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. Shūsaku 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 Brontë 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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Ducker of the Turl (More)

Posted on January 25, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Another story has appeared in connection with the closure of the shoemakers Ducker and Sons in The Turl, Oxford. See earlier post. This will occur later this month according to the story in The Oxford Times. The store’s ledgers are to be auctioned, details of which are provided in the article. Waugh is again mentioned as a former customer along with, inter alia, JRR Tolkien, some of whose purchases are described. Although not mentioned in the article, Waugh has described his relations with the shop in his Diaries. Here is the entry (p. 785) for 2 September 1961:

When Ducker of the Turl died I told Catherine Walston that I must find a new bootmaker. She took me to Thrusal of Cambridge (with whom I have dealt ever since). On my first visit he was measuring me for my last when Catherine suddenly drew attention to Thrusal’s own boot which was almost circular, like the boots ponies wore on their hooves when drawing lawn mowers. ‘That’s exactly the kind of shoe I have been looking for all my life.’ ‘I regret to say, madam, that I am obliged to wear it because of a deformity of the foot.’

A Google search for Thrusal of Cambridge failed to turn up any information and no shoemaker of a similar name came up in a broader search of the area. The premises of the Oxford shop are to be converted into a wine merchant. 

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NYRB Reviews Eade Biography

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of the New York Review of Books has a review of Philip Eade’s biography of Evelyn Waugh. This is by John Banville and is entitled “The Strange Genius of the Master.” Banville also named Eade’s book as among his best reads of the year in the Guardian. See earlier post. In another article entitled “Jesuits Admirable and Execrable,” Garry Wills considers a number of books about Jesuits. Among those listed is Waugh’s biography of Edmund Campion. Both of these articles are behind a paywall requiring a subscription to read them.

UPDATE (25 January 2017): It is worth seeking out this issue of NYRB for both of the reviews mentioned above. In Banville’s review of the Eade biography, he carefully summarizes the book and offers up his own opinions on the relatively few occasions where he differs from those of Eade or thinks more need be said. More interesting are his comments on Waugh’s work, a topic on which Eade admittedly did not dwell. For example, Banville dismisses what is Waugh’s most popular book, Brideshead Revisited, as vastly overrated:

…despite many wonderfully sustained and beautifully written passages, [it remains] a soggy mess: sentimental, queasily religiose, self indulgent–as he later came ruefully to acknowledge–dismissively class-conscious, in places embarassingly melodramatic, and in other places just plain silly.

Banville thinks Waugh’s best works are Decline and Fall (“brilliant debut”), Scoop (“eviscerated Fleet Street journalism”) and Sword of Honour (“expresses more about the nature of war and warfaring than Hemingway and Clausewitz put together”). He concludes:

Philip Eade has written a brisk, lively, and entertaining account of a strange, tormented, unique creature…While previous biographers have been respectful (Martin Stannard) or compassionate (Selina Hastings), Eade seems genuinely to like his subject, and takes Waugh largely as he presented himself to the world… 

Garry Wills’ essay on the Jesuits ambitiously lists 8 books as its subject. Among these are Waugh’s biography of Edmund Campion and the more recent (and more detailed) version by Gerard Kilroy. But Wills’ article lives up to his ambition. In its concluding section, he deals with the life of Campion (after admitting some personal interest in the subject because he went to a high school named for him) as his final Jesuit case study in which he compares Campion’s career with that of Daniel Berrigan. He finds more differences than similarities and in the process compares Waugh’s short book both with its source, the 1876 work by Richard Simpson, and with the new scholarly work by Kilroy. He explains what bits of Simpson Waugh left out where they were inconsistent with his own thesis and shows how Kilroy fills in blanks left by Simpson as well as those created by Waugh. For example, he demonstrates fairly persuasively that Campion resisted returning to England after his years in Prague where he had enjoyed a considerable success because he foresaw that other members of the mission were set on a confrontation with the Crown that he thought unnecessary and contrary to the best interests of English Catholics. This is certainly the best short essay on Campion that this correspondent has encountered and it takes only less than 1/3 of the total text.

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Rex Whistler Exhibit at Mottisfont Abbey

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian has reported an exhibit of the works of artist Rex Whistler at Mottisfont Abbey, a National Trust property located in Hampshire between Winchester and Salisbury. Whistler decorated the interior of the house in the late 1930s when it was occupied by Maud Russell. Most biographies of Whistler conclude that this was one of Whistler’s most fraught country house assignments, with the owner constantly changing her mind about the details. The Guardian’s description of the exhibit tells a somewhat different story:

[Maud Russell] was portrayed as constantly interfering with Whistler’s work, changing her mind and generally making the job a misery – but that was not the truth of the relationship in her diaries, and it’s good to have this chance to set the record straight. She was highly intelligent and very interested in creating a room in keeping with the history of the house.” Whistler’s last great mural, fantasy gothic architecture covering walls and the ceiling of Russell’s huge drawing room, took far longer than expected. She tried to pay him extra, but he only accepted £100: she wrote in her diary that it was the first time in her life that anyone refused to accept her money. The diaries – A Constant Heart, edited by her granddaughter and to be published in February by Dovecote Press – also reveal her sadness when he finally did finish.

Whistler and Waugh knew each other and had a close mutual friend in Diana Cooper. Waugh admired some of Whistler’s works but had reservations about others; Whistler’s drawings were used posthumously to illustrate Waugh’s 1947 pamphlet Wine in Peace and War. Whether Waugh ever visited the murals at Mottisfont is not known to your correspondent but he was not a close friend of the family that owned it. According to the Guardian: 

Evelyn Waugh is said to have based Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited on Whistler – but Govier [curator of the exhibition] believes both he and Russell had far fewer affairs than credited with. Whistler was welcomed as much for his charm as his talent in a procession of wealthy houses. The designer Cecil Beaton described his conversation as “enchantingly funny”, though he added: “No gossip – doesn’t know any. No sex talk – doesn’t think of it.”

There is not much in Whistler’s character that rubbed off on Ryder except perhaps for his friendship with his Slade School classmate Stephen Tennant whose wealthy family occupied a country house not far from Mottisfont called Wilsford House. This was Whistler’s introduction to the upper class world in which he afterwards thrived. Tennant like Sebastian Flyte suffered an alcoholic decline in his later years, but Whistler unlike Ryder never married, and unlike Ryder, Whistler painted country house interiors rather than the exterior views that made Ryder’s reputation. There is another Waugh character that can more reliably based on Whistler–this is the young artist Arthur who is decorating Julia Stitch’s house in the first chapter of Scoop. The exhibit continues until April 23rd. Details are available here.

UPDATE (18 March 2017): Maud Russell’s wartime diaries (A Constant Heart) have now been published and are reviewed in a recent issue of the Daily Mail. The review is more interested in the extent to which the diaries describe her affair with Ian Fleming than to her influence on Rex Whistler’s murals.

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William H Pritchard Reviews New Waugh Books

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Noted US literary critic William H Pritchard has reviewed the two new books about Evelyn Waugh by Philip Eade and Ann Pasternak Slater. The article entitled “Evelyn Waugh Revisited” is published in the current issue of The Hudson Review. Prof Pritchard has written widely on 20th Century English literature with full length books on John Updike, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Frost as well as several collections of essays, including one on Waugh’s generation– Seeing Through Everything: English Writers 1918-1940. 

He is disappointed with Eade’s book:

The new biography by Philip Eade seems to have been written without more purpose than providing another readable account of the life. Eade tells us he wrote the book at the request of Alexander Waugh, who gave him full access to the Waugh archives. But although Eade dutifully lists what counts as new material…there is nothing revelatory that I could determine… Eade’s book is smooth reading, but Selina Hastings’ was superbly so, and with incisive treatment of the works.

On the other hand, Prof Pritchard finds much to recommend in Pasternak Slater’s book. He begins with his own categorization of Waugh’s novels into an “early period” (everything pre-Brideshead but including The Loved One and Pinfold) and late period (all the rest). After providing his own assessment and a summary of that of Edmund Wilson, he proceeds at some length to consider how Pasternak Slater deals with the oeuvre. He sees himself in agreement with her that the early books have been given more attention that the later ones and comments that she adjusts that deficiency by herself concentrating on the late ones:

The thirty pages Pasternak Slater devotes to Brideshead Revisited are partly directed at refuting Edmund Wilson’s assertion about the end of the novel…Pasternak Slater insists …that “revelation” is the point of the novel, and that both Ryder and the reader are slowly, sometimes unwillingly, brought to this realization …

Prof Pritchard expresses some reservations on this point but then reaches Sword of Honour:

Of the hundred pages Pasternak Slater devotes to the war trilogy, I will say little except to call it the heart of her book and her appreciation of Waugh. For fullness of presentation, sharpness of argument, I don’t see that it will be bettered… Sword of Honour is the “Catholic” novel that movingly completes thirty-three years of novel writing.

Thanks once again to reader Dave Lull for sending a link to this article. Ann Pasternak Slater is among the speakers scheduled to appear at the Evelyn Waugh Conference to be convened at the Huntington Library near Pasadena, California, in May. 

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Country Life Revisits “U and Non-U” Controversy

Posted on January 23, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Country Life magazine has published an article reviewing the “U and Non-U” speech controversy 60 years since it raged in the 1950s after it was publicized by Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, inter alia,  in the collection of essays published as Noblesse Oblige. Waugh’s contribution first appeared as an essay in Encounter magazine (December 1955) entitled “An Open Letter to Hon. Mrs. Peter Rodd on a Very Serious Subject”.

The article by Leslie Geddes-Brown opens with this background information:

The whole thing started with an essay by Alan S. C. Ross, Professor of Linguistics at Birmingham University, in an obscure Finnish linguistic publication. At the time, he stated that: ‘It is solely by their language that the upper classes nowadays are distinguished, since they are neither cleaner, richer nor better-educated than anyone else.’ How Mitford and her co-writers, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman (who contributed his already published poem How to Get on in Society), Christopher Sykes and ‘Strix’ (pseudonym of Peter Fleming, brother of Ian), came across the original is anyone’s guess. And I don’t think that Prof Ross actually listed all of the words unacceptable to the upper classes. I suspect – I would like to suspect – that Mitford made a whole lot up in the spirit of pure mischief. That would make the whole episode even more fun.

What follows are several paragraphs tracing words identified as having class distinctions in the 1950s and considering the current viability of those distinctions today. It concludes:

U distinctions largely died out, I think, with the advent of media types, such as cockney actors and photographers in the 1960s, who had accents. Instead of pretending to be dukes, we were more concerned to be born with a fruity cockney accent like Michael Caine, David Bailey or Twiggy. The accent of this century is, so far, either Estuary English or Mockney and, unsurprisingly, I don’t think we much care today whether someone is nobly born or an Hon. However, although the abandonment of silly class distinctions can’t be wrong, you can bet some other way of distinguishing the posh from others lurks in our psyches.

Waugh’s “Open Letter” is collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews and is available online in the Encounter magazine archive. 

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BBC Arena Waugh Trilogy Available Online

Posted on January 23, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Part 1 of the 1987 BBC Arena three-part documentary, usually called the “Waugh Trilogy,” has been posted on YouTube. This is entitled “Bright Young Things.” It was last broadcast in 2008. The series was directed and narrated by Nicholas Shakespeare, and some of the readings are by actor Nigel Hawthorne, well known for his appearance as the civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby in the BBC’s Yes, Minister series. There are two further episodes (2. “Mayfair and the Jungle” and 3. “An Englishman’s Home”), and it is hoped that these will also be posted. The video and audio on the YouTube copy of Part 1 are of high quality, and it is well worth watching. Among those interviewed in this episode are Harold Acton, Diana Mosley, Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell. 

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