–The London Review of Books has published a major article on the works of novelist Ronald Firbank. This is by Alan Hollinghurst and is entitled “It’s queer how I’m lonely.” This is not the first such effort to revive an interest in Firbank. Nor is it surprising that Waugh’s views on Firbank are prominently on display. Here’s an excerpt:
…It’s evident that Firbankianism was from the start both a technical and a moral quantity. In the generation who were first strongly influenced by Firbank, Evelyn Waugh constitutes the most striking case of this duality.
Waugh’s essay, written at the time of the first collected edition in 1929 (for which Firbank had allocated funds in his will), is the first intelligent appraisal of him by a major fellow novelist and invaluable testimony to the impact Firbank’s formal innovations and humour had made on the generation of writers emerging in the decade after the Great War, among whom Waugh listed Van Vechten, William Gerhardi and Ernest Hemingway. For Waugh, Firbank was a liberator, the person who had seen how to take the novel forward as a form. His technique, Waugh perceived, was compositional rather than narrative: ‘His compositions built up, intricately and with a balanced alternation of the wildest extravagance and the most austere economy, with conversational nuances.’ At the same time, Firbank does not write the ‘novel of conversation’, since there is rarely any significant exchange of views: ‘From the fashionable chatter of his period, vapid and interminable, he has plucked, like tiny brilliant feathers from the breast of a bird, the particles of his design.’ This insightful, sophisticated essay is one of those moments where you see a live spark leap from one generation to the next. Waugh was just getting going on Vile Bodies at the time – a novel whose first part is one of the most Firbankian texts produced by any other writer, showing an influence so strong that it had to be tamed (and is tempered already in the latter parts of the book), though Firbankian principles of economy and absurdity, the way people react and talk at an oblique angle to their meanings, remained operative in Waugh’s fiction until the end.
Thirty-three years later, when the seven completed chapters of Firbank’s last and most unbuttoned novel, The New Rythum, were published, the literary editor of the Spectator had the bright idea of asking Waugh to review it, and got the following postcard in reply: ‘I am sorry to say that your kind invitation to review The New Rythum reaches me thirty years late. In youth I was fascinated by Firbank. Now I can’t abide him. E.W.’ Interviewed around the same time by Julian Jebb for the Paris Review, Waugh was asked about his influences, and named in first place P.G. Wodehouse, while also acknowledging a debt to Hemingway and ‘the way he made drunk people talk’ in The Sun Also Rises. Pressed about Firbank, Waugh acknowledges nothing, and again says, ‘I can’t read him now’; asked why not, he says: ‘I think there would be something wrong with an elderly man who could enjoy Firbank.’
The full article is available at this link.
–The National Review has an article by George Weigel in which he traces Donald Trump’s origins to a fictional Waugh character. The article is entitled “A Tiny Bit of a Man’: Evelyn Waugh’s Anticipation of Donald Trump.” Here’s an excerpt:
More than 70 years ago, while on leave from the Royal Marines, Evelyn Waugh penned a portrait of a buccaneering moneyman with political ambitions and a hollow interior, a sketch that rings loud bells of familiarity in today’s presidential campaign.
When Rex Mottram first appears in Brideshead Revisited, it’s not clear what the source of his wealth is…
The truth about Rex — that there’s really no there there — begins to emerge when, in order to please the very Catholic Lady Marchmain, Julia’s mother, Rex decides to convert to Catholicism …
Waugh’s dissection of Rex Mottram (who bears some similarities to Max Aitkin, Lord Beaverbrook) extended to Rex’s politics, which were elastic. At first he’s comfortable with the Tories, whose old money, if not always invested wisely by Mottram standards, nonetheless speaks of a social stature he craves. Later, as the political winds blow from other directions, Rex blows with them, “flirt[ing] with communists and fascists,” moving with dispatch wherever opportunity and power beckon.
At the bottom of Rex Mottram, there is no bottom; or, as Julia puts it: “Rex isn’t anybody at all. . . . He just doesn’t exist,” as least in any humanly substantial way. He isn’t so much stupid as utterly ignorant. He isn’t so much immoral as amoral. He isn’t wantonly cruel; he’s simply callous, unable to understand how others could not perceive that his way is the best way, the expedient way, successful way – the only way, these days.
Julia is Sebastian Flyte’s sister who marries Rex (not happily as it turns out). The full article is available here.
–Today’s Guardian has a review by Kathryn Hughes of novelist Philip Hensher’s new work. This is non-fiction and is entitled A History of the Novel in Britain. It is headed by a familiar photo of Waugh holding a pipe. Here is an excerpt:
In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view…
The article also briefly mentions an appearance of Waugh in the text:
…Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself “experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity? That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies (1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to Fielding…
The review can be read in full at this link.
