Powell Lecture to be Given by Alexander Waugh

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The annual lecture of the Anthony Powell Society will be given this December by Alexander Waugh at the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London. Here’s a copy of the AP Society’s announcement:

Anthony Powell Lecture

Wavian Reactions to Anthony Powell

to be given by Alexander Waugh

Wednesday 6 December 2017, 1830 for 1900 hrs

The Travellers Club, 106 Pall Mall, London SW1

Tickets: £13 are available via the Society’s online shop, at www.anthonypowell.org or from the Hon. Secretary, 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford, UB6 0JW, UK
The ticket price includes a glass of wine before the lecture, from 1830 hrs

Travellers Club members should book through the Club

All orders will be acknowledged and tickets will be mailed out in early November

Alexander Waugh has worked as an opera critic and written books on classical music and opera as well as co-writing a musical (Bon Voyage!) with his brother Nathaniel.  His other publications include Fathers and Sons (2004), an inter-generational portrait of his own family, which formed the basis of a BBC4 documentary in 2005.  He is General Editor of his grandfather Evelyn Waugh’s Complete Works, a scholarly collaboration between the University of Leicester and Oxford University Press currently expected to run to 43 volumes.  In his talk he will trace the relationship of Anthony Powell with Evelyn Waugh, Waugh’s brother-in-law Alick Dru and Waugh’s heirs and assigns, particularly Auberon Waugh.

Share
Posted in Academia, Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Lectures, London | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Powell Lecture to be Given by Alexander Waugh

New Novels with Wavian Undercurrents

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Two new novels have been credited in reviews with having been influenced by the writings of Evelyn Waugh. In the Spectator, Elizabeth Day’s fourth novel The Party is described in a review by Helen Brown as beginning with the hero’s

Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase… Elizabeth Day’s fourth novel is the latest in a long literary line of suburban lost boys sucked into the intoxicating orbit of a wealthy friend. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Patricia Highsmith, Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst and Gillian Flynn have all done it before and we know the story never ends well. Day drops references to them all into her book, like olives into an increasingly dirty martini.

After describing the plot and comparing the narrative structure to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Brown’s review concludes:

…As readers, we’re as vulnerable as [Day’s characters] to the narcotic narcissism of the super-rich. It’s a guilty pleasure to sneak into Ben’s party, past the supermodels in their backless, sequinned gowns and the floating silver trays of ironic cocktails. We settle in, hoover up lines of Day’s wicked prose at an increasingly giddy pace and wait for the whole sickly scene to curdle into crime.

The i News reviews the latest novel by Anthony Quinn. This is what is described as the third novel in a 20th Century trilogy that began with Curtain Call. This latest novel is entitled Eureka and is takes place in the late 1960s milieu of “swinging London.” It relates to the making of a film in and of that period, and the text of the screenplay is woven into the narrative. As described by the i News reviewer (Simon O’Hagan):

…if the plot of Eureka is a little meandering, the human comedy more than makes up for it. There is something Evelyn Waugh-like about Eureka, not just in its depiction of the escapades that privilege can afford, but in the ease and seeming effortlessness of Quinn’s prose.

According to an interview of Quinn, this novel’s claim to be part of a trilogy is a bit tenuous. The three novels are linked by the appearance of a character named Freya in each of them. She appears briefly as a child in the 1920-30s of the first, is the heroine of the post-war second novel, entitled Freya, and has a supporting role as a journalist in this third one. In addition, the protagonist of this last novel, screenwriter Nat Fane, had a supporting role in Freya. Otherwise, the stories and characters are independent of each other.

Share
Posted in Evelyn Waugh, Fiction, Interviews, Newspapers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on New Novels with Wavian Undercurrents

Alan Hollinghurst on Henry Green (and Evelyn Waugh)

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Alan Hollinghurst has reviewed several of Henry Green’s novels (the first six, I believe) in New York Review of Books. This is in connection with the republication of Green’s books by the NYRB’s book subsidiary. In addition to the first six, two more will be released later this year (Nothing and Doting) leaving only Concluding and his autobiography Pack My Bag (which are being republished separately by New Directions) to complete the set.

Hollinghurst notes that Waugh and Green were friends at Oxford and that Waugh was an early booster of Green’s work with his review of Living (1929) in The Graphic. See earlier post. He compares Green’s work with his those of his Oxford friends Waugh and Anthony Powell, who would

make their names as novelists of raffishly upper-class life, their social experience broadened in their thirties by their experience in the army. Green was quite different, in part because of what he did next.

That was to work in his father’s factory after Oxford, eventually becoming managing director, and to serve in the Auxiliary Fire Service in London during the war.

Most of Hollinghurst’s review is devoted to Green’s three novels written during and about WWII: Caught, Loving and Back. These are not technically a trilogy because they have different characters and the plots are unconnected except by their settings (wartime England and Ireland). Most of his discussion of Caught relates to the new version in which it is printed for the first time. Green was required by his publisher to make several substantive changes in the original. Loving (1945) is contrasted with Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; they were written about the same time and both stories are set in country houses. But Green’s novel is “downstairs-upstairs…the wealth of his interest lies with the servants.” Their world is threatened just as was that of the Flytes in Waugh’s novel but for different reasons. Waugh thought the book “obscene”, even though he earlier told Green that “I never tire of hearing you talk about women.” Hollinghurst refers to this and concludes the discussion of that book: “…a delicate mix of fondness and farce … quite unlike the heady nostalgia of Brideshead.” Back (1946) is about the return of an injured soldier. Waugh wrote Green a letter (14 November 1946) that is effectively a review of the book, also quoted by Hollinghurst. There were bits he liked and others he thought did not work. That is his last published letter to Green. Hollinghurst does not mention that, in his subsequent correspondence with others, Waugh described Green’s later books (e.g., Nothing) as evidence of Green’s decline into madness.

Hollinghurst concludes with a discussion of the writers whose work influenced Green, most prominently Ronald Firbank whose importance as an innovator is credited by Hollinghurst with having been discovered by Waugh in a 1929 essay–the same year Waugh wrote his review in praise of Living. Both Green and Firbank are now largely forgotten as modernist innovators and have also suffered from unavailability of their works. In Green’s case, Hollinghurst believes this neglect will be overcome by the NYRB’s republication of his books.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, Letters, Newspapers, World War II | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Alan Hollinghurst on Henry Green (and Evelyn Waugh)

Leigh Fermor Novel Reprinted

Posted on August 13, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

New York Review Books has republished the only novel of Patrick Leigh Fermor. This was originally published in 1953 and was entitled The Violins of Saint Jacques. It is about a fictional Caribbean island where a volcano erupts and disrupts the melodramatic plot of a family feud and potential duel. It is dedicated to Waugh’s close friend Diana Cooper. This dedication is mentioned in the recent TLS review by Roderick Beaton:

…as a reminder that the Fermor’s world was not so distant from that of Evelyn Waugh–the Waugh of Black Mischief crossed with the Waugh of Helena. There is more than a hint of mischief, and indeed humour, about Paddy’s nostalgia for a lost world and its ethereal afterglow that lives on in the violins of the title.

Waugh did not review this book, although he did review its predecessor A Time to Keep Silence published earlier that year and also reprinted by NYRB. Diana Cooper found it pretentious and and asked for Waugh’s opinion (MWMS, p. 163). He said much the same thing but more politely in his Time and Tide review. The TLS reviewer also detects some pretension in Violins, noting examples of “lush” language–  “(‘orgulous’ and ‘impavid’ appear in the same sentence, both redundant).” Thanks to Peggy Troupin for a copy of the review.

Share
Posted in Black Mischief, Helena, Letters, Newspapers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Leigh Fermor Novel Reprinted

Another Waugh Writer

Posted on August 13, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Another member of the Waugh family has turned to writing. This is Nathaniel Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson and second son of Auberon. According to a 2003 story in the Guardian by Alexander Chancellor, Nathaniel had recently moved to France from Shepherd’s Bush with his family to set up as a shopkeeper in a small town north of Bordeaux:

Nat’s shop, although proudly English, is in this great French tradition. It is bang in the middle of the town’s medieval quarter, only a few yards from the Arcus Germanicus, a perfectly preserved triumphal arch dating from the town’s most glorious period as a provincial capital of the Roman Empire. For what it costs to buy a wretched flat in Hammersmith, Nat is now the owner of a fine, spacious medieval stone building surrounding a courtyard entered from the main street by a broad arch, above which sways a shop sign displaying representations of two quintessentially English products – a pot of Marmite and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce – and the name of the shop, La Perfide Albion.

Nathaniel has now returned to England after 15 years and has written about his experiences in France in The Oldie. In his recent article (“Mon dieu, where is your dignity?”) he explains why the British are so often misunderstood when they travel in France:

…I now find myself marvelling at the exoticism of the English on my return to my native West Country. How is it that the mores and codes found throughout continental Europe appear to have eluded the British? It used to break my heart to see well-meaning British holidaymakers causing offence at every turn, through simple ignorance of the French attachment to form.

Even such mundane matters as how the British dress on holiday and how they walk and talk in public give offence to the French. The full article is available to read on the internet. Nathaniel previously collaborated with his brother Alexander in the script for a musical play Bon Voyage!.

UPDATE (28 November 2017): Dave Lull has kindly sent a link to another article from The Oldie by Nathaniel Waugh describing his life in France (“My life selling Marmite to the French is over”). This is dated 1 May 2017 and has been reprinted in Press Reader where it may now be read.

Share
Posted in Auberon Waugh, Newspapers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Another Waugh Writer

Alec Waugh Remembered

Posted on August 12, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of The Oldie has a memoir by Alexander Waugh of his Uncle Alec. He was known in the family as “Uncle Sex” and the memoir is written on the 100th anniversary of the publication of his novel Loom of Youth which discussed homosexuality among public schoolboys. In 19i7 this was quite scandalous. He was rarely a visitor at the Waugh home in Somerset, and Alexander learned of his death in 1983 from a friend in Taunton who heard about it on the radio. An excerpt is available on the internet but a subscription is required to read the full article.

The previous issue of The Oldie made an allusion to Evelyn Waugh on its cover, referring to an article by Rachel Johnson (sister of Boris) as “Love Among the Ruins”, the title of Waugh’s 1953 dystopian novella. In the article (entitled “Alms and the woman”), Johnson imagines future life in an almshouse and opens with a reference to Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (“If you were driving up the Clerkenwell Road, you will have passed it: London’s version of the ‘low door in the wall that opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden’, that so enraptured the young Charles Ryder when he popped along to Brideshead.”) Thanks to Milena Borden for letting us know about this.

UPDATE (18 August 2017): Alexander Waugh’s Oldie article seems to be the source of an item in the Daily Mail’s gossip column by Ephraim Hardcastle. This relates to Evelyn Waugh’s 1957 libel suit against the rival Daily Express:

Under oath Alec gamely conceded that Evelyn was the much greater novelist. Evelyn got £5,000 in damages–ÂŁ50,000 now. Recalls Alexander: ‘Alec, wearing a foulard scarf and a stripy blazer, left the court before the verdict was announced, cheerfully returning to his busy sex-life in Tangier.’

Since the reported incident occurred several years before Alexander’s birth, he must be recalling some one else’s recollection, not his own.

Share
Posted in Alec Waugh, Alexander Waugh, Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Love Among The Ruins, Newspapers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Alec Waugh Remembered

In Search of Arcadia

Posted on August 10, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In several recent posts we have considered the concept of “Arcadia” and its contribution to Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and vice versa. BBC Four earlier this week transmitted a documentary entitled “In Search of Arcadia” presented by Dr Janina Ramirez and John Bailey. It considered a 12 mile stretch of the Thames from Hampton Court to Chiswick House and explained how landscape gardening developed there and how this was intended to incorporate the more natural and wilder Arcadian concept into the English garden that was previously more formal in construct. Dr Ramirez begins with a look at the 1638 painting of Nicholas Poussin usually referred to as “Et in Arcadia Ego” after the inscription on the tomb depicted. She shows the painting on her iPad rather than in its museum setting, so one assumes she is looking at the one in the Louvre and not its predecessor at Chatsworth House which would be of an earlier date.  See previous post.

Most of the program is taken up by consideration of the gardens and houses at Hampton Court, Twickenham, Marble Hill, Chiswick House and Syon House. These are used to illustrate the progression from Baroque formality at Hampton Court’s gardens to Arcadian naturalism of those at Syon House. Most of the literary discussion relates to Isaak Walton who wrote The Complete Angler and Alexander Pope who built a house and garden at Twickenham. All that remains of that is an underground grotto he built to connect the house with the garden. Pope is considered more as a gardener than a a poet. Waugh’s citation of the inscription from Poussin’s painting doesn’t get a mention nor does Brideshead Castle as an Arcadian concept, but one can’t have everything. To be fair, Waugh was more interested in describing the architecture of the house than the design of the garden.

The program can be viewed on the internet on BBC iPlayer for about the next four weeks. A UK internet connection is required.

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Brideshead Revisited, Television Programs | Tagged , , | Comments Off on In Search of Arcadia

Huntington Waugh Conference Reviewed

Posted on August 10, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Veteran Waugh scholar Robert Murray Davis has written an assessment of the recent Evelyn Waugh Conference at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. This is posted on the University of Leicester’s internet site:

The symposium can’t be compared to previous Waugh gatherings in Oxford, Austin, Downside, or Leicester because the sponsorship and focus of each were quite different. This was the most luxurious (if you don’t count the dinners in Oxford and Austin hosted by Bill Wendt), with quarters at the Cal Tech Athenaeum and dining at the Athenaeum and at the Huntington.

One sign of the efficiency of the service was the omelet I ordered on Friday morning, which not only arrived hot but stayed hot until I finished it. And at Rothenberg Hall at the Huntington, the paper towel dispenser was designed so well that single towels  could be picked up without dampening five others in the stack. This may seem minor– acting Huntington president Steve Hindle said that I was the only person who noticed the towels or for that matter the omelet–but it testifies to the care with which the institutions are designed and maintained.

Once problems with the sound system were overcome–sometimes by turning on the microphone switches–the papers were well received and the responses were varied, often lively, and sometimes carried on outside the sessions, even beyond the boundaries of the symposium.

What had earlier seemed a division between those who have studied Waugh for years and those brought in to work on the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh because of their expertise in textual editing turned out in practice to be illusory or readily bridged. Several people of ages ranging from the twenties to the eighties mentioned that they were discouraged from working on Waugh, and this led, indirectly, to brief discussions of how to counter this disparagement of Waugh’s importance as a writer and increasing the number of people studying Waugh and his work. No conclusions were reached.

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Conferences | Tagged , | Comments Off on Huntington Waugh Conference Reviewed

Telegraph Names Brideshead Among Top TV Costume Dramas

Posted on August 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

On the occasion of ITV’s announcement of a new TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the Daily Telegraph has produced an album from what its fashion editors consider the most sumptuous costume dramas of all time. Granada’s 1981 production of Brideshead Revisited is the earliest drama on the list. The Telegraph in this case is focused on costume over drama and includes a still of Diana Quick (who played Julia Flyte) wearing what it describes as “a cloche hat with a cream dropped waist dress.” Others included in the album of 20 range from three earlier adaptations of Jane Austen novels to the more recent Jackie, Mad Men and Game of Thrones.

In the National Geographic magazine, another chapter in the round-the-world walk of Paul Salopek (“Out of Eden Walk: Into Eden”) focuses on the plant life of Kyrgyzstan.  As he describes various wild flowers, Salopek is reminded of a passage from Evelyn Waugh:

As I hike out of Kyrgyzstan, traversing the lush valleys of the Alai Mountains bound for the neighboring state of Tajikistan, I rack my brain to recall the names of the constellations of flowers that, mile upon mile, I wade through: Poppies. Vetches. Bedstraws. St. John’s wort. Naturally I lifted these delightful names from the British press.

It is reassuring to know—in these anarchic, shark-pool, digital media days—that English newspapers still not only employ “gardening correspondents” but also send them on far-flung assignment to remotest Kyrgyzstan to botanize, on horseback, for readers. (“Under hot sun we trot ever higher past wild white roses and rocks crammed with saxifrage and campanulas.”) It is no accident that Evelyn Waugh chose a mild-mannered nature writer as his foil in the novel Scoop, his classic satire of war correspondence. (“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole,” writes his garden-columnist hero, who is shipped off to an African war zone by mistake.)

Finally, an unnamed Twitter user has set up a page for posting favorite quotations from the works of Evelyn Waugh. Here’s a link provided by one of our readers: Evelyn Waugh (@waughquotes) | Twitter

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Scoop, Television, Twitter | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Telegraph Names Brideshead Among Top TV Costume Dramas

The Roman Empire and Freedom of Movement

Posted on August 8, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The feature of EU membership which more than any other seems to have contributed to Britain’s exit from that institution is freedom of movement. Yet, as explained in a recent article in the Catholic Herald, there is nothing particularly innovative about this concept as is demonstrated by a look at several early Christians. St Paul, St Augustine and several others (including St Helena) are examples of the free movement that existed within the Roman Empire where subjects considered being Roman more important than belonging to a more narrow ethnic or linguistic group into which they were born. The article offers this by way of discussion:

You may recall Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful novel Helena, where the heroine, daughter of Old King Coel, born in Colchester, sees Rome for the first time as an old lady. Of course, we know very little for sure about the origins of the Empress Helen, but one thing is for sure, she travelled widely all over the Empire, as did her son, and considered herself Roman, an identity that transcended birthplace and ethnicity.

Similarly, St Augustine was likely a dark-skinned Berber and St Paul was a Jew and a Pharisee but these were details as opposed to the importance of their Roman citizenship which allowed them to move freely from place to place. While it is not spelled out in the article, the implication is that this freedom of movement was important to the spread of early Christianity. The historic concept has been popularized recently in writings of historian Mary Beard but these have come too late to be of any use in the campaign against Brexit.

Another Roman Catholic source, this one an apparently unofficial weblog called The Rad Trad, has published an article on the ever-vexing topic of birth control (referred to in religious circles as “Natural Family Planning” or “NFP”). In the course of the discussion, published during NFP Awareness Week, it quotes Evelyn Waugh at some length:

“Evelyn Waugh mocked the rise of the birth control movement in his 1932 novel Black Mischief, when the Minister of Modernization in a small African nation attempted to spread propaganda to the uneducated masses by means of a colorful poster design:

It portrayed two contrasted scenes. On one side a native hut of hideous squalor, overrun with children of every age, suffering from every physical incapacity — crippled, deformed, blind, spotted and insane; the father prematurely aged with paternity squatted by an empty cook-pot; through the door could be seen his wife, withered and bowed with child bearing, desperately hoeing at their inadequate crop. On the other side a bright parlour furnished with chairs and table; the mother, young and beautiful, sat at her ease eating a huge slice of raw meat; her husband smoked a long Arab hubble-bubble (still a caste mark of leisure throughout the land), while a single, healthy child sat between them reading a newspaper. Inset between the two pictures was a detailed drawing of some up-to-date contraceptive apparatus and the words in Sakuyu: WHICH HOME DO YOU CHOOSE?

Interest in the pictures was unbounded; all over the island woolly heads were nodding, black hands pointing, tongues clicking against filed teeth in unsyntactical dialects. Nowhere was there any doubt about the meaning of the beautiful new pictures.

See: on right hand: there is rich man: smoke pipe like big chief: but his wife she no good: sit eating meat: and rich man no good: he only one son.

See: on left hand: poor man: not much to eat: but his wife she very good, work hard in field: man he good too: eleven children: one very mad, very holy. And in the middle: Emperor’s juju. Make you like that good man with eleven children.

And as a result, despite admonitions from squire and vicar, the peasantry began pouring into town for the gala, eagerly awaiting initiation to the fine new magic of virility and fecundity.”

Share
Posted in Academia, Black Mischief, Catholicism, Helena, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on The Roman Empire and Freedom of Movement