Crouchbackian Undercurrents Seen in Australian Novel

Posted on July 4, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent Australian novel tells the story of a soldier who suffered through the British evacuation of Crete. This is Archipelago of Souls by Gregory Day. It is reviewed by a  writer identified only by his/her initials (“AF”) in The Saturday Paper, a newly-established print newspaper published weekly throughout Australia. The Australian soldier, Wesley Cress, is compared to Guy Crouchback in that both are seriously disillusioned by what they see has happened in Crete:

Just as the hero of Waugh’s trilogy retreats from the world he despairs of after the conflict’s end, so too does Wesley Cress consciously withdraw. But this is where the two authors part company. Waugh’s creation Guy Crouchback, aristocratic scion of an old Catholic recusant family, heads for a castle in Italy; Day’s invention, Wes Cress, a farmer’s son from Colac in Victoria, heads for King Island in Bass Strait: an island off an island.

I’m not sure where the reviewer gets the idea that Guy returns to a castle in Italy after the war. At the time of the the Cretan debacle, that option would hardly be one that Guy contemplated, as Italy was still in the war. In the end, he settles at Broome, not Italy, and in 1950-51 sells the castle to Ludovic.  He may have made visits to the castle in the years before Ludovic’s purchase, but no such visits are mentioned in Waugh’s epilogue to the trilogy.

Where the authors part company is in how they describe the events in Crete.  The Cretan experiences of Wesley Cress are quite different from Guy’s in that Cress missed the evacuation and remains trapped behind the lines in Crete. He is haunted by his experiences as he tries to re-establish himself after the war and strives to come to terms with them by writing them down and sending them to a local girl with whom he has fallen in love. Guy’s experiences, on the other hand, are not told in flashbacks but form the present narrative of the novel.  He broods generally over the poor performance of the British forces and specifically over the Ivor Claire episode but cannot be said to have been unhinged by them, as seems to have been the case (or nearly so) with the depressive Australian.

Thanks to R.M. Davis for drawing our attention to this article.

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Waugh and the Mitfords

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A brief article by your correspondent about Waugh and the Mitford sisters has been posted on The Mitford Society’s internet site. It relates to the sisters Nancy, Diana and Deborah. The article originally appeared in The Mitford Society Annual, volume 1 (2013).     Volume 2 (2014) is now also available, containing an article by the editor Lyndsy Spence entitled “Evelyn Waugh & Diana Guinness,” an extract from her recent book Mrs Guinness: The Rise and Fall of Diana Mitford, the Thirties Socialite.

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The Pram in the Hall

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Tomorrow (Friday) night’s episode of the BBC2’s cultural series Artsnight will investigate the conclusion of Waugh’s friend Cyril Connolly: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”  This is from his 1938 book (probably his best known) Enemies of Promise. The program will be presented by Lily Cole, model, actress, digital entrepreneur and 8 months pregnant. She will consider the life of Waugh’s contemporary, sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and will interview novelist Lionel Shriver and poet Hollie McNish, among others. There is no advance indication that there will be any discussion of Waugh’s life or work, but Waugh’s career would tend to disprove Connolly’s theory. Fatherhood, starting in 1938, seems to have had little, if any, effect on the volume or quality of Waugh’s literary output. The program will be transmitted on BBC2 at 11pm on Friday and will be available on BBC iPlayer to view on the internet for 4 weeks thereafter. A proxy server connection will be needed for viewing outside the UK.

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Sharper Sword

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The South China Morning Post has published a review of Waugh’s Sword of Honour as part of a three-part retrospective review connected by each subject’s containing a knife in its title.  The other two reviews relate to a 2006 recording by a Swedish rock band, Silent Shout by The Knife, and Roman Polanski’s first feature film, Knife in the Water. Cute idea, but the review of Waugh’s novel (apparently by Matthew Scott) has nothing particularly original to say about it. Indeed, it leads with some familiar dismissive references to Waugh’s military career which were recently and forcefully discredited by Donat Gallagher and Carlos Villar Flor in their critique of Waugh’s biographers, In The Picture: The Facts behind the fiction in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour (Amsterdam and New York, 2014). But the review of Waugh’s book itself is on the whole favorable and may stir some interest among Hong Kong readers, particularly those who are also fans of Swedish rock music and Polish films.

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Waugh’s 1949 Minnesota Lecture

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A newspaper article describing Waugh’s 1949 lecture at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, has been reprinted in full in the latest issue of Writing in the Margins (Spring 2015), the journal of the University’s English Department. This was written by Henry Lexau, a student at the time and later editor of the Catholic Digest, and appeared in the March 11, 1949 issue of the student paper, The Aquin. The subject of the lecture was the same as that delivered by Waugh at other venues on the 1949 lecture tour: Three Catholic Writers. The first, G.K. Chesterton, according to Waugh, “is underrated by most critics. His life presents no problems for biographers, his style is too simple for scholars to find subjects for theses.” The second writer, Ronald Knox “is essentially a scholar, shy, scrupulous, but … a great master of English prose style.” The final example, Graham Greene, is characterized by pointing out “the theological implications of his three greatest books.” The article concludes: “The lecture was provocative, the audience receptive, and Mr. Waugh witty.”

 

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Waugh Binge Recalled in Spectator Competition

Posted on June 25, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Jeremy Clarke, author of the Spectator’s “Low Life” column, is running a competition for the best description of “the drunkest I’ve ever been.” The winner will be announced at the launch party for the collection of Clarke’s columns to be held later this week. In the run up to the launch party, Clarke wrote a column that included a selection of similar descriptions from the past that might inspire punters to write for his competition. Among these is Waugh’s description of a visit to Athens:

We went straight to a nightclub kept by a one-legged Maltese who gave us cocktails made out of odd drugs and a spirit of his own distilling. Later the première danseuse of the cabaret came out and warned us on no account to touch the cocktails. Later still, I drove around the city in a taxi cab on I forget what errand, and then back to the nighclub. The taxi driver followed me back to our table. I had given him as a tip over ten pounds in drachma, my watch, my gloves and my spectacle case. It was too much, he protested. The rest of my visit was rather overshadowed by this introduction to Athenian life.

This is a quote from Waugh’s 1930 travel book Labels (p. 149). It relates to his first visit to Athens, when he was an undergraduate. The book also goes on to mention his second visit during the 1929 voyage that is the subject of the travel book. On that occasion, he also suffered from over indulgence following “a late night, drinking after a ball with some charming Norwegians.” He describes a “wholesome and accessible pick-me-up” offered by his friend Alastair Graham to provide relief. This consisted of a lump of sugar soaked in Angostura bitters and rolled in Cayenne pepper which is then dropped into a large glass of champagne:

Each bubble as it rises to the surface carries with it a grain of red pepper, so that as one drinks one’s appetite is at once stimulated and gratified, heat and cold, fire and liquid, contending on one’s palate and alternating in the mastery of one’s sensations. (Labels, p. 150)

Perhaps Mr. Clarke should suggest that the Spectator keep a supply of the ingredients for Alastair’s remedy on hand for the revelers at the launch party. Or maybe the participants can be assumed to be so experienced in these matters as to not require any help.

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Waugh in Sitcom Punchline

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest episode of the ITV sitcom Vicious, starring Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen as a elderly gay couple, Evelyn Waugh makes an appearance.  In this episode (No. 4 of the current series) the couple are contemplating marriage after being together for over 50 years. The wedding planner asks Stuart (played by Jacobi)  for his ideas about the scope of the event. Stuart responds that he is thinking, “Summer meets Evelyn Waugh meets Paris in the twenties,” no doubt having in mind the parties described in Vile Bodies, or perhaps in the early pages of Brideshead Revisited. Shortly thereafter (spoiler alert) Stuart learns that his companion Freddie (an actor played by McKellen) has failed to land an important part that would have produced the income needed to pay for an event that would have fulfilled Stuart’s Wavian expectations. The episode can be viewed online on itvPlayer.  A proxy server connection is needed outside the UK. The first series of this program was also broadcast in the U.S. by some PBS stations and was issued on DVD, so this current series may also become available from those sources.

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Candace Bushnell, Waugh Fan

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

U.S. novelist Candace Bushnell is the featured writer in this week’s By the Book column in  the New York Times Book Review. She is best known for Sex and the City which was a collection of her columns from The New York Observer and was made into a popular HBO TV series in 1998-2004.  The New York Times column involves a series of set questions, one of which is “If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?” This is Bushnell’s answer:

“A Handful of Dust,” by Evelyn Waugh, was a real game-changer for me. I read it for the first time when I was 12 and remember feeling like certain aspects of life suddenly clicked into place. It was my first encounter with irony, social satire and dark humor in literature, and it clarified the kind of writing I wanted to do.

Her favorite novelist is Flaubert but among the books she most rereads are P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels, among Waugh’s own favorites. Bushnell is interviewed by Rachel Cooke about her latest book in today’s Observer.

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Waugh Among the Bohemians

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC is currently running a cultural documentary entitled How to be a Bohemian. It is presented by Victoria Coren Mitchell and is broadcast on Monday nights over the BBC4 channel. The first episode traced the history of artistic “bohemians” from 19th century Parisians via Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley to England. In the second episode (transmitted on June 15), the early years of the 20th century were covered, beginning with the Bloomsbury Group and proceeding to the Bright Young People.

Waugh comes in not as a Bright Young Person (or “bohemian”) per se but as having operated on the margins of that group. He is said by Coren Mitchell to have used Stephen Tennant, a leading BYP, as the model for the character Miles Malpractice in his novel Vile Bodies. A clip from Stephen Fry’s film Bright Young Things, based on Waugh’s novel, is shown with Michael Sheen camping it up as Malpractice. Coren Mitchell’s attribution of Miles’ character to Tennant is somewhat questionable. That character (who also appears in Decline and Fall) is usually attributed to the equally camp BYP, Eddie Gathorne-Hardy. This is based on his having been named originally Martin Gathorne-Brodie in the first edition of Decline and Fall. Later printings reflected a change in the character’s name upon advice of counsel. Tennant may have contributed something to Malpractice but was not the exclusive source.

The BYP episode also contains an interview with Stephan Fry who explains their relationship to the historic category of bohemians. Unlike the earlier variety, BYPs tended to have money and were willing to display it to gain attention, but they were dedicated to behaving in a manner to shock their forebears, a classic bohemian trait. Fry offers the BYPs’ extravagant party-giving as one example of their bohemianism. The segment ends with Fry’s reading of the now perhaps overly familiar “party” paragraph from Vile Bodies (“Masked parties. Savage parties…” Penguin, p. 123).

The program will continue to be available on BBC iPlayer until about July 13 and can be watched online. A UK internet connection via a proxy server is needed outside of the UK. These are available on the internet. The final episode, bringing the subject up to the present day, will be broadcast next Monday (June 22) at 2100 BST and will be available on iPlayer thereafter.

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Robert Byron, Dangerous Lunatic

Posted on June 20, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest edition of the Australian Financial Review contains a story by Nick Hordern about Robert Byron, an outstanding British travel writer of the 1930s. The focus of the article is Byron’s book The Road to Oxiana which several critics have acclaimed the best travel book of the period. It recounts the 1933-34 travels of Byron and Christopher Sykes, later Waugh’s biographer, to various architectural monuments in Iran. Waugh knew Byron from Oxford, and they had several friends in common, such as Nancy Mitford, who appears in a photo with Byron that accompanies the article. But although Byron’s talent was recognized, he had a personality even more difficult than Waugh’s. In particular, he suffered anger management problems as were recounted by Harold Acton in an incident described in the article:

On the one hand he was recognised as a passionate advocate of unusual causes, such as the Byzantine influence on European art. On the other he was a contrarian, appallingly abrasive and opinionated to the point of violence. In his autobiography, Oxford contemporary Harold Acton recalled a 1936 incident where Byron ran amok at a dinner party in the British legation in Beijing, and had to be forcefully restrained by an embassy guard.

It was this very incident in Peking to which Waugh was referring in the quote which concludes the article, describing Byron as a “dangerous lunatic, better off dead.” This comes from a letter Waugh wrote to Acton in 1948, passing on his comments relating to Acton’s memoirs in which Byron’s bad behavior is described. The complete quote is somewhat less harsh than what appears in the article:

It is not yet the time to say so but I greatly disliked Robert in his last years & think he was a dangerous lunatic better dead. (Letters, p. 277)

Byron was safely dead when Waugh expressed this opinion, having been killed in 1941 when his ship was torpedoed.

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