Metropolitan Papers Continue to Trail D&F Production

Posted on August 21, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has published more photos from the Welsh location setting of the BBC’s production of Waugh’s novel Decline & Fall. Most of these feature Eva Longoria between takes as Margot Beste-Chetwynde, but there are also several of Jake Whitehall and another unnamed actor in full period kit. In addition there is an assortment of period cars that, according to the story, backed up traffic in central Cardiff where the filming was taking place.

In The Sunday People newspaper, there was further comment about Whitehall’s wardrobe, congratulating the BBC on the actor’s transformation. They describe Whitehall as ”almost unrecognizable”:

The Bad Education star, 28, wore the pinstripe suit and fedora for filmmaking in Cardiff…Jack plays Paul Pennyfeather in the adaptation of Waugh’s novel—a teacher seduced by Eva [Longoria’s] character, Margot, a pupil’s mum.

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Two Waugh Events at Cheltenham Festival

Posted on August 21, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Cheltenham Literature Festival is featuring two Waugh-related events in October. The first is entitled Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead and Beyond and will involve a panel discussion. Here’s a description:

Philip Eade, author of the new biography Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited, Alexander Waugh (Fathers and Sons), writer and grandson of Evelyn Waugh, and James Holland, acclaimed historian and Waugh fan explore Waugh’s life and the enduring popularity of his work with Paula Byrne (Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead).

This event will take place on Wednesday, 12 October at 1130a in The Times Forum at the Montpellier Gardens site.

The second event is entitled Cheltenham Booker: 1945. It also involves a panel who will discuss which novel published in 1945 from the following shortlist should have won the Booker award for that year:

Which 1945 title deserves to win our very own Booker? You decide! Akala, Raffaella Barker, Antonia Byatt, Rachel Johnson and Alexei Sayle discuss George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincote’s, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, chaired by James Walton. They fight it out to determine which would have triumphed, had The Man Booker Prize existed in 1945. Introduction by John Coldstream.

The panel will convene on Saturday, 15 October at 1230p in the Town Hall, Baillie Gifford Stage. Tickets for both events are £10 plus transaction fee and go on sale to the public on 7 September.

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Waugh Connections

Posted on August 19, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Times gossip columnist Patrick Kidd discusses Phiip Eade’s identification of models for Waugh characters in today’s “Diary”:

…Lord Parakeet in Decline and Fall was based on Gavin Henderson, an exceedingly camp noble who, on becoming Lord Faringdon, opened a speech in parliament with “my dears” instead of “my lords”. Then there is Lord Beauchamp, model for Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, who had to flee to France after his homosexual activities were exposed by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster, known as Bendor. 

There is nothing original about these identifications, all of which have been noticed by previous biographers, although Eade may be the first to cite Henderson’s campish address to the House of Lords. Kidd fails to note that the Gavin Henderson character was originally called Kevin Saunderson in the first printing but was changed to Lord Parakeet in subsequent editions for fear of libel actions.

Another Decline and Fall character features in the RIBA architectural website’s story about its exhibition called “At Home in Britain.” One of the exhibits is based on the modernist Isokon flats built in the 1930s in Hampstead:

The Isokon was designed in 1934 by Wells Coates, a Canadian expatriate and early pioneer of Modernism in Britain who provided the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s functionalist architect Otto Silenus in ‘Decline and Fall’. The 34 flats were designed “with special reference to the circumstances of the bachelor or young married professional or businessperson” and offered a minimal urban existence inspired by Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living’.

The exhibition continues through 29 August, at the RIBA Architecture Gallery, 66 Portland Place W1.

A Waugh architectural association (along with that of George Orwell) is used in another newspaper to help shift some new flats in another of Waugh’s North London neighborhoods. This is in the Islington Gazette which refers to Waugh’s and Orwell’s residences in Canonbury Square:

Orwell’s flat at 27b Canonbury Square, moments away from the new properties, in what was then a very down at heel part of London was described by friends as “bleak”. But it is unlikely that the Animal Farm author, who left London for Scotland in 1947, would recognise either the flat, which sold for just under £900,000 in 2014, or the area now.Canonbury is one of the most sought-after parts of Islington with its grand Georgian architecture and pretty city squares a short stroll from Upper Street…

The [new build] houses will be finished with an eye to luxury in a mode more appealing to that other illustrious literary light of Canonbury Square, who lived at number 17 [sic] during the 1920s…Author Evelyn Waugh lived in Canonbury during his disastrous first marriage in the late 1920s.

According to a letter Waugh wrote from the Canonbury Square flat, its address was No. 17a. Orwell’s building is marked by a plaque, Waugh’s is not. 

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Panegyric for Waugh in LMS Journal

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Autumn 2016 issue of the journal of the Latin Mass Society contains the text of the panegyric delivered on 8 July 2016 by Archbishop Thomas Gullickson on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death. See earlier post. The journal is called Mass of Ages and the entire issue is available online. The Waugh article is entitled “Giving His All for the Mass” and appears on p. 6.

The Archbishop recognizes how “Waugh saw clearly and spoke out, putting himself in harm’s way” in his efforts to preserve the Latin Mass. He condoles with Waugh for his “upright and courageous stance” and gives thanks for “the gifts this talented author showered on our world, for so much reading, entertainment and insight into a world which may not always deserve to be mocked but certainly merits a laugh or two more than we may often concede.”

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New Criterion Reprints Article on Waugh’s African Writings

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The New Criterion has reprinted a 2003 article by James Panero about Waugh’s writings on Africa, making the point that Waugh got most things right. This is entitled “Reading Africa in Waugh.” Panero’s family had business in Africa; his grandfather ran a hotel in Somalia from which he was bloodily evicted in the 1970s, barely but thankfully escaping with his life. Panero himself had visited that continent.

The article opens with an excerpt from a letter Waugh wrote to Henry Yorke from Addis Ababa in 1930:

Life here is inconceivable—quite enough to cure anyone of that English feeling that there is something attractive & amusing about disorder. . . . Public castration which is the usual punishment for most infringements of law has been stopped until the departure of the distinguished visitors. I have rarely seen anything so hysterical as the British legation all this last week. . . . I go to very stiff diplomatic parties where I am approached by colonial governors who invariably begin ‘I say Waugh I hope you aren’t going to say anything about that muddle this morning.’

Several quotes from Black Mischief and Scoop make the point that Waugh foresaw the mischief that would befall that area if the colonial powers were driven out. And Waugh also recognized the chaos that would result if  the”tribalism”, held in check by colonial administrators, were let loose. This is from a letter he wrote his wife from Tanganyika in 1959:

I spent one day with the Masai. . . They all carry spears & shields & clubs & live in mud bird-nests and are only waiting for the declaration of independence to massacre their neighbours. They had a lovely time during the Mau Mau rising. They were enlisted & told to bring in all the Kikuyus’ arms & back they proudly came with baskets of severed limbs. 

Panero goes on to describe how the political correctness of today’s politicians. noting especially Jimmy Carter, has contributed to the problem by denying that it exists. Waugh, on the other hand, wrote about Africa with no such reservations, and Panero finds that refreshing.

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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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