The Saga of the Stella Polaris

Posted on March 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information on the ship see this link.

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The Oldie Returns to Brideshead

Posted on March 26, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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Waugh and the Coronavirus (more)

Posted on March 25, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

One example he offers is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Evelyn Waugh Studies 50.3 (Winter 2019)

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

ARTICLES

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

INTRODUCTION

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

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

REVIEWS

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

NEWS

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

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The Loved One Meets the Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brideshead Revisited

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

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

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

Brideshead Revisited BRITBOX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Anthropologist at the Hypocrites Club

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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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 blasĂ© 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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Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Festivals, Humo(u)r, Put Out More Flags | Tagged , | Comments Off on Ambrose Silk + Anthony Blanche = Brian Howard