this:

“Oh the hell of Christmas cards.”

Evelyn Waugh
Letter to Lord Kinross
December 1953

The statement was included in a letter relating to the arrival of the gift of a present from John Betjeman. It was some sort of antique wash basin for which Waugh believed (wrongly as it turned out) that a part was missing. After the quote above about Christmas cards, Waugh closed with this: “How lucky to be Scottish–or has this beastly custom spread north?” (Letters, 416)

Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to all our readers.

 

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Society’s Secretary Interviewed on Literary Website

Posted on December 23, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The literary and entertainment website Book and Film Globe earlier this week interviewed the Society’s Secretary Jamie Collinson. The interview entitled “Waugh in Our Time” is posted today. Here’s the introduction by interviewer Michael Washburn:

Nearly six decades after his death in 1966, the British novelist, short story writer, memoirist, biographer, critic, journalist, and foreign correspondent Evelyn Waugh keeps coming up in discussion. References to him in contemporary reportage, books, movies, and academic discourse are far too myriad to catalog. Waugh has much to say to us in 2023.

That is the view of Jamie Collinson, an author and the secretary of the London-based Evelyn Waugh Society, who recently took time out of his crammed scheduled to share his thoughts on the creative talent whom his organization promotes and celebrates.

In our wide-ranging interview, Collinson, whose newest book The Rejects will be out from Little, Brown in February, mentioned Waugh’s ubiquity and the fact that nearly all reviews of the hit movie Saltburn contain a reference to Waugh.

That is not surprising. One of the film’s protagonists, the young aristocrat Felix, tells the strange young visitor to his estate that his relatives seem to him to provide the inspiration for all Waugh’s characters. Felix’s parents, in particular, represent the kind of vain and pompous high-society toffs Waugh loved to satirize in his stories and novels.

Ultimately, the Waugh reference in Saltburn feels like a strained attempt to lend gravitas to a flashy but vacuous thriller. If you really want insight into Britain’s aristocracy, social dynamics, class rivalries, imperial aims, literary ambitions, geopolitical entanglements, and military humiliations, there is no better source to turn to than the writer himself. Waugh wrote with the ear of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, never using too many or too few words, and he ran circles around even George Orwell in the breadth of his interests and the scope of his literary explorations.

Whether he set his works at an estate buried deep in the sedate hinterland of northern England, or a town in Wales, or a chaotic Yugoslavian village in the midst of war and upheaval, or an African state trying to find its way in the world, or the hellhole known as Hollywood, Waugh wrote with verisimilitude and found the uproarious humor always ready to pounce from behind the workaday. Today he is controversial, and a candidate for cancellation, because his pen did not spare the sacred cows of progressive dogma. Indeed it often seems when reading Waugh that he reserved a special contempt for ideological fads that tried to claim the status of gospel.

But in our interview, Collinson pointed out that Waugh did not suffer fools gladly regardless of where or in what guise they might appear, and that people who tar him as a supercilious toff and a haughty guardian of highbrow taste ignore his tendency to skewer members of his own class the most savagely of all.

The interview was wide-ranging and both the questions and answers were thoughtful and detailed. Here is an excerpt:

…are there areas of his work that non-members of your society—or even members—find problematic? For example, his rather brutal satire of a former colonial state in Black Mischief, or his skewering of “enlightened” penological approaches in Decline and Fall, where an inmate in a prison carpentry program uses a saw to remove a well-meaning priest’s head?

It’s a while since I’ve read Black Mischief, but I seem to remember that the most brutal and hilarious satire is reserved for the white colonial characters. That said, Waugh was an equal opportunities satirist in that no one was safe. Waugh was clearly a conservative, or as he describes his alter ego in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold—“maintaining an idiosyncratic Toryism which was quite unrepresented in the political parties of his time and was regarded by his neighbors as being almost as sinister as socialism.” As such, I think it’s safe to say he’d have been skeptical of dangerously naive do-gooding, represented by the Decline incident you refer to.

George Orwell, near the end of his life, wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.” Do you think that Waugh’s continued appreciation faces dangers in this age of cancellation and de-platforming of creators?

As above, Waugh seems to have got away with it somehow. I think probably that’s down to the hysterical cancellation types not having read him (do they read anything, or just look at TikTok?), but more so the fact that his talent is, as Orwell implies, absolutely undeniable. I remember being astonished by the crystalline clarity of the prose when I first encountered him.

The modernity of it was striking, compared to the far more verbose, maximalist work of his contemporaries—something like Malcolm Lowry springs to mind. The way he can draw a character in a few deft sketches, the insistence on “action, dialogue and the sequence of time,” as opposed to dull description. The humor and the perfect arcs of the narratives. Also: the astonishing imagination and under-recognized experimentalism—and of the most successful and exciting kind. The ending of A Handful of Dust is one of the most unexpected and breathtaking that I’ve encountered in fiction.

One thing I’ve noted since my love of Waugh’s work developed: rarely a week goes by that I don’t notice some reference to him, usually in a newspaper or cultural magazine or similar. He looms very large, simply because he’s so good.

In short, I think the clue is in the Orwell quote: it perfectly summarizes why Waugh is still read and loved and will never be cancelled…

In a question about what he described the relative paucity of the adaptation of Waugh work into film, the interviewer mentioned only the films of The Loved One and A Handful of Dust as well as the TV series of Brideshead Revisited. He seems to have been unaware of the two TV adaptations of Sword of Honour, the most recent in 2001 scripted by novelist William Boyd, as well as the 2008 film version of Brideshead and Stephen Fry’s 2003 adaptation of Vile Bodies (retitled Bright Young Things). Boyd also adapted a two-hour London Weekend version of Scoop which appeared on ITV in 1987.  Collinson also noted the BBC’s 2017 adaptation of Decline and Fall as the latest effort as well as rumors of a third Brideshead adaptation.

The interview concludes with this exchange:

Looking back on your Evelyn Waugh Society, from its founding to the present, where do you see interest in Waugh as reaching its peak? And what insights can you offer on this writer’s posthumous fortune?

I’ve only been a member of the Society since 2017. I’m pleased to say that I detect more interest in Waugh recently than at any other time in those six years. I had the sense that he was very unfashionable when I joined, but as per the above in terms of just how often he’s referred to culturally, I think that has changed. There are rumors of a star-studded new Brideshead adaptation, lurid stories such as that of the Piers Court ownership debacle, references in those Saltburn reviews, and as I said, barely a week goes by that I don’t encounter his name. Perhaps that’s partly because times like these cry out for a satirist such as Waugh. He would have had a field day.

The complete interview is available at this link.

 

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Pre-Christmas Roundup

Posted on December 16, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The British Film Institute (BFI) has posted a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s 1924 silent film production The Scarlet Woman. I think the film was more a creation of Waugh’s Oxford friend Terrence Greenidge than Waugh himself, although Waugh seems to have written the script and provided the setting for many of the scenes in the garden of his family’s home on North End Road.  Here is the description of the film from BFI’s website:

Much of the appeal of this confusing but fascinating amateur film is a gloriously camp performance by its writer, Evelyn Waugh. He plays the Dean of Balliol College, Oxford, and based his performance on the real Dean, ‘Sligger’ Urquhart. Urquhart, he observed, was Catholic, homosexual, and a snob; an epithet that could as well describe the author himself after his conversion in 1930. Filming took place at Hampstead Heath, Golders Green, and the Waugh family’s Hampstead back garden in the summer of 1924.

In the film the Dean is under orders from the Pope and his envoy Cardinal Montefiasco to convert the English monarchy to Roman Catholicism. The Dean holds a sinister influence over the Prince of Wales, but this is counteracted by the attractions of cabaret actress Beatrice de Carolle, played by a sinuous Elsa Lanchester (The Bride of Frankenstein) in her first film role.

Here’s a link to the film.  It is available for streaming without charge on the BFI Player via a UK internet connection.

–The website CapX sponsored by the UK’s “center-right” Centre for Policy Studies has posted a list of books read and recommended by its contributors in 2023. Here’s one listed by Tom Jones:

With the rise of medically assisted suicide, it was a ‘good’ year to get round to Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins. Written at the very beginning of the welfare state, Waugh delivers a tour-de-force that reminds you satire was, at one point, important rather than impotent. This welfare dystopia has become so unbearable that euthanasia is now the most in-demand government service – as it now seems to be the Canadian government’s first resort.

Waugh’s novella is available in the Complete Short Stories. Here’s a link to the listings.

—Niall Ferguson writing in The Spectator has an article entitled “Students annoyed their elders in the 1930s too”.  Thus was inspired by the debate on apparent student support for the Palestine side in the recent warfare with Israel. Ferguson cites the debate that erupted in response to the 1933 Oxford Union motion that “this House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country.” Here’s an excerpt:

…It is true that Oxford had moved to the left since the 1920s. The onset of the Depression, the fashionable appeal of socialism and communism, and the admission of more grammar-school boys had dispelled forever the indulgent atmosphere that Evelyn Waugh later nostalgically recalled in Brideshead Revisited. [Frank] Hardie, the Union president, was a typical Oxonian of the 1930s. Educated at Westminster, he was also chairman of the Labour Club. Yet his most enduring contribution to our national life was a book on the political role of Queen Victoria…

—The Times today has the obituary of Roderic O’Connor, Irish eccentric and environmentalist. Here’s an excerpt:

Roderic O’Connor was born Kevin Roderic Hanly O’Connor in Dublin in 1946, the only son of Captain Maurice Bernard O’Connor and his wife Pamela (nĂ©e Hanly), who had been married to the 16th Viscount Gormanston. Lord Gormanston was killed during the Second World War. Roderic’s maternal grandmother was Lady Marjorie ­Feilding, daughter of the Earl of Denbigh, aide de camp to King George V.

Roderic’s mother lived at Gormanston Castle, a gothic revival house in Co Meath. Evelyn Waugh considered buying it when it came on the market in 1946 and was somewhat surprised when it was Mrs O’Connor, as she had then become, who opened the front door to his persistent knocking. When Waugh expressed surprise at the chatelaine of such a grand house opening her own front door, she told him, “I’m afraid footmen have gone out of fashion in Ireland, Mr Waugh.’’

UPDATE: Roderic O’Connor obituary added after initial posting.

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Roundup: Kitsch, Photos and a War

Posted on December 10, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Last week, a group of Waugh scholars convened by Zoom.com to listen to and discuss a talk by Professor Taichi Koyama on the subject Waugh and Kitsch. Here’s a description of Prof. Koyama’s presentation:

Evelyn Waugh’s novels, from the earlier secular comedies to the Guy Crouchback trilogy with its deep concern with God’s grace and the vocation of each individual, always grappled with the disordered chaos of the modern world. All of them focalise on rootlessness, dislocation and the loss of temporal and spatial contexts. This presentation seeks to add another angle to the preceding analyses of such elements, by applying the idea of kitsch to two major works of Waugh’s, A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. 

Prof. Koyama has translated some of Waugh’s work into Japanese. Hopefully, the results of the online conference, including Prof. Koyama’s paper, will be published in some readily accessible forum.

–In the current issue of the London Review of Books, Susannah Clapp discusses the work of mid 20th century photographer Yevonde which was recently on display at the National Portrait Gallery. Among the subjects of her photography was Evelyn Waugh. Here is an excerpt from the article:

…Her range of work is handsomely illustrated and sympathetically quizzed in Clare Freestone’s Yevonde: Life and Colour (NPG, ÂŁ40), written to accompany the exhibition at the revivified National Portrait Gallery. On one page, the scarcely arrested vivacity of a still life in which a toadstool looks like a flying saucer. On another, the daftness of the cover for Woman and Beauty, where a woman with puffed sleeves, a straw hat and a cigarette-holder languidly shells peas. Some of the least flamboyant images are the most disconcerting. Evelyn Waugh’s face is squashed into a tiny picture frame between a potted plant and a copy of Vile Bodies. Double portraits of couples, with back-to-back profiles, raise the question of whether they are fusing or running away. One of these was of Yevonde and her husband, the playwright Edgar Middleton, who called his autobiography I Might Have Been a Success. She also produced self-portraits in which the camera looks like a metallic face. In 1968, she pictured herself in perky miniature, beside a massive studio camera. She is shackled to the great beast by a cable, which could also be a lifeline…

The NPG exhibition has alas concluded but the book is apparently available.

–The Washington Post reviews a book by Scottish professor Andrew Pettegree. Here’s a description:

…In “The Book at War,” Pettegree, a professor of modern history at Scotland’s University of St Andrews, explores how printed media has shaped people in relation to conflict. Books and war, he argues, are closely intertwined. Books have conditioned readers to expect and subsequently support war. They have been vectors of ideology and plunder for victors. Yet they have also represented great solace and solidarity in times of combat, for civilians taking cover and for soldiers on the front lines. […]

Pettegree clearly possesses an exceptional breadth of knowledge, in addition to a skill for nuanced narrative and convincing arguments. His accounts are often fascinating, such as his description of how modern spycraft relied on librarians, books and academics. He tells us of banned books entering Germany in the backpacks of Allied soldiers, and of “pudgy” and “insubordinate” Evelyn Waugh petitioning his commanding officers for leave to write what would become “Brideshead Revisited.” (Waugh was given the leave, in part because he was so insufferable.) …

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Advent Roundup

Posted on December 2, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The religious website Thinking Faith has posted an essay by Gerard Kilroy, who is, inter alia, co-editor of the recently published volume of Edmund Campion in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. In this essay, Kilroy explains in some detail the history of the writing, publication and critical reception of Waugh’s book. I had not realized until I read this that there were three editions of the book with different contents (1935, 1946, and 1961), not just two as I had previously thought. Here’s an excerpt:

…Waugh tells us, on the book’s last page, that he wrote Edmund Campion between October 1934 and May 1935 at three country houses, ‘Mells – Belton – Newton Ferrers’. Actually, he did much of the writing before Christmas 1934 in his bolthole, the Easton Court Hotel, Chagford (where, ten years later, he wrote Brideshead Revisited). By September 1935 he had sent 50 signed copies of the first edition to friends like Hilaire Belloc, Lady Diana Cooper and Lady Pansy Lamb, and the book was publicly advertised in October for the price of 6s 6d.

It was an immediate success and, by a remarkable concurrence of dates, Evelyn Waugh received the Hawthornden Prize for ‘a work of imaginative literature’ on 24 June 1936 – it was on the same date in 1580, the feast of John the Baptist, that a fair wind enabled Campion to cross the Channel. Two days after this accolade, Waugh attended the official opening of Campion Hall by the Duke of Alba, and two weeks later he received a telegram from Mgr (later Cardinal) Godfrey, sent from Rome, telling him that his annulment [of his first marriage] had finally come through: ‘Decision favourable. Godfrey.’ By the time Waugh married Laura Herbert on 17 April 1937, Edmund Campion had sealed both his friendship with [Martin] D’Arcy and his involvement in the life of the Hall, and established his own inclusion in what Waugh called (in a phrase borrowed from Campion’s scaffold utterance) the ‘Household of the Faith’…[Footnotes omitted]

–The religious journal Catholic Insight posted a related article on 1 December 2023, the date of remembrance of Edmund Campion in the Roman Catholic calendar. Here’s an excerpt:

…Waugh’s book, to this writer’s mind, is a masterpiece of hagiography, portraying the saint as he was, in his own time, and even in his own  ‘mind’, insofar as such is possible, the inner turmoil, difficulties and even doubts, as this once-foppish young man joined the most rigorous of Orders, full of their original zeal (the Jesuits were only constituted in 1540, four decades before Campion’s death). How Campion, by grace and training, was formed into an elite soldier for Christ, risking a brutal and grisly death to bring the Faith, the Sacraments, and some solace, to Catholics left bereft in Elizabeth’s increasingly anti-Catholic England. […]

Waugh’s prose and powers of description – honed in his time as as traveling journalist, through war zones – are a delight and inspiration.

–The New York Review of Books has a review by Nathaniel Rich of the new book by James Heffernan entitled Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II. One of the books considered by Professor Heffernan is Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. Here’s what the review has to say about that:

In Put Out More Flags, war is just another racket, the latest opportunity for shameless self-promotion, blackmail, giggles, and social gamesmanship. As one character says, “One takes one’s gas-mask to one’s office but not to one’s club.” Waugh did not write autobiographically: none of his characters is a Waugh stand-in, despite sharing his class and milieu. Waugh, in fact, committed himself to the war effort with much greater seriousness than any member of Basil Seal’s coterie, joining the Royal Marines as a second lieutenant. It would be tempting to say that Put Out More Flags reflected Waugh’s own disillusionment about the honor of war, but as Heffernan points out, he was under no illusions when he enlisted. Waugh’s correspondence from the period reflects a frank expectation of his own violent death and describes the fighting as “tedious & futile & fatiguing.” (In this way Waugh resembles Robert Jordan more than Basil Seal, risking his life for a cause that disgusted as much as inspired him.) In diary entries from the Battle of Crete, during which the Royal Navy suffered a humiliating defeat, Waugh describes starving men reduced to ghosts, crawling out of ditches like lizards. He began writing Put Out More Flags on an ocean liner back home. He would later claim it was the only book he wrote purely for pleasure. John Keegan, the preeminent military historian of the period, called Waugh’s farce of pompous dodgers and profiteers “the greatest English novel of the Second World War.”…

—The Times (30 November, p. 39) has an article by Susie Goldsborough inspired by the reading of a Jimmy Carter love letter to his wife at her recent funeral. The article contains several love letters penned by writers rather than politicians:

… it’s more often writers who pen the best love letters. The all-time greatest, to my mind, is fictional — Captain Wentworth’s letter to Anne in the closing chapters of Jane Austen’s Persuasion — but [the following] real-life examples are rather lovely too. […]

Evelyn Waugh to Laura Herbert, 1936.  You might think about me a bit & whether you could bear the idea of marrying me. Of course you haven’t got to decide, but think about it. I can’t advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you, but think how nice it would be for me. I am restless & moody & misanthropic & lazy & have no money except what I earn and if I got ill you would starve.

–In today’s issue of The Times, Hugo Rifkind considers what might be called the angst of party going. Among the matters discussed are the ways various writers reacted to party going. Here’s an excerpt:

Evelyn Waugh certainly knew the horror of being left out–“she had heard some one say something about an Independent Labour Party and was furious that she was  not asked,” he wrote–even though his entire body of work rests on the premise that all social gatherings and everybody at them were invariably ghastly.

–The Financial Review (Australia) posted an article in its satire column which professes to show several proposals by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (aka Harry and Megan or “H&M”) for productions on Spotify. All were rejected. Here’s one of them:

Vile Bodies: A modern adaptation of the classic Evelyn Waugh tale in which a group of “bright young things” set about modernising the stuffy, boring old House of Windsor, only to find the monarchy is riddled with the vilest form of racists, sexists and misogynists. In one pivotal scene, an unnamed royal wonders whether two of those bright young things, the gorgeous mixed-race celebrity couple “Hugo and Muriel” who are expecting a child, will have a baby with brown skin or fair skin. The tension mounts unbearably 


Dear H&M, No it doesn’t, actually. Spotify.

 

 

 

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Posted in Anniversaries, Edmund Campion, Letters, Newspapers, Put Out More Flags, Vile Bodies, World War II | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Advent Roundup

Thanksgiving Roundup

Posted on November 25, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–James Marriott writing in The Times offers some thoughts on the new film Saltburn (mentioned in several previous posts). Here’s an excerpt:

…With the complacency characteristic of her class, Fennell [writer/director of film] never pauses to reflect that a person like Oliver [Charles Ryder figure] might not be that interested in befriending aristocrats. After all, her film seems partly to want to persuade us that they are vacuous halfwits. Oliver, meanwhile, is the only person in his year at Oxford who has read all 50 books on the summer reading list and is rarely glimpsed without an orange-spined Penguin classic. Would such a person really yearn for the company of Potterhead poshos? Apparently, inherited wealth carries its own irresistible charisma. That assumption is one of the leitmotifs of British culture. Every generation has its crowd-pleasing, toff-ogling popular hit. In literature, for instance, Evelyn Waugh’s lavishly snobbish fantasia Brideshead Revisited and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. TV offers Upstairs, Downstairs and its spiritual successor Downton Abbey. In each instance the upper classes are made an ideal projection of all the writer’s dreams of superiority. For Waugh they were impressively tortured and Catholic, for Hollinghurst impressively cultured and tasteful, for Julian Fellowes impressively benign and paternalistic. Too many English writers still subscribe to the world view of the ancient Greeks, whose word for “aristocrat” was the same as their word for “the best”.

The truth, of course, is more banal. The scenario nobody seems prepared to consider is that the posh might simply be … boring. Being very wealthy is not a substitute for a personality and neither is living in a 17th-century house, however elaborate its porticos or lavish its acres. Anybody who has been exposed to the very posh — as I briefly was at university — cannot continue to regard them as inevitable paragons of culture, style and wit. The opposite, frankly…

Britain is odd in lacking any tradition of the romance of social mobility. We have no national myth equivalent to the American dream or even the French ideal of egalite. Instead, we are left with the cliche uncritically retailed by Saltburn: the upwardly mobile are almost always gauche, often ridiculous and perhaps even sinister. Saltburn’s Oliver — furtive, awkward, grasping, oddlooking, resentful — is the manifestation of every scholarshipboy stereotype committed to celluloid. In Britain, classism is the last socially acceptable prejudice.

Now that poor pay, expensive housing and insecure employment mean our creative elite has been colonised once again by the very wealthy — the Old Etonian actors, the trustafarian screenwriters — we should probably prepare to get used to these stereotypes: the enviable aristos, the sinisterly aspirational lower middle classes. Meanwhile, we must remember that real life is not like that at all.

–The auction house Christie’s is offering a group of letters including one from Evelyn Waugh to Robin Campbell dated 27 December 1945. Here’s the description:

In a letter to Robin Campbell, Waugh defends a recent letter he wrote to The Times with a fierce attack on Picasso who, he claims, fails as an artist and is a symbol of decadence and the decline of Western civilisation – ‘the only criticisms valid for him are: “Ooh doesn’t it make you feel funny inside” or “the fellow’s a charlatan”‘ – including Gertrude Stein in his criticism (‘aesthetically in the same position as, theologically, a mortal-sinner who has put himself outside the world order of God’s mercy’).

The letter is reprinted in Letters (1980), pp. 214-16. Here’s a link to the Christie’s catalogue in which the other letters in that collection as well as the details of the auction are available.

–Writing in The Nation, Professor James K Galbraith, who teaches at the University of Texas, takes issue with two recent newspaper articles which urge the elimination of the New Deal regulations requiring banks to offer 30-year fixed-rate mortgages:

Their thrust is that the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage—fairly standard in the United States—unfairly protects current homeowners from the risk of rising interest rates. That risk is therefore borne (they say) by the lenders, whose assets are devalued, and also by prospective homebuyers, who find fewer houses for sale, and at prices they can no longer afford. Meanwhile, aging boomers hold on to homes they might otherwise unload. Casselman writes, “Buyers get all the benefits of a fixed rate, with none of the risks.” Campbell confirms: “It’s a one-sided bet,” and goes on to add: “If inflation goes way up, the lenders lose and the borrowers win
”

This is where my Anatole France moment kicked in. My father—also a Harvard economist in his day—once elaborated what he called Galbraith’s Law: “People who have money to lend, tend to have more money than people who do not have money to lend.” Casselman and Campbell believe that the market, in its majestic equality, should distribute risk equally to lenders and borrowers alike—to the have-mores and the have-less, to the bank and to its customers.

After discussing in some details what he believes to be the fallacy of the proposed elimination of the fixed rate mortgage, Galbraith closes his article with this:

Long ago, a news report told that a tumor excised from Randolph Churchill (son of Winston) had proved benign. Evelyn Waugh commented that it was a miracle of modern medicine to find the only part of “Randy” that was not malignant, and remove it. That, roughly speaking, is what Casselman and Campbell propose for our American system of banking and finance.

—The Herald (Scotland) carries a story by Rosemary Goring about recent litigation over abuse of students allowed in public schools. Here’s an excerpt:

In Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh’s excoriating satire of public schools, it was taken as given that teachers were, at best, peculiar, and often far worse than that. In his interview with the Headmaster, aptly named Dr Fagan, young Paul Pennyfeather admits he was sent down from university for indecent behaviour: “Indeed, indeed? Well, I shall not ask for details. I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.”

–Mark McGinnis in The Oldie observes the 75 anniversary of the death of Robert Kennedy by recounting the sad life of his sister Kathleen Kennedy. In it, he describes, inter alia, the refusal of her parents to attend Kathleen’s 1944 London wedding in which she married Billy Cavendish, heir to the Duke of Devonshare and a Protestant:

Rose [Kathleen’s mother] took herself to hospital with a nervous collapse. Evelyn Waugh, one of her admirers from a wider circle, warned her she would go to hell (using her plight for Julia Flyte falling in love with Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited).

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