A Different View of A Handful of Dust

Posted on February 9, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Waugh News from Slovenia and Sweden

Posted on February 8, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

…a satire on journalism. Waugh wrote the novel in part from the personal experiences he described in his book Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), and the characters are based on real people such as a newspaper magnate and a variety of other persons in whom we can easily recognize contemporaries. […] The novel’s humor has given it a wide response among readers and placed it on many of the lists of best books of our time. Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is considered one of the central English authors of the 20th century. The novels Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust have been translated into Slovenian. The translation and accompanying text were prepared by Dušanka Zabukovec.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Daisy Waugh’s New Novel Reviewed

Posted on February 7, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

There’s also this excerpt from the Tatler:

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

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

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

Thanks to David Lull for sending links to these articles.

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George Steiner 1929-2020 R.I.P.

Posted on February 6, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Groundhog Day Roundup

Posted on February 2, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article concluded with this:

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

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

Honoured up to a point

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

J C H Mounsey
Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New Daisy Waugh Novel Includes a Brideshead Spin-off

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Waugh’s Victorian Blood Book

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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Late January Roundup

Posted on January 26, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Waugh’s Friends at Brideshead Festival

Posted on January 24, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has started a new series of posts in which he describes memoirs of Waugh’s friends as they might occur during visits to Castle Howard for this summer’s Brideshead Festival. The first posting relates to Richard Plunket Greene and is accompanied by photos of his motorcar as well as sights that might inspire him on the grounds of Castle Howard. It relies on Waugh’s diaries for the period as well as the writings of Robin Hilyard who is the current owner of one of Plunket Greene’s motorcars.

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Brideshead Marathon in Norway

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Kunstnernes Hus (Artists’ House) in Oslo has announced a marathon session of the 1981 Brideshead Revisited Granada TV series. This will take place on the weekend of 22-23 February. Here’s a translation of the announcement:

A rare opportunity to watch the legendary television series based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel on a large screen at the Artists’ House Cinema. The program is dotted with short tributes and critical banter by author Hans Petter Blad; critic and writer Kaja Schjerven Mollerin; visual artist and writer Morten Andenæs; editor and author Rob Young; professor of neuroscience Siri Leknes, and translator and writer Johanne Fronth-Nygren.

Here you can sit right through all eleven episodes, or wander to and fro and catch  favorite moments. The marathon show will be both a family gathering for old Bridesheaders – those of us who have a long and close relationship with the series and the book – and a chance to convert to the cult. Saturday night there will be a mid-party with a tailor-made drink menu in Lofthus Samvirkelag. Brideshead Revisited is a collaboration with author Hans Petter Blad and translator Johanne Fronth Nygren. Tickets 250, – for the whole weekend (200, – for students). Welcome!

For a detailed schedule and ticketing information, see this link.

–A less ambitious program is on offer tomorrow (Thursday, 23 January) at Lytham Hall near Blackpool in Lancashire. This is a showing of the 2008 theatrical film version of the novel. Food and drink are also on offer. Details are available here.

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