Brideshead Reconfectioned

Posted on October 23, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has run a story (“It’s the Great Brideshead Bake Off!”) about a project by the new occupants of Castle Howard to remake the building in the form of a cake in an effort to promote Christmas season visitors: 

It’s a cake that even Marie Antoinette might have considered flamboyant: a giant £20,000 concoction of gingerbread and icing representing one of the most famous stately homes in Britain. Measuring a whopping 13ft by 10ft, the giant confection will depict Castle Howard – where the classic 1981 TV drama Brideshead Revisited was filmed – complete with intricate columns, its trademark dome and some of the architectural features found in its 10,000-acre grounds. The cake, more elaborate than anything seen on the Great British Bake-Off, will form the centrepiece of the estate’s Christmas festivities, going on display to the paying public from the middle of next month.

The house was also chosen as the setting for the 2008 film adaptation of Waugh’s novel. The Mail goes on to note some of the background for the project, which may have its origin in a recent dispute within the Howard family over occupancy of the estate:

Some say its extravagance reflects the change of regime at the stunning 18th Century country home that has followed a dramatic family upheaval. As The Mail on Sunday revealed a year ago, Simon Howard, 59, who had presided over the estate for 30 years, was served with an eviction order and has now moved out with his wife Rebecca and their family, making way for older brother Nicholas, 64, and his wife Victoria, a former chief executive of publishing giant HarperCollins. It is the new chatelaine who has ordered the giant cake, sparking criticisms it was needlessly ostentatious – especially after the estate had to sell £12 million of artwork last year to ‘preserve and nurture’ Castle Howard for the future.

The story continues with a report of dissatisfaction among the locals because the project has been contracted out to London confectioners rather than those in the neighborhood. There are also reports that local events that were traditionally held at Castle Howard are being rescheduled elsewhere. Nanny Hawkins would not be pleased.

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Waugh Biography Reviewed in the US Press

Posted on October 22, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Reviews have appeared in two US newspapers of the new biography of Evelyn Waugh by Philip Eade, published earlier this month in the US. In the Wall Street Journal, the book is reviewed by British novelist and journalist Allan Massie. (If you cannot open the article on your computer, try it on your smart phone where the pay wall does not seem to be so formidable.) After a thorough summary of the story of Waugh’s life as retold by Eade, Massie concludes

Any biography of Waugh is entertaining because he was such a witty man, and Mr Eade does not fail to entertain. He is not only fair to Waugh, moreover; he evidently likes him. It’s good to read an admiring rather than a debunking biography. Yet ultimately it is Waugh the novelist who matters, and Mr Eade, eschewing ctiticism, pays little attention to his work.

Massie then attempts to set matters straight by offering a thumbnail critique of Waugh’s writings. He focuses primarily on Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour. After confessing to have loved Brideshead since he first read it 60 years ago, Massie now comes down on the side of the war trilogy as his favorite:

Waugh has been condemned as a snob. Yet in Sword of Honour the members of the upper classes behave badly and the most admirable officers belong to the middle-class regiment, the Halberdiers. There is comedy and acute social observation throughout the trilogy, but essentially it’s a story of disillusionment, as Guy finds what seemed to him a noble cause corrupted and betrayed. This rings true. It rings equally true that Waugh gives Guy and the trilogy an ironically happy ending.

Well, not exactly, at least with respect to the ending. In the first edition Waugh does provide an “ironically happy ending.” But when Nancy Mitford congratulated him on the upbeat conclusion and Anthony Powell said he thought it didn’t work, Waugh changed it to remove the happy bit but leave the irony. That change is reflected in the second printings of the UK and US hardback editions of volume 3 (Unconditional Surrender/The End of the Battle) and the one-volume recension of the trilogy published in 1965 as Sword of Honour but never made its way into the single volume Penguin editions of volume 3 on which Mr Massie apparently relied. Eade does not address this matter in his book.

In the conservative Washington Free Beacon, the biography is reviewed by English Literature professor and journalist Micah Mattix. He begins with an interesting comparison of the views of Waugh held by George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens. He then provides a fair summary of the book, highlighting the new materials that Eade brings to bear, something Massie left out. Mattix concludes:

What’s missing in Eade’s Evelyn Waugh, however, is the man himself. We are told a great deal about Waugh—about what he said and did—but are rarely treated to any exploration of why he said and did those things. Eade chalks most of them up to Waugh’s bitterness at his father’s preference for his brother and Napoleonic competitiveness. (Waugh was short, we are reminded.) As real as Waugh’s bitterness and competitiveness may have been, surely there was more to the man…While Eade’s life of Waugh is not a “critical” biography, the absence of any extended analysis of his work for what it tells us about the man is puzzling in a biography of a writer whose fiction was so autobiographical.

Eade is a gifted narrator and a master at providing the right quote at the right time at just the right length, avoiding, thankfully, the temptation (which must have been acute in the case of Waugh) of ventriloquism or the overuse of block quotes. With two of Waugh’s three biographies currently out of print and with Waugh’s Complete Works scheduled to be published in 43 volumes (including 12 volumes of Waugh’s letters and diaries) between now and 2020, Eade’s account of Waugh’s life (undertaken at the request of Waugh’s grandson, Alexander) will be a useful starting point for the biographies or more specialized studies of Waugh to follow.

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Portrait with Bowler Hat and Cigar

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A blogger has posted on The Tweed Pig a well known 1930s photo of Evelyn Waugh and explained its progeny. The photo was selected from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery as a gift:

I went for the photograph … of Evelyn Waugh by (Madame) Yevonde Middleton. My friend is a fan of the City look, though I’m not sure what he thinks about having Evelyn Waugh hanging on his wall. The photo has it all though — pinstripe suit, brolly, bowler hat and cigar…Yevonde Middleton was an English society portrait photographer who was active from the Edwardian era right up to her death in the 1970s. She’s best known for her work in the 1930s, in particular the Goddesses series for which she had guests at a party, who were dressed as gods and goddesses, pose for her…Yevonde was a pioneer of colour photography, using an early British process called Vivex, where the image was built up from three exposures in each primary colour. 

Madame Yevonde is also credited with the photo of Waugh that illustrates the dust wrapper of the UK edition of the recent biography by Philip Eade. (See also Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, following p 306.) The blog post is handsomely illustrated with the Waugh portrait as well as other examples of the photographer’s work.

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Death Announced of Wodehouse Society Founder

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Lt-Col Norman Murphy, who founded the British branch of the P G Wodehouse Society, has died at the age of 83. According to the Telegraph, Murphy was

a literary sleuth whose researches over four decades showed that Wodehouse’s 98 comic novels were not solely the fruit of his romantic imagination, as claimed by Evelyn Waugh and others; they were based on real people, places and incidents…Tracing his way through a cocktail of fact and fiction Murphy showed that the innocent Bertie Wooster was a mixture of the steeplechase jockey Lord Mildmay of Flete and the actor George Grossmith; that Lord Emsworth was the probably the pig-loving 6th Earl of Dartmouth; and the scapegrace Ukridge an amalgam of two schoolfriends at Dulwich and a sponger who ran a chicken farm.

Unrelated to his Wodehouse researches, Murphy once made a note of  “the cameo appearance of the 17th Duke of Norfolk as a gardener sweeping leaves in the film of Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.”

The obituary in the Times makes a similar observation:

Establishing himself as the foremost Wodehousian sleuth, Murphy disproved claims by Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell that the settings of Pelham Grenville’s novels were fictional. Murphy insisted that the whimsical world of loveable, aristocratic reprobates actually existed and proceeded to prove it by revealing the real-life name and location of practically every Wodehouse character and scene. “They are all based on fact, he just made it funnier,” he said…His sleuthing yielded instant results. Blandings Castle, for example, was revealed to be Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, the resting place of Katherine Parr. Blandings’ gardens were based on Weston Park in Shropshire, of which he said: “There are no other places in England with the lake, the terraces, the Greek temple, the pond and the kitchen garden, the cottage in the wood laid out exactly as he described it.”

After founding the British outpost of the Wodehouse Society in 1997, Murphy married the president of the American branch four years later. The wedding took place, appropriately enough, on Long Island.

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A Tiger’s Dinner

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

An auction house in London has on offer a letter from Evelyn Waugh dated 4 December 1964 to Peter Luke, playwright and journalist. In it, Waugh apologizes for having written in A Little Learning that Luke’s grandfather, who was the father of Waugh’s school friend at Lancing, Rupert Fremlin, “had been eaten by a tiger in India.” Luke complained to the Sunday Times about this error, and they passed his letter along to Waugh. Rupert Fremlin (Luke’s father) was described by Waugh in A Little Learning (London, 1964, p. 126) as a 

delightful, mercurial fellow…His alternations of exhuberance and depression–‘Fremlin’s “states”‘–later became settled in melancholy. He was with us at university and died very young in West Africa.

When Luke explained that his grandfather died of natural causes, Waugh wrote in apology  that he

had memories (no doubt inaccurate) of Rupert telling us of a more dramatic ending which, again inaccurately, I thought your grandmother confirmed. In any case it seemed to us then a glorious death and it was in no spirit of ridicule that I recorded it. 

In his letter, Waugh explained that it was too late to change the text of the first edition but that future editions would be corrected. In fact, the 1973 edition (published after Waugh’s death) states that Rupert’s father was “wrongly believed to have been eaten by a tiger” (p. 123). The letter is Lot 66 in Forum Auction’s current catalogue. The cataloguer erroneously describes the tiger’s misremembered meal as Lukes’s father, rather than his grandfather.

 

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Great Parties and Rock Concerts in Literature

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A non-profit organization called Electric Literature, which supports writers and promotes literature, is holding its 2nd annual Genre Ball next week in New York City. In a promotional posting, they name what they deem to be the 11 greatest parties in literature. Among those are the parties in Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies which are attended by the Bright Young People and summarized by Adam Fenwick-Syme in the much-quoted paragraph that begins: “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties…etc.” Some of the other literary parties on the list include those in The Great Gatsby, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Less Than Zero and The Sun Also Rises. 

On America’s other coast, another event next week will have a Waugh connection. Two Willamette Valley rock bands have scheduled a joint performance in Salem, Oregon, on October 28 to mark Evelyn Waugh’s birthday. The bands, based in Salem, are Buttfrenchers and Face Transplant. The Salem Weekly News has announced the event, and details are available there. Aside from the coincidence of Waugh’s birthday falling on the date assigned for their gig, there is nothing to explain why the bands have made this connection.

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Henry Green (More)

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

There has been more activity on the internet relating to the Henry Green revival. See earlier post. A blogger posting on cakesordeathsite.com has written a three-part article with illustrations that surveys most of Green’s books. He makes an interesting comparison with one of Waugh’s novels:

Curiously enough Loving was published at the same time as his friend Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, which is also set in a large country house. But whereas Brideshead Revisited is a nostalgic paean to a rapidly vanishing way of life, wistfully conveying a time where everyone knew their place and was grateful for it, from the loyal servants to the obliging lords of the manor, Green was too clear-eyed to be having any of this self-serving sentimentality. His portrayal of down-stairs life resembles Jonathan Swift’s masterful satire Directions To Servants much more than the obsequious, incidental characters offered by Brideshead Revisited or indeed its present day variation that peddles the same insidious fantasy, Downton Abbey.

On the Oxford University Press blog, Nick Shepley, author of a recent study on Henry Green, also makes several points of comparison relating to Waugh:

Henry Yorke (pseudonym Henry Green) and his wife, Dig, were the exemplar IT couple of the 1920s and 30s. Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh referred to them as the “Bright Young Yorkes” in their letters. They were indeed well connected – Dig’s friend, the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother), became godmother to their son, Sebastian, in 1934. But to read Green’s novels of class, Living (1929) – “the best proletarian novel ever written” (Isherwood) – Party Going (1939) and Loving (1945), alongside Waugh’s evocations of class privilege in Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust(1934), and Brideshead Revisited (1945), is to enter a much more nuanced, unsentimental interwar landscape.

Shepley also notes that New York Review Books will shortly have brought all of Green’s novels back into print. Our earlier post noted only the first three to appear in this project. Shepley also mentions a panel discussion of Green’s work lead by an NYRB representative earlier this week at a New York bookstore.

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Penguin UK Publish New Brideshead Hardback

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Penguin UK is selling a new hardback edition of Brideshead Revisited that was published last week. This is in their Penguin Classics series but has a dust wrapper that differs from the uniform hardback Penguin Classics edition of Waugh’s books that they published in 2011. This book is in a new classics series that has abstract designs on the dust wrappers.  Others in the series include Orlando by Virginia Woolf and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Brideshead along with Put Out More Flags and Vile Bodies are among the volumes in the 2011 classics uniform hardback edition that are no longer for sale on Penguin’s website and have apparently gone out of print. A new edition of Put Out More Flags in yet another Penguin Classics series will be published next month with a bright orange paperback cover. And Penguin have also announced issuance of a TV tie-in edition of Decline and Fall to be published next March in conjunction with the new BBC adaptation.

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Mixed Results for Waugh in Imaginary Booker Prize Competitions

Posted on October 15, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The results are in from the competition at the Cheltenham Literary Festival to determine which book would have won the Booker prize for the year 1945 had there been one. Brideshead Revisited was on the shortlist and its case was put to the selection panel by comedian, writer and Waugh fan Alexei Sayle. According to a report of the proceedings by Gloucestershire Live, Brideshead was edged out, coming in fourth in a short list of five. Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love came third; second place went to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart and the winner was Animal Farm by Geroge Orwell. Sayle is reported to have responded: “I don’t mind. I’ve got another event this evening.”

Some consolation appears, however, in another competition announced by the London Review Bookshop. This selected the winners of Booker prizes for the years 1900-1968 if there had been competitions in each of those years. Waugh’s Put Out More Flags was the LRB’s 1942 winner. Their 1945 selection was Mitford’s Pursuit of Love. Here’s how the LRB explained its results:

If the Booker Prize had begun in 1900 – rather than in 1969 – who would have won each year? This is a provisional set of answers: if you have better suggestions, please email us, or tweet us using the hashtag #Booker1900. (Years where the winner seems particularly unlikely we have marked with a bold exclamation mark: [!]) We will revisit this list periodically. We’ve decided to go with the post-2013 Booker rules, so any English-language novel is eligible.

The 1942 choice of Put Out More Flags is one of the provisional choices marked with an exclamation point so its status may be in jeopardy.

 

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Waugh Article to Appear in Next Issue of Journal

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Space Between, an academic journal devoted to literature and culture in the interwar period, has announced the contents of its next issue. The lead article will be by Waugh scholar Naomi Milthorpe, who teaches at the University of Tasmania. The article is entitled “A Secret House: Evelyn Waugh’s Book Collection”. The Space Between is published annually by Monmouth University in New Jersey and may be contacted here. Dr Milthorpe is among the scholars who are scheduled to speak at next year’s Evelyn Waugh Conference at the Huntington Library.

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