Waugh’s 118th Birthday

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Yesterday, 28 October, was Evelyn Waugh’s 118th birthday. He was born on that date in 1903. This event was marked in several brief announcements (including one showing that  actress Elsa Lanchester was born on the same day, something the two of them once discussed at some length). There were at least two postings that offered more extensive comments. One was on the Roman Catholic website Church Militant which posted an article entitled “Waugh Contra Mundum”. It opened with this:

Perhaps best known for penning Brideshead Revisited, Waugh serves as an especial model for the laity, having faced and anticipated many of the difficulties Catholics grapple with today. Upon his conversion to Catholicism in 1930, he wrote, “The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.” The same is, sadly, still true today.

The article by Samuel McCarthy goes on to discuss Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and his defense of the Latin Mass as well as other elements of the pre- Vatican II traditions.

The other was posted by author, satirist and radio presenter Garrison Keillor on his website  The Writer’s Almanac:

…He came from a literary family: His father was the managing editor of an important British publishing house and his older brother was a distinguished writer. But Waugh didn’t do well in school and he left Oxford without receiving a degree. He tried working as a teacher but he got fired from three schools in two years. He said, “I was from the first an obvious dud.” He was seriously in debt, without a job, and had just been rejected by the girl he liked, so he decided to drown himself in the ocean. He wrote a suicide note and jumped in the sea, but before he got very far he was stung by a jellyfish. He scrambled back to shore, tore up his suicide note, and decided to give life a second chance.

He didn’t know what else to do so he wrote a novel about a young teacher at a private school where the other teachers are all drunks, child molesters, and escaped convicts; and the mother of one student is running an international prostitution ring. His publishers forced him to preface the book with a disclaimer that said, “Please bear in mind throughout that it is meant to be funny.” The novel, Decline and Fall, was published in 1928, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern satire.

 

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Roundup: Great Writers and Happy Danes

Posted on October 25, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–A Korean language paper Seoul Ilbo recently published a background article on Denmark, explaining its reputation as the happiest country in the world. This appeared among its sources for the article:

Also, unlike other Nordics, Danes are known for being relatively sociable, friendly, and optimistic. In particular, the British novelist ‘Evelyn Waugh’ (1903-1966), [as he wrote] about the capital Copenhagen, rated Danes as the most cheerful people in Northern Europe.

출처 : 서울일보(http://www.seoulilbo.com)

Waugh’s assessment probably comes from his 1947 Daily Telegraph article “The Scandinavian Capitals: Contrasted Post-War Moods” although the English word he used for the Danes was “exhilarating” (EAR, p. 341). The translation of the Korean language article is by Google.

–The Jesuit magazine America posts a review of a new novel by a Roman Catholic writer that opens with this:

Who is the greatest Catholic novelist in the English language? Is it Flannery O’Connor? Graham Greene? Walker Percy? Muriel Spark? Evelyn Waugh? Caroline Gordon? A quick survey of 112 years of America content shows that this magazine has spilled a trillion gallons of ink on the question, even though the obvious answer was and is and always will be J. F. Powers.

But what about in the generation after that? That question, too, has been asked every few years since the glory days of the early 1960s, when J. F. Powers won the 1962 National Book Award for Morte D’Urban, Edwin O’Connor the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Edge of Sadness and Walker Percy the 1963 National Book Award for The Moviegoer. Who in recent decades has joined those ranks as a great Catholic novelist? Mary Gordon? Ron Hansen? Alice McDermott? Jon Hassler? Toni Morrison?…

The article continues with a consideration of whether the book under review is written by a novelist who has recently joined the ranks of those aforementioned “Great Catholic Novelists”. This is Sally Rooney whose new book is entitled Beautiful World, Where Are You?

–A notice has been posted about an Oxford reading group on a related topic:

“The Golden Age”: English Catholic Authors of the 20th Century: With the aim of introducing participants to five outstanding Catholic writers: GK Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Green and JRR Tolkien. Each author will be treated in a stand-alone session and the assignment for each week will consist of a characteristic example of the author’s work.

This week:
Our author this week is Monsignor Ronald Knox, one of the first Catholic chaplains to be based at the Old Palace and a leading figure in English Catholic life from the 1920s to the 1950s. We will be looking at some of his conferences to Oxford students on theological questions. As these are not available online you will need a photocopy of the material if you want to do some reading in advance. Contact Fr William [Pearsall, SJ]. Or just come along to the session – there will be plenty of opportunity to learn!

The first meeting in this Wednesday, 27 October 2021, 2-3pm at the Oxford University Catholic Chaplaincy, Rose Street. Details are available at this link.

–Penguin Books has posted an interview of British chef and TV presenter Rick Stein on its promotional website Still Life. Stein was asked to discuss his own favorite books:

…I first discovered Brideshead Revisited in my early 20s when I was at Oxford University. It seems silly to say now, but I went there as a “mature” undergraduate – 22 or 23. I’d spent time travelling the world before that, getting involved in all kinds of bits and bobs, whereas everyone else was straight out of school. That made me feel rather inferior. It was so intensely competitive, intellectually, and I didn’t really fit into that. I spent a lot of time at parties not doing the right things, then took a bit of a dive after I left.

One of the reasons Evelyn Waugh was such an inspiration to me is that he didn’t fit at Oxford in some ways either; I left Oxford with quite a bad third-class degree, as indeed he did. I loved his early books, which are so funny and irreverent, but Brideshead was later on and much more thoughtful. He was very keen on being a converted Catholic. I liked all that thinking he did about religion…

–Finally, the New Republic has posted an article about a podcast by Lili Anolik relating to life at Bennington College in the 1980s. One of the students from those days was novelist Donna Tartt, and Anolik sees influence on her novel The Secret History from both college life and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

…At the time at Bennington, there was a notable association between avant-gardism, gay men, and particular styles of dressing that had a lot to do with the success of the television series of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, which aired on PBS in 1982 and also explains a lot of the particular cultural motifs that flow through The Secret History. […]  Struck by [Waugh’s] vision of campus life, men all over the Bennington campus—but a group of students, particularly students of Greek, […]—began dressing in an approximation of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the series, with long scarves and flannel trousers. […]

Anolik sees the influence of Evelyn Waugh as unlocking some hitherto unarticulated aspect of Donna Tartt’s art. “Costuming is a romantic way of giving shape to something previously inchoate inside you,” Anolik says, quoting Mary Gaitskill. Anolik told Page Six that her intention in the podcast was to show that “Donna Tartt wrote the American version of Brideshead Revisited, i.e., The Secret History, because she was living the American version of Brideshead Revisited.” In Tartt’s novel, a young man named Richard Papen goes off to college and falls under the spell of a glamorous group of Greek students, all more sophisticated than he—a tight group he joins before it ultimately dissolves amid acts of violence. Although the plot is very different  from Brideshead’s, both novels are narrated much later by the older, jaded version of the naĂŻve young man at the heart of its story. Both novels engage with the ways that ostensibly academic conversations, like the riverside chats that stud Brideshead or the Greek classes with Julian in The Secret History, can hold erotic subtexts whose meaning might elude the unenlightened eavesdropper…

 

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Mid-October Roundup

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times has posted an interview with actor Jack Whitehall in which he discusses his favorite books, films, TV and music. Here’s the opener:

My favourite author or book
Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall holds a special place in my heart because I was lucky enough to get to be a part of bringing it to television and it remains one of my favourite books. I also love Scoop, Brideshead Revisited — even lesser-known novels such as The Loved One are fantastic. In his early comic works I can’t get enough of his wicked sense of humour and deranged cast of characters.

The entry is followed by a copy of the Henry Lamb portrait of Waugh.

–Last week,  The Spectator posted an article in its Spectator World edition entitled “Why we should venerate Evelyn Waugh” This is by Chilton Williamson and opens with a warning that Waugh should not be viewed as a comic writer such as PG Wodehouse but as a serious writer in whose works comedy often manifests itself. He then briefly surveys Waugh’s entire catalogue:

His preoccupations as a novelist, a travel writer, and a critic are a series of oppositions: order vs chaos and anarchy, civilization vs barbarism, and civility vs incivility, all set in the 20th-century world. Due to his assured grasp on Western history, his extreme sensitivity to contemporary social and intellectual movements and — dominating all — his Catholic faith, Waugh was acutely aware of the fragile nature of civilization, which he saw as a man-made haven threatened by an aggressive encompassing wilderness relentless in its determination to take back its own.

He begins by mentioning two under-appreciated works. Robbery Under Law is

less a travel book than a sophisticated historical disquisition [in which] the concept of civilization under never-ending siege underlies all of his novels, which he succinctly described as ‘the creation of small independent systems of order.’ […]

He achieved many of his finest comic effects by juxtaposing differences (often superficial ones) in customs and manners between Europeans and barbarians. Yet it is not always the Europeans to whom he gives the advantage. Some of the most hilarious parts of Black Mischief, for instance, recount the efforts of Seth, Emperor of the island kingdom of Azania, to ‘modernize’ his country by aping European progressivism…

He then divides Waugh’s novels into two categories: Dionysian and Apollonian. All the early ones except Handful of Dust up to Put Out More Flags are in the former and the rest in the latter. He clearly prefers the former in which the comedy is more pronounced but his favorite is Handful, in a class by itself:

The incomparable achievement of A Handful of Dust results from its success in combining elements of his Dionysian and Apollonian phases. Its pitch-black comedy begins with acutely observed social climbing, continues into a description of an adulterous love affair and tragic death, and concludes with its protagonist captured by a madman who forces him to sit aloud reading the works of Dickens. It remains unique in Waugh’s canon, and in 20th-century English literature, in the readers’ never entirely knowing what their reaction should be to it. It is, and remains, inimitable.

The article concludes with brief considerations of Waugh’s travel books (not among the “finest” of that genre), his anti-American leanings, and his religious inclinations, and ends with this:

Still, the manner of his end became the man. Waugh died after hearing Mass on the afternoon of Easter Sunday, April 10, 1966, locked in the WC and seated on the toilet. His own black humor was never quite so black as that.

The article is attractively headed with a pencil rendering of a very late photograph of Waugh. No subscription seems necessary to open this Spectator World article.

–A new Spanish language novel with a Wavian theme is reviewed. This is Mientras Mi Mirada Te Busque (While my gaze looks for you) by Aranzaza Sumalla:

The narration focuses especially on the Jungman sisters, people belonging to the English gentry, daughters of the Dutch painter Nicolaas Wilhelm Jungmann, who were essential in that free lifestyle of England in the 1920s, that of the Bright Young Things, that era evoked with great fortune by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, a Writer who had a great relationship with the Jungman sisters, Zita and Teresa, and is said to have been deeply in love with Teresa […]

Sumalla emphasizes that period well but in reality what fascinated her about the fate of these two sisters is the way of life they chose after the war: they were Catholics, they went to live in Leixlip Castle, in Ireland, far from the madding crowd, both dying after reaching 100 in our XXI century. That is to say that fascination comes to Sumalla from the possibility of leading a way of life radically different from how the eyes of others judged us. In addition, the author may have noticed the Jungmans for certain elective affinities because the same could have been done with the Mitford sisters…

The review appears in nuevatribuna.es and is translated by Google.

—The Lady magazine has posted a list of books recommended for holiday reading. Among those in the classics section is this:

THE SWORD OF HONOUR TRILOGY by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin Classics, ÂŁ14.99)

This trilogy of novels spanning the Second World War is Waugh’s masterpiece: comedy, irony and tragedy. Look high-brow by the poolside. If you’ve read this, try: A Handful Of Dust

Why this summer reading list is only posted now is not explained.

–Finally, Byline Times, a newspaper for journalists, posts a story by Matthew Gwyther entitled “Journalism is Not a Profession”. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Journalism is not a profession – there are no qualification letters after our names. I’m not even sure if it’s a calling or even a trade. Sure there are many journalists on a mission like a priest preaching the gospel of Xi Jingping, but then so is a dog in search of a bone. One should, anyway, mistrust journalists on a mission – they tend to ignore inconvenient truths that refuse to fit in with their worldview.

The best journalists err towards scepticism rather than zealotry. For those remaining who are entirely economically reliant on journalism, however, it must be more than a pastime. It is what it is: telling stories for a living.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop the hacks aren’t terribly ‘professional’ but a mixed pack of feckless, unprincipled and cunning scribblers, hacks and ink-slingers. It’s a mark of their acknowledged lower standing – but not necessarily low self-esteem – that journalists often quite happily call themselves hacks which is defined as “a writer producing dull, unoriginal work”. Call a lawyer a hack and you’ll see him in court.

 

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AN Wilson Returns to Brideshead

Posted on October 15, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oldie joins the Spectator in commemorating this week’s 40th anniversary of the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. They send critic and novelist AN Wilson back to have another look. He begins by noting Waugh’s main themes: the decline of the upper classes with their stately homes and their salvation by the Roman Catholic Church. Wilson thinks Waugh got both these wrong. The upper classes continue to thrive and their stately homes with them, and Wilson notes Waugh’s recognition of that in his 1960 revised edition. The church has evolved in another  direction, however, unanticipated by Waugh. Wilson, thus, sees a different outcome for Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte under today’s Catholicsm:

The situation of Charles and Julia in today’s church would surely enable them to live together and to receive the sacraments. Julia, after all, married a man – Rex Mottram – who already had a wife living, and so, by the strict tenets of canon law she was not in fact married at all. She was quite free to marry Charles in a Catholic ceremony, were his first marriage to be annulled – as was Evelyn Waugh’s. Since, like Waugh, Charles had married before becoming a Catholic, and in circumstances which made it clear he did not have a Catholic view of the sacrament of marriage, he would surely today have been granted an annulment.

Wilson then considers Brideshead’s position in Waugh’s oeuvre, between: “the brittle comedies of his youth and young manhood, and the august achievement of the Sword of Honour trilogy, one of the undoubted works of literary genius, in any language, to emerge from the Second World War.” Wilson concludes that “Brideshead Revisited, lush, colour-splashed, romantic, comes between these two bodies of work. It is Waugh’s Antony and Cleopatra. It is his richest, and most passionate book: passionate about male love, about the love between men and women, about the centrality of beauty in human life.”

Wilson then considers the book’s plot and characters, offering several interesting and innovative insights on both. For example, in considering Charles’ career as a painter, Wilson inserts this factoid: “In the great ITV adaptation of the novel, in 1981, directed by Charles Sturridge, they used the paintings of the sublime Felix Kelly; but one senses that Ryder also owes something to Rex Whistler.” And here’s his take on the character of Sebastian:

It was a highwire act of prodigious skill not to make Sebastian as cloying as his malicious friend Anthony Blanche (“Antoine”) wants Charles to find him. The young Sebastian with Aloysius the teddy bear is adored by everyone – barbers, Oxford scouts, the jeunesse dorée. The ruined Sebastian in Morocco, seeking out an existence loosely attached to Catholic religious houses, could be equally annoying, since he possesses only what “Antoine” calls “the fatal English gift of charm” and, an even riskier quality to convey in a novel, holiness. But it would be a harsh reader who did not see why Charles loved him, just as it would be strange not to fall in love with Julia.

At the end of this discussion, Wilson reveals his own favorite among the characters, a somewhat surprising choice, as it turns out–Cara: “All Cara’s observations, about love, sex, and religious practice, deserve to be memorized. And she is that rarity in the Waugh oeuvre, a thoroughly decent sort.”

The article concludes with this:

Given the solemnity of the theme, “the operation of divine grace”, you might have expected Waugh’s humour to have failed him in this book, but even the hilarity of the early novels is outshone by the comic characters in this one. Charles’s father, Anthony Blanche, or the awful Samgrass take their place among the immortals with Dr Fagan and Captain Grimes. Even the figures whom Waugh and Ryder hate – Hooper and Mottram – are funny. And even non-Catholics have laughed at Cordelia’s hoodwinking Rex into believing that there are sacred monkeys in the Vatican.

I couldn’t agree more and have made that same point several times in the past since it is easy to overlook the book’s comedy. To be fair, I would have to add Cousin Jasper and Bridey to the list of memorable comic characters, perhaps because of their brilliant and memorable portrayals in the Granada adaptation.

Wilson doesn’t say much about the greatly anticipated BBC/HBO adaptation now in production. He does mention, however, that Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchette will be playing the Marchmains. The new producers will be hard put, however, to find the equals of the 1981 production for characters such as Anthony Blanche and Charles Ryder’s father.

UPDATE 18 October 2021: Reader Ryan Koopman noticed a typo in The Oldie’s AN Wilson article about Brideshead. The name of Lord Marchmain’s mistress is Cara, not Carla as was printed in The Oldie. The above post has been corrected accordingly.

UPDATE 27 October 2021: Thanks to anonymous reader for another correction to The Oldie’s text: jeunesse dorĂŠe.

 

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Granada TV Adaptation Celebrated in the Spectator

Posted on October 14, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator has published an article marking the 40th anniversary of the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. This is by literary critic Mark McGinness. It opens with a description of the state of mind of potential UK viewers in a cold and wet Autumn of Thatcherite Britain, who were being offered “659 minutes of romantic escapism.” After reciting the introductory trappings, McGinness embarks on a history of the “very difficult gestation” of the series over the previous two years. This included the scrapping of the original script by John Mortimer and, in the middle of production, a strike by TV crews. This in turn required a change in director, loss of a major actor (Jeremy Irons) for an extended period due to other commitments and loss of the original actor chosen as Cousin Jasper (Charles Dance) in similar circumstances. There were also some benefits, as the new shooting schedule meant that Lawrence Olivier was now available to play the role of Lord Marchmain. The delay also made it possible for the producer Derek Granger (who recently celebrated his own anniversary–in his case his 100th) to negotiate an increase in the originally planned 6 episodes to effectively twice as many (11 episodes, 13 hours).

On 12 October 1981 it was ready, and, as described by McGinness, it went down a treat. He cites ecstatic reviews by novelist Anthony Burgess, who thought it better than the original novel, as well as TV critics in the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Guardian. Clive James (probably in the Observer) wrote: “If Brideshead is not a great book, it’s so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.”

There were dissenting voices too. Kingsley Amis (who as a young writer had suffered from Waugh’s disdain) summed up his criticism in the title of his TLS article: “How I lived in a very big house and found God.” The Spectator assigned its reviewing to two of its contributors. According to McGinness, Richard Ingrams “thought it far too long, the characters not nearly strong enough to last the distance. He considered the narrative doleful and the music disastrous, ‘too many oboes and horns'”, and he thought the “gay element gratuitous”, citing a “quite unnecessary shot of naked bums on the Castle Howard roof.”

The other Spectator reviewer was Auberon Waugh, who also weighed in on “what he dubbed ‘the great Bottoms Debate'” and noted that his “family cheered at every bared bottom,” topping out at a “final bum count” of eight. Auberon concluded that the homosexual element was written “so artfully that it could be read in the drawing room as well as the smoking room.” The one thing he found disturbing, according to McGinness, was the love scene on board the ship. It was “‘not only distasteful but highly distressing’ to have to watch Charles Ryder mauling Diana Quick’s ‘perfectly formed’ nipple as the lovers were being tossed on board the RMS Constantia.” He thought that if there was a rerun, that scene should be cut (as it indeed was in the USA when PBS reran it).

The article concludes with a description of the program’s even greater success in the United States, where it was broadcast three months later, achieving “something approaching cult status”:

One wonders what the author himself would have thought of this great success. There is the story of the wife of an American theatre producer who told him that Brideshead Revisited was one of the best books she had ever read, to which he had some pleasure in recounting his reply: ‘I thought it was good myself, but now that I know that a vulgar, common American woman like yourself admires it, I am not so sure.’ He affected a similar distaste for television so perhaps, as the Critic’s Alexander Larman suggests, Waugh would have loathed it on principle.

For the rest of us, it remains the sine qua non of mini-series.

At the bottom of the story, following McGinness’s conclusion, this notice appears:

Luca Guadagnino’s new BBC/HBO adaptation of Brideshead Revisited will air next year.

 

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Columbus Day Roundup

Posted on October 9, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Independent newspaper collected from its readers book titles that played on the titles of older books. These were published in a recent article by John Rentoul. One of Waugh’s was selected:

8. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Piers Brendon, 2007. Nominated by Richard Vaughan. Evelyn Waugh took just Decline and Fall, 1928, from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, 1776-1789, pointed out Stephen Date, Cole Davis and Gavin Kelly.

Perhaps the best were those further down the list:

9. First Among Sequels, Jasper Fforde, 2007. The fifth book in the Thursday Next series. A reference to Jeffery Archer’s First Among Equals, 1984. Thanks to Peter Elliott.

10. A Tale of Two Kitties, Lord of the Fleas, For Whom the Ball Rolls and Fetch-22. All titles in the Dog Man series by Dav Pilkey, 2018-19. Thanks to Simmy Richman.

–The New York Public Library has announced an event in its digital great books series that may be of interest. On 21 October 2021 at 215p NY time, they will discuss Brideshead Revisited. It will be carried on zoom.com and registration is required. Information and registration are available at this link.

–The politically conservative news website American Greatness has posted an article on what its author Bruce Oliver Newsome calls “anti-woke science fiction”. It also serves as a review of a new example of the genre entitled Lethe by Joseph McKinnon:

Fashionable educators and publishers of “English literature” would leave you blind to “anti-woke science fiction.” I have coined the term as an update to a long tradition. Think of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins (1953). These works were anti-Marxist, before the failed Marxists recast themselves as “woke” by replacing economic justice with social justice.The literary elite doesn’t like to admit anti-Marxism as a motivation for great literature. Indeed, the elite shoves uninspiring writers down our throats just because they were Marxist—such as the ever overrated Ernest Hemingway. […]

Evelyn Waugh lamented Britain’s slide into authoritarian socialism during World War II, with several real-time war novels (including Brideshead Revisited in 1945), before writing his one and only science fiction novel. In Love Among the Ruins (1953), some “near future” British government keeps criminals in such luxury that they choose crime in order to return to prison, while “welfare weary” citizens seek official euthanasia.

Joseph MacKinnon’s Lethe combines the quest to escape state-prescribed happiness in Brave New World, the quest to escape surveillance and misinformation in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the quest to rediscover past knowledge in Anthem, and the quest to pair up and burn down in Love Among the Ruins. Further, Lethe reminds me of the quest to escape bureaucracy in Terry Gilliam’s film, “Brazil” (1985), and the quest to escape cyber mind-control in “The Matrix” (1999).

–Waugh biographer Duncan McLaren is interviewed on the literary website Flashbak.com. Here are some excerpts:

When did you first discover Evelyn Waugh‘s work? What did you like about it?

DM: I was seventeen. I’d been reading fairly widely, or at least as widely as the Penguins stocked in the local WH Smith (my family was living in Hemel Hempstead by this time) would let me. I was struck by the humour in Waugh, as I was later by the humour in Viz (equally male-centric). I realised that the author was using words in a very clever and subtle way to preserve his self esteem and his idea of himself. He seemed to be turning worldly failure into a personal success. Also, the covers of the paperbacks were fabulous. I think they were designed by someone of the glam rock generation. I would be lying on the brown beanbag in the lounge of my parents’ house, in that post-school-day slot, listening to David Bowie records while reading Evelyn Waugh novels. That remains a vision of teenage happiness for me. Living the dream before reality kicked in again, through work of one sort or another. […]

Where does Waugh stand in terms of literature?

DM: Well, I don’t know. I deliberately don’t think that way, as there are so many academics who go on from their English degrees thinking along these lines. But if you push me… Joyce and Woolf are two of the most fashionable figures now, it seems to me. Waugh gained some familiarity with modernism then rejected it. But he didn’t revert to nineteenth century realism, rather jumped to his own version of post-modernism. In other words, I think he was ahead of his time. I have a feeling his reputation will go from strength to strength. Certainly, it will if I have anything to do wiith it. But that would mean that certain of his views (his Toryism, racism and misogyny) would have to be seen in perspective, and possibly forgiven. No sign of that in the present climate, which is perhaps as it should be as we continue to work on the moral framework of society. In other words, equality of opportunity and outcome is more important than the freedom to think and do what you like, which is what Waugh champions.

The interview allows Duncan to discuss Waugh’s books and is amply illustrated with dust jacket art. It is by no means limited, however, to the topic of his works on Evelyn Waugh but ranges extensively into his other interests and his own life story as well.

–Finally, the Wall Street Journal posts an interesting essay (“Finding Hope in Hardship”) based on A Handful of Dust. This is by Brenda Cronin, an associate editorial features editor. The essay opens with this:

‘The more I see of other people’s children, the less I dislike my own,” Evelyn Waugh wrote to his friend and fellow author Nancy Mitford. Waugh’s equal-opportunity dyspepsia—he disliked people of all ages, not just youngsters—propels his 1934 novel, “A Handful of Dust,” as it spirals down from a brittle comedy of manners to a nightmare of loss and abandonment.

The essay is very well written as newspaper articles go and, within its fairly brief compass, provides an excellent survey of the book and its place in Waugh’s oeuvre. For example, it makes an interesting point of the source of the book’s title in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land: “Waugh echoes the ravaged and lost world of Eliot’s poem in A Handful of Dust without heavy-handed sermons or apocalyptic foreboding.”

There is at least one point where the author seems to get the wrong end of the stick. She refers to Waugh’s “grim stint at boarding school” and “miserable boarding school years”. In the latter reference, she is discussing a source for Decline and Fall and not Handful, but I think the references are not consistent with Waugh’s own assessment of his boarding school years. While not, perhaps, idyllic, they were not particularly unhappy years nor was he unsuccessful. He may have been disappointed at not having achieved admission at Sherborne but otherwise had no lingering complaints about these years. Another small quibble in an otherwise accurate essay.  In his 1930s travels, he spent little time in the British West Indies, making only brief stops on the boat trip to British Guiana. And while he did hike into the Amazon Basin at Boa Vista, Brazil, he never achieved his goal of the river itself.

The essay concludes with this:

…in later works, such as “A Handful of Dust,” Waugh went beyond acid satire. Faith moves lives such as Tony’s, in Waugh’s books, beyond pointless blundering and pain. His conviction that amid death and depravity the soul alone abides elevates his novel above a dark-witted between-the-wars period piece. A life without meaning is a misery, he asserts, whether gadding around London or marooned in a mosquito-infested jungle. But the soul—no matter how well concealed in Waugh’s secular and solipsistic characters—can make any situation bearable by imbuing suffering with meaning.

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Robert Murray Davis (1934-2021) R.I.P.

Posted on October 4, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Robert Murray Davis, one of the leading academic scholars of Evelyn Waugh and his works, has died in Arizona on 11 September 2021 at the age of 87. The following obituary has appeared as well as a related story in the Boonville Daily News in Boonville, Missouri, his home town. Here are some excerpts from the newspaper article by Bert McClary as well as from the obituary:

When Bob Davis graduated in 1951 at age 16 as valedictorian from Ss. Peter and Paul High School, after having worked at the Cooper County Record with local newspaperman, historian and author E.J. Melton, he was not yet aware of his career goal, but he knew it would be something involving the use of words.  He also was not yet aware of his family ancestry including the 16th Century theologian and author William Whitaker, Master of St. John’s College of Divinity, Cambridge University, England, and William’s son, Alexander, lifetime missionary to Jamestown Colony, America and publisher in England of cultural sermons to his white congregants and the natives he converted.

Bobby Davis grew up on a 24 acre “place” within the city limits of Boonville with parents M.C. and Liz Davis, siblings Johnny and Mary Beth, and many chickens, cows, and hogs, where he learned the politics, culture and responsibilities of both city and country life.  He played all sports, but had a special interest in baseball.

After four years at Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Bob worked briefly as a reporter for a small Kansas newspaper.  Finding the routine unsatisfactory, he returned to academics and earned master’s and doctorate degrees in English literature at the University of Kansas and the University of Wisconsin.  The field of academics and scholarly writing proved more acceptable.

An academic career that followed included Loyola University, Chicago, the University of California, [Santa Barbara] and the University of Oklahoma, Norman.  At OU he served in many academic and administrative roles in the English department, including directing the graduate studies program. During more than 50 years Bob received numerous grants and awards for teaching, research and travel, taught at five American, two Canadian and two Hungarian universities and lectured in more than a dozen countries.

His academic and publishing area was modern English and American literature and creative writing, focusing on literary criticism and scholarship, literature of the American West and literature and culture of Central Europe.  He published more than 20 books and numerous scholarly articles between 1966 and 2014, and was one of the foremost authorities on the life and literature of the well-known modern English satirist Evelyn Waugh.

While Bob’s emphasis was primarily scholarly writing, of little interest to the general public, he wrote two volumes of poetry and several nonfiction books related to his life experiences.  His published books included creative nonfiction Mid-Lands: A Family Album, The Ornamental Hermit: People and Places of the New West, and Midlife Mojo: A Guide for the Newly Single Male; the cultural study The Literature of Post-Communist Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania; a collection of personal essays Born-Again Skeptic & Other Valedictions; and a collection of poems Live White Male.

Mid-Lands is both a memoir and social commentary, describing growing up as a Catholic in Boonville, and being a youth in white, small-town, post-war America.  Boonville is a town that he appreciates and is proud to be from …

The following excerpt appeared in the obituary:

…While in Wisconsin he met and married fellow PhD candidate Barbara Hillyer. Bob’s first teaching positions were at Loyola University in Chicago, and the University of California at [Santa Barbara].  Bob and Barbara continued their careers at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, where Barbara was director of the women’s studies program and Bob served in many academic and administrative roles in the English Department.  They adopted three children, and Bob was active with them in a local swim club, was a competitive adult swimmer, and continued his lifelong love of jazz and blues music.[…]

Bob retired from OU as Emeritus Professor of English and moved to Phoenix, where he met Elaine Brock, and they were life partners for 18 years.  He continued to work as an independent writer, lecturer, and consultant.

He was preceded in death by his parents and is survived by his partner Elaine of the home; brother John (Pat) Davis and sister Beth (Bert) McClary, both of Boonville; daughter Megan (Don) Dey and grandchildren Brendan and Mia of Phoenix; son John (Alex) Davis and grandchildren Mathew and Lucas of Seattle, Washington; daughter Jennifer Davis of Okarche, Oklahoma; and a number of nieces, nephews and cousins throughout the United States.

A memorial service will be held at a future date in Boonville.

UPDATE (6 October 2021): The stories above originally indicated that Robert Murray Davis taught for a time at the University of California, Davis. In his memoirs Levels of Incompetence, Davis wrote that he taught for several years starting in 1965 at University of California, Santa Barbara.

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End-of-the-Month Roundup

Posted on September 27, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph is about to bring back its Way of the World column. This was a home of irreverent political satire from 1955 when it was started by Michael Wharton until 2008 when Craig Brown gave it up. In between those two, the column was written by Auberon Waugh. As explained by the new columnist Michael Deacon, Auberon, at 21, first sought to contribute to Wharton’s columns as an apprentice but was politely rejected:

Thirty years later, however, Waugh finally realised his long-cherished dream. For the final decade of his life, he took over Way of the World – and remade it in his own gaily outrageous image.

He was forever proposing bold new policies to make Britain a happier place: for example, the introduction of “National Smack a Child Week”, and the imposition of a nipple tax on the newspapers of Rupert Murdoch. Meanwhile, he railed against what he saw as the most deplorable developments of the 20th century (hamburgers, rambling, the works of AA Milne) and was every bit as scornful about politicians of the Right as those of the Left (“Anybody who went to public school will have recognised Alan Clark as the sort of Old Boy who returns to his old school in some veteran or vintage car to impress the smaller boys”).

Waugh, in turn, was succeeded by Craig Brown, who wrote Way of the World from 2001 until 2008. After that, however, the column fell into abeyance.

Deacon’s column will appear in the Tuesday and Saturday editions of the DT starting this week.

–Alec Marsh was asked by the Guardian to choose the top 10 novels of the 1930s. This was not an easy task. Here’s the one  by Waugh that he selected:

10. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
No one does satire as seriously as the British, and Waugh is more sincere than most. In Vile Bodies(1930) he eviscerated the aristocratic Bright Young Things generation of socialites of interwar Britain, developing the darker side that he’d already touched on in Decline and Fall and broadening the scope of this attack. Few books of the time say quite so much, quite so enjoyably about a certain slice of life in the 1930s – one which, though it didn’t know it, was coming to an end.

He struggled between that and Scoop. Also on the list are Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train (also a close call, with Brighton Rock an alternative).

—The Economist announces a new development in the life of an ancient publication. This is Debrett’s which

… has just gone digital. This is in many ways disappointing. Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage, a snob’s guide to Britain’s aristocracy, feels as though it ought to be written on vellum and served by butlers, rather than hosted on internet servers. Austen’s “Persuasion” opens with Sir Walter Elliot thumbing the Baronetage’s much-loved pages. Nancy Mitford mocked its chronicles of “ancestors with P.G. Wodehouse names” and “Walter Scott fates”. In Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, when Sebastian Flyte is asked about his family, he says crisply: “There are lots of us. Look them up in Debrett.”

–In the German paper Die Welt, they have published an article in their Literature in One Sentence column. This is based on the passage in Brideshead Revisited near the beginning of Book One, Chapter 4 (Penguin, 77-8): “It was thus I remember Sebastian…”

A scene like Proust’s, box hedges instead of hawthorn, England instead of France. And the whole thing takes place a few decades later, just before the Second World War instead of the First World War. The souls and bodies of the survivors and those born after them are damaged, no longer as innocent as they were in the Belle Epoque, even for the superficial observer. The wheelchair symbolizes injuries here. Sebastian, gentle anarchist, witty master of the arts, beloved friend of the narrator, broke his foot, probably due to some recklessness, while he was roaming the enchanted palace.

It literally stands for the picturesque family home of [the Flytes or Marchmains of Brideshead]. Metaphorically meant, however, is also the youth, the most enchanted palace through which one will ever stroll. Sebastian’s life will lead him steadily downhill. The friendship grows cold because he feels suffocated by his family. He starts to drink. Finally, after a bizarre affair with a depraved Nazi, he ends up as the doorkeeper of a monastery in North Africa…

I’m not sure it is altogether fair to describe Kurt as a “depraved Nazi”. He was certainly not a Nazi when Sebastian met him in North Africa and became one only under some duress when the Germans later had him arrested and sent home from Greece. Sebastian later followed and discovered him “dressed as a stormtrooper in a provincial town.” But according to Waugh, the Nazification was “only skin deep with him. Six years of Sebastian had taught him more than a year of Hitler; eventually he chucked it, admitted he hated Germany, and wanted to get out.” (Penguin, 292). But the Germans wouldn’t wear it and put him into a concentration camp, where he eventually hanged himself.

After some discussion of the depiction in the novel of the Bright Young People of the 1920’s and Waugh’s place in it, the article concludes with this:

But if the generation and society portrait even secretly fails [sogar insgeheim scheitert] (as the author contritely admitted in the foreword to a later, heavily revised edition), it fails in beauty. And his fans love it dearly. A wise person once remarked that we never fall in love with the virtues of another, only with the flaws of another.

The article is by Jan KĂźveler and is translated by Google with a few edits. It is available in the original German at this link.

–Finally, the TV streaming service BritBox has announced that it will make the 1981 Granada TV production of Brideshead Revisited available in 4K definition. This is intended to mark the 40th anniversary of the original ITV broadcast. The new version will apparently begin streaming next month in North America and Britain. I cannot say from experience what kind of improvement in the picture quality one should expect, but the announcement has been widely distributed and seems to be well received. I assume this will not change the aspect ratio based on the smaller TV screens prevalent in the 1980s, but none of the stories mentions that. See this link.

 

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Autumnal Equinox Roundup

Posted on September 21, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Sydney Morning Herald has posted an article by Tony Wright entitled: “In memory of cleft sticks and the frustrations of sending a story.” It opens with this:

There were times in strange places when I longed for a cleft stick or two. The usage of the cleft stick in long-distance news communication was brought to the literary world’s attention by Evelyn Waugh’s novel of 1938, Scoop. It remains the finest farce written about the work of travelling newspaper correspondents. […]

Furnished with a fabulous expense account, the unlikely Boot of the Beast sets off with a small mountain of essential equipment. His kit includes a portable typewriter, six hockey sticks and six polo mallets, a furnished tent, three months’ rations, a collapsible canoe, a Union Jack, a hand-pump and sterilising plant, an astrolabe for calculating latitude, six suits of tropical linen, a sou’-wester, a camp operating table and surgical instruments, a portable humidor, a Christmas hamper complete with Santa Claus costume and mistletoe stand, a cane for whacking snakes, a coil of rope and a sheet of tin for unspecified purposes.

Oh, yes, and a large supply of cleft sticks.

Wright then describes the convoluted and ingenious methods that correspondents used to deliver their stories to distant publishers before the internet took much of the excitement out of the trade. One of the most interesting was this story of an early pre-internet “word processor”:

Technology intervened in the 1980s. A photographer and I travelled around Australia in 1988, sending stories every day for months. I typed on a little word processor that had only eight lines of words visible. Shooting the story to the news desk involved finding a phone – booths sat even in the desert those days – and connecting two rubberised suction caps to the clunky handpiece. A satisfying whooshing sound ensured – the words were converted to electrical sound, and hurtled off to a receiver far away.

I do not recall ever seeing such a device. Waugh would have loved to satirize that machine and its users if he had lived long enough. He had trouble using the telephone and never learned how to type.

–The New Republic has published a profile of TV personality Tucker Carlson. In his early years, before he became (according to Alan Shephard) “the most important right-wing voice in the country”, he was building a success as a journalist:

In these [early] pieces, we see the nucleus of Carlson’s later persona: He cares not one iota for public policy; what gets his blood up is hypocrisy, particularly when it comes from women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. He continued writing for The Weekly Standard but became one of the most sought-after long-form magazine writers in the country publishing pieces for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and, later, The New Republic.

In 1999, he profiled George W. Bush for Tina Brown’s Talk magazine. Bush was running as “a compassionate conservative,” a Christian of deep faith, and a moral leader who could lift the country out of the debauched Clinton years. Carlson’s profile was glowing—mostly. But he also caught Bush’s naughty, frat boy side: He quotes the Texas governor saying “fuck,” over and over again, something Bush’s communications director, Karen Hughes, went to great lengths to deny. More chillingly, Carlson also noted Bush mocking Karla Faye Tucker, a recently executed death row inmate in Texas: “‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’”

Carlson “was really a kind of hilarious—at that time—gadfly scamp,” Brown said. “Tucker is a fantastic writer. One of the things I find regrettable in all of this is that Tucker had an almost Evelyn Waugh–ish ability to skewer people and make it really funny. He had such a hilarious touch and truth. I thought he had the makings of a top talent.”

Shephard goes on to describe how, after these early successes, Carlson overcame several setbacks on his road to conservative stardom. Alas, we no longer have The Weekly Standard, but Tucker Carlson is still very much with us.

–The New York Times interviews CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper for its weekly “By the Book” column. Here’s an excerpt from the Q&A:

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

A. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I’ve watched the mini-series many times and it is still so great, so I thought I should read the book. I loved it.

–Brooke Allen in the New Criterion reviews a new biography of art critic Clive Bell. The review opens with this:

When Charles Ryder, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s semi-autobiographical Brideshead Revisited (1945), arrives as an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1920s, he fills his bookshelf with volumes by Lytton Strachey, A. E. Housman, Norman Douglas, Compton Mackenzie, and a copy of Clive Bell’s Art (1914), a touchstone of modernist theory. It is a nice detail, indicating not only the boy’s aspirations to intellectual modishness but his cultural insularity, a point that will be underscored later in the novel when, in thrall to the Flyte family, Charles makes an aesthetic conversion to the international Baroque.

For Bell (along with his older comrade-in-arms, Roger Fry—also featured on Ryder’s bookshelf) was modern art’s apostle to the Anglo-Saxons, the island nation’s interpreter of the ideas behind the post-Impressionist revolution taking place across the Channel. Most famously, Bell explicated the concept of “significant form.” […] Bell took the line (followed by the callow, impressionable Charles Ryder) that artistic genius had dimmed since the quattrocento, and he breezily dismissed most of the masterpieces of the High Renaissance and the Baroque. Art had reignited, he said, with the post-Impressionists and Cubists, who far from initiating a radical break with the past had rejoined the European tradition from which mainstream art had long deviated. Giotto, he opined, was perhaps the “greatest painter of all time.”

It is telling that already in 1945 Waugh was presenting Art as a period piece, though Bell was to live into the 1960s. Bell himself, in later life, described the book as a record of “what people like myself were thinking and feeling in the years before [World War I],” and [his biographer Mark] Hussey states that now, in the twenty-first century, it is generally “regarded as solely of historical interest.” …

The review is entitled “Clive Bell’s chimes” and is available here. The book reviewed is entitled Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism by Mark Hussey and is available here.

–Finally the University of Dayton in Ohio has posted a Master’s Degree thesis on the internet. This is entitled “Beyond Sins and Symptoms: Suffering in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited” and is written by Sarah Miller. Here’s the abstract:

This work interrogates the ongoing popularity of Catholic Modern novelist Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 classic Brideshead Revisited as a novel that depicts the modern struggle to find hope and meaning in the midst of suffering after the widespread onset of modernity and decline of Christianity in the wake of World Wars I and II. I argue that Waugh’s characterization of Sebastian Flyte, a lapsed Catholic aristocrat struggling with familial dysfunction and subsequent alcoholism, confounds both traditional models of sin as well as psychological frameworks of diagnosis. Employing close readings from the novel as well as historical and theological context, I demonstrate that Sebastian’s suffering falls into the no-mans-land between modernity and spirituality, highlighting the failures of each to support healing and the importance of embracing suffering with compassion.

The paper (36 pp.) is posted at this link. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending the link.

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“Brideshead Regained” Again

Posted on September 19, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Italian religious webpage Radio Spada has posted a review of the 2003 “sequel” to Brideshead Revisited. This somewhat misbegotten volume was written by Michael Johnston as an intended celebration of Waugh’s centenary. As explained in the article, the book was issued without the permission of the Waugh Estate. After they protested, (Alexander Waugh is quoted as having described the author as “illiterate”), the book was withdrawn from the marketplace except for online sales and a disclaimer was pasted on the dustwrapper. The Italian review by Luca Fumagalli continues:

…Beyond the legal controversy, from an artistic point of view Brideshead Regained is a mediocre book. In fact, if “rewriting” a masterpiece is a fairly widespread practice – there are many illustrious examples, from Shakespeare to Milton -, it is decidedly more difficult to produce something that is up to the original, especially if you are dealing with an author like Waugh, in whose prose, difficult to replicate, mixing seamlessly the serious and humorous, high and low (or sacred and profane, to quote the subtitle of Brideshead Revisited).

Johnston’s novel – divided into two parts that echo the chapter title “Et in Arcadia Ego” of Waugh’s book – follows the story of Charles Ryder, newly promoted “official war artist”, during the Second World War. Charles is first sent to North Africa, where he paints a portrait of De Gaulle, improvises himself as a spy and paints alongside Churchill. In a Tunisian monastery, he also finds Sebastian who, having made peace with his friend, can finally himself die in peace. After the Normandy landings, Charles is transferred to Europe and witnesses the horrors committed in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In the epilogue, set after the war, the funeral of the elderly “Nanny” Hawkins is an opportunity for him to return to Brideshead. There he briefly, and for the last time, meets the Flyte family.

In the course of his adventures, in addition to Cordelia, Julia and historical characters described in a slightly too spooky way, the protagonist’s path crosses some of the figures that made Brideshead Revisited immortal. The first one he encounters is his cousin Jasper, who boasts the dull industriousness useful for making a career in a government ministry, while “Boy” Mulcaster, on the other hand, confirms himself as a bored and spendthrift aristocrat, fundamentally unable to face reality (he gets his lover pregnant and finds no other solution than to borrow money from Charles for a clandestine abortion). Others include Mr. Ryder, cold and aloof as always, the hateful Rex Mottram and Anthony Blanche, the homosexual dandy from Oxford, who is found dying in Bergen-Belsen. In addition, the complicated relationship between Charles, his two children and his ex-wife Celia, to whom he owes a large part of his fortune as an artist, is deepened. In recalling the names and events of   Brideshead Revisited, Johnston allows himself the luxury of even inserting a “cameo” by Waugh himself: at a certain point, it turns out that Charles has a novel by the English writer on his bed and that the latter, according to the most recent news, is busy on a mission in Yugoslavia.

For themes and settings, Brideshead Regained is more than a simple sequel to Brideshead Revisited. It appears to be a mixture between Waugh’s masterpiece and the Sword of Honor trilogy, with its classic Waughian theme of an old and noble England that is unfortunately destined to disappear. On the other hand, there are many similarities between Johnston’s Charles and Guy Crouchback, starting from the desire to finally be engaged on the front line in a war that is becoming more boring and exhausting for them every day.

However, as already mentioned, the overall result is not very satisfactory. There are many shortcomings in the novel, starting from a potentially intriguing structural system – with three distinct temporal planes that alternate – but which in the long run collapses in repetitiveness. In the same way, the style, which also tries to imitate the satirical air of  Brideshead Revisited, is too flat and monotonous, all seasoned with descriptions of a marked sensuality that certainly Waugh would not have tolerated. As for the plot, the impression is that, in the end, very few things happen and even those few are described too hastily, condensed at best into a handful of pages.

The gravest fault of Brideshead Regained however remains that of betraying the apologetic soul of Waugh’s masterpiece which ends – it should be remembered – with Charles’s conversion to Catholicism (“I recited a prayer, an ancient formula, recently learned” ). Instead, Johnston shows the reader a Ryder whose new religious sensibility remains confined to an intimate and private dimension. He does not officially belong to any Christian denomination and, consequently, continues not to approach the sacraments. Moreover, faced with the horror of the Nazi concentration camps, he again seems inclined to deny the existence of God (“Can there be a God? Would even God know?” Are the last words that close the story).

Thus, by depriving the protagonists of  Brideshead Revisited of their spiritual verticality – the same mistake made in Julian Jarrold’s 2008 film adaptation – the story is reduced to a particularly dark and distressing sentimental drama, where, paradoxically, religion  hinders the happiness of men, a happiness which, obviously, according to such a perspective can only be exclusively earthly.

The translation is by Google with edits. The original Italian text is available at this link. And despite the reviewer’s misgivings, the book’s online sales continue.

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