Father’s Day Roundup

Posted on June 19, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–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 relationships—dramas, often, of mutual incomprehension and dismay—in 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 “Fathers and Sons.” He “was never—well, hardly ever—sharp with us,” 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 “had been bitten off by a Royal Bengal Tiger . . . or had dropped off, quite inexplicably, that very morning.”

Auberon was also wise, as is clear from his autobiography, “Will This Do?,” which he wrote when he was in his fifties. All the Waugh literary men produced histories of themselves and their family. Auberon’s is the best—far better than Evelyn’s “A Little Learning” (1964), a late, bored book—and 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 – whose idea it all was – 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 area’s ‘hidden gem’ 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 can’t 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 Cyr’s church.

As for where to eat and drink, there’s 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 you’re after a delicious Sunday roast dinner and sunny beer garden to spend an afternoon, there’s also The King’s 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 — performative corporate “allyship”, perhaps, or our hopeless government — 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 — in crisp, elegant, acerbic prose — 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 “platty joobs”, everything British — and particularly English — 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 — 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 — 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 August’s 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 “Brideshead Revisited” 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 book’s action takes place.

 

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Flag Day Roundup

Posted on June 13, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–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:

I’ve 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-U (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 “settee,” “serviette,” and “pardon.” 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: “There are subjects too intimate for print. Surely class is one?” 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, “We’re all middle class now.”

–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 ‘with the Danube, Budapest forms one of the most beautiful cityscapes that exists along a river.’ The Danube is central to the city — 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 — kitsch but charming — 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 Waugh’s signature is the inscription ‘Stolen from John Betjeman’ in Betjeman’s 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 Waugh’s 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. Waugh’s 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 machines—“What the Butler Saw,” or some other—which 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.

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BBC 1967 Adaptation of “Sword of Honour” Now Available

Posted on June 11, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

There is an announcement on YouTube of the availability for home viewing of the three 90-minute episodes of the BBC’s 1967 Theatre 625 adaptation of Waugh’s war trilogy Sword of Honour. The adaptation was written by Giles Cooper and directed by Donald McWhinnie who met with Waugh about the project shortly before Waugh’s death. See previous post.

There is a brief clip from part two on the YouTube post.  Here’s the link. The supplier is Roberts (Hard to Find) Video. E-mail and North American telephone contacts are posted on YouTube. Callers from outside North America should use the Canadian number 306-955-3763; the country code for Canada is 613. Here’s a link to the website. Digital downloads of each episode are available from the Canadian supplier who hopes to be able to offer DVDs and VHS tapes once regular international mail services have been restored in Canada. Although these are substantial downloads and take considerable computer space, the downloading, which took abut 5 minutes for each episode, was fairly straightforward in the format used.

I have watched the three episodes and can confirm that the picture and sound quality are good. Part one (“Men at War”) covers the story in that volume of the trilogy. Much of Waugh’s dialogue is taken straight off the page, and little of the story has been changed (although there may be bits that have been dropped). The character of Apthorpe, played by veteran actor Ronald Fraser, carries much of the comedy and a good deal of the plot for this episode. This is even more noticeable in the TV film than it is in the novel. Ritchie-Hook as played by Paul Hardwick is a bit more OTT but so is he in the novel. One small complaint is how they handled the severed head from the West African landing party. Rather than suggest its existence and show a sack which might contain it, special effects made up a plaster model of a black man’s head, with bulging eyes and shiny teeth. It looks as if it had already been shrunken to Ritchie-Hook’s specifications. Those scenes would not play well on today’s TV.

The second part (“Officers and Gentlemen”) is a bit more difficult to follow and even having read the book several times, there are moments where I found it difficult to keep up. The sound quality deteriorates when too many actors are talking or they are too far from the microphones. There are no subtitles, but they would be of little use unless produced from the script rather than the soundtrack. But they do manage to get in most of the story. In particular, the story of Trimmer’s “heroism” is fully displayed, although at some points a bit of the humor is lost because it is moving so fast. The actor playing Trimmer (Tim Preece) should have been funnier than he was. His accent seemed a bit off and he should probably have had more than one which he could change to fit his audience. But whether his relative dullness was his fault or the screenwriter’s I could not say. Ian Kilbannock (played by James Villers) comes across as the source of much of the comedy, with his ironic pronouncements on whatever he happens to be describing.

Part three (“Unconditional Surrender”) is probably the best of the lot. The story is simpler and more linear and there are fewer characters to deal with, most of whom will by now be familiar. The humor in this part is supplied mostly by Ludovic, played brilliantly and just as written by Waugh. The actor is Freddie Jones who later became quite well known for playing comic parts. Uncle Peregrine (Basil Dignan) is also played just as written by Waugh. Some funny bits are omitted such as the witch doctor hired by Army intelligence but most of the story is preserved. The ending conforms to the changes made in the second and later printings to limit Guy and his new wife to one child (Gervase, fathered by Trimmer and Guy’s wife Virginia). The story of the Jewish refugees is somewhat truncated; at least, I do not recall hearing about the arrests of the Kanyis and the transfer of the others to Italy. Guy Crouchback and his wife Virginia are played by Edward Woodward and Vivien Pickles to their expected high standards.

So far as I am aware, BBC has not rebroadcast this series since the 1960s nor was it ever released on DVD or videotape. It has been available on a limited basis in the UK through the BFI, but this requires a visit (perhaps multiple visits) to their London “Mediatheque” on the South Bank.  It was sometimes available in other cities at libraries or theaters for on-site viewing, but that no longer seems to be the case.

The 2001 two-episode (193 minute) adaptation by William Boyd and starring Daniel Craig as Guy Crouchback, can be seen currently on UK Channel 4’s free streaming service. This will require a UK internet connection. DVD copies of the C4 adaptation are also widely available. It necessarily leaves out more of the story but is on the whole quite satisfactory.

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Jubilee Roundup

Posted on June 5, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–An American edition of Paula Byrne’s biography of novelist Barbara Pym is being published next week. This is entitled The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym and was issued last year in the UK by William Collins, which is also publishing the US edition. See previous post. It has been reviewed thus far in the New Yorker (Thomas Mallon), New York Times (Matthew Schneier)  and the Wall Street Journal (Katherine Powers, daughter of Waugh’s friend and novelist, J F Powers). Byrne is, of course, well known to Waugh Society members for her biography Mad World and her presentations at Waugh conferences at Downside and Leicester.

–Barbara Pym also is featured in other book news this week. In the Wall Street Journal, novelist and critic Alexander McCall Smith chooses her Excellent Women as one of his “Best Five: Books on Inconspicuous Lives”. His second choice is Evelyn Waugh’s 1952 novel Men at Arms, the first volume of his war trilogy Sword of Honour. The Times newspaper has also produced a “Jubilee books special” in which it asked its critics to pick their favorite novels published by British and Commonwealth writers during the past 70 years. That list included 50 novels and was headed by Pym’s Excellent Women but contained no novel by Evelyn Waugh, even though all three of the war trilogy novels plus Gilbert Pinfold (considered by Anthony Powell, inter alia, his best novel) fall within the designated period. None of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novels was selected either.

–The Evening Standard has posted an article reviewing a well-established Mayfair  restaurant with a connection to both The Queen and Evelyn Waugh:

Tucked away on Bruton Place is where you’ll find Bellamy’s, Her Maj’s most visited restaurant, where she has donned her finest co-ords and dined for events including her own 80th birthday and, most recently, an intimate supper with Princess Anne and cousin Princess Alexandra in 2016. Named after the gentlemen’s club in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour books, its doors were opened in 2004 by long-standing proprietor and master of discretion, Gavin Rankin. Since then, the appearance of the 65-seat French brasserie has barely changed.

–Two journals have reposted articles from their archives relating to or written by Evelyn Waugh. The Atlantic Monthly’s latest repost is a review by Waugh from its January 1949 issue. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

In a stable society, such as nowadays exists nowhere in the world, people live and die in the place and condition of their birth, and social custom is inculcated by precept and example from earliest childhood until it seems to be instinctive. Each nation, religion, class, and trade has its own traditional etiquette — the label frankly proclaiming a man’s social status. Such a society has no need for written manuals of etiquette. They are needed by restless and rootless people who have to adapt themselves to strange ways — in fact by most people today.

Mrs. Millicent Fenwick, in Vogue’s Book of Etiquette (Simon and Schuster, $5.00), has accomplished a clever feat of editorship. The large volume is clearly arranged, illustrated and cross-referenced. She has, moreover, achieved something unique in the literature of etiquette. She has written a book that is not funny. I mean it is not “funny-ha-ha”; it is “funny-peculiar in many respects, as when (p. 42) she states that debutantes with wise parents are “allowed not to drink ; but she nowhere provokes the deep laughter for which we treasured her predecessors’ works. Such lapidary ordinances as: “If you break a glass, apologize, but do not offer to pay and Never touch the fruit; a practiced eye should easily discern the best on the dish, have no place in this studious work. Moreover she professes a different motive from her predecessors’. Their task was frankly to instruct people of low origins in the social habits of their superiors. Not so Mrs. Fenwick, who claims that “the new standards of behavior are based on what, millions of people have accepted as right and wrong. Etiquette is a forum of citizens open to anyone who cares about the amenities of living.”

The review is entitled “The Amenities in America” and is not collected in either EAR or A Little Order.

The New Republic reposts the 1995 review by novelist John Banville of Selina Hastings’ biography of Waugh. It is mostly an essay by Banville about Waugh’s life and work but there is also this:

How to explain the continuing fascination that Waugh holds for us, as a man and a writer? Martin Stannard’s recent two-volume biography, a superb work written in a clean, vigorous style befitting its subject, seemed the last word, but now here is Selina Hastings’s hefty Life. Has she unearthed new material on Waugh, or found new things to say about him and his world? The answer is: not really. All the same her book is a valuable and fascinating biography, not displacing Stannard’s but complementing it. Hastings has drawn a remarkable portrait of a remarkable figure.

UPDATE (8 June 2022): A link to the New York Times review of The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym was added.

 

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Waugh, the Stirling Brothers and the SAS

Posted on June 3, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has posted an article from the Mail on Sunday  by Gavin Mortimer about his new book The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS. This is about David Stirling, a WWII “hero” from the North Africa campaign widely credited with the creation and leadership of a formation known as the Special Air Service (SAS). As recounted by Mortimer, it was David’s brother Bill Stirling and a former Irish rugby player, Blair “Paddy” Mayne, who were actually responsible for the establishment and leadership of the SAS. David Stirling’s “contribution” consisted in the command of smaller subunits which engaged in several hare-brained but well-publicized schemes that, according to Mortimer, contributed nothing of military value and were largely a waste of manpower and equipment. They did, however, attract publicity as David chatted them up to the Cairo press corps.

As explained by Mortimer, the SAS was in one sense an answer to Churchill’s need for a British propaganda counterpart to the success of Rommel’s Afrika Korps which had reversed the early British victories in North Africa. It was formed out of the Commando units in which Waugh was serving. According to Mortimer, it:

… was set up at the Commando Special Training Centre at Inverailort House in the remote north of Scotland, and among the first recruits – thanks to Bill’s intervention, and to the relief of the Scots Guards – was [David] Stirling.

Bill quickly discovered what the Guards had known for several months: David Stirling was indolent and temperamental, a disruptive influence. Now it was Bill’s turn to look for a way to offload his wastrel sibling. The man who would, indirectly, prove his salvation was Winston Churchill.

In June 1940, the Prime Minister sent a memorandum to his chiefs of staff instructing them to establish Britain’s first special forces – the Commandos. That November, Stirling was posted to the No 8 Commando unit, alongside author Evelyn Waugh, which was despatched to North Africa under the codename Layforce.

It is not clear from this whether the Stirling brother posted with Waugh to No 8 Commando unit was Bill or David but context and a later reference suggests the latter. David was an instructor in the Commando unit to which Waugh was assigned for training and is mentioned in Waugh’s letters home as a congenial companion on the voyage out to Africa.  In early 1943, David was captured by the Germans on one of his poorly planned SAS missions in North Africa and remained in captivity for the remainder of the war (except when he was unsuccessfully attempting to escape).  The following reference to Waugh appears at the end of the article, but is misleading as to Waugh’s associations with the two Stirlings:

The SAS had played a small but significant role in the successful invasion of France in 1944, earning praise from Allied supreme commander General Eisenhower for their guerrilla campaign against the Nazis.

[David] Stirling, meanwhile, was increasingly living in a fantasy world. He was a habitue of London’s most exclusive casinos, clubs and restaurants, drinking champagne with Evelyn Waugh – the ‘Giant Sloth’ of the early war years. [The sloth was David’s military colleagues nickname for him, not Waugh.]

Only when Mayne died in 1955 did [David] Stirling finally write his memoir, The Phantom Major, a Hollywood fantasy in which the truth was sacrificed for titillation. He even added an inch and a half to his height, which meant he surpassed Bill’s 6ft 5in. Such minor details mattered to him.

In 2002, 12 years after [David] Stirling’s death, a statue was unveiled near the family plot at Keir. It is right that one of the Stirling boys should have been honoured, but they got the wrong one. Bill Stirling was the intellectual force behind the SAS and Paddy Mayne the physical force. David Stirling was merely its salesman.

These references to Waugh are irrelevant to the story in the Mail and are unhelpful to Waugh’s own war record which doesn’t need any more negative associations. Waugh was, in fact, a friend of both Stirling brothers. The descriptions of his associations with the Stirling brothers in Waugh’s war diaries and biographies, however, relate almost exclusively to Bill Stirling.  He ended up as Waugh’s commanding officer after Bob Laycock’s Commando unit left for Italy without him in 1943. It was under Bill Stirling’s command that Waugh did his parachute training in late 1943. He actually spent some time as a guest in Bill Stirling’s home in Perthshire, and Bill was one of his daughter Hetty’s godparents in May 1944.  Bill Stirling may have been involved in the approval of Waugh’s leave to write Brideshead Revisited, although he did not sign the order (Diaries 565-66). Waugh seems to have been in occasional contact with David Stirling after the war and he is mentioned briefly in two letters.  But Waugh was certainly never as close to David as he was to Bill. The Stirling brothers were, in turn, cousins of Waugh’s nemesis Shimi Lovat, but there seems to have been little love lost between them and Shimi.

It may well be the case that the references to Waugh’s relations with the Stirling brothers are clearer in the context of the book than they are in what were probably  extracts used for the Mail on Sunday article. Hopefully, that will prove to be the case.  The book was published last week in the UK, and an American edition will be issued in August.

An interview of Gavin Mortimer also appears in the Perthshire paper The Courier. This clarifies that “Great Sloth” was the epithet applied to David Stirling by his fellow soldiers in the Scots Guards before his brother engineered his transfer to the Commandos.


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Waugh and the Coronation at Piers Court

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

This week, Britain is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Queen’s reign, which began on 6 February 1952, and was consummated with the Coronation on 1 June 1953. The Platinum Jubilee itself will extend from tomorrow, 2 June to Sunday, 5 June.

The Waugh family also marked the occasion, most pointedly on Coronation Day itself. Waugh comments in his diaries and letters that his daughters arrived from school on 30 May with several friends whose parents were resident in Africa. The “sterner” Downside School regime apparently released its students later. On Sunday 31st May, Waugh received complaints about lack of decorations at Piers Court, and the next day, he writes that he caused to have erected a “triumphal arch with our curved lion on the top,” apparently at the gate to the estate. That same day, he entertained the “Dursley Dramatic Society and some of the village. The Silver Band played and got very drunk. The children, both ours, Donaldsons and Annabel behaved admirably.”  On Coronation Day itself (Tuesday, 2nd June) he attended Mass. “Then great upheaval providing fancy dresses and decorating the marc and cart. Cold and windy but no rain. Sports. After dinner older children with Donaldsons looking at bonfires.” (Diaries, 720-21)

On Wednesday, 4 June, Susan Mary [Alsop] arrived. The Waughs had met her in France where her husband was an American diplomat. She was a friend of both Nancy Mitford and Diana Cooper, as well as a fairly long term mistress of Duff Cooper with whom she had a child. She had taken up Waugh’s invitation to visit Piers Court, and stopped there after attending the coronation. Waugh told Nancy that he expected that the visit will be “nice for us” and next day (after a “gala dinner” chez Waugh) he escorted her to Gloucester Cathedral, Stanway and Stratford in a chauffered limousine he had hired for the occasion (LNMEW, 313-15; Diaries, 721). They attended a play at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Waugh summed up the visit, describing her as “a tough & appreciative little guest on whom I spent great trouble & money. She enjoyed herself no end.” (LNMEW, 315)

As reported by Susan Mary in her memoirs, she was met on arrival by Laura whose leg was in a cast, but Laura assured her that she would be “all right for the party tonight.” Susan Mary had expected no party and brought only a simple evening dress. She had been given to understand that Waugh had refused to attend the coronation and prohibited his children from watching it on TV (although he had erected a “God Save the Queen” banner over the entry to his driveway). She arrived at dinner to find all the Waugh children in their best clothes, with Waugh in white tie and decorations and Laura in a ball dress and tiara. On the other hand, no servants were in evidence and Laura struggled to get the food on the table “crutches, ball dress and all.”

After dinner, Waugh told his children that Susan Mary would give them a first hand description of the coronation: “Mrs. Patten [as she then was] had been in Westminster Abbey watching the Queen’s liege lords drop to one knee as they rendered homage to her.” In fact, as Waugh well knew, she had viewed the procession from the War Office, using Isaiah Berlin’s tickets, and had been “nowhere near the Abbey.” Given the children’s rapt attention and high expectations, she described the ceremony as she had seen it on TV. She concluded, “I shall never know what the point of all this was.” Had Waugh felt sorry for the children and tried to make it up to them for denying them TV or was it only a joke to make fun of her? The day after the coronation dinner, “another Evelyn emerged” as he accompanied her in his country gentleman mode while touring the countryside. (Susan Mary Alsop, To Marietta from Paris 1945-1960, Garden City, NY, 1975,  pp. 225-6).

Nancy Mitford wrote that, after Susan Mary’s return, it was all around Paris about Waugh’s “torturing” her on that visit and the “poor little thing looks more like a Nazi victim than ever” (apparently referring to her anorexic thinness) (LNMEW, 314).

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Memorial Day Roundup

Posted on May 28, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Atlantic Monthly has reposted its issue for September 1956. This contains Waugh’s article entitled “Max Beerbohm: A Lesson in Manners”. This was a reprint of the article that had earlier appeared in the Sunday Times. It was a memorial of Waugh’s first meeting with Beerbohm written on the occasion of the latter’s recent death. Waugh was invited to a dinner in Beerbohm’s honor in about 1928-29, and then encountered him briefly the next day at the club where both were staying. Waugh’s article concludes that shortly afterwards:

I was greeted by the porter with a letter addressed— could it be? — in the fine little handwriting which fills the spaces of the famous drawings. How I wish I had kept it! Part of the anarchy which I then professed, was a disdain for personal records. I remember the gist but not the inimitable diction. It was an apology. Max Beerbohm was growing old, he said, and his memory played tricks with him. Once in his own youth he had been mistaken by an elder for someone else and the smart troubled him still. He reminded me that he knew my father well and had seconded him in days before I was born for this very club. He said he had read my novel with pleasure. He was on his way back to Italy. Only that prevented him from seeking a further meeting with me. It was an enchanting document. More exciting still was the thought that, seeing my distress, he had taken the trouble to identify me and make amends.

Good manners were not much respected in the late twenties; not at any rate in the particular rowdy little set which I mainly frequented. They were regarded as the low tricks of the ingratiating underdog, of the climber. The test of a young man’s worth was the insolence which he could carry off without mishap. Social outrages were the substance of our anecdotes. And here from a remote and much better world came the voice of courtesy. The lesson of the master.

The article is also collected in EAR.

—The Times in an obituary of film director Gavin Millar opens with this:

Gavin Millar had a laid-back, hands-off approach to directing and often appeared dishevelled on set, lounging in a wicker chair in crumpled clothes, with a mop of tousled hair. And yet, according to William Boyd, who wrote the screenplay for Millar’s ITV adaptation of Scoop in 1987, he would always have the cast “eating out the palm of his hand”.

“Every director wants to do an Evelyn Waugh,” Millar reckoned. “He’s probably the 20th century’s best English comic novelist. But the situations and characters in Scoop are so bizarre that one has to play them down. I just tell the actors to be, not to act and not to be comic, because the comedy is supplied by Mr Waugh.”

The actors for that production, who included Denholm Elliott and Herbert Lom, responded well to this understated method, even when a train full of them got stuck in the searing heat of the Moroccan desert for a day and Millar, recognising the comic potential of the moment, asked them to improvise, with the cameras rolling.

It probably helped to reassure the actors that Bill Deedes, the editor of The Daily Telegraph who was by then in his seventies, had been invited on to the set by Millar and had confirmed that not only were all the period details accurate but also the comic situations. The novel’s hapless journalist hero, William Boot, played by Michael Maloney, had been based on the young Deedes, who had covered the war in Abyssinia in 1935 with Waugh.

For more details on Millar’s life, see our earlier post.

–Conservative news network Newsmax has posted an article that lists the 10 most significant banned books in America. They start by explaining that “books get ‘banned’ in America — by local school boards removing them either from their student reading lists or from their library shelves.”  Their alphabetical list includes this one:

“Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh (1945)

The story follows the protagonist Captain Charles Ryder’s life and affairs from the 1920s to the 1940s, with the Flytes, a high society Catholic family who reside in a mansion called Brideshead Castle. Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Sebastian and Julia.

The novel’s themes include dependence-driven relationships, the complexities of religious faith, a hint of homosexuality and nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy.

The American Library Association included “Brideshead Revisited” on its list of banned and challenged classics. Without mentioning the book’s name, Alabama state Rep. Gerald Allen, a Republican, proposed a bill that would prohibit the use of public funds for the “purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.”

Others on the list include Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye.  The only other book by a British author on the list is Brave New World.

—Penguin Books has also published a list. This includes the 50 funniest books of all time. There is only one choice per author, and for Waugh the choice is Scoop. Here’s the explanation:

With Evelyn Waugh, readers are spoilt for choice, because his novels Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, The Loved One and Decline and Fall (jestful from the opening page) all fizz with waggish genius. However, we’ve gone for Scoop, a cracking satire about the world of newspapers. Waugh’s ability to mock behaviour was at its sharpest in a tale of a dishonest press pack. Waugh perfectly skewers a Fleet Street baron (Lord Copper, owner of The Daily Beast), while protagonist William Boot, the nature columnist mistakenly sent to cover a conflict in the African Republic of Ishmaelia, is a marvellous comic creation. Waugh, like Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers, was an expert at characterisation, making us laugh in fiction that was, paradoxically, full of profound wisdom and insight.

The choices are heavily weighted toward more recent books (31 were published after 1990) and it seems to have helped to have been published by Penguin. Oddly missing are books by J P Donleavy (eg, The Ginger Man), P J O’Rourke, and Edward St Aubyn.

–The Oxford Mail has posted several 1970s black-and-white photos from their files. Some of these show cast members of the Granada TV production of Brideshead Revisited filming on location in 1979. The two photos in the posting show Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the Botanic Garden and a street scene. Here’s an excerpt:

Kevin Loader, co-producer [of the 2008 Brideshead remake, that also was filmed on location in Oxford], said in 2008: “Oxford is a beautiful place to work. It has its own challenges, one being that it is full of tourists.

“During the shoot in Oxford, the film makers needed to quickly establish key points in the story. We had to really establish the sense of wonder of Charles’s first experiences of the architecture and the hustle and bustle of Oxford and then the difference between Sebastian’s world and the one that Charles has come from, which is reflected a little in the difference between their two colleges.

“Sebastian’s college, Christ Church, is one of the grandest and richest, with the largest quadrangle, where as Charles’s at Lincoln is much more intimate and domestic.”

For many years movie star Mr Irons has shared a home in Watlington with wife Sinead Cusack and over the years they have both devoted time to various projects in the local community.

–Finally, BBC Radio 4 Extra is rebroadcasting an episode of its Great Lives series from 2018. This is presented by comedian and Waugh fan Russell Kane, assisted by Matthew Parris.  Their topic is Evelyn Waugh. It will air at 1830 on Th 16 June and 0300 on Fr 17 June. It is posted at this link.

 

 

 

 

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Roundup: Mostly Books

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times has an article describing a re-reading of Henry Green’s peculiar 1939 novel Party Going. This is by Claire Alltree and opens with this:

I think of Henry Green’s 1939 novel every time I walk across Victoria station, which is where I like to imagine Party Going is set. Crippling fog, the prewar equivalent of leaves on the line, has stopped all trains from departing a London station, leaving the concourse swelling with thousands of commuters desperate to get home. Tucked away in the station hotel is a group of very rich bright young things, the story’s main focus, who are trying to make their way to a party in the south of France. As they anxiously wait, and wait, Green’s dryly satirical fever dream of a book feels a bit like James Joyce mixed up with Evelyn Waugh, except that Party Going is also so distinct unto itself there simply isn’t another novel like it.

No one reads Henry Green any more. An Eton-educated wealthy industrialist, he wrote several uneasy, stylistically radical novels between 1926 and 1952, of which Party Going is one of the most peculiar and the best. It’s also not particularly easy to read, although it’s only when you are about a third through that you realise almost nothing is happening. A strange miasma seems to infect the writing, blurring distinctions between location and often even the members of the party — you sometimes think you are reading about Julia, or Claire, only to realise that Angela is speaking instead.

Alltree does not say what edition of the book she read. In the US, the book is available from NYRB Classics along with several other of his works. Here’s a link.  That also appears to be the edition being sold as new in the UK. She goes on to describe the book’s strange plot (applying that term loosely).

Waugh had praised Green’s early novel Living (1929); indeed, he praised it twice. First, in Vogue (4 Sep 1929): “the most vital and dynamic book that has appeared since the war” and about a year later in The Graphic (14 June 1940): “a neglected masterpiece.” But after this initial flirtation with the avant garde, Waugh went silent in the press, and in private proclaimed Green’s later work to be evidence of his madness. He and Green (whose real name was Henry Yorke), knew each other from Oxford and remained on friendly terms, still exchanging letters after the war. They fell out after some incident that occurred on a 1951 visit by Green and his wife to the Waughs. Green, his work and relationship with Waugh are mentioned in several previous posts.

–A Bangladeshi paper The Daily Star carries a story profiling the life and work of novelist and travel writer V S Naipaul. This is by Farhad B Idris. Waugh was an early admirer:

Naipaul’s unique command of the English prose is a fact acknowledged by his friends and foes alike. Following the publication of The Middle Passage, Evelyn Waugh noted its brilliance and observed that Naipaul’s “exquisite mastery of the English language  should … put to shame his British contemporaries.” Waugh did not live long enough to read Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987), a much more complex work that combines travel narrative, fiction, and autobiography in an exquisite blend. It is no surprise that the Nobel committee mentioned this work in particular and praised Naipaul’s mastery of his materials in its award citation. Though subtitled “A Novel,” The Enigma is largely autobiographical and recounts, among other topics, Naipaul’s early difficulties as an Ă©migrĂ© determined to be a writer in England following the footsteps of no precursor.

—Slightly Foxed has announced their reprinting of a book that might be of interest. This is James Lees-Milne’s memoir of his early life Another Self. Here’s the announcement:

James Lees-Milne wrote that he ‘always felt an outsider in every circle’. It was this, combined with his eye for detail and highly developed sense of the ridiculous, that made him such a wonderful comic writer. John Betjeman compared the impact of Another Self to that of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.

James Lees-Milne, writer and architectural historian, is probably best remembered for his mischievously perceptive diaries, which chronicled the doings of upper-class English society from the Second World War onwards in twelve addictive volumes. Another Self, his fanciful, funny, yet poignant account of his early years, has the same gripping quality.

We’re delighted to announce that this classic memoir will be available to readers once more, published on 1 June in a Plain Foxed Edition. These sturdy little books, bound in duck-egg blue cloth, come in the same neat pocket format as the original Slightly Foxed Editions.

In the US, the book is available in a Kindle edition from Amazon.

–The magazine Current Affairs has published a dialogue between its editor and an architect about the career of architect Christopher Alexander who recently died at the age of 85. He is described as a “champion of vernacular structures.” Here is one item of interest from the dialogue which also extends to many other subjects:

Peter Eisenman, who I mentioned earlier, has a marvelous quote, something like my job is not to think about what people want, it’s to think about what they would want if they knew what they should want. He once designed a house that was so bizarre, very geometrically innovative but totally inconvenient. The clients could barely inhabit it successfully. (“Eisenman grudgingly permitted a handful of compromises, such as a bathroom.”) This is actually parodied in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, which features a modernist architect who resists including a staircase in a house on aesthetic grounds. (The architect, a clear parody of Le Corbusier, says that “the problem of all art [is] the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. 
 I suppose there ought to be a staircase. 
 Why can’t the creatures stay in one place?”)

–Culture news website LitHib.com posts an article by novelist Natalie Jenner in which she considers what she calls “unhappy happing endings.” One example is a Waugh novel:

Take Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and its fairly somber ending (which is also its beginning, given the present-day framework around the plot). To the outside world, narrator Charles Ryder is middle-aged, divorced, and alone, except for comrades in war and his rediscovered faith. But what he really is, is someone who finally sees the truth around him, unobscured by repressed envy. Charles doesn’t get much at the end of the novel, but what he doesn’t do is lose any further. He has reached a new, higher level of emotional understanding and grace, and every time I close the pages to Waugh’s classic novel, I feel the very same.

Jenner’s works include the novels The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls.

 

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Smallbeer, the Professor and Waugh

Posted on May 20, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

D J Taylor writing in the current issue of The Critic describes how Professor Barry Mole managed to eke a career out of the works of the largely forgotten 1930s poet Esme Smallbeer. This is the latest entry in his “Arty Types” column. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Esme Smallbeer died young in 1938 leaving behind him four slim volumes of lyric poetry and a reputation that, as his Times obituarist tactfully put it, had been “somewhat eclipsed” by more fashionable contemporaries such as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender.

And that might have been the end of Esme, his forty-odd years on the planet and Twilight in Wardour Street, the delicate volume of autobiography left unfinished at his death, had not a promising young graduate student named Barry Mole discovered his name in the index to Valentine Cunningham’s British Writers of the Thirties.

There were only four references, and one of them was merely a footnote about Evelyn Waugh’s mocking review of his first collection, Smitten by the Tarantula, but Barry was not deterred.

In the spirit of Taylor’s profile of Mole’s career, we can note that research of Waugh’s journalism for that period has turned up the “mocking review” cited in the article. This was one of the rare examples overlooked by Waugh’s bibliographers. It appears in the first (and only) issue of the magazine Day Before Yesterday. This was an attempt (futile as it turned out) by several of the participants in the production of the 1937 weekly journal Night and Day (that included weekly contributions from Waugh in a books column) to resurrect it in the early months of 1938. This was after its original publishers shut it down in the closing days of 1937. The inaugural issue of Day Before Yesterday, scheduled to be released on 23 March 1938, contained Waugh’s review (entitled “Better Smite Than Bite?”), but it never saw the light of day. Most issues were pulped when the publishers couldn’t pay the printers.

When one of the few surviving issues recently passed through the hands of London  bookseller, Joshua Shellout, we were generously allowed to read but not reproduce it. Waugh discerned in Smallbeer’s collection a foreshadowing of the work of Julian Maclaren-Ross in the 1940’s, another minor  writer in whose work Waugh  took an interest. How that may have been managed by a poet might be difficult to imagine but with the benefit of Waugh’s text, it all becomes clear. No doubt we can look forward to the appearance of that text in a forthcoming column.

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Two Essays: Orwell’s Comic Novels and Waugh’s Oxford

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

There are two well written and interesting essays this week relating to Waugh. The first is by Jonathan Clarke and appears in the quarterly City Journal. This is entitled “Orwell’s Humor” and relates mainly to his two 1930s comic novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939). These are frequently overlooked by Orwell readers since they have little to connect them to his major (and more popular) works. After a discussion of Aspidistra (probably the funnier of the two) Clarke writes:

Orwell’s exact contemporary, Evelyn Waugh (also born in 1903), succeeded as a comic novelist to an extent that Orwell did not, and the comparison is instructive. Waugh had several advantages over Orwell. He had been one of the “Bright Young Things” of postwar London and therefore had the social confidence of an insider. For Orwell, the pain of not having the right parents, of not having enough money, and of not performing the jeux d’esprit that only these two things permit, made impossible the light, bright, heartless tone that Waugh did so well. Waugh was also quite comfortable with his own sadism and turned it outward, while Orwell’s was mostly internalized as self-loathing. The fate of Tony Last in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the decent but feckless aristocrat captured and forced to read Dickens to an illiterate bush tyrant, is somehow funny; in Aspidistra, Gordon Comstock’s more prosaic suffering cuts deeper because we recognize it as Orwell’s own.

The second essay is by Daisy Dunn and seems directed to those critics who complained that the Brideshead connection to her recent interwar Oxford book was underdeveloped. This was entitled Not Far from Brideshead and is discussed in several earlier posts. Her essay is posted on The Oldie’s blog and concludes with this:

In some cases, the aftershocks of war were even magnified. In the 1920s, students were reminded repeatedly by their tutors and domestic staff of the courage and superiority of their predecessors who had served King and Country. Waugh’s portrait of the university was not unblemished – Anthony Blanche could attest to that – but the realities of postwar Oxford were in some ways underplayed.

Pansy Lamb’s words – there was ‘something baroque and magnificent on its last legs’ about 1920s society – wouldn’t have surprised Waugh or many other Oxonians by the end of that decade.

Writing in Cherwell in 1930, in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, a student journalist mourned the death of the postwar university and the arrival of an era he described, with clear vision, as ‘uninspiring’.

Looking around at the rather dour students, fun-loving Bowra asked, ‘Where are the aesthetes of yesteryear?’

The frivolities of the 1920s might have seemed vacuous – or even misplaced. But they gave a colourful veneer to a deeply scarred age. Something changed at the end of the ’20s.

The world of Brideshead, in all its contradictions, vanished so quickly that you could be forgiven for asking whether it had even existed at all.

Dunn’s book was published in the UK but is also available for sale in the US. Here’s a link to Amazon sellers. I don’t know whether there is a distribution to US bookstores.

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