90th Anniversary of Waugh’s First Visit to Ethiopia: 10 October 1930

Posted on October 9, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The following post is by Waugh Society member Milena Borden and is a preliminary version of a longer article that is being prepared for publication in a future issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies:

In July, it was reported that the bust of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie which stood in Cannizaro Park in Wimbledon was destroyed by a group of Ethiopian diaspora. Shortly afterwards the Friends of Cannizaro Park’s website published a short message thanking those who wrote to them about it and expressed hopes that there will be better news about the fate of the statue soon. It was also reported that the police have launched an investigation in relation to the incident. The attack on the statue was linked to the death of the Ethiopian singer Hachalu Hundessa who was shot dead in June in Addis Ababa followed by waves of protests.

I recently visited the Cannizaro Park where the Emperor’s statue stood but all what was left from it was the pavement foundation on which it was erected. The sign “Haile Selassie Statue” still points towards the location but there were only three benches within a small and secluded green area suitable for a picnic.

Haile Selassie had a turbulent life by all standards. In 1930, he acquired the title of the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Tafari Makonnen and was crowned as the Negusa Negast, the King of the Kings of Ethiopia. Five years later, Italy invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and Selassie was exiled in Britain until 1940. He triumphantly returned to rule the country until 1974 when after a military coup he died in detention under suspicious circumstances.

The most famous account of the Emperor Haile Selassie’s coronation is written by Evelyn Waugh who spent five months in Abyssinia from 10 October 1930 to early March 1931. Waugh went as a correspondent of The Times and the Daily Express but he also wrote in detail about the events in Addis Ababa in his travel book Remote People (1931). In the biography of Selassie, King of Kings  (2015), Asfa-Wossen Asserate regrets that Waugh focused on the entertaining aspects of the coronation ceremony and especially on the faux-pas of the international journalists, officials and diplomats who attended. Assarete, who is a living relative of the Emperor, writes that Waugh was “a typical English snob under the blazing African sun” and supports this claim with the opinion of others who were present. According to him both the explorer Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003) and the Duke of Gloucester (1900-1974) who represented Great Britain at the event disliked Waugh.

At the time of his first Abyssinian adventure Waugh was a 27-year old Catholic convert. He was taken by the amusing stories he heard about the country from his close friend Alistair Graham, who was then a diplomat in Cairo. Waugh decided to explore one of the most exotic and oldest African Christian traditions and went to Abyssinia on a journalistic assignment. From there he wrote 13 reports which gained him the approval of the Times editor.1

From reading them as well as Remote People one is left with the impression that Waugh was not a fan of the Ethiopian royalty. He usually described the Emperor in purely informative terms underlining his monarchical ambitions:  “…he wished to impress on his European visitors that Ethiopia was no mere agglomeration of barbarous tribes open to foreign exploitation, but a powerful, organised, modern state. He wanted to impress on his own countrymen that he was no paramount chief of a dozen independent communities, but an absolute monarch recognised on equal terms by the monarchies and governments of the great world.”  However, while in the Ethiopian capital, Waugh purchased a portrait by a native artist of the Emperor, which was made the frontispiece of Remote People, and the painting was hung in Piers Court where he lived with his family until 1956.

As the world moved on towards the Second World War, the Ethiopian politics intensified and so did Waugh’s career as a writer and a journalist. In 1936 he went back to Ethiopia under very different political circumstances but again as a journalist although a more mature one. He supported the Italian invasion of Ethiopia led by the Fascist leader Mussolini. At the same time Britain became the first country to recognise Victor Emmanuel III as the emperor of Ethiopia. Waugh’s views about the Italian campaign are well documented in his book Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). Although he closely followed Ethiopian politics, his focus was primarily on the coverage of the international press during the conflict.

It is also interesting and perhaps typical of him that he was critical of the British policy towards the conflict: ”…I believe that the misfortunes that have fallen upon both peoples – the slaughter and terror on one side, the crippling expenditure on the other – are primarily due to the policy pursued by the British government. The Emperor believed that if he could win the support of the League, there would be decisive action on his behalf…”. The Italian-Ethiopian conflict provoked a political crisis in Britain. Officially the government was against the Italian aggression in Ethiopia but at the same time also wanted to maintain good relations with Italy as part of its appeasement policy. It entered secret negotiations with France over a compromise which was leaked to the public and viewed as a pact with the devil. Meanwhile the League of Nations was still debating how to deal with the Italian aggression, but the resistance in Ethiopia collapsed.

Waugh was never part of the inner circle of the Emperor, neither when he attended his coronation nor during his exile in Britain. He died ten years before Selassie who was deposed in 1974. With his end, the 3000 year history of the Ethiopian Empire, which Waugh admired, drew to a close. It is beyond doubt that, had he lived, he would have disapproved of Selassie’s authoritarian modernisation of the country, and especially of his flirtations with the Soviet Union and Tito during the 1960-70s. But it is easy to imagine that he would have been interested in Selassie’s highly ceremonial reburial in Addis Ababa in 2000 with only a few western journalists in attendance. As far as the most recent destruction in Cannizaro Park, Waugh probably would have thought about it as yet one more predictable misunderstanding between the Emperor and the world.

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Evelyn Waugh Society, Remote People, Waugh in Abyssinia | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Peregrine Worsthorne 1923-2020: RIP

Posted on October 8, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Noted 20th century journalist Peregrine Worsthorne has died at the age of 97. He was an admirer and chronicler of the aristocracy. Waugh shared some of his admiration but also satirized the upper classes. In Worsthorne’s case, he was more likely to be the subject of satire rather than its author. Here are some excerpts from the obituary in The Independent newspaper, which describes his:

… career as an eminent contrarian. First as a columnist and then as editor of The Sunday Telegraph, Worsthorne taunted the left and encouraged the Conservative Party to remain loyal to the concept of a ruling class. He could be naive, sometimes charming, and often funny, particularly when he took to the road. He wrote memorable accounts of journeys to California, Scotland and Australia, which were collected in an amusing book titled Peregrinations; Alan Watkins said fondly that on his travels Worsthorne appeared to be a combination of Lord Curzon and Mr Pooter. […]

He was sent to school at Stowe, where he behaved like a snob and posed as a Roman Catholic bigot. He confessed that, had he gone to a Catholic school, he might well have championed Protestantism. […] His war was spent in Phantom, an intelligence unit advancing into Germany. Worsthorne was recruited, like a character in Evelyn Waugh’s War Trilogy, at the bar of White’s Club. He said that war sorted out the men from the boys and that he himself had not yet discovered into which category he fell. […]
His first proper job was at The Times, where he felt he belonged. He was sent to Washington DC as deputy to The Times’s correspondent. Worsthorne took the Republican Party seriously. In 1952, when most of his colleagues were dazzled by the intelligent liberalism of Adlai Stevenson, Worsthorne accurately forecast a win for Dwight Eisenhower. He also had sympathetic words to say about Senator Joe McCarthy. He thought that Westminster could also benefit from a dose of anti-communism.
Worsthorne soon found himself reporting from Ottawa instead of Washington. Although staunchly anticommunist, Waugh did not fall for McCarthy’s brand of witch-hunting politics, as he explained in a 1960 article in The Spectator. Despite the urging of William F Buckley Jr (a McCarthy apologist), Waugh never wavered in his opposition.
Share
Posted in Newspapers, Sword of Honour | Tagged , | Comments Off on Peregrine Worsthorne 1923-2020: RIP

A Tale of Two Atwaters

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has posted an article about an interesting crossover between novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. On Waugh’s side this appears in Work Suspended (written 1939/published 1942) in which the minor character of Arthur Atwater appears. The connection he sees is with Powell’s first novel Afternoon Men (1931). The major character and quintessential “afternoon man” in that novel is William Atwater. But the connection is not limited to the name, as McLaren explains more fully in his article.

McLaren also sees obvious connections written by Powell into Afternoon Men which were he believes based on Waugh’s Vile Bodies published the previous year to great acclaim. Powell was writing about the same Bright Young People as Waugh but Powell’s crowd were less bright and probabably a bit older than Waugh’s. One of the characters in Powell’s novel named Pringle would probably have reminded Waugh of elements of his own life at the time his first marriage broke up.

McLaren also explains Powell’s relationship with Waugh and with Waugh’s first wife and her second husband John Heygate and how this clouded the relationship between the two writers during the 1930s. Powell also wrote the Heygates into his 1937 novel Agents and Patients as characters with the name Maltravers which McLaren thinks was taken from a Waugh chatacter in Decline and Fall.

The article is available here and is worth reading even if one lacks familiarity with Powell’s books.

Share
Posted in Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Work Suspended | Tagged , | Comments Off on A Tale of Two Atwaters

Roundup: Censorship and Adaptation

Posted on October 2, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–There has been a colloquy in the provincial British press about racist language in Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief. This was begun in an article or letter by Michael O’Neill of Penarth that was reproduced from the Western Mail. O’Neill reviewed the critical reception of the novel after his recent reading. One group concentrated their comments on the comic content of the book, recognizing that much of it was at the expense of Africans but also noting that the British diplomats and officials in the African setting are equal opportunity targets for Waugh’s satire. Others felt that the repeated use of one particularly offensive word to describe Africans required in today’s cultural environment some censorship. O’Neill concludes:

It’s not just a question of vocabulary, but the use of certain words may send messages as to the opinions of the author and also what the political and social likings of the possible readers will be.

In 1932, opinions were definitely different from today, but the issue of the book I have is a paperback (Penguin Classic) which has seen several reprints in more recent years. The edition I have was of 1965, reprinted in 2000. Waugh died in 1966, and posthumous editions of Black Mischief could be amended, with the permission of the literary executors if necessary, the deletion of a few unacceptable words going a long way to giving that novel some greater respectability while at the same time one does not wish to tread clumsily on the toes of someone who was a leading creative writer whose novels as a whole have been greatly enjoyed by generations of readers.

The following day, Ray Jenkins of Cardiff offered this response which was reposted from the South Wales Echo:

Personally, I do not feel that it would be helpful to amend the text of Evelyn Waugh’s novels to remove offensive words and attitudes, as they provide a context for the world in which his characters live. Faulkner frequently uses the word to which I think Mr O’ Neill is referring, but I believe Waugh is far more problematic than other outstanding English novelists like Hardy, Forster, Graham Greene and the sadly underrated LP Hartley, perhaps because he was both a snob and the closest to the Establishment of his time.

Unless a text is intended to be assigned to school children, it would seem to me no further explanation or censorship should be needed, certainly not in editions sold to the public such as the Penguin edition Michael O’Neill was reading. Mark Twain’s book Huckleberry Finn uses the same term frequently. Because of its relative importance in the American canon, it is more likely to be assigned reading by high school students. I can’t say whether there is a consensus among American publishers and educators, but I would hope that Twain’s now classical references are not removed from the text of non-school editions. This is a more serious dilemma for American educators and publishers than for their British counterparts given the comparative status of Huckleberry Finn that was written for a younger readership. Even if it means that Waugh’s book (never intended for sixth formers) doesn’t make it into A-level reading lists, that sacrifice is preferable to set a bad precedent by censoring it.

–William Boyd writing in The Sunday Times has reviewed the practice of adapting novels to produce screenplays. He begins with the observation of the dominance of adaptations in the film industry:

My own experience is typical. Of the 20 produced films, short films and television series based on my screenplays, 14 are adaptations. I have adapted novels by Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, the Sword of Honour trilogy), Mario Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) and Joyce Cary (Mister Johnson). Not to mention adapting the lives of Charlie Chaplin and William Shakespeare and five of my own novels and three short stories. Adaptation is far and away the dominant form — original screenplays are inevitably the poor cousin, it appears.

He then describes four “elephants in the room” when comparing the quality of adaptations to original screenplays. The first and most obvious is the relative length of novels in relation to the time limit of films (usually 90 minutes/two hours):

It’s an elementary calculation to realise that most novels — even average-sized novels of 350 pages —won’t fit into the normal running times of films. As a result, most screen adaptations are in fact savage redactions of the novels or books they are based on. My Sword of Honour adaptation turned three medium-sized novels into three hours of television. A lot is necessarily missing. I would say that in the average adaptation at least 50 per cent of the adapted book never makes it to the screen. Already we are in a world of huge compromises. But there are more radical accommodations and impossibilities up ahead.

He goes on to describe the other three elephants in the cutting room, as it were, and wonders why with, all the difficulties, writers even bother with adaptations:

As a thought experiment, draw up a list of your ten favourite films. I would be surprised if the majority were not based on original screenplays. It’s certainly true of my top ten. Film — and I use the term as a catch-all to include television, or indeed anything shot with any kind of camera — is a wonderful, powerful art form, but most of the time, 75 per cent of the time, it is trying to be, or to mimic as best it can, something else: a novel or a short story, or a biography or an investigative newspaper article, and so forth.

But he does see some reward to be extracted from a successful adaptation:

The fact that, at the end of the day, a long novel has been rethought and reconceived as a good film (if you’re very lucky) is no mean achievement. We toil in an unforgiving vineyard, but sometimes the wine we manage to make can be heady.

In a comment to Boyd’s rhetorical question of why such a large percentage of films are adaptations, one reader noted that the answer was that adaptations were more likely to be funded than original scripts because they are deemed to entail less risk.

—The Times in a feature length article by Andrew Billen considers several topics that will become conversation points in the new TV series of The Crown, appearing on Netflix next week. This one will play out during what have come to be known both as the Eighties and the Thatcher Years:

Before, there was high society and low. The Eighties created new league divisions at the top, and relegated those British untouched by the boom to something called the underclass. At the society’s zenith, inspired, as far as anyone can work out, by Granada’s 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, were the Sloanes.

These were the rebranded scions of the gentry, a generation of unapologetic brayers who called champagne “champers” or “poo” (after shampoo) and sprayed as much of it as they drank. They wallowed in their mostly inherited wealth, but did so, wriggling through the Eighties’ great loophole, ironically. Peter York and Ann Barr’s Official Sloane Ranger Handbook came out in 1982 and became a Ned Sherrin revue in 1985. If you didn’t like it, you had suffered a sense of humour failure.

Diana was a Sloane and never got the joke — which turned out in the end to be on her husband — either. Within a few years of the decade’s end she and her sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson had turned the royal family into a soap opera far more vulgar than The Crown. In the Eighties, however, their contribution was still significant. They had made our stuffy royalty into something glossy enough for fashion magazine covers.

–Waugh’s French publisher has issued a new edition of Pinfold. This is L’ÉPREUVE DE GILBERT PINFOLD, translated and with an introduction by Claude Elsen. It is issued in Robert Laffont’s Pavillons Poche series.

–Finally, The Independent newspaper polled its contributors to determine what were the best Biblical references that had been turned into book titles. One of the 10 titles was by Waugh:

9. Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh. Philippians 3:21. Nominated by Allan Holloway, Adrian Hilton and Ian Greenfinch.

Oddly, the quotation which appears as the books epigraph is from Alice Through the Looking Glass and not Philippians. Among the other titles selected were Stephen Fry’s Moab Is My Washpot and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

 

 

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Black Mischief, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Scoop, Sword of Honour, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Conversion Anniversary

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The American Spectator, a conservative journal, has an article by Tom Raabe marking the 90th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism on 29 September 1930. Raabe remarks that, at first, the conversion did not have much impact on Waugh’s writing, which continued with the comic satires he had begun with his pre-conversion novels Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies nor did his behavior change much:

Evelyn Waugh was in life everything that good Catholics, not to mention Christians in general, abjure, or are supposed to abjure. He was a short-tempered, rude, cranky, insulting, bibulous, intentionally unkind and insensitive man who didn’t much like his children and who, increasingly deaf in his later years, frequently carried with him an ear trumpet, nearly two feet long and comically old-fashioned, that he would raise to his ear when he was speaking and lower when he was spoken to. How can you not love a guy like that?

He may have continued to exhibit many of the same characteristics after his  conversion but with Brideshead Revisited in 1945 his writing changed. It was more what he wrote about than how he wrote it, but the change did not go down well with his critics. Raabe quotes to this effect Edmund Wilson, Joseph Frank, Kingsley Amis, Bridgid Trophy and Philip Toynbee.  According to Raabe, with Brideshead:

…Waugh departs from reliance on witty repartee (à la Ronald Firbank, an influence in Waugh’s earlier books), doesn’t include stand-alone humorous scenes, and brings the cast of characters into a religious milieu — the main characters are all set against a backdrop of faith. The patriarch of the central family, the Marchmains, and one son are wayward Catholics who, each in his own way, come back to the church in the end — one on his deathbed; the other, dissipated and repentant, at a religious house in Morocco. The mother and a daughter are as staunch in faith as can be; a different daughter is engaging in extramarital affairs but is wracked by guilt and eventually returns to the church. And the narrator, Charles Ryder, an atheist condemning Catholicism as “mumbo-jumbo” throughout, finds a spiritual home in the church at the end. Intellectuals dismissed the novel as a “Roman tract.”

It didn’t help that the Marchmains were aristocrats at a time when that became unfashionable among literary tastemakers. But Raabe is not persuaded that the wave of left-wing critical objections warrants a lower estimation of Waugh’s reputation . He concludes: “As all conservatives, Waugh possessed a realistic view of human nature, for we are all one step from barbarity without God’s grace.”

 

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Newspapers | Tagged , | Comments Off on Conversion Anniversary

Michaelmas Observed

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In a short article in the Daily Telegraph, Christopher Howse explains the meaning and importance of St Michael whose day is marked tomorrow (29 September) as Michaelmas. Howse is reminded of a prayer to St Michael which is mentioned in one of Evelyn Waugh’s novels:

On Michaelmas Day two years ago, the Pope asked pious Catholics to say a prayer that seeks the intercession of the Archangel Michael. This surprised some people who thought Pope Francis trendy, because the prayer in question is old-fashioned.

It had, in 1886, been ordered by Pope Leo XIII to be recited after Mass. It begins, in Latin, Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio, “Holy Michael archangel, defend us in the day of battle. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God thrust down to hell Satan and all wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.”

It is this prayer that is remembered by the delirious Guy Crouchback in an open boat drifting in the wartime Mediterranean in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen. But, in his fever, Crouchback directs his words to St Roger of Waybroke, a renaming in his confusion of Sir Roger of Waybroke, a Crusader knight whose chivalry he admires.

The Pope wasn’t invoking Waugh in his call for prayers. He was thinking, he said, of the devil as the “Great Accuser” referred to in the biblical Book of Job, who “goes around the world seeking to accuse”. In the Hebrew of the Book of Job, “Accuser” is a meaning of the name Satan. Satan, in that tale, takes away Job’s wealth and kills his children. Job’s answer is: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

In the novel, Guy recalls the prayer in hospital as he is recovering from the voyage out of Crete and is awakened by a visit from a priest:

There was one clear moment of revelation between great voids when Guy discovered himself holding in his hand, not, as he supposed , Gervase’s medal but the red identity disc of an unknown soldier, and heard himself saying preposterously: ‘Saint Roger of Waybroke defend us in the day of battle and be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil…’ (Officers and Gentlemen, Penguin, 1977, p. 228).

Share
Posted in Catholicism, Newspapers, Officers and Gentlemen | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Michaelmas Observed

Waugh’s Politics Surveyed in “The Critic”

Posted on September 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Critic magazine has published another article on Evelyn Waugh following hard on the short article by Eleanor Doughty dealing with Brideshead Revisited, discussed in two previous posts. The latest posting is a feature length article by Bruce Newsome who is lecturer in international relations at the University of San Diego. Given his academic speciality, it is perhaps not too surprising that his topic is Waugh’s politics.

The article opens with this observation: “From the start, Waugh’s writings were political, but since he was on the wrong side of trends, his politics are usually caricatured or ignored.” He then goes through Waugh’s novels one by one, spending most of his time on Vile Bodies, Decline and Fall and (as a group) the war novels and concludes that discussion with this:

Waugh wrote many political critiques but few prescriptions. He is often categorised as a religious conservative, given his conversion to Catholicism, his opposition to the Church’s later reforms, and his offering of Catholicism as a binary solution to modern decline.

Ultimately, the charge of religious conservatism is dissatisfying. Waugh was conservative but not partisan. His novels feature politicians who are equally flawed whatever their party. In fact, parties are rarely clear, although most of his characters are privileged or titled to suggest Conservatives. His second novel (Vile Bodies) satirised the tumultuous politics of the 1920s with a character described as “this week’s prime minister.”

He then takes up Waugh’s non-fiction and considers two books. The first is Waugh in Abyssinia:

The book that most corrupted his reputation was Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), based on a three-week tour, with Italian support, of newly conquered Abyssinia. He had reported from Abyssinia on the Emperor’s coronation in 1930 and from the Abyssinian side during the first months of Italian invasion in 1935. His contempt for its Emperor, ethnic minority rule, slavery, and corrupt clerics was a consistent feature of his commentary.

It should be noted that he made two trips to Abyssinia which are reflected in the book. The first was about 5 months at the end of 1935. He began work on the book in April 1936 but returned to Abyssinia for about 6 weeks in August and September. He finished the book a few days after his return. It is not his best book, as he was well aware. But based on those same trips he wrote Scoop during 1937.  It was certainly one of his best, and Newsome concludes is “known for lampooning the virtue-signalling and fake news in journalism, but also satirised the idealism and false promises of international institutionalists.”

The final book he analyses is Robbery Under Law which is probably Waugh’s most overtly political book and the one that is least read. According to Newsome, the book is:

an erudite history of the [oil] industry and the politics [of Mexico]. He also used the book to set up both communism and fascism as antagonistic to a preferred ideology that he called “individualism.” Waugh’s individualism mixed Christianity, humanism, and classical liberalism, akin to libertarianism.

Unfortunately, his best polemic is the least known. He deferred writing the book until December 1938, and did not finish until April 1939, so it was published too late to capture public attention from the crises in Europe. It sold little and was never reprinted.

It was reprinted by British book club in 1940 but was not otherwise reprinted in his lifetime. There was an American paperback at some point and Penguin finally got around to reprinting it in hard back in 2011 when they reissued all of his books in a uniform edition.

The article concludes:

In popular culture he became a caricature of the unfashionable establishment, which Waugh consciously provoked by keeping servants, wearing garish tweed clothes, and sneering at change. […] Today, Waugh is one of those novelists who is too white, male, English, conservative, and counter-consensus to be admitted in English literature classes. Upper classness alone would prevent his novels from being debuted today (although publishers reprint his past successes). Yet Waugh offers more political insight into how Britain has developed since the 1920s than most of the political fiction published today.

The article is a good survey of the subject, focussing on politics in novels like Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust where you would least expect it as well as those such as the war novels where it is more relevant. Mr Newsome is obviously well acquainted with Waugh’s writings, and his article is on the whole quite well researched. I am not sure he would receive universal agreement that Waugh was a “a confidant of Duff Cooper [in seeing through] Winston Churchill’s chaotic leadership.”   They were barely able to speak to each other without shouting, but I suppose they may have been able to conspire on a point where they knew in advance they were in agreement. It might have been an idea to include what may be Waugh’s ultimate dismissal of party politics in his 1959 response to a Spectator symposium on an upcoming election: “I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign in her choice of servants.”

Share
Posted in Decline and Fall, Newspapers, Robbery Under Law, Vile Bodies, Waugh in Abyssinia | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh’s Politics Surveyed in “The Critic”

Another Look at Brideshead (More)

Posted on September 24, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

This editorial message appeared in a recent TLS.  It relates to the subject of Eleanor’s Doughty’s article in The Critic that was discussed in a previous post. Here is the opening section from the TLS:

Edith Wharton was buried in the American Protestant section of the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles. Yet she was drawn towards Roman Catholicism in her final years, writes Sarah Whitehead, in her introduction to “The Children’s Hour”, a short story written by New York’s Gilded Age laureate. We take great pleasure in publishing it for the first time. Her friend Nicky Mariano, however, recorded one sceptical intime laughing at the thought that Wharton took her love of smells and bells too seriously: “if Edith should be converted to Catholicism my heart would go out to her confessor”.

Secular souls might argue it was better for her art that Wharton didn’t fully embrace Mother Church. Zealous Catholic convert writers have been criticized for sacrificing convincing narrative on the altar of faith. Edmund Wilson, a great admirer of Evelyn Waugh, wrote of the deathbed repentances and conversions at the end of Brideshead Revisited: “The last scenes are extravagantly absurd, with an absurdity that would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not – painful to say – meant quite seriously.” Graham Greene’s Catholicism divides the critics to this day. The End of the Affair has been described as his masterpiece. Its miracles, however, leave others cold.

A Middlebury College weblog also posts a brief essay on Waugh by John Vaaler that opens with this:

During what is hopefully the last few months of the Trump era, recommending Evelyn Waugh can seem like a daunting task. Both Waugh’s brand of Catholicism and his political views bend towards the uber-conservative, and the novels of his later years increasingly include storylines and jokes that give way to theological tirades and overwrought language.

But when he stays away from untenable beliefs, Waugh’s novels reign supreme in their painstaking style and dark humor. The word “satire” almost doesn’t apply to his books; Waugh’s jokes don’t just strike the reader with their barbed venom but simply induce sheer (if at times uncomfortable) laughter.

The remainder of the article discusses other books–with particular reference to Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust. There is also a brief mention of Brideshead Revisited:

… a good deal of the novel’s last 200 pages play out a tad ham-fisted, particularly when Lord Marchmain — an avowed atheist and philanderer — suddenly takes Holy Communion in his last minutes, dying only after making the sign of the cross. But the book’s first 100 pages have an unvarnished sentimentality which has aged well…

The Critic also posted a letter that responded to Doughty’s article. Here’s an excerpt:

…Her failure to engage with Brideshead’s theme accounts for her extraordinary claim that the novel’s punchline never comes. How did she manage to miss the climactic scene in which the dying Lord Marchmain finally accepts his previously rejected Catholicism? The agnostic narrator Charles Ryder realises that this moment is like the veil of the Temple being torn in two.

Waugh’s Catholicism arose directly out of his early satirical novels: he came to see how grace could act on people despite the world’s chaos and absurdity. This is also the unifying theme of his World War II Sword of Honour trilogy — but perhaps Miss Doughty finds that “a bore” too.

Andrew Nash

Abingdon, Oxfordshire

One of our readers (Auberon Quin) also commented. That comment is attached to the original posting and may be viewed here.

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Newspapers, Sword of Honour | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Another Look at Brideshead (More)

Michaelmas Roundup

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Several religious journals carry a story by George Weigel about the elimination of the Papal States in the 19th century as part of Italy’s reunification. The article, as published in the interfaith journal First Things, opens with this:

Evelyn Waugh’s Catholic traditionalism was so deep, broad, and intense that self-identified “traditional Catholics” today might seem, in comparison, like the editorial staff of the National Catholic Reporter. Yet the greatest of 20th-century English prose stylists held what some Catholic traditionalists (notably the “new integralists”) would regard as unsound views on the demise of the Papal States: a lengthy historical drama on which the curtain rang down 150 years ago this month.

In the third volume of Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy, the novels’ protagonist, Guy Crouchback, makes Italy’s surrender in World War II and King Victor Emmanuel III’s flight from Rome the occasion to lament, to his father, the papacy’s acquiescence to its loss of the Papal States: “[This] looks like the end of the Piedmontese usurpation. What a mistake the Lateran Treaty was . . . How much better would it have been if the popes had sat it out and then emerged saying, ‘What was that all about? Risorgimento? Garibaldi? Cavour? The House of Savoy? Mussolini? Just some hooligans from out of town causing a disturbance . . . ’”

To which Gervase Crouchback, a man of insight informed by deep piety, replies in a letter:

“Of course in the 1870s and 1880s every decent Roman disliked the Piedmontese. . . . And of course most of the [Catholics] we know kept it up, sulking. But that isn’t the Church. The Mystical Body doesn’t strike attitudes and stand on its dignity . . . When you spoke of the Lateran Treaty did you consider how many souls may have been reconciled and have died at peace as a result of it? How many children may have been brought up in the faith who might have lived in ignorance?”

–Charles Moore writes in The Spectator of his thoughts on elevation to the peerage:

I believe I am Etchingham’s third peer. […One of the] others was Lord Killearn who, as Miles Lampson, was our imposing plenipotentiary in Egypt during the war. He is said to have originated the phrase ‘Get your tanks off my lawn’, addressing King Farouk. According to the not always reliable Evelyn Waugh, Lampson sent a telegram to Winston Churchill after Randolph Churchill had dined with him in the embassy in Cairo in 1941. It said: ‘Your son is at my house. He has the light of battle in his eye.’ Waugh claimed that ‘Unhappily the cypher group got it wrong & it arrived “light of BOTTLE”. All too true.’

–The Daily Express publishes a listing of the favorite 6 books of Charles Spencer, author, broadcaster, 9th Earl and uncle to Prince William and Harry. At the top of his list is:

PUT OUT MORE FLAGS Evelyn Waugh ( Penguin Classics, £ 9.99) I reread this masterpiece of black comedy as Covid- 19 appeared. Waugh’s targets in this 1942 novel – the bogus “experts” and the profiteers who appear at times of crisis – still resonate strongly today.

–Jane Shilling writes in the Daily Telegraph about the effect of COVID-19 restrictions on returning university students:

For students, the real loss will be of life lessons not to be found in the seminar room or the library. Of these, the first to go will be permission to be silly. For countless generations of undergraduates, a degree has offered a brief window of freedom through which to explore new experiences, meet new people, make mistakes and learn how to be a grown-up. It is a process that often involves a certain amount of boisterious behaviour – “its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins”, as Evelyn Waugh put it in Brideshead Revisited. But in the shadow of Covid, tolerance of student peccadilloes promises to be sharply curtailed.

–A local newsblog from the Sevenoaks Chamber of Commerce also quotes Waugh about the beginning of the school year:

“It is typical of Oxford … to start the new year in Autumn.” As August turned to September, the weather has definitely taken an autumnal turn and the Summer holidays are long forgotten as we go into “back to school” mode. Even if you don’t have any connections to school-age children, the calendar continues to revolve around the 3 term system.

My quote actually comes from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and it does raise a good point; who came up with the new academic year starting in the Autumn? Oxford and Cambridge certainly have their idiosyncrasies and special terminology as we’ve discussed before in this blog. While the Autumn term is known as the Michaelmas term in Oxford, it follows the standard UK convention of making a fresh start in September.

Waugh himself did not matriculate in Michaelmas Term. He started in January (Hilary Term). Although he was not to know it at the beginning of his student career, this would later cost him the award of a degree. He took his finals in the summer at the end of his 8th term and passed with a low third. This resulted in loss of his scholarship at Hertford College, and his father refused to pay the fees for his 9th term which was necessary to fulfill residency requirements. This may have had more to do with Evelyn’s prodigious debts than with the poor exam results. His father (New College) had also graduated from Oxford with a third-class degree.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Newspapers, Oxford, Put Out More Flags, Sword of Honour | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Michaelmas Roundup

Downside Abbey to Close

Posted on September 22, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent article, The Tablet announced that the Benedictine Abbey at Downside would be closed, after having previously been separated from the public school on the same site in Somerset. The school will remain on the site but the abbey will move to a new location:

The decision comes soon after the abbey and its monastic community completely separated from Downside School, a move that followed a 2018 investigation by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) into abuse at both Downside and Ampleforth. At Downside IICSA found a “culture of acceptance of abusive behaviour” that prioritised monks’ reputations over the safety of children.

In September 2019 the Charity Commission approved the creation of a new charity to run Downside School, while the abbey was to continue as Downside Abbey General Trust. No monk from the Community was allowed to have a role in the charity that ran the school.

A spokesperson said today that the separation of the abbey and the school had enabled the Monastic Community to concentrate on discerning their future. “They have now unanimously decided to make a new start and to seek a new place to live.”

In a statement the Community said that the shrinking monastic community and “changing circumstances” mean that the current monastery buildings are no longer suitable.

Another article by James Baresel explains Evelyn Waugh’s longtime attachment to both the abbey and the school. This appears on the website ChurchMilitant.com:

Downside, as the senior community within the English Benedictine congregation, took its place as an important influence within 19th century England’s Catholic revival. Its school rose steadily to the top, the Benedictines eventually overtook even the then-rigorous Jesuits as their country’s true masters of Catholic education. Its architecture was at the forefront of the neo-Gothic movement and has since been declared a Grade I building by England’s National Heritage Trust.

Such centrality to English Catholic life continued well into the 20th century. One of its monks, Dom Hubert van Zeller, ranked among the more popular spiritual writers of mid-20th century England and was a friend of both Monsignor Ronald Knox (for whom he also served as a confessor) and Evelyn Waugh (who frequently made retreats at the monastery and sent one of his sons to its school).

Waugh sent his oldest son Auberon to the Downside School but his second son, James, was sent to Stonyhurst (another Roman Catholic school). Septimus Waugh, his youngest son, mentions in a recent article in The Tablet that he was also educated at Downside. See previous post. The Downside School kindly hosted the Evelyn Waugh Society’s 2011 conference. Waugh’s last work published in his lifetime was a review of Dom van Zeller’s autobiography One Foot in the Cradle. This appeared in the Downside Review (April 1966). Waugh died on 10 April 1966.

Share
Posted in Catholicism, Newspapers, Waugh Family | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Downside Abbey to Close