Christie’s Online Sale of Waugh Presentation Copies

Posted on May 4, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Christie’s has issued a catalogue for the sale of several Waugh editions from the collection of William S Reese. Here’s the general description:

The themes of Part Three of The Private Collection of William S. Reese include fine art, Yale and Connecticut, St. Barts, American practical arts including drawing and penmanship manuals, carpentry and architecture, general Americana, bibliophily and book history, and first edition literature.

Highlights include an original drawing by Henri Matisse; first edition presentation copies by Evelyn Waugh, Flann O’Brien, James Thurber, and Wallace Stevens; an original miniature painting from the Bhagavata Purana, rare manuscripts and maps relating the St. Barts, autograph material by Saki, a comprehensive collection of works by Asher Benjamin; some of the earliest American carpentry guides and price-books; and a very handsome copy of John Gundry’s large folio Specimens of Penmanship.

Perhaps the choicest items being sold as a single lot are seven presentation copies to Waugh’s biographer Christopher Sykes. The guide price on those is $7000-9000. Equally exciting are three books presented to John and Penelope Betjeman. These are being sold separately and include one of the 50 copies of the Brideshead Revisited page proofs given as Christmas presents in 1944 as well as first editions of A Little Learning and Edmund Campion. Each item is individually described in the catalogue. The sale is scheduled for online auction between 19 May and 2 June. The items may be viewed from 20-26 May, 10a-5p at 40 Rockefeller Center, New York. Here’s a link.

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Toffs Floribundi: Costume Drama, Oxford and Brexit

Posted on May 2, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–On the occasion on the release of a new Downton Abbey film, The Times has devoted several articles to the costume drama as a genre. These begin with Robert Crampton defining the genre. From his perspective, a costume drama must have three ingredients:

Let’s establish our parameters. The genre could in theory encompass any production set at a time when people wore less comfortable clothes. There has to be a cut-off and I reckon it’s the Second World War. Thus, Brideshead is fine. But, say, Our Friends in the North is too recent. During wartime also doesn’t count: no Nazis allowed. And no Romans or Vikings either. Nor indeed anything from before the Stuarts. Prior to the 17th century the clothes and haircuts were crap and anyway most people were dead before they were 30. Or deformed.

Also, there has to be a hefty toff quotient. Not because they were the only ones with decent clobber (the clothes in Peaky Blinders are fab), but because you need baddies and in most British literature worth adapting, rich people are generally wrong ’uns. Pretty much every costume drama is a tale of an attractive protagonist from a humble background thwarted by the hierarchy of the age. Given social mobility is still so limited, we remain drawn to this storyline.

Also, sorry to be nationalistic but a costume drama needs to be British. Witness the recent failure of Julian Fellowes’s The Gilded Age. We all knew that in New York in 1880, if you made and spread around enough money, you were going to be allowed into “society”. In Britain, it’s never been quite that simple. [Emphasis supplied.]

He then starts with Upstairs, Downstairs as the first costume drama to qualify, and works his way to the 1981 Brideshead series:

… as we moved into the 1980s, Brideshead Revisited, had plenty [of all three ingredients]. I didn’t fancy Anthony Andrews or Jeremy Irons, seductive as their outfits were, but I watched them voraciously.

As did my whole generation, at an impressionable age. If anyone doubts the sociological impact of this apparently innocuous genre, they should know that Brideshead fashion, hairstyles and high-camp high Toryism swept the nation in the early Eighties. Bridgerton has boosted sales of croquet sets; Brideshead set the political tone for a whole decade. Margaret Thatcher had good reason to be grateful to Evelyn Waugh.

After Ed Potton explains why it helps if a few tears are jerked, Ben Dowell gets down to rating the top 21 costume dramas–11 TV series and 10 films. The first entry is devoted to

Brideshead Revisited (1981)
Anthony Andrews’s Lord Sebastian Flyte holding his teddy bear, Aloysius, is not the only lasting memory from Granada’s sumptuous adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s longest and probably best novel. The journey of Waugh’s alter ego Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) from callow Twenties Oxford undergraduate to world-weary wartime captain captivated the nation.
Bodice-ripper rating a firm 4. Never more than a few cricket pitches away from a powerful gay subtext.
Britbox, ITV Hub

Some of the other selections wander a bit off piste to, e.g., Russia, Italy and France, but the productions are English. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens dominate the sources, with multiple listings, and Andrew Davies would be the most prolific adaptor.

–One of Crampton’s elements for a successful costume drama (toffs) also provides the basis for a new book profiled in UnHerd.com by Will Lloyd:

It was summer, 2019. People who read the FT were still unsure why Brexit happened, beyond knowing that whatever made it happen was not good. At that moment Simon Kuper appeared, and wrote an article that was so delicious, and so put-all-the-dots-together, it immediately went viral. What machine spat out Brexit? Oxford. Which wackily irresponsible creche raised Boris Johnson? Oxford. The reason Kuper provided was not good. An old story (unearned privilege; naughty toffs) that has always chilled Britain’s fretful not quite upper-middle classes. It was just what Remainers wanted to read. Finally, an explanation that satisfied all their priors.

Now the viral article is a short and typical non-fiction book. Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Kuper’s story is simple. One afternoon he flicked through some old Cherwells, where he had been a student journalist in the late Eighties, and realised that the names there were the same ones bothering the pages of the Times in the late 2010s. Gove, Cameron, and Johnson; Hunt, Hannan, and Rees-Mogg. He had covered them back then, and here they were again, running Britain into the ground by levering it out of the EU. “Though we didn’t realise it, we were witnessing British power in the making,” Kuper writes of his time at Oxford.

Waugh had little interest in politics as a student or later, although he did make an appearance at the Oxford Union at least once, shortly after his arrival. That institution was, according to Will Lloyd, the incubator of the Brexiteer Tories that Kuper writes about:

…Kuper does not think much of his Oxford Tory Brexiteers. Nevertheless, he is good on Boris. On the sad clown tensions; his “killer” cynicism; his studied Wooster-Waugh role-playing. Then again, no one left in London media should be in this game if they can’t file 1,000 classy words of Boris pop-psych at this point. As Kuper points out himself: “[Boris] possessed the political asset of being all too easy to write about.”

As for Boris, so for Brexit. So easy to write about, if your aim is to titillate rather than explain. Did Brexit happen because Michael Gove, David Cameron and Boris Johnson learned that “the rules didn’t apply to them” in Oxford in the Eighties, as Kuper suggests? Did Brexit happen, as Fintan O’Toole argued in Heroic Failure, because England’s toffs ‘n’ plebs still harbour a sickly yearning to hear the sound of trumpets on the plains of Omdurman? And did Brexit happen, as every half-drunk Etonian I’ve met since June 2016 has insisted to me, because Boris Johnson got into Pop, and David Cameron didn’t? In a century, these tropes may be of sociological interest to historians, but they will not have much explanatory power.

Toward the end of the article an unexpected Brideshead character makes an appearance. According to Lloyd:

Chums ends up baffled by Oxford. Kuper cannot see the point of the place in our supposed-to-be meritocratic age. Like Hooper walking through the Marchmain’s palatial house in Brideshead Revisited, Kuper is troubled. “It doesn’t seem to make any sense,” says Hooper, “one family in a place this size. What’s the use of it?”

Kuper doesn’t trust the house to clean itself up. Outside forces must intervene, before young over-valeted men with long faces — he raises the ominous spectre of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s nephew play-acting at the Union recently — get big ideas again. So make a use for it. Make it a postgraduate “Institute of Advanced Studies”, he says. Or go even more full FT: convert Oxford into a start-up hub, and make “even more money from corporate conferences and executive education”. He thinks this will make Britain a fairer place.

—The Times also reviews Kuper’s book. This is by Hugo Rifkind who confesses that he is a Cambridge graduate. Here is an excerpt:

Kuper writes about the shock of Americans, such as the Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton, at the essential silliness of Oxford life in the 1960s. He also shares his own lingering shock that few of his peers seemed all that interested when the Berlin Wall came down. For him, though, the Cameron/Johnson generation epitomises the climax of “British unseriousness”. Or, as he puts it, unsheathing that knife again: “Bertie Wooster came back from the dead.”

Some of the Berties, though, wanted to be more than Berties. Kuper sees in the Oxford Tories the “shame of late birth”. He quotes the writer Rosa Ehrenreich, a Harvard graduate who arrived in Oxford in 1991 and said of the generation she found that “they were born to a poor island, still rigidly conscious of the glorious past, and told to adjust to the unglorious present and the grey future represented by Prime Minister John Major”. It was this that gave them that Brideshead and Bullingdon streak; a nostalgic longing for a status ebbing away.

While the review may not cite toffs by name, they would be understood implicitly as included in the “Brideshead and Bullingdon streak.”

 

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May Day Roundup

Posted on April 30, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The second part of Alexander Larman’s centenary recognition of Kingsley Amis has appeared in this month’s regular issue of The Critic. See previous post. He starts with an amusing description of Amis’s somewhat ramshackle acceptance of his Booker Prize for The Old Devils and then continues with this:

…In his centenary year, the man once regarded as the greatest comic novelist since Evelyn Waugh is now seen as little more than a joke himself, a Blimpish caricature of a bon viveur whose major books are little more than reactionary relics of a (thankfully) bygone age, and whose minor works are, at best, blessedly forgotten squibs and, at worst, vile indicators of personal failings that would, in our more enlightened era, have immediately led to Amis’s cancellation. (One can only imagine what Kingers would have had to say about the culture wars.) […]

But generally, Amis’s writing is now seen, even more than Waugh’s or his friend Philip Larkin’s, as the grim expression of a disordered mind. To admit to an affection, let alone an idolatry, for his works is to stand above the parapet and declare oneself a thoroughly wrong ’un. 

Well, I have been tarred and feathered for my literary views before, so another round of denunciation will make little difference now. Amis remains, along with Waugh, the finest comic novelist of the twentieth century — and yes before you say “what about Wodehouse”, Plum is essentially a timeless writer who removed himself from anything so dull as social concerns or normal life — and a memoirist, correspondent, critic and even poet of distinction, even brilliance.

–Alan Bennett has put together another collection of diaries. This one is entitled House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries.  It will be published in the UK early next month. Here’s an excerpt in the Guardian from the diaries for 7 May 2020:

Harriet Walter is doing Soldiering On and asked Nick [Hytner] how it was I “did posh so well”.  Short of a ready explanation he said (somewhat desperately) he thought it was because I had been a friend of Debo D [the late Duchess of Devonshire]. There is some truth in this in the sense that my awareness of upper-class tropes comes not from Debo but her sister Nancy, whose The Pursuit of Love I have known ever since I first discovered it in Majority 1931–1952– the omnibus edition of Hamish Hamilton publications, read when I was at Oxford. “Too many memoirs” would be another explanation (and “some Evelyn Waugh”).

Whether this volume includes writings other than the diaries is not clear from the Guardian’s excerpt or the Amazon.co.uk listing. Nor is it clear whether it includes previously uncollected diaries from 2019 or before.

–Craig Brown in the Daily Mail considers the infelicitous language occasionally used by Media and Sport Minister, Nadine Dorries, such as “downstreaming” videos and building tennis “pitches.” She blames this on her dyslexia. Brown is reminded of similar expressions uttered by former deputy leader of the Labour Party John Prescott:

…Prescott is now remembered not for any legislation he introduced, or political battle he ever won, but for his butter-fingered way with words. As Evelyn Waugh once said of the poet Stephen Spender: ‘To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.’

Like Prescott, Nadine Dorries is in the habit of rounding on those who snigger at her failings; she condemns them as insensitive. But it’s never a two-way street: she demands sympathy from others, but is abusive herself.  ‘You think you’re sensitive, but you’re not,’ says Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. ‘Your sensitivity only works for things that other people do to you. Touchy and vain yes, but not sensitive.’

The Waugh quote re Spender is from a review appearing in EAR.

–The Jacobin magazine has a story by Anne Colamosca about foreign correspondent George Steer who scooped the story of the 1937 German bombing of Guernica in Spain:

…Steer and a small group of foreign journalists had rushed to Guernica after hearing that the historic town had been decimated on the afternoon of April 26 — a market day. Many other reporters filed their stories the following morning. But as Nicholas Rankin explains in his 2003 biography, Telegram from Guernica, Steer’s story broke the explosive news that it had been the German Luftwaffe, specifically the Condor Legion, that had almost completely destroyed Guernica. Steer’s story ran on the front pages of newspapers around the world — rightly seeing the attack as a “dress rehearsal” for the global war that would follow.

Steer had previously gained credibility as a co-respondent by reporting from Abyssinia:

George always wanted to be a newspaperman and did an apprenticeship with a South African paper before being hired by the Times at age twenty-five. He immediately flew to Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and soon become a personal confidant of Emperor Haile Selassie. He would earn a reputation for his sheer obstinacy, intractability, and dark, relentless humor, explains Rankin in his excellent biography of Steer. “He was to the right of George Orwell but well to the left of his journalistic nemesis in Ethiopia, Evelyn Waugh.” (Waugh never failed to write in support of Mussolini in his articles for the Daily Mail.)

See previous post.

–Christopher Howse in the Daily Telegraph objects to UK Justice Secretary Dominic Raab’s reference to prisoners as “residents” or “clients.” This is in an article entitled “Prisoners aren’t ‘clients’, because words can never buck reality.” Here’s an excerpt:

It’s always the way with euphemisms. In Evelyn Waugh’s novella on the American way of death, an embalmer says to an orderly: “Will you tell Mr Joyboy that my Loved One is ready for posing? I think he should come now. He is firming.” Firming is really rigor mortis. And The Loved One, the dead person, gives the story its title. The more the phrase is repeated in the book, the weirder it seems.

I am sorry to say that loved ones have figured often in broadcasts during these pandemic years. No doubt it was meant kindly. But what of all those people who died and weren’t much loved? Waugh, of course, was fascinated by a Californian attempt to effect a cultural shift in attitudes to death. After all, he had called an earlier novel Vile Bodies, a reference to the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer, which is very plain in its language about the dead body that we commit “to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”.

Yet despite constant failures through the decades to change reality by changing the language describing it, we find more and more that organisations are getting at us via special vocabulary.

–Finally, the Guardian and other papers report the death of Gavin Millar (1938-2022). He was a noted director of TV and film dramas in the 1960-80s. His best work is considered by the Guardian to have been the direction of Dennis Potter’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland; this was entitled Dreamchild. He also directed Alan Bennett’s Intensive Care and one of the monologues in his Talking Heads.

He will be best remembered by our readers for his direction of the 1987 William Boyd adaptation of Waugh’s novel Scoop. This was produced by London Weekend Television for transmission on ITV.  It was a one-off production, not a series, and was not accorded the praise that was its due. This was particularly the case for some of the secondary parts such as Denholm Elliott who played Mr Salter and Michael Hordern who had the part of Uncle Theodore. Indeed, the scenes at Boot Magna were far the best of the adaptation, as they were also, for some readers, of the book. They alone were well worth the price of admission. A 1972 BBC multi-episode TV adaptation by Barry Took was even less successful.

 

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New Academic Studies (Updated)

Posted on April 28, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The article based on a previously mentioned lecture has now been published and posted on the internet. This is entitled “Narrating Difficult Histories: Interwar Border Crossing in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) and Christopher Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit (1962)” and is written by Yuexi Wu. The lecture, which had a slightly broader topic, was described in a previous post linked above. Here is the abstract for the printed version:

The interwar border crossings in Vile Bodies (1930) and Down There on a Visit (1962) reveal difficult and often lost histories of violations of freedom of expression and persecutions of sexual minorities. Drawing on archival material, including literary manuscripts and historical British Government records, to shed new light on the two novels, this essay demonstrates how border controls in Europe attracted urgent attention in the shadow of war and how customs, at the forefront of national security, were consequently relied upon as an ever crucial institution responsible for protecting the nation states and their citizens from “undesirable aliens”. Waugh and Isherwood criticised the injustice and violence of the border control policies and practices that failed to balance the self-interest of the nation states and humanitarian concerns. Narrating the difficult histories of the shadow of the shadow and experimenting with comedy and satire to narrate violence, both writers themselves crossed borders.

The article is published in the journal English Studies (April 2022) and is available online at this link. Yuexi Wu is co-editor of the society’s journal, Evelyn Waugh Studies.

–The University of Ghent (Belgium) has posted on the internet a 215-page academic article submitted by Florian Deroo for a master’s degree in 2015-16. This is entitled: “‘Why Go Abroad? See England First.’ Colonialism and Modernity in the Travel Writing of the Webbs and Evelyn Waugh (1911-1931)”.  It consists of two parts: the first dealing with the writings of Sydney and Beatrice Webb about their travels in India and the second about Evelyn Waugh’s travels in Africa in 1930-31 as described in Remote People and Black Mischief. The article is written in English with Dutch summaries and is available at this link.

–A literary criticism of Waugh’s fictional writings was published earlier this year in India. This is Evelyn Waugh Revisited by Ravi K Dhar. This description appears on the book’s back cover:

…In the maze of his prolific writings, the quintessential Waugh often escaped the critical scrutiny of critics and reviewers, who often charged him with being a bitter critic of modern Britain, without presenting an alternative moral vision or else that his novels play up an untenable nostalgia for the aristocratic values of the feudal past and a pre-occupation with thrusting his religion on others.

This book attempts to tear through the foggy veil of such critiques to revisit and redeem the real Waugh as represented in his creative works. The study argues that the claim of Evelyn Waugh to be recognised as a major twentieth century novelist in English literature rests on his creative use of comedy to convey his unique vision of life. The book highlights the centrality of the ubiquitous metaphor of the ever-revolving wheel of life to an understanding of his comic vision and art. The metaphor helps to define not just the division of this world into static, dynamic and religious characters, but also the weltanschauung that drives them to lead their lives in a particular way. Based on this, Waugh’s novels are amenable to classification into lesser and greater comedies. The book argues that while the lesser comedies play up the absurdity of belief in the Enlightenment philosophy of progress, the greater comedies present the grandeur of life in the spiritual resurrection of the central characters.

The 313 page book is available from Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle editions. There is a link on the Amazon site to the book’s Introduction section. There are also detailed descriptions of Ravi Dhar’s other writings and academic credentials. He teaches at Guru Gobind Indraprastha University in New Delhi.

UPDATE (29 April 2022): The information about the publication and availability of the “Border Crossing” article was received shortly after the original notice was posted.

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Nancy Spain, Yet Once Again

Posted on April 27, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has added some interesting material to his discussion of the Summer 1955 attempts by Daily Express reporters Nancy Spain and Lord Noel-Buxton to gain entry to Waugh’s house Piers Court, near Dursley, Glos., to conduct an interview. This led to a series of letters in the press and ultimately to libel suits in which Waugh prevailed two years later with much publicity. In the course of all this P G Wodehouse wrote a poem about the affair entitled “The Visitors”. This was published in his autobiographical collection Over Seventy in October 1957 but may have appeared earlier in a journal such as Punch from which much of the collection is reportedly taken. There was also an earlier US edition of the autobiography under a different title and with different content where the poem may have first appeared.

Waugh was surely aware of the poem since he and Wodehouse were correspondents at the time. But I can find no reference to it in his letters or diaries nor in his biographies. I can’t think it could have escaped both his and his biographers’ attentions. It is quite memorable and very funny. Here is the final stanza:

Noel-Buxton and Nancy Spain, my lads,/Noel Buxton and Nancy Spain./They’ll walk right in with a cheerful grin/And when they are in, remain./I wouldn’t much care to be stung by bees/Or bitten, let’s say, by a Pekinese,/But far, far better are those than these./Noel-Buxton and Nancy Spain. 

Any readers who may have more information about the publication history of the poem or any communications between the two writers about it are invited to reply as provided below. The Waugh bibliography lists the book (B1176) but mentions no previous publication. The complete verse can be found on Duncan’s website at the end of the article entitled “Scoop Revisited”. Here’s a link.

 

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New Brideshead Adaptation “Shelved”

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

According to the entertainment news website IndieWire, Luca Guadagnino has confirmed in an interview that the planned TV series remake of Brideshead Revisited has been shelved. Here’s an excerpt from the story by Samantha Bergeson:

…director Guadagnino […] confirmed that his remake of 1980s drama series “Brideshead Revisited” is officially shelved. The series was set to star Andrew Garfield, Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes, and Rooney Mara for BBC.

The story was also reported on the website Theplaylist.net which concluded: “The reason for the project’s discontinuation wasn’t provided but given the high-profile cast, scheduling could have been a problem.” 

There is no reported comment from BBC or HBO who were originally identified in the Daily Mail as the producers of the series. But then, so far as I am aware, they never issued any formal announcement of their plans either.

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Roundup: Book List and Bullingdon

Posted on April 23, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–Charles Moore writing in the Daily Telegraph has a story entitled “Not even the Queen’s Jubilee is safe from BBC preaching: There are good writers all across the Commonwealth, but Auntie insists on telling us that it knows best”. He is referring to a BBC list of 70 books as recommended reading of books published during the period of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign (10 for each decade). Moore finds the list quite odd if only because he hasn’t heard of half of the listings. Here is his discussion of the first decade (1952-61)

Seven of them deal with issues of slavery, racism, immigration and empire. All important themes for fiction, but a bit obsessive in such concentration. Only one of the ten, A House for Mr Biswas, by V.S.Naipaul, could be described as famous.

Yet the decade in question was prodigious for British fiction. In those years – Ian Fleming’s James Bond burst upon the world in 1953 with Casino Royale and continued at the rate of one a year. Kingsley Amis’s debut, Lucky Jim, was the comic hit of the decade. Raymond Chandler (British, though living in the United States) produced The Long Goodbye. Graham Greene published Our Man in Havana.

It was an era of great fictional projects too. Evelyn Waugh wrote his Sword of Honour trilogy, which many see as the greatest English fiction to have emerged from the Second World War. It was in the 1950s that Anthony Powell brought out the early volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time. Mary Renault got going on her novels of the ancient Greek world (including The King Must Die), which are nowadays recognised as classics of gay literature. It was a period of tremendous literary diversity. Sad to leave so much out.

An even odder omission is The Lord of The Rings (1955). J.R.R.Tolkien’s construction of an entire mythical world has sold more than 150 million copies. Perhaps the selectors saw his trilogy as children’s books, which they exclude. If so, they were mistaken, although of course many children love Tolkien.

He finds similar omissions in other decades and concludes:

As so often in current culture, I fear that we, the reading or would-be reading public, are being preached to about what somebody thinks would be good for us rather than encouraged to read what we would actually enjoy…

–A more nuanced view appears in The Critic. This is by Alexander Larman who eschews charges of wokery in favor of considering the selections (or lack thereof) on the merits. He notes obvious omissions (“One whistles for Waugh or Wodehouse, both of whom produced work in the past 70 years — although alas, little of it their best — let alone Kingsley Amis, David Lodge or Edward St Aubyn”) and concludes with this:

…it is hard not to feel that this carefully curated selection feels like a missed opportunity, with box-ticking winning out over great writing. Genuine imaginative art that stirs spirits and moves hearts has lost out to the inclusion of a novel that just happens to have originated from New Zealand. Ranking books as if they were horses is never a brilliant idea. But this uninspiring, Gradgrindish assortment still feels like the least inspiring selection in recent memory. First Prince Andrew, and now this: what a disappointing 2022 the Queen is having.

–Another Telegraph reporter, Allison Pearson, thought she could make a more useful list with the help of the paper’s readers. So she did just that. Her list (posted 21 April 2022) includes Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender for 1961 (“greatest fiction to come out of the Second World War”). Also on the list are books from Waugh’s contemporaries Graham Greene (Our Man in Havana) 1957 and Anthony Powell (Dance to the Music of Time–all 12) 1970. Nothing from Nancy Mitford, however.

–The Daily Mail has added another review of Daisy Dunn’s book Not Far From Brideshead. See previous posts. This is by Kathryn Hughes who begins with a discussion of frequently mentioned links to Waugh’s novel and then continues:

Dunn’s particular interest is the way in which the spirit of inter-war Oxford, for good and for ill, was shaped by the classical syllabus. Her unlikely hero is Maurice Bowra, the clever, closeted classics scholar who is the obvious person to become the next Regius Professor of Greek, at the time the most prestigious academic role in the country. The problem is that not only is his scholarship a bit old-hat, but Bowra was also gay at a time when homosexuality was a crime.

News of his social adventures in anything-goes Berlin meant that it was E. W. Dodds, an obscure Irishman from Birmingham University, who got the job. To say that Oxford was upset is putting it mildly. Dodds, a genuinely clever man, found himself sent to Coventry. People walked out of rooms when he came in, and some dons refused to let their undergraduates go to his lectures. Bowra congratulated Dodds through clenched teeth and went out of his way to make his life as unpleasant as possible. Sharp-eyed Waugh, meanwhile, was taking notes. He put Bowra into Brideshead as Samgrass, an Oxford academic who is a social climber and a bit of a bore. Bowra recognised himself and claimed to be flattered.

This might all sound parochial, but as Daisy Dunn shows, there was something greater at stake. Hitler and his henchmen were busy building the Third Reich along what they fondly imagined were Ancient Greek lines. They particularly admired the Spartan practice of killing off weak children and invalids – a kind of rough-and- ready eugenics. Other, home-grown fascists such as Oswald Mosley went out of their way to win Oxford over to their cause.

–Emily Hill in The Spectator describes her experience with the purchase a few years ago of her “part-buy, part-rent, one-bedroom eco-home.” Until recently she bemoaned her misfortune in being stuck with an unfashionable, cramped dwelling where she sweltered in the summer heat and couldn’t open the windows. More recently, she has reassessed her situation as her own fuel bill increases have proven considerably less burdensome than those of her acquaintances in their more commodious, conventional structures. She can now take a more nuanced and ironic view of her situation:

Anyone who has a father who read Evelyn Waugh novels for parenting guidance will have been raised, like me, in a culture of lukewarm baths used by two previous occupants. The thermostat in our draughty house was positioned right next to the hearth so the heating went off if it was cold enough to light a fire.

–Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, writing in the Daily Telegraph’s “Comment” section, defends Oxford’s Bullingdon Club from its OTT portrayals in recent dramas. These include Laura Wade’s play and film from 2010 (Posh) and 2014 (The Riot Club) and, more recently, the Netflix series Anatomy of a Scandal. As he explains, these works unfairly describe a fairly minor and relatively harmless institution and exaggerate its importance in Oxford social life and national politics. The article concludes with this:

You could write another series about how Presidents of the Oxford Union debating society have dominated post-war politics, too. They include Michael Foot, Ted Heath, Anthony Crosland, Tony Benn, Jeremy Thorpe, William Rees-Mogg, Michael Heseltine, William Hague, Michael Gove and one Boris Johnson. The Oxford Union has been a much more fertile cradle for politicians than the Bullingdon. But it doesn’t have the same lethally attractive cocktail of class, privilege and white-faced tailcoats.

So we can only expect more lazy crime dramas about the club. If only modern writers borrowed from the only author who ever got the Bullingdon right: Evelyn Waugh, who mocked it as the Bollinger Club in Decline and Fall (1928). Waugh wrote that Bollinger members included “epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates”.

Waugh took the truth of the Bullingdon Club and made it funny. Anatomy of a Scandal turns it into a series of wicked, lazy falsehoods.

 

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Derek Granger: This Sunday in Eastbourne

Posted on April 22, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Derek Granger, producer of the Granada TV series Brideshead Revisited will appear this Sunday, 24 April at 2 pm in Eastbourne College. He is 101 tomorrow, Saturday, 23 April. He will be in conversation with David Grindley at Eastbourne. Here are the details:

Derek Granger (Powell 1935–39) was born on 23 April 1921. After the Second World War, in which he served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, Derek worked as a journalist in Brighton, before being headhunted by the Financial Times as their first drama and film critic. That led to an invitation from Sidney Bernstein, the head of Granada, to work in television. He was a producer of Coronation Street in its early days, as well as being a scriptwriter, and later became Granada’s head of drama.

Derek has spoken at the College several times in recent years including giving a fascinating talk to the sixth form about his lifelong relationship with Hamlet, and inspiring pupils with his knowledge of countless productions. He worked with and was a close friend of Laurence Olivier who also appeared in Brideshead Revisited as Lord Marchmain for which Derek is probably most famous as its producer for Granada Television. It won a BAFTA award for best drama series in 1982. When he gave a talk about this production in 2014, he was joined by cast members Anthony Andrews and Nickolas Grace. We are delighted that Derek has accepted an invitation to come to talk, on the day after his 101st birthday, about his life. The audience will be invited to help him celebrate after the talk with something bubbly and some birthday cake.

David Grindley (Wargrave 1986–88) read English literature and philosophy at the University of York and then became a theatre director. His keynote productions are Loot, Abigail’s Party, Journey’s End, The Philanthropist, What The Butler Saw, The American Plan, Copenhagen, and The Gigli Concert. In 2007, David’s production of Journey’s End won the Tony Award for Best Revival. He and Derek have recently met at Derek’s Thames-side flat to put together this afternoon’s talk.

Tickets
£15.00 each (plus £1.50 booking fee), including a glass of champagne and birthday cake, available from https://www.wegottickets.com/event/539771

All proceeds will go to the Eastbourne College Bursaries Fund.

The bar will be open before and after and we are happy to accept donations in cash only.

Here are some excerpts from an interview of Derek that appeared earlier this week in the Daily Telegraph:

…For his next big thing Granger […] filmed what turned out to be 11 hours of Brideshead Revisited entirely on location. The original adaptation was the work of John Mortimer but, dissatisfied with it, Granger rewrote the lot himself, inserting the languid voiceover delivered by Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder.

“He responded rather fiercely by demanding that he see the whole version of what I’d written. He saw it and not a word did I hear back. I mean not a word.” Who got the royalties? “He did. And again and again. So he’s not on a bad deal.” (Mortimer died in 2009.)

Granger hasn’t revisited Brideshead since it was broadcast, though years later he asked Plowright how he’d got away with reinventing the language of television drama almost by accident. “He said, ‘Oh we rather liked what you were doing and we just thought you ought to get on with it.’ ”

Granger tacked across into cinema to produce and co-write Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and, his swansong in 1991, EM Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread. “I would have gone on but the opportunities had slightly drifted away by then.” The latter closed the circle as Forster was the writer who first opened his young mind. […]

It is the burden of centenarians to be pumped for the secret of longevity. What’s Granger’s? He chuckles.

“I always want to know what happens next. I really am an old journalist at heart and I think God, when I die it’s going to be a terrible day when I’m not going to know. And that will be shocking for me.”

 

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Robert Morse (1931-2022) R.I.P.

Posted on April 21, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

American actor Robert Morse has died at the age of 90 at his home in Los Angeles. He is best known in this parish as the actor who played the role of Dennis Barlow in the 1960’s Hollywood adaptation of Waugh’s novella The Loved One (1948). It was one of his first starring film roles, but he made his name as an actor primarily on the stage and in TV drama. According to the New York Times, his:

gap-toothed grin and expert comic timing made him a Tony-winning Broadway star as a charming corporate schemer in the 1961 musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” who later won another Tony for his eerily lifelike portrait of the writer Truman Capote in “Tru,” and who capped his long career with a triumphant return to the corporate world on the television series “Mad Men.”

With respect to his performance in the film adaptation, the NY Times notes:

His success in “How to Succeed…” led to movie offers, but not to movie stardom; he rarely had a screen vehicle that fit him comfortably. “The parts I could play,” he observed to The Sunday News of New York in 1965, “they give to Jack Lemmon.”

When he co-starred with Robert Goulet in the 1964 sex farce “Honeymoon Hotel,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, “It is hard to imagine good actors being given worse material with which to work.”

Mr. Morse fared better, but only slightly, in “The Loved One” (1965), a freewheeling adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s scathing novel about America’s moneymaking funeral industry, in which he was improbably cast as a British poet who finds work at an animal cemetery. Then came “A Guide for the Married Man” (1967), in which Mr. Morse gives a fellow husband (Walter Matthau) advice on how to cheat on his wife.

The AP wire service obituary also mentions the Waugh adaptation:

Among his films was “The Loved One,” a 1965 black comedy about an Englishman’s encounter with Hollywood and the funeral industry, based on the satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh.

“I don’t think in terms of whether a picture will help or hinder my career,” Morse told the Los Angeles Times when the film was in production. “I think of who I’m working with.” Among his “Loved One” co-stars were Jonathan Winters, John Gielgud and Tab Hunter.

Morse (who was born 18 May 1931 in Newton, Massachusetts) must have been one of the oldest surviving members of the film cast and crew when he died. According to the internet, however, his co-star Anjanette Comer (b. 1939), who played AimĂ©e Thanatogenos in the film, is still among the living. Both of them played their parts pretty much as Waugh himself had written the characters (as did British actors John Gielgud and Robert Morley who played Francis Hinsley and Ambrose Abercrombie) in parts probably written for the screen by Christopher Isherwood. It was the off the wall performances of Jonathan Winters and Rod Steiger as well as several cameo performances by the likes of Liberace and Milton Berle, probably written by co-screen writer Terry Southern, that doomed the film’s acceptance by Waugh and his readers.

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Tax Day Roundup

Posted on April 15, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in The Tablet, former Anglican priest Chris Moody provides a remembrance of Septimus Waugh. He begins by recounting a visit, shortly before Septimus’s recent death, where Moody showed him the photo of his latest work as installed in an Ilfracombe church. He goes on in some detail to describe his early career and major works.  The memoir concludes with this:

He carried his faith lightly as he did all things in his life. Good humour and conviviality were hallmarks of his character including his woodcarving. I remember the early panel he carved of St Brigid surrounded by the barrels in which she had turned bathwater into beer. A lively but not altogether serious interest in the wilder reaches of Catholic legend and veneration was one of his hobbies, seasoned by travel, and shown elsewhere in his written articles and reviews.

This is most memorably conveyed in the statue of St Jude he carved for the Sacred Heart Church in Wimbledon, London. Artistically, it is perhaps the best work he ever completed, and he took considerable pains over it, both in researching it and in making and measuring the maquette in preparation for the finished work. […]

Laura, his daughter, pointed out to Septimus, when she saw the crucifix that was to be placed behind the altar in the church in Ilfracombe, that the hands looked very much like his own, strong and capable. A nice thought, reminding his friends that Septimus expressed his faith in God and in human nature much more in what he did than what he said. “Christ has no body now on earth but yours,” as St Teresa puts it.

Septimus made a deliberate choice to lead his life directed by his enthusiasms rather than by ambition or any selfish desire to prove himself. Practical engagement in family, community and with making a living, combined with wider intellectual interests and concern for political and social equality – these were the centre of his life and identity. Right to the end, he displayed the Benedictine core value of stabilitas that he had first encountered at school at Downside: loyalty, concern and perseverance on behalf of those you are entrusted with to love. He would not have claimed to have been a good Catholic, but you couldn’t call him a lapsed one either; more a relaxed and true one.

–The Sunday Telegraph has a review of a book by a German on the English class system. This is England: A Class of its Own: An Outsider’s View by Detlev Piltz. It is reviewed by Tanya Gold, who opens with this:

Detlev Piltz is a German lawyer bewitched by the English class system. […] He is a fan of England (“a wonderland”) and Englishness (“a unicorn”). He is diligent. There is no piece of culture related to the class system he has not read – quotations from George Orwell and Oscar Wilde and Ferdinand Mount fill his pages.

Yet one cannot be fair about a unicorn, or wonderland, with which one is bewitched. He is less concerned with the sweep of history – with what made class and why – than with the details: the mannerisms and habits of the aristocracy which, due to the personal anxieties of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, are a glittering canon of hagiography and denial.

And so this book often reads like an article by one of the class specialists employed by tabloids to troll readers with their lives. Don’t say “toilet”. Don’t call your daughter “Kayleigh”. Parts resemble a guidebook for what I imagine is the very small number of German lawyers who might wish to impersonate an English aristocrat badly.

After explaining at some length how Mr Piltz has got it wrong, the review concludes:

…despite some fascinating information, which he mostly misunderstands, this book is another homage to the England we think exists, rather than the England that does. It deals with our palatable face; our shadows on sundials; our myth. His great reveal – that he boarded for a summer in his youth with a parson and his family in the Cotswolds, and the daughter was the future Theresa May – is buried at the end, thrown away, and I think I know why. It was the source of the bewitchment.

–The Los Angeles Times has an article in its books section entitled “How Los Angeles transformed American literature”. This is by David L. Ulin. It is a broad topic, but it does involve Evelyn Waugh.  Ulin describes the project near the beginning

If I chose to do so, I could make a case that in the last 50 years or so, the writing of Los Angeles has shifted from a literature of exile to a literature of place. Until the middle of the century, its most visible work was crafted by outsiders from the East or Europe, bewildered by what they perceived as the otherness of Southern California, its sun and light, its palm trees. That all began to shift in the 1960s with the emergence of the Watts Writers Workshop […]

After describing briefly the careers of several LA-based writers, a few of whom, such as Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Ray Bradbury, have achieved broader recognition beyond Southern California, Ulin comes to this:

It’s impossible to ignore the influence of Hollywood on some of this, although I resist that as a metaphor. Of the writers who came to write for the movies, how many tried to understand the place? Maybe Nathanael West, whose “The Day of the Locust” (1939) recasts the Hollywood novel as apocalyptic — “just as,” to borrow a phrase from Joan Didion, “we had always known it would be in the end.” Maybe Evelyn Waugh, who understood the thanatotic impulse of celebrity well enough to frame his 1948 novel “The Loved One” through the lens of death. Maybe [Charles] Yu, whose novel “Interior Chinatown” grew out of his experience writing for “Westworld” (and won a 2020 National Book Award). Popular culture, literary culture. Literature of exile, literature of place. [Joan] Didion too worked as a screenwriter, but she mostly left the subject of the movie business to her husband.

–On a website aimed at TV obsessives called 25yearslatersite.com, self-confessed obsessive Ellen Peden has written an article that considers how the previous adaptations of Brideshead Revisited relate to each other and to Waugh’s novel. She then considers how the newly announced (but as yet unscheduled) remake might fit in:

I must confess, when I first heard that the new series would involve the director of Suspiria, my first thought was “Dario Argento!” The director is in fact Luca Guadagnino, who was responsible for the Suspiria remake. Once I got over my disappointment that the new Brideshead wasn’t going to be a carnival of lurid interiors and garish lighting, with a soundtrack by Goblin, I realised I know very little about Guadagnino’s work. He is a versatile director who, although not primarily concerned with horror films, found himself drawn to filmmaking by his passion for the genre. He describes it as the “cinema of the senses”, in which film is used to present a “heightened reality”. Perhaps my hopes for a giallo Brideshead aren’t entirely dashed after all. Intriguingly, he says that he values intuitive filmmaking, as opposed to the purely rational, and sees the finished film as something independent of him; “an arrow that flies through time”. This leads me to hope that he will avoid the pitfalls of the overly rational Brideshead Revisited film, which was burdened by a clumsy desire to replace the spiritual elements of the novel with caricatures of Catholic guilt.

Listening to Guadagnino got me thinking, who else could bring radically imaginative direction to this slippery tale of dying cultural embers? Yes, you guessed correctly. What if David Lynch were to direct Brideshead Revisited? Lynch has that beautifully confounding habit of giving a character two different lives. Suppose Julia and Sebastian are the same person in flight from a spiritual awakening? Both Waugh and Lynch show a consciousness of the poetic significance and meanings of names, and a sense of the unspoken things that are easily lost. I’m not entirely sure Waugh would approve, though.

For now at least, I suspect we will have to settle for a more conventional retelling. While I remain eager to see the result, I’m still a little sceptical about the possibility of an adaptation that faithfully captures the spirit of Waugh’s world. Maybe one day someone will render the tale in a way that reconnects us with something lost. Otherwise, I fear the low door in the wall will soon be locked forever, the lamp finally extinguished, and there will be no going back.

–An academic article entitled “Einstein, Evelyn Waugh and the Wapisiana Indians: Ventriloquism and Eclipses in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale” has recently been posted on the internet. This is written by Kerry-Jane Wallart who teaches at University of OrlĂ©ans, France and originally appeared in 2008 in Commonwealth Essays and Studies but is only now available more widely online. Here is the abstract:

This paper concerns itself with generic questions in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist Tale and links them with the peculiar postcolonial “writing back” which takes place therein. Whereas one might first assume that the author inscribes the text in a Bakhtinian lineage, it then appears that its various voices are never tamed or tied into one consistent narration. An Eliotian music is soon heard which is half-poetry and half-drama, and which aims at retrieving the ritualistic functions of language, Indian or otherwise. Eventually however, the novel turns out to be the fruit of the lies and deceptions of one single narrator in disguise, who has set out ventriloquizing the whole world into his own words.

It might help you to know that:

Pauline Melville was born in 1948 in British Guyana, the daughter of an Englishwoman and of a Guyanese father of mixed, and partly Amerindian, ancestry. The novel was published in 1997 and it won the Whitbread First Novel Award as well as an enthusiastic book review by Salman Rushdie. It came after Shape Shifter (1990), a collection of short stories which won quite a number of prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book Award, and was followed by another collection of short stories entitled The Migration of Ghosts (1998). 

She has written additional fictional works since the above profile was published: most recent was The Master of Chaos and Other Fables in 2021. Her novel The Ventroliguist’s Tale was mentioned in a previous post.

 

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