Waugh and Intermodernism

Posted on November 14, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

An academic article entitled “Intermodernism and the Ethics of Lateness in Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton” and published in English Studies, v. 103, Number 6 (2022) has been posted on the internet. This is written by Allan Killner-Johnson, University of Surrey. Here’s the abstract:

Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton had a deeply ambivalent relationship to the narrative of modernism, and their attempts to negotiate their position within the literary milieu of their own time clearly registers the tensions inherent in much of late modernist writing. Early modernism and high modernism were concerned with the nature of the ‘firstness’, of innovation and change, but as this article argues, intermodernism is best seen as an ethical mode that saw itself as increasingly removed from the organising attitudes of literary revolution. In their mid- and late-period writing, Acton and Waugh were concerned with structures of age-old history and prestige-notably Catholicism (Waugh) and China (Acton)-that they felt outweighed the innovations of modernism and made the modern aesthetic spirit seem clumsy, if not painfully late.

The full article can be read at this link.

 

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Roundup: Oxford, Metro-Land and Commandos

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times has a review of the recent book about Waugh and the Oxford-based Hypocrites Club, entitled Hellfire. See previous posts. This is reviewed by Daisy Dunn who opens with a well written summary of some of the book’s high points. Here are some excerpts of her assessment of the book:

…Does such a short-lived social club warrant a biography? While several of the Hypocrites went on to become very famous — Waugh, Anthony Powell and the Party Going novelist Henry Green for example — they hardly owed their success to their club membership alone. They wrote relatively little about it, not because it was secretive, but because, in all honesty, there was not very much to say. […] Fleming attempts to get round this by shifting quickly from the student club to the grown-up lives of the Hypocrites. He follows them into publishing houses and newspaper offices, into London parties and terraces, down aisles and back up them, and finally into the Second World War. […]

It seems inadvertent that, in drawing attention to the successes of the Hypocrites, Fleming also undermines them. His book illustrates brilliantly just how lazy and overindulged several of these characters were. Most went down from Oxford with no degree or secured a lousy third. […] Some of the Hypocrites were certainly ambitious. […] But it was almost as though these men grew too enervated in their darting passions to see anything through in their youth. They didn’t always amount to very much. […]

This is a pacey and colourful read and, with the exception of the occasional anachronism (it is bizarre to refer to Waugh wearing “an Andy Warhol shock blond wig” in 1924 when the artist wasn’t born until 1928), elegantly written. Whether or not you feel the book represents yet another indulgence of a group that never quite merited the attention may well depend on your tolerance for monocles and tweed.

Dunn herself recently wrote a book about interwar Oxford, but it dwelt on more elevated and serious academic circles. This is entitled Not Far From Brideshead and has been described in previous posts.

–An earlier edition of The Times mentions Waugh in a different context. This is in an unsigned leading article that marks the centenary of Marcel Proust’s death. It is written in the form of a page-long Proustian paragraph from which this excerpt has been taken. It describes his major work:

…which is about 15 times the length of an average novel, comprising the epic text of a writer whom Graham Greene considered “the greatest novelist of the 20th century” although Evelyn Waugh did call him “insane” and more recently Kazuo Ishiguro described his work as crushingly dull, presumably because the narrator is a pretentious snob given to micro-analysing a life in which nothing happens… 

The Times received the following letter in response to the aforesaid leading article:

Sir, For some very peculiar reason your leading article on the standing of Marcel Proust in this, the centennial of his death (Nov 11), cites Evelyn Waugh’s view of him as “insane”. What in fact he wrote to Nancy Mitford was: “I am reading Proust for the first time in English of course and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely has no sense of time.” Proust suffered from all sorts of ailments, but dyschronometria wasn’t one of them. Waugh’s claim is not simply stupidly offensive but symptomatic of a certain provincial way with Proust. The Times seems to have opted for his company. Prof Christopher Prendergast King’s College, Cambridge

The letter was posted in the 12 November 2022 edition.

–Historian and TV presenter Dominic Sandbrook writing in the Financial Times has an article entitled “Revisiting Metro-land: is the future suburban?” In this he considers the centenary of the area to which “the Metropolitan Railway lured home buyers to a suburban paradise on London’s fringes.”  This mostly revolves around the works of John Betjeman who praised the area both in his books and poems and on TV. But Waugh (who was less enamored of the area) also gets a look-in:

Even at the time, critics found Metro-land laughably fake–a British equivalent of the Disney World residential communities that followed. As early as 1928 Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel Decline and Fall featured an intolerably stuffy politician who is ennobled as Viscount Metroland. Six years later, the composer Constant Lambert mocked “the hideous faux bonhomie of the hiker, noisily wading his way through the petrol pumps of Metroland, singing obsolete sea chanties with the aid of the Week-End Book, imbibing chemically flavoured synthetic beer under the impression that he is tossing off a tankard of ‘jolly good ale'”

—The Imaginative Conservative reposts a 2011 article by Daniel McCarthy entitled “Books That Make Us Human”. This includes:

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh – His first and by no means his best novel, but it captures so much of the human experience:  how it feels to be young, to be at once ambitious and fearful for one’s career, to suffer reversal and suddenly achieve one’s dreams. Possibility, uncertainty, love. You could give this to a Martian and he would begin to understand what these human beings are like.

–Finally, for those interested in the subject of the WWII SAS and Commando units as depicted in the ongoing BBC drama series SAS Rogue Heroes (featured in a recent post), the BBC has reposted an earlier three-episode documentary on the same subject. This is narrated by Ben Macintyre based on his same book that inspired the drama series. It is somewhat confusingly entitled SAS: Rogue Warriors and is available on BBC iPlayer through the end of November. A UK internet connection is required.

UPDATE: A letter to The Times regarding the Proust leading article was posted in the 12 November issue of the paper and was added to this roundup.

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Roundup: Books Listed, Reviewed and Revisited

Posted on November 6, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has a review of the new book by David Fleming entitled Hellfire: Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club. This was published in the UK last month as noted in a recent post. The review is by Nikhil Krishnan and begins with this:

Oxford has never been short of drinking clubs. Why does this one so short-lived deserve as lengthy a biography as David Fleming has given them? There is to start with the fact that the club counted as members three novelists of great originality (Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green and Anthony Powell) and one man with a claim to be the 20th century’s greatest travel writer, Robert Byron. There were others–Brian Howard and Harold Acton–who never quite delivered on their early literary promise but did their bit for modern literature by providing Waugh with the inspiration for Anthony Blanche, the memorable camp aesthete from Brideshead Revisited.

But is this enough to justify revisiting much visited literary territory yet again? Fleming proposes that the Hypocrites were special. Although they ran the political gamut from “bone-dry Conservative” (Waugh) to “firmly on the left” (the journalist Claud Cockburn), they had in common a sensibility: independent-minded, rebellious, argumentative and intolerant of cant. […]

After discussing several of the book’s themes and noting that the “editorial apparatus is disappointingly sparse”, Krishnan concludes:

Fleming’s prose is, at best, workmanlike, unflashy and blandly informative. Nearly every quotation has the inevitable effect of making the lack of distinction in his own prose painfully apparent, but that is the occupational hazard of a literary historian.

The book will also be reviewed in an upcoming issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

–Emily Temple writing in Literary Hub has made a list of the top 60 “campus novels”. Here’s her definition and selection criteria:

..to keep you company as the cold weather descends, here is a list of the greatest academic satires, campus novels, and boarding school bildungsromans in the modern canon.

I limited my selections to one per author (though I made an extra note here and there, and a set or two may have slipped in) and I excluded anything written for children (or the magic schools would overwhelm), though boarding schools in general are allowed. Finally, my obligatory caveat that not every campus novel that anyone has ever loved is included here, lists and time both being finite and literature being subjective, but please feel free to add on in the comments section.

Her Waugh selection is Decline and Fall:

A novel in which events are set in motion by a trouser theft and subsequent streaking and even subsequenter expulsion? No one does satire like Waugh. See also: Brideshead Revisited, the most famous (and best) campus novel that is actually mostly not a campus novel at all.

—Entertainment Weekly has compiled a list of the 25 best Hollywood novels. Waugh’s The Loved One is included:

A little Six Feet Under here, some Golden Age romanticizing there, and you’ve got Evelyn Waugh’s crackling The Loved One. A poet and pet mortician becomes enraptured by the golden gates and paradise aesthetic of Whispering Glades Memorial Park, located in the heart of Los Angeles, where he falls into a bizarre love triangle.

–John Self in The Critic has produced a thoughtful reconsideration of the works of Kurt Vonnegut. As he sees it, Vonnegut is one of several novelists who is best known for the wrong book–in his case Slaughterhouse-Five:

If Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle are the early peaks of Vonnegut’s work, later in the decade he would produce one combining science fiction and war that masquerades as a peak, but is really the beginning of the journey down the other side. Like Evelyn Waugh, Kazuo Ishiguro and Charlotte BrontĂ« (among many others), Vonnegut is famous for the wrong book.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) remains his most popular book, and in a way you can see why. It takes a serious subject — war and the bombing of Dresden — and makes it funny, in fact twists it out of shape with a hero who becomes “unstuck in time”, has future flashbacks and travels to a planet called Tralfamadore.

Yet I can only agree with the ur-critic, John Carey, who categorises it among those books “that gain their power from their subjects more than their writing”. The book saw Vonnegut placed as an anti-war satirist alongside Joseph Heller, another member of the famous-for-the-wrong-book club, whose Catch-22 had been published at the beginning of the decade.

In Waugh’s case Self presumably assumes the wrong book is Brideshead Revisited.

–Finally, the New York Times reviews a selection of diaries and photos of the Rome-based, US-born photographer Milton Gendel. This is entitled Just Passing Through. After explaining Gendel’s somewhat eclectic career, the review notes his acquaintanceship with several writers:

More public writers are observed concisely and without mercy, both their work and their personalities. Of Muriel Spark: “She is a bag fumbler.” On “Portnoy’s Complaint,” by Philip Roth: “It is brilliant. But caricatural and pseudo-literary,” with “comic strip characters.” Evelyn Waugh is held to account for his “bitchy right-wingery and his vein of anti-Semitism,” even as Gendel fraternizes with his eldest son, Auberon. Graham Greene is deemed a “brilliant tightrope walker edging between God and his grubby little creatures” but nonetheless compares unfavorably to Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Gendel would have encountered Waugh on one or more of the latter’s several trips to Rome in the 1950-60s where Gendel’s wife was a friend of Diana Cooper. See previous post.

 

 

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Waugh at Hertford

Posted on November 4, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Hertford College, Oxford has posted on YouTube an excerpt from a recent presentation at the college to a group of its alumni assembled in the college chapel. The excerpt is the opening of the presentation by the college Principal, Tom Fletcher, and relates to a fundraising campaign called Hertford 2030. The prime goal of this is the construction of a new library for the college at a cost of ÂŁ16m. You may not learn all of this from the excerpt itself, but it may help you to put things into context.

The Principal opens the presentation by reminding those assembled that this year marks the 100th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s matriculation at the college in Hilary Term 1922. See previous post. To that end he provides a brief summary of Waugh’s career at Hertford, noting that he probably spent relatively little time in the library. It is an amusing and well-presented talk, although somewhat oversimplified in some respects. For example, he notes that Waugh did so poorly on his finals that he “didn’t bother to pick up his degree.”

That is a correct statement but somewhat misleading. The reason that Waugh did not “pick up” his third class degree was that the college cancelled his scholarship. As explained in the previous post, this was due to the fact that he had done so poorly on his exams. Given his substantial unpaid debts, his father refused to pay the costs of the final term at Oxford. Residence during that term (which would have been his 9th) was required to meet university degree qualifications. Waugh was looking forward to spending that term at Oxford and had even booked a flat on Merton Street (outside of Hertford College) which he would have shared with Hugh Lygon.

The presentation also mentions Waugh’s membership in the Hypocrites Club and his animosity toward his tutor CRMF Cruttwell, who later became the college Principal. The present incumbent concludes by wondering how Waugh might respond to issues facing students today such as wider access to Oxford and climate change. Here is a link to the 11 minute presentation.

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BBC WWII Commando Series

Posted on October 29, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC has scheduled the broadcast of a 6-part docudrama series on the WWII Commandos. This will focus on the SAS, which was the brainchild of Commando David Stirling with whom Waugh was serving in 8 Commando in 1941. Here are excerpts of the story from the Daily Telegraph:

When Steven Knight decided to create his latest TV show SAS Rogue Heroes he pledged to honour the history of how the Special Air Service was born, rather than making it “try to fit fiction”.

Yet as Mr Knight, the Peaky Blinders creator, delved deeper into the history of this elite regiment that was formed in the deserts of North Africa during the Second World War, he discovered true stories that were so outlandish he had to change the narrative in order to make them seem plausible.

And so the six-part BBC series begins with the disclaimer that while the following is “based on a true story” the events shown “which seem most unbelievable
 are mostly true”. […]

Mr Knight confirmed that “the regiment itself has given us a nod of approval” for the series.

It comes after the BBC placed a “trigger” warning for moderate violence on the show’s one-minute trailer which features explosions and a soldier being jokingly pushed out of the back of a lorry.

The programme is based on the book by journalist and historian Ben MacIntyre, which he wrote after gaining access to previously classified SAS documents and diaries.

It explores how a group of fearless soldiers and officers came together to form a new unit, which was built around Stirling’s idea of parachuting into the desert.

However, Stirling’s first experiment with the parachute was a flop, as Knight explained there was lots of “failure and disaster” in the early days of the regiment’s formation.

Yet, it was their curiosity that made them so unique in their ability to continue in the face of adversity.

“It seems to me that soldiers obey orders mostly and don’t know why they are doing it, but what was different about the SAS was they said to ask why, question the order and had their own ideas,” Knight added.

One of the most pertinent elements Mr Knight took away from his research on Stirling, who died in 1990, was how he and his fellow men did not fear death.

He explained that the secretary who worked with Stirling for 30 years told him that when Stirling used to leave the office in the 1970s, he would close his eyes when he crossed the main road. “He’s in his early 60s and he still wants the possibility of death,” Mr Knight said.

He added that he hoped the series inspires people “who feel they are excluded and not right for society and that kind of thing”.

Mr Knight described the founding members of the SAS as being the “people who stepped up”, adding “this is a tribute to them”.

The BBC’s History Magazine has also reposted a 2016 story about David Stirling’s efforts to create the smaller SAS squads out of the larger Commando units. This explains:

Among Stirling’s fellow commando officers were the novelist Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill, the Prime Minister’s son. Shipped to the Middle East in early 1941, the Commandos spent several frustrating months launching a series of largely unsuccessful seaborne raids against German and Italian targets in Libya, Syria and Crete.

Waugh was still in 8 Commando when he was serving in Crete during 1941 and remained in some version of that unit until later in 1943 when they shipped out to the Mediterranean without him.  The embarkation coincided with his father’s death. Bob Laycock, who was his commanding officer, refused to approve Waugh’s rejoining the unit overseas after his bereavement leave (although in some reports Laycock had already decided to leave Waugh behind when the unit departed).  Waugh then ran up against commanding officers in the UK who were less forgiving of his faults than Laycock.  He resigned from the Commandos in July 1943 after having been ordered to report for basic training by Shimi Lovat.

He drifted around Windsor with the Royal Horse Guards but contacted Bill Stirling (brother of David) seeking a position in the SAS. He had met Bill in Scotland during his earlier Commando training. Bill Stirling had Waugh assigned to an SAS unit with Christopher Sykes in late 1943. While doing parachute training in that unit, he injured his leg (cracked fibula). While he was recuperating, he decided that he could better spend his time writing the novel he had been contemplating than pursuing his flagging military career. His superiors were only too happy to comply. Just as he was delivering the text of the novel (Brideshead Revisited) to the publisher, Randolph Churchill invited him to join a special mission to Yugoslavia which he readily accepted.

It is not entirely clear what Waugh’s service in the SAS would have entailed had he not suffered the injury during parachute training. But according to the reports of the BBC series, the SAS were active in France during and after the Normandy Landings, particularly in disrupting German supply lines which often involved parachute drops behind German lines. In his war memoirs (Four Studies in Loyalty, London, 1946), Christopher Sykes describes parachuting into the Vosges Mountains in northeastern France with his SAS unit in late August 1944. This was in advance of the Allied invasion of that area (expected during September) and was intended to allow the SAS to make contact with the local French resistance to aid that invasion.

This invasion was unexpectedly delayed until November and during their time behind the lines, the SAS unit, although supported by the local Maquis, was frustrated in its efforts to organize an offensive operation while remaining under cover in the forests. By mid-October the Germans had discovered enough about their whereabouts and activities to render them useless, and, according to Sykes, they were ordered to retreat back across the American lines. In the course of that action, their 92-man unit lost one killed in action and 29 taken prisoner, of whom all but one were killed in captivity. Just as well Waugh fractured his leg a year earlier and was dispatched to Yugoslavia.

A recent book entitled David Stirling: The Phoney Major by Gavin Mortimer has developed the idea that it was David’s brother Bill Stirling and his colleague Paddy Mayne who were the brains beyond the successful creation and operation of David’s  SAS concept of smaller hit-and-run units. This is described in greater detail in a previous post. Indeed, David was a POW from early in 1943 until the end of the war so was unavailable to contribute to later iterations of the SAS that saw action in the invasions of Italy and France. The conclusions of Mortimer’s book seem to run counter to the descriptions of the BBC series’ plot, but it is mentioned in the History Magazine posting. The hardcover version of Mortimer’s book had its UK release in June and will be published in the US on 22 November (a Kindle version was released in June in both the US and UK). Link to US edition here.

The BBC One series SAS Rogue Heroes will be broadcast beginning Sunday, 30 October at 9pm. All episodes will be available immediately thereafter for streaming on BBC iPlayer with a UK internet connection. Here’s the conclusion from an advance review of the series in the Financial Times:

The series will undoubtedly further fuel our nostalgic nation’s propensity for turning the second world war into the stuff of legend. It might elicit eye-rolls for its use of brash gimmicks. But the show’s spirit of adventure proves hard to resist, and there have been few scenes on TV this year as jolting and immersive as the mission sequence which opens the third episode.

Ultimately, SAS Rogue Heroes has the makings of another hit for Knight and the BBC. Don’t be surprised to see men trading in their Blinders flat caps for military berets before too long.

 

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Evelyn Waugh’s 119th Birthday

Posted on October 28, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh was born on this date in 1903. His birthday is marked in several media announcements but this one on the website of satirist and radio commentator Garrison Keillor is the most detailed:

It’s the birthday of Evelyn Waugh, born in London, England in 1903. His family was affluent, and he was upset when he found out that he couldn’t attend the same prestigious school as his father and brother. He wasn’t allowed in because his brother, Alec Waugh, had a homosexual relationship, was dismissed from the school, and then wrote a book about it. So Evelyn went to a less prestigious school, where he thought all his classmates were unsophisticated. Then he went to Hertford, one of the Oxford Colleges, where he did art and wrote and drank, and neglected his academics. When someone asked him if he’d done any sports at college, he replied, “I drank for Hertford.” He left Oxford without a degree. He tried teaching and he hated it, he was in debt, so he attempted suicide by drowning himself in the ocean, but he got stung by a jellyfish so he ran back out. He decided to give his life another chance, and he wrote his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928). It’s about an innocent schoolteacher named Paul Pennyfeather who is expelled from Oxford for running across campus without his trousers, and has no choice but to become a schoolteacher. He’s surrounded by bigots, drunks, and pedophiles, and he almost marries the mother of one of his students, but it turns out she makes her money trafficking in brothels in South America. Evelyn Waugh went on to write many novels, including Brideshead Revisited (1945).

Evelyn Waugh said, “The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.”

The website Literary Hub also headed its daily announcements with a large photo of Waugh sitting at his desk with a cigar.  Here’s a link.

 

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Roundup: A Handful of Quotes

Posted on October 26, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in the London Review of Books about the Iranian armed drones being used by Russia against Ukraine, James Meek is reminded of similar weapons employed by the Nazis against Britain in WWII after the Normandy invasion. These were the V-1 and V-2 rockets.  Here’s an excerpt in which Waugh is quoted:

Those early Nazi drones, launched from mainland Europe, killed thousands of people, caused heavy destruction in towns and cities already partly ruined by conventional bombing, and badly hurt morale in London, where V-1s and V-2 rockets destroyed or damaged more than a million houses. Hundreds of thousands of children were evacuated. The uncanny remoteness of drone warfare, brought home in the 2000s by footage of suspected terrorists and harmless civilians being blown up by US drones whose pilots were safe a continent away, was already present in wartime London. [Philip] Ziegler quotes Evelyn Waugh: ‘No enemy was risking his life up there. It was as impersonal as a plague, as though the city was infested with enormous, venomous insects.’

The quote is from Unconditional Surrender (London, 1961, p. 245).

–The European Conservative has posted an essay (“Rediscovering Waugh“) by James Bradshaw discussing Waugh’s major works. It is quite well written and worth reading even by those quite familiar with the subject. Here are the opening paragraphs:

In terms of the breadth of his popularity, Evelyn Waugh has probably not fared as well as some of his literary contemporaries who achieved distinction in the mid-20th century. This may not have surprised him, given how much time he spent bemoaning the societal changes which were accelerating in the decades before his death in 1966. These changes included the decline of the aristocratic way of life, the elevation of politics and secular political ideologies to a position of pre-eminence, and, above all else, the decline of the Christian religion which alone had given hope to an author who was permanently plagued by melancholy and misanthropy.

Occasional revivals in popularity due to adaptations of his work—most notably, that which followed the release of the glorious ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited in 1981—will always continue. But there is far more to Waugh than first meets the eye, and no matter how great the gulf between his era and ours, readers who delve into his work can discover not only a supremely gifted literary craftsman, but an extraordinary soul and intellect as well.

—Harvard Medicine, the journal of the Harvard Medical School, has posted a list of favorite books recommended by its graduates. A 1995 alumnus posted this:

…Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which I have read perhaps ten times in my life. This quotation has always stuck with me: “To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”

–The religious journal Aleteia has an essay by Fr Peter John Cameron OP entitled “Sin and something better“. It opens with this:

…In God’s loving providence, even sin plays a redemptive role in leveling us so that we finally come face to face with what really matters in life. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, “God permits evil in order to draw forth some greater good.”

Recall that poignant scene from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited in which a character, living in adultery, goes through a meltdown:

“Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it. ‘Poor Julia,’ they say, ‘she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her little, mad sin.’”

Quote from Book Three, Chapter III, The Fountain. (Rev Ed 1960).

–The Literary Hub has convened a panel of four writers and academics to discuss the topic: “The Most Important Poem of the 20th Century: On T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” at 100“. Here’s a quote from a contribution by David Barnes:

…I sometimes wonder if The Waste Land hasn’t had more of an influence on the modern novel.

Evelyn Waugh named A Handful of Dust (1934) after a line from the poem, of course; Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) contains a number of conscious echoes of The Waste Land in its descriptions of the New York cityscape. And in post-war writers, that influence continued: Sam Selvon’s novel of alienated Caribbean immigrants, The Lonely Londoners (1956) begins with a description of the foggy “unrealness” of the London scene.

Jeanette Winterson’s novels are steeped in quotations from Eliot. The Waste Land has seeped into culture as a moving set of referents to describe urban alienation, fracture, cultural collapse. It also has a striking ability, inherent in its form I suppose, to speak across cultures. Jahan mentioned the impact of the text on Caribbean poets like Walcott and Braithwaite; and although it’s a poem focused on London, the apex of political and economic power, its language and structure seem also to destabilise, decentre.

The lines from the poem are:

“…I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

–The Majorca Daily Bulletin has an article recalling the 2000 filming of Channel 4’s adaptation of Sword of Honour on that island:

This was a production based on Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and loosely paralleled Waugh’s experiences during the Second World War. In Mallorca, it was the production of that year, 2000, with locations chosen to represent Egypt, Italy and Yugoslavia.

Valldemossa became an Italian town, the quarry in Porreres was a camp in Egypt; camels were used for authenticity. Cala S’Almunia and Cala Torta were chosen for landings and for escapes from enemy fire; Selva was a village full of partisans. Even the Castell de Sant Carles in Palma was a location. In the film it was a military barracks. Filming would normally be difficult there because it is a Spanish military place. However, and as Nofre Moya explains: “When we told them what the story was about, they loved it. Everything was easy.”

 

 

 

 

 

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Roundup: “The Waste Land” Centenary

Posted on October 16, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The centenary of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land has been marked in several print and broadcast media. The Washington Post notes the poem’s appearance in Brideshead Revisited:

First published in the inaugural October 1922 issue of Eliot’s literary magazine, the Criterion, “The Waste Land” was quickly recognized as a seismic event. Evelyn Waugh, a novelist of exquisite eye, re-created the force with which the poem landed. In “Brideshead Revisited,” his novel of 1920s Oxford, Waugh placed a sophisticated student of cutting-edge taste on a balcony, loudly declaiming lines from “The Waste Land” as crowds passed below.

The scene in question was inspired by Harold Acton’s recital of the poem from a Christ Church balcony which would have taken place shortly after the poem’s publication.

There is also a BBC documentary (“T S Eliot: Into The Waste Land“) in which most of the poem was reread with comments, as well as the rebroadcast of a commentary by A N Wilson (“Return to T S Eliotland”) and a reading of Four Quartets by Ralph Fiennes. The documentary is currently available for streaming and the latter two will be broadcast this evening.  All will be available from tomorrow on BBC iPlayer with a UK internet connection.

–The Spanish paper Diario de Sevilla is reminded of the closing scene of Brideshead Revisited in this recent article:

PERHAPS one of the most beautiful moments in television history is the final reflection of Brideshead Revisited, the series based on the novel of the same name by Evelyn Waugh. Remember: Charles Ryder (played by a young Jeremy Irons), returns to the country mansion of his old and missing friend Lord Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews), where he had been so happy in his youth and which at that time is a makeshift barracks where troops are instructed to go to the front. In the midst of the military bustle, Ryder, a skeptical complement officer, manages to find a few minutes to pray in the palace chapel, built with the stones of the feudal castle of Lord Sebastian ‘s family, former knights who, like the vast majority of the medieval nobility, had fought in the Holy Land. Before the tabernacle and its lamp, Ryder prays and the voiceover sounds: “… That flame that the old knights saw shine from their graves and that they saw go out; that flame burns again for other soldiers far from their homes, further in their hearts than Acre or Jerusalem, and could only have been lit by the builders and the tragic ones. And there I found it that morning, burning again among the old stones.”

It is tempting to feel a little Ryder when passing through the hole in the San Juan de Acre gate in Seville , demolished in 1864 […] Today, the Puerta de San Juan de Acre is a place disordered by development, half town, half neighborhood, with no more interest than the proximity of the river. However, as in that chapel in Brideshead in which Ryder prayed before leaving for the front, a tile-shaped flame continues to burn that reminds us that there was a shutter there with the name of the knights of Acre and takes us back to another time surely worse than the current one, but more beautiful and magical. We should never revile the power of toponymy.

The translation (including the passage from BR) is by Google.

–Peter Hitchens writing in The Spectator remembers former train journeys to France before the Eurostar tunnel service replaced them with faster but more Spartan fare. He thinks some of the old opulence might be restored, noting a passage from Brideshead Revisited:

In fact the delight of eating proper meals aboard trains might be re-established on the Paris run, and spread outwards – once more people realised just how wonderful it was. As Evelyn Waugh described it in Brideshead Revisited:

“The knives and forks jingled on the tables as we sped through the darkness; the little circle of gin and vermouth in the glasses lengthened to oval, contracted again, with the sway of the carriage, touched the lip, lapped back again, never spilt; I was leaving the day behind me.”

And so he was, and when I take the train to Paris or beyond, I am leaving the humdrum world behind me. Can’t it once again be a voyage, rather than a bureaucratic, joyless procedure best done under general anaesthetic?

—The Epoch Times has published an article reviewing the career of novelist W Somerset Maugham. Here’s an excerpt:

Gabriel García Márquez, George Orwell, James Michener, and Evelyn Waugh all admired his work, with Waugh describing him as “the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit.” In “Earthly Powers,” Anthony Burgess pays homage to Maugham, sometimes humorously so, by basing his narrator Toomey on Maugham and even having that character meet Maugham.

The Waugh quote comes from a 1939 Spectator review of Maugham’s novel Christmas Holiday. Reprinted in EAR, 247.

–Finally, The Conversation has reposted an article from 2021 about a visit to the church at Blythburgh in Suffolk. This includes a reference to Waugh:

A church first stood in Blythburgh before 654 CE. That was the year King Penda of Mercia slaughtered King Anna of East Anglia and his son in battle. Anna’s followers brought their bodies here for burial. The present building is mostly 15th-century. In this part of England those days were what Evelyn Waugh called the fat days of wool shearing and the wide corn lands. (Brideshead Revisited, Penguin, 1976, p. 317)

 

 

 

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90th Anniversary of Black Mischief Marked

Posted on October 13, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

A feature length article in the academic journal The Conversation marks the 90th anniversary this month of the publication of Waugh’s third novel Black Mischief. This is by Naomi Milthorpe who is also the editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh volume for that novel and longtime member of the Society. The novel was published in October 1932 in both the UK (Chapman & Hall) and US (Farrar & Rinehart). The UK edition was reprinted six times in its first month. Here’s an excerpt from Milthorpe’s article:

…Black Mischief was the Book Society choice for October 1932. The Book Society was an interwar subscription book club established in 1929. Members were often from non-metropolitan UK or English dominions, such as Australia, and used the Book Society to access new English books that were otherwise hard to get. The result was that Waugh’s novel did quite well in the UK.

It was published simultaneously in the United States. For whatever reason, it failed to move US readers. But the novel’s financial failure in the US was only a small concern in the face of its critical savaging by the Catholic press at home.

For a reader today, the offensive parts of Black Mischief are its representations of race. This is a novel that uses racial slurs. It depicts its Oxford-educated African Emperor as a fool and a lunatic, susceptible to “the inherited terror of the jungle”. Africans are described as “black, naked, anthropophagous”.

When it was reprinted in 1962, Waugh included a series of his own illustrations, which had previously appeared only in a limited large paper edition issued to family and friends. In these, his drawings of African characters resemble the clichés of blackface minstrelsy, a staple of British music hall and US popular entertainment in the early 20th century.

The reviewers of 1932 did not have a problem with Waugh’s depiction of race. Instead, the major controversy of its publication centred on the question of his violation of standards of decency…

As explained by Milthorpe, the Roman Catholic Church, like the reviewers, was not troubled so much by the book’s racist attitudes:

…Ernest Oldmeadow, editor of the Catholic weekly The Tablet, […] called the novel “nauseating” in its depiction of adultery and cannibalism. Oldmeadow argued that Waugh violated Catholic civility by showing Basil and Prudence’s loveless sexual affair (there’s a suggestive image of a cigar limply unfurling in a hip-bath), and Prudence’s grisly end, “stewed to pulp among peppers and aromatic roots”. He called into question Waugh’s good faith and even suggested the work was blasphemous…

Milthorpe goes on to describe in some detail the prolonged debate between Waugh and Oldmeadow regarding these issues.

A Penguin edition appeared in 1938 and was (according to some sources) reprinted even during the war when paper was in short supply. I have yet to see one of those wartime editions which are not listed on Pengiun’s copyright pages. Later Penguin editions (starting in 1965) also include Waugh’s illustrations mentioned in the article. The article includes several interesting and well-produced illustrations and is available at this link.

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Columbus Day Roundup: Cricket, Latin and Name Extinction

Posted on October 8, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–In what is perhaps this week’s most interesting story, the Independent newspaper has posted a history of the Hollywood Cricket Club. This is by Leonie Cooper and describes in some detail the club’s founding, growth and membership. Evelyn Waugh makes a contribution:

Founded in 1932 by British character actor and one-time England test cricketer Charles Aubrey Smith, the Hollywood Cricket Club was a home away from home for Brits in Los Angeles at the boom of the talkies. […] Smith was already in his late sixties when he formed the club. Before acting on the London stage, Smith had been a professional cricketer, playing for both Cambridge and Sussex. It wasn’t just the cricket that made him every inch the stereotypical British gent – there was the bristly handlebar ’tache and fondness for smoking a pipe, too. Such was Smith’s stature that fellow Brit Evelyn Waugh would immortalise Smith’s Hollywood years in his death industry novella The Loved One. Here Smith would take the form of Sir Ambrose Ambercrombie, an endearingly pompous expat committed to holding up an extreme version of Englishness for himself and his fellow UK transplants. “The captain of the Hollywood Cricket Club was the redoubtable, craggy C Aubrey Smith,” wrote David Niven. “A famous county cricketer, he had a penchant for suddenly nipping out from behind the umpire and firing down his fast ball… He had been nicknamed ‘Round the Corner Smith’. His house on Mulholland Drive was called ‘The Round Corner’; on his roof were three cricket stumps and a bat and ball serving as a weather vane.”

Among the interesting bits of information on offer is that PG Wodehouse, not much of a batsman, when in LA on scriptwriting assignments, would stop by the Club’s Griffith Park grounds and act as scorekeeper. The Club’s founder C Aubrey Smith died in 1948, the year The Loved One was published.  The Griffith Park cricket pitch has been converted to other uses, but the pavilion is still there, now serving cucumber sandwiches to wedding parties.

–James Marriott writing in the Times newspaper addresses the “British affliction of mistaking fusty learning [inherent in Oxbridge educations] for intellectual heft.” He cites the recent example of the new Chancellor of the Exchequer:

It’s now clear that an appreciation of Latin poetry and a PhD in 17th-century coinage aren’t enough to stop a man from crashing the economy. Kwasi Kwarteng’s intellectual armoury sounded intimidating but it turns out that when the pound is jittering and kicking like a spooked mule, you can’t soothe it with a few well-chosen verses from Horace. Intriguingly, even as bits of the economy were falling off and bursting into flames, the chancellor’s allies continued to insist their man was “formidably” intelligent. The guy writes poetry in Latin. And if you ever wanted an informed opinion on the coinage crisis of 1695-97 . . .

He goes on to discuss how Americans are similarly confused by attributing unwarranted intelligence to successful businessmen and notes this example of how the English see through this American prejudice from an Evelyn Waugh novel:

In Britain, the notion that businessmen are philistines is a matter of long tradition. In Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh informs readers that the Canadian entrepreneur Rex Mottram is unable to appreciate a glass of fine burgundy because its complex taste reveals that “the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his”.

It’s . . . a drink? In few other countries would it even begin to make sense to associate expensive booze with esoteric wisdom. You don’t have to meet many aristocrats to become sceptical of the idea that drinking in posh clubs is making them smarter.

–The New Statesman marks the anniversary of the James Bond films with a reference to Waugh’s reaction to the first of them:

Sixty years ago, on October 5, 1962, the first James Bond film, Dr No, was released in the UK. Evelyn Waugh, a friend of Ian and Ann Fleming, accompanied them to the premiere, after a swell dinner party. He was not impressed. In his diary, Waugh recorded: “We entered in darkness and left unobserved by the paying audience; not at all like a gala performance of opera with tiers of boxes, promenade and tiaras sparkling under chandeliers. The film was totally fatuous and tedious, no mystery, not even erotic.” A few months later Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming remembering what he could about “Bond’s passions” in the movie: “In the film I think he dallied during a sweaty siesta
 and then went off in a boat with a prize cock-drop – a sort of Swedish games mistress. But I was not very attentive.” So much for Ursula Andress.

Waugh, it seems, did not feel that he had been present at an historic event for the nation as a whole. Yet that evening launched one of the defining cultural icons of Britishness to this day, up there with the Beatles, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and the late Queen Elizabeth, whether we like it or not. James Bond is the longest continually running film series; it is estimated a quarter of the global population has seen at least one Bond film. …

The article goes on to explain how the franchise and its budget grew and grew beyond its original roots. It seems unlikely that these efforts would have made any difference to Waugh.

—America magazine remembers J F Powers, an American writer whom Waugh admired and befriended. This may have been intended to mark the 75th anniversary of Powers’ first book publication. See previous post. The article opens with this:

What is worse, a sin of commission or one of omission? In the case of the obituary writers of The New York Times over the decades, the latter failings call out more loudly for repentance. Any survey of the accounts of lives of religious novelists is all the evidence you need. With what words would you bury Evelyn Waugh? The Times chose “Evelyn Waugh, Satirical Novelist, Is Dead at 62.” His greatest triumph, Brideshead Revisited, is described as (not kidding) “a tragic recounting of the decline of a great English family.”

J. F. Powers didn’t fare much better. This finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction for 1957, the winner of that award in 1963, a writer hailed as a literary lion by everyone from Flannery O’Connor to Philip Roth to Mary Gordon to Frank O’Connor, was dispatched upon his death in 1999 with “J. F. Powers, 81, Dies; Wrote About Priests.”

I suppose it’s not entirely wrong: Both of his novels (Morte D’Urban in 1962, Wheat That Springeth Green in 1988) and many of his short stories had priests as protagonists, and surely no American writer has ever captured the quotidian existence of parish priests better than Powers. But you wouldn’t bury a writer with “Hemingway: Wrote About Drunks,” nor “Melville: Wrote About a Whale.” There’s a sneer behind the headline, the passing regret that J. F. Powers didn’t write about something more compelling.

The article goes on to describe Powers’ career that was marred by the frustration of a 25 year writer’s block with respect to his second novel. The subject of Waugh’s friendship is not developed further, although the two writers reviewed each other’s books, corresponded and met each other over several years.

—The Economist magazine has an article about a new program to promote the study of Latin and Greek in English schools. It opens with this:

Evelyn Waugh, a novelist, valued his classical education. Not because it enabled him to understand ancient languages: Waugh could remember no Greek, write no Latin and enjoyed reading neither. But it did enable him to excel in a more important exercise: spotting and judging those who knew less than he. Such people (“most Americans and most women”) betrayed their deprivation with sentences of “inexcusable vulgarity”. “I do not,” he wrote, “regret my superficial classical studies.

Latin occupies an odd place in English curriculums. One part proper subject, two parts smug social shibboleth, to have chanted “amo, amas, amat” in a Latin class has long implied membership of another kind of class altogether. The decline and almost fall of Latin in state schools in the 20th century did not diminish its social cachet, because numbers in fee-paying independent schools remained high. In 2020 eight times more pupils sat Latin gcse at Eton, a posh school, than in the entirety of Northumberland. Waugh considered Latin the mark of a gentleman. Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, puts it more briskly: it gets seen as a subject for “posh white boys”.

—The Independent newspaper has also done a survey of name popularity and has determined that the name Evelyn for boys has become extinct in the 21st century. It provides a list of 10 most commonly used names in the past that are now extinct and describes the process as follows:

…the definition of extinct is a name that doesn’t appear in the Office for National Statistics dataset of babies’ first names in England and Wales since 2000, or in the Scottish records for 2020 and 2021. The ONS dataset omits names that are recorded only once or twice in a year, on grounds of confidentiality – so “extinct” means no more than two in any year since the turn of the century.

Here’s the comment on Evelyn’s extinction: “Nominated by Paul Edwards. Extinct for boys. Never mind Waugh, it is the 21st most popular name for girls: 1,729 in 2021.” Among the other boys’ names facing extinction are Branwell, Hilary and Torquil.

 

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