Patrick Melrose Novels to be Televised

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn will be adapted for television in a 5 episode series. Each episode will be devoted to one of the five novels. The satirical humor of these novels is often compared to the work of Evelyn Waugh. Benedict Cumberbatch who recently played Sherlock Holmes in the BBC adaptation, will play the lead role of Patrick. According to an article in The Independent, the series is to be adapted by David Nicholls and co-produced by two cable channels–Showtime and Sky Atlantic. Shooting is expected to begin in late summer. There is a 2012 film adaptation of one of the novels, Mother’s Milk, but it was not particularly successful at securing distribution. It was reviewed in the Guardian. Here’s an excerpt:

Edward St Aubyn has co-written this movie adaptation of his Booker-shortlisted autobiographical novel Mother’s Milk, directed by Gerry Fox. The result looks a bit like television, though it isn’t bad: sparky, boisterous, cynical, a little self-conscious but more grownup and literate than most new British movies. … The humour is brittle, British and throwaway, but with a tang of real poison. There is a sharp cameo from Diana Quick, Patrick’s malicious mother-in-law.

UPDATE (9 March 2017): The Evening Standard has interviewed novelist David Nicholls who is adapting the Melrose novels for TV. Here is an excerpt:

“The books are very dark, with very adult themes that I could never write about in my own original work. They’re about damaged people, terrible cruelty, coming to terms with an appalling crime and an attempt to find some kind of peace and redemption.” …As a satire on the world of public schools, posh people and parties, the books are often compared to Evelyn Waugh. …“As a dramatist you have to resist the temptation to turn it into aristocrat-bashing.” There was also the delicate issue of how to depict the violent rape of the five-year-old Melrose by his own father. “Certain things you can’t do, moments that are moved off-screen, implied or referred to in retrospect. The focus is very much on the legacy rather than the crime itself,” says Nicholls, who sweetly emails me later to say he’s worrying about spoilers, especially as filming doesn’t start until the summer.

UPDATE 2 (12 March 2017): Today’s New York Times Book Review added this to the discussion in its “Open Book” column:

In The Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote about St. Aubyn’s “remarkable” series: “The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation and black humor, as if one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time.”

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Waugh and the Great Ladies

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Lyndsy Spence, founder of The Mitford Society and editor of their annual collection of essays, articles and reviews (which recently published its 4th volume) has also written a series of essays about aristocratic women of the interwar period. This is entitled These Great Ladies: Peeresses and Pariahs and consists of studies of eight examples, including Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, Mariga Guinness, and Venetia Montagu. In her introduction, Spence credits Evelyn Waugh for having provided the inspiration for the book and its title:

When the stage adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies was to appear in a London theatre, aristocratic women, young and old, scrambled for tickets. Dedicated to Diana and Bryan Guinness, the book, when published in 1930, set high society ablaze. It was read by everyone, adored and vilified in equal measures, and through time it has become a life enhancer. Likewise when tickets were made available for the play, a socialite’s revolt took place. Emerald Cunard got her manicured claws on one, but complained about the location of her seating and about having to take Prince George to the eighteenth row. ‘Old trout,’ snapped Waugh, ‘she’s only an American anyway.’ A snob to his fingertips, even he was beyond forming a literary tease when Emerald, formerly named Maud, needled him. And Doris Castlerosse, a wily, willful courtesan known in lower echelons as Jessie Doris Delevingne, refused to pay for her ticket. ‘Oh dear,’ Waugh appeared lost for words, ‘these great ladies.’ Like Waugh, I am attracted to the glamour and artifice of their lives. From an outsider’s perspective nothing infiltrated their exclusive worlds. But dig a little deeper and one will find women with ordinary, universal problems while living extraordinary lives. I was drawn to women who were stars in their day but have fallen into obscurity, in the mainstream anyway. As such, I have chosen women who not only dazzle me but who were pioneers on the social front, albeit their fame for the sake of being famous or their social consciences. However behind the scenes they were quite naughty and lived by their own rules.

The quotes are from Waugh’s letter to Dorothy Lygon, dated 16 April 1932 (Letters, pp. 61-62) as cited in John Howard Wilson, Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography 1924-1966, p.92.

 

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Travel Guide to Guyana’s “Waugh Country” Launched

Posted on March 5, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guyana Chronicle has announced the launch of a tourist guide to the Rupununi region of southern Guyana:

…the North Rupununi was an extraordinary natural area in southern Guyana that for the last 30 years had been isolated from the public. The North Rupununi extends from the Siparuni River to the Kanuku Mountains and from the Essequibo River to the Brazilian border. The Rupununi website outlines that the area was well known in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it received visits from David Attenborough, Gerald Durrell, Evelyn Waugh and Charles Waterton; all of whom wrote eloquently of their experiences. Added to that the recent upgrading of the Georgetown-Lethem road and the completion of the Takutu Bridge, these open new economic opportunities that may bring rapid change to the savannahs, forests and eco-systems.

This is the area traversed by Waugh in 1932-33 on his visit to what was then British Guiana. He described his trip in his travel book Ninety-Two Days (1934) and fictionalized it in his short story “The Man Who Loved Dickens” (1933), later incorporated into the novel A Handful of Dust (1934). Although the article provides no link to an online version of the new guidebook, one wonders whether it may contain an entry for the:

Todd Guest Ranch in McMaster Township. Traditional rustic accommodation dating back to colonial days. Long stay visits a speciality. Full board emphasizing local cuisine. Book groups welcome. Library available to qualified readers.  Victorian fiction well represented. Side trips to Boa Vista by river and horseback organized with sufficient advance notice. Reasonable rates. Ask about the Charles Dickens Special. Contact: Anthony Last III, PO Box 92, Karanambu, Guyana HD7 4EW.

 

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Waugh and Highclere (More)

Posted on March 4, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Countess of Carnarvon who presently resides with her husband at Highclere Castle in Hampshire has written a book about entertaining there. The house was the setting for the recent Downton Abbey TV series and is being open to the public more frequently based on the notoriety that production occasioned. See earlier post. The Daily Mail has published an excerpt from the book (At Home At Highclere: Entertaining At The Real Downton Abbey):

Today, more than 120 years on, we still entertain at Highclere, though perhaps not with the extravagance of those distant days when a future monarch [Edward VII, then Prince of Wales] came to stay. Nor can we match the hospitality of the 6th Earl and his wife Catherine in the 1930s, when London high society often descended on the castle and the place was such a byword for a good time that Evelyn Waugh described an especially comfortable weekend he’d been on as ‘very Highclere’.

Both of Waugh’s wives were born into the family that lives at Highclere. His first wife’s mother was actually raised there and the mother of his second wife was married to a younger son of that same generation. But your correspondent still hasn’t found any record of Waugh’s having visited there personally. He did make joking references to the house in letters, e.g.,  to Mary Lygon and Diana Cooper. Mark Amory explains this in his edition of Waugh’s Letters (p. 71, n. 1):

Highclere Castle is the home of Lord Carnarvon. Lady Sibell Lygon had stayed there and referred to its splendor afterwards. The name was taken up and used to mean any grand house or sometimes any house at all.  

So the joke, such as it was, was based on a visit by Mary Lygon’s sister, not by Waugh. The mentions in Waugh’s letters usually refer to Highclere ironically when describing a place that isn’t up to Highclere’s standards, as established by Sibell Lygon. For example, when Waugh stayed in a hotel in Guyana, he wrote “there was no bed & 3 scorpions on the floor and only corn beef to eat and no bread.” He went on to conclude that when asked to sign the guest book, he wrote: “Exactly like Highclere,” and then noted that the proprietor “was very puzzled & scratched his wool” (Idem).

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The Loved One is Prescribed Reading for Europeans

Posted on March 3, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Writing in his Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung blog, “Don Alphonso” informs his European readers that they cannot understand what is going on in the United States today unless they have first read Waugh’s 1948 novella The Loved One (in German translated as Tod in Hollywood or Death in Hollywood). The title of article is is translated as “European Death in La La Land”:

When I went to America after college entrance exams, I had prepared myself well: I had recorded cassettes with music from the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and read a travel guide to the mentality of the natives. The travel guide is called “Death in Hollywood” and comes from the pen of the British writer Evelyn Waugh , who elaborated his short and unsuccessful career as a screenwriter in Los Angeles in this … ironic novel. It goes, grosso modo, to the incompatibility of the American way of life with everything, which can even apply as a starting point as European nonconformity, eccentricity and moral flexibility. The virtues of the New World, according to the conclusion, are in a deadly contrast to the elevated manners of Old Europe, and this was exactly the case with my journey. I’ve seen a lot, but that’s enough for me, and whoever avoids the US because Trump is there can just buy Waugh’s book. It is worth it.

Waugh himself was a remarkable figure. He was ethnically very diverse and came from the rich middle classes, had in his youth several homosexual affairs, and for a long time difficulties to find a suitable place in life. He was witty, but flaccid and unadjusted, morally rather questionable and driven by lust and pleasure. It must be conceded that he liked to harass others, and lost a position because he tried a sexual approach in the drunken state. He also converted to Catholicism, which on both Protestant sides of the Atlantic was regarded as a sign of ethical questionableness among the Lutheran and other heretics.

The article goes on to consider the recent reactions of Americans to two eccentric European journalists–Milo Yiannopoulos, formerly of Breitbart, and Laurie Penny, the British radical feminist. He opens the discussion of Yiannopoulos with this thought:

In general, the character of Milo is easily understandable when one knows Waugh, his biography, his work, and particularly the figure of Anthony Blanche in Waugh’s classic “Brideshead Revisited”.

Penny became associated with Yiannopoulos through her German press reports on his appearances at the Republican National Convention and his more recent aborted appearance at UC Berkeley. The article seems to suggest that her position in defending Yiannopoulos has caused her radical feminist audience to turn against her, but something may have been lost in translation on this point. So far as your correspondent is aware, she has caused relatively little stir in the US press, as least as compared to Yiannopoulos. Perhaps some of our readers who can read the original German could elucidate this point.

The article concludes:

Milo and Penny have enriched the American election campaign with an eccentric European note, sort of popcultural looters to the left and right of the mainstream of their respective camps. Both are outsiders to their group and weren’t accepted but for being useful.  … It is only logical that they have been discredited with short, brutal beatings and banished into the desert in front of the American cultural Mojave. You could have known it if you had read Waugh. And it will be interesting to see how Milo and Penny are reinventing themselves after their excursions, because their expulsion is far from making their orthodox persecutors – those who do not wear bead chains and do not dance on poles – into something sexy, exciting or presentable in the media. These are terrible people, ghastly, who you would not want to meet.

The translation is by Google and could use some help. The article is generating a lot of comments, several relating to Waugh’s work.

UPDATE (4 March 2017): Thanks to a reader for helping with the translation. See comment below.

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Scoop Recommended on World Book Day

Posted on March 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Today is World Book Day. The Daily Telegraph marks the occasion issuing another list of recommended reading–this is the Top 20 and includes Waugh’s Scoop:

Last year Telegraph writers put together a list of the 100 novels everyone should read. From their selection, we’ve taken the most-recommended works to produce this condensed shortlist of 20 must-read works of fiction for World Book Day.

An Irish magazine called The Gloss also lists Scoop as one of its books for this year’s World Book Day. It was recommended by Sarah Halliwell, Beauty Editor, who explains that the book represents “satire at its most clever; still fresh and funny, almost 80 years on.”

 

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Evelyn Waugh and the “Catholic Novel”

Posted on March 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A blogger writing as Tychy has posted an article billed as a review of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock but is really an essay on Greene’s writing as a Roman Catholic novelist. The blogger (a non-catholic) begins by comparing Greene’s novel with a 1953 story by Flannery O’Connor entitled “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and goes on to consider Orwell’s criticism of the religious content Greene’s novels (and anyone else’s for that matter). He also notes that 

Greene himself regretted in his autobiography Ways of Escape (1980) that Brighton Rock was a “simple detective story” that had contracted the cancer of a theological discussion “too obvious and open for a novel.”

At one point toward the end of the essay the blogger cites Waugh’s assessment of the novel, focusing on its chief character, the youthful but violent hoodlum, Pinkie. This comes from Waugh’s 1948 review of Greene’s later, even more bleakly religious novel The Heart of the Matter:

 Evelyn Waugh, a Catholic novelist who Greene’s biographer Jeremy Lewis has wittily described as being “more Catholic than the Pope,” does not hold out any hope for Pinkie at all. He regards Pinkie as “the ideal examinee for entry to Hell. He gets a pure alpha on every paper.” Indeed, Waugh worries that Greene has made evil too remote with Pinkie’s character: “We leave our seats edified but smug. However vile we are, we are better than Pinkie.” 

The article by Waugh from which the quote is taken (“Felix Culpa”) may be found at Essays, Articles and Reviews, pp. 360-61. Although the weblog article is filed under “Literary Review”, this apparently does not refer to the magazine of that name but to the subject matter of the article. 

Another writer who considered himself a Catholic novelist is Anthony Burgess, currently in the news because this is his centenary year. The Tablet has published an article marking this occasion. Burgess considered himself a Catholic novelist “in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark” even though his religious career was the mirror image of those convert writers. He was born a Roman Catholic; his father was from a Lancashire Catholic family. Waugh once compared these Lancashire old Catholic families to the early English Catholics settling in Maryland: “the same tradition of Jesuit missionaries moving in disguise from family to family, celebrating mass in remote plantations, inculcating the same austere devotional habits, the same tenacious, unobtrusive fidelity” (EAR, p. 383). According to The Tablet, Burgess’s father “accepted no English king or queen after James II and asserted that the true capital for English Catholics was not London but Rome or Dublin.” After attending Roman Catholic schools in Manchester, Burgess left the Church at 15, influenced by Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man given him by his history teacher.

The Tablet article (by Andrew Biswell, English Literature professor at Manchester Metropolitan University) explains that Burgess’s religion is expressed in several of his books:

This is nowhere more evident than in his magnificent 1980 novel Earthly Powers, an exploration of good and evil in the twentieth century. … Burgess drew on Catholicism again in 1993 in A Dead Man in Deptford, a novel about Christopher Marlowe and the religious politics of Elizabethan England. …. Burgess evokes a landscape of paranoia and subterfuge that resembles Waugh’s Edmund Campion and Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Asked to identify his target audience, Burgess once wrote: “The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind 
 who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.” This seems too narrow as an estimation of what his readership might be. A hundred years after his birth, and with sales of his novels steadily rising in places such as Mexico, China and Russia, it is clear that the work of Anthony Burgess continues to resonate with the generation that has come to maturity since he died.

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Waugh Topic of Lecture and Preview

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

This month will see Waugh’s biographer Martin Stannard lecture in Oxford and the BBC’s film of Decline and Fall previewed in Cardiff:

Campion Hall in Oxford will host a lecture by Prof Martin Stannard entitled “No Abiding City: Evelyn Waugh and America”. Stannard, who teaches at the University of Leicester, wrote the standard two-volume biography of Waugh and is currently heading the Complete Works of Waugh project to be published by the Oxford University Press. Waugh was an early supporter of Campion Hall which is under the direction of the Jesuit Order.  He assigned the royalties of his 1935 biography of Edmund Campion to the college. The lecture is additionally supported by the Anthony Burgess Foundation which is  this year celebrating the centenary of its founder, an admirer of Waugh’s work. See previous post. The lecture will be given on Friday, 3 March at 530 pm and a reception will follow. The details are available from Campion Hall’s website. Here is some additional information from that website:

The writer Evelyn Waugh is famous for many reasons: A sparkling wit, an acerbic tongue, a prolific literary output. Especially in Oxford, Waugh’s ghost is never far away. And thanks in part to a deep friendship with former Campion Master Martin D’Arcy, SJ, Waugh’s relationship to this Hall in particular was always strong. The British author’s relationship to America was decidedly more ambivalent. Though he lampooned many American traits in novels such as The Loved One, Waugh nevertheless came away from his visits to America impressed by the country’s religious sensibilities.

Also recently announced is a preview screening of the BBC’s production of Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall. This will take place at Cineworld, Cardiff on Monday, 20 March at 630pm. The film was adapted by James Wood who also wrote the series Rev. The production is by Tiger Aspect Drama and Cave Bear Productions and was supported by the Welsh Government’s Wales Screen Fund. Parts of it were filmed in Cardiff. A Q&A will fillow the screening. Details are available from BAFTA Cymru.

 

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TLS Reprints Review of “Miss” Evelyn Waugh’s First Book

Posted on February 28, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In last week’s edition (22 February 2017), the TLS in its “From the Archives” column has reprinted its 1928 review of Evelyn Waugh’s first book: Rossetti: His Life and Works. This review was published anonymously, as was then customary, but it is revealed in the reprint as having been written by “Sturge T Moore.” They probably mean T Sturge Moore (1870-1944) who was a poet of suffcient note to have been nominated to be Poet Laureate in 1930. His original name was Thomas Sturge Moore but, according to his Wikipedia entry, he adopted use of his middle name (his mother’s family name) to distinguish himself from the poet Thomas Moore. The review was a detailed one and remains so even in the edited reprint version. Here’s an excerpt as it refers to the book’s author:

…Miss Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti’s latest biographer, is of the moment in dissatisfaction with the pure doctrine of Fry and inability to free herself from it. She rightly reasons that there is no distinctive aesthetic emotion; so used, “aesthetic emotion” can merely mean emotion caused by a work of art. … Miss Waugh approaches the “squalid” Rossetti like some dainty Miss of the sixties bringing the Italian organ-grinder a penny, merciless in spite of the best intentions. Though alert and courageous, she surely sees but half, and is more inadequate over the poetry than over the pictures—admires “Fifine at the Fair” more than “House of Life” (though by that time the sense of form and beauty had got practically crowded out of Browning’s work by his intellectual interests), and prefers Morris’s later interminable flaccid “grinds” to the best constructed narratives in English verse. On page 41 she sums up Rossetti’s and Hunt’s visit to Paris and Belgium, but omits mention of “that stunner” Memmelinck—though the letters about him and Van Eyck give the kernel of Rossetti’s aesthetics and shed light forward even to the “Beata Beatrix” and beyond. Why should admiration for Chatterton be termed “adulation”? And why does she repeatedly call Simon the Pharisee’s House Simon Peter’s? And why write “sensual” when she means sensuous? No, her mental eye is probably slightly astigmatic, but she is never tedious.

Waugh’s reply, which has come to be considerably better known than the review (or, indeed, the book itself), is also reprinted:

Sir,—In this week’s Literary Supplement I notice with gratitude the prominence given to my Life of Rossetti. Clearly it would be frivolous for a critic with pretensions even as modest as my own to genuine aesthetic standards to attempt to bandy opinions with a reviewer who considers that Rossetti’s drawings “refine on” those of Ingres; but I hope you will allow me space in which to call attention to [one] point in which your article appears to misrepresent me.

Your reviewer refers to me throughout as “Miss Waugh.” My Christian name, I know, is occasionally regarded by people of limited social experience as belonging exclusively to one or [sic] other sex; but it is unnecessary to go further into my book than the paragraph charitably placed inside the wrapper for the guidance of unleisured critics, to find my name with its correct prefix of “Mr.” Surely some such investigation might in merest courtesy have been taken before your reviewer tumbled into print with such phrases as “a Miss of the Sixties.” …

Your obedient servant,

EVELYN ARTHUR ST. JOHN WAUGH.

In view of Moore’s evident sensitivity to his own Christian name, one might have expected that he would have taken greater care in his use of another’s. Indeed, Waugh might well have made note of this if he had known the name of his reviewer. The reprinted text of Waugh’s letter is the same as that appearing in Mark Amory’s edition, but surely in the third line of the second paragraph Waugh must have written (or intended to write) “one of the other sex.” Or am I missing something?

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Anniversary on Horizon

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A passage from Waugh’s 1935 biography of Edmund Campion has been quoted on a religious website by Fr John Hunwicke (formerly a teacher and chaplain at Lancing College). This is intended to provide a context for the observance next year of the 450th anniversary of the Papal Bull (entitled “Regnans in Excelsis“) under which, in Waugh’s words, “Elizabeth was excommunicated and her subjects released from the moral obligation of obedience to her.” This was issued in February 1570 by Pius V. Here’s the quote (slightly edited) from Waugh’s book as it appears in the posting by Fr Hunwicke (OUP, 1980, p.41): 

His contemporaries and the vast majoriy of subsequent historians regarded the pope’s action as ill-judged. It has been represented as a gesture of medievalism, futile in an age of new, vigorous nationalism, and its author as an ineffectual and deluded champion, stumbling through the mists, in the ill-fitting, antiquated armour of Gregory and Innocent; a disastrous figure, provoking instead of a few bullets for Sancho Panza the bloody ruin of English Catholicism. That is the verdict of sober criticism, both Catholic and Protestant, and yet … a doubt rises, and a hope; had he, perhaps, in those withdrawn, exalted hours before his crucifix, learned something that was hidden from the statesmen of his time and the succeeding generations of historians; seen through and beyond the present and the immediate future; understood that there was to be no easy way of reconciliation, but that it was only through blood and hatred and derision that the faith was one day to return to England?

Why this event should be commemorated in the UK is not explained. The edict did not convince Elizabeth to change her religious affiliation. It did provide, however, a convenient pretext, as Waugh explains in the biography, for those in Elizabeth’s court, looking for an excuse to do so, to persecute Roman Catholics, and they took full advantage of it. It was as a  result of this campaign of persecution, according to Waugh, that Edmund Campion left Ireland where he had been living in hiding and travelled in disguise to the continent. Nor, so far as appears in the posting, has the hidden insight that may have motivated Pius V to issue the apparently “futile” edict (about which Waugh pondered in the quote) ever revealed itself.

 

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