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.

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Diaries, Helena, World War II | Tagged , | Comments Off on Waugh and the 1945 General Election

Waugh and the Abdication (More)

Posted on July 3, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Alexander Larman’s new book The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to Abdication is reviewed in yesterday’s issue of The Times. The reviewer, David Aaronovitch, thinks Larman has overstated the seriousness of the issue, at least among the British public if not not the upper classes and Conservative government. He notes, for example, that there were no efforts to measure public opinion on the question since such polling was not on offer from the Gallup organization until after the abdication had been carried out. As an example of public indifference, he cites Evelyn Waugh’s statement in his diary quoted by Larman in his book:

… paradoxically, given his conviction that the abdication was a crisis that “threatened the stability of the British state”, Larman begins his book with an extract from Evelyn Waugh’s diary in which the perceptive author writes that “the Simpson crisis has been a great delight to everyone . . . There can seldom have been an event that caused so much general delight and so little pain.”

So my thought on finishing this always interesting book was to ask the question that it decides not to: wasn’t the whole abdication business a ruling-class psychodrama that distracted the courtiers and the barons and the King’s ministers from the far more serious set of crises unfolding in 1936?

I haven’t seen the quotation as cited in Larman’s book, which is not scheduled to be published until next week, but there is more in that passage that seems to support Aaronovitch’s conclusion, as has been noted in previous posts. In his Diaries, 8 Dec. 1936, p. 415, Waugh wrote :

The Simpson crisis has been a great delight to everyone. At Maidie’s nursing home they report a pronounced turn for the better in all adult patients. There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain. Reading the papers and listening to the announcements that there was no news took up most of the week… .

Maidie refers to Maidie Hollis, wife of Waugh’s Oxford friend Christopher Hollis. She had been in a nursing home in Bristol since September after a miscarriage (Ibid. pp. 407-08). Waugh goes on to mention that:

Conrad [Russell] lunched with me on Sunday, very happy with the crisis. Perry [Brownlow] is out with Simpson in Cannes. If it had not been for Simpson this would have been a very bitter week. [Ibid, p. 415]

Waugh’s friend Perry Brownlow was Lord-in-Waiting to Edward VIII.

Share
Posted in Diaries, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh and the Abdication (More)

Summer Solstice Roundup

Posted on July 1, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Peter Quennell may be having a revival. Duncan McLaren (see previous post) has now been joined by A N Wilson in recounting his career. Wilson in a memoir posted by The Oldie discusses several first hand meetings he had with Quennell over the years as well as some anecdotes he picked up from other sources. The fraught relationship between Quennell and Waugh is one of the subjects he writes about:

Evelyn Waugh hated PQ so much that he once came up to him in White’s and jumped up and down on his feet, the sort of bullying you would expect in a school playground, not at the hands of a distinguished novelist in his fifties in a gentleman’s club. The hatred went back to their young manhood when Q had reviewed Waugh’s first book, a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Q, who had been at Oxford with Waugh, pretended that “Evelyn” was a woman and referred throughout his review to “Miss Waugh”.

Waugh in his journals or letters, I have not found the reference, made the fair point that Fuddy Duddy Fishface, as he called Quennell, was a better writer, technically, than anyone in his generation, but that he had nothing to write about. Although his books are mellifluous and beautifully crafted – volumes on Baudelaire, Byron, Ruskin etc., you never feel he was writing from compulsion. I wonder whether something got sealed off in his youth.

It was not Quennell’s reference to him as a woman that ruffled Waugh. That error was committed by the TLS reviewer (Letters, p. 28). It was rather Quennell’s negative tone from some one he knew personally that offended Waugh and sparked an exchange of letters.

–The trade press of the publishing industry contains another round of stories about the new owners of Waugh’s literary estate (and also includes some clarification of the extent of their ownership interest as it applies to Waugh’s works). Here’s an excerpt from The Hollywood Reporter:

International Literary Properties, the newly former London- and New York-based company that earlier this month acquired the estates of 12 late authors, has signed a first-look deal with BBC Studios, marking its first major production partnership. Under the deal, announced Tuesday, BBC Studios Production, the production arm of BBC Studios, and its portfolio of independent producers can explore the intellectual property owned and managed by ILP. Set up last year, the company currently holds the rights for authors including Georges Simenon, Eric Ambler, Margery Allingham, Edmund Crispin, Dennis Wheatley, Robert Bolt, Richard Hull, George Bellairs, Nicolas Freeling, John Creasey and Michael Innes as well as 20 percent of Evelyn Waugh’s estate.

Twenty percent is not exactly a controlling interest as was was wrongly suggested in the first round of stories about ILP’s acquisition. Just how they will work with the other owners has yet to be explained.

–Alexander Larman writing in The Critic joins several others in celebrating the 75th anniversary of Brideshead Revisited’s publication. After a discussion of the context in which it was written, its mixed initial reception, and its popularization by the 1981 TV serial, Larman concludes:

I read Brideshead Revisited for the first time when I was about 11, a decade or so after the TV series had appeared. I still remember the circumstances in which I encountered it, lying on my bed one summer afternoon. I didn’t understand everything in it, either the language or the situations described, but it made me feel transported, as if I had travelled to a new world that I had previously only dimly perceived the existence of. Like Charles, I thrilled to the description of prelapsarian Oxford; delighted in the straight-faced tomfoolery of Mr Ryder; enjoyed the farce of the worst tutor in literature, Mr Samgrass; and, above all, revelled in the vividly evoked sense of another, richer world. While my peers lost themselves in science fiction and fantasy novels, I, precocious little prig that I was, took my escapism from Evelyn Waugh. […]

Yet three-quarters of a century on, and nearly four decades after Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons made standing around in central Oxford looking wistful with a teddy bear the height of chic, Brideshead Revisited remains one of those quintessentially iconic stories that encapsulates not just aristocratic privilege, but our communal yearning for something glorious yet unattainable. Not for nothing is one of the sections of the book called ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, nor is there much more Proustian in English literature than Charles’s comment, revisiting Brideshead during WWII, that ‘I had been there before; I knew all about it’. As tourists flock to Christ Church to take photos of the fountain of Mercury in which Anthony Blanche was dunked, and the book continues to sell in its thousands every year, it remains the classic that Waugh hoped it would be, and, in its combination of glacial beauty and lovelorn desperation, speaks to all readers, be they precocious 11-year olds or their older and hopefully wiser selves.

Larman also mentions an artist named Felix Kelly (1914-94) as one of Waugh’s possible inspirations for the character of Charles Ryder. Others have frequently mentioned Rex Whistler in this connection, but this is the first I have seen a reference to this artist. Some additional explanation might have been helpful. For example, according to his Wikipedia entry, Kelly painted, inter alia, many country houses and enjoyed staying in them.

–After his financial success with Brideshead, Waugh considered moving to a home located where less ruinous taxes applied. One of these was Gormanston Castle in Ireland. The Independent newspaper  has published a story about the recent development of that property and mentions in passing Waugh’s experience:

After the passing of a series of land acts, the Prestons [then owners] were forced to divide up the estate and sign over land to tenants. By the time Ireland had gained independence, the estate was in a perilous financial state. The writer Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited, had planned to buy Gormanston Castle, but was deterred when he learned of Billy Butlin’s plans to build a holiday resort at the nearby beach at Mosney.

Instead, the Prestons sold the castle and the remaining estate in 1947 to the Franciscan order, which set up an all-boys’ boarding school called Gormanston College in the grounds. The alumni of the college include actor Colin Farrell and former ministers Charlie McCreevy and James Reilly.

In Stamullen, just across the M1 from Gormanston College and its nearby beach, Glenveagh Properties is building a scheme called Silver Banks on land that likely once belonged to the Gormanston estate.

The development of 202 homes near the Co Dublin border is sandwiched between mature housing and St Patrick’s GAA’s playing grounds. The scheme will appeal to families commuting to Dublin or Drogheda by motorway or train and who want to be close to the beach.

Waugh would no doubt have been equally appalled by the middle class housing estate as he was by the prospect of being a neighbor to Butlins. Indeed, it was the postwar encroachment of suburban housing in Dursley as well as UK taxes that had prompted his decision to make an exit from Gloucestershire.

–Finally, the TLS has a review of a collection of obituaries (or brief lives) by Nicholas Barker. The collection is entitled At First, All Went Well…. Although apparently not a subject of one of the essays, Waugh gets a mention:

At First All Went Well
 pulls together half a century’s worth of Barker’s pieces, some from the Independent, most from The Book Collector. Taken together, these pieces represent more than simply an anthology of individual lives. Barker paints a picture, an accidental sociology, of the book world in the twentieth century, its dealers and collectors, publishers, printers and scholars. The early obituaries – representing lives that ended in the 1960s and 70s – have the effect of telescoping time, pitching us, at one degree of separation, among the Edwardians and the Bright Young Things of the interwar years. When the bibliographer Graham Pollard was still young enough to travel around Putney by pram, he encountered the aged Swinburne, who poked at him with a stick. (The following day Pollard asked his nanny if they might take a different route on their perambulations.) It was Pollard too who introduced corduroy trousers to the Oxford fast set and defeated Evelyn Waugh in the university’s 10-foot spitting contest.

 

 

 

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Letters, Newspapers, Rossetti: His Life and Works | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Summer Solstice Roundup

Campion in La Prensa

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Buenos Aires paper La Prensa has published a review of Waugh’s biography Edmund Campion. The review, which is unsigned, opens with this:

Evelyn Waugh wrote this book between 1934 and 1935, in homage to the Jesuit College of Oxford University (Campion Hall) and Father Martin D’Arcy SJ, who years earlier had guided him in his conversion to Catholicism. Although it is an unusual work In his production, his portrait of the English martyr contains vibrant narrative passages and a sound historical survey, valid for Catholics of all times, from the cruel persecutions of the Elizabethan era.

In the preface to the American edition, Waugh explained that he had not set out to write a scholarly biography of St. Edmund Campion (1540-1581), but “to select the incidents which would strike a novelist as important, and put them into a narrative which I hope may prove readable. ” We can affirm that he achieved that purpose, and that he did it with the command of the English language that is habitual in all his books, and with his typical tense, compact, precise style, which says more when it seems to say less.

This is followed by a well written and concise summary of the book and concludes with this:

In 1946, when he wrote the preface to the American edition of the book, Waugh (1903-1966) warned that the world of that year, at the beginning of the Cold War, was in a better position to understand the martyrdom of Saint Edmund Campion than the more tolerant Victorians. Perhaps the same can be said of this deranged 2020. With other excuses, the “unending war” on faith continues and promises to intensify. Waugh warned the reader: “The hunted, trapped, murdered priest is amongst us again, and the voice of Campion comes to us across the centuries as though he were walking at our side.”

The book was translated into Spanish and published in Madrid in 2009. The reviewer seems, however, to have read it in an English language edition that included the 1946 introduction. The introduction was written for the American edition which appeared after the success of Brideshead Revisited but has also been included in UK editions printed since then. The computerized translation of the article into English is quite readable with very few minor adjustments. In the excerpts above, the language from the book that quotes Waugh’s writing has been taken from the original and substituted for the retranslation from Spanish.

Share
Posted in Biographies, Edmund Campion, Newspapers | Tagged | Comments Off on Campion in La Prensa

Harold Acton (and Martin Green)

Posted on June 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has added Harold Acton to Waugh’s pantheon of friends. On this occasion he writes it up as a straight narrative rather that as an addition to the crowd gathering at the now postponed Brideshead Festival at Castle Howard.

He breaks their relationship into three periods: Oxford and After, China and Travel, and Post War. This works quite well, as the Oxford and After period is already covered in other biographies and is well summarized by McLaren. He also notes that Acton’s decision to move to China coincides with Waugh’s adoption of a nomadic life following the breakup of his first marriage. A useful description of Acton’s life and work in China is also provided, a period that is less well known. After the war they met each other from time to time and leave descriptions of those meetings in their memoirs and letters. These are well covered in the article.

Acton’s reputation rests as much or more on his friendships with other writers such as Evelyn Waugh than with his own writing. Waugh relied on Acton’s opinion to consign his first novel to the fireplace and dedicated Decline and Fall to him, but, as time went on, McLaren explains how Waugh became less enamored of Acton’s own writing. That opinion seems to have held up, as little of Acton’s writing aside from his memoirs remains in print. Even those could not be described as “easy reading”.

McLaren also introduces the book Children of the Sun: A Narrative of ‘Decadence’ in England After 1918 (1976) into the article. This is by Martin Burgess Green (1927-2010) who taught at Tufts University for many years. This set out to describe the group of aesthetes and intellectuals who formed around Harold Acton and Brian Howard in the 1920s. McLaren provides some interesting background on Green’s research for the book as well as Acton’s rather negative reaction to it. The book is still in print although you may have to search more diligently than usual to find it. Here is a link to the entire article.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall | Tagged , | Comments Off on Harold Acton (and Martin Green)

Brideshead @ 75: A N Wilson, The Oldie and The Folio Society

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oldie has posted A N Wilson’s introduction to the Folio Society’s 2018 reprint of Brideshead Revisited. While this may not be denominated by Wilson or The Oldie as a commemoration of the novel’s 75th anniversary, we should be entitled to regard it as such. Wilson begins by placing the book’s plot in historic context and explaining how the story would play out both the same and differently in today’s social and religious environments. His discussion of the religious context is of particular interest. He then provides his own assessment of the story itself:

…So, Brideshead Revisited is a period piece. The aristocratic way of life which Waugh believed to be doomed, still continues, albeit in modified form. The seemingly immutable Holy Mother Church has shifted some of her sterner stances.

This in no way spoils our enjoyment of the novel , which many would consider Waugh’s masterpiece. Those of us who love his work, and reread it often, must often have felt torn between appreciation of the brittle comedies of his youth and young manhood, and the august achievement of the Sword of Honour trilogy, one of the undoubted works of literary genius, in any language, to emerge from the Second World War. The early comedies, owing so much to Ronald Firbank, but so distinctively themselves, make us laugh aloud. The sports day at Llanabba Castle in Decline and Fall, the oafish customs inspectors in Vile Bodies, confiscating Dante’s Inferno because it sounds foreign and therefore pornographic, the hatefulness of the Connolly children in Put Out More Flags, these are crystalline comic vignettes which are cruelly and perfectly constructed. The Sword of Honour books retain the comedy (who can forget Apthorpe’s thunderbox?) but follow the themes of all great literature, love, war, death, with unmatched seriousness. Brideshead Revisited, lush, colour-splashed, romantic, comes between these two bodies of work. It is Waugh’s Antony and Cleopatra. It is his richest, and most passionate book…

Wilson’s introduction continues through other topics and ends up on the often overlooked success of the book’s comic characters:

Given the solemnity of the theme, “the operation of divine grace”, you might have expected Waugh’s humour to have failed him in this book, but even the hilarity of the early novels is outshone by the comic characters in this one. Charles’s father, Anthony Blanche, or the awful Samgrass take their place among the immortals with Dr Fagan and Captain Grimes. Even the figures whom Waugh and Ryder hate – Hooper and Mottram – are funny. And even non-Catholics have laughed at Cordelia’s hoodwinking Rex into believing that there are sacred monkeys in the Vatican.

To which might be added the character of Bridey who raises religious cluelessness to previously unattained heights of humour.

 

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Brideshead @ 75: A N Wilson, The Oldie and The Folio Society

Bright Younger People

Posted on June 22, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, Toby Young writes about his days at Oxford in the 1980s, energized to do so by a new book out later this week by Dafydd Jones. This is entitled Oxford, The Last Hurrah. The US edition will be out early next month. Young begins his essay with a description of the first time he encountered Boris Johnson:

The audience at the Union roared with laughter – and it was laughter of appreciation, not ridicule. There was something so winning about this befuddled yet strangely charismatic 19-year-old that you couldn’t help warming to him. This was the first time I ever set eyes on Boris Johnson. I’d been at Oxford for about a week by then, searching in vain for the Bright Young Things I’d found so appealing in the TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

It was watching that ITV series that had made me want to go to Oxford in the first place – there was something irresistible about the Olympian insouciance of the characters. And here at last, performing a comic turn honed to perfection over five years at Eton, was someone who conformed to the Oxford stereotype. Blond, handsome, oozing with confidence and humour, it was as if Boris had sprung, fully formed, from Waugh’s imagination.

It was only later that I learned he was the son of a middle-class farmer on Exmoor who was himself the grandson of a Turkish immigrant. After landing at Eton on a scholarship, Boris had set about recreating himself as a cartoon version of a posh public schoolboy […] The number of people pretending to be posher than they were was one of the striking things about Oxford in those days.

Looking like you’d been born with a silver spoon in your mouth hadn’t been fashionable in Britain since Labour won a landslide Election victory in 1945. But for a brief period in the mid-1980s, it was surprisingly cool to be privileged. It’s hard to imagine today, but people from quite ordinary backgrounds would go to parties wearing tailcoats and silk dressing gowns, as if to the manner born. The 1960s gave us hippies and the 1970s gave us punks, both determined to overthrow ‘the system’.  The 1980s, by contrast, gave us Sloane Rangers and Young Fogeys, as if a new generation were reacting to the misery of the previous decade by thumbing their noses at the finger-wagging egalitarians.

Young goes on to describe his first encounters with other members of these Bright Younger People such as Hugh Grant, David Cameron and Nigella Lawson. Toward the end, he offers a roll call of the entire decade at Oxford, including BYPs in the years before and after his own Oxford career, some of whom came as a surprise to your correspondent. The story is illustrated with several photographs from the book, which are what it’s all really about. Dafydd Jones seems to have done for this new generation what Cecil Beaton did for his own contemporary BYPs. There are several amusing photos of the people Young describes with evident retrospective enjoyment as well as one of him enjoying himself first hand.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Oxford, Photographs | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Bright Younger People

Juneteenth Roundup

Posted on June 19, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent article in the Times newspaper criticizes plans for reopening some schools after lockdown with what it sees as a confusing “blend” of in-school live and at-home online teaching. Alex Massie opens the article with a quote from Evelyn Waugh:

Sent down from Oxford for an unfortunate episode of indecent behaviour, Paul Pennyfeather, the protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, discovers that his employment prospects are on the bleak side of disappointing. Teaching appears to be all that is available to him. At interview, he discovers that schools are classed into four grades: “Leading School, First-rate School, Good School and School” and “Frankly, School is pretty bad”.

To which we may now add a further category: “Blended School” and note, with still greater remorse, that frankly Blended School is pretty much certain to be worse than “School”. This, however, is what Scotland’s children will have to endure when schools return for the new academic year in August…

–A Danish e-newspaper Information.dk has posted an article commemorating the 75th anniversary of Brideshead Revisited. This is written by Jakob Illeborg and entitled “Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited continues to be particularly pervasive and inhumanly English”. Here’s the introduction and opening paragraphs:

Beautifully written, thick with nostalgia, steeped in class distinction, outlawed homoeroticism and religion – and a good place to start if trying to understand Brexit. This month, the novel  ‘Brideshead Revisited’ is 75 years old.

Many Danes, born in the last five decades of the old millennium, want a relationship with Brideshead Revisited. For most people, it’s because of the iconic 1981 television series starring Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder and Anthony Andrews as the noble enfant terrible Sebastian Flyte. The series is beautifully filmed with the huge Castle Howard as the backdrop for the fictional manor Brideshead, which, as the title indicates, plays a crucial role in the novel.

Brideshead provides a historical insight into the British upstairs and downstairs tradition. As you know, the fascination of British class society continues to be great, and Brideshead is a kind of precursor to the television series Downton Abbey’s worldwide success. However, the latter is primarily a glossy narrative, while Brideshead is both more dangerous and infinitely much more complex.

The computer translation is quite high quality but the remainder of the story has been placed behind a paywall. Perhaps one of our Danish readers can provide a summary.

–Australian artist Franko Franko has posted an offer for a painting he calls “Taxed Painting”.  This was, as he describes it:

Painted on pages from the book ‘When the Going Was Good’ by Evelyn Waugh… oranges, white, cream and black with a dash of pink, blue and green… These beautiful pieces (“Bookclubs” as I call them) have a classy or subject relative vibe to them created by the subject matter of the base. They are either produced on (mostly) old vintage or destructed books (I have assembled a large collection) or vintage comics….classic, yet totally modern. Pop based, often with a with a touch of realism rather than pure Pop art styling.

A full color copy of the painting is posted on the dealers website.

–Ephraim Hardcastle in his Daily Mail gossip column included this item referring to an incident from 60 years ago:

ABOUT to go bust with debts of £20,000 in 1960, the London Library was delighted to get manuscripts from TS Eliot, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh with the Queen gifting a book on Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance sculptor, from Queen Victoria’s Library. The Queen Mother sent a silver wine cooler. Did the royal toper think the library was a front for a bar?

The idea was not to have the London Library deposit the manuscripts but sell them on to provide operating capital. Waugh gave them the manuscript of Scott-King’s Modern Europe which they sold at auction for ÂŁ160. EM Forster sent in the manuscript of A Passage to India which sold for ÂŁ6500 and TS Eliot copied out the text of The Waste Land which brought ÂŁ2800. Letters, p. 545, n5.

–An article in the neo-fascist Italian language paper Il Primato Nazionale addresses the Italian Fascist government’s policy in 193o’s Abyssinia where one of its first actions was to abolish the slavery that had been practiced under the regime of Hailie Selassie. The article by Eugenio Palazzini quotes Evelyn Waugh’s book Waugh in Abyssinia as a source:

Before then, as Evelyn Waugh writes in his sublime reportage Waugh In Abyssinia, “Slavery and slave raiding were universal practice; justice, when executed at all, was accompanied by torture and mutilation in a degree known nowhere else in the world; […] disease was rampant” [p. 32]. In all this, the Abyssinians, Waugh writes, “boasted of their audacity and the inferiority over all the other breeds, white, black, yellow and brown”. And instead the Italians, those “racist” bad guys, had another idea: “Treating an empire as a place that had to be fertilized, cultivated and made more beautiful, instead of a place from which things could be taken away, a place to be plundered and depopulated “.

The text above is taken from the English translation that has been published on the website news1.news. The quoted text has been retranslated into English from an Italian version except for the first quote which I tracked down to the original and substituted for the retranslation.

–Finally, the website of the literary journal Kenyon Review has posted an article by Aatif Rashid explaining how and why he came to admire Brideshead Revisited despite being a non-religious former Muslim. Here’s an extract:

As a declared atheist who’d abandoned my own religion (Islam) in my youth, I wasn’t at all taken in by this Catholic plotline. […] I didn’t want to believe that Charles would ever convert to Catholicism, because it would have been a total rebuke of my own personal journey away from Islam.

I think, though, that this tension is where the novel gets its power: in disagreeing so vehemently with Waugh’s ultimate moral message, I was having a profound emotional experience from a novel. Art had forced me to reckon with my own spiritual development, my own atheism. Even if I didn’t agree with Waugh’s ultimate Catholicism, I couldn’t help but acknowledge that the novel was brilliant. 

Share
Posted in Auctions, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Newspapers, Scott-King's Modern Europe, Waugh in Abyssinia, When the Going Was Good | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Juneteenth Roundup

Peter Quennell: Reviewer and Rival

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Two recent articles by Duncan McLaren have been devoted to Peter Quennell. Waugh had developed a particular dislike of Quennell (similar to that he had of other literary critics such as Alan Pryce-Jones and Edmund Wilson). The acquaintanceship between Waugh and Quennell dates back to Oxford or perhaps even before. In his first article, McLaren attributes Waugh’s aversion to Quennell’s review of his first book Rossetti in the New Statesman.  While not a hatchet job, it was decidedly lukewarm.  Quennell was more receptive to Waugh’s first novels Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, and Waugh reciprocated with a favorable review of some essays published by Quennell.

Over time, however, Waugh’s attitude toward Quennell hardened and McLaren attributes this to jealousy rather than professional rivalry. Quennell wrote well, as Waugh recognized, but he was not jealous on that account. Rather, Quennell seemed to have just the sort of easy success with attractive women which Waugh lacked. Moreover, Quennell formed close friendships with such women friends of Waugh as Diana Cooper and Ann Fleming which Waugh resented. In addition, Waugh resented the fact that Quennell, like his close friend Cyril Connolly, had a good war without having to go through all the boredom and bad treatment meted out to Waugh by the Army which had little use for him (although it did provide considerable future material for his writing).

The first article consists of narratives by McLaren and Nancy Mitford on the relationship between the two writers and comparisons of their writings about each other. The second article, entitled “The Quennell Room”,  is an imagined dialogue between Waugh and Nancy Mitford of a display at the Castle Howard festival of Quennell’s criticism of Waugh’s works. This appeared over his years at the Daily Mail where Quennell worked as chief book reviewer between 1943 and 1955.  McLaren brings up the texts of the reviews as they are displayed on computer consoles at the imaginary exhibit. Few of these have  been reprinted or even discussed by Waugh scholars due to some extent to their having been missed by the compilers of Waugh’s bibliographies. They are on the whole favorable or even adulatory, giving rise to little call for Waugh’s resentment.

Quennell is little mentioned among literary scholars today which is odd considering the large body of work devoted to his contemporary and colleague, Cyril Connolly, to whom Quennell’s career is most obviously comparable. In addition to his position at the Daily Mail, Quennell went on to edit the Cornhill magazine and wrote several books according to McLaren. No posthumous collection of his essays or letters has ever been published. Nor has any biography or comprehensive study of his works been written. DJ Taylor recently gave him a major supporting role in his study of Connolly’s life during his years as editor at Horizon magazine. This was in the recently published Lost Girls.

Share
Posted in Articles, Festivals, Newspapers, Rossetti: His Life and Works | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Castle Howard’s Brideshead Webinar on YouTube

Posted on June 12, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The webinar produced by Castle Howard on the 75th anniversary of Brideshead Revisited’s publication (28 May 2020) has been posted on YouTube. This is entitled “Castle Howard and Brideshead: Fact, Fiction and In-Between” and is presented by Chris Ridgway, Castle Howard’s Curator. He discusses the relationship between features of the house and grounds at Castle Howard and the TV and film adaptations of the book that were both set there. See previous posts. It is well worth watching if you missed it on the day. Here’s the link. There is no charge or subscription required.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Castle Howard’s Brideshead Webinar on YouTube