Pre-Halloween Roundup

–A copy of a 1938 passenger list for the SS Aquitania has been posted on Reddit. The list contains the opening pages and then an excerpt of the list showing passengers whose names begin with “W”. On that page are listed Evelyn Waugh and his wife. They were on their way to Mexico in July 1938 where he  would collect information for the book that became Robbery Under Law. They stopped in New York and made a side trip to Washington, DC, before taking another ship from New York to Veracruz. On the return voyage in October 1938, they travelled by train from Mexico via Laredo, TX to New York where they caught a steamer back to England. Waugh had learned that the air conditioned US railroads were more comfortable (at least in first class) as well as more frequent and faster than ocean going steamers between the US and Mexico.

Another entry on the same page of the excerpted list names identifies as passengers Clifton Webb and his wife. One of the comments assumes this was the well known film actor of that name but another says that he was never married, which is confirmed by Wikipedia.  Here’s a copy of the passenger list as posted on the internet. 

–An interesting article on the “Hollywood novel” is posted in the current edition of the Berkeley-based magazine Dispatches. This is by Scott Saul and the subject is the 1959 novel by Gavin Lambert entitled The Slide Area. British born and Oxford educated, Lambert was a screenwriter and film critic as well as a novelist. He wrote three other novels with Hollywood themes including Inside Daisy Clover (1963) which was made into a film in 1965, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. He later wrote a biography of Wood. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Gavin Lambert struck an unusual tone—at once ironic and affirming—across The Slide Area (1959), his first novel and an unassuming masterpiece of Los Angeles fiction. Its narrator pairs a rare clarity of vision with an even rarer warmth of engagement: he manages to be sharp without being cutting, and sympathetic without being indulgent. If The Slide Area does not deliver the more familiar satisfactions of LA noir in its “scenes of Hollywood life” (as its subtitle has it), it is not because there are no crimes committed—there will be at least one murder, one case of statutory rape, and one case of fraud—but instead because Lambert’s interest lies elsewhere. As Gary Indiana has remarked of Lambert’s fiction more generally, it works to solve “mysteries of personality rather than crimes.”…

Saul mentions several other Hollywood novels in his discussion including this:

…Since we rarely gain insight into what the narrator [of The Slide Area] specifically wants or desires, the action of the novel seems to fill that vacuum: what he most desires, it appears, is simply to know these other people, and through them to understand the city that supports or fails them. He feels as reliable as a first-person narrator can be. While quick to catch and register ironic details in the scenes he dramatizes, as a character he largely acts as a sounding-board for the wide cast of dreamers he meets, his sympathy allowing them to make the best case for their aspirations, or to give voice to their doubts and qualms.

A brief summary of those aspirations suggests how easily they might have been mocked in the satirical manner of, say, Evelyn Waugh in his LA novel The Loved One. We meet a former British schoolmate, who desires only to sun himself on the beach and supports that lifestyle by living with a wealthy man he resents (“Nukuhiva!”); a blind and nearly deaf dowager-countess, still in love with the lost world of aristocratic Austro-Hungary and eager to go on one last Grand Tour, her declining senses and fortune be damned (“The End of the Line”); a middle-aged Hollywood star (based on Joan Crawford) seeking to revive her career through manipulation and force of will (“The Closed Set”); a fourteen-year-old midwestern runaway with a bottomless faith in her future stardom (“Dreaming Emma”); and a scion of a powerful Hollywood agent, erotically drawn to men and women, who drifts from one scrape to another (“Sometimes I’m Blue”). The novel’s main characters tend to be either creatures of ambition or creatures of pleasure, and in the loose structure of The Slide Area serve as foils of one another….

The full article is available on the Dispatches internet site and can be read at this link,

–A brief article has been posted in the political-religious journal The Imaginative Conservative entitled Crimes Against the Humanities: The Tragedy of Modernity. This is by literary journalist Joseph Pearce and opens with this:

One of the most heinous crimes against humanity that modernity has perpetrated is its war on the humanities. And let’s not forget that the humanities are thus called because they teach us about our own humanity. A failure to appreciate the humanities must inevitably lead to the dehumanizing of culture and a disastrous loss of the ability to see ourselves truthfully and objectively.

The follies and fallacies of modernity and their dehumanizing consequences have been critiqued by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century… Evelyn Waugh, in his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, a novel inspired by a line in one of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, lampoons the “hollow men” produced by modernity in his portrayal of the characters of Hooper and Rex Mottram. Hooper had “no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe”…

The complete text is available at this link.

 

 

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