Oldie Digs up Grave Problems at Combe Florey

Posted on April 30, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oldie magazine in response to recent stories in the national press about the sale of Combe Florey House has republished an article from 2016 by Teresa Waugh, Auberon’s widow and former owner-occupant of the house. This relates to the Waugh family graves situated next to the house property:

…The one certainty is that [location of the graves] had absolutely nothing to do with [Evelyn Waugh’s] having been a Roman Catholic and in a funny way it had nothing to do with him since the decision to lay him where he still rests next to his wife was taken by his family after he died.

Quite some fourteen [sic] or so years ago a split appeared in the wall supporting the small plot in which Evelyn, Laura and their daughter Margaret FitzHerbert are buried. At the time I was living in Evelyn’s old house and, considering myself to be responsible for the graves which no one would wish to see falling into the churchyard, I took it upon myself to have the wall patched.

Since the story was first published in The Oldie for June 2016, it may now be nearly 19 years since the crack in the wall appeared. See previous posts. The story continues:

I was quite unaware of my transgression until a few years later when the crack widened drastically and it looked as though one side of the wall that turns at a right angle round the plot might collapse at any minute. I then consulted Bert Simons, an admirable man who had long worked for the family and who assured me that he could fix the problem. Had I kept my mouth shut he would have done it there and then. I would have paid him and that would have been that.

Oh no! Nothing can be allowed to be that simple. When I mentioned my plan to a member of the Parochial Church Council I was told not only that the wall had nothing to do with me but that I had no right to touch it.

History may relate that poor Bert Simons was chased from the churchyard by an angry parishioner waving a pitchfork. Be that as it may, the wall remains precariously unrepaired to this day [June 2016] just as hordes of culture-thirsty Americans make their pilgrimage to the great man’s grave.

I was informed that the wall round the long-since closed churchyard was not in urgent need of repair and that, in any case, it was part of the church fabric and something called a ‘faculty’ would be required from the diocese before anything could be done to it. But years later, after my son, Alexander Waugh, and my brother-in-law, Septimus Waugh, have, like Madame de SĂ©vignĂ©, spent themselves in letter-writing, it turns out that since the churchyard is now the responsibility of the local council, planning permission would be needed before any alteration to the wall could take place, that is if the wall isn’t – which it may not be – part of the fabric of the church.

So far as appears in the recent reports of the sale of Combe Florey House, this problem remains unresolved. The Oldie’s reposting refers to no such resolution. The article concluded with a reference to the current status of the family’s efforts to resolve the matter through the local council as of 2016:

… Alexander received a sniffy letter from a member of the Taunton Deane Borough Council accusing him of not respecting his grandfather’s wishes. Waugh’s wishes with regard to his interment remain to this day unknown and no grandson has ever been prouder or more respectful of his grandfather than Alexander.

Although the Waugh Family sold the house in 2008 before the story appeared in The Oldie, they may have retained rights in that part of the property on which the graves are located.

UPDATE (9 May 2021): Alexander Waugh has kindly sent the following information:

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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Earth Day Roundup

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Several other papers have run stories about the sale of Combe Florey House. The most extensive photographic displays are in the Daily Mail and Country Life which also have brief discussions of the Waugh family’s associations with the house. The local Somerset County Gazette  also has a photo display and has this to say about the house’s history:

Combe Florey is a delightful Grade II listed 18th century manor house with an appealing classical facade in the style of James Gibbs. It is believed an earlier Elizabethan house was situated closer to the village church and was pulled down after the Civil War. It is understood to have then been replaced by a new house at the present site. The 17th Century house was extensively remodelled by William Frauncies in 1730. The property was sold to the Perring family in 1799 and sold again in 1896 to the Batchelor family before being purchased by Evelyn Waugh in 1956 and lived in by his family until 2008 when the present owners acquired Combe Florey House.

–Jeremy Clarke in his column in The Spectator describes a recent hike along a rare, unspoiled section of the French Mediterranean  coastline:

…unlike the soulless grey boulders or mud brown sand that passes for a beach elsewhere along that coastline, the beaches here are of fine white sand. I looked down into the first low headland into the sea, and I was reminded of Graham Greene’s memorable assessment of Evelyn Waugh’s prose, which was, he said, “like the Mediterranean before the war: so clear you could see to the bottom.

–A feature length story about the Mitford sisters appears in the Evening Standard. This is focused on the literary work of Nancy Mitford and announces that the BBC will next month broadcast a new adaptation of a Nancy Mitford novel:

[Nancy Mitford’s] work is about to become a lot more familiar to those that don’t know it. A luscious adaptation of The Pursuit of Love, her most famous novel, will air soon on the BBC with an all-star casting including Lily James and Andrew Scott. Expect big houses, gorgeous clothes, cut-glass accents and everyone falling dreadfully, dreadfully in love. It’s well known that the novel, which is set between the world wars, was largely autobiographical – so what’s the true story behind her life?

It is not clear from this article whether the series will be limited to an adaptation of  only The Pursuit of Love itself or will contain the stories as well from the other novels in that series Love in a Cold Climate and Don’t Tell Alfred.

–George Callaghan has posted a memorial to Auberon Waugh on the 20th anniversary of the latter’s death in 2001. After an entertaining and accurate summary of his early life and career in journalism, Callaghan offers a retelling of Auberon’s brief political career in opposition to Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party. The article concludes with this:

One of the perhaps surprising things about [Auberon] Waugh was his anti police attitude. In this he was an 18th century Tory. He regarded them as bossy boots, nanny staters and incipient totalitarians. He loathed a nosey parker and a jobsworth. This sort of petty tyrants infuriated him. He also made a name for himself as the foremost anti working class journalist. He reviled plebeians as uncouth, unlettered, unwashed, uncultured and brutish. Waugh despised the urban metropolitan liberal elite no less.

Though unfailingly mannerly he was also vulgar. He did not stint from swearing. The police were there to manage the crowds at Waugh’s funeral. As Waugh’s son Alexander said nothing would please his father more for there to have been a riot at the funeral. Waugh is sorely missed.  He was forthright, fearless, mordant, morbid, scintillating yet exasperating. There shall never be anyone like him anymore.

The full text is available at theduran.com.

–The Oxford-based journal Cherwell asked its editors to recommend books set in universities as appropriate reading for students returning for Trinity Term. Books editor Maebh recommended Brideshead Revisited:

Amidst the news that there will be a new film adaptation of this classic novel written by Waugh in the 1940s, I decided to pick up and finally read a copy of it during the two weeks of isolation I went through in Michaelmas term. Whilst I was confined to my small bedroom, Waugh’s evocation depiction of 1920s Oxford made me nostalgic for the Oxford I had experienced before the pandemic; the joys of roaming around colleges, meeting new people, and the highs and lows of university life. In a weird way, I guess, it gave me a sense of belonging, the characters being described as strolling down the very same street that I lived (and was then isolated) on. Waugh’s memorable characters, his powerful evocation of a country both during and after the two World Wars, and his beautiful prose style makes this novel a joy to read, and an essential for anyone who has, or will, live in Oxford.

The other recommendations were Philip Larkin’s Jill set in wartime Oxford and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot set in 1990s Harvard.

–Finally, on the website Literary Hub, novelist KT Sparks considers what she calls “Graceless Literary Exits”. Among her choices is this one by Evelyn Waugh:

Tony Last—the genial exemplar of a social set in which “any sin is acceptable provided it is carried off in good taste”—spends the second half of A Handful of Dust trying hard to leave—his marriage, his faithless friends, his country—with the greatest dignity and refinement. And yet each of his attempts at grace only move him closer to one of the funniest—and saddest—graceless exits in print: declared dead back in Britain, Tony’s last scene is in an Amazonian village, far from his beloved country estate, forced to re-read Little Dorrit to his captor, an illiterate Dickens fanatic.

Others include Mr Collins’s ejection in Pride and Prejudice and Krook’s spontaneous combustion in Bleak House.

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Annual Waugh Lecture (More)

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

As noted in a previous post, the annual Evelyn Waugh Lecture was delivered at Lancing College earlier this week. The talk was given by Jeremy Tomlinson, a former master of the house where Waugh lived as a student. It was entitled “A Housemaster’s Report”. After an introduction by current Headmaster Dominic Oliver, the lecture consisted of a discussion of passages in Waugh’s works relating to Lancing. It began with some remarks from Evelyn Waugh’s Final Report by his Lancing teachers that had been donated to the school by the Waugh Family. This was followed by references and quotes from Waugh’s schoolboy diary for the years 1919-21, ending with his entry for 15 December 1921 where he describes his acceptance letters from Oxford and the responses of his teachers and school friends.

Tomlinson then identifies passages in Waugh’s fiction where his Lancing experiences are implicated. These most notably appear in Decline and Fall (Paul Pennyfeather’s unidentified public school, not Llanabba School where he taught). After mentioning Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism (noting that Tom Driberg, a fellow OL was the only witness), the lecture moves on to Brideshead Revisited. More specifically, Tomlinson mines the prequel Waugh started to write in 1945 which was later published as Charles Ryder’s School Days. This proved a rich source for references to people and places associated with Waugh’s own school days at Lancing.

Finally, Tomlinson discusses and quotes from Waugh’s autobiography, A Little Learning and notes references therein to his Lancing diaries. He made the interesting point that Waugh was probably in the process of writing this at about the same time as he was interviewed on BBC by John Freeman in the Face to Face episode. When Freeman tried to lead Waugh into dissing Lancing, Waugh did not take the bait. The lecture ended with another look at Waugh’s Final Report and some prescient comments made on his future by those who had taught him.

There followed about 15 minutes of Q&A from those participating via the internet. These included questions such as what career a boy with Waugh’s qualifications would be expected to pursue today, where the setting for Brideshead Revisited was based, why Waugh chose Helena as his favorite book, what women were most influential to Waugh in his youth and which of Waugh’s  books Tomlinson would recommend for O-level reading today. A message and expression of thanks from Lancing’s head boy Will Simpson and a final statement from the Headmaster closed the proceedings.

The entire program extends for 1:15 hours.  You can see it at this link.

 

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Across the Years and into a Documentary

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Earlier this month, PBS broadcast a three-part Ken Burns documentary on the life and work of Ernest Hemingway. At a total of nearly 6 hours, this threatened to be a bit overextended and one feared another “Baseball”. But it started well and got better as Hemingway’s life and writing became more and more tortured. In the end, it was overall brilliant, in the same league with Nicholas Shakespeare’s 1980s “Waugh Trilogy” on the BBC and much of Burns’s earlier work.

The final episode was the best, in my opinion. This may be because it built on what preceded it, but one anticipated something unbearably bleak. It’s subtitle promised as much: “The Blank Page (1944-1961)”. In the middle of that episode (41:00), it took up the story of Hemingway’s attempt at a come-back novel after WWII. His previous novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, about the Spanish Civil War, was published in 1940. His new novel Across the River and into the Trees was much awaited and appeared in 1950. It was about a worn down veteran of WWII who has fetched up in Venice. The book let loose an avalanche of negativity from the critics. This was well illustrated in the Burns documentary with several well chosen quotations. For example, they read the following quote from the review by Maxwell Geismar in the Saturday Review of Literature while showing a clip of that review on the screen with its title “To Have and to Have and to Have”.  Geismar wrote that the book was “not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and it throws a doubtful light on the future.” Others were quoted as dismissing it as “sentimental”, “embarrassing”, “pitiable”, “a disaster”.

The producers missed an opportunity to note that there were a few dissenting voices from other writers of some prominence. One of these was Evelyn Waugh who reviewed the book in The Tablet, 30 September 1950. Waugh notes the virtual tsunami of criticism that had washed over Hemingway’s book since its publication earlier in the year, but points out that the critics had missed a rather important point:

Mr Hemingway is one of the most original and powerful of living writers. Even if he had written a completely fatuous book, this is not the way to treat it.  What he, in fact, has done is to write a story entirely characteristic of himself, not his best book, perhaps his worst, but still something very much better than most of the work to which the same critics give their tepid applause….

Since Waugh’s review appeared in The Tablet, a British Roman Catholic cultural journal not widely known to the literary establishment in America, it might have passed unnoticed by them. But Time magazine noticed it and published an excerpt in its 30 October 1950 issue in a miscellany column entitled “The Strenuous Life”:

The critics were still wrangling at the top of their voices over Ernest Hemingway. His Across the River and into the Trees (deftly parodied by E. B. White in The New Yorker as Across the Street and into the Grill) had strong popular support; it stood firmly at the top of the bestseller list. There was also moral support from fellow Writer Evelyn Waugh. The critics, wrote Waugh in London’s Catholic weekly, the Tablet, “. . . have been smug, condescending, derisive, some with unconcealed glee, some with an affectation of pity; all are agreed that there is a great failure to celebrate … I believe the truth is that they have detected in him something they find quite unforgivable—Decent Feeling. Behind all the bluster and cursing and fisticuffs he has an elementary sense of chivalry—respect for women, pity for the weak, love of honor—which keeps breaking in. There is a form of high supercilious caddishness which is all the rage nowadays in literary circles. That is what the critics seek in vain in this book, and that is why their complaints are so loud and confident.”

The Time excerpt did indeed attract some attention to Waugh’s attack on the critics’ one-sided view.  Two weeks later, this appeared in Time’s “Letters to the Editor”:

Faulkner to Waugh to Hemingway

Sir: Re Waugh on Hemingway

Good for Mr. Waugh. I would like to have said this myself, not the Waugh of course but the equivalent Faulkner. One reason I did not is, the man who wrote some of the pieces in Men Without Women and The Sun Also Rises and some of the African stuff (and some—most—of all the rest of it too for that matter) does not need defending, because the ones who throw the spitballs didn’t write the pieces in Men Without Women and The Sun Also Rises and the African pieces and the rest of it, and the ones who didn’t write Men Without Women and The Sun Also Rises and the African pieces and the rest of it don’t have anything to stand on while they throw the spitballs.

Neither does Mr. Waugh need this from me. But I hope he will accept me on his side.

WILLIAM FAULKNER Oxford, Miss.

Waugh was actually present in New York during the last half of October 1950. This was in connection with the American publication of Helena. He and his wife were guests of Henry Luce (head of Time-Life) and his wife Claire during part of that visit and Waugh was negotiating on terms of the Life article that became “The Plight of the Holy Places” in the following year. It may well be that the topic of Hemingway’s book came up during his meetings with Time-Life executives and Waugh mentioned his Tablet review. Waugh’s review was later reprinted in several other journals and collections (including a German translation). It is included in EAR.

The documentary is posted on the PBS website and will be available to stream free of charge until 26 April.

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Another Inez Holden Reprint

Posted on April 19, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Herald (Glasgow) has a review of another reprint of a book by Waugh’s early literary friend Inez Holden. This is entitled There’s No Story There (1944) and is reviewed by Malcolm Forbes. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Inez Holden is one of those cruelly forgotten figures of 20th-century British literature, a writer who tasted all-too-brief success before being cast off into obscurity. Born in Warwickshire to a gentry family in 1903, she moved down to London where she immersed herself in the bohemian world of Bright Young Things. She made many artistic connections – she modelled for Augustus John, worked alongside Evelyn Waugh, and was a friend (and lover) of George Orwell – embraced socialism, and earned a living as both a novelist and a journalist. However, by the time of her death in 1974, she had faded from view, her name barely known, her books out of print.

Two years ago, Handheld Press, an independent publisher specialising in long-neglected books, launched something of a literary salvage operation by reissuing two of Holden’s short works in one volume. Blitz Writing comprised It Was Different at the Time, an account of Holden’s life from 1938 to 1941, and Night Shift, a novella which drew on her wartime experience working in an aircraft factory.

The Herald’s reviewer goes on to summarize the book and concludes:

Whether with dialogue on the factory floor or streams of consciousness in [a character’s] head, Holden captivates her reader. No single protagonist emerges to steer the proceedings but the snapshot portraits and potted histories of the rotating cast members add up to a satisfying whole. […] With luck, more of her lost-and-found work will see the light of day.

Waugh’s friendship with Holden was explored in greater detail in a review of Handheld’s first reprint that appeared in Evelyn Waugh Studies 50.1 (Spring 2019). Here are some excerpts:

Waugh first mentions Inez in his Diaries as a “charming girl” he met while they were both working at the Express (9 May 1927, 284). A few weeks later, she joined him after work at the Express for a night on the town: “We sat in the Savoy for a long time then went to a cinema, then to the Gargoyle, then to the Night Light where she spent all my money on a shilling in the slot machine then back to the Gargoyle” (1 July 1927, 284-85).This was the same day Waugh had collected his last pay packet from the Express.

He then describes a meeting with Inez and Anthony Powell at the Gargoyle Club after which Waugh took Inez to the pictures. “Later in the month, Waugh recorded a dinner with Inez and afterwards a casual visit to her flat in William Street (apparently SW1, Knightsbridge) where he “sat for so long a time
that, for poverty, I was obliged to walk home” (n.d., September 1927, 289).”

Waugh describes an odd meeting with Holden’s parents at their home in rural Warwickshire:

When he told Mrs. Holden that he had seen Inez recently and that she was “living on cachets de faivre,” Mrs. Holden replied: “I don’t think I know the de Faivres” (2 October 1927, 291). Waugh […] says that there were lots of other people there, including Inez’s unprepossessing brother (“
looking like death. He showed indecent pictures and talked of night haunts.”)…

Waugh reviewed Inez’s first book (Sweet Charlatan) in the 4 September 1929 issue of Vogue magazine (the same review in which he discussed Henry Green’s novel Living). Both books get favorable coverage.

Waugh mentions seeing Holden a few more times during and shortly after his marriage. The last meeting with Inez that he records in his diaries took place about a year later, after his divorce (Diaries, 28 June 1930, 318). This would also have been after his success with his first two novels:

Inez lunched with me. I said ‘How bad-tempered Harold [Acton] was last night’ to make things easier. Inez said, ‘He was sweet to me. But then I know him so well he wouldn’t think of being anything else.’ Inez has taken to kissing me lately


Why they drifted apart after that 1930 meeting is not clear. There seems to have been no row or other falling out. It could be that, with her left-wing political outlook, Inez didn’t fit in with the more upper class clique Waugh formed in the 1930s (although that didn’t affect his friendship with Nancy Mitford).

 

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Waugh-Themed Academic Papers

Posted on April 17, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–On Tuesday, 20 April 2021, Yuexi Liu, Assistant Professor of English at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University will make a presentation on the subject: “Narrating Difficult Histories: (Inter)Wartime Border Crossing in Hemingway, Waugh, and Isherwood.”  Here’s a summary from the notice:

The (inter)wartime border crossings in A Farewell to Arms (1929), Vile Bodies (1930), and Down There on a Visit (1962) reveal difficult and often lost histories of deserters, violations of freedom of expression, and persecutions of sexual minorities. Drawing on extensive archival material, including literary manuscripts and historical British Government records, to shed new light on the three novels, this talk demonstrates how border controls in Europe attracted urgent attention in the shadow of war and how customs, at the forefront of national security, were consequently relied upon as an ever crucial institution responsible for protecting the nation states and their citizens from ‘undesirable aliens’. Hemingway, Waugh, and Isherwood criticised the injustice and violence of the border control policies and practices that failed to balance the self-interest of the nation states and humanitarian concerns. Narrating the difficult histories of the shadow and experimenting with comedy and satire to narrate violence, all three writers themselves crossed borders.

Yuexi is a member of the Evelyn Waugh Society and co-editor of its journal Evelyn Waugh Studies. She is completing a monograph entitled Exterior Modernism: Evelyn Waugh and Cinema. The presentation on Tuesday is scheduled at 530-7pm local time at the University (near Shanghai), HS436. Details are available at this link.

–Cornell University Press has recently published a book entitled Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism by Cara L Lewis. Chapter 4 is on the subject: “Bad Formalism: Evelyn Waugh’s Film Fictions in the age of Cinemechanics.” Here is the introductory paragraph from that chapter:

Writing in his diary at the age of twenty, in July 1924, Evelyn Waugh guiltily observes the gap since his last entry: “More than a week has passed but I cannot quite remember how. I went out with Adrian one evening and overdrank myself with Terence another and I have been to many cinemas.” At the time, Waugh had just come down from Oxford, and the hazy fog of this entry, in which too much alcohol and too much cinema going blend together, is a characteristic affect of his student years and his early twenties. His diaries from this period are filled with similar notes of debauchery, as when, for instance, he and his friends pooled their efforts in the summer of 1924 in order to make a twenty-minute film called The Scarlet Woman . Their production metamorphoses into reckless consumption: “The week before was hectic with cinema work and extremely expensive. Looking back on it I think the money was ill spent. The film cost us each ÂŁ6, the hire of the dresses and taxi fares added heavily, and on Saturday night I gave a dinner to Elsa Lanchester which cost ÂŁ4. [. . .] We were all a little drunk. Terence put on the cinema and I was quite disgusted with the badness of the film. Elsa and I discovered that we were born on the same day and fought all over the floor for a pound note which eventually became destroyed.” [Footnotes omitted.]

 

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Annual Waugh Lecture: A Housemaster’s Report

Posted on April 16, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Lancing College has announced the details of this year’s annual Evelyn Waugh Lecture to be held by Zoom Webinar on Thursday, 22 April at 1930-2030 London time:

2021 marks the centenary of Evelyn Waugh leaving Lancing and 50 years since tonight’s speaker started teaching English at the College. Jeremy Tomlinson will consider the impact of Lancing on Waugh’s life and writing and how his teachers assessed him. Jeremy became Housemaster of Head’s in 1981 when little had changed since Waugh was in the House and will describe something of what his schooldays were like 60 years before. We look forward to hearing more about the relationship between Lancing and its most famous novelist on Thursday 22 April at 7.30pm, in the 2021 Evelyn Waugh Lecture entitled: ‘Evelyn Waugh, A Housemaster’s Report’.

The announcement explains that the event is by invitation only to members of the Lancing Foundation. In the past they have allowed members of the Evelyn Waugh Society to attend if they apply directly, identify themselves as such and space is available. The registration details and contact information are available at this link.

 

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Tax Day Roundup

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–An article in Lapham’s Quarterly commemorates Tax Day (even though it may have been postponed in the USA this year). This is from the recent book Rebellion, Rascals and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages by Michael Keen and Joseph Slemrod. It opens with a quote from Waugh:

In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh drew on his experiences in 1930s Abyssinia to imagine tax collection in fictional Ishmaelia:

“It had been found expedient to merge the functions of national defense and inland revenue in an office then held in the capable hands of General Gollancz Jackson; his forces were in two main companies, the Ishmaelite Mule Tax-gathering Force and the Rifle Excisemen with a small Artillery Death Duties Corps for use against the heirs of powerful noblemen
Towards the end of each financial year the general’s flying columns would lumber out into the surrounding country on the heels of the fugitive population and return in time for budget day laden with the spoils of the less nimble; coffee and hides, silver coinage, slaves, livestock, and firearms.”

It was from simple plundering of much this kind that today’s often mind-numbingly complicated tax systems evolved. Taxation may be one of the few things in our lives that our ancestors would recognize from theirs.

Something recognizable as taxation doubtless began as simple plunder in the mold of General Jackson, long before Ptolemaic Egypt or even ancient Sumer. Elements of plunder continued over the centuries. [,,,]

–Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Simon Heffer, reviews Selina Hastings’ career as a biographer. This is on the occasion of the recent publication of her biography of novelist Sybille Bedford. See previous posts. Heffer notes that several of Hastings’ subjects, including Bedford, have been relative monsters (with particular reference to Evelyn Waugh and Somerset Maugham) and yet she has managed to describe them and their work in relatively moderate terms. He posits three reasons for her success:

…First, she can write. A remarkable number of biographers cant. Hastings’s style is clear, precise and uncluttered. Second, her scholarship is exemplary; she reconnoitres her ground before she writes, not merely combing the papers of her subjects and their networks but also interviewing those who knew them. […] But third, what distinguishes her biographies is their tone. Most of her subjects were outright monsters; to handle such people without alienating the reader requires immense skill.

Hastings sticks to the facts; she does not engage in amateur, posthumous psychoanalysis; she simply presents the story. Both Waugh and Maugham were monuments in selfishness, and in later life made themselves (Maugham especially) notably loathsome. Their biographer examines their lives–particularly Waugh’s inability to relate successfully to women, and Maugham’s sexual ambiguity and manipulativeness –and tries to see the best in them, while never denying their social and moral atrocities. […]

He goes on to describe Hastings’s treatment of Bedford, often described as arrogant, and concludes that Hastings “persuades us to accept her at a high valuation.” Since in Waugh’s case several of his closest friends and confidantes are women, his point on Hastings’s treatment of his “inability to relate successfully to women” may be a bit oversimplified.

–A BBC website posts a review by John Self of a book by Musa Okwonga (One of Them) about the latter’s schooldays at Eton College. In a discussion of how the school has been described by other writers (Ian Fleming, George Orwell and John Le CarrĂ©), Self writes:

… take the case of Evelyn Waugh, the envious outside chronicler of the upper class, who probably wished he’d gone to Eton instead of the humbler Lancing College. And in a typical act of one-up-manship, he sent his character Sebastian Flyte there in his most nostalgic novel Brideshead Revisited. “Thank God I went to Eton,” sighs Sebastian during an obscure philosophical argument between family and friends. Sebastian, significantly, starts the book as the epitome of glamour but undergoes a decline as the story proceeds. (Waugh’s mixed feelings about Eton may also have been coloured by the fact that his first wife, also called Evelyn, had an affair with an old Etonian.)

Waugh actually wished he had gone to Sherborne School where his father and brother Alec had been students. Evelyn was barred from entry there after his brother wrote a novel (Loom of Youth) depicting homosexuality at a fictional public school.

–The website Aeon.co has posted an essay by Rachel Hope Cleves that may be an excerpt from her latest book: Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality. It deals with the subject of how the attitude toward pederasty has changed since the prewar days of the 20th Century. The excerpt opens with this:

The British writer Norman Douglas was so famous during his lifetime (1868-1952) that he frequently turned up as a character in fiction. D H Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Richard Aldington all put him in their novels, while Douglas’s own bestselling novel South Wind (1917) appeared on the shelves of characters in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Bombarded by fans who sought him out in Florence, his home base during the 1920s and ’30s, Douglas had his mail sent to the local Thomas Cook travel bureau to keep his address secret.

Among the typically laid back views of Douglas in his lifetime held by upper class Britons are these expressed by Waugh’s friend Harold Acton:

Harold Acton, the Florence aesthete, [remarked] wistfully that ‘such a schoolmaster [Douglas] would have been ideal, and I regret that I met him too late, when I was more or less crystallised.’ Acton, who witnessed many of Douglas’s intergenerational affairs in Florence, including the final episode that led to his flight from the city, was under no illusion about the nature of Douglas’s relationships with children. He simply didn’t condemn Douglas for his sexual behaviour.

–An article on the alcoholism of Waugh’s character Sebastian Flyte is posted on the website The Daily Eudemon: Catholic Cultural Commentary on Everything that Matters:

The early pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited describe the drunken antics of students Lord Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder (the narrator). Ryder makes the later observation that he “got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it; Sebastian drank to escape.” […]

As alcohol works through a person’s system, the drinker loses his sense of suffocating self-regard and its accompanying worries, with the result that he decreasingly sees existence through the distorting prism of self-regard. As the prism breaks apart, he becomes re-acquainted with the fact that earthly life is a gift—a good gift that is the gift of God, Who is Full Goodness. After enough drinks, everything seems good. Rather, everything is good (for all is created by God), and the drinker becomes acutely aware of this. This awareness gives him a joy that he has difficulty finding in the everyday world as he walks about with his constant sense of self-regard.

After a discussion of Sebastian’s alcoholism as it is described in Waugh’s novel, the article concludes with this:

Sebastian was fit for neither the secular world nor the religious world. He was still pulled in two opposite directions and pathetic by both worlds’ standards. But Waugh leaves us with the impression that Sebastian obtained a good life—all ambition thrown aside, still drinking, but at least ashamed of it. He became a man whose vice was permanently affixed to his back, but a man who was becoming holy by carrying it as nobly as possible.

Thanks to Dave Lull for a link to this article.

 

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Hetton Abbey Revisited

Posted on April 14, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

An article in The American Conservative magazine takes a new look at Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust. This is by Peter Tonguette who explains his motivation in the opening paragraph:

During the last 12 months, countless old movies, books, and plays have been remembered or reinterpreted to help us make sense of the pandemic and its miseries. Few works from the past evoke the cognitive dissonance of our moment, the sense that we are watching society go to pieces from the comfort of a picture window, better than Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust, a masterpiece that was judged one of the last century’s 100 best books by the Modern Library.

He sees in Tony Last a hero whose “character […] mirrors our own […] a life in retreat from a hostile, declining society.” What follows is an interesting and entertaining review of the story, updated as needed to show its relevance to the world created by the coronavirus pandemic. When he arrives at the ending, Tonguette is reminded of the conclusions of an earlier reader:

…In a 1977 piece in The New York Times, the critic Anatole Broyard suggested that Tony’s fate was not one worse than death. “I wonder, as we leave Tony there, whether he will not eventually be happier with Mr. Todd and Dickens than if he were to make his way back to England,” wrote Broyard, whose favorite Waugh novel this was. “With American life going on as it has been, I sometimes feel like holing up with the complete works of Evelyn Waugh.”

The impulse to hole up, to withdraw, to retire to a grand country estate, to lose oneself in the literature of long ago: are these not widely shared as we look around us today? As with the French revolutionaries and Marie Antoinette, the vanguard—even if only in the form of alimony-seeking unfaithful spouses—did come for Tony Last, but he found, in his role as a literary vassal to Mr. Todd, a new warren to burrow into.

What, finally, makes A Handful of Dust so sad? Maybe it’s not that Tony Last is lost in the jungle, but because, this year, it sometimes feels as though we are right there with him.

The article is entitled “Watching the World from Hetton” and can be read in its entirety at this link. Tonguette doesn’t mention the alternate ending to the novel in which Tony does not travel to South America but appears to emerge a bit from the hole into which he has dug himself at Hetton. Perhaps it is just as well to ignore that alternative since it was written not because Waugh thought it an improvement but because it avoided a copyright conflict in connection with the American serial version of the story.

 

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Waugh Biographer Takes Up Another Author

Posted on April 10, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Paula Byrne who wrote the “partial biography”, as she described it, entitled Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (2009) has now written a full-on biography of another satirical English novelist. This is entitled The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym and will be released in the UK next week by William Collins.

The book has already been reviewed quite favorably in several papers. Writing in last Saturday’s edition of The Times, Ysenda Maxtone Graham noted:

Pym the novelist is particularly good on the unmarried older woman at Christmas, in her bedsit, heating up a meal to share in front of the television with the other lonely resident from across the stairwell. From that moment of yuletide desolation her bleak poetry sprang.

Prepare yourself for a long read. Byrne presents Pym’s life story in the picaresque style of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: 124 chapters with titles such as “In which our Heroine sees Friedbert for the Last Time” and “In which Miss Pym leaves Pimlico for Barnes”. Byrne justifies this comic-epic format by suggesting that Pym “spent a lot of time in love” and “on the road”. […]

The chapters are enticingly short, and I romped through them. Each adds a vital piece of the jigsaw, explaining the provenance of her fictional characters and building up our understanding of the state of mind of the person who wrote the late masterpieces Quartet in Autumn (1977) and The Sweet Dove Died (1978).

The Guardian’s reviewer Kathryn Hughes earlier this week wrote to much the same effect:

Although Pym’s archive has already been well picked over by scholars and fans, Byrne’s book is the first to integrate its revelations into a cradle-to-grave biography. She gives a seamless timeline of Pym’s life as a provincial solicitor’s daughter, Oxford undergraduate, wartime Wren and diligent employee of the International African Society. Byrne doesn’t dodge the uncomfortable implication that Pym’s phase as a Nazi sympathiser (she even had a swastika pin that she wore around Oxford) went on longer than most middle-class Britons in the 1930s, but she is clear too how completely it was bound up with Pym’s feelings for prewar Germany as a land of music, mountains and philosophy and, above all, as a crucial bulwark against the terrifying threat of communism from Russia. It perhaps says something about Pym’s blind spot on the subject that she had to be badgered by her friend and first reader Jock Liddell into excising Nazis from the typescript of Some Tame Gazelle.

An excerpt from Byrne’s book appears in today’s Daily Telegraph: “Barbara Pym’s secret sexual awakening.” BBC Radio 4 will also be broadcasting excerpts from the book starting on Tuesday, 13 April at 0030. There will be additional 15 minute episodes daily through Saturday. [NOTE: This is change of time from original schedule due to pre-emption by programming relating to the death of Prince Philip. Check BBC Radio 4 website for scheduling of later episodes.] The episodes will be posted on the internet after each broadcast and will available worldwide  on BBC iPlayer.

Sion College in London has announced an online seminar in which Byrne will discuss the book. This will take place on 10 May. Details on booking are available here. Registration fee will include a copy of the book which will be shipped before the seminar convenes. Amazon.com has not yet posted a schedule for the book’s availability in the USA, but North American readers can easily purchase a print edition from Amazon.co.uk and pay in dollars using a credit card or other digital payment.

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