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).

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Collections, Newspapers, Robbery Under Law | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Halloween Roundup

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.

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Newspapers, Vile Bodies, Waugh in Abyssinia | Tagged , | Comments Off on Samuel Hynes (1924-2019) R.I.P.

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.

Share
Posted in Discussions, Evelyn Waugh, Radio Programs | Tagged , | Comments Off on The Write Stuff: Waugh Episode

Waugh’s Birthday Roundup

Posted on October 28, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

Thanks to reader Dave Lull for sending this link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The review concludes with this:

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

Share
Posted in Academia, Anniversaries, Books about Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Interviews, Newspapers, Robbery Under Law | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Waugh’s Birthday Roundup

Three French Aesthetes and Rex’s Tortoise

Posted on October 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Non-fiction | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Three French Aesthetes and Rex’s Tortoise

Mottramism (More)

Posted on October 21, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending the link.

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

Roundup

Posted on October 20, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harold Bloom (1930-2019) R.I.P.

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The American literary critic and Yale Professor of the Humanities Harold Bloom died earlier this week at the age of 89. There are several notices but perhaps the best are those in the New York Times. One is by Dinitia Smith and is a standard but fairly detailed obituary. The other is “An Appreciation” by Dwight Garner who also frequently reviews books for the Times and writes on literary matters. If you choose to consult only one, read that written by Garner.

Bloom wrote widely but clearly was happiest writing about poetry. He did write at least one full length book devoted to novels. This was Novels and Novelists (2007). Waugh is mentioned but there is no chapter devoted to his writing. One mention comes in connection with Bloom’s discussion of Tobias Smolett:

Sometimes, when I am reading Smolett, I wish he had been able to read the Evelyn Waugh of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, because I think Waugh would have been a good influence on him.

Waugh is also listed in an appendix to what may be Bloom’s best known book, The Western Canon: the Books and School of the Ages (1994). The short list of 20 some “canonical” authors does not include Waugh. The listed authors who might be deemed Waugh’s contemporaries are Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Kafka. Waugh is, however, included in Appendix D: The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy.  The books listed under Waugh’s name in the prophetic appendix are A Handful of Dust, Scoop, Vile Bodies and Put Out More Flags. Other contemporaries of Waugh among the British prose writers named in this appendix include Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Graham Greene, George Orwell, and David Jones.

Bloom was also engaged as editor for several years from 1989 in an ambitious project involving several hundred critical works published by the Chelsea House Press (later acquired by or merged with Facts on File). One of these is entitled “Evelyn Waugh” and is said by both Google Books and Amazon to have been published on 1 May 1994. It even has an ISBN number: 978-1555463533 and is described as appearing in “Modern Critical Views, Series 2”. Harold Bloom is listed as author but might have been the intended editor. Neither the Library of Congress nor the New York Public Library has in its catalogue a book by that title and author/editor combination nor that ISBN. Nor does it appear in a search on WorldCat.org. Anyone knowing anything about the circumstances of this “publication” is invited to comment below. It may be the case of a book project that was assigned an author, title and completion date but never got written or approved for publication.

Share
Posted in Academia, Newspapers, Sword of Honour, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Harold Bloom (1930-2019) R.I.P.

Brideshead Products On Offer

Posted on October 15, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

An internet-based marketing company called TeePublic.com has on offer several personal articles of clothing and household goods decorated with the cover art from the dust jacket of the Little, Brown/Book of the Month Club 1945 first edition of Brideshead Revisited. The products are the work of an independent designer. In the case of the Brideshead product line, the designer is identified as “buythebook86”.  As explained on the website:

TeePublic is the world’s largest marketplace for independent creators to sell their work on the highest-quality merchandise.Every TeePublic purchase supports independent artists, podcasts, streamers, and more!

The principal article is a teeshirt in various colors and sizes carrying the dust jacket design on the front. Other products such as sweat shirts, coffee mugs, phone and computer cases, tote bags, etc. are also available with the same imprint but in more limited color (and in some cases size) ranges. Other products by the same designer use dust jacket designs similar to that for Brideshead; these include Tropic of Cancer, The Maltese Falcon, Gone with the Wind and Mrs Dalloway. Oddly, the design for The Great Gatsby product line uses the title page rather than the iconic Scribner’s dust jacket. See link.

The original Little, Brown cover art was the work of Lester M Peterson, whose name appears on the front flap of the dust jacket for the Little, Brown/BOMC edition published in September 1945. A limited edition of 600 copies was sold by Little, Brown at the same time, but with a different dust jacket, probably also designed by Peterson. See link. The same artist was also the creator of other dust jackets for several of Waugh’s books published by Little, Brown in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to Brideshead, these include the reprints of Decline and Fall (1943), Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust (both 1944), Black Mischief (1946) and Edmund Campion (1947) as well as first editions of When the Going was Good (1947) and Tactical Excercise (1954). This list is based on an examination of the dust jackets or, where those were not available, photos or book descriptions on the internet.  Peterson may have also been responsible for the Little, Brown dust jackets of Put Out More Flags (1942) and Officers and Gentlemen (1955) based on their similarity to his other productions, but there is no name attribution on those dust jackets and they differ slightly from the others examined.

How much, if at all, Waugh may have been involved in the design of these Little, Brown dust jackets is not clear. He would unlikely have had any say in the one used for Brideshead Revisited since he was stationed in Yugoslavia or Italy during most of the period in which that would have been in preparation. The textual material included on the front and back flaps of the Little, Brown book does not appear to have been written by Waugh, unlike that on the UK edition entitled “Warning” and signed by him. The jackets on these Little, Brown books conform to a unitary, consistent design format of lettering and pictorial material and seem intended to contribute to a brand image to help promote the Waugh product in the period of popularity his works enjoyed in America during the 1940s.

UPDATE (18 October 2019): TeePublic is now promoting additional Evelyn Waugh designs on its products. One of these is a colorized photo of Waugh based on a 1930 black and white original attributed to Howard Coster on the National Portrait Gallery website. This is by the designer EsotericaArt. Another consists of the name “Evelyn Waugh” displayed in large letters styled in what may be an original design by KubikoBakhar.

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Brideshead Revisited, Items for Sale | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Brideshead Products On Offer

Lancing Chapel to be Completed

Posted on October 14, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Times newspaper reports, in an article by Nicola Woolcock, that the chapel at Lancing College will be completed over 150 years after it was begun:

A stunning and distinctive place of worship towering over the landscape has remained unfinished for more than a century amid wrangles over cost and design, but now the end is in sight. Not the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona but the chapel at Lancing College, a leading private school on the edge of the South Downs, that has Evelyn Waugh, Sir Tim Rice and Sir David Hare among its alumni.

Work began on the neo-gothic structure — the tallest and arguably most imposing school chapel in the world — in 1868, some 20 years after the college was founded by Nathaniel Woodard, the parish priest. It is said that he gazed out across the River Adur one day after a service and, with its clear views across the West Sussex valley, he immediately realised he had found the spot. […] 

The chapel was eventually dedicated in 1911, despite one side being finished with a sheet of corrugated metal. That was replaced with a wall featuring a vast stained glass rose window in 1978, dedicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in a ceremony attended by the Prince of Wales. The west wall remained incomplete, however, with temporary doors and filled in arches and, until recently, it appeared that plans to finish the 27 metre (90ft) high building were a lifetime away.

Although not quoted, Waugh describes his impression of the chapel when he was taken to enroll in the school in 1917. This is from A Little Learning, his autobiography:

…We had been sent some photographs of the buildings, but they failed to prepare us for the dramatic dominance of the chapel which filled the scene before us. Mr Woodard had paid dear for his choice of site. The foundations, it was said, lay deeper below ground than the chalk groining above. He intended all his buildings to be a reaffirmation of the Anglican Faith, and Lancing Chapel was to be the culminating monument of his design, proclaiming his purpose in the clearest tones. The great building was unfinished, but the east end, which confronted us gave no evidence of the ruinlike, temporarily abandoned areas which lay behind. The glass seen from outside was greenish as though enclosing an aquarium. Visiting preachers often compared the apse to the prow of a ship. I know no more spectacular post-Reformation ecclesiastical building in the kingdom. (CWEW, v. 19, p. 80).

According to The Times, the building schedule ambitiously calls for completion in 2020:

The west wall remained incomplete, […] with temporary doors and filled in arches and, until recently, it appeared that plans to finish the 27 metre (90ft) high building were a lifetime away. Now an ambitious £3.5 million plan to attach the chapel to the independent boarding school has been scaled down with a different vision — a £1.2 million project to create a new porch offering a more fitting entrance. Only £350,000 is left to raise, thanks to donations and legacies, and the building is due to be completed at the end of 2020 and rededicated in early 2021. […] The chapel is made from Horsham stone, a local sandstone susceptible to erosion, especially given its lofty position only miles from the sea. […] The new porch will be built in Somerset stone, which is more durable.

To make donations to the completion fund and see renderings of the new west end of the chapel, go to this link.

The other incomplete ecclesiastical structure mentioned prominently in the article is the Church of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Waugh also wrote a detailed description of that project in his early travel book Labels (Chapter VII). Although not mentioned, another notable example of an unfinished church is the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Morningside Heights in New York City. It was begun in 1888 (20 years after Lancing Chapel) and several portions remain unfininshed, the most noticeable being the north tower of the west front. And as for musical examples, how could they have overlooked Schubert’s Symphony No. 8, nearly always referred to as the Unvollendete (“Unfinished”)?

 

 

Share
Posted in A Little Learning, Evelyn Waugh, Labels, Lancing, Newspapers | Tagged , | Comments Off on Lancing Chapel to be Completed