Waugh as Biographer, Up to a Point

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In this week’s Spectator, the lead book review (“Biography is a thoroughly reprehensible genre”) is by Roger Lewis. In this, he describes a book by James Atlas entitled The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale. Atlas is a literary critic and biographer, having written on Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. Lewis thinks most literary biographies are a waste of time and ruin the writer in the minds of both those who write and read them. But there are exceptions, and Evelyn Waugh falls into one of them:

The best biographers are artists themselves. Atlas has interesting digressions about Greene on Rochester, Evelyn Waugh on Campion, Powell on Aubrey. I’d add Anthony Burgess on Shakespeare, AndrĂ© Maurois on Shelley, Stefan Zweig on Mary Queen of Scots, Nabokov on Gogol and A.N. Wilson on Iris Murdoch and John Betjeman. There is a personal investment in these works; the imagination is operating.

Powell and Greene are mentioned as writers whose lives have been exhaustively written by their biographers: Norman Sherry in the case of Greene and, although not named, presumably Hilary Spurling in the case of Powell. Lewis offers no comment on Waugh’s biographers although they are conspicuous by their number: there are at least six that I can think of, most recently Philip Eade.

The Financial Times considers another phenomenon that can be a writer’s ruination. This is the celebrity speaking circuit and is described by Simon Kuper:

The best business nowadays is selling to the 1 per cent. A caste of pundits has accordingly arisen to supply them with thoughts, or at least talking points. These pundits make decent money themselves, especially on the speakers’ circuit, which is now the place where original thinkers go to die.

Kuper considers several examples, including writers of a successful political book on a specific topic who, like “Christopher Hitchens, prostituted his talent in the cause of the Iraq war.” Another example includes a mention of characters in an Evelyn Waugh novel:

You are a rightwing journalist. There aren’t many of those, so you are adopted by a rightwing press proprietor. You serve his empire and his friends, telling yourself that his cause is generally just, even if some of the details make you queasy. Reading Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, you used to identify with the naive young journalist. Now you are the editor who is always telling the proprietor, “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

In another Spectator article, Waugh is mentioned as one of several writers associated with a rare patch of wild land just north of Oxford. This is Otmoor and the article is written by Christopher Fletcher. Waugh is not one of the writer’s who describe or use the area as a setting in their books (as did Aldous Huxley in Crome Yellow and Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass) but did frequent the area on excursions from Oxford:

Otmoor is encircled by seven villages whose church towers can confuse as much as aid navigation as perspectives shift. One is Beckley, where Evelyn Waugh drank to his third-class degree in the Abingdon Arms. It is now an excellent community pub — that rallying spirit again.

Finally, in Vogue’s online edition, a photo slide show by Karen Walker includes a shot of what looks like a mint condition copy of a 1951 Penguin edition of Waugh’s A Handful of Dust sitting next to a dish of SoufflĂ© Suisse at the Wolseley restaurant.

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Greatest Writer of “Our” Generation ?

Posted on February 28, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Literary critic, novelist and publisher Dr Stoddard Martin has written a review of Philip Eade’s biography which he turns into an assessment of Evelyn Waugh’s career and legacy. This is entitled “Class Act” and appears in The Quarterly Review, an online literary  journal. Dr Martin (born in Philadelphia in 1948 and graduated from Stanford: Class of 1970) has lived in England for about 40 years. He has several books of criticism to his credit (mostly from the 1980s) and, according to the Library of Congress, 11 novels (all self-published by his Starhaven Press of La Jolla, California and written under the name of Chip Martin). He begins his article by describing an interview with “a literary editor of contemporary repute [who maintained] that ‘Brideshead is what we all want.’ She went on to posit that such nostalgia is what impelled Brexit.”  This takes place in the Academy Club on Lexington Street in Soho that Dr Martin explains “was not only founded by Bron Waugh but my home-away-from-home for a quarter century.” He goes on to trace the evolution  of his own assessment of Waugh and his works, beginning with his reading of The Loved One in the late 1960s. He was at first:

appalled at what [was taken] as unforgivably partial satire – indeed, malicious misrepresentation – of a culture that had feted the author when lured to L.A. by the lucre of a film prospect. Years passed, and further readings of that novella produced a deeper perception of Waugh’s purpose, as well as a belated sharing of what was hard to dispute in the general critical verdict: that Waugh as stylist stood above almost all…[He has made] his way to a predominance almost of his own fashioning, opportunistic yet solid and in the event prudent enough that such an empire as he created has not fallen, but flourished – carried on by his successors now to a point where a million pounds is being spent to publish in annotated, definitive, official edition every word he ever wrote.

After summarizing Eade’s biography, Dr Martin gets down to the question of where Waugh’s reputation stands today, and he seems to feel that he has become rather overrated. He thinks a better claim to canonical greatness can be made by:

…Graham Greene, who among English contemporaries must be the rival contender for title of great writer of the era. Greene’s books may seem shabby and sour when set against Waugh’s, in style quite inferior, yet in content perhaps they are clearer. It strikes me as telling that I am able to recall their purpose and plots better than those of many in Waugh’s oeuvre.

But Dr Martin does not stop there. He concludes his article with another suggestion:

It seems plausible that, if one is obliged to look back, playing the bubble games of ‘greatest writer’ and ‘desert island’, it would be to one who flourished in the Anglo-sphere just before the fall that the Waugh/Greene era was taking, presaging tendencies in both along with something more in range of inquiry and less in partisan fracture – Somerset Maugham. This is a provisional suggestion. But like many a ‘bloody awful yank’, not least one who’s plied the expatriate path for decades, it is hard not to admire the sensibility which fashioned The Razor’s Edge rather more than those which produced The Loved One or The Quiet American, however clever – if not to say accurate – those painfully satirical, counter-idealistic portraits may be. That said, it may be that looking back is the problem. However much some may wish it to be otherwise, that is not the direction ‘we’ are going.

Why the three writers cannot share “canonical greatness” seems not to have occurred to Dr Martin.

These excerpts and summaries do not do justice to his article. It is interesting, thought-provoking and enjoyable and should be read in full by anyone who agrees or disagrees with the opinions quoted above.

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Roundup: From Seven Deadly Sins to Four Brandy Alexanders

Posted on February 27, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Spanish newspaper El Mundo has a story about the career of novelist Ian Fleming, best known for his James Bond novels and films. This begins with a discussion of Fleming’s less well-known role as International Editor of The Sunday Times. During his tenure in that position, he put together a series of essays on the subject of the Seven Deadly Sins. According to El Mundo:

As he writes in the preface, the idea of ​​making a book about the seven deadly sins was [Fleming’s], and he himself chose and matched the outstanding writers–several of them his friends–with the sin they were to write about, giving rise to an intelligent, funny and insightful work. So the result remains: Angus Wilson (envy); Edith Sitwell (pride); Cyril Connolly (covetousness); Patrick Leigh Fermor (gluttony); Evelyn Waugh (sloth); Christopher Sykes (lust) and W. H. Auden (anger). Three of these writers (Sitwell, Waugh and Sykes) were Catholics.

These articles were first published as a book in 1962 by The Sunday Times, which had earlier published them in the newspaper. The first UK edition does not mention Ian Fleming’s role in their production and has an introduction by Raymond Mortimer. The US edition, by William Morrow, also published in 1962, has a “Special Foreword” written by Fleming, and it is probably to this that the El Mundo article refers. Waugh’s contribution on “Sloth” is available in Essays, Articles and Reviews and A Little Order.

–Several papers report the premiere USA performance of the Letters Live review at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles. The Daily Mail prominently mentions the appearance of Stephen Fry, the first since he announced his cancer diagnosis late last year. According to the report by Sam Blewett in the Belfast Telegraph and other Irish papers: “Fry read a letter from Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh as well as one from Archibald Clark Kerr during his tenure as ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War.” This may be the same Waugh letter (31 May 1942, Letters, p.161) read out in previous performances of this program by other actors. This was written to his wife from Scotland where he was stationed in the Army and describes the Army’s removal of a tree from the garden of a local aristocrat with disastrous unintended consequences. See previous posts.

–The New York Times in its “New & Noteworthy” book review column includes a recommendation of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust. This is written by its Sr Staff Opinion Editor, Honor Jones:

I can’t help it. I like books set in pleasant English country houses. But I also like books that shake me up. In Evelyn Waugh’s A HANDFUL OF DUST, I have found the perfect combination. Imagine you’re watching ‘Downton Abbey’ and Carson the butler, instead of serving the sherry, slits the throat of the family dog…

–British politician Dan Hannan writes in the Washington Examiner about the muddle of “conservatives” in the USA. This is illustrated in Hannan’s article by the recent invitation extended by the conservative association CPAC to Marion MarĂ©chal-Le Pen to speak at a major gathering this Friday. Hannan, a British MEP and member of the Conservative Party, argues that the Republican Party and its supporters appear to be moving beyond traditional conservatism to what he calls the European “far right” model based on an authoritarian state structure. Ironically, he sees a convergence of extremists on the right and the left, citing Evelyn Waugh’s response to a previous example of this phenomenon:


the reason that the rivalry between “far-right” statists and left-wing statists is so fierce is that they are competing for the same kind of voter. Theirs is, as Hayek used to say, a quarrel between brothers. Both sets of socialists — national socialists and Leninist socialists — regard classical liberals, not as heretics, but as infidels, damned beyond redemption. From time to time, the two sets of socialists have patched up their quarrels to stand together against Western free-market democracy. It happened in August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed their pact. The British writer Evelyn Waugh — a proper conservative if ever there was one — recorded the moment in one of his novels: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” That, surely, is the proper conservative response to authoritarians of any stripe. They have done enough damage in Europe. No American should want to copy them.

Waugh’s statement appears in his novel Men at Arms and is Guy Crouchback’s reaction to the Nazi/Communist Non-Aggression Pact.

–A Dutch blogger (Ferdi de Lange on Jalta.nl) has posted a discussion of Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel The Sparsholt Affair. In this, he compares Hollinghurst’s previous novel The Stranger’s Child to Brideshead Revisited: “At the center is the somewhat famous poet Cecil Valence, in which Hollinghurst in five episodes – from 1913 to 2008 – after Valence is killed in the First World War– makes the link between the lifestyle of a diverse range of characters.” If such a comparison is to be made, however, the story in The Sparsholt Affair itself seems closer to Brideshead than The Stranger’s Child: “A young fit man who studies in Oxford at the beginning of the Second World War. Sparsholt is an endless source of inspiration and fascination for a group of well-to-do students who secretly all have an eye on him.” Indeed, Hollinghurst’s earlier novel The Line of Beauty, also discussed by the blogger, may come closer than either of these later ones: “A novel where we follow the young Nick Guest who settles in the family of a British Conservative MP and eventually steals the show by dancing with Margaret Thatcher.” Several reviewers, when it was published, noted the similarity. Perhaps it suffices to say that there is much in Hollinghurst’s novels that reminds one of Brideshead Revisited.

–Finally, in the online newsletter Quartzy, which is dedicated to “living well in the global economy,” there appears an article on cocktails that opens with this:

Cream is not an intuitive mixer for alcohol, as lime juice and ginger ale are. You might try a creamy cocktail as a kitschy throwback, or make one for a themed party, but how often do you crave what amounts to a boozy milkshake? At least that was my thinking, until I read about the history of the Brandy Alexander in 3-Ingredient Cocktails by Robert Simonson. According to Simonson, Tennessee Williams was known to drink one before his daily swim. Evelyn Waugh wrote about them in Brideshead Revisited, and Kingsley Amis counted them among his favorite drinks, so long as the standard amount of brandy was quadrupled


It was, of course, Anthony Blanche in Book One, Chapter II of Waugh’s novel who was so ecstatic over the experience of a Brandy Alexander (or four):

At the George bar he ordered ‘Four Alexandra [sic] cocktails please,’ ranged them before him with a loud “Yum-yum’ which drew every eye, outraged, upon him. ‘I expect you would prefer sherry, but, my dear Charles, you are not going to have sherry. Isn’t this a delicious concoction? You don’t like it? Then, I will drink it for you. One, two, three, four, down the red lane they go. How the students stare!’…

Actor Nicholas Grace, playing Anthony Blanche in the 1981 TV film adaptation of the novel, made an absolute meal of this scene. It was one of the most memorable moments in a film that was overflowing with them.

Translations from Spanish and Dutch are by Google with a few minor edits.

 

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Naim Attallah Interviews Harold Acton

Posted on February 26, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Writer and publisher Naim Attallah has posted on his weblog what looks like the complete text of his interview of Harold Acton in 1990. This was only a few years before Acton’s death in 1994. Acton and Waugh were friends at Oxford and corresponded for many years afterwards. Waugh destroyed his first novel The Temple of Thatch after Acton criticized it. Whether or where this interview has ever been published previously is not stated. Attallah is the owner of Quartet Books and was an early investor in both the Literary Review and The Oldie so the interview may have first appeared in one of those journals. Here is an excerpt from the interview where Acton discusses his friendship with Evelyn Waugh :

Your friendship with Evelyn Waugh spanned many years. Did you admire him as a man and writer equally?

I admired his writing far more than I admired his character, but he was a delightful, warm-hearted, hot-tempered personality such as you rarely find today. He was a man of extreme views and a convert to Catholicism, and a passionate convert at that, which is also rather rare nowadays. He was a deeply religious person, but his gifts were not really in the most serious vein. His gifts were humorous and I think his best novels are the least serious. For instance, Decline and Fall, dedicated to myself, is still I think one of the most brilliant of English light novels. He got a little more serious towards the end, and he lost somehow the light touch, so rare in English literature. Not many people have that light touch. Evelyn Waugh was a master of prose as well; he wrote very good English. That’s another thing that is rare nowadays: good, sound, logical English. I wouldn’t say Waugh was depressing as a person. He was rather more depressed than depressing because he saw the way the world was going and it didn’t appeal to him at all. But he had a heart of gold and I was really very fond of him. I was best man at his first wedding, a marriage which went badly, alas. I’m afraid he married a rather superficial lady who flirted with others and he couldn’t stand it. He was very old-fashioned, expected his wife to be loyal and faithful to him. He couldn’t stand the strain of her going off on her own. He was a proud man and he was very loyal as a friend. We stayed friends till the day he died and he’s one of the few friends I’ve never quarrelled with. I’m also a friend of his son Bron. Towards the end of his life, Evelyn became a kind of recluse, except that he loved his family, and loved to be in the company of his devoted wife, surrounded by his children. He didn’t care to join literary societies, but liked to stand on his own. He was independent. There’s too much nowadays of congregating in these literary societies, of people blowing their own trumpets, but Evelyn was dignified about all of that.

It has been said that characters in Brideshead Revisited are based on your own character. Do you find the idea flattering or provoking?

I think it is very flattering, but I don’t recognize any character in Brideshead connected with myself. He’s taken little traits from me in one of the characters, certain physical traits so that people confuse me sometimes with that particular character, but I don’t think it was in his mind. A novelist has to take everything in his experience and use it. That’s why we respond. If we felt a novelist’s work was false, we wouldn’t admire it, unless his fiction were absolutely farcical and fantastic, and Evelyn’s is only farcical up to a certain degree. There is seriousness underlining all his fiction.

According to Auberon Waugh, Attallah was instrumental in hiring him as editor of Literary Review. They met through Auberon’s daughter Sophia who worked for Attallah at Quartet Books after coming down from Durham University.

UPDATE (7 March 2018): Sophia Waugh came down from Durham University (not Oxford as originally posted) “with a good degree in English” according to her father’s autobiography (p. 265).

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Armies of the Night; Writers on the Right

Posted on February 26, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Hoover Institution at Stanford University has posted a 1968 TV interview of novelist Norman Mailer by William F Buckley, Jr. This was in Buckley’s Firing Line series which went out for many years on PBS. The subject of the interview was to be Mailer’s then recent book Armies of the Night, now considered by many to have been his best nonfiction work (if, indeed, it can properly be considered to fall into that category). The book was Mailer’s retelling of the story of his participation with other Vietnam War protestors, including Dwight MacDonald and Robert Lowell, in their attempt to occupy the Pentagon. As Buckley notes when introducing the subject: “The Pentagon won.” In the course of the interview, this exchange occurred:

WFB: “Oh, sure, I’m very anxious to discuss [Mr. Mailer’s latest book, Armies of the Night]… [which] I think everyone should read, because I think it’s an extremely interesting and enjoyable book, if that’s the right word for it.”

NM: “Well, I wish someone on the right wing would write a book that would be as good, because it would be a great help to us on the Left. I wanted to help the right wing understand-”

WFB: “You wouldn’t notice it if it were written.”

NM: “No, I would notice it. You know I’m a lover of literature.”

WFB: “Yes.”

NM: “I think Evelyn Waugh is a marvelous writer…. Unfortunately, he’s not an American.”

WFB: “Yeah. Unfortunately, he’s dead.”

NM: “That too.”

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“Churchill’s Secret Affair” to Air in TV Documentary

Posted on February 25, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has a feature length story on what may have been a secret (but brief) affair between Lady Castlerosse (born in humble circumstances as Doris Delevigne) and Winston Churchill. This took place (if it did) in spring 1930 when Churchill was out of power and began on a visit to Lord Beaverbrook’s villa in the South of France. According to the Mail, he there met Doris and painted her portrait. He may also have bedded her later on at the Ritz Hotel in Paris after the painting was completed. Her story is told in a previous post but missing this latest development. The Mail goes on to elaborate:

It’s not easy to think of Churchill — the soon-to-be hero of World War II, his greatness captured in the film Darkest Hour, now winning Baftas and probably Oscars — as a bad boy in this way. Certainly he was a passionate man when it came to politics. But in matters of sex, he was pretty much a non-starter, always seen as a steadfast, one-woman man loyal to the formidable Clemmie, and not interested in romance. His biographer, the politician Roy Jenkins, calls him ‘probably the least dangerously sexed major politician on either side of the Atlantic since Pitt the Younger’. So did he really stray in those dog days between the world wars? A book by biographer Lyndsy Spence hints very strongly that he did and a Channel 4 documentary next month called Churchill’s Secret Affair pursues the same theme.

The Mail’s story by Tony Rennell goes on to discuss a better documented subsequent affair between Doris and Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son. Waugh is called in as a witness to this. According to the Mail:

At the San Carlo restaurant, the writer Evelyn Waugh recorded how Castlerosse hurled a vase at Randolph but he ducked and it knocked out Lady Birkenhead, whose husband had been on a wartime expedition to Yugoslavia with Randolph.

The article fails to note that Waugh was also a member of that same WWII expedition which is soon to be dramatized in a play. See previous post. The Mail’s  account is probably based on a 1960 letter Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming where he recalled an incident in the 1930s that involved Randolph’s “knocking out Margaret Birkenhead at the opening night of the San Carlo Restaurant.” A footnote to the letter explains: “Before the war, at the opening of a restaurant, possibly the Malmaison, Lord Castlerosse threw a vase at Randolph Churchill and narrowly missed Lady Birkenhead” (Letters, pp. 552-52). Lord Castlerosse was for a time a gossip columnist at the Daily Express and Doris, then his wife, contributed. Whether they were so employed at the time of the vase-throwing incident isn’t explained in the article. The Mail dates Randolph’s affair to 1932, so that may when the incident reported by Waugh took place.

The UK Channel 4 documentary about all this entitled “Churchill’s Secret Affair” is scheduled for next Sunday, 4 March at 8pm. It is described as: “An explosive documentary revealing new evidence of Winston Churchill’s secret affair and how it came to haunt him.” Here are the details. A UK internet connection will be needed, and it will presumably be posted for streaming on 4oD after the broadcast.

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Private Chapels (More)

Posted on February 24, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent post we mentioned a newly built Roman Catholic private chapel at Culham Court near Henley in which regular services are held. The Catholic Herald has an article this week by Sarah Crofts about several more such private chapels, including two in the same general area south of Oxford. These are Milton Manor Chapel (near Didcot) and Stonor Chapel (near Henley). Evelyn Waugh would be happy to hear that a traditional Latin Mass is celebrated on some occasions in both chapels. At Milton Manor services are attended by invitation only, according to the Catholic Herald article. At Stonor Chapel there are regular services at 1030a every Sunday. This chapel has the added attraction as having been a site where Edmund Campion lived and worshipped and also has a Graham Greene association. According to the Catholic Herald:

The celebrated St Edmund Campion was priest at Stonor Chapel near Henley in Oxfordshire. It was there that, in great danger, he wrote the illicit pamphlet “Ten Reasons” to spearhead the intellectual resistance to Protestantism in England. The leaflet was printed on a mobile press in the roof of the house and transported to Oxford. There it was slid onto the seats of delegates arriving for a university conference, causing a great scandal. It was the leaflet that ultimately led to Campion’s capture, torture and death… This remarkable place contains Stations of the Cross created by a Polish prisoner of war, Jozef Janas, which were given to the chapel by Graham Greene…

Waugh mentions Campion’s stay at Stonor several times in his Edmund Campion, Part III: The Hero.

The Catholic Herald article goes on to mention another chapel with a Waugh association:

One of the best-known private chapels is the one in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The chapel, based on the original at Castle Howard, was brilliantly realised as the scene of languid conversations between Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the 1981 television series. Its murals are by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, finished with a gilt ceiling and ornamented by a vast organ.

This reference seems to have confused two private chapels, neither of them Roman Catholic. The chapel Waugh describes in Brideshead Revisited is that at Madresfield Court near Great Malvern. This was constructed in the early 20th c. and designed in the Arts and Crafts style by the Birmingham Municipal School of Arts & Crafts. The one at Castle Howard that was designed by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in the 1870s was used as a setting for the chapel scenes in both the TV and film adaptations of the novel but is not the one that Waugh had in mind when he wrote the description of the chapel in his novel. Both of these private chapels observe the rites of the Church of England.

Waugh himself toyed with the idea of a private chapel at his home Piers Court in Stinchcombe, Gloucestershire. In a 1950 letter to Nancy Mitford, he wrote:

I am intriguing to get a private chapel at Stinkers [Stinchcombe] behind the back of the Bishop of Clifton, who hates private chapels as undemocratic and not contemporary. After seeing a lot of Princes & Cardinals I found the man who really decides such things is a plain Padre Costa, a Brazilian living in the suburbs. I went to him & he received me with great congeniality until he learned my name was not Vaughan as he supposed & that I was not the bastard grandson of Cardinal Vaughan. All seemed lost until I found he came from Manaos and by an extraordinary piece of Prodlike scholarship I happened to know that Manaos was the first town in the American continent to have a tramway. After that all was sunny again & I think I may succeed in my pious ambition (Letters, p. 303).

So far as I know, nothing ever came of Waugh’s chapel project.

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Vile Bodies: Two Wins and a Loss

Posted on February 24, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Esquire magazine has published a list of what it considers the “24 Funniest Books Ever Written” as compiled by Will Hersey. At number 6 is Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930):


Evelyn Waugh brilliantly, hilariously, unflinchingly but always humanely pinions a society which is in thrall to gossip and decadence, traumatised by war and catastrophe yet unable to stop itself rushing headlong into further and deeper cataclysm. This book is as much for our age as Waugh’s.

Other books on Esquire’s list by Waugh’s contemporaries include Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954) and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961). Waugh refused a request to offer a supporting blurb for Catch 22 but one of his favorite books also makes the list. This is Diary of a Nobody (1892) by George and Weedon Grossmith.

An article by Alex Clark in last Saturday’s Guardian newspaper criticizes Esquire’s list for naming only two novels by women. In additional to Cold Comfort Farm, the list also includes The Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend. The most prominent missing comic novel mentioned by Clark is Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate that is extensively quoted in the article’s introduction.

Meanwhile the report of an online books group is less enthusiastic about Vile Bodies. This is reported on Annabookbel.net:


none of us loved it, and most found it a perplexing bore
 It was later in the book when a succession of BYTs had a go at being gossip columnists, basically making it up, that I got a bit fed up. This was because this summer I read Beverley Nichols’ novel Crazy Pavements 
 in which a young man has a job as a gossip columnist and gets taken up by some BYTs.  Crazy Pavements was published before Vile Bodies, and so it felt repetitive.  Both Crazy Pavements and the early novels in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence deal with the BYTs in a mostly non-satirical way, and I much preferred that treatment. It’s not until the very end of Vile Bodies that Waugh injects a bit of gravitas with a rather serious and perhaps fitting coda.

Finally, on the entertainment weblog The Wrap, Vile Bodies is mentioned in a reposted 2014 article in connection with what the blogger considers to have been one of Peter O’Toole’s most memorable film roles:

“Bright Young Things” (2003): Stephen Fry‘s brilliantly acrid adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” has no shortage of British eccentrics, but they all take a back seat to Peter O’Toole’s Colonel Blount, who seems to be operating in a dimension entirely his own. Dotty and circumloquacious, the good colonel pops up in only a few scenes of the film, but O’Toole’s wonderfully whacked-out performance stays in the memory.

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Too Much #MeToo?: Bring Back Bron

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent issue of the Spectator, Matthew Parris longs for the return of Auberon Waugh. Parris feels that Auberon’s humorous approach to controversial matters is needed to bring some balance and reason to the debate over women’s rights in which the pendulum seems to have swung too far in one direction. After describing some of the more excessive examples of reparation demands from allegedly wronged women and his own limited acquaintance with Auberon, Parris concludes with how he thinks Auberon, if he were alive today, might react:

Today, Bron would probably have founded a Men’s Survival Party, as he founded his Dog Lovers’ Party after the then Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe had been accused of involvement in the murder of a dog. [See previous post.] The founding principle of the Men’s Survival Party would be the defence of the male sex against what Bron would have speculated was a secret feminist agenda first to humiliate, then to relegate men within society, then to turn us into vassals, and finally to eliminate our sex altogether…. Warming to his theme, he would have pointed out that across much of the animal and insect kingdom the male is there for only two reasons: to impregnate the females, and to fight and kill inferior males so that the genetic stock of the species is continuously improved. He would have explained that with the godless techniques of IVF, artificial insemination and genetic engineering, there would soon be no need for actual men at all; and quoted as evidence of this mis-andrist plot to create a man-free world the radical American feminist Valerie Solanas: ‘The male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.’ He would easily have dismissed the objection that we all have perfectly pleasant and reasonable feminist friends who couldn’t possibly be involved in a conspiracy to wipe men from the planet. ‘They are, in Lenin’s sense, Useful Idiots,’ he would have explained. ‘Unaware of the feminist ultras’ secret agenda, they have become unwitting accomplices in a campaign that is more sinister than they know: nothing less than gendercide. They see the beginning but they do not see the end of the journey.’

Would the po-faced culture we now live in have tolerated Bron, or understood his delicate balance between seriousness and comedy? I cannot say. But there have been days recently when an Auberon Waugh in our midst could have turned scowls into smiles. How I miss him.

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Ethiopia Explicated: Waugh and Wakanda

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In an article posted on the news website Taki’s Magazine, journalist and blogger Steve Sailer offers what seems a good summary history of Ethiopia. Perhaps central to his explanation of why an ancient Christian civilization and monarchy survived in the midst of an area that was conquered by alien Moslem and European nations is its geography. According to Sailer:

Ethiopia is at a pleasant altitude. The current capital, Addis Ababa, is at 7,700 feet elevation. It’s average high temperature ranges from 69 degrees during the July rainy season to merely 77 in March. While most of hot sub-Saharan Africa was beset by infectious diseases that kept the population low and widely dispersed, Ethiopia’s climate allowed more intensive settlement, more like a Middle Eastern land. It attracted Arab settlers from climatically similar Yemen across the Red Sea. Ethiopia had an ancient written Semitic language and impressive churches hewn from solid rock. In 1896, Emperor Menelik II defeated the invading Italians, the only long-term defeat Africans imposed on Europeans in a test of arms in the 19th century.

Sailer also quotes Evelyn Waugh on the unique qualities of Ethiopia that Waugh uncovered in his informal researches prior to his 1930 trip as a correspondent covering the coronation of Haile Selassie:

Like some other isolated high-altitude nations such as Tibet, Yemen, and Bolivia, Ethiopia remains a land of a certain eccentric charm, most famously depicted in the writings of Evelyn Waugh. He recounted his first discussion of visiting Abyssinia in 1930:

“Further information was contributed from less reliable sources; that the Abyssinian Church had canonized Pontius Pilate, and consecrated their bishops by spitting on their heads; the real heir to the throne was hidden in the mountains, fettered with chains of solid gold;… [We] looked up the royal family in the Almanack de Gotha and traced their descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; we found a history which began: ‘The first certain knowledge which we have of Ethiopian history is when Cush the son of Ham [sic] ascended the throne immediately after the Deluge.’… Everything I heard added to the glamour of this astonishing country.”

Sailer’s article is entitled “The Real Wakanda” which is the name of the mythical kingdom described in the Marvel comic book and recent film Black Panther. The Waugh quote is from the opening chapter of Waugh’s 1931 travel book Remote People. The quoted conclusions are based not on Waugh’s actual findings but rather on the fanciful understandings of Ethiopia he collected from his own countrymen before he departed from England. In the original version the name of Cush’s father is left blank, and in the excerpted 1946 version (When the Going Was Good) the phrase relating to his lineage is wholly deleted. What source Mr Sailer may be quoting is a mystery.

Another blogger picks up from Sailer’s article and posts one of his own that traces in more detail the historic or mythical links between the fictional Wakanda and the actual Ethiopia. This is James J O’Meara on the weblog counter-currents.com. His article opens with a portion of Sailer’s Waugh quotation and is entitled “From Barbados to Black Panther: Will Afrofuturism Beat Archeofuturism?”

Meanwhile, the South China Morning Post carries a story by Adam Nebbs about the reopening of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway line to regular passenger service. This line was described by Waugh in both his fiction and nonfiction accounts of Abyssinia in the 1930s:

The new Chinese-built railway linking the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, with Djibouti, on Africa’s eastern coast, has been moving cargo since 2016, but started carrying passengers only last month. Train travel website The Man in Seat 61 already carries several first-hand passenger reports in place, with detailed and sometimes quite alarming feedback, which makes for interesting reading even if you have no plans or desire to make the trip. The new railway line follows the same route as the old Ethio-Djibouti Railways, which was built by the French in the early 20th century. British journalist Evelyn Waugh used it a number of times in the 1930s during his travel-writing period, and his experiences are recorded both in Remote People (1931) – described with some justification by publisher Penguin as “perhaps the funniest travel book ever written” – and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), and fictionalised in Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop(1938).

 

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