Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford (More)

Posted on June 14, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Two new reviews have been published relating to Dr Barbara Cooke’s book Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford. The first is by literary critic and novelist D J Taylor in the current issue of The Oldie magazine. Taylor opens by placing Waugh’s Oxford career in the context of those of his contemporaries who also became writers:

Almost to a man – the exception was George Orwell – the gang of major English writers born in the period 1900-1910 spent three years of their late teens and early twenties at Oxford University. Again, almost to a man, their scholastic achievements at this seat of learning were feeble in the extreme. Cyril Connolly and Anthony Powell took third-class degrees. Graham Greene managed a moderate second. Evelyn Waugh’s third was nullified by his refusal to complete the statutory nine terms needed to graduate, while Peter Quennell was sent down for sexual misconduct.

This catalogue of humiliation tends to give the Oxford sections of the average literary memoir a somewhat sober edge. Greene’s A Sort of Life barely mentions his time at Balliol. Powell’s Infants of the Spring climaxes with his 20 year-old younger self admitting to a hugely affronted Maurice Bowra that he disliked the place and burned to leave. It was left to Waugh, both in Brideshead Revisited (1945) and his lapidary autobiography A Little Learning (1964), to lay on the Ruskin-esque aquatint in which all memories of what now gets known as the ‘Brideshead Generation’ have come to be drenched.

Taylor goes on to discuss Cooke’s treatment of the subject in her book which he describes as “handsomely produced” and “less an exercise in debunking than a series of exercises in creative cause and effect … followed by some explorations of ‘Waugh’s Oxford’, nicely illustrated by Amy Dodd, in which Cooke considers the incidental role played by various colleges, institutions and landmarks in Waugh’s fiction.” He also remarks on the illustrations which he describes as “superlative” and concludes with this:

All this offers a fascinating gloss on the literary-cum-artistic tradition in which Waugh might be thought to repose. On this evidence, his real forbear was not Dickens but Thackeray, whose knack of producing drawings which both reflect the text they illustrate and comment on them as well he clearly shares. Meanwhile, the photograph of the Oxford University Railway Society reunion dinner of 1963, in which Waugh and his convives can be found ponderously reassembled on the station platform, offers a ghastly reminder of the fate of thrusting young satirists who grow old. Waugh and Connolly (both just turned 60) look about a hundred; their chins, alas, are beyond computation.

The second review is by your correspondent and appears in the current issue of the Anthony Powell Society Newsletter (No. 71, Summer 2018). This will ultimately be published on the Society’s website. This review offers a more detailed summary of the book’s contents and notes how Waugh’s friend and fellow novelist Anthony Powell fits into Waugh’s Oxford career and, more particularly, the years in London immediately following. For example, Dr Cooke explains how Arthur Waugh’s Oxford career affected that of his son:

… the sources of Arthur Waugh’s theatricality are explained in the entry for ‘The New Theatre’ and his Oxford academic career in that for ‘New College.’ I had not knownthat Arthur also received a third class degree (to a large extent accounted for by his time spent ontheatrical matters)—so it must have been more his son’s extravagance than his poor scholarship thatcaused Arthur to refuse to pay for the final term needed for his degree. Moreover, I had not realized thatEvelyn was the 5th generation of his family to attend Oxford. (Although not mentioned, there were at least two more after him, his children Teresa and Auberon, and his great granddaughter, Mary. There are perhaps others, although the line seems to skip the generation of Evelyn’s grandchildren.)

The review concludes: “Dr Cooke’s book is an enjoyable and informative introduction to the Oxford of AP’s years. It is well produced and nicely bound and printed on high quality paper. The illustrations, which are numerous and of excellent quality, are well integrated with the text.”

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Roundup: Brideshead Matters

Posted on June 13, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In an article posted on National Catholic Register, Joseph Pearce considers whether education still matters and concludes that it should but doesn’t always manage. In order to matter, education must teach the truth as revealed in the wisdom of the ancients. He refers to a 1977 book by Christopher Derrick entitled Escape from Scepticism: Liberal Education as if Truth Mattered for a fuller explanation.  As examples of what happens to those who fail to acquire a properly based education, he offers two characters from Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited:

Evelyn Waugh, in his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, a novel which was itself inspired by a line in one of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, lampoons the “hollow men” produced by the modern academy in his portrayal of the characters of Hooper and Rex Mottram. Hooper had “no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe”:

Pearce goes on to explain an emptiness in both these characters that can be traced to what Waugh would have considered an inadequate education.

Co-authors of a new Young Adult novel entitled Freshmen, have prepared a reading list of campus novels for students embarking on their university educations in a few weeks time. Among those listed is Brideshead:

Although the novel spans more than 20 years, some of the most memorable scenes take place at Oxford University, where Charles Ryder meets the “magically beautiful” Sebastian Flyte and his circle of glamorous and debauched friends. Waugh invented the Oxford of literary imagination that tourists hunt for today, but Brideshead explores much more than manicured lawns and medieval panelled dormitories where dilettantes talk to teddy bears. It is about growing up, desire, faith, and loss in a tumultuous and dark world.

The list is published here and is compiled by Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison.

Another reference to Brideshead appears in a notice on Decanter.com for a new hotel in the Bordeaux region of France that also mentions two Oxford students about to embark on a day out of the city:

Both wine sales and hotel developments have been slow in Sauternes, but new initiatives are now underway across the board. One of these is Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey’s Hotel & Restaurant Lalique which, acording to owner, Silvio Denz, combines ‘four worlds: wine, crystal, gastronomy and hospitality’.

The hotel, due to open in June, will include a restaurant run by two-star Michelin chef Jérôme Schilling. Fans of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited will also enjoy the fact that this château is mentioned by Sebastian Flyte: ‘I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey – which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. It’s heaven with strawberries.’

Meanwhile, The Tablet’s wine reporter, N O’Phile (I’m not making this up), in an article recounting the history of the liqueur Green Chartreuse, made by monks in the south of France, wrote this:

Popular culture is peppered with references to Green Chartreuse. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby it is said to be the favourite drink of the more louche characters in the novel, including Gatsby himself. The outrageously fay Anthony Blanche, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, refers to “Real g-g-Green Chartreuse, made before the expulsion of the monks. There are five distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue. It’s like swallowing a sp-spectrum.” …

Actor Rupert Everett, who got his start playing an English public school boy in the 1984 film Another Country, was interviewed in the Evening Standard earlier this week. This was on the occasion of this week’s premiere of his new film The Happy Prince in which he plays Oscar Wilde and which he also wrote and directed. The interview, after exploring the details of the Wilde film, concludes with this:

So what next? What Everett would very much like to do is play to his strengths, as someone from a public school background who’s getting on a bit. He wants to make a film of something by Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh because he belongs to the “last remaining generation” who knows how people talked and behaved in those days. It drove him nuts when he saw the recent Brideshead, which got everything wrong, and a TV documentary about the 1970s that missed the point of the period. In a way, he’s a repository of memory, which is the one thing our own period lacks.

Finally, a weblog called DailyBritain commemorates the 95th anniversary of the first public performance of Edith Sitwell’s poem Facade set to music. This was performed in the Aeolian Hall on 12th June 1923 to an unappreciative audience:

However the London literati wasn’t ready for such an experimental work and the  performance was greeted with hisses and threats from the audience; ‘though there was considerable applause the house as a whole was infuriated… and so hostile that the performers were warned not to leave the hall until the audience had dispersed’….In the audience was Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolfe, and Noel Coward who walked out of the performance. Afterwards Coward wrote a review lampooning the Sitwells which caused a feud to last decades.

Waugh had been taken to the performance by his friend Harold Acton, and this may have been the beginning of his acquaintance with the Sitwells.

UPDATE (14 June 2018): Reference to article in The Tablet was added.

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Aston Clinton Profiled on Country House Website

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The estate of Aston Clinton, associated with Evelyn Waugh in the 1920s, is profiled on the website of House and Heritage.org, maintained by David Poole. The estate became well-known thanks to its ownership by a member of the Rothschild family between 1851 and 1923. The original family member and his daughter and only heir were responsible for the development of the extensive gardens and decorating the house with artwork. After being requisitioned during WWI, it was sold in 1923 to Dr A E B Crawford for use as a boys school. This is where Waugh comes into the story:

Evelyn Waugh was a schoolmaster for a short time from 1925, and in his diaries he referred to it as “an unconceivably ugly house but a lovely park” and “a house of echoing and ill-lit passages.”

This was Waugh’s second teaching post after working at Arnold House in North Wales earlier in the year. He started at Aston Clinton in September 1925 and continued until February 1927 when he was sacked for inappropropriate attentions to the matron while drunk. After Waugh left, the school soon sold up, and the estate went through several iterations as a country club and various hotels. It was finally acquired by the County Council. The house was demolished in 1956 and later replaced with a training center. The gardens are apparently still maintained.

The same website has posted just below the Aston Clinton profile an article about the proposed sale of Piers Court, with a focus on its ownership by the Waughs. This includes several features not reported in the earlier press accounts and a family photo of the Waughs and a servant arranged along a wall. The date isn’t given but it must have been shortly before they moved.

The House and Heritage Piers Court article avoids the mistaken claim made in the press that Brideshead Revisited was among the books written at Piers Court. It also contains several quotations from the memoir of Frances Donaldson, the Waughs’ neighbor in Stinchcombe, including this description of the library:

“In his library the carved shelves were built out in bays as they are in a public library and painted dark green, but it was a big room and the effect was rather beautiful while this arrangement provided room for his collection of books.”

A photo of Waugh sitting at his desk in the library is also reproduced and the article concludes with this:

Back in 2004, the then-custodian revealed that [Waugh’s] beloved library was long gone. “Under a previous owner, the library where Waugh wrote was shipped, piece by piece, to Texas, where it was supposed to be reconstructed as a museum but is still in packing cases.”

It was Waugh who had the library and its fittings removed from Piers Court to have them reinstalled in his new house at Combe Florey in West Somerset. The University of Texas bought the library fittings from there, along with his books and papers, after his death. The books and papers are archived in its collections at the Harry Ransom Center but the fittings remain in storage. One hopes that they are still in the packing crates. His desk, however, occasionally surfaces and was displayed at the Society’s 2008 conference at the HRC.

An attempt was made by the Waugh Family to reacquire those library fittings and other artifacts separate from the books and papers. They offered in exchange Waugh’s correspondence files which had not formed part of UT’s original acquisition. Although the HRC staff was reported to have wholeheartedly supported the exchange, a provision of the State of Texas procurement laws relating to property exchange valuations proved to be a complication too far. The library fittings remain in Texas and the correspondence files went to the British Library.

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Evelyn Waugh and Simon Raven

Posted on June 11, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In his Daily Mail weblog, Peter Hitchens wonders whether the popularity of the recent BBC series on the Jermy Thorpe scandal might presage a revival of the Alms for Oblivion novels by one of his favorite under-read authors, Simon Raven:

The enjoyable revival of the Jeremy Thorpe follies, or rather, of Peter Bessell’s account of them, shows that Raven was not far off the mark of truth. In fact much of the Thorpe story could have been written by Raven, especially the homosexual elements, an area of English upper-class life which nobody else really wrote much about until quite recently. Evelyn Waugh, whose expeditions into homosexuality were deeper and longer than he cared to recall or relate, was very coy about putting much of them into his books, even the most autobiographical of them. The famous reference to such things in ‘Brideshead Revisited’ is so elegant and allusive that the casual reader can easily miss it, as I did the first two or three times I read that profound and important book.

It is an interesting point, but then when thinking about it, I concluded that reading Raven’s series would be more like “Thorpe Without End.” I had tried to read Raven’s novels in the 1980s as a follow-on to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. I eagerly and optimistically bought a complete set (9 or so volumes) of Raven’s Alms for Oblivion series off the shelf at Blackwells and lugged them home. I started it three times but gave up somewhere in the middle of volume three. In an earlier post (“Better Without the Sex”), which Hitchens links in this latest one, he explains why. In this passage he is comparing Raven’s novel cycle to those of Powell (which Hitchens didn’t like at all) and C P Snow (which he liked, but less than those of Raven):

I should also mention here that neither [Powell’s nor Snow’s cycles] contain the passages of sheer filth that Raven liked to indulge in. Now, when I say filth,  I mean filth. I know that lots of people get up to odd things in their bedrooms, and up to even odder things inside their heads, and there it is.  Sexual fantasies are  frequently rather startling, and some people may long to know the details of other people’s – but I prefer not to.  Personally, I’d cheerfully Bowdlerise these books, removing various scenes of voyeurism and embarrassing sex, even (though reluctantly) excising the various spanking fantasies of one particular person who is singled out for rather a lot of this sort of thing. It’s not that I enjoy the fantasies, just that, attributed to this particular person, they are especially funny.    And I’d more or less dispense with the eighth book in the series,  ‘Come Like Shadows’ , apart from the final scene in which the appalling yet marvellous Lord Canteloupe of the Estuary of the Severn delivers some excellent advice on how to deal with foreigners, in this case Americans. Suitably pruned of their bad sex, they might have a higher reputation, a higher reputation which in my view they deserve.

I think this is a fair description of my problem with Raven’s novels. The books were well written and the characters were well drawn, but they simply couldn’t stopping groping and prodding each other and then describing it in graphic and rather lurid detail. If you are prepared to deal with that, as Hitchens suggests, then his proposal for a revival might work for you. On the other hand, there is something to be said for Waugh’s method for dealing with these topics, as Hitchens notes in his comparison quoted above. He comes back to his comparison later in the article:

At one point [a Raven character] is described as consuming his victuals ‘with silent, reverential greed’, a description which I think is quite worthy of Evelyn Waugh. In fact, while there are occasional lapses, much of Raven is comparable to the early Waugh, though more realistic than (say) ‘Decline and Fall’ or ‘Vile Bodies’, and less self-consciously artistic than ‘Brideshead’.  It is the occasional sheer crudity of events and characters which (I suspect) make people think he isn’t quite first rate. [Emphasis supplied.]

In his 2013 post, Hitchens makes another interesting comparison to Waugh. He notes that Raven was clearly not religious:

Yet he plainly loved much of Christian England. In what is, in some ways the central volume of the series ‘Places Where They Sing’, the very title is a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer, and contains a very early denunciation of the pestilent use of modern Bible translations. There are references to John Bunyan, and a clear appreciation of the beauty of religious architecture and art, and of the need to preserve it from destruction. He must be the only 20th century author apart from Evelyn Waugh who would even try to refer seriously to the concept of honour, and he plainly loves the badges and trumpet calls of chivalry, already vanishing from England in his own boyhood, but just faintly echoing.

If you’re at all interested in trying Raven’s books, read both of Hitchen’s articles, then try it out with one volume. Borrow it from the library if at all possible. Hitchens says they do not need to be read in order but the characters do carry through. In a comment addressing the question of where to start, Hitchens offers alternatives:

The chronological beginning of ‘Alms for Oblivion’ is ‘Fielding Gray‘, which (while extremely powerful) is perhaps the most, er, homosexual of the series. As each book is self-contained, it doesn’t really matter where you start. But in some ways ‘Sound the Retreat;, set in the final months of British Rule in India, is the key to the whole thing. This is the end of a great power, in all its seedy, sinister ludicrousness. My personal favourite of them all is ‘The Sabre Squadron‘ , set in Goettingen in 1952, which also wouldn’t be a bad starting point.

Another mistake to avoid is not to think Raven’s sequel series First Born of Egypt might be an improvement. Hitchens warns several times against that. Unmentioned by Hitchens, Raven also wrote TV adaptations–his best were probably The Pallisers based on Trollope’s novels and the early Thames TV version of Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. This was better in some respects than the later BBC adaptation–mainly for Michael Aldridge as Uncle Matthew, Michael Williams as Davey and Vivian Pickles as Lady Montdore, all chewing as much of the scenery as they could manage. According to Hitchens, Raven died in poverty, living out his years at the Charterhouse in London where he had gone to school. Like many of his characters, he probably managed to live beyond his means no matter how much of it was available.

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Amazon to Screen Thorpe Scandal Series in USA

Posted on June 10, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Amazon.com will screen the BBC TV series A Very English Scandal in the USA on its Amazon Prime streaming service later this month. In fact, it appears that episode 1 may be already be available to view as a bonus feature in advance of the full series that can be seen on and after 29 June.  As described in previous posts, this series is relevant to the career of Auberon Waugh who was responsible for publicizing the shambolic plot of Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe to have a former homosexual lover exterminated, only to succeed in having the lover’s dog Rinka put down instead.

Since the series was screened on BBC1 in the UK, a weblog called Nigeness has posted a copy of Auberon’s election manifesto. This was prepared for the 1979 general election when he stood for Thorpe’s seat as a means of further publicizing the earlier schemes. He had planned to publish this in the Spectator, but Thorpe’s lawyers managed to have it enjoined. A few copies were sold however before the injunction could be enforced. The supressed speech concludes with this:

Rinka is NOT forgotten. Rinka lives. Woof, woof. Vote Waugh to give all dogs the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

 

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Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018)

Posted on June 9, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

There is not much to connect TV presenter Anthony Bourdain, whose death was announced earlier this week, and Evelyn Waugh except for their inclination to travel to difficult destinations and then report about it. Bourdain was also a writer, and according to the New York Times, he was a close reader of George Orwell. His first published essay in the New Yorker, that grew into his book Kitchen Confidential, was modelled on Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

One commenter (Michael Rennier), writing on the website of Dappled Things, a Roman Catholic literary journal, makes this connection between the travel journalism of Waugh and Bourdain:

[Bourdain’s] travelogues were sensitive and insightful, particularly about the fragility and beauty of the human experience. Even as he experienced genuine highs in his exploration of the world, he clearly found meaningful connection in more intimate moments simply connecting with new friends on an individual basis. Travel is broadening in the way it opens us up to new cultures but also in the way it puts us into contact with other human beings […]

In his travelogue Remote People, Evelyn Waugh is brutally honest about the psychological cost of travel. He writes about how we tell stories of travel with selective memory, forgetting the pains and inconveniences, but also the one, inescapable, supremely devastating terror of melancholic personalities – boredom. He writes, “The boredom of civilized life is terminable and trivial…I am constantly a martyr to boredom, but never in Europe have I been so desperately and degradingly bored as I was [while traveling]”. He then delicately dissects the concept of human boredom, writing from a hotel in the heart of Africa while waiting for a steamship whose arrival is indeterminate. The point being, no matter where we are or what we are doing, a human being must struggle with the highs and lows of existence. Travel is a beautiful thing, but it isn’t a magic pill to solve the existential sickness that ails us […]

Waugh Society member, Richard Oram, makes the same point about travel and boredom in a recent email referring to Bourdain’s death and citing Waugh’s January 1933 article in the Daily Mail entitled “Travel–and Escape from Your Friends.” CWEW v26, p. 491. This was based on Waugh’s contemporaneous trip to British Guiana.

 

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Waugh Novel in New Penguin Series

Posted on June 8, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Penguin Books has issued A Handful of Dust in a new series being sold in the UK. This is called the Penguin English Library and, with the latest additions, will bring the total to over 80 titles. Others in this new batch include Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. According to Penguin’s announcement, the English Library books, introduced in 2012, will reflect:

the best fiction in English, from the 18th century to the Second World War. Designed with beautiful patterned covers illustrated and commissioned by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

The new format does appear to be distinguished more by its cover art than its content. No critical apparatus or introductory essay is mentioned.

A Handful of Dust is the first of Waugh’s books to be issued in this new line. Most of his other books published  by Penguin fall into its Modern Classics group. Put Out More Flags appears in a series with more austere covers called Pocket Penguins and Brideshead Revisited is issued in both Penguin Modern Classics paperback and Penguin Clothback Classics editions.

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“The Loved One” Anniversary Marked

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Pilot, newspaper of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese pf Boston, has published an article marking the 70th anniversary of the US publication of Waugh’s novel The Loved One. This is by Russell Shaw who explains that the book was published in June 1948 and quickly went through four printings by the end of August. In this case, first US book publication preceded first UK publication by several months. A UK version of the book had, however, been published in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine in February 1948.

Shaw goes on to explain the importance of the book beyond its comedy and satire:

The tipoff to the book’s deeper, darker meaning comes early, when an elderly Englishman whose Hollywood career is in a terminal nosedive makes passing reference to a magazine piece about Soviet scientists who are said to be keeping a severed dog’s head alive: “It dribbles at the tongue when it smells a cat. That’s what all of us are, you know, out here.” The aging Englishman means “out here in Hollywood.” But Waugh means “out here in the world where materialism reigns.”

The point of what seems to be a casual aside becomes devastatingly clear late in the story, when the body of a Whispering Glades cosmetician who has taken her life at her workplace (to the huge embarrassment of the head mortician, her suitor) is surreptitiously disposed of in the crematorium of the Happier Hunting Ground…Waugh for his part is taking deadly aim at philosophical materialism and its implications for human self-understanding. If the materialists are right about human beings, he’s slyly saying, there is no special reason to make a distinction between the two cemeteries of his tale or to turn up our noses at those Soviet scientists and their dog’s head.

A slightly revised edition of the book with a new preface by Waugh was published in 1965 in both the UK and USA.

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Evelyn Waugh at the Hay Festival

Posted on June 6, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

An article in Vanity Fair describes an event at this year’s Literary Festival in Hay-on-Wye that featured a reading from a work of Evelyn Waugh. So far as appeared from the schedule, there were no events in which a Waugh topic was to be presented. He does appear, however, in the latest iteration of the Letters Live presentation as described in Vanity Fair:

After a venison burger (it really is that sort of place), Letters Live kicked the afternoon off. The concept—actors of note reading letters of note—was a welcome break from the weightier matter of the morning. Benedict Cumberbatch read a 1961 letter by Patrick Leigh Fermor about crabs (and not the nautical kind; “my private fauna”, he called them). Clark Peters read Groucho Marx , and Toby Jones read Evelyn Waugh’s “lousy proposal” of marriage to his ex-wife’s 19-year-old cousin. There were moving letters as well: Tony Robinson delivered Italo Calvino’s impassioned defence of the right to choice penned in response to an anti-abortion friend, and a man sitting in front of V.F. was moved to tears by novelist Katherine Mansfield’s final letter to her brother, serving in the trenches in 1915. Far and away the largest applause of the event, however, was for Rose McGowan, who read both Dorothy Parker and a hilarious 2007 open letter of complaint to Procter & Gamble for printing the message “Have a happy period” on their tampons.

The Waugh letter Jones read is presumably that dated 28 April 1936 (Letters, pp. 103-05). It was written from one of his friend Percy Br0wnlow’s estates where Waugh was at the time living above the estate office and writing Waugh in Abyssinia. Vanity Fair’s reporter, Thomas Barrie, attended the Saturday, 2 June Letters Live performance, but it was repeated on Sunday. The exact contents of the programs were not announced in the Festival listings, but they did mention actor Benedict Cumberbatch’s appearance at both. Whether Toby Jones read the Waugh letter again on Sunday isn’t mentioned. Another letter of Waugh to his wife, written after they were married, has been read at previous performances of Letters Live. This is the one dated 31 May 1942 and describes the army’s unintended damage to the home of Lord Glasgow in the process of removing an unwanted tree. See earlier posts.

Benedict Cumberbatch features in another press story mentioning Waugh. This is from the USA entertainment journal Variety in which an interview of the actor is reported. When asked by the other participant in the interview, actress Claire Foy, whether he was involved in the recent adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels from the project’s conception, he answers:

I was. The books had been out for a while. I’d come to them quite late by word of mouth, and immediately was like, “This is extraordinary material.” It’s some of the most beautiful, stunning prose of the 21st century, in the vein of Evelyn Waugh and Wodehouse. It’s got that incredible ease about it and wit. In a line, you get the whole picture of a character. It just holds you. There are these amazing laugh-out-loud moments, but also this trauma at the center of it. This man who’s abused by his father from the age of 5 onwards.

Finally, another member of the Waugh family makes an onstage presentation. This is Alexander Waugh who delivered a lecture relating to the authorship of Shakespeare’s works in the recent Shakespeare Week at Brunel University in West London. See previous post. A video recording of his lecture has now been posted on YouTube.

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Roundup: From All Over

Posted on June 5, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A story in a recent edition of The Print, a New Delhi-based digital newspaper specializing in political reporting, likens the journalistic coverage of the recent Russian hacking scandal to the war coverage described in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop. The story opens with this:

The British writer Evelyn Waugh probably foresaw the state of journalism today when he wrote his hilarious novel Scoop. Written in 1938, almost 80 years ago, the novel sought to expose the vainglorious and mindless side of journalism in England. It focuses on an imaginary war-torn east African country, the ‘Republic of Ishmaelia, and seeks to depict Fleet Street’s hunger for sensation and so-called “exclusive” stories. The nationalists and patriots, rebels and revolutionaries, Russian Bolsheviks and rulers create such fantastic mayhem that no one knows exactly who is fighting whom and for what. Yet, a reporter completely ignorant of the country and with no experience in ‘war journalism’, writes reports for ‘The Daily Beast’ that make headlines back home in England…

Waugh wrote the novel when there was no debate on fake news, post truth and the cyber-riot. That started much later, after the arrival of mobile phones, and the advent of the global anarchy of social media. The reportage on the alleged hacking attack to influence the 2016 US presidential election and Trump’s suspected Russian escapades is not far from this scenario.

After a brief discussion of the hacking scandal reportage, the story morphs into a review of similar journalistic shortfallings in coverage of Indian elections.

From Abu Dhabi, Joe Jenkins reporting in The National, also cites Waugh’s novel. In a discussion of his “favorite reads”, he starts with Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and anything by “Orwell, Wyndham, Wells and Greene – for pleasure, as well as plenty of Thomas Hardy” and then starts a specific reading list with this:

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy includes some of the finest writing of the 20th century, but this little marvel of his is perhaps the most biting and witty novel I know. Scoop is the ultimate satire on old Fleet Street. Dispatched by Lord Copper’s Daily Beast to cover a brewing conflict in Ishmaelia (actually Abyssinia), countryman William Boot is out of his depth, overloaded with superfluous supplies and while cutting his teeth as a foreign correspondent attempting to wade through the fog of a phoney war. The experience transforms him from near-bumpkin to knowing adult. If you haven’t read it, do. It will not fail to make you smile.

Singaporean comic novelist Kevin Kwan, writing in The Week magazine, recommends six social satires among which is Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies:

The name Evelyn Waugh might bring to mind Brideshead Revisited seriousness. But his early works were wickedly hilarious. This romp [Vile Bodies] about the Bright Young Things — a decadent subset of 1920s London high society — had me laughing so hard I almost fell out of bed.

Finally, from Ireland, the Independent newspaper also has a proposed book list. This is for vacation reading and is helpfully divided into several book categories from thrillers to Irish literature, with 4-5 books in each category. Under “classics” comes this:

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)

It’s the ultimate indulgence read. It’s a leisurely, meandering novel with scores of memorable characters, and follows Charles Ryder, fresh up to Oxford when we first meet him, as his life entwines for decades with that of Sebastian Flyte’s aristocratic Catholic family. It’s funny and sad in almost equal measure, and contains a glorious section involving Charles and Sebastian heading to a decaying Venice to visit the latter’s father. Later, there’s also an extended trip on a cruise ship, making two literary holidays for the price of one. Reading this for the first time would make any holiday more memorable.

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