Midwinter Roundup

Posted on January 28, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–Charles Moore writing in his miscellany column for The Spectator marks the upcoming 70th anniversary of the death of George VI:

King George VI died in his sleep 70 years ago next week, after a day at Sandringham shooting hares and pigeons (the pheasant season having just ended). ‘I hope,’ said Winston Churchill to his doctor, ‘you will arrange something like that for me. But don’t do it till I tell you.’ He then broadcast to the nation. His phrase about the King having ‘walked with death’ was much admired. Evelyn Waugh was unimpressed. ‘Do your foreign set know that our King is dead?’ he wrote to Nancy Mitford in Paris. ‘Mr Churchill made a dreadful speech on the TSF [TelĂ©graphie sans fil, i.e. wireless]. Triteness enlivened only by gross blunders
 George VI’s reign will go into history as the most disastrous my unhappy country has known since Matilda and Stephen.’ ‘All the newspapers,’ he raged, ‘are full of the glorification of Elizabeth Tudor [because the new Queen was Elizabeth II], the vilest of her sex.’ He added that ‘The King died at the moment when Princess Elizabeth [in Kenya] first put on a pair of “slacks”
 The Duke of Windsor lost his throne much more by his beret than by his adultery.’

The letter is dated 28 January 1952 (NMEW, 264). The Spectator quote omits an interesting passage about Queen Elizabeth I in which Waugh disagreed with Winston Churchill’s assessment of her reign:

His [Churchill’s] most inept historical parallel: comparing our present Queen with Elizabeth Tudor: ‘Neither grew up in the expectation of the crown.’ Elizabeth Tudor had been formally bastardized & declared ineligible by Henry VIII and all three estates of the realm. She survived alive because of the high Christian principles of Mary Tudor, when in any other royal family, she would have been executed. She was jockeyed into place by a gang of party bosses and executed the rightful heir Mary Stuart.

–A posting on the weblog of the University of Texas–Permian Basin (in Odessa) includes an excerpt from a new book by one of its faculty, Antonio Moreno, Professor of Spanish. This is entitled Burnished Mahogany Between Two Mirrors: Mexico and Scandinavia and will be published next month:

Travel narratives are not a minor undertaking nor an easy task. They force us to implement a range of techniques and a variety of devices to describe the landscape and to both make immediate and transcendent that specific moment when the traveler connects profoundly with the place and the people. [..] To transcend said bond [between place and people], one must practice searching, negotiating, interacting, crossing
 and must be open to barter. A text narrating a voyage is completely questionable if rooted in stereotype, prejudice, and an underestimation of the visited culture.

There are many examples, from both sides of the spectrum.

Let’s take, for instance, Mexico: An Object Lesson (1939), by British writer Evelyn Waugh. Its pages reveal that the reasons for the 1938 trip described by Waugh had nothing to do with pleasure, aesthetics, or gastronomy; they were political. The translation of the title into Spanish speaks volumes: MĂ©xico: robo al amparo de la ley (2009) / Mexico: Theft Sanctioned by Law. The translator’s interpretation of the title confirms that Waugh was traveling as a correspondent both for the British Crown and for the British oil companies – very much the same way employees of the famous East India Company did a century prior. The British author was not a traveler with a desire to learn lessons from a vast country he knew nothing about. His views on Mexico provoke indignation. He maintains that it is a country in ruins, plunged into chaos, dependent on the rich nations, and—as if that were not enough—a country lacking Enlightenment-fueled ideas. Waugh aims to impose his ideological point of view, one of an English conservative and colonialist (though one who, at least, writes devilishly well) as he assesses the effects of the oil appropriation that President Lazaro Cardenas had set in motion, thereby impacting Great Britain’s investments and interests on Mexican soil.

—The Guardian has posted an interview of writer Edmund White. Here is one of his responses:

The book I could never read again
I have a book group of two with the novelist Yiyun Li. I suggested we read Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which I’d read as a student and thought was terminally sophisticated. When we tried it a year ago I thought it was antisemitic (Father Rothschild!), heavy-handed and unfunny.

–The Italian religious website Radio Spada has posted an English-language version of an article by Luca Fumagalli. This is entitled “Chesterton and Waugh: resounding, unforgettable laughter”.  Here are the opening paragraphs:

With the exception of being converts to Catholicism G. K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh seem to have nothing in common: in addition to being born in different periods, each had a unique and unmistakable style.

Yet a profound bond exists between the two, starting with some shared biographical details such as a passion for drawing and the journey towards religion undertaken only after having toyed with the idea of suicide.

Chesterton and Waugh are, so to speak, the alpha and omega of the first period of English Catholic literature of the twentieth century, the one that draws heavily from the theological-cultural tradition of Newman and Manning, and that ends with Vatican II (harshly criticized by Waugh) and with a new generation of more progressive Catholic authors.

–The website The Data Lounge has opened a discussion thread to consider this question:

Watching [the 1981 Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited] I couldn’t help but think, would anyone in 2021 be able to sit through a single episode of this? It’s far too literate for people weaned on recent period pieces like Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age etc.

Is it even possible for something to be both popular and sophisticated like this anymore?

There are several interesting responses, and I believe the thread may still be open. Here’s the link.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Film, Letters, Newspapers, Robbery Under Law, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Midwinter Roundup

Keeping Up With Aristocrats (More)

Posted on January 23, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

The second episode of the new ITV series “Keeping Up With the Aristocrats” airs tomorrow on ITV at 9pm. This will, no doubt, offer additional examples of enterprising efforts by four aristocratic families to make something of more immediate value out of their inheritances. Previously, we mentioned Evelyn Waugh’s connections with one of these families–the Sitwells at Renishaw Hall. It turns out, after some additional research, that Waugh also had a connection with the Sitwell’s neighbors the Fitzalan-Howards at Carlton Towers. Waugh recounts in some detail a 1939 visit to Carlton Towers where he was the invited guest of Miles Howard.

This connection is mentioned in an article by Eleanor Doughty appearing in today’s Sunday Times based on her interview of Gerald Fitzalan-Howard and his wife. Here’s an extract:

…Carlton, rebuilt by Edward Pugin in 1873, has 126 rooms, a clock tower, and about 2,000 acres. The house came into Gerald’s family through his grandmother Mona, 11th Baroness Beaumont, in whose family, the Stapletons, the estate had been since 1301. Gerald’s late father treasured Carlton as his childhood home, and, Gerald told me in 2018 when I visited, “could remember the First World War armistice parade coming through”. His friend, the author Evelyn Waugh, who was at Oxford with the future duke — in his time, the most senior lay Roman Catholic — stayed at Carlton, “and wrote Brideshead Revisited after he stayed here”.

Waugh leaves a record of that visit in his diary for 29 July 1939. The visit began with a trip in a hired railroad carriage arranged by Miles Howard who accompanied Waugh and two other guests on the trip to Yorkshire, where they got out at Selby. Waugh’s connection with the Howards seems to come through their friendship with his wife’s family, the Herberts. The Times article suggests that Waugh and Miles knew each other at Oxford, but that seems unlikely since Miles was 12 years younger than Waugh. In his diary entry, Waugh comments, “Lord Howard has little importance in the house and twitches painfully.” That must have been Lord Howard of Glossop (1885-1972) who (according to a footnote in the diary) was the father of Miles Howard (1915-2002) and owner of Carlton Towers at the time of Waugh’s visit. Miles  became the 17th Duke of Norfolk in 1975, inheriting the title not from his father but from a second cousin once removed. Miles was, in turn, the father of Gerald Fitzalan-Howard (b. 1962) present owner of  Carlton, who appears in the ITV series.

Just to complicate matters further, Waugh’s biographers make several references to a Francis Howard. This is probably Francis Philip Howard, 2nd Baron Howard of Penrith (1905-1999). Waugh met him on the occasion of his first meeting with the Herbert family in Portofino. His obituary in the Daily Telegraph (8 Dec 1999) says that during “school holidays and thereafter he enjoyed staying with his Herbert cousins in the West Country where his love of literature was fostered in company that included Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc, and Ronald Knox.” Francis was a witness at Waugh’s marriage to Laura Herbert in 1937 and a godfather of their first child Teresa. Selina Hastings identifies him as “Francis Howard, 2nd Baron Howard of Penrith”. On the day of his departure from Carlton Towers (2 August 1939), Waugh enigmatically writes in his diary: “Lord Howard of Penrith dies.” The person referred to as Francis Howard would have inherited the Penrith title at that time, but Waugh makes no connection between this Howard and those at Carlton Towers mentioned a few lines above. How Francis may be related, if at all, to the Fitzalan-Howards at Carlton Towers is not explained. His father was a diplomat: EsmĂ© Howard (1863-1939), sometime Ambassador to the US, and was created the 1st Baron Howard of Penrith in 1930 when he retired.

Waugh says that there were 7 or 8 Howards present when he visited Carlton Towers in 1939, “each with a Christian name beginning with M.” That would seem to exclude Francis Howard from that party. However, it is somewhat troubling to note that Miles, who was definitely present and seems to be Waugh’s connection to the family, had the full name “Miles Francis Stapleton Howard”.  So far as I can determine, however, “Francis Howard” and “Miles Howard” as referred to by Waugh and his biographers are different people. Michael Davie, who edited Waugh’s diaries, seems to agree (p. 810). Anyone having more or contrary information on this point is invited to comment as provided below. Another indirect connection existed between Waugh’s wife Laura and a “Henry Howard” who, according to Selina Hastings (p. 324), was one of her suitors before she met Evelyn. Since he lacks an “M” name, he was also probably absent from the Carlton Towers house party. He may possibly be Francis Howard’s brother: Henry Anthony Carrillo Howard (1913-1977).

In his diary, Waugh provides a detailed description of Carlton Towers, both outside and inside. It is not very flattering:

“First sight of the house is staggering, concrete-faced, ivy-grown, 1870 early Tudor, bristling with gargoyles, heraldic animals carrying fully emblazoned banners, coroneted ciphers; an orgy of heraldry…The inside gives every evidence of semi-amateur planning; space where none is needed, cramped arches and windows where one cries out for space, harsh light everywhere from bad stained glass…Large numbers of indifferent paintings ascribed to Italian masters. The great drawing room wainscotted in sham ebony with, above, sham Spanish leather, atrocious paintings in the panel of Shakespearian characters, more escutcheons with countless quarterings.”

But as he explored some further reaches of the house, he found

“many charms: the relics of two earlier houses below the 1870 shell, some 1830 Gothic, some first-class pre-Adam Georgian and bits of pre-Tudor rooms. A fine music library with some fairly interesting books.”

So far as I can tell from Waugh’s writings, he did not renew his friendships with the Howards after the war. They must have rubbed into each other in London but he mentions no further visits to Carlton Towers or meetings with Miles, Francis or “Lord Howard”. In the case of Francis, this may have been due to a war wound in 1942 from which, according to the Telegraph, he never fully recovered and which  limited his mobility. There was a further connection with Carlton Towers after Waugh’s death. As explained in Miles Howard’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph (26 June 2002):

When Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust was filmed at Carlton Towers, [Miles Howard, by then 17th Duke of Norfolk] was an extra in the part of a gardener; Kenneth Rose remarked in The Sunday Telegraph that Norfolk lit a bonfire and touched his cap as if “to the cottage born”.

It would seem fair to say that a closer personal relationship existed between Waugh and the Fitzalan-Howards than he had with their Protestant relatives living at Castle Howard a few miles further north, even though the latter have benefitted more from repeated adaptations of his works.

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Diaries, Documentaries, Interviews, Newspapers, Television Programs | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Keeping Up With Aristocrats (More)

Connolly’s Letters

Posted on January 22, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

A London auction house (Forum Auctions) has listed for sale 5 letters from Cyril Connolly to Evelyn Waugh. Here’s the description from their online announcement:

Connolly (Cyril) 5 Autograph Letters signed to Evelyn Waugh, [c. 1948], discussing “The Loved One”, to be published in Horizon magazine and with references to Aldous Huxley, Ronald Knox and George Orwell who, Connolly tells Waugh, “has written a horrific anti-totalitarian book about the future in this country, called 1984”.

The source of these letters is not revealed. The interesting question is why they are not included in the British Library’s archive catalogued as the Evelyn Waugh Papers.  This contains incoming correspondence to Evelyn Waugh from his friends and associates such as Connolly. The BL archive includes a manuscript volume # MS 81051 that contains 47 pages of letters from Connolly to Waugh between 1946-1964. The letters to be auctioned apparently cover the period late 1947-early 1948 when Waugh arranged for the publication of The Loved One in Connolly’s Horizon magazine. They may contain discussions about edits to the text of that novella which appeared in the magazine’s February 1948 issue. Some of Waugh’s side of the correspondence about The Loved One publication appears in his collected Letters, pp. 259 ff.

It is apparent from the annotations that the editor of the collected Letters (Mark Amory) had copies of Connolly’s side of the correspondence (or at least some of it) about the Horizon publication of The Loved One. At p. 260, this note appears relating to Waugh’s proposal dated 16 September 1947 offering the novella to Connolly for publication in Horizon:

Connolly was enthusiastic. “One of your very best I think. I shall be honoured to publish it.” He made several detailed suggestions, most of which Waugh adopted. The Loved One was published in February 1948 in Horizon and in November as a book. [Letters, 260.]

Additional comments from Connolly are quoted at p. 262. Waugh’s biographer Philip Eade quotes a letter from Connolly to Waugh that discusses the Horizon publication; this is dated 2 September 1947 and is cited to the BL archive as its source (Eade, pp. 283, 368). That quote also includes some of the same language of Connolly quoted in the collected Letters annotations (p. 260, n.2). Whether other letters among those to be auctioned may be the source for additional references to  Connolly’s publication of and editorial suggestions for The Loved One is not clear.

The Forum Auction notice includes a copy of one page of Connolly’s correspondence. This is where he describes George Orwell’s convalescence in a sanatorium near Stroud, Gloucestershire, which was in turn near where Waugh was living at Piers Court in Dursley. Waugh took up Connolly’s suggestion and visited Orwell there.  A least one Orwell biographer (DJ Taylor, p. 409) was aware that it was Connolly who was responsible for Waugh’s visiting Orwell at the sanatorium. But whether the discussions of Waugh and Connolly about Aldous Huxley or Ronald Knox or about Connolly’s early personal assessment of 1984 and Orwell’s state of health have been available to and discussed by the several biographers of those various writers I couldn’t say. The Ronald Knox discussion probably relates to Waugh’s essay on Knox that appeared in the May 1948 issue of Horizon.  Perhaps the BL or one of the repositories of Connolly’s papers will acquire these letters and assure their future availability to scholars.

The auction is scheduled for 10 February 2022. For more details see this link to the auction notice.

Share
Posted in Auctions, Letters, The Loved One | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Connolly’s Letters

Midwinter Events

Posted on January 18, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Here are some upcoming events that may be of interest to our readers:

–ITV has started a 3-episode documentary series called “Keeping up with the aristocrats” which began airing yesterday. It will follow the lives of four aristocratic families who are striving to preserve their expansive and expensive homes and estates by marketing bits of both to the public. Among the participants are the residents of Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, ancestral home of the Sitwells and a favorite venue for Evelyn Waugh’s Country House visits in the days of Osbert Sitwell’s incumbency. Today, Alexandra Sitwell, daughter of Osbert’s brother Sacheverell (also a friend of Waugh), and her husband Rick Hayward live there.

In this episode Alexandra and Rick host their Yorkshire neighbors Lord and Lady Fitzalan-Howard (aka Gerald and Emma) who live at Carlton Towers near Harrogate. They are relatives of the Howards who live at Castle Howard, also in Yorkshire. As noted in a recent post, these Fitzalan-Howards are of a Roman Catholic heritage whereas those at Castle Howard are descended from Protestants. The Fitzalan-Howards are in the process of starting a vineyard and wanted to compare notes on that subject with the Sitwells (or should they be referred to as the Haywards?) who already have one. Waugh would probably find this amusing. The other two subjects are Princess Olga Romanoff (currently single) and Lord Ivar Mountbatten and his husband James.

The Daily Telegraph’s online review of the first episode was written by William Cash, who it turns out supplements his income from journalism by organizing holiday lets on his own estate called Upton Cressett. Here’s the opening of his review:

There is a wonderful 1960s photograph of Evelyn Waugh taken by photographer Mark Gerson in which he is standing in a dogtooth, bookie-style, three-piece suit fiercely between two stone caryatides with armoured breasts who are guarding his small Somerset estate, Combe Florey. His hands are slung deep into his pockets and his frosty expression says: “Do not enter”. In short: public keep out.

The reverse is true today. To keep going, the public — or “guests”, as the former Duke of Devonshire always used to call Chatsworth’s tens of thousands of visitors — are now being courted with an increasingly wacky array of ventures. As seen by the enterprising efforts of the colourful cast of the new reality show, Keeping Up With The Aristocrats, which starts tonight on ITV, long gone are the days when aristos relied on thousands of acres of land and tenant rents to pay for their London houses and school fees.

It’s nothing less than an artisan country house revolution, and my milliner wife, Lady Laura, and myself are proud to be part of it. English country houses have always been stage sets and by reinventing themselves again they are helping to regenerate local economies and become local community hubs as they were in the Victorian and Edwardian (ie Downton) era.

No longer are we talking about the old traditional country house survival model: owner-led guided tours and tea rooms. Thanks in part to the Culture Recovery Fund, which doled out previously unheard of grants to struggling privately owned heritage owners, many faced with near ruin after their visitor businesses were closed due the pandemic, there has been a gold rush of planning applications and projects to turn every disused barn or stable into some innovative new ‘sustainable’ enterprise.

The first episode can be streamed on itvPlayer and subsequent episodes will air on the next two Mondays at 9pm. You will need a UK internet connection.

–Gresham College in London has announced a lecture on “Coincidences in the Novel: Charlotte BrontĂ« and George Eliot to Evelyn Waugh and David Nichols” that may be of interest. Here’s the description:

If, as displeased reviewers and readers sometimes complain, coincidences mar good plots, why do so many novels turn on them? From Charlotte BrontĂ« and George Eliot, to Sebastian Barry and David Nichols, novelists have relied on coincidences. While these can reveal the weaknesses of a novel’s design, they can also be put to creative use: as we will see, novelists, like Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark, choose to emphasise coincidences, making them entertaining and revealing.

The lecture will be given by literary critic Prof. John Mullan and can be attended online or in person at the Museum of London, 150 London Wall, Barbican EC2 on Wednesday, 2 March at 6-7pm. Registration details are available at this link.

–Finally, the Long Island newspaper Newsday has announced an online discussion of Waugh’s novel Scoop. This will be conducted via Zoom by the Amagansett, NY Library on Monday, 7 February at 130-230pm. Here’s a link for registration.

UPDATE (19 January 2022): Excerpts from William Cash’s review of the ITV “Aristocrats” series were added.

Share
Posted in Academia, Discussions, Lectures, Television Programs | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Midwinter Events

MLK Birthday Roundup

Posted on January 16, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the Daily Telegraph, combining elements of the travel and gardening columns, Matt Collins describes a recent trip to the Atlantic island of Madeira:

Upholding at least six of writer Paul Theroux’s 10 golden rules of travel, I went alone to the island, ignored the smartphone and packed light, taking a map, a notebook and a novel. The novel, Evelyn Waugh’s darkly comic Scoop, felt particularly apt: the hapless provincial English nature diarist of a leading broadsheet, William Boot, finds himself suddenly alone and in a landscape “where huge trees raised their spongy flowers”. Indeed, “Plants & Places” is not so far off the fictional Boot’s “Lush Places”.

—The Spectator offers a review by John Self of the The Penguin Modern Classics Book. Here are some excerpts:

In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk a line between freshness and durability; reflect the current age but hope to outlast it. For individual publishers, given many 20th-century writers are still in copyright, a modern classics list will necessarily be partial. However, few such partial lists are as complete as Penguin Modern Classics (PMCs), founded in 1961 […]

The outstandingly good reasons were lots of outstandingly good books that weren’t old enough to warrant the status of Penguin Classic but demanded some recognition, or at least some marketing. […] Now Penguin, never shy of raiding its own archives, gives us The Penguin Modern Classics Book by Henry Eliot, a companion to his Penguin Classics Book (2018). It is essentially a gossipy catalogue of the books, a feast of cover designs and fact-nuggets; and contains every book — more than 1,800 — ever published in the series.

Ah yes, those cover designs. From the start, PMCs have sought to present a stylish face to the world, to look, as Penguin publisher Simon Winder puts it, like ‘a series to be enjoyed, rather than something that is good for you’. The books of our youth are no less evocative than the music, and in browsing this volume you will be drawn magnetically to your own era: for me, it’s the 1990s watery-green-spined Penguin 20th-century Classics look, in which I first read Waugh, Woolf and Greene.

Waugh’s contributions to the Modern Classics line are well served in the book. As noted in a recent post, the first of these beginning in 1961 bore covers illustrated by Quentin Blake who went on to illustrate several examples of Waugh’s regular Penguin editions.

–Veteran Washington Post book reviewer Michael Dirda has created a list of the 20th century books he would preserve in a downsized collection:

…it’s all just too much. You decide to chuck the modern world and retreat to a cabin in the woods. […] I’d opt for books that through their prose, ideas or storytelling, trigger in me a deep sense of contentment and well-being. Works that are powerful and disturbing don’t qualify.

Because my beta shortlist ran to more than a hundred titles, what follows limits itself to 20th-century prose by English-language authors, one book apiece. Perhaps I’ll cover poetry and older literature another time. Needless to say, my final list is unapologetically personal and unofficial — no other kind is worth anything. Here, then, are 66 of my favorite books, in no particular order, each described with telegraphic succinctness.

It is not surprising that a book by Waugh makes Dirda’s shortlist, given his frequent references to books by and about Waugh over the years.  But his choice is rather out of the ordinary:

“The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh,” edited by Donat Gallagher. Journalism from the best modern practitioner of classic English prose.

And here’s his choice of a book by the Society’s Honorary President:

“Small World,” by David Lodge. The funniest of all academic comedies.

–The TLS has a review about a history of the Messel family: From Refugees to Royalty by John Hilary. Waugh was acquainted with two of the more recent family members who were his contemporaries: Oliver and Anne, later married as  (1) Anne Armstrong-Jones and later still as (2) Anne Parsons, Countess of Rosse. The review (by Michael Hall) concludes with this:

…the two younger children, Anne and Oliver, both became celebrities, Oliver as a stage and interior designer of charismatic brilliance and Anne as a beauty and socialite. Hilary backs up every anecdote with a reference and so ignores the one attributed to Evelyn Waugh, who claimed that when shown a turf hovel on the Irish estate of her second husband, the Earl of Rosse, Anne turned to its unhappy elderly inhabitant saying, “My dear, don’t change a thing. It’s simply you!”

This apocryphal story was a tease at the expense of Anne’s genuine interest in architectural conservation, which led to her becoming one of the founders of the Victorian Society in 1958. Both her flirtatious charm and the element of cold-hearted toughness it disguised were inherited by her son from her first marriage, Lord Snowdon, qualities that may perhaps provide a clue to how the family has been able to reinvent itself so many times. In his conclusion Hilary laments that the Messel name is in danger of dying out in England, but the fact that it is borne by the furniture designer Thomas Messel (son of Linley) and his son, the silversmith Hal Messel, suggests that the story is far from over.

The Waugh anecdote is recorded in the Diaries (783, UK; 779,US), referring to Anne as “Tugboat Annie Rosse”.

UPDATE (16 January 2022): Thanks to reader Dave Lull for providing the source of the “Tugboat Annie” quote.

UPDATE 2 (22 January 2022): A clarification of Quentin Blake’s illustration details was added.

Share
Posted in Essays, Articles & Reviews, Evelyn Waugh Society, Newspapers, Scoop, The Loved One, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on MLK Birthday Roundup

Terry Teachout (1956-2022) R.I.P

Posted on January 15, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

American literary, drama and music critic Terry Teachout died earlier this week at the age of 65. It its obituary, the New York Times commented that the conservative Teachout never allowed his political views to influence his artistic judgement:

An acolyte of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Podhoretz, he emerged from the scrum of young urban conservatives energized by the Reagan presidency and eager to take it further; he once called for a “Ronald Reagan of culture” who could “present an affirmative vision of America’s common culture.”

But he took care to separate his politics from his criticism, and he derided those who mixed the two. Nor was he a cultural reactionary: He played bass in a high school rock band, loved the TV show “Freaks and Geeks” and welcomed the possibility that film might have replaced the novel as the dominant storytelling medium.

The Times notes at least one example of where his political and artistic judgements worked in tandem. This was in the 1980s, after he had begun living in New York City and writing for, inter alia, Harper’s Magazine, The Daily News and Wall Street Journal. According to the Times:

He fell in with a gaggle of like-minded young conservatives who felt ostracized by the liberal culture around them. He helped start a salon, the Vile Body; its name was taken loosely from a book by the British writer Evelyn Waugh, who was then enjoying a renaissance among young right-wingers.

The salon became a regular haunt for 20- and 30-something conservatives located along the Washington-New York-Cambridge axis, including Bruce Bawer, Richard Brookhiser, David Brooks, Roger Kimball and John Podhoretz.

Teachout rarely missed a chance to mention his admiration of Evelyn Waugh’s writing whenever the opportunity arose. Here is a recent example reposted from the WSJ on his webpage About Last Night:

A Terry Teachout Reader, my self-anthology, came out sixteen years ago. I’ve published hundreds of pieces on various subjects since then, and I have no plans to put together a sequel to the Teachout Reader, so I’ve launched a series of occasional posts drawn from my fugitive essays, articles, and reviews. I hope you like this one, which came from a 2004 review of Bright Young Things, the film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

*  *  *

Like so many other novelists of his generation, Waugh was keenly interested in how films “make things happen” on the screen by showing “actions and incidents” instead of allowing characters to explain their motivations at length. In Vile Bodies he translated this essentially visual approach into words on paper, depicting London in the Twenties in a tumbling rush of fragmentary scenes and spare, elliptical dialogue that suggests far more than it states. Nothing could have been so self-consciously modern. Yet the uproariously funny Vile Bodies turns out to be the darkest of “comic” novels, one whose inhabitants are all hurtling gaily toward their doom. It’s anything but surprising to learn that Waugh’s first wife left him while he was writing Vile Bodies, or that he converted to Catholicism eight months after it was published. Every page is scented with the anguish of a disillusioned young man searching for meaning in a world gone grossly wrong.

 

Share
Posted in Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Evelyn Waugh’s Centenary at Oxford

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

This month marks the centenary of Evelyn Waugh’s matriculation at Oxford. He started his Oxford career at Hertford College on 8 January 1922. That was the beginning of Hilary Term in 1922; this year, it begins next Sunday, 16 January 2022. The decision to start in a by-term rather than in the Fall or Michaelmas Term was primarily his father’s and had unhappy consequences later in his Oxford career. As Waugh explains in his autobiography, his father:

… in January 1922 decided to send me at once to Oxford in the by-term. I was eager enough to go and my father was showing his habitual impatience to get a task finished; in this case my education. He was growing weary of routine at Chapman and Hall’s and looked forward to retirement. He believed (a delusion as things turned out) that when I had my degree I should be off his hands and he so much the nearer to leisure or to less exacting work.

The original plan had been that, if I had won a scholarship, [which he did] I should go for nine months to France to get some command of the language. It has been my life-long impediment that I never did this. But I do not regret my premature matriculation. It sent me to university as a lone explorer.

Many men were content to confine their interests and friendships to their colleges. I do not know if I should have been, if I had come up at the normal time. As things were, I had little choice but to be a rover. A Little Learning, p. 135 (CWEW, v. 19).

In his third and final year, he faced final degree exams in the the Trinity Term (April to June). Because he started early, this was his 8th term of the 9 required for a degree. He planned to spend the following Michaelmas term in residence (in a flat to be shared with Hugh Lygon on Magdalen Street) in anticipation of little pressure of course work or exams. Because he passed with a poor third-class, however, he lost his scholarship, and his father refused to pay the costs of that final term. Waugh, therefore, left without a degree. This was not because he failed his exams (as many think) but because he was unable to complete the residency requirements. I have been told by Oxford officials that, under today’s practice, a request for waiver of the residency requirement would be routinely granted to any student who had passed his final exams before completing the 9 terms in residence. I wonder if it has ever occurred to the University that it might be a worthwhile gesture to bestow that degree posthumously.

 

 

 

Share
Posted in A Little Learning, Academia, Anniversaries, Oxford | Comments Off on Evelyn Waugh’s Centenary at Oxford

Roundup: Parties, T-shirts and Statues

Posted on January 9, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Financial Times has an article by Rosa Lyster on “What makes a great fictional party.” This is inspired by the party drought that was only broken only a few months ago:

…As well as people, music and a reason to celebrate, you need at least two or more of the following in combination: a highly anticipated guest, ideally a new person or someone who has been away for a long time; an inner sanctum for smaller groups to conduct private business — it’s best, though not essential, if these groups have only recently been formed; a core group; an intimidating element that must be won over; an enemy, ideally a common one, for purposes of bonding; uneven awareness of a potentially upsetting piece of information; a dedication to making hay in the shadow of gathering storm clouds; pockets of sexual tension; evidence of recruitment from different social universes; a mix of ages; people who need to fall in love with one another; and a collective recognition that it cannot last. Extra points if the party is in an unexpected venue or has involved a long or uncomfortable journey.

Not to be a traditionalist, but in addition to all this, the minor decencies of life must be observed. It’s best if the party takes place in the evening, and while drugs can, maybe even should, be present, they cannot play too central a role. In other words, the party cannot be about drugs, so no monologues from someone on amphetamines, and absolutely no stream of consciousness from someone who is hallucinating. Exceptions can be made for all other proscriptions but these ones are important.

These qualities feature in the set pieces of the great 20th-century party laureates — F Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green. Not all of them at once but enough to produce the unpredictable conditions necessary for a party to work, for events to veer off in exhilarating directions, for people to decide they are in love with each other after 10 minutes, for a bomb to go off whose reverberations will be felt throughout the story. They are everywhere, when you know what to look for.

The article continues with a brief discussion of fictional parties from the works of five other authors, the most memorable of which are those in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Edward St Aubyn’s Some Hope. The highly anticipated guests in those were Mrs Thatcher and Princess Margaret, respectively.

–An enterprising online clothing company is offering T-Shirts for men, women and children that display the art work from the US first edition dust jacket of Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Here’s the link.

–The saga relating to the production status of the BBC/HBO TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisted continues in the entertainment trade press. This appeared in a recent edition of Variety:

A biopic of iconic actress Audrey Hepburn starring Rooney Mara is in the works at Apple, Variety has confirmed. Oscar-nominated “Call Me by Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino will helm the project, with Mara producing and “The Giver” co-writer Michael Mitnick penning the script.

Mara has been nominated for an Academy Award twice, for her work in 2011’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and 2015’s “Carol.” She most recently starred in Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” alongside Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Willem Dafoe. Mara’s upcoming projects include Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking,” a drama centering on eight Mennonite women, which also stars Frances McDormand, Ben Whishaw, Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley.

Guadagnino recently wrapped production on his upcoming romantic horror film “Bones and All,” starring Taylor Russell and TimothĂ©e Chalamet. The Italian filmmaker also co-created, co-wrote and directed the 2021 HBO miniseries “We Are Who We Are.”

Several other trade journals have added comments similar to this one from SlashFilm.com:

Guadagnino and Mara are also tentatively set to collaborate on a BBC miniseries adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel “Brideshead Revisited,” which would further reunite Mara with her “Carol” and “Nightmare Alley” co-star Cate Blanchett (assuming the cast comes together as intended).

–The British Library has posted an illustrated description of one of its holdings that has a Waugh connection. This is a pamphlet containing one of what are known as    T S Eliot’s Ariel poems–“The Journey of the Magi”. The pamphlets were published in 1927 by Faber and contained a total of 6 original Eliot poems published for the first time. There were also poems by other lesser known poets as well as illustrations by several contemporary artists such as Eric Gill, John Nash and Eric Ravilious. The artwork that is the focus of the BL article was by McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954). According to the BL posting, Kauffer:

…was an artist, graphic designer and friend of Eliot’s. His work was commissioned by a number of high-profile clients including the London Underground and British Empire exhibition. It became fashionable to the extent that, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) the fictional Charles Ryder remembers displaying one of Kauffer’s posters in his Oxford college rooms in the early 1920s. According to Eliot himself, Kauffer ‘did something for modern art with the public and something for the public with modern art’. His design on the cover abstracts the Magi into geometric shapes, all the more contemporary for the fact that they appear to be wearing bowler hats; the star which they follow in the story hangs above them in stylized form.

The cover artwork can be viewed in the photo of the pamphlet that accompanies the posting. Here’s a link. Charles Ryder’s poster by Kauffer is mentioned at p. 26 (first UK edition), 36 (rev. edition).

–The Bodleian Library has posted a copy of the detailed contents of a collection of letters received by Arthur Joseph Pollen (1899-1968). He was a sculptor and his connection with Waugh probably arose from the bust of Ronald Knox that Pollen created. The notice includes this:

Evelyn Waugh: 12 letters to Arthur Joseph Lawrence Pollen, 1946-1959. With letter from Mark Amory, Jun 1976; and accompanying notes by Louis Jebb [post 2017].

The correspondence (or at least some of it) is probably in connection with Waugh’s preparation and delivery of an address at the 1959 unveiling of Pollen’s bust of Knox at Trinity College, Oxford. According to Waugh’s Letters, this was entitled “The Quintessence of Oxford”. The text was published in The Tablet but has apparently not been included in any subsequent collection. Nor were any of Waugh’s letters to Pollen included in the 198o collection edited by Mark Amory, even though the Bodleian notice mentions Pollen’s communication with Amory. What may have engendered the Bodleian’s publication of the notice at this particular time is not explained.

 

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Adaptations, Art, Photography & Sculpture, Brideshead Revisited, Letters, Newspapers, Ronald Knox, Television | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Parties, T-shirts and Statues

The Times Revisits Castle Howard

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Jeffrey Manley

Today’s issue of The Times carries an article by Andrew Billen (“Stately homes to spare? TV stardom beckons”) recommending country houses to visit, once they are reopened to the public, based on their setting for TV series and films. This was inspired by an article in yesterday’s edition of the paper by Jake Kanter (“Netflix is lifeline for stately homes”) about how important such settings had become for film producers and how equally important the income from those productions had become for the owners. Here’s the entry from Billen’s article (“TV stardom beckons”) for Castle Howard:

Castle Howard, North Yorkshire (Bridgerton and Brideshead Revisited)
While Bridgerton’s Simon and Daphne played their sex scenes within Wilton Hall, Clyvedon Castle’s exteriors, grounds and entrance hall were all Castle Howard. For millions, however, the Yorkshire castle will always be Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead.

Granada TV’s adaptation of Brideshead Revisited in 1981 introduced cinematic grandeur to TV drama and viewers’ first glimpse of Castle Howard gobsmacked them as surely as it did Charles Ryder on his first visit to Sebastian Flyte’s family home. The association between the two castles proved so indelible that a 2008 film was again filmed at Castle Howard.

Visitors can visit Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds, where in both versions Charles and Sebastian tipsily canoodled, and also the four-poster bed where Lord Marchmain (Laurence Olivier/Michael Gambon) died. The connection between the Flyte family and the Howards is not only cinematic. Like the Flytes, the Howards are one of Britain’s pre-eminent Catholic [sic] families.
Gardens open now

Not so sure they’ve got it right about the religious affiliation of the family at Castle Howard. The Roman Catholic Howards are the branch who live, inter alia, at Arundel Castle in Sussex and hold the title of Dukes of Norfolk. These are called the Fitzalan-Howards. Those at Castle Howard in Yorkshire are, so far as I am aware, Protestants. The two lines are related, but it would take some one well above my genealogical pay grade to explain how. It has something to do with the Earl of Carlisle. If anyone knows how to explain why the Yorkshire Howards became and remain Protestant, they are invited to comment below. It is the sort of thing Evelyn Waugh would have liked to discuss.

A Times reader raised a different point regarding today’s story:

Sir, Further to Andrew Billen’s article “Stately to spare–TV stardom beckons” (Time2, Jan 4) on Castle Howard being used as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead by Granada TV, the fictional Brideshead was based upon the Gothic Revival Madresfield Court, where Waugh had been a frequent guest, a far cry from the English baroque of Castle Howard.

Professor Peter Fawcett

Department of Architecture, University of Nottingham

In reply to Professor Fawcett another reader wrote this:

Sir, Professor Peter Fawcett (letter, Jan 5) asserts that the English Baroque of Castle Howard was not the primary model for Brideshead. I disagree. The clues in the text are too numerous to ignore: arches, broken pediments, coffered ceilings, “pillared shade” and above all “the high and insolent dome”. On his first visit, Charles Ryder asks: “Is the dome by Inigo Jones too?” and later describes staying at Brideshead as “my conversion to the Baroque”. The confusion arises because Waugh did indeed stay at Madresfield Court but it was his friends, the children of the 7th Earl Beauchamp, particularly the ill-fated Hugh Lygon, who were inspiration for the Flyte family.

However, given all this pedantry it is perhaps fitting to recall Sebastian’s reply to Charles’s question quoted above: “Oh, Charles, don’t be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it’s pretty?”

Victoria Hooberman London NW1

Anther Times reader added this a few days later:

Castle Howard’s mystery
Sir, The extent to which Castle Howard informed Evelyn Waugh’s thinking is not explicit but there are many affinities between it and Brideshead, not least the great dome (letters, Jan 5 & 6). Waugh visited Castle Howard in 1937, and his approach from the north closely corresponds with the sequence of sights Charles Ryder records on his first visit to Brideshead.

Waugh also enjoyed teasing his readers: the novel contains the caveat “I am not I: thou art not he or she; they are not they”, and one might add the warning “it is not there”. He was writing a novel, not a guidebook. It was the Granada TV production that linked the real house in Yorkshire with the fictional one in Wiltshire. After scouting various possibilities, the producer, Derek Granger, declared Castle Howard “quite the most romantic and atmospheric house I have ever seen — Castle Howard most beautifully fills the bill”.
Christopher Ridgway
Curator, Castle Howard

The author of the last latter Christopher Ridgway recently gave an illustrated and fully researched lecture entitled: “75 Years of Brideshead Revisited: Brideshead & Castle Howard–Fact, Fiction and In-between.” This is posted on YouTube. See also my detailed article on the same subject: “Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead and Castle Howard” in Evelyn Waugh Studies 50.3 (Winter 2019).

UPDATE (8 January 2022); Two additional letters and concluding paragraph were added.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Evelyn Waugh Studies, Newspapers, Television | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on The Times Revisits Castle Howard

New Year’s Roundup

Posted on December 31, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–In a semi-final round of the University Challenge Christmas edition on BBC4, broadcast 29 December 2021, a three-part bonus question was based on the writings of Selina Hastings. The question (at 11:02 minutes) was to identify the subjects of three of her biographies based on the clues provided. The University of Edinburgh team (made up of graduates, rather than students, in this seasonal series) correctly identified the first two as Nancy Mitford and Sybille Bedford. The third subject was described as a satirical novelist about whom the reviewers had commented that his portrayal was sympathetic because, like his biographer, he was a dedicated gossip and was also the most complicated of men. He died in 1966. The team could be heard discussing the possibilities, and at least one of them mentioned  Waugh, but the team captain, TV actor and presenter, Miles Jupp,  answered NoĂ«l Coward. Edinburgh went on, nevertheless, to win that round and advance to the finals.

–A military history website has posted an undated entry on the 1941 British raid on Bardia in North Africa. Following the description of the raid, this coda is added:

The author Evelyn Waugh—who took part in the raid—related in an article he wrote for Life Magazine in November 1941, that the Germans “sent a strong detachment of tanks and armoured cars to repel the imagined invasion”. In his diary published in 1976, a very different picture emerged of incompetent execution by the commandos, against virtually no opposition.

The Life magazine article entitled “Commando Raid on Bardia” is reprinted in EAR.

–The Independent newspaper has joined other journals in predicting the presentation of a treat for Waugh fans in the New Year:

Brideshead Revisited on BBC One

Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino is adapting Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel for the small screen, with an army of stars playing the lead roles. Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes and Joe Alwyn are just some of the actors who will appear in this story of a young British man who gets entangled with an aristocratic family after visiting their ancestral home.

And this notice appeared in a Vogue magazine listing of movies, shows and books to be enjoyed in the New Year:

“I’m super excited for the new BBC adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (one of my favourite novels!). The cast includes Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes and Rooney Mara and given how much I adored this year’s adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love I imagine this is going to be such a treat. I’m also hanging out for mini-series adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends.” — Annie Brown, contributing editor

Similar notices appear in the websites of Wired and GQ magazines. But there is still no advance, in any of these notices, on previous reports in terms of the number of episodes or scheduling details.

–This week’s guest in the New York Times Book Review interview series “By the Book” is writer Kathryn Schulz. Here’s an excerpt:

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

A couple of years after we met, my partner and I moved in together and combined our book collections, but the literary merger that’s more striking to me began when we fell in love. Inevitably I wanted to read all the books I’d missed that were important to her, which is how I finally got around to reading, among other things, Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood,” Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” and Jean Toomer’s “Cane.”

–A housing developer or city planner in Charles County, Maryland, has come up with a batch of new street names based on English writers. The developer describes the new housing estate in these terms: “St. Charles is a masterplanned community with townhomes and single-family homes for sale in White Plains, MD.” New listings are appearing on streets such as Evelyn Waugh Court. Here’s a link to a new listing at 11603 on that street. Nearby are houses on Mary Shelley Place, Dorothy Sayers Place, and Charlotte Bronte Lane. These street names are too new to appear on Google maps, but nearby names are filled in for Shakespeare Circle, Thomas Hardy Place, Tolkien Ave, Roald Dahl Place, etc. Nothing yet on a Nancy Mitford Street or Elizabeth Bowen Drive, but those are surely under development. Until the street names appear on an accessible map, we can only guess whether Evelyn Waugh Court may be placed in a neighborhood where the other streets have been named exclusively for British women authors. Of course, once they’ve run out of authors, why not use characters and book titles–Crouchback Crescent has a nice alliterative ring to it and Brideshead Boulevard sounds like a sure winner.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Biographies, Brideshead Revisited, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Interviews, Newspapers, Television Programs | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on New Year’s Roundup