Roundup: From Clubs to Travels

–The Daily Telegraph reports that one of Waugh’s London clubs has voted to continue to exclude women members:

A PRIVATE gentlemen’s club in Mayfair has voted against admitting women for the first time, The Telegraph has learnt.

The Savile Club, established in 1868 for writers and artists, voted to reject a motion calling for women to be allowed as members in an extraordinary general meeting. Male members at the meeting voted against changing “Rule 1” of The Savile’s governing documents, which states the organisation “shall consist of such number of ordinary members, being males over the age of 18”.

Sir Stephen Fry and Lord Lloyd-Webber are among the club’s more recent members, while early literary affiliates included John Le Carre, Evelyn Waugh, Rudyard Kipling and AA Milne. A proposed motion had called for the word “males” in the club’s founding rule to be substituted with “persons”. It also proposed for “the feminine” meaning to apply to any applications to become an honorary or temporary member.

The general committee said this was equivalent to asking: “Do you think the club should admit women members?” The majority of those at the Thistle Hotel in Marylebone on Tuesday voted to “affirm” the original wording. They backed a separate motion stating this “explicitly restricts membership to males over 18 years of age and reaffirms existing unambiguous language”.

Several members resigned in protest over the decision, The Telegraph understands. The Savile Club was approached for comment.

–The Mexican journal Diariojudio.com has posted an article about writer Chaim Potok that opens with this:

Potok was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Benjamin Max (died 1958) and Mollie (nĂ©e Friedman) Potok (died 1985), who were Jewish immigrants from Poland. He was the eldest of four children; all of them converted to or married rabbis. His Hebrew name was Chaim Tzvi. He received an Orthodox Jewish upbringing. After reading Evelyn Waugh’s novel  Brideshead Revisited  as a teenager, he decided to become a writer (he often said that  Brideshead Revisited  was what inspired his work and literature). He began writing fiction at the age of 16. At 17 he made his first submission to The  Atlantic Monthly magazine . Although it was not published, he received an editor’s note praising his work. He attended high school at Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy, the all-boys school of Yeshiva University. In an interview, Potok said: “I prayed in a small shtiebel [prayer hall], and my mother is a descendant of a great Hasidic dynasty and my father was Hasidic, so I come from that world.”…

–The journal The New Criterion has an editorial entitled “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly” critical of the new Labour Government. This appears in its latest issue and opens with this:

It seems like dĂ©jĂ  vu all over again. Last month in this space we wrote about British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s apparent embrace of various dystopian novels in formulating his policies for Great Britain. Most obvious was the government’s embrace of the totalitarian principles laid down in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially regarding curbs on free speech and the filtering of common reality through the politically correct scrim of Newspeak. Then there was the demographic catastrophe described in Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints. This novel from the 1970s tells the story of how a tsunami of illegal migration from the Third World, combined with the moral paralysis begot by adherence to progressive ideology, destroys Western civilization. Finally, there was Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins. This “Romance of the Near Future” describes what happens when a society, marinated in nihilistic utilitarianism, embraces euthanasia as a social desideratum…

–Finally, the latest issue of Literary Review contains the review of a collection of the  travel writings of Norman Lewis. This is edited by John Hatt and is entitled A Quiet Evening. The review is by Nicholas Rankin and opens with this:

Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was arguably the finest English travel writer of his generation. Other contenders for the title – Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, say – were all Oxford-educated, but Lewis was a product of Enfield’s grammar school and its public library. A devotee of the classics – Herodotus, Suetonius, Chekhov, Turgenev – he was attracted southwards. Federico García Lorca was his favourite poet. He gracefully reconfigured his first book, Spanish Adventure, written at twenty-six, into his last book, The Tomb in Seville, at the age of ninety-four. Just as a matador conceals his sword behind a bright muleta cape, he masked a tragic sensibility with a comic style.

This brilliant new anthology, A Quiet Evening, is the latest selection of Lewis’s work edited by John Hatt, who founded Eland Books in 1982. Hatt’s dream was to republish great travel literature in handsome editions. The first classic he reissued was A Dragon Apparent, Lewis’s account of his journeys in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, originally published in 1951, before war devastated Indo-China. (Hatt was surprised to find its author very much alive.) Eland subsequently republished Lewis’s masterpiece Naples ’44 and his study of the Sicilian Mafia, The Honoured Society

A full copy of the review is available here.

Share
This entry was posted in Brideshead Revisited, Collections, Love Among The Ruins and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *