Midsummer Roundup

Posted on August 6, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Article has a detailed review of the recent CWEW edition of A Handful of Dust. This is by literary biographer and critic Jeffrey Meyers who has written several articles about Waugh in the last few years. Meyers opens his review with this comment on the book’s production and content:

…This ÂŁ95 book is nicely designed and printed but does not lie flat when opened.  Excellently edited by H.R. Woudhuysen, it has a detailed 12-page chronology of Waugh’s life, a perceptive 61-page Introduction, a helpful 43 pages of explanatory notes and a deadly 68 pages of textual variants that only a few fanatics will read.  That makes 184 editorial pages to 188 pages by Waugh…

He then proceeds to raise several additional points that he believes the editor could have made about the book. The most interesting are perhaps these comments relating to Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and other writings :

…The title and epigraph of the novel come from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”  But the key word originates in “The Burial of the Dead” in The Book of Common Prayer (1549): “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  This recalls Genesis 3:19: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”, which accounts for the custom at funerals of throwing a handful of earth on the grave of the deceased.  In his story “Youth,” (1898), Joseph Conrad recalls: “I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back . . . the heat of life in a handful of dust.”

More significant in The Waste Land is “The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.”  Waugh posed for a well-known 1926 photo on his motorbike, and Eliot’s “horns and motors” unite the hunting horns that attract Tony’s son, John Andrew, and the motor’s backfire that startles the horses and causes his fatal accident.  Waugh’s “horns that sounded in the heart of the wood” echoes the mournful mood and location of Alfred de Vigny’s “Le Cor” (1826): “Le son du cor est triste au fond du bois” (“The sound of the horn is sad in the depth of the wood”).

Waugh observed that “Man without religion will seek after strange and false gods (fortune-telling, psychoanalysis, economics, lost cities)”, as well as bone-setters and chromium plating.  His statement alludes to Deuteronomy 31:16: “this people will rise up, and go whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land.”  Eliot used After Strange Gods (also 1934) as the title of the bigoted book he later suppressed.  After the Brazilian Indians steal all Dr Messinger’s goods and disappear, he exclaims, “The situation is grave.  But not desperate,” which echoes the notorious speech of the German Minister of Foreign Affairs in July 1914, one month before the outbreak of World War One…

How much Meyers may be adding to what the editor wrote on these and other topics discussed in the review is hard to say without having seen the CWEW edition of the book.

The final section, and by far the longest, is essentially Meyers’ review of Waugh’s text and story rather than the editorial content and production standards of the new edition. Again, he may be elaborating on points made by Woudhuysen or discussing points Woudhuysen may not have raised. For example, this comment appears near the end of this final section:

…A Handful of Dust was a great critical and commercial success.  Edmund Wilson and Frank Kermode, two of the best modern critics, called it Waugh’s masterpiece.  Recalling the epigraph, Wilson observed the “sense of fear that permeates the novel”—the fear of loss, treachery, imprisonment and death…

It is not clear from this whether Meyers is relying on Woudhuysen’s text for these cites or is criticizing him for not including them.

The article is very interesting and well-written and is well worth reading whether or not one has any interest in the  critical apparatus added by the Complete Works edition. Here is a link.

–Lucy Scholes has added a book to her column “The Booker Revisited” on Lit Hub. This is a 1977 novella entitled Great Granny Webster written by Caroline Blackwood. She wrote several books, of which Scholes finds only three still in print. One of those is Granny Webster that was nominated for the 1977 Booker. Here’s a brief summary from the Lit Hub article:

…Initially, the chapters have the flavor of three distinct vignettes. The narrator’s account of her sojourn with Great Granny Webster reads as though it could have been written by Barbara Comyns, whose tales of young women in uncannily perilous domestic settings have a similarly gruesome, gothic allure. Aunt Lavinia’s chapter, meanwhile, takes us into territory that feels closer to that of an Evelyn Waugh novel; a world in which tragedy and excess sit side-by-side, but everyone’s very matter-of-fact about it all and no one makes a fuss. The visit the narrator pays her aunt—her account of which gives the chapter its shape—takes place on the day Aunt Lavinia is discharged from a psychiatric hospital, in which she’d been briefly interned following a failed suicide attempt. Now, back ensconced in her white lily-bedecked boudoir, sat at her dressing table and painting her nails, the whole episode was simply “infuriating” she tells her niece. And to make matters worse, she’s now in the most “frightful dilemma”—should she dismiss the poor maid who found her? The “indignity” of being discovered “stark naked in a blood-drenched bath” by one’s employee is really too much to bear…

Scholes goes on to describe how the 1977 Booker prize process eliminated Granny Webster from contention. This is:

…understood to have been down to the caprices of the chair of that year’s judges, Philip Larkin, who—in an episode that’s so dramatic it could have been lifted straight out of Blackwood’s novel—famously threatened to jump out of the window if the prize wasn’t awarded to Staying On, Paul Scott’s sequel to his acclaimed Raj Quartet. Whether his fellow judges agreed with him, or if they just wanted to shut him up, Larkin got what he wanted. He also wasn’t shy about airing his opinion that Great Granny Webster was autobiography and not fiction, so shouldn’t really have been a contender for the prize at all.

Blackwood is also remembered as an heir to the Guinness fortune and as wife of poet Robert Lowell. Great  Granny Webster is still available in both the US and UK as a New York Review Books Classic. Here’s a link to AmazonUS.

–The Catholic World Report has posted a review of the collection of articles by Cardinal Newman scholar Edward Short entitled What the Bells Sang. Among these is an essay on Evelyn Waugh. Here’s an excerpt from the CWR review:

In his survey of Novelists, Short gives a brief reflection on “The Catholic Apologist in Evelyn Waugh.” He notes that “After converting to Rome in 1930, Waugh spent the rest of his days trying to see himself and the world sub specie aeternitatis.” Contrary to the later animadversions of his grandson, Alexander Waugh, “there was nothing make-believe about his Catholic faith.” For, according to Waugh, his life after conversion was

“an endless delighted tour of discovery in the huge territory of which I was made free. I have heard it said that some converts in later life look back rather wistfully to the fervour of their first months of faith. With me it is quite the opposite. I look back aghast at the presumption with which I thought myself suitable for reception and with wonder at the trust of the priest who saw the possibility of growth in such a dry soul.”

Waugh unabashedly addressed Catholicism in his both his non-fiction and his journalism, but above all in his novels such as Brideshead Revisited, Helena, and The Sword of Honour, all of which were “studies of grace,” according to Short:

“Waugh shows how the life of faith actually takes root in a world hostile to but transformed by grace, the supernatural being always present in the natural world. Sebastian Flyte, Helena and Guy Crouchback all find themselves in a world radically fallen, and yet it is their persevering, grace-endowed faith that sustains them.”

Here’s a link to Short’s book.

–Religion journalist Joseph Pearce has posted an article entitled “Evelyn Waugh and the Traditional Mass” on a new subscription-only website called Inner Sanctum. No other information is available.

–A website called Academic Accelerator (looks like a cram sheet for high school and college students) has posted anonymous background notes for Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall. There are four sections: A biographical introduction, a plot summary, a critical reception and a discussion of “other media” (i.e., adaptations). Here’s a copy of the of the critical reception paragraph:

In 1928, The Guardian called the book “The Great Lark. The author has a pleasant sense of comedy and character, a talent for writing smart and persuasive dialogue, and his paintings are very much in the spirit of the story.” It’s harmonious,” he praised. . The paper also compared the novel’s superficial presentation to that employed by P.G. Wodehouse. Arnold Bennett hailed it as “an uncompromising and gloriously malicious satire”, while writer John Mortimer called it “the most perfect novel of all … a plot that is as ruthlessly comic” as Waugh’s is. Journalist Christopher Sykes recalls in his biography of Waugh, “I was in a nursing home when Decline and Fall was published, and Tom Driberg came to visit me and I [sic] brought a copy and he started reading some of his favorite passages and I literally couldn’t read them.” In a 2009 episode of Desert Island Discs, British actor and comedian David Mitchell said: He named Decline and Fall as a book to take to a deserted island, calling it “‘the funniest book I’ve ever read’ and ‘exactly the kind of novel I’ve always wanted to write’.”

Whether there are similar background entries for Waugh’s other works and why only this particular entry came up in a search, I couldn’t say.

 

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LRB Posts Waugh Article

Posted on August 3, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The London Review of Books has posted a feature length article by Seamus Perry relating to several of Waugh’s books. This is entitled “Isn’t London Hell?” The article ostensibly reviews 5 of the 6 Waugh novels published late last year as Penguin Classics in hardback editions with new introductions.  See previous post.  Those listed for review are Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour. But the topics range well beyond the new Penguin editions to include discussions of Black Mischief, Remote People, Helena, and even Rossetti, as well as briefer mentions of several others. Indeed, the only two novels that are not mentioned are The Loved One and Put Out More Flags. Here’s an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

‘A novelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery,’ reflects the beleaguered hero of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged car crash. But really, as Pinfold goes on to say, ‘most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters – Dickens and Balzac even – were flagrantly guilty.’ Pinfold is by admission a self-portrait, so Waugh must have expected readers to speculate on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself. In 1958, a Cambridge don called Frederick J. Stopp produced a study of Waugh – uniquely, Waugh himself gave ‘generous assistance’ – which warmly endorsed the idea that he had basically ‘two books in his armoury’, the first featuring the ‘contrast between sanity and insanity’ and the second ‘sanity venturing out into the surrounding sphere of insanity, and defeating it at its own game’. Whether this particular dualism had Waugh’s approval is unclear, but either way it doesn’t seem entirely satisfactory since the two alternatives look like variants of the same thing. Less well-disposed readers have thought that Waugh’s books divided on much more rudimentary lines: the good ones, which are funny, and the bad ones, which are pious. There is the string of brilliant, brittle social comedies in the 1930s, and then there is whatever started happening with the publication in 1945 of Brideshead Revisited. Stopp reported, presumably with his master’s sanction, that ‘Mr Waugh’s reputation among the critics has hardly yet recovered from the blow.’ Brigid Brophy had the best joke: ‘In literary calendars, 1945 is marked as the year Waugh ended.’

But maybe Dr Stopp was on to something when he implied that the two Waughs are really dual aspects of a single cast of mind. No doubt one side of his writerly nature, the devout and romantic, exerted itself more completely as he aged – so that what Brophy took to be the authentic Waugh, the brilliantly sardonic farceur, was ‘conclusively eaten by his successor, Mr Evelyn Waugh, English novelist, officer (ret.) and gentleman’. But the co-existence of startlingly different elements was there from the off. His first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), established at once the distinctive atmosphere of Waugh’s 1930s books: ‘the world’, as Malcolm Bradbury summarised it, ‘of comic absurdity and anarchy, in all its animalism and madness’… Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s books to have been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions…

Not much more is said about the Penguin editions themselves. And no mention is made of a sixth novel that was published at the same time as these five. That was Scoop with an introduction by Alexander Waugh. The books are not for sale in America so far as I can see. But the good news is that Penguin has kindly posted on its UK promotional website copies of the covers and the introductions by well known Waugh scholars Martin Stannard (Sword of Honour), Barbara Cooke (Decline and Fall), Paula Byrne (Brideshead Revisited), Simon J James (Vile Bodies) and Philip Eade (A Handful of Dust). Here’s a link.

Seamus Perry is a professor of English at Oxford and also appears in LRB podcasts with Mark Ford in a series called “Close Readings”. Perhaps we can look forward to a Waugh episode in that series.

UPDATE (4 August 2023): The 5 books that are the stated subject of the review are listed in the opening paragraph.

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Roundup: Late Stories, Stately Festivals and a Rare (but Misspelled) Burgundy

Posted on July 30, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–This week’s TLS has a review of Inez Holden’s late stories recently published in a collection issued by the Anthony Powell Society. Here’s an excerpt from the review by Lindsay Duguid:

…The stories share an elusive quality, with only the briefest introduction given to a mundane or exotic setting. Some offer subversive glimpses of high society while others reflect the author’s personal experience of working in a factory, a department store or a film company. Bad behaviour, neurosis and getting drunk are rewarding themes in which the influence of Evelyn Waugh can be detected.

As a literary figure Inez Holden (1902–74) is known for her appearance in novels and memoirs, where she is slender, droll and carefree, a friend of H. G. Wells, George Orwell, Stevie Smith, Powell and Waugh. Her life has its own fascination for she rejected her county family and became financially independent, earning her living in London during the war, working as a journalist, lunching at the Gargoyle and moving from flat to flat with her two cats. As Powell ploddingly remarked: “In a strange way it was herself rather than her books that marked her out”. As well as publishing five novels she wrote articles for Harper’s and the Strand and reviewed for the BBC. This collection published by the Anthony Powell Society has a bouncy introduction by Robin Bynoe as well as extracts from personal memoirs by Anthony Powell and Celia Goodman, Holden’s cousin, who is worth a volume of her own.

The Oldie in its July issue carried a story by Lucy Lethbridge about Inez Holden’s revival which mentions both the recent short story collection and other writings reissued previously by Handheld Press. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The writer Inez Holden (1903-74) is one of those people who crops up here and there in the memoirs of mid-twentieth century literary lives but whose work seems to have slid inexorably below the cultural radar. She is the shingled, gamine beauty in the centre of a grainy photograph of bright young 1920s people in fancy dress; the lover of Orwell, the tenant of HG Wells, the acquaintance of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, the friend for 40 years of the equally uncategorizable Stevie Smith…

A link to The Oldie article is available here.

Notice: your correspondent has a personal (but non-pecuniary) interest in this project as a co-editor of the short story collection Late Stories. It can be purchased at this this link.

–The Times has a story (26 July 2023) about the migration of rock festivals from large farms to stately homes. This is by Helen Rumbelow and is entitled “Stately home raves and what goes on after dark.” It opens with this:

Last August at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, one of England’s finest Palladian houses, the peace of the grand interior included a confused raver who bypassed the velvet ropes and was lying for a disco nap on one of the brocade sofas.

It wasn’t a huge surprise: Houghton Hall now hosts one of dance music’s most popular festivals, known only as “Houghton”. It is a novel twist that brings together two themes: first, the need for modern “capital-rich, cashpoor” aristocrats to harness modern trends that will squeeze the assets of their gargantuan properties. Second, a grand tradition of English debauchery in the warm summer glades of stately homes that reaches from Lord Byron via Evelyn Waugh to Alan Hollinghurst’s novelistic depictions of the hard-partying 1980s.

The very posh are increasingly letting young barbarians in through the ornate gates: for a few hundred quid the 24-hour party people get an upgrade on the normal festival surrounds of cow pat-strewn field or grim municipal park. The lord of the manor gets not just ticket sales but a rare weekend in which the grounds fill with the energy of youth this is a demographic that is diametrically opposite to the silver-haired set that normally arrive for an 11am slice of lemon drizzle and a tour of the ancient clocks. Just watch out for the ha-ha.

The story goes on to describe festival goers wandering from their squalid tents into stately homes and, in one recent more tragic case, to die somewhere on the premises. The events are intended to raise cash quickly to preserve the family estate but no specific preservation efforts are mentioned. One can imagine what Anthony Blanche might have said if Rex Mottram threw open the gates of Brideshead Castle while he was in residence to raise a few quid to cover repairs. The festival might be have been called Flytes of Fancy.

–Writing in The Spectator, Bruce Anderson wanders through desultory discussions with some friends about sports results and dismissal of Anthony Powell’s novels and journals, finally arriving at the more congenial subject of wine. This is inspired by the Powell Society’s publication of a collection of that novelist’s writings on the topic:

Anyway, the washed-out cricket was followed by a treat which washed away the taste of frustration. I have mentioned a rich and secretive Californian friend whom I once steered in the direction of a cellarful of serious Burgundy. He decided that it was time to visit London and inspect his trophies, including a 2002 Chambertin-Clos de Bèze from Armand Rousseau. Though he has no intention of selling any of the treasures, he was delighted with the way they had appreciated in value. Now it was time to check the tasted.

When I last drank it, for the first time, I concluded that it was one of the finest wines I had ever drunk, and that the House of Rousseau lived up to its reputation as probably the greatest Burgundian producer of the present era. There was no reason to change one syllable of that verdict.When my pal first ventured into Burgundy, he did not know much about wine and was surprised to learn that a 20-year-old bottle could be regarded as a promising youngster. I reassured him that his prizes were still approaching their prime, and would remain there for years. I did offer to make regular tasting inspections to check that all was well in the vinous nursery – the favours one does for friends – but he declared that this would be unnecessary. He planned to be in town more regularly. We drank other bottles which would be rated excellent in any other company. But that Clos de Bèze deserves to stand on its own: a very high place in my all-time wine XI.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waugh fans may recognize that Burgundy from Brideshead Revisited as the wine Charles Ryder ordered in Paris to share with Rex Mottram, “a Clos de Bère [sic] 1904″ (pp. 152-54, UK 1945).  It is mentioned later (again misspelled) when Rex pronounces the meal “not half bad.”  Alas, this bit of wine snobbery was spoiled by a typo that occurred in the book editions of the novel, as Waugh confessed in the 1960 C&H revision (p.10, UK 1960). It was still being misspelled in the 1957 Penguin reprint. Ironically, the wine was correctly spelled in the serial version of the book published in the US by Town and Country magazine in four issues November 1944-February 1945. That version was abridged and published without any editorial supervision by Waugh (and without his knowledge or permission). See EWS 50.2, Autumn 2019, pp. 16-17.

–Australian novelist DBC Pierre (best known for his novel Vernon Little God) is interviewed in the Guardian’s column The books of my life. Here’s an excerpt:

The book that changed me as a teenager
At around 12 I bought a book for its good value; the object itself was beautiful, and a bargain. It turned out to be Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall – and the timing of its appearance, when I finally started reading it, seemed to chime with the orbits of people, the recurrences and rises and falls I was beginning to see all around.

The writer who changed my mind
I can’t find this book, the writers have since been disgraced – but in my 20s a friend gave me a memoir by American televangelists as a joke. They recounted a miracle whereby an expensive mobile home came into their possession after they expressed a wish to their congregation. I found the book mesmeric, not for the contents but for the authors’ utter self-belief and lack of irony. It changed my mind on distinction and taste; we would laud any novelist who could describe these characters, and here they were speaking for themselves. High art.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Not a single book: every one threw a lever of some kind. I can say the one I wished I had written when I read it in my teens was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for its ability to snatch the truth from thin air.

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Roundup: From Addis to Epstein

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Reporter, an Ethiopian English-language journal, has identified the wholesale modernization of the country’s capital Addis Ababa as a matter of cultural concern.  Here are the opening paragraphs:

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s enigmatic capital, is undergoing a makeover that’s as controversial as it is transformative. Historic neighborhoods that breathe life and culture into the city – like Piassa, Legehar, Arada, Postabet and Beherawi – are being bulldozed to pave the way for modern glass and steel structures.

While this redevelopment promises economic gains, it’s also erasing chapters of the city’s artistic and historical narrative. Even as new attractions spring up across Addis, preserving the city’s architectural remnants – irresistible to travelers and historians alike – remains paramount.

Piassa, Addis’ beating heart, is known for its Italian-style buildings remnants of the Fascist occupation. Its medley of European and Ethiopian influences has long epitomized the city’s adaptability and persistence.

The landmark Taitu Hotel, Ethiopia’s first, stands as a tribute to Addis’ rich past, hosting legends like Evelyn Waugh and Emperor Haile Selassie. Demolishing such structures means more than losing buildings; it severs Addis’ connection to the past that shaped its unique identity.

Another target in Addis Ababa’s bulldozer’s sights is Leghar, home to the Franco-Ethiopian Railway, a remnant of Ethiopia’s early flirtation with globalization. The railway station’s distinctive Art Deco style is a tangible tether tying Addis to its international past. Snapping that line risks breaking residents’ collective memory.

Waugh wrote four books which took place largely in Ethiopia and described the environs of Addis in all of them, but most especially Remote People. Although as a Conservative, he might be expected to oppose the sort of radical modernization of Addis that is being described, he was no lover of that city’s decor on his various visits there and might in this case have favored the new cityscapes described in the article over what they replaced.

–The Australian literary journal Quadrant posts an article entitled “At War with Wodehouse.” This is a detailed account by Barry Gillard about how Wodehouse naively ran afoul of British politics while living under the German Occupation during WWII and ended up living in exile in the USA afterwards. Here are the closing paragraphs:

…Of Joy in the Morning, eventually published in 1946, the New York Times Book Review said: “Maybe Wodehouse uses the same plot over and over again. Whatever he does, it’s moderately wonderful, a ray of pale English sunshine in a grey world.” It closed with a comment Wodehouse thought “terrific”:

There is, of course, the question of Mr Wodehouse’s “war guilt”. Upon mature post-war reflection, it turned out to be about equal to the war guilt of the dachshunds which were stoned by super-heated patriots during World War I.

Wodehouse was enough of a writer for T.S. Eliot to confess that he took a stance only “this side of idolatry”. Evelyn Waugh was less restrained: “One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes on each page.” Ludwig Wittgenstein thought Honeysuckle Cottage (1927) the funniest thing he had ever read, and Christopher Hitchens called Wodehouse “the gold standard of English wit”.

Some Wodehouse jokes never found their way into the books, however. He offered a gem in a 1948 letter to fellow writer Guy Bolton. A clergyman is doing a crossword puzzle on a railway journey and is perplexed over his answer to 15 Across. He consults a colleague seated opposite:

“15 Across—‘Appertaining to the female sex’? Something–U–N–T?”

“Aunt!”

“Ah, yes, of course,” replies the clergyman. “I say, have you an eraser?”

—The American Spectator carries a review of a new book of literary criticism by veteran critic Joseph Epstein. This is entitled The Novel, Who Needs It? and it is reviewed by Larry Thornberry who begins by recounting his own literary education:

…I didn’t have the benefit of Joseph Epstein’s fine brief for the beauties, charms, and deep understanding of the human enterprise and its manifold mysteries that can be gained through the careful reading of serious fiction. A level of understanding available, Epstein insists, nowhere else. The well-read Epstein is clearly the man for this job. In The Novel, Who Needs It?, without being preachy or didactic, he makes a convincing case. […]

Nowhere in this compact book — extended essay really — does Epstein give us one of those 50 best lists of writers or of books that have repaid his reading time or added to his insights on human nature and the vanity fair that we call life. But through its chapters Epstein praises the work of [writers such as] Ivan Turgenev, Marcel Proust, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Kafka, Tom Wolfe, Milan Kundera, V.S. Naipaul, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Trollope, Barbara Pym, Thomas Mann, Anthony Powell, et al. His book mentions would require a list too long to share here…

I’m sure Epstein knows he’s facing strong headwinds in urging more Americanos to take up serious fiction. Much of the work of the more thoughtful writers is long and requires a major commitment of reading time…Another impediment to reading in anything save the shortest forms is the diminished attention span of our online, digital age, where pixels have replaced pages and the modern mind wanders after more than a few sentences. ..So The Novel, Who Needs It? is unlikely to become a best-seller. And I’m sure Epstein’s expectation of converts is modest. But I’ve never said that lost causes are necessarily bad ones. Epstein does the work of the angels by making the effort, even if the kind of reading Epstein recommends is too much time under the lamp for most. …

–The religion website WordOnFire has an article discussing the importance of Equanimity. The prime example comes from a novel by Evelyn Waugh:

In Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Men at Arms, Mr. Crouchback was a delightful, older, aristocratic widower who earnestly loved his Catholic faith and his storied English family tradition. And yet, when his beloved estate of Broome was lost (“without extravagance or speculation, his inheritance had melted away”), Mr. Crouchback (without affectation) maintained his equanimity. Waugh illustrates equanimity brilliantly:

‘[Mr. Crouchback] was an innocent, affable old man who had somehow preserved good humor—much more than that, a mysterious and tranquil joy—throughout a life which to all outward observation had been overloaded by misfortune. He had like many another been born in full sunlight and lived to see night fall. . . .

Only God and [his son] Guy knew the massive and singular quality of Mr. Crouchback’s family pride. He kept it to himself. That passion, which is often so thorny a growth, bore nothing save roses for Mr. Crouchback. . . .

He had a further natural advantage over Guy; he was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had a fair share of joys, and these were ever fresh and accessible in Mr. Crouchback’s mind. He never mourned the loss of Broome. He still inhabited it as he had known it in bright boyhood and in early, requited love.

In his actual leaving home there had been no complaining. He attended every day of the sale seated in the marquee on the auctioneer’s platform, munching pheasant sandwiches, drinking port from a flask and watching the bidding with tireless interest, all unlike the ruined squire of Victorian iconography. ‘Who’d have thought those old vases worth 18 pounds? Where did that table come from? Never saw it before in my life. . . . Awful shabby the carpets look when you get them out. . . . What on earth can Mrs. Chadwick want with a stuffed bear?’”

Even after losing his family home at Broome, Mr. Crouchback cheerfully returned once per year to have a requiem Mass sung for his ancestors. His walk down High Street to and from his former estate was punctuated by the warm greetings of old friendly shopkeepers and young passersby. Mr. Crouchback was a picture of equanimity.

 

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Bastille Day Roundup

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—Architectural Review has reposted its June 1930 article by Evelyn Waugh about the buildings of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. Some of this was included in Waugh’s  contemporaneous travel book Labels, but the magazine article appears to be more fully illustrated. Here’s an excerpt:

…Only a small part has as yet been built of the great Church of the Holy Family, which was to have been Gaudi’s supreme achievement, and unless some eccentric millionaire is moved to interpose in the near future, in spite of the great sums that have already been squandered upon it, the project will have to be abandoned. The vast undertaking was begun with very small funds and relied entirely upon voluntary contributions for its progress. The fact that it has got as advanced as it has, is a testimony to the great enthusiasm it has aroused among the people of the country, but enthusiasm and contributions have dwindled during the last twenty years, until only ten men are regularly employed, most of their time being taken up in repairing the damage caused to the fabric by its exposure. There are already menacing cracks in the masonry; immense sums would be required to finish the building on the scale in which it was planned, and the portions already constructed fatally compromise any attempt at modification. It seems to me certain that it will always remain a ruin, and a highly dangerous one, unless the towers are removed before they fall down.

All that is finished at present is the crypt, a part of the cloisters, the south door, two of the towers, and part of the east wall. There is a model in the crypt of the finished building which was shown in Paris at one of the International Exhibitions, but did not attract any great international support. The church is to be circular with a straight, gabled south front forming a tangent touching the circumference, not as might be supposed at its centre, but at a point some way to the east of the main door; beyond the high altar is to be a baptistery with a very high pointed dome, fretted and presumably glazed…

Work continues on the structure to this day but Waugh’s photos can be used to show the  progress.

—Time magazine posts an article by Sarah Watling on the poll taken by writer Nancy Cunard in 1937 to determine British writers’ positions on the ongoing Spanish Civil War. This article was apparently inspired by similar attempts today to make a similar determination on the Russo-Ukraine conflict. Here’s the article’s opening:

The first thing I ever knew about the poet, journalist, and activist Nancy Cunard was a commanding broadsheet she dispatched in the summer of 1937, containing the challenge that, decades later, would spark the questions that prompted my book, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future. She addressed it to many of the most important writers of Britain and Ireland, sometimes sending multiple copies with the idea that they’d pass them on. It made its way to George Bernard Shaw and Evelyn Waugh; to T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett; to Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay and the Woolfs; to Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden. It reached Aldous Huxley and George Orwell; Vita Sackville-West and Sylvia Pankhurst. It went to Vera Brittain and H. G. Wells; to Rosamond Lehmann and her brother, John; to Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner, Valentine Ackland.

Nancy printed her missive in black and red and addressed it, broadly and grandly, to ‘the Writers and Poets of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales’. Large type announced: THE QUESTION. Along the left-hand side of the sheet was added, vertically: SPAIN

The Question (though technically there were two) appeared perfectly straightforward. ‘Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?’

Nancy assured her writers that she would publish the answers they chose to send, by which she meant: you are asked to state a position publicly. As far as she was concerned, not taking a position was impossible.

Most of the writers opposed Franco and several replies are mentioned. I did not see any further mention of Waugh’s reply, but he did send one and it is included in his collected journalism:

I know Spain only as a tourist and reader of the newspapers. I am no more impressed by the ‘legality’ of the Valencia [leftist] government than are British Communists by the legality of the Crown, Lords and Commons. I believe it was a bad government, rapidly deteriorating. If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent (EAR, 187).

The reply along with others appeared in the Left Review.

–Neil Tennant, member and co-songwriter for the band called the Pet Shop Boys, was interviewed recently by Mojo magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

Smash Hits [a magazine for which Tennant wrote] was renowned for asking pop stars curious questions. Remember any good ones?

My famous question was “Does your mother play golf?” Which I thought was an interesting question because it revealed a lot about your family background. My mother did play golf and got narked by the question because she thought it was a dig at her. Chris Heath always asked, “What colour is Tuesday?” A good question because I’m immediately going to say “Green”. The influence Smash Hits had on me was, I wasn’t afraid of humour. I also got it from My Fair Lady, and before that when I was in HMS Pinafore at school. That you can be serious but you can still be funny. One of my favourite writers, Evelyn Waugh, is like that. It’s funny, but it’s really bitter, quite nasty, actually.

Evelyn Waugh and chart pop is a slightly unusual combination. Did you think you were doing something new?

We thought very much that we had the secret of modern pop, the pop that came after Duran Duran, Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which was going to combine hip hop, hi-energy, electro with emotion. And with songs about real life.

–Waugh’s opposition to reform of the Roman Catholic liturgy is mentioned in two sites. One is in the religious journal Crisis Magazine where Robert Garnett posts a summary of Waugh’s position. Here’s an excerpt:

In 1962, the Second Vatican Council opened with great fanfare, amidst rejoicing at the prospect of the Church opening up to the modern world, a twentieth-century updating (the famous aggiornamento). The Council would, many fondly hoped, usher in a second Pentecost, almost a Second Coming.

Waugh was unimpressed. The glib optimism was fatuous, the presumption repellent. As the Council convened that autumn, his reservations appeared in the British weekly The Spectator, in an essay titled “The Same Again, Please.”

The other is an anonymous posting in the liturgical weblog rorate-caeli which concludes with this:

…As in Waugh’s day, there is a temptation for Catholics today to lose hope that the attempt to “rob the Church of poetry, mystery and dignity” will never end. But there is indeed reason to hope. The first is that Waugh’s letters are even more relevant today than they were when he wrote them. Waugh was not a crank or reactionary, as he might have supposed, for caring. Instead, he expressed concerns that have proved timeless.
The next is that, unlike in the mid-1960s, there is no longer a default assumption of Catholics that whatever the Pope or the bishops do is the work of the Holy Spirit. Waugh assumed that Catholics would simply go along with the changes– but they did not. Five years after Waugh’s death, Paul VI granted the Agatha Christie indult to all Catholics in England, allowing the celebration of the traditional liturgy. Today, beautiful pre-1955 Holy Week liturgies proliferate around the world. Against all efforts to stamp it out, traditional Catholicism has survived and thrived. It will continue to do so.
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Mid-July Roundup

Posted on July 11, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–Novelist, critic and literary biographer DJ Taylor in this month’s Literary Review writes about literary biographies. His own most recent efforts in this field are a revision and expansion of his biography of George Orwell originally published in 2003 and his Lost Girls: Love and Literature in Wartime England (2019). The latter was reviewed in EWS 50.3 (Winter 2019). The Literary Review article opens with this:

The first literary biography I ever read, back in 1977, was Christopher Sykes’s life of Evelyn Waugh. Even at the age of sixteen, I seem to remember, I had my doubts, impressed, on the one hand, by what the book clearly gained from the author’s friendship with his subject, yet puzzled, on the other, by the emollience of the tone and the reluctance to confront one or two of the, shall we say, more challenging aspects of Waugh’s personality…

–In the religious journal OurSundayVisitor, Kenneth Craycraft has another look at Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter. The review opens with this:

In July of 1948 Evelyn Waugh reviewed Graham Greene’s new novel, “The Heart of the Matter” for “Commonweal” magazine. Waugh used the opportunity not merely to review the book, but to discuss the purpose of the Catholic artist. “There are … Catholics … who think it the function of the Catholic writer to produce only advertising brochures setting out in attractive terms the advantages of Church membership,” Waugh observed.

“To them this profoundly reverent book will seem a scandal,” he continued, “for it not only betrays Catholics as unlikeable human beings but shows them tortured by their faith.” Waugh predicted that “The Heart of the Matter” would “be the object of controversy and perhaps even of condemnation.” I hope I can be forgiven for saying that Waugh’s review truly gets to the heart of the matter, both with regard to Greene’s book and its argument that good Catholic art may portray Catholics as disagreeable and haunted by their faith.

Waugh’s own greatest novel, “Brideshead Revisited,” can be described in precisely this way. The most (relatively) sympathetic character in “Brideshead” — its protagonist and narrator, Charles Ryder — is an adulterer who abandoned his wife and children before his conversion to Catholicism, and is churlish and rude after. And I know of no character in Catholic literature more tortured by his faith than Sebastian Flyte, the novel’s other central character, who can neither accept nor reject God’s grace…

–Gareth Roberts in The Spectator takes on what he calls the “The Saintly Reading Cult” in which reviewers look for moral reasons not to read a book. Here’s an excerpt:

…And then we have Goodreads, the source of much of this madness. Many of the reviews are written in the grand ‘I’ve been so enriched’ tone of Hyacinth Bouquet wanting to be seen chatting to the vicar. It was the Abigail Proctors of Goodreads who descended on Kate Clanchy, who panicked Elizabeth Gilbert into retracting her latest novel merely because it was set in Russia. Goodreads is where you will find all the worst excesses of the Saintly Reading Cult.

I confess I’ve got hooked checking on Goodreads after I’ve finished reading a book I suspect they won’t like. There is something very funny about people who read a book not for fun but to rate it against their tick list of the progressive opinion suite c.2023. My favourite was the contributor who compared reading Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief to being trapped in a lift with Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, which is doing both of them an enormous and undeserved compliment. I’ve been tempted to write inappropriate Goodreads reviews just to liven the place up. Of Human Bondage – ‘well done Somerset, another winner’. On The Wretchedness Of The Human Condition – ‘bit gloomy for a beach read, one star’…

–A film blog called Movieweb has produced a list of underrated 1960s films which it thinks should be considered cult classics. Here’s one of the choices:

The Loved One is a black satirical comedy starring a who’s who of 1960s Hollywood, based on the satirical novel The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy by Evelyn Waugh. The film follows Dennis Barlow, played by Robert Morse, who joins the funeral industry after his uncle commits suicide. He falls for Aimee, who is the spiritual funeral home stylist, but stumbles on a wicked plan schemed by the cemetery owner. The film was divisive at the time for challenging the limits of dark comedy, where some of its satirical elements threw the audience off their guard. Nevertheless, the film is known for its outrageous humour and a special cameo by the musical prodigy, Liberace.

–Several papers have stories based on the recently announced sale of the book collection of the late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts. Here’s an excerpt from a BBC announcement:

…The signed copy of Gatsby leads the auction, with an estimated price of ÂŁ200,000-300,000. Fitzgerald dedicated the book to MGM Screenwriter Harold Goldman, with whom he worked on the 1938 Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh comedy A Yank In Oxford.

The inscription reads: “For Harold Goldman, the original ‘Gatsby’ of this story, with thanks for letting me reveal these secrets of his past”.

Also for sale is a proof copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which the author sent to friends for their comments in 1944. Waugh later made several changes to the novel, including rewriting the ending and changing some names…

The auction will take place in two parts, a live sale at Christie’s headquarters in London on 28 September, and an online sale that runs from 15 to 29 September.

Highlights will be put on display in Los Angeles from 25 to 29 July, New York from 5 to 8 September, and London from 20 to 27 September.

 

 

 

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Campion Lecture in Oxford Announced

Posted on July 5, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

Campion Hall, Oxford has announced a public lecture in September that may be of interest to our readers:

Professor Gerard Kilroy, Senior Fellow in English at Campion Hall, will be delivering a public lecture to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the foundation of the British Province of the Society of Jesus. The talk will include a panel discussion and refreshments, followed by an ecumenical Service of Thanksgiving in Christ Church Cathedral at 11.30am.

A special aura surrounds the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries to England. From the moment of landing in June 1580 till the capture of Edmund Campion in July 1581, their clandestine preaching and sacramental ministry involved disguise, constant danger, narrow escapes: enough to create a legend. Campion was always in the first rank of candidates for canonisation, even if negative publicity attached itself to Robert Persons. Evelyn Waugh’s life of Campion captured the chivalric glamour of Campion by largely ignoring any doubts he had and minimising the role of Persons.

Recent scholarship has tried to attach political aims to the mission itself. John Bossy even accused Campion of reckless disregard for his own safety, praised the prudence of Persons. Michael Carrafiello accused Catholic historians of ignoring the mission’s ‘political intent’, thereby giving some justification to the response of the Privy Council. Peter Lake and Michael Questier gave the Edmund Campion affair a central place in English history but argued that the mission was not political but ‘structured by certain political and polemical objectives’.

This talk aims to restore Campion’s own doubts about papal policy to the account, his ‘lingering’ (as the Bohemian Jesuit historians described it), and to give full weight to the disastrous effect of the Irish expedition of Dr Nicholas Sander which completely undermined the claims of the missionaries that they had no political objectives. It will argue that Campion, far from being naive, understood from the first the confused religious and political situation in England, was further outraged by the secrecy with which the mission to Ireland had been shrouded (as his interview with Dr Allen makes clear), but threw himself into his sacramental mission with all the freedom of a condemned man.

If anyone is to be blamed for the “failure” (in human terms) of the 1580 mission, it must be the man who planned it, Dr William Allen, without telling either the missionaries or Everard Mercurian, the superior General, that Sander had already landed in Dingle. Yet, in the end, both Nicholas Sander and Edmund Campion were carrying through their profound beliefs about the nature of the church and its relationship to the state; until recently, the view of Allen and Sander, was considered orthodox, even if the tide has now turned in favour of Campion’s position.

The public lecture will be followed by an ecumenical Service of Thanksgiving in Christ Church Cathedral at 11.30am; everyone is welcome to attend this service without need for registration.

Professor Kilroy is the co-editor of the recently published v. 17 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr. Information on ticketing for the lecture is available at this link. There is no charge for admission and tickets for the service at the cathedral are not required.

 

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Evelyn Waugh Studies 53.3 (Winter 2022)

Posted on July 4, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

A copy of the latest issue of the Society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies is posted for review. This is described by Jamie Collinson, the Society’s secretary as follows:

This is an edition I’ve been keenly looking forward to, because the writer Gavin Mortimer has contributed an essay on Waugh’s connections to Bill and David Stirling and the Special Air Service – the British Army’s special forces regiment. Gavin is an excellent writer who contributes regularly to The Spectator, a magazine to which Evelyn, Auberon and Alexander Waugh all have strong connections.

The essay is fascinating, and I hope you enjoy it.

Also in this edition is an excellent piece by Timothy M. M. Baker on identifying Waugh’s Merton Street house in Oxford, and Nan Zhang’s review of The Business of Reading: A Hundred Years of the English Novel by Julian Lovelock.

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4th of July Roundup

Posted on July 1, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The website LitHub.com has a story about a proposal by the former royal couple Harry and Meghan to Netflix for what sounds like a prequel to Great Expectations. Should that fail to be commissioned, the LitHub reporter Janet Manley has some other proposals she thinks the couple should consider, including this:

…An adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief transposed to Montecito, in which an Englishman arrives with ideas of modernizing the agrarian society of talk show hosts, gardeners and nannies. Hijinks ensue when the Englishman turns out not to understand the ways of the Californians…

–The auction house Tennants recently listed:

…a ‘Portrait of George Waugh’ by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) offered with an estimate of ÂŁ2,000-3,000. The sitter was the brother of the artist’s first wife, Fanny. The lawyer lived with his parents in Bayswater, but sadly died at 34 having accidentally drowned in the sea off Devon. It seems that the portrait was executed after his death, with the likeness taken from a photograph prior to 1874, when the arts cut off contact with his family-in-law. The portrait was once owned by writer Evelyn Waugh.

You can view a reproduction of the portrait and more details of Evelyn Waugh’s ownership on the firm’s website. It is listed in lot 1171 in a sale scheduled for 15 July.

–Books blogger Nigeness reports that he is reading Waugh’s novel Helena. Here is his first reaction:

I am reading what is probably Evelyn Waugh’s least characteristic and most nearly forgotten novel, Helena (1950), his sole excursion into the genre of historical fiction – and, oddly, the novel Waugh regarded as his best work. So far, I’ve found that the most striking thing about it is how un-Wavian it seems: apart from the author’s pugnacious Preface, it could have been written by almost any good historical novelist of the time, and I should think very few, reading it ‘blind’, would guess that it was Waugh…

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending this.

–Another blogger (novelist Daniel McInerny) on a weblog entitled The Comic Muse discusses what he calls Waugh’s “minimalist” prose style as applied in Vile Bodies. Here’s the introduction:

Here Waugh puts on display what has been called his “minimalist” technique, a technique which he utilized throughout his career, but which especially characterizes his first five novels: Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938).

In a 1930 review of W.R. Burnett’s boxing novel Iron Man, Waugh himself describes the technique in the following way:

‘There are practically no descriptive passages except purely technical ones. The character, narrative, and atmosphere are all built up and implicit in the dialogue, which is written in a vivid slang, with numerous recurring phrases running through as a refrain. Ronald Firbank began to discover this technique, but his eccentricity and a certain dead, ‘ninetyish’ fatuity frustrated him. I made some experiments in this direction in the telephone conversations in Vile Bodies. Mr. Ernest Hemingway used it brilliantly in The Sun Also Rises. It has not yet been perfected but I think it is going to develop into an important method.’ (from “The Books You Read,” pp. 300-01 in the 2018 Oxford University Press edition of Waugh’s Essays, Articles, and Reviews: 1922-1934).

In fact, I believe Waugh—along with Hemingway—brings the technique to a great height of perfection. (You can also find minimalism employed, for example, by Joan Didion, Muriel Spark, Raymond Carver, and the late Cormac McCarthy in The Road.)…

–Finally, Fiona Reynolds in Country Life magazine describes her recent explorations around Madresfield Court and explains its connections to Waugh’s writings:

…It was the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (where it was doomed Tony Last’s ancestral home, Hetton Abbey) and, more famously, Brideshead Revisited, drawing on the Lygons to create the intriguing Flyte family, Sebastian at its heart. The elegiac novel was filmed for the ITV series at Castle Howard, but its description matches Madresfield, which Waugh often visited in the 1920s…

Commenters often confuse the sources of Waugh’s inspirations but Reynolds has it right. Mardesfield the house inspired the structure in A Handful of Dust and the occupants of the house (the Lygons) inspired the Flytes in Brideshead.

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Complete Works Featured in TLS

Posted on June 28, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

A review of the four latest volumes in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh series is featured on the cover of this week’s TLS. This is written by literary critic Peter Parker and entitled “A Handful of Books: Evelyn Waugh’s failed marriage and spiritual crisis”. Here is a summary from the weekly editor’s column:

The great Waugh juggernaut rolls on. The University of Leicester and Oxford University Press’s forty-five-volume collaboration on a lavish, scholarly edition of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh – letters, juvenilia, poems and graphic art included – continues with the publication of four volumes of fiction and nonfiction, A Handful of Dust (1934), The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), Edmund Campion (1935) and Robbery Under Law (1939). Peter Parker reviews the work in progress.

A Handful of Dust reflects the author’s shame after the failure of his first marriage to the Hon Evelyn Gardner. Waugh’s “darkest novel” was also, according to Parker, coloured by the humiliating rejection of his proposal to Teresa “Baby” Jungman. In Vile Bodies (1930), Waugh had already reached a turning point: thereafter he condemned a civilization that had thrown away its moral compass. Writing to his brother about his intention to divorce his wife, Waugh complained that “the trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment”. Untethered from hierarchy, tradition and the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, we were all, like his doomed protagonist Tony Last, lost. He would scourge the Bright Young Things in his satires.

Waugh’s hagiography of the sixteenth-century Catholic martyr Edmund Campion showed the way ahead. “If Campion began as an act of pietas”, says its editor, Gerard Kilroy, “it had become, by 1946, the cornerstone of Waugh’s future writing”, introducing Catholic themes in all his later books. Yet was Waugh truly at peace? In his penultimate novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, the autobiographical story of a Catholic writer’s breakdown during a sea voyage, hallucinatory voices suggest that his religion is humbug of a social climber. “Everything with him was jokes”, replied his friend Nancy Mitford.

As is so often the case, Waugh’s underrated travel book Robbery Under Law is not even mentioned by the editor aside from its title. Parker’s review gives it more attention. Here’s an excerpt:

The account of sixteenth-century religious persecution [in Edmund Campion] was undoubtedly informed by Waugh’s knowledge of similar purges in his own times, and Robbery Under Law (1939), another of Waugh’s least regarded works, includes a whole chapter on the harrying and murder of Catholics in Mexico. Unlike Campion, Robbery was initially undertaken for strictly commercial reasons. It was commissioned by Clive Pearson, the son of the late Lord Cowdray, whose Mexican Eagle Oil Company had been expropriated by the country’s Marxist government with promises of recompense that were clearly never going to be fulfilled. The contract drawn up between Pearson and Waugh, reproduced in Michael G. Brennan’s introduction, was kept secret to ensure that no one would know that the author had been paid by an interested party to write the book.

The result was that Waugh’s case for Mexican Eagle and praise of its late proprietor appeared entirely objective. Waugh was, however, genuinely appalled by what he found in Mexico, and it seems unlikely that he would have written the book any differently without Pearson’s ÂŁ1,500 (which was added to his publisher’s advance of ÂŁ400). […]

One of his biographers, Christopher Sykes, maintained that Waugh came to regard Robbery Under Law “with shame and displeasure”, but there is no evidence for this. Waugh did once liken the book to “an interminable Times leader of 1880”, but this was in a letter to Diana Cooper and need not be taken seriously. The opening sentence acknowledges the book to be a political one, but the first chapter, in which Waugh describes his arrival in Mexico City and his impressions of the capital, is travel writing of a high order. The book also contains some admirable passages of rhetoric, as well as enjoyable satire of the kind familiar from Black Mischief and Scoop. The frequently changing rulers of Mexico and the losses incurred by foreign businesses in the country are now of merely local historical interest, but some of Waugh’s observations remain pertinent, as when he writes that American interventions in countries south of its border have repeatedly “proved disastrous”.

Contrary to Parker’s comment quoted above, there is indeed some evidence that Waugh had disowned the book written under contract. After the war when he compiled a selection of his prewar travel writings, generous excerpts from Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days and Waugh in Abyssinia were assembled for When the Going Was Good (1946). In the introduction, Waugh writes: “There was a fifth book, Robbery  Under Law, about Mexico, which I am content to leave in oblivion, for it dealt little with travel and much with political questions. […] So let it lie in its own dust…” Parker’s own observations indicate that Waugh may have been unfair in his judgement of the book, but that does not change the fact that he deemed the book to have been an embarrassment.

Parker also adds this interesting observation about the editorial decision to omit from this Handful of Dust volume of the Complete Works the alternative ending written for the magazine version :

The novel was published in Harper’s Bazaar in an abbreviated version with a different (and happier) ending. A scholarly edition of this novel ought really to have included this alternative ending, which Waugh published under the title “By Special Request” in Mr Loveday’s Little Outing and Other Sad Stories (1936). The reason it does not is that Mr Loveday’s Little Outing will be Volume 5 of the Complete Works, but we have no idea when this will appear, and the omission here is frustrating.

Finally, Parker concludes with some observations about the books’ production and editing. He is annoyed by the blurry photographic reproductions and finds that while some of the detailed discussion

will be of interest only to scholars, much of it will be welcomed by the general reader. Woudhuysen’s observations about architecture in A Handful of Dust, for example, are particularly illuminating.

There is also a mention of some oversights. For example:

…when in Robbery Under Law Waugh compares nations to “horses at ‘Minaroo’, moving at varying speeds towards the same object”, Brennan suggests he “might be referring to a popular fairground game”, the name of which is of “unknown derivation”. Minoru, as it is properly spelt, was in fact a popular board game of the Edwardian period, named after the king’s world-famous racehorse, winner of the Derby in 1909…

There are plans afoot for reviews of these four volumes in future issues of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

 

 

 

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