EW News | The Evelyn Waugh Society

Homeless in Mayfair

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The religious website Aleteia reports the decision to erect a statue of a “Homeless Jesus” at a Roman Catholic church in Mayfair, London:

The sculpture titled “Homeless Jesus” can be seen in several locations around the world, but none as surprising as the Church of the Immaculate Conception, on Farm Street in Mayfair, London. … London has always had a reputation for legions of the homeless, whose unkempt and often unwashed presence encourages the authorities to move them on swiftly, especially in the City of Westminster. Not in the vicinity of Farm Street though. The Jesuit priests there intend to place the sculpture on the inside of their church. Timothy Schmalz’s life-size bronze representation of a figure huddled under a blanket on a park bench will be placed before the Shrine of Our Lady of Seven Dolors.

The article goes on to explain Evelyn Waugh’s long-time association with the church, which he usually referred to simply as “Farm Street”:

Farm Street, as it is known, was made famous through its many literary associations. This was the church that produced some of Britain’s most celebrated Catholic converts, including Graham Greene and Sir Alec Guinness. Most famous of all is Evelyn Waugh, whose definitive novel about the English class system, Brideshead Revisited, gives due prominence to Farm Street.

This church was, for example, where Rex Mottram in Waugh’s novel was sent for his religious instruction by Fr Mowbray (London, 1960, p. 214). One doubts whether that bit of religious/literary history is commemorated within its confines. Waugh’s daughter Margaret worked at Farm Street for its vicar, Fr Caraman, in the early 1960s.

Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Evelyn Waugh, London, Waugh Family | Tagged Aleteia.com, Farm Street Church, Homeless Jesus | Comments Off

Waugh Story on Sunday Times List

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

On the occasion of announcing the winner of the Sunday Times EFG short story award, the paper has issued a list of the 100 best short stories. These are selected by 9 Sunday Times “culture writers” who are named at the conclusion of the list. There is no more than one story per writer, and a Waugh story is among those selected:

Bella Fleace Gave a Party by Evelyn Waugh (1932)
An elderly aristocrat in an Irish country house of fading splendour decides to throw a grand society ball: Waugh’s skewering at its sharpest.

Waugh’s story first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar (both London and New York editions) and was first collected with other Waugh stories in Work Suspended and Other Stories (1948). It is currently available in The Complete Stories. Others selected from the same period include “Landlord of the Chrystal Fountain” by Malachi Whitaker (1934), “Green Tunnels” by Aldous Huxley (1928), “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton (1934), “A Clean, Well-Lighted Room” by Ernest Hemingway (1933), “The Crime Wave at Blandings” by P G Wodehouse (1936) and “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” by F Scott Fitzgerald (1922).

The Daily Telegraph last week selected the 60 best British TV shows of all time. The selection was made by five journalists named at the beginning of a slide show presentation and is described as “highly subjective.” The 1981 Granada TV production of Brideshead Revisited is #32 (although whether that is a ranking or merely a random number isn’t clear). The production is described as “sumptuous… and excessively faithful to its source material,” as well as “leisurely and literary.” It has also become “the benchmark for TV costume drama.”

Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Short Stories, Television | Tagged British TV shows, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times | Comments Off

Boa Vista in the News

Posted on April 29, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Boa Vista, a remote city in northern Brazil, received considerable attention in Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 travel book Ninety-Two Days, as it was the furthest point reached on his trip from neighboring British Guiana. The city is again receiving attention as a mecca for refugees from the chaos of nearby Venezuela. According to a story in the New York Times:

The population of Boa Vista…ballooned over the past few years as some 50,000 Venezuelans resettled here. They now make up roughly 10 percent of the population. At first, residents responded with generosity, establishing soup kitchens and organizing clothes drives. By last year however, local residents in Pacaraima, the border town, and Boa Vista, the state capital, which is 130 miles from the border, felt overwhelmed. “Boa Vista was transformed,” said Mayor Teresa Surita. “This has started generating tremendous instability.”

On a recent morning, squatters who took over the Simón Bolivar plaza, one of the city’s largest, were preparing meals on small wood burning stoves. Some napped in hammocks while others stared blankly, having nowhere to go and nothing to do. The mood was grim. A stomach bug had spread through the camp, leading to bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. Adding to their discomfort, neighboring residents, in an act of defiance, had burned a row of bushes near the plaza that the Venezuelans had been using to defecate.

As she watched smoke billowing across the campsite, Ana García, 56, said she could scarcely believe her new reality in Brazil. She was a homeowner who ate well and lived comfortably on a social worker’s salary in the Venezuelan city of Maturín. But as her paycheck became worthless last year because of soaring inflation, she quit her job of more than a decade, hoping to get a payout large enough to go abroad. Instead, she walked away with an amount that was so little it only enabled her to buy a small bag of rice, half a chicken and a banana. As food became increasingly scarce, Ms. García set out on a nearly 600-mile journey with her 18-year-old daughter, hitchhiking most of the way. The first night she slept in the plaza, Ms. García said, she broke down in tears before crawling under a black tarp she now shares with her daughter.

Waugh also found himself to be a refugee in Boa Vista. He arrived from the wilds of British Guiana in the hope of finding the bright lights of a big city in Boa Vista, as well as access on a river boat to the even more civilized city of Manaos further to the south. Instead he found no available boat passage and a ramshackle city lacking any vestige of charm. He describes Boa Vista in in Chapter 5 of the book, which contains some of its funniest passages. In this quoted text he recounts Boa Vista’s history:

…It was a melancholy record. The most patriotic of Brazilians can find little to say in favour of the inhabitants of Amazonas; they are mostly descended from convicts, loosed there after their term of imprisonment…They are naturally homicidal by inclination, and every man, however poor, carries arms; only the universal apathy keeps them from frequent bloodshed. There were no shootings while I was there; in fact there had not been one for several months, but I lived all the time in an atmosphere that was novel to me, where murder was always in the air…There was rarely a conviction for murder. The two most sensational trials of late both resulted in acquittals…The [second] case was the more remarkable. Two respected citizens, a Dr Zany and a Mr Homero Cruz, were sitting on a verahdah talking, when a political opponent rode up and shot Dr Zany. His plea of innocence, when brought to trial, was that the whole thing had been a mistake; he had meant to kill Mr Cruz. The judges accepted the defence and brought in a verdict of death from misadventure… (Penguin, 1983, pp. 90-91).

When a long-awaited boat operated for the local Boundary Commissioner arrived, Waugh requested passage for himself back to Manaos, but the Commissioner:

flatly refused to have me in his boat. I cannot hold it against him. Everyone in the district is a potential fugitive from justice and he knew nothing of me except my dishevelled appearance and my suspicious anxiety to get away from Boa Vista. (Idem, p. 99)

Despairing of securing passage to Manaos, Waugh painstakingly put together supplies and horseback transport for a return trip via British Guiana. According to his Diaries, Waugh was in Boa Vista for a total of 14 days (4-18 February 1933), and it was while there that he conceived of the short story that bccame “The Man Who Liked Dickens” which, in turn, became the ending of A Handful of Dust. When he wrote up the trip in Ninety-Two Days, he managed to turn what was probably an extended period of tedium and anxiety into something full of humor and even a bit of satire.

Posted in Diaries, Newspapers, Ninety-Two Days | Tagged Boa Vista, Brazil, New York Times, refugees, Venezuela | Comments Off

Haphazard Dust-bins

Posted on April 28, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Spanish novelist Imma Monsó has written an article inspired by the publication in Spanish of US novelist James Salter’s The Art of Fiction. Salter’s book is based on a series of 2014 lectures he gave at the University of Virginia as their Writer in Residence. Monsó’s article focuses on Salter’s inclusion of a quote from Evelyn Waugh about the process of writing a novel. This comes from a 1930 Daily Mail article entitled “People Who Want to Sue Me.” Neither Salter nor Monsó cite the source for Waugh’s quote; Salter slightly misquotes it, and the Spanish version carries things even further. Here’s the quote from the article (reprinted in A Little Order, p. 13):

If only the amateurs would get it into their heads that novel writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people’s conversation. One has for one’s raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smouldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables.

Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them. It is not merely a matter of filling up a dust-bin haphazard and emptying it again in another place.

In CWEW, v. 26 (pp. 241-45) a note to this article explains that Waugh was concerned to avert litigation involving persons claiming they were depicted as characters in his novel Vile Bodies–in particular Rosa Lewis who saw Lottie Crump as a parody of herself.

In Monsó’s article, she updates Waugh’s analysis a bit based on her own experience of writing several novels and short story collections:

The metaphor of rubbish has enchanted me. And that’s what Waugh said a century ago! Imagine now: since virtual life has been added to real life, our mind is a dumping ground for images, phrases and encounters that do not give us time to recycle. Such is the infinity of stimuli to which we are subjected, so many perceptions that reach us in a single day, in reality and on the screen, that unprocessed waste accumulates incessantly in our heads. Also in the head of the writer, whose biggest concern is no longer the blank page: it is the blank mind that worries, that the mind goes into collapse, gripped by the creeping chaos against which it is difficult to fight.

In this way, the blank page is now almost a chimera, an object of desire, something as rare as the white blackbird or the green ray. I have not seen one for a long time, since I first published notebooks at the university. Sometimes I dream, and at the thought of dirtying it, I wake up in terror. Fear of the blank page? No man no. Our biggest concern, is currently one and only one: rubbish.

Translation is by Google; Waugh’s “rubbish” is substituted for Google’s translation of “basura” as “garbage”. The article appears in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and is entitled ¿En blanco? (“Blank Page?”)

Posted in Complete Works, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged A Little Order, Daily Mail, Imma Monso, James Salter, La Vanguardia | Comments Off

Roundup: Vile Media

Posted on April 27, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The magazine GQ India had an article about Asian-based novels satirizing Asian-based rich people. This opens with a reference to one of Waugh’s novels:

It is an unassailable truth that where there is money, a thinly veiled roman-à-clef documenting the lives of the one per cent is not far away. It has been proven time and time again in the West – from Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh in 1930, to the more recent Primates Of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin. But as Asia ascends, and its people join the ranks of the global wealthy elite, so too does a whole new literary genre: the one percenters of the East. Already, Singapore’s Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy has achieved cult-like status for its dizzying depictions of the manic spending by the super-rich of Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Most of the remainder of the article discusses Kwan’s books which were mentioned here in a previous post.

The English Department at the University of Regina in Canada is offering a course this Fall that uses the same Waugh novel for a different purpose:

ENGL 110-397 Mass Media and Misinformation WEB DELIVERED

This course will focus on literature that explores the troubled relationship between mass media and objective reality. To that end, we will study a variety of texts – including works as diverse as essays by George Orwell, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and episodes from the first season of Matthew Weiner’s long-form television series, Mad Men. Through such texts, we will approach representations of what Stephen Colbert refers to as “truthiness” in the context of totalitarianism, the gossip column, Gonzo journalism, the newsroom, and advertising.

Although not listed as the lecturer for this course, Marcel DeCoste, well known in this parish, is the head of the English Department and may well intend to contribute something.

The Guardian reviews the revived Universal Films 1932 horror classic The Old Dark House. In his review, Peter Bradshaw unearths some interesting literary connections:

Revisiting this film is a time to ponder its origins in a novel by JB Priestley (adapted by RC Sherriff and Benn Levy) and to see a literary lineage of the horror film, quite apart from Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley. You can see how the creepy brother Saul, lurking at the top of the house, is in a line that stretches from Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in the attic to Thomas Harris’s imprisoned Hannibal Lecter, cunningly persuading people to do his bidding. And there’s a touch of Evelyn Waugh’s butler Philbrick from Decline and Fall as well.

The New Statesman in a review of a collection of short stories by a Peruvian writer–Daniel Alarcón, who writes in English–notes an analogy to another Waugh novel:

Alarcón saves his most overtly surreal writing for his final story, the outstanding “The Auroras”, a novella-length piece. Herman, a lecturer, takes a sabbatical from both his university and from his wife and stepson, arriving in a port city precisely “2,700 kilometres from home”. Almost immediately he is taken in by Clarissa, a sinuous beauty he first glimpses standing “against a wall as green as the sea”, whose sailor husband is away on a long voyage. The ensuing events with Clarissa and, one by one, her friends, occur in a fug of erotic disassociation, as Herman falls truly “out of his element, as he hoped he’d be”, although his final status recalls the delirium-soaked fate of Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. It’s a magnetic piece in a collection that dazzles with allegorical power and satire.

The Catholic Herald mentions Waugh’s contribution to another sort of collection. This was the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors compiled by Sister Mary Joseph at Webster College near St Louis in the 1930s and 1940s:

By 1954, membership of the Gallery itself had climbed to 775. … The organisation was in possession of more than 60,000 pages of manuscript, 750 letters, photographs and voice recordings, and countless books, pamphlets and magazines. … Academy members included Hilaire Belloc, naturally, and Evelyn Waugh, who sent manuscript pages of Edmund Campion to form part of the Gallery’s collection of authors’ papers. … Other members included Clare Boothe Luce, … Thomas Merton, … François Mauriac, Maria von Trapp and Fulton Sheen. … Jacques Maritain seems to have been a particularly strong champion of the Gallery…

The remainder of the story is behind a paywall but other sources relate that the Gallery soon exceeded the ambitions of Sister Mary Joseph and the resources of Webster College and in 1960 was transferred to Georgetown University where it is now part of their Special Collections. Waugh’s contribution of handwritten manuscript seems to be limited two pages of his text of Edmund Campion according to Georgetown’s catalogue.

Posted in A Handful of Dust, Academia, Collections, Decline and Fall, Edmund Campion, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged Catholic Herald, Gallery of Living Catholic Authors, GQ India, Guardian, New Statesman, University of Regina | Comments Off

Latest EW Studies Features New Views of Brideshead

Posted on April 26, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the Society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies has been published (Number 48.3, Winter 2017).

The lead article, Brideshead Rearranged: Charm, Grace, and Waugh’s Building of Worlds, by Grazie Sophia Christie, is the winner of the 2017 John Howard Wilson Jr Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest administered by the Society. The contents of this issue are set out below. Selected introductory paragraphs from each article (citations and footnotes omitted) have been included. The full contents are available at this link.

ARTICLES

Brideshead Rearranged: Charm, Grace, and Waugh’s Building of Worlds by Grazie Sophia Christie

Introduction. In the process of writing on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited I began to notice affinities between the novel’s narrator, Captain Charles Ryder, and myself. Ryder is an artist: he publishes “splendid folios” of English architecture headed for “extinction,” of “gutted palaces and cloisters” in Mexico and Central America. Wading into Waugh’s starfish-and-sea-glass prose, I am similarly intent on identifying elements and processes of construction…My architectural analysis will begin with the etymological relationship between charm and grace, the foundation for Waugh’s suggestion that the two should be constructed similarly. I will then examine the charming world of the Flytes, and the pastiche that marks Waugh’s mode of fashioning it for the reader. Turning to performance and theatricality in the novel, I will analyze the figure of Anthony Blanche as a representation of grace’s capacity for this same inclusion and rearrangement. My paper will close by analyzing unhappiness in the novel as a symptom of what it means to pursue a conversion that fails at pastiche, that builds a world of faith where charm and other objects of human happiness are excluded. Waugh’s own biography and engagement with literary tradition reveals the ways that Brideshead is full of unfulfilled potentialities for happiness through refashioning that Ryder never takes. Ryder gives up human happiness for divine contentment, but this is an unnecessary sacrifice. It is a failure of design of Ryder’s own making, not a central component of Waugh’s understanding of conversion.

Waugh and the Profession by Robert Murray Davis

Introduction. My invitation to speak at this symposium said that I might discuss first, “how the academic environment has evolved” and second, “whether responses to the challenges faced by the humanities that have emerged during the course of my career have been encouraging or inadequate.” After a little reflection I realized that, like the elder Plant in Work Suspended, “I am a Dodo.” Both my research and the challenges facing the profession can be understood by comparing the demographic, political, and economic factors that influenced me with those affecting my successors.

“The highest achievement of man:” Evelyn Waugh Preaching Divine Purpose through Temporal Creations by Maria Salenius

Introduction. The purpose of this article is to explore some of the rhetorical choices made by Waugh in the text of A Handful of Dust as well as in Brideshead Revisited, with special reference to changes made between the first edition and the second of the latter, specifically from the point of view of rendering the aspect of divine guidance and conversion. Between the first and the final edition of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh made several versions and worked fervently on the language as well as the structure of the novel. In addition to purely literary aims, it seems evident that Waugh is presenting his “magnum opus” as a treatise of the Catholic faith, and the climax of the death of Lord Marchmain and the subsequent conversion of the agnostic Charles Ryder, is foregrounded with ample rhetorical device. A Handful of Dust, too, saw a number of revisions and restructurings, especially when negotiating between the serialised and the book-form publication of the novel. Looking at the final forms of both novels within the context of structural symbolism shows the use of a similar method, and alludes to a similar aim. A Handful of Dust “looks ahead to Waugh’s explorations… of the interrelated order of nature and grace”, and Waugh stated as the primary aim of Brideshead Revisited “to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world”.

REVIEWS

“Through the Glass of a Tank”– Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time, by Hilary Spurling. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

NEWS

Among the news items is the announcement of a recently published short work entitled Lost Domains & Worlds Regained: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. This is by David Fensome and is available in Kindle editions from Amazon at these links in both the USA and UK. Here’s an excerpt from the Amazon description:

The argument is straightforward: in Evelyn Waugh’s journey into isolation, Brideshead Revisited marks the spot where he cut his ties with the twentieth century: when he and his epoch began to travel in different directions. In terms of subject and theme, and matters of style the novel stands alone in his body of work; it assured his reputation as a best-selling author, while simultaneously condemning him to critical dismissal by previously admiring critics and commentators. …This book can be split into two parts. The first part, sections one to four, attempts to place the novel in its historical context and also within Waugh’s oeuvre; to offer an insight into Waugh’s life and preoccupations when he is engaged in writing the novel; and to summarise the critical response. The second part, section five presents ten approaches to the text from a variety of biographical and theoretical perspectives. These are offered as preliminary sketches of perhaps much longer pieces. They are included to suggest points of departure for approaches to Waugh, his work, and those aspects of his thinking and instincts which contributed to his art in general, and Brideshead Revisited specifically…

Posted in A Handful of Dust, Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Conferences, Evelyn Waugh Studies, Undergraduate Essay Contest, Work Suspended | Tagged Anthony Powell, David Fensome, Hilary Spurling | Comments Off

Waugh Novels in a New “Trilogy”

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In a paper posted on the website culturedvultures.com (described as “a community dedicated to helping writers of all experiences and backgrounds to have their work seen and read”), Huw Saunders proposes a new “trilogy” of books about Africa. Two of the books are Waugh’s novels Black Mischief and Scoop. The third is The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth (b. 1938–the year Scoop was published). Forsyth’s career in Africa (as described in Wikipedia) began much like Waugh’s. He was the BBC correspondent in Nigeria during the early stages of the civil war involving Biafra. When his 6-month term was up, the BBC refused to extend it because it was “no longer covering the war.” But the war continued, and Forsyth returned as a freelance, moonlighting as an MI6 agent (for which he says he received no pay). He then wrote a 1969 nonfiction book about the war (The Biafra Story) and followed with The Dogs of War (1974), his third novel, which takes place in Africa and may reflect elements of his experience.

Saunders makes a case for treating Waugh’s African novels and this one of Forsyth’s as a trilogy:

Black Mischief, Scoop, and The Dogs Of War all fit quite neatly into their respective authors’ modus operandi. Black Mischief and Scoop see posh boys ending up in tinpot African dictatorships and screwing with affairs of state almost by accident. The Dogs Of War, meanwhile, has an ultra-rich London financier discover that an African nation is harbouring an untapped mountain of platinum, and setting up a friendly coup so his firm can best take advantage of this. (This plot may sound familiar, since it inspired Mark Thatcher, son of the former British Prime Minister, to have a go at arranging a friendly coup himself.)

The common thread is probably already becoming clear – these are stories of Europeans going to Africa, and doing what Europeans tend to do to Africa (while it’s a fanciful description, it rhymes with ‘cape’). Waugh’s entries take place during the waning days of full-on colonialism, while Forsyth’s takes place after colonialism was ostensibly over, but really, little enough has changed. As such, both have moments of racism we simply can’t recreate with modern technology, and Waugh is clearly the greater offender in this category. Forsyth makes some fairly unpleasant generalisations about European and African soldiers, noting that only the Europeans tend to keep their eyes open while firing, but would never have a sympathetic character employ the phrase ‘you black booby’ – certainly not with the relish Waugh uses it. Indeed, Forsyth is the only one of the two authors to depict black people as anything other than unsympathetic, dim, or both.

The paper continues by combing through all three books, finding elements that connect them as well as distinguish them from each other. He never gets to the point of comparing Forsyth’s writing style with that of Waugh (except to comment that Waugh’s books were comedies and Forsyth’s a thriller). Rather he connects them through characters and story lines. And he shows how history and the end of empire is reflected in Forsyth’s book, illustrating both how some things have changed while others remain much the same. Saunder’s case is well presented but might be more interesting if one has already read The Dogs of War. And a comment on Waugh’s views of Africa in his postwar travel book, A Tourist in Africa (1960), might have contributed some interesting insights. The paper concludes with this (Manson and Cat are characters from Dogs):

…After years (or, in this trilogy setup, two books’ worth) of colonialism, of coups that are proxy power struggles between European interests, of the Basils and Mansons of the world wandering up and pillaging African nations, finally the world’s power-brokers are rudely reminded that the Africans are there too, that they have agency of their own, and aren’t best pleased by the rubber plantations and unequal treaties. Perhaps it’s iffy that they only become capable of it with help from Cat and crew, but it’s a marked improvement on how Waugh treated them.

Posted in A Tourist in Africa, Black Mischief, Evelyn Waugh, Scoop | Tagged Africa, Frederick Forsyth, Huw Saunders, The Dogs of War | Comments Off

TV Series Previewed: Like Trainspotting Written by Evelyn Waugh

Posted on April 24, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Sunday Times has an interview of Benedict Cumberbatch and a preview of his new Patrick Melrose TV series. Cumberbatch both produced the series and plays the leading role. The books were adapted for TV by David Nicholls who previously adapted his own novels One Day and Starter for Ten as well as the 2015 film version of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. According to Stephen Armstrong for the Times:

The Patrick Melrose series of novels — Edward St Aubyn’s epic, cuttingly witty family saga of abuse, addiction and redemption that reads like Evelyn Waugh writing Trainspotting — has been a cult favourite since the 1992 publication of Never Mind. The five volumes are thinly disguised autobiography: St Aubyn, a minor aristocrat and former junkie, was repeatedly raped by his father when he was a child. Readers are often recommended the novels, avoid them for a while, dip in and rapidly become obsessive fans. … For those unfamiliar with the novels, news that Sky had commissioned a series based on five dark books about abusive and decadent minor aristocracy might have seemed slightly surprising. Is Brideshead Revisited really improved by backstreet drug deals and savage torture? For those who know and love Melrose, however, there was a sharp dread akin to news that a relative was in mortal danger. Melrose fans are protective of Patrick. They don’t want anyone else to hurt him or do him wrong. And Cumberbatch should know — he’s as devoted as the best of them.

The series begins in the USA on the Showtime cable network (Saturday, 12 May 9pm) and in the UK on Sky Atlantic (Sunday, 13 May at 9pm) and will be available for streaming in both markets thereafter. There will be five one-hour episodes, one for each of the novels. The primary change for the adaptation will be to switch the order for books 1 (Never Mind) and 2 (Bad News) so that Patrick’s dealing with the death of his father will come before a flashback to his traumatic childhood.

Earlier TV adaptations are considered on the occasion of World Book Day (observed yesterday) by the New Zealand website stuff.co.nz. This chooses the top 5 adaptations of novels for TV. Ranked number 1 was the 1981 Granada production of Brideshead Revisited:

Along with The Jewel in the Crown and Fortunes of War, this 1981 take on Evelyn Waugh’s novel was Sunday night appointment viewing in New Zealand in the 1980s. The 11-part series turned Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews into household names and even caused public protests in this country when TVNZ decided to remove the sex scenes from one particular episode.

Others included Hannibal, the original House of Cards and the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice.

Finally, yesterday’s Cincinnati Enquirer has an op ed piece by Kenneth Craycraft on the importance of remembering the persecution in the 20th century Holocaust, citing Evelyn Waugh from Brideshead Revisited on the subject of memory:

…failing to remember events like the Holocaust is not a tragedy only because of what it might cause (or fail to prevent) in the future. Rather, a failure of memory of the Holocaust and similar events is a tragedy because of what is says about us in the present. In his great novel, Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh says through the narrator and main character, “My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me.” If it is true that we possess nothing certainly except the past (and I believe that it is), then if we do not possess that past, we possess nothing. And if we possess nothing, we stop being moral beings, capable of authentic reflection, and choice. Our inability, or refusal, to remember compromises our capacity to make moral choices. Put another way, remembering is a moral act, and memory is a moral function.

UPDATE (14 May 2018): Emily Temple, writing in the Literary Hub, offers another comparison of Waugh and St Aubyn. She thinks St Aubyn’s Melrose novels are “a deft mash-up of the English social novel and what I suppose is best described as the recovery memoir, something like Evelyn Waugh by way of William S. Burroughs, but with a rather lighter touch than either.”

Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, Interviews, Newspapers, Television | Tagged Benedict Cumberbatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Edward St. Aubyn, Emily Temple, Literary Hub, Patrick Melrose Novels, Stuff.co.nz, World Book Day | Comments Off

U and Non-U in TLS

Posted on April 23, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The U and Non-U debate about social class distinctions that raged (if that’s the correct word) in the 1950s has resurfaced in the TLS. This appears in its N.B. column that is written by J. C. (believed to be James Campbell). It began with the March 20 column (“Blue Plaque blues”) in which the columnist mentions his purchase of the 1969 book entitled What Are U ? during one of his bookish perambulations. He describes this as the “little-known follow up (‘sequel’ is hideously non-U) to Nancy Mitford’s Noblesse Oblige which contains her ‘Inquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy.'” That was published in 1955. The follow-up is edited by Professsor Alan S. C. Ross, who wrote the essay that started Mitford on her campaign. J. C. runs some of the examples from the 1969 book against today’s useage and concludes:

It requires only a short time spent with What Are U? to make every step treacherous. Do we say ‘paid’ £3 for it on our perambulation, or ‘were charged’ £3? Where would Ross stand on ‘stumped up’ ? It should be a useful–we just stopped ourselves saying U-seful: puns are non-U–investment.

Does he have any qualms, one wonders, about the useage of “perambulation”?

In last week’s TLS, J.C. writes about a copy of the original book edited by Mitford and found on a subsequent perambulation, forking over (if he’ll excuse the expression) another £3. This is described as a “survivor from the aristocracy of Penguin production, fifty years old, sturdy and companionable.” A copy of the cover with a drawing by Osbert Lancaster accompanies the article. In that regard, J.C. notes that, in this earlier iteration, Mitford has “roped in Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman, with Osbert Lancaster illustrating (the couple here are seen reading Noblesse Oblige).” See link. Waugh’s contribution is reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews.

Perhaps we can look forward to yet another column when J.C. finds a copy of the 1978 book edited by Richard Buckle, entitled U and Non-U Revisited and published by Debrett’s. This contains a symposium in which Professor Ross appears as well as articles by, inter alia, Christopher Sykes (who also wrote an essay for the 1955 original) and Diana Mitford (apparently as stand-in for her sister Nancy). Are there yet others to be found ?

These articles are not available without a subscription. The cover illustrations, however, are linked above. Thanks to reader Peggy Troupin for calling these to our attention.

Posted in Academia, Discussions, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Newspapers | Tagged James Campbell, Nancy Mitford, TLS, U and Non-U | 1 Comment

From Anatolia to Catalonia

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A Turkish website which looks like a promotional books blog (okuryazar.tv) has posted a brief introduction and excerpt from the Turkish translation of A Handful of Dust (in Turkish Bir Avuç Toz). After a plot summary, the introduction continues:

A Handful of Dust, a unique blend of tragedy, comedy and grimace, is [considered] … one of the most important novels of the century by leading critics such as Frank Kermode and Alexander Woollcott. “Evelyn Waugh examines the problems of an alienated generation, describing the veiled barbarism that comes from the unraveling of bonds that hold society and isolated individuals together.” We present Chapter 1 from A Handful of Dust.

From the other end of the Mediterreanean, a print/online Catalan language newspaper published in the Balearic Islands (arabalears.cat) has an article by Marina P. De Cabo about fictional journalists. This opens:

From the irony of the pen of Oscar Wilde, who wrote that the difference between literature and journalism is that “journalism is unreadable and literature is unread”, to the not always reliable honesty of Ryszard Kapuscinski, who described journalism as a wonderful school of life, via the point of view of the poet Roger Wolfe, who, referring to the profession, advises: “Launch the shit and wash your hands”: there are numerous authors who have pronounced on the profession, and not few fictional characters that have exercised it. Nothing is farther from the intent of this article than to establish an indefinable canon of reporters created through the written word. The intention is more toward offering a taste of imaginary journalists to outline the ways in which literature has focused on the vocation. As a true reflection of reality, there are some ethical and corrupt and vicious ones. What is offered is not exhaustive but a good representation.

After discussing such fictional journalists as Henrietta Stackpole (from Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady) and the cartoon strip characters Tintin and Lois Lane, this Waugh creation is offered:

Lord Copper. The plot of the novel “Noticia bomba!”[Scoop], one of the most celebrated works by the British writer Evelyn Waugh, deals with irony, not without criticism of the journalistic issue. The narration centers on a terrible confusion: they send the wrong person to cover the war of Ishmailia; Instead of a famous novelist, the assignment is given to a columnist specializing in nature stories. From that point on, fun is assured. The work is based on the author’s work experience, specifically on the work he did to cover the invasion of Abyssinia by Mussolini.

The list continues with several other examples, including novelist Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe and cartoon character Brenda Starr. The translations are by Google with edits.

Posted in A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Scoop | Tagged Arabalears, Marina P de Cabo, Turkish translation | Comments Off