British Library Posts Article on BYPs

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The British Library has posted an article on its website about the Bright Young People of the interwar years. This is by Dr Milena Borden and is entitled: “Bright Young Things: behind the party mask.” Dr Borden concentrates on how the period was reflected in the writing of four novelists: Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Nancy Mitford and Henry Green. The article opens with this quote from Waugh:

Evelyn Waugh pronounced the best definition: ‘There was between the wars a society, cosmopolitan, sympathetic to the arts, well-mannered, above all ornamental even in rather bizarre ways, which for want of a better description the newspapers called “High Bohemia.”’… The Bright Young Things included writers, artists, society women and rich club members memorably satirised by Waugh in Vile Bodies (1930). 

The quote is cited to an article about Cecil Beaton included in Essays, Articles and Reviews (p. 568). Dr. Borden goes on to comment on how Waugh’s writings reflected modernism and his participation in WWII as well as, briefly, on his non-fiction.

 

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A Recent Visit to “Whispering Glades”

Posted on July 9, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In this week’s LA Weekly, an alternative newspaper distributed in the Los Angeles region, there is a humorous description of a recent visit to Forest Lawn Cemetery by artist and illustrator Tony Mostrom. He begins with references to the negativity expressed by East Coast visitors as well as the English writers Evelyn Waugh and Jessica Mitford. Here’s the Waugh contribution:

Even in the ‘20s, Forest Lawn Memorial Park (to give its full and proper name) was getting hit for its alleged lack of good taste and high-pressure salesmanship. British novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote a comic novel called The Loved One (1948), which made much comic hay out of, for example, embalmers plying their trade fine-tuning the faces of fresh cadavers at the in-house mortuary of Waugh’s barely fictionalized cemetery, Whispering Glades, transparently modeled on Forest Lawn:

“‘We had a Loved One last month who was found drowned. He had been in the sea a month and they only identified him by his wrist-watch. They fixed that stiff,’ said the hostess disconcertingly lapsing from the high diction she had hitherto employed, ‘so he looked like it was his wedding day. The boys up there surely know their job. Why if he’d sat on an atom bomb, they’d make him presentable.’”

Even today the molding of a corpse’s mouth into a smile, as described in the book, still occurs routinely in mortuary practice. Hopefully with the family’s consent.

Mostrom also provides helpful illustrations of his visit (including a 1940s vintage picture post card) and a description of his exploration of some of the older parts of the cemetery. He offers a “baker’s dozen” list of the celebrities who are buried there (some of whom would have been implanted in Waugh’s time):

Walt Disney, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Humphrey Bogart, Alexander Pantages, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, W.C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Lon Chaney, Jean Harlow, Nat King Cole

Since a visit to this site may well be on the “to do” lists of many participants in next year’s Waugh conference in nearby Pasadena, Mostrom’s light-hearted introduction is a good starting point for a current reading list on the subject.

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Irish Times Reviews Eade Biography

Posted on July 9, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Today’s Irish Times has a review of Philip Eade’s biography of Evelyn Waugh. The reviewer is Matthew Adam who begins with his own catalogue of some of Waugh’s nastier traits as recounted by Waugh’s friends and acquaintances as well as by Waugh himself. He then turns to Eade’s treatment of this theme:

Waugh needed his vices, cultivated them, was as proud of them as he was ashamed. As Philip Eade puts it in this brisk and entertaining new biography, they were both “defences against the boredom and despair of everyday life” and the outward signs of a hatred of the sentimental and demonstrative. They were also occlusive of the kinder and more generous facets of Waugh’s personality. Or so Eade argues. He quotes many of Waugh’s friends and acquaintances to support this proposition.

Adam is not convinced by Eade’s attempt to build a case for a kinder and gentler Waugh from sources such as his letters to Teresa Jungman:

Where Eade is more persuasive – and more interesting – is in his account of the forces that contributed to Waugh’s peculiarly fraught relationship with the question of love and friendship. The account takes us back to Waugh’s childhood, which was marked by a debilitating absence of love from his father, the publisher and literary journalist Arthur Waugh.

After describing Waugh’s troubled childhood and his distant treatment of his own children, the review concludes:

Eade is not much interested in Waugh’s literary achievements (he says at the start of the book that this is not a critical biography), but the limited use he makes of his work is intelligent and illuminating. These qualities are also apparent in his narration of Waugh’s troubled and troubling existence. Although one might wish for a more concerted engagement with the ways in which the tensions and the contradictions of Waugh’s personality are inscribed and modified in his writing, this biography nevertheless amounts to the best single-volume life of the author available. To read A Life Revisited is to experience a reckoning with a man whose life, like his work, is both a solace and a stimulus. And also, inimitably, a challenge.

 

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Jay McInerney Lists Waugh in NY Times Article

Posted on July 9, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In listing his favorite books, novelist and, more recently, wine commentator Jay McInerney included Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. His own first novel Bright Lights, Big City (1984) might be considered a 1980s version of Decline and Fall. In an article in the New York Times T Magazine, McInerney explains his choice of Waugh’s novel:

This novel shows all of Waugh’s gifts for satire and farce, but unlike his earlier novels, it has a three-dimensional, tragic protagonist in aristocratic cuckold Tony Last.

Other books on his top 10 list include The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises and The Code of the Woosters.

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BBC Radio 4 Broadcast Concluded

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 4 today broadcast the final episode of the reading of excerpts from Philip Eade’s biography of Waugh as its Book of the Week. The programs will remain available over the internet on BBC iPlayer for the next four weeks. The material covered in each episode is as follows:

Ep. 1: Childhood; family; school.

Ep. 2: Oxford; schoolmaster; first publication.

Ep. 3: Marriage; divorce; conversion; Spitzbergen.

Ep. 4: Courtship and marriage of Laura Herbert; Abyssinia; Piers Court; Mexico.

Ep. 5: Hollywood and The Loved One; children; Pinfold; decline and death.

The greatest gap seems to be Waugh’s service in WWII and the writing and reception of Brideshead Revisited; another episode would have been necessary to cover those topics. The reading by Nicholas Grace was well done and never threatened to become tedious.

 

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William Boyd Names Scoop as a Favorite Classic

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In response to a request by booksellers W H Smith, novelist William Boyd has named Scoop one of his five favorite classic novels. This comes as no surprise since Boyd wrote the screenplay for the 1987 TV adaptation of the book. Although not as popular as some of the other adaptations of Waugh’s works, the Boot Magna scenes come across quite well, and the performances of Michael Hordern (Uncle Theodore) and Denholm Elliott (Mr Salter) were outstanding. Perhaps this is explained, at least in part, by Boyd’s own critique of the novel: 

I happen to believe that Waugh’s best novels are his comedies and Scoop is a near perfect comic masterwork. It contains possibly the funniest chapter in English literature (Mr Salter’s visit to Boot Magna). The brilliant aspect of Waugh’s humour was its utter ruthlessness. He refused to console the reader and this is what makes his comedy so bracing and enduring.

Boyd’s other choices included A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, a writer whose work was also admired and promoted by Waugh.

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Memorial Service for Waugh to be Celebrated Tomorrow

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Latin Mass Society of the UK has announced that a service of Vespers and Benediction for the repose of the soul of Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) will be celebrated tomorrow, Friday, 8 June 2016, in South London. The service will be held at the Roman Catholic Church of St Mary Magdalene in Wandsworth SW18 at 5:30pm and will be conducted by Archbishop Thomas Gullickson. Musical accompaniment will be provided by Cantus Magnus under the direction of Matthew Schellhorn.  

UPDATE (8 June 2016): As explained in today’s issue of The Catholic Herald, Evelyn Waugh was among those instrumental in forming the Latin Mass Society in 1965 and was asked to be its first president:

In 1965, several attempts were made to create an organisation in England and Wales in defence of the Latin Mass. After a letter was published in the Catholic Herald of January 22, 1965 by a banker called Hugh Byrne suggesting the immediate formation of an organisation, a group was formed to put the wheels in motion.

It was recorded in the Herald in 1965: “This week efforts are being made to start a national Latin Mass Society in Britain. Mr Evelyn Waugh, one of the strongest opponents of the vernacular, has been asked to become President of the Society, which will aim at campaigning for at least one Latin Low Mass in every church on Sundays.”

Waugh declined the invitation to be the society’s first president due to ill health but

…until his death in 1966, Waugh acted as an unofficial spokesman for the conservatives, expressing their growing disenchantment to Cardinal Heenan and in the press. He was also instrumental, with Sir Arnold Lunn and Hugh Ross Williamson, in founding the Latin Mass Society at Easter 1965.

Waugh’s involvement in this movement is described in a recent book entitled A Bitter Trial, edited by Alcuin Reid.

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Waugh Conference Announced at Huntington Library

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Dr Steve Hindle, Director of Research at the Huntington Library, has announced a conference on the theme Evelyn Waugh: Reader, Writer, Collector. The conference will be held at the Huntington Library near Pasadena, California on 5-6 May 2017. It will be convened by Dr Barbara Cooke of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Project and Prof Chip Long, Chairman of the Evelyn Waugh Society, and will be funded jointly by the Society and Loren Rothschild, benefactor of the Library. For details and logistics relating to attendance contact Catherine Wehrey-Miller at the Huntington Library: (click to email).

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Alec Waugh and the Cocktail Party

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The website Vinepair, which is devoted to wine, beer and spirits, has posted an article by Emily Bell about how Alec Waugh invented the cocktail party. As he explained in an article in Esquire, he set out to find something to do between 5:30 and 7:30. In his first attempt, he sent invitations for drinks in those hours, which in England are usually devoted to tea, something Alec deemed not worth the effort. Only one person showed up. So he tried a different approach:

“I returned to the attack in the Autumn of 1925,” he writes. Except here, as he notes, he proceeded “with caution.” Caution being lies. “I asked some thirty people to tea at five o’clock.” As expected, “they came to find the conventional appurtenances of a tea
Then, at a quarter to six, I produced my surprise—a beaker of Daiquiris.”

Here’s where an American—an Embassy worker—stepped in to genesis [sic] of the cocktail hour; a friend of Waugh’s, he actually mixed the Daiquiris, which tasted more of “sherbet,” leading guests to drink and ask for more. Except, whoops, “very soon it became apparent that the drink was singularly strong.” The cocktail hour, or rather surprise-teatime-Daiquiri-blitz, was a success… “’You served cocktails after tea?
What was the point of that?’” Inquiry preceded imitation and the cocktail party was born. A book tour later, Waugh returned home to a nation wherein cocktails had replaced tea after the five o’clock hour.

Alec goes on to describe how his brother later reacted to his claimed invention:

“Some years ago I remarked to my brother Evelyn that I believed I had invented the cocktail party,” Alec writes. “His eyes widened and whitened in the way they did. ‘I should be careful about making that boast in print’…He may well be right,” writes [Alec]. “But I have, I trust, reason for maintaining that in the literary bohemian circle I did frequent in London, I gave the first cocktail party.”

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D J Taylor Reviews New Waugh Biography

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist and critic (and well-known Waugh fan) D J Taylor has reviewed Philip Eade’s new biography of Waugh in The National (an assertedly independent newspaper published in Abu Dhabi). As is the case with previous reviewers, Taylor’s verdict is mixed. He cites two fundamental problems facing Eade:

The first is that [the book] was commissioned by the subject’s family, meaning that politeness and some rather gratuitous compliments to surviving members of the clan are the order of the day.

The second is that so many previous biographers have staked out the territory…And this is to ignore a well-nigh unquenchable tide of letters to friends and considerations of, as it may be, Waugh at war, or the “Brideshead Generation” of writers who cut such a swathe through the English literary 20th century.

Taylor is not impressed by Eade’s claims to be able to offer important new insights from previously unavailable materials that the family has provided to him, citing the letters to Teresa Jungman and new wartime witnesses as examples:

Eade uses this material well, and is perfectly entitled to crow over it – what biographer wouldn’t? At the same time, he can do little to shift the well-established outline of Waugh’s career…The stones may have been tinkered with, but the pattern of the mosaic remains the same.

Taylor also joins several earlier critics who thought it a pity Eade didn’t take the opportunity to assess the new material’s impact (or not, as the case may be) on Waugh’s works. He concludes his review:

On the credit side, Eade writes neatly and has an eye for a quotation. While always determined to do his best by his subject, Eade is fully alert to the awfulness of a man who, while staying in Hollywood, could publicly refer to his host’s black servant as “your native bearer”, but this long-term Waugh-fancier wasn’t convinced. 

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