Book List Roundup: Wuhan Virus Edition

Posted on March 14, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The unfilled hours produced by the disruptions of the Wuhan virus seem to call for more reading and, thus, have apparently inspired the compiling and posting of book lists. Several of these include books by Evelyn Waugh:

–The Milwaukee Magazine lists 9 Catholic books to read while you’re staying home from Mass. One of these is Brideshead Revisited:

I actually didn’t like this book that much. Sorry. But all the other Catholic book people really seem to be into it, so I guess it should be included on this list. It’s very English. Lot of fancy people and dinners and stuff. Also the big house is a metaphor for the Church. So there’s that.

Other more positively recommended books include The Seven-Story Mountain by Thomas Merton (which Waugh edited for the UK edition that was retitled Elected Silence), The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, the Father Brown Stories by G K Chesterton (also featured in Brideshead)  and Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy.

—Forbes Magazine recommends 10 “armchair travel books” to carry you through the epidemic. One is by Waugh:

When the Going Was Good, by Evelyn Waugh. This is a compilation of excerpts from four travel books that Waugh wrote between 1929 and 1935. He is forever the Englishman as outsider, but his observations, laced with a hearty dash of his class, cantankerous nature, and culture, are forever entertaining. His wit and sense of the absurd shine through, whether attending the coronation of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia or mucking through the jungle in Guiana.

Others include Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. For those who prefer complete texts, all four of the books excerpted in WGWG as well as two others are collected in the 2003 Everyman Library edition entitled Waugh Abroad.

–The Daily Telegraph provides lists of various forms of entertainment on various types of media (except books). In their television list chosen by Ben Lawrence they include the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited:

The 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel was built to last. Jeremy Irons plays Charles Ryder, the outsider beholden to the dysfunctional aristocratic family of his dissolute friend Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews).

It can be streamed on the BBC/ITV service Britbox in both the US and the UK. You might also have a look on Amazon.com. It was available there a few weeks ago.

—Esquire magazine reposts a list from 2009 of the 32 funniest books ever written. This is compiled from recommendations of contributors and editorial staff. Comedian Alexei Sayle proposed Waugh’s Vile Bodies:

It is a gift to the satirist to live in turbulent times but there still remains the task of encapsulating them. In Vile Bodies, an ostensibly superficial comic novel (Waugh wrote to Harold Acton, “It is a welter of sex and snobbery written simply in the hope of selling some copies”) Evelyn Waugh brilliantly, hilariously, unflinchingly but always humanely pinions a society which is in thrall to gossip and decadence, traumatised by war and financial catastrophe yet unable to stop itself rushing headlong into further and deeper cataclysm. This is a book as much for our age as for Waugh’s.

–While not in a book list, Dave Lull has sent this recommendation that appeared in a recent issue of the Catholic Herald:

A joyously satirical Cluedo game of a novel: In the Crypt with a Candlestick by Daisy Waugh. Waugh marries the best of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse in a joyous Cluedo-game of a novel, with props including the candlestick of the title, a vast pot of Crùme de la Mer and a silver sugar pot with an irascible inhabitant. The book is sprinkled with in-jokes and literary allusions: a gamekeeper named Mellors, a great 20th-century novel called Prance to the Music in Time, and a character who wears a boater and carries a teddy bear (a reference to Waugh’s grandfather’s creation, Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead Revisited).

Thanks to Dave for sending this.

–A blogger posting on a local website unearthed a book list compiled by her US Navy veteran father. One contained a book with an entertaining chapter about an interview of Waugh in Baltimore during his 1949 US lecture tour:

“The Good Times” by Russell Baker. I’m not too surprised to find Baker’s second memoir on dad’s list, since he also served in the Navy and grew up in the Depression. […] According to the “Library Journal,” “Aspiring writers will chuckle over Baker’s first, horrible day on police beat, his panicked interview with Evelyn Waugh and his arrival at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in top hat, tails, and brown-bag lunch.” Who doesn’t appreciate a man who brings a brown-bag lunch to the Queen’s coronation?

–Finally, Waugh’s French publisher Robert Laffont is releasing a new edition of Officiers et gentlemen next Thursday, 19 March 2020. This will be in the Pavillons Poche series. Here’s an edited Google translation of their announcement:

The second part of the trilogy devoted to the Second World War by the author of  Brideshead Revisited, this book finds  Guy Crouchback prey to the small and big ironies of war. Thanks to Churchill himself, he is reinstated in the army after the unfortunate ups and downs recounted in Men at Arms. And in an elite corps moreover! However, things will get worse again: in Scotland, in a commando camp, Guy finds the abominable Trimmer, an upstart who was the lover of his ex-wife. Sent to Egypt, he was appalled by the failings of the noble British army. Then it’s Crete, and another lost opportunity to show his bravery … It’s time for him to mourn his idealism. With the satirical tone and the acerbic humor which one associates with him, the great Evelyn Waugh describes a civilization in the grip of the sinking of its most fundamental values.

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Officers and Gentlemen, Vile Bodies, When the Going Was Good | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Book List Roundup: Wuhan Virus Edition

Brideshead Reviewed in Credo Magazine

Posted on March 13, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the online quarterly religious journal Credo Magazine is devoted to the theme The Truth Inside the Lie: Theology through Fiction. Several novels are discussed in some detail. One of these is Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited which is surveyed by Timothy Larsen, Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College in Illinois. His article is entitled “Hound of Heaven”.

Larsen gets one’s attention with this opening paragraph:

Admittedly as a kind of provocation […], I have been known to declare while teaching a class that Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) is the greatest Christian novel ever written. One would never make such an unmeasured claim in print, of course.  The most prudent qualifier would be “that I have read” or “that I know of.”  The second would be “with the obvious exception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.” Furthermore, if writing for publication, my assertion would be leavened with at least one specimen of what are pejoratively known as “weasel words” – qualifiers such as “probably”, “possibly”, “perhaps”, or “arguably”.

After describing the book he explains how he, as a low church Protestant, came to read and interpret it. He also addresses the negative attitude toward the expressions of religious belief in the book, especially focussing on those of British literary critic and novelist A N Wilson. He then concludes with this:

…I was not as surprised as many others when in 2009 A. N. Wilson himself publicly announced his conversion to the Christian faith. I wrote about Wilson’s newfound faith in an article published in the Wall Street Journal which was titled, “Look Who’s a Believer Now.” It ended: “As is the case with Mr. Wilson, intellectuals often pursue long, drawn-out love affairs with Christian thought. Next time you hear someone fume that God is the most contemptible being who never existed, keep in mind that you just might be watching the first act of a divine romantic comedy.” When it comes to fiction, Brideshead Revisited is a powerful and delightful example of this overlooked genre of the divine romantic comedy.

Other literary works considered in the current magazine include Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin) and Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” and Hard Times.

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers | Tagged , | Comments Off on Brideshead Reviewed in Credo Magazine

Beaton Exhibit Opens at NPG

Posted on March 12, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The much-mentioned exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s photgraphic record of the Bright Young People of the 1920s opens today at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Waugh’s biographer Selina Hastings has written a review for the current issue of Tatler. It is not surprising that this opens with multiple references to Waugh:

‘Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties’ – this was how Evelyn Waugh depicted the era of the 1920s, when the elite of the younger generation, determined to throw off the gloom of the Great War, dedicated themselves to entertainment. As Waugh portrayed them in his novel Vile Bodies, the Bright Young People (or Bright Young Things, as others called them) were funny, frenzied and frivolous, capering from party to party. Among them, and, like Waugh, an astute recorder of the period, was the photographer Cecil Beaton, whose portraits of the era’s leading lights make up the dazzling cast of Bright Young Things, a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Beaton had been at prep school with Waugh, who bullied him cruelly. Beaton later described Waugh as ‘a very sinister character’, while Waugh pilloried Beaton in Decline and Fall as the society photographer David Lennox, who ‘emerged with little shrieks from an Edwardian electric brougham and made straight for the nearest looking-glass’.

The review goes on to describe several anecdotes involving Beaton’s connections with the BYPs, including this one not mentioned, so far as I can recall, in previous articles:

Known for his elegance and bitchery, accurately describing himself as ‘a scheming snob’, Beaton adored being at the centre of this wild and frivolous world. He made friends everywhere, and was even lured into bed by the ravishing, decadent Viscountess Castlerosse. Doris Castlerosse, always up for a challenge (‘Doris could make a corpse come,’ as Winston Churchill once reputedly remarked), had succeeded in seducing Beaton in a bedroom filled with tuberoses, an achievement that led to a brief affair, with the two of them seen together at house parties and about town. On one occasion at a fashionable restaurant, Lady Castlerosse’s husband noticed them at a nearby table, Beaton en maquillage and effeminately attired. ‘I never knew Doris was a lesbian!’ he observed.

There are also several photos of Beaton as well as what looks like a 1932 watercolor drawing he made of Tallulah Bankhead not included in any previous article.

The Guardian’s review of the exhibit by Sean O’Hagan also opens with a reference to Waugh:

In his novel Vile Bodies, published in 1930, Evelyn Waugh gleefully satirised the gilded lifestyles of the so-called Bright Young Things, whose antics were then regularly attracting the attention of gossip and society columnists in an otherwise colourless postwar Britain.

In one vignette, Waugh describes a party hosted by a character he calls Miss Mouse, whose father was bankrolling the revels. He writes: “Miss Mouse (in a very enterprising frock by ChĂ©ruit) sat on a chair with her eyes popping out of her head 
 She never could get used to so much excitement, never … It was too thrilling to see all that dull money her father had amassed, metamorphosed in this way into so much glitter and noise and so many bored young faces.”

Miss Mouse, her designer dress and her daddy’s money, popped into my head as I wandered through the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things, in which Waugh briefly features…

The auction house Southeby’s, which is home to Beaton’s archives, posts on its website an interview with Robin Muir, who curated the exhibit. Among several insights, he includes this:

I’ve also had to re-evaluate my overriding preconception of Cecil as vain, self-centred and someone with overreaching ambition. Actually, he’s all those things, but at heart there is a moral centre to him. He could be a terrible snob and an unthinking friend, but he is, in the end, immensely loyal to those from the past. His grief at Rex Whistler’s death is profound. Unexpectedly moving too, is the help he gives to less fortunate friends, such as the painter Francis Rose and Margot, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, an early patron to whom he is loyal and who appears to have driven away most of her close circle late in life.

I admire the self-lacerating honesty he displays in his own account of his hopeless love affair with Peter Watson, the love of his life. There is a bravery and an honesty in his admitting to feelings that other diarists of the time would not remotely consider. In short, he is more human than his grating florid faux cut-glass accent tends to convey.”

The digital magazine Londonist also opens its review of the exhibit by Will Noble with a reference to Waugh’s BYP novel:

“All that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies.” Evelyn Waugh, who features in a scowling, pint-clutching portrait by Henry Lamb at Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things, jealously (and brilliantly) scythed down Beaton and his set of artsy hipsters in the 1930 novel, Vile Bodies.

Finally, The Oldie in an article, which may be related to the Beaton exhibit, publishes a memoir by Ferdinand Mount of the artist Henry Lamb whose portrait of Waugh also features in the exhibit. It turns out that Lamb was Mount’s uncle and also painted a portrait of him which is photographed in The Oldie’s article. After discussing Lamb’s career, Mount concludes with his recollection of having his portrait painted:

In 1957 – the summer after my mother dies – Uncle Henry asks if he may paint my portrait, perhaps to cheer me up, just as he cheered her up with his long, chatty letters from Ireland when she was in hospital. There is no possibility of my parents paying for the portrait – and it is by portraits that he has managed to feed his family, a never-ending grind of academic luminaries in their robes and other notables, mostly with moustaches. […]

Now I am sitting in his high, chilly studio with the north light. […] I sit very still and proud in the cold air […] How strange it is to have someone looking at you so hard and so long and at nothing else in the world. What a lot of other people those light, watchful eyes have focused on over the years – Dorelia and Ottoline and Diana Mitford and Thomas Hardy and Evelyn Waugh and Neville Chamberlain, all gone now, but the gentle slap of the brush on the canvas goes on.

The painting itself seems almost like an anticlimax. How lugubrious I look in it, like a demoralised cod. That’s not because it’s a bad picture, or even because I am thinking about my mother; it’s my default expression. No, it’s a likeness all right.

The Cecil Beaton exhibit continues at the NPG until 7 June.

UPDATE (13 March 2020): The Times review by Rachel Campbell-Johnston was posted today. Here’s an excerpt:

[Cecil Beaton’s] images of the bright young things […] remain those that perhaps best define him. The blacksmith’s grandson discovered his aesthetic home in a society of artists, actors and aristocrats. The elegant strength of a singular vision, star-struck by beauty, circumscribed by snobbery, unfurls in the black-and-white prints around the walls.

Take time to read the accompanying texts. This show, which is staged with a feyly theatrical swagger, has all sorts of stories to tell. Among the cast are many possessed of artistic talent — Rex Whistler, Siegfried Sassoon, Tallulah Bankhead, Evelyn Waugh.

But perhaps it is the aristocrats, as impossibly beautiful as they are impeccably bred, who will most fascinate precisely because elsewhere they go all but unrecorded. The bit-part players and bystanders of history, long since faded into irrelevance, are brought back to the foreground to glint like the mayflies that they were in a momentary shaft of light.

 

 

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Decline and Fall, Events, Interviews, London, Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Beaton Exhibit Opens at NPG

Roundup: Satire in a Divisive Age

Posted on March 10, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times last week carried an opinion article by James Marriott in which he welcomed the announcement that the political satire TV series Spitting Image will return to the screen. But he wonders whether, in the current age of divisive partisanship, satire will have the same effect as in previous times:

…satire is shaped as much by its audience as by the politicians it targets. The puppeteers and joke writers of the new series face a tougher crowd than their predecessors in the 1980s and 1990s. Evelyn Waugh, surely the greatest satirist of the last century, wrote that satire “flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards”. That is: for satire to work, we all need to agree, even loosely, on what we hate.

Waugh suggested that was why the early Roman empire and 18th-century Europe were golden ages of satire. He’s spot on. Consider the cartoonist James Gillray’s caricatures of the slovenly future George IV. The vices that preoccupied Gillray — sloth, gluttony, stupidity — were the ones that were anathema to the ideals of his commercial, rational, democratic age.

Our society lacks the shared moral framework in which the best satire flourishes. What evils do we despise? The small-minded, pigheaded, Little-Englander absurdity of Brexiteers? Or the pompous, condescending smugness of Remainers?

The Waugh quote is taken from his 1946 Life magazine article “Fan-Fare”, reproduced in EAR, p. 304.

–Another successful satirist from a previous era has posted his list of the best satirical books. This is Jonathan Lynn, co-writer of the BBC’s political satire series Yes Minister. His list of six is posted on the website Gentleman’s Journal. One of his choices is Waugh’s Scoop:

This is a satire about sensationalist newspapers and foreign correspondents. Written in 1938, the proprietor of newspaper the Daily Beast, Lord Copper, sends a journalist called Boot to cover a ‘promising little war’ in Africa. Boot does get a scoop in the end but is not given credit for it because that’s the kind of journalist he is.

Lord Copper seems to have been some combination of Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook, the owners of the Mail and the Express and Standard respectively. The book is about the impact and influence of scary newspaper proprietors and really is still applicable to Rupert Murdoch, The Sun and The News of the World and, I think, to the Barclay brothers who own The Telegraph.

Other choices include A Modest Proposal, Animal Farm and Catch-22.

—Scoop is also among the books recently recommended on the website of the Slovenian TV network RTV SLO. The book was issued late last year in a Slovenian translation entitled Ekskluziva. See previous posts:

The 1938 published novel, originally titled Scoop, is a satire on journalism. Waugh wrote the novel in part from the personal experiences he described in his book Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), and the characters of the newspaper magnate and other persons, in whom we can easily recognize now our contemporaries, are based on real persons. Waugh, is a master of satire […] which has given the novel a wide-spread response and ranked it on many charts of the best books of our time. (Translation by Google with edits.)

–A recent novel has been described as a satirical comedy by two reviewers. This is House of Trelawney by Hannah Rothschild. In Town & Country magazine, Adam Rathe’s review opens with this:

If the idea of eccentric British aristocrats in a crumbling mansion seems familiar, that’s because it’s at the heart of some of literature’s greatest works. “Brits love satire, and to do a satire well, a house becomes a useful thing,” says Hannah Rothschild, whose new novel, House of Trelawney, makes fine use of one. In her story the ancient, noble Trelawney clan has hit rock bottom: Siblings are estranged, fortunes are squandered, and the family manor is ready to collapse. And that’s when things get interesting.

Rothschild’s book is the latest in a long line of novels by the likes of Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh that put this very specific world at their center. “I was lucky, growing up, to stay in various collapsing stately homes,” she says. “Sometimes you’d have to run from the kitchen to the sitting room, because those were the only two areas they could afford to heat.”

A similar assessment is adopted in The Lady magazine:

With echoes of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, although not as crisp, this is a highly entertaining, lively and mildly satirical family saga of the impoverished aristocratic Trelawney family as they struggle to survive the financial crash of 2008 and shore up their crumbling 800-year-old castle in South Cornwall, which ‘has a room for every day of the year’, ‘miles of freezing corridors’ and ‘bad plumbing.’

–Finally, writer Will Self in an essay published in a recent “Freelance” column of the TLS considers the question not of satire (of which he is quite capable) but of self-plagiarism (to which he also admits). After consideration of a case where an interviewer copied some words from his subject that had appeared in earlier interviews or published works of that subject, Self takes up the case of:

…borrowing one’s own words from oneself, rather than from one’s subjects – surely this cannot be accorded a great crime? […] At certain times during my freelance career, I have been filing anything up to a quarter of a million words a year (I include books in the estimate), so is it any wonder if I’ve repeated myself – and sometimes knowingly? For years, my rubric for self-plagiarism was this: in my fiction I tried to create new conceptual space, coin fresh metaphors, bend and warp language in surprising ways – the books had fewer readers than the newspaper and magazine work, so it seemed perfectly legitimate to transplant images, riffs and coinages from this sequestered word-garden into the brighter but more ephemeral light of the daily and weekly press. […]

I think it was Evelyn Waugh who said that most writers are lucky if they have one original book inside them – and that therefore an awful lot of literary careers consist, perforce, in rewriting it. Jorge Luis Borges invented “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, as a heuristic with which to explain the polyvalent properties of prose itself: there was no plagiarism involved in Menard’s writing of “the Quixote”, because it wasn’t the same text as Cervantes’s, by definition. Of course, when it comes to the far shorter forms filled in by journalists, Waugh’s dictum heralds disaster, as we rewrite the same old articles again and again. The Menard defence cuts no ice with our jaded editors, sickened as they are by the never-ending go-round that the prolific Observer writer and scourge of cultural bubble wrap Nick Davies has dubbed “churnalism”.

 

 

 

Share
Posted in Essays, Articles & Reviews, Newspapers, Scoop, Waugh in Abyssinia | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Satire in a Divisive Age

Bright Young People Re-illuminated

Posted on March 8, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

There are several stories in the press about the “Bright Young People” inspired by next Thursday’s opening of the Cecil Beaton exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery mentioned in several previous posts. The most interesting of these is by Hugo Vickers in the Daily Telegraph. He begins by explaining that he brings to the table his authorized biography of Beaton. For this, he interviewed Beaton in January 1980 just a few days before he died. Vickers describes his interviews of several other surviving BYPs. These include Stephen Tennant, Loelia Ponsonby, Steven Runciman, Anne Messel and, most notably, the two Jungman sisters. According to Vickers:

They were not always frivolous. During the Second World War, Zita drove a Polish ambulance and was declared “missing” for a while; in May 1940, she was one of the last to leave Le Havre. Teresa had two small children but also did as much as she could for the war effort.

It was an extraordinary experience for me when, in December 1987, the two sisters arrived in a little Mini to collect me from a hotel and drive me to Leixlip Castle, Co Kildare, and yet more extraordinary when, in 2004, I suggested they appear in a television documentary to mark Beaton’s centenary. We had been told not to film Zita asleep and this was a problem. She was 100, and awoke only from time to time. (Every day she watched The Sound of Music, though only parts of it, as she dozed off intermittently.)

Meanwhile, Teresa, a mere stripling of 96, had a deep reluctance to be filmed, or quoted in any way, but her inherent good manners meant that she relented, and stories emerged of the costumes that would be laid out [by Stephen Tennant] on the bed at Wilsford for the next photographic session. In their heyday they had staged treasure hunts; used their connections to arrange a fake edition of the Evening Standard and had Hovis loaves baked to order with clues inside. Zita even attempted to stay overnight in the chamber of horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. But the two sisters disappeared from public view in the Thirties, living together in perfect harmony from 1947 to the end, fortified by their Catholic faith. You could imagine the one saying to the other: “Stop me if I told you this before
”

We can only hope that one of the TV networks will take advantage of the exhibition to rerun the 2004 documentary in which Vickers mentions he participated. His 1985 biography of Beaton is scheduled for republication later this year in the USA. In the UK, a new edition was published last week and is currently available.

Another interesting article is that of Robin Muir in the Financial Times. He is curator of the Beaton exhibit. Like Vickers, he came into contact with some of the “atoms of the past” still associated with BYP survivors in the 1980s. This is when we worked as a junior member of staff in the offices of Vogue magazine. He recalls being given letters to drop in the mail by Peter Coats, one of the more snooty “atoms” still working (he was at House & Gardens, one of the other magazines located in the Vogue offices). On the top of the pile arranged in order of social importance was usually one addressed to “Lady Lindsay”. Muir then explains her relevance to the Beaton exhibit:

I found out that Lady Lindsay had been, half a century before, Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, married to the fabulously wealthy Hugh “Bendor” Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, and the first to be christened the “Brightest of the Bright Young Things” (when she tired of it, the crown passed to her cousin Elizabeth Ponsonby). A photograph of her by Cecil Beaton was kept in Vogue’s archives, dating from 1930, the year of her marriage. If she looked a little uneasy, there were good reasons, not least because the tiara atop her immaculately shingled head was colossal. The Westminster “halo” tiara was fashioned by Lacloche in the oriental “bandeau” style to include the Arcot diamonds, once belonging to Queen Charlotte, consort to George III. “Our most beautiful of duchesses”, sighed Vogue. And, as it would transpire, one of our most unhappy.[…]

Beaton was 26 when he photographed the new Duchess of Westminster in 1930 – the year that saw both the publication of his first book, The Book of Beauty, in which he elevated to the pantheon those he considered worthy, and an exhibition in Mayfair that drew in London society. The duchess was noted in the book and made the cut in the show on account of her “raven’s wing shingle and magnolia complexion” […]

Many others from The Book of Beauty find a place in the show, including Margot, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, an early patron. Evelyn Waugh enjoyed lampooning Beaton’s portrait of Margot in Decline and Fall(1928), but he had even more fun lampooning Beaton himself, as the society photographer David Lennox, who emits “little shrieks” and makes “straight for the nearest looking glass”. Beaton and Waugh had never got on since prep school.

There are similar although somewhat less detailed stories in the Daily Mail (“The kids that make the 1920s roar”) and the Independent (“Power, Privilege and Glamour in 1920s London”). Most of the articles are liberally illustrated with photos from the exhibition. After opening on Thursday at the National Portrait Gallery, Trafalgar Square, the exhibit will continue through 7 June.

 

Share
Posted in Decline and Fall, Events, London, Newspapers, Photographs, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Bright Young People Re-illuminated

The Resurfacing of Robert Byron

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Robert Byron has appeared at the Castle Howard Brideshead Festival–at least on Duncan McLaren’s website. In his latest posting, McLaren arranges that Nancy Mitford, a close friend of both Evelyn Waugh and Robert Byron, engages in an extended conversation with Byron about his relationship with Waugh. They were certainly friends during their Oxford days but as time went on strains in their friendship appeared. Both had a tendency to become animated when pressed on certain matters–in Waugh’s case, e.g., religion; in Byron’s case, art and art history. The Mitford/Byron discussion extends over the history of the friendship which was cut short when Byron went down with a ship that was torpedoed by the Germans in WWII.

Here’s a sample of the conversation which mentions the visit to the Sitwells at Renishaw in 1930 that was cited in a recent post:

Byron: “Three months later, Evelyn and I travelled together to Renishaw. According to his diary, I made him travel third class as I only travel first when abroad as I feel that’s expected of an Englishman. In his diary, he describes Renishaw as very large and rather forbidding. We were there for ten days though most of the party left after the weekend. Evelyn found the household to be full of plots and gossip. Sachie liked talking about sex. Osbert was very shy. And Edith wholly ignorant. I’m afraid I disappointed Evelyn by shutting himself in my bedroom for most of the day. So he got in touch with Alastair who was in the country, persuaded him to join us, and those two spent their time in each other’s company as they had done before the Evelyns got together.”

Mitford: “And did you? Shut yourself away in your room?”

Byron: “I think I must have been trying to get my head around the things Evelyn had been telling me. He was in the process of being received into the Roman Catholic Church. The Plunket Greenes were involved in this process, and a priest called Father D’Arcy. Of course, to any rational person, it was all nonsense, and your sister had made a point of telling him so. As a result, Evelyn engineered an argument with Diana and she was no longer part of his life. I didn’t want that to happen to me and Evelyn so I kept my views to myself.”

Mitford: “Did you really spend ten days in Evelyn’s company not telling him what you thought of his religious conversion?”

Byron: “Doesn’t sound likely, does it? I must only have been there for a few days. Anyway, it was a parting of the ways. Evelyn spent the next ten years travelling the world and writing books responding to these travels, while I did the same. I travelled to Russia, then India and Tibet.”

As usual, the posting is amply illustrated with relevant photographs and drawings from the period.

Share
Posted in Evelyn Waugh, Festivals | Tagged , , | Comments Off on The Resurfacing of Robert Byron

Waugh and Pre-Raphaelites at Yale

Posted on March 5, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The New Criterion’s website has posted an article about an exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art entitled “Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement”. The article is written by Stephen Schmalhofer and opens with this:

In 1927, Evelyn Waugh was fired from his teaching job and wrote in his diary that “the time has arrived for me to set about being a man of letters.” Apart from their artistic achievements, the Pre-Raphaelites deserve our gratitude for supplying the subject of Waugh’s first book, Rossetti: His Life and Works. His father doubted he would finish the book after he enrolled in an Arts & Crafts furniture-making class. He completed both the manuscript and a mahogany bedside table, but “not very well.”

In William Holman Hunt’s 1882–83 portrait of Rossetti, you can meet Waugh’s subject face to face. The two friends often posed for each other. In this portrait, they lock eyes as Rossetti looks up from his own canvas. The picture adorned the cover of Waugh’s book and is on display at the Yale Center for British Art during “Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement,” running until May 10, 2020. With over two hundred works, including significant loans from the Birmingham Museums Trust, the exhibition presents Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings from Rossetti, Hunt, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and more alongside Arts & Crafts enamels, ceramics, stained glass, textiles, printmaking, and metalwork.

The Holman-Hunt portrait mentioned in the article is on the dust jacket of the 1975 reprint by Duckworths, who also published the first edition. The portrait appears at the frontispiece in both editions, but the dust jacket of the first edition is unadorned (at least in the UK version). The US first edition has a reproduction on the dust jacket of Rossetti’s painting Proserpine depicting Jane Morris.

Schmalhofer makes another allusion to Waugh when he describes the Yale venue for the exhibit:

The building that houses Yale’s Center for British Art was the brainchild of the architect Louis Kahn. It and many of his other concrete and steel monoliths could have just as easily been designed by Waugh’s fictitious Professor Otto Silenus. Appearing as a modernist architect in Decline and Fall, he is one of the author’s perfect minor creations:

“I suppose there ought to be a staircase,” he said gloomily. “Why can’t the creatures stay in one place? Up and down, in and out, round and round! Why can’t they sit still and work? Do dynamos require staircases?”

In the course of his article, Schmalhofer makes several additional references to Waugh’s biography of Rossetti which was recently reprinted by OUP as v.16 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. The exhibit opened on 13 February and continues through 10 May. For details see this link.

Share
Posted in Academia, Art, Photography & Sculpture, Decline and Fall, Events, Newspapers, Rossetti: His Life and Works | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh and Pre-Raphaelites at Yale

Waugh Appears in Vatican Document Release

Posted on March 4, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Vatican recently released a large quantity of documentary archives that cover the period at the end of WWII. It is not surprising that much of the press comment on these documents relates to their reflection on the attitude of the Papacy to WWII refugees in general and Jewish refugees in particular. But the Vatican’s notice relating to the release by Johan Ickx also includes this insight, which was  largely repeated in several newspapers covering the story such as La Stampa, (translation by Google with edits):

… there is no doubt that there are small surprises. Who would have thought that the English Captain Evelyn Waugh, the famous author of the novel Brideshead Revisited, would be not only a postman but a source of recommendations for the Holy See on the situation of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia after the war?

This comes as no surprise to Waugh scholars. Waugh mentions his meeting with the Pope, which took place directly after he left Yugoslavia in February 1945, in his letters and diaries. In this meeting, he discussed the parlous state of the Roman Catholic Church in Yugoslavia. His biographers were well aware of the visit. As described by Selina Hastings:

On 24 February, having obtained the permission of his immediate superior, Major John Clarke, Evelyn flew to Rome to see Pope Pius XII. After several days of wearying interviews with Vatican officials, he was finally granted an audience. “The sad thing about the Pope is that he loves talking English and has learned several elegant little speeches by heart parrotwise & delivers them with practically no accent, but he does not understand a word of the language.” After listening politely to the Pope’s well-intentioned small talk, Evelyn requested that they speak in French. “I left him convinced that he had understood what I came for. That was all I asked.” (Hastings, p. 478, quoting from Diaries, pp. 613-19, Letters, pp. 201-02)

After meeting the Pope, Waugh gathered his thoughts into a detailed report to the British Government about the treatment of the Roman Catholic Church by the Tito regime, which the British were still supporting. It was largely ignored. What might be interesting to learn from the Vatican archives is whether the Church took Waugh’s report more seriously than the Government.

Share
Posted in Diaries, Letters, Newspapers, World War II | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh Appears in Vatican Document Release

Humor Books in the News

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator has reposted a review from December 2005 by biographer and literary critic Bevis Hillier of the third edition of Ned Sherrin’s Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations. He had some reservations about the earlier editions as being overly inclusive but has largely come around:

…I felt the Humorous Quotations anthology was too lazily compiled. For example, there were and, alas, still are no fewer than 35 quotations from P. J. O’Rourke (born 1947), whom I find wildly unfunny. As someone who relishes Bernard Shaw’s prefaces more than his plays, I feel rather the same about this new edition of Sherrin’s dictionary. It contains his amusing prefaces to the first and second editions and a preface to the new edition. […] They are among the most enjoyable parts of the book. […] Among the welcome newcomers is Nigella Lawson, defending toad in the hole to an American audience: ‘No amphibian is harmed in making this dish.’

As it turns out, there was in fact a fourth edition of Sherrin’s book issued a few years after Hillier’s review.

Although apparently beyond the scope of his assignment from the Spectator, Hillier segues into a review of another and competing book:

That Sherrin’s dictionary has gone into three editions entitles him to say Nah nah ne nah nah to me; but now there arrives a dic of quots which puts his dic in the shade: Funny You Should Say That: Amusing Remarks from Cicero to the Simpsons compiled by Andrew Martin (Penguin, £20). The book has two great merits. First, Martin really has been diligent in tracking down sayings one hasn’t encountered before; and secondly he is absolutely scrupulous in trying to give us their origin, or at least his source. He writes:

“I would like to mention … that this is not one of those books where you’ll read, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’, followed by a breezy ‘Jane Austen’. No, you are told that the quote occurs in chapter one of Pride and Prejudice, and you are given a potted biography of Jane Austen, alongside the 1,300 other authors (I think it is) of the 5,000 quotes in the book.”

Following this, Hillier offers several suggestions of quotes that Martin (and possibly Sherrin) might have included. Among them is this one from Evelyn Waugh:

Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford, 1954: “Have you heard about ‘The Edwardians’ [i.e. Teddy Boys]? They are a gang of proletarian louts who dress like Beaton with braided trousers & velvet collars & murder one another in ‘Youth Centres’ … Beaton is always being stopped now by the police and searched for knuckle-dusters.”

After this, there are several other quotes without an attribution, some of them very good indeed. But I don’t think that they are written by Waugh. One of them reads: “The email of the species is deadlier than the mail.” Maybe Hillier should compile his own volume.

But Hillier isn’t finished with his review. He concludes with a mention and several quotes from two other books:

The funniest book of last year was Simon Hoggart’s send-up of those awful Christmas ‘round robin’ letters that tend to begin ‘Dear All.’ It was called The Cat that Could Open the Fridge, and I thought it would be impossible for him to better it. But his new assault on round robins, The Hamster that Loved Puccini (Atlantic Books, £9.99), is even funnier.

Finally, Sam Leith, the Spectator’s literary editor, has mentioned a book on the website UnHerd.com. This is The Portable Curmudgeon by Jon Winokur. Leith cites several examples of curmudgeons, including Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis among their number. He then discusses what distinguishes them from other grumpy conservatives, taking issue with a recent application of the term in The American Conservative:

…the curmudgeon is a pessimist, whose grumpy outlook is born of long experience, and of the realisation that what good there is in the world has been hard-won and is perpetually vulnerable to the hare-brained schemes of dreamers, utopians, and idiots of every stripe. Kingsley Amis was much pilloried for his reaction to the expansion of higher education: “More will mean worse,” he wrote in Encounter in July 1960. But as the educational establishment now struggles to keep a lid on spiralling costs and — at least as indicated by grade inflations — declining standards, many will think that there was something in what he said.[…] The curmudgeon is the very praetorian guard of conservatism — not the technocratic, neoliberal sort of Right-wingery that thinks innovation is the answer but the unfashionable, unglamorous sort that thinks, on the whole, that we should — in Belloc’s words — “always keep a-hold of Nurse/ For fear of finding something worse”.

It may that Leith’s own discussion of the The Portable Curmudgeon led him to repost Hillier’s memorable 2005 review. The first Curmudgeon book was  published  in 1987 and has had several sequels. Leith posts on Twitter as @questingvole.

Share
Posted in Humo(u)r, Letters, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Humor Books in the News

Virginia Troy: A Champagne Flute with an Iron Spine

Posted on March 2, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

An essay by Washington-based writer Eve Tushnet has been posted on the website of the conservative think tank Russell Kirk Center. This is entitled: “Champagne Flute with an Iron Spine: Dystopia and Providence in Five Novels.”  Her topic is five “reactionary” novels through which she explains how

the collapse of the previous order was not merely an economic and political transformation but an existential cataclysm which shattered men’s understanding of their place in the world. For these novels the death rattle of premodernity meant not merely revolution, but apocalypse.

Four of these novels are classics of revolt against the times: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Russian Civil War novel White Guard, and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. The fifth, Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, is an experimental science-fiction collage novel which at first seems to sit oddly among works otherwise set in some version of a real, historical world. Yet to read these books not in order of publication but in the order I’ve just named them—slotting Hesse in right before Waugh—is to watch the apocalypse in slow motion. The post-apocalyptic world is recognizably our own, as the vanished world is recognizably alien. By exploring these novels’ common ground, we can see what we’ve lost—and what we’ve forgotten.

After applying her interpretation to the four other novels she arrives at Waugh’s war trilogy. Following a brief summary of the novel in the same context in which she considered the other four, she encapsulates her analysis in this description of Virginia Troy:

[Guy Crouchback’s] divorcĂ©e Virginia Troy, once Virginia Crouchback, dies in the role she spent the whole trilogy fleeing: a Catholic wife and the mother of the Crouchback heir. She was ferocious to Guy once (“Darling, don’t pretend your heart was broken for life”) and she somehow manages to surrender without ever collapsing. She makes her first confession “fully, accurately, calmly, without extenuation or elaboration”; she calls her child “it” and there’s something perversely appealing in her honest, shocking distaste for her own baby. She’s like a champagne flute with an iron spine. Virginia is shameless and sans-souci: God’s own gossip, the meretrix turned mediatrix. In this novel, which slowly reveals how totally the premodern world has been lost even before the book begins, there is one last link with that lost world, forged on God’s terms and not our own: God the comedian continues the line of the Blessed Gervase through the child of a con man and an adulteress.

The essay then concludes with this:

If there is a lineage of reactionary novels, it tells the transition from premodern to modern not as the triumph of humanism, but as the loss of the human. Like the A-bomb, these novels demonstrate that where human power abounds, human powerlessness abounds still more. And the hope Waugh’s trilogy offers, which is not found in Roth or Hesse and flashes like lightning at the edges of Bulgakov’s work, is that we are not in our own hands.

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending a link to this essay.

In an essay on Waugh’s religious conversion, Joseph Pearce, editor of the St Austin Review, offers his view of Virginia Troy. This is posted on the National Catholic Register website. Pearce considers Virginia one of

Waugh’s […]  hollow men. We think of Ted [sic] and Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust, of Hooper and Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, or of Guy Crouchback’s ex-wife Virginia in Sword of Honour, to name but a representative few. And yet Waugh’s works do not derive their depth of applicable meaning from the shallows and the shadows of the hollow men he satirizes but in the presence of grace working in the lives of those whose consciences are alive to its power. […] In Sword of Honour it is Guy Crouchback’s decision to remarry his ex-wife, the ironically named Virginia, who is pregnant with another man’s child, which constitutes the act of self-sacrificial love, wedded to suffering, to which grace has called him. In laying down his own life for the unborn child, Guy accepts and embraces the gift of grace which is all the more beautiful because it is crowned with thorns.

Share
Posted in Academia, Catholicism, Sword of Honour, World War II | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Virginia Troy: A Champagne Flute with an Iron Spine