Literary Family Rivalries

Posted on August 31, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Booksellers Barnes & Noble have posted a list of rivalries within literary families. The Waugh family makes the list:

Evelyn, Auberon, and Alec Waugh
Evelyn Waugh is one of the most celebrated writers of all time, with books like Brideshead Revisited lodged firmly in the global imagination. Many have forgotten that there was a time when his older brother Alec was the more famous writer; The Loom of Youth made a huge splash in 1917, and Alec continued to publish throughout his life, even as his younger brother overtook him in reputation. When Alec’s novel Island in the Sun became a big hit 40 years after Loom, Evelyn damned it with faint praise, saying it was “rather good if you think of it as being by an American, which he is really” (trust us when we say Evelyn Waugh describing you as “American” was a terrible insult). Evelyn’s son Auberon summed up the family’s opinion of Alec’s literary output with the Britishly savage quip that Alec “wrote many books, each worse than the last.” As with all things British, you kind of have to translate that through a Sick Burn Filter to get a real sense of just how brutal a takedown it was meant to be.

Others on the list include Kingsley and Martin Amis (father/son), Margaret Drabble and A S Byatt (siblings) and Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (husband/wife). Except for Sylvia Plath, they were all British. Comments welcome on what a “Sick Burn Filter” might be?

Share
Posted in Alec Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Discussions, Waugh Family | Tagged , | Comments Off on Literary Family Rivalries

Oxford to Offer Waugh Seminar

Posted on August 31, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford University Department of Continuing Education has announced a one-week seminar next summer on the topic Evelyn Waugh: Beyond Brideshead. The theme is explained in the announcement which was posted yesterday:

Since his death 50 years ago, Evelyn Waugh’s reputation has, for many, come to rest on one book alone – Brideshead Revisited. But there is far more to Waugh’s literary output than Brideshead and there is far more to Waugh than the image of him as a snob, a racist, and an instinctive conservative figure set against the modern world. This course will examine a number of Waugh’s novels and will critically examine the work of one of the most important English novelists of the first half of the 20th century and one of the finest stylists of all time.

The seminar is part of a program called The Oxford Experience which offers

a residential summer programme providing one-week courses in a variety of subjects aimed at non-specialists. It offers a choice of seminars each week over a period of six weeks.

It will be held in the week of 16-22 July 2017 and participants will be fed and housed at Christ Church. It will be lead by Paul Laurence Quinn, Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester. The classes will meet in the morning for five consecutive days and discuss these novels: Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust, The Loved One and Sword of Honour. The books are assigned in the current US editions issued in paperback by Back Bay Books/Little, Brown. The seminar is open to the public and registration begins on 19 September.

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Academia, Black Mischief, Brideshead Revisited, Events, Oxford, Sword of Honour, The Loved One, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Doctoral Dissertation re Intertextuality in Waugh Posted on Internet

Posted on August 30, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A Ph.D. dissertation by Janelle Lynn Ortega entitled “‘I Heard the Same Thing Once Before’: Intertextuality in Selected Works of Evelyn Waugh” has been posted on the internet by the University of New Mexico. According to the abstract:

…This dissertation begins with an explanation of intertextual theory and the words and phrases pivotal to a cohesive understanding of these findings. It then proceeds through the works chronologically. Chapter One explores the use of Dante and Carroll in the novel Vile Bodies by explaining a deterioration of both culture and humanity while providing a remedy that is literature. Then Chapter Two’s discussion of Malory’s text within Handful of Dust rejects the initial critical reaction of associating pessimism and fatalism with the text. Chapter Three’s analysis of ‘Out of Depth’ and Love Among the Ruins uncovers an intertextual analysis concerning Huxley, Shakespeare and earlier works of Waugh himself that purports the importance of reviving literary culture and reclaiming freewill. Chapter Four recognizes that Waugh’s use of T.S. Eliot in Brideshead Revisited begins to confirm the essentiality of literature for the well-being or the individual as well as the world. The dissertation culminates in Chapter Five with The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and its emphasis on the personal application of intertext. Ultimately this dissertation reveals that by way of intertext Evelyn Waugh subtly challenges his readers to improve themselves by looking beyond their own experiences…

The author dedicated her paper jointly to her husband and to the late John Howard Wilson, founder of the Evelyn Waugh Society and former editor of its journal. The complete text of the thesis is available in PDF format and may be downloaded without cost from this link.

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh Society, Love Among The Ruins, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Doctoral Dissertation re Intertextuality in Waugh Posted on Internet

Waugh Novel in Psychology Today Top 100

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One was selected for inclusion in Psychology Today’s list of the top 100 novels everyone should read. The list was compiled by an Eng. Lit. professor at the University of Connecticut who has been assigning novels to her students for nearly 30 years. She explains her selection process in the article accompanying the list:

I decided to take a deep breath and put my reading lists together, limiting my choices by the following factors: 1. I admire this work so much that I’ve taught it in a course, have notes on it and believe that it’s a terrific accomplishment as a work of literature; 2. These works have all (to my knowledge) been written in English and not translated from other languages (otherwise Madame Bovary would be on there, as well as dozens of others); 2. These books are NOT in any particular order except in my own spider-web mind…

Other books on the list from writers of Waugh’s generation include The Great Gatsby, The Death of the Heart, Rebecca and Sons and Lovers. More recently published selections include Small World by David Lodge, the Evelyn Waugh Society’s Honorary President

Share
Posted in Academia, The Loved One | Tagged , | Comments Off on Waugh Novel in Psychology Today Top 100

Leicester Schedules Waugh Events for Literary Festival

Posted on August 28, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Literary Leicester Festival has announced an ambitious schedule of Waugh-related events on Friday, November 18. A panel on textual editing will meet at 3-4pm at which Prof Martin Stannard and Drs Barbara Cooke and Sharon Ouditt will discuss issues relating to the editing of Vile Bodies; at 630-730pm, Philip Eade will discuss his new biography of Waugh; and at 8-9pm, another panel including Alexander Waugh and Alexander Masters will discuss Waugh’s letters, diaries and biographies. In addition, throughout the day the BL will be conducting A-Level study sessions for local students relating to Waugh’s works.   The festival will extend over 4 days between 16-19 November. Entry is free and ticketing details may be seen here.

Share
Posted in Alexander Waugh, Biographies, Diaries, Festivals, Letters, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Leicester Schedules Waugh Events for Literary Festival

Waugh Biography Reviewed in Standpoint Magazine

Posted on August 27, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Philip Eade’s biography of Evelyn Waugh is reviewed by Laura Freeman in Standpoint Magazine together with a recent biography of A E Housman by Peter Parker. Freeman connects the two authors at several points in the review, the first being their residence in Highgate and Hampstead. Housman bemoaned the development of the area for suburban villas at about the same time that the Waugh family were moving into one of those dwellings. She contrasts the two books by noting that the study of Housman deals with his works (effectively the afterlife of A Shropshire Lad) as well as his life whereas that of Waugh mentions the books but little. Her discussion of the Waugh book begins with an interesting summary based on the famous “parties” passage of Vile Bodies:

The books are something secondary to be dashed off between Oxford parties, London parties, flings with lovers both male and female, neo-pagan caravan parties, marriage to his first wife Evelyn (“Shevelyn”), Bright Young Things’ parties, Black Velvet cocktail parties, dinner with Arnold Bennett, lunch with Cyril Connolly, plays at the Savoy Theatre (“I am Evelyn Waugh. Please give me a seat”), Venice parties, marriage to his second wife Laura, and “sticky” tea parties with the vicar. For much of his twenties and thirties Waugh could be found swaying home to Hampstead every morning “in crumpled evening dress among the navvies setting out for their day’s work”.

When he needed to work Waugh sought solitude in the country whereas Housman wandered through Hampstead and Highgate as he composed A Shropshire Lad. Waugh finally moved from London to the country in 1937 when he settled at Piers Court in Gloucestershire. Freeman describes his “Piers Court years” as productive but erroneously includes within them his last four books which he wrote from Combe Florey in Somerset. That oversight certainly cannot be charged to Eade who devotes a whole chapter to the move. Eade also mentions that Waugh moved away from Gloucestershire because of the growing suburban development around Piers Court, a point Freeman could have used to elaborate her principal unifying theme.  

Freeman’s review concludes with another comparison:

Both Housman and Waugh went up to Oxford on scholarships, Housman to St John’s College in 1877, Waugh to Hertford in 1922. Neither fulfilled their early academic promise. “You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything in between,” is Cousin Jasper’s advice to Charles Ryder. Waugh passed with a third; Housman failed finals altogether…Eade’s biography is vastly entertaining — a Perrier-JouĂ«t book, frothy and fun. One has the sense of having had a very jolly time — and having forgotten everyone’s names the morning after.

Share
Posted in Biographies, Books about Evelyn Waugh, Combe Florey, Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Waugh Biography Reviewed in Standpoint Magazine

Rereading Barbara Skelton

Posted on August 27, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In today’s Guardian, literary critic and novelist D J Taylor reviews the life and writings of Barbara Skelton. She was a fixture of interwar literary London Bohemia, having been the wife of, inter alia, both Waugh’s friend Cyril Connolly and, more briefly, his posthumous publisher George Weidenfeld. When not married (or even when she was), she usually arranged to be the mistress of some one who could pay the bills. King Farouk of Egypt was among her patrons. She also managed to have a writing career, with both novels and memoirs to her credit. Taylor begins his article with a review of her first novel A Young Girl’s Touch published in 1955 and recently reissued by Faber Finds. He tracks the plot of the novel against the facts of her lfe as described in her own memoirs as well as those of others and the two stories fit together rather well:

…Skelton was famous, or perhaps only notorious, part of the tiny yet legendary demographic defined by the essayist Peter Quennell (with whom she had pursued a wartime affair) as “lost girls” – “adventurous young women who flitted about London, alighting briefly here and there and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend”. Their ranks included Orwell’s second wife Sonia Brownell, Janetta Parlade (then married to the journalist Robert Kee) and Connolly’s former girlfriend Lys Lubbock, and the associative net flung out to gather them in was usually a connection with Connolly’s 40s literary magazine, Horizon. Skelton herself had first come across Connolly while sharing a flat with Quennell upstairs from the Horizon offices.

Waugh doesn’t cross her path directly in Taylor’s narrative but is quoted gossiping about her in his letters:

Here is Evelyn Waugh, writing to Nancy Mitford early in 1950 with a bumper selection of the latest Grub Street scuttlebutt: “G Orwell is dead, and Mrs Orwell presumably a rich widow. Will Cyril [Connolly] marry her? He is said to be consorting with Miss Skelton” [Letters, 320]…Punctuated by outsize doses of husbandly melancholia and periodic crises in the pets department (“His Animal has been sacked from the zoo” Waugh reported to Nancy Mitford, “and sent home to Oak Cottage in disgrace”) [Letters, 423] the marriage limped on until early 1955, when Connolly became aware of his wife’s infidelity with Weidenfeld – apparently by walking on a whim through the front door of the latter’s house in Chester Square and finding them in flagrante.

She is also immortalized in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time as the man-eating ATS driver Pamela Flitton.

Share
Posted in Letters, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Rereading Barbara Skelton

A Norwegian Review of Waugh’s Career

Posted on August 27, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of Agenda Magasin (a Norwegian language journal) includes an extended esaay on the career of Evelyn Waugh and his literary legacy in Norway. This is by Ivar Dale and is written on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death. Dale begins by noting that Waugh is best-known in Norway because of the Norwegian broadcast of the Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited in 1982. His Sword of Honour trilogy was translated into Norwegian in the early 1990s, but the other two unidentified books that were translated in  the 1940s are available only in antique shops. This is apparently the extent of the availability of Waugh’s works in Norwegian. The articles continues:

Waugh’s very British tone can be difficult to reproduce in other languages, but it can not be the whole explanation for why he is read more often in neighboring countries. The influential Russian magazine Inostrannaja Literatura devoted a whole month’s April number to him, under the heading “50 years without Waugh.”

After a summary of Waugh’s early life and brief discussion of his first two novels, Dale hones in on Waugh’s third novel, Black Mischief, which he notes has been described by some as pure racism. He goes on to view Waugh’s descriptions of foreigners such as the Africans in Black Mischief in the context of his general satirization of other nationalities, most particularly the British upper classes, and cites the conclusions of Selina Hastings and Douglas Patey defending Waugh against charges of racism.

Dale concludes with a brief review of Waugh’s views on Norway and its citizens as reflected in his writings:

If we Norwegians do not fully appreciate Waugh, the feeling is at least mutual. His ridicule is not confined to distant peoples and climes, as in Remote People (1931) or A Tourist in Africa (1960), but applied equally well to Scandinavians. After a trip to Bergen, Tromsø and Svalbard in 1934, he concluded: “I do not like Norwegians at all. The sun never sets, bars never open and the whole country smells of herring.” He did not find major inspiration in our part of the world beyond that confined to a short article, “The First Time I Went North: Fiasco in the Arctic.” [Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 144]

An Oslo visit thirteen years later did not improve matters. Vigeland Park is described as “the most depressing spectacle it is possible to encounter; something far more awful than the ruins of Hiroshima.” The park had “no hint anywhere of any intellectual process or spiritual ambition” and Waugh “wondered what hope there was for the people who had made it.”  Oslo City Hall was still under construction in 1947 and Waugh expected that it would eventually become “the most hideous building in the world, both inside and outside.” [Essays, Articles and Reviews, pp. 337, 339]

The translations are by Google Translate, with some adjustments by your correspondent where they appeared appropriate. Where the original of Waugh’s quotes were readily available, they were substituted for the retranslations. Anyone possessing a knowledge of Norwegian who might be able to offer improvements is invited to do so by submitting a comment. The author of the article Ivar Dale has previously contributed comments on the EWS Twitter feed relating to Waugh’s appearances in Russian media and may be persuaded to comment.

Share
Posted in A Tourist in Africa, Anniversaries, Articles, Black Mischief, Brideshead Revisited, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Remote People, Sword of Honour, Television | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Waugh in Review of Auden’s Collected Works

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest issue of The Weekly Standard, Edward Short reviews the the 6th and final volume of The Complete Works of W H Auden: Prose. This is edited by Edward Mendelson. Waugh is mentioned several times:

One can agree or disagree with the charge brought by Philip Larkin that Auden’s intellectual interests stultified his poetry, but one cannot maintain that the essays in which he pursued those interests are stultifying. They exude zest. There may be much about the writing of Auden’s generation that is meretricious. Evelyn Waugh was unsparing about Stephen Spender—”To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee”—yet Auden wrote a sprightly, elegant, witty prose…

Since Auden only published two essay collections, The Dyer’s Hand (1962) and Forewords and Afterwords (1973), there is much uncollected and unpublished work gathered here, and together with the previously published pieces, they reveal a good deal about the poet’s inner life. In 1964, for instance, in a review of autobiographies by Waugh and Leonard Woolf, he wrote something of an autobiography of his own in which he gave expression not so much to family or personal history as to the exile’s inexorable loneliness. Writing about other artists beguiled his sense of aloneness. The range of Auden’s subjects is staggering: Goethe, Gogol, Hardy, James, Stravinsky, Mozart, Tennyson, Sainte-Beuve, Dickens, Shakespeare, Dante, Kipling, Wagner, Cervantes, Johnson, Beerbohm, Waugh, Wilde, Scott—these and many others make lively appearances here. 

Waugh met Auden for the first time on a visit to the US in 1948. This was at a party given by their mutual friend Ann Fremantle in New York. Waugh wrote to his wife that he was surprised to find that he “rather liked him” (Letters, 290). The quote from Waugh in The Weekly Standard comes from a 1951 review he wrote of Stephen Spender’s memoirs World within World. This is reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 394. 

Share
Posted in Articles, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Letters, Newspapers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Waugh in Review of Auden’s Collected Works

Waugh’s Upper Lip in Poetry Competition

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In this week’s Spectator, Lucy Vickery posts the results of a competition she set for a poem relating to an author’s body part. This was inspired by John Sutherland’s recent book entitled Orwell’s Nose. Several entries are displayed but, with one exception, their creators do not match the winners listed in Vickery’s article. Here’s the one inspired by Waugh’s upper lip which was written by Alanna Blake:

Vile bodies may have spared the Brideshead set —
No defects in their body parts as yet —
But take the upper lip of Evelyn Waugh,
The most expressive lip you ever saw.
Though masterful with words upon the page,
In personal relations he’d engage
Eye contact, twist of lip, while with no speech
Demeaning all who came within his reach.
Occasionally one small nasal twitch
Would underline the cynicism which
Was his default emotive attitude
As he looked down on anyone who stood
Their ground against his egocentric stance.
Few critics waited for a second chance
To undergo his wordless high disdain,
See the raised lip decline and fall again.

Alanna Blake

Other entries included poems on Shakespeare’s skull, Rimbaud’s right flank and Byron’s genitalia. The winning entry by D.A. Prince was about some otherwise unnamed writer’s lung, might it be Keats? The other published entries, including that relating to Waugh, may have been runners up.

Share
Posted in Events, Newspapers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Waugh’s Upper Lip in Poetry Competition