Scoop with Squash Rackets

Posted on December 19, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A blogger on a squash rackets weblog is posting a serial retelling of Scoop in which the mistaken identity is wrapped up in squash trivia. Here’s a link to the first installment, entitled “Desert Places (Ă  la Evelyn Waugh).” In this case, the wrong Boot is sent to cover a story in an imaginary country on the Arabian Peninsula. The second installment has just been published.

The blogger’s identity is not otherwise revealed except by the name Peter Heywood. He may be a squash playing journalist who happens to be a Waugh fan. The project is explained in the first installment in these terms:

Evelyn Waugh‘s book ‘Scoop‘ was published in 1938. It is the supreme novel of the 20th-century English newspaper world, fast, light, entertaining and lethal. Remarkably, it’s a satire revered among successive generations of British hacks, the breed so mercilessly skewered in the book by Waugh, a one-time special correspondent for the Daily Mail…I’ve based John Boot’s club in London’s Pall Mall on the Royal Automobile Club whose premises have housed squash courts since the 1930s.

In another boost for Scoop, Ian Jack, veteran British journalist, gave this advice to a group of Indian journalism students, as reported by The Telegraph (Calcutta):

Q. What should be essential reading for anyone interested in journalism?

A. First, two novels — Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938) and Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn (1967). Both are comic novels, because newspapers I think are essentially comic, in the end. The third is a book by Janet Malcolm, the The New Yorker writer, called The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). It’s very interesting
 about the techniques of certain kinds of journalism and the moral quandaries posed by certain kinds of journalism…I’d also recommend people read an essay by George Orwell called Politics and the English Language (1946). It is about clarity and writing.

 

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Waugh’s Murals

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The Tablet carries an interesting story of how the murals in the Lady Chapel at Campion Hall, Oxford came to be painted. They were funded from the sale of Waugh’s biography, Edmund Campion, although Waugh himself had no role in choosing the artist. That decision was in the hands of Fr. Martin D’Arcy who, according to The Tablet

was on a mission to correct what he felt was an unfair perception of the Jesuits as lacking in artistic taste, and hoped the Lady Chapel murals might contribute.

D’Arcy started out well by taking expert advice and then acted on it by hiring Stanley Spencer. But Spencer turned out to be too eccentric to his liking, so he was sacked and replaced by Charles Mahoney. While The Tablet defends Mahoney’s craftsmanship, the choice seems ironically to have confirmed the point D’Arcy had set out to disprove. The Jesuits simply couldn’t abide the brilliant and original but eccentric and uncontrollable Spencer. They could have had murals by one of the most noteworthy 20th English painters and instead got something beautiful of its kind but of no particular artistic importance.

On the other hand, what Spencer painted could well have proved to be controversial. While Waugh was not apparently consulted in the matter, his views may well have coincided with those of D’Arcy. In his Diaries (pp.  746-47) he mentions visiting a 1955 exhibit of Spencer’s paintings at the Tate and found them

realistic and proletarian, with the remnants of nineteenth-century nonconformity such as Betjeman has popularized.

Not necessarily something Waugh disliked, but perhaps not the sort of thing that would fit comfortably on the walls of a Roman Catholic Chapel.

Thanks to Robert Murray Davis for sharing this article with us.

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David Bowie, Waugh Fan (more)

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In an earlier post, David Bowie’s appreciation of Waugh’s work was noted. An arts blogger (Dan Shepelavy) offers additional information. According to his article “Bright Young Things, Part 2: Bowie Edition,” Bowie’s album Aladdin Sane was inspired by his reading of Vile Bodies on a liner returning to Britain from his first U.S. tour in the 1970s. Shepelavy’s source is an article in the July 1973 edition of Circus Magazine:

David Bowie sat in an overstuffed armchair in his suite aboard the ship Ellinis, returning to London from his first triumphal tour of the States. His delicate brows knit in a look of perplexed recognition as he read Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” – a 40 year-old, futuristic novel about a society of “bright young things” whirling through lavish parties in outlandish costumes, dancing, gossiping and sipping champagne. Suddenly David lowered the book to his lap, picked up the spiral notebook and pen sitting on the small mahogany table at his side, and began to write the words to the title song of his new LP, Aladdin Sane…“The book dealt with London in the period just before a massive, imaginary war.” David would later confide, touching one finger, with its green-painted nail, lightly to his chin. “People were frivolous, decadent and silly. And suddenly they were plunged into this horrendous holocaust. They were totally out of place, still thinking about champagne and parties and dressing up. Somehow it seemed to me that they were like people today.”

Shepelavy’s article helpfully provides quotes from Bowie’s lyrics and links to the songs that illustrate the influence of the novel.

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Nicholas Lezard’s Waugh Moment

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In his column in this week’s New Statesman, journalist and critic Nicholas Lezard experiences a Waugh moment worthy of note. While looking for excuses to delay preparations for a trip to the U.S., he is introduced to his daughter’s new boyfriend. His first impulse is to look him in the eye and say, “Hi. I’m your worst nightmare.” But that is quickly rejected as having been suggested by a friend and likely to come across as second-hand. Then, he has this insight:

My daughter’s boyfriend’s first name is Old Testament, so even though he’s not actually Jewish, I toyed with the idea of pretending he was, for my own amusement, like a father in an Evelyn Waugh novel, and ostentatiously not serving him bacon at breakfast and asking him if he’d be going to shul on Saturday. The idea is to keep them on their toes, you see, and make them wonder where the theoretical and practical limits to the father’s insanity lie.

The father in the Waugh novel is of course that of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited (pp. 61-3). He tortures Charles’s unfortunate school friend Jorkins by insisting upon thinking him an American he has previously met. The joke gets funnier the longer Waugh stretches it out, and John Gielgud in the Granada TV film makes an absolute feast of it.

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Waugh’s Life of Ronald Knox Cited

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A nondenominational religious Blog has included a lengthy cite from Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox. This relates to Waugh’s discussion of Knox’s friendship with Guy Lawrence. The two became acquainted when Knox, then still an Anglican, was chaplain at Trinity College, Oxford, and Lawrence was an undergraduate. Lawrence became a member of one of the informal discussion groups that formed around Knox, who entertained them over tea in his college lodgings. The posting continues:

In his early adulthood, Knox developed a strong friendship with a young man named Guy Lawrence. As Waugh reflects on the place of this friendship in Knox’s life, he includes a lengthy quote from Fr. Bede Jarrett, which was originally addressed to a monk who was troubled by how intensely he had developed an affection for one specific friend.

A complete quote of the passage then follows. Fr. Bede Jarrett, described by Waugh as a “wise and holy Provincial of the English Dominicans,”  re-established that Order’s presence at Oxford where he became a friend and religious adviser to Graham Greene.

It might also be useful to know that Knox and Guy Lawrence remained friends after Lawrence left Oxford. Waugh goes on to explain that Lawrence was one of many (if not most) of Knox’s close friends from his school and college days who died in WWI.

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Another Waugh West Country Venue

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent Daily Beast article, several favorite drinking spots of famous writers are identified. One of these is the Barley Mow in Colehill north of Wimborne in Dorset:

Evelyn Waugh, distinguished author and godfather of this publication (which takes its name from his novel Scoop), was a master carouser. While the penman patronized plenty of pubs scattered across dear old England, The Barley Mow holds a special place for Waugh lovers. While living in this boarding house-cum-pub, Waugh wrote part of his first novel Decline and Fall. When he wasn’t writing, he spent plenty of time imbibing in the pub downstairs with visiting friends and his future wife, conveniently of the same name, Evelyn Gardner.

It is nor clear from their listing whether the current landlords still rent out the room over the pub where Waugh did his work, but it might be worth asking. Duncan McLaren has described his recent visit to this pub but he stayed in a nearly B&B. Evelyn! Rhapsody for an obsessive love.

Other watering holes still operating that were frequented by writers of Waugh’s generation include Sloppy Joe’s Saloon in Havana, made famous by Graham Greene and recently reopened after being shuttered for 50 years, the White Horse Tavern in New York’s West Village, where Dylan Thomas drank his last, and the Liguanea Club in Jamaica, where Ian Fleming hung out on his extended visits to that island (not a pub but a private club for expat whites).

 

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Waugh Letters Discovered at Maggs Bros

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The Financial Times reports the closure of Maggs Bros. bookstore in Berkeley Square where it has been located for about 80 years. The plan is to move to new premises yet to be located. One advantage of the move has been the discovery of letters from writers that have been lurking in their files. This includes one:

written by Joseph Conrad in 1922. “Would you care to take over either 50 copies of each for £200, or 60 copies of each for 200 guineas?” wrote the hard-up novelist. Maggs takes another letter from the file, this one written by Henry James in 1913 magisterially requesting to be taken off the firm’s mailing list: “I am chiefly interested in never again purchasing books; being very old and having already so many more than I can house or read.”
“We found dozens of letters in nooks and crannies we didn’t know existed,” says [manager of the firm Ed] Maggs as he shows me others from Evelyn Waugh and Harry Houdini.

The contents of the Waugh letters are not otherwise discussed nor are they listed in the store’s online catalogue. We can only hope for more details when they are, as seems likely, put up for sale.

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Waugh, Satire and Conservatism

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The neoconservative news website Washington Free Beacon considers the source of satire in its review of Christopher Buckley’s latest novel The Relic Master:

There’s a line about satire you sometimes hear—a line how all truly great satire, the hilariously brutal stuff, is written by conservatives. Or, at least, a line about how all the best satirists end up expressing deeply conservative ideas…So, for example, Evelyn Waugh started out as the most vicious satirist of his generation, and he certainly ended up a profound conservative. The underrated Tom Sharpe began by writing satires of apartheid South Africa, and he would go on to write stuff as openly hostile to modern Britain as his jaw-droppingly funny 1978 book, The Throwback. Christopher Buckley, for yet another example, would begin his 10-novel romp through the fields of comedy with satires of the presidency in his 1986 The White House Mess and the tobacco industry in his 1994 Thank You for Smoking. And now Buckley has given us a satire set in a place and time as distant from the modern political world as he could find—looking for comedy in late medieval Europe with his new book, The Relic Master.

The reviewer, Joseph Bottum, goes on to express some doubts about Buckley’s conservatism given his 2008 support for Barack Obama, “a leftist Presidential candidate,” but thinks he sees the true spirit of conservatism shining through in the wit and humanity of this and his earlier novels.

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Waugh Venue to be Converted into Houses

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The Easton Court Hotel where Waugh wrote several books, including most of Brideshead Revisited, is being turned into two private houses according to the Western Morning News. The owners tried unsuccessfully to sell it as a hotel for 1 1/2 years and even reduced the price in their attempts to find new owners, but their efforts were unsuccessful. See earlier post. According to the Devon-based paper:

Owners Paul and Debra Witting have now requested planning permission to convert the property into two residential homes. The property consists of two main buildings, a 15th century longhouse and a 1920s build which served as the hotel. Easton Court Hotel has seen many famous guests over the years including John Betjeman, John Steinbeck, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Evelyn Waugh, who died in 1966.

It was Waugh who recommended the venue in the village of Chagford to Leigh Fermor and both attended the funeral of one of the previous owners, Carolyn Posthlewaite Cobb, an American.

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Simon Winchester, Waugh Reader

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s “By the Book” column in the New York Times features an interview of British journalist and author Simon Winchester. His most recent book is entitled Pacific, a nonfiction work about that area of the world. In answer to the question what books were in his book pile he gave the following answer:

A bit of dog’s breakfast, I’m afraid. Top of the pile is Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies,” as I like to go to sleep in good humor. Then there is Witold Rybczynski’s “One Good Turn,” the history of the screwdriver; and a classic Folio edition of Samuel Smiles’s “Lives of the Engineers.” I am on a Stefan Zweig bender just now, so I have “The Post-Office Girl” to hand. And Josephine Tey, “The Singing Sands”: I’m teasing this last one out, so I’m still not sure what happened to the dead man on the train.

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