Spring Equinox Roundup

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Several publications have posted recommended binge reading and watching for the homebound during the Wuhan coronavirus shut-down. Many of these include books or adaptations of books by Waugh:

—The Guardian produced a list of 50 of the “Best Binge Watches: From Buffy to Brideshead.” This was compiled from recommendations of a team of TV writers. Here’s the one for Brideshead:

49. Brideshead Revisited
Amazon Prime Video/BritBox
They don’t, in so many senses, make them like this any more. ITV’s 1981 version of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel was, with its 11-hour running time, not far off granting the wish of those viewers who like dramatisations to include every word of the book. That meant the world Waugh conjured – fading nobility, eccentric inter-war hedonism and grassy afternoons at a perfectly proper Oxford University – could be allowed to completely envelop the viewer. In the days before the big US box-set beasts, Brideshead Revisited was routinely cited as the best TV show of all time. In part, that was due to the exquisite score, the sky-high production values and the brilliant cast. But its appeal has always been mainly as a door to a fantasy of a bygone world. That’s now perhaps more valuable than ever. Jack Seale

—The Sunday Times also has a list of 50 TV serials recommended in its “Coronavirus Lockdown: Self-Isolation Special”. This was compiled by Helen Hawkins. Under the “Period” heading this one appears:

Brideshead Revisited
Even more than the sets and costumes, Evelyn Waugh’s dialogue and characters sing. How many series offer cameos by Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud?
Britbox; Amazon, from ÂŁ6.99

—Forbes Magazine lists 8 books to take you away from your quarantine to somewhere overseas:

When it comes to the foibles and absurdities of the upper-crust (and often under-behaved) British land-owning aristocrats, there is no writer as masterful as Evelyn Waugh. And of all his varied and accomplished writings, there is no novel more instantly absorbing (and impossible to resist) as Brideshead Revisited. His depiction of privileged boyhood is a classic, and you will find yourself rooting for its protagonist as he falls within a very dissolute, very English lifestyle. In the words of Waugh: “You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.” Expect many more one-liners to follow.

—At least one recommendation mentions a Waugh novel other than Brideshead. This appears in the Greater Manchester online newspaper mancunianmatters.co.uk and is entitled “Ignoring coronavirus: A cultural guide”. It is written by Emma Morgan, and this particular section starts with a Jane Austen novel:

Although a trip to the cinema is probably off the cards, Autumn de Wilde’s new adaptation of [Jane Austen’s Emma] will also be available to view at home from Friday. This film is an elegant and picturesque interpretation of the grace and wit of Austen’s prose, which is sure to have a calming effect on any viewer. The reassuring softness of Emma is echoed in the style of novelists Elaine Dundy and Evelyn Waugh. The blasĂŠ heroine of Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, Sally Jay Gorce, and the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, protagonist of Waugh’s Decline and Fall, seem to exist in some sort of comedic vacuum, where no action or decision has any real consequence on anything.

—The Australian issued a list of books to read in “self-isolation”. Among these is Brideshead Revisited as well as the Book of Revelations, W G Sebald’s Austerlitz and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.

–In another of its “Top 10 Books” columns, the Guardian lists books about boarding schools. This was compiled by James Scudamore whose new novel, English Monsters, “is about a group of friends who meet at a boarding preparatory school at the age of 10, and whose experiences there resound inescapably in their lives over the next 30 years. […] Everyone at boarding school craves superpowers, because it’s the most obvious response to the powerlessness. But you don’t have them.” One of those on Scudamore’s “Top 10” list is Waugh’s Decline and Fall:

4. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Sent down from Scone College, Oxford for indecent behaviour after his trousers are stolen by a drunken member of the Bollinger Club, Paul Pennyfeather is exiled to teach at a purgatorial boarding school in Wales. On sports day, the hurdles have been burned for firewood and are replaced by five-foot-high spiked railings, and the starting pistol is Philbrick the butler’s service revolver, which ends up being discharged into the heel of Lady Circumference’s son, Lord Tangent. Among its many delights is the novel’s acknowledgement of the fact that teachers at boarding school often seem as perplexed as the pupils as to how they came to be in such a place.

Others included are George Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Days”, The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

–The global fashion and travel magazine Lucire has posted on its website an article from issue #41 entitled “The Land of the Giants” by guest contributor George Rush. He writes about his recent trip to Guyana in advance of changes likely to be wrought in that country by revenues from the oil exploitation that is just beginning. As part of his equipage he

…brought along a copy of Ninety-Two Days, Evelyn Waugh’s amusing diary of his 1933 trek into this country’s wilderness (and a template for his novel, A Handful of Dust). Before embarking on his ‘journey of the greatest misery,’ Waugh had strolled around Georgetown, finding that its ‘main streets were very broad, with grass and trees down the centre.’ And so they still were—plaited with canals, to drain a city that lies three feet below sea level at high tide. (One more incentive to pay attention to climate change!) Georgetown was bigger now—population: about 200,500—and probably tattier, due to a chronically depressed economy. But much of what Waugh saw remained.

The web post is accompanied by photography, some of which is quite stunning.

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Sword of Honour Re-examined

Posted on March 21, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of the literary magazine Raritan Quarterly (Winter 2020, v. 39, #3) includes an article by Andrew J Bacevich about Waugh’s war trilogy. This is entitled “My Guy”, giving some indication that Bacevich finds himself in agreement with Waugh’s (and Guy Crouchback’s) views of the conduct and results of WWII. Bacevich is a graduate of West Point, retired army officer and Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University. He is noted for his outspoken criticism of the second Iraq War, which may explain to some extent his identification with Evelyn Waugh’s position on WWII as reflected in his trilogy.

In the absence of an abstract of the article, here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs in which Bacevich explains what he sets out to do:

The first volume of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy appeared in 1952 and the last in 1961. In the United States, this was the Eisenhower decade, a moment defined by three seemingly unimpeachable convictions: first, that the recently concluded Second World War had been a righteous struggle pitting good against evil; second, that the ongoing Cold War was a replay of the conflict that had ended in 1945 in decisive victory; and third, that God had remained throughout firmly on our side. Eisenhower endorsed all three of these propositions. So too did the great majority of his fellow citizens. Or at least they pretended to, aware that overt dissent could be perilous. […]

Today, several decades after they first appeared, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and. Gentlemen (1955), and The End of the Battle (1961) retain their place among the very best novels of World War II. They are vividly written, savagely funny, and teeming with the sublimely absurd characters that are a trademark of Waugh’s fiction. Yet underlying the comedy is serious purpose. The trilogy is above all a sober reflection on cultural and civilizational decline, which, in Waugh’s view, the conflict soon to be enshrined as the Good War had served to accelerate.

In an act of anticipatory demolition, Sword of Honour takes aim at the yet-to-be-fully-promulgated Good War/Greatest Generation myth and proceeds to dismantle it. For Waugh, the war that Europeans date from 1939 does not qualify as good, in considerable part because Great Britain chose to wage it by following a morally disreputable course. Nor does he deem those who fought or endured the war particularly great. They are merely human: flawed, frivolous, and mostly preoccupied with minimizing the annoyances and discomfort that number among war’s byproducts.

The article is available on academic subscription services EBSCOhost Web and ProQuest..

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Life in the Time of Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

There are several articles containing recommended reading for the period of confinement during the present epidemic. But perhaps the most thoughtful is that in (odd as it may seem) the Daily Mail. This is by Roger Alton and relates to the Mail’s “Book of the Week”: The Rules of Contagion by Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist who teaches at the University of London’s School of Tropical Medicine. This was obviously written and probably went to print before the present epidemic got started. The reviewer congratulates the author for avoiding the temptation to add last minute references in an effort to increase timeliness. These were not needed to make the book relevant. (The book will not be released in the USA until September. Here’s a link to the UK edition currently on offer.)

After summarizing the book’s description of the history of epidemics and the evolving means to contain them, the review provides Kucharski’s summary conclusion:

‘There’s a saying in my field: “If you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen . . . one pandemic.” ’ And like all good mathematicians, [Kucharski] knows that numbers are the key. Not hysteria. Not fear.

Here’s the reviewer’s summary of what the math teaches, according to Kucharski:

The shape of all outbreaks is roughly the same: first spark, then growth, peak and decline. It is a pattern known as the SIR model, dividing populations into three types: susceptible, infected and recovered. Once the number of recovered people is large enough, the disease will die out as there is no one left to infect. And at the heart of that is a mathematical big beast, the reproduction number, known as R, representing the number of people an infected person will go on to infect. If R is less than one, then sooner or later the disease will die out. But above that, if R is greater than one, the contagion will spread. The R for coronavirus appears to be between two and three, comparable to the Sars outbreak of 2002. Ebola and pandemic flu have an R between one and two. Measles, though, which is staggeringly infectious, has a very big R, about 20.

Toward the conclusion of the review, the writing of Evelyn Waugh is drawn into the discussion:

As we live through the throes of a disease pandemic and a stock market panic, never has it been more important to hold the line between real and bogus information. It’s not a new phenomenon. In Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 satirical novel Scoop, legendary American foreign correspondent Wenlock Jakes is sent to cover a revolution in the Balkans. Unfortunately he oversleeps on his train and wakes up in the wrong — but wholly peaceful — country. Not realising his error, he makes up a story about ‘barricades in the streets, a dead child like a broken doll spreadeagled in the deserted roadway, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter’. Other journalists swiftly arrive and make up similar stories, stocks plummet, the country has an economic crash, there’s a state of emergency, and then a revolution. And Jakes is there to cover it.

Fiction of course, but now the speed at which bogus information can be transmitted — like a virus — is incomparably quicker than in Waugh’s day. Whether it is disease epidemics or crime and terrorism, mathematical models can help countries plot outcomes and allocate resources.But models are just that, writes Kucharski: reality is messy and complex. If you build a model train set — no matter how skilful and full of add-ons such as delays, leaves on the line, faulty signals — it will always differ from reality in some way.

A survey of other recommended reading will follow in a later post.

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Ambrose Silk + Anthony Blanche = Brian Howard

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has posted another of his profiles of Waugh’s friends as they foregather at Castle Howard in anticipation of a literary festival. The recent postponement of that event may require some adjustment in the arrival of future participants, but the latest addition to McLaren’s list, Brian Howard, one of Waugh’s most interesting if not beloved friends, is not coming in person in any event.

Waugh’s relationship with Brian Howard may have been even more prickly than that he had with the most recent previous arrival, Robert Byron. Since Brian is not expected to attend the Brideshead Festival, McLaren’s presentation on him is written as a monologue of Nancy Mitford as she researches materials for Brian’s biographical profile. From this it is shown, through Waugh’s writings and those of Mitford, as well as others, how Brian contributed heavily to two of Waugh’s fictional characters: Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags and Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. As spelled out near the end of McLaren’s posting:

… in March, of 1958, Evelyn wrote to Earl Baldwin [on the occasion of Brian’s death]: ‘I used to known Brian well – a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous – constantly attacking people with his fists in public places – so I kept clear of him. […] There is an aesthetic bugger who sometimes turns up in my novels under various names – that was 2/3 Brian and 1/3 Harold Acton. People think it was all Harold, who is a much sweeter and saner man.’

Having made something of a study of this, I [Nancy Mitford] have to correct Evelyn. Ambrose Silk may indeed be 2/3 Brian and 1/3 Harold, but for Anthony Blanche the fractions are surely reversed.

That this is a fair point is made clear from the writings about Brian (some few written by him) as well as about Harold Acton. These are quoted and discussed in the earlier pages of the posting. Indeed, after reading Nancy’s jottings, it seems fair to say that Brian, who never produced any writings worth mentioning, did nevertheless make two important contributions to 20th Century British literature. These are  two of Waugh’s most memorable and humorous characters who could not have been created without a heavy contribution from Brian Howard.

McLaren’s posting is, as usual, amply illustrated, but in this case it is the quotations from Waugh’s novels that tell the story, with a little help from Mitford. One thing they illustrate is that Ambrose Silk is an equally or, perhaps, even more interesting or fully developed character than Anthony Blanche. Anthony has benefitted considerably from his portrayal by Nicholas Grace in the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Ambrose has missed out on that sort of opportunity, but one day an adaptation of Put Out More Flags is bound to happen and Ambrose will surely achieve character stardom.

 

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Peter Fleming’s War Career (More)

Posted on March 19, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In the current New Criterion, D J Taylor reviews the recent biography of Peter Fleming, brother of Ian and friend of Evelyn Waugh. See previous post. Before addressing the contents of this biography, which covers his military career, Taylor discusses Fleming’s life before WWII, concluding that discussion with this:

[In 1938] Fleming was installed in Merrimoles House on a two-thousand-acre estate in Oxfordshire given to him by his uncle Phil. As well as furnishing him with a home and the occupation of a country squire, the locale also gave him the chance to indulge the great hobby of his life. This, it seems fair to say, was killing things. Even Alan Ogden’s Master of Deception, [the book under review] a punctilious and notably well-researched account of Fleming’s military career, can’t quite ignore the altogether exceptional havoc that its subject wreaked on the fauna of the United Kingdom (and other places) during his five decades or so behind a rifle sight.

Waugh knew Fleming and records in his Diaries a brief meeting with him in 1932 just as Fleming was returning from Brazil (where he gathered material for his Brazilian Adventure) and Waugh was leaving for Guyana. Waugh was looking for advice about the kit he was taking along on a trip to gather material for Ninety-Two Days. Waugh also met up with Fleming in North Africa in WWII where Fleming was looking for Army customers to use secret espionage appliances developed under his supervision. See previous post.

Taylor also mentions Waugh’s war writings in connection with Fleming’s military career:

As for the military environment that Fleming found himself in between his re-enlistment in the Grenadier Guards in 1939 and his eventual demobilization seven years later, it takes only a chapter of Master of Deception to establish that, if conducted at a stratospherically higher level, this was a version of Crouchback’s war—as in the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. […] There is a literal connection, too, for in the Norwegian campaign Fleming served as aide-de-camp to the legendary one-eyed, one-armed, death-defying General Adrian Carton de Wiart, the model for Waugh’s Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, who returns from a raid on the African coast with a sentry’s severed head. Here the real-life de Wiart confines himself to marching off with unimaginable sangfroid through a village being obliterated by Heinkel bombers in search of rations. “Better get rid of those egg-shells,” he instructs Fleming on his return; “Don’t want the place in a mess.”

Fleming admired de Wiart, whose biography he mysteriously failed to complete, and was admired by him in return. Meanwhile, Ogden’s account of Fleming’s time in Greece emphasizes just how closely he and his fellow soldiers share some of the attitudes quietly on display in Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender. There is, for example, the undisguised contempt for foreigners. […] Like Waugh, he is no fan of the Royal Air Force, routinely describing its representatives as “mongrels” and remarking of the raf men attached to the party during the retreat from Greece that “they all flap and gas and give a sorry exhibition.” […]

On his demob from the army, Fleming declined the offer of a safe Conservative seat in parliament, detached himself from the Times hierarchy, and spent the last quarter century of his life managing his estate and, after a slow start, writing best-selling works of popular history. It was almost as if a part of him realized that the world he had strode through so blithely in the 1930s was dead. “You’re the flower of England’s youth,” one of Crouchback’s friends observes in Men at Arms, “and it just won’t do.” […]

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Brideshead Festival Postponed

Posted on March 19, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The organizers of the Brideshead Festival scheduled for this summer at Castle Howard have announced its postponement. Here is a copy of their press release:

“In the interest of the health and the well-being of our participants, visitors, employees and partners, given the current situation with COVID-19, we have taken the decision to postpone The Brideshead Festival which was scheduled for June 2020. We will continue to monitor the situation in order to decide when the Festival will be reinstated. In the meantime, please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused, we are all disappointed to have had to take this decision.”

Those with tickets can find details about refunds at this link.

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Group ’27

Posted on March 18, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Spanish novelist and critic Jose Joaquin Bermudez Olivares posting on the Spanish literary website Todo Literatura has nominated a generation of English writers as Group ’27. He refers to a group of Spanish writers with a similar denomination, although their relevance to the English group is not particularly clear. It should be noted in this regard that the computer translation of the essay leaves much to be desired. Olivares introduces the English writers as follows:

All temporal division is relative, but there are several factors that lead me to use ’27 to characterize the authors that I will cite below. Born just after the death of Queen Victoria (1901) and, therefore, Edwardians – a term that would later become almost pejorative – affected in their adolescence by the Bolshevik coup of 1917, too young to fight in World War I, university students around 1921 (the annus mirabilis of In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway …, they live through the general strike of 1926 at the end of their educations and they start publishing around 1928. We are talking about great men (and women) like George Orwell (Eric Blair), Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Henry Green, Anthony Powell … without wishing to be exhaustive.

Olivares then, without much justification, strikes Orwell from the list. This is explained because he didn’t attend Oxford, as did the others (except Mitford), nor did he associate himself with each of them, as they did with each other. That is not entirely fair since Orwell did attend Eton with Connolly, Powell, and Green, and was friends of both Connolly and Powell and, latterly, with Waugh. Mitford is also somewhat set apart as the only aristocrat at a time when English women rarely enrolled in universities. Conspicuous by his absence is Graham Greene (b. 1904) who was a student at Balliol College, Oxford.

Olivares next briefly explains the importance of the group:

It can be said that, at the time, the one with the greatest impact was Waugh, better known now for Brideshead Revisited (and the unforgettable television series […]),  than for, at the time, the massive sales successes with his youthful novels: Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Decline and Fall, Scoop …, that the most cultured was Cyril Connolly (author of The Unquiet Grave and for many years editor of the influential Horizon magazine), the most hermetic, Henry Green  (pseudonym of H. Yorke), author of Party Going and the finest and most elegant, Anthony Powell (at least so thought his friend Kingsley Amis), with his dozen novels grouped together as A Dance to the Music of the Time.

The influences on the Group of ’27 are then considered:

[…] If we had to seek intellectual influences on these authors, I would look at their “older brothers”: Aldous Huxley (1894), Dorothy Sayers (1893) or Maurice Bowra (1898). It should be noted that social environment, the milieu, is more important to them than ideology: they wrote about each other, lived in daily contact, frequented the same places in London and identical vacation destinations … they were an elite within a very small social group. Nancy Mitford amused herself in compiling a glossary of terms used by the upper class […].

It would also suffice to read Waugh’s A Little Learning on Connolly [? TambiĂŠn bastarĂ­a con leer Una educaciĂłn incompleta de Connolly sobre Waugh], Powell’s At Lady Molly’s or Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate (Waugh himself was in love with her sister Diana and, after her wedding to the heir to the Guinness brewery, dedicated to the couple his Vile Bodies of 1930). Not all of these works are necessarily of the roman a clef type, but the “joyful deathbeds” [? “alegres lechos de muerte”], to use an expression of Connolly, which fill them are often their own shared or solitary beds.

An important point would be who can we consider as the [literary] influence on this group? […] Curiously, those references seem to be all poetic: Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Apollinaire, ValĂŠry … but only Connolly occasionally wrote poetry; it is true that Eliot and ValĂŠry were important critics. On the other hand, it is curious that these referents were politically “reactionary”, at least in an aesthetic sense and, in the case of Pound even with criminal consequences, while Mitford, Orwell and Connolly were, nominally Marxist, with a strong commitment during the Spanish Civil War.

Thus it seems that, like most groups, these “twenty-sevens” were more aligned “against” than “for”. […] The question that  arises is whether today, a century later, Conrad and James are more provincial than Waugh or Powell.

Or perhaps it is that literature is a continuum, where each work occupies its place, like a tile, in the great mosaic that we contemporaries, too close, cannot see; and groups, schools and generations are mere mnemonic pretexts to save us the effort of detailed and conscious reading. Fortunately, many of these authors’ works have recently been rescued in Spanish […]. Perhaps this time of isolation is a good occasion for your (re) reading.

Olivares was originally an academic biochemist but switched professions, publishing his first novel in 2017: El ultimo de Cuba. As noted above, the Google translation of his essay is not particularly good in this case. Some of our readers may want to comment or correct the edited version quoted above or discuss some of the deleted portions of the essay that defied editorial efforts. The Spanish original is available at this link.

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Waugh’s Bananas in New Essay Collection

Posted on March 17, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

A new essay collection published last month includes an item devoted to the anecdote told by Auberon Waugh about his father consuming the first post-war bananas available to his family in front of his fruit-deprived children, some of whom had never even seen a banana. The book is entitled Something that May Shock and Discredit You and was written by Daniel Mallory Ortberg, a transgender writer who has subsequently married and become Daniel M Lavery. Ortberg’s previous works include Texts from Jane Eyre (2014): a NYTimes bestseller consisting, according to Wikipedia, of “imagined famous literary characters exchanging anachronistic text messages”.

The new collection contains as Chapter 8 a short essay entitled “Evelyn Waugh and the Opposite of Communion”. It examines Waugh’s alleged banana gorging against the words of the liturgy for Communion, not to Waugh’s credit. Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning of the essay:

I think of this story often, which seems over-the-top even for Evelyn Waugh, and how unpleasant the dish must have seemed by at least the second bite: a sort of raw bananas Foster, the sugar grainy and undissolved, the cream slopping everywhere, the sheer size of the thing, the unrelenting monotony of a mouthful of wet banana. The story has everything: joyless dessert eating, public enforcement of family discipline, excess without taste, banana peels, the showiness of hoarding pleasure. Sad English childhoods always sound like caricatures of themselves, yet they’re somehow all true. It doesn’t matter if the inheritance is tasteless and unappetizing: a child knows his rights and objects to watching a tasteless banana that is rightfully his go to his father all the same. “If a brother or sister is naked and without food and one of you says to them, Depart in peace, be warmed and filled, but do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit them? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:15-17). A child might not know what a banana tastes like, and a child might suffer for the longing of it just the same.

I seem to recall reading recently that Auberon in his autobiography substituted bananas for caviar as the short-supply comestible item Waugh greedily consumed before his children. It would be hard to imagine a child who felt disappointment in being excluded from a share of that product, at least for the first time. Waugh’s youngest son Septimus describes Auberon’s autobiography as

… a quixotic version of the truth, containing among many other anecdotes a story about Evelyn devouring the wartime banana ration intended for his children. This, it’s true, had a reprise in my lifetime — transformed into caviar. One Christmas an American heiress, Mrs Cutting, had decided to adopt our needy English family and had sent a Christmas hamper which included a small pot of caviar. This my father consumed solo in front of his six beady-eyed children. Maybe it was a little greedy, but what fortitude! Most fathers would hide it to share with a significant other when the crowds had dispersed. (“Oh, what a lovely Waugh,” Spectator, 22 March 2016).

 

 

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Cecil Beaton Exhibit @ NPG (More)

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The curator of the National Potrait Gallery’s Cecil Beaton exhibit (Robin Muir) has posted several photos (some with his comments) of the exhibit. There is one on Instagram showing Henry Lamb’s portraits of Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton hanging next to each other. The portrait to the left of Cecil is Constant Lambert by Christopher Wood. Here’s the link. You may have to scroll up to see Robin Muir’s comments, but it’s worth the effort. They are copied below in case they prove elusive:

rkm_muir
🎟 MEDITATIVE 🎈Portraits by Henry Lamb and Christopher Wood • This is likely the first time Evelyn Waugh and Cecil • (Both by Henry Lamb) • Have knowingly been in the same room together • For an extended period of time at least • Since Heath Mount Prep School, Hampstead • (E was absolutely HORRID to C • And C never forgot it) • Cecil has so many connections to Christopher Wood too • (Left, his portrait of Constant Lambert) • Not least acquiring Reddish House from poor dead Kit’s parents 💥🖤 #nationalportraitgallery
#cecilbeaton
#brightyoungthings

For additional photos from the NPG exhibit, link to Robin Muir’s website.

–Muir, who is also a contributing editor of Vogue’s London edition, will give a talk on Friday, 20 March at the NPG entitled “’When I Die I want to Go to Vogue’: Cecil Beaton’s Most Enduring Patron”. This will be at 19:00p in the gallery’s Ondaatje Wing Theatre. Tickets and other details are available at this link.

–According to its website (as of 13:30p GMT, 16 March 2020), the NPG at Trafalgar Square is currently open daily from 10:00a-18:00p, Friday until 21:00p. It has also posted this advice relating to the Wuhan virus epidemic: “In line with government guidelines, the Gallery is open for business as usual. We are closely monitoring the situation and will continue to act on the advice of the Government and Public Health England.” See update.

–The current issue of the London edition of Vogue also carries a story by Muir about the decision to mount an exhibit limited to the early years of Beaton’s career. As Muir explains:

…virtually every exhibition of his work to date has been a career-long survey. Yet Beaton’s whimsical early years as a photographer deserve special attention. Opening at the National Portrait Gallery on 12 March, Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things traces Beaton’s artistic development from 1924, when he began considering where photography might take him, through to the end of the 1930s, when World War II forced British Vogue – and Beaton – to radically change its style. It was during the first decades of his life, which Beaton called the “uprise”, that his ear for a name and eye for a beauty were at their keenest, especially if either might advance him. That fact is manifestly apparent in the wonderful luminosity of the vintage prints in the exhibition – many of which show, with tears and abrasions, the patina of age, lucky survivors entirely out of step with the digital age.

UPDATE (18 March 2020): The NPG has announced that it will be closed after today, Wednesday 18 March. The lecture on Friday is cancelled and whether it will be rescheduled is unknown.

 

 

 

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Waugh Things First

Posted on March 15, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The religion and public policy journal First Things has posted two articles with discussions of works written by Evelyn Waugh:

–The first is a review of a novel by Randy Boyagoda entitled Original Prin that has been described as a satirical comedy about a suicide bomber living in Canada. Reviewer Gregory Wolfe in the current print edition of the journal notes this connection to a satirical novel by Waugh:

In [Original Prin’s] opening it’s hard not to hear an echo of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the first words of which are: “Was anyone hurt?” Indeed, Waugh is the modern master in whose steps Boyagoda follows. In the typical Waugh satire, you have a passive protagonist—more acted upon than acting—combined with a detached narrative voice that delivers its zingers in absolute deadpan. A classic example would be the passage from Waugh’s Decline and Fall describing a university club: “There is tradition behind the Bollinger; it numbers reigning kings among its past members. At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been!”

Original Prin owes more than a stylistic debt to Waugh, since ­Boyagoda shares his mentor’s Catholic faith and mordant attitude toward contemporary political cant and moral disarray. …

To understand how this all works out, one needs to read the review (or perhaps even better, the novel).

–An article on the First Things website considers the 1947 short story “The Trouble” by J F Powers. This relates to a race riot in the American Midwest and how it affected both white and African-American Roman Catholics. Joshua Hren writes:

…The First Commandment of Fiction has mutated from “write what you know” to “stay in your lane.” But this rule is at odds with the essence of good fiction. […] In his short story “The Trouble,” the American Catholic writer J. F. Powers (1917–1999) doesn’t observe the new First Commandment of Fiction. Rather, he weaves between black and white lanes. By imagining the particularities of a Catholic African-American family, he thereby makes tangible the universality of the faith. […]

Powers was mentored by Waugh in his early years (beginning after “The Trouble” was written), and Hren mentions how Waugh himself wrote about his own impression of the African-American Roman Catholics in his 1949 essay on the Catholic Church in America:

As Powers’s friend Evelyn Waugh wrote, in America black Catholics faced “sharper tests” than their white co-religionists, for the source of their persecution was not only Protestant prejudice but also “fellow-members in the Household of the Faith.” In “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church,” Waugh lauds the African-American faithful whose supernatural knowledge of their creed surpassed that of their hypocritical clergy: “Honour must never be neglected to those thousands of coloured Catholics who so accurately traced their Master’s roads amidst insults and injury.”

Waugh’s essay was published in Life magazine and is reproduced in EAR. The original magazine version is also available to read online. Hren goes on in his article to explain how Powers got into his own “trouble” in working out what happens when the two conflicting races share the same faith in the American Catholic church.

–The Spectator’s Australian edition finds an example of a Waugh character from another of his 1930s novels in today’s news:

…the World Health Organisation […] has played an extraordinary role in attempting to whitewash China’s appalling mismanagement of the [Wuhan virus] outbreak — but its Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, seems to have stepped straight off the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief. Like Seth, ‘Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University,’ Tedros was educated in England and set about modernising Ethiopia after joining the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and becoming health and foreign minister. […] Tedros was enthusiastically backed by China for the top job at WHO. He set the tone for his tenure by making Robert Mugabe a Goodwill Ambassador in recognition of his contribution to Zimbabwe’s healthcare.

–Another character from Black Mischief is mentioned in an article on the tax avoidance consequences of the British policy of what is called “Acceptance in Lieu” (or “AiL”). Under this scheme, death duties may be avoided or mitigated when artwork or property from the deceased’s estate is donated to the state or a qualifying charity. The article posted on the arts website artzy.net uses a Waugh quote to explain a result of this policy:

The English author Evelyn Waugh, in Basil Seal Rides Again, or The Rake’s Regress (1963), colorfully lamented the decline of the great country houses that had fallen into the hands the National Trust, the public body responsible for looking after donated houses: “You know what [the country house is] like as well as I do. Oh the hell of the National Trust…all the rooms still full of oilcloth promenades and rope barriers and Aunt Barbara in the flat over the stables and those ridiculous Sothills in the bachelors’ wing.”

The story details a historical moment when, due to high inheritance duties, many large houses were being donated to the nation to avoid crippling tax bills. Thousands of aristocrats were forced to leave their houses, or reside in closed-off annexes, while their great halls were opened to tourists. This change in circumstances for the upper classes was accelerated by the AiL.

Waugh’s short story, originally published as a limited edition book, is available in his Collected Stories.

 

 

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Posted in A Handful of Dust, Basil Seal Rides Again, Black Mischief, Decline and Fall, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh Things First