Max Mosley 1940-2021 R.I.P.

Posted on May 25, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The death was announced yesterday of Max Mosley, best remembered as the head of Formula One racing, who sorted it out during his tenure. He is also well known as the son of Diana Mitford and her second husband Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. Max was also a battler against invasion of privacy by the British press. He contributed to the demise of News of the World against whom he prevailed in a privacy case stemming from a 2008 story. It may have helped that he was a qualified barrister.

The Daily Mail, not a friend of Mosley, runs two obituaries. The briefer (and less unkind) by Jonathan McAvoy carries the following description of his mother and his career:​

Mosley died on Sunday night, aged 81, after one of the most significant and controversial contributions to [Formula One’s] history […] His mother was described by Evelyn Waugh as possessing a beauty that rang through a room like a peal of bells. […] In Formula One circles, he was a central figure. Tall, taut, clever with words, he never lost an argument. He delivered his every line with precision and never ducked a fight. His whole demeanour was dressed up in punctilious politesse.

The reference from Waugh is taken from his novel fragment Work Suspended (Penguin, p. 173). The heroine in that novel, Lucy, is a thinly disguised portrait of Diana Mitford, Max Mosley’s mother. See previous post.

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Roundup

Posted on May 23, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–The exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s works relating to the Bright Young People of the 1920s has reopened in Sheffield. This was originally scheduled for exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London last spring but was forced to close after one week due to the coronavirus lockdown. It is now on exhibit at the Millennium Gallery of the Sheffield Museums. Here is their description:

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things explores a deliriously eccentric, glamorous and joyful era of British cultural life during the 1920s and 30s through the lens of the renowned British photographer. The exhibition presents a dazzling leading cast of society figures, artists, writers and partygoers, each seen through the prism of Beaton’s portraits. Featuring 150 works, many of which are seldom exhibited, the images on display present a playful spectacle of costumed theatricality and unbridled creativity.

Among the works on display are portraits of Evelyn Waugh. Details are available at this link. See also earlier posts for reviews of the exhibition when it originally opened in London.

–Comedian Alexei Sayle is this week’s guest in BBC’s long-running radio series Desert Island Discs. Here is an excerpt of a summary he provided in a recent interview:

His chosen tracks included Joe Hill by Joan Baez, which had been sung at the funeral of his communist mother; Dizzee Rascal’s Bonkers, and the Battle Hymn Of The Soviet Air Force, technically known as the Aviators’ March, which he said would be the national anthem of the Tropical Socialist Republic Of Alexei Sayle he would set up on the fictional island.

His luxury item was a Chinese broadsword, both because he enjoys martial arts as a hobby but also because he could use it as a machete, and he chose Evelyn Waugh’s  Sword of Honour as his book…

This episode is available on BBC Radio 4 over the BBC iPlayer at this link.

–The Financial Times has a story about the welcome announcement that foreign travel is about to be reopened to the British people. The article is by Tom Robbins who thinks this is in general a good thing. Here’s an excerpt:

Not everyone is so delighted. The truth is that tourists have always been unpopular. […] By the latter half of the 19th century, tourists were already being likened to dumb animals, collectively described as herds, flocks or droves. Paradoxically, seeing the world was becoming an increasingly universal aspiration, the doublethink required enabled by an emerging distinction between the free-willed “traveller” and sheeplike tourist. “Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist,” wrote Evelyn Waugh in 1930.

–In the Indiependent newspaper, Ed Bedford writes that the new adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love owes more to the 1981 Granada TV adaptations of Brideshead Revisited than to previous adaptations of Mitford’s novel:

Before going into the detail of these allusions, it is worth noting that some level of similarity is bound to occur as both Mitford and Waugh both had similar backgrounds, and were themselves writing about the same groups of people. What should be stressed is that the allusions this article covers are limited to this specific TV adaption. It would be a great disservice to think that Mitford’s novels are in any way derivative of Waugh’s.

The most apparent of these allusions can be found in the music. Most of the music choice is deliberately anachronistic, blending a range of time periods and styles to wonderful effect. One musical choice that stands out, however, is the use of Georges Delerue’s Le Grand Choral as the narrator Fanny first approaches and enters Alconleigh, the house of the decidedly eccentric Radlett family. As Fanny steps across the threshold, the melody includes a phrase that is uncannily similar to one of the main motifs of Geoffrey Burgon’s theme for the 1981 ITV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.

Other allusions discussed are the scenes where a cigarette is passed by Linda to Fanny and where Charle Ryder passes one to Julia Flyte and the mannerisms of Andrew Scott’s Lord Merlin compared to those of Anthony Blanche as portrayed by Nicholas Grace.

UPDATE (26 June 2021); Edits made in final entry relating to the recent Pursuit of Love BBC adaptation. Thanks to Ed Bedford for pointing out the errors.

 

 

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Mid-May Roundup

Posted on May 15, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Nicholas Lezard, writing for the New Statesman opens his article on cold weather angst with this:

I was reading Evelyn Waugh’s first travel book, Labels, which for some inexplicable reason I had never got round to before, and I was barely a couple of pages in when he mentioned the Mediterranean seaboard. I was hit with a hammer-blow of longing to travel there, anywhere along there really, to sit in my shirtsleeves at a harbour cafĂ©, a plate of freshly grilled sardines and a chilled carafe of the local white in front of me, sky-blue fishing boats bobbing gently. You know, the works.

–The religious/cultural website The Imaginative Conservative has posted an article by David Deavel about Waugh’s literary style, a difficult subject to write about. The article opens with this:

Evelyn Waugh understands that if a writer is to develop, he “must concern himself more and more with Style.” By approaching words with the attention and craft of a tailor, the literary artist not only communicates but also gives pleasure to others.

–Literary critic Laura Freeman has posted a brief appreciation of 2oth century artist Scottie Wilson. This appears in The Spectator:

Scottie has been called a ‘primitive’ or an ‘outsider’ artist. Hopeless terms, really. Ragged nets to catch a lot of queer fish. Maori bushmen are primitive, Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau is primitive, African carvings are primitive, the paintings at Lascaux are primitive, Alfred Wallis is primitive. All it means is: didn’t go to school, or didn’t go to the right school, or didn’t get into the salon, or didn’t play the game. […]

Evelyn Waugh had a dig at Scottie — or Scottie’s fans — in The Loved One. Sir Francis Hinsley, reading a copy of Horizon, complains to Dennis Barlow: ‘Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton-Burnett, Sartre, “Scottie” Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?’ Sir Francis points to a page: ‘Those drawings there. Do they make sense to you?’ No, says Dennis. No, says Sir Francis.

—The Spectator has also posted a list by Stephen Arnell of “10 films about the upper classes” that he thinks might appeal to those who are enjoying the BBC’s current adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. These include 2 based on Evelyn Waugh novels:

Brideshead Revisited (2008). This is the film version that the article admits is “entirely superfluous compared to the excellent Granada series” from 1918. It is worth watching for the “pretty good” cast and the adaptation skills of Andrew Davies although lacking in the graphic depiction of what Waugh might have termed “Naughtiness”. The article also questions why with the BBC has started a remake of the series given these earlier efforts.

Bright Young Things (2003). This was Stephen Fry’s misfired attempt to adapt Vile Bodies. Again, a good cast but what worked on the page didn’t translate to the screen.

–The Daily Mail has a review of a new book entitled Elegy for a River by Tom Moorhouse. This is his account of a career studying river creatures in English habitats for Oxford University. Among the creatures he includes is one immortalized by Evelyn Waugh. The review opens with a reference to that:

William Boot, the hapless hero of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, famously observed in his nature notes column for the fictional Daily Beast: ‘Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.’

That just shows how little Mr Boot really knew about voles. They are not feather footed and they do not quest but move with a sort of rapid waddle, says Tom Moorhouse, who knows more about the behaviour of the water vole than is entirely healthy.

As described in the book, these creatures are not doing very well, through no fault of Waugh.

–Finally, in this week’s “Weekend Essay” in The Times, Michael Henderson writes what may be the first of many pieces in recognition of Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday. He urges that Dylan be applauded for what he is: a great singer-songwriter and not for what he isn’t: a poet, philosopher or prophet. As to the latter, Henderson offers this:

He is not a prophet. “Don’t criticise what you can’t understand” made a big splash in the Sixties, when it was all too easy to see the times they were a-changin’. Evelyn Waugh, not known for revolutionary fervour, expressed something similar in Brideshead Revisited, 20 years before young people were encouraged to turn on and drop out. Dylan, to be fair, wasn’t a hippie either. He seems to have had no time for those charioteers of “the alternative society” who became bankers and bought agreeable homes in Connecticut.

 

 

 

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Evelyn Waugh World Cup Competition

Posted on May 13, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Many of you may have followed the recent competition organized by novelist, literary critic and Waugh fan Philip Hensher. This was conducted on Twitter which is linked on the right side of the Society’s home screen. In case you missed it, the results of the final round were announced this weekend.  The way it worked was to organize the leading books into four groups from which the finalists would be chosen:

Group 1: Decline and Fall, Black Mischief, Put Out More Flags and Men at Arms

Group 2: Vile Bodies, Ninety-Two Days, Brideshead Revisited  and Officers and Gentlemen

Group 3: Labels, A Handful of Dust, The Loved One, and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Group 4: Remote People, Scoop, Helena, and Unconditional Surrender 

Just what a book needed to qualify for the group round or why Sword of Honour was separated into three entries rather than participating as a single volume at its full strength was never fully explained except that each book in the group was “from a different period”. It may have been related to the difficulty of assigning Robbery Under Law, Ronald Knox, Edmund Campion and A Tourist in Africa to a “period” (not to mention Collected Short Stories) and the general recognition that none of them was a serious contender.

The participants in the final round were, in descending order: Brideshead Revisited (39.3%), Handful of Dust (22.1%), Decline and Fall (21.5%), and Scoop (17.2%). This looks more like a semi-final than a final round, but it does look doubtful that Handful could have prevailed over Brideshead given their point spread. There were a total of 163 votes.

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The Cult of the Country House Reconsidered

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

A reference to the article of Matthew d’Ancona in the Evening Standard was inadvertently omitted from yesterday’s post on the critical reception of the BBC’s adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love. This is a pity because it is, in my opinion, the most thoughtful of the several articles that appeared in response to the series. The article is subtitled: “Are we still in the cult of the English country house?” Here is an excerpt:

I have a hunch that Nancy Mitford would have relished the furiously divided response to the BBC’s new adaptation of her great comic novel, The Pursuit of Love. Directed by Emily Mortimer, the three-part series […] has been hailed by some as a sublime reimagining of a literary classic and by others (especially on Twitter) as an intolerable provocation. […]

What scratches at the English conscience about the Mitfords is not so much their politics but precisely what makes them so compelling: the shamelessness of their class-consciousness. The companion piece to The Pursuit of Love is Nancy’s essay The English Aristocracy, originally published in Encounter in 1954: essentially a series of arbitrary assertions (“shame is a bourgeois notion”; “effort is unrelated to money”; the “lords never cared very much for London”), that became notorious for its division of language into “U” (upper class) and “non-U”. Hence: “cycle” is non-U, whereas “bike” is U; ‘“greens” is non-U, while “vegetables” is U; “home” is non-U, but “house” is U — and so on.

Nancy’s great correspondent, Evelyn Waugh, saw immediately that her essay was mischievous, the intervention of an “agitatrix
 of genius”. To this day, the English are obsessed by social categorisation and classification. In the Mitfords’ era, this was snobbery. Today, it is called market research or lifestyle journalism. In his own masterpiece of mid-century social observation, Brideshead Revisited, Waugh foresaw the crumbling of the old order. In contrast, Nancy intuited that it could survive by hiding in plain sight, mocking itself, embracing irony.

What she demonstrated in The Pursuit of Love trilogy — completed by Love in a Cold Climate (1949) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960) — was the immense potential to commodify the shabby glamour of the upper classes. Reflecting upon Brideshead in 1959, Waugh admitted that he had completely failed to foresee the “cult of the English country house” — a cult that remains fervent to this day.

As it happens, the aforesaid article coincides with another that appears on the website Frieze.com sponsored by the arts culture magazine of that name. This marks the 40th anniversary of the 1981 broadcast of Granada TV’s adaptation of Brideshead Revisted. It is written by Brian Dillon who was a 12 year old Dublin resident when the series first appeared. He missed the original broadcast (suspecting that his “pious” parents might have thought it inappropriate for some one of his age) but saw it two years later when it was rebroadcast by the new Channel 4 network. After discussing how the 1981 series and the novel, which he finally read, affected his university career, Dillon continues:

As I write, I’m halfway through what must be my seventh or eighth viewing of the series. When I first came back to it, about 15 years ago, I was dismayed by how little is really about the halcyon days of Charles and Sebastian at Oxford and how much is about the importunate demands of Catholicism: on Sebastian, on Julia, on Charles the atheist, and the apostate Marchmain. Then I recalled that this is what put me off the novel the first time round: its descent into scolding piety. So, I tried watching again a few years later, and started to notice both the comedy and the sadness. John Gielgud in a luscious comic turn as Charles’s delicately tormenting father, and Laurence Olivier as the Byronic runaway, Lord Marchmain. (Olivier, who spends much of his onscreen time dying, realized too late that Gielgud had the better role.) Endearing details drew me in – certain joyous bits of business by Gielgud, or just how bad Irons is sometimes at acting fey – but I also began to discern a long, slow disquisition on lost youth and lost time, on the heaviness and the lightness of middle age.

After considering the portrayals of other characters, in particular Anthony Blanche, Julia Flyte  and Lady Marchmain, he offers this observation about the production of the series:

As Clive James pointed out in the Observer on 1 November 1981, the texture of the show was also to do with language. Brideshead Revisited repurposed large tracts of Waugh’s dialogue and narration: the last added as a perfectly pitched voice-over by Irons, who, already in his early 30s, had the vocal nuance for the weariness and rue of Charles’s middle age. The screenplay was credited to the writer-lawyer John Mortimer – he even wrote a puff piece for The New York Times in 1982 about his approach to adapting Waugh – but, in fact, his script was never used by the directors, Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Instead, producer Derek Granger and associate producer Martin Thompson laboured nightly, during production, revising almost every scene in the novel. They toned down or excised a lot of snobbery, prejudice and outright racism. Charles’s wartime adjutant, Hooper, is no longer quite the portrait of grasping bourgeois vulgarity; Lady Marchmain no longer frets that Julia’s fiancĂ©, Rex, may have ‘Black blood’. Most of the anti-Semitic aspersions are gone too, along with Charles’s horror of Americans.

The article concludes with a consideration of how the series is perceived today and closes with this:

I live in London now, have spent half my life in England, was long ago disabused of any lingering notions about an aristocracy of wealth, heritage or taste. You will sometimes hear the more outlandishly retro members of the current Conservative government described as plausible, or merely aspirant, figures from Brideshead Revisited. Two Prime Ministers of the last three have been former members of the Bullingdon Club, the boisterous and scornful Oxford dining society that is the scourge of Blanche, and to which (in the television series) Sebastian seems to belong. But, instead of sorrowed aesthetes, it’s the minor scolds and boors of Brideshead Revisited who seem reborn among contemporary Tories: the toady Samgrass, Charles’s stuffy cousin Jasper, the eager dimwit Mulcaster. Turn back to the 1981 series, or discover it for the first time, and you find instead a world of blazing innocence and exhausted experience, wracked with violent nostalgia, touched by kitsch. And populated by characters whose grace, or lack of it, is beside the point – but whose longing, for the future, for the past, for the present, is everything.

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The Pursuit of Adaptations

Posted on May 11, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The verdicts on the recent BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love are decidedly mixed. This is not surprising, since the advance announcements indicated this version would take a fresh approach, given that there had been two earlier traditional adaptations in the 1980s (ITV) and 2000s (BBC).

–The Daily Telegraph’s Anita Singh is one of those who mostly liked the new version. Here are some excerpts from her review:

The Pursuit of Love (BBC One) is good fun. This is mostly because it is adapted very faithfully from the Nancy Mitford source novel about eccentric English aristocrats, which is a sublimely funny piece of work, and you’d have to be a frightful Counter-Hon to stuff it up completely.

It is enjoyable, and the first episode is quite the best.[…]  But its leading lady is all wrong, despite looking the part.[…] Emily Mortimer [who wrote the adaptation and directed] is clearly besotted with her leading lady [Lily James], and the camera lingers on her throughout. […]

Linda Radlett should be exasperating, but in this adaptation she is simply annoying. Mitford’s novel is a hilarious depiction of the upper classes, […] But it often seems as if James and Emily Beecham [who plays Fanny, the narrator] believe themselves to be appearing in a po-faced, joke-free period drama, which makes for an uneven tone…

–Lucy Mangan writing in the Guardian had not read the book (or anything else by Mitford). She also liked the adaptation. Here’s an excerpt from her review of Episode One:

…The hour moves at pace. […] The fun – and funniness – here is thanks again to such a deft, intelligent and loving script from Mortimer. It is edged with melancholy, and beneath it all lies a throb of pain. This is what may convert even the fans most hostile to the idea of messing with their heroine’s work. …

–In the New Statesman, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett admitted she was not a Mitford fan but found the adaptation had things she liked:

Is it that I’m allergic to posh people? Sometimes I have wondered. But it can’t be that. Given half a chance I’d abolish the aristocracy, but I’m not such an ardent lefty that I can’t recognise how hilariously funny they can be. I love Evelyn Waugh; I grew up on a diet of PG Wodehouse. During lockdown last year, I almost considered reading all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which as far as I can tell from the TV series mainly consists of people from Eton bumping into one another. […] Then again, not buying into Mitford madness does have its benefits: my loyalty to the novel was zero, so I quite enjoyed Emily Mortimer’s adaptation. Perhaps I’ll read the book (again) alongside it, and will develop strong views on the matter, though what usually happens is I get bored and decide to read Vile Bodies or The Loved One again instead, while everyone tells me what I’m missing.

–Flora Watkins in The Spectator, on the other hand, found six other series that she recommended watching for those who share her negative feelings about Mortimer’s adaptation of Pursuit:

The actress Winona Ryder once declared that if anyone attempted to film The Catcher in the Rye, she’d have to burn the studio down, such was her love for the book.

There’s many a Mitfordian wishing they could enact this retrospective action on the new BBC production of The Pursuit of Love. RAGE-messaging amongst my friends began even before Emily Mortimer’s directorial debut dropped on the iPlayer. ‘There’s not a single line from the book in the trailer!’ ‘Has she actually read the book?’ ‘Let’s go and crack stock whips under her window’.

There’s so much not to like about it (Andrew Scott’s viciously fabulous Lord Merlin notwithstanding): the jarring soundtrack lifted from Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the loss of much of the humour. But what has most upset the book’s many, many fans is that Mortimer (who also wrote the script) often substitutes her own leaden dialogue for Nancy’s effervescent wit.

Among the alternatives suggested are the BBC’s 2o01 adaptation of Mitford’s novel and ITV’s 1981 version of Brideshead Revisited.

— The Daily Mail’s TV reviewer Jan Moir joins with those of the Telegraph and the Guardian:

This rather frantic Pursuit does have delightful moments, particularly because it looks gorgeous; glowing with colour and texture, from the pink walls of the wedding room, to the bobbled wool on Linda’s Fair Isle sweater, to the crepe paper party hats at Christmas, decorated with period perfect silver rickrack. There are moments when an atmosphere of clotted camp almost overwhelms, but what do we expect from a family who live in a world of superlatives?

But the Mail’s final word is written by columnist  Craig Brown who contributes a guide to Mitfordian word pronunciation for those who find the dialogue difficult to follow. Here is a random excerpt from Brown’s guide:

Bed: Opposite of good.

Bessa Clare: At heart; fundamentally. ‘Bessa clare, Sir Oswald was a thoroughly decent man.’

Bellay: Art form that employs dance and music to convey a narrative.

Chetswarth: Debo Mitford’s home in Derbyshire.

Chomming: Delightful, attractive. ‘Say what you like about Edolf, but we always found him uttleh chomming.’

Crawspetch: Bad-tempered person. ‘Winston could be an awful old crawspetch.’

Creme: Offence punishable by law. ‘Make the punishment fit the creme.’

Dernchew: Question expecting agreement. ‘It’s simply pelting outside. I think we might stay indoors, dernchew?’

Ears: Opposite of nair. ‘Did you or did you not commit the crime?’ ‘Well, ears and nair.’

All episodes are available for streaming on BBC iPlayer. Previous press reports indicated the series would be available to American viewers on Amazon Prime, but there doesn’t yet seem to be an announcement of the dates.

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Combe Florey House (More)

Posted on May 9, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Alexander Waugh has kindly confirmed the following with respect to the Waugh Family graves next to Combe Florey House:

The wall has now been fixed by family effort and EW’s grave is now approached up some steps from the church yard.  Also the stones have been reset so they are no longer sloping.

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May Day Roundup

Posted on May 5, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has a preview of the upcoming BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. See previous post:

THE Mitford sisters would doubtless approve. Emily Mortimer, the daughter of the novelist John Mortimer [credited with screenplay for the 1980’s Granada TV Brideshead Revisited series], has admitted she channelled her inner “punk” to make the raciest version yet of Nancy Mitford’s classic novel The Pursuit of Love. […] The three-part serial, which begins screening on Sunday [9 May] in the slot vacated by Line of Duty, takes the much loved novel and sexes it up considerably. Mortimer, who wrote the screenplay, directed it and also stars, has confessed to inserting a scene in which Linda Radlett, the heroine played by Lily James, tells her best friend and cousin Fanny Logan, played by Emily Beecham, that she has become sexually aroused by a small painting of Lady Jane Grey.

No such scene exists in the novel although Nancy Mitford did once make such an admission in a letter to Evelyn Waugh. The confession was too good for Mortimer to ignore who decided to write it into her screenplay.

The letter from Mitford to Waugh is dated 21 May 1948 and is reproduced in the NM/EW Letters, p. 100:

…I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey, so I thought about her continually & even conceived a fine water colour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, & in which Lady Jane & her ladies in waiting all wear watches hanging from enamel boxes as my mother did at the time. The sublimation of sex might be recommended to Harriet, except that I don’t think it changed anything & I still get excited when I think of Lady Jane Grey (less and less ofter though as the years roll on)…

According to a footnote, the letter to Mitford from Waugh that inspired this response “has not survived”.  As noted in the comment posted below, “Harriet” probably refers to Waugh’s third and youngest daughter who was Nancy Mitford’s god-daughter.

–Alexander Larman writing in The Spectator has made a list of short books suitable for reading on daily commutes that are about to resume as coronavirus restrictions phase out. One of these is by Evelyn Waugh”

The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh
Few of Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant satirical novels are especially long, but his fantasia on Hollywood and ‘the American way of death’ comes in at a snappy 160 pages. Published after Brideshead Revisited, it is everything that that (admittedly seminal) book is not: irreverent, blackly comic and jaw-droppingly scabrous. It tells the story of failed poet Dennis Barlow and his excursions into the Whispering Glades Memorial Park, an upmarket Californian mortuary, where death is viewed less as an end and more as a particularly bizarre beginning. It features all of the rich characterisation and distinctly un-PC one-liners that Waugh is associated with, and is probably the last of his fleet-footed satires. Thereafter, his work became graver and more pointed, arguably to its detriment.

Other conveniently commutable books on the list are Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. 

–In another Spectator article, Jeremy Clarke continues his reports of life in the South of France with the story of a delayed visit to a hospital in Marseille:

Amid the angry chaos of the Marseille traffic jam, I remained reasonably tranquil for a stationary hour, absorbed by sound recordings of interviews with famous English writers, published by the British Library. It felt faintly incredible to be listening to these famous authors’ clipped English voices while stuck in honking French traffic. Ian Fleming was suave; J.B. Priestley petulant; Graham Greene slippery; William Golding mystical; Daphne du Maurier blithe; C.P. Snow diffident; Rudyard Kipling shamanistic; and Evelyn Waugh funny. Interviewer: ‘You are in favor of capital punishment?’ Waugh: ‘For an enormous number of offenses, yes.’ Interviewer: ‘And you yourself would be prepared to carry it out?’ Waugh: ‘Do you mean actually do the hangman’s work?’ Interviewer: ‘Yes.’ Waugh: ‘I should think it very odd for them to choose a novelist for such a task.’

–Evelyn Waugh’s grand daughter Daisy Waugh recently posted this on The Oldie’s weblog:

The battle for a Woke Wide World grows more toxic every day
 And the Wokies are winning. They believe in male menstruation and eternal victimhood, and in the hatefulness of anyone who dares to disagree. The rest of us – secretly or not so secretly – believe the Wokies are stupid; also dangerous; also slightly insane. What both sides desperately need (as I said to my agent, not long ago) is an injection of good-natured humour to bridge the hostility gap.

Daisy explains that she decided to write a book filling this gap: Guy Woakes’ Word Diary:

It’s a short novel and I wrote it, in a burst of energy and mirth, at around the time the good people of Wuhan were experimenting with their laboratory window latches and/or adding more stock to their stew. Since when, we’ve been locked into our houses, alone with our social media: opinions have become still more polarised, and tempers still more strained. In arts and media, politics and corporate life, Wokeness rules the day.

The book is also mentioned in previous posts. Thanks to Dave Lull for the link.

–Novelist John Banville writing in The Nation reviews the recent biography of Graham Greene. This is written by Richard Greene and is mentioned in a previous post. Banville’s review (more an essay on Greene’s life and work based on the biography as well as his own reading) is entitled “A Cold Heaven: Graham Greene’s God”. It opens with this:

Evelyn Waugh liked to tease Graham Greene by remarking that it was a good thing God exists, because otherwise Greene would be a Laurel without a Hardy. It is a mark in Greene’s favor that he recounts the jibe in a tribute to Waugh written shortly after his friend’s death in 1966. […] It is not insignificant that Waugh’s squib does not work the other way round, even though Waugh was far more firmly, if not indeed fanatically, committed to his faith than Greene ever was; in the course of a private audience at the Vatican, Pope John xxiii is said to have interrupted a tirade by Waugh against the reformist spirit sweeping through the church by observing gently, “But Mr. Waugh, I too am a Catholic.” Ironically, while Greene was known universally, and to his irritation, as the world’s preeminent “Catholic novelist,” Waugh was what Greene wished to be accepted as: a novelist who happened to be a Catholic. Both men were converts, but while Waugh pledged himself absolutely to Rome and never wavered, Greene was always ambiguous in his religious commitment.

Banville continues his discussion of Greene’s attitude toward religion throughout the essay/review and comes back to his comparison with Waugh briefly toward the end. Greene,”unlike Waugh, was never to be a rule-bound Catholic; religion for him had a strain of magic.” The Greene biography will be reviewed in a future issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

UPDATE (9 May 2021): The reference to “Harriet” in the letter of Nancy Mitford quoted above was explained by Mark McGinness in the comment posted below.

 

 

 

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Latest Issues of Evelyn Waugh Studies Posted

Posted on May 2, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issues of the society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies have been posted on the website: EWS No. 51.2 (Fall 2020) and EWS 51.1 (Spring 2020). These have been delayed and are somewhat reduced in content due the coronavirus pandemic.

The Spring 2020 issue (51.1) contains a review of Novel Houses: Twenty Famous Fictional Dwellings, by Christina Hardyment published by the Bodleian Library. Here are the opening paragraphs of that review:

This attractive and informative book is the latest example, dating back over the last five years, of books devoted to narratives about the connections between houses in novels, their authors, and in some cases the dwellings of those authors. The others are Writers’ Houses (2015) by Nick Channer (reviewed in EWS 47.1, Spring 2016), and House of Fiction (2017) by Phyllis Richardson.

In this case, Christina Hardyment limits herself to twenty novels written in the UK and the USA, from the 18th century (Horace Walpole and Castle of Otranto) to the present day (J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter). Her previous writings have also mostly related to seemingly nonliterary themes in literature, such as gardens, child care, servants, household procedures, trails, nature and the Thames.

The Fall 2020 issue (51.2) contains a review of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh edition of Waugh’s 1950 novel Helena.  This was published recently by Oxford University Press. Here are the review’s opening paragraphs:

This is the second novel to be issued in the OUP’s ongoing Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh series. The first (Vile Bodies) was published over three years ago, so it has been much awaited, and is worth the wait. Helena is noted both as Waugh’s only historical novel as well as the one that took him the longest to write. As explained in the volume’s “History of the Text” section, he began the book in 1945, right after Brideshead Revisited was published, and it was issued 5 years later in 1950. The delay was due to Waugh’s changing his mind and putting it aside.

He began with the idea of writing a “Saint’s life,” following the formula of Roman Catholic hagiography, but, after doing a considerable amount of historical research, soon gave that up. After writing in what was probably a serious style starting in May 1945, he put it aside and picked it up again at the end of the year. By then, he had decided to write it as a historical novel rather than a Saint’s life. I thought he announced in a diary entry or letter the exact point at which that decision was made (after a disappointing and unproductive weekend at Chagford), but if he did, I can’t find it, and nor apparently did the editor, Sara Haslam.

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Two Waugh Favorites on BBC

Posted on May 1, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Laura Freeman writing in The Times has provided more information on the upcoming BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s novel Pursuit of Love. After describing two previous Mitford-based TV series (by Simon Raven in 1980 on ITV and Deborah Moggach in 2001 on BBC),  Freeman continues:

Nancy’s working title for the book was “Linda” and really it is Linda’s story. Nancy wrote what would become The Pursuit of Love (her friend Evelyn Waugh suggested the title) in a storm of inspiration in the early months of 1945. […] The Pursuit of Love is all edge and gleam. Nancy couldn’t remember if she started writing before reading Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited or after. In any case, she wrote to Waugh: “It’s about my family, a very different cup of tea, not grand and far madder.”

She was in love when she wrote it. When Linda meets Fabrice, Duc de Sauveterre after two failed marriages, both ending in bolts, she is “filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love. […] The model for Fabrice was Gaston Palewski. Nancy called him “the Colonel” or “Col” after his rank in the army. He had served in the French air force and was directeur de cabinet of General Charles de Gaulle’s government in exile in London. They met in the garden of the Allies’ Club in London. The Colonel was enchanted by Nancy’s stories about her eccentric family. “Racontez, racontez,” he would say. Tell, tell. Fabrice says the same to Linda.

The historian Lisa Hilton, the author of The Horror of Love: Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London, has described the Colonel as having a face like “an unpeeled King Edward”. Fabrice is “short, stocky, very dark”. In the new series, Fabrice is played by the definitely too dishy French-Moroccan actor Assaad Bouab (Hicham Janowski in Call My Agent!).

Nancy worried that she could never better the book’s two leading males. To Waugh she wrote: “Also you see what nobody else seems to that having used up Farve & Fabrice I am utterly done for — all the rations have gone into one cake. Now what?”

Nancy managed to eke out two more books from this material: Love in a Cold Climate (1949) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960). The latest script is based on the first novel in this trilogy. The screenplay is by Emily Mortimer who also appears as The Bolter. The three-episode series begins on BBC One, Sunday, 9 May 2021. It will be available in the USA and Canada on Amazon Prime at dates to be announced.

–Waugh Society member Milena Borden has sent a link to a three-episode “celebration” of P G Wodehouse, one of Evelyn Waugh’s favorite writers. This is on BBC Radio 4 Extra and is presented by comedian Alexander Armstrong. It was first broadcast in January 2020. Here’s a link to the first episode (“In the Offing”) which is currently available and contains information on the two upcoming episodes: 2. “Carry On”, We 5 May 11am, and 3. “Much Obliged”, We 12 May 11am. All episodes are available worldwide on BBC iPlayer after broadcast.

 

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