–D J Taylor has written a thoughtful essay on the current status of literary biography. This is posted in The Critic Magazine. Here are the introductory paragraphs:
Q. Who, just under a century ago, wrote the following, and about whom?
“No doubt the old-fashioned biography will return, and, with the years, we shall once more learn to assist with our fathers’ decorum at the lying-in-state of our great men … Meanwhile, we must keep our tongue in our cheek, must we not, for fear it should loll out and reveal the idiot? We have discovered a jollier way of honouring our dead. The corpse has become a marionette. With bells on its fingers and wires on its toes it is jigged about to a “period dance” of our own piping; and who is not amused?”
In fact, this pointed little homily on the biographer’s art is taken from the preface to Evelyn Waugh’s Rossetti: His Life and Works (1928), published a few months before his debut novel Decline and Fall, and the fellow practitioner he is taking to task turns out to be Lytton Strachey, proud author of Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921).
If one aspect of Waugh’s dislike of Strachey is generational — the inevitable contempt of a man born in 1903 for a man born in 1880 — then another is narrowly aesthetic. Rossetti (specimen sentence: “Turner was seventy-one years old, sinking like one of his own tremendous sunsets in clouds of obscured glory”) is a “romantic” biography; Strachey, alternatively, was an ironist, a debunker and (occasionally) a disparager. Waugh, in holding a few of his rival’s first principles up to scrutiny, is reacting against a reaction.
The Victorian biographers, whom Strachey set out to supplant, had no other urge than to glorify. With one or two conspicuous exceptions, they approached their great men (and very infrequently women) in the spirit of the embalmer, determined to do justice, to take pains, to heap up every last testimonial to the edifying influence their subjects had had on the world…
The complete article is available at this link.
–Penguin Books is sponsoring a series of podcasts promoting its products. Here’s a link to a History Special dealing with the books about WWII as well as several earlier conflicts. This is conducted by Al Murray and James Holland and, among other things, discusses Waugh’s Scoop and Sword of Honour war trilogy. A written transcript is also provided.
–An internet book reviewer (Nicky @ The Bibliophilian) has posted a review of the recently published The Book at War by Andrew Pettegree. Here’s the summary and opening paragraph:
Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando – before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book at War, acclaimed historian Andrew Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture – from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank – has shaped, and been shaped, by the conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war – and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace.
Andrew Pettegree’s The Book at War delves into how books, libraries, and literacy more generally have been used in war, in various contexts. There’s a lot to say about the World Wars, and particularly World War II, but the book doesn’t start there or finish there. It begins, in fact, by discussing military education and the kind of libraries provided for the teaching of future officers (often heavy on the classics)…
Here’s a link to the full text.
–Finally, several sources have posted discussion of a recent auction that involved a bit of indirect Waviana, Here’s an excerpt from the BBC’s report:
A large collection of rare teddy bears, including one that starred in the 1980s TV drama Brideshead Revisited, has fetched more than ÂŁ290,000 at auction. Aloysius, which was made in 1910 and featured in the ITV series, had been part of the collection at the Teddy Bears of Witney shop prior to going under the hammer. Ian Pout, the shop’s owner, previously told the BBC he had decided to sell much of his collection because of his age. Aloysius … sold at the auction for ÂŁ26,000.
