Waugh’s Favorite Bookstore Profiled in Vanity Fair

Posted on January 11, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Vanity Fair has published a brief history of Heywood Hill Books located in London’s Mayfair district. This is written by Francis Wheen. The shop was for many years Waugh’s favorite bookstore (or one of them at least). It was located next door to his barber, facilitating frequent visits, and was managed by his friend Nancy Mitford during WWII when its owner and founder was on active service. It was during her tenure at the bookshop that her regular correspondence with Waugh began. She left in 1945 after her income from Pursuit of Love freed her from the need to work:

Evelyn Waugh described the wartime shop as “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London,” and it sounds like a riotous party. According to one chronicler, “All the literary beau monde and half the Free French Army were there.” When a rival bookseller shook his head over how small the premises were, Mitford explained that her customers “love being pressed bosom to bosom.” 

Waugh also described the shop in a letter to Dorothy Lygon dated 23 March 1944 as “the one centre of old world gossip left” (Letters, p. 182). It now belongs to the Duke of Devonshire who inherited it from his father in 2004. It went through rather a bad patch after its longtime manager John Saumarez Smith retired in 2008. But a suitable replacement was eventually found in the person of the Duke’s son-in-law Nicky Dunne. Although he had no experience in the book trade he loved passing the time in bookshops and has applied that to an advantage by turning the business around:

He appears to have been a quick learner. Annual turnover is back over £1 million. Heywood Hill will never compete with Amazon on price or the height of its stockpile, but what it can offer, like the Mayfair gents’ outfitters in nearby Savile Row, is bespoke tailoring that understands customers’ requirements more precisely than would a mere algorithm.

These special services include a book club tailored to the personal preferences of each member and the compiliation of complete libraries for individuals or even commercial accounts such as hotels. The shop is still located at 10 Curzon Street, W1.

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Waugh’s Scarf

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Croatian newspaper Jutarnji Vijesti (Morning News) published in Zagreb has a longish article about Waugh’s career in Yugoslavia in WWII and his connections with that country afterwards. The story opens with a description of a silk scarf on display in Rijeka. This is an example of a scarf worn by British aviators in WWII that was designed to be insoluble in water and displayed accurate road networks to facilitate escape routes for those in downed aircarft:

The scarf on display belonged to the English pilot [sic] and writer Evelyn Waugh who in 1944 survived a crash somewhere in the area of Petrova Gora…It is the original “escape map” that was worn by English pilots; this was confirmed in conversation with Mladen Urem, [who is related to a Dr Kučić, who in turn is said to have treated Waugh after the crash and was given the scarf.]… Urem, who donated the scarf to the museum in Rijeka, explains that the origin of the scarf is an “urban legend” but does have a factual basis.  Waugh actually survived a plane crash in 1944 in the area of Petrova Gora, and in this area a Dr. Zdravko Kučić was head of the IV. Army medical corps. Doctor Kučić after 1945 became the director of the Rijeka hospital, which now bears his name. After all, Waugh described 1944 events in Croatia in a novel–reports Urem– and this is the most interesting fact related to the story of the silk scarf.

The article goes on to describe Waugh’s service in Yugoslavia, his identification of Marshall Tito as a woman, and his preparation of a study of church-state relations in the aftermath of the war. The story also says that Waugh’s war trilogy Sword of Honour (Počasni mač) could not be printed in a Croatian (or at the time Serbo-Croatian) translation while Tito was still alive. After his death, all three volumes were published separately in a 1993 Croatian edition. The cover from volume 3, Unconditional Surrender (Bezuvjetnoj predaji), which deals with Guy Crouchback’s Yugoslavian experiences, is reproduced in the article. There are also several other interesting photographs, including one of Waugh with a group of soldiers and a detail from the scarf. The translation is by Google with considerable editing and simplification. Here’s the full translated version but, be warned, it is fairly rough.

UPDATE (11 January 2017): The translation from the Croatian newspaper has been modified to clarify that Dr Kučić was given the scarf during the war and one of his heirs donated the scarf to the museum in Rijeka.

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Evelyn Waugh, Cigar Lover (more)

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh is frequently quoted on the enjoyment of Havana cigars, but the source of this quote has eluded your correspondent:

“The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana cigar.”

 See earlier post. A clue is offered in an article by Alexander Chancellor in The Spectator for 11 January 2014:

Among the most famous cigar smokers of the 20th century — Winston Churchill, Orson Welles, Groucho Marx, Al Capone and, less reputably, Bill Clinton — was Evelyn Waugh, who, after achieving early fame as a novelist in the 1930s, went so far as to promote cigars in an advertisement on behalf of the Cuban government. This was published in the Times in 1938, and in it Waugh made the now surprising claim that cigars were cheap. ‘It always strikes me as odd that cigars should, almost universally, be regarded as symbols of wealth,’ he wrote. ‘I know of no other physical pleasure which can be purchased as cheaply, and leave behind it so few regrets or responsibilities.’ It was true, he said, that in fiction and films and caricatures cigars were always associated with ‘the elderly and the opulent’, but in fact they were one of the pleasures we could all afford to share with them. ‘How much in their harassed routine they need those exquisite hours when the Tobacco of Havana comes to calm their apprehensions and woo them into self-esteem,’ he wrote. ‘We, too, have our worries and we, too, turn to the same source of comfort.’

While this Spectator article does not contain the exact quote that is usually cited, the quoted language may appear somewhere within this advertisement in The Times. If any of our readers have access to archival material containing that advertisement, they are invited to comment below.

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Vile Bodies Again Cited as One of Funniest Books

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Esquire (Middle East edition) has published its list of the top 20 funniest books less than a week after the Guardian issued its choices for the top 14. See earlier post. Vile Bodies is on both lists, joining Three Men in a Boat as the only book to achieve that distinction. Here’s how Esquire describes its selection:

It is a gift to the satirist to live in turbulent times but there still remains the task of encapsulating them. In Vile Bodies, an ostensibly superficial comic novel, Evelyn Waugh brilliantly, hilariously, unflinchingly but always humanely pinions a society which is in thrall to gossip and decadence, traumatized by war and financial catastrophe, yet unable to stop itself. This is a book as much for our age as it was for when Waugh wrote it in 1930.

Other books on Esquire’s list which were conspicuously absent from the Guardian’s are Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith (one of Waugh’s favorites) and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (which Waugh thought unfunny). On the other hand, oddly missing from Esquire’s list is anything by P G Wodehouse.

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Waugh’s Ear Trumpet on Auction

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

One of Waugh’s ear trumpets will be auctioned on March 30 along with several books and letters from a collection which is being sold off. The auctioneer is Forum Auctions, but the catalogue is not yet available online. According to the Antiques Trade Gazette, the trumpet on offer last sold at Sotheby’s in 1995. It is said to be the one which Waugh removed from his ear to tune out a speech by Malcolm Muggeridge at a Foyle’s luncheon in 1957. According to the Gazette

The plated copper English made telescopic ear trumpet… comes with letters of provenance from son Auberon Waugh. He wrote: “I have sent you a disgusting object… you may be able to identify as a telescopic ear trumped as used by my Father in his later years… it may be of some whimsical interest to an obsessive collector.”

This is not the only ear trumpet Waugh possessed. As reported in the Gazette, citing an earlier post on this site:

A tortoiseshell ear trumpet, which he was given to him by the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, was once offered to journalist Alexander Chancellor to try on a visit to the Waugh household over a decade ago. Chancellor, whose daughter Eliza is married to Evelyn’s grandson Alexander Waugh, recalls he “heard rather better through Waugh’s ear trumpet than I do through my two state-of-the-art Swiss-made electronic hearing aids that cost me around £2,000 each a few years ago”.

The estimated sale price is £1000-1500.

 

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Black Mischief on Surfer List

Posted on January 8, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief is included on a list of recommended books that every surfer should read. This is on the surfing weblog beachgrit.com and is compiled by Chas Smith:

Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh is the most awesome piece of racism that you’ll ever read. I love it so much. Racism is, anyhow, a social construct that is almost always funny. Even when people really mean it, it’s funny. I know, I know, it’s easy for me to say since I’m white. But Waugh elevates the idea of national building in Africa to such ridiculous heights. It’s the sort of old-timey aristocratic remove that today’s social liberal would cry about. Waugh doesn’t take himself seriously either. The well-bred Englishman star of the show is absurd. Awesome. I can’t talk about it anymore. You should go and buy a copy right now.

Other books on the list (which totals only 6 in apparent recognition that surfers are not voracious readers) include Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (“long, rambling and shot through with radiance” and G K Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday (“…Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who sold tons of secrets to the USSR used to give the book to his friends. Good enough for me.”).

Another West Coast reference to Waugh’s work surfaces (if you will excuse the expression) in a detailed and thoughtful review of the recent biography of Waugh’s contemporary Kenneth Clark by James Stourton in the Los Angeles Review of Books. This is by Kevin McMahon who comments on the high bar set for any biography of important figure of Clark’s generation:

…books about interwar Britain always run the risk of becoming anthologies of aristocratic howlers. The task of the biographer wading into this terrain consists largely of scaling the Himalayan mountain range of memoirs, diaries, and letters of interwar literati like Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, Lord Berners, Cyril Connolly, the Mitfords, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Set, not to mention the novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, et al. These have covered the ground so articulately, with such nuance and malice-fueled acuity, that later writers struggle to be heard. Stourton succeeds in making himself audible above this chatter by spinning adventure yarns out of Clark the administrator and indefatigable committee-joiner.

Later in his review McMahon makes another nod to Waugh with his reference to the early years of WWII as “this Put Out More Flags period.”

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Charles Ryder’s Outside-the-Book Experiences

Posted on January 7, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Two postings make use of Charles Ryder’s experiences from Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in contexts outside the structure of the novel. On a Roman Catholic weblog (Aleteia), Br. Silas Henderson is reminded, on the Feast Day of the Epiphany (6th January), of Charles’ experience at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed:

Near the end of the novel, Ryder has an awakening, an epiphany, as he watches the final act of faith of a man he presumed shared his ambivalence toward Catholicism. Despite himself, Ryder “felt the longing for a sign… the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the Sign of the Cross. Then I knew the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.” In the ancient world, an epiphaneia was a visible manifestation of a god or the solemn visit of a secular ruler to the cities of his realm. The celebration of the Epiphany of the Lord brings together the quiet realizations of a Charles Ryder with the grandeur of a king’s visit and in the celebration of this great feast, we are not passively remembering the journey of the Magi—Epiphany is a dynamic feast celebrating the redemption that has been won for us through the Incarnation of Christ.

In a more mundane context, another writer is reminded of Charles’ ecstatic reaction (perhaps even another epiphany) to the seemingly idyllic world of the Marchmain family at Brideshead Castle. This is by Terry Cutler from the sports pages of Newsweek.com:

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe…” Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited. Manchester City rose to the English Premier League summit on August 28, 2016, with a 3-1 victory over West Ham United at Etihad Stadium with a performance that suggested new manager Pep Guardiola’s vision was already half realized.

But City’s early run of victories was soon broken by several defeats as the season progressed (or regressed, as the case may be):

Like Charles Ryder realizing the Brideshead of reality did not match his memory, Guardiola was awoken with a bucket of cold water from his dream… All of which means by January 6, 2017, his first-ever experience of FA Cup football as a manager, Guardiola must find a way through the longest cold snap of his career. 

City won yesterday’s FA Cup match against West Ham 5-0, so perhaps the Ryderian summer reveries have re-emerged, at least while the team can bask in the glow of that resounding victory. 

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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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