Upcoming Waugh Events: Aberdeen and Leipzig

Posted on February 11, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

—Random House has announced a Waugh-related promotional event at the upcoming Leipzig Book Fair next month.  They will offer two readings by Jan Weiler of selections from his audiobook in German of the unexpurgated translation of Waugh’s novel Scoop.  This is newly available in on a CD recording (8 hrs 34 min).  The readings will be presented on 12 March at 2000p and 13 March at 1230p. For more details see this link. The audiobook will be released on 9 March and is currently for sale on Amazon.de.

–Daisy Waugh will appear later this month at a writing festival in Aberdeen called Granite Noir. Her event is a writing workshop scheduled at Aberdeen Central Library on Saturday, 22 February at 2.30pm. She discusses this in an interview with David Knight of the Aberdeen Press and Journal:

Q. I heard Daisy’s voice from my mobile on the table, “Do you mean me, David?”. This was becoming more like PG Wodehouse. […] I then went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like, “you have such famous writers as father and grandfather – has that been a help or hindrance in your career?” I cringed as the words tumbled out.

A. “I get asked that all the time,” she answered with a tart dollop of exasperation in her voice. I grew up in a big fat house and had a great time. Comparisons are made endlessly, but I am proud of my family.”

Q. When Brideshead became a global television hit she was still at school. How cool was that?

A. “I think I was a bit tetchy, chippy and arrogant at the time to be honest,” she told me.[…]

Q. She also writes novels under the pseudonym E V Harte and enjoyed success with her “Dolly Greene” detective stories. The eponymous heroine lives a chaotic lifestyle as a tarot reader with weird neighbours, who turns sleuth. Glowing reader reviews praised her style as “gentle and cosy” crime with lots of great characters.

A. “I can’t stand horrible sadism and torture in many crime books. We need more funny books,” Daisy explained.

Q. It might sound like the antithesis to Tartan Noir, but crime writing is a broad church. It’s also a huge business which outsells all other fiction genres. Daisy has a new comic murder-mystery coming out this month in her name, too.

A. “You need to let your imagination run, but never forget you are building a jigsaw of plot and false trails which must ultimately fit together,” said Daisy. “You also need to find a niche.”

No doubt, she will also be discussing her new book In the Crypt with the Candlestick to be released a few days before the event. For tickets and other details, see this link.

–New York area readers may be interested in a notice on the New Criterion’s  website about a Wednesday (12 Feb) lecture at NYU on English country house preservation:

“Recent Research in Preventative Conservation at English Heritage,” with David Thickett, at the Institute of Fine Arts (February 12): It’s easy to visit a historic country house and admire the condition of the furniture, the silver, and the china without considering how exactly the items remain in such good condition. This Wednesday, David Thickett, a Senior Conservation Scientist at English Heritage, will speak at the IFA on the high-tech methods being used today to keep objects gleaming.

Waugh’s novels A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited were forerunners of the movement that was led by English Heritage and the National Trust to preserve country houses as a important part of English culture and history. For details and reservations, see this link.

 

 

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Pre-Valentine Roundup

Posted on February 10, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan McLaren has added a new Waugh chum in his descriptions of “visitors” to the Castle Howard Brideshead Festival. This is Patrick Balfour who was a friend of Waugh from his Oxford days. They remained friends until Waugh’s death. Balfour contributed heavily to the character of Ian Kilbannock in Sword of Honour as well as to some characters in earlier works. In Duncan’s posting he is staying in a visitor cottage on or near the Castle Howard grounds and musing over his long friendship with Waugh. Here’s Patrick’s first thought about what he is about to describe as he reviews his friendship:

I couldn’t believe that no-one had written about it before. The striking similarities between Evelyn Waugh’s life and my own. We met at Oxford, worked side by side at Chagford, partied with the Lygon girls at Madresfield, paired up in Abyssinia as reporters, married in the same year. We each had a good war, in our own way, and then spent our post-war years writing the books we wanted to write. How about that? And there’s more.

As usual, the posting is illustrated with photos of Patrick (many of a very high quality and not seen before), as well as his works (some of which aren’t so easy to find). In addition there are more familiar photos where he is shown with Waugh.

–The Daily Telegraph reports on the upcoming election in Guyana where the winner will preside overs the distribution of the considerable new wealth that will soon be flowing from offshore oil development. The balance of power between evenly divided immigrant ethnic parties is held by indigenous groups living in the south of the country:

The area is separated from the coastal capital, Georgetown, by 500 kilometres of pristine rainforest populated by giant anteaters, 40-stone anacondas and monkey-eating harpy eagles. The region is famously remote. When a bruised and penitent Evelyn Waugh visited in 1932 while escaping a collapsing marriage, he used the savannah and region and surrounding jungles as the setting for the nightmarish ending of A Handful of Dust. In his notes he described the local parish of St Ignatius “as lonely an outpost of religion as you could find anywhere.”

–The Oxford Mail has a review by columnist Chris Gray of a new memoir of Oxford:

…Tim Holman’s memoir of student life, An Oxford Diary – Three Surprising Years at Trinity College 1977-1980 (Janus Publishing, ÂŁ13.95). Hailing it “a minor masterpiece” – correctly, as I discovered – the [Oldie] magazine’s diarist, The Old ‘Un, clearly enjoyed the convincing ordinariness of the chronicle.

More Adrian Mole Goes to Oxford, it was said, than the high-society antics of Brideshead Revisited, (which was being filmed for television elsewhere in Oxford – with me reporting from the set – during Tim’s student days). Indeed so, with the charm of the book best revealed in quotation from it.

Gray and Holman were contemporaries at Oxford and several of their joint activities are described, including this:

In “a posh restaurant overlooking High Street” – I guess it was probably Burlington Bertie’s – he joined Cherwell colleagues for a ‘works do’ on March 10, 1978. “Apart from magnificent food, the waiters kept coming round and filling up our glasses with wine and by 10 when we left we were pretty pissed. Then we split into various pub-crawling groups . . . Finally eased myself into bed . . . totally smashed out of my skull.” The tone is reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s diary entries on nights out in Oxford. Like Tim, he sometimes boozed in The Nag’s Head, in Hythe Bridge Street […]

–Richard Ingrams writing in Catholic Herald sets out the importance of learning Latin (or not, as the case may be). After a description of his own education in the subject (for which he expresses gratitude to his father) he mentions this:

My father had been taught classics at Shrewsbury by Fr Ronald Knox, a distinguished classical scholar and at the time an Anglican priest who had, according to his biographer Evelyn Waugh, “no specialised knowledge of anthropology, astronomy, biology, chemistry and physiology, history, physics and chemistry or psychology”. But in Waugh’s view this did not render him incapable of writing on such subjects, rather furnishing proof of “the old claim that a mind properly schooled in Literae Humaniores [Classics] can turn itself effectively to any subject connected with man”.

Written in 1959, Waugh’s conclusion would have been read with approval by the prime minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, another pupil, as it happened, of Ronald Knox, and a former classical scholar at Eton who liked to air his fascination with the war between Athens and Sparta (though even Waugh might later have had to admit that it was of little help to the prime minister when faced with such 20th century events as the Profumo affair).

Some people may like to think that all this is truly ancient history. Yet the extraordinary thing is that, once again, in 2020 we have an Old Etonian classical scholar in Number 10 – Boris Johnson, just as keen as Macmillan to proclaim his love of Homer and his admiration for the heathen Romans. We can only hope that he doesn’t take his lead from Waugh and convince himself that his classical education equips him to understand and pontificate on all sorts of subjects about which he knows as little as I do.

—The Spectator has a review of a book by Sophy Roberts entitled The Lost Pianos of Siberia. She hopes that:

… on her journey she will find a decent instrument — or one with a provenance so intriguing that she can overlook the cracked soundboard and mouldy hammers — buy it and bring it back to Odgerel Sampilnorov, a Mongolian pianist whom she has met and who has cast a spell. ‘What if I could track down a Bechstein in a cabin far out in the wilds?’ she writes (though chances are a cat would be living in it). […]

Alas, there are too few marvels, too many monsters for my taste. […] By Roberts’s admission, she doesn’t play the piano. This needn’t be a problem — Evelyn Waugh probably knew little about the politics of Abyssinia before turning up there in 1935 to cover the country’s unexpected war with Italy, producing a gripping if wayward colonialist-meets-native narrative — yet it quickly becomes one. The first decades of the 19th century were vital in the development of the modern pianoforte, as Roberts writes, yet the concert halls throughout Europe in which she places them in these same years were largely not yet built; the explosion in middle-class consumption (and performance) of pianoforte music belonged more readily to the 1840s and later.

Waugh knew more about Abyssinia than the average reporter when he returned there in 1935 after covering the coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930-31 and writing two books about it.

–Critic Terry Teachout  in the Wall Street Journal reviews a play performed by the Hunter College Theater Project. This is called “Mac Beth” and is, according to Teachout:

Freely inspired by by a 2014 crime in which two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls stabbed a companion to death. “Mac Beth” takes place in what looks like the backyard of a condemned house on the wrong side of the tracks. Enter seven giggly, selfie-snapping school girls [… looking like] they’re acting out Macbeth for their own pleasure, and at first they do so withingenuity,  charm and what Evelyn Waugh described in Brideshead Revisited as “a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality.”

 

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A Different View of A Handful of Dust

Posted on February 9, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Italian online religious newspaper Radio Spada has posted an article reviewing Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust. This is by Luca Fumagalli who has previously written about Waugh’s work. See previous posts. He begins his article with this:

Released in 1934, A Handful of Dust is often considered Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece. If, on such a judgment, it is legitimate to have some reservations – in this case personal taste has a not insignificant weight – certainly the book marked a turning point in the career of the English writer, acting as a watershed among his early works, characterized by satire to the limit of the surreal, and the novels of the following years, religiously more mature (above all Brideshead Revisited and the war trilogy Sword of Honor). In A Handful of Dust, in fact, ridiculous and grotesque passages alternate with singularly gloomy pages which, in addition to preparing the ground for the final tragedy, show that there is nothing behind modern secularized society, dominated by a secular humanism that, paradoxically, is in all respects inhuman [Italian: mostrano quel nulla che si cela dietro la moderna societĂ  secolarizzata, dominata da un umanitarismo laico che, paradossalmente, è in tutto e per tutto disumano]: that is why A Handful of Dust can be, quite rightly, called the first Catholic novel written by Waugh.

The article then discusses critically several features of the novel, including what is a misunderstanding relating Waugh’s decision to write a different ending for the serialized version that appeared in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. The article assumes that the ending used for the book was written after the one that appeared in the magazine and was “even more scathing [Italian: ancora piĂš graffiante], drawing fully from his previous story ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens'”. It should be pointed out that the different ending for the magazine version was not Waugh’s decision. He could not use the original ending as written for the book version in the US magazine edition because the exclusive US magazine right to publish that (effectively, the previously published text of the short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens”) was held by another magazine. Moreover, the editors of Harper’s Bazaar did not like the book’s version of the ending and may, in addition, have wanted to shorten the serial version. The last part of the quote assumes that Waugh, after the serial appeared, wrote a new ending that was based on “The Man Who Liked Dickens”, but that is not the case. In the the 1964 revised edition of the novel, Waugh included the alternative ending separately as an appendix, describing it as a “curiosity”. Waugh never intended the book version to reflect that shortened ending but does not explain that fully in his introduction to the 1964 edition.

After an interesting discussion of several other points, the article concludes with this:

Hetton Abbey, although it is a former monastery converted into a dwelling at the time of the Reformation – and in this respect it echoes something of the social and moral degeneration of England in the 1930s – still remains the symbol of a desirable society, based on tradition and a healthy desire for eternity that has its roots in the world, but not its end. So quite the opposite of that present that finally comes to disturb even the naive Tony, meanwhile committed to pretending an extramarital affair only to be able to grant a divorce to a wife to whom he still feels an obtuse devotion. […]

Despite A Handful of Dust […] boasting one of the darkest endings of all Waugh’s production, there is still room for a faint hope, that is, quoting Teddy,”one day to restore Hetton to the splendor that it had enjoyed in the days of his cousin Tony” or, metaphorically, to backtrack, to regain possession of the glorious chivalrous values of the past and thus to return to man his lost dignity.

The translation is by Google with some edits. It is in some places unclear, as indicated, and would benefit from some linguistic expertise if any of our readers would like to offer suggestions in a comment below. The original from the English edition has been substituted for the quote from the Italian translation of the novel (Una manciata di polvere).

UPDATE (10 February 2020): Some improved translations were kindly provided by a reader (see comment) and have been substituted.

With respect to the tortured history of the alternative endings of the novel and its relationship to the short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens”, it might be helpful to have this chronology. The short story was written and published in late 1933 in both the USA (Hearst’s International/Cosmopolitan) and UK (Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine). After it had been finished, Waugh decided he would write a novel explaining how and why the events in the story occurred. He wrote the novel in late 1933-early 1934. Serialization rights were to sold to Harper’s Bazaar, but they wanted it shortened and with a different ending. Waugh simply deleted the original ending and substituted a shorter one, making a few minor changes in the remaining original text to accommodate this. That serialized version was published under the title A Flat in London in both the USA and UK editions of the magazine in five installments between June-October 1934. The book was published in September 1934 to coincide with the final serial installment. To confuse things still further, Waugh’s alternative ending was later published as a stand-alone short story entitled “By Special Request” in the collection Mr Loveday’s Little Outing and Other Sad Stories (1936) and has subsequently been reprinted with that title. It also bore a subtitle taken from the magazine version:  “Chapter Five, The Next Winter”.

In the 1964 revised edition of the novel, Waugh included the alternative ending in an appendix entitled, simply and helpfully, “Alternative Ending”. He provided this somewhat cryptic explanation of its provenance:

“An American magazine wanted to serialize it [the novel] (under the title of their choosing, A Flat in London) but could not do so while it incorporated The man who liked Dickens. I accordingly provided the alternative ending which is here included as a curiosity.”

Waugh’s explanation seems to assume that that Harper’s Bazaar “could not” republish the text of “The man who liked Dickens” because of its previous publication in a different magazine which had exclusive rights.  Some commentators suggest that this may be a red herring dragged out by Waugh to provide a convenient excuse for making substantive changes demanded by commecial publishers, something he usually resisted. In the USA, they note that both magazines were under common ownership of the same Hearst Magazine group. It is not clear, however, whether that was the case in England.

 

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Waugh News from Slovenia and Sweden

Posted on February 8, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Slovenian online newspaper Ljubljanske Novice has published a brief review of the recent translation of Scoop into Slovenian (Esklusiva). See previous post. The novel is described as:

…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 are based on real people such as a newspaper magnate and a variety of other persons in whom we can easily recognize contemporaries. […] The novel’s humor has given it a wide response among readers and placed it on many of the lists of best books of our time. Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is considered one of the central English authors of the 20th century. The novels Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust have been translated into Slovenian. The translation and accompanying text were prepared by DuĹĄanka Zabukovec.

In Sweden, the newspaper Expressen has published a column in its Culture section which recommends a reading list of 11 books for conservatives. Among the two novels on the list is this one by Waugh:

“Brideshead revisited”, 1945. What is more beautiful than a lost paradise? It is the only thing that never disappears. It remains. It will not wither in the winds of time. Perhaps there once was something better than that which just happens to be.

The other novel listed is Midcentury (1960) by John Dos Passos. The remaining books listed are mainly political and cultural essays and critiques from Edmund Burke (French Revolution) to Harold Bloom (Western canon) and Horace Engdahl (HĂśgkultur som subkultur).

The article, written under the byline “William Shakespeare”, includes this in its introduction:

…Many people want to be conservative today, but for one to do that with pride, it is not enough to wear a hat or a pearl necklace, support stability, fear abortion, and complain about threats against Swedish traditions. […] I know, it hurts to think, and it hurts even more to read, but if you want your conviction to be a good fit, you have no choice. That is why I will set you a task today: This is a small selection of classics, both personal and general, for someone who wants to don a tweed or a suit with a little more confidence…

A corrected translation has been provided by Maria Salenius who teaches at the University of Helsinki. Many thanks.

UPDATE (8 February 2020): The translation from the Swedish newspaper has been corrected and is substituted in the text. Thanks to Maria for providing this correction.

 

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Daisy Waugh’s New Novel Reviewed

Posted on February 7, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Several papers have published advanced reviews of Daisy Waugh’s new book In the Crypt with a Candlestick. This will be published later this month. See earlier post for report of an interview. Here’s the review by Natasha Cooper in the Literary Review:

Daisy Waugh has great fun mixing a cosy crime caper with elements of her grandfather’s novel Brideshead Revisited and the TV adaptation that was filmed at Castle Howard. In the Crypt with a Candlestick stars the Tode family, who have owned the magnificent money pit that is Tode Hall for generations. Living there now are the recently widowed Emma, Lady Tode; her faithful retainers, Mr and Mrs Carfizzi; and a once-celebrated actor who had a big part in the television version of A Prance to the Music in Time, with his famous teddy bear, Dogmatix. The mental instability of the heir persuades Lady Tode to bring in some more distant relatives to run the house and mayhem ensues. Many jokes, good characterisation, entertaining satire and a neat resolution to the murder mystery make this novel a perfect antidote to wintry gloom.

There’s also this excerpt from the Tatler:

The subjects of Daisy Waugh’s frothy aristocratic crime caper are the Todes of Tode Hall, famous for its Vanbrugh done and its association with a Brideshead-like novel, Prance to the Music in Time. […] It’s sharp, funny and just the right amount of farcical – the best sort of murder mystery.

And this is from the the review by Claire Allfree in the online paper Metro.news:

Daisy Waugh, granddaughter of Evelyn, pokes some harmless fun at Brideshead Revisited in this barmy tribute to the golden age of crime writing. […] Throw in a dead body, a suspicious butler and a ghost that pops out of a sugar dispenser, and you have an effervescent madcap whodunnit.

Thanks to David Lull for sending links to these articles.

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George Steiner 1929-2020 R.I.P.

Posted on February 6, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Literary critic and scholar George Steiner died last week in Cambridge, England at the age of 90. He is the latest eminent literary critic to pass away recently, starting with Harold Bloom in October and continuing with Samuel Hynes, Clive James and John Simon. See previous posts. According to the obituary in the New York Times, Steiner was

…a literary polymath and man of letters whose voluminous criticism often dealt with the paradox of literature’s moral power and its impotence in the face of an event like the Holocaust […] An essayist, fiction writer, teacher, scholar and literary critic — he succeeded Edmund Wilson as senior book reviewer for The New Yorker from 1966 until 1997 — Mr. Steiner both dazzled and dismayed his readers with the range and occasional obscurity of his literary references.

When his death was announced, I was reminded of two of his books: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959) and The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (1981), his only novel. I looked for any article or opinion he may have written about Waugh’s works, but a search on Google Books came up with only this mention in the context of a discussion of the different publishing practices in England and America. After remarking that publishing in America is more remunerative, Steiner concludes that English publishers are more patient, supportive and nurturing over the longer term:

…Above all, English life fosters privacies, a narrow quiet and modesty of material exustence, such as encourage a writer’s slow development of his own voice and purpose. Hence the striking number of contemporary English novelists who genuinely have “work in progress,” in whose writing there is a vital architecture: Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Evelyn Waugh, C. P. Snow, Lawrence Durrell, Muriel Spark. One may not like what they were doing, but their individual books carry a sense of the whole.

This was published in Language and Silence (1967). By the time it was in print, Waugh was dead. When he died, there was at least one work in progress that was unfinished. This was the second volume of his autobiography to be entitled A Little Hope. He may have been somewhat reluctant to proceed with that because the early chapters would have had to deal with the failure of his first marriage, not a period he was going to enjoy describing. Moreover, he had not sensed any pressure to complete volume 2 in a hurry because his publisher did not intend to print it until the large print run of the first volume A Little Learning (1964) had been exhausted. Given the low ebb of Waugh’s reputation at the time, the copies of that were not exactly flying off the warehouse shelves. So, in this case, it was a publisher that was more patient than nurturing.

It was down to literary critic Dominic Green to identify the book written by Waugh that Steiner should have analysed. In an appreciation of Steiner written for the new literary journal The Critic, Green opens with this:

George Steiner, who died on Monday aged ninety, was our last link with Stefan Zweig’s ‘world of yesterday’, the world of European high culture and polysemic scholarship that the Germans destroyed after 1933. Steiner more than anyone else invented the academic disciplines now called Comparative Literature and ‘translation studies’. He achieved this not just against the flow of a history whose undertow nearly took him down as a child, but also against the fashions of an academy which did its best to ignore him even after he had forced it to acknowledge him. Steiner was the American critic that Harold Bloom claimed to be but wasn’t…

After a discussion of Steiner’s life and career, Green writes:

…Steiner was also precocious in understanding that the Shoah was the crucial aspect in the historical eclipse of Europe’s twentieth century. Postwar America generated another Jewish immigrant, Saul Bellow, to describe the knock-on effects of Europe’s civilizational crack-up. Postwar Europe, which had produced writers capable of amplifying and expounding every previous shift in its modern history, failed to produce a single new novelist willing or able to look Europe in the eye. The Germans, usually so voluble, produced only the slippery evasions of Gunther Grass. The French agreed not to talk about it all in public, though in 1955 Alain Resnais managed in Night and Fog to present on screen what was not to be written about on paper. Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate did not appear in the West until 1980. It fell to Evelyn Waugh, of all people, to describe the Second World War as a civilizational disaster, and the murder of Europe’s Jews as its central motif, in the Sword of Honour trilogy…

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Groundhog Day Roundup

Posted on February 2, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan McLaren adds a second entry in his new series of posts which involve the imagined visits of Waugh’s friends to this summer’s Brideshead Festival at Castle Howard. In this one, Dick Young (a fellow schoolmaster at Arnold House and the primary model for Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall) travels to Castle Howard in Richard Plunket Greene’s roadster. During the visit, they discuss Young’s career as described in Waugh’s writings and elsewhere. Perhaps the best bit of this discussion relates to Young’s reaction to Waugh’s portrayal of him in his writings. This inspires Young’s counter-description of Waugh:

“…I wanted to write something proportionate to the offence given. After all, Waugh had ended up saying [in Decline and Fall]: ‘Grimes was a life force. Sentenced to death in Flanders, he popped up in North Wales. Drowned in North Wales, he emerged in South America. Engulfed in the dark mystery of Egdon Mire, he would ride again somewhere at some time, shaking from his limbs the musty integuments of the tomb.’”

“Much the same thing could be said of Evelyn. Crucified by She-Evelyn, he fled to Arica. Bored by Abyssinia, he turned up at Madresfield. Rejected by Baby Jungman, he went on a mission up the Amazon in search of a Jesuit. And so on.”

Also included is a description of the display of Young’s ceramic statuettes which, according to McLaren, he bequeathed to the Ashmolean Museum.

–On 25 January, the Daily Telegraph ran a story in which it described the reaction of actor Hugh Laurie to a recent offer of a CBE:

…Laurie has confessed that he considered rejecting the most recent honour, before some frank advice from his son persuaded him not to take the path of pomposity.[…] After his deliberations Laurie decided against being “up himself”, and accepted his own award with good grace. The actor and musician believes that honours are simply part of the system in which stars operate, and there is a self-importance to turning them down. […]

“I did wonder about the whole meaning of the thing and whether it is something one should be participating in,” Laurie said of being approached with the offer of a CBE. “But my son came up with something wise, which was that you’d have to be so up yourself to turn it down…

The article concluded with this:

More traditionalist literary figures often associated with the establishment have also snubbed any additions to their name. Rudyard Kipling decided against a knighthood, and Evelyn Waugh turned down a CBE in the Fifties.

A few days later, the Telegraph printed this letter in response:

Honoured up to a point

SIR – On the question of writers’ and artists’ attitudes to the honours system (report, January 25), Evelyn Waugh did indeed refuse the honour of being a CBE, but only because he thought he was worth being made a Companion of Honour.

J C H Mounsey
Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire

–DJ Taylor’s book about Cyril Connolly’s literary journal of the 1940s Horizon and the bevy of young ladies who helped him run it (Lost Girls) will be published in the USA later this week by Pegasus Books. It was reviewed favorably last week in the Wall Street Journal by Moira Hodgson and a review will appear in a forthcoming issue of the society’s journal, Evelyn Waugh Studies. For discussions and links to reviews of the British edition, see previous posts.

–A club denominated 5 Hertford Street located in Mayfair’s Shepherd Market district, has announced a Literary and Arts Festival at its premises on 9-16 March. Here’s the announcement from their website:

Justine Picardie, writer and former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar and Town & Country will host a week-long festival of talks at the club, in conjunction with Heywood Hill.  Speakers include Erdem Moralioglu (fashion designer), Oriole Cullen (V&A curator and mastermind behind the Dior Exhibition), Daisy Waugh (tarot reading granddaughter of Evelyn Waugh) and other highly acclaimed authors such as Hannah Rothschild, Andrew Roberts and Belinda Harley.

Daisy Waugh will probably discuss her new book In the Crypt with a Candlestick mentioned in our last previous post. For more details consult the club’s website.

–Finally the Australian LGBTQ website Q News has posted a profile of William Lygon. The concluding section includes an explanation of his contribution to one of Waugh’s most memorable characters:

Evelyn Waugh immortalised Lygon when he used him as the model for the character Lord Marchmain in his novel Brideshead Revisited. Widely acclaimed on its release in 1945, the book enjoyed renewed interest with its adaption for television in 1981 and again with a movie adaption in 2008.

Asked about her father before her death, his daughter Sibell remembered a very nice man. “He was a very nice man and he did care so very much about his children. Mother was his greatest mistake and maybe because he was homosexual he made the wrong choice in marriage.” She said the main thing he taught his children was, “Tolerance. Always tolerance.”

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New Daisy Waugh Novel Includes a Brideshead Spin-off

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Daisy Waugh’s latest novel entitled In the Crypt with a Candlestick will be published next month. The novel is described in an interview of the author by the Daily Mail as having a Brideshead Revisited “spin-off” theme in the plot:

Waugh’s granddaughter’s new effort, she told Tatler, is a ‘comic novel with some murder thrown in,’ and aims to poke fun at the British upper class, which she called the ‘only people writers are allowed to make jokes about any more.’

The heroes of her upcoming novel are the Tode family, from Tode Hall, who she says live in a fabulous stately home. The Brideshead connection is that Tode Hall [the setting of the new novel] is famous for being the filming location for a famous TV series about a family of aristocrats, presumably the Flytes.  The author jokes that her grandfather’s legacy kept his family ‘in expensive shoes and Botox for decades’, and revealed how she finally decided to write a funny modern-day-spin-off of his most acclaimed novel after years of refusing to do so. Daisy jokes that this is because the upper class had become the victim of the ‘woke folk’s’ spite, ‘suffering the abuse in silence and isolated in their stately homes’.

In order to write the novel, which is set to come out in February, Waugh did some research by staying at Castle Howard, where she conversed with Nick Howard and his wife Vicky Barnsley. But she said she mostly drew inspiration from her own family on her mother’s side, who were the owners of Clandon Park, built in 1730, which was donated to the National Trust by Daisy’s grandfather, Arthur Onslow.  Clandon park, unfortunately, burned down in 2015. Waugh explained she wrote the ‘merry’ and ‘frivolous’  book because she felt the world was in need of cheering up.

The Brideshead spin-off seems not to have occurred to the publishers, Piatkus. Here is their summary of the book from its back cover as quoted on Amazon.co.uk:

Sir Ecgbert Tode of Tode Hall has survived to a grand old age – much to the despair of his younger wife, Emma. But at ninety-three he has, at last, shuffled off the mortal coil.

Emma, Lady Tode, thoroughly fed up with being a dutiful Lady of the Manor, wants to leave the country to spend her remaining years in Capri. Unfortunately her three tiresome children are either unwilling or unable (too mad, too lefty or too happy in Australia) to take on management of their large and important home, so the mantle passes to a distant relative and his glamorous wife.

Not long after the new owners take over, Lady Tode is found dead in the mausoleum. Accident? Or is there more going on behind the scenes of Tode Hall than an outsider would ever guess….?

In the traditions of two great but very different British writers, Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, Waugh’s hilarious and entirely original twist on the country house murder mystery comes complete with stiff upper lips, even stiffer drinks, and any stiffs that might embarrass the family getting smartly brushed under the carpet…

They might have also mentioned its connection to Cluedo. The book is also on offer from Amazon.com but under a different title: Castle Beardsley. This change seems odd since Americans would understand the allusion in the British title. They play Cluedo in America as well, only they call it “Clue”.

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Waugh’s Victorian Blood Book

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

On the website openculture.com, blogger Josh Jones has posted a description of the so-called Victorian Blood Book that was acquired by Evelyn Waugh and added to his collection. It now resides in the Harry Ransom Center’s Evelyn Waugh Collection at the University of Texas and much of it is available online at this link provided on openculture.com. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

The novelist, the Ransom Center notes, “was an inveterate collector of things Victorian (and well ahead of most of his contemporaries in this regard). Undoubtedly the single most curious object in the entire library is a large oblong folio decoupage book, often referred to as the ‘Victorian Blood Book.’”

Waugh deeply admired Victorian art, and especially “those nineteenth-century enemies of technology, the Pre-Raphaelites,” writes [Charles] Rolo. Still, like us, he may have looked upon scrapbooks like these as bizarre and morbidly humorous, if also possessed by an unsettling beauty. (One 2008 catalogue described them as “weird” and “rather elegant but very scary.”) More than anything, they resemble the kind of thing a goth teenager raised on Monty Python and Emily Dickinson might put together in her bedroom late at night. Such an artist would be carrying on a long “cherished tradition.” […]

The “Blood Book”‘s actual title appears to have been Durenstein!, which is the Austrian castle where Richard the Lionhearted was imprisoned. Assembled from hundreds of engravings, many by William Blake, it apparently depicts “the spiritual battles encountered by Christians along the path of life and the ‘blood’ to Christian sacrifice.” The “blood” is red India ink. The quotations surrounding each collage, according to the Garland family “are encouraging one to turn to God as our Saviour.”  […]See a full scanned copy of the “Victorian Blood Book,” and download high-resolution images, online at the University of Texas, Austin’s Harry Ransom Center.

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Late January Roundup

Posted on January 26, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New York Times, in a recent column in its By The Book series, interviewed dramatist and gay health rights activist Larry Kramer. Waugh came up in this context:

Q. What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?

A. This is a special subject for me. I love words and how they’re made beautiful. Two of my very favorite authors are P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. I am constantly rereading them. Each is a brilliant writer with great skill with words and the English language. No one writes a sentence like both of them. It makes me happy to laugh as I witness this expertise. I guess I should include my Yale classmate Calvin Trillin, who’s no slouch.

—The Spectator has a story relating to the candidature of Rebecca Long-Bailey for leadership of the Labour Party. It relates to the irony of a Labour candidate with a hyphenated surname and opens with this:

When Francis Hurt inherited the Renishaw estate in 1777, he changed his surname to Sitwell. His eight-year-old son and heir Sitwell Hurt thus grew up to be Sir Sitwell Sitwell. ‘Perhaps his hypersensitive descendant should resume the patronymic and call himself Sir Hurt Hurt,’ Evelyn Waugh once remarked of his contemporary Osbert Sitwell.

I was reminded of this by a declaration from Rebecca Long-Bailey that her name now bears a hyphen. Ms Long-Bailey’s father Jimmy Long was a trade unionist and she is married to Stephen Bailey, but she did not want to be the last in a long line of Longs.

–Fr Dwight Longenecker comments on Waugh’s war trilogy on his weblog:

During my recent bout with the flu I had the chance to re-read Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy. One of the criticisms of the books is that they are uneven, dull at times, confusing and disjointed. On re-reading I realize much of that was intentional. Waugh was showing the reality of war.

–A recent PhD dissertation relating to Waugh is mentioned in the CV of Dr Michael Horacki who teaches at Luther College in Regina, Saskatchewan:

His dissertation, Memory, Interpellation, and Assemblage: Multivalent Assemblage in the Novels of Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh (2019), examines the relationship between individual and group identity in the fiction of the three authors.

–A reader has added Waugh’s 1928 biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the weblog for the St Louis Public Library’s current book challenge:

In this biographical study Evelyn Waugh seeks to understand both Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s success and his failure.  The former, he concludes, demands a spiritual aesthetics that transcends formal analysis, while the latter is best explained by the artist’s personal tragedies and character flaws.  Rossetti spent his career pursuing an ideal of the feminine, but was sabotaged by his own indiscipline and irresponsibility.

Rossetti was Waugh’s first full-length book, but if his development is certainly not complete the voice is already unmistakable his.  Especially delightful are his account of Rossetti and Whistler’s shared mania for blue china and the ethics of reviewing the books of one’s friends, although equally characteristic is his vivid description of his subject’s isolation, paranoia, and despair.

A photograph of the front cover of the book’s US edition is included.

–The Catholic News Service reviews a book by Joseph Pearce entitled What Every Catholic Should Know. The review is by Patrick Brown who writes:

…The book offers a Cook’s tour through pre-Christian epics, a full-throated defense of Dante’s “Purgatorio” and “Paradisio,” a helpful take on dystopian fiction and St. Thomas More, and rightfully effusive praise for the insights of Jane Austen. “Literature” becomes especially rich when Pearce gets to 19th- and 20th-century figures. […]

When, in contrast to the usual brief sketches, he spends a generous five pages on Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” you sense Pearce come alive with excitement about the book he calls “arguably the finest novel of the 20th century.” …

–Finally, writing in the the Guardian, Emma Jane Unsworth briefly compares a currently popular novel (I Am Sovereign by Nicola Barker) to earlier works with this rather quirky analogy:

The narrative style is elegant and frenetic, which suits the story of a house sale that becomes an existential scrum. [Satirical novelist] Nell Zink described it as “Evelyn Waugh on ecstasy” and I think that’s about right. Either that or F Scott Fitzgerald on meth. It’s also nice and short – I’m not a heathen but since having a child I read approximately one novel per year so the short ones feel much more doable.

 

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