Milk in First

Posted on November 17, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent article in the Sunday Telegraph describes its reporter’s experiences in a venture 

…at the Lanesborough hotel in London, which has recently launched an afternoon tea etiquette experience in partnership with Debrett’s, which has been Britain’s authority on etiquette and influence since 1769.

In the course of the article, Evelyn Waugh is quoted on an important element of tea lore. The instructor emphasizes:

…this is important: tea before milk, always.” 20th-century novelist Evelyn Waugh famously touched on this peculiarly prized classist fetishism of the English when wrote about the concept of a ‘milk-in-first’ sort of person in his diary. “People who could only afford cheap porcelain put the milk in beforehand to avoid cracking their cups with boiling water,” [the instructor] explains. Neither of the experts argues that tea in first actually enhances taste. The idea of a ‘rules-before-rationale’ sort of person comes to mind — though admittedly it doesn’t have the same ring.

In his 1955 “Open Letter to the Honble Mrs Peter Rodd (Nancy Mitford) on a Very Serious Subject,” Waugh himself had a rather different explanation from that of the instructor:

All nannies and many governesses, when pouring out tea, put the milk in first. (It is said by tea-fanciers to produce a richer mixture.) Sharp children notice that this is not normally done in the drawing-room. To some this revelation becomes symbolic. We have a friend you may remember, far from conventional in other ways, who makes it her touchstone. “Rather MIF, darling,” she says in condemnation. (Essays, Articles and Reviews, pp. 298-99.)

 It might also be noted that putting the milk in first avoids confronting another dilemma mentioned in the Telegraph article:

Stirring tea clockwise is a crime. Anti-clockwise is equally delinquent — only a back-and-forth motion from 12 o’clock to six o’clock is permissible…

 

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Waugh and Saki

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In its latest issue, Prospect Magazine, an independent monthly journal published in the UK, includes an essay marking the 100th anniversary of the death of the writer Saki (a/k/a H H Munro). The essay, by Fatema Ahmed, opens with the following assessment:

Exactly a century after Saki’s death on 14th November 1916, it seems remarkable that his work has survived so well. In a line-up of the wits of 20th-century English literature, Saki is usually tucked somewhere between PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. Both were prolific writers (Wodehouse frighteningly so), and most of their work is worth remembering. Waugh was a brilliant and fair critic of fiction he had sympathy with, and once wrote that Saki produced no more than seven or eight short stories that are masterpieces. (The Collected Stories numbers over 120.) The rest “too often have the air of being fancies and jests unduly expanded, or of dramatic themes unduly cramped.” Seven or eight masterpieces, including his most famous story “Sredni Vashtar,” is more than most writers ever manage but—given such a low strike rate and the slightness of his chosen form—Saki’s enduring popularity, among fans including Roald Dahl, in children’s editions, and this year as the subject of a play, is one of the stranger literary feats I can think of.

The quote is taken from Waugh’s 1947 introduction to Saki’s only novel, The Unbearable Bassington. Waugh observes that Saki, in writing his short stories, seemed to have “conformed too complacently to the requirements of the editors of the time; perhaps this was a defect in his exemplary literary tact.” Despite this restraint which marred much of his work, as Waugh noted in the quote above, the 7 or 8 masterpieces he managed is in itself a “notable achievement.” Waugh went on to describe Saki’s novel, published in 1912, as “inferior to the best of the short stories.” But despite its defects, “its virtues are abundant and delectable…The wit is continuing and almost unfailing; there are phrases on every page that are as fresh and brilliant…as on the day they were written.” Waugh’s introduction is collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 323 and A Little Order, p. 87

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John Betjeman on Stage

Posted on November 15, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A one-man stage performance of Edward Fox playing Evelyn Waugh’s friend and Poet Laureate, John Betjeman, is currently touring Southern England. The play entitled “Sand in the Sandwiches” opened in Oxford last month and is reviewed in the Oxford Mail whose critic Tim Hughes enjoyed the play and noted allusions to Waugh in the script:

We find Betjeman approaching his 50th birthday looking back on his life so far through “a magnifying glass of self-pity”. His childhood – exploring his sense of separation and precocious early awareness of his worth as a poet – his family holidays, flings and crushes, his time at Oxford, and his work as a prolific journalist (reviewing films for the Evening Standard among other work), make for fascinating listening – particularly, for this Oxford Playhouse audience, his tales (both bittersweet and downright hilarious) of our city’s eccentricities and colourful characters – such as his friend Evelyn Waugh. We are also introduced to his teddybear – the threadbare Archibald Ormsby-Gore (later immortalised by Waugh as the inspiration for Sebastian Flyte’s bear Aloysius in Brideshead Revisited).

The play is written by Hugh Whitemore who also adapted Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time for television. Edward Fox memorably played Uncle Giles in that production, which was shown on Channel 4. The play will continue with performances in Guildford, Exeter, Salisbury and Folkestone. Details here.

 

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New Novel with Brideshead Theme

Posted on November 15, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A new novel has a Brideshead theme. This is the third novel by Francesca Kay, whose first two were also well received. This one is entitled The Long Room and, according to a review by Max Davidson in the Mail on Sunday, it is:

…a spy novel that is neither riddled with violence nor incomprehensibly plotted. The hero of Francesca Kay’s elegant Cold War novel, set in London, is a young counter-espionage operative who spends his days listening to the tape-recorded conversations of suspected spies and radicals… The situation is so weirdly hypnotic that it inspires an alpha-class thriller, delivered with aplomb.’

The importance of Brideshead to the novel’s plot is described by the author herself in a recent blog post. The novel is set in 1981:

… the year in which Lady Diana Spencer married the Prince of Wales in a cloud of virginal white satin and romance. In the autumn of that year, ITV broadcast a brilliant adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, that supreme novel of yearning and nostalgia. At a time when Britain had only three television channels, and few households owned video recorders, programs could become national talking points. Brideshead was one. I remember friends arranging Brideshead parties, where we clustered together round tiny television sets, and no one ever made other plans on those Tuesday evenings.

Stephen [the book’s hero] watches Brideshead too, as do the other characters in the book. How interesting it now seems to me that we were all engrossed in that love letter to a vanishing aristocratic world at a time when our own world was changing too. The novel itself is much more than a story about decadence and privilege, and yet on the screen it was the languorous scenes of Oxford in the 1930s and life in an astonishingly grand and lovely house that took such lasting possession of our collective imaginations.

 

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Evelyn Waugh, Mark Twain, and US Election

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Christopher Buckley, writing in the New York Times, invokes Evelyn Waugh in a review of an audiobook of Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Buckley turned on the recording and ran it straight through for 8 hours to avoid any more news about the the recent US election. The review opens:

“It was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short.” Those lines are from Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Brideshead Revisited.” They came to me as I switched off the 2016 presidential campaign and listened to Nick Offerman’s audiobook narration of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” What a tonic those eight hours were!

The quote comes from the Prologue to Waugh’s novel where Charles Ryder is awakened after a nighttime arrival at his unit’s new quarters only to learn that they are to be stationed at Brideshead Castle (1960, rev. ed., p. 24). Whether Christopher Buckley thinks the country has now arrived at the equivalent of Brideshead Castle seems unlikely. Although his father may have thought so, even that is not beyond doubt. Rather, Christopher seems to have been pleased to escape into an earlier, happier world for 8 hours.

Although there would appear little political content in Twain’s novel, Buckley does come up with this:

Decades later, Twain would call President Teddy Roosevelt “the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the 20th century.” This was not intended as a compliment.

Perhaps the scene in which Tom persuades his friends to paint his aunt’s fence might remind one of the President-elect’s “Sawyeresque” proposal to have the Mexicans pay to build one. 

UPDATE (15 November 2016): A reader has pointed out that it may not have been Huck Finn who painted the fence of Tom’s aunt, as originally stated. The only ones named in the novel are Ben Rogers, Billy Fisher and Johnny Miller. But it also says, “If he hadn’t run out of whitewash, he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.” So Huck may have been among those who contributed. Thanks to Mark Pinkerton for catching this.

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Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) R.I.P.

Posted on November 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Poet, novelist and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has died at the age of 82. In his native city, the Montreal Gazette has invoked the words of Evelyn Waugh in a memorial article:

Evelyn Waugh once said at a certain point in his life every writer has to decide whether he is going to be an esthete or a prophet. Go down the list of your favourite writers or musicians and you can put them quite nicely into one of those two slots — they are either someone who luxuriates in artistic production, or is using the art as a means of political, moral or spiritual transcendence. Bowie and Prince, each in his own way, were two of the greatest esthetes the world has ever seen. Dylan, of course, is the arch prophet. Then there is Leonard Cohen, who fused the esthetic and the prophetic in a way almost no one has ever done before, or perhaps ever will again.

The statement attributed to Waugh in the article is not quite as it was written. It comes from his 1946 article for Life magazine entitled “Fan-Fare” (reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 301, and A Little Order, p. 29):

Most European writers suffer a climacteric at the age 40. Youthful volubility carries them only so far. After that they either become prophets or hacks or aesthetes. (American writers, I think, all become hacks.) I am no prophet and, I hope, no hack.

As recounted in Cohen’s obituary in the New York Times, he began his artistic career as a poet and novelist. His two early novels The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966) were well received by the critics but relatively unremunerative. Before he reached 40, he had drifted into songwriting and then singer-songwriting where he found greater success. But he never flirted with hackdom. It is a pity, however, that he dropped novel writing altogether because his early works were in the comic satirical tradition of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis and others of that earlier generation. But then, many of his songs were in that same tradition, and we can be grateful for that. 

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Vile Bodies, with an Emphasis on the Vile

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Sydney Morning Herald reviews a recently-opened exhibit of contemporary Chinese art that is somewhat misleadingly entitled “Vile Bodies.” 

Vile Bodies is a catchy title but there are very few points of comparison between Evelyn Waugh’s novel about the party-going lifestyles of young Londoners in the 1920s, and the current exhibition at the White Rabbit Gallery. In a Chinese context the word “party” takes on an entirely different connotation, and unless you’re on the Central Committee it’s not conducive to having fun. White Rabbit’s 15th exhibition of contemporary Chinese art doesn’t present a particularly tight argument or theme. After a brief discussion of mythical monsters and our own implicit monstrosity, the catalogue launches into a defence of “vileness”. The anonymous writer assures us: “the vile in us is not always evil, it can be beautiful, even glorious.”

Based on the reporter’s description of some of the art on display, Waugh fans in the Sydney area might want to consider carefully before texting for an Uber and heading for the gallery.

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Eade Reviewed in Bay Area Reporter

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s issue of The Bay Area Reporter, voice of the LGBT community in the San Francisco Bay region, has a review of Philip Eade’s biography of Waugh. This is by Brian Bromberger who begins with a quick categorization of Eade’s book:

When novelist Evelyn Waugh died of a sudden heart attack at 62 on Easter Sunday, 1966, his literary reputation was in decline, his work seen as nostalgic and retrograde compared to the countercultural post-modernist writers then in ascendance. But as journalist Philip Eade argues in his new biography of Waugh, …he is now celebrated as one of the greatest English satirical authors and novelists of the 20th century… Eade, however, is more concerned with rehabilitating Waugh’s character, which because of his complexity, is a far more dubious task… [and] the success of this reappraisal is middling at best. Waugh may be a stunning writer, but he was not a very nice man.

This is followed by an accurate and well written summary of Eade’s book. Indeed, this is one of the best written summaries to appear so far. Bromberger concludes his review with a nod to the paper’s primary audience:

The straight Eade, while more forthcoming about Waugh’s early homosexuality than previous biographers, doesn’t offer any explanation why he abandoned relationships with men. LGBT readers will be struck with how gay Waugh seemed in his attitudes and mannerisms throughout his life. It would be fascinating for a gay writer to interpret Waugh, but Eade’s comprehensive book will probably be the primary biography of Waugh the man (but not the writer) for years to come.

Bromberger himself, however, had already offered his own interpretation, via Alastair Graham, of Waugh’s sexuality based on Eade’s text:

Evelyn’s marriage to the beautiful Evelyn (called Shevelyn) Gardner… lacked bedroom chemistry, and in her memoir she thought he was “homosexual at the base,” proceeding to have a very public affair with another man, humiliating Evelyn. He reunited with Alastair [Graham] for awhile, but that ended when Evelyn, looking for respectability and entrance into aristocratic circles, became, in Alastair’s estimation, a boring snob. From then on, Waugh focused only on women, marrying Laura Herbert, an 18-year-old Catholic daughter of an explorer, in 1937.

It seems unfair, in these circumstances, to complain that Eade has ignored this issue. Alastair Graham’s opinion would appear to be the best place to start with the more detailed analysis Bromberger hopes to see.

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BL to Publish Collection of Travel Writing

Posted on November 10, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

British Library Publishing will issue a collection of travel writing early next year. This will be entitled The Writer Abroad: Literary Travellers from Anne Radcliffe to Evelyn Waugh. The book will be edited by Lucinda Hawksley, biographer, historian and promoter of the works of her ancestor Charles Dickens and the Dickens Foundation. UK publication is planned for February 2017 and according to Amazon, the book 

takes us on a literary journey around the world, through extracts from Arthur Conan Doyle in Australia, Aldous Huxley in India, Charles Dickens in Italy, Henry James in France, Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden, and many more.

Details of the selections from Waugh’s extensive travel writing are not yet available in online sources.

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Innovative Study to Include Waugh Chapter

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Publication has been announced of an innovative literary study of 28 authors that will include a chapter on Evelyn Waugh. This is entitled The Doubling: Those Influential Writers that Shape Our Contemporary Perceptions of Identity and Consciousness in the New Millennium. It is written by Diana Sheets (University of Illinois) and Michael Shaughnessy (Eastern New Mexico University) and will be published by Nova Science Publishers in December.

The book is written in the format of interviews of Sheets answering questions posed by Shaughnessy. It will involve comparisons of 14 pairs of writers. Chapter 9 is entitled: “Evelyn Waugh and Edward St. Aubyn—Privilege, Pedigree, and ‘the Order of Precedence.’” Other author pairings include William Faulkner/Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald/Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer/Tom Wolfe.  

 

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