–Charles Moore writes in the Daily Telegraph a critique of the newly issued US National Security Strategy. The article is entitled “Civilisation erasure is real, but Donald Trump is part of the problem,” and opens with this:
Amid stiff competition (including PG Wodehouse and Michael Frayn), Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop remains the funniest fictional account of newspaper journalism. One of the book’s great comic creations is the proprietor of the Daily Beast, Lord Copper, a mighty tycoon who loves the sound of his own voice. To his overawed foreign editor, he outlines his paper’s policy: “The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonist governments everywhere,” he declares, “Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.”
Scoop was published in 1938, but Lord Copper’s policy has now achieved global proportions. Last week, the White House published President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS). I think Lord Copper would be able to claim copyright.
Words like “strong” and “robust” appear almost as often as the words “President Trump”, who is also described as the “President of Peace”. The “sole purpose of this strategy”, says the document, is “the protection of core national interests”: “The world works best when nations prioritise their interests.” The strategy offers “an American-led world of sovereign countries”…
Moore goes on to finds some aspects of the NSS as sound but also much that is ill-conceived. It concludes with this: “[The NSS] cannot make up its mind whether it wants to run the world or withdraw from it. It gets cozy with Eastern dictators and creates difficulties for Western friends. In this, if in nothing else, the Trump presidency oddly resembles that of Barack Obama.” The article is available at this link.
–In The Spectator, Christopher Howse explores literary works in which the newspaper is prominently mentioned in fictional plots. Here are the introductory paragraphs:
There are decades when The Spectator is shorthand for a trait: sex (2000s), young fogeys (1980s), free trade (1900s). But I was surprised to find Henry James, a writer not given to shorthand, deploying the magazine’s name to give a sketch of Isabel Archer, the title character of his Portrait of a Lady: ‘She had had everything a girl could have: kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator, the latest publications, the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot.’
‘That half-page is sufficient to reassure me that the world goes on much as it always has’
In a way the list undermines the heroine by mixing the serious and the frivolous. James, writing as the 1880s broke, lumps Gounod in with bonbons and bouquets perhaps because the composer had spent years in London in the 1870s getting tangled up with the strange figure of Georgina Weldon and then trying to get untangled from her. A favourite subject of gossip, she was a soprano, spiritualist, serial libel plaintiff and energetic opponent of her estranged husband’s attempts to have her locked in an asylum.
In Men at Arms (1952), Evelyn Waugh uses a similar novelistic technique of suggesting character by association. On Saturdays, Guy Crouchback, the hero, of a kind, remains in barracks when there is a general exodus: ‘It was holiday enough for Guy to change at his leisure, wear the same clothes all the afternoon, to smoke a cigar after luncheon, walk down the High Street to collect his weekly papers – The Spectator, the New Statesman, the Tablet – from the local newsagent, to read them drowsily over his own fire in his own room.’…
Auberon Waugh’s work for another paper also receives some attention later in the article:
…Elizabeth Day in her new novel One of Us fictionalises The Spectator as the Witness, in which Edward Buller, as editor, had made an awkward remark about harems and Muslims, upon which the Witness offices were promptly firebombed. This must have been inspired by some comments that the late Auberon Waugh once made in the Times before he joined The Spectator about Mohammed. I won’t repeat them, but they provoked an angry mob to burn down the British Council building in Rawalpindi…
–Alexander Larman writing in the Daily Telegraph addressed the issue of grooming children in schools for sexual abuse. He found literary evidence that this a long-standing problem in both state and private schools:
…this is not the first time that abused children have not been given the chance to tell the story of what has happened to them. At the other end of the class spectrum, those who attended British prep schools throughout the 20th century suffered similarly traumatic levels of sexual abuse at the hands of paedophile adults, many of whom – like Evelyn Waugh’s Captain Grimes – took the jobs largely because of the opportunities to molest the young boys in their care with impunity (and the vast majority of these cases do appear to have been boys, rather than girls)…
–Waugh biographer Martin Stannard has an essay in which he considers how his original biographical writings and research may have affected two recent works on his subject, the author Muriel Spark: another biography and an edition of her letters. In this, Stannard focuses on how Spark had interfered with and required changes in his book. He doesn’t mention any such interference with his two-volume Waugh biography (still the recognized standard) even though members of the family complained about aspects of the final version. He does include a brief mention of Waugh:
…Wilson [the most recent Spark biographer] is surely right when she suggests that “like Caroline Rose in The Comforters, Muriel was ‘an odd sort of Catholic—very little heart for it, all mind.’” In this she replicates the cold theology of her admirers Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. (Frank Kermode once described her work as theological rather than religious.) Like Greene, she preferred to be thought of as a Catholic who happened to be a writer rather than as a Catholic writer. None of this grand triumvirate of converts was in the proselytizing business; all suffered breakdown; all tested their faith with honest doubt…
Stannard’s essay appears in a recent edition of The Lamp and may be read at this link.
–The Boston Association of Phi Beta Kappa has announced a Waugh event that may be of interest:
Join members of the Boston Association of PBK for a book discussion via Zoom, scheduled for the evening of Tuesday, January 6th, 2025, at 7:30 pm. (Please note we are meeting on Tuesday!)
Guests of participants are welcome and please come even if you haven’t finished (or even started!) the book.
The discussion will be on this book:
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century and called “Evelyn Waugh’s finest achievement” by the New York Times, Brideshead Revisited is a stunning exploration of desire, duty, and memory. The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece — a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder’s entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. “A genuine literary masterpiece.” –Time “Heartbreakingly beautiful…The twentieth century’s finest English novel.” –Los Angeles Times
We look forward to a lively and wide-ranging discussion with this highly recommended book as a starting place. Please RSVP to (click to email) or to (click to email).
Details about joining the event are available here.
