Alastair Graham Wikipedia Entry Updated

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

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.

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Waugh’s New Year in Dutch Journal

Posted on January 2, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

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.

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Autumn Issue of Society Journal

Posted on December 31, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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Waugh and Hugh Johnson

Posted on December 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

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.

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Waugh and the Jellyfish

Posted on December 29, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

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.

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Waugh Scholar at Oxford Literary Festival

Posted on December 28, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

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.

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Corker and Shumble ReBooted

Posted on December 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

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.

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Waugh Novel Among Abebooks’ 2017 Top Sellers

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Abebooks has announced its highest priced books for 2017. A set of Waugh’s war trilogy came in at #16 and sold for $12,500. Here is the seller’s description:

First editions of each volume in the author’s acclaimed Sword of Honour Trilogy. Octavo, 3 volumes. Men At Arms is inscribed by the Waugh to fellow author, J.F. Powers, “For Jim Powers with admiration from Evelyn Waugh I bet you $1 you can’t finish it.” Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender are both signed by Waugh. Each are near fine in very good to fine dust jackets. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box…

Powers was an American novelist best known for his 1962 novel Morte D’Urban about a midwestern Roman Catholic priest. Waugh promoted Powers’ early work, and they met in 1949 on Waugh’s lecture tour of North America. They continued to exchange letters for many years and Powers later visited Waugh at his home in England.

The seller was Raptis Rare Books of Palm Beach, FL. The top price for an Abebooks sale in 2017 went for a copy of J D Salinger’s Nine Stories. This was sold for $22,500. Last year Waugh was also on the top seller list when Abebooks sold a first edition of A Handful of Dust for $16,450. See previous post.

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Waugh’s Christmas, 2017

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh is remembered in the Yuletide press this year in several stories. In a fashion blog basenote.net, the perfume Nuit de Noël is mentioned:

when it comes to a real Christmas perfume, for me Caron set the standards way back in 1922 with their classic “Nuit de Noël.” A jazzy oriental, created by Caron’s founder and self-taught ‘nose’ Ernest Daltroff, it was a fragrant paean to the “Roaring Twenties” a generation determined to party till the bitter end, when the ghost of WWI still loomed over them. Author Evelyn Waugh even gave this perfume a plug in his era-defining 1930 novel Vile Bodies:

“… the waiter came in with a tray, the smell of kippers contending with Nuit de Noël rather disagreeably…”

This scent wastes no time in announcing itself – with its riotous blend of ylang ylang, rose jasmine, oakmoss and sandalwood, it’s the olfactory equivalent of stepping out in a cocktail dress, killer heels and a smattering of glitter.

In the Irish Times, Donald Clarke provides a Christmas column about rock music, noting that the now classic Christmas song Fairytale of New York by the Pogues was denied the Christmas number 1 spot in its day (1987) by a Pet Shop Boys cover of Always on my Mind. How this relates to Evelyn Waugh requires some explaining:

The implication is not just that The Pogues are a superior band. There is a further suggestion that the Anglo-Irish tea-tray abusers (that reference is going back a bit) are more “authentic” than the urbane, dial-twiddling Isherwood-quoters.

Just look at the state of The Pogues. Like all proper rock stars, they’ve allowed themselves to be dragged through a hedge backwards and have then gone on to smoke the hedge. Pet Shop Boys, when not wearing avant garde vegetables on their heads, dress as if they’ve got an appointment with the Duke of Snootington. What’s authentic about that? …

The myth of authenticity nags away at all art. Some people care that, before committing every unnecessary word of On the Road to unlucky paper, Jack Kerouac really did bore his way across the United States. He hammered the novel out in three weeks on one continuous scroll while living perilously on West 20th Street. On the Road may not be as good as Evelyn Waugh’s precisely contemporaneous The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, but, as a posh bloke in a Somerset mansion wrote that book, it cannot compete in the authenticity stakes.

Your correspondent cannot claim familiarity with either band but does recognize Fairytale of New York as a now standard Christmas offering when he hears it. Never heard the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of Always on my Mind, however.

A Norwegian paper (Oppland Arbeidersblad) offers lists of winter reading (both classics and current) prepared by four literary critiics. Anne Merethe K. Prinos, who writes for the Aftenposten inlcuded Brideshead Revisited among her three classics:

A glorious new translation from 2017 that shows the way in a complex classic about British aristocracy in the Middle War. The 1981 TV show, in which Jeremy Irons plays the lead role as Charles Ryder, has remained surprisingly good and is still well worth seeing. Translated into Norwegian by Johanne Fronth-Nygren.

Translation into English by Google. The other two classics were Mrs Dalloway and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

And finally, religious columnist Tod Worner chooses Christmas Eve to post an article on sainthood. This is on the religious website Aleteia. Worner quotes Waugh’s character Cordelia Flyte from Brideshead Revisited:

And the painfully accurate words of the young, bright Cordelia served to distill the plot of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, but also spoke to the essence of Sainthood.

“No one is ever holy without suffering.” 

Okay, okay. So Sainthood isn’t boring. But it seems awfully painful. And to be sure, these quotes from the pens of Waugh [and others] give stark testimony to the cost of faith.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the new year to all our readers.

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Waugh’s Christmas, 1942

Posted on December 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In a letter to his wife, Evelyn Waugh describes his Christmas 75 years ago in 1942. At the time, he was stationed with his brigade in Sherborne School, Dorset, where his father and brother Alec were students but from which he had been barred due to disapproval of Alec’s book Loom of Youth that mentioned schoolboy homosexuality:

Dearest Laura,

Christmas was rather better than was feared but very exhausting and I find it difficult to hold the pen which behaves rather like an ouija board. There has been much heavy drinking.

…I went to Daphne Weymouth’s for one night. Duff, Diana, Conrad [Russell], the Cavendish boys [sons of Duke of Devonshire]–an excellent pair–Debo [Mitford], Rex Whistler and many nameless foot guards. Great drunkeness. I went to call next morning on your cousin Olivia Greene & and found her with no trousers on completely drunk and Gwen blacking the grate. Then I came back to Sherborne again, to a great dinner party given by Bill Stirling & Peter Milton. Last night I suffered the delusion that black rooks were flying round and round my room…

Daphne Weymouth, then married to Henry Weymouth, was living at Sturford Mead, a house on the Longleat Estate in Wiltshire that Henry was later to inherit when he succeeded to the title of Marquess of Bath. She subsequently married Xan Fielding and wrote several books under the name Daphne Fielding. Deborah Mitford married the younger of the two “Cavendish boys” mentioned in Waugh’s letter; in her own memoirs, she recalled this event when she met Waugh for the first time (Deborah Devonshire, Wait For Me!, New York, 2011, Chapter 9). He was much the worse for drink when she arrived but then:

…he poured a bottle of Green Chartreuse over his head and, rubbing it into his hair, intoned, ‘My hair is covered in gum, my hair is covered in gum,’ as the sticky mess ran down his neck.

Waugh was not proud of his performance that night, and Deborah records that, as recompense, he gave her a hat he bought in Paris soon after the war had ended.

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