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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The Spectator at 10,000 (More)

Posted on April 26, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator’s celebration of its 10,000th issue continues to spread and produce comment. The Daily Telegraph provides an opportunity for The Spectator’s current editor Fraser Nelson to explain what he has found to be the magazine’s approach to politics:

…David Butterfield, a Cambridge don whose new history of The Spectator is published this week, was […] expecting to find a magazine that had evolved hand-in-hand with the Establishment; he found that, instead for two centuries, it had been tweaking the tail of those in power. It was The Spectator that came up with the phrase “the Establishment”, in a 1955 article explaining where British power really lay. The magazine’s first big campaign was to push through Parliament the 1832 Reform Act. In the 1975 EEC referendum, the only publications backing Brexit were The Spectator and the Morning Star. We were also the only one to back the north against the slave-owning south in the American civil war. [… ] And we were denounced as the “bugger’s bugle” when we advocated the decriminalisation of homosexuality, a decade before it happened.

These causes are not really left wing or right wing, and have been taken up by individual editors whose own politics have varied wildly. Over the years, readers have been advised to vote for all kinds of parties – but, usually, given no advice at all. Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1959 about his “aspirations of a mugwump”, saying he would not vote: “I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign in her choice of servants.” Alexander Chancellor, whose inspired editorship saved the magazine in the 1970s, put it best: The Spectator, he said, is a cocktail party rather than a political party. Bang on too much about politics, and it’s over.

The National Review, the American magazine which likes to think of itself as The Spectator’s translantic counterpart (despite itself dating back only to the 1950s), also weighs in with its congratulations in an article entitled “The (Other) Greatest Magazine in the English-Speaking World”.  This is written by Kyle Smith who includes this reference:

The television critic and columnist James Delingpole […] is a master putdown artist himself and once wrote delightfully about getting high with David Cameron while listening to Supertramp during their Oxford years. Delingpole even had freaky photographic evidence. (Yes, they all know one another, the Brits; they all live in the same Evelyn Waugh novel.)

It should be noted in this regard that, when the National Review was started, its founder and editor William F Buckley Jr was a leading admirer and defender of Senator Joseph McCarthy.  Waugh in 1960 wrote a review in The Spectator (5 February 1960) in which he praised a book critical of McCarthy by Richard Rovere. In the review, Waugh associated himself with those critical views. Buckley wrote to urge him to reconsider his position and sent him several books and articles supporting McCarthy. Here’s an excerpt from Waugh’s reply:

…McCarthy is certainly regarded by most Englishmen as a regrettable figure and your McCarthy and his Enemies, being written before his later extravagances will not go far to clear his reputation. […] Your book makes plain that there was a need for an invesitgation ten years ago. It does not, I am afraid, supply the information that would convince me that McCarthy was a suitable man to undertake it. Rovere makes a number of precise charges against his pesonal honour. Until those are rebutted those who sympathize with his cause must deplore his championship of it. [Letters, p. 536]

Buckley’s letters to Waugh continued, and he also urged Waugh to write for his magazine. This frustrated Waugh to the point where he wrote to Tom Driberg: “He has been showing me great & unsought attention lately and your article [in the New Statesman] makes me curious. Has he been supernaturally ‘guided’ to bore me? It would explain him.” (Letters, p. 543) Waugh finally relented and wrote a few articles in the magazine. There are at least two: a 1961 review of a biography of Chesterton by Gary Wills and a 1962 report of Waugh’s revisit to Guyana; both are reprinted in EAR which does not, alas, contain his review of the McCarthy book in The Spectator. But neither of these NR articles reflected any change in his views on McCarthy. See previous post. Whether Buckley or his magazine ever changed their views is not known to me.

The Spectator itself has posted another article on its celebration. This is by Simon Courtauld and is entitled “The radical history of The Spectator”. He covers much of the same territory as Fraser Nelson’s article in the Telegraph but adds this brief comment about the magazine’s literary coverage:

Among the fairly entertaining book reviews of the time was one by Bel Mooney, which the literary editor, A.N.Wilson, altered to read as an insult to Clive James. Wilson’s sacking by [Alexander] Chancellor subsequently cost the editor his job. Rebecca West threatened legal action when her wartime book on Yugoslavia was described by Alastair Forbes as ‘Balkan balderdash’. When reviewing a collection of Spectator and New Statesman articles, Auberon Waugh wrote that he couldn’t think ‘of a single reason why anyone should buy it’. In the previous century, more significantly, Spectator reviewers had been dismissive of some of the works of Dickens (especially Bleak House) and the BrontĂ« sisters (Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre).

Auberon also wrote for The Spectator from time to time. But of course that wouldn’t stop him from making a joke about them if they were the most convenient target available.

 

 

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New Yorker’s “Waugh Stories”

Posted on April 24, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The New Yorker has reposted its 2007 article entitled “Waugh Stories”. This apparently began life as a review of Alexander Waugh’s 2004 book Fathers and Sons but grew into something more ambitious in which the reviewer Joan Acocella launches into her own discussions of the lives and works of various Waughs beyond those contained in the book under review. In the end it has become one of those longer articles for which the New Yorker is well-known.

Most interesting to your correspondent were several mentions of Evelyn Waugh’s largely ignored early comic novel Black Mischief. This has fallen out of fashion since the satire directed against Africans now seems rather dated. But other subjects are also satirized in the book, and they are just as funny today as they were in the 1930s:

In “Black Mischief” (1932), which is set in an African country, the hero, Basil Seal, arrives at the British legation to announce that civil war has erupted in the nation. “I think it’s very mischievous of you saying all this,” the legate’s wife, Lady Courteney, replies. “You’re just talking. Now go and get yourself some whiskey . . . and I think you might put that dirty gun outside in the lobby.” She is English, and upper-class, and if the people of this strange, hot country to which her family has been posted have begun killing one another, that is no concern of hers. This is the soil from which Waugh reaps his comic harvest, but his books wouldn’t have lasted if they did not contain a serious moral drama. […]

But the morals didn’t get in the way of the comedy, some of which is directed at people whom, today, we are disposed to rescue from a history of abuse. An important character in “Black Mischief” is known to her friends as Black Bitch. Her countrymen squat on their haunches and polish their teeth with sticks. They all but have bones in their noses. Yet, in his treatment of Africans and other groups foreign to him, Waugh was in complete agreement with most of the educated people of his time and class. Their views have gone to the grave with them. His have survived, because they are enshrined in his marvellous novels, and therefore we have the opportunity to be shocked by him. Furthermore, Waugh didn’t just make fun of today’s targeted minorities; he made fun of everyone. […]

In “Black Mischief,” the Europeans, the would-be bringers of civilization, are satirized much more wickedly—and much more pointedly, in moral terms—than the Africans. When, at the end of the book, Lady Courteney’s nymphomaniac daughter is eaten for dinner at a tribal gathering, we don’t cry for her.

While digressing on such subjects, the reviewer does not ignore the book she is reviewing. She gives detailed descriptions of Alexander’s characterizations of Arthur, Evelyn and Auberon and adds her own thoughts where relevant. Alec Waugh receives relatively less attention but that was probably true in the book as well. Here’s an excerpt of her discussion of Auberon:

…Though he wrote on many subjects—politics, books, wine, food, nature—his specialty was the short, comic “diary” column, which is what he produced for fourteen years at Private Eye. In an entry from December, 1981, he notes that two headless bears are said to have been found in the river at Hackney: “Immediately one begins to feel alarmed for several of one’s friends. . . . I have not seen Geoffrey Wheatcroft for some time.” A week later, he describes The Spectator’s Christmas party, where the main speech was given by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. He adds that Sir Peregrine’s father, the Colonel, “used sometimes to be seen in bed with Eartha Kitt although it is thought that no impropriety occurred.” The next month, he reports on the activities of Women Against Rape. “What do they propose to put in its place?” he asks. Elsewhere, he takes out after Admiral Sir Alexander Gordon-Lennox, the sergeant-at-arms of the House of Commons, who, understandably, has been reluctant to give Auberon a press pass. When a small bomb goes off in Westminster Palace, Auberon accuses Sir Alexander of having farted.

He did not mince words about what such writing constituted. “Vulgar abuse,” he called it, and he stood up for it. “Vituperation is not a philosophy of life nor an answer to all life’s ills. It is merely a tool, a device. . . . It redresses some of the forces of deference which bolster the conceit of the second-rate; it also prevents the first-rate from going mad with conceit.” He felt that mockery was a British specialty and that this made “life in Britain preferable to life anywhere else.”…

The article is both informative and entertaining. It is available at the above link. Evelyn Waugh for his part did not write for the New Yorker, so far as I am aware. His writing appeared frequently in Life magazine, religious journals such as Commonweal, and Hearst magazines such as Town & Country. Edmund Wilson praised Waugh’s early books in the New Yorker (of which he was literary editor) but took a different view of the later ones after he disliked the religiosity of Brideshead Revisited.

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The Spectator at 10,000

Posted on April 23, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator, always proud of its heritage as the oldest periodical in English, is now celebrating the publication of its 10,000th issue. As part of this, they commissioned a clerihew competition (“Two couplets, AABB, metrically clunky, laconic and humorous in tone”). The subject should relate to the magazine’s contributors. Various Waughs feature in several of the winning entries (each of which was awarded a prize of ÂŁ8):

Auberon Waugh/is hard to ignore/but it takes no effort to revel in/Evelyn. (submitted by Robert Schechter)

Auberon Waugh/Thought his given name rather a bore,/Perhaps my parents suffered from Shakespeare mania./But I feel a right Titania. (submitted by Brian Allgar)

‘Evelyn Waugh’/Rhymes with ‘Bernard Shaw’./ So why ‘Shavian’?/But not ‘Wavian’? (submitted by Basil Ransome-Davies)

Here are some others relating to Evelyn’s contemporaries:

Kingsley Amis/had many fans who may miss/him terribly, but at least they can hearten/to know we still have Martin. (submitter unspecified)

Graham Greene/Judged Shirley Temple on the silver screen/More than age appropriately cute./Her studio filed suit. (submitted by Chris O’Carroll)

Also related to The Spectator’s publication milestone is an article entitled “From Middlemarch to Mickey Mouse: a short history of The Spectator’s books and arts pages.” This is written by Richard Bratby. Waugh frequently wrote for The Spectator throughout his career and his contribution is duly noted in the article, along with that of his friends John Betjeman and Graham Greene;

…there are the moments when the editor guides a writer to the ideal subject, and creates something remarkable in itself — a glimpse of immortality before any other contemporary could have perceived or expressed it. […]

Graham Greene’s film reviews have been the subject of books, but he wrote on other subjects as well, and in an obituary of Ford Madox Ford in 1939 he suddenly soars clear into pure, unmistakable Greene:

“The war had ruined him. He had volunteered, though he was over military age and was fighting a country he loved: his health was broken, and he came back to a new literary world which had carefully eliminated him
 But I don’t suppose failure disturbed him much: he had never really believed in human happiness, his middle life had been made miserable by passion, and he had come through — with his humour intact, his stock of unreliable anecdotes, the kind of enemies a man ought to have, and a half-belief in a posterity which would care for good writing.”

 

These moments get easier to spot as the 20th century progresses. Betjeman reveals that his teddy bear Archie ‘has a very dreary, Nonconformist face’, and discusses pets in the most Betjeman way imaginable: ‘I had the privilege of being introduced to two enormous millipedes, about nine inches long and half an inch in diameter, by Miriam Rothschild in a country house drawing-room in Oxfordshire a few days ago.’ […] With E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess and Anthony Powell all contributing to the mid-century arts section, the game is to try and find the most illuminating possible mismatch of writer and subject. […]

Evelyn Waugh, asked to nominate Christmas books, suggests using them to settle grudges (‘We can send these missiles in the happy assurance that in the dyspeptic gloom of Boxing Day, any hit which we score will be doubly painful’). …

In his 1983 selection of Evelyn Waugh’s journalism, Donat Gallagher wrote: “In most circumstances Waugh would write entertainingly for a high fee. He would write seriously for no fee (e.g., for the Tablet) or for a small fee (e.g., for the Spectator). The market in between did not much interest him.” (EAR, pp.111-12).

Finally, Waugh is also mentioned in connection with another less well- remembered art figure of the interwar years. This is Arthur Jeffress described as a “bright young person of the post-war art scene”. He was a collector and dealer of artworks who has now become the subject of a biography by Gill Headley: Arthur Jeffress: A Life in Art. This is reviewed in this week’s Spectator by Ariane Bankes. As she explains:

…A penchant for dressing up and play-acting enlivened his days at Cambridge, and he emerged into the world of bright young people. or indeed Vile Bodies, with the funds to make a splash, hosting the infamous Red and White Party in 1931. His aesthetic taste was honed by friendships with the likes of the Sitwells and Edward Burra, and notably during his turbulent affair with John Deakin, then a belligerent and sulphurous would- be painter before he turned to photography…

The review goes on to describe his career as a dealer and collector, ending with his suicide at 55 for reasons not entirely clear.

 

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Roundup: Audrey Lucas and More

Posted on April 21, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan Mclaren has added more information to his website concerning Waugh’s friendship with actress and writer Audrey Lucas. This takes the form of an imagined interview of Audrey by Nancy Mitford in advance of the now postponed Brideshead Festival at Castle Howard. This is mainly focused the the consideration of two novels omitted from Duncan’s earlier posting: Lucas’s Life Class (1935) and Waugh’s Put Out More Flags (1942). Both books contain a character which each of the authors had based upon the other. In Life Class this is Matthew Lenox and in POMF, Angela Lyne. The previous post considered Angela Lyne’s appearance in Black Mischief, but this is much expanded in the new discussion. Here’s is Audrey’s explanation to Nancy of her character’s derivation from Evelyn Waugh :

AL: … The main character, Matthew Lenox, was effectively Evelyn Waugh. He had written one successful novel, called Bright Fear, and he was wondering what to write about next. His sister and mother were scathing about his first book and encouraged him to learn a bit more about life before writing anything else.’

NM: “If that was a side-swipe at Decline and Fall, I have to say that I love that book.”

AL: “I think by the time I wrote Life Class, Evelyn had written Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust. I wasn’t saying these novels were bad. I was just saying that they focussed on the feelings of a very privileged individual and his set. What about the ordinary man and woman? Life Class was set in a boarding house where Mathew Lenox went to live in order to observe ‘ordinary’ life. But Matthew was not the protagonist of my book any more than the couple who ran the boarding house, or the daughter who first attracted Mathew’s attention, or the henpecked husband and his bullying wife who stayed there, or the lonely spinster, or the Indian guests, or the cleaning woman, or the cook.”

Here’s a link to the new posting on Duncan’s website. Duncan also provides a link to the earlier post at the end of the new one, but I recommend starting with the new one because it is self contained. If you want to know about Audrey herself then go back to the earlier post.

–Ephraim Hardcastle in a recent Daily Mail gossip column includes this entry:

Graham Greene enjoyed a warm correspondence with Auberon Waugh, son of Evelyn, reveals former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams, now compiling a volume of Bron’s letters. How did he get on with his curmudgeonly father? Asked at the Ritz Hotel launch of Selina Hastings’s biography if the Scoop author was looking down on proceedings, Bron replied: ‘You mean looking up?’

There is no information on the status of Richard Ingrams’s collection, but it is one more thing that we may anxiously await.

–Penguin Books in one of their various newsletters has selected 20 book that defined the 1930s. These are not all available in Penguin editions, but the recommendation of the one by Waugh is a Penguin Classic:

Waugh’s mind was certainly a free flowing fountain of genius [and] Scoop was his masterstroke. The late author [Christopher] Hitchens called it ‘a novel of pitiless realism, the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has ever done save Hecht and MacArthur’s Front Page.’ […] Readers laugh as loudly now as they did in 1938 at the technicolour characters, absurdity of 20th century journalism and pinpoint persiflage of what is widely acknowledged as the unrivalled masterpiece of Fleet Street lamponery.

–Last year’s inaugural David Bradshaw Writer in Residence at Oxford, Rob Francis, has just seen his first novel published. This is entitled Bella and is reviewed in the Express and Star, a regional newspaper based in Wolverhampton. The review by Heather Large also includes an interview. According to Rob (who writes as R M Francis):

His novel, was completed as part of his PhD in Creative Writing in the University [of Wolverhapmton’s] School of Humanities, and is a folk horror story set in Netherton and Dudley. Bella tells the tale of a small community dealing with the hear-say, myths and hauntings of the local woods and the novel plays with oral traditions of storytelling, using Black Country dialects and the different voices of multicultural Britain.

“Almost every community in the UK has got strange stories, not necessarily bodies found in trees but other strange occurrences, especially if they live on the edge of town, that lots of people talk about and pass on through generations so they become part of its cultural psyche,” says the 36-year-old.

Rob, who lives in Dudley, spent three years researching and writing followed by a year of editing and says the story was also inspired by his fascination with the Black Country landscape.

“The novel is like my love song to the Black Country and Black Country culture. I feel like the Black Country is an overlooked community culturally – overlooked by people who aren’t from here and people who are from the Black Country and people from the Black Country take the beauty and culture for granted,” he says.

Last month’s book launch is available on YouTube.

–Oxford post graduate student Franziska Rauh was forced by the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown to return home to Bavaria. She has written an article for Cherwell about her struggle to find reading material that will have the effect of keeping her connected to Oxford during her continental quarantine. The article opens with this:

Okay, I thought, when I found myself two weeks into lockdown: NOW is the time to finally read that copy of Brideshead Revisited I bought at Blackwell’s in my first week at Oxford. I opened Evelyn Waugh’s much beloved masterpiece and read its opening description of a sunny June day in Oxford. But the references to cobblestones, punting on the Isis, walking down High Street, and passing Carfax tower gave me a sharp pain in the chest. I could not read them while feeling that I had been torn away from all this beauty and excitement by a global health crisis; that, in all likelihood, there would not be any days of June in Oxford for me in the foreseeable future (being on a one-year graduate course, I could not soothe myself by hoping for better luck in Trinity 2021, either). I was too heartbroken. So with a sigh, I put Evelyn Waugh back on the shelf, where he had been since October; only, this was now the bookshelf in my childhood bedroom somewhere in Bavaria, and not an Oxford college bookshelf anymore, which had given my earlier failure to read one of the most famous Oxford novels at least some kind of glamour before.

In the remainder of the article she discusses her struggle to decide which book of Dorothy Sayers on the shelf she should read instead of Brideshead. She finally decides on Gaudy Night, set in Oxford, in preference to Have His Carcase which takes place elsewhere.

UPDATE (24 April 2020): Information was added to the entry on Rob Francis’s new book.

 

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Posted in Academia, Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Collections, Newspapers, Oxford, Put Out More Flags, Scoop | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Audrey Lucas and More