–D J Taylor has written a thoughtful obituary of David Lodge in the latest issue of the journal New Criterion. This is based on his review of Lodge’s life as written in the three-volume autobiography published in Lodge’s final years. Taylor focusses primarily on the first volume, Quite a Good Time to be Born. The obituary/review concludes with this:
…Lodge the Catholic novelist is a very different proposition to such august ornaments of the trade as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, less interested in salvation and redemption, the Damascene conversion, and the deathbed repentance as in the sheer practical difficulty of squaring “faith” with the demands and temptations of the zeitgeist. Lodge’s characters, consequently, are not doomed (or exalted) ex-ceptionalists but ordinary people trying to get by, nervously monitoring their progress through a landscape that simultaneously excites them and worries them by virtue of the threat it poses to the things they hold dear.
As for Lodge’s own part in this, Quite a Good Time to Be Born, again, harbors one or two earnest identifications and records doggedly set straight. There is a way in which these calibrations of art and the reality on which the art is based would be better left alone. The characters exist quite happily (or not) on their own terms. Best leave them to it. But all this, you realize, is a matter of vital importance to Lodge, the kind of person he was or imagined himself to be, and the professional-cum-creative journey he found himself on. In the week after his death, a caricature of him appeared on the cover of the British Catholic weekly The Tablet, for which he had written for many years, above the caption “How Far Did He Go?” The answer, you suspect, is one hell of a way.
–In an article appearing in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Martin Filler discusses the recent wild fires in Los Angeles. He opens with a review of the 1971 book about Los Angeles architecture by British author Rayner Banham. Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning:
…A working-class Brit who lived through the Blitz, Banham cherished an optimistic belief that modernism held the answers to perfecting the built environment, if not human nature itself. He also had a romantic streak, and like many of his countrymen (though not Evelyn Waugh, the Jonathan Swift of Forest Lawn) he saw Southern California as a sparkling sybaritic wonderland antithetical to drab, inhibited Britain. The cover image for the first edition of his book was his younger compatriot David Hockney’s painting A Bigger Splash (1967), which depicts a turquoise swimming pool in front of a flat-roofed midcentury modern house and two tall, skinny palms against a cloudless azure sky, rendered in the flat sun-blasted tonalities of LA’s endless summer.
–An article about Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in the 1930s (the subject of two books by Evelyn Waugh–Scoop and Waugh in Abyssinia) has been posted by the website borkena.com (presumably located in Ethiopia). The article is written by Mengistu Asfaw and entitled “Graziani’s Tyrannical Rule 1936-37”. Here is an excerpt:
The Italians who had a mere nominal control in the face of the courageous and determined Ethiopian Patriot boldly claimed in Europe that the “war in Abyssinia” is completely over. Whereas, in reality such claims were a fiasco. Opposing such claims of the Italians, the famous English writer Evelyn Waugh in his eye-witness account explained the situation as follows: “the Italians are starving, the soldiers live on a piece of bread a day. Nothing can be bought in the shops. No one will accept the Italian money (lira). The Abyssinians are encamped all around the town. The Italians hold Addis Ababa, the railway line and the road to Makale- beyond that nothing. No one can go a hundred yards outside the town (Addis Ababa). Ethiopians are fighting every day in the center of the town.”
Waugh’s account apparently is quoted from his war reportage book Waugh in Abyssinia.
—The Evening Standard has a preview of the new BBC dramatic series entitled “Dope Girls” which starts tonight on BBC One. Here is the opening:
According to the BBC, the series is inspired by “a forgotten time in history” – a period directly after the end of World War One, when men returned to Britain from the battlefields to find that the women they left behind had found a new sense of empowerment and power. Suddenly, women wanted the vote (shocking), and they wanted to work in institutions like the police rather than the kitchen. Faced with a sudden loss of manpower after the horrendous losses of the First World War, the men started, reluctantly, to cede ground.
This applied to nightlife, too. From 1914 to 1918, around 150 illegal nightclubs opened in Soho, and for the women at the time, London was their playground – whether they worked as chorus girls or were members of gangs shaping the city’s hedonistic nightlife scene. [According to the BBC], “Dope Girls depicts in visceral delicious detail the birth of the modern nightlife industry guided and gilded by hard-fought female endeavour” …
As noted in previous posts, this series has a link to a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel. This was Ma Mayfield in Brideshead Revisited who was based on Kate Meyrick owner of several night clubs in the interwar period:
…Prostitution was … rife inside her clubs: the girls who worked there were called Meyrick’s Merry Maids, and in fact actor David Niven wrote in his 1971 autobiography that he lost his virginity at age 14 to one of them, called Nessie.
She achieved such a level of notoriety that she even caught the eye of Evelyn Waugh, who apparently used her as the inspiration for his character Ma Mayfield – a nightclub owner – in his 1945 book, Brideshead Revisited.
A fixture of the press, her children eventually married into aristocracy and ran her nightclubs when she worked in Paris or served her five prison sentences. Meyrick died age 57 in 1933 from influenza (London’s clubs and theatres dimmed their lights on the day of her funeral as a sign of respect), but her legacy helped shape clubbing culture in the UK for decades to come.
While not mentioned, it sounds as if there will be elements in the series that may resemble scenes and characters from Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies written at the time the drama is set. The first episode airs tonight in the UK on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 915 pm and will no doubt appear in due course in other countries.
