Latest “EWS” Posted: States, Issues and Complete Works

Posted on March 10, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The most recent issue of the Society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies is now posted. This is No. 52.3 (Winter 2021) and opens with an article by Hartley Moorhouse entitled “Bibliographical Confusion Surrounding the First UK Editions of Scoop”. This uses book listings of Waugh’s novel to explain bookseller nomenclature in descriptions of early editions:

One question that needs clearing up is the bibliographical difference between a “state” and an “issue.” This is the kind of subject that has non-biblionerds rolling their eyes in boredom and contempt […] Somewhat regrettably, the cataloguers…seem to use the two terms interchangeably, or seem to think that “state” should be applied to dust jackets whereas “issue” should be applied to books […]. Cataloguers working for British auction houses and dealers in rare books frequently get their states and their issues in a horrible muddle, and in one way this is perhaps hardly surprising: it is an inherently confusing subject.

There are also reviews of two recent additions to the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. These are the first examples of travel writing to be published in this series: Ninety-Two Days, v. 22,  reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher and A Tourist in Africa, v. 25, reviewed by Jeffrey Manley. These volumes were both issued last year. Here’s the link.

It should also be noted that EWS No 52.2 (Autumn 2021) issued last year and described in a previous post is also now posted at this link.

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New Book on Interwar Oxford

Posted on March 8, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Weidenfeld and Nicolson have announced the publication later this month of a new book about interwar Oxford. This is by Daisy Dunn and is entitled Not Far From Brideshead. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Oxford thought it was at war. And then it was.

After the horrors of the First World War, Oxford looked like an Arcadia – a dreamworld – from which pain could be shut out. Soldiers arrived with pictures of the university fully formed in their heads, and women finally won the right to earn degrees. Freedom meant reading beneath the spires and punting down the river with champagne picnics. But all was not quite as it seemed.

Boys fresh from school settled into lecture rooms alongside men who had returned from the trenches with the beginnings of shellshock. It was displacing to be surrounded by aristocrats who liked nothing better than to burn furniture from each other’s rooms on the college quads for kicks. The women of Oxford still faced a battle to emerge from their shadows. And among the dons a major conflict was beginning to brew.

Set in the world that Evelyn Waugh immortalised in Brideshead Revisited, this is a true and often funny story of the thriving of knowledge and spirit of fun and foreboding that characterised Oxford between the two world wars. One of the protagonists, in fact, was a friend of Waugh and inspired a character in his novel. Another married into the family who inhabited Castle Howard and befriended everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Virginia Woolf. The third was an Irish occultist and correspondent with the poets W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and W. B. Yeats.

This singular tale of Oxford colleagues and rivals encapsulates the false sense of security that developed across the country in the interwar years. With the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich came the subversion of history for propaganda. In academic Oxford, the fight was on not only to preserve the past from the hands of the Nazis, but also to triumph, one don over another, as they became embroiled in a war of their own.

The book is apparently not a novel but a collection of biographical sketches about several people. Here’s an excerpt from a review by Selina Hastings:

Daisy Dunn’s fascinating portrayal of academic Oxford in the first half of the 20th century is profoundly perceptive, frequently funny, and remarkably well written. Focussed mainly on the world of classical scholarship, she provides a lucid account of the professional and private lives of such remarkable figures as, among others, Gilbert Murray, Maurice Bowra, T.S. Eliot and Louis MacNeice, all depicted with an exceptional understanding not only of the characters themselves but the eccentric world which they inhabited.

This would suggest that the friend of Waugh who, according to the publisher, inspires a character in Brideshead Revisited is probably Maurice Bowra who contributed to the character of Mr Samgrass. They might also have mentioned that the date for such a book is all the more appropriate given that this year marks the 100th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s matriculation at Oxford in Hilary Term 1922

The book will go on sale on 31 March 2022 in both the US and UK, according to Amazon.com. Orders are not yet being taken in the US but are being processed in the UK.

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Neglected 1930s Classic Republished

Posted on March 4, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

A long-neglected 1937 novel by American writer Herbert Clyde Lewis has been republished and is reviewed in this week’s TLS. The book is entitled Gentleman Overboard and is reviewed by Ian Thomson. The review (entitled “A Yalie All at Sea”) explains its history:

…Why Gentleman Overboard, Herbert Clyde Lewis’s darkly comic tale, has remained out of print for eight decades is something of a mystery. When it was first published in 1937, Evelyn Waugh (writing in Night and Day) praised the slim novel as “thoroughly readable”. Lewis subsequently wrote three other books, including the anti-war Spring Offensive (1940), but none was so well received. Curiously, the novel has had more success abroad, with translations in Spanish, Dutch and Hebrew. Thanks to Boiler House Press, Lewis’s long-forgotten masterwork is now afloat once more in its original language.

Since Waugh’s short review has never been reprinted, this seemed like a good time to do so:

Mr. L.A.G. Strong has a generous praise for Gentleman Overboard. […] He calls it: “A brilliant example of the conte. A real find.” It is a very short novel, less than 150 pages, by Mr. Herbert Clyde Lewis. It describes the emotions of a man who at dawn falls from a liner in the Pacific, keeps afloat all day and drowns at evening. It is thoroughly readable and has one admirable ironic chapter in which the other passengers discuss the mishap; Mr. Standish, the hero, is an exemplary character, prosperous, happily married, stirred only by the mildest feeling of restlessness; he knows who his grandfather was and exhibits all the signs of mediocrity which in America are accepted as the evidence of high-breeding; his fellow-travellers assume that he has committed suicide and after some discussion are able to satisfy themselves of his motive. In spite of its brevity it is too long; a Frenchman could have told the story in 59 pages, but it is a commonplace, of which anyone who has business dealings with them is continually, bitterly reminded, that Americans are incapable of being concise. It can be read inattentively and will last a three-hour railway journey, with interludes for looking out the window, very comfortably.

L A G Strong was the pen name of an English novelist (Leonard Strong) who was popular in the 1930s and must have written a review of Gentleman Overboard in another paper. He has also recently been mentioned as an unjustifiably neglected writer.

As was typical for Waugh’s reviews in Night and Day, this one included two other books. The review, entitled “Uplift in Arabia”, was mostly concerned with the first of these, Triumphant Pilgrimage. This was the story, apparently a biography, of an Englishman who became a convert to Islam. Waugh was not impressed. Waugh’s assignment with Night and Day, edited by his friend Graham Greene, who also wrote the film reviews, extended over the entire short life of the magazine  A contribution by Waugh appeared every week from July to December 1937. That may be the longest stint of regular journalistic output in Waugh’s career; his regular reports for the Daily Mail from Abyssinia extended from late August until early December 1935.

As explained in the TLS review of the reprint, the author of Gentleman Overboard came to an unhappy end:

…the author died alone in New York in 1950, at the age of forty-one. The heart attack that killed Lewis was a complication of his alcoholism and, it is suggested, the threat of making the Hollywood Blacklist. (An FBI informant had identified him as a member of the American Communist Party.) Conceivably, Lewis used alcohol to numb a sense of failure: having toiled for years as a reporter, he had high hopes of becoming a successful novelist, but he struggled constantly with debts, and ended his days in a squalid Greenwich Village hotel. As with Standish, his friends wondered if he had taken his own life.

The book is available at this link. Thanks are due to the staff at the University of Texas HRC Library for providing expedited access to the archived copies of Night and Day, facilitating the timely posting of this notice.

 

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The Loved One in Italy

Posted on March 3, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

A review of The Loved One has appeared in the Italian language religious website Radio Spada. This is by Luca Fumagalli who has been working his way through Waugh’s oeuvre as well as that of his contemporaries. This latest installment is entitled: “‘The dearly departed’ by Evelyn Waugh: a satirical novel on the spiritual emptiness of the modern world (and of the United States in particular).” The Italian title of the book is “Il caro estino”, literally translated as “the dearly departed”. After an introduction explaining Waugh’s inspiration for the story during his 1947 trip to Hollywood and a summary of the story, the article concludes with this assessment:

…In a reality of widespread ugliness and madness, joke characters move lazily, bodies without brains who struggle to make a living amidst the small incidents of everyday life. None of them, however, is as detestable as the protagonist, a concentration of selfishness, insensitivity and cynicism. Mr Joyboy, basically a good-natured idiot, can’t do it, much less the unfortunate AimĂ©e, perhaps the most elusive character in the whole story. The girl’s personality is such a high concentration of inconsistencies that Guido Almansi, in the introduction to the Italian edition of the novel by Bompiani, defines it as “the unsolved problem of the book”. […]

More generally, beyond the mockery of the Hollywood culture of appearances and that Anglo-American impasse which has its most successful manifestation in the British expatriate community – in this regard it should not be forgotten that the original subtitle of the novel is “An Anglo-American Tragedy” -, with Il caro estinto, the main goal of the author remains that of revealing the spiritual emptiness that characterizes modernity, a goal pursued through harsh criticism of the funeral business .

[…] Waugh wrote to Cyril Connolly that “there is no such thing as the American. They are all rootless: exiled, transplanted and doomed to sterility. The ancient gods who abjured eventually came back to take them.” Again, years later, when Jessica Mitford was immersed in research for her book The American Way of Death, Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford on the same wave-length: “Warn Decca before she makes fun of American customs that all the features of their funerals that appear gruesome to our eyes can be traced in the papal, royal and noble rites of the last five centuries. What is unique and deplorable will most likely not bother one like her; I’m talking about the theological void, the belief that the purpose of a funeral is to console the bereaved person and not to pray for the soul of the deceased”.

The infantilism and vulgarity of similar funerary customs also find a correspondence in the practices of the animal cemetery, where every distinction between beasts and human beings vanishes, thus ending up totally denying that sense of memento mori, seasoned with skulls, skeletons and worms, which had made Renaissance art great […] (Waugh reiterates this in his article about Forest Lawn for Life magazine). After all, the world of Il caro extinto is a spiritually brutalized universe, inhabited by dubious holy men and scrupulous preachers. Iconic, in this sense, are some lines that AimĂ©e addresses to the Brahmin GurĂč: “I am progressive and therefore I have no religion; but I consider religion something not to be mocked, because it makes many people happy, and not everyone can be progressive at this stage of Evolution.”

If Waugh’s intent, in the words of George Mikes, was to point out “the contrast between the treatment of the dead by a soulless commercial society and that of the Catholic Church”, it is quite evident that the target […] has been centered. But, after all, The Loved One– brought to the cinema in 1965 by director Tony Richardson – did not want [it] to be a Catholic novel or a spiritual text in the broad sense of the author. Waugh was only interested in lashing out against modern irreligion, showing how much comic and tragic there is in it. Perhaps he hoped that the reader, confronted with the disease of his time, would immediately rush out of the house in search of a doctor.

The retranslated quotes have not been corrected or edited but the Google translation in this case seems readable and generally correct. A few minor edits have been made. It is worth looking at the Italian original for the illustrations, especially an Italian version of the poster for the 1965 Hollywood film adaptation. Here is a link.

 

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Partygate Roundup

Posted on February 27, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–An article posted on the website The Conversation,com has attracted a lot of attention since it appeared last week. This is entitled “Partygate Revisited” and is written by Trinity College Dublin senior research scholar Orlaith Darling.  She begins with a familiar comparison of events and characters in Waugh’s novels, particularly the early ones such as Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall, with the behavior of Conservative Party leaders in the governments of David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson’s recent problem stemming from parties convened in Downing Street during the Covid lockdowns is referred to as “Partygate”. She then comes to the central point of the article with this discussion of how much Johnson resembles a character in Waugh’s later fiction Brideshead Revisited–Sebastian Flyte:

Much of Sebastian’s eccentricity is conveyed in his language. At one point, Anthony Blanche, another character in the novel and a fellow Oxford student, asks Charles:

“Tell me candidly, have you ever heard Sebastian say anything you have remembered for five minutes? [
] when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then – phut! vanished, with nothing left at all.”

It is difficult not to compare this to Johnson, whose style of public speaking is identical to the “bluster and zest” and “soapsuds” of Waugh’s characters. While Anthony affects a stammer to appear posher and more interesting, Johnson recently made car noises in a bizarre speech, before going on a tangent about Peppa Pig, whom he described as a “Picasso-like hairdryer”. He was, at the time, supposed to be delivering a serious address to the nation’s business leaders. […]

In Brideshead, when asked how much of what Anthony says can be trusted, Sebastian replies: “I shouldn’t think a word. That’s his great charm.” Similarly, we should ask how we can trust a prime minister for whom political language is manifestly unserious. While, depending on your point of view, Johnson’s whimsical language may be amusing or ostentatious, it is also slippery and intentional. […] Now, by asking the public to accept that he does not know the difference between a party and a “work event” Johnson once again makes the obvious seem insubstantial…

The website has a comment section following the article if our readers wish to participate.

–Dwight Garner in the New York Times reviews a new book of the collected writings of novelist Margaret Atwood. This is entitled Burning Questions and  includes not only essays and reviews but speeches, many of which were delivered at various PEN International events. Garner recognizes that much good work is attributable to PEN but then there is this:

The PEN conference speech, that’s a different thing. Out come the resonant and ego-buffing generalities, from boldface names, about art and politics and storytelling.

The amount these speeches have added to the sum of human dullness is incalculable. As after-dinner speeches, they sneak under the line. Reprinted, they’ve been chloroforming novelists’ essay collections for generations. The speakers talk on and on, as if they’ve finally been handed the conch shell in “Lord of the Flies.”

Evelyn Waugh, writing in 1962, tried to diagnose the problem. Waugh divided the literary world into “those who can write but cannot think, those who think but cannot write, and those who can neither think nor write but employ themselves at international congresses lecturing on the predicament of the writer in modern society.”

That’s so cynical it almost hurt my fingertips to type. But I’m with him most of the way. And this applies even to those who can clearly write and think, like Margaret Atwood.

The quote comes from Waugh’s review of Nancy Mitford’s collection of essays entitled The Water Beetle. The review appears in EAR, p. 600.

—The website Spiked.com has an article by Simon Evans in which he considers how present day literati are reacting to J K Rowling’s new political and cultural pronouncements by proposing to separate discussion of her beliefs from that about her writing, at least so far as the Harry Porter books are concerned– effectively “cancelling” the writer but not the writings. Evans provides his own views on this phenomenon beginning with this:

… I love Evelyn Waugh, and even Waugh’s fiercest advocates acknowledge that his tyrannical treatment of his family and servants was indefensible. We simply find that our concerns dissolve on contact with his matchless comic prose.

Still, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually try and imagine Brideshead Revisited or Scoop
 without its creator. It suggests a quite psychotic detachment from the reality of the creative process, this attempt to actually remove a living author from their creation, to sort of float her free, like a decal transfer from its backing paper. What exactly is the preferred scenario? To pretend that all JK Rowling did was refurbish some sort of pre-existing mythos, like those re-workings of Homeric or Arthurian legend for modern readers? Or that Hogwarts was really a collaborative effort that sprang into being on Warner Bros’ watch, more meaningfully emanating from the genius of Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson than from Rowling herself?

–Literary biographer and critic Jeffrey Meyers has an essay in The Article describing the bitter rivalry and feud between critic Edmund Wilson and poet Allen Tate. It began with their origins–Wilson’s from New England abolitionist Puritans, Tate’s from Southern slave-owning gentry–and went downhill from there over several decades. One source of strife arose from Tate’s unexpected conversion to Catholicism; Wilson from his side had little use for organized religion in any form. This is where Waugh enters the story:

… As early as 1932, after the accidental death of Wilson ’ s second wife, Tate seemed mildly concerned with his spiritual welfare. He asked [poet John Peale] Bishop, “ What do you suppose poor Edmund will do now? I wish he might be brought to some notion that would save his soul.” In January 1951, personally affronted by Tate ’ s conversion and doubting his sincerity, the ironclad atheist sent him an insulting letter. Wilson condemned the recent attacks of the Catholic Church on his novel Memoirs of Hecate County, published in 1946 but still banned as obscene in America. He also scorned, with three unusually hesitant “ seems to me,” Tate ’ s willingness to swallow the absurdity of Christian doctrine. […]

Wilson fiercely repudiated [Tate’s] imputation that he himself was a believer and mocked Tate ’ s doomed attempt to cultivate the gentle benevolence of his newfound faith: “ He makes against me a malicious, libelous and baseless charge of crypto-Christianity. It is strange to see habitually waspish people like Allen and Evelyn Waugh trying to cultivate the Christian spirit. I hope, though, that conviction will soften Allen, who has lately been excessively venomous about his literary contemporaries. He could never forgive any kind of success.”

Waugh had wittily confessed, “ You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I were not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” Tate ’ s zealous Catholicism did not change his sexual behaviour. Religion provided a sanctimonious cover for the old satyr, who went frequently to Mass, confessed and took Communion — and continued to fornicate for the next two decades.

–Finally, the University of Nottingham has announced an exhibit entitled “Editing D H Lawrence”. This was recently opened and will run through 29 May at the University’s Lakeside Arts Centre. There will also be several related events that will take place during this period. Here’s one that might have special interest to our readers:

Drawing in Words, Writing in Images

Tuesday 8 March, 1-2pm

Writers often express themselves not only in words, but images. Dr Rebecca Moore discusses the visual works of various writers, including DH Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh, and how these shed light onto the often-overlooked talents of some of the most revered authors.

Rebecca Moore will be familiar to our readers for, inter alia, her involvement in the recent London exhibit of Evelyn Waugh’s graphic art as described in a previous post. Details on the Nottingham talk are available here.

 

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Waugh in Translation

Posted on February 24, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Adelphi Edizioni, an Italian publishing company, has announced the publication of an Italian translation of Waugh’s 1952 book The Holy Places. This was previously issued as a separate book by Ian Fleming’s Queen Ann Press in identical UK and US numbered editions, although the latter edition contained some corrections and edits by Waugh. It originally appeared in slightly different form in Life magazine as “The Plight of the Holy Places”, (24 December 1951) and, with “additions and alterations,” in Month magazine (March 1952) as “The Defense of the Holy Places”. Here’s a translation of the Italian publisher’s description:

In 1951 the cynical, caustic, Catholic Evelyn Waugh sets foot in the Holy Land, an eternal minefield, and has the courage to have his say, as only he knew how to do – with devotion, curiosity and wonder at the splendor of the places – on a wound never healed in every soul, believer or non-believer.

The translation is by Daniele V. Filippi and the book (weighing at 61 pp.) appears in the publisher’s Microgrammi series entitled I Luoghi Santi. A digital edition is also available.

The same publisher has also issued translations of Labels (Etichette, 2006, translated by Franco Salvatorelli) and Waugh in Abyssinia (In Abissinia, 2011, translated by David Mezzacapa and Luciana Pansini Verga). Here is a translation of the publisher’s description of the book about Abyssinia:

This book should have been called War in Abyssinia. Good title: dry, factual, exotic. Nobody knew anything about Abyssinia in 1934, even though the country was the only African state co-opted into the League of Nations and its young despot was a media ward – Man of the Year for Time in 1935. But now about that immense coffee plantation was about to be taken over …

The publishers miss the point of the English title which was a pun on the title suggested in the blurb. That would, no doubt, have been impossible to render into Italian. It has some history, as Waugh had objected to the punnish title but lost out in discussions with the publisher who had suggested it.

The Holy Places has apparently never been reissued in book form in English. Although a reference to its inclusion in something called the Mazal Holocaust Collection appears in a World Catalogue search, there is no publication date other than 1953. It is included in EAR which seems to have adopted Month’s version together with the corrections and edits that Waugh made in the US edition (p. 420, note) and in the 2003 Everyman edition of collected travel writings: Waugh Abroad, edited by Nicholas Shakespeare.  A Spanish edition of the book was issued in 2011: JerusalĂ©n: viaje a los Santos Lugares, and it may have been included with a Hungarian translation of Helena. This was issued in 2010 with the title HelĂ©na; A szent helek.

An Icelandic edition of Brideshead Revisited has also recently appeared. This was issued in book form in 2019 and in electronic format in 2021. It is entitled in Icelandic Endurfundir ĂĄ Brideshead   and is published by Ugla. Here’s a translated excerpt from the publisher’s description:

Brideshead Revisited was voted one of the 100 best novels in the world by Time magazine. It is the most popular book by the English stylist Evelyn Waugh, who is traditionally considered one of the leading authors of English literature in the twentieth century. […]  Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh’s first book to be published in Icelandic. Hjalti Þorleifsson translated it into Icelandic.

A review of the Icelandic translation of Brideshead appeared in a recent edition of Evelyn Waugh Studies (No. 50.3, Winter 2019) which is available at this link.

UPDATE (25 Feb 2022): Thanks to Dave Lull for providing a link to the EWS issue that I had inadvertently misfiled.

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Washington’s Birthday Roundup

Posted on February 21, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the TLS, backpage columnist M.C. is reminded of the

BBC television quiz show Take It or Leave It. Devised by Brigid Brophy, this quiz show ran from 1964 until 1971 on BBC Two. “Preference and prejudice towards books and writers” was one witty tagline by which the quiz described itself (the line has a Brophyan ring to it, we think); John Betjeman, one of its regular panellists, preferred to think of it as “Money for Jam”.

This summary is possibly ringing a bell with some readers while sounding somewhat absurd to others. The show’s guests – who included A. S. Byatt, David Cecil, Cyril Connolly, Michael Frayn, Francis Hope, Claire Tomalin and Angus Wilson – were simply asked to listen to an excerpt from some literary work being read out, to identify its author and maybe the work itself, and to discuss it. The presenter was Robert Robinson.

After offering several examples (two of which survive on YouTube) of how this worked (or didn’t, as the case may be), this one was mentioned:

Evelyn Waugh’s A Little Learning is easily identified and then enjoyably put in its place. “It seemed to me 
 to be full of the usual sort of clichĂ©s of attitude”, [Anthony] Burgess remarks. [John] Gross says it is written in a “sitting in the club armchair style”. “Rather a slack piece of work”, [Anthony] Blond adds. By which they all mean that they prefer the novels. We look forward to seeing Take It or Leave It revived for the age of critic-as-influencer (and vice versa).

–On the website MercatorNet.com, Irish-based critic James Bradshaw reviews Waugh’s novel Sword of Honour, a 1965 recension of the three shorter novels in his war trilogy. The review begins with this context:

Taken individually, the short novels are an absorbing and entertaining insight into the war, and the small part which Waugh played in it. When read together, Sword of Honour represents the pinnacle of his achievements as a writer, where he provided the deepest insights into religious faith.

Bradshaw then offers an interesting comparison of this novel with Brideshead Revisited (both book and 1981 TV version) with which Sword of Honour competes for top billing among Waugh’s novels. The review continues with a consideration of the book’s characters and their story, with particular reference to Guy Crouchback and his father. It also offers this insightful description of a few of the secondary characters:

Aside from his usual sharp-eyed critique of upper-class English life, the close assessment of the officer corps means that the reader is treated to a range of characters which leap off the page: the imposter Trimmer, the professional hero Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook and the socially inept Apthorpe, with whom the Brigadier wages a psychological war over a portaloo.

The review does a good job of summarizing Guy’s journey from enthusiasm for the war to his final disillusionment and how those attitudes tracked with the trajectory of Waugh’s own wartime career. It concludes with this:

The strange workings of Providence in perpetuating one family and one Church are foreshadowed early on in a tale which stretches out over the course of a decade. One day, Sword of Honour may be brought to a broader audience, but even if this never happens it will remain the highest testament to the skills of the greatest novelist of the 20th century.

–The website Comedy.co.uk has posted a fairly detailed survey of the career of a TV producer of the 1950s-70s who has gone largely unsung in recent days. This was Michael Mills. The survey by Graham McCann opens with this:

‘Dark satanic Mills’ is what some of his colleagues used to call him, and, with that Mephistophelian beard and somewhat steely-eyed and grim-lipped expression, one can see why. Drape a black cloak over his shoulders or drop a white cat on his lap and he would have looked eerily at home as a Moriarty-like crime master or a coolly sadistic Bond villain. His appearance, however, was deceptive, because, behind that sombre exterior, Michael Mills was actually one of the most sharp-witted, enthusiastic and inspirational creative forces in the history of British comedy.

He made things happen. This is not merely to suggest that he signed contracts and flicked switches. He was immersed in every stage of the programme-making process. He spotted talent, started careers, put together partnerships, turned ideas into things and made people believe in themselves and their projects and their audiences. He could do anything and everything himself, from writing and directing to producing and commissioning, but he also helped many others to do one or another of these things even better than they had thought possible.

McCann explains how Mills ranged from network to network and back again contributing to their decisions to make such landmark productions as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Dad’s Army and Wodehouse Playhouse. But he also engendered some brilliant productions that have not survived so successfully among reruns:

Always too attached to the hustle and bustle of the factory floor to find the lofty executive life entirely tolerable, Mills relinquished the post of [BBC] Head of Comedy in 1971 in order to return to producing full-time. Now free of the regular burden of having to plough through piles of paperwork, he proceeded to make more impressive shows and series, including in 1972 Clochemerle (Galton & Simpson’s critically acclaimed, and beautifully filmed, nine-part adaptation of Gabriel Chevallier’s comic novel) and Scoop (Barry Took’s audacious reimagining of the Evelyn Waugh novel with Harry Worth as William Boot); in 1973 a memorably unruly Spike Milligan special, even by his standards, called Milligan In Summer; and in 1976 another set of widely celebrated Wodehouse plays.

According to IMDB, the Michael Mills/Barry Took Scoop adaptation was broadcast on BBC 2 in 1972. It included in the cast James Beck (the spiv Pvt Walker from Dad’s Army in what may have been one of his final performances) as Corker, Sheila Hancock as Mrs Stitch and Sinead Cusack as Katchen. If it still exists in the BBC archive, it might be worth considering a revival during this post-Covid period when there is so little new material on offer. On the other hand, the critical reception of the 7-part serial when it was broadcast between 8 Oct-19 Nov 1972 was negative, at least in the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and Observer. In the latter paper, Clive James wrote:

About Scoop (BBC-2) one’s feelings are mixed. Harry Worth is a funny man all right, but whoever dreamed that Boot was supposed to be funny? It’s what happens around him that is supposed to be funny. If Waugh is one’s favorite comic novelist, and Scoop close to being  one’s favorite among his books, it’s a debilitating experience to find the compression of his writing prised open, the velocity of his elisions paralyzed, and the elegant outlines of his characterisaton scrawled over with crayons : and all of this is what you’re bound to get when the thing is put on in front of a studio audience. The decision I understand was taken at a high level. Just the right level to jump from.

The DT and ST attributed the problem to the assigning 0f the project to Michael Mills of BBC Light Entertainment rather than some one from BBC Classic Serials. So it is probably the case that this sleeping dog will remain undisturbed in the BBC archive.

–Two new writers whose earlier successes have been noted are queried about their own reading. Hanya Yanagihara is intervewed in the Evening Standard as she begins a UK tour promoting her new novel To Paradise on the back of her success with her first novel A Little Life:

Yanagihara seems happier talking about visual culture — ceramicists, experimental land artists, those leading figurative portraiture’s resurgence —than fellow authors. “I don’t follow the contemporary literary scene or who’s on it,” she says. Asked whom she has been reading, she mentions only dead white British men: Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Trollope. Her plans for her visit to London this week are more visual than bookish: to visit the John Soane Museum, the New Craftsmen shop and the studio of floral installation artist Silke Rittson-Thomas.

In the New Yorker, poet, novelist and tweeter, Patricia Lockwood, is interviewed. The interviewer Deborah Treisman explains by way of background:

[Lockwood’s] first novel, “No One Is Talking About This,” which was excerpted in The New Yorker, tells the story of a woman who lives very much online, in what she calls “the portal,” until she is pulled back to the real world by the birth of a niece with a lethal genetic syndrome.

As the interview progresses, Lockwood explains that one of her early influences was L M Montgomery and this exchange follows

How did you come across the L. M. Montgomery books?

I’m not sure. I mean, “Anne of Green Gables” makes its way into a lot of girls’ hands. “Emily of New Moon” [by Montgomery] much less so. I think that I had a tendency to read down rabbit holes, so if I read “Anne of Green Gables” and recognized something in that, I would seek out everything else I could find by that person. If she mentioned a book, say, in one of her journals, something like “The Story of an African Farm,” I would seek that out and it would just lead me to everything. I found a copy of “The Loved One,” by Evelyn Waugh, when I was really young. How did I recognize the quality in these things? But there is something almost tangible, so I went by feel. It was obsessiveness, I think, and a sort of persistence in tracking down these people who were interesting to me.

–Finally, an article in The Critic considers why contemporary novels have been deemed “boring” by commentators such as novelist Philip Hensher as cited in Private Eye:

…the real reason why most modern fiction is so dull is that it is insufficiently middle class. To make this point is not to pretend that most novels don’t have traditional middle class settings, for at least 90 per cent of their characters are surrounded by the usual accoutrements of houses, cars, university degrees and status anxiety.

What is lacking, on the other hand, is a failure — or perhaps only an unwillingness — to recognise that the novel is essentially a bourgeois art form, and that the moment it ceases to reflect the desires of the aspirational middle-classes is the moment it fails to fulfil its original function and becomes duller and less interesting to the majority of its potential readers.

What single factor connects Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), H.G. Wells’s Kipps (1910), Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) and Martin Amis’s Money (1984)?

The answer is that, once you strip aside the incidentals of plot, character and milieu or the fact their authors are exclusively male, they are all about upward social mobility. Like the eighteenth-century picaresques that preceded them, their heroes are young men on the make, climbing over or sometimes crawling underneath the hurdles erected by a vigilant authority with the aim of frustrating their passage through life.

The Critic’s article is written by “Secret Author” and makes its point rather well.

UPDATE: After this was posted, additional research was done on the 1972 BBC 2 serial of Scoop,  and this has been added to the Michael Mill discussion.

 

 

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Waugh Abroad: Firbank and Scoop

Posted on February 19, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Two foreign language journals have recently reviewed works of Waugh. The first is in the Italian religious website Radio Spada. In that essay, Luca Fumagalli reviews an early essay by Waugh on Ronald Firbank that appeared in a 1929 issue of Life and Letters. According to Fumagalli, Firbank is the :

…spiritual son of Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson, the acclaimed author of the apocalyptic The Master of the World, [and] was one of those tightrope walkers of Edwardian, homosexual and unfriendly Catholic decadence, whose works were rediscovered only after his disappearance, when the critics began to see in their hurricane of  camp madness an ideal bridge between the fin de siĂšcle season and the modernist avant-garde.

Even Waugh cannot help but open his article by underlining how Firbank’s books, although influenced by the Beardsley of Sotto il monte [Under the Hill] or by the works of Baron Corvo, did not fail to influence the works of contemporaries such as Harold Acton, Carl Van Vechten, William Gerhardie and Ernest Hemingway. […]

However, Firbank’s novels are by no means perfect, quite the opposite. Especially those of his youth, which in addition to lingering a little too long on the descriptions of the beautiful young people who peep in there, [are guilty] of “obscurity and stupidity”. On the [other hand], in those of maturity, above all The Flower Beneath The Foot, Prancing Nigger and Cardinal Pirelli , where the narrative technique reaches its apex, “the darkness disappears to leave room for a radiant clarity and much of the alleged nonsense, when well expressed, turns out to be something exquisitely significant.” […]

Waugh particularly admired Firbank’s devious and allusive use of language, among other things by endowing his characters with sympathetically absurd names. More generally, if the dialogues, constructed through the juxtaposition of words and rhetorical constructs derived from the conversations in vogue at the time, [they] seem to lead nowhere, [and] “little by little the reader becomes aware that a casual reference on one page is linked to some particular inflection or phrase in another, until a plot emerges; usually a plot so outrageous that he himself is wary of his own deductions. “The story thus takes shape little by little,”a touch and a retreat”, and the reader initially finds himself wallowing in a sea of ​​inconsistencies, lost and nauseated by a story that seems to want to go nowhere. […]

Conceiving such epiphanies is Firbank’s trademark, the main lesson that Waugh and other writers of his generation have learned from him.

The Google translation in this case is a bit of a challenge to read in English. And many of the quotes are translated into Italian from Waugh’s original. No attempt has been made to correct those. The original Waugh essay is available in both A Little Order (p. 77) and EAR (p. 56).

The second is a review of the Spanish-language edition of Scoop, which is published in Spain as ÂĄNoticia bomba! Here’s a translation of the opening paragraph in the Spanish paper Diario Sanitario:

Today we rescue from the heavy rubble of literary oblivion a comic narrative gem from 1938. Scoop is, above all … , a hilarious parody of tabloid journalism, a satire in capital letters, a splendid comedy with no pretensions other than affording an enjoyable reading. English humor, fine, pure, critical, scathing, sparkling, acid, at times malicious, boxed in its almost three hundred pages, is what serves us in such a work by Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), one of the best British satirical writers. […] Over time, it has become a reflection of a journalism from another era, distant, evocative, irretrievable, a journalism of cigars, telegraphs, typewriters and alcohol, lots of alcohol…

 

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Modernism’s Centenary Marked: Essay and Lecture

Posted on February 18, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

There have been several stories in the papers recently about the major events in the history of modern literature that occurred in 1922. A recent article by John Self in The Critic magazine does an excellent job of bringing them together:

One hundred years ago, in 1922, the world changed. Not the real world, of course — that had happened a few years before, with the war — but the literary world, which is always a few ticks behind.[…] The year of 1922 was indelibly marked by the publication of two great, still-standing, monuments to modernism: James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. These two, bookending the year, are the great granddaddies of the show, but other titles, as we shall see, were just as important.[…]

The key connecting figure in literature’s year zero was the young poet Ezra Pound, whose impatient desire for a new Renaissance (“make it new!”) saw him find a publisher for Joyce’s first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and read draft pages of Ulysses. It was to Pound that Eliot dedicated The Waste Land (“il miglior fabbro” — the greater craftsman). Literature, after all, is a human story, and the web of relationships that informed the new literature tell us much about its development and purpose…

After a discussion of Joyce’s 1922 meeting with Marcel Proust and the impact of Proust’s death later in the year, Self returns to London. A discussion follows about how English writers reacted to Ulysses and The Waste Land and how Virginia Woolf contributed to modernism, notably with the 1922 publication of her novel Jacob’s Room. The article closes with this.

Where are the modernists now? Joyce, Eliot and Woolf are all still read, though attention tends to be focused on one or two major works by each (similarly, volume one of Proust’s epic has an Amazon sales rank ten times better than the next five volumes). At times Eliot’s influence seems to be less in poetry than in providing sonorous phrases with which other writers may title their books, from Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas to Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, and many, many, many others. […]

The year of 1922 also gave birth to two writers, later lifelong friends, who would embody not just an absence of modernist experiment but opposition to it: Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin.

Quietly, three days after the first publication of Ulysses, the world received the first issue of a magazine that would dictate library and bookshop choices more than the modernists ever could: on 5 February 1922, Reader’s Digest was born. Its unashamedly populist anthologies of abridged novels — four per volume — would at their peak sell 10 million copies per year. And they have never included Ulysses, The Waste Land or Jacob’s Room.

Waugh seems to have admired Eliot’s work and injected in not only into A Handful of Dust but has Anthony Blanche declaim The Waste Land from Sebastian Flyte’s Christ Church balcony in Brideshead Revisited. As far as Ulysses’ contribution to modernism is concerned, Waugh offered these comments in a 1962 BBC TV interview. This is in answer to the question were writers trying to shock the public in the 1920s when Waugh was starting out?:

…What Cyril Connolly called The Break Through actually became the break-up. In painting, architecture and poetry, in which the common man has a certain feeling of awe so he’s prepared to be bamboozled–they accepted what was offered. But when it came to prose, the English common man knows what prose is, he talks it all the time himself and he wasn’t going to be taken in. And there were a lot of Americans, headed up by one called Gertrude Stein, who wrote absolute gibberish. They hired a poor, dotty Irishman called James Joyce–he was thought to be a great influence in my youth–and he wrote absolute rot, you know. He began writing quite well and you can see him going mad as he wrote, and his last books–only fit to be set for examinations at Cambridge. […] If you read Ulysses it’s perfectly sane for a little bit, and then it goes madder and madder–but that was before the Americans hired him […] to write Finnegan’s Wake, which is gibberish…(Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, v. 25: A Little Learning, pp 580-81).

Waugh added to the humor by consistently pronouncing “gibberish” with a hard G.

Those interested in how Waugh’s works relate to modernism may wish to know about this lecture: “The Waste Land (1922): A Mad Poem in a ‘Fallen’ World”. This will be delivered at the University of Leicester in Ogden Lewis Seminar Room 3 at 13:00p on 23 March 2022. Here are the details:

This centennial talk looks at the literary legacies of T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem. We will focus on novels by three Catholic authors – Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, and Muriel Spark – that respond, in similar and different ways, to Eliot’s apocalypticism.

Dr Scott Freer is the editor for ‘The Journal of the T. S. Eliot Society (UK)’, author of Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods (2015), and co-editor of Religion and Myth in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry (2016).

*While we welcome non-ticket holders to all our Literary Leicester 2022 events, we do recommend booking your free tickets in advance to avoid disappointment.*

Tickets are free. Booking information is available at this link.

 

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P J O’Rourke 1947-2022 R.I.P.

Posted on February 17, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

American satirist P J O’Rourke died earlier this week at the age of 74. He made his name as a conservative commentator but was an equal opportunity satirist. For example,  according to the obituary in the Washington Post, he once explained his position as follows:

During the 2016 presidential election, he came out against Donald Trump and endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, even as he called her “the second-worst thing that can happen to his country.”

“I mean, she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters,” he said on an episode of [PBS program] “Wait Wait.” Referring to Trump, he added, “This man just can’t be president.”

The New York Times offered other examples:

In 2010, The New York Times invited him and assorted other prominent people to define “Republican” and “Democrat.” He offered this:

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove the crab grass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.” […]

For many fans, his signature book was “Parliament of Whores,” subtitled “A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government” and first published in 1991.

“Although this is a conservative book,” Mr. O’Rourke explained in the opening pages, “it is not informed by any very elaborate political theory. I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.”

Simon Evans in the website Spiked wrote this:

O’Rourke had been an active commentator on America, both as a place to live and as an evil eye of Sauron projecting power into the darkest, dankest corners of an ungrateful, resentful world, for as long as I’ve been alive. His worm’s eye view of abroad was at least as interested in finding – and funding – the Way to the Next Whisky Bar, as it was in the more traditional, or at least official business of the foreign correspondent (most notably at Rolling Stone). He was clearly someone who regarded Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop as much as a manual as a satire. But that didn’t mean he ignored the political realities. It means he saw how theory impacted on reality, and which tended to come off worse.

As noted in previous posts, O’Rourke also expressed his enjoyment of Waugh’s novels Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags. I was reminded of some of Waugh’s 1930s writing (such as Black Mischief and Scoop) about what we now call third world countries by this quote in the Post:

“I was not prepared to do anything but upchuck and die,” he wrote of a trip to Paraguay, “after the eight-hour night flight from Miami on an Air Paraguay DC-8 older than most second wives that flew through the center of five Dr. Frankenstein-your-lab-is-on-the-phone lightning storms and aboard which I was served a dinner of roast softball in oleo.”

That may not be the way Waugh would have written it, but the sentiments are the same. P J O’Rourke will certainly be missed, particularly as this is an election year.

 

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