Roundup: War Trilogy, Conference and Campus Novel

—The Critic magazine has published a feature length article on Waugh’s war trilogy, Sword of Honour. This is written by Max Bayliss and is entitled “Waugh at war: Self-sacrifice, tradition and service seem to have been cast aside by today’s society.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Over a pint recently, a friend described how, after leaving the infantry, he underwent a prolonged period of physical and psychological exertion in the hope of joining the Special Forces. Gruelling stuff. Despite years of training and an impressive service record, he didn’t make the cut.

Yet Evelyn Waugh, at 37 and running to fat after two sedentary decades veering between the bottle and the typewriter, joined 8 Commando. He had been recommended by a friend to Brigadier Sir Joseph Laycock at the bar of White’s. Laycock, who admired Waugh’s work, took him on because their mutual friend said he was “often funnier in fact than in fiction” and “could not fail to be an asset in the dreary business of war”.

To spend an afternoon in Waugh’s company is to spend time in another world, where the seemingly impossible is probable, and the romantic is routine. His novels and his life — at times almost the stuff of fiction — are a window onto a set of ideals and experiences barely recognisable today. His work and biography challenge contemporary mores. They confront our society’s views on death, conflict, duty and corporate identity. I can’t help but think that ours are found wanting…

Sword of Honour is discussed in greater detail in the remainder of the article. Reverend Bayliss is Chaplain and Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge.  Here’s a link to the full article.

–Our colleague Duncan McLaren has posted a complete copy of his memoir of the Society’s 2011 Conference at Downside College.  Any of our readers who attended that conference will appreciate many of the details recounted by Duncan.  The photographs are also worth a close look.  His experience does not start well.  Here are introductory paragraphs from the opening section entitled “Arrival”:

We get to Downside School, Somerset, at 9pm, hoping that we’re not too late for dinner. The private Catholic school is massive, dark and quiet. Is anybody there? A couple of security guards are. They know nothing about any Waugh conference but are aware that something was going on in the middle of the school earlier in the evening and are willing to escort me there.

So off I go between the two uniformed guards, and after five minutes march, I’m face to face with a couple of unsmiling organisers of the Waugh conference. Apparently, they have reported to the police someone making a drunken nuisance of themselves in the school grounds, and I think they suspect that the villain has been apprehended and brought before them. Not so: I come in peace, and, what’s more, having paid for full board and lodgings. Accordingly, I ask if there’s any food available. “Nope,” comes the stony-faced reply. “Are any of the other confrères still around?” I ask, smiling. “Most of them have retired to their rooms.” I’m told, dryly. I suppose that means that a few folk are still up and socialising. But by the time I’ve turned around his answer the pair have disappeared up a corridor, no doubt headed for some exclusive meeting in a bar. Christ, maybe Kate and I should have got up at 4am this morning in order to check-in on time and endure a tour of Downside Abbey.

The local pub has also stopped serving food, which is bad news in particular for Kate, who needs to eat little and often and who’s been going on about her hunger since we touched down at Bristol Airport. I’m not bothered by the situation, indeed I’m quite excited by a coincidence. In the summer of 1946, when Evelyn Waugh attended – purely for the jollies – a conference in Spain, devoted to a lawyer he’d never even heard of, he wrote in his diary that he and his travelling companion, Douglas Woodruff, had ‘no luncheon’ on the first day. When he later came to fictionalise the event in Scott King’s Modern Europe, where a dim classics scholar, accompanied by an academic called Whitemaid, goes to a conference in Neutralia devoted to the work of an obscure Seventeenth Century poet, Waugh transformed his experience into art in the following way: “A steward announced: ‘We shall arrive at Bellacita at sixteen hours Neutralian time.’
‘An appalling thought occurs to me, said Whitemaid. ‘Can this mean we get no luncheon?’”…

Things lighten up after this bumpy beginning. The full text and photographs are posted at this site.  Thanks to Duncan for sending this along.

–The Daily Telegraph has an article by writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe.  Johns makes the case that this was the quintessential example of a genre called the “Campus Novel” that has by now all but disappeared.  After a fairly detailed discussion of Porterhouse Blue (both the 1974 novel and the 1987 TV adaptation), Johns offers this description of its history:

Next came Kingsley Amis’s mordantly amusing Lucky Jim (1954), a send-up of post-war academia’s pretensions, featuring protagonist Jim Dixon, a disenchanted history lecturer at an unnamed red-brick university, whose academic mishaps and romantic vicissitudes are chronicled in what was probably Amis’s tour de force.

The genre reached its zenith in the 1970s – perhaps unsurprising, given that compared with the 1960s, when only 4 per cent of people in the UK went to university, that figure had risen to 8 per cent a decade later as universities expanded to take students from disparate social classes and backgrounds. As social mobility increased, campus novels provided a welcome place where the traditions of the past, the flux of the present and hopes for the future could all be interrogated.

Along with Porterhouse Blue, the decade saw the publication of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) – a salacious satire of academic life set in the fictional new “glass and steel” university of Watermouth, depicting the sexual dalliances and political intrigues of sociology lecturer Howard Kirk and his wife Barbara; Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes (1976), set partly in Cambridge; Michael Frayn’s play Donkeys’ Years (1976), a farce about an Oxbridge reunion; and David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), a clever and humane novel about an exchange between English lecturer Philip Swallow and US academic Morris Zapp from the respective, fictitious universities of Rummidge and Euphoric State in the equally fictional town of Plotinus, “situated between Northern and Southern California”.

All captured the zeitgeist and preoccupations of their time, when the tectonic plates of social class, educational aspiration and the new “isms” were rubbing together, often discordantly. Howard Jacobson’s Coming From Behind (1983), featuring priapic Jewish protagonist Sefton Goldberg, an English teacher at a West Midlands poly, and Lodge’s Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), the concluding parts of his campus trilogy, were more touchstones to the genre. But the genre was arguably on the wane, out of step with the asperities of Thatcherite Britain and economic recession, when higher education had, for some, become less important as a means to self-improvement.

Greater accessibility to tertiary education in the past 30 years has perhaps sounded the death knell for the British campus novel. Under Tony Blair’s Labour government, the democratisation of higher education was a priority and in 1999 a target of 50 per cent of young people going to university was set. One can only surmise that, with its cachet of exclusivity gone, what is now quotidian and familiar to many is less appealing to treat in fiction.

Yet despite the fetishisation of British academic life over earlier decades, and some recent laudable offerings, including Elanor Dymott’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2012) and James Cahill’s Tiepolo Blue (2022), the British campus novel now seems moribund, a relic of a bygone, more optimistic and ebullient age.