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 TĂŠa 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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A Buyer’s Market for Quennell and Connolly

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has aded another article about Evelyn Waugh’s interest in Anthony Powell’s novel cycle Dance to the Music of Time. In this one, Evelyn and Nancy Mitford continue their discussion of Powell’s books, focussing on the second in the series–A Buyer’s Market. Perhaps the highlight of this discussion is Nancy’s determination that Powell’s characters Mark Members and JG Quiggen are based on Peter Quennell and Cyril Connolly, respectively. Here’s how it begins:

Waugh: “You think Quiggin is Connolly? Though Tony is careful not to describe Boots as short, fat and straight out of an Irish bog, which would have made identification a lot more straightforward.”

Mitford: “Although the name ‘Quiggin’ suggests ‘Quennell’, that is undoubtedly a red herring. Quennell is about to be introduced in the next sentence under the name of Mark Members. In fact, I am going to use the names Quennell and Connolly for the rest of my reading, as that will best test my theory.”

Waugh: “Yes, do that.”

“‘It was at that stage we were joined by Quennell, rather to my surprise, because, as undergraduates, Quennell and Connolly had habitually spoken of each other in a far from friendly manner. Now a change of relationship seemed to have taken place, or, it would perhaps be more accurate to say, appeared to be desired by each of them; for there was no doubt that they were prepared, at least momentarily, to be on the best of terms. The three of us talked together, at first perhaps with a certain lack of ease, and then with greater warmth than I remembered in the past.”

Waugh: “So you’re saying that’s Connolly, Quennell and Powell talking together at a London party in 1928 or 1929. And yet I concluded when reviewing a volume of the Dance – in the Spectator, I think – that in each of Tony’s pre-war novels, I could detect the originals of characters in the books. Yet I couldn’t identify any originals in the superb post-war novel sequence.”

Mitford: “You were wrong, Evelyn. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”

As usual in this type of analysis, there is some basis in the identification but Powell’s characters are made up of several other people he knew as well as elements of his own imagination. I’ve heard it said that Members had Wavian elements in him. I have also heard A Buyer’s Market compared to Vile Bodies because of its place at number two in the cycle, its time, and its setting in a seemingly endless series of parties. It would be nice to hear what Evelyn and Nancy would have said to that. They seem to be heading that direction in the concluding section of this article. Here’s a link to the article.

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Waugh’s Good Read on BBC

Posted on August 2, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 4 has rebroadcast earlier today a 2010 episode of their series A Good Read where a moderator and two guests discuss a book each of them has chosen. In this episode the moderator Sue MacGregor chooses Waugh’s 1930s novel Vile Bodies. Here’s a description of the broadcast:

Journalist and Strictly Come Dancing’s John Sergeant and food writer and TV presenter,Anjum Anand talk to Sue MacGregor about favourite books by Arthur Ransome, Aravind Adiga and Evelyn Waugh.

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

White Tiger by Arvind Adiga

The program can be heard over the internet on BBC iPlayer. The Waugh portion begins at about 17:00 if you want to skip the other two. Here’s a link.

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End-of-July Roundup

Posted on July 29, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Economist magazine’s 1843 section has an article by Catherine Nixey entitled: “The death of nostalgia”. It is subtitled: “People used to pine for a simpler life. Now they’ve got it – and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” This starts by comparing Virginia Woolf’s diary reciting the hardships of wartime London with today’s difficulties during the quarantine lockdown. Other writings from wartime are also considered, including this one relating to Evelyn Waugh:

In war, as now, we yearned for better times. The second world war spawned a literary genre that Laura Freeman, a critic, has called “hungry novels”, with a “marked stomach sensibility, an obsessive detail of food”. Think of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, a novel of Oxford, champagne and summer picnics with friends in the blue shade of elms. Reading Brideshead now evokes a powerful nostalgia less for the cooking than the closeness. Imagine lolling on a blanket, mere millimetres from a friend, rather than a socially chaste metre or so apart. Consider dipping your hand into a bowl of strawberries with such carelessness, your fingers where another’s fingers had been, liberated from the covid calculus as to whether the red juice might kill the virus or preserve it.

If the second world war spawned the hungry novel, it seems likely that the self-isolation of covid-19 may spawn the lonely one, a spate of books in which face masks are all returned to the operating theatre and characters greet each other not with elbow bumps but eager embraces, shout at football matches, sing in church or swig from the same wine bottle with louche abandon, the now-unthinkable act of putting your lips where someone else’s have been so recently.

–In Tatler magazine, an article by Delilah Khomo describes the conversion of the house of Patrick Leigh Fermor in rural Greece into a hotel. It is being promoted as a former celebrity venue based on the guests entertained there by Leigh Fermor:

A war hero, self-made scholar and the greatest travel writer of his generation, [Leigh Fermor] journeyed on foot to Constantinople, lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. There he acquired a deep interest in languages and remote places – tales of which he would regale his favourite pen pal, the Duchess of Devonshire, with. Seduced by Greece’s elemental beauty, after two decades searching for the perfect spot, he found the idyllic coastal town of Kardamy in the Peloponnese. It was here in the olive-tree-studded countryside that Fermor ended up living with his wife Joan in a charming stone house he built himself, where the great and the good of High Society would spend summers, including Nancy Mitford, Freya Stark, Evelyn Waugh and Bruce Chatwin.

The other named and many more post-war literary and cultural celebrities certainly visited Leigh Fermor at his Grecian house. But Evelyn Waugh was surely not among them. They were both close friends of Nancy Mitford, Diana Cooper and Ann Fleming but not so much of each other. Moreover, Leigh Fermor only started building his house in 1965-66 and, while he did entertain several guests before its completion in 1969, Waugh was not in a fit state of health by that time to make a visit to a partially completed structure in a remote Grecian village. His last recorded foreign trip was to Spain with Laura in October 1964. The trip was sponsored by Venture magazine for which he wrote an article appearing in its February 1965 issue: “Evelyn Waugh’s Impressions of Spain”.

–In the religious journal First Things, Professor Hadley Arkes of Amherst College takes issue with Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion in the recent transgender rights decision. The article concludes with a reference to an Evelyn Waugh novel:

At the end of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder directs a contingent of World War II soldiers in making use of the vast Brideshead estate and its chapel. There is the majestic house and sumptuous grounds owned by a Catholic family in which he had once been enmeshed. The soldiers, playing soccer, have damaged some of the statuary, and the elegant fountain has become a receptacle for cigarette butts. Ryder’s young aide, the hapless Hooper, finds the spectacle almost unintelligible. “‘It doesn’t seem to make any sense—one family in a place this size. What’s the use of it?’”

“‘Well, I suppose,’” says Ryder, “‘Brigade are finding it useful.’”

The simple Hooper moves to the simplest truth: “‘But that’s not what it was built for, is it?’”

“‘No,’” says Ryder, “‘not what it was built for.’” This political order, shaped by the Founders, was […] surely never meant to house the denial of that nature that distinguishes mothers from fathers, brothers from sisters, and secures the ground of all of the rights that flow from nature. That is not what the Constitution, and this American regime, were made for.

–Blogger Harry Mottram, who publishes/edits/writes the occasional online journal Rapscallion Magazine, recently posted a review of Waugh’s first WWII novel Put Out More Flags. Here’s an excerpt:

For an insight into wartime Britain Put out more Flags by Evelyn Waugh is a good read. Written in 1941 and published a year later it tells the stories of a collection of mainly middle class men and women who are in part idol [sic] in nature, flippant about politics and eventually spurred into action by the war effort. Or at least some of them are. Others seek a life as far away from the front line as possible.[…]

We’ve been reared on years of Home front heroics of Dad’s Army and Land Girls and Mrs Miniver but here are people who don’t fit the usual narrative. Basil Seal writes right wing leaders for the Daily Beast believing Liberia should be annexed lecturing two retired officers on the subject who believe Russia will join Germany in attacking Britain. Such is their wisdom and presumably the thoughts of many at the time who believed Italy and Japan could still become allies. It’s vintage Waugh if a little uneven as the events taking place inevitably affect the novel divided into the four seasons. […]

–Finally, a recent issue of The Spectator carries a story by Richard Bratby entitled “Model villages aren’t just for kids.” He takes as his prime example the model village of Bekonscot. This was originally erected in the 1920s in the Metroland town of Beaconsfield and is now being updated (not for the first time). Among its structures are these:

Bekonscot isn’t immune to progress. For years, it moved with the times — there were office blocks and a mini-Concorde. Then, in the 1990s, it was rebooted back to a semi-rural 1930s. ‘ […T]hey’ve added a New Town: an architectural capriccio on Metroland modernism, featuring skewed but recognisable interpretations of the Hoover Building and Arnos Grove Tube station. A pair of chic socialites stand outside a replica of High and Over, the Corbusier-style mansion in Amersham — for all the world like Evelyn Waugh’s Margot Beste-Chetwynde and Professor Silenus.

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A Handful of Offense

Posted on July 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Writing in the Catholic Herald, novelist and critic Philip Hensher considers the implications of the current movement to suppress or destroy monuments and other public expressions that give offense to the present generation. This is in an article entitled: “Many great novels are offensive. But could it be otherwise?” His prime example is the removal of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston’s statue which was of no particular artistic merit. But he wonders what might happen applying the same logic to Tiepolo’s Wurzburg frescoes which are offensive to Africans or Edward Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queen that offends the Irish.

Literature, without a doubt, is going to prove the most challenging area to exercise this debate […] A test case might be Evelyn Waugh. There is no doubt that he is a great writer; there is also not much doubt that there are pages, and possibly entire books, which are deeply offensive to current sensibilities. The treatment of Mrs Beste-Chetwynde’s lover Chokey in Decline and Fall; savage flurries of anti-semitic caricature in both A Handful of Dust and Helena; the scenes of African life in Scoop and, especially, Black Mischief; the appalling mockery of African cultures in Remote People.

The problem is that these books haven’t just become offensive as attitudes have changed. They were always offensive, and their brilliant comedy rests on just how unacceptable they were. Black Mischief culminates in a celebrated scene in which the hero is served his mistress, cooked into a stew by African cannibals. He eats her. […]

This isn’t a superficial problem that can be addressed by cutting obnoxious passages, or dropping a single author here and there. It might just be the nature of comedy, even of literature. Two of the funniest passages written in English occur in Remote People, Waugh’s account of a journey in Africa. In the first, an American professor attempts to explain what is happening at the coronation of Haile Selassie; in the second, a scout master examines a small Somali boy in Scout Law: “Both parties in this dialogue seemed to be losing confidence in the other’s intelligence.” I don’t doubt that someone could decide that these passages were racist in meaning. Comedy, however, has always been based on a keen awareness of difference, and between differences in social standing. If you decide that it’s indecent to laugh about inequalities, then we are lost.

Hensher doesn’t have a solution but recognizes the problem is one that has to be faced, as he is in the process of doing while he edits a collection of short stories which contain potentially offensive language by Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.

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Caveat Lector

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Kenyon Review posts another article by writer Aatif Rashid about re-reading  Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

In a piece last month, I wrote about my admiration for Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. [See previous post.] But my experience reading it was actually more complicated than I described: when I first read the novel, I was taken in by its rich language, its lush descriptions, and its admiration for aesthetic beauty that seemed to belie its morally simplistic Catholic themes. When I reread the novel a year later, however, I found it darker, more melancholy, and far less rich and indulgent than I had remembered. Its aesthetic beauty felt pared down, and the vivid descriptions of Oxford and pre-war English life seemed overlaid with a grey, melancholy pallor. I was a little taken aback by this altered reading experience.Had I really changed so much in a year that the once-beautiful passages of aesthetic splendor had turned suddenly somber? Could a single year of life really alter the experience of a novel so significantly? I honestly felt a little depressed, and I wondered if it would ever be possible to recover the experience of reading the book the first time.

The truth was, though, it was not me that had changed: it was the book. What I didn’t realize was that the copy of Brideshead I’d checked out from my college library for my first reading had been a printing of the original 1945 text—but when I went and bought a version from the bookstore to read it a second time, I’d purchased the more standard 1960 version, which Waugh had revised, with “small additions” and “substantial cuts.” […]

He goes on to compare two passages from Brideshead where Charles Ryder is describing a Burgundy wine. Rashid comments: “Looking back, I can’t help but feel Waugh made a mistake: the original is so much better, so much wilder, so much more passionate.” He then compares Waugh’s changes with those made by Mary Shelley and Charles Dickens to the original texts of Frankenstein and Great Expectations and concludes that things would have been better if left alone:

If I had my way, I would replace every edition of each of these novels with their more powerful originals. But because I’m not in charge of Penguin or Oxford University Press, I’ll have to make do with encouraging readers to seek out the originals rather than the revised and “accepted” versions. If they were still alive, the authors might object, but as we know, a novel is not the sole property of a writer once it’s published. These three writers created works of art that were profound and moving. We shouldn’t let them diminish their masterpieces just because their own feelings later changed.

It is easy enough to find the original versions in the US since Little Brown did not publish the revised version until 2011. Thus, all US reprints up to that date published by Little Brown continued to reflect the 1945 text. To be sure, it would be best to check with the bookseller; if the edition he is selling has the 1959 “Preface” written by Waugh, it is unlikely to be the original 1945 text. If anyone reading this knows of any exceptions to this understanding, please comment as provided below.

Although US paperback publishers put out a “new Dell edition” as a Laurel edition in October 1960, the Waugh Bibliography notes that it “Seems identical to previous edition”–i.e., the one first published by Dell in 1957, before Waugh’s 1959 edits.  Penguin editions published since 1962 are the revised text. The Everyman’s Library hardback edition published in 1993 in the US by Knopf contains the text of the 1960 revised edition, according to a bookseller note on ABE. Assuming it follows its previous policy, the OUP’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh v. 9, Brideshead Revisited will contain the original 1945 edition, with changes made in subsequent editions noted.

 

 

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Another Spanish Review of Wine in Peace and War

Posted on July 26, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

A few weeks after the appearance of an article about Waugh’s Wine in Peace and War appeared in a regional Spanish paper, another article has appeared in the Canary Islands. This is by Luis M Alonso and is entitled “El genio satĂ­rico jamĂĄs ironizĂł sobre el vino” (“The satiric genius is never ironic about wine”). It appears in the paper El DĂ­a: La Opinion de Tenerife. The previous article was more about Waugh’s attachment to the wine merchants Saccone & Speed who commissioned the book, whereas this latest one is more about the book itself and its place in Waugh’s oeuvre. After a brief summary of Waugh’s early work, focusing primarily on Vile Bodies (Cuerpos viles in Spanish), that introductory portion concludes:

Satire, in any age, is a type of writing that draws its energy from an essentially critical and subversive view of the world. It thrives on the absurd contradictions of the human being. Waugh dismissed that qualification on the grounds that satire flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards. However, it is not a disposable wrap around a set of positive moral precepts. His early novels have an essentially satirical motivation. They are founded on an ironic, impartial and comprehensive vision of the claims and follies of each class, profession, race and even religion. They are based on the idea of ​​decline. His great admirer, another homorous author David Lodge, once said the title of his first novel, Decline and Fall, could serve to title all of them without exception.

The remainder of the article is devoted to Wine in Peace and War and is translated by Google below (with some edits):

Waugh crowned 1948 [sic], the year that concluded a great cycle, by writing on commission an influential wine guide stripped of his characteristic sharp humor but full of knowledge and judgment. In England, his loyal fans have never stopped talking about it. Waugh was a refined drinker who started racking beer, sherry and port between hours, passionate about champagne, and ended up showing a special predisposition to the great reds of Bordeaux and Burgundy. The pleasure that wine brings was, for him, the only definitive proof of any harvest. The corollary, as for any connoisseur, was based on the fact that this pleasure was greatly improved thanks to knowledge and experience. But a connoisseur and an epicurean need not necessarily be synonymous. The first is a scholar or a specialist, the second pursues pleasure for its own sake. Learning sometimes involves pain. There are those who drink with the concern of being caught in bad judgment and do not enjoy. Waugh encouraged one to drink copiously and without complexes.

In the guide, commissioned by the historic wine merchant Saccone & Speed ​​Ltd, of which he was a regular customer, he describes champagne as “naked beauty” and argues, as everyone would later verify, that it is an acceptable drink at all hours of the day and night and can be accompanied by any type of food. The drunkenness it causes also has, he suggested, less serious consequences than that caused by other drinks. Then he said that if he had to choose a fermented liquor as his only companion for life, he would choose the great sparkling French.

Regarding sherry, his judgment is unquestionable, “nothing can be more delicious than a glass of Fino pale, very dry, refrigerated at midday, in the middle of summer.” And that it is an admirable aperitif before and at the beginning of any dinner and it is best enjoyed in tranquility. […]  Of port he wrote that it is not a drink for young people, the vain and active. […] Of Château d’Yquem, the great sauternes of all time, he says that it is a liqueur wine to drink very slowly when the thirst is completely quenched.

Burgundy. Ah, the burgundy. Waugh advances in a short thesis the characteristics of a terroir in which very different wines are entitled to the same communal title. “The Château Margaux of a given year”, he writes referring to one of the great Bordeaux houses, “is a definite, invariable wine; two bottles of authentic Chambertin of the same year, blended by different merchants, may be very different indeed”.

When Waugh was commissioned to write the Wine in Peace and War guide, Brideshead Revisited had been voted America’s Book of the Month. The characters in the novel, Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte, in a heady scene drink a bottle of Château Peyraguey while eating strawberries and smoking Turkish cigars on a grassy knoll. Together they discover the castle’s cellar and test their reservations night after night. At dinner in Paris, at Paillard, with Rex Mottram, Ryder chooses a bottle of Montrachet from 1906 to accompany a sole and Clos de Bèze, from 1904, for the duck. Brideshead is one of the most oenological novels I have ever read.

Saccone & Speed ​​Ltd’s agreement with the writer was that Waugh would get a dozen bottles of champagne from the firm for every 1,000 words he wrote. Since he was able to write 2,000 a day, he knew right away that he could soon wash his hair with it. When he finished, 192 bottles were alloted to him. It’s not bad at all.

The book is undated but is usually thought to have been published in 1947. It is listed before Scott-King’s Modern Europe in the Waugh Bibliography.

 

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