Roundup: From Addis to Epstein

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Reporter, an Ethiopian English-language journal, has identified the wholesale modernization of the country’s capital Addis Ababa as a matter of cultural concern.  Here are the opening paragraphs:

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s enigmatic capital, is undergoing a makeover that’s as controversial as it is transformative. Historic neighborhoods that breathe life and culture into the city – like Piassa, Legehar, Arada, Postabet and Beherawi – are being bulldozed to pave the way for modern glass and steel structures.

While this redevelopment promises economic gains, it’s also erasing chapters of the city’s artistic and historical narrative. Even as new attractions spring up across Addis, preserving the city’s architectural remnants – irresistible to travelers and historians alike – remains paramount.

Piassa, Addis’ beating heart, is known for its Italian-style buildings remnants of the Fascist occupation. Its medley of European and Ethiopian influences has long epitomized the city’s adaptability and persistence.

The landmark Taitu Hotel, Ethiopia’s first, stands as a tribute to Addis’ rich past, hosting legends like Evelyn Waugh and Emperor Haile Selassie. Demolishing such structures means more than losing buildings; it severs Addis’ connection to the past that shaped its unique identity.

Another target in Addis Ababa’s bulldozer’s sights is Leghar, home to the Franco-Ethiopian Railway, a remnant of Ethiopia’s early flirtation with globalization. The railway station’s distinctive Art Deco style is a tangible tether tying Addis to its international past. Snapping that line risks breaking residents’ collective memory.

Waugh wrote four books which took place largely in Ethiopia and described the environs of Addis in all of them, but most especially Remote People. Although as a Conservative, he might be expected to oppose the sort of radical modernization of Addis that is being described, he was no lover of that city’s decor on his various visits there and might in this case have favored the new cityscapes described in the article over what they replaced.

–The Australian literary journal Quadrant posts an article entitled “At War with Wodehouse.” This is a detailed account by Barry Gillard about how Wodehouse naively ran afoul of British politics while living under the German Occupation during WWII and ended up living in exile in the USA afterwards. Here are the closing paragraphs:

…Of Joy in the Morning, eventually published in 1946, the New York Times Book Review said: “Maybe Wodehouse uses the same plot over and over again. Whatever he does, it’s moderately wonderful, a ray of pale English sunshine in a grey world.” It closed with a comment Wodehouse thought “terrific”:

There is, of course, the question of Mr Wodehouse’s “war guilt”. Upon mature post-war reflection, it turned out to be about equal to the war guilt of the dachshunds which were stoned by super-heated patriots during World War I.

Wodehouse was enough of a writer for T.S. Eliot to confess that he took a stance only “this side of idolatry”. Evelyn Waugh was less restrained: “One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on each page.” Ludwig Wittgenstein thought Honeysuckle Cottage (1927) the funniest thing he had ever read, and Christopher Hitchens called Wodehouse “the gold standard of English wit”.

Some Wodehouse jokes never found their way into the books, however. He offered a gem in a 1948 letter to fellow writer Guy Bolton. A clergyman is doing a crossword puzzle on a railway journey and is perplexed over his answer to 15 Across. He consults a colleague seated opposite:

“15 Across—‘Appertaining to the female sex’? Something–U–N–T?”

“Aunt!”

“Ah, yes, of course,” replies the clergyman. “I say, have you an eraser?”

—The American Spectator carries a review of a new book of literary criticism by veteran critic Joseph Epstein. This is entitled The Novel, Who Needs It? and it is reviewed by Larry Thornberry who begins by recounting his own literary education:

…I didn’t have the benefit of Joseph Epstein’s fine brief for the beauties, charms, and deep understanding of the human enterprise and its manifold mysteries that can be gained through the careful reading of serious fiction. A level of understanding available, Epstein insists, nowhere else. The well-read Epstein is clearly the man for this job. In The Novel, Who Needs It?, without being preachy or didactic, he makes a convincing case. […]

Nowhere in this compact book — extended essay really — does Epstein give us one of those 50 best lists of writers or of books that have repaid his reading time or added to his insights on human nature and the vanity fair that we call life. But through its chapters Epstein praises the work of [writers such as] Ivan Turgenev, Marcel Proust, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Kafka, Tom Wolfe, Milan Kundera, V.S. Naipaul, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Trollope, Barbara Pym, Thomas Mann, Anthony Powell, et al. His book mentions would require a list too long to share here…

I’m sure Epstein knows he’s facing strong headwinds in urging more Americanos to take up serious fiction. Much of the work of the more thoughtful writers is long and requires a major commitment of reading time…Another impediment to reading in anything save the shortest forms is the diminished attention span of our online, digital age, where pixels have replaced pages and the modern mind wanders after more than a few sentences. ..So The Novel, Who Needs It? is unlikely to become a best-seller. And I’m sure Epstein’s expectation of converts is modest. But I’ve never said that lost causes are necessarily bad ones. Epstein does the work of the angels by making the effort, even if the kind of reading Epstein recommends is too much time under the lamp for most. …

–The religion website WordOnFire has an article discussing the importance of Equanimity. The prime example comes from a novel by Evelyn Waugh:

In Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Men at Arms, Mr. Crouchback was a delightful, older, aristocratic widower who earnestly loved his Catholic faith and his storied English family tradition. And yet, when his beloved estate of Broome was lost (“without extravagance or speculation, his inheritance had melted away”), Mr. Crouchback (without affectation) maintained his equanimity. Waugh illustrates equanimity brilliantly:

‘[Mr. Crouchback] was an innocent, affable old man who had somehow preserved good humor—much more than that, a mysterious and tranquil joy—throughout a life which to all outward observation had been overloaded by misfortune. He had like many another been born in full sunlight and lived to see night fall. . . .

Only God and [his son] Guy knew the massive and singular quality of Mr. Crouchback’s family pride. He kept it to himself. That passion, which is often so thorny a growth, bore nothing save roses for Mr. Crouchback. . . .

He had a further natural advantage over Guy; he was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had a fair share of joys, and these were ever fresh and accessible in Mr. Crouchback’s mind. He never mourned the loss of Broome. He still inhabited it as he had known it in bright boyhood and in early, requited love.

In his actual leaving home there had been no complaining. He attended every day of the sale seated in the marquee on the auctioneer’s platform, munching pheasant sandwiches, drinking port from a flask and watching the bidding with tireless interest, all unlike the ruined squire of Victorian iconography. ‘Who’d have thought those old vases worth 18 pounds? Where did that table come from? Never saw it before in my life. . . . Awful shabby the carpets look when you get them out. . . . What on earth can Mrs. Chadwick want with a stuffed bear?’”

Even after losing his family home at Broome, Mr. Crouchback cheerfully returned once per year to have a requiem Mass sung for his ancestors. His walk down High Street to and from his former estate was punctuated by the warm greetings of old friendly shopkeepers and young passersby. Mr. Crouchback was a picture of equanimity.

 

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Bastille Day Roundup

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—Architectural Review has reposted its June 1930 article by Evelyn Waugh about the buildings of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. Some of this was included in Waugh’s  contemporaneous travel book Labels, but the magazine article appears to be more fully illustrated. Here’s an excerpt:

…Only a small part has as yet been built of the great Church of the Holy Family, which was to have been Gaudi’s supreme achievement, and unless some eccentric millionaire is moved to interpose in the near future, in spite of the great sums that have already been squandered upon it, the project will have to be abandoned. The vast undertaking was begun with very small funds and relied entirely upon voluntary contributions for its progress. The fact that it has got as advanced as it has, is a testimony to the great enthusiasm it has aroused among the people of the country, but enthusiasm and contributions have dwindled during the last twenty years, until only ten men are regularly employed, most of their time being taken up in repairing the damage caused to the fabric by its exposure. There are already menacing cracks in the masonry; immense sums would be required to finish the building on the scale in which it was planned, and the portions already constructed fatally compromise any attempt at modification. It seems to me certain that it will always remain a ruin, and a highly dangerous one, unless the towers are removed before they fall down.

All that is finished at present is the crypt, a part of the cloisters, the south door, two of the towers, and part of the east wall. There is a model in the crypt of the finished building which was shown in Paris at one of the International Exhibitions, but did not attract any great international support. The church is to be circular with a straight, gabled south front forming a tangent touching the circumference, not as might be supposed at its centre, but at a point some way to the east of the main door; beyond the high altar is to be a baptistery with a very high pointed dome, fretted and presumably glazed…

Work continues on the structure to this day but Waugh’s photos can be used to show the  progress.

—Time magazine posts an article by Sarah Watling on the poll taken by writer Nancy Cunard in 1937 to determine British writers’ positions on the ongoing Spanish Civil War. This article was apparently inspired by similar attempts today to make a similar determination on the Russo-Ukraine conflict. Here’s the article’s opening:

The first thing I ever knew about the poet, journalist, and activist Nancy Cunard was a commanding broadsheet she dispatched in the summer of 1937, containing the challenge that, decades later, would spark the questions that prompted my book, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future. She addressed it to many of the most important writers of Britain and Ireland, sometimes sending multiple copies with the idea that they’d pass them on. It made its way to George Bernard Shaw and Evelyn Waugh; to T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett; to Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay and the Woolfs; to Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden. It reached Aldous Huxley and George Orwell; Vita Sackville-West and Sylvia Pankhurst. It went to Vera Brittain and H. G. Wells; to Rosamond Lehmann and her brother, John; to Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner, Valentine Ackland.

Nancy printed her missive in black and red and addressed it, broadly and grandly, to ‘the Writers and Poets of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales’. Large type announced: THE QUESTION. Along the left-hand side of the sheet was added, vertically: SPAIN

The Question (though technically there were two) appeared perfectly straightforward. ‘Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?’

Nancy assured her writers that she would publish the answers they chose to send, by which she meant: you are asked to state a position publicly. As far as she was concerned, not taking a position was impossible.

Most of the writers opposed Franco and several replies are mentioned. I did not see any further mention of Waugh’s reply, but he did send one and it is included in his collected journalism:

I know Spain only as a tourist and reader of the newspapers. I am no more impressed by the ‘legality’ of the Valencia [leftist] government than are British Communists by the legality of the Crown, Lords and Commons. I believe it was a bad government, rapidly deteriorating. If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent (EAR, 187).

The reply along with others appeared in the Left Review.

–Neil Tennant, member and co-songwriter for the band called the Pet Shop Boys, was interviewed recently by Mojo magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

Smash Hits [a magazine for which Tennant wrote] was renowned for asking pop stars curious questions. Remember any good ones?

My famous question was “Does your mother play golf?” Which I thought was an interesting question because it revealed a lot about your family background. My mother did play golf and got narked by the question because she thought it was a dig at her. Chris Heath always asked, “What colour is Tuesday?” A good question because I’m immediately going to say “Green”. The influence Smash Hits had on me was, I wasn’t afraid of humour. I also got it from My Fair Lady, and before that when I was in HMS Pinafore at school. That you can be serious but you can still be funny. One of my favourite writers, Evelyn Waugh, is like that. It’s funny, but it’s really bitter, quite nasty, actually.

Evelyn Waugh and chart pop is a slightly unusual combination. Did you think you were doing something new?

We thought very much that we had the secret of modern pop, the pop that came after Duran Duran, Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which was going to combine hip hop, hi-energy, electro with emotion. And with songs about real life.

–Waugh’s opposition to reform of the Roman Catholic liturgy is mentioned in two sites. One is in the religious journal Crisis Magazine where Robert Garnett posts a summary of Waugh’s position. Here’s an excerpt:

In 1962, the Second Vatican Council opened with great fanfare, amidst rejoicing at the prospect of the Church opening up to the modern world, a twentieth-century updating (the famous aggiornamento). The Council would, many fondly hoped, usher in a second Pentecost, almost a Second Coming.

Waugh was unimpressed. The glib optimism was fatuous, the presumption repellent. As the Council convened that autumn, his reservations appeared in the British weekly The Spectator, in an essay titled “The Same Again, Please.”

The other is an anonymous posting in the liturgical weblog rorate-caeli which concludes with this:

…As in Waugh’s day, there is a temptation for Catholics today to lose hope that the attempt to “rob the Church of poetry, mystery and dignity” will never end. But there is indeed reason to hope. The first is that Waugh’s letters are even more relevant today than they were when he wrote them. Waugh was not a crank or reactionary, as he might have supposed, for caring. Instead, he expressed concerns that have proved timeless.
The next is that, unlike in the mid-1960s, there is no longer a default assumption of Catholics that whatever the Pope or the bishops do is the work of the Holy Spirit. Waugh assumed that Catholics would simply go along with the changes– but they did not. Five years after Waugh’s death, Paul VI granted the Agatha Christie indult to all Catholics in England, allowing the celebration of the traditional liturgy. Today, beautiful pre-1955 Holy Week liturgies proliferate around the world. Against all efforts to stamp it out, traditional Catholicism has survived and thrived. It will continue to do so.
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Mid-July Roundup

Posted on July 11, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Novelist, critic and literary biographer DJ Taylor in this month’s Literary Review writes about literary biographies. His own most recent efforts in this field are a revision and expansion of his biography of George Orwell originally published in 2003 and his Lost Girls: Love and Literature in Wartime England (2019). The latter was reviewed in EWS 50.3 (Winter 2019). The Literary Review article opens with this:

The first literary biography I ever read, back in 1977, was Christopher Sykes’s life of Evelyn Waugh. Even at the age of sixteen, I seem to remember, I had my doubts, impressed, on the one hand, by what the book clearly gained from the author’s friendship with his subject, yet puzzled, on the other, by the emollience of the tone and the reluctance to confront one or two of the, shall we say, more challenging aspects of Waugh’s personality…

–In the religious journal OurSundayVisitor, Kenneth Craycraft has another look at Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter. The review opens with this:

In July of 1948 Evelyn Waugh reviewed Graham Greene’s new novel, “The Heart of the Matter” for “Commonweal” magazine. Waugh used the opportunity not merely to review the book, but to discuss the purpose of the Catholic artist. “There are 
 Catholics 
 who think it the function of the Catholic writer to produce only advertising brochures setting out in attractive terms the advantages of Church membership,” Waugh observed.

“To them this profoundly reverent book will seem a scandal,” he continued, “for it not only betrays Catholics as unlikeable human beings but shows them tortured by their faith.” Waugh predicted that “The Heart of the Matter” would “be the object of controversy and perhaps even of condemnation.” I hope I can be forgiven for saying that Waugh’s review truly gets to the heart of the matter, both with regard to Greene’s book and its argument that good Catholic art may portray Catholics as disagreeable and haunted by their faith.

Waugh’s own greatest novel, “Brideshead Revisited,” can be described in precisely this way. The most (relatively) sympathetic character in “Brideshead” — its protagonist and narrator, Charles Ryder — is an adulterer who abandoned his wife and children before his conversion to Catholicism, and is churlish and rude after. And I know of no character in Catholic literature more tortured by his faith than Sebastian Flyte, the novel’s other central character, who can neither accept nor reject God’s grace…

–Gareth Roberts in The Spectator takes on what he calls the “The Saintly Reading Cult” in which reviewers look for moral reasons not to read a book. Here’s an excerpt:

…And then we have Goodreads, the source of much of this madness. Many of the reviews are written in the grand ‘I’ve been so enriched’ tone of Hyacinth Bouquet wanting to be seen chatting to the vicar. It was the Abigail Proctors of Goodreads who descended on Kate Clanchy, who panicked Elizabeth Gilbert into retracting her latest novel merely because it was set in Russia. Goodreads is where you will find all the worst excesses of the Saintly Reading Cult.

I confess I’ve got hooked checking on Goodreads after I’ve finished reading a book I suspect they won’t like. There is something very funny about people who read a book not for fun but to rate it against their tick list of the progressive opinion suite c.2023. My favourite was the contributor who compared reading Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief to being trapped in a lift with Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, which is doing both of them an enormous and undeserved compliment. I’ve been tempted to write inappropriate Goodreads reviews just to liven the place up. Of Human Bondage – ‘well done Somerset, another winner’. On The Wretchedness Of The Human Condition – ‘bit gloomy for a beach read, one star’…

–A film blog called Movieweb has produced a list of underrated 1960s films which it thinks should be considered cult classics. Here’s one of the choices:

The Loved One is a black satirical comedy starring a who’s who of 1960s Hollywood, based on the satirical novel The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy by Evelyn Waugh. The film follows Dennis Barlow, played by Robert Morse, who joins the funeral industry after his uncle commits suicide. He falls for Aimee, who is the spiritual funeral home stylist, but stumbles on a wicked plan schemed by the cemetery owner. The film was divisive at the time for challenging the limits of dark comedy, where some of its satirical elements threw the audience off their guard. Nevertheless, the film is known for its outrageous humour and a special cameo by the musical prodigy, Liberace.

–Several papers have stories based on the recently announced sale of the book collection of the late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts. Here’s an excerpt from a BBC announcement:

…The signed copy of Gatsby leads the auction, with an estimated price of ÂŁ200,000-300,000. Fitzgerald dedicated the book to MGM Screenwriter Harold Goldman, with whom he worked on the 1938 Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh comedy A Yank In Oxford.

The inscription reads: “For Harold Goldman, the original ‘Gatsby’ of this story, with thanks for letting me reveal these secrets of his past”.

Also for sale is a proof copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which the author sent to friends for their comments in 1944. Waugh later made several changes to the novel, including rewriting the ending and changing some names…

The auction will take place in two parts, a live sale at Christie’s headquarters in London on 28 September, and an online sale that runs from 15 to 29 September.

Highlights will be put on display in Los Angeles from 25 to 29 July, New York from 5 to 8 September, and London from 20 to 27 September.

 

 

 

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Campion Lecture in Oxford Announced

Posted on July 5, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

Campion Hall, Oxford has announced a public lecture in September that may be of interest to our readers:

Professor Gerard Kilroy, Senior Fellow in English at Campion Hall, will be delivering a public lecture to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the foundation of the British Province of the Society of Jesus. The talk will include a panel discussion and refreshments, followed by an ecumenical Service of Thanksgiving in Christ Church Cathedral at 11.30am.

A special aura surrounds the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries to England. From the moment of landing in June 1580 till the capture of Edmund Campion in July 1581, their clandestine preaching and sacramental ministry involved disguise, constant danger, narrow escapes: enough to create a legend. Campion was always in the first rank of candidates for canonisation, even if negative publicity attached itself to Robert Persons. Evelyn Waugh’s life of Campion captured the chivalric glamour of Campion by largely ignoring any doubts he had and minimising the role of Persons.

Recent scholarship has tried to attach political aims to the mission itself. John Bossy even accused Campion of reckless disregard for his own safety, praised the prudence of Persons. Michael Carrafiello accused Catholic historians of ignoring the mission’s ‘political intent’, thereby giving some justification to the response of the Privy Council. Peter Lake and Michael Questier gave the Edmund Campion affair a central place in English history but argued that the mission was not political but ‘structured by certain political and polemical objectives’.

This talk aims to restore Campion’s own doubts about papal policy to the account, his ‘lingering’ (as the Bohemian Jesuit historians described it), and to give full weight to the disastrous effect of the Irish expedition of Dr Nicholas Sander which completely undermined the claims of the missionaries that they had no political objectives. It will argue that Campion, far from being naive, understood from the first the confused religious and political situation in England, was further outraged by the secrecy with which the mission to Ireland had been shrouded (as his interview with Dr Allen makes clear), but threw himself into his sacramental mission with all the freedom of a condemned man.

If anyone is to be blamed for the “failure” (in human terms) of the 1580 mission, it must be the man who planned it, Dr William Allen, without telling either the missionaries or Everard Mercurian, the superior General, that Sander had already landed in Dingle. Yet, in the end, both Nicholas Sander and Edmund Campion were carrying through their profound beliefs about the nature of the church and its relationship to the state; until recently, the view of Allen and Sander, was considered orthodox, even if the tide has now turned in favour of Campion’s position.

The public lecture will be followed by an ecumenical Service of Thanksgiving in Christ Church Cathedral at 11.30am; everyone is welcome to attend this service without need for registration.

Professor Kilroy is the co-editor of the recently published v. 17 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr. Information on ticketing for the lecture is available at this link. There is no charge for admission and tickets for the service at the cathedral are not required.

 

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Evelyn Waugh Studies 53.3 (Winter 2022)

Posted on July 4, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

A copy of the latest issue of the Society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies is posted for review. This is described by Jamie Collinson, the Society’s secretary as follows:

This is an edition I’ve been keenly looking forward to, because the writer Gavin Mortimer has contributed an essay on Waugh’s connections to Bill and David Stirling and the Special Air Service – the British Army’s special forces regiment. Gavin is an excellent writer who contributes regularly to The Spectator, a magazine to which Evelyn, Auberon and Alexander Waugh all have strong connections.

The essay is fascinating, and I hope you enjoy it.

Also in this edition is an excellent piece by Timothy M. M. Baker on identifying Waugh’s Merton Street house in Oxford, and Nan Zhang’s review of The Business of Reading: A Hundred Years of the English Novel by Julian Lovelock.

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4th of July Roundup

Posted on July 1, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The website LitHub.com has a story about a proposal by the former royal couple Harry and Meghan to Netflix for what sounds like a prequel to Great Expectations. Should that fail to be commissioned, the LitHub reporter Janet Manley has some other proposals she thinks the couple should consider, including this:

…An adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief transposed to Montecito, in which an Englishman arrives with ideas of modernizing the agrarian society of talk show hosts, gardeners and nannies. Hijinks ensue when the Englishman turns out not to understand the ways of the Californians…

–The auction house Tennants recently listed:

…a ‘Portrait of George Waugh’ by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) offered with an estimate of ÂŁ2,000-3,000. The sitter was the brother of the artist’s first wife, Fanny. The lawyer lived with his parents in Bayswater, but sadly died at 34 having accidentally drowned in the sea off Devon. It seems that the portrait was executed after his death, with the likeness taken from a photograph prior to 1874, when the arts cut off contact with his family-in-law. The portrait was once owned by writer Evelyn Waugh.

You can view a reproduction of the portrait and more details of Evelyn Waugh’s ownership on the firm’s website. It is listed in lot 1171 in a sale scheduled for 15 July.

–Books blogger Nigeness reports that he is reading Waugh’s novel Helena. Here is his first reaction:

I am reading what is probably Evelyn Waugh’s least characteristic and most nearly forgotten novel, Helena (1950), his sole excursion into the genre of historical fiction – and, oddly, the novel Waugh regarded as his best work. So far, I’ve found that the most striking thing about it is how un-Wavian it seems: apart from the author’s pugnacious Preface, it could have been written by almost any good historical novelist of the time, and I should think very few, reading it ‘blind’, would guess that it was Waugh…

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending this.

–Another blogger (novelist Daniel McInerny) on a weblog entitled The Comic Muse discusses what he calls Waugh’s “minimalist” prose style as applied in Vile Bodies. Here’s the introduction:

Here Waugh puts on display what has been called his “minimalist” technique, a technique which he utilized throughout his career, but which especially characterizes his first five novels: Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938).

In a 1930 review of W.R. Burnett’s boxing novel Iron Man, Waugh himself describes the technique in the following way:

‘There are practically no descriptive passages except purely technical ones. The character, narrative, and atmosphere are all built up and implicit in the dialogue, which is written in a vivid slang, with numerous recurring phrases running through as a refrain. Ronald Firbank began to discover this technique, but his eccentricity and a certain dead, ‘ninetyish’ fatuity frustrated him. I made some experiments in this direction in the telephone conversations in Vile Bodies. Mr. Ernest Hemingway used it brilliantly in The Sun Also Rises. It has not yet been perfected but I think it is going to develop into an important method.’ (from “The Books You Read,” pp. 300-01 in the 2018 Oxford University Press edition of Waugh’s Essays, Articles, and Reviews: 1922-1934).

In fact, I believe Waugh—along with Hemingway—brings the technique to a great height of perfection. (You can also find minimalism employed, for example, by Joan Didion, Muriel Spark, Raymond Carver, and the late Cormac McCarthy in The Road.)…

–Finally, Fiona Reynolds in Country Life magazine describes her recent explorations around Madresfield Court and explains its connections to Waugh’s writings:

…It was the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (where it was doomed Tony Last’s ancestral home, Hetton Abbey) and, more famously, Brideshead Revisited, drawing on the Lygons to create the intriguing Flyte family, Sebastian at its heart. The elegiac novel was filmed for the ITV series at Castle Howard, but its description matches Madresfield, which Waugh often visited in the 1920s…

Commenters often confuse the sources of Waugh’s inspirations but Reynolds has it right. Mardesfield the house inspired the structure in A Handful of Dust and the occupants of the house (the Lygons) inspired the Flytes in Brideshead.

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Complete Works Featured in TLS

Posted on June 28, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

A review of the four latest volumes in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh series is featured on the cover of this week’s TLS. This is written by literary critic Peter Parker and entitled “A Handful of Books: Evelyn Waugh’s failed marriage and spiritual crisis”. Here is a summary from the weekly editor’s column:

The great Waugh juggernaut rolls on. The University of Leicester and Oxford University Press’s forty-five-volume collaboration on a lavish, scholarly edition of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh – letters, juvenilia, poems and graphic art included – continues with the publication of four volumes of fiction and nonfiction, A Handful of Dust (1934), The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), Edmund Campion (1935) and Robbery Under Law (1939). Peter Parker reviews the work in progress.

A Handful of Dust reflects the author’s shame after the failure of his first marriage to the Hon Evelyn Gardner. Waugh’s “darkest novel” was also, according to Parker, coloured by the humiliating rejection of his proposal to Teresa “Baby” Jungman. In Vile Bodies (1930), Waugh had already reached a turning point: thereafter he condemned a civilization that had thrown away its moral compass. Writing to his brother about his intention to divorce his wife, Waugh complained that “the trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment”. Untethered from hierarchy, tradition and the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, we were all, like his doomed protagonist Tony Last, lost. He would scourge the Bright Young Things in his satires.

Waugh’s hagiography of the sixteenth-century Catholic martyr Edmund Campion showed the way ahead. “If Campion began as an act of pietas”, says its editor, Gerard Kilroy, “it had become, by 1946, the cornerstone of Waugh’s future writing”, introducing Catholic themes in all his later books. Yet was Waugh truly at peace? In his penultimate novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, the autobiographical story of a Catholic writer’s breakdown during a sea voyage, hallucinatory voices suggest that his religion is humbug of a social climber. “Everything with him was jokes”, replied his friend Nancy Mitford.

As is so often the case, Waugh’s underrated travel book Robbery Under Law is not even mentioned by the editor aside from its title. Parker’s review gives it more attention. Here’s an excerpt:

The account of sixteenth-century religious persecution [in Edmund Campion] was undoubtedly informed by Waugh’s knowledge of similar purges in his own times, and Robbery Under Law (1939), another of Waugh’s least regarded works, includes a whole chapter on the harrying and murder of Catholics in Mexico. Unlike Campion, Robbery was initially undertaken for strictly commercial reasons. It was commissioned by Clive Pearson, the son of the late Lord Cowdray, whose Mexican Eagle Oil Company had been expropriated by the country’s Marxist government with promises of recompense that were clearly never going to be fulfilled. The contract drawn up between Pearson and Waugh, reproduced in Michael G. Brennan’s introduction, was kept secret to ensure that no one would know that the author had been paid by an interested party to write the book.

The result was that Waugh’s case for Mexican Eagle and praise of its late proprietor appeared entirely objective. Waugh was, however, genuinely appalled by what he found in Mexico, and it seems unlikely that he would have written the book any differently without Pearson’s ÂŁ1,500 (which was added to his publisher’s advance of ÂŁ400). […]

One of his biographers, Christopher Sykes, maintained that Waugh came to regard Robbery Under Law “with shame and displeasure”, but there is no evidence for this. Waugh did once liken the book to “an interminable Times leader of 1880”, but this was in a letter to Diana Cooper and need not be taken seriously. The opening sentence acknowledges the book to be a political one, but the first chapter, in which Waugh describes his arrival in Mexico City and his impressions of the capital, is travel writing of a high order. The book also contains some admirable passages of rhetoric, as well as enjoyable satire of the kind familiar from Black Mischief and Scoop. The frequently changing rulers of Mexico and the losses incurred by foreign businesses in the country are now of merely local historical interest, but some of Waugh’s observations remain pertinent, as when he writes that American interventions in countries south of its border have repeatedly “proved disastrous”.

Contrary to Parker’s comment quoted above, there is indeed some evidence that Waugh had disowned the book written under contract. After the war when he compiled a selection of his prewar travel writings, generous excerpts from Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days and Waugh in Abyssinia were assembled for When the Going Was Good (1946). In the introduction, Waugh writes: “There was a fifth book, Robbery  Under Law, about Mexico, which I am content to leave in oblivion, for it dealt little with travel and much with political questions. […] So let it lie in its own dust…” Parker’s own observations indicate that Waugh may have been unfair in his judgement of the book, but that does not change the fact that he deemed the book to have been an embarrassment.

Parker also adds this interesting observation about the editorial decision to omit from this Handful of Dust volume of the Complete Works the alternative ending written for the magazine version :

The novel was published in Harper’s Bazaar in an abbreviated version with a different (and happier) ending. A scholarly edition of this novel ought really to have included this alternative ending, which Waugh published under the title “By Special Request” in Mr Loveday’s Little Outing and Other Sad Stories (1936). The reason it does not is that Mr Loveday’s Little Outing will be Volume 5 of the Complete Works, but we have no idea when this will appear, and the omission here is frustrating.

Finally, Parker concludes with some observations about the books’ production and editing. He is annoyed by the blurry photographic reproductions and finds that while some of the detailed discussion

will be of interest only to scholars, much of it will be welcomed by the general reader. Woudhuysen’s observations about architecture in A Handful of Dust, for example, are particularly illuminating.

There is also a mention of some oversights. For example:

…when in Robbery Under Law Waugh compares nations to “horses at ‘Minaroo’, moving at varying speeds towards the same object”, Brennan suggests he “might be referring to a popular fairground game”, the name of which is of “unknown derivation”. Minoru, as it is properly spelt, was in fact a popular board game of the Edwardian period, named after the king’s world-famous racehorse, winner of the Derby in 1909…

There are plans afoot for reviews of these four volumes in future issues of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

 

 

 

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Summer Solstice Roundup

Posted on June 24, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–In a recent issue of The Sunday Times, Matthew Syed discussed the legacy of Boris Johnson. This excerpt appears near the beginning:

We always knew Johnson was a skilled deceiver and dissimulator. In his book Chums, Simon Kuper tells of a formative experience at Balliol College, Oxford, when “good old Boris” was caught by his classics tutor, Jonathan Barnes, copying a translation straight out of a book. Johnson reputedly apologised: “I’ve been so busy I just didn’t have time to put in the mistakes.” It was an early lesson in how a winning smile can get you out of a corner and elicit a giggle. As Evelyn Waugh remarked in Brideshead Revisited: “Those that have charm don’t really need brains.”

Sounds like something Anthony Blanche would say.

–American novelist Gary Shteyngart was recently interviewed by The Guardian regarding his reading preferences. Here a few of his replies:

…The writer who changed my mind
I guess George Orwell, with Nineteen Eighty-Four. I grew up loving dictatorships as a Soviet citizen, but Orwell made it seem a lot less sexy. I’m glad Lenin never met that magical goose…

The book or author I came back to
Reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a teenager was not a great idea. But when you’re in your 20s it rocks…

The book I could never read again
I guess Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief. Hoo boy, that is um 
 Yeah.

The book I discovered later in life
Later in life? Who has time to read?

–The London Review of Books has a review of Gertrude Trevelyan’s 1937 novel Two Thousand Million Man-Power. The review is by David Trotter and is entitled “Hippopotamus Charges Train.” Trevelyan wrote 8 novels during the 1930s of which this is the 5th. The novels have not attracted much interest until lately when two others were republished. In this latest reprint, she describes life between the wars in London, with news items from the period inserted in the narrative of the lives of the two characters, a recently-married couple named Robert and Katherine. Here’s an excerpt:

…Two Thousand Million Man-Power stops dead, for no apparent reason, shortly after George V’s funeral procession in London on 28 January 1936. It thus omits a key event in the story of the bomber’s increasing supremacy, the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July (Guernica was hit on 26 April 1937). The focus, towards the end of the novel, is on Italian actions in Abyssinia. ‘League force for the Saar, Franco-Soviet commercial agreement, Italo-Abyssinian relations strained – Where’s Abyssinia? – Abyssinian losses at Wal-Wal, Italian government seizes securities, Mussolini on importance of fighting.’

The Abyssinian losses in question were incurred in November 1934 during a skirmish at the Walwal oasis in the disputed border zone between Abyssinia and what was then Italian Somaliland. Robert and Katherine [characters in the novel] cannot have been the only people in Britain who needed to ask where Abyssinia was. ‘Everybody talking about Abysinnia, wh. I cannot spell,’ … On 3 October, Italian troops entered Abyssinia from Eritrea. Robert wonders whether the news of distant hostilities might rekindle what’s left of Katherine’s desire to do a bit more about things: ‘When the Italians won, as they obviously would, she’d take up Abyssinians instead of German Jews.’ To follow the Abyssinian pathway through the database is to begin to think about the radical 1930s outside the customary Orwell orbit. For Trevelyan, news of the war in East Africa consists of a series of facts of uncertain implication; for Evelyn Waugh, in Scoop (1938), it consists of wild surmise further embellished by Fleet Street hacks. The more apt comparison might be Claude McKay’s breezily satirical Amiable with Big Teeth, set in Harlem in the period after the invasion, an event of widespread concern among African Americans because it threatened to complete the European subjugation of Africa…

Trevelyan died in 1940 apparently as a result of wounds suffered in a German bombing raid on London.

—The Jewish Chronicle has an article entitled “The ever-present antisemitism of George Orwell.” This is by Ian Bloom. Here is an excerpt:

…Literary antisemitism was the norm in England until relatively recently. If they mention Jews at all, most major 19th-century English novelists described unattractive stereotypes. Perhaps George Eliot is the shining exception, as is EM Forster in the next century. But Graham Greene, JB Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell are all “guilty”, while HG Wells, Saki, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are positively odious. As for the poets, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound are simply vile. This then was the context, the prevailing milieu, when Orwell was serving both his literary and political apprenticeship in the 1930s. There was a prevailing hostility towards Jews in both spheres. If, like me, you expected better, even then, from the young Orwell, you’d be disappointed…

Waugh, Powell, Greene and Priestley were certainly guilty of describing Jews as “unattractive stereotypes.” Whether that, in and of itself, constitutes antisemitism, such as that evidenced by Belloc or Pound, could be argued. Where Orwell falls within this spectrum can also be open to discussion, which Bloom does fairly and thoughtfully in his essay.

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Sale Drama at Piers Court Continues

Posted on June 23, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has reported the outcome of legal proceedings to order sitting tenants at Piers Court to vacate the premises so that new buyer can take possession. See earlier posts for details of the auction sale that took place late last year. The Mail also reveals the identity of the new  owner who bought the property at the auction. After serving three notices to the sitting tenants to vacate the premises, the new owner filed proceedings for a court order. According to the Mail:

Two Evelyn Waugh superfans who have been refusing to leave the literary giant’s ÂŁ3m country mansion have just 15 days to get out after losing a court battle with the new owner, we can reveal. Bechara Madi and his partner Helen Lawton, a life-long Waugh enthusiast, have been digging their heels in and refusing to budge from the Grade II-listed 18th century Cotswolds property they have called home for the past four years.

MailOnline can reveal that the new proprietor is a Brazilian socialite by the name of Vanessa Valerie Gomes De Bustamante Sa who bought the sprawling, eight-bedroom house where the novelist penned works such as Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Brideshead Revisited [sic] at auction for ÂŁ3.16million last December – but she has been unable to get access to it for the past seven months…

On June 8, a judge at Gloucestershire County Court ordered the [sitting tenants] to leave the house within 28 days – or face the bailiffs. He also ordered Mr Madi [one of the sitting tenants] to pay the new owner costs of almost ÂŁ18,000. This was despite Mr Madi claiming to have paid a ÂŁ250,000 deposit for the house and a further ÂŁ250,000 repairing and maintaining it. Mr Madi said he was unable to afford legal representation and that he and his wife had been left penniless. He told the court: ‘It’s not a great position to be in.’

As noted in previous posts, the sitting tenants took the position that their rights to remain under their lease with the previous owner were superior to those of a buyer at the auction sale:

But the auction went ahead. With a starting price of ÂŁ2.5m, the hammer eventually fell at ÂŁ3.16m, with Ms [Vanessa] Gomes De Bustamante Sa outbidding three other interested parties. The [Brazilian] daughter of a surgeon, she has lived in London for more than a decade during which time she has been photographed at a string of society events including the polo, gallery openings and fashion shows. She also runs a company called the Conscious Kitchen Club – which hosts children’s parties with a difference. Rather than featuring cake and Coca-Cola, the young guests are instead taught to cook healthy, nutritious food such as spinach and pomegranate salads and avocado on toast. Precisely what plans Ms Gomes De Bustamante Sa has in store for Piers Court remains unclear. She declined to comment when approached by MailOnline.

The story in the Mail online edition includes several new photos, primarily relating to the new owner. It also repeats certain misstatements such as that Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited while living at Piers Court and misidentifies a 16-year old Auberon Herbert as Evelyn Waugh in a wedding photo. These have been discussed in previous posts.

 

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Rossetti Reviewed

Posted on June 17, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh Society member Milena Borden has kindly prepared the following review of the Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhibit currently running at the Tate Britain museum. This was mentioned in previous postings. The review is entitled “What Is Wrong with Rossetti?”:

The Tate Britain’s current exhibition The Rossettis features Evelyn Waugh’s biography Rossetti: His Life and Works displayed alongside poetry collections and Jan Marsh’s biography of Christina Rossetti. The company in which Waugh’s book is placed would likely please the author, known for his admiration of the Victorians. The exhibition highlights the extraordinary artistic family, focusing on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina, his brother William Michael, and his wife and model Elisabeth Siddall (Lizzy). The Rossettis are credited with bringing about an artistic revolution in Britain and beyond. 

 The exhibition provides expert explanations of the origins and aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (P.R.B.), of which Rossetti was a founding member. Rossetti’s paintings are curated alongside key poems by Christina Rossetti, which are read aloud when viewers step on digitally activated spots on the floor. Rossetti’s art radiates from the gallery walls, particularly showcasing his renowned portraiture of his beloved women who served as his models, muses, and lovers. The Tate hails the Rossettis as successful “medieval moderns” and “radical romantics.” 

 However, amidst the praise and the exquisite display, there is a noticeable absence of criticism or questioning of Rossetti’s art or life. No mention is made of the highly symbolic yet unsettling depictions of women’s faces on unnaturally thick necks, nor is there discussion about the overall confusion in Rossetti’s compositions, which possess both biblical and non-religious elements. 

 In contrast to the exhibition’s celebratory tone, it is worth reflecting on what Waugh wrote 95 years ago. Waugh believed that Rossetti lacked “essential rectitude” and argued that real art should possess a moral centre and social value. He criticized Rossetti’s brooding on magic and suicide as symptoms of mediocrity rather than genius, pointing out a spiritual inadequacy and a sense of disorganization in his work. 

 This raises the question of who is correct: Waugh or Tate Britain? However, a more intriguing question arises: Why was Waugh drawn to Rossetti in the first place, given his critique? 

 Italians have historically thrived in London, and Rossetti embodies the stereotypical image of an Italian in England. As the son of a political refugee, he was named after Dante Alighieri and grew up in a household surrounded by notable Italians. While his sister emerged as one of the finest Victorian poets, Rossetti became one of the most famous members of the P.R.B., associated with mystical imagination and a somewhat divine artistic madness. Yet, his scandalous personal relationships with working-class English women who became his muses and models, along with his hot-headed and eccentric nature, contributed to the tragic aspects of his personal life. 

 This context sheds light on Waugh’s interest in Rossetti. Prior to becoming a professional writer, Waugh aspired to be an artist, and he had already written an essay about the P.R.B. before publishing this “product of its own time” (M. Brennan, Introduction,  The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Rossetti His Life and Works, vol. 16, OUP, 2017). During that period, Waugh, like Rossetti, embraced a romantic and bohemian lifestyle while studying at Oxford and cultivating deep friendships. Their shared rejection of established academic norms, Waugh of Oxford and Rossetti of the Royal Academy of Arts, may have contributed to Waugh’s fascination with the enigmatic and melancholic Victorian painter.

 The Tate exhibition provides valuable insights into Waugh’s motivations by examining Rossetti’s paintings. While Rossetti is recognized as a radical and revolutionary figure within the 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite movement, his highly symbolic works never quite achieved the status of true masterpieces. Appreciating Rossetti’s peculiar mastery over his primitive biblical compositions and his depiction of working-class English models, one must also confront the core of his artistic achievement—his failure. Are his works idealistic or salacious, revolutionary or exploitative? 

 Waugh’s critique extends beyond artistic analysis. By exploring Rossetti’s dual life as a romantic painter and a cruel husband and lover, one can find valuable insights in his early biographer’s judgement. Waugh thought very highly of the painting “Beata Beatrix” (1864-1870), which is displayed centrally in the exhibit depicting Beatrice as the saintly muse with the poet Dante hovering mournfully in the background, capturing the weighted symbolism and foreshadowing death. It serves as an apt subject for a psychological analysis of the artist’s mind, paralleling the tragic real-life story of Rossetti’s wife and model, Lizzy. It is perhaps interesting to note here that Waugh’s analysis of this painting avoids making judgements or drawing conclusions about the more modern theme of Rossetti’s guilt as the driving force behind it. After his wife’s tragic death at the age of 32 from an overdose of laudanum, he continued to have love relationships with his models, most notably with Jane Burden (William Morris’s wife) but seems to have never quite recovered from the shock. 

Waugh dedicated his first book to his first wife, Evelyn Gardner, to whom he was married for a very short period of time. Much later on in his life he did say that he would like to rework the Rossetti biography but, since it didn’t happen, one can only speculate about what he might have written about the Rossetti’s marriage with perhaps more understanding of Elisabeth’s emotions. After his failed marriage Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 and this would have most probably changed his thinking about Rossetti who was a declared atheist. 

Since 2020 under the pressure of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Tate has taken a new direction of rethinking the artistic depictions of racial hierarchies. Nowadays Rex Whistler’s mural at the Tate is closed for recreation which would try to acknowledge problems with racism. It seems obvious that in line with this policy, it is represented in the context of race too. The Beloved (1865-6) which depicts a bride attended by virginal bridesmaids and an African page is displayed alongside individual studies of the boy in order to expand the theme. Also a fictional essay by Chiezda Mhondoro dedicated to this topic is published in the catalogue. Waugh disliked ideological and progressive interpretations of art and it is virtually certain that he would have dismissed this trend as a misguided decolonization. 

Both Tate and Waugh discuss Rossetti from an English point of view and say almost nothing of his reception outside Britain. It seems that the Rossettis have integrated to such an extent into Victorian London that they became an entirely English phenomenon with limited fame and almost no influence in Europe. Giuliana Pieri, an Italian academic, writes convincingly that despite the acknowledged aversion to Rossetti’s paintings in late 19c Italy as “ill painted and repulsive”, he remains the most popular of the pre-Raphaelites in his native Italy which he never visited. 

The Tate Britain exhibition about Rossetti, in its celebratory nature, glosses over some uncomfortable aspects of the artist’s “incongruous” achievement to use Waugh’s definition and avoids criticism and inquiry. In contrast, Waugh’s book on Rossetti, despite its relative obscurity and acknowledged limitations, remains a delightful read due both to its critical assessment and the elegance of its prose. It offers a welcome break from the ambitious and weighty exhibition dominated by live narration of Christina Rossetti’s poetry combined with her brother’s high symbolism. 

 As visitors step across the floor circles within the exhibition, Waugh’s question lingers in the mind: “What is wrong with Rossetti?”

 

 

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