–Two writers have posted a discussion of Waugh’s novel The Loved One. This is on YouTube and involves PhDs Kevin McAleer and Bruce Newsome, each of whom has written a book satirizing California. Here is a description of their talk:
It’s a short novel but rich, a masterfully concise, biting observational novel in which Waugh takes no friends, and uses opposing stereotypes to expose each other, and to expose both at the same time. Kevin and Bruce committed to discuss Waugh’s novel, having themselves each written a novel satirizing California. Bruce admits explicitly that his writing of “The Dark Side of Sunshine” was inspired in at least style by Waugh’s early novels, such as “Bright Young Things,” “Black Mischief,” and “Scoop.” As a reviewer, Bruce found that Kevin’s novel “The LA Kid” reminds of Waugh’s “The Loved One.” But Kevin hadn’t read it! So Kevin and Bruce committed to discuss “The Loved One” after a fresh reading. They didn’t expect to find this much to discuss in a short novel…
Here’s a link.
–Waugh’s biographer Selina Hastings has written an article in the latest issue of The Tatler about Cecil Beaton. This is entitled “Funny! Frenzied! Frivolous! Why the capers of Cecil Beaton and the Bright Young Things continue to captivate a century on”. Here’s the opening paragraph;
‘Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties’ – this was how Evelyn Waugh depicted the era of the 1920s, when the elite of the younger generation, determined to throw off the gloom of the Great War, dedicated themselves to entertainment. As Waugh portrayed them in his novel Vile Bodies, the Bright Young People (or Bright Young Things, as others called them) were funny, frenzied and frivolous, capering from party to party. Among them, and, like Waugh, an astute recorder of the period, was the photographer Cecil Beaton. Beaton had been at prep school with Waugh, who bullied him cruelly. Beaton later described Waugh as ‘a very sinister character’, while Waugh pilloried Beaton in Decline and Fall as the society photographer David Lennox, who ‘emerged with little shrieks from an Edwardian electric brougham and made straight for the nearest looking-glass’…
—The Critic magazine has an article entitled “Into the Boomersverse: Older commentators cannot understand how younger people experience the UK.” This is written by Associate Editor, Sebastian Milbanke, and opens with this:
I am regularly struck by the abiding truth of an observation made about English society by Evelyn Waugh over 70 years ago in Brideshead Revisited:
“They and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems, a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few miles distant, the same rural horizon, could have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other’s fortunes, a regret, even, that we should be separated, and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other’s pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them…”
–Two internet booksellers have posted extensive lists of books by and about Waugh. Here are links, each of which contains a reproduction of the cover where available. These are posted by MostRecommendedBooks.com (total 47) and GoodReads.com (total 74 ).
–Finally, what appears to be a religious website called DeLibris.org provides a brief description of Waugh’s novel Helena. Here are the opening paragraphs:
A historical novel that narrates the life of Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, and her quest for truth and the Christian faith in a pagan world. Waugh recreates the Roman era in detail and explores the moral dilemmas of his characters. The novel shows how Helena, despite her position and power, faces personal and spiritual challenges that help her grow as a person and as a believer. The work combines historical facts with the author’s imagination, offering a rewarding reading experience.
Since little is known about Saint Helena’s life, the author —as he himself notes in the introduction— drew on his literary creativity to fill in the historical gaps and imagine unknown episodes. The result is an outstanding novel that combines historical accuracy with imagination, focusing mainly on the pivotal event of the discovery of the True Cross by the empress in Jerusalem…
