Waugh’s Travel Writing

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Spring Equinox Roundup

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chagford has all the basics too — great pubs, allotments, a primary school and an impressive collection of local shops, including a greengrocer, a newsagent, a chemist, a superior wine shop, a convenience store and Blacks Delicatessen, whose homemade ready meals (venison and red wine casserole, £6.50) and sweet treats (halva and tahini brownies, £2) have been keeping the town fed during the pandemic…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing this one along.

 

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Interviewed by a Smart-Aleck Baboon

Posted on March 24, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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St Patrick’s Day Roundup

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Brideshead Festival May Not Happen

Posted on March 13, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Waugh and the Cancel Culture

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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VB Theatre Programme On Offer

Posted on March 8, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

 

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Late Winter Roundup

Posted on March 7, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Mail has posted some excerpts from the new and unexpurgated edition of the diaries of Chips Channon. Two of these new entries involve comments of Channon about Evelyn Waugh:

Evelyn Waugh – Sunday, December 16, 1934

Lunch was amusing: Evelyn Waugh said that anyone can write a novel given six lessons, pen, paper and no telephone or wife. Perhaps he is right.

Tuesday, August 6, 1935

Evelyn Waugh has just signed on with the Daily Mail for the duration of hostilities between Italy and Abyssinia, and is leaving for Ethiopia on Saturday. He may, as he says, be away for five years, or five months. He pretends to have insured his testicles for £3,000, as Ethiopians had a way of castrating unwelcome individuals.

Richard Davenport-Hines quotes the latter passage more briefly in his review of the diaries in the TLS. He also provides an interesting comparison of this latest edition, which will stretch to three volumes, with the earlier one-volume edition. Much of the text of that earlier version was eliminated by Channon’s boy-friend and literary executor Peter Coats, not by the named editor Robert Rhodes James, whose primary contribution was a forward and some footnotes.  Publication details are available in an earlier post.

–Waugh biographer and EWS member Duncan McLaren is interviewed on the book website Flashbak.com. Here are some excerpts:

Q: What is special about Waugh to you and in comparison to other writers?

DM: It’s in adolescence that we are most open to new art. We then carry this with us through the years, and the constant engagement with it leaves its creators in an unassailable position among our preferences.

Decades after adolescence I read the books of, say, Julian Barnes, and enjoyed them. But I won’t ever be putting Barnes on a par with Waugh in my personal pantheon, because there has been insufficient time to grow with his books and his understanding of the world. Maybe a better example is Irvine Welsh. I was 36 when Trainspotting came out as a novel. I realised straight away it was brilliant, on a different level (of originality, of energy, of ambition) to anything else written in the 20th-Century by a Scot. And I could relate to it in some ways, but not in others. So I never quite committed to it, and though I’ve read other books of his, and been impressed by astonishing qualities, I’ve not read them all, and I’ve not even considered researching his life. It’s like appreciating what my brother got me to listen to of the Smiths. I loved Morrissey’s music, his vibe, but I was from Bowie’s generation, had all the albums and had listened to them hundreds of times. Bowie was embedded in my being. The first cut is the deepest.

Q: When did you decide to write a biography on Waugh? Why did you decide to write it in such a brilliant and original way?

DM: I decided to write about Evelyn Waugh in the way I did because I’d just had great fun, and some success, taking a similar approach to the life of Enid Blyton.

But you say ‘brilliant’, about my writing about Waugh, which is very nice of you, so I’ll address that. It starts with a rigorous chronology and geography (that again, so maybe I didn’t waste the government’s money). Things happen to Evelyn Waugh in a particular place at a particular time. So that has to be pieced together, and in so doing you realise who else was there. The picture builds up, and as you’re making it more three-dimensional, Evelyn and his mates start talking and doing stuff. You hold on for grim life to the authenticity of the scene, never forgetting your sense of humour and your moral compass. Then out pours the original insight. Sometimes I struggle to contain it all in suitable vessels. […]

Q: What can we learn from reading Evelyn Waugh? What life lessons?

DM: The qualities inherent in Waugh that I used to bolster myself with when young (irony, humour, the primacy of art), I’ve tried to distance myself from later in life. Sometimes the best way forward is to live a healthy, well-balanced, straightforward life amongst other people. Waugh was not good at this. He drank too much, always. He became inflexible in his opinions as he got older. His right-wing views, largely ironic when he was younger, solidified and became horribly serious. He professed to believe in God in a way that seems un-nourishing. He began to lose the few friends he had, he was so rude to everyone. He died at the age of 62, having become bored with life and longing for death.

At 63-year-old, I’m having to tend poor Evelyn’s grave, diverting readers’ attention to his earlier years and books, when he was funny, sweet and full of joie de vivre. […]

–Another interview, this one focused on Brideshead Revisited, has been posted on YouTube. This appears in a series called Plotlines.  The interview is conducted by a college student named Connor  who is otherwise unidentified. The interviewee is Joseph Pearce, who frequently writes on Waugh’s religion. If the first 10 minutes is any guide, that will also make up most of what will be discussed in this 45-minute session.

–The Guardian has announced the death of the actress Nicola Pagett at the age of 75. She first made her name in TV serials such as Upstairs Downstairs but went on to stage and film appearances. Her career was interrupted by bouts of mental illness but she resumed acting after her recovery. The Guardian mentions one role she played that I had forgotten:

In Scoop (1987), a two-hour film scripted by William Boyd, based on Evelyn Waugh’s great 1938 novel, she was Julia Stitch alongside Michael Maloney as the hapless war reporter William Boot and Denholm Elliott as the chaotic newspaper editor.

–American literary critic Terry Teachout reviews the new biography of Graham Greene in the National Review. Details of the book may be seen in an earlier post. Teachout begins his review with this:

Sixty years ago, Graham Greene was widely regarded as an important novelist, perhaps even a great one, both in England and in America. His critical admirers included V. S. Pritchett, John Updike, and his close friend Evelyn Waugh, who called him a writer of “the highest imaginative power.” He was also very popular, in part because several of his books, most notably Brighton Rock (1938), The Third Man (1949), and Our Man in Havana (1958), were turned into successful films, often with his direct involvement (he was one of the first writers of stature to take a close interest in the screen). […]

But Greene, who died in 1991, is no longer as popular or admired in this country as he used to be, and if I had to guess, I’d say the reason is that his major novels are permeated with more or less explicitly Catholic themes and symbolism. Time was when Catholic novelists such as Greene and Waugh were well regarded, even fashionable, but religious faith has long since been shunted into a cultural siding, and today’s Catholic artists are treated contemptuously by most modern-day tastemakers. Even the radically idiosyncratic version of Catholicism espoused by Greene, who called himself a “Catholic-agnostic” and made a priest in Brighton Rock speak of “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,” is too often greeted nowadays with not-our-kind-dearie sniffishness…

He doesn’t mention why Waugh’s reputation has not been subject to these problems, or at least has been less affected by them than has Greene’s.

–John Self writing in The Critic magazine addresses the importance of money to a professional writer’s career. He compares Evelyn Waugh to another writer of their generation:

Evelyn Waugh never stopped wanting a richer start in life, and as a child would walk far enough from Golders Green to ensure that his letters were postmarked Hampstead. In 1928 he asked his agent A. D. Peters to “please fix up anything that will earn me anything, even cricket criticism or mothers’ welfare notes”. By the early 1930s he was earning around £2,000 a year, a third of which was from journalism; this was around the time that “five hundred a year” was declared to be the income required to distance a writer from money worries (by Virginia Woolf, who had none), though Waugh still felt himself to be permanently “starving” until the success of Brideshead Revisited in 1945.

But no writer of that era was quite so desperate as the gilded father of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like Waugh, he resented not being higher-born, “distrusting the rich, yet working for money with which to share their mobility and the grace that some of them brought into their lives”. Like Jay Gatsby, for a time he spent his way into this lifestyle. But by the 1930s, his literary stock was low and he was writing to fund what Arnold Gingrich, his editor at Esquire, called “the fantastically expensive treatments for mental illness” undergone by his wife Zelda…

–Finally, the online magazine FarOut has reprinted the late Tom Wolfe’s 2007 list of his 10 favorite novels. One of these was by Evelyn Waugh:

10. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (1930). This careening novel follows a group of shallow, well-off Brits to motor races and antic parties. Joining in on the Bright Young Things’ mad doings are a writer named Adam Fenwick-Symes and his on-again, off-again fiancée. War looms, but Waugh’s style —dry and bubbly as the novel’s flowing champagne —keeps us laughing, even as characters descend into madness or head for the battlefield.

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Travel Book Launch

Posted on March 2, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project last week conducted a virtual book launch for the next two books to be published in the series: Ninety-Two Days and A Tourist in Africa. The meeting was conducted by Barbara Cooke, a CWEW Executive Editor, and the presenters were Douglas Patey and Patrick Query who edited these two volumes.

Patrick Query, who teaches at West Point and is the former secretary of the Evelyn Waugh Society and past Co-editor of its journal Evelyn Waugh Studies, opened with a discussion of A Tourist in Africa (1960). He first explained how Waugh came to write this book, the last of his six travel books. He needed a trip to break away from the strain and tedium of his family duties, the Christmas Holidays and the British winter. As it turned out, his agent had already learned somehow that the Union Castle steamship line were looking for some one to write a book that would promote their services to Africa. This was an ideal destination for Waugh who was quite familiar with the territory. His agent noted that the project had been turned by Laurens van der Post, a well-known and popular writer at the time. Waugh agreed to the project so long as he was free to write and have it published as he wished, subject to the understanding that he it would be intended to promote the services of Union Castle.  Patrick made the observation that, unknown to most readers, van der Post was rather a nasty piece of work on several levels, leading Patrick to wonder what the book might have looked like if van der Post had agreed to write it.

Patrick noted that the two outstanding passages of the book in which Waugh was fully engaged with the subject were at the beginning where he visited the Campo Santo cemetery in Genoa with Diana Cooper and toward the end when he visited the Serima Mission in Zimbabwe. These were new experiences, whereas many of the other points he visited were places he had stopped on his earlier travels. Patrick went on to explain that the manuscript development was not as challenging as for other books except in the later passages where wholesale textual rearrangements in the published book were difficult to track from the available manuscripts because no typescripts were available. Waugh, as usual, avoided political comment, and Patrick made the interesting point that, in view of the turbulent political situation in Africa at the time, the book might have been better for it if Waugh had departed from his usual practice and injected his political opinions. But even as it is, the book represents a useful view of Africa in the period just before everything changed.

Douglas Patey, who teaches at Smith College, has written a biography of Waugh, and is a long-standing member of the EWS, presented his edition of Ninety-Two Days (1934). He began by contrasting the genuine danger and adventure involved in a trip to British Guiana and Northern Brazil as compared to Waugh’s other travel destinations. He also discussed why Waugh may have chosen that area for his trip as opposed to less adventurous zones. He then noted what he thought would be the difficulty faced in researching the textual development of a book for which there were no manuscripts, typescripts or corrected proofs available. Waugh had given the manuscript to Diana Cooper in thanks for the use of her cottage on the South Coast to write the book, but it appeared to have gone missing.  As it turned out, however, Jeffrey Heath possessed a photo copy Diana had allowed him to make when he wrote his book about Waugh, and a copy of the original later surfaced at the Huntington Library. Loren Rothschild had donated it after he acquired it through dealers to whom Diana’s descendants had passed it on.

Doug then continued his presentation with a comparison of several passages describing scenes that appeared in various newspaper and magazine articles that preceded book publication. Copies of these had been distributed to attendees before the conference to facilitate discussion. This was probably the most interesting part of his presentation because you could see and hear from Doug’s reading just how Waugh had improved both the vocabulary and grammar as well  modulating and polishing the subject matter as he moved from journalism to literature. He closed by mentioning something I had never realized. Long after Ninety-Two Days was published, the writer Pauline Melville wrote a novelized version of the story based on the visit of a British academic to Guyana researching the details of Waugh’s trip. This is entitled The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) and contains not only places and events that made up Ninety-Two Days but characters as well, including one based on Waugh himself.

There followed a Q&A session, addressing subjects such as the changing descriptions of racialism and the British Empire in literature, the difference between Waugh’s writing as reflected in travel books and fiction, and the photographs he took for Ninety-Two Days. The books will be published in the UK the last week of March and in the USA the last week of April. They may currently be ordered from either OUP or Amazon.

 

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Brideshead 2008 Film Adaptation on BBC2

Posted on February 27, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times has posted in its TV listings the following notice about the broadcast of the 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. This will take place today (Sa 27 Feb 2021) at 225 GMT:

BBC2, 2.25pm
The reaction to Julian Jarrold’s elegant, restrained adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel was rather muted at the time of its release. Certainly it’s long and rather ponderously paced. But this tale of the unstable love triangle between middle-class Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), gorgeous heiress Julia Flyte (Hayley Atwell) and her erratic brother Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) is lovely to look at and gently absorbing. The high point is any scene that features Emma Thompson, suitably frosty and patrician as Sebastian and Julia’s mother, Lady Marchmain. Abandoned by her husband (Michael Gambon), who has left her for another woman, Lady Marchmain is as brittle as a dagger made of ice. At her insistence, Charles accompanies her children to Venice to visit their father and his mistress. (133min) Wendy Ide

The BBC co-produced the film with Ecosse Films and Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. The film will be available on BBC iPlayer to stream on the internet after its transmission.

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