–The Financial Times has an article by Janan Ganesh entitled “The right will want a United States of Europe”. It opens with this:
Auberon Waugh, son of the novelist Evelyn, died a quarter of a century ago this month. Never likely to match the old man sentence for sentence, he nonetheless plugged away at journalism. He had a respectable go at fiction too. And unlike his father, a straight-down-the-line conservative, he had at least one interesting opinion. He was a rightwing pro-European.
Almost everywhere, attitudes to Brussels tend to harden the further right you go on the political spectrum. Waugh Jr bucked that rule, seeing Europe as a potential fortress against American cultural influence and other modern barbarities. He liked the European project because he was reactionary, not despite it. The closest modern equivalent is Jeremy Clarkson, that unlikeliest of Remainers…
Here is a link to the full story.
–The Imaginative Conservative also has story featuring Auberon. This is also on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death. It is written by David Deaval and opens with this:
Great men shouldn’t have sons. This moral axiom is dubious, at best. It’s understandable why some say it. It’s even more understandable why sons of great men occasionally say it. Great men too often make terrible fathers. Even if apples don’t fall far from trees, they are too often bruised by the branches. Auberon Waugh, eldest son of the great novelist Evelyn, who died twenty-five years ago on January 16, 2001, took from his father both a great deal of suffering and a great deal of good.
Evelyn Waugh was both a serious Catholic convert and a famously cantankerous and slow-to-be-sanctified man. To the question of how a Christian could be such a nasty person, he responded that he would be scarcely human were it not for the faith. It is not to say he had no lovable, loving, or even holy qualities. It is to say that this great artist of the page often made messes of the pages of his life. As a father, Evelyn was distinctly troublesome. The son’s 1998 memoir, Will This Do?, began by observing that “the children of Evelyn Waugh did not come particularly well out of his published letters and diaries.”…
The entire article is available here.
—The Spectator has an article reminiscing about the days when transatlantic journeys were taken in relatively slow comfort and enjoyment on ocean liners rather than aeroplanes. Here’s an excerpt:
…And now? The ships have sailed into the sunset, but traces of their world live on in art and architecture. Where would interwar fiction be without the shipboard love affair? Think of Evelyn Waugh’s Julia Flyte and Charles Ryder on their stormy ocean crossing, consummating the passion that had been impossible back at landlocked Brideshead. Or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers in Shall We Dance? (1937), tapwhen dancing across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary to the melodies of Gershwin (another regular passenger). But then, out at sea Anything Goes: Cole Porter’s fictional SS American provides the whole setting for his 1934 musical…
The article is by Richard Bratby and can be read here.
–An article in The Conversation considers the importance of literary anniversaries and their observance. Here’s an excerpt:
…Literary anniversaries are not just limited to famous and well-loved authors, however significant. Many dates pass us by unmarked, despite the fact that we are in the midst of a golden era of key dates of literary significance.
The 2020s has been a decade of major Romantic-period milestones, including the bicentenaries of the deaths of the poets John Keats (2021), Percy Bysshe Shelley (2022), and Byron (2024). Last year’s Austen anniversary was particularly notable because the writer was so widely and enthusiastically celebrated.
Yet it also was the centenary year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-age classic The Great Gatsby, alongside Virginia Woolf’s modernist favourite Mrs Dalloway. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love all turned 80, while children’s classic The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis celebrated its 75th birthday….
The full article by Amy Wilcockson is available at this link.
—The Irish Aesthete (whose byline is “This is not an Oxymoron”) has posted a story about the country house known as Lisnavagh located in County Carlow. Here is an excerpt:
…In September 1937 Lisnavagh was inherited by William McClintock-Bunbury, fourth Baron Rathdonnell who, ten years later and in the aftermath of the Second World War, was faced with the challenge of how to look after a very substantial house on a relatively small income. Initially he and his wife, the artist Pamela Drew, put the place up for sale: one potential purchaser was Evelyn Waugh, then travelling through Ireland in the hope of finding a home for himself and his family: he described Lisnavagh as a ‘practical Early Victorian Collegiate building.’ …
Waugh’s visit took place after the war when he was seriously considering moving to Ireland. The quote is from a May 1947 Letter to John Betjeman in which Lisnavagh appears in Waugh’s short-list of three Irish country houses he was seriously considering after an extensive search (Letters, pp. 249-250). The article is well illustrated and can be viewed here.
–Finally. the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell has posted a brief 2012 story by Charlotte Hart that may be of interest. Here’s the opening:
We could not provide an adequate account of our university’s unusual literary past without mentioning the man who established the Oxford stereotype that remains ingrained in the minds of the public today. Undergraduates applying to Oxford probably envisage an indulgent existence of champagne luncheons, decadent excess and diamond-encrusted tortoises, but they could not be more mistaken (except perhaps for the unconventional choice of college pets).
Evelyn Waugh, it would seem, not only wrote about the decadence of upper class society, but lived it too. His thoughtful, satiric portrayals of the aristocratic way of life in novels such as Brideshead Revisited were partly fuelled by first hand experience. Arguably, it was his time at Oxford that shaped the literary satirist that we have come to know so well…
