Muggeridge Anniversary

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The National Review has posted both print and audio versions of an article in which M D Aeschliman notes the upcoming 30th anniversary of Malcolm Muggeridge’s death. It opens with this:

Malcolm Muggeridge died 30 years ago and had so variegated a career that it is hard to bring into focus and evaluate—acidulous literary wit; journalistic, satirical, and historical writer; influential broadcaster and interviewer; world traveler; editor, memoirist, and the most influential lay Christian apologist since the death of C. S. Lewis in 1963. But his extraordinary life and achievement can best be understood in light of two themes or dimensions. The first was unusual in his time but has subsequently become a common feature of contemporary life: mobility. The second remains painfully problematic: the quest for an authoritative morality in a radically pluralistic, relativistic era.

The article then explores Muggeridge’s “mobility” in the 1930-40s through teaching in England and India, journalism highlighted by a trip to the Soviet Union at the height of the purges, intelligence work in WWII which brought him into contact with Graham Greene and the Cambridge spies. He also wrote several books, some of which attracted notable attention. These included:

a study of Samuel Butler (1936), writing for a magazine edited by Graham Greene, and writing an existential novel, In a Valley of This Restless Mind (1938; highly praised by Evelyn Waugh in The Spectator), and a satirical-documentary history, The Thirties (1940), that was reviewed and praised by George Orwell, who became a good friend for the remainder of his life.

He kept moving after the war as well and expanded into broadcasting, finally gravitating toward “authoritative morality” when he converted to the Roman Catholic church. The article briefly mentions his interface with Evelyn Waugh:

Yet the existential quest for a transcendent morality that would order and evaluate these developments had become increasingly agonizing. Evelyn Waugh had said in 1938 of Muggeridge’s novel In a Valley of This Restless Mind that “its range includes satirical reportage and something very near prophecy.” Many years later the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor said that Muggeridge’s novel Winter in Moscow was the best English-language book ever written on Soviet Russia, an evaluation reaffirmed more recently by the historian Norman Stone. In 1940, George Orwell praised Muggeridge’s satirical-documentary chronicle The Thirties, and the two men became such close friends that Orwell asked Muggeridge to write his biography. He never did, but he contributed a powerful essay on him, “A Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” to Miriam Gross’s volume The World of George Orwell (1971). He said of Orwell that “he loved the past, hated the present, and dreaded the future.”

These references leave the impression that Waugh was one of Muggeridge’s admirers. Quite the reverse, it turns out.  Waugh did admire his early novel and his review of that is included in Essays, Articles and Reviews (p. 232). But Waugh was less kind to a post-war novel.  This was Affairs of the Heart reviewed in The Tablet, 4 February 1950 (not reprinted). Muggeridge in his autobiography says that Waugh “spoke of the promise of ‘serious interests’ which had not been fulfilled.” The Infernal Grove (1974), p. 202.

Indeed, Waugh had come to so dislike Muggeridge (perhaps because of his notoriety as an opinionated broadcaster and journalist), that he publicly snubbed him at a Foyle’s 1957 book launch luncheon for The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Muggeridge was scheduled to say a few supportive words and describes the results in his autobiography. He had intended to offer an:

…homage to a writer and a book I greatly admired [but this] turned into a meandering, facetious discourse while Waugh himself engaged in a pantomime act with an ear-trumpet he then affected.

Waugh was widely reported in the press to have removed the ear-trumpet when Muggeridge rose to speak, noisily place it on the table in front of him and then stare blankly into space as Muggeridge spoke. Waugh did not live to witness Muggeridge’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, which took place in 1982. Whether that would have made any difference is hard to say. Muggeridge died on 14 November 1990.

 

 

 

 

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Roundup: Boyd, Banville and Paper Hats

Posted on October 12, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Novelist William Boyd is interviewed in The Times by Robbie Millen. This is on the occasion of the publication of Boyd’s new novel Trio  which is about the creation of a film in the late 1960s. After establishing Boyd’s somewhat tenuous connection with the 60s (he was a schoolboy at the time, in a remote boarding school), the topic segues to Boyd’s career. Although he has never won a Booker Prize, he notes that all 16 of his novels are still in print:

… “I remember when my second novel was published, An Ice-Cream War, in 1982. It was described, rather patronisingly, as ‘traditional’. I was quite happy to accept the label. I am a realistic novelist, I invent my characters, I invent their worlds, I use my imagination. This tradition of the English novel has never gone away.

“If I was a painter, I’d be a figurative painter, not an abstract painter. Freud, Hockney, Frank Auerbach. They are essentially figurative painters; they are not conceptual artists. Same with the world of literature; there are trends and fashion and zeitgeist movements, but the broad river of realistic novel writing flows on. I’m squarely in that tradition and unapologetically so.”[…]

Before A Good Man in Africa appeared he had written three dud novels that were never published. He regards these as his “apprenticeship” and “on-the-job learning”. Nothing is wasted. He “cannibalised their good parts” for later novels. One section set in west Africa in Solo, his James Bond continuation thriller, was lifted from one of these failed books. […]

He does seem to be forever working: 16 novels, short story collections, screen adaptations of his novels Any Human Heart and his spy novel Restless, and of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and Sword of Honour (read An Ice-Cream War and you will see wonderful echoes of early Waugh at his funniest and most absurd). An original screenplay, Spy City, set in Berlin in 1961, the summer before the wall went up, is due to be broadcast this year.

Boyd’s new novel will be published early next year in the US.

–A review of Boyd’s book appears in the current issue of the fortnightly literary newsletter Books from Scotland. This is by David Robinson who sees a Wavian influence in one of the characters. This is Elfrida:

… the [film] director’s wife, [who] is falling apart. It’s been ten years since she wrote her third novel, her writer’s block growing ever wider as she sinks into alcoholism. Maybe the seeds of it were there right at the start of her career, when she was heralded as ‘the new Virginia Woolf’ – an epithet she is unable to shake off, even though she can’t stand Woolf’s novels. Finally, she has an epiphany: she realises the will only be able to write if she kills off Woolf in her own fiction, so she starts writing about the summer’s day in 1941 in which Woolf waded into a river weighted down by stones. That happened only about 15 miles from Beachy Head, where Elfrida’s husband sets the denouement of his film, in which his two stars prepare to do what we now know as ‘a Thelma and Louise’ over the East Sussex cliff. Suicide – both fictional and real – is in the air.

Boyd has always acknowledged the influence of Evelyn Waugh – the ‘glittering, malevolent brilliance’ of early comedies more than his later works – and there are indeed strong echoes of it in the Elfrida chapters. She drinks remorselessly, lying about it all the time, yet here at last is a way out. Why, she wonders, has it taken her so long for this recension? She looks it up. No, wrong word. Recessional? No. ‘”Transfiguration” was the word she needed. It had been a transfiguration, a transformation, something beautiful, sublime had happened – a metamorphosis.’

–Writer Lisa Hilton writes about a recent seaside hike on the Sussex coast. This appears in The Critic and is entitled “Five go mad for fish and chips”. It opens with this:

Simplicity, thought Evelyn Waugh, was an overrated quality. Questioning whether “the whole business of civilised taste is not a fraud put upon us by shops and restaurants”, he nonetheless concluded that delicacies are not merely luxuries which we have been taught to prefer because they are exclusive, but “a far from negligible consolation for some of the assaults and deceptions by which civilisation seeks to rectify the balance of good fortune”.

Waugh would have been unimpressed by his friend Diana Mitford’s concoction of a frugal beach lunch on the Sussex coast during the period when her in-laws, the Guinness family, were building Bailiffscourt, their house at Climping. Before the astonished eyes of the company, the Hon Miss Mitford fried eggs on a portable stove. “I’ve never heard of such a thing, it’s too clever,” marvelled Mrs Guinness. Little has happened gastronomically in Climping since, but the cafĂ© in the car park is reputed to do a good crab sandwich.

The article proceeds to the next stop in Littlehampton where a meal at the East Beach Cafe is described.

–Novelist and literary critic John Banville has recently revealed that he has been writing mystery novels for several years under pseudonyms. He has now broken cover and written one (Snow) under his own name. According to the review by Maureen Corrigan in the Washington Post, he may not have done himself a favor:

“Snow” is set in 1950s rural Ireland, during a freak blizzard. The murder victim is one of those social-climbing Catholic priests — himself straight out of an Evelyn Waugh novel — who attaches himself to the landed gentry, even though the landed gentry of Ballyglass House are straggling members of the Protestant landowning class. A frequent guest at Ballyglass House, Father Tom Lawless has been discovered dead — and gruesomely castrated — in the aforementioned library. As Chekhov should have said: “If in Chapter One you have murdered a priest, then by the final chapters of the novel, vengeful sexual abuse survivors must turn up.”

She goes on to compare the book to the game of Clue (in the UK, Cluedo).

–A letter by Waugh is included in a recent selection by Shaun Usher entitled Letters of Note: War. This is the latest in a series published by Penguin, collecting letters from various sources on a given topic. Others topics have included Cats, Music, Love and Art. The Waugh letter that is selected is the one sent to his wife in March 1942 describing the removal of a tree from a local aristocrat’s garden by some of his fellow commandos who are training in Scotland.

–Finally, A N Wilson has reposted the review he wrote in The Tablet of the recent biography of Graham Greene. See previous post. Wilson is reminded of

…Time magazine’s article on the publication of The End of the Affair: “NOVELIST GRAHAM GREENE: Adultery can lead to sainthood”. If this doctine is true , Greene, long before he died,  must have been  well on his way to  sanctification . Evelyn Waugh, who expressed the view to a friend that Greene was a saint, was asked “But, what about Mrs Walston? ” This was the vampish  Catherine Walston, one of Greene’s longest-standing mistresses, who herself became a Catholic. The new biography reminds us,  “A wisecrack went round that they had made love behind all the high altars of Europe”. Waugh’s reply to his censorious friend was this. “In the middle ages, there was a Pope who was so holy that he felt in danger of people revering his sanctity, which would lead to spiritual pride. So he took to appearing in the streets of Rome wearing a ridiculous paper hat, so that no one could take him too seriously. Mrs Walston is Graham’s paper hat”.

 

 

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“92 Days” Complete Works Edition Announced

Posted on October 10, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford University Press has announced the UK publication date for its definitive edition of Waugh’s 1934 travel book Ninety-Two Days. This will appear in the UK on 25 February 2021, the same UK publication date as the previously-announced A Tourist In Africa. See previous post. US publication details are not yet available. Ninety-Two Days will be volume 22 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh and is edited by Douglas Lane Patey, who previously wrote a biography of Waugh published in 1998. Here’s the OUP’s description:

This is the first fully annotated, critical edition of the travel book Ninety-Two Days (1934), Evelyn Waugh’s account of an arduous journey through British Guiana and northern Brazil that provided crucial material for what many consider his finest novel, A Handful of Dust. A biographical and historical introduction places the work in the context of Waugh’s life, and among other travel books written about the area; discusses how the text evolved from manuscript to print; and connects it with other literary works such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and with the persistent myth of the lost city of El Dorado. The appendices include excerpts from works mentioned in the text which are not readily available elsewhere, including those by Peter Fleming and Father Cuthbert Carey-Elwes.

Professor Patey teaches at Smith College and is an honorary member of the Evelyn Waugh Society. The OUP’s announcement includes this biographical sketch:

A specialist in eighteenth-century literature and satire, Douglas Lane Patey grew up in Corning, New York. After attending Hamilton College he took graduate degrees at the University of Virginia, and since 1979 has taught in the Department of Engilsh Language and LIterature at Smith College (Northampton, MA). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Guggenhaim Foundation. He is the author of Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (CUP, 1984; reprinted 2009), and The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography (Blackwell, 1998; 2nd edition 2001).

 

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90th Anniversary of Waugh’s First Visit to Ethiopia: 10 October 1930

Posted on October 9, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The following post is by Waugh Society member Milena Borden and is a preliminary version of a longer article that is being prepared for publication in a future issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies:

In July, it was reported that the bust of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie which stood in Cannizaro Park in Wimbledon was destroyed by a group of Ethiopian diaspora. Shortly afterwards the Friends of Cannizaro Park’s website published a short message thanking those who wrote to them about it and expressed hopes that there will be better news about the fate of the statue soon. It was also reported that the police have launched an investigation in relation to the incident. The attack on the statue was linked to the death of the Ethiopian singer Hachalu Hundessa who was shot dead in June in Addis Ababa followed by waves of protests.

I recently visited the Cannizaro Park where the Emperor’s statue stood but all what was left from it was the pavement foundation on which it was erected. The sign “Haile Selassie Statue” still points towards the location but there were only three benches within a small and secluded green area suitable for a picnic.

Haile Selassie had a turbulent life by all standards. In 1930, he acquired the title of the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Tafari Makonnen and was crowned as the Negusa Negast, the King of the Kings of Ethiopia. Five years later, Italy invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and Selassie was exiled in Britain until 1940. He triumphantly returned to rule the country until 1974 when after a military coup he died in detention under suspicious circumstances.

The most famous account of the Emperor Haile Selassie’s coronation is written by Evelyn Waugh who spent five months in Abyssinia from 10 October 1930 to early March 1931. Waugh went as a correspondent of The Times and the Daily Express but he also wrote in detail about the events in Addis Ababa in his travel book Remote People (1931). In the biography of Selassie, King of Kings  (2015), Asfa-Wossen Asserate regrets that Waugh focused on the entertaining aspects of the coronation ceremony and especially on the faux-pas of the international journalists, officials and diplomats who attended. Assarete, who is a living relative of the Emperor, writes that Waugh was “a typical English snob under the blazing African sun” and supports this claim with the opinion of others who were present. According to him both the explorer Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003) and the Duke of Gloucester (1900-1974) who represented Great Britain at the event disliked Waugh.

At the time of his first Abyssinian adventure Waugh was a 27-year old Catholic convert. He was taken by the amusing stories he heard about the country from his close friend Alistair Graham, who was then a diplomat in Cairo. Waugh decided to explore one of the most exotic and oldest African Christian traditions and went to Abyssinia on a journalistic assignment. From there he wrote 13 reports which gained him the approval of the Times editor.1

From reading them as well as Remote People one is left with the impression that Waugh was not a fan of the Ethiopian royalty. He usually described the Emperor in purely informative terms underlining his monarchical ambitions:  “
he wished to impress on his European visitors that Ethiopia was no mere agglomeration of barbarous tribes open to foreign exploitation, but a powerful, organised, modern state. He wanted to impress on his own countrymen that he was no paramount chief of a dozen independent communities, but an absolute monarch recognised on equal terms by the monarchies and governments of the great world.”  However, while in the Ethiopian capital, Waugh purchased a portrait by a native artist of the Emperor, which was made the frontispiece of Remote People, and the painting was hung in Piers Court where he lived with his family until 1956.

As the world moved on towards the Second World War, the Ethiopian politics intensified and so did Waugh’s career as a writer and a journalist. In 1936 he went back to Ethiopia under very different political circumstances but again as a journalist although a more mature one. He supported the Italian invasion of Ethiopia led by the Fascist leader Mussolini. At the same time Britain became the first country to recognise Victor Emmanuel III as the emperor of Ethiopia. Waugh’s views about the Italian campaign are well documented in his book Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). Although he closely followed Ethiopian politics, his focus was primarily on the coverage of the international press during the conflict.

It is also interesting and perhaps typical of him that he was critical of the British policy towards the conflict: ”
I believe that the misfortunes that have fallen upon both peoples – the slaughter and terror on one side, the crippling expenditure on the other – are primarily due to the policy pursued by the British government. The Emperor believed that if he could win the support of the League, there would be decisive action on his behalf
”. The Italian-Ethiopian conflict provoked a political crisis in Britain. Officially the government was against the Italian aggression in Ethiopia but at the same time also wanted to maintain good relations with Italy as part of its appeasement policy. It entered secret negotiations with France over a compromise which was leaked to the public and viewed as a pact with the devil. Meanwhile the League of Nations was still debating how to deal with the Italian aggression, but the resistance in Ethiopia collapsed.

Waugh was never part of the inner circle of the Emperor, neither when he attended his coronation nor during his exile in Britain. He died ten years before Selassie who was deposed in 1974. With his end, the 3000 year history of the Ethiopian Empire, which Waugh admired, drew to a close. It is beyond doubt that, had he lived, he would have disapproved of Selassie’s authoritarian modernisation of the country, and especially of his flirtations with the Soviet Union and Tito during the 1960-70s. But it is easy to imagine that he would have been interested in Selassie’s highly ceremonial reburial in Addis Ababa in 2000 with only a few western journalists in attendance. As far as the most recent destruction in Cannizaro Park, Waugh probably would have thought about it as yet one more predictable misunderstanding between the Emperor and the world.

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Peregrine Worsthorne 1923-2020: RIP

Posted on October 8, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Noted 20th century journalist Peregrine Worsthorne has died at the age of 97. He was an admirer and chronicler of the aristocracy. Waugh shared some of his admiration but also satirized the upper classes. In Worsthorne’s case, he was more likely to be the subject of satire rather than its author. Here are some excerpts from the obituary in The Independent newspaper, which describes his:

… career as an eminent contrarian. First as a columnist and then as editor of The Sunday Telegraph, Worsthorne taunted the left and encouraged the Conservative Party to remain loyal to the concept of a ruling class. He could be naive, sometimes charming, and often funny, particularly when he took to the road. He wrote memorable accounts of journeys to California, Scotland and Australia, which were collected in an amusing book titled Peregrinations; Alan Watkins said fondly that on his travels Worsthorne appeared to be a combination of Lord Curzon and Mr Pooter. […]

He was sent to school at Stowe, where he behaved like a snob and posed as a Roman Catholic bigot. He confessed that, had he gone to a Catholic school, he might well have championed Protestantism. […] His war was spent in Phantom, an intelligence unit advancing into Germany. Worsthorne was recruited, like a character in Evelyn Waugh’s War Trilogy, at the bar of White’s Club. He said that war sorted out the men from the boys and that he himself had not yet discovered into which category he fell. […]
His first proper job was at The Times, where he felt he belonged. He was sent to Washington DC as deputy to The Times’s correspondent. Worsthorne took the Republican Party seriously. In 1952, when most of his colleagues were dazzled by the intelligent liberalism of Adlai Stevenson, Worsthorne accurately forecast a win for Dwight Eisenhower. He also had sympathetic words to say about Senator Joe McCarthy. He thought that Westminster could also benefit from a dose of anti-communism.
Worsthorne soon found himself reporting from Ottawa instead of Washington. Although staunchly anticommunist, Waugh did not fall for McCarthy’s brand of witch-hunting politics, as he explained in a 1960 article in The Spectator. Despite the urging of William F Buckley Jr (a McCarthy apologist), Waugh never wavered in his opposition.
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A Tale of Two Atwaters

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has posted an article about an interesting crossover between novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. On Waugh’s side this appears in Work Suspended (written 1939/published 1942) in which the minor character of Arthur Atwater appears. The connection he sees is with Powell’s first novel Afternoon Men (1931). The major character and quintessential “afternoon man” in that novel is William Atwater. But the connection is not limited to the name, as McLaren explains more fully in his article.

McLaren also sees obvious connections written by Powell into Afternoon Men which were he believes based on Waugh’s Vile Bodies published the previous year to great acclaim. Powell was writing about the same Bright Young People as Waugh but Powell’s crowd were less bright and probabably a bit older than Waugh’s. One of the characters in Powell’s novel named Pringle would probably have reminded Waugh of elements of his own life at the time his first marriage broke up.

McLaren also explains Powell’s relationship with Waugh and with Waugh’s first wife and her second husband John Heygate and how this clouded the relationship between the two writers during the 1930s. Powell also wrote the Heygates into his 1937 novel Agents and Patients as characters with the name Maltravers which McLaren thinks was taken from a Waugh chatacter in Decline and Fall.

The article is available here and is worth reading even if one lacks familiarity with Powell’s books.

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Roundup: Censorship and Adaptation

Posted on October 2, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–There has been a colloquy in the provincial British press about racist language in Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief. This was begun in an article or letter by Michael O’Neill of Penarth that was reproduced from the Western Mail. O’Neill reviewed the critical reception of the novel after his recent reading. One group concentrated their comments on the comic content of the book, recognizing that much of it was at the expense of Africans but also noting that the British diplomats and officials in the African setting are equal opportunity targets for Waugh’s satire. Others felt that the repeated use of one particularly offensive word to describe Africans required in today’s cultural environment some censorship. O’Neill concludes:

It’s not just a question of vocabulary, but the use of certain words may send messages as to the opinions of the author and also what the political and social likings of the possible readers will be.

In 1932, opinions were definitely different from today, but the issue of the book I have is a paperback (Penguin Classic) which has seen several reprints in more recent years. The edition I have was of 1965, reprinted in 2000. Waugh died in 1966, and posthumous editions of Black Mischief could be amended, with the permission of the literary executors if necessary, the deletion of a few unacceptable words going a long way to giving that novel some greater respectability while at the same time one does not wish to tread clumsily on the toes of someone who was a leading creative writer whose novels as a whole have been greatly enjoyed by generations of readers.

The following day, Ray Jenkins of Cardiff offered this response which was reposted from the South Wales Echo:

Personally, I do not feel that it would be helpful to amend the text of Evelyn Waugh’s novels to remove offensive words and attitudes, as they provide a context for the world in which his characters live. Faulkner frequently uses the word to which I think Mr O’ Neill is referring, but I believe Waugh is far more problematic than other outstanding English novelists like Hardy, Forster, Graham Greene and the sadly underrated LP Hartley, perhaps because he was both a snob and the closest to the Establishment of his time.

Unless a text is intended to be assigned to school children, it would seem to me no further explanation or censorship should be needed, certainly not in editions sold to the public such as the Penguin edition Michael O’Neill was reading. Mark Twain’s book Huckleberry Finn uses the same term frequently. Because of its relative importance in the American canon, it is more likely to be assigned reading by high school students. I can’t say whether there is a consensus among American publishers and educators, but I would hope that Twain’s now classical references are not removed from the text of non-school editions. This is a more serious dilemma for American educators and publishers than for their British counterparts given the comparative status of Huckleberry Finn that was written for a younger readership. Even if it means that Waugh’s book (never intended for sixth formers) doesn’t make it into A-level reading lists, that sacrifice is preferable to set a bad precedent by censoring it.

–William Boyd writing in The Sunday Times has reviewed the practice of adapting novels to produce screenplays. He begins with the observation of the dominance of adaptations in the film industry:

My own experience is typical. Of the 20 produced films, short films and television series based on my screenplays, 14 are adaptations. I have adapted novels by Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, the Sword of Honour trilogy), Mario Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) and Joyce Cary (Mister Johnson). Not to mention adapting the lives of Charlie Chaplin and William Shakespeare and five of my own novels and three short stories. Adaptation is far and away the dominant form — original screenplays are inevitably the poor cousin, it appears.

He then describes four “elephants in the room” when comparing the quality of adaptations to original screenplays. The first and most obvious is the relative length of novels in relation to the time limit of films (usually 90 minutes/two hours):

It’s an elementary calculation to realise that most novels — even average-sized novels of 350 pages —won’t fit into the normal running times of films. As a result, most screen adaptations are in fact savage redactions of the novels or books they are based on. My Sword of Honour adaptation turned three medium-sized novels into three hours of television. A lot is necessarily missing. I would say that in the average adaptation at least 50 per cent of the adapted book never makes it to the screen. Already we are in a world of huge compromises. But there are more radical accommodations and impossibilities up ahead.

He goes on to describe the other three elephants in the cutting room, as it were, and wonders why with, all the difficulties, writers even bother with adaptations:

As a thought experiment, draw up a list of your ten favourite films. I would be surprised if the majority were not based on original screenplays. It’s certainly true of my top ten. Film — and I use the term as a catch-all to include television, or indeed anything shot with any kind of camera — is a wonderful, powerful art form, but most of the time, 75 per cent of the time, it is trying to be, or to mimic as best it can, something else: a novel or a short story, or a biography or an investigative newspaper article, and so forth.

But he does see some reward to be extracted from a successful adaptation:

The fact that, at the end of the day, a long novel has been rethought and reconceived as a good film (if you’re very lucky) is no mean achievement. We toil in an unforgiving vineyard, but sometimes the wine we manage to make can be heady.

In a comment to Boyd’s rhetorical question of why such a large percentage of films are adaptations, one reader noted that the answer was that adaptations were more likely to be funded than original scripts because they are deemed to entail less risk.

—The Times in a feature length article by Andrew Billen considers several topics that will become conversation points in the new TV series of The Crown, appearing on Netflix next week. This one will play out during what have come to be known both as the Eighties and the Thatcher Years:

Before, there was high society and low. The Eighties created new league divisions at the top, and relegated those British untouched by the boom to something called the underclass. At the society’s zenith, inspired, as far as anyone can work out, by Granada’s 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, were the Sloanes.

These were the rebranded scions of the gentry, a generation of unapologetic brayers who called champagne “champers” or “poo” (after shampoo) and sprayed as much of it as they drank. They wallowed in their mostly inherited wealth, but did so, wriggling through the Eighties’ great loophole, ironically. Peter York and Ann Barr’s Official Sloane Ranger Handbook came out in 1982 and became a Ned Sherrin revue in 1985. If you didn’t like it, you had suffered a sense of humour failure.

Diana was a Sloane and never got the joke — which turned out in the end to be on her husband — either. Within a few years of the decade’s end she and her sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson had turned the royal family into a soap opera far more vulgar than The Crown. In the Eighties, however, their contribution was still significant. They had made our stuffy royalty into something glossy enough for fashion magazine covers.

–Waugh’s French publisher has issued a new edition of Pinfold. This is L’ÉPREUVE DE GILBERT PINFOLD, translated and with an introduction by Claude Elsen. It is issued in Robert Laffont’s Pavillons Poche series.

–Finally, The Independent newspaper polled its contributors to determine what were the best Biblical references that had been turned into book titles. One of the 10 titles was by Waugh:

9. Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh. Philippians 3:21. Nominated by Allan Holloway, Adrian Hilton and Ian Greenfinch.

Oddly, the quotation which appears as the books epigraph is from Alice Through the Looking Glass and not Philippians. Among the other titles selected were Stephen Fry’s Moab Is My Washpot and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

 

 

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Conversion Anniversary

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The American Spectator, a conservative journal, has an article by Tom Raabe marking the 90th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism on 29 September 1930. Raabe remarks that, at first, the conversion did not have much impact on Waugh’s writing, which continued with the comic satires he had begun with his pre-conversion novels Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies nor did his behavior change much:

Evelyn Waugh was in life everything that good Catholics, not to mention Christians in general, abjure, or are supposed to abjure. He was a short-tempered, rude, cranky, insulting, bibulous, intentionally unkind and insensitive man who didn’t much like his children and who, increasingly deaf in his later years, frequently carried with him an ear trumpet, nearly two feet long and comically old-fashioned, that he would raise to his ear when he was speaking and lower when he was spoken to. How can you not love a guy like that?

He may have continued to exhibit many of the same characteristics after his  conversion but with Brideshead Revisited in 1945 his writing changed. It was more what he wrote about than how he wrote it, but the change did not go down well with his critics. Raabe quotes to this effect Edmund Wilson, Joseph Frank, Kingsley Amis, Bridgid Trophy and Philip Toynbee.  According to Raabe, with Brideshead:

…Waugh departs from reliance on witty repartee (Ă  la Ronald Firbank, an influence in Waugh’s earlier books), doesn’t include stand-alone humorous scenes, and brings the cast of characters into a religious milieu — the main characters are all set against a backdrop of faith. The patriarch of the central family, the Marchmains, and one son are wayward Catholics who, each in his own way, come back to the church in the end — one on his deathbed; the other, dissipated and repentant, at a religious house in Morocco. The mother and a daughter are as staunch in faith as can be; a different daughter is engaging in extramarital affairs but is wracked by guilt and eventually returns to the church. And the narrator, Charles Ryder, an atheist condemning Catholicism as “mumbo-jumbo” throughout, finds a spiritual home in the church at the end. Intellectuals dismissed the novel as a “Roman tract.”

It didn’t help that the Marchmains were aristocrats at a time when that became unfashionable among literary tastemakers. But Raabe is not persuaded that the wave of left-wing critical objections warrants a lower estimation of Waugh’s reputation . He concludes: “As all conservatives, Waugh possessed a realistic view of human nature, for we are all one step from barbarity without God’s grace.”

 

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Michaelmas Observed

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In a short article in the Daily Telegraph, Christopher Howse explains the meaning and importance of St Michael whose day is marked tomorrow (29 September) as Michaelmas. Howse is reminded of a prayer to St Michael which is mentioned in one of Evelyn Waugh’s novels:

On Michaelmas Day two years ago, the Pope asked pious Catholics to say a prayer that seeks the intercession of the Archangel Michael. This surprised some people who thought Pope Francis trendy, because the prayer in question is old-fashioned.

It had, in 1886, been ordered by Pope Leo XIII to be recited after Mass. It begins, in Latin, Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio, “Holy Michael archangel, defend us in the day of battle. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God thrust down to hell Satan and all wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.”

It is this prayer that is remembered by the delirious Guy Crouchback in an open boat drifting in the wartime Mediterranean in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen. But, in his fever, Crouchback directs his words to St Roger of Waybroke, a renaming in his confusion of Sir Roger of Waybroke, a Crusader knight whose chivalry he admires.

The Pope wasn’t invoking Waugh in his call for prayers. He was thinking, he said, of the devil as the “Great Accuser” referred to in the biblical Book of Job, who “goes around the world seeking to accuse”. In the Hebrew of the Book of Job, “Accuser” is a meaning of the name Satan. Satan, in that tale, takes away Job’s wealth and kills his children. Job’s answer is: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

In the novel, Guy recalls the prayer in hospital as he is recovering from the voyage out of Crete and is awakened by a visit from a priest:

There was one clear moment of revelation between great voids when Guy discovered himself holding in his hand, not, as he supposed , Gervase’s medal but the red identity disc of an unknown soldier, and heard himself saying preposterously: ‘Saint Roger of Waybroke defend us in the day of battle and be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil…’ (Officers and Gentlemen, Penguin, 1977, p. 228).

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Waugh’s Politics Surveyed in “The Critic”

Posted on September 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Critic magazine has published another article on Evelyn Waugh following hard on the short article by Eleanor Doughty dealing with Brideshead Revisited, discussed in two previous posts. The latest posting is a feature length article by Bruce Newsome who is lecturer in international relations at the University of San Diego. Given his academic speciality, it is perhaps not too surprising that his topic is Waugh’s politics.

The article opens with this observation: “From the start, Waugh’s writings were political, but since he was on the wrong side of trends, his politics are usually caricatured or ignored.” He then goes through Waugh’s novels one by one, spending most of his time on Vile Bodies, Decline and Fall and (as a group) the war novels and concludes that discussion with this:

Waugh wrote many political critiques but few prescriptions. He is often categorised as a religious conservative, given his conversion to Catholicism, his opposition to the Church’s later reforms, and his offering of Catholicism as a binary solution to modern decline.

Ultimately, the charge of religious conservatism is dissatisfying. Waugh was conservative but not partisan. His novels feature politicians who are equally flawed whatever their party. In fact, parties are rarely clear, although most of his characters are privileged or titled to suggest Conservatives. His second novel (Vile Bodies) satirised the tumultuous politics of the 1920s with a character described as “this week’s prime minister.”

He then takes up Waugh’s non-fiction and considers two books. The first is Waugh in Abyssinia:

The book that most corrupted his reputation was Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), based on a three-week tour, with Italian support, of newly conquered Abyssinia. He had reported from Abyssinia on the Emperor’s coronation in 1930 and from the Abyssinian side during the first months of Italian invasion in 1935. His contempt for its Emperor, ethnic minority rule, slavery, and corrupt clerics was a consistent feature of his commentary.

It should be noted that he made two trips to Abyssinia which are reflected in the book. The first was about 5 months at the end of 1935. He began work on the book in April 1936 but returned to Abyssinia for about 6 weeks in August and September. He finished the book a few days after his return. It is not his best book, as he was well aware. But based on those same trips he wrote Scoop during 1937.  It was certainly one of his best, and Newsome concludes is “known for lampooning the virtue-signalling and fake news in journalism, but also satirised the idealism and false promises of international institutionalists.”

The final book he analyses is Robbery Under Law which is probably Waugh’s most overtly political book and the one that is least read. According to Newsome, the book is:

an erudite history of the [oil] industry and the politics [of Mexico]. He also used the book to set up both communism and fascism as antagonistic to a preferred ideology that he called “individualism.” Waugh’s individualism mixed Christianity, humanism, and classical liberalism, akin to libertarianism.

Unfortunately, his best polemic is the least known. He deferred writing the book until December 1938, and did not finish until April 1939, so it was published too late to capture public attention from the crises in Europe. It sold little and was never reprinted.

It was reprinted by British book club in 1940 but was not otherwise reprinted in his lifetime. There was an American paperback at some point and Penguin finally got around to reprinting it in hard back in 2011 when they reissued all of his books in a uniform edition.

The article concludes:

In popular culture he became a caricature of the unfashionable establishment, which Waugh consciously provoked by keeping servants, wearing garish tweed clothes, and sneering at change. […] Today, Waugh is one of those novelists who is too white, male, English, conservative, and counter-consensus to be admitted in English literature classes. Upper classness alone would prevent his novels from being debuted today (although publishers reprint his past successes). Yet Waugh offers more political insight into how Britain has developed since the 1920s than most of the political fiction published today.

The article is a good survey of the subject, focussing on politics in novels like Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust where you would least expect it as well as those such as the war novels where it is more relevant. Mr Newsome is obviously well acquainted with Waugh’s writings, and his article is on the whole quite well researched. I am not sure he would receive universal agreement that Waugh was a “a confidant of Duff Cooper [in seeing through] Winston Churchill’s chaotic leadership.”   They were barely able to speak to each other without shouting, but I suppose they may have been able to conspire on a point where they knew in advance they were in agreement. It might have been an idea to include what may be Waugh’s ultimate dismissal of party politics in his 1959 response to a Spectator symposium on an upcoming election: “I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign in her choice of servants.”

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