Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green and Living

Posted on February 3, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Adam Thirlwell has written an article in The Nation on Henry Green’s early novel Living (1929), citing, inter alia, the importance of Evelyn Waugh to the novel’s success:

[Green] had written one of the most radical novels of his era. It was Evelyn Waugh who most quickly identified what Green had done. Writing in Vogue [4 Sept 1929], Waugh observed that it was the book which, “if properly read, is likely to have the most influence on the author’s contemporaries.” A year later, this time in The Graphic, Waugh wrote a second, even more insistent piece:

“Technically, Living is without exception the most interesting book I have read…. The effects which Mr Green wishes to make and the information he wishes to give are so accurately and subtly conceived that it becomes necessary to take language one step further than its grammatical limits allow.”

It was a novel, in Waugh’s argument, that had inherited the lessons of early modernism. According to these lessons, in giving form to the disregarded everyday, a novel must dislocate language into meaning, with the same kind of attention to sentence effects more usually found in poetry:

“Modern novelists taught by Mr James Joyce are at last realising the importance of re-echoing and remodifying the same themes…. I see in Living very much the same technical apparatus at work as in many of Mr T.S. Eliot’s poems—particularly in the narrative passages of The Waste Land and the two Fragments of an Agon.”

Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot! It should have been Green’s era—this modernist prodigy. But he did not publish another novel for a decade—Party Going, which came out in 1939. Instead, it became the era of Evelyn Waugh—whose early novels, like Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, avidly ingested Green’s inventions in the art of surface.

After having opened his essay with the sentence: “There is really no appropriate way to write about a novel by Henry Green,” Thirlwell goes on to do just that over several pages. Among the addtional points he makes is another implicating Waugh:

Waugh had been … accurate in his mention of Joyce. Green’s subject wasn’t only working-class life but the universal, unavoidable minuteness of living. (“I did not read Ulysses until Living was finished,” Green claimed, but I find this simply unbelievable.)

Another, longer essay by Sarah Nicole Prickett considers Green’s entire career. This is entitled “Ever Green” and appears in the current issue of Bookforum. At one juncture, she makes one of the same points as Thirlwell quoted above:

Trends and even movements disagreed with [Green], as did adherence to forms. By the end of the Jazz Age, when Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, and Anthony Powell were being feted for their own romans à clef, their friend Henry was peddling a novel about an iron foundry, that is to say Living, after which he took a decade to reappear with Party Going, a waiting-room comedy filled with the rich and indisposed, at just the time that blue-collar picaresques were the rage. 

These are the latest articles in support of a Henry Green revival. See earlier posts. Green’s books are being brought back into print by New York Review Books. Party Going is now available and Living will be released next month. Waugh’s quoted review of Living in The Graphic is available in both A Little Order and Essays, Articles and Reviews. Adam Thirlwell’s latest novel is entitled Lurid & Cute.

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Dudley Carew (More)

Posted on February 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of The Cricket Monthly includes a major article about Waugh’s school friend Dudley Carew. See earlier post. This article, by Gideon Haigh, has particular reference to Carew’s career as a reporter on cricket for The Times and his 1936 cricket-themed novel The Son of Grief  but also mentions his friendship with Waugh: 

…Carew could claim a certain distinction from being Waugh’s first disciple. He was awed by Waugh’s intelligence and poise; he was shocked and intrigued, as a clergyman’s son, by Waugh’s nonchalant atheism. They were successive editors of the Lancing magazine, and members of various world-weary student societies – the Dilettanti, the Corpse Club, the Bored Stiff Club. They holidayed with one another’s families, Carew revealing in his memoirs that one remark in The Son of Grief – “If a man knows the Bible, Shakespeare and Wisden, he won’t go far wrong” – was a dictum of Waugh’s father.

After a fairly detailed summary of Carew’s novel and citations of several other books, the portion of the article dealing with Carew concludes:

…His association with Waugh ended acrimoniously, when he took exception to the novelist’s description of him in A Little Learning (1964) as “a boy in another house” whom he had “fascinated and dominated”. Always modest about his talents (“I place myself in the second league of mediocrity, just above B, just below A”), Carew resented Waugh’s modesty on his behalf, sold his sizeable cache of Waugh’s correspondence to the University of Texas, and wrote a piqued memoir entitled A Fragment of Friendship (1974) – which proved, perhaps gallingly, his most successful book. He enjoyed, at least, one distinction Waugh did not: an obituary, five lines, in Wisden, page 1195 of the 1982 edition.

 

 

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Alec Waugh Features in New Book

Posted on February 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Alec Waugh prominently appears in a recently published book entitled Wild Bird:The True Jazz Age Tale of Ruth Wrightman Morris. The subject of this book is the “Ruth,” whose name is otherwise undisclosed and who populates most of the final chapters of volume one  of his autobiography: The Early Years of Alec Waugh (pp. 244-308). Her full name was Ruth Wrightman Morris, and she was Alec’s partner in a prolonged affair stretching over more than 3 years. As the description of the new book about her makes clear, Ruth Wrightman Morris was a remarkable woman. Alec’s book provides this brief description (pp. 244-45):

She was a dramatic person and she had led a dramatic life. She was the one of the first Americans to fly an aeroplane, and one of seven or eight women to be given an Army commission in the First War, in her case to train pilots. She had driven racing cars professionally. She had written scripts for motion pictures [and took up bull fighting in Spain.] She was wild, very wild; with at times an ungovernable temper. But she was capable of an extreme sweetness. She could make you feel as though you were living in an enchanted country, where the air was softer, the scent of flowers richer, the plumage of birds more bright.

She was married throughout their affair to a man called “Govie” in Alec’s book. This turns out to be Gouverneur Morris, a wealthy New Englander who at the time was a film script writer. The affair started on board a ship from Tahiti to San Francisco in 1926 and caused Alec several subsequent transatlantic and transcontinental crossings (including another trip to Tahiti) to keep it going. But Alec didn’t like the fact that he was competing with some one Ruth called the “lad” who was a Welshman working as crewman on passenger liners. Alec broke up the affair in 1930, as he describes at the end of his book. According to Wild Bird, it was Govie who assured there would be no reconciliation. Shortly after Alec returned to London following the break-up, Govie discovered their affair when Ruth mixed up envelopes for letters to him and to Alec. When Govie got the letter intended for Alec, he wrote immediately to Alec in London, saying “Stay away from my wife.” Alec immediately sent back a telegram saying “Have just received your letter it shall be as you wish.” And that was that. The author of the book about Ruth (John Greenwald) says that Alec never saw her again but carefully saved all of the letters she wrote him which are preserved in his archive at Boston University.

Ruth died in 1940. During the 1930s, she and Govie had to give up their mansion in Monterey where Alec had visited (now the Monterey Museum of Art). After living in more humble circumstances nearby, they found a suitable although less grand house in Manhattan Beach near Los Angeles. But Ruth’s adventures continued. According to a recent story in The Beach Reporter, which covers Manhattan Beach, an investigation into the death in 1936 of a frequent visitor to their house, Reid Russell, was controversial. The death was first ruled a suicide but suspicious actions of Ruth and Govie led to the case being reopened. Again, the investigation was shut down by the District Attorney with the suspicious circumstances remaining unresolved and unexplained. But now, Greenwald’s book has stirred up renewed interest.

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Scoop and “Fake News”

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

There have been several references to Waugh’s Scoop in the wake of the new concern with “fake news” arising from present US political turmoil. As anyone familiar with Waugh’s novel will know, this is not a new phenomenon. Perhaps the most poignant of the recent references is that from a New York Times article by Lawrence Osborne. This is not about journalists reporting from a war zone but about a novel (Dark at the Crossing) by Elliot Ackerman that takes place in one–the current conflict in Syria. Osborne opens his review with this:

“The age of the war correspondent as hero,” Phillip Knightley famously wrote in his book “The First Casualty,” “appears to be over.” According to Knightley, Vietnam was the high-water mark for the self-mythologizing and self-aggrandizing descendants of the war correspondent Ernie Pyle, mowed down by the Japanese on the island of Ie Shima in 1945. Since then, he argued, governments at war have learned to tame their roving journalists; to exaggerate only by a certain degree, many correspondents have become variants of the press eunuchs laconically described by Evelyn Waugh in Abyssinia sitting at the hotel bar writing up the destruction of a hospital in Adowa by Italian bombers. During that war in 1936, indeed, Waugh himself received an actual cable from his editors in London concerning the “heroic nurses” supposedly killed at Adowa. It read, “Require earliest name life story photograph American nurse upblown Adowa.” To which he immortally replied, “Nurse unupblown.” The journalistic stenography of war had already begun.

In another response to the interest in Scoop, a college teacher of journalism and former foreign correspondent (Ronald E Yates) has reposted his summary of the novel in view of its importance to his students. Here is an excerpt:

The sub-title of Scoop is, “A Novel About Journalists.” However, it is more than that. Much more. The novel strips away the mystique of the foreign correspondent and reveals many as self-serving egotists who would just as soon start a war as cover one and who believe that the most important thing about any story is the fact they have arrived to cover it. Not a very flattering picture. I say this as somebody who has covered war and mayhem in almost every continent of the planet.

After reciting the much-quoted passage about Wenlock Jakes’ “false news” report and the telegraphic traffic from “The Daily Beast” in which similar material is demanded from William Boot, Yates concludes:

Another correspondent eventually explains to a disillusioned and confused Boot why they are all in Ishmaelia: “News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it.” That crisp line pretty sums up journalism as Waugh saw it.

Finally, the Daily Mail interviews UK radio and TV presenter Bill Turnbull on the occasion of his move to a country cottage that he has recently remodeled. The interview concludes with this:

I’m a big fan of all Evelyn Waugh’s novels, and I particularly treasure this copy of Scoop – about a fictional foreign correspondent in the 1930s – because it was given to me for my 50th birthday by a very good friend.  A lot has changed since the book’s hero William Boot’s day, but when I travelled abroad with a TV crew in the 1980s we still had to take around 20 cases for all the equipment. I remember in Panama once a wheel came off the taxi we were in, and we had to flag down a passing truck.

 

 

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“Prose Factory” in Paperback

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times has selected D J Taylor’s The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918 as one of its paperback picks of the week:

Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary: “After dinner I went to the Savoy Theatre and said, ‘I am Evelyn Waugh, please give me a seat.’ So they did.” That’s one of the many stories that can be found in this sweeping history of English literary life. It’s not heavy-going lit crit but a wide-ranging survey of how writers, publishers and reviewers made a living — and how they were regarded by each other and by the reading public. We learn about the rise of modernism, the taste-setting of the Bloomsberries, the arrival of the 1950s “new man” … and then the young gunslingers of the 1970s and 1980s …

See earlier posts. It is available in the UK for ÂŁ12.08.

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Rolle’s Ramblings (More)

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Elisa Rolle, chronicler of the LGBT community in a series of books describing their lives and locations, has posted from her books another entry mentioning Evelyn Waugh. See earlier post. This is from Queer Places, v 2 (2016) and describes the area around Canonbury Square where Waugh lived briefly with his first wife in the late 1920s:

Canonbury is a residential district in the London Borough of Islington in the north of London…A dark red brick, traffic free estate, it was praised as an example of municipal architecture, but acquired a bad reputation and has since been extensively redeveloped to improve security for residents…Many significant figures from the arts and literary worlds have lived on the square, including George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Samuel Phelps. Notable queer residents at Canonbury Square:
• Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), King James I’s Lord Chancellor, lived in Canonbury Tower, N1 1616-1626
• Evelyn Waugh (October 28, 1903- April 10, 1966), writer, lived at 17a Canonbury Square, N1; he left after a couple of years in 1930, claiming he was tired of having to explain to friends why he was livng in so appalling a district. Waugh lived also at 145 North End Road (London, W14) [sic].
• Duncan Grant (1885-1978) and Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), painters and designers, lived at 26a Canonbury Square, N1 from 1949 to 1955.

The source for Waugh’s statement of the reasons for his leaving the area is not cited. He may well have said that somewhere to cover up the fact that he vacated the flat after his first wife dropped him and later married another man, John Heygate. According to Dudley Carew, Waugh’s friend from Lancing days, Waugh was no longer using the flat in the late summer of 1930 and allowed Carew (whose own marriage had also recently broken up) to move in. Carew remained there until 2 April 1931, and he recalls that, shortly thereafter, Waugh wound up the lease. The postal code for the Waugh family residence on North End Road should be NW11, not W14.

Rolle has also written about Waugh in another of her books. This is in Days of Love (2014) which “chronicles more than 700 LGBT couples through history.” Among the entries is one entitled “Evelyn Waugh & Hugh Lygon” at p. 375. This item may not yet have been posted on the internet among Rolle’s “reviews and ramblings”, but it can be accessed on Amazon. It describes Lygon as “the inspiration” for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited and claims that he and Waugh were lovers on the strength of the suspicions of Prof A L Rowse, whose book Homosexuals in History (1983) is cited.

It is odd that Rolle chose this “couple” for inclusion in her book because Waugh’s homosexual affairs at Oxford with two other men (Alastair Graham and Richard Pares) are much better documented. She mentions both of these men in her later book Queer Places, v 2 (p. 109) in an entry on Piers Court where she describes them as Waugh’s partners in his “most lasting of…several homosexual relationships.”  Waugh’s biographers are inconsistent on whether Waugh and Lygon were lovers. Most recently, Paula Byrne has said that they were and Philip Eade is more doubtful. In the book by Prof Rowse, cited by Rolle, discussion of Waugh is limited to a brief citation of Brideshead Revisited as reflective of homosexuality among those of his generation at Oxford (p. 318), but the book doesn’t even mention Hugh Lygon. 

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Jesuit Journal Reviews Eade Biography

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of America magazine, the journal of the Jesuit order in the US, reviews Philip Eade’s biography of Evelyn Waugh. The review is by David Leigh and is not a favorable one: 

Any biographer of Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) writing 50 years after the writer’s death has to justify competing with major predecessors [Sykes, Stannard and Patey]…Disappointingly, A Life Revisited provides few insights into Waugh’s motivation for giving up his youthful dedication to high Anglicanism in favor of the Catholic Church in 1930, which made him one of the most notable converts of the 20th century. Eade’s account shows little of how Waugh’s spiritual renewal helped him deal with addictions to alcohol and sex, and with issues of fidelity in his marriage to Laura Herbert and their family, not to mention with his lifelong search for God and meaning in the modern secularized world…

The review continues with a fairly thorough summary of Eade’s book but finds little to like. It concludes:

Eade portrays the subsequent declining years with some sympathy, although not with a full understanding of Waugh’s resistance (as a staunch convert to Catholicism) to the changes that emerged from the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the year before he died. He was never reconciled to the use of vernacular in the Catholic liturgy, for which he had gained great devotion for 30 years…In brief, readers of Evelyn Waugh, whose 43-volume complete works are currently being published by Oxford University Press (under the editorship of his grandson Alexander Waugh), will still be looking for a full critical and personal biography of this great stylist and author of fiction, biography, satire and travel literature.

 

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Brideshead and Silence

Posted on January 28, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Japanese author Shusaku Endo, a Roman Catholic, wrote a novel entitled Silence (1966) that has recently been adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese. The book seems generally to be considered Endo’s masterpiece. The story is about Jesuit missionaries sent out in the 16th century to convert the Japanese.  One of them runs into a bad patch with the locals and apostasizes. This brings out a relief party from Rome and things get complicated.

The film has been reviewed in the Roman Catholic press and compared by critics to Brideshead Revisited as well as to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.  One critic, in The Tablet, declares Scorsese’s film a masterpiece; another, in The Christian Review, deems it a failure. The Tablet review notes that:

Endo…has been called the Japanese Graham Greene. When the novel appeared, Greene commented, “In my opinion one of the finest novels of our time.”…A few years ago a feature film for theatrical release was made of Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Brideshead Revisited.” While the television series based on Waugh’s book was magnificent, the film completely missed the religious dimension of the story. Whether the creators of the film did not understand the novel or decided the religious dimension would hurt the box office, I can only guess!

In the case of Scorsese’s Silence, the filmmakers got it right, according to this reviewer (Fr Robert Lauder), and brought in the religious element correctly.

In the Christian Review, on the other hand, the critic (Barabara Nicolosi) thinks Scorsese, who is a lapsed Catholic, failed to comprehend the religious themes and therefore does not fully understand the story:

It’s axiomatic that the greatest novels don’t translate to the screen. It’s even more true when we are talking about great spiritual novels. ShĹŤsaku Endō ’s Silence is one of the greatest Catholic novels of the Twentieth Century alongside literary wonders like Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited [and] Greene’s The Power and the Glory… The key to translating a great Catholic novel to the screen is to have a profound sense of what Evelyn Waugh called “That Catholic thing,” in Brideshead. When you miss “That Catholic thing” in one of these great novels, you don’t just end up making a confusing mess on the screen, you end up making an anti-Catholic thing. That’s what has basically happened here in albeit not in a formidable way…

So, in the hands of a Church-loather, Graham Greene’s Power and the Glory is a scandalous tale of a weak-willed alcoholic priest. In the hands of a keen-eyed believer, it’s about the mysterious power of the grace of the sacrament of ordination. In the right hands, Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh, is a story about how the Gospel has rendered one family very different from others, full of intoxicating charm. In the wrong hands, it’s about how the weird Flytes keep ruining their lives by always bringing God into everything… 

According to Ms Nicolosi, Scorsese just doesn’t get the religious element and, without it, the film fails. It is not clear whether in her comparisons Ms Nicolosi is referring to actual or hypothetical film adaptations of the novels by Waugh and Greene. In the case of both books, there have been two film adaptations. The first reviewer condemns the 2008 version of Brideshead but finds the 1981 version acceptable; he expresses no opinion, however, on the adaptations of Greene’s novel. In the case of The Power and the Glory, according to Wikipedia, the 1947 version was freely adapted by John Ford and retitled The Fugitive. It was a box office failure but won a Roman Catholic-sponsored prize at the Venice Film Festival. The second version was a 90 minute US adaptation made for TV in 1961 and starred Lawrence Olivier. It was a critical success and later shown in theaters overseas.

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Emma Tennant (1937-2017): Latter-day BYP

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Emma Tennant has died at the age of 79. She was a prolific writer, leaving an oeuvre of over 45 books. She was also founder and editor of a 1970s literary magazine known as Bananas. Although she wrote in a satirical style, she is unlikely to be compared to Waugh or others of similar stature. Here’s The Times’ description of her writing from her obituary:

…critics were wary of her idiosyncratic style, but beguiled by her quirkiness. “Too wild to be fully effective, but fun all the same,” wrote one …Tennant’s oeuvre also included challengingly postmodern, feminist takes on 19th-century classics; memoirs of her aristocratic family and of her bohemian life (sometimes deliberately mixing fiction with fact); extravagantly fanciful tales based around members of the royal family; and children’s books…Her style was characterised by shifting perspectives and convolutions so extreme that a sentence might contain 150 words, four dashes, four parentheses, two colons and two semi-colons. Although commending The Bad Sister for its “consistently striking” writing and images, The Times stated that “vampirism, previous existences, departures from the body . . . play such a confusing part in the story that its fictional grip on the imagination is intermittently lost”. Tennant was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, yet her subversive sequels to Austen and BrontĂŤ classics were often critically panned.

Her life, on the other hand, sounds like something out of  a Waugh novel. She was the daughter of the 2nd Baron Glenconner whose brother Stephen Tennant was her uncle. Stephen was certainly among the brightest of the BYPs, at least for a brief time. Commentators credit him with having contributed to Waugh’s characters Sebastian Flyte and Miles Malpractice as well as Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. He was also the direct model for V S Naipaul’s landlord in The Enigma of Arrival. Emma’s own life in the 1960s and 1970s sounds like Vile Bodies updated. According to the Daily Telegraph, she was not a major beneficiary of the once large family fortune and had to work for a living while watching it become much smaller in the hands of her half-brother Colin, the 3rd Baron.  Emma was married several times. One of her husbands, Alexander Cockburn, was the son of Claud Cockburn, Evelyn Waugh’s cousin, so the families are distantly related by marriage. Another, Sebastian Yorke, was the son of novelist Henry Green, Waugh’s friend from Oxford. On the whole, well-connected both intellectually and socially, she made the best of her connections and her talent to promote her career and may well be remembered as much for her life as for her works.

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Waugh-Designed Bookplate on Ebay

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A book for sale on ebay contains a bookplate designed by Evelyn Waugh. The book belonged to Dudley Carew (1903-1981), Waugh’s school friend from Lancing who later wrote a memoir entitled A Fragment of Friendship: Evelyn Waugh as a young man (1974). The bookplate is dated 1924, the year Waugh left Oxford, and is mentioned in Waugh’s diary on 10 October 1924:

I stayed at home…being troubled with a cold and employed myself with drawing bookplates. One for Dudley Carew a pastoral of pot-boiling and one for my father– armorial (p. 182). 

He earlier (28 July 1924) mentions working on a “cover design for Dudley Carew’s novel.” This would have been for The Next Corner, published by John Lane in 1924, but according to Carew’s memoir, although Evelyn made two designs, both of which were “admirable,” the publisher rejected them. The bookplate is pasted in a book by J C Squire entitled Tricks of the Trade (1919). Carew worked for a time at the London Mercury, a literary journal published by J C Squire and may have acquired the book in connection with his employment. He later worked for the Times, first as a reporter on cricket and later as film critic for nearly 20 years until his retirement. He wrote several books, including six novels.  According to Michael Davie, editor of Waugh’s Diaries:

Carew came under the influence of Waugh at Lancing in 1920 and possessed from the start  an unshakeable belief in Waugh’s genius, saving every scrap of his writing (Diaries, p. 796).

An excellent copy of the bookplate is posted on ebay in connection with the book’s sale. The offer ends in 4 days. The bookplate may be worth more than the book. Our thanks to Adrian Pascu-Tulbure who sent us a link to this item. 

UPDATE: The original post was updated to include additional information that subsequently became available.

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