–A new biography of Oscar Wilde has been issued. This is After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal by his grandson Merlin Holland. It is reviewed in Literary Review by Thomas W Hodgkinson who summarizes it as describing the unique legacy of how Wilde’s life and scandals affected the lives of his family, including the biographer Merlin.
Two Waughs are mentioned in the review. Firstly, it notes that Wilde’s son Vyvyan (Merlin’s father) died after having had a “boozy lunch” at the the Beefsteak Club with Alec Waugh. Secondly, there is this brief discussion of Evelyn’s assessment of Wilde:
..itâs best to ignore the publisherâs claim that this book is âthe definitive study of Oscar Wildeâs posthumous reputationâ. It isnât anything of the kind. We learn something about changing attitudes towards homosexuality in the 125 years since Wildeâs death, but we get little on his critical standing. His society comedies have always been popular, but for decades Wilde was seen as a lightweight. In an article in 1930, for example, Evelyn Waugh dismissed his talent as âunremarkableâ and sneered at his epigrams and paradoxes as âmonkey-tricks of the intellectâ. Since then, he has been accepted as a writer to be taken seriously â one who bears comparison with Waugh himself, say, combining social snobbery with perfect pitch and a fine gift for silliness.
The book is available in the UK and US from Europa Books: 652 pages, ÂŁ30. The Amazon.com price in the US is $37.50. The review is available here. Reviews are also available in the Evening Standard and the Guardian.
—The Times newspaper has posted an attractively illustrated narrative commemorating “100 Years of Art Deco“. This is by Hannah Betts and focusses on Claridge’s Hotel in London as offering an outstanding display of the movement (which, according to her, received its name only in 1966). Waugh’s work is described as an example of Art Deco in literature:
…The most coruscating of the Bright Young Things, the socialite Stephen Tennant, was said to be the model for Evelyn Waughâs Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, Miles Malpractice in his Vile Bodies, and Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitfordâs Love in a Cold Climate. Joining him was a cast of exotic characters thumbing their noses at post-war austerity with rallying cries of âDarling!â and âToo, too divine!â
The only thing this most social of sets took remotely seriously was its partying. Evelyn Waugh catalogued these excesses in Vile Bodies, his bestseller of 1930:
“Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties⊔
The article may be found here.
–Eleanor Doughty has written an article about the Roman Catholic aristocracy that appears in the latest issue of The Tablet magazine. This is entitled Brideshead Recycled. Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:
…The story of the British upper class in the twentieth century and beyond is a mixed one â of deference lost, landholdings shrunk and relevance questioned. Despite it all, the titled, landed aristocracy is still going strong. But what of its Catholic contingent? Time was when either the seminary or the convent was a definite career path for the young, privileged Catholic…
The article goes on to describe the lives of several surviving Roman Catholic families of ancient vintage without really focussing how they relate to the family Waugh created in his novel. Waugh’s characters had ancient Catholic roots, but from the mother’s side, which doesn’t seem to have been particularly wealthy. The money came from the father’s side, and that family was Anglican. He converted to Catholicism in order to marry his Catholic wife. Whether there are similar instances in the families discussed in the article seems likely but they have not been fully developed. Here’s a link in case others want to dig deeper.
–The Australian literary journal Quadrant has published an article by Ian Callinan entitled “A Trilogy of Trilogies”. Among those he discusses is Waugh’s Sword of Honour. Here’s an excerpt.
…Waugh, in this writerâs estimation, wrote the best novel of the Second World War in penning the three volumes of the Sword of Honour sequence. Waugh had an unmatched and perfectly honed style which could make the tragic comic and the comic tragic to create an almost perfect tragicomedy in the closely related fates of the faithless Virginia and her gentle and faithful husband Guy Crouchback. Although the Sword of Honour series is about the war, there were only two episodes of actual direct warfare in it, brilliantly recounted on the basis of Waughâs own participation in them: the chaotic retreat from Crete, and an ill-conceived and disastrous amphibious raid on a German stronghold in north Africa. The Sword of Honour, in the view of some including this one, better achieves the moral purpose of Waughâs Catholicism than Brideshead Revisited, the book considered by most readers to do that.
There are Waugh societies all over the world and practically anything that might be written about him here is otiose. For a short time some years ago, I was attached to the law faculty of the University of Indiana, the principal campus of which was at Bloomington where the faculty kindly arranged for me to have lunch with Professor Beaty, an authority on Waugh and Lord Byron, who had written The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh, because they knew that I was a fan of Waugh. When I asked this literate man whether he taught Waugh and Byron in his lectures, he replied, in words worthy of Waugh himself, that it was difficult to excite the interest of the children of pig farmers in Brideshead Revisited or Childe Haroldâs Pilgrimage…
