Waugh Biographies on Summer Reading List

Posted on June 28, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

George Weigel writing in Catholic World Report has included two biographies of Evelyn Waugh on his list of books recommended for summer reading:

Of the making of Wavian biographies there seems to be no end, but I thoroughly enjoyed Philip Eade’s Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited (Henry Holt). Unlike some of Waugh’s biographers, Eade does not start from the premise that the twentieth century’s great master of English prose was a fiend in human form: a wise decision that allows him to see, and portray, a complex personality in full. For those who want to explore Waugh’s still-immensely-readable oeuvre, Douglas Lane Patey’s The Life of Evelyn Waugh (Blackwell) remains the gold standard; those more interested in the man than in his literary accomplishment will be well served by Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited.

Other books on his list include several by Joseph Epstein, Alvin Felzenberg’s story of William F Buckley’s political journey and its impact on history in A Man and His Presidents (Yale), and Robert Harris’s “Cicero Trilogy” – Imperium, Conspirata, and Dictator (Vintage). 

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Screen Credit Blues

Posted on June 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Irish Times has a story by Donald Clarke about the dissatisfaction of screen writer Neil Jordan with the final versions of the TV series Riviera episodes now running on Sky TV. According to the IT story, the final versions reflect substantial changes in Jordan’s script although he is still shown as scriptwriter on the screen credits along with co-writer John Banville.

The story then proceeds through a history of similar past disputes, including screenwriter/novelists such as Gore Vidal and John Steinbeck whose final scripts were substantially altered. There is also a discussion of how a new position known as “showrunner” has appeared in some TV film credits, apparently indicating a position between (or perhaps above) writer and director/producer.

The concluding discussion relates to the script that was used for the final version of the 1981 Granada TV film of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

Thirty-five years ago, John Mortimer received enormous credit for adapting Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited for Granada television. Much later, Jeremy Irons told this writer that the script had been largely junked. “I tell you a secret. It wasn’t Mortimer,” he said to me. “He wrote an eight-hour script – or maybe a six hour one. We were shooting it, and then the financiers said: ‘We don’t like the script.’ They felt it had lost the Proustian quality. They were going to withdraw their money. Our producer said to them: ‘Don’t worry. We understand’. We went to Malta and we just had the book in our hands. John really only did a bit.” If you want total control, write a novel.

Mortimer didn’t make much a fuss about the final version even though he was shown as writer in the credits. Because it was considerably longer than what he had written, fewer changes were needed in the story which ended up relying much more heavily on the text of Waugh’s novel than Mortimer’s script. As to whether “total control” over a story rests with the author, Evelyn Waugh would disagree with that over the story that was filmed in 1965 based on his novel The Loved One or the 2008 film version of Brideshead Revisited.

This is a reminder that the 1960’s adaptation of The Loved One will be shown on the Turner Classic Movies channel later this week: Thursday, 29 June at 1030pm Eastern Time.

 

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Commonweal Marks J F Powers Centenary

Posted on June 26, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Roman Catholic literary magazine Commonweal has marked the centenary of novelist J F Powers birth with an article on Powers’ career entitled “His Bleak Materials” by biographer and critic Jeffrey Meyers. The article begins with Meyers’ memoir of a 1981 visit to St John’s University in Collegeville, MN where Powers taught creative writing.  Meyers was invited to stay in Powers’ home next to a monastery, and when he woke after a night of drinking and talking he found the house was barely liveable. It had been built to house the construction workers who built the monastery. But such dodgy housing was the story of Powers’ life as has recently been told in his collected letters (Suitable Accommodations) edited by his daughter who knows from first hand experience what living in such structures can be. 

As explained by Meyers, Powers wrote little due to family commitments, lack of a remuneraitve day job and a nearly perpetual writers’ block. But what he did produce was memorable and worth reading. Meyers describes what he considers Powers’ best story as well as his two novels, Morte d’Urban and  Wheat that Springeth Green. These are still available from New York Review Books as is a collection of his stories. Meyers also mentions that Evelyn Waugh admired Powers’ early stories and helped to promote his work:

Waugh taught Powers close observation, subtle wit, savage unmasking of falsity. Like Waugh, Powers is deeply amused by his characters’ faults, but also conveys the urgent need—with salvation at stake—to rise above them. Like Joyce and Waugh, he assumes that the author shares the defects and aspirations of his creations. In his essay “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church,” Waugh, emphasizing Powers’s themes of disillusionment and spiritual waste, wrote that his presbyteries:

“…are not mere literary inventions. Reading those admirable stories one can understand why there is often a distinct whiff of anticlericalism where Irish priests are in power. They are faithful and chaste and, in youth at any rate, industrious, but many live out their lives in a painful state of transition; they have lost their ancestral simplicity without yet acquiring a modest carriage of their superior learning or, more important, delicacy in their human relations, or imagination, or agility of mind.”

Waugh reviewed two collections of Powers’ stories and Powers reviewed The Loved One and A Little Learning. One of Waugh’s reviews is collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews as is the essay quoted above. They each visited the other’s home and corresponded from 1949, when they first met on Waugh’s lecture tour of the Eastern US, until the 1960s. Powers’ letters to Waugh are collected in Evelyn Waugh Studies, 45.1 (Spring 2014).

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Retour Ă  l’europe moderne

Posted on June 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s French publisher Robert Laffont has issued a new printing of the French translation of Brideshead Revisited (Retour Ă  Brideshead). This is a paperback as was the previous version but has a new cover with new dimensions and pagination in the firm’s Pavillons Poche format. The reissue was recently reviewed on the French books blog “Dans le manoir aux livres”. After summarizing the plot, the reviewer concludes (translation by Google): 

The gallery of characters is excellent. Their psychology is deep and well worked. Sometimes it is necessary to know how to read between the lines especially with regard to the enigmatic and elusive Sebastian. Brideshead, the family home of the Flytes is also a protagonist in its own right. This is where the great moments unfold. … The end leaves the reader a little disarmed as to the future that is in store for the different characters. I am very happy to have finally discovered this novel thanks to its reissue. I really like this kind of bittersweet story as the British know so well how to write. This book is resolutely modern and audacious for the time. Now I ask myself a lot of question about Evelyn Waugh himself. It seems that he put much of his person in this novel. I am curious to learn a little more about him.

On this side of the Atlantic, The Dallas Morning News has published a list of classic novels recommended as summer holiday reading. To qualify for the list, a novel must be  “relatively short (i.e. beach portable) and, most important, fun to read.” One of those listed is by Waugh:

Waugh is perhaps best known for his acclaimed 1945 novel about British nostalgia, Brideshead Revisited, but he was also a great satirist. Case in point: Scoop, which is based on Waugh’s personal experience as a journalist, is a witty take-down of sensationalist journalism. Though written in 1938, the book’s jokes and critiques resonate strongly today.

Other novels on the list include Emma and Peyton Place.

Finally, an American blogger on a site called “Never Yet Melted” notes the International Olympic Committee’s decision to drop three men-only shooting competitions in favor of those open to all so as to make gun events “more youthful, more urban” and more inclusive of women. This reminds the blogger of the final passage in Waugh’s “Scott-King’s Modern Europe” where the headmaster asks Scott-King to teach more up-to-date subjects to better prepare students for the modern world and replace his increasingly unpopular classics curriculum. Scott-King answers: 

“No, headmaster.”

“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. [Emphasis added] I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”

 

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Two Openings and a Debut

Posted on June 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A Waugh quote opens an article in the South China Morning Post about Djibouti:

Not that long ago, Djibouti was known for little more than French legionnaires, atrocious heat and being at the other end of a railway line to Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia. English novelist Evelyn Waugh was appalled by its “intolerable desolation”, declaring it a “country of dust and boulders, utterly devoid of any sign of life”. Nowadays, however, this tiny republic of about 900,000 people on the Horn of Africa has grand plans to establish itself on the global stage. And international powers are increasingly interested in what it has to offer: “an oasis in a bad neighbourhood”, as one foreign ambassador puts it.

The article wonders whether with all this foreign investment Djibouti may become Africa’s Dubai. But after poking around beyond the area of the port where development is concentrated, the SCMP finds other areas which sound not that different from what Waugh described, so perhaps expectations of Dubaization are a bit premature. The quote is from Remote People (Penguin, 2011, p.21)

A London investor newsletter (Risk.net) contains an article touting a City law firm that has handled several recent cases emanating from the banking debacles of the past decade. The opening quote again comes from Waugh (Brideshead Revsited, Book 2, ch. 1):

The string of financial scandals that has tarnished the banking industry in recent years calls to mind the Evelyn Waugh quote: “a blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise”. From the mis-selling of payment protection insurance to the rigging of Libor and foreign exchange benchmarks, this has been a boom era for market manipulation, and has brought trust in financial markets to an all-time low.  

Finally, another London newsletter (Running Past), this one providing information to runners whose courses take them through areas of South London, mentions Evelyn Waugh in connection with the career of Elsa Lanchester, whose Catford birthplace is identified  for the newsletter’s clientele:

After the war ended she worked for a charity teaching dancing called Happy Evenings, during her second summer of this she set up a school in Charlotte Street in central London.  She also used the premises to set up what was effectively an after-hours theatre club – the Cave of Harmony – which began to attract a famous clientele which included the likes of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh who became a regular visitor. As she was with many friends and acquaintances, Lanchester was quite cutting about Waugh – describing him as ‘not at all attractive looking
.pink in patches as though he had a bad cold.’   [Footnotes citing Lanchester’s autobiography (Elsa Lanchester, Herself) as the source are omitted. The quote about Waugh is cited from p. 57.]

Lanchester is probably best known for her lead role in the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein and for having been the wife of actor Charles Laughton whom she married in 1929. But she got her start in films by playing the female lead in the 1925 short silent film The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama which was written by Waugh and in which he also played a prominent role. This was produced and directed in large part by Waugh’s friend Terence Greenidge and also featured several other of their friends from Oxford. Lanchester may not have mentioned this early film appearance in her memoirs or autobiography, but it does appear on her Wikipedia page as well as IMDB. She is mentioned by Waugh in his diaries and his autobiography, A Little Learning. Waugh is also credited by Greenidge with directing the scenes of Lanchester’s pursuit over Hampstead Heath which take up most of the last part of the film. Much of the production was filmed in the garden of the Waugh family’s house on North End Road. 

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Decline and Fall to be Shown in Overseas Markets

Posted on June 23, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC First has announced that it will screen its recent adaptation of Decline and Fall in several overseas markets beginning in August. The announcement appears in online TV listing service TVTonite. BBC First is a TV subscription service which operates in markets such as Australia, Hong Kong, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore and several Middle East countries, as well as Holland and Belgium. 

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Waugh and Brit Grift

Posted on June 23, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The online newspaper The Daily Beast (which owes its name to a fictional newspaper in Scoop) recently ran a story by James Kirchick entitled “The Brit Grifters and the Designated American Suckers.” This suggests a history of British residents whose careers have hit a wall in their homeland and who move to the USA where they set themselves up as experts of one kind or another. In the USA, they manage to succeed, at least for a time, thanks to American gullibility. Current examples of this type of career transfer, according to The Beast, include Louise Mensch, Milo Yiannopolis, Piers Morgan, and Sebastian Gorka. 

The Beast then notes a long literary tradition of this type of transatlantic career move starting with The King and The Duke in Huckleberry Finn and continuing with the shady young Englishmen hanging around Jay Gatsby’s crowd in Fitzgerald’s novel. More recently, examples have appeared in films such as Arthur and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, where the phonies were played by Dudley Moore and Michael Caine, respectively. Perhaps another example might be the hired gunman Butler in Robert Altman’s 1971 film McCabe and Mrs Miller. Although we don’t know his back story, his accent would suggest that he may have occupied a more exalted position in England, at least for a time. Waugh also made a contribution to this literary stereotype:

Evelyn Waugh’s comedic novella The Loved One, a devilish satire of English expatriates in Hollywood, featured the character Dennis Barlow, a poet and failed screenwriter who winds up working at a pet cemetery. In his attempts to court a young cosmetician, Barlow frequently peppers his speech with quotations from Tennyson and Poe while pretending that the verse is his own.

That’s a good point but Dennis can hardly be said to have achieved the level of success of the recent British grifters cited in The Beast. Indeed, Dennis ended up cremating his loved one at the pet cemetery after she ditched him, before going back to Blighty with his tail rather between his legs than wagging.  

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Waugh and Wales and Fashion

Posted on June 21, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent article in the TLS entitled “Do the Welsh Just Sing?” by Samuel Graydon opens with a quote from Decline and Fall:

“The Welsh . . . are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing.” Such is Evelyn Waugh’s damning criticism from Decline and Fall. A little unfair, perhaps, and also, in one particular, very much mistaken. In Wales, it is not just singing. Male-voice choirs and rugby crowds aside, a sense of lyricism, music and song pervades the literature of the country. …

The article continues with a discussion of recent offerings of Welsh literature in such fields as fiction, poetry, drama and even opera. It concludes with a more detailed discussion of historic Welsh literature and in particular the The Mabinogi, which is a Medieval collection that had recently been republished in two versions.

The Daily Telegraph has mentioned Waugh in an article by Alice Vincent. This is in connection with the announcement of a new film to be entitled The Phantom Thread and will star Daniel Day-Lewis in what is said will be his last film performance. The plot, to the extent anything is known about it, is described in a quote from the film’s Wikipedia site as:

 “A drama set in the couture world of 1950s London, where Charles James – played by Day-Lewis – is commissioned to design for members of high society and the royal family.” Charles James was a real designer, who was born in 1906  into a wealthy military family and became known as America’s First Couturier. … James mixed in glamorous circles. He was a close friend of Cecil Beaton whom he met while at school in Harrow, where he also met Evelyn Waugh, before being expelled for a “sexual escapade“. … James is credited with inspiring Christian Dior to create The New Look, the flirtatious, fitted styling of the late Forties that revolutionised fashion in the middle of the last century. 

The inclusion of a Waugh connection seems a bit dodgy. If he did know James, it was not through a meeting at Harrow School which Waugh did not attend. Nor is Waugh likely to have met James there while visiting Cecil Beaton, since Waugh and Beaton were not on friendly terms in their school days. Any association (if there was one) must have have been rather fleeting since it does not seem to have come to the notice of Waugh’s biographers, of which he has had more than the average number for a 20th century British writer. Similar information appears on the Wikipedia site for Charles James. Wikipedia credits the sentence that includes Waugh to a 2014 Daily Telegraph article but that article does not mention Waugh. Perhaps some one might have a word with Wikipedia.

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Tom Wolfe Alters Waugh

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Tom Wolfe has written a detailed obituary of painter and photographer Marie Cosindas for New York magazine. In this, he explains that Cosindas is best known for being the first photographer to realize the potentials of Polaroid color film. She studied under Ansel Adams who recognized that she composed things in color, not black-and-white, and converted her to color film just at the time Polaroid was introducing its own version. Wolfe brings Waugh into the story with an altered quotation from Decline and Fall:

Movie companies began to commission her to do Polaroid portraits for promotion: The Great Gatsby, The Sting’s Robert Redford and Paul Newman. As her income accumulated, she began to invest in stocks and bonds — on her own, no broker, no adviser — and made spectacular profits. “To Fortune, a much-aligned lady!” as Evelyn Waugh once put it — because she developed a spine-bending scoliosis in the early 1980s and suffered several serious falls. She went through a series of operations. Back surgery seldom leads to complete recovery.

The original quote is Paul Pennyfeather’s toast “To Fortune, a much-maligned lady!”, proposed at the Ritz just before he was arrested and then recalled at the very end when he meets Peter Beste-Chetwynde at Oxford (Penguin, 2011, pp. 209, 290).

In another quote from Waugh that appears unaltered, the Daily Telegraph includes Waugh’s characterization of Marseilles among other “Best Travel Quotes of All Time”:

“Everyone in Marseilles seemed most dishonest. They all tried to swindle me, mostly with complete success.” Diaries, Christmas Day, 1926.

Waugh was on his way to Athens to visit Alastair Graham who had recently been posted there by the Foreign Office. Waugh’s visit probably informed his description of Marseilles in Decline and Fall written a few years later. The Telegraph’s collection carries four other quotes about visits to Marseilles, and the one from Henry Swinburne written in 1783 is to much the same effect as Waugh’s:

“No place abounds more with dissolute persons of both sex than Marseilles…It is almost on a par with London.”

 

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Sports Day Revival

Posted on June 19, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

After falling out of favor, at least at the more progressive public schools, competitive sports are having a revival. According to Jane Shilling, writing in the Daily Telegraph, that has also created a renewed interest in sports days. For some, that spells enjoyment, for others, not so much:

While their fleeter classmates polish their winners’ cups, the unco-ordinated, the weedy, myopic and hopelessly vague, who would rather be working on their cantatas than running like the wind, can always find consolation in satire. “Few associated games with pleasure,” wrote Evelyn Waugh of his schooldays in his memoir, A Little Learning. “They were a source of intense competition, anxiety and recrimination to those who excelled; of boredom and discomfort to those who were bad at them.”

If Waugh … had managed to avoid competitive games at Lancing, his schooldays might have been happier, but the loss to generations of readers would have been incalculable: deprived of the savage (but strangely recognisable) description in Decline and Fall of that most anarchic of scholastic traditions, the school sports day.

Perhaps. But the disastrously chaotic sports day described in Decline and Fall probably owes more to Waugh’s experience as a schoolmaster at the shambolic Arnold House in Wales than the the better ordered events at Lancing.

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