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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NR Marks 10th Anniversary of Latin Mass Revival

Posted on July 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

An article in the National Review cites today (7 July 2017) as the 10th anniversary of Pope Benedict’s action to revive the Latin Mass. This was an action that had been sought by the founder of the National Review, William F Buckley Jr, as well as Evelyn Waugh, since 1962 when the vernacular mass became the norm. As described in the NR by Michael Brendan Dougherty:

It is so difficult to explain to young Catholics the fugitive feeling of attending a Traditional Latin Mass before the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year in this millennium. I had been doing so for just five years. Latin Mass communities were detested by bishops and cardinals, most of whom believed it was their life’s mission to modernize a defective Church. It also marked one out for scorn from most who considered themselves conservative Catholics. They called us disobedient schismatics. We often deplored them in return for the personality cult they built around the papacy of John Paul II. (In truth, our side of this dispute did and still does have cranks in its ranks.)

Pope’s Benedict’s action 10 years ago apparently explained or clarified that Vatican II had not abrogated the Latin Mass, as some had advocated, and this had the effect of re-legitimizing it. Other leading conservative Catholics in addition to Buckley and Waugh, such as Patrick Buchanan and JRR Tolkien, had urged that the Latin Mass continue to be allowed. Dougherty explains Waugh’s position in his article:

Evelyn Waugh intuitively sensed the bizarre intellectual alliance that informed the making of the new rite of the Mass; it was slipshod scholarship paired with a facile desire for revolution: “There is a deep-lying connection in the human heart between worship and age. But the new fashion is for something bright and loud and practical. It has been set by a strange alliance between archaeologists absorbed in their speculations on the rites of the second century, and modernists who wish to give the Church the character of our own deplorable epoch. In combination they call themselves ‘liturgists.’” Waugh’s son Auberon stopped going to Mass and likely lost his faith, feeling that the modern Church had almost no connection to the faith of his father. Modern Masses appeared to him to be “kindergarten assemblies.”

The quotation comes from Waugh’s 1962 essay about the Vatican Council entitled “The Same Again, Please” which appeared in both the Spectator and the National Review (EAR, p. 606).

A US religious journal Tablet Magazine (this one with Jewish sponsors, not to be confused with “The Tablet” which is a Roman Catholic journal published in the UK) also includes a quote from Waugh in a recent issue. This is in an article on marriage by Rabbi David Wolpe. One of the recommendations he gives to modern couples is this:

Seek Out Meaning, Not Happiness

After the breakup of his own marriage, the English writer Evelyn Waugh wrote to a friend: “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.” Americans have mostly lost the talent for unhappiness. Earlier generations did not expect that life would be as frictionless as we try to make it. They took suffering as the inevitable lot of life; we more often see it as a fundamental injustice to be corrected. This, along with an increased emphasis on individualism, makes us temperamentally less suited for the stresses of life in general, and married life in particular.

The quote comes not from a letter to a friend but from Waugh’s travel book Labels (p. 206) which he wrote, as stated, in the aftermath of the breakup of his first marriage.

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Waugh and Mussolini

Posted on July 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Tablet has published a review of two new books about Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator in the 1930s and Hitler’s ally in WWII. The review by Robert Carver opens with this summary of Mussolini’s reputation in Britain before the war:

In the early 1930s, Mussolini was at the height of his prestige. In Britain, no less an authority than The Tablet called the Duce “an intellectual giant”. Pope Pius XI had a soft spot for “Catholic totalitarianism” and eulogised Mussolini as “a man providence has sent us”. Churchill, Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, Sir John Reith of the BBC and Lord Rothermere were all among the admirers of a dictator who had saved Italy from Bolshevism, settled a concordat with the Vatican, and made the trains run on time. “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” read the headline in the Daily Mail.

Waugh’s own support for Mussolini came into focus and to public attention in the context of the Italian war against Abyssinia in 1935. Waugh thought Italy could make a better job of governing Abyssinia than the regime of Haile Selassie which he regarded, from his previous visit, as corrupt and barbarous. Waugh’s position was stated in a 1935 article in the Evening Standard (EAR, p. 162) and found support in Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail which sent him to cover the war (EAR, pp. 176 ff.) He returned to England during a lull in the fighting and, travelling via Rome, managed to secure an interview with Mussolini. This was arranged by the British Embassy with Waugh’s agreement that he would not write about it. But he made it clear to his friends that he found Mussolini “impressive…and less ridiculous” in person than he appeared in the antifascist press (Sykes, Penguin, p. 226). He wrote about the war (but not the interview) in his book Waugh in Abyssinia published in 1936. But this articulation of his support for Mussolini’s policies came out just as the Spanish Civil War took over the world’s attention and pushed the Italian Fascists off the front pages.

Waugh also stated his support for Franco over other regime choices for Spain (EAR, p. 187) but did not make himself a spokesman for that cause as he had for Mussolini. As Mussolini began moving closer to Hitler, Waugh went relatively quiet. By the time Italy declared war on Britain in June 1940 (after the fall of France), Waugh seems to have lost interest, by then on active service. He continued to inveigh against Communists in Yugoslavia, even after they became allies of the British, and never let up in his opposition to Marshall Tito. There is some consistency in Waugh’s position from the 1930s through the Cold War, even though it was not always a popular one. So far as I am aware, he never thought it necessary to apologize for or further explain his support for Mussolini in the 1930s.

The books reviewed in The Tablet are A Bold and Dangerous Family: The Rossellis and the Fight Against Mussolini by Caroline Moorehead and Claretta: Mussolini’s Last Lover by J B Bosworth. It seems unlikely that any extended discussion of Waugh’s position would appear in either volume, although the book by Moorehead does cover an element of the Italian opposition to Mussolini which was fairly open in its support for Stalin.

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Arnold Bennett Anniversary Remembered

Posted on July 6, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The South China Morning Post has marked the 150th anniversary of novelist and critic Arnold Bennett’s birth. This appears in the paper’s travel column by Adam Nebbs which seems odd until he explains that Bennett wrote two books that took place in London’s Savoy Hotel, one of which (The Grand Babylon Hotel) is still in print. In addition, an omelette was named for him that is still on offer at the Savoy Grill.

Bennett’s book reviews in the Evening Standard were influential in the 1920s and actually helped sell books. He was an early admirer of Waugh’s writing because it made him laugh out loud. He described Decline and Fall as “an uncompromising and brilliantly malicious satire…near to being quite first-rate.” He especially liked the prison scenes but recalled overall that it made him laugh about once a page. He thought Vile Bodies less successful because it lacked a plot but described some of the satire as “extremely, wildly farcical…” Both reviews are collected in Martin Stannard’s Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage. Waugh also reviewed one of Bennett’s books. This was included in a multi-book review in the Graphic for 18 October 1930. That uncollected review is about the novel Imperial Palace which is Bennett’s other novel relating to the Savoy Hotel, also mentioned in the SCMP article. It is still in print as well, according to amazon.com.

Bennett died in 1931 before being able to review Waugh’s more mature work. He would surely have enjoyed the other comic novels had he lived to read them. The SCMP article characterizes Bennett’s own writing style as “a dry blend of Evelyn Waugh and Agatha Christie – both humorous and compel­ling.” Although the SCMP describes Bennett as largely forgotten, many of his novels, in addition to those about the Savoy Hotel, remain available in print or in electronic format or print on demand. Several were made into TV series, including Clayhanger and Anna Of the Five Towns. Collections of his articles and reviews are also available.

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Sword of Honour on Several Summer Lists

Posted on July 5, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s war trilogy Sword of Honour has been named on several recent lists as recommended summer reading. The Irish Times polled a number of readers who also happen to be writers, and novelist John Banville included SoH:

David Brown’s new biography of F Scott Fitzgerald, Paradise Lost, is a fine and fascinating, and highly entertaining, re-evaluation of this largely misunderstood, or at least misinterpreted, writer, one of the last Romantics. Brown is a historian, and emphasises Fitzgerald’s role as a chronicler of his time, when modern America was being born. I have just re-read Men at Arms, the first volume of Evelyn Waugh’s superb Sword of Honour war trilogy. The novel is evocative, elegiac and wonderfully funny – and there are two more volumes still to savour…

Banville’s novels include Booker prize-winning The Sea as well as Ancient Light and, most recently, The Blue Guitar.

An anonymous blogger on mirabiledictu.org is reading SoH and has posted a progress report relating to volumes 1 and 2:

These novels are absorbing, but not too brainy (good for summer reading). Partly autobiographical, partly a moral examination of war, they are also satiric.  Though Sword of Honour is as far as you can get from War and Peace, Waugh, like Tolstoy, ridicules the muddle of military strategy.  Everybody is forever getting lost, military operations go awry, and battles are randomly won and lost.  In Waugh’s world,  companies don’t see action for months or years:  they are posted in England or Scotland…Then in Officers and Gentlemen … Guy observes the height of military incompetence.  …  These books are very enjoyable, even though they are about the war.

Finally, Roman Catholic news  blogger Tod Worner has decided to read SoH. His plans are posted on aleteia.com in an article with 7 other recommendations which also include a suggested drink to be enjoyed while reading:

This summer I have decided to tackle Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy. … Evelyn Waugh tells a story as only Evelyn Waugh can. With cocked eyebrow and tongue firmly in cheek, he introduces us to figures and behaviors which at first make us wince or laugh until we realize that Waugh is puckishly needling us about those sometimes inspiring & often less savory nuances of our own.

To accompany this book, I should recommend a particular whiskey splashed into a heavy-bottomed snifter. But, instead, I favor an Odell’s India Pale Ale (or for the brave of heart, Myrcenary, Odell’s double IPA) in a chilled glass mug. Let’s read and drink. Evelyn would be proud.

UPDATE (9 July 2017): Today’s Guardian has a list of recommended summer reads in which John Banville is again polled. Having apparently finished the book about Fitzgerald, he mentions Colm Toibin’s House of Names and Michael Longley’s Angel Hill, and concludes with this:

I shall not be going anywhere – hate holidays – but will stay happily at home, rereading Evelyn Waugh’s second world war Sword of Honour trilogy (Penguin £14.99). Pure bliss.

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Waugh and Chesterton

Posted on July 4, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Italian religious website Radio Spada has posted an essay by Luca Fumagalli entitled “Chesterton e Waugh: ridere per non dimenticare“,  roughly “Chesterton and Waugh: laughing so as not to forget.” The article notes that Waugh and Chesterton had little to connect them as writers except their similar paths in converting to Roman Catholicism:

Chesterton and Waugh are, so to speak, the alpha and omega of the first period of English Catholic literature from the early twentieth century, the one that draws in full from the theological-cultural tradition of Newman and Manning, and ending with the 2nd Vatican Council  (criticized by Waugh) and after which leadership passed to Graham Greene and a new generation of progressive authors. Waugh… admired the work of Chesterton, in particular the poem “Lepanto”, a striking lyrical rider in the footsteps of Don John of Austria and the Christian fleet defeating that of Turkey in 1571…

In fact, the work of Chesterton which Waugh seems to have emphasized over all others is his survey of history The Everlasting Man, not cited in the article. Waugh also mentions in his writings another of Chesterton’s poems “The Song of Right and Wrong”, the first verse of which Waugh is said to have recited from memory to a group of Notre Dame University students to whom he had lectured in 1949:

FEAST on wine or fast on water,/And your honour shall stand sure,/God Almighty’s son and daughter/He the valiant, she the pure;/If an angel out of heaven/Brings you other things to drink,/Thank him for his kind attentions,/Go and pour them down the sink.

This was by way of explaining to the students why he found the lack of beer and wine in their dining halls one of the most annoying things about America. In the lecture he gave on that tour, Chesterton was one of the three British writers whose works he discussed. The others were Ronald Knox and Graham Greene, all converts to Roman Catholicism.

After discussing other works by Waugh and Chesterton (including Brideshead Revisited) Fumagalli concludes his essay: 

The “Contra mundum” shouted out loudly by Charles and Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, far from being the slogan of a post-adolescent rebellion, is the banner under which Chesterton and Waugh are battling to challenge conventions and banality. And both writers, to face a declining universe, decide to use the smile, a sophisticated weapon, the best way to entertain and engage the reader. If Chesterton excels in the art of paradox, Waugh opts for satire, for a melancholy laugh, with tight teeth, which sometimes results in the extremes of black humor. His temperamental style, however, has nothing nihilistic about it, and teasing is never separated from pity and compassion, to evoke the mysterious ways by which Divine Providence attains its purposes. Still today, Chesterton and Waugh are two authors who deserve to be read and read…

Translation is by Google Translate with minor edits. Not sure about the title and a few other points if anyone would care to comment.

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American Castles and Brutalist Towers

Posted on July 3, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the National Review has an essay by Michael Knox Beran entitled “Why We Love McMansions and Other Modern Castles.”

…America, though born in the faith that all men are created equal, is infatuated with castles — the principal function of which is to make other people feel inferior. Scott Fitzgerald showed Gatsby’s castle fantasy to be the stuff of horror, yet it has been converted into a national ideal. The palaces of the plutocrats — Kykuit, San Simeon, The Breakers — have become places of pilgrimage, and there is hardly a suburban subdivision, covered with mock châteaux, that does not offer up its unsightly homage in the name of the national cult.

After explaining what he describes as the “Darwinian” function of castles to attract members of the opposite sex to their owners, Beran reviews the literary treatment of the subject, and here Waugh’s writings come into play:

The Greek scholar Werner Jaeger went so far as to assert that culture “is simply the aristocratic ideal of a nation, increasingly intellectualized.” Western culture “begins in the aristocratic world of early Greece,” he wrote, “with the creation of a definite ideal of human perfection, an ideal towards which the élite of the race was constantly trained.” As Jaeger tells it, the young Grecian milord was arduously exhorted to reach for the highest arete (excellence), that he might “take possession of the beautiful” (a phrase of Aristotle’s). Western civilization followed. Jaeger perhaps exaggerated, but the old castle, being evil and beautiful, did on occasion create attractive forms of order. Brideshead Castle was not, for Evelyn Waugh, an illusion. The order of such places had its effect even on the proles, or so Jaeger believed: Aristocratic ideals of beauty and arete, he maintained, were continuously being democratized, “universalized.”

Waugh would probably agree with Beran’s conclusion as to why Jaeger’s aristocratic underpinning for castle building no longer applies in its US manifestation:

The very cheesiness of our modern castle establishments is a testament to the triumph of democracy, which makes the well-to-do fretful, and ostentatious in all the wrong ways.

Waugh’s architectural writings are also cited in an article by blogger Richard King relating to the Grenfell Tower fire. The article opens with this:

The British have always been wary of modern architecture, the British upper crust especially so. From the Prince of Wales and his “monstrous carbuncles” to Sir John Betjeman and his iambic fantasies about “heavy bombs” raining down on Slough, a deep suspicion of architectural modernism would appear to be the default position of the bluebloods and their literary hangers-on. The prejudice is perhaps most wittily expressed in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, in the figure of architect Otto Silenus. Silenus is talking to a journalist who has come to inspect his “surprising creation of ferro-concrete and aluminium”. “The problem of architecture as I see it,” he says, “is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.”

Although Otto’s principles appear to be reflected in the structure of Grenfell Tower, the article goes on to conclude that it was not the building’s brutalist design that caused the catastrophic fire but rather the neglectful attitude of politicians to the building’s upkeep and safety. The basic problem, according to King, arises from the 1980s decisions of the Thatcher government, continued by the Blairites and subsequent Tory austerity policies, to spin off social housing to semi-private management companies in which the government would be less directly involved. The use of cladding to soften the brutalist style cannot be blamed since there were safer options of cladding available for the job at slightly higher cost.

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