Acorn TV has posted a trailer on the internet for its streaming of the BBC’s adaptation of Decline and Fall. The series is available next week starting on Monday, 15 May. The Acorn trailer differs from that used by BBC. It is longer and contains clips from all three episodes. It is not yet clear whether all three episodes will be available for streaming at once or whether they may be issued one at a time over a fixed schedule.
In a recent article in the Irish Times, columnist Frank McNally discussed the derivation of adjectival forms for proper names, wondering for example why people in Cork are known as Corkonians rather than Corkians or Corkists. One example he considers is the adjectival form of George Bernard Shaw’s surname (“Shavian”):
I suspect it has to do with our old friend rhoticity, mentioned here last week in the context of Winston Churchill’s insistence that “jaw-jaw” rhymed with “war-war”. As pointed out then, those with non-rhotic accents, like Churchill’s, do not roll Rs (hence his rhyme); except sometimes, perversely, where there is no R to roll, as in “India-r-and-Pakistan”. So if the adjective was “Shawian”, as it might be on this (rhotic) side of the Irish Sea, that would tend to become “Shawrian” in England. Maybe “Shavian” was designed to preempt confusion…
Anyway, maybe there is a logic to Shavian. If so, why does the rule not apply to Evelyn Waugh? I ask this fresh from a belated reading of the latter’s classic satire on journalism, Scoop, which is full of Wavian (as nobody calls it) humour, based loosely on the author’s own experiences as what Churchill would have called a Waugh correspondent.
Well, not quite “nobody”.
In a new New York Times column entitled “Watching” and carried in its online edition, the paper has an article focusing on four new TV streaming services that specialize in bringing programs from European TV networks to US viewers. These services are intended as upscale competition with the more established streaming services of Netflix and Amazon. Among the new services mentioned is Acorn-TV which is described as like “a big box store for shows from across the Commonwealth” and as the closest equivalent among the four newcomers to “the enveloping Netflix experience.” One of Acorn-TV’s latest offerings is the recent BBC adaptation of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall. The NY Times provides this preview:
Making its United States premiere on Acorn TV on May 15, this BBC adaptation doesn’t entirely do justice to Evelyn Waugh’s riotous first novel — about the bewildering, hilarious misfortunes of a theology student in 1920s Britain — but it gives you a sense of Waugh’s comic genius that you won’t get from rewatching “Brideshead Revisited.” Jack Whitehall is good as the unfortunate Paul Pennyfeather, and Douglas Hodge, Vincent Franklin and Stephen Graham are excellent as his various tormentors.
The Times article reports that Acorn-TV access costs $4.99 per month or $49.00 yearly and is also be available as an Amazon Prime add-on. There is also a free trial access which might be useful for watching the Decline and Fall adaptation.
The weblog of the Huntington Library (Verso) has posted an article by Barbara Cooke, Research Associate of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project, and Chip Long, Chairman of the Evelyn Waugh Society, relating to the conference on Evelyn Waugh now underway at the Huntington:
Waugh’s appreciation for the book as object and as literary art is the inspiration behind the conference “Evelyn Waugh: Reader, Writer, Collector,” taking place on May 5 and 6 in Rothenberg Hall. The Rothschilds’ gift—which includes 250 rare books and reference books and 135 letters and manuscripts by the author—is the catalyst for the conference, a collaboration between The Huntington, the Evelyn Waugh Society, and the UK-based Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project.
Some highlights of the conference are described:
Both groups have lost no time in exploring The Huntington’s new holdings: Naomi Milthorpe, a 2015–16 short-term Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at The Huntington, has already incorporated her findings into a book, Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts, while Douglas Lane Patey, Sophia Smith Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, has been studying the manuscript of Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days for his new edition of the travelogue. Both will be presenting at our conference, along with leading Waugh biographers, archivists, and editors.
Together, we will be exploring the concept of editing as an act of collection (gathering materials and collating across continents) and investigating what Waugh’s own collections of fine books and paintings can tell us about his life and work. The participation of archivists and one speaker who was present when the first of Waugh’s possessions made it to the United States will encourage us to reflect on the role institutions play in maintaining, interpreting, and promoting collections.
In addition to the conference, the Huntington has mounted an exhibition of some items from its Waugh archives. This will consist of the:
… display, in the East Foyer of the Library’s Main Exhibition Hall, two items from the Rothschilds’ gift to the Library. The autograph manuscript of Ninety-two Days, with its slipcase, will be on view. This is Waugh’s 1933 account of his travel to Guyana and Brazil. Also on display will be the corrected typescript of Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), a satire of the honor codes of the British gentleman, the culture of Oxford, and the foibles of upper-class society.
Several internet sites that track TV streaming services have noted Acorn TV’s offering of the BBC adaptation of Decline and Fall. This will begin on May 15. The most interesting is a review on the website TV Equals by P T Jackson. Her article is entitled “Four Reasons You Need to Watch Acorn TV’s Decline and Fall” and she provides interesting background information for each reason.
The Guardian also mentions Waugh in connection with an article on a new book about spying. This is M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster, by Henry Hemming. One of the spies newly revealed in the book is Graham Pollard. He is said to have known Evelyn Waugh at Oxford in a rather bizarre connection:
Though Pollard was close to the heart of the British Communist party, he made an unlikely spy, let alone communist luminary. At Oxford, he distinguished himself with his book collection and by beating Evelyn Waugh to a “half blue” in spitting (at a distance of 10 feet).
In an article by George Neumayr in the American Spectator about Pope Francis’s affinity for left-wing politicians, there is a rather speculative reference to Waugh:
Were the 20th-century English Catholic satirist Evelyn Waugh alive today, he would find the radical left-wing political flirtations of Pope Francis too bitterly farcical even for fiction. Could a satirist like Waugh have imagined a pope happily receiving from a Latin American despot the “gift” of a crucifix shaped in the form of a Marxist hammer and sickle? That surreal scene happened during Pope Francis’s visit to Bolivia in July 2015.
There are several articles coming in from outside the UK where the BBC’s TV adaptation of Waugh’s Decline and Fall premiered a few weeks ago. A French TV website (Telerama) includes the series in a collection of its reviews of recent UK TV productions:
… this adaptation of the work of Evelyn Waugh (1928), in three episodes, is absolutely delicious. There is Hergé in the “tintinque” peregrinations, obsolete and sparkling, of that innocent Pennyfeather, a witness undergoing a full blow of the decay of the manners of his time … Decline and Fall, with its fantastic gallery of characters, its varied humorous palette (grotesque gags, subtle jocularity, satirical dialogues) and its authentic grain of madness, accentuates the angles of a world that does not turn round. … Irresistible ! [Goggle Translate]
A San Antonio (Texas) based news website (MySanAntonio.com) reports on the series in anticipation of TV streaming for US audiences on Acorn TV starting on 15 May (“a subscriber site for British television … acorn.tv, offers a free trial and thereafter costs $4.99 a month”). The website is most interested in the role of Margot Beste-Chetwynde played by Eva Longoria, described as “San Antonio’s adopted A-Lister”:
If you’re wondering if Longoria speaks with a British accent here, the answer is no. As we soon learn, her character is American — from California, although her parents hail from Venezuela. Margot moved to Britain when she married a man from Winchester; she became a widow when her son was 9 ….The entire cast is superb … Corpus Christi-born Longoria, in particular, is a kick in this departure from her norm, spouting some of the best lines. One of my favorites? When his new love insists that Paul not return to teaching in Wales, he ponders other professions. “Journalism?” he suggests. “No, no, no,” Margot responds, “we’ll find you a proper job.”
In the novel Waugh described Margot as simply “South American” to link her with her family’s business, the Latin American Entertaniment Co.
Finally, in India, the news and entertainment website Scroll.in has posted a (mostly) favorable review of the series:
In adapting a comic novel for film or television, there is the danger that the wit on the page will come across as stilted or, worse, inappropriate on the screen. Gladly, the new BBC adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 novel Decline and Fall does not suffer this malaise. Over three episodes, director Guillen Morales, working with a screenplay by James Wood, transforms Waugh’s nifty saga into a curious mix of humour and caution.
…Decline and Fall fumbles somewhat [in Episode 3], as it tries to paint Pennyfeather as a tragic hero [after his trial and imprisonment] … Pennyfeather’s final rescue is midwifed by Dr Fagan. Meanwhile, the jaunty Margot makes an unfortunate exit. Is she villainous or vacuous? Waugh left that question unanswered, and the series sticks to this lack of resolution. For all its successes, Decline and Fall worked better in Waugh’s hands, who sprinkled what is essentially a morality tale with generous doses of irony. Adapted to the screen, the series switches rather abruptly from really good comedy to something far harder to place.
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo has published a feature length story on British correspondent George Steer to mark the 80th anniversary of the attack on Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Steer, reporting for The Times, is credited with having been the first to report German involvement in the attack, and his “scoop” is described in El Mundo:
On April 26 he got a car to travel to Marquina. He passed through Guernica and, shortly, crossed with a Heinkel 51 at the height [a la altura ?] of Arbácegui and Guerricaiz. He had to jump into the gutter, machine-gunned. He returned to Bilbao and, at night, learned of the disaster. In the event, he returned to Guernica to build his famous chronicle. The impact of his work is known. More interesting is the story of his failure. German propaganda, despite its obvious contradictions, managed to sell its version. Even the Times stung [picaron?]. That is why Steer dissociated himself from the newspaper and, little by little, began to say goodbye to journalism.
Waugh had known Steer earlier in Abyssinia where he was also reporting the invasion by Italy for The Times. According to El Mundo:
In Ethiopia, the pilot episode of World War was filmed and The Times hired Steer to write from the court of Haile Selassie I, besieged by fascist Italy. There was also Evelyn Waugh, correspondent of the Daily Mail, who left a couple of novels about that war: Black Snack [i.e., Black Mischief] and Bomb News [i.e., Scoop]. Those who once laughed at the evils of these stories will feel uncomfortable if they ask. The Ethiopian war was not a comedy, it was a tragedy. And Steer became so involved in the Ethiopian cause that he ended up on the blacklist of the Italians.
Steer is said to have contributed to the character of Pappenhacker in Scoop and his actions are also described in Waugh in Abyssinia. The El Mundo article describes Steer as
… small, red-haired and mustachioed and, if anything, he looked like Chaplin. He was hyperactive and quarrelsome, heavy as a meat pie and innocent in the most blessed sense of the word, always looking for just causes to make them his own. Evelyn Waugh mocked him for his eagerness.
That’s not that far off the description of Pappenhacker in Scoop:
…young and swarthy wth great horn goggles and a receding stubbly chin. He was having an altercation with some waiters… “He seems to be in a very bad temper.” “Not really: He’s always like that to waiters.” … (Penguin, 2012, p. 41)
In Waugh in Abyssinia, he is described as “zealous”, and in a later book review, Waugh remarked upon a “devotion to duty even at the expense of personal dignity and competitive zeal that was notable” even among the notorious “rough and tumble” of the international press corps. See previous post.
The translation is by Google Translate with a few edits and questions in brackets on which readers are invited to comment or propose improvements.
Writing in Standpoint magazine (“War on Waugh”), Waugh’s great grand-daughter Constance Watson expresses dismay at the reaction to the BBC’s adaptation of Decline and Fall which recently concluded its three-episode run on BBC One (emphasis supplied):
The great British sense of humour — once renowned for its unwavering ability to identify and mock the absurd, its unparalleled propensity to ridicule the institutions upon which our society is built — is dying. … This tragic turn of events has been brewing for a while. … so it is with particular interest that I witnessed the barrage of condemnation that swirled across cyberspace following the broadcast of the first episode [of the BBC’s Decline and Fall]. Waugh was denounced as a racist, a snob, an anti-Semite and — less imaginatively — a conservative. And it wasn’t just the puritans on social media that leapt to vilify him. Alex Larman went further: “Waugh’s depiction of 1920s high society means very little to modern readers.”
Can it be so? … [Waugh’s] shrewd ability to capture the eccentricities of human conduct despite the 90 years that separates his fiction and our reality should serve to remind us of our infinite absurdities. So let us remember that: we are all ridiculous. And let’s keep laughing — before it’s too late, and we forget how to.
Ms Watson must be referring largely to comments on social media rather than the print and broadcast media. The papers and weeklies were almost uniformly positive. The only totally negative journal was Radio Times. The New Statesman published a critical review by Rachel Cooke but followed with a SRSLY podcast which was more favorable. The TLS published a mixed review by an Oxford Eng Lit professor, but he was more concerned that the BBC had over-explained the humour and felt it would have been preferable to take the text as written. The other papers (including the broadsheets, weeklies and tabloids) and literary weblogs were more positive than not and several published multiple reviews. That was also the case with the Guardian and Observer–they had multiple favorable reviews and a critical editorial. See previous posts. Your correspondent missed the Guardian article cited by Watson, but it was not a review–more of a reconsideration of the novel, published on 20 March 2008, before the TV series had been conceived. Here’s a link. Watson has taken Alex Larman’s article out of context, and it deserves a fuller consideration (emphasis supplied):
…It is … true that after Decline and Fall, Waugh never wrote anything so uncomplicatedly funny again. … Along with Lucky Jim and A Confederacy Of Dunces, Decline And Fall is surely one of the greatest debut comic novels of the last century. … One of the reasons why the book possibly isn’t as popular today as it has been is that it can be argued that Waugh’s depiction of a world of 20s high society means very little to modern readers, and that the arch dialogue and authorial commentary make it difficult to care about any of the characters. This seems an unfair criticism. …
It’s possible another reason that the book isn’t as appreciated as it should be is that it has never been adapted for TV; the only version of it is an appalling film that has never been released on DVD. … It’s possible to imagine it working brilliantly with a younger David Tennant as Pennyfeather, Stephen Fry as Dr Fagan and someone very short “of about thirty, with a short red moustache, and slightly bald” to play Grimes. I quite like the idea of Toby Jones, who already proved in Infamous how skilled he was at portraying undesirable literary figures.
That’s hardly vilification. And Larman leaves it open to consider that the BBC’s adaptation, while not following his own casting prescriptions, may contribute something toward rehabilitating Waugh’s reputation among the “modern readers” to whom he refers. One wonders how many of the social media commenters on whom Watson apparently relies for her “barrage of condemnation” read anything much longer than a Twitter post. Tip of the hat once again to David Lull for sending us a link.
UPDATE (30 April 2017): In rereading the Alex Larman article in the Guardian for another purpose, I noticed that it was dated 20 March 2008, long before the BBC TV series had even been mooted. My renewed interest in the article was based on the fact that Larman thought Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s name would be pronounced “Beast Chained” rather than “Beest Cheating”, as in the BBC’s adaptation. The Guardian’s search engine has a habit of resurrecting stories with renewed relevance from long past editions but without any warning that they are from the past.
Rosamund Urwin in the Evening Standard has written an article about degree results. She opens with this:
In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, the protagonist Charles Ryder receives advice from his cousin Jasper before starting his Oxford degree. “You want a first or a fourth,” he says. “Time spent on a good second is time thrown away.” I’d long thought this view as dated as those degree classifications. Surely a 2.1 … is a green light to employers? It reassures them that you hadn’t spent three years as a library hermit… That’s no longer true. This week, figures showed that among recent grads, a first wins you a £2,500 bonus. I imagine this shift reflects student ambition rather than employers’ desires: the smart kids don’t want to pile up debt just to while away time in Wetherspoons. And given how obsessed many of those who went to university are with the result, this seems wise…
So, Cousin Jasper is redeemed.
A reference to Waugh also opens another article. This is by K E Colombini in The American Conservative and is entitled “The Literature of Angels and Demons”.
Tucked away as a footnote in Philip Eade’s recent biography of Evelyn Waugh lies an interesting observation comparing Waugh to another contemporary novelist, Graham Greene: Lady Diana Cooper, a friend of both the British authors, commented in a letter to her son that Greene was “a good man possessed of a devil,” and Waugh “a bad man for whom an angel is struggling.”…Lady Diana’s comparison of Waugh and Greene strikes at the heart of good literature … One can easily analyze the major serious works of these two novelists to find countless examples of people struggling between their personal angels and demons…
The article continues with a discussion comparing Brideshead Revisited and Greene’s The Power and the Glory and extending to the recent films Silence and The Young Pope and the poetry of T S Eliot.
In the weblog Literary Hub, an article appears that collects references to books that inspired writers to write. Here is the entry for South African novelist Nadine Gordimer:
Q. Perhaps the isolation of your childhood helped you to become a writer—because of all the time it left you for reading—lonely though it must have been.
A. Yes… perhaps I would have become a writer anyway. I was doing a bit of writing before I got “ill.” I wanted to be a journalist as well as a dancer. You know what made me want to become a journalist? Reading Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop when I was about eleven. Enough to make anybody want to be a journalist! I absolutely adored it…
Finally, Lord Fowler, The Lord Speaker, in another reference to Scoop opened an address to the London Press Awards 2017 with this:
‘Looking back I think there is a tendency these days to think of the sixties as the golden age of newspapers. But as that splendid figure in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop was apt to say to his proprietor – “Up to a point Lord Copper”. The truth is that the newspapers of today are better informed, better written, infinitely better laid out, and altogether better value for the reader than they have ever been. They not only hold officialdom to account they also campaign much more vigorously than ever before on issues which are of undoubted public concern but can get swept under the carpet…
In the present UK electoral climate, The Spectator has republished a 1959 article by Evelyn Waugh in which he expressed his views of elected governments:
‘Mugwumps‘ are in the news today, after Boris Johnson used the term to describe Jeremy Corbyn. In the 2 October 1959 issue of The Spectator, Evelyn Waugh also used the term, when he wrote a piece entitled ‘Aspirations of a Mugwump.’
In another article in The Spectator, Dr David Butterfield of Queens’ College, Cambridge, thinks Boris misapplied the term:
Trust Boris to dominate the headlines by reopening that most famous of books, Johnson’s Dictionary. Writing in the Sun, our effortlessly provocative Foreign Secretary swiped at Jeremy Corbyn with this colourful barb: ‘He may be a mutton-headed old mugwump, but he is probably harmless.’ … In fact, there’s more to being a ‘mugwump’ than a throw-away jibe. The word comes from the original New Englanders, the Algonquins, for whom mugquomp meant ‘great chief’. It was a term of respect laden with connotations of nobility. But that presumably wasn’t what Boris had in mind. … the term ‘mugwump’ came to be associated with a group of Republicans who switched party affiliation in order to support the rival Democrat candidate. …Who were these Mugwumps, then? They were very firmly members of the establishment – high-class and high-society big beasts. They formed the traditional business elite, and saw themselves as figures of social and intellectual importance. …Boris Johnson is a man who can cut a phrase into a lapidary weapon with the very best of them… But I’m not yet sold on this one. Some may make a case for Corbyn being other things: a mugger (gurner), a muggletonian (a devotee of an obscure and misguided cult), muggins (fool), or just a mug (a hirsute-faced sheep). But here we are. For better or worse, mugwump – that plodding, doltish spondee – may well stay stuck to Corbyn.
From this disquisition on the term, it would appear that it was correctly applied to Waugh by whoever devised the title for his 1959 article. That article was published in The Spectator as part of a “symposium of election comments.” Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 537; A Little Order, p. 139.
Waugh also appears in another Spectator article: “Debate: Is boarding school cruel?”. This has Alex Renton, who recently wrote a book on the history of British boarding schools: Stiff Upper Lip and Lara Prendergast, online editor of The Spectator taking opposite sides. Renton argues the affirmative (that they are cruel) and Prendergast, the negative (missing the opportunity to point out that a fictional namesake would probably have been on Renton’s side; although, maybe not–Prendy thought boarding schools and their students were cruel to underpaid and persecuted masters, but not necessarily the reverse). Her statement, in any event, implicates Waugh:
Literature does a good job of reinforcing the sense that boarding schools are ruthless places that churn out dysfunctional characters. Alex’s book is no exception. He has extrapolated from his own experiences, and found contemporary sources who confirm them. Boarding school is terrible for children, they say, supported by quotes from authors such as Dickens, Kipling and Evelyn Waugh. Alex paints a hellish picture. It’s just not one that I recognise.
