Roundup: Booklists Abound

Posted on May 10, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

There have been several lists of recommended books or TV adaptations published in the last week as the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown continues. A number of these have included works by Evelyn Waugh:

–The Daily Telegraph published two “Top 100” lists early in the week. The first was a list of British TV programs compiled by its identified staff writers. This included  Brideshead Revisited in its 1981 Granada TV adaptation:

This sumptuous adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel was obsessively faithful to its source material and it showed. Leisurely and literary, this examination of the aristocratic Marchmain family seen through the eyes of Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons, pictured right, with co-star Anthony Andrews) remains the benchmark for costume dramas.

A few days later, a list of the Top 100 novels appeared. It was described as extending “from Tolkien to Proust”. This was compiled by unidentified DT reporters and included translations as well as English language works. At #18 on the list is:

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938). Waugh based the hapless junior reporter hero of this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.

–Perhaps the most ambitious of the postings (more a catalogue than a list) is that in Sight & Sound magazine prepared by its contributors and entitled “Flick lit! 100 great novels about cinema”. The selection of  Waugh’s contribution is no surprise:

50. The Loved One. Evelyn Waugh, 1948

Fitfully a film fan – his diaries of the 1920s are flecked with references to silent comedies by Harold Lloyd and the like – Evelyn Waugh first travelled to Hollywood in 1947 to work on a screen adaptation of his smash novel Brideshead Revisited for MGM. The movie was never made, but Waugh went home with bile enough to fill this slender, scabrous volume, subtitled “An Anglo-American Tragedy” in what seems a jibe at Henry James. In its pages Dennis Barlow, a minor poet, comes to southern California from England to work for the Megalopolitan film studio, only to find himself in the employ of a posh pet cemetery, the Happier Hunting Ground, and drawn in by the idiot allure of AimĂ©e Thanatogenos, cosmetician for the dead at Whispering Glades, a spoof of state-of-the-art Forest Lawn cemetery. A biting burlesque of the death industry in the capital of screen immortality as later exposed in The American Way of Death, a muckraking nonfiction work by Jessica Mitford, who Waugh had known as a little girl in his Bright Young Things days. Tony Richardson drew on both Waugh and Mitford’s works for his film of The Loved One, released in 1965, and excoriated in a series of transatlantic cablegrams by Waugh, who after a sudden heart attack went to his own reward the following year, administered conditional absolution by the attending priest, though denied the much-desired active participation in last rites.

— Nick Pinkerton

The article is posted on BFI’s website.

—Harper’s Bazaar devoted its #BazaarBookClub column to “the classic novels you now have a chance to read”. At the #3 slot was:

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

All of Evelyn Waugh’s novels are brilliant – and devastating – but a good place to start is his most famous, Brideshead Revisited. Charles Ryder recalls his relationship with the charismatic aristocrat Sebastian Flyte and his troubled family. The two meet at Oxford after a drunken Flyte is sick through the window into Ryder’s ground-floor room; as an apology Flyte fills Ryder’s room with flowers and invites him to a breakfast of quail’s eggs. This gilded opening, already tinged with longing and regret, is increasingly overshadowed by family secrets, damaged lives and broken relationships: it is at once elegiac and richly funny.

Harper’s Bazaar was an early venue for Waugh’s writings, most notably for the serial version of his 1934 novel A Handful of Dust. This version was shortened to exclude the ending based on “The Man Who Liked Dickens” due to copyright issues and was retitled in the magazine “A Flat in London”. The serial appeared in both the New York and London editions of the magazine.

–The New York Public Library has published a list of recommended reading by satirist and comedian Andy Borowitz. His list is entitled “Six Comic Novels To Lift Your Spirits” and the first book mentioned is:

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
An exuberant comedy of mistaken identity and brilliantly irreverent satire of the hectic pursuit of hot news.

— Forbes magazine in a book review that recommends the recent republication of what it considers a sensible guide to drinking habits is reminded of an earlier satirization by Waugh of more pretentious examples of the genre:

Waugh, in fact, sent up such drivel long ago when he had his effete characters in Brideshead Revisited describe wine thus:

‘…It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle.’

‘Like a leprechaun.’

‘Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.’

‘Like a flute by still water.’

‘…And this is a wise old wine.”A prophet in a cave.’

‘…And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.’

‘Like a swan.’

‘Like the last unicorn.’

So it is always good to find a new book on the shelves that regards wine with both pleasure and common sense, including a good deal about manners and drunkenness. How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Drinking (Princeton U. Press; $16.95) was written by a garrulous fellow named Vincent Obsopoeus, who did so in reaction to the barbarous drunken behavior demonstrated by the Germans of his day, who were consuming 120 liters of wine per person per year. His day was the 16th century. [See previous post.]

–Finally, Quadrant magazine, the Australian literature journal, has posted an obituary of Alexander Thynn,  the 7th Marquess of Bath. They may be the only mainstream paper to cite Waugh’s mention of his chance meeting of Alexander as a young man. See previous post.  Quadrant’s article, written by Waugh admirer Mark McGinness also cites an interesting anecdote about a visit by James Lees-Milne to the 5th Marquess regarding a possible National Trust takeover of the Longleat Estate. The visit did not go well for the NT as Lees-Milne recounts in his diaries, as quoted in the Quadrant:

“Old Lord Bath, the most distinguished and courteous of patricians, received me a in a frockcoat. At the conclusion of a fruitless interview he rang the bell and ordered that my motor-car be brought round. He insisted on accompanying me to the front door. The steps to the drive were flanked on either side by a row of footmen in livery. In place of my uniformed chauffeur an extra footman wheeled my bicycle to the front of the steps. I shook my host’s hand, descended the perron and mounted. At the end of a straight stretch of drive 
.. I looked back for a last view of the glorious façade. Lord Bath, attended by a posse of open-mouthed and doubtless disdainful servitors, was in the old world manner of true hospitality still standing at the top of the steps until his guest was out of sight.”

 

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Waugh Transformed

Posted on May 9, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph has written an article entitled “How the Second World War transformed British literature”. The subject is a good bit more narrow than the title suggests. In fact, he considers primarily how WWII transformed the writing of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Other writers of the period briefly mentioned include Patrick Hamilton and Nigel Balchin, who are dismissed as now forgotten, and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, neither of whom participated in the war directly.

Huxley had moved away from literature to philosophy while Orwell during and after the war wrote the two books that “contributed more to English culture and idiom than any other novel of the last century, and were steeped in the author’s reflections on the evils of totalitarianism.” These were Animal Farm and 1984. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that Orwell was “transformed” by the Spanish Civil War, in which he did participate, than by WWII. His two novels were directly influenced by that transformation.

As to his two main subjects, both of whom witnessed the war at first hand, Heffer has more to say:

…their experiences in the war years and in the turbulent times that followed VE Day changed them and, inevitably, how they wrote. Both men served their country during the conflict, if in different ways. Greene was recruited into MI6, where he reported to and became friends with Kim Philby. Waugh, thanks to his friendship with Randolph Churchill, son of the prime minister, secured a commission in the Royal Marines. He proved a thoroughly unpopular officer and therefore, like Greene, was transferred to intelligence work.

This, though, set them apart from the other major novelists of the 1940s. Although both men would have rejected any idea that they were self-consciously intellectual, both were converts to Catholicism; and their conception of religion and of that faith in particular becomes central to their works […]

Heffer then proceeds to consider separately how the war affected each of his two subjects, starting with Waugh:

Waugh’s 1942 novel Put Out More Flags represents a pivotal moment in his career as a writer. Using a tone and sense of characterisation that would be familiar to readers of his earlier novels – notably Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop – the approach darkens as the novel, about the preparation of the often feckless upper-middle classes for total war, and the way in which they reconcile themselves to it, becomes an unconscious prelude to the more querulous cynicism of his later works.

Anyone reading the Sword of Honour trilogy – Waugh’s three mildly autobiographical novels of 1952-61 – should start with Put Out More Flags as a prelude. It marks the end of Waugh’s youthful and callous exuberance, and the beginnings of the presence of a soul in his writing. His next novel, published just after VE Day, remains his best known: Brideshead Revisited. It is a book of nostalgia, with many autobiographical elements, and not least a lament for a refined, aristocratic world of ease that Waugh assumed the war had buried forever.

He wrote it in early 1944 when recovering from an injury sustained in a parachute drop; the tide of the war had turned, but Waugh feared the social revolution that would come with victory. Writing to Graham Greene five years after Brideshead was published, Waugh claimed that the novel “appalled” him; but he and Greene both understood the journey of Charles Ryder, the central figure, who eventually sees the need to convert to Catholicism after years of exposure to the Catholic Flyte family. Waugh had changed profoundly from the man who wrote satire: that baton had, by the end of the war, been passed on to Compton Mackenzie. He now wrote about concepts such as reconciliation and grace…

Heffer goes on to consider Greene’s wartime and immediate postwar production, with his focus particularly on The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951), which Heffer deems his masterpiece. He concludes with this:

…The experience of war had taken both men on a parallel journey. It may not have made them better men, but it did make them better novelists.

To be fair, Heffer’s article has a subtitle: “VE Day not only marked the defeat of Nazism – it ensured that the careers of our leading novelists would never be the same.” (Emphasis supplied.) It explains how that was to be the case with at least two of them.

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Waugh’s V-E Day

Posted on May 8, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Milena Borden has forwarded the following article to commemorate the 75th anniversary of V-E Day as experienced by Evelyn Waugh:

A few days before the Victory in Europe (V-E Day), which marked the formal end of Hitler’s war, Waugh was not entirely pleased with the war’s outcome, given Communist advances in Central Europe and the Balkans and wrote in his diary in London on 13 April 1945:

“Armies monotonously victorious. Gloomy apprehensions of V Day. I hope to escape it.” (Diaries, p. 625).

He later wrote on 1 May 1945 from Chagford in Devon where he had gone to escape V-E Day as well as his family and start writing his next novel:

“
The end of the war is hourly expected. Mussolini obscenely murdered, continual rumours that Hitler’s mind has finally gone. Communism gains in France. Russia insults USA. I will now get to work on St Helena.” (Diaries, p. 627)

Waugh’s two military missions, in Crete (1941) and in Yugoslavia (1944) have generated many controversies. There is also a fair amount of generally critical talk about his declared intellectual support for General Franco during the Spanish Civil War and his hatred towards the Yugoslav partisan leader and ally of the British, Marshall Tito, has been a subject of anecdotal industry. However, one other feature of his war-time personage, which is mentioned in the above diary entry, is his interest in the Italian fascist leader Mussolini who came to power in 1922.

Under Mussolini’s leadership, Italy’s participation in the Second World War was a succession of military disasters. Waugh had met Mussolini in Rome in January 1936. He was on his way back from Abyssinia where he was a Daily Mail correspondent (1935-36). Waugh arranged to interview Mussolini on the condition that it wouldn’t be published or talked about publicly. Presumably, Waugh would have trusted Mussolini’s military competence, if it was discussed, as is reflected in his 1936 book Waugh in Abyssinia. But this would have been a misjudgement, as the Abyssinia campaign failed. Furthermore, it is unclear in what language Waugh and Mussolini would have talked to each other. There is no evidence that there was an interpreter at the meeting. Mussolini was well known as good conversationalist but he only knew limited French, German and even more basic English. It is possible that they talked in any of these languages or in a mixture of all, but it is unlikely that the conversation was deeply nuanced or long.

Waugh’s later involvement with the war took him far away from Mussolini’s Italy both physically and mentally. In 1939 the Pact of Steel sealed the alliance between Mussolini and Hitler. It eventually led Italy to catastrophe and the Duce to his death. In March 1945, Waugh stopped in occupied Rome on his way home from Yugoslavia. He lobbied successfully for an audience with the Pope Pius XII to report on the treatment of Catholics in Croatia. Mussolini was in exile in the north of Italy and on the 28 April (after Waugh’s return to England) he was executed by the partisans then dragged to Piazzale Loreto in Milan to be spat on by the Italian citizens who once admired him.

During that time Waugh was preoccupied with what he saw as the ‘unconditional surrender’ of the West to the influence of communism with Tito, Stalin and Churchill being the main actors in his mind. The war changed everything and Waugh’s interest or involvement with the Italian empire idea and Mussolini seem to have faded completely. Waugh was deeply disappointed with the political and cultural shape of the new realities, with the Soviets taking over the states in Europe east of the Elbe and driving yet another wedge into the continent.

On the eve of V-E Day he found very little to be proud of and felt perhaps more than a little guilty:

“Sunday 6 May 1945
All day there was expectation of V-E Day and finally at 9 it was announced for tomorrow
It is pleasant to end the war in plain clothes, writing. I remember at the start of it all writing to Frank Pakenham that its value for us would be to show us finally that we were not men in action. I took longer than him to learn it. 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 seem 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, p. 627)

The foregoing is an excerpt from a more detailed article in preparation about the subject of Waugh and Italy: politics and history that is intended for a future edition of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

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Penguin Promotes Waugh

Posted on May 7, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Penguin Books, Waugh’s UK paperback publisher since the 1930s, has posted an article by literary journalist John Self about Waugh’s works, most of which are in print in Penguin editions (including some volumes of the attractive 2011 hardback series). The article is entitled “Beyond Brideshead: why Evelyn Waugh needs to be reclaimed as our funniest writer” and is headed: “Sharp, sparkly and endlessly versatile, ‘Evelyn Waugh’s overlooked novels make him the perfect choice to cheer us all up, says John Self…'”

The article ranges over most of Waugh’s fiction and contains several interesting insights. Here is an excerpt:

…It’s possible that if you know only one novel of Waugh’s, you weren’t aware that he’s supremely funny, because he is, tragically, famous for the wrong book. His work is overshadowed by the monolith of Brideshead Revisited, his 1945 novel of nostalgia, aristocracy and Catholicism. It was given a boost by the mimsy 1980s TV adaptation – a soft-focus alliance of Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and a teddy bear – and that legacy lingers, but even in Waugh’s lifetime it was his most popular book, which “led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers.” But its popularity is hard to fathom to anyone who has read Waugh’s other, funnier novels. Brideshead is solemn and dreary, and the key to this is that it was written during the war, “a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster,” as Waugh later commented. “In consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now on a full stomach I find distasteful.” Exactly so.

Indeed, it’s Waugh’s usual care for language that makes his best books so funny and piercing. “I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in language, and with this I am obsessed.” It is his obsession with getting the right words in the right place that makes his jokes funny, his plot turns shocking and – despite himself – his characters so affecting. […] But as a comic writer, Waugh had a vast range: he was (with all due respect to dear old Plum) the P. G. Wodehouse whose books aren’t all the same.

It is odd that in an article that is obviously intended to promote sales of “overlooked” books, no mention is made of what are probably Waugh’s least read novels: Black Mischief and Helena. On the other hand, nothing is coming to mind that would compare with the article’s lively recommendations of his other novels. Perhaps for Black Mischief: “Don’t let dated racial prejudice stop you from reading brilliant comedy where even cannabilism gets a laugh.” And for Helena: “Waugh thought this his best book; read it and see if you agree.” Penguin does have some other nonfiction works in print that are also worth a mention, such as Waugh in Abyssinia (the Penguin Modern Classics cover art alone is worth the purchase price), Labels, and A Little Order. (Amazon.uk is temporarily out of stock of the latter two but they appear to be available from Penguin directly at this link.) They even offer an edition of the selected travel writings When the Going was Good.

There is an active dialogue going about the article on Twitter: @john_self.  There are several Waugh Penguin covers posted.

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Not Wanted: Coronavirus Novels (At Least, Not Yet)

Posted on May 6, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest issue of Literary Review, literary critic and novelist D J Taylor has an article entitled “Why I Won’t Be Writing a Coronavirus Novel”. This begins with his fears that some half baked ideas may already be forming in the minds of the literati which will not, based on previous experience with novels dealing with apocalyptic events, advance their careers. He offers the example of several novels written during and just after WWII which, while considered good at the time, have not become classics: for example Julian Maclaren-Ross’s short story collection The Stuff to Give the Troops (1944) and Monica Dickens’ The Fancy (1943). The great WWII novels had to germinate over several years:

…the great British ‘war novels’ took years, and sometimes decades, to complete. Unconditional Surrender, the final instalment of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, hung fire until 1961. Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy petered to a close in 1965. The Military Philosophers, the last volume of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time sequence to deal with his hero Nick Jenkins’s wartime career, emerged as late as 1968. Part of the reason for this delay lay in the fact that it took Waugh and Powell a certain amount of time to establish the ideological framework in which they imagined the Second World War to have been fought. They were right-wing writers who assumed that the ‘People’s War’ interpretation of the conflict had worked a deeply injurious effect on postwar English life. But another part lay in the authors’ sheer hesitancy, their recognition that vast international crises don’t easily yield up their import and that the best treatments are sometimes those that come in at the obliquest of angles.

He might also have usefully mentioned Waugh’s “phoney war” novel Put Out More Flags (1942) as one of the few contemporary wartime novels that have remained popular. Moreover, Brideshead Revisited was written by Waugh during the last days of the war. He finished his first draft just as D-Day was happening, and it was published shortly after V-E Day in late May 1945. In that book, he proves Taylor’s point that he wrote the wartime chapters too soon because he feared that the “Peoples War” was going to wreck the things he held most dear. But as he recognized 15 years later when he revised his first edition, things didn’t work out the way he expected.

After adding a discussion of some ill-considered novels relating to Donald Trump’s presidency, Taylor concludes his LR article with this:

There are novels to be written about coronavirus, but they probably shouldn’t be written yet. And the novelist who at some point will chasten us with an account of what Trump did to America is probably still in kindergarten.

 

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Wanted: Comic Novelists

Posted on May 5, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Writing in the UK-based magazine The Critic, Alexander Larman bemoans the lack of comic novels in today’s literary marketplace. This is in an article entitled “Where is the Waugh or Wodehouse of our time? Comic writing: light distraction or social mirror?” He puts this down to some extent to the following problem:

There is […] an unwritten but widely understood sense amongst the literary establishment that any comic books that do appear should be either left-leaning or, at the least, liberal, and that any sort of ‘difficult’ material that might be construed as racist, xenophobic or sexist should either be omitted entirely or, if it has to be included, should appear in such heavy quotation marks as to make it entirely clear that the author does not hold the repellent views of his or her characters.

He goes on to consider how this policy would have applied to his two favorite comic novelists: Waugh and Wodehouse. As to the former:

Waugh would almost certainly never have published a single novel. Not only was his writing entirely devoid of anything that would today be regarded as ‘woke’ or politically correct, but he took a grim delight in antagonising his readers if they dared to raise any objections. When he received a critical letter from an American woman who had not enjoyed Brideshead Revisited, he did not reply to her but instead wrote in an aggrieved fashion to her husband, asking him ‘if he was in the habit of allowing his wife to write impertinent letters to strangers’. This would almost certainly go viral on social media today, and that is before one gets into his flippant treatment of such difficult subjects as paedophilia (Decline and Fall), racism (Black Mischief, and much of the rest), mental illness (The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold) and the rest.

He recounts an anecdote relating to the beginning of Waugh’s career as a novelist, describing it as “something of a close-run thing that it ever began.” After a discussion of the comic works of Wodehouse and Nancy Mitford, Larman sees some hope for the future in the literary prize givings aimed at comic novels. Indeed, in the case of one of these, there is another Waugh connection. Waugh’s grand daughter Daisy Waugh has been shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print prize for her book In The Crypt with a Candlestick. See previous posts.

He concludes with a look forward to more comic contributions from novelists such as:

…Edward St Aubyn, Paul Murray and Jonathan Coe, who could make something entertaining out of our current dire international situation. […] It doesn’t seem too much to ask that at least one novel that comes out can summon up something of the spirit of Waugh and Mitford and be riotously amusing.

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V-E Day Roundup

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–As the observance of the 75th anniversary of V-E Day approaches, the Daily Mail has posted in a slide show a collection of 1945 events that seemed to presage a return to a social system where class status was again recognized:

As the whole country celebrated VE Day with joy and relief, the upper classes seemed to carry on as if Hitler had never existed. The lights were now blazing and the curtains left undrawn at London’s Savoy Hotel, while evening dress again became obligatory at its restaurant. Glittering balls were held once more as they always had been at the great stately homes, and before long Princess Elizabeth would marry Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, while a group of eligible aristocrats would form around her vivacious younger sister Margaret. In a world where over ÂŁ1m could be fluttered on a summer’s day out at the first post-war running of the Derby, all seemed well with the world –bar the prospect of even tighter rationing and a few rats…

Among the stories noted in the article is this one involving Evelyn Waugh whose photo is included in the Mail’s slide show:

Evelyn’s in the waughs: One of the last rocket-bombs to fall on London landed near Marble Arch on 25 March. The blast blew out the window of the Hyde Park Hotel suite occupied by Evelyn Waugh (pictured), recently returned from serving with the British Military Mission in Yugoslavia. At the end of May, his new novel Brideshead Revisited sent ripples of excitement through high society. It is widely believed the story was based on the family of the late Earl Beauchamp and their home Madresfield Court, near Malvern.

Waugh’s book was anything but optimistic about a return to class system as Englishmen knew it between the wars.

–An article by Tom McGrath in the Oxford journal Cherwell relates to nostalgia brought on by the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown and also makes a reference to Waugh’s novel:

Nostalgia is often a dark force in literary works. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian Flyte is said to be ‘in love with his own childhood’, the personification of nostalgia. This was not meant as a compliment. Sebastian, walking around Oxford clutching his teddy bear, finds himself incapable of living successfully as an adult, years of indulgence turning to substance abuse. Charles Ryder looks back with nostalgia at 1920s England from the ‘40s, and is trapped by longing for the past, until the workings of divine grace help him escape at the end of the book.

—Tatler has put together a list of “High Society” films that you might like to watch during lockdown: “Immerse yourselves in the lives of the super glamorous and super rich, as class, money, reputation and romance all intermingle in these smart, stylish films. It’s what Tatler would watch on a rainy afternoon…” One of these film adaptations is based on a Waugh novel but perhaps not the one you would expect:

A Handful of Dust
Another Evelyn Waugh classic brought to the big screen (he was, after all, the expert on class), the 1988 adaptation of A Handful of Dust stars Kristin Scott Thomas as an unhappily married chatelaine, who embarks on an affair with John Beaver, who unknown to her is using her for her social status. When her husband refuses to divorce her because it means losing his family seat, Beaver leaves her, while her husband goes on a disastrous journey to find a lost city in Brazil. Suffice to say all is not well that ends well in A Handful of Dust, which emphasises how possession really means nothing.

–Duncan McLaren has posted another article about Waugh’s friends gathering at Castle Howard. This involves an imagined discussion between Patrick Balfour and Robert Byron about the books they had written relating to their 1930s travels where their paths crossed in Persia. Patrick’s book was entitled Grand Tour: Diary of an Eastward Journey and Robert’s The Road to Oxiana. While they were making their trips, Waugh had been traveling in the even more remote and uncomfortable country of British Guiana which he was to write about in Ninety Two Days. Here’s an excerpt from Duncan’s article:

…In November of 1932, Evelyn had travelled to British Guiana in South America. Why had he done that? Not in search of an alternative civilisation, as had been the inspiration for Robert Byron’s journey. But on a whim, really. […]

Patrick had learned about this at Chagford, near Exeter, where they often independently went to write their books. Patrick could put what he’d found out about both writers in the following way. Evelyn Waugh, like Robert Byron, found it very hard to travel from place to place in foreign lands. Both individuals were rugged, determined, and pushed themselves through intense privation: hunger, pain and fear. They got themselves into situations – and experienced emotions – that simply demanded to be written up as books…

Those interested in Robert Byron’s book which has become a classic and is still in print will enjoy Duncan’s article about the discussion which puts Patrick’s less ambitious effort into perspective.

 

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Post-Pandemic Predictions: A Roundup

Posted on April 29, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–David Aaronovitch writing in a recent issue of The Times posed the question what would be the cultural responses to the pandemic. This is in an article entitled “We’ll be free to enjoy the Roaring 2020s”. He thought the closest equivalent would be to look at what happened after the Spanish flu pandemic had passed. That of course followed the equally apocalyptic WWI but both had hit hardest at the young adults. In America the response manifested itself in the Roaring 20s and the literature and music of the Jazz Age for which Scott Fitzgerald acted as spokesman.

Here in Britain the “Bright Young Things” satirised by Evelyn Waugh in his 1930 novel Vile Bodies, included several leading writers, described by one historian as possessing “a restless rootlessness 
” having “a feeling, because ultimately they survived the war, of being both chosen and undeserving”. One of Waugh’s main characters describes “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties 
 almost naked parties in St John’s Wood”. Condom sales grew exponentially. The diaphragm began to be mass produced. If the privileged partied, then at least the less well-off danced — the Charleston, the Lindy-hop and in dance marathons. And if women authors displayed a new candour, then ordinary women displayed a new independence.[…]

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the emergence from the straitened, anxious, death-laden times of the Great War and the Great Pandemic created a cultural and social dynamism, as the life force reasserted itself. In 1918, American cinemas and theatres were closed in flu-hit cities and towns, and mass events were banned. Masks were worn. And, given that the transmission from person to person of the flu was well understood even then, there must have been a reluctance to press up too closely against other bodies. Yet not only did the closest form of mass entertainment — cinema — survive, it thrived. Within a matter of months huge picture palaces seating 1,200 people were being constructed. By 1930, in a US population of 123 million, weekly movie attendance was 90 million. In close social proximity the pandemic survivors watched Buster Keaton, the “It girl” Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino.

My reasoned hope is that the same will happen this time. That the lid put on our collective lives will come flying off as younger generations of play-goers, cinephiles, festival fans, art-lovers and their heroes, together, turn the world upside down again. Get ready for the Roaring 2020s.

–A not dissimilar reaction is described as following WWII. This is in an article (“Brace for the New World Order”) by Harold Persimmon posted on the New Zealand website of thebfd.co.nz (a center-right media organization), and Evelyn Waugh is again its spokesman:

When Great Britain emerged blinking from the rubble of the Second World War it was a nation hugely in debt and on the brink of a silent social revolution. The country’s war debt to the United States was in the order of $3.7 billion, and despite Harold Macmillan’s ’never had it so good’ speech of 1957, the debt owed was not fully repaid until December 2006. The social change to come was hinted at presciently in Evelyn Waugh’s wartime novel Brideshead Revisited where a young soldier remarks in the closing pages that ‘it’s our turn now’ – ‘our turn’ referring perhaps to those belonging to the new order – ‘the people’; different people to the ones who are running things now. The country would henceforth become a startlingly different place, run to a new agenda.

–Another view is expressed by Lou Stoppard in the weblog of aperture.org, a nonprofit foundation consisting of members of the photographic community. In a review of the current but now closed NPG exhibit of the early works of Cecil Beaton, she concludes with this:

…The Bright Young Things were the generation after the war had passed. They were, for a while, the lucky ones. There was, like today, a remarkable split between generations, a chasm between young and old. And if you were young, you were so very young.

Post-lockdown, post-COVID-19, post–all the death and anxiety and the relentlessness of being cooped up and afraid, will the young of today fully take up their place as a “generation after”? Will it be the roaring twenties all over again? Will they break free from worry into parties and make-believe and lightness? Or will they do something more? I’m sure the latter, but who can know. The words of Lord Metroland, in Waugh’s Vile Bodies, have never seemed more poignant: “There was a whole civilization to be saved and remade. And all they seem to do is play the fool.”

–Finally, the Washington Examiner has posted a discussion by Eric Felten of a newly translated book by a little known German poet. This opens with a reference to a Waugh post-war novella in which he bemoaned the “new world order” that he had forseen in Brideshead:

The dim protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s postwar novel Scott-King’s Modern Europe teaches classics at a British boy’s school. Inside the classroom, he slogs through Xenophon and Sallust. Outside, he has carved out a niche as the sole scholar of an obscure 17th-century middle-European poet, Bellorius, whose life’s work was “a poem of some 1,500 lines of Latin hexameters.” The poem told of “a visit to an imaginary Island of the New World where in primitive simplicity 
 there subsisted a virtuous, chaste and reasonable community.” The verse was, as Waugh put it, “irredeemably tedious.”

Classics professor Michael Fontaine has found a real-life Bellorius, a Renaissance German poet who composed verse in Latin and who is remembered, if at all, mostly for one work. The poet is Vincentius Obsopoeus. Where the fictional Bellorius penned a paean to an imaginary “virtuous, chaste and reasonable community,” the nonfictional Obsopoeus celebrated The Art of Drinking. This obscure poem has just been published by Princeton University Press under the unfortunate title How to Drink.

Waugh’s novella is also included in his Complete Stories.

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Waugh and “The Editorial Line”

Posted on April 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Mexican newspaper El Universal has posted an opinion article on the political situation in Mexico that opens with a quote from Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop. This is entitled “La linea editorial”:

Evelyn Waugh published in 1938 a satirical novel about war correspondents. They are sending out of confusion a good man (William Boot) into a conflagration and he has the following dialogue with the head of international news (Mr Salter):

“–Can you tell me who is fighting  who in Ismailia?

–I think it’s the Patriots and the Traitors.

–Yes, but which is which?

— Oh, I don’t know that. That’s Policy, you see.

[Spanish version: Esa es cuestion de la linea editorial. Literally retranslated: “That’s a question from the editorial line.” (Scoop, Penguin 2011, p. 57; Spanish version entitled  ¥Noticia bomba!,)]

After the morning talk of the President on April 22, I remembered that passage. The fundamental idea of AMLO [ President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador], if I do not misunderstand, is to establish two sides with integrity and once they are configured, “the editorial line” should support the good against the bad. And who defines the editorial line: he does. He leads the Patriots and those who oppose him are Traitors. Waugh intended a parody. Our President is serious.

The translation is by Google with edits and substitution of the original English quote from the novel. The article is by Jose Woldenberg who is a Professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico and goes on to elaborate what he sees as President Lopez Obrador’s position:

The public space in democracy, where journalism plays a strategic role, resembles a detuned chorus of voices. That is its fundamental characteristic and its value. […] And listening to the President, it would seem that he wants a public space in which the government’s voice is equivalent to the revealed truth, and also accompanied by a concert of echoes.

UPDATE (29 April 2020): The post was modified to reflect additional translation of the Spanish text.

 

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Waugh in “Angloliguria”

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Massimo Bacigalupo, author of the 2017 book in Italian Angloliguria: From Byron to Hemingway, has written an article in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto about a “virtual trip” to three villas in Portofino during this time of lockdown. One of the spots he visits is Villa Altachiara which has connections to Evelyn Waugh. As described in the article (translation by Google with minor edits):

Above the square with its cafes and ice cream parlors, lace and fruit stalls, you can see the Villa Altachiara, the Italianization of Highclere, the British home of the Earls of Carnarvon known to all since it became the set of Downton Abbey. At Altachiara lived [Henry] Herbert, the fourth earl, his eccentric diplomatic son and his nephew Auberon whom many still remember as a hearty big drinker. But there was also the fifth earl, who in 1922 discovered and is said to be the victim of Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus, and later the writer Evelyn Waugh: proud and bourgeois, he converted to pre-reform Catholicism, to marry a Herbert (very ancient Catholic family) [sic], and who after the Second World War, looked suspiciously at the new English owners of Castello Brown (“middle class and Protestants!”).

In the Altachiara I remember, [there were] large halls with comfortable and simple English-style furniture, armchairs with old faded linings: a luxury camp. In the garden, you could look out over the sea as far as the eye could see and hear the perfect cadences of the young bennati [?]. It is said that during the Great War the Herberts had left an account open in the bakery for the Portofinesi; they were therefore in some way the lords of the country, they took charge of it. Characters of great smokers and drinkers, with carved and rustic faces, loved by the farmers with whom the harvest was celebrated and celebrated [sic] in September, going for the narrow bands covered with vines, enjoying here and there a glimpse of blue among the foliage. And the scent of the must, the light wine and the “musciame” (dolphin salami, I think). The contrast between the English guests and the Ligurian women who prepared those memorable lunches.

He goes on to describe Castello Brown as:

Originally a fortress-platform, it was transformed around 1900 by the architect De Andrade for Montagu Brown into a villa with a circular tower, the esplanade became an English garden, it was furnished with medieval-style stained furniture. Brown, residing in Genoa, rented it to more and less illustrious guests, including Emil Ludwig, biographer of Mussolini, and Elizabeth von Arnim, who from her stay in April 1922 drew inspiration for the novel The Enchanted April.

The other villa mentioned, Castello di San Giorgio, is:

…actually a building of “two bodies around a tower” (Caterina Olcese Spingardi, Great hotels and villas of the Belle Epoque, Sagep 2012 ). On the facade an English diplomat had [translated] some of the verses written by Catullus in large letters: “Or who is more blessed than one who returns to his home …”. From 1910 it belonged to Alfons von Mumm (1859-1924), baron, German diplomat (in China) and photographer, who apparently organized medieval dress parties with his English wife Jeanny.

His description of Evelyn Waugh’s connection is a bit brief and may suffer from translation by Google. Waugh did marry into the Herbert family (twice, in fact) but neither of them was from a “very ancient Catholic family.” His first wife Evelyn was not a Catholic. His second wife Laura (a half-cousin of the first wife), was Roman Catholic because the family of her mother (nee Mary Vesey) had converted. Prior to conversion, they were members of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy. The family of Laura’s father Aubrey Herbert were not Roman Catholics nor was he a convert. It was he who inherited Altachiara and its ownership passed to his wife Mary upon his untimely death in 1923.

Waugh met his second wife at Altachiara. He was returning home from a Mediterranean cruise during which he had met her sister who invited Waugh to visit. After their marriage, they continued to visit the Villa, and Waugh at least in part based Guy Crouchback’s pre-war Italian residence in Sword of Honour on Portofino. In a recent Town & Country magazine profile of Highclere Castle, TV and film setting of Downton Abbey and still a Herbert family residence, another Waugh connection is mentioned:

Lady Carnarvon explained that she and her husband hoped to bring back “a little of the glamour” that the estate was previously known for. “[Novelist] Evelyn Waugh would say in his letters to Nancy Mitford something was ‘very Highclere’ if it was very well done. That’s a nice way of setting the scene.”

There are references to Highclere used in this sense in Waugh’s 1930s letters to the Lygon sisters, Mary and Dorothy, and to Diana Cooper, but the collected letters to Nancy Mitford do not record such a reference on available databases.

 

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