Roundup: Protests and Summer

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The “Rhodes Must Fall” debate has been revived in Oxford in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests. See previous post. In the Daily Mail, a comment on the matter by Evelyn Waugh is brought to bear:

Oxford will have an easier time finding that coronavirus vaccine than solving this conundrum. So much easier, of course, to fixate on a statue. Cecil Rhodes never saw this stone effigy of himself. It was put up several years after his death by a college thrilled to receive £100,000 of his fortune upon his death in 1902. It’s not a terribly good statue. Rhodes looks like a bank manager on his second-storey alcove, lording it over the two mere King-Emperors standing below – Edward VII and George V.

They all stand on the North Wall of the Rhodes Building, a mock-Jacobean complex built between 1909 and 1911. The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ lot were by no means the first to seek the dismantling of this unashamedly imperialist façade. Back in 1930, one of Oxford’s most famous literary sons, Evelyn Waugh, wrote: ‘A very small amount of dynamite should be enough to rid us forever of the High Street front of Oriel.’

The quote comes from a satirical comment of Waugh relating to a proposal for preserving Oxford’s “Amenities”. He had jokingly suggested that “judicious destruction” would be preferable to wholesale preservation as a means of improving Oxford. In this regard he by no means singled out the High Street front of Oriel for destruction but included such other sites as “the clock tower at Carfax, the Town Hall […] the Holywell Front of New College and the whole of Hertford.” He also proposed to eliminate through traffic by destroying Folly and Magdalen Bridges but included this reservation: “Magdalen Bridge is a pretty structure and its total destruction is unnecessary; one arch would be enough.” (Letters, p. 49)

–In the Wall Street Journal,  Terry Teachout recommends series novels as an ideal selection for reading in today’s circumstances. The article is entitled “The Staying Inside Guide: Traveling the World Through a Novel–or 20” He recognizes the contribution of the French roman fleuve as written by Proust and Balzac but also sees an English multi-volume tradition dating back to Trollope’s Barchester and Palisser novels. He singles out three contemporary versions of the genre, starting with Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander (this is the 20-volume example referred to in Teachout’s title), continuing with Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time (a favorite of Waugh, as Teachout points out), and ending with Waugh’s own Sword of Honour. He recommends the final version as edited by Waugh and published in 1965. He writes that the books:

…are permeated with [Waugh’s] deep-dyed disillusion—he believed that the England of his idealistic youth had been destroyed by the war. Yet their dark account of the coming of modernity is nonetheless full of characteristically riotous touches of satire

Although Teachout suggests that Waugh’s edits were substantial, they do not materially change the story (except perhaps for the ending). Anyone with access to the three individual volumes should be content with reading them.

–The National Review has posted a brief article addressing the decision of HBO to first drop and then, instead, to attach a disclaimer on streamings of Gone With the Wind. The NR thinks both moves to be wrong

We don’t need a disclaimer on Gone with the Wind any more than we need them Mark Twain’s books or movies based on Kipling’s stories. I run across anti-Semitic stereotypes in literature all the time. I don’t need you to repudiate Shakespeare’s or Dickens’ portrayal of Jews, because I get it. I don’t need you to cancel Roald Dahl or Evelyn Waugheven if they occasionally trafficked in bigotry. They’re both dead. Their work isn’t. They were geniuses. We’re adults.

—Prospect magazine has gathered quotes written by writers from George Orwell and Virginia Woolf to Evelyn Waugh and Barabara Pym expressing their reactions to a hot summer such as that which seems to be developing in England this year. Here is Waugh’s contribution:

On 12th July [1955], Evelyn Waugh observes in his diary from Piers Court, Gloucestershire: “High summer continues. I shall not go to London until it breaks. This is a pleasant house in the heat. For the first time since I planted it the honeysuckle outside my bedroom window scents the room at night. I don’t sleep naturally. I have tried everything—exercise, cold baths, fasting, feasting, solitude, society. Always I have to take paraldehyde and sodium amytal. My life is really too empty for a diarist.”

The chemical cocktail he mentions for sleeping in the heat was later to bring on the breakdown he describes in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.

–RTV Slovenia has posted the transcript of a broadcast review by Misha Gams of the recent translation of Scoop into Slovenian. See previous posts. The 5-minute review began with a fairly detailed and accurate description of Waugh’s plot and several of the characters and concluded with this:

The novel Ekskluziva [Scoop] is marked by ironic monologues and witty dialogues, with which the writer Evelyn Waugh shows the whole emotional range of the journalistic profession, taking on new dimensions in the uncertain war situation. At the same time, he points out how slippery and manipulated the truth can be when it comes to the reckoning of major political forces and the desire to maintain a monopoly in the field of media. Waugh without a hair on his tongue confirms that truth is a construct created as a result of invested financial resources of interest groups who want to present war from the perspective of geostrategic imperialism, not from the perspective of the poorest citizens who pay the highest price in conflict.

Share
Posted in Letters, Newspapers, Radio Programs, Scoop, Sword of Honour, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Protests and Summer

Brideshead @ 75: National Review and Diario de Noticias

Posted on June 7, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

—The National Review has posted an article commemorating the 75th anniversary of Brideshead Revisited. The article is by NR columnist Madeleine Kearns and is subtitled “The best 20th-century novel on time and grace.” It opens with this:

Between December 1943 and June 1944, English author Evelyn Waugh took unpaid leave from the army to finish his novel Brideshead Revisited, now considered by many to be his greatest. The book (which Waugh first suggested calling “A Household of Faith”) has many themes — Catholicism, aristocracy, youth, redemption — but the author’s specific focus was, in his own words, “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.” Today Waugh’s religiosity, much like his traditionalist tastes, may seem niche or archaic, but his treatment of the human experience of time is — well, timeless. In an updated preface, Waugh offered Brideshead “to a younger generation of readers as a souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensibly deals.” While nostalgia functions both as a theme and a narrative device in the novel, what is often overlooked is how masterfully the two themes, nostalgia and grace, are interwoven.

What follows is not the usual plot summary but an interesting discussion of Waugh’s use of a first-person narrator, George Orwell’s criticism of that and other elements of the book and an interpretation of the fountain scene with Julia as self-parody. The article concludes:

In 2003 essay for The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens agreed with Orwell that there was something adolescent about Waugh’s worldview, although “Waugh was not a mere propagandist, and we would not still be reading him if he had been.” He’s right about that. Readers are free to reject Waugh’s religious interpretation, just as the novel’s characters are (though ultimately they don’t). The accusation of childishness is nevertheless correct. A child is simultaneously fully present in his time and yet capable of fully leaving it through imagination. Being truly present — free from regret, change, loss, and shame — are all things lost with experience and retrieved through grace.

–The Portuguese paper Diario de Noticias has published the fourth and apparently final installment in a series of articles about the connections between Brideshead Revisited and Waugh’s friendship with the Lygon family. These are entitled Uma educação sentimental and are written by AntĂłnio AraĂșjo. See previous posts. This one addresses Mary Lygon’s unhappy marriage to a Russian prince and her subsequent decline into alcoholism. It begins by describing the circumstances of the marriage and Waugh’s troubled relationship with the couple, including his short-lived and unsuccessful attempt  to share an apartment with them in London. The article also mentions Waugh’s hatred of Prince Vsevelod, including a claim that he once told Mary that Vsevelod was spying for the enemy. There should have been some mention in mitigation that Waugh and Vsevelod were able to cooperate in Waugh’s 1947 book Wine in Peace and War that was dedicated to Vsevelod who was an employee of the sponsors. After that, the relationship between the couple and Waugh as well as Mary Lygon’s marriage went ever more precipitously downhill, ending in a divorce and her impoverishment in the 1950s. The article notes that friendly relations between Waugh and Mary herself were never seriously threatened and contains this in its concluding section:

Maimie was interviewed when the the Granada TV series of Brideshead Revisited was broadcast. At the time, at 71, she lived in a small house in a London suburb, where the television broadcast shows the chaotic and dirty housekeeping arrangements, and Maimie continuously serving vodka sweets, even though it is mid-afternoon. Mary “Maimie” Lygon died of cancer in September 1982.

The article also mentions Waugh’s attitude toward Portugal and religion in an earlier section:

…in 1952, Waugh traveled to Goa, which fascinated him by the European presence and the mark of the Christian faith (as is evident, not only in that did he not question the Portuguese colonial rule but also that he proved to be a supporter and admirer of Salazar).

The article is accessible on the newspaper’s website linked above. If it asks for access code and password, try again later. The translation by Google is better than average, aside from the usual Iberian gender confusion with pronouns. The quotes  above have been edited somewhat.

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Wine in Peace and War | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Brideshead @ 75: National Review and Diario de Noticias

ILP Acquires Rights to Waugh Works

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Publishing industry journals have announced that a new firm has acquired the right to license the copyrighted works of Evelyn Waugh.  These have been managed for many years by the successors to the A D Peters firm. Here’s an excerpt from the story in Variety magazine:

Recently formed rights business International Literary Properties (ILP) has acquired the literary estates of 12 writers, including Evelyn Waugh and Georges Simenon, from U.K. agency Peters, Fraser + Dunlop.

The eight-figure multi-estates deal sees London and New York-based ILP acquire the rights for the literary estates of writers Georges Simenon, Eric Ambler, Margery Allingham, Edmund Crispin, Dennis Wheatley, Robert Bolt, Richard Hull, George Bellairs, Nicolas Freeling, John Creasey, Michael Innes and Evelyn Waugh.

Their works spans books including Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels, and Wheatley’s thrillers such as “The Devil Rides Out,” and Creasey’s “The Battle for Inspector West.” […]

Peters, Fraser + Dunlop will continue to act as literary agent for the twelve estates.

ILP launched last year to acquire the rights and manage IP from literary estates, as well as from living authors, with an eye on exploiting the rights across platforms including film, TV and theater.

In the case of Waugh’s literary estate, the PF+D firm will apparently not be acting as literary agents. That function was transferred in 2008 to the Andrew Wylie Agency according to a story in The Bookseller. See this link.

Share
Posted in Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on ILP Acquires Rights to Waugh Works

Roundup: Riots and Pestilence

Posted on June 1, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Conservative essayist and editor Roger Kimball writing in the journal The Epoch Times (describing itself as “non-partisan” but otherwise characterized elsewhere) addresses the controversial subject of political protests and street riots in the USA. The article is entitled “Those Burning Our Cities Aim at Destroying Our Civilization.” Without attempting to summarize his position (which will come as no surprise to those familiar with his work), here is an excerpt from his conclusion which contains a reference to Evelyn Waugh:

Writing in the dark days of 1939, Evelyn Waugh noted that “barbarism is never finally defeated: given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity.” […] Waugh was right. “The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat.”

We got a taste of that vulnerability when we indulged in a strange cult-like exercise of society-wide self-asphixiation over a novel respiratory bug. Now we seem bent on trying self-immolation instead. “At a time like the present,” Waugh warned, society is “notably precarious. If it falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint stock companies, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.” […]

The quotes are from the concluding paragraph of Waugh’s book Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object Lesson. It was one his few ventures into written political commentary, and the book was the only prewar volume which was never reprinted in whole or in part during his lifetime.

–The Portuguese newspaper Diario de Noticias has published the third installment of its series of articles on Evelyn Waugh entitled  “Uma educacao sentimental“. These are written by Antonio Araujo. See previous post. Unfortunately this one is behind some kind of access wall on my laptop. Although it will open on my iPhone, I cannot translate it from there. This episode appears to deal with Brideshead Revisited and the characters as they relate to the Lygon family but that is only an uneducated guess. If any of our readers can open the article and translate it, they are invited to describe its content by commenting below.

–Georgetown University Library in Washington, DC has mounted an online exhibition relating to a history of performances in the university auditorium known as Gaston Hall. This was the site of Evelyn Waugh’s lecture in 1949. Georgetown was the only venue where the original lecture on 10 February was so overbooked that the sponsor scheduled a second performance on 13 February. A ticket to the first night reads as follows:

The Graduate School of Georgetown University / presents  / Evelyn Waugh / The Distinguished British Novelist / Who Will Lecture on / “Three Convert Writers: Chesterton, Knox and Graham Greene” / on Thursday, February 10 at 8:00 PM / in Gaston Hall, Georgetown University / 27th and O Streets, NW / Washington, DC / Reserved Section $2.40 (Tax Included)

–Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph has a story about a projected biography by literary critic John Sutherland. The subject is Monica Jones, one of Philip Larkin’s girl friends, and it will be based, at least in part, on a collection of over 2,000 previously unpublished letters from her to Larkin. Rupert Christiansen writes about the value and danger in biographical reliance on personal letters. Evelyn Waugh enters into the subject at one point:

Letters can indeed be as rich in artifice as novels or poems: they adopt the narrow perspective of being directed at one person, someone to whom the writer has a specific relationship, someone to whom one shows a particular side of oneself, someone who knows and responds to certain aspects of one’s personality and not others. […]  But they are also less considered and more contingent – vessels for unguarded opinions that we may not precisely mean or believe tomorrow.

Evelyn Waugh once advised his daughter: “When you write a letter, try to put yourself in imagination into the presence of the person you are writing to.” Larkin manages this to a rare degree, which is what makes his correspondence so compelling. He is not there so much as the self that his correspondent requires or desires.

—The Spectator recently posted an article by Flora Watkins entitled “Bookish Cakes: From Proust to Pym”. After considering the madeleine and several other examples, including seed cake, angel cake and gingerbread she comes to the primary English example of the cake genre:

Another lost cake, now found only in literature — but remembered fondly by the schoolboys and girls of the 1940s and 50s, for whom it was a tuck box staple — is Fuller’s Walnut. It appears in some of my favourite books, by Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Barbara Pym; the comfort reads I’ve been turning to of late.

‘Oh Mrs Heathery, you angel on earth, not Fuller’s walnut?’ exclaim the Radlett children in Love in a Cold Climate. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s cousin Jasper dispenses volumes of preposterous advice over a very good tea of ‘honey-buns, anchovy toast and Fuller’s walnut cake’. It pops up again in Barbara Pym’s Crampton Hodnet, published posthumously in 1985, but written during the war, during an illicit liaison between an academic and his student in Fuller’s Oxford teashop. […]

Unlike Proust, ‘the vicissitudes of life’ did not become ‘indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory’. But I’d found the English equivalent to his madeleine.

 

 

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Events, Newspapers, Robbery Under Law | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Riots and Pestilence

Brideshead @ 75: Tablet, Quadrant, Penguin

Posted on May 29, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

More commemorations of the Brideshead anniversary have been posted:

–Eleanor Doughty writing in The Tablet confesses in her introduction that, despite being a dedicated Waugh fan, she has never liked this particular volume. She surveys other literary journalists and scholars, most of whom find reasons for liking the book or finding it of some literary interest. Included in her survey are interviews of Barbara Cooke and Martin Stannard, co-editors of the OUP Complete Works project. Doughty then looks more closely at Waugh’s attitude toward the upper classes and his alleged snobbery as reflected in the book. She concludes her article with this:

Brideshead needn’t be just a book about Catholicism, the country house, or the aristocracy. It can be all of these. It can be good, and it can be bad. It is now 75, and for me, it is still not as funny as Decline and Fall. But it is not boring. It is touching. Truly, it is Orwell’s “good bad book”. “People like Waugh to be one thing,” says Dr Cooke. “Brideshead really caught the spirit of the time.” Most importantly, says [Patrick] Kidd, “it teaches the lesson that every boy needs a bear – though A.A. Milne may do that better.”

I would have to agree with her that the book is overrated and currently being overhyped (largely due to the popularity engendered by the 1981 TV adaptation, which she also mentions). But one shouldn’t allow the bad bits to overshadow the good ones. And the comic characters in Brideshead stand out against the relgiosity and snobbery which in the final analysis take up a relatively small part of the book. Those religious and social themes were important to Waugh and are likely to be so to many readers but need not necessarily be to all. Comic characters such as Anthony Blanche, Ryder’s father, Bridey, Mr Samgrass, Rex, Cousin Jasper, and even Cordelia continue to evoke laughter (often out loud) every time I read it and the book can still be read for that even if the religious and social content do not resonate. And the comedy even has its religious and social dimension. Who can take Roman Catholicism entirely seriously after reading Bridey’s and Cordelia’s versions of it? And who can be concerned about social snobbery after a few minutes on a page with Mr Samgrass or Anthony Blanche? Maybe it’s not as consistently funny as Decline and Fall but it’s close enough to warrant multiple re-readings.

–The Australian literary journal Quadrant has posted an article by Mark McGinness in which he begins with a brief discussion of how the book came to be written and published during wartime conditions. He goes on with a more detailed survey of its critical reception both in the literary and popular press, as well as among Waugh’s friends, and concludes that discussion with the assessment of American critic Edmund Wilson who, like many (including Eleanor Doughty who also cited Wilson) were put off by the book’s religious themes and snobbery:

…the New Yorker’s Edmund Wilson, a warm admirer of Waugh’s (“the only first-rate comic genius who has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw”), drew a sharp line between the early novels and Brideshead. He called it “a bitter blow”. While he thought the early chapters “felicitous, unobtrusive, exact”, the last scenes were “extravagantly absurd”. Wilson, an atheist, was especially appalled by the conversions of both Lord Marchmain as he crosses himself, and Charles Ryder falling on his knees to pray at the bedside.

“What has caused Mr. Waugh’s hero to plump on his knees isn’t the cross but Lord Marchmain’s aristocratic prestige.” Waugh’s friend, fellow novelist Henry Green, agreed, “how shocked & hurt I was when the old man crossed himself on his deathbed” and thought that “you may have overdone the semicolons a bit yet even then the regret with which the whole book is saturated, is beautifully carried out in the long structure of your sentences. The whole thing seemed deeper & wider than any book you have written.”

Wilson missed the anarchy of the early Waugh “that raised its head — boldly, outrageously, hilariously, or horribly” while the religion that is “invoked to correct it seems more like an exorcistic rite than force of regeneration.” But as Ann Pasternak Slater has written more recently it is this revelation that is the point of the novel. Wilson sadly predicted that the novel will prove to be the most successful, the only extremely successful, book that Evelyn Waugh has written
” Of course, Waugh’s response to the review of his erstwhile admirer was “I am glad we have shaken off Edmund Wilson at last.” […]

McGinness then refers to Waugh’s decision in the late fifties to edit the book in an effort to remove some of the more dated and overwritten portions. Waugh wrote in his introduction to the 1960 edition, quoted my McGinness: “Much of this book … is a panegyric preached over an empty coffin.”

The Quadrant article then concludes: That coffin may well have been empty, but in 2020, a time of angst and uncertainty when one looks for permanency and perhaps something otherworldly, there is still much in this panegyric, even for those who have heard it before, to justify revisiting.

—Penguin Books, Waugh’s UK reprint publisher since the 1930s, has posted its own anniversary notice about Brideshead. Included are several examples of the Penguin covers for the novel, illustrating how they have evolved over the years since it was first published in 1951 in the boilerplate orange “tri-band” cover. This is by no means a complete reproduction of Penguin covers for the book, however. For example, Chris Ridgway in yesterday’s Castle Howard webinar showed another orange Penguin cover with a drawing of Brideshead Castle in the center that predates the 1981 TV series and is based on Waugh’s own written description. The cover drawing looks remarkably like Castle Howard, even though Waugh himself never identified that as a model. There were also probably TV and movie tie-in editions and I can recall some recent post-2000 editions with particularly dreary and unimaginative covers which are, perhaps thankfully, excluded.

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Bibliophilia, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Brideshead @ 75: Tablet, Quadrant, Penguin

Brideshead @ 75: Castle Howard, The Spectator, BBC

Posted on May 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Today is the 75th anniversary of the first book publication of Brideshead Revisited. Chapman & Hall and the Book Society jointly issued the book in London on 28 May 1945. The occasion has been marked in several recent events:

–Castle Howard this morning sponsored a “webinar” in which the connections between the book and the building were discussed. Most of these connections stem from the two adaptations of the book which were filmed at Castle Howard. The Castle Howard curator Chris Ridgway delivered an excellent talk with illustrations from both the 1981 and 2008 adaptations as to how the building and grounds were skillfully woven into the films. He also explained that connections between Waugh’s fictional Brideshead Castle and the real Castle Howard were more illusive but nevertheless worth considering.  Waugh’s only recorded visit was in 1937 and not much is known of the details of that visit. Still, Waugh has included many elements of Castle Howard in Brideshead Castle (including the dome, the fountain and the back story) as well as several hints in the book that suggest he may have had Castle Howard in mind for at least some important features of his fictional edifice.

This was a very interesting talk, both well researched and presented. The illustrations were also efficiently laid out and relevant to the theme. The webinar was well attended. I noticed more that 90 participants on the Zoom.com participant counter. The webinar will be posted on the Castle Howard website in the coming days and a link will be provided when that occurs. Meanwhile, an abbreviated transcript of Chris Ridgway’s presentation with several of the slides has been posted on the Castle Howard’s website for immediate access at this link.

—The Spectator magazine has posted a podcast marking the book’s anniversary. This involved the participation of novelist Philip Hensher and Waugh’s grandson Alexander and was moderated by literary journalist Sam Leith. The topics discussed began with how Brideshead Revisited fitted into Waugh’s oeuvre, the style of his writing compared to his other works, and how the text of book evolved over the years after publication. Philip Hensher asked Alexander what version of the book would be used for the OUP Complete Works edition. Alexander, who is acting as the project’s General Editor, explained that it would be the 1945 London edition with all subsequent changes clearly annotated. The book’s religious and comic themes were also discussed at some length as were film and TV adaptations. Another topic related to how Waugh built original fictional characters using elements from real life friends and acquaintances. The podcast carries on for about 45 minutes and never lags. It can be monitored at this link.

The Evening Standard posted this entry in its Londoner’s Diary column relating to the Spectator podcast:

John Mortimer, who wrote such a poor script for the film of Brideshead Revisited that it had to be rewritten by the director and producer straight from the book, was once asked: “How did you do it?” Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, recounts his self-effacing reply, “well you know it’s all Waugh, he’s wonderful, he’s just such a good writer”. Alexander Waugh adds to the Spectator’s podcast: “He wouldn’t quite admit that he didn’t write it at all, and yes it was all Waugh.”

–BBC Scotland has interviewed Jenny Niven who is the dircctor of the now postponed Brideshead Festival at Castle Howard originally scheduled for next month. This is carried on BBC Radio Scotland in the Monday, 25 May episode of The Afternoon Show. The first topic was how the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown has affected cultural events such as this. Niven commented on her hope that the Brideshead Festival event can be rescheduled, but with all the current uncertainty, firm rescheduling plans have not yet been possible. The presenter (who I think was Janice Forsythe) also asked Niven to discuss the history of the book and the filmings of the two adaptations that took place at Castle Howard.

You can listen to the interview on BBC iPlayer for about a month. It appears at the end of a 2 1/2 hour broadcast. Set the timer to 2:11:00 which is about where it begins. Here’s the link.

UPDATE (29 May 2020): A reference in the Evening Standard to the Spectator podcast was added.

UPDATE (30 May 2020): An abbreviated version of Dr Chris Ridgway’s webinar presentation has been posted on the Castle Howard website pending the availability of the complete webinar,

UPDATE (1 June 2020): The source referenced in the 29 May update should have been the Evening Standard, not the Evening News.The link itself was correct.

 

 

 

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Alexander Waugh, Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Events, Festivals, Film, Interviews, Radio Programs, Television | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Brideshead @ 75: Castle Howard, The Spectator, BBC

75th Anniversary of Brideshead Book Publication

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The first book publication of Brideshead Revisited took place in London 75 years ago this week on 28 May 1945. In the period of slightly less than a year since Waugh had submitted his typescript to Chapman & Hall in June 1944, he had spent most of his time en-route to and from, or in Yugoslavia. His editing of the text was based on page proofs that were parachuted into Yugoslavia in November (with the help of Winston Churchill). Chapman & Hall incorporated those edits into the final text that was printed for release on 28 May. By that time, Waugh had returned to England and was there when the book was published. His diary entry for that date starts: “The day of publication of Brideshead. A charming letter from Desmond MacCarthy this morning promising to review it in the Sunday Times.”

The review appeared the Sunday after the novel was published (3 June 1945, p. 3) and began with this:

This is a remarkable novel and a moving one. I place it among the few best novels of the last twenty-five years, and at the top of Mr Waugh’s own achievements: both on account of the penetrating candour of its insight and the author’s firmly passionate grasp of his theme. […] There are fine examples of poetic realism, both descriptive and dramatic, in Brideshead Revisited, beautiful passages and pages.

MacCarthy goes on to describe the story and the characters who have a “marked individuality and are vividly drawn with a justice in which I could find no flaw.” The review concludes:

…this I must add, for it is the most striking thing about the whole book: this story of the strain Catholic doctrine may put upon different temperaments, and of the support it gives, is told with an impartiality which may even disquiet unintelligent and timid Catholics. Charles, the observer, remains sceptical and detached until the very end, when, having lost Julia and been present at the death-bed of her father, he has an inkling of its sublime, extravagant “other-worldiness.”

Waugh went on to engage in a constructive correspondence with MacCarthy about his review which is discussed in a previous post.

The first edition was jointly published by Chapman & Hall and the Book Society. The book was issued in 9000 copies on 28 May 1945 (of which 8700 copies were set aside for the Book Society whose paper supply exceeded that of C&H which was apparently allotted the remaining 300 copies).* The Book Society and trade editions were identical in appearance, with a few variations. Most copies (those released through the Book Society) on the title page stated publication by “Chapman & Hall and the Book Society”. On the copyright page there appeared at the top the statement “This edition issued on first publication by the Book Society Ltd. in association with Chapman & Hall Ltd. May 1945.” There is an “Author’s Note” in the middle of that page and information at the bottom about conformity with government standards and printer identification. On the few copies released by Chapman & Hall, the title page mentions only that firm. On the copyright page, the message about joint publication does not appear and the “Author’s Note” is printed in its place at the top. At the bottom, in addition to the standards and printing information, there is a box below that in which is printed “Cat. No. 5010/4”. There is also the word “and” centered between the standards and printing statements. Aside from those differences, the texts of the two versions printed at the same time are said by bibliographers to be identical.

The dust jackets were apparently also identical, although at least some copies had a wrap-around paper band on which was printed “Book Society Choice” on the front, back and spine and the Book Society’s colophon below that on the spine. Whether this band was included on those few copies allocated to Chapman & Hall is not known, although an internet offer of the book including that rare addition is the Chapman & Hall version.  There is no mention of the Book Society on the dust jacket itself, and the wrap-around band appears to have been their sole source of identification on the book’s exterior.

Waugh notes in his diary (1 July 1945) that the first edition “sold out in the first week and is still in continual demand” which is not surprising given the limited number available for sale through book stores. Chapman & Hall’s advertising in the TLS, 2 June 1945, p. 261 (a few days after publication) stated “First Edition sold out, now reprinting”; a similar notice appeared in advertising copy in the Sunday Times, 3 June 1945, p. 3.  The publishers issued a “Revised Edition” sometime before August when Waugh was discussing the revisions in a letter to Tom Driberg and at least one other (“third”) edition came out in 1945, both under the C&H imprint. Additional C&H printings appeared in 1946 and 1947.

*NOTE: The information about the allocation of copies between the Book Society and Chapman & Hall appears in an unpublished letter from F B Walker, Chapman & Hall, to A D Peters (Waugh’s agent), 1 March 1945. The letter is in the A D Peters papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. It is possible that between that date and 28 May the allocation numbers may have changed.

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Diaries, Evelyn Waugh, First Editions, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on 75th Anniversary of Brideshead Book Publication

Brideshead @ 75: Sunday Telegraph

Posted on May 24, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

This is the opening day of Brideshead Revisited’s 75th anniversary week. The first book publication took place on 28 May 1945 in London. The Sunday Telegraph is first off the mark in its recognition of the event with an article by Hannah Betts. She opens with a mention of the book’s current reputation based on the opinion of Christopher Hitchens and events such as the BBC rebroadcast of a four-part radio adaptation and Castle Howard’s webinar later this week. See earlier posts. She then considers its critical reputation at the time of its publication, the evolution of that reception as well as Waugh’s own evolving assessment of the book and concludes with her own analysis. Here is an excerpt:

So what is the enduring appeal of this novel that has such a grip on the popular consciousness, even among those who — like Hitchens, radical and anti-theist — one might imagine would resist its heady allure?

It haunts us because it is about being haunted; a postlapsarian account of the prelapsarian, and an elegy for not one, but two lost worlds. […]

Brideshead, it must be said, is also bloody funny. One thinks of Cordelia’s sacred Vatican monkeys, or the wincingly awful Cynthia asking whether she should “put her face to bed”, lest her spouse require intercourse.

Personally, it is not Oxford, Venice or Brideshead itself that exerts its siren call, but the interlude on the boat; not “forerunner” Sebastian, but his sister whom I weep over. That nightmarish breakdown at the fountain — as coruscating a scene as ever appeared in Eng Lit. For all the book’s sepia-tintedness, the nostalgia it gives us is of the most lacerating sort, a blade never not among the plovers’ eggs.

Still, in the end, even this pain becomes a pleasure, and part of our reason for revisiting. A.N. Wilson again: “Waugh is one of the rare band — Lermontov, Jane Austen, Nabokov — who made of his novels perfectly crafted objects. Brideshead Revisited, of all his books, is the most beautifully made, the most richly enjoyable. Above all, enjoyable.”

Re-read it and weep – but happily.

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers | Tagged , | Comments Off on Brideshead @ 75: Sunday Telegraph

Online Waugh Events: NYPL and Others

Posted on May 22, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New York Public Library has announced an online event next week. This will be part of their series Avant-Garde Reading Room. Here are the details from their website:

Please join us online for our short story discussion on Tuesday, May 26th at 6 pm. This time, we’ll be reading Evelyn Waugh’s “Excursion in Reality”.

A novelist is recruited to rewrite Hamlet for the motion pictures–but to update it in terms of language. In the process, of course, with studio committees what they are, the play loses much of its actual being. Meanwhile, the novelist’s fickle relationship with his girlfriend is put on hold, as he becomes wrapped up in a completely other affair.

Evelyn Waugh’s short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century. For anyone who enjoys the taste of elegant prose laced with sparkling wit, Evelyn Waugh’s short stories deserve a place that is both prominent and permanent in one’s well-stocked storehouse of vintage literature. Cutting, indeed cruel at times, but always interesting, he zeroes in on the upper and upper middle classes of the interwar years. Cruelty can, in fact, be rather fun!

The story was first published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1932, appearing in both the New York (July) and London (August) editions. It had a different title in each edition. The current title was adopted in the 1936 UK collection Mr Loveday’s Little Outing and Other Sad Stories and used again in the postwar American collection Tactical Exercise. The story is also included in the Complete Stories. 

The participation instructions are provided here. According to the webpage the participant list is full but you may place yourself on a waiting list.

–Another online book event has also been announced. Joseph Pearce, Roman Catholic writer and educator, has posted notice of an online discussion of Brideshead Revisited to be lead by him. Here’s the posting:

Due to the popularity of the “Thursdays with Thursday” book club on The Man Who was Thursday, which begins next week, we’ve decided to offer another five-week book club, which we’re calling “Revisiting Brideshead” in which I’ll be leading a discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel, Brideshead Revisited. This will meet at 8pm on each Thursday from July 16 until August 13. This will also be limited to only 50 participants so please do consider signing up soon – and tell your friends! Here’s the link:
https://homeschoolconnectionsonline.com/brideshead-revisited

Here are the details:

Special Note: This Book Club is for Adults Only.

Day and time: Thursdays, 8:00 PM Eastern Time (7:00 Central 6:00 Mountain 5:00 Pacific)

Dates: July 16, July 23, July 30, August 6, and August 13

Price: $17 per person for all 5 weeks

Seating is limited to 50

Description:
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh is one of the greatest and most popular novels ever written. It is also one of the most Catholic. Waugh described its theme as “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters”. Joseph Pearce has taught this novel many times at college level, always including it on the syllabus for the senior level Twentieth Century Literature course for English majors. Join him as he revisits Brideshead.

–The UK-based digital radio station Classic FM has posted a notice about the Brideshead Revisited theme song. Here is an excerpt from their announcement:

One of the greatest TV series ever gave us one of the finest theme tunes too.[…]

Geoffrey Burgon’s Bafta-nominated score is at once expansive, regal and melancholic, with wistful oboe and trumpet, matched with horns that conjure up the pomp of Brideshead and the demise of Lord Marchmain and his family. The soundtrack album sold more than 100,000 copies, won a gold disc, and brought Burgon an Ivor Novello award.

 

 

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Discussions, Events, Radio, Short Stories | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Online Waugh Events: NYPL and Others

Cyril in Fiction: Roundup

Posted on May 21, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–In his latest posting, Duncan Mclaren discusses yet another of Waugh’s friends. This time it is Cyril Connolly’s turn. McLaren looks at Cyril’s appearances in several of Waugh’s novels, at first obliquely as a name assigned to an unrelated character and finally in Waugh’s last novel (Unconditional Surrender) as the thinly disguised portrait of the character named Everard Spruce. This character was editor of the magazine Survival and accepted for publication the aphorisms of another character Ludovic entitled PensĂ©es. These were the equally thinly disguised parodies of Cyril’s Horizon magazine and his own aphoristic collection published as The Unquiet Grave. Those connections have been mentioned before, most recently in D J Taylor’s book Lost Girls which is prominently discussed in Duncan’s article and is reviewed in a recent issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

The most interesting and original feature of McLaren’s post is his identification of Cyrillic elements in the character of Mr Joyboy in Waugh’s novella The Loved One. McLaren develops this connection very carefully and sees a linkage with a visit by Cyril to Piers Court with his then girlfriend Lys Lubbock that was contemporaneous with Waugh’s writing of the book. There may be elements of the AimĂ©e Thanatogenos/Joyboy relationship and that between Cyril and Lys. Here’s a link to Duncan’s article. Additional connections include a copy of Horizon discussed by the characters and a drawing of the cover that appears in one of the illustrations. Moreover, Cyril devoted an entire issue of the magazine to publication of the novella.

–New Zealand blogger Bob Jones has compared the recent governmental policies adopted in response to the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic to a similar example of bungling described by Evelyn Waugh in his late travel book Tourist in Africa:

The coming economic collapse is totally a man-made disaster. When the dust is settled we need an independent enquiry or even a Royal Commission, to study the idiotic decisions made in order to prevent a future reoccurrence. For make no mistake. Such epidemics will strike again. An enquiry will hopefully produce a better way of handling them.

As the brilliant Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1959, describing the ill-thought and enormously costly Kenyan groundnut fiasco by the post-war Labour government, “the fault was pride; the hubris which leads elected persons to believe that a majority at the polls endues them with inordinate abilities”! Ring a bell?

Waugh’s discussion of the groundnut scandal–which took place in Tanganyika, not Kenya– appears at pp. 84 ff. of his travel book which was published in 1960.

—TV Guide has posted a review of the adaptation of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust. It has recently been streamed in the USA on HBO2 and is available on Amazon Prime:

This film version of what many consider Evelyn Waugh’s finest novel is the handiwork of Derek Granger and Charles Sturridge, the producer-director team responsible for “Brideshead Revisited,” the popular TV adaptation of another Waugh novel. […] Many devotees of the novel have been disappointed by Sturridge’s film, finding it fails to capture Waugh’s biting satire. While retaining much of Waugh’s dialog and keeping much of the story intact, Sturridge has, nevertheless, altered the tone of the proceedings. Though something is lost in the transition form novel to movie, A HANDFUL OF DUST is still a tale of horrible selfishness and cruelty. The period production design is excellent, and the photography is beautiful, both in its misty English country scenes and in its lush South American jungle settings. The costumes received an Oscar nomination.

—Tatler magazine has published a list of what it considers the six best TV series dealing with High Society. At the top of the list is the Granger/Sturridge adaptation of Brideshead:

The best version of Evelyn Waugh’s most famous tale is undoubtedly the 1980s television series starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick, which is loved for its stylish cinematography and even more stylish costumes. […] The series has stood the test of time, and is held in higher regard than any film adaptation.

–The New York Review of Books has published a retrospectve review of the books of satirical novelist Nell Zink. The review, entitled  “Getting Away With It” by Andrew Martin, opens with this brief summary of Zink’s books starting with her first two The Wallcreeper and Mislaid. Martin writes that Zink:

…has a habit of killing off interesting characters sooner than seems wise, though the cheerful revenge of the bacchantes in her books rarely takes the form of physical violence. Her novels, famously written quickly (three weeks is usually cited as the time it took to draft each of her first three books), do, at times, read as though they wrote themselves; their startling combinations of registers and breakneck plots sometimes give the impression that they sprang directly from the author’s unconscious, if a more rigorously structured one than that of, say, the Beats. Though Dickens is often invoked as a point of comparison for writers of wildly varying styles and quality, Zink may be the contemporary writer who most deserves the comparison. She has a Dickensian gift for caricature and set pieces, as well as his nagging, theatrical tendency to wrap all the story’s loose ends in a bow. There are hints of early Penelope Fitzgerald in her embrace of misfits (as well as in her late start to publishing), and a healthy dose of the English novelist Barbara Trapido, whose Brother of the More Famous Jack shares Zink’s zest for bad literary manners.

As Martin nears the end, he discusses her latest book Doxology  and makes a comparison of its place in the oeuvre with one of Waugh’s novels:

…The result is a book that doesn’t quite justify its deployment of the trappings of the “novel of our times.” Caught somewhere between satirizing that genre and earnestly attempting it, Zink lands in an uncertain middle ground. It may be the case that her strengths as a writer are fundamentally those of the disrupter and the caricaturist rather than the nuanced social chronicler, but the madness of the current moment calls as much for disruption as it does for breadth and grace. Doxology may prove to be a transitional book in her career, like, say, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the work of a committed spitballer creeping toward a more sober reckoning with the world, then bailing out when things get too real.

 

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, A Tourist in Africa, Evelyn Waugh Studies, The Loved One, Unconditional Surrender/The End of the Battle | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Cyril in Fiction: Roundup