–Jack Trotter has posted an essay on Waugh’s work in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. This is entitled “Remembering Evelyn Waugh: Satirist and Defender of Moral Order.” It opens with this:
Evelyn Waugh was the 20th century’s finest satirist and perhaps the greatest in the English-speaking world after Jonathan Swift. Born in 1903 in London, Waugh was the second son of a prominent publisher whose firm, Chapman and Hall, published many of Waugh’s own books. He was educated at Oxford, where he read history for two years and lived a rather dissipated, rebellious life, leaving without a degree. Waugh turned seriously to writing only in the late 1920s. In 1930, he married his first wife, also named Evelyn. Within a year, she abandoned Waugh for another man—a sense of betrayal haunted Waugh for decades and may have contributed to his conversion to Roman Catholicism that same year. In 1937, after his first marriage was annulled, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic. They produced seven children…
Trotter offers comments on several of Waugh’s works, some of which tend to be overlooked. His comments on Robbery Under Law and Love Among the Ruins are of particular interest. A copy is available at this link.
–Several papers have reported about a rather expensive property development in Mayfair. It also involves a bookshop with a Waugh association. Here is an excerpt from the story in the Times:
It will be a bibliothèque for billionaires — one of the world’s most lavish libraries is to be curated by a bookseller-to-the-stars at Britain’s priciest luxury development yet.
The book salon owned by Peregrine Cavendish, the 81-year-old Duke of Devonshire, has been appointed by John Caudwell, the self-made billionaire-turned property developer, to assemble the library at his 1 Mayfair development. The property is due to be completed in spring 2027 and will contain three penthouses marketed at £200 million each.
The Duke of Devonshire, often known by the nickname Stoker, is the owner of Heywood Hill, on Curzon Street in Mayfair, which was reputed to be a favourite of the late Queen. Opened in 1936, the shop-cum-salon was described by Evelyn Waugh at the end of the Second World War as “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London.”
In recent years the bookshop, which is run by Stoker’s son-in-law Nicky Dunne, has launched an exclusive service to collate bespoke collections for the private libraries of the UK’s wealthiest and most powerful people, who are sometimes prepared to pay seven figures for the service.
To add to 1 Mayfair’s exclusivity, Caudwell — a working class boy who made millions through Phones4u — announced that Heywood Hill would curate his 1,000-book library. The entrepreneur described his ambition in typically hyperbolic terms, citing “libraries such as those of Aristotle, Alexandria, Pavlovsk, Congress and the Bodleian” as inspiration…
–The Financial Times marks the centennial year of the general strike of 1926 with a review of three books on that subject. One of them is entitled Britain’s Revolutionary Summer and is written by Edd Mustill. A character from a Waugh novel makes an appearance. Here’s an excerpt:
…In Britain’s Revolutionary Summer, Edd Mustill complains that the events of 1926 have “vanished from the national story we tell ourselves”. He notes that the interwar saga of Downton Abbey managed to end abruptly on New Year’s Day 1926, with the film sequels then resuming in 1927. This discretion has spared us a storyline in which Matthew Crawley volunteers for some strikebreaking fun, such as that enjoyed by “Boy” Mulcaster in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited — Upstairs Downstairs reimagined as class struggle…
The Financial Times review of all three books can be accessed at this link.
—Modern Age magazine has reposted its Spring 1976 review of Christopher Sykes’ biography of Evelyn Waugh. That was in turn published in 1975, so the review if not the biography itself is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary. Here is the concluding paragraph from the review:
…Ten years after Waugh’s death critics are still trying to put him in the proper niche in the hierarchy of British writers (equal to Greene? to Foster?) and list his literary creditors (Firbank? Ford Madox Ford?), but mere authors will continue to despair of their ability to approach that prose perfection, though the existence of the challenge must make them better writers. Readers will regret that the Autobiography, which promised so brilliantly, can now never take the shelf as an explanatory masterpiece, and that the crass patterns of modern life—on both sides of the Atlantic—will never again find so detached and elegant and devastating a castigator. But, to use Waugh‘s favorite phrase, we must not repine. We have that rich legacy, which is a great deal, and we should be grateful for one of the best collections of satire and comedy in all modern literature.
The full review is available here.
–Finally, yet another biography of novelist Muriel Spark has been published. This is written by James Bailey and entitled Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark. It is reviewed in The Times by Waugh’s biographer (and EWS member) Paula Byrnes. She notes how Waugh took an active interest in Sparks’ writing:
…Evelyn Waugh, an early supporter, advised her to write longer novels and she complied, writing her “magnus opium”, The Mandelbaum Gate, in 1965 before returning to her own pared-back and inimical style…
Waugh is cited again in the conclusion of the review:
…She was, as Waugh noted, the unique voice of her generation, as he once was of his. He handed on the baton when he sent a copy of his last novel, Unconditional Surrender, with the dedication “For Muriel Spark in her prime from Evelyn Waugh in his decline”. But the last word should perhaps be given to the greatest critic of our time, Christopher Ricks, who said if God “looks upon His created world with the same eye with which [Spark] looks upon hers then thank God I am an atheist”.
Read the full review at this link.
