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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Valentine’s Day Roundup

Posted on February 13, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Corydon (Indiana) Democrat recommends an Evelyn Waugh short story as a selection appropriate to be read on Valentine’s Day. This is “Bella Fleece Gives a Party”. The story will help the reader to “remember friends, loved ones” as is expected on this day.

–The “Media Watch Dog” column in The Weekend Australian had this comment on a character in Scoop:

As avid readers will recall, in Media Watch Dog Issue 57 (11 June 2010) Matt Canavan drew attention to that part of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop in which the snobbery of the leftie journalist Pappenhacker was revealed.

Waugh’s line was that a wealthy communist, university-educated chap named Pappenhacker believed that the best way to undermine the capitalist system was to be rude to the members of the proletariat. This would make them angry and help to bring about a revolution. Sandalista Snobbery Space is devoted to recording the snobbish views of the Pappenhackers of our day.

It probably helps to be Australian to understand the reference to “Sandalista Snobbery Space”.

–The TLS reviews four new books of or about nature writing that opens with this:

For nearly 200 years, beginning in the late eighteenth century, nature writing was the gentlemanly pursuit of country chaps with a mildly scientific bent. If we pass over the work of the sadists lurking in the reeds alongside T. H. White, Gavin Maxwell and Henry Williamson, much of the material was dull, footling and too easily mocked. Evelyn Waugh’s “questing vole” passing “feather-footed through the plashy fen” in Scoop (1930) is probably the most famous parody, but Saki skewered the form as early as 1911.

The review is by Sarah Hudson.

–Novelist Howard Jacobson has written an autobiography that will be published next month. This is entitled Mother’s Boy and the Guardian has published an excerpt. In the section dealing with his youth, Jacobson writes:

Can you die of others thinking you’re a fantasist? I thought I might. My fault, of course, for ever telling people I was working on a novel when I wasn’t. It didn’t help, either, that I was called Howard. Can you write a novel when you don’t have a novelist’s name? Howard Jacobson? I didn’t think so. Scott Fitzgerald. Virginia Woolf. Evelyn Waugh. Now, with those names you had a fighting chance. Even my father’s name had a writer’s ring. Max Jacobson – I could have been a writer of tough-guy Chicagoan prose had I been a Max.

–Writing in the Jesuit magazine America, James T Keane surveys the magazine’s history of publishing the writings of novelist Walker Percy. The reviewer is particularly interested in a little-read 1974 review by Percy of a book by Paul Horgan on the craft of writing. Here’s an excerpt, quoting from Percy’s review:

“Most writers, especially fiction writers, have their little eccentricities, lining up pencil and paper a certain way, but these are less apt to be signs of madness than a very human anxiety to preserve what Horgan calls ‘an induced and protracted absentmindedness’,” Percy writes. “Evelyn Waugh once reported that he thought Graham Greene a little strange because he had to run out in the street and wait for a car to pass with a certain combination of numbers on the license plate before he could get to work. But Waugh of all people should have had sympathy for the quailings, twitches and fits which are apt to befall a man trying to write a good sentence.” Zing!

—CondĂ© Nast Traveller has published a story about visiting Patrick Leigh Fermor’s house in rural Greece. This is by Artemis Cooper, Leigh Fermor’s biographer, and is entitled: “Inside a restored Greek home that’s now open to visitors”. It is headed by a statement that was apparently not written by the article’s author:

Writer Patrick Leigh Fermor’s many adventures included walking across Europe at 18 and becoming a resistance fighter. Now his restored Greek home, where Evelyn Waugh [sic] and Nancy Mitford once stayed, is open to guests – his biographer Artemis Cooper returns for a visit.

According to Cooper’s biography, construction of the house was not even started until 1965. It was completed in 1969.  Since Waugh died in 1966 when no habitable structure apparently existed, he could not have been a visitor. He would have been too frail in his final days even to make the arduous trip to the building site. Cooper does record a visit by Nancy Mitford in 1967 when there was apparently at least a partially completed structure (p. 338), but Waugh was by then not available to accompany her.  I do not believe Waugh ever visited Leigh Fermor at his earlier Grecian residences. No such visits are recorded by Cooper.  The two writers knew each other primarily through their common friendships with Nancy and Deborah Mitford, Diana Cooper (the biographer’s grandmother) and Ann Fleming. Waugh and Leigh Fermor were cordial but not close friends with each other.

UPDATE (21 February 2021): Mark McGinness has kindly noted that Artemis Cooper is Diana Cooper’s grand daughter. The text is amended accordingly.

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Academia x 2: Pinfold’s Voices and Waugh’s Propaganda

Posted on February 11, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent academic article about Waugh’s postwar novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold has been posted on the internet. This is entitled “Hearing Voices: The Extended Mind in Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold” and is by Yuexi Liu, a member of the Waugh Society and co-editor of its journal, Evelyn Waugh Studies. She teaches at XJT-Liverpool University in Shanghai. The article originally appeared in Modernist Cultures, 15.2 (2020) which has now posted it. Here’s the abstract (which also appeared in a previous post):

Waugh’s last comic novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) takes ‘exterior modernism’ to a new height, no longer avoiding interiority – as in his interwar fiction – but exteriorising the interior through dissociation. ‘The Box’, to which the writer-protagonist attributes the source of the tormenting voices, may well be his own mind, an extended – albeit unhealthy – mind that works as a radio: he transmits his thoughts and then receives them as external signals in order to communicate with them. Pinfold’s auditory hallucinations are caused by the breakdown of communication. Interestingly, writing is also a dissociative activity. Concerned with the writer’s block, the novel reflects on the creative process and illuminates the relationship between madness and creativity. If dissociation, or the splitting of the mind, is a defence against trauma, the traumatic experience Pinfold attempts to suppress is the Second World War. The unusual state of mind accentuates the contingency of Waugh’s radio writing; his preferred medium is cinema.

A full copy of the article is now available at this link.

–Another article appears in The Review of English Studies. This is entitled “‘Conducting his own Campaigns’: Evelyn Waugh and Propaganda” and is written by Guy Woodward (Durham University). It was originally published on 23 September 2021. Here’s the abstract:

This essay examines Evelyn Waugh as practitioner and critic in the field of wartime propaganda. In 1941, Waugh produced a fictitious account of a British Commando raid on German territory in North Africa for publication in Britain and the United States, an episode which reveals his skill as a propagandist, but also prompts scrutiny of his contacts with British propaganda agencies and agents and of the effect of propaganda on his writings. Waugh’s interwar fiction exhibits a sophisticated understanding of the evolving and growing power of modern propaganda, but the novels also anticipate the public relations and psychological warfare campaigns of the Second World War, specifically those carried out by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret service established in 1941 to produce and coordinate propaganda to enemy and occupied Europe. Waugh’s proximity to the PWE is suggested by a dense network of social and professional connections, and is further indicated by a series of references to the PWE and its work which I have uncovered in his fiction. Allusions to covert propaganda in Put Out More Flags and the Sword of Honour trilogy betray Waugh’s understanding of the PWE’s operations, but also provide a critique of the corrosive and unforeseen effects of information warfare waged by the secret state and offer a productive means of re-examining his much-noted anxieties regarding modernity and mid-century political change.

A full copy is available here.

UPDATE (29 April 2022): A correction was made in the entry about Yuexi Wu’s Gilbert Pinfold article. The original entry copied the abstract from a different article. The correct abstract is now posted.  Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

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BBC Radio 4 to Rebroadcast A Handful of Dust

Posted on February 9, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Tne BBC will rebroadcast its two hour, two episode radio adaptation of  A Handful of Dust. This will be transmitted on BBC Radio 4 Extra on Thursday, 24 February at 1000a and will be available thereafter on BBC iPlayer. Here is the announcement:

When Brenda Last embarks on an affair that is the talk of London society it has tragic consequences for all those involved…

Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel starring Tara Fitzgerald and Jonathan Cullen. Dramatised in 2 parts by Bill Matthews.

The adaptation was originally broadcast in 1996 and was last rebroadcast in 2020.

 

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Roundup: End it with a Waugh

Posted on February 5, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–An opinion article in The Times by Matthew Parris considers the actions that will be taken on the part of Tory politicians seeking to replace Boris Johnson as their leader. Their different political placements call for different tactics. But the article ends with this observation that is generally applicable to all:

They should be warned, though, that with Johnson the traditional procedure cannot be relied upon. Max Hastings reminds me that when Evelyn Waugh’s Captain Grimes was left with a revolver and a bottle of whisky, colleagues returned to find the revolver untouched, and the man — and the whisky — gone.

–The New York Times has an opinion article by a Jesuit priest (James Martin) about the proper reaction by the vaccinated on the death of an outspoken Anti-vaxxer. He explains that the German’s have a word for this dilemma: schadenfreude. After discussing several alternatives, the article ends with this:

When it comes to schadenfreude, a line from Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” is apposite. The dotty father of Charles Ryder, the protagonist, is hosting a meal at home. The father mentions someone whose business has failed, and another guest chuckles.

“You find his misfortune the subject of mirth?” Charles’s father retorts.

It’s a lighthearted scene, probably not meant to carry as much weight as other scenes in Waugh’s novel about moral choices. But it has always stuck with me. Don’t find another person’s misery the subject of mirth, glee or satisfaction. Doing so is mean. It’s immoral. And one day you may be the unfortunate one.

–Johanna Lane writes in the Daily Beast about novels in which the large house or castle in which the action takes place is as important as the characters. After several examples, including Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Elizabeth Bowen’s Danielstown in The Last September, she closes with this:

I chose this because it’s the novel from which I took the epigraph for my book: Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead Revisited, says “I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.” I love this sentiment because it articulates how ironic it is that families create these great houses to demonstrate their own importance, but their houses almost always outlive them—and their family line.

Her book that she refers to is probably her first novel Black Lake which she cites at the beginning of the article.

–Novelist Susan Hill marks her own 80th birthday in this week’s issue of The Spectator. One of the things she finds herself enjoying is rereading her favorite books: Dickens (Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations) leads the list: “I am also having an Elizabeth Bowen jag this year and finding Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse even better than I remembered. That’s also the case for the trilogies by Olivia Manning and Evelyn Waugh set during the second world war…” Diary of a Nobody, Three Men in a Boat and Pursuit of Love close out the discussion.

—The Times has another article citing Waugh’s writing. This is about a school in North London called City of London Academy Highgate Hill. Although it is a state comprehensive school, it has over the 17 years of its existence managed to become “nakedly selective” and a target for admission of  a “pupil premium”. The headmaster explains his:

… conviction that without great teaching in lessons, you might as well let children run riot.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, landed with his first class, asks in panic, “But what am I to teach them?” He is told, “Oh, I shouldn’t try to teach them anything, not just yet anyway, just keep them quiet.”

This is anathema to [Headmaster] Gennuh. “The lesson has to be good,” he says. “With students behaving themselves in the classroom, teachers have to teach. If you’re not teaching good lessons you may as well let the students run around in the classroom and babysit them.”

–Finally, in The Imaginative Conservative, religious commentator Joseph Pearce considers two examples of TV adaptations of novels where the success of one doomed the effort of a remake. The two adaptations are Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1995/2006) and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1981/2007). While not mentioned, another story in the Irish Times confirms that the plans for a third attempt at a Brideshead adaptation have not yet quite jelled. This is in an interview of actor Andrew Garfield:

Garfield confirms that, as has been reported, he hopes to play Charles Ryder in a new TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited for Luca Guadagnino. “It’s a matter of time and schedule, and financing and all that stuff,” he says.

 

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Academic Roundup: 2020-2021

Posted on February 4, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The following articles and reviews have appeared in academic journals for the period 2020-21 (2019 in one case) and have not been previously posted. The summaries of articles come (except as noted) from an academic library search service and those of reviews are quoted from text:

–Lara Ehrenfried, “‘There’s a Song There, Really’: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, the Musical Revue, and Early Sound Film”, Modern fiction studies, 2020-10-01, Vol.66 (3), p.423

Description
This essay examines the relationship between Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, the musical revue, and early sound film in Britain. By attending to the soundscapes of Waugh’s novel and connecting them with the history of revue, early sound film productions of revue shows, and contemporary reviews of the novel as a “revue between covers,” this analysis demonstrates the text’s critical interaction with both emerging sound film and stage entertainment of its time. The essay argues that Vile Bodies is Waugh’s attempt to assert the place of the novel in a rapidly expanding media system.

–Matt Phillips, “First Miles Philips, and Then Tony Last: The Noble Savage Myth in Hakluyt and in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust”, The Comparatist, 2021-10-01, Vol.45 (1), p.287-299

Description
Opening paragraph: In his 1582 “A discourse written by one Miles Philips Englishman, put on shore in the West Indies by Mr John Hawkins,” Miles Philips delivers a tale of shipwreck and captivity that ends with his heroic return to England. In 1934, Evelyn Waugh publishes the novel A Handful of Dust, another narrative of captivity, though one that leaves the reader with the tacit knowledge that protagonist Tony Last will live out the rest of his days imprisoned, reading Charles Dickens to his illiterate captor, Mr. Todd. Although separated by nearly four centuries, what links these two narratives is how each intersects with the myth of the noble savage. Both Philips and Last find themselves in the role of the subjugated, finding themselves in a position to empathize with native peoples historically thought of by some as savages. Along with this subjugation comes the potential to experience the type of conversion expected of the legendary noble savage. Philips, the former invader and slave trader, undergoes what we might call a mock-conversion during his captivity. His attitude about the natives is reformed, as he develops a “great familiarity with many of them, whom [he] found to be a courteous and loving kind of people 
” (Hakluyt 150). Such a change, I argue, ultimately leads to Philips’s deliverance. Last does not undergo such liberation. Waugh’s own religious conversion alongside his complex affinity with the writings of Dickens alter his view of the noble savage myth. Waugh biographer David Wykes writes that Last “is an alter ego of the naĂŻve Evelyn Waugh in the blindness of irreligion” (106). On September 29, 1930, Waugh joined the Catholic Church, four years prior to the publication of A Handful of Dust (Wykes 74). If Last were successful in his discovery of the imagined lost city in the novel, he would perpetuate those very humanist ideals, alongside the type of unchecked conquest—the “glory” of Hetton—that Waugh satirizes (Waugh 308). By comparing Philips’s and Waugh’s distinctive viewpoints regarding the myth of the noble savage, I will show how Waugh—in the shadow of Dickens—ultimately rejects the redemptive power that Philips experiences.

–Peter J Comerford, “Redeeming the Times: Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour as Sacramental Epic”, Christianity & literature, 2021, Vol.70 (1), p.28-51

Description
Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy is a sacramental epic that derives its theology from the thinkers of the ressourcement, the theologians seeking a renewal of Catholic thinking by rediscovering the works of the early church fathers. Waugh shows grace operating both through the seven sacraments as well as the sacramentality of creation. He portrays a notion of specific vocation, whereby every person has a unique role to play in God’s plan. He uses the narrative device of eucatastrophe, which depicts that within God’s plan, good can come out of evil.

–Amanda K Greene, “The Passing Hour: 1930s Real-Time, Vile Bodies, and the Ethics of Reading”, Configurations (Baltimore, Md.), 2021, Vol.29 (2), p.119-154

Description
Understanding real-time as an orientation toward the present and its documentation as opposed to a concrete (digitally determined) technological affordance, this article locates real-time in the burgeoning photographic tabloid culture of 1930s Britain. It traces how technical innovations in information transmission and circulation during the interwar years impacted the circuits between readers and their “real life” environment. Moreover, by engaging with Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), a text strung between novel and tabloid supplement, it suggests how real-time’s newly habituated, melancholic modes of reading might push individuals to stand by in the face of individual pain and mass violence.

–Jonathan Greenberg, “A Double-Edged Sword”, Papers on language & literature, 2020-04-01, Vol.56 (2), pagination unavailable.

Description
Greenberg reviews Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts by Naomi Milthorpe. [This is concluding paragraph: “Synthesizing established views while also revising or overturning them is a challenging task, especially in a concise volume such as this. In the end, the Waugh who emerges is as elusive as ever, and that is probably as it should be. In some chapters–such as the readings of Decline and Fall and Love Among the Ruins–he appears as a cultural reactionary, valuing tradition, religion, and restraint rather than the chaos and energy embodied by figures like Decline and Fall ‘s Grimes. In others, such as the reading of Put Out More Flags, the pervasive understanding of Waugh as a conservative is successfully challenged. And of course however dour Waugh’s pessimism, it cannot erase the glee he takes in skewering modernity and inflicting bitter fates on his hapless and helpless characters. Ultimately, we probably have to concede that Waugh is neither one thing nor the other. To be sure, his reputation hardened over time into that of a curmudgeon, and at times he appears merely “a grumpy middle-aged man in a bad mood with Attlee” (138). But, as Milthorpe contends in Chapter 7, on The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Waugh always maintained a “self-conscious and self-mocking awareness” (147) of his own public image and never shied from numbering himself among the targets of his satire. She thus makes a welcome break from reading the novel autobiographically, viewing Pinfold as a kind of self-parody and self-disguise. Waugh here, as elsewhere, remains one step ahead of his critics.]

–Anna Faktorovich, “Over Quoting, Contradiction and other Amoralities in Waugh Scholarship”, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, 2019-07-10, v 11(2), pp. 112-114.

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[Review of Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts by Naomi Milthorpe.] Since there have been many other studies on Waugh, the summary then promises that this book “renews scholarly debates central to Waugh’s work: the forms of his satire, his attitudes towards modernity and modernism, his place in the literary culture of the interwar period, and his pugnacious (mis)reading of literary and other texts. While Waugh denied he was a satirist and has a different moral tone to his critiques, in part because unlike most satirists he uses third person narrators, Milthorpe argues that he retains a subversive satiric style under a veil of disregard: “readers are meant to see these” moral “standards lurking behind the arras, and Waugh’s verbal strategy enables an implicit criticism of that narrative world, in which civility might retain some vestigial power, but brutality is allowed to proceed unchecked by authority” (2-5). Readers who come to this book without this type of knowledge might be turned away from studying satires due to all these confusing critical contradictions. […]those new to Waugh or to satire, should not read this book.

 

 

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75th Anniversary of Waugh’s Trip to Hollywood

Posted on January 31, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

On 31 January 1947, Evelyn Waugh and his wife Laura arrived in New York on board the SS America. They were enroute to Los Angeles in a trip arranged by Waugh’s agent A D Peters. This was planned to facilitate Waugh’s meeting with MGM studios about the filming of Brideshead Revisited. It is apparent from the book about that trip by Robert Murray Davis (Mischief in the Sun, Troy, NY: 1999) that Waugh was more interested in finding relief from the restraints of austerity in Britain than in securing a contract for the filming of his novel. He had been urging Peters to organize the American expedition for the past year. Most of what follows is based on Davis’s book.

This was not the Waughs’ first visit to New York. They had stopped there in 1938 on the way to and from Mexico. However, Waugh made little effort to describe the portions of that trip that took place in the United States except to mention how hot New York was in July. There are brief references to a side trip to Washington but little else. Since Laura was with him, there were no letters home. The outbound trip continued by ship to Veracruz. They returned by train via Texas and New York, but Waugh had even less to say about that journey.

On the 1947 trip Waugh was keeping a diary, probably with the thought of using the experience for future writings. While Waugh never wrote a travel book describing the trip, he did use his experiences to write The Loved One, several articles on the film industry and its practitioners, as well as an article about American burial customs. Bob Davis uses those sources as well as Waugh’s correspondence about the trip to his friends and professional contacts such as Peters. In addition, memoirs of others who met with Waugh  in America are cited.

On the outbound journey, Waugh allowed 3 days in New York before proceeding by train to California. From Davis’s description, this stop was more to facilitate Laura’s shopping than to enable Waugh to improve his publishing contacts. He did visit with some representatives of various Hearst magazines that had previously published his work. These produced nothing concrete but a $3500 payment from Hearst, partly for previous publications but mostly as an advance on unspecified future works. An additional $2000 was set aside to finance a station wagon to be delivered in Ireland. The cash was mostly used to fund Laura’s shopping. Accommodations and travel were covered by MGM. There were future repercussions with Hearst about this substantial advance but, without knowing it, Waugh was about to find another even more lucrative outlet for his American journalism: Life Magazine.

The Waughs were put up at the Waldorf Astoria, at that time the most “luxe” of New York’s hostelries. Waugh was not altogether satisfied with that establishment and on future trips stayed at The Plaza. An MGM representative Carol Brandt was assigned to facilitate the Waughs’ entertainment, shopping and meals. Brandt arranged for dinner parties in her own home as well at those of two of her friends. She also got them theatre tickets to a Broadway show that Waugh described as a “comedy shot through and through with socialist propaganda.” Bob Davis thinks this was probably Gordon Kanin’s Born Yesterday. According to Davis, Waugh seemed generally pleased with Brandt’s efforts.

After their three days in New York, the Waughs were put aboard the New York Central’s first class Twentieth Century Limited for the overnight trip to Chicago where they were scheduled to connect to the Santa Fe Chief for the onward trip to California. The railroads in America never managed to arrange for thru single train service between the East and West Coast, but the Waughs’ connection was relatively seamless. As Bob Davis describes it, their New York- Chicago NY Central coach was shunted from one Chicago station to another where it was attached to the Santa Fe train. This process took about 4 hours but the passengers could remain aboard the coach. Waugh knew from his Mexico trip that long-distance American trains  “are the most comfortable means of getting across country yet devised by man” (Robbery Under Law, Penguin, 2011, p. 7). Little could he know that over the next decade this form of transport ceased to exist.

The Waughs were befriended by an American couple on the train to California. This was Howard and Marguerite Cullman. Mr Cullman was involved in show business, and they were both fans of Waugh’s writings.  They were also well informed about the Hollywood film business and briefed Waugh on the MGM executives he was about to meet. Mrs Cullman, who later published a memoir in which she recounted, inter alia, her encounter with Waugh, also provided advice on what to see. Among her suggestions was the pet cemetery.

Waugh made three more trips to New York: 1948, 1949 and 1950. Most of this trip was spent in California where he arrived on 6 February 1947. The furthest west he got on those later occasions was Minneapolis-St Paul.

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New Dutch Edition of Brideshead

Posted on January 29, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

A new Dutch edition of Brideshead Revisited will be published next week. The Dutch title is Terugkeer naar Brideshead (literally “Return to Brideshead”) and will be published by Prometheus in Amsterdam. This is the 10th edition of a Dutch version. Here is an excerpt from a translation of the review by Rudi Muelemans in the Belgian paper De Standaard:

It’s doubtful that a creative writing student would get good marks with a paper like  Brideshead Revisited. The teacher would certainly point out some structural shortcomings. For example, the most fascinating character, Sebastian, disappears from the picture after a few chapters and in the third part the main character, Charles, suddenly appears to have a wife and children out of nowhere. The author of  Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, was aware of these flaws based on his experience with the writing process.

Waugh had gone into military service at the outbreak of World War II. When he parachuted out of a plane during a training flight in December 1943, he made a somewhat rough landing and broke his fibula. He got leave. During that time, lasting until June 1944, he wrote Brideshead Revisited. Although largely set in the 1920s and 1930s, it is a souvenir of the Second World War.

Waugh described the novel’s theme as the action of divine grace on a group of distinct but closely related characters. He had joined the Catholic Church a few years earlier and, after the satirical works Decline and fall and A handful of dust , it was time for his great Catholic novel. He subtitled the book The Sacred and Profane  Memories of Captain Charles Ryder . Those memories are linked to a specific place:  Brideshead castle…

Waugh’s leave was originally granted for a few weeks to recuperate from his injury but was later extended several times to allow him to write the book. The review continues with a summary of the plot and ends with this:

The epilogue of the book takes us back to the beginning. Charles sees how the troops have damaged Brideshead. Evil tongues sometimes claim that during the war the British army caused more damage to the manors than Hitler’s bombings. As his men settle in, Charles visits the chapel and says a prayer.

At this point in the novel, I consider that Sebastian’s disappearance from the narrative may not be Waugh’s fault after all. It ensures that the reader also feels the pressing loss. Charles realizes that the best time of his life was the period of his friendship with Sebastian. The only thing we possess is the past.

The first Dutch translation was by E. van Andel and was published in 1947 by De Bezige Bij in Amsterdam. A new translation by Luc Viljingh was issued in 2001, and Prometheus republished that version in 2008. This information is based on WorldCat.com. The translation of the review is by Google with a few edits.

 

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