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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Granada Brideshead Among Telegraph’s Top 50 TV Programs

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A panel of Daily Telegraph journalists has compiled a list of the top 50 British TV programs of all time. Not surprisingly, the 1981 Granada TV production of Brideshead Revisited for ITV makes the list: 

This sumptuous adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel was obsessively faithful to its source material and it showed. Leisurely and literary, this examination of the aristocratic Marchmain family seen through the eyes of Charles Ryder…remains the benchmark for costume dramas. 

Other literary adaptations on the list include The Forsyte Saga; I, Claudius; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and Wolf Hall. Several selections appeared to be a bit too recent for inclusion–for example, The Great British Bake-Off, Catastrophe, and Fleabag don’t seem to outrank those excluded such as The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to…, The Good Neighbors and The Jewel in the Crown.

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Evelyn Waugh, Travel Writer

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Several recent articles remind us of Waugh’s pre-eminence as a travel writer in the 1930s, a time when foreign travel was still something exotic. The adventure travel magazine Avaunt has added Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days (1934) to its reading list:

This account of a journey on horseback into the jungles of then British Guiana is certainly a lesser-known work by the Brideshead Revisited author, but Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh is nonetheless a hilarious catalogue of complaints, with Waugh crafting a wonderfully eccentric sketch of an underprepared trip in uncharted territory.

British author Ben Mcintyre writing in the Times describes another book of travels to South America which Waugh had favorably reviewed after his own trip to the area. This was by Peter Fleming, older brother of Ian Fleming, the spy novelist. Fleming joined an expedition organized to locate the mysterious explorer Col Percy Fawcett. He reported the somewhat shambolic events of that venture in the Times and later wrote the book. According to Mcintyre:

… the resulting book, Brazilian Adventure, was a minor masterpiece, brilliantly subverting the established rules of travel writing. Fleming lampooned the absurdity of explorers’ chest-thumping tales of derring-do (including those of Fawcett) and gloried in the “atmosphere of caricature” that surrounded his own expedition…The book was an instant bestseller, becoming the most successful travel book published between the wars. “I am putting it in the highest class,” wrote Evelyn Waugh. The New Yorker called Brazilian Adventure “one of the most amusing and engaging travel records ever written”. Fleming single-handedly invented a new subgenre of travel writing, adventurous but self-mocking, hair-raising but tongue in cheek, a style later echoed by writers such as Eric Newby and Redmond O’Hanlon. Fleming was hailed and admired as a daredevil of a very British sort, not least by his younger brother.

Mcintyre’s article may have been occasioned by the opening of a film about the Fawcett expedition entitled The Lost City of Z (apparently based on a book of that title) which he mentions in the Times. Waugh’s review of Fleming’s book appeared in August 1933 while he would have probably been writing Ninety-Two Days which was released the next year. Waugh modestly doesn’t take the occasion to boost his own upcoming book but keeps to the subject of Fleming’s work in what is a relatively long Spectator review. Waugh’s review is collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 136.

Blogger Eamonn Fitzgerald has posted an article about Waugh’s travel writing entitled “Waugh on Travel and Terror”. He takes as his focus a 1959 article by Waugh in which he bemoans the decline of foreign travel in the postwar period as compared to its golden age between the wars: 

“I See Nothing But Boredom… Everywhere” was the ominous title of a piece by Evelyn Waugh that appeared in the Daily Mail on 28 December 1959. The future of travel was the great man’s theme. Like all newspaper prophesy, it was ignored as soon as it was read, and because Waugh was extremely contrary, his predictions were dismissed as the bitter reproaches of an ageing man (he died in 1966). A rereading, however, shows that he had imagined our future with incredible prescience and was rightly appalled by the vista. He said: “One went abroad to observe other ways of living, to eat unfamiliar foods and see strange buildings,” but in the future, he foretold, the world would be divided, on the one hand, into “zones of insecurity” dominated by terrorism and, on the other, vulgar tourist traps consisting of “chain hotels, hygienic, costly, and second rate,” to which people would be transported by the uniform jet. Well, we’ve got the terror now, we’ve all stayed in ghastly, modern hotels and air travel began its journey towards industrial conformity and security nightmare some while ago.

Waugh’s article predicting the future was not limited to foreign travel but included other topics as well. The article is also collected in EAR, p. 538 and A Little Order, p. 45.

Finally, Time Out magazine recommends to those visiting London, which must be rather tense after the recent terrorist attack near Parliament, that they might want to drop in on this event on the other side of the city in Spitalfields as a “fun thing to do”:

Libreria Bookclub: Scoop, Libreria, Sun, free. Take your ma to Libreria’s March bookclub for some intellectual chit-chat about ‘Scoop’, Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire on journalism, and discuss whether the novel is as relevant in today’s climate as it was when first written.

 

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Norwegian Translation (More)

Posted on March 23, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The translator of the 1959 version of Brideshead Revisited into Norwegian has responded to our posting on the review of that book in Aftenposten. See earlier post. The response is copied below:

From: Johanne Fronth-Nygren <(click to email)>
Date: Mar 22, 2017 08:57
Subject: Comment to posting about new Norwegian edition of Brideshead 19th March
To: (click to email)
Cc:

Hello!

What fun that the vigilant Society got wind of this new edition!

Now this is also a good example of the limitations of google translate and the need for human translators to avoid misunderstandings:

The reviewer refers the point I make in the afterword of the ‘sacred’ aspect of the book often being overlooked in the general reception, and how the love story between Charles and Julia is eagerly read, whilst the fact that they part out of religious conviction has been and still often is seen as a “bad ending” to an otherwise enjoyable tale. This is due, I think, to Waugh’s (maybe too) subtle guidance of the reader through Charles’ spiritual development. In the afterword Brideshead’s treatment of conversion is contrasted with that of the roughly contemporaneous Gymnadenia and Den brennende busk by Norway’s catholic Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset, and also seen in connection with Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of life stages. With the aid of these references a non-believing reader can gain a better understanding of Waugh’s project when rereading – or “revisiting” (not “reunion”) –Brideshead.

P.S. The Norwegian title of the review is “Forfatteren som unnskyldte sitt eget verk”.

With best wishes,

Johanne Fronth-Nygren

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Doreen Jones (1941-2017): Casting Director of Granada Brideshead

Posted on March 23, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Doreen Jones who was casting director of Granada TV’s 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited has died at the age of 76. Her obituary in the Guardian is written by Derek Granger who was producer of the series. Although she is best known to our readers for her participation in Brideshead, she also has several other notable casting achievements to her credit. As explained by Granger:

Doreen had a sharp instinct for the subtle chemistry that can exist between actors and knew well how players could spark off each other. She demonstrated this flair in the casting of Granada’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1981), which I produced, when she matched a lineup of promising young actors including Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick and Phoebe Nicholls against such starry veterans as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Claire Bloom.

Over her career, she was involved in casting over 400 productions. Among the other highlights cited by Granger was her casting of Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison in ITV’s   long-running series Prime Suspect beginning in 1991. She also cast Olivier in two other TV series after his Brideshead appearance:

Doreen’s acute eye was always in evidence. Recognising Olivier’s immense versatility she cast him not only as Lord Marchmain in Brideshead but also as the lecherous old artist in the TV film of John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower (1984) and again as the music-hall performer Harry Burrard in the adaptation of JB Priestley’s Lost Empires (1986).

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Waugh Cited in Arsenal Manager Crisis

Posted on March 22, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The ongoing crisis in the status of Arsene Wenger as manager of the Arsenal FC has resulted in a quote from Waugh in the Guardian. This appears in a posting of Marina Hyde on the Guardian’s Sportblog  considering this long pending matter:

Perhaps all unfathomable matters in Britain warrant some sort of comparison to the Royal Family, the latter having been the most enduringly unfathomable part of national life for so long. Wenger is very much at royal-comparison stage now, with his departure endlessly spoken of as a moment of “abdication”. But do consider Evelyn Waugh’s amusing diary entry on the original abdication crisis, a period that has been hammed-up more in retrospect than it was at the time. “The Simpson crisis has been a great delight to everyone,” Waugh wrote. “At Maidie’s nursing home they report a pronounced turn for the better in all adult patients. There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain.” (Diaries, p. 415)

The quote is from a diary entry dated 4-8 December 1936 a few days before the abdication was finally signed on 10 December and Edward VIII’s farewell speech delivered the next day. Waugh was commenting on the crisis leading up to the abdication rather than the act itself, which makes the quote perfectly applicable to the Wenger situation.

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Washington Post Recommends Scoop

Posted on March 22, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In a feature length op-ed article in the Washington Post (“Dystopian Fiction is Big Now”), Christopher Scalia makes Waugh’s Scoop recommended reading. He begins by describing the unexpected (and probably unintended) result of Donald Trump’s election as having made reading great again, citing the best seller status bestowed on such classic dystopian novels as Orwell’s 1984, Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale.

Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, believes that Scoop has equal relevance for today’s readers. He cites fake news (Wenlock Jakes) and the herd instincts habits of the press corps (they all leave town on a false trail leaving the inexperienced Boot to scoop them when a story breaks).  These themes have been mentioned in several other recent articles arguing Scoop’s relevance to today’s news. Scalia also cites another facet of Scoop which others have overlooked:

…the novel’s depiction of an insular, gullible and sometime dishonest press will strike a chord with many readers in the Age of Trump — or in the Age of the Anti-Trump Media. For one thing, the novel’s London press is detached from life outside of the city. The view Boot’s editor has of rural life reads like a parody of the American press corps’ unfamiliarity with rural America: “His knowledge of rural life was meagre. … there was something unEnglish and not quite right about ‘the country’, with its solitude and self-sufficiency, its bloody recreations, its darkness and silence and sudden, inexplicable noises; the kind of place where you never knew from one minute to the next that you might not be tossed by a bull or pitch-forked by a yokel or rolled over and broken up by a pack of hounds.”

He compares Salter’s detachment from rural reality as well as the Fleet Street papers’ uniformity of content with that of the current US press corps who knew so little of the country beyond its urban coastlines that they failed to see Trump coming. The article concludes:

To be sure, were he still alive, Waugh would not be wearing a red MAGA cap with his tweed coat. Always skeptical of America and modernity, Waugh may have seen Trump as the greatest emblem of what’s wrong with both…Nevertheless, “Scoop” accurately captures why so many Americans distrust the press and its power. As Hitchens put it, “Scoop endures because it is a novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps.” The reflection is familiar today.

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