The current Evelyn Waugh Studies 53.1 can now be read at this link.
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EWS #53.1 (Spring 2022) Now Posted
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Roundup: Boris Johnson, Arcadia and a Feghoot
–The New Statesman mentions Waugh twice in separate articles recounting the last days of Boris Johnson’s premiership. The first is by Jason Cowley and is entitled “In 2019 Boris Johnson had everything he wanted. But the gods were waiting for him”. Here’s an excerpt:
Like Churchill, Johnson is a writer. He is celebrated for his flamboyant witticisms and arcane vocabulary, part Bertie Wooster, part early Evelyn Waugh. But as prime minister he never found an authentic voice â or tone or register â to speak to and for the British people, especially during the traumatic first year of the pandemic. For whatever reason â a reluctance to deliver bad news, a fear of the wrath of the libertarian right in his party, a failure of empathy â he could not, as the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote of Donald Trumpâs response to the pandemic, step outside his political role and reveal âhimself uncloaked and humbled, as someone who can draw on his own pains and simply be present with others as one sufferer among a common sea of sufferersâ.
The second is by Simon Kuper and is entitled: “The final act in the Gove-Johnson psychodrama: The pairâs unlikely political alliance began at Oxford, was cemented by Brexit and ended with one last strike of revenge“. The story begins with Gove acting as campaign manager in Johnson’s second (and successful) run for president of the Oxford Union. The article continues through their years as MPs and partnership in securing Brexit (without which Kuper thinks the referendum would have lost). Along the way, and before the Brexit episode, Gove had formed an alliance with David Cameron. This is where Waugh comes in:
The Goves holidayed with the Camerons, their children. practically grew up together […] but Gove remained in awe of Cameron. Tim Shipman’s book about the Brexit referendum, All Out War, compares the men’s relationship to that between the upper-middle-class Charles Ryder and the golden Etonian Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Gove was probably the most gifted right-wing politician, brighter and more articulate than the Etonians, but he accepted that in the Conservative Party, intelligence was not the decisive attribute. It could even be a handicap: Britain was not France.
The article goes on to describe how both Gove and Johnson ditched their former colleague Cameron over Brexit and then re-united when Johnson became premier in 2019 only to fall out again as Johnson was cratering.
–In his Spectator column, Jeremy Clarke describes several means by which he has tried to relieve his mid-summer malaise:
As of now I have two things left up my sleeve to try to get myself out of this slough. One is magic mushrooms. […] The other is a silent contemplation and prayer in a closed religious community. […] The nunnery is huge, old and remote and the seven gentle, smiling nuns â Argentinian âare like nothing on Earth. Now and again I read in the paper about the gradual suppression of Latin in the Catholic Church. I know nothing of the theological debate. All I do know is that it was a contributory cause of Evelyn Waughâs early death. The poor man should have fled down here. Here the nuns sing and chant away in Latin as though unaware of any theological controversy more recent than the Council of Trent. Like Peter Cook, I never âad the Latin. But I do enjoy the ring of a Latin expression. For example, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus â false in one thing, false in everything.
–The TLS reviews a two-volume book entitled A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature. The author is Paul Holberton, and it is reviewed by Jonathan Bate. This appears near the beginning:
…the abiding influence of the name [Arcadia] owes more to Roman history. Though it was the supposed home of Pan and the birthplace of the huntress Atalanta, Arcadia as the place where humankind lives in harmony with nature is an idea rooted in the literary and artistic traditions of pastoral. Yet in the first eclogue of Theocritus, father of the genre, Pan is asked to leave the mountainous land of the Arcadian king Lycaon and relocate to Sicily. Arcadia itself is not named. It was only with Virgilâs Latin imitations of Theocritus, the sequence of poems he called his Bucolics, that Arcadia became the locus amoenus (pleasant place) where shepherds sing in the shade of their various loves and losses.
The review eventually gets around to the section of Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited entitled “Et in Arcadia Ego”. That is behind a paywall, but an examination of the book’s contents would suggest that it is probably discussed in volume 2, Chapter 16, entitled “Et in Arcadia Ego”. This deals with paintings on that topic by, inter alia, Guercino and Poussin, as well as writings by Milton (“L’Allegro”), Marvell (green thought”) and Grey’s Elegy.
–The Washington Post has been posting a series of columns where readers are invited to send in passages which include a pun as well as clues to what phrase is being punned. It seems to be called a feghoot. This is defined in Wikipedia: “also known as a story pun or poetic story joke [a feghoot] is a humorous short story or vignette ending in a pun (typically a play on a well-known phrase)”. Here’s one in which Evelyn Waugh appears. The solution is added in parenthesis at the end:
Having given chef the night off, Evelyn Waugh decided to make Christmas dinner himself. Waugh was a bit prickly, and got infuriated by little things â like recalcitrant salsa or dribbling Worcestershire. And so, as the carol tells us, âCooking when the sauce oozed out often cheesed off Evelyn.â (I credit the Royal Consort for discerning âGood King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen.â)
The Royal Consort seems to be the columnist’s partner.
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Newspapers, Oxford
Tagged Feghoots, New Statesman, The Spectator, TLS, Washington Post
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Evelyn Waugh Studies, No. 53.1 (Spring 2022)
The latest issue of the society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies has been distributed to the members and is now posted at this link. Here is a description of the contents as set forth in the cover letter:
1. Thomas J. Hellenbrand reappraises Waugh’s time in what was then Yugoslavia during World War II, a fascinating interlude and an experience Waugh turned into some of the most moving sections of the Sword of Honour trilogy.
2. Francisco Teles da Gama provides an excellent piece on the reborn hero in the works of Waugh and Schnitzler, appropriately entitled “Fall and Rise”.
3. Meanwhile, our very own Jeffrey Manley considers the 75th anniversary of the US publication of Brideshead.
4. Book reviews include two editions from the long-awaited Complete Works series, edited by titans of Waugh scholarship, Donat Gallagher (v. 26 Essays, Articles and Reviews) reviewed by Marshall McGraw and Martin Stannard (v. 2, Vile Bodies) reviewed by Nicholas V. Barney.
UPDATE (18 July 2022): Link to current issue added.
Posted in Academia, Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Complete Works, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Evelyn Waugh Studies, Vile Bodies, World War II
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Arnold Bennett Revival ?
Simon Heffer writing in the Daily Telegraph reconsiders the career and reputation of Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), an early supporter of Evelyn Waugh. The article opens with this:
Despite the literary achievement of Arnold Bennett, generations have now grown up unaware of him. Even 40 years ago, when I was studying for an English degree, the novelist was despised by dons who followed the groupthink initiated by Virginia Woolf (in a Cambridge lecture in 1924) that Bennett was â like his popular contemporaries HG Wells and John Galsworthy (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature) â second rate.
The article goes on to mention a new biography of Bennett by Patrick Donovan. This is entitled Arnold Bennett: Lost Icon and is the first since the one by Margaret Drabble in 1974. Here’s an excerpt:
Before the Great War, Bennett had lived in Paris, acquiring a French wife and an understanding of the advanced currents of French culture. He befriended Maurice Ravel. When war came he joined Britain’s propaganda operation, became one of its directors, and turned down a knighthood. Firmly part of the establishment, he acquired a new best friend, Lord Beaverbrook. He wrote one of his most critically-acclaimed novels, Riceyman Steps, in 1923, but his reputation as a novelist declined soon after Woolf ‘s attack.
That didn’t stop him becoming one of the most influential literary critics in the land. He was paid the equivalent of ÂŁ350,000 a year by the Evening Standard to review books for them: he praised Evelyn Waugh and championed Radclyffe Hall’s controversial 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness.
In his final years when Bennett was the chief book reviewer at the Evening Standard, that was still an influential paper. In that venue, Bennett briefly reviewed both Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), strongly preferring the former to the latter. Although the Telegraph article does not go into the details of those reviews, they are both available in Martin Stannard’s Critical Heritage volume devoted to Evelyn Waugh. According to Bennett, D&F was
an uncompromising and brilliantly malicious satire, which in my opinion comes near to being quite first rate–especially in the third part dealing with the prison system. I say without reserve that this novel delighted me.
He mentions it again two years later: “really brilliantly funny about once a page.” But in that same article he found VB “less successful”. It included “satirical sallies of the first order of merit” but the nonlinear plot required careful reading. He found the “smart set” unsympathetic and, while Waugh’s satirization of it is “not unjust, … some of it is extremely, wildly farcical.” Bennett “began the book with great expectations but found hard times in the middle of it.” His review concludes with a reference to Alec Waugh who he believes has “more to say [and] is weightier than his cadet”, praising Alec’s new book The Coloured Countries.  Bennett died the year after that second review was written.
The article in the Daily Telegraph concludes its discussion of the new biography with the following assessment:
This excellent book puts Bennett back on the map. All that is now necessary is for people to start reading him again: an enterprising publisher should republish his novels, and encourage a new audience to discover the treasure they hold.
Arnold Bennett:Lost Icon was published last March in the UK and will be published next month in America. It is already available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.Â
Posted in Biographies, Decline and Fall, Newspapers, Vile Bodies
Tagged Arnold Bennett, Daily Telegraph
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Roundup: Changing of the Guard
–The main story of the week is of course the fall of Boris Johnson. Veteran journalist Max Hastings writing in The Times brings a Waugh character into his assessment of Johnson’s career:
Herein, I suggest, lay much of the extraordinary success of Boris Johnson. He is a stranger to truth who has sooner or later betrayed every man, woman and cause with which he associates. He nonetheless became leader of our country, won two critical popular votes, and has retained his office for three years.
In holiday mood before the world suddenly got serious, a host of voters decided it would be fun to have a prime minister who was fun. He has been uncommonly lucky in his enemies, starting with Jeremy Corbyn.
Since 2019 he has transformed the Conservatives into the Johnson Party, evicting some of its most respected personalities, headed by Ken Clarke, and elevating a gallery of grotesques of whom Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries are only the foremost.
He has broken every rule of decency, and made no attempt to pursue a coherent policy agenda beyond Brexit. Matthew Parris was generous enough to mention here that I had proposed to him a comparison of the prime minister with Evelyn Waughâs immortal scoundrel Captain Grimes who, left alone with a bottle and a revolver after being exposed in some ghastly crime, drank the whisky and rejected the âhonourable way outâ. Yesterday, Johnson was still attempting to do the same.
–Another British journalist Toby Young writes in the internet newsletter The Daily Sceptic of his own shifting assessment of Boris’s career from the time they met at Oxford to the recent events. Here’s an excerpt about the happier days at the beginning:
“Iâd been to enough Union debates […] to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. That was particularly true of freshmen, who were expected to have mastered all the arcane procedural rules, some of them dating back to the Unionâs founding in 1823. But Borisâs chaotic, scatter-brained approach had the opposite effect. […] His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if heâd wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticatedâand honestâto enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.
To say I was impressed would be an understatement. A few years before arriving at Oxford I had watched the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waughâs Oxford novel, and had been expecting to meet the modern-day equivalents of Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche: larger-than-life, devil-may-care aristocrats delivering bon mots in between sips of champagne and spoonfuls of caviar. But the reality was very different: warm beer, stale sandwiches and second-hand opinions. Lots of spotty students, all as gauche as me. Less like an Oscar Wilde play than a Mike Leigh film.
In Boris, though, it was as if Iâd finally encountered the ârealâ Oxford, the Platonic ideal. While the rest of us were works-in-progress, vainly trying on different personae, Boris was the finished article. He was an instantly recognizable character from the comic tradition in English letters: a pantomime toff. He was Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night demanding more cakes and ale, Bertie Wooster trying to pass himself off as Eustace H. Plimsoll when appearing in court after overdoing it on Boat Race night. Yet at the same time fizzing with vim and vinegarââbursting with spunk,â as he once put it, explaining why he needs so many different female partners. He was a cross between Hugh Grant and a silverback gorilla.”…
–An article in the National Catholic Register discusses what is described as the businesslike aspect of the Roman Catholic Church as exemplified in the actions of its clergy. The discussion is based on the writings of Ronald Knox as further elucidated in those of Evelyn Waugh:
…The Catholic priest, Knox explained, âgoes about his work with the briskness, the matter of factness, of a shopkeeper or an operating surgeon.â An outside observer âis favorably impressed with the convictions of men and women who can thus hold commerce with the other world without inhuman deportment.â
Knoxâs close friend, the convert novelist Evelyn Waugh, saw the same thing. Most people know him mainly as the author of the novel Brideshead Revisited. (Performed in an excellent TV series by Granada Television and in a wretched movie made by people who apparently didnât like the storyâs religion, which is the whole point.)
Though a novelist, he wasnât romantic about beauty. He valued it, of course, but when he went to Mass he saw it as an action, a thing to be done, by the priest in his role and the layman in his. As a novelist, who saw his work as a craft, he saw worship the same way.
The point is further elaborated in the article which is available at this link.
–Jonkers Rare Books in Henley-on-Thames has listed the latest in what seems a run of Waugh presentation copies to John Betjeman and his wife Penelope. Recent offerings from other dealers have included a first edition of Decline and Fall and a Brideshead pre-publication limited edition. The Jonkers offering is a copy of Waugh’s final book and first volume of his unfinished autobiography A Little Learning (1964). Here’s the description:
First edition. Grey boards lettered in silver, in original dustwrapper. Inscribed by Waugh for John and Penelope Betjeman on the front free endpaper, “For John & Penelope, with love from Evelyn, 10th Sept 1964”. With an annotation in Betjeman’s hand to p. 192, indicating that Waugh’s “friend of my heart” who he calls “Hamish Lennox” is in fact “Alistair Graham”. A very good copy in a very good dustwrapper.
An exceptional association copy, uniting two of the most prominent British authors of the twentieth century.
Waugh and Betjeman met at Oxford, and Waugh remained friends and correspondents with him and his wife Penelope. Penelope was very much Waugh’s muse when he wrote Helena (1950), and Waugh confided in a 1945 letter to Betjeman, “I am writing her life under the disguise of St Helena’s”. When Betjeman wrote of his enjoyment of the novel on publication five years later, Waugh replied, “It is you & six or seven others whom I seek to please in writing”.The initial volume of Waugh’s autobiography documenting his youth and education. His death two years after this publication meant that his autobiography was never completed.
The price is ÂŁ5,000. Here’s a link.
–Michael Lindsay-Hogg is best known in this parish as the original director of the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. He has become a celebrity as a result of the recent Peter Jackson production of an extended documentary (entitled “Get Back“) on the Beatles’ film Let It Be. Lindsay-Hogg was also the director of that. See previous posts. He was recently interviewed at some length by the New York Times. Near the beginning, this brief summary of his career appears:
So would he like to talk about his time with the Beatles?
âThat was a small part of a long career,â he said in the sitting room of his three-bedroom Civil War-era house in Hudson, N.Y.
He had a point. In the so-called Swinging London of the 1960s, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg made a name for himself as a creator of the music video, directing promotional films, as they were then called, for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who a decade and a half before MTV. In the early 1980s, he was again a trailblazer, as the co-director of âBrideshead Revisited,â an 11-hour adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel that was a forerunner of prestige television dramas like âThe Sopranos.â He is also a Tony-nominated stage director, painter and author. Oh, and Orson Welles may very well be his biological father.
Itâs almost too much to get through. No wonder he had a request, delivered in a deadpan voice: âPlease make the entire article about my painting.â But eventually, over the course of three interviews, we got around to John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Posted in A Little Learning, Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Decline and Fall, Items for Sale, Newspapers
Tagged Jonkers Rare Books, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, National Catholic Register, New York Times, The Daily Sceptic, The Times
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Waugh and “Cablese”
A letter in the Guardian attributes a humorous but effective example of the use of “cablese” language to a quote of Evelyn Waugh. It is true that Waugh brilliantly parodied the language used by foreign correspondents and their home based employers in his 1938 novel Scoop. But the letter may go astray when it cites Waugh as the author of this particular “cablese” quote:
Signing off in style
Alex Clarkâs article brought to mind one of the most splendid resignation notes (âI quit! The art of resigning in styleâ, Focus). Newspaper foreign correspondents in the days of transatlantic communication by telegram would write in a journalistic shorthand to save cost; the full article would be fleshed out by the editor. While in America, Evelyn Waugh regarded his articles as sacrosanct. Consequently, he would transcribe his writing on to a telegram, verbatim.
The cost did not go down well and the newspaper, after repeated warnings to keep telegrams shorter, issued an ultimatum: shorter telegrams or youâre out of a job. Waughâs resignation telegram was a miracle of brevity: âJOB UPSTICK ARSEWISE WAUGH.â
David Hill
Penryn, Cornwall
Firstly, Waugh and his novel’s characters sent and received their cables from Africa, not America. Waugh did write articles about his late 1940s trips to America, but these were long articles (not news reports) which he probably wrote after returning to England. He was not acting as a foreign correspondent for a particular paper on his American trips. Nor do I recall reading the quoted language in Waugh’s novel Scoop or travel book Waugh in Abyssinia where it might have been relevant. Moreover, the terse resignation message quoted in the letter has received several other attributions, none involving Waugh. For example Sam Leith in his book Sod’s Law: Why life always lands butter-side down (2009) writes:
Around the middle of the last century, so the story goes, the managing editor of one of Britain’s national newspapers was trawling through the ledgers when he noticed that the newspaper was, every month, paying a substantial retainer to a correspondent in a part of the world Alan Clark would have referred to as Bongo-Bongo Land. He had never heard of this correspondent. A trawl through the cuttings library established that nor had anybody else: the last time this man’s byline had appeared on a dispatch was in the previous decade. The foreign editor was instructed to find out what was up.
He sent a telegram: ‘WHY UNFILE’. With surprising promptness the reply came back: ‘UNFILE UNHISTORY’. He sent another telegram: ‘UNSTORY UNJOB’. The reply came: ‘UPSTICK JOB ARSEWISE’
A more recent quote of the apocryphal cable cites Ernest Hemingway as the source. This is from John Osman. Life, Love Laughter, Liberty (2015):
…I wonder if cabling, or “cablese”, still exists in these days of emails, mobile phones and the internet. I hope so, if only so that young foreign correspondents might rise to the challenge of trying to outdo Ernest Hemingway. Legend has it that he sent the most famous cablese service message of all time. In every newsroom in which I ever worked, it was believed that it was dispatched by the author to the news agency employing him during the Spanish Civil War.
When he decided that he had experienced enough of war reporting and resigned, he allegedly put it like this:
UPSTICK JOB ARSEWISE
I shall not be surprised if somebody tells me that the story is just a myth. True or not its cablese meaning was clear, if coarse.
Unless Hemingway was working for a British news service, he might have spelled it “ASSWISE”. The Google search result shows other sources dating back to the 1980s, including a 1983 issue of the Far East Economic Review, but those have less context than the ones above and, from what is available, do not involve Waugh or his writings.
I think that it’s fair to say that the Guardian’s letter correctly identifies Waugh as a prime source for the successful comic application of “cablese” language, if not, perhaps, this particular phrase. Anyone among our readers who may know of Waugh’s use of that phrase or of any other source for its original use is invited to comment as provided below.
Posted in Letters, Newspapers, Scoop
Tagged "Cablese", The Guardian
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4th of July Roundup
–It is reported in antiquestradegazette.com that the 1944 page proof edition of Brideshead Revisited from the William Reese collection sold at the Christie’s recent NY online auction for $23,940 (ÂŁ19,050) including premiums. Here’s a link. This was the copy that belonged to John Betjeman. It was one of 50 such paperbound copies distributed by Waugh as Christmas presents. See previous post.
–In this week’s Guardian column “Top 10s” the subject is “male friendship.” This week’s contributor is Benjamin Markovits who is reminded of the topic after rewatching the 1959 film Diner about a group of male friends from Baltimore. One of his selections is Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:
A reminder that you donât fall just for people but also for the worlds they come from. At various points, Charles Ryder has to choose between Sebastian and his family, and even marries his best friendâs sister, but you always get the sense that their friendship lies deeper than all of the other storylines that grow out of it.
Others from the same period are Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises, Greene’s The Third Man and Kerouac’s On the Road.
–The New York Times “By the Book” column this week interviews novelist Alice Elliott Dark. One of the Q&A’s mentions a Waugh novel:
Q. Whatâs your favorite book no one else has heard of?
A. Iâll mention three lesser-read novels by well-known authors. I deeply love âThe Catherine Wheel,â by Jean Stafford, for its extraordinary and often very funny sentences. It takes place during a summer in Maine in a fusty old town and a house full of old-fashioned objects and habits, yet like her work in general itâs sobering about the nature of desire. âA Handful of Dust,â by Evelyn Waugh, always makes me squirm and hope Iâm not deluding myself like Tony Last. Itâs a scathing book that takes down the pretensions of class and empire as it entertains with quick brilliant scenes. âThe Good Terrorist,â by Doris Lessing,â is a thorough look at radical squatters in London and what they understand and what they donât.
Dark’s latest novel is Fellowship Point to be released next week.
–A Scottish paper The Sunday Post has published a biographical background article on pioneering food writer Elizabeth David. Her first book was published in 1950 by John Lehman and was entitled A Book of Mediterranean Food. Evelyn Waugh has a small part in the story:
French Country Cooking followed in 1951. An extensive tour of Italy begot Italian Food, in 1954: Evelyn Waugh pronounced it one of his two favourite books that year. Summer Cooking came out in 1955 â the first to display her impressive grasp of the best British dishes â and, in 1960, French Provincial Cooking, widely thought her greatest work.
–Several papers have filed profile articles on Chris Pincher who recently resigned as Conservative Party Whip. The Guardian’s story opens with this:
Chris Pincher may well be taking consolation from what he has described as his favourite story â Kenneth Grahameâs The Wind in the Willows â which, of course, involves a reckless character who needs the help of friends to save himself from himself.
In the Wind in the Willows, Toad sees the error of his wild, excessive ways and ends up living happily ever after. Whether Pincherâs situation has a happy ending remains to be seen. But he undoubtedly needs friends.
Several papers (including the Guardian) also list Pincher’s favorite authors (in addition to Kenneth Grahame) as revealed in his CV: Evelyn Waugh, Arnold Bennett, R L Stevenson, John Buchan and Simon Raven.
–Finally, Penguin Books has posted a publicity sheet promoting the paperback edition of publishing executive Nicholas Coleridge’s 2019 autobiography The Glossy Years. Here’s an excerpt of their excerpts:
‘The autobiography of magazine kingpin Nicholas Coleridge is a Waugh-like whirlwind of eccentric characters, lavish parties and even a spell in a Sri Lankan jail. It was funny enough to excuse all the name-dropping’Â Evening Standard, Books of the Year
[…]
‘A deliciously moreish memoir of the author’s glittering career in magazine publishing. Like having a really good gossip over a glass of fizz with Evelyn Waugh‘ Sunday Telegraph [Emphasis provided by Penguin]
Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) was Waugh’s destination in 1954. It was during that journey that he suffered the halucinatory episodes described in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Coleridge’s own experiences in the Sri Lankan prison may make an interesting comparison. See previous post for more about that episode. Coleridge (a relative of the poet) made his name at the CondĂ© Nast publishing group. A date for the US publication of this edition has apparently not yet been announced.
Posted in Auctions, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
Tagged Antiques Trade Gazette, Chris Pincher, Guardian, New York Times, Penguin Books, The Sunday Post
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Father’s Day Roundup
–The New Yorker offers a special Father’s Day treat by reposting several articles from its archives on the subject of fathers. One of these is the 2007 review by Joan Acocella of the book Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh. This is “about the father-son relationshipsâdramas, often, of mutual incomprehension and dismayâin five successive generations of his family.” The review is a thorough summary of the Waugh fathers, noting Arthur’s almost pathological favoritism of Alec over Evelyn and Evelyn’s own tendency to find his children boring and to avoid them if at all possible. Auberon, on the other hand was another matter:
He turns out to have been the best father of those surveyed in âFathers and Sons.â He âwas neverâwell, hardly everâsharp with us,â Alexander writes, and he was huge fun to be with. He loved games; he loved dinner; he would sing Offenbach with a glass of port balanced on his head. Alexander recalls that his school friends often asked Auberon, with horror, what had happened to his left index finger, which the accident in Cyprus had reduced to a stump. He would explain to them that it âhad been bitten off by a Royal Bengal Tiger . . . or had dropped off, quite inexplicably, that very morning.â
Auberon was also wise, as is clear from his autobiography, âWill This Do?,â which he wrote when he was in his fifties. All the Waugh literary men produced histories of themselves and their family. Auberonâs is the bestâfar better than Evelynâs âA Little Learningâ (1964), a late, bored bookâand one of the finest things in it is his discussion of his mother, Laura.
The review is available at this link and is not behind a paywall (although you may be asked more than once if you would like to subscribe to the magazine). Alexander’s book is still available for sale in both print and digital editions from Amazon.com.
–The auction house Bonham’s has an interesting item for sale. This is described as the “Visitor’s Book” of the BBC interview series Face to Face that was broadcast in the late 1950s. It was compiled by the producer Hugh Burnett. Here’s the description:
Visitors’ book from the BBC’s Face to Face series of television interviews with John Freeman, including the signatures of thirty-one guests, one on each page, including the bold signature of C.G. Jung (dated 26 June 1959, a particularly important interview made two years before his death), Evelyn Waugh (a subject of a notoriously awkward interview, here signing himself “E.A.St.J. Waugh”), John Reith (his signature subscribed “Late BBC and regrets he ever left it”), Otto Klemperer, Jomo Kenyatta, Tony Hancock (whose grilling is thought by some to have strengthened his suicidal tendencies), Gilbert Harding (who was, famously, reduced to tears), Adam Faith, Stirling Moss, Compton Mackenzie (“A very pleasant talkative half hour for me”), Danny Blanchflower (after famously refusing to take part in This is Your Life), Augustus John and others, prefaced by that of John Freeman himself (“To Hugh Burnett â whose idea it all was â way ahead of his time”), 49 album leaves, some loose, others excised, red cloth, some wear, 4to (292 x 238mm.); with gelatin silver prints of the Jung interview at KĂŒsnacht (4), Cecil Beaton, Augustus John and Albert Finney; three items of correspondence including an undelivered typed memo from Hugh Burnett dated 20 February 1962 explaining the difficulties encountered on the last series (ending with the assurance “…the reports of personal difficulties and ill will between John and myself are quite unfounded and unjustified…”); with a copy of Jonathan Cape’s book based on the programme and edited by Burnett, published in 1964, signed by the portraitist Feliks Topolski (small group).
The auction is scheduled for 22 June at 11:00 BST. It will take place at Bonham’s in Knightsbridge, London but online participation may also be available. See details here.
–The local newspaper WiltshireLive.com is promoting visitors to a village in neighboring Gloucestershire. This is Stinchcombe, only 1/2 hour from Wiltshire. Here’s an excerpt:
Considered one of the areaâs âhidden gemâ places to visit, there might not be a post office or village shop anymore however it does have plenty of beautiful English countryside and some charming spots to eat, drink and stay on its doorstep. And the picturesque village is also said to be the haunt of Love Actually and Bridget Jones star Hugh Grant.[…]
Nor is that the only celebrity link that the miniature village can boast. Famous English writer and journalist Evelyn Waugh lived at Piers Court, a similarly magnificent, listed property in Stinchcombe for twenty years in the mid-20th century, even acting as Chairman of the Parish Council and writing his literary masterpiece Brideshead Revisited here.
Though literary fans canât go into the property, which is privately owned, there are a number of public footpaths near Piers Court. Lovers of the outdoors will also want to climb Stinchcombe Hill, which offers incredible views of the surrounding Severn Valley and Cotswold Way, or head over the Tyndale Monument in nearby North Nibley. Another exceptionally pretty site of interest worth checking out while in Stinchcombe is St Cyrâs church.
As for where to eat and drink, thereâs plenty of options in the surrounding area that only require a short walk or drive to get to. Nearby market town Dursley, for example, has everything from traditional pubs to takeaways and coffee shops.
The quaint Old Spot Inn is a particularly well-rated pub to head to. Ranked number one in the area by Tripadvisor users, this spot is loved for its real ales, classic dishes and relaxed, dog-friendly atmosphere. Or, if youâre after a delicious Sunday roast dinner and sunny beer garden to spend an afternoon, thereâs also The Kingâs Head. Each is only five minutes from Stinchcombe by car, or around 42 minutes to walk.
Waugh was not living at Piers Court when he wrote Brideshead Revisited. That was during the war in 1944 when the premises were leased out to a convent. The novel was largely written in the Easton Court Hotel, Chagford, Devon. The Waughs reoccupied Piers Court in late 1945 after Brideshead had been published.
–Tim Dawson writing in The Critic has posted an essay entitled “I Miss the Simon Ravens”. This opens with a brief explanation of who it is that he is writing about:
I am fortunate to count amongst my eclectic circle of friends a brace of middle-aged, misanthropic homosexuals who suggested to me one day when I was moaning about something â performative corporate âallyshipâ, perhaps, or our hopeless government â that I should read Simon Raven.
Raven was one of those twinkly-eyed twentieth century mischief makers who have crashed out of fashion. He was a product of Charterhouse, from which he was expelled for licentious activity, and the Army, from which he resigned pending a court martial for gambling. His novels chart â in crisp, elegant, acerbic prose â the post-war decline of the British upper-middle class and, with it, the decline of Britain. His most famous work is Alms for Oblivion, a ten part roman-fleuve written between 1964 and 1976, and set between 1945 and 1973. Journalism and plays also abound, as well as a multitude of pot-boilers (Raven had a fascination for vampires, which crop up, more camply than erotically, in a number of his lesser works). But Oblivion is the masterpiece.
After a brief but detailed description of Raven’s life and work, the essay concludes with this:
I miss the Simon Ravens of this world. They were a British tradition, of the old sort: whimsical, sharp, self-deprecating, rather than ironic. (Why must everything be ironic now? From scones and jam to the âplatty joobsâ, everything British â and particularly English â has to be drenched in sickly-sweet, postmodern irony; the real flavours obliterated by Blairite ketchup.) Evelyn Waugh was a roughly equivalent figure, though arguably less subversive, and definitely less rude â but an effective gateway drug. More broadly, Anthony Powell, Auberon Waugh, James Lees-Milne, Christopher Isherwood, art historian Kenneth Clark and his miscreant son, Alan, satirists Peter Cook and Willie Rushton â all seemed to be hewn from similar material.
Such figures may have left the public square. But I hope, somewhere, they are sprawled louchely around a cricket pitch, warm in the smile from a long lost Augustâs sun.
–Finally, the website Harvard Law Today has issued it’s summer reading list. This is produced by the staff of the Harvard Law School. Their selections include this by law professor Sharon Block:
I started my summer with my first trip to Oxford [England] and fell in love with the city. The trip inspired me to reread âBrideshead Revisitedâ by Evelyn Waugh. I had the fun of staying in Hertford College during my visit, which is where Charles Ryder, the Brideshead protagonist, is a student and where much of the bookâs action takes place.
Posted in Auctions, Autographs, Biographies, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Piers Court, Television Programs, Waugh Family
Tagged Bonhams, Harvard Law School, New Yorker, The Critic, WiltshireLive.com
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Flag Day Roundup
–Author Irvine Welsh (best known for his novel Trainspotting) was interviewed in advance of an appearance at the Beyond the Pale Festival at Wicklow, Ireland, 10-12 June. This appeared in the Irish Examiner. Here’s an excerpt:
Iâve always admired writers that are from different backgrounds and social milieu to me. A writer like Evelyn Waugh. His Sword of Honour trilogy, which is about upper-class English people, has nothing to do with me, but what I liked was the way he handled male relationships and the schadenfreude between men. That was quite influential to me.
–An article in the leftist online and print journal Protean Magazine discusses the British class system. This is entitled “The Road to Brighton Pier: Class, Caste, and the British Left” and is written by Samuel McIlhagga. This extract appears near the beginning:
… the English, and to an extent British (the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish elite are often extremely Anglicized) upper-middle class operates a damaging, and very silly, binary code of speech. These rules were formalized by British linguist Alan S.C. Ross as U and non-UÂ (upper class and non-upper, i.e., middle, class), and popularized by the socialite Nancy Mitford in the 1950s. Mitford used them to mock the perceived non-U bourgeoisie prissiness of words like âsettee,â âserviette,â and âpardon.â As with all honest illustrations of cultural class differences, there was anxiety around even raising the issue. Indeed, the author Evelyn Waugh responded to Mitford stating: âThere are subjects too intimate for print. Surely class is one?â The taboos around the discussion of class serve to stifle class consciousness, silence critics, and create the conditions for politicians like John Prescott, Labour deputy prime minister under Blair, to argue that, âWeâre all middle class now.â
–The Daily Mail in a story by Victor Sebestyen describes the tourist attractions of Budapest, which he explains is really two cities on opposite sides of the Danube. Evelyn Waugh is quoted as a proponent of the city’s attractions:
The novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote that âwith the Danube, Budapest forms one of the most beautiful cityscapes that exists along a river.â The Danube is central to the city â figuratively as well as physically. One of the best ways of seeing Budapest, particularly at night during spring and summer, is on the river ferries, part of the cheap public transport network, or â kitsch but charming â a river cruise complete with (drinkable these days) Hungarian wine and violin music.
Waugh wrote of the delights of Budapest in a 1938 article in the Catholic Herald. This was entitled “Impression of Splendour and Grace” and was about a religious conference he had attended in that city. It is reprinted in EAR (p. 234) but I could not find the exact phrase quoted in the Daily Mail article. This may have come from an earlier article in the Catholic Herald which was not reprinted: “From London to Budapest,” 27 May 1938, p. 1.
–An interesting copy of Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall is on offer from Harrogate booksellers John Atkinson Fine & Rare Books. Here’s the description:
A first edition, first printing published by Chapman and Hall in 1928. A very good copy with sunning to the spine with some light wear and a little chipping to the spine tips, a little spotting to the contents and crease to page 81. SIGNED by Evelyn Waugh in his elaborate hand without dedication. beneath Waughâs signature is the inscription âStolen from John Betjemanâ in Betjemanâs own hand. In the supplied dust wrapper which is near fine (or better) with a little wear to the spine tips and corners. The titles are strong. A very nice example of the Author-designed dust wrapper. […]
A superb association and more so given the fact this is Waughâs first novel. In a custom-made clamshell box.
Here’s a link to the announcement. The price is ÂŁ30,000.
–The New Republic has reposted its 24 January 1959 review by Malcolm Muggeridge of Frederick J Stopp’s book Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of an Artist (1958). It is more a rambling description of Muggeridge’s troubled relationship with Waugh than a book review but it does offer comments on Stopp’s book. Here is an excerpt from the beginning:
My own acquaintance with Mr. Waugh is slight. The last time I saw him was at a wedding. I am no expert on wedding attire, but his seemed unusual. A tall black top hat, I thought funereal in character, provided an additional bizarre touch. He made considerable play with an old-fashioned Victorian ear trumpet, though whether for use or ostentation I cannot say. Occasionally he seemed to head in my direction, almost to orbit round me, but no trace of recognition appeared on his large, rubicund countenance. I felt no particular desire to be recognized by him, but these strange gyrations struck me as odd. In any case, on the few occasions that I have been on speaking terms with Mr. Waugh, I have formed the impression that he does not like me.
Usually, such antagonisms are mutual. I cannot, however, say that I reciprocate Mr. Waughâs dislike. There is, to me, something oddly sympathetic about this professional eccentric. I admire the bizarre, though none-the-less often highly effective, protests he has made against the times in which we both live. I once saw him at Brighton, on this occasion attired in an enormous overcoat and grey bowler hat. He was making his way alone on to the pier. I was tempted to follow him and see whether it was the machinesââWhat the Butler Saw,â or some otherâwhich attracted him thither, or whether he just went to the end to stare for a while out to sea. Despite his bulk and peculiar accoutrements, he had, I thought, an air almost of sanctity. The fool who persists in his folly becomes wise, Blake wrote. In this sense at least, Mr. Waugh may be accounted wise. Most of us, in the pursuit of folly, at a certain point prudently draw back. Mr. Waugh has persisted to the end. He has fought the good fight, if only with bladders and in the setting of a harlequinade.
The article is entitled “My Fair Gentleman” and a revised version is reprinted in the 1966 collection of Muggeridge’s articles entitled in the UK Tread Softly For You Tread on My Jokes and in the US, The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge. It was originally written less than 2 years after Waugh had purposefully embarrassed Muggeridge at the 1957 book launch for The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold at a Foyle’s book luncheon where Muggeridge was scheduled to introduce Waugh. When Muggeridge began his introduction, Waugh removed his large ear trumpet and placed it in front of him on the table, staring straight ahead throughout Muggeridge’s presentation. The incident was widely reported in the next day’s trade press, to the advantage of neither Waugh nor Muggeridge.
Posted in Books about Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, First Editions, Items for Sale, Newspapers, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
Tagged Daily Mail, Irish Examiner, Irvine Welsh, John Atkinson Books, Malcolm Muggeridge, Protean Magazine, The New Republic
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Summer Solstice Roundup
–In the current issue of Commentary magazine, essayist Joseph Epstein has an article entitled “Good Grief.” This is a fairly light discussion of the heavy subjects of grieving and bereavement. In the course of the discussion, this appears:
It may be the case that Jessica Mitford’s interest in the funeral industry was piqued by Waugh’s novella, although some sources suggest that it was her husband who encouraged her to investigate the subject. She was living in Oakland, California at the time. Waugh’s novel appeared in 1948 and her book followed in 1963. She devotes a section of her book to Waugh’s contribution to the subject.
–London booksellers Perter Harrington have listed an interesting association copy of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust:
The price is ÂŁ9750. Here’s a link to the listing. There are several detailed photos.
–Penguin Books in its latest catalogue is offering the following: “Beautifully designed new hardback editions of Evelyn Waughâs six greatest novels.” The new “Penguin Classic” hardbacks will include Decline & Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour. How these hardbacks will differ from existing Penguin hardbacks of Handful (2018) and Brideshead (2016) is not explained. The prices vary from ÂŁ14.99 to ÂŁ18.99. They will be issued in the UK on 6 October. See Penguin catalogue (p. 58) at this link.
–The Italian language newspaper La Repubblica reviews the recently translated Italian edition of Waugh’s book The Holy Places. The review by Daria Galateria opens with this:
The translation is by Google.
–An article in the Washington Examiner reviews the descriptions of wine from a selective Napa Valley source called “Martha’s Vineyard”. This is by Eric Felten. In the course of describing these wines he offers several comments on the descriptions themselves, including this one: