Novelists Review Powell Biography

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In yesterday’s papers, two novelists review the new biography of Anthony Powell by Hilary Spurling. Philip Hensher in the Spectator declares that Powell has finally received the biography he deserves. He also discusses the relationship of Powell and Evelyn Waugh:

The five novels [Powell] wrote in the 1930s fell under the shadow of Waugh and even of Henry Green; they are extraordinarily dry, and met with only very moderate success, though their brilliance has never been in doubt. The last of them, indeed, was published days before the war broke out and was a minor casualty of the conflict. Powell had a mixed war, though relations between him and the army never broke down as spectacularly as they did in the case of Evelyn Waugh — in person, he was always much more emollient, though perhaps not very competent.

In the Guardian Claire Messud also praises the biography and offers her own favorable judgment of  Powell’s work. She too includes Waugh in her discussion, citing the same assessment Waugh made of Powell’s work as quoted by Hilary Spurling in the recent Times article.  See previous post. Messud concludes that discussion:

…Waugh rightly salutes “the permeating and inebriating atmosphere of the haphazard” so distinctive to Powell’s oeuvre…In the immediate postwar years, Powell struggled again with depression, and was at sea as a writer: “Contemporaries like Waugh, Greene, and even Orwell were beginning to think about collected editions but he had published nothing for eight years, and was nowhere near starting a new novel. The closest he had got was to spend the last year re-reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,” Spurling writes of a frantic period in which Powell was reviewing approximately a book a day. This rediscovery of Proust proved definitive for Powell, who came to envision a new way of writing, and a project that would consume him for the next 25 years. A Question of Upbringing was published in 1951.

UPDATE (29 September 2017): Lara Feigel, author of The Love Charm of Bombs, a literary history of WWII London, has reviewed the biography of Anthony Powell in the Financial Times. She also features a discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s relationship with Powell which opens her review:

Reviewing the sixth volume of A Dance to the Music of Time [The Kindly Ones] in 1962, Anthony Powell’s long-time friend and some-time rival Evelyn Waugh paid generous tribute. “Less original novelists tenaciously follow their protagonists”, Waugh wrote, but Powell’s method was different. Here we watched the characters through the glass of a tank: “one after another various specimens swim towards us; we see them clearly, then with a barely perceptible flick of fin or tail, they are off into the murk”. For Waugh, Powell had succeeded in capturing nothing less than the haphazard daily experience of life.

Waugh also reviewed the fifth volume (Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant) but liked it less than he had the others. Both reviews appeared in the Spectator and the earlier one is reprinted in Waugh’s Essays, Articles and Reviews. In the one quoted by Feigel and several others, Waugh thought Powell was back on form, and he enjoyed it as much as he had the earlier volumes.

 

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Put Out More Rabans

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The London Review of Books has published a biographical description of his father’s experience in the early days of WWII by Jonathan Raban. One of the few literary allusions in the article is Raban’s reference to Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags in connection with his father’s experience of the “phoney war” in the months before the German invasion of France and the Low Countries. According to Raban:

 the most conspicuous feature of the Phoney War was the havoc caused by the ‘evacuees’ from the big cities: several million school-age children, along with pregnant women and mothers with their under-fives, who were bundled onto trains and sent out into the countryside in the first four days of September 1939. This chaos, born of bureaucratic panic and a gross overestimation of the likely casualties of German bombing raids, was called Operation Pied Piper, and it plays a central part in Evelyn Waugh’s seriocomic novel of the Phoney War, Put Out More Flags.

The LRB introduction explains that Raban, who has written several travel books (as well as  novels and essays) reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, suffered a stroke in 2011 and is only now beginning to be able to write again. He may well be a distant relative of Waugh whose mother’s maiden name was Catherine Raban. It’s not a common name, and both seem to have clergymen in their family backgrounds. Jonathan Raban previously commented on Waugh’s novel in a National Public Radio interview (All Things Considered) in 2008. Here’s an excerpt:

…For my money, Waugh is the greatest stylistic craftsman of the 20th century. Tone-deaf to music, he was pitch-perfect when it came to the music of the English language. I love the limpidness of his writing, its shocking clarity. Put Out More Flags is as tightly constructed — point and counterpoint — as a baroque fugue. If it begins in something close to farce, it darkens steadily, like a long summer sunset, as 1940 wears on, and gravity becomes the order of the day. Even Basil Seal eventually finds a serious job — in a commando unit, where, fighting Nazis overseas, being an incorrigible rogue will make good moral sense. His transformation, from bounder to useful soldier, mirrors the transformation of a whole society, as Britain learned, slowly and painfully, how to fight for its survival…

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Julia’s Meltdown and the “Filial Correction”

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Catholic Herald has an article by its US editor Michael Davis in which he explains what is politely called the “filial correction” in Roman Catholic circles. This is a group which has written to the Pope explaining how he may have gotten it a bit wrong in his Amoris Laetitia pronouncement. Davis uses the scene from Brideshead Revisited where Julia hysterically breaks up with Charles Ryder to make a point. This is the scene near the novel’s end (which Davis quotes in full) where she confronts her adultery:

Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it’s fretful. Always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. “Poor Julia,” they say, “she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her little sin. A pity it ever lived,” they say, “but it’s so strong. Children like that always are. Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.”

Davis makes his case in the article that this scene explains how Waugh would have come out in favor of the “filial correction.” It would be foolhardy and presumptuous to attempt to paraphrase or summarize his argument, but the full text is available in the article linked above. He concludes by linking back to Waugh:

Adultery doesn’t stop being a sin just because we “draw the curtains on it.” Our conscience won’t grow stronger if we “put it to sleep with a tablet of Dial when it’s fretful.” Sin has consequences. Waugh knew that. So do the authors of the filial correction. The question is, does the Pope?

The online version is headed by a handsome photograph of Waugh and his second wife at their marriage ceremony. His first marriage ended in divorce due to his wife’s adultery.

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Anthony Powell Biography to Appear Next Week

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Hilary Spurling, who has written a new and much awaited biography of Anthony Powell, has served up an appetizer in an article published in the Times. She starts with a survey of the major 20th century writers who admired Powell’s work. These included P G Wodehouse, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. They also included a friend from Powell’s Oxford days, Evelyn Waugh, who wrote:

“The life of the series [Dance to the Music of Time] is generated within it,” said Evelyn Waugh. “Less original novelists tenaciously follow their protagonists. In the Music of Time we watch through the glass of a tank; one after another various specimens swim towards us; we see them clearly, then with a barely perceptible flick of fin or a tail they are off into the murk. That is how our encounters occur in life.”

Spurling goes on to give a sampling of her research on Powell’s early love affairs about which he was relatively reticent in his memoirs. In one of these he intersected with Evelyn Waugh, as will probably be mentioned in the biography:

When he and [his first lover] parted, Tony consoled himself with, among others, the tempestuous Varda (always known, like a man, by her surname), once billed by the great impresario CB Cochran as “the most beautiful woman in the world”. Tony met her when she sent him her translation of the French avant-garde writer Raymond Radiguet and shortly afterwards a novel of her own called Faces (always referred to by its author as Faeces).

Waugh describes some of the details of his own fling with Varda in his Diaries. Spurling’s biography is scheduled to be released next week in the UK by Hamish Hamilton.

The book is reviewed in the Sunday Times for 24 September by John Carey. Not known as a Powell fan, Prof Carey provides this comparison of Powell’s war trilogy in the Dance series to Waugh’s Sword of Honour:

Though nominally a member of the armed forces, [Powell] sat out the Second World War in various desk jobs, peacefully attaining the rank of temporary major and never setting foot outside the British Isles. This arrangement allowed him to spend occasional weekends with his wife, but it had its downside. His limited experience of soldiering is one reason why the three volumes of Dance that cover the war years are so inferior to Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, the Sword of Honour trilogy.
One of the commenters (Andrew Dickens) on Prof Carey’s review disagrees on this point:
Carey is quite amusing on the subject of Powell’s “youthful deprivation” (only 3 servants!), but I can’t agree that his war novels are inferior to Waugh’s. Their approach was quite different: Waugh preferred the farcical aspects (Apthorpe, Ritchie-Hook) while Powell’s version was only too believable. The unfortunate Captain Gwatkin for example.
UPDATE (26 September 2017): Link to John Carey’s review of book was added to above article.
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Waugh Saga

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Lars Walker has posted a review of Sword of Honour on internet book site Brandywine Books . Walker has written several novels in what looks like it would be called the Norse warrior saga genre and so has an obvious interest in Waugh’s war trilogy. His most original comment relates to another war novel:

I was reminded of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, in the sense that this is a darkly comic book about the insanity of war. Only Waugh’s presuppositions are very different from Heller’s. His hero longs for a reason to fight – even to die – but is denied it. There were also similarities to Graham Greene, another Catholic writer. But Greene admired the Communists and hated Americans, while Waugh loathes the Communists, and find Americans merely vulgar.

Reader and Waugh fan Dave Lull who sent this along also noted with interest a comment to the post that mentioned as helpful in reading the novel the commentary of David Cliffe who formerly maintained a Waugh-related website. The commenter wondered whether that website was archived. Dave Lull provides this link to David Cliffe’s archived website along with some advice on how to get there:

A copy of David Cliffe‘s website is available via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160308112425/http://abbotshill.freeserve.co.uk/home2.htm

If you run into a dead-end link, i.e., nothing shows on the linked to “capture” page, just try a different date of “capture.”

Hat tip to Dave Lull once again.

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Lost Children and Losing Margarine

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian has published an article by Alex Clark about the theme of lost children in literature. The prime example is Ian McEwen’s Thatcher-era novel The Child in Time whch has been adapted for television by BBC/PBS in a 90-minute film that premieres on BBC One at 2100p, Sunday, 24 September. Clark explains the theme of this genre before he comes to specific cases:

In cultural artefacts as in life, the missing child is rarely given the liberty of a stable identity: after the initial, brutal drama of disappearance, a wave of emotional and psychological complications rush in to fill the space left by the agony and terror of loss. Quickly, the child becomes a cipher for more deeply rooted and amorphous anxieties about our ability to protect and to keep frequently unforeseeable dangers at bay; about the family’s relation to society as a whole; and about the fear of the unknowable, predatory other.

After considering the theme in several films and TV series, Clark mentions Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet when a lost child theme is use to tie the novels’ story back to the beginning where the two mothers searching for the child in volume 4 recall their search for lost dolls that opens the first volume. This where Waugh comes in:

It’s a stark difference with another kind of mother entirely: the heinous Brenda Last in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. She commits perhaps the greatest parental transgression of all when her son, John Andrew, is killed in a riding accident. When the news is conveyed to her, she momentarily believes that her lover, also called John, is dead when the truth is revealed, she utters the memorable – and unforgivable – words, “Thank God!” It is hard not to see Brenda, awful though she is, as a woman punished for licensing her sexual desire, firmly placed by Waugh beyond the pale.

Waugh also comes into an article on the academic website The Conversation in which Ellen Turner of Lund University discusses the downfall of margarine. This comes in the wake of Unilever’s announcement that it is discontinuing two of its popular brands of that product:

In a column penned by Evelyn Waugh for The Spectator in 1929, margarine represents a general post-war lack of good taste. During the war, writes Waugh, “[e]verything was a ‘substitute’ for something else”, the upshot being “a generation of whom nine hundred and fifty in every thousand are totally lacking in any sense of qualitative value” as a consequence of “being nurtured on margarine and ‘honey sugar’.” Such a diet, according to Waugh, makes them “turn instinctively to the second rate in art and life”.

Waugh’s article was the first in a series about the “Younger Generation”. It is collected in A Little Order and Essays, Articles and Reviews.

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Waugh and his Enemies: Hugh Trevor-Roper

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In advance of the lecture (“Waugh’s Enemies”) scheduled for next Monday, 25 September at Hertford College, Oxford, the University of Leicester has posted a brief article about what will surely be one of the topics. This is by Milena Borden and refers to one of Waugh’s most prominent and consistent enemies, Prof. Hugh Trevor-Roper, variously holding appointments at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Dr Borden reviews the first of the public disputes between Waugh and Trevor-Roper. This arose from Trevor-Ropers’s first book, The Last Days of Hitler, and related, inter alia, to the professor’s unsubstantiated claim that Joseph Goebbels had received his schooling in institutions run by the Jesuits. After an exchange of letters in The Tablet, Trevor-Roper had to back off somewhat in a later edition at the direction of his US publishers. After summarizing the dispute, Dr Borden concludes:

So, what does this quarrel tell us about Waugh, Oxford, and the bigger question – ‘What is history?’. Is it factual, unemotional and secular or is it inductive and tainted with beliefs, and religious faith? Waugh, a devout Catholic, argued against the idea that fascism could be linked to his religion, whereas Trevor-Roper – a staunch anti-Catholic – understood and accepted criticism only if it was on the ground of academic accuracy. Waugh extended his absolute disdain for the historical empiricism of C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, his history tutor at Oxford, to The Last Days of Hitler, the book, which A. J. P. Taylor called ‘a delight for historian and layman alike’. The quarrel reached a point where all could enjoy the infinite view of history debates at Oxford.

Other disputes followed between the novelist and the professor, with letters published in the pages of The New Stateman. These related to the English Reformation and what came to be called “Popish Plots”. Some of these are reproduced in Waugh’s collected Letters. Neither side came out of these disputes the clear winner. But Trevor-Roper actually kept on a non-public but disputatious correspondence even after Waugh’s death.  See, e.g., “Destroy after Reading: Selected Correspondence of Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lord Birkenhead” (EWS 45.3: Winter 2015). For tickets to the lecture and further details go to this link.

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Mr Sniggs and the Pillocks

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In the Evening Standard, Sam Leith unburdens himself of his thoughts on today’s undergraduates as they are returning to classes in the UK this week. He opens with a passage from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall where Junior Dean Sniggs is counting up the fines he will collect from the Bollinger Club’s high spirits. Leith continues:

New figures find that over the last three years, £350,000 of fines were levied on students for antisocial behaviour — and there’s been a 16 per cent rise in the last year…Each new generation invents its own new way of being the pits. Look back through the annals of time and at every significant point in history there has been a student behaving like a pillock. Decline and Fall gives us student pillocks; Lucky Jim gives us student pillocks a generation later; The Young Ones gives us student pillocks a generation after that; Fresh Meat a generation after that. And what’s the first half of Romeo and Juliet but a bunch of students being pillocks? Don’t get me started on Hamlet.

After thinking it over, Leith decides it’s best to :

…let students be pillocks. Punish them, by all means. But fining them for drunken misbehaviour, the singing of ribald songs and wheelie bin-related hijinks is to further enmesh them in our glumly transactional world. We already soak them for tuition fees, the better to enrich members of the rent-seeking Vice-Chancellor class. Let’s stop there. We are all, at one time or another, the Bollinger Club. We don’t have to grow up to be Mr Sniggs.

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Waugh and the Country House (more)

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh’s biographer Paula Byrne has reviewed the book House of Fiction by Phyllis Richardson in the current TLS. This book has been mentioned in several recent posts but Byrne focuses more closely on Richardson’s descriptions of Evelyn Waugh’s relations with the country house than do previous reviewers. Byrne takes issue with several of Richardson’s conclusions, especially relating to the houses she associated with Tristram Shandy and Northanger Abbey. In the case of Waugh and his connections with Madresfield Court, about which Byrne has written extensively in her biography, she notes several errors of fact and judgment on Richardson’s part. These include her placing Waugh in the “upper middle class”, claiming he was dependent on an allowance from his father in the “Bright Young People” era, mispelling Lord Elmley’s name, describing Countess Beauchamp as Roman Catholic, etc.:

An even greater problem than the local carelessness is Richardson’s obsessive and simplistic quest for real-life models for fictional houses…The quest for singular originals for literary houses (or characters) is always doomed to failure. For all the parallels between Madresfield and Brideshead, Hugh Lygon and Sebastian Flyte, Waugh also made use of Barford House, the home of his other  undergraduate love [sic], Alastair Graham.

Byrne seems to overlook Waugh’s first undergraduate lover (Richard Pares) in this regard and perhaps overstates his attachment to Hugh Lygon. She also includes a consideration of Richardson’s chapter on the different treatment accorded the country house in post-modern fiction, raising several interesting points about the survival of both the country house and its literary genre. She concludes with this:

As Toby Litt wrote appropos of his contribution to the genre, Finding Myself: “once you gather a group of people together in a country house then certain things try to force themselves in. Like ghosts. Like midnight flits. Like marital breakdown. Like meditations on the state of England.”

It is not clear from the review whether the quote is also contained in Richardson’s book or is an original contribution by Byrne, but, in either case,  it is a good way to end her article. Thanks to Peggy Troupin for sending this along.

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“Tsunami of Waviana”

Posted on September 17, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Australian magazine Quadrant has a review in its online edition by Mark McGinness of the early volumes of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh published earlier this week. The article is entitled “Total Waugh.” McGinness begins with an effort to make sense out of the selection of these first volumes for publication:

The first four volumes, published this week, cleverly encompass the young Waugh – his personal writings, his first biography, his second novel, and his autobiography.

Waugh’s early journalism will complete the package and, as noted by McGinness, this volume (the first of four devoted to this facet of his writing) will be published later this year.

McGinness offers quotes from the introductions to Rossetti and Vile Bodies to support his theory. When he comes to A Little Learning, Waugh’s last published book, he provides this  justification:

Waugh’s first and last sentences are so elegantly apt. He begins A Little Learning with “Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.” The memoir closes in July, 1925, after a suicide attempt in Wales where he swam out to sea and met a school of jelly-fish; and swam back to shore. His last sentence reads, “Then I climbed the sharp hill that led to all the years ahead.”

The volume Precocious Waughs is the first of 12 devoted to personal writing and, to McGinness, this one contains the greatest revelation. It includes his schoolboy diaries and adolescent letters published for the first time. According to the editors (Alexander Waugh and Alan Bell):

“The clarity of his writing, even in adolescence, and his sharp eye for the absurdity of formal situations and social intercourse –  the same traits that combined so artfully to make his fiction –  are here all shown in their earliest forms, fusing to create a vivid critical and comical commentary on everyday life.”

McGinness concludes with a congratulatory message to OUP for undertaking this ambitious project, foreseeing what he describes as a “tsunami of Waviana” :

One might have expected this sort of honour to be restricted to Shakespeare, Austen or James. Instead it has been conferred on a twentieth-century writer, an abiding enemy of both the Common Man and the Modern Age, but one of the greatest stylists in the English canon. Even committed Wavians may quake at the fulsomeness of it all — four done and 39 to go – but the style, the tone, the presentation and erudition displayed so far, deserve the widest acclaim.

McGinness’s review is cited and linked in the “Prufrock” column of the Weekly Standard magazine which adds its comment:

The first volumes of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh will be published in a few weeks—a massive undertaking to print every word Waugh wrote. “One of the fascinating aspects of Evelyn Waugh is how much of his life he poured into his art. When his Diaries were published in 1976 his eldest son, Auberon, declared, ‘[They] show that the world of Evelyn Waugh’s novels did in fact exist.’”

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