–US magazine Town & Country had included a brief article in its current issue regarding its status as the first venue to publish Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited:
The author Evelyn Waugh was on a wartime mission to Yugoslavia when he learned that his forthcoming novel, Brideshead Revisited, would be serialized in T&C ahead of its hardcover publication. Though Waugh was paid a princely $5,000 for the rights to the story (the equivalent of $94,000 today), he was unhappy with the results. But then again, our editors did butcher his masterpiece: the good folks at T&C cut the text down to half its original length. When it was published, Waugh told his publisher, “I hope it was plain that I would sell them the novel only on the condition that they would use it all.” The complete saga of the middle-class interloper Charles Ryder, his time at Oxford, and his relationships with the aristocratic Marchmain clan (consider it a proto-Saltburn) arrived on bookshelves the following year. And it’s been a favorite ever since.
The now preppy classic has since been adapted for the screen twice: Jeremy Irons led the cast in a 1981 miniseries, while Emma Thompson played Lady Marchmain in the 2008 film. Each version took some artistic license, but nothing as drastic T&C’s changes, which were apparently made for space. This drama may account for its relatively unexamined place in our archives (though Adrienne Westenfeld noted it, about a decade ago in the T&C Family Album). As Waugh says in the novel, “To understand all is to forgive all.” On the occasion of our 180th anniversary, we’d like to offer our apologies.
Waugh took care to assure that an abbreviated version of the novel did not appear in the UK. He was prepared to allow excerpts of the full text as written and approved by him. That was offered to Harper’s Bazaar in the UK, but once they discovered that Town & Country has published a shortened version of the entire book in the US, Harper’s lost interest. No one else took him up on it.
—The Times newspaper has a review of Philip Hensher’s book A History of the Novel in Britain, mentioned in a previous post. This is by novelist and literary scholar Paula Byrne. Here’s an excerpt:
…This is an unflagging survey that pays attention to the splendid but neglected mid-20th-century novels of Robert Liddell, Denton Welch and Ivy Compton-Burnett. No literary snob, Hensher enjoys Jilly Cooper’s “delighful” novels and Catherine Cookson’s “beautifully written, direct, honest” work. It’s unclear whether the absence of an account of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,the great novel of domestic abuse, is because he disapproves of it or hasn’t read it.
Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is described as “the most brilliant first novel since The Pickwick Papers” and Bleak House as “the greatest novel in the English language”. Some would reply that The Portrait of a Lady deserves that title, and Henry James, who had settled in London by then and took British citizenship in 1915, has as good a claim to being in these pages as anyone here. Bizarrely, The Portrait of a Lady is given only half a sentence that doesn’t name the title.
It is when he gets to Dickens that Hensher is at his inimitable best. He glories in the uproarious comedy of Pickwick and shows how Dickens can break your heart with the touch of a child’s finger in David Copperfield or in Joe Gargery’s “what larks” when he kneels at Pip’s sickbed. Then there is the cheery old woman in The Uncommercial Traveller, a collection of magazine sketches, who sells a young boy for sex with sailors on shore leave. But nothing surpasses the horror of the hair and blood on Bill Sikes’s club that batters Nancy to death. In Hensher’s telling phrase, the essence of the greatness of Dickens is “the exact and truthful notation of small and unique particulars”…
The article includes a color photograph of a scene from the BBC’s 2017 adaptation of Waugh’s Decline and Fall. A full copy of the review, entitled “An opinionated history of the novel…” is available here.
–Another recent book review in The Times mentions Waugh. The book by Steven Casey is entitled The Sceptic Isle: How the British Government Sold the Second World War and is about the Ministry of Information. It is reviewed by Ian Cobain. Here’s an excerpt:
…From the outbreak of war, the new Ministry of Information, attempting to maintain and monitor morale from Senate House at the University of London, had long been a byword for amateurishness and excessive censorship. The radio comedian Tommy Handley suggested it should merge with the Ministry of Agriculture to form the Ministry of Aggravation, with the power to “confiscate, complicate and commandeer”. Even at the height of the war Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh could not resist the urge to lampoon the ministry and its inexpert officials…
A full text can be read at the link above.
