Roundup: Theatrical Torture, Biographical Therapy and Lineage of Comic Novel

–The Italian newspaper La Stampa for 25 January 2025 has an article by the late Gaia Servadio which is based on an interview with Graham Greene that seems to have taken place about 1978 (publication date of The Human Factor which is the primary subject of the interview). The article includes a discussion of an earlier exchange between Greene and Waugh:

One of the world’s best-known and most translated authors, Graham Greene was educated at the Balliol, Oxford, where he was with the “golden” generation. Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Malcolm Muggeridge. “Evelyn Waugh was one of my dearest friends, he was a rebel, he couldn’t stand anyone, not even the Conservatives. He didn’t think in political terms. To give you an example, one evening – one of the last times we were together – we went to see Ionesco’s latest play, Rhinoceros , with Laurence Olivier here in London. The next day I had published a letter in the Times protesting against torture in Algeria. Evelyn wrote me a little letter: “I see you are sending letters to the Times about torture in Africa: why don’t you also talk about ours, inflicted on us last night by Laurence Olivier?”…

Translation by Google. Since Waugh died in 1966, this letter must have been written well before the interview. There is a letter from Greene to Waugh dated 22 June 1960 suggesting that they had both attended (separately) a performance of Rhinoceros the night before. (Graham Greene, A Life in Letters pp. 248-49).  That may have crossed the letter from Waugh referred to in the interview. There is no letter of Waugh to Greene of that date in Waugh’s collected Letters. The author of the La Stampa article, Gaia Servadio, died in 2021, according to Wikipedia.

Psychology Today has an article suggesting that reading works of biography and autobiography can have therapeutic benefits. Here’s an example:

The life story of … renowned British writer, Evelyn Waugh, was … troubled. Waugh also continually suffered from initial money problems as well as a thorough dislike of the modern world. The man drank heavily to escape his emotional demons, ambiguous sexuality, and conflicting religious feelings, yet left a legacy of being arguably the best British writer of the first half of the 20th century.

The article by Lawrence R Samuel explains how experiences such as those of Waugh can be helpful in therapy:

… we often tend to think our situations are unique when, in fact, many have gone through similar rough patches in their lives and prevailed. Stories of people who have achieved notable, sometimes great things during their lifetime illustrate the genuine possibility of overcoming both personal and professional obstacles, making them an underappreciated therapeutic approach. Life is a roller coaster filled with ups and downs, autobiographies and biographies make clear, with no one immune to setbacks, disappointments, and downright failures…

Here’s a link to the article.

–The Thomistic Institute is sponsoring a podcast on the subject of “The Influence of Virgil and St. Augustine on Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited'”. This will be presented on Tuesday 4 February at a time to be announced. The presenter is:

Patrick Callahan, director of the Newman Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture as well as Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at St. Gregory the Great Seminary. There he directs and teaches in a Great Books Catholic program for students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and other regional colleges. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Dallas and his graduate work at Fordham University in Classics. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife and 5 children.

Details at this link.

–The latest New York Times Book Review carries an interview with novelist Robert Harris, several of whose books have been adapted for movies or TV. The film version of his 2016 novel Conclave has been nominated for 8 Academy Awards.  Here is the concluding Q & A;

Q. You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

A. My three literary heroes: Graham Greene, George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

–The Oxford student newspaper Cherwell has posted a review of the latest book by Jonathan Coe. This is entitled The Proof of My Innocence and is reviewed by Hassan Akram. Here is the opening paragraph:

There are some writers whose line of literary descent is so clear as to resemble a kind of genealogical chart. The lineage of the English comic novel, for instance, runs smoothly from Fielding to Dickens, Dickens to P.G. Wodehouse, Wodehouse to Evelyn Waugh, Waugh to Kingsley Amis, and from Amis through to Jonathan Coe, whose The Proof of My Innocence is one of the funniest novels published in Britain in recent years. In a burlesque fusion of murder mystery, dark academia, and autofiction, Coe charts the development of a pro-NHS-privatisation think-tank from its roots in Cambridge in the 1980s to its short-lived triumph with the rise of Liz Truss in 2022, scattering the story between the perspectives variously of a failed conservative novelist, a Cambridge undergraduate, a murdered anti-Tory blogger, a police detective, and a sushi attendant…

The full article is available here.

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