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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Evelyn Waugh and Selina Hastings x 2

Posted on February 26, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Forum Auctions has posted an early letter from Evelyn Waugh (sometime in 1929) relating to the writing of Vile Bodies. This is addressed to Lord Hastings and thanks him for the loan of a two-volume work about his ancestor Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. The full text of the letter is reproduced in a handwriting that is more legible than in those of later vintage. The context of the letter is explained by Waugh’s biographer Selina Hastings, whose father was the addressee:

Waugh was at the time writing Vile Bodies and wished to make a comic reference to their famous ancestor, to which end Lord Hastings loaned him a two volume biography.

She explains this more fully in her biography (p. 210):

Towards the end of [Vile Bodies]. Colonel Blount becomes involved in making a film about the life of the Methodist peeress, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, and the two rivals for her love, [John] Wesley and [George] Whitefield (in one episode, Wesley in America is ‘rescued from Red Indians by Lady Huntingdon disguised as a cowboy.’) NOTE 5: Evelyn had gone to some trouble to find out about Lady Huntingdon, borrowing material from her direct descendent Viscount Hastings, heir to the then Earl of Huntingdon, who was a close friend of Alec’s. It is clear from the novel, however, that the use he made of this authentic material was slight.

Whether the earlier Selina could ever have claimed the surname “Hastings” (she married Theophilus Hastings, 9th Earl of Huntingdon but was Lady Selina Shirley in her own right) is beyond your correspondent’s competence with English aristocratic titles , but it makes a good headline. The letter is Lot 202 and will be auctioned on 30 March 2017, the same day as Waugh’s much publicized ear trumpet. The estimated price is £300 – 400.  

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Telegraph Makes Literary Tour of Stately Homes

Posted on February 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In today’s Property section of the Daily Telegraph, there is a discussion of a tour of stately homes that have a literary connection. This is by Eleanor Doughty, known to this parish as a Waugh fan. She starts with a discussion of the 

45 houses to feature on the Historic Houses Association’s (HHA) literary trail, which launches next week. The collection – the theme of which was chosen to coincide with Visit England’s Year of Literary Heroes, itself chosen because 2017 is the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death – will guide visitors around the country to houses of bookish importance.

After describing some of the highlights of the HHA scheme Doughty ends up at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire where Evelyn Waugh was a frequent visitor in the 1930s:

His first impression of Madresfield would have been romantic as he came along the drive, with its neo-gothic gables, brick chimneys and gargoyles. But this might not be the Brideshead of his readers’ imaginations; the house used in the acclaimed 1981 television series … was filmed at the grand baroque palace Castle Howard in Yorkshire, which, as stately homes go, could not differ more from Madresfield. 

After discussing the details of the chapel in Brideshead and the one at Madresfield as well as Waugh’s later recognition that he may have overdone his romantic descriptions in that novel, Doughty concludes with an interview of the present occupants of Madresfield:

Waugh’s chapel at Brideshead is “unmistakably the chapel in Madresfield”, says Lucy Chenevix-Trench, the house’s present owner. Rarely open to the public, it is “very much a home rather than a museum”, she says. The house, although large, “is not grand and imposing”, she adds. “It has no great ego, but is charismatic and intriguing.” Chenevix-Trench’s children are the 29th generation of the family to live at Madresfield, in a dynasty stretching back over 900 years. “Waugh used our family as a skeleton from which he created Brideshead. It is a pleasure for us that he has played a part in our history.”

In another separate but related article, the Telegraph online has a slide show of stately homes. This includes Lytham Hall said to be “the finest Georgian house in Lancashire.” But the description oddly seems to go a bit off the trail with this:

It is said that Evelyn Waugh based the character of Sebastian Flyte on Harry de Vere Clifton who was the last squire to own Lytham Hall…

Clifton was an erstwhile film producer in the 1930s who ran through his entire inheritance including Lytham Hall. He was four years younger than Waugh and, if they knew each other at Oxford, no one among their contemporaries or Waugh’s biographers seems to have noticed. The Wikipedia entry for Harry Clifton a/k/a Henry Talbot de Vere Clifton (1907-1979) mentions the connection with Waugh and Sebastian Flyte, citing only an internet site maintained by the Lytham Town Trust which promotes visits to Lytham Hall. That site offers no support for their statement. Waugh mentions having visited Lytham Hall once in 1935 and was hosted by Violet Clifton, who was Harry’s mother. There were several other of her children present, and Waugh’s letter to Katharine Asquith mentions them each specifically by name, but not Harry. Waugh was impressed by the house and notes: “Five hideous Catholic churches on estate.” A footnote by Mark Amory asserts: “An elder brother, Harry, knew Waugh at Oxford.” Again, no evidence is cited (Letters, p. 95). The family were apparently Roman Catholic, as witnessed by the numerous chapels and the fact that Harry’s parents were married in the Brompton Oratory, so that may lend some credibility to the Brideshead connection.

UPDATE (28 February 2017): The Malvern Gazette and other local papers in the Worcestershire area have also reported on the participation of Madresfield Court in the stately home visitation scheme and have added some Waugh-related information not covered in the Telegraph’s report:

Waugh also wrote Black Mischief, his third book, published in 1932, while staying at Madresfield as a guest. It is believed an old nursery was converted into a writing room for him…Peter Hughes of the Madresfield Estate said: “A lot of visitors come to Madresfield because of the Evelyn Waugh connection, more than for any other single reason. “Waugh never said Brideshead was based on Madresfield, but there are certainly a lot of similarities.”

Guided tours of Madresfield Court take place between March and September, but must be booked in advance.

UPDATE 2 (2 March 2017): The Blackpool Gazette has also reported on the impact of the literary trail in their area. They mention and quote from the letter Waugh wrote about his visit to Lytham Hall but don’t mention his lack of contact with Harry Clifton. They also include a discussion of literary associations with Stonyhurst but fail to mention Waugh’s connection with that estate, now a Roman Catholic public school. Waugh visited his Oxford friend Christopher Hollis several times in the early 1930s when Hollis was teaching there. Waugh spent much of his time there writing and lists Stonyhurst along with Chagford and Madresfield as the places where he wrote Black Mischief.

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Jonkers Issue Waugh Catalogue

Posted on February 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Jonkers Books of Henley-on-Thames have issued a 70-page illustrated catalogue exclusively devoted to books and writings by Evelyn Waugh and his friends. Here’s a link to the online edition which is limited to books or other writings by Waugh or to which he contributed. What is probably the most interesting item in the internet list (not included in the printed catalogue) has already been sold. This is Fitzroy Maclean’s copy of the Brideshead Revisited pre-publication edition limited to 50 copies. As explained in the book’s description, when Waugh served under Maclean in WWII Yugoslavia, the two men took an instant dislike to each other :

…it would appear, however, that they found a means of tolerating one another and even developed a reserved respect for each other’s very different talents. Maclean allowed Waugh to publish his anti-Partisan (and thus anti-government policy) report on Catholicism in Croatia, Church and State in Liberated Croatia…Waugh, having completed the initial draft of Brideshead a month before leaving for Yugoslavia spent his spare hours correcting the proofs and was allowed by Maclean (and his friendship with Randolph Churchill) to use the diplomatic channels to return the corrected proofs to London for publication … This particular copy will have been presented in person, shortly before being demobilised in September 1945, doubtless as a mark of thanks for the part Maclean played in its publication.

In view of its having been sold, the asking price is now unavailable.

There remain some interesting association copies of books inscribed, for example,  to Graham Greene and Anthony Powell as well as a copy of Unconditional Surrender inscribed to Bill Deakin (“For Bill/Souvenir of Bari/from Evelyn/October 1961”). The entry for the book describes Waugh’s relationship with both Deakin and Maclean:

Bill Deakin was parachuted in to Yugoslavia in 1943 to make contact with Tito and his Partisans. The mission was soon taken over by Fitzroy Maclean, who set up a military air base on the Italian coastal town of Bari. It was in Bari that Waugh, along with Randolph Churchill, was stationed and where Waugh first met Deakin. Waugh seems to have taken an instant liking to Deakin, in the same way that he took an instant dislike to Maclean, and regarded Deakin as one of the unsung heroes of the Yugoslavian operation for which Maclean took much of the credit. Their friendship continued in peace time when Deakin became the first warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford and was knighted in 1975.

The asking prices for the remaining offers vary from £30.00 to £26,500.00. 

UPDATE (2 March 2017): The Jonkers catalogue entitled Evelyn Waugh and his Friends can now be viewed online in a PDF file. It may also be purchased directly from the bookseller. These items are available via this link.

 

 

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Waugh and Chesterton Lecture on YouTube

Posted on February 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A video lecture on the theme of “G K Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh” is posted on YouTube. This was delivered at the 35th conference of the American Chesterton Society convened in 2016 at Slippery Rock State University in Pennsylvania. It was written and delivered by Joe Grabowski who graduated from Marquette University and received a PhD in Philosophy from the St Charles Borromeo Seminary. He currently works at the International Institute for Culture in Philadelphia. Links to several other papers from the conference on other topics will appear in a right-hand column when you load this one from YouTube. Chesterton was one of three British writers who converted to Roman Catholicism that Waugh included in his 1949 lectures sponsored by US Catholic colleges and universities. The other two were Ronald Knox and Graham Greene.

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El Pais Chronicles Brideshead TV Generation

Posted on February 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A feature article in the Spanish language newspaper El Pais chronicles the generation of party goers inspired by the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited:

In his first scene, Sebastian appears vomiting through an open window. Margaret Thatcher had been living in Downing Street for two years and it was becoming clear she would be more than a head of government. It would be more like a climate or a way of life. Earning money or, better yet, having it accumulated from yesteryear, like Brideshead’s Flyte, was something worth celebrating in public. The series caught on with a disparate audience, but especially among those who understood the codes of that world, who knew, without the script to explain, that Michaelmas is what they call in Oxford the term that runs from October to December.

This is mainly the story of Dafydd Jones who made a photographic record of the phenomenon beginning in 1980s Oxford. This was shortly after Jones, an Old Wykehamist, had graduated from art school:

“Living in Oxford was in the right place,” recalls Jones. “I was not part of the high society, not even the University. I came from much further down the social ladder, but I started investigating.” He bought black-and-white reels, because they were cheaper, and he set about sneaking in on the New Sebastians’ parties , of people like today’s media chef Nigella Lawson, whose father had become Thatcher’s minister; or Hugh Grant, whom he photographed dressed as a pixie at a party of the secret society Piers Gaveston…

Jones entered his photographs a contest set by the Sunday Times relating to the revived Bright Young Things and, although he lost the contest, the ST published his photos and this led to a job with Tina Brown’s Tatler magazine:

During the next decade, the debutantes and the children of the lords met with him at every wedding, every charity evening and every dance at Annabel’s, the eternal nightclub of the aristocracy. He portrayed them in all their glory, with disjointed faces and nipples outside… 

But, as explained by writer Peter York (The Sloane Ranger Handbook), it couldn’t last forever:

When was the party over? York dates it to the early nineties, “when it started another more international style, more sophisticated and more politically correct. In addition, the culture of celebrity was installed … The most important thing was to lose the accent if one wanted to be taken seriously. If they went to the City to work for companies with Japanese or German owners, they needed to look like modern, responsible and global people. ” 

The story is illustrated with examples of Jones’ photographs in high quality digital reproductions. The translation is by Google with some editing.

UPDATE (25 February 2017): In a story in the New York Times “T-Magazine” dated 24 February 2017  by Alexander Fury entitled “In London, the Rise of Old-Fashioned Fashion”, the revival of the movement described above seems to have started:

The phrase …  “Young Fogies,” [was] arguably first coined in its contemporary form by Alan Watkins in The Spectator in 1984, though it is both ideologically and aesthetically related to Peter York’s “Sloane Ranger” of a decade earlier. Both terms designate a lifestyle — as well as a look — describing a set of political and social beliefs, as well as a hairstyle or a type of glasses (wire-rimmed, of course). For both Sloane Rangers and Young Fogies, that world outlook involves conservatism (with a small ‘c’) and lots of tradition, alongside tweeds and crêpe-de-chine blouses. The original Young Fogies, though, were obsessed with the past, rather than class: they read Evelyn Waugh, and despised modern architecture. In short, they were classicists whose sartorial tastes veered towards the old-fashioned — just like the characters created by these Young Fogey designers today.

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Combe Florey Parish Council at Risk

Posted on February 23, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Parish Council of Combe Florey is at risk of dissolution for lack of interest. According to the Somerset County Gazette, there are only two council members remaining in their seats as a result of others having resigned. The Parish Council cannot act unless additional councilors can be found. To fill in the present gap, the Taunton Deane Borough Council is allowing the Combe Florey Parish Council to co-opt two of its own members in order to make up a quorum until new Parish Councilors can be appointed or elected, as the case may be.

It is not the Parish Council, however, that has been unable to act in the case of approving planning permission for repair of the Waugh Family grave sites adjacent to the Church of St Andrew in Combe Florey. See earlier post. That matter must be resolved by the Taunton Deane Borough Council’s planning authorities (Combe Florey parish apparently being a constituent part of that borough) or by the Archdiocese of Taunton, as the owners of the churchyard, or both. The Parish Council of Combe Florey is a civil agency independent of the church, which also has a “parish” made up of the church members, but that’s another story. 

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