Waugh for the Holidays

Posted on December 23, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

As the holidays approach, the media are gathering their year end collections of journalistic musings on 2016. Several of these implicate Evelyn Waugh or his writings.

In the Daily Express, comedian Ruby Wax names a Waugh novel as one of her six favorite books:

THE LOVED ONE by Evelyn Waugh Penguin, £8.99 I’m fascinated by the macabre and this is a satire set in Hollywood where death is sold like a holiday. It’s about how we package everything. I like anything that attacks the way we monetarise [sic] everything in America.

In a TLS blog, columnist Michael Caines includes Waugh’s attitudes toward Christmas among those of other writers, quoting from Diaries, 639-40:

Evelyn Waugh…could appreciate some benefits of Christmas festivities – the “caviar . . . chicken soup, grilled soles, roast turkey, cold beef, plum pudding and mince-pies all in very large quantities”, for example, on offer during one pre-Christmas dinner of “quiet reflection” in 1945, which were accompanied by “vodka, champagne, port, brandy, Havana cigars”. The shops were full of “expensive trash”, though, and the presence of the children in the house was hardly to be relished. On Boxing Day, it was only by keeping them in bed for as long as possible that “we managed to have a tolerable day”. “My children weary me”, he told his diary. “I can only see them as defective adults; feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humourless.” Christmas deprived him of the customary distractions: “Though I make-believe to be detached from the world, I find a day without post or newspapers strangely flat”.

Scoop is being discussed in the New York Times’ ongoing book podcast, having been chosen by columnist Greg Cowles. It has also been cited as the “canonical text” on the hot topic of “fake news” in a journalistic  weblog The Unz Review, quoting the Wenlock Jakes incident.

The new biography of Waugh by Philip Eade has been selected as one of the top 10 LGBT nonfiction books of the year in the Bay Area Reporter. It has also been reviewed favorably in the Smokey Mountain News, a weekly free distribution paper published in Waynesville, NC. In a TES poll of academics, the biography was selected as a book of the year by a Turkish professor:

… The book covers the familiar ground of his college antics, but also reveals the precarity of the writing profession even when you’re famous, living from one commission to the next and exploiting friends’ hospitality for a peaceful place to write.

Finally, in an interview in the Irish Echo, novelist, former prisoner and IRA activist  Danny Morrison gave this response:

Q. Name a book that you were pleasantly surprised by. 

A. “Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh.

Thanks to reader Dave Lull for sending links to some of the above.  

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Latest Evelyn Waugh Studies Posted on Website

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the Society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies (No. 47.2, Autumn 2016) is posted on the website. Here are the contents:

ARTICLES

Grace Stevens, Unnatural Narratology and the Tiresian Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited 

David Bittner, The “Vanbrugh Brouhaha” in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited

REVIEWS

“Explanations, No Apologies”,  Evelyn Waugh, by Ann Pasternak Slater. Reviewed by J.V. Long

“Was This Book Really Necessary?” Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited, by Philip Eade. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley

Brideshead Revisited: A Play, Adapted by Bryony Lavery from the novel by Evelyn Waugh. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley 

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New German Edition of Sword of Honour Reviewed

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A new German edition of Sword of Honour was published earlier this year. This was the same translation as that published originally in 1981 but, according to the December issue of literaturkritik.de, it has been checked (durchgesehen) and, one presumes, updated somewhat. The German title is Ohne Furcht und Tadel which is not a literal translation of the English title but a phrase used to describe a desired a quality of Medieval knights (Without fear and without reproach). The reviewer, Dr Sylvia Heudecker, offers the following explanation of why the book is relevant for Germans:

The book…offers a very unusual reading to the German public. It is not the suffering of the victims or the cruelty of the perpetrators that determines the course of things. Here, life in the British army is reported from the perspective of an officer. The tone is light, ironic, the figures shown are drawn with a satirical wink. The events in the troops, initially in the training and later in the service, often do not correspond to the allegedly penetrating seriousness of the historical situation. On the contrary, the reader learns how organizational planlessness and chaotic logistics lead to a joyous lottery of the soldiers, especially as long as they are on the home front.

The book is written at the same time with critical distance and patriotic idealism from the military interior perspective on the Second World War. This perspective is also familiar to German literature, such as Ernst Jünger – but the narrative is entirely different. And so the novel sends its German reader to explore his own expectations of a war-romance. Already this experience is worth reading.

After commenting favorably on the translation by Werner Petrich, the reviewer describes the difficulty new readers must face in understanding military terminology that has fallen out of current useage in the years since the original novel was published. The review concludes:

Waugh draws an illuminating portrait of his time, which is particularly impressive in that the view of Guy Crouchback is that of a “single, rather untypical Englishman.” Thus writes the author in his short foreword. Because Guy sees things differently from most around him, his interest is attracted by the seemingly secondary. He challenges the self-evident and thus opens up unusual perspectives. Although he belongs to a small elite, his Roman Catholic social position separates him from the rest of the Anglican upper class. Crouchback’s origin is that of an outsider in his own culture, who willingly serves the common fatherland. In this tension field, the novel moves to the last sentence: “Everything has gone very well for Guy.”

The translation is by Google with minor edits. Readers are invited to offer improvements or corrections by commenting below.

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Frank Rich Names Waugh Novel His Book of the Year

Posted on December 21, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Vanity Fair has reprinted a straw poll of leading journalists who were asked to choose their book of the year for 2016. Frank Rich, former drama critic for the New York Times and currently writer-at-large for New York Magazine, made this selection:

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, because it is a great novel about the inexorable passing of an age and a civilization, and surely this is a time to read (or re-read) wise fiction that gives us a wider view of the world than what is right in front of us.

Most of the other journalists chose non-fiction, but these other novels were mentioned:

Jill Lawrence named “… the latest Armand Gamache novel by former journalist Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning. Her literary mysteries are a grand, disturbing, sometimes laugh-out-loud feast of art, evil, psychology, religion, politics, crime and policing (and also bistro food). As a gift, I would recommend Still Life, the first in the series, because each book builds on the one before. Reading them in order is a treat.”

David Shribman, editor-in-chief, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night (McGill-Queens University Press). This is a long forgotten 1959 Canadian novel that may be the best novel I’ve read in decades…The author is known for his classic The Two Solitudes but this is perhaps even better, an examination of friendship, loyalty and revolution in which the most memorable character is not a human but the city of Montreal.”

The poll was conducted by James Warren, Chief Media Writer, Poynter.org and originally appeared on that web site.

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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 soufflé 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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