–The British Medical Journal has posted an article from 1975 in which a professional psychiatrist reviews the 1957 novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. This appeared in the December 1975 issue of the professional magazine. The author is identified as Eliot Slater. The first page of the article has been reproduced and posted on the internet. Here is an excerpt from that page in which Dr. Slater describes Waugh’s book as:
“…a novel and not a medical document. A lot of novelist’s work has gone into it, with its elaborately interwoven conspiracies and hallucinatory voices speaking in perfect syntax. Nevertheless, one finds evidence that Waugh’s psychotic episode was passed in a state of clouded consciousness. Pinfold describes defective memories and disorientation in time. Most telling of all, the characters of the story have not been observed at all, least of all with Waugh’s habitually penetrating and sardonic eye. The story is an absurdity. Gilbert Pinfold is presented as a hero of titanic strength. He defends himself against his persecutors, confident he will be the victor. He unravels the “truth” of the conspiracies, defies the conspirators, reduces them to pleading for mercy, and eventually to silence. On return home he sees no priest, no psychiatrist, no medical specialist. He knows that he has endured “a great ordeal and, unaided, had emerged the victor.” Waugh v the Powers of Hell.
Given his personality it is no wonder that Evelyn Waugh had a paranoid psychosis; the wonder is that it needed drug intoxication, on top of alcoholism and his increasing deafness, to produce it. He got no promotion in the Army all through the war because of his total unfitness to be an officer. He could not be put in command of men because he bullied them and he hated them. He antagonised others by his delight in causing offence or by his own ostentatious indiscipline. Unaware of his failings, he put it all down to plots and machinations…
Dr. Slater was obviously aware of Waugh’s own personal response to the Pinfold episode which included medical and religious intervention. He mentions the Sykes biography, which was published the same year as the BMJ’s article, where these details are revealed (Sykes, Penguin, pp. 485ff). He may well address that historic response in the later pages of his article. The remainder of the article apparently may be viewed on the BMJ’s website which is available at this link. It is not mentioned in Waugh’s bibliography which appeared in 1986 and I cannot recall seeing it cited in later articles. Dr. Slater does include it among the extensive list of his publications in his archives. These are available here.
—The Daily Telegraph has an article about the unfinished cathedral in Barcelona which Waugh described in his travel book 1930 travel book Labels (ch. VI). The article is by Stephen Bailey and is entitled “La Sagrada Familia is Gaudi’s masterpiece. It’s also hideous.” In the article he explains how the design and construction of Barcelona church differs from the usual cathedrals. He notes that Orwell, who saw it a few years after Waugh, had thought it so defective that it should be torn down. The article concludes with this:
…Evelyn Waugh was more enthused by La Sagrada Família than Orwell. He visited in 1930 and it reminded him of the terrible bungalow communities on the South Coast. Thinking, perhaps of Peacehaven, Waugh found in Barcelona: “The same eagerness to attract attention”. He saw an “irresponsible confusion of architectural styles”. Gaudí, Waugh said, broke through “all boundaries of order and propriety”. This he did, leaving others to tidy up after him.
But the great thing about La Sagrada Família is what it tells us about ugliness and its place in our culture. And this is that ugliness is not boring, while sterile perfection often is. Mies van der Rohe’s hyper-modernist 1929 Barcelona Pavilion has been rebuilt on its original site. The Catalan tourist authorities are not much moved to promote it, beautiful as it may be.
As for the architect, in 1926 Gaudí was run over by a tram on the Gran via de les Corts Catalanes. He was looking so shabby, officials took several days to identify the body.
The complete article is available here.
There is also an article about the Barcelona church posted on the website Prufrock. This is by Micah Mattix and contains an extensive quote from Waugh’s travel book Labels. The article concludes with this:
…If you have never read Waugh’s Labels, summer is the perfect time, and Waugh is at his best in the book. Here’s the first sentence: “I did not really know where I was going, so, when anyone asked me, I said to Russia. Thus my trip started, like an autobiography, upon a rather nicely qualified basis of falsehood and self-glorification.” Perfect.
Here’s a link.
–London bookseller Peter Harrington has on offer a first edition copy of Work Suspended with an interesting back story:
First edition, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Frank from Evelyn, Christmas 1942”, and housed in a fine onlaid folding box. The recipient was his friend Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford, an old associate from Oxford, the godfather of Waugh’s son Auberon, and a companion with whom Waugh spent Christmas 1930 at Pakenham Hall in Westmeath, Ireland.
During their university years, Pakenham (1905-2001) edited the Oxford Fortnightly Review, which announced that “Evelyn Waugh made a perilous but successful journey to Oxford the week before last on Queensbury, his new motor-bicycle, and a few were privileged to watch him, leather-coated and leather-helmeted, pushing it along the Corn in a gallant but blasphemous effort to shame [it] into some sort of activity” (cited in Stannard, p. 123). Waugh wrote to him about his place as a writer during wartime, stating that the conflict’s “chief use would be to cure artists of the illusion that they were men of action”, a lesson Waugh admits he learned slower than Pakenham (Carpenter, p. 351).
Work Suspended was the title given to the fragments of a novel Waugh abandoned to take up active service, not published until his return. It is one of 500 copies printed.
The book is on offer for £4,000. Here’s a link.
–After facing much criticism for its recent list of the 100 best novels based on a survey of literary critics and journalists, the Guardian has conducted a survey of its readers. While nothing by Waugh appeared in the first list, Brideshead Revisited appears as No. 75 in the more recent one. The entry also includes this comment:
Declan Durrant, South Australia, 28: “It is the great novel from possibly the greatest prose stylist of the 20th century. Creamy and redolent with excess and guilt and moral decay in a lost England which, perhaps, never existed – and if it did, maybe shouldn’t have.”
The entire list can be accessed through this link.
—Literary Review has published a review of the recent book that is a history of the writing and publication of the novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover. This is entitled Flailing Fornication and is written by Guy Cuthbertson. The review is by Duncan Fallowell. Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:
…Unsurprisingly, Lady C is replete with drama and farce. We learn that the novel’s passionate admirers included W B Yeats, Philip Larkin, Hermann Hesse, Stevie Smith, Norman Mailer, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, E M Forster, Madonna and David Bowie. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath revered it; for Plath, Hughes became a Mellors-gamekeeper fantasy. The haters included Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, W H Auden and Enid Blyton. F R Leavis did not admit the novel into the Lawrentian canon because, as Cuthbertson perceptively observes, it ‘was a book Leavis was not in control of’. T E Lawrence delivered the classic dismissal of those who can’t cope with Eros at all: ‘Surely the sex business isn’t worth all this damned fuss?’ …
