Joseph Crowley (1926-2020) R.I.P.

Posted on April 3, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Joseph Crowley, Waugh’s friend and correspondent in the 1950s, died last month in Washington. Joe first encountered Waugh while an undergraduate at the University of Detroit in 1949. He crossed over to Windsor, Ontario, to hear Waugh lecture at Assumption College on 16 February. Later, while stationed in London, he attended a public open house at Waugh’s home in Piers Court. This was held on 14 August 1954 to benefit the local Roman Catholic parish church. The two met and became friends and correspondents after that event. Another American present, Edward Sheehan, a Boston Globe reporter, wrote about the event as did Frances Donaldson, Waugh’s neighbor, who included an account her memoir. Joe later commented on both of these versions, as is described in Douglas Patey’s 1998 biography of Evelyn Waugh:

An intelligence officer with the CIA in London, Crowley asked that his anonimity be preserved, and so appeared in Sheehan’s “A Weekend with Waugh” as “Conley”. He arrived at Piers Court having read Waugh’s advertisement in The Tablet, not expecting that Waugh himself would be present. […]

In the year after that first meeting, Waugh invited Crowley back to Piers Court and entertained him in White’s; the two visited an exhibition at the Royal Academy. (Later Crowley invited Waugh to join him for a holiday in Spain.) In October 1954, as he later told Nancy Mitford (NM 354), Waugh sought Crowley’s literary advice. Famous for his ability to reproduce colloquial conversation, Waugh had been criticized for his uncertain grasp of American slang in LO. Determined that OG would contain no such slips, he wrote to Crowley: “In the book I am writing I have introduced some American journalists. I should greatly like to have their conversation vetted…Few things are more exasperating than bogus slang.” (16 Oct. 1954, private collection). Crowley suggested changes such as from “Why” to “How come”, to which Waugh replied: “I am deeply grateful for all your trouble in correcting my attempts at American dialogue…I will set about revising the passage and will adopt your philological advice. The character ‘Ian’…is a British liaison officer trying to be matey by adopting what he thinks is suitable jargon, so that his errors of diction are admissable. I am sure I am wrong in the other cases. I relied on a faulty ear at the cinema. The Americans I know speak as you do.” (22 Nov. 1954, private collection). As further thanks, in the scene in which Ian Kilbannock introduces Trimmer to three American journalists (originally Bum Schlum, Scab Dunz and Mick Mulligan), Waugh changed “Mick” to “Joe” (interview with Joseph Crowley, 18 Nov. 1995). [Patey, pp. 406-07 n28]

In his cited letter to Nancy Mitford (22 November 1954), Waugh wrote:

I sent an American acquaintance three pages of typescript & asked ‘is the American slang authentic?’ Weeks passed. Now I have back 50 pages on Embassy paper giving the opinions of three public relations officers.

Joe’s friend Susan Farrell has kindly written the following remembrance to the Society:

Dear Alexander and devoted Wavians,

I am obliged to bring you sad news – wrapped in warm memories and deep thanks.

Joseph Crowley, friend and life-long devoté of Evelyn Waugh,  died on March 9.

For many years, I encouraged Joe to recognize himself as a bundle of footnotes to history.  Thus I let you know of his death, with thanks to Doug Patey for transmitting the most beautiful.  At age 93,  Joe may well have been — apart from Waugh family members — the last person alive to have actually chatted with, lunched and sipped wine with, viewed an art exhibition with Evelyn Waugh.  And he would very much regret being the last.

Searching for words with which to thank you for all you brought to Joe, I was unable to call up any which resonated sufficiently until I unearthed in my archives Joe’s letter to Alexander following the 2012 Waugh conference in Baltimore:

“Dear Alexander,

I am still savouring the congeniality, the wit, the formation of new friendships,and the all-around jolly good fun that Susan Farrell and I experienced in Baltimore and, five days later, at Georgetown.”

To all of which I can attest!   And I’d like to add the delightful semi-rustic dinner in Baltimore (which many of you were able to attend) and the deeply moving decision (at the dinner table) to embrace both Joe and me as honorary members of the Evelyn Waugh Society.

A few weeks later, in the course of assembling his EW letters (as he’d promised), Joe murmured that he had been “re-living” the experiences they called to mind – for which he would also want to thank you. 

And, moving forward, he would wish you, your families, your studies and the Evelyn Waugh Society many healthy, happy years ahead.

              Susan

 

 

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The Brideshead Effect

Posted on April 2, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In an article primarily devoted to the new Julian Fellowes dramatic series Belgravia that started a few weeks ago on ITV, The Herald (Scotland) also considers the effect successful costume dramas may have beyond the world of entertainment. As its case study, the article, written by Barry Didcock, considers two costume dramas from the early 1980s:

… Julian Fellowes isn’t quite right when he says that what the characters in a costume drama are wearing makes no difference at all. That is to underestimate the visual appeal of the form and the sartorial impact it can have. As proof, from time to time a costume drama comes along that not only “catches on”, as he puts it, but affect both fashions and manners. Two examples from the same year, and both set largely in the 1920s, are Brideshead Revisited, Granada TV’s 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel, and Chariots Of Fire, the Oscar-winning film about the 1924 Paris Olympics.

“Brideshead Revisited and Chariots Of Fire are having an undeniable impact on fashion, both here and abroad,” wrote The New York Times Magazine in April 1982. “The British fashion press reports that London’s new look is that of the ‘trad English gentleman – cool, dashing, aristocratic’, as exemplified by Nigel Havers, who plays Lord Andrew Lindsay in Chariots Of Fire, and Anthony Andrews, who portrays Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited 
 If these films have attracted appreciative audiences, none have been more attentive than the men and women who design American ready-to-wear – notably Perry Ellis and Ralph Lauren”.

Two years later the so-called Brideshead Effect was still palpable in the US. The late Christopher Hitchens once recalled walking home through Washington DC in 1984 on the day his son was born, not long after Brideshead Revisited had screened Stateside. As he sauntered through the streets Hitchens, wearing a white linen suit and carrying a teddy bear, was regaled by more than one shout of “Hello, Sebastian”, so closely did he resemble Anthony Andrews’s portrayal of the doomed, teddy-toting aristocrat Sebastian Flyte.

And of course there’s the now infamous 1987 photograph of Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club featuring David Cameron and Boris Johnson in black tie and tails. For a generation of middle and upper-middle class Britons, usually male, usually students at the UK’s more storied seats of learning, the aesthetic of Brideshead Revisited was a temple at which to pray (and bray).

Brideshead Revisited, both the novel and the TV serial, are receiving what may be more than their fair share of attention from the press and the blogosphere as diversionary entertainment during the coronavirus lockdown:

–In Vogue magazine, the Duchess of Cambridge has included the novel on her list of recommended reading:

If nothing else, Evelyn Waugh’s paean to the lost world of the British aristocracy before the Great War will make you feel decidedly better about your own family relationships.

–In the Oxford-based journal Cherwell (one of Waugh’s earliest writing venues),  Jess Curry includes the novel among his recommended books:

For me, the ultimate ‘dreaming spires’ fiction – although only really featured in the first third of the novel, Waugh constructs an intoxicating picture of Oxford that sometimes I still find more real than my experiences at university today. Chock-a-block with homo-eroticism, fine art and catholic guilt, the narrative, while framed by the Second World War, deals with the decline of the English aristocracy with a perhaps too uncritical nostalgia. The reader, like wallflower narrator Charles Ryder, is swept up in the charm of it all, until they are rudely spat out again as the perfect image starts to dissolve.

–Another publisher of Waugh’s early writing, Harper’s Bazaar, recommends the 1981 TV series as among the 10 best all-time period dramas in a column written by Ella Alexander:

The 13-hour serialisation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel may have first aired in 1981, but it is still rightly remembered as one of history’s finest period dramas. Starring a young Jeremy Irons as lead protagonist Charles Ryder, the story follows Ryder’s relationship with a wealthy, eccentric family called the Flytes who live in a mansion called Brideshead Castle. Sophisticated, nostalgic and hedonistic, Brideshead Revisited offers escapism into a bygone world of the English good life.

–To the same effect, on the website InsideHook.com, Gillian Anderson writes:

Brideshead Revisited. The granddaddy of them all. Based off Evelyn Waugh’s classic, the 1981 miniseries was all the rage in the U.K. and also in the U.S.: The New York Times called it “one of the most memorable television productions of the decade,” and if there is or was a golden age of British literary adaptations, I’d say this kicked it off. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime, and the 11 episodes clock in at about an hour each, so you can knock out nearly two weeks right here. Do them at night to wind down; you’ll finish in just short of two weeks…

–The website of the private banking company Coutts.com recommends Waugh’s novel at No. 48 on Stephen Dalton’s list of the best 80 novels:

Illicit passion and religious devotion collide in Waugh’s epic novel charting protagonist Charles Ryder’s complicated relationship with the wealthy, dysfunctional Flyte family.

–The magazine Gentleman’s Journal has an article entitled “Shelf Isolation” in which Phoebe Hunt lists the classic works of fiction that one now has no excuse not to read. Here’s the entry for Brideshead:

Re-popularised by various TV and film adaptations, Brideshead transports you to an elitist 1920s dreamworld of champagne, punting in Oxford and weekend jaunts to the magnificent stately home of Brideshead Castle. Set against the fading glory of the English aristocracy in the early 20th century, Waugh’s protagonist Charles is simultaneously attracted and repulsed by this world of finery his friend Sebastian introduces him to.

Beneath a deeply nostalgic depiction of a bygone era of white linen suits and masquerade balls, Evelyn Waugh weaves in one of the most beautiful portrayals of love and heartbreak in fiction. The homo-erotic undertones of the novel have been hotly debated since it was first published, with critics falling on both sides of the fence when it comes to deciphering if Charles and Sebastian’s friendship is purely platonic.

–The non-denominational religious website Adamah.Media has posted a short essay by former TV newswriter Martin Ketterer about Waugh’s novel. This is not written from the usual Roman Catholic point of view but is more reflective of Christian religious beliefs generally.

–Finally, in the Winnipeg Free Press, Jill Wilson compiles a list of TV shows available to Canadian audiences for streaming. She includes this one:

The 1981 BBC series of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited has been called the best-ever television adaptation of a book. Spanning the 1920s to the 1940s, it comprises 11 episodes (of varying lengths) and stars Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder, a young man who befriends the debaucherous Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews) and becomes entangled with the affairs of his Roman-Catholic family, who live in a mansion called Brideshead Castle.

It won the Golden Globe for Best Miniseries, and Andrews won Best Actor; Laurence Olivier took home a supporting-actor Emmy for his role as Lord Marchmain.

A later post will consider other Waugh works recommended for reading or watching in the current lockdown.

 

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Waugh’s Collage

Posted on April 1, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent article in the Indian paper National Herald, reporter Mrinal Pande refers to a collage created by Evelyn Waugh in 1935 which is mentioned without citation in the writings of Graham Greene. This is in an article entitled “A surreal world crumbling around us.” The collage is discussed in the article in the context of writing about the current chaos created by the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic:

In 1935, Evelyn Waugh put together a collection of what Graham Greene described as a collage. It had reports from Waugh’s immediate past, bits and pieces from his personal diary, scraps of newspaper advertisements, lines of poems and bits of social gossip. Greene confessed he did not know why Waugh might have chosen the pieces that he did.

But in March 2020, under the shadow of a mysterious, unknown and tiny virus that has caused a global pandemic, the collection appears apt and faintly familiar. They speak of people living through an unsettled reality, of unnamed dread and a certain black humour. Waugh at one place quoted Stephen Spender:

“We, who live under the shadow of a war,

What can we do, that matters?” [Quotation marks supplied]

What indeed?

Waugh discussed two ideas for making films.

“Ten men on a death row draw lots with matchsticks. One of them, a rich man, draws the longest one. He offers all his money to anyone who will take his place.

A prisoner agrees to take the rich man’s place for the sake of his family. Later when released, the rich man visits the family that benefited from his wealth while remained anonymous. He himself had nothing left but his life…” [Quotation marks supplied]

In the other story, two penniless men meet at a crossing, with one road leading to a scaffold and another to riches; they toss a coin and go their separate ways. But both end up in a town on the morning of a public execution.

Then there are scraps of advertisements that Waugh had clipped and kept, of corsets exuding an odd kind of sadistic pleasure over tightening them, and shoes, and stockings of the finest sheer silk.

There are bits of literary gossip too about writers.

Virginia Woolf had gone mad, believing herself to be Brownings’ dog Flush, wandering about unhappily. And about the widow of GK Chesterton with her bright, dyed red hair and a voice with a grating accent. How will we cope with illnesses, Waugh frets in his diary, when children separated from parents come down with tormenting sicknesses?

After comparing Waugh’s “collage” with various responses to the current epedemic, Pande ends the article with this:

Waugh quoted Tom Paine from Landor’s Imaginary Conversations:

“Eloquence has the varnish of falsehood; Truth has none…Burke is eloquent;

I am not. If I write better… it is because I have seen things more distinctly, and have had the courage to turn them up on their backs, in spite of tooth and claw…”

The final quote (at least, the first line) is correctly sourced to Landor’s Imaginary Conversations and has been much cited elsewhere as is the line from Spender’s 1933 poem quoted earlier, but they do not show up in a search for works by Waugh. There is no reference to a 1935 collage by Waugh in his letters or diaries nor does one show up in the catalogue of the Evelyn Waugh Collection at the University of Texas. He does refer in a 1953 letter to Nancy Mitford to a collage he put together in connection with his composition of Love Among the Ruins (Letters, p. 391) but does not explain what it may have contribited to the published book. It’s possible that the numbers of the year were inadvertently reversed and that he sent such a collage to Graham Greene but, if he did, it is not mentioned in the collected editions of the published letters between the writers. Anyone knowing anything about the collage mentioned in this article or its whereabouts is invited to comment as provided below.

 

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Roundup: Wavian Humour When it is Sorely Needed

Posted on March 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan McLaren has posted a new article in a section of his weblog denominated “Waugh Bites” where one can find miscellaneous articles about various unconnected topics. The new posting is entitled “The Legs Have It”. This posits that two leg injuries–one in his post Oxford years when he fell during an escape from an Oxford hotel to avoid an unwanted engagement and the other in wartime after a parachute jump–contributed to mobility problems experienced later in life. These problems are described in the memoirs of Waugh’s friends Harold Acton and Anthony Powell. Whether or not there is any medical support for Duncan’s supposition, the post makes interesting light reading relating to Waugh personal life spread out from the beginning to the end of his working life.  It also makes the point that had not previously occurred to me that these injuries contributed to the composition of two of Waugh’s works–the first to “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” and the second to Brideshead Revisited. Here’s a link. Enjoy.

–Roger Lewis in the Daily Telegraph chooses “10 funny books to keep you laughing through coronavirus quarantine.” Among these is this one:

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. Some people are easier to get on with on paper than in the actual flesh, where they’d be brutal and quarrelsome. Such were Nancy and Evelyn, her in Paris, him in the West Country, both of them hating the modern world (Picasso, television, socialism) and united in converting spleen and snobbery into high comic art. Every page contains an outrageous observation: “I went to a circus entirely run by half-witted boys. Such a good idea. They get on far better with the animals than sane people.” “For 150 years or more the only great French men and women have been found in convents.” There is plenty of gossip about Honks, Boots, Baby, Fruity and Boofy, helpfully identified in Charlotte Mosley’s footnotes. Boofy, for example, was the 8th Earl of Arran, who introduced the Sexual Offences Bill and the Badger Protection Bill in the House of Lords. In this book we also discover that, in John Betjeman’s Wantage rectory, “a horse sleeps in the kitchen,” and that when Graham Greene is taken to hospital his ailment may be caused by “five diseases two of which are not immediately fatal, the others are”. Though Waugh “fell into an extremity of rage” most days, he was profoundly moved by his correspondent: “Try not to die. It is the strong ones who go under easiest.”

The Irish Times also has an article recommending funny books to help get through the Coronavirus epidemic. This includes “Evelyn Waugh’s first five novels [which] are Wodehouse with a slice of sarcasm and bitter irony on the side.”

–An earlier issue of the DT had an article by Chris Leadbetter entitled “How to have a holiday in Venice without leaving home”. This recommended various TV and film adaptations to view for this purpose. The list included the Granada series of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited “which still sparkles in the imagination (almost) four decades after it was first broadcast (in 1981).”

–The novelist Hannah Rothschild whose recent novel The House of Trelawney was was compared in several reviews to Brideshead Revisited (see previous post) was recently interviewed on an Israeli podcast called “Desert Island Books”. The Q&A includes this exchange:

Q. The first book you have selected is Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, written in 1938. Tell us why you selected that book.

A. For many reasons. First, I think it’s one of the funniest books ever written. Basically a man who is a correspondent for a newspaper writing about nature is mistakenly sent to a warzone. He shares the name Boot with their War correspondent. I think Evelyn Waugh is one of our greatest British novelists. He’s funny, he’s acerbic. He turns plots inside out and upside down. If I could write like anyone, I’d want to write like him.

Here’s a transcript from Jewish News.

—The Times has a review by Robbie Millen of the book by Robin Muir published in connection with his curatorship of the National Portrait Gallery’s Cecil Beaton exhibit. The review opens with this:

In July 1927 Evelyn Waugh confided to his diary: “I went to another party the other night in Brook Street. I don’t know who the host was. Everyone was dressed up and for the most part looking rather ridiculous. Olivia Plunket Greene had had her hair dyed and curled and was dressed to look like [the leading socialite] Brenda Dean Paul. She seemed so unhappy.”

The host was a Captain Neil McEacharn and the evening that Waugh so ill-enjoyed was an Impersonation Party, or Living Celebrity Party. Everyone was there, darling. […]

It was this party that caused the Daily Express to ask: “Who, then, are the Bright Young Things?” The answer to that question is contained in this upmarket coffee table book, which was published to go alongside a (now mothballed) National Portrait Gallery exhibition. Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things is a collection of the society photographer’s work from the 1920s and 1930s.

It’s a gorgeous affair. There are numerous silvery portraits of Phoebe Waller-Bridge lookalikes, interwar beauties and socialites, all bobs, cheekbones and elbows; the men are prettier and poutier still — they look as if they have escaped from a Marc Almond album cover. […]

Robin Muir, the exhibition’s curator, does a neat job of introducing the rich, famous and posh characters whom the young Beaton photographed, and their world of parties, pageants, charity matinees, evenings of tableaux vivants. Waugh satirised this empty-headed, glitzy scene in his novel, Vile Bodies (1930). I often, though, thought the names he conjured up for that satire were rather silly, the characters too preposterous. This book makes you rethink that, especially because of the preponderance of absurd nicknames — “Eggie”, “Buffles”, “Pempie”, “Dadie”.

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The Saga of the Stella Polaris

Posted on March 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh readers will know of the cruise ship M/V Stella Polaris as the vessel on which Evelyn Waugh and his first wife traveled on the 1929 cruise that became the subject of his first travel book. This was Labels  published in 1930. The travel column of the South China Morning Post carries a story about the ship’s history after Waugh’s noteworthy journey:

The arrival on Christmas Eve, 1929, of the Stella Polaris was eagerly awaited in Hong Kong. “From the illustrations and brochures,” noted the Hong Kong Daily Press on December 14, “the vessel appears to be as luxurious as any ship that has ever steamed into the port […] with spacious promenade decks and comfortable cabins with the latest Thermotank Punkah ventilating system.” The same paper witnessed her grand arrival at the Kowloon Wharf: “Her graceful yacht-like lines, and gleaming white paint attracted immediate attention as she made her way into her berth passing sturdy cargo boats, warships, and native craft.”

The SCMP article includes an excellent photo of the ship which looks more like a yacht than a cruise ship, at least by today’s standards. The article then mentions Waugh’s connection with the ship:

One of the first purpose-built luxury cruise ships, the “Stella” had carried English writer Evelyn Waugh around the Mediterranean earlier that year. The resulting Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930) was his first travel book, in which he had promised the ship’s Norwegian owners generous coverage, in exchange for a free berth.

“Every Englishman abroad, until it is proven to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist,” he wrote. “As I watched my luggage being lifted on to the Stella I knew that it was no use keeping up the pretence any longer. My fellow passengers and I were tourists, without any compromise or extenuation.” On board, “as one would expect from her origin, she exhibited a Nordic and almost glacial cleanliness. I have never seen any­thing outside a hospital so much scrubbed and polished.”

Waugh also offers a more detailed description of the ship not quoted in the SCMP:

She was certainly a very pretty ship, standing rather high in the water, with the tail-pointed prow of a sailing yacht, white all over except for her single yellow funnel, and almost ostentatiously clean […] So far, I was agreeably impressed, but I reserved judgment, for she has the reputation of being “the last word” in luxury design, and I am constitutionally sceptical of this kind of reputation. (London, 1974, p. 39)

The SCMP story goes on to explain that the ship was one of the first to be used for pleasure cruising in the Arctic regions of Scandinavia and concludes with this:

After a long and distinguished career, the Stella was sold to a Japanese company in 1969. She became a floating hotel then a floating restaurant, serving Scandinavian smorgasbords off the Izu Peninsula. In 2006 she was bought by a Swedish company for refurbishment in Stockholm, but sank under tow while still in Japanese waters.

For more information on the ship see this link.

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The Oldie Returns to Brideshead

Posted on March 26, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In its latest issue, The Oldie’s two cover stories are grouped together as “Return to Brideshead: From the film set to the smart set”. They are intended to mark the 75th anniversary of the novel’s publication as a book in May 1945. One article is by Waugh biographer Selina Hastings who sets out to describe “the friends who inspired Waugh’s most successful book.” Her article, entitled “Evelyn’s smart set”, opens with this:

It was in January 1944 that Evelyn Waugh managed to procure three months’ unpaid leave from the army, in order to begin work on what is regarded by many, myself included, as his finest novel, Brideshead Revisited. At that particular period, Waugh had little to do. Nobody seemed to want him. The war was going on elsewhere, and the jobs he had hoped for in his brigade had been allotted to others, his commanding officer explaining that he was so unpopular as to be almost unemployable. Thus it was that he found himself staying at a small hotel in a Devonshire village, writing about a world far distant from the grim austerity of wartime Britain. The book took him only five months to complete…

The other is a memoir by Nicholas Grace, the actor who chewed more scenery than any other in the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of the novel. His portrayal of the character of Anthony Blanche is the most memorable from a cast with several other serious contenders (especially John Gielgud’s Ryder pĂšre). Here’s the opening of Grace’s memoir entitled “Britain’s Grandest Film Set”:

Had I been born two years earlier, I would be as old as Brideshead Revisited, published 75 years ago! Still, I’d rather be younger. One sunny morning in 1979, my agent asked me to read for a new series, Brideshead Revisited. My heart leapt – I adored the book at school. I dared to ask the question: which part? ‘Anthony Blanche.’ ‘Oh God, isn’t that the queer guy with the stutter?’ ‘The very same,’ responded my agent. I went off to meet the director, the classically handsome, cigar-smoking Michael Lindsay-Hogg; the producer, the charmingly effusive Derek Granger (who turns 99 on 23rd April); and the casting director, Doreen Jones. She didn’t want me for the role! There was no reading at all; just an informal chat and an invitation to a screen test in Manchester. I found Blanche’s stutter a genuine challenge…

The Oldie has also posted on its weblog a short story by Teresa Waugh, wife of the late Auberon Waugh. This is entitled “Isolation” and is described as “the tale of an elderly lady, tormented by coronavirus-induced isolation.”

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Waugh and the Coronavirus (more)

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

An estate owner in rural Shropshire called into The Times with a story suggesting that rather than being locked-down in London, those of its readers with sufficient funds might like to avail themselves of vacation lets on his estate which were otherwise going empty. The landowner recalled the days of WWII when many residents of the capital fled the bombing to seek refuge in estates such as his (although his was apparently deemed too remote to be of any wartime interest to the military or civil authorities). Here’s a link.

One example he offers is this:

During the war, country houses were turned into hospitals, schools and training camps redolent of the prologue of Brideshead Revisited, which was written by Evelyn Waugh over six months in 1943-1944, mostly in a secluded country hotel in Devon.

In Waugh’s case, he was not fleeing from London but from an army base in Windsor. He was granted an extended leave to write his novel Brideshead Revisited. His own country house in Gloucestershire was occupied by nuns, and his wife was living in West Somerset with her family–i.e., Waugh’s in-laws, with some of whom he did not get on particularly well. If he was fleeing from anything, it was both the Army tedium and the small children and family life that he found interfered with his writing. Indeed, he was also absenting himself from the birth of his 5th child which occurred while he was holed up in Devon writing his novel. He had used the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford on several previous peacetime occasions to write in seclusion. His wife joined him there as soon after their daughter Harriet was born as was feasible and helped him proof the final typescript.

In another story in the same issue of The Times, columnist Quentin Letts makes an allusion to Waugh’s novella The Loved One to support a point:

The Commons had spent much of its day passing the Coronavirus Bill, the legislation strengthening ministers’ powers, constraining our freedoms. It became easier to lock up the mentally ill, close borders and, in the sterile language of officialdom, “enable the death management system to deal with increased demand”. If that formalin-scented phrase carried an echo of Evelyn Waugh’s embalmer Mr Joyboy, it returned when Matt Hancock, the health secretary, spoke of victims as “those who are taken from us”. …

The Roman Catholic news website The Catholic Thing also cited Waugh in a story about the emergency practices adopted by the Chutch to deal with the coronavirus epidemic:

Last Tuesday [17 March 2020]– the first day of no public Masses in our diocese – I was reminded of this scene from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, when the priest came to close up the Marchmain family’s chapel:

“The priest came in. . .and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday.”

That last line in particular rang in my mind:”as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday.”…

The story was by Fr Paul Scalia from the Diocese of Arlington, VA and was entitled “Priests without People”. Here’s a link.

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Evelyn Waugh Studies 50.3 (Winter 2019)

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Winter 2019 issue of the Society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies No. 50.3 has been issued. It is posted at this link. The contents are set out below:

ARTICLES

“Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead and Castle Howard” by Jeffrey Manley

INTRODUCTION

Castle Howard has become inextricably connected in the public perception with Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. This is due more to its selection as a setting for two popular film adaptations than to what was written by Waugh himself. And yet because of the overwhelming effectiveness of the portrayals of Waugh’s story in these films (or at least the earlier Granada TV production), even some literary scholars have come to accept the identity of Castle Howard as the setting intended in Waugh writings. The purpose of this paper is to compare Waugh’s descriptions of Brideshead Castle to Castle Howard itself and to review the process of the filmmakers in selecting that site as the setting for the story. The paper will then consider to what extent the identification of Castles Howard and Brideshead can be attributed to Waugh and what to the film adaptations.

Another question arises relating to the source for the Flyte family itself. They are clearly identified with the Lygon family who lived in Worcestershire at Madresfield Court. To some extent, Sebastian Flyte has similarities to Hugh Lygon, who was the second son of the Lygons and had a serious drinking problem that contributed to his early death. Hugh was to have been Waugh’s flat-mate in his final term at Oxford if Waugh had not left without finishing his degree. Hugh’s father, Lord Beauchamp, was forced into exile by homosexuality, whereas Lord Marchmain exiled himself by choice to escape his domineering wife and her religion in favor of his Italian mistress. Few among Waugh’s friends missed these connections. But to spare the Lygon family further embarrassment, Waugh provided thefictional Brideshead Castle and its residents with identities that are intended to distinguish them from the Lygons and Madresfield. His efforts in this regard were more successful in the case of distinguishing the houses than it was the families.

REVIEWS

“The Ghosts of Romance”, Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951, Constable, 2019. 384 pp. £25.00, or Lost Girls: Love and Literature in Wartime London, Pegasus, 2020. 336 pp. $28.95, by D. J. Taylor. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

NEWS

UPDATE (26 March 2020): A link to EWS 50.3 has been added.

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The Loved One Meets the Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–A blogger posting as “Sapper” traces the influence of Waugh’s writing about Los Angeles in the post war 1940s to what may be the first of several New Yorker essays by English writer and satirist Geoff Dyer, now a resident of that city (more specifically, the beach suburb of Venice):

Roll Over, Evelyn Waugh — Geoff Dyer Finds Laughs & Humor In Our Own Plague Year

As this blogger read Geoff Dyer’s essay about living in the US during a pandemic and scanned Dyer’s descriptions and reactions, the blogger remembered reading another Brit’s reaction to US attitudes toward death, Evelyn Waugh (full name: Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh) spent a brief post-war interlude (1945-1947) on a film project of one of Waugh’s novels, Brideshead Revisited. When the project collapsed, Waugh remained in Los Angeles and went on a tour of one of the most famous (or infamous) cemeteries in Southern California: Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, CA. The experience and several return visits to Forest Lawn, were the basis of Waugh’s British interpretation of death and funerals in the United States: The Loved One. And Geoff Dyer carries on the tradition of a British view of US attitudes toward death and dying. If this is (fair & balanced) macabre humor, so be it.

Waugh’s tenure in Los Angeles was much shorter than indicated in the blogpost. His visit lasted for about 6 weeks in February-March 1947. The Forest Lawn Memorial Park that Waugh visited was the original incarnation of that institution in Glendale. The Hollywood Hills branch opened after his trip, in 1952. Dyer’s New Yorker article appears in the March 23, 2020, issue of the magazine. Here are the opening lines, mentioning two other English writers (and later a French one), but not Waugh:

This might be the first installment of a rewrite of “A Journal of the Plague Year,” but it will be written in real time rather than with the benefit of the fifty-odd years of hindsight that Daniel Defoe was able to draw on. If all goes well—or very badly—it might also be the last installment, because although we’re only at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, I’m close to the end of my tether. Physical effects lie in the future, but the psychic toll is already huge—and wide-ranging. At the top end: Am I going to catch it? This can be answered with a slight rephrasing of Philip Larkin’s famous line from “Aubade”: most things may never happen; this one probably will.

Dyer’s article is entitled “The Existential Inconvenience of Coronavirus” and may be viewed at this link.

–Recommendations for reading and viewing during the coronavirus shut-down continue to roll in:

The Daily Telegraph provides a list of 20 “best TV box-sets for self-isolating”. Each entry has a brief summary. Here’s the only Waugh box-set that is listed:

Brideshead Revisited

For pure escapism and nostalgia, what better screen spectacle to lose oneself in than Granada’s gorgeously lavish 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel? Jeremy Irons plays Charles Ryder, the Oxford student bewitched by the dysfunctional aristocratic family of his dissolute friend Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews). Castle Howard in North Yorkshire stands in for the Marchmains’ palatial country seat, while a distinguished supporting cast is led by Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and, of course, Aloysius the teddy bear.

Available on: BritBox, Amazon Prime Video or DVD (Collector’s Edition ÂŁ27.99)

The Daily Mail has compiled its own streaming list that also includes Brideshead:

Brideshead Revisited BRITBOX

This 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel is perhaps the greatest costume drama of all time. Jeremy Irons is Charles Ryder, an undergraduate at Oxford who forms an intense friendship with hedonistic Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews).

Flyte loathes his family but insists on taking Charles to their country estate ‘to meet mummy’, but it is Sebastian’s sister Julia (Diana Quick) who really catches his eye.

Laurence Olivier plays Lord Marchmain and John Gielgud is Charles’s snobbish, small-minded father. One series

— Michah Mattix’s “Prufrock” column, formerly in the Weekly Standard, is now in The American Conservative. Mattix:

asked readers to send me their favorite book (fiction or nonfiction, classic or contemporary) of the past five years. Boy, did you all deliver. Here’s the list, which I’ll continue to update over the next few days. Any comments that appear after the titles are from the readers who recommended the book (in some cases, slightly edited).

One of the books recommended is Waugh’s Decline and Fall.

–A webpage for marajuana lovers called leafly.com prepared “a list of 50 of our favorite stoner books. Whether you define a stoner book as a novel about the delights of cannabis, or a nonfiction work about the history of weed, we’ve got you covered.” One of those recommended is Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. How it meets the stated criteria isn’t explained, but perhaps some of the journalists managed to get stoned while on assignment. Hashish was no doubt available. Anyone recalling such an incident is invited to comment below.

 

 

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Anthropologist at the Hypocrites Club

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

A new book surveys the professional career of E E Evans-Pritchard, a noted anthropologist who made his reputation with studies of Sudanese cultures. This biography is entitled The Anthropological Lens: A Dandy Among the Azande and is written by Christopher Morton. It is reviewed by anthropologist Adam Kuper in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal. According to the review, what sets Evans-Pritchard apart is his writing style. Quoting another assessment, Kuper writes:

“there has been no greater master of the ‘Oxbridge Senior Common Room’ tone, instancing his deployment as a guerrilla officer in the Sudan during World War II: ‘This was just what I wanted and what I could do, for I had made researches in the Southern Sudan and spoke with ease some of its languages.'”

Evans-Prichard was a member of the Hypocrites Club at Oxford. While Waugh, also a member, doesn’t mention him among his “roll call” of Hypocrites in his autobiography A Little Learning, Kuper explains that they would have known each other. Waugh’s friend Anthony Powell, also a member, recalls Evans-Pritchard in his memoirs as “grave, withdrawn and somewhat exotic in dress.” He was photographed wearing a Berber gown at a 1924 fancy dress party given by the Hypocrites. Evans-Pritchard had another connection at the Hypocrites through Waugh’s friend from Lancing, Tom Driberg, also a member. Driberg’s brother Jack, who “would become a district officer in the Sudan, [had] studied anthropology under Bronislaw Malinowski, and became a bosom friend of Evans-Pritichard.”

Kuper goes on to explain how several of the Hypocrites became part of the Bright Young People after they left Oxford but does not mention whether the biography places Evans-Pritchard himself in that group. Evans-Pritchard like fellow Hypocrites Waugh and Christopher Hollis and non-Hypocrite Oxford contemporary Graham Greene also became a convert to Roman Catholicism. This took place while he was serving in Libya.

After his conversion Evans-Pritchard rather distanced himself from fellow anthropologists whom he dismissed as “dogmatic unbelievers, obsessed with showing that religious belief was a bundle of illusions…” He, nevertheless, held the chair of social anthropology at Oxford until 1970 and, according to Kuper, “at his peak was the equal of his teacher and rival Bronislaw Malinowski. Mr Morton offers a fresh perspective on an extraordinary career.”

From a quick survey of the table of contents and index of the book available on Amazon.com, it appears that these discussions of Evans-Pritchard’s Oxford career and religious conversion come from Kuper’s own knowledge rather than Morton’s biography. The latter appears to concentrate more on Evans-Pritchard’s photography and fieldwork than it does on his personal life.

 

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