War, Peace and Brideshead

Posted on February 7, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, Harry Mount declares the recent BBC adaptation of War and Peace by Andrew Davies to be a failure. This is inevitable, he writes, when an attempt is made to compress a massive 19th Century novel, written originally in a foreign language, into 6 hours of English language television. See earlier post. For one reason, it just doesn’t sound right:

Artifice creeps in everywhere. So, in this new adaptation, the French characters speak English with a French accent. But the posh Russian characters speak English with public school English accents; the peasants speak with northern English accents. Think about it for a second and it’s ludicrous.

He might have mentioned that, to make matters worse, several of the Russian names and places are mispronounced, confusing even those who may be familiar wth the novel and its original language. For example, Drubetskoy is Tolstoy’s fictionalized version of the Russian name Trubetskoy, but the stress is on the final syllable. In the BBC version, it’s pronounced Drubetsky, with the stress on the second syllable, and is unrecognizable to anyone knowing Russian.

After explaining his disappointment with the Tolstoy adaptaton, Mount thinks back to one novel adaptation that was successful and explains why:

The 1981 Brideshead Revisited series was a triumph. But that was because it was given 11 one-hour episodes to cover a relatively short book: 326 pages in the Penguin Classic edition. No plot compression required.It helped that the actors, particularly Anthony Andrews and John Gielgud, mirrored Waugh’s characters immaculately. The acting in War and Peace was perfectly good – but no one jumped out of the screen as a Tolstoy original in the flesh.It helps, too, that Brideshead Revisited was written in English in 1945 – recently enough for nuances of language and plot to be recognisable to viewers 36 years later, with minimal exposition required.

Most crucially, the director, Charles Sturridge, ripped up John Mortimer’s script for Brideshead Revisited and rewrote it. Sturridge incorporated long, original tracts from the book, read out as a voiceover by Jeremy Irons’s Charles Ryder. The big screen version in 2008 was no good because the screenwriters badly rewrote Evelyn Waugh’s impeccable lines. One of those screenwriters, incidentally, was Andrew Davies on a rare off-day.

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Tony Last and Julian Assange

Posted on February 6, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A UK political blogger has posted a message comparing the plight of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the hero of Waugh’s novel Handful of Dust. This was T0ny Last, who:

… ends the book trapped as a prisoner in the Brazilian jungle – the plaything of an insane tribal chief – having to continually read Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” to the inhabitants…I thought of this in connection with Julian Assange. He was born in the wonderful town of Townsville in Queensland, Australia …, a place of sun, sea and sugar beet. By an oddly circuitous route, he has ended up surrounded by Harrod’s hampers in a room in Knightsbridge. He may not enjoy walks in the park but he can eat hand cut piccalilli on demerera shortbreads. There is a great deal of the ridiculous – and tragic – in the whole episode. The similarity with “Handful of Dust” breaks down in that the book’s main character, Tony Last, did not do anything to bring about his ridiculous situation. That cannot be said for Julian Assange.

It was not just Little Dorrit that Tony had to read to Mr. Todd, but the complete works of Dickens save a few that had been devoured by ants. Moreover, whether Mr. Todd was a “tribal chief” is questionable. He was a half caste whose father was a Christian missionary from Barbados and mother, a member of the local tribe. But despite these minor lapses, the blogger may be onto something here. Perhaps the Dickens Fellowship could send over a team to the Embassy of Ecuador to read nonstop from their master’s oeuvre until the hapless Ecuadoreans are relieved of their uninvited guest.

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Adapter of Brideshead Film Profiled in Independent

Posted on February 6, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Andrew Davies, probably the most prominent adapter of books into TV series is profiled in a recent issue of the Independent newspaper. This article is inspired by his latest script which adapted Tolstoy’s War and Peace into a 6-hour series on BBC that has been widely praised. The profile explains Davies’ methodology:

He is irreverent toward the original, fearless in his choices (he has no compunction about killing off characters or changing major plot points) and he always leavens the mix with plenty of humour. Give him a 19th-century novel and he is never distracted by the bonnets and top hats and general surfeit of period detail that can bog down lesser writers. His interests are more primal: [what] Davies has described as “sex, money and class”. Any Davies adaptation will foreground these three key elements. That is why they are so pleasurable for so many viewers. They have cultural integrity and snob appeal but they are sexed up too and often attract new audiences who wouldn’t go near the books. As the producer David M Thompson put it, he has a unique ability to “turn the apparently unadaptable into riveting television”.

 Davies has mostly worked on adaptations for TV where the ability to spread a novel over several episodes offers more scope that theatrical film or stage adaptations.

One film he did work on was Julian Jarrold’s underrated 2008 big-screen version of Brideshead Revisited. He shared a credit on the film with Jeremy Brock, who has perceptive remarks to make about Davies’s skill in adapting the Evelyn Waugh novel. “I had the privilege of collaborating close up with his script and was able to see first hand how confidently and economically he bore down on a massive novel, Brideshead being one of the great classics,” he recalled. “I saw how innovative he is and, crucially, how unreverent he is of a novel’s provenance. I think that is one of his great gifts – he is unafraid. All of us screenwriters when faced with a novel like Brideshead Revisited feel a slight tremor, particularly when that novel has become one of the iconic TV series of its time.”

Of course, one feature of the earlier TV adaptation that made is “iconic” is that it made very few changes in Waugh’s original story. It was, in turn, such changes by Davies and Brock that resulted in criticism of the later theatrical screen adaptation and that have caused it to be “underrated”.

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Waugh and “How to Spend It”

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The London Review of Books Blog has posted an article by Inigo Thomas on conspicuous consumption as evidenced by the magazine How to Spend It that accompanies weekend editions of the Financial Times. The blog article opens with a description of Waugh’s  appreciation of conspicuous consumption in his own days:

Evelyn Waugh was no enemy of money – he wrote for it, he made a lot of it – but monied society was his subject, and like F. Scott Fitzgerald he wrote about the careless, destructive people for whom spending money is a palliative for everything, the Toms and the Daisys, the Beavers and the Brenda Lasts…. In a piece about hotels in New York, Waugh explained there was no end to what you could spend your money on if you stay in one:

“These hotels provide many surprises. Every time you ring a bell a different servant answers it; every time you touch the door handle there is a flash of blue lightning and you get a violent electric shock; there are only two sorts of food – tepid and iced – and all indistinguishable in taste whatever the name on the menus. But the beds are comfortable, the telephone girls are polite, and you have only to sit in the foyer to be endlessly amused and excited. You need never leave the hotel. Trade conventions are arriving and dispersing at every moment. You can wander through bazaars and cafes in every style of decoration. You can have your hair dyed and all your teeth pulled out. If you happen to die you can be embalmed and lie there in state.”

The blog article goes on to describe levels of consumption as advertised in the FT‘s magazine that probably would exceed anything Waugh could have reasonably imagined in the 1940s, at least at his income bracket. Indeed, it seems unlikely that a novelist living today, even one as successful as Waugh, would be among the audience targeted by the advertising in thr FT.

The Waugh quote comes from an essay entitled “Honeymoon Travel”, published in a collection called The Book for Brides (1948); reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 343.  On his 1947 trip to New York (on the way to/from Los Angeles) he stayed at the Waldorf Astoria. Apparently, he was not entirely satisfied with that hotel, however, because on subsequent trips to New York, he stayed at The Plaza. Thanks to David Lull for calling this article to our attention.

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TES Cites Black Mischief

Posted on February 4, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest Times Educational Supplement cites Waugh’s Black Mischief in its “What Are You Reading? ” column. This has an entry by Peter Catterall, Reader in History at University of Westminister and author of several books on British history and politics, who writes:

This 1932 satire is replete with examples of well-meaning but culturally ill-informed attempts at modernisation of the kind still encountered in aid policy. Waugh satirises Westerners and non-Westerners alike with well-directed barbs, while implying that modernising political institutions without changing political culture simply gives unaccountable elites new means to power. Unfortunately the importance of political culture all too often remains overlooked.

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Julia Flyte and the Quality of Mercy

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

An article on the Christian concept of mercy in the recent opinion pages of the Times of Malta opens with a quote from Waugh:

In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited – that great Catholic novel on life, death, the fall from grace and the possibility of redemption – Julia Flyte says these words: “I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from His mercy… Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won’t quite despair of me in the end.”

After explaining Julia’s plight and her decision not to marry Charles Ryder, the article goes on to launch into an explanation of mercy in its broader religious context. The concept also has a secular dimension as reflected in these lines from The Merchant of Venice (Act 4, Scene 1):

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

There is not much of evidence of mercy in Charles’s response to Julia in the novel, but perhaps it is a beginning: “I don’t want to make it easier for you,…I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.” 

 

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TLS Posts 1935 Review of Waugh’s Edmund Campion

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

The curent issue of the TLS posts the 1935 review of Waugh’s Edmund Campion in its Then and Now column. The review is written by A.F. Pollard, Professor of History at University College London and specialist in the Tudor period. His best known book is his 1929 study of Wolsey. Waugh’s book was published in September 1935, and the review was in the TLS for 3 October of that year. Pollard’s article is not among those collected in the 1984 Critical Heritage volume, and this may be the first time it has been republished. The review is detailed and on the whole favorable:

His book, he says, is only “a short, popular life”, which “makes no pretension to be a work of scholarship”; but we might add that Mr. Waugh is pretty well read in the proper authorities, better versed than most writers on the period in its religious dialectic, and gifted with a facility of expression generally denied to scientific historians. Notwithstanding his zeal for Jesuit martyrs, he can recognize that “humble, eccentric men” could “die deliberately, without hope of release, for an idea” in Mary’s reign: and, while he is precluded from calling them martyrs, his recognition of their sincerity and devotion entitles him to the respect of others who cannot enjoy quite the same historical Weltanschauung.

The article goes on to catalogue several errors, mainly in Waugh’s descriptions of periods before and after Campion’s life. The current TLS also carries a review of the new scholarly biography of Campion by Gerard Kilroy which had been foreseen by Waugh in 1935. This review is available only with a subscription. See earlier post.

NOTE (3 February 2016): The full text of Peter Davidson’s TLS review has been made available by a kind friend. Davidson raises two points worth noting. Kilroy makes use (“with meditated, ironic mischief”) of Waugh’s title for the Oxford chapter of Brideshead Revisited (“Et in Arcadia Ego”) as the title for his own chapter describing Campion’s years spent in Prague, “the one period of peace and stability in Campion’s life.” In his conclusion Davidson compares Kilroy’s work with Waugh’s “eloquent if deeply partisan book” and notes that Waugh donated the proceeds of the book’s sale to Campion Hall where they were used “to finance Charles Mahoney’s exquisite murals in Edwin Lutyen’s Lady Chapel.” See earlier post.

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Evelyn Waugh, Conversation and Dean Swift

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

In a weblog entitled Anecdotal Evidence, blogger Patrick Kurp has posted an article based on Frances Donaldson’s 1967 memoir Evelyn Waugh: Diary of a Country Neighbor. It opens with this quote:

“When he came to our house or we took people to his for a drink, he would arrive in the room full of hope and curiosity and exert himself to amuse. But so often his jokes fell by the way, were not recognized as jokes. Sometimes there was a brutal truth behind them which in conversation shocked people, so that although they might find his books very funny they did not find him funny at all….But he had the faculty of pulverizing other people, reducing them to silence.”

The article goes on to discuss the importance Waugh attached to conversation. It concludes with a comparison to Jonathan Swift, supported by a quote from Waugh himself in a letter to Diana Cooper where he said that he “found many affinities with the temperament (not of course the talent)” of Swift. Although not mentioned in the article, this was written a few weeks after he wrote to Cooper that a couple he had visited in the West Indies found him boring after he had thought that he “was particularly bright” with them.  Mr. Wu and Mrs. Stitch, pp. 318, 320. He died less than a year later.

 

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New Book on Roman Catholic Culture Praises Waugh

Posted on January 30, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

A Roman Catholic newsblog OSV Newsweekly has posted a notice reviewing a recent book by Robert Royal. This is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Traditions in the Twentieth Century. According to the reviewer (Russell Shaw), Royal’s book:

…is an attempt — a remarkably successful one — to introduce (or reintroduce) Catholics to some recent high points of their own tradition. Distinguished figures like Maritain, Guardini, Chesterton, Belloc, Greene, Mauriac, Bernanos, and others receive close and illuminating attention. Royal’s leanings can be seen in the fact that he considers Evelyn Waugh perhaps the greatest English novelist of the past century and Waugh’s World War II trilogy “Sword of Honor” as the author’s finest work. Since these are judgments I share, I naturally applaud them.

The Amazon.com listing for the book does not provide any views of the text nor do the reviews and reader comments posted on Amazon mention any discussion of Waugh’s work, so it is difficult to judge the extent of the book’s consideration of Waugh as compared to the other writers mentioned.

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Two Essays Posted with Brideshead Themes

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Jeffrey Manley

Two essays have recently been posted which discuss themes developed by Waugh in Brideshead Revisited. The first is entitled “Is Downton Abbey the best we can do?” and is  posted on a political internet blog called opendemocracy.net, which is self described as nonpartisan. This compares Waugh’s version of the English class system as described in his novel to those in other works such as the novels of Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and the TV serials Downton Abbey and Dallas.

The second is entitled “Baptizing the Modern World” and is posted on a Roman Catholic theological blog called Patheos. This essay seeks to explain how Waugh proselytizes his faith by placing his

audience directly into dialogue with a sympathetic and typically modern character, making them perfect examples of the New Evangelization. Waugh does this exceptionally well in Brideshead Revisited. From Book One, he places his reader alive in the modern world, “Et In Arcadia Ego,” alongside protagonists Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte. Throughout the book, he weaves together a narrative of relationship and redemption enveloped in an ethos of hope.

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