Evelyn Waugh World Cup Competition

Posted on May 13, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Cult of the Country House Reconsidered

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Pursuit of Adaptations

Posted on May 11, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bed: Opposite of good.

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

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

Chetswarth: Debo Mitford’s home in Derbyshire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Combe Florey House (More)

Posted on May 9, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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May Day Roundup

Posted on May 5, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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Latest Issues of Evelyn Waugh Studies Posted

Posted on May 2, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Two Waugh Favorites on BBC

Posted on May 1, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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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 Sévigné, 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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Posted in A Little Learning, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Diaries, Helena, Lancing, Lectures | Tagged | Comments Off on Annual Waugh Lecture (More)