All Converts Together

Posted on August 16, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent issue of the National Catholic Register, a Roman Catholic newspaper, journalist Rick Becker writes of his discovery and enjoyment of Mary Frances Coadey’s 2015 book  Merton and Waugh: A Monk, A Crusty Old Man, and The Seven Storey Mountain. He was particularly taken with how these two converts to  Roman Catholicism ended up supporting each other’s beliefs from their different life perspectives of worldly novelist and Trappist monk. Becker also recounts Waugh’s interaction with Dorothy Day, another convert, and notes how, despite her social activism, which made the conservative Waugh uneasy, he ended up supporting her cause with contributions. This relationship is also a subject of Coadey’s book.

It is Becker’s observation, based in part on Coadey’s book, that converts withdraw from their non-Catholic friends, who provide no religious support, and form relationships in a closer knit, exclusively Roman Catholic environment. Yet, that was certainly not the case with Waugh. As Becker recognizes, Waugh did not become a close friend or long-term correspondent with either Merton or Day. But contrary to Becker’s theory, Waugh’s  regular long-term correspondents, with the exception of Graham Greene, were non-Catholics. These included Nancy Mitford, Ann Fleming, and Diana Cooper. In the most notable case of Waugh’s nudging his friends toward conversion, the result was not a happy one. Penelope Betjeman converted and her husband John remained steadfastly Anglican, took up with a mistress and effectively ended their marriage.

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Waugh Event in Cincinnati

Posted on August 16, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Mercantile Library in Cincinnati is sponsoring a series of lectures and discussions moderated by independent writer and researcher Richard Lauf on the subject of Making Us Laugh: Four Comedic Literary Novels. The series will begin on Tuesday, 30 August at 6pm in the library and the first novel considered will be Waugh’s Scoop:

August 30 Evelyn Waugh – Scoop
Waugh gives us a satire of the major news media of his day, the Fleet Street Press, as they cover a small war somewhere in Africa. The misunderstandings that drive the plot make us ask how much the news reports are likewise a series of misunderstandings. The question remains timely.

Subsequent discussions will follow at two-week intervals and will include Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and John Barth’s The Floating Opera. Bookings can be made through the Library’s webpage at the link above.

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Evelyn Waugh and the Preposterous Parson

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A book describing the career of Rev Basil Bourchier, the first vicar of St Jude-on-the-Hill in Hampstead Garden Suburb, has been written by the current vicar, Alan Walker. Evelyn Waugh’s family were parishioners at the church in his youth, and he was confirmed there in 1916. He described Bourchier in his autobiography A Little Learning as somewhat flamboyantly high church:

I went to church with my parents, who had taken to frequenting Saint Jude’s, Hampstead Garden Suburb, a fine Lutyens edifice then in the charge of a highly flamboyant clergyman named Basil Bourchier . . . Personal devotees flocked to him from all parts of London. His sermons were dramatic, topical, irrational and quite without theological content. . . . Despite all Mr Bourchier’s extravagant display I had some glimpse of higher mysteries.

The book is entitled A Totally Preposterous Parson: Evelyn Waugh and Basil Bourchier and is available from Amazon. The title is a quote from A Little Learning (p. 131):

Mr Bourchier was a totally preposterous parson. When he felt festal, whatever season or occasion marked on the calendar, he dressed up, he paraded about, lights and incense were carried before him. When the mood took him, he improvised his own peculiar ceremonies. Once he presented himself on the chancel steps, vested in a cope and bearing from his own breakfast table a large silver salt cellar. ‘My people,’ he announced, ‘you are the salt of the earth,’ and scattered a spoonful of salt before them…He was anathema to the genuine Anglo-Catholics of Graham Street, Margaret Street, and St Augustine’s, Kilburn.

UPDATE (16 August 2016): This book is not yet available from amazon.com in the US but can be purchased from amazon.co.uk in the UK. The price is £14.99 but may be paid in dollars and shipped to North America.

UPDATE (23 August 2016): We have received more information about the contents of this book since the foregoing was posted:

Bourchier would probably be forgotten today if it were not for a few lines in Evelyn Waugh’s A Little Learning in which he is ridiculed as “a totally preposterous parson”…By the time of A Little Learning (1964) Waugh had been a Roman Catholic for over thirty years and had long since come to think of the Church of England as an essentially ‘bogus’ institution. Bourchier himself had died in 1934 at the age of 53.

Biographers of Waugh invariably repeat the 1964 portrait as if it were an accurate account of Waugh’s youthful opinion of his vicar. Alan Walker (the current vicar of Hampstead Garden Suburb) reconsiders Waugh’s statements in the light of the church’s records and suggests the author actually had a much warmer and more positive opinion of Bourchier – and indeed of the Church of England. He corrects several errors and misunderstandings about Bourchier and his ministry, and goes on to look at the clergyman’s later career and final downfall.

 

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Another Cocktail Attributed to Waugh

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A pub in Kuala Lumpur is offering an exotic cocktail called the Noonday Reviver that is attributed to Evelyn Waugh. The pub is called The Sticky Wicket and has a cricket theme throughout its decor and menu. The cocktail is described as

a reinterpretation of Brideshead Revisited novelist Evelyn Waugh’s Noonday Reviver, comprising Citadelle Reserve gin, Becherovka herbal liqueur, house-made Guinness Demerara reduction & ginger syrup, with lingeringly complex, yeasty dimensions (you might especially like this if you love Marmite) & a tickle of cinnamon near the end.

The article, in a KL food blog, is accompanied by photos of the ingredients as well as the finished product. Here’s a link (scroll down to the second drink in the article).  

A less elaborate version of a drink called “Evelyn Waugh’s Noonday Reviver” was described by Kingsley Amis in his 1972 book On Drink (reprinted in the 2008 collection Everyday Drinking). Amis’s recipe consisted of gin, stout and ginger beer. The attribution to Evelyn Waugh was, according to Amis, based on hearsay, and he admitted that he “cannot vouch for [its] accuracy.” He probably overheard someone’s recollection of a drink Waugh had described in his 1947 booklet Wine in Peace and War. This was to be taken late in the morning and consisted of old ale, gin and ginger beer with a sprig of borage. Whether Waugh called the drink “Noonday Reviver” cannot be determined from sources available on the internet.

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Billy Wilder, Sunset Blvd, and The Loved One

Posted on August 13, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

An article posted on the MyInform.com news blog reviews the history of the classic 1950 Hollywood film Sunset Boulevard, written and directed by Billy Wilder. The author of the article, which appears to be generally well written and researched, is identified only as <denofgeek.us>. The article refers at one point to the influence of Waugh’s novel The Loved One on Wilder’s story and film:

Billy Wilder was one of the ultimate Hollywood insiders and he grew with film. He directed classic films like Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole, The Apartment, The Lost Weekend, Stalag 17, Witness for the Prosecution, Sabrina, and Some Like It Hot. Sunset Boulevard’s cinematographer John Seitz said Wilder “had wanted to do The Loved One, but couldn’t obtain the rights.” British author’s Evelyn Waugh’s satirical 1948 novel was about a failed screenwriter who lives with a silent film star and works in a cemetery. At one point Norma mistakes Joe for a funeral director and asks for her coffin to be white, as well as specially lined with satin. White, pink, or maybe bright flaming red. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who plays herself in the movie, wrote that “Billy Wilder … was crazy about Evelyn Waugh’s book The Loved One, and the studio wanted to buy it.”

The author may have relied in this paragraph on an earlier article by Steve Sailer, journalist and film critic, that explored in more detail the influence of Waugh’s novel on Wilder’s film. See earlier post. As Sailer points out in his article, there are several instances of Wilder’s use of elements of Waugh’s story but they are inverted or twisted in Wilder’s version. The new article quoted above gets one of these wrong. In The Loved One, the failed screenwriter Dennis Barlow who works in a cemetery lives not with a silent film star but with another, older failed screenwriter, Sir Francis Hinsley. Sailer cites a fairly direct allusion in the film when the failed screen writer, Joe Gillis, is mistaken for the employee of a pet cemetery on his arrival at the home of Norma Desmond, the aging  film star. She had earlier called the cemetery to collect her dead pet chimpanzee, and was expecting one of their representatives rather than Gillis.

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Vogue Revisits Brideshead

Posted on August 13, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Hamish Bowles, European editor for the American edition of Vogue, recently revisited Castle Howard and wrote about it in an article appearing in the current issue of the magazine. He describes his early visit as a child with his father and then in the 1980s

…when I was just embarking on my studies at Saint Martin’s School of Art, we were enslaved to the television every Tuesday night to watch Granada Television’s magisterial adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a novel of doomed Bright Young Things and spiritual redemption. The director, Charles Sturridge, who managed to cast many of the greatest actors of the period (Sir Laurence Olivier as Lord Marchmain, Sir John Gielgud as Mr. Edward Ryder, and a young Jeremy Irons as his son, in thrall to Anthony Andrews’s glamorous, spoiled, and irresistible Lord Sebastian Flyte), chose Castle Howard as the setting to represent Brideshead. Ever since, the house and its fabled grounds have been associated in the popular imagination with Waugh’s book. Even Julian Jarrold’s woefully inferior 2008 movie adaptation was (rather unimaginatively) also set there.

Bowles’  latest visit was at the invitation of the present owners.

In his description of the Granada TV film, Bowles mentions Charles Sturridge, one of the directors, as having chosen Castle Howard for the setting. In fact, Sturridge joined the crew as director after filming at Castle Howard had already begun. He replaced the original director Michael Lyndsay-Hogg who jointly decided on the selection of Castle Howard with producer Derek Granger.  Because of a previous commitment, Lyndsay-Hogg was unable to continue as director after a prolonged disruption in production due to a strike. Lyndsay-Hogg left following the filming of the early episodes. The remaining episodes, making up most of the series, were directed by Sturridge, although he was not involved in the selection of Castle Howard as the setting nor was he involved in much of the casting.

 

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Scoop in the News

Posted on August 13, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s 1930s novel Scoop about newspapers and journalists has itself made the news in two journals this week. The Independent, now an online-only newspaper, has compiled a list of  “novels or films whose invented insider culture influenced real life.” Here’s the entry for Scoop in the 10 novels and films that made the list:

After journalists realise they’re not going to bring down a president (see no 5), they still think of themselves as colourful rogues abroad. Nominated by Henry Jeffreys.

No. 5 is All the Presidents’ Men a book by and film about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and their employer the Washington Post, whose journalism did in fact bring down President Richard Nixon in the 1970s. The article is headed by a photo of the first printing dust wrapper of Waugh’s book. Subsequent printings lacked the masthead of The Daily Beast due to threats of libel action for similarity to that of the paper it satirized.

The politically conservative US online newspaper Breitbart News makes a link between present day Daily Beast (another online newspaper) and its fictional namesake. The Beast sent a reporter (Nico Hines) to Rio, along with packs of his fellow journalists, to cover the Olympics. His brief was to cover not the games but the sexual habits of the Olympic athletes. He posed as a homosexual on Grindr to troll for examples:

Like so many in the Fourth Estate, Hines missed the story in front of him (a quadrennial competition of the planet’s best athletes) for a duh, non-story hiding behind well-placed bedroom walls (that gays exist among the ten-thousand-plus Olympians gathered and they engage in online trysts away from home)…Hines’s major deceit came when he convinced himself he acted as a journalist in writing online what normally appears on the bathroom wall. Like William Boot working for that Daily Beast, Nico Hines working for this Daily Beast passed himself off as somebody else.

The Daily Beast’s editors printed Hines’ article but then later deleted it as inconsistent with the the paper’s standards of supporting the LGBT community against discrimination. After criticizing Hines for posing as a homosexual on Grindr to write the story and the Beast for commissioning and then deleting it, Breitbart News cites another Waugh allusion for the conclusion to its article:

The creator of the original Daily Beast ironically received Daily Beast treatment posthumously. Author Paula Byrne, relying on less than convincing but more than thought-provoking evidence, writes that Evelyn Waugh experienced an “acutely homosexual phase” at Oxford in her book Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. She didn’t use Grindr to out the half-century dead Catholic novelist. She instead relied on a picture that some people saw but we can’t, cryptic letters, and evidence from a trio of long-since dead alleged male paramours. Even if she got every fact right, Byrne, like Hines, did something terribly wrong.

“He was wrong about the Battle of Hastings,” the dim-witted Daily Beast owner Lord Copper tells his foreign editor about a star reporter. “It was 1066. I looked it up. I won’t employ a man who isn’t big enough to admit his mistakes.”

Good for The Daily Beast to admit its mistakes. Bad for them to not know the answer, like Lord Copper, to such a basic question.

UPDATE (14 August 2016): There have been several other comments about the journalistic ethics of the Daily Beast’s reporter at the Olympics. These are collected in FastNewsUS.org and include a quote from the Breitbart News story citation to Scoop.

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Waugh Remembered on Fleming Anniversary

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A website devoted to the life and works of Ian Fleming has posted an article commemorating two important events on 12 August. One is the birth on that date in 1952 of Caspar, Fleming’s only son with his wife Ann. Ian died on the same date 12 years later in 1964. Waugh’s correspondence with Ann Fleming is mentioned twice in the article. After Casper’s birth

Ann spent two weeks recovering in the hospital before resuming her role as a society hostess and inveterate letter writer. Her most frequent correspondent was Evelyn Waugh, who was not terribly fond of her son. In the tea room of the Grand Hotel, Folkestone, Waugh approached the three-year-old and made faces of “such unbelievable malignity that the child shrieked with terror and fell to the floor.” Ann gave Waugh, a hard slap, overturning a plate of eclairs, and had her revenge when she drove over a road bumpy enough to make him swallow half his cigar. Waugh remained unrepentant: “I do hope that old Caspar has nightmares about his visit to Folkestone. I shall, for many years.”

After Ian died

Evelyn Waugh condoled Ann with a sad prophecy: “You will lose someone you love every year now for the rest of your life. It is a position you have to accept and prepare for.” Waugh died in 1966, followed by Ann’s father, her brother in 1970, several beloved friends, and finally, in 1975, Caspar. 

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Waugh in the Daily Mail

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh rates two mentions in this week’s issues of the Daily Mail. Gossip columnist Ephraim Hardcastle has this takeaway from Philip Eade’s biography:

Was literary giant Evelyn Waugh, who died in 1966 aged 62, a paedophile? According to a new study, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade, he wrote a letter home in the 1930s, after his first marriage had failed, describing a visit to the red light district of Fez, Morocco, saying: ‘It was very gay and there were little Arab girls of 15 & 16 for ten francs each & a cup of mint tea. So I bought one but I didn’t enjoy her very much because she had skin like sandpaper and a huge stomach.’ He preferred another, Fatima, who was ‘brown in colour and had a gold tooth she is very proud of but, as we can’t talk each other’s language, there is not much to do in between rogering’. The old snob would be banged up today.

Is Hardcastle applying the standards of current British or Moroccan law, I wonder?

The Mail is also still trailing the production company filming the BBC’s series of Decline and Fall in Wales and has published this story with photos. The story (and more especially the photos) concentrate on the activities of actress Eva Longoria who is playing the part of Margot Beste-Chetwynde:

Eva …toured Castle Cardiff during her time off. Decline and Fall, set in the 1920s, also stars comedian Jack Whitehall, Poirot’s David Suchet and This Is England’s Stephen Graham. The Texan [Eva grew up in Corpus Christi] said: ‘So we’ve just been told that sometimes a guy from the castle comes back as a ghost and sits in this dining room,’ she says during a Snapchat video filmed during her visit. ‘I’m freaking out that the place is haunted and that he (the castle’s previous owner) comes back for dinner every night.’ Eva’s probably referring to the second Marquess of Bute, who began the restoration of Cardiff Castle prior to his death in 1848 and who is said to appear walking through the fireplace in the library.

 

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Eade Biography Reviewed in Antipodes

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The new biography of Evelyn Waugh by Philip Eade is reviewed by Mark McGinness in the Sydney Morning Herald. After summarizing Waugh’s life as reflected in Eade’s book McGinness concludes:

Waugh’s work has and will endure. Leicester University and Oxford University Press have embarked upon The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh – 42 volumes – to be published from 2017. Under the general editorship of Alexander Waugh, with a panel of eminent scholars, it will be worth waiting for. In the meantime, while Selina Hastings’ biography from 1994 remains the best, Eade’s sympathetic, well-researched, not in the least analytical but abundantly anecdotal portrait will whet the appetite of any Wavian.

There is also a review in the current issue of the Catholic Herald in which “Michael Duggan goes looking for Evelyn Waugh’s soft side.” That article is behind a paywall.

 

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