Waugh and Norman Mailer: “The Naked and the Read”

Posted on March 10, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s TLS has an article (“The Naked and the Read”) about Norman Mailer’s library. This is by J Michael Lennon, Mailer’s archivist and authorized biographer. Mailer seems to have been a book accumulator rather than a book collector like Waugh. He possessed over 7,000 volumes scattered over four locations: two in Brooklyn and two in Provincetown. He spent over $1,000 a month on books but was not interested in first or rare editions, only in their contents. Indeed, according to Lennon, if there was a passage or section to which he wanted to refer at some event, he would rip out the relevant pages. This was true whether the book was a signed first edition or a mass market paperback. Sometimes he taped the pages back into the book, sometimes not.

His main interests were American and French literature (he had a working knowledge of French) but he also included British writers in his library. According to Lennon:

… his favourite authors [were] those he listed on seven published surveys. They were: Dos Passos (on all seven), Tolstoy (six), Spengler, Thomas Wolfe and Marx (five), Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Hemingway and James T. Farrell (four), as well as Malraux and Steinbeck on three occasions. Several other writers are listed twice, including Melville, Borges and E. M. Forster, the only English author.

His interest in British writers extended beyond Forster, however, as we noted in a previous post where he mentioned admiring Waugh during an interview by William F Buckley. Lennon goes on to explain the extent of Mailer’s interest in British literature:

Mailer may have been more influenced by French novelists than British ones, but he nevertheless admired the skills of the latter. During a visit to London in the autumn of 1961, he told an interviewer, “Sentence for sentence, the good British authors write better than we do. I’m thinking of people like Amis, Waugh, Graham Greene. Some are bad: I’ve never been able to read Joyce Cary”…. On the other hand, he owned most of Forster’s novels. Forster was not “one of the novelists I admire most. But I have learned a lot from him” […]

His best-loved British novelist was Graham Greene; he once said that The End of the Affair was the best anatomy of a love affair he had ever read (the fact that Greene wrote to him to say that he was “moved and excited” by the “magnificent” Advertisements for Myself did no harm to their relationship). […] Speaking on the BBC programme Omnibus in 1971, Mailer praised Nineteen Eighty-Four for its “profoundly prophetic vision of a world filled with dull, awful, profoundly picayune little wars . . . that would kill the world slowly”. Orwell admired Mailer’s work, and said in a letter in 1949 that The Naked and the Dead was “awfully good, the best war book of the last war yet”, a comment that appeared on paperback copies of the novel for decades. Some of the other British books on the shelves are The Mill on the Floss, Women in Love (discussed at length in The Prisoner of Sex, 1971), The Good Soldier and Cyril Connolly’s The Missing Diplomats, a non-fiction examination of the scandal surrounding the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, which Mailer probably consulted for Harlot’s Ghost. The earliest book by a British writer is Charlotte Brontë’s final novel, Villette (1853), a Folio Society edition which shows no dog ears. There is nothing by Austen, Dickens, Trollope, or Hardy.

Waugh and Mailer met at least once, in 1961 (probably during the visit mentioned above), at a party in Somerset given by a Mrs Kidd. Waugh told Ann Fleming in a 23 September 1961 letter that one of the horses “bit an American pornographer who tried to give it vodka.” This was Mailer, accompanied by Mrs Kidd’s daughter, Lady Jean Campbell (whom Mailer later married). Waugh’s letter continues:

I had never met Lady Jean Campbell and was fascinated. She came to us next day bringing the bitten pornographer. He might have come straight from your salon–a swarthy gangster just out of a mad house where he had been sent after an attempt to cut his wife’s throat. It is his first visit to England. His tour is Janet Kidd, Randolph, Ian Argyll. He will be able to write a revealing pornogram of English life.

Mailer responded to this description, apparently in response to a letter of enquiry from Mark Amory:

The horse did bite me on the finger but I was not feeding him vodka, just patting his nose…I did not cut my wife’s throat…Jean Campbell asked me what I thought of him [Waugh] and I said ‘Lots of fun. Much sweeter than I expected.’ Letters, 572-73.

The archives of both writers have come to rest in the same building at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

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CWEW Journalism Volume Published

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Volume 26 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh was published in the UK earlier this month and is available for sale. This is the fifth volume of the Complete Works to be published and first of four volumes in the Essays, Articles and Reviews series. It covers Waugh’s journalism for 1922-1934 and was edited and compiled by Professor Donat Gallagher who also edited earlier collections of Waugh’s journalism as well as several books and articles on his life and works.

This description of the contents appears on the OUP website and is substantially the same as that we posted previously:

This first volume of Evelyn Waugh’s Articles, Essays, and Reviews contains every traceable piece of journalism that research could uncover written by Waugh between January 1922, when he first went up to Oxford, and December 1934, when he had recently returned from British Guiana and was enjoying the runaway success of A Handful of Dust.

Long interred in fashion magazines, popular newspapers, sober journals, undergraduate reviews, and BBC archives, 110 of the 170 pieces in the volume have never before been reprinted. Several typescripts of articles and reviews are published here for the first time, as are a larger number of unsigned pieces never before identified as Waugh’s. Original texts, so easily distorted in the production process, have been established as far as possible using manuscript and other controls. The origins of the works are explored, and annotations to each piece seek to assist the modern reader.

The volume embraces university journalism; essays from Waugh’s years of drift after Oxford; forcefully emphatic articles and contrasting sophisticated reviews written for the metropolitan press from 1928 to 1930 (the most active and enterprising years of Waugh’s career); reports for three newspapers of a coronation in Abyssinia and essays for The Timeson the condition of Ethiopia and on British policy in Arabia. Finally, in early 1934 Waugh travelled for three months in remote British Guiana, resulting in nine travel articles and A Handful of Dust, acclaimed as one of the most distinguished novels of the century. Waugh was 19 when his first Oxford review appeared, 31 when the Spectator printed his last review of 1934. This is a young writer’s book, and the always lucid articles and reviews it presents read as fresh and lively, as challenging and opinionated, as the day they first appeared.

This volume is scheduled for release in the USA on 1 May 2018, and Amazon.com is accepting advance orders at the link posted above.

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Weekend Roundup: Brideshead in the News

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel The Sparsholt Affair  is being released in the USA next week and is reviewed in the Boston Globe. The Globe’s reviewer, Priscilla Gilman, as with several in the UK, notes the book’s conections with Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

The first section, “A New Man,” is utterly captivating and immersive. It is a literary memoir by former Oxford student Freddie Greene, whose wry, bemused, plummy voice is perfectly realized. With wit and elan to spare, Greene expatiates on the intrigue that ensues when David Sparsholt, an engineering student with a fiancĂ©e, Connie, and a plan to join the Royal Air Force, arrives at Oxford in 1940….Sparsholt’s enigmatic allure, the impossibility of possessing, knowing, or pinning him down casts a dreamy spell over character and reader alike. In this “New Man” section, rife with “brief dislocated intimacies” and “fleeting alliance[s]”, Hollinghurst gives us a brilliant homage to Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford novels while creating a mood of provocative possibility and ominous foreboding distinctively his own.

Brideshead is also the inspiration for the posting of a recipe in The Guardian. This is sorrel soup which appears on the menu in Waugh’s novel: “I remember the dinner well – soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white-wine sauce, a caneton Ă  la presse, a lemon soufflĂ©.”  The Guardian article, from a correspondent in Brisbane, Australia where it is now late summer, offers this context:

…as I reminded myself of the other courses Charles Ryder orders – a sole in white wine sauce and a dish of pressed duck – I decided that, although it certainly would have been served hot in Paris, I was happy to reimagine it as a cold soup. And on a muggy January night in Brisbane, it’s the only version I could imagine eating. The sharp acidity of the sorrel is tempered by the egg and cream, though they’re added in small amounts so that the soup doesn’t taste too rich. I could have eaten the whole pan – it’s a soup I’ll be repeating.

The Atlantic magazine ran a poll on the question of which fictional house you would prefer to live it. One respondent made this choice:

Meg Wolitzer, author, The Female Persuasion

As someone who happily grew up in a suburb off the Long Island Expressway (Exit 43), once in a while I imagine what it would’ve been like to spend my childhood wandering the echoing halls of Brideshead Castle, from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited—English accent included.

The MSN.com website’s Insider column chooses the 50 best TV shows from history to watch in  a lifetime during what it sees as another “golden TV age” dawning. At number 4 is the Granada TV production based on Waugh’s novel:

Brideshead Revisited (1981). Considered by many critics to be the gold standard in adapting a novel to TV, “Brideshead Revisited” starred Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews as a pair of friends from youth to adulthood who grow apart. Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel gets deep into its character’s heads, but the adaptation gives it time to breath and translates it into an entirely new medium instead of simply staging the same scenes.

It was outranked by The Sopranos, Game of Thrones and The Wire at #s 1, 2, and 3 respectively.

The CBC has posted on its website’s books column My Life in Books a list of the favorite books of its sportscaster Andi Petrillo. Among those selected was Waugh’s The Loved One:

“I caught myself laughing out loud many times reading The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh. This is one of my favourite satirical novels. Instead of getting angry with the human pursuit of social status, this novel mocks it using humour by exaggerating our chase for it through how we depict ourselves even in death.”

Finally, BBC Radio 4 has reposted a 1999 broadcast of its series A Good Read. In this, the presenter Bel Mooney discusses three books with  guests Hunter Davies (novelist and biographer) and Jim Sergeant (BBC Chief Political Correspondent). All three participants had had experience as  journalists and brought this to bear in a discussion of Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop. This forms the first discussion of three on the 30 minute episode.

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Waugh and Anthony Powell (More)

Posted on March 8, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s influence is prominently mentioned in a review in this week’s Die Tagespost, a German language paper sponsored by the Roman Catholic church. The review is by Urs Buhlmann and the book is Powell’s novel The Soldier’s Art which has been translated into German (Die Kunst des Soldaten). This is No. 8 in Powell’s 12 volume series Dance to the Music of Time. The review begins by describing Powell as: “Better than Balzac,” according to one critic; another thought that he could classify the author as a mere descriptor of the British upper class.  …  He is a worthy successor to Evelyn Waugh, mostly not yet known [in Germany]. The review is entitled “KĂŒhl, humorvoll, durchdacht” (translated as “Cool, Humorous, Thoughtful”). In the article,  this is explained by describing Powell’s work as: “…a reading pleasure, like a bottle of good sparkling wine to quote Evelyn Waugh, ‘cool, humorous, thoughtful and well built'”.  Where this translated quotation originates is not explained. It doesn’t appear as such in the two Spectator reviews Waugh wrote of Powell’s novels. It may be Buhlmann’s interpretation of something Waugh wrote. Whether Waugh was writing about Powell’s work or wine is unclear from the translated text. The article concludes with another reference to Waugh:

The typical topics of recent British literature, as already encountered in Evelyn Waugh – the rise of the success-oriented middle class with simultaneous decline of the hitherto leading elites -are coolly noted by Anthony Powell, not challenged.

The translations are by Goggle with some edits.

Another reviewer, this one addressing the recent biography of Anthony Powell by Hilary Spurling, also describes Powell’s relationship to Waugh. This is by Martin McGinness in the Sydney Morning Herald. He begins by considering how well Dance to the Music of Time has worn:

With a title taken from Poussin’s masterpiece of the four seasons, Dance, has been described as “Proust Englished by P.G. Wodehouse” but perhaps Powell’s closely-observed study of 20th-century bohemacy has suffered from being too real: its texture a trifle tweedy; its colours slightly faded. He is not an escapist like Wodehouse; a moralist like Orwell, nor a satirist like Waugh. And yet his 3000 pages, 1 million words and nearly 500 characters are still a singular and extraordinary achievement – a very English life over 60 years through the eyes of Nicholas Jenkins. Auberon Waugh said on the publication of his father’s diaries, “[They] show that the world of Evelyn Waugh’s novels did in fact exist”. This is even truer of his friend and contemporary. Powell’s Dance is not just a roman-fleuve; it is also largely a roman-a-clef.

McGinness goes on to compare aspects of Powell’s characters and plot with real people and events. After adjudging Hilary Spurling’s official biography a bit inferior to the earlier unauthorized book by Michael Barber, McGinness concludes:

Anthony Powell, the novelist, deserves to be read and though, like the last century, it was not a merry one, his Dance can be enjoyed – its elegant ebb and flow, its cadences and coincidences; its galaxy of recurring characters; and its message that time takes its toll.

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Evil Genius on BBC Podcast

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC has signed comedian and Evelyn Waugh fan Russell Kane do a series of podcasts on the theme of the Evil Genius. In this, he will trace characters through history who have been geniuses but who have also done horrible things. These will include “characters from W G Grace to Evelyn Waugh,” and at the end of each podcast Kane will decide (with the help of a panel) whether the subject’s genius is outweighed by his or her evil. The idea will be to decide whether it is acceptable to enjoy art that is somehow at the same time horrible.

Kane is well known in the Waugh world. For example, he once appeared on a BBC Mastermind Special (devoted to charity fundraising) and brilliantly answered a series of rapid fire questions on Waugh and his Novels (18 out of 19). See previous post. The first episode of the new series has been posted. It is devoted to the life and work of John Lennon.

Meanwhile, the TLS has posted an interview of literary journalist Adam Gopnick who writes for the New Yorker and who seems to think Waugh is, if not exactly evil, at least not so much a genius. In answer to the question of what writer he thought was most overrated, Gopnick answered:

My good friend and part-time literary conscience Anthony Lane will doubtless never speak to me again – he holds Waugh and Wodehouse to be the two pillars of fine modern style – but, love Wodehouse though I do, the Waugh cult I find still baffling. The meant-to-be-funny bits seem laboured and sniggering and schoolboyish – that hilarious thunderbox! – and the not-meant-to-be-funny bits embarrassingly ripe and second rate. This isn’t a political or religious prejudice, since I find Nancy Mitford, whom he condescends to in their letters, limitlessly fun. Nor is it anti-Catholic since Chesterton, whose anti-Semitism is a lot more overt even than Waugh’s, is an author I can never read enough. It’s just Waugh. (Add to the overrated list William Burroughs, whose life was certainly lively, but whose prose seems as dead as a doornail.)

 

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Evelyn Waugh, Brexiteer?

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In an article in the “pro-market” website Reaction, Alastair Benn considers why more artists do not support Britain’s exit from the EU. When he reviews where today’s writers come out on this subject, Evelyn Waugh’s name comes up:

Although it might be true that opposition to Brexit has become a kind of idĂ©e fixe for the present-day cultural policy establishment, these things come and go. Fashions change. Some of the greatest English writers of the last century, those who make up the recognised canon, whose books are never out of print, are hardly hostile to a conservative world view. Take one of my favourite writers: Evelyn Waugh, whose later work becomes obsessed with social worlds that may appear quite alien to modern life. But then again, his early work is hardly conservative at all – brilliant satires engaging with the modern themes of technology, social change and with a strong anti-establishment ethic. Great writers resist easy classification.

An earlier article on this same topic by Simon Head in the New York Review of Books’ daily online edition took a more aggressive view of Waugh’s likely position:

Boris Johnson leads the cabinet faction agitating for a hard Brexit, a “clean break” from the EU, but he now has a serious rival for leadership of the party’s nationalist wing in Jacob Rees-Mogg, a deeply Euroskeptic member of parliament who outshone Johnson at the recent conference in Manchester. In their different ways, Johnson and Rees-Mogg both evoke the image of late-imperial Britain to which the aging membership of the Conservative Party feels drawn. So what would the great social geographer of the period, Evelyn Waugh, have made of  them? He would surely have spotted Johnson as a phony in a trice: his combination of bombast and faux bonhomie, his opportunism, his hack writing and intellectual sloppiness. Johnson makes a perfect fit for a villainous journalist toiling away for Lord Copper in Scoop. Waugh would surely have approved, however, of Rees-Mogg’s catholic dogmatism and his ample progeny. In his later years, Waugh complained that the Conservative Party hadn’t put the clock back five minutes; Rees-Mogg is someone who wants to put the clock back sixty years, at least.

Finally, in another battle over conservatism (or more specifically, conservation), Waugh’s name comes up in connection with a dispute between two aging rock stars over conserving a historic house in the west Kensington neighborhood. This is Tower House designed by Victorian architect William Burges. It belongs to Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin. He opposes improvements to the house next door by Simon Head, who was once lead singer for Take That and wants to expand his basement to include such amenities as a swimming pool. An article in The Times invokes Waugh and his friend John Betjeman as previous defenders of Tower House:

Page, who lives in Tower House, a grade I listed property that was previously owned by the poet John Betjeman and the actor Richard Harris, wrote that “it seems reasonable to expect the council to dismiss any application for subterranean development on a site so near to such an important ‘heritage asset’ as the Tower House”. He noted that the house, which was designed by William Burges, was “one of the most historic buildings in the borough” and that vibrations from building work next door would put his house and garden wall at risk. …“I believe the house was one of the first Victorian buildings in the country to be listed and was saved by John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh, who amongst others, campaigned against the threat of its demolition in the early sixties. Having protected the Tower House for over 40 years, I am now continuing the fight against a new threat to this precious and unique building.”

Page may somewhat overstate Waugh’s role in the preservation of Tower House. Betjeman was indeed for a short time its owner, having been left a two-year remainder on the lease by the previous owners in the hope that he would preserve the house by taking it over for his own use. According to A N Wilson, Betjeman felt he could not afford that burden, and the house was sold to actor Richard Harris in the hope that he would fulfill the owners’ wishes. Waugh comes into the story indirectly at best. Several years before he became owner of the house, the owners gave Betjeman a washstand from the house that had also been designed by Burges. When installation of this in Betjeman’s house proved impracticable, he made a gift of it to Evelyn Waugh. This then became the subject of a delusion in Waugh’s novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh himself suffered similar delusions relating to what be believed was a piece he had remembered seeing that had gone missing when the washstand was delivered to his house. Whether Waugh was ever drawn into the later issue of the preservation of the house itself during Betjeman’s brief ownership is unclear.

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Update: Churchill’s Secret Affair

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Channel 4’s documentary Churchill’s Secret Affair broadcast last night differs in several important details from the account published in the Daily Mail last week. See previous post. Several experts contribute to the documentary. From our perspective the most important are UK academics Warren Dockter (University of Aberystwyth) and Richard Toye (University of Exeter), both of whom have written books on Churchill, and Judith Mackrell who has written on Doris Castlerosse (The Unfinished Palazzo). Also contributing are Catherine Delevigne, Doris’s niece, and historian Hugo Vickers.

The story begins with Dockter’s discovery of a 1985 tape in the Churchill College archive at Cambridge in which John “Jock” Colville, one of Churchill’s secretaries, mentions that, while Churchill was not particularly active sexually, he did have one brief affair with Doris Castlerosse. Dockter’s joint researches with Prof Toye track this to a 1933 visit by the  Churchill family (including wife and at least some children) to a villa in the South of France. This was called ChĂąteau de l’Horizon and was owned not by Lord Beaverbrook, as is suggested by the Mail, but by an American actress by the name of Maxine Elliott. Doris,  who by then had already married and divorced Valentine Castlerosse, was also a guest. The next detail isn’t entirely clear but is important to our readers. Doris had an affair with Randolph Churchill before, not after Winston’s. C4 dates this only to the “early 1930s” so it may have been before or during the 1933 visit. Evelyn Waugh contributes to the story in his later report (Letters, p. 552) where he writes of the contretemps between Randolph and Valentine in a London restaurant that would probaby have occurred during this affair. Alas, Waugh’s contribution does not get mentioned in the documentary, and Randolph’s affair takes up only about 1 minute of the film.

Doris’s affair with Winston was more extensive than was suggested in the Mail story. Winston returned to the chĂąteau by himself on four separate occasions beginning the following summer (1934). It was on the first of these that the affair began (not at the Hotel Ritz). It was also on these vists that Winston painted three portraits of Doris, one of which he gave her. He only painted one portrait of his wife Clementine, who it is also suggested on Colville’s evidence, may have herself had an affair with an art dealer Terence Philip while she was on a cruise without Winston in 1934. After Doris moves back to London in 1937 (apparently having been residing full time in the South of France) meetings are occasionally arranged in her Berkeley Square residence. According to Catherine Delevigne (based on information from her mother and her father, Dudley Delevigne, Doris’s brother) on these occasions the staff were temporarily dismissed so there was no one present except Doris and Winston. After Winston returned to the government and became more involved in events leading up to the war, the affair ended.

The story concludes with Doris’s decampment to Venice and then New York in 1939 where she never found anyone willing to pay her way and from whence she is rescued by Winston’s discrete intervention in 1942 facilitating her return to London. Lacking no more support in London than she had in New York, however, Doris died after overdosing on sleeping pills a few months after her return. The one-hour documentary is available for streaming on Channel 4’s internet service 40D. A UK internet connection is required. It seems likely, given the high quality and content of the film, that it will appear on US television in due course.

Meanwhile, more information has become available about the play Happy Warriors in which Waugh’s WWII mission to Yugoslavia with Randolph Churchill is dramatized:

A new play, ‘Happy Warriors’, written by 91-year old James Hugh Macdonald, makes its worldwide premiere Upstairs at the Gatehouse Theatre in Highgate from 28th March – 22nd April. WT Stage, the producers, wanted to buck the trend of young writers giving a veteran his chance to have his script come to life on stage!

Happy Warriors is set in a war zone and based on a true story. … Along with Randolph [Churchill] and Evelyn [Waugh], who are billeted in a small deserted farmhouse, is Zora Panic, a young, belligerent, university-educated partisan. Zora is far from thrilled when told by her guerrilla commander she must learn to be less arrogant ahead of joining her comrades in the battle against the German army. In addition, she was told that her employment in the menial position of cook/housekeeper to the two Englishmen must be endured. Zora takes out her indignation, frustration and anger on the two men. What could possibly go right?

 

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Weekend Roundup: French Connections

Posted on March 4, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In a Times review of  Nina Caplan’s new book The Wandering Vine: Wine, the Romans and Me, reviewer Michael Henderson includes this as his opening:

“O for a beaker full of the warm south!” Keats, who died in Rome, gave voice to a universal wish when he marvelled at the nightingale singing of summer in full-throated ease. Wine as consolation. Evelyn Waugh was hardly less clear when he described Charles Ryder’s dinner with the vulgar Rex Mottram in Paris. Draining a sapid Clos de Bùze, Ryder “rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.” Wine as civilisation.

The reference is of course from Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited; a formal citation is deemed unnecessary.

The same issue of the Times also contains a review of Agnes Poirier’s book Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950. This is by Laura Freeman who discusses the contribution to the subject by noted Francophile, Waugh’s friend Cyril Connolly, who never ceased to express his longings for things French throughout the run of his magazine Horizon:

After the Occupation ended Connolly complained of the “lassitude, brain fatigue, apathy and humdrummery of English writers” compared with a Paris that “blazed with intellectual vitality and confidence”. Evelyn Waugh, visiting the Horizon office, complained to Nancy Mitford: “Miss Sonia Brownell [Connolly’s editorial scout and later Mrs George Orwell] was working away with a dictionary translating some rot from the French.”

This quote is from Waugh’s letter to Mitford dated 10 October 1949 (NMEW, p. 149) in which he continues with the statement: “That paper [Horizon] is to end soon”, which it did. Waugh had done what he could to support the magazine’s continued existence by allowing Connolly to include the text of his novella The Loved One which took up the entire February 1948 issue. The only payment asked by Waugh was his yearly subscripton fee. Horizon’s last issue was a double: No. 120-121, dated December 1949-January 1950.

In what amounts to a hat trick plus one (or a “haul” in soccer) yet another Times book review (for a total of four in the 2 March 2018 edition–including the one discussed in the preceding post) contains a reference to Waugh:

All who are familiar with the prologue of Brideshead Revisited will instantly grasp what this book is about. It’s about those houses, like Brideshead, that were requisitioned by the War Office in 1939 and freely handed over by their owners, who had to move out or live in the bachelor wing for the duration. It’s Nissen huts on the lawn, Essex board nailed over the murals, locked drawing rooms, Van Dycks used as dartboards, men in uniform barking orders with their hot breath in the cold air, unheated dormitories and not nearly enough bathrooms. …

This is in a review by Ysenda Maxtone Graham of the book Our Uninvited Guests: The Secret Lives of Britain’s Country Houses 1939-1945 by Julie Summers.

Meanwhile, the Canadian magazine Maclean’s also cites Brideshead in an article by Tabatha Southey entitled “Why we should talk about masculinity more often”:

Mostly, I’m just confused when people complain about the recent “feminization” of education as the cause of cause of men not pursuing higher education. Were there chapters of Brideshead Revisited I missed where they suddenly stopped picnicking and punting and just spat and bludgeoned each other with sledgehammers for a spell? Certainly there was that one time that Boy Mulcaster and some others tried to throw Anthony Blanche into a fountain, but he jumped in himself, “struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home
” Brutal stuff, but they all had to have a sherry afterwards. The beloved teddy bear in Brideshead, Aloysius—the model for whom was Archibald Ormsby-Gore, Sir John Betjeman’s teddy—was perhaps part of the nuance we’ve been rejecting for our boys and men that they may just demand, in a manly way, to have back, thanks very much.

Finally, UK Channel 4 tonght at 10pm will air Churchill’s Secret Affair which also has a French connection, as previewed by Suzi Feay in the Financial Times:

…The sizzling Doris Castlerosse had racehorse legs and zero scruples. … Before marrying a besotted Lord Castlerosse, Doris was a “professional mistress” who “slept her way up the social ladder”, according to her biographer. She’s a figure straight out of Evelyn Waugh, partying on the CĂŽte d’Azur at the racy ChĂąteau de l’Horizon with Randolph Churchill and other socialites just before the war. She moved on from Randolph to his father, who promptly brandished his paintbrushes and got her to pose. The resulting portrait was far from racy, but times were different and two academics get very excited about what might have happened to Churchill’s reputation had the scandal not been hushed up. …

The preview in the Daily Mail had Winston passing her along to Randolph, and this was backed up by dates. (See previous post.) Perhaps the TV script will clarify this.

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Waugh’s Oxford Reviewed in Times; “The Scarlet Woman” Online

Posted on March 3, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times is the first paper to review the new book Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford to be published by the Bodleian Library later this month. The book is by Dr Barbara Cooke who is Co-Executive Editor of OUP’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project. James Marriott is the reviewer and begins with a description of his own days as a student beginning in 2011 when the city was still populated with characters from Waugh’s novels. Here’s some of what he has to say about Dr Cooke’s book:

In Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford, Barbara Cooke, an academic at Loughborough University, gives a good rundown of his endless creative enthusiasms, which included writing, bookbinding and engraving. He also acted in a film, The Scarlet Woman, in which the Pope and the dean of Balliol College (played by Waugh) conspire to convert the English monarchy to Roman Catholicism. Amazingly, you can watch the whole camp thing on the website of the British Film Institute.

…In Cooke’s amiable trot round Oxford, the place is still very much Waugh’s “city of aquatint”… Readers new to the writer will get the impression that he was a high-spirited, bitchy, but ultimately good-natured chap. In fact, Waugh’s infamous nasty streak was well developed by the time he was an undergraduate. Cooke touches on Waugh’s persecution of his tutor, CRMF Cruttwell, but doesn’t hint at its insane extent. Waugh and Cruttwell never got on, but the older man hit the snobbish, insecure Waugh’s nuclear button when he called him “a silly suburban sod with an inferiority complex”… If Cooke gives the man an easier ride than he deserves, we can forgive her indulgence to the city. Everyone who has seen Oxford has fallen in love with it. If the university’s graduates eventually squirm at all that Brideshead nonsense, tourists deserve a chance at infatuation too. Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford is a decent guide for those longing to fall in love with the Brideshead dream for the first time.

Marriott gets one thing slightly wrong. Waugh did not exactly “flunk out” in 1924 as he puts it. He took his final exam in the term before he completed his residency (he started in Hilary term, January 1922) and passed but with a low third class grade. However, this poor result did cause the loss of his scholarship, and his father (Arthur Waugh) refused to pay the fees and expenses for Evelyn’s final term of residency that would have been required for a degree. This was due more to Evelyn’s extravagant expeditures than to disappointment with his degree results. As Dr Cooke explains in her book, Arthur Waugh also passed with a third but remained long enough to collect his degree. Under current university practice, Evelyn would have probably received his degree today as the residency requirements are normally waived for those who pass their final exams before their ninth term (unless of course Dean Cruttwell were still alive to withhold the waiver).

Thanks to James Marriott for citing the BFI’s posting of The Scarlet Woman. It can be watched on the BFIPlayer free of charge at this link. (A UK internet connection is required.) As is explained in Dr Cooke’s book, the film was made in and around the back garden of the Waugh family house on North End Road NW11 based on a script written by Evelyn shortly after he had taken his exams. It was directed by Evelyn’s Hertford College friend Terence Greenidge. As noted in a previous post, Dr Cooke will discuss her book at the Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday, 18 March at 10am in the Weston Library on Broad Street next to Blackwells. Click here for details.

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Henry Green, Enthusiasms, Tammy Faye, and Clarissa

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The attempted revival of Henry Green’s works and reputation marches ever onward. The latest contribution is an article by Dominic Green (no likely relationship since Henry’s family name was Yorke) in the New Criterion. Green makes the case that Yorke (to avoid confusion) was influenced heavily by cinematic dialogue and tracks the historic development of that genre against developments in Yorke’s own literary style. The article includes the now familiar cite to Evelyn Waugh’s defense of Yorke’s novel Living in a 1929 Vogue article but fails to note the deflation of Waugh’s enthusiasm for Yorke’s later work (at least as expressed in private communications). According to Green, Waugh was influenced by Yorke but only up to a point:

Waugh capitalized upon Yorke’s conversational effects, and nodded to Eliot too, in A Handful of Dust (1934). But the conversational fireworks were only one weapon in the Waugh arsenal, and the resemblance does not run deep. Yorke has wit and can be sexually knowing, but he lacks the eighteenth-century ebullience that drove Waugh to name a character Polly Cockpurse, to tack “The Man Who Liked Dickens” onto the manuscript, and then to cook up an alternative ending to accommodate serialization in an American magazine.

The Weekly Standard in an in-depth article by Martyn Wendell Jones considers the careers of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. religious evangelists in the USA who thrived in the 1970-80s until brought down by sex scandals. The article traces the strand of the Bakkers’ brand of evangelism back to movements in the 17th and 18th centuries discussed by Ronald Knox in his book Enthusiasm:

The American continent, wrote Monsignor Ronald Knox in 1950, “is the last refuge of the enthusiast.” Knox, a Catholic writer and friend of Evelyn Waugh’s, considered the 600-page study Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion his life’s work. The primary emphasis in religious enthusiasm, he wrote, “lies on a direct personal access to the Author of our salvation, with little of intellectual background or of liturgical expression.” In both Catholic and Protestant variations, enthusiasm knocked established Christianity off the rails. This personal spirituality was often accompanied, Knox wrote, by “a conviction that the Second Coming of our Lord is shortly to be expected” and “ecstasy, under which heading I include a mass of abnormal phenomena, the by-products, it would seem, of prophecy.” Then, too, there were the tremors and shakes, the falling into trances, and the glossolalia—outbreaks of “unintelligible utterance” believed by the utterers to be a private means of direct communication with the Lord.

Waugh later declared Knox’s book “the greatest work of literary art of the century” (Books on Trial, October 1955; EAR. p. 477). Knox dedicated his book to Evelyn Waugh who after Knox’s death wrote his biography.

Waugh’s friend Clarissa Eden (nĂ©e Churchill and now Lady Avon) is interviewed in Spear’s Magazine. Winston Churchill was her uncle and Randolph a first cousin. The interviewer asks her about her life before her marriage to Anthony Eden in 1952 and she replies:

…in May 1940, … Churchill became prime minister. The future Lady Avon was just 19, and just two years after she had ‘come out’, as one of the notable debutantes of her year presented at court with Deborah Mitford, later Duchess of Devonshire. That followed several years in Paris and Oxford, where she befriended Evelyn Waugh – ‘a good writer
 But that was my world before I was married. I don’t think I ever saw him afterwards’ – Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Powell, Greta Garbo and many others.

She is too polite to recall Evelyn Waugh’s persecution of her (like him a Roman Catholic) for her marriage to Eden, who was divorced. Of course, so was Waugh when he married his second wife, but that didn’t bother him since he had obtained an annullment of his first marriage from the Roman Catholic hierarchy. This was not Waugh’s finest hour (Letters, pp. 378, 381-82).

Finally, the Daily Telegraph has published a list of what its staff reporters have selected as the greatest 100 novels of all time. This includes novels in languages other than English. How the selection was conducted is not explained but no author has more than one work listed (although in same cases multi-volume works are classified as one). Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop appears on the list at Number 18 (the ranking or numbering is likewise unexplained):

Waugh based the hapless junior reporter hero of this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.

Other novels by writers of Waugh’s generation include Dance to the Music of Time (#32), Brighton Rock (#16), 1984 (#21) Code of the Woosters (#15) and Mrs Dalloway (#9).

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