Year’s End Roundup

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in The Critic, Clive Aslet discusses the decision of the Tate Gallery to close its restaurant in response to its designation as “racist” conferred on the mural of Rex Whistler, which decorates its restaurant. See earlier post. Aslet puts Whistler’s early mural into the broader context of his work as an example of “rococo irony” rather than racism. Aslet thinks the Tate’s response to close the restaurant is an over-reaction to the extreme “Wokery” of the critics and that it may well awaken a counter-response from the Conservative government. In the course of his essay, Aslet also compares Whistler’s artistic attitudes to those of his contemporary Evelyn Waugh:

Whistler was an ironist, whose imagery should no more be taken at face value than that of Grayson Perry. There’s a hint of the black humour of Evelyn Waugh – except that whereas Waugh was rude and snobbish, Whistler was adored for his warmth, wit and kindness to children, whom he would entertain with his sketches, being, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “one of the most sensitively cultured and intelligent of men”.

—-In his annual diary appearing in the London Review of Books, Alan Bennett remembers Waugh’s Oxford friend Richard Pares from Bennett’s own Oxford days in the 1950s:

3 October. Reading a piece on universities in the TLS brings back Richard Pares, whose last course of lectures I went to at Oxford in 1957. He was plainly dying, lecturing from a wheelchair and barely audible, with another don turning over the pages of his text. The subject would have been topical today, the influence of the sugar interest on English politics, not recounted then as it would be now in a humanitarian anti-slavery tone, but purely factually and without reproof. I did not know this at the time, but Pares had had something of a Damascene conversion, having been as an undergraduate one of the circle around Evelyn Waugh, before turning his back on frivolity for academic life. But the spectacle – and it was a spectacle – of someone giving his last breath to the study of history taught me more than any of the tutorials and lectures that I had had at Oxford, and which in the last term before Schools were about to come to an end.

–Alexander Larman writing in The Critic’s “Artillery Row” column addresses the problems facing a book editor choosing which of an author’s books to deemed classics. He considers the Penguin Classics series as a case study and opens by musing over which of Len Deighton’s books should survive as classics and which allowed to go quietly out of print:

It is the ultimate necessity of turning an author’s entire bibliography into Modern Classics that makes an editor’s job both simple and difficult. Few would argue that Evelyn Waugh’s novels Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust would merit inclusion in such a series, but does his rather unsuccessful historical novel Helena, about the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, really deserve to be described as a modern classic? And do interesting but flawed books by George Orwell such as Burmese Days and A Clergyman’s Daughter honestly merit such a selection? The concern is that the once-hallowed designation of a Penguin Classic, modern or otherwise, is being bandied around too freely and without the discrimination that it needs. But who is in charge of such selection?

Such decisions ultimately lie with Henry Eliot, the Creative Editor of Penguin Classics since 2016. He was brought in, in his words, “to be a fresh pair of eyes”, and has tried to revitalise the format. He has quite literally written the book on the series, 2018’s The Penguin Classics Book, in which he offers incisive and enjoyable commentary on 500 authors and over a thousand books in the series, including anything from Greek tragedy to the First World War poets. He will be following it up in autumn 2021 with The Penguin Modern Classics Book, its companion volume, which will cover every title that has even been a Penguin Modern Classic: a daunting task.

As one who enjoyed Eliot’s 2018 book, I eagerly await its successor and hope it appears early enough to put it on my Christmas list next year.

–In a website called Keghart.org, devoted to Armenian topics, blogger Art Stepanian posts extracts from two of Waugh’s travel books: Remote People and Labels.  Here’s his explanation for his choices:

In Ethiopia Waugh met two Armenians. A hard-to-please man with a sharp tongue, Waugh was impressed by the two men (his driver and a small hotel owner). His take of the two Armenians (the driver is not identified but the hotel owner’s name was “Bergebedigian”] was remarkably complimentary. During his Mediterranean cruise in 1929, Waugh spent several days in Istanbul. The city didn’t impress him. Below are extracts from his report on Istanbul and his memories of the two Armenians in Ethiopia…

Inclusion of the extract from Labels was based not on Waugh’s attitudes toward Armenians but rather on his negative assessment of Turkish culture. This is apparent from his final excerpt from Remote People:

[Sailing home, Waugh met a Turk on the ship.] The warmth of my admiration for Armenians clearly shocks him, but he is too polite to say so. Instead, he tells me of splendid tortures inflicted on them by his relations.

There are also Armenians in Waugh’s novel Black Mischief, most notably Krikor Youkoumian, who also makes an appearance in the 1932 short story “Incident in Azania.”

–In a recent issue of Catholic World Report, there is an interview of writer Joseph Pearce in which Maurice Baring’s career is discussed.  Here’s an excerpt where Baring’s influence on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is discussed:

Franczak: Reading Tinker’s Leave, which was my first book by Baring, I kept wondering where the author was leading me. By the end I understood that the journey taken by young Miles Consterdine was to show “the operation of grace”, the theme which is well-known to all the readers of the famous Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The same is in C. You mentioned that Cat’s Cradle “shows the mystical presence of providence in the life of the heroine”. You also said that Mauriac noticed this theme, too. Was it Baring’s main motif? And what is the difference between his way of presenting “the operation of grace” and Evelyn Waugh’s? Was there any interinfluence between the two writers? I think that to a certain extent the end of Brideshead Revisited (1945) resembles the end of Tinker’s Leave (1927).

Pearce: The comparison with the work of Waugh, especially with respect to Brideshead Revisited, is both apposite and perceptive. I make the same connection between Baring’s novels and Brideshead in my book, Literary Converts. There is no doubt that Baring’s novels exerted considerable formative influence on Waugh throughout his life. As early as 1928, shortly after Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall was published, Waugh described Baring as “an idol of mine”. Thirty-five years later, in November 1963, Waugh remarked to Sir Maurice Bowra how much he “loved Maurice Baring”. Since Waugh is arguably the greatest twentieth century English novelist, it says much for the quality of Baring’s own writing that his novels should have had such an enduring influence on Waugh. This, combined with Mauriac’s praise, should induce all lovers of literature to check out Baring’s work. It is difficult to weave the hidden hand of Providence into a fictional narrative, making God the invisible protagonist, without stooping to the level of didacticism or preachiness. Only the finest novelists can do so convincingly. Baring is indubitably, along with Waugh, a true master of this all too rare art.

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending this link.

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Britain’s Favorite Novel on C5

Posted on December 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The UK’s Channel 5 yesterday broadcast a program called Britain’s Favorite Novel.  Only novels by British writers were considered. The selection was based on what they described as a poll of C5’s viewers. Since I would not be included in a category answering to that description (nor would most of our readers) I cannot offer any further explanation of the poll.  The result was as might be expected.

There were 30 novels on the short list. These were described in a countdown format, with most novels being given a brief description by a group of commenters that was about half novelists and half TV presenters and performers.  There were 8 novels which received no comments but were simply identified and briefly described by the narrator. This was probably due to time constraints. About half the listed novels were post-1950, nine were 19th century classics and the remaining 4 or 5 from the first half of 20th century. Except for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, there were none by Evelyn Waugh or writers associated with him such as Graham Greene, Nancy Mitford, Anthony Powell, etc. Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale was also on the list at #28.  [Spoiler alert.] The top five selections were: 1. Pride and Prejudice; 2. The Lord of the Rings; 3. Jane Eyre; 4. Nineteen Eighty Four and 5. Wuthering Heights.  Some of the commentators were authors of books on the list.  These included Ian McEwen, Sebastian Faulks, Helen Fielding and Louis de Bernieres.  I suppose it should come as no surprise that their comments, both on their own books and those of others, were the most incisive.

As these things go, this was an entertaining program.  Channel 5 is making an effort to improve its documentary content and in this case they have succeeded. It was quite well edited and never dragged.  More explanation of the selection criteria might have been useful and could explain the high percentage of recent best-sellers on the list. The program can be viewed on My5, Channel 5’s streaming service. Here’s the link.  A UK internet connection is required.

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Waugh’s Christmas 1945

Posted on December 25, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Here is Waugh’s diary entry for his Christmas 75 years ago–Wednesday 26 December 1945:

Maria Teresa and Bron have arrived, he ingratiating, she covered with little meddals and badges, neurotically voluble with the vocabulary of the lower-middle class–‘serviette’, ‘spare room’.  Only on points of theology does she become rational. On Christmas Eve we went to midnight Mass at Nympsfield. I was moved to remit the sums owing by the nuns for the losses and breakage for their six years’ tenancy of the house. We managed to collect a number of trashy and costly toys for the stockings. We had a goose for luncheon and a tasteless plum pudding made for us by Mrs Harper, a bottle of champagne. By keeping the children in bed for long periods we managed to have a tolerable day. My only present, a very welcome one, a box of cigars from Auberon. I have seats for both Bath and Bristol pantomimes. The children leave for Pixton on the 10th. Meanwhile I have my meals in the library.

Though I make believe to be detached from the world I find a day without post or newspapers strangely flat, and look forward to tomorrow’s awakening with Ellwood laying the papers by my pillow.

A Happy Christmas to our readers from the Evelyn Waugh Society.

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Profile in Hatred: Evelyn Waugh and Robert Byron

Posted on December 21, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Biographer and literary critic Jeffrey Meyers has written a biographical profile of travel writer Robert Byron, with particular reference to the mutual hate – love – hate relationship between Byron and Evelyn Waugh. This appears in the online journal The Article and is entitled “Fierce Friends and Bitter Enemies”.

Meyers mines Waugh’s letters and diary as well as his journalism for expressions of his feelings for Byron. There was jealousy and adversity at Oxford followed by friendship in the late 1920s. Indeed, Meyers goes into some detail to explore how the two were on friendly terms at the time of Waugh’s 1928 marriage to Evelyn Gardner. Byron was one of the few who was invited to the wedding and the couple were actually in temporary accommodations across from Byron’s house where they spent most of their time prior to the wedding due to the “disgusting” nature of Waugh’s lodgings. Byron described his role in the wedding service: “to fetch Evelyn Gardner to the church and I know she won’t come.” After the wedding, the two writers fell out again and remained at odds until Byron’s death in WWII. Meyers offers this explanation for their post-marital renewal of ill-will:

The most obvious reason for the rupture of Waugh’s friendship was Byron’s virulent anti-Catholic attacks, which shook the precarious foundation of Waugh’s newly acquired faith. Byron’s hostility, favouring Byzantine over Catholic art and architecture, was aesthetic as well as spiritual. Douglas Patey pointed out that “all Byron’s books of the twenties pause to attack Rome, the papacy and Catholic art, favouring instead Byzantine and Islamic styles. Waugh also meant to irritate Byron by consistently mocking ‘the glamour of the East,’ by running down the Orthodox churches he visited (always unfavourably compared to Catholic), and by his wholesale, deliberately Blimpish condemnation of Islamic art and culture.”

Byron’s role in the wedding was a topic considered at some length in an article in EWS 41.2 by John Howard Wilson, “A Neglected Address: 25 Adam Street.”

In addition to citing and analyzing Waugh’s vituperative feelings toward Byron at some length, Meyers offers descriptions of Byron by Anthony Powell, Christopher Sykes, Harold Acton as well as others, and sometimes comments on what may have motivated their attitudes toward him. Some are familiar, others less so. He also offers an explanation of the detailed circumstances of Byron’s death during WWII, something previous biographers have overlooked. One almost gets the suspicion that Meyers is (or was) writing or considering a book length biography of Byron (or Waugh) and selected some of the more entertaining bits for this article.

Meyers concludes his article as to Waugh’s side of the relationship with this:

Waugh’s self-loathing and competitive spirit combined with Byron’s tirades against Catholicism and vehement political views were the most obvious causes of Waugh’s violent hatred. But there were also more subtle reasons. Byron had been an eyewitness and painful reminder of the two most discreditable and humiliating episodes in Waugh’s life: his Oxford homosexuality and disastrous first marriage. The cuckolded Waugh wanted to suppress and forget them, while the antagonistic Byron always remembered and ridiculed them.[…] Finally, Waugh felt guilty about the effect of the war on their lives and reputations. He had secured an army commission, had an undistinguished record during the British retreat from Crete and his military liaison with Tito in Yugoslavia. He survived the war and died straining himself on the lavatory. Byron, whose violent temper prevented him from getting a commission, was Waugh’s only close Oxford friend who died through enemy action. The dead Byron seemed to emerge from the war with more glory than the living Waugh. In venting his hatred, despite the great achievement of his novels, Waugh must have felt, as Gore Vidal sharply observed, “it was not enough to succeed, others [like Byron] must fail.”

Meyers’ article is well written (if a trifle repetitive) and amusing throughout. Even the repetitive sections bear repeating since they offer a different perspective on a matter mentioned previously. One can only hope that it may be the harbinger of a longer work. It should be recalled that Meyers previously published an article on Waugh’s war service in Yugoslavia; this appeared in EWS 50.2. Perhaps these are parts of an extended narrative or  collection.

 

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The Waugh Before Christmas

Posted on December 19, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Several publication and broadcast media have featured Waugh’s works in their holiday season offerings:

–The BBC is going to rebroadcast a 2016 radio program that includes readings from Philip Eade’s biography: Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited. This will be transmitted tomorrow (20 December 2020) at 14:20 on BBC Radio 4 Extra and will be posted afterwards on the internet via BBC iPlayer. Here’s a link.  It will consist of a 1 hr. 10 min. reading by Nicholas Grace who retired the jersey for portrayal of Anthony Blanche in the 1981 Granada TV series.

–The Grace/Blanche connection is also noted in this article about the liqueur Chartreuse appearing in the New York Times:

The Carthusian [monks] sustain this isolated lifestyle largely through the production and sale of Chartreuse, a liqueur the monks developed centuries ago. Like its mountainous namesake and the hue named after it, Chartreuse is sharp, bright, profoundly herbal. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Brideshead Revisited,” Anthony Blanche compares it to ingesting the rainbow: “It’s like swallowing a sp-spectrum.” A Baltimore bartender and Chartreuse superfan, Brendan Finnerty, says it tastes “like Christmas in a glass,” or “grassy Jägermeister.” To me, it has the color and flavor of summer sunlight striking a canopy of leaves — impossibly vibrant, sparkling with life, green beyond belief.

–Another publication also makes a point of the reference to wine expertise in that same novel. This appears in the Telegraph India:

… few writers in the last half-century have written about wine with the passion of Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited: when an older Burgundy is brought out, Charles Ryder says, “[the Burgundy] seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place…”  Indeed, the exchange between him and Sebastian Flyte (“Ought we to be drunk every night… Yes, I think so.” “I think so too.”) seemed to mirror Charles Baudelaire in the 19th century when he said, in “L’Âme du vin (The Soul of Wine)”, that “one should always be drunk”, be it on wine or poetry.

–Finally, the Times Literary Supplement has prominently included Waugh quotes in its Christmas Quiz set by Tony Lurcock. Our reader Dave Lull has kindly sent alongs these excerpts each of which includes a Waugh quotation:

8. WICKET-KEEPERS
a. ‘“I used to keep wicket for my college, you know, but I was too short-sighted to be much good. Still, I am entitled to the blazer,” he said with a note of defiance in his voice, “and it is more appropriate to a sporting occasion than a stiff collar.”’
b. ‘… his attention being providentially attracted by his hat, which was toppling. Indeed, it demanded from him a constant attention, and a quickness of eye and hand, very like that exacted by wicket-keeping.’
c. ‘“And there’s Ned Noakes, the whiskered and one-eyed wicketkeeper, alert and active, though he’s forty-five if he’s a day. With his one eye (and a glass one) he sees more than most of us do.”’
d. ‘And here came slowly out, to keep wicket at the age of 70, John Farringdon, a member of the M.C.C. Committee, who had captained an English team to the West Indies, who had made fifty runs with a broken thumb, whose presence on any cricket field conferred an honour.’
e. ‘“Written your essay? Good. Then we won’t read it.
Late yesterday I saw you playing cricket.
Now let’s suppose these volumes are a wicket.
Just watch. Here’s some advice. I’m sure you’ll need it.”
He piled up books and crouched behind, pretending,
A wicket-keeper, waiting for the ball’.
11. ‘A PREFERENCE FOR WATER’
a. ‘Previous governesses had limited their conversation on the wine topic to a respectful and doubtless sincere expression of a preference for water.’
b ‘If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.’
c. ‘“The water,” I said in a low voice. “The glass of water is very moving to me.” I looked up and saw the surprised faces of my students. “The water is a sign of …” I paused. “The water seems to be a sign of absence.”’
d. “Water? Water! Oh yes – water – water – very good – water – good – good.”
e. ‘“Water, sir?” said a voice in Mr Salter’s ear.
“Well, I think perhaps I would sooner …” A clear and chilling cascade fell into his tumbler and James returned to the sideboard.’
17. BRAZIL
a.‘ “I’ve decided to go to Brazil.”
“Brazil! Why, they are all Roman Catholics there, surely!”
“Are they? I hadn’t thought of that.”’
b. ‘The mighty merchant smiled.
Brazil? He twirled a button,
Without a glance my way:
“But, madam, is there nothing else
That we can show to-day?”’
c. ‘“No bathing in Brazil. No bathing in Brazil.” The meeting took up the cry. “No bathing in Brazil.”’
d. ‘“…that rascal of a boy of mine made some sort of a stupid suggestion that I should –”’
‘“ – That you should offer your hand and heart to Donna Lucia d’Alvadorez – from Brazil, where the nuts come from.”’
e. ‘On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country.’
The Waugh answers are 8.a: Decline and Fall; 11.e: Scoop; and 17.c: A Handful of Dust.  The only one I got right was 11.c because of the Salter reference. I expected a Waugh quote in #17. Brazil but guessed wrongly with the choice of 17.a as a quote from Ninety-Two Days.  Thanks to Dave for sending this along.

 

Comment:  The Waugh answers are 8.a: Decline and Fall; 11.e: Scoop; and 17.c: A Handful of Dust.  The only one I got right was 11.c because of the Salter reference. I expected a Waugh quote in #17. Brazil but guessed wrongly with the choice of 17.a as a quote from Ninety-Two Days.  Thanks to Dave for sending this along.

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Mid-December Roundup

Posted on December 16, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Posted on the website of the Australian literary journal Quadrant, an article by Mark McGinness marks the 75th anniversary of Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love. This was published on 10 December 1945 about 6 months after Brideshead Revisited had appeared. McGinness comments on how Waugh influenced the book (or at least tried to):

…As Diana [Mitford] saw it, “in its way just about perfect. I can’t find a criticism. Evelyn couldn’t have done it.” Interestingly, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy’s great friend and correspondent, was a valued mentor and played a key part in Pursuit. Nancy had favoured the title My Cousin Linda and it was Waugh who suggested The Pursuit of Love. He had sent her an early copy of his masterpiece Brideshead Revisited, published in May 1945, and as she relayed their worldly friends’ views on the classic (she was well-informed, having created a salon at Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Mayfair), she confessed,

“I am writing a book, also in the 1st person. (Only now has it occurred to me everybody will say what a copycat – never mind that won’t hurt you only me) It’s about my family, a very different cup of tea, not grand and far madder. Did I begin it before reading B.head or after I can’t remember….I’m awfully excited my fingers begin to itch.”

After a description of Nancy’s career following the success of Pursuit,  McGinness also summons Waugh:

… Again Waugh advised her on finding her voice and a readership when she turned to history — in this case Madame de Pompadour; “Write for the sort of reader who knows Louis XV furniture when she sees it but thinks Louis XV was the son of Louis XIV and had his head cut off.”

–In his recent diary column for The Times, Patrick Kidd included this recollection by Antonia Fraser of her first encounter with Evelyn Waugh:

KEEPING UP WITH WAUGH
Evelyn Waugh had high expectations of infants. Speaking at an event for the charity Give a Book, Lady Antonia Fraser said she met the novelist when she was a few weeks old. “Saw F Pakenham’s baby and gave it a book but it can’t read yet,” Waugh wrote in his diary, which made her feel indignant when this was later drawn to her attention. “I learnt to read jolly soon after that,” she insists. As a teenager she found Brideshead Revisited on what her mother called her “banned shelf” and naturally read it but did not see what was so naughty. “Was it the adultery or the alcoholism?” she asked and ma replied: “I thought it might put you off Catholicism.”

Fraser’s mother was Waugh’s friend, writer Elizabeth Harman, who married another friend Frank Pakenham. They later acquired the name of Longford when Frank inherited the family title and estate from his brother Edward.

–Novelist William Boyd has reviewed the recent biography of Graham Greene in the New Statesman. As mentioned in previous posts, this is by Richard Greene and is entitled Russian Roulette. In his discussion of Greene’s religious beliefs, Boyd includes this:

…It’s a matter of some note that three of our greatest 20th century novelists – Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark – all converted to Catholicism. Waugh was genuinely devout – his faith was his safety net, his life-raft. But I’ve long struggled with Greene and Spark’s declared belief in a supernatural being. It has always struck me as both conveniently useful to them as writers and fundamentally bogus. However, the other revelation of Richard Greene’s biography is that, having converted to Catholicism in order to marry his wife, Vivien, Greene’s faith, while it wavered from time to time – he made a nice distinction between “faith” and “belief” – was a remarkable constant in the ups and downs of his life. He went to mass, he received the sacrament, Roman Catholic priests were close friends. On his deathbed he had a Catholic priest read him the last rites.

Anton Chekhov once declared that he could never understand how an intelligent person could believe in a god – an opinion I share. Greene’s agonised personal life, however, was not noticeably inhibited by the injunctions of his faith. Richard Greene recounts one particularly complicated situation in 1952. Greene’s relationship with the wealthy American beauty Catherine Walston – the second longest love affair of his life – was going through one of its regular rough patches…

–Boyd, writing in the Guardian, also reviews a recent collection of letters, entitled Love in the Blitz and written during WWII by Eileen Alexander , a young Jewish woman who lived through the war in London. As described by Boyd:

Love in the Blitz covers the passage of time from the summer of 1939 to 1946 in the form of a series of love letters written by a young woman, Eileen Alexander, to her lover, Gershon Ellenbogen. It makes for a fascinating subjective account of an individual life over these years, unfiltered by any ambitions of literary posterity or knowingness. The frankness and guilelessness of these letters grant them an astonishing authenticity.

Waugh’s own wartime correspondence is also cited and contrasted:

Evelyn Waugh once scolded his wife, Laura, for her uninspired wartime letters to him, odiously reminding her: “A letter need not be a bald chronicle of events … I simply am not interested in Bridget’s children. Do grasp that. A letter should be a form of conversation; write as though you were talking to me.” [Her lover and correspondent] Ellenbogen would have no need to rebuke Alexander for any similar failing. Her voice is absolutely, beguilingly conversational – and she was reputedly a great conversationalist in life. The letters are witty, clever, subversive, candid…

–Also in the Guardian, a new entry in its Top 10s books compilations deals with “House Parties in fiction”.  Among the selections is this one by Waugh:

3. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (1928)
I can’t think of a funnier house party than the one that Margot Beste-Chetwynde throws at her scarily modernist country house, King’s Thursday, and then decides not to attend. My favourite line concerns Margot’s teenage son, Peter, who serves the cocktails: “Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book.”

The list was compiled by David Leavitt who also included Henry Green’s Party Going and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

 

 

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John le CarrĂŠ (David Cornwell): 1931-2020 R.I.P.

Posted on December 15, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist John le CarrĂŠ died last week at the age of 89. Best known for his novels about spies, espionage and governmental bureaucratic intrigue, le Carre’s work would seem to have little in common with that of Evelyn Waugh. Spies do appear from time to time in Waugh’s novels–one thinks of Scoop and Sword of Honour–but they are never the main event.  Waugh’s career overlapped with the early years of le Carre’s work (including publication in 1963 of one of his best novels, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and in 1965, A Looking Glass War) but there are no reviews of le Carre’s books by Waugh mentioned in Waugh’s bibliography.

Two of the notices published on the occasion of le Carre’s death do, however, mention Waugh. In the Daily Telegraph, the obituary by Jake Kerridge opens with this: “An absent mother and an abusive father in the pocket of the Krays: le Carre’s early years unfolded like chapters of an Evelyn Waugh novel.”   Unfortunately, Kerridge doesn’t tell us which Waugh novel has sprung to mind. The point is elaborated somewhat after le Carre’s parents are described. His father Ronnie Cornwell was basically a confidence man, living from scam to scam. In one such scheme he tricked Olive Glassey (“several rungs higher on the social scale”) into marrying him in 1928. They had two sons, but in addition to being a conman, Ronnie was abusive and eventually Olive bolted, effectively deleting herself from le Carre’s life. The obituarist then returns to his Waugh theme:

When I read Adam Sisman’s mighty biography of le Carre, I had the sensation, whenever Ronnie popped up, that I was reading a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Like one of Waugh’s subsidiary characters, Ronnie would keep disappearing and then reappearing unexpectedly in hugely varied situations and circumstances, but always recognisably himself.

Ronnie was a small time crook, an intimate of the Krays and an aspiring politician. […] He knew and charmed everybody and held huge parties at his home in Buckinghamshire where senior judges, police officers and civil servants would rub shoulders with such celebrities as Don Bradman and the Crazy Gang. Then he was arrested and imprisoned for various frauds and swindles: the memorable headline in the Daily Express read, “Uncrowned king of Chalfont St Peter owes a million and a quarter.”

Ronnie insisted on sending his sons to public schools, and when the demands for unpaid fees became urgent, he offered such unobtainable blackmarket delicacies as bananas and gin in lieu. It was at Sherborne that David really learnt the art of constant dissembling, trying to fit in with the other boys and pretend that his background was no different from theirs.

In the Guardian, critic Mark Lawson mentions another connection:

In polls of the greatest British TV drama series, the BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ranks highly, alongside ITV’s version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Curiously, though, the first of these landmarks in upmarket screen drama owed its existence to the second.

In the 1970s, the BBC, during one of its periodic crises over justifying the licence fee to politicians and the media, craved a starry, classy, filmed book, and had been negotiating the rights to Waugh’s story of a Catholic aristocratic family. When, unexpectedly, the estate sold the book to Granada Television, Jonathan Powell, running BBC Drama, was asked to quickly find a replacement brainy treat. He settled on the 1974 first volume of Le Carré’s trilogy (later umbrella-titled The Quest for Karla) about the search by George Smiley, a Sherlock Holmes of the spook world, for Russian double-agents in the British secret service.

Healing some BBC wounds by reaching TV in September 1979, two years before ITV’s Brideshead, BBC Two’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, had Alec Guinness’s Smiley taking reaction shots to new levels of attentive reflection in episodes of such deliberative pace that, at this early stage in the era of home video recorders, viewers sometimes wondered if they had accidentally engaged the freeze-frame function.

Lawson goes on to explain how the BBC’s Tinker, Tailor series at first confused many viewers. Even Clive James thought it a dud. But over time, the slow development of a complicated plot over several episodes sank in, helped along no doubt by the relative success of Brideshead two years later. The TV genre that began with Tinker, Tailor and Brideshead has become a mainstay of the adaptation business in the new age of streaming. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the theatrical film versions of both novels that were made in the 2000s failed to resonate with many viewers largely because they had to simplify the plots.

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Waugh and Two Noteworthy 1950s Americans

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Recent stories feature Waugh’s attitude toward two Americans who rose to popular fame during the 1950s (and in one case descended into infamy). Waugh’s position on each of them is not what one would have expected. The first is described by Olivia Rutigliano on the website CrimeReads in an article entitled “Evelyn Waugh loved Perry Mason with all his heart”. The article opens with this:

In this life, it’s rare to love anything as much as Evelyn Waugh, the great English novelist of Brideshead Revisited and Vile Bodies, adored Perry Mason, the popular Los Angeles-set mystery series written by Erle Stanley Gardner, about a defense attorney who helps the wrongfully-accused-of-murder. In a 1949 interview with Harvey Breit in The New York Times, when asked the name of his favorite writer, Waugh replied “The best American writer is, of course, Erle Stanley Gardner…Do I really mean that? By all means.” According to his wife Laura, he read every single one of Gardner’s books, and considered a comparison to Mason to be the sincerest compliment, writing to his agent D.A. Peters, “You grow more like Perry Mason daily. I know no higher praise.”

According to Linda Kelly, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Waugh was not the only famous literary admirer of Gardner’s series, with the comic poet Ogden Nash having mentioned his commitment to the books in one of his poems, and the novelist John Updike having admitted to reading forty of the novels ravenously as a young man. And the English writer Graham Greene was also evidently a fan, as evidenced by letters he exchanged with Evelyn Waugh.

She goes on to describe and quote the correspondence between Waugh and Gardner, who was equally as surprised and suspicious as the NY Times correspondent at Waugh’s praise for his writing.

The other noteworthy (or in his case, notorious) 1950s American is Senator Joseph McCarthy who made a career of hounding those he disliked by labelling them as “Communists”. His story is retold in a recent book Demagogue: The life and long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye reviewed in this week’s TLS by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. It would be hard to imagine an opponent of Communism more dedicated, outspoken and sincere in his opposition than Evelyn Waugh. He knew first hand what mischief the Communists were capable of based on his experiences in Yugoslavia at the end of WWII when they ruthlessly took over after the defeat of the Nazis. When McCarthy rose to fame, Waugh was still ranting at every opportunity against Marshall Tito who had become the darling of Cold War politicians because of his denunciation of control by the Soviets–but as Waugh kept repeating, he never held a free election or denounced totalitarian Communism.

Wheatcroft notes Waugh’s position on McCarthy somewhat obliquely:

As McCarthy swung out more and more erratically, he hired as a consigliere the young lawyer Roy Cohn, a Mephistophelean figure who would leave his seamy spoor through American life from McCarthy to later days, when he served Trump among others. In April 1953, Cohn and his sidekick David Schine set off for Europe to scour out communistic literature in American official overseas libraries. This farcical jaunt was greeted with derision by Europeans, as indeed was McCarthy himself. It’s true that Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford, “I do wish McCarthy would start his good work here on the Mountbattens”, but that was what in England is known as a “joke”. A former prime minister was brisker. “We are pardonably annoyed at being instructed by a beginner like Senator McCarthy”, Clement Attlee wrote. “The British Labour party has had nearly forty years of fighting Communism in Britain, and, in spite of war and economic depression, the Communists have utterly failed.”

In fact, Waugh reviewed favorably Richard Rovere’s 1959 exposure of the evils of McCarthyism in The Spectator (5 February 1960). Unfortunately, this review has never been reprinted.  It should perhaps be explained that Waugh had objections to the way the book was organized and written but not to its conclusions on McCarthy:

He had certain likable, rascally qualities: a gambler and a drunkard who was unshakably loyal to his cronies and often magnanimous to his enemies. He was devoid of patriotism and political principle. He was a man of no outstanding abilities who rose to the top, or very near it, by representing a mood of frustration and dismay among his countrymen and by fantastically exaggerating suspicions that were not without some foundation. He had the essential demagogue’s gift of identifying the scapegoat and performing public sacrifice […] What seems certain is that McCarthy never discovered a spy or even an active Communist […] It is arguable, I think, that McCarthy on the whole prospered the Communist cause.

Waugh’s description of McCarthy and Roy Cohn will resonate with contemporary Americans for reasons explored by Tye and Wheatcroft. Waugh’s review was not the end of his encounter with McCarthyism, however. The review appeared just as William F Buckley, Jr. was becoming the popular voice of conservatism while retaining his admiration for McCarthy. Buckley wrote to Waugh urging him to change his position as reflected in the Rovere review, but Waugh refused to budge. Buckley did finally succeed in securing some articles by Waugh in his fledgling National Review. But, to his discredit, Buckley never disowned his defense of McCarthy (or if he did was rather quiet about it).

UPDATE (11 December 2020): The posting originally stated that Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review appeared in The Spectator. It was in fact in the TLS (to which it was correctly linked) and the text has been corrected accordingly.

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Pearl Harbor Day Roundup

Posted on December 8, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–According to a report in The Times, the Tate Britain is considering the future of Rex Whistler’s well-known mural that decorates the walls of its restaurant:

A mural in Tate Britain’s restaurant depicting two enslaved black children has been described as offensive by its ethics committee, raising doubts that the artwork will be seen by the public again. The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats was painted by Rex Whistler in the 1920s for the restaurant named after him. After the White Pube critics’ group drew attention to the mural this year, and with the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Tate said it had been “transparent about the deeply problematic racist imagery in the mural”.

Its ethics committee commissioned a discussion paper by the artist John Akomfrah and academic David Dibosa. In September Dame Moya Greene, the chairwoman, told the Tate board the members were “unequivocal that the imagery of the work is offensive” and the “offence is compounded by the use of the room as a restaurant”. Tate said yesterday that the restaurant and its fine dining counterpart at Tate Modern would remain closed until at least next autumn because of uncertainties over visitor numbers. A spokesman said that it was “taking this time to consult on the future of the room and the mural”.

Surely they aren’t considering closing the painting to public access or eliminating the dining room for which the mural (with its theme of food) was commissioned. The offensive portion is a tiny section of the painting. An explanation in the museum’s catalogues and wall descriptions of why it is now considered potentially offensive should be sufficient. Even that may be overkill by drawing more attention to a small portion of the painting that most museum goers will have overlooked.

–BBC TV presenter Jeremy Paxman has issued a list of “the books that built him” in the Gentleman’s Journal magazine. After listing Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time which he concedes is really 12 books and a bit of a cheat in a relatively short list, he lists 2 (or 4) of Waugh’s novels:

Sword of Honour.  Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy is also a cheat, for obvious reasons. I have a special place in my heart for Apthorpe and his ‘thunderbox’, which for some reason reminds me of Boris and his successive failures with Covid.

Scoop. Like all journalists, I adore this book, and I often wonder why the only novel to rival it, Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of The Morning was published over 50 years ago. Something comic has vanished from life in the media.

The Penguin cover selected to illustrate this choice is from their edition of 1965 recension of the the three war novels. Since the text differs slightly from the individual volumes, it could fairly be considered as a single volume. There were reports about a year ago that Paxman was being considered for the post of Principal of Hertford College, Waugh’s alma mater. The position of Principal reportedly went to Tom Fletcher, diplomat and author, who is also an old Hertfordian. As of this week Paxman is still presenting University Challenge on the BBC, one of the few predictably bright spots in the schedule.

—The Guardian last week ran an article about Hollywood script writer and novelist Arthur Calder-Marshall. It relates to a novel Calder-Marshall wrote in the 1930s based on his extensive travels in Latin America.  The film rights to this were acquired by Orson Welles who botched the adaptation that was never made. The book was published as:

The Way to Santiago (1941) [and] is a heady hybrid of spy thriller, murder mystery, gun-toting adventure and sleek noir, playing out against the dusty landscapes of South America in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish civil war and the start of the second world war. It follows the hapless agency writer, Englishman Jimmy Lamson, as he attempts to find the murderer of a fellow press man, hoping to find his own journalistic integrity along the way. The novel rattles through a kaleidoscopic array of Latin American vistas – sinister cantinas, crude railside shacks, glitzy palaces and dirt roads – all populated with characters you might find congregating on a Hollywood backlot: sad, red-lipped beauties, itchy-fingered assassins and clipped English gentlemen.

The article was inspired by this week’s release of the Netflix film Mank in which another Welles film project (Citizen Kane) is the main subject and in which Calder-Marshall’s grandson Tom Burke plays the role of Welles. Calder-Marshall also had a Waugh connection:

It was Calder-Marshall who Alec Waugh contacted to keep an eye on his difficult younger brother Evelyn during his visit to Mexico in 1940. It was Calder-Marshall who Julian Maclaren-Ross contacted while looking for work after the war. And it was Calder-Marshall who was sourced by MGM, alongside his glamorous Garboesque wife Ara, to write golden hits for Hollywood greats, until both the monotony of Los Angeles and the war forced the elegant couple to flee the town “where people looked as beautiful as the food but proved as tasteless”.

Evelyn in 1937, before his trip to Mexico, had reviewed two of Calder-Marshall’s books (a nonfiction political study he panned and a short-story collection he praised) in back-to-back issues of Night and Day. He also mentioned briefly encounters with him during the war, but does not seem to have made contact with him in connection with the Mexican trip.  Calder-Marshall is not mentioned in the index of Robbery Under Law; Waugh kept no diary during the Mexico trip and wrote no letters home since Laura accompanied him.

–Writing on the literary website The Millions, Matt Seidell composes a list of books of

Autofiction and its attendant criticism [that have] perhaps reached a saturation point, I decided to map out new avenues for autofiction writers to explore and new variants for autofiction critics to classify: a handy manual that doubles as my year in reading.

After discussion of autoerotic, autochthonous and other “auto” novels, Seidell comes to item no 11:

11. Otto Fiction: Ideally this category would include historical novels about Otto von Bismarck’s youthful Prussian romps—maybe he appears in the Flashman series?—but for now I’ll include a long-overdue rereading of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, in which the architect Otto Silenus, a ridiculous parody of Walter Gropius, nonetheless enjoys a perspective unavailable to the madcap novel’s other careless characters.

–In a Times op-ed article, Quentin Letts described UK Health Minister Tony Hancock’s announcement of the Covid 19 vaccine approval:

Throughout the purse-lipped illiberalism of this pandemic, Hancock’s soundbites have made many of us want to box our own ears. At this moment of merciful news he was no less annoying. His silhouette tilted to the horizon. He sucked his molars and paused just long enough to suggest a statesman reaching into his gubbins for an extempore pearl. It was, aw-shucks, “a day to remember, frankly, in a year to forget”. That “frankly”: pure Blair.

Readers, your roasted Christmas goose, after prolonged basting in melted butter, will not glisten or swell to the extent that little Hancock did. Brian Blessed, playing Ophelia in a gender-blind Hamlet, could not have wrung greater juice from the moment. We had “fruits of endeavour”, “precious”, “side by side” and “resolve”. Hancock was in colossus mode. He spoke of our “loved ones”, that term Evelyn Waugh thought sufficiently dreadful to take for the title of a satirical novel, yet now all officialdom uses. And there was no end of “rolling out”. Ruddy rolling out. What happened to “dispense”?

 

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Evelyn Waugh as Seen by Anthony Blanche

Posted on December 3, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s Spectator has another writing competition in which a Waugh entry gets a mention. This is #3177 and the topic is “a well-known fictional person’s view of their author”.  The Spectator’s  Lucy Vickery cites some interesting non-winners in her opening to the article. Here’s the one that mentions Waugh:

… Anthony Blanche’s withering verdict on Evelyn Waugh as told to J.C.H. Mounsey: ‘My dear, what can I say? An absolute horror. Snobbish of course, being trade through and through. Constantly claiming gentry in his own b-b-background when the best that could be found were rows of sturdy yeomen…’

J C H Mounsey’s Waugh parodies have featured in earlier Spectator competitions mentioned in previous posts. He has once again kindly sent us his full entry for publication. The text follows on from “sturdy yeoman” in the above quote (and it actually gets better):

“…Did you ever meet Waugh père? My dear, a terrible old ch-ch-charlatan – endless amateur dramatics and poetry readings. Too shaming. You can see why Evelyn had to escape but his clothes! My dear! Bowler hats and suits with checks so loud that they were p-p-positively atomic. As for sex, well, he was definitely queer at Oxford and afterwards, all those children – if that wasn’t trying to prove something, I’m the D-D-Dalai Lama. And the rude-ness! I can’t tell you. In a league of his own and don’t let’s forget the c-c-cloying Catholic religiosity – always creeping round to priests and nuns and talking about men’s souls. Too gruesome.”

Two of the winning entries include characters in novels that were among Waugh’s favorites: George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

Waugh is also mentioned in another Spectator article. This appears in the column of “Taki” Theodoracopulos who answers a letter in which a Spectator reader asks him what books he is currently reading. As he explains, he stopped reading novels 50 years ago:

…Because authors began to write very, very, very long books containing millions of words that didn’t exactly ever get to the point, instead describing weird objects in improbable situations. The style was even worse than magic realism. To someone like me, used to clear and precise prose, this defeated the purpose of reading. What I like is beautiful, descriptive prose about interesting people. Modernity was gimmicky. I remember Truman Capote’s description of On the Road: ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing.’ But I liked Kerouac, just as I liked the writing of the truly horrible man that was Capote. (The maligned Answered Prayers is a gem.)

So, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie are not for me, and I am rather proud to say that I’ve never read more than a chapter of any of their books before giving up. It might not make sense, but I don’t believe a word they write, because fiction has to be believable. […] From what I’ve read about him, Evelyn Waugh was a horror — snobbish and a bully — yet reading his books, even at their satirical heights, I believe every word because I have met English people just like those he describes in Vile Bodies.

He goes on to describe the biographies and history books that now make up his reading selections.

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