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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4th of July Roundup

Posted on July 4, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Harry Mount explains how the recruitment of spies has evolved beyond the “tap on the shoulder” formerly applied. After explaining how he tried and failed to get the tap, he mentions another example

For decades after the war, the security services kept on interviewing and hiring some of the worst possible people for the job. When he was rusticated from Oxford for failing his exams, the late journalist Auberon Waugh was told by his father, Evelyn: “There are only two possible careers for a man who has been sent down from Oxford. You must become either a schoolmaster or a spy.”

Auberon, or Bron, duly wrote to Sir Roger Hollis, an old drinking friend of Evelyn’s, who was head of MI5 at the time. Shortly afterwards, he was sent to the Civil Service Selection Board – the same body that rejected me 35 years later. Bron failed, too, and he also reapplied three years later. He got an interview even though his friend Martin Dunne had given him the worst reference possible, dwelling at length on Bron’s “irresponsibility and carelessness”.

Bron finally ended his prospective espionage career in his interview, when he said how much he admired the new independent countries in Africa. “You don’t think they may have some problems?” asked one of the interviewers.

“I feel sure they will overcome them,” he said. “You see, they may not be as good as us at our particular skills, but they are much better than us at other things.”

“What sort of things?” Bron’s mind went blank. “Well, climbing trees,” Bron suggested weakly. Soon after, he was looking for posts in the teaching profession.

When I interviewed him in 1991, Bron said: “There’s no sense in waiting for a tap on the shoulder. Perhaps you should expose your shoulder. I went round tapping shoulders, but didn’t make it. It can be very boring; stuck behind a desk. Even if you make it, with your cover you won’t appear successful to the outside world, being a very humble First Secretary to an embassy at best.”

—Country Life has an article that discusses the origin of names for creatures that often have several versions. One involves a well-known passage in a Waugh novel:

On a rainy night in early March of 1928, after hours of debate about soldiers’ pensions, the Protection of Lapwings Bill was read out in the House of Commons. The legislation had been proposed in the hope of bringing an end to people setting out in spring to pick the iridescent waders’ eggs.[…]

Those of you who know your Evelyn Waugh will be aware that, in a now-illegal culinary context, lapwing eggs have another name. After Sebastian Flyte vomits through Charles Ryder’s window in Brideshead Revisited, Flyte invites him to a lunch where the guests are dining on ‘plovers’ eggs’. It all ends with the flamboyant aesthete Anthony Blanche shouting verses from T. S. Eliot’s Modernist epic The Waste Land across the quad. Oxford, I’m told, is different these days.

Plover is an old name for the lapwing and I like to think that Blanche would have known it derives from pluvia, the Latin for rain, because the birds are seen flocking in autumn as the weather starts to turn.

–Waugh’s reference to Eliot’s poem also receives some attention in the website InterestingLiterature.com.   An article by Oliver Tearle is posted about the history and derivation of the phrase: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” After a discussion of how the phrase evolved through various texts, the article concludes:

In short, then, the ‘fear in a handful of dust’ which the godlike figure promises to show the ‘Son of man’ is, we might say, both human mortality and the pointless death-in-life that people without spiritual meaning in their lives have to endure. Neither is viable: however you view this ‘handful of dust’, it must be rejected in favour of that shadow or protection which stretches far beyond one man and his narrow lifespan. The Waste Land is a poem about modern life stripped of deeper spiritual meaning. The ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’, in referring to both human mortality and the fate of the Sibyl, shows the horror of both, offering something ‘beyond ourselves’ as the solution or cure to this fear.

The phrase ‘a handful of dust’, from Eliot’s poem, was used by Evelyn Waugh for the title of his 1934 novel.

–In another Daily Telegraph article, Harry Hudson considers the implications of the recent announcement that annual scholastic sports days may now be resumed as the Covid epidemic winds down. Not everyone would agree that will be a good thing:

For those in whom the thought of sports day only evokes melancholia, the recent government announcement giving sports days the green light after last year’s blanket cancellation will not have come as good news. Memories of stumbling round the second lap of the 800 metres or dropping the baton in front of baying crowds will have come rushing back with unpleasant clarity to some, while others will have thought only of Evelyn Waugh’s farcical send up of this most British of annual institutions in Decline and Fall and reckon he got it about right.

It is not often, however, that participants in these events nowadays will end up with a fatal shot from a starter’s pistol.

–Finally, the weblog Chateau Lloyd has posted a follow up article in which it compares works of Evelyn Waugh to those of Ford Maddox Ford. This is by A H Lloyd whose original comparison related Waugh’s Sword of Honour to Maddox Ford’s Parades End. See previous post. Since both were multiple novels on the subject of war as seen by a participant, a comparison was fairly obvious. This followup relates Brideshead Revisited to The Good Soldier for which the subject matter of the novels was on the surface quite different. After comparing in some detail the two authors’ treatment of their narrators, the stories and structure and the treatment of religious faith, the essay concludes:

As an admirer of both, I unquestionably enjoy Brideshead Revisited more.  Repeated readings bring renewed appreciation for Waugh’s talent.  The Good Soldier doesn’t have the same effect, and while one can go back and admire Ford’s craftsmanship, the story itself is just unpleasant to read. Still, as I said in my other piece, Ford’s writing was known and available, and if his tale of the idle rich is inferior to that of Waugh, it is still an important milestone in literary development.  Both books are well worth your time.

 

 

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Ronald Knox Revival Imminent?

Posted on July 2, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

An article in the Catholic Herald (“Rediscovering Ronnie”) suggests that a revival of interest in the writings of Waugh’s close friend and biographical subject Ronald Knox may be imminent. This is written by the Herald’s contributing editor Serenhedd James based partly on his

…recent lockdown reading that included The Knox Brothers– Penelope Fitzgerald’s retrospective of her father and uncles–and the biography by Evelyn Waugh, and partly because of Knox’s thoughts on university chaplaincy, about which [Mr James wrote in the] Catholic Herald in April, Knox having been chaplain to Oxford in the years before the Second World War.

The article goes on to cite the wide reach of Knox’s writings, with particular reference to his limericks:

…it is challenging to engage with his literary legacy and not come away tainted by a touch of envy, plus a lingering feeling of inadequacy and a sense of life misspent. Theology, satire, history, pastoralia, broadcasts, detective novels, parodies, apologetics, pithy verses: Knox mastered them all, and then used the fluency in Latin which he had acquired in childhood to crown his life’s work with a new translation of the Vulgate Bible.

Alongside all this achievement, Knox also exercised a quasi-national chaplaincy to the great and the good. He was as comfortable at the dining table as he was at his writing desk, which allowed him to maintain a ministry far beyond the parameters of that to which he had been officially appointed.

Many of Knox’s religious works have remained in print, including his translated Bible and books such as Enthusiasm (1950). I was surprised to find, however, Amazon.com listings for most (perhaps all) of his mysteries that have recently been republished: The Viaduct Murders (1925), The Three Taps (1927), The Footsteps at the Lock (1928), The Body in the Silo (1933), Still Dead (1934), and Double Cross Purposes (1937). Several of these are available online in multiple formats and some in ebook or audible only.

As to his limericks, the article offers one that Knox definitely wrote and another possible attribution. The article closes with the one he wrote, as introduced in the article :

For all the millions of words, my favourite bit of Knox has always been another of his limericks, “God in the Quad”, which I first encountered as a teenager. It presents an engagement with Berkeleian ontology – about which I then knew nothing – in the form of an imagined exchange involving George Berkeley and the Almighty.

“There was a young man who said, ‘God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.’ 

“’Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.’”

The other quoted limerick (a possible Knox attribution written as a want-ad) opens the article:

Evangelical vicar in want
Of a portable second-hand font,
Would dispose of the same
For a portrait (in frame)
Of the Bishop-Elect of Vermont.

For an explanation of that one, please see the article at this link.

 

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Complete Works Project Seek Help

Posted on June 28, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Project at the University of Leicester seek help to identify copyright holders of certain letters received by Evelyn Waugh from various writers for permissions to publish such letters in future volumes of their Personal Writings series (numbers 31-41). Their request for information as posted on the internet is copied below:

Orphan Works
An orphan work is a copyright-protected work for which the rights holder cannot be traced. Help us reunite lost works with their “parents”.

The Complete Works plans to publish not only Evelyn Waugh’s personal writings but letters sent from his friends and acquaintances. To do this, we need to acknowledge all copyright-holders properly. Please contact us if you have any information about the descendants of these Waugh correspondents:

Brenda, Lady Dufferin
Waugh comforted her when her husband, Frederick Marquess of Dufferin and Ava was killed in an air accident in July 1930. Ivana and Sheridan Lowell are descendants.

Crease, Francis
Crease was not a schoolmaster but lived about four miles from Lancing College. Waugh visited him for calligraphy lessons.

Fletcher, John Arthur
Wrote a disgusted letter to Waugh in 1930 after reading Vile Bodies, in which he urged the author to take English lessons.

Graham, Alistair
Waugh’s Oxford lover later inspired the character of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited.

Guthrie, James
Owned the Pear Tree Press in Sussex. Waugh was very briefly apprenticed to him in 1925.

Driberg, Tom
Waugh’s contemporary at Lancing and Oxford. Newspaper columnist and later a prominent Labour politician.

Lewis Hill, James
Waugh’s contemporary at Lancing, who wrote to him in 1921 – after Lewis Hill had himself left the school.

O’Connor, D.M
Waugh’s contemporary at Lancing, who wrote to him in January 1920.

Pares, Richard
Historian. He and Waugh shared a passionate friendship at Oxford.

Plunket-Greene, Gwendolyn
Mother of Olivia Plunket Greene, a Bright Young Thing with whom Waugh was close in the interwar years.

Plunket-Greene, Richard
Olivia Plunket Greene’s brother.

Roxburgh, John Fergusson
Waugh’s headmaster at Lancing College.

Scott-Moncrieff, Charles
Last known copyright-holder was Constance Elizabeth Hannah Scott-Moncrieff, to whom the rights passed in 1947.

Edmund
A pupil taught by Waugh at Ashton Clinton School in 1926-27.

For more information, see this link.

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Roundup: Public Schools, Pronunciation and Epigraphs

Posted on June 27, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has an essay by Rupert Christiansen reviewing the English obsession with Public Schools. This begins with a consideration of several novels, films and stage plays that center on the miserable lives suffered by both students and teachers in these establishments. Although none by Waugh is mentioned in this section, the play South Downs by David Hare is noted as a reflection of his unhappy days at Lancing College, a school where Waugh in an earlier generation was, according to his own recollections, largely happy. The focus then shifts to more positive or comic descriptions of the public school experience:

The mood of public-school culture is not always so negative, however. As I remember from my own boarding-school incarceration, hysterical laughter saved one from sinking into anger and despair, and comedy is rightly the dominant note of anything set in prep-schools, where the complicating stresses of adolescent hormones have yet to set corrosively in.

Two fictional creations stand out here. One is contained in Evelyn Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall, with its hilarious portrait of Llanabba Castle, an institution of toxic mediocrity, staffed by the dregs of the establishment and humiliated in a farcically disastrous sports day. The other is the immortal character of Molesworth, the scourge of St Custard’s and the jaundiced narrator of four much-loved books by Geoffrey Willans written in the 1950s and now valuable records of a lost lore and lingo (as in ‘chizchiz’, and ‘hello birds hello sky’).

Waugh’s depiction of public schools in his novel is based more on his experience as a teacher in his post Oxford career than in his schooldays at Lancing. The essay then concludes with a discussion of girls schools.

–On the website Literary Hub, Thomas Swick considers the art of the epigraph. After discussing several examples from multiple authors, he comes to Waugh:

Often authors use epigraphs […] to reveal the sources of their titles. Evelyn Waugh, not a regular practitioner, prefaced A Handful of Dust with the passage he’d cribbed from The Waste Land.

While it is true that Waugh did not regularly use epigraphs, he does include them in Vile Bodies (from Alice Through the Looking Glass) and Put Out More Flags from Lin Yutang. In the latter example, as in the one cited by Swick, Waugh uses the epigraph to explain the origin of the book’s title. In addition, one might consider the title of Book One of Brideshead  Revisited as an epigraph: “Et In Arcadio Ego“.

–The New Statesman carries a feature length story about another and earlier humorist who once lived in Combe Florey, Somerset and whose wit is worthy of consideration alongside that of a later resident of the village:

He was born in 1771, 250 years ago this month, and died, aged 73, in 1845. His name was the Reverend Sydney Smith. As his simple title implies, he did not reach high office in the profession to which he was, in effect, conscripted by his father. This was partly because he was so witty and thus not seen as serious by the church hierarchy. He was the man who described heaven as “eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets”. Also: “What bishops like best in their clergy is a dropping-down-deadness of manner.” And his musing on episcopal romance: “How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is: ‘I will see you in the vestry after service.’” These were not lines calculated to win preferment.

The article is by Matthew Engel and is a good, concise survey of Smith’s career. While he was vicar of the Combe Florey parish, he was not a full time resident. As was the practice in those days, the income from his living afforded him the ability to hire a curate for full time church duties, allowing Smith to enjoy the company of his fellow bon vivants in London. As the article explains, Smith was able to combine his incomes from various appointments at other ecclesiastical establishments to support his more worldly exploits:

As the Tories faltered in the late 1820s, Lord Lyndhurst became Lord Chancellor and slipped him in as a prebendary of Bristol Cathedral. To that was added the post of rector of Combe Florey in Somerset, which must count as the funniest village in England; it was later the home of both Evelyn and Auberon Waugh.

In 1830, the Whigs came to power at last, bringing forth many of the reforms for which Smith had campaigned. Both their prime ministers that decade, Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne, claimed they wanted to make him a bishop. But it never happened. The final consolation prize was to be made a canon of St Paul’s. This enabled him to adorn London dinner tables regularly while ministering part-time to Combe Florey. The canonry also involved a good deal of administration, which he did with pernickety efficiency, as if proving a point.

The article concludes with a reference to a literary society established in Smith’s name that is the repository of a cache of his unpublished letters in which, no doubt, further evidence of his wit abounds and will soon be released upon his admirers.

–In another article posted by the Daily Telegraph, Christopher Howse addresses the ever vexing problem of pronouncing the English language. Toward the end of the article, after covering considerable ground littered with examples of common and (at least sometimes) avoidable mistakes, he concludes with this:

My favourite two words almost always mispronounced are pejorative and flaccid. There is a choice with pejorative, but the nobby U-pronunciation is to stress the first syllable: PEE-jorative, as you can hear Evelyn Waugh saying in his celebrated television interview with John Freeman. With flaccid there is no leeway. Most people say flassid, but it should be flak-sid. It’s the law, or would be if we British tried to control our language as the Académie Française pretends to in France.

Yet I wouldn’t dream of correcting anyone who innocently got it wrong, unlike the 35 per cent of survey respondents who admitted to relishing the opportunity. It would be like sneering at their clothes. When it comes to pronunciation, we all live in glass houses.

A quick browse of the BBC interview quoted shows the interviewer John Freeman using the word “pejorative” to describe Waugh’s public references to the BBC (Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, v. 19, p. 563). Perhaps I overlooked Waugh’s own utterance of the word.

–Finally, author Ben Macintyre (who specializes in the subject of espionage) was recently interviewed in the Guardian column “Books that made me.” Near the end, this exchange appears:

Q. My comfort read
A. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. I know, I know: racially insensitive, viciously snobbish, but still the best satire of journalism ever written.

 

 

 

 

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