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 Aimée 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 Orléans, 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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Thomas F. Staley R.I.P. (1935-2022)

Posted on April 13, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Tom Staley and Evelyn Waugh: A Reminiscence

Richard Oram

Not many heads of special collections are profiled in the New Yorker. The only two who come to mind are Lola Szladits, the spitfire director of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and my recently deceased boss, the estimable and equally dynamic Thomas F. Staley, director of the Harry Ransom Center from 1988 to 2013. Tom was especially devoted to a handful of authors, principally James Joyce and his dissertation subject, Scott Fitzgerald. In the second tier were Graham Greene (I remember that Tom took it very personally when an inferior biography of GG was published about thirty years ago) and Evelyn Waugh.

Tom loved to quote Greene’s famous description of Waugh’s style as being “like the Mediterranean before the war, so clear you could see to the bottom.” Shortly after arriving at the HRC, Tom attempted to trade most of the artwork once displayed in the Combe Florey library for a large collection of incoming correspondence, then owned by the family and in the care of Alan Bell, if memory serves. Tom had previously been Provost at the University of Tulsa and was pretty much used to having his own way when it came to library matters. Unfortunately, books and manuscripts at Texas were just “inventory” at the time. At one point the Gutenberg Bible was put on the property schedules and straight-line depreciated! The Waugh art was therefore subject to an arcane set of state regulations designed to keep property from being sold or traded. For a time, negotiations with Auberon Waugh were proceeding rather well until such time as Tom apparently became frustrated with administrative obstacles placed in his way and his attention turned to other acquisitions. The correspondence later went to the British Library.

In 2004, I made a plea for the purchase of a single letter from Waugh to Greene. It was in the hands of an Oxford bookseller. Tom agreed and at the time it must have been one of our more expensive single-letter acquisitions. It was displayed at a Ransom Center exhibition in 2005: “Writing Among the Ruins: Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh” of which I was co-curator.  Not surprisingly, Tom was very supportive of this exhibition, featuring two of his favorite Catholic novelists.

Around 2006, Tom acquired, through a gift, about a dozen rare Waugh editions from the collection of Sam Radin (most formerly belonged to Roger Rechler), notably the black tulipy pamphlet An Open Letter to His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster (1933). This completed the HRC’s run of Waugh first editions.

Tom Staley’s passionate personal involvement with “his” authors informed the acquisitions of his tenure. Few novelists were more special to him than Evelyn Waugh, who might have been at the very top of the list if only he had been born Irish.

NOTE:  An obituary also appeared in the New York Times which is available at this link. Thanks to society member Richard Oram for his reminiscence. Tom Staley was an honorary member of the society from its inception.

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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 Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve 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 engravèd 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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