Powell and Betjeman in Oxford; Greene in September

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Anthony Powell Society has announced that it will hold a conference in late summer at Merton College in Oxford. The subject will be Anthony Powell and the Visual Arts and the dates are Friday 31 August to Sunday 2 September. Among the speakers will be Hilary Spurling whose biography of Powell was recently published. She will speak on “Powell and the London Art Scene.” Also scheduled are talks by Prof Peter David of Campion Hall on “John Aubrey’s Drawings” and Prof Nigel Wood an editor on the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project who wll speak on “Powell’s Modernism.” Complete details are available at this link.

The John Betjeman Society has also scheduled an Oxford event. This is a half-day program on “JB’s Oxford” scheduled for Tues, 12 June at 1430. Details available here.  Here’s a description:

A guided walk led by Andrew McCallum with poetry and prose along the way, starting outside The Dragon School where JB’s association with Oxford began when he arrived as an 11 year old in 1917 and ending at The Painted Room, Cornmarket, where JB worked for The Oxford Preservation Trust in the late 1940s. There, a member of the Trust’s staff will join us to talk briefly about the work of the Trust and the Painted Rooms with its Shakespearean associations. Walk duration: about 1 hour 45 minutes, distance covered: about 2 miles.

The Graham Greene Birthplace Trust has also announced some advance details for their annual International Festival to be held this September in Berkhamstead. The final program will be announced in May. Here’s a description from their website:

We have a singer/songwriter who has produced some brilliant, thoughtful tracks on Greene – and whose name I shall release in  […] May! We also have two amazing films, May We Borrow Your Husband? (1986), starring Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Attenborough, and Under the Garden (1976) [….] The programme is nearly full, but I do not wish to give too much away too soon, therefore I shall tantalise your taste-buds with the names of two speakers: Professor Mark Bosco S.J. of Georgetown University will deliver a talk, as will festival favourite, Emeritus Professor François Gallix of Paris IV-Sorbonne; the subjects that they shall address shall also follow in May […], when I shall include the line-up for the festival in full.

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Conferences, Evelyn Waugh, Events, Oxford | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Powell and Betjeman in Oxford; Greene in September

Evelyn Waugh on BBC’s “Evil Genius” Podcast

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC has posted the episode of comedian Russell Kane’s “Evil Genius” podcast series that features a consideration of Evelyn Waugh. The idea is to have a panel decide whether each episode’s subject was more evil or more genius. Previous episodes considered John Lennon and Marie Stopes. The Waugh episode panel consisted of scriptwriter Jolyon Rubinstein and two actresses: Sadie Harrison and Ellie White. The first 5-6 minutes is taken up with determining that none of the panelists had any knowledge or preconceived notion of Waugh, the person or the writer, beyond some familiarity with Brideshead Revisited. Kane never established, however, any discipline over the panel who consistently spoke over each other, making the podcast difficult to follow.

Kane tried to begin what never comes close to resembling a discussion by reading an example of what he considers Waugh’s flawless prose. The sample he selects comes from near the end of Brideshead Revisited (1960 C&H ed., p. 333):

…perhaps all our loves are hints and symbols; vagabond-language inscribed on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

Having established Waugh’s writing genius, Kane tries to give a very brief summary of his life and works. Then he launches into the “evil” side of the balance, and the panel become fully engaged: he was snobbish, cruel, a bully, racist and antisemitic, misanthropic–pleasant to read but unpleasant in person. Kane confesses his own snobbishness when, growing up on a council estate, he always wished to belong to the middle class, whereas the middle class Waugh always wished to be part of the upper class. Then, as an example of Waugh’s cruelty, Kane describes his treatment of his son Auberon after he was wounded in the Army. Evelyn not only refused to visit Auberon (although it is not mentioned that he was hospitalized in Cyprus) but, after receiving a letter from Auberon in which he expresses gratitude to his father in contemplation of what was then thought to be his imminent death, Evelyn cut off Auberon’s allowance. Kane never got the panel away from obsessing over this particular bit of seemingly gratuitous child neglect. One of them thought even naming his son “Auberon” was an example of cruelty.

SPOILER ALERT: Those who want to listen to the 27-minute podcast should stop here. When Kane took a poll of the panel, they voted unanimously that Evelyn Waugh was more evil than genius. My own guess is that Kane himself would have voted the other way but was too effective at being devil’s (or evil’s) advocate.

Share
Posted in Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Discussions, Evelyn Waugh, Radio Programs | Tagged , | Comments Off on Evelyn Waugh on BBC’s “Evil Genius” Podcast

Julia’s Meltdown and Church Unity

Posted on March 20, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest issue of the Roman Catholic journal Commonweal, there is a review of a book called To Change the Church by Ross Douthat, the conservative commentator on the New York Times. The review is entitled “A Precarious Unity?” and is written by Paul Baumann, Commonweal’s editor. It opens with an extended discussion of the scene in Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited where Bridey announces that he won’t bring his new wife Beryl to visit Brideshead Castle while Julia and Charles (both divorced and planning to marry) are living there:

Julia rushes out of the house, engulfed in a grief she fights against and only barely understands. “Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, showing it around, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it’s fretful,” she sobs hysterically. The soliloquy goes on for some time, and Waugh later regretted the melodramatic nature of the scene. The novel ends, of course, with Julia giving up her “adulterous” marriage to Charles and returning to the church, and with Charles’s seemingly miraculous conversion to a Catholicism he had long disdained. God’s mysterious grace triumphs over wayward human desire. If the novel’s sexual renunciations were incomprehensible to many, the heroic romanticism of the abnegations resonated powerfully with Catholics, who had long been firmly schooled in the indissolubility of marriage and the impossibility of divorce and remarriage. For my parents’ generation, the rejection of divorce was a profound marker of Catholic identity in a less demanding—or more forgiving—Protestant environment. A host of sins could be forgiven as long as the marriage remained, at least publicly, intact. Whatever one’s private failings, the public permanence of marriage upheld the church’s authority and reputation. Brideshead celebrated this heroic constancy, and, thanks to sales in America, it became Waugh’s bestselling book.

Waugh and Brideshead have remained especially popular with so-called orthodox Catholics. This was no doubt abetted by the excellent 1981 BBC adaptation of the novel, which was introduced, with patrician conviction, on American television by William F. Buckley Jr. [… ] Ross Douthat, a protĂ©gĂ© of Buckley’s, shares the high romantic vision of Catholicism that suffuses Waugh’s novel. In [his book], Douthat makes a fervent case against the pope’s efforts to find some sort of pastoral solution that would allow Catholics who have divorced and remarried without an annulment to receive Communion. He argues, in thoughtful but nevertheless melodramatic terms, that the church’s “vision of marriage’s indissolubility, its one-flesh metaphysical reality, was crucial to Christianity’s development and spread. It was sociologically important, because it made such a stark contrast with the sexual landscape of ancient Rome.” He does not note that it took many centuries for this teaching to take its final form, and even then observance was often the exception rather than the rule. Child bearing, for example, often came before marriage vows (as it still does).

The reviewer proceeds, without resort to melodrama, to offer a refutation of the case for the status quo on this matter as presented in Douthat’s book and to support the actions of the current Pope. The article concludes:

The triumphalist Catholicism of Brideshead is that of a church proudly at war with a post-Christian world. Whatever its real virtues and achievements, that “fortress” is not a place Catholicism can revisit—not unless it is willing to repudiate Vatican II. Francis, whatever his shortcomings, knows that in a way his predecessors, for understandable reasons, could not.

Commonweal has provided a forum in which those who wish to comment on the article may do so. The 1981 TV Brideshead adaptation was made by Granada TV for ITV, not the BBC. It was broadcast on PBS in the USA in Channel 13’s Great Performances series.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Television | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Julia’s Meltdown and Church Unity

Waughs: Comedy and Fitness

Posted on March 19, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

An article has been posted entitled “Evelyn Waugh’s Comic Muse in Scoop”. This is by Dr Robert Hickson and is available on the weblog Catholicism.org. The article opens with the posting of Waugh’s introduction to the 1963 edition of Scoop followed by Dr Hickson’s own introductory paragraph to the article:

Such candid words are a worthy introduction and framing for the especially comic presentation of one extended passage from Scoop, a passage which is to be found and savored near the end of the novel. This very passage will also provide the main focus of this appreciative essay, which proposes thereby even to enhance our own warm-hearted and generous comic sensibilities.

A PDF file of the article follows just below this introduction and is seamlessly accessible in the website. It is, for the most part, extended excerpts from the last part of Waugh’s novel: “Book Three: Banquet”. These include Dr Hickson’s own highlighting of what he considers the comic parts of the text and bracketed elucidations of some of the references.

Also in the news is Evelyn Waugh’s granddaughter, novelist Daisy Waugh. She appears in a Daily Mail article about the recognition by middle-aged women of the importance of keeping fit. Daisy is one of three women who appear in photographs and explain why and how they manage to maintain their fitness. Daisy’s segment opens with this:

In my early 20s I preferred to keep as motionless as possible — except to empty an overflowing ashtray or, if drunk, to dance. I barely moved my body at all…So what happened? As I neared 40, somewhere between having three children and sitting at home in front of my computer, day after day, I got sick of the hangovers; of feeling fatter and slower than I wanted; of the disgusting taste of cigarettes in my mouth every morning. And the bad habits dropped away. A decade or so later, I may even be the fittest person I know. I still smoke, at parties, and I still drink — but not much. And because, as a novelist, I still work alone and from home, it is easy — not to say essential — to break up each silent writing day with a burst of exercise. I look forward to it.

She misses the chance to plug her latest novel but that’s not really the point of the Mail’s article. Her grandfather’s idea of keeping fit was to retire occasionally to a health spa in an effort to lose weight. One cannot imagine him (or any of his contemporaries for that matter) running through the English countryside to achieve that result.

Share
Posted in Academia, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Scoop, Waugh Family | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Waughs: Comedy and Fitness

Yes, You Have No Bananas

Posted on March 18, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Toronto Globe and Mail has an opinion article entitled: “Shakespeare’s children: Should artists have kids?” This is by writer Tom Rachman (best known for his novel The Imperfectionists) and opens with this:

After years of grey deprivation during the Second World War, the British celebrated victory in yellow: Each child was to receive a banana. Among the lucky kids were the offspring of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who first explained to his kin how to prepare this exotic delicacy: Peel it, then slice, add a drizzle of cream, a dazzle of sugar. At which point, he devoured all three bananas “before the anguished eyes of his children,” as one bitterly recalled in adulthood.

The story is part of the Wavian apocrypha and is recorded in Auberon Waugh’s autobiography Will This Do?, p, 67. The bit about his father’s explaining to the children how a banana is eaten and demonstrating how to peel and slice it is not in Auberon’s version. The article goes on to examine other examples of artistic parental misbehavior from Dickens to V S Naipaul (who had no children but in their absence behaved abominably toward his first wife) but concludes that there may be exceptions.

Share
Posted in Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Humo(u)r, Newspapers, World War II | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Yes, You Have No Bananas

Waugh Exhibit in Hampstead Museum

Posted on March 17, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Hampstead Museum at Burgh House has announced the opening of a small exhibit “on the landing” relating to Evelyn Waugh. Here’s a description from the museum’s website:

Evelyn Waugh, the distinguished twentieth century writer, grew up in North End Road, on the boundary between Golders Green and Hampstead.  With his father, the publisher Arthur Waugh, he attended the newly opened church of St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and came under the influence of its flamboyant and outspoken young vicar, Basil Bourchier. In later life, and after he had become a Roman Catholic, Waugh ridiculed Bourchier, calling him a “totally preposterous parson”.  This small exhibition curated by Reverend Alan Walker, seeks to reconsider their relationship and rediscover a local clergyman who performed on the national stage.

The exhibit is related to Rev Walker’s recent booklet entitled A Totally Preposterous Parson: Evelyn Waugh and Basil Bourchier. The museum is located on New End Square near Flask Walk, a short walk from the Hampstead Underground Station. Waugh’s family home at 145 North End Road is about a 1/2 hour walk from the museum (one may also take the train to the next tube station at Golders Green and walk 5 minutes from there). The house is marked with an English Heritage Blue Plaque.

The exhibit opened earlier this week and continues through Sunday 24 June. The museum’s opening hours are somewhat eccentric and should be consulted before planning a trip. See details here.

Share
Posted in Academia, Events, Hampstead, Waugh Family | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh Exhibit in Hampstead Museum

Brideshead: Crime Story, Aesthetes and a Scientist

Posted on March 16, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The second season of the TV series American Crime Story is nearing its end on the FX cable channel in the USA. It has just begun on BBC and has reached Episode 3 this week. It is entitled the Assassination of Gianni Versace and is based on Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History. (The first series, also successful, was devoted to the O.J.Simpson case.) News reports of Episode 8 (“Creator/Destroyer”) bring Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited into the story. The murderer was a 27-year old homosexual named Andrew Cunanan who had met Versace, a successful fashion designer who was also gay, in the early 1990s. The series, which begins with the 1997 murder of Versace by Andrew (one of several), takes both the victim and the perpetrator back through their life histories, and by Episode 8 has reached Cunanan’s Southern California teen age years in the early 1980s.

Andrew was his father’s favorite and was assigned the master bedroom in their sprawling La Jolla house. He even bought Andrew a sports car before he was old enough to drive. All of this was beyond the family’s means but that’s another strand of the plot. The reviews of Episode 8 explain how Brideshead comes into the story. As described in Entertainment Weekly:

Cunanan gets into a prestigious private school, where he’s voted “most likely to be remembered.” He happily stands out with a flamboyant flair for attention-seeking behavior. … But he wasn’t a liar yet. He wasn’t a child who skinned squirrels or bullied others. Instead, he read Brideshead Revisited (a massive poster on his bedroom makes sure the audience doesn’t miss the symbolism there) and acts like a manic charmer, seducing people around him with his refusal to fit in.

An article in the entertainment newsite and magazine VICE attributes Andrew’s interest as much to the TV series as the novel. At the time of its debut in the USA, it is suggested that:

… he was just a precocious ten- or 11-year-old… (Shout out to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a classic novel of wealth, war, and homoeroticism that Andrew started obsessing over after he caught the equally beloved 1981 PBS miniseries.)… Although he hid his sexuality from his family, at school he cultivated a gregarious, pretentious, preppy, and extremely effeminate persona inspired by the aristocratic, queer Brideshead character Sebastian Flyte. He dated older men who showered him with gifts—including one named Antoine…

Is it too much to hope that Antoine’s surname is White?

On a lighter note, the academic weblog The Conversation posts an essay about beauty in art by Robert Wellington. In a discussion of 20th century aesthetes, the essay considers the examples of Oscar Wilde and Stephan Tennant:

Stephen was immortalised as the character of Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. Waugh’s character of the frivolous Oxford Aesthete who carries around his teddy bear, Aloysius, and dotes on his Nanny, borrows these characteristics from Stephen — who kept a plush monkey as a constant companion right up until his death.

Waugh’s book is a powerful meditation on art, beauty and faith. The narrator, Charles Ryder, is thought to have been loosely based on Tennant’s close friend, the painter/illustrator Rex Whistler, the aesthete-artist who tragically died on his first day of engagement in the Second World War.

Through the character of Charles, Waugh grapples with the dilemma of beauty vs erudition. Visiting Brideshead, the magnificent country estate of Sebastian’s family, Charles is keen to learn its history and to train his eye. He asks his host, “Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later.” Sebastian replies: “Oh, Charles, don’t be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it’s pretty?” Sebastian gives the aesthete’s response, that a work of art or architecture should be judged on aesthetic merit alone.

Tennant may well have contributed to the character of Sebastian but there were other donors as well. Those frequently mentioned are Alastair Graham and Hugh Lygon, Waugh’s friends from Oxford. As to whether Rex Whistler was a model for Charles Ryder, there seems to be less of a consensus than is suggested by the article.

Finally, a North India newspaper, The Tribune, contains a memoir by a former student (Shelley Wakia) about Cambridge scientist Stephen Hawking, who died earlier this week. Among his recollections is this:

I had been working on the decline of the aristocracy, especially in the context of Evelyn Waugh, and at one of our meetings, Hawking interestingly drew my attention to Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” enmeshed in the culture and academic atmosphere of Cambridge and Oxford. In our conversation, he mentioned how Hitler had decided not to bomb these two centres of higher learning while the allies in return spared Heidelberg and Gottingen. To my amusement, he told me how Hitler had envisioned Oxford as the capital of his empire.

 

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Television, Television Programs | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Hard Cases: Drugs and Reality

Posted on March 15, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spanish magazine Historia y Vida based in Barcelona has an article this month about Brenda Dean Paul. She was a member of the bright young people, and the story by Eva MelĂșs connects her with Waugh’s novels of the period:

In theory, Dean Paul always wanted to be an actress, but this interest soon deflated. Already at twenty years old, she had succumbed to the nightlife of Berlin in Weimar Germany, where she spent a season. Back in London, she concentrated on her celebrity role and queen of the holidays. Her circle, baptized by journalists as Bright Young Things, mounted them in all colors. …The writer Evelyn Waugh, one of the Bright Young Things, portrayed Brenda Dean Paul’s parties in his novels like Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930). Meanwhile, the Englishman in the street, (el inglĂ©s de a pie) affected by the Great Depression, absorbed with a mixture of envy and disapproval the activities of that gang of idle and banal millionaires.

After explaining her addiction to morphine and later heroin and her prison sentence for drug possession and fraud, the article describes the sad ending to her story in the 1950s:

….[A]t age 45 she got her first big role in the theater: being the protagonist of La Princesa Zoubaroff. Drugs had not made a dent in her beauty, but in her ability. Her addiction prevented her on many occasions from performing her role. Her repeated relapses and scandals did not cease. ..The artist Michael Wishart claimed to have seen her clean her syringe in the water of a vase during a party. And one of her roommates informed the police that she was hiring herself out as a submissive in sadomasochistic sessions. She died at age 52, probably because of an overdose.

I don’t think any of Waugh’s characters sank quite to her level of depravity. Still, one wonders how much she may have contributed to the naming of Brenda Last in Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust? The translation is by Google with edits.

The Catholic World Report has a review of the Disney film adaptation of the novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. According to the reviewer, James Watson, the book involves characters who are forced to encounter reality at various levels. He thinks the adaptation misses the point of the book and offers examples of how other writers have dealt with it more succesfully:

This emphasis on the hardness of reality is not unique to L’Engle, of course, though it has become rare in recent decades. Dostoevsky’s priest tells the Karamazov patriarch that the most dangerous type of lie is that which one tells oneself. Charles Williams (a lesser known Inkling) has his character Lawrence Wentworth begin his descent into hell by fudging small historical details in his books, then allowing himself to indulge in an increasingly unrealistic fantasy about an unrequited love, and finally by isolating himself in pure solipsistic delusion as he lowers himself step by step into damnation. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisitied, Julia finally comes up against the immovable object of her indissoluble marriage, and leaves Charles Ryder permanently. Her absolutely steely decision has nothing to do with her feelings on the matter.

This probably makes more sense if you have read the book.

 

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Hard Cases: Drugs and Reality

A Diary, a Legacy, and a First Edition

Posted on March 13, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The long-running “Londoner’s Diary” column of the Evening Standard has been relaunched as “The Londoner” and has a new author, Charlotte Edwardes, who writes her introductory article with a nod to Evelyn Waugh and several of his friends:

On my first day on one of the broadsheet diaries back in the late Nineties, I found a reporter balled up in the stationery cupboard reeking of what they called “a light breakfast wine”. […]

As I return to the new Londoner, launched yesterday, I’m reminded how important these mischievous, dirty, scandalous corners are to the trade. They have bags of history — not least in Evelyn Waugh’s satire Vile Bodies, where a diarist is the tragic hero. Anyone snobby towards diarists should remember the alumni: John Betjeman, Randoph Churchill, Harold Nicholson and Michael Foot, all worked on The Londoner. The diary,  said Bill Deedes, should have one fact, one generalisation and a slight inaccuracy.

Rules today seem as they always were: the least relevant are the most haughty, while the most glittering are the most helpful.

Waugh’s career as a gossip columnist was on the Daily Express which used none of his copy written during his brief tenure. He became a subject of a gossip column in the “Londoner’s Diary” in 1948 when he was waylaid by a reporter on his arrival from the USA. This was after an unpublicized tour to gather research for a Life magazine article. Having avoided negative publicity on this tour, he was somewhat abashed by the story that appeared in the Standard’s “Londoner’s Diary” for 30 December 1948: “The Americans–by Waugh” (reprinted in CWEW, v. 19: A Little Learning, p, 505). In this, he complained that the Americans overheated their rooms, nailed down their windows, played their radios endlessly, talked too much and chewed bubble gum. After the story spread through the US press on the wire services, Waugh felt obliged to submit a rejoinder, professing his admiration for Americans. This was intended to unruffle feathers in advance of his public lecture tour of the USA in early 1949. The article eventually appeared, entitled “Kicking Against the Goad”, in Commonweal, a Roman Catholic journal (EAR, p.371).

Naim Attallah has republished on his website another of his detailed literary interviews. The subject was Sybille Bedford, novelist and biographer of Aldous Huxley as well as his friend. The interview was conducted in 1996, 10 years before Bedford’s death in 2006. Her first novel was A Legacy, published in 1956. Attallah asks her about it:

Q. A Legacy was reviewed favourably by Evelyn Waugh in The Spectator. He said: ‘We know nothing of the author’s age, nationality or religion, but we gratefully salute a new artist.’ I imagine these words gave you a tremendous thrill


A. Still do
still do. It’s the one thing I hang on to sometimes when I start to wonder what I have done with my life. It’s much the best thing that ever happened to me.

Waugh’s review (entitled “A Remarkable Historical Novel”) appeared in The Spectator’s 13 April 1956 edition and is reprinted in EAR, p. 510.

Finally, an inscribed first edition of Waugh in Abysinnia is offered for sale by a dealer in Hull:

A very good book that has been warmly inscribed by the author to his father, to the ffep. The Inscription reads BEST LOVE FROM / EVELYN. The book has the family bookplate of Arthur Waugh to the front pastedown, opposite the authors inscription.

The book is listed on ABE for about $15,000. The listing includes photos of the inscription and bookplate.

UPDATE (15 March 2018): Modified to reflect comment of David Platzer printed below. Thanks, David.

Share
Posted in Complete Works, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Evelyn Waugh, First Editions, Interviews, Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Waugh Criminal

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A new book about criminality in WWII (Merlin at War) has been written by Mark Ellis and is discussed on Historyextra.com  (official website of the BBC History Magazine). The article opens with this:

The Second World War was a golden period for British crime. Between 1939 and 1945, reported crimes in England and Wales rose from 303,711 to 478,394, an increase of 57 per cent. What was behind this huge jump? The blackout and the bombs were the most obvious factors, and murder, rape, robbery, burglary and theft all flourished in the dark and the chaos. But there were other reasons. The war brought with it a vast raft of new restrictions and regulations which many people chose to break or circumvent. Rationing of various staples of life offered huge opportunities to fraudsters, forgers and thieves and created a vibrant black market…

After considering many of the examples cited in the opening paragraph, the book comes to one with a Waugh connection:

Other government initiatives, such as evacuation, were open to fraudulent manipulation. Some country families were happy to have children billeted with them, but others weren’t – and some resorted to bribery to evade the responsibility. Basil Seal, one of Evelyn Waugh’s protagonists in his wartime novel Put Out The Flags, takes advantage of his sister’s position as a billeting officer and makes a nice sum from this type of corrupt activity, illustrative of activity at the time.

Other examples of wartime criminality in Waugh’s books would include Dr Akonanga, the abortionist/witch doctor in Unconditional Surrender, not to mention Ludovic in Officers and Gentlemen (although killing an officer came under military, not civilian jurisdiction).

Racing Post has a story about a 109-year old resident of Gloucester, Ralph Hoare, who remembers delivering baked goods to Evelyn Waugh in his youth:

Prior to serving in the RAF, Ralph worked as a bank clerk, where he met TE Lawrence, otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia. “I met Evelyn Waugh before the war as well,” he says. “He was a grumpy old thing. He was very fond of cake as well. My landlady in Somerset made very good cakes. He would come to pick one up, but if it wasn’t ready I had to take it to his house. I thought he was quite surly.”

Since Waugh was living in Gloucestershire just before and after the war (in Stinchcombe near Dursley) Mr Hoare may have gotten his landlady’s locations mixed up. Waugh didn’t move to Somerset until the 1950s.

The Independent newspaper has posted its list of the best 10 alternative titles for books. Waugh’s “alternative title” for Brideshead Revisited is one of those selected: “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder: … Peter Warner, who had the idea for this list, suggested this one.”  That’s more of a subtitle. I don’t think Waugh ever gave any thought to using it as an alternative. Others on the list include: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: J M Barrie, Peter Pan; and The Modern Prometheus: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Again, those sound more like subtitles.

Finally, the Richmond Times-Dispatch quotes a speech of a Member of the Virginia House of Delegates (Lee Ware) to a gathering of distinguished local news correspondents about the importance of their work:

…as we gather here I am reminded of the exchange that indicates a rising tension between would-be husband and wife in the novel “Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh. After listening — again — to her consort complain about people believing in the “hocus pocus” of a particular religion (which happens to be mine, by the way) the woman bellows, “Why don’t you write a letter to The Times?!” The man does not do so, not because he lacks the conviction — though it is a conviction he holds only half-heartedly. He does not do so because he recognizes in his lover’s cry of the heart that writing a letter would not only change no one’s mind but bring him no peace.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Put Out More Flags, World War II | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Waugh Criminal