Ma Meyrick Inspires Again

Posted on September 29, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Kate Atkinson has written a book about a London night club hostess from the 1920s that has received considerable press coverage. This is entitled Shrines of Gaiety. The opening of this article by Jake Kerridge in the Daily Telegraph is typical of the comments:

In the London of the Roaring Twenties, no woman – not even the feistiest flapper – provided more pleasure for more people than Kate Meyrick. Ma Meyrick, as she was universally known, was the proprietress of the city’s most exciting night clubs, rackety spots endowed with glamour by their clientele of aristocrats and celebrities.

She was a rather incongruous figure in such company – Barbara Cartland once described her as “a wispy little woman who always had holes in her stockings”. But if she didn’t match anybody’s mental image of the woman the press dubbed the “Night Club Queen”, that was an apt reminder of the bizarre transition she had made in her 40s from unremarkable doctor’s wife to tutelary spirit of London’s nightlife.

Unsurprisingly, novelists have been fascinated by this unlikely character over the decades – Evelyn Waugh put her into his books as “Ma Mayfield”, with her most famous club, The 43 in Soho, renamed “The Old Hundredth”. Now Kate Atkinson has appropriated Ma Meyrick’s story for her latest novel, Shrines of Gaiety, in which the formidable “Old Ma Coker” battles the business rivals trying to take over her night club empire.

After a fairly detailed discussion of Meyrick’s history, Kerridge returns to Waugh’s coverage in Brideshead:

The question of what attracted these upstanding male members [to her clubs] was addressed by Ma in the chapter on “Dance Hostesses” in her memoir, Secrets of the 43 Club. How could the hostesses “command the substantial earnings they do without descending into ways that are dubious”? The answer was that “a great many of the rich men who come to night clubs are dancing mad” and would tip “an expert dancing partner” extravagantly.

The hostesses needed to lead temperate lives to keep themselves fit and attractive – “How does such a regime fit in with the picture of night clubs as ‘dens of iniquity’ which uninformed people are so fond of painting?”, Ma asked. One assumes that the two hostesses Charles and Sebastian pick up in Brideshead Revisited – “One had the face of a skull, the other of a sickly child” – were having an off day.

Writing in the New York Sun , Jude Russo reviews Atkinson’s book as well as Meyrick’s contribution:

“Shrines of Gaiety” follows the tribulations of the Coker clan, a family running an underground jazz club empire under the canny eye of their matriarch, Nellie — a formidable presence modeled on the historical “Night Club Queen,” Kate Meyrick, who also inspired Evelyn Waugh’s Ma Mayfield in “Brideshead Revisited.” Chief Inspector John Frobisher sets himself to ending their reign of vice with the aid of a peppy librarian, Gwendolen Kelling.

Readers familiar with P.G. Wodehouse and Waugh will find much that is pleasantly familiar in “Shrines of Gaiety” — toffs and toughs, antique cars, flappers, corrupt policemen, hardboiled policemen. Ms. Atkinson’s work as a detective story writer has served her well; it is in the crime novel strain of this latest book that her skill for plotting is most evident. Despite its scale, “Shrines of Gaiety” comes together like the innards of a fine Swiss watch.

Laura Miller reviewing Atkinson’s book in Slate also notes the literary connection somewhat more more broadly:

London in the 1920s, and especially the shenanigans of the Bright Young Things—a group of socialites famous for their extravagant costume parties and excessive drinking—has provided fodder for dozens of novelists, including Waugh, Nancy Mitford, and Anthony Powell, all of whom were counted among the Bright Young Things themselves. In Shrines of Gaiety, everyone in town is talking about a bestselling book, later adapted for the stage, portraying this milieu: The Green Hat by Michael Arlen, a real novel now long forgotten. There’s also a character evidently based on Waugh, who despite fawning over the Bright Young Things in person, is at work on a book about how their brightness has become “tarnished.” This plan chagrins Nellie’s feckless son Ramsay, who fancies himself the writer best positioned to depict the intersection of the aristocracy and the underworld where his mother’s businesses flourish. That is, if he can manage to actually write.

The Economist’s reviewer also offers this comment on Ramsay’s book: “Another of Nellie’s sons tries to capture the zeitgeist in a dreadful novel called “The Age of Glitter”, a nod to “Vile Bodies”, Evelyn Waugh’s satire of the era of the Bright Young Things.”

The book was also favorably reviewed in the Guardian, the Minneapolis StarTribune and the New York Times. The latter explains why so many reviewers were able to identify the connection between Atkinson’s character and Waugh’s:

A cast list of this teeming tapestry up front might have been helpful, though at least one figure may be familiar to some readers; Atkinson notes in the afterword that her nightlife maven Nellie Coker was inspired by the famed 1920s club impresario Kate Meyrick, already immortalized as Ma Mayfield in “Brideshead Revisited.” A middle-aged turnip of mysterious provenance, Nellie has molded herself through sheer will and ruthlessness — is there ever any ruth, when it comes to this kind? — into the queen of Soho’s demimonde, supplying all manner of nocturnal pleasures to the government ministers, movie stars and Bright Young Things who can afford her entrance fees.

Atkinson’s book was published earlier this week in both London and New York. The US edition is available at this link.

UPDATE (30 September 2022): A reference to The Economist’s review was added.

 

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Roundup: Mostly Books

Posted on September 25, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Public Domain Review has posted an article and links to reproductions from a noted piece of Victoriana in the Waugh Collection at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. Here’s the opening:

The novelist Evelyn Waugh was an inveterate collector. His interest was Victorian arcana — bric-a-brac unfashionable in his time, even gauche, and cheaply acquired. He had a soft spot for histrionic decorative objects, and furniture much larger than function demanded. By his own account, Waugh’s taste referenced the musty, redolent home of his three maiden aunts, a house that hadn’t been altered since 1870, which had entranced Waugh as a young child. Brownish oil paintings; mounted butterflies; glass cabinets of fossils; a taxidermized monkey on the bathroom shelf. “It all belonged to another age, which I instinctively, even then, recognized as superior to my own.”

In middle-age, Waugh turned his collector’s eye toward books, telling Life magazine in 1946 that he was now “collect[ing] old books in an inexpensive, desultory way”. Indeed, he amassed some 3500 volumes, all of which were transferred after his death to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. Despite the size of Waugh’s library, the archive had no trouble designating its “single most curious object”. That distinction belonged without question to the Victorian Blood Book.

A similar article was mentioned in a previous post, and the Society’s own Richard Oram has spoken and written articles about the Blood Book as well. Richard was librarian at the HRC when a copy of the book was posted on the HRC ‘s website.

–Novelist Andrew Greer mentions Waugh in connection with his new book Less is Lost. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: So you didn’t go for the more vicious comedy of, say, an Evelyn Waugh?

A: The one Evelyn Waugh I like is called The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which I read while I was working on this book. It’s a fictionalization of a time when Waugh went on a cruise. and he mixed some of his doctor’s drugs by accident and started hallucinating. It’s bizarre but it’s funny and painful and it was really interesting because it wasn’t as caustic as his other books which I find unpleasant.

The new book is described by interviewer Christopher Bollen as “humorous and heartbreaking”. It is a sequel to Greer’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Less. The full text of the interview appears in Interview Magazine.

–The New Statesman reviews a new book about the Huxley family (Thomas, Julian and Aldous). The book is entitled An Intimate History of Evolution and is written by Alison Bashford. In the review by John Gray, this appears:

…Aldous is the least interesting of the three [Huxleys]. Like Evelyn Waugh, he began by satirising the mores of his contemporaries in light, witty novels, then developed a concern with spirituality – though the faith to which he surrendered was less well-defined than Waugh’s. Like his pacifism, which was common among London’s intelligentsia, a watered-down Indian mysticism was popular in Hollywood. He is remembered for a single work of genius, Brave New World (1932)…

–Ben Macintyre, author of several books and film and TV scripts about spies is interviewed in the Irish Times. Here’s an excerpt:

A book to make you laugh?

It is very politically incorrect but Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop still makes me laugh. I read it once a year. “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.” Every time I think my writing is getting a bit too lush and a bit too purple, I take another look at Scoop.

–The National Catholic Reporter mentions a literary anniversary overlooked by other publications. Here’s the opening section:

In June 1944, an unlikely inmate at a federal penitentiary in Minnesota passed the time by corresponding with a priest friend about the wonders and woes of clerical life. The prisoner was 27-year-old James Farl Powers: “Jim” to close friends and “J.F.” to the writers Evelyn Waugh, Donna Tartt and many other devoted fans who gushed about Powers’ oft-overlooked fiction as they would, in the words of critic Denis Donoghue, about “an idyllic village in an unfashionable part of France, not to be disclosed to the ordinary camera-flashing tourist.”

Powers’ first short story collection, Prince of Darkness and Other Stories, was published 75 ago, kicking off a celebrated career dedicated to the messy lives of Catholic priests: their pushy visitors, parish finances, and long, dark nights of the soul.

Waugh reviewed the book in 1949, apparently when the UK edition appeared.  The review was published in the Month and is reproduced in EAR. Waugh noted that “the shadows of Hemingway and Steinbeck lie over the work but not so heavily as to obscure the brilliant and determining quality which [John Lehmann, the book’s UK publisher] does not choose to notice. The book is Catholic.”  (EAR, p. 373).

Waugh and Powers became friends and met each other on Waugh’s 1949 lecture tour to the US (requiring a substantial detour to St Paul between St Louis and Springfield, IL) as well as during Power’s periods of residence in Ireland. The imprisonment mentioned in the NCR article was related to Powers’ declaring himself a conscientious objector in WWII. Powers’ stories (as well as his two novels) remain in print in the US market thanks to New York Review Books. Here’s a link.

–Finally, another Roman Catholic journal, Crisis Magazine, has published a brief essay by Joseph Pearce highlighting the religious themes in Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Here’s a link to that essay.

 

 

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Orwell News

Posted on September 21, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

George Orwell was born the same year as Evelyn Waugh and they became acquainted  in the late 1940s shortly before Orwell’s death. They admired each other’s writing but had different political and religious views (although both agreed in their opposition to Communism). The following articles relating to Orwell may be of interest to our readers:

–Obituaries have appeared in both the US and UK announcing the death of Peter Davison (1926-2022). He was a literary scholar and academic best known for his editing of the The Complete Works of George Orwell. This took over 17 years and was completed with vol. XX that appeared in 1998. According to D J Taylor, writing in the Guardian:

Without the efforts of Peter Davison, who has died aged 95, our knowledge of the life and works of George Orwell would be immeasurably the poorer. In an editorial engagement that extended for nearly three-and-a-half decades, Davison turned himself into a one-man Orwell industry: his 20-volume George Orwell: The Complete Works (1998) is rightly regarded as one of the triumphs of late 20th-century publishing.

This achievement is all the more remarkable in that Davison’s career as an Orwell scholar did not begin until he was in his mid-50s. At an age when most academics are settling into comfortable retirement, he was working eight hours a day on the voluminous output of a man whom he regarded as the greatest writer of his age.

Davison’s enlistment as an Orwell scholar came out of the blue. He had spent a quarter of a century teaching literature at Birmingham, Lampeter and Kent universities, specialising in Elizabethan textual scholarship and gaining a reputation for indefatigable hard work: his one-time colleague the novelist David Lodge remembered that his departure from Birmingham left 17 committee posts to fill.

In September 1981, shortly before he took early retirement, he was telephoned by the publisher Tom Rosenthal of Secker & Warburg and asked if he would be prepared to “look over” a forthcoming edition of the six novels and three works of non-fiction Orwell had published in his lifetime. Publication was set for 1984.

Rosenthal assured him that little was needed in the way of amendment. Davison, on the other hand, found himself having to check the books against nearly 50 extant editions and manuscripts. Out of this initial contract – Davison was initially paid at the princely rate of £100 a volume – grew the altogether mammoth undertaking of George Orwell: The Complete Works.

In the mid-1980s Orwell studies barely existed. Bernard Crick had written his pioneering biography George Orwell: A Life (1980) and Ian Angus and Orwell’s widow Sonia had co-edited the four-volume Collected Journalism, Essays and Letters (1968), but vast amounts of uncollected articles and lost correspondence awaited rediscovery in ancient files.

Assisted by Angus and Davison’s wife Sheila – who devoted herself to the project – and eking out his pension by taking on the additional burden of the secretaryship of the Albany building in Piccadilly, Davison set to work.

The 17 years it took to get all 20 volumes into print were marked by a series of disasters. The first three books did not appear until 1986 and had to be pulped as the printers had used an uncorrected version of Davison’s texts. Subsequently the edition was abandoned six times by its publishers (Secker in London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in New York): after each abandonment Davison carried on regardless. There was a further setback in 1995 when his doctors advised him to have a sextuple heart bypass.

It was not until 1998 that the books finally appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, to a chorus of praise in which Davison sometimes seemed to achieve equal billing with his subject. As another of Orwell’s biographers, Michael Shelden, put it: “In America such an enormous undertaking would be likely to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars of government funding … But Davison has had to get by on a few thousand pounds advanced to him by his British and American publishers … One can only marvel at the devoted service one British scholar has given to that genius [Orwell].”…

The ongoing Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project will ultimately extend over more than twice as many volumes (total 41) as the Orwell collection. Waugh lived 15 years longer than Orwell and wrote more books, journalism and correspondence during his working life. Fortunately, there are more people at work on the Waugh project, and by the end of this year, 12 of the projected volumes will have been published. The goal in both cases seems to be the same–to publish a definitive edition of the author’s work consistent with his intentions at the time of his death. Whether the Orwell editions contain the detailed manuscript development material included in the Waugh editions exceeds my experience with the Orwell editions.

—The Spectator has recently reposted a 2011 feature length article about Orwell’s views of religion, in particular his disregard for Roman Catholicism. This is entitled “Orwell vs God ” and was written by Robert Gray, who included this brief mention of Orwell’s and Waugh’s views of each other:

…Perhaps Evelyn Waugh divined something of Orwell’s buried spirituality when he wrote to congratulate him on Nineteen-Eighty-Four, and subsequently visited him in the nursing home at Cranham in Gloucestershire. On the other side, one of Orwell’s last attempts at writing was to draw up notes for an essay on Waugh, who, he considered, ‘is abt as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding unacceptable opinions’.

Waugh’s later novella Love Among the Ruins (1953) was in a sense his “answer” to 1984 since he brought into his dystopia a consideration of the element of religion that he felt was missing from that of Orwell’s.

UPDATE (22 September 2022): Edits added.

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Fall Equinox Roundup

Posted on September 18, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Sunday Times contributes another assessment of the literary achievements of Queen Elizabeth II’s years. This is entitled “The books that defined the Queen’s reign.” It is written by Dominic Sandbrook, who begins with a consideration of T S Eliot’s World War II visit to Buckingham Palace while Elizabeth was still a princess. It did not go well.  Sandbrook then proceeds to the years of Elizabeth’s reign, beginning with the 1950s:

…Some candidates pick themselves. Of the books published in the immediate aftermath of her accession, the most influential on the world’s imagination was surely JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The best? Hard, I think, to look past William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, indelibly stamped by the horrors of the Second World War.

Yet perhaps the best glimpse of life in the early Fifties, and certainly the funniest, comes in Kingsley Amis’s debut, Lucky Jim, which recounts the misadventures of a young history lecturer at a redbrick university. Published in 1954, it might seem irredeemably tweedy today, with its smoke-wreathed pubs, high-minded folk singers, beret-wearing artists and tight-sweatered bluestockings.

At the time Lucky Jim’s sheer irreverence, as well as its unrepentant masculine hedonism, caught the mood of a Britain emerging from the rigours of austerity. Evelyn Waugh thought it symptomatic of a “new wave of philistinism”. Somerset Maugham, more bluntly, thought its grammar-school-educated hero and his contemporaries were “scum”. “Some will take to drink, some to crime, and go to prison,” Maugham wrote. “Others will become schoolmasters and form the young, or journalists and mould public opinion. A few will go into Parliament, become Cabinet Ministers, and rule the country. I look on myself as fortunate that I shall not live to see it.”

Sandbrook continues through the years, mentioning such notable books as Angus Wilson’s Last Call, John  Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. For the concluding years, Sandbrook reservees judgement but thinks something by Jamie Oliver or Joe Wicks might well be noted.

—The Critic in an article by CD Montgomery about Boris Johnson (“A critical man without any plan”) offers a comparison with Waugh’s assessment of a politician (something he rarely stooped to):

…[Johnson] disappointed those who had hopes of him, but what of those who merely had expectations? Even then, his premiership contrived to end more miserably than Theresa May’s. For she at least was ground down by events. Whereas Boris Johnson was undone by the pettiest form of himself: the little man breaking free from the great man of history.

With his ear for a quip, this prime minister was fond of recalling Evelyn Waugh on Churchill (“simply a radio personality who outlived his time”) but now posterity claims the sometime Archie Rice of Downing Street: a man who will forever be associated with the moment he missed and the destiny he failed. The waters will close over him, and the idea of “Boris loyalists” will soon seem preposterous. There shall be no Borisites tending to his cult… 

–In the latest installment of BBC’s University Challenge, Waugh came up in a Bonus Question. The questions related to fictional places and the one involving Waugh asked to name his novel in which William Boot was sent by mistake to Ishmaelia. The answering team responded Decline and Fall and lost 5 points. The correct answer was of course Scoop.

–In the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine, James Parker explains how he

…fixed his insomnia with whiskey and audiobooks. Seriously. I was a terrible non-sleeper, once upon a time. In the small hours, in the little pointy hours, wife asleep, son asleep, dog asleep, when the whole apartment seemed to creak and bulge like a vessel rigged for oblivion, I would creep onto the couch and torture myself with last-man-in-the-worldness. But then I discovered it. I synthesized it: Jameson, headphones. The antidote. The warming, blurring-the-edges whiskey—a shot or two, no more—and the human voice.

First it was John le CarrĂŠ novels. English voices murmuring about espionage—to a boarding-school boy like me, a cracked product of the Establishment, intensely soothing. Then it was Linda Hamilton (yes, Linda Hamilton of Terminator) reading Martin Amis’s Night Train; Michael Cochrane reading Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold(a performance of extraordinary Pinfoldian energy—when Cochrane enunciates the word parliamentary it has six syllables); and John Moffatt reading Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Believe me, nothing lays you out like The Faerie Queene. I don’t think I’ve ever made it to the second canto…

–In the Literary Review of Canada Mark Kingwell recalls his life of book buying and reading:

What are the highlights on this most recent journey of self-rediscovery? For one thing, I’m struck by how much I associate certain books with where and how I bought them — and sometimes with whom. I found my first edition of Brideshead Revisited in a Toronto used bookstore. It was beyond my means, but my friend Matt Parfitt pressured me to splurge. (He and I were mesmerized at the time by the Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews television adaptation.)

 

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Roundup: Spike Milligan, Tom Stoppard and More

Posted on September 11, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan McLaren has had the idea to compare the WWII novels of two British comedians who wrote about it, based on their experiences: Evelyn Waugh and Spike Milligan. Here’s the introduction:

If Evelyn Waugh wrote a series of the most memorable books about the Second World War, then so did Spike Milligan. It can’t be emphasised enough how differently they came at the same subject. Born in 1918, Milligan was fifteen years younger than Waugh. Which goes part of the way to explaining why in 1939, after the declaration of war with Germany, 36-year-old Evelyn Waugh vainly (at first) tried to use his contacts to get taken on as a trainee officer, while 20-year-old Spike Milligan just as vainly tried to ignore the call-up papers that kept being delivered to his parents’ home in London.

The article and illustrations are posted here.

—Maggs Brothers, Booksellers, in London have on offer a 1948 post card by Waugh in response to a reader’s query about The Loved One. Here’s the description:

Waugh, contrary to his rather his rather prickly public persona, replies to Mrs Brown Fullerton of Brodick, Isle of Arran, with genuine pleasure having received a letter from her regarding his recent book, The Loved One: “It is most kind of you to take the trouble to write to me about ‘The Loved One.’ What the radio announcer told you is not, in general, true but your letter was a pleasant exception. I have happy memories of Brodick where I spent Christmas 1940 with the commandos.” The Loved One was published a month before this letter, in February 1848.

The Loved One version that appeared in February 1948 was the one in Horizon magazine for that month, so that would have been the  one referred to in the post card. The UK book edition from C&H (with revisions) appeared in November/December 1948. This was to avoid a marketing conflict with Scott King’s Modern Europe that was published in the UK in December 1947. The US book edition of The Loved One was published in June 1948 as there was no marketing conflict in the US  where  SKME was not published until 1949. The post card is on offer for ÂŁ750.

–The New York Times has a long background piece on playwright Tom Stoppard. This is by Maureen Dowd and was written to coincide with the October New York opening of Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt. This is based on his research into his Jewish roots in late 1930s Czechoslovakia. In the course of that discussion, this appears:

[Stoppard’s] biographer, [Hermione Lee]  noted that Stoppard was particularly influenced while researching “Leopoldstadt” by Alexander Waugh’s book, “The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War,” about the wealthy, sophisticated Viennese family that produced the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his brother Paul, who continued to be a concert pianist after losing an arm in World War I. The family had been Catholic for two generations, but when Hitler annexed Austria, they were stunned to learn they counted as Jews.

The full article is available here.

–This notice recently appeared in The Daily Beast:

A tidbit from Media Bistro’s Galleycat that warms The Daily Beast’s heart: Sales of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel Scoop, from whose pages this website takes its name, were up 83 percent for the week ending October 12. With overall book sales still pretty low—Nielsen Bookscan reports 3,000 copies sold since it started tracking in 2001—we won’t yet be demanding royalties.

–In the religious/philosophical journal First Things, Andrew Bacevich recalls his experience with reading Brideshead Revisited and finds it relevant today. One of his teachers in a “small Benedicitine high school in the middle of the prairie” recommended the book to his students in the 1960s:

The result was disappointment. In the grip of a severe Anglophilia, I found Waugh’s savage takedown of British upper-class life utterly discomfiting. Waugh’s principal characters were lost souls. Members of his supporting cast were either preposterously obtuse or shallow, self-indulgent, and habitually drunk. At an age when I wanted to fit myself into whatever I might be reading—preferably in a heroic role—Waugh offered me no one to identify with.

Sixty years later, I decided on a whim to give Brideshead a second chance. Father Allen’s grandiose verdict still strikes me as a stretch. Tagging any novel as “best ever” is akin to identifying the “best ever” left-handed pitcher or carrot cake recipe: necessarily arbitrary.

That said, the novel Waugh dashed off in a matter of months during a break from wartime service unquestionably qualifies as a masterpiece. For perplexed Americans today—especially for perplexed believers—here is a book that invites careful reflection. Nearly eighty years after it first appeared in print, Waugh’s unsparing depiction of a society in an advanced state of decay to which its elites are willfully oblivious (or in which they are unconsciously complicit) captures a major element of our own dilemma. In Brideshead, Waugh previews the nihilism that inundates present-day American life.

The basis for the conclusions is set out in the remainder of the article which is available here.

 

 

 

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Elizabeth II (1926-2022) R.I.P.

Posted on September 10, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The main story of the week is of course the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Waugh commented little about the monarchy,  but some of the papers found relevant references in his works.

–Dominic Green writing in the Wall Street Journal managed to find a relevant quote in a letter. Here’s an extract of his story:

…In her, the monarchy outlived the system it symbolized. Through her, the monarchy assured its survival by refusing to change, except when it changed utterly. The origins of reality television lie in “Royal Family,” the 1969 BBC documentary that was watched by an estimated 350 million people. The origins of the current media war of the Windsors between her grandson Prince Harry and the rest of his family, lie in Princess Diana and Prince Charles’s public airing of their unhappy marriage in 1995. As Harry has said, monarchy is now a “mixture between ‘The Truman Show’ and being in a zoo.”

We never really knew what Elizabeth II thought about the collapse of deference and the rise of the royal cabaret. She was an accomplished performer who delivered the Christmas Day message every year and never broke the magician’s oath. The smoothness of her delivery belied the scale of her achievement and the extent of the transformation over which she presided. “When George VI died in 1952, Evelyn Waugh wrote that his reign “will go into history as the most disastrous my unhappy country has known since Matilda and Stephen.” Those medieval monarchs laid waste to England through civil war; the modern English had done the right thing in the world wars, but their exchequer was empty, their cities were in rubble, and the empire, with the loss of India in 1947, was over.

Yet the long and melancholy withdrawal from empire was drowned out by the rise of a new England, less class-ridden, cold and repressed, and more musical, multiracial and fashionable. As everything changed, Elizabeth was what T.S. Eliot, who took British citizenship just after her first birthday, called “the still point in the turning world.”

The queen, whose duties were planned down to the last detail, planned her death and her obsequies. Each member of the family has a plan and a code name. Philip, her husband of 73 years, whose death last year was a premonition of her mortality, was “Forth Bridge.” She was “London Bridge.” London Bridge has fallen now. We shall not see her like again. The world that made her, and of which she was the last and grandest echo, departs with her. The queen is dead. Long live the king. (Letters, 369)

The Waugh quote is from a letter to Nancy Mitford dated 15 February 1952 in connection with the death of George VI. Waugh began the topic by criticizing a speech made by Winston Churchill on the occasion, with particular reference to the new Queen who, like Elizabeth I, Churchill said had not grown up “in expectation of the crown.” Waugh was not an admirer of Elizabeth I whom he described as “the vilest of her sex.” After the quoted remark in the WSJ, Waugh wrote “One interesting point stands out. The King died at the moment when Princess Elizabeth first put on a pair of ‘slacks’–within a matter of minutes anyway. The Duke of Windsor lost his throne by his beret more than his adultery.” (Letters, 368-69. Somehow, I can’t think this is correct, since Princess Elizabeth may well have worn slacks during her WWII duties as an ATS mechanic.

–There was also this from the Guardian sports pages on what was otherwise a slow news day:

Not that the Queen had any obvious fondness for sport. “I have often observed in women of her type a tendency to regard all athletics as inferior forms of fox-hunting,” Evelyn Waugh wrote of Lady Circumference in Decline And Fall. Does that sound about right? The Queen did love the horses. She seemed to quite like going to cricket. One of her first non-ceremonial appearances was to meet the touring Indian team of Vijay Hazare at Lord’s in 1952. She met Don Bradman’s Australians at Balmoral and her sister stood very near Keith Miller looking pleased.

The headline reads: “Reign stops play for Queen.”

–The Evening Standard’s coverage extended to its food page where the columnist considered the Queen’s favorite restaurants. Here’s the top of the list:

It’s said that the Queen enjoyed going out, in part because of the simple novelty of ordering. Used to having her kitchens prepare food 24 hours in advance, deciding what to have in the moment was thought to be something of a boon. The Queen may have rarely had the opportunity to dine for pleasure, but she did occasionally. Here’s where.

Bellamy’s

The Queen is reported to have visited Bellamy’s at least twice. She visited first for her 80th birthday, returning a decade later with Princess Anne and Princess Alexandra, her cousin. Owner Gavin Rankin took the name from the gentlemen’s club in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, and accordingly dubs it “a club without a sub”. A French brasserie, it specialises in comfort, in the kind of lunches and suppers that can stretch on for hours. Her Majesty is said to have ordered the smoked eel mousse, caviar and roast quail, while elsewhere the menu includes Dover sole, said to be another favourite. The wine list is very proper, which is to say French entirely, and the Martinis are particularly good. Despite its pedigree, there is a set menu for £27 for two courses, £33 for three.

The restaurant has been mentioned frequently in previous posts. What Waugh himself might have thought of it is a question never broached.

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Another Title Added to Complete Works Editions

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

A Handful of Dust has joined the three other new titles announced for UK release next month in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.  Here is the description issued by Oxford University Press:

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) is often thought to be among his best novels. It is a darkly bitter account of the end of a marriage, its causes and its effects. Waugh wrote the book with half an eye on his own recent experience of the break-up of his marriage to Evelyn Gardner. The care and trouble he took over the work are reflected in his successive revisions of its text in manuscript and print. These can be recovered from sources on both sides of the Atlantic, notably from the autograph and typescript manuscript in the Harry Ransom Center at Austin, Texas, a proof copy of the first edition at the Huntington Library in California, in the serialization in different versions of the first part of the novel in Harper’s Bazaar, prepared for the UK and the US markets, and in four editions published in his lifetime in the UK and one in the US. All of these witnesses have been collated in this, the first fully edited and annotated edition of the novel. There is a substantial introduction describing the novel’s composition and reception, as well as the literary influences on which Waugh drew—including Shakespeare, Dickens, Kipling, and Beatrix Potter. The edition seeks to show Waugh as a consummate craftsman, at work on a painful subject that he treats in comic, tragic, and satirical ways.

The new edition is edited by Henry Woudhuysen whose CV is included in the OUP release:

H. R. Woudhuysen was educated at the University of Oxford. He was Professor of English at University College London until 2012 and is now Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. His published work includes (with Michael. F. Suarez, SJ) The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010) and The Book: A Global History (2013).

An American release date has not been announced yet, but it will probably be the same as for the others in this batch of Complete Works editions–27 January 2023.

 

 

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Brideshead TV Project Resurfaces

Posted on September 5, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

It is reported widely that the Brideshead TV project to be backed by BBC and HBO and written and directed by Luca Guadagnino has resurfaced. Previous reports of a delay were attributed to Guadagnino’s unavailability, but he now says in an interview that it was due to lack of money. Here’a an excerpt from the the entertainment journal Deadline:

…Two years ago the director had assembled an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes, Andrew Garfield and Rooney Mara, to lead a 10-part prestige TV version of Waugh’s brilliant study of British upper-class decadence.

But the HBO and BBC production was shelved because of its cost. “It’s a very sad story,” Guadagnino told Deadline late on Sunday night, following a screening at the Telluride Film Festival of his latest film […] Guadagnino said that he and Benjamin Walters, a young British writer, spent 18 months writing the scripts for Brideshead Revisited. “I had a great cast and I needed the money and the money I needed was $110 million, $11 million dollars an episode, and there was no way we could put it together.” He continued, “I said to myself: ‘I cannot compromise. It has to be done the way I want it to be done’.”

Guadagnino had gathered [Andrew] Garfield to play anguished artist Charles Ryder, with the intention of splitting the part. “I wanted Garfield as the older Charles Ryder,“ he said. He added that a younger actor would play Ryder at Oxford with Sebastian Flyte, the teddy-bear-loving son of an aristocratic Catholic family who reside at the stately home called Brideshead. Harry Lawtey, “a wonderful young actor from the UK,” Guadagnino told us, had been in place to play Sebastian, and Rooney Mara  had been cast as Lady Julia, his highly strung sister.

Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes were to have played their parents, the incredibly grand Lord and Lady Marchmain. “I had so many others, a huge and beautiful cast. It’s maybe possible to assemble this cast again. I know these people love me,” Guadagnino said confidently. “I want to say to HBO and the BBC: ‘Guys, let’s do it, we still have the scripts and the rights.’”

Guadagnino noted that the screenplays were “granular” and had expanded the subtext to incorporate Waugh’s own biography as well. “So, we tried to bring what we know about Waugh’s young times at Oxford into the story of Sebastian and Charles Ryder, and, of course Lord and Lady Marchmain and Julia. ”It was going to be an allegory of the fall of the West, and the fall of the ruling class, and the fall of all that. The Catholic Church was a huge deal, too,” Guadagnino said as he outlined how he envisioned the project stretching from the 1920s through to 1945.” It’s a very dear project. I love this novel. I wrote with Benjamin Walters, the script, so it’s something so close to me. If the miracle would happen I would jump and do it. It’s the question of a miracle right now, probably. I truly believe in miracles,’ ” he said…

There are no reports of any response from BBC or HBO.

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Labo(u)r Day Roundup

Posted on September 3, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–Christopher Buckley writing in the Wall Street Journal has identified what he considers to be the five best literary breakdowns. Waugh’s Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is one of his selections:

Evelyn Waugh called this, his next-to-last novel, his “mad book,” based as it was on an episode in the early 1950s. In poor health and afflicted with chronic insomnia, Waugh took nightly sleeping draughts of bromide and chloral, washed down with crème de menthe. Increasingly antisocial and seeking privacy in which to write, he boarded a ship—in the novel named SS Caliban—bound for Ceylon. Waugh began to have hallucinations and hear voices of passengers plotting to kill him. He was so rattled he jumped ship in Alexandria. Back in London and genuinely believing he was demonically possessed, Waugh asked the Rev. Phillip Caraman, a distinguished Jesuit priest, to perform an exorcism on him. Father Caraman sent him to an eminent psychiatrist, who diagnosed the problem. (See “bromide,” “chloral” and “crème de menthe,” above.) Pinfold is one of Waugh’s most intimate romans à clef, not only for the mordantly funny journey aboard the Caliban, but also for its opening section, a self-portrait of the artist in late life, featuring his arguably even more ghastly ordeal of being interviewed by the BBC.

The other choices were F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes.

–The latest edition of the long-running BBC program University Challenge began earlier this week. The Daily Mail covers the story which includes the sad news that it will be the final season presented by Jeremy Paxman who will retire after its conclusion due to Parkinson’s disease. The next season will be presented by Amol Rajan. The Mail story also printed the starter for 10 questions from this week’s installment, including this:

8. In the names of fictional establishments, what short word follows Bellamy’s in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and Junior Ganymede and Drones in the Jeeves and Wooster books?

The answer is, of course ,”Club”. The Mail story notes that Paxman has been presenter since 1994. The BBC did itself proud on the night of the broadcast by offering a documentary retrospective of the series dating back to its origin as a Granada Production presented by Bamber Gascoigne for many years, as well as a film entitled “Starter for 10” featuring, inter alia,  Dominic Cumberbatch in an early supporting role as the stuffy coach of the Bristol University’s “University Challenge” team. These items remain available to stream on BBC iPlayer to those having UK internet connections

–The Atlantic Monthly posts a selection of “Seven Books Where the Setting Exposes the Characters”. One of these is Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.  Here’s an excerpt:

…When writers bring us back to a location that they’ve already visited, they’re employing a useful narrative tool. The contrast with unchanging environments is a clear way to illustrate how a protagonist changes over the years. But it can also be a subtler measuring stick of how secrets simmer, or of how painful, powerful forces such as racial injustice or economic inequality can grind characters down over time. The books below show how a setting can reveal the depth of those tensions, and how people respond to their circumstances at different periods in life—for better or worse.

…[Brideshead Revisited] opens with [Charles] Ryder, an Army Officer, stationed in the Flyte family home, Brideshead, which has been requisitioned during World War II. From there it shoots back in time to the beginning of his relationship with the place and details his subsequent visits, where we learn about his relationship with Sebastian, Sebastian’s sister Julia and the way their complicated family history and religion will intertwine with his own…In a section that describes Charles’ last visit to Brideshead before the war, we see why he can never break through to the Flytes and why coming back to the house is so painful.

Other examples include Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Marilynne Robinson’s Home.

–The Seattle Times interviews Stesha Brandon, a local bookseller and library consultant, on her current reading. Here’s an excerpt:

What book have you reread the most?

That’s tricky because I read different books for different reasons. I’m a big fan of Jane Austen so I’ve probably read “Pride and Prejudice” 50 times. It’s a good comfort read and funny and when you’re in the mood for company who’s smart and incisive, I turn to her. For many years I would reread “Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh. I would often reread it with Michael Chabon’s “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” because those books have beautiful resonance and both books are about finding yourself and sort of making your way in the world and coming to terms with adulthood so when I was younger, I often read those.

–An article posted in The New European  considers Venice as the home and subject of writers. This is by Charlie Connelly who notes that Venice was the home as well as the subject of several painters, but with respect to writers, it’s a different story. Here’s an  excerpt:

…Unlike many great literary cities, Venice has produced barely a handful of writers of its own. There was Marco Polo, of course, whose accounts of his voyages remain among the greatest works of travel literature, while Carlo Goldoni was a highly successful playwright of the 18th century who wrote much of his dialogue in the Venetian dialect. Casanova was a Venetian, albeit one better known for his love life than his writing, as was Veronica Franco, a high-class sex worker who during the second half of the 16th century was a regular attendee at literary salons, published two volumes of poetry, a collection of letters and compiled a handy directory of Venetian courtesans.

It’s been left to the visitors, the incomers, the blow-ins, to establish Venice’s exalted standing as a literary city and, in contrast to the beauty of its buildings that has been disseminated around the world from the brushes of
Titian to the filters of Instagram, it’s the seedier side of Venice that has held writers in its thrall for centuries.

After considering several obvious Venetian-inspired writers (Goethe, Henry James, Lord Byron), Connelly comes to this:

…Among the fiction in which Venice appears, Voltaire’s Candide arrives in the city full of optimism about its beauty and culture and is soon disabused by the immorality he sees openly displayed around him. Constance Chatterley travels to the city in the hope of becoming pregnant in DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder spend a bizarre week in the city with Flyte’s father Lord Marchmain and Marchmain’s lover.

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New Book About Hypocrites Club

Posted on August 31, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

A new book has been announced that has Waugh in its title. This is Hellfire: Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club by David Fleming. Here’s a description:

From the moment in March 1924 that a tipsy young nun trying to gain entrance to Balliol College, Oxford, an all-male establishment, was unmasked as the son of the Bursar, rolling back after a scandalous party at its premises, the days of the Hypocrites Club – they were rumoured to eat new born babies boiled in wine – were numbered. The membership included some of the most interesting people of the next half a century or more. Its one-time Secretary was Evelyn Waugh – who used some nine of his fellow members as models in his fiction, not least in Brideshead Revisited.

Fellow members included Robert Byron, icon of travel writing thanks to  his masterpiece The Road To Oxiana; the communist Claud Cockburn, whose journalistic motto was ‘believe nothing until it has been officially denied”; Anthony Powell, the ‘English Proust’ who wrote the twelve volume Dance To The Music Of Time; Henry Yorke, who wrote acclaimed modernist novels as Henry Green; Tom Driberg, a Labour politician whose sexual proclivities were so actively pursued that it was presumed he had some kind of official clearance; and Alfred Duggan, a super-wealthy alcoholic, called by Waugh ‘a full-blooded rake of the Restoration’, who had a car and chauffeur on standby to take him up to London to see his mistress, a nightclub hostess. He staggered his contemporaries by becoming a highly regarded historical novelist in his forties. And there are Harold Acton and Brian Howard, the models for Anthony Blanche of Brideshead Revisited.

Waugh’s minor characters drawn from the Hypocrites’ orbit include one half of Basil Seal, bitten to death by an ape with whom he was sharing a hotel room in Spain; and Lord Parakeet, whose real life inspiration once set the Thames on fire, and addressed his fellow members of the House of Lords as ‘My dears.’ The club’s only stated rule was that ‘Gentlemen may prance but not dance.’ It was often ignored.

The Hypocrites Club lasted less than three years: its members continued to be thorns in the Establishment’s side for the next five decades – even those who rather approved of it. This is the first book length portrait of what another member, the littĂŠrateur Peter Quennell called ‘a kind of early twentieth century Hellfire club.’

The book will be released in the UK by the History Press on 13 October and is already on offer from Amazon.uk. A US release date is not available.  The author  is described in the announcement:

David Fleming was born in Islington in 1957. He studied English Literature at Cambridge University. He worked in television as a writer, producer and director. He has written articles for several national newspapers, and two previous books.

The titles of the two previous books are a mystery due to name confusion in Amazon listings. The press release is available here.

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