75th Anniversary of The Loved One

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The Loved One appeared in print 75 years ago this month in the pages of Cyril Connolly’s  magazine Horizon. Waugh had begun writing it on 21 May 1947 shortly after his return to England from Los Angeles.  He finished a first written draft in early July, with final typescript revisions by 14 September. He offered it to Connolly on 16 September, and Connolly accepted subject to some revisions of his own to which Waugh agreed.  It was also offered to American magazines, with particular hope, on Waugh’s part, that the New Yorker would take it up; but they rejected it, deeming it (according to Selina Hastings) yet another “Hollywood novel” in the wake of those by Nathaniel West, Aldous Huxley, et al. One can’t help suspecting that Edmund Wilson may have a hand in that decision. By December 1947, a final version including all revisions had been prepared.

Waugh agreed to have it published for the price of his yearly Horizon subscription in  recognition that Connolly’s magazine was struggling to survive. In the introduction which Connolly wrote for the Horizon version, he quotes at length Waugh’s public explanation for the pre-book publication.  Waugh recognized that the subject matter was controversial and wanted to see what sort of reaction it would receive from sophisticated readers such as those who subscribed to Horizon.  Indeed, Waugh and his agent A D Peters had at first concluded that the book was too controversial for publication in the United States, and Peters feared that it would wreck the valuable American readership that had developed in response to the American publication of Brideshead Revisited in 1946.

Waugh said that he “anticipated ructions” from the book. As it turned out, these began even before the magazine appeared. Connolly faced considerable opposition from his Horizon publisher Peter Watson who found the book unacceptably bleak, negative and offensive. But Connolly prevailed, and the magazine containing The Loved One appeared in due course (about 17 February 1948). This was the full text of the book, not an abbreviated version and took up that entire 159-page edition of the magazine. It was sold out in a week. Book publication in the UK was postponed by C&H because they did not want it to interfere with sales of Scott King’s Modern Europe that had been published in the UK only a few weeks before in December 1947.

Little Brown had no such qualms since they had not yet published SKME and could postpone that book’s release to 1949. The Loved One therefore was published in America in June 1948 (probably about 22 June when the first newspaper reviews began to appear) and had warranted 4 additional printings by August 1948.  Indeed, according to Martin Stannard, it would have been published sooner, but Little Brown had to await legal opinion and make necessary revisions to avoid libel actions before it could be released.  This was the only occasion where US hardcover book publication of a Waugh novel preceded UK book version release.  Stannard wrote that the book received generally favorable reviews in the US. Time magazine, then an important arbiter of US taste, devoted six columns to The Loved One, something not done for any previous book.

UK book publication took place in November 1948. By then the 9,500 Horizon copies would have already circulated and, in at least one case, The Loved One had already been reviewed from that magazine edition. This was Peter Quennell who reviewed it in The Daily Mail, 21 February 1948, p. 2. Here are some excerpts:

“…brilliant short novel…among the finest things that he has ever written…Neatly and forcefully written by a novelist to whom the art of story-telling seems to come as second nature, it abounds in a dry, malicious wit and flashes with strokes of satirical observation; it made me laugh aloud again and again; and that alone, in February 1948, is something to be grateful for…”

When the hardcover book was published in November, the UK reviews were largely favorable —eg, TLS (anonymous: Marie Hannah), Manchester Guardian (Alistair Cooke) and Sunday Times (Desmond MacCarthy). Novelist Olivia Manning, reviewing it  pseudonymously in the New Statesman, was more reserved.

The book has probably remained in print without interruption in both the US and UK markets since its publication. A Penguin edition appeared in the UK in 1951, with Modern Library and Dell paperback editions in the US shortly thereafter. In 1965, a Hollywood film adaptation was made by MGM, the studio which had turned down Brideshead Revisited. This was written by Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern and directed by Tony Richardson. Although it was panned at the time of its release, the film continues to show up on classic movie channels and DVDs. The portions satirizing the British film colony are actually very well written (probably by Isherwood who would have followed the book) and performed (esp. John Gielgud and Robert Morley). But the insertion of a plot by Southern under which Whispering Glades will be emptied by rocketing the corpses into outer space and the land used for a retirement home simply doesn’t work. It isn’t funny despite the efforts of comedian Jonathan Winters who plays both the cemetery owner and his brother who plots the acquisition of the rockets from the military.

 

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Valentine’s Day Roundup

Posted on February 13, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–David Mills writing in The Times takes another look at the novels of post-Waugh English satirist Simon Raven. He considers the 1969 novel The Rich Pay Late, the first of 10 in Ravens’s Alms for Oblivion series:

…Raven is astoundingly snobbish, despising any connection with business and adhering to values that were out of date by the 1860s. “Clean” money can only come “from wide and prudently managed acres”. Salinger [a character from The Rich Pay Late] is condescended to because he has bought his stately home himself, mixes with stockbrokers and holds the lavish ball to celebrate his wedding on a Saturday night, “typical of a parvenu”.

Such baroquely elaborate snobbery combined with a propensity for the sudden, heartless dispatch of characters to a grisly end often when least expected (“Miss Beatty was found in her flat this morning. Or rather, most of her was”) might seem reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, except Waugh’s novels always have a moral core, either Catholic or a passive innocence adrift in a wicked world.

There is no innocence in Raven. Everyone is self-interested and duplicitous, with a diverting sexual perversion to boot. The one possible exception in The Rich Pay Late is Peter Morrison, an MP out of the pages of Trollope, “a man of conscience and goodwill, a wealthy, landed young man who conceived it his duty to take part in a public life”. Yet even he, in sidestepping a wrong, turns it to his own advantage with surprising political calculation…

–Duncan McLaren has added a new discussion to his website. This is an analysis of Evelyn Waugh’s admiration for the writings of P G Wodehouse. It was inspired by Duncan’s receipt of an email from a Wodehouse fan who may play an equivalent role in Wodehouse studies as that of Duncan in the world of Waugh. One surprising revelation (to me at least) is that Wodehouse had a more critical opinion of Waugh’s writing than Waugh had of Wodehouse’s. Here’s a link.

–The website digital journal Literary Hub has an article entitled “An Unequal Partnership: On the Marriage of Kingsley Amis and Jane Howard”.  This is by Carmela Ciuraru who makes this interesting observation at the beginning of the article:

…Jane was well acquainted with men behaving badly, especially as she tried to assert her position among London’s male-dominated literary set. Once, while conducting what would be Evelyn Waugh’s final broadcast interview—for the BBC, in 1964—Jane endured his belittling comments (“Ah, Miss Howard—and have you had anything to do with literature?”) and dotty remarks to the camera crew: “When is Miss Howard going to take off all her clothes?” She was fond enough of men to overlook their more beastly moments, and for Kingsley she seemed to retain an infinite store of patience and forgiveness…

–John Self writing in the latest issue of The Critic reviews the career of American novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

…Ellis was launched into the dazzle of immediate success with his novel Less Than Zero (1985), which he began writing when still at school. Its opening line — “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles” — didn’t just introduce three of his recurring motifs (LA, cars, fear) but perfected out of the box his affectless style, even if Joan Didion had pioneered it 15 years earlier with Play It As It Lays. […]

Less Than Zero was received with the combination of admiration and horror that a good publicist can only dream of. “Mr Ellis clearly possesses talent, and the drive to do something with his gifts,” wrote the New York Times, adding that the book was “one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time.”

The book was frightening because it showed the world its author knew, and the blankness of the style meant its satirical intent wasn’t immediately clear. (The New York Times reviewer “read it with the worrying sense that it might all be true”.) Still, there’s no doubt that Ellis, like Evelyn Waugh before him, was half in love, or at least half-obsessed, with the world he was simultaneously mocking…

–An article in Public Discourse  the journal of the Witherspoon Institute considers a recent essay by a Roman Catholic clergyman on the Church’s inclusiveness (or lack thereof). The article is by Professor Christopher Tollefsen from the University of South Carolina and opens with this:

I was thinking about Julia Flyte as I read the recent essay by Cardinal Robert McElroy in America. Lady Julia is a central character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Married to a divorcĂ©, and living out of wedlock with Charles Ryder, she has a near breakdown late in the novel when her callous brother explains why he cannot bring his fiancĂ©e Beryl to Julia’s house: “It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin with Rex or Charles or both—I have always avoided enquiry into the details of your mĂ©nage—but in no case would Beryl consent to be your guest.”

Julia’s response is powerful for expressing her awareness that, as much of an ass as Bridey might be, “He’s quite right. . . . He means just what it says in black and white. Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing in it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it around, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it’s fretful.”

This confession anticipates her final conversion of heart as her father is dying, a conversion that Charles could see coming “all this year,” and portending the end of his relationship with Julia…

After several additional references to the novel as well as to Waugh’s 1947 memo to the MGM movie studio regarding its possible film adaptation, the article closes with this:

…Too often the Church has been Bridey, insensitive and cloddish in its pastoral care of sinners; Cardinal McElroy is correct to note the failures. But it has also failed, and now no less than in other times, to speak truthfully while resting assured, again quoting Waugh’s memo, in “how the Grace of God turns everything in the end to good.”

—The Chattanoogan a local digital news site includes the following in a list of things to see in Los Angeles:

Forest Lawn Museum https://forestlawn.com/museum/ in Glendale is one of the leading cemeteries that have made L.A. a destination for those who want to visit the final resting places of the stars (after being given a tour, English novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote the bestselling novel The Loved One, a satire of the local funeral industry, which was turned into a classic film). Among those who called it their eternal home were Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers (staff won’t point out where they are, so check online sources). Founder Hubert Eaton made it essentially a vast museum of art celebrating religion and history, placing original statues and paintings, as well as reproductions of major works, around the grounds and in its churches and mausoleums (ask for the map). The largest is the painting “The Crucifixion” by Joan Styka, whose curtains measure 440’x50′. The Forest Lawn Museum itself has many notable works, including Frederic Remington’s bronze “The Bronco Buster,” Fletcher Ransom’s oil on canvas “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and even a small head from Easter Island. The biggest surprise is the exhibit on Bob Barker’s Marionette Theater, which in 1963 began putting on legendary shows with puppets controlled by string …

It is gratifying to see this recommendation, since Forest Lawn has fallen quite far from its status as a leading tourist destination in 1947 when Waugh made his visits.

 

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Roundup: Country Houses and Leisurely Lunches

Posted on February 5, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–An essay entitled “‘The Ancient Lore’ of Brideshead Revisited” written by Ianto Fox has been posted on the internet. Here’s an excerpt from the author’s description of its content:

Nearly all commentary on Brideshead over the years has focused on the backdrop of Catholicism in the novel; the by-gone era of the English aristocracy; the homosexuality of Sebastian Flyte; the presence or lack of this in Charles Ryder, and nostalgia for the salad days of youth. As the full title of the novel suggests, “The Sacred and Profane Memories”. The story quite deliberately ends when Charles is about to turn forty years old…

Possibly because of the era in which I was born, the central theme of the novel never appeared to me to be the waning of Catholic influence in England, nor the struggles of those Catholic families, nor a by-gone time before television, computer and cell phone screens, when ladies and men wore extravagant hats and asked each other if they were “dining out”, and the delights of jazz clubs when that was the radical new music, although the latter nevertheless was one of the primary attractions of the book. To me, especially upon a second reading as one burrowed one’s way through one’s twenties, the central theme is that of a warning to those in their twenties and thirties, especially as they approach their fortieth birthday, like Charles Ryder is, when we meet him for the first time. Brideshead Revisited is a warning that, as one gets older, one must maintain past, present and future in equal measure in order to grow older successfully. One must keep one’s passions and great memories, but one must move forward and leave the past behind: otherwise, by trying to obtain what one had, or missed out on in one’s adolescence and young adulthood, one will decay in his thirties and forties and destroy the things he loves, as Oscar Wilde put it…

The entire text is available to read at this link.  Thanks to Ianto for sending us a copy.

–The latest issue of Esquire has an article entitled “Why You Should Make Your Lunch a Long One: Nothing says existential despair like an al desko sandwich”. This is written by Matthew Fort and opens with this:

“They were nearly an hour over luncheon. Course followed course in disconcerting abundance, while Colonel Blount ate and ate, turning the leaves of his book and chuckling frequently. They ate hare soup and boiled turbot and stewed sweetbreads and black Bradenham ham with Madeira sauce and roast pheasant and a rum omelette and toasted cheese and fruit. First they drank sherry, then claret, then port. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to have a little nap’,” says Colonel Blount in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

In less than an hour! Blimey. That’s going it a bit. Cramming that lot into less than several hours suggests a degree of vulgar excess. Lunch is to be loved. Lunch is to be lingered over. To lunch properly is to loiter with intent.

Waugh was writing about the tail-end of the greatest era for lunching, the reign of Edward VII, himself no nibbler. Sir Harold Nicolson, MP, diplomat, journalist, writer, husband to Vita Sackville-West, wrote eloquently of the dietary demands in that time of gastronomic exuberance (at least for the upper middle and upper classes), in his essay “The Edwardian Weekend”. He depicts it as a leisurely peregrination from one Lucullan blow-out to the next…

Fort goes on to describe what has been lost with the passing of the leisurely lunch tradition. Here’s a link.

–iUniverse, a self-publishing company, has announced the release of a book entitled Evelyn Waugh: The Novelist. The announcement explains that the author “Prof Jagdish Chandra Jha has done yeoman’s service to the scholar community of English literature by bringing into print his thesis on Evelyn Waugh, the great novelist, in fact one of the most famous authors of English literature.” A description of Prof. Jha’s career follows. The announcement, which also includes a summary of the book, as well as purchase instructions are available here. There is also an invitation to post a review of the book.

—Country Life magazine invokes Waugh’s patronage as a selling point for a Dartmoor country house near the village of Chagford:

…Chagford … is an ancient and thriving Devon market town within the Dartmoor National Park, 20 miles west of the cathedral city of Exeter. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the town’s former Easton Court Hotel was a popular writers’ retreat, where Evelyn Waugh reputedly completed A Handful of Dust in 1933 and Brideshead Revisited in 1944…

—The Gazette (Blackpool) announces the screenings of two films with local Lancashire themes one of which it believes may appeal to Evelyn Waugh fans:

…The short features are Granny, which celebrates the life of Lizzy Ashcroft, a star of the Preston-based Dick Kerr Ladies football in the early 20th century, and Flyte of Fancy, which was filmed at Lytham Hall last summer is set in the late 1930’s. It builds on the suggestion that Lytham squire Harry Clifton had been a friend and inspiration to Evelyn Waugh for the character of Sebastian Flyte in his book Brideshead Revisited. Waugh himself visited Lytham Hall on more than one occasion…

In Flyte of Fancy, a mysterious man claiming to be author Evelyn Waugh’s butler visits Lytham Hall, the home of Waugh’s friend from Oxford, Harry Clifton.  The lead is played by former Emmerdale actor Mathew Bose, who played Paul Lambert in the soap, supported by Lytham-born Martyn Coyne as Lomax and Anne Bouget as Violet Clifton. The screenplay was written by local playwright David Slattery-Christy, with significant research having been carried out through Oxford University. It was filmed and directed by local filmmaker Gillian Wood.

Sunday’s premiere screenings will be at The Pavilion in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens on Sunday, February 12 between 5.30pm and 6.45pm and Flyte of Fancy director Gillian Wood and Granny writer Michelle Crane, who is Blackpool-based, will be available afterwards for a question and answer session. It’s a Pay What You Can screening, with seats available for whatever you can afford to give. Details here.

 

 

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Groundhog Day Roundup

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Economist started the week with a story headed by this discussion of a Waugh novel:

Evelyn Waugh, a satirist of pre-war England and of the careless aristocrats who ran it, would have had a field day with the modern Conservative Party. Sometimes it feels as though he already has. Take the resemblance between Rishi Sunak, Britain’s current prime minister, and Paul Pennyfeather, the hapless protagonist of “Decline and Fall”, Waugh’s debut novel.

Pennyfeather is an earnest and unworldly theology student at Oxford, who returns to the fictional setting of Scone College one evening just as the Bollinger Club, an aristocratic drinking society, is embarking on a night of mayhem. Pennyfeather is stripped of his trousers and runs the length of the quadrangle. He is sent down the next day for indecency. From there, things only get worse.

Mr Sunak is no failure. All his life he has been top of the class, from Winchester to Oxford to Stanford and the City, putting scarcely a foot wrong nor a nose out of joint. But much of his agenda is inoffensively sensible. He is accident-prone. And he is surrounded by colleagues whose decisions cause him harm.

–The death earlier thus month of journalist Paul Johnson has been widely noted by his fellow journalists and others. Among them are Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion magazine. His wide ranging memoir includes this:

Paul, an accomplished watercolorist himself, had contemplated a career as a painter. His father, though he acknowledged Paul’s skill as a draftsman, put him off art as a career. “I can see bad times coming for art,” he told his son: “Frauds like Picasso will rule the roost for the next half-century. Do something else for a living.” Paul took the advice to heart in two senses. In his professional life, he exchanged paintbrush for pen (or typewriter), and he nurtured his father’s animus against Picasso. Many readers will recall that there was a period when Evelyn Waugh ended his letters with the cheery valedictory, “Death to Picasso!” Paul came from a kindred school, as the title of his 1996 collection To Hell with Picasso and Other Essays reminds us. In his book on the history of art, Picasso emerges as an archetype of what he called “fashion art, as opposed to fine art”—that is, art as a species of hucksterism.

Paul’s view of Picasso (who died, he tells us, “the richest artist in history”) is one of the things that furrowed the brows of his critics. But it is worth noting that while he was hostile to Picasso, he was not cavalier. Picasso, he acknowledged, raised unique problems in the history of art, so “it is important that everyone should make up [his] own mind about him.”

Paul’s rejection of Picasso had less to do with Picasso’s deplorable character—he was, quite simply, a swine—than with Picasso’s attitude towards his own art. Paul was quite tolerant about the foibles of artists, Picasso’s and others. What he objected to was not so much Picasso’s exploitation of people as his exploitation of his talent to gratify the demands of his ego (and that reliable appendage of ego, the pocketbook). If Paul was right, Picasso helped to license the attitude that Marshall McLuhan summed up when he said that “art is anything you can get away with”—the attitude that prevails in many of the most respected quarters of the art world today. In any event, I was pleased indeed that over the years Paul gave me several of his watercolors. At least two occupy honored spots on the walls chez Kimball.

–David Platzer in The Oldie recalls another noteworthy person Waugh brought into his writings:

Stuart Preston (1915-2005) was the New York Times art critic from 1949 to 1965 and wrote an excellent monograph on Édouard Vuillard (1972). But he’s most famous as ‘the Sarge’, renowned for the extraordinary social success he enjoyed in wartime London’s aristocratic bohemia 80 years ago. His nickname derived from his rank in the US Army as a sergeant…

Tall and elegant, he was blessed with good looks that reminded Cecil Beaton of Gary Cooper, and his boyish enthusiasm was matched by erudition. His part in the liberation of France won him a Croix de Guerre, proving him a hero as a well as a social lion.

Evelyn Waugh caricatured him as the Loot (short for Lieutenant Padfield) in Unconditional Surrender. Meeting him in New York in 1950, Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford, ‘Sergeant Preston is as bald as an egg and very watery-eyed. I suspect he drinks.’

–Patrick Cockburn in an iNews newsletter column finds the NATO countries’ decisions to send tanks to Ukraine may presage the end of Putin, at least if Evelyn Waugh was right about a similar situation in the 1930s.  This is where “Seth, emperor of Azania, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief responds on hearing that people in the bazaar are speaking of his army’s defeat.”  Although the quote is behind a paywall, Cockburn is probably referring to this passage:

Fools, what do they know. I am Seth the grandson of Amurath. Defeat is impossible. I have been to Europe. I know. We have the Tank. This is not a war of Seth against Seyid but of Progress against the Barbarians. And progress must prevail. I have seen the great tatoo of Aldershot, the Paris exhibition, the Oxford Union. I have read the modern books–Shaw, Arlen, Priestley. What do the gossips in the bazaar know about all this?,,, (Penguin 16-17).

–A review of Richard Bradford’s new biography of Norman Mailer (mentioned in last week’s Roundup) comes up with several pejorative quotes Mailer uttered against other writers:

There’s an adage to the effect that a biographer eventually comes around to admiring his subject. Whoever said that never met Richard Bradford.

Every insult directed to another writer is meticulously preserved:

— J.D Salinger, “The greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”

— Gore Vidal “is imprisoned in the recessive nuances of narcissistic explorations which do not go deep enough into himself, and so end as gestures and postures.”

— Saul Bellow, “I cannot take him seriously as a major novelist.”

— Of women writers who were his contemporaries, “I do not seem able to read them 
 the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goisy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid 
”

— Evelyn Waugh, “I hate to admit it, but the little fairy can write.” 

“Indeed,” writes Bradford, “it seemed almost an insult not to be insulted by Mailer.”

The full review is available in truthdig.com.

—The Spectator’s columnist Bruce Anderson writes about the reading matter he managed to get through in a recent hospital visit:

Hospitals are places to think. I regret to inform readers that my thoughts led me in the direction of Anglo-Saxon philistinism, inspired by Dr Johnson and Evelyn Waugh’s Mr Prendergast. Johnson was asked how he could refute Bishop Berkeley’s denial of material substance. He saw a stone and gave it a hearty kick with his boot. ‘I refute it thus, sir.’ Mr Prendergast lost his faith because he could not see why God had troubled himself to create the world. A couple of theologically minded friends visited me. I am sure that they both thought I could have done better. But there it is: a coalition of two extremely unlikely characters, Johnson and Prendergast, ending in my case – though not in theirs – with eupeptic pessimism.

 

 

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Roundup

Posted on January 22, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan McLaren sent over an interesting exchange relating to Waugh’s possible use of Peter Quennell as a model for characters in his novels. His an excerpt from the email that started it:

Dear Mr McLaren,

I am a reader of your Waugh web-blogs and very much enjoyed your book ‘Evelyn!’ I thought you might be interested in some thoughts on who might have been the inspiration for the character Arthur Potts in ‘Decline and Fall’.

I don’t know much about Waugh but have made a few discoveries about Graham Greene, including uncovering two early stories which, I believe, are likely his first published work. Greene also used his friends and enemies as models for his characters and he was caught out in ‘Stamboul Train’, when J.B Priestley identified himself as Q.C.Savory forcing Greene to adjust his text. But Greene did still manage to ‘smuggle’ another author into that book – Mr Kalebdjian a servile hotel manager in the last chapter of the book, is a dig at Dikran Kouyoumdjian, otherwise known as Michael Arlen, author of ‘The Green Hat’ and very famous at the time.

And it’s a ‘friend’ of both Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh who was, I’m fairly sure, the inspiration of Arthur Potts. Not Anthony Powell whom, I suppose, could be suggested by his initials, but someone else very well known in the Waugh world – Peter Quennell.

My identification of Quennell as an inspiration for Potts is based on two lines in the book.
“I bicycled over to St Magnus’s at Little Beckley and took some rubbings of the brasses there. I wished you had been with me.”…

If this whets your appetite for more, follow this link to Duncan’s website:  evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-43/index.html

–Kenneth Craycraft introduces a new column to appear in the religious news service OSV News.  Here’s the opening:

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war-time,” explains protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, “Brideshead Revisited.”

“These memories,” he continues, “which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me.”

This theme is so essential to “Brideshead” that the passage provides the subtitle of the book: “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.”

The account of Charles Ryder’s memories and the book in which the story is told are both examples of what we intend for this new column. It will be a monthly meditation on what it even means to possess memories, as considered through some cultural possession of the past. We will try to recapture and refine memories by revisiting classic stories, novels, plays, songs, and poems, as well as signal philosophical, theological, and literary essays…

The entire article is available at this link,

–The National Catholic Reporter has an article about how humility is reflected in the works of Roman Catholic writers in Britain. Here’s the portion dealing with Waugh:

The social media landscape doesn’t lend itself well to the practice of humility. At the height of its influence in the 20th century, the legacy press landscape also traded in the inflation of egos. Yet Catholic authors sometimes said or did things that pierced that bubble of ego — and often in jarring ways. At the height of their literary success, authors like Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor reflected on themselves as sinners in need of grace.

Evelyn Waugh

Waugh’s first marriage collapsed in 1929. This crisis left its mark on his satirical 1930 novel Vile Bodies, which he wrote as his own life unraveled. A year after his divorce, he was received into the Catholic Church. His conversion was an unsentimental affair. In Waugh’s estimation, the Catholic Church held the fullness of the truth, therefore it was reasonable to revere it — and that was that.

When Waugh (1903-1966) appeared in a 1960 BBC television interview, he told reporter John Freeman that in the late 1920s he was “as near an atheist as one could be.” Freeman asked Waugh to speak of the greatest gift he’d received from Catholicism. Was it tranquility or perhaps peace of mind? “It isn’t a lucky dip that you get something out of,” Waugh responded. “It’s simply admitting the existence of God or dependence on God or contact with God — the fact that everything good in the world depends on him. It isn’t a sort of added amenity of the welfare state that you say, ‘Well, to all this, having made a good income, now I’ll have a little icing on top of religion.’ It’s the essence of the whole thing.”

Waugh’s temperament was sometimes as extraordinary as his writing. He was often a cruel curmudgeon, a prickly snob; he dabbled in fascistic politics and he was mercurial. If there’s truth to the trope of upper-class British fathers preferring their pet dogs over their children, Waugh took pains to embody that truth. He wasn’t much better with adults. When novelist and friend Nancy Mitford introduced Waugh to her publisher in 1950, Waugh shocked them with his rude behavior. “How can you behave so badly — and you a Catholic,” Mitford exclaimed. “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,” Waugh responded. “Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

The sections on the other writers may be read at this link.

—The Sunday Times invokes Waugh in an article about education:

“Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia,” reads the motto of the Waid Academy, the secondary school founded in 1886 by the philanthropist Lt Andrew Waid in the sleepy seaside village of Anstruther, in the highly desirable location of the East Neuk of Fife.

Many have indeed passed through but whether their knowledge has increased is a moot point. The Sunday Times school rankings put the Waid Academy at number 124 in Scotland, with 42 per cent of pupils passing five Highers.

In Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant satirical novel, Mr Levy of the scholastic agents Church and Gargoyle categorises the educational establishments on his books as “leading school; first-rate school; good school; and school. Frankly ‘school’ is pretty bad”, he tells the hapless Paul Pennyfeather.

These days, despite the plethora of league tables, HM inspectors’ reports and education policy documents, we don’t have a system quite as honest as that. But with more than 300 secondary schools in Scotland, Waid could justifiably argue it was a good school, going on first-rate, by Church and Gargoyle’s standards. It is a typical Scottish secondary and, apart from the occasional appearance in the Fife Free Press, exists below the radar.

–The religious philosophical journal Patheos has an article that takes another look at 1960s film adaptation of The Loved One and finds more to like than did the film’s critics  when it was first released. Here’s the conclusion:

The intensity of the humor strikes at the heart of our society (then and now). In [Mr Joyboy’s] mother, we have the externalization of mid-century consumer culture, a parody of patriotic citizen who prefers to salivate at ads than actually watch any programming. There is no death so long as there’s endless food and brain-massaging content. Her queer son’s slavish devotion masks an inability to escape the mutually assured destruction that is their relationship—a representation, perhaps, of the dark side of suburban family life or the lonely depths of the closet (writer Christopher Isherwood was gay; director Tony Richardson was bisexual, a fact the world only learned when he suddenly died of AIDS). The reverend is a good ole American confidence man, a whited sepulcher who uses the sacred to profit, conspiring Fat Leonard-style with military brass to blow up the dead and suck dry the living—in essence, the figure who has come to define this great land more than any other. AimĂ©e is a gullible simpleton who actually believes the cemetery owner’s lies. And Dennis—Dennis is an empty shell, the vacuousness of so much pretend youth rebellion of the sort that would emerge shortly thereafter (not that there wasn’t genuine sentiment there—but not every mod or hippy cared for easy living and peace). The gang’s all here.

While The Loved One may be uneven, it’s far from unfocused. Over-ambitious perhaps, the film’s hectic production shows; it is no Dr. Strangelove, even if the two movies share a writer and similar themes. But Kubrick’s horrifying black comedy is among the greatest films ever made. To fall short of that can still mean greatness. Though this Tony Richardson effort doesn’t land every jab, it laughs hard—and makes us laugh hard—in the face of nuclear apocalypse. It has a perspective, a vision, just a deeply cynical one in which we’re left with little to do but lampoon, lampoon, lampoon until the rocket explodes and we can lampoon no more. Waugh probably never saw it and he would have hated it for being so American. But its blithe rancor matches his own; I’d call that a success.

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Jonathan Raban 1942-2023: R.I.P.

Posted on January 20, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The death earlier this week of Jonathan Raban has been announced. He was a well known British-born writer of travel books and novels, although according to several of his obituaries he objected to his works being labelled  “travel books”. The New York Times obit, for example, explained:

Mr. Raban’s literary narratives of the places he visited and the people he met combined travelogue, memoir, reportage and criticism. What he was not, he insisted, was a travel writer.

“Travel writing seems to me a too-big umbrella, full of holes to let the rain in,” he told Granta magazine in 2008. “Anyone commissioned by a newspaper to write up meals and hotels in foreign holiday resorts is a travel writer. Anyone who does a guidebook is a travel writer.”

He had an affinity for V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, whose books take the reader to places far and wide but transcend the travel genre.

“Chatwin and Sebald knew that ‘travel book’ and ‘travel writing’ were terms of literary abuse and did their best to rescue their books from the category,” Mr. Raban said in the interview. “I know that feeling.”

Waugh also distinguished his “travel books” such as Labels, Robbery Under Law and A Tourist in Africa, which were written to order under contracts with e.g. shipping companies, from his other travel writings such as Remote People, Ninety Two Days and Waugh in Abyssinia. While not disowning the former three commissioned works, he did take care to exclude excerpts of the first two from the 1946 collection When the Going Was Good.  No doubt, the later-published A Tourist in Africa would have suffered the same fate had it been written before the war.

The most detailed of the obituaries was that appearing in the Guardian. This also addresses the same issue discussed in the NY Times and goes on to discuss Raban’s less well-known fiction:

His first novel, Foreign Land (1985), follows an eccentric expat Englishman, George Grey, who leaves the Caribbean to return home, much to the consternation of his daughter, and sail a just-bought boat around Britain. Raban recapitulated the story himself in Coasting, in which he sails around the country, which, as the Falklands war erupts, seems an increasingly insular island nation. The book marks the perfecting of his classic English voice, that of the friendly faux-bumbler whose self-deprecation is itself a form of humble-brag, which has served British humour from Arthur Marshall to Bill Bryson; it made him a neutral sort of observer to Americans he met…

His 2003 novel, Waxwings, takes its butterfly title from Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure of the window pane.” Drawing on Bad Land, it is the story of an expat Hungarian-British man, in the dot.com boomtown that is Seattle, with an American wife, and an illegal Chinese immigrant worker who begins reconstructing his house. Raban was a distant relative of Evelyn Waugh, and the book recalls Waugh’s Men at Arms, where the social whirl does not stop for the newly launched war. My Holy War (2006), about the 9/11 attack and the US invasion of Iraq, was almost a companion piece.

In 2006 he published his third novel, Surveillance, in which a journalist tracks down a reclusive writer who has been kept hidden by his publisher lest he destroy the credibility of his Holocaust memoir. Its prime concern is the many-faceted ambiguity of liberty in the war on terror. “The world changed,” he said. “It didn’t change with 9/11. It changed with the Patriot Act, with the homeland security measures and the war on terror.”

The Daily Telegraph also contributes an interesting discussion.

Raban had settled in Seattle after a divorce from his third wife and helped to raise their daughter from that marriage who also lived there. His writing career was interrupted by a serious stroke in 2011. Although he continued to contribute book reviews and articles to literary journals (particularly the New York Review of Books), no new book has appeared since he suffered the stroke. Fortunately, this book drought is about to break with the appearance later this year of his autobiographical memoir to be entitled Father and Son.

 

 

 

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Fall 2022 Issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies Posted

Posted on January 19, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies has been posted. This is Volume 53.2 (Autumn 2022) and features a review of the recent book by David Fleming entitled Hellfire: Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club.  This is published by The History Press and is for sale in the UK. Amazon.co.uk will also ship the print version to North America. A link to this edition of the EWS is available here.

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MLK Day Roundup

Posted on January 15, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The German-language paper Der Standart based in Austria has posted an article about Waugh’s book collecting. This is mostly devoted to a book previously discussed. Here is a translation of the text:

You may know the British novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) as the author of the novel Brideshead Revisited, Memoirs of Captain Charles Ryder ,  or through the 2008 film adaptation starring Emma Thompson. But Waugh was not only a novelist, he was also avid collector with a fondness for Victorian decorative objects and furniture. Glass showcases with fossils, butterflies stretched out with needles, even a stuffed monkey were part of the inventory of his domicile.

In later years he turned increasingly to collecting books, his estate comprised around 3,500 volumes. The books were taken over by the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas after his death.

Upon perusing the collection, one book that was made entirely of oddly spooky collages immediately stood out. Entitled “Durenstein”, it contains 45 collages designed by John Bingley Garland. Because blood plays a major role in many of these illustrations, the book was soon dubbed the “Victorian Blood Book”.

John Bingley Garland (1791 to 1875) was a distinguished English merchant and politician. He spent a few years in Newfoundland and then returned to England, where he ran the family business – trading fish – until his death.

Owned by Evelyn Waugh and designed by Garland, the book is a stunning collection of collaged images that arguably grew out of the Victorian love of decoupage. Garland was thus a forerunner of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who around 1910 invented the new art form of collage from newspaper clippings, wallpaper and other materials.

For his paintings, Garland used reproductions of European masterpieces, especially religious art, as well as colourful, cheaply produced prints of fruit, flowers, insects, snakes and birds, which he meticulously cut out and processed into these amazing, visionary collages. The space between the images is filled with tiny handwritten writing, the words seem like a choppy sermon:  “One! yet has larger bounties! to bestow! Joys! Powers! untasted! In a World like this, Powers!”   In addition, there are inscriptions of religious texts, Egyptian hieroglyphs, representations of ruins and of course the characteristic drops of blood.

The book’s reputation rests on these crimson drops in red ink hanging from many of the pictorial elements. Blood drips from grape plates and tree branches, statues and skeletons. Blood runs down from crosses, angels dangle from bloody sashes. A bouquet of white chrysanthemums is sprinkled. Today this orgy of red color is interpreted as the blood of Christ.

The Blood Book of Waugh bears an inscription by John Bingley Garland to his daughter Amy, dated September 1, 1854: “A legacy left in his lifetime for her future examination by her affectionate father.”). The album was probably intended as a wedding present.

A small reference to Austria is not missing either: the first page of the book contains a table of contents with the heading “Durenstein!”, a reference to DĂŒrnstein, the Lower Austrian castle where Richard the Lionheart, returning from the Third Crusade, was imprisoned. The subject of some panels is the struggles that Christians have to endure on the way to salvation.

The article is also illustrated with several pages from the book and is available at this link.

–Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the London Review of Books has an extended and detailed review of all three volumes of “Chips” Channon’s complete diaries. Here’s an excerpt in which Evelyn Waugh is quoted on Channon’s marital life:

…Two years after their wedding, the Channons’ only child, Paul, was born, but eighteen months later ‘we broke off conjugal relations, never in our case particularly successful.’ By then Honor was increasingly absent on supposed skiing holidays – one of them in July – and Channon eventually realised that she was having an affair with a skiing instructor, then another with a Hungarian nobleman. Finally she left him, and went off with ‘a dark horse-coper named Woodman’. Evelyn Waugh heard a fictional echo – ‘Lady Chatterley in every detail’ – although Channon thought it more Far from the Madding Crowd: ‘She is Bathsheba, Sergeant Frank Troy, Mr Woodman.’…

Where the quote is taken from or in what context is not revealed. It seems to come from a letter to Randolph Churchill in September 1941: “Honor [Guinness] has left Chips [Channon] for the bailiff–like Lady Chatterley in every respect.” Letters, p. 154. Nor is it clear whether the credit for finding it goes to Mr Wheatcroft or Simon Heffer, the editor.

–An article entitled “The Game of Laughter” by Simon Evans appears in The Critic. This considers whether comedy (or at the least stand-up variety) should be considered an art form:

What, apart from its survival, is it that defines art? Art is that which is either “collected” — financialised, by scoundrels — or requires a subsidy. Sometimes both. The artier it is, the heartier the portion of the public’s largesse it demands — with, I imagine, Wagner’s vision of Opera as the supreme art well endorsed by this reckoning.

Not comedy. Not stand-up. Among its proudest boasts, in my book, has been comedy’s refusal to attempt to pry a penny of the taxpayers hard-earned to fortify its precarious presence on the stage. No furlough for us.

Not that all entertainment has such a short half-life of course, of course. Some entertainment survives its creator. Graham Greene notoriously divided his work into novels (art) and entertainments. No prize for guessing which now seem the most datedly — miserably contorted by Greene’s sterile struggles with his faith — and which played more productively with the foibles of human nature and the quirks of fate. Much the same could be said of Evelyn Waugh’s early, light-touch genius in Scoop and Vile Bodies not being much improved by the introduction of “bigger themes” in the Sword of Honour trilogy.

–Paul Perry, in the Independent (Ireland), reviews a new biography of American novelist Norman Mailer  to be issued later this month. This is entitled Tough Guy and is written by Richard Bradford. The review opens with this:

Evelyn Waugh has one of the most prescient summations of Norman Mailer in Richard Bradford’s compellingly readable and engrossing new biography of the US writer, which is due out this week in advance of the centenary of Mailer’s birth.

It is 1966 [sic], and Mailer has yet to win his two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Armies of the Night (1969) and for The Executioner’s Song (1980), but he has courted success and fame with his debut The Naked and The Dead (1948), a novel which recounts his experiences as a rifleman in World War II.

Mailer is in England with his latest lover, Jeanne Campbell, and they are at the Somerset country house of Janet Kidd for a ball. The ball is preceded by a gymkhana. Waugh describes the event in a letter to a friend. He reports how a horse “bit an American pornographer who tried to give it vodka”. Waugh goes on to describe Mailer as a “swarthy gangster straight out of a mad house where he had been sent after his attempt to cut his wife’s throat”.

It may seem like outrageous hyperbole, but Bradford own’s description of Mailer as a character straight out of a Hemingway novel is accurate. Mailer famously head butts Gore Vidal before one television appearance and is lucky to have got away with stabbing his wife.

Here’s a quote from the letter which was sent to Ann Fleming on 23 September [1961], not 1966, by which time Waugh would have been dead for several months:

He might have stepped straight from your salon–a swarthy gangster just out of a madhouse where he had been sent after the attempt to cut his wife’s throat. It is his first tour to England. His tour is Janet Kidd, Randolph, Ian Argyll. He will be able to write a revealing pornogram of English life. Letters (pp. 572-3)

From the context it appears that Jeanne Campbell brought Mailer to Combe Florey to visit Waugh. The editor of the Letters (Mark Amory) apparently gave Mailer a chance to respond. Mailer commented (n. 7). “The horse did bite me but I was not feeding him vodka, just patting his nose…I did not cut my wife’s throat…Jean Campbell asked me what I thought of him [Waugh] and I said ‘Lots of fun. Much sweeter than I expected.'” This would probably have been in the late 1970s.

 

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Roundup: Waugh Venues and School Envy

Posted on January 11, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The American print media have finally discovered the news about the sale of Piers Court. A brief article appears in the New Yorker entitled “For Sale: Evelyn Waugh’s Manor House, 8 BR/24 Acres/1 Waugh-Obsessed Tenant”. This begins with a summary of the reports on the auction of the house still occupied by uncooperative tenants. The reporter Parker Harvey was apparently sufficiently interested to make a post-auction recon of Dursley and the premises. The article concludes with the report of that effort:

Among residents of Dursley—J. K. Rowling named Harry Potter’s odious adoptive family after the town—impressions of the tenants are mixed. “They are going through an absolute poo-fest,” a local shopkeeper said. “They are absolutely lovely people. Helen is great for a good chat.” A waitress said that Lawton had asked her to work as staff at one of her parties: “She told me she’s a real party animal.” She added, “They hang around with, like, rich people, not the likes of me.”

What of the tenants? Had they pulled a Harry and Meghan and left town? Or were they still defiantly partying? The gates to Piers Court, which are in mild decay, were open on a recent day. A long driveway led to a house of almost comic grandeur. Madi [one of the tenants] answered the door dressed all in gray. Lawton [the other tenant] remained upstairs. Boo [their dog] was nowhere to be seen. “We are extremely private people and do not like the media attention,” Madi said. “We are caught up in our friend’s problems. And it is a real bummer. The news makes it out like we only pay two hundred and fifty pounds per year. But the garden alone costs a hundred thousand pounds a year to maintain, which, believe me, we are paying!” He went on to complain about the plumbing.

Piers Courts is where Waugh lived when he wrote “Brideshead Revisited,” a novel about nostalgia for the golden age of the English aristocracy. [sic]  Madi said he hadn’t read it: “I am not a literary person.”

The house technically already had new owners—an anonymous bidder had paid 3.1 million pounds. Madi vowed to stay. “Although theoretically the house has been auctioned, we think it is reversible,” he said. “If the sale goes through, the new owners will get an order to evict us.” He gave a thumbs-up and smiled: “We’re fighters!”

–Another Waugh venue also recently got some press coverage. CondĂ© Nast Traveller has an article entitled “5 secret, pretty places to visit in Somerset.” Here is the entry for number 2:

Combe Florey

Combe Florey, one of the most quintessentially pretty and bucolic places to visit in Somerset, had a brief period of infamy in the early 19th century due to the behaviour of the resident cleric Sydney Smith.

Known to be “the greatest master of ridicule since Jonathan Swift” according to Thomas Babington Macaulay (author of the masterful History Of England From The Ascension of James II), Smith was a passionate social reformer and critic of slavery, poaching and even the Church itself; he referred to Anglican bishops as being “not always the wisest of men; not always preferred for eminent virtues and talents, nor for any good reason known to the public.”

His majestic invective may have been a reason why Evelyn Waugh chose to live here though the Brideshead Revisited author may also have been attracted to the local pinkish-red sandstone from which almost every house in Combe Florey is constructed.

I don’t recall Waugh ever mentioning Sydney Smith’s connection to Combe Florey although it is noted on signage in the local Anglican church where Smith served.  Given his religious preferences, Waugh is unlikely to have ever encountered that message.

–Alec Russell, editor of FT Weekend and former foreign correspondent for that paper, was recently interviewed by Oxford Blue. Here’s one of the Q&A’s:

What has been your biggest scoop?

‘The biggest story I covered was the siege of Dubrovnik in the Yugoslav wars of the early 90s. I was trapped in the coastal city for nearly a month when it was under bombardment. Apparently my front page stories were read out to the furious generals of the Yugoslav forces who were laying siege.

My biggest scoop at the FT was a story of how China was making a massive investment in South Africa. I stumbled on the story rather like the character William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. I was reminded that even when times are quiet you should keep talking to people.’

—The Article prints a long review by literary biographer Jeffrey Meyers of the recent collected letters of John Le CarrĂ©. This mostly recounts his own correspondence with Le CarrĂ© over the years about Meyers’ proposal to write Le CarrĂ©’s biography. The on and off scheme went through several iterations which are amusingly recounted by Meyers. Graham Greene comes into the discussions and Waugh gets a brief mention in connection with Meyers’ biography pf George Orwell:

…I asked him what George Orwell meant to him as a writer and included his perceptive response in my biography, published in 2000.  On September 27, 1998, [Le CarrĂ©] observed that Orwell’s life and works were fused into a noble ideal:

“Orwell meant and means a great deal to me. . . . Burmese Days still stands as a splendid cameo of colonial corruption.  Orwell’s commitment to the hard life is a lesson to all of us.  I taught at Eton.  It always amused me that Blair-Orwell, who had been to Eton, took great pains to disown the place, while Evelyn Waugh, who hadn’t been to Eton, took similar pains to pretend he had.  Orwell’s hatred of greed, cant and the “me” society is as much needed today as it was in his own time—probably more so.  He remains an ideal for me—of clarity, anger and perfectly aimed irony.”…

Le Carre’s remarks about Waugh’s school envy are somewhat ironic since it was Sherborne, not Eton that Waugh was most immediately sorry to have not attended. Le CarrĂ© himself was a student at Sherborne, and his biography by Adam Sisman recounts some of the adventures he had there when his father’s shady financial schemes sometimes interfered with his ability to pay the school fees.

—The Article also has a discussion by David Herman of the trend toward self publication of books that are well worth reading. Here’s one mentioned in previous postings:

Some of the best books I have read in the last couple of years have been self-published. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is the range of subjects, from 1920s Oxford to Jewish refugees during the Second World War… David Fleming has just published his first book, Hellfire: Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club (The History Press, 2022), a fascinating and well-told account of an extraordinary group of figures in interwar Oxford, including Waugh, Anthony Powell and the political journalist Claud Cockburn.

The book will be reviewed in an upcoming issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

 

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New Year’s Roundup

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Discussions of Waugh’s taste in clothing have appeared in two recent blogs. One relates to tweed suits, something Waugh obviously admired and inadvertently promoted. Here is an excerpt from the “Grey Fox” website:

The Italian word ‘sprezzatura’ perfectly describes that rather dishevelled but Oh-so-English look of a well-used tweed suit, as worn with such aplomb by so many men in the early half of the twentieth century. I came across the image … of author Evelyn Waugh which perfectly illustrates that casual, crumpled and unselfconscious English style. How can we emulate that comfortable tweedy appearance today?

Waugh [preferred] a heavyweight tweed (they would normally have been fairly robust cloth in those days) in a shepherd check. As is normal with a well-worn-in tweed, it looks as comfortable as an old jumper and pair of jeans might be to us today. Men were used to wearing tailoring in those days, and Waugh would have thought nothing of throwing himself down on the sofa for a post-prandial nap fully clothed in his three-piece.

It’s this slightly disordered but so natural and unforced look, the result of wearing a suit day in and day out, that’s often admired in the English (or more strictly British) man of that era. Sadly today’s man has largely abandoned tailoring in favour of casual wear or that mix of leisure and sports wear, ‘at leisure’, that, while possibly easy to wear, lacks elegance or style.

The art of wearing tailoring for relaxation has been lost and today it’s felt that sloppy and shapeless is necessary for easy wear. Evelyn Waugh shows us that this is a mistaken view. Tweed is a casual cloth, designed originally for easy movement outdoors, retaining its shape and protecting the wearer from the elements. A good quality cloth is soft, robust and lightweight, moulding readily to the body. Its forgiving nature means that it doesn’t need to be treated with care, like a flannel business suit.

Worn well the tweed suit combines effortless style with comfort. Let’s buy more tweed suits (I suggest some sources of new and vintage tweeds below).

There are two photos of Waugh in full tweed kit posted with the article at this link. The print of a drawing by Neale Osborne of Waugh in a tweed suit is available at this site and is worth a look in any event.

–The other fashion note relates to the “black turtleneck” and appears in the weblog “Brooklyn Muse.”

Fashion, Fabric, and Culture have impacted societies across the globe. The simple Black Turtleneck sweater has been a staple in American closets since the late 19th century. It was initially developed for British polo players (polo neck) and worn by sailors, laborers and soldiers.

Many iconic individuals have been closely connected with this ebony sweater of distinction. [,,,] During his so-called “ Electric Period” of 1965-1966 Bob Dylan was rarely seen without this iconic fashion piece. In that same decade, Andy Warhol adopted The Black Turtleneck as his personal signature piece. He paired it with funky shades and a wild floppy wig. This was known to be quite an effective artistic makeover as Warhol previously was known to don preppy suits and ties.

[…]

By the 20th century, European Bohemians were seeing the garment’s elegance and took it to a new functional, everyday wear design. British playwright Noel Coward wore one regularly through the 1920s. It became known as his trademark piece and he attributed that element to comfort alone and a disdain for the conventional shirt and tie. This trend caught on quickly. The garment took on a sort of rebellious nature for the naked bodies it covered. Writer Evelyn Waugh commented that The Black Turtleneck was believed to be “most convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties.”

–The Daily Telegraph in an article reviewing the various turbocharged cars produced by the Bentley motorcar company describes the 2005 launch of the Flying Spur model

…in Venice of all places. As Evelyn Waugh once telegraphed ‘Streets full of water, please advise.’

No source is given, but its sounds as if it might come from Scoop. I can’t recall whether William Boot passed through Venice to or from Africa. Or it may be some one’s version of what Boot would have written had he passed thru Venice.

–The Hong Kong paper South China Morning Post has an article about how the city-state has modernized its funeral observations. Here is the opening:

Happy Valley’s historic Colonial Cemetery chapel, built in 1845 – Hong Kong’s oldest surviving British-era structure – contains a little-noticed relic that recalls the building’s original function.

An anteroom where the coffin was kept overnight, before early morning committal ceremonies, has heavy metal mesh ventilation grates set into the walls below the windows. Constant cross-draughts through the room – even when otherwise closed up – helped slow the corpse’s decay in hot weather; a practical reminder of earlier times.

The American funeral industry’s consumerist excesses – in particular, elaborate embalming techniques – all wonderfully eviscerated in Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One (1948) and Jessica Mitford’s satirical, journalistic exposé The American Way of Death (1963), did not reach Hong Kong until recent decades.

–Simon May writing in the Catholic Herald considers the representation of religious themes in the works of PG Wodehouse. Here’s the opening:

A charming 1930 short story by PG Wodehouse, “Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit”, contains much traditional English Christmas atmosphere. “It being Christmas Eve,” says Bertie Wooster, “there was, as I had foreseen, a good deal of revelry and what not: first the village choir surged round and sang carols outside the front door, and then somebody suggested a dance.” There is the usual Wodehouse imbroglio and Jeeves ends up getting his trip to Monte Carlo – but nobody goes to church.

You will look in vain in the index of any of the standard lives of Wodehouse for the words “Church” or “ Christianity” (though he did profess an interest in Spiritualism) and critics down the years have attempted to address this. In the envoi to her 1982 biography, Frances Donaldson says that Wodehouse “had many of the qualities of a saint. Kind, modest and simple, he was without malice or aggression.” Evelyn Waugh made a very grand excuse for the eirenic, indeed paradisal world of Wodehouse: “For Mr Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man, no ‘aboriginal calamity’
 He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”

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