Election Week Roundup: A Journalistic Memoir and A Belated Review

Posted on November 5, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Foreign correspondent Robert Fisk has died at the age of 74. The New York Times  describes his career in their obituary:

“Robert Fisk, a dauntless journalist who was widely praised by colleagues and competitors alike for relentlessly chronicling the Middle East’s many agonies, but who was also faulted by some critics as insufficiently tough at times on despots, died on Friday in a hospital in Dublin. He was 74. […] With muscular reporting and a pugilistic writing style, Mr. Fisk, who had British and Irish citizenship, covered wars both civil and resolutely uncivil in the Middle East and beyond — in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel and the occupied territories, Northern Ireland, Algeria and Lebanon, where he long made Beirut his base.”

Another notice written by Katya Bohden and appearing in the online edition of Al Jazeera opened with this:

“The only book Robert Fisk ever recommended I read was the satirical journalism novel – Scoop – by Evelyn Waugh – a story about hapless nature writer William Boot who, due to an unexpected turn of events, is sent to the fictional African country of Ishmaelia to report on the conflict there as a foreign correspondent.

When I received the news that he had passed away, scenes of my interactions with him replayed in my mind. Somehow the day he recommended Scoop was one of the brightest memories among them – it has since become one of my favourite books.

The novel is a pure satire that takes aim at the newspaper industry and the journalistic profession. It is a rather interesting read to recommend to an aspiring young journalist. But that in itself is emblematic of how he was as a person, or at least of how I knew him: Kind-hearted with a great, and oftentimes sarcastic, sense of humour; an empathetic, radiant and intelligent man.”

Robert Fisk, 1946-2020. R I P

–The literary journal Essays in Criticism has posted a review of Philip Eade’s biography and Ann Pasternak Slater’s critical essays on Waugh, both published in 2016. This is by Jason Harding who teaches at Durham University. Why it is only now being published is not explained, but it was worth the wait for what is a thoughtful and very well written review. And it provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at these two important books.

Harding begins with a discussion of several aspects of Eade’s biography such as Waugh’s childhood and bisexuality and then notes:

“Philip Eade’s Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited ‘aims to paint a fresh portrait of the man by revisiting key episodes throughout his life and focusing on his most meaningful relationships’. Waugh’s first biographer, his friend Christopher Sykes, had complained: ‘Evelyn Waugh was quite simply exceedingly unpleasant’. The portrait of Waugh that emerges from Eade’s lively and readable biography is more pleasant, but it leaves us with a simpler, less interesting character than the novelist who could deploy his cynicism, snobbery, and sadism in a devastating satirical art that has delighted and disturbed generations of readers. And could not these unattractive qualities, intimately bound up with personal experience of hurt and betrayal, be an indelible, indispensable source of the novelist’s genius?”

After considering favorably several other aspects of the book, Harding finds Eade’s presentation of Waugh’s WWII military career, based on Donat Gallagher’s recent study, unconvincing, Harding concludes:

“Eade’s biography is prefaced by garlands of celebratory reviews, although its contribution to Waugh scholarship and literary criticism demands a judicious assessment. His breezy manner flattens the psychological depths of this life; it is disingenuous to pretend that cruelty and contempt are not crucial ingredients in the comic and serious dimensions of Waugh’s satiric edge. Eade’s biography is not primarily concerned with the craft of Evelyn Waugh the novelist. When he ventures into literary criticism the commentary is perfunctory. Comparison of Eade’s epitomes of Waugh’s novels with the corresponding pages of detailed analysis of Waugh’s fiction in Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography points towards a fundamental deficiency. Eade’s approach is insufficiently sophisticated to capture the troubling and conflicted aspects of Waugh’s life that are reflected in the imaginative power of his art.”

This is a bit unfair in view of Eade’s disclaimer of any intention to present critical literary judgments. He says at the outset that he is writing about the life rather than evaluating the works. Harding does not face this problem with respect to Slater’s book:

“The abeyance of literary-critical engagement in Eade’s biography is not a weakness shared by Ann Pasternak Slater’s contribution to the British Council’s Writers and Their Work series. Slater concentrates on how Waugh transmuted personal experience (Gilbert Pinfold talks eagerly of ‘a hamper to be unpacked of fresh, rich experience – perishable goods’) into a felicitous ‘elegant structure’. By contrast, she waves away ideological confrontations with the man and his work. The contours of Waugh’s achievement as delineated by Slater are distinctive, and the terrain will look different from other critical perspectives. ‘His novels took an undulating path towards greater depth and complexity’, she asserts, a judgement that is hard-earned through years of scholarship allied to literary-critical acuity. What stands behind this judgement is her conviction that Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism was of paramount importance to his artistic vision. In the words of Noel Annan, ‘only the Church explained why the world was as horrible as it was’ and why Waugh himself, one of the faithful, was not degenerate or unregenerate.”

The review concludes with this:

“There are unmistakable virtues in Eade’s and Slater’s settled determination to accentuate the positive in the life and work of one of the finest English writers of the twentieth century. Waugh’s stature as a novelist has been challenged as a consequence of the socio-political orthodoxies of our modern liberal democracy. However, when his defenders adopt the haughty, brittle, dismissive tone heard in his interview with John Freeman, it is still liable to breed intransigence.”

 

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Italian Biographical Sketch of Waugh

Posted on November 2, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Italian online religious journal Radio Spada has published a feature-length illustrated article containing a thumbnail biography of Evelyn Waugh. This is by Luca Fumagalli who frequently writes on English literary subjects generally and Waugh specifically in that paper. The biographical article opens:

“Evelyn Waugh is probably the most paradoxical British writer of the twentieth century. In fact, even though he signed some of the funniest songs ever written in English, he suffered from chronic depression in the last twenty years of his life; he then donated large sums of money to charity and was always lavish with compliments towards other authors whom he appreciated, but at the same time he knew as well as few others how to be despicable and arrogant. Still, at some point in his career, when his books began to sell well and his wallet grew, he began to pose as a wealthy landowner, although the plaid suits and hats he used to wear made him look like a bookmaker. Friends knew that his character limitations were compensated for by the many qualities,”  

There follows a largely accurate and familiar description of Waugh’s childhood, education, and post-Oxford life. One thing I learned was that Waugh was paid for some of his writing in Oxford student publications. The article then arrives at the troubling subject of Waugh’s first marriage and his writing success:

“… the need for more regular income had pushed him towards the shores of journalism. Fortunately for him, he possessed the three basic requirements of the perfect freelancer : he wrote well, he was versatile and, above all, he had found in the legendary AD Peters an agent ready to get him the best offers. […] By now the salient features of his prose were clearly defined and included, in addition to a very accurate style, a delicate allusiveness and a taste for a satire with a slightly farcical flavor. According to Graham Greene, Waugh’s writings had the clarity of the Mediterranean before it was polluted by tourism. The fact that he was an excellent promoter of himself, capable of combining humor and intelligence as few others, helped to facilitate his climb to success.”

Next, the subject of his conversion to Roman Catholicism and his writing on religious subjects is taken up. This is among the topics discussed: 

 

“Ernest Oldmeadow, editor of The Tablet, was one of his most ardent opponents: in the Catholic weekly there were in fact some reviews under his signature that harshly criticized Waugh’s latest novels including Black Mischief, of 1932. He answered in no uncertain terms, and when in 1935 the direction of the periodical was entrusted to Douglas Woodruff he became, almost out of spite, a regular collaborator. In general, the publication of a biography of the Jesuit Edmund Campion, martyr under the reign of Elizabeth, whose earnings were given to charity for the reconstruction of Campion Hall, the center of the Society of Jesus, also contributed to improving relations with the most hostile co-religionists. in Oxford. The book also won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize.”

There is a good summary of Waugh’s prewar writing, second marriage and WWII career but, strangely, it says little about the writing and reception of his most popular book Brideshead Revisited. The article continues with the postwar success and the onset of a more extravagant lifestyle. Here the story goes a bit astray. Waugh was not forced to sell his manuscripts during his lifetime. Indeed, he donated the manuscript of Brideshead to Loyola College in Baltimore which had awarded him an honorary academic degree in 1947. He had given the manuscript of Vile Bodies to Bryan and Diana Guinness in the 1930s and distributed the manuscript pages of Labels in copies of a special first edition. The bulk of his manuscripts remained in his possession when he died and became part of the University of Texas Humanities Research Center when it acquired his library in the 1970s. The reason for the sale of Piers Court was not financial but to escape from the suburban sprawl of Dursley. Combe Florey was not a downmarket Piers Court.

The concluding section describes his declining later years and the drug and alcohol consumption that lead to the hallucinations depicted in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. The article concludes with this:

“He died of a heart attack on April 10, 1966, Easter Day. Thus it was that British Catholic culture suddenly lost its best standard bearer, a contradictory man, with whom it was not easy to deal, but a very talented writer and, above all, one of the last intellectuals in England to still give some value to the word Tradition.”

The translation of the excerpts is by Google with some edits. The Google translation of the entire article is fairly high quality for this sort of thing and may be read at this link.

 

 

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New Biography by Selina Hastings

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of TLS has a preview from the new biography by Selina Hastings. In this, she writes of the life and works of novelist Sybille Bedford. Hastings explains in the excerpt that Bedford was raised in Germany in a part-Jewish family during the early Nazi years. She was befriended by the Aldous Huxleys whom she met in Spain and they helped her settle in England and later in the USA.  One of her major works was a biography of Huxley.

The TLS excerpt mostly concerns Bedford’s best known novel A Legacy, first published in 1956. As Hastings explains below, Waugh was influential in its success:

The story of A Legacy, based mainly on her father’s family history, follows the dramas resulting from the interlinking through marriage of three families, of the Merzes in Berlin with the Feldens and Bernins, both Roman Catholic and long established in the bucolic south of the country, near the border with France. […] Lively, sensual and impressionistic, the novel is shot through with wit and irony; both harrowing and wickedly entertaining, it has a complex plot as well as a disturbing portentousness, a hint of darkness to come. […]

The initial reaction to A Legacy on its publication in London […] was disappointing. The few reviews that appeared were far from encouraging, with one critic on the BBC describing the work as “pretentious feminine drivel”. Fortunately, Esther Murphy, a one-time lover of Bedford’s, dismayed by such dismal reactions, sent a copy to her friend Nancy Mitford. Enchanted by it, Mitford wrote Bedford a highly complimentary letter – “It is certainly one of the very best novels I have ever read”, she told her – before going on to recommend it enthusiastically to her old ally Evelyn Waugh. “I am hugely grateful to you for sending me A Legacy”, Waugh replied. “I read it straight through with intense pleasure.” Inevitably, he had a number of criticisms, in particular regarding the author’s distressing ignorance on the subject of Roman Catholicism, but he had been fascinated by the book. On April 13, a short review by Waugh was published in the Spectator. “A novel has just appeared by a new writer of remarkable accomplishment”, his article begins, “a book of entirely delicious quality 
 cool, witty, elegant.” This was not to say the novel was flawless, but overall he found it an exceptional work and “we gratefully salute a new artist”.

For Bedford, Waugh’s review changed everything. “Nothing that has been said about my work has given me so much pleasure”, she later remarked. “It’s the one thing I hang on to sometimes when I start to wonder what I have done with my life.” Other laudatory reviews soon followed, and nine months after its British publication A Legacy appeared in the US. Initially, there had been little enthusiasm in New York, where it had been turned down by five publishers, one of whose directors described it as among the dullest books he had ever read. But then Bedford received an offer from Simon and Schuster, where it was enthusiastically promoted by the book’s editor, Robert Gottlieb. Appearing on January 30, 1957, it remained for several weeks on the bestseller list of both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, was bought for $1,500 by the Readers Subscription Club, and in a surprisingly short time had sold more than 20,000 copies. As Gottlieb later remarked, for such a European and elitist novel this was “a highly unlikely success”.

Laura Freeman reviews the book in The Times. After describing Bedford’s “extraordinary” life and her works, Freeman concludes:

Hastings, biographer of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Rosamond Lehmann and Somerset Maugham, writes with her hallmark elegance, insight and forgiveness. Bedford’s faults as a writer, friend and lover are laid bare and understood. Bedford regretted how “selfish” and “domineering” she had been towards the novelist Eda Lord, her partner of 20 years, always “bulldozing on” with work and failing to look after Lord. One might, however, wish for a quick snip here and there. The litany of schlösser, villas and Wiltshire manor houses tips into Private Eye’s “What you didn’t miss . . .” territory. And when it comes to lists of vintages, I’m afraid I’m with the painter David Hockney, who horrified the epicurean Bedford when he responded to the question of what he would like to drink with: “Plonk.”

When Bedford was appointed OBE in 1981, the Queen asked: “What did you do for it?” Bedford replied “quite loud and proud”: “I am a writer, Ma’am.” The Queen inquired how long she had been at it. “All my life, Ma’am.” Said the Queen: “Oh dear! Ah well.”

Hastings’ biography entitled Sybille Bedford: An appetite for life is published next week in London and will be available in the USA in February. A Legacy has been reprinted as a New York Review Books Classic in the USA and is available as a Penguin Modern Classic in the UK. Hastings’ biography of Waugh is also available from Amazon.com at this link.

UPDATE (30 October 2020): A reference to Laura Freeman’s review of Hastings’ book in The Times, posted 29 October 2020, was added.

UPDATE (8 November 2020): A review of Hastings’ book appeared in The Spectator. This is by Sara Wheeler and makes the case that Bedford was a massive snob. The review is quite favorable. Here’s an excerpt:

Hastings has had the cooperation of the Bedford estate and full access to diaries and letters, and she and her researcher have delved heroically and judiciously. She is an accomplished stylist and her prose suits her subject: elegant, deft and restrained, as operatic arias ‘hiss’ from the horned gramophone in the schloss.

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117th Anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s Birthday

Posted on October 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

On this 117th anniversary of Waugh’s birthday, we look back 80 years to see how he celebrated the occasion on 28 October 1940. This was nearly a year after he had joined the Royal Marines. He had arrived back from the aborted mission to West Africa on 27 October 1940 and was granted leave after docking in Kilmarnock, Scotland. This was general leave for his unit and was apparently unrelated to his birthday. Waugh writes in his diary (p. 485):

Next day, my [37th] birthday, difficulties over special train held up general leave, but I got off on representing that I might at any moment be called up for the Commando. The army PO has given us no letters later than September 15th. The journey to Taunton took just twenty-four hours. Long waits outside all junctions, no attempt to run connections.

I arrived very happy to forget the war for a week. Got into civilian clothes, caught a sharp cold, but had a highly enjoyable week. Laura and I visited Stinkers and found the house full to capacity ; the chaplain sleeping in the wine cellar, the garden breast-high with weeds, all the young hedges looking very unwell, many young plants completely lost. I got twenty gallons of petrol out of the Bristol control. Talk is all of air raids. Evacuation is very much better at Pixton as family life has now been separated from children and helpers. Laura lets the numerous rows pass over her. We drove to Chagford for luncheon. Bad accident on railway; over thirty killed at Norton Fitzwarren. Sunday papers full of Hitler’s attempts to conciliate the Catholics. Greek war beginning as Norway and Finland began. Good news seems so improbable that people seem rather to resent it. There are no signs of any shortage of supplies but great disorganization of communications. Three of our officers went on leave not knowing where to find their wives. Countless troops in the same position. Leave expires tomorrow. [Diary entry dated Pixton Park, Tuesday 5 November 1940]

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Halloween Roundup

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–There are several reviews this week of William Boyd’s new novel Trio. Waugh is mentioned in some of them. The Guardian’s review opens with this:

…Some of his comic writing suggests a kinship with Evelyn Waugh as a farceur of rare talent, but other books hint that he is a very un-English talent indeed, as befits his upbringing in Ghana, Nigeria and Scotland. For all his skill at constructing page-turning narratives, there is an ostentatious delight in game-playing that almost makes him the novelistic equivalent of Tom Stoppard.

In much the same vein, Alan Massie writes this in The Scotsman:

From the time he published his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, Boyd has been recognized as a splendid storyteller, something that distinguishes him from a number of his most admired contemporaries. Evelyn Waugh once called Somerset Maugham “the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit.” Reading him offered “the same delight as in watching a first-class cabinet-maker cutting dovetails”. One might say the same of Boyd. He is a master-craftsman. Aspiring novelists might learn more from a study of how he does it than from many weeks of a Creative Writing course.

–The Daily Mail has reviewed a book about WWII spy Catherina Koopman, a/k/a “Toto”. When she wasn’t spying she was modeling clothes and having affairs with both men and women. Waugh commented on one of her male conquests who is described as:

… the man who, one way or another, would have the greatest influence on her life, newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily and Sunday Express. A quixotic and outspoken character, many people loathed him because of the power he wielded without mercy and the disdain with which he treated people. The writer Evelyn Waugh was once asked if he believed in the Devil and replied: ‘Of course. How else could you account for Lord Beaverbrook?’ Even his great buddy Winston Churchill called him Machiavelli.

The biography is entitled Toto & Coco: Spies, Seduction and the Fight for Survival and is written by Alan Frame.

—Standpoint magazine has a reposted a 2013 review entitled “McBrideshead Revisited” about a political memoir from a member of the then recent “New Labour” government, Damian McBride. This is entitled Power Trip:

McBride worked at the Treasury under Gordon Brown, first as civil servant and then as political adviser dealing with the media; transferred to No 10 when Brown became Prime Minister; and had to resign when he was implicated in an attempted smear campaign. This book explains how that came about. McBride details all his distasteful acts, successful or otherwise, to manipulate the public image of his boss and lower the standing of rivals. We are meant to be shocked. […]

The memoir like

…Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited [is]  composed as flashbacks from an opening trigger (Ryder’s regiment arriving at Brideshead; McBride climbing out of a neighbour’s kitchen window to evade photographers). In both the narrator drifts into a career for which he had no previous training (Ryder becomes a painter after redecorating Brideshead; McBride starts as a VAT expert and ends as a spin doctor). The role of Sebastian Flyte is shared between Ed Balls and Ed Miliband (and during the story they swap roles of unreliable narcissist and teddy bear).[…]

Nevertheless, both writers use a dominating metaphor around which all action revolves. For Waugh this was Brideshead itself, the stately home whose values are being polluted by modernity. For McBride it is the equally monolithic Gordon Brown, a titanic statesman of genius and moral certainty who saved the world but has been traduced by an ungrateful nation. Power Trip is not an act of contrition but an attempt at rehabilitation. If only we had known the “real” Gordon Brown; if only we had understood how deeply he cared; if only we could have seen him in private; if only we could have appreciated what was going on inside his head; if only, if only, urges McBride, then the Brown administration would not have been such a bloody cock-up. And that, I’m afraid, is where Power Trip goes all wrong.

–The Evesham Journal has announced the death of Rosalind Morrison, the Vice Lord-Lieutenant of Worcestershire:

When Lady Morrison of Madresfield Court was officially chosen as the new High Sheriff of Worcestershire in 2011, she became the first person to occupy the office since 1974 after the Worcestershire and Herefordshire posts were separated again. Lady Morrison’s aunt was Lady Dorothy Heber-Percy, formerly Lygon, who died in 2001.

Lady Dorothy’s family seat was Madresfield Court near Malvern, and the family is thought to have inspired Evelyn Waugh’s most famous work, Brideshead Revisited. Lady Dorothy’s father – Lady Morrison’s grandfather – was the 7th Earl Beauchamp, with Lady Morrison chairing the charity the Beauchamp Community at Newlands, which was originally endowed by her family.

She was 74 at the time of her death. R.I.P

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War Trilogy: Fake Novels and an Anniversary

Posted on October 22, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest issue of TLS, D J Taylor has written an essay on what he calls “Made-up Stories” or fake novels. What reminded him of the genre (if that’s what it is) was his recent re-reading of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume cycle Dance to the Music of Time. Powell makes rather a meal of the practice of making up titles for novels that his characters may have written or planned to write. Indeed, Powell kept lists of such titles in his Writer’s Notebook which he may have carried around for years before putting them to use. Other novelists that have used the practice extensively include Thackeray and A S Byatt. George Orwell used it in Keep the Aspidistra Flying when he has Gordon Comstock write a long poem called “London Pleasures”. This was based on a project Orwell himself had actually started in the mid-1930s and never finished.

Taylor goes on to identify four different types of fake novel–one of which is its use to settle scores with other writers. Evelyn Waugh made up some writings that fall into this category:

Many an original reader of Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh (1961) assumes that PensĂ©es, the collection of aphorisms by Corporal-Major Ludovic, was a send-up of his old sparing partner Cyril Connolly’s book The Unquiet Grave (1944). In Work Suspended (1943), on the other hand, which features the crime writer John Plant, author of such works as Death in the Dukeries and Murder at Mountrichard Castle, Waugh is merely amusing himself with a genre that he considered slightly below the salt.

Perhaps the most original use of this type of fake novel by Waugh also occurs in Unconditional Surrender and involved Cpl-Maj Ludovic.  The latter, as a result of PTSD from the evacuation of Crete and his own in-born nastiness, goes even madder and isolates himself with his puppy at his parachute training center where he obsessively writes a novel called Death Wish. He rushes off batches of manuscript pages to the typist and then straight on to the printer without any revision. The novel is intended to “turn from the drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of the recent past transformed and illuminated by disordered memory and imagination.” This is obviously Waugh writing a self-satirization of Brideshead Revisited, even down to the conditions under which that novel was written during his isolation in Devon on leave from the Army. By 1961, when Unconditional Surrender was published, Waugh had become embarrassed by the popular success of the novel he once thought was his “magnum opus”. So, with Ludovic’s Death Wish, he is getting his own back at himself.

The war trilogy is also in the news in another recent article. This is a brief military-political analysis of the battle of Crete in anticipation of that event’s 80th anniversary next June. The article is by Greg Mills, the director of the South Africa-based military think-tank the Brenthurst Foundation. It appears in the Daily Maverick as well as the foundation’s own newsletter. In addition to considering what went wrong with Allied planning and decision-making, the article offers this observation based on Waugh’s own descriptions of the battle in the second volume of his war trilogy:

The halls of Oxford and Cambridge were a fertile recruiting ground for expertise […] Unsurprisingly, it was a time with strong overtones (and undercurrents) of class. Evelyn Waugh was posted to the commando unit “Layforce”, under Colonel Robert Laycock, which was to assist the evacuation. Waugh was scandalised by the “officer first, soldier second” mentality, which features in Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen. Waugh vents on what he saw as a betrayal of the soldiers by the British ruling class. He later claimed that the officers, as Antony Beevor notes in his magisterial volume on the campaign, “had behaved disgracefully” in the flight over the White Mountains to Sphakia, with “many of them taking places in the motor transport and leaving the wounded to walk”.

The article seems to suggest that Waugh’s observations converge with those of Beevor. It is not quite as simple as that, as Don Gallagher and Carlos Villar Flor explain in their recent book In the Picture.

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A Handful of Reading in the Lockdown

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

An article in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera addresses the question of why booksales and reading  have enjoyed revivals during the Covid 19 lockdowns. This is by Alessandro Piperno and portions are translated below:

…Personally I am grateful to Evelyn Waugh ; yes, to him, the great English novelist: dandy, traveler, reactionary, snob, misanthrope, alcoholic, man of proverbial intractability and contempt, and yet or perhaps precisely for this, an incomparable designer. I am grateful to him for having conceived one of the most brilliant stories ever written about the insane spell that strikes us poor compulsive readers after adolescence. The tale is tucked into the end of A Handful of Dust, for some his best novel: when Tony Last, the protagonist, an idealistic gentleman plagued by chronic imbecility, decides to embark on an adventurous journey of spiritual rebirth in the Amazon. Poor Tony! He’s taken a beating. First the son who died in a hunting accident, then the discovery of his wife’s adultery. In the best tradition, all he has to do is put on the role of the explorer and set off for who knows where.

Of course, the expedition turns out to be yet another idiotic choice. In a few weeks, everything falls apart. Tony falls ill with malaria and loses his travel companion. A Mr. Todd thinks about saving him: a superb cross between the Conradian Kurtz and the psychopathic Annie Wilkes, in short, one of those absurd heroes that only Waugh’s satirical genius could have given birth. As it happens, in fact, Mr Todd, although he has a passion for Dickens, of which he owns all the books, is also hopelessly illiterate. That’s right, he can’t read. The son of an Indian and a missionary from Barbados (from whom he inherited a decent library), Todd is English-speaking but has never learned to read and has never moved from his shack in a clearing in the middle of an impenetrable forest. Until recently, he had a personal reader: a Georgetown black man who earned his loaf by reading Dickens’ novels to his master. Long dead, he left the eccentric Mr Todd orphaned with the adventures of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. Long story short, when Todd discovers that Last is fully literate, aware that the gentleman will never be able to leave that place without his help, he imprisons him by forcing him to read to him every damn evening and until death do us part, long passages from the great Dickensian masterpieces. Well, if this isn’t some sublime satire against a passion for reading, then I really don’t know where else to look. It’s not clear how some people think that reading makes us better people.

It was of Tony Last and his relentless jailer that I was thinking the other night when, at dinner with my generous editor, I learned not without satisfaction that for some time the book market, chronically plagued by sales crises and financial shortages, has been going through. a season if not thriving at least encouragingly.

[…] Maybe when people are happy or have better things to do they don’t read. Perhaps reading is a mournful and solipsistic fallback. Of course it can also be seen otherwise. When life becomes a damn serious thing then good old introspection is back in vogue. However you see it, it seems that the pandemic has acted on certain impressionable consciences such as the perverse Mr Todd, forcing some of us to shut up at home to read Dickens.

Yet, net of these slightly snobbish cynicisms inspired by that grim satanasso [?] Evelyn Waugh, and although [my editor] has an irredeemable hatred for the pandemic in progress, it is nice to know that books (Cinderella with broken soles) are doing less worse than usual. […]

The translation is by Google with a few edits. The Google program does not have an English equivalent for “saltanasso” which is used as a description of Evelyn Waugh. Perhaps one of our readers can give some help with that in a comment as provided below.
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Roundup: From Goldfinger to What’s Become of Waring?

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Guardian has announced the death earlier this month of actress Margaret Nolan (1943-2020). She had

…a noticeable role in the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night (as the girl accompanying Wilfrid Brambell in a casino), and the James Bond film Goldfinger, as the masseuse Dink. Nolan also appeared in Goldfinger’s celebrated title sequence, wearing a gold bikini and with images projected on her skin – though in the film itself it was Shirley Eaton who played Jill Masterson, the girl smothered to death by gold paint.

Later, she began to appear in TV films and was given a part in the 1981 Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. She was Effie, one of the “dancehall girls” picked up by Sebastian, Charles and Boy Mulcaster at Ma Mayfield’s (Book One, Chapter V). Indeed, Effie in the novel was Boy’s alleged favorite from previous visits to the Mayfield establishment, but she failed to recognise him on this later occasion. According to the Guardian, the portrayal of Effie was one of the last screen roles in which Nolan appeared before she turned her attention to political theatre and the visual arts. She was 76. R. I. P.

–William Boyd was interviewed in a recent issue of the New Statesman:

Q. What would be your Mastermind specialist subject?

A. I’m one of those people who knows a little bit about a lot of things – I don’t really have a niche area of expertise. Postwar British artists, perhaps. Or the life and work of Evelyn Waugh.

I’m afraid TV comedian Russell Kane may have already played the Evelyn Waugh card on Mastermind.  Perhaps there is enough material there for another round.

–Another remake of P G Wodehouse has been published. This is reviewed in The Critic by Alexander Larman. It is written by Ben Schott (his second example of a Wodehouse homage novel) and is entitled Jeeves and the Leap of Faith. According to Larman:

…the book is a combination of the old and new, done with panache and wit. There is a plot about Bertie attempting to save the Drones’ Club from financial ruin by organising a complex series of bets that could have emerged from the pages of any of Wodehouse’s novels, but, just as Schott’s earlier book touched on darker and more dramatic subjects than the originals would have ventured, so this one strays into less frivolous territory.

One of the reasons these Wodehouse homage novels succeed is credited  by Larman to Evelyn Waugh who:

…famously said, “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” Nobody has ever sat down to read about the adventures of Jeeves, Bertie, Bingo Little, Gussie Fink-Nottle, the terrifying Aunt Agatha and Roderick Spode (to say nothing of his black short-wearing followers) and expected gritty social realism.

—Harper’s Magazine has a long review by Christopher Beha of William Gaddis’s first two novels: The Recognitions and J R.  These have been reprinted recently by New York Review Books as NYRB Classics. Beha explains at some length about why these books have been deemed “difficult” by readers.  At one point he compares Gaddis to Waugh:

Where the much remarked-upon “difficulty” that plagues The Recognitions has to do with its content—the untranslated chunks of foreign languages, the range of esoteric references—J R’s is formal: 770 pages of mostly unattributed dialogue, with no chapter breaks and little in the way of exposition or scene setting. But in both cases, the challenge is exaggerated. A good deal of The Recognitions’ learnedness is there for effect. One need not know Hungarian or the works of Athanasius to understand or enjoy the book. As for J R, Gaddis borrowed its polyphonic form—which perfectly fits a book about the absence of objective values that might otherwise provide a proper context for our lives—from Waugh and Ronald Firbank, neither a writer considered unwelcoming to readers, and like them he uses it to great comic ends, piling on misunderstandings and miscommunications. Gaddis has an incredible knack for the cadence of spoken English, and once a reader catches the rhythm of the book the difficulties largely disappear.

–The Quarterly Review has an essay by Bill Hartley on the art of writing biography. This is entitled “The Lives of Others” and contains this comment relevant to our remit:

Whilst an on-form [Sir Richard] Burton might be the ideal fantasy dinner party guest, Evelyn Waugh probably wouldn’t feature. Even HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother discovered how obnoxious he could be. This incident and many others are recounted in Selina Hastings’ Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (1994). The author manages to keep us consistently interested in a man whom one reviewer described as a ‘miserable rotter’. Waugh of course wasn’t the only ‘swine who could write well’ but the author manages to salvage some of the fun which can be found in his writing as she recounts his appalling snobbery, and often self-inflicted disasters. Out of his largely undistinguished military career came the wonderful Sword Of Honour trilogy. The Army, glad to see the back of him, gave him leave (in the midst of the Second World War!) to write Brideshead Revisited. Were it not for this biography then the best advice might be to experience Waugh only through his own writings.

–Finally, Duncan McLaren has posted another article (entitled “What’s Become of Waugh?”) in his series comparing the writings of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. In this, he traces the inter-relations between the two writers and Duckworths, the publishers of Waugh’s 1930s nonfiction, up to a point, and where Powell worked in a menial position. McLaren explains how Duckworths, through bad management, lost out on Waugh’s fiction and, ultimately, on his nonfiction as well. He also adds an original and interesting analysis of how Powell comes to portray this saga in his 1929 novel What’s Become of Waring?. It makes a good story and is an entertaining way to learn about the publication details of both authors’ early writings. McLaren also adds to the story with his usual colorful illustrations of the books (mostly with dustjackets) he is writing about.

 

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Virtual Book Launch for Helena

Posted on October 17, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford University Press and Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project have announced a virtual book launch for the publication of Helena. The book (volume 11 of the Complete Works) will be published next month in the UK, with North American publication to follow in January 2021.  Here’s the text of the announcement:

The launch will feature a talk by Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson and General Editor of the series, and a Q&A with Helena’s editor, Professor Sara Haslam. We will hear also from other editors in this landmark series as well as, we hope, from Waugh himself in a recorded reading of what he called his best book.

Members of the Evelyn Waugh Society are invited to attend via zoom.com. The book launch is scheduled for 6-8pm GMT on Wednesday 11 November 2020. That would be midday/late morning in North American time zones. Portions of the book launch will be posted on the internet afterwards for those unable to attend on zoom.com. Details for joining the book launch will be provided separately.

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Vile Bodies BBC Radio Adaptation Posted

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

A 90-minute BBC Radio adaptation of Vile Bodies has been posted on YouTube. The posting is by ChestertonRadio.com.  It is also available on other sites. The adaptation was written by Barry Campbell and was first broadcast on 31 October 1970 in the BBC’s Saturday Night Theatre series. Campbell also wrote an 11-episode radio adaptation of Sword of Honour which was broadcast as an independent production in 1974.  Saturday Night Theatre ran for over 50 years from 1943 to 1996. Actors featuring in the production include John Standing as Adam Fenwick-Symes, Lynn Redgrave as Agatha Runcible and Anna Cropper as Nina Blount.

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