Evelyn Waugh and Middle Age

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent column in The Independent, D.J. Taylor describes the evolution of the concept of middle age. He invokes the writings of Evelyn Waugh to illustrate the attitude toward middle age of those bright young people who were young adults in the 1920s.

Waugh writing in January 1929 bemoans the “Peter Pans of middle age who block the way.” According to Taylor:

The people Waugh is complaining about, it transpires, all those “ex-captains and majors” from the Great War stymying the younger generation’s chances of preferment, are barely out of their thirties.

Waugh was writing in the Evening Standard in an article entitled “Too Young at Forty.” It is reproduced in Essays, Articles and Reviews at p. 45.

As Taylor explains, after WWII life expectancy and incomes increased and middle age expanded to include those well above the 40s. Within these years, the occurrences of the “mid-life crisis” and  “male menopause” were added. No doubt if he had lived beyond post-war middle age, Waugh would have also had something interesting to say about these concepts,

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Evelyn Waugh’s Old Neighborhood

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s Observer ran an article about the recent transformation of the borough of Islington from the London home of New Labour’s founder Tony Blair to a district that now seems to be exemplified by a movement to revert the Labour Party to its socialist roots. The latest upheaval is lead by Jeremy Corbyn. He is MP for Islington North and is also a resident.

The article also briefly summarizes Islington’s history as a haven for artists and intellectuals in earlier years. Among those mentioned are Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Charlie Chaplin, Vladimir Lenin, and Evelyn Waugh. In fact, when Waugh lived there briefly in the late 1920s, after his marriage to Evelyn Gardner, it was described as the sort of place where City gents rented spaces for their mistresses. The Waughs’ flat was in Canonbury Square, now heavily gentrified.  This was the only London residence Waugh ever called home as an adult, independent of his parents who lived further north in Hampstead. After his first marriage broke up, Waugh lived a rather nomadic existence until his second marriage to Laura Herbert in 1937 when they settled in Gloucestershire.

Another later resident of Canonbury Square was George Orwell who lived there in the 1940s and whose flat is marked by a plaque. Waugh’s Islington flat, unlike Orwell’s, is not marked by a plaque, but Waugh would probably prefer it that way, since the brief part of his existence that was lived there was not one he cared to remember.

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Evelyn=Basil and Audrey=Angela

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren, author of Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love, has given us the results of another of his ambitious research projects and much to think about. He follows the trajectory of the relationship between Waugh and Audrey Lucas, which goes from their North London childhoods to an affair that followed Waugh’s first marriage. He also plots Audrey’s life after the affair, when she became a novelist, leaving intriguing allusions to her life with Waugh in her published works. McLaren makes an interesting case that Audrey inspired the character of Angela Lyne in Black Mischief, playing the neglected woman in an affair with Basil Seal (who McLaren argues is heavily autobiographical).

McLaren concludes his article, published on his website, with a thoughtful assessment of Audrey’s impact on Waugh’s life and career:

Lucas’s importance, as far as Evelyn Waugh’s history is concerned, was in loving him in 1930 and in giving him the confidence to portray himself as Basil Seal in Black Mischief. Equally, I suspect it was the recovery of Evelyn’s self-confidence as a sexual being that allowed him to go on to write in depth and with maturity about the failed affair with She-Evelyn.

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Waugh Letter Read on Video by Geoffrey Palmer

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s 1942 letter to his wife recounting the Commando’s farcical attempt to remove a tree stump from the estate of an aristocrat near their training base in Scotland is read out to great humorous effect by TV actor Geoffrey Palmer. The letter was also recently read at the Hay Festival by another actor, Jude Law. See earlier post. Palmer is best known for his roles in TV series such as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and As Time Goes By. The video of his reading was posted last month by Letters Live, which also sponsored the Hay Festival reading.

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Evelyn Waugh in Country Life

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Country Life magazine has published a list of 60 things that make Britain great. No. 43 is the public school:

Ever since William of Wykeham set up his college for poor scholars in Winchester more than 600 years ago, these schools have been part of national life. Private schools only educate about 7% of the school-age population and annual fees are in excess of £30,000 a year for some. Nearly all, however, provide extensive academic, sports, music and arts scholarships and bursaries. They set a gold standard to which our universal education should aspire.

Each entry is accompanied by a representative photo of the subject and is followed by an appropriate quotation of a British writer. In the public school entry, the photo might be of Harrow and Evelyn Waugh provides the quote:

That’s the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

Country Life may not have fully appreciated the context of the quotation. It is from Decline and Fall (Part One, Chapter 3) where Captain Grimes is describing to Paul Pennyfeather his experiences as a public school teacher. He explains that he usually gets along all right at a school for about six weeks and “then I land up in the soup,” no doubt referring to some pederastic activity. But the system supports its own. Grimes recalls his days as a schoolboy when he “got the push after my sixteenth birthday” for what appears to have been similar activity. His housemaster, “a public school man [who] knew the system” nonetheless gave him a “corking good letter” which he still used to find new employment whenever he got the sack.

Another Waugh connection, unattributed, is in entry No. 21, the country house. The unidentified illustration for that subject is Mells Manor where Waugh was a frequent guest of his friend Katharine Asquith.

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Spectator Competition

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator‘s correspondent Lucy Vickery has set a competition for writing a short message in the style of one of four writers suggested by Michael Gove, Secretary of State, formerly for Education and now for Justice, as models for civil servants. Here are the rules:

No. 2909: Taking the Michael

Michael Gove has urged civil servants to take inspiration from George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and George Eliot when writing correspondence. But which well-known writer would you like to see Whitehall bureaucrats take their lead from? You are invited to submit a memo generated by either the Department of Education or the Ministry of Justice as it might have been written by that writer. Please email entries (150 words maximum) to (click to email) by 29 July.

NOTE (6 August 2015): The winners of the competition were published in the Spectator’s 8 August edition. None parodied Waugh, although there was a parody of P.G.Wodehouse writing from the Ministry of Justice, of which Waugh would, no doubt, have approved.

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Express TV Critic Rewatches Brideshead

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The 1980s TV series of Brideshead Revisited was recently rebroadcast by ITV Encore and is still available on an online “catch up” site which may require a subscription fee and UK internet connection. The Sunday Express TV critic, David Stephenson, chose that as one of the TV dramas to review this week. He seems to have watched only the last episode but was duly impressed:

The scale of the series was epic, in every sense, and parts of it were shot like a film, with long tracking shots in this episode of Jeremy Irons and Diana Quick walking through the woods discussing the “lack of entail”…You couldn’t accuse it of rushing a story either. Here was Evelyn Waugh’s evocative classic told in its entirety by John Mortimer. No messing, no reimagining, no updating, just how the original writer would have imagined it on the screen.

I’m not so sure he’s got it right about John Mortimer’s role in the production. Although Mortimer receives screen credit, those involved in the production have explained that his script was largely discarded in favor of Waugh’s original dialogue and narrative. Stephen-son concludes by offering this advice:

My message to drama commissioners now is to watch Brideshead to see where they have gone wrong for the past 34 years. Don’t give us another reheated version of Dickens, or Tolstoy (we’re to get War And Peace soon on the BBC); just do it straight and you will be rewarded with millions of viewers. But maybe don’t put it out over a barbecue summer.

 

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Waugh at the Ashes

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh gets quoted in the Guardian’s report of the opening ceremony of the Ashes Test Cricket Match in Cardiff. The reporter (Barney Ronay) is complaining about the lengthy opening ceremony which

kicked off with a rain-sodden male-voice choir singing not one, not two but three national anthems… “Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle,” Evelyn Waugh wrote in Decline and Fall. “It doesn’t end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever.” At times before the start of play in a series that, frankly, needs no introduction it was tempting to apply the same principle to Welsh cricket grounds and interminably woolly opening ceremonies.

The quote is Captain Grimes advising Paul Pennyfeather in the Llanaba pub where the local band is in a wrangle about sharing out the proceeds they have just received for their performance at the school’s sports day. Grimes concludes his remarks with the comment: “They’ll still be discussing that three pounds at the end of term: just you see.” (Decline and Fall, London, 1928, p. 112.) And no doubt the tedious opening ceremony in Cardiff will still be discussed after the Test Match ends, if, indeed, any one notices when that happens. In case any one is interested, the match is between England and Australia.

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Max and Diana

Posted on July 11, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Many of our readers will be familiar with the story of how Waugh’s friend Diana Mosley (nee Mitford) and her husband Sir Oswald Mosley (leader of the British Fascist party) were imprisoned in 1940. Diana had, a few weeks before entering prison, given birth to a son. This was Max Mosley. But how many of us focused on the fact that this little chap would grow up to be Max Mosley, the racing car celebrity and scourge of tabloid journalism, who has just published his autobiography Formula One and Beyond?

Max’s story is retold in a review of his book in The Spectator and an extended interview in the Guardian. It contains themes of car racing and newspaper scandal-mongering reminiscent of Waugh’s Vile Bodies.  Either the Guardian’s reporter or Max manages to get in a word about Waugh: “Evelyn Waugh dedicated Vile Bodies to the young Diana, saying “her beauty ran [sic] through the room like a peal of bells” .

That  book, as well as Labels, was dedicated to both Diana and her then husband Bryan Guinness, a friend of Waugh’s from Oxford. That much-misquoted description, allegedly about Diana, comes from Waugh’s unfinished novel Work Suspended (Penguin, 1976, p. 173) and applies to the character Lucy Simmonds, not Diana Mosley. Waugh in March 1966 wrote to Diana (in what may have been his last letter) about her relationship to Lucy:

…I must not leave you with the delusion that Work Suspended was a cruel portrait of you. It was perhaps to some extent a portrait of me in love with you, but there is not a single point in common between you and the heroine except pregnancy. (Letters, p. 639)

The misquoted passage has come to be repeated from one news story to another with “ran” erroneously substituted for Waugh’s “rang,” which rather spoils the simile.  Although Diana could arguably be deemed to be the object of that description, a bit of context would be helpful. It has instead become an established “fact” that Waugh  applied those words directly to Diana Mosley herself so far as the press are concerned.

 

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Waugh in Wonderland

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent New Yorker article, critic-at-large Anthony Lane, author of the essay on Waugh in the Cambridge Companion to English Novelists (2009), adds his own thoughts to the outpouring of words marking the bicentenary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. Near the beginning, he quotes part of Waugh’s epigraph to Vile Bodies in which Alice is discussing reality with Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

“You know very well you’re not real.”
“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
“You won’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”
“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”
“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt. 

The bolded text (from Through the Looking-Glass) was used by Waugh for the second half of his epigraph. Lane goes on to comment that “the tone is a perfect match for the chill, directionless frenzy of Waugh’s personae” in Vile Bodies.

Lane recognizes that there is more text in Waugh’s epigraph (also from Through the Looking-Glass) but doesn’t mention the content of the first half, which quite literally involves “directionless frenzy:”

‘Well in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else–if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.’

The remainder of the article goes on to discuss now mostly familiar topics, such as whether Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll was a pedophile who would have either been arrested or hounded by the press in today’s Oxford. One would like to hear Waugh’s take on that issue. He did write an essay on Carroll in 1939 in which he comments: “Children became for [Carroll] the symbols of innocent faith and accordingly the only tolerable companions; converse with them gave his fantasies literary form” (Essays, Articles and Reviews, pp. 260-62). But that was before pedophilia had engaged the public’s attention.

The article closes with the story of the 1932 lecture trip to the United States by Mrs. Alice Hargreaves, who as Alice Liddell was the model for Carroll’s heroine. That was news to me, as was the fact that a film of that event (Dreamchild) was was made in 1985 with a script by Dennis Potter. That will have to go on my Netflix queue.

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