Combe Florey Sale Coincides with Waugh Anniversary

Posted on April 9, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

In an article in today’s Times newspaper, Patrick Kidd writes:

On Easter morning 55 years ago tomorrow [Saturday, 10 April 2021] Evelyn Waugh said his last Deo gratias. After assisting his priest at a Latin mass in the Somerset town of Wiveliscombe, Waugh returned to his home in Combe Florey, seven miles away, for a family lunch in a rare jolly mood. At some point before the lamb was served, he went to his library and was never seen alive again.

The greatest novelist of his generation, as Graham Greene described him in The Times — or “the nastiest-tempered man in England” according to the architectural historian James Lees-Milne — was found dead in the downstairs toilet. Biffed while on the thunder-box, as Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, the one-eyed maverick in his Sword of Honour trilogy, would have put it.

Waugh is buried near by. The location, in a former ha-ha on the edge of the 35-acre estate where he spent his last decade and the adjacent churchyard, chimes with his personality of awkwardly refusing to fit in anywhere.

The article goes on to explain how Waugh relied on his carpentry skills to oversee redecoration of the house and how, after he died, it came to belong to Auberon and his family. This was not down to primogeniture inheritance but to the fact that Auberon and his wife Teresa bought it from Evelyn’s widow Laura after she had been living there alone in relative squalor (as described by Auberon) for about 5 years. When Auberon’s family moved in, Laura then lived in one wing of the house.

The article in the Times then describes how the present owners, who bought the property from Auberon’s widow Teresa Waugh about 10 years ago, have upgraded the house. This includes addition of an orangery, a heated pool and a caretaker’s cottage. Several of these features are described in the article. Other details and more photographs are available in the online listing by the realtors Strutt & Parker on their website.

Some of this may be a bit oversimplified. Here, for example, is Patrick Kidd’s description of the disposition of Evelyn Waugh’s Combe Florey library:

Disappointingly, nothing survives of Waugh’s library, where he wrote his autobiography and Unconditional Surrender, the final volume of Sword of Honour. The room remains a library with glass doors over new shelves, but you would never know that a literary great ever used it. Blame his widow, who sold the contents, shelves and all, to a Texan in 1968. Alexander suggests that in doing so she had “effectively extinguished the spirit of Evelyn’s personality”; his father, the journalist Auberon Waugh, believed she did it to annoy her children.

It was not an individual Texan, but a Texas institution that purchased the library. This was the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas which acquired the library, preserved and expanded it and made it readily accessible to scholars. What particularly annoyed the family perhaps was not so much that their mother sold the books but also all the furnishings, decorations and paintings from the library. They later sought to have those accoutrements returned in exchange for Waugh’s correspondence archive. While the Ransom Center’s staff would have reportedly been happy to oblige, the State of Texas couldn’t come up with the necessary finding that the archive was equal in market value to the furnishings. So they languish in the Ransom Center’s basement storage and the correspondence archive went to the British Library.

Another online property website posts a listing for Waugh’s earlier residence at Piers Court. This appears on TheSpaces.com. This may, however, be a reposting from a 2018 listing that appeared a few years ago as was described in a previous post. The realtor in that transaction posted that that the property was sold.

UPDATE (10 April 2021). The last paragraph was amended to reflect sale of Piers Court pursuant to 2018 listing.

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Easter Roundup

Posted on April 5, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Edward St Aubyn has written a new novel: Double Blind. The Sydney Morning Herald explains why it may (or may not) appeal to Waugh readers:

St Aubyn’s early prose can be almost unbearably sharp, mordant and bitterly ironic. The fictional world of ossified Anglo-American wealth, privilege and clever cruelty depicted in his books feels like a kind of depraved Evelyn Waugh, taking the reader to dark places where Waugh and his generation of high-society novelists would never have ventured. Dark, certainly, though often very funny. […]

St Aubyn’s characters are no longer cultivating aristocratic detachment but seeking engagement with the world’s problems, albeit while remaining safely within their exclusive social circle.
These post-Melrose characters are just as privileged, attractive and damaged as their more decadent predecessors, and anyone can be made to look frivolous under St Aubyn’s witheringly satirical gaze. His worldview is not exactly heartless, but there is no place for sentiment. There is the possibility of redemption, even if it is almost impossible to attain in this life. […]

The great preoccupation of St Aubyn’s fiction is inheritance in all its aspects, and to that extent Double Blind is of a piece with the Melrose novels. This may not be the author’s best book, but this upscale social comedy-drama is entertaining as well as companionable.

The Guardian’s reviewer came to much the same conclusion:

…What defined Edward St Aubyn’s quintet of Patrick Melrose novels was their bitter comedy and sadistic wit, and though his two subsequent novels (one a satire on literary prizes, the other a reworking of King Lear) were attempts to alter the template, their tone remained much the same. Double Blind opens in unfamiliar territory, as an earnest, unworldly young botanist called Francis wanders through a country estate, Howorth, where he lives off-grid and is employed as part of a wilding project. Seemingly purged of irony, the tone is more DH Lawrence than Evelyn Waugh and almost rapturous in its pantheism (“He felt the life around him and the life inside him flowing into each other”). […]

–Daisy Waugh, Evelyn’s grand daughter and Auberon’s daughter, has just written and self published a new book called Guy Woake’s WordDiary. Here is a brief description from her website:

GUY WOAKE is a straight, white, cis male born into a racist, heteronormative, transphobic, patriarchal world. But all these things offend him and he’s trying his best to be better.

He’s 18 years old, a lonely fresher, studying Waste Water Recyclement at the Uni of Lakeside, Brighton. He misses his family. He misses his dog. He’s outraged by the state of the world, and he’s bored with recycling water.

“If you want to change stuff,” he tells himself, “you have to DO stuff.”

So he starts a blog, which he posts unflaggingly, to deafening silence 
 until the campus bullies catch sight of it, and for better and worse, Guy’s uneventful life is turned upside down.

She mentions this book in a recent interview on YouTube. See previous post. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending a link.

–The Daily Mail has a feature length story by Jessica Fellowes (who interviewed Daisy Waugh in the YouTube program mentioned above). Fellowes compares the origins the Bright Young People of the “Roaring Twenties” following the disaster of WWI and the Spanish Flu to what she foresees as what may be a similar generation in the 2020s following the recent upheavals of Brexit and the Covid 19 pandemic. Here’s her conclusion:

…This was the birth of Art Deco and social-climbing women who called themselves interior designers. Evelyn Waugh, who shone a brilliant satirical light on this era with his novels Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, describes entire walls of mirrors being installed in the drawing rooms of great houses, but it wasn’t too much of a fantastical stretch. Take a look at Eltham Palace, fabulously rebuilt in 1933 by Stephen Courtauld and his wife using the best of the new Art Deco ideas.

★ ★ ★ ★

Nostalgia can be dangerous – a denial of present pain. But reflection is good and I would encourage us to take inspiration from the perspective of the past, to see how the resilience and daring, even the glorious decadence, of the people who lived before us led them to create a brighter future. One that is out there for us, too. Most of all, let’s remember how to have fun in the Roaring 20s Mark II.

—The Tablet has posted an article by Allan Mallinson about his experience as the new military obituarist of The Times newspaper. One of his first subjects was:

…Major-General Jeremy Phipps, cavalryman and SAS officer. His mother was Veronica Fraser, daughter of the 14th Lord Lovat, Chief of Clan Fraser, Jacobite Catholics. Phipps went to Ampleforth, where his housemaster, Father Walter Maxwell-Stuart, was secretary of the Ampleforth College Beagles. Phipps, he said, hadn’t learnt much history, but did cast “a very pretty dry fly”. I was minded of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Indeed, Waugh would have made much of the material I gathered.

His article concludes with this:

…it’s time I re-read the Sword of Honour trilogy (it’s all of five years since last time): all life is there, as they say; the humour is “wicked”, and the Catholicism comforting. I also know that, with the centenary of Irish Independence approaching and with it the unresolved issue of Nationalism and the IRA, I really must steel myself to read Anna Burns’s [Booker prizewinning Milkman] and see what if anything I failed to grasp in the 1970s and 1980s about Ardoyne and the other “Green” areas. Only then perhaps will it be time for personal “Indemnity and Oblivion”.

–Finally, the New York Times in yesterday’s Book Review published a full-page illustrated memorial to the bowler hat in literature. Prominently mentioned are appearances in Becket’s Waiting for Godot, as a favorite apparel article of P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves and, perhaps most memorably, as the deadly weapon of Oddjob in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger. It is a pity they missed the opportunity to include a photo of Evelyn Waugh wearing one.

 

 

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Waugh’s Hoax on April Fools Day

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Economist in recognition of the importance of April Fools Day has published a list of famous hoaxes. These were not necessarily perpetrated on the day itself. One category was art hoaxes. These included the Nat Tate wheeze concocted by novelist William Boyd in 1998 as well as a Turner look-alike (“Fighting Temeraire”) by painter and decorator Tom Keating. Both of those hoaxes were actually sold at auction as such even after their bogosity was well known. Waugh also gets a mention in this category:

…Before all of these came a canonical hoax: Bruno Hat’s “Still Life with Pears” (1929), auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2009. Hat, his sponsors claimed, was a largely self-taught painter born on Germany’s Baltic coast and discovered working in a village shop in Clymping, West Sussex. It was hard to obtain more details. The moustached artist who rolled by wheelchair into his first London show, in the summer of 1929, spoke very little English. (Mainly because he was actually the socialite Tom Mitford, who spoke very little German.)

The show was a stunt by a sniggering coalition of Bright Young Things. Evelyn Waugh wrote the catalogue notes. (“Bruno Hat may lead the way in this century’s European painting from Discovery to Tradition.”) Brian Howard, a model for Sebastian Flyte in “Brideshead Revisited”, was the chief curator. (He and the artist John Banting supplied the work.) Their successful joke haunted Howard: his contemporaries saw it as the principal achievement of a wasted life. But the war redeemed him. At the end of 1940, MI5 assigned Howard to spy on his own class. He toured West End grill rooms and English country houses, hunting for genuine Quislings. Only the truly gifted can make a career out of deception.

Perhaps as part of the joke, the article attributes Brian Howard’s role as a character model in Brideshead Revisited to the creation of Sebastian Flyte. Howard is usually recognized as having actually inspired the character of Anthony Blanche, with a little help from Harold Acton.

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Waugh’s Travel Writing

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Biographer Jeffrey Meyers has written another in his series of articles about British travel writers in The Article, an online magazine. Waugh was prominently mentioned in two previous articles–those dealing with Robert Byron and Wilfred Thesiger. These are described in previous posts. This latest one is devoted to Waugh’s own travel writing, at least as that was represented in the first four volumes of that genre published in the 1930s. Meyer’s essay opens with this:

Following the inspiring example of DH Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh shifts the centre of travel-writing from the external world to his own complex character. His books — Labels (1930) on the Mediterranean, Ninety-Two Days (1934) on British Guiana, Remote People (1931) and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) on Africa — contain spontaneous revelations of his own feelings and thoughts. He has no desire to live in the Mediterranean, and is horrified by Guiana and Abyssinia. But he gets both emotional and intellectual satisfaction from his travels and suffers vicariously for his readers. He defines himself in relation to the landscape and people, and shows the response of an extraordinary personality to the spirit of the place.

Meyers has interesting things to say about all four books but is at his best in describing Ninety-Two Days, which he may have preferred to the other three:

Waugh was fascinated by “distant and barbarous places, particularly in the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of development.” He went to South America because he knew so little about the countries […] Though there is nothing much to see and he is often bored, his trip becomes a dangerous adventure and test of endurance. Though Waugh describes himself as a victim in the tropics, he turns out to be much tougher than the pampered aesthete of Oxford and the spoiled visitor to fashionable country estates. […]

Meyers is especially good on the visit Waugh makes to Boa Vista in Brazil:

…the natives are suspicious and contemptuous, and “only their listlessness prevented active insult.” Accustomed to bountiful hospitality he inquires, “where do strangers stay?” and is told, “strangers do not come to Boa Vista.”

The town is depressing, even inimical. The main street “was very broad, composed of hard, uneven mud, cracked into wide fissures in all directions and scored by several dry gullies. On either side was a row of single-storeyed, whitewashed mud houses with tiled roofs; at each doorstep sat one or more of the citizens staring at [him] with eyes that were insolent, hostile and apathetic; a few naked children rolled about at their feet. The remains of an overhead electric cable hung loose from a row of crazy posts, or lay in coils and loops about the gutter.” In this comatose village only the coiled children show any sign of life.

When he asks if the next boat to Manaus will be a question of days or weeks, he is shocked to hear that it will be “a question of weeks or months.” Time here, as in Mann’s The Magic Mountain, has lost its usual meaning. After only a few hours the Boa Vista of his imagination has been shattered by crude reality. No wonder that the inhabitants look ill and discontented. […]

Waugh has the extraordinary ability to interest the reader in this boring episode, which affords the opportunity to fantasise about European luxury and culture while rotting away in a barbaric outpost. Since neither pleas nor bribes gain passage on the overcrowded boat to Manaus, he concentrates on escaping in any direction from Boa Vista and reluctantly decides to retreat to British Guiana….

Meyers mentions briefly his own trip up the Amazon in which he managed to attain Waugh’s goal of Manaus only to find it “modernized and squalid”.  He continues on to Iquitos in Peru which he describes as “truly primitive” and seems to remind him of Waugh’s Boa Vista.  It would have been nice to have had more of this comparison and one suspects that Meyers may be planning to put these essays together in book form where he may have more room to expand and compare his own travel adventures as a lecturer on cruise tours. If Meyers does intend further publication of the article, he might also want to note that it was Tom Burns, the publisher of Waugh in Abyssinia, who insisted on the book’s punnish title, not Waugh, who tried to persuade them to adopt an alternative: The Disappointing War (Stannard I, p. 431).

Meyers may have been unaware that the publication of his article would coincide with the publication of Douglas Patey’s annotated edition of Ninety-Two Days in the OUP’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Perhaps we can look forward to a review of that edition by Meyers.

 

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Spring Equinox Roundup

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–A new book about Evelyn Waugh’s friend Randolph Churchill has been published. This is entitled Churchill and Son and is written by Josh Ireland.  It apparently deals mainly with Randolph’s rocky relationship with his father but may touch on his equally rocky relationship with Waugh. The TLS in a review by Sarah Curtis notes that:

Randolph, always supremely self-confident, took any leg-ups as a right. He was quickly addicted to high living and spending money, of which he never had enough. He was objectionably rude to others, especially when drunk, as he frequently was, though he also charmed many, quarrelling and making up with equally irascible contemporaries like Evelyn Waugh. The American diplomat Averell Harriman found him during the Second World War “a most delightful and stimulating travelling companion”. This book shows that Winston was aware of his son’s offensive traits but could never manage to induce him to moderate them…

–The Daily Mail has published an excerpt from the book that focuses on the break-up of Randolph’s marriage with his first wife, Pamela. Randolph blamed this on his father for having encouraged her affair with Harriman:

Pamela sought solace in the company of the Harrimans; Randolph at the bar at gentlemen’s club White’s, where he heard hints about Pamela’s adultery. He reacted furiously, drinking too much then spreading ‘malicious inventions’ about his wife. He told friends that his father had not just condoned her affair, he had encouraged it because of Harriman’s importance to Britain. He confronted his father but Winston denied knowing about the affair and accused Randolph of mistreating the mother of his son. Neither man could stop himself from saying words they knew would wound the other grievously. Randolph vowed never to speak to his father again. Not long afterwards, he walked out on Pamela.[…]

Randolph later parachuted into Yugoslavia to make contact with Tito’s partisans at their secret headquarters and was again injured. But his undoubted courage did nothing to build bridges with his father.

Back in London, Randolph arrived drunk at Downing Street for dinner and bellowed at his parents, his sister Sarah and the chiefs of staff that his wife was a whore, naming her lovers. There is no record of how comprehensive Randolph’s list was. Her many conquests included the journalist Ed Murrow and Major General Fred Anderson, the American air force commander. Randolph turned on his parents and when Sarah – ‘the only member of his family who ever liked him’, according to Evelyn Waugh – protested, he hit her in the face.

Winston went deathly white and Clementine thought he was on the brink of a heart attack. When Winston could talk once more, he summoned the Marines to eject his son. The violence of the encounter left the family stunned. It became the talk of the Carlton Grill, the bar of White’s and the Commons smoking room. It had long been known that Winston had spoiled his son. Now, they said, he was afraid of him.

On what occasion Waugh may have described Sarah’s loyalty to Randolph isn’t stated. He surely was not present at the family confrontation.

—The Times has published a profile of the Devonshire village of Chagford that was one of Evelyn Waugh’s favorite writing venues:

It’s a remarkable town; beautiful, arty and very community minded.[…] The music festival Chagstock returns in July after a Covid-related fallow year, with Seasick Steve and Scouting for Girls due to headline. With any luck, sister festivals Chagfilm (movies) and Chagword (books) will be up and running again soon. There are artists and art galleries everywhere, taking inspiration from the landscape and a longstanding tradition of creativity: Walter Sickert painted in Chagford; and Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited here.

Chagford has all the basics too — great pubs, allotments, a primary school and an impressive collection of local shops, including a greengrocer, a newsagent, a chemist, a superior wine shop, a convenience store and Blacks Delicatessen, whose homemade ready meals (venison and red wine casserole, ÂŁ6.50) and sweet treats (halva and tahini brownies, ÂŁ2) have been keeping the town fed during the pandemic…

–The new Mitford Murder book by Jessica Fellowes is reviewed in the California-based online newspaper Kings River Life. This is entitled The Mitford Trial and is summarized by reviewer Sandra Murphy as follows:

Louisa Cannon has been a lady’s maid to the Mitford family since she first went into service at age nineteen. Now she’s taking classes to be a court reporter and is getting married. She won’t be on equal footing with the wealthy Mitfords, but she’ll no longer be at their beck and call.

At least that was the plan. Diana, married to Bryan but unhappy about it, has taken a lover—Oswald Mosley, a political troublemaker. Younger sister Unity is fascinated by Germany’s new leader—Hitler. She feels the German people are not smart enough to decide what’s best for them. In the midst of Diana’s divorce, it’s decided the two sisters will travel with their mother, partly by train and then on a ship. It will serve the purpose of getting Diana away from potential gossip, prevent her from being seen with another man during the divorce, and keep Unity properly chaperoned—by Louisa.

In the interview, Fellowes describes her writing career and in the course of that discussion mentions her favorite reading:

I love reading about and listening to other writers. There’s no magic bullet to writing a novel – you have to sit down and write – but I can’t get enough of hearing about other people’s processes, their writing spaces, their disciplines and tips. But to read: Anne Tyler, Charlotte BrontĂ«, Evelyn Waugh, Bernadine Evaristo, Sally Rooney, Anne Patchett
 there’s a long list!

Whether Waugh makes an appearance as a character is this book as he did in her last, Fellowes doesn’t say. She recently interviewed Waugh’s grand daughter Daisy Waugh about her latest writing. See previous post.

–A weblog recently posted a passage from Waugh’s Put Out More Flags that reminded the blogger of current events relating to the British Government’s response to Covid-19:

The passage that caught my eye concerns the government’s requisitioning of a big house to turn it into a hospital for air-raid victims. The result seems to me to parallel exactly the idiocy of the UK government during this pandemic, focussing solely on those with the current virus, forgetting the care they owe to those with other ailments:

“So there was the house … and the government moving in to make it a hospital … It’s full of beds and nurses and doctors waiting for air-raid victims and a woman in the village got appendicitis and she had to be taken 40 miles to be operated on because she wasn’t an air-raid victim and she died on the way.”

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing this one along.

 

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Interviewed by a Smart-Aleck Baboon

Posted on March 24, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

In the American Scholar, literary critic, essayist and screenwriter Arthur Krystal has written a memoir of his experiences with Jacques Barzun, his teacher and mentor at Columbia in the 1970s and later his friend and colleague. Among the numerous literary anecdotes, he includes this one about a visit Barzun made to Evelyn Waugh in December 1951:

Barzun had his disagreements with historians and writers (Leon Edel, for one, regarding something William James wrote), but I never came across a true vilifier except for Evelyn Waugh. In the winter of 1951, Life magazine sent Barzun to interview the novelist. Afterward, Waugh decided that Barzun had scotched his deal with the magazine: “Life had sent a smart-aleck down here,” he wrote to Graham Greene, “and that has ended my profitable connexion with them” (Feb. 27, 1952). Waugh’s diary entry reiterates the sentiment: “They sent me an apostate frog called professor Smart-Aleck Baboon. He stayed here and gave me a viva in history and reported all.” Which makes me wonder if Waugh’s pen was dipped in imperceptible acid when he wrote, “Dear Professor, I enjoyed our conversation so much last night. Do come again” (Dec. 18, 1951).

Barzun apparently never wrote up his version of the interview. The meeting arranged by Life was not intended for publication in the magazine but was more in the nature of setting up another project to follow Waugh’s article on the Holy Places that they had just published. I cannot find the quoted reference to Barzun as a “Smart-Aleck Baboon” but perhaps that was edited out of the published version of the Diaries.

Waugh may be correct that Barzun discouraged any further Waugh projects for publication by Life based on his 1951 meeting. According to Waugh’s follow-up letter to Barzun, they had discussed as a possible subject the Emperor Constantine.  In his letter, Waugh proposes Thomas More as an alternative. He also offers a second choice of Ignatius Loyola as a subject if that proved more appealing  (Letters, 361-62).

Waugh later describes a reception to which he was invited to view Life’s new London offices and notes that it did not go well. There was later an exchange of correspondence in 1954-55 about an article on St Francis of Assisi, but that broke down after Waugh demanded a substantial advance (Diaries, 715, 747-50; Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch,  213-17).

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St Patrick’s Day Roundup

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–RAI Radio 3 has posted a podcast relating to the new Italian translation of A Little Learning. Here is a translation of the introduction:

Let’s not expect the usual self-glorification of the middle-aged writer: Waugh takes us first to get to know his family tree full of temper and bizarre types, then moves on to sketch a vaguely hostile father and a vaguely hen mother, and finally here is the young Evelyn, unsure of his literary vocation and so malevolent towards himself as to border on self-defamation. As Mario Fortunato writes in the note that introduces the volume, “reality for Waugh is nothing but our imagination reduced to a minimum”.

I think translator Mario Fortunato may take part in the podcast. Here’s a link to the recording on RAI’s website in case you understand Italian.

–The book is reviewed by Alessandra Stoppini on SoloLibri.net. Here is an excerpt translated by Google with a few edits:

…In the winter between 1962 and ’63, at the age of sixty, Evelyn Waugh settled in Menton, in the South of France, with the intention of starting the first of the three volumes that should have composed his autobiography. But the writing did not continue, because there was the problem of having to tell real events, describe people who are still alive. The names, facts, circumstances, feelings that had to be examined and narrated were those of real life, even if in the recent past, and there was the risk of hurting the sensitivity of someone, a family member, a friend, an acquaintance. Menton’s atmosphere and indeed a considerable propensity for drinking, smoking and sleeping pills had not helped the writing, so Waugh had gone home.

In 1964, finally, the first volume of the autobiography was published, completed by Waugh in a few months.[…] If in the first part of the volume the author reconstructs a significant part of his family tree, describing his parents wisely, in the second part, instead, the fictional side so dear to the author appears. In fact, in these pages, which stop at the year 1924, the names of many real characters are changed, […] The names change, but their characters and their bizarre and over the top personalities maybe not…

—JSTOR Daily has published an article entitled “Sick Party!” by Naomi Milthorpe and Eliza Murphy. The theme is described as follows: “The idea that partying can make you sick is not new. But the party as an occasion for illness or disease—as an occasion not generally in the service of public health—has specific valences in history and culture.”

After discussing parties in the works of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and F Scott Fitzgerald, they come to those of Evelyn Waugh. Here’s an excerpt:

The parties in Evelyn Waugh’s satiric novel Vile Bodies (1930) are definitely irresponsible, but hardly pleasurable at all: as we’ve written elsewhere, they waste time, effort, money, and occasionally life. As Marius Hentea writes, Vile Bodies was one of a host of party novels published during the twenties and thirties, and follows a group of young socialites based on the historical Bright Young People of post-war London. In a letter to fellow author Henry Green, Waugh wrote that Vile Bodies “seems to shrivel up & rot internally,” hinting that the novel’s parties aren’t all frolics and fizz.

Instead, they are physically nauseating and morally depleting. In the opening chapter, a voyage across the English Channel is likened to “one’s first parties, [
] being sick with other people singing.” In a later scene, a gossip columnist gate-crashes a party in a bid for the latest scoop, masking his identity with a fake beard. The mask is a symptom of the “bogus” modernity which, as the literary scholar Brooke Allen comments, Waugh skewers throughout the novel. Gaining entry is a matter of life or death: “if I miss this party,” one character, Lord Balcairn, says “I may as well put my head into a gas-oven.” When he’s thrown out for being recognized, he follows through with his plan. Instead of offering a venue for play and renewal, the party drives him to suicide.

Only slightly less grim is the novel’s most infamous party scene, in which a party is held in a tethered airship (an inherently unstable setting, with echoes of warfare that would not have been lost on Waugh’s audience). While the party’s odd venue is a novelty, the guests in attendance are “all the same faces.” As the protagonist, Adam, enters the airship, one of the first things he sees is a woman “breathing heavily; evidently she felt unwell.” […] Moving from an airship to an illegal nightclub, then to an acquaintance’s bedsit, Adam concludes his evening by listening to his host vomit next door.

The article concludes with a discussion of how the recent novel entitled Severance by Ling Ma fits into this oeuvre (if that’s what it is).

–An interview of Evelyn Waugh’s grand daughter Daisy Waugh, also a novelist, is posted on YouTube. The interviewer is another novelist, Jessica Fellowes. The interview begins with a discussion of Daisy’s family life and how it has shaped her career. This mainly involves what she learned from her father Auberon Waugh but also what it is like for a writer to live and work in the shadow of a grand father with a reputation such as that of Evelyn Waugh. The latter half of the 25 minute program becomes more of a dialogue than an interview as both writers describe how they approach the tasks of writing a book and then getting it published. Daisy’s next book is Phone for the Fish Knives, out in June in the UK, and she is at work on or has just finished another one to be called Guy Woake’s Word Diary (or something to that effect–she points out that she and her publisher do not always agree on a title). Jessica has been writing a series called The Mitford Murders, the latest of which was The Mitford Trial, published in November.

The interview is part of a series called “Tuesday Connection” produced and posted by Forum.  Here’s a link which was kindly provided by Dave Lull. You will be asked to subscribe to watch the entire program, but there is no charge. It is worth the effort to subscribe.

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Brideshead Festival May Not Happen

Posted on March 13, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Yorkshire Post has published a story by David Behrens in which it reports that the festival scheduled last year to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Brideshead Revisited’s publication may never happen. This is largely based on an interview with the festival’s brainchild Victoria Barnsley. It opens with her expression of some relief that it had to be postponed from its original date:

“It poured with rain all that weekend,” she said. “And my sadness that the festival didn’t happen was mixed with relief because Brideshead in the rain wasn’t the idea. It was all going to be picnics and punting on lakes.”

This year marks perhaps an even more significant anniversary for the grand house, home to the Howard family for three centuries – for it was 40 years ago that Granada Television’s monumental adaptation of the novel hit the screen.

It was filmed in large measure at Castle Howard – apparently Waugh’s inspiration for the fictional Brideshead Castle – and its phenomenal success in Britain, the US and beyond, placed the house indelibly on the world tourism stage.

Ms Barnsley had considered reviving the festival for this summer, but the uncertainty over international tourism made it impractical.

“I don’t know whether we’ll ever resurrect the idea now. It feels as if its time has come and gone,” she said. “It’s so sad. We were going to have glamping in the walled garden and Sebastian Flyte’s teddy bears’ picnic.

“As far as I know, no-one has done a festival around a single book or a single author. But it was a huge amount of work and the logistics in such a rural location were also challenging. We might revisit bits of it – the teddy bear’s picnic on its own could be a lovely thing to do.

“But there will be a perennial interest in Castle Howard because of Brideshead. There’s even a new BBC adaptation rumoured to be in the works.” […]

After a discussion of Castle Howard’s connection with the film productions, Ms Barnsley addresses Waugh’s personal association with the house:

Evelyn Waugh had passed it in 1937 on his way to Ampleforth Abbey and was later a visitor there. When Brideshead Revisited was serialised in the USA and the publishers requested an illustration, he sent an engraving of the Yorkshire house [sic]. But the narrative dictates that the fictional Brideshead Castle is closer to Oxford.

It is true that the drawing that illustrates the serial version of Brideshead in Town & Country magazine does resemble Castle Howard. But Waugh had nothing to do with that serial version or its illustrations as he was in Yugoslavia when it was being edited, prepared for publication and issued in four installments in November 1944-February 1945. Waugh never saw the abbreviated version before its publication and was furious when he learned it had been shortened. The artist who illustrated the serial (Constantine Alajalov) used only Waugh’s verbal description in the novel to depict the house, but that came so close to Castle Howard as to look as if it were a copy.  For a more detailed discussion of the serial version of Brideshead see Evelyn Waugh Studies, No 50.3 (Winter 2019). A reproduction of Alajalov’s drawing appears at p. 17 of the article.

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Waugh and the Cancel Culture

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Simon Heffer writing in the Daily Telegraph discusses the cancel culture’s attack on Philip Larkin. He suggests the proper area of debate should be limited to Larkin the man and not his poetry. In the course of the article he also notes:

The question of whether an artist’s personal views should affect our appreciation of his or her art goes far beyond Larkin. His fellow Hull poet, Andrew Marvell, devoted much of his prose writing to vilifying Roman Catholics. How long will he last? Shakespeare has already necessitated “trigger warnings” for those university students incapable of putting language in its historical context. Charles Dickens had quite poisonous views on women, and the first draft of Oliver Twist makes his later treatment of Fagin look benign in its anti-Semitism. Saki drips anti-Semitism too, as did several writers of his class and generation. It is astonishing that Evelyn Waugh’s treatment of black people in Decline and Fall, Black Mischief and Scoop has so far escaped scrutiny.

I don’t know Mr Heffer’s age but since the 1960s when I began reading Waugh I can’t think of any period when critics were ready to give him a pass on his attitude toward black people whenever the opportunity arose. Unlike Larkin, who has a statue in Hull that is now at some risk, no monuments have ever been erected for Evelyn Waugh and perhaps we should be thankful for that.

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VB Theatre Programme On Offer

Posted on March 8, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Another programme for the 1932 Vaudeville Theatre production of Vile Bodies is on offer. This one is on eBay and the bidding is set to close on Wednesday 10 March. Here’s the link:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1932-Vaudeville-Theatre-Programme-Vile-Bodies-Evelyn-Waugh-/353406831994#viTabs_0

See earlier post for a more detailed description of the programme contents and circumstances of the production. These are based on listing for the previous sale.

 

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