Waugh Cited in Book on Alcohol in Literature

Posted on December 17, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian has published an essay which appears to be based on a book about the role played by alcohol in 20th Century history. This is by Henry Jeffreys and is entitled Empire of Booze: British History Through the Bottom of a Glass.” See earlier post. The essay focuses on how writers have used alcohol in their works:

So closely are some of the giants of 20th-century literature associated with alcohol that modern readers might be forgiven for thinking a serious booze habit was once the equivalent of a degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia.

It comes as no surprise that Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is among the works considered:

In Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the constant listing of drinks such as marsala, cinzano, asti spumante and martini, serves as a reminder that there was a normal life before the war and will be afterwards. For Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, “this Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place …” In the same novel, alcohol plays a less benevolent role, as a weapon in the snob’s arsenal during a scene in which Ryder has dinner in Paris with Rex Mottram, an arriviste Canadian businessman and his love rival. Ryder orders a cognac that is dismissed by Mottram as “the sort of stuff he puts soda in at home. So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex’s sort. ‘That’s the stuff,’ he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it left dark rings round the sides of his glass.” Waugh wants us to see Mottram as a vulgarian and Ryder as a man of taste, but also reveals his own prejudices.

Jeffreys moves on to wine connoisseurship as a theme in literature and, after citing Edgar Allan Poe and Roald Dahl, returns to Brideshead:

… the real amusement comes from the pretensions of the wine taster: “a prudent wine … rather diffident and evasive but quite prudent”, he says. In a famous scene in Brideshead Revisited, Ryder and Sebastian Flyte try to outdo each other with their descriptions of a wine:

“It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle.”
“Like a leprechaun.”
“Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.”
“Like a flute by still water.”
“… And this is a wise old wine.”
“A prophet in a cave.”
“… And this is a necklace of pearls
on a white neck.”
“Like a swan.”
“Like the last unicorn.”

Oddly, he doesn’t mention how alcohol contributed to the Sebastian’s downfall.

 

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Weekly Standard Remembers Waugh

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of Weekly Standard carries an article memorializing Waugh in this 50th anniversary year of his death. This is by Algis Valiunas who is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The essay begins with the familiar characterization of Waugh as a writer of very funny books but a very unpleasant person. It provides a summary of several of Waugh’s recorded misdeeds including his persecution of Dean Cruttwell and Clarissa Churchill and his meltdown when his friend Henry Green and his wife smoked at the dinner table. It then provides a brief description of Waugh’s works starting with Decline and Fall in which: 

Waugh unleashes every anarchic impulse …, as he does in the best ones to follow. And when every civilized institution has been definitively laid waste—the universities and public schools, the aristocracy, the military, Parliament, marriage, the great country houses, the Empire—the reader is hard put to think of anything he holds dear that might withstand such withering fire. All that remains is manic laughter. One can still grovel with hilarity amid the devastation.

The essay finds Vile Bodies and Black Mischief to be darker and less funny, and it skips over what is probably Waugh’s funniest book Scoop and focuses on A Handful of Dust in which disappointment is expressed:

But when Waugh does turn serious, it is to ill effect. A Handful of Dust (1934), which takes its title and epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, retails the haphazard adulterous collision of two nullities moved principally by boredom. The story is told in a leaden monotone that aspires to devastating irony but overdoes the moral emptiness.

Similar disappointment is noted in Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy. The essay, which is entitled, “Waugh’s Gift”, concludes with this:

These five novels, the serious ones, are widely considered to be Waugh’s best. Far from it. He came to see his vocation as instructing a godless world in the true nature of God, when his true calling was as a minor comic master, funny as hell, who could laugh at the most appalling outrages and play jazz clarinet with consummate virtuosity in the devil’s band.

This is odd and a bit unfair because the essay began by positing that Waugh should be remembered for his humorous works but then, aside from Decline and Fall, ignores the best of them. There is no analysis of Scoop and no mention of Put Out More Flags and The Loved One which are generally considered his funniest works. Nor is there any recognition that Brideshead and Sword of Honour contain some of Waugh’s best humorous passages.

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Waugh Scholar Wins Award for New Novel

Posted on December 15, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh scholar, author and professor of English Philology at the University of La Rioja in Spain, Carlos Villar Flor, has won an award for a new novel, his fifth.  According to the Spanish newspaper La Rioja, Villar Flor:

… has just won the José María Pereda award, granted by the Cantabrian Government, with his short novel ‘Descubre por qué te persigo‘ (‘Guess why I am chasing you’).., in which Villar Flor has chosen to reverse the classic structure of the thriller. “The classic thriller usually starts with a murder and the reader does not care much about the victim because, in fact, he has not had much time to meet him. But in my novel it happens in reverse, the victim, still alive, has to find the reasons why someone wants to kill him.”

Villar Flor has written and lectured extensively on the works of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and has appeared at several conferences devoted to these writers, including those sponsored by this Society. He also organized a conference in 2003 at the University of La Rioja and co-edited its proceedings published as Waugh Without End. More recently, he was co-author of the critical biography of Waugh’s military career and writings entitled In the Picture. The newspaper article concludes

“I have four more novels in mind and I’ve been working on a biographical study of Graham Greene for four years relating to his trips to Spain.” However it is not Greene, but Evelyn Waugh who is the author to whom more time has been dedicated as translator and popularizer of his work. And he is also very fond of the English sense of humor: “It is an understated humor, and there enters the concept of irony, which is very rich and complex, and I find it very interesting. As with Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms.”

The Spanish language article has been translated by Google with some edits. 

UPDATE (19 December 2016): Carlos Villar Flor has offered some improvements in the translations cited. These have been incorporated in a revised version of the post. Many thanks to Carlos for these suggestions.

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Tatler’s List of Snobs

Posted on December 13, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Tatler magazine has published a list of the great snobs of history. This is written by Sophia Money-Coutts and author-critic D J Taylor.  Taylor has recently written a book on this subject (The New Book of Snobs) and the entry for Waugh may have come from there: 

As a teenager, the writer habitually walked down the road from his parents’ house in Golders Green, NW11, to post his letters in Hampstead, where they would carry the NW3 Post Office frank.

As noted in an earlier post, there seems to be little support for this particular but apocryphal aspect of Waugh’s snobbery, although other indicia are not hard to find.

There is an interesting phenomenon at work in this list of 9 “great” snobs. Fully 2/3 are members of Waugh’s generation: Virginia Woolf (thought James Joyce’s writing showed evidence of  “working class” origins), Tom Driberg (Waugh’s school friend, who took care that there would be no sauce bottles displayed on his table at a Labour Party conference), James Lees-Milne (thought stupid toffs made better company than intelligent yobs), Gerry Wellington, and Edward Sackville-West (never met anyone who thought an inherited title wasn’t better than one bestowed by the monarch). Even the lives of the two more recent exemplars (Alan Clark and Princess Margaret) overlapped with Waugh’s and are now dead. Would this indicate that snobbery has died out or is the Tatler afraid of offending some of its readers?

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

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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”

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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)

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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

Posted on December 8, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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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