The Elections and the Waughs

Posted on November 12, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Armistice Day Roundup

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more details see this link.

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BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped Our World

Posted on November 6, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC has announced its list of 100 novels that shaped our world in advance of Friday’s public panel discussion at the British Library. See previous post. The panel of 7 were asked “to choose 100 genre-busting novels that have had an impact on their lives.” This event kicks off an extended celebration of the 300th anniversary of the English novel but is heavily skewed to the most recent 40-50 years.

There is nothing on the list by Evelyn Waugh, nor are F Scott Fitzgerald, Anthony Powell, D H Lawrence, William Faulkner, E M Forster or James Joyce represented. From Waugh’s generation, there are novels by Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls), Graham Greene (The Quiet American), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty Four), Virginia Woolf (Orlando), Patrick Hamilton (Slaves of Solitude) and P G Wodehouse (Psmith, Journalist) on the list. Apparently, only one book per author could be listed. creating anomalies such as Herman Melville’s being represented by Bartleby, the Scrivener and not Moby Dick.

The Daily Telegraph dismisses the selection as “a short-sighted list that will please nobody.” The Guardian’s story (entitled “Discworld dishes Moby Dick”) carries these remarks by one of the panel members, author Juno Dawson:

As this panel of judges, we’re not qualified to say this is the definitive list, but we are qualified to say these are our favourites. We knew right from the beginning that the role of these lists, almost, is for people to disagree with them … and we could only pick 100 books.[…] I hope people look at the list and recognise how we have allowed the emotions behind a novel to factor into our choices, not how many copies it’s sold, or if it’s considered a work of great literature,…

The Guardian’s report also contains this statement from a BBC spokesperson:

BBC Arts director Jonty Claypole said the list took “months of enthusiastic debate” to put together. “There are neglected masterpieces, irresistible romps as well as much-loved classics. It is a more diverse list than any I have seen before, recognising the extent to which the English-language novel is an art form embraced way beyond British shores,” he said.

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Early November Roundup

Posted on November 4, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley
–The Daily Mail reprints extracts from the gossipy personal diaries of journalist and biographer Kenneth Rose. These are from the second volume entitled Who Wins, Who Loses? covering the period 1979-2014:

March 29, 1982. Geoffrey Warnock [Oxford vice-chancellor] tells me that so loathed was [novelist] Evelyn Waugh at Hertford that when he died, the college passed a resolution that it should not be represented at his funeral.

Warnock was a scholarship student at New College from c. 1945-49, well after Waugh’s Oxford days. He was Principal of Hertford College in the period 1971-1988 but was a tutor at Magdalen College at the time Waugh died in 1966.  This quote suggests that Warnock somehow influenced a decision at Hertford at a time he was not present there. It seems more likely that he became aware of the incident (if indeed his memory is accurate) after the fact. Waugh’s descriptions of his visits to Hertford College after the war indicate that he and the college were on relatively amicable terms by that time. In some other literary gossip, Rose mentions two of Waugh’s friends:

June 17, 1980. Story about Maurice Bowra [former vice-chancellor of Oxford University]. At a wedding, when asked if he was ‘bride’ or ‘bridegroom’, he replied: ‘I don’t know. I have slept with both.’

September 22, 1983. Lunch at the Beefsteak [London men-only club]. Bevis Hillier [art historian and author], who is writing [former poet laureate] John Betjeman’s life, tells me that not even in his cups will John Sparrow [Warden of All Souls, Oxford] part with his letters from Betjeman; probably because they shared a salacious interest in little boys’ muddy football shorts.

–A recent issue of the Washington Post reviews a book entitled Hate Inc. by journalist Matt Taibbi. (Yes, the Post still reviews books even though it eliminated its Sunday book magazine insert several years ago.) The review opens with this reference to Waugh’s Scoop:

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” the irreverent 1938 sendup subtitled “A Novel About Journalists,” where hapless protagonist William Boot wonders why so many reporters file divergent accounts of the same events.

“But isn’t it very confusing if we all send different news,” he asks a veteran correspondent.

“It gives them a choice,” the colleague says of British editors. “They all have different policies so of course they have to give different news.”

I was reminded of “give different news” while reading Matt Taibbi’s “Hate Inc.,” which is also a book about journalists but with a much darker subtitle: “Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another.” Taibbi, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, writes that “Scoop” is one of a handful of books he carries whenever he travels, and traces of its comic cynicism animate his prose. But where Waugh brilliantly satirized, Taibbi aims a cannon, blasting an American media industry he accuses of taking sides and manipulating the audience for profit — “different news” elevated to a business model.

–The quarterly literary journal Raritan, published by Rutgers University, has announced that its next issue will contain an article on Evelyn Waugh. This is written by Andrew Bacevich, retired professor of history at Boston University and, before that, retired officer from the US Army. His Wikipedia entry shows no previous literary writing but a good many books and articles devoted to US foreign policy, particularly with respect to the Middle East. He also describes himself as a “Catholic conservative” so that may be a clue.

—The Times newspaper has a story in which John O’Connell takes another look at the book-reading habits of the late singer-songwriter David Bowie. He reports how Bowie’s penchant for book reading surfaced during a US film shoot in the 1970s:

He had, rather ambitiously, promised not to use drugs for the duration of the shoot, so when he wasn’t needed he would take himself off to his trailer and indulge in an altogether less harmful pastime: reading books. Luckily, he had plenty to choose from. As a location report explained: “Bowie hates aircraft so he mostly travels across the States by train, carrying his mobile bibliothèque in special trunks, which open out with all his books neatly displayed on shelves.” This portable library stored 1,500 titles. 

Fast-forward to March 2013. The Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition “David Bowie Is” has opened in London to rave reviews. To coincide with its subsequent launch in Ontario, the V&A issued a list of the 100 books Bowie considered the most important and influential – not his “favourite books” as such – out of the thousands he had read during his life. The mobile-library story shows how Bowie’s reading had calcified into a compulsion by the time he was world famous. He went about it the way he went about everything, with a kind of manic fervour.

As has been previously reported on this site, one of the books on Bowie’s top 100 list was Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. The Times’s article includes Bowie’s Top 100 list, with specific comments on some of the choices but not, alas, for Vile Bodies. They might have mentioned that Waugh’s book also influenced some of the songs on Bowie’s album Alladin Sane

—The Daily Drone, a weblog for former Daily Express reporters and other admirers of that journal in its more successful days has posted this brief notice:

EXPRESSMAN Geoffrey Mather, writing on his website about Brideshead Revisited, recalled an amusing anecdote about the book’s author Evelyn Waugh.

Quoting Waugh’s biographer Philip Eade he wrote: “Waugh spent several weeks ‘working’ at the Daily Express. Having been fired in 1927 he gave advice to budding reporters.

“When assigned a story, ‘the correct procedure is to jump to your feet, seize your hat and umbrella, and dart out of the office with every appearance of haste to the nearest cinema’.

“At the cinema the probationer was advised to sit and smoke a pipe and imagine what any relevant witnesses might say.”

We on the Drone reckon this was an excellent policy which was followed 50 years later by eager Expressmen, although at that time pubs were more de rigueur than cinemas.

And the moral? Never take work too seriously.

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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 Brontës 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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