Henry Green (More)

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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Penguin UK Publish New Brideshead Hardback

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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Mixed Results for Waugh in Imaginary Booker Prize Competitions

Posted on October 15, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

 

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Waugh Article to Appear in Next Issue of Journal

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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Waugh Cited in Press Interviews

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Several recent unrelated newspaper interviews mention Evelyn Waugh in the context of the careers of those interviewed. In the Catholic Herald, historical novelist Robert Harris talks about his latest novel Conclave. This has as its setting the selection of a Pope. The interview raises questions about Harris’s interest in religion:

…this is an author who is clearly an admirer of the Church. Not only does he love the history and the art, the display and the ritual, from which politicians have learned so much, he also immersed himself in St John XXIII’s Journal of a Soul to prepare for this novel. He is a profound admirer of three Catholic novelists, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and the lesser known but underrated Brian Moore. These authors catch the spiritual dimension to life, the neglect of which was the great mistake of George Orwell’s, as Waugh was the first to point out.

A Sri Lankan paper, the Daily News, reports on an interview with a local novelist, Ashok Ferrey, who studied mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. His books include Love in the Tsunami and Colpetty People. When asked who are his favorite writers, Ferrey answered:

They are Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and R.K. Narayan. All of them are very funny. Graham Greene I love, because all his books are to do with good and evil. They are about people who through no fault of their own end up in a world where they are forced to make decisions and are forced to pull a gun out and shoot. He deals with the ethics and the morality of things. He deals a lot with guilt. Evelyn Waugh is supremely funny and satirical and yet there is an underlying pathos and sadness. Muriel Spark is absurd and her characters are so weird. I empathize because some of my characters are somewhat weird. And R.K. Narayan is such a funny observer of life. Surely if you like a writer’s work twenty years ago you will still like it now? I have been told that R.K. Narayan is completely out of fashion now! But I love his style because his words are very simple. It is a deceptive simplicity.

Finally, in an Evening Standard interview, Kim Jones, artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, was explaining to the reporter the many and various objects of interest which decorate his Paris apartment. Prominent among them were artifacts of the Bloomsbury Group, including

… a favourite, painted screen by Roger Fry. ‘It’s from 1909, belonged to Evelyn Waugh’s brother and is mentioned in Brideshead Revisited. I was tipped off about it by Bryan Ferry who knew I was interested in Omega Workshop stuff.’

Although the article is accompanied by several photographs, the screen does not seem to be among them, The Omega Screen is used in Brideshead to illustrate Charles Ryder’s transition in artistic tastes. He buys it shortly after his arrival at Oxford to express his interest in the Bloomsbury Group, then has it removed when he acquires different tastes from Sebastian and his circle, ultimately selling it to Collins to help get himself through the summer term (Penguin, 1962, pp. 29, 35, 60).

UPDATE: The ever resourceful David Lull has found an auction house internet listing for the sale of the Roger Fry screen formerly owned by Alec Waugh. It is described in the novel as a “screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provencal landscape…” (Penguin, 1962, p. 29). Sounds like a ringer for the one in the listing. This may be where Kim Jones acquired it. Tip of the hat once again to Dave Lull.

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Anne Ford and Helena

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Booksellers Peter Harrington have on offer a post card from Evelyn Waugh to Anne Ford.  The message relates to US publication of Waugh’s novel Helena in 1950. Here’s the text and description from Harrington’s internet catalogue:

A postcard inscribed by Waugh to Anne Ford, publicity director at Little, Brown & Co., regarding his novel Helena, published that year: “No praise for Maclean. Loyalty to a former commander seals my lips. But no praise. I hope you have now seen ‘Helena’. I don’t expect it to be popular in USA but I think it my best book. Please use ‘blurb’ for it identical with English blurb. All good wishes, E”. Ford has circled the phrase “I think it my best book” in pencil and written below it: “Do not use quote until I check with him – note his request to use English blurb – be sure Miss Jones knows.” The Maclean referred to was Fitzroy Maclean, Waugh’s commanding officer in Yugoslavia, who Waugh had used as a model or Constantius Chlorus in Helena.

Waugh had visited Ford on his 1948 US tour sponsored by Life magazine. She arranged his trip to Boston, including stops at Boston College where he spoke informally to students and Harvard University where he met up with Maurice Bowra who was a visiting professor at the time. Ford entertained Waugh at her home in suburban Brookline where her mother prepared the meal. She and her mother later visited Waugh at his home in England where he also entertained them to dinner, taking care to serve the same wine as they had served him. Ford later described these visits in a memoir published in the Boston Globe after Waugh’s death.

His instructions relating to the publication of Helena were followed. The blurb on the inside front leaf of the dustwrapper is identical to the one in the UK edition, with one exception. The following sentence was omitted, possibly so that it would fit on the page:

[The book] should not be dismissed as trivial merely on account of its brevity, for the author has long made compression and selection his particular study and here he distils [sic] what would have occupied three or four volumes of a less industrious writer.

There is no mention of the fact that he thought it his best book. Waugh seems to have gotten it wrong about the book’s likely popularity in the US. According to the Bibliography by R M Davis, et al., the first edition was reprinted four times. The same source records no reprinting of the first UK edition.

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Waugh Quoted in Times Article on Brexit

Posted on October 11, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times for 11 October carries an article castigating those members of the Conservative Party who are now backing away from the anti-immigrant groundswell that carried the day for the Leave faction who led the campaign for Brexit. The unsigned article opens with a quote from Waugh’s first novel:

To adapt Evelyn Waugh’s famous line about schools from Decline and Fall, in post-Brexit Britain “We class foreigners, you see, into four grades: leading foreigner, first-rate foreigner, good foreigner and foreigner.” And “Frankly, foreigner is pretty bad”. That, at any rate, seemed to be the dominant message emanating from the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham last week. I thought of this when I heard Irish friends complaining that, for the first time, they wondered if they were really welcome in the United Kingdom. When you discover that not one or two or three but half a dozen or more such friends are prepared to think like this, maintaining the view that there’s nothing to see here becomes progressively more difficult.

The adapted quote appears in the first chapter of Waugh’s novel (Penguin Classic, 2011, p. 16) where the school recruiter Mr Levy explains to Paul Pennyfeather the unambitious status of the Llanabba School.

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US Edition of New Waugh Biography Issued

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The website of booksellers Barnes & Noble is quick off the mark to issue a review of the US edition of the new biography of Evelyn Waugh by Philip Eade which is published this week. This is by Katherine Powers who writes a regular review column for the B&N site called “The Reading Life.” She is the daughter of American novelist J F Powers, whose early career was boosted by Waugh, starting a regular correspondence that lasted until Waugh’s death. She recently edited a collection of her father’s letters entitled Suitable Accommodations. 

After placing the new biography in the context of those that preceded it, Powers notes that 

Eade spends more time than previous biographers poring over questions of whom Waugh slept with, what he did in that regard with whom, when, and for how long. To this end, he includes a photograph of the nude person and nice bottom of Alastair Graham, Waugh’s “friend of [his] heart” and one of the models for Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited.

Powers is most impressed with Eade’s treatment of Waugh military career which offers a different approach from those of his earlier biographers. After summarizing his book, Powers concludes that Eade

is far less tactful than Waugh’s friend Christopher Sykes’s and necessarily less detailed than Martin Stannard‘s rather plodding 1,000-plus-page, two-volume behemoth. It is not written with the pitch-perfect tone, alertness to irony, and all-around panache of Selina Hastings’s 1994 Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, but that book, like Sykes’s, is out of print. So, this one will have to do. There’s nothing really wrong with it except that, with the exception of Eade’s straightening-out of the Crete affair, there is nothing new. The best parts are, as in every biography of Waugh, the quotations from the letters of the great man himself.

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Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green and Terry Southern

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest issue of the New Yorker, there is an interesting article (“The Novelist of Human Unknowability”) about Henry Green written by London-based literary critic Leo Robson. The article is built around the friendship between Green and US writer Terry Southern and both have connections with Waugh. Waugh and Green (whose real name was Henry Yorke) were friends from Oxford days. Waugh wrote a review of an early Green novel that is mentioned in Robson’s article:

In 1930, Evelyn Waugh had reviewed “Living,” Green’s novel about Birmingham factory life, under the headline “A Neglected Masterpiece.” It was the first of several dozen articles that bemoaned Green’s lack of acceptance and helped bind his name as closely to the epithet “neglected” as Pallas Athena is to “bright-eyed.” Waugh blamed philistine book reviewers, but he knew that Green’s image hadn’t helped. “From motives inscrutable to his friends, the author of Living chooses to publish his work under a pseudonym of peculiar drabness,” he wrote.

Waugh’s review is reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 80. Waugh never reviewed another of Green’s novels (although they remained friends), and in his letters, Waugh turns distinctly colder toward Green’s writing, in which he detected symptoms of madness.

Green’s connection with Terry Southern came about through the latter’s admiration for Green’s writing. Robson describes Southern’s  pursuit of Green as a fan and explains how they met and became friends and collaborators. Southern conducted an interview of Green that was published in the Paris Review. Southern’s connection with Waugh (not mentioned by Robson) was more distant. Waugh had noticed Green’s influence on Southern’s early fiction and commented on this in a 1958 letter to Anthony Powell (Letters, 507). Later, Southern was selected by Tony Richardson as a screenwriter for the film adaptation of Waugh’s novel The Loved One. Waugh was not happy with the results of that collaboration.

As Robson writes in the New Yorker, there have been several attempts to promote Green’s works, beginning with Waugh’s 1930 review. Efforts on his behalf were extended in the 1970s by admirers such as V S Pritchett and John Updike and again in the 1990s with publication of a biography and uncollected works, but he never seemed to take hold as part of the canon, described as a “writer’s writer’s writer.” Another attempt is underway to revive interest in his work. The New York Review of Books has begun to bring his books back into print with the recent republication of Caught, Loving and Back. Robson’s article certainly can’t hurt that effort.

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Anthony Burgess Society to Convene Centenary Conference

Posted on October 9, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Anthony Burgess Society has announced a conference next year to mark the centenary of the novelist and critic to whom their organization is dedicated. The conference will be held on 3-5 July 2017 in Manchester, which was Burgess’s home for many years, and the theme is Anthony Burgess: Life, Work and Reputation. The society has called for papers on this broad topic but has defined it somewhat in its announcement:

The conference aims to investigate Burgess’s relationships with other writers, film-makers, artists, musicians and cultural movements of his time. Among his network of friends and associates were (for example) Kingsley Amis, William Boyd, Christine Brooke-Rose, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Shirley Conran, Umberto Eco, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller, B.S. Johnson, Erica Jong, Olivia Manning, George Orwell, Eric Partridge, Thomas Pynchon, Adrienne Rich, Paul Scott, Muriel Spark, Dylan Thomas, Gore Vidal and Evelyn Waugh. As a cultural critic, his reviews took in most of the prominent writers of his time. Burgess also collaborated with visual artists such as David Hockney, the Quay Brothers, Joe Tilson, Fulvio Testa, David Robinson, Edward Pagram and others. Papers which examine the influence of Burgess on international writers of subsequent generations are also encouraged.

Burgess is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange which was made into a now classic film by Stanley Kubrick. Because the society’s previous conference was focussed on that work, however, papers on it are not encouraged. Any other works by Burgess may be considered as eligible topics. Burgess wrote several essays about Waugh and reviews of his books (including A Little Learning, A Little Order and the Amory edition of his letters). His review of Waugh’s autobiography is reproduced in Evelyn Waugh: The Cultural Heritage. 

UPDATE (9 October 2016): David Lull has kindly provided a link to Anthony Burgess’s review of A Little Learning which originally appeared in Encounter Magazine.

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