Black Sheets as Metaphor

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Straits Times has a story by its correspondent Corrie Tan about the teachers who introduced her to literature. One of them is Mr H who came to Singapore from England and taught her in Junior College. She meets him at a class reunion and talks with him about her school days:

“I still remember you telling us about black bedsheets in Decline And Fall,” I said, recalling Evelyn Waugh’s darkly comic social satire about British society that Mr H had dissected with us in class. “I don’t even know why I remember that specific metaphor”…

Late in the evening, as several of us were preparing to head home, a classmate asked Mr H if he would read us a passage from Decline And Fall, brandishing her well-thumbed book.

“What?!” he exclaimed. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

But he was grinning from ear to ear.

The black sheets appear in the opening scene of Decline and Fall as two college under officers are discussing the possible targets for attack by the members of the Bollinger Club who are gathering in the college quad. They expect that one chosen for harassment will be Partridge who “possesses a painting by Matisse or some such name [and has] black sheets on his bed.” Sure enough, later on as they assess the damage, they find that the clubmen “tore up Mr Partridge’s sheets, and threw the Matisse into his water jug” (Everyman, 1993, 2012, pp. 4-5). I wonder what the metaphor was about?

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Daily Mail Prints Excerpt From New Waugh Biography

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has printed an excerpt from the new biography of Evelyn Waugh which will be published in the U.K. in July. This is by Philip Eade and will be issued by Weidenfeld and Nicolson who also published Waugh’s Diaries and Letters. The excerpt tells the now familiar story of Waugh’s homosexual relationship with Alistair Graham at Oxford and of its contribution to  Brideshead Revisited and the relationship of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte. One unfamiliar passage may be new material. This relates to the suggestion of rival affections for Alistair expressed by Harold Acton:

Among the queue of admirers was Evelyn’s friend Harold Acton, the writer and scholar, who gushed in a letter jointly addressed to Evelyn and Alastair: ‘I had erections to think of you two angels in an atmosphere salinated with choir boys and sacerdotal sensuality!’
He later described Alastair as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty and said that he had ‘the same sort of features as Evelyn liked in girls – the pixie look’.

Also new may be the suggestion that Evelyn tried to renew his relationship with Alistair after Evelyn’s first marriage broke up:

He was assumed … to have resumed his love affair with Alastair, a suspicion scarcely allayed by Evelyn’s tendency to camp it up and put on a high-pitched voice whenever they were together, which was most of the time.
The following year he went to stay at Barford when he was trying to start his third novel, Black Mischief, but found it impossible to work with Alastair around.
‘We just sit about sipping sloe gin all day,’ he complained to a friend. ‘I am reading all the case histories in Havelock Ellis [a doctor who studied human sexuality] and frigging too much.’
The last appearance of Evelyn’s name in the Barford visitors’ book was in 1932, by which time he had stayed there on more than 20 occasions. 

Barford is the home of Alistair Graham’s family in Warwickshire. Thanks to Dave Lull for emailing a link to this article.

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Guardian Announces Reopening of Scoop Venue

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent Guardian article about Ethiopian jazz includes the announcement that the Taitu Hotel in Addis Ababa, described by Waugh in his writings as the favored venue of the press corps and damaged by fire last year, will reopen later this year:

A dark, dank jazz den attached to the Hotel Taitu playing gigs seven nights a week, Jazzamba is currently closed due to a fire last year but is expected to reopen later in 2016…For food, fill up on any of a variety of Wat (spiced stews) served on the much-revered injera (sourdough pancake) at the cheap and cheerful Taitu Hotel – Addis’s oldest, and the setting of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop. 

As noted in an earlier post (12 January 2015) relating to the fire, “this was the hotel where the press corps stayed in great discomfort, four to a room. It was thinly disguised as the ‘Splendide’ in Waugh in Abyssinia and inspired the Hotel Liberty in Scoop. This was not, however, … where Waugh himself stayed while covering the war for the Daily Mail. As explained in William Deedes’ 2003 memoir, At War With Waugh (pp. 24-25), Waugh chose to stay in a less crowded billet. When Deedes arrived in Addis in 1935 to cover the looming war for the Morning Post, Waugh suggested that Deedes join him there. This was the Deutches Haus, called in Waugh’s novel “Pension Dressler.”

The Guardian’s article includes a photo of the Taitu Hotel looking in pretty good nick, but it doesn’t say when it was taken.

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Writer Follows Waugh’s Career Advice

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Lisa Hilton, who has just just written a new novel, is interviewed in today’s Belfast Telegraph. The book is entitled Maestra and is described an erotic thriller: 

It tells the story of Judith, a working-class young beauty trying to make a career in the high-end London art world, who embarks on something of a murderous rampage around Europe. She also happens to like sex, a fact that is graphically portrayed in the book.

Hilton, citing Evelyn Waugh’s advice, began her writing career with a biography. Her subject was: 

Louis XIV’s mistress Athenais de Montespan, Athenais: The real queen of France. “Evelyn Waugh said if you want to be a novelist you should write biographies first because it’s the best discipline and training. So I had a go at writing my first biography. And that’s kind of the only job I’ve ever had really.” She writes at home at the kitchen table, in the London home she lives in with her now ten-year-old daughter.

Hilton is also the author of The Horror of Love: Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in London and Paris as well as other biographies and historical novels. The Wavian advice to which she is referring is probably that in an article he wrote in 1929 (“Careers for our Sons: Literature: The Way to Fame,” reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 49):

The best sort of book to start with is biography. If you want to make a success of it choose as a subject some one very famous who has had plenty of books written about him quite recently…You will not make very much money by this first book,  but you will collect a whole list of kindly comments which your publisher will be able to print on the back of the wrapper of your next. This should be a novel, preferable a mildly shocking one.

Waugh was describing his own recently successful career track. At the time he wrote that article in 1929, he had in the previous year seen into print his first  book, a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in April 1928, followed in September by the mildly shocking (by then current standards) novel Decline and Fall. The inner flap of the novel’s dust jacket carried the following statement:

In the spring of this year, Mr. Evelyn Waugh’s first book, a critical biography of D.G. Rossetti, attracted the respectful attention of critics in this country and America, and won for him a prominent place among the youngest group of writers.

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Waugh and Arboretums

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Today’s Financial Times has a feature length article about John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843), the inventor of the arboretum. The first of this new type of garden was planted in Derby in 1840 and inspired similar designs in the U.S. at New York (Central Park) and Boston (Arnold Arboretum). Waugh offered an ironic comment on Loudon’s invention in his war trilogy:

Some arboreta made so little concession to nature and aesthetics they were not much more than museums to dendrology. And there is more than a hint of Victorian pomposity about the word arboretum, although perhaps not quite as pompous as arbortorium, which is how the superb collection at Westonbirt in Gloucestershire was known until the 1950s. Evelyn Waugh caught this mood in Unconditional Surrender (1961): “He faced, across a half an acre of lawn, what the previous owners had referred to as their ‘arboretum’. Ludovic thought of it merely as ‘the trees’.”

The quote is from the scene in Book 2, Ch. 5 at the parachute training camp as Ludovic looks out the windows of his rooms that were specially chosen to avoid any view of the platforms and other military apparatus of the facility he is meant to be commanding (Little, Brown, 2012, p. 114).

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Brideshead and Yorkshire in the News

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Several photos from the rehearsals of the stage production of Brideshead Revisited have been posted on What’s On Stage. The photos include members of the cast, indentifying their parts, as well as of the director, Damian Cruden, and playwright, Bryony Lavery. The play opens later this month at the Theatre Royal in York. See earlier posts.

A book just reviewed in the Washington Post includes an article on Brideshead.  This is The Books that Changed My Life, edited by Bethanne Patrick. It is a collection of articles by writers and other artists and celebrities. Although not mentioned in the Post review, the article by novelist and fashionista Victoria “Plum” Sykes explains how her life was affected by Brideshead Revisited. She is the grand daughter of Waugh’s biographer and friend Christopher Sykes and now lives in New York City. The Sykes family estate is at Sledmere, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, just down the road from Castle Howard, the setting for two film adaptations of Brideshead. 

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Exhibition of Waugh Film Memorabilia at Bridport

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Dorset Echo carries a story about a newly announced feature of the Bridport From Page to Screen film festival this weekend. See previous posts. This will relate to:

…Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One on Sunday 3rd. His grandson Alexander Waugh will be a special guest and he is bringing his private collection of memorabilia from his Grandfather’s collection, including the original posters and photographs from the film in the 1960’s. This will all be available to look through during the Film Buffs Brunch at 1pm on Sunday 3rd. Alexander Waugh will also be speaking to director Charles Sturridge about his grandfather’s love of film and Charles will be reflecting on his experiences of adapting Waugh’s work to film when he directed the famous version of Brideshead Revisited starring Jeremy Irons in the 1980 and Lawrence Olivier in the 1980’s.

In the same article, Ines Cavill writes:

I’m really looking forward to the talk after the screening [ The Loved One, Sunday 3rd, 2pm] when Charles will be in conversation with Evelyn Waugh’s grandson and family biographer, Alexander. It’s a rare opportunity to hear the inside story of adapting for screen the works of one of Britain’s greatest novelists.

 

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Saga Louts and BYPs

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s Spectator reports on the growing problem arising from the increase in the population of “Saga louts.” These are people in their 50-60s who have refused to grow up. They can frequently be observed misbehaving in pubs from which they are often turfed out. They populate rowdy rock festivals and recently have contributed to an increase in hooliganism and even crime. The Spectator’s reporter William Cook sees a link between this generation of geriatric of n’er-do-wells and the BYPs of the 1920’s:

This contrast between conscientious youth and shiftless middle age may seem a new phenomenon, but you don’t have to look too far back to see it’s happened several times before. The most recent instance was between the wars. The 1920s generation partied hard and scorned conventional morality. The 1930s generation were determined to make the world a better place. This Kulturkampf is epitomised in the contrasting novels of Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell. Today’s Saga louts are a lot like Waugh’s jaded hedonists, albeit with worse table manners and much worse dress sense.

So how do you spot a Saga lout? What are their distinguishing features, their breeding habits, their mating calls? Well, drink is a big part of it, but you won’t find them in the golf club or the saloon bar. They congregate in those gloomy modern pubs designed to look like nightclubs, where they try (and fail) to blend in with punters half their age. They smoke dope and discuss the relative merits of its various varieties in mind-numbing detail. They dress in the same jeans (Levi 501s) and trainers (Adidas Sambas) they wore in their teens. They sport (saggy) piercings and (faded) tattoos. In a crowded bar, in a bad light, they could almost pass for trendy twenty- or thirtysomethings. Only when you come closer is the bald and wrinkled truth revealed…They’re those baby boomers, born between 1945 and 1965, who turned 18 between 1963 (when sexual intercourse began, according to Larkin) and 1983 (when Saga magazine first appeared)… 

This summer, while the Saga louts make their annual pilgrimages to Glastonbury and the Isle of Wight to pay homage to wizened old rockers like Iggy Pop and Status Quo (all nearly 70), my son will be on an Outward Bound course, before knuckling down to his science A-levels. Me? I’ll be down the pub, knocking back snakebites and moaning about the good old days when teenagers could afford to be rebellious, and grown-ups were grown up enough to give them something to rebel against.

Cook might have mentioned that when Waugh’s “jaded hedonists” got to their 50-60s, they had to deal with WWII and the Cold War, something the Saga louts seem to have missed.

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More News on Waugh Graves

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times newspaper today carries a story by David Sanderson about the problem arising from the siting of the Waugh family graves. As noted in a previous post, the graves are situated in a ha-ha which stands between Waugh’s former house and Combe Florey churchyard. The ha-ha was designed to provide an unobstructed view of the church and village from the house. It uses a steep drop off in elevation from the house (at the top of a hill) to the churchyard (at the bottom) which is held back by a vertical wall. This keeps livestock from wandering from the estate into the churchyard without the need for an ugly fence that would interrupt the view. The family retained ownership of the burial plot at the top of the ha-ha when the house was sold seven years ago. But to access the plot, one must walk across the churchyard, pass through a gate and walk over private land. According to Sanderson:

The ha-ha, is deteriorating badly. Waugh’s family has offered to finance the reconstruction of its wall and the creation of steps in the ha-ha to allow access to the burial plot. They have been unable to act, however, because nobody knows who owns the ha-ha and therefore who should grant permission. “It is bureaucratic obtuseness,” Septimus Waugh, the novelist’s son said. “We want to set steps so that people can come and look at the grave.”

If the ha-ha is owned by the church, a “faculty” would be required from the Bishop of Bath and Wells for any alterations. If it belongs to the landowner, Lady Teresa, planning permission would be needed from Taunton council because it is part of the curtilage of a Grade I listed church. Planning officials have told Mr Waugh that the family may or may not need the council’s permission. Lady Teresa did try in 2008 to repair the wall, Mr Waugh said, but a church warden chased her builder off the grounds. One planning official told Mr Waugh that he did not think that the author would want to be part of the churchyard given that he was Catholic. “But most Catholics are buried in Anglican churchyards,” Mr Waugh said.

“One of the reasons it has become a problem is the degree that Evelyn Waugh scholars come across from the United States.” He said the home’s new owners were willing to let people walk through their land but “quite reasonably” objected to being abused for not tending to the land beyond the grave.  Mr Waugh said that one reason the authorities had failed to work out who owns the ha-ha was the “popular perception that our father was a monster, [a point he refutes]. The church did not respond to requests for a comment.

Why not ask both the Bishop and the Council to grant permission “to the extent necessary” and get on with it? Thanks to our friends in Kilburn for sending a copy of the article.

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BBC to Mark Waugh Anniversary

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 3 has announced a broadcast next week to mark the 50th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s death on Easter Day in 1966 . This will be a 45 minute episode of their programme Free Thinking. Here are the details:

Matthew Sweet is joined by two writers who are long term admirers – Adam Mars-Jones and Bryony Lavery whose new stage adaptation of Brideshead Revisited opens later this month and by Waugh’s grandson and editor, Alexander Waugh.

The programme will be transmitted on 5 April 2016 at 22:00 UK time. It will be posted on the internet shortly thereafter and can be replayed on BBC iPlayer, including at points outside the UK.

 

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