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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80th Anniversary of Nazi/Soviet Non-Aggression Pact Marked

Posted on August 23, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The French news website Contrepoints has reposted a 2014 article by British journalist and politician Daniel Hannan (“The biggest success of the left: to forget the German-Soviet pact”). The article was written on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the signing of the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and is reprinted to mark the 80th anniversary this week. This pact made possible the Nazi attack on Poland about a week later. But as noted in the article, most people have forgotten that it also made possible a few weeks later still for the Soviets to occupy the rest of Poland as well as the Baltic States and parts of other neighboring countries.

That forgetfulness stems from the 1941 decision of Hitler to break the pact by attacking the Soviet Union, making the Soviets and the British (joined later in the year by the Americans) into allies. As noted in the article, Evelyn Waugh writing in the late 1950s was not one of those who forgot:

The German-Soviet pact lasted 22 months, a third of the duration of the conflict. We remember with pride that we were alone with Hitler. But in reality, the isolation of our fathers, and the heroism at such a height, was even greater than that. I see no more courageous moment in the conflict than when we also prepared, after declaring war on Hitler, to open a new front against Stalin. The British commandos were about to be deployed to defend Finland, while the Cabinet was considering various plans to cut off the oil supplies of the USSR in the Caucasus.

In the course of events, these plans were overwhelmed by history. There remains an unsurpassed moment of pure and bloody bravery, magnificently captured by the reaction of Evelyn Waugh’s fictional hero, Guy Crouchback: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”  (Men at War, Penguin, 1976, p. 12)

In his Diaries for 22 August 1939 Waugh wrote  “Russia and Germany have agreed to neutrality pact so there seems no reason why war should be delayed.”

Much of the story in Contrepoints is devoted to how leftists managed to forget about the alliance by the two major dictatorships after it fell apart. Again, Waugh was not one of those, as indicated by Guy Crouchback’s reaction in the novel:

So why have we repressed, if not denied, these events in a corner of our mind? In his trilogy Sword of Honor, Evelyn Waugh explains often in half-words [half-heartedly?] how Soviet sympathizers in the West used the alliance with the USSR to rehabilitate their beliefs (explique souvent Ă  demi-mots comment des sympathisants soviĂ©tiques en Occident utilisĂšrent l’alliance avec l’URSS pour rĂ©habiliter ses doctrines).

Guy’s reaction to the end of the non-aggression pact was stated in Officers and Gentlemen after his recovery from the evacuation of Crete in an open fishing boat (not quoted in the article):

Now that hallucination [of what had appeared to be a period of “light and reason”] was dissolved like the whales and turtles on his voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world where […] his country was led blundering into dishonour. (Officers and Gentlemen, Penguin. 1977, p. 240)

The translation is by Google with a few edits and could use a little help in explaining what is meant by “demi-mots” in the second quoted passage. Hannan speaks French fluently, according to his Wikipedia entry, and apparently wrote this article in that language as no English version is cited.

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Dog Days Roundup

Posted on August 19, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Musician Johnny Greenwood, composer and lead guitarist of the veteran rockband Radiohead, was recently interviewed by the Times newspaper. In answer to their request to identify his favorite writer he again named Evelyn Waugh and declared Sword of Honour as his favorite book:

Q. My favourite author or book

A. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. The sardonic humour feels very truthful: Captain Crouchback is passed over for promotion, but it’s OK because he’s “a good loser — or, at any rate, an experienced one”. But to mention someone different, how about Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity?

That is the same answer he gave over four years ago to the Guardian and more recently to Rolling Stone. See previous posts. He also remains a fan of poet and critic Clive James who is responsible for introducing him to Waugh’s works:

Q. The book I’m reading

A. I’m finishing an orchestral commission, so reading isn’t something I have time for. If I read it at all, it’s familiar essays by Clive James. […] He ties a lot of my cultural life together, […] illuminating things I already enjoy or leading me to new interests.

–Candace Bushnell, author of, inter alia, Sex and the City, was recently interviewed by the website Shelf-Awareness. She named Evelyn Waugh as one of her five favorite authors, along with Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy.

—The Times has also noticed a new book by Stephen Hoare. This is reviewed by Roger Lewis and is entitled Palaces of Power: The Birth and Evolution of London’s Clubland. Lewis opens by noting that where there were once over 400 such institututions, the number today has dropped to about 50.

A decline set in after the First World War, however, when a generation of members or potential members was slaughtered. Between the wars clubland went further out of favour as Edward, Prince of Wales, led the fashion for nightclubs, jazz and dancing to gramophone records. Also, as we see in the antics of Evelyn Waugh’s characters, the sexes wanted to mix.

During the Second World War, however, clubs were a cheaper option than hotels, and rooms were booked up months in advance by overseas delegations, Whitehall politicians and military personnel. […] If they have survived it is because, Hoare argues, they are “a symbol of good taste” and “kept faith with the past” by retaining a hint of Edwardian formality…

Waugh was at one time or another a member of the Savile, St James’s, White’s and Pratt’s clubs.

—The Spectator has an article in its Coffee House section about Alexander Waugh’s decision to stand for parliament as a Brexit party candidate. This is by William Cook who is also the editor of a collection of Auberon Waugh’s writings, Kiss Me Chudleigh. He describes Alexander as the party’s “most illustrious candidate.” In addition to information already noted elsewhere, Cook offers the following analysis of how Alexander’s candidacy might fare:

Does Alexander stand any chance of winning? Stranger things have happened, and with four parties competing head-to-head the next election promises to be uniquely unpredictable. However the arithmetic is against him. The sitting Conservative MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger, is defending a 15,448 majority, and his record on Brexit hardly gives Alexander much traction. He backed Leave in the 2016 Referendum – no Remoaner, he. At the last election, Labour came a distant second, the Liberal Democrats a poor third and Ukip lost its deposit. Could Alexander split the Brexit vote, and let in a Remainer? With the national polls split four ways, anything seems possible.

If that unintended consequence came to pass, Alexander’s father would surely be spinning in his grave – with laughter. It would excite his sense of humour, his love of the absurd. A rebel in a tweed suit, Auberon was gloriously unpredictable, and one of the opinions which continues to surprise so many of his admirers was his unstinting support for the EU…

–The Financial Times has article about outdoor dining in style. This is by Luke Edward Hall and opens with this:

Is there any such thing as a stylish picnic?
“Charles! You’re to come away at once. I’ve got a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Chñteau Peyraguey, which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted so don’t pretend.”

I have always loved this Brideshead Revisited line, and the picnic scene from the 1980s television series, adapted from Evelyn Waugh’s novel, has long given me aesthetic inspiration. There is nothing more delicious on a summer’s afternoon than gathering essentials, packing provisions, travelling to meet friends or family at some special place then whiling the hours away eating, drinking, napping, reading and swimming (if you’re lucky) on repeat.

–Yesterday (18 August) was St Helen’s Day in the western Christian Church. This is marked on the Weblog of Amy Welborn by the reposting of an article first published last year on this date. In it she explains how her religious publishing house was able to issue an edition of Waugh’s novel Helena, which he claimed was his favorite of all his novels, when the book fell out of print in the USA. She also posts a long excerpt of the introduction by George Weigel for that edition. See previous post.

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New Study of Wartime Literary London Reviewed

Posted on August 18, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Sunday Times reviews the new book about Wartime and Postwar London by D J Taylor. This is entitled Lost Girls and will be issued in London early next month. A January 2020 publication date in the USA is planned. See previous post. The book is reviewed by retired professor John Carey who describes it as:

An inspired study of mid-20th-century literary life through love and sex, […]  an exploratory and sometimes eye-popping slice of social history. It follows the fortunes of a group of not very well-known young women in London during the Second World War. He calls them Lost Girls, and explains that they were lost in the sense that,  for various reasons, they lacked parental guidance, so had to fend for themselves — which they did with some success.

The review identifies the lost girls as Barbara Skelton, Janetta Parlade, Sonia Brownell and Lys Lubbock but says that only the first two really fit into Taylor’s definition. Prof Carey goes on to claim that the book is really about Cyril Connolly who gathered these girls as well as others around him in the period when he was editor of the cultural magazine Horizon. According to the review, Connolly is

remembered now as the author of a single wonderfully funny novel, The Rock Pool (1936), and a sharp-eyed assessment of modernist literature, Enemies of Promise (1938). [He] was at prep school and Eton with Orwell, and he is Falstaff to Orwell’s Prince Hal. Falstaff notoriously divides critics. For some he is gluttonous, cowardly, dishonest, criminally exploitative and soggy with self-pity. For others he is the very spirit of comedy in rebellion against joyless puritanism. It was the same with Connolly. For some, such as Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, he was a joke. But the lost girls swarmed around him.

Waugh may have treated Connolly as a joke in his correspondence with Mitford, but he also recognized his importance as a literary figure and was more than a bit jealous of him. Waugh allowed Connolly to publish The Loved One in its entirety, taking up a complete issue of the magazine in February 1948. He did this in return for the price of his yearly subscription at a time the magazine was struggling financially.

Prof Carey concludes his review with this:

Taylor is a strikingly versatile writer — novelist, critic, historian, author of the standard biography of Orwell, and the acerbic wit behind Private Eye’s What You Didn’t Miss column. He starts this book with a brilliant snatch of spoof history in which a guileless young woman from Shepperton finds herself, by mistake, at a party among an alarming gathering of 1930s Bloomsbury intellectuals. He ends it with an account of a real-life interview that Janetta, aged 94, granted him in 2016, in which she pooh-poohs his whole idea of Lost Girls (“I think it’s rather silly really”). […]  If you have even a passing interest in human relationships and the imagination, you should not deny yourself the pleasure of reading it.

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War Novels Revival

Posted on August 17, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

William Boyd writing in the Daily Telegraph reviews the first four books in a new series published by the Imperial War Museum. These are notable novels from WWII that have been relatively neglected. See previous post. Boyd opens his review with an interesting observation that the great literature of WWI was mostly by poets (he can think of only one novel worth considering: Her Privates We by Frederic Manning). In WWII, on the other hand, he can think of only one great poet–Keith Douglas–whereas there have been several great novels. The best of these were, according to Boyd, written by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen and Anthony Powell; he might in all fairness have included Olivia Manning. Boyd explains this phenomenon by the fact that during the period of WWI poetry was the most popular and accessible of writing forms whereas after modernism took hold in the 1920s (especially The Waste Land) poetry became more difficult and therefore less accessible to the average reader and writer. The novel was more able to absorb elements of modernism without distancing itself from the reader.

The IWM’s remit is to republish novels written about the war by those who experienced it. Boyd describes all four IWM books as realistic novels: Alexander Baron’s From the City, From the Plough is about a soldier preparing for D-Day; the book by actor Anthony Quayle, Eight Hours from England, is an autobiographical account of clandestine work in Albania; and Kathleen Hewitt’s Plenty Under the Counter is a home-front mystery. Boyd gives his highest praise to David Piper’s Trial by Battle which relates to the fall of Singapore:

What elevates Piper’s novel is the fastidious elegance of his prose. The writing is very fine and acutely observed. […] The other feature of Piper’s novel, and indeed all four, is an unsentimental realism. These are not gung ho, patriotic celebrations of British pluck and derring-do.  On the contrary the world-view is more often cynical and jaundiced. […] The jingoistic songs and doggerel of the First World War–pack up your troubles in an old kit bag–would be impossible to reproduce in the Second. What the First World War taught the fighting men was that “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” was a cruel lie. By the time the Second War War came around, the soldiers and civilians had wised up. […] Warfare was never going to be the same again and the men and women who endured it were going to tell the truth this time. Paradoxically, the best place to tell the truth was through fiction. Scales had fallen away from everybody’s eyes and these four novels are excellent testimonials to our hard won maturity.

While not mentioned by Boyd in the review, he adapted Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy for TV. This featured Daniel Craig as Guy Crouchback and was broadcast by UK Channel 4. It is still available on the internet as well as DVD. Boyd also wrote and directed a film about WWI: The Trench (1997). His TV adaptation of Scoop was broadcast in 1987 and gets less attention than is its due, if only for the performances of Denholm Elliott as Mr Salter and Michael Hordern as Uncle Theodore.

UPDATE (18 August 2019): The full text of William Boyd’s review is now available on the internet and the notice has been modified to reflect it.

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Fiction, Newspapers, World War II | Tagged , , | Comments Off on War Novels Revival