Desert Island Confusion

Posted on June 20, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Independent newspaper in London has a story in a recent issue about the BBC’s long-running program Desert Island Discs. This article by Alex Johnson focuses on book lists and this week opens with a discussion of the choices made by “castaways” on the BBC’s program. Unlike music recordings (of which 10 are allowed), only one book may be chosen (aside from the Bible and Complete Works of Shakespeare which are given to each). The story then lists the most popular ten book choices over the program’s history, all of which would be considered classics, such as War and Peace and Pride and Prejudice.

The story continues to consider book choices of notable guests on Desert Island Discs. But then it shifts to another book listing scheme entirely:

Aaron Hicklin, owner of the One Grand bookshop in Narrowsburg, New York, has taken the concept a stage further. He asks well-known writers, artists and creative minds to choose 10 books they would take to a desert island and then stocks his shelves accordingly…

As an example, Johnson offers novelist Jay McInerney’s 10 “desert island” bests. This includes Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust as well as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The combination in the same article of these different lists that each carry the “Desert Island” label is at least a bit misleading. McInerney was never a guest on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, so far as I can tell, and was therefore never asked to list his single book choice. Moreover, in a previous post we listed several of Waugh’s books that had been selected on the Desert Island Disc program, but Handful of Dust was not among them. See previous post. Read carefully, the Independent’s story is accurate, but the combination of these different lists with the same label at least creates some risk of confusion.

 

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Janetta Parladé (1921-2018)

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph has announced the death of Janetta Parladé. As a young woman, she was a member of the Horizon magazine social set centering on the editor Cyril Connolly. Shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Cvil War:

Janetta met Cyril Connolly, who offered her a lift in his car to the south of France, where her mother had taken a house. During the drive Connolly was arrested by a suspicious policeman for abducting a minor, and a call had to be made to the British consul in Bordeaux before he was allowed to continue his journey. Wearing corduroy trousers and a French soldier’s cape, and carrying her belongings in a red-spotted handkerchief, the gamine Janetta must have looked even younger than her 17 years.

A few years later, in The Unquiet Grave, Connolly fantasised that he had been in love with Janetta’s “sad, grave, gem-like beauty … which I grasped and was not brave enough to hold”. He told his wife that she suited his “second adolescence”. George Weidenfeld described Janetta in his memoirs as “a wayward beauty who had been the Egeria to many remarkable men, some of whom she wed”.

[… ]she worked at Horizon, the literary magazine founded by Connolly and Stephen Spender. There she acquired the nickname of Miss Bluefeet because of her habit of walking barefooted around the office. Sonia Brownell was editorial secretary at Horizon; when she and Orwell were married in University College Hospital in 1949, three months before he died, Janetta and David Astor were the witnesses. […] (Evelyn Waugh described Janetta as “a dead-end kid [with] a baby by a communist doctor”.)

The “communist doctor” is probably Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, who, according to the Telegraph, “led the first British medical unit to Spain in 1936.” They never married but she took his name and they lived together as a family. Janetta is the barefoot young woman whom Waugh describes in his letters as answering the door at Connolly’s flat when Waugh made a visit. See previous post. She was married four times. Among her husbands were literary figures of the 1940s Humphrey Slater (editor-founder of the short-lived literary magazine Polemic and sometime lover of Waugh’s friend Inez Holden), the also much-married Derek Jackson, and writer Robert Kee.

UPDATE (23 June 2018): According to the obituary in The Times, Janetta did not marry Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit as her second husband but took his name and had his child under that name:

…she left Slater for Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, a young left-wing doctor who had led the first British medical unit to Spain in 1936. They met at a party for Spanish Civil War veterans and he instantly left his wife for her. They did not marry but she changed her name to Sinclair-Loutit and he became the father of her first daughter, Nicolette. Nicky Loutit, as she is now known, is a painter and writer. The Sinclair-Loutits shared a house in Regents Park with Connolly, who occupied the middle floor, but by 1945 they were separated, as Evelyn Waugh reported in a letter to Lady Diana Cooper, referring to Mrs Loutit as “Mrs Bluefeet” (after she had opened the door to him in bare feet).

The text of the original post has been corrected to reflect this.

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An Uncertain Guest: Video Memoir of Evelyn Waugh

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A posting on YouTube’s series “Web of Stories” contains a short video memoir of Evelyn Waugh recorded by the late John Julius Norwich. He was the only child of Waugh’s close friend Diana Cooper and her husband Duff. The memoir is not dated, but Norwich appears fairly advanced in years. His oral recollections are similar to those recorded in his writings. A written transcript of the memoir accompanies the recording. It mostly relates to Waugh’s strained relationship with Duff Cooper:

My father was always in two minds about him; he didn’t mind him fancying my mother a bit, but Evelyn was argumentative and loved rowing. My father actually had loved a good political row too, but they used to almost come to blows, those two together.

This is a clip from a longer version and is preceded by a YouTube ad (unless you have a subscription).

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Another Private Chapel Story

Posted on June 18, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times reports that singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran plans to build a private chapel near his home in Suffolk. This seems to be becoming a trend. See earlier posts. The article by Libby Purves opens with a reference to a Waugh novel as well as one by Nancy Mitford:

You’re a grandee with wealth, fame and acclaim. You’ve got the great house and grounds, guest wing, ballroom, staff. What next? A private chapel! The rich have souls, status doesn’t exclude spirituality, and the parish church is a bit plebby and means putting on outdoor shoes. Thus, from early Tudor times, an exquisite little chapel was the finishing touch to a grand home. At Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead, “a monument of art nouveau” had angels in smocks, saints in armour and texts in Celtic script above a grass-green carpet strewn with daisies. That was based on Madresfield Court, where the 7th earl (later a gay exile) had it decorated as a wedding present from his wife. Or think of the more archaic Hampton chapel in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, where Leopoldina, “Polly”, outrages her mother by marrying her lecherous snob of an uncle.

Sheeran’s chapel sounds quite appropriate (“a flint one, Saxon-style, with a round tower. It will hold a 24-person entourage — sorry, congregation.”) but has run into some problems. In addition to opposition from the locals to a move by a landowner toward “aggrandization” of his property, the building would be sited in area that is home to the great crested newt. The story concludes with this thought about the “new celeb-liberal establishment”:

…Where old aristocracy shunned the vulgarity of the packed local church for fear of smells and smallpox, the new one shudders to contemplate eternity in one of our (often empty, achingly beautiful) historic churches within a mile. They might be glimpsed without hair ’n’ make-up! Someone might smile and say hello! Ugh! The irony is that east Suffolk is a notably un-gawpy region, one of the less likely places to suffer a selfie-hound. It’s already overstocked with famous actors dressed to not impress ….So good luck with the newts, young Sheeran, and sing on. But try laughing at yourself sometimes too.

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Cecil Beaton Documentary Available Online

Posted on June 17, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The full length documentary film of Cecil Beaton’s career that was released last December is now available online. See previous post. This is entitled Love, Cecil. The film was briefly reviewed at the time of its release in the Daily Express (which liked it) as well as in The Times and the Guardian (not so much).  A new more in-depth review has now been posted on the website Movie Nation. This explains a Vogue magazine connection with the project and also offers a bit more analysis of the contents than the  earlier reviews:

…filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland had archival TV interviews with Beaton, even access to his first on-screen essay on “American beauty” (from 1929, and he insisted there was no such thing as “American” beauty). She had Beaton’s many published diaries, and Rupert Everett (as Beaton) reading from them. Mostly though, she had self-portraits to choose from — thousands of the damned things — preening, made-up, perfectly coiffed, perfectly lit and beautifully composed shots of the man’s idealized image of himself…The film is as adoring as those self-portraits.

Filmmaker Vreeland, granddaughter-in-law- of Vogue empress and Beaton intimate Diana Vreeland, rounded up legions of those who met, knew or were influenced by Beaton’s chic tastes, eye for color and social climbing — designers like Blahnik and Mizrahi, current British “Vogue” editor Hamish Bowles among them.

Bowles previously reviewed the film favorably for Vogue magazine. The current review concludes:

…Vreeland’s film, wallowing in the Beaton vision of beauty via his images, his art and his screen work, does a marvelous service in reclaiming this dandy’s dandy/designer’s designer and iconic photographer from obscurity. The culture will never see the likes of Cecil Beaton again, a Renaissance Man with an unfailing eye for composition and color, though his record for narcissistic self-portraiture is challenged every day by the stars of Instagram.

The film is available on DVD from Amazon.com and may also be streamed online in the UK on Amazon.co.uk. It has been published in book form as well.

UPDATE (29 June 2018): Another article about the Cecil Beaton documentary appears in a recent Women’s Wear Daily. This is by Bridget Foley and also mentions that the film opened this week at the film theatre in Lincoln Center, New York.

 

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Waugh and International Law

Posted on June 16, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Dr Fernando Gomez Herrero from the University of Birmingham delivered a paper at a London conference on Languages Memory based on Evelyn Waugh’s description of his attendance at an academic conference in Scott King’s Modern Europe. The paper was entitled ‘About Law and Literature; Or Evelyn Waugh attends the Pax Romana Commemorations in honour of Francisco de Vitoria in Spain in 1946′. Dr Gomez Herrero explains his paper in a posting on the University of Brmingham’s website:

This presentation provided syntheses of Waugh’s satirical novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947), against his diary entries and elements of his biographical writing, engaging with Vitoria, but also the city of Salamanca, the International Congress of Pax Romana, the Franco Regime in early moments of the Cold War. “Vitoria” is short name for international-law initiatives, war-peace mediations, ideal of imperial self-restraint, worrisome (post-) colonial legacies, Euro-American relations, Catholicism and Protestantism, etc. Waugh’s middlebrow writing in the humorous vein is a peculiar English version of Vitoria. I look into how he did it and the possibly why. He did not know the “Neutralian lingo” and did not think much about a lot of things. Orwell already said something meaningful about this supreme art and lightness of being. I look into Waugh’s satirical humour critically. I gave vignettes…. My presentation looked into the mechanics of satire, how satire works, how laughter is engaged, whether it wins over the reader, or does not. Scott King’s Modern Europe is slapstick comedy, a crazy romp against any type of pomp and ceremony: think Marx Brothers, add 19th-Century Spanish costumbrista writer, Mariano Jose de Larra, even touches of Berlanga’s famous film, and audacious comedy, Bienvenido Mister Marshall  (1953)…

Waugh’s novella is also collected in his Complete Short Stories. The Orwell reference probably relates to his review of Waugh’s novella.

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Waugh and Proust: A Handful de Chez Quoi ?

Posted on June 15, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A brief letter in this week’s TLS raises several interesting points about Waugh’s understanding of Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. This is from Dorothy McMillan at the University of Glasgow:

Sir, – As your correspondents have shown (most recently, June 8), the title of Proust’s first volume is tricky to translate. Evelyn Waugh seems not to have understood it at all. Two of the chapters in the first edition of his A Handful of Dust in 1934 are headed, “À côté de chez Beaver” and “À côté de chez Todd”. Conor Cruise O’Brien thought that Waugh must have read some Proust because he had paid him “the tribute of misquotation”, although Waugh told John Betjeman in 1946 that he was then reading Proust for the first time. On both counts Scott Moncrieff’s decision in 1925 to ignore Waugh’s desire to become his secretary seems vindicated. Later editions of the novel correct to “Du côté de chez Beaver” and “Du côté de chez Todd”. Does anyone know who had a word in Waugh’s ear? DOROTHY MCMILLAN School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow.

In a recent issue of Tatler’s Hong Kong edition, Handful comes up in an interview of Lady Kinvara Balfour, described as a “British aristocrat—and producer, writer, creative director and public speaker.” This entry comes after an illustration of the original orange and black cover of the Penguin edition of the novel:

“This book by Evelyn Waugh is my favourite. I love Brideshead Revisited also, but A Handful of Dust is so unbelievably sad and so incredibly reflective of an extraordinary era in Britain. The movie adaptation was filmed at Carlton Towers, the home of my late grandfather (Miles Fitzalan-Howard, the Duke of Norfolk) in Yorkshire. Grandpa was invited by the director to be an extra; he stood in as a gardener who tips his cap when the character played by Anjelica Huston lands her plane on the driveway of the house.”

Finally, another paper opens a story about recent developments in the war in Yemen with this allusion to Scoop, the novel that followed Handful:

In a few days, we could all become relative experts on that Red Sea port city, which may have escaped our attention until now. It’s complicated, but the one-sentence version (with apologies to the late Evelyn Waugh, author of the epic journalistic novel “Scoop”) runs as follows: Pro-government Yemeni forces, supported by a Saudi-United Arab Emirates (UAE) coalition, are attacking Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who control Hudaydah, currently the only way that food and other humanitarian aid can get to 20 million Yemenis who live in the rebel-controlled territory, including the capital, Sana.

(The literary reference is twice justified. The setting of “Scoop” is 1930s Ethiopia, just across the Red Sea from Hudaydah, and the novel’s hero, a mis-assigned gardening correspondent, is sent to cover a confusing civil war with foreign involvement — in reality, the Italian invasion of then-Abyssinia.)

This appears in The Hill, a US based political website, and is written by Simon Henderson.

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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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