Iris Murdoch Centenary Marked This Week

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

This week is the 100th anniversary of novelist-philosopher Iris Murdoch’s birth in 1919. It will be marked by a Centenary Conference at St Anne’s College, Oxford this weekend (13-15 July). A later conference is scheduled on 10-11 October at the University of Picardy in France sponsored by the SEAC (Societe d’Etudes Anglaises Contemporaines).

This week’s TLS has also devoted a good deal of space to the centenary observance. There is a memoir by her biographer Peter Conradi, a review of two recent books about her works and a review of Conradi’s recent memoirs, the last third of which are devoted to his association with Murdoch. In addition, there are several brief remembrances and appreciations of Murdoch by other writers, including A N Wilson, William Boyd and Mary Beard.

Waugh did not review any of Murdoch’s books, although he does seem to have read some of her works–at least The Bell (1957), which many consider one of her best. This is mentioned in Martin Stannard’s Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years (p. 446, n.13) in a discussion of Waugh’s assessment of the then younger generation of aspiring English novelists. Tom Driberg had written to Waugh in 1961

…citing Murdoch as a writer who alternately irritated and fascinated him by her self-conscious use of symbols. ‘Symbols,’ Waugh replied…’I should have qualified my remarks by saying “good novelists”. Murdoch is a fraud. E.g. her bell could not have been rung as she describes it’.

Waugh’s message was included in his written dedication of Driberg’s copy of Unconditional Surrender. Whether Murdoch herself wrote any assessment of Waugh’s works isn’t mentioned.

A recent MA thesis compares the works of the two writers. This is by H C Otis and is entitled “The Love that Points: The teleologies of Evelyn Waugh and Iris Murdoch.” It was submitted last year at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan. Here is the Abstract:

Both Evelyn Waugh and Iris Murdoch use their novels to work out the ways in which metaphysical ends undergird and direct the world of lived experience. In other words, both authors are consistently teleological, though they disagree wildly on what (or who) the ultimate teleological good actually is. I have chosen to examine Waugh’s and Murdoch’s teleologies in light of the nature of love, which functions for both authors as a virtue and as a teleological engine. In my first chapter I treat the relationship between love and sex in Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, considering Murdoch and Waugh as exemplars of Platonic and Dantean eroticism, respectively. In my second chapter I treat the relationship between love and art in Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat, where Murdoch reflects a Platonic conception of creation and Waugh an Augustinian one. In my final chapter I treat the relationship between love and service in Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream and Waugh’s Sword of Honour, arguing that Murdoch exemplifies Simone Weil’s understanding of the human self and will, whereas Waugh exemplifies Augustine’s understanding of the same. For Murdoch, I argue, sex and art are teleologically split: that is, they are each by nature at least partially inimical to virtue, and thus must remain imperfect if they are to direct the soul toward the Good. Likewise, the efficacy of service depends on a recognition of the imperfection of the self and its subsequent destruction. For Waugh, on the other hand, sex and art are each by nature good; though that goodness becomes demonic when wrenched from its proper context, it nonetheless continues to point toward God, a lesser and distorted reflection of a greater light. Similarly, service requires not the destruction of the self but rather an affirmation of the self and its particular vocation toward God and others. In all this, Murdoch’s Good gives her a teleology that is markedly impersonal and distrustful of the self, whereas Waugh’s God gives him a teleology that is markedly personal and affirmative of the self.

The full text of the thesis is available at this link.

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Anniversaries, Brideshead Revisited, Conferences, Newspapers, Sword of Honour, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold | Tagged , | Comments Off on Iris Murdoch Centenary Marked This Week

4th of July Weekend Roundup

Posted on July 7, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–America: The Jesuit Review has reposted on its website a 2013 essay about Waugh written by Jon M Sweeney. The essay was a response to the re-issuance of all of his fiction in the USA by Little, Brown and all of his books in hardback by Penguin Classics in the UK. It is entitled “Waugh’s Head Revisited” and opens with this:

…Seventy-five years ago Waugh was one of the world’s most popular writers of fiction. A convert to Catholicism like his friend Graham Greene, Waugh had less aversion to the label “Catholic writer.” For Waugh, joining the church was the result of an investigation into truth; it also came immediately after his first marriage ended. For Greene, it was always more of a matter of coming to terms with evil and sin, his own and others, and originated in his desire to marry a Catholic woman as a young man. Waugh couldn’t sound less like Greene, for instance, when he writes to a friend in Sept. 1964: “Do you believe in the Incarnation & Redemption in the full historical sense in which you believe in the battle of El Alamein? That’s important. Faith is not a mood.”

Waugh’s longtime publishers on both sides of the Atlantic—including Little, Brown and Company here in the United States in December 2012—have spent the last two years rereleasing much of his oeuvre in hopes that interest in his writing will revive. Will it? I wonder. Does anyone read Evelyn Waugh anymore?

Sweeney goes on with a fairly broad review of Waugh’s writing, mainly fiction but touching upon the non-fiction as well. He also compares and discusses the differences between the recent USA and UK reprints. The essay closes with this:

Evelyn Waugh deserves to be remembered. By most accounts, he is one of the best, if not the best writer of English prose of the 20th century. He does aristocracy, privilege, sadness, beauty, romance and wonder better than just about anyone. And he’s better on love and sex than most. […] Unless you have an interest in the life of Waugh and his role in the Catholic renaissance of 20th century letters, stick to the novels. His other books are mostly irrelevant today. […] The legacy of Waugh in England seems to be broader than it is here, where his prose and storytelling are all we remember. There Waugh remains (with Chesterton and Greene) an intellectual voice of a historic, religious minority, where he will be known more than ever as a distinctively Catholic writer, fiction or nonfiction.

–What should have been a major literary event was the opening of the film Vita and Virginia. This is about the affair bewteen Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Marcus Berkmann reviews it for The Oldie and doesn’t find much to like. Here’s an excerpt from his review entitled (“Portrait of a Howler”):

Vita, who may not have quite enough to occupy her time, is fascinated by the Bloomsbury Group and goes to a party of theirs, which for budgetary reasons looks like a bring-a-bottle party from the 1970s with slightly posher accents. For some reason, director Chanya Button has chosen to portray the Bloomsbury Group as larky sixth-formers with a wacky sense of humour; or maybe she couldn’t afford real actors.

Enter Virginia, played by the Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki, who is far too beautiful for the frankly odd-looking Virginia, and possibly far too beautiful for real life as well. Debicki has an impossibly posh voice and talks in long sentences you never quite understand. Vita falls for her. They spend long scenes staring at each other, breathing heavily and flaring their nostrils to show uncontrollable lust. ‘You know very well that I like you – a fabulous lot,’ says Vita. ‘Do I?’ says Virginia, raising a well-bred eyebrow. ‘I like things wild and vast and complicated,’ says Vita. ‘So I hear,’ says Virginia, raising the other eyebrow this time. It’s around now that the thought dawns on you that she is a stupid person’s idea of clever person, a thought that’s impossible to shift for the rest of the film.

The Evening Standard’s reviewer (Charlotte O’Sullivan) was not much kinder:

[Gemma] Arterton is completely miscast. She plays Sackville-West as a pert, predatory trophy wife, the sort who causes mayhem in Evelyn Waugh novels. They should have given the part to Phoebe Waller-Bridge (whose sister Isobel provides the exuberantly jarring, rave-culture score).

–Another recent film finds disfavor with the critic for the Los Angeles Times. This is the  TV adaptation of Catch-22 now playing on Hulu in the US and Channel 4 in the UK. The review written by Michael Hiltzik notes that bad novels (e.g., The Godfather) often make better films than great ones (e.g., War and Peace):

There are some obvious reasons why great books are often unfilmable. Great literary works have an inner life that can’t easily be presented through image and dialogue. No film can reproduce the moral dialogue that Leo Tolstoy has with his characters and the reader that makes “War and Peace” a unique reading experience. The key to Faulkner’s greatest novels is a prose style that invests his narratives with the power of Biblical parable, but has no cinematic analogue.

There also are less obvious reasons. One is that adaptations of great works often come to the task with an excess of reverence. The filmmakers are reluctant to communicate the exuberance of some first-rate literary work for fear of seeming disrespectful; the result is an agonizingly slow translation of a work that should move like a pistol shot. Even the generally fine 1981 miniseries of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” with Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews drained away much of Waugh’s tragic sarcasm. That left mostly the tragedy, which wasn’t as much fun.

Waugh was asked to provide a favorable blurb for Catch-22 when it was first published but declined:

…It suffers not only from indelicacy but prolixity. It should be cut by about half. In particular the activities of “Milo” should be eliminated or greatly reduced. You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches–often repetitious–totally without structure. Much of the dialogue is funny.

You may quote me as saying: “This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies.”  (Letters, 572)

–Finally, an academic paper mentioned in a previous post has been published in a book containing papers collected from the conference on international law where it was presented. This is NorteamĂ©rica y España: una historia de encuentros y desencuentros [North America and Spain: A History of Convergences and Divergences]. The article by Dr Fernando Gomez Herrero from the University of Birmingham is entitled “Francisco de Vitoria in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s On the Law of Nations“. It includes references to Waugh’s novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe:

The former American Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) invokes the figure of the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1492-1546), in his fight within and against the imperial politics during the Reagan presidency. And he does it indirectly via the novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947) by Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). The connection is direct between this work of fiction with Moynihan’s social-science work titled On the Law of Nations (1990).

Share
Posted in Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Film, Letters, Newspapers, Scott-King's Modern Europe, Television | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on 4th of July Weekend Roundup

Spring Issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies Published

Posted on July 5, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies (No. 50.1, Spring 2019) has been distributed. The contents are noted below. A copy may be accessed here.

ARTICLES

 “Huxley’s Ape”: Waugh in Scandinavia (August-September 1947), by Jeffrey Manley

Between his first two trips to the USA in the spring of 1947 and the fall of 1948, Evelyn Waugh made a two-week tour of Scandinavia. The trip was proposed and sponsored by the Daily Telegraph, which later published two articles about it written by Waugh. Unlike his earlier postwar journeys to Spain and the USA, this one produced neither a novel nor a travel book. Nor do his biographers spend much time considering either the motivations for the trip or the newspaper articles it produced. 

The trip is of interest to Waugh enthusiasts, however, because it took place at the peak of his popularity as a novelist, between the publication of his two best-selling works. Brideshead had been published in 1945, and he had just completed The Loved One, which would be published in 1948. During the tour he was extensively interviewed by reporters about these two books, as well as those he’d written previously and works he’d planned for the future. Because he had recently returned from his trip to Hollywood he discussed his impressions of the United States, the film industry, and burial practices at Forest Lawn. His comments⁠—generally informative and candid⁠⁠—were widely reported in the newspapers of all three Scandinavian countries and are translated here for the first time. The reporters manifested a keen interest in his answers about the USA. 

REVIEWS 

Reconstruction and Ricochet

Lara Feigel, The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich,

Reviewed by Marshall McGraw 

Inez, Evelyn, and the Blitz 

Inez Holden, Blitz Writing: Night Shift and It Was Different at the Time, edited by Kristen Bluemel

Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

Share
Posted in Articles, Complete Works, Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Waugh Studies, Newsletter, World War II | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Spring Issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies Published

Wavian Wine Writing

Posted on July 4, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Catholic Herald has a review of Auberon Waugh’s 1986 book Waugh on Wine which has been reprinted by Quartet Books. The review is by David Platzer who writes:

Waugh reveals in his introduction that it was Tina Brown, his former protĂ©gĂ© who was then spicing up the staid Tatler before her departure to New York, who encouraged him to write about wine. As the Tatler’s wine correspondent, he disguised himself as Crispin de la Crispian, a Pimpernel-like pen name he dropped in future wine columns in Harper’s & Queen and the Spectator.

Waugh was the most consistently entertaining writer of his generation. He could make his articles enjoyable even to those less than fascinated by the subject. […] Reading Waugh gives one that agreeable feeling, not only that one wine is better than another but that one knows why.[…]

Waugh was wrongly accused of being a snob by those who failed to grasp his teases. His priority in praising a wine invariably depended on its cost, just as he would tick off a book if it was too expensive. […] He ended this delightful collection with an essay on “Evelyn Waugh’s Wine” in which he describes his too often misunderstood father as “a gentle, humorous man – sometimes sad, sometimes gloomy – and nowhere near as bad-tempered as he appeared to the Press.” His explanation for his father’s abandonment of claret, which Evelyn had once loved, is a must for devotees of “Waviana”.

The new edition contains an introduction by Naim Attallah who also edited the recently published collection of Auberons’s essays, A Scribbler in Soho. See previous posts. It is not available yet in the USA but can be purchased from Amazon.co.uk.

Forbes magazine, meanwhile, has advocated an approach to wine writing which sounds very much like the Herald’s description of Auberon Waugh’s. This is in an article written by John Mariani who wants to abolish what he calls “winespeak” and uses a passage from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited to illustrate what he is talking about:

[…]Nowhere is Winespeak better parodied than in Evelyn Waugh’s 1944 novel Brideshead Revisited,  when two drunken rouĂ©s describe various bottlings as “a little, shy wine like a gazelle. . . . Like a leprechaun. . . . Dappled, in a tapestry meadow” and “like the last unicorn.”

Obviously such satires of such piffle haven’t stopped the wine media from trudging on in the pages of Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, Decanter and other publications with hundreds of descriptions that range from technical gibberish like, “Brett in the nose, incomplete malolactic fermentation, a slight taste of graphite, a scent of botrytis, and enough vanillin to suggest overuse of new French barriques,” to reveries like “cinnamon, Meyer lemon, papaya, Monte Cristo No. 2 with Dominican wrapping, cat’s pee, and a hint of Sicilian blood orange.” Perhaps the silliest descriptor I’ve ever heard was in the 2013 documentary Somm, in which one wine steward preparing to take the Master Sommelier Exam, exclaims with mind-boggling certainty, “I’m getting notes of. . . freshly cut garden hose.” […]

UPDATE (5 July 2019): A link was provided to an earlier post and other non-substantive edits were made.

Share
Posted in Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Wavian Wine Writing

End-of-the-Month Roundup

Posted on June 30, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Today’s New York Times has an article about people who choose to have portraits of their houses painted rather than photographed:

While landscape portraiture became a common endeavor for artists centuries ago, homes were rarely the principal subjects of the paintings. The Vanderbilt family commissioned artist John Singer Sargent to paint several family portraits in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, but none of Biltmore Estate, their famed 8,000-acre property in Asheville, N.C. One house portrait painter of note, albeit fictional, was Charles Ryder, the narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Brideshead Revisited.” He was not taken very seriously as an artist, but his vocation was a convenient vehicle for exploring Brideshead Castle and the world it represented.

Charles got his start in house portraiture not at Brideshead Castle but at Marchmain House in London, which he memorialized on canvas inside and out before the family sold it off to be torn down and redeveloped into flats.

–Yesterday’s Times newspaper carried an interview of veteran BBC TV presenter Michael Parkinson. It opens with this:

My favourite author or book
Anything by Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh. They’re my two favourite authors of all time. Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, because I’m a journalist and laughed all the way through it, and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. You can pick any book you want, but those two are the best of the bunch from my point of view.

His favorite TV series, however, is Z-Cars. The most over-rated book in his opinion is Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

–The religious website Aleteia.org makes a recommendation for 7 books to be read by Roman Catholic women this summer. They make picks in several categories:

If you like historical fiction 


Grab Helena by Evelyn Waugh. It’s a short book about an intriguing time in history 
 and a saint. Not only is Helen a saint, but she was a married woman, and mother to an emperor in Rome. A powerful and enjoyable story about a strong woman living in very interesting times.

–The New Criterion has a review by Simon Heffer of two recently republished books that have a possible connection to Waugh’s Sword of Honour. These are by John Verney who is described in the review:

…Verney was born in 1913 and, like many young men of his generation, was sufficiently concerned by the threat of Nazi Germany to the peace of Europe and the security of Great Britain that, in 1937, he joined the Territorial Army, or yeomanry, whose members trained as soldiers during summer holidays and on weekends. Verney found the men with whom he was thrown into association rather unfathomable: “My brother officers. Are they human?,” he asks. Until the war he worked in the cinema, as an assistant director in Britain’s then-booming film industry. But the war changed everything for him. Before too long he began to fathom his brother officers, and one of the miracles of war was that its necessities bonded them together against a common enemy.

Verney chronicled his war—after a fashion—in two books: Going to the Wars, published in 1955, and its sequel, A Dinner of Herbs, which appeared in 1966. They enjoyed a significant vogue when they first arrived, with reviewers seeing Verney as the voice of his generation; they have, however, rather like their author, been largely forgotten. Therefore it is clever of Paul Dry to rediscover them and put them again before the public in paperback…

After a description of the two books, Heffer closes his review with this:

The first volume of this duo appeared in the same year as the second book in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy; one wonders whether Verney had read Waugh’s Men at Arms, the first novel in the trilogy, published in 1952, because the tone of voice is uncannily similar. That could be not least because Waugh, though a decade older than Verney, came from a similar background and endured a similarly frustrating war spent partly on special operations. Or, perhaps more importantly, it could be because they were both similarly schooled that the English way to deal with a sticky situation is to laugh about it, and to find the ludicrous rather than the heroic or the noble. Waugh dealt in fiction; Verney, despite the name changes, dealt in fact. All his tone does is convey the genuine nobility that he and his fellow warriors against Nazism possessed, and which a whole new generation reading these books may find almost impossible to grasp.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Helena, Men at Arms, Newspapers, Portraits, Scoop, World War II | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on End-of-the-Month Roundup

BBC to Repeat Commando Documentary

Posted on June 26, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Four TV will tonight rebroadcast the 2012 documentary about the Commando training base at Achnacarry, Scotland. This is entitled “Castle Commando” and will be broadcast at 2200p BST. Waugh’s 1943 assignment to that training base contributed to his decision to leave the Army (or at least the Commandos). Stannard II, pp. 85-86. Here’s the BBC.s description of the program:

In January 1942, the historic Achnacarry Estate was transformed into a wartime paramilitary academy. In four years of operation, 25,000 men came to the Scottish Highlands to endure the world’s toughest infantry training course.

Narrated by Rory Bremner, Castle Commando looks back on the larger-than-life characters that helped shape Winston Churchill’s legendary raiding troops. Veterans remember how the ferocious Highland landscape was the perfect environment for the most exacting, most gruelling military training of World War II.

For a more detailed review, see previous post. The program will be available for streaming on BBC iPlayer after broadcast. A UK internet connection will be required to stream from this source.

Share
Posted in Documentaries, Television Programs, World War II | Tagged , | Comments Off on BBC to Repeat Commando Documentary

OED Declares “Brideshead” an Adjective

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

In its June 2019 list of new words the Oxford English Dictionary declares “Brideshead” to be an adjective independent of Waugh’s novel. Here’s their entry and usage examples for the new word:

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’.

The OED‘s etymology of the new word is also provided: “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.”

Share
Posted in Academia, Brideshead Revisited | Tagged , | Comments Off on OED Declares “Brideshead” an Adjective

Decline and Fall: Two Editions on Offer

Posted on June 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Oxford University Press has posted promotional material for a special edition of Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh’s first novel. This is rewritten for Level 6 English language learners (secondary and adult students) by Clare West. It is part of the Oxford Bookworms Library that has seven reading levels. Here’s a description of the book from OUP’s website:

After a wild, drunken party, Paul Pennyfeather is forced to leave Oxford and begin a new life out in the wide world. His experiences take him from a boys’ private school in Wales, where he meets some rather strange people, to a life of luxury in a grand country house and the Ritz Hotel, and then to seven years’ hard labour in prison. Where will it all end? The black humour of this story about English society in the 1920s is as fresh today as it was when the novel was first written.

The book was originally published in 2008 and is in a paperback format. The website offers sample pages showing the page design and illustrations which seem to be unique to this production. Here’s a link.

Meanwhile, Oxfam has on offer a first edition of this same novel. It is ex-library and has the usual characteristics of that progeny but is priced accordingly. It is identified as a genuine first edition by reference to “Martin Gaythorne-Brodie” on page 168 that was changed in later editions because of its similarity to Edward Gathorne-Hardy. On following page “Kevin Saunderson” was also changed because of similarity to Gavin Henderson. In later editions they appear as Miles Malpractice and Lord Parakeet, respectively. The Oxfam offering includes several photographs showing the state of the book. The price is £399.99. Here’s their description:

Two-tone red and black ‘snakeskin’ cloth lettered in gold at spine. With a frontispiece and five illustrations by the author. Has some wear to corners, damage to top and bottom of spine and no dust jacket. Ex library book which is internally good apart from first few pages which have damage from library markings/ticket pocket and tears, also library stamp and a signature. Please see extensive pictures taken.

Share
Posted in Academia, Decline and Fall, Items for Sale | Tagged , | Comments Off on Decline and Fall: Two Editions on Offer

Summer Solstice Roundup

Posted on June 23, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–A new biography has been written of Lord Beaverbrook, primary model for Lord Copper in Waugh’s novel Scoop. This is reviewed by Richard Davenport-Hines in the current TLS. The review opens with this:

There have been previous biographies of the newspaper mogul Lord Beaverbrook, but none has been so timely as the most recent one by the international banker and Labour politician Lord Williams of Elvel. As a study of an arbitrary and lawless spirit, of ill-gotten gains and mischief-making, of the frivolous irresponsibility of newspapermen who reach the Cabinet and above all of Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, Max Beaverbrook provides a parable for our times. “I am no authority on European politics”, Lord Beaverbrook told his Sunday Express readers in the early 1930s when he was running his Empire Free Trade crusade. “I cannot speak their languages. I don’t want to. I don’t know their politicians. I don’t like them. I don’t want alliances with European states.” Beaverbrook died in 1964, but if cryogenics had preserved him for reanimation in 2016, he would have been an arch-Brexiteer.

Although Waugh started his career in professional journalism at Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, he never showed any gratitude. Indeed, he filed multiple libel suits against the paper after the war, successful for the most part.

–Waugh’s biographer and friend Christopher Sykes is profiled in a weblog called “Tweedland and the Gentlemen’s Club.” The posting is by Tom Sykes who is, I believe, Christopher Syke’s grandson. Here’s an excerpt:

Nowadays Sykes is especially remembered for his biography of his friend Evelyn Waugh, whom he met after the success of Waugh’s Vile Bodies. He introduced Waugh to the socialite Diana Cooper, aka Lady Stitch. He praised Brideshead, Waugh’s Catholic epic (the two were both Catholics, but with the notable difference—mentioned by Waugh’s son Auberon when reviewing Sykes’s book in the November 1975 issue of Books and Bookmen – that whereas Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his twenties, Sykes was a cradle Catholic) though admitting to his dislike of the character Julia Flyte. Sykes makes some interesting comparisons between scenes in Waugh’s books and those of William M Thackeray – the fox hunting scene in a Handful of Dust is compared to that in Barry Lyndon.

[…] He also wrote [a life] of Orde Wingate (published 1959 – Sykes drew attention to Wingate as the possible basis for Waugh’s character Brigadier Ritchie Hook in The Sword of Honour trilogy, in his biography of Waugh) the general sometimes known as the “Lawrence of Judea” (a phrase that Wingate deplored) […]

After 1945 Sykes worked for many years in BBC Radio, where he helped to get Waugh’s broadcast on P G Wodehouse, who was captured in Le Touquet by the Germnas, on air, as well as writing for several British and American periodicals…

–Here’s a posting from what looks like a Berkeley-based weblog called “Mallory’s Camera”:

Also watching Brideshead Revisted for the 20th time. Love, loss and redemption never get old! The 1981 mini-series is an excellent adaptation of a novel I deeply love. Evelyn Waugh was a right old warthog, a truly obnoxious individual, but he could write!

Many people think this is the greatest line in 20th century English-language literature: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. They’re wrong.

This is the greatest line in 20th century English-language literature: But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

–The Amherst College website posts a biographical article about a long-serving and outspoken Professor of English named Theodore Baird. That article is based on Baird’s diaries:

William H. Pritchard ’53, the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, edited two volumes of posthumously published Baird essays. “He was a man of very strong taste, and he really was pretty much of no two minds about anything,” Pritchard recalls. “He liked it or he didn’t like it. He admired it or he didn’t admire it.”

It’s a trait evident in the diaries. In one entry, for example, Baird dismisses an author’s work before describing a trip to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: “July 13, 1933: Read Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, a low dull book. Quite exciting however, to be going to Chi and the Fair. … We walked the 3 miles to the end of the Fair, buying a few souvenirs, going to see Rumba. Remember the smell of the Fair.”

–Finally, conservative journalist and editor of New Criterion, Roger Kimball, has posted an article on the weblog American Greatness on the occasion of the death earlier this month of author and academic Charles Reich at the age of 91. This is not so much an appreciation of Reich’s life as it is a revisit to Reich’s only notable book The Greening of America (1970). The book was a major bestseller when it was first published but is now extremely dated, out of print and best forgotten (although a Kindle edition is available). It seems hardly worth Kimball’s time, but he apparently wants to drive the final nail into the coffin, which he does quite effectively, albeit at greater length (not the nail) than necessary. His conclusion brings Waugh into the story:

…The path to enlightenment that Reich extolled was a path to nowhere —to “utopia” in its etymological sense. That did not prevent it from becoming a major highway “for the long march through American life.” The unhappy example of Charles Reich—his silly book, his 15 minutes of celebrity—should not distract us from the malevolence of the message he helped promulgate. He himself was rather like the unfortunate Seth, emperor of Azania, whom Evelyn Waugh described in his novel Black Mischief:

“The earnest and rather puzzled young man became suddenly capricious and volatile; ideas bubbled up within him, bearing to the surface a confused sediment of phrase and theory, scraps of learning half understood and fantastically translated.”

Although Reich managed pretty well to destroy his own life, he was too fuzzy-headed and inept to find many real disciples. In this respect, he was more a symptom than a cause. In the hands of people like Timothy Leary, however, the nonsense that made up Reich’s pseudomystical “philosophy” damaged countless lives and insinuated itself into the inner fabric of American life. Requiescat in pace.

Share
Posted in Biographies, Black Mischief, Scoop, Sword of Honour, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Summer Solstice Roundup

Report of Recent Waugh Event

Posted on June 21, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A local Oxfordshire news weblog has posted this report of a recent evening of Waugh-related presentations at the Abingdon Arms in Beckley, a village near Oxford:

On June 3rd the pub hosted three emerging talents as the grand finale of the David Bradshaw Creative Writing Residency, a collaboration between the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, Worcester College and the Bodleian Library. Dr Barbara Cooke, current co-executive editor of the Complete Works, introduced the project and read from her new book, a fascinating study of Waugh seen through the lens of locations in Oxford that were important to him, from the railway station, where he helped to organise drunken dinners on steam trains, to his tailors, where he ran up large debts.

            Rob Francis then read a series of energetic, visceral poems inspired by Barbara’s research, some composed as he walked around the city in Waugh’s footsteps. A highly polished and engaging performer, even the unfamiliar black country idioms with which he peppered his verses held the audience spellbound.

            Rob was followed by a rehearsed reading of Sophie Swithinbank’s Even in Arcadia, a modern retelling of Brideshead Revisited with female protagonists. An engrossing and tightly-paced story of sexual fluidity, alcoholism and addiction, by turns moving and funny, it was enhanced by the electrifying performances of Amelia Holt as Sabrina, Matthew Staite as Joseph and Abby McCann as Charley.

            As Dr Cooke said, Beckley has always welcomed writers with open arms – open Abingdon Arms, that is – so our special thanks go to Aimee for keeping the pub open late for this memorable evening.

Share
Posted in Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Complete Works, Events, Oxford | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Report of Recent Waugh Event