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.

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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.

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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.

 

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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.”

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Mexico Revisited: Waugh, Greene and Theroux

Posted on April 9, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux recently published a travel book about an automobile trip to Mexico. This is entitled On the Plain of Snakes and is reviewed in the digital academic magazine PublicBooks.org by Ignacio Sanchez-Prado, professor of Latin American literature at Washington University (St Louis). Sanchez-Prado considers Theroux’s book

…the richest portrayal of contemporary Mexico available to Americans, and an urgent one: it’s a picture of the complex country and people upon which many of the privileges of the United States are built. Mexico is a faithful friend, the source of the largest population of immigrants in the United States, and a trade and cultural partner. Yet Americans are often unable or unwilling to understand their southern neighbor in all of its complexity. On the Plain of Snakes can be read as an attempt to address the lack of quality renderings of contemporary Mexico in English-language literature and media.

Prof Sanchez-Prado also puts Theroux’s book into literary perspective:

It seems that Theroux and I agree on the failings of past American writing on Mexico. In fact, he begins On the Plain of Snakes by revisiting this canon, showing how, for these writers who came before him, “Mexico invariably represents … the exotic, the colorful, the primitive, the unknowable.”

Rejecting this lineage, Theroux notes how often these writings were “bad-tempered” and “joyless,” as he characterizes Greene’s The Lawless Roads; or full of “hatred or contempt for Mexico,” as he describes Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery Under Law. He even notes that Mexican writers are equally problematic in representing their own country: “No one is more antagonistic toward Mexico than the Mexicans themselves.” (footnote omitted)

Here Sanchez-Prado is referring to Theroux’s introductory chapter in which Theroux himself discusses those foreign writers he considered his literary predecessors. What follows is taken from that chapter:

…Stephen Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Lowry, John Dos Passos, Aldous Huxley, B. Traven, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, John Steinbeck, Leonora Carrington, Sybille Bedford, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Harriet Doerr, and more—the list is long. Mexico has been lucky in the eminence of its visiting writers, and though they all see something different, Mexico invariably represents for them the exotic, the colorful, the primitive, the unknowable. One of the common deficits of the visiting writers is that they had a very slender grasp of Spanish.

On his short (five weeks) trip to Mexico in 1938, Graham Greene did not speak Spanish at all. His Lawless Roads is lauded by some critics, but it is exasperated and bad-tempered, a joyless, overdramatized, and blaming book, contemptuous of Mexico. He traveled in Tabasco and Chiapas at a time when the Catholic Church there was under siege by the government (and elsewhere in the country the government battled with heavily armed Catholic “Cristeros”). Greene, a convert to Catholicism, took the suppression of religion personally. “I loathed Mexico,” he writes at one point. And later, “How one begins to hate these people.” Again, “I have never been in a country where you are more aware all the time of hate.” He describes praying peasants (indigenous Tzotzils probably) in Chiapas with “cave dweller faces” and his having to suffer “unspeakable meals.” And toward the end of the book, “the almost pathological hatred I began to feel for Mexico.” Yet the novel that was inspired by his Mexican travel, The Power and the Glory, is one of his best. […]

Hatred or contempt for Mexico is a theme in Evelyn Waugh’s obscure and rancorous travel book, Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object Lesson, and in Aldous Huxley’s better-known Beyond the Mexique Bay. Waugh: “Every year [Mexico] is becoming hungrier, wickeder, and more hopeless.” Huxley: “Sunrise, when it came, was a vulgar affair,” and “Under close-drawn shawls one catches the reptilian glitter of Indian eyes.”

But I have not found a traveler or commentator, foreign or Mexican, who has been able to sum up Mexico, and maybe such an ambition is a futile and dated enterprise. The country eludes the generalizer and summarizer; it is too big, too complex, too diverse in its geography and culture, too messy and multilingual—the Mexican government recognizes 68 different languages and 350 dialects. Some writers have attempted to be exhaustive. […]

An implication in all books about the country is that, though Europeans successfully emigrate to Mexico and become Mexican, no American can follow suit: the gringo remains incorrigibly a gringo. In practice, this is not a hardship but amounts to a liberation. […] Owing to Mexican generosity and good humor in a culture that values manners, especially the manners that govern jocular teasing, an American who accepts the role of a gringo is licensed in his gringoismo. A gringo who doesn’t abuse that status is given the latitude to be different.

The US edition of Waugh’s book was published in June 1939 as simply Mexico: An Object Lesson. Unlike Greene, Waugh did not follow up with a novel based on his trip to Mexico. Whether he ever seriously considered doing so is doubtful since he next set to work on what was published as an unfinished fragment under the title Work Suspended. He started writing this in October 1939 but was quickly interrupted by WWII.

 

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Pre-Easter Roundup

Posted on April 8, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Roger Lewis has posted another reading list for the current epidemic. This is in the Daily Mail and is entitled “Keep laughing and read on.” Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop is among those recommended:

William Boot, who contributes nature columns on voles to the Daily Beast, accidentally turns into a foreign correspondent — during slack periods newspapers always want jolly stories about distant wars.

The irreverent novel was based on Waugh’s experiences, contributing to this paper, as it happens, when he covered Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia.

He doesn’t stint on descriptions of megalomaniac proprietors, eccentric editors, and lunatic reporters running up expenses accounts for collapsible canoes, cleft sticks, camels and tropical kit. Journalists love this, as they can see nothing in it is invented.

–The Australian Financial News has a list of books to be read over the Easter holiday. These are recommended by several of its contributors. Author and journalist Chris Hammer includes these two in his entry:

As a ling-time journalist, I’ve always loved Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, which has the added advantage of being extremely funny, as a young man is dispatched to cover the Abyssinian war. And speaking of humour in dark times, Spike Milligan’s classic Adolph Hitler: My Part in his Downfall is laugh-out-loud funny.

—Scoop also appears in the list of reading recommended by the staff of Southern Utah University. Here’s the entry contributed by Nicole Heath:

Published in 1938, “Scoop” follows wannabe writer William Boot as he is thrown into a warzone to cover a breaking story.  William writes a less-than interesting column about various nature topics including badgers and great crested grebes. He is sent on the adventure of a lifetime that he didn’t ask for when the large newspaper he works for mistakes him for the famous author John Courtney Boot. William must leave the quiet of his home in the countryside outside of London and find himself woefully unprepared to cover a civil war in Ishmaelia. Lauded by Prof. Christiensen of SUU as one of the few books that have made him laugh out loud, this short satire will have readers gasping for breath and wiping tears of laughter from their eyes through the heat of summer vacation.

—The Guardian asked several novelists to recommend a book that would “inspire, uplift and offer escape.” Here’s novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s suggestion:

I thought JR Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday was the most enjoyable book I’d ever read when I discovered it belatedly 10 years ago, and it seems to me even better now. Another time (the 1920s), and another place (the Indian state of Chhokrapur), are captured in a brilliantly observant journal by Ackerley, who had spent five months there as private secretary to the whimsical, indecisive and sexually unorthodox Maharajah, one of the most enchanting characters in nonfiction. Evelyn Waugh called Hindoo Holiday “radiantly delightful” and its accuracy of human perception “intoxicating”. Wise, subtle, amazingly frank and wonderfully funny, it makes a perfect outing from the horrors of the present moment.

Waugh’s review of Ackerley’s book appeared in a 1932 issue of The Spectator and is collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews 1922-1934, CWEW v. 26, p. 454.

—TLS asked its contributors to discuss “cultural things to occupy themselves in isolation.” Biographer and novelist Lisa Hilton is stranded in Venice where among other things she is teaching English. She includes in her discussion the following:

The books I have here in Italy tend towards the serious – if only the complete works of Evelyn Waugh could be flown in by drone. Or some really juicy thrillers. Or Jilly Cooper, come to that. Obviously I could seek them out online, but the temptation to scroll through the news is too strong.

–In an article in the Evening Standard that discusses Mark Kermode’s recent BBC Four TV series Secrets of the Cinema, David Sexton focuses on the final episode relating to spy films. The feature attractions are Alfred Hitchcock who directed several notable spy films and the James Bond series based on Ian Fleming’s novels. On the latter, the article includes this comment:

Not everyone loves him [James Bond], you know. Evelyn Waugh, taken to the 1962 premiere of the first film, Dr No, by Ian and Ann Fleming, thought it “absolutely awful — fatuous & tedious, not even erotic”.

—-An article appears on the Ralph Lauren website entitled “The Iconic Titles that have Inspired Ralph Lauren’s Collections and his World”. This is written by Mary Randolph Carter. Brideshead Revisited is included:

The style of Lord Sebastian Flyte and Captain Charles Ryder in Waugh’s riveting epic of the aristocratic Flyte family in the years between the world wars has often inspired the English elegance and studied nonchalance embodied by so many of Ralph Lauren’s men’s collections, and in particular his Purple Label line.

–Another fashion website (L’Officiel) also has featured a design with a Brideshead connection. This is explained in an article by Jason Lim entitled “Here’s how the leading luxury brands integrate sustainability with fashion:”

In order to give back to the industry and as a wonderful way to foster young creative talent, Alexander McQueen has devised a scheme to redirect surplus house fabrics for students at fashion colleges in the UK. […]

Steven Stokey-Daley, a recent graduate of Fashion/Apparel Design (BA) at the University of Westminster incorporated a selection of these fabrics for coats in his final collection. Pictured is the Ryder tennis coat in slubbed wool and the Flyte dressing gown made up of 120 panels in three different silks, both coats are named after the protagonists in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. [Emphasis supplied.]

 

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Waugh and the Marquesses of Bath

Posted on April 7, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The 7th Marquess of Bath (1932-2020) died last Saturday. His name was Alexander Thynn, and he was the son of parents, both of whom were friends of Evelyn Waugh dating back to his Oxford and Bright Young People days. The Daily Telegraph mentions this connection in its obituary of the 7th Marquess:

Alexander’s father Henry, Viscount Weymouth [later, 6th Marquess], had been described by his headmaster at Harrow as “moronic beyond reach”, yet got into Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh. Alexander’s mother, Daphne Vivian, was a spirited girl who had been “removed” from two schools, once for spearing a geometry mistress in the backside with a compass. As their respective parents disapproved of the relationship, they married in secret in 1926.

As might be expected, their children had an unconventional upbringing. “Frightfully noisy and drunken,” Waugh reported after a weekend at Longleat in 1948. “Daphne keeping me up until 3.30 every night, and the children riding bicycles round the house with loud cries from 6.30. No sleep. Jazz all day. Henry at meals reading the most disgusting parts of Malinowski’s Sexual Life of the Savages (and goodness they are disgusting) aloud to his 18-year-old daughter.”

But young Alexander was not a happy child. As a small boy, he was close to his mother but, after she deserted her husband for the travel writer Xan Fielding, a man 15 years her junior, in the early 1950s, he felt she stopped defending him against his authoritarian father.

Waugh’s description of the wild children appears in a letter to Nancy Mitford dated 7 April 1948. On the same visit he met with his friend Olivia Plunkett Green who, with her mother, had been provided housing on the Longleat estate by Henry and Daphne (then known as the Baths).

The Daily Mail in an obituary notice by Richard Kay quotes Waugh’s same letter and goes on to wonder:

Might there, too, have been a key to Alexander’s future priapic direction in Waugh’s note that Lord Bath insisted on reading ‘the most disgusting pages’ from the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life Of Savages to his teenage children at meal times?

In a subsequent letter to Alexander’s mother (by then known as Daphne Fielding), Waugh mentions a chance meeting with Alexander (who would then have been in his mid-20s):

…I met your boy Weymouth, he came to a sad little dinner at Captain Bennett’s hotel before a ball and I think he is the most enchanting creature of either sex I have met for twenty years. I didn’t know who he was but a lot of dreadful looking men with long hair were saying how do you do to me and then I saw his mothers lovely mad eyes and I said what cocktail and he said gin & tonic. That was really all I saw of him but goodness I fell in love…. [Letter dated 2 October 1956; Letters 475-76]

Both papers go on to describe Alexander’s education, eccentric life, and artistic career before his relative retirement several years ago.

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Henry Yorke and Evelyn Waugh

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s friend from Oxford Henry Yorke (who wrote as “Henry Green”) has joined his other friends on the growing list appearing on Duncan McLaren’s website. This latest entry is in the form of a narrative of the relations between Yorke and Waugh as they developed and deteriorated over the years. The narrative is as if written by Nancy Mitford who was a friend of both writers. She is writing while at Castle Howard awaiting the convening of the now postponed Brideshead Conference. Here’s a link.

Waugh and Yorke met after Waugh had left Oxford but was still returning there on a regular basis. Yorke was 2 years behind Waugh. He admired Yorke’s first two books Blindness and Living and praised both of them in letters to Yorke. He also reviewed Living twice, once in Vogue and about a year later in the Graphic where he called it a “neglected masterpiece.” The latter review is reprinted in EAR and A Little Order. McLaren includes this remark as indicative of Waugh’s regard for Living:

In June of 1929, Evelyn wrote again to Henry, beginning his letter: ‘I have just got back and read Living.’ He goes on to discuss the book in some detail. A crackpot researcher, Duncan McLaren, points out that a copy of Living takes pride of place – top of the pile – in a photo that was taken of the Canonbury Square flat that the Evelyns lived in in north London.

The photo is reproduced in the posted article.

The “Mitford narrative” explains how Yorke reciprocated Waugh’s praise in letters to him regarding Waugh’s 1930s books (although Yorke didn’t think the ending of A Handful of Dust worked) in a period (1931-38) when Yorke wasn’t publishing anything. When he finally came out with Party Going in 1938 Waugh wrote with some reservations but overall favorably. It is only fair to say that both Living and Party Going were mostly (or exclusively) dialogue and would have been considered “Modernist” and “Experimental”, not the sort of thing that Waugh wrote–at least not after Vile Bodies.

During and after the war they drew apart to the point where Waugh was writing to Mitford in the 1950s that he thought Yorke had gone mad. This assessment was supported by a visit of the Yorkes to Piers Court that did not go well. As might be expected, McLaren/Mitford pulls all this together in a quite readable narrative, supported with helpful illustrations.

Since he died in 1973, there have been several attempts to revive Henry Yorke’s reputation. The first was lead by John Updike in the late 1970s. At the turn of the century a biography by Jeremy Treglown was published and some of his works returned to print. More recently, the New York Review of Books has weighed in to put  his works back into print and other books and articles devoted to his life and works have been published. But I think he will always be a writers’ writer. Much of what he wrote looks like the response to an assignment in a Creative Writing class by a graduate student who tries too hard to be original, and less hard to tell a  readable story.

 

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A Handful of Dust on BBC Radio 4

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC will rebroadcast a 1996 two-hour adaptation of Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust. According to the Daily Mail Weekend Magazine radio listings:

The critics gave the thumbs down to this Evelyn Waugh novel when it was published in 1934. The book-buying public, however, knew a good thing when they read it, and Waugh’s tragicomic tale of a ghastly country house, a fortune-seeking cad and a bored socialite has never gone out of print. Tara Fitzgerald stars as Lady Brenda Last in a story that will whisk you away to another age, as well as making you laugh. Just the ticket in these troubled times.

The role of Tony Last is played by Jonathan Cullen. The adaptation is by Bill Matthews and the director is Sally Avens. The first of two one-hour episodes will broadcast at 1000a next Thursday, 9 April on BBC Radio 4 Extra, with the second to follow at the same time on the next day, Friday, 10 April. After the broadcast, the play will be available on BBC iPlayer worldwide. The adaptation was originally broadcast on 26 May 1996.

One wonders about the Daily Mail’s claim that the book never went out of print. Chapman & Hall issued a reset edition in 1937 and a “uniform” edition in 1948, but the first Penguin edition was not issued until 1951, well after the war. There is no record in the Waugh bibliography (p. 8) of a UK reprint between 1937 and 1948. Nor is there any record of a US reprint between 1938 and 1944.

Waugh’s novel recently featured in a Forbes Magazine article that collected recommendations from travel writers of “10 books for the trip of a lifetime–at home”. In Hilary Bradt’s selection, A Handful of Dust is described as:

…a fiction title which makes one travel to all kinds of corners of high society travel and shipboard romance, [by] wicked-witted Evelyn Waugh.

“I have just finished reading A Handful of Dust. Waugh is one of those writers that one ought to read in a lifetime and I happened to pick this up when I had nothing to read on a train. About a quarter of the book is about travel, but classic travel–exploration–described in great detail and as far as I can tell, totally accurate. Tony, who has never been outside London or his friend’s mansions, travels through the jungles of Guiana to seek a lost city. The ending is a classic, oft quoted. And, yes, it’s fiction.”

Well that gets me in, and you? … The book’s dark ending with “room for a faint hope” is a little bit analogous with our times.

She also chose two books by Peter Fleming, one of which, Brazilian Adventure, describes a trip by Fleming which may have contributed to Waugh’s decision to make his own trek into the Brazilian outback. Waugh’s trip is more fully depicted in his 1934 travel book Ninety-Two Days.

The origin of the title of Waugh’s book is discussed in a recent National Review column “The Corner” by Madeleine Kearns:

“April is the cruelest month” in T.S. Eliot’s 1921 poem The Waste Land because, as spring brought signs of new life and renewal, Europe was in a crumbling, dying mess in the wake of World War I. Eliot wrote his most famous work while recovering from a nervous breakdown, in the peak of marital distress, and six years prior to his conversion to Anglicanism.

Eliot said that his intention was to express the same kind of suffering in The Waste Land that Beethoven had in his final string quartets. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” Eliot pens in his first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” referring to the post-war generation’s reckoning with death and spiritual irrelevance, a theme later explored in Evelyn Waugh’s first seriously Catholic novel, A Handful of Dust (1934)…

Waugh’s originally-proposed titles for the book were “A Handful of Ashes” and “The Fourth Decade.” A serialized and shortened version appeared in Harper’s Bazaar as “A Flat in London.” It is missing the final chapters of the book based on the short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens.”

 

 

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Waugh Podcasts

Posted on April 4, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The quarterly literary magazine Slightly Foxed has announced that its next podcast will be devoted to Evelyn Waugh. This will be posted on their website, probably on 15 April. Details such as topics, participants, time, etc. do not seem to be available on the website, but it will presumably be posted here. This looks as if it will be denominated podcast Episode 18. Episode 17 was devoted to “Margaret Drabble: A Writer’s Life”. It is currently posted, along with several others at the link provided above.

Dave Lull has kindly sent along a link to the Daily Mail podcast relating to the recent mystery novel written by Waugh’s grand daughter Daisy Waugh. This is entitled In the Crypt with a Candlestick and is mentioned in several earlier posts. Here’s the description of the podcast:

A Book and a Bottle, with Sarah Vine. It’s the series that’s made for locked-down lovers of literature! In the first of an unputdownable new series, our columnist invites Imogen Edward-Jones and Santa Montefiore into her living room to dissect Daisy Waugh’s delightfully wicked new book, In The Crypt with a Candlestick.

Thanks to Dave for sending this along.

Finally, BBC 4 earlier this week broadcast a one-off TV documentary entitled “Scandal & Beauty: Mark Gatiss on Aubrey Beardsley.” Although Waugh doesn’t seem to have published anything about Beardsley, he was acquainted with his works, published to some notoriety in the early 1920s. He mentions writing a paper in 1921 about the biography of Beardsley by Arthur Symonds. Waugh describes this as his favorite biography. This “paper” seems to have been written in connection with his Oxford entrance examinations. Precocious Waughs, CWEW v 30, pp. 396-97. The BBC program is currently posted on BBC iPlayer. Coincidently, the US edition of Daisy Waugh’s mystery novel was originally listed on Amazon.com as Castle Beardsley. Not sure what connection there may be to the artist.

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