A. A. Gill (1954-2016), R.I.P.

The journalist and humorist A A Gill has died at the age of 62, the same relatively young age at which Evelyn Waugh died. He spent most of his career writing for the Sunday Times but also wrote a memoir (Pour Me) and tried his hand, less successfully, as a novelist–Sap Rising (1996) and Starcrossed (1999). He also wrote several volumes of collected essays and journalism, most recently To America with Love (2013) and A A Gill is Further Away (2011). According to his obituary in the Daily Telegraph he was:

A born critic, he tackled anything that interested him – books, pictures and music, buildings, cars and clothes. But he devoted himself mainly to television and restaurants, which he wrote about with knowledge, passion and outrageous wit.

At least one of the London papers makes a connection between Gill and Evelyn Waugh. This is also from the Daily Telegraph:

Gill explained his religious faith – low-church C of E, fiercely Protestant (“vicars tend to annoy me”) – in the same way that Evelyn Waugh did his Roman Catholicism: “It’s entirely about making me a much better person than I would be without it.” And he was delightful in person, to people he liked the soul of courtesy and charm. And, like Waugh, he felt it was his right and duty to offend, and did so with relish.

He wrote much of his newspaper criticism in the satirical tradition of Waugh and Swift, but he was able to carry his points a bit further than Waugh, perhaps thanks to the more permissive age in which he wrote. Where both writers were prepared to put the fork into their victims, Gill was willing to twist it once it was inserted. Here are some examples from the Telegraph’s obituary:

He was rude about the Welsh (“dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls”) and the English (“the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd”). He was rude about members of the Groucho Club (“eels in a storm drain”), and readers who posted online comments beneath his articles (“Why am I supposed to care what any of you think?”). Reviewing a programme about Ancient Rome by the classicist Mary Beard, he argued that she “should be kept away from television cameras altogether”, while a cycling tour by Clare Balding provoked him to call her “the dyke on a bike”. He thought that if half his readers loved him and the other half loathed him then he had achieved the right balance.

But it was more complicated than that, as even his admirers were often appalled by his tastelessness. A Gill simile could delight (the artist Lucian Freud in chef’s trousers, “looking like a buzzard who’d eaten the cook”) or disgust (“She let out a laugh, like a string of pearls breaking into a urinal”). He could always be relied on to go too far. After a poignant description of seeing a teenager shot dead on a street in Haiti, he could not resist adding, “Who’d choose to die in a yellow nylon hockey shirt?”

You can view the full obituary on the website of the Australian Financial Review.

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Evelyn Waugh and “The Waste Land”

The Guardian has named T S Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as its latest selection in its 100 best non-fiction books. See earlier post. Once again Evelyn Waugh is mentioned in connection with the selection:

The Great War was a mass slaughter. It also became the catalyst for a social and cultural earthquake. But not until a young American poet began, in 1919, to address the desolate aftermath of this Armageddon did the interwar years begin to acquire the character we now associate with the 1920s, and also become explicable to the survivors of an apocalypse.

The Waste Land has attracted many labels, from the quintessential work of “modernism” to the “poetical equivalent to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring”. It was also one of those very rare works that both embody and articulate the spirit of the age. As such, it would be adored, vilified, parodied, disparaged, obsessed over, canonised and endlessly recited.

A generation after its publication, Evelyn Waugh would conjure the mood of interwar Oxford, and Charles Ryder’s initiation into university life in Brideshead Revisited, by having Anthony Blanche declaim The Waste Land at the top of his voice from Sebastian Flyte’s balcony.

The declamation is described in Chapter One of Waugh’s novel (Penguin, revised ed., p. 34):

After luncheon [Anthony] stood on the balcony with a megaphone which had appeared surprisingly among the bric-a-brac of Sebastian’s room, and in languishing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.

I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all.’ he sobbed to them from the Venetian arches;

‘Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,/I who have sat by Thebes below the wall/And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead…

Where the Guardian’s columnist Robert McCrum got the idea that Anthony was shouting at the top of his voice is hard to say. Perhaps he was recalling one of the film adaptations. Mr McCrum might have made a bit more of Waugh’s admiration of Eliot’s work if he had mentioned that Waugh pinched the title for what many consider his best novel from this same poem:

‘…I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’

Finally, there is another allusion to the poem in Waugh’s 1961 novel Unconditional Surrender where Everard Spruce wonders whether Ludovic, when he wrote”the Drowned Sailor motif” in his Pensees, may have “consciously had Eliot in mind?” Ludovic answers, “Not Eliot…I don’t think he was called Eliot” (Penguin, p. 51).

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Waugh in the News (more)

The author (Pedro Mexia) of the Portuguese language article about Evelyn Waugh in the weekly Lisbon newspaper Expresso has kindly sent us a complete copy of the article. See earlier post for the opening paragraph. Here is an edited Google translation of the remainder:

…No one denies that Waugh was “bloody difficult”. He had ultramontane views on almost everything, some to shock, others out of conviction. He detested socialism (and even the Tories seemed to him socialist), the modern theater, the Second Vatican Council, basically everything that the well-thought-out media appreciated. It was a Victorian formalism, a maniacal demand. A misanthrope, he excluded at the outset any contact with nine tenths of the people, by socio-cultural snobbery, or by class idealization. He was annoyed with enormous ease. I’d rather lose a friend than lose a good joke. And he was not inhibited from being a spoiler, inconvenient, ruthless.

Frances Donaldson witnessed a few less edifying episodes, for example when her husband, Jack (Frances and Jack were Labor militants, and Evelyn Waugh drew scythes and hammers on the otherwise amiable cards she sent them). But she also saw the other side of Waugh, a cyclothymic who experienced both neuroses and euphoria. She met a hospitable Waugh, gentle, curious, immune to flattery and very generous to his fellow writers such as Anthony Powell or Cyril Connolly; Graham Greene was a home visitor. A man who decided to withdraw from the city largely because in London his vices (procrastination, alcohol, quezes [?]) would have kept him from writing the novels he wrote and would have consumed all the time and energy.

One of Waugh’s most interesting scholars, Ian Littlewood, rightly wrote that the novels of the author of “Brideshead Revisited“: 1) are an escape; 2) are about the idea of escape; 3) are about people who avoid reality; 4) are a way of avoiding reality. Waugh’s defense mechanisms, according to this essayist, were distance, humor, romanticism, nostalgia, religion, and the transfiguration of biography. Frances Donaldson confirms all this, and more. She closely followed the mental collapse that gave rise to the novel “The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold” (1957), a self-satirical, paranoid, and tells us that Waugh was unable to stick to the facts even when he spoke of himself, because he preferred always the grotesque and the ferocious…

The title of the article “O vizinho desagravavel” would be translated as “The unpleasant neighbor.” Many thanks to Mr Mexia for sending this along.

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British Council Promotes Waugh in Diversity Week

The British Council in India is celebrating diversity week and is promoting the works of British writers from the LGBT community who it deems to represent diverse views. Evelyn Waugh is the first writer mentioned:

Waugh explored his homosexuality both at school, and later while studying at Oxford University. There, he was part of an avant-garde circle of friends, the Hypocrites, where he met his partner, Richard Pares and later, Alastair Graham. Waugh is known for drawing much inspiration for his work from his own life, and he certainly paved the way for later LGBT writers.

They recommend Decline and Fall and post a link to the audiobook of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Other writers recommended include Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence, and Alan Hollinghurst.  

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Waugh in the News

Evelyn Waugh is cited or quoted in several recent newspaper articles:

In the Guardian, columnist Ian Jack has written a story in which he muses about the possibility that the Oxford-Cambridge rail line may be revived under a recent government proposal. In the course of the story, he recalls, without much relevance, the days of the Railway Club at Oxford to which Waugh and several of his chums had subscribed:

Oxford University’s railway club, for example, never seems to have used the line for its excursions, though probably because the Oxbridge trains lacked a restaurant car. The club, founded in the 1920s, included bright young things such as Evelyn Waugh among its membership and aimed “to popularise the pleasures of drinking on trains at night”.  A favourite outing took members in full evening dress to Leicester onboard the Penzance to Aberdeen express. On the way they would drink and dine, and at Leicester change platforms quickly to catch the reverse express, Aberdeen to Penzance, back to Oxford, drinking and speechifying in the restaurant car all the way.

The New York Times publishes an article about the rudeness of the ever increasing numbers of Chinese tourists now encountered at the world’s favorite watering holes but quotes Waugh to urge that matters be kept in proper perspective:

It seems to be human nature to poke fun at other tourists’ misdemeanors and not recognize our own. As Evelyn Waugh observed, “The tourist is the other fellow.” Perhaps the Marquis de Sade was right and none of us should be allowed to travel. Then we can all just misbehave at home.

The quote comes from a 1935 Vogue article (“The Tourist Manual”) reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 170.

A Philippine newspaper (The Inquirer) opens a story about the recent political problems in that country under its new leader with a quote from Brideshead Revisited:

“A blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise.” In his novel “Brideshead Revisited,” Evelyn Waugh describes it well: “with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne.” This is how it has felt to be a young person in the first year of the Duterte administration—to proceed from the haphazard optimism we all tried to feel at first, and to watch aghast as the administration has begun inch by inch to pull the rug out from underneath us. [Book 2, chapter 1, p. 161, Penguin]

The New York Review of Books, in a review of a veritable cascade of books expressing nostalgia for the post-war period’s brutalist age of architecture, characterized by seemingly charmless and hard to love concrete structures, cites the example of the renewed interest in the previously maligned period of Victorian architecture to which Waugh contributed:

Oxford aesthetes of the 1920s (a coterie that included John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, and Evelyn Waugh) discovered new charm in ornate Victorian monuments that their parents’ contemporaries dismissed as eyesores.

Finally, an article about Waugh by Pedro Mexia in the weekly Portuguese language newspaper Expresso, published in Lisbon, starts with a familiar journalistic refrain:

The testimonies are unanimous: Evelyn Waugh was an unpleasant man, if not detestable. Waugh died fifty years ago, and I was about to read the latest biography of Philip Eade when I found in one of those chaotic and invaluable London booksellers of Charing Cross a small 1967 book entitled “Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbor “ by Frances Donaldson…The book confirms almost everything that has been written about the novelist, but recalls that Waugh himself boasted that this fame was known and exacerbated…. [Translation by Google]

Unfortunately, at that point the text retreats behind a complicated paywall that defeats Google Translate’s ability to render it into English. The article is entitled “O vizinho desagravavel” (The rightful neighbor). Any readers having access to and ability to read the article are invited to comment as provided below.

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Evelyn Waugh: Equal Opportunity Racist

The conservative website Heat Street has published an article by UK journalist Constance Watson defending Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief against charges frequently leveled at it for its racist remarks, citing several from Twitter as examples. As she points out, the book is indeed racist, but it satirizes all races, if not with equal vigor at least without unfairly singling out any one or two in particular:

Black Mischief is a transgressive comedy that satirizes modernization. In doing so, Waugh ridicules women, Jews, fascists, Arabs, the French, upper class white colonials, as well as indigenous populations, therefore showing himself to hold intense disdain for humanity. Rather than racist, Waugh is anti-human and pro-God. Comedy is used to reveal the absurdity of the human race. The social media pharisees are missing the joke.

Watson goes on to point out that a more reasoned analysis has been applied to the book in recent times, even by present day Ethiopians who might well have been thought to have reason to complain about how their ancestors were described. In addition, she notes:

Women are shown to be glib, unintelligent and jolly, capable of conversing only on ‘their hats and physical disorders.’ Jews are portrayed as parsimonious and immoral – ‘[in the local town] you were jostled against the wall by
 Jews foreclosing on mortgages
 taxation
 vulgar display
 no respect of leisure.’ And similarly, the western white colonials are mocked and slandered, characterized as frivolous, corrupt and louche, ‘insupportable barbarians.’ The English are depicted as thick, semi well-meaning fools who get everything wrong… 

The article concludes:

The detrimental effects of colonization are felt by the reader – they’re simply hidden in amongst the jokes. If the [politically correct prudes] are happy to attack Waugh on the grounds of racism, they should tread carefully. For in his quest to satirize the modern, to scorn the human race, to show that we are fallen and without God, Waugh leaves no race, gender or class unscathed.

Watson, who also writes for other journals such as The Spectator and Standpoint, discloses in the Heat Street article that Evelyn Waugh is her great grandfather. 

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The Loved One Declared Favorite Novella

Hatchards book shop on Piccadilly has declared Waugh’s The Loved One to be its favorite novella:

Over the last eight months Hatchards has run a campaign to discover which novella of the last 200 years is our customers favourite. We are delighted to say that ‘The Loved One’ by Evelyn Waugh has triumphed… [The book] is a barmy satire which features a crazy ex-pat community, a thoroughly unenthusiastic agony aunt and a love triangle of morticians which all lead to ‘The Loved One’ being a truly magnificent novella. To celebrate the success of ‘The Loved One’ we have commissioned a brand new hardback edition exclusive to Hatchards. Gorgeously presented with a specially designed jacket, William Morris endpapers and with a limited print run this beautiful book is now available to all of our customers.

Hatchards don’t offer their definition of “novella”, so it is difficult to know what other books were in the running. 

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Waugh in the Public Domain

The Public Domain Review (a website devoted to the promotion of the free expression of ideas) has published a list of artists whose works will enter the public domain in some jurisdictions next year. In some countries this happens 50 years after the creator’s death. For those who died in 1966, as is the case with Evelyn Waugh, their work may enter the public domain in those countries in 2017. The major English language jurisdictions where this will happen are Canada, Hong Kong and New Zealand. In other countries such as the UK, Ireland (and most of the EU), Australia and  (subject to certain other complications) the US, the basic rule is 70 years after the creator’s death.  Writers whose works will enter the public domain next year under the 70 year rule are Gertrude Stein and H G Wells. In the US, however, the window keeps moving as the Disney interests lobby for continued protection. It so happens that Walt Disney also died in 1966. Here’s the description of Waugh’s works in the Public Domain Review:

Primarily known as a writer of novels, biographies and travel books, Waugh was also a prolific journalist and reviewer of books. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–61). Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the twentieth century, the critic Clive James commenting that “Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English
 its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him”.

What this means as a practical matter for our readers in Canada, Hong Kong and New Zealand is not exactly clear. But most of the rest of us will have to wait.

UPDATE (2 January 2017): The original posting said that Waugh’s works would enter the public domain in 2037. It is more complicated than that. See later post.

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Waugh Books Feature in Best of Year Listings

UK newspapers have begun listing their best of the year selections, and books about Waugh feature in several of them. Philip Eade’s biography was named in numerous papers. The Financial Times included the book in its selections of best literary non-fiction:

Eade’s new biography draws on unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs to explore the eccentric, larger-than-life story of one of the most acclaimed novelists of the 20th century. Will send readers back to the novels in droves.

In the Guardian’s best of the year listings, novelist John Banville included it among his choices:

Philip Eade’s Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) demonstrates that Waugh’s life, already done by diverse hands, really is worth another visit.

Yesterday’s Sunday Times named both Eade’s book and that of Ann Pasternak Slater as among the best books in the literature category:

Two essential, complementary books about Waugh: Eade’s pacey new biography delivers the raw material of Waugh’s life, the “hamper…of perishable goods”, and Pasternak Slater’s keen, insightful study explores how that raw material became “imperishable art”. While Eade serves up a compelling four-page account of Waugh’s drug-fuelled hallucinations in 1954, for example, Pasternak Slater devotes an entire chapter of lucid analysis to that episode’s transformation into Waugh’s late novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Buy both books and treat the Waugh aficionado in your life to a proper spread.

Two Roman Catholic bloggers in the US have also recently made recommendations. Dr. Adam Deville read the Eade biography but preferred that of Douglas Patey:

Patey’s book is not only a scholarly analysis of Waugh’s life and work, but it is the most theologically informed and intelligent biography every written of Waugh. Indeed, I would say that it’s very high and elegant theological literacy sets the standard for other biographies of Christian writers. Eade’s book, by contrast, pays scant attention to theology, and overall breaks very little new ground. His groundbreaking is extremely workmanlike, without great flourish or insight. So there is nothing wrong, per se, with the book–only that it is superfluous… 

Writer and convert Eve Tushnet blogging on patheos.com recommends one of Waugh’s own books among her top ten reads of 2016:

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Self-lacerating and unusually phantasmagoric Waugh. I’m super always down for self-lacerating phantasmagoria, #myaesthetic and all that, also always into novels where people have the symptoms of long-term alcoholism. There’s a sweetness to this book which suggests something about, at least, Waugh’s aspirations.

Finally, another US reader (Jesse Friedman) blogging on Books.inq recommends Decline & Fall:

…Decline and Fall is a book to be enjoyed: true, there’s social commentary here; and true, there’s an autobiographical quality as well. But to focus too heavily on these aspects of the novel is, I think, to miss its magic. Waugh’s contribution is the perfectly time joke, the innuendo left unsaid, the character with a name too good to be true. Decline and Fall was the start of it all, and while it doesn’t entirely hold together, it signaled the emergence of a significant new talent, one with a sense of humor — and sense for how humor could be used to enhance a writer’s literary pursuits.

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Waugh Makes Appearance in SAS Book

Evelyn Waugh makes an appearance in a new book Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre that is excerpted in The Daily Beast. This is a history of the Special Air Service brigade (SAS) and its founder David Stirling. Waugh knew Stirling from the Commandos in which they both served in North Africa. The excerpt describes Waugh’s 1941 visit to Stirling in a Cairo hospital where Stirling was recovering from a leg injury suffered in a parachute jump. This was in the period before he organized the SAS:

The writer Evelyn Waugh, a fellow officer in the commando force, came to visit Stirling about three weeks after his admission to the hospital. Waugh had been misinformed by the matron that one of Stirling’s legs had already been amputated, and he would likely lose the other. “I can’t feel a thing,” Stirling told his friend. Embarrassed, as Englishmen tend to be when faced with disability, Waugh kept up a steady stream of meaningless small talk, perched on the edge of the bed, and studiously avoided the subject of his friend’s paralysis. Every so often, however, he would sneak a surreptitious glance to where Stirling’s remaining leg ought to be, and whenever he did so Stirling, with extreme effort, would wiggle the big toe of his right foot. Finally, Waugh realized he was being teased, and hit Stirling with a pillow.

“You bastard, Stirling, when did it happen?”

“Minutes before you came. It takes a bit of effort, but it’s a start.”

Stirling was regaining the use of his legs. Others might have cried for joy; for Stirling, however, the first sign of his recovery was an excellent opportunity to play a practical joke on one of Britain’s greatest novelists.

Stirling left the Commandos shortly after Waugh’s visit to organize the SAS, whose first mission was to send small, specially trained units to attack the Germans behind their lines. The success of the North African operation led to the spread of the SAS to other theatres of war and its ultimate survival after the war. It is not mentioned in the excerpt that Stirling was a cousin of Shimi Lovat, the officer who was instrumental in Waugh’s dismissal from the Army after his return from North Africa. Waugh returned to active duty, during which he suffered a leg injury in parachute training prior to joining a mission in Yugoslavia. That operation was headed by Randplph Churchill; it was not conducted by the SAS. 

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