The Bolthole and the Beast

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Both the Financial Times and the Guardian have stories this weekend based on Waugh’s writngs. They are also mentioned prominently in two Australian papers.

Writing in the FT, Janan Ganesh sees what may be the passing of the middle class longing for a rural bolthole in the form of a country residence. The tradition now disappearing was fostered, according to Ganesh, in Waugh’s writings:

…one vestige of [the aristocracy’s] old cultural sway remains and it is what Evelyn Waugh called the “cult” of the country house. To own one, even a small one, is to play the squire. … The cult is strongest in this country but it touches America, that insatiable market for Downton Abbey or whichever colour-by-numbers costume drama the Brits are peddling this year.

The tradition is less prevalent in Europe where the aristocracy’s sway was weakened by decades of war and revolution. But even in the English speaking worlds, Ganesh sees the lure of the country house or cottage as diminishing:

In 1987, “inner city” meant poor. In 2017, it means the most coveted parts of the realm. I sense little of Waugh’s cult in friends my age, even those with the cash to indulge it, even those with families who could use the roaming space. Their priority is the best first home they can afford. … Forgive the urban chauvinism but, having fought for a toehold in a great cosmopolis, it seems perverse to flee to the opposite environment at regular intervals.

But the day of the country house’s attraction for the city dweller has not entirely withered away, if an article in the Guardian is anything to go by. This is an excerpt from a recent book by Phyllis Richardson entitled The House of Fiction which contains descriptions of  houses that appear in English literature:

Howards End, Manderley, Brideshead – some fictional houses are as unforgettable as the characters who inhabit them. They can provide a sense of identity, as in the novels of Walter Scott, which were set in a time when a man was distinguished by the land and house from which he got his name. They can convey ideas of personality, as Charles Dickens’s living spaces reflect the quirks of his characters. They can offer us symbols of social status, as with Jane Austen’s Pemberley, or some tangible link to the past, as so ardently forged by writers such as Evelyn Waugh.

Several examples of descriptions taken from Richardson’s book are provided from writers extending from Laurence Sterne to Alan Hollinghurst. To be fair, not all of these are country houses, unless one counts Hampstead or “Metroland” as the country.

Another Guardian article by Ian Jack takes up Waugh’s theme of journalism in his 1938 novel Scoop. Jack begins by recalling his own early days as a journalist at the Scottish branch of the Express which once seemed to be epitomized in Waugh’s “Daily Beast.” That role today is played by the Daily Mail which has been described in a recent novel. This is entitled, not very subtly, The Beast and is written by Alexander Starritt who has worked for the Daily Mail:

As the title suggests, the book makes no bones about its literary heritage and unashamedly tips its hat to the work of Michael Frayn as well as Waugh. Its comedy is darker than either, but arguably (Scoop, after all, was published in 1938) that bleakness reflects our darker age. Certainly, its subject more urgently demands our attention…What Starritt gets vividly right, in a way I think no other fiction has managed, is the editing process that is so central to the success of any popular paper – and which through techniques of presentation has far more influence on the paper’s emotional, social and political register than all its writing staff put together. “The very belly of the Beast”, is how he describes the production department…

What follows in the Guardian article is a description by Jack about how the editorial process on a successful modern tabloid works. It is not a pretty picture.

Finally, Waugh is mentioned in two articles in the Australian press. In an opinion article by Ian Warden published in The Age on the ever-fraught issue of nationality in Australian politics, there is this analogy:

…when it comes to notions of nationality, there is Evelyn Waugh’s neat notion that it is beyond certification and is something to do with one’s stage of life. His insight that we are all American at puberty is profound, and spot on. Everything about America and the rash, loud, confused, spotty, hormone-powered, know-it-all, energetic-but-ignorant way it and its presidents behave is deeply pubescent.

And in the Spectator’s Australian edition, Karl Schmude is reminded of Waugh in a speech at the Christopher Dawson Centre in Hobart named for the Australian man of letters or independent scholar best known perhaps for having written The Making of Europe:

Evelyn Waugh once described his father as a “man of letters,” and noted that this category was “now almost extinct,” like that of the maiden aunt.

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Churchill, the “Sham Augustan”

Posted on July 28, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Winston Churchill’s reputation seems to be enjoying yet another renaissance. This may be due to political leadership fatigue in the English-speaking world. A recent book and two films are the latest examples of Churchilliana. An issue of The Tablet from earlier this month has a review of Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas Ricks. In his review, Christopher Bray writes:

Ricks’ mission is to convince us that his two “vastly dissimilar” subjects were in fact cut from the same cloth. The high-born Tory romantic and the socialist scholarship boy were united in their belief that the twentieth century’s big- shot ideologues wanted to sound the death knell on individual freedom.

Another link is found in their writing careers:

In the end it’s literature that really yokes these two men together. Though they relied on very different tics and tricks, both were highly influential stylists. Orwell, who said that he wanted his prose to be “like a window pane” through which the reader would get an unadulterated view of the world, is the father of all subsequent serious journalism. Churchill was a more ornamental writer (Evelyn Waugh scorned what he called his “sham-Augustan prose”), but for all his rhetorical overdrive he had a way of cutting through.

Thanks to Milena Borden for sending a link to this article.

Two films of Churchill’s life are scheduled for this year. The first (entitled simply Churchill) has already been released and was recently reviewed on a weblog called Grouse Beater. Churchill is played by Brian Cox who receives high marks from the blogger, but the review has a few concerns about historic accuracy. The blogger also points out that:

Churchill was not well liked in his day. The novelist Evelyn Waugh disliked Churchill intensely. Through a character in his trilogy The Sword of Honour, Waugh’s alter ego, Guy Crouchback calls Churchill “a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, a Zionist, an advocate of the popular front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and of Lloyd George”.

The other film Darkest Hour stars Gary Oldman as Churchill and will be released later this year. This will focus on the early days of WWII when there was a real threat of German invasion. The Brian Cox film seems to consider and contrast Churchill’s roles in both world wars.

For the most thorough explication of Waugh’s attitude toward Churchill, see the article by the late John Howard Wilson on this subject in Waugh without End, p, 247. Here’s what Wilson says (p, 251) about the charge of “sham Augustan” prose:

Churchill was fond of parallellism and abstraction, like many Augustan writers. Waugh believed that style was a matter of period, so any modern imitation was only “sham.”

Several critiques of Churchill’s historical writings are quoted from Waugh’s essays and letters to support his point.

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Waugh and the New Perfumes

Posted on July 28, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

As reported in the Daily Mail, a new line of perfumes is being marketed by a company called Deco London. According to their Creative Director, Sophie Fannon-Howell:

Her six Eau de Parfums capture the elegance, glamour and frivolity of the Roaring Twenties, taking inspiration from the bright young things of the era and bring back to life fragrance notes that had fallen out of fashion in modern scents. … ‘The personalities of 1920s London were larger than life, glamorous, hedonistic, tragic and elegant; coming to terms with a new changing world following World War I. I wanted to capture those characters in the fragrances I created and introduce my audience to British history.’

One of the new perfumes called “Millicent” is pictured in the Mail with the caption: “Each perfume’s name is inspired by a glamorous character from the 1920s, such as Millicent…”

There follows an insert of four members of the Bright Young People with brief character descriptions of each: Cecil Beaton, Daphne Fielding, Patrick Balfour and Sheila Chisholm. They were all friends of Waugh, and the story mentions that Sheila had inspired Waugh’s novel The Loved One (more on this below). This list suggested, to me at least, that there were perfumes in the product line named for each of them. Daphne or Patrick perhaps, but Cecil and Sheila seemed a stretch. I am sorry to report that I was misled. None of the perfumes in the Deco line are named for these BYPs. In addition to Millicent noted above, the other perfumes are named Loretta, Constance, Ernest, Lawrence and Quentin. On second thought, “Cecil” and “Sheila” (or maybe “Sir Cecil” and “Lady Sheila”) would not be so terribly out of place in this line after all.

Sheila Chisholm was an Australian friend of Waugh’s from the 1920s. She is usually referred to as Sheila Milbanke which was the name of her second husband. She was by chance in Los Angeles in 1947 at the same time the Waughs were visiting in connection with an abortive attempt to license film rights for Brideshead Revisited. They met at a dinner party, and she convinced Waugh to make a trip to Forest Lawn Memorial Park which she had just visited and which “for sheer exquisite sensitive beauty surpassed anything she had seen of that kind” (Sykes, p. 411). She accompanied Waugh on his first trip to Forest Lawn the next day. He made several more in the following days. It became Whispering Glades in the novel.

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Waugh and the Horn

Posted on July 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Another article has appeared contrasting Evelyn Waugh’s dismissive attitude toward Djibouti in the 1930s with the bustling activity there today. This is entitled “Scramble for the Horn” by Oliver Miles in the London Review of Books:

Evelyn Waugh, who passed through Djibouti on his way to the coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930, when it was still a French colony, said that no one voluntarily spends long there.

Miles finds Waugh’s view (probably having in mind Remote People) quaintly out of date when so many countries (including the USA, China, France, Japan and even UAE and Saudi Arabia) are building facilities there because of its uniquely strategic location:

…it’s the only major trading port on the 4000 miles of coastline between Port Sudan to the north and Mombasa to the south, as well as being strategically situated on the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the narrow entrance to the Red Sea and a choke point on one of the world’s major shipping routes.

Miles conveniently overlooks the qualification on Waugh’s statement that no one voluntarily spends more time there than necessary. The personnel manning the facilities he enumerates probably receive hardship duty pay but are unlikely to have much choice in whether they or not they are assigned there for duty. And they probably are given R&R leave in Dubai on top of their allowances. He does not suggest that any more tourists are going to Djibouti to have a good time today than was the case in Waugh’s day.

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Waugh and Lodwick and Ludovic

Posted on July 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

D J Taylor in this week’s Spectator reviews a book about the life of a post-war British writer named John Lodwick. This is A Forgotten Man by Geoffrey Elliott and depicts a prolific writer of over a score of books whose works have simply disappeared. Taylor checked the circulation record for his books at the London Library and found that it ranged from inactive to nonexistent. It appears that all of his books are out of print (except for the ebook of his 1948 thriller Brother Death). As Taylor describes his oeuvre, it sounds rather promising:

In an era already tending to institutionalised drabness, he belonged to an all-but extinct part of the literary demographic — the writer as man of action, who fights (none too scrupulously, on this evidence) in wars, explores far-flung climes as a traveller rather than a tourist and, perhaps inevitably, leaves behind a personal myth that is almost as enticing as the shelf-full of books.

He hasn’t left much of a personal archive and much of his life as reconstructed by Elliott is based on the autobiographical nature of many of the books. There is also his war record but he doesn’t seemed to have impressed his senior officers. According to Taylor:

… Lodwick served successively in the French Foreign Legion, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and a Commando Unit, blew up fuel depots in Crete and ended up in a Serbian POW camp…

This perks up one’s interest for a Waugh connection, but Taylor soon shatters that:

Geoffrey Elliott does his best for Lodwick, offers context when data ebbs and can be forgiven for making more of his chance encounters with famous contemporaries than is warranted by the stark record of their association. His dealings with his ‘friend’ George Orwell, for example, were limited to a single meeting and I didn’t believe for a moment that Evelyn Waugh — again, met in the course of a brief wartime interview — mangled his name to produce the character of ‘Corporal-Major Ludovic’ in the Sword of Honour trilogy.

Taylor’s conclusions are usually sound, but it might be interesting to judge for oneself. Unfortunately, the review doesn’t reveal which of Lodwick’s books (if any) relate to his war experience or whether any mention service with the Commandoes in Crete. In the introduction to the reprinted thriller, Chris Petit describes Bid the Soldiers Shoot as an autobiography and says Peal of Ordnance is about WWII. Second-hand copies are widely available, but those will soon fly off the shelves if Elliott’s book has any success in restoring interest in Lodwick’s career.

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Opera on Life of Siegfried Sassoon to Debut

Posted on July 26, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian reports on the debut of an opera based on the life of WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon this weekend at the Garsington Opera in Buckinghamshire. Waugh and Sassoon were contemporaries but not friends, although they were connected through their friendships with others, most notably Ronald Knox and Katharine Asquith. Sassoon lived for many years at Heytesbury, Wiltshire near Mells in Somerset, where Knox spent his last years as a guest of Katharine Asquith. Knox helped arrange Sassoon’s instruction for conversion to Roman Catholicism in the late 1950s when he was too ill to take on the task himself. Sassoon, Knox and Asquith are all buried in the Mells Anglican churchyard next to Asquith’s ancestral home.

The Guardian article claims a further connection through Stephen Tennant with whom Sassoon had an affair in the 1920. According to the Guardian, Tennant “was among Evelyn Waugh’s inspirations for Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian Flyte.” That seems a bit far-fetched. The flamboyant Tennant probably contributed more to  the character of Anthony Blanche or Ambrose Silk or some of the BYPs in Vile Bodies than to the melancholic Sebastian.

Sassoon’s religious conversion forms a background to the opera which is entitled “Silver Birch.” According to the Guardian’s article, written by Joanna Moorhead, he developed an attachment to his niece and god-daughter Jessica Gatty late in life and was instrumental in her own conversion to the Catholic faith, something about which her family were not particularly happy at the time. She later became a nun, after Sassoon’s death, and continues to live in a convent near Twickenham where she

 focuses on ecological issues, of which her godfather would have approved. She remembers him as a shy man who rarely looked his listener in the eye, but who could certainly talk – often about the first world war. “The weight of war was still there. It was obvious that what he’d seen and experienced in the trenches was still very traumatic.”… In her view, Sassoon’s entire output was a quest towards God. “His poetry turned into prayer,” she says. “The attention that was there as he wrote poetry became the attention that turned to the source of poetry.”

Sister Jessica Gatty, as she is now, was the source of information for the libretto of the opera. According to the librettist Jessica Duchen:

 talking to Sister Jessica helped draw out the poet’s personality. “She helped me understand his life and motivations. It was wonderful to meet someone who had been so immeasurably influenced by him.”

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Powell Society Papers Include Two about Waugh

Posted on July 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Anthony Powell Society has recently published the Proceedings of its 2016 Conference in York. There are two papers in this collection that relate directly to the writings of Evelyn Waugh. The titles and abstracts of these papers are set forth below:

The Group Novel: Waugh’s Vile Bodies, Powell’s Afternoon Men, and Green’s Party Going by YUEXI LIU, Durham University

“Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green can be considered as part of a group. Having rejected high modernism and its interiority, this group turned to the outside and created what I call “exterior modernism”. Not only did the exterior modernists operate as a group, not dissimilar to those in their novels, they also wrote “the group novel”. Offering anthropological insights, Vile Bodies (1930), Afternoon Men (1931), and Party Going (1939, written 1931-1938) are excellent studies of group behaviour – talk in particular – and psychology. In or about 1930, human character changed again: the stream of consciousness gave away to what David Lodge terms the “stream of talk”. This group of exterior modernists experimented with what I prefer to call “talk fiction” rather than Waugh’s the “novel of conversation”. Cinematic, comic, and satiric, Vile Bodies, Afternoon Men and Party Going are primarily concerned with the talk of a distinctive social group. Their talk, however, accentuates miscommunication, or, as often, the breakdown of communication. Interestingly, the rise of talk fiction coincided with the coming of sound in cinema, or the talkies. Informed by the debate about the group mind, this paper also investigates the psychology of the group revealed by the talk of its members in the three novels. Within the group, the group mind is characterised by the desire for belonging and the fear of assimilation. In the face of the crowd, against which the group identifies itself and, paradoxically, of which it is often oblivious, the group, however, unites in its thinking about the containment of the crowd and the preservation of itself. Despite the threat of extinction, the group often manages to survive, which is no less despairing.”

Anthony Powell, Brideshead and Castle Howard Revisited by JEFFREY MANLEY

“Castle Howard has become inextricably connected in the public perception with Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. This is due more to its selection as a setting for two popular film adaptations than to what was written by Waugh himself. And yet because of the overwhelming effectiveness of the portrayals of Waugh’s story in these films (or at least the earlier Granada TV production), even some literary scholars have come to accept the identity of Castle Howard as the setting intended in Waugh writings. The purpose of this paper is (1) to examine Anthony Powell’s opinion of Brideshead Revisited, both the novel and the 1981 TV series, (2) to compare Waugh’s descriptions of Brideshead Castle to Castle Howard itself and (3) to review the process of the filmmakers in selecting that site as the setting for the story. The paper will then consider to what extent the identification of Castle Howard and Brideshead can be attributed to Waugh and what to the film adaptations.”

Other papers published in the 2016 York Proceedings include:

The Dance to Come: Powell and the Victorians; John Bowen

‘Ever More Congenial’ – AP and the Essence of Mr WS; Colin Donald

Literary Lampoons and Chronological Knots; Bruce Fleming

Adultery in A Dance to the Music of Time and in The Great Gatsby; Steve Loveman

Shocking! Powell on Sade; Didier Girard

Narration, Character and Time in Anthony Powell’s Dance; David Martin Jones and Lana Starkey

Finding Powell’s Voice: The Kind of Immortality Most Authors Want; Robin Bynoe

Punching Authors: The Novelist as Critic and Parodist; Peter Kislinger

Jenkins as Horatio as Hamlet; Nicholas Birns

This 200-page publication is available from the Anthony Powell Society to nonmembers at the price of £10 UK or £16 overseas (including postage and handling). Lower prices are available to APS members. Details of ordering and payment are available here.

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Reminder: Lecture on Waugh’s Graphic Art Tommorrow

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

This is a reminder that Rebecca Moore will lecture tomorrow (Tuesday, 25 July) at Maggs Bros books on her recent research into Waugh’s graphic art. The lecture is at 630pm in Maggs Bros new premises at 48 Bedford Square, London WC1. See earlier post.

Meanwhile, several other publications have issued reviews of the ongoing exhibit of Waugh’s graphic art at Maggs Bros. This includes the internet page of art publishers Phaidon which begin its article:

Evelyn Waugh used to illustrate his own books. This might come as a surprise to those who think of the British novelist and journalist as a writer, rather than a visual artist. However, a new exhibition at Maggs Bros Rare Books in London should persuade any doubters of his lesser-known talents.

A N Devers writing in Fine Books and Collections Magazine started a review of a gallery visit with this report of a conversation with Ed Maggs:

To a bustling crowd of bibliophiles and collectors, Managing Director Ed Maggs briskly handed out white wine and led newcomers over to a simple and unusual untitled original pen and ink drawing by Evelyn Waugh, that he then declared the inspiration for the entire exhibition.

Signed and dated 1929, the illustration depicts a hotel lounge of assorted denizens: a reader, a waiter, a cephalopod in a fish tank, and a bare-bottomed statue being prickled by a cactus–Maggs noted it is a possible unused illustration for Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies. In his introductory remarks, Maggs said of picture, “This [exhibition] began with this drawing. I am a dealer not a collector and I am seldom consumed by envy of others’ books and objects. I sold this drawing 25 years ago and Mark Everett bought it from under my nose last year. I was fuming. I was incandescent with jealousy. I, of course, would have probably sold it to him, but I would have had it for a few minutes. It is a tremendous thing.”

Anny Carpenter reported the event for Spear’s Magazine:

“Coinciding with the publication of the first volumes in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh by the Oxford University Press, highlights of the show include a hand-written manuscript of Waugh’s second novel, Vile Bodies (1930). Invaluable in its own right, the manuscript is accompanied by a colour proof of Waugh’s most famous design for the dust jacket and title page illustration, inscribed to his friends Brian and Diana Guinness: ‘This is to be the cover. Do you like it? I do.’ Part of the Elliot collection, the one-of-a-kind manuscript is being lent by the Brotherton Library of Leeds University…The exhibition shows us what might have happened if Waugh, who died at 62 in 1966, hadn’t decided to write: and while a wonderful show, on the whole I think he made the right choice in the end.”

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New Study of Waugh’s Fiction Published

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Amazon is offering an independently published study by Indian academic Ravi Dhar of Evelyn Waugh’s novels. According to the introduction by former Professor S. K. Das of the University of Calcutta:

Dr Dhar examines the philosophical basis of Waugh’s novels. His contention is that Waugh’s novels are philosophical in their attitude to change and progress. This very attitude shapes Waugh’s comic vision of life and makes his works universal…Dr Dhar’s work is the product of a long and painstaking research. This meticulous study … will certainly contribute to deeper understanding of Waugh’s novels.

The 442-page book is entitled Evelyn Waugh Revisited (not to be confused with the recent biography by Philip Eade entitled Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited). Dr Dhar’s book concentrates on Waugh’s works–each chapter is based on one of the novels–whereas Eade focused primarily on Waugh’s life. The book is available in paperback and ebook formats from Amazon in both the US and UK.

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Two Hitchenses on Waugh

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Articles on Waugh by brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens have recently been resurrected on the internet. These are Christopher’s essay “The Permanent Adolescent” which originally appeared in The Atlantic magazine for April 2003 and was later collected in Arguably. This is now available on YouTube as read out by an anonymous British-accented reader. The other is Peter’s article: “The Second World Waugh – some thoughts on ‘Put Out More Flags‘ and ‘The ‘Sword of Honour‘ trilogy” which originally appeared in his Mail on Sunday weblog for 17 April 2013. This was recently quoted by David Lull in the Books Inq. weblog.

Another blogger considers what Waugh can teach us about fatherhood. This is Fr. Michael Rennier on Aleteia.com:

[Waugh’s] entire family was awash with fathers and sons bickering, imposing and rebelling in turn, and wishing that their fathers would disappear. Waugh himself came from a long line of bad fathers. He understood his flaws clearly, though, and in his novels doesn’t shy away from discussing the complexities of fatherhood.

The article then considers the examples of Gervase Crouchback from Sword of Honour, Lord Marchmain from Brideshead Revisited and Waugh’s own father Arthur from A Little Learning. He concludes:

A father doesn’t need to be perfect, but all a child wants is for him to be there and to give unconditional love. Do that, and you’ll be a hero. But choose to ignore your child and he may one day satirize you mercilessly in his novels.

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