Roundup: Television and Weblogs

–Blogger Andrew Kern has posted on Substack an article praising Waugh’s war novel Men at Arms. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh wrote better than any dead or living Briton from the 20th century. He tells stories that incorporate but transcend his perspectives. He understands how other people view the world and treats them all with the same level of respect: that is to say, he treats them all as farcical (far’s’cl for you sailors) excuses of a broken race that somehow carry a well-hidden grace visible only to those who wish to see it.

Also, his sentences are so continually (not continuously, I hasten to add) perfect that when I find one that disappoints, I know it must be an error, even a typo, and I rejoice with a joy so full of vainglory that I rush to my nearest-at-hand pencil with the enthusiasm of a man who has found the ash on which was built a royal palace.

Men At Arms launches Waugh’s three volume Sword of Honour trilogy, and I read it last year. It tells the story of Guy Crouchback, an English recusant1 who spends the 1930’s in Italy after his wife divorces him, ending any hope that he might preserve his ancient line. His life drifts along the Italian coast like a sedate and sedated yacht. As Hitler and Mussolini rise to power, he is otherwise occupied. He knows Hitler is bad and he regards Mussolini as a chancer. But he is sedate and sedated, like a yacht floating in the harbor below his family’s ancient villa…

–A Portuguese website (naoeimprensa.com) has an article by Adaubam Pires about the 1960 BBC interview of Evelyn Waugh which is now available over YouTube.com in Portuguese language markets. Here is an excerpt:

…Evelyn Waugh was not an easy guy. Our “favorite villain,” as Ronald B. Griggs, the greatest translator of Waugh in these parts, aptly defined it. Irascible and temperamental, an old-school conservative , the writer had decided in the early 1950s to exchange the hustle and bustle of London society for the isolation of a country mansion . What led him in 1960 to abandon his much-loved country peace to go and show his face on national television in a program that looked more like a police interrogation?

“Poverty,” as Waugh himself explains during the interview. “We were both hired to talk in this deliriously happy way.” Although his works continued to be published and sold, in the last years of his life the writer found himself under financial pressure, which led him to agree to participate in interviews. It must not have been easy, in fact, to support a family of six children in a large mansion with eight suites, six living rooms, a wine cellar and a garage for five cars.

The 1960 interview is said to have been Waugh’s television debut. And it was in front of journalist John Freeman, a former Labour MP who had left politics to become the host of the BBC’s Face to Face programme, where he had a (bad) reputation for embarrassing his guests with his inquisitive style. For a newcomer, Waugh didn’t do too badly.

But watching the interview left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was happy to hear from the author himself a series of interesting details about his life and work. On the other hand, the interviewer’s impertinent and derogatory attitude towards his interviewee left me annoyed and frustrated. I was annoyed because the questions were directed at Waugh in a rude and offensive manner, without the slightest concern for establishing a minimally friendly relationship with the interviewee. I was frustrated because, in his eagerness to read his previously formulated questions, the interviewer moved on to the next subject without letting Waugh elaborate on any topic, leaving the feeling that, at times, he didn’t even care to listen to what Waugh had to say. How could I miss the opportunity to let one of the greatest prose writers in the English language delve deeper and ramble lyrically in his answers?

This harassment is handled politely by Waugh—up to a point. Waugh’s instinctive hostility toward the interviewer’s lack of decorum begins to take the form of increasingly evasive responses as the interview progresses. When he realizes that the interviewer is more interested in attacking his Catholicism and social status than in actually discussing his novels, Waugh begins to answer all impertinent questions briefly and tersely, whenever possible with answers laden with sarcasm. And it is these rude responses from Waugh that make this interview worth its weight in gold…

Translation is by Google.

—The Guardian has an article about an upcoming TV series that may be of interest:

…It’s their triumphs and travails that form the basis of the historical drama House of Guinness, from Peaky Blinders showrunner Steven Knight, which is due on our screens next year. As befits the drink that made the family’s name, it is the story of stout hard work with dark undertones and conspicuous froth on top.

The dynasty was established by Arthur Guinness, the son of a farmer, who founded the brewery in 1759. Its position was secured by his third son, Benjamin, who became the richest man in Ireland.

But by the 1920s decadence had arrived in the shape of Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and one of the bright young things, the upper-class bohemians satirised by Evelyn Waugh. He married Diana Mitford who left him for Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader and acolyte of Adolf Hitler…

It is not clear from available information when this will be televised but it seems likely it will be available on Netflix later this year.

–An entertainment website (Metro.co.uk) discusses a new BBC TV production (Dope Girls) that includes depiction of the woman on whom Waugh based Ma Mayfield:

Dope Girls stars Julianne Nicholson as Kate Galloway, a single mother who establishes a nightclub amidst the hedonistic uproar of post-World War One London and embraces a life of criminal activities in order to be able to provide for her daughter Evie ….

The series is based on real life figures including Billie Carleton, Brilliant Chang, Edgar Manning, and Kate Meyrick. The later was known as the ‘Night Club Queen’ who owned several nightclubs in London in the 1920s and was believed to have earned around £500,000 (£17 million today) from her hotspots. Throughout her life she served five prison sentences and was the inspiration for the character Ma Mayfield in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited…

The 6-episode  series will be available on the BBC later this year.

–Blogger europhilevicar.com has posted on his web diary a discussion of Waugh’s works that he has read over the past year.  You will need to scroll down to the entry entitled “Through a glass darkly–138” to begin this discussion with Remote People and Black Mischief. Here’s an excerpt:

…Black Mischief, published in 1932, also leans on the Abyssinian experience. The primitive cruelty, treachery, and cannibalism of Azania are confronted by the young Emperor Seth’s commitment to Modernity and the New Age. The British-educated Seth wants to put his Oxford degree to good use by dragging this primitive country into the twentieth century. And in this endeavour he is assisted by Basil Seal, an upper class chancer and contemporary at Oxford, and by the slippery Armenian trader Mr Krikor Youkoumian. Other characters include Sir Samson Courteney, the ineffectual Head of the British Delegation, and his romantically inclined daughter Prudence;  General Connolly, a former Irish game warden, now Head of the Army; Connolly’s local wife, known as the ‘Black Bitch’; and Monsieur Balloon, the French freemason Consul.

Azania is not Abyssinia, but is based rather on Zanzibar. And Seth is certainly not a portrait of Ras Tafari, the new Emperor, who appears in Waugh’s travel writings as an exotic but enigmatic figure.. Where Haile Selassie was seen as a distinctly African figure, proud to be the only independent native monarch in Africa, Seth is wholly divorced from his African culture, a fervent believer in the concept of ‘Progress’. Waugh portrays Seth as a man with no discernible religious faith, who is confronted by a world of treachery and fear. The spy scuttling away from the door is a recurring image in Black Mischief.

The book was written in a stop-start manner, partly at the hotel at Chagford, partly at the Lygon family’s country seat at Madresfield, as Waugh juggled an increasing number of journalistic and reviewing commitments. It was published in October 1932 and attracted hugely varied reviews. Favourable reviews in the Spectator and the Telegraph and the Listener found the book original and well-written, with an increased seriousness, and tinged with Eliot’s Waste Land vision of western society, an unsentimental pessimism. But other reviewers were unconvinced, using word like vapid and fatuous. James Agate in the Express wrote: “‘this book is an extravaganza … I assume that Mr Waugh’s plan was to think of an island of cannibals to whose vile bodies he could add Lottie Crump’s clientele out of an earlier novel. The book will be deemed wildly funny by the intelligentsia, and there is always a chance it is too clever for me.”

I don’t recall what I made of this book reading it some sixty-plus years ago in Lamb A dayroom. But these decades later I find the book funny but slight. An insubstantial work, easily read and discarded. And I surprised too that Waugh has not been denounced for his casual [but period] use of the nigger word…