Upcoming Waugh Events

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Two Waugh-related events have been announced for late next month. Unfortunately, they occur on the same day but do not necessarily conflict:

–The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Project in Leicester has announced a reading from a new play based on Brideshead Revisited:

“Easter Bank Holiday weekend and Port Meadow is pullulating with people. Charley Wilson-Ryder is working on her CV when Sabrina Flute vomits all over her picnic blanket…”

Award-winning playwright Sophie Swithinbank presents a rehearsed reading of Even in Arcadia, a new play responding to Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Playwright and cast will be available for a Q & A session immediately following the performance.

Swithinbank’s play was written during her residency with the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Project, and you can read about her experiences during its creation on the project blog.

The reading will take place on 30 March at 1830p in The Hayloft at the Organ Grinder, 4 Wood Gate, Loughborough. Tickets are available at this link. For more information about the play and playwright see previous link.

–Not so far away, there is an event earlier that same day at the Oxford Literary Festival that will be of interest. Critic and novelist D J Taylor will appear at a presentation on his recent book The Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-51:

Biographer D J Taylor tells the story of four women from the generation of ‘lost girls’ – the missing link between the first wave of newly liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the free-for-all of the 1960s.

Taylor says there were at least a dozen or so young women in Blitz-era London that could qualify for the title, but he concentrates on four – Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade. They were chic, glamorous and bohemian members of English literary and artistic life of the 1940s. Three had affairs with Lucian Freud, one married George Orwell, one became mistress of the King of Egypt and all were associated with the celebrated literary magazine Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. They had affairs with dukes, celebrity divorces and appeared in the novels of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford…

The book is described in several recent posts and will be reviewed in an upcoming issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies. The presentation is scheduled on 30 March at 1400p in St Cross College, Oxford. It should be possible for the very keen to include both events in a single day trip since Loughborough is not a bad drive from Oxford (90 miles via M40/M1) and there are frequent train connections. For details on venue and booking see this link.

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Otto Silenus Rides Again in New Criterion

Posted on February 22, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The cutural journal New Criterion posts an editorial in its current issue relating to the recent announcement of a new Federal policy on architectural style. This is entitled “Decline, fall & rise: On ‘Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again'”. The article starts from a point taken by Evelyn Waugh in his first novel:

In his novel Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh guys a fictional Corbusier-like modernist architect called Otto Silenus. “The problem of Architecture as I see it,” Silenus pontificates, “is the problem of all art—the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form.”

But shouldn’t art—and above all the art of architecture—cater to and celebrate the “human element”? There are certainly traditions of abstract art that seek to minimize or expunge all references to humanity and, indeed, to nature in all its messy mutability. But the main current of art in the West from Athens and the Roman Republic through the Renaissance and the glories of Georgian and Victorian England has embraced and been guided by the “human element.”

The editorial goes on to state its quite reasonable support for what must be one of the least politically controversial pronouncements of the current administration. Readers might want to stop after paragraph 7, however, because the article then morphs into another partisan political battle about which the less said the better. Waugh did a much more effective and memorable job of putting modern architecture in its place with a little bit of satire than do New Criterion’s editors.

In another New Criterion article, David Platzer writes a reconsideration of English novelist Hugo Charteris, whose work in the mid-20th century was once admired but is now largely forgotten:

When Hugo Charteris’s first novel, the haunting A Share of the World, was published in 1953 to the praise of Rosamond Lehmann (who helped to get it published), Peter Quennell, Evelyn Waugh, and Francis Wyndham (Charteris’s relation and consistent supporter), the author, just turned thirty-one, seemed set for lasting fame. It hasn’t worked that way in the almost five decades since his death of cancer in 1970, aged only forty-seven. Nowadays, few people seem to know his name. This is true among not only the ever-growing majority who pay little attention to novels and novelists, but also the enlightened minority who do. The obscurity is at odds with the rich admiration shown in Charteris’s time by many of his contemporaries.

When A Share of the World was first published in 1953, Waugh named it as the best first novel of the year in a Sunday Times compilation (20 December 1953, p. 6). He gave no explanation. That first novel was reprinted in 2015. See previous post. His second novel Marching with April was published in 1956 and was  reprinted in 2017. According to the description on the cover:

Hugo Charteris’ second novel is a magnificent farce of vying intentions set in a far northern Scottish county, with a motley of disparate characters fiercely protecting their own interests in a choppy sea of suspicion and bewilderment. The author’s spare, intriguing and deadpan style embellishes this complex scenario with extraordinary flashes of insight and prodigious atmosphere. V. S. Pritchett said of this novel ‘What a relief to laugh, to go in for spoofing and madness. I think this is one of the funniest novels I have read since the early Evelyn Waugh.’

Last year, another of Charteris’s novels was reprinted. This was Picnic at Porokorro, first published in 1958. This takes place at a diamond mine in British West Africa as colonialism is dying. According to the information on the cover:

The spare, snakelike prose of Hugo Charteris’ fourth novel explores the late colonial mindset with fascinating depth and unusual candour, creating a harshly vivid portrait of people trapped in the ending of an era.

 

 

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Town & Country Remembers Waugh

Posted on February 20, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

This month 75 years ago Town & Country magazine, based in New York, completed the serial publication of Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited with its fourth monthly installment issued in February 1945. This abbreviated version preceded by several months the first book publication in May 1945. This was issued jointly by the Book Society and Chapman & Hall in London. There was no serial version in the UK.

So far, Town & Country seems not to have commemorated this event. It did mention it seveal years ago in a March 2014 article entitled “T&C Family Album: Evelyn Waugh” by Adrienne Westenfield. The article opened with this:

Forward-thinking though his prose may have been, English writer Evelyn Waugh was a man who loved to look backward—at his debauched youth, at his spiritual journey, and at the erosion of the aristocracy, among other things. We like looking in that direction too, and so to our mutual delight, in November 1944, T&C published the first of three [sic] segments from Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s swan song to the old English order that remains his best-loved novel. ,,,

She gets it slightly wrong in that there were four rather than three monthly installments of the novel. For more detailed informaton about the publication of the serial version, see article “Brideshead Serialized” in Evelyn Waugh Studies 50.2 (Autumn 2019).

T&C hasn’t forgotten Waugh entirely, however, as demonstatred in its current issue. This includes the report of a society wedding last summer. The bride, née Tatiana Hambro, is the great-granddaughter of  Lettice Lygon and wore a tiara once belonging to Lettice. As described in T&C:

The most important element of the final look, though, was the tiara. The Victorian piece comes through Tatiana’s paternal line, the Lygon family, who inspired the aristocratic Flytes in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The tiara entered the family via Tatiana’s great-grandmother Lady Lettice Cotterell, née Lygon. The Lygons had a grand estate, Madresfield Court, where Waugh was a frequent guest. Years later, when writing his most important work, he based the Flytes on his hosts.

Lettice was the oldest sister of Dorothy and Mary Lygon who became friends of Waugh in the early 1930s and of Hugh and William who knew him from Oxford.

UPDATE (21 February 2020): Please note that the above posting was corrected in a few respects.

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Nancy Mitford Joins Waugh Pantheon

Posted on February 20, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

In his latest posting, Duncan McLaren has Nancy Mitford join Evelyn Waugh’s friends gathering for the imagined reunion at the upcoming Brideshead Festival at Castle Howard. See previous posts. In this entry, Mitford muses over her first two novels (Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding) and how they may have been influenced by those of Waugh.

What is most striking is the similarity of the drawings by Mark Ogilvie-Grant in Christmas Pudding with those of Waugh for Decline and Fall. There are also parallels drawn between the plots and characters of those two novels and a brief discussion of the influence of Waugh’s novel on Highland Fling. Here’s an excerpt from the opening section of Duncan’s posting (Nancy is narrating):

When I flick through Highland Fling I can no longer see the rich connections with Decline and Fall. That process I went through in erasing the connections must have been a thorough one. What a fool I was! But never mind, I gave myself a second chance.

At the beginning of 1930, Vile Bodies appeared, the most eagerly awaited book of all time. And it was about then that Highland Fling went to my agents. On March 10, I wrote to Mark [Ogilvie-Grant]: ‘What do you really think of Vile Bodies? I was frankly very much disappointed in it I must say but some people think it quite marvellous.’ Of course, I see now that the split with She-Evelyn means that the book could not be exuberantly happy, as Decline and Fall had been. But it seems that if Evelyn Waugh couldn’t write a follow-up to Decline and Fall with all its joie de vivre, then I would. In December of 1931, I wrote to Mark: ‘My new book [Christmas Pudding] is jolly good, all about Hamish at Eton. Betjeman is co-hero.’

[…] It is not a million miles from Paul Fotheringay to Paul Pennyfeather, and one only has to consult the first scene to see that I very much have Evelyn Waugh in mind. Actually, dear Mark illustrated the book, and his frontispiece is a masterpiece over which we spent hours laughing together.

What follows are Mitford’s imagined musings over both of her early books together with illustrations and quotes to show the Wavian influences. She also mentions Mark Ogilvie-Grant’s connections at this time with Alastair Graham in their overseas FO postings. It seems that Ogilvie-Grant is also expected to join Waugh’s other friends at the reunion, including several not previously mentioned. As the posting comes to a close, Mitford lists several of those she expects to see there:

…now I am ready to go forth and mingle. I expect to bump into Alastair and Mark outside. My five sisters may have arrived. Brian Howard and Robert Byron, who I dedicated Highland Fling to. Yes, Robert’s love of Victorian art was a forerunner of Evelyn’s. Hamish who is the dedicatee of Christmas Pudding will be there, I expect. Oh no, I have that the wrong way around. Hamish got the dedication of Highland Fling and Robert got Christmas Pudding. Why is it that so many of my really close friends were gay? Evelyn tried to answer that question for me once as we sat together over tea at the Ritz.
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Presidents’ Day Roundup

Posted on February 16, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New York Public Library is celebrating its 125th anniversary and has used the occasion to ask its staff to choose the best 125 books for adult reading published during its lifetime. One of those selected is Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Other novels from writers of Waugh’s generation include The Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, The Sun Also Rises and The Quiet American.

–Claire Allfree writing in the Daily Telegraph has an article entitled “We may hate snobs–but they make the best novelists”. She starts with E M Forster and works her way down through Nancy Mitford to Waugh and Wilde:

…I find the vicious social comedy of Evelyn Waugh harder to forgive. In Decline and Fall you can see his misanthropic contempt for what he believed to be the spineless decadence among all classes emerging in English culture after the First World War. And yet later he became ambivalent towards the upper class which he was close to but never quite a part of. Often he reserved his sharpest barbs for characters such as A Handful of Dust’s Lady Brenda and Brideshead Revisited’s Lady Marchmain, but he could also be shamelessly nostalgic (particularly in that latter novel) and forgave the aristocracy their faults simply because he thought they were so entertaining…

–In another Daily Telegraph article, Waugh also surfaces in a profile by Eleanor Halls about Tom Stoppard whose latest play Leopoldstadt has opened in the West End. After telling the story of his family’s move from Czechoslovakia via Singapore and India to England to escape the Nazis, it is explained that he skipped university and started as a journalist in Bristol, reviewing plays and writing columns (including one on motoring). But he dropped journalism, wrote a play (A Walk on the Water) and

…it was only a matter of time before Stoppard moved to London to court the bright lights of the West End. If he were to become a proper playwright, he needed to be in the thick of it, and so in 1962, he rented a grubby little flat in Notting Hill to write full-time.

To cover costs, he applied to the just-launched theatre magazine Scene, and was hired on staff. Critically underfunded, the magazine required Stoppard to fill its pages with reviews and columns written under various pseudonyms, to give the illusion of different writers. His favourite nom-de-plume was William Boot, named after the incompetent journalist who accidentally finds himself covering an African civil war in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop…

When the magazine folded he went back to writing plays and has been there ever since.

–In an Op-Ed article for The Times, Philip Collins comments on Boris Johnson’s recent cabinet reshuffle and is reminded of two Randolph Churchills:

…The reshuffle adds to the suspicion that Mr Johnson is a Wizard of Oz figure. There’s nothing there, really, other than the desire to show off. Apart from Iain Macleod, who died in office, Sajid Javid has become the first chancellor not to deliver a budget since Randolph Churchill in 1880. The squalid mess of this reshuffle calls to mind Evelyn Waugh’s line when Randolph Churchill’s grandson, also Randolph, had a benign tumour removed: “They’ve cut out the only part of Randolph that isn’t malignant.”

–Writing in the Irish Times, Donald Clarke has an article entitled “Why are actors quick to blame everyone else for bad films?” The primary example cited is the reaction to the film adaptation of the musical “Cats” by two of its actors. Clarke goes on to note that other artists, including writers and musicians, have also been known to turn on their works but with a bit more circumspection:

…More honourable are belated reappraisals by authors or musicians. Kraftwerk don’t consider their first three albums worthy of inclusion in the canon. “I re-read Brideshead Revisited and was appalled,” Evelyn Waugh said of his most famous novel. Martin Amis gets uppity if anyone mentions his book Invasion of the Space Invaders. Good for them. Nobody else is being blamed.

Yet there is a qualification worth making here too. All such disavowals are made from a position of strength. “I made an error, but I sorted myself out,” they seem to say. Where are the renunciations from those taking responsibility for continuing failure? “I wrote a bad book, nobody liked it and I remain stranded in deserved obscurity,” one might read…

–The book Hat: Origins, Language, Style by Drake Stutesman is reviewed, overall favorably, in the Spectator. The review is by Stephen Bayley who closes with this:

…Stutesman misses my all-time favourite hat anecdote. On his African travels in the 1930s, Evelyn Waugh came across an isolated tribe whose habit was cheerfully to disport themselves naked at all times — except for the discarded homburg hats which they eagerly adopted. They were not using the hat as Stutesman’s ‘extension of the multi-tasking head’, but as a device which changes your status even more than your style.

Nice that a reverence for the decoration of your head unites Park Avenue ladies who lunch and Waugh’s savanna tribesmen who, behatted, dance. Professor Stutesman? A few quibbles, but on the whole: chapeau! Or, in English, I take my hat off to you.

The reference appears in Waugh’s travel book Remote People (1931). It relates to  a tribe near Kisumu in Kenya (pp. 200-01).

–Finally, the Times and Star (Cumbria) newspaper has a profile of Higham Hall near Cockermouth. It traces the building through several private owners (the last of which was the Fisher family) before it came under public ownership in 1947. While it was still owned by the Fishers, Evelyn Waugh was a guest there:

In 1926 Evelyn Waugh spent two nights at Higham while travelling to Scotland and wrote in his diary of a house “with turrets and castellations and a perfectly lovely view across the lake to a mountain called Skiddaw” and of going on an otter hunt – “a most indisciplined affair”.

Waugh stopped there in the course of a motor trip to Scotland with Alastair Graham and his mother. The Grahams apparently stayed behind in Carlisle with relatives while Waugh visited the Fisher family at Higham (Diaries, 257-58).

 

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Waugh in “The Mitford Scandal”

Posted on February 15, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

The Mitford Scandal by Jessica Fellowes, was published last month in New York, following earlier publication in the UK.  This is the third book in a series that places the Mitford sisters in the midst of fictional mysteries that occur around them. As noted in an earlier post, the first two volumes follow the story of the heroine Louisa Cannon from her working class adolescense to service in the Mitford family who give her support during a time of crisis.

In this book, she has been living in London with various unpromising jobs after failing to obtain an appointment in the Metropolitan Police. She reconnects with Nancy Mitford while working as a temporary at a reception for Diana Mitford and Bryan Guinness in connection with their marriage. They arrange for Louisa to be employed by Diana as her lady’s maid. She is happy to be back in employment with the Mitfords but would prefer police work.

This latest book advertises that Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford will be among the “coterie of friends” to appear in the story. This is less true of Waugh than it is of Nancy. The description of Waugh’s appearances would cover scarcely more than a page, if that. And he plays no role of importance in the plot.

The book covers the period 1928-1932. This time-frame brackets the engagement and marriage of Diana and Bryan and their impending break-up as Diana becomes acquainted and infatuated with Oswald Mosley. The book accurately but briefly mentions that Waugh and Diana became close friends during her pregnancy with her first child.

Waugh is first mentioned by name as accompanying Nancy on a visit to the Guinnesses, to whom he is already well known. Waugh’s book Vile Bodies had just appeared but he seems to think that Nancy’s career as an author is “as promising as his” (135). He may, however, also have appeared earlier (118) as an unidentified man seated next to Diana who is expostulating to her about Mussolini; that may, on the other hand, have been Oswald Mosley for all the reader is told.

Later Waugh is seen again at the home of the Guinnesses, once more with Nancy present. Louisa comments that he “practically trailed Diana’s every step these days, sitting on her bed as she read her morning letters and accompanying her to the shops…” (184). This sounds like it was during Waugh’s infatuation with Diana when she was pregnant, but nothing more is made of that in the novel. After this, Waugh disappears except for Louisa’s brief mention that she had herself read Vile Bodies “almost undercover, so darkly true was it of the life [Diana] led” (235).

After the book’s conclusion, there is an “Historical Note” in which it is explained, inter alia:

Evelyn Waugh, initially a good friend of Nancy’s, had become very close to Diana in the wake of his divorce. He dedicated his novel Vile Bodies to her and Bryan. Sadly, after her son Jonathan was born, she and Evelyn seemed to fall out and were never friends again in quite the same way.

That is an accurate, if rather abbreviated, description of their friendship. It hardly explains Waugh’s presence in the book, since he advances the plot not at all. There are other cultural celebrities who are given mentions. These include Cecil Beaton and John Betjeman, but their presence is even less felt than Waugh’s.

The mystery story is enough to keep the pages turning, but only just, and even then it helps to have a fairly keen interest in the Mitfords. The historical and literary allusions are also accurate and help support the story. Those eager to learn more about Evelyn Waugh and his relationship with the Mitfords will, however, likely be disappointed in what they will find in this book.

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Waugh on Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 14, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

A website offering varying forms of love letters that might be sent by a prospective suitor includes one that Evelyn Waugh sent to his second wife. This is in TheLily.com (a Washington Post affiliate):

4. Write short, and don’t be dull

A love letter shouldn’t be a dissertation. It’s better to be brief than boring. […] There’s no magic page count to shoot for, but keeping your letter to a sheet or two seems sensible. Consider what you want to say before you start writing, and aim to only include the most interesting updates, memories or anecdotes. In other words, avoid tedium.

Several decades before our attention spans were hammered to bits by smartphones, Evelyn Waugh begged Laura Waugh (who evidently decided to accept his marriage proposal) to zhuzh up her dispatches.

“Darling Laura, sweet whiskers, do try to write me better letters. … Do realize that a letter need not be a bald chronicle of events; I know you lead a dull life now, my heart bleeds for it, though I believe you could make it more interesting if you had the will,” he wrote. “But that is no reason to make your letters as dull as your life. I simply am not interested in Bridget’s children.”  [Letters, Dubrovnik, 7 January 1945, p. 195.]

Waugh did not always follow his own advice and could also write syrupy, banal, plaintive love letters when he put his mind to it. Here’s an excerpt from one he sent to Teresa Jungman (31 July 1933) who turned him down multiple times during his roughly two-year courtship:

I think of you all the time…I believe you are the first woman I have ever been in love with…I love you so much…I don’t think of much except you—your beauty, so fragile and intangible, a thing of fresh water and the early morning and the silence of dawn and mist just alloyed with gold and deep, saturated restful greens like sunrise on that river I travelled down last winter—and your intimate character, all mystery and frustration, a labyrinth with something infinitely secret and intimately precious at its centre…I couldn’t  understand anyone less and want anyone more…Darling Tess your beauty is all around me like a veil so that every moment apart from you seems obscure and half real.  (Philip Eade, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited  (2017) Ch. 14).

The Daily Telegraph has compiled a list of books recommended by its staff for reading on Valentine’s Day. Not all of them are happy love stories. Here’s the one of Waugh’s that is recommended:

A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh

It’s a truism that love can drive you mad, but few vignettes bring this home with such a bleak punch as the famous scene in Waugh’s 1934 novel when Lady Brenda Last, who is having a supposedly casual fling with John Beaver, a younger man she knows to be second-rate, hears over the telephone that “John” has died in an accident. When she realises that it’s her infant son, not Beaver, who has died, Brenda says: “John… John Andrew… I… Oh, thank God.” Love conquers all, but here it’s not a good thing. Iona McLaren

In addition to several collections of romantic poems, the Telegraph lists other novels, including Pride and Prejudice, Brigette Jones’s Diary and The Old Devils.

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Yugoslavia: Churchill Hoodwinked

Posted on February 12, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Writer and TV producer Peter Batty was recently interviewed by the Slovenian weekly news magazine Democracija. The results are posted in English on their website. He is asked about his book Hoodwinking Churchill (2011) in which he explained how English soldiers and diplomats Fitzroy Maclean, William Deakin and James Klugmann filtered information to Churchill in WWii to secure his decision to switch support from the royalist Chetniks led by Mihailovic to the communist Partisans led by Tito. He also explained that before writing the book he worked as a TV documentary producer at the BBC and prepared a two-part documentary program on the same subject. When it finally aired, the BBC had made edits without his knowledge to exhonorate the very people Batty had identified as the hoodwinkers. This experience lead him to write the book.

In the course of the interview, Evelyn Waugh’s role in WWii Yugoslavia comes up:

Q. Some British emmisaries praised the Partisans, others, like Evelyn Waugh, sent detailed reports on communist atrocities. Yet Waugh’s reports were suppressed by the British cabinet. Why?

A. John Henniker-Major, a British liaison-officer sent out to Titos’s HQ, says in his memoirs Painful Extractions that Evelyn Waugh was thought a crashing snob and that he loathed the Partisans because they were anti-catholic. He says that Waugh and Randolph Churchill, Winston’s only son, and Lord Birkenhead, were tolerated only because their presence gave the Tito mission prestige and a higher profile back home, and added to the impression that Fitzroy Maclean had a lot of people on his side. They were what he described as »markers on the board«. Few took notice of what they said. Fitzroy [Maclean] made sure of that. Eventualy Fitzroy saw to it that Waugh was expelled from Yugoslavia,

Q. Because of Waugh’s reports the British government could anticipate that communists will murder anti-communists, so why did British forces hand over anti-communists to Tito?

A. For the reasons explained in my previous answer, Waugh’s reports were never taken seriously in London

Waugh never gave up on his fight against the UK’s support of Tito, even after the latter broke with the Soviet Union. Waugh became particularly vociferous in a letter-writing campaign when Tito was invited on a state visit to the UK in the 1953. This also comes up in the interview, but Waugh’s role is not mentioned:

Q. Churchill invited Tito on a state visit in the 1950s. It was Tito’s first visit outside communist block, in fact, it opened his door on world stage. So why did Churchill do Tito such favour, if he was doublecrossed by him, as he claimed in first post war years?

A. It was more of a Cold War manoeuvre than anything personal. After Tito’s ‘break’ with Stalin, the West sought to befriend him so as to annoy the Soviets. There were anti-Tito demonstrations while he was in London.

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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, £13.95). 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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Posted in A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited, Diaries, Newspapers, Oxford, Sword of Honour, Theater | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pre-Valentine Roundup