Next Witness: Call Captain Grimes

Posted on February 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Alex Renton recently wrote a book about pederasty in British prep schools and public schools called Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class. He has now made a documentary about the same subject which aired on ITV Monday, 19 February 2018 and is now available online on itvPlayer. (A UK internet connection is required.) This is “Boarding Schools: The Secret Shame: Exposure.” An article about the background of both the book and the documentary appeared in a recent issue of The Sunday Times: “A conspiracy of silence: Alex Renton on sexual abuse at top British boarding schools.”

The article recounts Renton’s own experience with a pederast at his prep school Ashdown House in the 1970s. His researches among former students at his own and other schools in the private sector turned up numerous similar incidents. Such occurrences are also reported in the public sector but these are typically concluded with legal action against the perp. In the private sector, however, Renton demonstrates that in most cases, the pederast in question was, if confronted, punished by, at most, a dismissal and rarely faced criminal charges. In many cases they simply took up positions at another school. That conclusion is, perhaps not surprisingly, buttressed by a citation to Evelyn Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall. According to Renton:

Evelyn Waugh, who had been both boarding schoolboy and teacher, based one of his greatest comic characters, the prep schoolmaster Captain Grimes of Decline and Fall, on a serial child molester. Waugh declares elsewhere that “pederasts” were normal in schools. “Never did me any harm,” public-school chaps will say, even today, as they recount their formative experiences with fumblers and groomers. (The women — and perhaps 20% of my postbag comes from female former boarders — are rather more reflective.)

Renton’s mention of the reference “elsewhere” by Waugh to boarding school pederasts probably comes from A Little Learning (CWEW 19, pp. 191-92). Although not mentioned by Renton, the recent BBC TV adaptation of Waugh’s novel made an adjustment in the script of the TV version that is relevant to Renton’s subject. The only evidence of Grimes’ sexual preferences in the film relates to his having it off in a garden shed with the adult chauffeur of one of the parents on visiting day. He is caught in flagrante by the headmaster and is told he must leave. It is clear from Grimes’ discussions with Paul Pennyfeather that this has happened before at previous schools where he taught, but, unlike in the novel, no schoolboy incidents are hinted at or mentioned in the TV film. It could be that this change in the story was influenced by Renton’s campaign. Boarding school abuse of students may no longer be a laughing matter as it was in the 1920s.

According to Renton’s research, the boarding school child abuses peaked in the 1960s-1980s and have abated in recent years. The reasons for their relative acceptance in previous years continue, however, to have some resonance today at some levels of society:

Many parents would accept the cover-up, convinced by the school that it would be better for all if police attention and scandalous court cases were avoided. Though one, whose son was abused at Gordonstoun’s junior school, Aberlour House, told me three years ago he felt the school had “hoodwinked” him with its promise that, if he agreed police were kept away, the teacher in question would never work in a school again. Of course, without going to the authorities there was no way the school could guarantee that. Deep in the ethos of many parents of boarding school pupils was the notion that some misery was a good thing for a child, and that learning to cope with life’s unpleasantnesses was best achieved by experiencing a lot of them, early on. This has played out in some shocking ways.

One of these shocking outcomes was illustrated in the ITV documentary. Robin Lindsay, headmaster and owner of the Sherborne Prep, feeder school for the public school attended by Arthur Waugh and his son Alec, had repeatedly been accused of child abuse. Gill Donnell, the Dorset Police Superintendent who investigated the accusations in 1993, was interviewed by Alex Renton on TV. She recalled speaking with parents of allegedly abused children who refused to allow them to be interviewed by the police investigators. Donnell says that in many cases the parents made clear that they were not prepared to risk scandal by cooperating with the law enforcement agencies if that were to jeopardize their child’s chances for entrance to the “required public school”. Renton concluded and Donnell agreed that, to those parents, the children’s futures were more important than their present suffering. Lindsay was forced to resign in 1998 (one year before his planned retirement) after an administrative tribunal recommended that he be barred from teaching, but he never faced police charges for his alleged repeated offenses.

 

Share
Posted in A Little Learning, Adaptations, Decline and Fall, Newspapers, Television, Television Programs | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Next Witness: Call Captain Grimes

North London Stage Production to Feature Evelyn Waugh

Posted on February 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

 The Highgate, North London, theatre Upstairs at the Gatehouse has announced the premiere of a new play called Happy Warriors that will feature Evelyn Waugh as one of the principal characters. The script is by James Hugh Macdonald and is cryptically described in the theatre’s announcement:

1943. War rages in Europe. Evelyn Waugh, Randolph Churchill and a belligerent housekeeper are billeted together in a Yugoslav farmhouse. What could possibly go right?

The production will run from 28 March to 22 April. Booking details are available here.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Evelyn Waugh, London, Theater, World War II | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Waugh at 60: BBC 1964 Monitor Interview Available Online

Posted on February 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A link has become available to the 1964 TV broadcast of the BBC’s Monitor interview of Evelyn Waugh by novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. The link is to the BBC Archives via Facebook (don’t ask me how that works or how long it will last) and contains the first half of the interview. Whether the second half will become available via the same routing is not indicated. The posted portion is good quality audio and video for the standards of the early 1960s. The background of how the interview was arranged was included in an earlier post, the relevant parts of which are copied and updated below.

Novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard was the last person to conduct a broadcast interview of Evelyn Waugh. This was for the BBC Monitor documentary series and was transmitted in February 1964. According to her memoirs, Waugh was willing to do a second TV interview after having appeared on BBC’s Face-to-Face series in June 1960. This time around, however, he wanted to write the questions himself and wished the interviewer to be either his friend Christopher Sykes or a woman who was familiar with his books. In the end, Howard got the nod (Slipstream: A Memoir, 351-52). A transcript of the interview is available in Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, vol. 19, A Little Learning (2017), Appendix F, pp. 575 ff.

Howard says that there were two afternoon filming sessions in the BBC’s London studios. This was necessary, she explains, to produce enough material for a one-hour broadcast, although the final result, as it survives in the BBC archives, is approximately 20 minutes, probably a segment of a longer program. Prior to the recording sessions, Howard met for lunch with Waugh and the director, Christopher Burstall, to whom Waugh condescendingly explained that “one used one’s knives and forks beginning from the outside.” She asked some of the questions from Waugh’s list, which she considered very “run-of-the-mill,” but managed to slip in a few of her own. During the filming, “Waugh was still playing games. During each interval when they reloaded the camera he asked things like, ‘When is Miss Howard going to take off all her clothes?’” She was also asked to amuse Waugh during the intervals and, when she explained her lack of a formal education, he “seemed to enjoy [it], or at least he remained benign throughout.” When she asked whether he preferred to be anxious or bored, he replied “Oh, bored every time is the answer.”

The Monitor interview is much less lively and spontaneous than the earlier one on Face-To-Face in which Waugh was forced to ad lib and came off brilliantly. Waugh also appears to have aged considerably in the few years between the interviews. He referred to his 1964 performance as “a dreary exhibition I made of myself on the television.” (The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 61)

Share
Posted in A Little Learning, Complete Works, Evelyn Waugh, Interviews, Letters, Television Programs | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh at 60: BBC 1964 Monitor Interview Available Online

Evelyn Waugh’s Ash Wednesday in New Orleans

Posted on February 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

On the occasion of the first day of Lent (or Ash Wednesday) in the Western Christian church, the Jesuit journal America has reprinted a 1955 article about its association with the carnival known in the French speaking world as Mardi Gras and celebrated to much acclaim in the city of New Orleans. This was observed last week on 14 February. The America article was by John Hazard Wildman and stated in part:

And so it is good to stand on Canal Street in New Orleans and watch the Carnival parades go by. And it is good to know that this all got started because New Orleans was and is a Catholic city. 
 Sometimes, [Mardi Gras events] can be a busman’s holiday—as when, for instance, I, an English professor, went down to escape from “all that” and found that the night’s subject was “The Plays of Shakespeare.” Sometimes, you seem to have seen it all before. 
 But Evelyn Waugh noticed (as many have before and since) the doors of the Jesuit church just off Canal on Baronne Street and the crowds that go through them on Ash Wednesday morning. He wrote (as no one else could) how Carnival and Ash Wednesday establish the long extent of men’s joys in this world and their definite, impassable limit. And certainly Catholics, who should be in the very best sense of the term realists, should be aware of the legitimate joys of this world which go far beyond the joys of Carnival and yet of which Carnival itself is a paradoxically noisy-humble part.

Waugh was in New Orleans for Ash Wednesday in 1949 (2nd March) as a stop on his lecture tour of the Eastern United States. He wrote about the religious observance of the day in his article for Life magazine entitled “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church” where he described “one of the most moving sights of my tour”:

Ash Wednesday; the warm rain falling in streets unsightly with the draggled survivals of carnival. The Roosevelt Hotel overflowing with crapulous tourists planning their return journeys. How many of them knew anything about Lent? But across the way the Jesuit church was teeming with life all day long; a continuous dense crowd of all colours and conditions moving up to the altar rails and returning with their foreheads signed with ash. And the old grim message was being repeated over each penitent: “Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” (EAR, p. 382).

Waugh delivered his lecture the following day on the subject “Three Catholic Writers: G K Chesterton, Ronald Knox and Graham Greene” at the PochĂ© Theatre on Canal Street sponsored by Loyola University.

Meanwhile, a Roman Catholic website (The Rad Trad) has cited Waugh in a reposted 2013 article about the influence of Pope Pius XII on Pope Paul VI. This is in the context of the recent canonizations of Paul XXIII and JohnPaul II as well as consideration of imminent sainthood for Paul VI. Others have suggested why not include Pius XII given his influence on Paul VI. The blogger warns:

readers of a traditionalist bent 
 to remember why [Pius XII’s] canonization should be opposed: because of what he actually did during his pontificate, not because of what secular media mindlessly repeating the accusation of Rolf Hochhuth merely think he did. At the time of his death Pius XII made the Church more vulnerable to the world and to poor leadership than any pope since Leo X.

 The blogger cited Waugh’s position on this point from his earlier post:

Lastly there is the liturgical question. Pope Paul [VI] stated explicitly in his bull Missale Romanum, which introduced the new ordinary of the Mass to the Roman rite of the Church, that this new praxis was the culmination of a renewal process which began under Pius XII. Given Montini’s [Paul VI] daily first hand knowledge of Papa Pacelli [Pius XII], one would be hard pressed to dispute this claim. Novelist Evelyn Waugh once wrote “many of the innovations, which many of us find so obnoxious, were introduced by Pius XII.” Waugh’s tone aside, he hits the “nail on the head” here. Evening Masses, vernacular Masses, people muddling through spoken responses, the new Holy Week, and other novelties came about with official approval from Pope Pius. He certainly was not a fan of other novel practices, like the lay offertory procession—which he condemned in Mediator Dei, but he did very little to stop other innovations such as Mass versus populum.

The quote is from a 1964 letter Waugh wrote to the editor of the Catholic Herald opposing further liberalization following John XXIII’s death and the election of Paul VI. His point was to remind the “progressives” not to categorize the liberalizations he and others found so “obnoxious” as products of “the Johannine era” but to recognize that they started with Pius XII. There seems to be some irony intended, since these same “progressives” could be expected to be opponents of the legacy of Pius XII. Or perhaps irony should not be inferred when one is discussing religious matters. EAR, p. 529.

 

Share
Posted in Catholicism, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Evelyn Waugh’s Ash Wednesday in New Orleans

Satirical Novel to be Adapted for TV

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

ITV has commissioned the adaptation for TV of J G Farrell’s 1978 novel The Singapore Grip. This is promised by online entertainment news magazine Deadline Hollywood to be of interest to Waugh fans. The adaptation will be by Christopher Hampton and the production by Mammoth Screen. Both have been involved in similar successful ventures: for example, Hampton in Ian McEwen’s Atonement and Mammoth in Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End.

Echoes of Waugh are mentioned by Christopher Hampton in the ITV’s Press Release. These are faintly audible to me. I recall reading the book when it was published and even rereading it a few years later. It was the last in Farrell’s Empire Trilogy which also included Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur, and I am a sucker for series novels. What stands out about The Singapore Grip was that it was very funny. It deals with the British expats living in Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion and is reminiscent of Waugh’s descriptions of that milieu in some of his novels (eg, Black Mischief and Officers and Gentlemen) as well as those of William Boyd and Anthony Burgess. I can’t say that I enjoyed the other two books in the trilogy; Krishnapur lacked the satire and comedy of The Singapore Grip and as a result I never tried Troubles. Perhaps this was a mistake because Wikipedia describes Troubles as a “comic yet melancholy tale”, and Charles Sturridge (director of the Granada Brideshead TV series) adapted it for television in 1988. All three books are currently in print from New York Review Books and Acorn TV has released a DVD of Troubles.

Singapore was Farrell’s last book, as he died by accidental drowning shortly after its publication at the age of 44. Salman Rushdie is quoted as saying that “Had he not sadly died so young, there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary.” He is probably referring to the trilogy, although Farrelll had also written several other novels before that. The ITV adaptation is scheduled for production later this year. Whether a North American network has joined in the production isn’t mentioned in the Deadline article.

UPDATE (12 February 2018): The source of the Waugh connection is revealed in the ITV Press Release, and this along with a few other modifications were made in the text.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Black Mischief, Newspapers, Officers and Gentlemen, Television | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Satirical Novel to be Adapted for TV

Dornford Yates Revival?

Posted on February 11, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Dornford Yates (the pen name of Cecil Wm. Mercer, 1885-1960) is a writer who thrived in the interwar period but who has never enjoyed a revival. He is usually linked with thriller writers of the period such as John Buchan, Sapper and Edgar Wallace. But their works and reputations remain better known. His career is reviewed in an article on the literary internet site Lion & Unicorn. This is by Alwyn Turner and is entitled “Imperial Fiction: Lower Than Vermin.” Turner makes the point that Yates wrote of an idealized upper class society that has now fallen out of favor. He was also openly anti-socialist and reflected this in his fiction. The same could be said of writers such as P G Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh up to a point. But as explained by Turner, Yates:

…  had a problem that his work was set in a recognizable here and now, not in an escapist paradise. P.G. Wodehouse might jokingly title a novel Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (1954), but that was taken as fantasy fun, to be enjoyed in a sense of jokiness; Yates, on the other hand, seemed genuinely attached to that same feudal spirit…There’s also the lack of humour: the characters in the Berry books, in particular, are always roaring with laughter at each other, but there are precious few jokes for the reader. There’s also the fact that it took his publishers so long to bring out mass-market paperback editions of the books. And the sometimes rococo prose style that was dated even at the time. Then there’s the politics
Yates was a deeply conservative writer and had never had any time for the Left. The first page of Blind Corner (1927) introduces us to his hero Richard Chandos just as he’s being sent down from Oxford for beating up communists (he treated them ‘as many thought they deserved’). There’s never a shred of doubt in any of the books that the social order is as it should be, that it suits everyone really rather well, whatever their estate.

Waugh also depicted the upper classes in his writings and yearned to be accepted by them. But that didn’t stop him from satirizing them in his books and turning them into objects of comedy. Moreover, Waugh also hated the left and lost no opportunity in poking fun at them. But he doesn’t preach about them. Even his favorite target Tito was usually laughed off by being described as a woman, and Parsnip and Pimpernell were derided without being excoriated.

Turner does get around to Waugh near the end of his essay. He is here discussing one of Yates’ late novels Lower Than Vermin (1950) where he considers how the lives of an aristocratic family on an English country estate are wrecked by the lower orders:

Like Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited (1945), Yates is using the image of the great country estate to chart (and to lament) the changes in British society – and I don’t think a comparison between the two novels is to Yates’s discredit. He’s aiming at an epic, almost mythic expression of loss, and for the most part he achieves it. Most importantly, and again like Waugh, this is not polemic but art; one doesn’t have to share Yates’s political perspective to feel the power of the piece, just as one doesn’t have to be Catholic to appreciate Brideshead.

Turner seems to think it might be time for another effort at a Dornford Yates revival. One was attempted in the late 1970s and 1980s but came to nothing. A biography was published along with reprints of some of the more popular books. I recall buying some but couldn’t get on with them. As recently as 2015, literary scholar Kate Macdonald included him in her list of the Top 10 conservative novels in the Guardian with this recommendation for his 1931 novel Adele and Company:

The elegant, witty, masterful Pleydell family of White Ladies in Hampshire have their jewels stolen in Paris. Knowing that the French police are simply useless, they set out to detect and recover Daphne’s emerald bracelets and Adùle’s pearls themselves. The best introduction to all of Dornford Yates’s specialities: the thriller, the riotously funny comedy of the upper classes, and the novel of high-speed car chases. Beware of the high-octane snobbery, but it’s brilliantly written. (See previous post.)

As Turner says, Yates’ books are usually available in the second hand market at reasonable prices. He may well find a market among today’s Brexiteers. Turner mentions that one of his most ardent admirers is Michael Gove, who has this to say:

You can never have enough P.G. Wodehouse, Dornford Yates or John Buchan in the house. No matter how ill or upset you are, they’ll cheer you up.

 

Share
Posted in Articles, Brideshead Revisited | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Dornford Yates Revival?

Weekend Roundup: Somerset in the News

Posted on February 10, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Most of our Waugh news in this week’s roundup come from or relates to the county of Somerset:

An Australian radio program on the ABC network announces the upcoming TV series on the career of politician Jeremy Thorpe. This is based on the book A Very English Scandal by John Preston who is interviewed by ABC. He explains how Thorpe’s career was more or less ended by a 1970s scandal, the flames of which had been fanned by Auberon Waugh. Thorpe, who represented a North Devon constituency, had hired a shambolic hitman to kill a former homosexual lover (Norman Scott) who was blackmailing Thorpe  (homosexuality at the time being illegal). The plot failed when the hitman misfired and killed Scott’s dog Rinka and then scarpered. The dog’s suspicious death was reported by an “obscure family-owned Somerset newspaper with about 5,000 subscribers” one of whom was Auberon Waugh who lived at Combe Florey and wrote for Private Eye. He saw the story and smelled a bigger one. It began with an entry in his Private Eye Diary for 15 December 1975:

West Somerset is buzzing with rumours of a most unsavoury description following reports in the West Somerset Free Press about an incident which occurred recently on Exmoor. Mr Norman Scott…who claims to be a good friend of Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal statesman, was found by an AA patrolman weeping beside the body of Rinka, his Great Dane bitch, which had been shot in the head.

Auberon began pursuing Thorpe in his Eye column and even went so far as to run against him on the ticket of the Dog Lovers’ Party. Given his importance to the story, Auberon will surely be portrayed in the TV series to be broadcast later this year on BBC. The role of Thorpe will be played by Hugh Grant and that of Norman Scott by Ben Whishaw (who played Sebastian Flyte in the 2008 Miramax film of Brideshead Revisited.) The ABC report does not say who would play the part of Auberon Waugh nor does the cast list on IMDB mention anyone assigned to that role. Maybe we will have to be satisfied with a mention.

Another politician with a Somerset connection is also in the news. This is Jacob Rees-Mogg a Euro-skeptic representing a Somerset constituency who is receiving a lot of attention as a potential minister or even Prime Minister in a Conservative Party Shake-Up over Brexit. Writing in the weekly paper The New European, Michael White doesn’t think so. He dismisses Rees-Mogg as a “faux aristo with plenty of principles and views–but no policies” and “a barmaid’s idea of a gentleman,” citing an Old Etonian who explains:

“True blue bloods were always rather lovable yobs, like mongrels…Would-be grandees accumulated behavioural traits they had read about in PG Wodehouse. Jacob doesn’t get noblesse oblige, an ethical system destroyed by Thatcher. His clothes are issued by a theatrical costumer, his children’s names a pale imitation of Evelyn Waugh.”

According to Wikipedia, the youngest Rees-Mogg was born last summer and is named Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg. Each of other five children have either 5 or 6 names to their credit (counting Rees-Mogg as two). The Waughs’ youngest child (their seventh) was named Michael Septimus.

Meanwhile, the Somerset Live news service has reported that the owner of the Farmers Arms public house in Combe Florey (site of Evelyn Waugh’s final residence and gravesite) has received planning permission to rebuild a new pub on the site of the one that burned down last year. See previous post. The new structure will have enhanced restaurant and bar facilities and improved access for disabled patrons but will otherwise replicate the ambience and exterior of its former incarnation. Presumably this means that it will have a thatched roof.

Finally, blogger Patrick Kurp on his weblog Ancedotal Evidence has posted this about Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox, who lived his final years at the other end of Someret in Mells where he is buried in the churchyard:

In 2009 I read Monsignor Ronald Knox (1959), Evelyn Waugh’s biography of his friend … Waugh quotes a 1901 letter Knox writes to his sister Ethel:

“I am dying to know how your photograph of me gracefully propped like a belated noctivagous reveller against the corrugated lithological specimen in the garden of our delightful country residence so exquisitely named in the sonorous nomenclature of our somewhat verbose Cymric neighbours Glan Gwynnant, has come out in printing.”

Knox was thirteen when he wrote this, and I had to look up “noctivagous.” Waugh tells us Knox’s letters from Eton were “often humorous in intent, alternating a parody of nursery speech and an extravagant pedantry.” While still a boy, his language could be downright Firbankian. That’s why I copied the sentence into a commonplace book.

Patrick recalled the word after finding a reference to an opossum species of that name. This research was inspired when his dog brought home several opossums of a different species.

Share
Posted in Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Combe Florey, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Radio Programs, Ronald Knox, Waugh Family | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Weekend Roundup: Somerset in the News

Decline & Fall: DVD Extra Features

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Acorn TV DVD of the BBC’s Decline and Fall adaptation has 15 minutes of extra features. This is for sale in North America. These include interviews with several of the cast and crew falling into 3 tightly edited 5-minute segments: Satire, On Set and Adaptation. Among those interviewed are the director Guillem Morales and the screenwriter James Wood as well as the principal cast members. There are also a “photo gallery” and subtitles. Here are some highlights which may be of interest:

In the first segment, Eva Longoria who plays Margot stresses that, although the story is a comedy, because it is satire, the roles must be played seriously, not as slapstick. David Suchet who plays Dr Fagan notes that he was most looking forward to the Welsh Silver Band scene which has the funniest line in the book. Unfortunately, although he doesn’t mention this, that scene does not come across on the screen because much of the comedy depends on Waugh’s satirical written description of the band and the Welsh. Suchet gets a laugh out of the line, however.

In segment 2, Morales explains that because the comedy depends on the characters and their dialogue, other aspects of the film needed to be realistic. This included the settings which were in many cases locations. But in the case of the King’s Thursday country house interiors, where most of Episode 2 is filmed, the sets were constructed in the studio. James Wood sees the three episodes as taking place in three distinct worlds, having in mind the school, the country house and the prison.

Finally, with respect to the adaptation, Jack Whitehall thinks the script adheres very closely to Waugh’s book. James Wood noted that this was only the third Waugh novel to be adapted for TV; the others he mentions are the 1981 Granada TV Brideshead Revisited and the Channel 4’s Sword of Honour adapted by William Boyd. (He seems to be unaware of the BBC’s 1960s B&W multi-episode TV adaptation of Sword of Honour and the London Weekend’s 1987 two-hour adaptation of Scoop for ITV and PBS, also written by William Boyd). Both Wood and Morales made the point that because so many readers know and love the book, they had to be careful to meet their expectations. There was little need to update the story since the targets of Waugh’s satire such as college rowdies, incompetent prison wardens and ineffective schoolmasters are still around today.

Unfortunately, there is no running commentary of the cast and crew to accompany the  film such as was made for the anniversary edition of Granada’s Brideshead Revisited. Those were popular in the early days of DVDs but have perhaps fallen out of fashion. Acorn Media is also selling the DVD in the UK and this seems to include the same extra features.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Decline and Fall, Interviews, Television | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Decline & Fall: DVD Extra Features

Mr Trump Puts Out More Flags

Posted on February 8, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Washington Post earlier this week revealed that Donald Trump was planning a huge military parade like those previously mounted following the victorious end of a war. In response, one of their columnists (Dana Milbank) suggests what Trump needs is a good old fashioned Roman triumph. His column opens with this refrence to Evelyn Waugh:

The Post’s scoop about President Trump’s plans for a grand military parade in Washington brings to mind Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire about England’s upper crust in the early days of World War II, “Put Out More Flags,” named after a Chinese proverb:

“A man getting drunk at a farewell party should strike a musical tone, in order to strengthen his spirit . . . and a drunk military man should order gallons and put out more flags in order to increase his military splendor.”

In his novel’s epigraph, Waugh followed this quotation from Lin Yutang’s Importance of Living with another quote from the same source:

“A little injustice in the heart can be drowned by wine; but a great injustice in the world can be drowned only by the sword.”

What Waugh means by this second quote is not entirely clear. This might suggest that, as in the novel, after the flags are put out and the wine has been drunk, the swords are drawn. Since Mr Trump does not consume wine (at least not in the quantities foreseen by the Chinese epigramist), this Chinese proverb could have troubling implications.

After describing in great satiric detail how Mr Trump would incorporate into his parade all the elements of the classical Roman triumph, Mr Milbank concludes:

There’s only one problem with this plan, as I see it. In the Roman triumph, a slave would ride with the general in his chariot and repeatedly whisper into his ear, “Memento mori”: Remember, you are mortal. For our parading president, this could be a dealbreaker.

Share
Posted in Articles, Humo(u)r, Newspapers, Put Out More Flags | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Mr Trump Puts Out More Flags

CĂ©line, Muriel Spark and Lloyd Cole

Posted on February 7, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Frederic Raphael is still best known for the TV adaptation of his own 1976 novel The Glittering Prizes, which is often compared with Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the popular and critical success of Raphael’s 1976 TV series paved the way for the production of the Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead a few years later. Raphael has now written a review in the TLS (“Aryan ghetto of one”) of a new book about the works of the French novelist known as CĂ©line. This is the pseudonym of Dr Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, probably the most well-known French novelist who also collaborated with the Nazis.  The book under review is published in French and is entitled CĂ©line, La Race , Le Juif, (“CĂ©line, Race, and the Jew”) but Raphael’s review seems to range well beyond its pages. CĂ©line’s sympathies for what Raphael calls “Aryanism” actually predated the Nazi occupation. Raphael discusses CĂ©line’s first novel, published in 1932 and entitled Voyage au bout de la nuit (“Travel at the end of the night”), and it is in that discussion that an Evelyn Waugh character is mentioned:

CĂ©line’s jagged masterpiece reads like the grumpy shtick of a paranoid one-man bandsman. His disgust with human beings appears to have originated in the carnage of the Great War, in which the young Louis-Ferdinand was a teenage combatant. The brave, foolhardy colonel who literally loses his head in the early pages of Voyage has something in common with Evelyn Waugh’s biffing Brigadier Ritchie-Hook; but his creator lacks any faith in the patriotic cause, still less in the Judaeo-Christian God. Nothing on earth was worth dying or living for and there was nothing else. Bardamu’s anti-pilgrim’s progress takes him to war, to colonial Africa, to 1920s New York, then to medical practice in a slummy Parisian banlieue. The slough of despond was always his likeliest return address.

Without knowing more about CĂ©line’s character, it would be foolhardy to take issue with this comparison. But Ritchie-Hook was not known to be a racist; he was more of an equal opportunity biffer so long as there was an enemy available. And it was not Ritchie-Hook who loses head in Men at Arms but an enemy soldier he encounters in Africa (probably serving with the Vichy French troops stationed where Ritchie-Hook had landed with Guy’s patrol). Ritchie-Hook dies in Unconditional Surrender, but this is from enemy fire in Yugoslavia, not decapitation. Thanks to Milena Borden for sending a link to this review.

Meanwhile, the Guardian has cited Waugh (and Graham Greene) as contributing to their decision to name Muriel Spark’s Momento Mori to be their reading group book of the month:

Originally published in 1959, Memento Mori was Spark’s third novel. It was described by the author’s famous champions Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh respectively as a “funny and macabre book [that] has delighted me as much as any novel that I have read since the war”, and a “brilliant and singularly gruesome achievement”. Gruesome, because of its constant refrain “remember you must die” and because of the painful and unexpected ways some of its characters meet the inevitable.

The quoted language does not seem to come from a review by Waugh (he reviewed other books by Spark but there is no record of a review of this one) but may be taken from a blurb he provided for the cover. He did recommend this book in a letter to Ann Fleming.

Finally, the Lancashire Post reports an interview of a musician who has returned to the UK after many years in the USA. This is Lloyd Cole, who made his name by organizing a band called the “Commotions” while at the University of Glasgow. They were quite prominent throughout the 1980s. Before that, in college at Runshaw in Lancashire, Cole recalls the creation of another less successful band:

“Me and Trevor Morris and Carl Bateson set-up a band, we were called ‘Vile Bodies’ but I don’t think we actually ever played out, maybe three or four engagements lined-up, where we were going to play at parties. I don’t think any came off. “I don’t think I’d come across Evelyn Waugh or even knew who she [sic] was when Trevor came up with the name.”

Perhaps it’s just as well that group never got up and running.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Men at Arms, Newspapers, Television, Unconditional Surrender/The End of the Battle, Vile Bodies, World War II | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on CĂ©line, Muriel Spark and Lloyd Cole