Duncan McLaren in Grahamland

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has added a new essay to his website. This is entitled “Evelyn Concluded or Ask Alastair” and is devoted exclusively to Alastair Graham and his on and off relationship with Evelyn Waugh in the 1920s and a bit of the 1930s. He uses effectively what little archival information is available about the elusive Alastair, relying heavily on Duncan Fallowell’s book How to Disappear and adding information and photos from a book by David N Thomas about Dylan Thomas’s life in New Quay.

As usual, McLaren adds comments from his previous writings and observations from his on-the-ground research in the locations he describes. In this case, he makes an extended visit to New Quay (where Graham lived out his final years in seclusion) and describes the setting as it exists today, illustrated with helpful and detailed photographs. He also offers discussions about Graham’s sister Jane, who may have contributed to the character of Cordelia in Brideshead, as well as his relations with poet Ewan Morgan (later Viscount Tredegar).

This is probably as close as we will ever get to a biography of Alastair Graham. It makes interesting and enjoyable reading for Waugh fans and may well encourage those newly introduced to McLaren’s work to spend a wet weekend going back over the other essays he has posted, as well as his book Evelyn!

While McLaren suggests this essay is “rounding out” his work, at least for the moment, one hopes that it will soon resume. It seems unlikely that he will be able to avoid having his curiosity pricked by some bit of Waviana others have overlooked or underestimated and take the time and effort to set matters straight. We look forward to the next installment.

UPDATE (17 June 2018): Duncan McLaren advises that the repair work on his website has been completed. The link to the site is now available at: http://evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-68/index.html.

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Waugh and Fake News

Posted on May 13, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Mexican newspaper Milenio, which is published in several editions in all the major Mexican cities, has printed a feature length article on Evelyn Waugh. This is by Danubio Torres Fierro and is entitled “Las fake news segĂșn Evelyn Waugh” (“Fake News According to Evelyn Waugh”). It appears in the newspaper’s weekly magazine, Laberinto (Labyrinth).

The article opens with a reference to Waugh’s 1939 essay “Well-Informed Circles–and How to Move in Them.” In this, according to Torres Fierro, Waugh spelled out the motivations and mechanics for the production of what is effectively fake news by journalists and others. After quoting several passages from Waugh’s essay, Torres Fierro

…comes to what matters in this article. It is not at all surprising that Waugh attacked with viciousness (and sarcasm) what he understood to be an unedefying and harmful act; often he himself put it to practice as a journalist, but above all always raised to the rank of a true writer, Waugh was mandated by supreme shelter in irony, and with it and from it to dedicate himself to not leave a puppet with a head [titere con cabeza] and liquidate the commonplace hypocrites.

Waugh’s article first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar (London) in January 1939 and later that year in Vogue (New York). It is collected in Essays, Articles, and Reviews (p. 241). Torres Fierro gives the original publication date as 1956.

The second half of the article is devoted to what is effectively a review of Philip Eade’s recent biography of Waugh. This is not a Spanish translation but the US edition of the book. What Torres Fierro seems to find most fascinating is Waugh’s correspondence, as quoted in the biography. He cites several letters to other writers such as Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene. He describes Eade’s book as revealing

a real life…as it unfolds and grows, incorporates, registers and distorts the characters that were part of the environment of the creator and inhabited the landscape that framed it.

The review seems to be a favorable one (although not entirely accurate since he sees in it “three marriages and a long progeny”). It closes with some thoughts on what George Orwell might have written in his projected essay on Waugh and the impact of Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism on his political beliefs. Although full of opinionated enthusiasm for Waugh’s life and work, it is somewhat disappointing that Torres Fierro did not apply some of that to a brief consideration of Waugh’s book on Mexico, Robbery Under Law, which was written at about the same time as the essay “Well-Informed Circles” with which the article opens. This may be down to the fact that Eade’s biography spends only about 2 pages on that book.

The paper also prints Spanish translations of two letters of Waugh,  separately and without apparent comment, although this must be connected to the main article. One is an October 1961 latter to the editor of The Times about the issue of indexes in novels, and the other is a July 1947 letter to the editor of an Irish religious journal defending his Catholicism. Both are included in the collected Letters (1980).

The translation is by Google and is not, in this case, as good as it should be. But this may be due to some extent to the difficulty of conveying the vigorous and idiosyncratic style of the original Spanish into English.

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Patrick Leigh Fermor Enters the Canon

Posted on May 12, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Dominic Green, writing in the Weekly Standard, discusses the career of Patrick Leigh Fermor. The article prominently features serveral points of contact with Evelyn Waugh, not least their service in WWII Crete (Waugh’s in retreat, Leigh Fermor’s in heroism) and their sharing of friendship and correspondence with Diana Cooper and Ann Fleming (and, he might have mentioned, Nancy Mitford). Green also subtly raises Leigh Fermor into the literary canon of 20c English literature by comparing his career with those of Waugh and Wodehouse:

How many English literary writers from the early 20th century remain genuinely popular? Wodehouse and Waugh, certainly. Maugham, though, is almost forgotten, and Conrad is more respected than read. Leigh Fermor produced six full-length books in his 96 years. … Though relatively small, this output suffices to confirm Leigh Fermor as the 20th century’s finest exponent of a genre that the English invented: travel writing. … When Wodehouse (born 1881) was confronted with the enormities of World War II, he persisted with his Edwardian fantasies and got himself into trouble accordingly. To Waugh (born 1903), the Nazi-Soviet Pact revealed the enemy “plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off . . . the Modern Age in arms.” When the Soviet Union changed from enemy to ally, Waugh knew that, one way or another, the Modern Age would win. Leigh Fermor was born in 1915. The precocious literary pedestrian was formed by a war that he did not expect to survive.

When Wodehouse was 23 years old, he wrote The Gold Bat (1904), a novel of boarding school pranks involving a miniature cricket bat. When Waugh was 23, he wrote “The Balance” (1926), an experimental story written as a film scenario. When Leigh Fermor was 25, in 1940, he trained as an Irish Guards officer, transferred to the Intelligence Corps, and sailed for Greece. “I had read somewhere that the average life of an infantry officer in the First World War was eight weeks, and I had no reason to think that the odds would be much better in the Second. So I thought I might as well die in a nice uniform.” By the time he was able to get out alive from the war, get out of uniform, and, his derring done, set out again from Britain and return to Greece, he was 31 years old.

Other points of contact between Waugh and Leigh Fermor include their marriages to women above their own class, their desire to be accepted by the upper classes through the exertion of their charm, and their choice of a writing venue in a small Chagford, Devon hotel. Some of these come together in this passage:

In 1944, when Leigh Fermor was in the Amari Valley, Evelyn Waugh, a veteran of the earlier Battle of Crete, retired to Chagford to write Brideshead Revisited. “I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm,” Waugh’s aesthete Anthony Blanche tells his social-climbing protagonist, Charles Ryder. “I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside of these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

Green’s article goes on to explain that Leigh Fermor’s life and works have inspired the formation of the Patrick Leigh Fermor Society, and he files his report from their recent visit to Crete where they explored several sites of their namesake’s exploits during the war. He also discusses the publication of several posthumous works of Leigh Fermor including collected letters, memoirs and, not least, the final volume of the travel trilogy as well as a current exhibition at the British Museum featuring Leigh Fermor’s life in Greece and interaction there with two painters. The article concludes with this:

The further World War II recedes in time, the sharper the edges of its essential contours become. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books and letters are strung across time’s abyss, skeins that still connect the English to themselves even as the rope runs out. He was one of the last Englishmen. This, and not his esoteric reworking of Greek Modernism, is what explains Leigh Fermor’s posthumous growth from popularity to eminence, from heroism to myth. …

Another unrelated report in the Powells Books weblog contains an interview of Christopher Buckley, novelist, essayist and son of William F Buckley. One of the questions evokes a passage just quoted by Green:

Offer a favorite sentence from another writer.
From memory, therefore perhaps not 100% accurate:

“I tried to warn you about English charm that night at Thame. It destroys everything. It destroys art. It destroys love. And now, my dear Charles, I g-greatly f-fear that it has destroyed you.” — Anthony Blanche to Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited

And this was followed by another:

My Top Five Books
Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I reread it at least once a year. Waugh himself said later in life that he thought it flawed (over-rich, over-ripe), but it never fails to pull me into its spell of golden, doomed youth. And the language is just caviar.

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Roundup: Eating with Waugh

Posted on May 11, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph has a profile of the London fish restaurant Wilton’s on Jermyn Street in St James’s. It is to fish what Rules is to meat, and Waugh is associated with both of them. According to the Telegraph:

The St James’s restaurant, one of the oldest in London, will mark recently turning 275 with a commemorative plaque unveiled by Sir Nicholas Soames on May 10. Like many politicians, Sir Nicholas has been coming to Wiltons for years – “it must be 50 now,” he says – and like many regulars, including the royal ones, it was a taste he inherited. It was a “natural home from home” for his grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill, “an oyster specialist and a huge fan of champagne.”… The private club feel was certainly appreciated by Princess Diana, who often lunched there, as did Lord Carrington, Henry Kissinger and Evelyn Waugh. … There’s nowhere else like it, says Sir Nicholas. “Claridges and the Connaught both got rid of wonderful restaurants over the years but Wiltons has resisted every idiot whim to change or allow the quality to slip, which is very reassuring for people like me who have been coming for years.”

Another London restaurant with a Waugh association is Bellamy’s in Mayfair. According to Architectural Digest this Mayfair restautant is one of 6 chosen by the Queen when she eats out:

In 2004, three Annabel’s alumni established this French brasserie (which was named for the club in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour books). The Queen discovered Bellamy’s in 2006—and she has, since, returned for the caviar and the smoked-eel mousse.

The Independent has an article about the Open Syllabus Project that accumulates data on assigned texts from college syllabuses throughout the English-speaking world. It was this data base which produced the recent gaffe in a Time magazine article misidentifying Evelyn Waugh as a female novelist. According to the Independent:

The Open Syllabus team point to Time magazine’s mistake in adding Evelyn Waugh to its list of the “100 Most-Read Female Writers in College Classes” as perhaps the result of the author of Decline and Fall being “one of the losers in literature canon change, and that as a result very few people under 40 have read him or, accordingly, been corrected on his gender during college”.

Finally, a reference to Waugh opens an article by John Broening in the New English Review about John Jeremiah Sullivan, described as a “gifted disciple” of novelist David Foster Wallace:

Can you create a work of art with little or no empathy? That’s easy. The answer is yes. The novels of Evelyn Waugh come to mind, in which there are few likeable or even vaguely sympathetic characters, in which death is a farce, filial love is an illusion, and romances are transactional unions between two dim, inattentive, and narcissistic people…To turn the question around, is there such a thing as an excess of empathy, and can it be a hindrance to the creation of a work of art? The writings of the journalist and essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan beg the question.

Most of the essay (entitled “The Empathist”) is devoted to Sullivan’s writings about Wallace as well as musicians Axl Rose and Michael Jackson.  
 
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Brideshead Published in Croatian

Posted on May 10, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Brideshead Revisited has been published in a Croatian translation. This is entitled Povratak u Brideshead and is issued by Mozaik Books. The book is translated by Petra MrduljaĆĄ, and the editor is Zoran Maljković. According to the publisher, this is the fifth of Waugh’s books to be published in Croatian, following each volume of the Sword of Honour trilogy and The Loved One. The book is reviewed in the Zagreb newspaper Večernji List (5 May 2018) as reposted on PressReader.com. The review is entitled: “Roman o bolnim socijalnim razlikama, nepravdi, ali i neispunjenim ljubavnim čeĆŸnjama” [A novel about painful social differences, injustices, but also unfulfilled love affairs].

The reposted review (which is unsigned and confusingly combined with an interview relating to the training of opera singers) mentions that Waugh is of more than average interest to Croatian readers because of his WWII experience in Yugoslavia. It also mentions in particular “Waugh’s visit to Tito’s staff with Randolph Churchill at the end of the Second World War, leaving behind interesting testimonials …” They might also have mentioned that Waugh made substantial changes to the text of Brideshead while stationed in Yugoslavia. Indeed, Winston Churchill intervened to facilitate the transport of the galley proofs to Waugh at his remote outpost in Topusko in late 1944.

The Google translation of the article is in this instance of low quality but provides what appears to be an accurate summary of the plot and description of the characters. Here’s the somewhat ambitious explanation of what the book is about:

What does Waugh actually write about in “Return to Brideshead”? Well, about a British society that has seen numerous … changes between the First and Second World War. About the cracks that appear in imperial puritanism [sic]. About the position of the Catholic minority in Protestant England. Of course, the position of other minorities, including those of sexuality. About the final collapse of a semi-feudal social order before the onslaught of liberal capitalism. About democratization of art and aesthetics. About people who can not escape their own accident [“vlastite nesreće”], and then from their own identity. About the position of women in a society that at least at first glance is very patriarchal, but that patriarchality is … on fragile feet. About alcoholism and dizziness. About human fidelity and the beauty of friendship.

The translation of this passage by Google has been slightly edited.

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Piers Court for Sale

Posted on May 9, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s country house in Gloucestershire has been listed for sale according to Country Life magazine. The listing agent is Knight, Frank and the asking price is £3 million. The article by Penny Churchill explains that the current owners, who have lived there since 2010, have substantially made over the house’s interior. Several detailed photos illustrate the results of these efforts. The one of a large bathroom is particularly over the top:

Certainly its present owners – who bought Piers Court in 2010 – have done much to enhance a house described by Pevsner as ‘dignified and elegant’, which, behind its classical 18th-century façade, caters for both formal entertaining and informal family living. The standard of fixtures and fittings is really something – as a picture of one of the bathrooms demonstrates. The genial, pleasantly rambling family house has some 8,400sq ft of accommodation, including five reception rooms. There is also a kitchen/breakfast room with a beautiful beamed ceiling, tiled floor and lovely rustic feel. Upstairs there are eight bedrooms and six bathrooms … plus extensive attics and a one-bedroom staff wing. Approached down a long drive lined with high beech hedges, Piers Court nestles in some 23 acres of gardens, parkland and pasture, with distant views over its land to the Welsh Hills and the Forest of Dean. Within the grounds are several outbuildings, including a mews and a Queen Anne coach house.

There are also several other photos accompanying the article including one of the library, hardly recognizable as such in its current incarnation. The article goes on to explain that Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited as well as Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen while living in the house. It is not clear whether this information comes from the estate agents or the magazine, but it is incorrect as to Brideshead. The Waughs let the house to a convent school in October 1939 and returned only in September 1945. Brideshead was written in 1944 and published in May 1945. The books written while in residence at Piers Court would include Robbery Under Law, The Loved One, Helena, and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold as well as the other two mentioned in the article. The book most closely associated with the house would be Pinfold since it describes a narrator who lived in such a house as well as hallucinations which took place there and involved some of the neighbors.

Another house associated with Evelyn Waugh is Plas Dulas in North Wales. This is located in Llanddulas where Waugh taught at the Arnold House school immortalized in Decline and Fall as Llanabba Castle. This is one of several historic buildings in North Wales described in the Daily Post  (Wales) that are threatened with destruction and for which restoration funds are being sought. This was the country home of Prof. R M Dawkins of Oxford, known to Waugh through the Hypocrites Club. In the unfinished second volume of his autobiography, A Little Hope, Waugh wrote:

…He had for a time provided an aegis for the Hypocrites Club. I had not known him well. Now, when he came home for the long vacation, he appeared as a rescuer sent to me in the desert from that green country. Professor Dawkins was a man of almost boundless tolerance but he did not take to Captain Grimes. To me and another young master he offered open-handed tolerance & companionship (CWEW, vol. 19, p. 487; see also Diaries, p. 213).

UPDATE (11 May 2018): The Times has a story about the sale of Piers Court in today’s edition. This in the “House of the Week” column by Anna Temkin. It adds some interesting details but also gets it wrong about the venue for composition of Brideshead:

Some of Evelyn Waugh’s most famous works, including Brideshead Revisited, were written in Piers Court. The Georgian mansion near Stinchcombe, Gloucestershire, was given to Waugh in 1937 by the family of his second wife, Laura, and the couple lived there until 1956. Their son, Auberon, later recalled in his book, Will This Do?, how he and his siblings knew “the front of the house belonged strictly to my father . . . one detected his presence as soon as we walked into the pretty hall, with its white and black stone floor and glass chandelier”.      [… ] Nikolaus Pevsner’s description of Piers Court as “a dignified and elegant house” still holds true. It has been grade II* listed since 1952. According to its Historic England citation, it dates primarily from the 18th century, but incorporates an earlier house that was on the site in the 16th century. Its present owners, who have lived there for the past ten years, have restored the 18th-century façade and updated its interiors. The grounds extend to 23 acres; the gardens, created by Waugh, feature gravelled walkways and ornamental fountains, along with a croquet lawn and tennis court.

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U and Non-U (more)

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The U and Non-U debate continues in the pages of the TLS. The latest batch of comments centers on the proper salutation before having a drink. A letter takes issue with the Non-U status imposed on “Cheers” by Nancy Mitford, which may be acceptable in U circles if pronounced “Chars.” Similarly, in the N.B. column, “Bottoms up” and “Chin-chin” may be U-ish “if accompanied by an ironic smile.” The discussion concluded (for this week at least) with this:

Martin Murphy cites Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh: “‘Here’s how,’ said Major Tickeridge, downing his pink gin…’Here’s how,’ said Mr Crouchback with complete serenity. But Guy could only manage an embarrassed grunt”.

There’s always “Here’s to you” or–again with a familiar wink–“Here’s lookin’ at you. Another reader suggests “Good health”. On which none can improve.

Thanks to Peggy Troupin for keeping us updated.

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Put Out More Flags Reconsidered

Posted on May 4, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

John Rossi, Professor of History at La Salle University cites Put Out More Flags as underrated, while nevertheless being considered by some as the best novel of WWII. This is in the latest issue of the American Conservative Magazine. Rossi describes the novel as:

 …a seminal work in the transformation of Waugh from the author of savage satires about the “Bright Young Things” of the late 1920s and early 30s like Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, and Scoop, to the more sober novelist of the postwar crisis of faith. It’s filled with the characters who once trotted mindlessly through those books, the “wealthy ill-mannered louts whose action left havoc in their wake,” men like Basil Seal, Peter Pastmaster, Alastair Digby Vane Trumpington, “Bright Young Things” all. It is also the novel that foreshadows the more serious postwar world of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited and Guy Crouchback in Sword of Honor. As such, Put OutMore Flags is worth a second look.

He goes on to discuss in greater detail the development of many of the characters from the  the early novels into more mature individuals in the early days of the war. He focuses particularly on the women in the novel;

Basil’s batty sister Barbara; his lover Angela Lyne; and Sonia Trumpington, Alaistair’s wife, all in Waugh’s phrase part of the “wreckage of the roaring twenties.” They all are sketched affectionately and with warmth; no longer the brainless females of his earlier novels, they are key figures whom Basil’s, Peter’s, and Alastair’s lives revolve around.

He also discusses the novel’s context and its publication at a crucial point of the war. There are discussions about the major characters and how they evolved from the earlier novels. And he notes Waugh’s references to other literary figures of the day in characters such as Parsnip and Pimpernell. The essay is well written and contains several original insights. It has already been cited and recommended in the Prufrock column of the Weekly Standard magazine.

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Lord Marchmain and a Secular Death

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A scene from Brideshead features prominently in a post on the Oxford University Press weblog. This is by Wayne Glausser, Professor of English at De Pauw University. He was reminded of what he calls secular death by the recent passing of Stephen Hawking:

When Stephen Hawking died recently, a report echoed around the internet that he had rejected atheism in his last hours and turned to God. The story was utterly false; Hawking experienced no such deathbed conversion. Similar spurious accounts circulated after the deaths of other notoriously secular figures, including Christopher Hitchens and, back in the day, Charles Darwin. … The topic of secular dying has been on my mind for a while now. In the middle of 2016, I learned that an incurable cancer had taken lodging inside me. … As I tried to sort things out, I thought of … scenes from the verge of secular death. One was fictional: Lord Marchmain, the bitter apostate from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, made a sign of the cross as he received last rites, shortly before he died… My challenge: find equanimity and some sense of cosmic resolution…but without Lord Marchmain’s sacramental revival of faith.

Profesor Glausser goes on to consider his options, rejecting LSD but looking for some form of more acceptable “do-it-yourself psychedelic therapy” that might be the answer. This would be combined with some work he is doing on his perception of time. He concludes: “for now, anyway, I don’t find myself … tempted to replace secular with sacramental dying.”

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A NaĂŻve Domestic Little Unicorn

Posted on May 2, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Writing in Forbes magazine, John Mariani surveys wine writing and finds that this is one area where inexperienced “experts” tend to bring too much imagination to bear on their work. He uses a scene from Brideshead Revisited to illustrate his point:

People madly in love with inanimate objects like a bottle of wine feel the need to exaggerate to make a point of their irrational obsessions. And as a wine writer who labors arduously not to repeat himself with inane adjectives in describing half a dozen of the same varietals, I feel their pain. […]  The most hilarious mockery of effusive wine talk is, of course, James Thurber’s New Yorker cartoon of a man at dinner with friends saying, “It’s a naĂŻve domestic little [sic] Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”

A more extended satire of such pseudo-poetical descriptions is in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, when his two louche heroes try to top one another in their assessment of a Chñteau Lafite-Rothschild 1895:

“…It is a little, shy wine, like a gazelle.”

“Like a leprechaun.”

“Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.”

“Like a flute by still water.”

“…And this is a wise old wine.”

“A prophet in a cave.”

“…And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.”

“Like a swan.”

“Like a [sic] unicorn.”

Mr Mariani may have brought a bit too much of his own imagination to bear in this case, as well. He claims that this discussion is about a particular bottle of a particnlar vintage. But in fact, Waugh’s description makes clear that Charles and Sebastian were drinking three types of wine and were so hammered that they were even mixing different wines in the same glass and had no idea whatever of which one they were so effusively describing. Moreover, there is no mention in this passage of ChĂąteau Lafite-Rothschild 1895. More sadly, Mr Mariani misses one of the best parts of the quote. In the concluding remark,  the wine was not compared to “a unicorn” but to “the last unicorn.” He also has a problem with his quote from James Thurber’s 1937 New Yorker cartoon. The wine there being discussed was, indeed, naĂŻve and domestic but not “little” as well.

 

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