Roundup: Rereading Black Mischief

Posted on November 4, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent column of The Times “Rereading” series contains a brief essay on Waugh’s 1932 comic novel Black Mischief. The column, published in today’s edition, is by Will Lloyd. Here’s the opening:

One afternoon in the absurdly early Thirties, Evelyn Waugh and some friends were discussing Abyssinia. The only African country to escape the dubious benedictions of European colonisation was in the news. Very soon, Ras Tafari would crown himself as Emperor Haile Selassie in a series of splendid ceremonies in Addis Ababa. Was it true, they wondered, that the legitimate heir to the throne was actually imprisoned in a mountain there? Surely the Coptic Church did not consecrate bishops by spitting on their heads, as was rumoured? Polygamy and drunkenness were everywhere in Abyssinia, Waugh’s friends said. Within two weeks Waugh would find out for himself. He was on a boat to Abyssinia, embarked on what he later called “one of the really amusing journeys left in the world”

That journey was integrated into his travel book Remote People, and transposed into his outrageous third novel, Black Mischief, published in 1932. This is not something that’s safe to read on the London Underground, unless you decide to sheathe it in a protective slip. (I usually place my copy inside the dust jacket of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race.) A book from the Thirties, written by an alltime snob, about Africa? Frankly, it’s a miracle that Black Mischief remains in print, and notable that when Penguin Classics reissued Waugh’s greatest works last autumn, they left this one out of the series.

They made a mistake. Black Mischief is a crucial throat-clearing work, the necessary novel Waugh had to write after his divorce and conversion to Roman Catholicism, before the slam-dunk, reputationsealing A Handful of Dust.

Although Black Mischief is a scream, it is also where Waugh discovers that he is serious. The world of society lightweights that the young satirist filleted in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies is tempered here by a new concern with grander themes. Such a shift is often a disaster for the comic novelist (see: M Amis), but it only made Waugh more coherent and funnier. […]

After a brief but accurate summary of the plot, noting that the humor arises from the Europeans imported to bring progress to Africa rather than the Africans themselves, the article concludes with this:

Progress was a mirage. As Waugh put it in a 1932 BBC radio broadcast as he worked on the proofs of Black Mischief: “Man’s capacity for suffering keeps pretty regular pace with the discoveries that ameliorate it,” He fully expected “a vast recession of the white races from all over the world” to occur in his lifetime. Waugh’s clarity came at a cost. He wrote Black Mischief, one observer said, “slowly and reluctantly … groaning loudly” in the nursery of a country house. He hated writing. We should always be glad he did it anyway.

–The Sunday Times has published its “Top 10 Literary Adaptations” selected by a panel of experts. This included noted adaptor Andrew Davies as well as Jack Thorne, Heidi Thomas, Daisy Goodwin, Mark Gatiss, Sebastian Faulks, Tim Glanfield and Victoria Segal. Their number 3 choice was the Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited:

Brideshead Revisited (1981) Jeremy Irons’s dulcet narration, some sumptuous title music and a fluffy toy cradled by Anthony Andrews all make this adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel utterly captivating. “The leads are perfect in every high-cheekboned aspect,” Victoria Segal says. Andrew Davies adds: “Ridiculously lush and self-indulgent, but it gets you every time.”

Davies’ 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was number 1 and the BBC’s 1976 series I,  Claudius was number 2.

The same issue of the Sunday Times (29th October) also includes an interview of Andrew Davies by Hadley Freeman. This is entitled “How to write a classic drama”. Here’s an excerpt: In Davies’s eyes a good adaptation will “render a truthful and honest experience of the novel”. In other words, fidelity to the words is less important than fidelity to the emotion. Why do almost 200-year-old books still make such blockbuster TV serials? “Well, they had bloody good stories that went on for a long time,” Davies replies, characteristically forthright. “Whereas contemporary novels seem mostly to divide up into, they’re very well written but there’s sod-all story, or there’s a lot of story but you can’t believe in the characters.”

–The German newspaper Welt has posted an article by Wieland Freund entitled (in translation) “When Evelyn Waugh interrupted the war”. It is focused on explaining how Waugh managed to edit the proofs of Brideshead Revisited while serving in the Army in Yugoslavia. Here’s an excerpt translated by Google:

 

 

…Waugh could put Randolph [Churchill] to good use. Somehow the upheaval of “Brideshead” had to reach Topusko. It is with some certainty that no upheaval has had a more adventurous journey, as Waugh described it years later. “Brideshead” was sent by the publisher to Downing Street in October 1944; “From there,” Waugh reported, “it traveled to Italy in the Prime Minister’s mailbag, was flown from Brindisi and parachuted over Gajana in Croatia, then an isolated region of the resistance; it was corrected in Topusko and then taken to Split by jeep when the road was temporarily out of enemy hands; from there by ship to Italy and so home, via Downing Street.”

 

–The European Conservative has an unsigned essay entitled “Liturgical Conservatism and the Catholic Church.” Evelyn Waugh is one of several writers considered, with particular reference to his novels Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour. Here’s the opening:

The conservatism of some of the greatest Catholic writers of the 20th century has often baffled, and sometimes enraged, their literary critics, with Evelyn Waugh and J. R. R. Tolkien in particular coming under sustained attack. … One critic protested Evelyn Waugh’s “excessive conservatism” and another, clearly irritated by The Sword of Honour’s critical success, argued that it was a triumph only “for pessimism and conservatism.” Writing in the New Statesman recently, Will Lloyd could not hide his exasperation: “Why the passing decades cannot diminish him ought to trouble our creaking, secular, liberal age.” Well, quite.

If Waugh’s social and political conservatism has been difficult to swallow, his liturgical conservatism has proved to be utterly inexplicable. Many critics seem to believe that the liturgical changes enacted after (not, despite popular belief, by) the Second Vatican Council were proof of the Catholic Church’s belated but inevitable acceptance of the modern world. Waugh’s heartfelt criticism of these changes was, therefore, clear evidence of his reactionary nostalgia: “An ardent traditionalist,” Mary R. Reichardt wrote, “Waugh especially deplored the liturgical changes of Vatican II, sadly convinced that his beloved Church was merely giving in to modernity”…

 

 

 

 

 

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120th Anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s Birth

Posted on October 28, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh was born at 11 Hillfield Road, West Hampstead, London on 28 October 1903. That makes this his 120th anniversary. His centenary was marked in 2003 with several events including two academic conferences–one in Spain and the other at Oxford. This year marks the centenary of his publication of articles and illustrations in Harold Acton’s new magazine the Oxford Broom. His writings and drawings continued to appear in Isis and Cherwell, also published in Oxford, and he was actively supportive in John Sutro’s successful efforts to revive publication of the latter. In addition, his work appeared for the first time in a London magazine. This was a drawing that was published in London Mercury. He probably joined the Hypocrites Club in 1923; he was introduced by Harold Acton who is recorded as having joined in October 1922. In any event, Waugh was certainly active in the club in 1923 and was I believe, at least briefly, an officer.

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Roundup: More Letters and a Radio Adaptation

Posted on October 27, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Another batch of Waugh’s letters have been auctioned recently. These consisted of communications with his bookbinders Sangorski & Sutcliffe regarding special bindings for his own library and presentation copies. These were recently sold by the auction house RR Auction in Amherst, NH. Here’s their description:

A group of three ALSs and one ANS from English writer Evelyn Waugh, one signed in full and three others signed with his initials “E. W.,” each one page, penned either on his personal postcard or on Combe Florey House letterhead, 5.5 x 3.5 and 8 x 10, dating to the early and mid-1960s, all seemingly addressed to his bookbinders Sangorski and Sutcliffe. Highlights from the handwritten letters include:

No date: “I may return the samples of leather given to Mr. Walker of Chapman & Hall. Will you please use the lighter of the two blues for binding ‘The Loved One.’”

September 5, 1963: “You will shortly receive from the printers sheet and a plate (frontispiece) of my ‘Basil Seal Rides Again.’”

April 3, 1965: “Thank you for your letter of yesterday about A Little Learning. I am distressed to learn that Chapman & Hall misunderstood my instructions. I am afraid it does make a serious difference.” In overall fine condition, with a block of toning to one of the postcards.

A third postcard dated 7 March 1962 informed the bookbinders that Waugh was now ready to accept the materials they were preparing for him. The items were sold for $368. The letters and other details are posted here.

—The Imaginative Conservative has reprinted Waugh’s preface to a 1958 edition of Ronald Knox’s A Spiritual Aeneid. Originally published in 1918, Knox’s book explains his migration from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic Church. Waugh’s preface consisted primarily of the “tribute” he wrote for The Sunday Times (1 September 1957) marking Knox’s death. The discussion of The Spiritual Aeneid appears at the end of the preface:

…A Spiritual Aeneid is his account, ingeniously constructed on the Virgillian frame, of his transition from Anglo-Catholicism to Roman Catholicism. It was written immediately after his reception and before his ordination as priest and is, by contrast with many similar confessions, remarkably unemotional and full of charity and justice towards the Church of his upbringing. It was not a book which in later years he liked—indeed he sometimes spoke of it in terms almost of disgust—but he agreed to its re­issue in 1950 and wrote his own preface, “After 33 Years,” for that edition. That essay makes any further preface unnecessary except such as I have attempted here, to complete and amplify the biographical details…

Waugh’s Sunday Times tribute as well as the preface have never been republished in his collected essays, articles and reviews. It may have been omitted in a recent reprint or ebook edition of Knox’s book in 2017-18 but has now been included in another new edition published a year ago in the US by Cluny Media. That is the source of the copy in The Imaginative Conservative. A complete copy of the preface is available at this link. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending it.

–A website that preserves and publicizes radio programmes of interest has noted two radio adaptations of Waugh’s short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens,” for at least one of which a recording survives. These were both broadcast on American radio networks. Here are excerpts from the posting. One episode appeared in the radio series “Suspense”:

This episode stars Richard Ney in an Evelyn Waugh classic story. It was adapted by Richard Breen. The story is considered a classic. Stephen King’s novel Misery was partly inspired by Waugh’s original short story. King has been known to like radio drama, and he may have heard either of the radio adaptations.

Richard Ney’s character is injured on a trip to the Brazilian jungle and is helped back to health by a man obsessed with the work of Charles Dickens. It seems he had “helped” others in the past. They were forced to read Dickens stories to him – in fact, the entire library – a few hours a day. It becomes clear they were never able to leave, and Ney’s character fears he may have the same fate.

The Suspense adaptation of the story has a more optimistic ending than the Escape version (1952-12-21). The latter was true to the original story’s pessimistic ending, and was adapted by John Meston, known most for his original writing for Gunsmoke.

Joe Kearns plays “Mr. Todd” in both the Suspense and the Escape productions and is superb in both. At the beginning of the broadcast he announces himself as co-star “Mr. Joseph Kearns.”

One network recording has survived. It is not known to which coast it was broadcast. It has a 15 second pause before network ID (“15s”).

This was Richard Ney’s first of two Suspense appearances. Ney’s movie and television career had sporadic success. He was an economics graduate of Columbia University and his career gradually moved to investing and as an investment advisor. Ney was eventually more successful as an investor than he was as a performer.

The cast:
RICHARD NEY (Anthony Last), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Mr. Todd), Eric Snowdon (Dr. Messinger), Tony Ellis (The stranger), Hans Conried (Missionary)

The surviving episode is apparently the one broadcast in the Suspense series on 9 October 1947. This is a 30 minute recording. It is available on the Internet Archive at this link.

–The New Yorker’s film critic Anthony Lane reviews the recent film “The Holdovers”. Lane is also an admirer of Evelyn Waugh and has written articles on his works. Here’a an excerpt from the film review:

The new film from Alexander Payne, “The Holdovers,” is set in the dying days of 1970. It is the season of good will, though not in the sour and unused heart of Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti). At Barton Academy, a hidebound East Coast prep school, he has been teaching Ancient Civilizations for so long that most of his pupils, not to mention his colleagues, view him as a product of antiquity—no better than a broken shard of the past. He is, in every sense, history. Needless to say, the antipathy is requited; near the start, Hunham refers to the boys in his class as “lazy, vulgar, rancid little philistines.” In his dreams, I imagine, he would smite them with the jawbone of an ass […] As for Hunham, he’s like the classics teacher in Evelyn Waugh’s 1947 novella “Scott-King’s Modern Europe,” who declares, “I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

Here’s a link to the full review.

 

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Roundup: A Major Auction and News from the Antipodes

Posted on October 22, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Auction house Bonham’s has scheduled the sale of several of Waugh’s books. These were presentation copies to F B Walker who worked at Chapman & Hall in the period of their publication. Bonham’s describes the importance of Walker to Waugh in its catalogue:

Provenance: F.B. Walker (1910-1993)…Walker was the Production Manager at Waugh’s publisher Chapman and Hall during the war, effectively running the department despite not being on the board. “It was he who had seen Put out More Flags, Work Suspended, and Brideshead through the press, and he and Waugh had a comfortable professional relationship…Walker was the only person left at Chapman & Hall for whom he felt the slightest sympathy” (Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939-1966, 1992). In September 1945, when Walker was overlooked for promotion to the Board in favour of John McDougall, Waugh resigned his directorship of the company in disgust. Subsequently he continued sending Walker warmly inscribed copies of his later books; by descent to the vendor.

There are twelve books available in lots 81-92 (from Work Suspended to A Little Learning). This includes a specially bound copy of the pre-publication issue of Brideshead Revisited (lot 82):

Brideshead Revisited. The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, AUTHOR’S PRE-PUBLICATION PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED “For F.B. Walker whose pre-natal care made the book possible, with gratitude from Evelyn Waugh” on the front free endpaper, half-title, “T.H. Saunders” watermark to title and dedication leaf, pencil numeral “353” on final page “304”, contemporary morocco-backed cloth, lettered “F.B. Walker” in gilt on upper cover, t.e.g., others untrimmed, 8vo, Chapman & Hall, 1945 [1944]

Footnotes

IMPORTANT ASSOCIATION COPY OF A SPECIAL PRE-PUBLICATION EDITION OF BRIDESHEAD, INSCRIBED TO F.B. WALKER, THE MAN “WHOSE PRE-NATAL CARE MADE THE BOOK POSSIBLE”.

Printed in a run of fifty copies at his own expense in 1944, Waugh sent these pre-publication copies to his closest friends and associates to garner opinions, after which he revised the text prior to the first trade edition published in the following year. Copies were issued in printed green wrappers, but this copy has a special bespoke binding stamped with the recipient’s name on the upper cover.

The estimated price for lot 82 is ÂŁ5,ooo-ÂŁ7,000. The auction is scheduled for 14 November at 14:00 pm at Bonham’s in Knightsbridge. Here’s a link to lot 82 from which you can scroll up or down to the others and find the details of the auction and bidding procedures.

–A recent issue of The Australian newspaper has a story about memorable characters from fiction. This is by Greg Sheridan and was inspired by the awfulness of Kenneth Branagh’s recent portrayal of Agatha Christie ‘s Inspector Poirot. It opens with this:

…I can’t say whether Peter Ustinov or David Suchet was the greatest Poirot. Both were a bit ahead of Albert Finney. But Branagh is monstrous. He’s been a puzzle to me, this Branagh. I can see why people get the impression he’s a great actor, but I’ve never been wholly convinced, much less moved, by any part I’ve seen him play. He’s like one of those fringe test batsmen who has a perfect technique but never scores any runs. All of which is a longwinded way of getting to my point. Who, in all of literature and film, is your favourite, most memorable character? […]

In literature you tend to have many favourites – Jeeves, Bertie, Lord Emsworth, Psmith – just from P.G. Wodehouse alone. The compellingly dreadful Kenneth Widmerpool from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, and his evil twin, Apthorpe, from Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy…

–Another Australian journal has posted an interview on this topic. The interview of the Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers appeared in the Financial Review. When asked about his favorite book, Rogers answered:

I read a fair bit. If I were to re-read some book a few times it would be the Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh without doubt. It’s something I thoroughly enjoyed and I have read it a few times.

—Publishers Weekly has posted an interview of Anglo/Venetian author MA Bennett that was conducted at the Sharjah International Book Fair. Here’s an excerpt:

Q. Can you tell us a little about the inspiration behind your hugely successful St. Adian the Great (STAGS) boarding school series?

A. I was brought up in the grounds of a stately home in the Yorkshire Dales, where my grandmother was the housekeeper. My mum was a working single parent so I was looked after by my gran, and the ‘big house’ became my playground. Gran used to work at the weekend hunting parties the family hosted, and the inspiration for STAGS was to imagine what would happen if a cohort of privileged teens planned a hunting weekend at one of their stately homes with no adults present. And then, what would happen if they brought three misfits from their elite private school, and hunted them over the weekend instead of animals?

[…]

Q. Are there any authors that you particularly admire, or who you feel have influenced your story telling?

A. Evelyn Waugh. I grew up on Brideshead Revisited (just like Charlie Spring in Heartstopper!). The theme of an outsider entering the world of a stately home, with a bit of Venice thrown in, really chimed with me. I would say that is the one book which had the biggest influence on STAGS.

Heartstopper is a young adult webcomic which was made into a successful TV series on Netflix. It was written by Alice Oseman.

–The Guardian has quoted Waugh in a story about this week’s double between England and South Africa, with World Cup competitions in both cricket and rugby:

When Evelyn Waugh wrote in Brideshead Revisited of “a blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne,” he was surely prophesying Jannie de Beer’s five drop goals in the 1999 quarter-final.

This obviously refers to the rugby match.

 

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Roundup: Letters and A Lecture

Posted on October 15, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—BBC Radio Four Extra has announced the rebroadcast of a 1996 adaptation of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust. This will be contained in two one-hour episodes. The first is broadcast on Tuesday, 24 October at 0500 repeated at 1500 and 0300, The second will air on Wednesday, 25 October at the same times and both will presumably be available on the internet thereafter. Here is the BBC’s description:

Brenda Last embarks on an affair that is the talk of London society. But there are tragic consequences for all those involved…Starring Tara Fitzgerald and Jonathan Cullen. Evelyn Waugh’s novel was first published in 1934. Dramatised in two parts by Bill Matthews.

Here’s a link.

–The following letter was posted in the New Statesman in response to its 8 September article by Will Lloyd. This was entitled “Evelyn Waugh is laughing at you.” See previous post:

“Depth of Feeling

The piece on Evelyn Waugh by Will Lloyd (Critic at Large, 8 September) might also have contrasted his letters and diaries, showing his morning and evening feelings.
Peter Bottomley MP, House of Commons”

–An auction house in Savannah, GA is offering for sale 4 letters from Evelyn Waugh. Here’s the description:

Four Articles, four articles, autograph card signed with initial, postmarked July 25, 1961, thanking Aubrey Ensor for writing; autograph letter signed, two pages, April 18 [1950], thanking Count Bompiani for luncheon and gift of publications; an autograph letter signed to Count Bompiani, letter of thanks; and an autograph letter signed, one page, unnamed recipient, matted.

Count Bompiani apparently translated at least one of Waugh’s works into Italian. This was Unconditional Surrender which Waugh refers to by its Italian title: Resa incondizionata. Copies of the letters and details of the auction can be found at this link.

–The University of Oklahoma has announced that the following lecture will take place on its campus at 4pm on 27 October.

Rader Lecture

David H. J. Larmour, P. W. Horn Distinguished Professor of Classics, Texas Tech University

“No Sense of an Ending: Satire in Juvenal, Evelyn Waugh and Martin McDonagh.”

Bizzell Library LL104

Details are available here. Here’s an excerpt from Professor Larmour’s c.v. posted on the Texas Tech University website:

…He has particular interests in Greek athletics & the Roman arena, Greek and Roman satire, lyric poetry, narrative theory, and comparative literature. Although grounded in classical philology, his research takes in display and representation of the body in text and space; the ideological underpinnings of competition, exile, memory and nostalgia; and the re-imagining of the classical past in the modern era. He also looks at how the physical borders of empires, and their accompanying mental categories, shape our understanding of the past, who we think we are, and whither we are headed…

His latest book, The Arena of Satire: Juvenal’s Search for Rome (Oklahoma 2016), looks at the connections between satire and the Roman arena, styling the satirist as a literary version of the gladiator who wounds, slices and dismembers his victims, while himself ending up as just one more performer in the imperial spectacle of power and powerlessness. The book also treats the “modern Juvenalians” of the 20th century and Prof. Larmour is now engaged in writing a follow-up monograph on these writers (including Evelyn Waugh, Viktor Pelevin, Martin McDonagh and Michel Houellebecq) and a survey of the genre of Juvenalian Satire in modern times. Other projects include a long-term investigation of the psychology of contested “border-zones” of the Roman Empire and other imperial powers in mainland Europe and beyond…

The full text of the c. v. is available here.

–A newspaper in Franklin County, Maine reviews a new book (Starling House by Alix E Harrow) in which coming of age is one of the principal themes. Here’s an excerpt:

What is coming of age? The prosaic idea of it as simply a transition into adulthood has no literary resonance. Certainly transition is present—the shedding of one state to attain another—but the traits of the transition are subtle and various.

We should first note that the nature of coming of age in adult novels and young adult novels are decidedly different. In the inveterately adult The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh describes it as follows: “He was adding his bit to the wreckage; something that had long irked him, his young heart, and was carrying back instead the artist’s load, a great, shapeless chunk of experience; bearing it home to his ancient and comfortless shore; to work on it hard and long.” This sense of having shed romanticism for artistry is the inverse of the young adult understanding of having attained a solid basis for romance.

The quote is taken from the closing lines of Waugh’s novella summarizing the reflections of Dennis as he returns to England.

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Columbus Day Roundup: 2 Podcasts, a Film and a Seminar

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–An interview of Alexander Waugh by writer James Delingpole has been posted on the internet. It is listed as “Delingpod #359” and is available from this link. It was recorded on 1 October 2023. Although the website suggests that a “subscription” is required, I was able to start the 92 minute podcast without registration or payment. The subject is Shakespearian authorship, although toward the end they do seem to be discussing other topics, some of which involve Evelyn Waugh who Alexander describes as a “misfit.”

–Another recently posted podcast features Evelyn Waugh as its main subject. This is part of a series being made by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in which each of the Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 that Burgess selected in his 1984 book of that title are discussed. This latest posting involved a discussion between Andrew Biswell of the Burgess Foundation and Barbara Cooke who is one of the senior editors of the CWEW. They discuss Brideshead Revisited which was Burgess’s selection for inclusion on his list. One of the points they discuss is Burgess’s revelation that he thought A Handful of Dust was a better book, but it fell outside the terms of his list. Here is a link to the  podcast which covers 51 minutes and was recorded last November.

–The new film Saltburn is much in the news this week. It was premiered at the London Film Festival on Wednesday. A review by Peter Bradshaw appeared in the Guardian and explains its interest to our readers. Here are some excerpts:

…Saltburn is an English mystery drama of the high-cheekboned upper classes, watchable but sometimes weirdly overheated and grandiose, with some secondhand posh-effect stylings, a movie derived from Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith, with a bit of Pasolini; it’s supposed to be (mostly) set in 2006, but behaves as if it’s 1932.

Barry Keoghan steps up to his first proper starring role as Oliver Quick, a bright, awkward young lad from Merseyside arriving at Oxford to read English; his haughty private-school college contemporaries sneer at this “scholarship boy” who can hardly bear to talk about his grim family background. From the first, Oliver is dazzled and infatuated by the exquisitely beautiful aristocratic student Felix Catton, played by Jacob Elordi…

Felix holds court to the in-crowd of Oxford’s bright young things, yet on a caprice, he generously befriends timid, lower-class Oliver, who has helped him with his bike; perhaps Oliver is his project or pet or charity case or maybe Felix just feels he can relax around him the way he can’t with other members of the jeunesse dorĂ©e. Touched by Oliver’s sad and shocking stories of his home life, Felix invites him for the summer vacation to his father’s palatial estate, Saltburn, a place of real prewar grandeur that has evidently escaped being sold off to the National Trust. To pre-empt the obvious Brideshead comparison, Emerald Fennell [writer/director] has a line about Evelyn Waugh being supposedly obsessed with the house.

And so we meet his standard-issue eccentric blueblood clan, including father Sir James (Richard E Grant) and sexy-damaged sister Venetia (Alison Oliver); the superb Pike is Felix’s gorgeous, distrait ex-model mother Elsbeth, who has a showstopping line, explaining why she abandoned a youthful experiment with lesbianism and turned to heterosexuality. Then there is cousin-slash-houseguest-sponger Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a mixture of Waugh’s Anthony Blanche and Highsmith’s Freddie Miles, who resents the counter-jumper oik monopolising his best friend, Felix, and shrewdly suspects something slippery about Oliver. Mulligan plays Elsbeth’s morose friend Pamela – the houseguest who will never leave.

Surely cruel, beautiful Felix will tire of his plaything Oliver, who does not belong in this place? But the women of the family variously take a shine to Oliver and things don’t turn out this way. It’s all entertaining enough, although this is a Brideshead-lite, a Brideshead nobility without the Catholicism or the pathos or the wartime regret. …

Robbie Collin writes to much the same effect in the Daily Telegraph:

…“All of Waugh’s characters are based on my family, actually,” Felix glidingly explains – which is writer-director Emerald Fennell acknowledging the debt with an outrageous stage wink. Fennell’s uproarious follow-up to her 2020 debut Promising Young Woman, which opened the London Film Festival tonight, is a sort of Brideshead Regurgitated: a macabre class satire that’s so drunk on its own daring, it all but asks you to hold its hair out of its face while it kneels by the toilet.

For readers uncertain as to whether this qualifies as a recommendation, take it from someone who spent half of the film barking with laughter and the other half watching through his fingers: it is. Set in the mid-noughties, and with the glorious pop soundtrack to prove it, Saltburn is both a riveting cuckoo-in-the-nest psychological thriller and a laser-accurate send-up of the modern English gentry’s crumbly plight…

Saltburn is stowed with terrific performances, from Keoghan’s skin-pricklingly enigmatic lead turn to Elordi’s note-perfect guileless toff, to the chokingly funny-slash-sad supporting turns from Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant as Felix’s parents. It’s also needlingly perceptive on identity: particularly that inbuilt young-adult resistance to defining oneself by one’s roots. And the details of its ultra-specific milieu are musically precise, from Pike’s throwaway reference to her teenage daughter’s bulimia as “you know
fingers for pudding” to Grant’s perusal of the News of the World over Sunday breakfast.

The film’s secret ingredient, though, is its sheer, nude-bungee-jumping-level fearlessness. British cinema hasn’t been this badly behaved since the days of Nic Roeg and Ken Russell, and was frankly in need of the shake-up. Fennell has a sharp eye for outrage, and an even sharper one for hotness, crafting any number of scenarios and images here that may elicit sotto voce phwoars against your better judgement. In the final stretch, Saltburn overplays its hand: the (unavoidable) tying up of loose ends takes a while, and it’s a pity that so much juicy ambiguity is shooed away via flashback. But it rallies with a final sequence that left my jaw rattling round my knees: this is cinema as mischief, with a raw saline bite.

The film opens in UK cinemas on 17 November.

—Pembroke College/Oxford has announced a series of seminars that may be of interest:

These weekly open seminars are run by our Chaplain, The Revd Dr Andrew Teal, and will take place every Thursday [starting 12 October] during term-time from 13:05 to 13:55. All students of any subject are welcome, as well as any interested participants from local faith communities and the wider city.

Whilst there is a particular relevance for theologians (by providing unusual primary material and broad discussion), this is an opportunity for honest discussion, dialogue, and exploration, in which members of the wider community are warmly invited to participate.

Water will be provided, but please feel free to bring your own lunch as well.

A Handbook of material and bibliographical references will be available electronically. Please do not hesitate to contact the Chaplain for further information.

Please find exact dates and topics listed below:

Theology in Dialogues (1): Through Poetry & Literature

Week 1, October 12th (Eccles Room): Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

Subsequent seminars will be devoted, inter alia, to Waugh’s contemporaries John Betjeman (2 Nov) and Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory (30 Nov).

–An essay on Thomas Merton’s book The Seven Story Mountain appears in the current issue of the Jesuit review America. This is by Gregory Hillis who mostly discusses how Merton’s book came to be written and what it has meant to  him. Toward the end he writes this:

The Seven Story Mountain is not perfect. It is overly wordy and needed more thorough editing. (The great English Catholic novelist, Evelyn Waugh, liked the book, but was so taken aback by the writing that he sent Merton a book on how to write more effectively). In his early writings, Merton depicts Catholicism in a triumphalist manner that doesn’t reflect his later theological depth of understanding. But these imperfections hardly registered for me when I read it for the first time. Much more important to me was the way in which his experiences spoke to my own—decades after Merton recorded them.

The author of the article may not be aware that Waugh also edited the UK edition of the book to reduce the wordiness about which he complains. This was published in the UK in 1949 as Elected Silence. Waugh also visited Merton in Kentucky during his late 1948 visit to the United States to research an article about Roman Catholicism in America that Waugh wrote for Life Magazine. Waugh’s edits were among the topics discussed during that visit.

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Posted in A Handful of Dust, Alexander Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Film, Newspapers, Oxford, Podcast | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Columbus Day Roundup: 2 Podcasts, a Film and a Seminar

Roundup: Anniversaries, Flemings and Nature Writing

Posted on September 30, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–A feature length article in the religious journal Crisis Magazine marks the anniversary of Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism on 29 September 1930. This is written by S A McCarthy and entitled “The Curmudgeonly Catholic: Three Life Lessons from Evelyn Waugh.” Here’s an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

…Born in Hampstead, England, in 1903 and raised in the Anglican church, Waugh was an aggressive agnostic by the age of fifteen and a full-fledged hedonist by the time he started studying at the University of Oxford. His time there was spent predominantly in drunkenness and homosexual relationships. His studies suffered to the extent that he was forced to leave and take a position as a schoolteacher at a ramshackle school in Wales, which served as the inspiration for his first novel, Decline and Fall, a semi-autobiographical comedy published in 1928.

As a newly-successful writer, Waugh returned to the party scene in Oxford and London, focusing his romantic interests on women now, not on men. His first marriage fell apart when his wife had an affair, rebuffed Waugh’s attempts at reconciliation, and eventually left him. Having attempted suicide once before, Waugh sought refuge this time in the pinnacle of order here on earth: the Catholic Church.

Through his hard-partying early twenties, Waugh had become disillusioned with the modern world and all it had to offer. He saw the decaying of sexual morality in particular as a threat to civilization. Upon his conversion to Catholicism on September 29, 1930, he wrote, “The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.”…

What follows is a well written and entertaining account about how Waugh’s conversion affected his life and writing career. It appears accurate and well researched although I would question this particular assertion: “Even after his first marriage crumbled, Waugh engaged in harmless (mostly humorous) flirtations but never went to bed with a woman until he married Laura in 1937.” (Emphasis supplied.) While there is no proof to the contrary, Waugh formed several close relationships with women during the early thirties (e.g. Pixi Marix, Hazel Lavery, and Joyce Fagan Gill: Hastings, pp. 244-46, 328-331) and may well have gone to bed with some of them. There are also amusing anecdotes which I do not recall seeing before or had forgotten such as his letters to a dog named Grainger and his embarrassment of a guest named Moor.

–A new biography of Ian Fleming has been written by Nicholas Shakespeare. He will be remembered by our readers as the writer-director of BBC Arena’s Waugh Trilogy documentary from the 1980s. Novelist Philip Hensher has reviewed the Fleming biography in The Spectator. He writes:

…Novels thrive during periods of brutal inequality, such as late Victorian Britain, but also when thrown into violent opposition to societies attempting to restrict personal enterprise. One of the most extravagant moments of fiction’s flourishing in our country came about in this mood of opposition after the second world war. With rationing continuing for years, taxation at levels approaching confiscation and a loss of all remembered excesses to a spirit of moral disapproval, the novel entered a glorious phase of opulence. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was one of the first; but if you come across a description of central heating in the fiction of this time, or an account of characters stuffing themselves with tournedos Rossini, you can be pretty sure of its appeal to a first readership shivering over a supper of snoek on toast.

Not the least of these marvellous monuments are the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming. Reading them, one has to remember the circumstances that made those gluttonous descriptions of meals and the tossing away of fortunes at the roulette table so agreeable…

This extract from the biography appeared in The Times:

…Some readers identified with Fleming’s hero so closely they fancied themselves to have been his model. Four months after Ian’s death, Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh: “Nothing on the breakfast tray but people who think they are James Bond or want to be James Bond.”

Fleming was skilful at fanning speculation. “To Pat, who was the model. The Author.” This inscription in Casino Royale was to Iva Patcevitch, who had stayed at Goldeneye. “He said that he thought James Bond was meant to look like me.” Then again, Fleming said the same thing to another visitor, Ann’s friend Lucian Freud, whom he detested. “You’re just like my hero” — which surprised Freud for not being sarcastic, for once.

Was there an original? Bond was a fictional compound of the agents and commando types he had met during the Second World War, a medley of himself and what he had asked others to do or heard they had done. “It’s my experience in naval intelligence and what I learnt about secret operations of one sort or another, that finally led me to write about them — in a highly bowdlerised way — with James Bond as the central figure.” He had reached out and gathered in all those he had known, all the “shenanigans” they were involved in, some of which he personally had “got mixed up in”, and reconfigured them into a single protagonist who had contours like Ian’s in his bachelor heyday, when he was at the centre of things and not, as he now felt, on the margin.

Add to that the lesion of Fleming’s unacknowledged war record. As his friend and naval intelligence colleague Robert Harling said, “I think he was a little piqued that he got no decoration at the end of it.”…

The book is entitled Ian Fleming: The Complete Man and will be available next week in the UK and next March in the USA.

–Meanwhile, The Times has recently published in its “Rereading” column an article by James Owen entitled “Brazilian Adventure by Peter Fleming–Here’s the real inspiration for James Bond.” That book by Ian’s brother also influenced Evelyn Waugh to make the trip to British Guiana and Brazil described in his 1934 travel book Ninety-Two Days. This is discussed in the introduction to the CWEW edition of that book.

In the Times article, Owen explains the connection between Peter Fleming’s travel writing and that of Waugh:

Like Evelyn Waugh, … Fleming came of a generation that instinctively rejected the values that had led Britain into a war in which his father had been killed. Where Ian’s hero would respond to a changing world by doubling down as the English gentleman, Peter looked to send up his code of behaviour in scintillating comic writing.

–Christie’s has announced the results of Part I of their auction of Charlie Watts’s book collection. One of Waugh’s books broke the auction record:

“The results so far for this landmark collection – celebrating the life and legacy of Charlie Watts – are a true testament to the erudite and passionate eye of Charlie, the epitome of an informed and inspired collector. Don’t miss further opportunities to secure remarkable Literature and Jazz lots in Part II which remains open for bidding until midday on 29 September, when it will begin to close sequentially. We look forward to sharing the final results.”

…

Evelyn Waugh’s classic Brideshead Revisited, inscribed to his World War II Commander, also made a new auction record, achieving £60,480.

Here’s a link to the full results.

–The Financial Times has an article by Katie Tobin explaining how the film and TV adaptations of Brideshead Revisited powerfully influenced her domestic tastes. Here’s how it opens:

The early months of my first year at university were filled with an ennui I attributed to my living situation at the time. Our flat didn’t have a communal dining area, so meals were an even more solitary affair than most students had to contend with. The only consolation was that my halls of residence nestled on the edge of the South Downs, a view of rolling hills and dense woodlands gracing my window.

I started to devour campus fiction as a kind of literary refuge: Vladimir Nabokov, Jeffrey Eugenides, Donna Tartt, Elif Batuman, and perhaps most resonantly, Evelyn Waugh. The aggressive brutalism of my undergraduate campus bore little resemblance to Waugh’s Oxford, but a Brideshead Castle-esque manor house lay only a short distance from my room. When we finished our lectures for the day, my friends and I would often walk around the grounds, musing over how we would decorate our own homes in the future. For me, Brideshead — as brought to life in Julian Jarrold’s 2008 film — always sprang to mind.

–The Sydney Morning Herald has a brief article about the status of nature writing in a world where the natural environment is radically changing. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh did a splendid send-up of nature writing in his novel Scoop. His hero William Boot writes a newspaper column called Lush Places. A typical column begins “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole 
“

How times have changed. Thanks to global warming, the lush places are either too lush or have dried up and the vole might have ceased questing for evermore. Now a branch of literature that in the past has often seemed a bit leisurely and indulgent has taken on a new urgency. Maybe getting people galvanised about nature will stem the tide of climate change. But how do we galvanise readers?…

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Late September Roundup

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent issue of the Financial Times carries a story of the impact of Evelyn Waugh and his contemporaries on the latest mens fashions. Here’s an excerpt:

This season, menswear has embraced the gimlet-tinged mood of Cecil Beaton’s diaries, the roman Ă  clefs of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, and the posturing of their 1920s peers. You can see it in the lace and exaggerated puffed sleeves at Simone Rocha, the Genet-like Marseille sailors at SS Daley and the flamboyant tailoring at McQueen and Peter Do. Most of Dries Van Noten’s collections feature pyjama silks that Beaton’s subjects would have loved. …

Designer and photographer Cecil Beaton has frequently revisited the 1920s and the so-called Bright Young Things, as documented by Beaton, Mitford, Waugh, and the tabloids of the day. “Those androgynous, luxurious and often queer-coded self-representations resonate with today’s menswear designers,” says Jay McCauley Bowstead, lecturer in cultural and historical studies at the London College of Fashion, and author of Menswear Revolution: The Transformation of Contemporary Men’s Fashion. “The famous Cecil Beaton photograph from 1927 of Stephen Tennant, Rex Whistler and the Jungman sisters dressed in a joyous simulacrum of 18th-century dress in Tennant’s garden in Wiltshire comes to mind.”…

The story by Mark O’Flaherty is entitled “How fashion got stuck in the Waugh zone” and is headed by a copy of the painting of the 26-year old Waugh by Henry Lamb.  It also contains several photos illustrating his point. Here’s a link.

–Writer Jonathan Raban’s final book entitled Father and Son has been published and is reviewed by Carl Hoffman in the Washington Post. Although Raban (a distant relative of Evelyn Waugh) didn’t like to be labelled a “travel writer”, he wrote several of his best books about his travels:

…The greats of travel literature were products of one very small island that ruled for centuries over an empire upon which the sun never set, and out from which a tiny population of erudite, upper-class White men embarked. The conceit of Raban in Arabia and all those men he was emulating — from Robert Byron to Peter Fleming, V.S. Pritchett to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, who infamously traveled “when the going was good” — was civilized man among the savages. They weren’t all British or even men, of course. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” is one of the most iconic lines in travel literature, but “Out of Africa,” by Isak Dinesen, is what it is: a lyrical, romantic homage to colonialism by a rich baroness in which the indigenous Kikuyu — “my Natives,” as she calls them — are childlike and her 6,000-acre farm wasn’t land appropriated from them by force…

Raban’s book intersperses memories of his father, whom Raban first encountered at age three due to his father’s war service, with his own last days in which he suffered from debilitating health problems.

–Rupert Murdoch’s recent announcement of his retirement has elicited from the press reminders of a Waugh character. For example, an article by Adrian Wooldridge on the Bloomberg news service has appeared in several papers. Here’s an excerpt from the Washington Post:

…Murdoch is the only contemporary figure who can be spoken of in the same breath as the great press barons of yesteryear: Alfred Harmsworth, the Napoleon of Fleet Street who invented the tabloid; William Randolph Hearst, who perfected the arts of sensationalism, salaciousness and war-mongering; and Lord Beaverbrook, who competed with Hearst in his enthusiasm for blurring the line between reporting the news and making it. If Hearst gave the world Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane, and Beaverbrook Evelyn Waugh’s Lord Copper, Murdoch gave it Logan Roy, the foul-mouthed master of family dysfunction. …

And this appeared in the Boston Herald, a paper Murdoch had rescued from failure:

…In the late 1980’s, as he began expanding into TV, Murdoch would fly into Boston just before Christmas and host a fancy dinner at a nice steakhouse for the top people at the Herald. I remember one year he told us not to worry about all these stories that he was losing interest in print. “The backbone of any media company is content,” he said. “And print people are the only ones who can produce the proper content. So this corporation will always be based in print.” We believed him — up to a point, to use the expression Lord Copper’s minions would use to agree with, sort of, their media mogul boss’ disassembling in Evelyn Waugh’s classic Fleet Street novel, Scoop. …

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Roundup: Book Fair and Vanity Fair

Posted on September 16, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Empire State Rare Book and Print Fair in early October has announced its exhibitors and events. This will take place at St Bartholomew’s Church on Park Ave betw. 50th-51st Streets starting 5 October. There are two live events of special interest to our readers. These are both on Friday, 6 October. Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg will appear for a “fireside chat” between 5-8pm. Here’s an excerpt of the description of his career:

If fame, though fleeting, matters at all, Michael Lindsay-Hogg is partly famous as the director who lured The Beatles up on the roof for their final-ever Concert as the climax to his film, Let It Be, which provided all the footage for Peter Jackson’s epic “documentary about the making of a documentary,” Get Back…

Moving to TV drama, Michael received four BAFTA nominations. In 1981, he won as Co- Director for Brideshead Revisited…

Lindsay-Hogg worked with Derek Granger on the casting, settings and script of the TV adaptation. He directed the first episodes and several portions of the later episodes but was forced to drop out for filming most of the later episodes because of a strike which delayed the production. He now lives in Upstate New York.  Preceding Lindsay-Hogg will be Daisy Waugh, speaking at 3-4 pm on the topic of “Writing Fiction”. Here’s the description:

Daisy Waugh has written 12 novels which, between them, have been translated into many languages. Three of those novels were set in early 20th century Hollywood, New York and Colorado.. She  has written two further novels under the name EV Harte, starring a tarot-reading detective.  Most recently, she has written a series of comic murder mysteries starring a family of contemporary British aristocrats. The third in the series, Old School Ties, will be published in the UK in September. She  is the granddaughter of Evelyn Waugh and daughter of Auberon Waugh.

According to the announcement, tickets to the fair will include entry to the foregoing events as well as the exhibits. Here’s a link to the details.

—Vanity Fair has an article by James Reginato on famous country house estates in Yorkshire, with detailed background histories on three of them. One (Castle Howard) is well known in this parish:

Over the years, various film productions—Brideshead Revisited and Bridgerton, most notably—have brought in much-needed cash. But when producers of the latter called, the family was skeptical. “I knew the books, because they had been published by Harper Collins,” says [Victoria] Barnsley. “This wasn’t Evelyn Waugh, put it that way.”

Another Yorkshire estate also has a connection to Evelyn Waugh but is less well known. This is Sledmere, discussed in another section:

“Some might argue that Sledmere, as the seat of mere baronets, hardly qualifies as a great house,” posits Christopher Simon Sykes, 75, a great-great-great-great-great-grand-nephew of Richard Sykes, builder of the aforementioned estate. The gray stone exterior of the house is fairly austere. But once inside, there’s nothing plain—or small—about it, and it sits on just under 9,000 acres.

This is the family home of Waugh’s friend and biographer Christopher Sykes who must have lived there as a child. Although not himself mentioned in the article, some of his siblings and perhaps his children and grand children are described. Waugh was certainly a more frequent guest at Sledmere than he was at nearby Castle Howard.

While researching Sykes’ life for the note above, I discovered that he was the co-author with another of Waugh’s Oxford friends Robert Byron of a novel called Innocence and Design (London, 1935). Its authorship was attributed to “Richard Waughburton”. It seems to be well known among booksellers as there are several copies available at collectable prices. What struck me as odd is that I don’t recall any of Waugh’s biographers or critics mentioning this. Byron’s biographer James Knox has a fairly detailed discussion of the book and its critical reception, noting, inter alia, that Waugh declared it “unreadable” (p. 334). Whether that was in a review or a letter isn’t stated. He wasn’t keeping a diary at the time.

–Kenneth Craycraft writing for a Roman Catholic news service (OSV News) notes the 100th anniversary of the Hogarth Press edition of Eliot’s The Wasteland:

I have long considered “The Wasteland” to be the poetic inspiration of such novels as Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” (among others), Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” and similar between-the-wars novels. Each of these works of literature are portraits of the disillusion and unmoored debauchery of post-World War II Europe. They are not celebrations of what the modern has wrought, but rather observations of the disaster and diagnosis of what it portends. All are “modernist” works, but only in the sense that the modern ought to make us shudder in anxious perplexity. We have lost our way, they all seem to say, and we haven’t the foggiest idea of how to find it again. Written before any of these novels, “The Wasteland” might be seen as the blueprint for all of them.

Indeed, Waugh used a line from “The Wasteland” as the title of another of his novels from that period, “A Handful of Dust.” If you know the novel, you can see how it was inspired by these lines from Eliot:

“You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water. / Only / There is shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

And in Waugh’s most famous (if not his best) novel, “Brideshead Revisited,” the stuttering character Anthony Blanche delivers from memory a passage from “The Wasteland,” at the window of lodgings at Oxford, in order to scandalize the earnest undergraduates passing by in the quad: “In languishing tones [Anthony] recited passages from ‘The Wasteland’ to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river. ‘I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all,’ he sobbed to them from the Venetian arches; ‘Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed, / I who have sat by Thebes below the wall / And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead.’”

 

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Roundup: Events and Architecture

Posted on September 10, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Waterstones the booksellers have announced a live, in-person interview of Andrew Pettegree on the subject of his latest book entitled “The Book at War”. This will take place on 17 October, 1830-1930p at the Waterstones store in Canterbury, 6-8 Rose Lane. Martin Latham will be the interviewer. Here’s what they will be talking about:

Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando – before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book at War, acclaimed historian Andrew Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture – from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank – has shaped, and been shaped, by the conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war – and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace.

Ticketing and other details are available here.

–The University Church in Oxford (St Mary the Virgin, just down the street from Hertford College) has posted this in an announcement of a service this week:

The cross is arguably the most iconic of all icons: an instantly recognisable symbol that is infinitely replicable, and which has spread across the world. We wear it on jewellery; we recreate it on our bodies when we make the sign of the cross; we hang it in our churches and even build our churches in its shape. And yet we rarely think, except perhaps on Good Friday, about the actual, physical cross on which Jesus died.

This is strange, since, as Evelyn Waugh expressed in his novel exploring the life of Empress Helena, ‘what is different about Christianity is that it identifies the mystery of God with a set of prosaic happenings in a specific place.’ God became a human being, at a particular time, in a specific place, and lived a human life, and died a human death. The cross is the ultimate expression of this specificity: a real physical object which not only touched Jesus’ body, but which was an instrument in his death, and therefore in our salvation. Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, is said to have discovered the True Cross when travelling in the Holy Land in the Fourth Century, sparking centuries of veneration of fragments and splinters of wood, as they spread across Europe and the world.

The service was for the feast of the Holy Cross on Sunday, 10 September at St Cross Church. The speaker was the Master of Balliol College, Dame Helen Ghosh.

–A current House and Garden magazine has an article by Fiona McKenzie Johnston discussing architectural and decorating “style tribes”.  She identifies several varieties such as “English Eccentrics” and “Espousers of Quiet Beauty” and concedes that one may comfortably claim membership in more than one tribe. Here’s one she describes one as “Country House Traditionalists.”

Nearly all of us fall into this tribe, or at least overlap with it – for English country house style, as perfected by the great Nancy Lancaster and John Fowler (who co-owned Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler) and immortalised by Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, and others, is hands down the most enduring decorating style of the last century, and there are several very good reasons why. It looks as glorious in a St. John’s Wood flat as it does in a sprawling Georgian rectory in Hampshire; there’s a high comfort quotient by way of deep squishy sofas and plenty of books to read, and, thanks to colour and pattern and a layering of both eras and rugs, it’s a perfect backdrop for children and dogs (in fact, you might argue that dogs are a vital ingredient)….

–This comment about architectural tastes recently appeared on the weblog of Charles Saumarez Smith:

I have just read the admirable short biography by John Holden, late of Demos, of Ralph Dutton who owned and reconstructed his family’s Victorian house of Hinton Ampner, employing Gerald Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, as its architect, just before the Second World War. It’s a fascinating, but in some ways frustrating, story because although Dutton seems to have had a wide circle of friends, many of them writers, including L.P. Hartley, James Lees-Milne and James Pope-Hennessy, none of them seem to have much to say about him, other than complimenting him on his impeccable taste and enjoying his hospitality. The only alternative glimmer of him appears in a characteristically waspish letter from Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford about a review he had written of Dutton’s book on The Victorian Home: ‘I took the writer to be a bumptious young puppy. I hear he is an aged and wealthy pansy’. Anyway, it has particularly good information on the taste for what Osbert Lancaster described as ‘Vogue Regency’ and a generation of Old Etonians who ran the arts.

The letters cited appeared in NMEW Letters 355-57 and relate to a review written by Waugh in the Sunday Times, 28 November 1954. This quote from the review appears in a footnote where Waugh describes Dutton’s book as one:

“which cannot be wholeheartedly recommended to any class of reader…The illustrations…are very poorly reproduced. The text is trite and patronizing…the only readers likely to derive enjoyment from it are those who indulge in the badger-digging of literary blood sports, the exposure of error.”

The book is unlikely to be all that bad, as Saumarez Smith cites an edition currently on offer 70 years later from Amazon.co.uk.

–Waugh (or his family) features in yet another architectural taste dispute cited in a Canadian entertainment website:

…Showbiz celebrities such as Emma Thompson, Imelda Staunton (The Queen of the latest episode of The Crown) and her husband Jim Carter (Butler Carson from Downton Abbey)…are outraged by a plan to build a glass and aluminum house in West Hampstead, an area on the northern outskirts of London where they live along with many other celebrities.

An American couple wants a new mansion. [They] made money on cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence and now dream of good retreat in a privileged segment of London. But the English actors are not in the know and have written a letter to the local council to oppose the project: according to them, new home [is] ‘better suited for Malibu’ while it is an eyesore in an area made up of Victorian and Edwardian Art Nouveau residences.

West Hampstead is something of a village in itself, dotted with small restaurants and independent shops: there is no McDonald’s or Zaras here, you’re having an outdoor brunch (weather permitting) or stopping to browse bookstores. It was here that writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Doris Lessing lived. Today it is home to actors such as Stephen Fry and pop stars such as Dua Lipa...

Evelyn Waugh did actually live in West Hampstead briefly, having been born there at 11 Hillfield Road on 28 October 1903. In 1907 the family moved to a house at 145 North End Road. I’m not sure what borough or postcode that was in when they moved, but by the time Waugh was a student, it became Golders Green NW11. It was never in West Hampstead (NW6) or Hampstead village (NW3). It is unlikely that Waugh ever expressed any societal or architectural enthusiasm over the Waugh’s residence on Hillfield Road as he was 4 only years old when they moved. There has been considerable comment, however, on his attitude toward the social position of the house on North End Road, but that’s another story.

–The Guardian concludes a series of articles on emotion in books, with the final topic being ambition (or “those who are determined to succeed”). This is written by Sophie Ratcliffe and concludes with this:

… while we may be struck by memoirs of odds overcome – from Tara Westover to Barack Obama – we are equally drawn to ambition in miniature – the everyday striving, and seemingly ordinary achievements, through which we may glimpse what Larkin terms an “enthralled/ Catching of happiness”.

Such scaled-back ambition is well caught in Metamorphosis, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s memoir about living with MS. “Always,” he writes at his book’s close, “there is the potential for something new to go wrong, or something old to deteriorate,” but, on waking one morning, he decides to risk it and “go for a walk”. There’s a knowing irony to his chosen route march – “the top of a nearby hill, a little over a mile away” looking over the “lead domes” and “thick fingers of honey-coloured stone” of Oxford – for it is a view that conjures up ambition on a big canvas. Here are the dreaming spires, the “city of aquatint” in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It would, Douglas-Fairhurst writes, “be an easy stroll for most people, but for me it will be a little voyage into the unknown. I’m not entirely confident that I’ll make it there and back without my legs buckling underneath me, but there’s only one way to find out.” It’s a fitting end to this beautiful, formally ambitious book. Opening his front door, he steps “into the bright morning sunshine”.

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