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 ChĂąteau 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 ChĂąteau 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 ChĂąteau 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 BĂšze, 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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Apthorpe and Widmerpool

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In Duncan McLaren’s latest posting, Anthony Powell joins the host of other writer friends of Evelyn Waugh who are either posthumously present or talked about at the recently postponed Castle Howard conference. In this case, Powell and several of his works are considered by Waugh and Nancy Mitford, who also knew both writers. After a discussion of the long and lasting friendship of Powell and Waugh as well as several of Powell’s pre-war books and the first volume of Dance to the Music of Time, Nancy and Evelyn have this exchange about two characters from the novels:

Nancy. “Do you recall reading A Question of Upbringing? It was in your library when you died, but not an inscribed copy.”

Evelyn.“Indeed. I read it soon after it came out.”

Nancy. “Were you impressed?”

Evelyn. “Certainly.”

Nancy. “Did it influence you in the writing of Men at Arms?”

Evelyn. “Why do you ask?”

Nancy. “Tony’s Question of Upbringing came out in January, 1951. You began writing Men At Arms a few months later. Both books share a philosophy that no plot is needed, just structure. And that events in our lives create sufficient structures. So Tony set his scenes at Eton, then in France in the year between school and university, and then at Oxford. Simple and satisfying. In Men at Arms, Guy Crouchback decides to join the army, he gets his officer training in the Halberdiers, and he goes into battle with his regiment. Again, straightforward, and following life closely. The devil is in the detail, of course. In the intimate following of characters as they go about their business over time, thereby revealing themselves.”

Evelyn. “That’s hardly a convincing connection.”

Nancy. “Wait. It was when I had just read a particular sentence in A Question of Upbringing that I thought of Apthorpe. Widmerpool is talking to the narrator, Jenkins. He says: “You must meet my mother. She is one of those rare middle-aged women who have retained their youthful interest in matters of the mind. If you like books – and you tell me you do – you would thoroughly enjoy a chat with her about them.” Something about the presumption, the inappropriate confidence, the air of absurdity that lurks just below the surface, made me think that sentence could just as easily have been spoken by Apthorpe to Crouchback.”

Evelyn. “You may have something there, young Nancy.”

Nancy. “Oh, thank-you, Professor Waugh.”

Evelyn. “Apthorpe nearly took over my book in the same way that Widmerpool nearly takes over Tony’s. And the battle of wits between Apthorpe and Brigadier Ritchie Hook over the right to exclusive use of the Thunderbox does bear some relation to Widmerpool’s modus operandum.”

This connection had never occurred to me and I don’t recall it being made by previous commentators, although Dr Christine Berberich may have alluded to it several years ago. Ironically, now it has been made by two Waugh admirers oceans apart within a week of each other. The other making the point was Australian journalist Greg Sheridan in a YouTube discussion mentioned in a previous post. Whether there may have been some cross fertilization when Powell came to write the war volumes of his novel might make an interesting paper.

Waugh was certainly interested in Widmerpool as he expressed in several letters to Powell over the course of the novel’s publication. Indeed, he downgraded one of the volumes he reviewed (Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant) because of the paucity of Widmerpool’s appearances. He was happily able to withdraw his reservation when Widmerpool was restored to prominence in the next volume, The Kindly Ones.

Unfortunately, as Duncan nears the end of the discussion, he recites his “Ten Little Oxford Men” ditty for what may be the last time since Powell is #10. So, this may mark the end of the series, although he promises more about the Waugh-Powell relationship, and Graham Greene has yet to be heard from.

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Helena Reviewed in Italian

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Italian religious news website Radio Spada has published a review of Waugh’s novel Helena.  An Italian translation of the novel was published as Elena: la madre dell’imperatore in 2002, but this review is not related to that publication, aside from a display of the cover art at the beginning of the article. The review is by Luca Fumagalli who frequently writes about Waugh’s works. Here’s a translation of the beginning of the article:

Contrary to what Evelyn Waugh himself claimed, Elena ( Helena ) is by no means his best novel. The book, published for the first time in 1950, is a study of a vocation, and the mysterious action of divine grace, a thematic path already started by the English writer with Brideshead Revisited  and The Loved One, and which would continue in the following years with the trilogy Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender. Waugh traces the story of Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine and the one to whom, according to tradition, credit goes to having found the True Cross of Christ, as a path of growth from the paganism of her adolescence in Britain to the Faith of mature age, spent in Rome and then in Jerusalem. [The story is told] in a pre-Raphaelite painting atmosphere, the result of the juxtaposition of a series of iconic scenes, where each person finds himself a pawn in an inscrutable divine project; in other words, Waugh tries to demonstrate the historical truth behind the foundation of the Church, an idea that is grafted onto the context, typical in his work, of the conflict between civilization and wild madness.

In Helena what is missing is above all an adequate psychological characterization of the main characters, and the plot also suffers due to a dancing rhythm and frequent temporal ellipses between one chapter and another, sometimes several years. Furthermore, the intentional anachronisms, conceived by Waugh with the aim of underlining how the story narrated is so significant as to be still relevant, are rarely spot on (in this sense the most illuminating example is the prophecy dedicated to Napoleon in exile to Saint Helena, intriguing in this regard but definitely out of place). There are inspired moments – above all the death of Fausta and the brilliant epilogue – which reveal the talent of an exceptional “prosatore”, but, like the True Cross, too often they are buried under piles of residual prose, slags of flat sentences and monotone.

Some critics spoke of the book as an experiment of “postmodernism” or “metafiction”, and certainly, except for the female protagonist and the Roman setting, Helena has little to do with similar historical novels such as Fabiola by NP Wiseman and Callista by JH Newman. Waugh’s story, in addition to taking place in a later period than that of the martyrs – a period frequented by Catholic novelists in England also for the evident analogies with the 16th century – shows the triumph of Christianity in terms not so exalting, so much so that his bitter irony does not spare even the great emperor Constantine, portrayed as a man full of himself and “with a clouded mind”. More generally, Helena  gives the impression of resolving itself in a strange amalgam of the historical and religious convictions of its author, a synthesis with great potential, but whose result, although interesting, cannot leave us fully satisfied.

The review continues with an attempt to link some of the characters to members of the Bright Young People that Waugh wrote about in his earlier novels and a discussion of some of the book’s religious themes. It may not be Waugh’s best novel, but it is probably the one he spent most time writing. He started in March 1945 with the idea of writing a Saint’s Life and changed his mind to make it an historical novel, which he finally completed in March 1950. Although not mentioned, the review is quite timely as the OUP has announced that its edition of Helena will be published later this year as Vol. 11 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh edited by Sara Haslam. See previous post. The translation is by Google with some edits.

 

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Another Spectator Competition: Glasto & Glynders

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator recently set another parody competition in which a Waugh entry received honorable mention but once again was not among those published. See previous post. This was described by columnist Lucy Vickery as:

… Competition No. 3157 [in which] you were invited to describe a visit to Glastonbury or Glyndebourne in the style of an author of your choice.

Highlights in an especially hotly contested week — oh, for more space! — were Timothy Clegg’s John Masefield, R.M. Goddard’s John Cooper Clarke, John Mounsey’s Evelyn Waugh, Hugh King’s Edward Gibbon, Anthony Bevan’s Rev. James Woodforde, Anthony Whitehead’s Martin Amis, C. Paul Evans’s Wordsworth, Nicholas W.S. Cranfield’s Samuel Pepys and several admirable Austens.

And again, the parodist J C H Mounsey has kindly agreed to allow us to post his unpublished entry. It was well worth the praise it was given. Be sure to read it through to the end:

The noise was deafening. Mr Pinfold stayed still, stupefied and bewildered. He had never been much interested in music and he disliked crowds. He turned his head and everywhere saw only rapt faces. One of his legs had gone to sleep. He shifted his weight, accidentally kicking his neighbour, who gave no sign of having noticed. He tried to speak to his companion (surely Boots couldn’t be enjoying this stuff?) but was unable to make himself heard above the vast wall of sound that rolled over him from the direction of the stage. He discovered that his ankles were entangled in an overcoat that had mysteriously appeared at his feet. Kicking it away and deaf to the rising hubbub of aggrieved voices, he began pushing past the line of bodies and eventually found the exit. Inside the Glyndebourne auditorium, unmoved by Mr Pinfold’s defection, the Valkyries continued their thunderous ride.

Once again, thanks to all concerned.

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Bastille Day Roundup

Posted on July 18, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Australian newspaper’s “Media Watch Dog” column cites its previous mention of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop

where the snobbery of the leftie journalist Pappenhacker was revealed. Waugh’s line was that a wealthy communist university-educated chap named Pappenhacker believed that the best way to undermine the capitalist system was to be rude to the members of the proletariat. This would make them angry and help to bring about a revolution. Your man Pappenhacker specialised in being rude to waiters. Others it seems target taxi drivers.

Some recent examples in Australia include rude comments about a politician’s English pronunciation and a celebrity’s criticism of the behavior of low paid security guards at a hotel where those under a coronavirus quarantine had been housed.

In another article, the paper’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan writes about “five books that changed me.” One of these was Evelyn Waigh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Later in the week, Sheridan appeared in a podcast interview about the novel produced by the Institute of Public Affairs, a conservative think-tank based in Melbourne. This is conducted by Bella d’Abrera and is the second in a series called Five Favorite Books. It extends over 45 minutes and turns out to be a very lively and penetrating analysis of the war trilogy as well as some of Waugh’s other works. Here’s the summary posted with the interview:

This episode is a discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s masterful and epic work which follows Guy Crouchback’s experience of World War Two. Greg [Sheridan] loves this book because it’s a celebration of Guy’s decency. Guy is not a superhero, he doesn’t have a particular high IQ, he doesn’t win the war and he doesn’t even win the girl. But there is a theme of moral survival in the novel which comes through as it occurs to Guy during the course of the war that Stalin cannot be allowed to win.

The complete interview is posted on YouTube.

—The Oldie has posted an article in which Rachel Billington describes her new novel which is set in World War II as fought by the RAF:

As I grew up, I discovered the famous [RAF] memoirs including the doomed Richard Hillary, Brian Kingcome, Geofrey Wellum and even the royal amour, Peter Townsend. There were fewer novels. Writers of fiction, it seems, fought on the ground and left the skies to the next generation. It is hard to imagine Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh in a cockpit. Perhaps the newness of the RAF seemed lacking in historical resonance.

Her novel is called Clouds of Love and War  and:

is about Eddie, a disaffected young man who joins the RAF in order to escape into freedom. Eddie flies his Spitfire as a man of the sky. The book is also about the people on the earth who can never quite pull him back. He kills and feels triumphant but mostly believes he has killed a Messerschmitt 109, not another man. The sky, the youth, the people on the ground and the war. It is not the right moment to fall in love. Eva doesn’t think of that. She assumes human nature doesn’t live in the clouds.

In another article in The Oldie, editor Harry Mount considers why Boris Johnson is so enamored of Latinate constructions in his speaking and writing. He recalls a discussion of several years ago where both were invited to speak. As recalled by Mount:

“The thing about Latinate words is they’re evasive,” said Boris. “There’s a whole world of difference between ‘You’re sacked’ and ‘We want to restructure the whole operation in the M4 corridor’. […] As Evelyn Waugh said of his own classical education, he learnt “that words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity”. Boris knows exactly when to depart from those meanings to produce metaphor or vulgarity, and sometimes both at the same time.

–Peter Hitchens writing in the religious journal First Things has an article evoking the joy of riding on trains when service was still an important selling point:

… no restaurant meal I have ever had, including the pressed duck at the old Tour D’Argent in Paris (before it became a museum where you could eat the exhibits), has surpassed the breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners I have eaten in trains.

I think of the wonderful bacon and eggs, accompanied by soda bread, on the cross-border Belfast-to-Dublin flyer in Ireland; […] Then there were the toasted teacakes near Grantham on the southbound Flying Scotsman, and the superb galley-cooked steak on the upper deck of the Chicago-bound Capitol Limited, as it climbed westward through the evening into the forests beyond Harper’s Ferry and up the Potomac valley.

Evelyn Waugh conveyed a tiny part of this abolished, intense pleasure in one of my favorite passages of Brideshead Revisited:

The knives and forks jingled on the table as we sped through the darkness; the little circle of gin and vermouth contracted to oval, lengthened again with the sway of the carriage, lapped back again, touched the lip, never spilt. I was leaving the day behind me. Julia pulled off her hat and tossed it into the rack above her, and shook her night-dark hair with a little sigh of ease—a sigh fit for the pillow, the sinking firelight and a window open to the stars and the whisper of bare trees.

He was leaving the day behind him. And that is the trick of it.

–Finally, the newsletter of the Stinchcombe Parish Council has posted a notice by the new owners of Evelyn Waugh’s former home Piers Court about public access. Here’s an excerpt:

…Now that the lockdown is being slowly relaxed, the owners have placed signs over the grounds of the property to guide walkers to the footpaths. […]   The owners have a contract in place with a local farmer Chris Morgan who takes care of the fields in return for the hay yield.  The owners are therefore requesting that walkers be community-spirited.

In addition, the owners of Piers Court are investing a substantial sum of money in restoring the original Parkland and planting new trees to replace those that are coming to the end of their life.  This would be for future generations to enjoy.

The owners are close friends with Evelyn Waugh’s family, in particular with Septimus (Evelyn’s youngest son) who vividly remembers his early childhood at Piers Court and who is currently assisting the new owners.  Given that it is the 75th anniversary of the publication of Brideshead Revisited (which was written at Piers Court), the owners will be inviting some of the Waugh family to Piers Court to mark the occasion.

Sorry to say that Brideshead was not written at Piers Court but at the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford, Devon. Several other novels, however, were written at the house during Waugh’s residence, including Helena, The Loved One, the first two volumes of the war trilogy and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.

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Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Interviews, Newspapers, Sword of Honour, Waugh Family, World War II | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bastille Day Roundup