Early August Roundup

–Novelist Dan Fesperman in LitHub.com discusses five novels which are set in realistic but imaginary places. One of those is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop:

…Waugh’s skewering of Fleet Street, published in 1938, is set in the East Africa nation of Ishmaelia, where hordes of British reporters have descended to report on a brewing civil war that may have imperial repercussions. Having arrived to find there is no actual war, the competing scribes then set about creating one on the pages of their newspapers.

A bit dated, but still a hilarious spoof, and its larger lessons seem to be proven true every time the world’s media magnates take an interest in some factional conflict abroad…

–The Times newspaper has a review by John Self of a new novel by Toby Viera entitled The Undrowned. Here are the opening paragraphs:

When a book makes you laugh on the first page — and the last time that happened to me was with Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall— you know you’re in business. Toby Vieira, who was born in India and now lives in Switzerland, may not be a big name, but anyone who read his 2016 debut novel, Marlow’s Landing— a steamy tale of diamond smuggling — will have been looking forward to his follow-up. And it’s even better.

That I laughed on the first page is not representative of the book, which is more of a thriller than a comedy, but it does reflect the sense I had of being putty in the hands of a novelist who knows what he’s doing. I relaxed with relief — then felt tense again as the plot began to crank into gear.

The Undrowned is set in a world like our own, but in it a new virus has begun to spread. It gives you yellow eyes and a fever — and it has an 80 per cent fatality rate. The virus, like the book, begins in an African country referred to only as The Land Of, where our hero Sebastian is working as a journalist…

–Charles Pasternak writing in The Oldie recalls his experience of being vetted for promotion in the postwar British Army. Here’s an excerpt:

…‘When you were at Oxford you were a member of the Anglo-Soviet Society?’

‘No, sir,’ I answered. ‘I was a member of the Oxford Union, but I didn’t participate in debates. I joined the Patten Club [for members of my alma mater, Magdalen College School] and the Spectator Club.’

The latter was an arty-crafty society addressed by eminent speakers. During my time as President, I invited Evelyn Waugh, making clear that we were a non-political, non-sectarian society. ‘I speak only to political, sectarian organisations,’ he replied…

Prospect Magazine has an article entitled Revisiting Brideshead. This is by Henry Oliver. Here are the opening paragraphs:

This is a time of Waugh. By which I mean: the ongoing publication of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, in a collaboration between the University of Leicester and Oxford University Press—including the 85 per cent of his letters which have never before seen print—is provoking an enjoyable critical reassessment of his writing.

But amid all the discussion, Waugh’s greatest novel—Brideshead Revisited—is being undervalued. The story follows Charles Ryder’s love affair with the Catholic, aristocratic Flyte family. After an intense friendship with the hedonistic aesthete Sebastian, he has an adulterous affair with Julia, Sebastian’s sister, leading to a religious crisis of conscience. The combination of the charms of pre-war Oxford and Charles’s eventual conversion has sustained Waugh’s reputation with the common reader for around 80 years. But the critics aren’t impressed.

Take this essay from the London Review of Books, for example, in which Seamus Perry dismisses Brideshead’s purple prose—even in Waugh’s toned-down later edition, he says, “your main reaction is still: oh puh-lease.” Perry concludes, in a backhanded sort of way, that this is “splendid schmaltz, like the Albert Memorial.”

Or this absorbing reappraisal of Waugh by Will Lloyd for the New Statesman (perhaps the best Waugh essay in recent years). Here, Lloyd largely ignores Brideshead, calling it “quite inexplicable to non-Catholics.” He tells me if he were ranking the novels, it would be close to the bottom.

Jeffrey Manley has even recommended (at the Evelyn Waugh Society website) crossing out the religious passages so that you are left with “a very funny book”. On a different track, though running in the same direction, Alexander Larman has said that there is not “a worse and queasier piece of writing” in Waugh than Brideshead’s sex scene between submissive Julia and possessive Charles.

Several of Waugh’s contemporaries felt similarly. Nancy Mitford told him the general view was, “Too much Catholic stuff”. His friend Christopher Sykes said, “‘Roman tract’ is being hissed in intellectual circles.” There were other complaints. Too many semicolons. Too much about the nobility. Too reactionary. Even Waugh’s brother Alec missed the straightforward jokes of earlier books.

Yet what they’re all missing is what keeps drawing readers in: Waugh’s artistry. In Brideshead, Waugh is the best 20th-century writer of dialogue. His comic monsters, such as Charles’s father, surpass even Jane Austen’s equivalents, such as Aunt Norris. Small moments of grotesque absurdity—the tortoise with the diamonds studded in its shell—are simply unforgettable…

— Centmagazine.co.uk posts an article by Jo Phillips that reconsiders the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and those of later generations that were inspired by the BYPs:

…This set of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites was based in London during the 1920s. They threw flamboyant parties, went on elaborate treasure hunts through nighttime London, and some drank heavily or used illicit drugs, all of which was enthusiastically covered by tabloid journalists and who elicited outrage from the population at the time.

But what became interesting and also almost set a playbook for future youth subcultures was the creativity that grew from it. From the young minds of writers like Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, to Trainspotting, the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, the sect of the ‘salad days’ has been consistently explored in literature.

Vile Bodies, the second novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1930, became a satire of the very bright young things, of which he was part. This elite group in 1920s Mayfair had a paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercising their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade, whether it was promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars.

The book highlights a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, who hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfilment of their desires.

Evelyn Waugh’s acidly funny and experimental satire showed a new generation emerging in the years after the First World War, revealing the darkness and vulnerability beneath the glittering surface of the high life. Interestingly, the original title, Bright Young Things, was changed by Waugh because he thought the phrase had become too clichéd…

Later generations are reflected in novels such as Trainspotting and A Clockwork Orange. A sound recording of the article is also available at the same site.