La Prensa Article Marks Brideshead Anniversary

Posted on December 2, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa has published an article marking the 75th anniversary of the completion of Brideshead Revisited in 1944. This is entitled “Bajo el hechizo del recuerdo” (“Under the spell of remembrance”) and is written by Guillermo Belcore who opens with this:

It could be said, dear reader, that the great news of spring has not been the disturbing return of Peronism or the escape of Evo Morales, but the decision of  Tusquets to liquidate inventories in Buenos Aires. Today, one can discover gems in Buenos Aires bookstores at the price of a shortbread. You will find, for example, one of the best novels of the twentieth century: Retorno a Brideshead, the masterpiece of Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), “English writer considered by many to be the brightest satirical novelist of his day” (according to Encyclopedia Britannica).

Seventy-five years ago, Waugh concluded the book, taking advantage of the fact that an indulgent military commander extended his medical leave. In 1944, the writer served in the Royal Marines and joined a British mission to prop up Yugoslav partisans, but – he explains in the prologue – he had the good fortune of suffering an unimportant wound that provided him with a rest season. He broke the piggy bank of his personal experiences to compose a sublime exercise of nostalgia that portrays a tiny sector of the British aristocracy – Catholic landowners, twenty families apart from any ascent – and that reflects on love, desire and religious convictions ( in 1930 Waugh had been received in the Catholic Church).

Tusquets is the Spanish language publishing house that has been offering the Spanish version of Brideshead since the 1980s, probably taking it up in the wake of the Granada TV series. Why they are liquidating their Buenos Aires inventory is not explained. It should be noted that Waugh wrote Brideshead during a leave from the military premised on his specific request for three months to write the novel. He was not on medical leave during the period February-June 1944 when the novel was written in Chagford, Devon. The author of the article may have been misled by Waugh’s introduction to the 1960 edition which does not fully explain this.

After an extended and lively description of the plot of the novel, the La Prensa article concludes with this:

[Robert Lewis] Stevenson said that there is a virtue without which all others are useless; That virtue is charm. Brideshead Revisited is pure charm. The characters are lovely, particularly the young people of the idle classes who can live comfortably from a grant from their elders and need to be shocked. The refined conversations, the long and majestic comparisons (undoubtedly Waugh had talent for metaphor), the plot twists are also lovely. Social criticism is also exquisite: behind a lord there is usually rot, snobbery and stupidity, as in any other human being.

But the author on page three hundred and twenty-two rebels against artifice and even against the intense need of the English to be educated. [He] wrote: “Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love. It kills art.” And in the prologue -dated 1959- he confesses that, “now with a full stomach”, he finds the “rhetorical and ornamental language” in bad taste. Ignore it, it must have been a concession to a time when socialism gained ground in the form of that calamity called political correctness.

The truth is that, even today, the novel catches both the aesthetic power of the form and the depth of the content. Identification is easy. Who has not lost any paradise in his life, real or imaginary? What person of faith does not ever suffer a problem of conscience? By the way, for the writer faith is basically two things: accept the supernatural as real and open the door of the spirit to religion.  Brideshead Revisited is, in short, one of those great novels in which you simply have to abandon yourself to the enjoyment of reading. Let’s say it with the words of Evelyn Waugh: literature “brought a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river’s bank when the kingfisher suddenly flares across the water.”

The translation is by Google with a few edits. The original text as written in English by Waugh and quoted from the novel has been substituted for the retranslation quoted from the Spanish version.

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Cartoons: Devlin Waugh and Mr Joshua

Posted on November 30, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Two cartoons with connections to Evelyn Waugh have recently come to our attention. The first is a character named “Devlin Waugh” that has appeared in various British cartoon anthologies dating back to 1992. That was when the character was invented, according to Wikipedia, by writer John Smith and artist Sean Phillips. “Devlin Waugh” has been described variously as a “homosexual vampire” or a “camp homosexual exorcist priest” who lives 122 years in the future. His creators provide this description which has a few attributes that might, with some imagination, apply to his namesake:

Smith describes Waugh as a hedonist, “a languorous upper-class misfit, a fop, an ex-public schoolboy with a neat line in sarcasm. A lounge lizard. Imagine NoĂ«l Coward as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger”. Phillips visualised him missing a tooth like Terry-Thomas.

This is quoted from the Wikipedia site devoted to “Devlin Waugh” which, according to the current iteration, is being considered for deletion from the website. The Wikipedia entry also contains several references to those comics and paperback reprints where the character has appeared as well as a history of authorship which has changed over the years. For our purposes, the most interesting of the publications devoted to the character would appear to be the collections of articles featuring Devlin Waugh taken from various sources. A new collection has been announced for release next year and is being offered for sale on Amazon. This is entitled Devlin Waugh: Blood Debt and will be published next July. Earlier collections include Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood and Devlin Waugh: Red Tide.

Duncan McLaren introduces the other cartoon character with a Waugh connection. This is on his website where he has recently added a page tracking Waugh’s post war years at Piers Court, much taken up with his children. The new post (entitled “Evelyn’s Pants”) includes several cartoon drawings from an artist known as “@Pants” and his character “Mr. Joshua”. According to McLaren:

He is a cartoonist, based in New York (I think), and certain aspects of his creation, Mr Joshua, strongly remind me of Mr Evelyn Waugh in his Piers Court years.   […] The Mr. Joshua masthead reminds us that Evelyn liked to wear a collar and tie (usually) and to comb his receding hair (usually) and go to the cinema in Dursley four times a week to take his mind off the ticking of his life’s clock. […] By the late 40s, Evelyn had several children. And so did Mr Joshua.

The posting continues through several references by Waugh to postwar life at Piers Court with his brood, together with actual photographs of the household in that period. These are interspersed with drawings from the Mr. Joshua posts which often bear a resemblance to Waugh and his family descriptions.

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Clive James (1939-2019) R. I. P.

Posted on November 27, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The critic and poet Clive James has died at the age of 80, after a long fight with cancer. He was born in Australia and moved to England in the early 1960s where he finished his education at Cambridge University. James began his journalism career in the late 1960s and soon found his niche as a TV reviewer for the Observer in the 1970s. He also reviewed books throughout his career and appeared as a TV presenter in the 1980-90s. As noted in the Daily Telegraph obituary by Michael Deacon, for Clive James

…a review should never just be a review. It should be a form of entertainment: one to rival, or surpass, the form of entertainment it was judging. As I later confirmed, by reading his reviews of programs that I had actually seen, Clive James was funnier than the comedies he wrote about,  and more illuminating than the documentaries he wrote about. Almost always, his reviews gave me more pleasure than their subjects had.

James wrote at least two essays devoted to Waugh. The more notable is his 1980 review of Waugh’s collected letters. This is entitled “Waugh’s Last Stand” and appeared in the New York Review of Books (reprinted in As of this Writing). The review is more a consideration of Waugh’s career than it is an analysis of his letter writing. James opens with a discussion of Waugh’s anti-semitism, which he considers to have been largely misunderstood by his critics. He then writes this:

Behaving as if recent history wasn’t actually happening was one of Waugh’s abiding characteristics. It is the main reason why his books always seem so fresh. Since he never fell for any transient political belief, he never dates. In the 1930s, far from not having been a communist, he wasn’t even a democrat. He believed in a stratified social order and a universal Church, the one nourishing the other. The stratified social order was already crumbling before he was born and the universal Church had disappeared during the reign of Henry VIII. His ideal was largely a fantasy. But it was a rich fantasy, traditionally based. Sustained by it, he could see modern life not just sharply but in perspective. When people say that Waugh was more than just a satirist, they really mean that his satire was coherent. It takes detachment to be so comprehensive.

James concludes his essay with this paragraph in which he foresees the restoration of Waugh’s reputation a few years in advance of its actual occurrence:

While academic studies have gone on being preoccupied with the relative and absolute merits of Joyce and Lawrence, Waugh’s characters have inexorably established themselves among the enduring fictions to which his countrymen traditionally refer as if they were living beings. In this respect Waugh is in a dircct line with Shakespeare and Dickens. Since he was public property from the beginning, a critical consensus, when it arrives, can only endorse popular opinion. The consensus has been delayed because many critics were rightly proud of the Welfare State and regarded Waugh’s hatred of it as mean-minded. He was paid out for his rancour by is own unhappiness. For the happiness he can still give us it is difficult to know how to reward him, beyond saying that he has helped to make tolerable the modern worlds that he abominated.

After this article was written, James’s predictions were fulfilled. The successful 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited revived Waugh’s popularity. That series set the cultural tone for the Thatcher Years in which Waugh’s views no longer told against him.

One comment on the 1980 article appears in the Herald Sun newspaper published in Melbourne. James Campbell in the paper’s obituary notice makes reference to James’s flirtation with social climbing:

…he penned a toe-curlingly embarrassing “comic” poem — Charles Charming’s Challenges On The Pathway To The Throne — in what some suspected was an attempt to get himself invited to Charles’s 1981 wedding to Diana. It was unsuccessful.“Such a blunder helps to demonstrate that if he calculated, he did not calculate very well,” he once observed of Evelyn Waugh’s failure to accept a proffered honour, though he might have been speaking of himself, going on to add a possibly hard-won piece of wisdom: “In this he differed from the true climber, whose whole ability is never to put a foot wrong.”

If he had stayed home [in Australia], would he have had such an obsession with climbing the greasy pole and that boastful insecurity that marks the outsider? Probably not. Would he have achieved what he did? Obviously not.

The other essay was included among several published as Cultural Amnesia in 2007. The book is subtitiled “Necessary Memories from History and the Arts” and described as: “Forty years in the making, a new cultural canon that celebrates truth over hypocrisy, literature over totalitarianism.” James begins the essay on Waugh by describing him as “the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century, even though so many of the wrong people said so.” But once Waugh’s reputation as a master prose stylist is secured, James launches into a detailed discussion of  a sentence in Waugh’s autobiography, A Little Learning, that contains a grammatical error: “A little later, very hard up and seeking a commission to write a book, it was Tony [Powell] who introduced me to my first publisher.” This involves a dangled participle which James immensely enjoys deconstructing over several paragraphs.

James mentioned Waugh in several other contexts and was obviously an admirer of his work and promoter of his reputation.

UPDATE (29 November 2019): A reference to the obituary of Clive James appearing in the Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper has been added.

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Brideshead 75th Anniversary Festival Announced

Posted on November 26, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Castle Howard has announced the dates of its festival next summer to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of Brideshead Revisited. This will be held at the Castle Howard estate in North Yorkshire from 26-28 June. Here is the text of the announcement:

As Evelyn Waugh’s seminal novel turns 75, we invite you to magnificent Castle Howard, for a celebration of this masterpiece of 20th century fiction and screen.
Waugh’s novel, an unforgettable exploration of youth, nostalgia, religion and class, set among the spires of Oxford and the immaculate lawns of one of England’s great country houses, is a classic of English literature.

Granada’s sumptuous 11 part adaptation takes its place among the greatest moments of TV history, shaped the fashion of the 1980’s, and transformed its stars – among them Jeremy Irons – into icons.

Featuring a stellar line up of writers, biographers, leading actors and crew, and including screenings, discussion panels, performances and exclusive tours, The Brideshead Festival will explore the ‘magic power’ and enduring nature of Brideshead Revisited. What makes the book a classic? Why have its adaptations captured the hearts, and imaginations of generations of viewers? Whatever happened to Aloysius?

UPDATE: The festival dates have bben corrected. See also later post.

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Pre-Thanksgiving Roundup

Posted on November 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in the Guardian, columnist Marina Hyde looks at the recent debacle arising from Prince Andrew’s BBC Newsnight interview. Her story is entitled “How badly must you do your job for your own mother to fire you?” After several comparisons, she lands up with this one:

It wasn’t simply bad. It was the Heaven’s Gate of royal interviews, basically killing the entire genre. Nobody ever made westerns like they used to after Heaven’s Gate, and nobody in the royal family is going to be giving carte blanche to a BBC interviewer again in a hurry.

But the more famous thing about Heaven’s Gate, of course, wasn’t that it ended westerns – but that it ended its studio. Michael Cimino’s monster flop effectively collapsed the entire studio that produced it, United Artists – and the question after Andrew’s interview is how dangerous his monster flop is to the royal family that produced him. In the warp and weft of the UK’s royal story, people are always looking for the incident about which they will end up saying: “Well, in retrospect, that was the moment 
” Some royal historians are already judging Andrew’s interview as seismically as Edward VIII’s abdication.

Maybe. Either way, it should always be remembered that the abdication crisis was hugely enjoyed by the public. As Evelyn Waugh remarked in a 1936 diary entry: “The Simpson crisis has been a great delight to everyone. At Maidie’s nursing home they report a pronounced turn for the better in all adult patients. There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain.” [Diaries, 8 Dec. 1936, p. 415].

Maidie refers to Maidie Hollis. wife of Waugh’s Oxford friend Christopher Hollis. She had been in a nursing home in Bristol since September after a miscarriage (Ibid. pp. 407-08). Waugh goes on to mention that “Conrad [Russell] lunched with me on Sunday, very happy with the crisis. Perry [Brownlow] is out with Simpson in Cannes. If it had not been for Simpson this would have been a very bitter week.” Waugh’s friend Perry Brownlow was Lord-in-Waiting to Edward VIII.

–Another comment on this topic also cites Waugh. This is by Charles Moore in his regular Spectator column:

Staying with a relation [in Scotland], I picked up from beside my bed Evelyn Waugh’s When The Going Was Good, a collection mainly of travel pieces written in 1930-31. In it, he describes discussions with tribal elders in Aden which centre on the King-Emperor and how pretty Princess Elizabeth is. Has it ever happened before in human history that one living person’s face and character have been known and loved right across the world for more than 90 years? This snippet helped put the Duke of York business in perspective.

The travel pieces collected cover the years 1929-35. Chapter Three (“Globe Trotting 1930-31”) is excerpted from Remote People and relates, inter alia, to the stop in Aden

–The monthly Mexican magazine Este PaĂ­s has a review of the book Letras sobre un dios mineral: El petrĂłleo mexicano en la narrativa (“Letters about a mineral god: Mexican oil in written narratives”) by Edith NegrĂ­n. Waugh’s 1939 book Robbery Under Law is one of those about the Mexican petroleum industry that is considered and compared by NegrĂ­n to other works. According to the review:

The report on the expropriation, Robbery Under Law, by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, written on request against LĂĄzaro CĂĄrdenas, may  be “the most racist and derogatory pages ever written about us.”

The review is written in Spanish by PĂĄvel Granados who is apparently quoting from the book by NegrĂ­n. The translation is by Google with a few edits.

–A new biography of David Ben-Gurion, founder of the modern state of Israel is reviewed in the journal The American Interest. The book is by Tom Segev and the review, by Ben Judah. The review opens with this:

A new biography about Israel’s founder shows that the idea of one political Jewish people is a myth, an illusion.

David Gruen loved Shmuel Fuchs. He loved him intensely, painfully, in that shape adolescent friendships often take. They were teenagers, they were Jews, and they lived deep in Poland, in the miserable town of PƂoƄsk, in the west of the Russian Empire.

“I so miss you, so very much desire and crave to see you, my beloved friend,” the David who would become Ben-Gurion wrote to the boy he so adored. “O, if I only had shaken your hand before you left, if I could only embrace you and bestow kisses on you.”

But they were not lovers. Theirs was a romantic friendship. “It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning,” was how Evelyn Waugh chose to describe it. “In England, it comes when you are almost men.” But they were not English. Their world was dark, muddy, almost medieval. It was a time of pogroms. Before their childhoods were over, the Russian Empire had turned on its Jews.

Gruen becomes David Ben-Gurion, and Fuchs becomes Sam Fox, a Brooklyn dentist, and their lives are traced and contrasted in the biography. The quote from Waugh is taken from Brideshead Revisited, Book One, Chapter 4.

–In the Daily Telegraph’s Thinking Man section there is a list of 19 recommended books that should be read in order to understand how to be a man. One of these is Brideshead Revisited, addressing the same point discussed in the Ben-Gurion biography:

The emotional landscape of Evelyn Waugh’s tale of two toffs resonates with people from all backgrounds and eras. Love between straight men has rarely been subjected to this kind of scrutiny, and the connections Charles and Sebastian forge with their common past and a shared sense of place are as germane to this sprawling story as its theological and societal concerns.

— Country Life magazine, has an article by Eleanor Doughty about the evolution of the London postal code system. As she points out, this has in the past been tinged with a snobbery in which Evelyn Waugh is implicated. According to Country Life:

… The original London letter-only postcodes (NW, SE and so on) were introduced in 1957 [sic], and 60 years later the numbering was added as an efficiency measure during the First World War. The ‘1’ numbers were reserved for the centre of the city; beyond that, the various areas were intentionally numbered alphabetically. The generally accepted explanation is that it was the fairest system, to avoid arguments about who comes first, and to stop those in far-flung parts of the metropolis feeling aggrieved by the high numbers of their postcodes.

Wikipedia explains that the system was introduced in 1857.  The Country Life story continues:

The irony is that despite the numbering being carefully managed to try and avoid stigma being attached to certain areas, the postcode system nonetheless produced it anyway. Whether you realise it or not, you will have, when receiving directions, made a judgement about the place you’re going based on the postcode. More than a century ago, when a young Evelyn Waugh lived with his parents in Golders Green, NW11, it’s said that he would walk to the next postbox to acquire a fashionable NW3 postmark on his letters.

There is little except gossip to support the story of the uphill trek to avoid NW11 postings. For more information, see previous post.

 

 

 

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Pinfold, Waugh, and Vivien Leigh

Posted on November 23, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh Society member and frequent contributor Melina Borden has posted on the British Library’s Weblog a brief article based on the BL’s archives of Waugh’s correspondence. The item of primary interest is a telegram Vivien Leigh sent Waugh in advance of the 1957 luncheon convened at Foyle’s bookstore in connection with the publication of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:

“HOW WONDERFUL WE ARE GOING TO SEE YOU TODAY YOU KEPT ME AWAKE NEARLY ALL NIGHT LAUGHING AND CRYING AT YOUR MARVELLOUS BOOK LOVE = VIVIEN +”

Borden goes on to discuss how Leigh’s own ordeals with mental illness may account for her fascination with Waugh’s book:

…Inevitably one wonders what did [Leigh], who suffered from a bipolar disorder from around the age of 25, find funny or not so funny in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold – a semi-biographical account of a deeply disturbed human being based on Waugh’s own experience with psychosis.

Gilbert is a carefully constructed character underpinned by a single and powerful belief, which is also a hallucination, that he is persecuted; because he is a German and a Jew; a Roman Catholic and a fascist; a communist homosexual and a suicidal drunk. Gilbert is more or less the same as Waugh. His hallucinatory conversations with imaginary enemies are full of distinctly autobiographical features.  Like Waugh, Gilbert is somebody who “abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz”, a member of the S.O.E. during the Second World War and a fake aristocrat who allegedly sympathized with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.

Medically inclined readers of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold often find Waugh’s self-parodying style unconvincing as a description of a clinical psychosis or delusion, although they recognize that there might be an element of alcohol induced hallucinatory experience in it. Alexandra Pitman argues that the novel illustrates “the difficulty in distinguishing alcoholic hallucinations from psychotic illness” but proves that in the case of the former if one stopped drinking the problem would resolve quickly, as in the case of Gilbert.

Maybe Leigh could laugh and cry with laughter at the fictionalized telescopic look Waugh took towards his own character because it had very little in common with her own highly volatile life, which behind the scenes was dominated by  battles with mental illness. Ten days after the Foyle’s event Leigh discovered that Olivier was having a affair and slashed him across the eyes with a wet face cloth while hitting her head on a marble bedside table. Her depressive and aggressive drinking habit drove her professionalism but also aggravated her illness and eventually killed her at the age of 53. She would die ten years later, a victim of her illness, at her flat at 54 Eaton Square, the very same place from which she’d sent the breezy telegraph to Waugh. What the actress Maxine Audley said about Leigh could probably be said about Waugh too: “When she was good, she was very good, but when she was bad, she was awful!”

The article goes on to discuss two other items in the archive. One is a three page letter from 1955 thanking Waugh for a review of a performance of Titus Andronicus in which she appeared and inviting him to attend a later production of Macbeth in which she would also perform. There is also a brief 1957 telegram congratulating him on the move to Combe Florey signed jointly with her husband Lawrence Olivier.

The article concludes with this brief assessment of these communications:

constrained as they are by form and function — [they] can only gesture towards the deeper friendships between those that wrote them. Nevertheless, if we’re willing to look at them more closely, certain currents become more visible; of shared troubles and triumphs; laughter and tears.

Waugh must have responded to these communications. As Auberon Waugh (I believe it was) once noted, Evelyn shared with Arthur Waugh the habit of being incapable of leaving a friendly message, no matter how brief, unanswered. These responses to Leigh are apparently not housed at the BL which holds the archives of Waugh’s incoming correspondence. A copy of Pinfold inscribed to her was recently sold (perhaps this was the one she was reading when she sent the telegram). This is mentioned in a previous post.

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75th Anniversary of Brideshead Airdrop

Posted on November 20, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

75 years ago today, the page proofs of Brideshead Revisited were dropped by parachute into Yugoslavia and retrieved by Evelyn Waugh. This event is recorded in his diary entry for Monday, 20 November 1944 (Diaries, p. 592). This is the first time he had been united with the text since he dropped off the typescript at Chapman & Hall in London on about the 16th of June. C&H were directed by his unpublished letter to AD Peters of 30 September to send the proofs addressed to Randolph Churchill (then his commanding officer) via 10 Downing Street. That subterfuge was necessary because no personal item larger than an air letter could be mailed to his post at Topusko in order to afford maximum room on transport flights for military supplies.

Waugh made extensive edits in his own handwriting, especially in the first half of the book. But he wasted no time, and in his diary entry for 26 November he writes: “Finished final proof correcting at 6 in the evening while Randolph was at a cinema show in Glina which failed to happen.” Belgrade had been liberated earlier in the week and on 28 November, Waugh’s departure from Topusko was approved. His next posting is described as Ragusa (the Italian name for Dubrovnik) which took him several weeks to reach due to road closures and flights via Bari in Italy. He arrived there just before Christmas in the Western Church.

How and when the corrected proofs arrived back in London isn’t known to your correspondent, but Waugh had already ordered 50 copies of the uncorrected proofs to be printed and  distributed as Christmas presents to his friends in the UK. On 28 May 1945, the book reflecting Waugh’s corrections was published by Chapman & Hall. All but 300 of the 9000 copies in the first print run were distributed to members of the Book Society. C&H issued the remainder in an identical edition. By then Waugh was back in the UK, having returned on 15 March. The proof copy with Waugh’s handwritten corrections resides at the Loyola-Notre Dame Library in Baltimore, to which it was presented by Waugh in gratitude for the honorary degree Loyola College of Maryland conferred on him in 1947.

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Brideshead Serial Lecture Available Online

Posted on November 18, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The audio version of the lecture delivered last Friday to the British Studies seminar at the University of Texas is now available online. See previous post. It can be accessed at this link.

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Mid-November Roundup

Posted on November 17, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Oxford journal Cherwell reviews a current production of Hamlet at the Keble College O’Reilly Theatre. The review opens with a quote from Evelyn Waugh:

“Would you not see a hundred Hamlets pottering about Broad Street?” Evelyn Waugh’s question is pertinent today: of course Oxford’s the best place to put on Hamlet, since where, outside Elsinore and Wittenberg, will you find so many self-questioning, introspective and pretty pretentious students in close proximity? It’s surprising then that Cosmic Arts’ new production at the Keble O’Reilly Theatre is Oxford’s first big one for several years. Maybe it’s because contest over theatre’s best lead role is so fierce: apparently over 100 auditioned to play the Dane.

Waugh occasionally wrote for Cherwell in his student days. But the quote is taken from a 1924 editorial in Isis, another Oxford student publication. Waugh was commenting on a current production of Hamlet by the OUDS. “Wittenberg and Oxford”, CWEW, v. 26, pp. 35-37. It is also reprinted in EAR.

–Another Oxford student publication was quoted recently in The Oldie magazine’s website. This was from an interview of Auberon Waugh by The Oldie’s current editor Harry Mount. Here’s the opening of the article:

Auberon Waugh would have turned 80 on November 17. In 1991, he was interviewed by a 19-year-old Harry Mount for The Word, an Oxford University newspaper.

–The religious weblog Words on Fire has posted an article entitled “On being protected: What I learned from Evelyn Waugh’s Mr. Crouchback.” The discussion in the article relates to the father of Guy Crouchback and his thoughts in the novel Men at War on the departure of his grandson Tony (Guy’s cousin) before his capture during the Fall of France. The article can be viewed at this link.

–Max Saunders, CWEW editor of Men at War and the other novels in Waugh’s war trilogy has posted an article on the OUPblog. This is about a book series published by Kegan Paul in the 1920-30s called To-Day and To-Morrow  in which they:

…published over 100 volumes, […] The books were highly diverse. They covered technological subjects – aviation, wireless, automation, politics, the state, the family and sexuality. Others focused on culture and everyday life topics – theatre, cinema, the press, language, clothes, food, drink, leisure, and sleep.[…]

A publishing sensation until the Depression hit, the series attracted leading writers – Vernon Lee, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, the scientist J. D. Bernal, Hugh MacDiarmid, critic Bonamy DobrĂ©e, philosopher C. E. M. Joad, novelist and biographer AndrĂ© Maurois – and many more. Other major modernist authors knew them. Joyce read twelve of the books. T. S. Eliot reviewed some, saying: “we are able to peer into the future by means of that brilliant series of little books called To-day and To-morrow.” Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard reviewed at least eight. Evelyn Waugh tried to write one, called Noah, or the Future of Intoxication, but it was rejected.

Selina Hastings (p. 146) describes the Kegan Paul series as a “collection of light-hearted essays […] of which the most the most notable to date had been Robert Graves’s Lars Porsena, or the Future of Swearing” whose title inspired that proposed by Waugh.

–The Daily Mail runs a story about advice for naming babies:

One of the country’s leading baby clothing firms is encouraging parents-to-be to break with tradition by choosing a gender neutral name for their newborns. JoJo Maman BĂ©bĂ© – which is based in Newport, Wales, and has more than 90 stores across the UK – has come up with 18 gender neutral baby names it thinks would be perfect for infants.

Among the recommended gender neutral names is this:

EVELYN – The name Evelyn started out as a predominantly male name, with the most famous being writer Evelyn Waugh. Despite it being much more common as a female name nowadays, we love the vintage feel of it for either gender. Evelyn is of Old English origin and means ‘desired’, making it perfect for your little one.

–The French newspaper PrĂ©sent has posted a review of the recently published translation of Waugh’s war diaries. This is entitled le Journal de guerre. See previous post. The review is behind a paywall but any Francophone reader having access to it is invited to describe it by posting a comment below.

–Finally, an art exhibit will open next week in London that may be of interest to our readers. Here’s an excerpt from the gallery’s announcement:

‘Divine People: The Art of Ambrose McEvoy’ runs 26th November 2019 – 24th January 2020. Philip Mould & Company will be holding a major retrospective of the work of Ambrose McEvoy ARA (1877 -1927) – the effervescent society portraitist whom art history had all but forgotten. this is first major exhibition of the artist’s work in almost fifty years and comprises over 40 works loaned by major public institutions and British private collections. ‘Divine People: The Art of Ambrose McEvoy’ will showcase some of the most daring and progressive portraits from the artist’s pioneering oeuvre. McEvoy’s subjects – often dramatically illuminated by his novel use of coloured light bulbs – have been generally overlooked in the broader history of 20th century British art, his paintings overshadowed by that of his close friend and contemporary at the Slade, Augustus John. Whereas John remains a household name today, McEvoy has been largely forgotten despite having painted such notable figures as Winston Churchill, Lady Diana Cooper, The Hon. Lois Sturt and Prime Minister James Ramsay Macdonald.

Details of the exhibit can be found at this link. There is a brief video within the gallery’s linked announcement in which the owner Philip Mould displays and explains the artist’s 1915 portrait of Diana Cooper, which she had dubbed “Call to Orgy”.

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Posted in Academia, Art, Photography & Sculpture, Auberon Waugh, Complete Works, Men at Arms, Newspapers, Oxford | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Mid-November Roundup

Niall TĂłibĂ­n (1929-2019) R. I. P.

Posted on November 16, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Irish actor Niall TĂłibĂ­n died earlier this week at the age of 89. He is best known in this parish for his portrayal of Fr Mackay in the Granada TV series of Brideshead Revisited. Acording to the obituary in the Irish Times:

Niall Toibin’s career encompassed comedy and straight roles, and over nearly six decades he was lauded for performances from Behan interpretations to touring solo shows. He was also a great raconteur, and often charmed the nation on the Late Late Show. He did a great line in priests, from formidable parish priest Fr Frank MacAnally in Ballykissangel, to psychopathic Fr Geraldo in Rat, to a gentler cleric in Brideshead Revisited.

He appeared only briefly in the final episode of the TV series. Fr Mackay is the Glasgow-Irish priest in Melstead, the nearest Roman Catholic church to Brideshead Castle. He is recalled to Brideshead by Julia Flyte to perform the last rites for Lord Marchmain. An earlier visit resulted in his being summarily dismissed by Lord Marchmain. The scene, as played by TĂłibĂ­n, replays that described by Waugh in his Diaries at the deathbed of his Oxford friend Hubert Duggan. Duggan was a Roman Catholic from birth through his father, who died when Duggan was a child. Waugh called in a priest (Fr Devas) at Duggan’s request but the Protestant family, like Charles Ryder and Lord Marchmain’s doctor in the novel, are opposed to the ceremony. Fr Devas, the priest called in by Waugh and Fr Mackay in the novel, explain the ceremony in almost identical terms. In the Diary entry Fr Devas is recorded as saying:

‘Look all I shall do is to put oil on his forehead and say a prayer. Look, the oil is in this little box. Nothing to be frightened of.’ (Diaries, p. 553)

In the novel, Fr Mackay says:

…I want to anoint him. It is nothing, a touch of the fingers, just some oil from this little box, look, it is pure oil, nothing to hurt him. (London, 1945, p. 295)

The TV series followed the novel, as in most other cases when it came to dialogue (53:00).

Niall TĂłibĂ­n, like most actors in the TV serial acted brilliantly in a performance that is easily recalled by anyone who has seen it. This is the case with so many of the secondary parts in the TV series that it makes one wish to watch it yet again. I am thinking of John Gielgud as Ryder’s father, Nikolas Grace as Anthony Blanche, Simon Jones as Bridey, and many others too numerous to mention.

One of those others who performed so memorably, however, should also be mentioned. This is Stephen Moore (1937-2019) who died last month. He played Charles Ryder’s Cousin Jasper in episode 1 of the TV series, also with notable success. According to IMDB: “He was an actor and director, known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981), Pirate Radio (2009) and A Bridge Too Far (1977).”

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