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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Waugh’s Journalism

Posted on April 19, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Literary Review in its latest newsletter has reposted Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s 1984 review of Donat Gallagher’s collection of Waugh’s journalism, Essays, Articles and Reviews. The publication of that collection and Wheatcroft’s review were contemporaneous with Martin Stannard’s Critical Heritage and there was no opportunity to include the review in that volume. This is a pity because the review contains many thoughtful and original insights into Waugh’s career as a journalist as well as praise for Prof Gallagher’s collection, and its republication by LR is a welcome gesture.

Wheatcroft’s review is essentially an essay about Waugh’s journalism that focuses on examples included in Prof Gallagher’s collection to prove Wheatcroft’s points, on most of which he is in agreement with Prof Gallagher. Wheatcroft begins with a fairly wide-ranging consideration of the relative importance of journalism to the Waugh family income. In Waugh’s family it was necessary “to work to keep alive”:

 …After his comical adventures as a private schoolmaster [Waugh] lived all his life by his pen. He enjoyed precocious success with his first novel Decline and Fall (‘welcomed and over-rewarded early’ was Mr Pinfold) but although his five pre-war novels were admired and widely read they did not keep him in the style to which he was becoming accustomed, and they were inadequate to support a large family living in a large house. In 1945 he hit the jackpot with Brideshead Revisited. His subsequent books were what’s called well received (not highly praised enough in the case of the war trilogy, the greatest English fiction of the last generation) but they were surprisingly, as Mr Gallagher tells us in one of his linking introductions, a declining asset.

Meanwhile Waugh’s life had become still more expensive. There is a hair-raising passage in the Diaries which suggests that he was spending £18,000 a year in the mid-Fifties. Maybe that was in an aberrant year but it represents – what? – the best part of £200,000 in today’s money. That is the economic background to this fascinating and desirable book. For much of his life Waugh was continually looking for journalistic work to supplement his income. Mr Gallagher mentions fees paid, but could have given more detail still: money is the neglected but ever-interesting side of any writer’s life.

In the 1930s Waugh might expect to receive ÂŁ20 or 30 guineas for a 2000-word piece in a glossy magazine, as they then weren’t called, which was handsome pay. On the other hand, reviewing books for the Spectator or the Tablet can scarcely have paid many bills. After the success of Brideshead he could command any sum he liked from American magazines but by a bitter irony penal taxation then made it barely worth his while. He was eager only for pieces which allowed him the luxury – privilege indeed under the Attlee Terror – of foreign travel. […]

After a discussion of the range of topics covered by Waugh’s journalism and Prof Gallagher’s success in producing relevant examples, Wheatcroft comes to this interesting insight on Waugh’s views of the Irish among the Roman Catholic clergy:

Perceptively also, [Prof Gallagher] points out that in certain telling respects Waugh was as much a ‘liberal’ as a ‘conservative’ Catholic. To be sure, he had no exaggerated personal respect for the clergy, as opposed to reverence for their sacred office. Part of that may be put down to – let’s call it ethnic disdain. It is possible to acquit Waugh, without excessive casuistry, of most of the usual charges of racial prejudice. But not of another. There is a bravura passage in his long essay ’The American Epoch in the Catholic Church’. […]

Instead of finding their destiny as the Catholic kingdom of the British Isles the Irish have crossed the Atlantic “where they have settled in their millions bringing with them all their grudges and the melancholy of the bogs 
 They have learnt some of the superficial habits of ‘good citizenship’ but at heart remain the same adroit and joyless race that broke the heart of all who ever tried to help them 
 It is one of the functions of an upper class to see that the clergy do not get above themselves 
 one can understand why there is a distinct whiff of anti-clericalism where Irish priests are in power 
 they have lost their peasant simplicity without acquiring a modest carriage of their modest learning.”

The last sentences were altered in the originally published form and here seen as Waugh first wrote them; it would be interesting to see this book reviewed in the Irish Press or the Maynooth Review….

In this instance Wheatcroft brings to light an example of Prof Gallagher’s scholarship. Where two published versions of an article exist, he compares the two and offers comments. In the bolded portion of the quoted text, Waugh’s language was evidently changed by or at the request of the Life magazine editors and carried forward, without apparent intervention by Waugh, in the UK version published in The Tablet. Prof Gallgher cited this in a footnote, and Wheatcroft restores the quoted text to reflect Waugh’s original version. There are other cases in which Waugh did intervene to restore material in a UK version that had been edited or omitted in the US.

Wheatcroft also addresses the issue of there being two versions of Prof Gallagher’s collection and jokingly professes some frustration at having been put to the expense of buying the original and much smaller collection published in 1977 as A Little Order. He claims in his conclusion that having shelled out for the original version “is one reason why I have reviewed this book, but the highest compliment is to say that I should have bought it anyway.”

In this regard, Prof Gallagher once explained to me that he originally hoped to publish a book the size of the final version in an edition uniform with the 1976 publication of Waugh’s Diaries. But Waugh’s reputation was at such a low ebb at the time that the publishers were unwilling to risk it. As I recall, the Diaries, at least in the USA, were fairly quickly remaindered. But with the success enjoyed by the Collected Letters published in 1980, and boosted by the popularity of the 1981 Granada TV series, the question of a larger edition was re-examined, and Prof Gallagher’s original concept was published in 1983 in the format reviewed in the LR. It should perhaps also be noted that the original and smaller collection remains in print in the UK as a Penguin paperback version under the title A Little Order; whereas, the 1983 version Essays, Article and Reviews is out of print.

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Evelyn Waugh’s America

Posted on April 18, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

There are several articles this week that focus on Waugh’s trips to the USA in the late 1940s:

–The most comprehesive is one by Roman Catholic publisher, educator and author Joshua Hren in the latest issue of the Jesuit journal, America magazine. This is entitled “What Evelyn Waugh saw in America (An Anglo-American romance)”, and in it Hren surveys the major newspaper and magazine articles based on Waugh’s American trips as well as his novella The Loved One. The article opens with this summary of what it will cover:

When Evelyn Waugh first visited the United States in 1947, he anthropomorphized the country as AimĂ©e Thanatogenos, the anti-heroine of his Hollywood novel The Loved One. She is a naĂŻve young beauty who was “dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements.” A year later, Waugh crossed the Atlantic from England again. Though he remained vexed by the country’s forbidding foreignness, on second glance his ironic distance was lessened. The birthmarks of the United States, he found, were not all blights that demanded excision. Discovering her Catholic side, the smitten Waugh took the country as his loved one.

The article goes on to cite Waugh’s novella and his articles in the Daily Telegraph, Life magazine and The Tablet satirizing the film companies and California burial customs. He returned the next year, but this time he was undertaking an exploration of Roman Catholic America. His two trips in 1948 and 1949 had a dual purpose which Hren does not fully address. They were intended to gather material for a major Life magazine article while also lecturing at Roman Catholic universities. The latter project was suggested to him by the Jesuit president of Loyola College of Maryland, Fr Francis X Talbot after he had organized the award of an honorary degree to Waugh in 1947. Waugh regretted he was unable to come in person to collect the degree due to British travel and currency restrictions, and Fr Talbot suggested a lecture tour of Catholic universities to finance the venture. Waugh then arranged with Life for a major article, and they paid for a preparatory research tour in Nov-Dec 1948, prior to the lectures in Feb-Mar 1949.

Hren conflates the two tours but this is understandable as they took place back-to-back with only a brief interval of less than a month in between. Waugh’s wife accompanied him on the 1949 lecture tour but not the 1948 tour, and it was on the 1948 tour that he stopped to see Thomas Merton in Kentucky, not the lecture tour as Hren has written. The current America article does an excellent job of summarizing Waugh’s published writings about these largely ignored later trips, appearing in Life and The Tablet in slightly different forms in the later months of 1949. His discussions of Waugh’s descriptions of Catholicism in New Orleans and Maryland are of particular interest. These trips are described in greater detail in a three-part article entitled “Something Entirely Unique” appearing in Evelyn Waugh Studies Nos. 43.3, 44.1 and 44.2 (2013-14).

Waugh made one more brief trip to the USA. This was in 1950 in connection with the publication of the Little, Brown edition of his novel Helena. His wife also accompanied him on this trip. Hren closes his article with this:

When Waugh made his final trip to the United States in 1950, he rode the coattails of his diagnoses in Life. Waugh was welcomed, in the words of Pamela Berry, “in a quaint Catholic light” that showed him to be “a noble gentle person who is capable, oh, yes, from time to time of naughty spitefulness, but who is on the whole a saintly, good person, healed and beatified by the Church.”

But Waugh was no saint much of the time. The tormented artist was aware of his hot temper and knew how uncharitable he could be. “How to reconcile this indifference to human beings with the obligation of Charity,” he confided in a friend, “That is my problem.” As George Weigel has noted, in his later years the novelist undertook a purgative “spiritual quest for compassion and contrition. As for many of us, the contrition likely came easier than the compassion.” Selena Hastings says that as a corrective to his misanthropy the Catholic writer “channeled a substantial portion of his income to Catholic charities.”

All of Waugh’s articles quoted in the America article are reproduced in EAR.

–A new biography of Roman Catholic social reformer Dorothy Day is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. The book is by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph and is entitled Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century. The Journal’s review by Michael O’Donnell is subtitled “Saint, Sinner, Troublemaker”. Day was a difficult person. O’Donnell illustrates this point with the same quote from Waugh as was cited in Joshua Hren’s contemporaneous article in America magazine: Evelyn Waugh, when he visited her New York soup kitchen during his 1948 trip to New York City described her as “an ascetic who wants us all to be poor.”  The book’s authors put it differently: “there is enough in the record of her dramatic life to alienate anyone.”  The review concludes with a description of her by a Chicago contemporary. “The definition of a martyr, he joked, was some one who had to live with a saint.”

–In his latest diary column in The Times, Patrick Kidd also alludes to Waugh’s 1947 trip to America:

Hollywood lesson
Prince Harry is said by his friend Jane Goodall to find his life in Los Angeles “a bit challenging”. The Hollywood mix of ego and informality can be hard for a royal raised on protocol. Harry should take advice from Evelyn Waugh, who had a similar problem in the 1940s and found it best to let the vacuousness wash over him. “They don’t expect you to listen,” Waugh wrote. “It’s the secret of social success. They talk entirely for their own pleasure.”

The quote comes from the opening pages of The Loved One.

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Mary Lygon Profiled

Posted on April 17, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

An article was recently posted on the website RoyalFoibles,com devoted to the life and, more particularly, the unhappy marriage of Waugh’s friend Mary Lygon. This is entitled “F****d Up Royal, or in this case Imperial, Marriages #49”. But don’t be put off by the title. It seems to be a serious research piece that is well written and organized. The anonymous WordPress weblog is self-described as:

An anecdotal look at ruling class misdeeds throughout history…It was born out of my life long obsession with the royal families of the world, particularly Europe. I’m a very shy man, so that’s as much as I’ll write about myself right now. I’m sure I’ll open up more as time goes on. In the meantime, please enjoy my blog.

The Mary Lygon article begins with this summary:

The romantic travails of Lady Mary Lygon not only wouldn’t have been out of place in an Evelyn Waugh novel, but it’s generally agreed he modeled the character of Lady Julia Flyte from his novel, Brideshead Revisited, after Mary, whom he befriended in the early ’30s, around the time she was being courted by Prince George, youngest surviving son of George V. This courtship likely would’ve turned into a marriage had Mary’s vindictive uncle, the Duke of Westminster, who harbored a long simmering personal hatred for, and political rivalry with, Mary’s father, the 7th Earl of Beauchamp, not exposed his heretofore secret homosexuality to the powers that be, including his prospective in-law, the King, prompting the good Earl to end his political career, flee the country, and prompting his wife to permanently separate from, though never divorce, him.

By the late ’30s Lady Mary settled for a morganatic marriage to a penniless Romanov prince, Vsesvolod Ivanovich, which granted her the title of Princess Romanovsky-Pavlovsky, with the style of Serene Highness. They made a glamorous couple in London during the Second World War, both volunteering to help the war effort, the Princess even running her own Red Cross unit complete with its own ambulance. Once the war ended, so apparently did their marriage. By the early ’50s both had become violent alcoholics, with Mary’s friends accusing her Prince of having pissed away her inheritance and openly cheating on her. He left her for his mistress shortly after Christmas of 1953, the both of them finally divorcing, on the grounds of Vsevolod’s adultery, in 1956. He would go on to marry twice more, dying of cancer in 1973. Mary would pass away nine years later, a broke, embittered alcoholic with only her dogs for company, having never remarried after her divorce. Her life proves the old maxim that truth sometimes really is stranger than fiction.

Waugh’s friendship with Mary Lygon, as well as his enmity towards her husband, are mentioned throughout the article. This theme is introduced in the article’s opening paragraph:

Our story begins in the early ’30s when Mary and her equally glamorous debutante sisters, Lettice, Sibell, and Dorothy, were hailed as The Beauchamp Belles, owing to their father being the Earl of Beauchamp, and were among London’s Bright Young Things immortalized in such novels by Evelyn Waugh as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. In fact, Waugh wasn’t only a friend of the Lygon sisters, especially Mary, but his long stays at her family estate, Madresfield Court, according to Coryne Hall in her 2009 article, Lady Mary and The Pauper Prince, served as the inspiration for the titular estate of his most famous novel, Brideshead Revisted, with Mary serving as the basis for the romantically star crossed character, Lady Julia Flyte, and Mary’s father generally supposed to serve as the murky inspiration for the Flytes‘ exiled father, Lord Marchmain. …

Following Mary’s relationship with Prince George (a son of George V) that was ended after her father’s scandalous exile, she returned to live at Madresfield. According to the article:

Despite her personal upheavals, however, Lady Mary partied on throughout the [1930s], continuing to be among the darlings of London society, and hosting lavish weekend parties, for her friend Evelyn Waugh among others, at Madresfield Court, which, thanks to her parents’ absence, her mother having chosen to leave the family seat after separating from their father, she had complete control over along with her siblings. [Emphasis supplied]

There seems little support for this assertion of lavish parties. The two recent accounts of Waugh’s frequent and often extended visits to Madresfield starting in January 1932 suggest that social life there was rather subdued because of financial restraints imposed on the living expenses of by the then effectively orphaned Lygon daughters Lettice, Sibell, Mary and Dorothy. These accounts appear in Jane Mulvagh’s Madresfield (2008) and Paula Byrne’s Mad World (2009).

Waugh certainly continued his friendship with Mary after her marriage (although their is no mention that Waugh attended her wedding ceremony in April 1939; he wasn’t keeping a diary at the time). He sometimes visited and stayed with the couple when in London during the war, and after the war he seems to have cooperated (at least to some extent) with Vsevolod on a book he wrote which was sponsored by Vsevolod’s employers, the wine merchants Saccone & Speed. In fact, Waugh dedicated his 1947 book Wine in Peace and War “To H. H. Prince Vsevolode [sic] of Russia”. So, they must have still been on speaking terms by then. The article seems to get this about right:

…Mary’s friends, particularly Evelyn Waugh, also stayed occasionally, and many began to see evidence that the Prince’s reasons for marrying his bride were more mercenary than romantic. Waugh certainly suspected as much, and wrote in his diary that, if Vsesvolod didn’t have any wine to sell, he’d be otherwise useless. Soon Waugh couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with him.

After their marriage broke up in the 1950s (they separated in 1953 and divorced in 1956), Mary fell on hard times (her inheritance having been squandered by Vsevolod), and Waugh provided her with financial support from time to time. The article ends with this:

She withdrew from the world after [the divorce], eventually moving to a small market town. She never remarried, and kept only her beloved Pekingese dogs for company. She died in 1982. Her ex husband would marry twice more, finding happiness with his much younger third wife, and finding financial security in a job as assistant to the CEO of an insurance company, before dying an excruciating death from cancer in 1973.

All in all, Lady Mary Lygon’s life stands out not for its glamour, but for its tragic romantic losses. Still, there was at least one man in her life who didn’t let her down. Her friend, Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, may not necessarily be considered a great work of literature by all, but it’s undoubtedly among the most famous English novels written in the last century, and most scholars agree he not only modeled the novel’s titular estate after the ancestral seat of Lady Mary Lygon’s family, but he based the character of the glamorous, romantically doomed Lady Julia Flyte, who’s arguably the novel’s heroine, after his friend, Mary. Her life may not have amounted to much, but in the world of literature, she’ll always be immortal.

The extent to which Mary may have contributed to the character of Julia Flyte is somewhat circumstantial and seems a bit overstated in the article. This conclusion relies heavily on the cited article by Coryne Hall (“Lady Mary and the Pauper Prince,” Royalty Digest Quarterly, 4/2009) which is not available online. Waugh never suggested a connection, so far as I am aware. Indeed, he was hoping to avoid connections with individual members of the Lygon family because the setting was to a large extent based on their residence at Madresfield House. There were thoughts of a Royal marriage for Julia (as was also the case for Mary), but there was never any courtship due to religious issues. Julia’s marriage was unhappy, but this was not because she and Rex were serious alcoholics, as was the case of Mary and Vsevolod, nor did Rex take advantage of Julia’s inheritance, so far as Waugh’s narrative goes. Mary did share with Julia a successful wartime career in charity work. But aside from these few connections, it would be inaccurate to assume that she contributed to Julia to the extent that Alastair Graham contributed to Sebastian. Perhaps her contribution was more on the scale of that of her brother Hugh’s somewhat circumstantial contribution to Sebastian.

 

 

 

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Needing a Laugh? Another List

Posted on April 16, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent issue of The Times, their comedy critic Dominic Maxwell recommends a list of 10 books which he hopes will make readers laugh, as did he when he read them. Here’s the recommendation for one by Evelyn Waugh:

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (1928)
Evelyn Waugh would go on to write books of greater heft, not least his war-inspired works Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy. Yet sod heft, let’s have some grimly glorious laughs. For sheer, pitiless, read-between-the-lines comedy, his debut, published when he was 24, takes some beating. The tale of a pleasant young theology student, Paul Pennyfeather, who gets shunted helplessly between the institutions of establishment England, announced Waugh as one of the great comic voices of the 20th century.

Waugh would be pleased with his book’s position in the list, which is arranged chronologically. He comes between Diary of a Nobody (Grossmith) and The Code of the Woosters (Wodehouse)–two that would probably be on Waugh’s own list of comedy favorites. Other books on the Times’ list include two surprises–novels which are based on (or are the basis for) more famous TV series: The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and Alan Partridge: Nomad. Martin Amis’s Money is also included but, while it is more ambitious, it is arguably less laugh-out-loud funny than Dead Babies. Waugh would be pleased as well with one of Maxwell’s omissions. This is Catch 22 which Waugh also failed to find amusing. Maxwell says he was never able to finish it.

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Slightly Foxed Podcast Posted: “The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh”

Posted on April 15, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The podcast produced by Slightly Foxed magazine mentioned in a previous post has now been posted. Here’s the link. Alexander Waugh and Selina Hastings are the guest panelists. A summary and cites to mentions of several works by and about Waugh are also posted:

The great prose stylist of the 20th century, monster, performer? Biographer and literary journalist Selina Hastings and writer and critic Alexander Waugh reveal the many reputations of Evelyn Waugh with the Slightly Foxed editors. From a pathological fear of boredom, hallucinations provoked by doses of bromide and cheques bouncing at the Ritz to his relationships conducted through letters, his genius for sharp satire and love of gossip, the conversation brings to light the darkness and humour of Waugh’s works. And we visit The Loved One’s Whispering Glades in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 45 minutes; 21 seconds)

Books Mentioned
Please note that while many titles by other publishers are available to buy from the Slightly Foxed shop, we will not be able to order them from our distributor and send them out to readers until the office reopens. We may be able to find second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna for more information.

Books by Evelyn Waugh
– The Sword of Honour trilogy: Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender (3:14)
– Put out More Flags is out of print (3:53)
– Decline and Fall (11:48)
– Scoop (18:44)
– A Handful of Dust (21:50)
– Brideshead Revisited (22:58)
– The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is out of print (27:09)
– The Loved One (32:35)

Other Books
– The Carey Novels by Ronald Welch, Slightly Foxed Cubs editions (1:46)
– Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, Selina Hastings is out of print (2:40)
– Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, Alexander Waugh is out of print (2:47)
– A Russian Journal, John Steinbeck with photographs by Robert Capa (40:37)
– The Singapore Grip, J. G. Farrell (41:40)
– Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Diana Price is out of print (42:27)
– Zoo Station, David Downing is out of print (44:02)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
– The Tortoise of Total War, Anthony Gardner on the Sword of Honour trilogy in Issue 36 (3:14)
– Race of Ghosts, Patrick Denman Flanery on Put out More Flags in Issue 9 (3:53)
– Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age, William Palmer on The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in Issue 65 (27:09)
– Waugh on the Warpath, Ranjit Bolt on The Loved One in Issue 46 (32:35)

The program begins with a wide-ranging discussion among the four panelists of several of Waugh’s books as well as aspects of his character. This goes on for about 1/2 hour and is the most interesting part of the presentation. Mention is made of an article about The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in the current issue of the magazine (#65). This is by William Palmer who is finishing up a new book entitled In Love With Hell which is about 20c alcoholic writers. There follow two regular features. The first is a reading from the Slightly Foxed archive. In this case, they select a June 2015 article by playwright and translator Ranjit Bolt about The Loved One. This is an interesting summary of a book that was not a topic of the panel discussion. But beware of several references to a character named “Derick”. I was distracted by this several times as I wracked my memory for who this may be. But after about about 5 references, it turns out the reader is talking about “Dennis” Barlow. Since the article is behind a paywall I could not determine whether this was the fault of the reader or the author of the article. In the final segment each of the panelists is invited to recommend a book. The most notable suggestion was Selina Hasting’s recommendation of J G Farrell’s novel The Singapore Grip which I have been meaning to reread if I can ever locate my copy. I think a TV adaptation may be about to appear on ITV–at least such was their promise earlier in the season.

UPDATE (15 April 2020): Some details of the program were added in a final paragraph.

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New Volume of CWEW Announced: Helena, v. 11

Posted on April 14, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford University Press has posted the next volume of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. This is his 1950 novel Helena which will appear as volume 11 in November. The OUP descripton is posted on their website. Here’s an excerpt:

Set in the 4th century AD, and Waugh’s only historical novel, Helena is the story of the mother of Emperor Constantine and her reputed discovery of the ‘True Cross’. Waugh described Helena as his favourite among his works—in a Face to Face interview with John Freeman for the BBC in 1960, for example. His fictional account of Helena’s widely-celebrated life and pilgrimage is the product of detailed historical research, and it contributes to our understanding of Waugh’s views of the Church, both ancient and modern. Uniquely, however, Helena also demonstrates Waugh’s interest in domestic politics set against a backdrop of significant historical acts.

The Table of Contents is also available:

Introduction
Helena
Appendix A: Contextual Notes
Appendix B: Manuscript Development and Textual Variants
Appendix C: Waugh’s Manuscript ‘Foreword’ to Helena
Appendix D: Manuscript Version of Chapter IX ‘Recessional’
Appendix E: Notes on Translating Helena

The editor of this volume is Sara Haslam. See previous post. Here is her c.v. from the website:

Sara Haslam is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Faculty Director of Research Degrees at the Open University. She is the author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War (Manchester, 2002) and co-author of Life Writing (Routledge, 2008), has edited five of Ford’s works, and is editor, or co-editor, of The Routledge Research Companion to Ford Madox Ford (2019) and three volumes of International Ford Madox Ford Studies. She has published widely on Ford, modernism, and war literature, and has also written on Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and the BrontĂ«s. She is currently researching First World War bibliotherapy, and her article on Helen Mary Gaskell’s War Library was published in the Journal of Medical Humanities (2018).

This volume is already offered for advance sale on both the OUP and Amazon.co.uk websites but has not yet appeared on their US counterparts. The UK offers indicate that the book is not available for shipment to the USA. This may be due to current interruption in transatlantic shipping schedules during the Wuhan coronavirus shutdowns.

 

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