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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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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Waugh Letters to Richard Plunket Greene on Offer

Posted on November 15, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Southeby’s has announced the auction of 10 letters from Evelyn Waugh, written while he was teaching at Arnold House School in North Wales. Here’s the description:

10 AUTOGRAPH LETTERS SIGNED, EIGHT TO RICHARD PLUNKET GREENE, ONE TO HIS MOTHER GWEN (“LADY PLUNKET”), AND ONE TO HIS FIANCÉE ELIZABETH RUSSELL
AN EXCEPTIONAL SERIES OF UNPUBLISHED EARLY LETTERS TO A CLOSE FRIEND WRITTEN DURING HIS STINT AS A MASTER AT ARNOLD SCHOOL, combining colourful comic anecdotes, admissions of personal anguish, and discussion of his struggles to write a novel, 16 pages, Arnold House School, Llanddulas, 31 January (“PRID. KAL. FEB.”) to 18 June 1925

A narrative description of the letters is included in the catalogue notes:

These letters were written during the six months Waugh spent teaching at a Welsh prep school, a purgatorial experience that culminated in a half-hearted attempt at suicide by swimming out to sea until jellyfish stung him back to land, but which formed wonderful raw material for Decline and Fall. It is not a well-documented period in Waugh’s life, and the recipient of these revealing and often hilarious letters was, at the time, one of the author’s closest friends. Richard Plunket Greene (1901-78) was an Oxford contemporary “piratical in appearance, sometimes wearing ear-rings […] tinged […] with melancholy, but also infused with a succession of wild, obsessive enthusiasms” (A Little Learning, p.217). After coming down from Oxford Waugh got to know his parents and siblings and by the end of 1924 he had, in his own words, “fallen in love with an entire family”, and in particular with Richard’s sister Olivia. Waugh’s complex relationships with the Plunket Greenes is a major thread running through these letters.
In an early letter, written a week after his arrival at Arnold House, Waugh writes to congratulate Richard on his engagement to Elizabeth Russell and gives a melancholic survey of his new life teaching dull boys (“the older they are the more stupid I find them”) with pitifully meagre evening entertainment: “The Cockney master also has a pipe with a tiny peep-show in it with six view of Dublin but one of these is sadly discoloured and one begins to weary of them after a time.” Matters improve somewhat with the lengthening days of spring: his aversion to cricket brings him more free time, he takes up shooting as well as more unexpected outdoor pleasures (“…yesterday there were sports and I won the masters egg-&-spoon race…”), and summer also brings a brief reference to the fellow teacher who served as the source for Decline and Fall’s Captain Grimes (“…Bathing has started to the intense excitement of the Sodomite master…”). He enjoys a trip to Rhyl, where the barber is an unexpected enthusiast of the Cabala, but the only letter in which Waugh expresses real pleasure in his life is the drunken weekend visit of another Oxford contemporary, Alastair Graham, and his indomitable mother – the original Lady Circumference. A brief unheaded note (possibly a fragment) from the end of May, announces a decision: “Five minutes ago I decided to accept the job at Pisa as secretary to Scott-Moncrieff […] The only real regret I shall have will be leaving friends […] for the most part England means only debt & drunkenness & disapproval”.
Waugh also makes numerous references to his writing in these letters. In February he writes to Richard that “feeling a little despondent” he burnt his manuscript (“it made so much smoke that the Headmaster when out of Chapel to see if his school was on fire”). He then goes on to outline his plan for “a prose epic of Silenus … with all manner of roistering in public houses and brothels”. The Silenus book is mentioned in several of the later letters, for example explaining that “I am putting the first chapter into the form of a film. It has solved many insuperable difficulties. The second chapter is going to be a Platonic dialogue”, asking Elizabeth to read the manuscript, and admitting that one minor character is “an unpleasing but accurate portrait of myself” but promising that no-one else is taken from life. This important series of letters therefore provides important clues about Waugh’s development as a writer, as well as revealing much detail about a key set of friendships, and his life in the school that was to provide the source of one of his most enduring fictions.

Here is a quote from one of the letters:

“…we went to Conway for luncheon and then for an enormous drive round the country past an Eisteddfod where everyone was drunk except a little girl with a very red nose dressed as a Druidess, and some aluminium works where a man was trying to burgle the dynamite store and a horrible town called Llanrwst where everyone was sober and some harlots giggled at us on a bridge & Mrs G[raham], who had been asleep since luncheon, suddenly woke up and delivered a furious speech against the Welsh & the lower middle class, to a place called Betws-y-Coed where Mrs G made us hunt for ferns in the rain…”

A photograph affording a partial view of the first pages of the letters is attached to the notice in the Southeby’s catalogue. None of these letters was included in the 1980 collection edited by Mark Amory and presumably were not available to him at the time. The sale wll take place 3-10 December 2019 at Southeby’s in London. For details see this link.

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Brideshead Anniversary Lecture in Austin

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The British Studies Seminar of the University of Texas at Austin will host a lecture on Friday, 15 November on the subject of the serial version of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. The publication of that version took place 75 years ago this month. The speaker will be your correspondent. Here is a description of the lecture:

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh’s most popular novel, although opinions vary on whether it is his best. This lecture will discuss the unusual wartime situation in which it was conceived and thematically written. How can it be explained that it was published first in the United States more than half a year before it appeared as a book? How did it happen that it was published in the form of a serial in Town & Country magazine, without Waugh’s approval and contrary to his wishes? What of its critical reception?

The British Studies Seminar meets on Fridays (at 245p for 3pm) in the Tom Lea Rooms of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center on the UT campus. An audio recording of the lecture will be posted on the internet next week. For more details see this link.

UPDATE (14 November 2019): The post was updated to reflect information on the British Studies website.

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The Elections and the Waughs

Posted on November 12, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Writing in the Daily Mail, Craig Brown looks back 60 years to the UK election of 1959 which he says is the first one influenced by television. For the first time, the majority of voters had television sets:

So keen was the Daily Mirror to stop its readers being tempted away from voting Labour that on the big day it only listed those programmes that began after 9pm, when the polls had closed.

These days, novelists and playwrights regularly voice their political views on Newsnight or Question Time. In 1959 they were less in evidence, perhaps because they had fewer platforms.  Of those who were asked their views, some refused to give them. Evelyn Waugh declared that he had no intention of voting: ‘I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign on her choice of servants.’

Waugh’s statement appeared in a symposium of election comments printed in the Spectator, 2 October 1959, reprinted EAR, p. 537 (“Aspirations of a Mugwump”). While he did choose not to vote, he did not decline to take sides. The article opened: “I hope to see the Conservative Party return with a substantial majority.”

In this year’s elections it looked as though Evelyn Waugh’s grandson would depart from this tradition, as did his father Auberon before him, but yesterday Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party, took action to assure that this was not to be, when he stood down the party’s candidates in constituencies where Conservatives won seats in the last election. Here is the report from yesterday’s Somerset County Gazette:

Alexander Waugh was set to be the Brexit Party candidate for Bridgwater and West Somerset, while Penny Rawson had put her name forward in Taunton Deane. Mr Waugh said he had already seen lots of support on his campaign trial, but he was somewhat relieved because he doesn’t consider himself a politician.

“I was very much geared up,” he said. “I was getting a lot of support. I think now I will go to help other candidates like Ann Widdecombe with her campaigning. I know a lot of people will be very disappointed. I won’t be surprised if there are a lot of spoiled votes with people writing the Brexit Party on their ballots. I can’t deny in some ways I am quite relieved because I am not a politician. I just thought sitting in my armchair complaining wasn’t very good. I am a man of action. The main problem is we simply cannot trust Boris Johnson.”

It may have occurred to Alexander to file his registration papers on Thursday as a candidate for the party founded by his father. This was called “The Dog Lovers Party” and would surely have found support in West Somerset. But if it did occur to him, he has thought better of it.

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Armistice Day Roundup

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

— Fr John Hunwicke posting on his website addresses literary works related to the commemoration of Armistice Day (Remembrance Sunday in the UK):

As far as WW2 is concerned, I often think about the contrast between two great fictional literary products of that war, both written by combatants; both overtly semi-autobiographical. [Nicholas] Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea is written by an ideologically and morally rudderless lapsed Marxist; as a memorial to the men who fought the war of the Atlantic convoys. I find it full of venom; venom against adulterous wives back home; against tall blond German submarine captains; against bullying Australians; against the Irish who denied Cork Harbour and Bantry Bay to the Royal Navy.

Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy is quite different. At its beginning, Waugh’s character, a traditionalist Catholic gentleman burdened with ethical Rights and Wrongs, saw the conflict as a chivalrous crusade on behalf of Christian civilisation against Nazi barbarism and its atheist allies in Moskow. When the war was ending, with Uncle Jo a genial ally and sitting in triumph on half of Europe, Waugh had come to perceive it as a sweaty tug of war between two teams of scarcely distinguishable louts. Waugh discerns the ironies and hypocrisies as embodied in the Sword of Stalingrad – a gift from the Christian King of England; a symbol of chivalry to congratulate Marshal Stalin; a triumph of craftsmanship … and with the symbols on its scabbard upside down. Waugh’s hero sees, as Waugh himself had seen, the vicious post-War savaging of Christian Europe in Tito’s Jugoslavia.

–The New York Times in this week’s Book Review interviews TV presenter Seth Meyers:

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

“Scoop,” by Evelyn Waugh. Its timeliness is both hilarious and depressing. Also “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy. The Judge now holds first position for “Fictional Character Who Has Given Me the Worst Nightmares.”

–John O’Brien reviews a new production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado by the English National Opera. This is posted on the website LondonTheatre1.com:

Part farce, part romantic comedy it is totally captivating. It takes you out of yourself and transports you to a world of fantasy and comic joy. It’s like reading Evelyn Waugh’s “Decline and Fall” for the first time. It’s silly, funny, hilarious and jolly. Like a soufflĂ© it rises miraculously and somehow stays upright. When it ends you just want more. It’s a wonderful cornucopia of delights. And Jonathan Miller’s masterstroke of setting it in a 1930s English hotel is pure genius. This production is like a Marx Brothers film, a PG Woodhouse novel and an episode of Fawlty Towers all rolled into one irresistible box of chocolates. Everything that’s jolly and fun is here. Its magnificent, magnetic and majestic.

–The current issue of the New Yorker magazine has an article by Issac Chotiner entitled “From Little Englanders to Brexiteers”. In this he considers a book by Fintan O’Toole entitled The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Power of Nationalism. Here’s an extract:

Britain emerged from the Second World War at once victorious and shrunken, the image of plucky heroism and imperial twilight. “The power of Brexit,” O’Toole writes, “is that it promised to end at last all this tantalizing uncertainty by fusing these contradictory moods into a single emotion—the pleasurable self-pity in which one can feel at once horribly hard done by and exceptionally grand. Its promise is, at heart, a liberation, not from Europe, but from the torment of an eternally unresolved conflict between superiority and inferiority.

Or, as Evelyn Waugh wrote in his California-based satire of Anglo-Americanism, “The Loved One” (1948), “You never find an Englishman among the underdogs—except in England of course.” India achieved independence in 1947, Jamaica in 1962; the great majority of the Empire’s “subjects” won their freedom in that fifteen-year interval. By the time the Suez crisis concluded in humiliating fashion, in 1956—when President Eisenhower forced an abrupt end to the Anglo-French-Israeli military operation to regain control of the canal—American primacy, however resented, could no longer be denied.

–The New York Public Library has announced the details of its exhibit about the life and works of novelist J D Salinger. This was mentioned in a previous post:

The exhibition is organized by Salinger’s son Matt Salinger and widow Colleen Salinger with Declan Kiely, Director of Special Collections and Exhibitions at The New York Public Library. The free exhibition coincides with the centennial of J.D. Salinger’s birth and will be on display October 18, 2019 through January 19, 2020 in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

For more details see this link.

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