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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Brideshead and Loving (More)

Posted on July 17, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has just posted an interesting comparison between the two 1945 novels: Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Henry Green’s Loving. This is quite different from the shorter Daily Telegraph article reported in a previous post. Duncan presents the comparison as if written by Robert Byron in the form of a memo to Nancy Mitford. It also includes a dialogue between Byron and Henry Green on the two novels.

Duncan begins with a description of how the two writers attempted to exchange advance copies of their novels but only Waugh’s was received by Green who left the copy of his book at the wrong club. This would have been while Waugh was in Yugoslavia. There is also quite an amusing discussion of the humorous use of lisping speech in the two books. This achieves greater prominence in Green’s novel, as the only example in Waugh’s is the occasional lapse of Kurt, Sebastian’s German boyfriend, into a lisping English. Duncan carries this much further and to good comic effect.

There is also an interesting comparison of the dead peacock in Green’s novel with a well-known scene in Brideshead. This comes about when:

the cook’s nephew at Kinalty […] first comes across a peacock. He kills it by strangulation. And the disposal of the corpse (of one of Mrs Tennant’s favoured pets) causes the servants consternation. Perhaps it’s not surprising that a cockney child taking refuge from the Blitz would experience culture shock in a palace. The equivalent at Brideshead would be the arrival of the rich, brash American Rex Mottram with a gift for the woman he intended to marry. ‘It was a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now straining across the card table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its ante-diluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening
 ‘Dear me,” said Lady Marchmain. “I wonder if it eats the same sort of things as an ordinary tortoise.”‘

Finally, Duncan’s article contains some interesting bibliographical information. Firstly, it almost happened that the same artist designed dustwrappers for both books. This was John Piper whose design was used for Loving, but he withdrew his Brideshead proposal  because of his own dissatisfaction. In addition, Duncan reproduces many of the covers for the several editions of Loving that have appeared. I had no idea that the book was sufficiently popular to support this much reprinting. The article can be accessed at this link.

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Waugh and Saint Sophia

Posted on July 11, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

A story by Dr Binoy Kampmark, Selwyn College, Cambridge, about the reconversion of the Saint Sophia cathedral in Istanbul from a museum to a mosque opens with this quote from Evelyn Waugh:

When the caustic Evelyn Waugh visited the majestic sixth century creation of Emperor Justinian, one subsequently enlarged, enriched and encrusted by various rulers, he felt underwhelmed. “‘Agia’ will always win the day for one,” he wrote of Istanbul’s holiest of holies, Hagia Sophia, in 1930. “A more recondite snobbism is to say ‘Aya Sofia’, but except in a very sophisticated circle, who will probably not need guidance in the matter at all, this is liable to suspicion as a mere mispronunciation.”

In a somewhat cool reaction, Waugh struggled to reconcile the pop mythology, at that point elevated by celebratory brochure and tourist packages, with the sight of it. “We saw Agia Sophia, a majestic shell full of vile Turkish fripperies, whose whole architectural rectitude has been fatally disturbed by the reorientation of the mihrab.”

The quotes are from Waugh’a 1930 travel book Labels (pp. 140-41). At the time Waugh visited in 1930, the structure was still being used as a mosque. The Ataturk regime made it into a museum four years later. Waugh continues in the same vein:

In Cairo I have noted the pride and superiority which a Western mind must feel when confronted with Arabic art; this feeling is intensified and broadened a hundred times in relation to everything Turkish. They seem to have been unable to touch any existing work or to imitate any existing movement without degrading it.

Dr Kampmark’s article has been picked up by several news websites and can be read in full at scoop.co.nz.

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4th of July Roundup

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan McLaren has added a coda to his recent posting about Waugh’s friendship (if that’s the right word) with Cyril Connolly. Duncan’s article is entitled “Cyril in Full Flow” and  is based on a visit Cyril made to Berlin in 1928. This time he imagines a discussion between Waugh and Nancy Mitford based on her recent reading of an article by Cyril in a 1930 issue of Life and Letters. It reports a conversation between X, Y and Z, of whom Cyril was one and Harold Nicolson and Raymond Mortimer were the other two. Here’s an excerpt:

Nancy: OK, Cyril’s title: ‘Conversations in Berlin’. Cyril begins by telling the reader that in his text, X is the host, while Y and Z are guests. And that Z’s talk is not so well recorded as Cyril’s own.”

Evelyn: “What about X and Y? Is their talk recorded just as well as Cyril’s?”

Nancy: “Good point. Y hardly features. And there is no reason to suppose X’s talk has been recorded any better than Z’s.”

Evelyn: “Typical Cyril. Smart but shoddy. […] Sharp as a tack but barmy as a fruit cake.”

Nancy: “I am going to start: ‘We had some interesting talks in Berlin. One night we discussed ourselves when young, at what age we should like most now to have met ourselves, and where. X described himself motor-cycling in Germany and held up two days forlornly in Dortmund. I would like to have come across myself at eighteen: droll, earnestly decadent, and rather birdlike among the second-hand bookstalls at Cologne. Z deplored one’s shyness at that age, and we all admitted that at a time when we were longing for intelligent conversations with people older than ourselves we had been too gauche to begin them, and reduced to getting stones from schoolmasters as our only intellectual bread. I said this did not really matter. Youth was a period of misadventure, and should only be enjoyed as such. The long line of missed opportunities were more rich and significant in their maladroitness than the competent never-miss-a-moment grasping philosophy of late youth and middle age
’ I’ll pause there. That gives us enough to get our teeth into, does it not?”

Cyril’s article is also collected in The Condemned Playground published in 1945. But you probably do not need to read the original to enjoy the discussion of it by Waugh and Mitford as presented by Duncan.

–The Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things exhibition, scheduled earlier this year at the National Porait Gallery but postponed due to the Wuhan coronovirus epidemic, may now have to be postponed indefinitely or, worse yet, cancelled. See previous posts. According to the NPG’s webpage and a notice on the ArtUK website, the NPG is now closed until 2023. Here’s the opening of the ArtUK article:

The National Portrait Gallery in London is closed until 2023 for a major refurbishment and a redisplay of the collection. Before the Gallery closed due to Covid-19 on 17th March 2020, it had just opened the exhibition ‘Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things‘ on 12th March. It explored the world of the infamous bohemian group of socialites, through the illustrious lens of the famed British photographer.

The article by Philomena Epps contains many Beaton photographs already displayed in previous articles relating to the exhibition but also includes some artwork that has not been previously circulated. One may hope that an alternative venue can be found, but there is no suggestion in the article that an announcement is imminent.

–The Catholic Herald recently posted a brief, humorous article “In defence of Catholic Snobbery” by Violet Hudson:

In the UK, we have scant little to be snobbish about – our churches tend to be modern and un-romantic, our hymns are dire compared with rousing Protestant numbers, our history is one of persecution and secrecy.[…] Evelyn Waugh is one of the most famous Catholics in this country’s post-Reformation history, and his Catholicism is synonymous with his ardent love for a big house and a delightfully dysfunctional family.  […]

When we think snobbery and British Catholicism we are thinking of the Anglo-Catholicism of Brideshead, of Cardinal Newman, of Jacobite Lairds and priest holes carved into Elizabethan oak. But the vast majority of Catholics in this country are immigrants from the Irish and Polish traditions – and even combined, we make up less than ten per cent of the population.[…]

All things considered, the CH article concludes: “we Catholics welcome all: the very antithesis of snobbery.”

–In one of what must be Roman Catholicism’s more remote outposts in North America (the Diocese of Gallup, New Mexico) a new director of religious education has been appointed. This is Kathleen Zelasko who was interviewed by the diocesan newspaper, Voice of the Southwest. Here’s an excerpt from the Q&A:

Do you have a favorite book or author?

My favorite book is Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. When I was in low times – it reaches everyone. There’s a character in there that can reach everyone. It’s just a beautiful book.

It is perhaps worth recalling that the Diocese of Gallup falls within the territory of what may the oldest Roman Catholic jurisdiction in the United States with its archbishop in Santa Fe. Early missions date back as far as the 16th century. A 19th Century incumbent was once the subject of a novel by Willa Cather.

–Finally, the British singer-songwriter Maisie Peters is interviewed in the music news journal Atwoodsmagazine.com. She got her start in 2017 by posting her work on YouTube and has since released two EPs on Atlantic Records UK. She has also started a book club which is a subject raised in the interview

AtwoodsMagazine: OFF-TOPIC, BUT I’D LOVE TO HEAR ABOUT HOW YOU HAD AN IDEA TO START THE BOOK CLUB? […] I THINK IT’S GOT LIKE 5000 FOLLOWERS NOW, WHICH IS MENTAL!

Maisie Peters: Yeah, it’s crazy. I’m doing it with a friend of mine called Abby who’s in publishing, and we’ve been friends for like 5 years now. So that’s really special because we get to work together. She’s in the world of publishing, so she’s been able to suggest books. […]  I’m reading so many books. I just finished a book called “A Handful of Dust” by Evelyn Waugh. It’s super old; I think it literally came out in thirty. It’s honestly amazing. I was kind of unconvinced for the first third then the last two-thirds are wild. Honestly, the ending is like one of the most disturbing and chilling things I’ve ever read. If you read it, you’ll read the first third and be like why the f**k did Maisie recommend this? Then you’ll read to the end and but like oh god, this is really insane. But now, I’ve got to choose what to read next and I’ve four different ones to pick. It’s so stressful.

It was published in 1934.

 

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Saccone & Speed Profiled in Spanish Paper

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spanish language newspaper Diario de Jerez has published a feature story on the wine merchants Saccone & Speed. The firm was founded and located in nearby Gibraltar and imported wine from, inter alia, the province of Jerez. A portion of the article is devoted to Evelyn Waugh’s brief connection to the firm:

The famous English writer, Evelyn Waugh, considered that Gibraltar enjoyed a unique position in this part of Andalusia: “A piece of Spain, linked by the narrow neck of neutral territory to the historic vineyards of Jerez”.

The Russian prince Vsévolod (1914-1973), was a director of the firm in London, and a friend of the acclaimed English writer Evelyn Waugh, whom he asked to write something about the wines in order to give it to a select group of his distinguished clientele .

On March 18, 1946, Waugh recorded in his diary the meeting he had with the Russian aristocrat in his office to deal with this matter, but not before obtaining in advance a box of Jerez and two burgundies. The agreement established a payment in kind: two dozen 1928 Roederer champagne, the result was one hundred copies, a beautiful booklet with illustrations by the artist Rex Whistler:  Wine in Peace and War (London 1947). Currently in high demand by collectors and bibliophiles.

A year earlier, his novel, Brideshead Revisted, had been chosen as Book of the Month in the United States, which meant a significant amount of money. Waugh had a substantial gross income and anything else he earned would be taxed at 80%. Hence the suggestion that Waugh receive his remuneration in bubbles.

Of our wines, he writes: “Sherry is a very poorly used name, and even in the strictest sense, applicable to a wide variety of wines, from Manzanilla, as pale and dry as the color of noble wood, to heavy wine, sweet and dark that is sold under a variety of names, often like ‘East India’ or Solera … Nothing can be more delicious than a glass of pale Fino, very dry, cold, mid-day mid-summer. admirable before and at the beginning of the meals.

Like all good wine, it is best enjoyed in tranquility. The Sherry Party that has become fashionable recently is an abomination to me. However, as long as people continue to have fun between six and eight in the afternoon, they will find that Amontillados and Amorosos are a useful resource, less damaging and less expensive than cocktails.

The first and essential thing to keep in mind about wine is that it is something made to be enjoyed. The pleasure it provides is the only definitive measure of any harvest.

The corollary of this is that, like all good works of man, its pleasure is greatly enhanced by knowledge and experience.

The translation is by Google with minor edits. The language quoted from the book has with one exception (in the opening paragraph) been retranslated into English from a Spanish version of the text. The last five lines in the excerpt seem to be from Waugh’s text but I have been unable to account for them.  The text of the book has never been reprinted in full but will, in good time no doubt, be included in volume 28 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Essays, Articles and Reviews 1946-1955.

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Three Country Houses in the Telegraph

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen describes three post war novels that each celebrated the English country house in a different way. The first was Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. According to Christiansen:

…its reception was largely enthusiastic and its sales soared. Fellow novelist Elizabeth Bowen expressed the majority view by calling it “supremely and triumphantly romantic”, and it has gone on to assume classic status, bolstered by the epic television adaptation of 1981. Another novel published at exactly the same time stands in fascinating counterpoint to Brideshead – Henry Green’s Loving. Both are focused on the spiritual condition of the upper classes and the fate of the great house, but they address the issue from opposite ends of the telescope.

Waugh and Green (born Henry Yorke) were old friends from their days as Oxford undergraduates. Green was a generous admirer of Brideshead Revisited: “the whole thing seems to me deeper and wider than any book you have written” he told Waugh. But there was a subtle sting in the tail of his encomium: “it is so curious that we should choose subjects, each of us, so distasteful to each other. Quite soon now another one of mine about the proletariat and about children will be on is way to you 
 and which you will find quite unreadable.” He appears to have been right on the last score – Waugh confided to his diary “Henry has written an obscene book named Loving about domestic servants” [..]

Christiansen then summarizes Loving which he denominates “the anti-Brideshead” and contrasts it to Waugh’s novel in several respects, one of which is the starkly different writing style adopted by Green

The writing is idiosyncratic in its elisions and inversions, with dialogue that is often oblique, even opaquely Pinterish. Waugh, who aimed at a prose of classical translucency, told Green that he was “debasing the language vilely”, but others have been enchanted by a style that is fresh, buoyant, untrammelled. […] While Loving debunks the country house, Brideshead Revisited mourns its demise.

The third country house novel that is considered is

…Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day – not published until 1948, but largely written in 1944-5… [This] presents it more positively as symbolic of a future fed by its past, through a perspective coloured by the author’s inheritance of the Georgian Anglo-Irish mansion of Bowen’s Court, near Cork. Set in 1942 when victory over the Nazis began to look possible, The Heat of the Day presents Bowen’s Court thinly disguised as Mount Morris. […]

In contrast to Green and Waugh’s negativity, Bowen invests her vision of the future in the continuities of Mount Morris; it is ironic that although she loved Bowen’s Court deeply and expended much time and effort post-war on upkeep, debt forced her to sell up in 1959 and the buyer demolished the house a year later. “A clean end,” she wrote bravely, “At least Bowen’s Court never lived to be a ruin.”

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Waugh and the 1945 General Election

Posted on July 4, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh returned to England via Italy from his assignment in Yugoslavia on 15 March 1945. He devoted the last few weeks in Italy to stirring up opposition to the new Communist regime of Marshall Tito. He spent most of the time in the Hyde Park Hotel with brief trips to Pixton Park where his family was located as well as to Oxford and Belton. During this period he also became acquainted with the American literary critic Edmund Wilson; he was not impressed. He spent some time trying to disengage himself from the Army, and Fitzroy Maclean gave him permission to present his position on the Tito regime to government officials, editors and others. In May, he retreated to Chagford to start work on Helena and avoid V-E Day. See previous post.

Looking back at the war, he wrote in his diary:

I regard the greatest danger I went through that of becoming one of Churchill’s young men, of getting a medal and standing for Parliament; if things had gone, as then seemed right, in the first two years, that is what I should be now. I thank God to find myself still a writer  and at work on something as “uncontemporary” as I am. [Diaries, 6 May 1945, p. 627]

He was also probably looking forward to the General Election that was inevitable after V-E Day and was, later in the month, called for 5 July 1945. Waugh had left Chagford, “deeply depressed”, and went to London via Pixton. On 28 May, he commented in his diary: “All my friends and enemies are standing for parliament. I do not envy them at all.” (Diaries, p. 627).  By 1 July, writing from Pixton, he declared: “The General Election is being a great bore.” (Diaries, p. 628) The day before the results were announced he wrote his wife from London: “Now that the election results are imminent, I have got quite excited about them.” (Letters, p. 209) The ballots were not counted until 25 July because of the need to collect votes from troops stationed overseas. After the results were announced, Waugh wrote on 28 July: “Election day, the day before yesterday, was a prodigious surprise. I went to White’s at about 11. Results were already coming in on the tape and, in an hour and a half it was plainly an overwhelming defeat.” (Diaries, p. 629)

Anthony Powell was later to comment in a review of the published Diaries that Waugh’s feigned relief at not having been standing with his friends for a seat was an example of his “complete lack of self-awareness regarding himself and his own behavior” despite the fact that in other respects Waugh’s diaries provided an “unvarnished picture of himself.” The Conservatives and most of “Churchill’s young men” (including his son Randolph) decisively lost the election, not that Waugh ever stood much of a chance of being selected as a candidate. It should perhaps be noted that Randolph had been “elected” to Parliament in 1940, standing as a Conservative in an uncontested wartime by-election. That was the seat he lost in 1945. A few days after the loss, according to Waugh, Randolph was again looking for a chance to regain his MP status in a safe district by-election.

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