The Fruit of Whispering Glades

Posted on September 14, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The TLS has published an article marking the centenary of the birth of Jessica Mitford, sister of Waugh’s friends Nancy, Diana and Deborah. The story (“Happy 100th Birthday, Decca”) is by Mark McGinness who has also recently written about Waugh in the Australian press. After reviewing her early life of rebellion and support of left wing causes, McGinness discusses her midlife decision to try a career in writing. Her best known book was inspired at least in part by Waugh’s writings about the American funeral industry in his novel The Loved One and his Life magazine article “Death in Hollywood” (UK title “Half in Love with Mournful Death”). According to McGinness:

In 1963, her lethal exposé of the unscrupulous and sinister funeral industry, The American Way of Death, became a classic and, after decades of sibling infamy, she at last tasted fame in her own right. Evelyn Waugh reviewed it positively, but, as Decca wrote to Debo, he “said I don’t have a ‘plainly stated attitude to death’. So if you see him, tell him of course I’m against it.” Her book even influenced Bobby Kennedy when he chose his brother JFK’s coffin. Offered a choice between one for $900 and one for $2,000, Bobby went for the former, telling Decca that were it not for her book he would have felt obliged to order the more expensive one.

Waugh’s review entitled “Embellishing the loved ones” appeared in the Sunday Times, 29 September 1963. Although it has not been included in in his collected journalism published thus far, it will no doubt become available in the final of the four volumes of his Complete Works that are devoted to his essays, articles and reviews. The UK version of Waugh’s article about the US funeral industry is available in EAR and A Little Order and the US version, at the link above. Mitford wrote an updated version of her book before her death in 1996. This was published in 1998 and entitled (appropriately) The American Way of Death Revisited and includes a chapter devoted to Forest Lawn.

 

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Newspapers, The Loved One | Tagged , , | Comments Off on The Fruit of Whispering Glades

Waugh’s Twofer in First Things

Posted on September 13, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

There are two articles on Waugh in the recent print and digital editions of First Things, a nondenominational religious journal. The first is a long essay on Waugh’s work and religion by Paul V Mankowski, SJ that is combined with a review of Philip Eade’s recent biography. This appears in the October 2017 print edition of the journal and is entitled “Waugh on the Merits”. It opens with a discussion of Waugh’s prose style. This is followed by a consideration of his religion and an illustration of his beliefs as displayed in his short story “Out of Depth.” Mankowski then discusses Waugh’s satire and explains how that is informed by his religion. Here he relies primarily on examples from Put Out More Flags and Helena.

After these matters are concluded. Mankowski turns to Eade’s biography. He explains how Eade has relied on prior biographies and uses unpublished materials to fill out and update these earlier works. He concludes:

With commendable moderation and, I think, insight, Eade permits the severest judgments on the character of Waugh—and they were severe—to be those attested by Waugh himself, whereas the evidence for virtues contrary to his self-constructed image of truculent misanthropy comes from the first-person testimony of recipients of his silent but exceptional and exceptionally frequent acts of generosity. One gets the sense throughout his work that Eade has set his hounds to sniff out the documents and interviews that give the truth, even if unsensational, rather than the racy or amusing anecdote; yet in the end his evenhandedness serves to sharpen rather than blur the likeness he has crafted. In sum, Eade succeeds in giving a convincing picture of a complex man—one more interesting, in human terms, than the portrait the artist gave us of himself.

In the journal’s online edition, Senior Editor Matthew Schmitz has written a shorter article about Waugh’s religious beliefs: “Christianity is for Cucks.” This starts with a quote from the same story “Out of Depth” cited by Fr Mankowski:

“Dishevelled white men were staring ahead with vague, uncomprehending eyes, to the end of the room where two candles burned. The priest turned towards them his bland, black face …. ”

Evelyn Waugh knew that a vision of Africans proclaiming the faith to whites would startle his readers in 1933…I sometimes think we are heading toward the world described by Waugh. He got the idea from John Gray’s novel Park, whose hero is transported to a future in which savage Englishmen live underground while civilized Africans cultivate England’s green and pleasant land, celebrating splendid Latin liturgies, studying the perennial philosophy…

Schmitz goes on to describe emails from alt-right commenters arguing that, for reasons such as those described by Waugh, ‘Christianity is for cucks’, the alt-right’s abbreviation  for cuckolds. He goes on to explain that this attitude wouldn’t bother Waugh, citing as an example Guy Crouchback, one of Waugh’s best-developed religious characters, who goes through three volumes of Sword of Honour in a state of cuckoldry but comes out of it a better person.

“Out of Depth” originally appeared in Harper’s Bazaar (London) in December 1933 where it was subtitled “An Experiment Begun in Shaftesbury Avenue and Ended in Time”). It later was included (without the subtitle) in the 1936 collection Mr Loveday’s Little Outing and Other Sad Stories and is currently available in The Complete Short Stories.

UPDATE (7 November 2017): A detailed response to Matthew Schmitz’s article has been posted on the website Faith and Heritage. This is sponsored by a group promoting Occidental Christianity. The article is  by Clive Sanguis and is entitled “Waugh unto you hypocrites: A response to ‘Christianity is for cucks.'”

Share
Posted in Biographies, Catholicism, Newspapers, Put Out More Flags, Short Stories, Sword of Honour | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Waugh’s Twofer in First Things

University of Leicester Posts PR about Launch of Complete Works

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The University of Leicester which is hosting the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project has issued a detailed Press Release about the publication of the first five volumes. The launch of the project is scheduled for later this week. Much of this information appeared earlier in an article in the Oxford Mail discussed in an earlier post. There is appended to the Press Release, however, new information about previously unpublished material that will appear in the 12 volumes of the Personal Writings series:

Before now, publication of Waugh’s private papers has been incomplete, diffuse, and unreliable.When Waugh’s diaries were first published by Michael Davie in 1976, Waugh had been dead only ten years and many of the people mentioned were still alive. Thus many passages which are now printable had, then, to be excised for fear of libel.

Personal Writings will contain the bulk of the unpublished work (c. 85% of the extant complete letters have never been printed), including in Vol 1 many sketches omitted by Davie. Other previously unpublished works will include: correspondence with prominent figures such as Randolph and Winston Churchill, Ian and Ann Fleming, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Muriel Spark, P.G. Wodehouse, and Henry Yorke to name but a few.  There are letters to and from Father D’Arcy – the Jesuit priest who received Waugh into the Catholic Church in 1930 – whose correspondence was withheld by the Jesuits for over 40 years, and letters to Teresa Jungman, to whom Waugh had unsuccessfully proposed, and who served as inspiration for some of his fiction. These letters, supposedly destroyed, were discovered by Alexander Waugh on a trip to Ireland in 2007, who has also unearthed around sixty transcribed letters to Mary Lygon, the originals of which were lost in a taxi.

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Complete Works, Diaries, Letters | Tagged | Comments Off on University of Leicester Posts PR about Launch of Complete Works

Waugh and the Small, Cornered Creature

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Private Eye (8-21 September) cites Waugh in its review (“Doesnae land”) of James Kelman’s collected stories That Was a Shiver. This comes after reminding readers that in the early 1990s Kelman was the “hippest cat on the block.” One critic at the time had remarked that “if you knew the meaning of the word ‘fuck’ you’d read 10 percent of his output already” and another noted Kelman’s belief that ‘proper English’ was simply another form of imperialist oppression:

He was also responsible for one of the funniest moments in British television when, reluctantly persuaded into a dinner-jacket for the 1994 Booker ceremony, he appeared before the bank of TV cameras looking like the small creature of the field once described by Evelyn Waugh–“cornered in his lair but liable to turn nasty.”

That quote sounds like Waugh and works well in the context but was actually written by D J Taylor in his 1992 novel Real Life (p. 60). Taylor liked it so much that he used it again almost verbatim in a 2002 New Statesman essay about novelist William Cooper who reminded him of character from an Evelyn Waugh novel that he (Taylor, not Waugh) described in those same terms. Taylor also writes for the Eye so perhaps he has recycled this phrase yet again in this unsigned review. Kelman won the Booker prize in 1994 for his novel How Late It Was, How Late. It deserved the award for the title, if nothing else. Thanks to Milena Borden for the clipping from the Eye.

Waugh also appears in another book review. This one is in the Scottish paper The National and refers to Alexander Starritt’s novel about journalism The Beast:

Starritt’s novel …  has been described as a satire but I hesitate to use that term because The Beast never strays far from reality. It, of course, namechecks Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and has echoes of Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of Morning but it is modern in setting and plot.

Finally, Waugh merits a mention in a gossip column of the San Francisco Chronicle:

Russ Stanaland, who emailed that he’d just reread Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Decline and Fall,” says one of the characters is “a wealthy, ill-mannered lout whose actions left havoc in his wake.” The name of the character is Sir Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington.

The entry before that describes a scene that might have been used by Waugh in one of his travel books:

Aboard a cruise ship on the way to Costa Rica, Eileen Alexander was seated with a Wyoming couple who’d brought their own bottle of wine, which they handed to a waiter so that he could serve it. At an appropriate time in the meal, the waiter approached, unscrewed the top and handed it to the gentleman to sniff.

 

 

 

Share
Posted in Decline and Fall, Newspapers, Scoop | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Alastair Graham and Steven Runciman (more)

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent post we mentioned a weblog article that described the friendship or affair between Waugh’s Oxford friend Alastair Graham and historian Steven Runciman. The book cited in that article (Outlandish Knight by Minoo Dinwash) sheds additional light on this matter and contains some details that differ from those described in the article:

Runciman and Graham met in Turkey, not Greece as stated in the article. The meeting took place in 1937 at the residence of Sir Percy Loraine, then HM Ambassador to Turkey. Graham is described as “attached to the Embassy” but Runciman was only visiting. Dinshaw goes on to write that “Graham, characteristically, left no great impression” (Ibid., pp. 220-221). Later, Dinshaw elaborates a bit based on correspondence with another of Runciman’s friends, David Pinckney, whom Runciman met in New York in 1978. Pinckney refers to Runciman’s “long-ago, brief meeting with Alastair Graham…at Sir Percy Loraine’s table in Istanbul.” At this point, Dinshaw inserts a footnote about Runciman’s relationship with Graham. This footnote is described as “extensive” in the blog post but is in fact only three lines: “Steven had, however, thought Graham worth his while enough to photograph him, and pointed out this snap while showing his younger guest [i.e., Pinckney] his albums at Elshieshields, after sufficient wine had been taken” (Ibid., pp. 530-31). This would have been more than 40 years after their meeting in Turkey, so Alastair must have made some impression.

Although not mentioned in either the blog post or the Runciman biography, Alastair had previously served in the British Embassy in Athens where Percy Loraine also had a diplomatic post in the late 1920s. This was probably explained in Duncan Fallowell’s book How to Disappear which is cited in the weblog. Waugh described in Labels (p. 149) a 1929 visit to his “friend Alastair” in Athens who was working at the Embassy. Steven Runciman was also posted to Athens by the British Council, but that was just after the war.

 

Share
Posted in Labels | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Vile Politics

Posted on September 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Heather Wilhelm writing in National Review has noticed that several commentators have been making the analogy between present national politics and professional wrestling. You can best explain what’s happening by remembering that, like a professional wrestler (who isn’t so much interested in who wins the match but rather in maximizing the number of viewers), Trump’s loyalty isn’t to one side or the other but to being the subject of the most watchable story.

Looking for other ways of fitting today’s politics into a framework of understanding, Wilhelm comes up with three. One of these is to treat it like:

“An over-the top Evelyn Waugh novel. Ah, Evelyn Waugh, master of the ridiculous. Think of the characters in Vile Bodies, out of touch and absurd — “Adam felt a little dizzy, so he had another drink” — with last names like Outrage and Chasm. They bounce all over the countryside, vague and half-hearted, crashing cars and wasting money and giving vast fortunes to random drunk army majors who repeatedly and predictably disappear without a trace. If that doesn’t sound like political D.C., I don’t know what does. (The drunk army major reappears with the money at the end of the book, by the way — but by then, it’s been completely devalued.)”

The others are to view politics like a 1990’s soap opera that contunues indefinitely, where despicable people will just keep on appearing. And finally, just approach the subject like a Monet painting. It looks fine if you keep your distance. But don’t get too close or it will just appear to be a messy jumble of dots.

Share
Posted in Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Vile Politics

Ann Pasternak Slater to Join Hertford College Event

Posted on September 8, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

It has been announced that Waugh scholar Ann Pasternak Slater, editor of Waugh’s short stories and author of the recent study Evelyn Waugh (Writers and their Work) will join Alexander Waugh and Barbara Cooke at the previously announced lecture at Hertford College, Oxford. This is on the topic “Waugh’s Enemies” and is scheduled for the afternoon of Monday, 25 September in the college Dining Hall. Only a few tickets are left. Booking details are available here.

Share
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Ann Pasternak Slater to Join Hertford College Event

George Smiley and Basil Seal

Posted on September 8, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Evening Standard has reviewed John Le Carre’s latest novel A Legacy of Spies in which he revives his old characters from the George Smiley novels. The reviewer David Sexton has this observation about the pitfalls of this practice:

Often it is a mistake for novelists to revive their favourite characters late in their careers, actually detracting from, rather than adding to, their original achievement. Evelyn Waugh’s appalling Basil Seal Rides Again published two years before his death remains the classic example, Waugh himself accurately calling it “a senile attempt to recapture the manner of my youth”. Le Carré is now 85 and it is more than a quarter of a century since he last visited these characters. Yet, quite remarkably, he has pulled it off. A Legacy of Spies deploys a complex and ingeniously layered structure to make the past alive in the present once more (so complex, in fact, that the novel only reveals itself fully on a second reading).

Waugh’s short story was first published in limited UK and US editions in 1963 and has subsequently appeared in his collected short stories. The book was dedicated to Ann Fleming and the quote comes from a letter Waugh wrote to her in December 1962 which was reprinted in the limited editions as well as in Letters, p. 562.

The online journal Artfix Daily has published a review of an exhibition entitled “Restoring the Minoans: Elizabeth Price and Sir Arthur Evans.” This is on display at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).

The inclusion of Elizabeth Price is explained by her production of an imaginative video illustrating how archeologists enhance and elaborate the items they collect. Sir Arthur Evans was an outstanding example of such elaborative practices in connection with his early 20th c. excavations at Knossos Crete. This is where Evelyn Waugh comes in:

One telling example of Evans’s imaginative re-creations is the “Lady in Red.” Here, one of his primary draftsmen has created an image of a complete figure based on a single small fragment of a fresco painting. The female subject, characterized by such features as lines indicating a coquettish smile, is more evocative of contemporaneous European art, than of anything found in Minoan wall paintings. It may have been “restorations” like this that inspired Evelyn Waugh in 1929 to note that restorers of Minoan painting “have tempered their zeal for reconstruction with a predilection for covers of Vogue.”

The quote is from Waugh’s 1930 travel book Labels (p. 136). There are, however, a few modifying bits left out. The complete quote reads: “…have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue.” The exhibit continues at the ISAW until 7 January 2018.

Finally, The Oldie’s weblog reports the events at its London literary luncheon earlier this week. Among the speakers was Waugh biographer Paula Byrne who discussed her recent biography of Kathleen Kennedy (Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth):

… Byrne talked about Kick’s surprising friendship with the bullish Evelyn Waugh, who asked her, on their first meeting, how big her ‘dot’ was. She thought he meant her belly button, and said it was normal-sized. In fact, he meant ‘dot’, as in the French for dowry. Byrne talked movingly, too, about the wartime death of Kick’s husband, the Marquess of Hartington, and her own tragic, early demise.

Share
Posted in Academia, Basil Seal Rides Again, Discussions, Labels, Letters, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on George Smiley and Basil Seal

Waughs and the Bat Colony

Posted on September 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Late last month in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, we posted a message about the Waugh Drive Bridge in Houston and its bat colony. Patrick Kurp, who maintains a weblog called “Anecdotal Evidence” and lives in Houston, has provided the following response:

“Thank you for the note. … “Waugh” is pronounced as you might expect, roughly the way Evelyn would have spoken his surname. Given various Texas accents, it comes out “Waw,” rhyming with “claw.”I drive over the Waugh Bridge on my way to work and back home again. Here’s what I have found online, though you may have seen this already:
 
 
 
 
An online search discloses more stories. Not a happy event for anyone.…Patrick” 
 
Another reader, Dave Lull, found an email exchange by Texas A&M University students and graduates on the pronunciation of “Waugh”. Most concurred with Patrick’s conclusions. A&M is, however, not in Houston but is located in College Station between that city and Dallas. Some respondents also claimed to have heard the name pronounced Waff (as in “laugh”).
The bridge and street are named for Tyrell Thomas Waugh (1897-1918), a US Marine from Houston who died in WWI. He was the son of T L Waugh (1864-1944), at one time Houston’s Street and Bridge Commissioner. No apparent relation to Waughs of Midsomer Norton, Somerset, but the accessible internet records go back to a Rev John Waugh born in Scotland c. 1630 who emigrated to Virginia where he died c. 1706. Evelyn Waugh mentions his great-great-great grandfather was named Thomas Waugh, was a member of the Scottish Secessionist Church and lived in Berwickshire. A Little Learning (1973, p. 10)
Several streets in Houston owe their names to WWI heroes, according to the Houston Chronicle. Waugh Drive was previously known as Euclid Street, acccording to a 1913 map. The bridge of that name, made famous by the bat colony, was built in 1922-24 to replace what is known in Texas as a “low water crossing”–i.e., something you drive through when it hasn’t been raining, otherwise not. One wonders whether the bats will rebuild under the bridge. They may have learned by now that living under a bridge spanning something called a “bayou” in Texas may not be a good survival strategy, but my guess is that, when it all dries up, the bats will find their way back home.

 

Thanks to Patrick and David for their responses.

Share
Posted in A Little Learning, Newspapers, Waugh Family | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Danish Journal Publishes Waugh Article

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Danish cultural journal Critique has published for the first time the full version of an essay on Waugh’s life and work written in 2009. This is entitled “Evelyn Waughs korstog mod moderniteten” (“Evelyn Waugh’s Crusade Against Modernity”) and is summarized in this introductory paragraph:

The author Evelyn Waugh developed dramatically from the ultra-modernist, depicting the decadence of the British upper class, to a sharp conservative author who in Christianity saw a way of development for Western Civilization. The great British satirist Evelyn Waugh’s conservative modernity criticism is the subject of lecturer, PhD. Søren Besenbacher’s article from Critique II (2009), which we have reproduced here from the original manuscript on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary Jubilee.

Besenbacher concentrates mostly on Waugh’s novels, discussing the modernism in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies and then, following his divorce and conversion, the religious themes developed in Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour. There are brief references to A Handful of Dust and Put Out More Flags but the other novels are hardly mentioned. Finally, the article looks briefly at Waugh’s political philosophy (such as it is) in Robbery Under Law, the only non-fiction book that is mentioned. The translation from Danish is by Google with a few edits.

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Newspapers, Put Out More Flags, Robbery Under Law, Sword of Honour, Vile Bodies | Tagged , | Comments Off on Danish Journal Publishes Waugh Article