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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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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