Roundup: Divorce, Cults and Lost Cities

Posted on April 9, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Guardian recently posted a selection of books on difficult marriages in its “Top 10s” column. It is not surprising that a book by Evelyn Waugh on this topic made the list. Here’s the entry by Elizabeth Lowry:

3. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Landed country gentleman Tony Last thinks he’s happily married to Brenda, the mother of his eight-year-old son. But Brenda is bored and starts an affair with a total scrounger. Her attempts to fix Tony up with a mistress are all unsuccessful: he’s too uxorious. Their boy is killed in a riding accident, Brenda demands a divorce, and Tony tries to escape the wreck of his life by taking a trip to the Amazon. He loses everything – including, perhaps, his sanity: when we last see him, he’s being held captive in the jungle by a monomaniacal Dickens enthusiast. What’s worse than being married to Brenda? Being forced to read the complete works of Charles Dickens aloud for the rest of your life.

She might equally well have chosen Sword of Honour or Brideshead Revisited.

–It is perhaps no accident that the Guardian’s column coincides with the implementation of new liberalization of the divorce laws. This is discussed in a story in The Economist entitled “No-fault divorce begins this week in England and Wales.” A reference to A Handful of Dust also features in that article’s brief recitation of the history of divorce laws:

Indeed, few families offer a finer potted history of English divorce than the royal one. It was easier for Henry VIII to separate England from the Catholic Church, and his spouse’s head from her neck, than himself from his wives. By the time Edward VIII acceded to the throne in 1936, divorce had become legally easier—but remained socially costly. When Edward informed the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, that he intended to marry the divorced Wallis Simpson, Baldwin pointed out that this was impossible. Today, not only is Prince Charles divorced, he is married to a divorced woman.

Increasing social acceptance did not immediately lead to increasing legal simplicity. Divorce and absurdity have been joined together for decades as a result. In the 1930s “hotel divorces”, in which an “adulterous” husband would hire a hotel room (Brighton was popular), a girl and a photographer, in order to be framed in an act of apparent infidelity, were so common that they were satirised by Evelyn Waugh.

–Literary critic Alexander Larman has written an article in The Critic that is entitled: “How to become a cult writer: What does it take for an author to become idolised way beyond their literary merit?” After explaining how Lord Byron and Lord Rochester are examples of cult writers, Larman provides this definition:

Welcome to the rarefied world of cult literature, where adherence to a writer goes far beyond mere appreciation of their work. At their most extreme, those who idolise long-dead writers regard them with the pugnacious and proprietorial attitude that a mother lion might reserve for her cubs. The fact that they will not receive any thanks for their endeavour does not deter them from their self-determined quest to continue to promote their chosen hero or heroine

A writer whose literary ambitions in their lifetime might not have stretched far beyond hoping that their work would be enjoyed, and read, by a small but select coterie of the like-minded might now be horrified to discover that, many years later, their every utterance is taken as Holy Writ, and personal items of theirs guarded zealously, like holy relics.

Recent examples of cultdom include Patrick Hamilton, Aleister Crowley and Mervyn Peake and he gives several examples of authors whose cult status made them so popular and widely read they they morphed into the mainstream. Larman also offers some interesting predictions:

The likes of Kingsley Amis and John Osborne have fallen into disfavour, but I can see a world in which the taint extends to Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and even George Orwell, whose once-impeccable political stances might well be too nuanced, even contradictory, to be acceptable to contemporary readers who would instead view him as yet another Old Etonian, with all of the prejudices and bigotries in place of his kind.

There are now two distinct, even contradictory, canons of cult literature. The first is the politically correct and socially conscious one, which has expelled the toxic male writers (with a few token exceptions, such as Wilde and Genet) and has boldly recalibrated the history of writing as one in which masculine oppression has been expunged, and the voices of hitherto unheard minorities are the ones that are sacrosanct. This, if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, is the preferred option to be found in higher education and, increasingly, in secondary schools, too.

The second definition of cult literature is made up entirely of refugees from the first, with added frowning. If I was to be found reading a copy of Scoop, Coming Up For Air or High Windows, I am no longer simply enjoying the work of a great writer, but actively participating in a patriarchal, oppressive conspiracy. That I might simply enjoy the writing for its own sake is unlikely to impress those who would castigate me.

—The Sun (Nigeria) carries a story that reviews the life and reputation of V S Naipaul. This is by Missang Oyongha and is entitled “The Long Afterlife of Naipaul’s Biswas.” Waugh enters it briefly:

By the late 1960s, a Naipaul admiration society, but no cult, was forming in the British literary pages, among commissioning editors, and in the writing prize committees. Miguel Street had been awarded, in 1959, the first Somerset Maugham prize given to a non-European writer. The Mimic Men won the W. H. Smith Award in 1968 . When The Middle Passage was published, in 1962, Evelyn Waugh reviewed Naipaul, publicly, with a right-handed salute to his “exquisite mastery of the English language”. Later on, Waugh would review Naipaul, to Nancy Mitford, in left- handed terms, as “that clever little nigger” who had just won another literary prize.

It would be interesting to know where Naipaul stands in Alexander Larman’s cult writer spectrum. Perhaps he needs to suffer a longer period of neglect before passing into cultdom.

–Finally, The History Reader website has posted an article about “lost cities”. In this, Edmund Richardson explains the right and wrong ways to find one. The wrong ways are exemplified by Heinrich Schliemann who destroyed the old city of Troy in the process of finding it and Arthur Evans who built over Knossos in Crete rather than restoring it. He cites Waugh in regard to the latter:

Each year, over a million visitors flock to Evans’ greatest discovery, the palace of Knossos in Crete: home of the Minotaur, the fearsome half-man, half-bull of Greek mythology, and the impossible labyrinth of Daedalus. No one tells the tourists that the site is not the work of Daedalus and his artisans, but of Evans and his twentieth-century workmen. Hardly anything is original. Evans and his men, as Evelyn Waugh put it, ‘tempered their zeal for [accurate] reconstruction with a [somewhat inappropriate] predilection for covers of Vogue.’ The palace of Minos is a masterpiece of Art Deco and reinforced concrete.

The quote, with some of the original restored, comes from Waugh’s 1930’s travel book Labels. The article concludes by describing Charles Masson’s discovery of Alexandria Beneath the Mountain, Alexander the Great’s city in Afghanistan, as the correct way to proceed.

 

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Amis (Pronounced “Ames”) Centenary

Posted on April 8, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph has posted an article by Jake Kerridge marking the centenary of Kingsley Amis. This will occur later this month. The article is entitled “Why misogynist Kingsley Amis is too good to cancel” and opens with this:

In Jonathan Coe’s recent novel Mr Wilder and Me, a film-maker mocks an ageing, out-of-touch colleague for wanting to adapt one of Kingsley Amis’s novels. Amis is dismissed as “someone nobody ever talked about any more and … now so out of fashion that you might as well try to get an adaptation of the Yellow Pages onto the screen.”

Is it only the ageing and out-of-touch who will be raising a glass to Amis on his centenary on April 16? Actually, no. His reputation seems to be holding up better than all but a couple of the British novelists of his generation; I don’t think he’s read much less than Doris Lessing or Muriel Spark, and certainly more than Iris Murdoch and Anthony Burgess. And with the publication this week of his collected poems and essays by Penguin Modern Classics, we now have far more of his books in print than at any time since his death in 1995.

But it is true he gives the impression of having nosedived further than his contemporaries, simply because he was once such a household name. Of all the novelists to have won the Booker Prize, Amis was the one best-known to the general public (excepting, for very different reasons, Salman Rushdie). He was a bestseller for decades, with the magical gift of appealing equally to “literary” and “non-literary” readers.

After discussing Amis’s views on women and the several adaptations of his novels, Kerridge comes back to this:

It was this deep engagement with language, this feeling for words, that was Amis’s greatest gift, and it reached its zenith in his two dozen novels.

He loathed experimental fiction (he would have been furious, but unsurprised, that the centenary of Ulysses has overshadowed his own), prompting his son Martin Amis to express puzzlement that “someone…as linguistically aware as my father should never have sought to experiment in prose at all.”

But such is Amis pere’s command of English that his prose carries the same kind of charge and invigorating freshness as that of the great Modernists. He is straightforward but always surprising.

Among the books Kerridge recommends is Penguin’s The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954-1990, originally published in 1990 and now reissued as a Penguin Classic. This contains several reviews by Amis of books by and about Waugh: Decline and Fall, the war trilogy, the Sykes biography, Jacqueline McDonnell’s critical analysis, and the 1981 Brideshead TV adaptation.  He liked Decline and Fall and Sykes but had serious reservations about the others.

Waugh was dismissive of Amis and was known at times to mispronounce and misspell his name as “Ames”.  In another Amis prose collection (What Became of Jane Austen ?, 1970) Amis wrote (p. 147):

…An acquaintance told me how he once asked Waugh: ‘What do you think of Kingsley Amis?’

‘Ames,’ said Waugh

‘Amis, actually.’

‘You mean, Ames.’

‘Look, I happen to know him, and he pronounces it Amis.’

‘The man’s name is Ames,’ said Waugh, so firmly that the discussion of my works was broken off at that point.

See also letter dated 15 July 1955 to Christopher Sykes (Letters, 445). There is no record that Waugh ever reviewed anything by Amis, and Amis says that the two of them never met. But there is much about Amis that reminds one of Waugh, in particular their humor and love of the English language, as well as, not to put too fine a point upon it, more consumption of alcoholic beverages than was good for them.

It should be noted that the newly issued Penguin Classics edition of The Amis Collection available in the UK, according to the pages posted on Amazon.co.uk, seems to have the same selection of reviews of Waugh-related books as does the 1990 version, but it also has more pages, so care should be taken to assure you are getting the content you want. There is also a Kindle version entitled Raising a Smile: Selected Nonfiction. That may also have different content.

 

 

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Avoidance of Class

Posted on April 6, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Philip Hensher has posted an essay on the website UnHerd.com that discusses the disappearance of social class distinctions as a topic in contemporary novels. He begins by noting that his students show reluctance to use class as a character marker in their written fiction assignments and then sees this as a more wide spread phenomenon:

…Social class — how people may be trapped in their circumstances, and struggle to escape them — has been at the core of the novel since the beginning. The form thrives on the differences between people, and the place people take in the world. They can be as vast as between Dickens’s Lady Dedlock and Jo the crossing sweeper, or as minute, but real, as those between Austen’s Emma and her vulgar enemy Mrs Elton. But we have to be able to tell characters apart for the novel to make sense; a story set in a society where social differences had been genuinely erased might be quite hard to follow.[…]

But now, through a combination of nervousness, embarrassment, and an apparent concern by novelists that their observations on difference shouldn’t be mistaken for snobbishness, the subject is being cast aside. In part, I think, this is because social class seems much more complex and puzzling than it used to be. What to make of a Russian oligarch with his house in Belgrave Square? Or the Syrian professor and refugee, now driving an Uber to get by?

In part, too, it must be affected by a general squeamishness about making personal observations of a specific sort. Some readers have started to object when a novelist makes a factual note about a character’s physical nature, or their race. This style of objection might be making novelists nervous about plain statements of class. You can talk about a character’s wealth or poverty, but it is quite hard to imagine a serious novelist writing about a character’s relationship to money and status in the direct and contemptuous way Evelyn Waugh writes about John Beaver, or Rex Mottram. […]

What is taking the place of this traditionally central concern? The main interests of the novel now are such things as race, particularly racial injustice, sex and sexual preference, and (a surprisingly common interest) the world as seen by individuals who are somehow hindered by an external factor, such as a mental illness. …

Hensher cites one current novelist who seems to be an exception to this rule. This is Douglas Stuart whose second novel was recently published. Its title is Young Mungo and, like his first (2020 Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain), it takes place in working-class Glasgow. Hensher’s essay continues:

…perhaps Stuart gets away with his analysis of class because both his novels are also concerned with one of these external factors, gay male sexuality. These factors will successfully distinguish characters; they will do a good job of showing how an individual is treated by society. They are all important and interesting subjects. But as motors of fiction they have one marked limitation — they are all unchangeable characteristics.

Social class was a central theme in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and his contemporaries such as Anthony Powell, Nancy Mitford and Scott Fitzgerald. It is difficult to imagine how they could have been written without referring to it.

 

 

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A Musical Waugh

Posted on April 3, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Four is rebroadcasting a 2006 production entitled The Piano: A Passion. This is presented by Alexander Waugh. Here’s the description:

Alexander Waugh has been passionate about pianos ever since he was a small boy. Fuelled by an insatiable curiosity about the roots of his musical addiction, he sets out in search of other like-minded piano-obsessives to discover what it is about this instrument that has the power to turn seemingly rational people into compulsive lifelong piano junkies.

Framed and punctuated by Alexander’s effort to teach a novice to play the piano in a week, the film follows him on his quest around the concert halls and homes of classical and pop pianists like Paul Lewis, Jools Holland and Damon Albarn as well as a wide range of enthusiastic amateurs, including a child prodigy, a pilot and a national newspaper editor.

Alexander’s grandfather disliked music and found listening to it painful. Perhaps he was tone deaf. He once declined an invitation extended by Igor Stravinsky to attend a premier performance of a new work because, as he explained, he would be unable to enjoy it. Whatever it was that put Evelyn Waugh off music does not seem to have been inherited by Alexander.

The program is available on BBC iPlayer for about 4 weeks and can be streamed from this link. A UK internet connection is required.

 

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Early April Roundup

Posted on April 2, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the Daily Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen has reviewed Daisy Dunn’s previously mentioned new book Not Far from Brideshead. The review is entitled “The Greats [sic] and the good at Oxford.” Here’s an excerpt:

…Dunn writes with intelligence and verve, but her book doesn’t quite add up. One suspects that her concept was something more rigorously focused, until a commercially minded publisher asked her to sprinkle in more anecdote and eclat – hence the fleeting appearances of peacock aesthetes such as Harold Acton and Eddy Sackville-West, the undergraduate japes of the Hypocrites’ Club and other cliches redolent of the fantasised Oxford of Brideshead Revisited that have little bearing on the central theme.

What is more crucially lacking is any exploration of Greats students who did not aspire to glamorous literary fame – for instance, Dunn tantalisingly mentions in passing that many of them ended up as code breakers at Bletchley Park – or any sense of the broader context in which the culture of Oxford shifted away from the classics and humanities towards the sciences and engineering with the establishment of Nuffield College in 1937. What Dunn ends up presenting sits uncomfortably between an engaging picture of donnish eccentricity and a substantial essay in intellectual history.

The author of this new book Daisy Dunn is interviewed on the website LitHub.com. Here’s a link to the interview conducted by Andrew Keen.

–The Jesuit magazine America has published an article entitled “Leonard Feeney said there was no salvation outside the Catholic church. Then he was excommunicated.” This is about a Roman Catholic chaplain at Harvard University in the 1940s who wandered off the reservation. The article by James T Keane also mentions Waugh’s brief encounter with Fr Feeney:

Two people who didn’t care for Feeney’s rhetoric were Robert F. Kennedy, who stormed out of one of Feeney’s lectures, and Evelyn Waugh, who after hearing him speak called Feeney “a case of demonic possession.”

Waugh’s confrontation occurred in Fall 1948 during his visit to Boston in advance of his 1949 US lecture tour (Letters, 292-93).

–The entertainment website MentalFloss.com has posted a detailed article by Jake Rossen on the making of the 1981 Granada TV series of Brideshead Revisited. After describing the roles of producer Derek Granger and the two directors, Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Charles Sturridge, the article explains:

The result was something unique not only to television, but to book adaptations in general. Instead of striking great portions of the book or altering its structure, the production opted to insert only minimal interpretation. Much of the dialogue and voiceover would come from Waugh’s book verbatim. At times, actors who hadn’t received new script pages simply recited from the pages of the novel. Irons provided voiceover as Charles, which would provide the internal monologue that dominated the book.

Granada also agreed to stretch the six episodes to 11, providing a deeper and more inclusive look at the novel’s many emotional entanglements and narratives. Brideshead Revisited was becoming something unique—not a book-on-tape, but a kind of book-on-film.

The article continues with a reference to the TV series’ positive critical receptions in both the US and UK and concludes with this:

It’s possible, as Christopher Hitchens observed in 2008, that even American viewers far from British aristocracy found something relatable in Brideshead—the tug of nostalgia for a simpler time. (So potent was that affection, Hitchens noted, that when he was wearing a white linen suit and carrying a teddy bear in a profile reminiscent of young Flyte, passersby yelled “Hi, Sebastian!” at him.)

There is also a brief reference to other remakes the Granada production has inspired, including “a planned BBC presentation with Andrew Garfield as Charles.”

—The Times has the obituary of an eccentric gardener who was responsible for the introduction of mini gardens along the banks of the River Thames as it became more accessible during the final years of the 20th century and later spread to other urban environments. This is Hilary Peters (1939-2022) whose family has a close connection to Evelyn Waugh:

She was born in 1939 in London but shortly after her birth the family moved to Boarstall Tower and did not return to the capital until the early 1950s, when she went to Francis Holland School. Hilary was the only child of a second marriage and had two half-siblings. Her father, AD Peters, was the literary agent of writers including Hilaire Belloc (who became Hilary’s godfather), JB Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. Her mother, Margaret, was a novelist.

–Finally, on the religious website CatholicCulture.org, Dr Jeff Mirus has posted a review of Waugh’s biography of Edmund Campion. Here’s an excerpt:

Campion … was a remarkable prose stylist, in addition to being quite capable of speaking off-the-cuff as if he had already carefully drafted and even corrected his remarks—an achievement demonstrated in extracts from his trial. It is fitting, then, that the magnificent prose stylist Evelyn Waugh should have been Campion’s biographer in the twentieth century. Waugh’s most famous work, Brideshead Revisited, is a joy as much for the brilliance of the writing as for the deftly personal treatment of its very serious characters. In much the same way, Edmund Campion: A Life engages the reader fully at every level of the storyteller’s craft. The book is divided into four powerful chapters: The Scholar, The Priest, The Hero, The Martyr. This is Waugh’s telling outline of Edmund Campion’s life.

COMMENT (Don Kenner, 4 April 2022):

I believe Father Feeney was excommunicated for his disbelief in “baptism by fire” and “baptism of desire,” two ways of establishing communion with the Church outside of the normal sacrament of baptism. The phrase “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” (no salvation outside the Church) is dogma in the Catholic Church.

I can’t say for certain what angered Waugh about Feeney’s speech, but Waugh, a faithful and traditional Catholic, would’ve been surprised (to say the least!) that Father Feeney denied these two established doctrines of the Church. However, it is very doubtful Waugh would call a priest “demonic” simply because the priest affirmed the n0-salvation-outside-the-Church doctrine. America magazine’s headline is a bit misleading.

REPLY (Jeff Manley, 4 April 2022):

Waugh explains in his letter to his wife several aspects of Feeney’s presentation of which he disapproved, including denunciation of a book by Ronald Knox. (Letters, p. 292) I can’t say that he discussed these two matters specifically.

 

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End of March Roundup

Posted on March 26, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–Alexander Larman writing in The Spectator marks the 75th anniversary of Waugh’s 1947 trip to the USA with the article “Waugh in Hollywood”:

…in early 1947, [Waugh] was forced to confront the modern world and do something out of keeping with his carefully constructed rural idyll. When Brideshead was published in the United States in 1946, it met with enormous commercial success after being picked as the prestigious Book of the Month Club selection in January. Waugh complained to his friend Maimie Lygon that “My book has been a great success in the United States which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can’t be.” He was always affectionately scathing about Americans, remarking that “the great difference between our manners [and theirs] is that theirs are designed to promote cordiality, ours to protect privacy.” But his own privacy was about to be interrupted.

He goes on to explain Waugh’s negative reaction to New York City, his enjoyment of the train ride to California, and his the unsuccessful negotiations with MGM over film rights for Brideshead. The good news was that the breakdown of those negotiations gave him the opportunity to explore more thoroughly the Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale. Larman notes in this regard Waugh’s meeting with Forest Lawn’s founder Dr Hubert Eaton who, according to the article, was immortalized in the novel as the “evangelical mortician” Mr. Joyboy. I believe Dr Eaton found his immortalization in the character of Dr Kenworthy who founded Whispering Glades. The article concludes with this:

His Hollywood trip may not have resulted in the sale of Brideshead Revisited, but it did lead to something that has proved more valuable to future generations: a final comic masterpiece. The British author and critic Cyril Connolly wrote of it that “in its attitude to death, and to death’s stand-in, failure, Mr Waugh exposes a materialist society at its weakest spot
 The Loved One is, in my opinion, one of the most perfect short novels of the past ten years.” Posterity has proved Connolly right. We may not have a sanitized Forties film version of Brideshead Revisited, but we do have an excellent novella. That, most would concede, is a far greater lasting achievement.

–The books blog Bookglow.net includes The Loved One on its list of the 10 “Must-Read” books that are set in Los Angeles. Here is its recommendation:

Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets’ mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday–and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with AimĂ©e Thanatogenos, a naĂŻve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer’s art. Waugh’s dark and savage satire depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.

Others on the list include Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.

–The website The European Conservative has posted an essay by Harrison Pitt about religious themes in Waugh’s early novels, in particular Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust. The essay is entitled “The Young Evelyn Waugh: Tragicomic Seeker” and opens with this:

Religious themes and situations are undoubtedly stronger in Evelyn Waugh’s later novels than in his early fiction. After the publication of Brideshead Revisited in 1945,Waugh made it clear that all his books would now have a religious purpose: “to represent man more fully, which to me means only one thing, man in his relation to God.”

Waugh’s writing before Brideshead is regarded as more secular in nature. In these early novels, comic inventiveness is unleashed on the gay decadence of the 1920s. Waugh fashions a capricious universe in which responsibilities are shirked, sexual deviance is commonplace, and virtue, if it appears at all, goes unrewarded. Critics as far back as Aristotle have appreciated the comic possibility of presenting human beings in their least flattering light, and Waugh’s efforts in this vein were highly innovative.

But was there some deeper purpose to his anarchic sense of humour? Early works like Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, for example, touch upon religion in ways that do not seem wholly driven by a creative search for comic material. The satirical tendency in Waugh was clearly strong and, as such, it became his mode of literary expression. But despite their undoubtedly comic form and apparent lack of any moral purpose, these youthful, zany novels also voice concern about the pitfalls of nihilism in a world that has abandoned God…

—Vogue magazine has posted a selection of several photographs of the Queen that have appeared in its pages. One taken by Cecil Beaton in 1945 includes her with Princess Margaret on a stairway at Buckingham Palace. The accompanying text explains that Beaton was at the time Vogue’s:

… star image-maker. Few could have done more of a service to the monarchy at such a crucial moment. […] This was a fairy-tale Queen, the very image of what monarchy should be for a modern era: glittering and remote but possessing what Evelyn Waugh, in Vogue, would call an “accessible and human” face. The little Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, ranged next in line for Beaton. “Who of us is so without romance as not to respond to the appeal of a young Princess?” asked Vogue.

Where and when Waugh may have written that in Vogue is not revealed.

–Finally, the New Yorker has reposted a long essay by its film critic Anthony Lane on Evelyn Waugh’s short stories. This was a review of the complete short story collections published in the US (1999) and the UK (1998). It first appeared in the magazine’s 4 October 1999 issue and was entitled “Waugh in Pieces”. This excerpt is taken from the introductory paragraphs where Lane explains that the new collection is :

…a fresh gathering of primary material: “The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh” (Little, Brown; 29.95). The title is clear, although in the Waugh canon a short story is not easily defined. The unfinished yet gracefully rounded tale “Work Suspended,” for instance, which consumes eighty-four pages of the present book, feels almost a match for “The Loved One,” “Helena,” and “The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold”—the brisk, peppery, death-haunted trio of novellas that Waugh produced in his riper years, and which are available only in individual volumes. He himself was a chronic bibliophile and a connoisseur of typography, who was admired in his youth for his capacity to illustrate rather than compose a text, and his fussing is contagious; as a rule, I am quite happy to read any cruddy old softback with splinters of wood pulp poking out of the pages, yet I treat my early edition of “Vile Bodies,” with its vibrantly woodblocked title page, like a frail and endangered pet. The craving for Waugh can come upon one without warning, especially when the tide of public folly or private slush rises to flood level, but I resent having to slake my need with an emergency Penguin. The new batch of short fiction is a necessary purchase, and you should be able to claim it against tax as an aid to professional sanity, but the I.R.S. might frown at the luridly whimsical dust jacket offered by Little, Brown. The hushed grays of the English edition, published by Everyman, would stand you in better stead.

The article is worth reading and would have made a fine introduction to the American edition which, as I recall, lacked one. Lane also wrote the article on Waugh’s novels that appeared in the Cambridge Companion to English Novelists (2009). The English edition of the complete short stories was nicely introduced by Ann Pasternak Slater who is also listed as editor. She is also editor of the Complete Works editions of short fiction scheduled to appear as volumes 5 (prewar) and 6 (postwar).

 

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“Waugh on Russia Revisited” by Milena Borden

Posted on March 21, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh Society member Milena Borden has kindly sent the following short essay on Waugh’s attitude toward Soviet Russia as reflected in his novel Sword of Honour. She started it some time ago but has found it has now become relevant to present events:

Waugh on Russia Revisited

The literary world knows that Evelyn Waugh wrote one of the best, if not the best novel about the Second World War, a trilogy entitled Sword of Honour (1965). It also knows that he was an uncompromisable anti-communist and rejected all things related to Marxism, the Soviet Union and atheism. But it is perhaps less known that the title of Chapter Eight (“State Sword”), as well as of the trilogy itself, is a direct reference to the Stalingrad Sword presented at the Teheran Conference in November/December 1943. The sword was made especially for the occasion at the British steel company Wilkinson Sword, which, among other military ware, also produced ceremonial swords for the Household Cavalry of the British Army. The sword was to mark the Anglo-Soviet Treaty between Churchill and Stalin signed in 1942 and the Battle of Stalingrad which was one of the culminations of the fighting on the Eastern Front.

The actual presentation of the “sword of honour” was an important British event at the time, with the sword being sent to many cities around the country where thousands of people saw it on display. After that, it was presented at a ceremony to the Russian Embassy in Teheran in a commemorative box and is preserved to this day in the Museum of the Stalingrad Battle in the Russian city of Volgograd, which was previously called Stalingrad, and before that, Tsaritsyn.

In Chapter Eight, Guy Crouchback observes the long queues of people wanting to admire the sword outside Westminster Abbey. While he himself is not tempted to join them, others are. Among the attendees is Corporal Major Ludovic of Hookforce who, after pausing reminiscently by St Margaret’s Church, makes his way inside  Westminster Abbey, which is about to close, and manages to see the sword: “He glimpsed the keen edge, the sober ornament, the more luxurious scabbard, and then was borne on and out. It was not five minutes before he found himself once more alone, in the deepening fog.” (Penguin Classics, 2001, p. 469) Later, on the same evening, he goes on to visit Sir Ralph Brompton formerly of the Foreign Office with whom Ludovic has previously served five years abroad. They meet at Sir Ralph’s fortified place near Victoria Street and have a conversation about the sword.

Ludovic plans to write a sonnet about it as part of a literary competition in the weekly magazine Time and Tide and they talk about it. The conversation, although casual as between old friends, becomes slightly edgy when it comes to the sword itself, with Sir Ralph underlining the meaning of the sword-present in support of the “tanks and  bombers and the People’s Army driving out the Nazis” whereas Ludovic thinks about it as a reminder of his disillusionment with the war. (Idem. p. 471) The sword then becomes a recurrent motif throughout the chapter, which ends with a comparison between the winning entry of the competition and Ludovic’s sonnet, which “failed to reflect the popular mood”:

Stele of my past on which engravùd are/The pleadings of that long divorce of steel,/ In which was stolen that directive star,/By which I sailed, expunged be. No spar,/ No mast, no halyard, bowsprit, boom or keel/ Survives my wreck
 (Idem. p. 488)

Waugh turned the sword into a symbol of the divide between the main character Guy Crouchback’s mistrust and dislike of the alliance with Stalin and the political support the British state and public gave to “Uncle Joe”. Previously Stalin was an ally of Hitler according to the Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. After it was terminated, when Hitler attacked Russia, in the West, the idea clarified that there was a need for a second front, and negotiations started with Stalin, less than a year after the Churchill – Stalin alliance had been concluded. Although it was conceived as an alliance of convenience, a huge effort went into convincing the British public that it was a step in the right direction to win the war. It remains a controversial event of the history of the Second World War to this day.

It is largely accepted that Churchill was hostile to communism, but he was also pragmatically focused on defeating Germany and this over-rode all other considerations. The alliance was consequently incorporated into the broad Churchill myth that he made the right decision at the right time. Yet, as a political compromise, the alliance became a dividing line between the West and the East in political opinion as well as in academic research since the end of the war in 1945. The argument in the Anglo-Saxon historiography that it was an alliance out of necessity was never full- heartedly accepted behind the iron curtain, with Eastern Europeans believing that they were indeed betrayed and forsaken by the British and the Americans. In the Russian-language history, this episode has been overshadowed by the view that the Soviet army fought a heroic battle on the Eastern Front, which eventually freed Europe.

It is very telling that until this day the commemoration of the sword in Russia praises J.B. Priestly for his contribution to the popularisation of the Soviet Union’s glory and does not mention Waugh’s novel (see https://stalingrad-battle.ru/projects/emploee-writes/2018/3949/?sphrase_id=8489) After the fall of the Berlin Wall, more histories of the Second World War have been revisiting the same old questions: what was the price of the Churchill’s alliance with Stalin and why was Eastern Europe betrayed by the West, which also became major themes in Waugh’s trilogy. Waugh, who was a very English writer actually thought like most of the people in Eastern Europe that it was double-dealing. He did not believe in any compromise with communist Russia and hence satirised the British establishment’s presenting Stalin with the sword: “By the way, do you realise it was Trimmer who gave the monarch the idea of the Sword of Stalingrad? Indirectly, of course. In the big scene of Trimmer’s landing I gave him a “commando dagger” to brandish. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen the things. They were an idea of Brides-in-the-Bath’s early on. A few hundreds were issued. To my certain knowledge none was ever used in action. A Glasgow policeman got a nasty poke with one. They were mostly given away to tarts. But they were beautifully made little things. Well, you know how sharp the royal eye is for any detail of equipment. He was given a preview of the Trimmer film and spotted the dagger at once. Had one sent round to him. Then the royal mind brooded a bit and the final result was that thing in the Abbey. An odd item of contemporary history.” (Penguin Classics, 2001, p. 478)

His views of course are particularly poignant today when the West and the entire world faces a war between Russia and Ukraine in the heart of Eastern Europe. Had Waugh lived to see the present Russian war, with apocalyptic scenes from Ukrainian cities and millions of refugees streaming into Europe, he most probably would not have been triumphant in his prophetic understanding of Russia but simply sorrowful.

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Spring Equinox Roundup

Posted on March 19, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The religious-philosophical website First Things has posted an article by George Weigel about conspiracy theories from within the Vatican hierarchy. This opens with an allusion to a seldom-mentioned Waugh character who has suddenly become relevant in the present international environment:

One of the minor characters in Evelyn Waugh’s World War II trilogy, Sword of Honor, is the commander of a super-secret military intelligence unit, Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole: a conspiracy theorist constantly connecting dots that no rational person would imagine connecting or even think connectable. The colonel was also possessed by a messiah complex: “Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end: and there would be no more war.” To Grace-Groundling-Marchpole, the Allies and the Nazis were in fact on the same side; and as soon as that was revealed, all would be well with the world.

One of the tragedies of this Catholic moment is that its Grace-Groundling-Marchpole is Archbishop Carlo Maria ViganĂČ, former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States. For years now, the archbishop has been issuing “declarations,” increasingly conspiratorial in their analysis of matters ecclesiastical, political, epidemiological, and vaccinal. Archbishop ViganĂČ’s March 6 encyclical, a 10,000-word “Declaration on the Russia-Ukraine Crisis,” took this conspiracy-mania into Grace-Groundling-Marchpole territory.

Weigel goes on in considerable detail to make his case. His article has gone viral on the religious internet and has been translated into several languages. You can read it here in English.

–Waugh biographer Paula Byrne has written a review of the new book on interwar Oxford entitled Not Far from Brideshead. This appeared in The Spectator.  Byrne offers interesting insights on the interwar lives of don’s wives and women undergraduates in Oxford as reflected in the new book. She also notes:

Where Dunn is less effective is as a literary critic, and she makes some errors in her analysis of Waugh and the origins of Brideshead Revisited. She claims that Anthony Blanche is based on chief aesthete Harold Acton, Sebastian Flyte on Alastair Graham and Brideshead itself on Castle Howard, once the home of Lady Mary. In fact, Waugh’s modus operandi was far more cunning. His method was to conflate two characters so that if he were accused by one of his friends, he could simply reply that it was the other. Blanche, he said, was one-third Acton but two-thirds the Etonian Brian Howard, a protĂ©gĂ© of Edith Sitwell. Brideshead was a composite of Castle Howard and Madresfield Court. The latter, like Brideshead, had an Arts & Crafts chapel with frescoes painted with the faces of Lord Beauchamp’s children, as in the novel. Madresfield was home to Waugh for a number of years, and he based Sebastian chiefly on Hugh Lygon, a hopeless dipsomaniac (though also using aspects of his love affair with Alastair Graham). When Waugh had finished Brideshead, he sent a copy to his inner circle, begging Nancy Miford to give him the consensus of opinion: ‘It’s the Lygons,’ she replied. Dorothy Lygon, the model for Cordelia Flyte, wrote to Waugh: ‘Sebastian gives me many pangs.’

Dunn overlooks the Lygon family, even though Waugh’s set knew that Julia Flyte was based on the beautiful Mary Lygon, who was slated to marry into the royal family until the scandal of her father’s homosexuality broke and he was exiled to an apartment on the Grand Canal in Venice. Hugh Lygon and Waugh visited Lord Beauchamp there, inspiring the visit to Lord Marchmain in the novel. Graham, Waugh’s Oxford paramour, was not an aristocrat. His home on the edge of Stratford-upon-Avon was a detached but modest house, hardly to be compared with Hugh Lygon’s family seat. The novel in which ‘Waugh would immortalise’ the ‘Roaring Twenties’ was not Decline and Fall, as Dunn says, but Vile Bodies. The Welsh boarding school to which the hero of Waugh’s debut is exiled on being sent down from Oxford is a far cry from the London of the Bright Young Things.

Byrne also makes some interesting points that might have been made in the book if more attention had been paid to “the Oxford novel” as a genre. She notes that this would have been appropriate in a book displaying one in its title. She concludes:

…this is an immensely readable and meticulously researched book, whose title perhaps obscures its intended meaning. Dunn, an Oxford woman herself, is clear-eyed about her alma mater’s ineffable charm and glamour, but she is patently aware of its dark side, epitomised so well by another phrase of Arnold’s: ‘Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!’

The book will be released later this month. Details on its current availability are linked in previous posts. As some of our readers will recall, the reviewer Paula Byrne made a presentation at the Society’s Downside conference. Her 2009 book on Waugh where she elaborates many of the points noted above is Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead.

–The New Yorker carries a detailed review of a new book entitled Last Call at the Hotel Imperial by Deborah Cohen. This is a history of the creation and growth of the concept of the foreign correspondent in the 20th century. It is written in the form of case studies of several American members of the trade, beginning with John Gunther. The review opens with this:

In 1928, the Soviet Union, then six years old, embarked on its first Five-Year Plan and held its first major political show trial. […] It was in the summer of that year that John Gunther, a twenty-six-year-old, Illinois-born foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, was posted to Moscow. Gunther found it practically impossible to understand the state formed by Vladimir Lenin’s proletarian revolution. But, since he had to file something, he took notes: that there were no outdoor cafĂ©s and hardly any street lights, that crowds gathered around loudspeakers to listen to the news, that his hotel chambermaid offered him a cigarette, and that servants now ate alongside the families that they served. After weeks of this, he finally cobbled together a story headlined “animated evenings mark life in russia’s capital.” As he settled into the five-month posting, his dispatches included the likes of “wear blue shirts at moscow opera” and “russia land of many paradoxes.”

It was precisely this type of news-gathering that Evelyn Waugh lampooned in his satirical novel “Scoop,” whose Wenlock Jakes, a swaggering American journalist, is partly based on Gunther. Jakes, we’re told, once overslept and went to the wrong Balkan capital—a peaceful one rather than a war zone—and nevertheless “cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window.” Waugh perceived the emergent American style of accreting detail when you don’t have a clue what’s going on.

–The Italian religious website Radio Spada has posted an English-language translation of an article on the support of British Roman Catholics for the Franco regime in Spain during the 1930s. Here is an excerpt:

…The future sister-in-law of Evelyn Waugh, Miss Gabriel Herbert, for her part represented the enthusiasm for Franco’s crusade that infected many young people of the time: she left for Spain and lent her help to the Nationalists who worked as ambulance staff (like Cordelia of Brideshead Revisited). Even the Labor Party, which had many members among Catholic immigrant workers from Ireland, regarded Republicans with suspicion. […] The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Arthur Hinsley, wanted to form another organization to provide humanitarian aid to the Nationalists. On the board, among others, were Lord Fitzalan of Derwent and Lord Howard of Penrith. There was also Evelyn Waugh, although his enthusiasm for Franco was rather limited (the partiality he had shown towards Mussolini had already alienated the sympathies of many of his writer friends; it was useless, therefore, to go too far).

–The recent Gresham College/London lecture “Coincidences in the Novel: Charlotte BrontĂ« and George Eliot to Evelyn Waugh and David Nicholls” by Prof. John Mullan is now available on YouTube and PDF file at this link. The announcement was carried in a previous post.

 

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“Not Far” Reviewed

Posted on March 13, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The book Not Far from Brideshead, mentioned in an earlier post, has been reviewed by Laura Freeman in The Times. Here are some excerpts:

…Not Far from Brideshead is a love letter to learning. In her preface, author Daisy Dunn pays tribute to the tutors who “taught me to think”. Her heroes aren’t Greek warriors, but dusty professors in dustier studies. Her portrait of Oxford between the wars is structured around the careers of three Oxford professors of Classics: Gilbert Murray, regius professor of Greek between 1908 and 1936, Maurice Bowra, the charismatic troublemaker who was expected to succeed him, and ER Dodds, the quieter soul who did.

“Though they could hardly have been more different in personality and style,” Dunn writes, “one, a libertine and veteran of the Western Front with an appetite for good food, society and praise [Bowra]; another an Irish pacifist and amateur hypnotist [Dodds]; the third an elegant Australian of Victorian reserve [Murray] — this trio inspired some of the most brilliant writers and thinkers of the 20th century.”

There are walk-on parts for John Betjeman (plus teddy bear), the writers Vera Brittain, Iris Murdoch, Virginia Woolf, Kenneth Clark, CS Lewis and Henry Green, and the poets Cecil Day-Lewis, WH Auden, TS Eliot, Louis MacNeice and Edith Sitwell.

Evelyn Waugh, not himself a classicist, was in the Bowra circle. Bowra was the inspiration for Samgrass, the genial and oleaginous professor in Brideshead Revisited. (Betjeman’s bear would become Aloysius, teddy to Sebastian Flyte.) In a further Brideshead connection, Murray married into the Howard family of Castle Howard, the setting for the 1981 ITV adaptation. Dunn proposes that Waugh, who visited Castle Howard in 1937, found inspiration for his novel in Murray’s in-laws and his wife, Lady Mary, “who became something of a Lady Marchmain figure herself”. […]

I am not so sure that the attribution of Waugh’s inspiration for Lady Marchmain will withstand close scrutiny. Waugh in 1937 visited  Castle Howard more likely as a day tripper than a guest. It is more generally accepted that the Lygon family living at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire were the inspiration for the Flytes.  The book goes on to describe the careers of the three main characters as depicted in Dunn’s book and closes with this:

Oxford between the wars was “a flawed Arcadia”, Dunn writes. As the Second World War approaches, plover’s eggs and supper parties feel ever less important. Dunn eloquently captures this short-lived, vanishing world.

One last anecdote, probably apocryphal, but too fun not to tell: when caught nude at Parson’s Pleasure bathing site by a party of ladies, every other man covered his genitals, only Bowra covered his face. He knew which part would be recognised in gossipy Oxford.

A review also appears in the Literary Review by Richard Davenport-Hines. It opens with this:

White men, superlatively educated, exclusive and discerning in their social and cultural tastes, who have no respect for ill-thought-out majority opinions and scorn Little Englander nativism are not à la mode. Daisy Dunn’s ‘conversation piece’ study of three 20th-century Oxford classicists is consequently a book of obstinate integrity. It is, too, eager and sprightly, sometimes laugh-aloud funny, sometimes saddening, and narrated with the affability of a good-natured and digressive raconteur.

Alexander Larman also apparently reviewed it in The Oldie:

Her erudition and energy are thrillingly applied…The effect is both refreshing and inspiring, like the first glass of champagne of the day… this is a witty and deeply researched book. It is full of revelations. She writes in an authoritative and hugely readable fashion and avoids anachronistic value judgements.

A detailed description of Daisy Dunn’s education and career as a classicist can be found at this link.  The book will be published in the UK on 31 March and is available for pre-order here.

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Middlemarch Roundup

Posted on March 12, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Financial Times recently considered the revival of the sleeveless sweater–a/k/a tank top or V-neck:

“As far as I know, the history of the tank top starts from the 1930s, where men would wear a V-neck slipover that was often knitted at home,” says Paul Smith of the tank, from his Covent Garden headquarters. […]  Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which stretches from the 1920s to the early ’40s, is a rich source of reference knitwear both in the television series (with Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder) and in the film remake (with Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw). The latter was a seminal reference for Financial Times columnist Luke Edward Hall when considering the patterned tanks that feature in his new brand, Chateau Orlando. “The knitted vest always feels quite ’70s to me but there is a bit of the English school uniform about them too,” he says. “It is probably my favourite piece of clothing: a jumper, but more fun.”

–In another more recent Financial Times issue  (in the FT Magazine, to be more precise), Asst. Arts Editor Rebecca Watson describes a “fantasy dinner party” she convenes at Brideshead Castle. Guests include Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith (all novelists), Francis Bacon (“maverick painter”) and Kramer (a character left over from the Seinfeld show). Wilcox, the Flyte’s butler, is there and Yottam Ottolenghi is the chef. Charles Ryder’s paintings are also on open display, to which Francis Bacon takes considerable umbrage. Entertainment is provided by Jeff Buckley, who opens with “Be Your Husband” and closes with “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over.” (Some one else may wish to comment on that choice of music.) A considerable volume of drink is consumed (negronis much in evidence), mischief made (separately) by Highsmith and Bacon, and a good time is had by all. According to Watson: “Nobody seems to want to leave. My mind travels as I imagine what Bacon has done on the walls inside. I picture red, yellow, a teeth-bared mouth. There are beds made up when the guests wish to retire, Wilcox says in my ear. Tomorrow, we start all over again.”  Too bad Waugh himself or at least Charles Ryder were not invited.

–Tom Utley, writing in the Daily Mail, blames Evelyn Waugh for his lack of knowledge about a major English writer:

Throughout most of my early life, my view of Charles Dickens was coloured by the hideous fate that befell Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s cruelly funny novel, A Handful Of Dust. As my fellow devotees will recall (spoiler alert), Waugh condemns the book’s ineffectual hero to a life sentence of unbearable torment in the Amazon rainforest, where he is forced to read aloud the complete works of our great Victorian novelist to the illiterate, maniacal Dickens fan who holds him captive. When poor Mr Last has finished reading out the final book, he is made to start all over again.

So it was from the moment I finished A Handful Of Dust, as a teenager, that I looked upon reading Dickens as a fate worse than death. Throughout most of my early life, my view of Charles Dickens was coloured by the hideous fate that befell Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s cruelly funny novel, A Handful Of Dust I blame Waugh, therefore, for the fact that until very recently, I’d read none of the most famous Dickens classics apart from the three I was made to read at school (A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations and A Tale Of Two Cities, if you’re interested). But I’ve long felt bad about this, and reluctant to admit it.

Utley goes on to explain how he has now got the Waugh novel behind him and is working through a list of some of Dickens’ less famous works:

So far, I’ve read Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey And Son and Hard Times, back to back — and the next on my list is The Pickwick Papers. Yes, I can quite see why the acerbic Waugh didn’t like him. After all, Dickens can be annoyingly verbose — and he tends to labour his jokes, over page after page, chapter after chapter. In that respect, he is wholly different from Waugh, whose economical prose makes every word count.

—The Spectator’s columnist Taki, writing from Gstaad, takes the opportunity at winter’s end to reconsider his lifetime of fiction reading in an article entitled “The books that made me who I am” . This is after he confesses to have spent most of his time devoted to reading on non-fiction books. His fiction list consists mostly of 20th century American novelists except for Dickens’ David Copperfield and Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and concludes with this:

Three English friends who all committed suicide—Mark Watney, Dominic Elwes, and John Lucan—were straight out of Evelyn Waugh, but I learned more about the English from Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time than from Waugh. And I still regret turning down an invitation to La Mauresque as a 20-year-old where I was to meet the great man Somerset Maugham. The invite was from a promiscuous homosexual and I was intimidated that the great man might try. I was a fool. Maugham is to me one of the best, and it is proof of how low our standards have fallen that he’s no longer relevant.

–Finally, retired professor Matthew J Franck, writing in the weblog of The Journal of the Witherspoon Institute (“Public Discourse”) describes the joys of browsing secondhand  book stores as compared to browsing on computers. Here are some examples of his joyful finds:

A site like Abebooks is great for searching for a book one knows one wants. But a used bookstore! Browsing the shelves leisurely, one discovers books one never knew one must have. Even the smell is enticing, of old paper and leather and cloth. It was there on Cape Cod in 1992 that I discovered a boxed set of British Penguin paperbacks of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender). I had read a little Waugh before this and enjoyed his wit, but these three novels of the progressive disillusionment of Guy Crouchback, a Catholic officer in the British army during World War II, were a revelation. Together they constitute Waugh’s greatest work, far better in my opinion than the somewhat lugubrious Brideshead Revisited (which I read later, and which suffered by comparison). Closely tracking Waugh’s own experiences, Sword of Honour captures the absurdity, futility, incompetence, and tragedy that invariably coexist alongside courage and daring in wartime.

Twenty-five years later we were in Inverness, Scotland, and I spotted Leakey’s Bookshop […], a former kirk of the Church of Scotland packed with books on two stories, all higgledy-piggledy with nuggets of gold amid the dross. Here I found another book by Waugh, released just after the war—a first edition of When the Going Was Good, an anthology of excerpts from his pre-war travel books. Waugh’s travel writing is not as widely read today as his fiction, but it bears all his characteristic marks—a sense of the bizarre, a gimlet eye for the way the world works, and some of the most adroit and hilarious English prose of the twentieth century. Here is Waugh on preparing to be a war correspondent for a London newspaper, about to be sent to cover the invasion of Abyssinia by Mussolini’s Italy in 1935:

“In the hall of my club a growing pile of packing cases, branded for Djibouti, began to constitute a serious inconvenience to the other members. There are few pleasures more complete, or to me more rare, than that of shopping extravagantly at someone else’s expense. I thought I had treated myself with reasonable generosity until I saw the luggage of my professional competitors—their rifles and telescopes and ant-proof trunks, medicine chests, gas-masks, pack saddles, and vast wardrobes of costume suitable for every conceivable social or climatic emergency. Then I had an inkling of what later became abundantly clear to all, that I did not know the first thing about being a war correspondent.”

I have been looking for that Penguin Box Set for years but have never come close to one available for sale by a bookseller located in the US.

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