Roundup: From Aston Clinton to Holkham Hall

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan Mclaren has expanded his discussion of Waugh’s school teaching career at Aston Clinton based on his newly available materials. The discussion has been posted on Duncan’s website. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to give you some idea of what he has added:

…On the face of it, the Welsh School, was uppermost in his mind. The physical layout of Llanabba Castle owes much to Arnold House, Denbighshire. Also, Mrs Roberts pub, where Paul Pennyfeather spent much of his non-teaching time, is an actual pub that can still be found in the streets of Llanddullas, and I drank there myself in 2011 in the footsteps of Evelyn Waugh circa 1925. Also, the extraordinary character Grimes is based entirely on a man called Young, who arrived at Arnold House at the beginning of Waugh’s second term there.

However, I hope to show that Waugh’s four terms at Aston Clinton were also important to the art of Decline and Fall. During School sports day, the arrival in a limousine of Margot Beste-Chetwynde was based on something that happened at Aston Clinton, located as it is between London and Oxford. Such exotic visitors were simply not going to turn up when Evelyn was exiled to the middle of nowhere, as Evelyn would have thought of his Welsh existence.

The photo album newly made available by Pat Grinling’s son and Sue Willis, nearly 100 years after it was put together, is going to be integral to my attempts to show how teaching at Aston Clinton contributed to Waugh’s artistry. The good news for you, dear reader, is that you don’t need to buy into my thesis. There is every chance that you will be just as intrigued and enchanted as I have been by the Pat Grinling photographs and the way they complement Evelyn Waugh’s vivid and outrageous diary entries of the time…

Here is a link to the additional material which includes at least one newly identified photograph of Evelyn Waugh. Many thanks again to Duncan for passing this along.

–The New Statesman has published a review of a new book entitled Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite. The book is by Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves and is reviewed by Nicholas Harris. It follows the lives of Francis Charteris and his descendants and is intended show to illustrate the adaptation and survival of the British upper class. Here’s the conclusion of the review:

…The public schools and establishment universities might still be producing this elite, but only because they’ve adapted to the new age. Eton Rifles is out, replaced by advanced Stem and kindergarten computer science. And it’s fitting that elite British education is an export industry now, subsidised in particular by the scions of an East Asian super-rich. What they aim to produce is not so much a domestic ruling class but an international elite, fit to fill the rosters of global business. Any descendant of Francis Charteris might pass through the same institutional furnaces as their ancestor, but they’d be smelted and beaten into a very different alloy. These levelling trends are only set to continue. Most people admitted to Who’s Who are around 50. Who knows what the fintech elite of 2054 will list as their hobbies: Peloton and IQ testing?

Thanks to the propaganda of the period drama, our vision of our upper class is hopelessly anachronistic. The general public remains more familiar with marquises and under-butlers than it is with consultancy or corporate law. Amid such misconceptions, Born to Rule is an important attempt to take the measure of our new and evolved elite and… provides much-needed academic clarity.

Class has now returned to British politics, but class war is very difficult to wage…The modern elite doesn’t exhibit itself with old boys’ ties, let alone horse and carriage. It Ubers about London open-necked, free from political identification or scrutiny.

In Friedman and Reeves’s conclusion, they suggest several admirable policy decisions to loosen the stranglehold they identify. One (applying VAT to private-school fees) featured in Labour’s first King’s Speech. Others – reforming council tax, raising a wealth tax, a cap on private-school students attending Russell Group universities – likely exceed the political capital of this government. But beyond public policy, the achievement of this fascinating book should be to spark a broader reconsideration of our new ruling caste: no longer the seigneurial elite so beloved of Evelyn Waugh, but a successor class to Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe”.

I am not sure it is quite fair to say the the upper class were “beloved” by Waugh. Like Tom Wolfe did for his generation’s “masters of the universe”, Waugh satirized the upper classes as he knew them and was probably grateful to them for the material they provided him to inspire his writing.

–Several fashion websites have cited Waugh’s writings as an inspiration for a new men’s clothing line designed by Hedi Slimane. Here is a sample of the description:

There has been much talk about the return of Cool Britannia in recent months, between the Saltburn phenomenon and the Oasis reunion – but it was another aspect of English aesthetics that Hedi Slimane had in mind when he signed, filmed, and produced the new Celine SS25 collection, whose video-show was unexpectedly presented yesterday afternoon under the title The Bright Young. A single glance at college-style jackets, 1920s straw hats, and glimpses of young people lounging among green fields or rowing on a pond takes us back to Brideshead Revisited, a classic by Evelyn Waugh and one of the cornerstones of the most aristocratic queer English prose after that of Oscar Wilde. It is to Waugh, but to the book Vile Bodies, a kind of satire of the hedonistic England of the 1920s, that the epigraph accompanying the collection belongs. And Slimane has followed the self-imposed theme thoroughly: in the avenues of the stunning Holkham Hall in Norfolk, slender, very young dandy figures move as if they have just come from Eton with their uniforms still on, taking refuge in their family’s noble villa in a burst of high society signifiers, including heraldic crests. (Emphasis in original)

This is excerpted from a posting on NSS Magazine which is available here.

–The religious website WordsOnFire.com has a brief review by Dr Christopher Kaczor highly recommending Brideshead Revisited. After a brief description of the plot, the review concludes:

…These marital and familial conflicts come to a surprising conclusion at the culmination of the novel. More than one character is caught with “an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” I won’t spoil the ending. But have Kleenex handy.

 

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Labor Day Roundup

Posted on August 31, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

—Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington has announced a Fall schedule of literary podcasts and other activities. One of these features a four-hour discussion of Brideshead Revisited in two separate podcast episodes. Here is their description:

One of the most beloved and confounding works of 20th century British literature, Brideshead Revisited poses a unique challenge to today’s readers. Even the author himself, Evelyn Waugh, couldn’t decide whether the book was his masterpiece or a disaster. Is the book a nostalgic celebration of the aristocracy in decline or a poison-pen dissection of British classism? How does the book’s portrayal of the loving friendship between its two male protagonists come across read through a contemporary lens? The inspiration for a classic British miniseries as well as the recent instant cult classic film Saltburn, Brideshead Revisited won’t leave us alone. In this two-session course, we’ll dive into this lyrical and deeply affecting book together to unlock its mysteries.

Reading Schedule:

Session One: Please read the Prologue and Chapters 1-6

Session Two: Please read Chapter 7 to the end

Two Mondays: November 4 and 11 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. ET Online

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (9780316242103)

Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection titled The View from Stalin’s Head which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. He has also written three novels: Faith for Beginners, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, Nirvana is Here, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards, and Hotel Cuba, a finalist for the 2024 Bridge Book Awards. In 2023, he was awarded by Lambda Literary with the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Tablet, O, the Oprah Magazine, and many others. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program.

Booking, fees and other details are available at this link.

–The New Statesman has a review of the final volume of the late Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life columns from The Spectator. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

One passes by the graveyard so often that sooner or later one falls into it, says the Russian proverb. Jeremy Clarke wrote the “Low Life” column in the Spectator from 2001 until his death from cancer, aged 66, in May 2023.

The column had been created by Jeffrey Bernard, recruited to the Spectator in the 1970s by the then editor, Alexander Chancellor, who admired Bernard’s writing in the New Statesman and devised “Low Life” to complement the “High Life” offerings of the gossip columnist, Taki. Bernard, an alcoholic, diabetic and perpetual chancer, excelled in exquisitely poised accounts of his chaotic days, making what would be painful to encounter – his editor described him as a nightmare; his agent called him a little shit – hilarious to read.

That feat seemed to be wholly individual, yet the column didn’t perish with Bernard in 1997. There have been two great exponents of such derelict dandyism since: Nicholas Lezard, in “Down and Out” in this magazine, and Jeremy Clarke.

Jeffrey Bernard was a fallen nob. Jeremy Clarke, lower middle class, raised in Southend, left school with two O-levels and supported West Ham. His dedication to drink, drugs, sex, partying and general mayhem, resulting in a number of convictions, was supplemented by work as a bin man and an assistant in a psychiatric hospital. Yet he was profoundly literary, his great inspiration being early Evelyn Waugh, above all the relished anarchy of Decline and Fall…

The book is reviewed by David Sexton. Here’s a link.

–Frank McNally writing in the Irish Times ruminates on the correct adjectival form for the surname of the poet James Clarence Mangan. Here’s an excerpt:

…I suspect the previously standard adjective for Mangan, by the usual rule of these things, was “Manganesque”. But Manganese is so much better it will surely stick now. Besides which, I’m not sure there are any rules for such words, beyond what sounds right.

There is of course a Wikipedia page listing all the known eponymous adjectives. They typically involve just adding “an” (eg Wildean), “ic” (Homeric), “ist” (Stalinist) or “ite” (Thatcherite) to the end of the name.

But as with verbs, there are also a few irregular ones, mostly (it seems) to do with the inability of the dominant English accent to pronounce certain sounds.

At least I used to assume that was why the literary style of Evelyn Waugh – whose surname many English people would have us believe sounds exactly the same as “war” – has become known as “Wavian”.

Or similarly, that we must use “Shavian” to describe things pertaining to our own George Bernard Shaw. But then again, it seems it was Shaw who started this habit, and that it’s based on a Latin joke.

As Nicholas Grene explained in a letter to this page some years ago, Shaw told his early biographer Hesketh Pearson that the adjective arose when somebody found a medieval manuscript by another Shaw with the marginal comment: “Sic Shavius, sed inepte” (“thus Shaw, but badly”).

—The Spectator has a review of a new book entitled Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans. The review is by Amanda Craig and opens with this:

Books and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster?

All this might seem familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Hannah Rothschild and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. The mad relations living under one giant leaky roof, the shabby furnishings, brown tap water and discomforts of being cash-poor, snobbish and servantless are what render the subjects of class and property entertaining. But in the hands of Evans, one of our finest writers of literary entertainment, this all becomes more than an exercise in nostalgia. The second world war formed the background of her previous novels, including Their Finest (which was successfully filmed in 2016) and V for Victory. Here she shows how the war’s disruption to ordinary lives prepared the ground for everything in today’s Britain, from the welfare state to feminism. Soldiers are being demobbed and the age of Attlee has replaced that of Churchill, signalling change that will continue into our own time…

The full review is available here.

 

 

 

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Dog Days Roundup

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–BBC has announced the rebroadcast of a three-hour adaptation of Waugh’s wartime novel Put Out More Flags. This will air on BBC Radio 4 Extra over three successive days at 15:00p British time starting on Tuesday, 3 September 2024. Here’s the detail for the first episode:

As the Second World War looms, louche, upper class loafer Basil Seal considers his role in the unfolding events.

Evelyn Waugh’s sixth novel, first published in 1942.

The satire reprises characters found in previous novels such as ‘Decline and Fall’ and ‘Vile Bodies’.

Three-part dramatisation by Denys Hawthorne.

The part of Basil Seal will be played by actor Simon Cadell. Basil had appeared most prominently in Waugh’s third novel Black Mischief (1932). This adaptation was first broadcast in September 1990. A link to all three episodes is available here.

–Waugh’s war trilogy features in the opening paragraph of an article in the religious journal Crisis Magazine:

In the first volume of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, Guy Crouchback learns from a chance conversation that because he has a valid sacramental marriage with a wife who divorced him, civilly married and then divorced others, and has recently been having casual sex with nobody knows how many men, it is morally permissible for him, as her husband, to himself sleep with her. With that knowledge, he meets with her in a hotel room and is at the point of succeeding when his plans are derailed by a chance telephone call…

The article by James Baresel then goes on in some detail to consider the religious implications of Guy’s resumption of marital relations with his wife. Here’s a link. An audio version is also available at the same link.

–An online religious-political journal leads an article with a quote from Waugh’s novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe. The website is called The Imaginative Conservative. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh’s gently satirical Scott-King’s Modern  Europe follows the declining career of a classics teacher at Granchester, a fictional English public school. Granchester is “entirely respectable” but in need of a bit of modernizing, at least in the opinion of its pragmatic headmaster, who is attuned to consumer demands. The story ends with a poignant conversation between Scott-King and the headmaster:

“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”

“I thought that would be about the number.”

“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”

“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”

“I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn’t conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?”

“Oh yes. Often.”

“What I was going to suggest was—I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?”

“No, headmaster.”

“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”

And there ends the story of Scott-King’s misadventures in the modern world. Any teacher who has endured a similar conversation sympathizes instinctively with poor Scott-King. His dignified but stubborn resistance to the wickedness of making students fit for the modern world speaks to the heart of teachers who, like Scott-King, take the long view. It is to these teachers, then—and to like-minded students, parents, and administrators—that this anthology of classic writings on education is addressed…

The novella is included in a collection of writings entitled The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being. This is edited by Richard Gamble who also wrote the article which may be read in its entirety at this link.

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New York Times Promotes “The Loved One”

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s 1948 novella The Loved One seems to be getting a lot of press attention nowadays. Earlier this week the new CWEW edition was reviewed in the TLS, and now the book is recommended in the New York Times. This is in a column entitled “Read Like the Wind” and written by Joumana Khatib. Here’s a copy:

You probably know Waugh for his novel “Brideshead Revisited,” or if you’re journalism-adjacent you’ve possibly read “Scoop,” or if you really have excellent taste you might cherish “Vile Bodies” as much as I do.

“The Loved One” isn’t as well known, but this novella is quintessential Waugh: outrageously funny, a satire that arrives like a javelin hurled from left field. It is also very, very weird.

The story follows a community of fairly ineffectual British expats in Los Angeles, and centers on a love triangle involving a funeral home aesthetician, her mortician boss and a rival embalmer — of animals.

I’m as skittish as the next maladjusted mortal about death, corpses, embalming fluids, coffins. And yet! I was howling on every other page. The premise is utterly absurd, sure, and Waugh packs a lot in: a lovelorn man called Mr. Joyboy, a pair of newspaper reporters writing a pseudonymous advice column, a madcap cover-up. (The 1965 film version — which, however improbably, features Liberace — deserves a mention in the DSM.)

But it’s the dialogue that sends the story into the extreme. Take this, as a sample:

“An open casket is all right for dogs and cats,” the animal embalmer (who is also a hack poet) explains to his love interest; but parrots “look absurd with the head on a pillow. 
 Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”

God, I’m laughing just retyping that.

Read if you like: Spy magazine, estate sales, “Fawlty Towers.”
Available from: A good library or used-book store, or online at Project Gutenberg Canada (where the book is in the public domain).

If  you click on the link to Project Gutenberg you will indeed find a full copy of the book. It is a reprint of the Chapman & Hall 1969 printing [2nd printing of the 1965 edition]. This contains the Preface written by Waugh in 1964 and several edits he made to the text. While you should be able to read it on your computer, you may not be able to download or print it unless you are connected to the internet in Canada where it is out of copyright.

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TLS Reviews The Loved One

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Jonathan Keates has reviewed the OUP’s new Collected Works edition of Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One. This appears in the current edition of the Times Literary Supplement (16 August 2024). The article is entitled: “Slumber Room, then Paradise: Evelyn Waugh’s pitiless vision of a Los Angeles cemetery.” Here are some excerpts:

When The Loved One first appeared, in a single issue of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine early in 1948, there was a distinct feeling of relief among many readers at its author’s return to form. Brideshead Revisited, the book’s predecessor, had been greeted with critical respect, and its sales were gratifying enough, yet the prospect of an accomplished and original satirist earnestly weighing the values of Britain’s Catholic aristocracy against their dreaded antithesis in “the world of Hooper” had furrowed quite a few brows. Time magazine, for example, found “the typical Waugh mood, bright, pardlike and impermeable, clouded by a sweat of nostalgic and religious dither”. With his new novel, Waugh’s admirers, claimed the Daily Telegraph, “who feared that he had lost his powers to be shocking may from all accounts take heart”.

Exactly how Waugh aimed to shock with The Loved One is not so obvious. The novel can be viewed on one level as a morsel of anthropology, fascinating us with the otherness of American manners, speech habits and preoccupations. There is a continuous sense of the challenge issued to our credulity by the writer himself, lured to Hollywood in 1947 by a potential contract for a screen version of Brideshead. While this project headed swiftly nowhere, Waugh trained his gaze on the Forest Lawn cemetery, its mortuary techniques and funeral practices, all part, as he saw it, of Hollywood’s unending struggle to fend off the more prosaic and pitiless actualities involved in the business of dying. Whereas the Old World saw interment and memorials as inherently admonitory, a moral injunction to the living, for the New “the body does not decay. It lives on, more chic than ever before; the soul goes straight from the Slumber Room to Paradise, where it enjoys an endless infancy”.

Talk of “the Slumber Room” forms part of a specialist vocabulary in whose acquisition Waugh clearly revelled. “I am entirely obsessed by Forest Lawn”, he told his agent. “I go there three or four times a week, am on easy terms with the chief embalmer. It is the only thing in California that is not a copy of something else.” …

In a wide-ranging introduction to this new edition Adrian Poole presents The Loved One as a work of greater substance than is often acknowledged. Dramatizing a clash of moral priorities, American vs European, while giving vent to its author’s spleen amid the cynical barbarism of the postwar world, the book shocked several early reviewers by its lack of anything like compassion. For Waugh the act of becoming a Catholic, it seemed, did not guarantee any renewed impulse of Christian charity. Desmond McCarthy was surely right in identifying “a misanthropic tinge more reminiscent of Swift” and seeing the story’s dimension of macabre farce as simply a carapace for its inherently tragic vision of life.

Nothing better emphasizes this aspect than Waugh’s treatment of his antihero, Dennis Barlow. Superficially another of the satirist’s Candide-like innocents, cast adrift amid predatory sophisticates, an avatar of Paul Pennyfeather, Adam Symes or William Boot, he is in fact a heartless, calculating opportunist whose insolent lying trashes the marriage prospects of Aimee Thanatogenos, the mortician Mr Joyboy’s prize pupil, driving her to suicide. The plot here offers a skilful variant on one of Saki’s most acrid short stories, “The Jesting of Arlington Stringham”, in which the jaundiced wife of a dim MP, puzzled by his suddenly acquired reputation as a wit, takes an overdose on discovering he has acquired a mistress with a turn for tart epigrams.

In this newest edition, The Loved One forms part of Oxford University Press’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, receiving in the process a treatment reminiscent of the Arden Shakespeare. There is an exhaustive survey of manuscript development and textual variants, while sections on reception history and the novel’s broader contemporary resonances are included, as is the original set of illustrations by Stuart Boyle. In case we should still think of the whole achievement as mere mischief-making born of boredom and frustration, the last of the editor’s contextual notes reminds us of Evelyn Waugh’s own statement, made in 1946: “I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as normality. That is what makes story-telling such an absorbing task, the attempt to reduce to order the anarchic raw materials of life. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own”. [Additional excerpts from the text of the article were added: 17 August 2024.]

The book was released in the UK in April, but publication in the US has been delayed several times. It was originally scheduled for US release in July but is currently rescheduled by Amazon.com for US delivery in February 2025, with no discussion as to why US publication has been delayed. Could it be the case that demand has so far  exceeded the initial print run that a new printing is required? Given that the book is selling for £130.00 in the UK, that somehow seems unlikely. A more likely explanation is that the shipping container in which the US copies were transported has been misdelivered.

 

 

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New Waugh Photos Posted

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has posted three newly-available photos of Evelyn Waugh. These were taken, probably in 1926, by one of his senior students at Aston Clinton School whom he had befriended. The photographer’s name was Patrick Grinling, and he is mentioned in Waugh’s Diaries (p. 255). The photos are of a piece with the well-known photo of Waugh on a motorcycle that appears in some of the biographies and is reproduced on the cover of Paula Byrnes’ 2009 book Mad World. That photo can also now be attributed to Grinling whereas it previously was sourced from the “Waugh Archives.” Duncan also provides an ample and enjoyable background description about the source of the photos and how they fit into Waugh’s then life as a schoolmaster. The text and photos are available at this link. Thanks once again to Duncan for sharing this new discovery with us.

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Roundup: War Trilogy, Conference and Campus Novel

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Critic magazine has published a feature length article on Waugh’s war trilogy, Sword of Honour. This is written by Max Bayliss and is entitled “Waugh at war: Self-sacrifice, tradition and service seem to have been cast aside by today’s society.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Over a pint recently, a friend described how, after leaving the infantry, he underwent a prolonged period of physical and psychological exertion in the hope of joining the Special Forces. Gruelling stuff. Despite years of training and an impressive service record, he didn’t make the cut.

Yet Evelyn Waugh, at 37 and running to fat after two sedentary decades veering between the bottle and the typewriter, joined 8 Commando. He had been recommended by a friend to Brigadier Sir Joseph Laycock at the bar of White’s. Laycock, who admired Waugh’s work, took him on because their mutual friend said he was “often funnier in fact than in fiction” and “could not fail to be an asset in the dreary business of war”.

To spend an afternoon in Waugh’s company is to spend time in another world, where the seemingly impossible is probable, and the romantic is routine. His novels and his life — at times almost the stuff of fiction — are a window onto a set of ideals and experiences barely recognisable today. His work and biography challenge contemporary mores. They confront our society’s views on death, conflict, duty and corporate identity. I can’t help but think that ours are found wanting…

Sword of Honour is discussed in greater detail in the remainder of the article. Reverend Bayliss is Chaplain and Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge.  Here’s a link to the full article.

–Our colleague Duncan McLaren has posted a complete copy of his memoir of the Society’s 2011 Conference at Downside College.  Any of our readers who attended that conference will appreciate many of the details recounted by Duncan.  The photographs are also worth a close look.  His experience does not start well.  Here are introductory paragraphs from the opening section entitled “Arrival”:

We get to Downside School, Somerset, at 9pm, hoping that we’re not too late for dinner. The private Catholic school is massive, dark and quiet. Is anybody there? A couple of security guards are. They know nothing about any Waugh conference but are aware that something was going on in the middle of the school earlier in the evening and are willing to escort me there.

So off I go between the two uniformed guards, and after five minutes march, I’m face to face with a couple of unsmiling organisers of the Waugh conference. Apparently, they have reported to the police someone making a drunken nuisance of themselves in the school grounds, and I think they suspect that the villain has been apprehended and brought before them. Not so: I come in peace, and, what’s more, having paid for full board and lodgings. Accordingly, I ask if there’s any food available. “Nope,” comes the stony-faced reply. “Are any of the other confrùres still around?” I ask, smiling. “Most of them have retired to their rooms.” I’m told, dryly. I suppose that means that a few folk are still up and socialising. But by the time I’ve turned around his answer the pair have disappeared up a corridor, no doubt headed for some exclusive meeting in a bar. Christ, maybe Kate and I should have got up at 4am this morning in order to check-in on time and endure a tour of Downside Abbey.

The local pub has also stopped serving food, which is bad news in particular for Kate, who needs to eat little and often and who’s been going on about her hunger since we touched down at Bristol Airport. I’m not bothered by the situation, indeed I’m quite excited by a coincidence. In the summer of 1946, when Evelyn Waugh attended – purely for the jollies – a conference in Spain, devoted to a lawyer he’d never even heard of, he wrote in his diary that he and his travelling companion, Douglas Woodruff, had ‘no luncheon’ on the first day. When he later came to fictionalise the event in Scott King’s Modern Europe, where a dim classics scholar, accompanied by an academic called Whitemaid, goes to a conference in Neutralia devoted to the work of an obscure Seventeenth Century poet, Waugh transformed his experience into art in the following way: “A steward announced: ‘We shall arrive at Bellacita at sixteen hours Neutralian time.’
‘An appalling thought occurs to me, said Whitemaid. ‘Can this mean we get no luncheon?’”…

Things lighten up after this bumpy beginning. The full text and photographs are posted at this site.  Thanks to Duncan for sending this along.

–The Daily Telegraph has an article by writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe.  Johns makes the case that this was the quintessential example of a genre called the “Campus Novel” that has by now all but disappeared.  After a fairly detailed discussion of Porterhouse Blue (both the 1974 novel and the 1987 TV adaptation), Johns offers this description of its history:

…There had been antecedents to the genre – including Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911), and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). But the campus novel was firmly established with C P Snow’s cerebral, emotionally nuanced The Masters (1951), which deals with the politics of academia and the scheming surrounding the election of a new master at an unnamed Cambridge college.

Next came Kingsley Amis’s mordantly amusing Lucky Jim (1954), a send-up of post-war academia’s pretensions, featuring protagonist Jim Dixon, a disenchanted history lecturer at an unnamed red-brick university, whose academic mishaps and romantic vicissitudes are chronicled in what was probably Amis’s tour de force.

The genre reached its zenith in the 1970s – perhaps unsurprising, given that compared with the 1960s, when only 4 per cent of people in the UK went to university, that figure had risen to 8 per cent a decade later as universities expanded to take students from disparate social classes and backgrounds. As social mobility increased, campus novels provided a welcome place where the traditions of the past, the flux of the present and hopes for the future could all be interrogated.

Along with Porterhouse Blue, the decade saw the publication of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) – a salacious satire of academic life set in the fictional new “glass and steel” university of Watermouth, depicting the sexual dalliances and political intrigues of sociology lecturer Howard Kirk and his wife Barbara; Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes (1976), set partly in Cambridge; Michael Frayn’s play Donkeys’ Years (1976), a farce about an Oxbridge reunion; and David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), a clever and humane novel about an exchange between English lecturer Philip Swallow and US academic Morris Zapp from the respective, fictitious universities of Rummidge and Euphoric State in the equally fictional town of Plotinus, “situated between Northern and Southern California”.

All captured the zeitgeist and preoccupations of their time, when the tectonic plates of social class, educational aspiration and the new “isms” were rubbing together, often discordantly. Howard Jacobson’s Coming From Behind (1983), featuring priapic Jewish protagonist Sefton Goldberg, an English teacher at a West Midlands poly, and Lodge’s Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), the concluding parts of his campus trilogy, were more touchstones to the genre. But the genre was arguably on the wane, out of step with the asperities of Thatcherite Britain and economic recession, when higher education had, for some, become less important as a means to self-improvement.

Greater accessibility to tertiary education in the past 30 years has perhaps sounded the death knell for the British campus novel. Under Tony Blair’s Labour government, the democratisation of higher education was a priority and in 1999 a target of 50 per cent of young people going to university was set. One can only surmise that, with its cachet of exclusivity gone, what is now quotidian and familiar to many is less appealing to treat in fiction.

Yet despite the fetishisation of British academic life over earlier decades, and some recent laudable offerings, including Elanor Dymott’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2012) and James Cahill’s Tiepolo Blue (2022), the British campus novel now seems moribund, a relic of a bygone, more optimistic and ebullient age.

Could Porterhouse Blue be written today? I doubt it. Campuses are fraught with obstacles for the contemporary novelist. With its pursuit of diversity, unremitting focus on students as consumers and proliferation of low-value degree subjects, higher education has changed inexorably.

Modern campuses are already so dangerously close to parody that satire is either redundant or off limits, for fear of falling prey to that career-destroying scourge, cancel culture. Conversely, one could argue that there has never been a better time – or need – for a Sharpe, Amis or Lodge to take aim at the foibles and peccadilloes, and puncture the intellectual vanities of a new generation of undergraduates – and academics.

I’d wager that the recent sight of students protesting in support of Palestine by occupying camps in the august environs of the Radcliffe Camera, Oxford, and King’s College, Cambridge – both hitherto hallowed spaces – would have been enough to give anyone, including even the most bien pensant of liberals, a Porterhouse blue.

 

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Instead of an obituary: James Waugh in the writings of his family.

Posted on August 12, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

As noted in a previous post, the Daily Telegraph dated 24 September 2022 announced the death on 12 September 2022 of James Waugh, age 76.  This appears to be the second son of Evelyn Waugh.  No other obituaries have been noted.  In their absence, the following memorial statement is offered based on the writings of James Waugh’s family members.

James Waugh is mentioned at least once in his father’s Diaries (2 July 1946, p. 655): “Home [from Spain] in comfort by air to find London almost as hot as Madrid.  A telegram awaiting me to say Laura was delivered of a son.”  There is no other indexed entry for James in the UK first edition of the Diaries, but then the index to that edition is notoriously inadequate.  There is no entry whatever for his youngest son, Michael Septimus.

In 1954, Evelyn wrote a letter to his daughter Margaret; “On Tuesday night your mother and I went to Mells for James’ first communion.  [James was 8 years old at the time.]  He looked very nice with a large white flower in his button-hole.  We had breakfast.  The little boy next to me, I could see from the corner of my eye, had a pile of loving letters from his brothers and sisters.  Not so poor James.  He came out to Mells for the day and cheated at Solitaire
”  The next day Evelyn Waugh and his wife went to London for his mother’s funeral. (Letter dated 13 December 1954, Letters, p. 434).

Two years later Evelyn mentions that he “left my son James [age 10] in charge of the Hollises to send with their son to Stonyhurst.” (Letter dated 26 September [1956] to Ann Fleming, Letters, p. 475.)  Stonyhurst is a Roman Catholic boarding school in the north of England.  Three years later, he wrote her (18 July 1959): “In choosing a school one consideration is paramount.  It must be either near friends or a civilized town. I have had to stop seeing my son James since sending him to Stoneyhurst [sic]. It is ghastly taking little boys (and girls) out from school.  A neighboring marble hall alleviates it a little” (Letters of Ann Fleming, p. 235).

In 1962, he wrote to Nancy Mitford that “Bloggs Baldwin
came here the other day & my son, James (age 16), said ‘At last I have met a P. G. Wodehouse character in the flesh.’” (Undated letter, received 22 August 1962, Letters, p. 592.)  On 7 January 1964 he wrote to Daphne Acton: “My son James (17) is also a thorn.  Won’t go into the church or the army, smokes cigarettes & can’t take his hands out of his pockets” (Letters, p. 617).  Later that year he wrote to Ann Fleming: “My dud son James [by then 18] has passed into Sandhurst so need not go to Australia” (Letters, p. 626).

James’ career from this point is a bit unclear.  In April 1966 he was at home with his younger brother Septimus when Evelyn died on 10 April.  They both cooperated in extracting Evelyn’s dead body from the downstairs lavatory where he had expired.  But since that was Easter weekend, they would be expected to be at home rather than at school or the Army.  He does seem to have served in the Army because Auberon writes in his autobiography that when their mother died at Combe Florey on 17 June 1975, James “then a soldier, had been staying with her in the wing.”

Auberon first mentions James in connection with comparing their boarding schools (Auberon at Downside and James at Stonyhurst).  Auberon notes that, like him, James had learned boxing at school but, unlike Auberon, James had won “a Blue at Oxford” (Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?, London: 1991, pp. 68, 210).  It is possible that James started college at Sandhurst (about age 19 in 1965-6) but transferred to Oxford (or he may have entered Oxford directly) and then served in the Army afterwards.  Army service was obligatory in those days and could be performed before or after college. There is a marriage recorded in October 1976 of  “James Waugh” to Rachel D’Abreu in Taunton.  They had one child.

Auberon also writes of James in connection with a meeting in September 1959 when their paths crossed at the Italian villa of their Uncle Auberon Herbert in Portofino.  James, then 13, was “the object of close cross-questioning by Auberon [Herbert] on the prevalence of homosexuality at Stonyhurst, the Jesuit college in Lancashire to which he had been sent.  James pretended not to know what it was, until eventually admitting ‘you get the occasional cases of vileness among the younger boys.’  This turn of phrase caused endless delight, and Auberon [Herbert] used it to his dying day, fifteen years later” (Idem, p. 122).

Alexander Waugh also writes of his Uncle James in his book Fathers and Sons (London: 2004).  Alexander grew up at Combe Florey and must have known James fairly well given that they seem to have lived near each other.  James is first mentioned by Alexander as one of the readers of the service at the 2001 funeral of Auberon, Alexander’s father, in an Anglican church near Combe Florey (p. 7).  Alexander writes, “Evelyn never showed the slightest interest in James, his second son.  The two youngest children were grouped together in Evelyn’s mind as ‘the boys’, but with Septimus always preferred. ‘Your brother James is home dull as ditchwater; your brother Septimus, bright as a button.’”

Alexander continues: “James was intelligent in mind and able with his hands but, like his mother, he was fundamentally lazy, unambitious, unrealistic and undemonstrative. Evelyn bullied him.  ‘And now,’ he would say to assembled guests after dinner, ‘and now my son James will tell us an amusing story.’  Poor James would leave the table in tears.  At best Evelyn found James ‘quaint’ and expected him, without conviction or interest, to follow the usual path of an English gentleman’s younger son by entering the army or the Church.  He had no expectation of him as a writer, believing him devoid of literary taste. ‘James is reading P. G. Wodehouse with great seriousness, “Don’t you find it funny, James?”  “I think the book is meant to be serious, Papa.”  The book was Carry on Jeeves.’  Later, in despair of James’s literary curiosity, he bribed him to read one of his own books.  James chose The Loved One, Evelyn’s shortest novel, and sat for a while sighing over the first page in the drawing room.  When Laura announced she needed help topping and tailing beans in the kitchen, James, not usually keen on that sort of thing, leaped to his feet and forgot all about the book” (pp. 325-6).

At another point, Alexander mentions Evelyn’s pairing James with Harriet (“Hatty”), his youngest daughter, as “backward.”  When they took an interest in raising rabbits, Evelyn “was at first enthusiastic but after a while began to see in Hatty’s and James’s uninhibited enthusiasm only further indication of their mental derangement.  Hatty’s favorite, Gabriel, and another called Raphael fell to the myxomatosis virus in December 1958, but James had cunningly taken a pair to school which, despite masculine names—Michael and Harvey—succeeded in breeding together a whole new generation.  Back at Combe Florey in the Christmas holidays Evelyn complained that the rabbits were not entering enough into the spirit of the season and gave them each a goblet of vodka to perk them up.  They expired of alcohol poisoning on New Year’s Eve” (p. 374).

Waugh’s biographers do not spend much time on James.  To Martin Stannard he remained a “mystery” and Christopher Sykes and Douglas Patey merely include him among a list of the children.  Selina Hastings (p. 580) manages a paragraph dedicated to James, recounting several of the anecdotes described above and adding that “James had a stutter, of which his father made cruel fun.  Evelyn decided that he had no sense of humour, and as a remedial exercise insisted he tell a new joke every day.  In desperation James bought a collection of a thousand and one American jokes, and stammered through each day’s installment at lunchtime, while his father sat stoney-faced, refusing to laugh.”

The most recent biographer, Philip Eade, after describing several of the foregoing incidents and recollections, wrote this: “
despite such ordeals, James remembers his childhood as extremely free and on the whole ‘very happy’, and he cheerfully confesses to have been left with no sense of maltreatment.  The youngest three were always ‘less privileged’, he recalls ‘but we were part of a tribe so it did not seem to matter’.”  This is based on an interview of James Waugh by Philip Eade in February 2016 (Philip Eade, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited, New York: 2016, pp. 290, 369, n. 12).

UPDATE (13 August 2024): Mark McGinness kindly provided the information regarding James’ wife and family as it appears in Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons.

 

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More Sad News: James Waugh 1946-2022

Posted on August 5, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the course of reviewing some of the notices regarding the recent death of Alexander Waugh, additional sad news is reported. This involves the apparent death of Alexander’s uncle, James Waugh, on 12 September 2022. This was reported in the Daily Telegraph, 24 September 2022, with only the name, date and age (76) reported and no mention of his parentage:

WAUGH. James Waugh, died on 12th September 2022 aged 76.

Beloved husband, brother, father, stepfather and grandfather. Memorial mass to be arranged. Online ref: 612485

This would have been the age of Evelyn Waugh’s second son, James Waugh, who was born on 30 June 1946. At least two internet sites have reported the death as being that of Evelyn Waugh’s son. Here is a link to the one on Ancestry.com.  Anyone reading this and having more definitive information on whether the death of the James Waugh announced in the Daily Telegraph report was in fact that of Evelyn Waugh’s second son, James Waugh, is invited to comment as provided below.

–Mark McGinness has sent the following comments based on his article in the Quadrant which were noted and linked in a previous post:

Thank you for your kind notice.

I got the Auberons’ move to Combe Florey wrong – it was 1971- not 1967.

And one of the CWEW editors, Barbara Cooke, told me that although EW did not record Alexander’s birth in his Diaries, he did dedicate A Little Learning to his grandchildren (in 1964) –  Sophia and Alexander Waugh, Emily FitzHerbert and Edward D’Arms. A lovely touch I wish I’d known.

Barbara also told me that before Sophia Waugh was born (and of course her gender was unknown), Evelyn wrote to Auberon to suggest a name for his and Lady Teresa’s first born: “Alexander Foxglove Brideshead Pinfold Clandon Forty-Martyrs Dillon”.

Forty Martyrs!

–The New York Times has meanwhile published its own obituary of Alexander Waugh. Here are some excerpts:

Alexander Waugh, who throughout his varied career as a composer, columnist and historian bore lightly the weight of his literary inheritance — his father, Auberon, and his grandfather Evelyn were considered among the finest English writers of the 20th century — died on July 22 at his home in Milverton, in southwest England. He was 60.

His sister Daisy Waugh, herself a well-known English novelist, said the cause was cancer.

The Waughs are one of Britain’s greatest literary dynasties, both in their level of acclaim and their sheer output. Beginning with Mr. Waugh’s great-grandfather Arthur, the family has produced nearly 200 books and thousands of pieces of journalism; all four of Auberon Waugh’s children, including Alexander, became writers.

Evelyn Waugh was known for his witty, incisive novels of class and culture, while Auberon perfected a kind of cheeky, conservative journalism that took on the elites and the left in equal measure.

Trained as a musician, he spent several years as an opera critic for The Mail on Sunday newspaper, then for The Evening Standard. He and his brother, Nat, wrote an award-winning musical, “Bon Voyage!,” which they produced in 2000 in London.

He wrote scores of book reviews for The Daily Telegraph, as well as a book on the history of time (“Time: From Micro-Seconds to Millennia; A Search for the Right Time,” 1999) and a “biography” of God (called, simply, “God,” published in 2004).

He founded Travelman, a publishing company that specialized in short stories one could fold up, like a map, and that were sold around train stations for a pound. He hosted the Bad Sex Awards, given annually to writers for excellence in overwrought descriptions of copulatory acts.

And in 2016 he took over as chairman of the De Vere Society, a group committed to the proposition that “William Shakespeare” was actually a pseudonym for the real author of the Bard’s plays and sonnets, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Though not as acerbic or sharp-elbowed as his father, Mr. Waugh relished a good literary row, and was constantly on the prowl for sparring partners, among them the writers Will Self, A.N. Wilson and Max Hastings, who had fired him from his critic’s job at The Evening Standard….

Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh was born on Dec. 30, 1963, in the Belgravia neighborhood of London to Auberon and Teresa (Onslow) Waugh, herself an accomplished novelist and translator. His family soon moved to rural Somerset, in southwestern England, near his grandfather’s estate.

Despite the mountains of books that surrounded Alexander as a child, he did not read much, aside from his grandfather’s novels; music was his passion, and he dreamed of being a conductor. His father wanted him to become a wine merchant, in part so he could manage the family’s overflowing cellar.

He took a year off after high school to work odd jobs in Paris. He studied music at the University of Manchester, but by the time he graduated he had decided to follow his father into journalism.

He married Eliza Chancellor, whom he met in college, in 1990. Along with his sister Daisy, she survives him, as do their children, Mary, Sally and Auberon; another sister, Sophie; his brother, Nat; and two grandchildren.

He began his career as a freelance newspaper cartoonist, then worked as an opera critic between 1990 and 1996.

By the late 1990s he was engaged in a project to edit 43 volumes of his grandfather’s books, letters and papers for Oxford University Press, a task that remained unfinished at the younger Waugh’s death.

After writing his books on time and God, he tackled his own family, digging into the diaries and correspondence left behind by his father and grandfather. The result, “Fathers and Sons,” received broad praise in Britain and the United States for its honesty and detail.

“He’s inherited the literary gene in spades, as well as a gift for very funny, coruscating prose,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times. “He has created a vivid, Dickensian portrait of his eccentric relatives and he’s done so with enormous irreverence and Ă©lan.”

Mr. Waugh followed that book with another portrait of an equally brilliant, dysfunctional clan, “The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War” (2008), in which the famously dyspeptic philosopher, Ludwig, comes across as the most normal of the lot.

One might say the same for Mr. Waugh. While previous generations of his family had no end of quirks and failings — fathers tended to beat sons; alcoholism was rampant; Auberon’s brother ended his career writing baroque pornographic novels — Alexander was by all accounts well-adjusted, at peace with the onus of his ancestors’ accomplishments and happy to keep any sibling rivalries on the tennis court.

“We’re very competitive at tennis, but it doesn’t spill over into writing at all,” he told The Independent in 2002. “But when it comes to tennis, I want to smash them all to smithereens.”

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Alexander Waugh (More)

Posted on August 2, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Additional obituaries and other notices have been posted memorializing the death of Alexander Waugh. The one by Mark McGinness posted by the Australian literary journal Quadrant is of particular note. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The death of Alexander Waugh at only sixty is a grievous blow for the world of scholarship and letters. And yet, although only sixty, he leaves a prodigious and eclectic oeuvre. Cartoonist, musician, impresario, record producer, composer, opera critic, publisher, writer, editor and archivist. Perhaps it was inevitable  — and it seems he fought it – that the great-grandson of Arthur Waugh, grandson of Evelyn, and son of Auberon would be a writer. He certainly inherited a number of Waugh-like traits  —  eloquence, intelligence, wit and a genius for mischief. As the Spectator’s literary editor, Sam Leith, saw it, the Waughs’ have had a ‘patrilineal inability to pass an applecart without giving it a shove.’…

The full article may be viewed at this link.

Another is by Dr James Alexander who teaches at the Bilkent University in Turkey. It opens with this:

So Alexander Waugh has died, aged only 60. He was, as I wrote a few months ago, third in the line of great Waughs. His father, Auberon, died aged only 61. His grandfather, Evelyn, died aged only 62. Sixty two, 61, 60: diminishing returns, perhaps, at least in age. There is no question, I think, that Alexander was less famous than Auberon, who was less famous than Evelyn. But, remarkably, there was no loss of quality. Alexander was as perfect an embodiment of a classical, catholic and coruscatory sensibility in literature and the arts as was his father and his grandfather. I cannot think of a comparison. Amis fils was a lesser figure than Amis pĂšre. Adam Nicolson writes well – his Homer book was a marvel (the best single thing written on Homer apart from Weil’s essay and some of Gladstone’s speculations) – but whatever Nigel and Harold were, they were not capable of Waughfare. It is hard to think of any example of similar sustained activity across three generations as the three Waughs managed, or such continuity of critical and satirical assault – always manifested in the highest of styles…

His complete text was posted in The Daily Skeptic website and can be read here. Both of these are thoughtful and detailed and mention three or more generations of Waugh writers.

Finally, our reader David Lull had kindly forwarded a link to a item from  The Oldie Magazine. This notes Alexander’s passing and posts an article they published by Alexander relating to his great uncle Alec Waugh. Here’s the link.

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