Early Waugh Book on Offer

Posted on February 6, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

London booksellers Peter Harrington are offering an early Waugh publication from 1927. This is a collection called the Decorative Drawings of Francis Crease for which Waugh wrote the 5 page preface. This was published the year after the appearance of his first book, PRB. Both books were privately published. Here is the bookseller’s description:

A scarce publication, the product is part of a series of private lessons in calligraphy and sketching given by Crease whilst Waugh was at Lancing. The close relationship between master and pupil eventually broke down (apparently on account of Waugh damaging a favourite knife of Creases), although Waugh never doubted the profound influence these lessons had on him: I owe anything at Lancing worth remembering to him (Evelyn Waugh, Diaries, 8th May 1920). Waugh’s preface is the only text, giving this publication strong claims for inclusion in the primary section of his bibliography. 

PRB is included in the “primary section” of Waugh’s biography. Waugh wrote the book and saw it into print with the cooperation of his friend Alastair Graham who was working for the printer at the time. That was not the case for the Crease Drawings. In A Little Learning, Waugh says he was asked by Crease to write the preface. Waugh was not responsible for the book’s publication, which was apparently managed by Crease, nor does he ever mention being consulted about the selection or arrangement of the drawings or otherwise exercising editorial supervision over the book. Indeed, he later writes in A Little Learning that he was given a copy of the book by a friend 30 years after its publication and had not seen the book during that passage of time. These circumstances would indicate that Waugh did not consider himself the author of the book, contrary to the bookseller’s suggestion. The book is priced at £2,500. Should one assume that the price would be even higher if Waugh’s bibliographers had deemed him to be the author? The preface is reprinted in both A Little Order and Essays, Articles and Reviews.

 

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Waugh Sites

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Several newspapers have recently recommended visits to sites in England that have been associated with Evelyn Waugh. The Daily Telegraph in its Property column has a fairly detailed description of Renishaw Hall. Although still owned and occupied by the Sitwell family, it is open to visitors:

It was the setting of parties and intellectual salons, where Evelyn Waugh, D H Lawrence and others would hold fort. The house is said to be the inspiration for Wragby Hall in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – described by Edith as a “dirty and completely worthless book”. Seated in Derbyshire, south east of Sheffield and near the West Yorkshire border, the house is in a densely packed, industrial area. Though it counts Chatsworth, Bolsover Castle and Haddon Hall among its neighbours, Renishaw is unlike those because it remains a real home…There are also more than 70 works by the artist John Piper, who was introduced to the house by one of the literary trio, Osbert, plus a Whistler painting of Edith Sitwell and a family portrait by John Singer Sargent.

Waugh mentions once meeting John Piper at Renishaw when their visits to the house coincided in 1942. Letters, p. 163.

In a later story, the Telegraph lists Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, not too far from the Derbyshire site of Renishaw, as one of the 10 buildings you should visit before you die:

Castle Howard. Built: 1699-1811. Architects: John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Hawksmoor

Forever Brideshead in the eyes of those seduced by ITV’s 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s baroque novel, Brideshead Revisited, Castle Howard marks the spectacular architectural debut of Sir John Vanbrugh, soldier, East Indian merchantman, spy, playwright and witty stalwart of the fashionable Kit-Kat Club. Nothing less than palatial, the great domed house rises from a stirring North Yorkshire setting, its sheep-studded acres adorned by such peerless ‘eyecatchers’ as Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s colonnaded circular mausoleum for the Howard family, who live here still. Devastated by fire in 1940, today the 145-roomed house is hugely popular.

Another building on the list, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona, also has a Waugh association. He made a visit there in 1929 which he describes (along with other works of the same architect) in chapter VII of his early travel book Labels.

The Irish Examiner carries a review of the book by James Peill entitled The English Country House now out in a large format paperback edition. Among the entries covered is one about Madresfield Court, home of the Lygon family. According to the Examiner, this house in the early 1930s :

…became a party house and amongst its regular habitues was Evelyn Waugh, a fellow-student of Hugh Lygon’s at Oxford, who it is also said, was his lover. The seventh Earl, Boom, inspired Lord Marchmain, and Hugh Lygon was the model for Sebastian Flyte. Like Flyte, he was an alcoholic and died in Bavaria in 1936, having never reconciled himself. apparently, to being a chip off the old block. Elements of Madresfield appear in Black Mischief and in A Handful of Dust, too, and an earlier ancestor’s 17-year legal battle for an inheritance is said to have been picked up by Dickens and used in Bleak House.

Parts of Black Mischief were written by Waugh when he was a visitor at Madresfield, but it is not obvious what “elements” of the house might appear the story. Some Waugh scholars believe that Madresfield contributed to Waugh’s description of Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust. 

Finally, SomersetLive.com  has made a list of notable gravesites to be visited in that county:

Evelyn Waugh…was a renowned author and penned Brideshead Revisited among his respected body of work. It was often thought that he possessed one of the best turn of prose in the 20th century … He died in 1966 and was buried at the Church of St Peter & St Paul in Combe Florey, near Taunton.

The story also mentions the Somerset grave of actor Leo McKern in Bath. McKern played Capt Grimes, an outstanding performance in the otherwise un-noteworthy 1960’s film adaptation of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall. 

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Waugh Inspires High Fashion Sunglasses

Posted on February 4, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Fashion designer Karen Walker has released a new line of sunglasses called Transformers. To promote the product, she has herself appeared as a model in 7 different personas, “all of which have distinct aesthetics that correspond with the varying styles of sunglasses.” One of the designs is named for Evelyn Waugh. This is explained by Walker on a fashionista website:

6) The Waugh On Terror: “[Evelyn] Waugh has been one of my favorite writers since I was about 10. I doubt there are more than two or two of his [books] I haven’t read. I love that opening he allows into a time when women’s freedoms, and in fact, all of youth’s freedoms changed, and how the consequences of that rippled out into society. I’ve always wanted to be one of his characters, and now I have been.”

Other designs were inspired by, inter alia,  Vidal Sasoon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dolly Parton and Princess Margaret. A clever idea, but perhaps too clever by half. The displays on the internet fail to link the illustrations of the sunglasses to their inspirations. In some cases (e.g., The Platinum C&W: Dolly Parton) this is fairly obvious, while in others, such as The Waugh on Terror, not so much.  

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Alexander Chancellor (1940-2017): Savior of The Spectator

Posted on February 3, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Journalist and editor Alexander Chancellor has died at the age of 77. He is probably best known as the man who saved the Spectator. He became editor at a low point in 1975 and remained for 9 years during which the magazine recovered and prospered. According to his obituary in the Daily Telegraph by Harry Mount:

When Chancellor took over the Spectator in 1975, it was said he got the job because he was the only journalist known to the proprietor, Henry Keswick, chief of Jardine Matheson, the mighty Asian business conglomerate, and a fellow Old Etonian and Cambridge graduate. He shook up the Spectator, lending it a funny, cynical, mischievous quality. Its circulation soon began to climb.

It was Chancellor’s inspired idea to pair columns by Taki, the fast-living Greek shipping heir, and Jeff Bernard, the gloomy, vodka-loving denizen of Soho. In his High Life column, Taki fearlessly dissected the questionable mores of the billionaire jetset. In Low Life, Bernard analysed the drink-fuelled, disaster-filled saga of his bohemian life with mordant wit. Chancellor also signed up his old friends, Auberon Waugh and Ferdinand Mount (my father), to inject a political, literary and satirical touch. With the cartoons of Nick Garland and Michael Heath, the magazine became a must-read from the mid-1970s onwards.

Evelyn Waugh was an admirer of the Spectator throughout his career. According to Donat Gallagher (Essays, Articles and Reviews, pp. 111-12):

Waugh summed up his attitude towards journalism and money…”Either one writes to be read by intelligent people…or for money.”…  In most circumstances Waugh would write entertainingly for a high fee. He would write seriously for no fee (e.g. for the Tablet) or for a small fee (e.g. for the Spectator).

Alexander Chancellor was related to the Waugh family by marriage. His daughter Eliza is the wife of Alexander Waugh, an Honorary Vice President of the Society. See earlier post.

Chancellor was still actively at work as a journalist when he died. He was editor of the Oldie and writing the “Long Life” column for the Spectator where his final article (about Donald Trump) was published last month: “Donald the Elephant’s days are numbered.”

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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 £12.08.

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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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