Boris, Winston, Brendan, Rex and Waugh

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent Spectator blog, Nick Cohen takes Boris Johnson to task for his adoption of an exit EU strategy. Cohen sees this as nothing more than a cynical move by Boris to take over leadership of the Conservative Party. He distinguishes Boris from his hero Winston Churchill because, while both are mavericks, Churchill had causes he believed in and fought for or against  (imperialism, appeasement). But, according to Cohen:

Churchill meant what he said, and was prepared to suffer when his beliefs were out of fashion. Johnson believes in the advance of Johnson. That’s all there is. There’s nothing else.

Cohen identifies a previous politician that Boris does resemble (but doesn’t hero worship). This is Brendan Bracken (Churchill’s protege), and this brings Waugh into the story:

Bracken too was careless with the facts. He invented stories about his childhood to con his way into high society. He was an energetic manipulator of the press in both Churchill’s interest and his own. (Whenever he gave dinner parties he instructed his butler to make up a story that the prime minister was on the phone and announce the news loudly to his guests). Evelyn Waugh couldn’t stand him, and in Brideshead turned Bracken into Rex Mottram, who marries the wealthy but naïve Julia because ‘he wanted a woman; he wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her cheap; that was what it amounted to’. Inevitably, he betrays her, within in months of the honeymoon.

‘Rex isn’t anybody at all,’ Julia concludes of Mottram/Bracken. ‘He just doesn’t exist.’ 

A fine line, which applies as well to Johnson after this week’s performance.

Waugh didn’t much like Winston Churchill either, but saw fit, for the most part,  to leave Winston out of his satirical writings, although he could be rather caustic in making references to his son, Randolph. The quotes from Brideshead Revisited appear in the London, 1945 edition, pp. 155, 240. In a later edition Waugh changed “cheap” to “at his own price” (Penguin, 1962, p. 169).

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Basil Seal Rides Yet Again

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

D.J. Taylor in the Independent announces low expectations for the BBC’s plans to revive its 1970s sit. com. Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. The plan is to have the 74 year old Michael Crawford reprise his role as youthfully naive Frank Spencer among a company of other superannuated actors from the original series. This will be a one-off production aired as part of the Sports Relief program. Taylor thinks the BBC is making the same mistake that he believes befell Evelyn Waugh near the end of his career:

When Anthony Powell, having finished his 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1976), resisted the siren voices urging him to create further opportunities for his characters he probably had at the back of his mind his friend Evelyn Waugh, whose Basil Seal Rides Again (1963) is a largely unsuccessful attempt to transfer the rakish ne’er do well of his 1930s novels Black Mischief and Scoop into the age of Harold Macmillan.

When Powell received his copy of Basil Seal Rides Again, he thanked Waugh rather cooly and said that Basil was not his favorite among Waugh’s characters. Powell also noted that he looked forward to Basil’s being killed in painful circumstances, so perhaps he thought that Rides Again was not Waugh’s last word on the subject (Letter dated 16 October 1963, BL, Waugh Papers). While it is true that Basil was not as outrageously ornery as he had been in his earlier incarnations, he was still a bit of a lad in Rides Again, albeit somewhat mellower. For the record, Basil did not reappear in Scoop, but he did show up as a character in Put Out More Flags and Work Suspended.

 

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Guardian Imagines Literary Mash-up of Brideshead Revisited

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent issue of the Guardian, literary critic John Mullan has re-imagined several mash-ups of literary classics after the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which made it to the best seller list in the U.S. and has now been adapted for the screen. That particular example of the genre has 

the Bennet girls prepare themselves for encounters with the undead just as enthusiastically as they prepare themselves for husband-hunting in the original. When Elizabeth walks across the fields to visit her sister, she is assaulted by a gaggle of zombies and survives only by dint of her skills in martial arts.

Among other mash-ups, Mullan re-imagines Trollope’s Barsetshire novels blended with Game of Thrones (“The Barsetshire Fantasy”) and “Jane Eyre’s Fifty Shades of Grey.” In the case of Waugh, Mullan mixes Brideshead Revisited with a ghost story:

Brideshead Re-exorcised
Charles Ryder revisits the big empty house where he once stayed and remembers its horrors. The Marchmains seem charming, but are pursuing converts to their dark desires. Poor Sebastian, no wonder he is on the booze when his ancestral home is a portal to hell. Upstairs is creepy nanny, chef d’orchestre of this supernaturally corrupted household. Don’t trust Mr Samgrass, the priest taken on as Sebastian’s guide, for he is stooge of Satan. Charles falls for willowy Julia Flyte, the only family member who seems unpossessed, but can even she escape the demons?

But why stop there? A character unnamed by Waugh, Rex Mottram’s first wife, can now be upgraded and given the name Rebecca. She tragically commits suicide when she learns of Rex’s marriage to Julia, but her spirit descends on Brideshead Castle…etc.

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David Cameron Learns from Lord Copper

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Blogger Roger Mac Ginty, who is also Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Manchester, compares press coverage of the recent UK-EU negotiations to a Waugh novel:

There was something very scripted about David Cameron’s EU negotiations on Thursday and Friday of last week…The whole thing sounded suspiciously scripted… 

This issue of the pre-planned media opportunity masquerading as reality is by no means new. Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop (1938) features Lord Copper, a London newspaper magnate telling the novice war reporter William Boot how an ongoing African war is to be reported in his newspaper, The Beast:

“I never hamper my correspondents in any way. What the British public wants first, last and all the time is News. Remember that the Patriots are in the right and are going to win. The Beast stands with them four-square. But they must win quickly. The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side and a colourful entry into the capital. That is The Beast policy for the war” (Scoop 1954: 42).

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Jacob Rees-Mogg Brideshead Fan, Up to a Point

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail recently published a profile of Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. He is a leading Euro-skeptic and has been called The Honourable Member for the 18th Century as well as a back bench Bertie Wooster. He might also be named as the Party’s “Chief Toff” if there were such a position. He represents the Somerset North East constituency which includes Midsomer Norton, ancestral home of Evelyn Waugh’s family. According to the Mail: 

There’s much about Rees-Mogg that’s predictable: the manners, the grace, the full complement of newspapers on the fireside Ottoman. He drives around the high-hedged narrow roads of Somerset in a 1936 Bentley, kids spilling around in the back without seatbelts (‘you don’t have to fuss about with car seats which are impossible, fiddly and annoying’), and reads international treaties in his spare time (‘So much easier now they’re all online’). Other things are unexpected — I’m amazed that he hasn’t read the ultimate young fogey novel, Brideshead Revisited, but he did watch it on television, even collecting coupons from a newspaper and sending off for the box-set.

It is perhaps foregiveable that he hasn’t read Brideshead in the original, but some one needs to have a word with him about the seatbelts. It seems unlikely that he would have had his vintage car refitted with airbags.

 

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Charles Ryder as Character Model

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Charles Ryder from Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited appears as a character model in two recent articles. In a Roman Catholic newsblog (Catholicphilly.com) he is compared to the hero of a recent Hollywood religious film called Risen, based on the origins of Christianity;

Wisely, writer-director Kevin Reynolds begins by giving us a hard-bitten, cynical protagonist — a figure as little disposed to believe in miracles as his worldly minded modern counterpart, Charles Ryder, the religion-averse narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s classic 1945 novel “Brideshead Revisited.” Where Ryder, an artist, is impeded by his pleasure-loving sophistication, Clavius (Joseph Fiennes), the Roman tribune at the heart of “Risen,” is too battle-weary and blood-soaked to entertain any easy hopes for the world. So the execution of Jesus (Cliff Curtis), which he witnesses almost accidentally, makes little impression on him.

It takes actual evidence of the Resurrection to convert Clavius, just as Charles must witness for himself Lord Marchmain’s sign of the cross before converting. 

Charles also gets a mention in the Buenos Aires Herald‘s  review of a recent novel based on the plot of The Great Gatsby. The new novel, entitled Gorsky by Vesna Goldsworthy, is reset in London among the wealthy Russians now resident there. The narrator’s acceptance by the wealthy Londoners is compared to that of Charles by the Flytes: 

What is never clear is why the narrator, Nick, who has neither status nor wealth, is adopted by the rich, even after his services to them have ended, as companion and confidant — a kind of pet. It’s just a given fact (useful for the advancement of the narrative), precisely as happened with narrator Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

One could argue that Charles Ryder was more than a narrative advancement device in Brideshead, but then Nick Carraway in the original Gatsby wasn’t much more than that.

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Christopher Hitchens’ Last Words on Waugh

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest New English Review contains a review of the posthumous collection of Christopher Hitchens’ essays entitled, And yet… While there are no essays or reviews devoted to the subject of Evelyn Waugh, he does get a mention:

…one of the most enjoyable essays in the collection is a review of Edmund Wilson’s work. In discussing Wilson’s review of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One Hitchens the atheist gleefully notes:

“An American critic might have chosen to resent the easy shots that Waugh took at Los Angeles and ‘Whispering Glades’; Wilson contented himself with indulgently pointing out that Waugh’s church practiced a far more fantastic and ornamental denial of death than any Californian mortician.”

Hitchens suggests that “Wilson’s political material has dated” and takes him to task over his underestimation of the importance of Kafka, but concludes that Wilson has “come as close to anybody has to making the labor of criticism into art.”

Your correspondent was looking forward to the inclusion of Hitchens’ previously uncollected 2008 article from the Guardian on Brideshead Revisited  entitled “It’s all on account of the war.” It was, alas, not included but can still be viewed on the Guardian’s website and is worth a look. It was better than many of the already rather dated political articles published in what will probably be the last collection of Hitchens’ work.

COMMENT (23 April 2016): In a later review of Hitchens’ book in last week’s TLS, Geoffrey Wheatcroft also mentions the Guardian article but doesn’t remark that it has not found its way into any of Hitchens’ collected works:

…Hitchens suffered acutely from that nostalgie de la guerre which afflicted so many of our generation born in the years after 1945, who’d heard all about fighting and dying, but had never experienced it. He once wrote very perceptively about Brideshead Revisited, and the memory of the First World War which overshadows Evelyn Waugh’s novel. War overshadowed Hitchens himself, the son of a man who had taken part in the sinking of the Scharnhorst in December 1943: “a more solid day’s work than any I have ever done”, as Hitchens revealingly said. Some delayed response may explain the way in which he became one of those cooing Vietnam doves of the 1960s who turned into such squawking hawks in the 1990s and beyond.

 

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Waugh’s Religion

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In the current issue of the U.K. paper The Catholic Herald, an article (“Seduced by the ‘Devil’ Hitler” by Francis Phillips) opens with a familiar quote from Evelyn Waugh:

There is a well-known story about the novelist Evelyn Waugh. He was once very rude and his hostess remonstrated: “How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!” Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” We remember this riposte both because it is redolent of Waugh’s mordant humour and because it reminds us that, without grace, we would all “hardly be a human being”…But it is the shocked reaction to Waugh’s behaviour that interests me. His hostess had assumed a higher standard of behaviour on the part of Catholics than for others.

The source of Waugh’s quote is apocryphal, and not something from his writings. It is reported to have been made by him to Nancy Mitford in Paris after he had been particularly rude to a guest (an unnamed young French intellectual) she had invited to dinner to meet him.  It was recorded by Christopher Sykes who claims he was told by Nancy Mitford (Sykes, A Biography of Evelyn Waugh, Penguin, 1977, pp. 448-49). Another biographer, Selina Hastings (London, 1994, pp. 505, 679), quotes a slightly different version from a letter of Nancy Mitford to Pamela Berry, dated 17 May 1950:

So I had Evelyn from Friday morning to Monday & still love him though at one point I felt obliged to ask how he reconciles being so horrible with being a Christian. He replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible (difficult) & anyway would have committed suicide years ago…He met my publisher, a charming middle class Frenchman, & was so dreadful to him I had to apologize. (The Letters of Nancy Mitford, Charlotte Mosley, ed., London, 1993, pp. 256-57).

Of the two versions, the letter written by Nancy Mitford herself more or less contemporaneously with the remark, would appear to be the more accurate. It is, however, the Sykes version, based only on hearsay and apparently reduced to writing more than 20 years after the event, that has engraved itself into the journalistic canon.

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Waugh and the Winter Break

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

One of the bloggers on the New Criterion magazine became so depressed by the New York weather he looked for books describing adventures in warmer climes:

With that in mind, I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh’s riotous A Tourist in Africa, which details a late-1950s jaunt down and around the African continent. On the first page, Waugh “declare[s] smugly that I am at the time of my life when I have to winter abroad, but in truth I reached that age thirty years ago.” As a man of similar age to the young-fogey Waugh, I can’t help but agree.

Thanks to David Lull for this reference to what must be one of Waugh’s least read and seldom cited works.

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Waugh and the Country House Revival

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent article in Spear’s magazine by its editor-in-chief and founder William Cash deals with several subjects, including the revival of the country house. The magazine is devoted to asset/investment management and the good life and has been described as a cross between Forbes and Vanity Fair. In the appropriately-named Cash’s view, Waugh (or more particularly his novel Brideshead Revisited) played a key role in saving the country house:

Evelyn Waugh liked to describe the English country house as our nation’s greatest contribution to Western civilisation. But it nearly didn’t survive as an art form. A … little-noticed anniversary in 2015 was the 40th of the ‘Destruction of the Country House, 1875-1975’ exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The show is a rare example of how an art exhibition can change the political mood.

Following the V&A show, public and government appetite for saving our great heritage improved. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, with the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, combined with the ‘Treasure Houses of Britain’ exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, opened with a gala ball attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales, that the idea of the English country house was reborn and fêted again.

That may overstate somewhat the importance Waugh attributed to the country house. Cash goes on, however, to describe a recently increased interest in reviving country houses in response to favourable government tax policy.

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