Three Longer Waugh Articles

–A copy of a 2017 article by Waugh Scholar Naomi Milthorp has been posted on the internet by Amazon Web Service. This is a PDF file and is entitled “The Materials of Which I Am Made: Evelyn Waugh and Book Production.”  It originally appeared in an issue of Script & Print (No. 41:4). Here’s the opening paragraph:

…Two particular clusters of archival material, dated in the years 1963–1965, provide clear evidence of Waugh’s role in the production of his books: those centred on the production of the édition de luxe of his final work of satire, 1963’s Basil Seal Rides Again: or, The Rake’s Regress, and those concerned with the setting of the ordinary edition of his autobiography A Little Learning.  In examining the Huntington Library’s archival materials Waugh’s professional interest in bibliographic matter is emphatically revealed. Moreover, both books’ textual concern with self-fashioning—whether openly ironic, or apparently serious—is reflected in their material form, the flamboyant luxury of the one answered by the prim sobriety of the other…

The full text of the article is available at this link.

–The second article, also in an academic journal, is actually about Cyril Connolly’s 1944 “word cycle” The Unquiet Grave. This is by Denis Topalovic and was published recently in the journal Textual Practice. But the author’s analysis frequently mentions Waugh’s reading of the work as explained in these introductory paragraphs (footnotes omitted):

In 1971 the University of Texas at Austin invited Cyril Connolly, then one of Britain’s leading literary critics, to inaugurate an exhibition enticingly entitled ‘One Hundred Key Books’. With its rich display of manuscripts and first editions drawn from the collections of the Harry Ransom Center, from Joyce’s Ulysses to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the exhibition was based on a book Connolly had published some years prior, in 1965, similarly entitled The Modern Movement: 100 Key Books from England, France and America, 1880–1950. Halfway between private list and authoritative compendium, the book corralled many of the widely acknowledged masterworks belonging to what Connolly had long been in the habit of apostrophising as the ‘Modern Movement’, and which more or less coincided, in both style and periodisation, with what English departments were then in the process of canonising under the general rubric of literary modernism.

Among the modernist totems put on display in 1971, however, was also one slim volume that did not officially feature in Connolly’s select pantheon of literary greats, but which enjoyed an intensely brief spell of notoriety during the last months of the Second World War: namely, Connolly’s own The Unquiet Grave, an eccentric book of pensées and aphorisms published in 1944 under the pseudonym ‘Palinurus’. It was, to be sure, Connolly himself who had insisted that The Unquiet Grave be included in the Austin exhibition: for while ‘some find the U.G. a mere common-place book’, he pleaded with the exhibition’s organisers, ‘others see in it, with its three movements and epilogue, a “chasse spirituelle”, a beautifully constructed and harmonious whole’. Evelyn Waugh’s personal library at the Harry Ransom Center happened to include a copy of The Unquiet Grave, and so the organisers readily obliged: The Unquiet Grave was proudly displayed among the major works penned by the modernists, many of whom Connolly had known and even published in their lifetime. Having asked to take a closer look at Waugh’s copy of the book, however, Connolly was much less flattered to discover that his long-time friend had filled the book’s margins with a number of disparaging comments, censoring him as a ‘drivelling woman novelist’, a ‘hack highbrow’ who ‘read Freud while getting a third in Greats’. A sharp question had also been jotted across the title page: ‘Why should I be interested in this book?’…

The full article is available at this link.

–Finally, Duncan McLaren has kindly sent a copy of his latest posting which is an article comparing the work of Evelyn Waugh and Scottish novelist and artist Alasdair Gray. Duncan uses for comparative purposes materials in both writers’ archives to which he has been given access.  He also prominently mentions materials in the UT Humanities Research Center.  And as usual, he provides several original and often remarkable illustrations of what he is describing. Here’s a link.