–A post on the website thinkinghousewife.com has this cite for its Mother’s Day offering:
IN HIS unfinished autobiography A Little Learning, the British author Evelyn Waugh remembered fondly his own mother:
“My mother was small, neat, reticent and, until her last decade, very active. She had no special literary interests, but read a book a fortnight, always a good one. She would have preferred to live in the country and from her I learned that towns are places of exile where the unfortunate are driven to congregate in order to earn their livings in an unhealthy and unnatural way. She had to be content with walking her dog on Hampstead Heath and working in the garden. She spent hours there, entirely absorbed; not merely snipping off dead heads but potting, planting, watering, weeding. (A man came one or two days a week to dig or mow or roll.) When my father in middle age, after the fashion of the family, chose epitaphs for himself and my mother, he directed that on his side of the gravestone should be inscribed: âAnd another book was opened which is the book of lifeâ and on my motherâs âMy beloved is gone down into the garden to gather liliesâ; but her flowers did not interest her more than fruit and vegetables. There was nothing pre-Raphaelite about my mother. I associate her less with lilies than with earthy wash-leather gloves and baskets of globe artichokes and black and red currants.”
–The New Criterion has an article by David Platzer that discusses a current art exhibit in Paris. This is “Matisse and Marguerite: Through the Father’s Eyes” at the Musee d’art modern de Paris. Marguerite is in this case Matisse’s daughter. Here is an excerpt:
…In Evelyn Waughâs Brideshead Revisited, Anthony Blanche dismisses English art as âsimple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.â The same can be said for much of French art. In White and Pink Head (1914â15), Marguerite modeled for Matisseâs version of Cubism, sweeter than anything Picasso or Braque produced, even if the bars and stripes make her look as if sheâs in a cell. In early 1918, while war raged in France, Matisse began to spend more time in Nice. Miss Matisse in a Scottish Plaid (1918) showed âMargotâ sitting on a balcony over the blue sea, bundled up against the cold. She seems more of a bright poppet than she did a few years before. Back at Issy-les-Moulineaux in the summer of 1919, she is very much a young woman, posing with a family friend in The Tea…
–An article posted by David Roman discusses Waugh’s war trilogy Sword of Honour. This is entitled “The Best WW2 Memoir Actually is a Novel.” The introductory paragraphs are available on the internet. Here is an excerpt:
Most British writers who spent World War II in uniform contributed to the military effort as translators, assistants and publicists. When the famous Evelyn Waugh tried to enlist for the front lines at the age of thirty-six, with no military experience and a poor attitude, he had to use a lot of contacts to end up in a commando unit where his twenty-something colleagues treated him and others of a certain age like cranky old men.
Itâs no wonder that Waugh’s military experience was so shocking, valuable, and absurd at the same time that it inspired him to write the best series of wartime novels: a trilogy called “The Sword of Honour,” a quasi-memoir in which he recounts his own adventures in a fictionalized and merciless way. Waughâs WW2 is unlike anything you ever saw before….
The Sword of Honour is many things. First of all, itâs Waughâs best novel, with all the virtues he displays in âBrideshead Revisitedâ in full exhibition, and a much more complex story with more characters and locations. Thatâs enough to make the book the best about World War II.
This may sound like a risky thing to say. I just ask the reader: name me a better book about WWII. A book that is better written, that has more truth to it, that shows more theaters of action, that deals with more human foolishness and reflects on the entire war more deeply than this trilogy. I donât think you will find that book…
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–The latest issue of Literary Review has posted an article by Frances Wilson entitled “All Yesterday’s Parties”. This contains several references to Waugh who was, in his day, quite a party goer. Here’s an excerpt:
…In Evelyn Waughâs story âBella Fleace Gave a Partyâ, the party gets no further than a list of names because Miss Fleace, waiting with a dance band, a cooked dinner and twelve hired footmen for her guests to arrive, has forgotten to post the invitations.
Parties end not when the guests have gone home but when they have composed their narratives of the night. The essayist Logan Pearsall Smith reflected after a soirée that it had been
a delightful evening ⊠the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and French philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squealing. But soon after, âGod, itâs awful,â I muttered, âI wish I were dead.â
The silent-film actress Brenda Dean Paul, one of the Bright Young People satirised in Evelyn Waughâs Vile Bodies, mythologised the debauchery of the Bath and Bottle party, held in a municipal swimming pool in 1928, with an image of the morning after: âturgid water and thousands of bobbing champagne corks, discarded bathing caps and petal-strewn tiles as the sun came out and filtered through the giant skylights of St Georgeâs Baths, and we wended our way homeâ…
The full article is posted on this month’s Literary Review website. Here’s the link.
–Duncan McLaren after years of avoidance finally read Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox. He was pleasantly surprised by what he found and has posted an illustrated review of the book. Here is the opening:
A 2025 Revelation. Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox is a great book. Why was I so sure that I wouldn’t like it that I’d never tried to read it before this week?
Firstly, I wasn’t that impressed with Waugh’s earlier biographies. Rossetti is all right, but uses too long quotes from Rossetti, steals from other biographers (including the book’s first sentence) and has little of the zest of Waugh’s early novels. His biography of Edmund Campion and his novel, Helena, are drolly dull for the most part, and the main reason for writing them, I reckoned, was to do with the author’s Christianity. I thought the Knox biography was another book written mostly out of duty, the duty being to plug the Roman Catholic Church. Secondly, the cover art of the first edition was so awful. …
The remainder is posted on Duncan’s website and can he accessed here. Among other things, he offers his own version of an improved Ronald Knox cover.
