Waugh’s Influence: A Roundup

Posted on December 23, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

–Jessica Fellowes, niece of the creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, has written a novel. This follows several companion books relating to the TV series. The novel is entitled The Mitford Murders and sounds like a combination of Agatha Christie and Nancy Mitford. But in Italy for the promotion of the Italian translation, she responded as follows to the question of what writer had influenced her in writing the book :

“Some of the critics have been talking about Charles Dickens…. Obviously it is a comparison that flatters me a lot, but frankly I do not know how relevant. I am an omnivorous reader, I have always read a lot to compensate for a hearing impairment that in some moments of my life has led me to a certain isolation. They are of rather traditional tastes. One of my favorite authors is Evelyn Waugh: I like the way he represents the surface of things, of people, of behaviors, in order to offer, in reality, a great depth of psychological penetration. That’s what I would like to be able to do in my books “.

The book may be the first of what becomes a series, one for each member of the Mitford family. The interview appeared in the Trieste paper Il Piccolo and is translated by Google.

–Patrick Skene Catling, British journalist and novelist, now age 92 and living in Ireland, was recently interviewed by the Irish Times. He is probably best known for his 1952 book The Chocolate Touch which inspired a successful children’s book series. His most recent book, published earlier this year, is Murder Becomes Electra. In the IT interview, he gave this answer to the question of what books had most influenced him:

Intensive reading and writing from childhood are helpful preparations for a literary career. I explored my father’s bookshelves and found inspiration in books by writers such as HG Wells (Scientific Romances), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust), Flann O’Brien (The Third Policeman) and Nathanael West (The Day of The Locust).

–In another Irish Times article, a new book by Australian philosopher Damon Young entitled The Art of Reading is considered:

In order to truly appreciate a text we must also [writes Young] “overcome our egocentrism”, which Virginia Woolf signally failed to do vis-a-vis Joyce, whom she initially read through the prism of class snobbery and rivalry. The philosopher concedes, however, that Iris Murdoch’s notion of “unselfing” has its limits. We are “partial beings” whose “incompleteness varies” with age, so that some novels – Henry James’s in the case of Evelyn Waugh – need to be grown into.

–James Salter, American novelist, journalist and screenwriter, recently died at the age of 90. A West Point graduate, his real name was James Horowitz. The Financial Times reviews his uncollected writings now published as Don’t Save Anything. Among the pieces published are literary profiles he wrote for People magazine. including those in which he wrote about Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov:

Graham Greene, whom Salter visited in Paris, is described as “like a retired informer or spy or the principal figure in a notorious criminal case” living “in anonymity and quiet”. It took a hand-written note from Salter, slipped under Greene’s door, before he finally agreed to an interview. Another novelist that Salter has to work on is Vladimir Nabokov, whom he eventually tracks down to the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he had been living in a suite of rooms for 14 years with his wife, Vera. “[Nabokov’s] opinions are probably the most conservative, among important writers, of any since Evelyn Waugh’s,” Salter writes. But “he is far from being cold or uncaring”.

–Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, has written an article about a new social phenomenon which sees English aristocrats marrying members of what he calls the “Glamocracy” rather than, as had previously been the case, each other. The latest example of this is Prince Harry’s engagement to a mixed-race American TV actress. After considering several other real life examples, Mount wonders how fictional characters, such as PG Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth, would have adapted to the new fashion. This brings him around to Waugh: “Today’s Charles Ryder has much the same outlook as Rex Mottram.” But I’m not quite sure how this works, since even in the 1930’s, the social climbing middle class Englishman (Ryder) and the arriviste Canadian businessman (Mottram) had both set their caps at the same English aristocratic beauty—Julia Flyte. And it was her religion, not her class, that defeated both of them. Mount’s article appears in a recent issue of The Spectator.

UPDATE (13 January 2018); A link yo Harry Mount’s article in The Spectator was added.

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A Handful of Monopoly

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Tom Utley writing in the Daily Mail compares the board game of Monopoly to the ending of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust. He recalls a disastrous holiday in the Scottish isles where his family endured endless rainfall in a cottage with a leaky roof:

And the only entertainment to be found on the premises was a shelf of yellowing Agatha Christie books, a pack of 47 playing cards and — you’ve guessed it — a cruelly complete set of Monopoly…So there we sat, for hours on end in the damp and gloom of that hall, playing game after endless game and hating each other more with every throw of the dice.I felt like Evelyn Waugh’s Tony Last in A Handful Of Dust, held prisoner by an illiterate maniac in the Brazilian jungle, condemned to live out his days reading and re-reading aloud to his captor the complete works of Dickens.

By day four on Arran, when we could stand the game no more, I suggested the family should venture out into the rain to climb Goat Fell, the highest point on the island, so that we’d have at least one achievement to show for our holiday. We were halfway up its 2,866 feet, ankle-deep in mud and bitten raw by midges impervious to the rain, when I had one of the greatest brainwaves of my life. I put it to my wife and the boys: ‘Should we press on to the top, and then go back … for another game of Monopoly? Or should we go back down right now, pack our bags, call off the rest of the holiday and drive home to London?’ The latter suggestion carried unanimously. We were on the next ferry to the mainland, heading back to the telly and the warm, dry beds of home. Since then, I’ve never been able to look at that familiar board without a shudder of horror.

 

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Essay re Waugh’s Edmund Campion Posted

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Gerard Kilroy has posted an essay in which he traces Waugh’s inspiration for his book Edmund Campion and its publishing history. Kilroy is author of a recent biography of Edmund Campion and co-editor of the OUP’s projected Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh volume of Waugh’s Campion book. Kilroy explains how Waugh was encouraged to write the book by Martin D’Arcy, to whom he dedicated it. This was at the time that D’Arcy was overseeing the establishment of Campion Hall at Oxford. Waugh pledged the proceeds of the book to that project. The essay also considers Waugh’s friendships with Katharine Asquith and Mary Herbert (mother of his second wife) and how they influenced his writing. It also reviews the various editions of Edmund Campion in which Waugh (as was his habit) made changes up until a 1961 edition, a few years before his death. There is, in addition, an interesting discussion of how Waugh’s work on the Campion book influenced his later book Robbery Under Law in which he described the history of the church in Mexico. It concludes with this:

If the book transformed the lives of others, it had the greatest effect on Waugh himself. An invisible thread connects it to Brideshead Revisited, Helena, Ronald Knox, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, also published in 1961, the year Waugh made his final change to the end of the ‘Preface’. Now Campion is heard as if ‘he were walking at our elbow’.  The change from ‘at our side’ [1946 edition] suggests that Waugh now felt him as a more insistent presence, not just a heavenly companion, but even more an inspiration for action.

The essay is thoroughly researched and contains detailed footnotes. One suspects that this may be a dry run for an introduction to Kilroy’s CWEW edition of the book, for which no publication date has yet been announced. The essay is entitled “Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion: ‘Walking at our elbow'” and is posted on the website of the Jesuits in England  (thinkingfaith.org).

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Waviana in the Book Trade

Posted on December 20, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A Baltimore dealer has on offer an original Hollywood film script of Waugh’s 1948 novel  The Loved One as written by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood. This is Royal Books on 25th St. This is a July 1964 draft of a script for the film released in 1965 and is described on the ABAA internet page:

Deluxe working script belonging to uncredited crew member William Todd Mason, with his name and phone number in holograph ink on the title page, and some brief penciled notations on three pages…An early draft, issued nearly two years prior to the film’s October 1965 release, with substantial differences from the finished film.The sister film to “Dr. Strangelove,” and in the eyes of many, just as much a masterpiece of exquisitely wrought black humor. Made in the US, but in a dense, British-American style. Ostensibly a satire on the funeral business, in which a young British poet winds up in a Hollywood cemetery as part of an inheritance arrangement–but in reality a satire of Hollywood itself, as well as the Western malaise of the mid 1960s.

Also on offer by the same dealer is a photo of scriptwriter Southern discussing the script with actor John Gielgud who played Sir Francis Hinsley in the film. This is a promotional photo with information about the film provided by the studio mimeographed on the back. The phot0 is listed at $650 and the script at $4500.

In other book news, Cambridge University Library Special Collections has posted an article about Victorian artist-architect William Burges. This relates to the design and construction of his residence in Kensington known as Tower House and is based on the book entitled The House of William Burges. The book is a collection of detailed descriptions and plates relating to Tower House. It was published in 1885 after Burges’ death, with a text by Richard Pullan, one of his former associates. The library’s copy of the lavishly illustrated book was formerly in the collection of Evelyn Waugh and was acquired by the library in 2016 from Maggs Bros. How it escaped the clutches of the University of Texas which acquired Waugh’s entire library after his death is not explained. Perhaps Waugh sold it before his death or UT decided uncharacteristically to deaccession it.

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Brideshead Revisited in Foreign Media

Posted on December 19, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Articles featuring Brideshead Revisited have appeared recently in Italian and Spanish news media. In the Italian-language Roman Catholic internet news site Radio Spada, Luca Fumagalli reviews the 1981 TV adaptation of the novel (although he notes that no Italian language version is available). He previously published articles on the same site relating to the 2008 film adaptation and to the novel itself. These are both linked in this latest article. He makes the case in this article that the 1981 TV film does a better job of conveying the religious themes of the story than either the 2008 film (no surprise there) or the novel itself and also makes a comparison to a novel by Maurice Baring:

Brideshead is a Catholic home, featuring a beautifully decorated chapel that, like in Daphne Adeane by Maurice Baring, was built by her husband for his wife. It is a place of consolation but also of nostalgia, and the light of the Most Blessed is a visible sign of that providential wind that pervades everything….

In Brideshead Revisited, the traditional aspects of the Catholic Novel are, however, subordinate to the sanctifying power of divine grace. The TV series, having a longer time than the novel – quite compact – almost manages to get back to the spectator the conflicts that cross the heart of the protagonists, victims of the drama of life, torn by doubts and contradictions. If young and beautiful Julia Flyte (played by Diana Quick) only realizes that the way for happiness goes through self-renunciation, Sebastian falls into the hell of alcoholism and despair before being accepted…at a monastery. Even Lord Marchmain, separated from his wife, returns to Brideshead to die, and Charles himself, an agnostic rhetoric, gives a long cascade to the charm of Catholicism.

Maurice Baring was also a convert to Catholicism and a prolific, though now largely forgotten novelist. His friend Hilaire Belloc immortalized him in this verse, quoted in Baring’s Wikipedia entry:

Like many of the upper class
He liked the sound of broken glass*
* A line I stole with subtle daring
From Wing-Commander Maurice Baring.

Waugh made use of that same image in describing gatherings of the Bollinger Club at the beginning of Decline and Fall.

In the Spanish language newspaper El Pais an article by Jacinto Anton about artist Rex Whistler (apparently little known in Spain) also alludes to Brideshead Revisited:

At age 16 Whistler entered the Slade School of Art in London, where his teacher Henry Tonks, who championed the tradition of the mural, channeled him towards that art, and where he became friends with Stephen Tennant, the offspring of a rich and cultivated family (and Siegfried Sassoon’s lover). The relationship, certainly very similar to that of Charles Ryder (it has frequently been said that Waugh was inspired by him) with Sebastian Flyte in  Brideshead Revisited, allowed Whistler to travel (significantly, to Italy) and opened the door to the world of high society, where he would find clients for his artistic work. In fact, one of the things that has made Rex Whistler an artist (if not exactly secret, then at least relatively little known) is that many of his large-scale decorative works are found in private mansions and many of his portraits, in private collections of wealthy people. This is not the case of the famous mural he painted, at the age of 22, for the London Tate Gallery café (now the Rex Whistler restaurant).

The Tennant/Whistler relationship may well have contributed to Waugh’s description of Charles Ryder’s career as an artist, but there are certainly other contributors to the characters of Charles and Sebastian. The translations are by Google with a few edits. Any corrections or suggestions may be made by commenting below.

The BBC has reposted Mark Kermode’s Radio 5 review of the 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead. This is now on BBC iPlayer. Kermode had not seen the 1981 TV series during his youth when he thought of it as “a bunch of toffs having a bad time” and was dismissive of anything by Waugh. But he found some good things about the 2008 film–especially whenever Emma Thompson (who played Lady Marchmain) was on the screen. The rest of the film, however, is rather flat whenever it lacks the “wattage of her presence.” Kermode simply can’t like “these people” in the way his counterparts in the Thatcher years hankered after the country house past.

UPDATE (20 December 2017): Final paragraph re BBC Radio 5 review was added.

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Wavian Roundup

Posted on December 18, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Guardian reviews the new book by Nicholas Shakespeare, who wrote and directed the BBC’s 1980’s Arena TV documentary series known as The Waugh Trilogy. The book is entitled Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister and deals with the period after the disastrous 1940 British invasion of Norway when Neville Chamberlain resigned. Among the notable participants in the invasion (which was, ironically, planned by Churchill who was its unintended political beneficiary) was one who featured in a Waugh novel:

[Shakespeare] conjures the characters and personalities of the senior commanders in the Norwegian campaign with a novelist’s flair and eye for detail. Most memorable are the Earl of Cork and Orrery, a monocle-wearing admiral known to junior officers as “Cork-n-orrible” and Adrian Carton de Wiart VC, who wore a patch after losing an eye during the first world war and was the model for Evelyn Waugh’s Brigadier Ritchie-Hook in the Sword of Honour trilogy.

—Waugh scholar Carlos Villar Flor has published a new novel. This is in Spanish and is entitled Descubre Por Qué Te Mato (Discover Why I Kill You). The novel, reviewed on Rioja2.com and other Spanish news sites, concerns a journalist who receives a death threat and is given one month to discover the motive. According to the article, the new book:

is the fourth novel by Carlos Villar Flor … professor of English Philology at the University of La Rioja. To document the world of journalism the author contacted the newspaper ‘La Rioja’ and other headers, and spent time at its headquarters, interviewing the staff and breathing the atmosphere of a newsroom. Villar Flor is a scholar of the English author Evelyn Waugh, of whom he has published numerous translations into Spanish, critical editions, and monographic books in Spanish and English. He is currently working on a study of Graham Greene’s travels through Spain.

The article does not suggest that Villar Flor’s novel was influenced by Scoop, Waugh’s own novel about journalists, but a parallel can be drawn from the fact that Waugh did inform his novel by undertaking his own personal study of journalists while on assignment in Ethiopia to cover its invasion by Italy. The translation is by Google.

—In a story on the BBC’s news website, it is announced that Belgium joins several other countries, including Britain (1982)  and the United States (2006), in terminating its telegram service. The importance of telegrams in previous times is recalled by references to their use as a cryptic literary device:

When Evelyn Waugh was despatched to Africa to cover the war in Abyssinia for the Daily Mail in the 1930s he displayed the kind of linguistic ingenuity to be expected from a great English novelist. Finding it necessary to kill a story which said that an American nurse had been blown up in the town of Adowa, Waugh managed it in a message back to London consisting of just two words: ‘Nurse Unupblown’.

The quote is from Waugh’s book Waugh in Abyssinia.

—Oxford University Press is selling all 5 published or scheduled volumes of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh at 1/2 price for a limited time. This includes v. 26 which is essays, articles and reviews 1922-34 to be released in February-March. Some of the published volumes are currently out of stock in the USA but OUP will ship them when available at the reduced price. The discount is valid for both US and UK sales and will continue thru 12 January 2018.  See this link.

 

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Evelyn Waugh: An End and a Beginning

Posted on December 16, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Elizabeth Kantor examines the fascination of viewers with the Netflix series The Crown and compares it to the earlier ITV series Downton Abbey. The  article is entitled, with not too subtle irony, “Crown of Duty.”  In the course of her thoughtful and entertaining analysis, Kantor brings in Waugh’s portrayal of an earlier generation as compared to those for and about whom The Crown is written to conclude her article:

Through most of the first season of The Crown, I kept wondering why the theme of “The Abdication” as the disaster to be avoided at all costs, the original Fall and expulsion from the original Eden, had so much resonance. And then the penny dropped. “The Abdication” for the British royal family is just like “The Divorce” for so many of us children of the 1970s. It’s the original tragedy that tore our world apart and must not be repeated. The timing actually makes sense. The British aristocracy embraced its own sexual revolution 40 years ahead of the one that eventually reached the American suburbs. Read the novels of Evelyn Waugh or the real-life adventures of the Mitfords and the rest of the 1930s smart set Waugh was satirizing, and you encounter a strangely familiar world: sexual adventurism suddenly commonplace in a generation whose parents still found it shocking, adults in reckless pursuit of their own happiness in disregard of their children’s welfare, divorce courts rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent.

Sunday Times political reporter Tim Shipman has written a book entitled Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. This is reviewed on the website Conservativehome.com by Andrew Gimson who opens his article with a quote from Waugh’s 1930’s novel about journalists Scoop:

“He had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephone to tape machines, insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor.”

So wrote Evelyn Waugh, describing the slight acquaintance with journalism of William Boot, accidental hero of Scoop. Anyone drawing their knowledge of British politics from Tim Shipman’s account of the year since September 2016 might form a similar impression. Neurotic men and women rush about betraying each other. The language is squalid, especially in the period when Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill are running the show for Theresa May, in the period up to her disastrous decision in April 2017 to call a snap election.

The review goes on to describe how Timothy and Hill get their comeuppances and both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbin look not too bad after all.

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The Baronets Heygate

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A Northern Ireland blogger posting as Lord Belmont has put up a history of the Heygate family of which John Heygate was a member. Heygate is perhaps best remembered as having alienated the affections of Evelyn Waugh’s first wife. He was also a novelist, but his works are out of print and mostly forgotten despite the fact than several of them retain their interest. He was the 4th Baronet Heygate and his succession to  the title is explained in the posting:

“SIR FREDERICK GAGE HEYGATE JP DL (1854-1940), 3rd Baronet, of Bellarena, married Flora, daughter of John Walter, in 1888;

major, the Mid-Ulster Artillery; barrister-at-law; DL, County Londonderry; Justice of the Peace; lived at Bellarena in County Londonderry and was Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Londonderry, 1887-88.

His cousin,

SIR JOHN EDWARD NOURSE HEYGATE, 4th Baronet (1903-76), of Bellarena,

married firstly, the Hon Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, daughter of Herbert, 1st and last Baron Burghclere of Walden, in 1930; secondly, Gwyneth Eliot, daughter of John Eliot Howard Lloyd, in 1936; thirdly, Dora Luz, daughter of John Harvey, in 1951.

He is chiefly remembered for his liaison in 1929 with Evelyn Gardner while she was married to Evelyn Waugh. Heygate and Gardner subsequently married, then divorced. He is portrayed as “John Beaver” in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.

By the 1970s, the 4th Baronet was living alone in Bellarena when, in 1976, he took his own life by shooting himself.”

It is explained earlier in the post that the house called Ballerena, located in County Londonderry, was acquired by the family through marriage in 1851. The baronetcy, however, dates back to 1831. Heygate is also probably the inspiration for a spotty-faced announcer at the BBC mentioned briefly in Vile Bodies.

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Revisiting Brideshead TV Series in Holland

Posted on December 14, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A Dutch language internet entertainment website has posted a review of the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. This is on the occasion of its recent rebroadcast in the Netherlands on the ONS Channel. The reviewer Robert Gooijer opens with his recollection of seeing the original broadcast when he was a teenager. He is reminded of it when he hears the voice of Jeremy Irons during an:

…audiotour of Westminster Abbey, exactly the same anointing voice that he also used for the endless voice-overs in the TV series, which to a large extent come directly from the book by Evelyn Waugh, which I still have not read. A series that was much more successful worldwide than you would expect from the highest literary, mildly homosexual and rather markedly Catholic content. And a series that is dated in a strange way thirty-six years after its transmission…

After a summary of the story, the review concludes:

Does the series hold out after so many years? The first thing that strikes you in these days of widescreen is the 4: 3 format of the image, that does not lend itself to the breadth of Brideshead, which is such a wide house that it only fits perfectly in the picture when it is kilometers away, being filmed. The pace is also old-fashioned; Brideshead Revisited the book you seem to have in three hours but the series is incredibly languid – slow is too negative a word here. With a haphazard zap through the episodes, zapping also shows that there are still a lot of depressing things happening; it is not just feasting and puking out of the window, there are also many other things going on. But the class of the series remains standing proudly. Except, it must be said, perhaps Charles Ryder himself. He is a sort of stand-in for the viewer, an outsider who wants to be part of it, sine nobilitas and a sack. He is less sympathetic than we found him at the time. His monologues occasionally disturb him and he is a bit of a fool and actually quite an irritating actor. Irons, who also seems to be a kind of Charles Ryder, appreciates horse riding, fox hunting and other upper class hobbies. The wondrous thing is that the director initially had the actor who plays Sebastian in mind as Charles. You cannot imagine that. So Charles Ryder remains forever Jeremy Irons, who now forms a small blot on Brideshead, but that is obviously very personal. In any case, I have quickly turned off the audio tour, tired of his slimy lisping [slijmerige gelispel] (?). But the flashback to Brideshead Revisited was nevertheless valuable. The house is cooler than the entire Westminster Abbey actually.

The suggestion that you could read the book in three hours seems a bit overstated but perhaps this is a translation problem. The review is posted on the Dutch entertainment website delagarde.nl.  The translation is by Google with minor editing. Any suggestions on improving the translation may be sent via comment as provided below.

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Evelyn Waugh and Our Lady of Guadalupe

Posted on December 13, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

An article posted in the Burkean Journal (produced by students of Trinity College Dublin) describes the importance of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Mexicans and to the history of Mexico. The article uses as its context the painting by Marxist artist Diego Rivera, The History of Mexico, in which the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe appears near that of atheist Karl Marx. The article by James Bradshaw explains that the image has also taken on political implications because it is based on the appearance of the Virgin Mary to one of the indigenous Mexican peasants at a time when they were treated as less than human by some Spaniards who enslaved many of them. The miracle was taken by the Church as confirmation of the indigenous people’s innate humanity and provided a pretext for expansion of the Church’s conversion efforts among them. The spot of the appearance is marked by a Basilica in the northern parts of Mexico City:

While Our Lady of Guadalupe is enormously popular in Mexico, the image – being inextricably linked to Catholicism – is not universally loved. The struggle between the religious and the irreligious has been one of the key conflicts in Mexican history, one which Diego Rivera went to great lengths to illustrate.

During the 1920s, the Catholic Church was viciously persecuted by the leftist victors of the Mexican Revolution. Priests were shot, churches were burned and in some regions of the country the practice of Catholicism was outlawed completely. In this environment, many feared for the survival of the tilma. Indeed, in his book about Mexico of the 1930s, Evelyn Waugh writes of how during the fiercest persecutions, the Indians guarded the Basilica at Guadalupe day and night, for fear that anti-clerical forces would attempt to rid Mexico of the tilma once and for all.

The “tilma” was the cloth on which the image of the virgin was miraculously imprinted at the time of her appearance and seems to have become an object of religious veneration. Waugh’s descriptions of the history of Our Lady of Guadalupe are contained in his 1939 book Robbery Under Law.

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