Easter Roundup

Posted on March 30, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Jesuit journal America has an article by senior editor James T Keane entitled “The sometimes-savage perfection of Catholic parody.” In looking back over previous articles on this theme, he came up with one in 1958 where its author Joel Wells offered parodies of a simple sentence by four writers. Here’s the result for Waugh:

…The 1958 contribution was from Joel Wells, an accomplished author and the editor of The Critic, an edgy Catholic magazine out of Chicago. In “Death of a Dog,” Wells imagined how a brief news story (“ITEM: A dog was struck and killed by a car at 9:30 last night on the highway north of town, an unidentified boy reported to the police this morning.”) would be handled by four authors: Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Francois Mauriac…

How about Evelyn Waugh? Wells was savage:

“A promising petrol tanker was just settling into his sights when Lady Distraught gave one of her well-known screams and something struck the car’s right fender with a thud. “Clement Attlee!” swore His Lordship, sure that he had run up against one of those rural American types whose clothing is covered over with copper rivets and buttons, ‘that’s bound to have marred the finish’.”…

The results for Greene and Hemingway are equally amusing. Here’s a link to the article.

–The Los Angeles Review of Books has a review of Andrew Pettegree’s The Book at War. This is by Greg Barnhisel. Here’s an excerpt:

In this generous and often surprising study, Pettegree looks at how books and war intertwine from every angle imaginable: how soldiers use books and how books shape soldiers; how writers depict war, and how war created writers; how noncombatants turn to books for solace, and how these inexpensive, durable, and easily damaged objects seem to be everywhere a conflict is raging.

Although he nods to the strong 19th-century connection of war and books—Clausewitz, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the library at Sandhurst—Pettegree’s great subject is the 20th century, when mass literacy, public libraries, and a thriving publishing industry across the Western world put books everywhere, even in the trenches of World War I’s Western Front. National library associations and eventually the Red Cross ensured soldiers and prisoners of war had reading material. If World War I didn’t provide much time for relaxing reading, it did spawn authors like Siegfried Sassoon, Ernest Hemingway, and the doomed poet Wilfred Owen.

The beloved novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) was the product of the next war, as insubordinate and incompetent Royal Marines officer Evelyn Waugh received unpaid leave at its height to compose his masterpiece. As he told his commanding officer, “once an idea becomes fully formed in the author’s mind, it cannot be left unexploited without deterioration.” How the Allies could win the war with Waugh a noncombatant remains a mystery.

Here’s a link to the full review.

—The Spectator has an article by Robin Ashenden entitled “Where have the West’s liberal value’s gone?” This begins with his consideration of what those values were before they disappeared. Among them there is this:

…there was a hunger for Western culture. As a teacher I was proud, I realised, of so much of ours: the National Gallery lunchtime concerts during the Blitz, Henry Moore and his bomb-shelter drawings, Orwell’s bloody-minded willingness to speak his mind and upset all sides at once. Writers like Evelyn Waugh or John Osborne (and latterly Martin Amis) proved you didn’t have to be anything as dull as ‘likable’ to be a great writer, that you could be outrageous and even loathsome and yet be all the more readable for it.

The complete article is available at this link.

–A literary event from the US-Mexican border offers proof that things may not be as tense in that area as they may seem from constant negative news reports:

Welcome to The River Gull Journal’s First Issue Launch Party! Join us at Los Olvidados Coffee Shoppe & Gallery for an evening of celebration. Be the first to get your hands on the inaugural issue of the first student-led literature magazine at Texas A&M International University. This issue is filled with prose, poetry and stunning artwork from members of the local community. Meet our talented contributors, listen to their work first hand and get to know the talent our local literary scene has to offer. We can’t wait to see you there!

While no details are offered as to the new journal’s contents, the following item from the Q&A in the invitation may offer a hint:

Q. Is there a dress code for the event?
A. Our theme is parties in literature! We encourage all attending to dress in their best literary fashions, from the elaborate parties and balls of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
The launch party is scheduled to take place on Saturday, 6 April, 6-10pm at 309 Flores Ave, Laredo. My guess is that some one will turn up with a teddy bear.

 

–An editorial in the Bahamian newspaper The Tribune (published in Nassau) starts with this:

Many years ago when I was a student, I remember being very annoyed by a novel by Evelyn Waugh called “Black Mischief”. I was annoyed because I was of the opinion that the author used a fictional country to illustrate how he thought blacks misgoverned their countries. Now, I am angry that 50 years after Independence my country is being run by politicians who seem to have been schooled by Black Mischief…

Here’s a link.

—The Critic has posted a review of a new film by Alec Garland called Civil War. The review by Robert Hutton starts with this:

One of the jokes in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is that when it comes to the civil war in the East African state of Ishmaelia, the Daily Beast newspaper wants victories for the Patriots and defeats for the Rebels. This is more even-handed than it sounds, because both sides say they’re the Patriots. Alex Garland’s Civil War deploys a similar technique. It’s set in an America where the trivialities of a culture war have been replaced by the horrible seriousness of the shooting kind. A hectoring president given to rambling speeches is holed up in the White House having seized an unconstitutional third term, and armies from California and Texas are fighting to remove him…

 

 

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2022 Academic Papers

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Announcements of academic papers with Evelyn Waugh in their title for the calendar year 2022 are posted below. Where abstracts have been published with the title and source, these have been included:

–Guy Woodward, “Conducting his Own Campaigns: Evelyn Waugh and Propaganda”, The Review of English Studies, 2022-3, v. 73:

“This essay examines Evelyn Waugh as practitioner and critic in the field of wartime propaganda. In 1941, Waugh produced a fictitious account of a British Commando raid on German territory in North Africa for publication in Britain and the United States, an episode which reveals his skill as a propagandist, but also prompts scrutiny of his contacts with British propaganda agencies and agents and of the effect of propaganda on his writings. Waugh’s interwar fiction exhibits a sophisticated understanding of the evolving and growing power of modern propaganda, but the novels also anticipate the public relations and psychological warfare campaigns of the Second World War, specifically those carried out by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret service established in 1941 to produce and coordinate propaganda to enemy and occupied Europe. Waugh’s proximity to the PWE is suggested by a dense network of social and professional connections, and is further indicated by a series of references to the PWE and its work which I have uncovered in his fiction. Allusions to covert propaganda in Put Out More Flags and the Sword of Honour trilogy betray Waugh’s understanding of the PWE’s operations, but also provide a critique of the corrosive and unforeseen effects of information warfare waged by the secret state and offer a productive means of re-examining his much-noted anxieties regarding modernity and mid-century political change.”

–Paul McCallum, “Evelyn Waugh and the 18th Century: Satire and the Problem of Time,” The Midwest Quarterly (Pittsburgh), 2022-11, v. 64(1), pp. 74-94:

“The presence of … Enlightenment elements serves at least two main functions in Evelyn Waugh’s fiction. Most immediately, these relics serve as satirical counterpoint to the equivalents produced by the twentieth-century, an age of jazz, plastic, and Picasso. Moreover, they give Waugh’s characters and readers access to other times, other places, other present moments. They inscribe the past into the present, and in so doing establish a cultural, a civilizational continuity that in the early novels offsets the Alice-in-Wonderland-like mayhem, and in the later novels points up a condition of rapid, perhaps irreversible decline.”

–Martin Potter,”Transformations and Transfigurations:Britishness and Romanness across the epochs in Evelyn Waugh and David Jones,”  University of Bucharest Review: Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2022-2, v. XI/2009(2):

“For British twentieth-century Catholic-convert writers Evelyn Waugh and David Jones coming to terms with their place in a British identity was problematic, given the way that concepts of Britishness had been shaped with reference to Protestantism, and with an anti-Catholic slant, since the Reformation. Like other British Catholic writers they approached this difficulty creatively by looking into history and reintegrating older understandings of the culture of the island of Britain into their own sense of Britishness, understandings in which Catholicism was a formative element. In both cases their interest in early British times brought them to engage imaginatively with the phenomenon of the Roman Empire, and ideas of parallels between the Roman and British Empires, and between the Roman Empire and the Church, become important to them. Through consideration of Waugh’s novel Helena and his Sword of Honour trilogy, and David Jones’s volumes of poetic work In Parenthesis, The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments I shall discuss and compare the elements of durability and of transience in Britishness and Romanness as these writers understand them, and suggest that especially in the case of Romanness the transformation they show is also a transfiguration.”

–Naomi Milthorpe, “‘The Twilight of Language’: The Young Evelyn Waugh on’Catherine’ Mansfield,” Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, pp. 21-34.

–Victoria Bilge Yilmaz, “Evelyn Waugh and Black Mischief as a Narrative of Failure,” IBAD Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2022-8 (12), pp. 125-36:

“Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932) has been accepted as one of the satiric novels of the 20th century English literature. Being Waugh’s third novel, Black Mischief includes a high concentration of satire and criticism through which the writer expresses his ideas on colonialism and the modern man in general. The novel is about an unsuccessful attempt at establishing a country in the heart of the oriental world. Seth, the Oxford-graduate emperor of a fictional Azania, fails to establish a correlation between the English-like Azania in his aspirations with the real cannibal-oriented country and its half-naked inhabitants. This study will analyze Waugh’s Black Mischief in terms of Frantz Fanon’s essay “On National Culture” (1959). A political philosopher and an intellectual from Martinique, Frantz Fanon has become highly influential in the discourse on colonialism and post-colonialism. His writing titled “On National Culture” outlines the steps to embrace the notion of national identity and national consciousness. This study will outline to what degree Waugh’s protagonist Seth fits into Fanon’s category of an endeavor to establish national culture. The study will conclude that Seth’s failure to establish his country heavily depends on the contemporary human conditions in the psychologically devastated universe.”

–Julie Labay Morère, “‘Voices at Play’ in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters and Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold,” Etudes britannique contemporaines 2022-9, v. 30, p. 83:

“In The Comforters and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, both published in 1957, two writers, Caroline Rose and the eponymous Gilbert Pinfold, suffer from aural hallucinations, just as Spark and Waugh did. The two authors have acknowledged the surprising similarities and echoes that link their works, but few studies have actually tried to go deeper into the dialogic approach initiated by Waugh in his review of The Comforters published in The Spectator (22 February 1957). My analysis will show how the voices that haunt the characters become a central element in the artistic creation. Exploring the limits of the autobiographical genre in relation with madness, the narrative voice blends other genres, intertextual references and metafictional elements, thus intensifying the plurivocal structure of the novels and unveiling the mechanisms of the texts, prefiguring post-modern theories.”

–Carlos Sanchez Fernandez, “Evelyn Waugh and Brideshead Revisited: Sites of Memory and Tradition”, MiscelĂĄnea, Departamento de FilologĂ­a Inglesa y Alemana–Universidad de Zaragoza, 2022-o6, v. 65, pp. 87-103:

“In this article, it is my intention to analyse two theoretical notions related to space, namely Pierre Nora’s idea of the site of memory and Gaston Bachelard’s thoughts on space and the house, as applied to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). I base my analysis on the symbolic value of the English country house with regard to the interwar English aristocracy and upper classes as depicted in this novel; that is, as a site of memory. I consider the point of view of three characters: Charles Ryder, the novel’s first-person narrator, Lord Sebastian Flyte, Ryder’s intimate friend, and Lord Marchmain, Sebastian’s father, who triggers the novel’s sudden and unexpected ending through his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, his family’s creed. My conclusion links the decline of aristocratic and Christian ideals with the disappearance of communities of memory and their traditions after the Second World War.”  [Highlighting in original.]

Some of these papers may have been mentioned in previous posts where internet postings appeared at their time of publication. Anyone knowing of additional academic papers from 2022 with Waugh as a subject is invited to notify us by posting a comment.

 

 

 

 

 

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Spring Equinox Roundup

Posted on March 21, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New Criterion has posted a review of Simon Heffer’s new book on the interwar period. This is entitled Sing As We Go, and it is reviewed by Jeremy Black. The review is quite favorable and notes that Heffer’s depiction of the 1930s is much less bleak than many other studies of this period. Waugh gets a mention in the review:

The war itself was to help weaken, if not quite destroy, much of the fabric and practice of pre-war British society. Symbolically, Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) provided an account of how wartime road transport helped force through change:

“We laid the road through the trees joining it up with the main drive; unsightly but very practical; awful lot of transport comes in and out; cuts the place up, too. Look where one careless devil went smack through the box-hedge and carried away all that balustrade.”

Waugh himself is ably discussed by Heffer as part of a superb chapter, “The Twenties Roar,” which is an important as well as brilliantly observed account of society from sexuality to local government. We have the fashionable Kit-Cat Club raided in 1925 for serving drink after hours. The Prince of Wales had been there the previous night. The 43 Club and Chez Victor also feature in an account of Waugh’s earlier world of Bright Young Things.

The book is Heffer’s fourth and final volume discussing the history of Britain from the Victorian era until WWII (1838-1939). It was issued in the UK in September, and it seems to be for sale in the USA (at least it is listed for sale on Amazon). The first two volumes were published in the US by Pegasus Books, but I cannot find a US release date for this one on their internet site. The New Criterion’s reviewer refers to the UK edition (Hutchison/Heinemann), and that may be the one that Amazon.com is selling.

–The Daily Telegraph’s Parliamentary Sketchwriter, Madeline Grant, has written a column expressing her concern about the capabilities of the newly appointed actor who will take the role of James Bond in future film series. She calls up a similar reaction Evelyn Waugh expressed in a comparable situation:

Is that a puff of white smoke from the Eon Productions chimney? Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the star of Kick-Ass and noughties classic Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, has reportedly received a firm offer to be the next James Bond…

What I most want to see in a new Bond is someone with a deep appreciation of the franchise. Recent outings have unpicked the series to deadening effect. Charlie Higson’s Bond remake novel recasts the character as a dreary centrist dad who frets about diversity and his gut biome. Cary Fukunaga, who directed the cinematic sludge known as No Time to Die, branded Bond a rapist. Dr No Means No, apparently.

Witnessing a beloved series in the hands of people with nothing but contempt for it recalls Evelyn Waugh’s dismissal of Stephen Spender: “To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.” It is like when people who clearly loathe classical art are hired to curate iconic national exhibitions.

So forget the pecs and eye-watering stunts, here’s the multi-million pound question – does the new Bond actually like Bond?

Here’s a link.

–Writing in The Times newspaper Ben Dowell has an article in the TV section entitled “5 of the best Eighties TV dramas”. Top of the list is the Granada/ITV production Brideshead Revisited.

–A guide to G K Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man has recently been published. Several commentators have noted Evelyn Waugh’s interest in what many see as Chesterton’s masterpiece. Here’s the notice in the Chesterton Society’s website:

Among the many masterpieces of G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man is his crowning achievement. It was the book that set a young atheist named C.S. Lewis on the path toward Christianity. Evelyn Waugh called it “a permanent monument” that “needs no elucidation.” And its lively prose and compelling defense of Christianity have dazzled readers ever since.

But a little elucidation, it turns out, is needed. Chesterton’s presentation of the story of humanity and religion is filled with obscure literary, historical, mythological, philosophical, and theological references – most of which are largely lost on today’s readers. And Chesterton’s paradoxical and apparently wandering style proves, at times, disorienting to newcomers.

In this groundbreaking guide – the first of its kind – one of the world’s leading authorities on Chesterton walks readers through the entirety of this great apologist’s text. Complete with an introduction, footnotes, and running commentary, Dale Ahlquist’s tour through Chesterton’s classic will draw new readers into his literary world – and old readers even deeper into his literary genius.

Beautiful hardcover edition with a dust jacket.

The quote is taken from Waugh 1961 review of the biography of Chesterton by Gary Willis that appeared in the National Review and is reprinted in EAR 558, 560. The new book is available from Amazon.com at this link.

 

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Auction Sale of Two Waugh Letters

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

An online auction is offering for sale a 1945 letter from Evelyn Waugh to a Conservative MP. This relates to the policies of the British Government in Yugoslavia during and after WWII. Here is the seller’s listing info as posted on the internet:

Autograph Letter Signed, to Member of Parliament Thomas Cecil Russell Moore, reporting that he [Waugh] wrote an anonymous letter to a British newspaper and gave information to the editor of another concerning what he learned in Yugoslavia [while serving in the British Army], accusing the Conservative Government of supporting Communist revolution, accusing Conservative MPs Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden of betraying the allies, and offering to meet to share whatever information he had about the situation in Yugoslavia. 2 pages, 4to, personal stationery; minor staining from staple at upper left corner, horizontal fold, faint scattered soiling. (SFC)
Stinchcombe, 5 November 1945

“. . . My experience of Jugo-Slavia was limited to Croatia which I left in March of this year & from which I have had no news since. On my return to this country I wrote two letters to the ‘Times’ newspaper signed ‘A British soldier lately in Jugo-Slavia’; I also put all the information I had at the disposal of the editor of ‘The Tablet’ who has made effective use of it. (I do not know whether you ever see that valuable journal.) I also made a full report on the question of the Catholic Church in Croatia to the Foreign Office, which I believe has been fairly circulated. In an interview with Lord Burnham I was expressly forbidden to show this report to any private individuals.

“I do not know what a private member of Parliament,–or indeed a Minister–can do about the grave crimes that are being committed in Jugo-Slavia. A British Conservative Government armed and officially recognized the Communist revolution. A Conservative Government condoned the annexation of Lithuania . . . . When that was done I sequestered myself from all political allegiance and rejoice at the party’s swift humiliation. I do not think Mr. [Ernest] Bevin would have dared, or wishes, to betray our friends as Mr. Churchill & Mr. Eden did. . . .”

The offering by Liveauctioneers.com (Lot 0168) also includes correspondence to the same MP from other parties relating to this issue and copies of the MP’s responses to Waugh. This item was being sold by a NY auction house, and it is noted that the bidding closed on 7 March 2024. Whether or not it was sold is unclear.  For details see this link.

Also on offer separately is a 1957 letter from Waugh to a University of Leicester academic relating to Waugh’s work on the biography of Ronald Knox. Here is the description of that:

A.L.S., Evelyn Waugh, one page, 4to, Combe Florey House, near Taunton, 18th September n.y. (annotated 1957 in pencil in another hand), to [H. P. R.] Finburg. Waugh states that it was good of his correspondent to have written and remarks ‘All that you tell me is of great interest. I need all the help I can get if I am to make a book about Ronnie [i.e. Ronald Knox] which will not rile his multitude of friends’, further commenting ‘I think that tho’ he was entirely without ambition he was a little hurt by the ingratitude of official England. If he had been an atheist he would have had had (sic) the O[rder of] M[erit].’ Waugh concludes his letter by asking if Kibworth is located near to his correspondent and if they have ever visited the vicarage, explaining ‘I should be interested to know if it is at all like the description in ‘Reminiscences of an Octogenarian’ (Bishop Knox) nowadays’. A letter of good association and interesting content. VG

H. P. R. Finburg (1900-1974) English historian, typographer and publisher who was head of the Department of English Local History at Leicester University.

Kibworth was the village near Leicester where Ronald Knox was born. It seems that Waugh was looking for information about it when he wrote to Prof. Finburg. There is no mention of the professor in Waugh’s preface where he acknowledges other contributors to his research. This is being sold by an auction house located in Spain and bidding is open until 14 March 2024. For details of bidding on the letter re Knox (Lot 1180) see this link.

 

 

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Late Winter Roundup

Posted on March 9, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has an article by Bernard Richards in which he considers how difficult it can be to translate idiomatic English words and phrases into French. He also notes Evelyn Waugh had struggled with the same problem:

…English idioms are often very picturesque, and although French has picturesque idioms it doesn’t have as many as English, and this becomes apparent once one attempts translation. French versions are often a bit of a mouthful, so it is hardly surprising that “information fallacieuse” makes heavy weather (temps lourd?) against “fake news”. Trying to speak French, one finds it difficult to come up with the alliterative vividness of “dead as a doornail”, “dead as a dodo”, “down the drain”, “fit as a fiddle”, “down in the dumps”, “dilly dally” and “not on your nelly”. Just the other day on Good Morning Britain, Richard Madeley wondered what “private eye”, might be in French – but it’s not “oeil privĂŠ“, just the more humdrum “dĂŠtective privĂŠ“.

It’s not a new problem. Back in the 1870s, in Henry James’s The American, the character Christopher Newman has just arrived in Paris, and wants to learn French from Monsieur Nioche: “Let’s begin! The coffee’s ripping hot. How do you say that in French?” It was obvious to James’s readers that “dĂŠchirant” simply would not do. Another example: Evelyn Waugh explaining to Nancy Mitford a difficulty in translating the English of Vile Bodies into French: “When I couldn’t cope with shy-making he lost interest”. It was rendered as “intimidant” – but that’s clearly inadequate. In a letter to Mitford of Aug 5 1955, Waugh translated the English phrase “hard cheese” as “dur parmesan“. He must have known that was not remotely French. Incidentally, he has “hard cheese” in Vile Bodies. It’s probably safest to stay away from any attempt to translate “gets on my wick”. You can imagine David Suchet’s Poirot saying, “Hastings, what is this wick that is being got on?”…

–Dominic Green writing in the Wall Street Journal reviews a current exhibit at the British Museum that may be of interest. This is called “Legion: Life in the Roman Army.” Green describes it as depicting Roman military service through a soldier’s eyes as he wrote home about it. Green manages to find a link to Evelyn Waugh in the exhibit. One of the military bases the Roman soldier describes in his letters is Alexandria where, as Green recalls, Evelyn Waugh was stationed in WWII. This was described in Waugh’s novel Sword of Honour. And like the Roman soldier, Waugh noted that securing assignments to such interesting billets often depended on family and connections. The exhibit continues until 23 June. Information is available at this link.

–In another issue of the Wall Street Journal  Lance Morrow has an opinion article entitled “How We Think About Hell”. The first example is the Pope’s view that “hell is empty.” He moves on to Evelyn Waugh who described hell in his novel A Handful of Dust. This was a remote region of Brazil where Tony Last was condemned to reread Dickens endlessly to an illiterate madman.

—The Times has an interview of Sir Nicholas Mostyn, a recently retired senior judge. This was conducted  by Catherine Baski. After a discussion of his legal career where he became one of the leading experts on family law, Sir Nicholas described his childhood:

…Born in 1957 in Hitchin in Hertfordshire — not Lagos, as Wikipedia suggests — Mostyn was taken to Nigeria at the age of four, following the postings of his father who worked for British American Tobacco. His father’s career also took him to Venezuela and El Salvador, but the future judge went to prep school in Suffolk, where he suggests the mistreatment of children would be prosecuted today. “It was quite the worst school imaginable,” says Mostyn, adding that it makes the establishment in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall look “positively civilised”…

–Recent internet reports suggest that the BBC’s 2017 adaptation of Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall can now be streamed on Netflix. Some of these are attributed to actor Jack Whitehall:

Jack Whitehall has taken to social media to tell fans that one of his old BBC shows Decline and Fall is available to stream on Netflix. While Jack Whitehall is best known for his role as teacher Alfie Wickers in Bad Education, he has also starred as an expelled Oxford student in a comedy series that might be considered an underrated gem. Originally airing in 2017, the series follows Jack’s character Paul Pennyfeather, who is unjustly expelled from Oxford University and is sent to teach at a public school. It is based on the 1928 novel of the same name by Evelyn Waugh. What’s more, it holds a 91% approval rating on aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with the critic consensus reading: “Funny, smart, and well-acted across the board, Decline and Fall brings its classic source material’s key themes to life while subtly updating the story for modern viewers.”

Our reader Dave Lull and I checked TV streaming schedules of Netflix in the US and could find no offering of the series (although it is available on other US streaming services such as Acorn and Amazon Prime). We have concluded that Whitehall must be referring to the availability of the series on the UK version of Netflix which we were unable to access from the US. Thanks to Dave for his contribution.

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Rhode Island Library Commemorates Waugh’s 1949 American Visit

Posted on March 8, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The St Thomas More Library of the Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island has mounted an exhibit commemorating Waugh’s visit to the school 75 years ago in March 1949. This was part of his lecture tour of Roman Catholic schools and universities in that year. Here’s a link to the notice posted on the internet. The written notice on the exhibit reads:

On March 20, 1949, the English writer Evelyn Waugh and his wife Laura, spent the night on our campus in the Manor House. This year marks the 75th anniversary of that visit which benefitted the Portsmouth Priory School.

Commemorative t-shirts were made in 2012 for the Evelyn Waugh Conference held in Baltimore, one of which is in the P. A. S. Library Archives. The t-shirts in this case are copies which feature Waugh’s self-portrait on the front, along with a tour  style listing of lecture dates on the reverse, showing Portsmouth/Providence as the final stop.

The visit to what is now called the Portsmouth Abbey School and the lecture which was delivered in nearby Providence were described in an article about the lecture tour published in Evelyn Waugh Studies. Here is the relevant text:

“Providence/Newport, Portsmouth Priory School, 20 March 1949. This lecture was sponsored by Portsmouth Priory School (now Portsmouth Abbey School), a Roman Catholic preparatory school near Newport, Rhode Island. It was announced in the Providence Journal on 20 March (“What’s Going On?” 2) and reported in the Providence Evening Bulletin on 21 March under a photo taken at the lecture (“Waugh Lauds Catholic Influence on British Writers,” 4). On 23 March, the lecture was reported on the front page of The Cowl, the student newspaper of Providence College. Waugh spoke on Sunday evening at Hope High School Auditorium, a public school on the east side of Providence. Dom Damian Kearney, OSB, came to Portsmouth Priory shortly afterward and gives this account of their visit:

The Waughs were met at the train in Providence by one of the monks, who was surprised to find Mrs. Waugh carrying the suitcase and offered to take it from her, only to be told by the author that she always carried the luggage, or words to that effect. When he was introduced at the lecture [by the Rev. Joseph Bracq, editor of the diocesan newspaper], his name was mispronounced, sounding something like “wawf”, which must have been disconcerting, but Mr. Waugh took it in good stride. Mr. Waugh stayed in guest quarters in the Manor House, which served as the main building for administration, guest facilities and reception rooms. [The Assistant Headmaster Francis Brady and his wife] presided at tea given in one of the reception rooms on Sundays and special occasions such as the Waugh visit. At the tea Mr. Waugh was on his best behavior and was most cordial; a number of the monks were present as well as several lay faculty. Also present was Mrs. Waugh.

Waugh’s visit is also mentioned in the memoirs of Sally Ryder Brady (A Box of Darkness, 2011). The Brady family, later to become her in-laws, were much taken with the Flyte family of Brideshead and “knew the book almost as well as they knew their Gospels.” One of the Brady children, Ellen, recalls meeting the Waughs:

As I remember (and I could be wrong, since I was fifteen at the time) the school wasn’t in session, which might explain why there isn’t any record of his visit. I clearly remember having breakfast at the high table on a Sunday morning with Dom Aelred Wall, … the then headmaster, Evelyn Waugh, and, I think, Mrs. Waugh and nobody else. The great man was surprisingly charmless. He carried a huge stick and smoked a huge stinky cigar and conversed rather rudely. Mrs. Waugh was quite plain and didn’t talk much. I clearly remember him walking away through the empty school dining room with his ridiculous stick, which he seemed to need for walking.

Waugh was also entertained in Newport by a family connected to his English Catholic friends. Edward Joseph Eyre was married to Pelline (nĂŠe Acton, 1906-1998), granddaughter of Lord Acton (1834-1902), the famous historian and Liberal politician. Waugh’s friend Daphne Acton, the patron of Ronald Knox, was Pelline Eyre’s sister-in-law. Waugh later visited Daphne Acton and her husband John in Southern Rhodesia in 1959, as described in A Tourist in Africa (1960).” [Footnotes omitted.]

After the Providence lecture, the Waughs went back to New York where he had already lectured twice. They returned to England from New York, arriving in Southampton on 31 March 1949.

UPDATE: Paragraph added to library notice.

 

 

 

 

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Editing Merton

Posted on March 5, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The Jesuit magazine America has posted a brief retrospective article describing Robert Giroux’s early professional coup with his 1948 publication of Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. This is written by James T Keane. Evelyn Waugh played a part in the story. Here are the opening paragraphs of Keane’s article:

He edited Flannery O’Connor. Virginia Woolf, too. Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac (for a while) and Walker Percy. Donald Barthelme. William Saroyan. Elizabeth Bishop. Katherine Anne Porter. Oh, and T.S. Eliot and John Berryman and Robert Lowell, too. And he had a rather distinguished cadre of external readers for his authors’ manuscripts. When a young Trappist monk and former college chum sent Robert Giroux his memoir in 1946, Giroux asked a few literary friends for advice. Who were they? Graham Greene, Claire Booth Luce, Archbishop Fulton Sheen and Evelyn Waugh.

That’s a lot of literary firepower, and I haven’t even named the monk in question yet: Thomas Merton. The book would become The Seven Storey Mountain, published in Great Britain (with Waugh as the editor!) as Elected Silence. It would remain on The New York Times’s best-seller list for over a year (The Times originally refused to include Mountain on the grounds that it was a “religious book”) and has sold more than four million copies since…

America also helpfully reposts its 1988 memoir by Giroux in which he recounts in somewhat greater detail Waugh’s participation in the project. Here is a relevant excerpt:

…there remained minor editorial polishing throughout—cutting out excess verbiage, repetitions, longueurs or dull patches. I must say that Merton was very responsive and cooperative about all these emendations, which were too numerous and unimportant to record. Writing to Sister ThĂŠrèse about these cuts—and if it were not for her scholarly interest in the matter, I would have been unable to throw much light on the editing since I kept no notes— Merton told her: “Really, the Mountain did need to be cut. The length was impossible….The editor at Harcourt was, is, my old friend Bob Giroux who comes into the book for a line somewhere. He did a very good job….I am perfectly satisfied to see anything go out of a book….When you hear your words read aloud in a refectory, it makes you wish you had never written a word. Fortunately, the Mountain was not read here. I would never have had the virtue to face such an ordeal!”

One irony is that I persuaded Merton to add five-and-one-half printed pages to the text. I had sent an advance galley proof to my friend, Professor Francis X. Connolly of Fordham University, who liked the book enormously. Merton had just published an article in Commonweal about America discovering the contemplative life, and Dr. Connolly thought this would fill one of the gaps in the book—the relevance of Merton’s vocation to the modern world. Merton agreed, and it occupies pages 414-19.

This interpolation also occupies the same number of pages in the London edition of The Seven Storey Mountain, which was edited by no less a light than Evelyn Waugh. I had sent him galley proofs, hoping for a quote but not really expecting one, and he wrote at once: “I regard this as a book which may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience. No one can afford to neglect this clear account of a complex religious process.” (I had also sent galleys to Graham Greene, Clare Boothe Luce and Fulton Sheen, all of whom responded in equally superlative terms. It was at this point that Harcourt, Brace increased the first printing from 5,000 copies to 12,500.)

If Sister Thérèse felt that my editing was too severe— and I’m afraid she did—I wonder what she thought of Evelyn Waugh’s. To begin with, he changed the title, the image of the mountain of purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which Merton considered “literally and physically accurate” for his book. Waugh found an English source in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “Elected silence, sing to me/And beat upon my whorlèd ear,” and his edition was brought out by Hollis and Carter in 1949 under the title, Elected Silence. In his preface, Waugh stated, “Nothing has been cut out except certain passages which seemed to be of purely local interest.” For example, following Merton’s moving account of the wartime death of his only brother Paul, whose bomber crashed in the North Sea, I ran Merton’s fine elegy in verse. Waugh threw it out. But surely it has more than local (by which Waugh of course meant American) interest. He also cut out parts of the Columbia College section, including Merton’s account of our first meeting at the Columbia Review. The English edition comes to 375 printed pages, 50 less than the American, a reduction of nearly 10 percent.

When I met Waugh in New York, on his way to Hollywood and later to Gethsemani, he told me how thoroughly he had edited Merton’s text. “Yes,” I agreed, “you edited me out of it.” “Really? I never noticed that,” he replied. At one point he described J. F. Powers, whose work he admired, as “a Southern writer.” When I said “Midwestern writer” would be more correct, he said he regarded Illinois as a Southern state. I was also amused by Merton’s report of Waugh’s visit to the monastery. He told Tom he found Hollywood dull; he had expected to find glamour and jewels and parades of elephants but found only businessmen doing business. He said the only real entertainment in Hollywood was at the Forest Lawn Cemetery, which he visited every day. He did not send Merton a copy of The Loved One because “it is not proper material for your refectory.”…

Sister Therese was a nun living in Milwaukee to whom Merton entrusted management of the details of the book’s editing and publication. Apparently he did not have an agent, so she appears to have fulfilled some of the functions an agent would have performed. Waugh met her in person later in the following year when he lectured to the students at Marquette University. For the record, J F Powers, a young Roman Catholic writer with whom Waugh also met on his 1949 North American lecture tour, was living in St Paul, Minnesota, not Illinois, when Waugh met him there. Try as one might, one cannot think of Minnesota as a “Southern” state.

 

 

 

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Another Look at Penguin Hardbacks

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

A 2011 article from The London Magazine by Paul Williamson recently became available on the internet. This is his review of the first 8 volumes of Evelyn Waugh’s books as published by Penguin Books in that year. Penguin at that time published the complete list of Waugh’s books in a uniform hardback edition. Williamson explains this at the conclusion of the TLM article:

…Penguin and Waugh have an association stretching back to the 1930s when Penguin published cheap reprints of several of Waugh’s early novels. These fell out of print during the Second World War, but in 1950 Penguin proposed to reprint all of Waugh’s fiction, in paperback, with a view to reaching a mass audience. To celebrate George Bernard Shaw’s ninetieth birthday Allen Lane had commissioned a reprint of ten of Shaw’s works in a print run of a hundred thousand. Works by H. G. Wells and Agatha Christie were issued in comparable numbers, and a year after the Penguin sets appeared none of these authors had sold less than a million books. Waugh was advised by his agent, A. D. Peters, to accept the deal and in 1951 Penguin published ten of Waugh’s novels in the mass-market format…

At the time the 10 Penguin volumes of Waugh’s fiction were issued simultaneously in 1951, 6 volumes had already been issued in Penguin paperbacks previously, starting with Decline and Fall in 1937 (Penguin No. 75). The 1951 batch included first paperback Penguin editions of The Loved One, Brideshead Revisited, When the Going Was Good, and, in a single volume, Work Suspended and Other Stories/Scott-King’s Modern Europe. Williamson’s article continues:

…By contrast, Penguin’s latest [i.e. 2011] edition, in the Penguin Classics imprint, is hardback and rather expensive – a set of books-as-objects of relatively austere design, intended to provide an aesthetically pleasing alternative to e-books. The set will look handsome on a bookcase, but there are details that could have been improved upon. For a luxury edition, the paper could perhaps have been a fraction heavier and greater care could occasionally have been taken with the inter-word spacing, which is sometimes extremely tight. (The map in my copy of Ninety-Two Days is extremely blurred, but that could be a one-off problem.) A greater drawback is that the texts are presented without introductions, textual notes or any other scholarly apparatus. For the moment one can mostly still read the novels without such aids, but Rossetti would certainly benefit from an introduction placing Waugh’s study in the context of ideas about art that were current in the 1920s. Similarly, although the travel books are undoubtedly an enjoyable read, that enjoyment could only be enhanced by the addition of explanatory notes.

Waugh seems to have been quite pleased during his lifetime with Penguin’s production and sale of his UK paperback editions. There was some suggestion at the time of the 2011 hardback reprint that Penguin were a bit put out by the choice of OUP rather than Penguin as the publishers of Waugh’s complete works and that this set of Penguin hardbacks was their response. I believe that, at about the same time, Penguin published a similar  hardback edition of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, so their decision to print this edition of Waugh’s books may have been a bit more complicated than was suggested. In any event, there seems to have been no later reprint of the original 2011 format. The hardback Penguin volumes were not sold widely in the US market, although several of the 2011 volumes appear to have been remaindered here. Penguin recently, however, reissued six of the novels in a uniform hardback edition with colorful uniform dust-jackets. See previous post. These appear to have used the printed texts of the 2011 editions, although they differ from those earlier printings in that they each have introductions by Waugh scholars (as Williamson had suggested in his 2011 review). As was the previous hardback run, these hardbacks are available for sale in the UK but not the US market.

The complete text of Williamson’s article (‘Evelyn Waugh’s First Eight Books’), including his discussions of the content of the books, is available at this link from The London Magazine website.

 

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Roundup: Letter, Exhibit and Two Recommendations

Posted on February 24, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–A letter from Evelyn Waugh is on offer on the internet. The description and text appear in this posting by the seller Rooke Books:

An autographed signed letter from Evelyn Waugh to Eileen Mayo, in the original envelope.

Envelope is postmarked the 30th March 1936, addressed to ‘Miss Eileen Mayo, 8 Eton Road, London N.W.3’.

Letter reads as, ‘Dear Miss Mayo, thank you so much for your letter. I love your picture – but alas I am not allowing myself the luxury of keeping it. I have bought it as a present for my young god-son, Jonathan Guinness. I think it is so important for him to have really good + unaffected pictures round him. Yours sincerely, Evelyn Waugh’.

Dame Eileen Mayo was an artist and designer who worked in many mediums, including tapestry, woodcuts, lithographs, and silk screening. She studied at the Slade School, and designed a platypus stamp for Australia, and six stamps of moths and fish for New Zealand.

The godson Waugh refers to in this letter is Jonathan Bryan Guinness, the 3rd Baron Moyne, who was born in 1930. He was the son of Bryan Guinness and Diana Mitford; this letter was written just seven months before Diana married Oswald Mosley. Waugh had been infatuated with Diana, dedicating his novel ‘Vile Bodies’ to her, and claiming that her beauty “ran through the room like a peal of bells”. The pair were fast friends, moving in the same literary circles, with Waugh living with the Guinnessess for extending periods in 1929 and 1930; however, there was a rupture in their friendship in 1930, with the pair becoming more distant and meeting infrequently. Waugh was likewise a good friend of Nancy.

Letter is written on letter headed paper from the Queen Hotel, Chester. The Chester Queen Hotel opened in 1860, and also saw Charles Dickens and Cecil Rhodes among its guests.

Here’s a link to the post which includes sales details and a photo of the letter and envelope.

–Novelist Philip Hensher writing in The Spectator reviews the catalogue of a new exhibit at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The exhibit is called Write, Cut, Rewrite. Hensher’s article opens with this:

The early stages of a literary work are often of immense interest. It is perhaps a rather tawdry kind of interest, like paparazzi shots of a Hollywood starlet taking the bins out before she’s put her make-up on. Of course it’s extraordinary to think that some of the most famous characters, events and lines in literature weren’t as we now know them but had to be struggled towards. Sometimes these efforts have the anachronistic but unavoidable sense of somebody getting it wrong.

Textual bibliographers have carefully classified the different steps a work takes from manuscript to first edition and subsequent versions. Perhaps we could go further in search of a writer’s progress. There are the inchoate thoughts, remote from any conscious intention – perhaps a sound, a mood, a phrase, a voice, a movement. Then some words that might merit being written down, even though no coherence is discernible. (But writers work in such different ways that none of this is universal.) Soon we start to have more consecutive writing – a few lines, or even a scene. A draft follows, which could be modified in any number of ways. At some point, eyes other than the author’s fall on the manuscript. Suggestions are made, changes might even be enforced, and agreement is reached on a final manuscript, which is sent to the printer and out to an audience.

Some or none of these stages may be preserved for the curious investigator. Occasionally we have everything, from the first jottings to the last authorised text. In many cases, however, writers have destroyed all other versions apart from the one first published, either by conscious decision or just custom. Sometimes even in these instances we still have signs of the author’s thoughts and decisions, because the work appeared in a subsequent rethought form. The differences between the first and second versions of The Dunciad and Brideshead Revisited tell us an enormous amount about the way Alexander Pope and Evelyn Waugh thought and worked…

Whether any of Waugh’s draft versions are displayed in the exhibit is not discussed in Hensher’s article or in the Bodleian’s announcement:

…The exhibition offers a peek behind the scenes into the writers’ workshops, drawing upon the Bodleian Libraries’ unparalleled collection of modern manuscripts from the 18th century to today, to reveal little-known literary revelations. It features abandoned works, such as Jane Austen’s The Watsons, and cases of censorship, such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It also touches on the revisions and rewritings of famous books, offering a unique chance to look over the shoulder of literary greats at the moment of creation.

Highlights include discarded ideas, fundamental changes, deletions, additions, notes and scribbles from great authors such as Mary and Percy Shelley, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Samuel Beckett, and John le CarrĂŠ.

I am not aware of any Bodleian holdings of Waugh’s drafts or edits unless there may be some edited texts from his very early efforts as a student journalist.

—The Times newspaper has complied a list of the best “luxury films” to provide what its columnist Chiara Brown calls “Ultimate Escapism”. One of these is the 2008 film of Brideshead Revisited (not on everyone best film list):

Based on the 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited stars a very young (and very attractive) Matthew Goode. Goode plays Charles Ryder, an army officer in the Second World War awaiting his battle orders at a temporary camp at the Brideshead estate. But this isn’t the first time he has been to Brideshead. Cue misty reveries about his first visit, before the war, as a guest of the wealthy Flyte family, who own the estate. Ryder had been invited to stay by his Oxford chum, Sebastian (Ben Whishaw). Sexual, class and religious tensions abound. There is much lolling on lawns and many longing gazes across the crystal.
Watch the trailer here

Others on the list include the 1956 film High Society and the 2023 partial remake of Brideshead called Saltburn. The Times “recommend[s] watching this one with anyone but your parents.”

—The Catholic Times includes a Waugh novel among its lenten reading recommendations:

In Evelyn Waugh’s experimental novel, Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine sometimes talks like a flapper in 1920s London, while her father (King Cole) anticipates the brilliantly crusty Leo McKern in Rumpole of the Bailey. Beneath the Wavian  humor, however, is another literary reflection on the drama of vocation: the life-long project of discerning what God is asking of us now, and then configuring our lives to that summons. The final sections paint a striking portrait of fourth-century Jerusalem.

I do not recall previously seeing that novel described as “experimental”.

 

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Presidents Day Roundup

Posted on February 19, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–Ben Dowell reviews  a new TV serial about Coco Chanel’s life in wartime Paris. The title of the review tells much about the story: “New Look Review–Nice Dresses: Coco Chanel–pity about the Nazi boyfriend”. The article in Saturday’s Times newspaper opens with thus:

‘Nazis! I hate these guys!” If we are going to imagine how we would respond to life in the Second World War, most of us would probably like to think our response would be the unimprovable one uttered by Indiana Jones. Still, what about the actual business of getting by? In the many stories about ordinary lives caught up in this epic conflict, from Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, the sheer random cruelties and helplessness of those years have been superbly realised on the small screen.

But what if you are the celebrated designers Christian Dior and Coco Chanel? Well, we actually know a fair bit about how they operated and that is the subject of Todd A Kessler’s The New Look, the latest lavishly funded epic drama from Apple. The first three episodes dropped this week and they’re spent in occupied Paris…

—Financial Times also reviews another recent TV series with a nod to Evelyn Waugh. The review is by Jo Ellison. Here’s an excerpt:

I hate to be the one to disappoint, especially in Valentine’s week and in the fugue of romance that tends to befall us at the time of year. But we must disabuse ourselves of the cultural preoccupation that hot, dumb posh boys with crowds of buddies fall for smart, caustic, socially awkward girls. The latest manifestation of this pervasive brain/brawn romantic fiction, One Day, started streaming on Netflix last weekend. A 14-part adaptation of David Nicholls’ rabid bestseller, first published in 2009, it follows a will-they-won’t-they-ever-get-their-rocks-off friendship over decades via an annual check-in — the perfect episodic structure for a TV adaptation in this binge-drama age…

At a time when wage inequality has become a burning issue and opportunity stagnated, it’s perhaps inevitable that we might press our greasy noses to the window to perve at the super-rich. We may frown at nepo babies, but we still fawn over Succession offering a small glimpse into that world. One Day echoes the same themes of class, aspiration and opportunity best explored in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It’s presumably no coincidence that the famous TV adaptation of that 1940s drama first aired at another time of huge inequity, and the rising tide of Thatcherism, in 1981. …

–David Slattery-Christy describes his recent biography on the website Great British Life. This is about Harry Clifton who lived in Lytham Hall, a stately house in Lancashire. Waugh is mentioned in the book’s title: Flyte or Fancy–You Decide: Evelyn Waugh meets Harry Clifton on the Road to Brideshead. Here’s an excerpt:

…[Harry Clifton] went to Oxford to study Modern History at Christ Church in 1926 at the insistence of his father. This is where he found his wings and experimented with life and sex. Although we know that Evelyn Waugh visited Lytham Hall in the 1930s, and much speculation has evolved that he became an inspiration for Waugh’s character Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, it’s fairly certain that Harry and Waugh would have met at Oxford in the private drinking clubs that were for the time so hedonistic and sexually liberated. Interestingly, Sebastian Flyte in the novel Brideshead Revisited also had rooms at Christ Church and was, like Harry, a spoilt, petulant and rich young man.

After a visit to Lytham Hall in the 1930s, Waugh wrote to Lady Asquith to say the Cliftons were “all tearing mad” but also made some complimentary remarks about Lytham Hall, saying it was “a very beautiful house by Kent or someone like him with first-class Italian plaster work. A lap of luxury flowing with champagne and elaborate cookery. Mrs Clifton, Easter (or so she seems to be called), Orsa [Avia], Michael, a youth seven feet high with a moustache who plays with a clockwork motor car and an accordion.”

The Cliftons were Catholics, and Waugh would convert to Catholicism in the 1930s, but his opinion of the places of worship was less than complimentary: “Five hideous Catholic churches on the estate.” Waugh then went on to say: “Large park entirely surrounded by trams and villas. Adam dining room…all sitting at separate tables at meals. Two or three good pictures including a Renoir. Appalling heat. All sitting in sun with a dozen aeroplanes overhead and the gardens open to the public.”…

The quote is from a letter of 24 June 1935 (Letters, 94-95).  The book is available from Amazon.co.uk and can be shipped to America. Here’s a link.

UPDATE (20 Feb 2024): Citation to Letters added and misspelling of book title corrected.

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