Chips Channon Diaries Booklaunch

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Heywood Hill Bookshop in Mayfair London has organized a webinar in connection with the upcoming publication of the unexpurgated diaries of politician and gossip “Chips” Channon. Here are the details from The Oldie magazine:

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38, edited by Simon Heffer

Heywood Hill’s bookshop have organised a zoom webinar at 6.30pm on 4 March 2021 to mark the long awaited unexpurgated publication of Chips Channon’s diaries. Professor Simon Heffer, the book’s editor, will be in conversation with Rt Hon Michael Gove MP. Register for the zoom here. Purchase your copy from Heywood Hill by 31 March 2021 and you will qualify for entry into a Prize Draw to win a post-pandemic literary treat: High Tea at Heywood Hill, an hour’s browsing in the legendary bookshop, with tea, cake or something stronger and £50 spending money.

Here is some additional information from the bookstore’s website:

The discussion will be followed by a Q&A hosted by Heywood Hill’s Nicky Dunne.

Born in Chicago in 1897, ‘Chips’ Channon settled in England after World War I, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. Channon’s career was unremarkable but his diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and catty by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. They will surely be considered by future generations as the one of the most entertaining and important British historical documents of the 20th century.

The first 300 copies sold by Heywood Hill will be signed by Professor Heffer. Heywood Hill will begin sending out pre-ordered copies on March 3. All purchases of this book from Heywood Hill completed by March 31, 2021 will also qualify for entry into a Prize Draw to win a post-pandemic literary treat: High Tea at Heywood Hill.

A single volume edition of the diaries was published in 1967 and edited by Robert Rhodes James. A paperback edition of that version was issued by Weidenfield and Nicolson in 1993. Waugh was mentioned twice in that volume; neither of those was particularly flattering: “…He looks like a ventriloquist’s doll, with his shiny nose…” (16 December 1934). The new edition will appear in three volumes, the first of which is to be published next month. The editor of this volume, Simon Heffer, is a professorial research fellow at University of Buckingham and columnist for the Sunday Telegraph.

UPDATE: 7 March 2021  Last paragraph amended to reflect publication of new edition in three volumes.

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Washington’s Birthday Roundup

Posted on February 21, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Last week’s Sunday Telegraph reviews a new book by Simon Fenwick entitled The Crichel Boys. This is about a post-WWII literary salon established in a house that was formerly the rectory of Long Crichel, Dorset. This was purchased by Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys later joined by Raymond Mortimer. They installed a good cook and her husband served as butler. The guest list as reflected in the review was quite impressive, including James Lees-Milne, Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten, Kenneth Clark, Elizabeth Bowen, Somerset Maugham, Greta Garbo and Graham Greene. Conspicuous by his absence is Evelyn Waugh. He is quoted as referring to Long Crichel:

The Crichel Boys were all members of the establishment […] but none of them was conventional. They were all openly gay (Evelyn Waugh called Long Crichel “the buggery house”)…

Laura Freeman reviews the book in this week’s Sunday Times. She is a bit less inclined to like it:

Here come the usual (or should that be U-sual?) suspects: Nancy Mitford, waspish, wasp-waisted, just back from Paris; Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor, bronzed and handsomely indolent; Lady Ottoline Morrell, splendid, ridiculous, roped in pearls. Sonia Orwell will perch on the fender and there will be cameos by John Betjeman, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, David “Bunny” Garnett and a glamorous Guinness or three.

Evelyn Waugh will turn up at teatime and be rude about everyone. It will be a bit Bloomsbury, a bit Bright Young Things, a bit BBC and a bit Oxford tweedy. Done well, the genre is enormous fun. Don’t you wish you were there? Guest of honour at a fantasy dinner party, with Paddy on your left and Nancy on your right and Virginia Woolf being wicked and bitchy within eavesdropping distance. Done less well, you feel trapped at an endless country-house weekend listening to minor literary liggers complain about the central heating.

Whether Waugh ever turned up is not stated nor could I find any evidence in his letters or diaries that he did so. His biographers make no mention of Long Crichel or its salon either.

–Flora Watkins writing in The Spectator addresses the frustrations of home teaching by listing (for her own home pupils and others) 10 examples of teachers who are worse than she is (or they are). One is Capt. Grimes from Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall:

Of all the misfits employed as schoolmasters at Llanabba Castle, the drunken deviant Captain Grimes is Primus inter pares. Dishonourably discharged from the army, he’s usually half-cut and perennially “in the soup”. He later makes a bigamous marriage with the headmaster’s daughter. Grimes’s pederasty was removed from the 2017 BBC-TV adaptation–what with boarding school abuse not being so amusing as it was in the 1920’s.

Others on the list include Jim Prideaux of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Wackford Squeers of Nicholas Nickleby; and Muriel Sparks’s Miss Jean Brodie.

–Novelist Louise Candish was interviewed in the Irish paper The Independent. Here is an excerpt:

Q. The writer who shaped you?
A. Margaret Atwood, Tom Wolfe, Patricia Highsmith, Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie, and, going back to childhood, Enid Blyton – have all had a strong influence on me. I connect with their unflinching interest in the less heroic motives of humans. Lust and avarice, cowardice and snobbery – the savagery that hovers beneath our civilised facades.

–The Canadian religious website Catholic Insight posts an unsigned review and recommendation of Waugh’s Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr. Here’s an excerpt:

 …Waugh’s biography […] and Campion’s life, speak very much to our own time. Campion was a contrarian, standing against the spiritus mundi. He could have had it all, bright, successful, up-and-coming, but threw all that way to follow Christ. Only a living thing can swim upstream, as another Englishman, G.K. Chesterton wrote, not to follow the entropic and enervating current, but show there is a far better way.

And that Campion did. Waugh’s book, to this writer’s mind, is a masterpiece of hagiography, portraying the saint as he was, in his own time, and even in his own  ‘mind’, insofar as such is possible, the inner turmoil, difficulties and even doubts, as this once-foppish young man joined the most rigorous of Orders, full of their original zeal (the Jesuits were only constituted in 1540, four decades before Campion’s death). How Campion, by grace and training, was formed into an elite soldier for Christ, risking a brutal and grisly death to bring the Faith, the Sacraments, and some solace, to Catholics left bereft in Elizabeth’s increasingly anti-Catholic England.

–An academic journal The Modernist Review has issued a call for papers headed with this reference to Evelyn Waugh:

“[L]et us hide the cocktail-shaker,” Evelyn Waugh wrote in the Daily Express in 1928, for “[c]ocktails are chilly things at the best of times, and during Christmas week they are ‘all wrong.’”

Waugh was perhaps being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but his demand that cocktails—an emblem of modernity—should be cast aside during the festive season raises intriguing questions. How did the modernists (and modernist-adjacents!) feel and write about festivity and parties? How does festivity intersect with modernity, and what effects does this produce? Waugh’s own Vile Bodies follows a gaggle of thoroughly modern Bright Young People from one bizarre festive locale to the next…

–The following abstract of a University of California, Berkeley PhD thesis has been posted. This is entitled “The Comic Bildungsroman: Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Beckett and Philip Roth” by David Seidel:

This dissertation argues that the relationship between comedy and the Bildungsroman is symbiotic rather than subversive, indicative of a fundamental affinity between mode and genre. The Bildungsroman is a genre supremely anxious about the social, professional, and romantic definition its heroes seek, an anxiety that leaves it highly vulnerable to the incursions of comedy. Definition is about limits, ends, bounds, and stability. I argue that comedy attacks all these things mercilessly, and finds in the Bildungsroman’s preoccupation with definition, limits, and bounds a fertile ground for its own forces of indefinition [sic], limitlessness, and boundlessness. Therefore, small, sometimes trivial examples of comic indefinition can be traced back to the larger definitional stakes of the Bildungsroman form. The comic twentieth-century novels I take up, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and The Loved One, Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Company, and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theater, feed on the Bildungsroman’s ever-present, latent comedy. Comic Bildungsromans, anti-Bildungsromans, parodic Bildungsromans: a rose is a rose is a rose. Whatever the name, the comic Bildungsroman doesn’t so much distort the image of the Bildungsroman as reflect its truest form.

Here’s a link to the full text of the thesis.

UPDATE (21 February 2021): Dave Lull kindly sent a link to the full text of the UC PhD thesis. It is posted above.

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Wilfred Thesiger Profiled in “The Article”

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Biographer Jeffrey Meyers has written a profile of pre-eminent British travel writer Wilfred Thesiger. This is posted in the online literary journal The Article. Meyers begins by recalling his 1979 interview of Thesiger in the latter’s London apartment. He notes Thesiger’s birth in Addis Ababa, education at Eton and Oxford and early life of wandering in pursuit of exotic people and cultures:

His travel writing was not an occasional interlude from ordinary life, but a continuous record from the inside of lost and disappearing cultures. He believed other races were entitled to their own moral standards and disliked missionaries who disrupted ancestral customs. …

The early chapters of the article cover Thesiger’s admiration of Lawrence of Arabia and books about Arabian lands and peoples. Given his experience of early life in Abyssinia and admiration for its culture and leader Haile Selassie, Thesiger was bound to come up against Waugh’s satirical writings about that country. Meyers provides a fairly comprehensive description of Thesiger’s and Waugh’s different points of view:

…In 1930 he attended the coronation of his father’s old friend, Emperor Haile Selassie, to whom he was fiercely loyal. In Addis Ababa he met Evelyn Waugh, who later enraged him by mocking the Abyssinians in Black Mischief and praising the Italian invasion of their country. He condemned Waugh’s superficiality and foppish dress, and disliked him on sight: “He struck me as flaccid and petulant.” Waugh wanted to join Thesiger’s expedition to a fierce tribe, but he adamantly refused his request and menacingly remarked: “Had he come, I suspect only one of us would have returned.”

Thesiger dedicated his autobiography “To the memory of His late Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie” and his portrayal of Selassie was completely opposed to Waugh’s. He praised the Emperor’s “sensitive and finely moulded face,” his dignity and kindness, “his inflexible will, his intense patience, his courage, his horror of cruelty, his dedication to his country and his deep religious faith”. Waugh claimed that Selassie had “fled precipitately”; Thesiger showed that Selassie had commanded his army against the Italians at Qoram. He was forced to admit that as Selassie “acquired power he became increasingly autocratic”. […]

Thesiger forcefully contradicted Waugh’s biased views of the hopelessly unequal war against the Italians, of General Rodolfo Graziani, of the barbaric methods of the invaders and — in defiance of the Geneva Convention — their horrific use of poison gas. He described the “bitter fighting, largely swords, spears and shields against rifles, bayonets and hand grenades, that lasted until nightfall.” In a striking sentence he noted, “to meet a modern army, the Abyssinians lacked everything but courage.” […]

After 425 deacons and monks were shot in Debra Lebanos, which Evelyn Waugh had visited in 1930, the furious Thesiger quoted Waugh’s justification of the Italian terror and extermination. Waugh declared that the Italian “civilising mission” was “attended by a spread of order and decency, education and medicine, in a disgraceful place.” Thesiger was also outraged by Waugh’s attempt to cover up the use of mustard gas, a toxic chemical that burned exposed skin and lungs and formed large blisters oozing yellow pus. The soft tissue of the eyes were especially vulnerable. In his New Year Letter (1940), WH Auden wrote of “The Abyssinian, blistered, blind.” Thesiger vividly concluded that “anyone who was splashed with the fluid or who breathed its fumes writhed and screamed in agony.”

At least one of Waugh’s biographers mentions Thesiger’s critical attitude toward Waugh’s views of Abyssinia. This is Selina Hastings who also interviewed Thesiger for her book (Hastings, p. 236). Whether Waugh himself commented on his encounters with Thesiger is not known to me, nor do Hastings and Meyers mention any. Thanks to reader Milena Borden for sending a link.

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Waugh-Themed Radio Drama Posted

Posted on February 16, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The 2003 radio broadcast of an audio-play entitled “Saint Graham and Saint Evelyn, Pray for Us” was posted on the internet earlier this month. This was written by literary critic and radio-TV presenter Mark Lawson. It was originally broadcast in Waugh’s centenary year, apparently on the BBC, and may have had some connection with that observance. According to a message posted on Reddit:

“In this literary comedy the Vatican decides to canonise either Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene. As priests explore the two writers (who were opposites in everything except friendship) their very different attitudes towards life, sex and Catholicism emerge.”

Much of the performance is devoted to discussions between the two writers, often based on written correspondence between them or on their other writings. The 43 minute broadcast is available on the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to preservation of print, audio and visual media. Here’s a link: archive.org/details/GrahamEvelynPrayForUs

The cast credits are also posted:

Graham Greene – John Sessions, Evelyn Waugh – Simon Day, Catherine Greene – Clare Corbett, Cardinal Coppa – Peter Wickham, Monsignor Hale – Daniel Evans, Monsignor Crutwell – Kerry Shale

The director of the 2003 broadcast performance was Robin Reed.

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Italian Version of A Little Learning

Posted on February 12, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Pre-Valentine Roundup

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scoop and the news cycle

Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is fantastic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You seem to find everything banal.”

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

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

 

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Naim Attallah: 1931-2021 R I P

Posted on February 5, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending these links.

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Roundup: Brideshead to Bridgerton

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Vile Bodies Artifact Posted on Etsy

Posted on January 23, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

Dimensions: 24.5 x 17.5 cm

Total pages: 6 plus the cover.

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

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

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

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

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Unloved in LA

Posted on January 20, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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