Visit to Oslo

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A letter from Evelyn Waugh to a Mr Some on the stationery of the Grand Hotel in Oslo is to be sold by Forum Auctions later this month. The letter would have been written in August 1947 while Waugh was on a visit to the Scandinavian capitals researching articles commissioned by the Daily Telegraph.

In the undated letter, Waugh thanks Some for the gift of a five-volume collection of the works of the artist Edvard Munch. Waugh mentions Munch briefly in the first of the DT articles as one of the two recently deceased masters of art in Norway who have prospered “under generous patronage of the state … painting acres of wall” (“The Scandinavian Capitals,” EAR, p. 340). The other partner in this “new generation” of artists was the sculptor Gustav Vigeland whose work Waugh found much more interesting and devoted several lines to in a subsequent article. He had dinner with Mr Some but does not otherwise identify him in the letter. In his [easyazon_link identifier=”0297771264″ locale=”US” tag=”theevewausoc-20″]Diaries[/easyazon_link] and in a letter to his wife, Waugh mentions having dinner at least once with his publisher, but it is not clear that this would have been Some since Waugh stayed four nights in Oslo.

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Rex Mottram and Scott-King Reconsidered

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In blogpost on the religious website Patheos, Tod Worner undertakes a review of the career of Rex Mottram and offers the results of his project in this conclusion:

As I revisited Brideshead Revisited and the story of Rex Mottram, I began to consider anew just what Evelyn Waugh was doing. At one point, I was convinced Rex Mottram was a buffoon, a fool, a caricature who offered levity amidst the deeper plot of the novel. But now, more than ever, I think Waugh intended Mottram to serve as a warning. This, he seems to say, is who we might become if we let this ghastly age mold and shape us. We too could risk being insincere converts. …. If we are not careful, we risk becoming absolutely modern.

At the conclusion of a lesser known, but nonetheless brilliant, story by Evelyn Waugh, Scott-King’s Modern Europe, a professor of classics, having seen the dangers of unbridled modernity, rebuffs the headmaster’s canard that “parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more”. The headmaster goes on saying that one cannot blame parents for wanting to “qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world.” Can you? Emphatically, Professor Scott-King says, “Oh yes. I can and do…I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.” Indeed.

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Death Comes for the Comic Novelist

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The interactive website Ranker has set up a listing that describes 13 celebrities who died on the toilet. This seemingly tasteless and pointless compilation by Carly Silver is part of Ranker’s subject category entitled “Celebrity Deaths.” Most of the deaths listed are of historical figures, some of quite ancient vintage, but there are six of 20th century celebrities, including Evelyn Waugh (along with, inter alia, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland and Lenny Bruce). Here’s the relevant portion of the Waugh entry:

The circumstances of Waugh’s passing are a bit unclear, some speculate he not only died on the toilet, but had actually drowned in it. According to reports, Waugh returned from mass when he headed to the toilet. When he didn’t return, his family went looking for him and found him dead on the floor. One friend said he was found with water in his lungs, though that is disputed. Whether he died on it or in it, Waugh definitely collapsed on the commode in 1966 and passed soon after. It was common knowledge that Waugh was in poor health and his official cause of death was from heart failure.

The rumor of death by drowning in the toilet itself has been convincingly discredited in an article linked in the Ranker entry. This is by Waugh’s biographer Martin Stannard and appears in a 1998 collection entitled Writing the Lives of Writers (Gould and Staley, eds.). It is worth further consideration to put the Ranker entry into factual perspective. Stannard explains (pp. 13-15) that Graham Greene was the source of the rumor about Waugh’s drowning in the toilet and, after a fairly thorough investigation, involving interviews of contemporaries and witnesses (including Greene, Christopher Sykes and Fr. Philip Caraman) and research of medical records, Stannard concluded:

The literal truth here, then, appeared to suggest that Greene’s fictive imagination had elaborated Caraman’s story and added water to the lungs…

The Ranker entry has the unfortunate effect of keeping alive the untruthful rumor that Stannard’s researches had disproved. Still, fact checking is not something on which Ranker rates very highly. See previous post. 

Here’s another take on the story, also linked by Ranker, that manages to be both slightly more factual and light-hearted about an inherently gloomy subject. This comes from a Roman Catholic literary weblog (Dappled Things) and, although undated, was apparently posted in March 2015; it is entitled “Biffed: or, The Strange Death of Evelyn Waugh upon the Thunder-Box.” 

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Waugh Panel at Cologne Literary Festival

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A discussion of Evelyn Waugh is scheduled as part of the International Literary Festival “lit.Cologne”. This will be convened on board the ship MS Rhein Energie at Frankenwerft, KD Anleger, 50667 Cologne on Saturday, 18 March 2017, at 21:00pm. Here’s an abbreviated translation of the description:

The fact that he is still known only to insiders in Germany borders on the scandalous. … Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was witty, conspicuous, snooty, archcatholic, politically incorrect, and rather unhappy. He also wrote like an angel. It’s time to get to know one of the great stylists of the last century. Moderators: Paul Ingendaay and Joachim Król .

Krol is an actor who has appeared in German films such as Run Lola Run and in the TV series of Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti and Tatort. Ingendaay is a literary critic, translator and novelist. He has written literary columns for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and has (with his wife) translated Patricia Highsmith into German. Among his novels is the award-winning Why Did You Leave Me (Warum du mich verlassen hast) published in 2006. For ticket information click here.

UPDATE (20 March 2017): A report of this event appeared in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung for 19 March 2017:

Paul Ingendaay and Joachim Król presented the eccentric upper-class chronicler on a moving Rheindampfer [steamboat]. Ingendaay praised Pre-Brexit England and the new, German-minded tendency towards political shame among the British and Americans. Among the texts presented by Król in a comfortable, arrogant manner, “A Handful of Dust” was prominent. The novel, in which a provincial woman deceives her husband with an ugly Londoner, as had happened to Waugh [was Waugh geschehen war], and, except for the little son, as everyone knows, [the novel] is full of mind and wit, even if during that evening unfortunately no word of English was heard.

Translation is by Google Translate with some edits.

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“Two Lives” Reviewed

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s biographies of two Roman Catholic priests (Edmund Campion and Ronald Knox) were published as a single volume entitled Two Lives in 2002. A paperback edition was issued in 2005. Both editions were published by Continuum International Publishing, an independent academic press that was acquired in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing. The book has been reviewed by Eve Tushnet, who describes herself as a “gay catholic novelist”. The detailed review appears on the religious weblog Patheos. It opens with Tushnet’s summary assessment:

You should absolutely read the Campion biography. It’s passionate and the prose hangs in garlands, with thorns tipped in blood. It isn’t swoony or silly (like the sentence I just wrote), it isn’t sentimental or polemical although this is Waugh so he does stick a shiv in occasionally; in general it’s crisp and acrid, and inspiring. The Knox biography has a surprising scattering of gems for the average reader but is frankly a pretty long book to read about a good man who did not in my opinion need such a long book written about him.

Tushnet’s detailed notes about both biographies follow. 

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Waugh in Oldie Article: “Too Close for Comfort”

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of Oldie magazine has an article (“Too Close for Comfort”) by Michael Barber on novelists’ use of those they know from real life to create characters in their fiction. Barber is the author of a Brief Life of Evelyn Waugh (2013) in a series of that name. His Oldie story mentions characters inspired to some extent from real life in novels of, inter alia, Colin Dexter (Inspector Morse), Anthony Powell (Kenneth Widmerpool and Nick Jenkins in Dance to the Music of Time), and Simon Raven (Peter Morrison and Somerset Lloyd-Jones in Alms for Oblivion). Perhaps not coincidently, Barber has also written biographies of both Powell and Raven. After several other examples, he comes to Ian Fleming who had a specific namesake in mind when he created Auric Goldfinger.

This leads Barber to his last example which is Fleming’s wife Ann, who sent a telegram to Evelyn Waugh identifying the deserter Ivor Claire in Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen (1955) with Waugh’s commanding officer in WWII Crete, Bob Laycock. The novel is dedicated to Laycock. Waugh went ballistic in his response, quoted by Barber, and threatened to end their friendship if Ann ever mentioned this in public. Barber also quotes from the Diaries, where Waugh writes that he had forbidden Ann to mention what Waugh described as a “cruel fact.” The exchange with Ann Fleming appears in Letters of Ann Fleming (ed. by Mark Amory), p.155; see also Diaries (6 July 1955), p. 728. As Barber mentions in his Brief Life (p. 68-69), it was the character Colonel Tommy Blackhouse who was intended by Waugh to be Laycock’s “doppelganger” in the novel, and he “conveniently breaks his leg en route to Crete, thus absolving Evelyn from any need for examining his conduct.” The conduct in question was the departure from Crete of Laycock, Waugh and other Commando officers while their troops were left behind to cover the evacuation and face certain capture and POW internment. There are two schools of thought on whether that conduct was consistent with their orders.

Thanks to Milena Borden for finding this reference and to Michael Barber for sending a copy of the article.

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HHA Literary Trail (more)

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Another local paper (The Gazette) has published a story about Evelyn Waugh’s association with a country house on the Historic House Association’s new literary trail. This is Woodchester Mansion located between Dursley (where the Waughs lived from 1937-1955) and Stroud. Here’s the paper’s report of Waugh’s connecction to that house:

Waugh, who lived at Piers Court in Stinchcombe at the time, published his famous satire on the press “Scoop” only a month before he gave a talk in Woodchester Mansion courtyard in 1938. He spoke on “The History and Associations of Woodchester Park” and pointed out that since the 16th century the Woodchester estate had never been owned by more than three successive generations of the same family. At the time Waugh’s reputation was increasing thanks to “Scoop” and press archives recorded that a large crowd of people heard his lecture before he “good-humouredly” signed autographs…Grade One listed Woodchester Mansion was mysteriously abandoned mid-construction in 1873 and so offers a unique view of the stonemason’s craft. It re-opens to the public on Saturday, April 1. 

The Waughs had a more stable relationship to the estate than is suggested by this 1938 speech-giving. The house had had a connection to the Roman Catholic church since it was acquired by a convert family by the name of Leigh in the mid 19th century. They had built a church and monastery on the estate and these were still being used when the Waughs moved to the area. Waugh refers to the church as “Nympsfield” which is the nearest village and that is where the Waughs attended services until a Roman Catholic church closer to them opened in Dursley in 1939. Some of this additional information is available from the HHA website:

In the 1930s the Woodchester Estate was owned by the devoutly Catholic Miss Blanche Leigh and her sister Beatrice. On occasions they opened the beautiful Woodchester Park to the public for charity. On Whit Monday 1938 a fete was held for a new Catholic Church in Dursley. Evelyn Waugh, who was then settling into the role of a country squire, was invited to speak at the Mansion after tea. The Dursley Gazette recorded that the talk was given in the courtyard. … Waugh also commented on the generosity of William Leigh to the Catholic Church. Like Leigh, Waugh was a Catholic convert, and he later benefitted from the fundraising day, as he became a regular attendee at the new church…

The Waughs no doubt also continued to attend church at Nympsfield when the monastery celebrated a service not available in the small Dursley parish church. At some point, the monastery may have been converted into a convent since Waugh describes attending services in Nympsfield among the nuns. See earlier post. The last members of the Leigh family left in the late 1940s and it is not known what happened to the church and monastery or convent after that. The Roman Catholic parishes of Dursley and Nympsfield seem to have been combined under a single priest and a “Marist Convent” is mentioned in the vicinity but how those may relate to Woodchester Mansion or the Leigh family is not explained. The Woodchester Mansion now belongs to a charitable trust and the adjacent landscaped park is administered by the National Trust. 

 

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Novelist Nicholas Mosley (1923-2017)

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The death has been announced of novelist Nicholas Mosley at the age of 93. He wrote several novels which are variously described in his obituaries as “heavy going”, “densely written”, “adventurous”, and “not light reading.” So, these are not exactly written in the Waugh tradition. The best known is probably Hopeful Monsters (1990) which was the final volume of a series called “the Catastrophe Practice novels” after the first to be published in 1979. This received the Whitbread prize and was called by A N Wilson “the best novel in the English language to have been written since the Second World War.” Mosley’s 1965 novel Accident was made into a successful film in 1966, directed  by Joseph Losey with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.  

He was the son of British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley by his first wife (b. Cynthia Curzon) who died when he was a child. He did not get along with his father nor with his step-mother (b. Diana Mitford) and their son, his step-brother and racing car enthusiast, Max Mosley. In an attempted reconciliation, Oswald bequeathed his papers to Nicholas to be the basis for a biography. Nicholas wrote a two-volume biography (The Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale) published in the early 1980s which was fairly balanced in the circumstances and critically well received; but not by his step-mother, Waugh’s friend Diana Mosley. She deemed it, according to Nicholas, the “degraded work of a very little man”, and she wrote in a letter to the media:

It’s all very well having an Oedipal complex at 19, a second-rate son hating a brilliant father, but it’s rather odd at 60. Nicholas wants to get his own back against his father for having had more fun that he’s had.

A tough bunch, those Mitfords, although one obituary in The Times newspaper reports a 2015 reconciliation by Nicholas and his step-brother Max. The foregoing was primarily based on the obituary by William Grimes appearing in the print edition of the New York Times on 5 March 2017.

 

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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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