Waugh in Oxford News

Posted on September 16, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh figures in an article in the newspaper Catholic World Report written by a Roman Catholic Rhodes Scholar about her recent experiences as a student in Oxford. She mentions numerous Roman Catholic churches still active in Oxford outside the university but also describes several with university connections in addition to Campion Hall where Waugh was a benefactor. These include Blackfriars, which seems to be nearly a College, and Newman House which she describes as: 

For those who prefer less liturgical formality and more young people… which I found remarkably similar to the Catholic Center at Harvard. Unlike Harvard, however, the Newman Center is also a residence (the antique part of which is the “Old Palace,” referenced in Brideshead Revisited) for students and the (Jesuit) chaplains.

Waugh also wrote extensively about the Old Palace in The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox. This was where Knox lived when he was Roman Catholic Chaplain at Oxford. The author of the article is rather standoffish about nearby Campion Hall where she found the Jesuits’ attitude toward women rather off-putting.

She found Catholic life less flourishing at Cambridge on her visits there but upon reflection concluded:

In the most general terms, Cambridge excels in the sciences, and Oxford in humanities. Still, it seems somewhat miraculous that great minds, and especially authors, of the twentieth century would be concentrated at Oxford: J.R.R. Tolkein, John Henry Newman, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis (okay, so the last one is wishful thinking
). On the other hand, it is not surprising that a university town in England would produce such riches. In Brideshead Revisited, the agnostic protagonist, Charles Ryder, says that Catholics “seem just like other people,” to which the Catholic Sebastian Flyte responds, “My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not—particularly in this country, where they’re so few.”

Another long-standing Oxford institution associated with Waugh is not, however, flourishing. This is his shoemaker Ducker and Sons at 6 The Turl. According to a blogger, who is also a customer, they are abut to close down:

Clients of Ducker & Son since they opened in 1898 have included: The Baron Manfred von Richthofen, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, the Bowes-Lyon family, an entire clutch of Indian Maharajahs and more recently, Rowan Atkinson & Eddie Jordan to mention but a few. John Le CarrĂ© wrote Ducker & Son into his novel “The Tailor of Panama” (and gave the firm one or two other mentions elsewhere I think but memory is hazy)…And now Ducker & Son, 6 The Turl, Oxford, is closing. It is time for the current proprietor to retire and there is no one willing or able to carry on the business.

Waugh’s orders and fittings are probably still carried on the books which will be archived at the Bodleian Library. Whether his custom-made lasts survive in the basement storage room and what will become of them isn’t explained.

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Waugh in the Blogosphere

Posted on September 15, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Several bloggers, especially those with a religious theme, make fairly regular mentions of Waugh and his works. Yesterday, a blogger who specializes in Eastern Christianity posted a review of Waugh’s novel Helena on the day that the Church commemorates the Invention of the True Cross. He begins by quoting  a joke based on the English name of this holy festival that Waugh used to open the novel:

It is reported (and I, for one, believe it) that some few years ago a lady prominent for her hostility to the Church returned from a visit to Palestine in a state of exultation. ‘I got the real low-down at last,’ she told her friends. ‘The whole story of the crucifixion was made up by a British woman named Ellen. Why, the guide showed me the very place where it happened. Even the priests admit it. They call their chapel “the Invention of the Cross”.

The article goes on to explain the derivation of the name of this festival day and the act it commemorates:

In Waugh’s hands Helena is the key figure who “invents” the true cross and so allows Christians, from her day to our own, to mark September 14th as a festival of the cross’s exaltation and triumph. Waugh, a master craftsman of English prose who would have been educated in Latin and who loved using deliberate archaisms, is of course using the verb “invent” here in an older sense of “to come upon, to find”–while also slyly playing on the more common connotation of “creating or producing with the imagination,” which of course his novel was itself doing. (The word itself is derived from the Latin verb invenire, to come upon or find.)…[Helena’s] vocation, in Waugh’s eyes, was to ‘invent’ (=find) the true cross that had been thought to be lost forever.

The article concludes by noting that Waugh seldom missed any opportunity to belittle the Eastern Church (as compared to the one based in Rome) in this and other writings, citing several examples. Helena may be Waugh’s least read novel even though he labored longer on it than most of the others and thought it his best. The blogger says he read it in preparation for the festival day of the Invention of the True Cross. It’s fairly short, at just over 150 pages in the Penguin edition.

Another blogger posted an article quoting descriptions of several wartime meals that occur in the plot of Sword of Honour. These vary from Major Hound’s desparate slapdash combination of various scrounged rations during the evacuation from Crete to the survival rations of Dr Glendening-Rees consisting of seaweed and limpets to the more luxurious meal of lobster, quail and artichokes enjoyed by Guy Crouchback and Tommy Blackhouse before their departure to Crete. The blogger concludes by noting the constant reference to the oyster color of Corporal-Major Ludovic’s eyes. Thanks to David Lull for a link to this blog post.

Finally, a third blogger, in an announcement of a UK book group convening to discuss G K Chesterton’s book about Thomas Aquinas, makes this comment, quoted from a publication of the American Chesterton Society written by Dale Ahlquist :

Evelyn Waugh claimed that G.K. Chesterton never actually read the Summa Theologica. He simply ran his fingers over the binding and absorbed its content.

Ahlquist’s essay provides no source for this quote but it seems to have entered into the canon of unattributed Wavian sayings. 

 

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Jeremy Irons at BAFTA Session

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A report on actor Jeremy Iron’s recent appearance at BAFTA’s “Life in Pictures” series is posted on IndieWire. See also earlier post. In reviewing his career, Irons suggests that his selection as Charles Ryder in Granada’s 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, coinciding with his role in the film version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, was an important early career break:

“They wanted me to play Sebastian Flyte, but he was very similar to a role I’d just played, a man who loved his mother too much, drank too much and fell off a bridge in Episode 8. And I thought, ‘No I want to keep going to the end.’ So I wanted to play Charles Ryder. Ryder is a sort of very internalized Englishman, not able to show a lot. I thought I knew that man. It needed an actor who was not going to perform, but an actor who was. He had to be like a host at a good party, just getting people together and enjoying them, but not playing too much on the front foot.”

“I made [The French Lieutenant’s Woman] in the middle of ‘Brideshead,’ which of course made the other actors livid, because they had to wait for me for four months while I was doing my thing. But I was 30. I knew that if I passed that up, by being a gentleman, it would have a huge effect on my career. That kind of chance doesn’t come along very often…I wanted to get enough fame that people would come and sit on their bottoms in the West End to see me do a play. But I never thought I would become a film actor, because in those days all the successful film actors were from the North. You know, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay. And I was sort of effete for all that. Thankfully ‘Brideshead’ swung the pendulum a bit and suddenly people wanted someone who could wear a suit.”

An audio recording of the complete program in which Irons discusses his career with Danny Leigh is reproduced on BAFTA’s website.

An internet entertainment site called The List has meanwhile named the 1981 Brideshead adaptation as the top TV period drama series:

Jeremy Irons reminisces about the time he spent at stately home Brideshead with the Flyte family. A grand tale of dysfunctional family life set between 1922 and 1944 based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel. The magnificent cast also includes Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud.

Others named include Blackadder, Bleak House and Jewel in the Crown.

 

 

 

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Radio Times Article on 1967 BBC TV Adaptation

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The director of the BBC’s 1967 TV adaptation of Waugh’s Sword of Honour wrote an article in Radio Times on the occasion of its rebroadcast in November 1968. Donald McWhinnie, “Three From Evelyn Waugh,” Radio Times, 28 November 1968, p. 33. This is reproduced on the internet site which is selling a copy of that issue of the magazine. Here’s a link. The article is in frame number 5. 

McWhinnie’s article opens: 

The story of the second world war as most of us knew it is told in Sword of Honour. Not the heroics and the high drama, the cruelty and the senseless suffering, but the day-to-day routine. It is a hilarious and sad and absolutely accurate picture of six inglorious years…The trilogy is one of Evelyn Waugh’s finest achievements, bursting at the seams with comic invention, rich in humanity and full of memorable characters. 

The article is headed by a photo of actor Edward Woodward who played Guy Crouchback in this early TV version. It has, alas, never been made available on videotape or DVD and is unlikely to be repeated on TV as it is filmed in black-and-white and extends over 270 minutes in three episodes. The British Film Institute preserves a copy and recently made it available for limited release in the UK. This is part of their Mediatheque program which also includes the BBC Arena Waugh Trilogy documentary, written and directed by Nicholas Shakespeare. Details may be found at this link. Any of our UK readers who have managed to see these or other productions in the BFI’s Mediatheque progam are invited to report on their experience by posting a comment below. 

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Bullingdon/Bollinger Faces Extinction

Posted on September 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Sebastian Shakespeare in his Daily Mail gossip column reports that the Bullingdon Club at Oxford (on which Waugh based the Bollinger Club in his novel Decline and Fall) may soon die out for lack of interest:

…The Buller is understood to be launching a recruitment drive among freshers to save it from extinction. Ambitious undergraduates have shunned the club, satirised by Evelyn Waugh in Decline And Fall as The Bollinger Club, because of its ‘toxic’ reputation. In the final nail in the coffin for Cameron’s ‘chumocracy’, the Bullingdon’s membership is down from 30 to just two.

Unless some of Oxford’s around 6,000 male undergrads sign up for the society’s unsavoury brand of posh hooliganism… the Bullingdon will be disbanded after more than two centuries of debauchery. One Oxford undergraduate tells me: ‘Most Bullingdon members graduated this year, and with likely no new members, this looks like it might be its last year in existence.’ Do get in touch if you know who the last two members are.

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Another Mitford Book

Posted on September 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Another biography of the Mitford girls is reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. They seem to be competing with Evelyn Waugh for the number of biographies published, but they have an advantage since there are six of them. This latest is entitled The Six (in the UK it was Take Six Girls) and is by Laura Thompson, who previously published a biography of Nancy Mitford entitled Life in a Cold Climate (recently reissued). She has also written widely on horse and dog racing as well as on Agatha Christie and Lord Lucan.

The NYT review is by journalist Tina Brown, who opens with a groan: “Oh no! Not another book about the Mitfords!.” But she found it was riveting and was especially impressed with Thompson’s analysis of how the life of Diana affected the lives of the others: 

…the Mitfords’ rivalries were as intense as their loyalties. Thompson makes it clear that Diana is the still, chill touchstone for them all. The spiky, possessive Nancy was forever jealous when her own admirer Evelyn Waugh fell at Diana’s feet. After the war the Mosleys exiled themselves to Orsay in France. Nancy loyally visited Diana but never introduced her to her glittering circle of Paris friends. Competition with Diana also stoked Unity’s determination to outdo Diana’s fascism by following Hitler. A tinderbox dynamic played out through all their lives — Jessica, eloping with the radical Communist firebrand Romilly because Unity was a Nazi, Unity becoming a Nazi because Diana was a fascist… 

I’m not sure the chronology of Waugh’s admiration for Diana, which peaked in the early 1930s, supports Brown’s (or Thompson’s) theory about Nancy’s jealousy, since his admiration for Nancy really blossomed during and after the war, long after he fell out with Diana; but she may have a point.

UPDATE: The print version of Tina Brown’s review appeared in the New York Times Book Review dated 18 September 2016.

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Australian Journalist Cites Scoop

Posted on September 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Australian journalist Mark Baker has cited Waugh’s novel Scoop as one of the books that changed his life:

This peerless satire of the foibles and vanities of Fleet Street in the golden age of newspapers is as sharp and funny today as it was when it first appeared in the 1930s. I stumbled on to it early in my career in journalism and saw repeated echoes through many years as a foreign correspondent: the pompous, bumbling bosses, the big-noting and big-spending star reporters, the sycophantic editorial bureaucrats. It ought to be a standard text for journalism students of all ages.

The article appears in the Sydney Morning Herald and several other papers. Other life-changing books cited by Baker include Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli, Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Australian novelist Richard Flanagan.

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Philip Eade to Appear at Oldie Lunch and Bridport Festival

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Oldie magazine has announced the appearance of Waugh’s biographer Philip Eade as one of three authors at its 11th October literary lunch:

This new study reveals that from his strained relationships with family and lovers to his religious and drug-induced awakenings, Waugh’s life was one of drama and complexity.

The others to appear at the lunch are Tom Bower who recently wrote a biography of Tony Blair and Anne Sebba whose recent book is Les Parisiennes about the life of women during the German occupation. The Oldie was among the first publications to review Eade’s biography, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited.  See earlier post. The lunches are held at Simpsons-in-the -Strand and may be booked here.

On Thursday, 10th November, Eade will appear at the Bridport Literary Festival in Dorset. There, he will be in conversation with Celia Brayfield at the Bull Hotel at 11am. Tickets may be booked here.

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Daphne Fielding, Writer

Posted on September 10, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A book blog called The Neglected Books Page has posted an article on the first book written by Waugh’s good friend and correspondent Daphne Fielding (1904-97). This is the first volume of her memoirs entitled Mercury Presides that was published in 1954. The article opens with a quote from Waugh: 

When Evelyn Waugh read Daphne Fielding’s memoir, Mercury Presides, he quipped that the book was “marred by discretion and good taste.” Considering that the author was one of the more sparkling of the Bright Young Things whose exploits and indulgences Waugh satirized in Vile Bodies and other early novels, one can understand his assessment…Waugh remarked that “the adult part [of the book] is rather as though Lord Montgomery were to write his life and omit to mention that he ever served in the army.”

Waugh’s comments are quoted from a letter he wrote to Nancy Mitford on 16 November 1954 (Letters, 433). Waugh had known Daphne since the days of the Bright Young People and became her mentor when she took up writing. Indeed, he can be said to have been the moving force behind her discovery of her writing talent. Daphne and her husband Henry Bath asked Waugh to write a brief history and description of their home at Longleat House to be used for a booklet to be sold to day trippers. Waugh declined on the basis that he couldn’t write about a family of Protestants that had unjustly (in his view) received their property from the Roman Catholic church during the Reformation. As a result Daphne completed the project herself and never stopped writing.

Most of her works, like Mercury Presides, are forgotten and out of print. These include a largely autobiographical novel (The Adonis Garden), which Waugh reviewed in The Spectator of 22 June 1961, as well as a second volume of memoirs. In his review of the novel, Waugh chided her for using up enough material for several books. Her book that enjoyed the greatest commercial success was Duchess of Jermyn Street. This was a biography of Rosa Lewis who ran the Cavendish Hotel with an imperious hand for many years. Waugh contributed an introduction to that book as well as suggestions for sources. Daphne also gave birth to Alexander Bath (Henry’s heir as the 7th Marquess) who became quite a celebrity in  his own right during the latter years of the 20th Century. See earlier post.

Thanks to David Lull for sending a link to this article.

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Waugh Appears in Student Reading List

Posted on September 10, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The iNews (an online UK newspaper) has published a list of books that all well grounded students should read (not necessarily as part of a course or degree syllabus). The list consists of both fiction and non-fiction. For example, two books (one in each category) are recommended by George Orwell: 1984 and Homage to Catalonia and by Aldous Huxley:  Brave New World and Doors of Perception. A single book by Waugh is among those recommended:

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. William Boot seeks the ‘scoop’ on the beginning of a “very promising little war” in a fictional East-African country. Waugh’s satire on fleet street sensationalism is a must read for any budding journalists.

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