Valentine’s Day Roundup

–Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the New York Times Book Review has posted this notice in its “Read Like the Wind” column. It is written by Book Review editor Joumana Khatib:

The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, by Evelyn Waugh

You probably know Waugh for his novel “Brideshead Revisited,” or if you’re journalism-adjacent you’ve probably 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 quintessentially 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 caller Mr. Joyboy, a pair of newspaper reporters writing a pseudonymous advice column, a mad-cap 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.” [or, she might have added, “Monty Python” in which a “late parrot” also prominently figured.]

AVAILABLE FROM: A good library or used-book store, or online at Project Gutenberg Canada (where the book is in the public domain).

–Craig Brown writing in the Daily Mail notes that P G Wodehouse died on Valentine’s Day 50 years ago. He goes on to offer the following:

…One of his greatest champions, Evelyn Waugh, argued in 1961 that ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale.  ‘He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’

Waugh also said Wodehouse was a master of his craft because he could produce ‘on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to the page’. And it is these wonderful similes, so exact yet so ludicrous, that ensure his comedy will never stale.

Brown concludes with a list of 15 of his own favorite P G Wodehouse similes. Here are two of the best from Brown’s list:

  1. Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.
  2. The shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French. 

The entire article and remainder of the similes can be read at this link.

–Mark McGinness also notes the Wodehousian connection to Valentine’s Day. He writes in The Spectator:

Pelham Grenville (PG – or Plum) Wodehouse breathed his last on Valentine’s Day fifty years ago. As Evelyn Waugh saw it, Wodehouse inhabited a world as timeless as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland. Wodehouse himself said it was as though he was forever in his last year at school. It was, Waugh said, ‘as if the Fall of Man had never happened’….

He reserved his wit and conversation for the page. When an uncharacteristically starry-eyed Waugh met Wodehouse for the first time, he was disappointed to find their exchanges did not get beyond the inequities of income tax. And when Plum was invited to join the Round Table gang at the Algonquin hotel in New York, he complained, ‘All those three-hour lunches. When did these slackers ever get any work done?’…

The full article is posted in this week’s Spectator.

–The Daily Telegraph has an article by Jake Kerridge about US novelist Robert Plunket whose 1983 satirical novel My Search for Warren Harding is being reprinted in the UK as a Penguin Modern Classic. Here’s an excerpt:

…Having moved to Sarasota, Florida, and found that trailer park life suited him, Plunket spent many years working for Sarasota Magazine as a gossip columnist – “Mr Chatterbox”, a sobriquet he borrowed from the gossip writer in Vile Bodies by his hero Evelyn Waugh – and became a leading figure in local society. “I was cultivated by the local politicians because they all wanted to see their names in print. And of course every third-rate celebrity with something to sell ended up in Sarasota so I interviewed them all – Pia Zadora, Eva Gabor.”

He covered George W Bush’s trip to Sarasota in September 2001, and witnessed the then-president being told about the Twin Towers attacks while reading to the children at an elementary school. “I can remember his face the moment he figured out what it meant. And then there was just chaos.” And naturally he was on the spot when Paul Reubens, aka the wholesome kids’ comedian Pee-wee Herman, was arrested for indecent exposure at a Sarasota adult cinema: “It was owned by a friend of mine, in fact I helped him programme all the movies.”…

–The Daily Telegraph has also published this letter from a reader relating to a story about Ofsted’s school rating system:

SIR–As a retired teacher of 35 years’ experience, may I recommend to Ofsted the classification of schools described in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall?

“‘We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate school, Good School, and School. Frankly,” said Mr Levy, ‘School is pretty bad.'”

What more need be said?

Max Sawyer

Stamford, Lincolnshire

–Finally, the Hudson Review has posted a long essay by Brooke Allen in which she discusses several notable contributions to literary scholarship that have appeared in the 75+ years of its existence. This one is of particular interest to our readers:

…William H. Pritchard is one of the best literary critics of his time, and it is The Hudson Review’s good fortune that more than 170 of his articles have graced the pages of the magazine over the course of nearly five decades. In “Total Waugh” (1993), his review of Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, Pritchard was among the first to be bold enough to suggest that Waugh, a humorous writer not taken too seriously by the literary establishment of his own day (he was ignored by high cultural institutions of the time like Leavis’ Scrutiny and Eliot’s Criterion), might just turn out to have been the best English novelist of the twentieth century. Thirty years later this opinion has become quite widespread. In his treatment of Waugh, and of Stannard, an exemplary biographer, Pritchard brings into play his characteristically elegant prose and his clear humanistic values. “The premiere English novelist of [the twentieth] century?” he asks. “I can’t think of any, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who is more repaying.” I can’t either.

The entire essay entitled “Classic Articles Revisited” can be read here.

 

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Evelyn Waugh Studies 55.2 (Autumn 2024)

The Society is pleased to post the latest edition of its journal Evelyn Waugh Studies. This is No. 55.2 (Autumn 2024). The contents are described by the Society’s Secretary Jamie Collinson as follows:

With Evelyn Waugh Studies No. 55.2,  Jonathan Pitcher and Yuexi Liu have served us up a smorgasbord of Waviana, with an enjoyably grammarian theme. As someone who recently had to consult his younger sister on the usage of ‘that’ or ‘which,’ I thoroughly enjoyed Hartley Moorhouse’s Evelyn Waugh: Which-Hunter ManquĂ©, and was relieved that even Waugh didn’t always get this right. The essay features cameos from Graham Green, George Orwell and our old friend Randolph Churchill – including his unforgettable exclamation on encountering the bible. While we’re on the subject of Greene, I was struck by a grammatical error in the first line of his autobiography, A Sort of Life: ‘…it may contain less errors of fact…’

Jeffrey Manley has been busy on the reviewing front. He considers a book published around last year’s exhibition of Rex Whistler paintings in Salisbury: Rex Whistler: The Artists and His Patrons, by Nikki Frater. This exhibition was timely, not least as Whistler became a victim of the absurdities of cancel culture when his mural at the Tate Gallery was hidden from public view. Manley examines how Whistler’s world intersected with Waugh’s, and more importantly the latter’s ambivalent and creatively fruitful attitude towards victory in World War II.

Manley has also reviewed Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, by Jeffrey Meyers, ‘probably the most prolific and admired literary biographer of his generation.’ Here, Waugh has his own say on the literary merit of a contemporary, and points out a glaring error of syntax.

I was astonished to read that, towards the end of 2024, our very own Vincenzo Barney, author of “Behind the Rhododendrons” (on Vile Bodies; 53.1) and the recent “Portrait of the Artist off His Onion” (on Pinfold; 55.1), pulled off a literary scoop. After he reviewed Cormac McCarthy’s late pair of novels, McCarthy’s companion Augusta Britt contacted him, revealing details about her relationship with McCarthy long sought out by other journalists.

Finally, as an avid reader and great admirer of Jeremy Clarke, writer of the Spectator’s Low Life column until his death in 2023, I was delighted to see him appear in EWS. Clarke was a great fan of Evelyn Waugh, as some of his best columns made clear.

I hope you find as much to enjoy in this edition as I did!

Warmest regards,

Jamie Collinson

Secretary, Evelyn Waugh Society

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Roundup: End of a Literary Era

–This week’s issue of the New Statesman has as its Weekend Essay an article by John Mullan. This is entitled “The Death of the British Catholic Novel: Catholicism gave English literature something it needs to rediscover” and opens with this:

When the novelist David Lodge died in January, the obituaries reflected on him as a Roman Catholic novelist – perhaps the last in a line of postwar British Catholic novelists. Hardly anyone noted that his distinguished career as a literary academic was also rooted in his Catholicism. Lodge obtained his first academic post, a lectureship at Birmingham University, on the strength of his thesis: “Catholic fiction since the Oxford movement: its literary form and religious content”, composed as a graduate student at UCL in the late 1950s. This author of such an intensely Catholic novel as How Far Can You Go? (1980) – which took a group of nine Catholic students (and a young priest) in the 1950s and followed them through their subsequent trials of sexual discovery and religious doubt – began his career with a study of the very sub-genre to which he would himself contribute.

Lodge’s thesis survives in a warehouse in Essex that forms part of the UCL Library. You can still call it up. Typed blurrily on very thin paper, it earnestly tests whether religious faith can feed a novelist’s imagination. Lodge quotes (in order to disprove) George Orwell’s assertion in “Inside the Whale” that “the atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel”. The roll-call of notable Catholic novelists before the 20th century (all discussed in Lodge’s thesis) would hardly challenge Orwell’s anti-Catholic dictum: EH Dering, Mrs Wilfrid Ward, Robert Hugh Benson
 John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain, a bildungsroman about a convert to Catholicism, may have been a Victorian bestseller, but is now unreadable.

Yet later Catholic fiction almost changed Orwell’s mind. On his deathbed, he was composing a piece on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (an article that he did not live to finish). Waugh had been received into the Catholic Church in 1930, the year in which Vile Bodies was published, but this was his first explicitly Catholic novel. Orwell, his friend and admirer, regretted the new influence of religion on his work. “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (ie as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.”…

Mullan goes on in some detail to consider the careers of other Roman Catholic novelists of the period, focussing particularly on Graham Greene and Muriel Spark. In the case of Greene, Mullan discusses how the religious themes in his The End of the Affair are related to those in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He ends with a brief consideration of the works of Hilary Mantel, who was born a Roman Catholic but renounced her religion. The article concludes with this:

The British Catholic novel now looks like a historical phenomenon, a thing of the past. David Lodge chronicled it and was there at its end. Yet what Catholicism gave the British novel – a means of “elucidating a moral pattern” – was something valuable. It is still what novels need to find.

The full article can be read at this link.

The Spectator has a brief article in its “Mind Your Language” series. This is written by Dot Wordsworth and is entitled “‘Loved Ones’ are everywhere at this time of year.” Here’s the text:

“My heart will melt in your mouth,’ said my husband gallantly, unwrapping some leeks from a copy of the Sun which bore this suggestion: ‘Create a special Valentine’s Day message for a loved one with this decorate-your-own gingerbread heart, ÂŁ2, new in at Morrisons.’

Loved ones, even dogs and cats, are fair game for hearts at this time of year. The astrologer Russell Grant warns Pisces about ‘a loved one’s wellbeing weighing on your thoughts’. At other times, loved ones are dead, the phrase being used without irony in broadcast reports of air disasters, war and inheritance tax. It annoyingly presumes that all relations who die are loved.

The Oxford English Dictionary finds examples of loved one from the 18th century onwards. It notes that in recent times it frequently makes conscious reference to the phrase in Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One (1948), quoting this example: ‘I saw the Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. And I saw the Waiting Ones who still stood at the brink of that narrow stream that now separated them from those who had gone before.’ Waugh had taken his family to California in 1947. While there he visited Forest Lawn, with horrid fascination

Curiously, Aldous Huxley had a similar experience two decades earlier, but in Chicago, as he recounted in Jesting Pilate in 1926. The telephone directory carried an advertisement for a firm of undertakers, or rather morticians: ‘Their motor-hearses were funereally sumptuous; their manners towards the bereaved were grave, yet cheering, yet purposefully uplifting; and they were fortunate in being able to “lay the Loved Ones to rest in – graveyard, the Cemetery Unusual”.’ It takes politicians with tin ears to take the object of Huxley and Waugh’s ridicule and adopt it as a solemn expression of sympathy.

–The Washington Post has an article in which it announces the retirement of its long-serving book editor Michael Dirda from his production of regular weekly reviews. He will continue writing for the paper on the subject of books but on a less regular basis. The article is followed by a Q & A which includes this exchange:

Q. Do you have a few reviews you remember most vividly or fondly? Not because they were raves necessarily, but because the act of writing them and thinking about them has stuck with you?

That’s a subtle question. I once wrote a piece of several thousand words for Book World in which I surveyed then-current biblical scholarship. I must have read 20 books, but the whole project was deeply gratifying. In another life, I did earn a PhD in comparative literature, and there’s a scholarly side to me that I like to allow out now and then.

I also once wrote a column about spending three weeks reading the six volumes of Arthur Waley’s translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s “The Tale of Genji.” That book was a revelation and led me to explore classical Japanese literature and culture. I had a similar experience with Ferdowsi’s “The Shahnameh,” in Dick Davis’s translation of the Persian epic, and with Gene Wolfe’s intricate and tricksy masterpiece “The Book of the New Sun,” the high point of late-20th-century science fiction.

Over the years, I discovered a couple of dozen contemporary writers whose work spoke to me with particular charm or power. I reviewed as many of their books as I could. These included Russell Hoban, John Crowley, James Salter, Steven Millhauser, Gilbert Sorrentino, Guy Davenport, Anthony Hecht, M.F.K. Fisher, Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett, Jack Vance, John Sladek, Robertson Davies, Daniel Pinkwater and Penelope Fitzgerald. What’s more, I think I must have reviewed nearly every nonacademic book written about Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov.

Truth is, I’ve loved a lot of books. In my hot youth, it was my ambition to read all the classics of world literature. I still have quite a few to get to.

Oh, but I should mention the review I most often recall when I give talks. It was a scorched-earth destruction of Judith Krantz’s novel “Dazzle.” My lead was: “I read most of ‘Dazzle’ in one sitting. I had to. I wasn’t sure I could face picking it up again.” The kicker, which I won’t quote, is even better. But W.H. Auden convinced me that writing snarky negative reviews — which, by the way, is dead easy — was bad for one’s character, so I’ve tried to avoid doing so as much as possible.

The full article and interview can be accessed at this link.

–St John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe has published a list of its courses on offer this summer at the Santa Fe campus. This one may be of interest:

Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor

Steve Isenberg and Mike Peters
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

As we mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, it is timely that we read the best novel to emerge from that war, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor. Waugh, a captain in the Royal Marines, imaginatively transforms his personal experience, coupling it with an acute sense of character and foible, farce and tragedy, heroism and cowardice, faith and despair. He created a full picture of British life at home, in the officer’s mess, in battle, from false starts in the Phony War to harrowing days in Greece and Yugoslavia. Comic wit, serious purpose, and heart join to summon a world long gone, yet living anew in this vivacious drama. Americans can discover here aspects of World War II uniquely beyond our literature.

Text: Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor. Back Bay Books, ISBN 978-0316216692

Registration and other details are available here: https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer-classics/seminar-schedule

–Somerville College, Oxford, has posted this notice on the internet:

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Catherine Peters (married name Catherine Storr) on Sunday 12th January, aged 94. Catherine taught English Literature at the college between 1980 and 1991, and wrote notable literary biographies of Thackeray (Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality, 1987) and Wilkie Collins (The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, 1992), as well as books on Dickens and Byron.

She graduated with the top first class degree in English Literature aged 50, in 1980, from St Hugh’s College. Daughter of literary agent A.D. Peters, who represented major writers such as Evelyn Waugh, she was married to psychiatrist Anthony Storr (Wadham and Green Templeton Colleges).

Catherine’s family will hold a memorial in Somerville later this year to commemorate her life. Details will be put here when they are available, and invitations will be sent to those students reading English when she taught in College.

She will also be remembered as part of this year’s College Commemoration Service, on Saturday 14th June, to which all alumni are invited.

The family have asked that anyone who remembers Catherine might consider donating to Marie Curie in her memory: https://catherinestorr.muchloved.com. She benefited hugely in her last years from night-time care from Marie Curie nurses.

 

 

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Roundup: From Clubs to Travels

–The Daily Telegraph reports that one of Waugh’s London clubs has voted to continue to exclude women members:

A PRIVATE gentlemen’s club in Mayfair has voted against admitting women for the first time, The Telegraph has learnt.

The Savile Club, established in 1868 for writers and artists, voted to reject a motion calling for women to be allowed as members in an extraordinary general meeting. Male members at the meeting voted against changing “Rule 1” of The Savile’s governing documents, which states the organisation “shall consist of such number of ordinary members, being males over the age of 18”.

Sir Stephen Fry and Lord Lloyd-Webber are among the club’s more recent members, while early literary affiliates included John Le Carre, Evelyn Waugh, Rudyard Kipling and AA Milne. A proposed motion had called for the word “males” in the club’s founding rule to be substituted with “persons”. It also proposed for “the feminine” meaning to apply to any applications to become an honorary or temporary member.

The general committee said this was equivalent to asking: “Do you think the club should admit women members?” The majority of those at the Thistle Hotel in Marylebone on Tuesday voted to “affirm” the original wording. They backed a separate motion stating this “explicitly restricts membership to males over 18 years of age and reaffirms existing unambiguous language”.

Several members resigned in protest over the decision, The Telegraph understands. The Savile Club was approached for comment.

–The Mexican journal Diariojudio.com has posted an article about writer Chaim Potok that opens with this:

Potok was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Benjamin Max (died 1958) and Mollie (nĂ©e Friedman) Potok (died 1985), who were Jewish immigrants from Poland. He was the eldest of four children; all of them converted to or married rabbis. His Hebrew name was Chaim Tzvi. He received an Orthodox Jewish upbringing. After reading Evelyn Waugh’s novel  Brideshead Revisited  as a teenager, he decided to become a writer (he often said that  Brideshead Revisited  was what inspired his work and literature). He began writing fiction at the age of 16. At 17 he made his first submission to The  Atlantic Monthly magazine . Although it was not published, he received an editor’s note praising his work. He attended high school at Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy, the all-boys school of Yeshiva University. In an interview, Potok said: “I prayed in a small shtiebel [prayer hall], and my mother is a descendant of a great Hasidic dynasty and my father was Hasidic, so I come from that world.”…

–The journal The New Criterion has an editorial entitled “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly” critical of the new Labour Government. This appears in its latest issue and opens with this:

It seems like dĂ©jĂ  vu all over again. Last month in this space we wrote about British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s apparent embrace of various dystopian novels in formulating his policies for Great Britain. Most obvious was the government’s embrace of the totalitarian principles laid down in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially regarding curbs on free speech and the filtering of common reality through the politically correct scrim of Newspeak. Then there was the demographic catastrophe described in Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints. This novel from the 1970s tells the story of how a tsunami of illegal migration from the Third World, combined with the moral paralysis begot by adherence to progressive ideology, destroys Western civilization. Finally, there was Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins. This “Romance of the Near Future” describes what happens when a society, marinated in nihilistic utilitarianism, embraces euthanasia as a social desideratum…

–Finally, the latest issue of Literary Review contains the review of a collection of the  travel writings of Norman Lewis. This is edited by John Hatt and is entitled A Quiet Evening. The review is by Nicholas Rankin and opens with this:

Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was arguably the finest English travel writer of his generation. Other contenders for the title – Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, say – were all Oxford-educated, but Lewis was a product of Enfield’s grammar school and its public library. A devotee of the classics – Herodotus, Suetonius, Chekhov, Turgenev – he was attracted southwards. Federico García Lorca was his favourite poet. He gracefully reconfigured his first book, Spanish Adventure, written at twenty-six, into his last book, The Tomb in Seville, at the age of ninety-four. Just as a matador conceals his sword behind a bright muleta cape, he masked a tragic sensibility with a comic style.

This brilliant new anthology, A Quiet Evening, is the latest selection of Lewis’s work edited by John Hatt, who founded Eland Books in 1982. Hatt’s dream was to republish great travel literature in handsome editions. The first classic he reissued was A Dragon Apparent, Lewis’s account of his journeys in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, originally published in 1951, before war devastated Indo-China. (Hatt was surprised to find its author very much alive.) Eland subsequently republished Lewis’s masterpiece Naples ’44 and his study of the Sicilian Mafia, The Honoured Society

A full copy of the review is available here.

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Roundup: Theatrical Torture, Biographical Therapy and Lineage of Comic Novel

–The Italian newspaper La Stampa for 25 January 2025 has an article by the late Gaia Servadio which is based on an interview with Graham Greene that seems to have taken place about 1978 (publication date of The Human Factor which is the primary subject of the interview). The article includes a discussion of an earlier exchange between Greene and Waugh:

One of the world’s best-known and most translated authors, Graham Greene was educated at the Balliol, Oxford, where he was with the “golden” generation. Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Malcolm Muggeridge. “Evelyn Waugh was one of my dearest friends, he was a rebel, he couldn’t stand anyone, not even the Conservatives. He didn’t think in political terms. To give you an example, one evening – one of the last times we were together – we went to see Ionesco’s latest play, Rhinoceros , with Laurence Olivier here in London. The next day I had published a letter in the Times protesting against torture in Algeria. Evelyn wrote me a little letter: “I see you are sending letters to the Times about torture in Africa: why don’t you also talk about ours, inflicted on us last night by Laurence Olivier?”…

Translation by Google. Since Waugh died in 1966, this letter must have been written well before the interview. There is a letter from Greene to Waugh dated 22 June 1960 suggesting that they had both attended (separately) a performance of Rhinoceros the night before. (Graham Greene, A Life in Letters pp. 248-49).  That may have crossed the letter from Waugh referred to in the interview. There is no letter of Waugh to Greene of that date in Waugh’s collected Letters. The author of the La Stampa article, Gaia Servadio, died in 2021, according to Wikipedia.

Psychology Today has an article suggesting that reading works of biography and autobiography can have therapeutic benefits. Here’s an example:

The life story of … renowned British writer, Evelyn Waugh, was … troubled. Waugh also continually suffered from initial money problems as well as a thorough dislike of the modern world. The man drank heavily to escape his emotional demons, ambiguous sexuality, and conflicting religious feelings, yet left a legacy of being arguably the best British writer of the first half of the 20th century.

The article by Lawrence R Samuel explains how experiences such as those of Waugh can be helpful in therapy:

… we often tend to think our situations are unique when, in fact, many have gone through similar rough patches in their lives and prevailed. Stories of people who have achieved notable, sometimes great things during their lifetime illustrate the genuine possibility of overcoming both personal and professional obstacles, making them an underappreciated therapeutic approach. Life is a roller coaster filled with ups and downs, autobiographies and biographies make clear, with no one immune to setbacks, disappointments, and downright failures…

Here’s a link to the article.

–The Thomistic Institute is sponsoring a podcast on the subject of “The Influence of Virgil and St. Augustine on Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited'”. This will be presented on Tuesday 4 February at a time to be announced. The presenter is:

Patrick Callahan, director of the Newman Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture as well as Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at St. Gregory the Great Seminary. There he directs and teaches in a Great Books Catholic program for students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and other regional colleges. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Dallas and his graduate work at Fordham University in Classics. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife and 5 children.

Details at this link.

–The latest New York Times Book Review carries an interview with novelist Robert Harris, several of whose books have been adapted for movies or TV. The film version of his 2016 novel Conclave has been nominated for 8 Academy Awards.  Here is the concluding Q & A;

Q. You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

A. My three literary heroes: Graham Greene, George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

–The Oxford student newspaper Cherwell has posted a review of the latest book by Jonathan Coe. This is entitled The Proof of My Innocence and is reviewed by Hassan Akram. Here is the opening paragraph:

There are some writers whose line of literary descent is so clear as to resemble a kind of genealogical chart. The lineage of the English comic novel, for instance, runs smoothly from Fielding to Dickens, Dickens to P.G. Wodehouse, Wodehouse to Evelyn Waugh, Waugh to Kingsley Amis, and from Amis through to Jonathan Coe, whose The Proof of My Innocence is one of the funniest novels published in Britain in recent years. In a burlesque fusion of murder mystery, dark academia, and autofiction, Coe charts the development of a pro-NHS-privatisation think-tank from its roots in Cambridge in the 1980s to its short-lived triumph with the rise of Liz Truss in 2022, scattering the story between the perspectives variously of a failed conservative novelist, a Cambridge undergraduate, a murdered anti-Tory blogger, a police detective, and a sushi attendant…

The full article is available here.

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MLK Day Roundup

–The US-based Jesuit journal America has an article in its latest issue describing the differences and similarities of conversions to Roman Catholicism by writers and intellectuals in the US and UK. It opens with the UK example of Evelyn Waugh and describes his disappointments with the reforms implemented in the 1960s just before his death. The article, entitled “England’s ‘Catholic Moment'”, by one of the magazine’s editors, James T Keane, then continues:

…Waugh’s move to the Roman Church in 1930 in what was a solidly Protestant nation was one of many such events in an extraordinary period beginning around 1833, in which British Catholicism’s intellectual profile was dominated by a group of scholars, writers and popular figures who had done the same. In a nation that in 10 years will recognize half a millennium since its dramatic public break from the Catholic Church, a striking majority of British Catholicism’s most prominent figures in the 19th and 20th centuries had “swum the Tiber,” as the saying went. Like Waugh, many did so with some misgivings and later regrets, but there was no shortage of swimmers.

The most famous were surely Cardinal John Henry Newman and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, who were formerly priests in the Anglican Communion and prominent leaders of the Oxford Movement, a 19th-century campaign to reassert the Catholic heritage of British Christianity. But they were joined by a host of others over the 130 years, including Waugh, Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., the Rev. Robert Hugh Benson, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, the Rev. Ronald Knox, G. K. Chesterton, Edith Sitwell and many more.

This epoch was so extraordinary in the life of the church that the historian Patrick Allitt began his 1997 book Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome with a startling assertion: “Nearly all the major Catholic intellectuals writing in English between 1840 and 1960 were converts to Catholicism.” Such figures, Mr. Allitt argued, enjoyed educational advantages still largely denied to cradle Catholics in both societies, but also benefited from an intellectual adventurousness that was not common among their cradle-Catholic peers.

These converts were marked by their creative output, but also in many cases by a commitment to Catholicism as an intellectual and religious bulwark against modernity. As our own cultural moment in the United States has included some prominent conversions to Catholicism—most notably Vice President-elect JD Vance—and conjecture about the influence of tradition-minded Catholic voices in government and politics in general, what might we learn from that period in British Catholic history?…

This is followed by a comparison of the conversions which took place within the intellectual community in the US during this period. A full text is available at this link.

–Alexander Larman writing in the Washington Free Beacon reviews William Boyd’s latest novel and sees links to Waugh’s works. Here’s an excerpt:

…William Boyd has been one of literature’s great purveyors of what you might call the thumping good yarn ever since his first novel, 1981’s A Good Man in Africa, cannily updated Evelyn Waugh’s distinctly un-woke but hilarious fiction for a contemporary audience. Ever since then, his superbly written, ceaselessly engaging books remain some of the most reliable pleasures to be found on any bookshelf, anywhere. Over the past few years, Boyd has settled into two main modes of storytelling. The first is the so-called whole-life novel, in which he follows an individual over the course of their entire existence; a literary form that he pioneered with 1987’s The New Confessions, perfected with his 2002 masterpiece Any Human Heart, and has since revisited several times, most recently in 2022’s The Romantic. And the other is the spy novel, which Boyd, for my money, does as well or better than any living writer.

Gabriel’s Moon, the first in what Boyd has suggested will be an ongoing series, is most definitely a spy novel of the Buchan-esque school, although there is nothing old-fashioned about the pace and vigor with which this particular story unfolds. Indeed, at times, the rat-a-tat-tat speed is almost disconcerting, rather like being tossed about uncontrollably on a rollercoaster. In the first few pages alone, we are introduced to the protagonist Gabriel Dax as a child, shortly before his house burns down, killing his mother, and from which conflagration he escapes only by blind luck. When we next meet Dax, he is a well-respected writer, on assignment in the Congo to interview its new president Patrice Lumumba. The idealistic politician talks of democracy and a bright future for his country, so inevitably he ends up assassinated under the auspices of untrustworthy foreign powers. And, as Dax is one of the last people to have seen Lumumba alive, his interview tapes are of enormous interest to these untrustworthy foreign powers…

Here’s a link to the full article.

–A blogger on the weblog “Sunshine and Celandines” reports on his recent visit to the seaside at Lytham Hall in Lancashire:

…The lives of the residing Clifton family fared well until the 1800s when John Talbot Clifton inherited the estate. Under him and then his son Henry Talbot De Vere Clifton, their overly extravagant spending squandered away the family fortune.

A little online research also reveals that the writer Evelyn Waugh was invited to stay at Lytham Hall by Henry in 1935. It is claimed that Waugh may have then based the character ‘ Sebastian Flyte’ in his novel ‘Brideshead Revisited‘ on Henry. In a letter to a friend he describes the Clifton family as ‘ tearing mad, all seated on separate tables at meals’. Waugh also met Henry’s mother Violet and his siblings,  including the wonderfully named ‘ Easter Daffodil Clifton’ who eloped with a gamekeeper



Henry Clifton was the last Clifton to inhabit Lytham Hall and today the house and estate are jointly looked after by various charities…

As has been noted previously, there are far more compelling candidates for the model of the character in Waugh’s novel, although the resident of Lytham Hall may well have made a contribution.

–The New York Adventure Club has announced an upcoming event that may be of interest. This is a webinar called ‘London’s Underground Nightlife of the 1920s & 30s’. It is scheduled for Thursday, 11 Feb 2025 at 5:30-7:00 pm EST; tickets $12.00. Here’s a description from their website:

Join New York Adventure Club as we explore London during the early 20th century, from the rise of illicit cocktail lounges and clubs that sprung up in the West End to the cat-and-mouse game between eccentric club owners and the police at Scotland Yard.

Led by Lucy Jane Santos — historian, writer, and cocktail aficionado — this virtual experience of London’s underground social scene will include:

  • An overview of how the global prohibition movement, implications of the First World War, and licensing restrictions forced London’s social scene underground
  • The story of American bartenders and customers fleeing prohibition arrived in London in droves — so much so that the American bar at the Savoy Hotel was dubbed the “49th State of the USA”
  • How club owners — such as the infamous Kate Meyrick, owner of the ‘43’ — were willing to push the boundaries of the law in the face of imprisonment and the wrath of a Home Secretary who had declared a “War on Nightclubs”
  • The police scandal that brought the Metropolitan Police’s integrity and methods into question
  • The rise of the Bottle Party and further crack downs of the late 1930s as the police attempted to “cleanse” London of illegal drinking — as well as the clubs that welcomed Queer, Black, and Jewish customers
  • Rarely seen photographs, ephemera, and film clips of the time period
  • Where to experience 1920s and 30s bars in London today, and some classic cocktail recipes from the period

Afterward, we’ll have a Q&A session with Lucy — any and all questions about London’s cocktail culture are welcomed and encouraged!

Booking and details are available on their website.

 

 

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New Book About Early Waugh Love Interest

A new book has appeared featuring one of Waugh’s love interests of the 1930s. This is entitled The Many Lives and Loves of Hazel Lavery and is described on its cover as a Novel. Here’s an excerpt from a review in The Times by Sophie Grenham based on an interview of the author Lois Cahall:

The American journalist and bestselling author Lois Cahall is unusually jittery for someone who is used to interviews. A few years ago, she set about writing a novel about Hazel Lavery, the wife and muse of the Belfast-born painter John Lavery, and the rumoured lover of Michael Collins, who played a pivotal role in Ireland’s war of independence. Cahall was daunted by the prospect of fictionalising this very Irish story. “I’m nervous because this book is about someone else,” she says. “It’s my responsibility to the Irish.”

Lavery was the daughter of a Chicago industrialist of Irish descent, and an artist, a great beauty and society figure. When her father died suddenly, she and her family travelled around Europe, and it was in Brittany that she first met John Lavery, who was considerably older. She married him a few years later. She is immortalised in more than 40 of John’s works, and her face even appeared on Irish banknotes. Cahall’s novel, The Many Lives and Loves of Hazel Lavery, is inspired by the relationships that shaped her and her role in a crucial moment for Anglo-Irish relations…

Cahall was born and raised in Boston and now lives near Manhattan. She sees parallels between her own life story and that of Lavery. After Cahall’s father left the family when she was a toddler, she was educated by nuns in a convent boarding school. Her mother banned her from discussing her father’s Irish heritage, so it wasn’t until she was ten and a family friend brought her to a St Patrick’s Day parade that she discovered what she calls “big Irish energy”.

“I think when you’re Irish your country is always with you,” she says. “When famous Irish people do interviews, they love wherever they’re from. The people are proud of their history and the old and the new weaves together. I feel a sense of loyalty, and I’m all about loyalty.”

It was Cahall’s friend who brought Lavery to her attention. “Lois, you have to write this book because Hazel had this incredible life with fascinating friends and lovers,” she told her. “She’s you, only from another country.” At the time Downton Abbey and Outlander were two of the biggest shows on television, and Cahall is a fan of grand, sweeping stories with a bit of history thrown in.

Lavery entertained many influential people at her London home, including Winston and Clementine Churchill, Cecil Beaton, JM Barrie and Evelyn Waugh. Cahall also has a glittering social circle; she worked for the author James Patterson after she sought his advice when starting her Palm Beach Book Festival ten years ago. She also founded the Cape Cod Book Festival, which celebrated its inaugural year in 2024. Cahall has also enjoyed friendships with Salman Rushdie and Colin Firth. “I didn’t see these people as famous. I saw them as colleagues,” she tells me. “I’m not someone who would ask for an autograph. I’d be on the arm of someone giving the autograph.”…

Waugh met Hazel Lavery in the socializing he enjoyed after the success of Vile Bodies.  The occasion was a dinner party given by Emerald Cunard. There followed an affair of some sort, but it seems to have been relatively brief according to Waugh’s biographers. Hazel was 16 years his senior and the wife of a well known painter who was nearly twice as many years her senior. Their “affair”, if that is what it was, seems to have been sufficiently memorable to cause Waugh to dedicate Remote People (1931) to her. How much of their liaison is described in Cahall’s new book is not discussed in The Times’ review. The most detailed description probably is that contained in the Selina Hastings biography pp. 245-46. Here’s an excerpt:

…[Hazel] had a reputation for what some described as nymphomania, others less censoriously as excessive romantic attachments, and for a time she pursued Evelyn with ardour. He, although slightly embarrassed by her flamboyant attentions, was nonetheless flattered, and quite ready to enjoy a brief liaison. He took her to tea with his parents and allowed her to drive him about when he had errands to do. But he soon grew bored by the hysterical demands, rebuffing her unkindly, behaviour which, when Hazel died in 1935, caused him to suffer remorse. He had a Mass said for her which he attended very early in the morning as a penance.

The new book is available here in hardback, paperback and digital editions. An earlier book (Hazel: A Life of Hazel Lavery) written by Sinead McCoole and published as a “biography” in 1997 is available at this link.

 

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Roundup: Television and Weblogs

–Blogger Andrew Kern has posted on Substack an article praising Waugh’s war novel Men at Arms. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh wrote better than any dead or living Briton from the 20th century. He tells stories that incorporate but transcend his perspectives. He understands how other people view the world and treats them all with the same level of respect: that is to say, he treats them all as farcical (far’s’cl for you sailors) excuses of a broken race that somehow carry a well-hidden grace visible only to those who wish to see it.

Also, his sentences are so continually (not continuously, I hasten to add) perfect that when I find one that disappoints, I know it must be an error, even a typo, and I rejoice with a joy so full of vainglory that I rush to my nearest-at-hand pencil with the enthusiasm of a man who has found the ash on which was built a royal palace.

Men At Arms launches Waugh’s three volume Sword of Honour trilogy, and I read it last year. It tells the story of Guy Crouchback, an English recusant1 who spends the 1930’s in Italy after his wife divorces him, ending any hope that he might preserve his ancient line. His life drifts along the Italian coast like a sedate and sedated yacht. As Hitler and Mussolini rise to power, he is otherwise occupied. He knows Hitler is bad and he regards Mussolini as a chancer. But he is sedate and sedated, like a yacht floating in the harbor below his family’s ancient villa…

–A Portuguese website (naoeimprensa.com) has an article by Adaubam Pires about the 1960 BBC interview of Evelyn Waugh which is now available over YouTube.com in Portuguese language markets. Here is an excerpt:

…Evelyn Waugh was not an easy guy. Our “favorite villain,” as Ronald B. Griggs, the greatest translator of Waugh in these parts, aptly defined it. Irascible and temperamental, an old-school conservative , the writer had decided in the early 1950s to exchange the hustle and bustle of London society for the isolation of a country mansion . What led him in 1960 to abandon his much-loved country peace to go and show his face on national television in a program that looked more like a police interrogation?

“Poverty,” as Waugh himself explains during the interview. “We were both hired to talk in this deliriously happy way.” Although his works continued to be published and sold, in the last years of his life the writer found himself under financial pressure, which led him to agree to participate in interviews. It must not have been easy, in fact, to support a family of six children in a large mansion with eight suites, six living rooms, a wine cellar and a garage for five cars.

The 1960 interview is said to have been Waugh’s television debut. And it was in front of journalist John Freeman, a former Labour MP who had left politics to become the host of the BBC’s Face to Face programme, where he had a (bad) reputation for embarrassing his guests with his inquisitive style. For a newcomer, Waugh didn’t do too badly.

But watching the interview left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was happy to hear from the author himself a series of interesting details about his life and work. On the other hand, the interviewer’s impertinent and derogatory attitude towards his interviewee left me annoyed and frustrated. I was annoyed because the questions were directed at Waugh in a rude and offensive manner, without the slightest concern for establishing a minimally friendly relationship with the interviewee. I was frustrated because, in his eagerness to read his previously formulated questions, the interviewer moved on to the next subject without letting Waugh elaborate on any topic, leaving the feeling that, at times, he didn’t even care to listen to what Waugh had to say. How could I miss the opportunity to let one of the greatest prose writers in the English language delve deeper and ramble lyrically in his answers?

This harassment is handled politely by Waugh—up to a point. Waugh’s instinctive hostility toward the interviewer’s lack of decorum begins to take the form of increasingly evasive responses as the interview progresses. When he realizes that the interviewer is more interested in attacking his Catholicism and social status than in actually discussing his novels, Waugh begins to answer all impertinent questions briefly and tersely, whenever possible with answers laden with sarcasm. And it is these rude responses from Waugh that make this interview worth its weight in gold…

Translation is by Google.

The Guardian has an article about an upcoming TV series that may be of interest:

…It’s their triumphs and travails that form the basis of the historical drama House of Guinness, from Peaky Blinders showrunner Steven Knight, which is due on our screens next year. As befits the drink that made the family’s name, it is the story of stout hard work with dark undertones and conspicuous froth on top.

The dynasty was established by Arthur Guinness, the son of a farmer, who founded the brewery in 1759. Its position was secured by his third son, Benjamin, who became the richest man in Ireland.

But by the 1920s decadence had arrived in the shape of Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and one of the bright young things, the upper-class bohemians satirised by Evelyn Waugh. He married Diana Mitford who left him for Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader and acolyte of Adolf Hitler…

It is not clear from available information when this will be televised but it seems likely it will be available on Netflix later this year.

–An entertainment website (Metro.co.uk) discusses a new BBC TV production (Dope Girls) that includes depiction of the woman on whom Waugh based Ma Mayfield:

Dope Girls stars Julianne Nicholson as Kate Galloway, a single mother who establishes a nightclub amidst the hedonistic uproar of post-World War One London and embraces a life of criminal activities in order to be able to provide for her daughter Evie ….

The series is based on real life figures including Billie Carleton, Brilliant Chang, Edgar Manning, and Kate Meyrick. The later was known as the ‘Night Club Queen’ who owned several nightclubs in London in the 1920s and was believed to have earned around £500,000 (£17 million today) from her hotspots. Throughout her life she served five prison sentences and was the inspiration for the character Ma Mayfield in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited

The 6-episode  series will be available on the BBC later this year.

–Blogger europhilevicar.com has posted on his web diary a discussion of Waugh’s works that he has read over the past year.  You will need to scroll down to the entry entitled “Through a glass darkly–138” to begin this discussion with Remote People and Black Mischief. Here’s an excerpt:

…Black Mischief, published in 1932, also leans on the Abyssinian experience. The primitive cruelty, treachery, and cannibalism of Azania are confronted by the young Emperor Seth’s commitment to Modernity and the New Age. The British-educated Seth wants to put his Oxford degree to good use by dragging this primitive country into the twentieth century. And in this endeavour he is assisted by Basil Seal, an upper class chancer and contemporary at Oxford, and by the slippery Armenian trader Mr Krikor Youkoumian. Other characters include Sir Samson Courteney, the ineffectual Head of the British Delegation, and his romantically inclined daughter Prudence;  General Connolly, a former Irish game warden, now Head of the Army; Connolly’s local wife, known as the ‘Black Bitch’; and Monsieur Balloon, the French freemason Consul.

Azania is not Abyssinia, but is based rather on Zanzibar. And Seth is certainly not a portrait of Ras Tafari, the new Emperor, who appears in Waugh’s travel writings as an exotic but enigmatic figure.. Where Haile Selassie was seen as a distinctly African figure, proud to be the only independent native monarch in Africa, Seth is wholly divorced from his African culture, a fervent believer in the concept of ‘Progress’. Waugh portrays Seth as a man with no discernible religious faith, who is confronted by a world of treachery and fear. The spy scuttling away from the door is a recurring image in Black Mischief.

The book was written in a stop-start manner, partly at the hotel at Chagford, partly at the Lygon family’s country seat at Madresfield, as Waugh juggled an increasing number of journalistic and reviewing commitments. It was published in October 1932 and attracted hugely varied reviews. Favourable reviews in the Spectator and the Telegraph and the Listener found the book original and well-written, with an increased seriousness, and tinged with Eliot’s Waste Land vision of western society, an unsentimental pessimism. But other reviewers were unconvinced, using word like vapid and fatuous. James Agate in the Express wrote: “‘this book is an extravaganza 
 I assume that Mr Waugh’s plan was to think of an island of cannibals to whose vile bodies he could add Lottie Crump’s clientele out of an earlier novel. The book will be deemed wildly funny by the intelligentsia, and there is always a chance it is too clever for me.”

I don’t recall what I made of this book reading it some sixty-plus years ago in Lamb A dayroom. But these decades later I find the book funny but slight. An insubstantial work, easily read and discarded. And I surprised too that Waugh has not been denounced for his casual [but period] use of the nigger word…

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Roundup: Renewed Interest in Rosemary Tonks

–The London Review of Books reviews the reprints of three of the later novels by poet-novelist Rosemary Tonks. She wrote during the period 1963-1980.  After a rather difficult life, she stopped writing in 1980 to become a fundamentalist Christian, dying in 2014.  Here is a summary of her novels in the LRB review by Ruby Hamilton:

…Before she gave it all up, and renounced poetry to live alone by the sea as a born-again Christian fundamentalist, there were also the novels. Six acid comedies of bad manners, at least as splenetic as the poems, if not as fĂȘted. A faultline divided her prolific 1960s: on the one side, Opium Fogs and Emir (both 1963), two quasi-Waughian works which have never been reprinted; on the other, four semi-autobiographical romps – The Bloater (1968), Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way out of Berkeley Square (1970) and The Halt during the Chase [1972]– which are now available again as Vintage Classics. She claimed not to care much for them (‘the English like their porridge,’ she responded when her editor told her of the fifth novel’s success), but spending too much time with Tonks will teach you not to take anything she says too seriously. Whichever way you look at them – as confessions of an irrepressible ego; as experiments in whether or not English satire can bear the weight of Baudelairean malaise; as works of a woman who couldn’t turn a forgettable phrase, no matter her insistence that she just dashed them off to make ‘a lot of red-hot money’ – the novels are thrillingly strange things. She had the knack.

The novel entitled The Bloater apparently had been reprinted earlier than the three now reviewed.  Unfortunately, the two early “Waughian” novels are not among those so far republished. Since both of these are now listed as “collectible” ($500+), we may hope to see them soon as reprints. The LRB review does suggest Waugh’s influence in one of the later, now reprinted novels:

The miraculous thing about the clairvoyants and psychics in The Halt During the Chase is that their advice–not least, packing Sophie off to a chateau in Alencon–actually works. She is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown who never reaches the brink. At the end of the novel she is ‘cut loose’ and ready to embark on a ‘new life’. It’s striking how happily Tonks’s novels end, when you set them beside Waugh’s death-filled Vile Bodies (by suicide, motor racing and dropping from a chandelier) or the wonderful dispatch in Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (now there’s a woman Tonks could love): ‘And last of all leapt Mr Trent-Garby, who catching his foot in the ruined flower box, fell headlong and, I regret to say, was killed.”…

Tonks’s Wikipedia entry also notes that “her highly personal style … at times approached the tone of Evelyn Waugh in its cynical observations of urban living, Tonks as a novelist had a mixed critical reception at best, although her critics admit that her grasp of the English language and her sense of London are sharp.”

–The Italian edition of Vanity Fair magazine has posted a list of travel books it  recommends to its readers. The list includes Waugh’s A Tourist in Africa which was recently translated into Italian. Here’s the description (translation from Italian by Google):

Setting out without a precise destination is Evelyn Waugh‘s philosophy , always looking for confirmation of the prejudices that afflict him: the more indefensible an opinion is, the more he will champion it. To be funny he has to complain about something, and as soon as he sets out on a journey fate promptly begins to plot against him. In the guise of an old man full of ailments and equipped with these credentials, he decides to spend the winter in an Africa that is changing: and here he is, the innocent abroad . He comes across picturesque characters that he barely deigns to glance at, he stumbles into absurd situations that do not affect him, or into unlikely adventures that he knows how to present to the reader like no other. [Highlighting in original.]

The Guardian has an article by Harry Taylor entitled: “London is Europe’s most congested city, with drivers sitting in traffic an average 101 hours last year.” Here’s an excerpt:

…The capital has been renowned for its traffic problems, with Piccadilly Circus becoming a byword for somewhere chaotically busy. In his 1938 novel Scoop, the author Evelyn Waugh satirised the junction’s traffic, describing it as “still as a photograph, broken and undisturbed”.

–A story in The Spectator by Lydia Schmitt is entitled “Private schools were ruined long ago.” Here’s an excerpt:

There is a story in private education circles of an apoplectic father who raged to the bursar that he was unable to find a prep school for his son ‘without central-heating’. It is probably apocryphal, but it reminds us of the mad heights to which some private schools have stretched: rowing lakes, glitzy IT centres, West End-style theatres and Olympic-sized swimming pools, no doubt necessary for storing the ever-growing associated fees.

It wasn’t always this way. My entire 1950s schooling was an exercise in back-to-basics privation, fostering a now-fashionable ‘resilience’ and ‘green’ ethos, unnoticed by us pupils of those distant days. My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire.

I visited it a few years ago, to find it still surprisingly unbeholden to the current expectations of the entitled, continuing to use the freezing bathrooms with huge rusting enamelled iron bathtubs. I doubt the washing regime continues, however. We small girls were plunged into these baths three at a time, twice a week, as the tepid water became increasingly soup-like…

If you were deemed ‘peaky’ you queued again for a spoon of Radio Malt. No one had a nut allergy. Hands were inspected before lunch, and you were dispatched to a chilly sink with a pumice stone if yours were inky. Once, my father, posted in the Middle East, sent the school a box of Jaffa oranges. We were transfixed as they were handed out, rather like Evelyn Waugh’s children seeing their first bananas, though brutally devoured in front of them by their father.

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David Lodge (1935-2025) R.I.P.

The Society regrets to announce that its Honorary President, David Lodge, died earlier this week on 1 January 2025 at the age of 89. He was a few weeks away from his 90th birthday. There are several obituaries in today’s papers, of which that in the Daily Telegraph (unsigned) is probably the most detailed. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

David Lodge, who has died aged 89, was too skilled a novelist simply to replay his own life in his fiction, but he wrote repeatedly in his prize-winning and popular books about two subjects close to his heart: academic life and Roman Catholicism; his attraction to and affection for both did not, however, prevent him from casting a comic, critical eye over them.

“Each of my novels,” he once said, “corresponds to a particular phase or aspect of my own life: for example, going to the University of California at the height of the Student Revolution, being an English Catholic at a period of great change in the Church, getting on to the international academic conference circuit; but this does not mean they are not autobiographical in any simple, straightforward sense.  I begin with a hunch that what I have experienced or observed had some representative–i.e., more than merely private–significance that could be brought out by means of a fictional story.”

Lodge spent 27 years teaching at Birmingham University, retiring as Professor of English in 1987. Along with Professor Malcolm Bradbury of the University of East Anglia–whom he referred to as “my closest friend”–he more or less invented the modern “campus novel.” More playful than satirical, it wore its seriousness of purpose lightly, and was always set amid the concrete sprawl of Britain’s  burgeoning “new” universities of the 1960s…

The Guardian also has a detailed article which is written by literary critic and scholar John Mullan. Here are the concluding paragraphs:

…In 2008 he published what was, in many ways, his most autobiographical novel, and one of his best, Deaf Sentence. Lodge had started losing his hearing in his mid-40s. Up to this point, only those closest to him had realised that his partial deafness had deeply influenced him. It contributed to his decision to retire from academia and turned him in on himself. Struggling to keep up with conversations, he said, had stopped him being amusing. Lodge often spoke of his feelings of anxiety, undiminished by literary success or academic standing. Yet the deafness that depressed him in life became comic in his novel.

Admirers of Lodge’s novels were often surprised to find him, in person, dolefully reflective. This was the spirit of his memoir, Quite a Good Time to Be Born, published in 2015. Covering the period from his birth to his breakthrough, at the age of 40, with Changing Places, it gives (despite the title) a glum and minutely circumstantial account of growing up a Roman Catholic in the 1940s and 50s.

Lodge looks back with some amazement at his younger self’s respect for Catholic doctrine. Two further volumes of memoirs, covering later periods of his life, followed. Writer’s Luck (2018), should have relished his middle years of celebrity and success, but is more precise about the small disappointments of his literary life. Varying Degrees of Success (2020), covering the years after academia, lets us know just how wearying the business of writing can be.

His last published work of fiction was The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up (2016), a collection of short stories mostly composed between the 1950s and 90s. Humorously fable-like, they serve as a reminder of this melancholy man’s comic instinct. Fiction allowed him to combine his literary-critical intelligence with a gift for observing absurdities, in order to fashion his own peculiarly bleak brand of comedy…

The obituary in today’s issue of The Times is also worth reading and elaborates on some of the same points as those in the other papers. Here are the concluding paragraphs from The Times’ unsigned article:

…Lodge’s campus novels continued to live long in the memory, aided by successful television adaptations of Small World in 1988, and Nice Work (by Lodge himself) in 1989. The latter won the Royal Television Society award for best serial. Lodge also won plaudits for his 1994 adaptation of Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit, with Tom Wilkinson as a magnificent Pecksniff.

Lodge’s wife, Mary, predeceased him in 2022. He is survived by their three children, Julia, Stephen and Christopher.

His novels remain relevant, ready to entertain a new generation, and he was inordinately pleased that the fictional universities of Limerick and Gloucestershire are now real ones as a result of life imitating his art…

Hopefully, the BBC will take this opportunity to recognize David Lodge’s heritage by replaying one or more of the adaptations mentioned in The Times’ article.

If you look at the photo of the Society’s 2011 Conference delegates on this website’s home page, Prof. Lodge is standing near the front in a light colored trench coat next to a delegate to his right (the viewer’s left) with very red hair. Paula Byrne is a few delegates to his left just behind those in the front row. Obituaries have also appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as several other regional and national papers in both the US and Britain and elsewhere.

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