Hugh Trevor-Roper on Evelyn Waugh (more)

Posted on March 9, 2014 by Jeffrey Manley

An earlier post here mentioned the publication of One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper. Standpoint magazine has now published a review of the volume, which it had earlier excerpted. In the review, Paul Johnson, friend (or at least acquaintance) of Evelyn Waugh and fellow Roman Catholic, mentions HTR’s rather prickly relations with Waugh:

For social purposes Trevor-Roper was an Anglican but regarded Christianity as inferior to Judaism or even Islam. He had a particular detestation of Catholics, especially converts. The genial Frank Longford, who would go the length of England to help a poor ex-criminal in distress, he dismissed as “an ass”, and he treasured a letter from Lord Birkenhead denouncing Evelyn Waugh in unmeasured terms, though would not refer to it publicly for fear of “incurring the insane malice of his son”, Auberon Waugh.

A copy of the Birkenhead letter was enclosed in a letter HTR sent to Alasdair Palmer relating to Waugh that was among  the earlier Standpoint excerpts, but he told Palmer to destroy it after reading.

Whether the denunciatory letter adds to anything said by Birkenhead elsewhere is hard to say. (Birkenhead had the misfortune of being cooped up with Waugh and Randolph Churchill in Yugoslavia during WWII.) There may be a copy of his letter among the papers of HTR archived at Christ Church College, Oxford. It seems unlikely that HTR would have himself destroyed it after having made such a meal of it in private letters. Moreover, by the time of his death, he no longer needed to fear the “insane malice” of Auberon Waugh, who predeceased him by two years. The letter would make interesting reading.

Thanks to Waugh scholar Prof. Robert Murray Davis for bringing Johnson’s review to our attention.

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David Bowie, Waugh Fan

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Jeffrey Manley

A list of singer/songwriter David Bowie’s 100 favorite books includes Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies. The list appears in an Independent newspaper article that was published in conjunction with the exhibition David Bowie is at the Victoria & Albert museum, which ran for several months last year, closing in August.

Bowie is described as a “voracious reader.” For example, when he travelled to the desert to make the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, he was accompanied by a trunkful of books. Three books by Waugh’s contemporary George Orwell appear on the list, making Orwell Bowie’s favorite writer. Among these is 1984 which is the title of one of the songs on his 1974 album Diamond Days. Bowie once proposed to turn Orwell’s novel into a rock musical but was refused permission. Other books on Bowie’s list by writers of the interwar generation include Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood, Blast by Wyndham Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The exhibition moved from the V&A to Toronto and will travel (via stops in Sao Paulo and Berlin) to Chicago next September where it will be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the only US venue.

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Complete archives of The Tablet and The Catholic Herald now online

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Antony F. P. Vickery

The Tablet and The Catholic Herald have made available online and searchable their archives of past issues.

The Spectator did this last year, benefiting greatly Evelyn Waugh enthusiasts and also admirers of the work of his son Auberon, a fixture for many years in the periodical.

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Waugh as a savior of Victorian heritage

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Jeffrey Manley

In a new BBC Four series that started Sunday night, Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry, art historian and critic Jonathan Meades cites Evelyn Waugh as one of the leaders of the movement to preserve the Victorian heritage in art and architecture. It can currently be viewed on BBC iPlayer (UK viewers only unless you use a proxy service which provides a UK IP address).

Meades is setting up a defense of the Brutalist style of the post-war period and uses the experience of the Victorian Gothic as a test case for revival. That style had, according to Meades, come to be “calumnized” as monstrous by critics and the public at large during the early 20th century. He lists several factors responsible for a shift in sentiment after 1960. One was the early band of proselytizers of a revival among whom were Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Harry Goodhart-Rendel, and Osbert Lancaster. Founders of the Victorian Society in the late 1950s, they had previously been regarded by their own generation as “puzzling provocateurs, not quite serious, forever mischievously guying the public with their perverse aestheticism.” They were later joined by Nikolaus Pevsner, an art historian by profession, who added “gravitas” to the movement. Presumably Meades will show in the next episode (to air on BBC Four next Sunday), that the time is now ripe for a change in attitude to the Brutalist structures which he himself describes as “concrete poetry.”

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Applicants sought for funded Oxford DPhil (PhD) in connection with the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Antony F. P. Vickery

From the announcement by the Faculty of English, University of Oxford:

Applicants are sought for a three year, fully funded Studentship (including both fees and living costs) to work towards a DPhil (PhD) in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford on the [Arts and Humanities Research Council] project The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. The Studentship will commence in October 2014 and is open to UK nationals, or EU nationals who have resided in the UK for 3 years or more.

The successful applicant will normally have achieved a Master’s degree with distinction (or equivalent) in English Literature or a relevant subject, but does not necessarily have to be a Waugh specialist at the commencement of the Studentship. Their work will focus on one of the project’s central areas of enquiry: Waugh’s inter-war travel writing. They will examine the whole cultural and bibliographical context of all five of the inter-war texts with a view to producing a book from the thesis that could be submitted to OUP as a companion volume to the edition. The student appointed to the project will be supervised by Professor David Bradshaw.

Additional information here.

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BBC Radio 4’s Sword of Honour wins at 2014 BBC Radio Drama Awards

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Antony F. P. Vickery

Jeremy Front’s dramatization of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, broadcast in seven episodes on BBC Radio 4 last year, won Best Audio Drama (Adaptation) at the 2014 BBC Radio Drama Awards held yesterday in London.

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In Search of Nancy: A first trip to the Evelyn Waugh Archive

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Antony F. P. Vickery

A new blog, Waugh and Words, created by Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project at the University of Leicester, features an essay by research associate Barbara Cooke in which she describes her first visit to Alexander Waugh’s home and reflects on the relationship between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford.

Nancy was special. Evelyn did not idolise her, but loved her deeply and respected her as a fellow writer. They corresponded for more than thirty years, right up until Evelyn’s death on Easter Sunday, 1966. The bulk of their surviving letters dates from 1944, just before the publication of Brideshead Revisited. As their fame grew Nancy and Evelyn critiqued one another’s novels, failed to take one another’s advice, and retracted criticisms once presented by the other with the finished goods. Like Lady Diana, Nancy had her own ‘shining row’ of special editions. Evelyn also dedicated The Loved One to her, in typically tongue-in-cheek fashion. This acerbic tale about the American funeral trade was published with illustrations by Stuart Boyle, and an urn appears on the frontispiece bearing the legend ‘TO NANCY MITFORD’.

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Huntington Library acquires major Waugh collection

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Jeffrey Manley

The Huntington Library in San Marino, California (12 miles west of Los Angeles) has announced the acquisition of a major collection of rare editions and manuscripts of Evelyn Waugh. The collection, consisting of some 250 books and 135 letters and manuscripts, is the gift of Loren and Frances Rothschild. Loren is a longtime book collector and member of the library’s board of trustees.

According to the Los Angeles Times, among the letters in the collection are a number relating to libel concerns about Waugh’s 1948 satire The Loved One, which was based on Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, just north of Los Angeles. Other interesting items include the manuscript of his 1934 travel book Ninety-Two Days which was dedicated to his friend Diana Cooper, a satiric journal he wrote at age 13, and a 1923 copy of The Broom, a short-lived Oxford publication that contains a story by Waugh. Waugh’s hand-corrected manuscript of his first novel Decline and Fall is included in the collection. Its title page contains several possible alternative titles, including Picaresque: The Making of an Englishman and Facing Facts: A Study in Discouragement, as well as various permutations of these suggestions. Waugh told his friend and fellow novelist Anthony Powell that another title he had considered was Untoward Incidents, based on a phrase used by the Duke of Wellington to describe the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino in a time of peace. The collection also contains a 17-page annotated typewritten manuscript of “The Hopeful Pontiff,” an essay about Pope John XXIII.

Professor John Wilson of Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, editor of Evelyn Waugh Studies and founder of the Evelyn Waugh Society, described the Rothschilds’ gift as establishing the Huntington Library as the second leading center of Waugh studies in the world. According to Professor Wilson, cited in the library’s press release, the Huntington’s collection is now surpassed only by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which acquired Waugh’s library and many of his possessions and manuscripts in several batches from 1961 to 1991. Other institutions with Waugh holdings include the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Georgetown University, Leeds University, Leicester University, and Notre Dame University.

A sample of the collection can be viewed in the slide show that accompanies the LA Times article.

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Evelyn Waugh’s ear trumpet vs. £4,000 worth of electronic hearing aids

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Antony F. P. Vickery

Alexander Chancellor tries Waugh’s notorious ear trumpet, and is impressed:

On Christmas Day, in the Somerset home of my daughter Eliza, and her husband, Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, I was offered the novelist’s old ear trumpet to try. I am rather deaf, as he was, and I was interested to see how it worked. It is a charming object, made of tortoiseshell, very light, and compressible so as to fit in a pocket, which was once given to him by the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. And I am embarrassed to say that I think I heard rather better through Waugh’s ear trumpet than I do through my two state-of-the-art Swiss-made electronic hearing aids that cost me around £2,000 each a few years ago.

Update (Jan. 24): In a letter to The Spectator published the following week, a Mr. Tom Blackett of West Byfleet, Surrey, writes:

Alexander Chancellor writes of the efficiency of Evelyn Waugh’s tortoiseshell ear trumpet (Long life, 11 January). Waugh also had a brass model — clearly less efficient — which he once brandished at Ann Fleming, shouting: ‘What? What?’ This so enraged her that she took a pudding spoon and soundly rapped the horn, sending the great man’s head into a spin.”

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Malcolm Muggeridge on Waugh and Stopp’s biography

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Antony F. P. Vickery

In 1959 Malcolm Muggeridge reviewed Frederick J. Stopp’s biography of Evelyn Waugh for the New Republic and described his own slight acquaintance with its subject:

The last time I saw him was at a wedding. I am no expert on wedding attire, but his seemed unusual. A tall black top hat, I thought funereal in character, provided an additional bizarre touch. He made considerable play with an old-fashioned Victorian ear trumpet, though whether for use or ostentation I cannot say. Occasionally he seemed to head in my direction, almost to orbit round me, but no trace of recognition appeared on his large, rubicund countenance. I felt no particular desire to be recognized by him, but these strange gyrations struck me as odd. In any case, on the few occasions that I have been on speaking terms with Mr. Waugh, I have formed the impression that he does not like me.

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