Penelope Betjeman and Helena

Posted on January 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph has published an excerpt from a book about Penelope Betjeman, a close friend of Evelyn Waugh to whom he dedicated his historical novel Helena (1950). The book about Penelope (to be entitled Mrs Betjeman), is described as a “fictionalized memoir” and is written by Mary Alexander. It will be published later this year. The excerpt summarizes Penelope’s life and her marriage to John Betjeman, which was not without difficulties. Waugh knew both of them:

… Penelope Betjeman gathered admirers without trying. Evelyn Waugh, in particular, fell in love with her when he was in between wives. He dedicated his 1950 novel Helena to her, having asked for her advice on its heroine while writing it: “I describe her as hunting in the morning after her wedding night feeling the saddle as comforting her wounded maidenhead,” he said. “Is that OK?” Penelope read several extracts of the novel before publication and declared the descriptions “very good”. She would go on to dodge questions about the precise nature of her relationship with Waugh for the rest of her life.

The quote in the letter from Waugh is reproduced in Letters, pp. 217-18 (15 January 1946). The Betjemans’ marriage continued on a fairly strained basis until after the war when Penelope decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. The extract in the Telegraph does not discuss the degree to which Waugh was instrumental in this decision or his relentless persecution of John Betjeman before and after it took place.

Both Betjemans had a strong Christian faith and he, a High Anglican, had always maintained they would stay together while they “knelt in the same pew”…But in 1948 Penelope finally decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. Waugh, fearing that her conversion would be beyond the pale for John, wrote: “Penelope seems determined to enter the Church in the autumn and John to leave her when she does so.” And so it turned out. In 1950 John met Elizabeth Cavendish, the sister of the Duke of Devonshire 25 years his junior, and began a relationship that was to last for the rest of his life.

Waugh’s quoted concerns about Penelope’s conversion are from his diary for 4 August 1947 (Diaries, p. 634). There seems to be no definitive answer to the question of whether an affair between Waugh and Penelope was ever consummated or existed only in Waugh’s imagination. In the recent biography by Philip Eade, there are positive hints from Waugh’s side but nothing but negativity from Penelope’s (Eade, p. 273). Whether the new book will address this matter remains to be seen.

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Waugh Among the Funniest

Posted on January 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian asked writers to name the funniest book they had read. The results are in today’s issue where the choices of 14 of those polled are reprinted. Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies was selected by another comic novelist David Lodge (who perhaps not coincidently is also the Honorary President of the Evelyn Waugh Society):

Choosing the author is no problem: Evelyn Waugh is the supreme master of comedy in modern English literature. But which novel: Decline and Fall? Vile Bodies? Black Mischief? Scoop? It’s a tough call, but I have a special fondness for Vile Bodies, his novel about the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. Although it was written partly out of the pain of discovering his first wife’s adultery and ends on “the biggest battlefield in the history of the world”, it is continuously amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny. Many scenes and episodes, especially those that involve Colonel Blount, the eccentric father of the hero’s on-off fiancee, still make me laugh every time I reread the book. Just remembering them can provoke a smile: for instance, Agatha Runcible’s appearance at the breakfast table in 10 Downing Street attired in Hawaiian fancy dress. That scene, like so many in Waugh’s comic fiction, works because of careful preparation and timing: Agatha’s ludicrous entrance is both unexpected and yet entirely consistent with the preceding narrative, from which certain details have been deftly omitted. And the sequence still works every time I revisit the novel because the language in which it is communicated, including the dialogue, is perfectly yet economically expressive. Comedy is generated from invented situations and verbal style, and Waugh was a master of both.

Another writer, David Nicholls, had trouble choosing and included Waugh’s Decline and Fall on his short list but ultimately selected Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s. Other selections included the Jeeves series by P G Wodehouse (named by novelist Sebastian Faulks), Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (John O’Farrell’s choice) and What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe (selected by comic novelist Monica Lewycka). Yesterday’s Guardian carries an essay by Coe entitled, “Will satire save us in the age of Trump?”

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Don’t Call Me Evie

Posted on January 6, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In an article in the latest Weekly Standard, essayist and frequent contributor Mr Joseph Epstein complains of the current habit of addressing complete strangers by their first names. He cites as an annoying example a recent reply email from the editor of the TLS in which he was addressed as Joseph. In support of his preference for a bit more formality, he cites the example of Evelyn Waugh:

 The novelist Evelyn Waugh, a famously irascible character, upon his return from a trip to Goa, wrote to his friend Nancy Mitford: “I can bear only intimacy, really, & after that formality or servility. The horrible thing is familiarity.” I am myself not big on servility, and I don’t mind formality, but I’m with Waugh on familiarity, at least when it’s unearned.

In the letter (18 February 1953) Waugh had told Nancy Mitford that he had found the Indians “much more servile than most foreigners,” and then went on to place that character fault into context with others (Letters, p. 392).

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Brideshead in the News: Charles, Sebastian and Celia

Posted on January 5, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Jeremy Irons who portrayed Charles Ryder in the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was recently appointed Chancellor of Bath Spa University. He is the first person to occupy that position and was interviewed by Times Higher Education (THE) last month:

Q. You were involved in one of the most famous dramas set at a university. Has Brideshead Revisited had an impact on how higher education is perceived?

A. When it aired, I think it did change things a little bit; not necessarily for the better. One of the great things that can happen at university is that you have fun and you mix with a variety of people from different backgrounds, as Charles Ryder did.

A Roman Catholic weblog has posted an article in which Fr Angelo Geiger discusses the condition called the “Christmas blues” and writes that one reason for this form of depression is the stressful gatherings of dysfunctional families during the holiday season.

In Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, [an example of this] is Sebastian Flyte, the alcoholic homosexual who arrives home two days late for the family Christmas gathering, claiming that he had been determined to have a happy Christmas. When asked if he did, he replies: “I think so. I don’t remember it much, and that’s always a good sign, isn’t it?” But if Sebastian is a source of awkwardness and discomfort for his family during the Christmas season, Waugh makes it clear that Sebastian has reasons to dull his recollections of his family life. He calls Brideshead, not his home, but the place where his family lives. Sebastian is openly dysfunctional… 

In an article in a travel magazine called Afar, journalist Emma John describes how reading Brideshead inspired an unusual journey:

During my first transatlantic crossing, Celia Ryder hosted a glittering cocktail party in her stateroom. The following morning, her room was festooned with thank-you bouquets. I was astonished. Who knew you could send people flowers on a ship? OK, so I wasn’t actually at sea with Lady Celia. She’s a character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, and I’d made this journey entirely from my couch. But the sheer decadence of that crossing from Southampton to New York, in the 1930s heyday of society cruises left me infatuated.

Emma booked a passage on the Queen Mary 2 and even went so far as to convene an onboard cocktail party like Celia’s in the novel:

The visions of Brideshead’s cocktail party remained before me—and what was that personalized stationery for, if not to invite my fellow passengers round for a French 75 cocktail? … On our penultimate morning onboard, my room steward, Lou, offered to deliver my invitations for me…It is a mark of what a transatlantic crossing does for one’s manners that my guests, a few hundred miles from the nearest 7-Eleven, still arrived with gifts. 

Finally, in another travel article on a BBC website, the sights of Shoreham-on-Sea in Sussex are discussed:

The soft green slopes of the South Downs – the term “downs” comes from the Saxon word “dun” for hill – rise behind the town, topped by the Gothic wonder of Lancing College. This amazing building was used for scenes in the 2008 film version of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, an old boy of the school.

The chapel is only Gothic Revival but is an impressive building nevertheless. One wonders what scene was filmed there, since Charles’ schooldays are not implicated in the novel itself on in the 2008 adaptation? Was the Lancing College chapel perhaps transposed to Oxford?

 

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Milthorpe Article on Waugh Book Collection Published

Posted on January 4, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

An article by Waugh scholar Dr Naomi Milthorpe is published in the latest issue of the academic journal The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945, v. 12 (2016). See earlier post. This is entitled: “A Secret House: Evelyn Waugh’s Book Collection.” Here’s an abstract taken from the journal:

This article examines Evelyn Waugh’s private library, reading his habits of book collection as a particular mode of late modernist practice. In private and public writing particularly during the Second World War, Waugh the book collector is simultaneously consumer, producer, and cultural combatant. Indeed, Waugh’s collection practices parallel his satiric practices: both satire and collection are guided by the impulse to discriminate, connoting both the pejorative and elitist senses of exclusion, but also selection, deliberation, and distinction. Waugh’s careful assemblage of a library at odds with mainstream literary culture proffers a striking case study of the contested cultural landscape of England in the space between, and after, the two world wars.

The full article is available online at the links above. If these do not open, a subscription may be needed. This will require registration on the journal’s website, but it is free of charge. Dr Milthorpe is among those scheduled to speak at the Evelyn Waugh Conference in May at the Huntington Library near Pasadena.

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Evelyn Waugh, Secret Agent?

Posted on January 4, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

There have been two articles posted within the last month which suggest that Evelyn Waugh was, along with other writers of his generation, at some time during his career in the employ of the secret intelligence services. The first, written by Richard Lance Keeble, appeared as a post on the Orwell Society’s website last month. This deals primarily with the question of whether Orwell was at some point an intelligence agent through his connections with David Astor, publisher of The Observer which also employed Kim Philby after he left MI6 following the Burgess-Maclean affair. This note appears in that article:

Orwell would not have been alone in working for intelligence during the war: Other intellectuals/writers included A. P. Herbert, Arthur Koestler (who had previously served the Soviet Comintern while a journalist during the Spanish civil war), David Garnett, Elizabeth Bowen, novelist Muriel Spark, Alec Waugh and his brother Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene.  Tom Bower, The perfect English spy: Sir Dick White and the secret war 1935-1990, London: William Heinemann, 1995, p. 227.

More recently, the suggestion also surfaced in the UK socialist daily paper The Morning Star. This appears in a review by John Green of a recent book: Journalism in an Age of Terror: Covering and Uncovering the Secret State by John Lloyd. The reviewer conceives the book as an apology for the state intelligence services co-opting journalists in their efforts to combat terrorism as they had in the past to combat communism;

As the work offers ideal cover, secret services have always used journalists and writers as agents — from Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Greene and Kim Philby to unnamed writers in the papers today.

Graham Greene’s and Malcolm Muggeridge’s work for the secret services is well documented (e.g., Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene: Volume 2, 1939-1955, pp. 166-83).  However, none of Waugh’s biographers suggest that he was ever actively involved with the secret services, either as a journalist or in the military. He was assigned for a brief period to the SAS and trained as a parachutist with the SOE but never went on active service with those agencies. He acted as his Commando unit’s “intelligence” officer during the Battle of Crete, but this did not involve any covert espionage. He also prepared a report on Communist persecution of the Roman Catholic Church in Yugoslavia; but he undertook this report on his own initiative and it was largely ignored by the government of the time. I am not aware of any suggestions that he was working for the intelligence services when he was on assignments as a correspondent in Abyssinia.

The Orwell Society’s article is supported by a cite to a book by Tom Brower. Full access to that cite is unavailable on the internet, but from the snippet view on Google Books, it can be seen to include Graham Greene with Waugh but in what capacity cannot be determined and no supporting evidence is available. What Brower’s book have to say about the other writers mentioned in the book is also not available. The Morning Star offers no support for their claim and do not suggest that it is based on the book under review. Any readers having access to these or other sources that may relate to this issue are invited to comment below. The Brower book may well have more relevant information than what is available on the internet.

UPDATE (28 January 2017): An examination of the book by Tom Bower sheds very little light on any engagement by Waugh as an intelligence agent. In a section explaining the recruitment by Dick White of a number of intellectuals into the service this sentence appears (p. 47): “Also passing through White’s office were some of the great names of British literature, including Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.” There is no further explanation or footnote. In a later passage (p. 54), Waugh is said to have provided a  reference for Roger Hollis, brother of Waugh’s Oxford friend Christopher, who had applied for a job in the intelligence service. He got the job, and went on to become the Director General of MI5.

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Powell Society Visits Waugh’s Oxford

Posted on January 3, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the Anthony Powell Society Newsletter (No. 65, Winter 2016) is largely devoted to reports of a visit to Oxford made by its members last September. The theme was “Oxford Day Out: AP and His Chums,” and inevitably this involved visitation of sites relevant to Powell’s undergraduate friend Evelyn Waugh. These included the site of the Hypocrites Club at 31 St Aldate’s where both writers were members, nearby Christ Church where Sebastian Flyte was a student and Anthony Blanche recited The Waste Land through a megaphone, Balliol College where Powell was a student and Waugh once lewdly serenaded the Dean, and Wadham College where Maurice Bowra was Warden and Waugh was a frequent visitor.  The group ended up having tea at Hertford College where Waugh was a student.  This was much later also the undergraduate residence of the Powell Society’s Chairman (Robin Bynoe), who occupied the same rooms where Waugh lived during his second year. Hertford College was the site of the Waugh Society’s foundation meeting at the Waugh Centenary Conference in 2003.

There are several articles in the Newsletter mentioning Waugh’s Oxford connections, including that by Stephen Walker, its editor, from which the foregoing description was taken. Perhaps the most interesting to Waugh enthusiasts is that by Robin Bynoe: “Powell, Waugh, and Two Contrasting Role Models.” This recounts Waugh’s career as a student at the then rather socially dim Hertford College, and, in dealing with Waugh’s animosity toward his tutor, later Dean, CRMF Cruttwell, Bynoe provides what is to me some interesting new information about Cruttwell’s later descent into madness:

Here we enter the realm of gossip. It is High Table gossip, the best sort. The story is that after an evening spent necking the College port and insulting other members of the Senior Common Room he staggered out with the admirable intention of counting the railings that form a circle around the Radcliffe Camera. He failed however to mark the railing with which he started, and when his fellows emerged from their beds the next morning he was still at it. The tally was by then some thousands. He was dispatched to a place of safety.

One is inclined to feel sorry for him but for another bit of gossip. This involves the aftermath of a tiff with a colleague. This man was standing in the Quad when a large piece of masonry fell from the roof, narrowly missing him. Cruttwell’s face appeared in the space previously occupied by the masonry, “Awfully unsafe, these roofs,” he cackled.

The Newsletter is distributed to members of the Powell Society in a printed edition but will after about a year be posted on the internet here.

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Waugh in the Public Domain (More)

Posted on January 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University Law School has posted a more detailed analysis of how the entry of Waugh’s works into the public domain will affect those countries such as Canada where that occurred yesterday. See earlier post. The introduction to the article (which displays a copy of the cover of the current Little, Brown edition of Brideshead Revisited) summarizes matters as follows:

Public Domain Day is January 1st of every year. If you live in Canada, January 1st 2017 would be the day when the works of Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Forester, and André Breton enter the public domain. Canadians can revisit Brideshead Revisited by staging their own dramatizations, or add the full works of Forester and Breton to online archives, without asking permission or violating the law. In Europe, the works of Gertrude Stein, H.G. Wells, and John Maynard Keynes will emerge into the public domain. And, due to a quirk in French law, Public Domain Day for Maurice Ravel came in May 2016 for France, when many of his compositions, including the popular and hypnotic Bolero, entered the public domain. In the US, Bolero is still copyrighted, preventing community orchestras from performing it because the sheet music is “simply too expensive.” (Footnotes omitted.)

Waugh, Forester and Breton all died in 1966; the others (except Ravel), in 1946. The article goes on to describe the legal quagmire in the United States created by successful efforts led by those such as the Disney lobby to extend copyright. Under this legislation, it appears from the article that Waugh’s works will not enter the public domain in the US until starting in 2024 for Rossetti–95 years following US publication in 1928. (This assumes compliance with all US filing and renewal requirements. Anyone with a better understanding of the law who believes this is incorrect is invited to comment below.) The saddest effect of this law is, as noted in the article, to prevent libraries and archives from preserving and disseminating even those works for which no copyright holder has been known to seek an extension. These are the so-called orphan works. 

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Party Time: Vile Bodies and Bruno Hat

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The anticipation of New Year’s Eve parties inspired media references to Vile Bodies. In an entertainment news blog (Salon.com), several memorable party scenes from films were recalled. The opening scene from Stephen Fry’s film adaptation of the novel (retitled as Bright Young Things) was among them:

The fast-paced opening sequence of Stephen Fry’s fabulous adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” features a divinely decadent costume party titled “Inferno.” Miles (Michael Sheen) confides to his dancing friend Nina (Emily Mortimer) that the party is “too dull,” to which she responds, “I’ve never been so bored in my life!” It’s “vile,” but a typical, absinthe-fueled party for the Bright Young Things, who host “masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Circus parties,” and more in 1930s London. Of course, the war soon breaks out and the party crashes once and for all. All these frivolous high society partygoers are faced with the “nausea, terror and shame” that awaits them. Fry’s film is a sly satire that still resonates today.

Several German-language newspapers in Switzerland also carried a listing of items to be considered in planning seasonal parties. This quote is from the version that appeared in the Tages-Anzeiger in Zurich:

Celebrate like the Bright Young Things. The English upper-class kids, who called themselves “The Bright Young Things”, celebrated a different way in the 20s and 30s. They actually celebrated throughout [?] and created creative mottoes for their parties. For example, there was a party called «The Second Childhood Party». There was the circus party, the Watteau party and wild treasure hunts in the city. Sometimes they disguised themselves as someone from the circle of friends. Makeup for men and androgyne fashion for women were the order of the day. Among the bright young things were, for example, the author Evelyn Waugh, whose novel “Vile Bodies” is a kind of portrait of the time, and the photographer Cecil Beaton, who began his career with photographing his party friends.

The story is accompanied by a Cecil Beaton photograph of costumed BYPs dressed as infants in prams, no doubt taken at the “Second Childhood Party” mentioned in the article. The translation is by Google.

Two postings from earlier this week provide background for another party prank in which Waugh took part. This was the Bruno Hat exhibition in 1929 where art was on display from a bogus modern artist. Waugh wrote the catalogue and Brian Howard did most of the paintings. The postings appear on Jot101.com (an eclectic website that urges readers to submit items of interest based on recent findings or researches). The postings are dated 26 December and 27 December 2016 and are based on the blogger’s discovery of a book by Patrick Balfour (Society Racket: A Critical Survey of Modern Social Life (London, 1933) in which he provides backgound information about the hoax exhibition. Balfour’s role in Vile Bodies is also explained in the introduction to the blog post:

At the time of this book [Balfour] was ‘Mr Gossip’ at the Daily Express and the character Adam in Waugh’s Vile Bodies was probably partly based on him (Adam becomes ‘Mr Chatterbox’ at the ‘Daily Excess’.) Balfour covers the 1929 hoax surrealist exhibition at the Guinness’s house in Buckingham Gate SW1.

There is also a quote in the second posting from Waugh’s hoax catalogue (“Approach to Hat”), which he wrote under the name “A.R. de T.” Here’s a sample:

The painting of Bruno Hat presents a problem of very real importance. He is no Cezanne agonisedly tussling to reconcile the visual appearance of form with his own intuitional perception of it… Bruno Hat’s work definitely accredit him with a similar power [to Picasso], developed, because of his youth only, to a less degree. The significance of this cannot be sufficiently stressed. It means, among other things, that Bruno Hat may lead the way in this century’s European painting from Discovery to Tradition. Uninfluenced, virtually untaught, he is the first natural, lonely, spontaneous flower of the one considerable movement in painting to-day.

The quote comes from an earlier Leicester Gallery catalogue where one of Bruno Hat’s paintings was for sale. This is also available online here.

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El Mundo Writes of Sybille Bedford’s Debt to Waugh

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A Spanish-language article in the daily newspaper El Mundo published in Madrid relates the story of author Sybille Bedford’s struggle to start her writing career.  This did not begin until she was in her 40s. She was born in Germany into a half Jewish family and, following her parents’ early deaths, she studied in England. She met Aldous and Mary Huxley in the south of France and, when she lost her German citizenship, they helped her arrange a marriage of convenience to an Englishman named Bedford. She moved to England with the Huxleys and accompanied them to America when they left. She may be best known for her biography of Huxley (1974) and her first novel, The Legacy (1956). The novel was written after the war and after she had published a travel book. This is where Waugh enters the story. According to El Mundo:

The Legacy is today considered a masterpiece, but its start was not easy. The editorial rejection of her three previous attempts to publish novels weighed down on Bedford. She said that her manuscript did not excite one of her best friends, American journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. The first criticisms of The Legacy were negative. But it turns out that Nancy Mitford was enthusiastic about the book and inevitably sent it to Evelyn Waugh with a warm recommendation. The consecrated [consagrado ?] author of Brideshead Revisited (1945) was amazed and published a highly complimentary critique [elogiosisimo commentario critico ?]. From there, The Legacy was a success.

Waugh and Mitford corresponded about the book for several months after she sent it to him in March 1956. His first response after reading it anticipates his review in The Spectator (13 April 1956) to which the El Mundo article refers. Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, pp,  387-95. Waugh’s review is reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews, pp. 510-11. After pointing out some largely technical and structural problems, he describes the novel as 

…a book of entirely delicious quality. The plot is intricate and admirably controlled. The theme is not superficially original; two families vastly dissimilar, the one Jewish, inartistic millionaires, the other slightly decadent Catholic aristocrats, become joined in marriage…There is no hint of (odious, cant word) nostalgia in the book. The lovable, civilized  hero is ruthlessly stripped and exposed. Only Gottlieb, the butler, maintains his ascendancy uncompromised. The rest are ‘all, all of a piece throughout’; frauds and failures and each event in the elaborate structure has a direct causal connection with the revelation of them. We know nothing of the author’s age, nationality or religion. But we gratefully salute a new artist.

Bedford went on to write several other books, including three more novels, and died in 2006. The translation of the text from El Mundo is by Google with some edits. Any thoughts on improving it are welcome and can be submitted by commenting below.

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