BBC Documentary on Waugh’s Illustrator

Posted on December 28, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC has broadcast a delightful documentary on Quentin Blake, artist and illustrator. This is entitled Quentin Blake: The Drawing of My Life and debuted on Christmas Day on BBC2. It will be repeated on 6 January. Here’s an excerpt from a review in the Financial Times which describes Blake as:

… a small, stubbly 89-year-old, with sticky-up hair and straggly eyebrows who looks remarkably like a Quentin Blake drawing. Directed by Peter Sweasey, this charming one-off documentary finds the British writer and illustrator reflecting on his life while drawing key scenes from it across a 30-ft canvas. It’s a treat to watch the artist at work, and to see him create characters and stories out of the roughest of squiggles, his eyes twinkling all the while. Not for nothing has he described his style as “deceptively slapdash”…

The Guardian also ran a preview of the program. Here’s an excerpt from that:

…A new BBC documentary, Quentin Blake: The Drawing of My Life, allows for a wider appreciation, opening as it does with the 89-year-old illustrator confronted by 30ft of empty canvas and an invitation to fill it with an artwork that tells the story of his creative life. The broad brush of biography is soon filled in: his 1930s upbringing in suburban Sidcup, south-east London, from where Blake first got his work published in Punch while still at school; his decision to read English at Cambridge rather than going to art school; his 60s career as an in-demand illustrator (his Penguin paperback jackets for the likes of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim have an attractively louche appeal); and as an author himself, most notably A Drink of Water, made with the writer and longtime friend and collaborator, John Yeoman….

Although not mentioned in the TV documentary or in the above reviews, an earlier Guardian article explained how Blake’s work for Penguin brought him into contact with Waugh’s books. This was in a review of a recent book: The Penguin Modern Classics Book by Henry Eliot. See previous post. Starting in 1961, Blake created covers for the six Waugh novels reissued by Penguin in its newly-introduced Modern Classics series: Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, Put Out More Flags, and The Loved One. After this fairly ambitious beginning, Blake’s drawings continued to occupy the cover space on additional printings of Waugh’s Penguins throughout the rest of the 1960’s. This extended not only to other books in the Penguin Modern Classics series such as Brideshead Revisited (1962) and Decline and Fall (1964) but to new additions to the Penguin contemporary list. These included Gilbert Pinfold in 1962, Helena in 1963 and each of the three war novels published separately in 1964. By the middle of the 1960s, a Blake drawing appeared on the covers of all Waugh novels then in print under the Penguin label. The earlier Guardian article concluded that “Blake, whose irreverent, scratchy style was already in place, captures Waugh’s mordant wit and keen sense of life’s absurdities…”

This uniform cover art must have been a successful marketing tool for Penguin because they repeated it in the 1970s with another artist. This was Peter Bentley and his partnership Bentley/Farrell/Burnett with their art deco/psychedelic covers. These included an even larger range of books than the Blake-illustrated Modern Classics line, as Work Suspended and When the Going Was Good were added. Unfortunately, Henry Eliot’s recent book, noted previously, does not extend to the Bentley covers, since they were issued outside of the Penguin Modern Classics series. As time went on, Waugh’s books changed covers fairly frequently and re-entered the Modern Classics line.  Some appeared in other Penguin uniform series such as the Penguin Travel Library in the 1980s, and occasionally they were issued independently of series as, for example, in the case of TV or film tie-ins.

In 2011, Penguin, reportedly piqued that the assignment for the Complete Works series went to OUP, published all of Waugh’s books issued in his lifetime (fiction and non-fiction) in a handsome hardback series denominated “Penguin Classics”. These had uniform, light blue dust wrappers in a minimalist, tombstone design that was reminiscent of Penguin’s early orange covers. They were apparently not reprinted, as some volumes (e.g., Brideshead) quickly sold out and became collectibles and others appeared on the remainder shelves. Brideshead seems to be an exception, however, since it has reappeared in a separate hardbound edition for a new “Penguin Clothbound Classics” series as well as a new paperback edition in the Penguin Modern Classics series.

The Quentin Blake documentary will be repeated on BBC2 on Thursday, 6 January 2022 at 0:45a and can be streamed on the internet for the next 11 months on the BBC iPlayer at this link. A UK internet connection is required.

UPDATE (29 December 2021): Relevant information from and a link to a recent posting was added.

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Bibliophilia, Newspapers, Television Programs | Tagged , , | Comments Off on BBC Documentary on Waugh’s Illustrator

Boxing Day Roundup

Posted on December 27, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Penguin have announced the issuance of a new edition of Waugh’s first book Rossetti: His Life and Work. This will be in the Penguin Modern Classics series and will be issued in the UK in April 2022. It will be the first Penguin paperback edition of this book. The only previous Penguin edition was in the 2011 Penguin hardback series. Here is a copy of the announcement:

Evelyn Waugh’s first book, Rossetti, is an intimate account of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s tragic and mysterious life: the story behind some of the greatest poetry and painting of the nineteenth century. Shot through with Waugh’s charm and dry wit, and illuminated by his sense of kinship with the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Rossetti is at once a brilliant reevaluation of Rossetti’s work and legacy, as well as a bold gesture of defiance against the art establishment of the 1920s.

A copy of the full announcement, including a photo of the cover, is available here.

–The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews a new book about the history of censorship in Britain. This is entitled A Matter of Obscenity and is written by Christopher Hilliard. The review by Thomas Sojka opens with a reference to Vile Bodies:

ON HIS RETURN to England from Paris, Adam Fenwick-Symes faced the inquisition of the customs officer. Fenwick-Symes had in his luggage a veritable library: books on architecture and history, a dictionary, an economics text, and a copy of Dante’s Purgatorio. Of these, the last two were confiscated pending investigation and dubbed by the witless official to be, respectively, “Subversive Propaganda” and “French, […] pretty dirty, too.” Perhaps most tragically for Fenwick-Symes’s livelihood, the manuscript of his autobiography, due at his publisher — deemed “downright dirt” by the official — was to be burned. Despite his protestations, the official was unmoved, saying, “Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.”

Though this account is invented by Evelyn Waugh for his 1930 novel, Vile Bodies, it is illustrative of the culture surrounding obscenity in early 20th-century Britain. The unnamed Home Secretary was a clear stand-in for the real William Joynson-Hicks, who served in the role from 1924 to 1929. The popular press portrayed “Jix” as a moral crusader, launching a war against nightclubs and the bright young things who frequented them and also against obscene literature (particularly Continental imports).

[…] It is this struggle among campaigners against obscenity, reformers, publishers, authors, and booksellers that Christopher Hilliard’s new book so brilliantly illuminates. A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern England refashions developments in the law into a lucid and engaging cultural history, outlining debates around censorship (particularly literary, but also film, magazines, and pulp fiction) in Britain from 1857 to 1979. […]  It is unsurprising that the trial over Lady Chatterley’s Lover takes up an entire chapter — indeed, it serves as a kind of fulcrum. And the compression of the Victorian period and its immediate aftermath into one chapter at the start both grounds subsequent sections and gets some important details out of the way…

–In the Catholic Herald, its editor William Cash recounts a recent visit to the Worth School in Sussex, a Roman Catholic independent school that is an off-shoot of his alma mater Downside:

…In August 1964, in the midst of the Second Vatican Council, five years after Worth separated from Downside in 1959 and became an independent school, the Catholic Herald published a letter from Evelyn Waugh – two years before he died on Easter Friday in the lavatory after receiving communion. In his letter, he lamented over those who celebrated Vatican II as a victory of “progressives” over “conservatives”. Waugh saw it as the defeat of theological principle to cultural fashion.

One thing I have learnt since becoming editor of the Herald is that as we head towards the 60th anniversary of Vatican II, the battle lines that will define the future history of the Church are now well drawn. The next few decades will be a critical time for informed Catholic journalism. Waugh was concerned about the decline of faith and tradition and the relationship of Catholicism to secular populist culture….

–The website for “the b/o/i” (“The Battle of Ideas”) has posted a talk from its current “Academy” series. The podcast takes about 1/2 hour and is described here:

Ideas Matter: ‘Brideshead Revisited: World wars and the end of the old elite’
December 22, 2021
From the series ‘The elite: old and new’, theme of the boi charity’s event The Academy, held online in November 2021.

Published in the weeks after VE day in 1945, just as British voters swept a Labour Government into power, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was a surprise bestseller in both the UK and America, and captured the imagination of generations of readers. The story follows the life of Captain Charles Ryder and his fateful obsession with the aristocratic Flyte family as they slowly fall from grace and fortune during the interwar years. So how does Waugh make sense of the decline of the British establishment? Is the destruction of the old order, as one character has it, ‘all on account of the war’? What drove Waugh’s attacks on modernism? And what can the decline of the old elite tell us about the elite of today?

Lecture by Helen Searls, chief operating officer, Feature Story News (FSN); founder, Washington Hyenas’ Book Club

THE ACADEMY ONLINE IV: The elite: old and new
To view the full programme and some suggested background reading to the talks, please visit https://theboi.co.uk/academy-online-iv

You can also listen to the talk at this link.

–A book blogger, writing as “astrofella.wordpress.com”, has posted on a website called “Books & Boots” a detailed summary and assessment of Waugh’s postwar novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe. The blogger has similarly surveyed most of Waugh’s books that preceded publication of SKME in order of publication, and those are posted on the same site. The exceptions are the biographies and two of the travel books. Here’s the introduction to the SKME entry:

Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a short, boisterous, high spirited, at times farcically crude satire on the state of the world just after the Second World War. I found it humorous and enjoyable all the way through and, as so often with Waugh, also packed with fascinating social and political history.

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Rossetti: His Life and Works, Scott-King's Modern Europe, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Boxing Day Roundup

Joan Didion (1934-2021) R. I. P.

Posted on December 26, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

American novelist, essayist and journalist Joan Didion (1934-2021) died earlier this week in New York City at the age of 87. A memorial column in the National Review remembers her as an early contributor to their pages in what was the early stage of her own career. One of her contributions was a review of Waugh’s war trilogy which she wrote on the occasion of the issuance of the final volume (The End of the Battle) that was published in 1962. The title was Unconditional Surrender in the UK. Part of that review was quoted in one of the memorials posted by the National Review (linked above). Here is a longer version of that excerpt where Didion tries to explain why many Americans do not fully appreciate Waugh’s writing–treating him as a humorist rather than a novelist:

…Every real American story begins in innocence and never stops mourning the loss of it: the banishment from Eden is our one great tale, lovingly told and retold, adapted, disguised and told again, passed down from Hester Prynne to Temple Drake, from Natty Bumppo to Holden Caulfield; it is the single stunning fact in our literature, in our folklore, in our history, and in the lyrics of our popular songs. Because hardness of mind is antithetical to innocence, it is not only alien to us but generally misapprehended. What we take it for, warily, is something we sometimes call cynicism, sometimes call wit, sometimes (if we are given to this kind of analysis) disapprove as “a cheap effect,” and almost invariably hold at arm’s length, the way Eve should have held that snake.

It is precisely this hardness of mind which creates a gulf between Evelyn Waugh and most American readers. There is a fine edge on, and a perfect balance to, his every perception, and although he is scarcely what you could call unread in the United States, neither is he what you could call understood. When he is not being passed off as “anachronistic” or “reactionary” (an adjective employed by Gore Vidal and others to indicate their suspicion that Waugh harbors certain lingering sympathies with the central tenets of Western civilization), he is being feted as a kind of trans-Atlantic Peter DeVries, a devastating spoofer who will probably turn out really to be another pseudonym for Patrick Dennis.

The review entitled “Gentleman in Battle” appeared in the 27 March 1962 issue of the National Review and reportedly has not been included in previous collections. It can be viewed at this link.  De Vries and Dennis had careers as comic novelists in the mid 20th century. Dennis’s best know works were Auntie Mame and Little Me, the only of his 16 comic novels written between 1953-1972 that are still in print. De Vries published 37 comic novels between 1940-1986, four of which, including the best known– Tunnel of Love and The Blood of the Lamb–remain in print.

The obituary notice in the National Review lists what are probably Didion’s best known works:

Didion, an acclaimed essayist, novelist, and screenwriter, was known for works including Play It As It Lays [novel and film], The White Album [essay collection], and her best-selling memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, for which she won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

She reportedly stopped writing in 2011, but a new collection of her essays (Let Me Tell You What I Mean) was published earlier this year and will soon be issued in paperback. This included essays not previously collected that were written between the late 1960s and the year 2000. A more detailed obituary appears in the New York Times. An earlier discussion about Didion’s career at the National Review appeared in a previous posting.

Share
Posted in Newspapers, Unconditional Surrender/The End of the Battle | Tagged , | Comments Off on Joan Didion (1934-2021) R. I. P.

Waugh’s Christmas 1946

Posted on December 24, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh records in his Diaries 75 years ago his rather downbeat experience of the second Christmas in the postwar Atlee era. His feelings may resonate with many of us who are experiencing our second Christmas in the Age of Covid:

Monday 23 December 1946

The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression. […] At tea I meet the three older children again and they usurp the drawing-room until it is time to dress for dinner. I used to take some pleasure in inventing legends for them about Basil Bennett, Dr Bedlam and the Sebag-Montefiores. But now they think it ingenious to squeal: ‘It isn’t true.’ I taught them the game of draughts for which they show no aptitude.

The frost has now broken and everything is now dripping and shabby and gusty. The prospect of Christmas appalls me and I look forward to the operating theatre as a happy release.

Waugh was scheduled to have an operation for hemorrhoids after Christmas and before embarking on an ocean voyage with his wife to New York en route to Hollywood. The operation turned out to be more painful and annoying than he had anticipated.

Christmas Day 1946

Drove to Midnight Mass at Nympsfield very slowy on frozen roads with Teresa, Bron and Vera [the nursery maid] in the back of the car. The little church was painfully crowded. We sat behind a dozen insubordinate little boys who coughed and stole and wrangled. The chairs were packed so close that it was impossible to kneel straight. Drove home very slowly and did not get to bed until 2.30 am. Laura has imprudently sent Saunders and Kitty for holidays so that she and Deakin are grossly overworked. I made a fair show of geniality throughout the day though the specter of a litter of shoddy toys and half-eaten sweets sickened me. Everything is so badly made nowadays that none of the children’s presents seemed to work. Luncheon was cold and poorly cooked. A ghastly day. I spent what leisure I had in comparing the Diary of a Nobody with its serialized version in Punch.

Laura gave me a pot of caviar which I ate a week ago. My mother gave me a copy of the Diary of a Nobody. But for these I have had no presents though I have given many. I should like to think that from 29th October [day after Waugh’s birthday] onwards friends from all over the country were thinking ‘What can we give him for Christmas?’ and hunting shops and embroidering and continuing to find me unique and delectable presents. But it is not so.

Share
Posted in Diaries, Evelyn Waugh | 4 Comments

Winter Solstice Roundup

Posted on December 23, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–The website Arab News has an article by James Drummond about how Armenians have succeeded as businessmen in many Arab countries. Here is one example:

Armenians were famous builders. Indeed, Sinan Pasha, the great architect of the Ottoman Empire, was reportedly of Armenian heritage. Many in the diaspora carved out niches as middle-men, translators, bankers and merchants. One such character, a Mr. Youkoumian, is an anti-hero of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel “Black Mischief,” set in a fictionalized Ethiopia in the 1930s.

It is not quite on point, as Ethiopia hardly qualifies as an “Arab Country”, but it is bordered on several sides by them.

–Radio presenter and satirist Garrison Keillor names on his website a Waugh short story as his Christmas selection:

It’s Christmas week, and we’re celebrating with Christmas stories. There’s a darkly comic story by British authorEvelyn Waugh, (books by this author) written in 1934, about a reclusive aristocratic octogenarian Irish spinster who decides to give a huge elaborate festive bash as a last big hurrah. Waugh’s “Bella Fleace Gave a Party” is set in the north of Ireland, in the countryside outside a town called Ballingar.

After retelling the story is some detail (and without a spoiler alert), Keillor concludes:

Evelyn Waugh’s “Bella Fleace Gave a Party” can be found in The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (1998). It can also be found in a collection entitled Christmas Stories (2007), edited by Diana Secker Tesdell, part of the Everyman’s Pocket Classics series.

–A blogger who is reading through and reviewing in order Time Magazine’s selection of the Top 100 books since 1923. Here’s an excerpt in the entry for A Handful of Dust:

Evelyn Waugh writes well, and I can understand why this book is on the top 100 list. Like Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, this is set in a time period and world that I don’t find greatly appealing and even though both works are dealing with the unraveling of that world they are not things I would seek out to read. With A Handful of Dust, I identified strongly with Tony Last and for personal reasons I really disliked Brenda’s shallow and careless actions which destroyed not only her marriage but the entire world of her husband. […]  Even though I may not have chosen to live in Tony Last’s world, I could empathize with the trauma he must have endured as it quickly is taken away from him and he finds himself in unfamiliar territory still attempting to be the person he once was. All reviews of any work of fiction are subjective, and although the work unearthed some painful memories for me, and it is not a genre or a time period that I find compelling it is well written and I can understand why many people enjoy its mocking of the collapse of this stilted and formal world. These brief reflections are, for me, a way of consolidating my thoughts after engaging with each work.

–The Vancouver Sun reviews a book by Canadian author John MacLachlan Gray which makes several allusions to a Waugh novel, including its title Vile Spirits:

While Gray’s deft use of mystery novel tropes reflects his debt to masters of the genre like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, his chosen title and section epigraphs all nod to another and more unlikely influence, that of dyspeptic British satirist Evelyn Waugh, whose early novels, in particular Vile Bodies, satirize the “bright young things” of the Roaring Twenties.

–A contributor to McGill University’s McGillReporter includes this item in a recommended reading column:

“I was recently recommended Scoop, Decline and Fall, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The first two books are supposed to be very dry humour, while the second is more of a drama,” writes Sean. Fun fact: Mr. Waugh had married a woman named Evelyn. Friends used to call them ‘He-Evelyn’ and ‘She-Evelyn.’

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Black Mischief, Newspapers, Short Stories, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Winter Solstice Roundup

When the Going Was Good @ 75

Posted on December 19, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s collection of travel writings from the 1930s was published in the UK 75 years ago today. This was entitled When the Going Was Good. US publication followed in January 1947.  This was has first book to be published after the success of Brideshead Revisited.

In an introduction, Waugh explains that what is reprinted comes from only four of the travel books he wrote between 1929 and 1939: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days and Waugh in Abyssinia. He distances himself somewhat from the latter, which he describes as more political than the others, and he further notes that his 1939 book about Mexico, Robbery Under Law, was excluded altogether because it was entirely devoted to a discussion of political matters.

He further explains that his life in the period these books were written was largely given over to travel and that he had no fixed abode. He expects, as he writes in 1945, to write no such book in the future, having by then adopted a more settled life:

These four books, here in fragments reprinted, were the record of certain journeys, chosen for no better reason than that I needed money at the time of their completion; they were pedestrian, day-to-day accounts of things seen and people met, interspersed with commonplace information and some rather callow comments. I have sought to leave a purely personal narrative in the hope that there still lingers round it some trace of vernal scent.

He then briefly summarizes what he best remembers about each book and notes that they all involved travel that fell largely outside of Europe, leaving time for more restful exploration of that continent ’til later. In this, he associated himself with his fellow travel writers Peter Fleming, Graham Greene and Robert Byron and distinguished himself from Cyril Connolly (referred to only as “Palinurus”) who, unlike Waugh and his fellow adventurers, had the foresight to visit Europe before it was “to melt overnight like an ice-castle, leaving only a puddle of mud…”

Looking ahead, he concludes by supposing that there will be few travel books such as his in the future:

There is no room for tourists in a world of ‘displaced persons’. Never again, I suppose shall we land on foreign soil with a letter of credit and passport (itself the first faint shadow of the cloud that envelopes us) and feel the world open before us. […] I never aspired to be a great traveller. I was simply a young man, typical of my age; we travelled as a matter of course. I rejoice that I went when the going was good.

That introduction is dated “Stinchcombe, 1945”. It was a year later that the book was published. Waugh was not to know, when we wrote the introduction, that a month after the book appeared he would be leaving England on a voyage to America with his wife that inspired The Loved One. And later that same year (1947) he made a trip to Scandinavia with the intent of writing about it for the Daily Telegraph. Nor could he have known that he would continue to travel on extended journeys to exotic destinations such as Goa, Ceylon, and the Holy Land, as well as repeat trips to the United States, British Guiana and Africa, two of which ended up in book form: The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and A Tourist in Africa.

When the Going Was Good was later printed in book club editions (1947-49) and later still in a Penguin paperback (1951). It was recently republished as a Penguin Modern Classic (2000) and is still available in the UK, Canada and Australia in a revised version of that edition, as well as an e-book.

 

 

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, When the Going Was Good | Comments Off on When the Going Was Good @ 75

Pre-Christmas Roundup

Posted on December 16, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times reports a recent interview of Nicholas Howard, current resident of Castle Howard in North Yorkshire. The interview, conducted and reported by Helen Rumbelow, opens with a discussion of the shortfall in revenue caused by the recent Covid-related closures in the context of the estate’s large repair and restoration budget as well as the costs of its daily operations. One topic not raised by Rumbelow (or at least not reported) is the recent closure of the estate to visitors for an extended period in September-October this year to accommodate filming by an undisclosed production company. According to previous reports, non-disclosure of the details of that project were part of the agreement between the estate’s owners and the film-makers. See previous posts.

The interview article closes with this:

We leave through what seems like an endless corridor: some claim that its 17th-century architect, John Vanbrugh, invented corridors, which sounds ridiculous until you see them, lit by the low light as if by a Hollywood cinematographer. And the domed roof, a mini St Paul’s Cathedral, now looks spectacular, a must-have accessory if you are to house, as it does now, a 30ft Christmas tree, or hang a vast chandelier made of 1,250 yellow washing-up gloves, as the family did for a “surrealist” 21st birthday party for Howard’s daughter Blanche, which ended with guests in the fountain. In Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh captured the outsider’s reaction to this inordinate beauty: seduced and suspicious.

One image sticks with me: Howard says that when his father rebuilt the dome he forbade anyone to go up there, saying that it was too dangerous. Howard, who scampered around the 145 rooms like a mouse, went up there immediately.

Now Howard can scamper no more. He told me that lockdown money shortages were “absolutely terrifying”. It was also scary for him as a boy staring down at the hall from the inside of the dome. “I can still remember the feeling of standing on the edge. There was no railing between you and that 70ft drop.”

I think that is what it’s like to be a Howard. High up, looking down, scared of falling.

Also mentioned is an upcoming TV documentary relating to Castle Howard: “Nick Knowles: Heritage Rescue” that is to be broadcast in the UK on December 22 at 9pm on something called “Quest”.

–Meanwhile, Time Magazine has announced “The 50 Most Anticipated TV Shows of 2021.”  The BBC/HBO production of Brideshead Revisited, noted but not mentioned by name above, is among the listings:

Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino is adapting Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel of a young British man who falls in with an aristocratic family and gets entangled in their drama. The enviable cast includes Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes and Joe Alwyn.

The scheduled broadcast is simply described as “TBA“.

–A one-hour plus podcast has been posted in “The History of Literature” series. This is moderated by Jacke Wilson and features Phil Klay as the presenter. Here’s the description:

…In this episode, Jacke is joined by author Phil Klay to discuss Waugh’s religion, military background, and his novel A Handful of Dust in particular. The two also discuss Klay’s award-winning fiction, his writing process, what it means to be a Catholic writer in Waugh’s time and our own, and the new podcast American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories, which Klay hosts.

PHIL KLAY is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His short story collection Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times. His debut novel, Missionaries, was released in October 2020 with Penguin Press.

–Earlier this week, the Daily Telegraph in an opinion article by Douglas Murray compared the current Conservative Government to a scene at the end of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall:

Professor Silenus, is watching a ride in an amusement park when Paul Pennyfeather comes upon him. Silenus explains the fairground attraction they are watching. For five francs the punters go into a room with tiers of seats, and in the centre is a great revolving floor that spins everyone around quickly.

At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh, and you laugh too. “It’s great fun.”

Pennyfeather wonders whether this is much like life.

“Oh, but it is” says Silenus. “You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on.

“There’s generally someone in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he’s paid by the management, though, or, at any rate, he’s allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there’s a point completely at rest, if one could only find it.”

I’m sure I don’t need to extrapolate to readers why this passage has been on my mind. This week has included an especially horrible turn of the wheel. And the fairground attraction of Boris’s Number 10 suddenly seems to have lost all of its amusement value. It can even turn a party into a portion of the horrible, destructive game.

After describing Professor Silenus’s understanding of how the spinning wheel is like the Johnson government, the article concludes:

How that sums up much of Westminster today – MPs and hacks who just enjoy the game and enjoy holding on as others go to the wall. But in the process they forget why anybody would want to get into this game in the first place.

You might say, as Silenus does, that “you needn’t get on it at all, if you don’t want to.” And that, at times, seems like the easier and more attractive option. Yet the ride this country is on is not an amusement.

If our country is to succeed in the coming years we are going to have to build as well as destroy, to develop people as well as fling them off. To find still points as well as the amusement. But nobody seems to want to think of that, so on it goes.

–There are several more articles marking the 10th anniversary of Christopher Hitchens’ death.  One of these by Alexander Larman in the World Edition of The Spectator magazine includes this:

When asked who his favorite writers were, [Hitchens] unhesitatingly listed Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse, none of whom shared his politics or worldview, as well as the more predictable figure of George Orwell.

The Atlantic, where Hitchens wrote literary reviews and essays for several years, has posted all his reviews that appeared in the magazine, including several that relate to Waugh, most notably “The Permanent Adolescent”. The New Statesman has published in its UK edition (its only edition so far as I am aware) the article on Waugh by Ross Douthat mentioned in a previous post.

 

 

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Anniversaries, Television | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Roundup: Flaubert’s Birth and Hitchens’ Death

Posted on December 9, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Novelist Julian Barnes has written a rambling retrospective of Flaubert’s career covering all of his books and many of his own and Flaubert’s obsessions. This is on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Flaubert’s birth and is published in the London Review of Books. One subject is a writer’s assessment of his own books:

Novelists are famously unreliable when judging their own work. Critical reception has an effect on their judgment, as does simple perversity; and they may affect to love the most overlooked of their progeny. Thus Evelyn Waugh used to claim that his favourite novel was Helena. Though Salammbô was a greater financial and social success than Madame Bovary – it became a meme, and the inspiration for ballgowns – most knew that Flaubert’s first novel was his best, and always would be. At times he resented this, once expressing the view that he would like to buy up every copy of the book and burn them all.

A more phlegmatic response to the Famous First Book dilemma was that of Kingsley Amis, who in later years was asked if Lucky Jim hadn’t been a bit of an albatross around his neck. ‘It’s better than having no albatross at all,’ he replied.

Another Thing Kingsley Amis Said,

this time of me: ‘I wish he’d shut up about Flaubert’ – advice it gave me delight to disobey.

–Ben Lawrence writing in the Daily Telegraph expresses his concern with the lack of editorial discretion lately being exercised. This manifests itself in such overblown works as Peter Jackson’s documentary about the Beatles’ breakup Get Back (nearly 8 hours), Hilary Mantel’s final volume of her Cromwell trilogy (912 pages) and the final Daniel Craig installment of the James Bond film epic (nearly an hour longer than the original–Doctor No). He then wonders whether this editorial laxity has any historical precedents:

If we go back in time, we can see that even such a genius as Charles Dickens was susceptible (although in his case it was often padding in order to fulfill a deadline, rather than a resolute conviction of his own genius). In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Tony Last goes slowly mad when is forced to read Martin Chuzzlewit to the illiterate Mr Todd. It’s not hard for us who have waded through Dickens’ novel (particularly that bit in America) to sympathize).

Lawrence goes on to recognize instances of where sound editorial supervision has produced works that have become classics by insisting on their being trimmed or rewritten–eg, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird.

—Town and Country, the American magazine that debuted Waugh’s novel in 1944 over four issues, has posted an article entitled “Everything To Know About the BBC’s Star-Studded New Brideshead Revisited“. Unfortunately, this article recites what we already think we know from last year about a project that seems surrounded by secrecy. It mentions the actors and director that were identified in a Daily Mail article that was replete with unsubstantiated expectations and comments on that in Deadline. See previous post. The T&C story by Emma Dibdin  neither confirms nor denies theses previous announcements but at least writes hopefully that they will prove to have been correct.

–The website crimereads.com posts an essay by Christopher Fowler on the subject of “Englishness” in British thrillers. The essay’s theme is stated in this header: “We specialise in a specific kind of English malice based on class and distorted moral rectitude.” Here is one of the three important historical developments in the subject of “Englishness”:

(2) By the start of the eighteenth century, the satirist James Gillray was happily ridiculing the British Prime Minister in print without reprisal. We satirised our social mores with the smug self-confidence of ruthless colonialists. Our authors had already learned to play jokes on readers, as anyone who has climbed the Everest of Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’ can testify.

British literature honed its sharpness in the Great War and emerging with new elements of irony, ridicule and gallows humour. The novels of Evelyn Waugh are cruelly funny but beneath the wit is a howling darkness that in ‘Black Mischief’ ends with the perfectly logical act of cannibalism. Killing becomes a social faux-pas on a par with grammatical errors.

—New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has posted on his own website a response to the Financial Times’ recent article on Christopher Hitchens. See previous post. That was by Janan Ganesh and noted the need for a voice such as Hitchens’ in the current political environment. Douthat thinks Ganesh may have overlooked or understated the abilities of several current journalists, although to be fair none of those identified by Douthat share with Hitchens the latter’s self-promotional abilities.  Douthat concludes with this:

In this sense the aspect of [Hitchens’] career that Ganesh emphasizes, the search for causes and enemies worthy of his romantic and crusading spirit, illustrates what in The Decadent Society I describe as the dangers of anti-decadence — the way that the desire for a great war or a Great Enemy can supply a “cure” for decadence that makes the world more interesting but also makes it worse.

Here there’s a special irony that in the very spring that the United States invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein, Hitchens appeared in the Atlantic with a caustic essay on Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, which he dismissed (wrongly, but never mind that) as the place where Waugh’s reactionary mood finally curdled and his gifts essentially ran out. Because in an important way the Hitchens of the War on Terror era quite resembles Waugh’s protagonist in that World War II-era saga, the English Catholic aristocrat Guy Crouchback, for whom the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the alliance of the totalitarians, felt like a moment of grand opportunity and purpose for an otherwise-decaying civilization: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” Coming from a very different ideological vantage point, this was exactly the Hitchens reaction to September 11: It famously filled him with “exhilaration” because it promised “a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate.”

At the end of Waugh’s novels, Crouchback ends up disillusioned: He meets a Jewish refugee in the Balkans who speaks of the “will to war” in 1930s Europe, the way “that “even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war.” She asks him: “Were there none in England?”

“God help me,” Crouchback answers, “I was one of them.”

I’ve always like that passage in part because that’s how I feel about myself, thinking back on some of my jejune writings (very) early in the War on Terror, my own youthful right-wing exhilaration at the possibility that Meaning was finally coming back.

I don’t think Hitchens ever came around to that kind of regret, but I do think his most important work stands, for now at least, as a monument to a variation on the temptation that Waugh describes. He wanted to join a great battle to save his particular vision of liberal civilization, but he chose his crucial causes poorly, winning pyrrhic victories that mostly deepened decadence, and left that same civilization more unhappy, endangered and internally divided than before. [Links in original.]

 

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Adaptations, Anniversaries, Black Mischief, Brideshead Revisited, Helena, Newspapers, Sword of Honour, Television | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Flaubert’s Birth and Hitchens’ Death

Evelyn Waugh Studies 52.2 (Fall 2021)

Posted on December 2, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the Society’s journal, Evelyn Waugh Studies, has been distributed to the membership. This is issue Ne. 52.2 (Fall 2021). A slightly edited summary  by the Society’s Secretary, Jamie Collinson, that accompanied the distribution, is set forth below:

Opening the proceedings, our own Jeffrey Manley reviews the career of the American Waugh scholar Robert Murray Davis. Next up is a short, funny and generally brilliant recollection of a visit to Combe Florey in 1963 by John Stathatos. Combining military special ops, a quintessential Waugh putdown and Wagner, what more could you ask for? Jonathan Pitcher reviews Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience, by Andrew James. For my money, Waugh is the clear antecedent for the comic genius of Lucky Jim, and it’s good to see Amis make an appearance here. His interviews for Nicholas Shakespeare’s Arena documentaries were fascinating.Finally, Jeffrey Manley closes proceedings with a review of Writing in the Dark: Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon Magazine, by Will Loxley. As the present company will doubtless know, Horizon played a key role in literary life around the Second World War, and was satirized to great effect in the Sword of Honour trilogy.The reference to Horizon reminds me of the EWS’ activity at the Huntington Library’s Waugh seminar in 2017. It was there that a fellow member advised me to read Anthony Powell, who fictionalized Horizon equally brilliantly in A Dance to the Music of Time. I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t attended – one of many reasons I’m glad I did. I very much hope that we can all get together in person before too very long.

A copy will be posted on this site in due course.

Share
Posted in Combe Florey, Evelyn Waugh Studies, World War II | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Evelyn Waugh Studies 52.2 (Fall 2021)

Post-Thanksgiving Roundup

Posted on November 30, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–10 December will mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens. This is commemorated in the Financial Times by an article entitled “The World Christopher Hitchens Left Behind”. This is by Janan Ganash who might have used as a subtitle “Where is Christopher Hitchens Now that we Need Him?”. After considering how Hitchens might have taken on several present-day issues, Ganash concludes:

…his devotion to the western canon was not an appendage to his politics, but its reinforcement. Grasp the complexity of an individual, as rendered by a novelist, and all ideologies look absurd. “Politics is the great generaliser,” said Philip Roth, “and literature the great particulariser.” Hitchens read Evelyn Waugh and (one of his last reviews) GK Chesterton more closely and sensitively than most of the fatheads who happened to share their politics. If, in the end, he spat them out, it was only after a discerning swill.

None of which is to canonise him. He never wrote a great book. Like Gore Vidal, to whom he was both dauphin and rival, he couldn’t say no to a deft but glib epigram. He didn’t account for or even wholly renounce his Trotskyism, and flounced out of one interview (with Matthew Parris, the greater 1949-born journalist, to my mind) when pressed on it. […] As for the right, he would have met them beyond the comfort zone of liberal talk shows (to whom, at one point, he gave the literal finger) in Red America. His godless evangelism was so potent precisely because it engaged pastors on their own southern and Midwestern turf.

It is just a shame that Anglo-America only really came off its hinges when he was no longer around to try to right it. In tribal times, his speeches and essays impart the only lesson worth teaching to those who care for truth and its dazzling expression. Never, ever join a team.

–The New Statesman has posted the copy of a 1978 review written by Kingsley Amis in which Amis reconsiders Waugh’s debut novel Decline and Fall. Here’s the New Statesman’s introduction:

Here, in the first of an occasional series of New Statesman articles on 20th-century writers, Kingsley Amis revisits Evelyn Waugh’s “Decline and Fall”. Amis had read the 1928 novel dozens of times. It was, he wrote, a book “written for me, and not for some porcelain-collecting multilingual gourmet”. The book has been considered “satire”, but Amis understood this term as being “more usefully reserved for pieces purposefully deriding vice or folly”; Waugh’s novel contains just some “incidental touches” of satire. The book should not be straightforwardly declared a “statement”, either; “No novel is a statement, and we should try to fight against making inferences about its author’s state of mind,” Amis writes. What a critic can do, and what Waugh was in need of when writing “Decline and Fall”, Amis suggests, was “something that offered an explanation of or an excuse for the horrors of existence”.

The full article can be read at this link.

–The Irish Times in a story about the appointment of Ralf Rangnick at Manchester United football club as “interim” manager makes an allusion to a character from Decline and Fall:

It is Rangnick’s personality as much as his background that makes this such a startling turn. There has already been a great deal of poring over his familiar lines, quotes and quips in the last few days. What emerges from that patchwork is a slightly comedic figure, something along the lines of Evelyn Waugh’s German modernist architect professor Otto Silenus, who sees human beings as flawed mechanical designs, who says things such as “the only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines not men”. Going by his pre-publicity it would be no surprise to see Rangnick take his first press conference standing motionless behind a synthesiser wreathed in dry ice and mumbling about being a robot.

–The Catholic Herald in an essay entitled “Joy of Unexpected Things” by Kenneth Craycraft uses quotes from Brideshead Revisited to illustrate facets of Roman Catholic beliefs. This opens with a quote from a dialogue between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte and ends with a quote from a dialogue between Charles and Lady Marchmain:

…“But my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all,” accuses Charles. “I mean about the Christmas star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”

“Oh, yes, I believe that,” Sebastian replies. “It’s a lovely idea.”

“But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea,” Charles exclaims.

“But I do,” answers Sebastian. “That’s how I believe.”

Charles thinks he is testing the reasonableness of Sebastian’s personal belief. In fact, however, he is imposing a rationalist conceit on the Catholic faith to which Sebastian adheres. In doing so, Charles confuses the tenets of the faith with the means by which one embraces it. And by using Christmas motifs in the dialogue, Waugh illustrates his own acute understanding of the difference. […]

Later in Brideshead Charles has a similar conversation with Sebastian’s mother, Lady Marchmain, in which Charles alludes to “a camel and the eye of a needle”. In reply, Lady Marchman says, “But of course it’s very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. It’s not to be expected that an ox and an ass would worship at the crib… It’s all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side of religion.”

Thus, Christmas. It is a time to celebrate the Wonderful Exchange through the lovely ideas of unexpected things.

— Quadrant, an Australian literary journal, has an essay by Cardinal George Pell entitled “Religion, Barbarism and the Fall of the Roman Empire”. Here’s the opening:

Evelyn Waugh’s novel Helena tells the story of the mother of Constantine, the first Christian emperor in Rome, who granted religious toleration to the Christian minority (10 per cent?) in 313 AD.

The remainder of the article is behind a paywall but presumably makes additional references to Waugh’s novel. The article may, indeed, be related to the subject of this year’s Thomas More lecture that Cardinal Pell will deliver at the Newman Society in Oxford on 13 November. This is discussed in the current issue of the Catholic Herald in an article entitled “The Ordeal of Cardinal Pell”. The article is written by William Cash who notes that Cardinal Pell is in England to deliver the lecture. The article also explains that the Cardinal was recently unlawfully imprisoned in his Australian homeland for 400 days only to be released by a unanimous acquittal order of the Supreme Court:

In prison, he watched England play Australia at cricket along with reading the Bible and Thomas More. He was also sustained by reading books including The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh. He also enjoyed watching Songs of Praise on television. He was unable to celebrate Mass for all of his 400-plus days, with the closest he came to traditional carols at Christmas being a Vietnamese choir that had gathered outside the prison walls on Christmas Day – but alas, he didn’t hear them.

After reporting about the Cardinal’s experiences during his imprisonment, Cash continues:

… the major theme of his Newman lecture [will be] the decline and fall of faith. Matthew Arnold’s only book that remains in print is Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Pell seizes on this theme in his lecture. He uses Waugh’s reason for converting in 1930 – faced with a choice between “Christianity or chaos”, he chooses the former as society disintegrates.

Pell used to prefer Graham Greene to Waugh but has changed his mind and was pleased that he was to be shown around the Wallace Collection by a member of the Waugh family.

The title of the lecture is “The Suffering Church in a Post-Christian Society” which sounds a bit broader than the topic of the Quadrant article. Tickets for the lecture are sold out but further information is available at this link.

–Finally, a familiar Waugh quote has recently made the rounds of the American papers. This may have originated in a story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on 18 November:

The Republican Party of Wyoming has formally banished Rep. Liz Cheney from its ranks. This decision calls to mind Evelyn Waugh’s remark when told that Winston Churchill’s son, a politician and journalist, had undergone surgery for a benign tumor: “A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.” Saying she is not a Republican is like saying Kim is not a Kardashian.

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Decline and Fall, Helena, Lectures, Newspapers, Oxford, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Post-Thanksgiving Roundup