Simon J. James (1950-2025) R.I.P.

Posted on June 21, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has advised that literary scholar Prof. Simon J James died earlier this week. He was active in the EWS and was editor of the Decline and Fall volume of the  OUP’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. This would be volume 1, not yet published. According to Duncan, Prof. James also wrote the introduction to Penguin’s 2022 edition of Vile Bodies. Here is an excerpt from the announcement issued by Durham University where he taught:

Simon passed away peacefully surrounded by his wife Kate and close family, having been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer just over a month ago. He faced these last few weeks with grace, courage, and characteristic good humour. The sense of loss and shock will be profound and lasting.

We knew Simon as a brilliant critic, an inspirational lecturer and teacher, and an illuminating supervisor, mentor, and friend. He was a leading authority on H. G. Wells, late-Victorian literature, and the modern novel.

In every way, he was utterly committed to what he did – to our discipline, his students and our department, which he served for 25 years, including as Head of English Studies, and to worlds beyond academic life…

The Society joins the University in extending its condolences to the members of Prof. James’ family.

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Juneteenth Roundup

Posted on June 18, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–This week’s Sunday Telegraph has an article entitled “The books that every 16-year-old boy should be reading.” This included short selections by several writers, including Simon Heffer who recommends Waugh’s Decline and Fall:

When I was 16 and thinking of trying to get into Cambridge to read English, my marvellous English master gave me a pile of novels, plays and poetry to consume, reaching far outside the English A-level course. Hidden away among the heavy novels was a slim volume called Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh. I had never read anything like it; jokes on every page, many of them quite offensive, ridicule of the aristocracy, the Church, the penal system and, above all, schools, and all told in a relentless drive that caused me to finish the book in two or three hours. I had within weeks read everything else Waugh wrote, and I doubt I was the only youth on whom he had that effect. His style is magnificent and his appeal irrestible.

Heffer doesn’t tell us the year in which his binge-reading took place. His online biography says he was born in 1960, so he would have been 16 in 1976.  At that age he would have been able to ready all of Waugh’s writings published in his lifetime, as well as the diaries which were published that same year.

–An article entitled “Let slip the dogs of Waugh” was recently mentioned as appearing in the Baltimore Sun. This was written in 2018 by the Sun’s then long-time literary editor John McIntyre. The article opens with this: “Even that prickly person Evelyn Waugh, never shy about parading his opinions, was quite aware that the things people complain about in language and usage are generally idiosyncratic preferences.” It seems to have been published in the edition of 12 June 2018 but a search of the paper for that date on both my library subscriptions failed to turn anything up.  It may have been reprinted on 17 June 2025, in which it seems to have been mentioned, but a subscription search of that edition was equally unsuccessful. What little can be read of the article on the search page sounds promising so perhaps one of our readers might be able to access it and report on the contents in a comment as provided below.

–A reviewer identifying as “Jim” has written and posted a review of Waugh’s Robbery Under Law on the website goodreads.com. Here is a copy:

Just because a writer is an exceptional novelist, it does not follow that he or she is also an astute economist or politician. Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery under law: The Mexican object-lesson” is a rather objectionable hatchet job. In his book, Waugh is so outraged by Lazaro Cardenas’s nationalization of the Anglo-American oil industry in Mexico that I cannot help but think he was an investor who lost money.

I read a little more than half the book before I decided I had better things to do than finish the book, including clipping my toenails. Poor Mexico has been hauled over the coals by too many foreigners who have never bothered to acquaint themselves with the country or its people.

Consequently, I will continue to love Waugh’s fiction, but I will have my head examined before reading any polemics written by him.

If the reader had possessed a bit more background, he might have usefully continued his reading. He seems to have been unaware that Waugh wrote the book under a contract to a disappointed British investor who was looking for just such a hatchet-job. Waugh was not proud of the book and never authorized its republication during his lifetime. The second half of the book is a more thoughtfully written description of the history and position of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico which, in the 20th century, was perhaps comparable to that of private investors in the Mexican petroleum industry.

–The Mitford family is enjoying a good deal of press and broadcast coverage in anticipation of the debut this week of a new TV series about them entitled Outrageous. One of the more interesting articles appeared in Women’s Wear Daily which put together a survey of its previous articles relating to the family, several of which also involved Evelyn Waugh and his family:

…Hatty Waugh, the daughter of novelist and social satirist Evelyn Waugh, was the subject of a 1978 profile in WWD’s Arts & People column. At the time, Waugh refused to pay $1.50 to purchase a magazine that had published a favorable review of her second novel “Mother’s Footsteps.” Her debut novel, “Mirror, Mirror,” was panned when it was released in the U.S. “Critics said that I was a pathetic writer just cashing in on Daddy’s name,” Waugh told reporter Valerie Wade. “Somebody even bought it because it got the worst review he’d ever seen. Actually, I thought the book was a laugh a line.”

In 1985, WWD writer Christopher Petkanas profiled controversial Mitford sister Diana Mosley, nee Guinness, on the publication of her book “Loved Ones,” which included portraits of her social circle including Evelyn Waugh and Mosley’s husband, and British fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. Asked about the popular interest in her family, Mosley — who was imprisoned during WWII for her close ties to the Nazi regime — said, “The press decides on certain families and writers about them without much reason, really. They force one to the front of the stage, then say, ‘How boring.’ So, you see, they have it both ways. What Shakespeare said is so true, really: The appetite grows with what it feeds on.”

The following year, Marybeth Kerrigan reported on the filming of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel “Scoop” in London, based on her experience as a war correspondent in the 1930s. “We’re hooked on nostalgia in this country — we’re addicted to it,” said film star Nicola Pagett. “We will not let go of the great days gone by. Of course, we do it well — our energies and emotions are there.”

In 2004, Stephen Fry discussed “Bright Young Things,” his screen adaptation of Waugh’s novel “Vile Bodies,” which he first read as a teenager. Fry directed the film, which starred Emily Mortimer and Stephen Campbell Moore. Fry mulled the modern day version — or lack thereof — of “bright young things,” and how the golden age of parties was long past. “They’re all vulgar commercials funded by the studios or sponsored by Grey Goose and Tattinger Champagne. I never, ever accept an invitation to something that has the name of a luxury goods company on it,” Fry told WWD writer Marshall Heyman. “You can’t ever be a Bright Young Thing,” he added. “You can be a youth with a zest for life and a love of language and nothing that is part of a commercial. You musn’t be selfish. You musn’t be thinking, ‘Look at me.’ If you find yourself following, just go ‘Baaa.’”…

–Finally, an ambitious website contributor has posted all pages of the so-called “Victorian Blood Book” in Waugh’s book collection at the University of Texas. This is on the website flashbak.com. Here’s a description:

The book’s decoupage (paper and card stuck on the page) was created from hundreds of engravings, many from collections of etchings by the writer William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) and other early nineteenth-century books. There are images from nature (flowers, insects, animals and the same image of a bird on every page – a large drop of blood-red India ink dripping from each of its wings) and Christian identity (the crucifixion and crusaders – all apparently dripping blood). For added depth, the book’s maker has added religious commentary.

The first if the book’s 41 plates (above) contains a short table of contents and the title “Durenstein!” – DĂŒrenstein is the Austrian castle at which England’s King Richard I (8 September 1157 – 6 April 1199), known as Richard the Lionheart, was held captive on his way back from the Crusades.

The title and the theme of many of the plates relate to the spiritual battles encountered by Christians along the path of life and the “blood” of Christian sacrifice.

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Roundup: From Lytham Hall to Combe Florey

Posted on June 12, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Lytham Hall is cited in a recent article as having inspired or influenced the country house setting of Brideshead Revisited. This is in a feature-length article by David Slattery-Christy in the Sunday Express. The author thinks that both the owner (Harry Clifton) and house in Lancashire contributed to Sebastian Flyte and Brideshead Castle in the novel. Here is an excerpt:

…When Waugh introduces us to Flyte’s rooms in Brideshead Revisited they are, like Harry’s, at Christ Church. Interestingly, Violet Clifton used to indulge Harry by sending him groceries in season when he requested them, sometimes driven by the chauffeur all the way from Lytham to Oxford. So Flyte’s demand for Plovers Eggs and Champagne on a whim had echoes of this eccentric and indulged behaviour. “The truth is,” declared Waugh, “that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.”

Sadly Harry never did. As the 1930s progressed, Harry spiralled into more absurd and bizarre behaviour. He was cross that the estate had to pay death duties that initially curtailed his lavish spending. He enjoyed London life and as a result took a permanent suite at the Ritz Hotel, the family home in Mayfair having been sold. To add to the already sizable costs he also took a room at Claridge’s. When asked why he had both, he airily declared: “If I go for a walk and need to rest, I have somewhere to go.”

If this seems eccentric, Harry also dined once a week at the Ritz with the “White Goddess” – who he claimed was his mentor, friend and spiritual advisor. Nobody else could see her, but the waiters served her and Harry spent the evening chatting with her while other diners looked on bemused. All this while squandering money and selling off prime assets to finance his adventures. Violet [Clifton] was in despair and worried he would destroy the dynasty. She was right to believe so. It became so desperate she even attempted to get a Harley Street doctor to certify Harry as insane so the estates could pass to his younger brother, Michael…

After a photograph of Waugh, the text continues:

…Waugh visited Lytham in the 1930s. The surviving letter [24 June 1935, Letters, 94-95] he wrote to Lady Katharine Asquith gives us an idea of what he thought of Harry [Clifton’]s extended family and Lytham Hall: “A very beautiful house by [William] Kent or someone like him with first-class Italian plaster work
 large park entirely surrounded by trams and villas. Adam dining room
 a lap of luxury flowing with champagne and elaborate cookery
 all sitting at separate tables at meals”…“Two or three good pictures including a Renoir
” Waugh’s opinion of Harry and his siblings was less than enthusiastic, however. He wrote: “Easter (or so she seems to be called), Orsa [Avia], Michael, a youth seven feet high with a moustache who plays with a clockwork motorcar and an accordion
 The Cliftons are all tearing mad
”

By this time Waugh had published Decline And Fall and Vile Bodies, both designed to shock and at times mock the ruling elites. This did not go unnoticed by Violet Clifton who declared she never read “cheap novels”, no doubt to Waugh’s amusement.

By then, Harry had bought at eye-watering cost at auction two Imperial Faberge Eggs – the Rosebud Egg and the Renaissance Egg – much to the horror of his mother. He had also met Lilian Griswold, a penniless American socialite, at a drunken party in London. They went on a drinking bender together and woke up married. Both seemed to be bemused at how it had happened, but it didn’t last.

Waugh had started work on Brideshead Revisited, the novel that would change his fortunes, by the late 1930s [sic] but it was put on hold because of the outbreak of the Second World War. When the novel was finally published in 1945, 80 years ago, it sent shockwaves through society.

But it secured Waugh’s success as an author, gave him global fame and made him financially secure for the rest of his life. Violet however described Waugh as “that awful man” and declared to never speak to him again for what she saw as his betrayal. Harry drifted along in a fog of fantasy, oblivious to anyone’s needs but his own…

There is no surviving correspondence thus far published referring to any close relationship between Waugh and Harry Clifton as there is with other models cited for Sebastian Flyte: Alastair Graham and Hugh Lygon. Indeed, the author of this article relies, as have others, on Waugh’s report on his visit to Lytham Hall to Katherine Asquith. But you can make what you will of how the visit to Lytham Hall and Harry Clifton’s lifestyle may have influenced Waugh’s novel. The family circumstances and the house do seem to be quite like those other influences more traditionally cited. Waugh did not start writing Brideshead Revisited until early 1944 (10 years after his visit to Lytham Hall) but seems to have started thinking about it several years before that.

–The new biography of Pamela Berry by her daughter Harriet Cullen (mentioned in previous posts) is reviewed by Simon Heffer in the Sunday Telegraph. This includes discussion of an important chapter of the book that involves Evelyn Waugh:

…Cullen describes how her mother took her and her siblings to France on a beach holiday, but blew all her foreign currency on objets d’art in Paris on her way there, and had no money left to feed the children.

To make matters worse, she had invited Evelyn Waugh, without first ascertaining that there was somewhere for him to stay, and Waugh – who was not of the rosiest disposition at the best of times – not only had to endure inferior lodgings, but also had to save the Berry children from “malnutrition”.

Cullen describes, commendably neutrally, her mother’s lack of interest in most of her children, partly because of her obsession with society and, for a decade, because of her affair with Malcolm Muggeridge, and how it strained their relationships with her. As a result, she has created a truly fine biography – and an object lesson in how to do it properly.

–A new biography of novelist Muriel Spark has been published in the UK. This is entitled Electric Spark and is written by Frances Wilson. Here is an excerpt  from a description of the book by the author that appeared in the New Statesman:

…Spark made an art of beginnings and endings. We see it in The Girls of Slender Means, which begins and ends with the line “long ago in 1945”, and in her use of flash-forwards, so that the manner of a character’s death is revealed at the start. The schoolgirl Mary McGregor, for example, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, “who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame
 at the age of 23, lost her life in a hotel fire”. Lise in The Driver’s Seat, who selects a stranger to murder her, will be “found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.”

The Driver’s Seat might be seen as the blueprint for the game Spark set in motion with [Martin] Stannard, whom she handpicked after reviewing the second volume of his biography of Evelyn Waugh. Stannard, Spark wrote, was “a literary critic and a scrupulous scholar”, who understood the relationship between a writer’s life and his work. When she first invited to him to her home, Stannard assumed it was to interview him for the job, but Spark had decided already that this stranger was the man she wanted…

The book has been reviewed favorably in The Guardian, The Spectator and Financial Times. It will be published in the US in September.

–Duncan McLaren has added several articles in his Combe Florey section before announcing that he is going on a break. These can all be accessed from this link. I most enjoyed the ones on the second visit of the photographer (“Photo Session: October 1963”) and the writing and publishing of Basil Seal Rides Again (“The Last Loved One”). The final article, recounting the various versions of Waugh’s death (“Easter Sunday 1966”), is also of particular interest.

 

 

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Alastair Graham: An Interesting Offer

Posted on June 10, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

One of our readers (Hartley Moorhouse) has sent an interesting auction listing relating to communications between Evelyn Waugh and his Oxford friend Alastair Graham. This is explained in Hartley’s comment:

You and other EWS Newsletter readers may be interested in this rather extraordinary item of Waviana coming up for sale at Dominic Winter Auctions later this month (hope this link works): https://www.dominicwinter.co.uk/Auction/Lot/807-waugh-evelyn-1903-1966-a-shropshire-lad-inscribed-by-the-author-1914-embroidered-stool-etc/?lot=418238

Two questions and an observation:
By describing himself as ‘A jonquil, not a Grecian lad’, is Waugh effectively saying his homosexual days are over?
The cataloguer first describes the embroidery as ‘probably made by Alistair Graham, who enjoyed needlepoint’ and then, apparently gaining in confidence, ‘almost certainly executed by Graham’. But does an auctioneer’s ‘almost’ certainty carry any legal weight and/or significance? Is this tantamount to a warranty?

One slightly nerdy observation: EW’s early handwriting and indeed signature seem quite different from his later hand. As the sharp-eyed Duncan McLaren has spotted, around the time of the Hevelyn/Shevelyn bust-up, just a few months after this inscription was written, the E of Evelyn went from being loopy to square (why?) and here is a beautiful example of loopy Evelyn. Early Waugh seems to render his lower case r as an upper case R (FoR AlistaiR’, ‘ChRistmas’, etc.); later he gets his Rs in order and goes along with convention.

Here’s a link to the auction catalogue which includes several photos.. In case you are unable to connect to the auction catalogue, the text is copied here:

Waugh (Evelyn, 1903-1966). A copy of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, London: Printed by The Riccardi Press for Philip Lee Warner, publisher to the Medici Society, 1914, original grey boards, 8vo, one of 1,000 numbered copies, with signed presentation inscription from Evelyn Waugh to his one-time lover, Alastair Hugh Graham (1904-1982), one of the principal inspirations for the character of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, inscribed in ink to front endpaper ‘For Alastair from “A jonquil, not a Grecian lad”, Evelyn, Christmas 1928’, together with a four-legged stool with an embroidered seat (probably made by Alistair Graham, who enjoyed needlepoint) depicting a naked youth with outstretched arms looking back at Graham’s home, Wern Newydd in Cardiganshire, plus a 1930’s valet set in leather case, a pack of playing cards in original painted wooden box, two small printed visiting cards for Alastair Graham, as AttachĂ© Honoraire Ă  la LĂ©gation de S. M. Britannique, AthĂšnes, and Honorary AttachĂ©, The Residence, Cairo

(Quantity: 4)

Critics and biographers of Evelyn Waugh largely agree that Alastair Graham (1904-1982) was the model for the character Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, a claim that was verified by Auberon Waugh. Graham went up to Brasenose College, Oxford in the autumn of 1922 where he met Evelyn Waugh and in early 1923 the two young men began a relationship. Thereafter Waugh was a regular visitor to the Graham family’s country house at Barford in Warwickshire. In a diary entry Waugh writes: “Alastair and I had tea together and went back to Barford where we dined in high-necked jumpers and did much that could not have been done if Mrs Graham had been here.” After Oxford Graham joined the diplomatic corps and was posted by the Foreign Office to Athens from 1927 to 1929 (where Waugh visited him), and later Cairo until 1933. Graham’s homosexual exploits led to his being advised by the police to leave London or risk prosecution, and so he purchased Wern Mansion, set in 40 acres five miles from New Quay, Cardiganshire, in 1936. He became known for his parties to which his glittering friends were invited, including Waugh, the painter Augustus John, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, and architect Clough Williams-Ellis.

Evelyn Waugh said that Alastair was “the friend of my heart”. Waugh’s presentation inscription in this copy of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad given to Alastair quotes from one of the poems, ‘A jonquil, not a Grecian lad’, with all its overtones of doomed love. Earlier in the same year (1928) Evelyn had married Evelyn Gardner (the two Evelyns wittily renamed ‘Hevelyn’ and ‘Shevelyn’) but the marriage rapidly foundered. The embroidered stool, almost certainly executed by Graham, may have been styled on a nude photograph Graham sent Waugh of himself near a waterfall, asking Waugh to ‘Come and drink with me somewhere’.

The seller is Dominic Winter Auctioneer, Cirencester, and the auction is scheduled for 19th June. Details are in catalogue. Thanks again to Hartley Moorhouse for sending this along.

NOTE (10 June 2025): Duncan McLaren kindly adds this comment relating to the above posting:

This sharp-eyed reader is sure that the dedication says ‘1923′. Which makes a lot more sense. Which means that the copy of Shropshire Lad was given by Evelyn to Alastair when their relationship was at its height.

The quote is from one of the poems in Shropshire Lad, the one that begins with the line: Look not in my eyes, for fear
.

The second verse reads:

A Grecian lad, as I hear tell,
One that many loved in vain,
Looked into a forest well
And never looked away again.
There, when the turf in springtime flowers,
With downward eye and gazes sad,
Stands amid the glancing showers
A jonquil, not a Grecian lad.

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Early June Roundup

Posted on June 6, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent issue of the Daily Telegraph reports the death of Roger Cooper. This includes a discussion of Cooper’s extended imprisonment in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran:

Roger Cooper, who has died aged 90, was a British journalist and businessman who was arrested as a spy on a visit to Iran in December 1985 and spent more than five years in prison, under sentence of death.

For most of that time he was incarcerated in the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran, often in solitary confinement. Nevertheless, he did not court sympathy when he was finally released: “I can say that anyone who, like me, was educated in an English public school and served in the ranks of the British Army is quite at home in a Third World prison.” […]

In February 1987 he was transferred to the notorious political prison in Evin, 10 miles from Tehran. “Shouting and cries of pain are often heard,” Cooper recalled, “only partly drowned out by religious chants and prayer ceremonies played endlessly on a tape recorder in the corridor.”

He was ordered to provide his captors with a detailed run-down on key figures in British intelligence. Having no knowledge of the subject, he invented a cast of personnel based on characters in the works of Evelyn Waugh, including a Secret Service legend called Colonel Dick Hooker, inspired by Waugh’s Brigadier RitchieHook. He amused himself in his cell by composing a poem: “Brigadier RitchieHook/ Is a character in a book./ My Colonel Dick Hooker/ Should have won me the Booker.”…

–The Wall Street Journal has an article by Witold Rybczynski who frequently writes on architectural themes. This is entitled  “Five Best: Fictional Homes That Steal the Show”. The first on his list is Brideshead Revisited:

Evelyn Waugh wrote “Brideshead Revisited” during World War II while recuperating from an an injury…”It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house,” Waugh reflected later, noting that “it seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoiliation.”… Waugh’s admiration is palpable, as is his sense for a disappearing age.

The other “Fictional Homes” books chosen were Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, Echo House (1997) by Ward Just, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) by V.S. Naipaul, and Master and Commander (1969) by Patrick O’Brian.

–Raptis Rare Books has on offer a letter from Evelyn Waugh to an unidentified addressee. It is dated “Oct 16th” (?) but no year or addressee is identified. Here is the text:

“Oct. 15th [sic] Dear Sir, My thanks for your letter of yesterday. I notice that the promise given to any writer’s books in your exhibition depends on his publisher’s arrangements of their stall,  [unreadable] of whether he makes a speech or not; also that the special publicity devoted to the speakers has to be divided among thirty four. It seems to me that in the circumstances only someone fanatically devoted to public speaking could reasonably be expected to accept. I dislike it very much and only attempt it for charity or clear personal gain. I hope the exhibition is a great success & that your thirty four orators have their audience spell bound – but please excuse me from competing with them. Yours thankfully, Evelyn Waugh.” In fine condition.

Anyone able to offer additional insights as to the year or subject matter is invited to comment. A copy of the original text is available at this link.

–The website Art.com has posted an offering of a color reproduction of a photograph of Waugh dated 1963 and taken in the library at Combe Florey. It is not accompanied by any background information, but I can recall other photos of Waugh wearing that suit in that setting, if not perhaps that particular pose.

 

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Roundup: Books, Paintings and Photographs

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The latest edition of The Oldie contains an article that may be of interest. This is by A N Wilson and is entitled “Great War Stories”. Here is the opening paragraph:

WWII inspired Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning

The coming of VE Day and VJ Day each year is always poignant. The numbers who took part in the fighting, and who still survive, have diminished to a heroic few. The numbers of books about the Second World War, however, continue to swell. Most of these books, in so far as I’ve sampled them, are stultifyingly boring and badly written…

The remainder of the article is behind a pay wall, but one can assume that Wilson finds the war novels of Waugh, Powell and Manning to be an exception to the rule he sets down in his opening. [See Comment below.]

–Eleanor Doughty writing in the “Rereading” column of the The Times has reviewed an early Waugh novel. This is entitled “Evelyn Waugh has captured the futility of the Bright Young Things in Vile Bodies.” Here are some excerpts from the opening paragraphs:

Vile Bodies is a book in which very little happens. A couple gets engaged, then unengaged, before the woman leaves the man for someone else; their friend has a car crash, and then ends up in a mental hospital. But it is also the definitive satire of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s — aristocrats and their hangers-on, jiving to the sound of their own futility in London’s swankiest nightclubs…

I first read Vile Bodies when I was at school and was hooked by the dedication — “with love to Bryan and Diana Guinness”. My teenage self wondered who they were. I had already become fascinated by the British upper classes so the brewery heir and his wife, a Mitford, turned out to be right up my street. With that dedication, the couple had been branded for posterity as the de facto leaders of the Bright Young People. The couple were great friends of Waugh and had showed him enormous kindness after his wife left him.

The original typescript of Vile Bodies contained a warning — and a red herring: “Bright Young People and others kindly note that all characters are wholly imaginary (and you get far too much publicity already whoever you are).” But as in other Waugh novels, in Vile Bodies an interested reader can match up its characters with their real-life counterparts. The socialite Elizabeth Ponsonby appears as Agatha Runcible, and the owner of the Cavendish hotel, Rosa Lewis, the Duchess of Jermyn Street, appears as the proprietress Lottie Crump at the fictional Shepheard’s Hotel on Dover Street, while two incidental travellers are named Arthur and Mr Henderson after the foreign secretary of the day…

The article also mentions an upcoming book publication that will be of interest: “Heirs and Graces: A History of the Modern British Aristocracy by Eleanor Doughty. This is published in September (Hutchinson Heinemann ÂŁ30).”

—The Times also has an article about an art exhibit which has a Waugh/BYP connection. This displays the works of Edward Burra who is described as “one of the most overlooked artists of the 20th Century.” This is a detailed review by Nancy Durant who describes both Burra and his works. Here’s an excerpt:

…“He is the product of two banking dynasties, of about seven generations of totally conventional people,” Jane Stevenson, author of the biography Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye, told BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives. “They must have been fairly amazed to find this sort of changeling in their midst.”

It doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. “The family’s very, very right-wing,” Stevenson says, and “one thing you can say that he gets from this is tanklike confidence: ‘I’m going to say what I like and do what I like and be what I like.’”

It must have stood him in good stead with the Bright Young Things, a loose group of wild young bohemians with whom the papers were fascinated during the Twenties, and which he, Barbara Ker-Seymer and their Chelsea Polytechnic chums Billy Chappell and Clover Pritchard were considered part of (it also included socialites such as the Sitwells, some Mitfords, Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton, hence the tabloid interest). Their particular brand of sexually fluid, performative hedonism was highly appealing for someone with such a determined lust for life, even if Burra’s own sexuality was seemingly not put into physical practice…

The exhibit is at the Tate Britain and extends from 13 June to 19 October. The article is also very well illustrated and is worth a look. Here’s a link.

–Duncan McLaren has also posted three more essays in his new Combe Florey series. The first is about the writing and publication of A Tourist in Africa, the second, about the Mark Gerson photoshoot of the Waugh Family at Combe Florey in 1959, and the final, about the writing and publication of Auberon Waugh’s first novel, The Foxglove Saga. I particularly recommend the Mark Gerson article, both for its written discussion on the event and its detailed photos, some of which I do not recalling seeing previously. The articles are all linked through the first one that is available here.

–Finally, this letter appeared in a recent issue of The Economist:

Holy waters

I enjoyed your article on the increasing number of young men in Britain who are turning towards Catholicism (“Altered minds”, May 10th). You referred to Graham Greene’s faith. Britain’s other great 20th-century Catholic novelist was Evelyn Waugh, and the article mentioned Farm Street Church in Mayfair. In “Brideshead Revisited” this is where Rex Mottram is sent for Catholic instruction. Discussing papal infallibility, the priest asks Mottram what would happen if the pope said it was going to rain, but it didn’t? Mottram replies, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.”

Paul Ferguson
Englefield Green, Surrey

COMMENT (2 June 2025): Our reader David Lull has kindly provided a copy of the article by A N Wilson in The Oldie mentioned above. Wilson’s discussion of Waugh’s WWII works is relatively brief. He notes that “Waugh’s Brideshead and his Sword of Honour trilogy are among the best things he wrote, if not the best.” There is no mention of Waugh’s Put Out More Flags that was both written and published during the war (1941-42). Brideshead was written during the months preceding D-Day in 1944 and published the following year. The war books by Manning and Powell were all written afterwards, as were those in Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. There is a more extended discussion of the books by Manning whose works are deemed even more impressive than those of Waugh and Powell and “stand comparison with War and Peace.” Thanks to Dave Lull for sending the text.

 

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Memorial Day/Bank Holiday Roundup

Posted on May 26, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Garden Museum in Lambeth, London, has opened an exhibit called “Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party.” This was described in a recent article in The Observer by Vanessa Thorpe:

…The strong horticultural influence on Beaton’s work is recognised now in an exhibition, Cecil’s Beaton’s Garden Party, running at Lambeth’s Garden Museum from [14 May], and it celebrates the importance of both the dilapidated properties that the great photographer and designer renovated in south-west England.

The advanced degree of dereliction of, first, Ashcombe House, and then Reddish House, were in fact strong selling points for any self-respecting Bright Young Thing of Beaton’s generation, and the gardens quickly became romantic stage sets for his social gatherings.

The most renowned of Beaton’s fancy dress entertainments was a fĂȘte champĂȘtre of 1937, for which he designed the majority of the costumes. Garlands of net flowers bedecked the gowns, while a trademark trail of ivy ran down the front panel of the pale pink satin dress which is now on display in Lambeth, made for the actor Wendy Hiller. Other guests wore DalĂ­-inspired rabbit masks and coats smothered with roses or, perhaps, a shepherdess costume. The aim was to look as if the disguise had been thrown together quickly, but with great aplomb. So foil was better than real silver, and cellophane, newly invented, was better still…

The article concludes with this:

…Beaton’s near-contemporary, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who as a schoolboy had bullied him from the safety of the year above, also viewed the English aristocracy with the fascinated amusement that came with a little distance. Waugh’s response was to create Brideshead Revisited, while Beaton orchestrated his flamboyant, masked parties and revelled in the counterfeit splendour of the theatre. Both men managed to seed an enduring vision of the indolent rich that still holds sway. It was certainly there, for instance, in the fancy dress debaucheries of the hit film Saltburn.

Among the standouts of the Garden Museum show are the dress Fonteyn wore in the ballet Marguerite and Armand with Rudolf Nureyev. The well-known publicity stills from 1963 show the prima ballerina in a white tutu with a garland of white flowers in her hair. But the actual stage costume is black net with dark velvet bodice topped with silk roses on the shoulders.

In an exhibition like this the scenery clearly matters, so Emma House asked the Beaton enthusiast Luke Edward Hall to decorate the display rooms with 1940s-style, freehand sketches of lavish canopies of flowers. In one corner visitors will also meet Hall’s full-length outline of the casually elegant Beaton, looking on, paint palette in hand, admiring his own work.

The exhibit continues through 21 September. Details are available at this link.

–On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Anthony Eden’s premiership,  The Oldie has reposted what was the final interview of his wife, the former Clarissa Churchill. This was conducted by Hugo Vickers in 202o, the year before she died. Here is the opening paragraph:

At the age of 98, Lady Avon was awarded a distinguished prize by the Oldie Magazine – The Oldie Who has seen it all Before and Worse Award.

She was surely the last intimate survivor from the world of Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, Lord Berners, Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, Nicolas Nabokov, Edith Sitwell and Orson Welles. I could list dozens more. When she was young, she had the exceptional advantages of being beautiful, extremely intelligent and well read. Being a Churchill, by name if not by temperament, and niece to Winston, she grew up surrounded by the most interesting men and women of the day. She studied philosophy in Oxford, was tutored by Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer and Lord David Cecil. She worked for Alexander Korda, and George Weidenfeld in the worlds of film and publishing…

The entire article is available here.

—The Harvard Crimson, for no particular reason, has reposted the text of a review of Christopher Sykes’ biography of Evelyn Waugh. The review is dated 4 February 1976 and is written by Paul K. Rowe. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Virginia Woolf once divided writers into two categories: those she would have liked to have dinner with, and those with whom she would have preferred not to. Now that Christopher Skes has written what will remain for the foreseeable future the definitive biography of Evelyn Waugh, it is clear that Waugh falls into the disinvited category. The man was a social sadist; he drove a war cripple into psychoanalysis in the course of a single weekend by verbal brutalization. Waugh knew it himself. “Without supernatural aid,” he said, “I would hardly be a human being.”

Sykes’ book is an unusually stereoscopic one, scrupling not at all about boundaries between “biography” and “criticism.” His book belongs to a genre which, he recognizes, is currently out of fashion–the critical biography. “A convention has grown up,” he notes in the kind of obiter dictum that grows more frequent as the book progresses, “that biography and literary criticism are separate activities which must never be associated.” The biography, certainly, is all there. But I, at least, would have liked even more lit crit than Sykes provides. There is precious little serious comment on Waugh, and when Sykes does turn to the nuts and bolts of criticism he proves himself both competent and perceptive.

Sykes tends to tell his story from inside; he knew Waugh well and, was, indeed, among his closest friends in the later years. He figures, under various disguises, in several of Waugh’s novels. On the whole this problematic relationship between author and subject is exploited only for good reasons. Sykes’s indentifications of the real identities of Waugh’s characters (and almost all his books have a large dose of roman a clef in them) are much more convincing as he makes it clear that he knew them all personally. The only area of restraint caused by his close relationship is Waugh’s marriage, a subject on which he sheds almost no light, aside from denying that Laura Waugh was a “doormat.”…

The entire review can be accessed at this link.

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Roundup: Handful and Helena

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Several Spanish language papers have reported a new Spanish translation of A Handful of Dust. This is by Society member Carlos Villar Flor who has participated in several EWS events. Here’s an edited translation of the announcement:

Professor of English Literature at the University of La Rioja , Carlos Villar Flor, has written the new translation of the novel A Handful of Dust , by the British writer Evelyn Waugh, now published by the publishing house Impedimenta. The work, written in 1934 , is considered one of the most representative novels of 20th-century English literature . In it, Waugh creates a sharp satire of the British aristocracy of the interwar period , marked by decadence and moral decay.

Carlos Villar Flor not only completed the translation but also wrote the prologue to this new edition. This marks a new milestone in his career as a translator of Waugh, an author to whom he has dedicated a significant portion of his academic and literary career. Waugh’s previous works translated by Villar Flor include Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender, Scott-King’s Modern Europe, and Put Out More Flags, published between 2003 and 2012 by various publishers.

The English title of the work translated into Spanish as Neutralia is Scott-King’s Modern Europe.

–Here’s a biographical sketch of the new Pope’s mother based on reports that appeared in the Chicago Tribune:

Mildred A. Martinez Prevost (mother)

Raised in Chicago with five sisters — including two who became nuns — she graduated from Immaculata High School for girls in June 1929, according to Chicago Tribune archives.

The contralto was a soloist in a 1940 Mundelein College performance and as a competitor in the 1941 Chicagoland Music Festival. Mildred Prevost obtained a graduate degree from DePaul University’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences in February 1947 and a master’s degree in education in 1949.

Her post-college exploits all appear to be rooted in faith. In December 1950, Mildred Prevost presented a book review of “Helena” by British author Evelyn Waugh to the Chicago circle of the International Federation of Catholic Alumnae. The book chronicles the life of Helena of Constantinople, whose son was Roman conqueror Constantine I. In October 1951, she was a member of a committee that produced a concert by the Gay Twins, dual pianists and nuns who were sightless since birth. Described as a homemaker in March 1952, Mildred Prevost participated in a forum called “The Catholic Woman in the Professional World.”

As president of the Mendel Catholic High School Mothers Club, Mildred Prevost organized a spaghetti dinner in April 1967 and presided over a hootenanny in September 1968 that featured Father Gale White and the Firemen. She also served as a librarian at the school, the Archdiocese of Chicago said.

Mildred Prevost died in 1990. Her death notice in the Tribune requested that contributions be made to the Augustinian Mission in Peru in lieu of flowers.

–The Collegium Institute has scheduled four internet reading group sessions on Waugh’s novel Helena. Here are the details:

The British Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh once described his historical novel Helena (1950) as his personal favorite among his works. The novel explores the life of Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine and discoverer of the True Cross. Waugh follows Helena from her humble origins in Roman Britain (an invention by the author) to her central role in Christianizing the Roman Empire. Waugh artfully explores faith, politics, and the nature of history in this imaginative novel.

Undergraduate and graduate students are invited to join us for the Summer 2025 Faith in Fiction virtual reading group in which we will read Evelyn Waugh’s Helena. We will meet virtually via Zoom on Wednesday evenings in June.

Date: Wednesday evenings in June

  • June 4

  • June 11

  • June 18

  • June 25

Location: Virtual via Zoom

To register, click the button below. All participants will receive a free copy of Helena by Evelyn Waugh. Questions? Please contact Quinn Moore ((click to email)).

It may be the case that this is open only to registered students.

–Finally, the editors of the journal First Things have made a list of their recommendations for summer reading. One of them (by Claire Giuntini) relates to Helena:

I wish I could say that I was amiably receptive when beginning Evelyn Waugh’s Helena, a fictionalized account of Helena of Constantinople’s quest to find the relics of the True Cross, but I anticipated being soured. As a friend once said, Waugh likes to crush your soul, and I don’t particularly enjoy having my soul crushed. Helena, his only historical novel, is full of Waugh’s characteristic hopelessness, but also didactic smugness. Waugh himself called the book didactic in the BBC interview with John Freeman appended to my copy. He also said it was his favorite work, though no one else’s.

I despise didactic novels, and I despised the didactic elements in this novel, which I had suspected and resented from the start. It would be unfair of me, however, to say I disliked the book entirely. It was, of course, humorous, if often darkly. As a classics major, I enjoyed how he rendered ancient Roman culture and society understandable and relatable. His skill in fabulating aspects of Roman culture and effortlessly familiarizing them made it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction; a beneficial attribute for a novel, a hindering attribute for one interested in accuracy.

Historicity, however, wasn’t Waugh’s goal. He said in the preface that he made up a great deal of the plot and details, mostly because he was writing a novel, which is an exercise of the imagination, but also because we don’t really know anything about Helena or the finding of the True Cross. His last introductory remark is that “[t]he story is just something to be read; in fact a legend.” Zoomers out there, what he means is, “this is fan fiction.” Don’t forget it’s “didactic” fan fiction. If that interests you, I recommend you read it.

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Three Longer Waugh Articles

Posted on May 17, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A copy of a 2017 article by Waugh Scholar Naomi Milthorp has been posted on the internet by Amazon Web Service. This is a PDF file and is entitled “The Materials of Which I Am Made: Evelyn Waugh and Book Production.”  It originally appeared in an issue of Script & Print (No. 41:4). Here’s the opening paragraph:

…Two particular clusters of archival material, dated in the years 1963–1965, provide clear evidence of Waugh’s role in the production of his books: those centred on the production of the Ă©dition de luxe of his final work of satire, 1963’s Basil Seal Rides Again: or, The Rake’s Regress, and those concerned with the setting of the ordinary edition of his autobiography A Little Learning.  In examining the Huntington Library’s archival materials Waugh’s professional interest in bibliographic matter is emphatically revealed. Moreover, both books’ textual concern with self-fashioning—whether openly ironic, or apparently serious—is reflected in their material form, the flamboyant luxury of the one answered by the prim sobriety of the other…

The full text of the article is available at this link.

–The second article, also in an academic journal, is actually about Cyril Connolly’s 1944 “word cycle” The Unquiet Grave. This is by Denis Topalovic and was published recently in the journal Textual Practice. But the author’s analysis frequently mentions Waugh’s reading of the work as explained in these introductory paragraphs (footnotes omitted):

In 1971 the University of Texas at Austin invited Cyril Connolly, then one of Britain’s leading literary critics, to inaugurate an exhibition enticingly entitled ‘One Hundred Key Books’. With its rich display of manuscripts and first editions drawn from the collections of the Harry Ransom Center, from Joyce’s Ulysses to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the exhibition was based on a book Connolly had published some years prior, in 1965, similarly entitled The Modern Movement: 100 Key Books from England, France and America, 1880–1950. Halfway between private list and authoritative compendium, the book corralled many of the widely acknowledged masterworks belonging to what Connolly had long been in the habit of apostrophising as the ‘Modern Movement’, and which more or less coincided, in both style and periodisation, with what English departments were then in the process of canonising under the general rubric of literary modernism.

Among the modernist totems put on display in 1971, however, was also one slim volume that did not officially feature in Connolly’s select pantheon of literary greats, but which enjoyed an intensely brief spell of notoriety during the last months of the Second World War: namely, Connolly’s own The Unquiet Grave, an eccentric book of pensĂ©es and aphorisms published in 1944 under the pseudonym ‘Palinurus’. It was, to be sure, Connolly himself who had insisted that The Unquiet Grave be included in the Austin exhibition: for while ‘some find the U.G. a mere common-place book’, he pleaded with the exhibition’s organisers, ‘others see in it, with its three movements and epilogue, a “chasse spirituelle”, a beautifully constructed and harmonious whole’. Evelyn Waugh’s personal library at the Harry Ransom Center happened to include a copy of The Unquiet Grave, and so the organisers readily obliged: The Unquiet Grave was proudly displayed among the major works penned by the modernists, many of whom Connolly had known and even published in their lifetime. Having asked to take a closer look at Waugh’s copy of the book, however, Connolly was much less flattered to discover that his long-time friend had filled the book’s margins with a number of disparaging comments, censoring him as a ‘drivelling woman novelist’, a ‘hack highbrow’ who ‘read Freud while getting a third in Greats’. A sharp question had also been jotted across the title page: ‘Why should I be interested in this book?’…

The full article is available at this link.

–Finally, Duncan McLaren has kindly sent a copy of his latest posting which is an article comparing the work of Evelyn Waugh and Scottish novelist and artist Alasdair Gray. Duncan uses for comparative purposes materials in both writers’ archives to which he has been given access.  He also prominently mentions materials in the UT Humanities Research Center.  And as usual, he provides several original and often remarkable illustrations of what he is describing. Here’s a link.

 

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Mother’s Day (US) Roundup

Posted on May 10, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A post on the website thinkinghousewife.com has this cite for its Mother’s Day offering:

IN HIS unfinished autobiography A Little Learning, the British author Evelyn Waugh remembered fondly his own mother:

“My mother was small, neat, reticent and, until her last decade, very active. She had no special literary interests, but read a book a fortnight, always a good one. She would have preferred to live in the country and from her I learned that towns are places of exile where the unfortunate are driven to congregate in order to earn their livings in an unhealthy and unnatural way. She had to be content with walking her dog on Hampstead Heath and working in the garden. She spent hours there, entirely absorbed; not merely snipping off dead heads but potting, planting, watering, weeding. (A man came one or two days a week to dig or mow or roll.) When my father in middle age, after the fashion of the family, chose epitaphs for himself and my mother, he directed that on his side of the gravestone should be inscribed: ‘And another book was opened which is the book of life’ and on my mother’s ‘My beloved is gone down into the garden to gather lilies’; but her flowers did not interest her more than fruit and vegetables. There was nothing pre-Raphaelite about my mother. I associate her less with lilies than with earthy wash-leather gloves and baskets of globe artichokes and black and red currants.”

–The New Criterion has an article by David Platzer that discusses a current art exhibit in Paris. This is “Matisse and Marguerite: Through the Father’s Eyes” at the Musee d’art modern de Paris. Marguerite is in this case Matisse’s daughter. Here is an excerpt:

…In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Anthony Blanche dismisses English art as “simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.” The same can be said for much of French art. In White and Pink Head (1914–15), Marguerite modeled for Matisse’s version of Cubism, sweeter than anything Picasso or Braque produced, even if the bars and stripes make her look as if she’s in a cell. In early 1918, while war raged in France, Matisse began to spend more time in Nice. Miss Matisse in a Scottish Plaid (1918) showed “Margot” sitting on a balcony over the blue sea, bundled up against the cold. She seems more of a bright poppet than she did a few years before. Back at Issy-les-Moulineaux in the summer of 1919, she is very much a young woman, posing with a family friend in The Tea…

–An article posted by David Roman discusses Waugh’s war trilogy Sword of Honour.  This is entitled “The Best WW2 Memoir Actually is a Novel.” The introductory paragraphs are available on the internet. Here is an excerpt:

Most British writers who spent World War II in uniform contributed to the military effort as translators, assistants and publicists. When the famous Evelyn Waugh tried to enlist for the front lines at the age of thirty-six, with no military experience and a poor attitude, he had to use a lot of contacts to end up in a commando unit where his twenty-something colleagues treated him and others of a certain age like cranky old men.

It’s no wonder that Waugh’s military experience was so shocking, valuable, and absurd at the same time that it inspired him to write the best series of wartime novels: a trilogy called “The Sword of Honour,” a quasi-memoir in which he recounts his own adventures in a fictionalized and merciless way. Waugh’s WW2 is unlike anything you ever saw before….

The Sword of Honour is many things. First of all, it’s Waugh’s best novel, with all the virtues he displays in “Brideshead Revisited” in full exhibition, and a much more complex story with more characters and locations. That’s enough to make the book the best about World War II.

This may sound like a risky thing to say. I just ask the reader: name me a better book about WWII. A book that is better written, that has more truth to it, that shows more theaters of action, that deals with more human foolishness and reflects on the entire war more deeply than this trilogy. I don’t think you will find that book…

Access to the remainder of the article requires a subscription.

–The latest issue of Literary Review has posted an article by Frances Wilson entitled “All Yesterday’s Parties”.  This contains several references to Waugh who was, in his day, quite a party goer. Here’s an excerpt:

…In Evelyn Waugh’s story ‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’, the party gets no further than a list of names because Miss Fleace, waiting with a dance band, a cooked dinner and twelve hired footmen for her guests to arrive, has forgotten to post the invitations.

Parties end not when the guests have gone home but when they have composed their narratives of the night. The essayist Logan Pearsall Smith reflected after a soirée that it had been

a delightful evening 
 the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and French philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squealing. But soon after, ‘God, it’s awful,’ I muttered, ‘I wish I were dead.’

The silent-film actress Brenda Dean Paul, one of the Bright Young People satirised in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, mythologised the debauchery of the Bath and Bottle party, held in a municipal swimming pool in 1928, with an image of the morning after: ‘turgid water and thousands of bobbing champagne corks, discarded bathing caps and petal-strewn tiles as the sun came out and filtered through the giant skylights of St George’s Baths, and we wended our way home’…

The full article is posted on this month’s Literary Review website. Here’s the link.

–Duncan McLaren after years of avoidance finally read Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox. He was pleasantly surprised by what he found and has posted an illustrated review of the book. Here is the opening:

A 2025 Revelation. Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox is a great book. Why was I so sure that I wouldn’t like it that I’d never tried to read it before this week?

Firstly, I wasn’t that impressed with Waugh’s earlier biographies. Rossetti is all right, but uses too long quotes from Rossetti, steals from other biographers (including the book’s first sentence) and has little of the zest of Waugh’s early novels. His biography of Edmund Campion and his novel, Helena, are drolly dull for the most part, and the main reason for writing them, I reckoned, was to do with the author’s Christianity. I thought the Knox biography was another book written mostly out of duty, the duty being to plug the Roman Catholic Church. Secondly, the cover art of the first edition was so awful. …

The remainder is posted on Duncan’s website and can he accessed here. Among other things, he offers his own version of an improved Ronald Knox cover.

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