Alan Hollinghurst and Ambrose Silk

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Esquire magazine recently interviewed novelist Alan Hollinghurst and among the questions asked was which authors had most influenced him. An excerpt from the interview and a printed list of the books he mentioned are posted on the internet. (See this link,)  Among those he identified, he first discusses JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings which he read 6 times as a boy but cannot read at all today. Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags is number 7 and when asked about why he included it, he chose simply to read a passage. This is a description of Ambrose Silk’s settling in an obscure country inn in Ireland after absconding there from the police in London toward the end of the novel. It appears in Chapter 3 (“Spring”), Part 5, Penguin, p. 204, beginning “Here Ambrose settled…”  This is a reminder of just how well written and consistently funny that book is and how persistently it has been neglected in favor of Waugh’s more popular novels. It deserves more attention that it gets.

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Waugh’s Visit to May Morris

Posted on October 18, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The recent discovery of the journals of May Morris, daughter of the more famous William, has inspired an exhibit devoted to her life and works. The journals reportedly reveal that she was responsible for many of the creative designs that were attributed to her father. After her parents’ deaths she moved permanently into their house in the Cotswolds called Kelmscott Manor. In newspaper reports of the journals and exhibit, much attention has been drawn to a visit by Evelyn Waugh and Alastair Graham to Kelmscott Manor. These reports are carried in both The Times and the Daily Mail. This is from the Mail:

Much of [May Morris’s] later years were spent in the company of Mary Lobb, a former World War Land Girl whom the writer Evelyn Waugh dubbed a hermaphrodite. The pair took up camping when May was 60, and fulfilled her lifelong ambition to visit Iceland, for which she packed Horlicks and 11 pounds of bacon. May died aged 76 and her death was followed a few weeks later by her ‘heartbroken’ close friend.

Waugh’s visit took place in October 1927, apparently while he was doing research for his biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (published in 1928) who had a strong association with William Morris and the house. Waugh was staying with Alastair at nearby Barford House at the time. The report on his visit that has drawn the attention of the press is from his Diary for 6 October 1927. May Morris seems to have been present during the visit:

…Miss Morris, a singularly forbidding woman–very awkward and disagreeable dressed in a slipshod ramshackle way in hand-woven stuffs. A hermaphrodite lives with her…I had imagined it all so spacious–perhaps it is because it lacks [William] Morris and has that extraordinary woman and her hermaphrodite.

There is a photo of both May Morris and Mary Lobb accompanying the story in The Times. The exhibition May Morris: Art and Life is at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow until 28 January 2018.

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The Waughs and the Leigh Fermors

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Two recent books about Patrick Leigh Fermor (Paddy) and his wife Joan include material about their interactions with Evelyn Waugh, his wife Laura, and their mutual friends:

The first is Joan: The Remarkable Life of Joan Leigh Fermor by Simon Fenwick. Evelyn Waugh is mentioned several times in this biography in two ways. Firstly as having described the Bright Young Things in his novel Vile Bodies (1930) many of whom were friends of Joan Eyres Monsell (1912 – 2003), the beautiful wife of Patrick Leigh Fermor, before the Second World War. Waugh is said to have been at the London parties of her older gay brother, Graham whose circle included Oxford undergraduates around Maurice Bowra, some of Waugh’s friends and others who they knew in common including Tom Driberg, Patrick Kinross, Alan Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly, John Betjeman, John Sparrow and Harold Acton.

In August 1944 Waugh stayed with John Rayner, Joan’s first husband, in his Rome apartment, while recovering from the injury after the airplane crash in Croatia a month before. Waugh wrote in his diary that he hardly knew him but recorded that they usually had dinner together at the ‘charming flat, 5 Via Gregoriana’ and the author quotes from Waugh’s diary entry of 22 August 1944. Further on, Joan wrote about Waugh in a letter to Paddy, with whom she started a romance after the war. Waugh was at the supper party given by Anne Fleming together with other celebrities:”…Evelyn Waugh who I talked to most of the time, mostly about the time he went mad & all his voices – fascinating.” However, it seems probable that Waugh did not appreciate Joan quite as much. Fenwick writes that in a letter to Diana Cooper from Greece where Paddy and Joan lived, Waugh referred to them as the “Nicotine maniac and his girl”.

The second is Dashing to the Post: The Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor, which has recently been issued in paperback. There are no letters in the collection (edited by Adam Sisman) to Waugh although they knew each other through mutual friendships with Diana Cooper, Nancy Mitford and Ann Fleming. In a 1973 letter to Nancy Mitford (pp. 292-93) Paddy mentions meeting Laura Waugh and her sister Bridget Grant who were travelling in Greece. Paddy voiced his disappointment in the “inadequacy and indiscretion” in the published version of Evelyn Waugh’s diaries, particularly the “idiotic” brief biography of Mark Ogilvie-Grant. This appears in an appendix (p. 799) and is apparently written by the editor Michael Davie. Adam Sisman comments that it is not obvious why Leigh Fermor was upset by it although his concern may relate to some inaccuracy in its description of Ogilvie-Grant’s work in Athens after the war. Paddy records Laura’s response:

Laura agrees, saying it was all the fault of Peters, E Waugh’s agent, who had the complete rights. She hadn’t even read most of it. It all sounds very rum to me and a bit wet.

In a subsequent letter to Diana Cooper in 1980 (p, 338), Paddy says he was “horrified…by Laura’s guilty frivolity in handing over [the diaries] unread…” This is in the context of advising Diana to be careful in handing letters and other documents over to her biographer Philip Ziegler. Finally, he mentions in a November 1966 letter to Ann Fleming having reread Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and, after having “hated” it the first time, he now thinks it

…really wonderful, fearfully sad, very funny, absolutely true, very grand indeed. I think the difference in mood, tempo, scope and its appearing in driblets, must have put me wrong the first time.

Thanks to Milena Borden for the portion of the above post on the Joan Leigh Fermor biography.

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Anthony Powell Biography (More)

Posted on October 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The new biography of Anthony Powell by Hilary Spurling has been widely reviewed in the British press and several additional reviews have cited Evelyn Waugh’s friendship with Powell. Nicholas Shakespeare, writer and director of the BBC Arena documentary “The Waugh Trilogy” in the 1980s, reveiwed the book in the Daily Telegraph:

Not normally a writer to stand one’s hair on end, Powell does so when contemplating his fellow practitioners. His publishers used to categorise him as “probably the greatest living English writer”, which made him sound like a lager. But just look how actively he cleared the ground of rivals past, present and future. The effect is not unlike napalm. Gustave Flaubert: “Does rather pile on the agony at the end.” Graham Greene: “Absurdly overrated.” Evelyn Waugh: “Unnourishing feeling in most of his books.” … Powell would have purred like his cat Fum at the way Spurling has brought him to humane and generous life, made head and tail of his character and work, and begun the process of restoring Powell to the same shelf as his contemporaries like Waugh, Greene and Orwell, where he always felt he belonged anyway.

Literary critic and novelist DJ Taylor, after writing a parody of Spurling’s book (and Powell’s writing) in Private Eye, wrote a generous and favorable review in The Times. Taylor begins by summarizing Spurling’s description of the financial and social difficulties Powell faced in breaking into the London literary establishment. Although dismissed by many as a spoiled product of the upper class, attending Eton and Balliol, his family depended on his father’s modest Army officer pay. It was often difficult for Powell to keep up with his contemporaries, such as his more successful Oxford friends Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. On that subject, Taylor notes:

One could have done, too, with a more nuanced view of some of his friendships, in particular his relationship with Evelyn Waugh, who once informed a third party that Tony “feared all human contact”. (The best of the Waugh stories has Waugh jokily threatening to give his family away to the Powells — the children had to be forcibly removed from Lady Violet’s car.)

Finally, the Irish Times has issued a review by journalist Kieran Fagan which cites what has become one of the most quoted passages in the UK reviews of Spurling’s book:

Powell’s friend and fellow novelist Evelyn Waugh saw the novel sequence this way: “We watch through the glass of a tank; one after another, the various specimens swim towards us; we see them clearly, then with a barely perceptible flick of fin or a tail, they swim off into the murk. This is how our encounters occur in real life. Friends and acquaintances approach or recede year by year. Their presence has no significance. It is recorded as part of the permeating and inebriating atmosphere of the haphazard which is the essence of Mr Powell’s art.”

Spurling quotes that passage in her book (p. 366), and it has been requoted (in whole or in part) in nearly half of the reviews in the UK press. It comes from Waugh’s review in the Spectator of the 6th book in Powell’s cycle Dance to the Music of Time. This is entitled The Kindly Ones and was published in 1962. It has not been collected, unlike Waugh’s review of the previous volume Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960) which appears in Essays, Articles and Reviews. That happened to be the volume Waugh liked least because of the introduction of several musicians in whom he had little interest. In the quoted review, Waugh thought Powell was back on form and commented favorably on the entire series up to that point.

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Henry Green’s Dead White Goose

Posted on October 13, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The New York Review of Books’ revival of the works of Henry Green is nearing its completion later this month. They will publish Nothing and Doting next week followed by the reissuance of Concluding by New Directions on 31 October. The introduction to the NYRB’s Doting is published in a recent issue of the The Paris Review. This is by Michael Gorra who teaches English at Smith College. He opens and closes his essay with consideration of the differences between Green’s works and those of his contemporaries Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene:

Evelyn Waugh could push a joke to the outer edge of our ability to bear it, stopping just when laughter turns to tears, and he’s had his imitators for the better part of a century now. So has Graham Greene, who blanched despair into a weary disillusionment; the contemporary thriller is inconceivable without him. Each of them added to the novelist’s grab bag of tricks. Their contemporary Henry Green didn’t quite manage that.

What Green did manage according to Gorra was to write nine original and innovative novels, each different from the others, until he dried up (or rather was unable to dry out) in the 1950s. Gorra concludes his essay with this observation:

I began by invoking Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, contemporaries whose careers were in every objective sense more successful, and whose books remain far more readable. But are they as rereadable? When I go back to them now they rarely have anything new to say, nothing more than I saw at first; I turn their pages with pleasure and yet the pleasure is that of repetition, the resumption of the familiar. The menu never changes. Henry Green seems in contrast always different, and never what he was. The emphasis alters, and some parts of his work remain forever odd, anomalous and even disturbing. On Doting’s first page, he writes that Peter would “several weeks later … carry a white goose under one arm, its dead beak almost trailing the platform, to catch the last train back to yet another term.” That goose isn’t mentioned again. I don’t really want to know what the boy plans to do with it, or even how he got it, but I would like to know why Green put it there. I never will, and among the many reasons for reading this difficult genius is the way he keeps his secrets still.

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Eade Biography Reviewed in LGBT Press

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A review of Philip Eade’s biography appears this week in conjunction with the publication of its paperback edition in the US. This is written by Lewis Whittington and is published by the Edge Media Network which serves the LGBT community. The reviewer is somewhat disappointed in Eade’s treatment of Waugh’s homosexuality:

For GLBTQ readers the primary interest will not only be Waugh’s gay relationships at Oxford, but the backdrop of sexually repressive England, where homosexuality was still a crime, yet gay subcultures were an open secret among the aristocracy. Waugh grew up in an aristocratic [sic] British family. … He was attracted to girls his age as a teenager, but his most intense emotional attachments were with boys…. The bulk of “A Life Revisited” centers around his relationship with his family, his heterosexual relationships, and his marriages. It disappoints that, on balance, Eade seems to gloss over Waugh’s serious relationships with men, particularly Richard Pares and Alastair Graham, who just fade from the pages without any narrative closure.

It’s hard to know where the reviewer gets the impression from Eade’s book that Waugh was from an “aristocratic British family” although he doesn’t attempt to make much of a point about it. The amount of Eade’s copy devoted to Waugh’s homosexual affairs is probably in a fair proportion to the amount of his lifetime they occupied. He certainly doesn’t avoid the issue; rather, he doesn’t dwell upon it as the reviewer seems to prefer. A previous  review in the LGBT press (noted in an earlier post) offers a more detailed and balanced view of Eade’s coverage of Waugh’s homosexuality.

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Another Lygon and More Bridesheads

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has an article about a recently pubished diary kept by two early women undergraduates at St Hugh’s College, Oxford: Dorothy Hammonds and Margaret Mowll. Their diary starts in 1905 and describes the restricted lives of the Oxford women students of that period; they could not venture outside the college after dark even to university sponsored activities without proper chapersones. So far as romantic interests in male counterparts are concerned, these were largely confined to the pages of their diary. One student in particular caught both their fancies:

,,,the greatest object of their desire appears to have been the undergraduate they christened ‘the Pride of all the Beauchamps’ — the Hon Henry Lygon of Magdalen College, the younger brother of Earl Beauchamp who was said to be Evelyn Waugh’s model for Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited. A coloured ink sketch made in the diary by Dorothy shows a golden-haired, handsome and debonair young man cycling with a pile of books under his arm.  November 21, 1905 was clearly a day of great excitement for both the girls.  ‘This is indeed a day of days, MKM has actually seen Face to Face the Pride of all the Beauchamps. This is the first time he has been seen accidentally in the flesh — Thus the need of capital letters.’ In December it was Dorothy’s turn: ‘DMH has astounding luck, the Pride of the Beauchamps again crossed her path, looking, she is sorry to say, horsey and common but nevertheless charming.’

The Mail’s reviewer, Barbara Davies, misses the opportunity to compare Henry Lygon to his nephew Hugh who, a generation later, attracted the romantic attentions of Evelyn Waugh and contributed to the character of Sebastian Flyte in Waugh’s novel. The diary is published by St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and is entitled Dare Unchaperoned to Gaze and is available here.

Other Brideshead news is related to drama. The student paper of the University of Louisiana, Lafayette (The Vermillion) reports the student production of Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia. This connection to Waugh’s novel is included in an article about a preview of the play:

The name is taken from “Et in Arcadia ego” (“Even in Arcadia, there am I”), the 17th century painting by French Baroque artist Nicolas Poussin, and refers to the presence of death even in a utopia. It also doubles as a reference (intentional or not) to Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” in which Charles Ryder has a human skull bearing the inscription on its forehead. In “Brideshead,” this is a crucial part of the mise-en-scène: embodying (sans the body) the image of a futile search for paradise and serving as a reminder of the imminence of death and the same themes apply to Stoppard’s work.

Finally, an entertainment news publication in Adelaide, South Australia, reports the production of a stage adaptation of Brideshead. This is not the version by Bryony Lavery staged last year in England but an earlier adaptation by Roger Parsley. The production is being performed by Adelaide’s Independent Theatre, which recently staged an adaptation of The Great Gatsby. It is scheduled to open on 17 November at the Goodwood Theatre.

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Paperback of Eade Biography Issued in USA

Posted on October 11, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Picador USA has announced the publication of the paperback edition of Philip Eade’s biography in the USA. The book, entitled Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited, was first published in the USA last year by Henry Holt. Both publishers are subsidiaries of Macmillan USA. The hardback edition was widely reviewed, including a review by your correspondent in Evelyn Waugh Studies 47.2 (Autumn 2016). The paperback edition is listed at $22.00 and is available on Amazon.com for $14.95. A Kindle e-book is also available for $9.99.

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Brideshead Film Emerges in Weinstein Scandal

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In wake of the sexual harassment scandal involving US filmmaker Harvey Weinstein, the New York Post has reported an incident arising from the production of the 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. In 2007, Weinstein visited the production on location in North Yorkshire while he was negotiating the North American distribution rights for his company, then called Miramax. Those negotiations were ultimately successful. It was on the set that the sexual harassment is said to have occurred after he encountered actress Hayley Atwell:

During a break in the filming, the brash Hollywood powerbroker…walked over to Hayley Atwell, a then-24-year-old British-American actress who was playing Julia Flyte in the movie. Weinstein started flirting with the actress, who was clearly nervous, starring in one of her first major roles. At lunch, Weinstein sat with the cast and crew, and told Atwell to watch what she was eating, explaining that he had just come from watching that morning’s filming and he didn’t like what he saw, a film-industry source told The Post “You look like a fat pig on screen,” said Weinstein, who had just come from watching the dailies. “Stop eating so much.”

When Atwell told her Oscar-winning co-star Emma Thompson that the Miramax head ordered her to go on a diet, Thompson flipped. She took Weinstein aside and threatened to quit if he forced Atwell or any other woman on set to go on a diet. “Emma called Harvey out for being a misogynist and a bully and really gave him a hard time,” the source said. Weinstein backed down.

Thompson, who was playing Lady Marchmain, had discussed this same incident in an interview reported earlier this year, without naming the principals. See earlier post.

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Three Generations of Waughs in The Oldie

Posted on October 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Various Waughs (and their associates) are scattered throughout the pages of this month’s issue of The Oldie. The leading feature article by Alan Thomas is about the Bright Young People and opens with a reference to Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies:

The Bright Young People – renamed Bright Young Things in the 2003 film version of Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel, Vile Bodies – first came to prominence thanks to a speeding offence. On 21st May 1924, the Honourable Lois Sturt, the actress daughter of Lord Alington, was caught speeding around the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park during a motorised treasure hunt. The 23-year-old lover of Reggie Pembroke (aka the Earl of Pembroke), Lois shot through a police control point at 51mph. When signalled to stop, she reduced speed slightly but then roared off again. The police caught up with her at London Zoo at the end of the race – in which she won third prize – and charged her with dangerous driving and failing to stop at the request of a police constable.

The remainder of that article is behind a paywall but Waugh may reappear in later sections.

Evelyn Waugh’s biographer Selina Hastings reviews the biography of his friend Anthony Powell by Hilary Spurling.  The review consists mostly of a summary of Powell’s life which suffers from several oversimplicifications.  For example, it suggests that Waugh met Powell while they were both studying at the Holborn Polytechnic after coming down from Oxford.  As Waugh’s biographer, Hastings would know that they both met as undergraduates at Oxford in the Hypocrites Club (Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, pp. 91 ff.), and Powell mentions being invited to “offal dinners” in Waugh’s rooms at Hertford College.  They reconnected in London shortly after AP started work at Duckworth’s and later met by chance at the Polytechnic where each had signed up for a course without telling the other. Hastings also describes how Powell’s life was affected by another Waugh, Evelyn’s son Auberon:

[Powell’s] journalistic positions ended explosively: Tony was sacked by Punch, and he left the Telegraph in a rage after reading in the book pages a derisory review of his work by Auberon Waugh.

In this same issue, another of Evelyn Waugh’s biographers, Michael Barber (Brief Lives: Evelyn Waugh (2013)), reviews John Le Carré’s latest George Smiley novel and the editor of his letters Mark Amory reviews a book about Edward Lear. Finally one of his grandchildren, Sophia Waugh (daughter of Auberon), is listed as a regular contributor to the magazine.

UPDATE (7 October 2017): While it’s not in The Oldie, it has been reported that Nicholas Shakespeare, who wrote and directed  the three-part BBC Arena series on Evelyn Waugh, has reviewed the Powell biography in the Daily Telegraph. Powell was interviewed in two of the episodes.

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