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.

Share
Posted in Catholicism, Collections, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh’s Journalism

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.

Share
Posted in Essays, Articles & Reviews, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, The Loved One | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Evelyn Waugh’s America

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.

 

 

 

Share
Posted in Articles, Brideshead Revisited, Wine in Peace and War | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Mary Lygon Profiled

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.

Share
Posted in Decline and Fall, Humo(u)r, Newspapers | Tagged , | 1 Comment

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.

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Alexander Waugh, Biographies, Brideshead Revisited, Discussions, Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags, Radio Programs, Sword of Honour, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold | Tagged , | Comments Off on Slightly Foxed Podcast Posted: “The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh”

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.

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Complete Works, Helena, Items for Sale | Tagged , | Comments Off on New Volume of CWEW Announced: Helena, v. 11

Book Clubs and Waugh

Posted on April 14, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

An article has been posted on the academic website TheConversation.com entitled “Book clubs and the Blitz: how WWII Britons kept calm and got reading.” This is by Nicola Wilson of the University of Reading. She explains the growth of book clubs and how they became increasingly important durng WWII as demand grew (especially after blackout enforcement became more strict) and supplies like paper and distribution networks shrank.

Wilson sees some similarities to the present situation of mandatory self isolation:

…Books were promoted by libraries and book clubs as the very thing to fight boredom and fill blacked-out evenings at home or in shelters with pleasure and forgetfulness. “Books may become more necessary than gas-masks,” the Book Society, Britain’s first celebrity book club, advised.

I’ve been researching the choices and recommendations of the Book Society for the past few years. The club was set up in 1929 and ran until the 1960s, shipping “carefully” selected books out to thousands of readers each month. It was modelled on the success of the American Book-of-the-Month club (which launched in 1926) and aimed to boost book sales at a time when buying books wasn’t common. It irritated some critics and booksellers who accused it of “dumbing down” and giving an unfair advantage to some books over others – but was hugely popular with readers.

The Book Society was run by a selection committee of literary celebrities – the likes of JB Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, George Gordon, Edmund Blunden and Cecil Day-Lewis – chaired by bestselling novelist Hugh Walpole. Selections were not meant to be the “best” of anything, but had to be worthwhile and deserving of people’s time and hard-earned cash.

Guaranteeing tens of thousands of extra sales, the club had a huge impact on the mid-20th-century book trade, with publishers desperate to get the increased sales and global reach of what publisher Harold Raymond called “the Book Society bun”.

How much this may have affected Waugh’s book sales is not entirely clear but may become more so when Wilson publishes the results of her research. She provides a summary in the posted article:

Throughout the second world war, the Book Society varied its lists between books that offered some insight on the strangeness of contemporary life and works of fiction – especially historical fiction – that took readers’ minds off it.

Titles in the first group include comic novels by the likes of E M Delafield and Evelyn Waugh, as well as forgotten bestsellers like Ethel Vance’s Escape (1939) (an unlikely thriller set in a concentration camp) and Reaching for the Stars (1939), American journalist Nora Waln’s inside account of life in Nazi Germany.

The 1986 bibliography of Waugh’s books lists several book club editions, but the only example of a pre-war book being republished by a UK book club during the war is Robbery Under Law. This was first published by Chapman & Hall in June 1939 and was reissued in 1940 by the Catholic Book Club (p. 12).

Put Out More Flags was published by C&H in 1942, and this was followed in 1943 by what the bibliography describes (p. 12) as a “Book Club Edition.” Illustrations of dustjackets and book covers on the internet suggest that this was issued by something called “The Book Club” rather than by The Book Society.

When Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945, the war was winding down, but rationing of paper continued. When the first edition was issued in May 1945, it was published jointly by The Book Society and C&H, with all but 300 of the initial run of 9000 taken by The Book Society. This was because the paper supply allocated to The Book Society exceeded that available to C&H. A similar situation prevailed in the USA where the issue date of Book of the Month Club edition required a postponement of originally planned publication of the Little, Brown trade edition by several months (except for a limited Little, Brown edition of 600 copies). See EWS 50.2 (Autumn 2019), p. 8.

Penguin Books paperback editions also helped meet readers’ wartime demand for Waugh’s books. They had published paperback editions of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Black Mischief before the war and seem to have kept at least the first two of those available by reprinting during the war years. They also printed the first paperback editions of both Scoop and Put Out More Flags during the war.

It seems likely that e-book publishers may take the place of book clubs and paperbacks in meeting heightened demand during the current emergency. In Texas, libraries and book stores are closed as “non-essential” (as opposed, for example, to gun stores and firing ranges which are allowed to remain open). The public library (at least in Austin) is able to lend e-books, and booksellers also have the option to sell e-books as well as deliver hard copies ordered by email or phone. (Audio books may also be available if they can be emailed.) Whether any enterprising libraries or booksellers are offering curbside pick-up is unknown to me.

UPDATE (14 September 2021): The discussion of the US publication date of Brideshead had been revised based on new research.

Share
Posted in Academia, Bibliophilia, Brideshead Revisited, Put Out More Flags, Research, Robbery Under Law, World War II | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Easter Roundup: Reading Waugh in a Time of Self-Isolation

Posted on April 12, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–An article in National Review relates mainly to Alessandro Manzoni’s 1840 novel in Italian The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi). This is by M D Aeschliman who explains the popularity of the 700 page work among his University of Virginia students over several years of teaching a course in Comparative Literature. He is reminded of the novel because of its setting in 17th century Lombardy during an epidemic of bubonic plague:

Historically very accurate, Manzoni’s novel depicts terrible curses external to people in Lombardy that afflicted them — the negligent, self-interested Spanish rule of Milan in the 1620s, its wink-and-a-nod relation to local Italian Mafiosi chieftains, their ruthlessness, incompetence leading to bread shortages, the plague itself, and ecclesiastical collusion with the cynical secular powers. But to identify and enumerate these exquisitely observed dynamics cannot suggest the grandeur, generosity, and justice of the great novel: despite the fact that even our “advanced” Western societies sometimes experience very similar dynamics today.

In fact the novel cries out for the superlatives that critics — including non-Italian critics — have given to it. The English critic Martin Seymour-Smith, writing in 1979, compared Manzoni’s novel to Shakespeare. In my own 2012 edition of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, I compared Manzoni to Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Seymour-Smith and I are not alone in the non-Italian-speaking world. Lives are changed by the book. […]

After a discussion of Manzoni’s distancing himself from the established church (to which he ultimately reconverted}, Aeschliman gives this comparison of the novel to works in other languages:

The consolation comes, as it does in Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tolstoy, from a persistent judiciousness about the human condition, a thoroughgoing devotion to moral law, to justice, that animates the human heart, and that satisfies its deepest hungers. Dante, Spenser, and Milton wrote consciously in light of a desire to create a work of art “doctrinal to a nation” (perhaps the 17th-century French dramatists did too); Tolstoy and Dostoevsky did something like this for the Russians (and Melville tried to do it for the Americans). Evelyn Waugh’s late Sword of Honour trilogy (1952–1961) strikes notes of piety, mercy, and pity found nowhere else in his fiction. …

–English novelist Susan Hill writes in The Spectator about her thoughts during the current lockdown period in Britain. She begins by noting how in many way it reminds her of her wartime early childhood and goes on to describe what she finds diverting on TV. That brings her down to reading:

As you grow older you forget books you have read more quickly. But there is much to be said for revisiting known pleasures, and trilogies of novels last a satisfactorily long time, so I have just taken down Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trio. I never got on with Brideshead, Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies — I find them brittle and cold — but the three Guy Crouchback books, set in the World War Two, are quite the opposite. They are deeply engaging, funny, warm, moving, sad by turns, packed with richly imagined characters, and their atmosphere is immersive. Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War series is almost as good. Those should keep you going.

–Scottish novelist Alexander McCall Smith is also called upon for his thoughts about the current crisis. He provides a diary for the Los Angeles Times of his current life while locked-down in Edinburgh. After a discussion of his reading, he arrives at this:

After dinner, my wife and I sit down to watch something. Now is not the time for anything with too much of an edge to it — so no Scandinavian Noir. Instead, I am dusting down the classics. We recently finished “Barchester Towers,” with its epic performance by Alan Rickman as the odious Mr Slope. Now we are on to “Brideshead Revisited.” All soothing stuff. Evelyn Waugh, of course, is one of those writers to whom one can return again and again. His “Sword of Honour” trilogy is a work of grave beauty, and I am listening to it for the nth time as an audio book. Waugh is wonderfully inventive with the names of his characters: Margot Metroland, Captain Grimes, Chatty Corner, the Earl of Circumference and his son Lord Tangent.

–Historian Robin Lane Fox writing in the Financial Times likens today’s self-isolation to that of those living in early Christian monasteries. He makes particular reference to St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai and considers the lives of monks associated with that and similar institutions, which brings him around to St Antony and the animals:

In his saintly biography, Antony is said to have rebuked hyenas. The demons had sent them to bite him in the desert, but he simply told them to bite if they had authority and power, but if they only came from the devil, in the name of Christ they must go. Shamed, they slunk away. […] Before long, other animals came to Antony and drank water from the little spring that fed his garden. They also trampled on his young seedlings. He is said to have caught one and asked it, “Why are you doing me wrong when I have done none to you? Go away, in the name of the Lord; do not come near any longer.” Again, the animal left and stayed away thereafter.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the Catholic Lady Marchmain has one of her “little talks” with the narrator Charles Ryder. She tells him, “Animals are always doing the oddest things in saints’ lives. It is part of the poetry, the Alice in Wonderland side of religion.”

–William Cook in The Independent recommends 20 books about foreign travel that are worth reading by the armchair traveller. Among them is this one by Evelyn Waugh:

Ninety-two days by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh was such a brilliant novelist that his travel writing tends to get a bit forgotten, but his travelogues are terrific fun, imbued with the dry, sardonic wit which makes his fiction so compelling. My favourite is this gloriously grumpy account of an arduous journey through the badlands of British Guiana, which inspired his sinister short story, The Man Who Liked Dickens, and his heartbreaking novel, A Handful of Dust. Never has a journey been less entertaining to undertake, and more entertaining to read about. And, in the end, isn’t that what travel writing should be all about?

Cook also edited the collected journalism of Auberon Waugh published as Kiss Me, Chudleigh (2010).

–Finally, on the website ThePublicDiscourse.com, Matthew Franck offers these books among others as suitable for self-isolation reading:

Two books that give us a glimpse of the internecine strife of which Christians are capable—both set in England during the Reformation—can make us grateful for the relatively healthy state of ecumenism among Christians today. The first is H.F.M. Prescott’s 1952 novel The Man on a Donkey, a sweeping chronicle of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, the upheavals of Protestant enthusiasm, and the tragedy of the “Pilgrimage of Grace” undertaken by the Catholics of northern England. The second is Evelyn Waugh’s brief biography of Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr (1935), the brilliant young Oxford scholar who left Elizabethan England to become a Jesuit priest and returned incognito to his native land to minister to the Catholic faithful, with a sadly predictable result. Waugh presented his book as “a simple, perfectly true story of heroism and holiness,” and it ranks among his most powerful works.

Share
Posted in Academia, Audiobooks, Brideshead Revisited, Edmund Campion, Newspapers, Ninety-Two Days, Sword of Honour | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Easter Roundup: Reading Waugh in a Time of Self-Isolation

Acedemic Roundup: Spring 2020

Posted on April 11, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The journal The University Scholar published by the University of Dallas, has included an essay on Waugh in its Fall 2019 issue (v. XX, No. 1, p. 48).  This is entitled “An Animalistic Death Cult: Materialism and Religiosity in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One ” and is written by Teresa Linn. Here are the opening paragraphs (footnotes omitted.):

French political thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, upon observing the America of the nineteenth century, noted the great threat of materialism ruling the hearts and minds of Americans: “Democracy favors the taste for material enjoyments. This taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is nothing but matter; and materialism in its turn serves to carry them toward these enjoyments with an insane ardor.” At the time of his observation, he noted that religious practice in America stifled this ever-growing materialism, for “belief in an immaterial and immortal principle, united for a time with matter, is so necessary to the greatness of man.” He foresaw that when the American refuses to acknowledge any transcendent, immaterial power, the material world becomes his god.

In Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, Tocqueville’s prophecy of excessive materialism becomes a grotesque reality. Hollywood has fallen prey to empty aestheticism, lacking a religion to turn its gaze to the immaterial. As a society so enraptured with physical beauty and without any familiarity with the immaterial, Waugh’s Hollywood strives to conceal the decay of the flesh through beautification, for the body’s decay shatters the hope of lasting beauty. Man thus takes great pains to hide his physical entropy even after death. Waugh presents Hollywood’s obsession with the preservation of the physical in the form of the spiritually vacuous cemetery of Whispering Glades. ….

–A recent PhD thesis now posted on the internet is based on a consideration of four of Waugh’s novels: Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. It is written by A. Veeraragavan and was submiitted to Annamalai University in South India. The title is “Male Sufferings in the Novels of Evelyn Waugh.” Here is an excerpt from the Introduction (pp. 19-20):

As a novelist, Evelyn Waugh explores the emotional world and the darker side of life of suffering people and downtrodden. Waugh further examines his protagonists as individuals who find themselves forced into uncongenial environments, fighting against the odds. Then, his writings portray these problems of the tragic tension between the individual and their unfavorable environment acquires the dimensions of existential anguish. Waugh’s characters are self-conscious of the reality around them and they carry a sense of loneliness, alienation and pessimism. He adds the realities of life and plunges the deep-depths of the human psyche to score out its mysteries and chaos in the minds of characters.

Close study of the texture and theme of the novels in relation to the tenets of existentialism justifies the above observation. Waugh’s works deal with the existential anxiety experienced by his suffered protagonists. Thus, the existential themes of solitude, alienation, the futility of human existence and struggle for survival are the major themes of his works. Evelyn Waugh expresses his personal feelings over suffering heroes through his works with existentialism.

The entire thesis is posted on the internet and may be accessed at this link.

–An article has appeared in the journal Philologica Canariensia 25 (2019) by Cristina Zimbroianu who is associated with two universities in Madrid. This is entitled “Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies in Franco’s Spain and Communist Romania.” In this, she examines how the governments of these two countries, when under totalitarian regimes, censored Waugh’s novels. She considers both written critical reception in the controlled press and modifications required by censors prior to publication (or, in one case, banning altogether).

–The British Journal of Religious Education, 04/2020, Volume 42, Issue 2 has published “Religious education and the interwar intellectuals: a secularism case study” by Paul G Chigwidden. Here’s an abstract:

For some time now, the idea of secularism has been the subject of renewed scrutiny. Statistical portraits, representing a simple, if relentless, narrative have been increasingly disparaged by scholars as unhelpful. Statistical secularism, as we may call it, tells a story of decline and little else. It is incapable of telling the real story which is one in which religious experience becomes hyper-fragmented. The memoirs and reminiscences of those English intellectuals who came to maturity in the interwar period have a contribution to make to this discussion. These pieces of life-writing reveal both the march of secularism in action but also the emergence of new religious experiences. At the heart of these radical changes was a widespread dissatisfaction with the way in which they were taught their religious faith. Where the experts of their day cautioned against teaching students doctrine, students like Evelyn Waugh, W. H. Auden and John Betjeman were particularly critical of that very concession. Thus, we get the chance to tease out an attitudinal pattern towards the religious education of the period and its contribution to the growing experience of secularism.

— Mark Zunac has written an essay entitled “‘There was something gentlemanly about your painting’: Art and Beauty’s Truth in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited“. This appears in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, 03/2019, Volume 71, Issue 2. Here the abstract:

By composing a work that, according to the author, records “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters,” Waugh committed the inexpiable literary sins of humanizing the upper classes and upholding Christian doctrine to boot. […] while the Catholic theme has overwhelmed criticism of it, one must not overlook Bridesheaďs place within a considerable oeuvre celebrating the receipt and preservation of the humanistic inheritance, underwritten by an unfaltering adherence to sober judgment, discriminating taste, exemplary moral virtue, and the belief that unrelenting secularization invariably coincides with the rise of the State and the loss of individual freedom. Yet the author defended not just the foundation of that life but also its yield, most notably those visual reminders of divine grace and human potential. […] while they are conditioned upon the primacy of the Christian tradition, it remains true that Brideshead itself, along with Charles Ryder’s vocation as a painter and his love for the Flyte family, all coalesce and are informed by the broader concept of worldly beauty and its moral imperative to sustain culture as the taproot of civilization. Critics have begun to dismantle the notion that Waugh’s interests were strictly material, arguing that both the war-framed narrative and Charles’s duality as character and narrator reveal a deep anxiety over the historical ruptures that ushered in the post-war Welfare State.2 Laura Coffey’s illuminating study of memory and history within Brideshead makes the case that following the war, efforts to preserve the country estate focused on the physical structure of the buildings rather than the social conventions that they had nurtured. […] says Coffey, the traditions and values that for Waugh constituted a stable and coherent social order had been democratized and detached from the collective memory, prompting certain novelists to “remember and preserve the social function of the country house in their writing, uniting past, present, and future in this potent image” (62).

–An article by Stephen Bayley entitled “Rise, Fall and Reinvention: The Architect’s Shifting Identity” appears in Architectural Design, 11/2019, Volume 89, Issue 6. Here’s the abstract:

Taking stock of architects’ hubris in actuality and fiction, London‐based design critic and curator Stephen Bayley asks why, recently, the architect has ceased to be a clown or hero in the eyes of popular culture. He posits that the reinvention of the architect is necessary to reclaim this lost prominence, good or bad, in the eyes of the public.

The article is behind a paywall and there is no explanation of Waugh’s relevance in the available abstract. It may relate to Waugh’s most well-known architect  character: Otto Silenus in Decline and Fall.

–Finally, Scott J Roniger’s essay “Platonic Eros and Catholic Faith in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited” has appeared in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 2019, Volume 22, Issue 4. Here is an excerpt from the opening pages:

…Just as we should see that the structure of a novel is not dissociated from its style but rather is the most fundamental dimension of it, so too we must see that an author’s style, including the structures he achieves, is not unrelated to the themes (or content) of the work. To be an artist is to be able to create structures that mirror the content the artist wishes to display in the work itself, so the style and structure of a great novel unify the work as a whole in order to manifest the nature of that which is discussed in the novel. There is an important distinction between what is said and how it is said, but the manner of the saying assists the listener in understanding what is manifested in the saying of it. In the hands of a great artist, the structures themselves of the art assist in displaying the themes to be discussed. According to Waugh, the themes explored in Brideshead are “the workings of the divine purpose” and “the operation of divine grace,”5 and I wish to claim that his style and the structure he achieves in Bridesheadare correlated to and disclosive of these themes.

 

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, The Loved One, Vile Bodies | Tagged | Comments Off on Acedemic Roundup: Spring 2020

Evelyn Waugh, d. 10 April 1966, R.I.P.

Posted on April 10, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Today is the 54th anniversary of the death of Evelyn Waugh. His death occurred on what was Easter Sunday, and he had attended Mass earlier in the day. He died after returning to his home in Combe Florey and is buried between his house and the adjacent churchyard.

This year the anniversary falls on what is Good Friday in the Western Christian Churches. The website of St Thomas Aquinas College (with campuses in both Ojai, California and Northfield, Massachusetts) has posted an article by one of its  alumnae appropriate to this date:

…I’m reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. (When am I not, though?) In the story, Cordelia mourns the departure of the Blessed Sacrament from the small chapel at Brideshead after the death of her mother, the matriarch of the manor. The chapel’s holy water founts are drained, the dancing red flame of the tabernacle lamp is quenched, and suddenly the world seems far lonelier and bleaker. Cordelia sadly remembers the prophet Jeremiah’s lamentations over the destruction of the once-beautiful city of Jerusalem; “Quomodo sedet sola civitas,” or, “How lonely sits the city that was once full of people.”

Share
Posted in Academia, Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Combe Florey | Tagged , | Comments Off on Evelyn Waugh, d. 10 April 1966, R.I.P.