New Biography of Graham Greene

Posted on September 4, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

A new biography of Graham Greene has been published. The UK edition is entitled Russian Roulette and is written by Richard Greene (no relation but editor of a collection of Graham’s letters). The book is reviewed in the Sunday Times by John Walsh who opens with a description of how Greene in 1948 introduced a teenage Michael Korda to drink, spying and sex on a single yachting trip:

It’s easy to see why Greene’s wicked-uncle sophistication, his familiarity with both yachting film stars and hookers on shore, persuaded the awestruck Korda to become a writer. But it’s puzzling to read, eight pages later in this new biography, Evelyn Waugh’s diary entry that describes a quite different figure. “Mass at 12 at Farm Street where I met the shambling, unshaven and 
 penniless figure of Graham Greene. He had been suddenly moved by love of Africa and emptied the contents of his pockets into the box for African missions.”

Walsh then continues with a a discussion of the contradictions exhibited in both Greene’s life and his writings. The review concludes:

The book, elegantly sliced into 78 chapters, bounds along with fluency, clarity and wry humour. It doesn’t deliver startling revelations to eclipse Norman Sherry’s three-volume authorised life, but its agenda is clear. Greene concentrates on his namesake’s emotional involvement with victims of oppression in the world’s poorest countries and the Cold War […]  He rescues Greene from seediness and coldness. And he lets you hear an echo of the character in The Quiet American who says: “Sooner or later one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”

The diary entry is for 11 January 1948 (Diaries, p. 694).

The Greene biography is also reviewed in the Evening Standard. This is by Ian Thomson who begins by noting the high bar set for biographer’s by Norman Sherry’s 30-year effort written during Greene’s lifetime:

Several biographers have tried but failed to topple Sherry’s monopoly. Michael Shelden, publishing his life in the mid-Nineties, sought to arraign Greene on charges of sadism, anti-Semitism and alcoholism. Anthony Mockler offered a Boy’s Own hagiography and fancifully imagined Greene on his Lake Geneva deathbed: “Graham looked out of the antiseptic room over the sterile Swiss sky. No vultures gazed back
” Thank goodness for Richard Greene, whose splendid one-volume biography offers a succinct counterbalance to Sherry’s inedible trifle and conjures the man Evelyn Waugh nicknamed “Grisjambon Vert” (French for “grey ham green”) in all his perplexing variety. Where Sherry is tactless and indecorous, Richard Greene (no relation) is respectful and considered. Crisply written, Russian Roulette takes its title from Greene’s vaunted flirtation with suicide as a teenager in Berkhamsted outside London, where his father was a school headmaster. Prone to bouts of self-loathing, he drank heavily, smoked opium and patronised brothels.

Waugh’s nickname was applied in a 1961 letter to Christopher Sykes referring to Greene’s recently published “very sorrowful” novel A Burnt-Out Case (Letters, p. 556). The new biography has already appeared in the UK and will be published in the USA early next year under the title The Unquiet Englishman.

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Graham Greene and Waugh Discuss Powell Novel

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest installment of imaginary encounters among Evelyn Waugh and his Oxford friends at the Castle Howard Brideshead Festival, Duncan McLaren has Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh discuss Anthony Powell’s 1971 novel Books Do Furnish a Room. This was the 10th volume of Powell’s 12-novel cycle Dance to the Music of Time. The book is set in literary London during 1945-47. The Waugh/Greene discussion begins with the funeral that opens Powell’s novel. This follows the death of the character Erridge who is based loosely on George Orwell. Greene and Waugh see some connections between Orwell’s actual funeral (described in Powell’s Memoirs) and that depicted in the novel. But most of their discussion centers on the character X Trapnel, a fictional novelist based heavily on the real life minor novelist Julian Maclaren-Ross, who was known to both Greene and Waugh. Much of the article is taken up with readings from the novel by Waugh interspersed with the two writers then discussing that bit of the text.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion centers on a connection the writers see between Powell’s scene where Kenneth Widmerpool, a central character in Powell’s novel, returns to his flat near Victoria Station to discover that X Trapnel has absconded with  his wife. This scene reminds Evelyn of the flat in Canonbury Square where he was living with his first wife in 1929 when she ran off with John Heygate. Here’s an excerpt:

Waugh: … I think Tony [Powell] had what happened to me in mind when he wrote the scene. After all, he was a close friend of mine at the time, and he heard my side of the story. Moreover, he was on holiday in Germany with John Heygate when they received a telegram from me telling Heygate to come back for She-Evelyn, because our miserable attempt at a reconciliation had failed. And Evelyn Gardner was a close associate of Tony’s too. And he remained good friends with the pair of them. Even writing of their shared life in the Canonbury Square – and easily recognisable flat – in his pre-war book, Agents and Patients. Then returning to the fiasco in volume two of his Memoirs, which is also lying on the table in front of you. Yes?”

Greene: “Yes.”

Waugh: “There are pages and pages about the breakdown of my first marriage in that book.”

Greene: “I think I see what you’re driving at. For at least a few pages in Tony’s Dance, you are Widmerpool. Or you understand yourself to be the failure and humiliation that was Widmerpool, the man who nevertheless kept going.”

There is also a discussion of the scenes set in the premises of the postwar literary magazine known as Fission, clearly based by Powell on Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine. In Duncan’s narrative, Greene and Powell see the editor of Fission, “Books” Bagshaw, as based on the shambolic Bobby Roberts (usually associated with a BBC connection) who was known to both Waugh and Powell and probably to Greene as well. Several Powell enthusiasts have favored Malcolm Muggeridge as the primary model for Bagshaw, although there may well be elements of Roberts in him as well. Powell (as did Waugh) usually combined features of several real life acquaintances as well as imaginary ones in creating their most memorable literary characters. Greene may have done so as well, but identifying the models for Greene’s characters never became the sort of literary parlour game that involved identfying those of Powell and Waugh.

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Nicholas Shakespeare Interviewed on ABC

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Australian network ABC has posted a podcast of its literary program The Bookshelf that Made Me. This is intended to go beyond the constraints of its broadcast version, and its first guest is Nicholas Shakespeare. He is best known in this parish as the writer-director of the BBC’s 1980s three episode Arena TV documentary series about Evelyn Waugh, now referred to as The Waugh Trilogy. But he has also written several novels as well as some nonfiction. The interviewer is the program’s usual presenter Kate Evans. Here is the network’s description of this episode on its website:

The Bookshelf that Made Me: A series of interviews in which writers reveal the books that have shaped both their latest book, and their lives and writing more broadly.

Nicholas Shakespeare is a biographer, critic, essayist and documentary maker as well as a novelist. He’s written nonfiction works on Bruce Chatwin, Winston Churchill, on an Englishwoman living in WWll France among others, and his novels include The Dancer Upstairs and Inheritance.

His latest novel, The Sandpit (Harvill Secker), was reviewed on The Bookshelf recently.

And it was with The Sandpit in mind that Kate Evans spoke to Shakespeare about the antecedents of this literary thriller, as well as the other books and writers that have shaped him.

The program extends over about 30 minutes, and Shakespeare mentions Evelyn Waugh three times. He first recalls that he actually met Graham Greene (one of his favorite authors) when he interviewed him for the Arena series on Waugh. Then in answer to a question of what books he had recently re-read, he began by saying he approached re-reading with some hesitation, because he fears seeing flaws in something he once had liked. This happened recently in the case of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. He had read it as a student and thought it “a tiny jewl with no word out of place.” On re-reading, he found it a bit “baggier” with several longuers he hadn’t noticed earlier. Finally, when asked which of his favorites he had failed to mention in the interview so far, he returned to Waugh. And given this second chance he mentions Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour war trilogy in which he thinks Waugh cannot write a bad sentence. He is currently re-reading Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels as part of his project to write a biography of Fleming authorized by the Fleming family.

 

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Roundup: Agony Aunts and Metroland

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the Daily Telegraph, Rowan Pelling muses over whether novelists would make good advice to the lovelorn “agony aunts”. Pelling has always thought Edith Wharton would be excellent and notes that Simone de Beauvoir and AnaĂŻs Nin in fact functioned as such, inspiring letters from readers of some of their writings, but is not so sure about other writers:

In fact, most famous authors would make terrible agony aunts. As Graham Greene rightly pointed out, good writers tend to have “a splinter of ice” in their hearts, which allows them to look dispassionately at unpleasant people and happenings and turn their observations into art. Greene himself would have been rubbish at proffering advice because of all that Catholic angst. Anyone who can make God the third person in a love affair, as he does in The End of the Affair, should be barred from counselling others. […]

In fact, speculating which writers would make good agony aunts, and which would not, makes an excellent parlour game for book lovers. I ran into the academic and Scott Fitzgerald aficionada Sarah Churchwell in the course of writing this article and we spent a delicious half-hour running through various scenarios. Churchwell’s top tip was Zelda Fitzgerald, on the grounds there was no experience she hadn’t lived through, including severe mental illness. We agreed you wouldn’t want to go near a man who’d taken advice from overly macho, wife-deserting Ernest Hemingway, nor one who modelled himself on Evelyn Waugh because of the repressed homosexuality and the snobbery (you’d feel you’d need to own a rather lovely country pile before he’d take any interest in your quandaries). Yet Henry James’s fine observation of errant behaviour, his ear for subtext – let alone his incredible insight into women – would put him right up there with his friend Wharton as a counsellor.

–In The Times, Deputy Books Editor James Marriott expresses his concern that exam results have become too pervasive in the university admissions system:

The West’s modern, exam-based meritocracy is an unsatisfactory answer to the old system of advancement based on wealth and family connections. In the years before the Second World War, Yale University admitted 90 per cent of its applicants. If you had the right sort of background and attended the right sort of school, you were almost guaranteed a place.

As late as the mid-1950s, an alumnus of an elite American private school was able to report that “Every member of the class got into his first-choice college except one, who was thought to be brain-damaged.” If Evelyn Waugh’s account of the rampaging Bollinger Club in Decline and Fall bears any relation to reality, 1920s Oxford was happily admitting even the brain-damaged, provided that they boasted suitably impressive lineages.

In the postwar years, our education system was rearranged to reward intelligence, not wealth. Oxford scholarships reserved for the pupils of particular private schools were abolished. Rather than accepting the poshest candidates, universities would accept the most able. The most convenient measure of merit to hand was exam results. Places at elite British and American universities became fiercely competitive. Nowadays Yale’s acceptance rate is 6.3 per cent. At Oxford it is 17.5 per cent.

This system soon infected politics and government services. The article concludes:

Unless we revert to a system of offering university places on the basis of aristocratic rank, exams are here to stay. They are a fact of modern life. But they needn’t be so central a fact. The grades GCSE students are assigned today will be arbitrary and unjust, regardless of whether or not an algorithm has screwed them up.

–A recent book review by James Baresel in the Roman Catholic weekly The Wanderer compares the writings of Ronald Knox to those of an American theologian:

Evelyn Waugh once wrote that one of the authors whom he read most frequently was Msgr. Ronald Knox, from whose books he could, at one and the same time, receive both spiritual edification and literary pleasure. Even in an age when that combination was not uncommon, Knox was able to achieve it to a truly rare degree, surpassed in English prose only by St. John Henry Newman. Today that tradition is largely a matter of history. Largely.

There remains one Anglophone priest who has maintained it, whose works are at least the equal of those from the pens of all but its greatest exemplars and can even be spoken of in the same breath as those of his handful of superiors and who is, moreover, the greatest contributor to that genre the United States has ever produced — Fr. George Rutler.[…]

Anyone not yet familiar with his works will find an excellent introduction to his thought and style in Sophia Press’ The Wit and Wisdom of Father George Rutler. Those whose familiarity with his writing is already extensive will find many of his most incisive and penetrative insights at their most memorable, amusing, and pungent best.

–Sam Wollaston writing in the Guardian thinks that the changes to work habits brought on by the Covid-19 epidemic may destroy the “commute” as a well-established subject of English literature. He mentions for example the:

…Metropolitan line, which brings commuters in from the more affluent (and further afield) mock-Tudor suburbs that became known as Metro-land and were celebrated by Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. But, again, there are very few commuters today. The capital – normally the lungs of the country, sucking in workers in the morning and exhaling them in the late afternoon – is breathing like a hibernating bear.

The tube has never been a place for striking up friendly conversations. With masks and distancing, it is more eyes-down-make-no-contact than ever. Social media is an easier space to approach strangers. My eye was caught by a tweet from a passenger on the 8.08 from Surbiton to Waterloo, usually one of the busiest commuter trains in the country, with a video clip showing the empty carriage. Surbiton, AKA Suburbiton, is quintessential commuter belt, home to Tom and Barbara in the 70s sitcom The Good Life and likely the inspiration for the fictional Climthorpe, where the salaryman Reggie hit his midlife crisis in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

He’s got it right about Betjeman and the classic TV series but I am not sure what work of Waugh he has in mind that makes anything much out of London commuter life. He is probably thinking of Decline and Fall where there is a character named Margot Metroland and her politician husband but they don’t commute on public transport.

–Finally, the Daily Telegraph carries a column by Simon Heffer who reminds us that the BBC4 is running the 1960 Face to Face interview of Evelyn Waugh this evening at 1105p. He recalls the innovations brought to TV broadcasting by that interview series:

For all his achievements, Freeman was no egomaniac. The programme was about his subject, not about him. He was chosen because he was a serious man who would ask serious questions, but not in a way that would cause offence. All one saw of him, if one saw anything, was the back of his head. They may have been what we would now call celebrity interviews, but the interviewer was not the celebrity.

The questions were designed to reveal, and not to goad, trap or humiliate. Freeman’s formal, gentlemanly and brisk manner, as much as the allure of some of his subjects, was why the programmes were so feted, and why they make such compelling viewing still. […]

What distinguished Face to Face from later television interviews was that the interviewees agreed to be questioned about themselves, in an almost psychiatric fashion, and not about a book, film, record or show. Freeman used the same method of interrogation with Carl Gustav Jung and Lord Hailsham as he did with Albert Finney and Adam Faith.

No one was patronised; nothing was played for laughs; there were no softballs to help bring along the audience. Above all, there was no need for soundbites, because there was so much time; no one else came in and sat on a sofa and joined in the banter.

As noted in a previous post, the interview will follow BBC4’s screening of the 2008 theatrical film of Brideshead Revisited at 9pm.

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Desmond Guinness (1931-2020) R.I.P.

Posted on August 25, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent issue of The Times carries the obituary of Desmond Guinness who died on 20 August at the age of 88. He was the younger son of two of Waugh’s closest friends during the early days of his career:

Desmond Walter Guinness was born in 1931, the younger of two sons of Bryan Guinness, scion of the 18th-century brewing family who became the 2nd Lord Moyne when his own father was assassinated in Cairo in 1944. His mother, Diana, regarded as the most beautiful and controversial of the Mitford sisters, went into labour with Desmond while at the theatre but was so enjoying the play that she stayed until the end. His brother, Jonathan, is the 3rd Lord Moyne.

During the interwar years their parents were among the brightest of the “bright young things”, a group satirised in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies (1930), which he dedicated to Bryan and Diana. A year after her son’s birth Diana began an affair with Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. She and Mosley were married in 1936, in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler a guest […]

In 1940 Diana was interned in Holloway prison, where she was visited by her son. Although Guinness acknowledged the postwar hostility towards her and his stepfather, he would not say a bad word against her. “She was very beautiful, very funny,” he said, keeping her portrait by Augustus John on his wall.

Much of the Times’ obituary is given over to Desmond’s dedication to the Irish Georgian Society which was devoted to saving period buildings and furnishings from destruction and in many cases restoring them. He acquired Leixlip Castle and lived in it for many years with his family.

…Guinness, described by friends as an unassuming but mischievous and flirtatious man, played the clavichord and French horn, and hated cats. He continued with his preservation work, championing not only historic buildings but also the arts. In 1970 he helped to organise a chamber music festival at Castletown House in Co Kildare, the first of what became the Great Music in Irish Houses festival, at which a young [Mick] Jagger is said to have helped to set out the chairs. John Williams, the Australian guitarist, played at the inaugural event.

Although the silver-haired Guinness stepped down as chairman of the Irish Georgian Society in 1990, Leixlip Castle and its visitors remained the centre of his life. The writer and historian Ulick O’Connor recalled venturing down one morning to find Jagger having breakfast in his dressing gown while reading Oscar Wilde’s fairytales. “Here, it always seems to be this weekend or the next,” mused Guinness philosophically.

His older brother, Jonathan, seems to have survived him, although that isn’t clearly stated. Jonathan was the recipient of the manuscript of Vile Bodies (given by Waugh to Diana and Bryan to whom, as noted in the obituary, it was also dedicated). Martin Stannard discovered its whereabouts in 1984 when he was researching his biography of Evelyn Waugh. Prof Stannard describes this in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, v. 2: Vile Bodies, pp xli-xliii.

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Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In Duncan McLaren’s latest series of articles, Evelyn Waugh’s friends from Oxford are collecting at the Brideshead Festival. The last of these, by my count based on Duncan’s own projections, is Graham Greene. The first installment of the Greene episode begins with this:

Alone in his room on the first floor of the West Wing, Graham Greene was thinking about how he could contribute to the Brideshead Festival. Thinking hard about how he could use it to further his own reputation.

Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh had much in common. One was born in 1903, the son of a publisher, the other in 1904, the son of a headmaster. Both read History at Oxford, though it was Evelyn who had a good time with Alastair Graham, while Graham suffered bouts of near-suicidal depression. Both had first novels published in the late twenties, The Man Within (dour and romantic) and Decline and Fall (a book that in later life Graham would admit to having read several times). Graham converted to Catholicism in 1926, because his wife-to-be was a Catholic. Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 after his first wife had deserted him. By the mid 1940s both were famous novelists and practicing Catholics, with success coming in America for Evelyn with Brideshead Revisited and for Graham with The Heart of the Matter.

But it is something else that happened in the mid 1940s which Graham wants to explore. There was a five-year gap between the publishing of The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The Heart of the Matter (1948). In between these books he’d tried his hand at being a publisher, and had helped transform the fiction list of Eyre and Spottiswoode. One of the books he’d seen into print was a masterpiece, one that stood comparison with Brideshead Revisited. Which was exactly what Graham was going to do. He was going to compare two classic novels.

So let’s go through this material slowly. The other book in question is Titus Groan and its author was Mervyn Peake, he who had produced his own stunning cover art.

After his comparison of Titus Groan and Brideshead (probably the most interesting part of the essay), Graham rather wanders around the premises poking his way into rooms occupied by other of Waugh’s friends, such as Nancy Mitford, Robert Byron and Anthony Powell. The narrative wanders a bit as well, and Graham never manages to set up the sort of imaginary dialogue with any of these others as those that populate Duncan’s previous episodes. Graham does have occasion, however, based what he finds in the other rooms, to contemplate his own odd description of Evelyn’s death, the enmity between Evelyn and Robert Byron and the view taken by Anthony Powell of Graham’s books. The full episode is available at this link.

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New Book Features Madresfield

Posted on August 22, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has posted an excerpt from a new book about English country houses. This is by Clive Aslet, former editor of Country Life and is entitled Old Homes, New Life. It is based on visits he has made to 12 country houses where he has interviewed their current owners and considers their tenures in the context of the the history of each house. The Mail’s excerpt is from the section of the book relating to Madresfield Court which has a close association with Evelyn Waugh:

Lucy Chenevix-Trench’s family have been at Madresfield Court, in Worcestershire, for 900 years. When I visited it for Old Homes, New Life […] I found it a deeply romantic house: readers of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited will see it through misty eyes, because its pre-War occupants, the 7th Earl Beauchamp and his family, inspired the story.
Unlike some film representations of Brideshead, though, Madresfield is not ostentatiously grand, having evolved in what Lucy’s husband Jonathan calls a ‘somewhat random and organic manner,’ as and when money permitted over the centuries. Today the overarching priority at Madresfield is family life. ‘We still have three out of four children at home,’ explains Lucy. ‘That will change, but for now we feel very strongly about its being a family home.’

Lucy is the daughter of the previous owner Lady Morison who inherited it from an uncle. Lucy was 23 when she moved in with her mother and so did not experience it as a child which is what her own young children are now doing. They also open the house to the public 40 days per year:

Initially Lucy was not sure what she would make of it. ‘We thought, ‘O my goodness, people wandering around in the middle of our house! We didn’t have that in our cottage in Hungerford.’ We now feel there’s a positive pleasure in sharing the house and its history. It all works very well, and we in turn learn a huge amount from our visitors.’

Lucy’s husband  also explains that they are trying to put the land itself to use by raising grass-fed cattle since it isn’t suitable for crops.

The book has also been reviewed in a recent issue of The Tatler:

From Jane Austen to Julian Fellowes, Ian McEwan to Evelyn Waugh, the British country house has beguiled and entranced for centuries. Benjamin Disraeli spoke of ‘that soul-subduing sentiment, harshly called flirtation, which is the spell of a country house,’ articulating a feeling that all who have visited British country houses know too well. But Old Homes, New Life reminds us that country houses are far more than objects of beauty and history to be admired by an adoring – if sometimes envious – public. They are family homes and working estates, supporting thousands of livelihoods and closely guarding an ancient way of life.

The book will be published early next month in the USA and is already for sale in the UK. The articles in the Daily Mail and Tatler are illustrated with some of the photographs from the book which come across very well on their internet editions.

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Waugh Night on BBC Four and Queer Stately Homes

Posted on August 21, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The BBC has announced the TV programming for next week that will include two Evelyn Waugh events on Thursday, 27 August. The first will be a rebroadcast of the 2008 theatrical film version of Brideshead Revisited, co-produced by the BBC along with Ecosse Films and Miramax. This will be transmitted at 2100. The Daily Telegraph program guide comments:

In light of the brillliant 1981 TV version, you do have to admire the chutzpah of anyone bringing Brideshead to the big screen. Julian Jarrold’s attempt suffers from a desire to force modern conventions upon a story defined by the mores of upper-class interwar Britain. Hayley Atwell and Ben Whishaw star as the Flyte siblings but Catholicism, the tale’s engine, is only pernicious, never seductive.

This will be followed at 2305 by the 1960 Face to Face interview of Evelyn Waugh by John Freeman. According to the Telegraph:

It is doubtful that interviewer John Freeman faced many tougher subjects than author Evelyn Waugh, puffing disdainfully on a cigar while batting questions away with ease. Still, it makes for an entertaining if rather combative confrontation, with Waugh unbending slightly to talk about his childhood (“it was idyllic which is probably why I don’t remember it”), his time at Oxford and his conversion to Catholicism.

Both programs will be available to watch on the internet on BBC iPlayer after broadcast (indeed, Face to Face may already be available). See links provided above. A UK internet connection will be required.

–Meanwhile, an internet event is scheduled this Sunday that may also be of interest to Waugh fans. This is “Live Like a Queen: a look at Britain’s queer stately homes.” Here’s the description:

Join award-winning tour guides Nick Collinson and Dan Vo as they look at the grand palaces and stately homes that have been the settings for queer love as well as inspired the fantastical imaginations of film makers across the decades.

From novels, to films, romance among the roses, and bust-ups in the bedchamber, stately homes around the UK have been the setting for queer love and heartbreak for hundreds of years. We go upstairs and downstairs as well as outside into the bushes, to look for queer love in some of the most glamourous residential buildings in the UK. Some of the amazing locations you will see are:

  • Knole was the ancestral home of Vita Sackville-West, which inspired Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. The property is where the original, fragile manuscript is kept today.

  • Sissinghurst Castle is where Vita Sackville-West made her home. Her beautifully designed gardens, while a source of inspiration for English gardens across the country, were first designed by her with same-sex romantic dalliances in mind.

  • Kensington Palace is the current home of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their young family. It was once home to Queen Anne, played by Olivia Colman in 2018 movie ‘The Favourite’. Its corridors echo with the turbulent relationships between the queen and her ‘favourites’.

  • Shibden Hall is the focus of the BBC drama series written by Sally Wainwright, ‘Gentleman Jack’ starring Suranne Jones and Sopie Rundle. Within a stone’s throw is also the church where Anne Lister and Ann Walker married.

  • Madresfield Court has belonged to the Lygon family since the 12th century. It was home of Liberal politician William Lygon, 7th Lord Beauchamp and Governor of New South Wales, who had a penchant for youthful, rosy-cheeked footmen. His story inspired Evelyn Waugh to write Brideshead Revisited.

  • Castle Howard was catapulted into the public eye in the 1980s, when it was used as the setting for the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. It is still synonymous with the well-loved novel and in 2008 reprised its role in the big screen adaptation.

Participation in the Zoom.com event will cost $10, and it will start at 2pm New York EDT. Ticketing and other details are available at this link.

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Scott-King’s Modern Latin

Posted on August 19, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In these days of preparation for the resumption of schooling in some form, The Epoch Times has posted an article asking whether parents should be signing up their children for Latin lessons. This is written by Jeff Minick, who opens with this quote from Scott-King’s Modern Europe:

In Evelyn Waugh’s “Scott-King’s Modern Europe,” a school’s headmaster and Scott-King, the classics teacher, discuss the declining enrollment in Latin and Greek classes. The headmaster wishes to do away with the classics: “Parents aren’t interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more. They want to qualify their boys for the modern world.” He then asks if Scott-King might teach history and economics. He refuses.

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”

Is the headmaster correct? Is there any reason to study Latin today? After all, why spend all that time and energy learning declensions and conjugations and memorizing vocabulary when no one speaks Latin anymore? Cui bono? (To whose good?)

The article goes on to discuss what Minick sees as several reasons why Latin may be a sensible choice of subject for a 21st century student. No doubt, Scott-King himself would have have found them superfluous. Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a novella that initially appeared in Cornhill Magazine (Summer 1947) and as “A Sojourn in Neutralia” in Cosmopolitan (Nov 1947. It was later published as a separate book in Dec 1947 (UK) and Feb 1949 (USA). It is now included in Waugh’s Complete Short Stories.

After the foregoing was posted, a weblog published another review of Scott-King. This is by Philip Spires and opens with this:

Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a short, perhaps over-short novella by Evelyn Waugh. Written in 1946, it visits a fictitious part of Europe largely unknown to its determinedly English protagonist. In 1946 Scott-King had been classical master at Grantchester for twenty-five years, we are told in the tale’s first sentence. This locks the book’s principal character firmly in his place within the English class system, sketches his likely character, with its staid dedication to what has always been and remains “right”, and posits him without doubt in the apolitical conservatism of an ultimately submissive establishment. It’s the kind of England that used to believe that fog at Dover meant that Europe was cut off. Thus Waugh presents him to his undoubtedly sympathetic readers.[…]

After a lively and amusing summary of the plot, the review concludes with this:

Written at the end of the second world war, when perhaps mythically the British had stood alone, the book is perhaps the author’s reflection on events that saw the division of Europe into opposing camps. The territorial integrity of the United Kingdom, and essentially England within it, had been maintained. But those “over there” we’re still foreign and thankfully they weren’t “over here”. Their values weren’t our values, and yet their influence was all-pervading, or at least potentially so. Britain, and the English on the throne within it, we’re still alone, still threatened. This is the culture that is suffused throughout Evelyn Waugh’s little book and it is the assumption that makes its reading now at least poignant. It might even have been written a week ago, based on anyone’s list of presumptions that surrounded the Brexit referendum. Everything that was not an English value is manifest in this non-culture of Neutralia, a nation that needs to invent heroes raised from within the mediocrity of its unrecognized and – even more reprehensible – unrecorded past. How non-English can one get?

Waugh’s humour enlivens the story and his unapologetic Englishness almost renders himself as the principal character. It’s is short enough to be read in an hour, but it’s sentiment and message will resonate very strongly with contemporary readers. In Britain’s current political context, Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a little book with a big message.

The complete text is available at this link.

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Dog Days Roundup: 18 August 2020

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in a recent issue of the Daily Telegraph, literary journalist Jane Shilling bemoans the early reaction of the publishing industry to the coronavirus lockdown. In a period when reading and cooking were two of the activities the “lockdownees” could enjoyably turn to, publishers began making wholesale postponements of their scheduled release dates. Shilling looked back to the books in her collection for precedents in previous stressful times and found this:

Among the many books I own are some published during the Second World War, including a 1942 edition of Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. The paperstock is little better than newsprint, the design perfunctory, but the effect on morale must have been tremendous. As I was beginning to compare the response of publishers then and now, the literary agent Jonny Geller had harsh words for the “narrow” approach of publishers, who put “everything in the deep freeze”, while other branches of the arts continued to produce new content, arguably in more difficult conditions.

Now the moment for the great defrosting has come. On September 3, almost 600 new titles will be published. For weeks now, proofs of forthcoming books have been arriving on my doormat, with press releases eloquently arguing their case.

–Several Roman Catholic papers have published another commemoration of Brideshead Revisited’s 75th anniversary. This is by Russell Shaw who concludes that there are two reasons for the book’s continuing popularity:

One is its nostalgia for happier times, especially strong in the story’s first section, which paints an idealized picture of undergraduate life at Oxford in the early ’20s. Several of the themes and characters introduced here take on darker hues as the story progresses, but the early days, as Waugh depicts them, are cloudless and golden. Although precious few people attended Oxford in the 1920s or any other time, Waugh’s idyllic version offers readers who ever went to any school any place a vicarious experience of carefree youth as they’d have liked it to be.

The second source of the book’s enduring popularity is, I think, its triumphalistic treatment of Catholicism. Waugh, a convert, makes being Catholic sound not just interesting but fashionable, delivering the message that the cleverest, most attractive and ultimately most serious people are Catholics. It’s all summed up in the book’s great deathbed scene in which even the agnostic Charles Ryder, the story’s narrator, falls to his knees to pray for a sign of final repentance by the imperious, adulterous lapsed Catholic Lord Marchmain.

A full copy can be viewed at this link and in several other papers.

—Country Life takes another look at the writings of Gilbert White, most well known for his writing about nature. In the assessment by Toby Keel of why White’s writings (especially The Natural History & Antiquities of Selborne) have survived, he makes a reference to Waugh’s own nature writings and asks:

…why has The Natural History proved so damnably readable across the churn and change of the centuries? Well, because it is English Literature, capital L, to rank alongside Austen, the King James Bible, Chaucer and Orwell. Literariness in Nature writing is a dangerous thing, too often rotting purple, the stuff so deliciously burlesqued by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop. ‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole,’ penned poor Boot. White, very much a practising naturalist, always keeps the quill in check. His are the words that are poetic, but precise. He is the lovable, learned friend by one’s side, his only wish to show you his parish’s splendours.

–A weblog devoted to the life and work of actor Errol Flynn has posted an article about his connections to Waugh’s novel The Loved One. The article is headed by a large photo of Flynn lying in bed and reading a copy of the Penguin edition of the book. It also mentions that Flynn was buried at Forest Lawn (the model for Whispering Glades) against his wishes. After a summary of the plot and a mention of the 1960s film, there is a link to the song Forest Lawn written and performed by Tom Paxton. This is worth a listen. Here’s one of the verses:

To find a simple resting place is my desire.
To lay me down with a smiling face comes a little bit higher.
My likeness done in brass, will stand in plastic grass,
And weights and hidden springs tip it’s hat to the mourners filing past.

The song was probably written about 1970 when both Paxton and John Denver recorded versions of it. The lyrics are available here.

–Finally, this week’s Observer carries a story by Nick Hillman about the upheaval in British university admissions caused by the disruption of the examination process in the coronavirus quarantine and the government’s inconsistent interventions:

In moments of doubt, new students should recall that higher education generally works out, with graduates tending to earn more and live longer. But the journey is not always smooth, so institutions are putting in place more online and face-to-face support for those who need extra help or have second thoughts – and accessing this should be recognised as the act of bravery it is, rather than evidence of being a snowflake.

Before anyone does drop out, they should remember that, even if their initial year of university life is disrupted, it is the least important one, academically and socially. As Evelyn Waugh put in Brideshead Revisited, you may even “find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first”.

The full article is posted on The Guardian’s website.

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