Perry Mason Meets The Loved One

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Another review of the recent Perry Mason TV series also implicates Waugh.  (See previ0us post.) This is not so much for his admiration of Erle Stanley Gardner but for his sharing with Gardner an interest in “distinctly Los Angelean” themes. One of these mentioned specifically is religion:

The Mormons notwithstanding, Southern California and LA specifically has always been ground zero for America’s homespun cults, but it’s rare for that to come up much in the media – if it does, usually it’s the few creators with the guts to take a pop at Scientology. But Perry Mason makes heavy feature of the, shall we say, interesting spin that the town of Hollywood puts on evangelical Christianity, which one feels is locked in a thorny spiritual battle over whether to feature a gift shop.

At one point, the show makes mention of Hollywood’s Forest Lawn cemetery, presented in the same circusish light as the rest of the religious mania at hand – which is interesting, because the show had already been putting me in mind of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, a novella which the staunchly Catholic Waugh had essentially vomited out in disgust after witnessing Forest Lawn’s tacky Disneyland approach to death. The Loved One, too, depicted more than a few deluded messianic figures, although typically for Waugh they were all secular in nature – here they’re leading the gospel chants while passing the collection plates (and are, by nature, some of the more lively performers). And with religion itself reduced to little more than cash-grabbing tourist trap, what hope for the rest of society?

The answer, per Waugh and reflected here, is ‘not much’. There’s a few islands of themselves-flawed decency in a seething morass of general misbehaviour – in other words, it’s a noir. ,,,

The review is by Huw Saunders and is posted on the  the entertainment website CulturedVultures.com.

Another recent article takes up the same theme. This is an excerpt from the recent book by Peter Lunenfeld that will appear in the next issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books. The book is entitled City at the Edge of Forever and the excerpt is posted on the LARB website. It opens with this discussion of the attitude toward death reflected in the works of Walt Disney, one of the few Hollywood artists Waugh admired:

…[Walt Disney’s] body is, of course, not cryogenically preserved beneath Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, as urban legend would have it and was in point of fact cremated and then interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery. But no matter. Disney’s frozen head is tailor-made for metaphor. Uncle Walt was an animator, bringing to life the insentient and making delightful the impossible. With a wave of his hand, brooms danced and mice sang. Playing with mortality is the secret sauce ladled over his corporate oeuvre. Bambi’s mother, Dumbo’s father, both of Cinderella’s parents, deer, elephant, and human — all dead. Yet mortality’s sting isn’t as fatal in Disney’s realm as it is in our own. Snow White eats a poisoned apple and undergoes a sleeping death, only to be reanimated by “love’s first kiss.” Disney understood Hollywood’s maxim that if something works once, it will work again. Thus Sleeping Beauty, where yet another young girl succumbs to the machinations of yet another evil older woman, falling into a state closer to a coma than to sleep, only to be awakened by another one of those kisses. Eros and Thanatos were never so colorful, nor so well scored.

Similar discussions ensue of how other noted Angelenos have been revered after their deaths. These include local Mexican cultural hero Ruben Salazar, Presidents Nixon and Reagan and rap artist Tupac Shakur. The article then segues into this:

Southern California’s cemeteries are big business, and like the entertainment industry that surrounds them and supplies their best-known clients, they must innovate or die. In 1917 Hubert Eaton, who vaingloriously referred to himself as the “Builder,” created in Glendale’s Forest Lawn what he saw as “a place for the living,” with art rather than relics, a “spiritual” rather than a “religious” space: “I shall endeavor to build Forest Lawn as different, as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness, as Eternal Life is unlike death.” English visitors including Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh could contain neither their contempt nor their guffaws at Eaton’s antiseptic necropolis with its bowdlerized art and flag waving patriotism, but the regular Folks of Southern California ate it up. Until Disneyland opened, it was Southern California’s most popular tourist attraction and the place Walt Disney’s parents most wanted to see when they came to Los Angeles to visit — and where, as noted above, Walt himself chose to be interred.

Finally, The Loved One is among a group of novels recommended in a list prepared by a writer whose first book (a collection of stories) is about to be published next month: Mannequin and Wife. This is Jen Fawkes and the theme of her booklist is “WHAT TO READ WHEN YOU SUSPECT THAT TIME IS NOT A LINE”. This is explained in the opening paragraphs of the article. Here’s the entry for The Loved One:

A satirical look at the treatment of death/dying/the dead in mid-century American, The Loved One is a purported love story. Dennis, an aspiring poet who works at a pet cemetery (The Happier Hunting Grounds), falls for Aimee, a cosmetician who makes up the faces of the recently deceased at an absurdly ostentatious funeral home/burial complex (Whispering Glades). Though the book is set over a fairly short span of time, the ways in which it grapples with death (and therefore life), make it pretty timeless. There’s also a film version of The Loved One (1965) that is truly spectacular.

The booklist is posted on TheRumpus.net.

 

 

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Waugh’s V-J Day

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

V-J Day celebrates its 75th anniversary this week. The Japanese surrendered on 15 August 1945 in Japan but the news was received when it was 14 August in the UK and USA.  In Britain this was a much lesser event that the V-E day celebration 3 months earlier. Prof Ashley Jackson of Kings College London has posted on the College website a brief survey of published diaries describing how their authors spent the day. For example, Harold Nicolson hardly noticed it. On the other hand,

… the novelist and soldier Evelyn Waugh was at his family home in Ickleford, Hitchin. ‘Peace declared. Public holiday. Remained more or less drunk all day’. On the following day he wrote: ‘Another public holiday. Hangover, Winston [Churchill, the Prime Minister’s grandson] a boisterous boy with head too big for body. Randolph [Churchill] made a bonfire and Auberon [Waugh’s son] fell into it. American came to luncheon and signed Randolph up for highly profitable daily column. Some village sports and damp bonfire and floodlit green.’

The quotes are from Waugh’s Diaries, p. 632. Waugh was, in fact, not at his own family home but that of his friend Randolph Churchill. Waugh’s home at Piers Court was not re-occupied by the family until 10 September 1945.

Novelist and critic D J Taylor also commemorates V-J Day with an essay in the New Statesman. This is entitled “We Lived Through It”, referring not to himself, born in 1960, but to his parents. As a child, he lived through the war vicariously, constantly reminded of it by his parents.  His father served in the Army and his mother was head of the household in his absence. He recalls it in his war-themed toys and the films he most remembers as a child in the 60s as well as what he read as a student:

It was the same with the novels by Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning which one started reading a few years later in the sixth form. Here, it seemed, was an entire literature devoted to the war your father had fought in, where even the angry young men of the statue-toppling 1950s were signed up as junior subalterns. After all, the university-lecturing hero of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim(1954) keeps his notes in an old RAF file, visualises the streets and squares of London by remembering a ­weekend leave spent there during the war and is forced to compare his tenure as a RAF corporal on the west coast of Scotland with the heroics of his student Mr Michie, who commanded a tank troop at Anzio.

After summarizing the impact of the war on specific elements of British post war politics and culture, he concludes:

Three-quarters of a century after VJ Day, when the Japanese surrender brought the Second World War to its close, reminders of the conflict and its effect on our collective sensibility are still everywhere to hand. If one of its consequences was to nurture a sense of the national collective we are, and were meant to be – that whole “People’s War” framing, which sees the founding of the NHS as a natural progression from the solidarity of 1939-45 – then another has been to encourage the low-level chauvinism that hangs over our relationship with Europe. The continent is immemorially regarded as a cartel bossed by Germany, the country we defeated, and France, the country we rescued from tyranny. Even now, at a time of unimaginably lowered national prestige, it is possible for a certain kind of Englishman (and it is usually a man) to console himself with the thought that: “After all, we won the war.”

As for the personal consequences, only the other day I turned up a copy of John Keegan’s history of the Second World War, given to my father as a birthday present in the late 1980s, and returned to me by my mother after he died. On the flyleaf Dad had written his name and the four words, “Who lived through it.” As anyone born in the decades after the Second World War can tell you, in our own indirect and necessarily diluted ways, we lived through it too.

UPDATE (14 August 2020): Reference to DJ Taylor essay added.

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Septimus Waugh in The Tablet

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Tablet’s latest issue celebrates the magazine’s 180th anniversary since its founding in 1840. One of the featured articles is a memoir by Septimus Waugh of his father’s religious beliefs and practices. As summarized by the editors: “Evelyn Waugh is often portrayed as a selfish and cantankerous father. By contrast, the youngest of his seven children remembers him as a gentle, melancholic man whose chief pleasure lay in parodying his condition.” Septimus begins by explaining his own attitude toward religion: “I was born a Catholic and accepted Catholic doctrine as something to be learned and obeyed in ­whatever form it might take.”

The article includes several anecdotes about Evelyn Waugh not previously published so far as I am aware. The first relates to religion as well as child rearing:

When I was six years old and undergoing instruction for First Confession and First Holy Communion, I discovered a great wheeze on my travel between convent and home. I would spend money given to me for the bus fare on sweets, having declared to the bus driver that my parents had failed to give me any money for the fare. This appeared to have been a successful ruse for a few weeks until, finally, two black-robed inspectors turned up at the house to demand of my parents why they had been failing to give their child money for his bus fares. I was, of course, hauled in to give an explanation for my behaviour, and admitted the theft of the money for sweets. But I announced that they could not touch me because I had confessed it, done penance and received absolution. That was good enough for my father. I think his lack of action encouraged in me a belief in the efficacy of truth.

There is also a story based on Septimus’s destruction of one of his father’s walking sticks followed by a discussion of his humorous attitude toward seemingly serious matters such as the church’s religious reforms. Here is an excerpt from the section about the Vatican II liturgical reforms:

Humour was the thing with which we attempted to cheer him up. Often the focus of his depression seemed to be the change of the liturgy into a rather crass vernacular. In particular he took exception to the translation of Et cum spiritu tuo – the response to Dominus vobiscum (“The Lord be with you”) – as “And also with you”. He would sit in the second row of our newly built red-brick parish church in Wiveliscombe muttering, “And with you too … Tohubohu”. The last part is apparently the Greek for chaos. My sister, Harriet, witnessed him retreating on one occasion to the car in the car park where he sounded the horn to the rhythm of “And also with you” when he felt that it was time for that response.

Septimus goes on to recount how he got one of the Downside monks in trouble by repeating to his father something he had overheard the monk say at school in opposition to a Papal pronouncement. The family’s own worship habits after their move from Dursley to Combe Florey are also discussed:

… The places where we congregated for Mass were frequently private chapels. Before it got its custom-built church, our local parish of Wiveliscombe met in a former haberdashery shop on the high street. We frequently went to Mass in the local mental hospital in Tone Vale which had a Catholic chapel, and a wonderful, eccentric old lady called “Bimber” Critchley-Samuelson had built a chapel in her house, which we attended when she had a priest staying. To be Roman Catholic was to have returned to a more ancient faith than the modern Anglican Church offered, and the ecumenical movement and the translation into the vernacular of the Roman Catholic liturgy by committee, even though the form of the Mass remained the same, was a problem for my father.

The article concludes with a story explaining how Ronald Knox’s reasons for not serving as an Anglican chaplain in the First World War may have contributed to the concluding scene of the novel Brideshead Revisited.

 

 

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Roundup: 12 August 2020

Posted on August 12, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Digital magazine The Big Smoke–Australia has posted a story entitled: “Two literary sons an equal to their famous fathers.” This is by Loretta Barnard. The first successful father/son literary pairing she discusses is that of Alexandre Dumas and his son of the same name. The other is Evelyn and Auberon Waugh. The story is headed by a photo of Auberon and Evelyn sitting on a sofa with Auberon’s young son Alexander in between:

…Reams could be written about [Evelyn] Waugh the man and the writer. Sadly, space doesn’t permit, but it’s safe to say that he’s one of the great English novelists of the twentieth century. It’s also safe to say he wasn’t a very likeable man. As a father he was distant, avoiding his children as much as he possibly could. His son Auberon wrote: “He reserved the right not just to deny affection to his children, but to advertise an acute and unqualified dislike of them.”

Auberon Waugh (1939-2001) was a journalist and novelist. It can’t have been easy being the son of such a renowned author but Auberon made his way in the world on his own terms. He’d written five good novels by the age of 33 and his autobiography Will This Do? (1991) is as hilarious as it is insightful.

It was as a journalist that Auberon came into his own.  […] A highly intellectual man, in private Auberon Waugh was well liked by his friends for his roguish sense of humour and his charm, and he was a good father to his four children.

In 2004, Auberon’s son Alexander Waugh (born 1963) wrote Fathers and Sons, an account of the male members of the Waugh family across five generations. He writes that in spite of the emotional distance between Evelyn and Auberon, the Waughs “entertained people and gave people pleasure”. And that counts for a lot.

Also mentioned but not discussed are the Kingsley/Martin Amis twosome and that of the two writers named William S Burroughs. Neither of those literary duos got along terribly well with each other.

–In the New York Review of Books, writer Jay Neugeboren tells the bittersweet history of his New York City family in terms of a set of the Complete Works of Dickens. The story begins:

My parents were married at six o’clock on Sunday evening, October 25, 1936, at the Quincy Manor in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and a week or so later, they began clipping coupons from the front page of The New York Post, one coupon a day, and mailing them to the Post, twenty-four coupons at a time, which coupons, along with ninety-three cents, brought them four volumes of a twenty-volume set of The Complete Works of Charles Dickens, a set that, with full-page illustrations, was printed from plates Harper & Brothers had used for older, more expensive sets. The Post’s promotion began in January 1936 and expired on May 16, 1938, two weeks before I was born. And when, eighty-two years later, in the week of June 9, 2020—a week that marked the 150th anniversary of Dickens’s death—I was isolated in my New York City apartment due to the Covid-19 lockdown, it occurred to me that this might be a good time to do what I’d often thought of doing: reread all of Dickens.

The set of books stayed with him to the present and seems to have contributed to his inspiration to write about the family. The resulting essay is entitled “Dickens in Brooklyn” and ends with this:

Now, in the spring of 2020, isolated in my New York City apartment, I took down The Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first published novel, and began reading. But as the prospect of rereading all of Dickens beckoned, I thought, too, of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. In that novel, Tony Last, an English country gentleman, goes on an expedition in search of a supposed lost city in the Amazon rainforest. On the journey, he falls ill, and is cared for by Mr. Todd, a British Guianan who lives in a remote part of the jungle. Although he is illiterate, Todd owns a set of the complete works of Dickens, and asks Last to read to him—first Bleak House, then Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. Meanwhile, a rescue party sent out to search for Last approaches. Todd conceals Last after drugging him into a comatose state, and tricks the would-be rescuers into believing that Last is dead. When Last comes round, he realizes there is no escape: he has been condemned to spend the rest of his life in the jungle reading Dickens to Todd.

“Let us read Little Dorrit again,” Todd says, near the end of A Handful of Dust. “There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.”

–The website of the Italian press agency Agenparl has posted the second part of a historical essay entitled “The Defense and Loss of Crete, 1940-1941”. This is based on research in the historical archives at Kew in London, which is where it is datelined. Among its conclusions from those materials, this appears:

Following the loss of Maleme the Allies fell back to regroup, but within a few days the situation deteriorated as the Germans began to push towards Canea, threatening the supply base at Suda Bay. They were also still holding ground outside Retimo and Heraklion, and their air attacks put the Allied troops under great strain throughout the battle. Among the few Allied reinforcements to arrive was a commando outfit known as Layforce, which included the author Evelyn Waugh. These troops were meant to carry out raids but instead had to be used as a rear-guard once the withdrawal began. There are some records relating to Layforce listed in our catalogue here.

On 26 May Freyberg sought permission to begin an evacuation of his forces, as he considered the situation hopeless. Wavell quickly agreed, after sending a signal to the Prime Minister stating that Crete was ‘no longer tenable’.

The link to the catalogue in the quote is from the original text. There is also a video included in the article. I have not tried opening or downloading either of those.

–The Courtauld Institute of Art has posted a story about the recent visit of one of its volunteer curators to Castle Howard:

In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited two friends, Charles and Sebastian, lounge in the colonnade of Brideshead Castle, the stately home of Sebastian’s family. They have just come down from their first year at Oxford. It is a peerless summer’s day. Charles is sketching an ornamental fountain.

Referring to the main house, Charles says, “Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later”.

Sebastian replies, “Oh Charles, don’t be such a tourist”.

It is believed that Waugh based Brideshead on Castle Howard, the only stately home of England to have a dome. It also has its own box in the Conway Library, with many photographs taken by Anthony Kersting. One image, showing the south front from the fountain, looked wrong somehow. Why? The dome had disappeared.

The article goes on to describe what happened to make the dome disappear during a fire in WWII (unrelated to enemy bombing) and how the family have rebuilt the structure since that time. It is correct to say that Castle Howard is the only baroque country house in England to have a dome, and Waugh may well have had that dome in mind when he constructed that feature of Brideshead Castle in his imagination. But, as discussed in a recent article in Evelyn Waugh Studies, he had venues in mind other than Castle Howard as well. “Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead and Castle Howard”, EWS 50.3, Winter 2019.

–The Spanish paper El Correo, published in Bilbao, has named Waugh’s novel Scoop (in Spanish “¡Noticia bomba!“) its book of the week. The article is by César Coca and is subtitled “A humorous novel about the most unlikely war correspondent lost in a conflict in Africa in the 1930s”. Here are some translated excerpts:

Many people know Evelyn Waugh from a novel and more especially  TV series and the subsequent film made from it. This is ‘Brideshead Revisited’. However,  Waugh had acquired celebrity before that book as a result of the publication of some volumes of travel  where he collected his own experience and an excellent humorous novel, one of the best of the genre in the 20th century. It’s this ¡Noticia bomba! (Scoop! is its original title).

Starting from a random and crazy event, Waugh criticizes the behavior of the mass media in the 1930s , when the novel was published. […] Everything is a caricature from that moment: the luggage that the inexperienced war correspondent carries with him, his chronicles and, of course, the great exclusive that he completely accidentally achieves and that gives the novel its title. This classic of English literature is one of the best imaginable readings for these days of rest with a mask.

The translation is by Google with a few edits.

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Waugh’s Politics in Fiction and Real Life

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Writer and historian Minoo Dinshaw, author of the recently published biography of Steven Runciman, has written an article for Catholic Herald which traces Waugh’s political views through the characters in his novels. It is entitled “Forewaughned” and begins with this:

The last novel that Evelyn Waugh composed, as opposed to adjusted, is The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). It is unanimously acknowledged as a searing and candid self-portrait, and as such contains a lapidary summary of its author’s politics:

[Pinfold] had never voted in a parliamentary election, maintaining an idiosyncratic toryism which was quite unrepresented in the political parties of his time and was regarded by his neighbours as being almost as sinister as socialism […]

Dinshaw then goes back to the beginning. After briefly citing the first two novels, he comes to Black Mischief and Basil Seal

In Black Mischief, Basil is described – justifiably so –  as “a bore”. He inflicts information upon those he encounters as a bully inflicts pain. He has a high regard for his abilities. With superficial charisma his only true resource, he enters an unfamiliar landscape and imposes patronising, anachronistic schemes that leave it in chaos. In Black Mischief Waugh crystallised a British tradition that, if it certainly did not begin with, yet culminated in Sir Anthony Eden, Tony Blair and David Cameron. The later Basil, to whom we will return, incarnates a quite different apex predator of the political veldt. […]

Lord Copper and Rex Mottram represent elements of Waugh’s political view of cynical businessmen who use political power to forward their private interests. But then, it is back to Basil.

Brideshead […] is too often allowed to eclipse its predecessor of the phoney war, Put Out More Flags. It is in this novel and this Basil that the attentive reader will locate today our country, its plight, its chief minister and its bluffed, fashion and issues driven, fake-it-till-you-make-it culture. The mature Basil is far better company than his namesake in Black Mischief – a pure cynic, a conscious fraud, a satirist of genuinely gifted if usually criminal capacities. He has emerged from a family context of alarmingly emotional and competitive intensity. In his private life he can be simultaneously thoughtless and tender. His is the perfect eye’s view upon a landscape of state-run chaos, dystopic disaster and vapid pretension, and who can doubt that our own Prime Minister, his memoirs once emerged, will prove of similar calibre?

 

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Perry Mason’s Return

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Erle Stanley Gardner’s most famous character Perry Mason has returned to TV. This is in a new series on HBO which is about to conclude its first run tonight. Philip Martin has written a background article on the earlier CBS TV series from the 1950-60s as well as the novels, other TV adaptations and the HBO series just ending. This appears in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He also discusses Waugh’s admiration for Gardner’s novels which was considered in an earlier posting. Here’s an excerpt from his article:

… I never read the Perry Mason novels and, as I grew, I came to think of them in that faintly dismissive way we have of remembering the enthusiasms of old maid aunts. Gardner was a best-selling writer of serial detective fiction, that was all I thought I needed to know.

Evelyn Waugh once called Gardner “the best American writer,” and lest his interviewer think he was kidding, added, “Do I really mean that? By all means.” Waugh and Gardner had a brief exchange of letters in which Waugh claimed he was one of Gardner’s “keenest admirers,” though the purpose of the letter was to correct Gardner, who in one of his books had referred to a piece of sofa-like furniture as a “davenport.” Waugh suggested that Gardner in fact meant “chesterfield.

Gardner stuck up for himself, arguing that in America, “davenport” could indeed be a synonym for “sofa,” but allowed that he was thrilled that the author of “The Loved One” read his books. Later, when American scholar Alfred Borrello wrote about these letters for the “Evelyn Waugh Newsletter ” [EWN, 4.3, Winter 1970] he harbored some residual doubt about  Waugh’s sincerity. With Waugh and Gardner having passed on, he approached Waugh’s widow, Laura, who told him that her husband had devoured every book Gardner had written. (Gardner wrote more than 80 novels that featured Perry Mason, nine that featured prosecutor Doug Selby, another 30 under the pen name A.A. Fair about the Cool and Lam detective agency, and a few others under his own name and various pseudonyms.)

“Is it … out of character that Waugh should be attracted to and take delight in the work of another author who is, though some may doubt that he is anything else, a superb craftsman?” Borrello wrote. “One only need to read Perry Mason’s adventures in any of the novels in which he appears to realize the author knows what he’s about.”

The latest series has at least one storyline about a character with a Waugh connection. In this, a character named Sister Alice McKeegan is obviously based on Aimee Semple Macpherson, a popular evangelist in interwar Hollywood who in turn inspires characters in two Waugh novels. She is credited as being the original for Mrs Ape in Vile Bodies (1930). In Waugh’s Hollywood novel The Loved One (1948), Aimee Thanatogenos explains that she is named after the evangelist Aimee Macpherson at the Four Square Gospel Church where her father had been swindled out of all his savings. That was the name of Macpherson’s church. Aimee Thanatogenos’s father wanted to change her name after the swindle, but she finally decided it was easier just to keep it as it was.

The final episode of the current series of 8 airs tonight on HBO in North America. The first series received a favorable notice in the Democrat-Gazette, and a second has been commissioned by HBO. In the UK, it is available on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV.

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New Brideshead Edition Announced

Posted on August 8, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s North American publisher Little, Brown & Co. has announced plans to issue a new edition of Brideshead Revisited in November. This is to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Little, Brown’s publication of the book in January 1946. Here are some excerpts from the announcement posted by Publishers Weekly:

…In November, Little, Brown will release the 75th anniversary edition of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, set in the interwar years and centered on an Oxford student who becomes enchanted and then disillusioned with his friend’s aristocratic family. The book has enjoyed various renaissances since it was first published in the U.K. in 1945 and in the U.S. the following year.

The 1982 paperback edition of the novel, for example, published around the time that PBS began airing the BBC TV [sic] adaptation starring Jeremy Irons. It’s sold almost 600,000 copies, according to Bowen Dunnan, publishing associate at Little, Brown imprint Back Bay. Since then, the book has been cemented as part of the Western canon, appearing in the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels and, more recently, on New York Public Library’s list of 125 beloved books from the last 125 years. […]

To mark the anniversary, Little, Brown had intended to take part in a festival celebrating the book at Castle Howard, an opulent estate in North Yorkshire, England, where both screen adaptations of the novel were filmed. But because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival, originally scheduled for this summer, was canceled. It’s perhaps fitting for a novel concerned with the decline of the aristocracy that promotion will now take place largely on the democratic turf of the Web. Dunnan is looking forward in particular to a social media read-along, and seeing, he says, “people bringing different perspectives to the book.”

A copy of the cover for the new edition accompanies the PW posting. It is a color drawing depicting the leading actors from the 1981 Granada adaptation on a vintage car in front of Castle Howard.

The article appears in PW’s “Backlist Backbones” column by Daniel Lefferts, where it also announces new mass market and trade paperback editions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. The 75th anniversary of Animal Farm’s publication will also be observed in 2020. Berkley Books will be the publisher as explained in this excerpt:

…The updated editions of Animal Farm, an allegory of Russia’s post-revolution descent into tyranny, also come with a new introduction by novelist Téa Obreht, who grew up in former Yugoslavia. “Coming out of an authoritarian system,” Lee says, Obreht can “frame Animal Farm for the current reading audience.”

While the new releases are tied to Animal Farm’s anniversary, precedent suggests Orwell’s books may experience a sales uptick as the U.S. nears yet another pivotal election. Orwell’s “rate of movement is very high always,” Lee says, because readers turn to the author “to make sense of larger world events around them.”

Cover illustrations for the new 1984 editions also accompany the article.

Both Brideshead and Animal Farm were published first in the UK– in May 1945 and in August 1945, respectively. In both cases, US publication followed in 1946– Brideshead in January by both Little, Brown and Book of the Month Club and Animal Farm in August by Harcourt, Brace.

 

 

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Challenging Waugh Question

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

On this week’s BBC Two episode of University Challenge, a Waugh reference formed one half of a 10 point question. Jeremy Paxman presented the question thus: What five letter word links an ironic synonym for “Force” in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and the second word of the name of the alternative rock group often known by the initials TMBH? The university teams (Strathclyde and Imperial) both missed it. One answered “Beast” and the other, “Giant”.

The correct answer was “Might”. The name of the rock band is They Might Be Giants. The Waugh reference is in a response by Mr Baldwin to William Boot about the content of the messages Boot has been sending back to the Daily Beast to explain the situation in Ishmaelia:

“Dear me, how little you seem to have mastered the correct procedure of your profession. You should ask me whether I have any message for the British public. I have. It is this: Might must find a way. Not “Force”, remember; other nations use “force”; we Britons alone use “Might”. (Book II, Chapter Five, Part 1: Penguin, 1983, p. 172)

Some one familiar with alternative rock bands might have known the answer to the second part, but anyone relying on knowledge of Evelyn Waugh’s writing would have had to strain to derive an answer to that side of the question.

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Soho and Auberon Revisited

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

A new book about Soho has been written by Darren Coffield. This is Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia. It was reviewed in a recent London Review of Books by novelist Andrew O’Hagan whose review may be even more amusing than the book. It does not limit itself to the particular watering hole to which the book is devoted but wanders all over the neighborhood as well looking into Fitzrovia next door. The review opens with this:

Soho never was what it was. That’s its essence: it was always ‘lost’. Its merits are chiefly nostalgic and its denizens were always ghosts. It only existed as a ragged story and an old tune, one each singer could make his own. Nothing in Soho ever quite happened, and the place was always passing into song. […]  The Colony Room, 41a Dean Street, was actually a dump full of interesting maniacs tearing lumps out of one another. But the facts don’t cover it. The need for it to be something it never was is the interesting story. […W]hat I loved most was the drinks and the smokes and the endless talk, and the fact that on every corner there was a room where people auditioned for parts that didn’t exist.

Early on, the review makes its way into the Academy Club with this result:

Up in the Academy, Auberon Waugh, happy in the corner and cushioned by an IRA informer or two, bought a round of drinks and told me he’d just run a review of my first book. He said it wasn’t at all bad. ‘What, the review or the book?’ I asked. ‘The review,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a bugger about the book.’ Those clubs were fun, and everybody was 26 (apart from Auberon Waugh, who managed to get through his whole life without being 26, though he might once have been 16, and was undoubtedly, and lastingly, six).

After brief considerations of other literary landmarks such as Jeffrey Bernard at the Coach and Horses (who may have also hung out at the Colony Club) and Julian McLaren Ross at the Wheatsheaf (a Fitzrovian boozer), the review comes to the Colony Room which is the principle matter at hand. That section  opens with this:

Francis Bacon​ was 39 when he tipped up at the club in 1948. He was introduced to it by Brian Howard, the poet and journalist who is Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies and ‘two-thirds’ of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (the other third, Evelyn Waugh said, was Harold Acton). Howard is now best known for a single hateful phrase (‘anybody over the age of thirty seen in a bus has been a failure in life’), which is a pity, because the new drinking club run by his friend Muriel ought to have given him a much deeper sense of what failure meant.

And so on for several columns.

In his gossip column in The Times, Patrick Kidd thought O’Hagan’s review so good that he started a recent installment with this:

A new book by Darren Coffield on bohemian Soho, called Tales from the Colony Room, allows the author Andrew O’Hagan to reminisce in London Review of Books. O’Hagan used to frequent the Academy Club where he once met Auberon Waugh, who told him he’d just done a review of O’Hagan’s first novel. “Not at all bad,” Waugh said. “The review or the book?” O’Hagan joked. “The review,” Waugh replied. “I don’t give a bugger about the book.” Acid put-downs are part of Soho culture and the queen of them was Muriel Belcher, founder of the Colony Room. They included a dig at the poet Sir Stephen Spender, who was known as Brenda when in Soho. “I don’t know why they call her Spender,” Belcher sniffed. “She never puts her hand in her pocket.”

Auberon also features in a recent article posted by The Oldie. This is a memoir by  A N Wilson in which he recalls those friends he misses most during lockdown. After a portrait of Hugh Massingberd, he writes this:

Bron’s widow Teresa said to me not long ago that most of what he wrote would now be unprintable in the papers. If that is true, and I think it is, it is a sign of how much we need this great writer. I think he was one of the very greatest writers of his generation. He was our Jonathan Swift. In some moods, I think his Private Eye diaries, which I re-read all the time, are better than Swift. He was a truly paradoxical figure, since he could be more cruel than any writer who has ever seen print. No one in personal life could be more generous, warm or polite. None of the journalists at the moment seem to be quite aware, as he was, of what a mad world we inhabit. Or of the monstrous stupidity of our political class. His thoughts on Brexit, Lockdown and so many other things have been sorely missed in the last twelve months. When he was sixty-one, there was a dinner. A friend asked him what he would have liked most for his birthday. He replied “The absolute assurance I won’t see 62”. Alas, his wish was fulfilled.

 

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Roundup

Posted on August 4, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Irish Times has a story about a visit to Birr Castle in Ireland. This is the home of the Earls of Rosse, and the present Lady Rosse conducts the IT ‘s reporter, Rosita Boland, through the house in a televised tour which is attached to the version posted on the internet. There is also a bit of literary history:

We’ve already been into the room which holds the astonishing family archive; a room which has the only complete Jacobean frieze in Ireland. Once a smoking room, it now holds floor-to-ceiling carefully catalogued archive boxes. My gaze randomly lands on a box labelled “Bright Young Things”. This box, it turns out, is full of letters to Lady Rosse’s father-in-law from his contemporaries at Oxford. There’s a large envelope of letters alone from novelist Evelyn Waugh.

The father-in-law would be Michael, Earl of Rosse (1906-79). He was a friend of Waugh’s at Oxford and is mentioned in several of Waugh’s published letters. There are none published from Waugh to him or his wife, and perhaps we can look for the contents of the “large envelope” in the coming volumes of the Complete Works of Waugh.

–Giles Brandreth writing in the Daily Mail describes a trip to America where he stopped at the New York Public Library for a special visit. NYPL are the custodians of the original stuffed animals from the AA Milne family that inspired the characters of Winnie the Pooh and his friends. Brandreth expresses his annoyance that they were never returned to England after a promotional trip to America in the 1940s. He goes on to explain his interest:

Like practically everyone in Britain, I count Winnie as an important part of my childhood.My parents lived in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, close to the Milne family home, and though I was a generation younger than Christopher Robin, I imagined I might step outside and bump into them all on their way to the Hundred Acre Wood. I had my own bear, named Growler. I loved Rupert Bear (really a boy with a bear’s head). In short, I was a junior arctophile — the scientific name for a devotee of teddy bears.

When I went up to Oxford, I didn’t take Growler with me, but only because I was afraid people would think I was copying Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (his bear, as every arctophile knows, was called Aloysius). So I was delighted to then discover that adults were allowed to love teddies too.

The revelation came from a conversation with an old actor named Peter Bull (he appeared in The African Queen and Dr. Strangelove), who looked rather like a bear himself and who had a marvellous collection of Steiffs — the Rolls-Royce of teddy bear makers — and other Teds…

He might have mentioned that it was Peter Bull’s bear who starred in the 1981 TV series as Aloysius. I can’t say whether he also featured in the more recent film adaptation.

–Novelist DBC Pierre was recently interviewed by the Guardian. Waugh came up in one of the answers:

What kind of reader were you as a child?
I was lucky enough to have my parents read to me at bedtime every day, which primes the imagination early on. My father was a very positive man – those bedtime books were things like The Little Engine That Could, which was a tool for later survival. As soon as I could read by myself I devoured the standard kids’ adventures until the age of about 11 when, for unknown reasons, and probably to do with the size of the book (I hated when they ended) I bought a massive hardback of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. This was pivotal because it was suddenly about real grownup life, in real grownup language, and was unparalleled exotica compared to The Hardy Boys.

–An article in the religious journal First Things reconsiders the life and career of Ronald Knox. This is by Sohrab Achmari, op-ed editor of the New York Post, who relies heavily on the biography of Knox by Evelyn Waugh. Here’s the opening of the article:

To read the biography of Monsignor Ronald Knox is to risk sinking into despair. The great English Catholic convert, biblical translator, and writer lived such an outstanding life that one can’t but feel the utter inadequacy of one’s own next to its record. […]

His only shortcoming, it seems, was his unfortunate physical appearance and the strange vanity associated with it. As Evelyn Waugh tells us in his gorgeous life of Knox, when the would-be churchman first arrived at Oxford he was “a frail, slightly drooping figure with a prominent nose, a heavy underlip which his pipe accentuated, unobtrusive chin, large eyes.” He was eighteen years old. Yet despite these features, Knox harbored a “whimsical hope that he might be thought of as good-looking.”

As I say, it’s hard to read the biography without envy tinging one’s admiration. Hard for me anyways, knowing, at age thirty-five, that I won’t achieve the ten-year-old Knox’s facility with ancient Italian, no matter how much I apply myself to Mr. Gwynne’s instruction books. Like Knox, I’ve staked out strong positions, but have made oodles of enemies in the process. And I fall far short of the man’s well-attested goodness and holiness…

—The Scotsman reviews an exhibition in Edinburgh That may be of interest. The title is Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant. Other influential artists of the period are also considered:

Alongside the twin giants of Quant and Conran, other great popularisers are introduced. Food writer Elizabeth David published books (beautifully illustrated by the artist John Minton) which challenged British ideas and expectations about food with wisdom from the continent. The writer Evelyn Waugh said she had his vote as the person most responsible for improving British life in the 20th century.

The exhibit is at the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh and tickets are required. Details are available at this link.

–Finally, conservative journalist and editor Roger Kimball posts a commentary article in Epoch Times asserting that even if Joseph Biden wins the November election, he will not be President. He compares his logic to an incident described in an Evelyn Waugh novel:

Perhaps the best way to explain is to recall the fate of Achon, son of Amrath, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief. The aged Achon, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas was in fact the legitimate Emperor of the fictional kingdom of Azania. But he had been safely confined to his cave these past fifty years. After various vicissitudes–appalling to contemplate but amusing to read about in a novel–Achon is set free. Alas his captivity has left him bent and senile. He dies upon coronation.

Eight months sequestered in your basement is not quite the same thing as fifty years shackled to a rock in a sunless cave, but you can take my point. Even if Joe Biden were to win, it will not be he who governs as next president of the United States.

UPDATE (7 August 2020): Roger Kimball recycled his allusion to Back Mischief in an article posted by The Spectator. Here’s the revised version with the added material in bold text:

A few days ago, I compared Joe to Achon in Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief (a book that probably could not find a publisher today and which, when the woke weenies catch up to it, will doubtless be canceled and then burned). Poor Achon, though the legitimate Emperor of the African backwater of Azania, has been held captive in a sunless cave, shackled by the ankle to a rock for the last 50 years. When he is finally sprung after a coup, he proceeds in an utterly dazed state to his coronation where he promptly expires. As I noted, eight months sequestered in your basement is not quite the same thing as five decades of captivity, but looking at Joe, you really have to wonder.

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