Italian Version of A Little Learning

Posted on February 12, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh’s autobiography A Little Learning will come out in an Italian edition next week. This is entitled  Autobiografia di un perdigiorno (Autobiography of an Idler).  Here is a translated excerpt of a review in Il Giornali by Stenio Solinas

Once he turned sixty, Evelyn Waugh began to notice that boredom was taking over his life. Not that until then he hadn’t been bored, far from it, and traveling as getting drunk, writing as getting married, even enlisting and being parachuted across the Channel had been the many ways in which life had fought and boredom defeated, all battles of a war that proved nevertheless interminable, a bit like the wars of succession, of religion, of thirty years. It was an old friend who alarmed him, warning him that in the eyes of many he had become boring  […]

The reviewer writes that Waugh knew autobiography was tricky. There was the danger of repetition of a life already described in his own fiction and by others; there was a risk of it being, not to put too fine a point upon it, boring.

Be that as it may, Waugh finally figured it out. A Little Learning came out in 1964, the first of a planned three-volume series, a sign that its author had taken a liking to it. Death decided otherwise. Unpublished in Italy, it is now published with a more understandable and captivating title, Autobiography of a perdigiorno [loafer] (Bompiani, 364 pages, 28 euros), chosen by Mario Fortunato who is also its excellent translator, as well as being the editorial editor of the work by Waugh […]

Set over a period of time that, from birth, reaches the age of twenty-five, except for a first chapter with a vaguely heraldic-genealogical flavor, The Ancestors [Heredity] , Autobiography of an idler re-proposes what had been the curse together with the blessing of English literature written in the early twentieth century, that is the school, from college to university, as a sort of eternally regretted Eden. […] In short, it is a sort of “theory of permanent adolescence”, according to the definition of Cyril Connolly, another of Waugh’s friends-companions-acquaintances, to hover in the book, youth as a racket, a gang apart and even a profession, the young man as an “eternal promise,” Always, and finally, not surprisingly, Autobiography of a loafer ends with the twenty-five-year-old Waugh who, faced with the existential failure to which his attempt to make ends meet as a teacher in a provincial school certainly leads him, contemplates suicide by drowning. He even left a farewell note, where he reported in Greek a verse by Euripides: “The sea heals all the ills of men.” The one in which he is swimming towards his end will turn out to be full of jellyfish. […]

Fortunato correctly writes that one of the keys of the book is reticence, which if it is the rhetorical figure par excellence of the twentieth-century novel is however the tombstone of any autobiography worthy of the name. Waugh is so aware of this reticence “that he denies almost to the last page of his autobiographical story his incoercible [incoercibile] vocation as a writer”. In its place is the aspiring painter, the designer of covers and bookplates who replaces the “presumptuous, heartless and certainly malevolent” adolescent who was, a concentrate, as appears from his school diaries, “of notable ignoble ». The end result is the founder of the Corpse Club, the member of the Hypocrites Club and the Oxford Railway Club, places he frequented and encountered a high rate of nicotine and alcohol,  with sexual preferences more homo- than heterosexual, over which Waugh spreads a modest veil, which help better define those mid-twenties years that he himself renamed an Indian Summer. […] What populates this Indian summer is a human type “who is unable to sever the cord that binds him to the university and continues to be possessed by it for years to come.” It is in some ways the creation of another social class that Waugh recounts in these pages, a communion of souls linked by a jargon, a behavioral code, a way of dressing, minority, but in its own way impregnable and destined, however, to unconditional surrender because the enemy is not external, it is internal: it is youth that goes away and cannot be turned back. It has passed, and they have not had time to notice it. It won’t be the [production] of an autobiography that will bring it back to life, and Waugh knows this very well. This is also why novels are written.

The translation is by Google with some edits. Most retranslations of Waugh quotes from Italian back into English have been omitted except where that was not possible without losing the context. No attempt has been made to substitute Waugh’s original language for the retranslation. There are also some quotes which seem to be from from the biographer’s Italian text (perhaps an introduction), but those are not always distinguishable. The Italian title is sometimes translated Autobiography of an “Idler” but at other times, “Loafer” or “Sloth”. The Italian incoercibile is translated by Google as incoercible but, in context, “inevitable” might be better.

 

 

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Pre-Valentine Roundup

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Spanish newspaper El Periodico announces the issuance of a Catalan translation of Brideshead Revisited;

Sebastian and Charles burst into the kitchen, in love like penguins, to share in the bombshell news that Viena Edicions has just published in Catalan the mythical novel by Evelyn Waugh, in a new translation by Xavier PĂ mies. The boys, of course, wanted to celebrate with strawberries freshly picked from the garden and ChĂąteau Lafaurie-Peyraguey white wine, because the idle and novelty classes are a bunch of ‘ snobs ‘ . What difference does it make? After all, dear reader , the best thing in life is a youthful summer trapped in the amber of memory. ‘Et in Arcadia ego’.

How is it possible to feel nostalgic for a time that was never lived, for a landscape never trodden on? That is what the witchcraft of good literature does. ‘Brideshead Revisited’ [Retorno a Brideshead] highlights the love between men, the love between men and women, the centrality of beauty in the existence of troubled humans. Is there something else? ‘ ‘ What else ‘ ‘ ?, As they say in the coffee ad.

Translated by Google. The name of the wine looks a bit peculiar.  Perhaps it’s just the context.

—The Spectator offers a list of “Books to Cheer Your Up” or in other words “purely entertaining books” to help divert minds during the extended pandemic. This is compiled by Alexander Larman and contains this one by Evelyn Waugh:

Fans of Evelyn Waugh’s unique, uproarious worldview – and I would definitely count myself as one – might find no purer expression of his talent than in his first novel, Decline and Fall, written and published while he was still in his twenties. Following the adventures of the hapless young Paul Pennyfeather, from university to teaching to white slavery to prison, and beyond, it is a novel without a shred of sentiment, but all the funnier for it. As with many novels on this list, it features an indelible cast of supporting characters, from the long-suffering headmaster Dr Fagan to the all-knowing butler Philbrick, but the greatest of them all is the deeply unsavoury schoolmaster Captain Grimes, forever finding himself ‘in the soup’ for some misdemeanour or other, and relishing the amoral freedom that ‘not being a gentleman’ gives him.

Others on the list include Lucky Jim, Pursuit of Love and Patrick Hamilton’s Slaves of Solitude.

–The Daily Telegraph includes a novel by Evelyn Waugh on its recommended reading for Valentine’s Day. This is A Handful of Dust. This seems an odd choice but here’s the explanation written by Telegraph reporter Iona McLaren:

It’s a truism that love can drive you mad, but few vignettes bring this home with such a bleak punch as the famous scene in Waugh’s 1934 novel when Lady Brenda Last, who is having a supposedly casual fling with John Beaver, a younger man she knows to be second-rate, hears over the telephone that “John” has died in an accident. When she realises that it’s her infant son, not Beaver, who has died, Brenda says: “John
 John Andrew
 I
 Oh, thank God.” Love conquers all, but here it’s not a good thing. 

Another satirical novel  recommended is Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. Its proponent is Orlando Bird who agrees that it:

might sound like a surefire V-Day downer. But look beyond the (admittedly hilarious) gripes about Welsh signage and the grotesqueries of ageing and you’ll find a deeply tender novel that celebrates love in its least glamorous forms – and blows Amis’s cover. He was an old romantic after all. 

–The Irish Examiner asked TV political news presenter Katie Hannon from RTÉ to list her “cultural touchstones”. These are mostly TV productions but there is also this by Evelyn Waugh:

Scoop and the news cycle

Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is fantastic.

It was written in the 1930s. It’s about an insignificant journalist who writes the nature notes for a newspaper.

He gets mistaken for a more famous cousin who is a writer and he gets dispatched to cover a war in Africa.

It’s the account of how this works out. He accidentally has a major scoop.

It’s very clever about how these things are done, how wars are covered, the madness of it all. It’s a great book. If you ever find it in a second-hand bookshop, pick it up.

–Columnist Nicholas Lezard writing in the New Statesman is also reminded of Waugh’s novel about journalists. His column is entitled “A reader accuses me of banality”:

The word that arrested me in my online fisticuffs was “banal”. “Crap” I can kind of live with, as it is pretty much implied by the word “banal”. Now, although I am reasonably confident that my critic never actually read past the headline, the word “banal” stung. I prefer “mundane”, as its etymological roots are from the Latin mundus (the world, and also “clean, elegant”); but then, in the end, everything is banal. In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the writer John Courteney Boot meets a precocious child who keeps using the word:

“You seem to find everything banal.”

“It is a new word whose correct use I have only lately learnt,” said Josephine with dignity. “I find it applies to nearly everything.”

UPDATE (12 February 2021): Additional information is added from the Daily Telegraph.

 

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Naim Attallah: 1931-2021 R I P

Posted on February 5, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The publisher and author Naim Attallah died in London earlier this week.  His obituary was posted today by the Daily Telegraph:

Naim Attallah, who has died aged 89, was a Palestinian-born entrepreneur who enjoyed a lucrative business career, notably with the luxury jeweller Asprey of Bond Street, but was better-known for his rather less financially rewarding role as proprietor of Quartet Books – a publishing company that he boasted had “employed more pretty girls than MGM and 20th Century Fox put together. […]

Attallah made little enough money from his publishing imprints, but some of his other ventures were so unremunerative as to be purely philanthropic. In 1981 he purchased the magazine Literary Review, installing Auberon Waugh as editor in 1986, and sank some £2 million into it with no hope of return, while Waugh drew a minimal salary and often paid contributors out of his own pocket.

The two men fiercely admired each other’s commitment to producing a first-class magazine (although it was too unpretentious ever to become fashionable) and in 2019, nearly two decades after Waugh’s death, Attallah edited A Scribbler in Soho, a tribute volume.

In 1992 he became the proprietor of another fledgling magazine, which aimed for a similar combination of intelligence and lack of stuffiness – The Oldie. It was edited by his old foe Richard Ingrams, and they too became friends, Ingrams describing him as “the first rich person I’ve met whom I like”. But by the time The Oldie finally began to flourish in the new millennium, Attallah had sold it on to John Paul Getty for a minimal profit.

Quartet Books also reprinted Auberon’s book Waugh on Wine in 2019.

At the time Attallah was born in 1931, Palestine was governed under a British mandate. According to the Daily Mail:

Attallah came to the UK in 1949 to study.[…] He was often to be found dining at his favourite restaurant in Shepherd Market, was happily married. He said he enjoyed flirting with women but never had affairs with them. ‘Darling, you’re pretty, come work for me,’ was his usual chat-up line. and it worked. […] His stable of employees — all fiercely loyal — included novelist Daisy Waugh, biographer Anna Pasternak and Emma Soames.

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending these links.

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Roundup: Brideshead to Bridgerton

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–A new Netflix serial “Bridgerton” has been compared in several papers to Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited and its film and TV adaptations. Here an excerpt from the Bloomsberg News:

… “Bridgerton” is a sly and sexy Netflix Inc. series set in Georgian England in 1813. At a time when Europe and the US feel like distant cousins, here we have a glorious example of British heritage and American irreverence fruitfully colliding to make riveting TV.

Launched on Christmas Day, just as it was becoming clear that the pandemic would make this a very long winter, Bridgerton is a mixture of historical romp, tart commentary on the 18th-century marriage market and an experiment in “color-blind” TV casting. It turns upside down the slave-holding society of the reign of King George III, giving a cast of various ethnicities roles as aristocrats and royalty, rather than relegating them to inferior positions as footmen and maids. […] Historical accuracy plays second fiddle to dramatic impact. Not only would the sex make Ms. Austen blush, but here the women take charge and manipulate the men. […]

It is a clever repurposing of the “Brideshead Revisited” formula, Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel about privileged Oxford University and stately home living, which is reliably screened or remade as every new recession bites. Waugh’s book was published in 1945 amidst British post-war austerity and rationing. As the author said, “It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the period of soya beans and Basic English — and in consequence, the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past.”

The 1981 independent television adaptation of Brideshead, shown when unemployment hit the three million mark in the U.K., is widely considered to be one of the best British productions of all time. A film version was also produced after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. And by no Covid coincidence, the BBC and HBO are shooting yet another TV version, this time directed by “Call Me By Your Name” director, Luca Guadagnino.

With conspicuous consumption a bad look nowadays, we’re once again drawn to bling and richness. There are close to 7,500 brightly colored costumes in the first season of Bridgerton. And the crunch of gravel leading to magnificent stately homes is the main soundtrack. (The producers appear to have commandeered the elegant city of Bath, where Jane Austen took the waters and penned her wry observations on humankind, for a stage set.) In one room, the glass window fittings alone cost 40,000 pounds ($54,436).

–They might have mentioned a further connection between “Bridgerton” and Waugh’s novel.  This review by Matthew Moore appeared in a recent video section of The Times newspaper:

When it comes to protecting the historic soft furnishings, the staff at Castle Howard take their work extremely seriously. Attendants employed by the stately home in North Yorkshire are so committed that they declined to leave the room during the filming of Bridgerton sex scenes, the period drama’s director has revealed.

Producers selected Castle Howard as one of several historic English locations for the Regency romance, which has become one of Netflix’s most successful ever original series.Most productions insist upon a closed set during intimate scenes, meaning only crew members who need to be present are allowed

The privately owned Grade I-listed estate, home to the Howard family for more than 300 years, has previously done duty as Brideshead in the television and film adaptations of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited.

–In the latest issue of the New Criterion, James Zug has an essay entitled “Stepping Stones”. In this, he cites numerous examples of how a random event has led him to a chain of memorable reading experiences. This begins with a neighbor named Paddy leaving a crumpled edition of The Sunday Times next to the swimming pool at Zug’s family home.  He found in it a serialized version of Graham Greene’s autobiography A Sort of Life and became an avid Greene fan. That experience is linked to one later in the essay:

…while up at Oxford, I had haunted Charing Cross secondhand bookstores. I’d buy up a half dozen books and the seller would sometimes tie them with brown twine like they were a miniature bale of hay. […] I scanned the shelves. I saw a blue spine: Graham Greene, Ways of Escape. I hadn’t heard of this book. A novel? No, his memoir. Another?

Ways of Escape came out in 1980, a sequel of sorts to A Sort of Life. It originated in introductions Greene had written for a collected edition of his novels. Deep into Ways of Escape, Greene discussed his Catholic faith, which led him to thinking about his relationship with another famous English Catholic writer, Evelyn Waugh. This led to reprinting some correspondence between him and Waugh and a short exegesis on Waugh’s “The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold”. I had never read this novel. When I got home, I ordered a copy. I read it. I didn’t like it. I adored Waugh and found the novel trapped, thwarted. It was even boring, something I thought Waugh could never be.

This kind of literary stepping stone—Sunday Times with Paddy to Greene to Waugh—was commonplace….

–A website called The Royal UK which describes itself as an independent source for news about the Royal Family has posted a list of Kate Middleton’s favorite reading. A Waugh novel is the only 20th century publication on her list:

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. If nothing else, Evelyn Waugh’s paean to the lost world of the British aristocracy before the Great War will make you feel decidedly better about your own family relationships.

The other selections (total 12) are all 19th C. classic novels plus Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Homer’s  Odyssey.

–In another New Criterion article Stephen Schmalhofer observes that last month marked the 850th anniversary of the murder of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. He reports on his recent visit to the site accompanied by his daughter:

At the site of the martyrdom in the northwest transept of the cathedral is a modern sculpture added in 1986. The four jagged swords resemble iron lightning bolts, suspended in the act of carrying out the foul deed. Becket’s feast follows St. Stephen the Protomartyr and the Massacre of the Holy Innocents. Evelyn Waugh best described this shocking contrast in the Church calendar: “After the holly and sticky sweetmeats, cold steel.”

—The Wall Street Journal has a review of Alexander Larman’s new book The Crown in Crisis. This is by Moira Hodgson who starts with this:

Alexander Larman opens “The Crown in Crisis” with a gleeful quote about the abdication of Edward VIII from Evelyn Waugh’s diary: “There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain.” Even now, over 80 years later, the saga of the king and the much reviled, twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson continues to entertain. The public has never tired of hearing about anything that concerns the British monarchy—but this scandal has proven a particularly enduring hit. In his fresh chronicle of the dramatic events leading up to the abdication, Mr. Larman, a historian and journalist, has unearthed newly released archives, unpublished letters and interviews with people who knew the couple.

 

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Vile Bodies Artifact Posted on Etsy

Posted on January 23, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

A theatre programme from the 1932 London stage production of Vile Bodies was recently posted for sale on etsy.com. Here’s the description:

This is a very rare survivor – and indeed so much so that I am unable to find another copy of this vintage theatre programme. It is for Evelyn Waugh’s famous work: Vile Bodies. It is a theatre programme for the play and the April 1931 [sic] production at the Vaudeville Theatre, London. The programme cost six old pence – which was quite a lot of money back in the 1930s.

The cover has an original printed colour lithograph on the front page- this image also appears on first editions of the book published in the 1930s – and I think that this image was actually designed by Waugh himself. The reverse of the cover image has a printed advert for a Columbia radio-graphaphone. Inside – is also an advert for the book – “Take a copy home with you”. Love the fact that you could also smoke in the theatre!

The production was by Lionel Barton. and adapted by H. Dennis Bradley from Waugh’s novel. All aspects of the performance are fully documented in the programme – as are all seat prices. – afternoon teas and even who ventilated the theatre itself!

Dimensions: 24.5 x 17.5 cm

Total pages: 6 plus the cover.

This is a very rare item and this is reflected in my asking price – the original two block woodcut on the front cover would look fabulous framed with a cream window mount and framed for display. The cover is made of thicker wove paper. It is in pretty good condition for its age – not pristine – but very acceptable. Given many of these must have been thrown away over the last 90 years – this is probably a special document for a Waugh collector or museum.

Unfortunately, the item has already been sold. But if you click on the link below, you can see detailed photos of the cover and some of the contents. These include the offer of copies of the C&H edition of the novel “available from attendants” at 3s/6d. The offer is still posted at this link. There is, alas, apparently no written material included from the hand of Evelyn Waugh in the programme.

The Waugh bibliography (pp. 60-61; 167-68) lists several published items regarding the play, such as reviews and a statement by Waugh regarding censorship of an earlier version privately performed at the Arts Theatre Club in October 1931. Waugh’s statements appeared in the Evening Standard on 17 August 1931 (“Mayfair Play Banned: Censor Objects to Stage Version of ‘Vile Bodies’ a Private Show: Mystery of Who Adapted the Novel”, with a follow up  in the same paper on 25 August 1931. Those “statements” have not been reproduced in the collected journalism, so far as I am aware, although the bibliography includes them under “Primary Material”.

The programme just sold on Etsy.com was for the public performances of the play at the Vaudeville Theatre which ran from 10 April to 11 June 1932, not 1931 as stated in the sale offering. This is explained in Martin Stannard’s CWEW edition of the novel  (Volume 2, p. lxxxix). The CWEW edition also contains several press clippings illustrating scenes from the 1932 production. The typescript text of the play showing revisions is on file at the British Library

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Unloved in LA

Posted on January 20, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

William Cash has written a feature length article in the Catholic Herald that provides some new insights into Evelyn Waugh’s 1947 trip to Hollywood. The trip combined an effort to agree film rights with MGM for Brideshead Revisited as well as for Waugh and his wife to enjoy an escape from austerity England. Although the film project failed, the trip did produce material for Waugh’s 1948 best selling novella about Hollywood The Loved One as well as several journalistic productions that were well above his average achievement in that genre. According to Cash:

Although Waugh biographers Martin Stannard and Selina Hastings have done a rigorous job of excavating the Waugh papers at the University of Texas, the full story as to why the 43-year-old novelist refused to let Louis B Mayer adapt his most popular novel remains in a “Waugh” MGM file that I located – when I worked in LA – in a storage warehouse in East LA.

What follows is quite a good description of Waugh’s Hollywood experiences, in particular the contributions to the story of MGM screenwriter David Winter and writer Ivan Moffat. Winter and Waugh had a history going back to their Oxford days that most other commentators have missed (and about which Winters’ bosses at MGM must have been unaware when assigning him to the project). According to Cash, Waugh had suffered an:

…intolerable experience with Keith Winter, the 41-year-old MGM screenwriter allocated to the project in 1947. Although the studio went to careful lengths to ensure that Waugh was handled only by Oxbridge-educated expat Brits under contract to MGM, their choice of Winter turned out to be deeply unfortunate.

Winter had been at Berkhamstead School with [Graham] Greene – whose father was headmaster – and both went on to Oxford with literary aspirations. Like Waugh, Winter followed Oxford with a stint as a schoolmaster and published a novel. He had also been a successful West End playwright. Although Winter and Waugh drifted in the same literary waters, Waugh viewed him with cool disgust. Writing to a bright young friend in 1931, Waugh said that the one good thing about London is that “one doesn’t see Winter or anyone like that”. A few months later in Villefranche, he wrote to novelist Henry Yorke that his holiday had been ruined by the arrival of an “awful afternoon man called Keith Winter”. He later described him as “Willy Maugham’s catamite”.

Waugh had always been unimpressed by Winter’s homosexual style of dress and once loudly shouted abuse at him for favouring a willowy red shirt with white spots. Enduring him again in LA in 1947 was almost too much. On Waugh’s second day in LA, Winter appeared for a “conference” in what Waugh (his own LA get-up, it should be noted, was pin-striped suit with a tartan waistcoat and watch and chain) distastefully described as “local costume – a kind of loose woollen blazer, matlet’s vest, buckled shoes. He has been in Hollywood for years and sees Brideshead purely as a love story.” A week later Waugh was complaining that “Keith Winter shows great sloth in getting to work. He came to luncheon with us in native costume and was refused admittance to the restaurant until I provided him with a shirt”.

Keith Winter clearly became Waugh’s working model for Dennis Barlow, the young British expat who disgraces the British colony in LA by working in a pet’s mortuary in The Loved One. In the novella, Barlow is a penniless poet who comes out to Hollywood to script a life of Shelley; Winter was an ex-novelist/playwright who had written a movie about the BrontĂ« sisters.

Winter symbolised everything that Waugh – who never worried excessively about the sloth of his aristocratic friends – found most sterile and debased about the expat “artistic colony” in California. As a middleclass, homosexual, trendy screen-hack, Winter held no interest for Waugh either socially or intellectually.

Another source apparently overlooked by previous commentators is Ivan Moffat. His  seems to have been interviewed by Cash rather than discovered in the film studio files:

Ivan Moffat remembers having dinner with Evelyn at a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard called Don the Beachcomber. When one of the owners, of “swarthy” complexion, came up to their table and introduced himself as a “Colonel”, Waugh replied “Colonel? Don’t look much like a colonel to me.” Then Waugh said it was “Lenten” and that he didn’t want too much food. As the portion duly arrived, Waugh took one disapproving look and said: “Even for Lenten that’s not very much.”

“He didn’t try to make himself likeable,” said Moffat. “Americans just didn’t get his drollery, his rather acrid attitude to everything. He spoke in a certain manner. The tone of voice was tongue-in-cheek but you had to know when he was being tongue-in-cheek. He was never self-important or high-horse.”

There is also a more detailed report of Waugh’s visit to Mount St Marys College, then located in suburban Brentwood:

Waugh always felt obliged to accept invitations to speak to Catholic schools. In LA, he was “trapped” by nuns to lunch at Mount St Mary’s College in Brentwood and exposed to a “brains trust” before the school. The student newspaper reported that when asked about his brother Alec’s novels, Waugh said he could say little because he had not read them. Asked to recommend some favourite authors, he listed TS Eliot, Max Beerbohm and Graham Greene. When a girl raised the name of John Masefield, Waugh replied: “A bore”.

That visit may have contributed to the inspiration for Waugh’s more ambitious American adventure in 1948-49 when he traveled over most of the Eastern USA lecturing at Roman Catholic colleges and universities.

Cash offers an excellent discussion of other information gleaned from the studio files and elsewhere about Waugh’s Hollywood visit. Much of this (in particular the information about Waugh’s memo to the studio, the Breen negotiations and the role of Leon Gordon, as well as, to a lesser extent, David Winter) was previously discussed in some detail in Robert Murray Davis’s 1999 book Mischief in the Sun: The Making and Unmaking of The Loved One.  Cash was apparently unaware of this, but his own more abbreviated discussion of the files is equally stimulating.

The article is well written and well researched and highly recommended to our readers. It is available in full at this link.

 

 

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MLK Weekend Roundup

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Tablet has posted an excerpt from Waugh’s novel Helena in recognition of both the Christmas season and the recent publication of that novel as the latest addition (vol. 11) to the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Here’s the introduction and opening of the quoted excerpt:

Helena’s epiphany occurs in the church in Bethlehem, as three bearded monks approach the altar to celebrate Mass, reminding her of the arrival at the stable after much prevarication of three over-dressed and over-educated sages carrying unhelpful gifts. “These are my kind,” she recognised, perhaps speaking for Waugh too – and for us. And the miracle is that they, too, are equally welcome to kneel in the straw beside those who believed without fuss or hesitation. Brendan Walsh

“The low vault was full of lamps and the air close and still. Silver bells announced the coming of the three vested, bearded monks, who like the kings of old now prostrated themselves before the altar. So the long liturgy began.

Helena knew little Greek and her thoughts were not in the words nor anywhere in the immediate scene. She forgot even her quest and was dead to everything except the swaddled child long ago and those three royal sages who had come so far to adore him.”

–The Daily Telegraph has noted the 70th anniversary of George Orwell’s death (21 January) as the day his writings enter the public domain in the UK. Jake Kerridge notes some of the possibilities this opens:

George Orwell died from tuberculosis in January 1950, aged 46. Writers who can combine such originality of thought with such clarity of expression are rare enough that even now it’s difficult not to be grief-struck by his lamentably premature demise.

But taking consolation where we can, we can celebrate the fact that in the month of the anniversary of his death comes the expiry of the copyright on his books – something that won’t happen for decades with the work of such longer-lived contemporaries as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. It is to be hoped that interest in Orwell will receive a boost – and as we live in a world that sometimes seems to be heading increasingly close to the nightmarish vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it couldn’t be timelier.

What difference will it make? Orwell’s executors have not been noticeably strict in comparison with some other literary estates, but there has been the odd kerfuffle. In 2015 the estate asked one company to stop selling beer mugs that bore extensive quotations from Orwell’s works, leading inevitably to accusations of Big Brother-esque censorship. From now on, however, you could market a range of tea towels containing the entire text of Animal Farm and nobody would be able to stop you.

The major consequence, however, is likely to be a rash of Orwellian films, television adaptations and so on, with film-makers now untrammeled by the need to win the estate’s approval – to say nothing of having to pay a copyright fee.

Waugh’s works will not enter the public domain in the UK until April 2037. In an earlier article, the Guardian noted that, under the stricter copyright laws in the USA, Orwell’s works will remain under copyright there until 2030. Not sure how they calculated that or when it will apply to Waugh’s works given that it is complicated by the “Mickey Mouse” extensions enacted in the USA.  But copyright is apparently not dampening plans for yet another adaptation of Brideshead Revisited which the entertainment press has  announced are underway. See previous post.

–The Guardian also included a Waugh character in its recent list of the Top 10 most dislikable characters in fiction. This was compiled by Louise Candish and contained this entry:

5. Lady Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
I still remember the exact moment when reading Waugh’s classic as a teenager that I twigged that the blithe-spirited Lady Brenda was in fact repugnant. On hearing of the death of John, she assumes it is her lover and is distraught, but on clarification that the John in question is in fact her young son, she responds, “Oh, thank God.” Brenda belongs to a particularly dismaying subset of dislikables that also includes The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan: only after you’re charmed into submission by their joie de vivre is the true emptiness of their souls revealed.

Among others on the list were Kenneth Widmerpool from Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time (one of Waugh’s favorite characters from that series) and Uriah Heep from Dickens’ David Copperfield.

–Hugo Vickers in The Oldie has written a 100th Birthday appreciation and personal memoir of Clarissa Churchill, wife of the late Anthony Eden. He describes her as:

… surely the last intimate survivor from the world of Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, Lord Berners, Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, Nicolas Nabokov, Edith Sitwell and Orson Welles. I could list dozens more. When she was young, she had the exceptional advantages of being beautiful, extremely intelligent and well read. Being a Churchill, by name if not by temperament, and niece to Winston, she grew up surrounded by the most interesting men and women of the day. She studied philosophy in Oxford, was tutored by Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer and Lord David Cecil. She worked for Alexander Korda, and George Weidenfeld in the worlds of film and publishing. […]

There is about her a withdrawn aloofness that just misses being haughty and widely misses being absurd. It is an unmodern quality, and I find it arresting 
 she demands, I think, a French background, the pillared elegance of the Second Empire, or the lofty saloons of Versailles to frame her to perfection.’

He doesn’t mention that Waugh rather persecuted her as a Roman Catholic because she married the Protestant divorcee Eden. Randolph Churchill, probably a cousin, came to her defense. E.g., Letters, 378-82.

–A post on the weblog of William Carey University provides “Reasons to Read Evelyn Waugh”. Here is one of several arguments put forward:

Within his works, Waugh was brilliant at illustrating bouts of low behavior but always maintaining a sense of both character building and conversational sparkle. Having a father who worked at the prominent publisher Chapman & Hall at least opened the door for Evelyn’s writing (however, it did not help Waugh that his older brother Alec was also a celebrated author). His satirical early writing (1928’s “Decline and Fall” and 1930’s “Vile Bodies”) set the stage for the consistencies in content that would follow while following in the modernist footsteps of T. S. Eliot. His conversion to Catholicism came with the failure of his first marriage and led to the more serious moral questioning in 1934’s “A Handful of Dust.” However, it was his service in World War II that provided the necessary backdrop to tie all of his storytelling together.

William Carey University is a private liberal arts college affiliated with the Southern Baptist Church and located in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The article is written by Mik Davis who does not provide his affiliation with that institution.

 

 

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Sword of Honour Reviewed in Italy (More)

Posted on January 11, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Luca Fumagalli has completed his review of Sword of Honour with two installments in subsequent postings on Radio Spada.  See previous post for volume 1. The review and summary of second volume Officers and Gentlemen (Ufficiale e Gentiluomini in Italian) begins with Fumagalli’s explanation of Guy Crouchback’s transfer to and training in a Commando unit and then picks up his participation in the Battle of Crete:

..Once again, the protagonist’s dreams of glory are hopelessly frustrated, so much so that in his head the idea begins to form that through the war he will perhaps not learn anything and that when it is over he will simply go back to being the same man as before.

In fact, thanks to an inept officer like “Fido” Hound, the clash in Crete is a sum of inefficiencies, misunderstandings and disregarded orders that culminate in a frightening chaos. The soldiers, without water or food, are in disarray and can do little or nothing against a distant and faceless enemy, whose planes are constantly bombarding their positions. In such a context, there are few who prove to be up to the task; rather, most men just go out of their way to save their own skin, regardless of others. For example, the super dandy Ivor Claire beats a cowardly retreat when things take a turn for the worst, while the corporal Ludovic even kills his own comrades in order to guarantee himself a way out. Guy, on the other hand, manages to escape from the carnage on a makeshift boat and miraculously lands, after a journey of several days, on the North African coast, and is taken to hospital, dying and delusional. The volume ends with his definitive return to his homeland and reassignment to the Halberdiers.

In a degrading war, with no good or bad, a bewildered Guy suddenly discovers that the hated Soviets have now become his allies and that honor no longer has any place; […] even the laboratories of war propaganda, in league with the press, do not have too many scruples in churning out fake heroes for the use and consumption of public opinion. Here it is that Trimmer, an incapable soldier and liar, after a farcical military operation tailor-made for him, is passed off as a new savior of the Empire, proudly exhibited in every corner of England (at his side is Virginia, Guy’s wife, who has meanwhile become his mistress). […]

Julia and Algernon Stitch, on the other hand, are the worthy representatives of a dull upper class that, despite the ongoing conflict, continues to lead an existence in the most restrained luxury, between servants and cocktails, interested in allied victory only to preserve those privileges that, after a long time spent in cotton wool, would be found too hard to give up.

Therefore, there is never an end to the grotesque, and […] it is precisely gentlemen who are the rarest commodity. Among other things, the few specimens that peek through the pages – Mr Crouchback, the Greek general Militiades
 – are all quite old and, coincidentally, belong to another era. Really when Waugh satirizes, as Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote, “he leaves a strong mark”.

The third volume is reviewed in the final installment. This is Unconditional Surrender (Reza Incondizionata in Italian):

Unconditional Surrender, published in 1961, nine years after the first volume of the trilogy and five after the second, is perhaps the best chapter of Sword of Honour. The novel, more personal and biting than the previous ones, brings to completion that slow transition from farcical to dramatic begun in the earlier volumes. In the book, […] the lucid and disenchanted examination of a modernity that has made a clean sweep of every value prevails, where honor no longer exists and everything is decided only on the basis of sinister calculations of self interest. […]

After all, the Guy Crouchback of Unconditional Surrender is a forty-year-old who has now gone through all the degrees of his irresolution and disillusionment. He is not yet completely cured of a certain underlying naivety, but at the same time he appears more mature and confident.

After returning to England in 1941, Guy is forced into an office job for many months, as unsatisfying as it is pointless. Among the colleagues of the various sections, in addition to a group of Marxist pseudo-intellectuals who create models for military operations that will never happen, there is even a shaman charged with hurling curses against Hitler. Guy still dreams of action, yet every time a hitch comes to keep him away from the front.

In the city, he finally finds his wife Virginia, alone, penniless and expecting a son with the disgusting Trimmer (who, to his relief, was sent to America). After the death of his elderly father, the only enlightening and entirely positive figure in the trilogy, Guy decides to take Virginia back with him – even if no one agrees with his choice – so as to give the little one a father. […] Virginia becomes a Catholic and the child, who was born in the summer of 1944, is given the name of his grandfather: Gervase.

Meanwhile Guy is in Croatia with the task of maintaining relations between the allied army and the Tito partisans. The latter, more than the “liberators”, on balance do not appear too dissimilar from the hated Nazis. They are arrogant and authoritarian, and when they try to prove their worth on the battlefield to an American general they look bad. Once again Guy encounters a cynical and merciless pantomime universe in which it is a moment to find himself facing the guns of a firing squad. Here the protagonist runs into a group of Jews, first deported to an Italian concentration camp, then taken prisoner by the Ustashi and finally parked, in very sad conditions, in a small town that is temporarily the capital of the provisional government. Guy, indifferent at first, little by little takes charge of their unhappy fate. He therefore tries to help them in all ways, but his efforts will have such a paradoxical outcome that it will be the Jews who will pay the consequences. […]

Despite the miseries, the moral garbage dump of politics and the intrigues […] that run through the plot, the epilogue of Unconditional Surrender is characterized by hope, to underline how Providence always and in any case offers the possibility of redemption. In fact, back in England, at the end of the conflict Guy takes Gervase with him – destined to be his heir – and returns to live in Broome, the old family home, with a new wife, sweet and capable. Meanwhile Tony, his nephew, has become a monk; Ivor Clare redeemed his lost honor by fighting bravely in Burma; and the slimy Ludovic, even though he has become a successful writer, is devastated in body and mind, morbidly attached to his little dog Fido (renamed in memory of “Fido” Hound, the cowardly officer who Ludovic had killed in Crete to cover up his desertion).

The Spada d’onore trilogy (from which a film was also made in 2001, with a young Daniel Craig in the role of the protagonist) closes on these bittersweet, but ultimately positive notes . Men at Arms , Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender are among the best of Evelyn Waugh’s novels and, in general, of British Catholic literature of the twentieth century. It would therefore be a real shame to let them slip away: the reader will certainly be able to draw great aesthetic and spiritual benefit from them, even while having a few laughs, which is never a bad thing.

The translation of the excerpts is by Google with some edits.

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Another Brideshead Anniversary

Posted on January 2, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Brideshead Revisited in America in book format. A serialized version had been issued in four installments in November 1944-February 1945 in Town & Country magazine published in New York. The novel had first appeared in book format in the UK on 28 May 1945. That edition was jointly published by Chapman & Hall and the Book Society. See previous post.

The US debut also involved a book club edition, and both that and the first trade edition were published in January 1946. The US publisher Little, Brown had planned to issue the book in September. But the Book of the Month Club wanted to make the book one of its monthly selections and decided to offer it to members as its January 1946 choice. Little, Brown was in no position to argue given the leverage of the BOMC.

In an apparent compromise, Little, Brown issued a “limited edition” in September 1945 consistent with its previous publication schedule. On the copyright page, this states that it was “Published September 1945”. Below that, this notice appeared:

This edition limited to 600 copies, of which 450 are for sale and 150 are for presentation, has been printed before the printing of the first American trade edition.

The normal Little, Brown trade edition was rescheduled for January 1946, consistent with the BOMC’s distribution of the book as its choice for that month. One of BOMC’s conditions was that the trade edition not be distributed in advance of its selection month. Most of the book club members would have elected their choice in December 1945 when the BOMC’s monthly News brochure was distributed.

Little, Brown’s copyright page for its trade edition states: “First edition after the printing of a limited edition of 600 copies/ Published January 1946.” Book dealers in the US (as well as this writer) have been confused for years about the release date of the large number of BOMC copies that flooded the market. Unlike Little, Brown, BOMC included no publication date in in its edition, merely the “copyright dates” of 1944 and 1945. The former was presumably necessary because of the magazine serial publication that began in November 1944. Many used booksellers seem to have assumed (as did I) that the BOMC edition preceded Little, Brown’s and was being flogged earlier in 1945. The formal release date of both editions would properly be stated as “January 1946”. Moreover, the texts of the two editions were identical. There is no reason to believe, contrary to the great weight of ill-informed opinion on the internet, that the publication of the BOMC edition “preceded” that of the Little, Brown “First Trade Edition” in any meaningful sense.

NOTE: The foregoing is an abbreviated version of an article that will appear in a future edition of Evelyn Waugh Studies. The delay in EWS publication is due to lack of access to research libraries because of the Coronavirus epidemic.

 

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Sword of Honour Reviewed in Italy

Posted on December 30, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Italian language religious newspaper Radio Spada has started what will apparently be a multi-article review of Waugh’s war trilogy. This is written by Luca Fumagalli who has written previously in Italian on Waugh’s work. See previous posts. An edited and excerpted version of the review entitled “Spada d’onore”: la Fede e la guerra in una trilogia di Evelyn Waugh – volume primo: “Uomini alle armi” is posted below in translation:

Begun, abandoned and finally completed after nearly a decade, the trilogy Sword of Honour (Spada d’onore) is the largest and most ambitious work of Evelyn Waugh, the fruit of artistic maturity, where one can find a happy synthesis all the typical themes of his previous works, from the comic to the dramatic, from the epic to the parodic, from the elegiac to the psychological. Even the classic Wavian themes of decadent modernity and religion are treated with renewed strength and with the awareness of the consummate writer.

The story, long and complex, not without twists, is largely inspired by the experience of Waugh himself during the Second World War, also influenced by works such as The Good Soldier or Parade’s End by Ford Maddox Ford. There are also […] allusions to other great authors of English Catholicism such as, for example, RH Benson, GK Chesterton and Graham Greene.

The protagonist of the story is the thirty-five-year-old Guy Crouchback, the last descendant of one of the oldest and most prestigious families of English Catholicism. […] Guy, self-exiled in Italy after his unsuccessful marriage with Virginia Troy, who in the meantime hasn’t had too many scruples about collecting other husbands and various lovers, is a lost, disillusioned man, barely supported by the Faith. He is an unfinished example, just like that English crusader, Roger of Waybroke, buried in Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, the area where Guy lives, who died there before setting sail for the Holy Land. […]

The first novel of the trilogy, Men at Arms (Uomini alle armi  1952), set between 1939 and 1940, follows the Guy’s long training , characterized among other things by the encounter with Apthorpe, an obsessive and eccentric man, destined for a tragicomic end, which perfectly embodies that sense of farce that hovers around the camp of the Halberdiers, between the mud of the exercises and the tea in the canteen (emblematic, in this regard, a quarrel has arisen around his chemical toilet).

As the months go by, the feeling is that the dramatic, the epic and the extraordinary are always and in any case to be found elsewhere, among the battlefields of the continent, and that Guy is irremediably excluded from all this. Those like him and Apthorpe have to wear the clothes of spectators, nailed to the rear of both battle and existence.

Moreover, even when Guy is finally engaged in a reconnaissance mission on the West African coast – which happens just before the epilogue of the book – the action ends badly, in a matter of minutes, without even having exchanged a few blows with the enemy (hence the ironic title of the volume, which alludes to a clash that, in reality, never happens). […]

The episode, seasoned with a fair dose of splatter , is set in a larger scenario that demonstrates how in modern war there is no more room for either glory or honor. Moreover, the outcome of the conflict does not even seem to depend on the heroism of the individual and his virtues, but rather on factors so unpredictable and crazy that they almost border on the harlequin.

However, we must not make the mistake of considering Men at Arms a mere satire. The lightness of the English writer is only apparent and, as Mario Fortunato notes, “as Guy’s adventures proceed through what has been the most frightening and horrendous conflict in the history of mankind, the parody, the humor, [and] the fun will gradually fade into a pain and a commotion that will gradually reveal the other side of Waugh, that of making us laugh to tears – the latter being at the roots of laughter”.

The translation is by Google with some edits.

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