Papers Praise BBC’s Decline and Fall

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times, Daily Telegraph and Guardian all make tonight’s first episode of the BBC’s adaptation of Decline and Fall recommended viewing. The notice in the Times’s “Viewing Guide” by James Jackson is the most detailed:

Alongside that other academia satire, Lucky Jim, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is one of the 20th century’s great debut novels. It helped to set a template for a strain of English satire in which pompous failures, manipulative women and alcohol conspire to create headaches for the hapless hero. … Jack Whitehall is convincingly bookish in the lead role, but the real fun is in the gallery of grotesques ripping it up around him. His Oxford dons, for example, are stiff-collared fogeys hammed to the hilt by Tim Pigott-Smith and Nickolas Grace (alumnus of another Waugh TV adaptation, Brideshead Revisited). David Suchet is Llanabba’s haughty headmaster…Meanwhile, the pupils are derisive, the common room decaying, and the alcoholic one-legged fellow don Grimes — Douglas Hodge, doing wonders with a potentially problematic character — gets Pennyfeather plastered, advising him to beat any of “the little turds” who put varnish on his chalk (the script is freely adapted). At least things look up when the alluring Mrs Beste-Chetwynde (Eva Longoria) asks him to be private tutor for her boy. What could go wrong? It all adds up to uncomplicated fun that captures hints of Waugh’s sour satirical undertow.

The tabloids also weigh in, with positive notices from the Mirror (“It all makes for a gloriously entertaining period comedy.”), the Evening Standard (“Friday night seems like an odd time for Decline and Fall to be airing. The new BBC comedy-drama boasts a period setting, a warm tone and an impressive cast that surely would nab it a Sunday evening slot – if Line of Duty wasn’t already there to give us all heart palpitations with its fourth series.”) and the Sun which finds Jack Whitehall “elevated to new levels of what he himself calls “proper acting”, and he passes with flying colours…Schoolboy and teacher shenanigans provide the laughs tonight, but things take a darker turn in the next two episodes…”

Radio Times also offers up support in the form of a feature article by Eleanor Bley Griffiths on Oxford’s Bullingdon Club and its inspiration for Waugh’s Bollinger Club in the novel:

When it comes to the real Bullingdon Club, there are no recorded instances of foxes being battered to death with bottles – but the secret society has a long history of bad behaviour….The Bullingdon Club pops up again in Brideshead Revisited (1945) when drunken members try to push Anthony Blanche into a college fountain. 

One dissenting voice comes from the New Statesman where Rachel Cooke writing in their TV and Radio column was less than enthusiastic:

Early Evelyn Waugh? No, me neither. But even if I was a fan, I would be slightly mystified by the BBC’s decision to commission an adaptation of his first novel, Decline and Fall (Fridays, 9pm). Why this book, now? The satire is somewhat laboured and it doesn’t score many points in the contemporary relevance stakes…

She finds much to like in the script and the performances (except for that of Eva Longoria as Margot Beste-Chetwynde):

Yet somehow it just never sparks to life. It is very silly and it is very white. How I wish the Beeb had done Scoop (again) instead.

The series starts tonight at 9pm on BBC One and will be available on the internet on BBC iPlayer shortly thereafter.

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BBC’s Decline and Fall Reviewed in The Tablet and The Spectator

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Two of the weeklies are the first off the mark with reviews of Episode 1 of BBC One’s Decline and Fall adaptation the day before it airs. These are by James Delingpole in The Spectator and Lucy Lethbridge in The Tablet and both are highly favorable. Lethbridge likes Jack Whitehall’s portrayal of Paul Pennyfeather and James Wood’s script adaptation but finds particularly praiseworthy the numerous supporting actors who:

…play to the hilt the gallery of grotesques that populate the lonely corridors of Llanabba. And how they have enjoyed themselves. David Suchet, splendidly, madly, off-kilter with an air of distracted distinction that hides an ineptitude of gothic proportions, is magnificent as the headmaster Dr Fagan. Douglas Hodge, once a stalwart young man of the 1990s classic drama, has adapted to middle-age triumphantly with a glorious performance as the ghastly, tragic, deluded Captain Grimes. …Then there is Mr Prendergast, “Prendy”, battered by religious doubts, the meaning of meaning, whose toupee has lost him every scrap of authority he ever had: “I don’t think anyone would fall in love unless they’d been told about it.”

Lethbridge’s only disappointment is Eva Longoria in the role of Margot Beste-Chetwynde (“too slight and uncharismatic next to the rich character parts playing alongside her. Her accent is all over the place and she mouths the words rather than understanding them.”) It should be recalled however that Margot is an outsider. Waugh described her as South American so one would expect some accent slippage. And her character as written by Waugh lacks the comic depth of the others.

Delingpole was skeptical of Whitehall’s ability to portray Pennyfeather with sufficient nuance but is in the end well pleased with his performance:

I’m happy to report that young Jack (still only 28, the bastard) has done Waugh proud. He has produced a performance, his most mature to date, entirely in the service of the part — which is to say, self-effacing, mildly bewildered, almost cipher-like in its modesty. Pennyfeather’s job, after all, is to act as the bemused butt of Waugh’s sadistic humour. The world is a cruel and unjust place, Waugh had already realised by the time (at 24) he published his first bestseller. Pennyfeather is his part autobiographical hero, part torture victim.

Delingpole also foresaw the difficulty of adapting a book which combined comedy with a pronounced darkness:

… the bleakness and callousness of Waugh’s world view which is — I suspect — tinged with not a little self-hatred. Waugh at Oxford — and he wasn’t the only one here present who felt that way — had more socially in common with Pennyfeather than he did with the Bollinger boys. … Get the tone even slightly wrong and you’d either end up with something queasily discomfiting or with something where all the jokes fall flat because everyone is just a caricature for whom you never really care. With this quite superb adaptation —scripted by James Wood (creator of Rev) — you do care because he has played it absolutely dead straight.

He expresses some disappointment in the apparent de-emphasis in the part of Chokey, Margot’s black lover, but can see how that may have been necessary: “This is the 1920s, after all — autres temps, autres moeurs.” The series starts tomorrow on BBC 1 at 9pm.

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Waugh, Helena and the Gnostics

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

George Weigel, author and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, has a written an essay aimed at generating interest in Waugh’s late novel Helena. Writing in the Catholic World Report, Weigel describes the novel as “slim and unappreciated” and, after a summary of the plot, explains that:

Helena discovers that post-persecution Christianity in Rome is embroiled in theological controversy, with various forms of Gnosticism threatening to reduce the faith to an arcane “knowledge” (the Greek “gnosis”) accessible only to the elite. So the elderly Helena, a practical British girl and something of a populist despite her status as Dowager Empress, decides to put paid to that nonsense by going to Jerusalem on pilgrimage and recovering the instruments of the passion: the physical evidence that Christianity, rather than being an esoteric myth, is founded on real events that happened to real people at a real time in a real place… Helena’s quest, which has its climax during Lent, is rewarded by the discovery of the True Cross. Helena is full of Waugh’s humor – including a hilarious putdown of Edward Gibbon and the anti-Christian motif in his [Decline] and Fall of the Roman Empire – which makes for easy and amusing reading. The author’s intent, however, was entirely serious…

Weigel concludes the essay with his explanation of Waugh’s intent and its application to a current controversy within the Roman Catholic Church relating to its teachings on marriage and divorce. You probably don’t have to be Roman Catholic or a Gnostic to understand and appreciate his conclusions, but it would help.

Waugh’s Catholicism also gets him mentioned in this week’s Spectator. This appears in A N Wilson’s review of the biography by Thomas Dilworth entitled David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet. Jones was also a Roman Catholic as is mentioned in this conclusion to Wilson’s favorable review:

The other ingredient in the story, once Jones had found his spiritual home, is the texture of Catholic life in England between the wars. Dilworth evokes what a small world it was, Jones numbering among his friends Vicky Ingrams, Hugh and Antonia Fraser, Julian Oxford, Martin D’Arcy and Evelyn Waugh. Jebbs, Pollens, Burnses, Woodruffs and Actons abound, many of them slipping the impoverished Jones cigarettes, whisky and cheques. The pen sketches of many of these characters are masterly. I liked the story of Evelyn Waugh telling Jones that his fringe of hair made him ‘look like a bloody artist’. ‘I am a bloody artist,’ Jones replied. That really is the story of this wonderful book.

In another review of Dilworth’s book written by Laura Freeman in Standpoint, Waugh is mentioned among the influential friends in the art world who supported Jones:

Dilworth reminds us of his friendships with the great and the generous. Jones was always hard up, keeping his trousers together with safety pins and wearing his coat in bed. Jim Ede and Kenneth Clark organised subscriptions and pensions. Harman Grisewood, who developed the BBC’s Third Programme, and Tom Burns, editor of the Tablet, indulged and encouraged him. He was fond of Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer, Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot, who published his poems at Faber. Anyone he really liked he called a “chap” — there was no higher term of praise.

UPDATE (11 April 2017): Rachel Cooke reviews Dilworth’s biography of David Jones in the Observer and has this to say about the allegedly reclusive artist-poet’s circle of friends:

… he is surely the most gregarious recluse who ever lived. He meets Yeats and Auden and attends Evelyn Waugh’s wedding; he has Christmas lunch with TS Eliot, and his new wife, Valerie (“Finished!” was Jones’s comment on Eliot’s creative life, on seeing his marital spooniness). What makes all this the more amazing is his itinerant lifestyle. For a long time, he lived at home with his parents. But he was always camping, too, turning up at friends’ flats ready to outstay his welcome.

Waugh reviewed Jones’ book-length poem In Parenthesis in Night and Day a few weeks after his wedding (Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 195) and sent him a letter about a year later congratulating him on behalf of both himself and Laura on receiving the Hawthornden Prize for that book (Letters, p. 117). Waugh does not mention Jones as a wedding guest in his Letters and Diaries but must have admired him sufficiently at the time to have sent him an invitation.

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Waugh in the Media

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A discussion of Waugh’s novel Scoop takes place in a recent episode of the Federalist Radio Hour. This involves an interview of Christopher Scalia by presenter Ben Domenech. Scalia begins by explaining, inter alia,  his background as an academic and nearly 8 years teaching English Literature at the Wise, VA branch of the University of Virginia. The predicate for the discussion is Scalia’s recent article in the Washington Post recommending Scoop as an alternative to the dystopian novels such as 1984 which are proving popular in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency. See previous post. This discussion begins at about the 42:00 minute mark of a 55:00 minute broadcast. At one point Scalia illustrates the importance of making the public understand that they should put the media into proper perspective. He quotes Corker from the novel where the reporter attempts to explain to William Boot the basis for the media’s unjustifiably high estimation of itself. This is intended as a useful reminder to today’s equally self-inflated media.

In another interview widely reported in the gossip columns, actress Emma Thompson recalls having nearly walked out on the 2008 production of Brideshead Revisited in which she played Teresa Flyte. Thompson’s outrage was raised by the proposal made to one of the other female cast members (unnamed) to lose some weight before proceeding with her role.

Brideshead Revisited also makes an appearance on a website supported by the spirits industry. This recommends a top 10 list of spirit-based drinks with a literary background: 

In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the character of Anthony Blanche is a flamboyant and “overt homosexual”. Witty and charming, we are told “his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than in the wish to shock”. One of his such vices was a fondness for an Alexander cocktail, a blend of gin, cream and creme de cacao. Waugh himself, however, favoured beer or claret.

Waugh might well have put champagne (even when mixed with some form of spirits into a cocktail) ahead of beer or claret, which would normally be drunk with a meal rather than beforehand. 

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Decline and Fall Profiled in Independent

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Independent newspaper (still publishing online) has profiled the BBC’s upcoming production of Waugh’s Decline and Fall. The article is written by Gerard Gilbert and contains much of the same material from cast and crew interviews as that appearing in the other papers. Gilbert does, however, express more skepticism than some of the others. This is based primarily on his disappointment with the BBC’s adaptation of the P G Wodehouse Blandings stories which “only served to confirm for me that much can be lost between page and screen, especially humour so reliant on comic tone and use of language as Wodehouse and Waugh.” 

Gilbert also shares scriptwriter James Wood’s fears based on previous Waugh adaptations:

… as Wood points out, none of Waugh’s books have proved particularly attractive to television executives. “In my lifetime there has been a very famous Brideshead in the 1980s that people still talk about now, and the Sword of Honour trilogy was done with Daniel Craig and adapted by William Boyd. And that’s it. It’s not like the drama department where you get another Bleak House every 15 years – the kind of literary churn, Waugh is not part of that at all.” Perhaps part of the reason might be some of the attitudes and language in Decline and Fall would these days be problematic. 

Gilbert recognizes that this production will be a challenge but thinks the carefully chosen cast as well as the experienced Wood (who has the comic series Rev to his credit) may be up to the task.

An unidentified blogger posting on the site Light on Dark Water (26 March 2017, “Sunday Night Journal”) decribes his experience with the Waugh adaptation that perhaps caused the greatest disappointment, at least to Waugh himself. He downloaded The Loved One and watched it with some hesitation: 

Months went by and it remained unwatched. I was seriously considering deleting it but decided to give it a chance. So my wife and I watched it. When it was over, we said “Well, that was strange.” It was funny, but…I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of it, and whether I wanted to recommend it to anyone else. I thought I might watch it again, so instead of deleting it I left it there. Another six months or so went by, and a couple of weeks ago I watched it again. This time I said again, “Well, that was strange.” But it’s also very funny, in a monstrous kind of way. And yes, it is good, quite good on the whole, and so I do recommend it to anyone who likes Waugh.

The blogger goes on to explain that after the first viewing he had reread the book fairly carefully. This made it possible to understand that the adaptation often followed the book, even down to copying the some of the dialogue directly, but then went well beyond it with the plotline in which the Whispering Glades cemetery is to be redeveloped into a shopping mall or something similar after the “loved ones” are disinterred and launched into space. It sounds funnier than it is, but the blogger concludes:

And it all ties together: Glenworthy’s machinations [to redevelop the cemetery] are not an extraneous subplot but are directly connected to the triangle…My only serious reservation is with the treatment of Joyboy’s home life, and his mother. She’s barely present in the book, and seems at worst to do a lot of complaining. The filmmakers chose to make her something of a monster, an enormously fat woman with repulsive habits, and to give the relationship between her and her son a pathological twist. Those scenes are off-putting to say the least, and almost enough to make me dis-recommend the film. So be warned about that, but if you like Waugh and have a taste for black humor in general, have a go at The Loved One.

There are also more postings on the Decline and Fall adaptation. The BT.com site has some background material on Waugh and the novel (“Five things you didn’t know about Evelyn Waugh”). The first episode is favorably previewed on The National Student:

The script is updated and brilliant, featuring some great contemporary references…has the ability to embed you in the world of Waugh. Costumes and locations work seamlessly together, making the programme feel strangely like a period drama. Period comedies are a rarer breed at the moment, so this is welcome… a long overdue adaptation, but the first episode is slightly let down by a slight stagnancy that plagues it. … around 40 minutes in I found myself checking my watch and growing slightly restless. It picked up the pace not long after, but the action of the last few minutes felt rushed after a much slower 20 minutes.

And one of the actors Gemma Whelan, who plays one of the Fagan sisters (Dingy), can be followed on Twitter as she anticipates the series premiere on BBC1 this Friday. 

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Waugh’s Bazaar

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of Harper’s Bazaar (May 2017) has an article by Alex Preston based on the magazine’s archives that should be of interest:

Alex Preston explores the Bazaar archives in our 150th-anniversary year, to discover a story of love, loss and betrayal that was played out in the pages of the magazine in the 1930s between Evelyn Waugh, his wife and her lover. All three were contributors to Bazaar, and despite the deep unhappiness caused by the end of Waugh’s marriage, his extraordinary talent blossomed in this magazine: perhaps most notably with his series entitled ‘A Flat in London’, which was subsequently published (with a darker ending) as A Handful of Dust, that great masterpiece of 20th-century fiction.

Waugh recycled his short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (published in late 1933 and collected in Complete Short Stories) as the ending of A Handful of Dust, which was written later. Because Waugh had sold exclusive magazine rights for that short story, he could not use that text for the ending of Bazaar’s serialized version of the novel. So he wrote a substitute ending in which Tony Last remains in London and has a very satisfactory revenge. The story told in the serial’s ending is related to the title (“A Flat in London”) which Waugh explains was chosen by the magazine.  In some respects it is a more satisfactory ending (at least for readers of the magazine if not literary critics) and arguably fits better with the plot of the novel. The serial “A Flat in London” appeared in both the US and UK editions of Harper’s Bazaar between June-October 1934.

When he published a revised version of the book in 1964, Waugh included the Bazaar serial ending as an “alternative” and deemed it “a curiosity.” Waugh claims in the preface to that edition that, when he wrote the novel a year after the story was published, the novel was “on the theme of the betrayed romantic, affording an explanation of my hero’s presence in the South American bush.” That was also the briefly stated premise for the hero’s signing on to a South American expedition in “The Man Who Liked Dickens.” 

Preston’s article appears in the UK edition of Harper’s Bazaar but may not be included in the US edition. Perhaps some of our UK readers who have access to the article might wish to comment on its contents. It would, for example, be interesting to know what contributions were made to the magazine by Evelyn Gardner and John Heygate.

UPDATE (4 April 2017): The alternative ending to A Handful of Dust is also included in the short story collection Mr Loveday’s Little Outing and Other Sad Stories (London, 1936) where it has the title “By Special Request.” There is also a brief introduction explaining that it was used to replace the final chapters of the novel in the serialized version. It is headed Chapter Five which has the title “The Next Winter.” It also appears in this form in The Complete Short Stories (London, 1998), with the Roman numeral “I” replacing “Chapter Five.” It is not included in the US collection of short stories entitled Tactical Exercise (Boston, 1954), but is included in the most recent version of the US collection entitled The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (New York, 2012) in a slightly different format from the 1998 UK collection.

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Waugh in Scandinavia (More)

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A Swedish newspaper has printed a review of a new translation of A Handful of Dust into Swedish (En Handfull Stoft) published by Modernista. The article is by Crister Enander and appears in the Helsingfors Dagblad. After a brief summary of Waugh’s life, stressing his fight against melancholy bolstered by his rich life and his religion, Enander describes A Handful of Dust as one of his “most hilarious novels with a deceptively light-hearted setting. The external action may be seen as a parody of infidelity marked by the genre’s charming banality.” After summarizing the plot, he compares Waugh’s realism to that of Balzac in his Human Comedy series:

It is more truthful to say that Evelyn Waugh’s keen eye and ability to see through the failings of others’ inner lives in a society that started to lose its moral moorings impels him to write novels that rip up the characters with their roots and reveal the innermost secrets … The characters’ lives are portrayed more authentically than perhaps he himself is fully aware. 

The article concludes with the thought (which is also reflected in the title and introduction) that in this novel “literature triumphs over contempt and chronic melancholy.” 

Another article has appeared in the Norwegian press about the recent translation of the 1959 revised edition of Brideshead Revisited. See earlier posts. This is published in the newspaper Dagbladet and is written by Fredrik Wandrup. He first mentions Decline and Fall which is not available in Norwegian but he recalls the 1968 film adaptation that played there and that he thought hilarious. He also thinks Scoop should be required reading for all journalism students. The article continues:

“Brideshead Revisited” is not satirical in the same manner as these precursors. … The new translation of Johanne Fronth-Nygren is super. She has also written a rich and interesting epilogue. “For me Brideshead both in form and content stands out as a sparkling illustration of our human urge to create order, our ultimately vain attempt to gain control over their own and others’ lives.” She has also provided the book with an appendix explaining expressions and phrases from the text … Waugh was known for his biting irony and self-destructive lifestyle, and he was hardly easy to impress. After a visit to Oslo in 1947, he compared Frognerparken to Hiroshima and argued that the nation smelled of herring. But Norwegian TV viewers loved Brideshead. It was shown three times on NRK and once on TV3.

The translations are by Google Translate and are a bit rough in patches. Comments would be appreciated.

 

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Waugh and The Queen Anne Press

Posted on March 26, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent TLS article in its weekly back page NB column is devoted to the Queen Anne Press. This was written in response to the publication of a special issue of the Book Collector magazine devoted to Ian Fleming. The QAP was started 65 years ago in 1952 by Fleming as part of his efforts to revive the Book Collector. The special issue includes a checklist of the QAP’s publications. Among early items was Waugh’s The Holy Places published in a limited edition in 1952 with specially commissioned engravings by Reynolds Stone. The text (but not the illustrations) was based on Waugh’s article for Life magazine (“The Plight of the Holy Places,” 24 December 1951). The QAP’s book was reviewed by Patrick Leigh Fermor in the Sunday Times (21 December 1952). He declared: “Few minor pleasures equal the delight of opening a book as beautifully presented as this.” Although not mentioned in the TLS article, Leigh Fermor also took issue with Waugh’s criticism of certain practices of Orthodox churchmen at shrines in the Holy Land for failing to take account of the impact on them lingering from the Great Schism and the depredations of the Fourth Crusade. As noted in the TLS, notwithstanding Leigh Fermor’s praise of the book’s production standards, Waugh was unhappy with the result. He warned Nancy Mitford to have nothing to do with the QAP. The misprints were “many and glaring” and the engravings “by a protege of Betjeman’s” were “dull as be damned.”

The next QAP book to be published was by Leigh Fermor himself. This was entitled A Time to Keep Silence and was based on his visits to several monasteries. There may have been a little self promotion in Leigh Fermor’s praise of the production quality of Waugh’s book since he would have known that his own effort would be up to the same standards. As fate would have it, Waugh reviewed Leigh Fermor’s book in Time and Tide (“Luxurious Editions and Austere Lives,” 20 June 1953). The TLS columnist may not be aware of this review because it is not included in Waugh’s collected journalism. Waugh begins by praising the efforts of the QAP to raise the standards of fine book production in postwar Britain. He goes on to describe Leigh Fermor’s book as “one of their more creditable adventures…made of durable materials and well designed.” This faint praise is then followed by a catalogue of “uneven press work,” “excessive and imperfect” paper sizing, “ill-drawn and unsightly” decorations, stains running down the corners, clumsy blocking of the back label, etc. Waugh concludes this discussion with more but even fainter praise: “Taken all in all, however, this is a very decent little book technically and therefore an enjoyable rarity.” He then begins on Leigh Fermor’s text, first offering more fulsome praise: “the young wallowing in a rich vocabulary…as a writer decriptive of sensual experience Mr Leigh Fermor is very good indeed” and comparing him to Sacherverell Sitwell. But then he gets his own back for the Fourth Crusade reference by spending the last half of the review explaining how Leigh Fermor failed to understand the monastic life he attempts to describe because of his own agnosticism.

Returning to the TLS article, the columnist “J C” mentions his never having encountered a QAP book on his frequently mentioned expeditions to book barrows and market stalls. But he does spot a copy of Waugh’s book on ABE for £45 with a “dull-as-be-damned dust jacket” and Leigh Fermor’s book for £1350 with a scarce John Craxton dust jacket. Thanks to our reader Peggy Troupin for sending us a copy of the article which is not available on the internet.  

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Decline and Fall Previewed by Harry Mount and Saturday Review

Posted on March 26, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Journalist and critic Harry Mount has previewed the BBC adaptation of Decline and Fall in the Daily Mail (“Oh! What a Lovely Waugh!”):

Here’s hoping the TV adaptation – written by James Wood (Rev) – brings more readers to Waugh’s first novel, published in 1928 and written at the astonishing age of 24. Astonishing because, at that early age, all the miraculous Waugh elements are already there, fully formed: the perfectly pitched prose, the irony, the cynicism and the cruel, surprising, funny humour. Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s most famous novel, written in 1945, is a melancholy book about religion and the disappointments of middle age. Decline And Fall is about the misery of youth and the essentially wicked nature of mankind. Pennyfeather is the device Waugh uses to show how horrible the world is: an innocent young man constantly taken advantage of by nastier, richer, grander people. The middle-class Waugh delighted in moving in the upper-class circles he floated in at Oxford in the Twenties, but he could also see quite how decadent and spoilt that upper class was.

Mount continues with a discussion of the early Oxford scenes, confessing that he himself was a member of the Bullingdon Club (depicted in the novel and TV film as the Bollinger) in his undergraduate days (see earlier post) but notes that: 

25 years ago, our antics were pretty tame – little more than drinking a lot in silly clothes in picturesque corners of Oxfordshire. But, almost 90 years after Decline And Fall, the club’s image is still defined by Waugh’s much more dramatic description in the opening pages of the book…And so Pennyfeather begins his decline. Like Waugh – also chucked out of Oxford, for messing up his exams – he is forced to teach at a low-grade Welsh prep school.

The article concludes with Mount’s summary of the main characters (revealing that Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s surname is pronounced “Beest-Cheating”) and a brief synopsis of the rest of the story, but he clearly found the Oxford bits the most interesting.

It may be something of an overstatement to say that Waugh, like Pennyfeather, was “chucked out” of Oxford. Waugh was forced to leave after he received a poor Third Class grade on his final degree exams. This cost him his scholarship, and his father refused to pay his fees so he was forced to leave without fulfilling the residency requirement needed to receive his degree. But he was not sent down or expelled by the college authorities, as was the case of Pennyfeather. Under today’s practice, the requirement for the final term’s residency could be waived, and the degree, lowly it may have been, could have been awarded. 

This week’s episode of BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review also takes up the TV adaptation of Decline and Fall as well as other subjects. D&F is the final segment of the 42 minute program, beginning at about 35:00 minutes with the dialogue between Col Grimes and Pennyfeather when they first meet. The moderator is Tom Sutcliffe and his guests are Catherine Hughes (historian), Prof Christopher Frayling (writer and critic) and Alice Jones (writer). Frayling feared that the script was sailing too close to Hogwarts at the beginning but in the end got things just about right. Hughes was pleased that the story involves not so much the posh people Waugh wrote about later but middle class people desperately clinging to their status. She also joined with Jones and Sutcliffe to note that the story had been cleverly updated in several respects. Sutcliffe singles out in this regard the character of Otto Silenus who is given some  very funny lines not in the book: for example, he tells Margot that he loves her almost as much as he does concrete.

 

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D J Taylor Anticipates New TV Adaptation in Guardian

Posted on March 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Critic and novelist D J Taylor has written an article expressing somewhat nervous anticipation in advance of next week’s premier of BBC’s three-episode version of Decline and Fall. It appears in the Guardian and is entitled “Would Evelyn Waugh have approved of the new TV adaptation?” Taylor recalls Waugh’s previous disappointment with film adaptations–specifically, the Tony Richardson/Terry Southern version of The Loved One. which Waugh refused to see, expressing disappointment that the original plans for a film to be directed by Luis Bunuel and starring Alec Guinness had not gone ahead. The BBC’s new version of D&F 

has already stirred the usual mixed emotions among Waugh fans. On the one hand, warm satisfaction at the prospect of an adaptation brought to a TV channel otherwise graced by Mrs Brown’s Boys; on the other hand, a faint but congenital wariness born of the fact that so many dramatisations of the Waugh oeuvre have defied the best intentions of director and cast alike to produce films that, for all their enthusiasm, sell their onlie begetter woefully short.

Following the disappointing film of The Loved One, Taylor catalogues other adaptations starting in the late 1960s, after Waugh’s death, without expressing his opinion of their success one way or the other. He sees some hope in the fact that

It is difficult to go completely adrift with Waugh; dialogue alone is enough to carry a certain amount of weak casting or confusion over the precise satirical point.

Taylor sees some examples of this in Fenella Woolgar’s performance of Agatha Runcible in Stephen Fry’s 2003 adaptation of Vile Bodies. But he wonders how the scriptwriters of D&F will handle Waugh’s “mocking references” to Sebastian Cholmondeley. He points out that the most successful adaptation was ITV’s 1981 Brideshead Revisited where there was less comedy and several big roles that could be played by well-known actors. In the early novels such as D&F the scriptwriters must address the fact that “much of the humour is verbal rather than visual.” He gives as an example of the challenge this poses to scriptwriter James Wood the two-word sign off to the mention of Grimes’ marriage to the headmaster’s daughter: “Nothing happened.” To succeed Wood must triumph “on a battlefield piled with the bones of aspiring screenwriters who, like so many interviewing journalists, went to Waugh and lost.”

UPDATE (28 March 2017): D J Taylor’s article in the Guardian is now available online.

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