Early October Roundup

Posted on October 6, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has posted an article by Christopher Howse on “bed rotting”.  Here’s the opening section:

One of my favourite books, Illustrations of Madness by John Haslam (1810), tells of how the unfortunate James Tilly Matthews, plagued by a gang operating an Air Loom from a cellar under London Wall, was subjected to the miseries of lobster-cracking, knee-nailing, bomb-bursting and apoplexy-working-with-the-nutmeg-grater.

He did not mention bed rotting, which on TikTok has attracted 310 million views, though not mine. It must be dull viewing, for bed rotting is nothing more than a jokey name for staying in bed all day not doing much more than watching television and fiddling with a telephone. It’s very popular with people aged 12 to 27 (Gen Z) who feel burnt out, on account of lockdown and parental expectations.

It sounds to me very much like the life of bright young things in Evelyn Waugh, except that they were a trifle more gregarious. In Black Mischief, Sonia and Alastair are in bed during the day, each with a telephone and a goblet of black velvet, a backgammon board between them, and some other people in the room playing the gramophone or trying out Sonia’s make-up. It is clearly very boring. Then the dog makes a mess on the bed…

–Australian writer Nick Bhasin recently had an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he pines for the days when comic novels were widely available. The article opens with this:

I was at an event recently, talking about my novel. It’s a “comic novel” – as in, one that is meant to be funny. When someone asked me what it was similar to, I paused.

There are a lot of influences that inspired the humour but I couldn’t think of one book that would helpfully answer the question. “Is it like A Confederacy of Dunces?” someone else asked. “That’s the only book anyone mentions when people talk about funny novels. No one knows the names of any others.”

No one is writing stories designed to make people laugh any more.Credit: Aresna Villanueva

Could that be true? I wondered…

After ruminating about the relative lack if comic novels currently on offer, Bhasin recalls the 20th century golden age of that genre:

…As part of my research for my book, other than mining the depths of my soul for truth and justice, I looked into other comic novels, new and classic, especially satire. I came across a lot of the usual suspects – famous books I had already been familiar with, often because they had been adapted into movies or TV shows.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

Humour is never taken seriously, even though it is literally the only thing that matters in this short, brutal existence.

Certain authors consistently came up as writers of comic fiction: Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Nathanael West, Nora Ephron, Carl Hiaasen, Evelyn Waugh, Mark Twain, Steve Toltz, Marian Keyes. (A lot of white dudes on these lists, I know. But that’s a conversation for another time.)…

Bhasin’s comic novel is entitled I Look Forward To Hearing From You.  Here’s his description:

…my intention was to write a story designed to make people laugh. Now, the laughs are derived from very dark, very uncomfortable circumstances while exploring “serious” themes like grief, racism, male body dysmorphia and mental illness. But that’s what makes me laugh. I don’t know what to tell you.

So I filled my book with as many jokes as possible. It’s a satire of early 2000s Hollywood, so I made up hundreds of movie and TV-show titles, working very hard to balance the comedy with the sadness. But to me, if it makes people laugh, that’s the bigger achievement. As Judd Apatow has said, “It’s not hard to make people cry. Kill a dog.”…

It is currently for sale in Australia. Thanks to Nick for sharing this.

–A website called BookishBay.com has posted an entry on the life and writing of Evelyn Waugh.  It is very tidy and nicely presented but adds little to Waugh studies. Here’s an item from the opening summary:

Waugh’s contributions to literature remain impactful, with his works continuing to be studied for their wit, social commentary, and stylistic complexity.

The complete posting can be consulted here. No author is mentioned. Somehow, a contribution by AI is suspected.

–One of our readers has forwarded a YouTube posting relating to the recent death of Alexander Waugh. This consists of a well-produced 3-minute compilation of video and audio clips of Alexander relating to his work with the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Here’s the link. Many thanks to Dave Lull for sending it.

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Roundup: Decline in Standards and Increase in Price

Posted on September 29, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times has published a sort of interview with William Boyd on the occasion of the publication of his latest novel, Gabriel’s Moon. Here’s an excerpt:

There is no point attempting to whitewash old attitudes. Trying to tidy up the bad behaviour of novelists of the past is misguided and fundamentally a waste of time. But you can certainly alert people that opinions expressed in these books are not opinions we have in polite society today. Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is full of racism. But you can’t possibly go back to Scoop, remove all that and represent it as Evelyn Waugh’s novel. You have to take the rough with the smooth.

The US edition will be published in December. The entire article can be viewed at this link.

—The Guardian has posted an article bemoaning the writing style of the Evening Standard’s new art critics and comparing them unfavorably with their predecessor, the late Brian Sewell:

Who knew the late art critic Brian Sewell was such a tediously cliched writer? Especially since some of the dead verbiage in the London Standard’s AI version of Sewell reviewing Van Gogh at the National Gallery has become common currency only since his death at 84 in 2015.

Give him credit, he had a voice. And it was a posh voice. Evidently the chatbot used by the Standard needs to be fed a lot more novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, some Latin perhaps, and a mouthful of plums before it can begin to resemble the public school-educated, Courtauld-trained Sewell, who started his career as the protege of the upper-class art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt…

I seem to be missing the point unless the Guardian thinks the new Standard’s art criticism comes out sounding like an AI production. Or can it be the case that it really is? Here’s a link.

—The Oldie has reposted on its blog an article from last October by A N Wilson in which he also pines for the superior literary criticism of the recent past. Here’s an excerpt:

..Merely to name Powell, Muggeridge and Orwell is to recall an era of literary and journalistic life which seems in every way more interesting than the present scene.

Horizon – between 1939 and 1950. The small-circulation journal was the first to publish Evelyn Waugh’s masterly account of American funerary customs, The Loved One.

Other contributors included AndrĂ© Gide, Rose Macaulay, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen, W H Auden and Kenneth Clark. BĂ©la BartĂłk wrote a piece for it, as did Barbara Hepworth. Distinguished as periodicals might have been in our day, we’ve surely not seen anything to match this?…

The entire article can be read here.

–The Catholic World Report has a story about the re-issuance of the writings of Waugh’s friend, the priest, Dom Hubert van Zeller. Here’s an excerpt:

…Another fascinating aspect of Van Zeller’s life is his close friendships with other much better known Catholic authors, most notably the spiritual writer, scholar, and Bible translator Fr Ronald Knox; the Dominican author Fr Bede Jerret; and the novelist Evelyn Waugh, whose Brideshead Revisited has become a Catholic classic and features in many courses on modern literature.

Zeller recounts Waugh’s reaction to his trip to America: asking Waugh what he thought of their mutual American acquaintance, who was to guide Zeller on his journey, Waugh responded: “[He’s] American. He can’t help it.” Of the same trip, Knox said, “You’ll hate it. They have meals out of heated cardboard boxes
” But van Zeller loved America, and his ministry there gave him a new energy—which was fortunate, since he had a rather melancholic personality. Into the 1970s and ‘80s, van Zeller continued to write, and obtained permission (as many English priests at the time did) to continue celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass.

–Henley booksellers Jonkers have on offer the copy of Waugh’s pre-publication gift version of Brideshead Revisited that belonged to Diana Cooper. Here’s an excerpt from the offer:

First edition. One of fifty pre-publication copies, printed for the author for distribution amongst his friends. Original blue wrappers with yapp edges, with printed labels to upper cover, title label printed in blue, limitation label printed in red. Author’s presentation copy inscribed for Lady Diana Cooper, “For Diana / Too little, but I hope not too late / with love from / Evelyn.” A fine copy, exceptionally so, with the wrappers clean and bright and only the most trivial creasing and wear to the oversized parts. Endpapers foxed as often, but otherwise very clean. A superb copy…

The asking price is £95,000.00!  I think that may be a record.  Does any one recall a higher one?

 

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Autumnal Equinox Roundup

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The political-economic online journal Compact has an article entitled “The End of the Churchill Myth.” This is by Nathan Pinkoski who describes how the principles on which Churchill based his war and postwar foreign policy (as adopted, amended and applied by the US) are now being proven to have been myths. The article concludes with this reference to and quote from Waugh’s 1950s novel Sword of Honour, where Waugh foresees this result:

The greatest literary work addressing World War II is Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor, written during the 1950s. The trilogy offers a blunt analysis of Britain’s fate. Yet it bends toward a surprising spiritual denouement. Following the career of Guy Crouchback as he enlists to fight against totalitarianism, the series begins with Waugh’s familiar satire, excoriating the failures of the British leadership class. This satire takes a dark turn in the second novel. Rather than recount the war’s victories, Waugh devoted most of the novel to the humiliating British withdrawal from Crete in 1941. The theme of imperial decline is obvious, but Waugh ultimately offered a more profound lesson. As a passage toward the end of the trilogy intimates, Waugh repudiated the moral myths of the war and gestured in a different, redemptive direction.

‘Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians—not very many perhaps—who felt this. Were there none in England?’

‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’

Here is a link to the entire article.

—The Observer quotes Waugh in an article by Anne McAvoy relating to the recent ownership sale of The Spectator magazine. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“Expect the unexpected” is the bland but pointed advice given by the evasive editor of the Daily Beast to the bemused William Boot, accidental protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s deathless Fleet Street satire, Scoop. This has turned out to be durable counsel when observing the ins and outs of newspaper proprietors: much that is solid has a tendency to melt.

So the Spectator (for which I worked in the late 1990s under the Telegraph Group ownership of Conrad Black) had a long period under the sway of the Barclay family, which has come to a debt-laden crashing close. The weekly magazine has been sold for a reassuringly high £100m to the hedge funder Sir Paul Marshall, after an Abu Dhabi-backed bid to buy it collapsed amid concerns that state-backed entities should not own UK news outlets.

The Daily Telegraph and its Sunday sister have attracted last-round bids from Marshall, a former Lib Dem and later Brexiter (though not at the same time) who has clearly decided that he is prepared to empty considerable pockets into UK media via his backing for the rightwing GB News channel and eclectic UnHerd website. In a donkey derby of remaining bidders, the recipe is ideological with a major injection of investment or private equity cash…

–Waugh’s novel on newspapers also features in a recent story in Financial Times. This is a report by Tim Hayward on a visit to the restaurant Sweetings, located in the City near the newspaper’s offices. It actually took two visits to compile the report. Here’s how the article opens:

This week, I thought I ought to do a business lunch or two. I’m a freelancer, so my relationship with my paper resembles that of William Boot and the Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Occasionally, I put on a suit and take the train down from The Country, to dine, bewildered, with my editor. So I asked her, “Where do you chaps go for your long, champagne-lubricated lunches?” and she seemed a little baffled. My image of the modern fourth estate may be askew. Nevertheless, she suggested Sweetings…

The visits resulted in a favorable and entertaining report which can be read at this link. You may have to register to read the story.

–A recent issue of The Oldie carries a story by Pierre Waugh relating to his experience as a pallbearer at the recent funeral service of his uncle, Alexander Waugh. This is entitled “The Absurd Waugh Family: Pierre Waugh salutes his uncle Alexander (1963-2024), grandfather Auberon and great grandfather Evelyn–and their war on seriousness.” Among other things, he tells us that his uncle Alexander was known within the family as “Pedro”. Pierre Waugh is a post graduate student at Durham University who is currently finishing his MA dissertation on the works of Aldous Huxley.  You may be able to read the entire article at this link, Thanks to reader David Lull for sending the link.

–Film-maker Luca Guadagnino was recently interviewed by the entertainment industry newspaper Deadline. The report on the interview by Baz Bamigboye opens with this:

Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) hopes to revive his dream project to make a mammoth 10-episode television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

Two years ago the director had assembled an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes, Andrew Garfield and Rooney Mara, to lead a 10-part prestige TV version of Waugh’s brilliant study of British upper-class decadence.

But the HBO and BBC production was shelved because of its cost. “It’s a very sad story,” Guadagnino told Deadline late on Sunday night, following a screening at the Telluride Film Festival of his latest film …

For those who are interested, the report includes further details about Guadagnino’s plans for the project. Here’s a link.

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Mid-September Roundup

Posted on September 14, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–A new biography of Claud Cockburn, friend and cousin of Evelyn Waugh has been published. This is entitled Believe in Nothing Until It is Officially Denied and is reviewed on the British political website conservativehome.com. The book by Patrick Cockburn is reviewed by Andrew Gimson . Here is an excerpt:

…[Claud] Cockburn’s youngest son, Patrick, has now written an excellent account of him, supplying much new or buried information about his two marriages, his long relationship with Jean Ross, on whom Christopher Isherwood modelled Sally Bowles, the files kept on him by MI5 etc.

This account also reminds us of things we perhaps knew but had forgotten. Soon after Cockburn arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1922, he was called on by his cousin Evelyn Waugh (they were great-grandsons of Lord Cockburn, celebrated Scottish judge). Waugh later wrote:

“I found a tall, spectacled young man with an air of Budapest rather than Berkhamsted [in Hertfordshire, where Cockburn was at school]. His father had been there for the last two years on diplomatic business and Claud was already captivated by the absurdities of Central Europe.”

Waugh’s letters and diaries confirm that for the next five years, he and Claud were constantly in each other’s company. We may think of Waugh as the highest of High Tories, but in his early novels he was an anarchist who set off a series of tremendous explosions under various ludicrous members of the Establishment…

A full copy of the review can be read at this link.

—The Times has posted an article by Ed Potton entitled “The 10 best Kristin Scott Thomas screen roles.” Heading the list is this one:

1. A Handful of Dust (1988)
After starting her career in bizarre style opposite Prince in Under the Cherry Moon, Scott Thomas delivered her breakthrough performance in this largely forgotten Evelyn Waugh adaptation. Her bored, restless Brenda Last won her the Evening Standard award for best newcomer.

Here’s a link to the entire list.

–The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Danny Heitman entitled “‘Scoop’: Evelyn Waugh’s Front-Page Parody”. Here’s the opening paragraph:

For those of us who practice it, journalism can be a comfortable perch for lambasting everyone else. But in 1938, British novelist and occasional newspaperman Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) turned the dagger deliciously inward with “Scoop,” a raucous lampoon of his fellow ink-stained wretches. Decades later, it remains a memorable insider takedown of the news business and its indulgence of rash certitude….

The remainder of the article is behind a paywall, but for those who have a subscription, here’s a link.

–We can now confirm that Oxford University Press has released in North America its edition of The Loved One in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. The book is available for sale from OUP and booksellers such as Amazon.com within normal shipping and delivery parameters. Why there was confusion about the release date (at least on the part of Amazon.com) is unexplained.

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Roundup: From Aston Clinton to Holkham Hall

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan Mclaren has expanded his discussion of Waugh’s school teaching career at Aston Clinton based on his newly available materials. The discussion has been posted on Duncan’s website. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to give you some idea of what he has added:

…On the face of it, the Welsh School, was uppermost in his mind. The physical layout of Llanabba Castle owes much to Arnold House, Denbighshire. Also, Mrs Roberts pub, where Paul Pennyfeather spent much of his non-teaching time, is an actual pub that can still be found in the streets of Llanddullas, and I drank there myself in 2011 in the footsteps of Evelyn Waugh circa 1925. Also, the extraordinary character Grimes is based entirely on a man called Young, who arrived at Arnold House at the beginning of Waugh’s second term there.

However, I hope to show that Waugh’s four terms at Aston Clinton were also important to the art of Decline and Fall. During School sports day, the arrival in a limousine of Margot Beste-Chetwynde was based on something that happened at Aston Clinton, located as it is between London and Oxford. Such exotic visitors were simply not going to turn up when Evelyn was exiled to the middle of nowhere, as Evelyn would have thought of his Welsh existence.

The photo album newly made available by Pat Grinling’s son and Sue Willis, nearly 100 years after it was put together, is going to be integral to my attempts to show how teaching at Aston Clinton contributed to Waugh’s artistry. The good news for you, dear reader, is that you don’t need to buy into my thesis. There is every chance that you will be just as intrigued and enchanted as I have been by the Pat Grinling photographs and the way they complement Evelyn Waugh’s vivid and outrageous diary entries of the time…

Here is a link to the additional material which includes at least one newly identified photograph of Evelyn Waugh. Many thanks again to Duncan for passing this along.

–The New Statesman has published a review of a new book entitled Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite. The book is by Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves and is reviewed by Nicholas Harris. It follows the lives of Francis Charteris and his descendants and is intended to illustrate the adaptation and survival of the British upper class. Here’s the conclusion of the review:

…The public schools and establishment universities might still be producing this elite, but only because they’ve adapted to the new age. Eton Rifles is out, replaced by advanced Stem and kindergarten computer science. And it’s fitting that elite British education is an export industry now, subsidised in particular by the scions of an East Asian super-rich. What they aim to produce is not so much a domestic ruling class but an international elite, fit to fill the rosters of global business. Any descendant of Francis Charteris might pass through the same institutional furnaces as their ancestor, but they’d be smelted and beaten into a very different alloy. These levelling trends are only set to continue. Most people admitted to Who’s Who are around 50. Who knows what the fintech elite of 2054 will list as their hobbies: Peloton and IQ testing?

Thanks to the propaganda of the period drama, our vision of our upper class is hopelessly anachronistic. The general public remains more familiar with marquises and under-butlers than it is with consultancy or corporate law. Amid such misconceptions, Born to Rule is an important attempt to take the measure of our new and evolved elite and… provides much-needed academic clarity.

Class has now returned to British politics, but class war is very difficult to wage…The modern elite doesn’t exhibit itself with old boys’ ties, let alone horse and carriage. It Ubers about London open-necked, free from political identification or scrutiny.

In Friedman and Reeves’s conclusion, they suggest several admirable policy decisions to loosen the stranglehold they identify. One (applying VAT to private-school fees) featured in Labour’s first King’s Speech. Others – reforming council tax, raising a wealth tax, a cap on private-school students attending Russell Group universities – likely exceed the political capital of this government. But beyond public policy, the achievement of this fascinating book should be to spark a broader reconsideration of our new ruling caste: no longer the seigneurial elite so beloved of Evelyn Waugh, but a successor class to Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe”.

I am not sure it is quite fair to say the the upper class were “beloved” by Waugh. Like Tom Wolfe did for his generation’s “masters of the universe”, Waugh satirized the upper classes as he knew them and was probably grateful to them for the material they provided him to inspire his writing.

–Several fashion websites have cited Waugh’s writings as an inspiration for a new men’s clothing line designed by Hedi Slimane. Here is a sample of the description:

There has been much talk about the return of Cool Britannia in recent months, between the Saltburn phenomenon and the Oasis reunion – but it was another aspect of English aesthetics that Hedi Slimane had in mind when he signed, filmed, and produced the new Celine SS25 collection, whose video-show was unexpectedly presented yesterday afternoon under the title The Bright Young. A single glance at college-style jackets, 1920s straw hats, and glimpses of young people lounging among green fields or rowing on a pond takes us back to Brideshead Revisited, a classic by Evelyn Waugh and one of the cornerstones of the most aristocratic queer English prose after that of Oscar Wilde. It is to Waugh, but to the book Vile Bodies, a kind of satire of the hedonistic England of the 1920s, that the epigraph accompanying the collection belongs. And Slimane has followed the self-imposed theme thoroughly: in the avenues of the stunning Holkham Hall in Norfolk, slender, very young dandy figures move as if they have just come from Eton with their uniforms still on, taking refuge in their family’s noble villa in a burst of high society signifiers, including heraldic crests. (Emphasis in original)

This is excerpted from a posting on NSS Magazine which is available here.

–The religious website WordsOnFire.com has a brief review by Dr Christopher Kaczor highly recommending Brideshead Revisited. After a brief description of the plot, the review concludes:

…These marital and familial conflicts come to a surprising conclusion at the culmination of the novel. More than one character is caught with “an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” I won’t spoil the ending. But have Kleenex handy.

 

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Labor Day Roundup

Posted on August 31, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

—Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington has announced a Fall schedule of literary podcasts and other activities. One of these features a four-hour discussion of Brideshead Revisited in two separate podcast episodes. Here is their description:

One of the most beloved and confounding works of 20th century British literature, Brideshead Revisited poses a unique challenge to today’s readers. Even the author himself, Evelyn Waugh, couldn’t decide whether the book was his masterpiece or a disaster. Is the book a nostalgic celebration of the aristocracy in decline or a poison-pen dissection of British classism? How does the book’s portrayal of the loving friendship between its two male protagonists come across read through a contemporary lens? The inspiration for a classic British miniseries as well as the recent instant cult classic film Saltburn, Brideshead Revisited won’t leave us alone. In this two-session course, we’ll dive into this lyrical and deeply affecting book together to unlock its mysteries.

Reading Schedule:

Session One: Please read the Prologue and Chapters 1-6

Session Two: Please read Chapter 7 to the end

Two Mondays: November 4 and 11 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. ET Online

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (9780316242103)

Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection titled The View from Stalin’s Head which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. He has also written three novels: Faith for Beginners, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, Nirvana is Here, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards, and Hotel Cuba, a finalist for the 2024 Bridge Book Awards. In 2023, he was awarded by Lambda Literary with the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Tablet, O, the Oprah Magazine, and many others. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program.

Booking, fees and other details are available at this link.

–The New Statesman has a review of the final volume of the late Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life columns from The Spectator. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

One passes by the graveyard so often that sooner or later one falls into it, says the Russian proverb. Jeremy Clarke wrote the “Low Life” column in the Spectator from 2001 until his death from cancer, aged 66, in May 2023.

The column had been created by Jeffrey Bernard, recruited to the Spectator in the 1970s by the then editor, Alexander Chancellor, who admired Bernard’s writing in the New Statesman and devised “Low Life” to complement the “High Life” offerings of the gossip columnist, Taki. Bernard, an alcoholic, diabetic and perpetual chancer, excelled in exquisitely poised accounts of his chaotic days, making what would be painful to encounter – his editor described him as a nightmare; his agent called him a little shit – hilarious to read.

That feat seemed to be wholly individual, yet the column didn’t perish with Bernard in 1997. There have been two great exponents of such derelict dandyism since: Nicholas Lezard, in “Down and Out” in this magazine, and Jeremy Clarke.

Jeffrey Bernard was a fallen nob. Jeremy Clarke, lower middle class, raised in Southend, left school with two O-levels and supported West Ham. His dedication to drink, drugs, sex, partying and general mayhem, resulting in a number of convictions, was supplemented by work as a bin man and an assistant in a psychiatric hospital. Yet he was profoundly literary, his great inspiration being early Evelyn Waugh, above all the relished anarchy of Decline and Fall…

The book is reviewed by David Sexton. Here’s a link.

–Frank McNally writing in the Irish Times ruminates on the correct adjectival form for the surname of the poet James Clarence Mangan. Here’s an excerpt:

…I suspect the previously standard adjective for Mangan, by the usual rule of these things, was “Manganesque”. But Manganese is so much better it will surely stick now. Besides which, I’m not sure there are any rules for such words, beyond what sounds right.

There is of course a Wikipedia page listing all the known eponymous adjectives. They typically involve just adding “an” (eg Wildean), “ic” (Homeric), “ist” (Stalinist) or “ite” (Thatcherite) to the end of the name.

But as with verbs, there are also a few irregular ones, mostly (it seems) to do with the inability of the dominant English accent to pronounce certain sounds.

At least I used to assume that was why the literary style of Evelyn Waugh – whose surname many English people would have us believe sounds exactly the same as “war” – has become known as “Wavian”.

Or similarly, that we must use “Shavian” to describe things pertaining to our own George Bernard Shaw. But then again, it seems it was Shaw who started this habit, and that it’s based on a Latin joke.

As Nicholas Grene explained in a letter to this page some years ago, Shaw told his early biographer Hesketh Pearson that the adjective arose when somebody found a medieval manuscript by another Shaw with the marginal comment: “Sic Shavius, sed inepte” (“thus Shaw, but badly”).

—The Spectator has a review of a new book entitled Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans. The review is by Amanda Craig and opens with this:

Books and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster?

All this might seem familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Hannah Rothschild and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. The mad relations living under one giant leaky roof, the shabby furnishings, brown tap water and discomforts of being cash-poor, snobbish and servantless are what render the subjects of class and property entertaining. But in the hands of Evans, one of our finest writers of literary entertainment, this all becomes more than an exercise in nostalgia. The second world war formed the background of her previous novels, including Their Finest (which was successfully filmed in 2016) and V for Victory. Here she shows how the war’s disruption to ordinary lives prepared the ground for everything in today’s Britain, from the welfare state to feminism. Soldiers are being demobbed and the age of Attlee has replaced that of Churchill, signalling change that will continue into our own time…

The full review is available here.

 

 

 

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Dog Days Roundup

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–BBC has announced the rebroadcast of a three-hour adaptation of Waugh’s wartime novel Put Out More Flags. This will air on BBC Radio 4 Extra over three successive days at 15:00p British time starting on Tuesday, 3 September 2024. Here’s the detail for the first episode:

As the Second World War looms, louche, upper class loafer Basil Seal considers his role in the unfolding events.

Evelyn Waugh’s sixth novel, first published in 1942.

The satire reprises characters found in previous novels such as ‘Decline and Fall’ and ‘Vile Bodies’.

Three-part dramatisation by Denys Hawthorne.

The part of Basil Seal will be played by actor Simon Cadell. Basil had appeared most prominently in Waugh’s third novel Black Mischief (1932). This adaptation was first broadcast in September 1990. A link to all three episodes is available here.

–Waugh’s war trilogy features in the opening paragraph of an article in the religious journal Crisis Magazine:

In the first volume of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, Guy Crouchback learns from a chance conversation that because he has a valid sacramental marriage with a wife who divorced him, civilly married and then divorced others, and has recently been having casual sex with nobody knows how many men, it is morally permissible for him, as her husband, to himself sleep with her. With that knowledge, he meets with her in a hotel room and is at the point of succeeding when his plans are derailed by a chance telephone call…

The article by James Baresel then goes on in some detail to consider the religious implications of Guy’s resumption of marital relations with his wife. Here’s a link. An audio version is also available at the same link.

–An online religious-political journal leads an article with a quote from Waugh’s novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe. The website is called The Imaginative Conservative. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh’s gently satirical Scott-King’s Modern  Europe follows the declining career of a classics teacher at Granchester, a fictional English public school. Granchester is “entirely respectable” but in need of a bit of modernizing, at least in the opinion of its pragmatic headmaster, who is attuned to consumer demands. The story ends with a poignant conversation between Scott-King and the headmaster:

“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”

“I thought that would be about the number.”

“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”

“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”

“I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn’t conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?”

“Oh yes. Often.”

“What I was going to suggest was—I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?”

“No, headmaster.”

“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”

And there ends the story of Scott-King’s misadventures in the modern world. Any teacher who has endured a similar conversation sympathizes instinctively with poor Scott-King. His dignified but stubborn resistance to the wickedness of making students fit for the modern world speaks to the heart of teachers who, like Scott-King, take the long view. It is to these teachers, then—and to like-minded students, parents, and administrators—that this anthology of classic writings on education is addressed…

The novella is included in a collection of writings entitled The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being. This is edited by Richard Gamble who also wrote the article which may be read in its entirety at this link.

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New York Times Promotes “The Loved One”

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s 1948 novella The Loved One seems to be getting a lot of press attention nowadays. Earlier this week the new CWEW edition was reviewed in the TLS, and now the book is recommended in the New York Times. This is in a column entitled “Read Like the Wind” and written by Joumana Khatib. Here’s a copy:

You probably know Waugh for his novel “Brideshead Revisited,” or if you’re journalism-adjacent you’ve possibly read “Scoop,” or if you really have excellent taste you might cherish “Vile Bodies” as much as I do.

“The Loved One” isn’t as well known, but this novella is quintessential Waugh: outrageously funny, a satire that arrives like a javelin hurled from left field. It is also very, very weird.

The story follows a community of fairly ineffectual British expats in Los Angeles, and centers on a love triangle involving a funeral home aesthetician, her mortician boss and a rival embalmer — of animals.

I’m as skittish as the next maladjusted mortal about death, corpses, embalming fluids, coffins. And yet! I was howling on every other page. The premise is utterly absurd, sure, and Waugh packs a lot in: a lovelorn man called Mr. Joyboy, a pair of newspaper reporters writing a pseudonymous advice column, a madcap cover-up. (The 1965 film version — which, however improbably, features Liberace — deserves a mention in the DSM.)

But it’s the dialogue that sends the story into the extreme. Take this, as a sample:

“An open casket is all right for dogs and cats,” the animal embalmer (who is also a hack poet) explains to his love interest; but parrots “look absurd with the head on a pillow. 
 Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”

God, I’m laughing just retyping that.

Read if you like: Spy magazine, estate sales, “Fawlty Towers.”
Available from: A good library or used-book store, or online at Project Gutenberg Canada (where the book is in the public domain).

If  you click on the link to Project Gutenberg you will indeed find a full copy of the book. It is a reprint of the Chapman & Hall 1969 printing [2nd printing of the 1965 edition]. This contains the Preface written by Waugh in 1964 and several edits he made to the text. While you should be able to read it on your computer, you may not be able to download or print it unless you are connected to the internet in Canada where it is out of copyright.

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TLS Reviews The Loved One

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Jonathan Keates has reviewed the OUP’s new Collected Works edition of Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One. This appears in the current edition of the Times Literary Supplement (16 August 2024). The article is entitled: “Slumber Room, then Paradise: Evelyn Waugh’s pitiless vision of a Los Angeles cemetery.” Here are some excerpts:

When The Loved One first appeared, in a single issue of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine early in 1948, there was a distinct feeling of relief among many readers at its author’s return to form. Brideshead Revisited, the book’s predecessor, had been greeted with critical respect, and its sales were gratifying enough, yet the prospect of an accomplished and original satirist earnestly weighing the values of Britain’s Catholic aristocracy against their dreaded antithesis in “the world of Hooper” had furrowed quite a few brows. Time magazine, for example, found “the typical Waugh mood, bright, pardlike and impermeable, clouded by a sweat of nostalgic and religious dither”. With his new novel, Waugh’s admirers, claimed the Daily Telegraph, “who feared that he had lost his powers to be shocking may from all accounts take heart”.

Exactly how Waugh aimed to shock with The Loved One is not so obvious. The novel can be viewed on one level as a morsel of anthropology, fascinating us with the otherness of American manners, speech habits and preoccupations. There is a continuous sense of the challenge issued to our credulity by the writer himself, lured to Hollywood in 1947 by a potential contract for a screen version of Brideshead. While this project headed swiftly nowhere, Waugh trained his gaze on the Forest Lawn cemetery, its mortuary techniques and funeral practices, all part, as he saw it, of Hollywood’s unending struggle to fend off the more prosaic and pitiless actualities involved in the business of dying. Whereas the Old World saw interment and memorials as inherently admonitory, a moral injunction to the living, for the New “the body does not decay. It lives on, more chic than ever before; the soul goes straight from the Slumber Room to Paradise, where it enjoys an endless infancy”.

Talk of “the Slumber Room” forms part of a specialist vocabulary in whose acquisition Waugh clearly revelled. “I am entirely obsessed by Forest Lawn”, he told his agent. “I go there three or four times a week, am on easy terms with the chief embalmer. It is the only thing in California that is not a copy of something else.” …

In a wide-ranging introduction to this new edition Adrian Poole presents The Loved One as a work of greater substance than is often acknowledged. Dramatizing a clash of moral priorities, American vs European, while giving vent to its author’s spleen amid the cynical barbarism of the postwar world, the book shocked several early reviewers by its lack of anything like compassion. For Waugh the act of becoming a Catholic, it seemed, did not guarantee any renewed impulse of Christian charity. Desmond McCarthy was surely right in identifying “a misanthropic tinge more reminiscent of Swift” and seeing the story’s dimension of macabre farce as simply a carapace for its inherently tragic vision of life.

Nothing better emphasizes this aspect than Waugh’s treatment of his antihero, Dennis Barlow. Superficially another of the satirist’s Candide-like innocents, cast adrift amid predatory sophisticates, an avatar of Paul Pennyfeather, Adam Symes or William Boot, he is in fact a heartless, calculating opportunist whose insolent lying trashes the marriage prospects of Aimee Thanatogenos, the mortician Mr Joyboy’s prize pupil, driving her to suicide. The plot here offers a skilful variant on one of Saki’s most acrid short stories, “The Jesting of Arlington Stringham”, in which the jaundiced wife of a dim MP, puzzled by his suddenly acquired reputation as a wit, takes an overdose on discovering he has acquired a mistress with a turn for tart epigrams.

In this newest edition, The Loved One forms part of Oxford University Press’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, receiving in the process a treatment reminiscent of the Arden Shakespeare. There is an exhaustive survey of manuscript development and textual variants, while sections on reception history and the novel’s broader contemporary resonances are included, as is the original set of illustrations by Stuart Boyle. In case we should still think of the whole achievement as mere mischief-making born of boredom and frustration, the last of the editor’s contextual notes reminds us of Evelyn Waugh’s own statement, made in 1946: “I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as normality. That is what makes story-telling such an absorbing task, the attempt to reduce to order the anarchic raw materials of life. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own”. [Additional excerpts from the text of the article were added: 17 August 2024.]

The book was released in the UK in April, but publication in the US has been delayed several times. It was originally scheduled for US release in July but is currently rescheduled by Amazon.com for US delivery in February 2025, with no discussion as to why US publication has been delayed. Could it be the case that demand has so far  exceeded the initial print run that a new printing is required? Given that the book is selling for £130.00 in the UK, that somehow seems unlikely. A more likely explanation is that the shipping container in which the US copies were transported has been misdelivered.

 

 

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New Waugh Photos Posted

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has posted three newly-available photos of Evelyn Waugh. These were taken, probably in 1926, by one of his senior students at Aston Clinton School whom he had befriended. The photographer’s name was Patrick Grinling, and he is mentioned in Waugh’s Diaries (p. 255). The photos are of a piece with the well-known photo of Waugh on a motorcycle that appears in some of the biographies and is reproduced on the cover of Paula Byrnes’ 2009 book Mad World. That photo can also now be attributed to Grinling whereas it previously was sourced from the “Waugh Archives.” Duncan also provides an ample and enjoyable background description about the source of the photos and how they fit into Waugh’s then life as a schoolmaster. The text and photos are available at this link. Thanks once again to Duncan for sharing this new discovery with us.

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