Another Literary Anniversary

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Graham Greene’s death in 1991. There have been several events associated with this anniversary. Perhaps the most ambitious is the BBC’s undertaking to adapt four of Greene’s novels for radio presentations. The most recent is The Power and the Glory which was presented in a two-part dramatization on BBC Radio 4 earlier this month and is still available on BBC iPlayer over the internet. Critic D J Taylor in the latest issue of The Tablet makes a comparison of that work to Waugh’s contemporaneous Robbery Under Law:

Lady Diana Cooper, who took a keen interest in both men, once remarked that whereas Evelyn Waugh was “a bad man for whom an angel was struggling”, his fellow Catholic convert Graham Greene was “a good man possessed of a devil”.

While Waugh’s visit to late-1930s Mexico produced a deeply conservative political tract (Robbery Under Law, 1939), his friend returned with the material for a novel. Yet, as Nick Warburton’s superlative two-part adaptation of The Power and the Glory [19 and 26 June] demonstrated in spades, Greene’s fiction turns out to be quite as polemical as Waugh’s bitter travelogue.

The other radio adaptations include The Honorary Consul which was transmitted in January-February and Monsignor Quixote and The Confidential Agent which will appear later this year.

The Graham Greene Birthplace Trust has meanwhile announced the program for its 2016 “International Festival” to be held in Berkhamsted, Herts., in September. Although none of the presentations described in the program specifically mentions Waugh, Roy Hattersley is speaking on 23 September on the subject of “The Catholic Muse” which is about British Catholic writers, and Waugh will surely come up in that discussion. That was the same topic chosen by Waugh for his 1949 lecture tour at various U S Catholic colleges and universities, and Greene was one of the three British writers he discussed. The others were G K Chesterton and Ronald Knox. Also appearing on the same day as Hattersley is Carlos Villar Flor, well known to Waugh scholars and co-author of the recent book In the Picture about Waugh’s wartime career. His topic is Greene’s “quixotic” holiday travels.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Anniversaries, Conferences, Festivals, Radio, Radio Programs, Robbery Under Law | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Another Literary Anniversary

Waugh, Churchill and Maisky

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The National Interest magazine, a U.S. bi-monthly espousing what is described as a realist view on foreign policy, has reviewed the diaries of Ivan Maisky, who was the Soviet ambassador in the U.K. at the beginning of WWII. The review is written by the magazine’s editor Jacob Heilbrunn, who segues into Maisky’s story via an opening scene quoted from Waugh’s  Officers and Gentlemen at the time the Nazis had just invaded the Soviet Union:

…Guy Crouchback, a lieutenant in the Halberdiers who has just fought the Germans in the Battle of Crete, finds himself convalescing during the summer of 1941 in Alexandria in the official residence of the hostess Julia Stitch… when her husband announces at a small luncheon that Hitler has just invaded Russia:

“‘Why couldn’t the silly fellow have done it to start with?’ Algernon Stitch asked, ‘instead of landing the lot of us in the soup first?’

‘Is it a Good Thing?’ Mrs. Stitch asked the simple question of the schoolroom.

‘Can’t tell. The experts don’t believe the Russians have a chance. And they’ve got a lot of things the Germans will find useful.’

‘What’s Winston going to say?’

‘Welcome our new allies, of course. What else can he?’

What On Earth Were These Russians Thinking??

 ‘It’s nice to have one ally,’ said Mrs. Stitch.”

Indeed it was. But as Algernon’s hauteur indicates, the suspicions that many British conservatives harbored about the Soviet Union before World War II never really went away. Perhaps no one found their hostility more vexing than Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to England from 1932 to 1943. Neville Chamberlain called Maisky a “revolting but clever little Jew.” Henry “Chips” Channon said that he was the “ambassador of torture, murder and every crime in the calendar.” And in Anthony Powell’s roman-fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time, after an irascible monkey named Maisky bites a butler who develops septicemia, Capt. Teddy Jeavons remarks that this was “the end of Maisky too, which wasn’t really just. But then what is just in this life?”

As noted in another recent post, Waugh was never under any illusion that the alliance with the Soviets was an unmixed blessing. Even while the alliance was thriving in 1942, he notes in his diaries that he was arguing the point with Duff Cooper and was still fighting with him about it during a visit to the Coopers in Paris in the 1950s, as recounted in Christopher Sykes’ biography.

Share
Posted in Articles, Officers and Gentlemen, World War II | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh, Churchill and Maisky

Waugh Week in The Times

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times (a London print newspaper) seems to have declared Waugh Week. On Saturday and Sunday (as noted previously) it published separate full length reviews by Paula Byrne and John Walsh, respectively, of Philip Eade’s new biography of Waugh. Today it is publishing a memoir by Benedict Nightingale (the paper’s former theatre critic) of his mother’s marriage to Evelyn Waugh. Her maiden name was Evelyn Gardner and she was the first Mrs Waugh. Nightingale will also, no doubt, have some comments to make about the new biography. All of these stories require subscriptions to view on the internet.

Share
Posted in Articles, Biographies, Books about Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers | Tagged , | Comments Off on Waugh Week in The Times

Russian Literary Journal Marks Waugh Anniversary

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Russian literary journal Inostrannaia Literatura (Foreign Literature) has devoted about two-thirds of its April 2016 issue to a collection of essays and translations relating to Evelyn Waugh. This was issued on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death. The cover is illustrated with a reproduction of Henry Lamb’s c.1929 portrait of Waugh. The collection is entitled “Literary Guide: A Half Century Without Waugh.” The introductory 10-page essay by Nikolai Mel’nikov is entitled “Znakomyi neznakomets” (literally “Familiar stranger”). There follow an approximately 50 page translation into Russian of Waugh’s 1930 travel book Labels (in Russian Nakleiki na chemodane) by Valerii Minushin (probably an excerpt) and a 60 page collection of Waugh’s letters selected and translated by Alexander Livergant, with a commentary by Livergant and Mel’nikov.  There are also translations of (1) nine of Waugh’s essays, articles and reviews, (2) the 1949 interview of Waugh by Harvet Breit in the New York Times and Waugh’s 1948 article entitled “The Gentle Art of Being Interviewed” (“Neprostoe iskusstvo davat’ interv’u“), and (3) seven reviews and articles about Waugh by other writers, including George Orwell, Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal. The contents of this issue in Russian may be viewed here.

Related to this special edition of Inostrannaia Literatura is an article in Russian posted on the website of Radio Svoboda (“Radio Liberty”), the Russian language broadcasting service based in Prague and financed (at least in part) by the US government. This is dated 1 June 2016 and may be the transcript of a program broadcast on that date. The author is Konstantin L’vov but he refers to many of the translated materials from the Russian journal and includes a copy of the journal’s cover page in the article. The article or program is entitled “Videl nravy mnogikh liudei” (literally “Saw the manners of many people”) but bears the subtitle of the Inostrannaia Literatura collection “A Half Century Without Waugh”).

Thanks to Ivar Dale for posting a link to the Radio Svoboda article on the Waugh Society’s Twitter feed.

UPDATE (28 June 2016): The introduction by Nikolai Mel’nikov to the recent collection of Waugh’s writings in Russian translation is available on the internet here. It is in Russian but can be translated to a serviceable version on Google Translate. In it, he explains that most of Waugh’s fiction, in particular his novels, have been made available to Russian readers over the years, beginning in the Soviet period as early as 1969. His non-fiction has, however, not been widely translated into Russian, aside from a few selections from his letters and diaries and his autobiography. This is why the editors of Inostrannaia Literatura have in their recent collection concentrated on Waugh’s travel writing, journalism and interviews.

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Anniversaries, Articles, Interviews, Labels, Letters, Radio Programs | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Russian Literary Journal Marks Waugh Anniversary

BBC to Air New Waugh Biography

Posted on June 27, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 4 will broadcast a reading of the new biography of Evelyn Waugh by Philip Eade in its Book of the Week series. The broadcast will be in 5 episodes starting next Monday, 4 July at 0945a (London time). The abridgement of the book by Libby Spurrier will be read by actor Nicholas Grace who chewed up a good deal of scenery playing Anthony Blanche in the 1981 Granada TV version of Brideshead Revisited. Each 15 minute episode will be broadcast at the same time every morning through Friday 8 July. They may be heard on the internet shortly after each broadcast. The Pier production for Radio 4 is produced and directed by Celia de Wolff. According to the BBC’s announcement: 

Waugh’s Estate has released previously unseen letters and there is new personal testimony from those who knew and worked with him. The book spans the whole of Waugh’s life, presenting new details of his difficult relationship with his embarrassingly sentimental father, his love affair with Alastair Graham at Oxford, his disastrous marriage to Evelyn Gardner and its complicated annulment, his dramatic conversion to Roman Catholicism and his chequered wartime career.

The book is published next week in the UK. The US edition will be issued in October.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Biographies, Books about Evelyn Waugh, Radio, Radio Programs | Tagged , , | Comments Off on BBC to Air New Waugh Biography

Child of Waugh Generation Dies

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph has announced the death of Henrietta Phipps who was the child of two of Waugh’s friends from the beginning of his career. She was 84. Her maiden name was Henrietta Lamb and she was the daughter of Pansy Pakenham and Henry Lamb. Pansy was the flatmate of Evelyn Gardner, Waugh’s first wife, at the time they met. She married artist Henry Lamb who painted the well known portrait of Waugh that illustrates the dust jacket of the 1973 collection of essays Evelyn Waugh and His World. Pansy’s sister Violet married Anthony Powell and her brother Frank Pakenham married Elizabeth Harman, all friends of Waugh.

Henrietta’s childhood in Coombe Bissett, south of Salisbury, was described in a poem attributed by the Telegraph to John Betjeman:

O the calm of Coombe Bissett is tranquil and deep,
Where Ebble flows soft in her downland asleep;
There beauty to me came a-pushing a pram
In the shape of the sweet Pansy Felicia Lamb.

The last line as quoted doesn’t quite scan, and I wonder if “the” before “sweet Pansy” is not supposed to be there. Henrietta attended Somerville College, Oxford, and became a landscape gardener who was active in the Kensington and Chelsea area. 

NOTE (25 June 2016): The ever-helpful and vigilant David Lull has confirmed my suspicions that the version of Betjeman’s poem as quoted in the Telegraph is incorrect. There is an extra “the” in the final line that shouldn’t be there. The poem is included in a letter Betjeman sent to Pansy Lamb in 1983 and is published in vol. 2 of his Letters, p. 577. The quoted poem also differs in other minor respects:

The calm of Coombe Bissett/ Is tranquil and deep
Where Ebble flows soft/ Mid her downlands asleep
And beauty to me came a-pushing a pram
In the shape of sweet Pansy Felicia Lamb.

As explained in a footnote, the poem was, according to Pansy Lamb, originally written in 1932 “at a time when [Betjeman] had a romantic image of me. It is now lost but it was a sort of a pastiche of a poem by Campbell…All I can remember is: ‘I too could be arty, I too could get on/With the Guinnesses, Gertler, and Sickert and John.'”

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Newspapers, Portraits | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Child of Waugh Generation Dies

Waugh Novel Included in Best Books of Past 75 Years

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Parade magazine is marking its 75th anniversary. It was started in 1941 by what has now become the Chicago Sun-Times as a weekly insert for Sunday newspapers. They asked novelist Ann Patchett to make a list of the best 75 books published over the magazine’s lifespan. Patchett is probably best known for her award winning novel Bel Canto. She enlisted workers in her Nashville bookstore to help her make selections. Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945, is at the top of her own contributions to the list:

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)
“This book is so perfectly executed—literature at its most engaging. When I think about so many of the books on this list, I’m also thinking about the books that didn’t get on. Personally, I love A Handful of Dust slightly more than Brideshead, but I was outvoted.”

She might also have noted that A Handful of Dust would have been ineligible for selection because it was published in 1934. Other books on the list that are written in the satiric tradition include Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Edward St Aubyn’s Complete Patrick Melrose Novels, and Jane Gardam’s Old Filth.

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers | Tagged , | Comments Off on Waugh Novel Included in Best Books of Past 75 Years

Weekly Standard Reviews The Prose Factory

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The US neoconservative journal The Weekly Standard in its latest issue has reviewed D J Taylor’s history of the English “man of letters” since World War I . See earlier posts. The book, entitled The Prose Factory, was published earlier this year in the UK and, so far as appears in this article, has as yet found no US publisher. The article links you to Amazon.com which offers an “international edition” sold by third party dealers, rather than Amazon itself.

The review by Dominic Green offers many reasons to search out the book, even though your local library or bookstore may not have it (in the US at least). The Weekly Standard illustrates why it will be of interest by heading its article with a photo of Evelyn and Alec Waugh. Green describes how Taylor uses the careers of the Waugh brothers to illustrate different strands of literary life from which a living could be derived. In the 1920s, during the rivalry between the literary traditionalists and the modernists, Evelyn Waugh split the difference by “merging Dickensian caricature with the speech experiments of Ronald Firbank.” Meanwhile, Alec wrote popular short stories and novels for the middle brow audience:

The solid storyteller Alec Waugh appealed to a far wider audience than his acerbic brother Evelyn, just as Peter Fleming would ultimately be outsold by his brother Ian… The postwar settlement undid the aristocracy, in wealth, government, and letters…. Alec Waugh prospered in Hollywood and Evelyn fumed in Gloucestershire. As the economy of highbrow letters narrowed, and the media became more powerful, the novelists and poets sheltered in the ivory tower and the academics cashed in as talking heads.

Green here oversimplifies matters somewhat. Taylor’s book explains how Evelyn’s works became hugely popular after the war, starting with Brideshead Revisited. Alec at first lost his way, as the market for his stories and novels dried up, but then found success with Island in the Sun. This became a best selling novel and hit movie, and Alec lived out his life on the proceeds from that one work. Evelyn’s full blown popularity had to await the revival in his fortunes that came after his death with the 1980s TV adaptation of Brideshead.  

 

Share
Posted in Alec Waugh, Articles, Brideshead Revisited, Film, Television | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Weekly Standard Reviews The Prose Factory

Evening Standard Reviews New Biography

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Yesterday’s Evening Standard published a review of Philip Eade’s new biography of Evelyn Waugh. This is the first daily newspaper review of the book, which is to be published next month in the UK. See earlier post. The review is by David Sexton who begins by noting previous biographies and wondering what new information this new one may offer. His answer seems to be, “Not much.” :

…[Eade] has had access to some unpublished Waugh letters, notably 80 or so written to Teresa “Baby” Jungman, with whom Waugh was unrequitedly in love in the 1930s, which he reverently calls “the holy grail of Waugh biography” and makes a meal of, maintaining that “they show a deeply romantic and tender side to his character that counters the popularly-held view of his heartlessness” — a view that could be held only by those who have failed to read him with basic comprehension.

Sexton goes on to regret that Eade spends too much time seeking to identify the models for the characters who populate Waugh’s books rather than offering an analysis of the writing itself:

…it is Waugh’s extremely lucidity, his lexical and grammatical precision, that allow no ambiguity to the cruelty and chaos and failure of love he found in the world around him from his earliest days and which provoke so much shock and laughter. It is Waugh’s writing that makes his world interesting, not the other way around.

A fair point perhaps, but then he also concedes that, by Eade’s own admission, this is not intended to be a “critical” biography. Sexton finds the feature of the book he most enjoyed is its use of the “salacious anecdote, often peripheral, from the Waugh family papers.” He then offers several examples, including:

an astounding photo of his Oxford boyfriend Alastair Graham in the nude, displaying his juicy bum, found in a letter to Evelyn inviting him for a drink in a wood (but Bron thought his father may have inserted it in the envelope later). And he does print, as a useful aide-memoire, headshots of women Waugh shagged in passing (Joyce Fagan, Audrey Lucas, Hazel Lavery, Pixie Maris).

After titillating us with several other bits of salaciousness, the review concludes:

Never mind: still a great writer, although this biography is not where to begin reading about him.

UPDATE (26 June 2016): The Times (a daily print newspaper based in London) in yesterday’s edition has also published a review of Eade’s book by Waugh biographer Paula Byrne. In today’s Sunday Times there is another review by John Walsh. These articles are  available to read on the internet with a subscription.

Share
Posted in Biographies, Books about Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Evening Standard Reviews New Biography

Auction of Several Waugh Items in July

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Forum Auctions of London has issued a catalogue of several items of interest involving books written and owned by and correspondence of Evelyn Waugh. The 75 lots come from various sources. Of the several pieces of correspondence, perhaps the most interesting are:

Lot 7, a postcard to Robert Byron dated 13 February 1928 relating to each writer’s works in progress of that period.

Lot 25, a 1936 letter to Canon F E Hutchinson relating, inter alia,  to his comments on Waugh’s biography of Edmund Campion.

Lot 59, a 1956 post card to Fr Philip Caraman seeking advice on some points of Jesuit history to use in a response to an article of Prof Hugh Trevor-Roper in the New Statesman. 

Lot 65, a series of post cards dated early 1960s to journalist and food critic Cyril Ray regarding socialism.

Lot 68, original of letter dated 28 October 1965 to Prof. A J P Taylor about war trilogy and  other matters; contents published in Letters, p. 634.

Also of particular interest are the following books:

Lot 3, copy of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that previously belonged to Waugh after his aunt bequeathed her gifted copy back to him.

Lots 21 and 22, copy of limited edition of Black Mischief and proof of “The Curse of the Horse Race” given to Diana Cooper in 1932 at the beginning of their friendship.

The sale will take place on 13 July at the London premises of the auctioneers, 220 Queenstown Road, SW8, and on the internet. The books may be viewed at the auctioneers’ premises and later at The Westbury Hotel at dates specified in the announcement.

Share
Posted in Auctions, Black Mischief, First Editions, Letters, London, PRB, Short Stories | Tagged , | Comments Off on Auction of Several Waugh Items in July