The latest issue of the society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies (No. 48.2, Autumn 2017) is now posted at this link. For contents see earlier post.
The Times has interviewed novelist David Lodge to mark the second volume of his memoirs. This is entitled Writer’s Luck and will be issued next week. In the interview (reported by Robbie Millen) Lodge discusses the fact that he has never had a novel awarded a Booker Prize:
Lodge describes the prize as being “good for ‘the novel’ but bad for novelists”. Does it annoy him that the prize has overlooked him? “No, it doesn’t bother me. What I have rather resented or regretted is I have not ever been longlisted or shortlisted since Nice Work. That does seem like a snub — though it is silly to see it like that. It is what prizes do to novelists.
Lodge, who is also Honorary President of the Evelyn Waugh Society, explained that he was encouraged to read Waugh’s novels in his youth:
Lodge was born in 1935. His father was a musician in a jazz band, his mother a housewife. “I owe my artistic genes to [my father]. He had a wonderful, natural gift for language, and considering he had such a limited education he was a cultivated man. He put me on to Evelyn Waugh and Dickens and other humorous writers. He encouraged that streak in my own work.
The latest volume of his memoirs carries the story up to 1991. It will be released in the UK on 11 January (USA, 27 February) and is already making news because of another Booker Prize story. When Lodge was chairman of a Booker jury in 1989, two of the members blacklisted Martin Amis’s novel London Fields, and Lodge describes the resulting controversy. He also explains why he feels that he was better off for not having taught at Oxford or Cambridge:
I would have been too obliged to make my mark in this very competitive Oxbridge atmosphere, whereas in Birmingham I was pretty free to do what I wanted.” So off he went to Birmingham — “a great place to feel the pulse of England. London novels are ten a penny. There aren’t many who write about Birmingham. It has been a good place for me in terms of giving me material.”
The first volume of his memoirs, Quite a Good Time to be Born, is available in paperback.
Alexander Waugh’s letter in the 25 November 2017 issue of The Spectator regarding the conclusion of his grandfather’s Oxford career has engendered a chain of responses comparable to those in which his grandfather used to engage. Alexander’s letter stated: “Evelyn Waugh did not ‘scrape a third at Hertford’, he never graduated from Oxford or anywhere else.” This in itself was in response to an earlier Spectator article in which a recent book written by Alexander was discussed. See earlier posts.
In the December 9th edition, a letter from Dr Geoffrey Thomas responded:
If Evelyn did not attend the graduation ceremony, then he did not graduate from Oxford. All reference to a third is not out of place, however, since the Oxford University Calendar, 1932, lists him in the third class ‘In Historia Moderna’ for 1924 (p. 232). By what margin he was assigned to this class, I have naturally no idea. ‘Scraped’ might be the right word.
In fact, both are correct. The Oxford University Calendar records the results of Evelyn Waugh’s examination in which he passed in the third class category. He never secured a degree, however, because he was required to remain in residence for another term. His low grade on the exam cost him his scholarship, and his father refused to pay the costs of the additional term, so he went down without a degree. Under current academic practice, once he had passed his exam, the residence requirement would almost certainly have been waived, and he would have graduated with a third class degree.
A further comment on this issue is offered in a subsequent Spectator issue. This comes in a letter by Timothy O’Sullivan. He cites Evelyn’s autobiography A Little Learning, and explains why Evelyn had taken the exam in the middle of the year instead of at the end of his final term:
Eager to have his second son’s education completed, Arthur Waugh despatched him to Oxford after he had won a scholarship at Hertford. Evelyn consequently arrived in a by-term, Hilary 1922. He achieved a third in his finals eight terms later, or one term short of the nine required in residence to be eligible to graduate. ‘My father decided that a Third Class BA was not worth the time and expense of going up for a further term.’
Another Spectator commenter (Peter Loring) gives a further possible explanation for Evelyn’s poor academic performance:
I wonder if Brideshead Revisited offers a clue to the origins of this mystery. When Charles Ryder arrives at the university, he is firmly advised by his cousin Jasper: ‘You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything between. Time spent on a good second is time thrown away.’ If Waugh did get a third, as Dr Thomas suggests, perhaps he didn’t want anyone to know.
There is evidence that Evelyn Waugh was not completely embarassed by his poor degree. Alexander is in possession of a certificate issued by the university in 1928 (four years after he took the final examination) attesting to his having passed. The date suggests to Alexander that Evelyn may have wanted to use the certificate to prove to potential employers that he had not left Oxford for failure to pass final exams. This was at the time he was courting Evelyn Gardner and was anxious to impress her family as to his respectability. See “Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford University Certificate, 17 May 1928” in EWS No 45.2, p. 14.
The Wikipedia article for Evelyn Waugh’s close friend Alastair Graham has recently been updated. This update appears to incorporate information from both Philip Eade’s 2016 biography of Waugh, including photographs published there for the first time, and the 2013 critical study of Waugh by Michael G. Brennan, as well as other earlier biographical works. What is still missing is the information from Duncan Fallowell’s essay on Graham in his 2011 book How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits. This carries the story forward from when Graham moved to New Quay in Wales in 1933 and explains his friendship with another major 20th century writer, Dylan Thomas. Also worth a mention would be Graham’s brief friendship with historian Steven Runciman described in the recent biography of Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw entitled Outlandish Knight.
An Amsterdam newspaper has posted an article on an Evelyn Waugh New Year’s celebration. This is entitled “Brideshead is een diamant” (“Brideshead is a diamond”) by Willem Pekelder and is on the website of the newspaper Trouw. It was inspired by the current rebroadcast of the 1981 TV series on the Netherlands network ONS:
“I hear that they are talking of starting a new year.” That is what Evelyn Waugh notes on New Year’s Day 1926 in his diary. A magnificent sentence. So full of ironic world-abuse that you want to read it a hundred times. The phrase reflects the mood of Waugh at that moment. After a suicide attempt in the previous year, he hopes ‘that 1926 will go more smoothly’. Waugh, until then a schoolmaster in Wales, has to wait another four years for that success. In 1930 he breaks through as a literary writer with ‘Vile Bodies‘. Other novels follow, including his magnum opus ‘Brideshead Revisited’(1945). The TV version of that book is now being repeated on the nostalgia channel ONS. And just like previous times… I watch it breathlessly again. Why? Because ‘Brideshead Revisited’ is a diamond that always shows a different, brilliant facet…Once you’ve read ‘The Diaries’ you know that ‘Brideshead’ is highly autobiographical. The protagonist Lord Sebastian Flyte (on TV: Anthony Andrews) is depressed, drinking and cutting homosexually. Just like Waugh.
That’s a bit of a stretch. Waugh is usually taken as depicting elements of himself in the middle class artist Charles Ryder who succeeds in breaking into the upperclasses, rather than in Sebastian who is already there. The article continues:
In ‘The Diaries‘ the alcohol vapor will wash you from page one. And not just on New Year’s Eve 1925 in Paris (‘each a bottle of champagne each in a café called Prado and Bill talked about Tony for several hours and was drunk’). The diary is a series of drink layers. 12 June 1930: ‘both of us too drunk to enjoy ourselves.’ Waugh represses his homosexuality and…, marries two times with noble ladies….
Translation is by Google with some edits.
The Autumn 2017 issue of the society’s journal (Evelyn Waugh Studies, No. 48.2) has been issued. The contents are posted below. The complete issue will be posted on the internet later this week:
ARTICLES
Paul Pennyfeather and the Victorian Governess: The Rejection of Nineteenth-Century Idealism in Decline and Fall by Ellen O’Brien
Introduction: Much has been written on the disputed use of satire in Evelyn Waugh’s first novel. While critics have offered various readings of the satirical elements in Decline and Fall (1928), the novel also invites discussion of the role of parody, farce, black humour, burlesque, the bildungsroman, the picaresque and the anti-hero in creating an amusing but damning representation of society between the wars … Given the richness and variation of the textual commentary, it makes more sense, perhaps, to view Decline and Fall as a fluid, prismatic novel that draws on literary elements as and when they are required, rather than conforming to some inelastic ideal of genre … It is, perhaps, better to do without a “didactic framework,” and to allow that a text may incorporate elements of farce, satire and parody in order to comment on a wide variety of subjects, both general and specific.
Put Out More Flags and Literary Tradition by Robert Murray Davis
Introduction: Estimates of Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags have ranged from L. E. Sissman’s, that it is “a novel of breathtaking symmetry, grace, craft, and discipline,” to John Bayley’s, that even though Waugh’s books can give pleasure to the uninstructed, he is not really a novelist and lacks humor besides. While the disparity may amount to no more than the fact that Sissman is prepared to be pleased and Bayley is not, it may be useful to step back from theoretical principles that on the one hand seem at best implied and on the other over-determined and instead to employ E. M. Forster’s inclusive definition of a novel as “prose fiction of a certain length.” That will enable us to look at what Waugh’s novel seems to be doing, and how, and thereby to place it in a series of broader historical and literary contexts.
REVIEWS
Fictional Counterparts: Commando General: The Life of Major General Sir Robert Laycock KCMG CB DSO, by Richard Mead. Reviewed by Donat Gallagher
A Slow Build: Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts, by Naomi Milthorpe.
NEWS
A PERSONAL NOTE
I Owe It All to Brideshead by David Bittner
In an interview for a recent issue of The Sunday Times, wine expert and author Hugh Johnson mentions commissioning articles by Evelyn Waugh on the subject of wine. This appears in the introduction to the interview by Andrew Lynch:
In 1963, Johnson succeeded André Simon, the French wine connoisseur and writer, as general secretary of Simon’s Wine & Food Society, persuading the cookery writer Elizabeth David and the author Evelyn Waugh to write for the society’s quarterly magazine.
According to the Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh (1986), the only fruit of this commission was Waugh’s 1964 article on champagne “Fizz, Bubbly, Pop” which first appeared in the Autumn 1964 issue (No. 123) of Wine and Food. This was later reprinted in Vogue (New York), September 1965 and in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 635. See earlier post.
A recent travel guide includes a reference to Waugh’s fortuitous encounter with a jellyfish off the coast of Wales in 1925, where its intervention aborted Waugh’s attempted suicide. This guide is entitled Britain by the Book and is written by academic Oliver Tearle who teaches English Literature at the University of Loughborough. The book is described in an Amazon reader’s review as:
…a ‘curious tour of our literary landscape’ each short chapter consisting of a two or three pages, each one offering interesting fragments of history involving various classic authors and poets … some very famous and some not so. This book starts at John ‘O Groats and ends up at Cornwall, passing through an abundance of villages and small towns along the way. Numerous fascinating facts and little known curiosities are divulged to the reader through the excellent writing of Oliver Tearle.
Waugh’s adventure is cited in the publisher’s promotional material for the book:
Why did a jellyfish persuade Evelyn Waugh to abandon his suicide attempt in North Wales?
The book apparently attempts to answer that question. Waugh describes his rescue by jellyfish at the conclusion of his autobiography A Little Learning. It also contributed to a description of the faked suicide of Capt Grimes in Decline and Fall. No jellyfish was needed to save Capt Grimes, however, whose suicide was never intended to suceed.
Barbara Cooke, lecturer at Loughborough University and Executive Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project will appear at the upcoming Oxford Literary Festival. Her subject will be Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford which is also the title of her new book published by the Bodleian Library to be released in the same week (US edition to follow in May):
Dr Barbara Cooke looks at the importance of Oxford to the novelist Evelyn Waugh and how it was portrayed in various forms in his novels. Cooke looks at the prose and graphic work Waugh produced as an undergraduate, his love for places such as the Botanic Garden, the Oxford Union and The Chequers, and Oxford’s portrayal in works such as Brideshead Revisited and A Little Learning.
Dr Cooke is also co-editor of the recently published volume 19 of the CWEW: A Little Learning and is at work on volume 14: The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Her presentation is schduled for Sunday, 18 March at 10:00am in the Bodleian’s Weston Lecture Theatre on Broad Street (next door to Blackwells). Ticketing and other details are available at this link.
Dr Cooke will also present a paper on Waugh at the 3rd International Conference of the French Society for Modernist Studies, 13-16 June 2018 at the Paris Sorbonne University. The theme for the conference is “Modernist Objects”. Her title is “‘They nicked the edge and tore straight’: materiality, process and vocation in the aesthetic philosophy of Evelyn Waugh.” Here’s the introductory paragraph to the abstract:
Throughout his career Evelyn Waugh privileged the idea of the book as a material, aesthetic object. From designing student modernist magazines to suggesting he illustrate his own, he took a sustained interest in the way his works appeared. In this paper, I will examine the vocational continuity Waugh drew between the process of book-writing and making, the pleasure he took ‘from my earliest memories […] in watching things being well done’ (A Little Learning, 1964) and the work of the Catholic priest as master craftsman, a former of ‘shape[s] in chaos’ (‘Out of Depth’, 1933). As his early works make clear, for Waugh “chaos” was inextricably linked with interwar social conditions; traditional Catholicism represented the antidote.
Simon Parry writing in the South China Morning Post offers a retelling of Waugh’s parody of journalists reset in the jungles of today’s Papua New Guinea. He is hired by an unnamed London Sunday paper to cover the story of the missing British explorer Benedict Allen (see earlier post) who has disappeared while looking for a lost tribe:
For inspiration, I turned to Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938), whose hero, William Boot, sets off for Africa with a collapsible canoe, a camp operating table, a portable humidor, a jointed flagstaff and Union flag, a cane for whacking snakes and a cleft stick to send his dispatches. An assistant at the hardware shop in Sai Kung, informed me, rather curtly, that they had none of the above in stock. So I threw my pocket penknife into my into my overnight bag and headed to the airport, imagining the moment I would burst into a jungle clearing and wittily exclaim: “Mr Allen, I presume?”
When he arrives in Port Moresby, Parry finds himself booked onto a flight into the remote outpost at Mount Hagen with two other reporters from a London daily paper (also unnamed) who are also covering the story and have written authorizations from Allen’s family for an exclusive interview. These he calls Corker and Shumble who last appeared in Abyssinia with William Boot, covering the Italian invasion in the 1930s as described in Waugh’s novel. Things get even more Wavian when all three try to book helicopter passage from Mount Hagen to the village where Allen is supposed to be located.
Parry tells the story in the same satirical spirit as Waugh, and it is available in full online in the magazine section of the SCMP. As it turns out, although Parry misses the actual rescue mission flight, he scoops the other two reporters when he interviews their helicopter pilot, Craig Rose, after they have left for London:
“It wasn’t like he really needed rescuing,” Rose said. “It wasn’t as if he was in mortal danger. It was just that his travel plans were stuck. He wouldn’t have been starving. There was water there. He was well looked after.”
Clearly this didn’t quite fit the Boy’s Own narrative. And the more Rose spoke, the better it got, at least from my jaded viewpoint. He had been surprised to see Allen use a video camera to alternately film himself and the helicopter as it circled the airstrip where he was waiting to be picked up.
“As soon as I saw him, I thought, ‘Yep, he’s a filmmaker,’” said Rose, adding that he was baffled at how the explorer had kept his batteries charged out in the jungle. (It now dawned on me why the pilot hadn’t received so much as a mention in the account of Allen’s rescue that morning.)
Corker and/or Shumble seem to have been working for the Daily Mail which was first to report the rescue mission on 17 November in a story written by Sam Greenhill, and the Mail is reported by the Guardian to have sponsored the helicopter flight. While Parry doesn’t mention the name of his Sunday paper employer, his story about the pilot’s interview appeared in the Mail on Sunday for 19 November. All this provides an added Wavian dimension to the story since the Mail was Waugh’s employer on his 1935-36 Abyssinian journalistic venture.
