Brideshead Article Reprinted

Posted on June 12, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The politically conservative journal Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture has posted a 2015 article by Roman Catholic journalist Joseph Pearce. The article, entitled “Revisiting Brideshead“, provides a concise and coherent restatement of the religious underpinnings of Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Particularly good, in your correspondent’s opinion, is Pearce’s exposition of the “avalanche metaphor”, from the closing pages of the novel, which is little noticed by other commentators who tend to seize upon the “twitch upon the thread metaphor.” The article was also reprinted in a 2016 special Waugh edition of the Saint Austin Review of which Pearce is co-editor. See previous post.  There is an opportunity for comment on the article on the Chronicle’s Facebook page.

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Waugh’s 1930

Posted on June 11, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

An anonymous Spanish-language blogger posting on picapicaweb has written a series of six brief articles tracing Evelyn Waugh’s movements in the year 1930. “Pica pica” is the scientific word for magpie, and the blogger claims to pick up those bits of information which suit his or her varying purposes. In this case, the blogger starts with a brief summary of Waugh’s life up to 1930. The date of this first post on the weblog is 23 May 2017. Additional posts appear at approximately one day intervals, starting with post #2  which relates to the publication of Vile Bodies.  This is accompanied with a quote of the “masked parties” paragraph from that book. The post says that publication was in June of 1930, but the London publication was actually in January. The book published later in the year was Labels which came out in September.

Post #3  explains the genesis of Waugh’s trip to Abyssinia with a quote from Remote People. It concludes:

In mid-September (sic) Waugh decides to convert to Catholicism and does so on the 29th. Since he will turn 27 on October 28, he also decides to celebrate it in Ethiopia and attend the coronation ceremonies of the Emperor Haile Selassie. His friends applaud the occurrence … Evelyn is a sparkling type. The party without end; Drinks, tobacco, beautiful people, witty conversations and always someone at the piano.

Waugh’s decision to convert to Roman Catholicism took a bit more time than is suggested in this article. Martin Stannard (Early Years, p. 227) dates the first mention of that decision to a diary entry on 2 July 1930.

In succeeding posts, also based on Remote People, the blogger describes Waugh’s visit to Abyssinia in #4:

Evelyn knows almost nothing about Ethiopia. He travels around the country and attends  the coronation festivities of the new emperor in Addis Ababa; The Ras Tafari, the Negus, the self-styled Haile Selassie I, King of Kings.  A month of celebrations, parties and nonsense. A permanent nonsense. Everything happens without order or concert. Continuous astonishment. The unexpected is the everyday. Waugh is English and England has an empire. Young, elegant, cultured, sophisticated … watches the events with an exquisite ironic distance. He does not understand or feel empathy. In the background he exhibits the curiosity of a walker by the zoo. The coronation took place on November 2, 1930 in the Cathedral of St. George in Addis Ababa, the religious ceremony lasted almost two days with very brief interruptions. Evelyn knows very well who his readers are and gives them what they expect. Send brief, intelligent and delicious chronicles. With the touch of British superiority. A success. In mid-November Waugh is back in the port of Djibouti. He has to make a decision because he is  facing a dilemma.

Post #5 describes the descision to proceed to Aden rather than directly back to Marseilles and then:

Fifteen splendid days in Aden, Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Nairobi, Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, Albertville, Elisabethville, Cape Town … crosses Africa without leaving the British Empire (sic) ; Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia, South Africa. Trains and boats. Who does Waugh relate to? Businessmen, officials, military, merchants, plantation owners … all Europeans. The natives are lower ranks (“subalternos”), they are part of the landscape. He embarks in Cape Town, makes stops in Santa Elena and Tenerife “where everybody bought some nauseous cigars”. On the morning of March 10, 1931, Evelyn Waugh arrives in Southampton. After five months the strange journey is over.

The detour to Albertville and Elisabethville took him through the Belgian Congo, not part of the British Empire.

Post 6 summarizes the results of the trip and the eventful year, starting with a quote from the conclusion of Remote People. The post itself concludes:

Evelyn Waugh published his trip as “Remote People” in 1931. Bright book, especially regarding Ethiopia and the stay in Aden. Twilight of a colonial world in which the natives were complacent and the travelers did not fly and transported trunks. World War II put an end to all that. From 1945 Evelyn will not be the same, of its evolution perhaps we will speak another time.

The posts are illustrated with relevant, well-reproduced photos, including covers of the Spanish language translations of the books cited. Translation is by Google with minor edits.

 

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Pinfold and the Paranormal

Posted on June 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A  blogger posting as Truthspoon.com has made a detailed analysis of Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and compared the hallucinations described there with those reported by victims of alleged invasive electronic surveillance. According to the blogpost, Waugh’s novel:

…gives a fascinating first hand account of the kind of thing those suffering from electronic harassment report and we can use this text which is composed in a methodical manner, as a valuable resource to identify the purpose and nature of these auditory hallucinations.

These descriptions of “electronic harassment” come from YouTube posts of broadcasts (linked in the blogpost) on TV and radio where these victims are interviewed. Whether these comparisons have any validity is hard to say, but a few minutes of listening to the posted broadcasts should be enough to for most of us to judge for ourselves that the comparison may be a bit of a stretch. The effort is nonetheless an interesting, original and unforeseen use of Waugh’s writings. 

Another blogger posting as Diary of an Autodidact has written a detailed review of Brideshead Revisited. At age 40, this is the first Waugh novel he has read. Here’s an excerpt of his conclusions:

Waugh was a true craftsman of words, with gem following bon mot, and pictures told clearly in an economy of words. His skill is apparent, as is his ability to see the cracks in people and society…Anthony Blanche is in many ways the most perceptive and honest character in the book, recklessly baring the souls of the other characters while making them all uncomfortable. Waugh is a delightful writer – his prose seems so effortlessly good, never labored, and always fit to the purpose. Brideshead Revisited is a good book, despite its flaws. Perhaps best is the way Waugh complicates motives. Nothing is as pure as it seems, and we are all flawed, wounded, and damaged. Waugh may not be convincing in his proposed cure, but he poses the essential questions, creating memorable characters along the way.

Finally, Canadian writer John Metcalf posting on The Walrus.ca, begins an article with a consideration of Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence. She was once thought to be “at the leading edge of Canadian writing” and died in 1987. After a discussion of her writing style, he progresses to Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly:

Most of the writers I know have treasured particular sentences by whatever writers are in the pantheon they have constructed for themselves. One of the sentences in my own casket of treasures is by Evelyn Waugh. In a review for a newspaper of World Within World, the autobiography of the rather humdrum poet and literary functionary Stephen Spender, Waugh wrote: “To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.” Evelyn Waugh brings me to the friend of his Oxford University days, Cyril Connolly. And Cyril Connolly will bring me back again to sentences.

The article then continues with a consideration of Connolly’s career. Waugh’s review of Spender’s book is included in the collections Essays, Articles and Reviews and A Little Order. 

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Baltimore Sun Quotes Waugh on Useage

Posted on June 8, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In his Baltimore Sun column entitled “You Don’t Say” (about language, useage, etc.), John McIntyre quotes a paragraph from a letter Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford in which Waugh comments on an article she wrote for Encounter magazine on the subject of upper class British useage. The letter is dated 19 October 1955 and is reproduced in the Mark Amory collection at pp. 451-52. McIntyre cites that as the quotation’s source but describes the letter in his introductory paragraph as follows:

In a letter of 1955 to Nancy Mitford about her article “The English Aristocracy,” later included in Noblesse Oblige, Evelyn Waugh makes the link between idiosyncratic linguistic preferences and social class.

McIntyre seems to suggest (although his statement is ambiguous) that this letter of Waugh’s was included in the collection entitled Noblesse Oblige. It may be that he only intended to say (correctly) that Mitford’s article was later published in that collection. For avoidance of doubt, however, it should be noted that Waugh wrote another longer, more detailed letter, entitled, rather pompously, “An Open Letter to the Hon Mrs Peter Rodd on a Very Serious Subject”, and that was the letter included in the collection. It was originally published in the December 1955 issue of Encounter magazine and is also reprinted in the collection of Waugh’s Essays, Articles and Reviews. In that “open letter”, he makes some of the same points that are made in the earlier letter now published in the Sun, but the Sun’s version contains personal references to friends of Waugh such as Perry Brownlow (described therein as “very illiterate”) and Ronald Knox (who is said to blanch “if one says ‘docile’ with a long o”). Waugh would not have made such comments in a “letter” he knew would be published contemporaneously. In any event, the quote published in the Sun works quite well for the purpose intended.

 

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Waugh Introduces New Edition of Greek Poetry

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

References to Waugh’s novels are used to introduce a review of the first volume of a new edition of The Greek Anthology published by Harvard University Press and The Loeb Library. The review is by Hayden Pelliccia and appears in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books.

One of the poems in the anthology is the epigram written by Callimachus to commemorate the death of Heraclitus. The entire text of this as translated by William Johnson Cory is quoted in the article. Waugh quotes two lines of the translation in Officers and Gentlemen (1955), a few years after he had written his own brilliant comic parody of the poem in The Loved One (1948). In O&G, Waugh has the British Commander in Chief (based on Field Marshall Wavell who is soon to be relieved) recite the Cory translation from memory at a party given by Julia Stitch which Guy Crouchback attends. In the book, only the first and last lines are quoted:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead…/For death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

When the C-in-C finishes, another guest, described as a cabinet minister, offers to one-up him by reciting the poem in Greek, but he is put off doing so by one of the other guests, a Greek. O&G, Penguin, 1977, pp. 130-31.

In The Loved One, Dennis Barlow uses the poem as the basis for a eulogy to be read out at the funeral of Francis Hinsley after he hung himself. The NYRB article quotes the first part of Waugh’s version in explaining the poem’s relevance to the new anthology:

Waugh, like other even mildly modernist Englishmen of his era, was both embarrassed by Cory’s sentimental old chestnut and unable to get it out of his head. He had the poetry-plagiarizing hero of The Loved One adapt it to commemorate the suicide of his mentor:

“They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung
With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie…”

This trip from the sublime—which Callimachus’s Greek text is—to the camp and down to the ridiculous is fully in keeping with the spirit of the Anthology, the vastness of which accommodates poems of remarkable variety.

It it worth quoting the last two lines of Waugh’s parody, just for the sake of completeness:

Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore,/Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost nor gone before. (Penguin, 1951, p. 69)

The same poem comes up again in Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox, near the end of Knox’s life when he delivers the Romanes Lecture at Oxford despite the weakness he was suffering in his final illness. As described by Waugh:

When, half-way through, to illustrate a point, Knox recited in full Cory’s familiar rendering of the Greek epigram, ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’, most of those present recognized his words as his own farewell to Oxford, and some with whom of old he had ‘tired the sun with talking’, did not restrain their tears. (Penguin, 2011, p. 439)

This lecture was delivered in 1957 a few years after Waugh has the C-in-C recite the poem in O&G.

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Review of Auberon Waugh Autobiography Posted

Posted on June 6, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture has posted on the internet a 1998 review of Auberon Waugh’s autobiography Will This Do? The magazine is a publication of the Rockford Institute, a think tank promoting the views of the “paleoconservative,” as opposed to the “neoconservative,” movement. The review appears in an article entitled “Waugh After Waugh” by Andrei Navrozov. The review was written before Auberon’s death but makes several points that are equally valid today. For example:

With the feigned naivete that is another trademark of Waugh’s journalism, this book is divided into two sections, some 200 pages for “Youth” and a mere 80 pages for “Maturity.” It does not surprise me in the least that the first section, more classically “autobiographical” in that it covers Waugh’s relationship with his father and the many branches of a becomingly complex family tree, is actually quite dull. This is because, deep down, Waugh does not fully appreciate his own uniqueness and cannot entirely accept his role in the modern world as the great progenitor he is, rather than a mere descendant of a world that is no more. Bron Waugh modest?! In this sense he is excruciatingly so, to the detriment of his writing. He simply cannot write—not with a straight face, at any rate—in a genre that he has not himself at least in part invented. Perhaps for this very reason, though it may also be just so much perverse coquetry, he is very firm about dissuading us from reading any of his five published novels. The second, ridiculously brief, section where he finally comes into his own as England’s favorite venomous viper is itself worth the price of the book…

The article suggests that the book is still in print in the Carroll and Graf edition. Amazon, however, is selling only second-hand copies, but those are available at reasonable prices. See above link.

UPDATE (6 June 2017): Thanks to David Lull for confirming that Andrei Navrozov is the author of the original review published in 1998.

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Waugh Echoes in Kevin Kwan Trilogy

Posted on June 5, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Singapore-born novelist Kevin Kwan has just completed a trilogy of comic novels which began with Crazy Rich Asians in 2013. According to the Seattle Times, the trilogy is

set among three intergenerational and ultrarich Chinese families and peppered with hilarious explanatory footnotes, [and takes place] mostly in Singapore but flits easily from one glamorous world city to another, with Young family heir Nick and his American-born girlfriend (later wife) Rachel as our levelheaded tour guides.

Kwan in an interview with Moira Macdonald in the same article explains that he always intended the story to be told in three books. He identifies his influences in answer to another question:

I love Anthony Trollope’s “Dr. Thorne” and his “Palliser Series,” Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” as well as everything Jane Austen has written. I have to admit that being a child of the ’80s, I was also inspired by family sagas on TV: “Dynasty,” “Falcon Crest” and more recently “Downton Abbey” and “Game of Thrones”!

In the Toronto Star, Shinan Govani, reviewing the final book in the trilogy Rich People Problems, also makes an allusion to Waugh’s writing:

Taking social climbing to its zenith, and continuing its stealth public service of providing a peephole into a billionaire caste we only really knew from pages of The Economist, the new book comes, like the first two, with a smidgen of Evelyn Waugh, a dollop of Edith Wharton, and a dash of Dynasty. As I’ve said before: Kwan’s world is so outrageous and so wicked it succeeds in making Downton Abbey look like Downton Arriviste, and Gossip Girl feel gauche.Packed to the gills, as ever, with real estate porn, a foodie free-for-all, and fashion’s Little Black Book, another thing struck me: how much of a glossary he’s created for the modern snob.

The article continues with an A to Z of references from the three books. The second book in the trilogy is entitled China Rich Girlfriend and was published in 2015.

The Metro, a UK free distribution newspaper related to the Daily Mail, reviews another new novel with a Waugh connection. This is Party Girls Die in Pearls: An Oxford Girl Mystery by novelist and fashion journalist Victoria “Plum” Sykes, who is the grand daughter of Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh’s friend and biographer. See previous post. This is Sykes’ third novel and, according to The Metro, the book is a:

…murder mystery comedy. Set in an Oxford college in 1985…it is a delightful, daft-as-a-brush caper as effervescent as the champagne everyone in the novel keeps necking. But…Sykes is no Evelyn Waugh when it comes to truly skewering Oxford collegiate life. And you have to suspend an awful lot of disbelief to swallow its bonkers set-up.

UPDATE (12 June 2017): A more positive review of the Plum Sykes novel can be found on the Daily O, an Indian online news and opinion journal:

Everyone sounds as if they’re straight out of Evelyn Waugh novels and Oscar Wilde plays…It’s all terribly posh, and please by all means regard this book as a serious anthropological exercise, especially with its almost all-male clubs and its Hildebeest conquests (as in inhabitants of the all female hall St Hilda’s). This is a campus free of gender issues, set in the 1980s so that there are no allegations of sexual harassment by tutors/date rape culture/excessive drink/drug-use. … Helpfully supplied with footnotes, it’s delightful and can be easily dismissed as anachronistic (though given the reactions to Theresa May’s premiership perhaps sexism isn’t such a dated attitude after all among the toffs)…All done very delicately and very snobbily. Think Agatha Christie meets Nancy Drew and dive in. Swim in a sea of Dom Perignon and top it with an enormous fry-up. It’s that kind of a breezy read. Ms Flowerbutton, bring more on.

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Alec Waugh, War Poet

Posted on June 5, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A weblog called “Behind Their Lines” which specializes in WWI poetry has posted a poem by Alec Waugh entitled “The Other Side”. He wrote the poem in March 1917, so this is now its centenary. 

The poem was included in a 65-page volume of Alec’s poetry entitled Resentment and published in 1918 (following the success of his public school novel Loom of Youth published the year before). It is now largely forgotten but it was praised at the time and is said to have influenced the writing of Siegfried Sassoon’s memoirs. The poem was also included in the 2008 collection The Winter of the World–Poems of the Great War. As described in the weblog, the poem:

argues that perhaps the only ones who can understand war are those who cannot speak of it: the dead…Waugh’s poetry is seldom read today, but in December of 1918, the Bookman published the essay “Poets in Khaki,” which reviewed the work of 44 soldier poets.  Citing “Cannon Fodder” and “The Other Side,” St. John Adock said that Waugh’s poems “strip the romance of war to the bone.” Adock included Waugh as one of “Three poets who I think do represent as faithfully and potently as any the later, essentially modern attitude towards war.” The other two writers singled out for this praise were Gilbert Frankau and Siegfried Sassoon.

The full text of the poem is in the weblog article. If you read it, don’t give it up in the middle. It gets much better toward the end. The other poem (“Cannon Fodder”) mentioned in the quoted 1918 article  is reproduced in Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004).  Does any one recall Alec Waugh mentioning these poems in his memoirs or other writings?

Another weblog specializing in clothing appearing in literature (Clothes in Books) discusses the recent publication of a “lost” volume of Erle Stanley Gardner entitled The Knife Slipped. After a critique of the clothing described in that book, the blogger addresses the mutual admiration of Gardner and Evelyn Waugh for each other’s works. These matters were also considered in an earlier post (q.v.) on the subject of the new Gardner book.

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Stephen Fry Film Compared to Waugh

Posted on June 4, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mirror in a review of the film adaptation of Stephen Fry’s 1994 novel The Hippopotamus describe it as a “mildly successful hybrid of a film noir detective story and the novels of Evelyn Waugh.” They don’t much like what they see, however:

Fry’s over-bearing smug pomposity weighs down every line of dialogue…full of cruel asides and flowery language, which delights in public schoolboy humour and obsesses over bodily fluids and functions…Fry previously directed a big-screen adaptation of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, called Bright Young Things. And there, as here, he fails to make us care about his herd of posh idiots. 

A US website specializing in British TV imports (Anglotopia.net) was kinder to the BBC’s recent adaptation of Decline and Fall. Their reviewer was:

…a little worried they would have trouble adapting the book because it’s filled with some rather dated and appalling racism. But they managed to work it into the show perfectly and lampoon it at the same time. I’m a huge fan of the 1920’s era (in both British and American history), so I’m really pleased with any show that takes place during the period. Acorn’s Decline and Fall is a delight, and we can heartily recommend watching it.

Finally, in another bit of film news with a Waugh twist, Nick Pinkerton writing in Artforum makes this comparison in a feature length article about filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch:

If Lubitsch had a political ethos, it might have been described by a musing which another of the funniest men who ever lived, Evelyn Waugh, gave to his creation Ambrose Silk: “It is a curious thing, he thought, that every creed promises a paradise that will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”

The quote comes from Put Out More Flags (Penguin, p. 60). The article is published in connection with a revival of Lubitsch’s films (“The Lubitsch Touch”) in New York at the Film Forum through 15 June.

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Waugh and the African Railways

Posted on June 3, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung published in Munich has a feature story (“Afrika-Express”) by Bernd Doerries about the expansion of the railway networks in East Africa financed by the Chinese. Most recently, this involves the opening of a new line in Kenya from Mombasa to Nairobi that will ultimately be extended to Lake Victoria. This replaces a railway line built by the British during the empire which was allowed to disintegrate after the British left. It had deteriorated to the point where trains moved at 30km/hour, and one never knew whether the Mobasa-Nairobi trip would take one day or six; it came to be called “the lunatic line.” Trains on the new line will make the trip in five hours at the cost of about six euros.  

As background to the story, Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 trip to East Africa is recalled. This was made at what the SZ calls the “height of railroad expansion” in that area. The trip from Djibouti to Addis Abba was mostly in Abyssinia where the newly crowned emperor “wanted to prove by the railroad that his country was as modern as the West.” I’m not so sure that Waugh’s descriptions of his trips over that line would demonstrate that the emperor’s aspiration was fulfilled. As his 1930 trip continued after leaving Addis, Waugh took the train from Mombasa to Nairobi and then on to Kisimu. He doesn’t say much about the rail service on that leg of his journey except to note that the overnight trip from the coast to Nairobi was subject to “periodic derailments (three to be exact)” but reached Nairobi by lunchtime the day after leaving Mombasa. (Remote People, Penguin 2011, p, 215). According to the SZ story:

It is a feverish journey, which Waugh describes, over which he loses control and which goes on and on and on, because always new tracks appeared, which lead somewhere. He landed in the Belgian Congo. The route that Waugh traveled then is no longer passable, but in many respects exactly the same as what the East African states and the Chinese investors would regard as a future network.

This description is accurate up to a point. Waugh travelled around Lake Victoria by steamer, arriving at Mwanza in Tanganyika where he took trains to Tabora and ultimately to Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika; from there he took a ferry to Albertville in Belgian Congo. The rail trips in Tanganyika were apparently uneventful except for infrequency of service requiring multi-night stopovers. In the Congo he took a train to Kabalo which took 11 hours on an “uneven line…jolted over mile upon mile of track cut through high grass.” He bought a first class ticket on that train to Kabalo, had the carriage to himself and was surprised to find it equipped with a shower-bath: “It was fantastic to discover, on a jolting single line in Central Africa decencies which one cannot get on the Blue Train.” He then conceded that the shower was “not in working order” (Remote People, p. 276-77). He made his way by river and another Belgian train to Elizabethville in the hope of air service back to the coast. When this proved unavailable, he took a six day train journey from Elisabethville to Cape Town to catch a steamer back to England.

The only part of Waugh’s journey to be replaced by the new Chinese-built lines, aside from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, is Djibouti to Addis (opened recently–see earlier post). There is also a projected line from Addis direct to Nairobi on the SZ map which would eliminate the need to take two rail journeys connected by a steamer from Djibouti to Mombasa. But, at least so far as the SZ story is concerned, there are no immediate Chinese-funded expansion plans for services south of Bujumbura in Burundi. So Waugh’s route from Mwanza to Cape Town is not thus far slated for improvement.

Translation by Google with minor edits.

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