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 Reykjavík 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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Sunset Boulevard and The Loved One (More)

Posted on May 16, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Another classic film blogger has posted an article noting, inter alia, the debt owed by Billy Wilder’s 1956 film Sunset Boulevard to Waugh’s novel The Loved One. (See previous posts.):

The British author’s satirical The Loved One was published in 1948, after Waugh had spent time in Hollywood observing the film industry and, of all things, the funeral industry. (The book is about a failed screenwriter who works for a cemetery and lives with a forgotten silent-film star.) Wilder and his co-writers reversed several elements, and there was no official connection between the movie and Waugh’s book. But as commentator Steve Sailer points out, more than one contemporary source mentions it as an inspiration. Sunset Boulevard‘s cinematographer, John Seitz, said Wilder “had wanted to do The Loved One, but couldn’t obtain the rights.” And gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (who appears in the movie as herself) wrote that “Billy Wilder … was crazy about Evelyn Waugh’s book The Loved One, and the studio wanted to buy it.” 

 An unintended comic touch not previously mentioned sounds like a scene from Waugh’s novel (or the 1960s film made from it):

THE OPENING SCENE HAD TO BE SCRAPPED BECAUSE THE AUDIENCE FOUND IT TOO FUNNY. 

Sunset Boulevard now begins with police cars racing to Norma Desmond’s house, where a dead body is floating in the pool. But it originally began in the L.A. county morgue, with toe-tagged corpses—including Joe’s—speaking to each other (in voiceover) about how they died. It was meant to be slightly humorous in a morbid way, but the audience at the first test screening found it flat-out hysterical, setting the wrong mood for the rest of the picture. When two more test audiences reacted the same way, Wilder cut the scene and the movie was saved.

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Audio Recordings of Waugh Conference Presentations Available Online

Posted on May 16, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Audio recordings of the presentations made at the two-day conference on Evelyn Waugh at the Huntington Library in Pasadena earlier this month are now available online. There are 15 recordings in all and they are available at this link. The conference was supported by Mr and Mrs Loren Rothschild, the Evelyn Waugh Society and the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh as well as the Huntington Library. 

UPDATE (25 May 2017): The introductions to the speakers are not included in the sound recordings. It is therefore, in some cases, not possible to know who is speaking without reference to the program schedule. This is available at this link.

Other recently posted SoundCloud files include a recording of a discussion of Philip Eade’s recent biography of Waugh that was presented at a University of Leicester program last November. The discussion is between Barbara Cooke of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project and Philip Eade and is quite good on Eade’s coverage of Waugh’s family life, first marriage and war career. This may be accessed at this link. There is also a recording from the same University of Leicester program of a panel discussion on writing biography from letters and diaries. The panel includes Martin Stannard, Alexander Waugh and another biographer, Alexander Masters. This recording is available here. 

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USA Premiere of Decline and Fall Today

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Acorn-TV is premiering the BBC’s adaptation of Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall today. All three episodes are available now for streaming, and a free one-week trial is on offer for those who do not already have subscriptions. Here’s the link to the Acorn-TV site for the series.

The series appears in the weekly recommended TV columns in several US papers, including the New York Times (“madcap journey … UK critics raved”), the Washington Post and TV Insider (“brisk and truly funny … rollicking satire”). The Los Angeles Times also publishes a more detailed review of the series by its TV Critic Robert Lloyd:

In 1928, when Evelyn Waugh published his first novel, the satirical “Decline and Fall,” there was no television to speak of. (Books were like television once, culturally speaking, if you can believe it.) But his work … is very adaptable to the screen, with its vivid characters, colorful settings and made-for-speaking dialogue. Plus, it has the added bonus of satisfying our undying taste for British period pieces… Screenwriter James Wood … has taken almost all his material from the page, pruning and shaping without violating the original’s form, adding in incidental exchanges and bits of business that for the most part build upon rather than kill Waugh’s own jokes. If he sets off (literal) fireworks the original author left unlighted, because that is what the screen likes, Waugh at least put them there.

After detailed praise for the acting and writing, Lloyd concludes:

It is a semi-fantastical tale, … the sort of story that does not mind shooting a schoolboy in the foot for the sake of a joke and then giving him gangrene, adding infection to injury…(Some prejudices of the author and/or his characters have been softened slightly, but not eliminated, while matters about which Waugh had to be circumspect are made a little more obvious.)… There are many delightful things here, from the production, with its old fabrics and furniture, through the performances. … Most pleasant, perhaps, is the sense that there is a kind of order even in a chaotic world, a force that brings these characters together to their benefit, though much might be suffered along the way. Perhaps that’s just literature, but it’s a cheery thought, the odd case of gangrene notwithstanding.

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Decline and Fall in the US Papers

Posted on May 14, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The TV Critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, David Weigand, has written a quite favorable review of the BBC’s adaptation of Decline and Fall which will debut tomorrow in the US:

Biting wit and a farcically frothy plot make “Decline and Fall” a delight. The three-part miniseries, available Monday, May 15, on Acorn.tv, is so much fun, you’ll be disappointed when the third episode is over. James Wood has done a beautiful job adapting the novel of the same name by the singular Evelyn Waugh. In fact, it was Waugh’s first published novel, and those who know his work will find familiar themes in the Acorn adaptation. 

The series will be available on the Acorn TV subscription service to stream over the internet. A subscription is required but there is also a free one-week trial period available.  The Chronicle’s review concludes:

The performances are exquisite… The story is post-Dickensian, with a heavy reliance on coincidence and characters who are over the top in one way or another. The whole confection turns on how blindly trusting Paul Pennyfeather is. He only sees the good in others, even when the bad is looking him straight in the face and taking undue advantage of him. All the better for our endless amusement.

The Wall Street Journal carries a feature-length story about the reception of the BBC TV series in the UK: “Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Decline and Fall’ Resonates After Brexit: The social divide  in the first TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s dark satire struck a chord in post-Brexit Britain”. The story is by Tobias Grey and opens with this:

Post-Brexit Britain is on the Waugh path. The first television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s satirical debut novel “Decline and Fall” has been hailed by British critics for how its depiction of a deeply divided country resonates today.

Grey explains that the series drew large audiences in Britain (4 1/2 million viewers watched the first episode) even though it was distinguished by its high drama and humor from other lighter weight costume dramas (e.g., Downton Abbey) covering the same early 20c period. The Brexit link is tied down by the depiction of the Bollinger Club in episode one, where the defenestration of a pig’s head is added to Waugh’s story by the production team. This is a clear reminder that David Cameron and Boris Johnson were members of that group’s inspiration, the Bullingdon, given that such a prank became a major scandal for the Cameron government a few years ago. Cameron and Johnson went on to engineer the cynical Brexit vote, never dreaming that it would carry. But like the toffs in Waugh’s story, they were prepared to ruin things for the next generation by their own self-indulgent actions in their own. 

Another addition to Waugh’s story along the same lines occurs in episode two where a  gossip columnist infiltrates Margot’s party disguised as a shiekh and proceeds to troll for copy. This echoes the real life exploits of Mazer Mahmood who similarly used a disguise to gain access to events for over 20 years, dredging up stories from unsuspecting guests for the tabloids. He was finally stopped when he was sentenced last year to 15 months for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. The scriptwriter James Wood admits to the addition of such contemporary in-jokes but explains that few were needed since Waugh’s “book feels like it was written for today.”

UPDATE (15 May 2017): The original story mentioned that the WSJ article was behind a paywall but a reader has kindly forwarded a copy of the full story in which Grey forcefully makes points overlooked by other journalists such as those noted above. 

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Waugh Included in Ethiopia Collection

Posted on May 13, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

An excerpt from Waugh’s 1931 travel book Remote People has been included in a recent collection of writings about Ethiopia. The book, recently reviewed in the TLS,  is edited by Yves-Marie Stranger and is entitled Ethiopia: through writers’ eyes. The Waugh excerpt is entitled “Waugh on Rimbaud” and appears in Chapter 5 of the collection: “Goodbye Abyssinia, Hello Ethiopia (1930-2015).” The material probably relates to Waugh’s side trip to the remote outpost of Harar where the poet Arthur Rimbaud had lived in the 1880s, pursuing various trading ventures, including gunrunning. Waugh did manage to find an aged Roman Catholic cleric in Harar who recalled Rimbaud. There is also a selection in the book from Rimbaud’s works entitled “A Sunken Boat,” perhaps an allusion to his poem “The Drunken Boat.” 

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Lucy, Paula, Jane and Evelyn

Posted on May 13, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Columnist Jennifer Selway in her Daily Express entertainment gossip column brings Evelyn Waugh into a literary scholarship cat fight between Waugh biographer Paula Byrne, PhD (Liverpool), and BBC historical TV presenter Lucy Worsley, DPhil (Sussex), both of whom have also written recent books about Jane Austen:

LUCY WORSLEY, TV’s history kitten, who loves to dress up, has been accused of plagiarising a book about Jane Austen by fellow author Paula Byrne. Bits of Lucy’s book sound ever so much like bits of Paula’s book … Meanwhile let me recommend another of Paula Byrne’s books, published a few years back. Mad World: Evelyn Waugh And The Secrets Of Brideshead tells the louche, compelling story of the Lygon family, the inspiration for the Brideshead clan … If Lucy Worsley ever does a book on this we can look forward to her subsequent TV series wearing Oxford bags and clutching a teddy bear called Aloysius.

The discovery of the alleged plagiarism was announced in the current issue of Private Eye (No 1443) in an article entitled “Playing fast and Lucy.”

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