Collection of Elizabeth Bowen Reviews Published

Posted on November 19, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A substantial collection of the book reviews written by novelist Elizabeth Bowen has been published by Northwestern University Press. It is entitled The Weight of a World of Feeling and is edited by Allan Hepburn, who previously edited a volume of Bowen’s essays. Bowen was a friend of Evelyn Waugh, who visited her at her home in Ireland in the early 1930s. That visit is mentioned by Bowen in the earlier collection where she recalled that Waugh had rescued her from a bat in her library on that occasion (People, Places and Things: Essays of Elizabeth Bowen, p. 146). According to a review of the new book by Micah Mattix in the Washington Free Beacon, Bowen:

…filed a weekly column for the The Tatler and Bystander, a magazine for “the horse-and-hounds set,” as Allan Hepburn puts it, between 1941 and 1950, and again between 1954 and 1958. She also wrote regularly for The New Statesman, The Spectator, and The Observer. In reviews on Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and many more, her judgments on individual writers and works have, for the most part, stood the test of time. Often they double as direct commentary on the art of the novel or the function of criticism, as the case may be.

According to an online index to the new collection, it contains Bowen’s reviews from the Tatler of at least four of Waugh’s novels: Put Out More Flags, Brideshead Revisited, Officers and Gentlemen and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Other reviews of Waugh’s works may be included in multiple book articles. Moreover, Waugh reviewed at least one of Bowen’s books. As it turns out this was a previous collection of Bowen’s book reviews and other short essays entitled Collected Impressions and published in 1950. Waugh concluded there that her reviews:

represent an active and discerning mind healthily and happily at work. Their scope is as wide as the publishers’ lists. Miss Bowen is unassumingly at ease with the whole of European literature and with most of English and Irish social life. One general impression is that, unlike most of her colleagues, she likes books. (Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 190)

UPDATE: Although, as originally noted, the contents of Bowen’s book are not available in the Amazon.com or publisher’s listings, a reader has kindly provided a link to a library reference that displays the contents. This is from the library catalogue of the University of California at Riverside. Tip of the hat once again to David Lull.

 

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Macaskie Twins Surface at London Book Launch

Posted on November 18, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A posting on the Ronald Knox Society of North America website describes a book launch in London earlier this week. The book is edited by Francesca Knox and is entitled Ronald Knox: A Man for All Seasons. It is a collection of essays and other writings by Ronald Knox, some of which have not been previously published. The book launch was attended by, inter alia, two women of an advanced age who are referred to as the Macaskie twins.

These two ladies are prominently mentioned by Waugh in his biography of Ronald Knox. They met Knox during WWII when both attended the convent school at the Aldenham estate where Knox was acting as chaplain. The school and convent had been removed from London at the beginning of the war to the estate of Lord Acton where Knox was already in residence. Waugh’s description of their meeting with Knox is quoted at length in the Knox Society article, and their importance to Knox’s biography is summarized in this passage (Penguin, 2011, pp. 369-70):

The twins invited him to stay in the holidays, and soon their house in Kensington Square became his regular lodging in London. He said they should put up a plaque: ‘Ronald Knox practically lived here.’ Later they were among the very few of his friends to whom he wrote letters in his old, free, affectionate manner. In May 1947 he wrote to Nicola: ‘You and Claudia are the only people I want to write to except on business.’ In the drab and sour period of victory their friendship was a substantial solace. With his habitual reticence, he seldom spoke of them. At the dinner given to him in London on his sixtieth birthday the appearance of Claudia, dressed for a ball and prematurely called away by a young man in a white tie, created a stir of curiosity among his elderly friends.

Waugh cites Knox’s letters to them frequently in the final pages of the biography and mentions them both in his list of those who helped him in its preparation. Their appearance at the book launch is described in the Knox Society article:

They were as thoroughly English, and thoroughly charming, as one might expect. They reminded me of two Miss Marples, complete with twinkling eyes at almost 90 years of age! The Creed in Slow Motion and The Mass in Slow Motion were dedicated to them, and the sermons Knox preached at their respective weddings are included in Bridegroom and Bride.

The book launch was held at Heythrop College of the University of London which is housed in Kensington Square in the former quarters of the convent school which had been evacuated to Aldenham. 

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BBC Radio to Air Discussion of Scoop

Posted on November 17, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The next installment of  BBC’s A Good Read on Monday 21 November will include a discussion of Waugh’s novel Scoop. Here’s the description from the BBC Radio 4 Extra schedule:

Rosie Boycott and her guests – novelist William Boyd and journalist Paul Foot – discuss favourite books by Evelyn Waugh, Vladimir Nabokov and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. From 2003.

The other books include King, Queen, Knave by Nabokov and Sunset Song by Grassic Gibbon. William Boyd wrote the script for the 1987  TV adaptation of Scoop made by London Weekend TV for ITV and PBS. 

This episode of A Good Read may be a rebroadcast of a 2003 episode. Here’s a link to the broadcast at 1830 next Monday. It will be available over the internet worldwide via the same link on BBC iPlayer a few minutes after 1900. 

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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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