Waugh and the Hendon Nudists

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

An article appears in the Londonist (an online magazine devoted to local news about London, past and present) relating to  a 1930 incident when a group of nudists chose to sunbathe unclothed at a Hendon lake called the Welsh Harp.  This was adjacent to a public footpath, provoking a group of protesters who gathered nearby. The incident also provoked an article by Evelyn Waugh in the Daily Mail which is quoted in the Londonist:

Novelist Evelyn Waugh also attributed the local attention to a kind of warped voyeurism: ‘The people who made such a fuss at the Welsh Harp simply detest the spectacle of bodies of any kind, beautiful or ugly. But do they cherish their over-delicate sensibility and avoid places where they are liable to be shocked?… No. These astonishing people assemble in a large crowd at the one place where they know they will see the very thing which displeases them.”

While Waugh was concerned to protect the privacy of the sunbathers, he also thought they might be more circumspect about their choice of venues for their activities and a bit less self-righteous about their expectations to be left alone. He also expressed some doubts about the wisdom of sunbathing as contributing to good health which has since been confirmed by the medical conclusion that it can contribute to skin cancer. The article entitled “This Sunbathing Business” appears in the Daily Mail for 5 July 1930. It is also collected in A Little Order, p. 17 and EAR, p. 86.

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Telegraph Reviews Opening of Waugh Art Exhibit

Posted on July 16, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

On the occasion of the opening of the exhibit next week at Maggs Bros booksellers relating to Waugh’s work as a graphic artist, Michael Bird reviews his career in that field in today’s Sunday Telegraph. After describing Waugh’s movement from modernist iconoclast to opponent of Picasso and his followers, Bird comments on the exhibit:

Antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros’ selection from Waugh’s copious artistic output includes his Cherwell contributions alongside later commercial work, such as the jacket for Vile Bodies, with its vorticist-inspired racing car graphic. There’s an illustration from Decline and Fall in which the German modernist architect Professor Silenus presides over a building site resembling a demolished temple. True to his cubist roots, Waugh understood what the avant-garde knockers-down of hallowed traditions were about. Modernism might be unfriendly or pretentious, but it was nowhere near as drearily deadly as English good taste…

How easily this angry, avant-garde young man has been obscured by the older Waugh’s born-again loathing for Picasso. After Waugh began his country-house life at Piers Court in 1937, and later at Coombe Florey, his eye seems to have been exercised more in domestic and garden design, and in collecting Pre-Raphaelite paintings, than in making art of any kind.

By the time Brideshead came out in 1945, he was well along this road. Yet, for the moment at least, the cubist renegade lived on in the heart of the grumpy squire. “Charm,” observes [Anthony Blanche to Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited], “is the great English blight. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.” No manifesto for modern art could put the case more clearly.

The article in the Telegraph’s online edition contains several well-produced reproductions of Waugh’s artwork. The exhibit is entitled “EW Pinxit: The Graphic Art of Evelyn Waugh”. It will have a relatively short run at Maggs Bros Ltd, 48 Bedford Square, London WC1 (maggs.com), from Tues 18 July to Friday 28 July. On Tuesday 25 July Waugh scholar Rebecca Moore will lecture on the subject of her recent research on Waugh’s art in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. See earlier post.

UPDATE (17 July 2017): The following additional information about the Waugh art exhibit appeared in the Antiques Trade Gazette:

The show, EW Pinxit, is thought to be the first of its kind, and presents a range of Waugh’s early illustrations, which combine Victorian and ‘jazz age’ visual styles. Some material is for sale while some pieces appear on loan from Leeds University’s Brotherton Library, the Waugh family and various private collections.

Among the highlights is a 1950 handmade Christmas card reproducing Gaetano Zumba’s 17th century wax diorama of a plague scene and likening it to family life. It is available for £4500. Also included are a manuscript of the author’s second novel along with a design for the dust jacket and title page illustration, and a selection of drawings for Waugh’s undergraduate magazines Oxford Broom and Cherwell. From the latter is a 1923 series ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ which includes ‘The intolerable wickedness of he who drinks alone.’

The gallery’s Ed Maggs says: “This has always been a somewhat underrated part of his life and we hope to show that his black humour and vicious irony found as equal an opportunity in his artwork as in his writing.”

UPDATE 2 (17 July 2017): The Waugh art exhibit will open tomorrow, Tuesday 18 July, not 25 July as originally stated. Rebecca Moore’s lecture will be on Tuesday, 25 July at 630pm. This has been corrected in the text above.

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“Scoop-like” Novel Boosted

Posted on July 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In Peter Wilby’s New Stateman column, the new novel Splash! by Stephen Glover often likened to Waugh’s Scoop has been given another boost. As explained by Wilby, Scoop:

… drew on Waugh’s experience of covering Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia (as it then was) for the Mail. Written in Waugh’s style, Splash! imitates his practice of giving characters expressively comic names: there’s an editor called Doodle and a reporter called Blunt. Glover clearly enjoyed writing it and I enjoyed reading it. But anybody hoping for a wounding portrayal of the Mail and its present editor Paul Dacre will be disappointed. Though the cognoscenti will spot similarities – for example, Doodle, like Dacre, doesn’t use a computer at work – they are incidental and inoffensive. Glover’s novel is an apologia for tabloid journalism and a celebration of its role in exposing corruption among the elite. The best fiction on the press comes from established writers who dabble in journalism only occasionally. Apart from Scoop, my favourites are Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning and Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day.

Scoop itself receives a recommendation on the website PureWow (hat tip to Dave Lull) as one of the 50 funniest books:

A satire of sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondents, Scoop is partly based on Waugh’s experience working for the Daily Mail. Ooo, juicy.

 

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Waugh and Country Houses

Posted on July 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

There have been several recent articles that mention Evelyn Waugh in connection with English country houses:

Carlton Towers. As noted in a recent post, this house was the setting of Hetton Abbey in the 1980s film version of A Handful of Dust. Waugh had been an invited guest there in the late 1930s but that was several years after he wrote the novel. The present owners are offering the house as a venue for corporate events and are taking advantage of the Waugh connections in their promotional materials:

Carlton Towers starred as Hetton Abbey in the 1988 film A Handful Of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, and provided a stunning backdrop for the television dramatisation of Charles Dickens’ Micawber, starring David Jason. More recently lavish ITV1 costume drama Victoria was filmed at Carlton Towers. Starring Jenna Coleman as the young queen, Carlton played the part of Windsor Castle in the acclaimed series.

Sevenhampton Place. This is a large house that was the last residence of Ian Fleming. It is described and illustrated, along with several of his other country houses, on a website dedicated to Fleming’s life and works :

Ian and Ann Fleming moved into what would be Ian’s final house, Sevenhampton Place in the village of Sevenhampton near Swindon in Wiltshire, in June 1963. It was Ann’s ideal home, but it was far from in an ideal state when the Flemings bought the house in 1959. The house required considerable repair, renovation and refurbishment, and it was four years before Ian and Ann could take up residence… In a letter to Evelyn Waugh, Ann Fleming describes its forty bedrooms, billiard room and ballroom, though these rooms would be considerably altered. …the house itself dates to the 18th century. The house was remodelled in 1904 before being remodelled a second time by the Flemings…

Ann Fleming’s letter to Waugh was dated 31 August 1959 and describes the house as “near Faringdon”, which is a more bucolic setting than Swindon, the nearest mainline station. The letter is collected in the 1985 edition of The Letters of Ann Fleming, edited by Mark Amory. She also told Waugh that it had “a romantic garden and a better piece of water than yours…the Carolean wings are lovely…”

Pemberley. This is a fictional house described in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice that was the home of the heroine’s love interest Mr Darcy. It is described in a recent New York Times article:

When did she fall in love with Darcy? Elizabeth’s sister Jane asks. “I believe,” replies Elizabeth, “I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” It is not a joke. As do country houses elsewhere in literature — Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead, for instance — Pemberley embodies the Tory values of old England. This is what Elizabeth is marrying into and what she will support, wholeheartedly, as Mrs. Darcy.

This discussion of the traditional view of Austen comes in a review by literary critic John Sutherland of a new and revisionist book about Austen’s life and work entitled Jane Austen: The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly. This new “radical” view of Austen rejects the foregoing interpretation of Austen’s motivations for marrying Darcy:

… Kelly’s Elizabeth is from another political galaxy. Elizabeth’s undutifulness as a daughter, her laughter, her lack of reverence for Mr. Collins, her lack of respect for Lady Catherine de Bourgh — they’re all of a piece. Elizabeth is, in short, constructed to be “a conservative’s nightmare.” … Why does Kelly’s Elizabeth marry the master of Pemberley? Because she is strong enough to radicalize him. Would Kelly’s Elizabeth have voted for Jeremy Corbyn? The answer is obvious.

Waugh would probably have taken a dim view of this revisionist interpretation of Austen (if, indeed, he bothered to express any view at all), but I wonder if he would agree with the Sutherland’s “traditional view” as applied to Brideshead Castle that it “embodied the Tory values of old England”. It may have done so up to the time of Lord Marchmain’s conversion to Roman Catholicism but afterwards, perhaps not so much? New values were brought in by his wife’s religion which would be consistent with “Tory values”, but only up to a point. And it was that conflict which could be said to have caused their marriage and family to fall apart. Charles Ryder at first fell in with the traditional values but in the end accepted the whole package.

UPDATE (16 July 2017): Today’s New York Times Book Review is a special issue largely devoted to the works of Jane Austen on the 200th anniversary of her death. In addition to the article mentioned above by John Sutherland, it carries two other book reviews, three feature length essays devoted to Austen and an Austen quiz. One of the other book reviews includes a book by Waugh scholar Paula Byrne who wrote Mad World (what she calls a “partial life” of Evelyn Waugh). The new review covers her second book about Austen–The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Works in Hollywood. Reviewer, novelist Jane Smiley, concludes that of the three books covered in her article, Byrne’s “gives us the most insightful analysis of the making of the Austen legacy,”

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Et in Arcadia Ego (More)

Posted on July 14, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Latin phrase that Waugh used for the first chapter of Brideshead Revisited (“Et in Arcadio Ego”) was mentioned in a recent post in connection with Paul Theroux’s humorous allusion to it in his recent novel Mother Land. Since that was posted, the source of this phrase has become the subject of an article in the latest Evelyn Waugh Studies (“Et in Chatsworth Ego?”) issued earlier this week in which Peter J Comerford argues that Waugh most likely first encountered the phrase in a painting by Poussin. This is the same point argued by the character Floyd in the Theroux novel: “What I had in mind was the ambiguous painting by Nicholas Poussin in which the enigmatic ego might–who knows?–refer to death speaking.” Comerford points out, however, that there are two versions of this painting, one in the Louvre (1637-38) and another earlier one (1627) at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Floyd, although ever the pedant, seems to have been unaware of this, and if his brother Jay, the narrator of Theroux’s novel, had known about it, there would surely have been a more extended exchange of satirical familial banter on that point.

Comerford persuasively demonstrates that Waugh had opportunities to see both of these paintings, but thinks his use in Brideshead must have been inspired by the Chatsworth version. This is both because of how the phrase is interpreted in that version and because of the presence of a skull on top of the tomb. But this analysis does not address the point raised in Theroux’s novel by Floyd’s wife, Gloria. This is the possibility that Waugh may have been influenced by the painting of another artist, Guercino. His painting predated (1618-22) those by Poussin and probably inspired them. Guercino’s painting is housed in the Galleria Nazionale in Rome. After looking at all three versions on the internet, the Guercino seems as close as Poussin’s “Chatworth” version to Waugh’s use of the painting in the novel. In fact, the skull and inscription are much more prominent in Guercino’s painting than in Poussin’s.

So Gloria may be more that just the “clever girl” described by Floyd in Theroux’s novel. She may, in fact, have trumped her husband with a better answer since Guercino’s painting is widely accepted as the source of those by Poussin . Neither Comerford nor one of his sources Michael Brennan (Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family) considers the possibility that Waugh may have been inspired by the Guercino painting, although Brennan acknowledges its existence and similarity to the earlier of the Poussins. It may be doubtful that there is any detailed evidence to prove that Waugh may have seen the Guercino at the Galleria Nazionale, such as that which Comerford and Brennan cite for Waugh’s opportunities to have seen the Poussins. But he was certainly a visitor in Rome on any number of occasions before writing Brideshead and could have done so (assuming that the painting was in the Galleria Nazionale at that time). On the other hand, in addition to the Diary citation quoted by Comerford, Waugh mentions Poussin favorably several times in his fiction and non-fiction but doesn’t seem to have expressed any written opinion about Guercino, which would tend to weaken Gloria’s case.

Comerford’s article also brings into focus another point. Prof Paul Doyle in his Waugh Companion, as mentioned in the earlier post, cited a 1968 article by Ernest Panofsky referring to other paintings dating back to the Renaissance displaying the Latin phrase. Assuming there are such paintings, they remain relatively obscure, and most of the discussion on the subject of “Et in Arcadia Ego” as represented in a painting is limited to the two artists mentioned in Theroux’s novel and in the writings of Comerford and Brennan.

 

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London Lecture on Waugh’s Artwork

Posted on July 12, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A lecture by Waugh scholar Rebecca Moore has been announced by London booksellers Maggs Brothers. This will take place in their 48 Bedford Square premises on Tuesday, 25 July at 630-8pm. The store, in new premises, is also sponsoring an exhibit of Waugh’s artistic production. See earlier post. Here are the details of the lecture

“Image and Text in “The Balance”: New discoveries in Waugh’s first published fiction”

Rebecca Moore, PhD student working on the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project at the University of Leicester, presents an exciting discovery from the Waugh archive held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas.

Join us for an evening at Maggs’ new premises to hear about Rebecca Moore’s recent research. There will also be a short reception following the talk and an opportunity to view the exhibition, “E. W. Pinxit: The Graphic Art of Evelyn Waugh”, after hours.

There is no admission charge but registration is available here.

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Waugh and the Q & A

Posted on July 11, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Humorist Craig Brown writing in the Daily Mail makes a case for the elimination of the Q&A following any vocal presentation by an author. He is particularly bothered by the typical literary festival as a waste of time. In the article, Brown cites two Waughs in support of his position:

…the literary Q&A is a peculiarly modern institution, the product, as Auberon Waugh once observed, of contemporary readers being fed up with reading and contemporary writers being fed up with writing. In fact, literary festivals offer a complete holiday from literature: instead of reading and writing, readers now listen and writers talk.

The article concludes with this discussion of Evelyn Waugh and interviews:

Personally, I yearn for those pre-festival days when authors were not afraid to be nasty. To the best of my knowledge, Evelyn Waugh never appeared at a literary festival, and the few interviews he gave were notable for their terseness. In one BBC Home Service interview, he is asked:

‘Do you find it easy to get on with the man in the street?’

‘I’ve never met such a person.’

‘What about on buses or trains?’

‘I’ve never travelled in a bus and I’ve never addressed a stranger on a train.’

And whereas today’s authors love to make a song-and-dance in Q&As about how impossibly hard it is to write a book, Waugh takes quite a different line.

‘Nothing easier,’ he says.

While it is probably true that Waugh never appeared at a literary festival, they were not particularly prevalent in his day. The Hay-on-Wye event which marks the beginning of festival mania dates from 1988 (although there was a more modest festival in Cheltenham from 1949). Waugh did however conduct an extensive lecture tour in the United States, appearing in 13 cities, primarily at Roman Catholic colleges and universities. According to press reports of that tour, he seems to have allowed a Q&A at least after some of the lectures. And those same reports also consistently show him getting the better of it.

 

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Waugh in Mother Land

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Mother Land is the latest novel of Paul Theroux whose career has many similarities to that of Evelyn Waugh. Both made their living exclusively from writing after beginning as school teachers. Theroux’s teaching career began in the Peace Corps on assignment to Central Africa. Their early novels were comic and satirical and both wrote about Africa. They each also branched into travel books. For Waugh, this was in the golden age of travel writing and seemed an obvious choice. For Theroux, it meant reinventing what was in the 1970s a moribund genre which he succeeded in rejuvenating, beginning with The Great Railway Bazaar. Both also wrote stories and essays in magazines and newspapers. And both had brothers who were also writers. While both are Roman Catholic, this is less important in the writing of Theroux, who was born a Roman Catholic, than in that of Waugh, who was a convert.

Theroux’s latest novel is about a dysfunctional family which seems based to some extent on his own. Unlike Waugh’s family, Theroux’s was a larger unit which he shared with several siblings; there are seven in the novel plus another who dies at birth but remains in contact with their mother. The comedy in the book is darker and less pronounced than in his earlier novels, many of which were written very much in the same tradition as Waugh and Graham Greene, with whom he is often compared. The best of these early books deal with Africa: Jungle Lovers, Fong and the Indians, and Girls at Play. How much of the dysfunction Theroux describes in the new novel is based on what he experienced in his own family is hard to say. He has described the book in an interview as 60 percent autobiographical, and the rest fiction,  But there is perhaps a bit too much of it on offer, and the book is unnecessarily repetitive, especially in the large number of family meetings which tend to become indistinguishable. It could have been a much better book by losing about 100 pages with very little rewriting of what was left (although Theroux told an interviewer that he had already cut a substantial portion of the book).

The subject matter might share something with Brideshead Revisited since that was about the offspring of two dysfunctional families. Perhaps for that reason Theroux includes an allusion to Waugh’s novel toward the end of Mother Land. This occurs (p. 469) after his mother, at the age of 101 but still in good health and mentally alert, moves to a retirement home on Cape Cod where most of the fimily live nearby. The name of the retirement home is Arcadia. As the narrator, Jay, is leaving the home after visiting his mother, he meets at the door his brother Floyd, a poet who teaches English at Harvard, and Floyd’s new wife Gloria. Their conversation begins with:

“Et in Arcadia Ego.” Floyd said as a greeting. “Source?”

“I think you’re looking for Waugh. Brideshead.”

“The obvious middlebrow reply. What I had in mind was the ambiguous painting by Nicholas Poussin in which the enigmatic ego might–who knows–refer to death speaking.”

Gloria said, “Guercino did one as well. Baroque.”

“Clever girl,” Floyd said. “Jay is overwhelmed, punching above his weight with that reference to Waugh.”

In Waugh’s novel, the Latin statement was inscribed on a skull in Charles Ryder’s room, rather than a painting but was generally used in painting beginning in the Renaissance, not necessarily associated with one by Poussin or any other particular painter. See previous post. So Floyd may have outsmarted himself since Jay’s reference can be traced back to Floyd’s. The book was recently reviewed in the New York Times by Stephen King who liked it despite its flaws.

UPDATE (20 November 2017): In yesterday’s Observer, Alex Clark reviewed Mother Land and included a remark about another possible Waugh allusion:

The portraits of Mother’s children, themselves ageing and succumbing to illness as she lives on past a century in fine fettle, are especially well done, and the novel’s climax, with its hints of an inversion of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, are sharp and subtle.

Since he may not have wanted to spoil the ending, this is all he has to say about it, so perhaps it’s best not to speculate on how Theroux may have inverted Waugh’s novel.

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Evelyn Waugh and Amanda Craig

Posted on July 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Sunday Telegraph has a feature length article in which columnist Allison Pearson reviews a new novel by Amanda Craig in her “Shelf Life” column. This is The Lie of the Land and is described as the first state of the nation novel after Brexit. The story follows a London family made up of a newly unemployed architect wife and a failing and philandering journalist husband and their children. They cannot sell their London house because of its fall in value so they rent it and move to Devon where they discover the state of England outside of London. The son has failed entrance to Cambridge and so gets a job in a factory called Humble which makes pies. There he befriends one of the last remaining British production line workers, a bitter Ukip supporter, as well as a “sharp-elbowed” Polish girl friend from among the mostly foreign work force. The Polish girl, Katya, sees through the British with a bitter satire.

Pearson notes that this is Craig’s 8th book and sees her as under-appreciated. An earlier novel A Vicious Circle (1996) described the plight of Grenfell Towers residents 20 years before the disaster struck. And an earlier state of England novel Hearts and Minds (2009) was the decade’s best of its type but only nominated for an award. She hopes that Lie of the Land with its timely story will bring Craig’s writing the credit it deserves. The review concludes:

Craig has everything you look for in a major writer: wit, indignation, an ear for the telling phrase and an unflagging attention to all the individual choices by which we define ourselves–where we stand as a society and how we decline and fall. If Evelyn Waugh had a social conscience and liked children, he could have been Craig. In a Brexit Britain riven by tribal loyalties, maybe it takes a novelist to tell us a story that expands our human sympathy and makes us see the other side.

The article is not yet on the Telegraph’s website but has been retweeted here. Thanks to Milena Borden once again for calling the article to our attention.

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BBC Radio 3 Programme Will Include Waugh

Posted on July 8, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 3 has announced a new episode in its series Words and Music that will include the reading of an excerpt from the writings of, inter alia, Evelyn Waugh. Each episode involves the reading by one or more actors of a text on a particular theme, interspersed with music having some relation to that theme. Some previous episodes have been limited to the written works of a single writer. For example, “Greeneland” in 2016 involved readings from Graham Greene’s books on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death. Other single writer episodes have been produced for T S Eliot and Dylan Thomas.

The episode that will include a Waugh excerpt is on the theme of “Arcadia”. While not revealed, it can be expected that this will involve a text from Brideshead Revisited in which the first chapter is entitled “Et in Arcadia Ego“.  According to Prof Paul Doyle, the Latin phrase:

…appeared in many paintings from the Renaissance onward. At first, such paintngs showed a skull in the middle of a quiet, happy pastoral landscape, indicating that the phrase meant “Even in Arcadia, I, Death, am there.” Later the skull disappeared and the phrase was read as “I [the painter or viewer] once lived in Arcadia.” The skull in Charles Ryder’s study bearing the phrase indicates that Waugh was aware of this dual significance. (A Waugh Companion, p. 50)

This programme will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday, 16 July 2017 at 1800 London time and will be available thereafter for a period of time on the internet via BBC iPlayer at this link. Here’s the description of what will it will include:

Fiona Shaw and Jamie Glover with poetry, prose and music exploring the vision of Arcadia and harmony with nature across the centuries from the pastoral visions of the Ancient Greeks Virgil and Theocritus to the anxieties of the American environmentalist Rachel Carson in ‘Silent Spring’, Stephen Spender’s exploration of technology coming to an English landscape largely unchanged in centuries and Robinson Jeffers’s ‘Carmel Point’ in which he imagines a time when nature and man can live in harmony. Arcadia includes work by Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland, Haydn, Debussy, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Evelyn Waugh, Willa Cather and John Clare.

For those who cannot wait until next week, there is a podcast relating to The Loved One available from today on Southside Broadcasting in Middlesborough. Waugh’s novel is the station’s Book of the Month. The broadcast will involve a discussion among writers Jennie Finch and Michael Blackburn and journalism undegraduate Ryan Reed.

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