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”.

 

 

 

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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] divorcée 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.

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Roundup of Updates

Posted on March 1, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition carries a story by Tobias Grey about the upcoming exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s works. This opens on 12 March at the National Portrait Gallery in London. See earlier posts. After describing the genesis of the exhibit, which is entitled “Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things”, and several of the photos to be displayed, Grey writes:

The antics of the Bright Young Things would inspire several novelists, including Evelyn Waugh, whose books Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies satirized the set. At the National Portrait Gallery, oil portraits of Beaton and Waugh by the painter Henry Lamb will eye each other from opposing walls. The two men were famously enemies–Beaton wrote in his voluminous diaries about Waugh bullying him at their boarding school–but they shared similar traits. Both came from middle-class families and used their artistic talents to gain access to a higher social sphere.

The bullying took place at a day school in North London–Heath Mount School–where Waugh and Beaton were both students. Waugh (born in October 1903) was in a higher form than Beaton (born a few months later in January 1904). They did not attend the same boarding school: Waugh was at Lancing and Beaton at St Cyprians (with Cyril Connolly and George Orwell) and, later, at Harrow.

–The dispute at Christ Church, Oxford between its Dean (Martyn Percy) and the governing board continues unabated after a ruling this summer by a legal tribunal in the Dean’s favor. See previous posts. This dispute (which stems from the response of the college to an assault in 2016 by one of its students upon another but has since spiraled far beyond that) has been summarized (if that’s the right word) by Andrew Billen, a Christ Church alumnus, in The Times. So far neither side has conceded. The one thing that is quite clear is that the expenses for the college continue to rise. In his conclusion Billen writes:

Christ Church has long had a reputation, dating at least back to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, for being a haven for Hooray Henries. Its “sharking parties”, in which second and third-year males target female freshers, are of a newer folklore, for it is only 40 years since women were admitted to the college as undergraduates. It faces other travails. […] For reasons I can only guess at, since the failed attempt to remove Percy, the college has lost £2.5 million in donations and legacies.

Might this be another Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in the making?

In a letter to the editor printed later relating to the article, a reader made this comment:

Sir, Christ Church college was not the only Oxford institution that Evelyn Waugh satirised. In Decline and Fall he satirised the Bullingdon Club under the name of the Bollinger Club. The dons gave tacit approval to the Bollinger’s acts of vandalism because the fines that the dons then exacted paid for Founder’s port, to be drunk at high table.
Robert Rhodes, QC
Outer Temple Chambers

And what about Paul Pennyfeather’s alma mater, Scone College? Perhaps less grand than Christ Church but the subject of satire nevertheless. And Waugh’s own college Hertford gets a mention in the final chapter where it is described as an “ugly, subdued little college.” (Penguin 2011, p. 284)

–The Daily Express asked comedian Alexei Sayle to choose his six favorite books. At the top of his list is Waugh’s Sword of Honour. He explains:

My parents were only interested in books that reflected their views. I am the opposite. Waugh was very right wing, he hated the working class, yet his work had a tremendous humanity. This is the greatest evocation of war and the depths of suffering.

Sayle has consistently named Waugh when asked by the press to categorize his reading, as can be seen in previous posts. Among his other selections on this occasion are Anna Karenina and The Communist Menifesto.

–Daisy Waugh’s latest novel In the Crypt With a Candlestick has been reviewed in the Daily Mail, which previously reported its linkage with her grandfather’s novel Brideshead Revisited. The Mail’s reviewer concludes:

One wonders what Evelyn Waugh would have made of his granddaughter’s plundering of Brideshead Revisited for this light-hearted romp. […] With more literary and media references than you can shake a stick at, this might well be sub-titled The Spoils Of Waugh.

The book was released on 20 February in the UK. Daisy will appear next month at the Hexham Book Festival where she will discuss her new book.

UPDATE (2 March 2020): A letter to The Times printed in today’s edition is added to the update on the Christ Church conflict.

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D J Taylor on the Roman-à-Clef

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In this week’s TLS, D J Taylor has contributed an essay in the Freelance column entitled “Write who you know: Ending up in a roman-à-clef.” This begins with a discussion of the four post-war novels written by William Cooper, starting with Scenes from Provincial Life. The models depicted as characters in the novel (including one based on Cooper’s friend, the novelist C P Snow) were easily recognized, but this was not a problem until the second installment (Scenes from  Metropolitan Life) when one of those portrayed took umbrage, and the book’s publication was delayed by 30 years. Taylor continues:

All this raises questions about what might be called the psychology of the roman-à-clef, and above all the reactions of people who fear that they may have ended up in one. Naturally, there are fictional models whose first thought […] is to threaten a libel writ. But there is also a decent-sized number of people who are prepared to tolerate their exposure or, in exceptional cases, are even flattered by it. Evelyn Waugh, asked how he had got away with projecting Peter Rodd into the scapegrace Basil Seal who dines off his mistress at a cannibal banquet in Black Mischief (1932), used to say that you could write what you liked about anyone in a novel as long as you were prepared to concede that they were attractive to women. Rodd, at least, was merely a victim of authorial design. But what about the people who actively want to be put into books?

The discussion continues, moving on to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and Barbara Skelton’s dual role as both a model and a writer (one of whose novels had to be withdrawn after two models objected to their fictional descriptions). The essay concludes with a discussion of how authors such as Charles Dickens and Simon Raven had to alter characters appearing in novels published in serial format (David Copperfield and Alms for Oblivion, respectively) to change their concept in later installments after the character models objected to their original depictions. It concludes with Taylor’s description of his own appearance in a roman-à-clef (a poem, actually) by D J Enright. It would be unfair to reveal the ending, but it is worth searching it out on the internet.

In a recent article in Evelyn Waugh Studies ( “’Huxley’s Ape:’ Waugh in Scandinavia (August-September 1947)”, No 50.1, Spring 2019) this topic came up in a press conference convened in Copenhagen when Waugh made a stop there. The Danish newspaper Politiken printed a quote translated into Danish of one of Waugh’s statements which, translated back into English, says:

I’ve never been able to write a roman à clef. All of my figures are free fantasy, even though I have been as inspired by real life as any other novelist.

In Danish the name of the genre is Nøgleroman, literally translated as “key novel”. Here they have combined the French word for novel (also commonly used for that term in Danish) and the Danish word for key “Nøgle“. Google translate cannot manage this: “key Roman” is the best it can do, and it took me a while to work out what Waugh was talking about.

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Waugh and the Sitwells

Posted on February 27, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail reports in Sebastian Shakespeare’s gossip column that the Sitwell family is selling off one of its principal properties:

The Sitwells were once among the most celebrated of society families, inspiring the quip that they belonged to ‘the history of publicity’. But things are much less rosy for the current generation — MasterChef critic William Sitwell and his brother, baronet and film producer Sir George. They have, I can disclose, decided to sell Weston Hall, the £5 million Northamptonshire pile which has been in the family for 300 years and boasts at least 11 bedrooms.

After explaining somewhat vaguely what brought them to this pass, the article concludes:

‘Weston is a big, draughty house with a bit of history but is expensive to run,’ says a friend. In the family’s heyday in the Twenties and Thirties, Brideshead author Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward and society photographer Cecil Beaton regularly stayed.

Waugh knew all three literary Sitwells of his generation (actually they were all a bit older than Waugh): Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell (“Sachie”). He met them formally through Harold Acton and was relatively close to all three–e.g., he was Edith’s “sponsor” in her conversion to Roman Catholicism. He clearly made several stays at the primary family estate in Derbyshire–Renishaw Hall. In Waugh’s day, that was occupied by Osbert, who also held the title: Sitwell of Renishaw. During Waugh’s acquaintance, Sachie and his wife Georgia (née Doble) lived at Weston Hall and remained there after Osbert died in 1969, a few years after Waugh. Sachie did inherit the title from Osbert and had two sons: Reresby and Francis. When Sachie died he left the title to Reresby who had already received the right to Renishaw from Osbert when he vacated it in 1965. Weston Hall was occupied by Sachie’s younger son Francis, but at some point ownership went into a “family trust”. The Mail’s article assumes one already knows all this.

When Reresby died in 2009 (Francis having predeceased him), he left the title to Francis’s older son George and Renishaw itself to his own daughter Alexandra (whose married name is Hayward). Although not mentioned in the Mail (again, apparently one is assumed to know these things), the title probably could not be inherited by a daughter, and Reresby left no sons.

There matters stood. George lived in Weston Hall for a time, then moved out in favor of London,  and it was thereafter occupied by William. It is the two of them  who have decided to sell Weston Hall. All this is by of saying that there is little evidence that Evelyn Waugh made frequent stays in Weston Hall. Aside from this letter to Diana Cooper in 1932, I find no reference to visits by Waugh to that particular venue:

Then I went to Sachie and Georgia for week-end. It rained all the time and we had mulled claret and very girlish gossip. (MWMS, p. 19)

On the other hand, his visits to Renishaw, beginning in 1930 when he stopped by with Robert Byron for an extended stay and was later joined by Alastair Graham, are fairly well documented in his diaries and letters. His last visit was in 1957, after which Osbert became increasingly debilitated by Parkinson’s disease. Anyone reading this who knows of any other visits made by Waugh to Weston Hall or of any corrections needed in the aforesaid chain of inheritance is invited to comment below.

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