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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Waugh Ear Trumpet to be Displayed in Glastonbury

Posted on June 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio Somerset has interviewed the director of the South West Heritage Trust which recently acquired one of Evelyn Waugh’s ear trumpets. This is Tom Mayberry who is interviewed by Radio Somerset’s Charlie Taylor. Mayberry explains that the ear trumpet is intended to be displayed at the Somerset Rural Life Museum, Glastonbury, in what he describes as its Creating Gallery. The interview is posted on the internet and extends for 11 1/2 minutes beginning with a detailed description of the ear trumpet which both Mayberry and Taylor assure listeners works as intended. The BBC’s internet page includes a good photograph of the device. Mayberry also points out that the trumpet is monstrously large and was obviously intended by Waugh to make a statement since there were in the 1950s hearing aids that were much less obtrusive. He mentions the Malcolm Muggeridge incident at the Foyle’s luncheon where Waugh ostentatiously removed the device and folded it up on the table to express his disinterest in what Muggeridge had to say. There is also a brief discussion of Waugh’s family roots in the West Country and his gravesite next to the Combe Florey churchyard (although the status of the dispute over the reparations of the gravesite is not mentioned). Mayberry concludes with remarks that Waugh is not revered or remembered in Somerset as he should be–there is no memorial or plaque erected. He hopes that the addition of the ear trumpet to the Glastonbury museum’s collection will to some extent rectify this neglect. 

In additional local news, the Hereford Times and other papers in the area includes a Worcestershire walking tour with a stop at a country church in Kempley that has a Lygon family association. This is :

 ..the Church of St Edward the Confessor. Built on relatively high ground in 1903 as a chapel of ease, the church, unconsecrated until 1934, became the Parish church in 1975 when St Mary’s was declared redundant. The church was funded by the Earl Beauchamp, designed by Randall Wells and built by local craftsmen using locally sourced materials. The building is important in architectural history for both its design and the internal ornament. It has also been dubbed a Cathedral to the Arts and Crafts Movement by John Betjeman….Just before the end of the walk, in front of Kempley Court , an inscription declares that “this oak tree was planted on the 20th day of February, 1893 by the vicar and parishioners of Kempley in commemoration of the coming of age of William, the seventh Earl Beauchamp of Madresfield Court, Worcestershire”.

The article (which includes a detailed map of the walk) goes on to mention Waugh’s friendship with the Lygon family and their contribution to the Marchmain family in Brideshead Revisited. The interior of the country church seems to bear some resemblance to the arts and crafts chapel at Madresfield Court where the Lygon family lived and which was the basis for Waugh’s description of the chapel at Brideshead Castle.

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Betjeman Play in West End

Posted on June 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The one-man play with Edward Fox portraying John Betjeman (“Sand in the Sandwiches”) opened its brief West End performance earlier this week at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. The play premiered earlier this year in Oxford. See previous post. It is reviewed in today’s Guardian–alas, not favorably:

It’s a labour of love. But Hugh Whitemore’s script…along with Fox’s often strangulated, monotonous vocal delivery, and Gareth Armstrong’s bland, static staging, could all do with some love of a tougher variety. And a kick up the theatrical backside. It’s all so tediously tasteful…But it makes incredibly dull theatre. Fox may not physically resemble Betjeman, but he captures his sweet sense of fun and, when given the chance, demonstrates that he can do more than sit in a chair, cuddle a teddy bear and look glum…The show is often best when Betjeman is at his most self-deprecating, but he remains emotionally elusive as Whitemore hurtles through the biographical detail:… CS Lewis (his reviled Oxford tutor), Evelyn Waugh (who tempted the high-Anglican Betjeman’s wife to Rome), WH Auden (the pair went “church crawling” together) all get name checked.

Michael Arditti writing in the Sunday Express was more kind:

Whitemore’s affectionate, elegiac portrait depicts Betjeman in late middle age reminiscing about his school days, rustication from Oxford, time as a prep school master straight out of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline And Fall, his literary friends, tempestuous marriage and long affair with Lady Elizabeth Cavendish. Betjeman’s air of genial melancholy is perfectly captured by Edward Fox…His performance is a total delight.

After Saturday’s performance the play goes on tour again with stops at points such as Cambridge, Brighton and Bath. Details of the touring schedule are available here.

According to Out magazine, the Turner Classic Movies channel is observing Gay Hollywood month and will feature a gay themed film each Thursday during June. The final offering (presumably on 29 June) will be the Hollywood adaptation of Waugh’s The Loved One. Out describes this film as:

…a crazy comedy from the 60’s…it could be the gayest movie of all time. It is based on an Evelyn Waugh novel, has a screenplay by Christopher Isherwood, costars John Gielgud, and features cameos from Tab Hunter and Liberace. It’s totally bonkers.

UPDATE (4 June 2017): A reference to a more positive review of “Sand in the Sandwiches” in today’s Sunday Express was added.

UPDATE 2 (9 June 2017): Lloyd Evans writing in this week’s Spectator declares “Sand in the Sandwiches” to be “the perfect play for those who feel the West End should be an intellectual funfair. It sets out to amuse, surprise, divert, uplift and nothing more… Edward Fox reminds us that when Betjeman said ‘Edwardian’ he rhymed the second syllable with card, not sword.”

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Radiohead Guitarist Still Reading Waugh

Posted on June 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Rolling Stone magazine has published a detailed article marking the 20th anniversary of the release of the alt-rock band Radiohead’s breakthrough album OK Computer in 1997. In the course of interviewing the band earlier this year when they appeared at the Coachella festival in California, Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene encountered them at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. At that moment, lead guitarist/keyboard player Jonny Greenwood was reading a paperback copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. Greenwood previously told a Guardian interviewer that his favorite book was Waugh’s Sword of Honour. See earlier post. The album itself has a literary connection, though not to Waugh. The title and some of the material was inspired by Douglas Adams’ book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Most of the band members have Oxford associations, as the band was formed at nearby Abingdon School where all five members were students. Jonny Greenwood actually grew up in Oxford and studied music theory at Oxford Brooke University, and the lead singer Thom Yorke (no apparent relation–or not close at any rate– to Waugh’s Oxford friend and novelist Henry) as well as Greenwood’s older brother Colin, the bassist, also went on from Abingdon to University of Exeter and Cambridge University, respectively. 

In another Oxford connection, poet Luke Wright is interviewed in the Oxford Student newspaper on his current poetry-reading tour. See previous post. He explains in the interview that

… the smooth transition between the poems is the key. ‘It’s experimenting about the art of show. ’ From a fiasco of the (non)-sighting of a lion at Essex to a wistful rhyme on visiting John Betjeman’s Grave, Wright’s virtuoso performance constantly surprises and delights….Wright represents his characters and stories in a tone both brutally honest yet ultimately affectionate. ‘Evelyn Waugh, my favorite writer, writes in a kind of cartoonish form- his world and characters seem hyper-real yet have genuine emotions. That’s the place I’d like to occupy.’ Indeed, Wright’s world-building has the same intuitive flair, and makes its readers deeply relate to its character that they are simultaneously laughing at. His poems remain life-size and refreshingly relevant, whether it be a historical ballad on a Georgian apprentice to a hatter tired with ‘dandruff decades’ or a playful caricature of the Essex Lion.

Finally, the Oxford University department for continuing education has announced the syllabus for an upcoming course on the short story. The first work assigned is Evelyn Waugh’s “An Englishman’s Home”:

Week 1: Evelyn Waugh’s An Englishman’s Home (and O Henry’s The Gift of the Magi): What for you is the centre of interest in Waugh’s story? Does it depend for its effect on the twist in the tale, in the way that O Henry’s story does? Is it helpful to think of Waugh’s story as having more resonance than O Henry’s does?

The story was first published in Good Housekeeping in 1939 and collected in the 1948 volume Work Suspended and Other Stories. It is also included in The Complete Short Stories. The course begins in October. Other stories on the list include one each by Elizabeth Bowen and Penelope Fitzgerald. See this link.

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Trump, Harry Potter, and Waugh

Posted on June 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Sonny Bunch writing in the Washington Post has noticed that opponents of Donald Trump seem to have become fixated on the literary world created by the Harry Potter novels. After Trump’s election:

the Potternistas gnashed their teeth and rent their garments, reaching back to the world of childish literature, announcing the formation of Dumbledore’s Army, reminding their friends that “even Hogwarts fell to Voldemort,” pleading for the Order of the Phoenix to “mount up.” And to this day — to the very moment you are reading this sentence — you can likely find Potterheads comparing our moment to the world of wizarding.

Bunch thinks it’s time for the anti-Trump brigade to grow up and find their referants in adult literature. To get started, three novels are recommended: Albert Camus’ The Plague, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop:

In a few pithy lines of dialogue, Waugh helped relay the absurdity of the news business and the ways in which competing views of the world vie for supremacy on the wires. “But isn’t it very confusing if we all send different news?” a novice war correspondent naively asks, wondering how each service can provide a different angle from the same front line. “It gives them a choice,” his confidant replies. “They all have different policies so of course they have to give different news.”

To drive that point home, here’s the telegram the aforementioned naïf receives from his bosses when the scoops fail to pile up: “CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT STOP LORD COPPER HIMSELF GRAVELY DISSATISFIED STOP LORD COPPER PERSONALLY REQUIRES VICTORIES STOP ON RECEIPT OF THIS CABLE VICTORY STOP CONTINUE CABLING VICTORIES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE STOP LORD COPPERS CONFIDENTIAL SECRETARY.”

The telegraphese that is the preferred communication medium for Waugh’s press corps could be seen as the counterpart for the Twitter twaddle in which Trumpistas communicate. After explaining the relevance of the other books, the Post article concludes:

Crucially, they’re all books about adults coping with the world as it is (or, in the case of “Infinite Jest,” plausibly could be) rather than mere wish-fulfillment intended to buoy the spirits of children. Dumbledore’s not coming to save you; you can’t just shout “Trumpius Impeachum” and wave a twig at the White House and expect Hillary Clinton to appear. A higher class of literature might better prepare you for dealing with reality — and preparation for the vagaries of the real world is far more important than cocooning oneself away in the world of fantasy.

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Circe Institute Podcast re Brideshead Revisited

Posted on May 31, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Circe Institute which is dedicated to the fostering of classical education is sponsoring an ongoing podcast relating to Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. The participants are David Kern, Tim MacIntosh and Angelina Stanford. The first episode dated 23 May 2017 and covering Chapters 1 and 2 of the novel (Close Reads #52) is available here. The topics to be covered are:

  • First experiences with Waugh
  • Waugh’s nostalgia
  • The prologue
  • The book’s various juxtapositions
  • The sacred and the profane
  • The book’s spiritual hauntings
  • 3 key decaying institutions
  • and more…

Future episodes will presumably be announced on the website linked above.

UPDATE (3 June 2017): The second part of the podcast (Close Reads #53) covering chapters 3 and 4 is now posted. Topics include:

  • Tim’s upcoming vacation
  • A comparison of Charles’ family and Sebastian’s family
  • Sebastian’s faith and Charles lack thereof
  • Sebastian and Charles’ youth and what it means
  • The aesthetic theology of the book
  • Aesthetics as a road to faith
  • and more…

Future episodes may be found by clicking “Browse Close Reads” at top right of photo on webpage linked above.

UPDATE 2 (8 June 2017): The third part of the podcast (Close Reads #54) is now available. Topics covered include:

  • Charles’ father
  • Sebastian’s malaise
  • The fate of young men during the era
  • Religion at Brideshead
  • More on the aesthetic theology of the book
  • and more…

UPDATE 3 (20 June 2017): Close Reads #56 is now available, with Brideshead Chapter 6 as its subject. Topics will include:

  • The greatest sentence of the 20th century
  • What’s wrong with Sebastian
  • Whether Sebastian’s family is being fair
  • More on the aesthetic theology of the book
  • and much, much more…

UPDATE 4 (29 June 2017): The lastest episode is now available and will discuss Brideshead Chapter 7. Topics will include:

  • Getting to know Julia
  • Rex’s ignorance
  • Why Charles is attracted to Julia
  • “Modern” education
  • Perspective and Waugh
  • and more…
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Waugh and the RAF

Posted on May 31, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Foreign Policy magazine is publishing excerpts from a new book by Thomas Ricks entitled Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom. The latest installment discusses the RAF pilots who prevented a German invasion in the Battle of Britain and who were predominantly from lower middle class social origins. According to Ricks, both Orwell and Churchill commented on this middle-class make-up of the RAF. He also notes that Evelyn Waugh joined in this observation in his war trilogy:

Evelyn Waugh, always alert to class differences, has a character in one of his novels set during World War II bemoan the fact that a senior Royal Air Force officer has been allowed to join an elite dining club. Thus gaff occurred, the character explains, because it came during the Battle of Britain, “when the Air Force was for a moment almost respectable…My dear fellow it’s a night mare for everyone.”

The quote is from chapter 1 of Officers and Gentlemen but needs a bit more context to make sense. The discussion occurs when Guy and Ian Kilbannock arrive at Bellamy’s (a fashionable men’s club) during an air raid. Ian mentions that the officer, Air Marshall Beech, managed to achieve membership to Bellamy’s because his name came up during “what the papers call ‘the Battle of Britain.'” Guy’s response is omitted: “Well, it’s worse for you than for me” (meaning that it was Ian who put the air marshall’s name forward and must accept a large part of the blame) to which Ian replies as in the quote. In the previous volume (Men at Arms) it was explained that the air marshall had secured Ian a cushy billet in the RAF in return for Ian’s agreement to get him into the club. Ian was willing to agree to put his name up with the belief that there was no chance such an “awful shit” would avoid a black ball. Back at Bellamy’s, there follows a scene when the air marshall crawls out from under a billiard table where he was sheltering during the raid and tells Guy to call his car from headquarters. Guy merely passes this “order” on to the club servants, to the evident annoyance of the air marshall. It is understood that, if he had been a gentleman, the air marshall would not have ordered another gentleman and fellow club member, Guy, to call his car–so Guy is now sharing in the “nightmare” of the air marshall’s membership.

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