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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A Tale of Three Novelists: Heygate, Waugh and Williamson

Posted on August 30, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

A copy of Evelyn Waugh’s first printed book changed hands last month. This was one of 50 copies of P.R.B: An Essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1847-1854 printed on order in 1926 by a Stratford firm where Waugh’s friend Alastair Graham was employed. Somehow, this copy fell into the hands of Waugh’s later nemesis, John Heygate, who eloped with Waugh’s first wife in 1929. Here’s the announcement of the sale from Antiques Trade Gazette:

Billed as a copy inscribed by the man who stole its author’s first wife at a party given by Anthony Powell and Constance Lambert, the top lot in a July 27 sale held by Stride & Son (18% buyer’s premium) was one of 50 copies of the 1926 first edition of Evelyn Waugh’s first book, P.R.B: Essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Bid to ÂŁ6000, three times the top estimate, in Chichester, it was a copy warmly inscribed (possibly in 1952) by the Northern Irish-born journalist and novelist Sir John Heygate (1905-76) to Henry Williamson.

The latter’s most famous work, Tarka the Otter, had been published in 1928, and Heygate’s inscription apologises for not having a book left of his own to give to his old friend, but hopes he “…will accept this, what I believe to be Evelyn Waugh’s first printed book”.

Divorce proceedings between Evelyn Waugh (‘He-Evelyn’) and the first Mrs Waugh, Evelyn Gardner (‘She-Evelyn’), began in 1929. Heygate was cited. He married Gardner a year later but they divorced in 1936.

Heygate had been portrayed as John Beaver in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust of 1934 and much later as Sir Piers Tofield in Williamson’s epic, 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight series of books.

Here’s a transcription of Heygate’s note to Williamson which apparently appeared on the book’s endpaper and was included in the sale:

Not having a book of my own left to give my old friend, Henry Williamson, on the occasion of his first visit to Bellarena, and to celebrate an [sic] friendship having successfully survived more than the average succession of misunderstandings (super-sensitivities ?), and, alas, not very likely now to write anything but this sort of stuff, I hope he will accept this, which I believe to be Evelyn Waugh’s first printed book. John Heygate 1952

The three novelists had a mutual history dating back to Waugh’s meeting with Williamson in 1928 on the occasion of the latter’s receipt of the Hawthornden award for Tarka the Otter (Diaries, 11 November 1928).  Waugh received the award in 1936 for Edmund Campion. Waugh later appears as a character (Tony Cruft) in Williamson’s Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. This is in volume 11, The Power of the Dead (1963), where Williamson includes a fictional version of the breakup of Waugh’s marriage. This is all described in some detail in my article “Evelyn Waugh as a Fictional Character” in EWS 30.1 (Spring 1996) and summarized by Martin Stannard in his Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh edition of Vile Bodies (v. 2, p. xl, fn. 59).

One can only wonder where Heygate’s copy of Waugh’s P.R.B. given to Williamson  was acquired. It is assumed that it wasn’t a copy inscribed by Waugh to the original buyer or gift recipient since no such inscription is mentioned in the seller’s catalogue.

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Summer Bank Holiday Roundup

Posted on August 27, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–D J Taylor in the latest issue of Literary Review has written a review of the new biography by Patrick Donovan. This is entitled Arnold Bennett: Last Icon. It was mentioned in a previous post.  Here’s an excerpt from the beginning paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh gestures at some of the clouds of gossip column glory that hung around [Bennett] in the closing pages of Decline and Fall (1928), where Paul Pennyfeather, now back at Oxford, narrowly avoids being run over by a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce containing the mysterious figure of Philbrick, one-time butler at the north Wales private school at which Paul has previously drudged. ‘Who was your opulent friend?’ Pennyfeather’s chum Stubbs enquires. ‘Arnold Bennett,’ Paul mischievously returns. Waugh, naturally, is having a little fun with an Olympian figure whom he would have regarded as the last word in staidness, but as a piece of cultural positioning the scene is highly convincing. Bennett, it is safe to say, was exactly the kind of writer who would have been seen bowling along Oxford High Street in a Rolls-Royce as the undergraduates scattered before him. Like many another mainstream novelist from the early 20th century, when mass communications and mass literacy combined to expand literary audiences, he made no bones about enjoying the fruits of bestsellerdom. In this lay the seeds of his altogether catastrophic undoing.

–Duncan McLaren has posted a new article that, as he puts it, tells the story of  Unconditional Surrender as related on the book covers published by Penguin. “The 5 covers take you into the books in very different ways.”  Here’s the link: olderevelyn.org.uk/styled-2/ Duncan adds: “As this was Waugh’s last novel, perhaps it is appropriate to read it in conjunction with this earlier piece on Decline and Fall and Penguin which was posted about previously.” Here’s the link to that: evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-136/index.html.

–The long-running  “Londoner’s Diary” of the Evening Standard (also Arnold Bennett’s book reviewing venue) has this story about a more recent member of the Waugh family:

Daisy Waugh becomes a yogi
What would grumpy Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh make of granddaughter Daisy’s latest career move? Also a novelist, she has now qualified as a yoga teacher. “Yoga’s not aerobics, it’s a way of seeing the world,” she tells The Spectator in an article.

Thanks to Dave Lull for suggesting this.

—The Monthly reviews a recent Kate Atkinson novel which has some themes that will resonate with with Waugh readers:

The overture to Shrines of Gaiety (Penguin) plays outside a jail with a release. The finale plays inside the same jail with a hanging. In between, there’s a slippery tale teeming with characters zipping across a fabulous stage: set by Baz Luhrmann, clothes by Liberty, cocktails (and drunks) by Evelyn Waugh, murders by Agatha Christie. It is 1926, just before the General Strike, and the Soho clubs are redefining London nightlife. Kate Atkinson has happily drawn on a real London nightclub owner, Kate Meyrick, for the fictional character Nellie Coker. As Coker does, Meyrick owned a handful of clubs in Soho, each catering for different tastes and classes but attracting the same criminal and constabulary interest. She was imprisoned (with hard labour) for various offences. Her main offence was possibly being a smart and tough woman who made real money.

Meyrick inspired the character of Ma Mayfield in Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited.

–The Daily Telegraph has posted an obituary of Charles Villiers who recently died at the age of 59. His final years were spent researching and writing a biography of his grandmother Lady Mairi Bury, a noted supporter of appeasement in its day. An earlier book was an account of his own 8 year divorce proceeding which had received extensive press coverage. Neither seems to have yet been published. Another incident recounted has a Wavian  element:

After attending the University of Edinburgh, where he read History, he visited the Falkland Islands just as the Falklands War ended. A letter of introduction to Governor Rex Hunt led to a rather comical mix-up. Hunt thought Villiers had been sent from Whitehall, so he presented him to the officers’ mess to acquaint him with the island’s military structure.

To his great surprise, Villiers was sent out to lead an infantry patrol the next day. His only military experience had been in the Officers’ Training Corps at Eton. The gaffe was never discovered, but Villiers compared the experience to events in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop.

–Finally, in a recent Guardian interview of novelist Irvine Welsh, this appeared:

Which novels inspired you?
Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy influenced me a lot; even though the characters had a completely different background to mine, I found the psychology of male schadenfreude and competitiveness really well observed. A background pulse [to wanting to write] came from the big Scottish books that made everyone go, whoa, this is great: William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw, Kelman’s The Busconductor Hines, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing…

Welsh’s statement on Sword of Honour is consistent with one he made a few months ago to an Irish paper which was mentioned in a previous post.

UPDATE (27 August 2022):  The Guardian interview of Irvine Welsh was inadvertently omitted and has now been added.

 

 

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Summer Dog Days Roundup

Posted on August 20, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writer Antonia Fraser is interviewed in a recent Daily Telegraph article. This is on the occasion of her 90th birthday this month. The interview is by her cousin and bridge partner Harry Mount (also editor of The Oldie). When he asked her about her memories of Evelyn Waugh, she replied that:

…he was a great friend of her father’s [Frank Pakenham]. When Antonia started working for the publisher George Weidenfeld in 1953, it hadn’t been long since one of his previous employees, Clarissa Churchill, had married the future prime minister Anthony Eden.

Waugh later said to Antonia, ‘The last person who had your job married the prime minister. See that you do better.’ Antonia says to me, laughing, ‘The jury’s still out on whether I did.’

Her first husband was politician Hugh Fraser and her second, playwright Harold Pinter.

—The Sunday Times in its latest edition carries the results of its survey of writers and critics to determine what were their favorite novels written since the publication of Ulysses in 1922. This is entitled: “Ranked: The 50 best books of the past 100 years — do you agree?” Their “jury” included 16 panelists, not many of whom could be considered household names (at least in my vicinity)–except for John Carey, Sarah Waters, Sebastian Faulks and Anne Enright, As described in the article:

Between them they have read thousands of books, and their choices reflect this: the oldest book was published in 1924, the most recent in 2009. […] Our process was simple but fair. Each member of the panel wrote a list of their 20 favourite novels, and we totted up the votes. The resulting selection is, we think, a comprehensive introduction to the very best writing in English of the past 100 years. Four of our panel — Anne Enright, Johanna Thomas-Corr, Diana Evans and Peter Kemp — will discuss the list at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, at 3.30pm on October 10.

Some writers (for example, Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson) have two books selected. The most votes seem to have gone to The Great Gatsby, which is, I suppose, no surprise. One of Waugh’s novels was selected:

47. Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Evelyn Waugh
So beloved that its title evokes blissful images of punting, picnics and youthful optimism, Brideshead Revisited tells the story of the young Charles Ryder, who is seduced (maybe metaphorically, maybe literally) by his fellow Oxford student Lord Sebastian Flyte. Charles takes refuge in the Flyte family estate, Brideshead, where sensuous ennui is the order of the day. In rich, sumptuous prose, Waugh traces the crumbling of their carefree youth.

Other British writers of Waugh’s generation included George Orwell (1984), Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Elizabeth Bowen (The Death of the Heart) and Sylvia Townsend Warner (The Corner that Held Them).

—House and Garden magazine has also compiled a recommended reading list. This focuses on the narrower category of 11 novels that “featured brilliant houses.” Their Waugh choice is also Brideshead:

Perhaps the most famous “big house” story ever, this novel tells the story of middle-class Oxford graduate Charles Ryder and his relationships with the aristocratic inhabitants of Brideshead Castle. Filled with arches and broken pediments, it is thought to have been inspired by Madresfield (featured in the June 2014 issue of House & Garden), though in the subsequent TV adaptation of 1981, Castle Howard in Yorkshire stood in for Brideshead, and did so again when the a film version was released in 2008.

Others on their list include Pride and Prejudice, Gatsby, Rebecca and A Room with a View. I would have thought Howard’s End a more appropriate choice for a Forster novel featuring a brilliant house.

—The American Conservative posts an article entitled “Rethinking Salman Rushdie” which attempts to place his book The Satanic Verses into a more objective perspective than have many of those commenting on his recent attack in New York State:

…most critics of The Satanic Verses don’t think the book should be banned or its author beheaded. They are saying that human beings should be more respectful of each other’s convictions. Religion shouldn’t be treated as something banal. Art shouldn’t be flippant.

These are moral judgements; they are also literary criticisms.

And they’re perfectly fair. If Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited ended with Charles Ryder still mocking the Flyte family’s Catholicism, it would fail as a novel—not because Catholicism is true (though it is), but because mocking other people’s religion is childish. And it’s boring. It doesn’t make for good art.

Rushdie’s defenders obviously don’t care about his literary merits, though. This has nothing to do with art and everything to do with politics. They only care about “free speech.” They reduce The Satanic Verses to a propaganda piece. This does a disservice to Rushdie’s craft. It misses the whole point of literature. It also undermines the cause of free speech.

The article also considers the terrorist attack on the staff of Charlie Hebdo as another example of what might be called free speech martyrdom overreach. The article is thoughtful and well-presented but is unlikely to change many minds of those who have defended Rushdie’s novel.

–This letter regarding post code snobbery appeared in a recent edition of The Times:

POSTCODES OF CHOICE
Sir, Such was his postcode snobbery that Evelyn Waugh apparently walked up the hill from his family home in Hampstead Garden Suburb to post his letters so that they would have an upmarket Hampstead postmark, NW3. As a resident of the south London equivalent to Hampstead, Dulwich (postcode SE21), I decry its relocation to Crystal Palace (SE19) in Bricks & Mortar yesterday.
Janet Clegg
London SE21

The Waughs lived in what was called Golders Green when numbers were added to postcodes. It was referred to as North End Road,  “London NW” or  “Hampstead NW” before then. Their address received the postcode number NW11 in 1919 which was considered inferior to NW3 that applied to neighboring Hampstead. Whether Waugh ever mislabelled his mail or trudged up the hill to Hampstead is more apocryphal than historic. See previous post. The letter’s author doesn’t mention the source of her aversion to Crystal Palace–perhaps she is a Charlton Athletic supporter.

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Waugh Website Expansion

Posted on August 18, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has rearranged his Waugh website in order to accommodate new entries. This involves creation of a new website where he will include all material relating to Waugh’s war and postwar life and writings (from 1939). Original material relating to this period already posted on the existing site will be transferred to the new one.  He has already posted two new articles. These are on two of the novels in the war trilogy: Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender. Here’s the introductory section of the Unconditional Surrender article:

Officers and Gentlemen was finished in November 1954. Evelyn Waugh had meant to get on with the third book in the war trilogy soon after, but things hadn’t quite worked out that way. The composition of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, a couple of years after the paranoid experience of it, plus the move from Piers Court, Gloucestershire, to Combe Florey, Somerset, took up 1956 and 1957. The close relationship to Ronald Knox, his final illness and death, and taking upon himself the task of writing an official biography: The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox, kept Evelyn busy throughout 1958. A trip to Africa followed by a pot-boiling account of the trip, A Tourist in Africa, took chunks out of 1959. All this ‘distraction’ had occupied Evelyn for five years. Hence it was only in March 1960, that he began to turn his mind to writing the third volume of his novel memorialising his own experience of World War Two.

In 1940, he had been 37, getting a bit old in the tooth to be a soldier. In 1960, he was 57, getting a bit old in the tooth to be writing about it with zest. Or so he feared. Evelyn knew himself to be a man who had played hard and fought hard, and had become decidedly old for his years. But how was the booze-riddled bonce? Could he still master his material? Could he still structure a novel? Could he still bear in mind the architecture of the whole while making each subsidiary part shine, glow and dazzle? Perhaps he pondered all this as he made a start to phase three of what he would later describe as his magnum opus. A term he’d also used for Brideshead Revisited.

For future reference, the link to the new site is olderevelyn.org.uk

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Roundup: Inez, Cecil and Paddington Bear

Posted on August 13, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–In this week’s New Statesman, D J Taylor reviews the life and work of Inez Holden, an early friend of Evelyn Waugh in the days of the bright young people. The article opens with this:

Inez Holden’s diary – a mammoth undertaking, only fragments of which have ever escaped into print – carries a rueful little entry from August 1948. “I read Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh,” the diarist writes. But the tale of Charles Ryder’s dealings with the tantalising progeny of the Marquess of Marchmain, here in an unfallen world of Oxford quadrangles and stately pleasure domes, awakens a feeling of “nostalgic depression”. This, Holden decides, is simply another of “those stories of High Life of the Twenties which everyone seemed to have enjoyed but I never did”.

By this point in her career, Holden … was a 20-year veteran of the London literary scene – and also of some of the more spangled redoubts beyond it. She starts turning up in magazine columns in the late Twenties: not as a writer but as an ornament of the hot-house enclosure stalked by the small group of party-goers and well-heeled socialites known as the Bright Young People. Evelyn Waugh’s diary for May 1927, written when he was briefly attached to the Daily Express, mentions “a charming girl called Inez Holden who works on the paper”.

The press photograph of the “Impersonation Party” …  a legendary Vile Bodies-era rout in which each guest came as somebody else, depicts a throng of exotic cross-dressers. Stephen Tennant masquerades as Queen Marie of Romania. The actress Tallulah Bankhead, white-costumed with racquet in hand, imitates the tennis player Jean Borotra. In the middle of the tableau sits a small and inconspicuous girl in a Breton jersey. Of the celebrities stationed nearby, Elizabeth Ponsonby (the archetype of Waugh’s Agatha Runcible) and Harold Acton are clearly having the time of their life, but Holden looks nervous, ill at ease, a rabbit caught in the flashbulb’s intoxicating light.

Holden’s book reviewed by Taylor was published last year by Handheld Press and is entitled There’s No Story There: Wartime Writing’s 1944-45.  It includes a “novel” originally published in 1944 and based on Holden’s experience working in a wartime munitions factory as well as three short stories from the same period.

—The Spectator has an article about the importance of marmalade to British culture:

It took Paddington Bear to solve the age-old mystery of what the Queen keeps in her handbag. When Her Majesty pulled out a marmalade sandwich during the pair’s sketch at the Platinum Jubilee concert this summer, it did more than just tickle the audience. It also served to remind us of our national love affair with marmalade.

Long before Paddington developed a taste for it, the preserve had been a stalwart of British popular culture, from Jane Austen (where Lady Middleton applies marmalade as balm for her daughter’s scratch) to Evelyn Waugh (where, in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder eats ‘scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night’) – not to mention Samuel Pepys, Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming. During the second world war, Winston Churchill is said to have stressed the need to keep the boats of marmalade oranges coming to maintain national morale.

–Cecil Beaton’s diaries have been adapted for the stage. The adaptation is by Richard Stirling and is reviewed in TheStage.com. Here is an excerpt:

…Beaton was a noted diarist and Richard Stirling has taken verbatim extracts of the diaries to create a fascinating portrait of the man and his motivation. Cecil Beaton’s Diaries has been thoughtfully curated to present the many different and not always complimentary aspects of Beaton’s life and work. A product of the wealthy middle classes, Beaton was terrified at the prospect of mediocrity but soon gained acclaim as a fashion photographer on both sides of the Atlantic. […]

Stirling’s portrayal gives us an honest, entertaining personal account of a life lived firmly behind the camera lens. Brittle and uncompromising, Stirling’s Beaton is also painfully aware of his shortcomings and regrets lost loves as age and ill-health bear down. Despite his glamorous clientele, he appeared to remain that nervous, softly spoken schoolboy, terrorised by Evelyn Waugh and destined to find the beauty in others.

The adaptation is being performed in Edinburgh at Greenside@Nicolson Sq where it will run through 28 August. Although not mentioned, it is probably offered as part of this year’s Edinburgh Festival.

–As reported in The Independent newspaper, British Airways has announced direct service to Georgetown, Guyana beginning next March. Waugh’s connection with that country is cited in the story:

The former colony was described by the writer Evelyn Waugh as one of the “gobs of empire” – along with the French and Dutch possessions on the shoulder of South America, Guyane and Surinam respectively. A map of the country is enticing. The road from Georgetown to the Surinam border, for example, passes through the settlements of Success, Paradise, Profit and Whim.

Waugh wrote about his travels in what was then British Guiana in his 1934 travel book Ninety-Two Days. A fictional version appeared in his short story “The Man who Liked Dickens” and the novel A Handful of Dust. He returned for a visit in 1962 and wrote about it in The Sunday Times: “El Dorado Revisited” (EAR, p. 592).

–Novelist Sebastian Faulks is interviewed in the Guardian’s series “The Books of My Life.” Here’s an excerpt:

The author I came back to
I couldn’t stick Evelyn Waugh at first, but I got there eventually by reading the Sword of Honour trilogy in 1991, when we were living in a remote farmhouse in Italy with our first child, who was a year old. Afterwards, I found A Handful of Dust and my ear became attuned to his prose. I still wish he’d used that gift on more worthwhile subjects, but there you go.

 

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