TLS: Cities and Writers/Officers and Novelists

Posted on December 19, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A few weeks ago, the TLS published an article by novelist William Boyd (“Footless giant: A visit to Kafka’s Prague”) about his recent trip to that city. It opens with this:

…it being Prague, my thoughts turn almost instantly to Franz Kafka. This powerful association between city and writer is reinforced when I open the hotel minibar and in it find a kind of circular biscuit, a chocolate-covered hazelnut-brittle wafer (yours for 60 crowns, about ÂŁ2) emblazoned with the writer’s soulful, big-eyed face in tasteful sepia contrasted with the black and gold of the wrapping. “Prague Kafka Oblaten” it says.

This type of immediate connection applies to other writers and other cities, naturally. Dublin and James Joyce; Bath and Jane Austen, Buenos Aires and Jorge Luis Borges, Chicago and Saul Bellow come to mind. As a notional parlour game one can posit other less obvious ones: Lyme Regis and John Fowles; St Petersburg and Andrei Bely; Trieste and Istvan Szabo [sic]. Or would that be Trieste and Joyce? Or Trieste and Richard Burton? Or Trieste and Rilke? It could be an extension of the game to pitch writers against each other to see who gets to stake the literary claim. What about Edinburgh? Walter Scott or Ian Rankin? Or Robert Louis Stevenson? Or Muriel Spark? – though the last two hightailed it out of their city as soon as was feasible. And who would claim Oxford? Evelyn Waugh? P. D. James? Max Beerbohm? Or New York. Or London. Or Key West. Hours of harmless fun on offer.

This discussion resulted in a letter in later issue of TLS on the Oxford pairing. This is from Gerald Rabie of London NW11 (Golders Green). He wonders where Boyd has “been living these past forty years? Has he never heard of Colin Dexter?” He refers, of course, to the author of the Inspector Morse novels (and ITV serial) about the Oxford police detective. One does wonder how P D James got onto the list since most of her fictional detective’s time is spent (as I recall) in East Anglia and London. Some thought must also have been given to J I M Stewart who wrote a 5 novel series about Oxford called A Staircase in Surrey. And while, like Brideshead Revisited, not entirely devoted to Oxford, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure contained a very moving section set in that city.

Anticipating several of the comments above, and in response to Mr Rabie’s letter, William Boyd sent his own letter which appeared in the 13 December TLS issue (which arrived in the USA after the foregoing comments were posted):

Of course Gerald Rabie is absolutely right about Colin Dexter’s association with Oxford.[…] I’m pleased he’s caught the spirit of the parlour game. But, if Dexter, what about Philip Pullman? Or Percy Shelley, C S Lewis, Iris Murdoch, J R R Tokien, Anthony Powell, Lewis Carroll, J I M Stewart (Michael Innes), Compton McKenzie, Dorothy L Sayers, and Edmund Crispin? One could go on and on. Where has Mr Rabie been all these years.

Boyd also seems to get a bit muddled when considering writers connected with another Hapsburg city. This is Trieste which he associates primarily with Istvan Szabo (a filmmaker, not a novelist). He must have confused that name with Italo Svevo who is, indeed, a writer closely associated with Trieste where he set his most widely read novel (Confessions of Zeno) and was a friend of James Joyce. Szabo could properly be matched with yet another Hapsburg city–Budapest.

Also in a recent TLS, there is a review of four WWII novels recently republished by the Imperial War Museum. See previous post. One of these is entitled Trial by Battle and is written by David Piper. The TLS review by Sean O’Brien, makes this observation about that book:

The sense that the death knell of empire has sounded intensifies when the troops come ashore into a military situation that, although they are slow to recognize or admit to it, is already beyond saving. The terror and nightmarish confusion of jungle combat, for which the Allied troops are wholly unprepared, are brilliantly conveyed. Piper’s writing bears comparison with David Jones’s account of the assault on Mametz Wood during the first battle of the Somme in In Parenthesis (1937), and with Ernst JĂŒnger’s depiction of trench warfare in Storm of Steel (Stahlgewittern, 1920). Communications collapse, and the scattered remnants of the Allied forces attempt a doomed fighting retreat. Here again the book survives a testing comparison, in this case with Evelyn Waugh’s narrative of the German invasion of Crete in Officers and Gentlemen (1955). […] There is worse to come for the Allies. In the rigorous frankness of his writing, Piper makes it clear why so many veterans said little or nothing about their experiences.

UPDATE (25 December 2019): The 13 December issue of TLS arrived after the above was posted. It contained a letter from William Boyd addressing several points raised in the above posting. This has been added to the post. Another letter in the same issue (from Mitch Abidor, Brooklyn, NY 11234) made the a similar comment to that above relating to the confusion of Italo Svevo and Istvan Szabo.

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Brideshead Festival (more)

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The organizers of this summer’s Brideshead Festival have released more details about the event. See previous post. These are contained in a press notice dated today from which the following is copied:

To mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, The Brideshead Festival will celebrate and interrogate the ongoing appeal of this seminal novel and its screen adaptations.

Bringing together the worlds of literature, film, TV and heritage, the Festival is the brainchild of former publisher, Victoria Barnsley, and promises to be one of the most exciting new additions to the cultural calendar in 2020.

The Festival will take place from 26th to 28th June 2020 at Castle Howard, Sir John Vanbrugh’s baroque masterpiece that became synonymous with Brideshead when it was used as the location for the agenda-setting 1981 TV adaptation and the subsequent feature film in 2008.

Published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited is arguably Waugh’s most popular novel, having won legions of fans around the world in its 75 year history. The Festival will explore the place the book holds in the hearts of readers and viewers and the novel’s themes of youth, sexuality, nostalgia, decadence, religion and class.

Speakers will evaluate Waugh’s place in the cultural canon of 20th century literature and the relevance of the novel for today’s audiences. Taking a modern-day perspective, presenters will also look at the impact of the TV adaptation on the imagination of generations of viewers and the role literary adaptations play in today’s cultural landscape. Members of the original cast and crew will join well known writers, novelists and commentators in the festival line-up.

A host of other festival activities will pay homage to scenes and themes in Brideshead including a Teddy Bear’s Picnic, a Wine Tasting at the Temple of the Four Winds and an immersive Brideshead Party. Bespoke Brideshead tours will offer a look behind the scenes of the iconic adaptations and a specially commissioned Sound Installation will focus on Castle Howard’s place in the Brideshead story. Echoing the theme of plenty in the novel, food and drink will be a particular feature with local producers and well-known chefs providing Brideshead-inspired culinary experiences.

Victoria Barnsley who runs Castle Howard with her husband Nicholas Howard comments;

“I am delighted to be launching The Brideshead Festival. It has long been an ambition of mine to celebrate Castle Howard’s connection to Brideshead, and what better time to do it than its 75th anniversary. We look forward to bringing together a vibrant mix of speakers and performers to interrogate and interpret this brilliant work and its screen adaptatons in the wonderful setting of Castle Howard.”

Readers in the USA with Amazon Prime membership can currently stream all episodes of the 1981 TV series on Amazon.com without additional cost. It can be annoying to find the right link but persistence will be rewarded.

 

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Roundup: Connolly’s Choristers

Posted on December 13, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books in its latest edition has as one of its articles a review of D J Taylor’s Lost Girls. See previous posts. This is by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Here is an excerpt:

There’s a hilarious sort of squawking Greek chorus running through the book, in the shape of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford’s gleeful letters to each other commenting on the life and love affairs of the circle. After Taylor’s painstaking examinations of his characters’ changes of mind and heart, it’s pleasing to have these goings-on witheringly summed up, and belittled, by Waugh and Mitford, who saw the absurdity in everything and everyone. Here’s Waugh’s description of the Horizon office: ‘horrible pictures collected by Watson [Peter Watson, financial backer of Horizon] & Lys & Miss Brownell working away with a dictionary translating some rot from the French’. Here’s his summing up of Sonia marrying Orwell (Waugh and Mitford’s nickname for Connolly was ‘Boots’, short for ‘Smartiboots’): ‘Boots’s boule de Suif what was her name? Sonia something is engaged to marry the dying Orwell and is leaving Horizon so there will not be many more numbers to puzzle us.’ He was right. Horizon closed down in January 1950, bringing these bombastic words from Connolly: ‘It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude and the quality of his despair.’ Taylor calls those words ‘horribly disingenuous’: it was really Connolly’s own laziness that brought the magazine to a close. Waugh was not all cynicism: he did say (later) that Horizon was ‘the outstanding publication of its decade’.

Taylor’s book was published last September in the UK and will be released next February in the USA. It will be reviewed in a future issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

–The online magazine Mental Floss has posted an article called “12 Surprising Things About Evelyn Waugh.” Many of them will not particularly surprise our readers, although this one contains information not much discussed:

3. EVELYN WAUGH WAS INCREDIBLY OLD-FASHIONED.

According to NBC producer Edwin Newman, who filmed a TV interview with Waugh in 1956, the novelist wished he had been born 200 or 300 years earlier. He loathed the modern world and its technology; he refused to fly in a plane or learn to how to drive a car. He resisted using the telephone in favor of writing letters, which he did with an old-fashioned pen dipped in ink. His quirky eccentricity informed his conservative political leanings and his opposition to reforms in the Catholic Church, of which he was a devout convert.

The references come from Edwin Newman’s book Strictly Speaking where he recalls a visit by him and an NBC TV crew to Waugh’s home at Piers Court. This took place in late June 1955, not 1956 as Newman remembered. The pretext for the timing of the interview was the forthcoming publication of Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen. Waugh noted it in his Diaries and was not particularly happy about it. The filming and recording sessions took all day and the results appeared in two parts on later NBC programs:

“Today” show on July 12, 1955 he was interviewed at his home.

“People” show September 25, 1955 presented film profile sketches of interesting people. He talks of his life and his work as a novelist.

Further details relating to the content of these programs are not known.

–On the booksblog The Millions, Jedediah Britton-Purdy posts a description of his recent reading. After a discussion of his completion of all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, with which he sometimes struggled, he mentions this:

It was in that headspace that I found myself reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited—looking for a sort of light Powell when I couldn’t take the denser stuff, like turning to Pullman from Milton. I didn’t know Waugh when we came across his first novel, Decline and Fall, in a tiny cache of English-language books in Greece last year, and his spare-nobody satire and perfect sentences made ideal beach reading. Brideshead is a strange book, like a religious interlude in the midst of one of Powell’s lives, as coruscating and deft as any of the satires, but walking a drunken path to some kind of mystical Catholicism. Whatever Waugh thought of this book, to me it read like the work of someone perfectly in command of his tools but overwhelmed by his themes, like a master costume-jewel whose workshop has been lifted by a tsunami.

–Finally, the London information website Londontopia posts an article relating to the history of the northwestern suburbs that came to be known as Metroland based on the services of the Metropolitan Railroad along which they stretched. In the literary section, their debt to the attentions of John Betjeman are mentioned but Evelyn Waugh is also credited with a contribution:

As Metroland began to take root in the public consciousness, the developments worked their way into media as early as the end of World War I.  It was about that time that George Sims penned the line “I know a land where the wildflowers grow/Near, near at hand if by train you go,/Metroland, Metroland!” into one of his songs.  By the 1930s, Evelyn Waugh was using the term in his novels Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and A Handful of Dust.  More songs soon followed such as “My Little Metro-land Home” all the way up to “Queensbury Station” by The Magoo Brothers in 1988, which makes many references to the area.

Waugh’s contribution took the form primarily of his naming of a character Margot Metroland who appeared in several of his novels.

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Auctions Update

Posted on December 12, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Southeby’s has announced the sale of the collection of letters from Evelyn Waugh to Richard Plunket Greene. See previous post. This was Lot 140 in the auction conducted 3-10 December. It sold for ÂŁ15,000 which was the low end of the estimate.

Earlier in the month, Bonhams announced the sale of items from the archives of John Heygate. See previous post. Lot 390 consisting of letters from various sources to Heygate, many of them discussing Evelyn Waugh, went for ÂŁ3562, including premium. Lot 377 containing letters from Anthony Powell to Heygate went for ÂŁ3187 and Lot 392 containing 20 books from Henry Williamson inscribed to Heygate went for ÂŁ1657, both including premium. Lot 391 consisting of 450 letters from Williamson to Heygate apparently did not sell.

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BBC To Rebroadcast “Frankly Speaking” Interview

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 4 has announced plans to rebroadcast the 1953 interview of Evelyn Waugh which is said to have contributed to his temporary madness as described in the novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Here’s the announcement:

Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh is grilled about his life and career by Charles Wilmot, Jack Davies and Stephen Black. Regarded as one of the most brilliant novelists of his day, Waugh loathed the BBC. His grandson Alexander believes that this interview, along with a cocktail of sleeping draughts, helped to send him “rather mad”. The author later turned his experience on Frankly Speaking into a scene in his novel ‘The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold’ with Stephen Black becoming the character Angel who haunts Pinfold in his hallucinations.

Launched in 1952 on the BBC Home Service, Frankly Speaking was a novel, ground breaking series. Unrehearsed and unscripted, the traditional interviewee/interviewer pairing was initially jettisoned for three interviewers firing direct questions – straight to the point. Early critics described it as ‘unkempt’, ‘an inquisition’ and described the guest as prey being cornered, quarry being pursued – with calls to axe the unscripted interview. But the format won out and eventually won over its detractors.

Unknown or very inexperienced broadcasters were employed as interviewers, notably John Freeman, John Betjeman, Malcolm Muggeridge, Harold Hobson, Penelope Mortimer, Elizabeth Beresford and Katherine Whitehorn. Only about 40 of the original 100 programmes survive. First broadcast on the BBC Home Service in November 1953.

The rebroadcast will be transmitted on BBC Radio 4 Extra on Saturday, 21 December 2019, at 14:15 pm. It will be available worldwide on the internet shortly after the 30 minute transmission. It was last previously aired in April 2017. See previous post.

 

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Waugh in History

Posted on December 10, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Former Conservative MP and European Commissioner and now Life Peer Christopher Tugendhat has written a book called A History of Britain Through Books: 1900-1964. In his introduction, he explains that the book has “two wellsprings”. The first is his own collection of books by British authors between 1900-1964 and the second is historian Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects in which he uses the objects as a discussion point for history. In the same way, Tugendhat uses his books:

…as a prism through which to convey the British experience through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. It was a tumultuous period that began with the British empire at the plenitude of its power and ended with the empire’s dissolution and the reversal of a population flow that had been in place for some two centuries. Instead of people going out from these islands to settle overseas, people from the former colonies began to come here. Because of the two wars, the build-up to them and the Cold War the nation was for much of the time facing an existential threat. It witnessed a transformation in the lives of the great mass of the people from poverty to prosperity. And it saw some traditional prejudices begin to crumble while others endured…

Tugendhat considers both fiction and nonfiction and both canonical texts and some that have been forgotten. He sets up several categories in which they are considered along with other books reflecting upon the same historic topic. This process can throw up “unexpected insights that in turn stimulate a reassessment of received opinion”. He offers three examples. The first is that it is not so much the suffragettes as it was the women in the trade union movement that brought the advancement of women’s rights. Another is reflected in John Braine’s A Room at the Top where the working class narrator and RAF airman Joe Lampton manages to secure his advancement into a middle class accountacy career by studying materials supplied by the Red Cross while being held prisoner in Germany after his plane was shot down. This wartime success story is at variance with the usual patriotic themes in the period’s writing.

Evelyn Waugh provides the third surprise. This is included in the section of Tugendhat’s book called “Imperialist Perspectives.” Waugh was, according to Tugendhat, despite his archreactionary views:

perhaps the first person to call time on the British empire in Africa […] in his 1931 travel book Remote People. One of its sections is on Kenya where, with the active encouragement of the British government, men and women from this country were between the wars building new lives in the expectation that British rule would last beyond their lifetimes. He wrote with approval of their efforts to reproduce the life of the English squirearchy in Africa and with sympathy of their colour bar and discrimination against the Africans. Yet he forecast that the European colonization of Africa might not last for more than another twenty-five years, which proved to be only a few years out.

The other Waugh books included in Tugendhat’s odyssey through these years are his novels Scoop (1938) and Brideshead Revisited (1945).These not discussed in the book’s introduction, but their relevance does appear from one of the book’s reviews. They fall into a section which comes just before the conclusion called “Diverse Perspectives”. The review in The Herald (Glasgow) explains this section as what the reviewer (Alastair Mabbott) describes as:

A final miscellany [that] draws together writings on the public school system, Elizabeth David’s pivotal book on Mediterranean cookery, Evelyn Waugh’s attitudes towards the press and the landed gentry and two contrasting takes on the Bright Young Things of the 1920s.

The other books mentioned in the quoted passage include Graham Greene’s The Old School, a collection of essays “by divers hands” published in 1934. The contrasting takes on the Bright Young People are, presumably, Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (1924) and Noel Coward’s The Vortex (1924).

There are also several other books considered in other sections of Tugendhat’s book that have a Waugh connection. In “War 2–Warnings and Reality” the book Darling Monster: The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to Her Son John Julius Norwich is considered and the Conclusion includes Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Nineteeen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. The book’s Introduction, Contents and the first few sections can be viewed as samples on Amazon.com at the link above.

 

 

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Socialites to Socialists: Inez Holden and Nancy Mitford

Posted on December 9, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Two books in the news were written by or about two of Waugh’s friends and fellow writers: Inez Holden and Nancy Mitford. As explained in reviews of those books, both progressed from upper-class to left-wing political views:

–Novelist and critic D J Taylor has reviewed the book by Waugh’s prewar friend Inez Holden entitled Blitz Writing. The book contains Holden’s novella Night Shift about factory workers and her wartime diaries published in 1943 under the title It Was Different at the Time. Taylor’s article (entitled “Socialite to Socialist”) appears in the current issue of the Literary Review and opens with this:

The best known photograph of Inez Holden (1903-1974) was taken at a Bright Young People ‘Impersonation Party’ in 1927. Here, late at night in a Chelsea garden, half-a-dozen archetypal Twenties figures ostentatiously commingle. Stephen Tennant masquerades as the Queen of Romania; Elizabeth Ponsonby (the original of the Hon. Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies) takes off Iris Tree; Tallulah Bankhead, Harold Acton and Cecil Beaton are exotically to hand. Seated in their midst, very much of the party and at the same time faintly detached from it, is a small, nervous-looking girl in a matelot’s jersey.

If nothing very much is known about Holden’s deeply mysterious life – there is even doubt over her date of birth – then a glance at the diaries and memoirs of the late 1920s soon establishes the world of the Impersonation Party as her natural milieu. Evelyn Waugh, when briefly employed by the Daily Express, mentions ‘a charming girl called Inez Holden, who works on the paper.’…

Inez Holden was a trainee reporter at the Daily Express at the same time as Waugh, and that was where they met. For more about their friendship and Holden’s book see this link to Evelyn Waugh Studies No 50.1.

–The biography of another novelist lady-friend of Waugh is published for the first time in the USA. This is Life in a Cold Climate and is about Nancy Mitford. It is written by Laura Thompson who also later wrote The Six which was about all of the Mitford sisters. Here’s an excerpt of the review by Christopher Benfey from Sunday’s New York Times:

Drawing on Nancy Mitford’s own poignant childhood memories from her exuberant novel “The Pursuit of Love” (including, notoriously, a “child hunt,” with “four great hounds in full cry after two little girls”), Laura Thompson (author of “The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters”) vividly evokes the swarm of brilliant and beautiful sisters, and their lone brother, growing up carefree in a succession of country houses in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. […]

Nancy’s formal education, according to her close friend Evelyn Waugh, was confined to learning French and horsemanship. She enrolled briefly at the Slade School of Art only to be informed that she “had no talent whatever.” She had better luck with writing; although she had a modest success with her first four novels, “The Pursuit of Love,” published in 1945, was hugely popular. “I sat under a shower of gold,” she remarked…

Thompson’s biography of Nancy Mitford was first published in the UK in 2003 and was followed by The Six (also by Thompson) in 2016 in both the UK and USA. In the UK, the latter book was published as Take Six Girls.

–The Guardian has run a story by Alison Flood about Waugh’s letters to his Oxford friend Richard Plunket Greene. See previous post. The following passage from the Guardian’s story has been widely reprinted. This arises from Waugh’s receipt of a letter from his friend Harold Acton expressing reservations about the draft of Waugh’s first novel. Waugh had sent this to Acton for his opinion, which was rather negative:

In one of the letters [to Plunket-Greene], Waugh describes “feeling a little despondent” and reveals that he had burned the manuscript, adding: “It made so much smoke that the Headmaster [went] out of Chapel to see if his school was on fire.”

Bidding online at the Southeby’s auction continues until tomorrow (10 December).

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Evelyn and Randolph in WWII Yugoslavia

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

In the new issue of the collected lectures of the British Studies seminar at the Unversity of Texas, there is a lecture entitled “Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill in Yugoslavia”. This is by biographer and literary critic Jeffrey Meyers who has written biographies of writers such as F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Edmund Wilson. The lecture was delivered in the Fall Semester 2017 and appears in the collection entitled Serendipitous Adventures with Britannia, edited, as are the previous 10 volumes, by Prof Wm R0ger Louis.

Meyers begins by promising new insights into Waugh’s military career from previously unavailable material:

One hundred and twenty pages of unpublished material from the National  Archives and the Public Record Record Office in Kew, England, and from Churchill College, Cambridge University, cast new light on British policy in Yugoslavia, its military contacts with Tito and the contrast between his Communist Partisans and the pro-Nazi Ustashe; on Randolph’s work, constant complaints and offensive behavior as well as his courage under fire; on Waugh and Randolph’s near-fatal air crash, their English comrade Stephen Clissold and Waugh’s support of the Catholic Ustashe in opposition to official policy. This archival material explains why these tragicomic adventurers wound up in wartime Croatia, why they quarreled bitterly in an isolated village and why their important mission was doomed to failure.

What follows is however mostly a retelling of the story of Randolph’s mission, accompanied by Waugh, as it appears in Waugh’s diaries as well as memoirs of Fitzroy Maclean, their commanding officer, and Freddy Birkenhead, who joined them briefly, in addition to biographies of Randolph, Waugh and Maclean. The narrative is well told and accurately reported but adds little to what has already been written in published material.

There are a few nuggets which apparently come from the newly available records. These include reports (pp. 57-58) by British agents from Yugoslavia in the months 0f 1944 before Waugh arrived. They reflect attitudes of the Yugoslavs at the time but do not mention Randolph’s mission or the role of Waugh. There is also a report (p. 60) of Randolph’s actions during and after the German raid on Drvar during May 1944 for which Randolph was awarded an MBE. That may well come from the archives. There is also a quote (p. 66) that may emanate from those records; this is about Randolph’s bad behavior toward a journalist named Robert Murray. Neither of these reports, which relate to Randolph, are cited as implicating Waugh. One problem with determining what previously unknown material is cited from the newly opened records is that the discussion appears in the form of a lecture in which detailed citations to sources are not provided.

The published lecture concludes with this assessment of Waugh’s role in the mission:

The pro-Catholic anticommunist Waugh was supposed to entertain Randolph and support the Partisans but constantly fought with him and made three disastrous mistakes. He openly courted the Ustashe fascists, publicly insulted Tito and endangered his comrades by flaunting his whitecoat during [an] air attack.

While there is ample evidence adduced for the last two errors, it comes not from the newly available public records but from previously published sources. As to Waugh’s open support for the Ustashe, that may well have been the case. But again, there is no new support for this cited from the unpublished public records. Previous commentators have focused on Waugh’s support for the Roman Catholic clergy and believers against their persecution by the Communists. They have, at least so far as I can recall, stopped short of citing any evidence that he openly supported the Ustashe. He did before the war support Mussolini’s Fascists as well as, somewhat less vigorously, those of Franco, but the Ustashe were an altogether nastier piece of work. If the new sources provide evidence of such open support, hopefully Mr Meyers will cite it specifically in his future writings on the subject.

UPDATE (27 December 2019): Jeffrey Meyers’s article discussed above is included in the latest issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies (No, 50.2).

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Labels Reconsidered

Posted on December 6, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent issue of the Goldsmiths, University of London literary magazine (GLITS-e-journal) is devoted to “The (Re)Imagined Mediterranean” and contains several articles on that theme. One of them, by post-graduate student Jasmine Bajada from the University of Malta, is entitled: “De/Mythologising the Mediterranean in the Modern Age: Evelyn Waugh’s Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930)”.

The article opens with a quote from Waugh’s 1957 novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:

The sea might have been any sea by the look of it, but he knew it was the Mediterranean, that splendid enclosure which held all the world’s history and half the happiest memories of his own life; of work and rest and battle, of aesthetic adventure and of young love.

It goes on to note that

in Labels, Waugh attempts to show how the Mediterranean that English travellers experience is in fact not the Mediterrean itself but a mythologized Mediterranean, that is a Mediterranean fashioned out of the myths that for centuries have been constructing the Mediterranean imaginary. The Mediterranean, especially for people of a Northern origin, is a place where culture, history, vitality, passion, and mystery intersect. Waugh’s aim in Labels is precisely to deconstruct this mythologisation of the Mediterranean in order to depict a Mediterranean that, in Kingsley Amis’s words, is ‘totally free of Mediterranean mystique’. [Introduction to 1974 Duckworth edition.] However, as shall be discussed, Waugh’s travelogue is ironically a construction of the Mediterranean in the interwar period of a ‘modern megalopolitan’ (Labels, p. 11) in search of a ‘Sense of the Past’ (Labels, p. 45) that ultimately is not as free of myths as it purports to be. Counterproductively, Labels reconstructs the Mediterranean from the perception of a Northerner gazing upon the Mediterranean with a colonial eye that reproduces a deeply embedded myth of the Mediterranean, that of Eurocentrism.

After developing these points, the article concludes with this:

…Waugh’s cruise aboard the Stella Polaris serves him to confirm his Englishness and to subsequently colonise the Mediterranean textually by writing a travelogue that appears to deconstruct previous Northern representations of the Mediterranean but that reimagines the Mediterranean as a region with a Western centre and an Oriental margin. Only years later in hindsight, as Waugh writes in his semi-autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), does he realise that the Mediterranean is inclusive and home to many, even to himself: ‘The Mediterranean had always welcomed Mr. Pinfold in the past. His annoyance would be over, he believed, once he was in those hallowed waters.’

Footnotes have been omitted. Page cites to Labels refer to Penguin Classics 2011 edition. A complete copy of the article can be found at this link.

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Adventide Roundup

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–There are two comments on similarities between the governmental missteps that lead to the release of a murderous jihadist terrorist and Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall. Conservative columnist Charles Moore writes in the Daily Telegraph:

The deaths inside and outside Fishmongers’ Hall last Friday were tragic. Two good people, and one bad one they had tried to help, died. Others were badly injured. Yet when I read the extraordinary details of the events – the fact that the attacks were made at an anniversary celebration of a rehabilitation programme backed by Cambridge University, and that the killer, Usman Khan, was himself a star pupil of that programme; the fact that people who were themselves criminals joined in to disarm the murderer – the memory of a satire niggled at the back of my mind.

Eventually I identified it – it was “the Lucas-Dockery Experiments”. Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, is chiefly remembered for its comic scenes of a ghastly prep school and for its depiction of the Oxford University Bullingdon Club (whose later members included Boris Johnson and David Cameron), thinly disguised as the Bollinger Club. But the book also contains a witty dissection of a certain sort of do-goodery. For reasons that need not detain us here, the book’s anti-hero, Paul Pennyfeather, finds himself doing seven years’ penal servitude for traffic in prostitution.

The prison governor, Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, is an enlightened professor of sociology appointed by a Labour home secretary. He strongly disagrees with his conservative predecessor, Colonel MacAdder, who held to the view that “If you make prison bad enough, people’ll take jolly good care to keep out of it”. “So far as is possible,” says Sir Wilfred benignly, “I like the prisoners to carry on with their avocations in civilian life.” He is also keen on a “system of progressive stages” for rehabilitation, such as being allowed after a bit to write and receive letters, aided by “little innovations” such as a “Thought for the Day” which he pins up each morning.

Moore goes on to explain how Lucas-Dockery chooses a red-headed prisoner to prove his theories and gives him a carpentry set to ply his preferred trade while imprisoned. The column (which is headed by a clip from the recent BBC TV adaptation of the novel) continues:

Two days later, the God-intoxicated carpenter uses the saw presented to him by the authorities to cut off the head of the prison chaplain. After that, […] “Sir Wilfred concentrated his attention upon the statistics, and the life of the prison was equitably conducted under the Standing Orders.”

Evelyn Waugh specialised in black comedy – and the London Bridge incident was, as I say, tragedy. But there is a read-across from one to the other which makes the 90-year-old novel worth re-reading…

A UK-based blogger posting on Raedwald.com quotes much of the same text and comes to a similar conclusion.

–On the nondenominational religious website First Things, Joshua Hren posts an essay discussing the issues arising from the secularization of society. He illustrates his points with several quotations from Waugh’s 1953 novella Love Among the Ruins. His cites to the novella conclude with this:

Through Waugh’s artfulness, the Nativity has been “made strange” in Love Among the Ruins. […] Although the twenty-first-century West does not yet evince the extreme secularity of the dystopian society in Love Among the Ruins, Waugh helps us perceive how our own world, too, is unreal, and how in our day, too, the God who is Love has been relegated to the category of “historical and cultural preservation.” Waugh pairs Clara’s plastic joy with the tidings of comfort that break from the “machine” beside her. This juxtaposition brings Plastic to retch “unobtrusively” before he exits the surgery ward, baffled.

The novella is included in Waugh’s Complete Stories.

–Several websites have mentioned an incident involving Waugh and his hat. The earliest seems to have been on stuff.co.nz:

Evelyn Waugh once collected his hat from a cloakroom and found a note inside it, written by the attendant to identify the hat’s owner. It consisted of one word: “florid”.

The reference comes from Waugh’s 1962 short story “Basil Seal Rides Again”. Here’s the context:

A week or two ago [Basil] had had a disconcerting experience in this very hotel. It was a place he had frequented all his life, particularly in later years, and he was on cordial terms with the man who took the men’s hats in a den by the Piccadilly entrance. Basil was never given a numbered ticket and assumed he was known by name. Then a day came when he sat longer than usual over luncheon and found the man off duty. Lifting the counter he had penetrated the rows of pegs and retrieved his bowler and umbrella. In the ribbon of the hat he found a label, put there for identification. It bore the single pencilled word “Florid”…

The story is contained in Waugh’s Complete Stories and was the last fiction that he wrote. Whether it was based on an actual experience described elsewhere isn’t stated. The editor of the stories (Ann Pasternak Slater) notes, however, that Basil “is a delightful and wholly frivolous portrait of [Waugh] himself.”

–Andrew McGowan has posted on his weblog a response he made at a recent conference of the Society of Biblical Literature relating to reading at the table in Biblical times:

In Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited the narrator Charles Ryder describes a deeply unpleasant vacation period during his Oxford studies spent at home with his father, who had a habit – clearly an uncivil one in this setting – of reading at the table, silently of course. This habit was part of the father’s usual solitary life, and he persists in it as a sort of passive-aggressive response to his son’s presence. He reads, but not aloud; and Charles takes up a conflict of sorts by bringing his own book to dinner, to underline or contest his father’s rudeness.

“The dinner table was our battlefield. On the second evening I took my book with me to the dining-room. His mild and wandering eye fastened on it with sudden attention, and as we passed through the hall he surreptitiously left his own on a side table. When we sat down, he said plaintively: ‘I do think, Charles, you might talk to me. I’ve had a very exhausting day. I was looking forward to a little conversation.’”

With wry humor Waugh presents the modern view; reading is an alternative to sociability, not a form of it…

–Finally, the Sydney Morning Herald contains this description of the 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, to be broadcast this Saturday (7 December) on the SBS Movies channel in Australia:

Evelyn Waugh’s anti-morality tale stands the test of time in this 2008 film version of the 1981 series of the 1945 book. This story of hedonism and homosexuality would barely raise an eyebrow today, but it’s easy to see how it caused such a fuss at the time – and informed generations of queer culture. Matthew Goode, Emma Thompson and Ben Whishaw star in this lavish retelling of the sexual awakening of a young artist.

 

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Posted in Basil Seal Rides Again, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Love Among The Ruins, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Adventide Roundup