Waugh and Nostalgia

Posted on November 6, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Washington Post’s theatre critic Peter Marks waxes nostalgic in response to the current period of political turmoil consuming the United States. Most prominently, in a recent column entitled “Nostalgia! Yestalgia!”, he harks back to the “soothing” musical comedies of Rodgers and Hammerstein, looking forward particularly to an upcoming Washington revival of Carousel. He also recalls a nostalgic theme from a Waugh novel: 

“Sebastian is in love with his own childhood,” is how one of the central characters is described in “Brideshead Revisited,” Evelyn Waugh’s sublime 1945 novel of Catholic aristocrats in England. How current an observation that still sounds. Sebastian Flyte is nostalgia personified: a scion of a storied family who strolls the lawns of Oxford carrying his teddy bear everywhere. The assessment of him, of course, by Sebastian’s father’s Italian consort, was not intended as a compliment. But does nostalgia, when applied to art, always have to carry a negative, hidebound connotation? There is as much in the term to suggest a warm, even revivifying homage — think of bare-shouldered Lady Gaga, gracefully crooning at the Oscars from the half-century-old “The Sound of Music” score — as there is of the faddishly retrograde.

Marks closes with contemplation of the recreation of Penn Station in New York to replace the structure summarily destroyed in the 1960s to be replaced by the hideous and much maligned remake of Madison Square Garden, and he looks forward to attending a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and a Stevie Nicks’ concert at Washington’s Verizon Center.

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Blue Feet and Smarty Boots

Posted on November 6, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s issue of Standpoint magazine reviews a autobiographical book by artist Nicky Loutit. The book is entitled New Year’s Day is Black. The review, by Jessica Douglas-Home, begins with this reference to the book’s preface, in which Evelyn Waugh plays a part:

D.J. Taylor’s somewhat insensitive and inaccurate preface to New Year’s Day is Black by the artist Nicky Loutit gives us the backdrop to London’s left-wing literary elite of the 1940s and ’50s, at a time when its protagonists — including Cyril Connolly, Robert Kee and George Orwell — were making their mark. Taylor describes Nicky’s mother, Janetta, who was a part of this world, by using snide remarks from Evelyn Waugh’s letters, so reducing her to some sort of acolyte secretary. As a mother, it is true, she had her faults. But Janetta was also a clever and artistic woman and, to Nicky’s cost, the femme fatale within this milieu.

Nicky Loutit’s mother Janetta (nee Wooley) was an artist who was a co-tenant in a house in Sussex Place with Cyril Connolly in the postwar years. She is mentioned in several of Waugh’s letters to both Connolly and Nancy Mitford. She seems to have stuck in Waugh’s mind because, when he once came to visit Connolly in the Sussex Place house, Janetta  came barefoot to open the door to him. She is referred to variously as “Blue Feet”, “bare-footed landlady” and at one point is said to have acquired a new look: “silk stockings, high heel shoes, diamond clips.” In a 1961 letter, Waugh jokingly confuses her with Lys Lubbock and Sonia Brownell, both of whom were admired by Connolly. Waugh also refers dismissively to Janetta’s second husband, Robert Kee, as a “rival doodler” and, after breakup of their marriage, as a “Mr Somebody” still living in Cyril’s digs (Letters, pp. 271, 276, 348, 399, 578). While the reviewer defends Janetta against Taylor’s use of Waugh’s “snide” comments to belittle her, the review goes on to describe Janetta as a rather nasty piece of work as Nicky’s mother. In any event, it seems only fair to mention that Waugh more likely intended his comments to be directed at Connolly than at Janetta herself.  Whether Taylor also makes that point cannot be determined from the information available.

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Review of Helena in Roman Catholic Journal

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Roman Catholic online journal Crisis Magazine, published by the Sophia Institute Press, has posted a retrospective review of Waugh’s 1950 historical novel Helena, possibly his least read work of book-length fiction. The review is entitled “A Catholic Satirist at Work” and is written by Michael de Sapio. After summarizing the plot, the review continues:

Waugh was a wicked satirist, a man who loved to rail against the modern world and its inanities. He was also a writer who reveled in the pure use of language. In Helena, Waugh finds parallels between Helena’s era and his own and satirizes both. To make the story more vivid and contemporary he gives his characters the lingo of British aristocrats of his own day, like Jeeves and Bertie Wooster transplanted to the fourth century. By means of this arch speech Waugh draws an anatomy of snobbery, with characters that run the gamut from vacuous to fatuous. Waugh’s Constantine is a conceited airhead whose adoption of Christianity is done mainly for political convenience and show.

The review concludes with a discussion of why de Sapio believes Helena is relevant to Roman Catholics today. 

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Memoir of Brideshead TV Film in Vanity Fair

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the original director of the 1981 Granada TV film production of Brideshead Revisited, has written a memoir of his experience. This is published in the current issue of Vanity Fair magazine and is entitled “Inside the Making of Brideshead Revisited, the Original British TV Obsession.” Lindsay-Hogg was replaced by Charles Sturridge due to a strike which delayed the production after initial filming. A contractural commitment for another project required him to move on.

Lindsay-Hogg explains how the finished production

… became a watershed in British and American television. It was broadcast on PBS beginning in January 1982 and was described as “the biggest British invasion since the Beatles.” The series was a precursor to the wonderful Merchant Ivory films of the 1980s and, later, to Downton Abbey. But, grounded in Waugh’s greatest novel, Brideshead Revisited was concerned not with costumed nostalgia or cliff-hangers or audience-grabbing surprises but with how life changes, how the dreams of youth alter and, in time, become a sterner reality.

He goes on to conclude with a description of a reunion of the cast and crew which took place at Castle Howard, the setting for the film chosen by him and Derek Granger, the producer. This took place earlier this year marking the 35th anniversary of the film’s first UK broadcast in 1981:

Our actors, when it all started, mostly ranged in age from their early 20s to mid-30s. Now they are men and women in their late 50s to early 70s. And Derek, with all his marbles and wit, is 95. He remarked that getting everyone together after all these years might be “rather like herding a group of feral cats in the middle of a thunderstorm.” But we met for a dinner, hosted by Nicholas Howard and his elegant wife, Victoria, the present custodians of Castle Howard, in the grand dining room of the castle—the most notable, beautiful, enormous, but harmonious house of its kind in England, started in 1699 by Sir John Vanbrugh, architect and playwright both. “I’d like to give a toast,” Nick Howard said, rising and raising his glass, “to the then and the now. What was and what is.”

 

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Mr and Mrs Chatterbox

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Today’s Daily Express carries a story (reproduced in PressReader) about a woman named Doris Delevigne who was one of the few working-class members of the Bright Young People. Born in 1900, she pulled herself up from the lower classes with the help of, inter alia, Gertrude Lawrence and became a “courtesan” on the prowl at the Cavendish Hotel. According to the hotel’s owner Rosa Lewis, she should have published her memoirs under the title Around the World in 80 Beds.  

Lyndsy Spence, who has written Doris’s biography entitled The Mistress of Mayfair, describes her tempestuous affair and secret marriage to Valentine Browne, who is better known as Viscount Castlerosse. He was a friend of Lord Beaverbrook and celebrity gossip columnist for the Sunday Express who inspired Waugh’s character Mr Chatterbox in Vile Bodies, according to Spence. When Castlerosse’s mother discovered the marriage, she cut him off,  and Doris went back on the game. Among her conquests were Winston Churchill and his son Randolph, Tom Mitford (brother of Nancy), as well as Cecil Beaton.

She found a patroness in the person of a New York heiress named Margot Hoffman who set her up with a villa in Venice which was later acquired by another New York heiress, Peggy Guggenheim, and turned into a museum. According to Martin Stannard, Doris was among the “beautful women” who surrounded Waugh on visits to Venice in the 1930s (The Early Years, p. 291).  Doris eventually decamped to New York with Margot, and was ultimately divorced by Castlerosse. Things did not end well for Doris, however. She was dumped by Margot and left alone and without support in wartime New York. She returned to London during the war, on transport arranged by Winston Churchill, in the hope that she could patch things up with Castlerosse. When that goal proved unavailing, she took an overdose and died in 1942. Other members of her family have, nonetheless, prospered; according to the Express, one of them is Doris’s niece, Cara Delevigne, who is currently pursuing a successful career as a celebrity model in London. 

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Commonweal Republishes Waugh Story

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

On the occasion of Evelyn Waugh’s birthday last week, the independent US Roman Catholic magazine Commonweal has republished his 1953 story of the dystopian future, Love Among the Ruins. The story made its first US appearance in Commoneweal’s issue dated 31 July 1953, a month after the UK publication of a shorter version in Lilliput. The story also appeared later that year in a UK edition in book form and has been included in various collected editions (R M Davis, et al., Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh, pp. 20, 115). Waugh’s story was in a sense his answer to George Orwell’s 1984 which was first published in 1948.

Commonweal has also recently published an essay (“A Book More Equal than Others: Animal Farm and Commonweal”) on its role in introducing Orwell’s writings to US Roman Catholics in the 1940’s. Waugh also figures briefly in that analysis as part of a discussion of Orwell’s reviews of books by Roman Catholic writers Frank Sheed (Communism and Man) and Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter):

The reviews of Sheed and Greene alone demonstrate a surprising theological sophistication on Orwell’s part—and an unusual degree of interest in Catholic teaching for a British socialist. Orwell was, to use the poetic phrase that Max Weber applied to himself, “religiously musical.” But he also had a nose for hypocrisy, posturing, and snobbery, and his criticism of Catholics often focused on those vices. He was suspicious of the fashionable upper-class vogue to “swim the Tiber” during the 1920s and ’30s. He thought the conversions of Evelyn Waugh and (Orwell’s Etonian classmate) Christopher Hollis were motivated at least in part by nostalgia. (It did not help that both Waugh and Hollis were politically conservative.) By contrast, although Orwell disliked Irish nationalist writers such as Sean O’Casey, he felt affection for the 3 million working-class Irish laborers in Britain, almost all of them Catholic. His argument was with Rome, not with the Irish Catholic worker in the pews of London’s East End.

UPDATE (3 November 2016): Commonweal is not published by the Jesuits, as stated in the original posting,  but is a liberal, lay Roman Catholic journal. America is the Jesuit journal. Both frequently publish articles about Waugh. Tip of the hat once again to Dave Lull for catching this one.

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A Week of Waugh

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A review of the preceding week’s online press and blogs turns up several references to Evelyn Waugh. The New York Public Library’s blog contains a short article on the occasion of Waugh birthday, recounting the origins of The Loved One:

With a caustic remark for every occasion, he seemed, like Dorothy Parker, to begin every morning by brushing his teeth and sharpening his tongue…Waugh’s LA novel mocked Americans as vacuous, uncultured saps, easy marks for the nearest British expat. Its ending is classic Waugh dark comedy, doubtless the reason why Waugh called it his “most offensive work.” He anticipated a harsh backlash upon publication, telling Randolph Churchill (son of Winston), “Give my love to any friends you see in USA. There will be none after the publication of The Loved One.”  He also asked his agent to avoid publishing the book in communist countries, fearing it would be used as anti-American propaganda. (Footnotes omitted)

Two papers commented on Waugh’s attitude to the press. The Baltimore Sun quoted at length from Scoop a conversation between Lord Copper and Mr Salter in an article entitled “Some Personality Types are Eternal.” The Observer (NY) quotes Waugh in the context of the recent revival of the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play The Front Page:

Evelyn Waugh, of all people, once described The Front Page as a barely intelligible story about newspaper life where neurotic men in shirtsleeves and eyeshades rushed from telephone to tape machine, insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor. The description still fits.

The Guardian in its ongoing selection of the best 100 works of nonfiction, this week chose Robert Byron’s 1937 travel book The Road to Oxiana. Waugh’s assessment of the book and its author are cited in support of its selection:

According to Robert Byron’s Oxford contemporary Evelyn Waugh – never the most reliable witness – the future author of The Road to Oxiana used to delight in shouting “Down with abroad”…An enthusiastic literary critical response ranged from Graham Greene, who admired Byron’s demotic, conversational brilliance, to the rivalrous Evelyn Waugh, who had to concede the book’s high spirits, via the Sunday Times, which linked Byron to his namesake (no relation) and declared him “the last and finest fruit of the insolent humanism of the 18th century”. Today, widely considered to be Byron’s masterpiece, The Road to Oxiana stands as perhaps the greatest travel book of the 20th century.

Waugh reviewed the book in the Spectator and the review is reprinted in his Essays, Articles and Reviews (p. 197). The quote must come from a review in the Sunday Times by some one else. 

Finally, in what may be one of the most original assessments of Philip Eade’s recent biography of Waugh, a blogger on Movie Nation has proposed that it be made into the next big TV series to fill the gap left by the termination of Downton Abbey:

He’d make the great subject for a serial autobiography, weaving in and out of the history of WWI boys’ schools to fascist sympathizer/bigot/anti-Semite to WWII “hero” to Great Man of British Letters. I envision a “Man Who Came to Dinner” take, with say Eddie Marsan or David Wenham — nobody too pretty, mind you. None of this McAvoy or Garfield casting. Maybe Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne or Ben Whishaw. Skewering, flirting, shocking and mocking. Waugh is a natural for a mini series. All his life experiences leading up to his “masterpiece,” “Brideshead,” which captures class, Catholicism, homo/bisexuality and WWII officer corps heroics in one tale.

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Nicholas Sheetz (1952-2016) R.I.P.

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The death of Nicholas Sheetz, former librarian of Georgetown University’s Special Collections, has been announced. Nick is well known to Waugh scholars and was always helpful to those using the collections. He was also always ready  to offer help to access information about Waugh and his generation outside the Georgetown archives. In 2003 he organized a conference  at Georgetown on the occasion of the centenary of Waugh’s birth. Here’s an excerpt from his obituary on a Newport (RI) website;

As Manuscripts Librarian at Georgetown University’s Joseph Mark Lauinger Memorial Library, Nicholas was personally responsible for helping the university to secure many important books and collections, including papers relative to extraordinary authors such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, and to diplomats and other members of the intelligentsia. Joseph E. Jeffs, University Librarian, recalled that Nicholas helped to start Georgetown’s extensive collection of Graham Greene, after Lord Oliver Walston had invited Nicholas to tea at the House of Lords, where he told Nicholas that his wife’s Greene collection was in the cellar of a bank in London.

Among the papers relating to Waugh in the Georgetown collections are those of Christopher Sykes and Graham Greene, including Waugh’s letters to them.

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Evelyn Waugh’s Birthday

Posted on October 28, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh was born on this date in 1903.

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The Cherwell Revisits Waugh’s Oxford

Posted on October 24, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford student newspaper the Cherwell has an article by Altair Brandon-Salmon that compares the Oxford described by Waugh in Brideshead Revisited with that of today. He uses as his text the tutorial on Oxford manners provided to Charles Ryder by his Cousin Jasper. This appears in Book One, Chapter II “My Cousin Jasper’s Grand Remonstrance…” and is quoted at some length before being deconstructed by comparison with today’s standards:

Comparing now and then, what immediately becomes clear is how little store was set by academic work. Lectures are to be gone to for the general improvement of the mind, rather than whether they aid with a tutorial essay (and thankfully, the tradition of attending open lectures continues). There’s an idea that Oxford is fundamentally a social university, a space to meet other people—hence Jasper’s exacting recommendation to ‘[d]ress as you do in a country house’. Sartorial standards may have dropped in the intervening decades amongst the majority. Although a minority can still be reliably found in a suit and tie most days…There’s also the snobbery. The casual dismissal of Modern Greats (now known as PPE) betrays a mindset of subject rivalry which has mellowed but is still present and encouraged to some extent; on the other hand, the contention that ‘You want either a first or a fourth’ in an era of Gentleman’s and Ladies’ thirds has long since passed since the expansion of universities in the post-war era…Oxford has changed substantially in many respects since Waugh went here, yet one need only scratch beneath the surface to see an institution where it is possible to step back in time, even for those who have not been privately educated. Brideshead Revisited still tells us where to look when we want to peel back the layers of a university nearly a millennium old.

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