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.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited | Tagged , | Comments Off on Nicholas Lezard’s Waugh Moment

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.

Share
Posted in Ronald Knox | Tagged , | Comments Off on Waugh’s Life of Ronald Knox Cited

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).

 

Share
Posted in Decline and Fall, Scoop | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Another Waugh West Country Venue

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.

Share
Posted in Letters | Tagged , | Comments Off on Waugh Letters Discovered at Maggs Bros

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.

Share
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh, Satire and Conservatism

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.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited | Tagged , | Comments Off on Waugh Venue to be Converted into Houses

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.

Share
Posted in Vile Bodies | Tagged , | Comments Off on Simon Winchester, Waugh Reader

Brideshead Among Forerunners of Gay Lit Opening

Posted on December 8, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In today’s Independent, Boyd Tonkin identifies Patricia Highsmith’s novel on which the new film Carol is based as an early example of ground-breaking gay literature. The Lesbian romance was originally published in 1952 as The Price of Salt but under a pseudonym (Claire Morgan) to protect Highsmith’s then promising career that had begun a few years earlier with Strangers on a Train. According to Tonkin, the book sold relatively well despite the pseudonym.

Tonkin places the book’s publication into context with the then recent publication of books such as Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

In 1945, Evelyn Waugh could make Charles and Sebastian’s affair the fulcrum of Brideshead Revisited while leaving enough wriggle-room to make denials of physical intimacy just about plausible. From Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After (1952) to Iris Murdoch’s The Bell (1958), a succession of major novels opened the closet door, inch by inch. Lifelong bliss might have been in short supply (as for conventionally married couples in the era’s fiction). Still, plenty of protagonists managed to avoid either suicide or conversion.

Ironically, it was less the homoerotic theme than the adultery that caused controversy for Brideshead. This is explained in Robert Murray Davis’s book Mischief in the Sun (1999). When MGM considered filming the book in 1947, it was understood by Waugh that the homosexual themes would be toned down or in the case of Anthony Blanche written out of the story. But the studio also insisted that the adulterous relationships (especially of Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte) would also have to go. That was a change too far for Waugh who went home without a contract. By the time the novel was eventually filmed in 1981 these issues no longer troubled the filmmakers.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Film | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Brideshead Among Forerunners of Gay Lit Opening

Two Waugh Novels Make BBC’s Top 100 List

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC recently conducted a poll of literary critics outside the UK to determine their choices of the 100 greatest British novels. Novels written by Irish or other non-British authors were excluded. The poll included 82 critics who were each asked to name their top 10 British novels, with 10 points accorded to their number one choice. Two of Waugh’s novels make the list: No. 37 Decline and Fall and No. 84 Scoop. Other novelists of Waugh’s generation on the list include Virginia Woolf with four, Graham Greene with three, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Ford Maddox Ford with two each, and Anthony Powell, Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen and P.G. Wodehouse with one each. Books published as multiple separate volumes such as Parade’s End and Dance to the Music of Time count as one novel. The top 10 were (in reverse order):

10. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848)
9. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
8. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens, 1850)
7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
6. Bleak House (Charles Dickens, 1853)
5. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
4. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861)
3. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)
2. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)
1. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)

Share
Posted in Decline and Fall, Scoop | Tagged , | Comments Off on Two Waugh Novels Make BBC’s Top 100 List

Waugh Novel Recommended in Gift List

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A Waugh novel has been selected for a list of potential gifts to be given to “conservative gentlemen.” The list appears on the weblog The Imaginative Conservative. The criteria for inclusion provide that the gift must be “quality if not…costly” (avoiding ties, slippers, sweaters and pipes) and begin with the letter B, thereby making it a “B-list.” Other articles on the list include bourbon, beard balm and badger-hair shaving brushes.  The Waugh novel selected is:

Brideshead Re-Visited [sic]– Evelyn Waugh was, perhaps, the perfect fogey. A delightful curmudgeon, he crafted some of the most hilarious stories in modern English literature. He called Brideshead Re-Visited his “GEM—Great English Masterpiece” and so it is. The book needs to be read, but the award-winning 1981 English television series is one of the most faithful book-to-film adaptations available. To view the series is to step into a golden England which, even in Waugh’s time, was fading away. Don’t worry too much about the flamboyant “aestheticism” in the opening episodes. It is all resolved in the end with a satisfying “twitch on the thread.”

I’m not so sure Waugh ever referred to the novel as the “Great English Masterpiece” and even less so as the “GEM.” No source is cited. A Google search traces those terms back no further than 2014 to an article by Dwight Longenecker that appeared, inter alia, in this same conservative weblog. Waugh somewhat jokingly referred to the book several times in letters as his “Magnum Opus” or “M.O.”  Writing on 29 January 1945 (to his wife) and 17 January 1945 (to Nancy Mitford), he mentions what he describes as Mitford’s preferred reference to it as the “G.E.C. (Great English Classic)”.  Letters, pp. 182, 184, 189, 198-99; Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, pp. 14-15. But “masterpiece” may be a stretch.

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Letters, Television | Tagged | Comments Off on Waugh Novel Recommended in Gift List