Early June Roundup

Posted on June 5, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New Statesman reports the confused results of the controversial Oxford Union appearance of Prof. Kathleen Stock, described as a “gender-critical feminist philosopher”. After the Union invited her to speak, a protest arose against her appearance as being unfair to the rights of trans gender people. After much debate on the debate, that included the Prime Minister (who urged she be allowed to appear), the Union proceeded with the project. Protesters against gathered at the Oxford Union on the day, and admission to the debate was monitored by security forces. The story in the New Statesman by Will Lloyd describes the event in some detail. After one of the protesters self-glued him/herself to the floor and others were removed, the somewhat subdued debate proceeded. According to Lloyd:

Stock said she didn’t mind the protest. She said that it was possible (still) to disagree reasonably with each other and remain friends. “They want me to be evil,” she said. “They want a baddie. I’m afraid I am a very shit baddie.” Before she disappeared in a scrum of security guards, she warned against institutions becoming “propaganda machines”. Wasn’t that what they always had been though? Perhaps this was one of those sticky moments when the values being propogandised by places like Oxford were shifting. From the “effortless superiority” of “Balliol men” to the “No dead trans kids” placards of Balliol they/thems.

This was the other side of Oxford. Yes, it had been the “anvil” that [Jan] Morris wrote about, where national consensus was forged. But there was also the Oxford that inspired fantasies. The secret nonsensical garden worlds of Lewis Carroll. The heady wonderlands of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and Evelyn Waugh. “We’re all mad here,” the Cheshire cat says at one point. Sometimes, as events at the union yesterday proved, the line between Oxford politics and Oxford fantasy blur…

One disturbing message in the article is that the protest (prefiguring others in the future) may threaten the continued existence of the Oxford Union. Waugh would not be pleased with that result.

–More information is posted on the Dutch-language stage production of Brideshead Revisited, scheduled to open on Monday. This is presented as part of this year’s Holland Festival in Amsterdam:

Though this masterpiece enjoyed cult status among queers and conservatives alike in the last century, nowadays this novel seems consigned to obscurity. While this is perhaps the most romantic and Anglophile book that literature has ever yielded….

Trapped in a bitter worldview himself, for Evelyn Waugh writing this novel was an attempt to recover the happiness of his younger years. Inspired by this soul-searching, De Warm Winkel exploits Brideshead Revisited as a vehicle for an autopsy of love and an unfolding of our (sexual) identity. With live music composed by Rik Elstgeest and the memories and fantasies of Florian and Abke as the beating heart, they finally resuscitate the epic love story Waugh so longed for.

Details of venue and booking are available at this link.

–The Daily Telegraph in a recent “Peterborough” column refers to life peer and Labour frontbencher Lord Ponsonby:

…Ponsonby’s coat of arms carries the words Pro Rege, Lege, Grege (For the King, the Law, and the People).

In a Lord’s debate, the peer admitted he was not always terribly good at the Lege bit. “I was stopped more times than I can remember by the police in Notting Hill and expect my experience with the police force 50 years ago was very different from the one displayed in Dixon of Dock Green,” he said.

Ponsonby was maintaining a family tradition. His grandfather, the 2nd baron, was arrested in 1925 when he and his friend Evelyn Waugh drove the wrong way down London’s Oxford Street while on a pub crawl. Lege-breaking must run in the family.

The article is headed “‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, Lord Ponsonby.”

–The journal Chronicles: An American Magazine of Culture includes in its latest issue “A Letter from Australia”. It is written by R G Stove and opens with this:

In 1956, Anthony Eden found himself graced with the porcine presence of the visiting Nikita Khrushchev. Many hoped that Evelyn Waugh—who, after all, had subjected Marshal Tito to one of the most murderous philippics that 20th-century English literature can boast—would unleash similar invective against the Soviet Union’s strongman. Waugh rejected all newspaper entreaties to unleash it. He justified his refusal by emphasizing an obvious difference between Tito and Khrushchev: that whereas the former hypocritically pretended to be a gallant ally of the West, the latter pretended no such thing. As Waugh himself put it: “There [is] nothing unchivalrous about dining with open enemies.”

So should Australian conservatives, if they have any sense, judge the prime ministerial tenure of Anthony Albanese, as the first anniversary of his May 21 electoral victory approaches. He has never presumed to think like a conservative or to talk like one. What conceivable purpose would be served by denouncing him for not being Germany’s Konrad Adenauer or Italy’s Alcide De Gasperi?…

 

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Memorial Day/Spring Bank Holiday Roundup

Posted on May 27, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Spectator has posted a memorial tribute to its recently deceased columnist Jeremy Clarke. This is by David Goodhart who writes that he gave Clarke his start as a journalist. Clarke’s longest and best known gig was the Low-Life column in the Spectator which he took over from Jeffrey Bernard. Here’s an excerpt from Goodhart’s tribute:

…a favourite English teacher, a raffish ex-journalist, happened to be standing behind Clarke as he was surveying the library books. The teacher plucked out a volume and said to Jeremy: ‘Read this.’ It was Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. And so began a lifelong love of Waugh and English satirical fiction and a determination to become a writer.

Just a few weeks ago, as he lay on his bed in the upstairs room of his home in Cotignac, looking out on to the blue skies of Provence and the Massif des Maures mountains, he returned to Waugh, watching YouTube videos of his literary mentor interviewed by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Their clipped upper-class accents contrasted with his own Essex twang and, as he always insisted, lower-middle-class upbringing. His father John was a bank clerk turned sales rep and heavy drinker; his mother Audrey, with whom he always remained close, a nurse and devout Christian.

After Jeremy was seduced, aged 17, by Waugh’s silky, sardonic prose, he adopted a kind of restless double life that lasted a couple of decades. He took odd jobs often inspired by the literature he was reading – factory jobs (Steinbeck), assistant in a mental hospital (Kesey). His affable manner helped him fit in everywhere, but he rarely let on that he went home after his shift to immerse himself in literary novels, lest he be considered soft.

A notice in the Daily Telegraph adds this:

… it was Evelyn Waugh who inspired his quixotic application to read English Literature at Waugh’s Oxford college, Hertford, after taking A-levels at night school. When that failed, he gained entrance to SOAS in London to read African studies.

Among other things, Clarke wrote travel pieces probably inspired by an extended trip to central Africa described by Goodhart. He was never able to put together a full length book, however. The full Spectator article is worth reading and is available at this link.

—The Washington Post does a literary analysis of the HBO Succession series before the start of the last season. Here’s an excerpt:

In the end, … perhaps the show’s most enduring literary legacy will be the one we are quickest to laugh off: its astonishing art of invective. Anybody can insult anybody, but it takes a certain kind of genius to hone insult into poetry, and nowhere has that genius been better cultivated than in Great Britain — a lineage that includes the late Martin Amis on “Don Quixote” (“an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative”), Virginia Woolf on E.M. Forster (“limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow”), Evelyn Waugh on his 6-year-old son (“I have tried him drunk & I have tried him sober”) and that master of all registers Shakespeare (“I do desire we may be better strangers”).

Small wonder that the creator and many of the writers of “Succession” are British. But what gives their work its special zest is how deftly they harness both Anglo-Saxon obscenity and American idiom to create a distinctly mid-Atlantic vituperation. Logan to his chief financial officer: “Karl, if your hands are clean, it’s only because your whorehouse also does manicures.” Shiv, catching a whiff of her little brother’s fragrance: “Oh, what is that? Date Rape by Calvin Klein?” Logan’s disaffected brother, upon learning there will be a Logan Roy School of Journalism: “What’s next? The Jack the Ripper Women’s Health Clinic?”

–There have been several follow up stories on Martin Amis after his death last week. Here is the opening of an obituary of Martin Amis by Mathew Walther in the Roman Catholic journal The Lamp:

“Among living writers of English prose there are few who attempt magnificence.” When Evelyn Waugh pronounced this severe sentence upon his contemporaries in 1955, he admitted only two exceptions: Sir Osbert Sitwell, whose delightful memoirs are almost entirely forgotten, and, perhaps more surprisingly, Winston Churchill, who even now enjoys a wide and devoted following among a certain kind of older male reader whose other interests include submarine warfare and reviews (consulted aspirationally) of very expensive cigars.

Waugh did not define the quality whose absence he lamented, but by “magnificence” he seems to have meant the prose of the eighteenth-century: stately periodic sentences set to Handel-like rhythms, decorous semicolons, and occasional dashes leaping across the page like a fox driven to hounds.

Martin Amis, who died on Friday at the age of seventy-three, did not aspire to magnificence in the Wauvian sense. But he almost certainly would have recognized what Waugh meant when he said that in his own age “elegance tends to be more modest.” Unlike many of his contemporaries, especially in America, Amis aspired to—and, I think, ultimately achieved—what Waugh had proposed as a universal ideal for writers: the dutiful cultivation of a highly individual and readily identifiable style…

–Dr James Alexander in The Daily Sceptic opened his obituary with this:

Martin Amis is one of the two classic ‘nepo babies’ of the English literature of the 20th Century. As everyone knows, Evelyn begat Auberon, and Kingsley begat Martin. And what was remarkable is how both the Waugh and Amis sons admired their fathers, and, to some extent, imitated them. I spent this morning looking through about twenty of Martin’s books and saw nothing so clearly as that the novels of Amis fils now remind me of those of Amis pùre: not in what was perhaps most characteristic of Martin: the turbo-charged and exuberant scabrousness of his whimsical version of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism; but certainly in the sentiment, situation and relentless humour, also the attention to language, and, finally, in the occasional intrusion of weighty themes – admittedly more weighty in the case of Martin than in the case of Kingsley.

Now, in this pantheon of great literary fathers and sons I have to say that I rate Martin the lowest. Evelyn Waugh was unparalleled: there is nothing like any of his early novels; and nothing like what is possibly his best single bit of writing, the long opening musing – essentially autobiographical, despite what he said – of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Auberon rather failed as a novelist in the 1960s, being out of time: but imposed his sense of absurdity more closely on his time, especially in the famous Private Eye diaries in the 1970s, but also in his journalism, where he was a rare case of someone who was able to express serious thought in amusing terms. (Consider Heath in drag; working-class children being supposed to eat lumps of coals, fish fingers and dogdirt; politics identified as a form of displaced psycho-sexual depravity.) Kingsley, of course, made his name with Lucky Jim: which bewildered Waugh as much as Decline and Fall had bewildered G.K. Chesterton. Such was the change in the sense of humour across the generations. But Kingsley wandered closer to his characters than Waugh (or drank with them); and there was more affection, more sentiment, less spite. I think Stanley and the Women was an achievement; not, as Martin thought, a stain. But the Amises both wrote much about cock anxiety, a subject avoided by the Waughs. Martin inherited the humour of his father, the language, and the sentiment: and added to it, as I say, scabrousness and, perhaps, a European or American taste for occasional experiment…

–Finally, here’s an excerpt from one in The Times by James Marriott entitled “Snobs like Martin Amis do society a valuable service”:

…Such was the vehemence of his campaign against mediocrity that he came to believe his intolerance of stupidity amounted to a mental disorder, a kind of “dementia”. A whole vicious and despairing tradition of English satire, from Alexander Pope to Evelyn Waugh, is founded on the fear that the forces of idiocy are overwhelming the fragile bastions of culture and good sense. Such elitism is eminently capable of being mad and unpleasant. It is very often wrongheaded…

Snobs are rarely nice people. The role requires a certain arrogance and in some cases a positively psychopathic indifference to public opinion. Waugh was not a pleasant man. Neither was Flaubert. Amis’s own life was hardly an essay in intellectual humility and sexual continence. His hostility to Islam in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings was deplorable. But in a week of headlines about Phillip Schofield, and the death of Rolf Harris, we might also recall that there is often something sinister about the light entertainer…

 

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Sherborne School Posts Record of Waugh’s Wartime Residence

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The Sherborne School and the Old Shirburnian Society have posted a detailed and annotated account of Waugh’s six month residence at the school while stationed there in the Army: 5 October 1942-12 April 1943. This was a little over a year after his return from Crete during which he was posted from one training course to another. Here’s the introduction (footnotes omitted):

On the 5 October 1942 Captain Evelyn Waugh arrived in Sherborne having been sent ahead by Colonel Laycock to prepare for the relocation of the Special Service Brigade (Commandos) Headquarters to Sherborne Castle.  Evelyn remained in Sherborne for the next six months until the 12 April 1943, a time revealed in his diaries and letters – and possibly also in his novel Brideshead Revisited.

The Waugh family and Sherborne had history. Evelyn Waugh was well-aware of this when he arrived in Sherborne in October 1942. Evelyn’s father, the publisher Arthur Waugh (1866-1943), had attended Sherborne School (School House) from 1879 to 1885 and, after the birth of his sons Alec and Evelyn, decided ‘there could be no pleasanter prospect than to see our sons at my old school, in my old house, and, as seemed likely, doing the things that I would have given my soul to do some 30 years before.’

Throughout their childhood Alec and Evelyn Waugh knew they were destined to follow their father to the hallowed grounds of Sherborne School. Alec, who was five years older than Evelyn, came to Sherborne School in 1911 and joined his father’s old house (School House), with Evelyn down to follow in September 1917.  Alec’s time at Sherborne School allowed Arthur Waugh to re-live his own very happy schooldays, coming down most weekends to stay at the Digby Hotel to watch Alec play cricket or rugby or to visit his former school masters.

But Evelyn’s fate never to follow his father and brother to Sherborne School was sealed on the 19 July 1917 with the publication of Alec’s semi-autobiographical novel The Loom of Youth. The novel was perceived at Sherborne as being critical of the School and resulted in the Old Shirburnian Society, in a fit of righteous indignation, officially removing Alec’s name from their roll and Arthur Waugh resigning from the Society in protest. Although Alec and his father were reinstated into the Old Shirburnian Society in 1933, 25 years after the publication of The Loom of Youth Evelyn was still keenly aware that he and his family had been snubbed by Sherborne School.

The posted account identifies the lodgings Waugh occupied and several non-military events he attended while stationed at the school. He was billeted there for most of the stay at a sort of lodging house called Westbridge House which had a somewhat eccentric landlady whose relations with Waugh and fellow officer, Basil Bennett, who also lived there, are the subject of some of the comments. Waugh wrote several letters to his father while stationed at Sherborne, only one of which apparently survived and which is cited in the school’s archive (footnotes omitted):

Although only one letter written by Evelyn to his father from Sherborne survives, Arthur Waugh’s diaries reveal that Evelyn wrote him several letters during this time. On the 12 December 1942, Arthur writes that he has received a letter from Evelyn offering to send them a turkey for Christmas and mentioning a visit he had made to Arthur’s recently widowed friend Littleton Powys (1874-1955) at his home Priestlands Cottage in Sherborne. When the author Elizabeth Myers (1912-1947) wrote to Littleton Powys on the 14 December 1942 she mentioned that Arthur had read this letter to her. Arthur’s diaries also reveal that Evelyn met Littleton Powys on at least three occasions during his time in Sherborne, and that on Christmas eve Littleton had shown Evelyn around Sherborne School.

At a time when wartime rationing would have meant a meagre Christmas for Arthur and his wife, on the 18 December 1942 Evelyn sent his parents two dozen half bottles of white Burgundy and on the 23 December Evelyn’s batman arrived from Sherborne with a small goose. Alec later described this incident as a ‘highly irregular operation which touched my father as much as the goose delighted him.’ On Christmas Day, Arthur and his wife dined on Evelyn’s goose followed by plum pudding and, no doubt, a glass of Evelyn’s white Burgundy!

Several of Waugh’s letters to his wife written during this sojourn have been published, but they make little comment on the incidents described in the Sherborne archive. The file also contains several photographs illustrating some of the sites and events Waugh visited during his stay. The school and society are to be congratulated for preparing this document and posting it for public access. It can be read at this link.

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Martin Amis R. I. P. (1949-2023)

Posted on May 21, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist and critic Martin Amis has died at the age of 73. Dwight Garner, a book critic of the New York Times, opens that paper’s obituary with this:

Martin Amis, whose caustic, erudite and bleakly comic novels redefined British fiction in the 1980s and ’90s with their sharp appraisal of tabloid culture and consumer excess, and whose private life made him tabloid fodder himself, died on Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Fla. He was 73.

His wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, said the cause was esophageal cancer — the same disease that killed his close friend and fellow writer Christopher Hitchens in 2011.

Mr. Amis published 15 novels, a well-regarded memoir (“Experience,” in 2000), works of nonfiction, and collections of essays and short stories. In his later work he investigated Stalin’s atrocities, the war on terror and the legacy of the Holocaust.

He is best known for his so-called London trilogy of novels — “Money: A Suicide Note” (1985), “London Fields” (1990) and “The Information” (1995) — which remain, along with his memoir, his most representative and admired work.

The tone of these novels was bright, bristling and profane. “What I’ve tried to do is to create a high style to describe low things: the whole world of fast food, sex shows, nude mags,” Mr. Amis told The New York Times Book Review in a 1985 interview. “I’m often accused of concentrating on the pungent, rebarbative side of life in my books, but I feel I’m rather sentimental about it. Anyone who reads the tabloid papers will rub up against much greater horrors than I describe.”

Mr. Amis’s literary heroes — he called them his “Twin Peaks” — were Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, and critics located in his work both Nabokov’s gift for wordplay and gamesmanship and Bellow’s exuberance and brio…

He moved to the US in 2011 settling in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn with his wife and children:

In America, he was happy to escape what he called “the cruising hostility” of the English press. He became an almost avuncular figure in Brooklyn, regularly seen walking his daughters to school. No longer the upstart, Mr. Amis himself inspired a younger generation of writers, including Zadie Smith and Will Self…

The obituary concludes:

…Mortality was long a theme in Mr. Amis’s work. In “The Information,” he wrote: “Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its humorless own arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.

He might have been speaking of himself in that novel when he wrote of one of its dueling writers: “He didn’t want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.”

This comment was also posted by the NYTimes following the obituary. It was submitted by Susan Fitzwater:

It must be dreadful, being the son of a celebrated father. A man who writes books. When you dream of writing them yourself. My acquaintance with the Amis’s is confined to–“Lucky Jim.” Which came out–when? Early ’50’s, I think–around seventy years ago. (The notorious Senator McCarthy is alluded to briefly. He bothered the Brits as much as he bothered us.) Compare that book with those of Evelyn Waugh. A man no less sensitive to the buffooneries of British life! the louts–the lovers–the ne’er-do-wells! The difference is– –Waugh looks down upon all this from an aristocratic standpoint. A bit cold, detached– –and we’re a million miles from the world of “Lucky Jim.” An excruciatingly funny book! And I gather this comic genius– –was passed on to his son. In spades.

Another obituary posted at London-based news website Unherd.com was written by Rob Lownie and opens with this:

“If the voice doesn’t work, Martin Amis told the Paris Review in 1998, “you’re screwed.” It’s just as well for the novelist, who has died at the age of 73, that his literary voice did work, so much so that plot, characterisation and moral instruction were all subsumed by the irony and wordplay which guided the reader through his novels.

The obituaries so far have focused on his status as the flagbearer of a dying breed of literary personalities. He was an enfant terrible; he was a literary rock star; he was the book world’s answer to Mick Jagger. And so on. Yet the disproportionate fascination with Amis’s love life and famous friendships obscures his satirical gift: he was the Evelyn Waugh of his own consumerist age, and his brand of literary cynicism is at risk of dying with him.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was quoted in several papers, including the Guardian and The Herald (Glasgow), as having posted this message on his Twitter account

Shocked and sad at the death of Martin Amis – the greatest, darkest, funniest satirist since Evelyn Waugh. If you want cheering up, re-read the tennis match in Money. RIP.

So far as I am aware, Martin Amis never wrote a major piece of criticism or biographical essay devoted to Waugh or his works. In 1981 he wrote a review of a “busty new paperback of Brideshead Revisited.” This would have been a Penguin reissue in connection with the Granada TV series based on that book that was released about then. Amis is not impressed with the book but then, as he notes, ultimately neither was Waugh who initially deemed it his magnum opus then disowned it when he saw how popular it was in America. Martin makes some interesting points on Waugh’s attitude toward middle-class characters such as Rex Mottram and Hooper as well as the unconvincing position of Julia in the final segments. He also sees inconsistencies in the characters of Sebastian and Lord Marchmain. The review concluded

…Waugh wrote Brideshead with great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and a deep conviction of its excellence. Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise. ‘The languor of Youth…How quickly, how irrevocably lost!’ The novel had its origins in this regret, the more keenly and confusedly felt by someone ‘beginning to be old.’ But then all this somehow had to be turned into art, that is where the real trouble started.

The article entitled “The Art of Snobbery” appeared in the Observer (25 October 1981) and was included in Amis’s 2001 collection entitled The War Against ClichĂ©.

UPDATE (22 May 2023): The complete quote of Boris Johnson’s statement was posted and other corrections were made .

 

 

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Roundup (Exhibits and a Lecture)

Posted on May 20, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Historical Association (Richmond & Twickenham Branch) has announced a lecture later this year that may be of interest to our London area readers:

Takes Place: 28th September 2023

Time: 8pm

Venue: Richmond Library Annexe, Quadrant St, Richmond TW9

Description: a fascinating vista of the inter-war period of British Society and the World of Literature

How to book: HA Members attend for free, as do School students; non-members pay ÂŁ2 on the door

Price: £2

Tel: 07958 729526

Email: (click to email)

Organiser: Richard Turk

Lecturer: Mr David Fleming

The subject will be Mr Fleming’s recent book Hellfire: Evelyn Waugh and the Hellfire Club. This has been mentioned in several recent posts and was reviewed in the latest issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

–Meanwhile, our Southern California readers may enjoy this recently-opened exhibit at :

… the Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale, “Grand Views: The Immersive World of Panoramas.” It’s a collaboration of two of L.A.’s quirkier alternative spaces, the hipster Velaslavasay Panorama and the kitsch-positive Forest Lawn Museum. Both institutions have unique connections to the subject matter. Forest Lawn founder Hubert Eaton had an abiding belief in the power of art to draw pre-need customers. He bought a mothballed panorama, Jan Styka’s The Crucifixion, and installed it as a light-and-narration tourist attraction in his Glendale cemetery. […]

Eaton located Styka’s painting, wrapped around a telephone in the basement of the Chicago Civic Opera Company. He bought it for a pittance and had it restored by Styka’s son. Put on display at Forest Lawn, it was billed as America’s largest religious painting. … No sooner had Eaton secured his big picture than he was planning a sequel. A crucifixion is a downer, at odds with Forest Lawn’s sanitized spin on death (satirized in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One). Eaton held a competition for designs for a similarly large painting of the Resurrection, to be shown alternately in the same building…

Even if you can’t schedule a visit to the exhibition, it is worth viewing the review posted on the website Los Angeles County Museum on Fire. The detailed illustrations will be of interest to anyone who has read Waugh’s novella and related essay on Forest Lawn: “Half in Love with Easeful Death” (EAR, 331). The 1952 photo from an unknown source entitled “Dr Hubert Eaton searching for Smiling Christ” is alone worth a look. The article is available at this link. Information regarding location and visiting hours at the museum is available here.

—The Independent newspaper has posted an article on what it considers the best individual episodes of television series. This is explained in the introduction:

Television shows are, inevitably, made up of parts. On the surface, there’s the great, overarching story that begins with the first shot and ends with the last. But, within that narrative, there are small parts: the series, and the episode. It is the smallest of these sub-divisions, the episode, that is most intriguing. A truly brilliant episode can bridge the gap between cinema and TV. It can refine the essence of the best shows into a single, self-contained moment. At its most potent, a perfect episode is like mainlining all the myriad ingredients of prestige television in a single sitting.

The article then chooses the best 50 episodes of all time, and ranking just below the top at No. 6 is the final episode of the 1981 Granada series Brideshead Revisited:

The final episode of Granada TV’s Evelyn Waugh adaptation is by far the most melancholic, and not simply because Laurence Olivier, in his last significant screen role, gives an acting masterclass as his Lord Marchmain lies dying – the dissolute, snobbish marquis making a surprise reconversion to Catholicism. The final 15 minutes set during the Second World War, when the narrator Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) returns to Brideshead with his army squadron, and finds the place that holds so many memories being turned upside down by the troops, makes for a perfect Proustian coda. GG

I would have chosen the first episode. There will never be a better dramatization of interwar Oxford.

—The Herald (Glasgow) has posted an article on Mary Quant. This is in connection with the opening of an exhibit at the Kelingrove Gallery and Museum in Glasgow entitled “Mary Quant: Fashion Revolutionary.” No doubt this is in connection with the celebration of Quant’s centenary year. See previous post. The article seems to be largely based on an interview of Quant’s long-time marketing and communications director Heather Tilbury Phillips. In the course of the article, this appears:

…Tilbury Phillips arrived at Quant’s HQ in Ives Street to take up a post working with Quant’s husband, Alexander Plunkett-Greene, an entrepreneur who came from old money (his family were said to be the inspiration for the Flyte family in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited).

While it is true that one might well find examples of characters based on the Plunket-Greenes in some of Waugh’s novels (especially Vile Bodies), there is little to connect them to the Flytes except for their  Roman Catholicism (at least Olivia Plunket-Greene and possibly her mother Gwen were converts; not sure about other members of the family). For one thing, they lacked a large country house estate such as Brideshead Castle.

–A Christchurch, New Zealand newspaper The Press:Te Matatika asked one of their veteran columnists (Joe Bennett) about his thoughts after several decades of journalism. One response related to memoirs:

“Evelyn Waugh, who’s an idol of mine, said the only time to write an autobiography is when you’ve lost all curiosity about the future. I don’t think I’m quite there but I can see it from here.” Bennett recently turned 66 and he suspects there is nothing much left to surprise him “apart from what are you going to die of?”

–Books blogger zmkc has posted a review of Scott-King’s Modern Europe after seeing a discussion about it in a book Bradbury wrote about Waugh. This may have been Bradbury’s 1964 booklet Evelyn Waugh in the Writers and Critic Series. Here’s her conclusion:

…Bradbury claims the book was written by Waugh after a visit to Spain. To me the country Scott-King is taken to seemed stranger and more remote than Spain could ever feel to a visitor from England. In any case, Waugh is, as always in my view, unable to put a word out of place and full of perceptive melancholy humour and wisdom. No one is a hero, everyone is scrabbling to live in some sort of reasonable comfort, life is consistently absurd and strange. The business of travel – the waiting rooms and so forth – are horrible, people are mysterious, surprising and absurd, confused surrender is the only useful attitude in face of the onrushing tide of life’s events.

I suspect someone could rig up a proposal for an academic thesis on books about innocents abroad, which could include Rates of Exchange, Scott-King’s Modern Europe and the scariest I’ve yet found of the genre – Metropole (or in Hungarian Epepe) by Ferenc Karinthy. If one wanted to, it also wouldn’t be impossible to argue that the story of Scott-King’s Modern Europe has some similarity to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – in both, the main characters are swept from their daily lives to a strange world quite outside their experience and then returned to their normal existences, with no one in their original world being any the wiser…

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending this review. It was inadvertently omitted from the original post.

 

 

 

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Mother’s Day (US) Roundup

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Oldie has posted an article by Mark McGinness to mark the 75th anniversary of the death of Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy on 13 March 1948. In this, he tells the story of her meeting and engagement with Billy Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington and heir of the Duke of Devonshire. This was during the Kennedy family residence in Britain when her father Joe Kennedy was Ambassador. Both families opposed the marriage on religious grounds, and her family returned to the US in 1939. Kathleen arranged to return to England in 1943 with the Red Cross where their marriage plans were concluded. As described by McGinness:

…their wedding, after four long years, was a ten-minute ceremony in redbrick Chelsea Town Hall. While Billy’s parents were present and the Duke of Rutland his best man, Kick only had Joe Junior as a witness. Rose took herself to hospital with a nervous collapse. Evelyn Waugh, one of Kick’s admirers from a wider circle, warned her she would go to hell (using her plight for Julia Flyte falling in love with Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited).

McGinness goes on to describe Billy’s death in action in Belgium a few month’s later and Kick’s acceptance by Billy’s family (which now included Deborah Mitford who had married the new heir).

She chose not to return home but sought the sort of role in British life she might have had; establishing a conservative salon in a townhouse just behind the Houses of Parliament. Evelyn Waugh jested that she was in love with him. As Kennedy scholar, Barbara Leaming, put it in her biography Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter (2016), ‘Waugh was partly right. Kick had fallen in love – with the world of Westminster.’

The article concludes with a description of her plans for a second marriage to another English aristocrat (also Protestant and, worse yet, married) but they died in an air crash on the way to meet her father in France to discuss the marriage.

—The Spectator has been running a series of articles describing the attractions to be found in the areas encompassed by London’s various postal codes. The final entry discusses London WC but does not distinguish between WC1 and WC2:

Our journey around London’s postcode areas has reached its final destination: WC. One of Evelyn Waugh’s female friends always insisted on referring to it in full as ‘West Central’, because she said ‘WC’ had ‘indelicate associations’. …

A more familiar story about Waugh and London postcodes might be made out of his alleged attitude to postcode area NW. When Waugh was born in 1903, that single “NW” area covered a huge portion of north London including both West Hampstead/Kilburn where he was born and North End (a part of  Hampstead village) to which the family moved. A revision of the system in 1917 (after the Waughs had moved) resulted in North End being assigned to code NW11, which also included Golders Green (an area populated heavily by Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe). Hampstead village acquired postcode NW3 which several commentators have claimed that Waugh preferred, to avoid possible association with the new emigrants. There is little, if any, actual proof of this bit of snobbery, although it has been suggested that he was known to carry letters up the hill from his house in NW11 to a post box in NW3 to assure the more desirable postmark. On the other hand, his published letters collected from after 1917 correctly display the North End Road NW11 post code in the return address.

—The Spectator’s restaurant critic Tanya Gold recently reviewed a new (to me at least) restaurant in Oxford. This is called the Alice and is located in the Randolph Hotel. Its name is attributed to both the fictional character Alice in Wonderland and her namesake, Alice Liddell, the daughter of a Christ Church don who was a friend of the fictional Alice’s creator. According to Gold:

Oxford…needs whimsy to deceive itself about its reality, which is power, and so its famous novelists wrote fantasy, even Evelyn Waugh, whose journey from Golders Green to Oxford was no less extraordinary than Lucy’s to Narnia and Frodo’s to Mordor, and I can testify to that. The Alice may be a dream world, but it is also a brasserie: that is Oxford’s realism. Its immediate competitor is not Narnia or Middle-earth (and I mourn this – I would like to see the Alice near the Cair Paravel Starbucks and the Brandywine Pret) but the Ivy on the High.

An assessment of the menu and service concludes the article.

–The Antiques Trade Gazette has a  report on the prices paid for various of Waugh’s books at a recent auction:

Bearing the cataloguer’s cautious observation that it is ‘Waugh’s masterpiece, arguably’, a copy of A Handful of Dust was one of a number of the writer’s works featured in a March 22 sale held by Toovey’s (24.5% buyer’s premium). Guided at £3000-5000, the 1934 first edition sold for £5500 in the Washington, West Sussex, saleroom.

A 1945 first of Brideshead Revisited made a top-estimate £1200 but the other Waugh lots also included one of his earlier works, Mr Loveday’s Little Outing, and Other Sad Stories of 1936. With ‘flexiback’ reinforcement to the hinges, as issued, it showed some staining and fading to the covers but retained a price-clipped dust-jacket and sold at £650 to an online buyer.

—The Globe and Mail (Toronto) has an article by Christine Sismondo on the conversion of English and Irish country houses into luxury hotels as one means of their survival and preservation. Here is an excerpt with a contribution from Evelyn Waugh:

…there are still several hundred four and five-star luxury country house hotels to choose from in the United Kingdom and Ireland. If you include pretenders, like converted hunting and fishing lodges, remote railway hotels and modern homages to stately homes, such as the Jacobean-inspired Fairmont Windsor Park outside of London, the options are endless. Windsor Park, a five-star hotel with over-the-top fitness amenities, first-rate dining and ample space for big celebrations, is almost entirely new, constructed on the site of Heath Lodge, a private home near Windsor Castle. Its construction would have been quite jarring for anyone living through the “crisis of the country house,” circa 1890 to 1950, when so many of the originals had fallen into disrepair and were slated for demolition. In 1944, when Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited, a nostalgic love letter to “buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation,” he was convinced such estates would soon be extinct. “In the year 1955, country houses in England were being demolished one per week,” Adrian Tinniswood, British historian and author of Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II ,  says.  Around that time, though, some house-poor owners did the previously unthinkable and threw their doors open to day-trippers who paid a half-crown for an afternoon escape and country house tourism was born.

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Pinfold Article Available

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The previously mentioned article on Waugh’s novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Dr Barbara Cooke has now been published and posted on the internet. See previous post and abstract. It is now available to download at this link. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction (footnotes omitted):

In 1957, Evelyn Waugh published The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: a conversation piece. The text was presented and marketed as a novel less for accuracy than for convenience, and it subtitle implies adjacency to, as opposed to full identification with, that stable literary category. It is fiction, but it is also highly autobiographical. Its protagonist shares many of his author’s personality traits – he too is a fifty-year-old writer – and its action is based very closely on a personal breakdown Waugh endured in early 1954. This breakdown occurred when Waugh embarked on the M.V. Staffordshire, alone, to sail to Sri Lanka. He was suffering from bromide poisoning which led him to experience auditory hallucinations during the trip. In Pinfold these distressing circumstances are related in a tone of humorous detachment that led to patchy critical classification, with varying levels of approval, as a comedy. It is clear from Waugh’s personal writings, and his recently discovered engagement diaries, that King Lear was on his mind both during his psychotic episode of 1954 and throughout the drafting process of the text that episode inspired. Pinfold was composed in two bursts of creativity in 1956, during which time Waugh was constantly re-reading Lear, and the play’s presence resonates throughout the text to such an extent that the second work may be studied as a form of postmodern, disordered adaptation of the first…

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Coronation Roundup

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

–This week’s most widely reported event has to be the Coronation. A Spanish paper (CrĂłnica Global) has made a story out of a widely-circulated cheer sent up at a recent football match by Glasgow Celtic fans. (My recollection is that it was “sung” to the tune of  “She’ll be coming round the mountain”):

“ You can shove your coronation up your ass ” sang the Celtic fans, in the stadium, at the beginning of a football match, undoubtedly very important for them. This is how they expressed their contempt –or something worse- for King Charles III, who was crowned this Saturday.

The story, by Ignacio Vidal-Folch, continues with a a discussion of his admiration for Waugh’s work, most of which he seems to have read in Spanish translations. There is also reference to Waugh’s short career as an international correspondent. This involves the use of the telegraphese language adopted by correspondents for cable traffic. After a background description of the story of the telegraphic exchanges in Scoop, the article meanders back to the Celtics fans and their Coronation cheer in its concluding paragraphs:

Days and weeks passed, battles and carnage followed, and bloody slacker Waugh never sent a story to the Daily Mail, while the other special correspondents telegraphed daily long and detailed articles on atrocities and massacres with which their respective newspapers filled their front pages. Finally his director, Smith, sent Waugh the following telegrams (laconic, because they were paid by the word):

— WHY NOT NEWS SMITH

Waugh incredibly responded:

— NO NEWS, GOOD NEWS WAUGH

The director, who was also not lacking in British humour, replied:

— NO NEWS, NO JOB SMITH 

Waugh could not get away with threats and closed the discussion with one last, cheap telegram:

—JOB STICK UP ARSEWISE WAUGH

The most admirable thing about this mythical (perhaps legendary) exchange is the tremendous conciseness of the messages without leaving room for confusion due to being so brief … Celtic fans are clearly unfamiliar with their classics, as they chanted “You can shove your coronation up your arse”, instead of taking advantage of Waugh’s ingenious innovation and resorting to “arsewise”.

There is no source given for Waugh’s telegraphic exchange but it does sound somehow familiar and is certainly similar (up to a point) to the exchanges contained in the text of Scoop. The quoted phrases from the cables appeared in English in the original Spanish version of the story, followed by Spanish translations. Where they are quoted from is not revealed. The most likely source would be Waugh in Abyssinia (pp. 158-61) but I couldn’t find them there. I think they are most properly attributed to the public domain. See previous post. The text was translated by Google.

–The obituary in The Times for Conservative MP and journalist John Cockcraft (1934-2023), who died last month at the age of 88, includes this anecdote about an encounter with Evelyn Waugh early in Cockcraft’s career:

…Having eschewed the civil service and embarked on a career in journalism, Cockcroft found himself on a winter cruise in 1961 during which he was befriended by Evelyn Waugh, and they had champagne dinners each night. He enjoyed Waugh’s gossip but found him “a terrible snob”. On the final night Waugh asked what his parents did. When Cockcroft replied that on both sides they were involved in the cotton trade the author said “how frightful”. Cockcroft rejoined: “But I went to Oundle and you only went to Lancing.”

That would probably have been the cruise Waugh took with his daughter Margaret to the Caribbean and Guyana in November 1961. He later wrote about it in the the Daily Mail: “Here They Are, the English Lotus-Eaters”, 20 March 1962, and Sunday Times: “Eldorado Revisited”, 12 August 1962 (EAR, pp. 583, 592).

–A British band touring the United States (mentioned in several previous posts) was recently queried about its connections to Evelyn Waugh. Here’s the introduction from an interview in BOMB Magazine:

The London-based band Flyte started in their school days when eleven-year-old Will Taylor (vocals, guitar) and Jon Supran (drums, vocals) made music together; they were joined later by Nick Hill (guitar, bass, vocals). The trio has become renowned for their infectious melodies, all-male harmonies reminiscent of The Byrds and The Beatles, and their literary edge––the band’s name is taken from Sebastien Flyte of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Their debut album, The Loved Ones, released in 2017, was named Best British Debut of the Year by The Sunday Times, noted for its classicist storytelling.

The Waugh theme was elaborated in a later interview in the website JustFocus.fr:

Q. Is your band’s name the same as Sebastian Flyte, a fictional character created by Evelyn Waugh in his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited? Why this choice?

A. There was something about this book that really stuck with me deeply when I first read it in my late teens. I felt such an affinity with the narrator Charles Ryder, a character from a lower class. Looking into a world that did not belong to him, the upper class. In England, class permeates everything, even now. You can’t see it, but it’s there. My father taught in a school for very privileged people and I and my brothers grew up around this environment while going to state school on the road and living half the time with our mother on the rougher side of town. It has instilled a kind of cultural duality in the way we see the world. When he came to name the band, the book had been such an influence on me that it seemed right to use the name Flyte, the embodiment of a world I would never enter. A doomed world that I could never understand.

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Piers Court Update in Daily Mail

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has posted an update on the recent auction sale of Piers Court, Waugh’s former residence near Dursley. The article by James Fielding is entitled: “Defiant Evelyn Waugh superfans are STILL living in the literary giant’s ÂŁ3M Cotswold home… four months after it was sold.” Basically, according to the Mail, there is little to report:

A couple of defiant Evelyn Waugh superfans who are living in the literary giant’s ÂŁ3million former home in the Cotswolds for a peppercorn rent are refusing to leave the mansion four months after it was sold. Helen Lawton, 62, and her partner Lebanese financier Bechara Madi, 60, pay just ÂŁ250 a year to live in the Grade II listed Georgian manor as part of a complicated arrangement with the trust that owned it – but are now digging in their heels and refusing to leave. The pair don’t answer the door to callers in case it’s bailiffs coming to evict them. Neighbours say they never see Ms Lawton, who is described as a larger-than-life ‘Hyacinth Bucket’ character.

MailOnline couldn’t get a reply when we called at the imposing eight-bedroom Piers Court in the Cotswolds village of Stinchcombe. But voices could be heard from inside, the central heating and TV were on and the couple’s pet bulldog could be seen at a downstairs window. Mr Madi later told us: ‘We are still residing at Piers Court. We are in the middle of a legal battle and are unable to make any comments as this could prejudice our position.’

After recounting in some detail the story of the auction sale as reported late last year and described in numerous previous posts, the Mail’s article concludes:

The new owner bought the mansion without seeing it – Mr Madi and Ms Lawton refused to show prospective buyers around or have the extravagant rooms and grounds photographed for the auction brochure. It’s not the first time the couple have been involved in a property dispute. They took landlords of their ÂŁ5m apartment in London’s Cadogan Square – the most expensive residential street in the UK – to a property tribunal in 2015. Now they are in another legal battle which may go to the High Court if a solution can’t be found. Meanwhile outside contractors are keeping the lawns cut and hedges trimmed while the occupants are continuing to answer their door.

The Mail’s online edition has several lavish illustrations, some not included in previous articles. One near the end of the article shows Waugh’s wife Laura as a bride, posing prior to their wedding in April 1937. She is standing next to a formal-suited young man, described erroneously in the caption as Evelyn Waugh. This individual (apparently a teenager) is too young to be Waugh and doesn’t look at all like him. It it is probably Laura’s brother, Auberon Herbert, who was a reluctant member of the wedding party and opposed their marriage wholeheartedly. He was 16 at the time and was responsible for giving away the bride, which would explain his formal dress.  The caption, also erroneous, states: “Waugh used the money from his wife’s father to purchase Piers Court.” The money came from Laura’s maternal grand mother, Lady de Vesci, not her father, who had died in 1923 (Stannard I, 449).

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Bank Holiday Roundup

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Jeffrey Manley

—Country Life has posted the second part of their interesting and informative essay on the building and decoration of Campion Hall at Oxford. The first installment was described in an earlier post. Here’s an excerpt relating to Waugh’s contribution to the project:

…another chapel is reached through an arch at the east end of the main chapel: the Lady Chapel. Suddenly, the visitor is transported into a world of spring flowers and tender, homely observation, for the walls have been almost entirely covered in murals by Charles Mahoney. They were commissioned in 1941, using royalties from Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr, written as a thank-offering to D’Arcy, who had been responsible for his conversion. The royalties amounted to ÂŁ600 and Mahoney’s estimate for the work was ÂŁ560.

The original idea had been to commission Stanley Spencer, who had completed his paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in 1932. Declaring that ‘in my painting I owe nothing to God and everything to the Devil’, Spencer proved too much for the fathers and it was clear he would not be prepared to live at Campion Hall for the duration of the project. The Catalonian painter Josep Maria Sert told Lutyens that he would paint the apse if Lutyens gave him the job of artist at Liverpool Cathedral; Lutyens could not promise to, so the deal was off. Happening to meet Sir John Rothenstein, director of Tate Gallery, D’Arcy asked his advice. He recommended Mahoney and described his work, remarkable for its minute observation of Nature. D’Arcy responded: ‘Done.’…

As did Spencer, Mahoney suffused the life he observed around him with the radiance of the Divine. His gentle style, delicate colours and delight in flowers were particularly suited to the Lady Chapel, the theme of which is the life of the Virgin Mary. Shepherds were modelled from the locals around Ambleside in the Lake District, to which the Royal College had been evacuated during the war …

Mahoney was not a Catholic, perhaps not even a Christian, so much as an ‘agnostic socialist,’ according to D’Arcy. But on dull days — he would only paint in natural light, which limited his productivity to the summer months — he would go on walks with people in the hall and quiz them about Biblical story-telling conventions. Was Joseph an old man? Were angels necessarily male? Would the shepherds have brought a lamb?

Sadly, when Mahoney presented his bill in 1953, the then bursar Father Corbishley found the £4,000 he was asking ‘a very unpleasant and distressing surprise’. Relations were broken off. By the time they were restored in the 1960s, Mahoney’s breathing trouble made work difficult and a few scenes were only sketched in black and white.

The article as posted on the internet includes several photographs of the Lady Chapel decorations and is well worth a look. Here’s the link.

–The Washington Post carries a long article by Michael Dirda on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio. This consists of his review of several books written in connection with the observance. Here’s an excerpt from the one relating to the book by Elizabeth Winkler entitled Shakespeare Was A Woman And Other Heresies:

Alexander Waugh, an ardent Oxfordian, is represented as a learned provocateur in the tradition of his novelist grandfather Evelyn and journalist father, Auberon. Still, Winkler ends her lively, often highly personal book on a somewhat muted note: Pressed again and again, the often controversial Harvard scholar Marjorie Garber dismisses the whole authorship business as uninteresting.

–The religion and philosophy journal First Things has posted some reading recommendations by its editors. Here’s an excerpt from one by Claire Giuntini:

…If you like Evelyn Waugh’s occasionally dark, oftentimes satirical humor, you won’t be disappointed with the Sword of Honour series. There are many who could write—and have written, in these very pages—extensively and eruditely about the merits of this trilogy.

What does this series have to offer? It has Guy Crouchback. There is nothing very exceptional about Guy. His family is unique in that it has always remained Catholic, and that there is a “Castello Crouchback” in Italy, but on the whole, the Crouchback family is fading. In the first book, Guy struggles to become a soldier (a long process, as he’s a touch too old to be wanted anywhere), and the following two books record his different (mis)adventures. In almost every way, he’s very average. You could say that he’s just a normal guy. Yet, this non-ostentatious nature makes Guy and his series stand out all the more. The choices Guy makes are directly relatable to our own lives. In other classics, the dramatic actions of the characters act as megaphones for what to do or what not to do—it’s not hard to miss the memo. With the Sword of Honour trilogy, though, you have to quiet down to hear what’s being said. And we could all do with a little quiet—and not just those of us in Manhattan.

—Edge Media Network has posted a review of a novel by Jonathan Leaf entitled City of Angles. The review is by Steve Weinstein. Here’s an excerpt:

As the title implies, “City of Angles” casts a cynical eye on the people who churn out what we generously call entertainment. The vague, noirish sense of menace that underlies the city’s relentlessly sunny sky, epic consumption, and self-absorption has been catnip for authors for decades, from Nathaniel West and Raymond Chandler to Bruce Webber and Bret Easton Ellis. But “City of Angles” most closely resembles the two funniest, and most bitter, Hollywood novels, Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays” and Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One.” That’s high praise.

—The Spectator reviews a debut novel by Alice Winn. This is entitled In Memoriam and takes place in WWI where

…two young men who fall in love at their public school (old money, military and aristocratic connections, tailcoats and buggery), before heading off to the front; the flower of their generation, doomed to die as the mechanistic future tears apart chivalric ideals, and society starts to question its very nature.

After a discussion in which several other books with similar themes and characters are considered, reviewer Philip Womack concludes with this:

…There is an undeniable tension at the heart of the book: Winn decries the public-school system, seeing it as fostering an empty-headed patriotism, forcing boys to cover up their true feelings. She even (anachronistically) trots out Evelyn Waugh’s remark that boarding school is good preparation for prison. (Mine certainly wasn’t — my father used to joke about it being more like a country club.) … This is a remarkable debut, with a keen and wise understanding of human nature. If Winn’s material is familiar, she handles it with skill and panache. …

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