Evelyn Waugh Studies 52.1 (Spring 2021)

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the Evelyn Waugh Studies has been published and distributed to members. This is issue No. 52.1 (Spring 2021). The contents and opening paragraphs are as follows:

ARTICLES

Evelyn Waugh: A Housemaster’s Report

Jeremy Tomlinson

Evelyn Waugh left Lancing 100 years ago this December saying: “I am sure I have left at the right time: as early as possible and with success.” He was the 2,862nd pupil of the school. Since then about 11,000 more pupils have come and gone but he remains one of the best known and most distinguished; he even has an annual lecture in his honour. On one of these occasions, the Waugh family gave the College Evelyn’s original final report from December 1921. It is a fascinating document, prescient and challenging, and greatly to the credit of Lancing. To almost everyone’s surprise, Waugh had just won an open scholarship to Hertford College Oxford to read History. At that time it was much easier for public school boys to get Oxbridge places – of the 400 pupils who were at school with Waugh over five years, 128 did so – but only 14 got academic scholarships; that was the gold standard.

In the report, the Revd Henry Lucas, his History teacher, said “He can write an essay that is fresh and thoughtful. He can think and has the happy gift of finding the right word to express his thoughts.” His English teacher and form master, J F Roxburgh, of whom more anon, said “His work has great merit and is sometimes really brilliant;” “I think he has quite unusual ability and a real gift for writing. Congratulations on the first of many successes . . . we shall hear of him again.” …

REVIEWS

Greene’s Life with Waugh

The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene, by Richard Greene, New York: Norton, 2021. 624 pp. $40; or Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene, London: Little, Brown, 2020. 608 pp. ÂŁ25.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

This is the first comprehensive, single-volume biography of Graham Greene, a major 20th-century British novelist. He was also a close personal and professional friend of Evelyn Waugh as well as a fellow Roman Catholic convert. The previous detailed biography was by Norman Sherry and was published in three volumes during 1989-2004. That was written with Greene’s permission and with access to his papers, though the first volume was published in Greene’s lifetime and did not meet with his approval because of its “intrusion into his sexual life” contrary to what he thought he had agreed with Sherry. The final volume was, according to the author of this latest version, Richard Greene (hereafter “RG;” no relation to Graham), written during an early onset of Sherry’s dementia and is “strangely incoherent”. Another shorter book by Michael Shelden entitled Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (1994) was affected, as I recall, by a rivalry with Sherry and Greene over access to Greene’s papers (which were denied to Shelden) and, while readable and brief, is not usually recommended. RG describes it as “prosecutorial”. Greene’s boyhood, education and literary history track closely with those of Evelyn Waugh. Their private adult lives, however, sharply diverge.

The present book covers their friendship and some of the common issues arising from their published works. There are excellent reviews of the book available for those who want a broader consideration of its contents. […]  Rather than offer another discussion of the entire book, it is my intention to concentrate on those points of contact between the lives and works of the two writers.

NEWS

A copy of this issue (52.1) is posted at this link. A copy of the previous issue 51.3 is available at this link.

UPDATED (16 August 2021): Last paragraph updated.

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Roundup: Vagaries and More

Posted on August 12, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in the TLS, critic and novelist DJ Taylor discusses one genre he discovered he enjoyed during his lockdown reading. He identifies this as the writer’s vagary:

What is the writer’s vagary? It is the solitary book in a well-known novelist’s oeuvre that deviates from a well-trodden path, the uncharacteristic or in some cases over-characteristic book, the exception that proves the rule, the occasion on which the talent in question takes it into their head to venture out on a limb. The master of drawing-room comedies who decides to write a three-act tragedy; the historical novelist who produces a book set in a psychiatric hospital in which all the characters are represented by letters of the Greek alphabet – it is in this questionable and hitherto untilled soil that the writer’s vagary takes root and burgeons.

Not that the burgeoning can ever be taken for granted. Publishers, naturally, hate them on the grounds that the paying public, used to one kind of book, are liable to become confused when a different kind turns up. […]

He then offers examples of three vagaries by leading writers:

Evelyn Waugh’s Helena (1950), which swaps the Mayfair charivari for a devotional novel set in the third century; Patrick Hamilton’s Impromptu in Moribundia (1939), a Marxist fable which bears no relation at all to the grimly naturalist Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky trilogy (1929–34) that had preceded it, or Graham Greene’s Lord Rochester’s Monkey (1974), a departure from the beaten track so pronounced that it had to wait nearly four-and-a-half decades for publication.

He returns to Waugh’s vagary in his conclusion: “Penguin Books, who with great fanfare reprinted each of Evelyn Waugh’s novels as paperbacks in the 1950s, quietly excluded Helena from the list.”  But Waugh’s US publisher Little, Brown recognized a potential demand for the book and marketed it accordingly. In the US, where it was published simultaneously with the English hardback, it was reprinted 4 times in the first 5 months of sales and flirted with best-sellerdom. It had to wait until 1957 for a US paperback edition, but that was not uncommon in those days. Penguin finally got around to a UK paperback in 1963, and I think it has remained in print ever since. It was recently issued by OUP as Volume 11 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.

–Alexander Larman in the Guardian offers this remark on a recent debut biography by Will Loxley, Writing in the Dark:

Will Loxley’s first biography concerns the fortunes of Horizon magazine, the influential 1940s literary title that Cyril Connolly edited, George Orwell and Graham Greene contributed to and Evelyn Waugh vocally detested.

I think it is unfair to say that Waugh detested it. He was jealous of its (and its editor’s) popularity and made frequent satirical comments about them both in his letters and diaries. But in 1948, when the magazine’s future was in doubt, he let them print the complete text of The Loved One for the cost of his year’s subscription. He also on more than one occasion recognized its relative importance as a literary journal after its demise. Loxley’s book is mentioned in previous posts and will be reviewed in a future issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

–A new Netflix film, The Last Letter from Your Lover, has been widely mentioned as containing a plot device based on the film characters’ referring to each other by names of characters in Waugh’s novel Scoop. Here is an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times:

Fittingly for a movie awash in lovely penmanship, “The Last Letter From Your Lover” announces its writerly trappings at the outset. It begins with a quote from “A Farewell to Arms” and then, a short time later, finds two of its characters sparring over Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop.” The literary references, perfunctory and obvious though they may be, do their part to signal the kind of movie we’re watching: a forbidden romance set against the hustling-and-bustling world of the British press.

–A recent issue of the Italian online religious literary journal Radio Spada contains a review of Waugh’s novella Love Among the Ruins. This is published in Italian as “Amore tra le rovine”. Here’s is a translation of excerpts from the review’s concluding paragraphs:

The result, as we said, is an absurd pastiche , almost a freak show characterized by irrational characters and even more unthinkable situations. Miles Plastic, emblem of the “Modern Man”, product of that “Progress” that makes the members of the government so proud, is just a disillusioned poor man who vents his nothing by incinerating everything, even himself. […] More generally, in Love among the ruins everything is marked by the same destiny of decadence, so much so that even Mountjoy Castle, unlike the other stately mansions that appear in Waugh’s works, emblems of a golden age unfortunately disappeared, is reduced to a delinquent resort (Mountjoy, by the way, is the name of the Dublin prison).

The story is saved from an otherwise desperate epilogue only by its dystopian nature, the desire to be above all a warning, a warning against the fulfillment of the political, cultural and moral nightmares that crowded the mind of Waugh (some of which,  incidentally, have now become a sad reality). Behind a patina of easy divertissement , Love among the ruins therefore hides a controversial substance that is not at all despicable, the same that makes history worth reading and meditating on.

The article can be translated on the Chrome browser. The above excerpt contains a few edits.

—Town and Country magazine, a frequent US venue for Waugh’s writing in the 1940s, has published an article on the U and Non-U debate inspired by Nancy Mitford. This is on the occasion of the US broadcast of the TV adaptation of her novel The Pursuit of Love:

… it is her short essay “The English Aristocracy,” first published in Encounter magazine, that may be her most enduring legacy.

In it, she referenced an academic paper “U and Non-U: An Essay in Sociological Linguistics,” published in a Finnish journal by Alan S. C. Ross, a professor at the University of Birmingham. Ross argued that England at that time was divided into three classes and that, “It is solely by its language that the upper class is clearly marked off from the others.” His article, which he acknowledged was based mostly on personal observation, explored differences in pronunciation, writing styles, and vocabulary.

It was the latter category on which Mitford focused, expanding on Ross’s examples with some of her own. Upper class speakers said “looking glass;” non upper class speakers said, “mirror.” “Chimney piece” was U; “mantlepiece” non-U. Some entries supported a notion that the upper class abhorred euphemism (“die” instead of “pass on”) and preferred original names to new ones (“wireless” instead of “radio”). But many of the entries seemed arbitrary.

Mitford’s article garnered enough attention that she reprinted it in book form accompanied by Ross’s paper and rebuttals from well-known writers, including her friend Evelyn Waugh…

 

 

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Waugh Would Not Be Happy

Posted on July 28, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

To Evelyn Waugh, one of the most important aspects of the Roman Catholic Church’s Vatican II reforms of 1960 was the limitation on the use of the traditional Latin Mass. He spent his final years in active opposition to this reform. According to recent stories, the leniency that allowed certain parishes to use the Latin Mass in addition to the new vernacular versions has now suffered a setback. Here is the story recently reported in the Toronto Globe and Mail:

It may be considered a dead language, but Latin seems to be very much alive, and kicking rather aggressively, if the past week is any indication. On July 16, Pope Francis reversed one of his predecessor’s most significant policies by reintroducing (and increasing) strict restrictions on celebrating the Latin Mass – or, to be more precise, the revised Tridentine rite so beloved of traditionalists and conservatives. He argued that this version of the mass was causing division within the church and being exploited by critics of the Second Vatican Council.

Vatican II, as it’s more commonly known, introduced some long overdue reforms into the church in the 1960s and allowed for a new, more participatory and, some would claim, more historically accurate mass, in the vernacular. Latin wasn’t outlawed but became increasingly difficult to find.

When the new service was introduced it certainly surprised people, but opposition was limited and relatively brief. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, loudly responded in Latin to show his displeasure. Writer Evelyn Waugh even asked to be excused from mass – but Evelyn Waugh would do that, wouldn’t he?

The Latin Mass enjoyed a renaissance during the pontificate of John Paul II, even though he wasn’t a particular devotee. There are now parishes that celebrate in Latin all over the world. Most also offer the service in the local language – but not always willingly or enthusiastically.

Under Pope Francis’s new policy, the old rite has to receive the approval of the bishop in each diocese, and newly ordained priests require permission to lead such services, with the Vatican also being consulted. The bishop must also ascertain if Latin Mass leaders and participants accept Vatican II, which will be extremely difficult to do, and there is ambiguity about where they may worship – whether they will be allowed to do so in churches.

Possibly related to this, the Italian language religious website Radio Spada has posted an article in which it offers a survey of Waugh’s writings on this issue. Here is a translated excerpt from its introductory paragraphs:

Among the English intellectuals opposed to the new course, Evelyn Waugh was perhaps the one who most of all publicly expressed his dissent: until the end of his days he fought with articles, armed only with a typewriter, a daily battle against rampant heterodoxy.  Even in his powerful correspondence – edited by Mark Amory and published in 1980 – several letters can be traced that deal more or less directly with the issues debated at the Council. In 1996 these letters were collected by Alcuin Reid in a small volume, A Bitter Trial , subsequently expanded and republished in a second edition in 2011 by Ignatius Press.

To read the entire article, click this link on the Chrome browser.  When it opens, click in the lower right corner of the screen and choose “Translate to English”.

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Upcoming Waugh Events

Posted on July 26, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–This Thursday, 29 July will effectively be “Waugh Night” on BBC Four. This will start with the 2008 Ecosse/Miramax film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. BBC was one of several co-producers of the film and has redeployed it several times. Oddly, it seems to get better over time as the changes in the story have become better known and less jarring while the quality of some of the acting becomes more evident. This will be followed at 2205 by Waugh’s Face to Face interview with John Freeman, one of the best in what was an outstanding interview series. If you are still awake after all that, you might want to watch the following program as well. This is a film adaptation of Dodie Goodwin’s novel I Capture the Castle. It’s like Brideshead Revisited without the religion. These will all be available on BBC iPlayer after broadcast (indeed, I think the Face to Face interview may be a permanent posting). A UK internet connection is needed to stream these.

–Amazon Prime will be streaming the BBC’s recent TV adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love. This will be available in the USA starting next Friday, 30 July. See several previous postings for critical reception of the series in the UK.

–Campion Hall in Oxford has announced the book launch for a book by Prof. Gerard Kilroy relating to Edmund Campion. Here is the announcement:

Evelyn Waugh began his life of Edmund Campion as an act of gratitude to Martin D’Arcy, SJ. The book, which he wrote in six months, won the Hawthornden prize two days before the opening of the new Campion Hall on 26th June 1936. His encounters with the horrors of communism in Mexico in 1939 and Croatia in 1944 transformed his understanding of Campion’s martyrdom, which he came to see as part of ‘an unending war’ between state and church, and led to that study of the ‘the same pure light shining in the darkness, uncomprehended’, Brideshead Revisited, whose original title, ‘A Household of the Faith: a Theological Novel’, echoed Campion’s scaffold utterance and perhaps best expressed his own view of Campion Hall.

The Book Launch will be a hybrid event with Professor Kilroy addressing a small audience in Oxford. We invite you to join us for the celebration online.

This is open to online participation on 9 September at 530pm UK time. See this link for free registration. The title of the book that is being launched is not entirely clear. Prof Kilroy is the author of a detailed biography of Campion published about 5 years ago and is also co-editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh’s projected vol 17 (Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr). This book launch may relate to yet another book called Edmund Campion and Waugh’s ‘Household of the Faith’ or it may be the issuance of an edition of one of these other books. Details of the event and joining instructions are available at this link.

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Scoop Scooped

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Scoop has become a prominent news story. This is the result of a poll by the Publishers Association to mark its 125th anniversary. They asked MPs to name their favorite book, and Boris Johnson named Scoop. He offered no explanation for his choice, although several others did briefly explain theirs. Here’s a link to the announcement of the choices (Scoop appears on p. 6).

Several papers mention the list (and Johnson’s choice). For example, The Spectator’s “Steerpike” column has this comment:

The Prime Minister’s own choice represents something of a hat-tip to his former career as a journalist. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, is a 1938 satire of foreign correspondents, sensationalism and newsroom rivalries set in the fictional East African nation of Ishmaelia. Unsurprisingly, Johnson’s own economies with the actualité in the jungles of Brussels and Westminster have prompted many already to draw parallels with Waugh’s delightfully sketched characters. An alternative suggestion for the PM could be the choice of Carolyn Harris MP, deputy leader of Welsh Labour who opted for Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer – a fantasy work about an uneasy peace in Ireland, nearly thwarted by one man’s over-elaborate technical ‘solutions.’

Patrick Kidd in his Times diary wrote this:

Boris Johnson went to Waugh: specifically Scoop. The prime minister surely does not identify with its hero, William Boot. He is hardly one to chase questing voles through plashy fens. The Johnson role model is more the man Boot replaces at The Beast: Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock, a reporter who can start revolutions simply by making up stories without leaving his hotel room.

Although not mentioned by those papers, Johnson’s selection may have been foreseen by a feature-length article in The Critic. This is written by journalist Robert Hutton and is briefly mentioned in the Guardian. This article is entitled “Putting the Boot in…” and relates to the novel specifically, not Johnson.  Near the beginning Hutton explains the book’s importance with a reference to a previous Prime Minister:

[David] Cameron, himself a man who was reluctant to take the whole business of prime ministering too seriously, understood this. As leader of the Opposition he’d kept on his desk a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. It’s a book that explains a great deal about the press in general and the current prime minister in particular.

For a British reporter, Scoop is the holy text of the job. One of the enduring mysteries of journalism is that a trade which employs large numbers of skilled writers, and puts them into interesting situations every day, has been the subject of so few really good novels. Scoop was written as satire, but eight decades after it was published, and after the industry has gone through two technological revolutions, it remains the best description of UK journalistic life.

After a review of the novel, Hutton explains how some of the characters relate to present day persons and events:

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. As well as being Britain’s most successful politician, the prime minister has long been one of the country’s highest-paid journalists, a job he did entirely in the Scoop mould. His sympathetic biographer, Andrew Gimson, describes how, posted to Brussels, Johnson delighted in producing stories that were more entertaining than accurate. It was not that he was opposed to writing accurate stories, but he didn’t see it as in any way essential.

The Scoop character Johnson most resembles isn’t the hero — Boot is too naïve, his reports too close to reality. Nor is the press corps regulars, Corker, Shumble, Whelper and Pigge, who huddle in the same hotel, lest they will be beaten on a story. Johnson, both as journalist and politician, has generally preferred to hunt alone. We must look to the man Boot replaced at the Beast, foreign correspondent Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock.

Like Johnson, who was hazy on the outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad, Sir Jocelyn is more confident than he should be about history (“He was wrong about the Battle of Hastings,” says Lord Copper. “It was 1066. I looked it up”). He hides in his hotel room before filing an entirely imaginary interview — something else for which Johnson has form. Sir Jocelyn was, pleasingly, modelled on Sir Percival Phillips, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, which would later employ Johnson.

Sir Jocelyn’s fabrications didn’t hold him back, and Johnson’s propelled him to the front rank of journalism, then into politics, where he exhibits the same behaviour: the pursuit of a higher “truth” unburdened by facts, the deadline mentality, the reluctance to correct mistakes, the assumption that someone else should pick up the bill…

The story closes with another Johnson reference. You can read it at this link.

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Auberon Herbert: Defender of Eastern Europe (1922-1974)

Posted on July 21, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh Society member Milena Borden has written a commemorative article about Auberon Herbert, brother-in-law of Evelyn Waugh. He died on this date in 1974 and the centenary of his birth on 25 April 1922 will be marked next year. The introduction to her article is posted below. A more detailed version is being prepared for publication in a future issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies:

Auberon Mark Henry Yvo Molyneux Herbert who died on this day, 21 July, in 1974, aged 52, was Evelyn Waugh’s brother-in-law. Waugh disliked him intensely and the hostility between them seems to have been mutual. The writer married Auberon’s sister Laura Herbert in 1937 and as Martin Stannard wrote about Waugh’s wedding, Auberon Herbert was a comical feature of what was otherwise a respectable day: “There was only one faintly ridiculous element to the proceedings: the bride was given away by her sixteen-year-old brother, Auberon, a moon-faced boy Waugh could never like.” (Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, 1986: 449). Waugh never really forgave him for being against the marriage and some of their common friends later on recalled how awkward it was when circumstances forced them to be together. But according to their contemporary Malcolm Muggeridge, who was a Catholic journalist and broadcaster, Auberon Herbert was able to express a degree of appreciation towards Waugh: “
whenever the subject of Waugh cropped up between us, he never failed to acknowledge Waugh’s qualities
” (Auberon Herbert: A Composite Portrait, 1976:48).

Auberon Herbert was the only son of Aubrey Herbert (1880-1923), a British military and intelligence officer, and a conservative politician from an aristocratic background who strongly supported the Albanian independence of 1912 after the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Although Auberon Herbert did not remember his father who died a year after he was born, he followed into his steps and had a huge commitment to other less fortunate nations of Europe, most notably Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1954, together with a few friends he founded the Anglo-Byelorussian Society and was its chairman until the end of his life. Byelorussian clergy conducted his funeral and requiem mass at the request of his family, underlining the very close bond between him and the Byelorussian community (The Journal of Byelorussian Studies, 1974).

Like Evelyn Waugh, he was a devout Roman Catholic deeply disappointed with the profound changes in the Latin Mass introduced by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). As a result, he frequented the traditional Eastern Liturgy of the Byelorussian Catholics at their church in Finchley, north London. Also, similarly to Evelyn Waugh, initially he couldn’t join the British Army because he was declared not fit on health grounds. Instead he enlisted voluntarily in the Polish Armed Forces in Britain (1940-1947) as a private, later became a second lieutenant and received several military decorations for his services. During his service with the Polish officers in London during the war, Auberon Herbert became a passionate supporter of Poland, a country which was tragically trapped between the German invasion from the west and the Soviet occupation from the east. In the course of the war and after it ended, Poland’s tragic division came to symbolise the historic betrayal of the rest of Eastern Europe which is also one of the major themes in Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour (1952-1961).

A very good account of the problems faced by Poland at the end of WWII is currently available on BBC4. This is in a series entitled World War II: Behind Closed Doors. It was originally broadcast in 2008 and is based on documents that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.  The earlier episodes disclose information about the Soviets’ annihilation and later cover-up of the Polish officer corps after their first occupation of Poland during the Nazi-Soviet non-agression pact. The final episodes focus on the inability of the British and Americans to prevent Stalin (now their ally) from imposition of a Soviet-backed government at the end of the war. The Poles had to wait 45 years for the “free elections” Stalin kept promising. Their advocate Auberon Herbert did not live to see that event.  The full six-episode series will be available on BBC iPlayer for the next 11 months. A UK internet connection is required to watch it.

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Roundup: Travel Book Revival?

Posted on July 19, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–A new book about travel writing has been published. Ever hopefully, a new look for a possible revival of the genre is undertaken by Tim Hannigan in his book The Travel Writing Tribe. This is reviewed by Noo Saro-Wiwa and appears in the current issue of TLS. It opens with this:

“Is travel writing dead?” It is a question that has been asked regularly since the nineteenth century. Yet time and time again, the genre has defied all predictions. Evelyn Waugh was writing it off in 1946 when Paul Theroux, one of today’s bestselling authors, was just five years old. Theroux’s book The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) sold 1.5 million copies and is often credited with launching the travel-writing boom of the late twentieth century, when seemingly anyone could get a book deal, and advances for the top writers were hand-rubbingly high. Yet these days the bookshop travel sections are getting slimmer. Large publishing houses dropped dedicated travel lists years ago, while smaller travel writing publishers have mostly shifted to novelty gift books and business manuals. In terms of advances, £15K is the new £50K.

Cheap, mass travel and television documentaries have perhaps contributed to the declining readership of travelogues. In a world that’s been thoroughly mapped and photographed, one sometimes wonders what exactly these shirtless men bestriding today’s sand dunes are discovering. So where can travel writing go in the twenty-first century? Tim Hannigan sets out to answer this question in The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in search of a genre, an excellent and thought-provoking book. […] Genial and passionate, he speaks to writers, scholars and even lay readers as he explores issues including not only class, gender and ethics but also fictionalization and whether the use of the first person is an indulgence.

Hannigan describes his own travels in connection with his visitations to current travel writing practitioners such as Sara Wheeler, Colin Thubron, William Dalrymple, Dervla Murphy et al., “in their natural habitats. The conversations are full, frank and often surprising.” He comes away with the conclusion that there is

…scope for a possible revival: if mass travel killed the genre, then a Covid-ridden world of restricted movement could conceivably spark a resurgence. He expects at the very least that publishers will make greater effort to seek out more diverse travel writing voices, the “insider-outsiders” or those who are “writing back” and turning the lens towards the traditional centres of power.

In any case, the human desire to hear about alien societies and cultures is an enduring one, and [Colin] Thubron believes the genre will survive because it is accessible and flexible. “It can change itself to suit anybody that wants to write about what it means to be somewhere else. I think the future’s there for travel writing, it’s just not going to be travel writing as you and I perhaps recognise it.”

The book is also reviewed in the Guardian. It is available for sale in the UK and will be published in America in September.

–In her Times review of the new book about wartime literary London, Writing in the Dark, Laura Freeman writes that the book is a tour:

…of literary London during the Second World War. [Will Loxley, the author,] starts with a cast of important characters: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, founders of the Hogarth Press; Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden, on the verge of their America flit; John Lehmann, poet, editor and founder of New Writing; Stephen Spender, poet and (briefly) “poster boy for the British Communist Party”; Cyril Connolly, former literary critic for the New Statesman, now editor of Horizon magazine; George Orwell; Dylan Thomas; Evelyn Waugh and Julian Maclaren-Ross, “soon-to-be novelist, short story writer and screenwriter, but currently working as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman”. This is a book about poetry, politics and propaganda, about little magazines and big ideas.[…]

After Isherwood and Auden left for America in January 1939, Waugh assessed the lie of the literary land. “The highbrows have split — half have become US citizens, the other half have grown beards and talk of surviving to salvage European culture.” As bombs fell, salvaging European culture meant magazines printed on rationed paper and edited amid dust, rubble and air raids.

See previous post. According to this link, Amazon.com will be selling the print version in the US on and after 22 July 2021.

–The books blog The Letterpress Project has posted the last in a series of reviews of Waugh’s war trilogy. This is by Alun Severn and relates to the final volume, Unconditional Surrender. It opens with this:

In Officers and Gentlemen, the second volume of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, we rejoined Guy Crouchback in black-out London following his ignominious discharge from the Halberdiers. In the third and final volume, Unconditional Surrender, Guy is again back in London and once more on the hunt for meaningful wartime employment. He still – just about – sees the defeat of fascism as an almost chivalric calling, one that his landed gentry ancestors would have understood and rallied to the flag for. On the other hand, he is realistic about his own declining physical powers and the absurdity and failure of at least some of the ‘actions’ that war has cast him as part of.

Archived with this review are the reviews of the previous volumes of the trilogy, as well as several other books including Brideshead Revisited, Put Out More Flags (2), Scoop and Handful of Dust. These are by Alun Severn and others. They are thoughtful, well written and worth reading.

–A legal news website Above the Law has posted a reading list with recommended books for the summer holidays. Here’s one contribution of interest to our readers:

Brian Dalton, Breaking Media SVP, Editorial Director

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it.” I’m old enough to agree with Nabokov on this one. Some old favorites I revisit:

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh — Among the two funniest books ever written.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis — The other one of the two.

Cultural Amnesia by Clive James — A liberal arts education that you can keep in your bathroom.

–Finally, Emily Mortimer who wrote, directed and appears in the recent BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love is interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald. This is in advance of Australian transmission of the adaptation on Amazon Prime. Before discussing the adaptation, the interview explores Mortimer’s previous career and the influence her father had on it. He was John Mortimer who drafted a script for the adaptation of the 1980s Granada TV version of Brideshead Revisited. Here’s an excerpt:

Just as John Mortimer’s father, Clifford, was sharply present in his thoughts and writing (the inspiration for Rumpole of the Bailey as well as his memoir A Voyage Round My Father), Emily feels the same way about her own father, who died in 2009: “I feel very sad that he’s not here any more,” she says.

His spirit imbues her version of The Pursuit of Love, she says: “Every single part of this has been influenced by my dad and the way he saw life. That kind of resolute and determined lack of earnestness that Nancy had, an absolute allergy to it, my dad had. You know: that you can be anything as long as you’re not boring.

UPDATE (23 July 2021): In the US, Amazon.com is selling print, not Kindle versions of the book Writing in the Dark. The text has been corrected accordingly.

 

 

 

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Waugh and the Clothes Press

Posted on July 15, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

A new print-only publication the Valet Magazine carries a feature-length article entitled “Waugh’s Last Hat”. This is written by Waugh biographer and weblogger Duncan McLaren. As usual, Duncan combines his scholarship and wit in describing Waugh’s sartorial history. He includes clothing references from the earliest stories and diary entries via many of the major works of fiction right through to Basil Seal Rides Again. This includes references to Waugh’s actual tailors and hatters such as Anderson and Sheppard and John Lock & Co, respectively. The centerpiece of the article involves Waugh’s attraction to outlandish tweeds and bowler hats in the flush days of the early postwar years. Here’s an example:

…Christopher Sykes recalled in Evelyn Waugh: A Biography that in 1947, Waugh ordered from Anderson and Sheppard a suit made from a material woven exclusively for the delectation of the Household Cavalry (including the Royal Horse Guards). Conventionally, it was used for overcoats and country caps, but as you might have guessed, Waugh had other ideas. He ordered it in the form of a suit of light-brown wool, but dominated by a loud red check about three inches square. Sykes noted that it made the writer look like a music-hall comedian, and that the bright-red line that ran down the fly buttons rendered the whole ensemble vaguely obscene. I wonder if this feature was present because of the expertise of his Savile Row tailor, or in spite of it. Black-and-white pictures of Waugh wearing the suit don’t quite convey the outlandishness of the garment.

The article is not posted on the internet but subscriptions and individual issues may be purchased at this link. While it is illustrated, it does not also show examples of the more radical side of Waugh’s tastes as described in Duncan’s text. It is possible that some of those might well be searched out on Duncan’s website.

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Roundup: Mostly Books

Posted on July 13, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the current issue of Literary Review there is the review of a new book about a subject familiar to Waugh readers. This is Will Loxley’s Writing in the Dark: Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon Magazine. The review by Daisy Dunn opens with this:

Virginia Woolf likened the sound of bombs falling in the war to ‘the sawing of a branch overhead’. At Rodmell in East Sussex, in Bloomsbury, Bow and beyond, the air scintillated with the aftermath of explosions or floated ‘thick as Hell’ above the trees. Lamplighters – ‘the silent brigade of the gloaming, like folkloric guardians of dreams’, as Will Loxley describes them – extinguished every last flicker on the streets below, leaving those brave enough to remain out after dusk as vulnerable to hazards on the ground as to what fell from the sky. ‘All the gossip is of traffic casualties,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh in his diary in October 1939. ‘Cyril Connolly’s mistress lamed for life and Cyril obliged to return to his wife.’

Connolly, at that time courting Diana Witherby, was preparing to push against the darkness, as well as the precept of his friend Logan Pearsall Smith that there were ‘three illusions’ everyone experienced: ‘falling in love, starting a magazine and thinking they could make money out of keeping chickens’. As the bookshops emptied, publishers postponed the release of new titles, T S Eliot wound up The Criterion and the final copies of London Mercury rolled off the press, Connolly’s Horizon arrived to illuminate ‘young writers-at-arms’.

The book is not yet available in America but can be purchased in the UK at the link above.

—The Scotsman reviews a new book entitled Honour and the Sword: The Culture of Dueling.  The book is by Joseph Farrell and is reviewed by Allan Massie. The review begins with a quote from Waugh’s novel Sword of Honour:

“Guy,” says Ivor Claire in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen, “what would you do if you were challenged to a duel”. “Laugh,” Guy replies.[…]

Joseph Farrell quotes this exchange early in his fascinating examination of the Culture of Duelling, and it is very much to the point. The two characters, Ivor and Guy, recognise that 150 years ago their understanding of Honour would have compelled them to accept a challenge to a duel, even in certain circumstances to offer one. Guy, a Roman Catholic (like Waugh himself) remarks that “moral theologians were never able to stop duelling – it took democracy to do that.”

The quotation is characteristically well-chosen, Waugh being one of the comparatively few 20th-century British novelists to have concerned himself with the question of honour. According to the duelling code, it was dishonourable to accept an insult unchallenged; honour required you to accept when challenged to a duel. Shakespeare has Falstaff dismiss honour as a mere word and say he’ll have none of it, but Falstaff was a man ahead of his time.

After a discussion of the book’s primary themes, Massie concludes with another reference to Waugh’s novel:

Professor Farrell, erudite, intellectually curious author of several admirable books about Italy and Stevenson in Samoa, ranges widely – there is even a chapter on duels fought by women. Democracy, as Waugh’s Guy Crouchback says, killed the practice; we are all with Falstaff now. But what has become of the idea of Honour? Dryden called it “an empty bubble”. Are we better now for its pricking? This splendid book, rich in examples of courage and folly, provokes thought. Read it once for pleasure. Then ponder its significance in our time of false news and slanderous speech.

The book is also without a US publisher but is available in the UK at the link above.

–The website Politico.com has published excerpts from a book by Gary Ginsburg entitled First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents. One of these is the “unsung” friendship of John F Kennedy with Englishman David Ormsby-Gore. This began in the late 1930s when Kennedy’s sister Kathleen (“Kick”) met him in London during the period their father Joe Kennedy was US Ambassador. According to the book:

When David met Kick that spring evening, whatever unease each may have felt vanished almost instantly. By the end of the weekend, Kick had found the squad that would sustain her in Britain for the following decade. With her older brother Jack due to arrive in London any day, Kick couldn’t wait to show them off. And by the time he left three months later, Jack, like Kick, would have his own London social circle, with David Ormsby-Gore at its center.

Precisely how, when, and where Kennedy first met Ormsby-Gore remains lost to history. Several accounts suggest they linked at a dinner party at the ambassador’s residence or at the Epsom horse races. The novelist Evelyn Waugh had a different recollection, saying they met “over supine bodies in a squalid basement bottle-party.” What is certain is that once Kick sparked their connection during the early summer of 1938, Jack’s attraction to Ormsby-Gore and his fellow Brits would prove as strong for him as it had been for her.

My own recollection is that Ormsby-Gore’s personal friendship with both John Kennedy and his wife Jackie was much sung about in the American press both during his term in office and afterwards. But perhaps it is not typical of the other brief lives that form the book’s theme.

–Finally, our reader David Lull has sent this poem by Jeffrey Burghauser that recently appeared in the New English Review:

On Alexander Waugh
Whose YouTube channel is devoted to the proposition that Edward de Vere wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare
 
Exhausted by the weight of heresies
I can’t but feel reveal the Truth,
(How they have multiplied since youth!)
I now must find the space in which to squeeze
     Another one. It brings me no delight
     That Alexander Waugh is likely right.

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New Books: Chagford and Fish Knives

Posted on July 6, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–American novelist Chuck Etheridge has published earlier this year a new book entitled Chagford Revisited. Here’s the description from the publisher:

Marker, an American Anglophile software engineer, has purchased the home Evelyn Waugh stayed in while writing Brideshead Revisited. He soon discovers the house is a money pit and quickly runs through his life’s savings. To save his home, he and his friends from the Castrated Goat, his local pub, start staging 1930’s style murder mystery role-play weekends for guests in Marker’s home. This attracts the attention of cheapskate BBC producers, who seize upon the low-cost opportunity to produce a lucrative TV series. Marker soon runs afoul of the Lord Mayor’s wife, the patrons of the Tortured Terrier, a supercilious rival pub, and the law. After causing an international diplomatic incident, getting arrested, and surviving a septuagenarian sex scandal, he succeeds in making Chagford the singles destination in the UK. But is this the Chagford he came to England to find?

Etheridge, who lives in Corpus Christi, is currently featured in a podcast interview on TheAuthorsShow.com. The book is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and ebook editions and several reader reviews are posted.

–Daisy Waugh’s new book Phone for the Fish Knives (see previous post) has recently been reviewed by Daisy Goodwin in the Catholic Herald. After a summary of the book, the review concludes:

This is a delightful soufflé of a book, puffed up and bursting with wit and attitude but lacking any solid underpinnings. Frankly that is a relief after reading so many thrillers which start with the mutilated corpses of young girls, and go downhill from there; or the psychological noir books in which women are gaslighted by horrible men. Phone For the Fish Knives may not be psychologically profound, but it is witty, well written and determinedly entertaining. In a year of gloom and dashed hopes, really who could ask for more?

This is the perfect book for the staycation, amusing enough to distract you from the driving rain or family you can’t get away from, but not so complicated that you can’t follow it after a couple of much needed gin and tonics. This book made me laugh out loud, and frankly that’s all I am looking for right now.

The book is available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and audio editions. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending the review.

 

 

 

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