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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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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