117th Anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s Birthday

Posted on October 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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Halloween Roundup

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The memoir like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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War Trilogy: Fake Novels and an Anniversary

Posted on October 22, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Handful of Reading in the Lockdown

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

Q. What would be your Mastermind specialist subject?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Virtual Book Launch for Helena

Posted on October 17, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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Vile Bodies BBC Radio Adaptation Posted

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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Muggeridge Anniversary

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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Roundup: Boyd, Banville and Paper Hats

Posted on October 12, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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“92 Days” Complete Works Edition Announced

Posted on October 10, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

 

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Posted in A Tourist in Africa, Academia, Complete Works, Evelyn Waugh Society, Ninety-Two Days, Oxford | Tagged , | 2 Comments