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 Mrduljaš, 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 čežnjama” [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 Naïve 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 naïve 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 Château 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 Château 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, naïve and domestic but not “little” as well.

 

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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