–The latest edition of The Oldie contains an article that may be of interest. This is by A N Wilson and is entitled “Great War Stories”. Here is the opening paragraph:
WWII inspired Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning
The coming of VE Day and VJ Day each year is always poignant. The numbers who took part in the fighting, and who still survive, have diminished to a heroic few. The numbers of books about the Second World War, however, continue to swell. Most of these books, in so far as Iâve sampled them, are stultifyingly boring and badly written…
The remainder of the article is behind a pay wall, but one can assume that Wilson finds the war novels of Waugh, Powell and Manning to be an exception to the rule he sets down in his opening. [See Comment below.]
–Eleanor Doughty writing in the “Rereading” column of the The Times has reviewed an early Waugh novel. This is entitled “Evelyn Waugh has captured the futility of the Bright Young Things in Vile Bodies.” Here are some excerpts from the opening paragraphs:
Vile Bodies is a book in which very little happens. A couple gets engaged, then unengaged, before the woman leaves the man for someone else; their friend has a car crash, and then ends up in a mental hospital. But it is also the definitive satire of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s â aristocrats and their hangers-on, jiving to the sound of their own futility in Londonâs swankiest nightclubs…
I first read Vile Bodies when I was at school and was hooked by the dedication â âwith love to Bryan and Diana Guinnessâ. My teenage self wondered who they were. I had already become fascinated by the British upper classes so the brewery heir and his wife, a Mitford, turned out to be right up my street. With that dedication, the couple had been branded for posterity as the de facto leaders of the Bright Young People. The couple were great friends of Waugh and had showed him enormous kindness after his wife left him.
The original typescript of Vile Bodies contained a warning â and a red herring: âBright Young People and others kindly note that all characters are wholly imaginary (and you get far too much publicity already whoever you are).â But as in other Waugh novels, in Vile Bodies an interested reader can match up its characters with their real-life counterparts. The socialite Elizabeth Ponsonby appears as Agatha Runcible, and the owner of the Cavendish hotel, Rosa Lewis, the Duchess of Jermyn Street, appears as the proprietress Lottie Crump at the fictional Shepheardâs Hotel on Dover Street, while two incidental travellers are named Arthur and Mr Henderson after the foreign secretary of the day…
The article also mentions an upcoming book publication that will be of interest: “Heirs and Graces: A History of the Modern British Aristocracy by Eleanor Doughty. This is published in September (Hutchinson Heinemann ÂŁ30).”
—The Times also has an article about an art exhibit which has a Waugh/BYP connection. This displays the works of Edward Burra who is described as “one of the most overlooked artists of the 20th Century.” This is a detailed review by Nancy Durant who describes both Burra and his works. Here’s an excerpt:
…âHe is the product of two banking dynasties, of about seven generations of totally conventional people,â Jane Stevenson, author of the biography Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye, told BBC Radio 4âs Great Lives. âThey must have been fairly amazed to find this sort of changeling in their midst.â
It doesnât seem to have done him any harm. âThe familyâs very, very right-wing,â Stevenson says, and âone thing you can say that he gets from this is tanklike confidence: âIâm going to say what I like and do what I like and be what I like.ââ
It must have stood him in good stead with the Bright Young Things, a loose group of wild young bohemians with whom the papers were fascinated during the Twenties, and which he, Barbara Ker-Seymer and their Chelsea Polytechnic chums Billy Chappell and Clover Pritchard were considered part of (it also included socialites such as the Sitwells, some Mitfords, Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton, hence the tabloid interest). Their particular brand of sexually fluid, performative hedonism was highly appealing for someone with such a determined lust for life, even if Burraâs own sexuality was seemingly not put into physical practice…
The exhibit is at the Tate Britain and extends from 13 June to 19 October. The article is also very well illustrated and is worth a look. Here’s a link.
–Duncan McLaren has also posted three more essays in his new Combe Florey series. The first is about the writing and publication of A Tourist in Africa, the second, about the Mark Gerson photoshoot of the Waugh Family at Combe Florey in 1959, and the final, about the writing and publication of Auberon Waugh’s first novel, The Foxglove Saga. I particularly recommend the Mark Gerson article, both for its written discussion on the event and its detailed photos, some of which I do not recalling seeing previously. The articles are all linked through the first one that is available here.
–Finally, this letter appeared in a recent issue of The Economist:
Holy waters
I enjoyed your article on the increasing number of young men in Britain who are turning towards Catholicism (âAltered mindsâ, May 10th). You referred to Graham Greeneâs faith. Britainâs other great 20th-century Catholic novelist was Evelyn Waugh, and the article mentioned Farm Street Church in Mayfair. In âBrideshead Revisitedâ this is where Rex Mottram is sent for Catholic instruction. Discussing papal infallibility, the priest asks Mottram what would happen if the pope said it was going to rain, but it didnât? Mottram replies, âI suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.â
Paul Ferguson
Englefield Green, Surrey
COMMENT (2 June 2025): Our reader David Lull has kindly provided a copy of the article by A N Wilson in The Oldie mentioned above. Wilson’s discussion of Waugh’s WWII works is relatively brief. He notes that “Waugh’s Brideshead and his Sword of Honour trilogy are among the best things he wrote, if not the best.” There is no mention of Waugh’s Put Out More Flags that was both written and published during the war (1941-42). Brideshead was written during the months preceding D-Day in 1944 and published the following year. The war books by Manning and Powell were all written afterwards, as were those in Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. There is a more extended discussion of the books by Manning whose works are deemed even more impressive than those of Waugh and Powell and “stand comparison with War and Peace.” Thanks to Dave Lull for sending the text.
