Thanksgiving Roundup

Posted on November 30, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New Statesman has an article about the crime novels of James Lee Burke. This is by Michael Henderson who describes the Louisiana setting of the novels featuring the characters of Dave Robicheaux and Cletus Purcel.  Here’s an excerpt with a reference to Waugh:

…It is Robicheaux and Purcel contra mundum. “The Bobbsey twins from Homicide”, Purcel calls them, referring to their early days in the New Orleans Police Department. Robicheaux, frustrated by official corruption, slides into a detective’s job in the New Iberia sheriff’s office after that first novel, running a bait shop on the side. Purcel, booted out of the Crescent City when superiors tired of his direct methods, becomes a private investigator and bail bondsman.

They could easily have been crusty bores. Wounded by broken childhoods, blasted by the horrors of Vietnam, they are troubled souls with a thirst for “the full-tilt boogie”. Nothing new there. Yet, from this unpromising clay, Burke has moulded men who achieve an Arthurian nobility.

Evil does not have to triumph, he reminds us, because it shouts louder. Goodness abides in unlikely places, and all souls are susceptible to that “twitch upon the thread” Evelyn Waugh wrote about in Brideshead Revisited. As Purcel frequently says, his words tolling like the Angelus: “noble mon, everything’s copacetic”…

The full article is linked here.

–Waugh also features briefly in another New Statesman article. This is a list of books nominated as book of the year by various New Statesman contributors:

Brendan Simms

I very much enjoyed John O’Beirne Ranelagh’s The Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1914-1924 (Irish Academic Press). The author is the son of a legendary member of the “Old IRA”, and interviewed many surviving members during the 1970s. He evokes a world gone by with empathy but without sentimentality, unsure whether the killing and the suffering was really worth it.

I was also completely absorbed by Dodie Smith’s 1948 novel I Capture the Castle (Vintage), which oddly I had never read before. It is an Edith Wharton meets Evelyn Waugh story about American money and English breeding with some surprises. The 2003 film version, with Romola Garai and Bill Nighy, is pretty good too.

Here’s a link to the entire list.

–A podcast of possible interest has been posted on the website podtail.com. Here’s a description:

Join Dr. Peter Sinclair, Professor and Chair of Languages and Literature at Sacred Heart University and Dr. William Baker, Distinguished Professor of media & entertainment at IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain, and President Emeritus of WNET-Thirteen, New York’s public television station, for a conversation on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.The Literary Catholic is a program dedicated to exploring life-changing stories from centuries of Catholic literature, a collaboration with The Guild of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Sacred Heart University, and the John Paul II Center for Evangelizing Communications, Diocese of Bridgeport.

Here’s a link 

–A website called keepingupwiththe penguins.com has posted a recommendation for reading a Penguin edition of Scoop that contains several amusing and interesting comments. Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh was the second son of Arthur Waugh, celebrated publisher-slash-literary critic, and also the brother of Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. I can only imagine the weight of family expectation on his shoulders, and the snippy conversations they had over Christmas dinners. Luckily, it would seem that Evelyn managed to out-write and out-last them both. He’s better known for his book Brideshead Revisited, but somehow Scoop, his satirical novel about sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondents, is the one that ended up on my reading list.

It’s kind of funny, really, to read a book about journalists and newspapers written before the News Of The World scandal. Scoop reads like a time capsule of the by-gone “heyday” of newspaper journalism. The protagonist is the humble (read: poor) William Boot, who lives on the very-very outskirts of London and regularly contributes over-written nature columns to The Daily Beast, a newspaper owned by the terrifying and powerful Lord Copper.

Evelyn did outlast his father but died in 1966 well before Alec, who survived his brother by more that 15 years, managing to write 7 books after Evelyn’s death.

 

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Roundup: From Arcadia to Bohemia

Posted on November 17, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Irish Rover, a newspaper sponsored by University of Notre Dame (in Indiana, not Ireland), has posted a brief article on the origins of “Arcadia”. This is by Santiago Legarre who is a visiting professor at the Notre Dame Law School. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh famously called “Et in Arcadia Ego” the first long section of Brideshead Revisited. Even though it might seem at first glance that “ego” is Charles Ryder (the protagonist) and “Arcadia,” Oxford, a closer inspection of the novel and of the Latin in the phrase suggests that the more likely intended meaning of those words (inscribed on a skull) is that “Death reigns too in Arcadia.” Paintings by Guercino and Poussin, depicting herders around tombs in a bucolic environment, contribute to confirm this interpretation of the phrase, especially as Charles, in the fiction, was a painter, likely familiar with those works, one of which is named “Et in Arcadia Ego.”

Leaving aside the original public meaning of the phrase as a memento mori (legal pun intended!), I would like to offer here a competing but complementary interpretation. For these purposes I will briefly elaborate on the nature of Arcadia as a place, if a place indeed it is. I find useful to explore at the same time a different but related question: Who dwells in Arcadia?

It is my submission that in Brideshead Revisited (and in similar other contexts) “Arcadia” is better understood not as a place but as a state of affairs. The phrase’s reference has certainly no meaningful connection with the contemporary Greek region (“Arcadia”) or with the “Acadia” that in the eighteenth century moved from somewhere in Canada to somewhere in what today is Louisiana. (The missing “r” in the latter is a mystery worth resolving, though this assumes that the “r” is indeed missing.)…

The full story can be accessed at this link.

–The TLS has posted a review about artists of the interwar years. This is by Daren Coffield and is entitled Queens of Bohemia, And other misfits. It is reviewed by Libby Purves. Here are some excerpts:

Darren Coffield is a painter of no small repute in the generation of the 1990s known as the YBAs (Young British Artists: he once notably did a heroic portrait of Arthur Scargill in the medium of coal dust). In Tales from the Colony Room (2020), he collated oral history and memoirs of a notorious drinking club on Dean Street in Soho. In Queens of Bohemia he focuses on the women who were artists, muses, club hostesses or companions in the years of classic bohemianism in Soho and Fitzrovia, from the 1920s to the 1950s.

It’s a big canvas, from the age of flappers, through cafe society and wartime mavericks, right to the leading edge of the Swinging Sixties. Figures range from impoverished artists to showbiz stars such as Hermione Baddeley, but Coffield feels that too often the light has fallen chiefly on the men. Women, he says, were the “dark matter holding bohemia together and keeping its stars in their orbit”. But, struggling to be seen and hampered by legal inequality, they “posed political, moral and existential challenges to authority and gave rise to a new way of living”….

There are a few likeable figures; more among the women, from Kathleen Hale, creator of Orlando the Marmalade Cat, to a strongwoman known as the Mighty Mannequin, who tore telephone directories in half and bent a poker round a man’s neck. Tallulah Bankhead seems an amiable toughie, as does the eccentric hotelier Rosa Lewis, who was once kind to a “morose” little boy among the Churchill family called Winston. She turns up fictionally in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. …

The book ends with a regretful account of how, after the Sexual Offences Act 1959, prostitution went indoors, and a more cheerful reflection that the women of that bohemian world were responsible for preparing the ground for feminism. That may be news to hundreds of quieter-behaved scholars, scientists, politicians and teachers, but never mind. From Jacob Epstein to Dylan Thomas, Walter Sickert to Lucian Freud, the boho artistic impetus is too often mixed either with callous insouciance about women and children or with morbid and creepy perversion (mistress’s aborted foetuses in pickle jars under the bed, coprophilia, etc). Maybe Darren Coffield has chosen the worst of bohemia, and could with equal justice have given it a bit more of a forgiving shine. But this record is not unimportant.

–The Financial Times published the letter posted below in its Friday edition (15 November):

By a curious coincidence, shortly before I read Camilla Cavendish’s column (“Labour must make good on its promise to the private sector”, Opinion, FT.com, FT Weekend, November 2) advising that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government needs to understand “what it means to risk your own capital in a venture”, I read the following lines about those that “are serenely ignorant of the anxieties that beset the small company director; the yearly struggle to present a plausible balance sheet; the harassed perusal of the national budget which may, by some incidence of taxation, close carefully prepared markets and turn a marginal profit into a dead loss. They live in a Utopian socialist state untroubled by the ardours and asperities of private enterprise.” It was written in 1930, by the British novelist Evelyn Waugh in his travel book Labels. Plus ça change . . . Geoffrey Wort Stockbridge, Hampshire, UK

–An article by Iain Martin on Waugh’s close friend Harold Acton has been posted on the website Reaction.life. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Harold Mario Mitchell Acton, the son of Arthur Acton, was born in 1904. His father was an illegitimate offspring of an adviser to the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, and consequently he and Harold were less distinguished scion of the Acton family than they liked to suggest.

What transformed his father’s and his own circumstances was his American mother’s inherited wealth; it supported and shaped Harold’s long and privileged life. The main source for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, Harold was a nomad, not entirely a citizen of anywhere. Waugh’s fictional depiction captures the essence:

“An attempt had been made in his childhood to make an Englishman of him; he was two years at Eton; then in the middle of the [First] war he had defied the submarines, re-joined his mother in the Argentine, and a clever and audacious schoolboy was added to the valet, the maid, the two chauffeurs 
 Criss-cross about the world he travelled with them 
 When peace came they returned to Europe, to hotels and furnished villas, spas and casinos 
 he dined with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diaghilev 
 At times we all seemed children beside him
”

The complete article may be accessed at this link.

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Waugh in Italian

Posted on November 10, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The announcement of an Italian translation of Waugh’s final travel book has appeared in at least two Italian papers. This is A Tourist in Africa (Un Turista in Africa) published by Aldelphi Edizioni. Here’s a translated excerpt of the review from the Italian books journal Il Libraio: 

…But here the enthusiasm for travel returned: “ I declare, and with satisfaction, that at fifty-five I am in the season of life in which I must winter abroad , though to tell the truth it is a stage I reached thirty years ago. I liked fox hunting, or so I thought, but at Christmas time the enthusiasm faded”. Waugh perceives himself from time to time as the last traveller , because, he writes, by now “tourism and politics have made a scorched earth. And fifty-five is not an age for travel : too old for the jungle, too young for the beach, better to be encouraged by watching others at work, who lead a very different existence from ours. Few experiences are more exhausting than socialising with those who spend their holidays on the north coast of Jamaica and who are all older , fatter, richer, more idle and uglier than we are” . And yet once again he is about to touch at least the jungle and even the beaches, while his bad mood will decrease as always, graced by an Africa that is no longer the same.

The signs of the imminent decolonization , and the consequent end of the British Empire, are now increasingly evident . It is curious, however, that from Port Said to South Africa (but with a first stop in Genoa, which he finds wonderful and surprising), along the entire western coast of the continent, between uncomfortable trains, acceptable ships and hated planes, Waugh behaves exactly as in the decades of his time that one would presume lost (and regretted), between letters of introduction, very polite guests, solicitous officials who accompany him everywhere, real tours de force , mischievous explorations of cities that do not seem to reserve anything interesting and instead, like Mombasa, hide the little jewel of the Star Bar; where good people do not want to go, but Waugh has a great time.

Nothing seems to have changed, on the surface. The writer is actually welcomed more than ever with all the honors (he is very famous, even in America where his novels have sold very well), he does what he wants and gets everything he desires, he seems to become more and more pleasant and kind, in fact he admits it himself, wondering why; his bitter moods emerge here and there but towards third parties and not directed at his interlocutors, as when he asks himself “to what extent the loss of prestige of Europeans in hot countries depends on the vile preference for comfort at the expense of dignity” given that his fellow countrymen resident there go around in shorts. He admires the Masai, but basically almost does not see – or pretends not to see – the local populations, he amuses himself with cannibal legends .

His Africa is largely English, Boers and Germans – the latter being highly recommendable as hoteliers unlike their compatriots, and this is underlined by a snarling and hilarious trait of futility.

The snows of Kilimanjaro, for example, have no Hemingway effect ; if anything, they are memorable for a healthy drop in temperature and “a solid, old-fashioned German inn, with balconies, a terrace, a lawn, a flower garden and a cage of monkeys”. The eastern highlands of Rhodesia , which he greatly enjoys, offer him the opportunity to take it out on tourism on the French Riviera, where “the survivors and imitators of the elegant young neurotics described by FS Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night are now those greasy masses of flesh that the proletariat besieges and invades”; and to reiterate that “The craze for sunbathing has lasted too long”. In Tanzania, the coastal town of Pangani gives rise to some Hamlet-like doubts, because “perhaps it will not survive for long. It is of little use to modern Africa. Should I be afraid of disturbing its gentle decadence by recommending it to tourists? I don’t think so”.

He was wrong, Pangani is still a destination, even if it is out of the way . But that is not what interests Waugh. He pretends to write a book for potential tourists who do not matter to him; the title itself is probably a provocative fiction, the framework to tell, almost between the lines, a world that is waning. He knows well that by now, at the height of the Sixties, everything is changing . He sweats, toils and has fun, but what he sees is not nature, it is the end of an empire, of a white society that now lives in a subtle sense of temporariness. There is no lack of allusions to independence movements , but as if they emerged by chance from some chat over a glass of whisky; and so the failures of the Labour government (which he detested) to try out a colonialism with a human face and launch bizarre and disastrous development plan

In some cases, many barely hinted references to the political reality of the time may seem cryptic to the Italian reader, but that is not what counts in the magnificent writing of a fascinating, irresistible antipathetic . At the end, almost as if to remind us that he is well aware of the situation, but has decided not to address it explicitly, Waugh performs an extraordinary excusatio non petita , which is perhaps the key to the book – and the recognition of tourism as the great fiction of its time: “It is noble to atone for the sins of humanity vicariously in a hermit’s cell. In the absence of such a remedy, let me gratefully accept the good things that the world still offers and, please, do not try to impute to me the blame for what is totally beyond my control”.

Emphasis in original. Translation by Google. Quotations from the book are based on Italian text.

Another newspaper, Il Manifesto, a daily leftist paper published in Rome, has also issued a review.  Here’s a translation of an excerpt from that one:

…It is the account in the form of a diary of a journey made in the early months of 1959, mostly by ship, to Tanganyika and Rhodesia – as today’s Tanzania and Zimbabwe were still called – with stops in Genoa, Port Said, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Salisbury, among others. The itinerary was entirely internal, as can be seen, to the English colonial empire. Waugh insists on the word “tourist” in the title to differentiate the book from his previous accounts, which were more those of a “traveler” and journalist. In the 1930s he had published, among other things, Labels (1930, translated by Adelphi in 2006: Etichette ) … and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936, translated by Adelphi in 2022: In Abissinia ), all focused on African experiences, partly conducted as a correspondent for newspapers such as the Times and the Daily Mail. A certain sense of adventure and discovery of exotic realities dominated these works, even if, compared to the models of Conrad and Leiris, the charm of “primitive” authenticity had completely disappeared: in its place, that sceptical irony so typical of Waugh emerged in every line, which led him to underline on the one hand the most squalid aspects of colonial cities, on the other the grotesque and sometimes surreal situations produced by cultural hybridizations. In A Tourist in Africa, not only is there no search for authenticity, but not even adventurous aspects: the author finds himself in places he already knows, he moves with ease and at each of his stops he is hosted and accompanied by people he knows or by officials who take care of him, such an illustrious visitor. What remains, however, is the taste for describing situations and characters who find themselves at the crossroads of different cultural worlds: from the cosmopolitan workers he meets on the ship, to the German hoteliers in Tanganyika, to the missionaries who found art schools for the natives, to the Maasai who go to boy scout rallies in London.

Figures from the margins that stimulate Waugh’s subtle sarcasm but, evidently, also his admiration: they are for him the living proof of the senselessness of those nationalisms that believe in pure cultures and that have just brought Europe into the catastrophe of war. This is the only clear political judgment expressed by Waugh, who otherwise never misses an opportunity to equally tease both Labour and Conservative visions. The result is very harsh judgments on Rhodesian apartheid, which the author attributes entirely to the influence of Afrikaan culture: it is the fruit of a “sick logic”, of “an infection of racial madness that is rising from the south”, he states, and it would have appeared incomprehensible and insulting in the eyes of all the first adventurers, who, while fighting the natives, cheating and plundering them, had somehow amalgamated with them. Which brings us to perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book: Waugh travels from North to South across the British Empire on the eve of its end. It is an end that is considered inevitable, and – it seems – not even particularly feared by the English and other Europeans. The climate is certainly not that of Algeria. It seems that many of the officials Waugh meets are progressives eager to create the conditions for the independence of African states. But our cynical author does not end on an optimistic note at all: he is concerned that the overcoming of colonialism is taking place on the basis of nationalist policies, and without a native ruling class having consolidated. He has this point of view expressed by an old Italian priest he meets in the Mbeya mission in Tanganyika: «the mistake was to introduce ‘Africanization’ through politics and not through public administration».

For his part, the Catholic Waugh advances a sinister comparison with the liberation of Latin America, accomplished by “local revolutionaries speaking the already antiquated language of the Enlightenment”, and which “was followed by a century of chaos and tyranny that has not yet been mitigated throughout the continent”. Assertions that sound – today – paternalistic and prejudiced, but perhaps not entirely unfounded: they serve at least to remind us that colonialism and its overcoming were complex and multidimensional phenomena, full of gray areas, and not reducible to the clash between Evil and Good that we too often tend to represent.

The review seems to have been written by Fabio Dei, although that may be a pen name. Translation by Google. The translation of Adelphi’s edition of Un Turista in Africa is by Stefano Manfarlotti and the price is €14.00. It might also be mentioned that Aldelphi recently published (2022) an Italian edition of The Holy Places as explained in an earlier post and earlier still, of When the Going Was Good (Quando viaggiare era una piacere, 2005).

 

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Armistice Day Roundup

Posted on November 9, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books has posted an episode from its ongoing podcast called Close Reads that may be of interest. This is in a series entitled “On Satire” that is conducted by Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell, both Fellows of All Souls, Oxford. The 32-minute podcast is available on YouTube and Apple Podcast. Here’s the description:

In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible. But before reaching that conclusion he had written several novels taking aim at his ‘crazy, sterile generation’ with a sparkling, acerbic and increasingly reactionary wit. In this episode, Colin and Clare look at A Handful of Dust (1934), a disturbingly modernist satire divorced from modernist ideas. They discuss the ways in which Waugh was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, with his belief in the artist as an agent of cultural change, and why he’s at his best when describing the fevered dream of a dying civilisation.

The YouTube link allowed me to listen to about half the podcast. You may have to register and/or pay a fee to hear the whole episode.

–Waugh’s friend Lord Berners is memorialized in an article appearing on a BBC website. The article by Geoff Brown relates to Berners’ music rather than his writing or painting. Here’s a summary from the introduction:

…Berners’s music changed in temper over the years, but the key ingredients, some contradictory, always remained: avant-garde grit meets traditional craftsmanship; cosmopolitan flamboyance runs alongside English reserve; stylistic satire is warmed by affection; and humour comes tinged with nostalgia, sometimes melancholy. If we cherish Satie, as we do, we should definitely cherish Lord Berners as well….

Since Waugh found listening to music physically painful, he is unlikely to have had extended discussions with Berners about his musical compositions. Indeed, Waugh once in 1947 declined an invitation from Stravinsky to attend the premiere of one of the latter’s compositions based on his inability to listen to it. See below. Waugh is mentioned briefly in Geoff Brown’s article and appears in at least one of the photos (of which there are many).

—Gentlemen’s Quarterly has posted a list of books prepared by Josiah Gogarty which it claims offer light or escapist reading to see one through the heavily political atmosphere of today’s recent election environment. Here’s one by humous journalist Craig Brown entitled One on One: 101 True Encounters (2012) in which Waugh’s 1947 declension of Stravinsky’s invitation noted above features prominently:

This book has a brilliant premise: it consists of 101 real-life encounters between historical figures from Elvis to Rasputin, with each one written in 1,001 words and forming a link with the stories either side (Alec Guinness meets Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Waugh meets Igor Stravinsky, Igor Stravinsky meets Walt Disney
). It’s an amazing technical accomplishment, but it’s also very fun – Craig Brown has a great knack for finding good dialogue and anecdotes. Forget the present day and start ping-ponging around the 20th century.

–Finally, the religious/political website The Imaginative Conservative has a brief article discussing:

…two great novels, one of which [Brideshead Revisited] is rightly considered a classic and the other of which [The Mass of Brother Michel (1942) by Michael Kent] is largely unknown, and then will conclude with Tolkien’s great prose epic, The Lord of the Rings…

 

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Three Views of Haile Selassie

Posted on November 4, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The British magazine History Today has posted on the internet the full text of its 2015 feature-length article, now entitled “In The Court of Haile Selassie.” This is by literary biographer and critic Jeffrey Meyers and tells the story of the Abyssinian emperor as reflected in the works of three authors. An abbreviated version under a different title was mentioned briefly in a previous post upon first publication. Here is the opening paragraph:

Christian and never colonised, remote and mysterious Abyssinia has only occasionally impinged on the western consciousness during its centuries of isolation. Evelyn Waugh visited it in 1930 and satirised what he saw as a barbaric country and the splendiferous coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, who was to reign for 44 years, in Remote People (1931). He returned six years later to report and praise the Italian invasion in Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). Wilfred Thesiger, the son of a diplomat, was born in the mud buildings of the British legation in Addis Ababa, spent his childhood in Abyssinia and later explored unknown parts of the East African country. Serving in Orde Wingate’s Gideon Force during the Second World War, he helped drive out the Italian oppressors. He admired the traditional way of life and remained fiercely loyal to Selassie in his autobiography, The Life of My Choice (1987). The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski described the revolution of 1974 that overthrew Selassie in The Emperor (1978). In the books of these three writers Selassie appears in various guises: an exotic potentate, a victim of war and rebellion and an evil oriental despot…

Meyers then proceeds to describe in some detail how each of these writers manages to describe the life and career of same historic figure quite differently, starting from the same historic materials. I can’t speak for his discussion of the works of Thesiger and Kapucinski but his description of Waugh’s contribution is both accurate and eminently readable. My only quibble would be his assertion that Waugh had  “punned in the title of Waugh in Abyssinia.” That title was selected not by Waugh but (as I recall) by the publisher of the book Tom Burns. In fact, Waugh was on record preferring to call the book The Disappointing War, which was the title under which excerpts were published in the English Review. Patey, p. 141.

The article concludes with this summary of the three different descriptions of Selassie:

…All three authors wrote superbly but distorted the truth to justify their own points of view. Waugh vividly portrayed the plight of the country but he praised the barbaric Italian invasion of 1935, which he believed would civilise and improve Abyssinia. Thesiger admired almost everything that Waugh disliked: locked in his own reactionary views, he knew more but understood less than Waugh. He hated and fought against the Italians who had destroyed an ancient culture that he felt should have been allowed to survive without western interference. Dazzled by the primitive pageantry he held to the idea, not the reality, of Selassie and was blindly loyal to the colourful Abyssinians. He longed for the pristine past; loved the wild Danakil, Masai, Samburu, Bedouin and Marsh Arabs and saw Abyssinia as a kind of private theatre for his delight. He wanted the spectacle to last forever and did not really care what happened to the mass of suffering people. Conditions that were funny to Waugh were tragic to the left-wing Kapuscinski. But when he arrived in Abyssinia 40 years after Waugh and political and social conditions had not improved, he agreed with the right-wing Waugh rather than with the retrograde Thesiger and supported the disastrous revolution in 1974.

The article is now available in full at this link.

 

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Waugh in Boston and Belgium

Posted on November 2, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Burns Library at Boston College has posted a photo of Evelyn Waugh that I have not previously seen. Here’s a link. Although there is no accompanying text, the photo must have been taken during Waugh’s short visit to Boston College in November 1948. This was in connection with his research for the Life magazine article “Catholics in America” which appeared in 1949. While he was visiting the college, he made a short presentation to a group of students. This was a sort of dry run for the lecture tour he planned to present at a number of eastern US Catholic colleges in early 1949. Here’s a  description of the visit from an article in EWS 43.3, Winter 2013 (footnotes omitted):

Waugh went to Boston on 15 November and stayed until the 18th. He visited his publisher, Little, Brown, and stopped at Boston College, where he attended a creative-writing class reported in the student newspaper, The Heights (19 November 1948, 1, 8). Waugh said he preferred to write by hand rather than typewriter, since that facilitated revision as he went along. He usually wrote two complete drafts before publication, made no advance plan, and simply sat down to write chapter by chapter. He emphasized that a writer should “know his language thoroughly 
 and be especially familiar with the ‘etymology of each word that he uses so that he will know its true derivation and meaning, rather than its colloquial shadings.’” The finished product should have words strung together to form a melodious pattern. In response to questions, Waugh explained that The Loved One originated in California’s modern paganism and people without roots. When asked why he withdrew Brideshead from the filming process, he explained that Hollywood producers were “horrified”that he should want the essence of the story kept intact. “The Marchmain family, I hope, represent a normal Catholic family facing the modern world. Cordelia is the good Catholic woman standing up against all obstacles; Sebastian is the youth assailed by temptation—in this case, alcoholism.”…

Here is another link to photos on the Burns Library website. This has a group photo that has appeared in other contexts as well as the one noted above where he is leaving the car. There is also a third photo posted separately below these first two. I think that one has also been posted or published before. The lecture tour is described in a three-part series of articles in the EWS archives: “Something Entirely Unique”: Evelyn Waugh’s 1948-49 Tours of North America. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending the Burns Library website link.

–The Dutch stage adaptation of Brideshead Revisited mentioned in a recent post has taken to the road. Here’s a description:

Brideshead Revisited comes to the Netherlands this week. Performances run 30 October – 11 December 2024 at De Warme Winkel. [The play] premiered at the Holland Festival in June 2023, playing to sold-out audiences for a month in the main hall of theatre hub De Sloot. Due to popular demand, the show is now embarking on a tour across the Netherlands and Belgium.

This masterpiece had a cult status among both queers and conservatives in the previous century, but nowadays, this novel seems to have been consigned to oblivion. Yet, perhaps, it remains the most romantic and Anglophile book literature has ever produced. After the success of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, De Warme Winkel brings another English literary classic to the theatre. Florian Myjer, together with Abke Haring, thrusts Brideshead Revisited into the 21st century.

The secretively autobiographical Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh tells the story of Charles Ryder, who, as a young student at Oxford in the early 20th Century, falls under the spell of the aristocratic Flyte family. One sultry summer long, he basks in their opulent life at the heavenly family country estate, where he falls in love with both the son Sebastian and daughter Julia Flyte. Yet, with the end of summer and the rise of fascism, adulthood also presents itself. No matter how much Charles would like it to, the freedom of those golden August days is not coming back. What had appeared to be the prelude to a radically honest and free-spirited life transpires to be the eve of a desperate and cynical existence.

Trapped in a bitter worldview himself, for Evelyn Waugh writing this novel was an attempt to recover the happiness of his younger years. Inspired by this soul-searching, De Warme Winkel exploits Brideshead Revisited as a vehicle for an autopsy of love and an unfolding of our (sexual) identity. With live music composed by Rik Elstgeest and the memories and fantasies of Florian and Abke as the beating heart, they finally resuscitate the epic love story Waugh so longed for.

The quoted story appeared this week online and in several Dutch and Belgian papers and was translated by Google. Schedule of performances and ticketing are available at this link.

 

 

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Centenary of Waugh’s Coming of Age: 28 October 1924

Posted on October 28, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Today marks the centenary of Evelyn Waugh’s coming of age on 28 October 1924, his 21st birthday. In Waugh’s diary entry for the following day, he begins: “Yesterday I became a man and put away childish things.” (Diaries, p. 182)  The preceding months had been quite eventful, not always in a positive sense. In the summer Waugh had taken his final exams at Oxford. He resumed his diary about the same time, in June 1924. This describes several weeks of undergraduate celebrations concluding with the news at the end of July that he had passed with a third class degree. One consequence of this is that he went down from Oxford (i.e., dropped out voluntarily) before completing the 9-term residency required for the award of a degree. The poor degree ended his scholarship, and his father refused to pay the bills for the final term. Waugh was at work on a book he calls The Temple of Thatch, which he continued after leaving Oxford but later binned when Harold Acton gave it a decidedly lukewarm report. In late July, Waugh and his Hertford College colleague Terrence Greenidge decided to produce a film, which in due course was completed as The Scarlet Woman. Much of it was filmed in the Waugh family back garden and adjacent portions of Hampstead Heath.

In late September, Waugh started art classes at Heatherley’s School of Fine Arts in London. He reports in his diary that he is pleased with the results in early days and was glad to see the last of Oxford. But then as his university comrades began to return, Waugh drifted toward Oxford on weekends and then for longer periods. In his diary entry, he concludes that “it is not possible to lead a gay life and to draw well.” (Diaries, p. 183) According to his autobiography, his coming of age on 28 October 1924 was observed at his home but “was not celebrated.” (ALL, p. 209) Waugh spent more and more time at Oxford and tried to learn printing nearby but in the end resorted to teaching posts in boarding schools as the source of a livelihood, starting in January 1925 at a school called Arnold House in Llanddulas, Wales.

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Pre-Halloween Roundup

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–A copy of a 1938 passenger list for the SS Aquitania has been posted on Reddit. This contains the opening pages and then an excerpt showing passengers whose names begin with “W”. On that page are listed Evelyn Waugh and his wife. They were on their way to Mexico in July 1938 where he would collect information for the book that became Robbery Under Law. They stopped in New York and made a side trip to Washington, DC, before taking another ship from New York to Veracruz. On the return voyage in October 1938, they travelled by train from Mexico via Laredo, TX to New York where they caught a steamer back to England. Waugh had learned that the air conditioned US railroads were more comfortable (at least in first class) as well as more frequent and faster than ocean going steamers between the US and Mexico.

Another entry on the same page of the excerpted list names identifies as passengers Clifton Webb and his wife. One of the comments assumes this was the well known film actor of that name but another says that he was never married, which is confirmed by Wikipedia. It is possible that Mrs Webb refers to his mother with whom he shared accommodations  during her lifetime.  Here’s a copy of the passenger list as posted on the internet. 

–An interesting article on the “Hollywood novel” is posted in the current edition of the Berkeley-based magazine Dispatches. This is by Scott Saul and the subject is the 1959 novel by Gavin Lambert entitled The Slide Area. British born and Oxford educated, Lambert was a screenwriter and film critic as well as a novelist. He wrote three other novels with Hollywood themes including Inside Daisy Clover (1963) which was made into a film in 1965, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. He later wrote a biography of Wood. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Gavin Lambert struck an unusual tone—at once ironic and affirming—across The Slide Area (1959), his first novel and an unassuming masterpiece of Los Angeles fiction. Its narrator pairs a rare clarity of vision with an even rarer warmth of engagement: he manages to be sharp without being cutting, and sympathetic without being indulgent. If The Slide Area does not deliver the more familiar satisfactions of LA noir in its “scenes of Hollywood life” (as its subtitle has it), it is not because there are no crimes committed—there will be at least one murder, one case of statutory rape, and one case of fraud—but instead because Lambert’s interest lies elsewhere. As Gary Indiana has remarked of Lambert’s fiction more generally, it works to solve “mysteries of personality rather than crimes.”…

Saul mentions several other Hollywood novels in his discussion including this:

…Since we rarely gain insight into what the narrator [of The Slide Area] specifically wants or desires, the action of the novel seems to fill that vacuum: what he most desires, it appears, is simply to know these other people, and through them to understand the city that supports or fails them. He feels as reliable as a first-person narrator can be. While quick to catch and register ironic details in the scenes he dramatizes, as a character he largely acts as a sounding-board for the wide cast of dreamers he meets, his sympathy allowing them to make the best case for their aspirations, or to give voice to their doubts and qualms.

A brief summary of those aspirations suggests how easily they might have been mocked in the satirical manner of, say, Evelyn Waugh in his LA novel The Loved One. We meet a former British schoolmate, who desires only to sun himself on the beach and supports that lifestyle by living with a wealthy man he resents (“Nukuhiva!”); a blind and nearly deaf dowager-countess, still in love with the lost world of aristocratic Austro-Hungary and eager to go on one last Grand Tour, her declining senses and fortune be damned (“The End of the Line”); a middle-aged Hollywood star (based on Joan Crawford) seeking to revive her career through manipulation and force of will (“The Closed Set”); a fourteen-year-old midwestern runaway with a bottomless faith in her future stardom (“Dreaming Emma”); and a scion of a powerful Hollywood agent, erotically drawn to men and women, who drifts from one scrape to another (“Sometimes I’m Blue”). The novel’s main characters tend to be either creatures of ambition or creatures of pleasure, and in the loose structure of The Slide Area serve as foils of one another….

The full article is available on the Dispatches internet site and can be read at this link,

–A brief article has been posted in the political-religious journal The Imaginative Conservative entitled Crimes Against the Humanities: The Tragedy of Modernity. This is by literary journalist Joseph Pearce and opens with this:

One of the most heinous crimes against humanity that modernity has perpetrated is its war on the humanities. And let’s not forget that the humanities are thus called because they teach us about our own humanity. A failure to appreciate the humanities must inevitably lead to the dehumanizing of culture and a disastrous loss of the ability to see ourselves truthfully and objectively.

The follies and fallacies of modernity and their dehumanizing consequences have been critiqued by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century… Evelyn Waugh, in his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, a novel inspired by a line in one of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, lampoons the “hollow men” produced by modernity in his portrayal of the characters of Hooper and Rex Mottram. Hooper had “no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe”…

The complete text is available at this link.

 

 

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Roundup: Cousins, Catholics, Allegories and Adaptations

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books has posted a review by Neal Acherson of the new biography of Claude Cockburn by his son Patrick.  This in mentioned in a previous post and is entitled “Believe Nothing Until It Has Been Officially Denied”. Here is an excerpt from Acherson’s review:

…Like George Orwell and several other establishment rebels, Claud Cockburn was born overseas, the son of Henry Cockburn, a senior diplomat in Beijing, and his wife, Elizabeth. Two years after his birth in 1904, he was sent back to Britain, soon followed by his parents: Henry had resigned on a complex matter of principle. They settled at Tring in Hertfordshire and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-war’. But the experiences that followed were what shaped his view of the world. His father was appointed to an international ‘clearing house’ supposed to make sense of Hungary’s hopeless finances. The family went to live in Budapest, and Cockburn was plunged into the chaos, misery and brutality of Central Europe, as new nation-states struggled out of the debris of three fallen empires. Hungary had been part of the Habsburg Empire, an enemy power in the war, and Cockburn, hardly out of school, was seized by passionate sympathy for the defeated nations – including Germany. The war, which had cost the lives of 230 Berkhamstead boys, had disillusioned him with patriotism.

At Oxford, he became close friends with his cousin Evelyn Waugh (both were great-grandsons of Lord Henry Cockburn, the brilliant and lovable judge whose memoirs are a late triumph of the Scottish Enlightenment). Their politics were about as far apart as imagination could stretch (Waugh thought his cousin’s obsession with comical foreign countries quite mad), but they made each other laugh. Both joined the Hypocrites club (‘a noisy, alcohol-soaked rat-warren’) where Cockburn fell in love with whisky (‘I got up fairly early... I would then drink a large sherry glass of neat whisky before breakfast and... drink heavily throughout the day’). Astonishingly, his drinking and his later consumption of several packets of Woodbines a day did him little harm…

The book was also reviewed in the Daily Telegraph by Roger Lewis who wrote:  “Cockburn was educated at Berkhamsted, where the headmaster was the father of Graham Greene, and at Keble College, Oxford, where he caroused with Evelyn Waugh. (“We enjoyed not only drink,” Waugh recalled, “but drunkenness.”) Waugh was Cockburn’s cousin: their mutual great-grandfather was Lord Henry Cockburn, solicitor general for Scotland in the 1830s.”

–The religious journal Commonweal Magazine, published in England, has an article by author and academic Phil Klay about Waugh’s claim that he would have been much nastier than he was if not for his Roman Catholicism. Here’s an excerpt:

…It’s a neat anecdote, one that transmutes Waugh’s rougher qualities into an appealing, rakish image. You can imagine him as living out life inside one of his own novels, a charming scoundrel like Basil Seal. Christopher Hitchens dismissed it as “a nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny.” And yet the story feels right, a fitting Waugh story in the tradition of great English writers making quips—Samuel Butler’s “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four,” or Oscar Wilde’s supposed last words: “Either those curtains go or I do.” There’s even something nicely flattering about it. “And you a Catholic!” suggests an era when Catholicism enjoyed higher expectations than it does now. But the story is, in a rather important way, a subtle lie.

…upon reflection I think what actually unsettled me was the way the story shifted my approach to Waugh. I like the Waugh of the quip, not only because he’s more fun to think about but also because he’s easier to dismiss in precisely the way that Hitchens did. I love Waugh’s novels, especially the ones without too much Catholicism in them. Brideshead Revisited stays with me far less than A Handful of Dust, which I first read in fits and snatches during officer candidate school, or the Sword of Honour trilogy, read after I’d been to Iraq and come back with more appreciation for military satire, or even Put Out More Flags, one of the most purely pleasurable novels ever written.

Waugh’s style, his humor, his joyful enthusiasm for puncturing modern delusions, I’ve gleefully gulped down, but his Catholicism—dovetailing as it did with his revulsion toward the modern world, his dismissal of jazz and modern art, his wish to have been born centuries earlier—I’ve held at a distance. I don’t lament being born into a secular age; the medieval world, with its murderous religious zeal, holds no appeal for me. And I look warily at my modern coreligionists who, sometimes with an edgy, Evelyn Waugh–inflected sense of humor, embrace the faith as a repudiation of the world we inhabit. “New York’s hottest club is the Catholic Church,” declared Julia Yost in the New York Times, before sketching out the reactionary subculture that features “Trump hats and ‘tradwife frocks,’ monarchist and anti-feminist sentiments” and whose “ultimate expression…is its embrace of Catholicism.”…

It is quite a thoughtful essay as these religious articles go. Here’s a link to the full text.

–Blackwell’s Books of Oxford has posted an offer for two letters from Evelyn Waugh to members of the Stathatos family. These are from July 1963 and relate to arrangements for John Stathatos, then a high school student in Greece on a summer holiday, to visit Waugh at his home in Somerset. The details of this visit are described in a recent article in Evelyn Waugh Studies (No, 52.2, Fall 2021). Here’s a link. The letters are on offer for ÂŁ450.00 each and may be viewed at this link. Information about a previous auction of what appears to have included these two letters is available here.

–The Spanish paper El Pais carries a story about Glaswegian actor James McAvoy. This relates to his new film Don’t Talk to Strangers. In discussing his career, this appears:

…at 18 [McAvoy] decided to change his life and joined the Royal Navy. And then, suddenly, another unexpected plot twist: just as he was about to become a sailor, he was offered a scholarship to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dramatic Art to study acting. McAvoy finished his studies in 2000 and the industry literally fell for his charms: he played a soldier in the series Band of Brothers (2001) and a high-society bandit in A Scandal with Class [sic] (2003) , an adaptation of Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. But, above all, he was Steve McBride in Shameless (2004/2005), a hugely popular British series set in a dangerous Manchester neighborhood.

Something may have been lost in translation here. There was a film adaptation of Vile Bodies about that time. It was written and directed by Stephen Fry and was entitled, in English, Bright Young Things. The film may have been called something else in Spanish and was retranslated under that title in El Pais. According to Wikipedia, McAvoy appeared in that film adaptation as the character Simon Balcairn. He was a suicidal gossip columnist in Vile Bodies, Ch, 6, not a high-society bandit.  Anyone with knowledge of these matters is invited to comment as provided below.

–Finally, a website called Allegory Explained has an unattributed article relating to Waugh’s novel The Loved One. The text and illustrations lead me to suspect that this may be an Artificial Intelligence production. Not sure what audience it is aimed at. Here’s an excerpt:

…Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One” has had a significant impact on literature, particularly on the genre of satire. The novel’s scathing critique of the American funeral industry and the shallow nature of American culture has influenced many writers in their own works.

One notable example is Tom Robbins’ “Jitterbug Perfume,” which also uses satire to comment on the human condition. Robbins’ novel shares with “The Loved One” a sense of irreverence and a willingness to take on taboo subjects.

Another author who has been influenced by “The Loved One” is Kurt Vonnegut. In his novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” Vonnegut uses satire to comment on the excesses of American capitalism. Like “The Loved One,” Vonnegut’s novel is a biting critique of American culture.

Finally, “The Loved One” has also influenced contemporary writers such as Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel “Fight Club” shares with Waugh’s work a sense of dark humor and a willingness to challenge societal norms.

The illustrated text is available here.

COMMENT: Our reader, Hartley Moorhouse,  offered the following helpful comment on the adaptations of Vile Bodies:

You’re quite right to suspect that something has been lost in translation with the article from El País. The film being referred to is indeed Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, which was released in Spain under the completely different title of Escándalo con Clase (it is common for English-language films to be given different, sometimes unrecognisable, titles in Spanish, a cause of much confusion). The phrase used in the article to describe the character of Simon Balcairn is ‘bandido de alta sociedad’; this can loosely be translated as ‘high-society reprobate’, which is perhaps slightly nearer the mark than ‘bandit’.

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Columbus Day Roundup

Posted on October 12, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Australian Financial Review carries the story of a new novel that may be of interest. It is written by Pam Sykes:

…Her latest novel, Wives Like Us, skewers the ultra-rich residents of the Cotswolds, a bucolic protected area of England that, incidentally, includes Gloucestershire and its surrounds. Sykes, 54, moved here 15 years ago from London with husband Toby Rowland, a tech entrepreneur and their daughters, Ursula and Tess. In that time, Sykes saw the area become more and more moneyed – and ever more ripe for the sharp end of her pen.

“I see life as a comedy of manners,” she says in a voice that matches her nickname (her parents, both now deceased, were dress designer Valerie Goad, and Mark Sykes, a financier who was convicted of fraud. They called her Victoria). “I see the joke in everything. I turn everything into a joke, however dreadful it is.” Growing up, she hoovered up the works of Nancy Mitford, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh, and at the University of Oxford in the late 1980s developed a taste for the American social observers of the time including Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. “And you know, Jane Austen, of course,” she adds. “I feel I’ve read Pride and Prejudice a million times.”

Sykes has always been a comic writer; her work at Vogue, where she began as an assistant in 1993 (in Britain), deftly married wit with glamour. With Wives Like Us, she took inspiration from her own life in the Cotswolds (where daily challenges include missing peacocks, a problem Sykes herself has contended with)…

The setting comes alive in Sykes’ book, with mentions of Daylesford, the up-market grocer, and other stores. Was she concerned about offending her neighbours, I wonder? Sykes takes a sip of her tea from a gold-lustre cup (she collects them and assures me “You can buy them for under a tenner on eBay”)…

–The website of the University of Minnesota Retirees Association has posted the conclusions of a meeting of its book club on 21 June 2024 at which it discussed Waugh’s novel Scoop. After a summary of the book, the UMRA concluded:

…UMRA Book club members had mixed reactions to the book. Some found it humorous, but many were concerned about the racism and sexism in the writing. Some found it hard to follow the plot, with the two different Boots and large number of characters.

Members also discussed journalistic ethics today, and recent concerns about the Washington Post potentially hiring an editor from England with a history of working on stories that appeared to be based on stolen records…

Here’s a link to the complete posting.

–The New Criterion has a review by David Platzer of an exhibit at the Pompidou Centre in Paris on Surrealism. The article is entitled “Go ask Alice.” Here is an excerpt:

…Surrealism came on the heels of the previous decade’s Dada movement and featured many of the same figures, including AndrĂ© Breton, Surrealism’s pope, famous for his arbitrary excommunications, and Louis Aragon, who eventually became an unrepenting communist but was also a leading poet and the author of the excellent novel AurĂ©lian, of which Evelyn Waugh was a fan…

I was surprised that Waugh would have been a fan of anything associated with Surrealism but was unable to find any reference to his expression of admiration for Aragon’s novel. Anyone knowing of such is invited to file a comment as provided below.

–An essay entitled “Lionel Shriver and the Resistance to Satire” is posted on the Action Institute website. This is by Lee Oser. Here is an excerpt:

… [Shriver] mentions in passing two satirists, Evelyn Waugh and John Kennedy Toole. I would note that Waugh and Toole are out of favor in elect circles, their reputations bobbing haplessly amid the rest of the civilizational debris, tossed overboard since the ship of state hoisted its shiny new flags, all signaling virtue. It is (as Shriver knows) countercultural to mention them. My main point is that the God-idea in Waugh and Toole licenses a good deal of play, connecting them, in their literary descent, to Cervantes and Shakespeare. Quixote and Bottom are the common ancestors of Guy Crouchback and Ignatius Reilly. Pearson does not really belong in their comical and physically exuberant company. She is too intellectually severe, too much the acolyte of her admired Dostoevsky. She is always on point.

“Pearson” is a reference to a character in Shriver’s new novel Mania which was recently reviewed in the New York Times and is the main subject of Oser’s article. This is Pearson Converse who teaches low level writing classes at UPenn. According to Oser, the novel is “a fierce satire of the progressive establishment.” The full article is available at this link.

Comments: Mark McGinness kindly sent the following comments about the Pam Sykes novel mentioned above:

I did enjoy your Columbus Day Round Up.
Plum Sykes, the author of “Wives Like Us”, is indeed the granddaughter of Waugh’s friend and biographer, Christopher Sykes.
Her father, Christopher’s son, Mark Sykes, was the subject of one of those eccentric lives that still occasionally appear in the obits pages of the London papers. The Times of 31 May 2022 described Mark as an “art dealer, gambler and wastrel” and in the context of his father’s friendship with Waugh ..”whose novels Mark appeared to regard as life manuals”
All best wishes, Mark McGinness

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