Daily Mail Features Decline and Fall Adaptation

This week’s Daily Mail carries a feature article (“Love and Waugh”) by Andrew Preston on the BBC adaptation of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall. This appears in the Mail’s “Weekend Magazine” and involves interviews with several members of the production’s cast and crew. After a summary of the novel’s plot, the lead actor Jack Whitehall who plays Paul Pennyfeather provides some personal background to explain his particular interest in the novel:

‘We see the 1920s on screen a lot but not with the wit this piece has,’ says Jack. ‘It’s like an anarchic Downton Abbey. The comedy is so sharp it feels modern, and its targets are still relevant. I think it really works for an audience now.’ …Whitehall remembers enjoying the book as a teenager at his public school, Marlborough College, having been given it by his father Michael (the former theatrical agent for Judi Dench and Daniel Day-Lewis, and Jack’s deadpan partner on the BBC chat show Backchat). ‘It’s my dad’s favourite book because it’s so close to his own life – he left school and didn’t know what to do, so became a teacher at a minor public school in the middle of nowhere. He was made head of games with no games experience, and head of geography even though he hadn’t done a degree and knew nothing about geography.’

After a discussion of the involvement of American film star Eva Longoria who plays Margot Beste-Chetwynde, the interview shifts to James Wood who wrote the adaptation:

‘Evelyn Waugh clearly adores Margot – he’s on the side of anyone who’s entertaining even if they behave appallingly,’ says James Wood, who created the hit BBC comedy Rev with Tom Hollander, and who has adapted the book for the BBC. ‘It’s the most brilliant comic novel and all the things he’s mocking are still in our lives, from ridiculous architects to the whole high-society bunch of twits who turn up for Margot’s party. One’s a government minister who’s a sort of Boris Johnson figure who keeps putting his foot in it and has nothing but contempt for the general public. Then there’s the ineffectual prison governor, wonderfully played by Jason Watkins. When we got the rights to adapt the book, all that Waugh’s grandson Alexander said to me was to make sure it’s really funny.’

As noted in a previous post, the three-episode series will air on BBC1 starting 31 March. Here’s a BBC trailer from the internet.

In another celebrity tie-in, BBC News online mentions that George Osborne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and soon to be editor of The Evening Standard will be working for Evgeny Lebedev, Russian owner of the Standard. According to the BBC’s Amol Rajan, who wrote the article, Lebedev:

is fond of Evelyn Waugh and 20th Century literature generally (full disclosure: I was for several years Lebedev’s adviser, and then his editor at the Independent). I imagine Lebedev will like the idea of reviving quaint, romantic 20th Century ideas about the relationship between politics and newspapers.

Lebedev is no doubt aware that Osborne was a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford which inspired Waugh’s Bollinger Club in Decline and Fall. 

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Details and Booking for Waugh Conference Now Online

The Huntington Library has posted online the detailed schedule for the Evelyn Waugh Conference to take place on 5-6 (Fr-Sa) May 2017 at the Huntington. See previous post. Here’s the link:

http://www.huntington.org/evelynwaugh/ 

There is a further link on the website to the registration and booking arrangements:

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2904646 

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Waugh and the Sri Lankan Cubist

The Deccan Chronicle, an English-language paper based in Hyderabad, has published an article about a 20th century Sri Lankan artist little known in the West. This is George Keyt (1901-1993) who is described as a cubist, influenced by the works of Matisse and Picasso. A book about his life and works is about to be published in Delhi. This is Buddha to Krishna by Yashodhara Dalmia. The Chronicle’s story explains the Waugh connection:

 “Keyt chose to live quietly in a village, away from the bustle of the city,” says Dalmia. Despite his attempts at solitude, no trip to Sri Lanka was deemed complete without Keyt’s residence being paid a visit. “He was alone, but never isolated. Anyone who visited Sri Lanka went to see him, he was a true icon, in that sense.” The visitors included actress Vivien Leigh, who bought his paintings, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who later wrote, “Keyt I think is the living nucleus of a great painter,” and the British writer Evelyn Waugh, whose account (a letter to his wife) has been recorded in Dalmia’s book.

Waugh’s visit took place in 1954 during the visit to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) on which he suffered the breakdown fictionalized in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. The letter referred to in Dalmia’s book is undoubtedly the one to Laura Waugh dated 16 February 1954 in which Waugh describes a visit he made with Monroe Wheeler (a director at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) to

a most eccentric local painter who lived in a very clean house with dozens of cheerful pictures by himself–half folk-art, half Picasso. He had nothing in the house & and had to send out for three cigarettes and a box of matches. (Letters, p. 420).

The identity of the eccentric artist is not revealed in Mark Amory’s edition of Waugh’s collected letters, and Dalmia’s research may be of use to future editors. Whether Waugh may have acquired any of Keyt’s works is not recorded in his published letter.

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Date Set for BBC Broadcast of Decline and Fall

Radio Times has announced the time and date for the broadcast of BBC’s adaptation of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall. Episode 1 will be transmitted on Friday 31 March at 9pm UK time. This will be on BBC1 rather than BBC2 as originally announced. The two subsequent episodes will be broadcast in the same time slot in succeeding weeks. Details of North American transmission are not mentioned in the article. The program will be available on the internet shortly after broadcast via BBC iPlayer. A UK internet connection will be required to view it on the internet at points outside the UK. 

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Vile Bodies to be Featured on BBC Radio 4

Next week’s edition of A Good Read on BBC Radio 4 will host Drs Chris and Xand van Tulleken. They are identical twins and both medical doctors who have appeared in such UK TV series as Trust Me, I’m a Doctor on BBC and Medicine Men Go Wild on Channel 4. The program will be presented by Harriett Gilbert.  According to its description in the BBC listing:

The guests recommend The House of God, a bawdy tale set in a hospital, by Samuel Shem and Yellow Tulips, a poetry collection by James Fenton. Harriett introduces Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh to the discussion.

The program will be transmitted next Tuesday at 1630 UK time and will be available on the internet shortly thereafter.

Meanwhile, journalist William Telford in the Plymouth (UK) Herald discusses the books he read last year. There were a total of 50 of them and many would fall into the comic novel category. These include three by Charles Portis (Gringos, Norwood, and True Grit) and one by Barbara Pym (Excellent Women) as his top 4. At #14 he lists Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (“rib tickling public school classic”). 

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Rachel Cusk Interviewed in New York Magazine

New York Magazine has today posted an interview of novelist Rachel Cusk. The interview is by Heidi Julavits and opens with this brief summary of Cusk’s work:

Cusk is the author of three memoirs and nine novels, most recently Transit, which came out in January to rapturous reviews. It is the second in a planned trilogy that has, along with her memoirs, made her a cultish figure. She writes about motherhood and marriage and houses. In the hands of a different writer, these might be neutral topics. Neutral love in neutral boxes. Cusk is not neutral. She is divisive. Readers love her or readers really do not love her. She, Cusk, the human being, is often hated.

Most of the article is devoted to a discussion of some of her more “devisive” works, in particular the 2001 essay or memoir about motherhood entitled A Life’s Work. But at the beginning of that discussion this brief, throwaway paragraph appears:

Early in her career, Cusk was not especially controversial. She published three novels influenced by Evelyn Waugh. These books were deemed witty and clever. She won awards and gained notice.

These novels are indeed both “witty and clever”. They actually made one laugh, something that is much less likely to happen when reading the later, more controversial works. One would like to hear more about why Cusk’s work, especially her fiction, changed direction after the last of these early novels was published in 1997. This subject was hinted at in an earlier interview, but that line of questioning is not taken up in this one. See previous post. How much these early novels were inspired by any specific works of Evelyn Waugh is hard to say, but they were certainly written in the same satiric tradition and could equally well be said to have been “influenced” by  Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, Barbara Pym or Jane Austen. These novels remain in print (two in the US and all three in the UK) and are worth pursuing if one hasn’t already done so: Saving Agnes (1993), The Temporary (1995) and The Country Life (1997). 

 

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Waugh in Reviews

The Prufrock column in this week’s Weekly Standard magazine contains this reference to the new book Ronald Knox: A Man for All Seasons, with a link to a review of the book:

The Catholic priest Ronald Knox made a deep impression on eventual convert Evelyn Waugh and translated the Latin Bible into English. He is almost entirely forgotten today.

The review by Greg Morrison appears in the University Bookman, an internet site sponsored by the Russell Kirk Center, a conservative think tank. Morrison’s review is more detailed and critical than that noted in our previous post. Here is its reference to Waugh:

In one of this book’s essays, Clare Asquith refers to Knox as “English Catholicism’s foremost convert.” … But Knox was in intimate contact with a more obvious candidate for “foremost convert”—the novelist Evelyn Waugh. Waugh arrived at Catholic belief after a long period of dissolution and profanity, at least half of it conducted in a spirit of ironic mockery. His earlier novels unflinchingly exaggerated the vices of the English aristocracy, and as he settled into his faith, he became increasingly unapologetic in his scorn for whatever he reviled about the modern world—the vernacular Mass, cars, children. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely friend for the sober, temperate Knox. Yet Knox impressed him so much that Waugh wrote a biography of his friend, and Waugh was responsible for the literary remains of the famous author.

A UK reader Milena Borden has been studying reviews of the book about Steven Runciman which we mentioned in an earlier post: Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw.  She has sent links to two of these reviews that implicate Evelyn Waugh. Although they were exact contemporaries, Runciman and Waugh do not seem to have known each other, at least not very well. But the reviewers do see parallels in their lives and careers. Both reviewers describe Runciman’s undergraduate love affairs at Cambridge in terms very similar to Waugh’s at Oxford. And although Runciman made his career writing popular history books, Rosemary Hill writing in the London Review of Books, notes this similarity between Runciman’s most popular book and the novels about WWII written by of Waugh and others of his generation:

The three-volume History of the Crusades, long in meditation, appeared in 1951-54. It was, in Averil Cameron’s judgment, ‘a great achievement of narrative history’… and Dinshaw makes a good point about its relationship to the prevalence of trilogies in postwar fiction: Waugh’s Sword of Honour, the three wartime volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy all dealt with the war itself, but the neo-Romanticism of the 1950s also created the appetite for richly coloured quasi-history which made T.H. White’s tetralogy The Once and Future King a bestseller. Like Macaulay, Runciman did not disguise what he saw as the relevance of history to the present and the books are saturated, as Cameron puts it, with ‘regret at the deplorable failure of the crusading West to understand Byzantium and the East’.

Ben Judah writing in the Financial Times also sees parallels between Runciman’s works and career and those described by Waugh in his books:

Had Steven Runciman not actually lived, someone, perhaps Evelyn Waugh, would have invented him. … Dinshaw, rather than writing a crisp biography, has written a gigantic one, as rich, funny and teemingly peopled as Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. He is lucky that Runciman ran up against so many of the men who made the England of Waugh and Powell — and in situations worthy of PG Wodehouse, to boot. Runciman pierced a voodoo doll with the young George Orwell at Eton, was taught by Aldous Huxley, listened to Lord Grey recite him The Prelude on his estate, tutored a dissolute Guy Burgess at Cambridge, was a dining partner of John Maynard Keynes and Sergei Diaghilev and a beloved teatime companion of the Queen Mother.

Thanks to Milena for sending these links.

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Addis Ababa Today

The Guardian in a feature-length article by Jason Burke in its “Cities” series describes the growing unrest in Ethiopia. This has its roots in the country’s land ownership policies under which the government owns all the land and allows development only at its sufferance, retaining the right to seize the land at any time to be put to a different use by new occupants. This has resulted in a growing chaos as people protest the government’s summary actions to seize land needed, for example, to support its planned expansion and modernization of Addis Ababa. In response, government security forces crack down. The article cites two western writers for background information: Evelyn Waugh and Ryszard Kapuscinski:

That Addis Ababa is in dire need of planning is not in doubt. It was founded in 1886, by the emperor Menelik II, who is widely seen as the architect of modern Ethiopia and whose statue now towers over a busy roundabout in the capital’s scruffy, lively neighbourhood of Arada. In the 1930s, just before Italy’s short-lived occupation of Ethiopia, the British writer Evelyn Waugh described the city as being “in a rudimentary state of construction” with “half-finished buildings at every corner”. Just over 30 years later, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski told his readers of “the wooden scaffoldings scattered” about a city that resembled “a large village of a few hundred thousand, situated on hills amid eucalyptus groves”. The hills are still there, as is the wooden scaffolding, which is more practical in the heat and sun than its steel counterpart. The trees are gone.

The Waugh quotation comes from Remote People (1931, p. 34). In his later book Waugh in Abyssinia (1936, p. 61) Waugh embellished and updated this description: the “ambitious buildings” were “still in the same rudimentary stage of construction; tufted now with vegetation like ruins in a drawing of Piranesi, they stood at every corner, reminders of an abortive modernism…”

 

 

 

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Brideshead Lecture Online

Fr Robert Lauder, priest in the Diocese of Brooklyn who teaches literature at St John’s University, has given a lecture on Brideshead Revisited that is now available online. Click here. The lecture is part of a series on the Catholic Novel and was broadcast over a religious network on 8 March 2017. It is not clear how long it may remain available online. It takes about 14 minutes and a central element is a reference to a 2013 article by Bishop Robert Barron entitled “Evangelizing Through Beauty”. According to Fr Lauder, this brief essay is key for his students to unlocking the novel’s religious theme. You might want to read that first.

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Waugh in the Papers

There are references to Waugh and his works in several major newspapers. In The Weekend Australian, an article in their opinion section urged Brits, Yanks and Aussies to stop blaming voters they view as irredeemably dim for results such as Brexit, Trump and, in Australia, Pauline Hanson. Better to let the democratic systems have the time to sort things out. The article goes back to George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh for support:

Politics is always changing, always new but always the same…. We grapple with the notions of post-truth and fake news as if they are revelations but our delusion is exposed by looking back 70 years to George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists,” wrote Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Evelyn Waugh was on to all this in 1938 with his novel Scoop, which, save for the missing digital technology, is as searing an examination of media behaviour as you could write today. “I read the newspapers with lively interest,” says Waugh’s Mr Baldwin. “It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.” 

Mr Baldwin was the enigmatic character Waugh met on his outward journey to Africa who turned out to know much more than any of the journalists about what was going on in Ishmaelia. Scoop, Penguin 2011, pp. 226 ff. 

Waugh is cited in two reviews of Roy Hattersley’s new book about the history of Catholicism in England, entitled The Catholics. In The Irish Times, Eamon Duffy, describes  Hattersley as an atheist who discovered after his father’s death that he had been an unfrocked Roman Catholic priest. Duffy finds the book riddled with errors and concludes that Hattersley labored without the help of a fact-checker. He also criticizes Waugh indirectly in this reference to Hattersley’s discussion of Edmund Campion:

One of the book’s few heroes is the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, but Hattersley draws on Evelyn Waugh’s elegant but derivative study published in 1935 rather than the deeply researched recent biography by Gerard Kilroy. Similarly, Hattersley’s principal guide to one of his book’s villains, Thomas More, is the late Jasper Ridley’s ferociously partisan onslaught on More’s reputation, The Fanatic and the Statesman, where More features, predictably, as the fanatic.

The Financial Times, however, is kinder to Hattersley’s book. Their reviewer Ian Thomson describes it as “well-researched if occasionally platitudinous” and a “scholarly chronicle” of its subject but a book that “at times feels too long and meandering to be digested pleasurably.” Waugh features as one of the writers who, as distinguished from Graham Greene saw “in Catholicism an alternative to godless Communism. The persecution and slaughter of Spanish priests by the government that preceded Franco’s had been roundly condemned by Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc and other Catholic authors. Any Englishman who was publicly Catholic in the 1930s was assumed to be in favour of Franco. Yet Greene was a left-leaning Catholic. Whose side was he on?” Thomson seems to have answered that question earlier in his opening paragraph, perhaps suggesting that Hattersley failed to do so.

UPDATE (17 March 2017): Melanie McDonagh writing in The Spectator had this to say about Roy Hattersley’s book:

He has firm literary views: he finds Greene and Waugh obsessed with sex and despair.. Still, given that there hasn’t been a comprehensive survey of the Catholic Church in England since John Bossy’s serious history in 1975, this is a brave, if flawed, attempt to fill the gap.

 

 

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