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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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.

 

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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.

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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)

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