Pre-Thanksgiving Roundup

Posted on November 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in the Guardian, columnist Marina Hyde looks at the recent debacle arising from Prince Andrew’s BBC Newsnight interview. Her story is entitled “How badly must you do your job for your own mother to fire you?” After several comparisons, she lands up with this one:

It wasn’t simply bad. It was the Heaven’s Gate of royal interviews, basically killing the entire genre. Nobody ever made westerns like they used to after Heaven’s Gate, and nobody in the royal family is going to be giving carte blanche to a BBC interviewer again in a hurry.

But the more famous thing about Heaven’s Gate, of course, wasn’t that it ended westerns – but that it ended its studio. Michael Cimino’s monster flop effectively collapsed the entire studio that produced it, United Artists – and the question after Andrew’s interview is how dangerous his monster flop is to the royal family that produced him. In the warp and weft of the UK’s royal story, people are always looking for the incident about which they will end up saying: “Well, in retrospect, that was the moment 
” Some royal historians are already judging Andrew’s interview as seismically as Edward VIII’s abdication.

Maybe. Either way, it should always be remembered that the abdication crisis was hugely enjoyed by the public. As Evelyn Waugh remarked in a 1936 diary entry: “The Simpson crisis has been a great delight to everyone. At Maidie’s nursing home they report a pronounced turn for the better in all adult patients. There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain.” [Diaries, 8 Dec. 1936, p. 415].

Maidie refers to Maidie Hollis. wife of Waugh’s Oxford friend Christopher Hollis. She had been in a nursing home in Bristol since September after a miscarriage (Ibid. pp. 407-08). Waugh goes on to mention that “Conrad [Russell] lunched with me on Sunday, very happy with the crisis. Perry [Brownlow] is out with Simpson in Cannes. If it had not been for Simpson this would have been a very bitter week.” Waugh’s friend Perry Brownlow was Lord-in-Waiting to Edward VIII.

–Another comment on this topic also cites Waugh. This is by Charles Moore in his regular Spectator column:

Staying with a relation [in Scotland], I picked up from beside my bed Evelyn Waugh’s When The Going Was Good, a collection mainly of travel pieces written in 1930-31. In it, he describes discussions with tribal elders in Aden which centre on the King-Emperor and how pretty Princess Elizabeth is. Has it ever happened before in human history that one living person’s face and character have been known and loved right across the world for more than 90 years? This snippet helped put the Duke of York business in perspective.

The travel pieces collected cover the years 1929-35. Chapter Three (“Globe Trotting 1930-31”) is excerpted from Remote People and relates, inter alia, to the stop in Aden

–The monthly Mexican magazine Este PaĂ­s has a review of the book Letras sobre un dios mineral: El petrĂłleo mexicano en la narrativa (“Letters about a mineral god: Mexican oil in written narratives”) by Edith NegrĂ­n. Waugh’s 1939 book Robbery Under Law is one of those about the Mexican petroleum industry that is considered and compared by NegrĂ­n to other works. According to the review:

The report on the expropriation, Robbery Under Law, by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, written on request against LĂĄzaro CĂĄrdenas, may  be “the most racist and derogatory pages ever written about us.”

The review is written in Spanish by PĂĄvel Granados who is apparently quoting from the book by NegrĂ­n. The translation is by Google with a few edits.

–A new biography of David Ben-Gurion, founder of the modern state of Israel is reviewed in the journal The American Interest. The book is by Tom Segev and the review, by Ben Judah. The review opens with this:

A new biography about Israel’s founder shows that the idea of one political Jewish people is a myth, an illusion.

David Gruen loved Shmuel Fuchs. He loved him intensely, painfully, in that shape adolescent friendships often take. They were teenagers, they were Jews, and they lived deep in Poland, in the miserable town of PƂoƄsk, in the west of the Russian Empire.

“I so miss you, so very much desire and crave to see you, my beloved friend,” the David who would become Ben-Gurion wrote to the boy he so adored. “O, if I only had shaken your hand before you left, if I could only embrace you and bestow kisses on you.”

But they were not lovers. Theirs was a romantic friendship. “It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning,” was how Evelyn Waugh chose to describe it. “In England, it comes when you are almost men.” But they were not English. Their world was dark, muddy, almost medieval. It was a time of pogroms. Before their childhoods were over, the Russian Empire had turned on its Jews.

Gruen becomes David Ben-Gurion, and Fuchs becomes Sam Fox, a Brooklyn dentist, and their lives are traced and contrasted in the biography. The quote from Waugh is taken from Brideshead Revisited, Book One, Chapter 4.

–In the Daily Telegraph’s Thinking Man section there is a list of 19 recommended books that should be read in order to understand how to be a man. One of these is Brideshead Revisited, addressing the same point discussed in the Ben-Gurion biography:

The emotional landscape of Evelyn Waugh’s tale of two toffs resonates with people from all backgrounds and eras. Love between straight men has rarely been subjected to this kind of scrutiny, and the connections Charles and Sebastian forge with their common past and a shared sense of place are as germane to this sprawling story as its theological and societal concerns.

— Country Life magazine, has an article by Eleanor Doughty about the evolution of the London postal code system. As she points out, this has in the past been tinged with a snobbery in which Evelyn Waugh is implicated. According to Country Life:

… The original London letter-only postcodes (NW, SE and so on) were introduced in 1957 [sic], and 60 years later the numbering was added as an efficiency measure during the First World War. The ‘1’ numbers were reserved for the centre of the city; beyond that, the various areas were intentionally numbered alphabetically. The generally accepted explanation is that it was the fairest system, to avoid arguments about who comes first, and to stop those in far-flung parts of the metropolis feeling aggrieved by the high numbers of their postcodes.

Wikipedia explains that the system was introduced in 1857.  The Country Life story continues:

The irony is that despite the numbering being carefully managed to try and avoid stigma being attached to certain areas, the postcode system nonetheless produced it anyway. Whether you realise it or not, you will have, when receiving directions, made a judgement about the place you’re going based on the postcode. More than a century ago, when a young Evelyn Waugh lived with his parents in Golders Green, NW11, it’s said that he would walk to the next postbox to acquire a fashionable NW3 postmark on his letters.

There is little except gossip to support the story of the uphill trek to avoid NW11 postings. For more information, see previous post.

 

 

 

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