Roundup: Cousins, Catholics, Allegories and Adaptations

…It’s a neat anecdote, one that transmutes Waugh’s rougher qualities into an appealing, rakish image. You can imagine him as living out life inside one of his own novels, a charming scoundrel like Basil Seal. Christopher Hitchens dismissed it as “a nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny.” And yet the story feels right, a fitting Waugh story in the tradition of great English writers making quips—Samuel Butler’s “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four,” or Oscar Wilde’s supposed last words: “Either those curtains go or I do.” There’s even something nicely flattering about it. “And you a Catholic!” suggests an era when Catholicism enjoyed higher expectations than it does now. But the story is, in a rather important way, a subtle lie.

…upon reflection I think what actually unsettled me was the way the story shifted my approach to Waugh. I like the Waugh of the quip, not only because he’s more fun to think about but also because he’s easier to dismiss in precisely the way that Hitchens did. I love Waugh’s novels, especially the ones without too much Catholicism in them. Brideshead Revisited stays with me far less than A Handful of Dust, which I first read in fits and snatches during officer candidate school, or the Sword of Honour trilogy, read after I’d been to Iraq and come back with more appreciation for military satire, or even Put Out More Flags, one of the most purely pleasurable novels ever written.

Waugh’s style, his humor, his joyful enthusiasm for puncturing modern delusions, I’ve gleefully gulped down, but his Catholicism—dovetailing as it did with his revulsion toward the modern world, his dismissal of jazz and modern art, his wish to have been born centuries earlier—I’ve held at a distance. I don’t lament being born into a secular age; the medieval world, with its murderous religious zeal, holds no appeal for me. And I look warily at my modern coreligionists who, sometimes with an edgy, Evelyn Waugh–inflected sense of humor, embrace the faith as a repudiation of the world we inhabit. “New York’s hottest club is the Catholic Church,” declared Julia Yost in the New York Times, before sketching out the reactionary subculture that features “Trump hats and ‘tradwife frocks,’ monarchist and anti-feminist sentiments” and whose “ultimate expression…is its embrace of Catholicism.”…

It is quite a thoughtful essay as these religious articles go. Here’s a link to the full text.

–Blackwell’s Books of Oxford has posted an offer for two letters from Evelyn Waugh to members of the Stathatos family. These are from July 1963 and relate to arrangements for John Stathatos, then a high school student in Greece on a summer holiday, to visit Waugh at his home in Somerset. The details of this visit are described in a recent article in Evelyn Waugh Studies (No, 52.2, Fall 2021). Here’s a link. The letters are on offer for £450.00 each and may be viewed at this link. Information about a previous auction of what appears to have included these two letters is available here.

–The Spanish paper El Pais carries a story about Glaswegian actor James McAvoy. This relates to his new film Don’t Talk to Strangers. In discussing his career, this appears:

…at 18 [McAvoy] decided to change his life and joined the Royal Navy. And then, suddenly, another unexpected plot twist: just as he was about to become a sailor, he was offered a scholarship to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dramatic Art to study acting. McAvoy finished his studies in 2000 and the industry literally fell for his charms: he played a soldier in the series Band of Brothers (2001) and a high-society bandit in A Scandal with Class [sic] (2003) , an adaptation of Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. But, above all, he was Steve McBride in Shameless (2004/2005), a hugely popular British series set in a dangerous Manchester neighborhood.

Something may have been lost in translation here. There was a film adaptation of Vile Bodies about that time. It was written and directed by Stephen Fry and was entitled, in English, Bright Young Things. The film may have been called something else in Spanish and was retranslated under that title in El Pais. According to Wikipedia, McAvoy appeared in that film adaptation as the character Simon Balcairn. He was a suicidal gossip columnist in Vile Bodies, Ch, 6, not a high-society bandit.  Anyone with knowledge of these matters is invited to comment as provided below.

–Finally, a website called Allegory Explained has an unattributed article relating to Waugh’s novel The Loved One. The text and illustrations lead me to suspect that this may be an Artificial Intelligence production. Not sure what audience it is aimed at. Here’s an excerpt:

…Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One” has had a significant impact on literature, particularly on the genre of satire. The novel’s scathing critique of the American funeral industry and the shallow nature of American culture has influenced many writers in their own works.

One notable example is Tom Robbins’ “Jitterbug Perfume,” which also uses satire to comment on the human condition. Robbins’ novel shares with “The Loved One” a sense of irreverence and a willingness to take on taboo subjects.

Another author who has been influenced by “The Loved One” is Kurt Vonnegut. In his novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” Vonnegut uses satire to comment on the excesses of American capitalism. Like “The Loved One,” Vonnegut’s novel is a biting critique of American culture.

Finally, “The Loved One” has also influenced contemporary writers such as Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel “Fight Club” shares with Waugh’s work a sense of dark humor and a willingness to challenge societal norms.

The illustrated text is available here.

COMMENT: Our reader, Hartley Moorhouse,  offered the following helpful comment on the adaptations of Vile Bodies:

You’re quite right to suspect that something has been lost in translation with the article from El País. The film being referred to is indeed Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, which was released in Spain under the completely different title of Escándalo con Clase (it is common for English-language films to be given different, sometimes unrecognisable, titles in Spanish, a cause of much confusion). The phrase used in the article to describe the character of Simon Balcairn is ‘bandido de alta sociedad’; this can loosely be translated as ‘high-society reprobate’, which is perhaps slightly nearer the mark than ‘bandit’.