Mother’s Day (US) Roundup

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Oldie has posted an article by Mark McGinness to mark the 75th anniversary of the death of Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy on 13 March 1948. In this, he tells the story of her meeting and engagement with Billy Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington and heir of the Duke of Devonshire. This was during the Kennedy family residence in Britain when her father Joe Kennedy was Ambassador. Both families opposed the marriage on religious grounds, and her family returned to the US in 1939. Kathleen arranged to return to England in 1943 with the Red Cross where their marriage plans were concluded. As described by McGinness:

…their wedding, after four long years, was a ten-minute ceremony in redbrick Chelsea Town Hall. While Billy’s parents were present and the Duke of Rutland his best man, Kick only had Joe Junior as a witness. Rose took herself to hospital with a nervous collapse. Evelyn Waugh, one of Kick’s admirers from a wider circle, warned her she would go to hell (using her plight for Julia Flyte falling in love with Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited).

McGinness goes on to describe Billy’s death in action in Belgium a few month’s later and Kick’s acceptance by Billy’s family (which now included Deborah Mitford who had married the new heir).

She chose not to return home but sought the sort of role in British life she might have had; establishing a conservative salon in a townhouse just behind the Houses of Parliament. Evelyn Waugh jested that she was in love with him. As Kennedy scholar, Barbara Leaming, put it in her biography Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (2016), ‘Waugh was partly right. Kick had fallen in love – with the world of Westminster.’

The article concludes with a description of her plans for a second marriage to another English aristocrat (also Protestant and, worse yet, married) but they died in an air crash on the way to meet her father in France to discuss the marriage.

—The Spectator has been running a series of articles describing the attractions to be found in the areas encompassed by London’s various postal codes. The final entry discusses London WC but does not distinguish between WC1 and WC2:

Our journey around London’s postcode areas has reached its final destination: WC. One of Evelyn Waugh’s female friends always insisted on referring to it in full as ‘West Central’, because she said ‘WC’ had ‘indelicate associations’. …

A more familiar story about Waugh and London postcodes might be made out of his alleged attitude to postcode area NW. When Waugh was born in 1903, that single “NW” area covered a huge portion of north London including both West Hampstead/Kilburn where he was born and North End (a part of  Hampstead village) to which the family moved. A revision of the system in 1917 (after the Waughs had moved) resulted in North End being assigned to code NW11, which also included Golders Green (an area populated heavily by Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe). Hampstead village acquired postcode NW3 which several commentators have claimed that Waugh preferred, to avoid possible association with the new emigrants. There is little, if any, actual proof of this bit of snobbery, although it has been suggested that he was known to carry letters up the hill from his house in NW11 to a post box in NW3 to assure the more desirable postmark. On the other hand, his published letters collected from after 1917 correctly display the North End Road NW11 post code in the return address.

—The Spectator’s restaurant critic Tanya Gold recently reviewed a new (to me at least) restaurant in Oxford. This is called the Alice and is located in the Randolph Hotel. Its name is attributed to both the fictional character Alice in Wonderland and her namesake, Alice Liddell, the daughter of a Christ Church don who was a friend of the fictional Alice’s creator. According to Gold:

Oxford…needs whimsy to deceive itself about its reality, which is power, and so its famous novelists wrote fantasy, even Evelyn Waugh, whose journey from Golders Green to Oxford was no less extraordinary than Lucy’s to Narnia and Frodo’s to Mordor, and I can testify to that. The Alice may be a dream world, but it is also a brasserie: that is Oxford’s realism. Its immediate competitor is not Narnia or Middle-earth (and I mourn this – I would like to see the Alice near the Cair Paravel Starbucks and the Brandywine Pret) but the Ivy on the High.

An assessment of the menu and service concludes the article.

–The Antiques Trade Gazette has a  report on the prices paid for various of Waugh’s books at a recent auction:

Bearing the cataloguer’s cautious observation that it is ‘Waugh’s masterpiece, arguably’, a copy of A Handful of Dust was one of a number of the writer’s works featured in a March 22 sale held by Toovey’s (24.5% buyer’s premium). Guided at £3000-5000, the 1934 first edition sold for £5500 in the Washington, West Sussex, saleroom.

A 1945 first of Brideshead Revisited made a top-estimate £1200 but the other Waugh lots also included one of his earlier works, Mr Loveday’s Little Outing, and Other Sad Stories of 1936. With ‘flexiback’ reinforcement to the hinges, as issued, it showed some staining and fading to the covers but retained a price-clipped dust-jacket and sold at £650 to an online buyer.

—The Globe and Mail (Toronto) has an article by Christine Sismondo on the conversion of English and Irish country houses into luxury hotels as one means of their survival and preservation. Here is an excerpt with a contribution from Evelyn Waugh:

…there are still several hundred four and five-star luxury country house hotels to choose from in the United Kingdom and Ireland. If you include pretenders, like converted hunting and fishing lodges, remote railway hotels and modern homages to stately homes, such as the Jacobean-inspired Fairmont Windsor Park outside of London, the options are endless. Windsor Park, a five-star hotel with over-the-top fitness amenities, first-rate dining and ample space for big celebrations, is almost entirely new, constructed on the site of Heath Lodge, a private home near Windsor Castle. Its construction would have been quite jarring for anyone living through the “crisis of the country house,” circa 1890 to 1950, when so many of the originals had fallen into disrepair and were slated for demolition. In 1944, when Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited, a nostalgic love letter to “buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation,” he was convinced such estates would soon be extinct. “In the year 1955, country houses in England were being demolished one per week,” Adrian Tinniswood, British historian and author of Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II ,  says.  Around that time, though, some house-poor owners did the previously unthinkable and threw their doors open to day-trippers who paid a half-crown for an afternoon escape and country house tourism was born.

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Pinfold Article Available

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The previously mentioned article on Waugh’s novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Dr Barbara Cooke has now been published and posted on the internet. See previous post and abstract. It is now available to download at this link. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction (footnotes omitted):

In 1957, Evelyn Waugh published The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: a conversation piece. The text was presented and marketed as a novel less for accuracy than for convenience, and it subtitle implies adjacency to, as opposed to full identification with, that stable literary category. It is fiction, but it is also highly autobiographical. Its protagonist shares many of his author’s personality traits – he too is a fifty-year-old writer – and its action is based very closely on a personal breakdown Waugh endured in early 1954. This breakdown occurred when Waugh embarked on the M.V. Staffordshire, alone, to sail to Sri Lanka. He was suffering from bromide poisoning which led him to experience auditory hallucinations during the trip. In Pinfold these distressing circumstances are related in a tone of humorous detachment that led to patchy critical classification, with varying levels of approval, as a comedy. It is clear from Waugh’s personal writings, and his recently discovered engagement diaries, that King Lear was on his mind both during his psychotic episode of 1954 and throughout the drafting process of the text that episode inspired. Pinfold was composed in two bursts of creativity in 1956, during which time Waugh was constantly re-reading Lear, and the play’s presence resonates throughout the text to such an extent that the second work may be studied as a form of postmodern, disordered adaptation of the first…

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Coronation Roundup

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–This week’s most widely reported event has to be the Coronation. A Spanish paper (CrĂłnica Global) has made a story out of a widely-circulated cheer sent up at a recent football match by Glasgow Celtic fans. (My recollection is that it was “sung” to the tune of  “She’ll be coming round the mountain”):

“ You can shove your coronation up your ass ” sang the Celtic fans, in the stadium, at the beginning of a football match, undoubtedly very important for them. This is how they expressed their contempt –or something worse- for King Charles III, who was crowned this Saturday.

The story, by Ignacio Vidal-Folch, continues with a a discussion of his admiration for Waugh’s work, most of which he seems to have read in Spanish translations. There is also reference to Waugh’s short career as an international correspondent. This involves the use of the telegraphese language adopted by correspondents for cable traffic. After a background description of the story of the telegraphic exchanges in Scoop, the article meanders back to the Celtics fans and their Coronation cheer in its concluding paragraphs:

Days and weeks passed, battles and carnage followed, and bloody slacker Waugh never sent a story to the Daily Mail, while the other special correspondents telegraphed daily long and detailed articles on atrocities and massacres with which their respective newspapers filled their front pages. Finally his director, Smith, sent Waugh the following telegrams (laconic, because they were paid by the word):

— WHY NOT NEWS SMITH

Waugh incredibly responded:

— NO NEWS, GOOD NEWS WAUGH

The director, who was also not lacking in British humour, replied:

— NO NEWS, NO JOB SMITH 

Waugh could not get away with threats and closed the discussion with one last, cheap telegram:

—JOB STICK UP ARSEWISE WAUGH

The most admirable thing about this mythical (perhaps legendary) exchange is the tremendous conciseness of the messages without leaving room for confusion due to being so brief … Celtic fans are clearly unfamiliar with their classics, as they chanted “You can shove your coronation up your arse”, instead of taking advantage of Waugh’s ingenious innovation and resorting to “arsewise”.

There is no source given for Waugh’s telegraphic exchange but it does sound somehow familiar and is certainly similar (up to a point) to the exchanges contained in the text of Scoop. The quoted phrases from the cables appeared in English in the original Spanish version of the story, followed by Spanish translations. Where they are quoted from is not revealed. The most likely source would be Waugh in Abyssinia (pp. 158-61) but I couldn’t find them there. I think they are most properly attributed to the public domain. See previous post. The text was translated by Google.

–The obituary in The Times for Conservative MP and journalist John Cockcraft (1934-2023), who died last month at the age of 88, includes this anecdote about an encounter with Evelyn Waugh early in Cockcraft’s career:

…Having eschewed the civil service and embarked on a career in journalism, Cockcroft found himself on a winter cruise in 1961 during which he was befriended by Evelyn Waugh, and they had champagne dinners each night. He enjoyed Waugh’s gossip but found him “a terrible snob”. On the final night Waugh asked what his parents did. When Cockcroft replied that on both sides they were involved in the cotton trade the author said “how frightful”. Cockcroft rejoined: “But I went to Oundle and you only went to Lancing.”

That would probably have been the cruise Waugh took with his daughter Margaret to the Caribbean and Guyana in November 1961. He later wrote about it in the the Daily Mail: “Here They Are, the English Lotus-Eaters”, 20 March 1962, and Sunday Times: “Eldorado Revisited”, 12 August 1962 (EAR, pp. 583, 592).

–A British band touring the United States (mentioned in several previous posts) was recently queried about its connections to Evelyn Waugh. Here’s the introduction from an interview in BOMB Magazine:

The London-based band Flyte started in their school days when eleven-year-old Will Taylor (vocals, guitar) and Jon Supran (drums, vocals) made music together; they were joined later by Nick Hill (guitar, bass, vocals). The trio has become renowned for their infectious melodies, all-male harmonies reminiscent of The Byrds and The Beatles, and their literary edge––the band’s name is taken from Sebastien Flyte of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Their debut album, The Loved Ones, released in 2017, was named Best British Debut of the Year by The Sunday Times, noted for its classicist storytelling.

The Waugh theme was elaborated in a later interview in the website JustFocus.fr:

Q. Is your band’s name the same as Sebastian Flyte, a fictional character created by Evelyn Waugh in his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited? Why this choice?

A. There was something about this book that really stuck with me deeply when I first read it in my late teens. I felt such an affinity with the narrator Charles Ryder, a character from a lower class. Looking into a world that did not belong to him, the upper class. In England, class permeates everything, even now. You can’t see it, but it’s there. My father taught in a school for very privileged people and I and my brothers grew up around this environment while going to state school on the road and living half the time with our mother on the rougher side of town. It has instilled a kind of cultural duality in the way we see the world. When he came to name the band, the book had been such an influence on me that it seemed right to use the name Flyte, the embodiment of a world I would never enter. A doomed world that I could never understand.

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Piers Court Update in Daily Mail

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has posted an update on the recent auction sale of Piers Court, Waugh’s former residence near Dursley. The article by James Fielding is entitled: “Defiant Evelyn Waugh superfans are STILL living in the literary giant’s ÂŁ3M Cotswold home… four months after it was sold.” Basically, according to the Mail, there is little to report:

A couple of defiant Evelyn Waugh superfans who are living in the literary giant’s ÂŁ3million former home in the Cotswolds for a peppercorn rent are refusing to leave the mansion four months after it was sold. Helen Lawton, 62, and her partner Lebanese financier Bechara Madi, 60, pay just ÂŁ250 a year to live in the Grade II listed Georgian manor as part of a complicated arrangement with the trust that owned it – but are now digging in their heels and refusing to leave. The pair don’t answer the door to callers in case it’s bailiffs coming to evict them. Neighbours say they never see Ms Lawton, who is described as a larger-than-life ‘Hyacinth Bucket’ character.

MailOnline couldn’t get a reply when we called at the imposing eight-bedroom Piers Court in the Cotswolds village of Stinchcombe. But voices could be heard from inside, the central heating and TV were on and the couple’s pet bulldog could be seen at a downstairs window. Mr Madi later told us: ‘We are still residing at Piers Court. We are in the middle of a legal battle and are unable to make any comments as this could prejudice our position.’

After recounting in some detail the story of the auction sale as reported late last year and described in numerous previous posts, the Mail’s article concludes:

The new owner bought the mansion without seeing it – Mr Madi and Ms Lawton refused to show prospective buyers around or have the extravagant rooms and grounds photographed for the auction brochure. It’s not the first time the couple have been involved in a property dispute. They took landlords of their ÂŁ5m apartment in London’s Cadogan Square – the most expensive residential street in the UK – to a property tribunal in 2015. Now they are in another legal battle which may go to the High Court if a solution can’t be found. Meanwhile outside contractors are keeping the lawns cut and hedges trimmed while the occupants are continuing to answer their door.

The Mail’s online edition has several lavish illustrations, some not included in previous articles. One near the end of the article shows Waugh’s wife Laura as a bride, posing prior to their wedding in April 1937. She is standing next to a formal-suited young man, described erroneously in the caption as Evelyn Waugh. This individual (apparently a teenager) is too young to be Waugh and doesn’t look at all like him. It it is probably Laura’s brother, Auberon Herbert, who was a reluctant member of the wedding party and opposed their marriage wholeheartedly. He was 16 at the time and was responsible for giving away the bride, which would explain his formal dress.  The caption, also erroneous, states: “Waugh used the money from his wife’s father to purchase Piers Court.” The money came from Laura’s maternal grand mother, Lady de Vesci, not her father, who had died in 1923 (Stannard I, 449).

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Bank Holiday Roundup

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—Country Life has posted the second part of their interesting and informative essay on the building and decoration of Campion Hall at Oxford. The first installment was described in an earlier post. Here’s an excerpt relating to Waugh’s contribution to the project:

…another chapel is reached through an arch at the east end of the main chapel: the Lady Chapel. Suddenly, the visitor is transported into a world of spring flowers and tender, homely observation, for the walls have been almost entirely covered in murals by Charles Mahoney. They were commissioned in 1941, using royalties from Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr, written as a thank-offering to D’Arcy, who had been responsible for his conversion. The royalties amounted to ÂŁ600 and Mahoney’s estimate for the work was ÂŁ560.

The original idea had been to commission Stanley Spencer, who had completed his paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in 1932. Declaring that ‘in my painting I owe nothing to God and everything to the Devil’, Spencer proved too much for the fathers and it was clear he would not be prepared to live at Campion Hall for the duration of the project. The Catalonian painter Josep Maria Sert told Lutyens that he would paint the apse if Lutyens gave him the job of artist at Liverpool Cathedral; Lutyens could not promise to, so the deal was off. Happening to meet Sir John Rothenstein, director of Tate Gallery, D’Arcy asked his advice. He recommended Mahoney and described his work, remarkable for its minute observation of Nature. D’Arcy responded: ‘Done.’…

As did Spencer, Mahoney suffused the life he observed around him with the radiance of the Divine. His gentle style, delicate colours and delight in flowers were particularly suited to the Lady Chapel, the theme of which is the life of the Virgin Mary. Shepherds were modelled from the locals around Ambleside in the Lake District, to which the Royal College had been evacuated during the war …

Mahoney was not a Catholic, perhaps not even a Christian, so much as an ‘agnostic socialist,’ according to D’Arcy. But on dull days — he would only paint in natural light, which limited his productivity to the summer months — he would go on walks with people in the hall and quiz them about Biblical story-telling conventions. Was Joseph an old man? Were angels necessarily male? Would the shepherds have brought a lamb?

Sadly, when Mahoney presented his bill in 1953, the then bursar Father Corbishley found the £4,000 he was asking ‘a very unpleasant and distressing surprise’. Relations were broken off. By the time they were restored in the 1960s, Mahoney’s breathing trouble made work difficult and a few scenes were only sketched in black and white.

The article as posted on the internet includes several photographs of the Lady Chapel decorations and is well worth a look. Here’s the link.

–The Washington Post carries a long article by Michael Dirda on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio. This consists of his review of several books written in connection with the observance. Here’s an excerpt from the one relating to the book by Elizabeth Winkler entitled Shakespeare Was A Woman And Other Heresies:

Alexander Waugh, an ardent Oxfordian, is represented as a learned provocateur in the tradition of his novelist grandfather Evelyn and journalist father, Auberon. Still, Winkler ends her lively, often highly personal book on a somewhat muted note: Pressed again and again, the often controversial Harvard scholar Marjorie Garber dismisses the whole authorship business as uninteresting.

–The religion and philosophy journal First Things has posted some reading recommendations by its editors. Here’s an excerpt from one by Claire Giuntini:

…If you like Evelyn Waugh’s occasionally dark, oftentimes satirical humor, you won’t be disappointed with the Sword of Honour series. There are many who could write—and have written, in these very pages—extensively and eruditely about the merits of this trilogy.

What does this series have to offer? It has Guy Crouchback. There is nothing very exceptional about Guy. His family is unique in that it has always remained Catholic, and that there is a “Castello Crouchback” in Italy, but on the whole, the Crouchback family is fading. In the first book, Guy struggles to become a soldier (a long process, as he’s a touch too old to be wanted anywhere), and the following two books record his different (mis)adventures. In almost every way, he’s very average. You could say that he’s just a normal guy. Yet, this non-ostentatious nature makes Guy and his series stand out all the more. The choices Guy makes are directly relatable to our own lives. In other classics, the dramatic actions of the characters act as megaphones for what to do or what not to do—it’s not hard to miss the memo. With the Sword of Honour trilogy, though, you have to quiet down to hear what’s being said. And we could all do with a little quiet—and not just those of us in Manhattan.

—Edge Media Network has posted a review of a novel by Jonathan Leaf entitled City of Angles. The review is by Steve Weinstein. Here’s an excerpt:

As the title implies, “City of Angles” casts a cynical eye on the people who churn out what we generously call entertainment. The vague, noirish sense of menace that underlies the city’s relentlessly sunny sky, epic consumption, and self-absorption has been catnip for authors for decades, from Nathaniel West and Raymond Chandler to Bruce Webber and Bret Easton Ellis. But “City of Angles” most closely resembles the two funniest, and most bitter, Hollywood novels, Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays” and Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One.” That’s high praise.

—The Spectator reviews a debut novel by Alice Winn. This is entitled In Memoriam and takes place in WWI where

…two young men who fall in love at their public school (old money, military and aristocratic connections, tailcoats and buggery), before heading off to the front; the flower of their generation, doomed to die as the mechanistic future tears apart chivalric ideals, and society starts to question its very nature.

After a discussion in which several other books with similar themes and characters are considered, reviewer Philip Womack concludes with this:

…There is an undeniable tension at the heart of the book: Winn decries the public-school system, seeing it as fostering an empty-headed patriotism, forcing boys to cover up their true feelings. She even (anachronistically) trots out Evelyn Waugh’s remark that boarding school is good preparation for prison. (Mine certainly wasn’t — my father used to joke about it being more like a country club.) … This is a remarkable debut, with a keen and wise understanding of human nature. If Winn’s material is familiar, she handles it with skill and panache. …

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Academic Article on Waugh’s Book Collection

Posted on April 27, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The University of Southern California has posted an illustrated copy of Naomi Milthorpe’s 2016 article “A Secret House: Evelyn Waugh’s Book Collection”. Naomi teaches at the University of Tasmania and is a longtime member of the Evelyn Waugh Society. This article first appeared in the journal The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 published by USC. See previous post. Here’s the abstract:

This article examines Evelyn Waugh’s private library, reading his habits of book collection as a particular mode of late modernist practice. In private and public writing particularly during the Second World War, Waugh the book collector is simultaneously consumer, producer, and cultural combatant. Indeed, Waugh’s collection practices parallel his satiric practices: both satire and collection are guided by the impulse to discriminate, connoting both the pejorative and elitist senses of exclusion, but also selection, deliberation, and distinction. Waugh’s careful assemblage of a library at odds with mainstream literary culture proffers a striking case study of the contested cultural landscape of England in the space between, and after, the two world wars.

The full article is freely available at this link without registration. The text and illustrations are very handsomely presented on the internet. I couldn’t say when it was posted, but if you haven’t read it previously, it is well worth a look.

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Twofer: Waugh and the Country House

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–An essay in current issue of The Critic is devoted to the threatened demise and later salvation of the English Country House. This is by Lara Brown and is entitled “Waugh saves the English country house.” She begins by explaining how Waugh foresaw the destruction of the country house and its occupants which he described in his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. When it came time for a reprint and revision in 1959, he explained how he had got it wrong and the country houses and their owners had survived and prospered. The essay brings matters up to date and concludes with this:

…Far from failing to predict “the cult of the English country house”, Waugh created it, ushering in — perhaps in spite of himself — a new age of democratisation for enjoyment far beyond the nobility. It was the work of novelists like Waugh which revived the country house and made it clear that these sites were of “historic interest”. The history of Brideshead has always been aligned with this process of democratisation. Castle Howard, the setting for the ITV adaptation of the novel, was one of the first houses opened up to the public after the war. Its current owner, Nick Howard, credits Waugh with preserving the site so synonymous with the novel.

We should take pride in the English country house. It is a wonderful, distinctly English institution. It has always been the job of writers to preserve our cultural inheritance. I was heartened to see Castle Howard, the real-life Brideshead, included in Netflix’s Bridgerton. Daphne’s reaction upon seeing her new husband’s home wonderfully mirrored Charles’ when Sebastian first drives him there from Oxford. As the National Trust is losing visitors, it may seem that we are losing this pride, however. Visitors to our country estates are accosted by slavery reports, apologies for colonialism and criticisms of our history. It is not in these circumstances that English heritage will flourish.

— Prospect Magazine has reposted the 2016 review of a relatively recent contribution to the country house novel genre, although in this case it’s more of a novella. This is by veteran novelist Graham Swift and is entitled Mothering Sunday. The review is by Frances Wilson and begins appropriately enough with a consideration of previous examples of novels featuring country house themes:

…When Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945, it had been impossible, wrote Evelyn Waugh, to predict “the present cult of the English country house.” Every writer worth their salt now counts a country house novel among their oeuvre: Sarah Waters has The Little Stranger, Toby Litt has Finding Myself. Ned Beauman’s debut, Boxer, Beetle (2010) pays tribute, he says, to “the three finest country house novels ever written: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” The country house novel is always paying tribute to the literary past, just as the historical past is usually the setting of the country house novel…

Swift’s recent contribution sounds like a Downstairs, Upstairs situation:

…In Mothering Sunday, Swift’s new novel and his own foray into the genre, there is a great deal of crossing between zones—domestic, generic, sexual and psychological. In brief and lacerating prose, Swift strips the genre bare: the exterior of Upleigh, his novel’s country house, remains undescribed, while the interior is for the most part uninhabited. Except that is in the book’s central scene, when a post-coital maid wanders through the rooms wearing nothing but a Dutch cap. The novel is set on 30th March 1924—Mothering Sunday—when the nation’s mothers are still grieving for the sons they have lost in the Great War. The tone is elegiac, but the lament is less for the certainties of social hierarchy than the innocence of pre-lapsarian bliss. Jane Fairchild, a servant, is having an affair with Paul Sheringham, a master…

The review concludes:

…Rarely does fiction invite such intense identification, such mental hazarding. Swift strips his reader bare. Our tension is born of familiarity: we too have done this… Poking around in other people’s houses is our national obsession. We do it when we flick through Hello! or World of Interiors, when we watch Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey. This is what we are doing when we read country house novels, which describe and, more importantly, re-enact the thrill of being in a room belonging to someone of a finer class.

Swift’s novel was published in 2016 and is available at this link. A film adaptation with a largely British cast was released last year and can currently be seen on streaming services.

 

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Roundup: Mostly Books and a Makeover in North Wales

Posted on April 23, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Spectator reviews a book by journalist and author Simon Winchester entitled Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic. Reviewer Dennis Duncan mentions that there is a discussion of Waugh’s Scoop in the book:

…Each of its six chapters is divided into a dozen or so numbered sections which read like standalone pieces. Winchester is clearly at his most comfortable when he’s telling a story rather than building an argument. Here are half a dozen pages on the Encyclopaedia Britannica; a paean to the London Library; the plot of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop; a reminiscence about how Winchester got into Oxford


The book’s index is posted on the internet and indicates a two-page discussion of Scoop. There is also this reference in the book’s Glossary section:

Waugh, Evelyn: The wildly comic author of such novels as Scoop and Decline and Fall. Waugh, due to his social and political views, has been rather cast out of fashion today, though the elegance of his imagination may yet allow him an enduring following.

The book’s publication is scheduled for later this week in both the US and UK.

–A book about Franco’s Spain is reviewed in the website jacobin.com. This is by Paul Preston and is entitled Architects of Terror: Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain. The review by Gustav Jönssen opens with this:

Every so often I’ll look up what certain twentieth-century intellectuals said of Francisco Franco. I’m always struck by how many of them were fooled by him: they swooned, like innocent debutantes, when the blue-shirted Falange marched past. To my mind, this “Franco test” is for the political right what the Stalinist show trials were for the Left — it is hard to really admire those who failed it…

After noting that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of them, he writes this:

Evelyn Waugh came out firmly in favor of the nationalist side: had he been Spanish, he said, he’d be fighting for General Franco. Taking a retrospective view, William F. Buckley said that Franco had stayed on too long, but he celebrated his skill in keeping Spain outside World War II. Buckley called him “an authentic national hero” who had saved “the Spanish soul” from a grotesque regime of “visionaries, ideologues, Marxists, and nihilists.” Such statements can still be heard on the religious right, though now usually muttered rather than exclaimed…

The book was published in February in the UK (link here) and is scheduled for US release in August (link above).

–The website Literary Potpourri has a regular weekly feature called “Shelf Control.” In this readers are asked to look at their “TBR” (To Be Read) piles and choose one to describe for the website. A recent posting (#224) was devoted to The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. After a brief description of Waugh’s career, it concludes:

… The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is described as ‘one of his most remarkable and self-revealing books’ based on an experience he himself had when in poor health. Gilbert Pinfold is a successful middle-aged novelist with ‘bad nerves’ who is travelling to Ceylon. Almost as soon as the journey starts, he begins to hear all sorts of sounds emanating from the roof of his cabin–jazz bands, barking dogs, revival meetings. He thinks a public address system is allowing him to hear all that’s going on aboard the ship, but then suddenly the sounds change–they become voices, and ones that are talking about him!

This sounds a fun novel in which Waugh seems to be (and I confirmed this from a friend’s review) poking fun at himself. Though Waugh did ‘do’ humour and satire, this still sounds very different from his usual line of writings, especially in the personal element coming through strongly. So this is one that is definitely staying on my TBR and one I would very much like to read.

There follow several comments from readers who are now considering whether to read the book. Whether the author of the notice will ultimately post an assessment is not explained.

–The book entitled Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited by Mary Eberstadt is reviewed in the National Catholic Register. This considers the impact of the “sexual revolution” following the introduction of birth control pills has had on various institutions. Waugh finds his way into the review’s conclusion (as well as the book’s title):

So is the sexual revolution an inevitable and irreversible process in history?  To this question, Eberstadt responds with an emphatic, “No.” Noting that ever since the 1960s, liberationists have anchored their successes to the supposed “inevitability of history,” she suggests that the sociopolitical changes spawned by the sexual revolution “could be subject like any other social phenomenon to scrutiny and revision.”

In fact, Eberstadt writes, “The revolution’s toxic legacy itself amounts to tacit vindication of [the Church’s] long-standing teaching concerning sex and marriage — whether or not that vindication is widely understood.”

In her epilogue titled, “What Are Believers to Do? The Cross Amid the Chaos,” Eberstadt quotes Evelyn Waugh, who, in a 1930 newspaper interview, revealed why he had converted to Catholicism. He said, “In the present phase of European history, the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on the one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos.” Eberstadt sees the same choice before us in America today.

The book is available in the US at the link above and in the UK at this link.

–The Daily Mail has a story about a couple who invested ÂŁ320,000 and 7 years of their time on a rundown building in North Wales  and turned it into two semi-detached properties selling for over ÂŁ1 million. The properties were formerly a dorm at Arnold House, the school where Waugh was a teacher in the 1920s and which he used as a setting for his first novel Decline and Fall. The Mail’s story explains Waugh’s connection in some detail:

…Waugh was a teacher at the school after studying at Oxford, but it wasn’t a happy time for the struggling young writer. While at Arnold House, he sent a few chapters of another manuscript, The Temple at Thatch to his friend Harold Acton, who thought little of it, and the disappointment, combined with missing out on another job, sent Waugh down to the beach, determined to drown himself. But on being stung by a jellyfish, he changed his mind and headed back to shore.

‘Decline and Fall’, was based on the boarding school (fictionalised as Llannaba) and others where he worked. It was televised a few years ago, starring Jack Whitehall and Eva Longoria, though the drama was filmed elsewhere in Wales. Waugh was paid ÂŁ160-a-year teaching history, Latin and Greek to the boys. He wrote in his diary: ‘Apparently, the school is so far away from any sort of place of entertainment that it is quite impossible to spend any money at all there.’ He would take a break from the gloomy environs of Arnold House in the Fair View Inn nearby, known as ‘Mrs Roberts’ pub’ in Decline and Fall. On March 16, 1925, said recorded in his diary that he went to the Fair View where a eunuch taught him a toast in Welsh. He wrote it down on an envelope which he later lost.

Waugh later recalled in an interview: ‘It was pretty terrible in that school from a teacher’s point of view. It was in a private school near Llandudno. We used to take the boys on picnics to Snowdon and Cadair Idris.’…

 

 

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Mary Quant: R I P (1930-2023)

Posted on April 22, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spanish language fashion magazine S Moda has published a retrospective article on the life and career of fashion designer Mary Quant on the occasion of her recent death. It contains a reference to the relationship of her husband Alexander Plunket-Greene to the family of that name to which Evelyn Waugh was closely connected. This was through his friendship with Olivia Plunket-Greene, her brothers, Richard and David, and their mother Gwen. Richard was Alexander’s father. Here’s the relevant excerpt translated by Google:

…The daughter of school teachers, descendants of Welsh miners relocated to the outskirts of the capital in search of a better life, Barbara Mary Quant herself exemplified the jovial uproar of the moment. At art school she met her future partner and husband, Alexander Plunket Greene, who had an impressive pedigree: grandson of legendary Irish baritone Henry Plunket Greene and his wife British aristocrat Gwendoline Maud Parry, son of motorcycle racer, jazz musician and writer Richard Plunket Greene, a jewel of the bohemian Bright Young Things whose adventures filled the pages of the London tabloids in the twenties (the writer Evelyn Waugh was close to the family and was inspired by Richard and his siblings, David and Olivia, to create characters in Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited). Still engaged, they arrived in Chelsea, which in 1955, was at the dawn of the youthquake. This was no longer just any neighborhood, but was abuzz with musicians, artists, filmmakers and society puppies becoming beatniks in cafes (espresso-bars) and clothing stores. In November they opened a restaurant, Alexander’s, and a boutique, Bazaar, in the building that Plunket Greene and his friend Archie McNair, a lawyer-turned-photographer, had bought on King’s Road. The bistro was a flop; the store, a success that would inevitably change the business model and what we now call the shopping experience…

It is doubtful that Waugh ever met either Mary or Alexander. Since Waugh died in 1966, he would have missed the period in which their careers were at their peak. Waugh last mentions in his published correspondence and diaries any meeting with members of the family in 1948. This was in connection with a visit he made to the cottage in which Olivia and her mother Gwen were living a rather ramshackle existence on the Longleat Estate. In his autobiography, Waugh gives a fairly detailed account of his relations with the Plunket- Greenes, noting that for “ten years…I was practically a member of the family.” (A Little Learning, CWEW, v. 19, pp. 180-185).

UPDATE (23 April 2023): Quote from ALL added.

 

 

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Tax-Day Roundup

Posted on April 16, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—Country Life magazine has posted a 2-part essay on the history of Edwin Lutyens design and the building of Campion Hall at Oxford. Waugh was involved in the process. Here’s an excerpt from part 1:

…Waugh celebrated the Hospitality of Campion Hall in a manuscript reminiscence kept in the hall’s archive. ‘We came from all quarters as guests of the house; fellows and undergraduates, gowned, from the neighbouring colleges, refugees from foreign tyranny, editors of Catholic papers from London, under-Secretaries of State visiting the Chatham or the Canning, the President of the Royal Academy, the Spanish Ambassador, and men marked by no notoriety but distinguished by the high privilege of the Master’s friendship. You never knew whom you would meet at Campion Hall but one thing was certain, that for a single evening at any rate they would all fit harmoniously into the social structure which the Master, without apparent effort, ingeniously contrived.

Today, the hall may feel pleasantly and appropriately severe, but that is not the impact it had on Waugh in the 1930s. Accommodation across Oxford was spartan, so Waugh felt ‘it was remarkable that the only religious house in the university should appear less monastic than the secular colleges
 the carpeted entrance-hall, the broad staircase, the profusion of ornate furniture, the bed-rooms with their tasteful choice of bed-side books, the prodigality and accessibility of hot-water, all had the air of a private house rather than of a college’. …

–The Thomistic Institute at Georgetown University in Washington, DC has announced a lecture by Prof. Patrick Callahan of the Newman Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture titled “The Influence of Virgil and St. Augustine on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” Here are the details:

Thursday, April 27

6:00 PM

WAL 491

This lecture is free and open to the public.

About the Speaker:

Patrick Callahan is director of the Newman Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as well as Assistant Professor of English & Humanities at St. Gregory the Great Seminary. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Dallas and his graduate work at Fordham University in Classical Philology. While his doctoral work focused on ancient Greek commentaries to the lyric poet Pindar, his recent work focuses on early Jesuit Latin texts.

–The German language newspaper Welt has a story about how Waugh got his novel Brideshead Revisited written, proofed and published during one of the most active periods of WWII. Here is an excerpt translated by Google:

…On June 6th – at breakfast the waiter had greeted him with the news of D-Day – he wrote the last chapter in no time at all, on the 20th he mailed the manuscript and returned via Gibraltar, Algiers, Catania, Naples and Bari back to war: together with Randolph Churchill, son of the prime minister , Waugh was to keep in touch with Tito’s partisans on the Croatian coast. How he should correct the upheaval of his novel behind enemy lines was therefore in the stars…

With some certainty no upheaval has embarked on a more adventurous journey than Waugh described years later. Brideshead was sent to Downing Street by the publishers in October 1944; “From there,” Waugh reported, “it traveled to Italy in the Prime Minister’s mailbag, was flown out from Brindisi, and parachuted into Gajana in Croatia, then an isolated region of resistance; it was corrected in Topusko and then taken to Split by jeep when the road was temporarily out of enemy hands; from there by ship to Italy and home, via Downing Street.”

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh’s most famous book to date; when he wrote it while the war was on hiatus for him, he himself thought it his best. After that, however, he was as severe with himself as he had been with Randolph Churchill, without whom it would not have appeared at the time.

“I wrote with a zeal that was completely foreign to me,” he recalled, “but also impatient to return to the war. It was a bleak time of real hardship before impending catastrophe – marked by soybeans and a limited vocabulary – and so the book is imbued with an immoderate lust for food and wine, for the splendor of the recent past, but also for rhetorical, ornamental language, which I find disgusting today on a full stomach.”

–The Los Angeles Times asked 95 local writers to name their favorite books about the city. In the published excerpts a Waugh novel appears twice:

“The books by emigrĂ©s — Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann and others. Even West falls into this category. The foreigners don’t count in most people’s L.A. canon, but they spoke to a kid raised among immigrants. I grew up among ‘foreigners.’”— Dana Gioia

“Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Loved One’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘After Many a Summer [Dies the Swan]’ snuck dark comedy onto the serious shelves (can we imagine Terry Southern or even Thomas Pynchon without them?).”— Boris Dralyuk

Links in the quote are from the original.

–The Guardian in a story about declining football player behavior blames in part the so-called VAR (video replay of on-field action). The story opens with this:

It is always vital not to bend too far with the weather, to dodge the squalls and thunderclaps; and above all to be wary of the worst and most deathly storm of all, the confected media storm.

Does the Premier League really have a problem with “player behaviour”? It has been tempting given the heat, the chat, the clipped-up punditry faces prophesying the decline of all that is fine and noble, like Evelyn Waugh bemoaning the death of the carpeted bathroom, to file the current rage about rage alongside all the other things that have seemed, very briefly, to signal the coming of the rapture.

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