—The Oldie has posted an interesting article by Mark McGinness on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Heywood Hill bookshop in Mayfair. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Giving a twist to Dr Johnson’s “When a man is tired of London; he is tired of life”, American editor, Roger Kimball, has suggested, “When a man is tired of Heywood Hill, he is tired of books.”
The eponymous bookshop at 10 Curzon Street, Mayfair is 90 today. On 3 August 1936 George Heywood Hill (always Heywood), a young Old Etonian (just thirty), after a seven-year apprenticeship with veteran bookseller Charles Sawyer in Grafton Street (“everything suitable for a gentleman’s library”), established his own shop, first, at 17 Curzon Street; then, when the lease expired in 1942, at a former dress shop at No 10. And so it has remained, despite three changes of ownership, essentially unchanged.
Someone dubbed it “the biggest little bookshop in the world” while Heywood called it “a tiny first-class kennel for underdogs”; Evelyn Waugh described it, in the early forties, as “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London”. Celebrating its fiftieth birthday, antiquarian James Fergusson saw “behind the Georgian bow window ……. [inside] like an overdressed West End stage-set ….marbled pillars with bold gold Ionic capitals are borrowed for a proscenium; a white panelled front room gives way to an unlikely bright burgundy backstage sanctum, and the books, like Helen Hanff props, tumble too neatly on the rich red carpet.” The chandeliered rooms, fireplace and chimney-piece give it the feel of a most clubbable club…
The full article is available here and is well worth reading.
–An article entitled “Brideshead’s Jewish secret” appears in a recent issue of The Jewish Chronicle. This is by Michele Goldsmith and is about the Sassoon family home of Trent Park House in Enfield. Here’s an excerpt in which the title is explained:
…if imitation is the greatest form of flattery, there is a widespread assumption that Evelyn Waugh partly based the character of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited on Sassoon. As Page observes: “Both Sassoon and the character are wealthy, flamboyant aesthetes, a little haughty, gay, with slight lisps.
The setting is often Oxford, where Philip studied and lived, and the actor chosen to play Blanche in the film [Joseph Beattie] even looks like Sassoon.”
The reference in the article is to Philip Sassoon who inherited the house at age 23 in 1912. The article, which is handsomely illustrated, is available here.
–Anthony Blanche is also featured this week in another article. This is in a recent issue of The Spectator. It is entitled “In defence of the Brandy Alexander: It’s not simply a drink for young fogeys.” This is by Christopher Akens. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
In the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, the Brandy Alexander is the catalyst for teetotaller secretary Kirsten descending into alcoholism. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night references ‘a pansy full of Brandy Alexanders’. This unfortunate view of the cocktail wasn’t helped by the memorable scene in the glorious 1981 television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in which the stammering Anthony Blanche (played superbly by Nickolas Grace) downs four Brandy Alexanders in flamboyant fashion.
The article is available at this link.
–Finally, a brief review of Scoop appears in the Encyclopedia of Satire. This is by Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson:
Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938) is the foundational text of satirical fiction about journalism in English. Its portrait of Fleet Street journalism — the proprietorial vanity that shapes editorial policy, the journalistic conventions that substitute excitement for accuracy, the foreign correspondent culture that invents the stories it fails to find — remains recognizable eight decades after its publication, which is itself a satirical comment on the unchanging nature of journalistic failure. Waugh’s technique is Horatian in its formal comedy but Juvenalian in its underlying contempt: he laughs at the absurdity of the journalistic world while making clear that its failures have real consequences for the people who are reported on and the societies whose affairs it claims to record. Newspaper satire’s full tradition in Britain traces the literary and journalistic lineage of which Waugh’s novel is the central achievement.
