Letter to Times Cites Waugh Defense of Wodehouse

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In a letter to The Times (headed “Wodehouse’s World”) arising from reports of the archiving of the papers of P G Wodehouse at the British Library (see earlier post), a reader has added Evelyn Waugh to the list of those who rose to Wodehouse’s defense when it was a less popular act to do so:

Sir, George Orwell was not the only British literary figure to rally to the defence of PG Wodehouse (News, Dec 28, and letter, Dec 29). Evelyn Waugh observed in 1961 that Wodehouse’s world “can never stale” and that he would “release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own”.

When held in literal captivity, Wodehouse’s naivety certainly caused him to misjudge the timbre of his wartime broadcasts. However that same quality was the origin of written works that have continued to give successive generations such unalloyed delight. In Wodehouse’s exquisite descriptions of worlds that never really existed, the reader escapes beyond the often bleaker nature of those that do.

Edward Turner
Worcester

The quote comes from a broadcast on the BBC Home Service on 15 July 1961 that was reprinted in the Sunday Times the next day. It is collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews, pp. 561-68.

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New Year Greetings via Evelyn Waugh in GQ

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

GQ magazine includes a quote from Evelyn Waugh in its New Year’s greeting article by Scott Meslow (“Champagne is an Anytime Drink”):

Here is the best time to drink Champagne: whenever. Throwing a dinner party? Keep a nice bottle of Champagne on ice. Having a quiet night in alone? Skip the tea or whiskey, pour yourself a crisp glass of Champagne, and settle into a cozy chair with some bubbly and a good book. Spending an intimate night chatting with a friend, partner, and spouse? Follow the advice of the late writer (and Champagne enthusiast) Evelyn Waugh: “For two intimates, lovers or comrades, to spend a quiet evening with a magnum, drinking no aperitif before, nothing but a glass of Cognac after—that is the ideal.”

For the background of this quote from a Vogue magazine article see earlier post.

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Waugh Dramatization Slotted for Spring Transmission

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times has announced a list of outstanding TV dramas scheduled to air in the New Year. Among them is the adaptation of Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall to be broadcast in the Spring. (See earlier posts.) Here’s The Times’ description:

It seems incredible, but this three-part comedy satire represents the television debut for Evelyn Waugh’s comic masterpiece. Jack Whitehall takes the lead as the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, who, after a mishap at Oxford involving the Bollinger Club (sound familiar?), ends up having to teach at an obscure public school in Wales. David Suchet is the headmaster of Llanabba School, while Eva Longoria will play the exotic Mrs Margot Beste-Chetwynde. James Wood, who wrote Rev, is the adapter, so expect something very lovely. 

The Times’ article on the internet is headed by a photograph from the film. Other adaptations from novels include SS-GB by Len Deighton on BBC One in February and, later in the year, a four-part animated dramatization of Watership Down co-produced by BBC and Netflix and a 10-part dramatization of stories of Philip K. Dick on Channel 4 to be entitled Electric Dreams.

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More Waughs Than One

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Daisy Waugh, novelist and journalist, is interviewed on the writers’ website Litopia. She is the daughter of Auberon and grand daughter of Evelyn and has written several books, both fiction and nonfiction. In the interview she discusses her latest offerings in both genres, which were published in 2014:

… she promoted her last book, “a feminist diatribe on modern motherhood” by “lying on a giant, polystyrene cut-out of my own name. In a tight red satin skirt which didn’t belong to me, and some magnificent shoes covered in velvet and jewels, on loan from Manolo Blahnik.”

To promote her latest novel— she sits down with us! But before we get to Honeyville— the pet name of the only town in Colorado where prostitution was legal in 1913— she gripes about trying to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter. She also opens up about being a Waugh, an atheist who loves the Tarot and the personal repercussions of her successful and divisive I don’t know why she bothers: Guilt-free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Women. By the time we reach whether it was better to be a whore than a wife in the Wild West— as proclaimed by Honeyville’s protagonist— the gloves are well and truly off. This Daisy is no shrinking wallflower!

The book about motherhood was published in the US under the title The Kids Will be Fine.  According to Amazon postings, the novel Honeyville is about Hollywood.

In the latest issue of The Week magazine, the autobiography of Daisy’s father, Auberon Waugh, (Will This Do?) is selected by the magazine staff as one of their best books read in 2016: 

Auberon Waugh’s memoirs, published in 1991, were new to me this year. In extremely witty prose, Waugh recalls the trials and indignities of being the son of the famous English Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh. He also shares what it was to be a Fleet Street veteran in London’s never-ending media war. Waugh knows what to do with a poison pen, whether he is aiming it at his teachers, his journalistic rivals, or socialist politicians. The many libel trials in which he was a defendant are entertaining in themselves. But the book is also a tender affair in parts. There is a rueful war remembrance of what it was to be an activist journalist on behalf of starving Biafrans in Nigeria. Or observations on the early career of media maven Tina Brown. The book is good gossipy fun, especially for Anglophiles of a certain age. —Michael Brendan Dougherty, senior correspondent

 

 

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Actor Peter Davison Names Waugh Novel Among Favorites

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In the Daily Express, British actor Peter Davison lists Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall among his favorite books:

It is the book that got me into reading. I didn’t really read at school but once I became an actor and reading wasn’t obligatory I read like a lunatic.This is about a student’s adventures in a rarefied world in the 1930s. It’s brilliantly written and very funny.

Davison, 65,  recently wrote his autobiography Is there Life Outside the Box? which will be published in the US next week. He is best known for his comic performances in TV series such as All Creatures Great and Small, A Very Peculiar Practice, At Home with the Braithwaites, and The Last Dectective. Among his other favorites, aside from several classics, are the contemporary comic novels Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and A Short History of a Small Place by T R Pearson.

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WSJ Traces Etymology of “Scoop”

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Wall Street Journal has an article in which it traces the origin of the word “scoop” and its application to a journalistic coup where one reporter gets his story out ahead of the others who are (or should be) looking for it.  This meaning is first mentioned in 1874 when the OED recorded the usage by a reporter from the Chicago Inter-Ocean who

explained to  a congressional committee how a newspaper tries “to cover a scoop: We hear of a thing that is going round and fear that somebody else will have it and publish it first.”

Credit also goes to Evelyn Waugh for further popularizing the term in his 1938 novel when he used it as his title and told “of a hapless foreign correspondent who accidently breaks a big story.” Waugh used the term ironically in a book which satirized the journalistic profession rather ruthlessly. The WSJ story, written by Ben Zimmer, doesn’t mention a more recent application of the term when US screenwriter Woody Allen used it as the title of a 2006 film which he also acted in and directed. Like Waugh’s novel, the film involved an innocent who was attempting to become an investigative journalist, but the satire is much milder than Waugh’s and the comedy at a lower pitch.

Another recent story in The City Paper (Bogota) covers the lamentable record of drug enforcement against Colombia’s cartels and opens with a quote from Waugh’s novel: “News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.” This is quoted in an excerpt from what is described as a new “blockbuster” from journalist Jimmy Weiskopf entitled My Part in the Narco-War. Whether it is fiction or nonfiction isn’t stated, but from the evidence in the excerpt, it is in written in the satiric tradition of Scoop.

 

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Author Richard Adams Dies at 96

Posted on December 28, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Richard Adams who is best known for his first novel, Watership Down, has died at the age of 96. The book is about rabbits and was derived from stories he had told his children, but it was also based on his own experience in WWII. Daniel Hannan writing in the International Business Times described it as a book about WWII in which the war itself does not appear, in much the same way that Waugh’s Vile Bodies was about WWI in which that war makes no appearance. A reviewer, writing in the Orlando Sentinel about Adams’ 1992 autobiography, The Day Gone By, compared Adams’ wartime experience with that of Evelyn Waugh:

”I am about to write about the bravest men who ever lived,” Adams says of the comrades with whom he served in the 1st British Airborne Division beginning in 1943. His admiration is unbounded and unabashed. In their company, ”I have never felt more proud, fulfilled or happy before or since.”Among those valiant men are the brave and self-effacing Maj. John Gifford and the swashbuckling Capt. Paddy Kavanagh – the models for Hazel and Bigwig in Watership Down…In the war years, the pace quickens, where action replaces introspection. Adams recalls those six years of cataclysmic upheaval with intense emotion – and some humor. In particular, his first encounters with the rough-tough Army regulars make for some amusing incidents. At the British equivalent of boot camp, life is very similar to Guy Crouchback’s in Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, Adams notes – all barracks, ”square bashing” (drilling) and ”bumping” (polishing).

According to Adams’ obituary in the New York Times: 

He told The Times of London in 1974 that he disliked modern novels “dominated by the problems of their heroes or heroines, who are constantly questioning their values.”

Although Adams’ fiction appears to bear little resemblance to that of Evelyn Waugh, when asked by the Daily Telegraph in 2014 who were his favorite writers, Adams pleaded a failing memory but did provide an answer:

I ask him his favourite contemporary author. “Mary Renault,” he offers. She died in 1983. The greatest English novelist? “Evelyn Waugh has had a long and successful career, hasn’t he? This blithering Catholicism is a bit annoying.”

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Waugh and the New American Racists

Posted on December 27, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

An article in the Mexican newspaper El Economista addresses the deveopment of a new form of racism in the United. After years of melting together, as immigrants came in from the south to join those already there from Europe, Africa and Asia, the European group now finds itself rapidly approaching a minority after having previously dominated. A portion of that group is becoming ever more vociferous, as reflected in the recent natonal election. Evelyn Waugh is cited to help explain this phenomenon:

There is a large group that is considered the whitest of all and sees with disgust, and now with irritation, the growing number of people of another color. As explained by Londoner Evelyn Waugh in Remote People: “… the northern races, facing the danger of [domination or] infection by [a coloured race, tend to go a little mad on the subject.] The fear of Indians, [Negroes], Japanese or Chinese obsesses [one or other of all the branches of the Nordic race] … Anglo-Saxons are perhaps [worse than any].”

Waugh was at this point contrasting the attitudes of Northern Europeans with those of “Mediterranean peoples [who] have been at war with the infidel for so many generations that they have learned to accept race antagonism calmly as a normal thing and therefore seem often to be immune from it, as Turks are said at advanced age to become immune from syphilis.” Translation is by Google. The quoted material has been edited to conform to the original. (Remote People, Penguin, 2011, pp 234-35) 

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Floreat Brideshead

Posted on December 27, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Brideshead Revisited receives attention in several recent postings. The New Statesman carries a brief article in its “TV and Radio” column in which a viewer retrospectively considers the 1981 TV adaptation:

Watching it now, at the terrifying age of 53, I am reminded how valuable it is to encounter art repeatedly: some things give up their full meaning slowly. Brideshead Revisited is intended for persons who have reached a certain age and suddenly thought, “What am I doing here?” The characters experience love, but they also lose love…It is maddeningly slow, but so is life; it is an apologia for religion but that won’t hurt you. It’s good to give in to yearning now and then and to revisit the things that we loved and misunderstood when we were younger. It will be interesting to watch Brideshead Revisited again in 30 years, to see how I have changed.

A Roman Catholic blog recommends Brideshead among 5 “Catholic novels” for its readers during the winter months and the blogger (Cecilia Pigg) comes to a similar conclusion on the book as was noted above about the TV series:

I read it first in high school, and my character analysis notes read something like this: “Ew. Julia is so condescending and superficial. I would never hang out with her. Sebastian, stop running away from your problems. Just because your dad did doesn’t make it right. Cordelia was a holy terror before becoming the family rock. Don’t people realize that?!”…Upon reading it after high school, my observations are a bit more nuanced! But that’s what makes the book so memorable. The layers present in the story, particularly in the images Waugh paints, withstand the re-read test and age with you—allowing you to grapple with the story again and again.

Finally, the auction house Bonham’s has announced the sale of another copy of the  limited edition of the novel Waugh had printed in 1944 as Christmas gifts for his friends. This one belonged to Pansy Lamb (nee Pakenham) and sold for £16,250. The auctioneers offer this by way of background:

On receiving her copy of Brideshead, Pansy, who in the 1920s shared a flat with Waugh’s first wife Evelyn Gardner, wrote to Waugh “You see English Society of the 20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs…. I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is”. 

The sale also included Lamb’s inscribed copies of Edmund Campion and Put Out More Flags which sold for £1,750 and £1,875, respectively. Copies of the inscriptions may be seen on the auctioneers’ website on the pages following the description of the Brideshead sale. The auction took place on 9 November 2016 in London.

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Waugh for the Holidays (More)

Posted on December 26, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the New Yorker magazine has included Philip Eade’s biography in its “Briefly Noted” column:

This crowded, witty biography follows Waugh from the ancestral home in Somerset (“The only bathroom featured a stuffed monkey that had, improbably, died of sunstroke”) to the jungles of Brazil. The supporting characters seem stranger, blunter, and more lovable, or hateable, than their doubles in “Decline and Fall” and “Vile Bodies”—in this case, life exceeded art. Eade plunges into correspondence and unpublished family papers to explore the writer’s obsessions with social status and Catholicism, his jackknife turns from affection to contempt, and his torturous ambition. “I know I have something in me,” a young Waugh wrote, “but I am desperately afraid it may never come to anything.”

The Sydney Morning Herald published a list of writers’ recommended reads for 2016. One of the selections of author Paul Ham was The Patrick Melrose Novels, which he compares favorably to the works of Evelyn Waugh:

With the completion of his five-novel autobiographical masterpiece, The Patrick Melrose Novels (Picador), Edward St Aubyn has skewered the English snobbocracy like no other writer since Evelyn Waugh. Unlike Waugh, St Aubyn is a member of that class and as a boy, he was repeatedly raped by his father. In less assured hands this might have turned into a self-pitying weepathon. In St Aubyn’s, the result is a savage social comedy in which the reader is never allowed to forget that the writer shares the poison of inherited privilege.

Finally, the Guardian has asked writers to submit questions for a holiday literary quiz. Novelist Sarah Waters submitted this entry for Part 1:

Sarah Waters: In Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, what kind of hat does Mr Chatterbox unsuccessfully attempt to turn into a high-society trend?

A chrome-yellow fedora

A bottle-green bowler

A polka-dot fez

You can find the answer, as well as other questions, here.

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