Dystopias and Novellas

Posted on September 8, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Robert Harris has written an essay in The Sunday Times about and extract from his new novel The Second Sleep that will be published next week in the UK (19 November in the USA). The novel is written in a distant dystopian future following a cyberwar in the 21st Century. The realization of what happened is described in the essay which starts with the elimination of the internet, disabling mobile phones, and proceeds to the worldwide destruction of electricity grids and with it the gradual end of organized civilization. What survives is somewhat surprising and Evelyn Waugh is invoked to help explain it:

Orwell got so much right, it seems churlish to point out the one big thing he got wrong. But his friend Evelyn Waugh put his finger on it in the letter of thanks he wrote to Orwell after receiving an advance copy: “What makes your version [of the future] spurious to me is the disappearance of the Church. Disregard all the supernatural implications if you like, but you must admit its unique character as a social & historical institution. I believe it is inextinguishable.”

Waugh’s prophecy came true in Poland in the 1980s, where it was the Catholic Church that did much to undermine the communist monolith in eastern Europe.

There are about 40,000 churches in England and Wales. It is likely that these structures — or their ruins — built mostly of stone and dating from an earlier epoch will continue to stand, long after modern buildings have collapsed. In my novel it is the churches that provide the local centres where survivors congregate — at first for shelter and security, and gradually for spiritual support and a theological explanation of the catastrophe that has overwhelmed them.

Waugh’s quoted letter is dated 17 June 1949 (Letters, p. 302). Harris’s point is elaborated in the extract from his book that accompanies the essay:

I have not attempted to give a comprehensive account of every building and monument in England above 800 years old, for such a task would be impossible. Too numerous to count are the examples that have survived from the Pre-Apocalypse Era, most notably our churches and cathedrals which, being constructed of stone, have proved more durable than structures erected many generations later. The same may be said of certain houses and other public buildings of what the ancients called their 18th and 19th centuries — now some 1,000 years old.

After Orwell’s death, Waugh attempted to flesh out the arguments from the quoted letter in a brief novella Love Among the Ruins which blogger Jerry House, posting on jerryshouseof everything, has reviewed and summarized;

This bitingly satirical novelette (illustrated by Mervyn Peake!) first appeared in the British magazine Lilliput in its May/June 1953 issue and was issued as a thin book later that year by Chapman & Hall (London).  Its prolific author, Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), was a persnickity, thin-skinned, fundamently conservative whose life was periodically undone by his own folly.  Nonetheless he was a sharp, often dispassionate observer who could wickedly skewer modern times (which he despised) with his old-fashioned pen and inkwell (no typewriters for Evelyn, no, no, no; also no telephones and no driving, so poo to modernity).[…] Lost within [Waugh’s output] is Love Among the Ruins, a dystopian novel about a future welfare-state England.[…] and a quick, enjoyable, and magnificent farce, one worthy of Waugh’s reputation.  Highly recommended.

A more complete magazine version of the novella appeared in the 31 July 1953 edition of  Commonweal published in the USA.

An anonymous Hong Kong based blogger on flashdesigner.com.hk offers a review and summary of another of Waugh’s post-war novellas Scott-King’s Modern Europe. Here’s the conclusion:

Written at the end of the second world war, when perhaps mythically the British had stood alone, the book is perhaps the author’s reflection on events that saw the division of Europe into opposing camps. The territorial integrity of the United Kingdom, and essentially England within it, had been maintained. But those “over there” we’re still foreign and thankfully thy weren’t “over here”. Their values weren’t our values, and yet their influence was all-pervading, or at least potentially so. Britain, and the English on the throne within it, we’re still alone, still threatened. This is the culture that is suffused throughout Evelyn Waugh’s little book and it is the assumption that makes its reading in 2018 at least poignant. It might even have been written a week ago, based on anyone’s list of presumptions that surrounded the Brexit referendum. Everything that was not an English value is manifest in this non-culture of Neutralia, a nation that needs to invent heroes raised from within the mediocrity of its unrecognized and – even more reprehensible – unrecorded past. How non-English can one get?

Waugh’s humor enlivens the story and his unapologetic Englishness almost renders himself as the principal character. It is short enough to be read in an hour, but it’s sentiment and message will resonate very strongly with contemporary readers. In Britain’s current political context, Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a little book with a big message.

Both novellas mentioned in these blogposts are available in Waugh’s Complete Stories.

 

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Waugh and The Brexlit Novel

Posted on September 5, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Australian literary journal Quadrant has posted an article entitled “Brexit and the Decline of the English Novel” in which a new genre of novel is described. This is the “Brexlit” novel and has already chalked up a number of examples to its credit (or discredit, as the case may be). The article by David Martin Jones notes seven full-length novels devoted to the subject of Britain’s departure from the European Union, or not as the case may yet be. The first off the press was Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016). This was followed by two others which reflected :

…a parallel reality [that] all the Brexit novelists share. Anger at the “No” vote and the threat it presents to their borderless worldview pervades Brexlit. Indignation comes naturally to the self-indulgent contemporary genre of auto fiction practiced by Olivia Laing and Rachel Cusk.[…] The Brexit novelists want to elect a new people. The current white male population—racist, homophobic, dumb and illiberal—is not fit for purpose.

Laing’s novel is entitled Crudo and Cusk’s Kudos, both published in 2018.

Martin Jones then takes up three examples by male novelists.  The first two are Time of Lies (2017) by Douglas Board and Perfidious Albion (2019) by Sam Byers. Both of these are satires that posit dystopian futures where the Brexiteers have won and eliminated the old two party system. In Time of Lies there a new party called Britain’s Great or “BG”, consisting of thuggish Fascists. They win the election and

Within weeks, the new populist government is at odds with the European Commission and threatening to explode a nuclear bomb over its Brussels headquarters. A Civil Service-engineered coup, however, ends BG’s brief populist experiment.

In Perfidious Albion, there is:

…the anonymous, multinational Green, a company that follows “the disruptive logic of the Silicon Valley”. Moving fast and breaking things, Green harvests personal information and runs social experiments to build an algorithmically-ordered digital dystopia.[…] Byers’s satire reduces populism to a mixture of mindless thuggery, racism and cynical manipulation. The Guardian found the novel, “furiously smart 
 and madly funny”.

Perhaps the most ambitious and thoughtful contribution to the genre comes from Jonathan Coe’s 2018 novel. This is called Middle England. It involves characters called back from his earlier State of Britain novels The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle. There is also at least one novel that offers sympathetic consideration to the working class losers who came out on the winning side. This is Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017).

Martin Jones then addresses previous generations of British writers facing momentous issues of the day in the 20th and 19th centuries:

Analysing social divisions in these simplistic terms [reflected in Brexlit novels] fails to explain why so many voted for Leave, which was neither just a provincial nor a working-class phenomenon. Consequently, no novel makes a serious effort to explore the wider cultural dimensions of Brexit. Brexlit ignores the Islamically-inspired terror attacks across Europe after 2014, and the impact they may have had on the popular perception of immigration, especially in the wake of Angela Merkel’s arbitrary decision to open Europe’s borders to refugees in 2015. […]

Brexlit instead reinforces the smug, self-referential worldview found in English literature departments, literary reviews and progressive publishing houses. Characters are one-dimensional, the plots soap-operatic. It’s hard to think of a time when the English novel would not have made more of the ironic possibilities that the chaos of Brexit affords. Post-war English writers as various as Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, George Orwell and John Braine would surely have dealt with Brexit in a more controversial and provocative manner. They would certainly have done some research, as Orwell did when he took The Road to Wigan Pier, and would never have expressed such contempt for the working classes or shown the unqualified respect for Labour politicians, liberal journalists, the progressive European establishment or Remainer civil servants as Brexlit does. Anthony Powell would have found in [the real life] Olly Robbins a fine example of the civil service’s Widmerpool tendency. Waugh’s Lord Copper would have enjoyed the Conservative and Labour parties’ shambolic reaction to the “No” vote. John Braine’s Joe Lampton would have shown far more resilience than Cairo Jukes [in The Cut] as well as contempt for the patronising, progressive views of women like Grace [in that same novel] or Sophie Trotter [in Middle England]. But we need only consider briefly how the modern condition-of-England genre first emerged to see the depths to which it has now fallen.

Among 19th century writers Martin Jones gives pride of place to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times as offering more balanced and thoughtful views of the chaotic times facing their characters, particularly the working classes. The article concludes:

The progressive London literary establishment, its academic book reviewers and Remainer publishing houses like Faber & Faber and Penguin have turned the English novel, not into a mirror to investigate the condition of England, but into a form of ideological group-think that Soviet-era dissidents like Czeslaw Milosz would recognise.

 

 

 

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Evelyn Waugh and the Mid-Century Gothic

Posted on September 4, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A book published earlier this year addresses what it sees as a postwar response in literature and other media of cultural expression to the modernism that prevailed in the interwar period. The book is entitled Mid-Century Gothic which is the name applied to the literary and cultural phenomena it describes. It is written by Lisa Mullen who is a research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. It would be reckless to attempt a summary of what is meant by the term Mid-Century Gothic, but one can read a full description in the book’s introduction which is available online at the above link.

One example of the concept is found in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. This is associated with the paintings of Charles Ryder as described in the novel. The first of these is the mural of a ruin he painted on the walls of Brideshead Castle before the war. This painting is ruined in reality by the carelessness of the military occupants during the war. According to the book (p. 30):

Charles is engaged in an anti-modern project to create a well-delineated but counter-factual reality, in which aristocratic privilege and taste will not be demolished by time […] As modern war creates new kinds of ruins and a new attitude to the past, the very idea of ruins–and their symbolic correlative–is threatened with superannuation.

There is also an interesting discussion of the contribution to the theory of the Mid-Century Gothic by the novel’s character Anthony Blanche, the only “modernist survivor” in the novel and the only critic of Charles’s paintings of ivy clad ruins of Latin American houses. He describes these as an inauthentic attempt at “exotic gothicism”. Finally, there is a concluding discussion of Charles’s conversion to Roman Catholicism which is seen as the rejection of his “one remaining modern attitude, the agnosticism that has defined him and which has set him apart from the family” (p. 32).

Other contemporary novels discussed in the same context as Brideshead (“Rubble, Walls, and Murals: The Threshold between Abstraction and Materiality”) include Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth and Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness. The author of the book, Lisa Mullen, also reviewed several volumes of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. See previous post. That review is now available without a subscription on Academia.edu.

 

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Labor Day Roundup: Waugh by Design

Posted on September 2, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Bristol-based interior decorators Jane Clayton & Co have announced a new line of household fabrics called Marchmain. As described on their website:

The decadence of a bygone era is evoked in this collection of richly coloured velvet and chenille woven designs inspired by textiles from the 20’s and 30’s. Marchmain takes its name from the fictional Lord Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited.

These were designed by Nina Campbell and in addition to Marchmain, there are three other designs called Flyte, Brideshead Damask and Sebastian. The various patterns and colors are illustrated at the above link.

–In another article relating to British design expertise, the Daily Mail includes a London hatter that was patronized by Waugh. This is Lock & Co:

Established in 1676, Lock & Co. is the world’s oldest hat shop and one of the oldest family businesses in existence. The family still run the business from the same shop at 6 St. James’s Street in London. The brand’s hats have topped Admiral Lord Nelson, Queen Elizabeth II, Sir Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin and Evelyn Waugh. They are designed in the UK and, wherever possible, Lock & Co. works with British suppliers. The store holds two coveted Royal Warrants for the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh.

–In different fashion context, the US-based menswear magazine GQ (formerly Gentlemen’s Quarterly) mentions Waugh in connection with a new trend in men’s fashion. This is based on a recent study commissioned by Women’s Wear Daily which

… shows that over the past year, men have gravitated away from “directional brands”—the ones that ply luxury streetwear—and are instead reaching for “pure luxury players,” a list that’s topped by Gucci and also includes Moncler, Givenchy, and Ralph Lauren.

That’s right: the hypebeast hath become the hypegent.

Maybe men, like me (a woman), have been reading nonstop Evelyn Waugh, and what else can you wear while having a champagne picnic with your teddy bear? Maybe these men read the Fall 2019 Trend Report, which predicted the return of good taste and a renewed interest in heritage brands and new designers who just act like their forebearers.

–The Oxford Mail has a review of Auberon Waugh’s recently reissued Waugh on Wine. The review by Christopher Gray opens with this:

In fact, though a considerable expert on drinking of all sorts, [Evelyn] Waugh wrote surprisingly little on the subject, except in his diaries and letters where his massive benders, especially in Oxford, figure prominently. In his celebrated ‘Oxford’ novel Brideshead Revisited, when Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte are caning into the contents of Brideshead’s cellars, their descriptions of the wine become absurdly picturesque.

After a largely favorable discussion of Auberon’s book, the review catches him out on this:

Monty Python came […]  into my mind as I read Waugh on Wine when, discussing ‘Little-known wines of France’, he writes: “The sad truth is that the best wines in France come from the five greatest wine producing areas of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Beaujolais, the RhĂŽne, Champagne and Alsace.”

Five! Only if Alsace and Champagne are one area, which they’re not. Wasn’t this like Python’s Spanish Inquisition whose “three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency . . . and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope”?

—The Guardian has reviewed D J Taylor’s new book The Lost Girls, mentioned in several recent posts. The review is written by Aida Idemariam who is concerned with whether the “Lost Girls” may have been precursors of the 1960s feminists. She concludes:

As for their place in history as feminists, [the Lost Girls] cannot, as Taylor acknowledges, really be called that – but their sense that “what mattered most was not material comfort but autonomy” makes a case for the importance of their example. Beautiful they might have been, and that is a kind of power, but they were handicapped before they began, not by lack of funds (though that happened frequently) but by a lack of education, entitlement, cultural capital and sheer expectation, which gave a manipulative, charming, horrible man like Connolly untold power over them. Taylor seems depressed by their servitude to this “pudgy figure hanging over the playpen rail”, and it is depressing. Even when they begin to detach themselves, “deep down they suspect that his are the sensibilities that matter most” – and, as even the last lines of Lost Girls, which is meant to be their story, attest, they are not wrong.

–Finally, a podcast called Screen Spiel is working its way through a list of the 100 greatest novels and has recently posted a discussion of Waugh’s Scoop which is #28. The two participants, identified as Mark and Sarah, consider the 1987 ITV adaptation as their “text”. The same approach is taken to other novels on the list, unless no adaptation is available. Here’s a description:

Hear all about it! Scoop was a 1938 novel by Evelyn Waugh. It’s a parody of the writers time as a war correspondent for the Daily Mail. We watch the 1987 ITV drama adaptation starring Michael Maloney in the starring role of William Boot. Garanteed no one else has ever produced a podcast about this obscure piece of TV, Mark & Sarah discuss the story and how this book has been brought to the small screen.

The podcasters admit they have never read the book and know Waugh only as the author of the equally unread Brideshead Revisited. Indeed, they struggle with the pronunciation of Waugh’s name and have a considerable problem following the story. They attribute their difficulty to a suspicion that the adaptation was required to drop parts of the story to fit it into the two-hour TV format, concluding that storyline was sacrificed to preserve over-long comic scenes. They compare Scoop to other adaptations discussed in previous episodes such as Lucky Jim and Cold Comfort Farm as well as to Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean’s Holiday.

 

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80th Anniversary of WWII

Posted on September 1, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of WWII when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The attack fulfilled Evelyn Waugh’s expectations that a war was imminent after Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact the previous week. See earlier post. After hearing the news relayed from the radio, Waugh continued his preparations for a tea to benefit the local orphanage to be held at the Roman Catholic church in nearby Nympsfield. Most of his comments revolve around the expectations for accommodating refugees in Stinchcombe:

…at 6 we went to receive the evacuated children at the village hut. Most of the village notables were there; no children, but Mrs Barnett had changed all the reception arrangements. Meanwhile we listened to wireless in a Mrs Lister’s motor car. It said the evacuation was working like clockwork. Still no children. Then some empty buses. Finally a police officer in a two-seater who said the children had come 400 short and there were none for Stinchcombe. Rain came on so we dispersed… (Diaries, p. 439).

He was to return to the theme of evacuated children in his novel Put Out More Flags (1942).

When the Soviets a few weeks later in the month attacked the parts of Poland unoccupied by their German allies, Waugh commented (24 September 1941):

The papers are all smugly jubilant at Russian conquests in Poland as though this were not a more terrible fate for the allies we are pledged to support than conquest by Germany. The Italian argument that we have forfeited our narrow position by not declaring war on Russia seems unanswerable (Diaries, p. 443).

Most of the entries for the succeeding weeks relate to Waugh’s attempts to acquire war work in the Ministry of Information or a place in the Armed Forces. He became so bored that he went to Chagford (23 October) and resumed work on his new novel which he hoped to finish before his call up. His work continued until the middle of November, resulting in about 10,000 additional words, but it was interrupted by the birth of his first son, Auberon (17 November). The novel was never finished and was later published in December 1942 as Work Suspended.

After several rebuffs from the military he finally struck lucky from an approach to Winston Churchill and Brendan Bracken who helped him secure a commission in the Royal Marines. This occurred shortly after Auberon’s birth. After fearing he had flunked the medical, Waugh was pleased to find when he reported for duty that this was because of his eyesight and that he needn’t worry because, according to the officer to whom he reported, most of his work would be in the dark (p.451). He was accepted into the Royal Marines and reported to his post at Chatham in early December.

 

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Waugh and Huxley

Posted on August 31, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Dr Gillian Dooley, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Department of English, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, has published a paper entitled “Love, Death and the Satirical Purpose: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One“. This originally appeared in Texture: A Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Vol. 1, No. 1, 2017 and has now additionally been posted on Academia.edu. Here’s an abstract:

“This paper draws attention to the parallels between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948). As satirical fiction, both novels are concerned with the way societies deal with basic human obsessions such as love, sex and death. Although they treat these themes very differently –Brave New World being a futuristic dystopia set in England while The Loved One is a contemporary satire set in the United States – there are some suggestive similarities in imagery which could arise from the fact that both authors had visited Southern California shortly before the respective novels were written. The paper goes on to compare the different approaches to political and social satire used by these authors, and discusses the aesthetic implications of these approaches.”

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Basil Seal Rides Yet Again

Posted on August 28, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph has a review of a book entitled Master of Deception: The Wartime Adventures of Peter Fleming by Alan Ogden. This is about something called D Division (or “deception organization”) in the Inter-Services Liaison Department. Peter Fleming, Ian’s older brother, was assigned to this while serving in the Secret Intelligence Service in WWII. One of his tasks was to confuse the Japanese plans to invade India. This involved “mystifying and misleading the enemy whenever military advantage may be gained.”

D Division is described as a “scratch battalion of odds and sods, including several lunatics and deserters.” Among its leaders was “one-eyed, one-armed Lt General Carton de Wiart who said of the French, ‘Damn Frogs, they’re all the same. One bang and they’re off.” Although not mentioned in the review, written by Roger Lewis, Carton de Wiart has been identified as a model for Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook in Waugh’s novel Sword of Honour.

The review concludes:

As for Peter Fleming himself, he comes across as one of those privileged people (Eton, Christ Church, the Guards) for whom warfare is not wickedness and inhumanity but, on the contrary, the excuse for adventure, for japes that induce a “state of pleasurable excitement”. He reminded me of Basil Seal in Put Out More Flags, for whom war “is what he’s been waiting for all these years
 He’s not meant for peace.”

Exactly like an Evelyn Waugh protagonist, Fleming’s young manhood was spent in South America and China, paddling canoes, starting revolutions, spending long days in the saddle – grand capers, which he wrote about in popular travel books. Ogden makes large claims for Fleming as an author, and quotes Harold Nicolson’s verdict with approval: “No modern writer can equal Peter Fleming as an astringent narrator of romantic and dangerous voyages through unknown lands.” Fleming’s style was a very English amalgam of “liberal dollops of understatement and laid-back insouciance”.

According to the book’s table of contents, Fleming also saw action with the SIS in Norway and Greece before his assignment to India. Waugh met up with him in Egypt (c. 14 May 1941) before embarking for Crete. Waugh was tasked with obtaining some “time pencils” from Fleming. This was apparently some sort of fuse used in the  “booby traps” being promoted by Fleming’s organization. According to Waugh, these were receiving a “poor audience” in the North Africa theater–at least during the few days he spent in Fleming’s company. (Diaries, p. 497).

I can’t think of a Waugh protagonist who spent his young manhood in China, although Waugh spent some of his in Brazil and used that as the basis for Tony Last’s trip to that part of the world in A Handful of Dust.  According to his Diaries (p. 355), Waugh consulted with Fleming in 1932 about “equipment for forests” shortly after the latter’s return from Brazil on the trip that provided the material for his 1933 book, Brazilian Adventure, which is probably his best. Waugh also reports in a 1946 letter to Nancy Mitford of a short visit to Fleming on a large farm he had bought near Nettlebed in Oxfordshire. He lived there with his wife, actress Celia Johnson. According to Waugh, the farm was not prospering at the time (Letters, p. 234).

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“Lost” Rex Whistler Painting to Be Exhibited

Posted on August 27, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent issue of The Oldie has an article about a painting by Rex Whistler which had been thought to be lost or stranded and unappreciated in an unknown private collection. The article is by Mirabel Cecil, co-author with her husband of a recent biography of Whistler. The painting in question is Ulysses’s Farewell to Penelope painted in 1931-32. Probably stimulated by reading about the painting in the Cecils’ book, the owner, identified only as “Penelope”, contacted Mirabel and offered to show it to her. This revealed the following provenance:

How the painting came to be with this family is straightforward; how Rex came to paint it and give it to its original owner is more mysterious. The owner is called Penelope. She saw the picture and loved it. In 1975, it was sold at auction for £2,500. So far, so transparent. The catalogue entry for the sale read, ‘The property of Mrs Peter Hastings, from the collection of her father, Sir Malcolm Bullock, Bt.’

Mirabel Cecil goes on to describe how Whistler painted the picture for Bullock whom he had accompanied on a trip to Paris earlier in 1931. He wanted to dissociate himself from Bullock, who was a fairly open homosexual, but to do so graciously. Waugh was also acquainted with Bullock and mentions him in his letters. There was also correspondence between them which turned up in a 2017 episode of the BBC’s Who Do you Think you Are series. The subject was TV presenter Clare Balding who is Bullock’s great grand daughter. She found letters from Waugh while researching for the program. See previous post.

The Oldie’s article proceeds to a discusion of details of the painting as well as Whistler’s life and career and toward the end brings in Evelyn Waugh. This is based on Mirabel’s discussion of the poor display of Whistler’s self-portrait in Army uniform in the collection of the National Army Museum in Chelsea:

…The caption is in poor taste as well as being pretty useless. Instead of explaining who Rex actually was, his dates, or how this self-portrait has come to be here, it states only that he was the model for the painter Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. This is not even proven, although the museum’s caption presents it as fact.

The only record we have of Evelyn Waugh on Rex is in a letter Waugh wrote to their mutual friend Lady Diana Cooper: ‘I barely knew Rex Whistler. How I love him for asking, “What has victory to do with it?” It was the question one longed to hear asked in the last years of the war and not hearing it made me morose. It is the theme of my own little trilogy.’ (Waugh refers to his Sword of Honour war trilogy, and not to Brideshead Revisited.) Waugh wrote this years after the war; but it shows his contemporaries’ admiration for Rex. Waugh, Diana Cooper, Cecil Beaton
 they all loved him for who he was. And they respected him for the brave decision he made in giving up his successful career and enlisting in order to fight the Nazi tyranny.

Waugh is recorded to have met Whistler on at least two occasions. The first was at a party in September 1933 at the home of Whistler’s close friend Edith Olivier near Salisbury in Wiltshire. At Christmas 1942, they were also both at a party given by Daphne Weymouth at her home on the other side of Wiltshire. They were both stationed in an Army post nearby at the time. On both occasions, Waugh is reported to have been hopelessly drunk and may not have remembered much about Whistler. He also used Whistler as the model for the character Arthur who is doing a painting on the walls of Julia Stitch’s house in the early pages of Scoop. Finally, after Whistler’s death in the War, his drawings were used to illustrate Waugh’s booklet Wine in Peace and War (1947). The drawings were in his correspondence with Saccone and Speed, the wine merchants who sponsored Waugh’s book for which he was paid in champagne.

The online version of The Oldie article includes two reproductions of Ulysses’s Farewell as well as the Army self-portrait mentioned above. Ulysses’s Farewell looks very much like a study for the mural Whistler did later in the 1930s at Plas Newydd. See recent post. According to The Oldie, Ulysses’s Farewell will be placed on exhibit later this year at the Salisbury Museum.

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Roundup: Witchcraft and Victory

Posted on August 26, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph reviews a new history of witchcraft since 1800 entitled Cursed Britain by Thomas Waters. The review is by Robert Leigh-Pemberton and opens with this:

The “Swahili witch doctor”, installed in rooms “off the Edgware Road” by the War Ministry to cast spells on members of the Nazi high command, was no more than a fantasy in Evelyn Waugh’s bleakly comic Sword of Honour trilogy. Yet the last prosecution under the 1735 Witchcraft Act did in fact take place in 1944, amid a minor panic that the Scottish medium Helen Duncan had been revealing sensitive military information during seances. Churchill described the prosecution as “tomfoolery” (Duncan was later unmasked as a fraud, with a particular talent for the manufacture of “ectoplasm” from cheesecloth, egg whites and lavatory paper), though such esoteric precautions are understandable during wartime.

Dr Akonanga had moved office when Virginia Troy was searching for him in the novel Unconditional Surrender, and she learned that he had installed himself at new premises in Brook Street, a move up in social terms. That is where she found him at a time he was awaiting a shipment of scorpions which Waugh has scheduled for delivery at a later and unexpected point in the novel, Unconditional Surrender.

–Another allusion to Sword of Honour occurs in a review of a new book by Peter Hitchens entitled The Phoney Victory. In this Hitchens debunks the accepted British version usually given for the benefits flowing from their victory in WWII. The reviewer John Zmirak on the news website Stream.org associates Hitchens’ position with that taken by Waugh and Guy Crouchback in Waugh’s novel:

There isn’t space here to lay out how Hitchens does it, but he challenges the veracity of every one of [the usual] claims. In careful, melancholy, morally serious chapters, Hitchens exposes a very different war. One much more like the grim, ambiguous farce-cum-tragedy that Evelyn Waugh depicted in his brilliant Sword of Honour trilogy. Hitchens’ narrative does a much better job of explaining why if World War II was such a triumph for Britain, its inhabitants ended up feeling so miserable and diminished. Remember that Orwell based 1984 on the grim material conditions in (victorious!) Britain in 1948.

—National Public Radio (NPR) recently conducted a poll to determine what books made its listeners laugh. They explain their methodology in the introduction:

We took your votes (more than 7,000 of them!) and with the help of our panel of expert judges — people so cool and so hilarious I’m surprised they even talked to me — created this list of 100 reads designed to make you laugh out loud. […] As with all our reader polls, this is a curated list and not a straight-up popularity contest; you’ll see that the books are grouped into categories rather than ranked from one to 100.

With one exception, no writer could have more than one book on the list. Waugh makes it for The Loved One:

Personally, as a journalist, says Petra [Mayer, who wrote the article], I was hoping readers would vote in Evelyn Waugh’s wicked journalism satire Scoop— but no, you guys preferred The Loved One, his savage take on death, American style. Waugh had visited Hollywood in 1947, and while he had no truck with the big studios or their interest in his work, he found great inspiration in the famous Forest Lawn cemetery (Bette Davis is buried there!) and its team of morticians.

Waugh’s novella falls into the “Classic” category. Others in that group include Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford and the Jeeves and Wooster Series by P G Wodehouse.

–Finally, several papers are reporting the release next month of a theatrical film based on the TV series Downton Abbey. Many of the original cast will reappear in familiar roles and some additional settings have been added. According to a story in the Yorkshire Post, these include some settings with a Waugh connection:

The locations include Ampleforth College, the prestigious Catholic boarding school in the North York Moors which Fellowes attended. Thirsk and Ripon have been used for filming street scenes, although it’s not known which buildings will feature. […] Famous as the main location for two adaptations of the novel Brideshead Revisited, Castle Howard is one of several stately homes to feature in the movie. It is likely that the house stands in for the stately home of friends of the Crawleys. The film hits cinemas on September 13.

Films made from successful TV series have a long history of disappointment. The 2008 movie of Brideshead is a notable example (the repeated useage of the Castle Howard setting did not save it) as are the two film attempts at Dad’s Army, two Dr Who duds, Absolutely Fabulous, The Singing Detective, etc. Waugh had little actual connection with Castle Howard or the family that lived there, but he did record a day trip in his Diaries during Holy Week in 1937 (p. 420) when he stayed at nearby Ampleforth College.

 

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Lost Girls (More)

Posted on August 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh biographer Paula Byrne has reviewed DJ Taylor’s new book Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951. This appears in today’s Times newspaper. Byrne stresses that the book is as much or more about Cyril Connolly as it is about the young women he attracted to live and work with him during the life of his literary magazine Horizon. She takes Taylor’s point that Connolly was extraordinarily successful in attracting these women’s attention. She also expresses a reservation, however, in Taylor’s analysis of the source of Connolly’s appeal:

Taylor suggests that Connolly’s attraction lay in his “superabundant charm”, yet gives little evidence to support this claim. The girls were all prepared to put up with his awful behaviour just to be in his orbit and to “luxuriate in the dazzle of his personality”, but the trouble with the book is that we see so little of this dazzle.

It wasn’t just the lost girls but others of Connolly’s colleagues, not least Evelyn Waugh, also found him charming. But his charm must have arisen from his conversation and ability to hold one’s attention in person because his writing is nothing special nor do written descriptions by others of his speech and behavior contribute much to suggest his charm. It seems to be the case that you had to be there to appreciate it. That may be what Anthony Powell is suggesting in a quote from his memoirs that appears as an epigraph to Taylor’s introduction:

What, in short, was the point of Connolly? Why did people put up with the frequent moroseness, gloom, open hostility? Why, if he were about in the neighborhood, did I always take steps to get hold of him? The question is hard to answer. The fact remains that I did…

Byrne concludes her review with this:

…With the exception of Skelton, the Lost Girls come across as upper-class groupies, badly educated, unintellectual and short on female solidarity. […] When Taylor describes Connolly as “a genuine literary powerbroker, a grand panjandrum, a maker and breaker of reputations”, he unwittingly gets to the heart of the mystery of Connolly’s appeal. The women who surrounded him were, like many insecure and unstable groupies, attracted to power.

Taylor finally gets to meet one of the Lost Girls, Woolley, now in her nineties. Her disavowal of his thesis of the Lost Girls seems to come to him as a shock. He asks her if there was any meaning to the term. “No none at all. I think it’s rather silly really.”

Janetta Woolley died last year at the age of 97. See previous post.

Those interested in Taylor’s subject may want to know about two upcoming events. He will appear at the literary festival in Henley-on-Thames on Sunday, 6 October 2019 at 12pm. The topic will be the book reviewed by Paula Byrne. Details available here.

Taylor will also deliver this year’s annual Anthony Powell Lecture sponsored by the Powell Society. The title of the lecture is “Anthony Powell and the Lost Girls”. According to the Society’s announcement, Powell knew most of the lost girls “both at the time of their flourishing in the late 40s and later when they were falling apart.” The lecture will be presented at the Travellers’ Club, 106 Pall Mall in London on Tuesday, 26 November at 7pm. Details available here.

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