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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Father’s Day Roundup

Posted on June 16, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–In response to the feverish political activity in London, The Independent newspaper has composed a list of the Top 10 fictional Prime Ministers. While no Waugh character makes the top 10, he is awarded an Honourable Mention:

Honourable mentions for Philip Downer and Matt Wheeldon, who nominated James Brown, in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, who has to resign after the Bright Young Things run wild at No 10, and his successor Walter Outrage, who is baffled about the conversations at cabinet meetings which he doesn’t understand.

Among the Top 10 are Jim Hacker from the BBC series Yes, Prime Minister, Plantagenet Palliser from Trollope’s novels, and Francis Urquhart from another TV series, Andrew Davies’ House of Cards.

–In another reference to the Prime Ministerial selection process, The Spectator has a story by Nick Cohen entitled “Everything about Boris Johnson is phony.” After discussing and dismissing Johnson’s attempts to compare himself favorably to Winston Churchill, Cohen writes:

As I have said before, Johnson bears few resemblances to Churchill, and far too many to Winston’s shifty sidekick Brendan Bracken, who became propaganda minister during the war. Bracken too was careless with the facts. He invented stories about his childhood to con his way into high society. He was an energetic manipulator of the press in both Churchill’s interest and his own. (Whenever he gave dinner parties he instructed his butler to make up a story that the prime minister was on the phone and announce the news loudly to his guests). Evelyn Waugh couldn’t stand him, and in Brideshead turned Bracken into Rex Motram, who marries the wealthy but naive Julia because ‘he wanted a woman; he wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her cheap; that was what it amounted to’. Inevitably, he betrays her, within in months of the honeymoon. ‘Rex isn’t anybody at all,’ Julia concludes of Mottram/Bracken. ‘He just doesn’t exist.’

–Another Spectator story, this one by Dominic Green, also mentions Prime Ministerial candidates with reference to a current film based on the British class system:

…you can get away with a lot in Britain if you have the right accent and manners. The Souvenir, directed by Joanna Hogg, is a coming-of-age romance about class and heroin, set in London in the early Eighties, when Britain was awash in smack and class war.

After the characters in the film have been dealt with, the article continues:

Poshness is the grift that keeps giving. The romance of Charles Ryder and doomed Sebastian Flyte wouldn’t be quite as fascinating if it had been conducted on a council estate, instead of a country estate. The beautiful surroundings and balmy memories of Brideshead Revisited tend to obscure the sorry fact that Charles is Sebastian’s enabler, just as Julie is to Anthony [in the film]. The same could be said about The Go-Between, where the past is a different country, distant enough for us to enjoy the pipe dream of paradise recovered, even as [L P] Hartley admits his part in a moral disaster. The Souvenir takes its title from Fragonard’s painting of that name, in which a pre-revolutionary aristocrat carves her lover’s initials into a tree.

—Esquire magazine has posted on its website a full copy of Waugh’s 1953 article “ST. FRANCIS XAVIER’S BONES: A festival in Old Goa honors the farthest-flung of travelers”. The article was also published about the same time in The Tablet but under a different title: “Goa: The Home of a Saint”. That is the version collected in EAR, p. 444. An earlier, shorter version also appeared in Picture Post (24 January 1953).

–The lastest issue of Harvard Magazine has an article in its “Brief Lives” series devoted to Ellen Newbold La Motte (1873-1961). She is described as a “bold activist…who challenged societal norms as a trained nurse, public-health administrator, suffragist, socialist, self-proclaimed anarchist, lesbian, anti-opium activist, and more.” In the course of her travels, she encountered Evelyn Waugh:

In summer 1916, she had left Europe to tour Asia with Emily Crane Chadbourne, a divorced American heiress and art collector who had been living in Paris. They had become a couple during the first winter of the war and remained together until La Motte’s death, their relationship occupying a liminal social space: recognized by some, considered a close friendship by others. (The acerbic English novelist Evelyn Waugh, who met them in Ethiopia in 1930, called them “two formidable ladies” whom “long companionship had made
almost indistinguishable.”)

Waugh met the two ladies at the coronation of Haile Selassie and mentions them in his book Remote People. This reference appears at p. 50 of the US edition which is entitled They Still Were Dancing; see also Penguin, 2011, p. 48.

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Letters to Maro

Posted on June 15, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

An auction house has on offer 5 letters and a post card from Evelyn Waugh to Maro Stathatos (nee Vatimbella, 1919-1989) and her son John. These were written in the period February 1962-October 1963 and are in the nature of arranging for visits and meals as well as expressions of thanks. In the post card dated 1 August 1963 advising her son how to recognize him on the platform at Taunton Station, Waugh describes himself as “short, corpulent and elderly”.

Maro is identified in the auctioneer’s material as an Egyptian-born Greek artist. Her maiden name is frequently associated with descriptions of her paintings. She was also a friend of Lawrence Durrell and one of his letters to her is on offer as well. Patrick Leigh Fermor was a friend of three generations of her husband’s family. He was named Constantine and was apparently a son of Peter Stathatos who features in Leigh Fermor’s biography as the source of the horse he “borrowed” to join the royalist uprising against the Venizelos government in the 1930s.

The auction house International Autograph Auctions has the 5 letters on sale for £200 each and the post card for £150.  Here’s a link via invaluable.com. The Waugh correspondence is Lots 140-45. The live auction will be held on Thursday, 20 June 2019 at 1pm, BST. How Waugh came to know Maro is not explained in the notes but it may come indirectly through her connections with Leigh Fermor who was a close friend of both Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford. It may also have involved an acquaintanceship with his daughter Margaret who is mentioned by Waugh in the letters and whose presence or absence seems to be relevant to the arrangements.

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Weedon Grossmith (d. 14 June 1919)

Posted on June 14, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Weedon Grossmith, best known as the co-author of The Diary of a Nobody (1892) died 100 years ago today. His collaborator was his brother George Grossmith who died in 1912. They were both also successful stage performers and wrote scripts as well as music for the theatre, but Diary was their masterpiece. Weedon also created the illustrations for later editions of the book. William Cook has written an article in the current issue of The Oldie commemorating Weedon’s death and career:

…suburbia has inspired some of our greatest comic works of art – and the first, and finest, is George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody. It’s the diary of Charles Pooter, a middle-aged clerk in an obscure City firm and the proud inhabitant (with his wife Carrie and their wayward son, Lupin) of The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, London N19.

Waugh once described the Diary in a 1930 Daily Mail article as the “funniest book in the world” and explained:

If only people would really keep journals like that. Nobody wants to read other people’s reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting, and will become more so as conditions change with the years.

Waugh’s article (“One Way to Immortality”) is collected in EAR, p. 84 and CWEW, v. 26, p. 287.

According to an article in a 2005 issue of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter & Studies by Peter Morton, Waugh found several similarities between the middle class suburban lives of the Pooter family described in the Diary and his own (“‘The Funniest Book in the World’ : Waugh and ‘The Diary of a Nobody'”, EWNS No. 36.1, Spring 2005, p. 1). His brother Alec saw many features of Lupin Pooter (hapless son of the fictional diarist) and Evelyn. Morton also describes how Waugh was cheered up in the rather depressing atmosphere of Christmas 1946 by receiving a present of the book from his mother. He went off with the book and made a concordance of his edition with the shorter version of the story as it had originally been serialized in Punch. That 1946 gift copy with Waugh’s marginal notations remains in his surviving library at the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas–one of the relatively few marked-up books in the collection.

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New Betjeman Collection

Posted on June 13, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Sunday Times has previewed a new collection of previously unpublished poems by Waugh’s friend John Betjeman, some of which have fairly explicit homosexual themes. The collection is entitled Harvest Bells and will be published later this month:

A newly discovered Betjeman poem entitled Sweets and Cake includes “the sturdy little arse of Teddy Sale” in a graphic and passionate encounter between a pair of schoolboys.The comic but increasingly explicit account of a heated fumble between Teddy, believed to be Betjeman’s alter ego, and another schoolboy named Neville is thought to have been written during the poet’s undergraduate days at Oxford in the mid-1920s.It was unearthed much later in a college archive and appears in a new collection of previously unpublished Betjeman poems called Harvest Bells. The most startling addition to Betjeman’s literary canon is undoubtedly Sweets and Cake, which takes a lurid turn after a memorable couplet: “I say, you’re awfully decent, Ted / Let’s find a place and go to bed.” […]

It was among Tom Driberg’s papers at Christ Church, Oxford, that researchers found clues that Betjeman may have gone far beyond schoolboy crushes. In addition to Sweets and Cake, they found a scatological poem believed to have been written to entertain his friends. In Summoned by Bells, his blank verse autobiography, Betjeman wrote of a youthful love that proved “too deep for words or touch”. But there is plenty of touching, not to mention messy mutual orgasms, in Sweets and Cake. Kevin Gardner, editor of Harvest Bells, said: “If in Summoned by Bells Betjeman dared not speak this love’s name, the two poems in the Driberg papers . . . fairly shout it out. In place of pastoral myth and innocent fantasy we encounter cheap, practical sex.”

Waugh was a friend of both Betjeman and his wife Penelope (who is thought by many to have been a model for certain traits of St Helena in Waugh’s 1950 novel). Waugh rather bullied Betjeman about his Anglicanism after Penelope converted to Roman Catholicism. Waugh’s friendship with both of them seemed to have rather cooled after that, although it continued at some level. For example, Betjeman gave Waugh a Victorian wash hand stand for his 50th birthday (1953) which provided the basis for one of Gilbert Pinfold’s hallucinations in Waugh’s late novel.

 

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