Oxford Mail Reports Pub Feast a Sell Out

Posted on July 28, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford Mail reports that the feast following this evening’s unveiling of the memorial plaque to Evelyn Waugh at the Abingdon Arms in Beckley is a sell out. No tickets or reservations are needed fot the 630pm ceremony at which Alexander Waugh and Barbara Cooke will preside, and I am sure you are welcome to service at the bar. Here’s an excerpt from the report:

The plaque being unveiled today will carry the words: ‘Evelyn Waugh, Author, wrote, drank and loved here 1924-1931.’ July 28 has been chosen for the unveiling because it was on this date in 1924 that Waugh attended a big feast in a barn next to the pub. He wrote in his diary that ‘until about 3 in the morning the whole village sat and ate and drank and danced and sang.’

In recognition of its role of the pub in the writer’s life, villagers will hold their own ‘big feast’ at which diners will enjoy a four-course menu created by the pub’s chef. Co-tenant Aimee Bronock said: “Many people know this as the pub where Lewis Carroll was said to have been inspired to write Alice Through the Looking-Glass by the magnificent view over Otmoor. “We’re thrilled to be highlighting a more recent literary connection as well.”

The feast is sold out but drinkers can attend the unveiling at 6.30pm.

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Whatever Happened to Harold Claire ?

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford Times in its Gray Matter column includes this among today’s stories:

I HAVE often wondered what became of Beckley farmer’s boy Harold Claire, and just possibly I might find out on Saturday night. Claire was a boozing companion of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, a regular visitor to the village’s Abingdon Arms pub in the 1920s, initially with his boyfriend Alastair Graham. Later, Waugh was to honeymoon there with his bride, the so-called She-Evelyn [Gardner]. He was also in residence, and busily writing his second hugely successful novel Vile Bodies, when he received a letter from her revealing the infidelity that was to lead to their divorce.

Waugh’s connection with the Abingdon Arms is being celebrated on Saturday with the unveiling of a blue plaque there by Waugh’s grandson Alexander. The ceremony will be followed by a “a big feast” at the pub in imitation of one that took place there on the very same date, July 28, in 1924, with Waugh and Graham in attendance.

Waugh recorded in his diary: “First there were sports and a cricket match and then at 4 an enormous meal in the big barn next to the pub. “It was a most delightful evening. Harold Claire was very, very drunk, but an excellent host to Alastair and myself, continually filling our glasses and introducing us to people. We danced with Mrs Mattingley [the landlady] several times and drank pints of beer. We went to bed long before it was over. Later we heard that it ended with Harold hitting the policeman on the head and then falling down in the road and cutting himself open.”

Nothing so indecorous, I trust, will be occurring at tomorrow’s ‘do’, for which some tickets are still available, price £43 (01865 655667). Smoked duck, confit trout and braised ox cheek figure on the menu. I will be there. Report next week.

In Waugh’s Diaries the story picks up in the next entry (p. 172) after he goes back to town and confirms that he got a third on his exams. On the following Saturday, he and Alastair return to the Abingdon Arms where they:

…dined with Cooke and Harold, and he and Mrs Mattingly came back to the caravan when the pub shut and drank champagne with us and Alastair and I gave a brooch to Mrs Mattingly which we had bought at Payne’s.

After that they scrounged some cash at Alastair’s home and set off for Ireland.

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Waugh in History

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh is cited in the context of two quite different works of history:

In the current issue of the magazine First Things (journal of the nonsectarian Institute on Religion and Public Life), there is a review of a book by Leo Darroch. This is entitled Una Voce and traces the history of the movement to restore the traditional Roman Catholic liturgy following the reforms of Vatican II in the 1960s. Waugh was of course part of that movement in its early days, and Alcuin Reid’s review of the book opens with this quote:

In 1965, Evelyn Waugh wrote to the archbishop of Westminster of the growing tide of liturgical changes: “Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial.” The prominent Italian Catholic literary figure Tito Casini went further in 1967… He virulently took to task the cardinal charged with implementing the reform…Casini and Waugh had a point. What began to happen to the Sacred Liturgy of the Western Rite of the Catholic Church in the 1960s (or perhaps earlier), and which led to the production of brand-new rituals produced to meet the needs—almost self-consciously—of that ethereal entity “modern man,” was perceived as madness by many, and caused distress to a great number of faithful Catholics.

The review goes on to explain how the reforms had the unintended consequence of discouraging church attendance by the poorer believers, the very group who were supposed to benefit most.

The association started in the UK to preserve the Latin Mass is not specifically mentioned in the review. Waugh was active in the formation and leadership of that group despite his failing health at the time. He would be gratified that the fruits of its labors do get a mention:

The first breakthrough [in the restoration movement] was made by the English. Through the good offices of Evelyn Waugh’s correspondent, Cardinal John Heenan, in 1971, a petition signed by prominent Anglophones, Catholic and non-Catholic alike (including two Anglican bishops) argued that the suppression of the older form of the Mass would be an irreparable cultural loss. Pope Paul VI, said to be particularly moved by the signature, among others, of the novelist Agatha Christie, granted the requested permission for its occasional use—not, however, without provoking the ire of the custodians of “the correct attitude.”

In an Ethiopian weblog Ayyaantuu News which posts articles relating to African history, the second part of an essay discussing the history of the large ethnic group called the Oromo people appears. This is by academic Mekuria Bulcha who cites Evelyn Waugh to explain the conquest and subjugation of the Oromo tribes (living in Southwest Ethiopia) by the Abyssinian nation under its emperor Menelik II:

The Abyssinian onslaught on and treatment of their subjects was worse than that of the European colonialists in other parts of Africa.  The British journalist Evelyn Waugh stated that “The Abyssinians imposed what was, by its nature, a deadly and hopeless system.” Comparing the Abyssinian and European treatment of the peoples they had colonized, he wrote that the non-Christian “peoples of the south and west were treated with wanton brutality unequalled even in the Belgian Congo” in the Abyssinian empire. He noted that the Boers in South Africa and the Abyssinians were “the most notoriously oppressive administrators of subject peoples in Africa.” By Abyssinians, Waugh meant the ruling elite and the naftanya settlers in the south. From Emperor Menelik II to the regime of the late Ethiopian Prime Minister, Melese Zenawi, the historical record confirms Waugh’s assessment. The other difference is that the Europeans left their colonies and went home; the Abyssinians did not after their years of occupation and exploitation. They simply changed their narrative… [Footnote omitted]

A footnote cites the quotations to Waugh’s 1936 book Waugh in Abyssinia (pp. 11, 24, 26).

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Weekend Roundup: Brideshead Re-edited

Posted on July 21, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited dominates this week’s roundup:

–Scottish novelist and journalist Allan Massie has written an article in the Catholic Herald entitled “Chapter & Verse: Brideshead re-edited”. The article begins:

Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945, was Evelyn Waugh’s first explicitly Catholic novel. It lost him, he wrote later, “such esteem” as he had enjoyed among his contemporaries. … It was possible to fall in love with the novel while ignoring its Catholic theme, or paying little attention to it. That was my experience, reading it in 1957, shortly before going up to Cambridge. I was entranced by Waugh’s evocation of 1920s Oxford, even if he assured the reader that this was now “lost as Lyonnesse”, entranced too by the beauty, charm, silliness and melancholy of Sebastian Flyte. Later I would be saddened by his descent into alcoholism as he ran away from adult life and the demands of his mother, Lady Marchmain – saintly but not a saint.

Of course I was reading it all wrong, as indeed the narrator, Charles Ryder, misunderstood Sebastian and his mother. In time he would come to see Sebastian as “the forerunner”, when a decade or so later he falls in love with Julia, Sebastian’s twin, has an affair with her, lives with her as man and wife, both being married – Charles to a bright socialite, Julia to the crass and pushing politician Rex Mottram. Julia, it should be said, is the great failure of the novel.

The remainder of the article is behind a paywall but perhaps one of our readers can report below how Massie would “re-edit” the novel.

–On the Anglophile website Anglotopia, a guest writer (Janna Wong Healy), who failed to find delight in either the novel or the 1981 TV adaptation when she was younger, has read (or listened) to the former and watched the latter, as well as the 2008 film version. She now has something good to say about each of them. After summarizing the story, she reaches this conclusion about the novel:

Brideshead Revisited has the depth and weight that are found in a writer working in his prime, in the full powers of an eager, good mind and a skilled hand, retaining the best of what he has already learned. It tells an absorbing story in imaginative terms. By indirection it summarizes and comments upon a time and a society. It has an almost romantic sense of wonder, together with the provocative, personal point of view of a writer who sees life realistically. It is, in short, a large, inclusive novel, … a novel more fully realized than any [considered on the website in] the year now ending, whatever their other virtues.

Moving on to the 1981 TV series, she admitted to having trouble sitting through the first episode, but she continues:

By the second episode, I was hooked.  The series is an extraordinarily true translation of the novel.  Every detail, every nuance of every character is depicted in the series.  In fact, I can think of no part of the book that was excised from the series.  When you watch the series, you get the full essence of the book, including (and especially) the lovely narration delivered in the dulcet tones of Jeremy Irons’ voice.

With respect to the 2008 film, she was able to watch that when it was released and then  again after reading the novel and viewing the 1981 series:

It’s a good piece of filmmaking.  It nicely depicts the friendship between Charles and Sebastian and the romance between Charles and Julia and it explores the importance of religion in the Flyte family.  But, there is no way to reduce a 432-page book that once had life as a 13-hour television series, into a 2 hour and 13 minute movie.  Too many of the subtleties of the characters and relationships are left undeveloped.  Watching the movie is a good method for becoming familiar with the main beats of the story and that’s how I appreciated it when I originally saw it in 2008.  But now that I am initiated in Mr. Waugh’s novel, I can see the movie’s shortcomings.  There was just too much from the novel that had to be excised in order to get it into the theater with a decent run time.

She concludes with a series of alternatives for combining the novel and the films in a satisfactory manner.

—Brideshead along with a later novel appear on the website Clothes in Books. They are both included on a list of books recommended as good reading while on cruise:

4) The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – Evelyn Waugh’s alter ego noisily going mad on a Mediterranean cruise. A kind reader has pointed out that while Pinfold passes through the Mediterranean, he is not on a Mediterranean cruise: he is on a ship travelling to Ceylon with cargo and passengers.

5) And Brideshead Revisited, also by Waugh, contains a memorable love affair on a transatlantic crossing…

Waugh did write a book about a Mediterranean cruise. This was Labels (1930), a travel book, not a novel.

–The BBC has announced that next year’s edition of its series Countryfile Live will be broadcast from Castle Howard in North Yorkshire. The program will air from 15-18 August 2019:

Chief Executive of Welcome to Yorkshire, Sir Gary Verity DL says: “…Castle Howard is a beautiful location and the perfect setting to host this family favourite.” Castle Howard, widely recognised as ‘Brideshead’ in adaptions of the Evelyn Waugh novel, will host many of the much-loved Countryfile Live attractions on its 1000 acre site including Passion for British Livestock, the Wildlife Zone and most importantly, The Craven Arms.

This year’s series of live broadcasts comes from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire 1-4 August.

–In the magazine Humanities (published by the US-based National Endowment for the Humanities) Danny Heitmen has written a retrospective essay entitled: “The Messy Genius of  W H Auden”. In describing Auden’s wartime career, the article first quotes his biographer as explaining that he left England “to escape the temptations to fame.” According to Heitman:

That’s perhaps the most charitable explanation for Auden’s move to America in 1939. Others couldn’t help noticing that his departure coincided with the start of Britain’s ordeal in World War II. Novelist Evelyn Waugh would later claim that Auden had left “at the first squeak of an air-raid warning.” His absence from England even came up in the British Parliament, although the government took no action against him. 

Auden and his companion on his trip to America, Christopher Isherwood, were depicted in Put Out More Flags as Parsnip and Pimpernell who made a similar trip. The quote comes from that novel. See previous post.

–Meanwhile, on the conservative website Counter-Currents Publishing: Books Against Time, Ash Donaldson has posted an article entitled “Sword of Dishonor: The Reasons for the Decline of America’s Military”. While alluding to Waugh’s WWII trilogy for his title, in his text he relies on a character from Brideshead Revisited to explain one facet of the American military decline. This is in a section titled “An Army of Hoopers”:

By the Second World War, officers like Hooper in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited were as common as hobbits in the shire:

“Hooper had no illusions about the Army – or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe. . . . Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry . . . Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales and Marathon – these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper…

–Finally, on the website of the Dublin-based popular music magazine Hot Press. a recent performance of the band calling itself Flyte is reviewed:

They’ve got that four part harmony thing down too, on opener ‘Victoria Falls’ from last year’s debut album, The Loved Ones, and ‘Closer Together’, which attempts to mix it up with some quasi 80s keyboards. … they’re at least heading in the right direction, although some of it sounded a bit samey, they could take it easy with the shiny keyboards, and they need to learn how to work an audience a bit more. The bass player has lovely hair though.

The performance was at The Iveagh Gardens in Dublin. See previous post.

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Waugh’s Oxford (more)

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The TLS has a review by Miranda Seymour of Barbara’s Cooke’s book Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford. It opens with a discussion of Waugh’s drawing of Harold Acton on the back flap of the dustwrapper (also p. 25) and continues:

Barbara Cooke’s emphasis here on Waugh’s graphic art – of which the Bodleian owns a splendid little collection – provides a useful corrective to our knowledge of a literary life that has been more sparklingly analysed by Selina Hastings, Paula Byrne and, most recently, Philip Eade. (Christopher Sykes’s engrossing biography of Waugh, published in 1975, remains endearingly tainted by his inability to write with sufficient detachment about one of his oldest friends.) Cooke may fail to sparkle, but she is tenacious in her determination not to mask Waugh’s manifold flaws.The first and better half of her book – it later descends into a historic trail guide (one beguilingly illustrated by Amy Dodd) to the famous and infamous locations of Waugh’s years at Oxford – potters across familiar ground.

The familiar ground is summarized as Waugh’s early life leading up to Oxford. Seymour thinks Cooke might have been more forthcoming about some of the more louche details of Waugh’s undergraduate years but…

Her interest revives when she turns to the novelist’s precocious gift for drawing and his early interest in film-making. Waugh shared Virginia Woolf’s fascination with silent film, and made many of his student friendships through Terence Greenidge, a fellow film enthusiast. Together they produced The Scarlet Woman, which was partly shot at Underhill, and featured, alongside Evelyn and Alec, Elsa Lanchester, who later starred in Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

Both Cooke and her publisher do full justice to Waugh’s early career as a graphic artist. It’s good to be reminded that woodcuts preceded Waugh’s work as a novelist – and to be shown in detail just how good his work was. The five Oxford types that Waugh drew as a frontispiece for Cherwell in 1923 were still being used by that magazine as late as 1940. When his comic novel Decline and Fall was published by Waugh Senior’s publishing firm in 1928, he provided his own illustrations. Clearly inspired by both Eric Gill and Aubrey Beardsley, Waugh’s darkly mischievous caricatures prefigure the exuberant wit of his early novels.

Our readers are reminded that an important phase of Waugh’s Oxford years will be commemorated next weekend on Saturday, 28 July at 6pm when a memorial plaque will be unveiled at one of his favorite pubs, the Abingdon Arms. This is just a few minutes cab ride north of Oxford in Beckley. For details and Waugh-themed menu of the feast planned after the event, see here.

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Score Settling Time

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In the 12 July 2018 issue of the New York Review of Books, Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, reviews Hilary Spurling’s biography of Anthony Powell. This is not scheduled to be published in the USA until the Fall, but Hastings seems more determined to settle old scores with Powell than to review the book. He was editor of the Telegraph in the 1980s when Powell was still the chief book reviewer after over 30 years. Powell resigned after Auberon Waugh in 1990 wrote a strongly negative review in the Sunday Telegraph of a collection of Powell’s Telegraph articles. (See previous post.) Hastings hasn’t forgotten that Powell made no secret of the fact that he thought Hastings bore responsibility for the publication of Auberon’s review and, more importantly, had taken the Telegraph downmarket under his stewardship.

The review opens with this:

Some decades ago, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell were widely regarded as Britain’s foremost novelists of the modern era. Today, Waugh reigns triumphant in the literary pantheon, one of the few twentieth-century British writers enthusiastically devoured by the young. Meanwhile Powell, if not forgotten, is scarcely read by people under sixty. His reputation, chiefly based upon his twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975, has slumped.

Hastings continues in the same vein, including several other references to his judgement that Waugh’s work is now universally deemed superior to that of Powell. He seems to suggest that Powell was engaged in some sort of underhand plot to secure the “top” position for himself but makes no comment on Spurling’s extensive argument that Powell in the late 1960s and 1970s was a lone voice from his generation speaking out in defence of Waugh’s stature as a writer. This was during a period that much of Waugh’s work had fallen out of print. Hastings also bears a grudge against Spurling for having undertaken to have the Telegraph commission a bust of Powell to display in their offices in recognition for his years of service and in atonement for Auberon’s review. Although he concludes in the end that Powell’s major work is still worth reading and that Spurling’s biography is well written, by that time he has already vented his spleen over three pages of invective.

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Take in One Flag, Put Out More

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A political dispute in Kansas inspired a reader of the Lawrence Journal-World to submit this letter citing Evelyn Waugh:

The governor’s response to the flag controversy — to put more flags on display around the Statehouse in Topeka — brings to mind Evelyn Waugh’s early novel of World War II, “Put Out More Flags.” Rich young men, seeing opportunities in government employment on the home front (certainly not on the battlefield), acquire a newfound spirit of patriotism. The governor has certainly done his bit, volunteering as a plastic surgeon in combat zones, but he is also a politician facing a tough election soon. Waugh’s title is from a proverb quoted by the Chinese writer Lin Yutang: “A drunk military man should order gallons [of alcohol] and put out more flags in order to increase his military splendor.”​

Richard Hardin

The letter refers to a report from earlier this month about remarks made by the Governor  with respect to flag displays at the University of Kansas which is located in Lawrence. According to the Journal (12 July 2018), this started with the outdoor display of an American flag on which an artist had painted black blotches and a striped stocking. This was one part of a larger display of objects from the collection of the university’s art museum. The Governor demanded, inter alia, the altered flag’s removal and destruction but at one point, he also suggested this:

Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer has ordered additional American flags flown outside the Statehouse in response to a university’s now-relocated public art display featuring an altered flag. Colyer spokesman Kendall Marr said the Republican governor ordered the 19 additional flags to go up Wednesday afternoon on the north and south sides of the Statehouse grounds.

There were apparently already a sufficient number of flagpoles installed around the statehouse to afford compliance with the Governor’s demand.

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Bastille Day Roundup

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

With the French celebrating their National Day and their World Cup victory this past weekend, our latest roundup is dedicated to them. Appropriately enough, our first entry relates to France.

–In the weblog Literary Hub, Emily Temple admits that most writers admire the work of Marcel Proust. To keep things in perspective, she collects several opinions that differ. One of these is Evelyn Waugh who wrote in 1948 to Nancy Mitford (who lived in France at the time and loved it there):

I am reading Proust for the first time—in English of course—and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely no sense of time. He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble & Francoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs-Elysees, Bloch takes him to a brothel. And as for the jokes—the boredom of Bloch and Cottard. [NMEW, p. 92]

Other anti-Proust writers in the LitHub’s collection include James Joyce, D H Lawrence and Anatole France who is supposed (apocryphally) to have said: “Life is too short and Proust is too long.”

–On his weblog Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp has reported that he is reading Helena, one of Waugh’s more negelcted books:

… I came across sentences spoken by Lactantius, the Christian convert who helps bring the title character to the true faith, that seem to express Waugh’s writerly credo:

“He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.”

…Waugh judged it his best book, which it is not, but Helena embodies his interest in “joinery,” “the construction of wooden furniture, fittings, etc.” (OED). Before Waugh resolved to be a writer, he considered devoting his life to painting, and then contemplated carpentry and printing. Writing, for him, is a species of making, not an emotional pressure valve. His books are usually funny, yes, but always exactingly crafted. In a 1953 interview with the BBC, when asked if he was conveying a “message” in his work, Waugh replied:

“No, I wish to make a pleasant object, I think any work of art is something exterior to oneself, it is the making of something, whether it’s a bed table or a book.”

–BBC Radio 3 on yesterday’s broadcast featured excerpts from the works of Evelyn Waugh in a special episode of Words and Music, which is subtitled “The News”. According to the BBC’s description, the program started with:

… the 19th century, when newspapers were seen as noble messengers, [and continued] to the 21st, with 24-hour rolling news on every screen. Comical newshounds in novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Trollope, populate the first half of the programme … Music, poetry and archive clips reflect key moments in history…We hear themes used for news programmes by Malcolm Arnold, John Williams and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and incidental music for plays and films, such as Samuel Barber’s School for Scandal and Bernard Herrmann’s score for Citizen Kane. Newsreader Kathy Clugston and Miles Jupp, host of BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz, are the readers for a special edition of Words and Music exploring the evolution of how we get our new.

The program can he heard on the internet over BBC iPlayer for approximately 4 weeks.

–The Countess of Carnarvon on her website discusses the past success of the TV series Downton Abbey that was filmed on Highclere estate in Berkshire where she lives with her family. She is posting in connection with last week’s announcement of a new production that will be a full length film based on the earlier story. As she ruminates over the past successes, her somewhat random thoughts turn to this:

Researching my book “Catherine” about the 6thcountess, I found [the 1920s] a fascinating time in British politics where the rise of the Labour party knocked against the hard edged glamour of Evelyn Waugh’s world of decadent aristocrats.  In fact, Evelyn Waugh married, in turn, two nieces of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon and I have to admit that “Brideshead Revisited” is one of my favourite books.

I wonder if she has in mind the introduction of a new character: a lately successful and upwardly mobile (if somewhat gauche) young novelist who falls in with one or more of the family’s younger female members. I can’t recall which of them remains unattached after the last episode but that doesn’t matter. It’s probably too much to hope for but maybe the Countess will have a word with Julian Fellowes.

–Finally, on the weblog Nigeness, the blogger “Nige” announces that he is undertaking a rereading of the novels of Auberon Waugh. This was inspired by his recent enjoyment of Auberon’s Private Eye Diaries. He mostly liked Auberon’s first novel The Foxglove Saga but was disappointed by the ending:

Again and again, Waugh sets up and executes brilliant comic set pieces involving these three and various authority figures and walk-on characters. Misunderstandings, confusion and crossed signals abound, and there are many laugh-aloud scenes and moments (which is a great deal more than you can say about many supposedly comic novels).  Up to somewhere near the end, The Foxglove Saga is a joy to read. Then, I think, something goes wrong with the tone, and the latent cruelty in Waugh’s (both Waughs’) comedy comes too near the surface…So, a novel full of promise, which for much of its length is brilliantly achieved and very funny, fails to carry through to the end. Never mind – the best bits are truly comparable to Waugh pere at his funniest, and suggest a great comic novelist in the making.  Bron, incredibly, was only twenty when he wrote this one. What happened next? Well, three years later, he published a second novel, Path of Dalliance. I have a copy, and am going to read it. I’ll be reporting back…

Thanks once again to Dave Lull for sending links to some of the stories reported above.

UPDATE (22 July 2018): The Sunday Times for today recommends the BBC Radio 3 programe described above:

This is a sequence without a presenter, beautifully, wittily, creatively crafted. Nobody tells you what you’ve heard. Part of the joy is guessing what you’re hearing. Last week’s theme was The News. The words came variously from Alvar Lidell, Anthony Trollope, Evelyn Waugh, Carol Ann Duffy and others. The music included Leroy Anderson, John Adams, Scott Joplin and a rainbow of news signature tunes. The readers were Miles Jupp (who presents Radio 4’s The News Quiz) and the Radio 4 newsreader Kathy Clugston; the producer was Helen Garrison. The result was intense pleasure.

 

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A Tale of Two Anthonys

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of the London Review of Books has an essay by Prof Perry Anderson on Anthony Powell.  This considers the recent biography of Powell by Hilary Spurling and morphs into a longer critical consideration of Powell’s works. It is Part 1 of what will be a two-part essay. Anderson notes at the beginning that Spurling’s supposedly official biography of Powell is considerably shorter than Martin Stannard’s work on Waugh as well as some of Spurling’s own biographies of other subjects; he also wonders about:

her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but, on the whole, in the warmth and grace of Spurling’s account there is a natural tact but little sign of inhibition. … Aesthetically speaking, at all events, the economy of her study is not out of keeping with its subject: Powell, a disciplined writer with a laconic streak of his own, would have appreciated it.

In the end, Anderson thinks Spurling gets it just about right. After an extended comparison of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time with Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time, Anderson compares Powell’s works with those of his English-language conetmporaries. This includes a comparison of Powell’s prewar novels with those of Evelyn Waugh:

The verdicts of Koyama Taichi, in The Novels of Anthony Powell: A Critical Study (2006), comparing them with Waugh’s output in the same [prewar] period, are brisk. Similarities abound – Decline and Fall: Afternoon Men (’the merry-go-round of manners’); Black Mischief: Venusberg (‘topsy-turvy in a foreign land’); Vile Bodies: Agents and Patients (‘satire of the fast set’); A Handful of Dust: From a View to a Death (‘the country house is falling down’); Scoop: What’s Become of Waring? (‘the dinginess of hacks’) – but Powell lacks the gusto of Waugh’s ‘wild, grotesque flights of the imagination’, his energy-saving variants yielding no more than a ‘light, prosperous disdain for the sordid affairs of the world’. That could be thought too harsh. But Koyama is perfectly correct in pointing out the most striking feature of the early novels. They contain, virtually without exception, only flat characters.

In an article in the Jesuit magazine America, the religious position of novelist Anthony Burgess is reconsidered by Christopher Sandford. The article provides this comparison with the approaches to religion of Burgess and Waugh :

Although [Burgess] proudly identified himself as an “unbeliever” from the age of 16, he continually returned to spiritual themes, whether in his novels, his poems or his screenwriting of the acclaimed 1977 miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth.” Burgess told me in 1987 that this aspect of his life was “an endlessly scratched itch.” Not that he ever for a moment identified with other prominent Roman Catholic authors of his generation (again shunning the lure of the club), telling The Paris Review in 1973 that he felt himself to be “quite alone…the novels I’ve written are really medieval Catholic in their thinking, and people don’t want that today.” Unlike him, Burgess continued, even the greatest of English Catholic writers “tend to be bemused by the Church’s glamour, and even look for more glamour than is actually there—like [Evelyn] Waugh, dreaming of an old English Catholic aristocracy, or [Graham] Greene, fascinated by sin in a very cold-blooded way…. I try to forget that Greene is a Catholic when I read him. Crouchback’s Catholicism weakens [Waugh’s] Sword of Honour in the sense that it sentimentalises the book. We need something that lies beneath religion.”

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Waugh and Brexit (more)

Posted on July 14, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh gets several mentions in the weeklies in connection with the Brexit debate. Two of these relate to Tory politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading proponent of Brexit. These are based on Dominic Green’s interview of Rees-Mogg for The Weekly Standard on which he also comments in The Spectator. In The Weekly Standard, Green reports:

There is much of P.G. Wodehouse in Rees-Mogg. When he canvassed door to door in his first, unsuccessful attempt to win a seat in parliament, nanny came too. When the papers reported that he was driving around in a Bentley, he objected that it was only a Mercedes. A contemporary of Rees-Mogg’s at Eton recalls how the pupils wagged him by humming the national anthem during class, so that young Jacob would jump out of his seat and stand to attention. But there is more of the serious comedy of Evelyn Waugh. Rees-Mogg’s anachronistic, almost theatrical overdressing; his posh, staunch, and fecund Catholicism, and his conviction that the old days and old ways were better all recall later Waugh. His constituency, North East Somerset, is in Waugh country.

He may mean that last phrase literally since the family of Arthur Waugh lived in Midsomer Norton (which is, indeed, in Rees-Mogg’s constituency), and Evelyn visited his aunts there many times as a child. In summarizing the interview for The Spectator, Green closes with this:

As I leave, I ask Rees-Mogg, a Catholic MP for a Somerset constituency, to name his favorite Evelyn Waugh novel. ‘Scoop,’ he says. ‘It’s such fun.’

American conservative journalist Roger Kimball, whose day job is publisher of The New Criterion magazine, also reports in The Spectator on Brexit in connection with this week’s visit of Donald Trump to Britain. He thinks Trump sees Brexit as a matter of sovereignity and closes his article with this quote from Evelyn Waugh:

The beautiful people who titter over the Baby Blimp and denounce President Trump’s policy of “America First” might take a page from Evelyn Waugh. “I believe in nationality,” he wrote in 1938 [sic], “not in terms of race or of divine commissions for world conquest, but simply this: mankind inevitably organises itself into communities according to it geographical distribution; these communities by sharing a common history common characteristics and inspire a local loyalty; the individual family develops most happily and fully when it accepts these limits. I do not think that British prosperity must necessarily be inimical to anyone else, but if, on occasions, it is, I want Britain to prosper and not her rivals.”

The quote is from Waugh’s book Robbery Under Law (1939) pp. 20-21 (Penguin, 2011 ed.).

UPDATE: Quote is from book published in 1939. Text is changed accordingly.

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