Journalism and Dystopia: Two Foreign Book Articles

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Works by Evelyn Waugh feature prominently in articles on two foreign language weblogs. In Spanish, the books blog entitled “Regina ExLibris” vigorously recommends Waugh’s novel Scoop (in Spanish Noticia Bomba!):

…in Noticia Bomba! Waugh distills all his wit and talent for satire with a hilarious story that pulverizes the sound of the press and the war correspondents… and he knows about the subject, because he was a war correspondent. But here he raises a wonderful comedy of entanglements, in which a tabloid mistakenly sends to cover a war in a remote country a columnist of botanical issues. It’s hilarious, really. AY, YOU HAVE TO READ IT!

In Italian, Luca Fumagalli has posted on Radio Spada an article about Roman Catholic dystopian novels (“Dark prophecies and terrible futures in Catholic fiction”). These include well known examples such as R H Benson’s The Lord of the World (1907) and The Dawn of All (1911) as well as G K Chesterton’s The Flying Inn (1914, in Italian, L’osteria volante). Also mentioned are the Father Elijah novels by Canadian Michael D. O’Brien published between 1996 and 2015 and Park: A Fantastic Story (1932) by poet John Gray. In addition, he discusses two dystopian works by Evelyn Waugh:

The same satirical and grotesque coloring [on display in these other books] comes back in two dystopian tales written by Evelyn Waugh. In the story “Out Of Depth” (1933). he recalls how a middle-aged American, Rip Van Winkle, after having met a mysterious magician, is thrown forward in time by five centuries. He finds himself in a London reduced to ruins, where the vegetation has now taken over and the population is forced to live in straw huts and mud, practicing agriculture and fishing. The dominant class consists of a group of black Catholics, barricaded on a military base. After waking up from what seemed like a dream, Van Winkle decides to return to the faith he had given up in his youth. Love Among the Ruins, published as a book in 1953, instead refers to Brave New World by Huxley. The novella, much more complex than the previous one, however, deals only marginally with religious issues, narrating the misadventures of a former pyromaniac who wanders in a dystopian and fake egalitarian Britain.

The translation is by Google with edits. Both of Waugh’s dystopian tales are available in The Complete Stories.

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Prendergast’s Wig and Brexit

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A reader of the Financial Times has written to the paper equating Brexit to the wig of Waugh’s character Mr Prendergast in his novel Decline and Fall. Here’s the explanation from Geoff Scargill of Stockport:

… All the boys know it is a wig. “[Prendy] knew from the start that it was a mistake but once they had seen it, it was too late to go back. They make all sorts of jokes about it.” Brexit is our wig. After months of talks and posturing about independence we can see that we are thin on top. Everyone abroad knows it and is making jokes about us. But it is too late to go back.

The letter is headed on the FT’s website with a photo of actor Vincent Franklin who masterfully portrayed Prendy in the recent BBC TV adaptation.

UPDATED (30 January 2018): Last sentence added.

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Waugh Presentation at Goa Conference

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The third international conference on the culture, language and literature of Goa was convened last week in India and is reported in several Indian news services. The primary subject was the theatre in Goa, and a presentation was also made on Evelyn Waugh’s 1953 essay “Goa: The Home of a Saint”. This involved a reading of the article in Portuguese. The essay was based on Waugh’s trip to Goa in late 1952-early 1953 where he observed Christmas and the 400th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis Xavier who is buried in a Goan church. The original article was published in December 1953 in both the Month and Esquire magazines. It is collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews.

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Oxfordshire Pub to Host Waugh Event

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Abingdon Arms in Beckley, Oxfordshire, will tonight host an appearance of Prof Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh’s biographer and co-executive editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project. He will discuss Waugh’s association with the pub which is where he wrote some of his earliest works and visited with friends such as Alastair Graham. See previous post. The event is scheduled for 7pm today, 28 January 2018. Beckley is just north of Oxford between Headington and Horton-cum-Studley. Details available here.

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Weekend Roundup of Waviana

Posted on January 27, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

An Athens art exhibit has been titled “The Unseen Hook” (Το αόρατο αγκίστρι). The name is taken from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. As explained in an article on a Greek website:

The “invisible hook” is what binds us to the past – memories, emotions, secrets and canceled expectations, everything that has shaped us and shaped us, everything we loved and betrayed, hurt and hurt us. Starting with this phrase, artists Andreas Vouras and Alexandros Maganiotis meet and present a common visual proposition, content and multiple readings. A proposition in the core of which lies the notions of memory, experience and identity.

Translation is by Google. The credit for the quoted language should go, however, to G K Chesterton. It is taken from a Father Brown story (“The Queer Feet”) which is recalled in Waugh’s novel by Cordelia.

‘…I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk – I mean the bad evening. “Father Brown” said something like “I caught him” (the thief) “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”‘ (Penguin, p. 212)

The exhibit opens on 2 February at the Alma Gallery in the Kolonaki district of Athens. See a video tour of the exhibit here.

Another reference to Brideshead appeared in the National Catholic Register, linking it to Milton’s Paradise Lost:

When it comes to literature, there are plenty of examples in which right and wrong portrayed subtly have led to confusion.  Evelyn Waugh’s masterful and very Catholic novel, Brideshead Revisited, is adored by numerous secular critics only because they fail to see its Catholicity.  Waugh, writing from the point of view of a narrator who is (for most of the story) not Catholic, is too subtle for his advocacy of the Faith to be grasped by many readers.  A still more grave example of this phenomenon is Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Milton asserts rather grandly near the beginning of his biblical epic that he intends “to justify the ways of God to man,” an intention which even a minute scholarly knowledge of Milton’s life and opinions supports.  But over the centuries since Milton wrote, scores if not hundreds of readers have felt (in the words of William Blake) that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”  Milton has been rolling in his grave ever since… For every person misled by Waugh’s novels or Milton’s poetry, there are perhaps two people whose faith is strengthened by their work—perhaps greatly strengthened…

The Financial Times reviews a new novel (The Adulterants) by Joe Dunthorne (his third) about a free lance journalist’s picaresque quest to find a larger flat in east London. This is compared to a Waugh novel:

Dunthorne gleefully sends Ray on a trajectory similar to that of Paul Pennyfeather in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928). Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse for our roguish protagonist, things continue their downward spiral. And just as there was something baroque and cruel about the way Waugh pitched Pennyfeather into ever rougher seas, Dunthorne is similarly cold-blooded in his treatment of Ray, a figure you simultaneously feel empathy for, yet wouldn’t mind seeing a little sense knocked into. …As with Pennyfeather’s fall from grace, Ray’s steady disintegration is oddly pleasurable to read. Dunthorne — also a published poet — has a humorous, well-observed precision to his writing …

A quote from Scoop opens an article in the online journal of the Stategic Culture Foundation, which is devoted to the practice of journalism. This is entitled “Nobody Cares About ‘The News'” and is written by Patrick Armstrong:

In his mordant novel Scoop, Evelyn Waugh has one of his characters explain what “The News” is:

‘News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.’

There is a great deal of wisdom in this little remark that I will attempt to unpack. It also, in my opinion, succinctly explains why we, who believe ourselves to be so brilliantly analytical and persuasive on sites like this one, have so little success in changing the opinions of our friends and neighbours (or awakening them as we might prefer to say).

Finally, another reference to Scoop turns up in the interview of a new novelist by the student newspaper (Palatinate) of Durham University where he was formerly a student and the paper’s editor. This is Matthew Richardson whose novel, entitled My Name is Nobody, is an espionage thriller currently being adapted for TV. When asked about his literary inspirations, he answered:

I did my dissertation at Durham on Evelyn Waugh so I really enjoy his work. He has a great novel, Scoop, which is a satire piece on the journalistic world … I have a huge respect for Dickens and Shakespeare. Graham Green, John le Carré … I especially like the authors that manage to bridge the gap between entertainment and high art. I prefer Dickens to Henry James.

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Precocious Waughs Reviewed in Italian Press

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Aridea Fezzi Price writing in Il Giornale, an Italian language newspaper published in Milan, reviews Precocious Waughs. This is one of the first volumes published in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project and the first of 12 to be included in the Personal Writings series, edited by Alexander Waugh. After briefly describing the other three CWEW volumes thus far published, “randomly”so far as Price can see, the focus centers on Precocious Waughs because it contains mostly content that has not been previously published. According to Price:

… The most incisive and less amiable traits of Waugh’s personality are evident from an early age, drawings and caricatures illustrate vigorously the first ungrammatical writings of the diary, but his aesthetic sense is already so developed that he spontaneously criticizes himself for writing “a mediocre phrase” . The sloppy writing was always unacceptable to him.

These are the pages that best tell the… life of English public schools day by day, the behaviors and hierarchies, the role of sport, the comrades, in a purely English institution. From the pages of 1912-14, at the age of twelve, Waugh emerges already full of life, energetic, curious, sure of himself, ready to defend what he considers right and to oppose with his fists or bad irony what he perceives to be incorrect. We already have the material that he will rework in his novels from A Handful of Dust to Brideshead Revisited. But his sharp eye never ceases to review and criticize these journals even if many years later he will consider them “naive, trite and pretentious like all the diaries of adolescence”.

Rereading them later while writing his autobiography, he concluded, as Alexander Waugh cites now in the introduction, a lucid and ruthless verdict: “If what I wrote about myself is true, I was cold and heartless, arrogant, insensitive, presumptuous, a rogue. I would like to believe that in this private diary I disguised a more generous nature, that I knew the absurdity of considering the evidence, page after page, of my underlying malevolence”. The success of his first novels never calmed an unhappiness that for scholars is the basis of his conversion to Catholicism. Letters and diaries were always important for Evelyn, a way of life.

The first correspondence in this volume is written at four years, in pencil in block letters on a postcard to his brother Alec with whom he will always have a difficult relationship, as with his father, a severe publisher. He began to write the diary in 1911 at the age of seven, and, with rare interruptions, he will keep it until the year before his death, on Easter 1966…Writing his diary with cynicism gave him obvious pleasure. It was not by chance that he identified himself with Samuel Butler … Like Samuel Butler, mordant and ironic, Evelyn always knew how to look deep inside, and it was this Butlerian detachment from the outside world and from himself, which made him vehemently lift his pen against excessive emotions, “the old ones with their visions, the young with their dreams”. Precocious Waugh, already all in a nurshell.

The translation is by Google with a few edits and deletions. No attempt has been made to conform the English language quotations to the original.

 

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Pinfold Redux: Muriel Spark Centenary

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Articles are appearing in advance of the centenary of novelist Muriel Spark which will be observed next Thursday (1 February). Scottish novelist Allan Massie has written an article in the i Newspaper in which he recalls her career and his introduction to it:

I was 18 when I first read The Comforters. It delighted me then and still delights me now, 60 years on. More importantly it delighted Evelyn Waugh. Sent a proof copy by the publisher, he replied: “The first half, up to the motor accident, is brilliant. The second half rather diffuse. The mechanics of the hallucination are well managed. These particularly interested me as I am muself engaged on a similar subject.” That was The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Waugh’s account of when he himself heard accusing voices, and as he put it, went off his head.

Waugh later wrote a friend: “Have you seen The Comforters by Mrs Muriel Spark–an admirable study of hallucinations? I am told she was very dotty and got over it.”  To Ann Fleming he wrote: I have been sent proofs of a very clever first novel by a lady named Muriel Sparks [sic]. The theme is a Catholic novelist suffering from hallucinations, hearing voices–very disconcerting. It will appear quite soon. I am sure people will think it is by me. Please contradict such assertions (Letters, pp. 474, 494). See earlier posts. As it turned out, both books were published in 1957, The Comforters in February and Pinfold in July.

Martin Stannard has also written a memoir recounting his writing of Spark’s biography. It was not an entirely happy experience. In his account, which appears in the current issue of The Tablet, he also refers to her delusions on which The Comforters was based:

We dealt with some delicate subjects, particularly her hallucinations in 1954. I had to tell her that Neville and June Braybrooke remembered Muriel insisting that T.S. Eliot was their window cleaner, spying on them, and threatening Muriel with coded messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk. This was tricky because the three months of her delusions exactly corresponded with the period of her instruction in Catholicism. All seemed to go well until we returned to the question of who, exactly, were her close friends…

Stannard, who also wrote the standard two-volume biography of Evelyn Waugh,  experienced difficulties with writing the book on Spark. She was as eccentric as Waugh in many ways, but unlike him, she was alive. She began by cooperating with Stannard but quickly shifted to setting up roadblocks. What he started in 1992 was not published until 2009 after she had died.

The centenary will be marked by a Symposium next week at the University of Glasgow. One of the papers raises interesting questions for Waugh fans. This is entitled “Spark: Hearing Voices and Delusion” and is scheduled for Friday, 2 February at 10am. It will amost surely relate to the story told in The Comforters to which Evelyn Waugh had repeatedly referred. The paper will be presented by Prof Patricia Waugh of Durham University. I once asked her if her family were related to that of Evelyn Waugh and, I am sorry to report, she emailed that she knew of no connection.

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Auberon Waugh and Anthony Powell

Posted on January 25, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s edition of The Spectator carries a story by Nicholas Shakespeare about his involvement in the 1990 dispute between Auberon Waugh and Anthony Powell over Auberon’s negative review of Powell’s collected literary journalism (Miscellaneous Verdicts) in the Sunday Telegraph. According to Shakespeare:

Among insults, Waugh (who maintained that his piece was merely ‘jokey’) criticised Powell for his ‘abominable English’ and likened his famous novel sequence to ‘an early upmarket soap opera’ which had enjoyed a cult among expatriate Australians.

As a result of the publication Powell resigned from the Daily Telegraph after over 30 years as the lead book reviewer.

Shakespeare explains that contrary to some commentators, this incident was not part of a plot to force Powell’s resignation and allow his replacement by a younger reviewer.  The paper had recently merged the books pages of the Daily and Sunday editions.  Powell was already the lead reviewer in the Daily and editor Max Hastings recommended to Shakespeare (now in charge of both book pages) to make Auberon Waugh lead reviewer of the Sunday.  The important Miscellaneous Verdicts review therefore fell to Auberon, but Shakespeare had no inkling of any animosity on Auberon’s part. And this despite the fact that he had recently made a a three-part film of Evelyn Waugh’s life for the BBC’s Arena series in which both Auberon and Powell appeared. Indeed, not mentioned by Shakespeare, if you read Auberon’s reviews of the last three novels in Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, they are perhaps mixed but are thoughtful and not overly negative. Two weeks before Auberon’s review of MV appeared (27 May), there was a quite positive interview of Powell in the Sunday Telegraph (13 May) by Hugh Massingberd and in the week following, another (and favorable) review (2 June) of MV by Hilary Spurling in the daily edition. Both were among Powell’s most ardent admirers. Shakespeare was on holiday in Morocco when the “shit hit the fan” (you must read the article to see why that cliché is funny in this case) and was left to sort things out when he returned, by which time Powell had already resigned.  Here’s a link to the article.

Shakespeare also recounts how this incident has continued to haunt him long after all the major players have died. His name has appeared in the indices of two books–Powell’s own Journals published in the 1990s and the recent biography of Powell by Hilary Spurling–only to have been excised from the text relating to this incident without explanation, presumably due to legal censorship. He concludes:

I wrote to Powell to apologise, but received no reply. A propitiatory bust was commissioned of him which lurked for a while on a filing cabinet. In 1991, when the titles re-separated, I handed over the Sunday’s books coverage to Miriam Gross (a [Powell] fan), and the daily’s coverage to John Coldstream. Even so, I remained curious to know what manner of man it was who could dish out pastings for half a century and yet be so affected by adverse criticism. When his Journals were published, securing him, in John Carey’s words, ‘a reputation for vanity and pomposity’, it wasn’t merely my name that I found had vanished, but my curiosity too.

 

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Andrew Marr and Ma Meyrick

Posted on January 24, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC4 is rebroadcasting Andrew Marr’s 2009 documentary series The Making of Modern Britain. Yesterday, this reached Episode 4: “Having a Ball.” This covered the 1920s, and both opened and closed with a party. Marr began by mixing a drink he called the bathwater cocktail that was featured at the Bath and Bottle Party convened in June 1928. The hosts were “Babe” Plunket Greene, Elizabeth Ponsonby, Edward Gathorne-Hardy, and Brian Howard, all at the center of the Bright Young Things. The cocktail was probably so named because it matched the color of the water in the St George’s swimming baths where the party convened.

Marr then flashes back to the beginning of the ’20s and illustrates the decade with the career of Ma Meyrick, owner of several night clubs including The 43 which appears in Waugh’s novels of the period.  She appears as Mrs Mayfield in Brideshead Revisited and the club as the “Old Hundredth” in both that novel and A Handful of Dust. She flourished thanks to bribery but was ultimately imprisoned several times by her nemesis William Joynson Hicks, then Home Secretary. She always managed to reopen and ultimately got two of her daughters educated at Roedean and married into the peerage. See previous post.

The program proceeds through the decade, with the return to the gold standard followed by the General Strike of 1926. It closes at the Bath and Bottle party in 1928 with which it began. Tom Driberg is a featured guest, at the same time covering the party for the Daily Express; another guest is Brenda Dean Paul, whose description of the party is also quoted. Marr describes the party as the beginning of the end of the Roaring Twenties, with an ominous reference to what is about to happen on Wall Street in 1929.

The episode can be viewed on BBC iPlayer for the next 4 weeks. A UK internet connection is required. While Waugh himself isn’t mentioned, many of those who are will be familiar.

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Waugh Letter to French Translator

Posted on January 23, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

London booksellers Peter Harrington have on offer a 1946 letter from Evelyn Waugh to a  translator who was interested in producing a French version of Vile Bodies. This is Jean Dauven who apparently had asked Waugh a number of questions relating to this and other books. The letter is quite long, covering 4 sides of a folded foolscap page (about 900 words). It is described in Harrington’s catalogue:

…The first part of Waugh’s letter deals with the difficulties of transposing the in-jokes from [Vile Bodies] into French, explaining that “chubb fuddler was chosen as a comic trade. Any French equivalent would serve. He is, in fact, the man who makes it his life’s work to intoxicate fish so that, when it is necessary to drain the fish pond, they can be moved without injury…”; that “Decorations” on an invitation card indicates that a member of the Royal Family is expected to be present (“would ‘personages royales’ be correct?”); that “Blast was an avant garde publication of the time… edited by Wyndham Lewis, probably forgotten by all but a dozen Englishmen.”; that kedgeree, offered to but not eaten by Adam and Nina at Doubting Hall, is “an excellent luncheon or breakfast consisting of rice, eggs & salmon or haddock”, and explaining a reference to Kipling’s poem Gunga Din, as well as recommending Lecky’s Eighteenth Century as “an excellent survey of the Wesleyan movement.” Waugh hopes that the translation “will breathe new life into a text which has become somewhat dated in the original”, but he “cannot help thinking in a book so localized & slangy there must have been other unfamiliar expressions.” Waugh welcomes further enquires but also suggests it might be easier to call on “Mrs Rodd Nancy Mitford now in Paris at 20 Rue Bonaparte who was very much a girl of that period & would I know be delighted to help you”.

Dauven took this advice but Mitford later wrote Waugh to say that they did not hit it off. After a brief family history, Waugh provides a summary of his works:

“In 1927 I published a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and in 1928 my first novel ‘Decline and Fall’ which was a success. Since then I have had no struggles for recognition & have always been unduly praised by critics… My best novel was called ‘A Handful of Dust’.”…Waugh ends with his most recent novel. “While recovering from a leg broken in parachuting (in England, no glory) I wrote a novel ‘Brideshead Revisited’ which is shortly appearing in translation in Paris (Edition Lafonte). This book is more serious than its predecessors, has annoyed most of the English critics and delighted illiterate Americas in a disconcerting way. But I like it.” He mentions that he has “no recent photograph”, so encloses “a reproduction of a portrait of me made in the year I wrote ‘Vile Bodies’… but they must make plain I am now 17 years older, fatter & uglier.”. The portrait, inscribed “Now aged 43 and much altered for the worse. E.W.” is included in the sale.

There is also a video on YouTube in which one of the bookseller’s representatives displays the letter and repeats much of what is written above. Vile Bodies was translated into French as Ces Corps vils (1947) by Louis Chantemele, which was a pen name used by Dauven. The asking price for the letter is £18,750.

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