Evelyn Waugh and Tolerance

Posted on January 22, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In an article in the Mexican newspaper El Informador, printed in Guadalajara, Waugh is quoted as the voice of warning against indiscriminate tolerance. The article is by Maria Palomar who complains about the current reign of political correctness:

To tolerate is good. But the inability to discriminate prevents categorization and appreciation, and ultimately destroys the notion of justice. And universal tolerance leads to the situation in Mexico, and that can still get worse: since everything is valid, there is no reason to correct anyone (it is the realm of rights without duties) and, [as a consequence, to obey the law that does not obey it–como colofon, da lo mismo obedecer la ley que no obedeceria] and there is no crime to be punished.

The article offers an antidote to this dilemma in Waugh’s 1932 statement entitled “Tolerance” from John Bull magazine where he provided a contribution to an article on the “The Seven Deadly Sins of Today by Seven Famous Authors:”

Twenty-five years ago it was the fashion for those who considered themselves enlightened and progressive to cry out against intolerance as the one damning sin of the time. The agitation was well founded and it resulted in the elimination from our social system of many elements that are cruel and unjust. But in the general revolution of opinion which followed, has not more been lost than gained? It is better to be narrow-minded than to have no mind, to hold limited and rigid principles than none at all. That is the danger that faces so many people today–to have no considered opinions on any subject, to put up with what is wasteful and harmful with the excuse that there is ‘good in everything’–which in most cases means an inability to distinguish between good and bad. There are still things which are worth fighting against.

The brief notice was a teaser for a short story (not mentioned in El Informador) that appeared in an issue of John Bull about a month later. This was entitled “Too Much Tolerance” and is the ironic story of a meeting on a ship to Africa of a man who seemed perfectly happy but whose life is gradually revealed to have been ruined by his inability to distinguish the bad from the good in his personal relationships. The article is reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews (p. 128) and the story in the Complete Short Stories (Everyman, p. 67). The translation is by Google (with a few edits) and the Waugh quote is the original. Any improvement in the translation, especially the bracketed text, would be appreciated.

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Waugh Scholar Praises Eade Biography

Posted on January 20, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Profesor Donat Gallagher, one of the leading Waugh scholars and a member of the Waugh Society, has reviewed Philip Eade’s biography of Waugh. The review appears in the weekend edition of  The Australian. Prof Gallagher certainly liked the book and fully explains why. According to his review, the book:

is packed with brand new, fascinating information about Waugh, his family, his friends and lovers. As well, it “rebalances” a number of entrenched, skewed perceptions of him as a man and as a soldier. And it is irresistibly readable.

After carefully describing the new information provided from Alexander Waugh’s archive about subjects such as Waugh’s homosexual affairs at Oxford, first marriage and unrequited love affair with Teresa Jungman, Prof Gallagher comes to a matter of greater interest to him–Eade’s description of Waugh’s military career–and concludes:

Eade is the first major biographer to produce the evidence needed for a balanced account of Waugh’s military service.

But he is too modest on this point. Eade relied heavily on and fully credited his sections about Waugh’s wartime experiences to the work of Prof Gallagher in his detailed book on this topic In the Picture published in 2014. The review concludes:

Is this a good book? Yes, up to a point. It is entertainingly informative, funny, moving, readable; and the epilogue is unforgettable. But Eade is a storyteller. Apart from the military passages that refute stated charges, he does not point out what information is new, let alone analyse or discuss its importance. I can only testify, if that is the right word, that I have been researching and writing about Waugh since 1963 and that Eade time and again surprised and delighted me. My picture of Arthur Waugh, for one, is richer, more complex and less flattering than it was. The vivid image of Alec in savage mood entering a room full of people and striking it dumb says more about the relationship between the brothers than a chapter of explanation. And so with the book. What it lacks in analysis it makes up by the cumulative force of new insights that never stop coming.

Prof Gallagher is one of those scheduled to speak at the Evelyn Waugh Conference at the Huntington Library, near Pasadena, California, in May.

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Waugh’s Ear Trumpet (More)

Posted on January 20, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Today’s Times newspaper has published an article by David Brown providing some additional information about Waugh’s ear trumpet which is to be auctioned in a few weeks’ time. See earlier post:

Although Waugh wielded the trumpet with relish he had admitted to the Duchess of Devonshire: “I don’t think I hear any better for them, but I look more dignified.” After Waugh’s death aged 62 in 1966, his trumpet gained almost mythical status among his fans. Malcolm Muggeridge, the author and satirist, described seeing Waugh for the final time at a wedding: “He made considerable play with an old-fashioned Victorian ear trumpet, though whether for use or ostentation I cannot say.”

Claud Cockburn, Waugh’s cousin, had described how the author’s “ostentatious, self-dramatising rejection of reality required, in middle life, an equally ostentatious model”. He recalled how Waugh once unscrewed the trumpet when he became bored during a speech by Muggeridge at a Foyle’s literary lunch in London. “The guest of honour could have dealt easily with some rude heckler, but the gesture with the trumpet utterly discomforted him.” Joseph Epstein wrote in the New Criterion Reader: “He is usually described as ‘brandishing’ his ear trumpet, which is not imprecise as he used it as a social weapon to make people uncomfortable.”

A comment submitted by R Morse provides more details about Cockburn’s description of Waugh useage of the instrument:

Cockburn’s original, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1973 and reprinted in the magazine Counterpunch in 2003, was, “The guest of honour could have dealt easily with some rude heckler. But the gesture with the trumpet utterly dismayed and discomfited him.” Still, we all know what you meant, and I’m sure Oliver Kamm would support the use of a different but similar word. Incidentally, Cockburn’s article doesn’t identify Muggeridge specifically as the target: he merely describes him as “the… principal speaker was some pompous statesman; a member I think, of the cabinet, with unjustified pretensions as a scholar and writer.”

The comment goes on to explain that Cockburn’s 1973 article is also the source of the story that Waugh walked up the hill from his family’s house in Golders Green NW11 to secure a Hampstead NW3 postmark on his letters. The Times article is accompanied by a photo (which your correspondent doesn’t recall having seen previously) of Waugh wielding the trumpet.

 

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Mottramism at Work

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Senior Editor of The American Conservatiive magazine Rod Dreher has posted in his blog on the magazine’s website an example of what he calls “Mottramism” at work in the higher echelons of the Roman Catholic Church. He defined the concept several years ago based on the writings of Evelyn Waugh:

This takes its name, of course, from Rex Mottram, Julia Flyte’s husband in Brideshead Revisited. At one point, Rex decides to convert to Catholicism in order to have a proper Church wedding with Julia. But the sincerity of his conversion becomes suspect when he is willing to agree with any absurdity proposed in the name of Catholic authority, and shows no intellectual curiosity into its truth or falsehood. As his Jesuit instructor, Father Mowbray describes his catechetical progress:

“Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said ‘It’s going to rain’, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’”

He doesn’t use the word, but … Carlo Lancellotti, a mathematics professor who comments on this blog…writes today about Mottramism in the current papal court — specifically, in the public statements of Father Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest who is in Pope Francis’s inner circle.

It probably helps to be Roman Catholic to appreciate the intricacies of what follows, but one has a good idea from Dreher’s definition of “Mottramism” what to expect. Here’s a link to the full posting. Thanks to Dave Lull for passing it on to us.

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Ronald Knox Revival

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s issue of The Spectator reviews a new collection of Ronald Knox’s works. This is entitled Ronald Knox: A Man for All Seasons and is edited by Francesca Bugliana Knox, who is related to Knox by marriage. See earlier post about the book launch. It is reviewed by Christopher Howse who sees it as evidence of a renewed interest in Knox and his work which is long overdue. Howse summarizes Knox’s life and brings Waugh in at the point Knox was living as the guest of Waugh’s friend Katharine Asquith in Mells, although they knew each other before that, since the time Knox was the Roman Catholic Chaplain at Oxford in the 1930s:

Emotionally, Knox needed the company of a woman, which, after Daphne Acton had gone safely to Rhodesia, Providence found for him in the person of Katharine Asquith, then in her sixties, with whom he stayed from 1947 for the last decade of his life at lovely Mells in Somerset. There he was visited by Evelyn Waugh (‘very mellow and nice’ as Mrs Asquith, unlike so many, called him in her diary), who wrote his biography (1959).

There’s the rub. Waugh portrays Knox as disappointed and ill-used by the Catholic church after his conversion in 1917…Yet in reality, was a decade as chaplain at Oxford a lesser task than being, say, Bishop of Salford? It might be galling to translate the Bible and then face quibbling objections from churchmen who couldn’t even write a verse of Greek. But most people do not translate the Bible at all…This habit of discounting has been mistakenly applied to all Knox’s writing.

Howse then proceeds to recount Knox’s works which have been unjustly “discounted”, including Enthusiasm and Let Dons Delight. The review concludes:

So it is welcome to see this collection of essays on Knox (and some previously unpublished writings by him) that insists he should not be discounted … Biographically, new light is shed by Clare Asquith (the Countess of Oxford) on the years at Mells and by Dominic Aidan Bellenger, who traces Knox’s early connections with the Caldey island Benedictines under the ineffably eccentric Abbot Aelred Carlyle. The editor of the whole caboodle, Francesca Bugliani Knox, married to the cryptographer Knox’s grandson, offers several tempting threads for future Knox scholars to pull at, such as his correspondence with Laurence Eyres, a friend for 46 years. But God forbid that Ronald Knox should become an academic subject. He lived by writing, and he should be read.

The Spectator’s internet edition in its “Life” section also includes a Waugh novel among “Books to get you through winter: A literary selection that will banish the winter blues”:

The one to make you laugh so hard you’ll forget it’s cold outside: Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin, £9.99). I’d defy anyone not to howl with laughter reading this bonkers story. A mix-up in Fleet Street results in a bumbling nature journalist being sent to cover an African crisis. Cue satire of the highest order. Waugh’s mocking tone is counterbalanced by a pitch-perfect lightness of touch and rich dollops of ridiculousness. Just perfect.

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Other Waughs

Posted on January 18, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

British mystery writer Christopher Fowler has posted a brief article on his internet site entitled “Waugh Stories” in which he considers the literary careers of Waughs other than Evelyn. He begins with Evelyn’s older brother Alec:

…He’s been described as the poor man’s Somerset Maughan, and as the author of over fifty books, is proof that output has little to do with inspiration…As he aged, his literary subjects reduced themselves to discursions on alcohol and his family…

Next up is Evelyn’s oldest son Auberon who enjoys a better reception:

He tackled five novels in his early career and then gave up, fearing comparisons with his father. They’re nicely written and often funny, but rather pointless and divorced from the real world. In his writing, Auberon had something of the old man’s spikiness, but with far less discipline…Becoming a newspaper columnist clearly suited his talents better, and his political writing for the Spectator constitutes some of his finest work… 

Finally, he mentions Evelyn’s youngest daughter, to whom he refers as Kate but who is better known in this parish as Harriet (her given name and the one under which she writes) or Hetty:

Unexpectedly, it was Evelyn’s daughter, Kate Waugh, who returned lustre to the family’s literary heritage by combining a sharp wit with powerful stories in books like ‘Kate’s House’ and ‘Mother’s Footsteps’.

Her first book was published in 1973 and her most recent, The Chaplet of Pearls, in 1997. She also writes occasionally for The Spectator.

Fowler’s own career spans over 40 books, mostly thrillers including a series involving a pair of detectives, Bryant & May. In another recent post, Fowler has announced that his next book in that series will involve a country house theme and will owe something to other “country house” novels such as, inter alia, Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust. He also writes (or wrote) a column for the Independent called “Invisible Ink” about forgotten writers. See earlier post. According to his Wikipedia entry, many of his books contain literary allusions. Any of our readers familiar with Fowler’s works and who know of any allusions to works of Waugh’s is invited to comment.

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A Handful of Dutch

Posted on January 17, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Dutch business/economic journal Het Financieele Dagblad opens a story entitled “Tragish Akkoord” (Tragic Agreement) with a paragraph about Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust. This is written by by Ferdinand Grapperhaus and involves a complex political deal relating to labour rights in the Netherlands :

Evelyn Waugh was a master of the tragic satire. [That is the literary form in which, in our perverse enjoyment of the main characters, even we the readers are pulled into terrible events where we start laughing.* ] Thus, Waugh describes in A Handful of Dust an upper class couple living together, who completely neglect their only child and leave it to heartless nannies and uninterested butlers  – all described hilariously. Eventually, during a hunt, no one is watching, and the boy is trampled to death by a horse. Waugh arranges that all stakeholders arrive late at the scene of the accident, and closes the chapter with the ominous sentence: They all agreed it was nobody’s fault.

* This sentence was originally deleted due to translation problems. A better translation has now kindly been provided by one of our readers, David Woods.  It is reproduced here in both the original Dutch and the Google translation:

Dat is de literaire vorm waarbij wij in ons leedvermaak om de hoofdpersonen worden meegelokt naar verschrikkelijke gebeurtenissen waarbij zelfs ons, lezers, het lachen vergaat  (Google Translation: That is the literary form in which we are lured into our schadenfreude for the protagonists to terrible events which reduces us readers to laughter.)

The sense of the article seems to be that in 2013 the parties to what they thought was an  agreement on a  politically sensitive labor problem now confront each other with the same conclusion– that what they thought was an agreement wasn’t, perhaps because no one was paying sufficient attention, but it’s nobody’s fault. 

UPDATE (18 January 2017): A better translation has now been provided for bracketed sentence in the text. See comment below. Many thanks to David Woods for his help.

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Pub in Combe Florey Damaged in Fire

Posted on January 16, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A fire last week in The Farmers Arms, a pub in Combe Florey, damaged the structure and forced its closure pending extensive repairs. This was reported in the Somerset County  Gazette. According to a later report on ITV news, the pub was frequented by Evelyn Waugh during his years in residence at nearby Combe Florey House. No doubt, Auberon and his family were also patrons of the establishment. Parts of the structure dated to the 15th century, according to one report. The thatched roof was among the parts that were destroyed. One of the regulars told the press: “It’s a tragedy, it’s the main place to meet people in Combe Florey.” The owners hope to repair the damage and continue the business. 

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Eade Biography (More)

Posted on January 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Writer and critic Martin Rubin has reviewed Philip Eade’s biography in the Washington Times:

Although there have been several other excellent biographies of Evelyn Waugh, this is perhaps the most penetrating and insightful one to date. Part of this is because of a great deal of newly available material, some of it thanks to Waugh’s grandson Alexander, who suggested this biography to mark the 50th anniversary of the author’s death in 1966. …. New letters, interviews and a host of other sources are all put to good use. 

The review also concludes on a favorable note:

For all the value of the newly available sources and the good use to which Mr. Eade has put them, in the end it is his biographical skills and crisp way with words and phrase that make this such a valuable tool for understanding the perplexing figure of Evelyn Waugh. If all his psychological acuity cannot finally reconcile the man and his oeuvre, he has probably gone as far in doing so as possible.

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Blanche, Hat, Malpractice and Seal

Posted on January 15, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Author Elisa Rolle, who chronicles the lives and travels of notable members of the LGBT community, has posted some of her reviews and ramblings relating to Brian Howard, Waugh’s contemporary from Oxford days. These miscellaneous excerpts apear to have been first published in her ongoing series of books Days of Love: Celebrating LGBT History One Story at a Time and Queer Places: Retracing the Steps of LGBTQ People Around the World. In the Brian Howard excerpts she mentions, for example, that he lived at Cobblestone House (formerly Nore House) near Godalming, Surrey which was later occupied by actor Dirk Bogard. The house is described in detail and a visit by Waugh’s friend and fellow writer Daphne Fielding during Bogard’s residence is mentioned (Queer Places, v. 2):

A great platonic love of [Brian’s] was Daphne Fielding, and although she never saw him at Nore, when she went to stay with Dirk and Tony (Anthony Forwood), she “was conscious of Brian all the time, and his own very particular atmosphere seemed to dominate even Dirk’s.”

In another excerpt from Rolle’s books (Queer Places, v. 3) she describes Waugh’s connections with Brian:

He was one of the Hypocrites group that included Harold Acton, Lord David Cecil, L. P. Hartley and Evelyn Waugh. It has been suggested that Howard was Waugh’s model for Anthony Blanche in “Brideshead Revisited.” Waugh wrote, to Lord Baldwin: “There is an aesthetic bugger who sometimes turns up in my novels under various names — that was 2/3 Brian [Howard] and 1/3 Harold Acton. People think it was all Harold, who is a much sweeter and saner man [than Howard].” In the late 1920s, he was a key figure among London’s “Bright Young Things” – a privileged, fashionable and bohemian set of relentless party-goers, satirised in such novels as Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 “Vile Bodies” where the character of Miles Malpractice owes something to Howard. …. In 1929 he was famously involved in the “Bruno Hat” hoax when the fashionable Hon Mr & Mrs Bryan Guinness promoted a spoof London art exhibition by an apparently unknown German painter Bruno Hat … [During WWII] he referred to his commanding officer as “Colonel Cutie” (a trait Evelyn Waugh gave his rebellious rogue Basil Seal in the novel “Put Out More Flags“) … Evelyn Waugh wrote: “I used to know Brian Howard well—a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous—constantly attacking people with his fists in public places—so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart.”

As described in another of Rolle’s “Ramblings,” Howard committed suicide in 1958 a few days after his companion, according to Rolle, died accidentally from gas inhalation at a villa in the South of France occupied by Brian’s mother. Waugh wrote to Bloggs Baldwin in the same letter where he discusses Brian’s death that his companion had  “gassed himself.” A footnote refers to a postcard sent 2 months later in which Waugh corrects himself on this point, noting that Brian’s companion “died suddenly but naturally in his bath”  (Letters, p. 505-06).

 

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