300th Anniversary of English Novel to be Marked

Posted on November 2, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

This year is the 300th anniversary of the English novel–at least if one will accept Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to be the first example, as seems to generally be the case. It was published on 25 April 1719. Other contenders are the same author’s Moll Flanders (1722) or looking the other direction John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688). Earlier this year, plans to celebrate this milestone were announced by the BBC as well as the British Library and other literary institutions. Details are now available in a nationwide literary festival denominated  “Novels That Shaped Our World.”

The first event will be at the British Library next Friday at 1300-1415p. This will convene a panel of 7 in the BL’s Knowledge Centre on Euston Road, WC2. Participating will be:

…Stig Abell, Syima Aslam, Juno Dawson, Mariella Frostrup, Alexander McCall Smith, Kit de Waal and Jo Whiley. […] This panel of writers, journalists and thinkers have selected 100 novels that have shaped their world. Chaired by BBC Radio 2’s Jo Whiley, writers Alexander McCall Smith, Kit de Waal and Juno Dawson along with broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, editor of the TLS Stig Abell and Bradford Literature Festival Director Syima Aslam reveal their choices. This event will be live streamed via BBC iPlayer and local libraries via the Living Knowledge Network.

For more details on booking and broadcast as well as other participating libraries see this link.

The next day (Saturday, 9 November, at 2145p) BBC Two will begin the broadcast of a TV series that will consist of three weekly one-hour episodes:

The series looks at how the novel changed the world. Using three unique and surprising perspectives – empire, women’s voices and class experience – these films reveal how, across 300 years, the novel has been at the heart of debate about society, and has often spearheaded social change. Novels That Shaped Our World will reflect on how the power of the novel in English effected change here and abroad through the 19th and 20th centuries. With key moments from novels brought to life with dramatic performances and readings, British and International novelists will talk about the novels that have meant most to them, as the series follows the story of how the novel has reflected our historic social struggles and been instrumental in effecting change.

The first episode (“Women’s Voices”) is also described in the same notice:

Episode one discusses the story of women and the novel – both as characters and authors. With Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale capturing global audiences, the programme will show how the plight of women is a theme that reaches right back to the earliest novels. From Richardson’s Pamela to Austen, the BrontĂ«s through to Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf, and to the post-war publishing boom where a new generation of global writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have continued to speak out for women to a new generation of readers.

For more details see this link.

Meanwhile, BBC History Magazine has somewhat stolen a march on these proceedings by announcing its own choices of “6 novels that captured life in Britain.” Here is their explanation: “As a BBC Two series marks the 300th birthday of the English language novel, we ask six leading authors and academics to pick the works of fiction they feel have best captured life in Britain and its empire since 1719.”

One of the six novels selected by the History Magazine panel is Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. This was the choice by panel member and author James Holland who explained his selection in this month’s issue of the magazine:

Although only part of Evelyn Waugh’s novel is set during the Second World War, it was written between December 1943 and June 1944, while the author was recovering from a parachute accident. Waugh served in the army during the conflict, including a stint with the Commandos, with whom he saw action at the battle of Crete in 1941.

Despite his reputation as a brilliant comic novelist, Brideshead is a wistful and rather mournful piece, narrated by Charles Ryder, an artist. One night during the war, Ryder arrives at a new army camp, only to discover that he has come to the grounds of a country house he knows very well: Brideshead, the home of the aristocratic Flyte family. This prompts him to reflect on his relationship with the family – first with Sebastian, the eccentric and tragic son; then Sebastian’s sister Julia, with whom Charles had an intense affair in the years leading up to the war.

Waugh’s recovery from the parachute accident required only two weeks at the beginning of the period indicated. The the period from February to June was covered by leave granted by the Army for the specific purpose of writing the book. Other novels on the magazine’s list (spread roughly over the 300 years of the English novel’s existence) are Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding, Mary Barton (1848) by Elizabeth Gaskell, Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling, Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916) by H G Wells and The Lowlife (1963) by Alexander Baron.

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John Heygate Archives on Offer

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The auction house Bonhams, in Knightsbridge, London, will hold an auction on 4 December that will include archived letters to John Heygate.  Several of these contain information that relates to Evelyn Waugh. Heygate was a friend of Waugh and his first wife (also Evelyn) until her affair with Heygate ended Waugh’s marriage. Her marriage to Heygate was also short-lived. The letters on offer are in two lots:

Lot 390 are letters from various senders who were friends and acquaintances of both John Heygate and Evelyn Waugh. Most were sent after Waugh’s death in 1966 but a few were written while he was still alive. The letters were written by Harold Acton: 1970-76, 20x; John Betjeman: 1969-73, 20x; Diana Mitford: 1975-76, 2x; Evelyn Nightingale (formerly Heygate, and before that Waugh, and born Gardner): 1974-76, 7x; Peter Quennell: 1954-73, 5x; Gerald Reitlinger: 1953-76, 35x; Christopher Sykes, 1974, 1x; and Auberon Waugh: 1970-76, 11x. See link. Much of this material is dated in the 1970s and probably arises from Christopher Sykes’ research for his biography of Waugh. This was published in 1975. The correspondence ends in 1976 when Heygate committed suicide in March of that year at his estate in Northern Ireland.

A larger trove is separately offered in Lot 377. This involves 60 typed letters and in excess of 60 post cards from Anthony Powell to Heygate between 1954 and 1974. Most of these include  descriptions of Powell’s drafts for successive volumes of Dance to the Music of Time. But several also implicate Waugh who was the mutual friend of both of Powell and Heygate and actually introduced them to each other during Waugh’s first marriage. Powell remained on friendly terms with Heygate and more distant terms with Waugh after Waugh’s marriage broke up. Powell and Waugh resumed their closer relationship when Powell moved to Somerset in the early 1950s. Here is Bonham’s summary of those portions of the letters in this lot that relate to Waugh:

[…] there are also a good many comments on their friends and contemporaries, including Evelyn Waugh, with whom [Powell] stayed in 1951 (“…The Waugh visit went off very well. Evelyn was in the best possible form and food and drink flowed, though I must say the sense of tension is pretty acute all the time. Every single object in the house had been bought because it is ‘amusing’ which is rather unrestful as you may imagine…”) and later sightings (“…I saw Evelyn W the other night who had been hitting the bottle pretty hard…”), plus comments on his books (“…I thought Officers and Gents full of technical faults and failings but was never actually bored. In a kind of way I prefer that sort of Evelyn to something very finished like the Loved One…”), news of his death (“…It was indeed sad about Evelyn, though I suppose for him to come back from church on Easter Day and go to sleep in his chair was just the sort of thing he would have chosen – quiet yet dramatic. I can’t say I was altogether surprised after my last view of him…”), Sykes’s biography (“…I was surprised how horrified everyone was at hearing of EW on his less attractive side. One was so used to stories about him that one assumed everyone else knew how bloody he could be when in the mood…”) and his own reminiscences (“…I have some plans to write some sort of an autobiography after I’ve finished the [Dance to the Music of Time], and (if I’m spared) I shall deal with EW against the larger background…”) […]  See link.

There are also inscribed copies of two volumes of Waugh’s war trilogy (one of which was inscribed to novelist L P Hartley): Lots 388 and 389.

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St Austin Waugh Issue

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of the bi-monthly religious literary journal St Austin Review (November/ December 2019) is entitled “Brideshead & Beyond: The Genius of Evelyn Waugh.” The Waugh-related content is described as follows:

Joseph Pearce admires “the genius of Evelyn Waugh”.

John Beaumont surveys “the conversion and post-conversion of Evelyn Waugh”.

Daniel Frampton is “in search of sanctity” in comparing Evelyn Waugh and Roy Campbell.

Aaron Urbanczyk sees “the dark side of literary encounter in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust”.

Annesley Anderson feels the “twitch upon the thread” and finds “grace in Brideshead Revisited”.

Deirdre Murphy discovers “vocation, redemption and hope in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and The End of the Battle”.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker finds in Brideshead “a fairy-tale revisited”.

There is no information regarding availability of this issue, but their website indicates that single copies are generally available for $10 from the University of Chicago.

UPDATE (16 November 2019): Here is a link to the full contents of the StAR Waugh issue as well as to a copy of one of its articles.

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Halloween Roundup

Posted on October 31, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books in its latest issue has published an article by Rosemary Hill on the life and career of Auberon Waugh. This is entitled “Woof, woof” and includes a description of Auberon’s life from the time he was injured in Cyprus through his journalism at Private Eye and the Literary Review via several other publications. There is also a brief review of the book A Scribbler in Soho.  This comes to the same conclusion as other reviewers that there is too much emphasis on the late journalism as compared to that of the earlier days at Private Eye. The article concludes with a discussion of Polly Toynbee’s obituary of Auberon written in 2001, in which she compares him with the then rising young journalist Boris Johnson whom she foresaw as carrying in Auberon’s tradition:

…”Boris Johnson, editor of the Spectator, is only 36, a writer of just this humorous stamp, with mannerisms to match. The fact that the obits proclaim Waugh ‘the most courteous and loveable of friends’, or that Boris Johnson is also a charming and affable fellow, is neither here nor there.”

As their political careers demonstrate, Waugh and Johnson were opposites. Johnson wanted power, Waugh distrusted power, wanted to subvert it, and believed that the best form of subversion was flippancy. By the time he wrote Will This Do? flippancy was under increasing pressure from political correctness, the libel laws and an increased social anxiety about causing offence. ‘I am mildly surprised,’ he wrote, ‘that I am still allowed to exist.’ For an indication of what his diary might have said today here is the entry for 2 July 1982:

“Nearly 2000 readers have written to ask my advice on whether or not Prince William of Wales should be circumcised. It is not an easy question 
 It all depends on what sort of a monarchy people want 
 I feel it should be made the subject of a national plebiscite, like the Common Market referendum. We have to think of something to keep us amused now the Falklands are over.”

–A collection of the essays of literary critic and classical scholar Daniel Mendelsohn has been published by New York Review Books. The book is called Ecstasy and Terror. It includes an article entitled “Brideshead, Revisited: Getting Waugh Wrong”. This is Mendelsohn’s review of the 2008 film of the novel by Julian Jarrold that appeared in the New York Review of Books for 9 October 2008.

–The National Portrait Gallery has announced additional details of next year’s exhibit of the works of Cecil Beaton. This was mentioned in a previous post. The exhibit will be open between 12 March and 7 June in the NPG at St Martins Place, WC1. Here’s a description:

This major new exhibition will explore the extravagant world of the glamorous and stylish ‘Bright Young Things’ of the twenties and thirties, seen through the eye of renowned British photographer Cecil Beaton.  It will bring to life a deliriously eccentric, glamorous and creative era of British cultural life, combining High Society and the avant-garde, artists and writers, socialites and partygoers.

Featuring the leading cast of the ‘Bright Young Things’, many of whom Beaton would call friends – Anna May Wong, Oliver Messel and Stephen Tennant among others, this show will chart Beaton’s transformation from middle-class surburban schoolboy to glittering society figure and the unrivalled star of Vogue. In addition to Beaton’s own portraits, the exhibition will also feature paintings by friends and artists including Rex Whistler, Henry Lamb, and Augustus John.

Further details regarding booking and related matters are available here.

–The New Criterion in its current issue carries a report of the opening of a new chapel at Hillsdale College in Michigan. From the accompanying photograph, this looks like an 18th century classical style (possibly Georgian) and is certainly proclaiming its distinction from the architecture of most contemporary academic institutions.

The chastely sumptuous, classically inflected structure occupies a prominent spot on the college’s central quad. It is, the college reports, the largest classical chapel built in America in seventy years. It must also be the most beautiful.

After several paragraphs proclaiming how the college’s construction of a chapel in this style demonstrates its adherence to the New Criterion’s conservative principles, the article offers a quotation from Evelyn Waugh:

We are living with a crisis of values that amounts in the end to a crisis of faith. There are many sides to this crisis, and a long history. […] The problem is not just around us: it is potentially within us as well. As Evelyn Waugh noted,

“barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment, however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on.”

The quote comes from Waugh’s book Robbery Under Law (London: 1939, p. 279).

 

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Samuel Hynes (1924-2019) R.I.P.

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Another veteran American literary scholar and critic died earlier this month at Princeton . This was Samuel Hynes, WWII veteran fighter pilot and retired Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. He was 95. His best known critical work was a trilogy covering British literature bewteen the Edwardian era and the beginning of WWII. The third volume of that work was entitled The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (1977).

Hynes begins his book with a consideration of The Waste Land as a defining book for Auden’s (and Waugh’s) generation. These were the writers who began their careers in the late ’20s-early ’30s.  Vile Bodies was another defining work that period.  As part of that discussion Hynes brings in the scene in Brideshead where Anthony Blanche declaims Eliot’s poem from a Christ Church balcony. While Hynes doesn’t mention Waugh’s use of the poem as the title for his fourth novel, A Handful of Dust, he does compare several passages of Vile Bodies to The Waste Land:

…Vile Bodies is a London novel only in the sense that The Waste Land is a London poem; the city itself is an Unreal City, a fantasy of modern life lived in the absence of values. […] the world of Vile Bodies is a Waste Land, only it is a Waste Land inhabited mainly by Bright Young People. […] The word that the Bright Young People use again and again [to describe] the condition in  their lives is “bogus”. […] Bogusness […] is not a simple expression of cynicism. It is a generation’s judgment of a world emptied of significance, and a sign of their ‘almost fatal hunger for permanence’. As in Eliot, the emptiness of modern existence is ironically under-scored by reference to magnificent visions of the past. (pp. 57-59)

Hynes is also impressed that “Waugh was the first English novelist to see his own time as a period entre deux guerres.”  (p. 60) The past war is described in photos of its participants displayed on the walls of Lottie Crump’s hotel, Adam Symes’ witnessing of an Armistice Day observation on his way to Marylebone Station, and the description of the guests’ attire at Lady Anchorage’s party. The next war is foreseen in Fr Rothschild’s discussion of the meaning of history with Prime Minister Outrage and, of course, in the book’s last chapter. Hynes concludes the “interwar” discussion with this:

Waugh’s novel stands, in many important way, as a precursor of later writing of the decade: in its prophecy of war, in its consciousness of the separateness of the younger generation, in its contemptuous hostility to the politics of the establishment, in its irony, in its bitter, farcical wit, and perhaps most importantly in the way Waugh has gone beyond probability and beyond realism to build a parabolic world, a comical Unreal City of sad, yearning Bright Young People. (p. 63)

Later in his book Hynes takes up travel writing of the ’30s in which writers “turned their travels into interior journeys and parables of their times, making landscape and incident–the factual narrative of reportage–do the work of symbol and myth–the materials of fable.” (p. 228) As examples of this he cites, inter alia, Waugh in Abyssinia and Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps. He goes on to cite Waugh’s earlier travel books as “witty” and “popular” but distinguishes them from the more “striking” books of the later years of the decade that included Waugh in Abyssinia, a little-read book that is frequently dismissed by Waugh’s other critics.

According to Hynes’s obituary in the New York Times:

Enraptured by airplanes from childhood, Professor Hynes flew 78 combat missions over the Pacific. He once described flying as “a life, like a sex life, that no normal guy would give up if he didn’t absolutely have to.” But the dozens of books he wrote, contributed to and edited were not all drenched in blood and guts. Among the more composed were his dissections of Thomas Hardy’s poetry, Edwardian novels and the work of W.H. Auden and his contemporaries.

 

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The Write Stuff: Waugh Episode

Posted on October 29, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 4 will later this week rebroadcast a 2000 episode of the long-running literary panel series The Write Stuff. The program will be devoted to the life and works of Evelyn Waugh. As described on its Wikipedia page:

Each week, the programme has an “Author of the Week” […] Each programme begins with the panellists reading favourite extracts from the author’s writing, and the first round is a series of questions about the author’s life and works. The programme normally ends with panellists having to write a pastiche (or parody; the programme uses the terms interchangeably) based on that week’s author of the week. Walton [the presenter] describes these as ‘the most popular bit of the programme’ Walton sets a topic that would be so out of style of the author in question that a pastiche would be humorous. For example, when Robert Burns was the author of the week, contestants were asked to write a poem, in the style of Burns, celebrating something typically English; when Philip Roth was the author of the week, contestants were asked how he might have written a children’s story. Faulks has published a collection of his parodies as a book, Pistache.

The Waugh episode was originally broadcast on 4 June 2000 in Series 3, episode 6. In this episode, the presenter, James Walton and regular team captains, novelist Sebastian Faulks and journalist John Walsh, were joined as panelists by actress Imogen Stubbs and novelist Louise Doughty. The episode will be broadcast this Thursday (31 October 2019) at o900 on BBC Radio 4 Extra. It will be available worldwide on the internet thereafter.

Over the years, other writers of Waugh’s generation who were discussed in the series included Nancy Mitford, Graham Greene, John Betjeman, Ian Fleming and P G Wodehouse. The episode relating to Kingsley Amis, which was also broadcast in 2000, is currently available on the internet. A complete list of episodes, including details such as subjects and panel members, is available on Wikipedia.

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Waugh’s Birthday Roundup

Posted on October 28, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh was born on this date in 1903. This is the 116th anniversary of that event.

–The Oxford English Dictionary has declared today’s Word of the Day to be “Brideshead, adj.” While they do not mention the birthday anniversary specifically in their notice, it cannot be a coincidence that this date was chosen for that word. Here’s the OED etymology:

[‘Reminiscent of the style, characters, plot, etc., of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), which depicts the lives of an aristocratic English family in the early 20th century; (more generally) of or relating to the world of the decadent English upper classes of this period.’]
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈbrʌÉȘdzhɛd/, U.S. /ˈbraÉȘdzˌ(h)ɛd/
Origin: From a proper name. Etymon: proper name Brideshead.
Etymology: < Brideshead, the name of a fictional castle in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), which was the basis of a popular television adaptation in 1981.
Reminiscent of the style, characters, plot, etc., of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), which depicts the lives of an aristocratic English family in the early 20th century; (more generally) of or relating to the world of the decadent English upper classes of this period.
1961 Financial Times 12 June 18/2 A simple anecdotal narrative, yet it bears the Brideshead stamp clearly enough.
1978 Daily Mail 13 June 19 A mis-spent year at Christ Church, Oxford, spent roistering in ‘Brideshead’ style.
1986 Guardian(Nexis) 8 Aug. The elitism, the class-based superiority, the seductive image of Brideshead decadence beloved of the media.
2018 New European(Nexis) 14 Mar. 21 As a student at Oxford University I had a brief flirtation with the romantic Brideshead myth of ‘Englishness’.

Thanks to reader Dave Lull for sending this link.

–Another reader, Bruce Gaston, who teaches at the University of Heidelberg in Germany has sent a link to his 2016 article entitled “‘But that’s not what it was built for’: The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work” which is now available online. The article first appeared in the journal AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2016), pp. 23-48, published in TĂŒbingen. Here’s the abstract:

Architecture is everywhere in Evelyn Waugh’s works, but critical analysis has concentrated on his depictions of country houses, which it usually views from an antiquarian and aesthetic perspective. Although this approach is understandable in an age when sightseers troop around stately homes, it is both anachronistic and limiting. In fact, a desire to preserve buildings just because they are old is a modern phenomenon. Starting from an investigation of Waugh’s use of the term architecture, this article offers an alternative way of reading not only the canonical texts such as Brideshead Revisited but also less well-known parts of Waugh’s oeuvre. It shows how Waugh’s views of architecture were formed and informed by the classical architectural theories which underpinned Palladianism and specifically by the Roman architect and writer Vitruvius’s trinity of values: durability, utility and beauty. Taken together, these criteria enable Waugh to explore the experience of architecture in its totality. One should stress the term experience, for if any definite verdict on architectural value is possible, then it is not a building’s artistic merit that matters but its suitability for fulfilling its original function.

The article is now posted on JSTOR at this link. You may require a subscription to read the full text but many public libraries now provide access. Thanks to Bruce for sending the link.

–Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux was recently interviewed about his new book.  This is entitled On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican journey. One of the questions asked him to compare his description of Mexico to those of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh:

Q. Loads of journey writers and top-shelf novelists have frolicked in Mexico. However in much of this writing, in Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh, it looks like they go there to be contemptuous of it. Is that one thing you needed to contrast?

A. Precisely. Graham Greene was there for less than six weeks. And he hated it. He wrote an excellent novel about it, The Power and the Glory. However his journey book is ridiculous. Evelyn Waugh’s? Identical. […] You write to amuse, to mock the natives. I used to spend a lot of time trying to destroy that stereotype. The more I’ve travelled, the more I’ve realized how small I am, how huge the world is and how I am unimportant. A journey book needs to be about different folks and their tales. My tales don’t matter.

This article appears to have been translated from a non-English publication. For example, Graham Greene’s novel noted in the above quote was entitled “The Energy and the Glory“). Some edits have therefore been added where the posted version was obviously garbled. The article is posted on a website called Fooshya.com. It may have originated in the Toronto Globe and Mail but is not cited to that source. That interview is behind a paywall, however. Anyone having access to the Globe and Mail interview is invited to comment below as to the comparison of their article to the one in Fooshya.com.

–Finally, a news website called Truthdig.com has posted a recent review of Philip Eade’s biography of Evelyn Waugh that was published in 2016. This is written by Art Barra and begins with a reference to Waugh’s reputation:

… In a famous 1944 piece, Edmund Wilson, who surely despised every social value that Waugh stood for, called him “The only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw.” Jean-Paul Sartre, of all people, praised Waugh as one of the progenitors of “the anti-novel.” Clive James, the greatest critic of our own time, thinks him “the supreme writer of English prose in the 20th century”—even though “so many of the wrong people said so,” by which, presumably, he meant cultural conservatives who thought that Waugh’s politics kept him from winning the Nobel Prize. Perhaps, but Waugh has continued to be read while the work of many a Nobel Prize winner has faded into the twilight realm of the praised but unread.

Barra then summarizes Eade’s book, adding some some comments and observations of his own. Some of these are quite interesting but they occasionally go astray. He suggests at one point that Waugh went to Eton but in the next line quotes some references to his time at Lancing, noting the school correctly. In another example he misscites a source :

If you want to cut Waugh some slack for getting good reviews as a parent from some of his children, you must counter it with a comment by Arthur Waugh in a letter to Evelyn’s brother, Alec, after Evelyn and his wife, Laura, lost a baby girl shortly after the child’s birth: “She wasn’t wanted and she did not stay.”

According to Eade’s account (p. 225) that remark was made in a letter Arthur wrote to Joan Waugh (Alec’s wife). This was quite similar to the message Evelyn himself wrote to his own wife on the occasion of the child’s death, as quoted in Eade’s text just below the quote from Arthur’s letter. Why quote Arthur to make this point when one could have quoted Evelyn directly?

The review concludes with this:

Eade writes, “This is not a ‘critical’ biography in the sense that it does not seek to reassess Evelyn Waugh’s achievements as a writer. 
” That’s a shame. I could have done with fewer stories of Lady Pansy Pakenham, Pixie Marix and Godfrey Wildman-Lushington. The anecdotes are amusing, but would count for nothing if Waugh hadn’t been a great writer. I still long for more insights into his work, especially “A Handful of Dust and Scoop.” Luckily for Waugh, his novels will probably outlive his biographies.

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Three French Aesthetes and Rex’s Tortoise

Posted on October 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times newspaper chooses a new book by novelist Julian Barnes as its “Book of the Week.” This is entitled The Man in the Red Coat and is a non-fiction account of three eccentric Frenchmen travelling in late Victorian Britain. The review by Sue Prideaux introduces them as:

… a prince, a count and a celebrity gynaecologist — [who] travelled to England for some “intellectual and decorative shopping”. […] Barnes in this digressive, wandering book […] finds much to admire — in the intellectual inquisitiveness, the creativity, its Europeaness.

It is the count, Robert de Montesquiou, who will be of primary interest to our readers. According to Prideaux:

A tortoise reputedly roamed Montesquiou’s flat, its shell gilded and studded with jewels. It died pretty quickly, for beauty, an exit that many decadents of the time recommended, beauty being the only thing worth dying for, although few followed their own advice. Montesquiou’s pet, incidentally, lives on in the diamond-studded tortoise that Rex gives Julia in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, where Jill Masterson doesn’t long survive being covered in gold paint.

Reading this book is like re-spooling Andy Warhol, or reading Nicholas Coleridge’s recently published The Glossy Years [see previous post] (Barnes was once Tatler’s restaurant critic). It’s top international tittle-tattle, awash with cantankerous snobbishness, reminding you that high society is always a pretty small fishpond whose fish sparkle as brightly as the jewelled shell of today’s tortoise — until tomorrow’s flashier reptile comes along.

It is not clear from the Times whether it is Prideaux or Barnes who makes the connections between the count’s tortoise and both Rex’s tortoise and Jill Masterson. Rex seems to be getting copious attention in the press these days, so the connection may come from the review rather than Barnes’s book. This would also seem to create a connection between Rex himself and Auric Goldfinger who share an admiration for cruelly decorated creatures.

After continuing through an account of the other two Frenchmen (especially the gynaecologist), the review closes with the conclusion that Barnes’s

sparkling and very enjoyable book has a serious subtext; no borders should be erected that hinder the flow of knowledge and ideas. Art and science are best served if we are free to travel the whole world to do our intellectual and decorative shopping.

Barnes’s book will be released in the UK on 7 November and will be published early next year in the USA.

 

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Mottramism (More)

Posted on October 21, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A reader has sent a link to an article posted by The American Conservative magazine. This is written by one of its senior editors Rod Dreher who both traces the origin of the term “Mottramism” as applied in the Roman Catholic context and extends its applicability to American politics. See previous posts. The article is entitled “#MAGA Mottramism”. The source of the original term dates back to a  c. 2002 reference in an article by

 …Canadian Catholic writer Mark Cameron [using] the term “Mottramism” to describe all-in Catholics like the writer Mark Shea, who fell all over themselves to absolve John Paul II of any fault whatsoever in the Catholic abuse scandal.

The application of the term to today’s US politics hardly needs explanation, but anyone wishing to see one should read Dreher’s article. One should bear in mind in doing so that it is written by a journalist well known for his conservative political views and appears in a journal that was founded to allow the presentation of such views even where they differed from those of a prevailing administration claiming to be guided by conservative principles.

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending the link.

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Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Mottramism (More)

Roundup

Posted on October 20, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Middle East and North African Financial News (posting as MENAFN) has a story that explains how the end of empire led to rising inequality in Britain that helped the Leave campaign to prevail in the Brexit vote. Among the many factors marshalled to support the argument, MENAFN offers this:

The fall in the fortunes of the very wealthiest had actually begun […], after the end of World War I. As the author Evelyn Waugh wrote in Brideshead Revisited, of the fictional Marchmain and Flyte families [sic]: ‘Well they are rich in the way people are who just let their money sit quiet. Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914.’

That is the parvenu businessman and politician Rex Mottram speaking. It’s hard to say which side he himself would have backed; probably both.

–Joseph Pearce, editor and journalist, had announced that the next issue of his literary journal the St Austin Review “will be on the theme of ‘Brideshead and Beyond: The Genius of Evelyn Waugh’”. This will presumably be the November/December issue of the review which is published by the St Augustine’s Press.

–The University of Colorado has posted the details of its graduate level course ENGL 5059: British Literature and Culture after 1800. Section 002 of the course is devoted to “Modernism in Britain” and the syllabus includes several 20th Century novels. That one of them included is a novel by Waugh is not in itself surprising, but that the one selected is Black Mischief is rather out of the ordinary. The reading list includes several other relatively neglected works:  Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier); Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day); Elspeth Huxley (Red Strangers), and Mulk Raj Anand (Coolie) as well as several familiar ones. The course is taught by Dr Janice Ho.

–A blogger on the website site denominated HoleOusia.com has posted an illustrated article devoted to the life of Evelyn Waugh’s friend Alastair Graham. This is entitled Love Among the Ruins although it has nothing to do with that novella. Most of the quotes and photographs will be familiar to readers of Waugh’s biographies and Duncan Fallowell’s How to Disappear: A: Memoir for Misfits (2011) as well as viewers of Duncan McLaren’s website. There is a photo of Graham’s house in New Quay that I did not recall seeing before. The blogger (Peter J Gordon) also makes the interesting point that Graham was depicted in the works of both Waugh and Dylan Thomas and quotes liberally from both versions. At the end of the posting, there is a video entitled “Quomodo sedet solo civitas” (“How lonely sits the city”) accompanied by music, photos and text. The biblical quotation is repeated several times in Brideshead Revisited in different contexts. See related post.

In a previous post (“A Life Revisited”) on the same site, there are several extracts from and references to Philip Eade’s biography. There is also a page from an unidentified magazine article (apparently entitled “Waugh and peace”) displaying a Waugh family photo by Mark Gerson not previously seen by me.

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Posted in Academia, Black Mischief, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Roundup