Dog Days Roundup

–BBC has announced the rebroadcast of a three-hour adaptation of Waugh’s wartime novel Put Out More Flags. This will air on BBC Radio 4 Extra over three successive days at 15:00p British time starting on Tuesday, 3 September 2024. Here’s the detail for the first episode:

As the Second World War looms, louche, upper class loafer Basil Seal considers his role in the unfolding events.

Evelyn Waugh’s sixth novel, first published in 1942.

The satire reprises characters found in previous novels such as ‘Decline and Fall’ and ‘Vile Bodies’.

Three-part dramatisation by Denys Hawthorne.

The part of Basil Seal will be played by actor Simon Cadell. Basil had appeared most prominently in Waugh’s third novel Black Mischief (1932). This adaptation was first broadcast in September 1990. A link to all three episodes is available here.

–Waugh’s war trilogy features in the opening paragraph of an article in the religious journal Crisis Magazine:

In the first volume of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, Guy Crouchback learns from a chance conversation that because he has a valid sacramental marriage with a wife who divorced him, civilly married and then divorced others, and has recently been having casual sex with nobody knows how many men, it is morally permissible for him, as her husband, to himself sleep with her. With that knowledge, he meets with her in a hotel room and is at the point of succeeding when his plans are derailed by a chance telephone call…

The article by James Baresel then goes on in some detail to consider the religious implications of Guy’s resumption of marital relations with his wife. Here’s a link. An audio version is also available at the same link.

–An online religious-political journal leads an article with a quote from Waugh’s novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe. The website is called The Imaginative Conservative. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh’s gently satirical Scott-King’s Modern  Europe follows the declining career of a classics teacher at Granchester, a fictional English public school. Granchester is “entirely respectable” but in need of a bit of modernizing, at least in the opinion of its pragmatic headmaster, who is attuned to consumer demands. The story ends with a poignant conversation between Scott-King and the headmaster:

“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”

“I thought that would be about the number.”

“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”

“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”

“I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn’t conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?”

“Oh yes. Often.”

“What I was going to suggest was—I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?”

“No, headmaster.”

“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”

And there ends the story of Scott-King’s misadventures in the modern world. Any teacher who has endured a similar conversation sympathizes instinctively with poor Scott-King. His dignified but stubborn resistance to the wickedness of making students fit for the modern world speaks to the heart of teachers who, like Scott-King, take the long view. It is to these teachers, then—and to like-minded students, parents, and administrators—that this anthology of classic writings on education is addressed…

The novella is included in a collection of writings entitled The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being. This is edited by Richard Gamble who also wrote the article which may be read in its entirety at this link.