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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Waugh and the Small, Cornered Creature (more)

Posted on September 16, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In a previous post, we discussed a quote attributed to Evelyn Waugh in an unsigned Private Eye book review about a new collection of stories by James Kelman. A search turned up the quote as having first appeared in a novel by D J Taylor who was also suspected of having written the review. Taylor, who is indeed the reviewer, has explained all this in a recent email:

Inspired by your researches, I decided to summon all the powers of memory at my disposal and track this back to source. It is NOT EW. Here is Alan Watkins in his Brief Lives (1982), writing about my namesake A.J.P. Taylor:

‘He was a short, slight man with a peering and somehow suspicious expression. He resembled a small creature of the field who was apprehensive of attack but would turn nasty in that event.’

I think I must have confused this with EW by misremembering a William Boot, Countryman column in Scoop.

So, that’s sorted. The quote as written by Watkins is unlikely to be mistaken for Waugh whereas, as modified by Taylor for his novel Real Life, it might easily be. Indeed, Taylor’s early novels, of which Real Life is one, are written very much in the Waugh satiric comedy tradition and should have received more attention than has been the case. Others include Trespass and The Comedy Man (published together with Real Life as Returning: Three Novels) as well as English Settlement.

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First Complete Works Volumes Published

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The first four volumes of Evelyn Waugh’s Complete Works have been published by Oxford University Press. Alexander Waugh is interviewed on BBC Radio 4 in yesterday’s edition of World at One in connection with this event. The interview is by Luke Jones and takes place in the quadrangle of Hertford College, Oxford, where Waugh was a student. The interview ranges over several subjects arising from Alexander’s general editorship of the project. He hopes that the results of these publications showing all sides of the writer will have the effect of improving his grandfather’s standing in the academic community where he has been somewhat neglected as a comic novelist with a reputation for being a difficult personality. The program may be replayed at this link starting at 23:00 and continuing for about 7 minutes.

The Evening Standard is the first off the mark with a review of the early volumes. The review by David Sexton concentrates on the first volume of Personal Writings and A Little Learning because they contain new material not previously published. Sexton describes some of the new material in A Little Learning (edited by Barbara Cooke and John Howard Wilson) which:

… contains some primary material that will not be familiar to non-academic Waugh readers (“Wavians”, it seems), including three brief drafts of the unfinished sequel to A Little Learning — A Little Hope — and also a collection of interviews with Waugh, some well-known but others retrieved from obscure sources. There are some stinging  pronouncements here. He says in A Little Hope, for example, that when he returned to London from teaching in Wales: “London seemed alight & alive with fun & variety. More than this it seemed a lovable place, dignified & beautiful, with its own inalienable character. The love was short lived. In a few years I saw it distended, despoiled & reduced to insignificant uniformity. I now shun it as do most of my acquaintance.” Asked by an interviewer in 1948 if he likes England, he replies: “One can’t like it. I am English, it is where I belong. It is one of the inherited disadvantages of one’s life. It is no use pretending one is Patagonian and going to live in Chile.” To a writer, “words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker”, the welfare state is “a pure fraud”, people who believe civilisation is progressing “must be locked up in lunatic asylums by now”, and “universal education is a waste of time”. Very good.

The first of the projected 10 volumes of Personal Writings is entitled Precocious Waughs (edited by Alexander Waugh and Alan Bell) and contains newly published letters and parts of Waugh’s diaries which were previously omitted from publication. These cover the years prior to his entry to Oxford. According to Sexton:

It turns out Michael Davie missed very few of the most rewarding entries in his “cautious abbreviation” of these juvenile writings in his 1976 edition of the Diaries. However, by removing the repetitions and the more humdrum day-by-day details of Waugh’s intense involvement in the life of Lancing, he altered their overall impression which, at least to anybody who has no direct knowledge of the public-schools, is quite horrifying. How could such an individual as Waugh spend his formative years so obsessed by the school’s minute status markers, its hierarchy and manners, by sport, by the other boys? Even while cutting it, Michael Davie astutely observed that this school diary was a unique document. “Public-school novels and retrospective accounts of public-school life have proliferated but Waugh seems to be the only writer of the front rank — or indeed of any rank — to have preserved a day-to-day record of school life while it happened.” Re-reading these diaries to write A Little Learning, Waugh wrote, but did not publish, this paragraph, now included in the notes of the new edition and quoted by Alexander Waugh in his introduction: “If what I wrote was a true account of myself, I was [cold-hearted, supercilious, arrogant and callous] conceited, heartless & cautiously malevolent.

Other volumes issued this week include Vile Bodies (edited by Martin Stannard) and Rossetti: His Life and Work (edited by Michael Brennan). The first volume of the complete journalism (edited by Donat Gallagher) will be published later this year.

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Rex Mottram Redux

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In his American Conservative magazine weblog, Senior Editor Rod Dreher has cited Waugh’s character Rex Mottram from Brideshead Revisited in connection with recent actions of President Trump. Dreher had previously adopted the term “Mottramism,” originally coined by Canadian Blogger, Mark Cameron, who used it to describe those Roman Catholics who accepted without question Pope John Paul II’s failure take effective action against sex abuse in the priesthood. They were, like Rex Mottram, “willing to agree with any absurdity proposed in the name of Catholic authority, and showed no intellectual curiosity into its truth or falsehood.” See previous post. Dreher used the term to refer to those Roman Catholics who accepted certain controversial teachings of the new Pope but now sees another example of this practice:

This useful term should now be deployed to describe supporters of Donald Trump who continue in their docility towards the Great Man despite that fact that he sells them out. I don’t have a strong opinion about DACA, but surely the fact that Trump has reached a deal with the Democrats to keep the so-called “Dreamers” in the country qualifies as a massive betrayal of Trump’s base.

There is, as you might well imagine, quite a lively online conversation regarding this topic at The American Conservative. Indeed, since the appearance of Donald Trump as a political force, Rex Mottram seems to be enjoying quite a comeback in politics, with character traits of his being attributed to Trump himself, as we have noted in a previous post. Dreher is now taking it further, attributing “Mottramism” to Trump’s supporters.

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