Roundup: Letters and A Lecture

Posted on October 15, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—BBC Radio Four Extra has announced the rebroadcast of a 1996 adaptation of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust. This will be contained in two one-hour episodes. The first is broadcast on Tuesday, 24 October at 0500 repeated at 1500 and 0300, The second will air on Wednesday, 25 October at the same times and both will presumably be available on the internet thereafter. Here is the BBC’s description:

Brenda Last embarks on an affair that is the talk of London society. But there are tragic consequences for all those involved…Starring Tara Fitzgerald and Jonathan Cullen. Evelyn Waugh’s novel was first published in 1934. Dramatised in two parts by Bill Matthews.

Here’s a link.

–The following letter was posted in the New Statesman in response to its 8 September article by Will Lloyd. This was entitled “Evelyn Waugh is laughing at you.” See previous post:

“Depth of Feeling

The piece on Evelyn Waugh by Will Lloyd (Critic at Large, 8 September) might also have contrasted his letters and diaries, showing his morning and evening feelings.
Peter Bottomley MP, House of Commons”

–An auction house in Savannah, GA is offering for sale 4 letters from Evelyn Waugh. Here’s the description:

Four Articles, four articles, autograph card signed with initial, postmarked July 25, 1961, thanking Aubrey Ensor for writing; autograph letter signed, two pages, April 18 [1950], thanking Count Bompiani for luncheon and gift of publications; an autograph letter signed to Count Bompiani, letter of thanks; and an autograph letter signed, one page, unnamed recipient, matted.

Count Bompiani apparently translated at least one of Waugh’s works into Italian. This was Unconditional Surrender which Waugh refers to by its Italian title: Resa incondizionata. Copies of the letters and details of the auction can be found at this link.

–The University of Oklahoma has announced that the following lecture will take place on its campus at 4pm on 27 October.

Rader Lecture

David H. J. Larmour, P. W. Horn Distinguished Professor of Classics, Texas Tech University

“No Sense of an Ending: Satire in Juvenal, Evelyn Waugh and Martin McDonagh.”

Bizzell Library LL104

Details are available here. Here’s an excerpt from Professor Larmour’s c.v. posted on the Texas Tech University website:

…He has particular interests in Greek athletics & the Roman arena, Greek and Roman satire, lyric poetry, narrative theory, and comparative literature. Although grounded in classical philology, his research takes in display and representation of the body in text and space; the ideological underpinnings of competition, exile, memory and nostalgia; and the re-imagining of the classical past in the modern era. He also looks at how the physical borders of empires, and their accompanying mental categories, shape our understanding of the past, who we think we are, and whither we are headed…

His latest book, The Arena of Satire: Juvenal’s Search for Rome (Oklahoma 2016), looks at the connections between satire and the Roman arena, styling the satirist as a literary version of the gladiator who wounds, slices and dismembers his victims, while himself ending up as just one more performer in the imperial spectacle of power and powerlessness. The book also treats the “modern Juvenalians” of the 20th century and Prof. Larmour is now engaged in writing a follow-up monograph on these writers (including Evelyn Waugh, Viktor Pelevin, Martin McDonagh and Michel Houellebecq) and a survey of the genre of Juvenalian Satire in modern times. Other projects include a long-term investigation of the psychology of contested “border-zones” of the Roman Empire and other imperial powers in mainland Europe and beyond…

The full text of the c. v. is available here.

–A newspaper in Franklin County, Maine reviews a new book (Starling House by Alix E Harrow) in which coming of age is one of the principal themes. Here’s an excerpt:

What is coming of age? The prosaic idea of it as simply a transition into adulthood has no literary resonance. Certainly transition is present—the shedding of one state to attain another—but the traits of the transition are subtle and various.

We should first note that the nature of coming of age in adult novels and young adult novels are decidedly different. In the inveterately adult The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh describes it as follows: “He was adding his bit to the wreckage; something that had long irked him, his young heart, and was carrying back instead the artist’s load, a great, shapeless chunk of experience; bearing it home to his ancient and comfortless shore; to work on it hard and long.” This sense of having shed romanticism for artistry is the inverse of the young adult understanding of having attained a solid basis for romance.

The quote is taken from the closing lines of Waugh’s novella summarizing the reflections of Dennis as he returns to England.

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Posted in A Handful of Dust, Academia, Auctions, Lectures, Letters, Newspapers, Radio Programs, The Loved One, Translations, Unconditional Surrender/The End of the Battle, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Letters and A Lecture

Columbus Day Roundup: 2 Podcasts, a Film and a Seminar

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–An interview of Alexander Waugh by writer James Delingpole has been posted on the internet. It is listed as “Delingpod #359” and is available from this link. It was recorded on 1 October 2023. Although the website suggests that a “subscription” is required, I was able to start the 92 minute podcast without registration or payment. The subject is Shakespearian authorship, although toward the end they do seem to be discussing other topics, some of which involve Evelyn Waugh who Alexander describes as a “misfit.”

–Another recently posted podcast features Evelyn Waugh as its main subject. This is part of a series being made by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in which each of the Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 that Burgess selected in his 1984 book of that title are discussed. This latest posting involved a discussion between Andrew Biswell of the Burgess Foundation and Barbara Cooke who is one of the senior editors of the CWEW. They discuss Brideshead Revisited which was Burgess’s selection for inclusion on his list. One of the points they discuss is Burgess’s revelation that he thought A Handful of Dust was a better book, but it fell outside the terms of his list. Here is a link to the  podcast which covers 51 minutes and was recorded last November.

–The new film Saltburn is much in the news this week. It was premiered at the London Film Festival on Wednesday. A review by Peter Bradshaw appeared in the Guardian and explains its interest to our readers. Here are some excerpts:

…Saltburn is an English mystery drama of the high-cheekboned upper classes, watchable but sometimes weirdly overheated and grandiose, with some secondhand posh-effect stylings, a movie derived from Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith, with a bit of Pasolini; it’s supposed to be (mostly) set in 2006, but behaves as if it’s 1932.

Barry Keoghan steps up to his first proper starring role as Oliver Quick, a bright, awkward young lad from Merseyside arriving at Oxford to read English; his haughty private-school college contemporaries sneer at this “scholarship boy” who can hardly bear to talk about his grim family background. From the first, Oliver is dazzled and infatuated by the exquisitely beautiful aristocratic student Felix Catton, played by Jacob Elordi…

Felix holds court to the in-crowd of Oxford’s bright young things, yet on a caprice, he generously befriends timid, lower-class Oliver, who has helped him with his bike; perhaps Oliver is his project or pet or charity case or maybe Felix just feels he can relax around him the way he can’t with other members of the jeunesse dorĂ©e. Touched by Oliver’s sad and shocking stories of his home life, Felix invites him for the summer vacation to his father’s palatial estate, Saltburn, a place of real prewar grandeur that has evidently escaped being sold off to the National Trust. To pre-empt the obvious Brideshead comparison, Emerald Fennell [writer/director] has a line about Evelyn Waugh being supposedly obsessed with the house.

And so we meet his standard-issue eccentric blueblood clan, including father Sir James (Richard E Grant) and sexy-damaged sister Venetia (Alison Oliver); the superb Pike is Felix’s gorgeous, distrait ex-model mother Elsbeth, who has a showstopping line, explaining why she abandoned a youthful experiment with lesbianism and turned to heterosexuality. Then there is cousin-slash-houseguest-sponger Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a mixture of Waugh’s Anthony Blanche and Highsmith’s Freddie Miles, who resents the counter-jumper oik monopolising his best friend, Felix, and shrewdly suspects something slippery about Oliver. Mulligan plays Elsbeth’s morose friend Pamela – the houseguest who will never leave.

Surely cruel, beautiful Felix will tire of his plaything Oliver, who does not belong in this place? But the women of the family variously take a shine to Oliver and things don’t turn out this way. It’s all entertaining enough, although this is a Brideshead-lite, a Brideshead nobility without the Catholicism or the pathos or the wartime regret. …

Robbie Collin writes to much the same effect in the Daily Telegraph:

…“All of Waugh’s characters are based on my family, actually,” Felix glidingly explains – which is writer-director Emerald Fennell acknowledging the debt with an outrageous stage wink. Fennell’s uproarious follow-up to her 2020 debut Promising Young Woman, which opened the London Film Festival tonight, is a sort of Brideshead Regurgitated: a macabre class satire that’s so drunk on its own daring, it all but asks you to hold its hair out of its face while it kneels by the toilet.

For readers uncertain as to whether this qualifies as a recommendation, take it from someone who spent half of the film barking with laughter and the other half watching through his fingers: it is. Set in the mid-noughties, and with the glorious pop soundtrack to prove it, Saltburn is both a riveting cuckoo-in-the-nest psychological thriller and a laser-accurate send-up of the modern English gentry’s crumbly plight…

Saltburn is stowed with terrific performances, from Keoghan’s skin-pricklingly enigmatic lead turn to Elordi’s note-perfect guileless toff, to the chokingly funny-slash-sad supporting turns from Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant as Felix’s parents. It’s also needlingly perceptive on identity: particularly that inbuilt young-adult resistance to defining oneself by one’s roots. And the details of its ultra-specific milieu are musically precise, from Pike’s throwaway reference to her teenage daughter’s bulimia as “you know
fingers for pudding” to Grant’s perusal of the News of the World over Sunday breakfast.

The film’s secret ingredient, though, is its sheer, nude-bungee-jumping-level fearlessness. British cinema hasn’t been this badly behaved since the days of Nic Roeg and Ken Russell, and was frankly in need of the shake-up. Fennell has a sharp eye for outrage, and an even sharper one for hotness, crafting any number of scenarios and images here that may elicit sotto voce phwoars against your better judgement. In the final stretch, Saltburn overplays its hand: the (unavoidable) tying up of loose ends takes a while, and it’s a pity that so much juicy ambiguity is shooed away via flashback. But it rallies with a final sequence that left my jaw rattling round my knees: this is cinema as mischief, with a raw saline bite.

The film opens in UK cinemas on 17 November.

—Pembroke College/Oxford has announced a series of seminars that may be of interest:

These weekly open seminars are run by our Chaplain, The Revd Dr Andrew Teal, and will take place every Thursday [starting 12 October] during term-time from 13:05 to 13:55. All students of any subject are welcome, as well as any interested participants from local faith communities and the wider city.

Whilst there is a particular relevance for theologians (by providing unusual primary material and broad discussion), this is an opportunity for honest discussion, dialogue, and exploration, in which members of the wider community are warmly invited to participate.

Water will be provided, but please feel free to bring your own lunch as well.

A Handbook of material and bibliographical references will be available electronically. Please do not hesitate to contact the Chaplain for further information.

Please find exact dates and topics listed below:

Theology in Dialogues (1): Through Poetry & Literature

Week 1, October 12th (Eccles Room): Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

Subsequent seminars will be devoted, inter alia, to Waugh’s contemporaries John Betjeman (2 Nov) and Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory (30 Nov).

–An essay on Thomas Merton’s book The Seven Story Mountain appears in the current issue of the Jesuit review America. This is by Gregory Hillis who mostly discusses how Merton’s book came to be written and what it has meant to  him. Toward the end he writes this:

The Seven Story Mountain is not perfect. It is overly wordy and needed more thorough editing. (The great English Catholic novelist, Evelyn Waugh, liked the book, but was so taken aback by the writing that he sent Merton a book on how to write more effectively). In his early writings, Merton depicts Catholicism in a triumphalist manner that doesn’t reflect his later theological depth of understanding. But these imperfections hardly registered for me when I read it for the first time. Much more important to me was the way in which his experiences spoke to my own—decades after Merton recorded them.

The author of the article may not be aware that Waugh also edited the UK edition of the book to reduce the wordiness about which he complains. This was published in the UK in 1949 as Elected Silence. Waugh also visited Merton in Kentucky during his late 1948 visit to the United States to research an article about Roman Catholicism in America that Waugh wrote for Life Magazine. Waugh’s edits were among the topics discussed during that visit.

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Roundup: Anniversaries, Flemings and Nature Writing

Posted on September 30, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–A feature length article in the religious journal Crisis Magazine marks the anniversary of Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism on 29 September 1930. This is written by S A McCarthy and entitled “The Curmudgeonly Catholic: Three Life Lessons from Evelyn Waugh.” Here’s an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

…Born in Hampstead, England, in 1903 and raised in the Anglican church, Waugh was an aggressive agnostic by the age of fifteen and a full-fledged hedonist by the time he started studying at the University of Oxford. His time there was spent predominantly in drunkenness and homosexual relationships. His studies suffered to the extent that he was forced to leave and take a position as a schoolteacher at a ramshackle school in Wales, which served as the inspiration for his first novel, Decline and Fall, a semi-autobiographical comedy published in 1928.

As a newly-successful writer, Waugh returned to the party scene in Oxford and London, focusing his romantic interests on women now, not on men. His first marriage fell apart when his wife had an affair, rebuffed Waugh’s attempts at reconciliation, and eventually left him. Having attempted suicide once before, Waugh sought refuge this time in the pinnacle of order here on earth: the Catholic Church.

Through his hard-partying early twenties, Waugh had become disillusioned with the modern world and all it had to offer. He saw the decaying of sexual morality in particular as a threat to civilization. Upon his conversion to Catholicism on September 29, 1930, he wrote, “The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.”…

What follows is a well written and entertaining account about how Waugh’s conversion affected his life and writing career. It appears accurate and well researched although I would question this particular assertion: “Even after his first marriage crumbled, Waugh engaged in harmless (mostly humorous) flirtations but never went to bed with a woman until he married Laura in 1937.” (Emphasis supplied.) While there is no proof to the contrary, Waugh formed several close relationships with women during the early thirties (e.g. Pixi Marix, Hazel Lavery, and Joyce Fagan Gill: Hastings, pp. 244-46, 328-331) and may well have gone to bed with some of them. There are also amusing anecdotes which I do not recall seeing before or had forgotten such as his letters to a dog named Grainger and his embarrassment of a guest named Moor.

–A new biography of Ian Fleming has been written by Nicholas Shakespeare. He will be remembered by our readers as the writer-director of BBC Arena’s Waugh Trilogy documentary from the 1980s. Novelist Philip Hensher has reviewed the Fleming biography in The Spectator. He writes:

…Novels thrive during periods of brutal inequality, such as late Victorian Britain, but also when thrown into violent opposition to societies attempting to restrict personal enterprise. One of the most extravagant moments of fiction’s flourishing in our country came about in this mood of opposition after the second world war. With rationing continuing for years, taxation at levels approaching confiscation and a loss of all remembered excesses to a spirit of moral disapproval, the novel entered a glorious phase of opulence. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was one of the first; but if you come across a description of central heating in the fiction of this time, or an account of characters stuffing themselves with tournedos Rossini, you can be pretty sure of its appeal to a first readership shivering over a supper of snoek on toast.

Not the least of these marvellous monuments are the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming. Reading them, one has to remember the circumstances that made those gluttonous descriptions of meals and the tossing away of fortunes at the roulette table so agreeable…

This extract from the biography appeared in The Times:

…Some readers identified with Fleming’s hero so closely they fancied themselves to have been his model. Four months after Ian’s death, Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh: “Nothing on the breakfast tray but people who think they are James Bond or want to be James Bond.”

Fleming was skilful at fanning speculation. “To Pat, who was the model. The Author.” This inscription in Casino Royale was to Iva Patcevitch, who had stayed at Goldeneye. “He said that he thought James Bond was meant to look like me.” Then again, Fleming said the same thing to another visitor, Ann’s friend Lucian Freud, whom he detested. “You’re just like my hero” — which surprised Freud for not being sarcastic, for once.

Was there an original? Bond was a fictional compound of the agents and commando types he had met during the Second World War, a medley of himself and what he had asked others to do or heard they had done. “It’s my experience in naval intelligence and what I learnt about secret operations of one sort or another, that finally led me to write about them — in a highly bowdlerised way — with James Bond as the central figure.” He had reached out and gathered in all those he had known, all the “shenanigans” they were involved in, some of which he personally had “got mixed up in”, and reconfigured them into a single protagonist who had contours like Ian’s in his bachelor heyday, when he was at the centre of things and not, as he now felt, on the margin.

Add to that the lesion of Fleming’s unacknowledged war record. As his friend and naval intelligence colleague Robert Harling said, “I think he was a little piqued that he got no decoration at the end of it.”…

The book is entitled Ian Fleming: The Complete Man and will be available next week in the UK and next March in the USA.

–Meanwhile, The Times has recently published in its “Rereading” column an article by James Owen entitled “Brazilian Adventure by Peter Fleming–Here’s the real inspiration for James Bond.” That book by Ian’s brother also influenced Evelyn Waugh to make the trip to British Guiana and Brazil described in his 1934 travel book Ninety-Two Days. This is discussed in the introduction to the CWEW edition of that book.

In the Times article, Owen explains the connection between Peter Fleming’s travel writing and that of Waugh:

Like Evelyn Waugh, … Fleming came of a generation that instinctively rejected the values that had led Britain into a war in which his father had been killed. Where Ian’s hero would respond to a changing world by doubling down as the English gentleman, Peter looked to send up his code of behaviour in scintillating comic writing.

–Christie’s has announced the results of Part I of their auction of Charlie Watts’s book collection. One of Waugh’s books broke the auction record:

“The results so far for this landmark collection – celebrating the life and legacy of Charlie Watts – are a true testament to the erudite and passionate eye of Charlie, the epitome of an informed and inspired collector. Don’t miss further opportunities to secure remarkable Literature and Jazz lots in Part II which remains open for bidding until midday on 29 September, when it will begin to close sequentially. We look forward to sharing the final results.”

…

Evelyn Waugh’s classic Brideshead Revisited, inscribed to his World War II Commander, also made a new auction record, achieving £60,480.

Here’s a link to the full results.

–The Financial Times has an article by Katie Tobin explaining how the film and TV adaptations of Brideshead Revisited powerfully influenced her domestic tastes. Here’s how it opens:

The early months of my first year at university were filled with an ennui I attributed to my living situation at the time. Our flat didn’t have a communal dining area, so meals were an even more solitary affair than most students had to contend with. The only consolation was that my halls of residence nestled on the edge of the South Downs, a view of rolling hills and dense woodlands gracing my window.

I started to devour campus fiction as a kind of literary refuge: Vladimir Nabokov, Jeffrey Eugenides, Donna Tartt, Elif Batuman, and perhaps most resonantly, Evelyn Waugh. The aggressive brutalism of my undergraduate campus bore little resemblance to Waugh’s Oxford, but a Brideshead Castle-esque manor house lay only a short distance from my room. When we finished our lectures for the day, my friends and I would often walk around the grounds, musing over how we would decorate our own homes in the future. For me, Brideshead — as brought to life in Julian Jarrold’s 2008 film — always sprang to mind.

–The Sydney Morning Herald has a brief article about the status of nature writing in a world where the natural environment is radically changing. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh did a splendid send-up of nature writing in his novel Scoop. His hero William Boot writes a newspaper column called Lush Places. A typical column begins “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole 
“

How times have changed. Thanks to global warming, the lush places are either too lush or have dried up and the vole might have ceased questing for evermore. Now a branch of literature that in the past has often seemed a bit leisurely and indulgent has taken on a new urgency. Maybe getting people galvanised about nature will stem the tide of climate change. But how do we galvanise readers?…

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Late September Roundup

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent issue of the Financial Times carries a story of the impact of Evelyn Waugh and his contemporaries on the latest mens fashions. Here’s an excerpt:

This season, menswear has embraced the gimlet-tinged mood of Cecil Beaton’s diaries, the roman Ă  clefs of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, and the posturing of their 1920s peers. You can see it in the lace and exaggerated puffed sleeves at Simone Rocha, the Genet-like Marseille sailors at SS Daley and the flamboyant tailoring at McQueen and Peter Do. Most of Dries Van Noten’s collections feature pyjama silks that Beaton’s subjects would have loved. …

Designer and photographer Cecil Beaton has frequently revisited the 1920s and the so-called Bright Young Things, as documented by Beaton, Mitford, Waugh, and the tabloids of the day. “Those androgynous, luxurious and often queer-coded self-representations resonate with today’s menswear designers,” says Jay McCauley Bowstead, lecturer in cultural and historical studies at the London College of Fashion, and author of Menswear Revolution: The Transformation of Contemporary Men’s Fashion. “The famous Cecil Beaton photograph from 1927 of Stephen Tennant, Rex Whistler and the Jungman sisters dressed in a joyous simulacrum of 18th-century dress in Tennant’s garden in Wiltshire comes to mind.”…

The story by Mark O’Flaherty is entitled “How fashion got stuck in the Waugh zone” and is headed by a copy of the painting of the 26-year old Waugh by Henry Lamb.  It also contains several photos illustrating his point. Here’s a link.

–Writer Jonathan Raban’s final book entitled Father and Son has been published and is reviewed by Carl Hoffman in the Washington Post. Although Raban (a distant relative of Evelyn Waugh) didn’t like to be labelled a “travel writer”, he wrote several of his best books about his travels:

…The greats of travel literature were products of one very small island that ruled for centuries over an empire upon which the sun never set, and out from which a tiny population of erudite, upper-class White men embarked. The conceit of Raban in Arabia and all those men he was emulating — from Robert Byron to Peter Fleming, V.S. Pritchett to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, who infamously traveled “when the going was good” — was civilized man among the savages. They weren’t all British or even men, of course. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” is one of the most iconic lines in travel literature, but “Out of Africa,” by Isak Dinesen, is what it is: a lyrical, romantic homage to colonialism by a rich baroness in which the indigenous Kikuyu — “my Natives,” as she calls them — are childlike and her 6,000-acre farm wasn’t land appropriated from them by force…

Raban’s book intersperses memories of his father, whom Raban first encountered at age three due to his father’s war service, with his own last days in which he suffered from debilitating health problems.

–Rupert Murdoch’s recent announcement of his retirement has elicited from the press reminders of a Waugh character. For example, an article by Adrian Wooldridge on the Bloomberg news service has appeared in several papers. Here’s an excerpt from the Washington Post:

…Murdoch is the only contemporary figure who can be spoken of in the same breath as the great press barons of yesteryear: Alfred Harmsworth, the Napoleon of Fleet Street who invented the tabloid; William Randolph Hearst, who perfected the arts of sensationalism, salaciousness and war-mongering; and Lord Beaverbrook, who competed with Hearst in his enthusiasm for blurring the line between reporting the news and making it. If Hearst gave the world Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane, and Beaverbrook Evelyn Waugh’s Lord Copper, Murdoch gave it Logan Roy, the foul-mouthed master of family dysfunction. …

And this appeared in the Boston Herald, a paper Murdoch had rescued from failure:

…In the late 1980’s, as he began expanding into TV, Murdoch would fly into Boston just before Christmas and host a fancy dinner at a nice steakhouse for the top people at the Herald. I remember one year he told us not to worry about all these stories that he was losing interest in print. “The backbone of any media company is content,” he said. “And print people are the only ones who can produce the proper content. So this corporation will always be based in print.” We believed him — up to a point, to use the expression Lord Copper’s minions would use to agree with, sort of, their media mogul boss’ disassembling in Evelyn Waugh’s classic Fleet Street novel, Scoop. …

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Roundup: Book Fair and Vanity Fair

Posted on September 16, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Empire State Rare Book and Print Fair in early October has announced its exhibitors and events. This will take place at St Bartholomew’s Church on Park Ave betw. 50th-51st Streets starting 5 October. There are two live events of special interest to our readers. These are both on Friday, 6 October. Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg will appear for a “fireside chat” between 5-8pm. Here’s an excerpt of the description of his career:

If fame, though fleeting, matters at all, Michael Lindsay-Hogg is partly famous as the director who lured The Beatles up on the roof for their final-ever Concert as the climax to his film, Let It Be, which provided all the footage for Peter Jackson’s epic “documentary about the making of a documentary,” Get Back…

Moving to TV drama, Michael received four BAFTA nominations. In 1981, he won as Co- Director for Brideshead Revisited…

Lindsay-Hogg worked with Derek Granger on the casting, settings and script of the TV adaptation. He directed the first episodes and several portions of the later episodes but was forced to drop out for filming most of the later episodes because of a strike which delayed the production. He now lives in Upstate New York.  Preceding Lindsay-Hogg will be Daisy Waugh, speaking at 3-4 pm on the topic of “Writing Fiction”. Here’s the description:

Daisy Waugh has written 12 novels which, between them, have been translated into many languages. Three of those novels were set in early 20th century Hollywood, New York and Colorado.. She  has written two further novels under the name EV Harte, starring a tarot-reading detective.  Most recently, she has written a series of comic murder mysteries starring a family of contemporary British aristocrats. The third in the series, Old School Ties, will be published in the UK in September. She  is the granddaughter of Evelyn Waugh and daughter of Auberon Waugh.

According to the announcement, tickets to the fair will include entry to the foregoing events as well as the exhibits. Here’s a link to the details.

—Vanity Fair has an article by James Reginato on famous country house estates in Yorkshire, with detailed background histories on three of them. One (Castle Howard) is well known in this parish:

Over the years, various film productions—Brideshead Revisited and Bridgerton, most notably—have brought in much-needed cash. But when producers of the latter called, the family was skeptical. “I knew the books, because they had been published by Harper Collins,” says [Victoria] Barnsley. “This wasn’t Evelyn Waugh, put it that way.”

Another Yorkshire estate also has a connection to Evelyn Waugh but is less well known. This is Sledmere, discussed in another section:

“Some might argue that Sledmere, as the seat of mere baronets, hardly qualifies as a great house,” posits Christopher Simon Sykes, 75, a great-great-great-great-great-grand-nephew of Richard Sykes, builder of the aforementioned estate. The gray stone exterior of the house is fairly austere. But once inside, there’s nothing plain—or small—about it, and it sits on just under 9,000 acres.

This is the family home of Waugh’s friend and biographer Christopher Sykes who must have lived there as a child. Although not himself mentioned in the article, some of his siblings and perhaps his children and grand children are described. Waugh was certainly a more frequent guest at Sledmere than he was at nearby Castle Howard.

While researching Sykes’ life for the note above, I discovered that he was the co-author with another of Waugh’s Oxford friends Robert Byron of a novel called Innocence and Design (London, 1935). Its authorship was attributed to “Richard Waughburton”. It seems to be well known among booksellers as there are several copies available at collectable prices. What struck me as odd is that I don’t recall any of Waugh’s biographers or critics mentioning this. Byron’s biographer James Knox has a fairly detailed discussion of the book and its critical reception, noting, inter alia, that Waugh declared it “unreadable” (p. 334). Whether that was in a review or a letter isn’t stated. He wasn’t keeping a diary at the time.

–Kenneth Craycraft writing for a Roman Catholic news service (OSV News) notes the 100th anniversary of the Hogarth Press edition of Eliot’s The Wasteland:

I have long considered “The Wasteland” to be the poetic inspiration of such novels as Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” (among others), Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” and similar between-the-wars novels. Each of these works of literature are portraits of the disillusion and unmoored debauchery of post-World War II Europe. They are not celebrations of what the modern has wrought, but rather observations of the disaster and diagnosis of what it portends. All are “modernist” works, but only in the sense that the modern ought to make us shudder in anxious perplexity. We have lost our way, they all seem to say, and we haven’t the foggiest idea of how to find it again. Written before any of these novels, “The Wasteland” might be seen as the blueprint for all of them.

Indeed, Waugh used a line from “The Wasteland” as the title of another of his novels from that period, “A Handful of Dust.” If you know the novel, you can see how it was inspired by these lines from Eliot:

“You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water. / Only / There is shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

And in Waugh’s most famous (if not his best) novel, “Brideshead Revisited,” the stuttering character Anthony Blanche delivers from memory a passage from “The Wasteland,” at the window of lodgings at Oxford, in order to scandalize the earnest undergraduates passing by in the quad: “In languishing tones [Anthony] recited passages from ‘The Wasteland’ to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river. ‘I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all,’ he sobbed to them from the Venetian arches; ‘Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed, / I who have sat by Thebes below the wall / And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead.’”

 

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Roundup: Events and Architecture

Posted on September 10, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Waterstones the booksellers have announced a live, in-person interview of Andrew Pettegree on the subject of his latest book entitled “The Book at War”. This will take place on 17 October, 1830-1930p at the Waterstones store in Canterbury, 6-8 Rose Lane. Martin Latham will be the interviewer. Here’s what they will be talking about:

Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando – before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book at War, acclaimed historian Andrew Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture – from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank – has shaped, and been shaped, by the conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war – and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace.

Ticketing and other details are available here.

–The University Church in Oxford (St Mary the Virgin, just down the street from Hertford College) has posted this in an announcement of a service this week:

The cross is arguably the most iconic of all icons: an instantly recognisable symbol that is infinitely replicable, and which has spread across the world. We wear it on jewellery; we recreate it on our bodies when we make the sign of the cross; we hang it in our churches and even build our churches in its shape. And yet we rarely think, except perhaps on Good Friday, about the actual, physical cross on which Jesus died.

This is strange, since, as Evelyn Waugh expressed in his novel exploring the life of Empress Helena, ‘what is different about Christianity is that it identifies the mystery of God with a set of prosaic happenings in a specific place.’ God became a human being, at a particular time, in a specific place, and lived a human life, and died a human death. The cross is the ultimate expression of this specificity: a real physical object which not only touched Jesus’ body, but which was an instrument in his death, and therefore in our salvation. Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, is said to have discovered the True Cross when travelling in the Holy Land in the Fourth Century, sparking centuries of veneration of fragments and splinters of wood, as they spread across Europe and the world.

The service was for the feast of the Holy Cross on Sunday, 10 September at St Cross Church. The speaker was the Master of Balliol College, Dame Helen Ghosh.

–A current House and Garden magazine has an article by Fiona McKenzie Johnston discussing architectural and decorating “style tribes”.  She identifies several varieties such as “English Eccentrics” and “Espousers of Quiet Beauty” and concedes that one may comfortably claim membership in more than one tribe. Here’s one she describes one as “Country House Traditionalists.”

Nearly all of us fall into this tribe, or at least overlap with it – for English country house style, as perfected by the great Nancy Lancaster and John Fowler (who co-owned Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler) and immortalised by Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, and others, is hands down the most enduring decorating style of the last century, and there are several very good reasons why. It looks as glorious in a St. John’s Wood flat as it does in a sprawling Georgian rectory in Hampshire; there’s a high comfort quotient by way of deep squishy sofas and plenty of books to read, and, thanks to colour and pattern and a layering of both eras and rugs, it’s a perfect backdrop for children and dogs (in fact, you might argue that dogs are a vital ingredient)….

–This comment about architectural tastes recently appeared on the weblog of Charles Saumarez Smith:

I have just read the admirable short biography by John Holden, late of Demos, of Ralph Dutton who owned and reconstructed his family’s Victorian house of Hinton Ampner, employing Gerald Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, as its architect, just before the Second World War. It’s a fascinating, but in some ways frustrating, story because although Dutton seems to have had a wide circle of friends, many of them writers, including L.P. Hartley, James Lees-Milne and James Pope-Hennessy, none of them seem to have much to say about him, other than complimenting him on his impeccable taste and enjoying his hospitality. The only alternative glimmer of him appears in a characteristically waspish letter from Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford about a review he had written of Dutton’s book on The Victorian Home: ‘I took the writer to be a bumptious young puppy. I hear he is an aged and wealthy pansy’. Anyway, it has particularly good information on the taste for what Osbert Lancaster described as ‘Vogue Regency’ and a generation of Old Etonians who ran the arts.

The letters cited appeared in NMEW Letters 355-57 and relate to a review written by Waugh in the Sunday Times, 28 November 1954. This quote from the review appears in a footnote where Waugh describes Dutton’s book as one:

“which cannot be wholeheartedly recommended to any class of reader…The illustrations…are very poorly reproduced. The text is trite and patronizing…the only readers likely to derive enjoyment from it are those who indulge in the badger-digging of literary blood sports, the exposure of error.”

The book is unlikely to be all that bad, as Saumarez Smith cites an edition currently on offer 70 years later from Amazon.co.uk.

–Waugh (or his family) features in yet another architectural taste dispute cited in a Canadian entertainment website:

…Showbiz celebrities such as Emma Thompson, Imelda Staunton (The Queen of the latest episode of The Crown) and her husband Jim Carter (Butler Carson from Downton Abbey)…are outraged by a plan to build a glass and aluminum house in West Hampstead, an area on the northern outskirts of London where they live along with many other celebrities.

An American couple wants a new mansion. [They] made money on cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence and now dream of good retreat in a privileged segment of London. But the English actors are not in the know and have written a letter to the local council to oppose the project: according to them, new home [is] ‘better suited for Malibu’ while it is an eyesore in an area made up of Victorian and Edwardian Art Nouveau residences.

West Hampstead is something of a village in itself, dotted with small restaurants and independent shops: there is no McDonald’s or Zaras here, you’re having an outdoor brunch (weather permitting) or stopping to browse bookstores. It was here that writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Doris Lessing lived. Today it is home to actors such as Stephen Fry and pop stars such as Dua Lipa...

Evelyn Waugh did actually live in West Hampstead briefly, having been born there at 11 Hillfield Road on 28 October 1903. In 1907 the family moved to a house at 145 North End Road. I’m not sure what borough or postcode that was in when they moved, but by the time Waugh was a student, it became Golders Green NW11. It was never in West Hampstead (NW6) or Hampstead village (NW3). It is unlikely that Waugh ever expressed any societal or architectural enthusiasm over the Waugh’s residence on Hillfield Road as he was 4 only years old when they moved. There has been considerable comment, however, on his attitude toward the social position of the house on North End Road, but that’s another story.

–The Guardian concludes a series of articles on emotion in books, with the final topic being ambition (or “those who are determined to succeed”). This is written by Sophie Ratcliffe and concludes with this:

… while we may be struck by memoirs of odds overcome – from Tara Westover to Barack Obama – we are equally drawn to ambition in miniature – the everyday striving, and seemingly ordinary achievements, through which we may glimpse what Larkin terms an “enthralled/ Catching of happiness”.

Such scaled-back ambition is well caught in Metamorphosis, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s memoir about living with MS. “Always,” he writes at his book’s close, “there is the potential for something new to go wrong, or something old to deteriorate,” but, on waking one morning, he decides to risk it and “go for a walk”. There’s a knowing irony to his chosen route march – “the top of a nearby hill, a little over a mile away” looking over the “lead domes” and “thick fingers of honey-coloured stone” of Oxford – for it is a view that conjures up ambition on a big canvas. Here are the dreaming spires, the “city of aquatint” in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It would, Douglas-Fairhurst writes, “be an easy stroll for most people, but for me it will be a little voyage into the unknown. I’m not entirely confident that I’ll make it there and back without my legs buckling underneath me, but there’s only one way to find out.” It’s a fitting end to this beautiful, formally ambitious book. Opening his front door, he steps “into the bright morning sunshine”.

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Charlie Watts’s Collection of Waughiana to be Auctioned

Posted on September 9, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

Christie’s has announced the sale of the book collection of Charlie Watts, late drummer of the Rolling Stones. Watts was not an ordinary book collector but, as described in Christie’s announcement, had a “deeply thoughtful” taste. This is well defined in the announcement which is available at this link. It concludes with this:

…all these books bear Charlie Watts’s fingerprints. Everyone who met him in life agrees that he was a truly likeable man — self-effacing and gentlemanly in a very English way. Strands of a specifically English genius run through the authors that he favoured most: the wit and wordsmithery of Wodehouse; the steely common sense of George Orwell; Graham Greene’s gift for ambiguity and uncertainty; Waugh’s prickly class-awareness.

It’s all there. You could get a good sense of what it meant to be a 20th-century Englishman by reading the first editions in Charlie Watts’s wonderful library.

In Waugh’s case he was interested in a complete collection and seems to have mostly succeeded. Christies has divided the sale between two auctions. The first contains books that are all inscribed to those friends of Waugh considered important such as Graham Greene and Robert Laycock. These often included comments with the inscription which are duly noted in Christies’s catalogue.  These will be sold in Part 1 of the auction. Here’s a summary of the select list (these are London first editions unless otherwise notes):

Decline and Fall: copy inscribed to Vyvyan Holland (Oscar Wilde’s son) who had invited Waugh and his first wife to a party.

Vile Bodies: Copy of Frederick K Adams a director of the J P Morgan Library. Not original dw.

Black Mischief: Graham Greene’s copy with inscription. Not original dw.

A Handful of Dust. No inscription. Original dw.

Brideshead Revisited: Page proof ed of which 50 printed as Xmas presents 1944; this was Robert Laycock’s copy inscribed by Waugh. Although  not noted, that inscription must have been added later as the book was printed and distributed while Waugh was stationed in Yugoslavia. There was no dw.

The Loved One: Graham Greene’s large paper, prepublication edition limited to 250 copies; signed by Waugh and artist. There was no dw.

War Trilogy: Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender: All copies inscribed to Robert Laycock. Original dust wrappers.

Officers and Gentlemen: Specially bound edition inscribed and gifted to Laycock, to whom the book was dedicated. This had no dw.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: One of 50 specially printed copies, inscribed to Laycock. No dw.

The books listed above are sold individually in lots 106-115 of Part 1 of the sale. The other books appear individually and as groups in lots 410 thru 414 of Part 2 of the auction. They are mostly first editions with dustwrappers. There are duplicates of some books in the more select list such as Brideshead Revisited and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1st C&H published editions). Some are inscribed but not to anyone of particular note or importance to Waugh or his career. The only books missing from the collection so far as I was able to tell are The Holy Places, the Life of Ronald Knox and A Little Learning. There was also no copy of P R B. An Essay on the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, although one can argue that that was not formally “published” until it was reprinted in 1982. Nor was there a copy of the post war collection of stories published in the UK as Work Suspended and Other Stories Written before World War Two (London 1948), although there is a copy of Work Suspended: Two Chapters of an Unfinished Novel (limited edition, London 1942). The only US publication in the collection is Tactical Excercise (Boston 1954) which included both pre- and post war stories.

One would have to conclude that Charlie was a fairly ambitious and studious collector of Waughiana. It is a shame to see his efforts at completeness and quality dispersed in an auction sale, but to be fair, this is not the sort of collection that appeals to academic libraries.

The select books described in detail above will be sold at auction at Christies/London on 28 September. This sale is called Charlie Watts: Literature and Jazz, Part 1. See this link. The other books from the collection will be sold in an online auction (Charlie Watts: Literature and Jazz, Part 2) starting September 15 at 10am and ending on 29 September at 11am (I assume those are London times). Here’s a link.

NOTICE (9 September 2023): A Little Learning was added to the list of books missing from Charlie Watts’s collection (or at least from those now being auctioned).

 

 

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Labo[u]r Day Roundup

Posted on September 2, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in the New  York Review of Books, Michael Gorra reviews novelist Zadie Smith’s latest book The Fraud. This is the lead article of this issue, and in it Gorra places the novel in the context of Smith’s other works as well as those of other novelists. Among those considered is Evelyn Waugh. Gorra writes that Smith:

…is now in her late forties, and having started so young it must feel like time to take stock. In 1939 Evelyn Waugh began a novel that he put aside at the start of World War II. He never went back to it, but he published the fragment a few years later under the title Work Suspended, and I would happily trade Brideshead Revisited for a finished version. It was Waugh’s initial attempt at writing in the first person, and his narrator is a novelist in search of a new subect. For he believes he’s “becoming mechanical, turning out year after year the kind of book I know how to write well….I have got as good as I ever can be at this particular sort of writing.”

That was Waugh’s own dilemma as he looked for a way past the frantic brittle comedy of his first books. Opinions differ, but I don’t think he ever found it. Smith hasn’t become mechanical, but she has kept returning to the same ground: modern-day Willesden and a few surrounding neighborhoods: close, tense friendships between people who’ve known each other since childhood; four hundred-odd pages; and an ending with a series of neatly resolved comic comeuppances. Does she feel that she’s gotten as good at that particular kind of book as she ever could be? I’ve no idea, but she’s a risk-taker, and in writing a historical novel she has stepped into the “new Worlds” that Waugh’s narrator says he wants.

–Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, moonlighting in The Spectator, has written an essay on the English practice of school nicknames. Here’s an excerpt:

…An American friend tells me nicknames were little-used in his New York schooldays. Their popularity in Britain depends on our peculiar taste for abusing our best friends in order to show intimacy – much easier than having to admit you like them.

That tendency is particularly marked in British private schools and the upper classes. Thus Boots – Evelyn Waugh’s nickname for his old friend Cyril Connolly, short for Smartyboots, thanks to Connolly’s dangerously suspect intellectual pretensions.

The Mitford sisters were inveterate nickname-droppers, as in ‘Cake’, their name for the Queen Mother after she shrieked the word with huge enthusiasm on spotting a large cake at a party.

But the Great British Nickname is at threat in an era of cancellation and sensitivity readers. Nicknames have even been taken away at some universities to reduce ‘micro-aggressions’. Instead, new undergraduates are asked to give the name, nickname and pronouns they would like to be known by…

–In The Oldie itself there is an article by Richard Howells entitled “Smoking’s Hotter Than Vaping.” It opens with this:

In one of the best smoking scenes in English literature, Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte are motoring to Brideshead. Julia is behind the wheel of her open-topped car and nods towards a box of cigarettes: ‘Light one for me, will you?’ ‘As I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers,’ writes Charles, ‘I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.’ But, of course, we all heard it. Imagine for a moment that, instead of lighting her cigarette, Charles had offered Lady Julia a pull on his vape. Things would have turned out so very differently. Why? Because vaping can never be cool. Smoking, on the other hand … Smoking, for all we know about it today, used to have a place not only in literature but also in film, photography and public life. It was usually a stylish one…

–Max Hastings in The Times has an article entitled “Clergy remain divine source of comedy”. While noting that while the church in Britain is doing a disappearing act, he writes that it will always survive in the pages of English literature. Most of his discussion relates to characters created by 19th c. authors, especially Trollope. But then he continues:

Even in the 20th century, comic novelists continued to feast upon parsons. Think of Bertie Wooster’s curate chums “Beefy” Bingham and “Stinker” Pinker, hulking athletes striving for livings. One of PG Wodehouse’s finest stories is The Great Sermon Handicap, in which a group of bored young men summering in the country run a book on the length of local parsons’ Sunday orations, irrespective of any possible merit.

Evelyn Waugh was rather ahead of his time when, in Decline and Fall, he described how the failed schoolmaster Mr Prendergast became a “Modern Churchman, who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief”. […]

Likewise, the Hon and Rev Bertie of Weston-on-the-Green, a squarson – wonderful word, that, characterising a parson who was also the local squire, a pairing now surely extinct – addressed a neighbour at an All Souls dinner: “I see you have been brought up in the best school, sir, the school of port. If you will take an old man’s advice, you will always drink it out of a claret glass.”

–The website LitBug.com has posted a detailed discussion of Waugh’s 1939 short story, “An Englishman’s Home”. This has a plot summary as well as textual analysis but does not reflect the story’s publication history. Here is the beginning of the plot summary:

The narrative explores the intricacies of class distinctions and social positioning within the context of a quintessential English village, Much Malcock. Through his incisive satirical lens, the writer exposes the dynamics of aspiration, snobbery, and societal norms that characterize this insular community.

Central to the story is the protagonist, Beverly Metcalfe, who aspires to transcend his middle-class origins and embed himself within the aristocratic upper echelons of Much Malcock’s social hierarchy. The tale unravels against the backdrop of England’s class system, replete with its established norms and stratified divisions. From the outset, it is evident that Metcalfe’s desires align with the village’s landed elite, an aspiration underscored by his careful observations of their behaviors, undertaken not merely for understanding, but as models for emulation…

The story was first published in Good Housekeeping (London, August 1939) and was first collected in Work Suspended and Other Stories Written Before the Second World War (London, 1948).

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Dog Days Roundup

Posted on August 26, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Will Lloyd, commissioning editor of the New Statesman, has written an interesting and enjoyable article in that journal summarizing why Evelyn Waugh’s works have outlived those of his contemporaries. This is entitled: “Evelyn Waugh is laughing at you: His lethally coherent worldview turns reality into a farce.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Art is not fair. If they knew what his reputation was now that is the lesson Evelyn Waugh’s contemporaries would surely learn.

His literary generation was pacifistic, left-wing, irreligious, and righteously believed that justice existed to be rendered in this world, not the next. Hardly anyone reads Stephen Spender or Sylvia Townsend Warner any more. They wrote the right things; they believed the right things; they took up the earth’s wretched as their cause.

Evelyn Waugh never did. He did not hope to reform the species. Today his peers are not much more than inter-war curiosities. Read their poetry and prose, then feel the aeons open up between you and them. Waugh remains utterly modern. Such a state of affairs is a joke as icy as any found in his writing. Why the passing decades cannot diminish him ought to trouble our creaking, secular, liberal age…

After a brief and entertaining discussion of Waugh’s unhappy childhood, unpromising university career, unsuccessful first marriage and religious conversion, Lloyd focuses on how these influenced his works, with particular reference to Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour. The contemporary writer to whom Lloyd most frequently compares him is Orwell, the other literary survivor of that generation. Here’s the conclusion:

…Unlike Orwell, he never had a reputation for prophecy, yet Waugh saw far more clearly than he. Orwell’s darkest forebodings were fantasies. The world turned out nothing like Ninety Eighty-Four (1948). It turned out nothing like Waugh’s generation hoped it would either; they often looked fondly on Stalin, or, like Orwell, believed a socialist revolution was coming. “The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors,” Waugh wrote. “It is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.” He knew that human happiness would never be achieved through politics.

Instead of theory there is his lethally coherent worldview, expressed in novel after novel. A consistent and horrible vision, made much the worse for being persuasive. The meek will not inherit the earth. Collective endeavours always come to grief. Cheats and scoundrels will be lavishly rewarded. Falling in love is the first step to having your heart eaten. Pity is a less powerful force than contempt. “I believe that man is, by nature, an exile,” he wrote, “and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth.”

As Margot [Metroland] says: this is just how things are going to happen. Oh dear! Knowing all this, Waugh, who was never lazy and rarely a bore, responded in the only sane way. He clowned, and invited us to join him in laughter.

The article can be read in is entirety and is available on the New Statesman without a subscription under its limited access policy. It is highly recommended.

–Simon Heffer in a recent Sunday Telegraph reviews George Orwell’s 1935 novel A Clergyman’s Daughter. He notes the general consensus that this may be Orwell’s weakest novel but thinks it is nevertheless worth reading if only because it is written by Orwell. Here’s his conclusion:

…Each reader must judge how effective his satire is: he lays it on thickly and without the deftness of his contemporary Evelyn Waugh. The other weakness is that the appearance of the helpful cousin is a little like too many plot devices in Dickens, where a saviour turns up and it usually provides a happy ending. In fact, it takes a second saviour to pluck Dorothy out of the near-slavery of her private school, and back to the near-slavery of Knype Hill. This troubling book has another interesting feature that was pointed out by DJ Taylor, Orwell’s biographer: that, like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dorothy ends up having to make an accommodation with her tormentors. To understand that work of genius better, we need to read A Clergyman’s Daughter.

Although he does not specifically mention Waugh’s description of public school life in Decline and Fall, that is presumably among Waugh’s satirical passages Heffer must have had in mind as having influenced Orwell.

–In a recent issue of the Daily Telegraph, Christopher Howse describes a late painting of  Goya called “The Last Communion of St Joseph Calasanz” who was at one time the head of the Piarist order. Like Heffer, Howse also invokes Waugh’s satirical description of public school life in the course of his discussion. Here is an extract:

…Goya is certainly a great painter, but I am not sure what part the mysteries of religion played in his vision of humanity. He would have applauded Calasanz’s humane approach to learning: his insistence that the vernacular as well as Latin should gure in classes, his preference for avoiding punishment. From 1591, when he was 34, Calasanz worked in Rome. In 1598 the Tiber flooded and he manfully tried to help the thousands of homeless poor whose houses had been destroyed. From 1600 the project of Pious Schools occupied him. Soon he had 1,000 poor children to look after. Calasanz’s positive attitude brought him enemies. He had admitted Jewish children to his schools. He sympathised with Galileo, and later provided him with a secretary when he lost his sight. At one stage, Calasanz had to help the Inquisition with their inquiries.

Calasanz’s own career ended in failure. A priest called Stefano Cherubini, in charge of a Piarist school in Naples, was appointed canonical visitor to the congregation. He was also said to have been guilty of sexual crimes with schoolboys. In Catholic Spanish society of the 17th century, this was strongly disapproved of, unlike, say, in the inter-war years in England when the middle classes seemed to take for granted some schoolmasters being pederasts, as Evelyn Waugh described in Decline and Fall (1928), written as a comedy, if a black one. Anyway, through family and institutional influence Cherubini managed to take over the whole Piarist congregation, and Calasanz, in his 80s, was pushed aside. The congregation was left divided and the Pope settled things in 1646 by suppressing it…

As explained by Howse in his conclusion, the order was later restored and survives to this day.

—The New Criterion in its latest issue has a review of the book Hellfire:Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club. The reviewer is David Pryce-Jones. Here is the opening paragraph:

Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) is a writer who will be read as long as there is anyone interested in English literature. His early novels have a comic spirit all their own. In contrast, Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Sword of Honour (1952–61) capture England at a time in her history when peace was giving way to war and the old social order was vanishing. Waugh was a voice speaking for the past, going against the grain of modernity, and this brought into question what kind of a man could he be…

The book is mentioned in several recent posts and was reviewed in EWS 53.2 (Autumn 2022).

–The NE Ohio news website cleveland.com has published a detailed and interesting review of the life and works of Dawn Powell. She wrote satirical novels about small town Ohio and big city New York during the 1920s-60s. These were well received by the critics but have been largely forgotten since her death in 1965 despite two attempts to revive interest (late 1980s and again in abt 2000). Another of those may be in the offing as a result of the article by John S. Matuszek. Here is an excerpt:

…Her reputation experienced a resurgence when longtime friend Gore Vidal praised the then-forgotten Powell in a 1981 article as a “comic writer as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens.” An article Vidal wrote for the New York Times Review of Books in 1987 led to the reissuing of several of her novels in paperback.

In 1991,  [Tim] Page, a Pulitzer Prize-winning classical music critic for the Washington Post, came across Edmund Wilson’s essay on “The Golden Spur,” and launched into a years-long effort to further restore Powell’s place in the literary canon. His efforts resulted in the publication of her diaries, along with anthologies of her work by the Library of America and Page’s 1998 biography. In 1996, Case Western Reserve University celebrated the “Centennial of Dawn Powell,” with Page as a guest speaker. Page was featured in a Plain Dealer Sunday magazine article by John Stark Bellamy in 1996 headlined “The Resurrection of Dawn Powell.” […] As Page told the Plain Dealer, “She is one of our national treasures, and especially an Ohio treasure.”

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Roundup

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New Statesman has an article by Josiah Gogarty entitled “Only snobbery can stop Elon Musk: Class prejudice is the last weapon against tech titans.” Waugh makes a contribution:

…Then there’s the more squeamish side of elitism: class snobbery. This is not a popular cause. In The Great Gatsby, one of the most enduring depictions of the old-money/new-money showdown, its representative is the oafish Tom Buchanan, who attained “acute limited excellence” at Yale, then sagged into a racist, booze-soaked manhood. Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels portray, vividly and at length, how the snobbery of English aristocrats cauterises human decency. After David Melrose rapes his five-year-old son, the protagonist of the series, he reflects that “he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far”.

Brideshead Revisited takes the opposite approach. As Martin Amis wrote in 1981, it “squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly”. The narrator, drugged up, like Evelyn Waugh was, on Catholicism and old buildings, laments a modern world “safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet handshake, his grinning dentures”. But Waugh’s snobbery only amounts to a “failure of imagination”, says Amis, matched by the clichĂ©d purple prose the novel is laden with.

Nevertheless, class prejudice can have paradoxically progressive effects. If, no matter how far you rise, you’re never allowed to forget your origins, you might retain some solidarity with the people you grew up with. A more liberal, meritocratic elite, which welcomes you as an old friend once you crack a certain tax bracket, is more effective at banishing class consciousness. Think of it as the White’s club model – wingback chairs reserved for the spawn of marauding Normans – versus the Soho House vision of overpriced cocktails for all. After Margaret Thatcher forced meritocracy down the Conservative Party’s throat, like a nanny wielding a spoon of cod-liver oil, Labour embraced social mobility too, and shied away from pitching itself in class-based terms…

–Spurred by the debut of a new series of the ITV costume drama Sanditon, The Sunday Times has compiled a list of the 36 best ever TV costume dramas. The 1981 ITV/Granada Brideshead Revisited series ranks number 2, behind BBC’s Pride and Prejudice.

–This week’s episode of BBC’s University Challenge included a series of bonus questions based on T S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. One of these asked the team from Emmanuel College, Cambridge to identify the Evelyn Waugh novel which included a quote from the poem in its title. They guessed wrong and answered Decline and Fall but won the match anyway. The correct answer is A Handful of Dust which will be the subject of an internet Zoom discussion sponsored by the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco. This is scheduled for 7pm-815pm PDT on Wednesday 11 October. It appears to be open to non-members. Details are available here.

–Richard Dawkins in the Evening Standard cites several instances of objections made to humorous references to transgender issues that represent attempts to censor what he deems to be well within the realm of fair comment. Here’s an excerpt:

The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.

Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society.

“Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from [Helen] Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.

–Interviewed by Jake Kerridge last week in the Daily Telegraph, Irish novelist Anne Enright discussed her latest novel The Wren, The Wren:

To my mind, Enright’s eighth novel, The Wren, The Wren, is as starkly soulful and bleakly funny about human failings as The Gathering [her Booker Prize nominee], and would have made a worthy Booker contender. At its heart is an act of betrayal – feted poet Phil McDaragh leaving his wife and young daughters in the 1970s, the better to pursue his calling – and the enduring effect over several decades on his abandoned daughter Carmel and on Nell, the granddaughter he died without meeting.

Enright, 60, is fascinated by “the oddness of when people find their creativity rendered impossible by the fact of children, as if children stole some faculty just by existing or were some kind of affront. Evelyn Waugh wouldn’t have his children playing even in the same wing of the house when he was working – how weird is that?”

Where other novelists might have mimsily asked us to take Phil’s talent on trust, Enright has included several of the poems for which he sacrificed his family’s happiness. I found them as austerely beautiful as her prose: in one, the eponymous bird becomes “a panic/ of feathered air”. Had she been burning to publish poetry?

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