Waugh Novel Adapted for New BBC2 TV Series

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

To mark the 50th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s death, the BBC has announced the production of a new three-part TV adaptation of his first novel Decline and Fall. The series will be adapted by James Wood who also wrote the scripts for the popular TV series Rev. According to the website British Comedy Guide :

Decline And Fall is described by the BBC as the author’s “first, most perfect novel”…The BBC explains: “[Paul Pennyfeather’s] unfair expulsion from Oxford kick-starts a disastrous series of events, wherein he is by turn a naive teacher, a celebrity bridegroom, a wanted fugitive, and an international (and unintentional) white slave-trader – while always being, indubitably – a victim of comic misfortune”…The BBC describes the three part series as “dazzling” and “anarchic, stylish and hilarious.” The series is being made by Tiger Aspect and Cave Bear Productions, and was commissioned Shane Allen, Charlotte Moore and Chris Sussman to mark 50 years since Waugh’s death.

An earlier film adaptation  of the novel by Ivan Foxwell was released as Decline and Fall of a Birdwatcher (1968) with somewhat disapointing results. Leo McKern’s portrayal of Capt. Grimes makes it worth a look however. BBC Radio4 produced a successful adaptation of the novel by Jeremy Front only last year. See earlier post.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Anniversaries, Decline and Fall, Oxford, Television | Tagged , | Comments Off on Waugh Novel Adapted for New BBC2 TV Series

Brideshead Urged for Post Downton Depression

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Press reports are appearing that recognize the need for something to replace the void now left by the termination of the Downton Abbey TV series. The Huffington Post in its Off the Shelf column contains an article by Kerry Fiallo recommending a dose of Brideshead Revisited (in either written or DVD format). Here’s an excerpt: 

A beautifully written novel, it is Waugh’s most introspective and personal work; like Charles and his best friend, Sebastian, Waugh struggled with alcoholism, class prejudice, religion, and his own complicated sexuality. It is also one of the most pro-Catholic texts I’ve ever read that also features openly gay characters, infidelity, divorce, and an agnostic narrator who battles against his lover’s staunch Catholic family, themselves adrift in an overwhelmingly Protestant country.

An earlier Off the Shelf column listed 9 other books, including Downton Tabby, which as you may have guessed is about aristocats.

The Toronto Star, on the other hand, devotes a column exclusively to DVD and streaming choices of films or TV series based on interwar novels as Downton replacements. Brideshead is among the recommendations: 

Brideshead Revisited (1981): Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud popped by to add class to this adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel that pulls off the miraculous feat of turning a thesis on Roman Catholicism into an engrossing soap opera.

Others on the Star’s list include Upstairs, Downstairs, A Room with a View and The Remains of the Day (1993)

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Humo(u)r, Newspapers, Television | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Brideshead Urged for Post Downton Depression

Driberg’s Wedding

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Express opens its weekend TV review column with a quote from Waugh:

WHEN the novelist Evelyn Waugh received an invitation to the wedding of the notorious philandering MP Tom Driberg, he declined to go. “I expect the church will be struck by lightning,” he explained.

The quote is offered in a review of the final episode of the current BBC TV series Call the Midwife and further discussion along that line will be avoided so as not to reveal the ending. The quote itself seems to be taken from the biography of Tom Driberg by Francis Wheen (p. 249) but is somewhat out of context. Waugh reportedly declined the invitation to the wedding because he would be abroad and was, indeed, in France at the time of the wedding, 30 June 1951. Waugh wrote, according to Wheen, “I will think of you intently on the day and pray that the church is not struck by lightning.” Waugh’s concern of such a lightning strike would have arisen not from Driberg’s philandering but, more likely, from his open homosexuality and Communism. The quoted letter is not included in Waugh’s collected Letters, but the collection does contain (p. 352) a letter to Driberg dated 21 July 1951 referring to a wedding present and commenting on press reports and gossip of the wedding.

Share
Posted in Letters, Newspapers, Television Programs | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Driberg’s Wedding

Alexei Sayle Names Sword of Honour

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Comedian and author Alexei Sayle names Waugh’s Sword of Honour as the book that has been most important to him. The selection appears in yesterday’s Glasgow Herald: 

Name: Alexei Sayle

Latest Book: Thatcher Stole My Trousers

A Book That Made Me: The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh.

I always loved Evelyn Waugh from the first time I read Decline and Fall even though he was a right-wing alcoholic who hated the working class. The Sword of Honour Trilogy though is his masterpiece, a trio of books relating the wartime experiences of Guy Crouchback, priggish and diffident officer in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Blissfully funny and irredeemably tragic, the finest evocation of the wasteful and perverted nature of warfare. If I ever went on Celebrity Mastermind (which I never will) my specialist subject would be the Sword of Honour trilogy.

Share
Posted in Decline and Fall, Sword of Honour | Tagged , | Comments Off on Alexei Sayle Names Sword of Honour

Waugh Gender Misperception as Good Career Move

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Independent has published a report from its correspondent at the Bath Lterature Festival, Katy Guest. When learning of Time’s recent mistake re Waugh’s gender, Guest wondered if the perception of Waugh as a female writer might be a good career move.  Women writers apparently shift more books but win fewer awards and less critical praise. The magazine’s recent error made her 

wonder how Evelyn’s books would be reviewed and marketed if she had written them now. In 1928, Decline and Fall was lauded as a viciously funny social satire; but would the same novel by Mrs Waugh be read as semi-autobiographical flimflam about a wedding? A Handful of Dust: a condemnation of the futility of humanist philosophy, or a thinly disguised roman à clef? Vile Bodies was a dark view of a decadent, doomed generation, but today’s Evelyn would have had her novel forced into pink covers, renamed Pretty Young Things and marketed as a romcom.

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Decline and Fall, Festivals, Humo(u)r, Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh Gender Misperception as Good Career Move

Larry Kramer Lists Waugh Novel

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Playwright and AIDS awareness activist Larry Kramer has named Handful of Dust as one of his 10 favorite books. The list is in the New York Times “T” magazine and reflects the 10 books Kramer woud select to take with him to a desert island. Here’s his explanation for this selection:

“A Handful of Dust,” Evelyn Waugh

Waugh, along with P.G. Wodehouse, was one the greatest users of the English language. Both men just loved words and how to use them to their unusually best advantage. Anyone trying to master the English language would do well to study either one. Any of Waugh’s novels is impressive, but this one may be the best.

Other novels on the list include Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Alice Munro’s The Progress of Love and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (Scott Moncrieff, translation). 

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust | Tagged | Comments Off on Larry Kramer Lists Waugh Novel

Arcadian Doubts

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the magazine of Oriel College, Oxford (The Poor Print) has an article that opens with a passage from Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall:

‘You see, it wasn’t the ordinary sort of Doubt about Cain’s wife or the Old Testament miracles or the consecration of Archbishop Parker. I’d been taught how to explain all those while I was at college. No, it was something deeper than all that. I couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all.’

Doubt. That the was reason Mr. Prendergast gave for leaving the comfortable life of a parish priest in Worthing for the life of a master in a beastly North Wales school…

The author of the article (Fergus Higgins) returns to these thoughts as he awaits the funeral service of a young friend. In the church:

… another Waugh novel registered in my thoughts. This time his magnum opus: Brideshead Revisited. Waugh entitled the first chapter of the book ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ – ‘Even in Arcadia I am’. That is to say, even in the most idealised situation, death will always be present. The injustice that, in the Arcadia of his youth, this promising young man had met death, with the possibility of his future cut short before it could ever be fully realised, struck me.

His doubts then coalesce into remembrance of a poem (“Friday Morning”) by poet-songwriter Sydney Carter (1915-2004)  on the same topic:

You can blame it on to Adam,
You can blame it on to Eve,
You can blame it on the apple,
but that I can’t believe.
It was God that made the Devil,
And the woman and the man,
And there wouldn’t be an apple,
If it wasn’t in the plan.

It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me,
I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree.

The article is headed by the reproduction of a 17th century painting. This is by Nicholas Poussin and is called “Et in Arcadia ego.” Thanks to David Lull for forwarding this artice.  

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Oxford | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Arcadian Doubts

Barchester Revisited

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist and critic Philip Hensher in today’s Daily Telegraph previews a new TV series adapted by Julian Fellowes based on a novel by Anthony Trollope. This is Doctor Thorne, the third novel in the Barchester Chronicles, which begins a three-part broadcast Sunday in the UK. In his article, Hensher contrasts the Victorians’ views of class distinctions, as evidenced in Trollope’s works, with those of today’s Englishmen, as exemplified by Julian Fellowes and Evelyn Waugh. According to Hensher, although Trollope wrote during a period of rising wealth from trade and industry, he identified a person’s class as “a thing determined by birth.” Today, on the other hand, “social class would increasingly be seen as revealed not by birth or parentage but by intricately observed behavior.” Hensher offers one example, in the person of a character from Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, where “the nouveau riche Rex Mottram reveals his social class and is roundly condemned for drinking brandy out of too large a glass.” (Penguin, p. 171) 

Hensher goes on to compare the Victorian industrial age, in which Trollope wrote, to 1940s and 1950s, both periods of great social mobility. It was the latter period

that produced Waugh’s baroque studies of aristocratic behaviour. as well as Nancy Mitford’s U and Non-U, which taught a generation not to say “pardon” or “settee”. The eighties were inspired by a famous dramatisation of Brideshead Revisited, the Sloane Ranger Handbook, and Jilly Cooper’s book Class, which among other observations taught us thet Tchaikovsky and Grieg were lower-middle-class composers. It is the conviction that external behaviour marks social class that distinguishes Trollope’s Doctor Thorne from Fellowes’.

The Fellowes adaptation of Doctor Thorne begins Sunday (7 March)  on ITV at 9pm GMT and may thereafter be viewed online with itvPlayer. A proxy server will be needed to view it online outside the UK.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Television Programs | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Barchester Revisited

Brideshead and Rhodes Must Fall

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Timothy Garton Ash, Profesor of European Studies at Oxford and author of several books, mostly about Eastern Europe, has brought Brideshead Revisited into the debate about removing a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College. The demand for removal was led by an ad hoc group called Rhodes Must Fall. In his article in the Guardian, Prof. Ash says both the movement and Oriel have made a valid point: 

It was a brilliant stroke of student activism to identify that obscure statue as the target. Every newspaper could print photographs of the honeystone facade in which it stands, looking Brideshead Revisited-cliché Oxford. Dave Spart biffs Evelyn Waugh.

Daily Telegraph readers would predictably chunter and international media pick up the story. The statue was just big enough to command attention and just small enough for there to be a sporting chance of something being done. In the event, Oriel College first said it was going to have a big debate about it and then, reportedly under pressure from donors, abruptly declared the statue would not be taken down – thus giving the Rhodes Must Fall activists an even better story. I foresee a bright political future for these guys.

David Spart is a left-wing activist well known in Britain but does not seem to have been directly involved in the Rhodes Must Fall movement. In this case, he has become a metaphor rather than an actual rouser of Oxonian rabble. Prof. Ash goes on to support Oriel’s decision to leave the statue undisturbed but credits the students with forcing Oxford to face the issue of its historic support for imperialiam. The statue is in fact rather unimposing, as it is set into the High Street facade of Oriel well above street level and rather hard to notice unless one is intent on finding it. See photos and video in this Daily Telegraph article by Harry Mount, also supporting Oriel’s decision. 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Oxford | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Scoop

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The New York ticket website ZEALnyc has compared the new film Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to Waugh’s novel Scoop. The film is based on the memoir Taliban Shuffle by foreign correspondent Kim Baker and stars TV actress Tina Fey. I must tell you that the comparison is not a favorable one.

What really aches is that this female-driven comedy, written and directed for the screen by men, is part of the tradition perfected by the great Evelyn Waugh in his 1938 novel Scoop. In that, in a clever plot twist, a mild-mannered country garden columnist, William Boot, gets kicked to Africa as a war reporter. In the fictional East African state of Ishmaelia, Boot encounters the war correspondent crazy culture and trips over the conflict’s biggest scoop. What’s the difference between Waugh’s fish out of water novel and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? The former is hysterically funny and enduring; the latter delivers an occasional chuckle before disappearing to video.

Scoop is also cited in posting on a British football weblog where the blogger compares the owner and former manager of the Chelsea FC to Lord Copper of the Daily Beast because their employees seem to provide them advice only “up to a point.” The case in question is their failure to reach a settlement with the medical doctor Eva Carneiro who is seeking wrongful dismissal compensation arising from the incident where she went onto a live football pitch to aid an injured player:

It was Evelyn Waugh who caught the situation perfectly in the novel Scoop! in which the insanely rich and powerful Lord Copper (part Lord Northcliffe, part Lord Beaverbrook) runs the Daily Beast in order to fulfil his political and egomaniac dreams. Working as his underling is Mr Salter, who cannot ever disagree with anything his boss says, and Lord Copper is thus immune to the realities of the world…I rather saw Chelsea like this, only doubly so, because it has often struck me that both Mourinho and Abramovich, were completely beyond reality and surrounded by people who say “yes” or “up to a point.”

It should not go unmentioned that the blogger is an Arsenal supporter.

Share
Posted in Scoop | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Scoop