Scoop and the Montana Election

Posted on May 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The internet newsite Rare.us has issued a story about the physical persecution of a British reporter in the recent Montana special Congressional election. This is entitled: “The lesson of Greg Gianforte: Bashing journalists, even literally, isn’t much of a liability.” The Republican candidate Gianforte, ultimately successful, took exception to a question by Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, and, according to the Rare.us report, when Jacobs refused to withdraw after being “asked politely” to do so, Gianforte: 

…body slammed him and punched him, breaking his glasses, all of which was later corroborated by audio from Jacobs’ recorder. Jacobs got a trip to the hospital and one hell of a story to tell his kids…

Rare.us opens its article with this quote from Waugh’s novel Scoop followed by an editorial comment:

“He had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephone to tape machine, insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor”. – “Scoop” by Evelyn Waugh.

Ah, for print journalism’s days of yore, when every reporter had a flask in the top drawer of his desk, editors used to wobble through the office in the late afternoon after spending the first half of the day reviewing copy at the bar, and staffs were packed into giant warehouse newsrooms thick with grime and sociopathy.

The libertarian-conservative website concludes from all this that, for journalists, “real grit and danger” such as Waugh described “do still exist” even in Montana. 

 

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Latest Issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies Posted on Website

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Antony F. P. Vickery

The latest issue of the Society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies (Vol 47 No. 3, Winter 2016) is now posted on the website. It includes an article entitled “Guy’s Deleted Nippers, Part I: The Unending Story of the Ending of Unconditional Surrender,” by Jeffrey Manley.

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Arthur Waugh and Prufrock and More

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Weekly Standard’s current issue has an article by American literary scholar William Pritchard marking the centenary of T S Eliot’s first collection of poems–Prufrock and Other Observations. The lead poem in the slim volume of twelve was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” previously included in a 1915 poetry anthology. Evelyn Waugh’s father, Arthur, had commented on Eliot’s poem when it appeared in that anthology. According to Pritchard:

… Arthur, was not taken by [the poem’s] originality … What Eliot and these young poets in their eagerness to be clever had forgotten was that “the first essence of poetry is beauty,” and that the “unmetrical, incoherent banalities” of such upstarts would eventually be corrected. Waugh concluded by alluding to a “classic custom in the family hall” in which a drunken slave was displayed by way of warning family members of the perils of unbridled self-expression. When Ezra Pound came to review Prufrock and Other Observations he mocked “a very old chap” (Arthur Waugh) for comparing the younger poets to “drunken helots,” Pound providing words that weren’t in the review. In fact, the reviewers of the Prufrock volume were more indifferent to the poems than outraged by them, as Arthur Waugh had been.

As evidenced by the numerous allusions at the recent Evelyn Waugh conference in Pasadena to T S Eliot’s work and its reflection in the works of Arthur’s son, Evelyn Waugh did not apparently share his father’s views. One bit of the evidence of the poem’s surviving influence may be the Weekly Standard’s regular column “Prufrock” by Micah Mattix.

The Daily Mail in a column by Val Hennessy entitled “Retro Reads” has recommended Waugh’s Decline and Fall (the book not the TV series):

With chortles galore — if somewhat public schoolboy chortles — Waugh’s comic novel on the page is hugely more amusing than the recent TV adaptation…One for the boys, I’d say. Posh, middle-aged boys at that.

Despite Hennessy’s dismissive attitude toward the TV series, the article is accompanied by a cover shot of the Penguin TV tie-in edition with Jake Whitehall appearing in his role of Paul Pennyfeather.

Finally, John Zmirak in his daily online religious-themed news report The Stream announces his resentment at “whatever satirical novelist is scripting our daily events from Hell. Or Purgatory, at best. No writer in Heaven would be cruel enough to inflict all this on us. Or would he?” He then lists four examples, but these are not from among the usual dystopian novels crowding the best seller lists such as 1984, Brave New World or The Handmaid’s Tale. Included in the books on Zmirak’s list is one by Evelyn Waugh–Love Among the Ruins which “predicted our transgender madness, the euthanasia craze, and the toxic, infantilizing effects of the welfare state …. ” The top satirist named by Zmirak for getting the future right is Anthony Burgess in The Wanting Seed:

which laid out a compelling theory of history: That the back and forth of ideologies and religions in the West acts like a see-saw. We always are either at or on the way to one extreme or the other. We oscillate between two theories of man.

 Waugh’s book is included in his Complete Stories.

 

 

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Decline and Fall in the National Review

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Kyle Smith, drama critic of the National Review, has written a favorable review of the recent TV adaptation of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall. This is now running on what Smith describes as “the superb streaming service Acorn TV, which … is an indispensable addition to the TV menu for fans of both current and classic British series.”

Smith opens the article with a consideration of past efforts to adapt Waugh’s work for the screen and finds that the comedies have fared less well that the “more dramatic works”  such as Brideshead Revisited. Decline and Fall presents an exception to this previous experience:

The TV adaptation gets Waugh’s humor exactly right: pugnacious and genteel, shocking yet understated, viciously deadpan, awash with fondness and cruelty. Somehow Waugh is both vicious and wistful about his days at Oxford, and later teaching at a “public school,” as the Brits call their private ones… [The script by James Wood] shows a real sense for perhaps the most English of humor techniques — the colossal understatement. Adhering to that dry tone throughout instead of seeking to punch up Waugh by making the jokes more visual is exactly the right choice. …  It’s a brilliant exercise in satirical leveling in which everyone in England seems to be drinking from the same well of absurdity. The TV adaptation is so faithful to Waugh’s glorious silliness that it ought to function as a gateway drug to his other work.

The review also discusses several details of the production, the acting and the script and is well worth reading before one watches the TV series as well as afterwards.

 

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Donald Trump, Pope Francis and Rex Mottram in Vanity Fair

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Paul Elie, “pontificating” (his pun) in Vanity Fair magazine, writes of the possible results of this week’s meeting between Donald Trump and Pope Francis. He begins by comparing their respective elections:

How strange is this: a group of 115 unelected celibate men of advanced age, bound to secrecy, choosing from amongst themselves and casting paper ballots in the Sistine Chapel, elects a relatively unknown man who turns out to possess abundant virtue and wisdom, and who is also clearly a man of the people; whereas an American voting public of 126 million men and women, working from the copious information produced by a robust free press and an endless run of presidential debates, has its votes channeled through arcane electoral math and bestowed on a self-serving huckster who has a poor grasp of notions like “public service” and “the common good,” and whose idea of “the people” is “my people.” It’s enough to make you want to swap the Electoral College for the College of Cardinals.

Mr Elie is not an admirer of Donald Trump and goes on to compare him to an Evelyn Waugh character, also a businessman turned politician, seen to be of equal shallowness:

…Trump puts in mind the amoral, bounding industrialist Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, a wealthy, showy man of “invincible ignorance,” as the Catholic tradition used to call it—a person who, a priest in the novel dryly reports, “doesn’t correspond to any degree of paganism known to the missionaries.”

That is not the first time this comparison has been made in the press, and it is unlikely to be the last. Elie sees little hope for a good outcome of the meeting:

If any piece of Francis’s wisdom could get through to Trump…it might be the rubric for discernment that Francis has followed since his days as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Jesuit provincial (superior) and archbishop of Buenos Aires. Here it is, cited time and again in the accounts of his life: “Time is greater than space; unity prevails over conflict; reality is more important than ideals; the whole is greater than the part.”

Elie goes on to consider how Donald Trump might react to each of these teachings. He is not optimistic. Here’s a link to the article.

Another Brideshead character appears on the internet in a promotion of menswear. This is on the website Mr Porter where a replica of Sebastian Flyte’s attire is on offer. This particular wardrobe appears in Charles Ryder’s description of Sebastian in Book One, Chapter One of the novel (Penguin, p. 24):

… “Sebastian entered – dove-grey flannel, white crĂȘpe de Chine, a Charvet tie, my tie as it happened, a pattern of postage stamps”. Set against a backdrop of a grand English country house, the spires of Oxford and the canals of Venice, the novel is a must-read for anyone who has an appreciation for classic British attire and the vagaries of the English upper class.

A gray flannel, double-breasted blazer as well as a Charvet tie are featured. No crepe de Chine shirt is offered to complete the ensemble, however. See previous post. The promotion is not enhanced by a photo from the 2008 motion picture of Ben Whishaw wearing a rather garish mauve suit with broad white borders and a too large white fedora with a black ribbon. Clothing inspired by four other literary characters is included in the offer: Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Patricia Highsmith’s Mr Ripley, Brett Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman and Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriaty.

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Ronald Knox, Prose Stylist

Posted on May 22, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In a review of the recent collection of articles Ronald Knox, A Man for All Seasons (see earlier post), Washington journalist Matthew Walther declares Knox to be the greatest English prose stylist of his time (P G Wodehouse excepted). Several others are considered by Walther but rejected: Lytton Strachey, Logan Pearsall Smith, E. M. Forster and Hugh Trevor-Roper, as well as Waugh himself. The review, entitled “The Last Great Homilist”, appears in the current issue of the Roman Catholic journal, First Things, and opens with Walther quoting Evelyn Waugh in support of his conclusion:

…“Every word you have written and spoken has been pure light to me,” Waugh once told his friend, and it was Waugh who came closer than anyone to explaining the difficulty of assessing a fellow writer who did not “employ a single recognizable idiosyncratic style” or stick to a single genre. “No major writer in our history,” he said, “has ever shown such an extent of accomplishment” as this author of essays, parodies, apologetics, criticism, light verse, and memoirs; scholar and author of detective fiction; ecclesiastical historian; translator; and homilist of genius. He was not entirely right about Knox’s style, though one begins to see what he means. Knox had an unrivaled ear; he could imitate any writer in Greek, Latin, or English. But he was not one of those authors like Trevor-Roper—or Waugh himself during the writing of his memoirs—who gives one the impression of having composed with Gibbon or another exemplar open on his lap. Like Newman’s, his style is at once high—solemn, Augustan, elegant, periodic, musical—and low—breezy, chatty, colloquial—without the slightest hint of discord. It is identifiable and wholly singular.

Walther goes on to regret the neglect of Knox’s prose mastery, noting that very few of his books are in print today and that Waugh complained even in his own day Knox’s books were available only in stores selling religious goods:

One can say without exaggeration that the present volume, a bundle of appreciative essays, correspondence, and unpublished and uncollected writings, will be loved by everyone who opens it. But one also hopes that its appearance, at the centenary of Knox’s reception into the Church, will inspire a wider interest in his life and works.

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Waugh: Upper-Class Wannabe

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Today’s Sunday Times in an “advice” column entitled “Mrs Mills Answers Your Questions” responds to a reader with an allusion to Evelyn Waugh:

Example of betters
When a toff passed away recently, the obituary notice in The Times read that when a guest arrived at a dinner party of hers with a bottle of wine, she took it from him and announced to everyone there, “Oh, why do the middle classes feel they must bring a present?” Should I stop taking presents from now on as it is bad form?
AB, Reigate

Why do you think the so-called upper classes should be any guide to your behaviour? Often, their defining characteristic is rudeness, born of a sense of entitlement. Thus many of those seeking to pass themselves off as upper-class think that behaving boorishly will make people believe they are properly posh (Evelyn Waugh being a prime example). It is kind and considerate to turn up with a present, and the less ostentatious the better: homemade jam, panforte or a book you have enjoyed are perfect.

How is panforte not ostentatious? Is there some Wavian irony at work here?

UPDATE (24 May 2017): The following comment was retweeted by @CWEvelynWaugh:

“Ah but his rudeness resulted in many apology gifts to his hostesses- so often that he eventually could not afford to dine out!”

 
 
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Waugh and the Friedman Unit

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

On a blog specializing in stories about the Iraq War, blogger Alexander Harrowell describes what is known to those write about such things as the “Friedman Unit”:

Those of us who blogged through the Iraq War will of course remember the Friedman unit, a measurement of time defined as how long it will take until things are OK in Iraq, conventionally equal to six months, named for Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman of the New York Times. But I didn’t realise the unit has a prior history. Not until I read Waugh in Abyssinia, that is.

What follows is an interesting analysis which divides Waugh’s book into three distinct parts. It is in the third part that the predecessor of the Friedman Unit appears:

He goes to see the Italian governor, who has installed himself in the emperor’s palace, surrounded by the few sticks of dictator chic the looters didn’t steal or torch. Six months, they agree. He bashes “liberals” some more. Guerrillas break into the city centre in company size, exactly as the guy he was shitposting says, and he gets shot at. Six months, he says, and everything will be OK. Not just the unit size, or the security situation, but the characteristic architecture and interior design of the Friedman unit has been defined. He has another dig at a British MP for believing that the Ethiopian resistance government still exists. They’ll be put in the bag, in six months. Rather as the Americans never did get Saddam’s appointed deputy, the Italians never did catch it.

The essay contains several well-written, original and amusing insights into Waugh’s book, which must be among his least read. This even includes a unique analysis of the book’s “racism”. It is posted on The Yorkshire Rant and is available at this link.

In another article about Waugh’s Abyssinian War writings, Ian Burrell in iNews reviews a book soon to be published which he describes as an update of Waugh’s depiction of the London press corps in the new business environment created by the internet. This is the novel Splash! by Steven Glover who writes for the Daily Mail:

Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’ is widely-regarded as the classic novel about the peculiarities of the British press. The adventures of its protagonist William Boot remind us of the long existence of fake news, and how overbearing press barons and inbuilt prejudices can have a corrupting influence on journalism. But the Brideshead Revisited author was writing in 1938 about an all-powerful industry, and Scoop’s contemporary relevance is fading as the media landscape evolves at dizzying speed. ‘Splash!’ is … set in the modern era, where a declining national press is struggling with the financial challenges of online news, while having its reporting methods scrutinised by a Leveson-style inquiry.

After summarising Glover’s novel, Burrell returns to its relationship to Scoop:

Unlike Scoop, which satirised Fleet Street, Splash! is ultimately positive about the press. It shows papers as feared scrutineers, rather than acolytes, of the elite.

The full book review can be viewed here.

UPDATE (8 June 2017): The Daily Mail has also posted a short review of the new novel Splash! Here’s an excerpt:

With a title that’s an obvious nod to Evelyn Waugh’s celebrated 1938 Fleet Street satire Scoop, the new novel from Daily Mail columnist and former editor Stephen Glover offers a modern take on the tabloid Press…This is both a terrific romp through the indiscretions, dodgy deals and Establishment stitch-ups of our times, and an invaluable reminder of just how vital the Press is in holding power to account.

UPDATE (30 June 2017): Stephen Glover was interviewed by Press Gazette about his novel and in this excerpt which appeared as a podcast on the internet explains in greater detail his debt to Waugh:

Asked whether he was consciously inspired by Waugh, Glover says: “Scoop’s always been one of my favourite novels but I’d not read it for a long time until recently, after this was finished. One difference is I was amazed re-reading Scoop last week how relentlessly Waugh satirised all journalists, upmarket or tabloid. The foreign editor Salter can’t even find ReykjavĂ­k on a map. The foreign correspondents are all untrustworthy or unpleasant. There isn’t really a decent journalist in the whole of Scoop and that doesn’t stop journalists loving Scoop. The whole process of journalism in Waugh’s view appears to be worthless. I don’t think he really liked journalism or thought that it was anything worth defending. I guess I take a different view.”

 

 

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Christ Church Dust-up Brings Waugh Cites in Press

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent incident at Christ Church, an Oxford college, has been widely reported in the British press. This involved a student, Lavinia Woodward, who was studying to be a surgeon. In a reportedly drug-induced rage, she stabbed her boyfriend (whom she met over the internet) and was arrested and charged. The judge has deferred sentencing until September but is considering leniency in view of the fact that a criminal record involving the use of a knife could, as one can well imagine, adversely affect Woodward’s future career as a surgeon. The Daily Mail on 17 May reported the story in an article by Josh White and Annabel Bagdi that drew an allusion to the Christ Church site of the incident as having been the same college where Anthony Blanche was dunked in the fountain by drunken students in Brideshead Revisited. But Anthony hardly suffered any grievous bodily harm; on the contrary, he rather enjoyed it.

An opinion column by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian defends the judge’s decision in this case but argues that other offenders at early stages in their careers (who may lack the advantages of students at Christ Church) should be teated with similar leniency. He writes that the “whole saga sounds like a chapter from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall.” Well perhaps, but Scone College was a more humble venue than Christ Church, and no one has suggested that letting off the likes of Digby Vane Trumpington, who perpetrated the attack on Paul Pennyfeather, contributed to the general welfare. And Waugh contrived that even the wrongly convicted Pennyfeather escaped with only a few months of hard and returned to Oxford to pursue his career.

Finally a blogger (Tom Winnifrith) picked up the theme in a blogpost:

Lavinia Woodward attends Christ Church the Oxford College known as “the House”. 17 Prime Ministers went there, it is the college of of the privileged elite. It goes without saying that like Evelyn Waugh I was rejected by the House and, like Waugh, ended up at downmarket Hertford. The House is for the blue bloods not great writers. Lavinia picked up her boyfriend on the casual sex app Tinder, then while off her head on drugs assaulted him, throwing a laptop and other objects in his direction before stabbing him in the leg with a bread knife. Jail beckons surely? Er…no.

After retelling the story, Winnifrith concludes:

No, judge Pringle, you are wrong. Getting into Oxford does not make you extraordinary. Most folks there are clever but not Einsteins. The medical profession will stagger on without the admission of posh Lavinia to its ranks and crime must go punished. Judge Pringle would send [a] chav from Blackbird Leys down without hesitation and would probably lecture the tearful wretch as she stood quivering in the dock about how she is an idiot and must pay for her sins to send a message to society. This is the 21st Century. It cannot be one law for the privileged elite and one for the great unwashed. Lavinia must go to jail and judge Pringle should be fired for being an elitist, out of touch old coot.

UPDATE (21 May 2017):Add Peter Hitchins to the writers who drag Waugh into Lavinia’s story. In his Daily Mail column Hitchins opposes special treatment for wrongdoers based on their privileged status:

But because their crimes happen in tower blocks, or in streets where there are dead fridges and mattresses in the front gardens, and don’t involve grand colleges made famous by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, these [nonprivileged] cases don’t get picked up by national media.

 

 

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Scoop Profiled in Arkansas Paper

Posted on May 17, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Philip Martin has written an opinion column on Scoop which appears in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s online edition. Excluded from his wife’s book group’s discussion of the novel, he took the occasion to reconsider it (and Waugh in Abyssinia) in his column. After summarizing the historical background and Waugh’s story (both the fictional and factual versions), he concludes with this:

… Waugh’s purpose is not to point out that reporters can be craven, opportunistic and careerist, though all that is certainly true. The real point of Scoop is that it’s difficult if not impossible to determine the real truth about anything. Waugh was deeply Catholic, distrustful of rationalism. Scoop isn’t an assault on the laziness of journalists, it’s a book about how arrogant human beings are when they pretend to know anything.

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