Waugh and Baby

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has printed the second and final installment of excerpts from Philip Eade’s new biography of Waugh to be published in July. Having devoted the first installment to his homosexual affairs at Oxford in the 1920s, this article tells about his heterosexual relationships in the 1930s London of the Bright Young People. 

There are, for example, several quotes from Waugh’s letters to Teresa “Baby” Jungman. These were not included in Waugh’s collected letters published in 1980 nor were they mentioned by previous biographers but became available only when Baby Jungman turned them over to Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, a few years ago. At that time she was living in Ireland and was about 100 years old. Perhaps the most poignant of these letters quoted here is the one he wrote to Baby in 1933, after over three years of unrequited advances: 

On December 29, he wrote to Baby from a ship bound for Morocco: ‘You will say it was sly to go away without saying anything
 But please believe it isn’t only selfish – running away from pain (though it has been more painful than you know, all the last months, realising every day I was becoming less attractive and less important to you) – but also I can’t be any good to you without your love and it’s the worst possible thing for you to have to cope with the situation that had come about between us.’

As it turns out he had, by the time he wrote that, already met the woman who was to become his second wife, Laura Herbert. This occurred in Portofino after he had taken a Mediterrean cruise on which he had met Laura’s sister, Gabriel, who invited him to stop at her family’s villa in Italy on the way back to England. Waugh mentions meeting Laura in a letter written in September 1933 to Katharine Asquith (Letters, p. 80). For some reason, this excerpt seems to suggest that their meeting took place only in 1935 at the Herberts’ home in Pixton Park: “But it wasn’t until January 1935 that Evelyn found a woman who could replace Baby in his affections.” That may be the date when Waugh realized he was in love with Laura, but he had met her more than 15 months earlier. (Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, pp. 350-52; Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, pp. 284-87)

They were married in April 1937 after the Roman Catholic church had annulled his first marriage. He wrote to Baby shortly before his wedding describing his new wife:

‘She [Laura] is very young indeed. Very thin and pale with big eyes and a long nose – more like a gazelle really than a girl
 silent as the grave, given to fainting at inopportune moments, timid, ignorant, affectionate, very gentle, doesn’t sing, Narcissus complex, looks lovely on a horse but often falls off. I love her very much and I think there is as good a chance of our marriage being a success as any I know.’ Baby was godmother to Laura and Evelyn’s first child, Maria Teresa, born in March 1938. Evelyn and Laura remained married until Evelyn’s death aged 62 in 1966.

 

 

 

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Performance Poem Inspired by Waugh Novel

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Performance poet Luke Wright recently appeared at Selby Town Hall where he read his poem What I Learned from Johnny Bevan. As reported in the York Press, this was a one- hour performance of the poem which tells 

a politically charged story encompassing shattered friendships, class and social ceilings, and the Labour Party’s battle for its soul. At university the whip-smart, mercurial Johnny Bevan saves Nick, smashing his comfortable middle-class bubble and firing him up about politics, music and literature. Twenty years later, as their youthful dreams disintegrate alongside the social justice they had craved, can Nick, now a jaded music journalist, save Johnny from himself?

The book’s description is quoted from the back of its cover. The paper goes on to explain the poem’s roots in Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited:

Luke’s verse play also was informed by one of his favourite books, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead (soon to be staged at York Theatre Royal incidentally in a new Bryony Lavery adaptation). “I was struck how the middle-class student, Charles Ryder, was fascinated by his upper-class friend, Sebastian Flyte,” he says. “In my piece, the middle-class Nick is fascinated by the brilliant working-class Johnny.”

After performing at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe and in a three-week run at London’s Soho Theatre, Luke will appear later this month in a private performance at the Palace of Westminster for MPs and parliamentary workers and at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre in May.

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Survey of Waugh

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Catholic World Report has posted an article surveying Evelyn Waugh’s works from a Roman Catholic perspective. This is by Prof. Adam A.J. DeVille, St. Francis University, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and is written on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death next week. The article includes a quote from what is probably Waugh’s least read book, Robbery Under Law and continues with a discussion of how Waugh was affected by the Vatican II Council. Prof. DeVille concludes:

In this Franciscan era, when we seem buffeted indeed by fashionable notions and airborne nostrums every other week, Waugh provides us with a handy, steadying heuristic amidst the chaos unleashed by churchmen over the last fifty years. When that chaos tempts Catholics to despair, Waugh’s writings remain, an abiding source of diverting delight, the splendid and often hilarious prose elevating our spirits and edifying our minds.

NOTE (11 April 2016): If you liked this post, you might want to know that Prof. DeVille has also posted a “second and longer” essay about Waugh’s books here. He is interested in Eastern Orthodoxy as well as Roman Catholicism and notes Waugh’s interaction with Orthodoxy in Abyssinia and Yugoslavia at the beginning of the essay. He then warns, however, that there may not be much more on that topic to follow. The “longer” essay is entitled “Eternal Memory Indeed” which is the roughly the Orthodox equivalent of Requiescat in Pace. 

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A Little More Learning

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Dr. Barbara Cooke, Research Associate at the University of Leicester for the Complete Works of Waugh project and editor of the volume containing Waugh’s autobiography A Little Learning has posted an article about how Waugh’s life at Oxford is reflected in that work.  She also compares that description with the Oxford passages in his fiction.  Her article concudes:

In his first term at Oxford, Waugh recounted a “subdued” happiness in adopting a sober and restrained undergraduate life. “A pity he didn’t continue,” opines Rowse. But what if he had? Could Waugh have written Brideshead Revisited if he had never loved Graham, or created Anthony Blanche without meeting Acton and Howard?

Rowse, son of a clay miner and holder of the “one miserable university scholarship for the whole county of Cornwall”, had every right to resent what he saw as Waugh’s wasting of an opportunity for which he, Rowse, had fought hard. But there was more than one kind of education on offer in Waugh’s Oxford; and in his case, a little learning was quite enough to engender a rich legacy of comic, lyrical and unforgettable works.

A.L. Rowse was a student contemporary of Waugh at Oxford and later a Fellow of All Souls and is included in a photo posted with this article. The full article is posted on the academic website The Conversation. The Complete Works A Little Learning volume is co-edited by the late John Howard Wilson who also founded the Evelyn Waugh Society and and was editor of its journal.

 

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Harry Mount on Brideshead Revisited

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Catholic Herald has marked the 50th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s death with a feature article by journalist and author Harry Mount on Brideshead Revisited. Mount begins with an assessment of the novel:

Fifty years after his death on April 10, 1966, Evelyn Waugh’s life and work still captivate us. It’s not hard to understand why – he is one of the prose stylists of the age, and one of its funniest writers. His comic gift is all the greater for being shot through with pleasing melancholy and joyful malice.

The curious thing is that, of all his books, it’s Brideshead Revisited that enchants the public more than any other. Waugh obsessives, including me, prefer A Handful of Dust – for its macabre chill – or  Scoop, for its mixture of comedy and eternal accuracy about the ridiculous side of journalism.

But it is Brideshead that dominates the popular vision of Waugh; Brideshead that was a huge hit in America after it came out in 1945; Brideshead that was made into the excellent Granada series in 1981, and the third-rate film in 2008.

Mount goes on the review the book’s themes and recounts the story of the making of the Granada TV film and its impact on Waugh’s popularity and reputation. In the course of the essay, Mount quotes a letter to Waugh from his great-aunt Pansy Lamb who was the recipient of one of the limited first editions of Brideshead Waugh sent out to 50 of his friends in 1944. She was one of those who thought Waugh may have gone a bit over the top in his book:

“All the richness of your invention, the magical embroideries you fling around your characters cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s,” she wrote. “Nobody was brilliant, beautiful and rich and the owner of a wonderful house, though some were one or the other 
 Oxford, too – were Harold Acton and Co really as brilliant as that, or were there wonderful characters I never met? 
 You see English society of the 20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs 
 I fled from it because it seemed preposterous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is.” Waugh was shocked by this letter, but acknowledged in 1959 that he had gone over the top in his luscious, hedonistic descriptions…

Finally, Mount considers Waugh’s snobbery and the book’s treatment of the aristocracy and Catholicism and he concludes:

By celebrating a grand Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh hoped to kill two birds with one stone, slipping in the virtues of religion beneath the intoxication of sin. Brideshead Revisited repudiates the sins of the flesh but not snobbery, identified by Proust as a sin against the Holy Ghost. Still, without the snobbery, the book wouldn’t be nearly so irresistible.

 

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Free Thinking about Evelyn Waugh

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 3 yesterday broadcast a panel discussion in its Free Thinking series about the life and works of Evelyn Waugh. As previously announced, the panel was moderated by Matthew Sweet and consisted of Alexander Waugh, the writer’s grandson, Adam Mars-Jones, author and critic, and Bryony Lavery, who recently adapted Brideshead Revisited for the stage. Added to the panel was Philip Eade, author of a new biography of Waugh to be published in July.

The panel ranged widely over Waugh’s career starting with a discussion of Brideshead and its adaptations. Lavery noted that in rehearsals for her theatrical production, the actors expressed concern with bits of the story they felt were important to them that had to be left out. Each was given the opportunity to mention in the performances at least one thing they wished had been preserved. 

When the panel discussed Waugh’s life, Alexander stressed his grandfather’s otherwise happy middle-class childhood, aside from the favoritism shown by his father to the elder son Alec. Sweet asked Philip Eade about a previously unreported 20 page memoir by Waugh’s first wife, the former Evelyn Gardner, relating to their brief marriage. According to Eade, this memoir tells her side of the story in which she explains that from the start there was “no chemistry between the couple in the bedroom.”

Adam Mars-Jones reported that he is working on a project to produce an opera from Waugh’s short autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. A passage in which the voices Pinfold heard gossiping about him is read out as it might appear in an operatic recitative. Mars-Jones is in negotiations with the Waugh estate on going forward with the project. A clip from the BBC’s Frankly Speaking radio interview of Waugh from the 1950s was played, and it was afterwards noted that Waugh had truthfully, carefully and unemotionally answered the interviewers’ increasingly hectoring questions. It was this interview which is said to have triggered the halucinations Waugh suffered and described in Pinfold.

The program closed with Alexander Waugh’s answer to Sweet’s question about what  contemporary writers should learn from his grandfather. His answer: (1) How to put chaos into communicable form; (2) How to write intelligently and clearly; (3) How to put the depth of an entire novel onto a single page; and (4) How to make people laugh.

The program is available over the internet on BBC iPlayer.

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University of Texas Announces Final Details of Waugh Panel

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Faculty Seminar on British Studies and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin will host a panel this Friday on the topic “Evelyn Waugh: His Visits to the United States.” The panel will consist of Martin Stannard and Barbara Cooke, both from the University of Leicester and the OUP Complete Works of Waugh Project in the UK, and Jeffrey Manley, a member of the Evelyn Waugh Society living in Austin. Here’s the University’s description of the program:

From the age of twenty-five, Waugh earned a substantial living as a novelist, journalist, and travel writer. His brilliant pre-war black comedies—Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and  Scoop (1938)—were popular in Britain but sold only modestly in the United States.

Brideshead Revisited became an American bestseller in 1945. It
transformed his career. The three editors will discuss Waugh’s trips to the United States, not least California, where he became fascinated with American funeral services and invented the character Mr. Joyboy—the mortician who leaves a beaming smile on the faces of embalmed bodies.

Martin Stannard is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester. Barbara Cooke is editing Waugh’s autobiography, A Little Learning. Jeffrey Manley is active in the Evelyn Waugh Society and has written about Waugh’s 1948-49 trips to the United States.

The panel will convene in  the Tom Lea Rooms, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center 3.206, Friday, 8 April 2016, 2:45 for 3:00.

 

 

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Waugh’s Eton Envy

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Commonweal magazine in its current issue has a review of Adam Sisman’s biography of novelist John le Carre. The review is by Jeffrey Meyers who has also written biographies of  several literary figures. Waugh features in the review in connection with le Carre’s brief career as a teacher at Eton College. This comes from Jeffrey Meyer’s own correspondence with le Carre in which Meyers had proposed to write his biography :

 In 1989 I had an angry exchange of letters with le CarrĂ© about my proposed biography, which he first allowed and then forbade. Later, he either forgot or forgave our quarrel and sent me two long handwritten letters. …. In a letter about Orwell (real name: Eric Blair) at Eton, le CarrĂ© wrote, “It always amused me that Blair-Orwell, who had been to Eton, took great pains to disown the place, while Evelyn Waugh, who hadn’t been to Eton, took similar pains to pretend he had.” He added that “Orwell remains an ideal for me—of clarity, anger, and perfectly aimed irony.”

Waugh may have wished he’d been to Eton (or even, for that matter, Sherbourne) rather than the more humble Lancing. But I don’t think he ever stooped to wearing an Old Etonian tie or exhibited other indicia of having “pretended” to have been a student there. One is reminded of Anthony Powell’s description of an exchange he once had with Waugh on this subject. Powell was discussing with Waugh his friendship with Ronald Knox, who was Powell’s neighbor in Mells, Somerset. In his memoirs, Powell wrote: 

I never saw much of Ronnie Knox, but always found him a man of delightful humour. Waugh had written that [Knox] could be chilly if surroundings were in the least unsympathetic. I said I had never noticed that. ‘You were at Eton and Balliol,’ Waugh replied. Anthony Powell, The Strangers All Are Gone (London 1982), p. 40.

Knox, like Powell, was an Old Etonian whose Oxford college was Balliol.

NOTE (14 April 2016): There is more on this topic in a recent Guardian story by Michael White about the troubles of David Cameron (tax shelters) and Archbishop Justin Welby (paternity), both Old Etonians:

What the two stories have in common, apart from eye-popping posh detail, is the glimpse they provide into how the other half – by which I mean the 5% – live, even in tough (for them) times. It is a world where there is always sensible tax-planning to be done and houses to be passed on efficiently to the next generation, sometimes in an atmosphere of sexual licence that might not be tolerated on a rough council estate. We know all this from fiction. The Etonian Anthony Powell’s mid-century novels and the dark comedies of Evelyn Waugh, more biting by virtue of his envious outsider status, tell the whole story, as newspaper readers were denied the real-life versions at the time by press lords’ censorship.

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BBC to Rebroadcast Waugh Radio Classics

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 4 has posted schedules for next week in which two Waugh radio programs will be rebroadcast. The first is the 7 episode series of Sword of Honour from 2013. This was dramatized by Jeremy Front, whose adaptation won the Best Dramatisation Award in 2014 from the Drama Audio Awards. Episode 1 will be transmitted on BBC 4 Radio Extra in its Classic Serial series beginning on Monday, 11 April at 1000 (repeating at 1500 and 0300). Episode 2 will appear on Tuesday 12 April at the same times.  They will be posted on BBC iPlayer shortly after broadcast and may be monitored without geographic restriction. Schedules for subsequent episodes have not yet been announced. BBC last year broadcast Front’s adaptation of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall.

The other program is an audio rebroadcast of Waugh’s 1960 Face To Face TV interview by John Freeman. This will appear 12 April on BBC Radio 4 Extra at 0630, 1330, 2030 and 0130 on and will be on iPlayer shortly after the first broadcast.

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Photo of Waugh’s 1947 U.S. Arrival Posted

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Getty Images has posted a photo of Evelyn Waugh arriving in the U.S. on 31 January 1947. He is disembarking from the S.S. America in New York City and is on his way to Los Angeles to negotiate the sale of the film rights to Brideshead Revisited. That effort was unsuccessful, but Waugh did collect enough material on the trip to write another bestselling novel. This was The Loved One (1948) which was made into a film in 1965. His wife Laura accompanied him on this trip but is not in the photo.

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