Waugh Among Top Sellers on AbeBooks

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Victoria, British Columbia, paper Times Colonist has published an interview of Richard Davies, a spokesman for the internet bookseller AbeBooks (which I believe originally was called ABE, standing for “Advanced Book Exchange”, but now has become a word unto itself). The company, now owned by Amazon, was founded in Victoria in 1996, and its operations are still based there, with a branch in Dusseldorf, Germany. The interview ranges over the history of significant sales on AbeBook’s website. The discussion of important sales in the last year includes a signed copy of one of Waugh’s novels:

This year’s most-expensive list includes Selectarum Stirpium Americanarum Historia by Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, which came in at No. 2 after selling for $25,679 US. A first edition of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations was third on the list after selling for $25,000 US. Other notables were a set of the complete works of Oscar Wilde that sold for $16,500 US, a signed volume of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust that sold for $16,450 US, a signed copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird that sold for $16,000 US, a set of F. Scott Fitzgerald first editions that sold for $15,096 US and a copy of the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, that sold for $14,500 US, which included a five-page letter from Williams to a family friend.

The top seller this year was a US first edition of Alice in Wonderland at $36,000. The highest-priced item ever sold on AbeBooks was an Italian ornithology book which fetched $191,000 in 2015.

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Philip Eade Interviewed by National Review

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

An audio interview of Waugh’s biographer Philip Eade by National Review’s John J. Miller has been posted on the internet in Miller’s “Bookmonger” series. This may be found on the website Riccochet. It lasts about 10 minutes and begins with Miller asking Eade to comment on the fact that both he and William F Buckley, Jr, founder of the National Review, deem Waugh to be the greatest English novelist of the 20th Century. After throwing that softball, Miller asks Eade what Waugh novel he would recommend to new readers as the best place to start. In reply, Eade names two: Decline and Fall because it is Waugh’s most perfect comedy, written during the happy period of his courtship of Evelyn Gardner, and his alternative, A Handful of Dust, which he joins many others to deem  Waugh’s masterpiece. If a choice must be made, he would opt for Handful. The discussion progresses through Miller’s own preference of Scoop, Waugh’s “conservatism”, and what is new in Eade’s biography.

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Biography of Robert Laycock Published

Posted on December 19, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A biography of Robert Laycock, Evelyn Waugh’s commanding officer in WWII, has been published in the UK. This is The Commando General: The Life of Major General Sir Robert Laycock by Richard Mead. The book is featured on a British military website (Army Rumor Service) by a reviewer posting as Metellus Cimber II (a character from Skakespeare’s Julius Caesar). He describes the book as:

…the perfect present for anyone interested in the Second World War, in the origins of the Commandos or in Evelyn Waugh, who was Laycock’s friend, admirer, staff officer and who features frequently in the narrative. The book is well-written and spiced with dry military humour.

After describing Laycock’s family, education and military experience, the review goes on to summarize the book’s sections on some of Laycock’s encounters with Waugh:

The five days in May 1941 that Laycock spent in Crete were the most controversial of his career. There is still debate over whether he disobeyed orders that Layforce (two lightly armed battalions of commandos) should be the last to leave the island and over whether he ought to have departed, as he did, leaving most of his command to be taken prisoner by the Germans. He was criticised at the time and again in 1955, when Evelyn Waugh published Officers and Gentlemen, the second volume of his war trilogy Sword of Honour, which was based on his own wartime experiences. Some people, who included Ann Fleming (Mrs Ian Fleming, a notorious charmer, gossip and trouble-maker), identified Ivor Claire, a composite fictional character who did desert his men, with Laycock. Waugh was appalled, denied the identification and and put Mrs Fleming firmly in her place: “Just shut up about Laycock”, he wrote, signing off “****, you! E. Waugh”. Surprisingly, their friendship survived this exchange; both of them thereafter sometimes ended their letters with “**** you! Love, Evelyn/Ann”. In reality the Sword of Honour character who most resembles Laycock is the brave and likeable Colonel Tommy Blackhouse. Long after Laycock’s death Anthony Beevor, in his magisterial study of the Cretan disaster, was highly critical of his decisions (while stressing that there was no question of cowardice on Laycock’s part). This has tarnished Laycock’s reputation.

We may never know what really happened, because it has since emerged that Waugh, the keeper of the Layforce war diary, made false statements in it, apparently in order to bury some unpalatable truths and perhaps to protect Laycock. However, although Waugh’s conscience troubled him thereafter, he would never criticise Laycock, nor permit criticism of him in his presence. His dedication of Officers and Gentlemen to Laycock read: “To Major General Sir Robert Laycock KCMG CB DSO. That every man in arms would wish to be”.

The reviewer does not mention whether the book also reflects the rebuttals of Beevor’s book in Donat Gallagher’s  In The Picture and more recently in Philip Eade’s biography. The book concludes its discussion of Laycock’s relations with Waugh:

There are many moments of humour in Commando General, some involving Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill. It says much for Laycock that he both tolerated their presence on his staff and retained to the end of their lives the unconditional loyalty of these two brave but unsoldierly and cantankerous officers. None of them made old bones. They died close together: Waugh in 1966, Laycock in 1967 and Churchill in 1968. None of them liked the post-war world into which they had survived.

The book will be published next month in the US and is for sale on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.  

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Shades of Black Mischief

Posted on December 18, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent “Wild Life” column by Aidan Hartley in the Spectator describes how the new British High Commissioner to Kenya has snubbed the few white farmers who remain in that country:

I realised I had fallen from grace when we were dropped from the Queen’s birthday party guest list at the British High Commission in Nairobi. I wondered what offence I had caused to the recently arrived plenipotentiary. I worried that it was because one evening, while jogging in the diplomatic suburb of Muthaiga, I had passed him going at a slack pace and barked, ‘Giddy up!’ I have always been so fond of our British HCs. I picture them to be like Waugh’s ambassador to Azania, Sir Samson, less engrossed with unfolding revolutions outside than with playing with his rubber dinosaur at bath time, which he sat on ‘and let it shoot up suddenly to the surface between his thighs 
 Chance treats of this kind made or marred the happiness of the Envoy’s day 
’

He goes on to recount the decline in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s resources since Sir Samson’s day as compared to other countries. But he also makes a case for some attention being given to the plight of the white farmers who are beset by infringements on their property rights encouraged by local politicians. Finally, he describes what he believes to be the cause of the new High Commissioner’s neglect:

It probably didn’t help things when, as a friend revealed, the High Commish was invited some months ago to a house high on a hill, overlooking the slopes of Mount Kenya. The idea was for him to meet local conservationists, farmers and so on, with the aim of getting him on side early. ‘Unfortunately, most of the eminent, distinguished and celebrity African conservationists could not make it,’ my friend said. Instead, he related, a certain woman turned up in an ebullient state, having just come from a party in the Rift Valley. This woman has a very posh English accent, but with the addition of alcohol the elocution lessons evaporate to reveal a sharp country brogue with plenty of invective. ‘A more shambolic introduction to hard-drinking white ranchers could not have been orchestrated better, with endless curses and profanities as more gin and champers were quaffed,’ my friend lamented. Eventually, the host of the house had to order the woman to go to her room, leaving the British High Commissioner in a state of trauma. ‘The poor fellow was last seen holding his head in his hands 
 I regret that this visit created a lasting impression
’.

It sounds like a scene from a book that might be called Black Mischief Revisited.

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Jonathan Coe, Evelyn Waugh and P G Wodehouse

Posted on December 17, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

An interview of novelist Jonathan Coe for Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines has been posted on the internet. The interview, published as “Laughing Out Loud with Jonathan Coe”, was conducted in October 2015 and deals with the comic content of Coe’s fiction. He is best known for his comic novel What a Carve Up! (1994) and the linked autobiographical novels The Rotter’s Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004). The interviewers asked what authors had influenced Coe:

Q: You wrote in an essay included in Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements. Nonfiction 1990-2013 that P.G. Wodehouse was ‘the elephant in [your] comic room’ because you had been reluctant to read him for a long time. On the other hand, Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh have been sources of inspiration for the very first novel that you wrote at the age of fifteen and which was never published (All the Way). Do you still feel connected to that literary tradition of comic writers?

A: Yes, I do feel connected to it, particularly to Evelyn Waugh, whom I first read as a schoolboy when I was fifteen or sixteen. I loved the combination which I detected in Evelyn Waugh of comedy and social commentary. Politically, Waugh and I come from opposite ends of the spectrum, but that didn’t stop the way he imported satirical ideas into his novels from being a huge influence on me. I think that was always the problem I had with Wodehouse: I felt that Wodehouse’s comedy, from what I knew of it—which is only very superficial knowledge—had no edge. It was too light and airy to me, too much of a soufflĂ© rather than a main course. Gradually I grew up and matured and realised that that is exactly what is so wonderful about Wodehouse, that he is to comedy almost what Bach is to music: what he does is so pure and so formally perfect and linguistically perfect that the content of it is really beside the point. You don’t read Wodehouse because you’re interested in the social mores of the English upper classes in the twenties and thirties; you can find that out from anywhere. You read his books because they are intensely pleasurable, pleasurable in an almost abstract way, and it took me a long time not just to understand that, but to appreciate it.

Coe goes on to identify other writers and works that influenced him, including Henry Fielding, novelist and TV script writer David Nobbs and the TV comedy series The Two Ronnies (for which Nobbs wrote sketches).

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Waugh and the Rolling Stones

Posted on December 17, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In the Washington Free Beacon, columnist Matthew Walter reviews the Rolling Stones’ latest album Blue and Lonesome. The review is not favorable. After comparing the new album to the earlier works of the Stones and others, he gets around to the related subject of rock star memoirs:

…if I were a nihilist I would say that I am firmly against the whole rock-stars-getting-clean thing that’s become so familiar to us from the shelves of bestselling memoirs they’ve graced us with for the last decade or so. What I’m really against is exertion. Evelyn Waugh, for example, took massive amounts of drugs and wrote The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, a masterpiece of English prose, got clean(ish), stopped writing novels, pounded out his memoirs, and died on Easter Sunday in glorious prospect of the Beatific Vision. For some reason these guys keep making records, which is a shame not least because Keef’s Life is in many ways superior to A Little Learning.

His chronology of Waugh’s progression after his drugs detox is not entirely accurate since he wrote at least one more novel afterwards.  This is Unconditional Surrender which some consider one of his better novels. The autobiography was his final work. It would be interesting to know in what respects Walter considers Keith Richards’ autobiography to be superior to Waugh’s. Although many have identified a falling off in Waugh’s writing in A Little Learning, from what little I read of Richard’s book, it didn’t seem likely to qualify him as a major English prose stylist. One even suspected that he had written it by himself.

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Waugh Cited in Book on Alcohol in Literature

Posted on December 17, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian has published an essay which appears to be based on a book about the role played by alcohol in 20th Century history. This is by Henry Jeffreys and is entitled Empire of Booze: British History Through the Bottom of a Glass.” See earlier post. The essay focuses on how writers have used alcohol in their works:

So closely are some of the giants of 20th-century literature associated with alcohol that modern readers might be forgiven for thinking a serious booze habit was once the equivalent of a degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia.

It comes as no surprise that Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is among the works considered:

In Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the constant listing of drinks such as marsala, cinzano, asti spumante and martini, serves as a reminder that there was a normal life before the war and will be afterwards. For Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, “this Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place 
” In the same novel, alcohol plays a less benevolent role, as a weapon in the snob’s arsenal during a scene in which Ryder has dinner in Paris with Rex Mottram, an arriviste Canadian businessman and his love rival. Ryder orders a cognac that is dismissed by Mottram as “the sort of stuff he puts soda in at home. So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex’s sort. ‘That’s the stuff,’ he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it left dark rings round the sides of his glass.” Waugh wants us to see Mottram as a vulgarian and Ryder as a man of taste, but also reveals his own prejudices.

Jeffreys moves on to wine connoisseurship as a theme in literature and, after citing Edgar Allan Poe and Roald Dahl, returns to Brideshead:

… the real amusement comes from the pretensions of the wine taster: “a prudent wine 
 rather diffident and evasive but quite prudent”, he says. In a famous scene in Brideshead Revisited, Ryder and Sebastian Flyte try to outdo each other with their descriptions of a wine:

“It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle.”
“Like a leprechaun.”
“Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.”
“Like a flute by still water.”
“
 And this is a wise old wine.”
“A prophet in a cave.”
“
 And this is a necklace of pearls
on a white neck.”
“Like a swan.”
“Like the last unicorn.”

Oddly, he doesn’t mention how alcohol contributed to the Sebastian’s downfall.

 

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Weekly Standard Remembers Waugh

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of Weekly Standard carries an article memorializing Waugh in this 50th anniversary year of his death. This is by Algis Valiunas who is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The essay begins with the familiar characterization of Waugh as a writer of very funny books but a very unpleasant person. It provides a summary of several of Waugh’s recorded misdeeds including his persecution of Dean Cruttwell and Clarissa Churchill and his meltdown when his friend Henry Green and his wife smoked at the dinner table. It then provides a brief description of Waugh’s works starting with Decline and Fall in which: 

Waugh unleashes every anarchic impulse …, as he does in the best ones to follow. And when every civilized institution has been definitively laid waste—the universities and public schools, the aristocracy, the military, Parliament, marriage, the great country houses, the Empire—the reader is hard put to think of anything he holds dear that might withstand such withering fire. All that remains is manic laughter. One can still grovel with hilarity amid the devastation.

The essay finds Vile Bodies and Black Mischief to be darker and less funny, and it skips over what is probably Waugh’s funniest book Scoop and focuses on A Handful of Dust in which disappointment is expressed:

But when Waugh does turn serious, it is to ill effect. A Handful of Dust (1934), which takes its title and epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, retails the haphazard adulterous collision of two nullities moved principally by boredom. The story is told in a leaden monotone that aspires to devastating irony but overdoes the moral emptiness.

Similar disappointment is noted in Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy. The essay, which is entitled, “Waugh’s Gift”, concludes with this:

These five novels, the serious ones, are widely considered to be Waugh’s best. Far from it. He came to see his vocation as instructing a godless world in the true nature of God, when his true calling was as a minor comic master, funny as hell, who could laugh at the most appalling outrages and play jazz clarinet with consummate virtuosity in the devil’s band.

This is odd and a bit unfair because the essay began by positing that Waugh should be remembered for his humorous works but then, aside from Decline and Fall, ignores the best of them. There is no analysis of Scoop and no mention of Put Out More Flags and The Loved One which are generally considered his funniest works. Nor is there any recognition that Brideshead and Sword of Honour contain some of Waugh’s best humorous passages.

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Waugh Scholar Wins Award for New Novel

Posted on December 15, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh scholar, author and professor of English Philology at the University of La Rioja in Spain, Carlos Villar Flor, has won an award for a new novel, his fifth.  According to the Spanish newspaper La Rioja, Villar Flor:

… has just won the JosĂ© MarĂ­a Pereda award, granted by the Cantabrian Government, with his short novel ‘Descubre por quĂ© te persigo‘ (‘Guess why I am chasing you’).., in which Villar Flor has chosen to reverse the classic structure of the thriller. “The classic thriller usually starts with a murder and the reader does not care much about the victim because, in fact, he has not had much time to meet him. But in my novel it happens in reverse, the victim, still alive, has to find the reasons why someone wants to kill him.”

Villar Flor has written and lectured extensively on the works of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and has appeared at several conferences devoted to these writers, including those sponsored by this Society. He also organized a conference in 2003 at the University of La Rioja and co-edited its proceedings published as Waugh Without End. More recently, he was co-author of the critical biography of Waugh’s military career and writings entitled In the Picture. The newspaper article concludes

“I have four more novels in mind and I’ve been working on a biographical study of Graham Greene for four years relating to his trips to Spain.” However it is not Greene, but Evelyn Waugh who is the author to whom more time has been dedicated as translator and popularizer of his work. And he is also very fond of the English sense of humor: “It is an understated humor, and there enters the concept of irony, which is very rich and complex, and I find it very interesting. As with Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms.”

The Spanish language article has been translated by Google with some edits. 

UPDATE (19 December 2016): Carlos Villar Flor has offered some improvements in the translations cited. These have been incorporated in a revised version of the post. Many thanks to Carlos for these suggestions.

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Tatler’s List of Snobs

Posted on December 13, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Tatler magazine has published a list of the great snobs of history. This is written by Sophia Money-Coutts and author-critic D J Taylor.  Taylor has recently written a book on this subject (The New Book of Snobs) and the entry for Waugh may have come from there: 

As a teenager, the writer habitually walked down the road from his parents’ house in Golders Green, NW11, to post his letters in Hampstead, where they would carry the NW3 Post Office frank.

As noted in an earlier post, there seems to be little support for this particular but apocryphal aspect of Waugh’s snobbery, although other indicia are not hard to find.

There is an interesting phenomenon at work in this list of 9 “great” snobs. Fully 2/3 are members of Waugh’s generation: Virginia Woolf (thought James Joyce’s writing showed evidence of  “working class” origins), Tom Driberg (Waugh’s school friend, who took care that there would be no sauce bottles displayed on his table at a Labour Party conference), James Lees-Milne (thought stupid toffs made better company than intelligent yobs), Gerry Wellington, and Edward Sackville-West (never met anyone who thought an inherited title wasn’t better than one bestowed by the monarch). Even the lives of the two more recent exemplars (Alan Clark and Princess Margaret) overlapped with Waugh’s and are now dead. Would this indicate that snobbery has died out or is the Tatler afraid of offending some of its readers?

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