Waugh to Appear in Mystery Novel

Posted on August 4, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

According to the advance publicity for an upcoming mystery novel, Evelyn Waugh will play at least a cameo role in its plot. The book is entitled The Mitford Scandal and is written by Jessica Fellowes. It is the third in a series of mystery novels involving the Mitford sisters and will be published in the UK in September followed by a US publication in January.

The publisher’s announcement describes the plot:

The year is 1928, and after the death of a maid at a glamorous society party, fortune heir Bryan Guinness seizes life and proposes to eighteen-year-old Diana, most beautiful of the six Mitford sisters. The maid’s death is ruled an accident, and the newlyweds put it behind them to begin a whirlwind life zipping between London’s Mayfair, chic Paris and hedonistic Berlin. Accompanying Diana as her lady’s maid is Louisa Cannon, as well as a coterie of friends, family and hangers on, from Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh.

When a second victim is found in Paris in 1931, Louisa begins to see links with the death of the maid two years previously. Now she must convince the Mitford sisters that a murderer could be within their midst . . . all while shadows darken across Europe, and within the heart of Diana Mitford herself.

Two previous books have been published in this series: The Mitford Murders and Bright Young Dead. Both appeared within 6 months of each other last year in the USA. The UK editions were published in September 2017 and October 2018. The series is written by Jessica Fellowes who made her name writing companion volumes for Downton Abbey, the TV series that was, in turn, written by her uncle Julian Fellowes.

According to a November 2018 interview of the author Jessica Fellowes by Elise Cooper, the working title of the upcoming volume at that time was Cruel Bodies and it will focus on Diana Mitford. There was no suggestion in the press reports that Waugh appeared in either of the earlier books. The second book (Bright Young Dead) must have come close to a cameo appearance by Waugh since it involved the Bright Young People of the late 1920s of which we was the primary chronicler.

There was a brief appearance in the second novel by Noel Coward, and a BYP treasure hunt was part of the plot. As explained by Fellowes in the 2018 interview:

I have never done a scavenger [i.e., treasure] hunt because they didn’t exist after the 1920s, though I wouldn’t mind trying one out! I discovered them when I was researching another project some years ago, and it was when I was putting together the plot for Bright Young Dead that I thought this would be the perfect place to use them. I liked the idea of a murder happening in the middle of a scavenger hunt, and how that could frame several suspects at once. The Bright Young Things were notorious in their time, with their antics and parties frequently reported on in the papers. There was plenty of authentic detail for me to draw on, too, which is a real bonus in a novel like mine.

Fellowes also elaborated somewhat on the role played by the Mitford sisters in the novels:

In terms of the two sisters, Nancy, a twenty-one-year-old, was a complicated person, I think, possibly born into the wrong time. In a more modern era, she would have lived a life that perhaps did not place such emphasis on a need to get married and have children. Despite her many accomplishments, there’s a sense of sadness that she did not create her own happy family. Her ambition made her spiky and her defensiveness, or jealousy, could lead her to tease her sisters in ways that were at times just plain mean. But then again, she also had a wonderful, true sense of humour and must have been huge fun. Of all of them, Nancy’s the one I’d have liked to go out and have a few cocktails with.

Pamela was quite different from all the other sisters. While they were all headstrong and wilful, unabashed about causing storms and headlines, Pamela was quiet and steady. She was more interested in horses, gardening and cooking than any political mantra, which is not to say she didn’t hold her own strong views. But I think she was the ballast of the family, the rock that kept them moored.

The first novel (The Mitford Murders) is set in 1919-21. The girls would have been much younger and, at that time, no connection with Waugh (then a student) would have yet existed.

 

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Early August Roundup

Posted on August 3, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–In The Times, author Lynne Truss (best known for Eats, Shoots and Leaves) has found it useful in the present unrestful circumstances to turn to comic novels as a way to reduce stress. She recommends 5 examples. Here is a quote:

“Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (1928)
The influence of Jane Austen on Gibbons and Waugh is obvious, so I should probably have chosen Pride and Prejudice, but there you are; I can’t change it all now. Decline and Fall is one of the funniest books, the tale of the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, innocently dragged into disgrace and ignominy by the worldly and profane. Astonishingly, the recent BBC dramatisation did it credit, and is really worth watching. Favourite moment: at the school sports, when a drunken Mr Prendergast shoots little Lord Tangent in the foot with his starting pistol (later, the foot has to be amputated).”

Others include Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbon and The Code of the Woosters by P G Wodehouse.

–The Daily Telegraph asked several of its writers who are recent university graduates what advice they would give today to their younger selves if they were just starting out. Here’s what Sasha Slater: Oxford 1990-94 would offer:

Dear younger me,

“‘You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first.’ That’s the warning Charles Ryder gets from his horrible cousin Jasper in Brideshead Revisited. Not true. In fact, the people you meet in the first week could be your best friends for the rest of your life. One of them’s your husband now. So, nurture those friendships and look after those people.

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean you should spend time having fun to the exclusion of practically everything else. A tiny bit more concentration on your studies wouldn’t hurt. And nor would squeezing a few more activities besides booze into your schedule. So, do get out of bed a little bit earlier – it really won’t kill you. And try to make it to the odd lecture. Just the odd one will do. Don’t be knocked back if you aren’t made editor of the student mag – write for it instead. And so what if you don’t win the starring role in the college play? You could do the lighting or props and still learn something and enjoy yourself.”

—The Daily Beast has published an article by Michael Weiss which explains that Boris Johnson can best be understood as an “Anglo-American farce”, considering he was born in the USA. The article concludes with a comparison of the character named Barlow and based on himself in Johnson’s novel Seventy Two Virgins with a similarly named character in Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One:

Dennis Barlow is Evelyn Waugh’s has-been English poet and transplant to the United States—well, Los Angeles, anyway—in The Loved One. He fails to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood and becomes a minor embarrassment to a close-knit and tightly self-regulated coterie of fellow exiles, all of them witting self-parodies of stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen. 

“We limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you know, Barlow,” says Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, who routinely traipses through Bel Air in a cape and deer-stalker cap because it’s what the yanks expect of him. “They may laugh at us a bit—the way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles—they may think us cliquey and stand-offish, but, by God, they respect us.” […]

The [Cricket Club] raises the money to send Barlow home where he at least can live out his life in discreet disgrace and not ruin things for the rest of the monocled castaways on the coast. This result, one senses, was what Barlow was searching for all through his steady descent into personal and national ruin: a free ride. That certainly sounds familiar, as does Waugh’s subtitle for The Loved One: “an Anglo-American tragedy.”

–The Amman, Jordan-based website MENAFN.com (Middle East North Africa Financial News) has posted a column explaining how the rise in popularity of margarine became a signifier of social class as reflected in literature of the 1930s. Examples from two Orwell novels, D H Lawrence and Dorothy Sayers as well as this excerpt from an essay by Evelyn Waugh are offered:

In a column penned by Evelyn Waugh for The Spectator in 1929 , margarine represents a general post-war lack of good taste. During the war, writes Waugh, ‘[e]verything was a ‘substitute’ for something else’, the upshot being ‘a generation of whom nine hundred and fifty in every thousand are totally lacking in any sense of qualitative value’ as a consequence of ‘being nurtured on margarine and ‘honey sugar’.’ Such a diet, according to Waugh, makes them ‘turn instinctively to the second rate in art and life’.

The article concludes with this:

Margarine functions as an extended metaphor for the tawdry world of fakes and counterfeits. At the same time that Sayers’ novel pokes fun at the consumer products of modernity, it dishes out scorn at the snootiness which ranks butter eaters as superior to those who choose margarine.

Margarine stands for the novel and the innovative. It stands for technology and progress. But margarine also embodies anxieties about the prevalence of mass culture and the fear surrounding the dissolution of boundaries between the high and the low, the real and the fake. Margarine is so threatening a symbol as it represents the potential contamination of society with what the early 20th-century elites might have seen as infectious mediocrity.

–Playwright David Hare was recently interviewed in the Financial Times. Here are some excerpts:

Q. Private school or state school? University or straight into work?  

A. I was a scholarship boy, at Lancing College, then Cambridge. My parents would not have been able to afford that education. I had great teachers at Lancing, in Harry Guest, who taught us modern languages, and Donald Bancroft, head of English. […]

Q. Ambition or talent: which matters more to success? 

A. Neither. There’s a quote from VS Naipaul: “A writer is in the end not his books but his myth.” What he means is that Virginia Woolf doesn’t matter because she wrote Mrs Dalloway, she matters because she was a great feminist. Evelyn Waugh doesn’t matter because he wrote Brideshead Revisited, he matters because he is the greatest stylist of the 20th century. You have no control over your myth.

Hare’s adaptation of Peter Gynt is currently playing at the Edinburgh International Festival through 10 August and will open at the National Theatre on 8 October.

 

 

 

 

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Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy 1933-2019: R I P

Posted on July 29, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph has reported the death of writer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy at the age of 86. He was the son of a younger son of an upper class family, but his father lacked access to inherited wealth and was unable to earn a living as a physician due to his alcoholism. They frequently lived a fairly hand-to-mouth existence as described in his autobiography Half an Arch (2004). He also wrote novels, short stories, biographies and children’s books. One of his best known books is The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (1972). According to the Daily Telegraph obituary: “Wherever he was, intimacies poured from him–which, slightly too often, involved lack of money.”

He is best known in the Evelyn Waugh community as the nephew of Eddie Gathorne-Hardy who contributed to a character in Decline and Fall originally named Martin Gaythorne-Brodie. On advice of counsel, the name was changed in the second printing to Miles Malpractice. There was apparently never any suggestion that Eddie Gathorne-Hardy objected to the the name similarity. As Miles Malpractice, the character also appeared in the later novels Vile Bodies and Put Out More Flags.

His second wife, who survives him, also has a Waugh connection. She is artist Nicky Loutit, daughter of Janetta Parladé, one of Cyril Connolly’s young women friends during his Horizon days. See previous post. Waugh met her on several occasions and was taken with the fact that she frequently went about without shoes. He applied to her the nick-name “Bluefeet” in his gossipy correspondence with Nancy Mitford. Her story, along with that of several other young women associates of Connolly, will soon be available in D J Taylor’s book The Lost Girls to be published in September.

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Harold Acton’s Estate Subject of Lawsuit

Posted on July 29, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The New York Post’s celebrity gossip website PageSix,com has posted a story relating to Harold Acton’s bequest of his estate near Florence, Italy to New York University. Acton died childless in 1994 and left most of his fine art and property to NYU with a smaller bequest to the British Institute of Florence.  NYU uses the estate known as Villa La Pietra as a base for “study abroad” students and faculty. The artwork is also open to the public for visits by appointment.

For some time the bequest has been contested by the late Liana Beacci and her daughter Mrs Dialti Orlandi who claimed that Liana Beacci, described as a Florentine hotelier, was the illegitimate daughter of Arthur Acton, Harold’s father. She was born of an affair between Arthur Acton and his secretary who was Liana Beacci’s mother. Under Italian law, at least since 2013, it is unlawful to discriminate against children born out of wedlock. Whether Harold Acton was aware of Mrs Beacci’s claim at the time he bequeathed his property to NYU isn’t clear from the Post’s story, or those of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail which have both picked it up. The Florentine civil court ruled on 18 July that Mrs Beacci was fathered by Arthur Acton. This is apparently based, inter alia, on DNA results. But there has been no ruling on whether she was entitled by law to a share of the estate.

What will happen now is unclear. The property is worth approximately £800 million according to the press reports. Mrs  Orlandi, who is pressing the claim and talking to the newspapers, says she doesn’t need the money but is fighting the case as a matter of principle.

The stories all note that Harold Acton was a friend of Evelyn Waugh at Oxford and afterwards and was the model for the character Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited.  Waugh and Acton were friends and Waugh respected Acton’s artistic taste. It was  based on Acton’s assessment that Waugh destroyed the draft of his first novel The Temple at Thatch, and he was among the few people invited to Waugh’s first wedding where he acted as best man.

A later, and expanded story in the Daily Mail adds more information about Harold Acton and his career, some of which implicates his friendship with Waugh. Not all of this new information is accurate. According to the Mail’s later story:

Among Acton’s guests [at La Pietra] was Evelyn Waugh. The pair had been lovers when they were at Oxford and Acton somewhat vituperatively nicknamed the author ‘little faun’.

Waugh had immortalised Acton in the novel Brideshead Revisited, saying that he was, in part, the inspiration for the ‘aesthetic b***er’ character of Anthony Blanche, a flamboyant, stammering intellectual with an encyclopaedic knowledge of high art and culture.

Blanche was overtly homosexual during an era when it was still seen as scandalous. Like Blanche, Acton had strong — some might say obsessive — ideas about beauty and refinement.

Waugh visited Acton in Italy at least twice after the war. He saw La Pietra in 1950 but was not a guest of Harold. At the time of Waugh’s visit, La Pietra was still occupied  by Acton’s parents and he lived nearby. Waugh stayed at the Pensione Villa Natalia and was probably escorted to La Pietra by Harold. In a letter to Nancy Mitford, Waugh  pronounced La Pietra as “very fine. Much more than I expected.” After that visit, he described Bernard Berenson’s villa at I Tatti as “a miserable hole” in comparison (Letters, p. 324). He also travelled with Acton to Sicily and Naples in 1952 but did not stop in Florence on that trip. The trip did not go well, and they saw each less often after that. Acton inherited the villa in 1953 upon his father’s death.

It is not clear from what information the Mail has concluded that Waugh and Acton were lovers. Selina Hastings (p. 95) wrote that Harold was attracted to Evelyn but the feelings were not reciprocated. She also notes that Harold was jealous of Evelyn’s relations with the men with whom Waugh did reciprocate his feelings, Richard Pares and Alastair Graham. Most Waugh scholars have argued, as the Mail notes later in its article, that Acton shared the honors as a model for Anthony Blanche with his friend Brian Howard, who also knew Waugh at Oxford but was not close to him afterwards. See below. According to Selina Hastings, Waugh also named him as the model for Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags.

The Mail goes on to describe what it calls the “Curse of Brideshead” and concludes that it may now be extended to Acton posthumously. According to the Mail, if the legal proceedings against the NYU bequest succeed:

… Acton will become the latest victim of the so-called Curse of Brideshead, which has struck a succession of the real-life individuals connected to the famous novel and its author. They include Hugh Lygon, who allegedly inspired Lord Sebastian Flyte and died at 31 after falling off a kerb; David Plunket Greene, whose hedonistic life was the basis for Waugh’s Vile Bodies, about the ‘bright young things’ of the Twenties (suicide at 36); Brian Howard, another purported inspiration for Blanche, who killed himself at 52 after the death of a boyfriend; and Robert Byron, a travel-writer friend of Waugh who died at sea aged 35.

Most Waugh scholars have concluded that Sebastian Flyte was inspired for the most part by Alastair Graham, one of the lovers of whom Acton was jealous, although Hugh Lygon may well have contributed some features to his character. Whether Plunket Greene’s life was the primary inspiration for Vile Bodies seems a stretch and neither he nor Robert Byron had anything to do with Brideshead aside from being friends of the author,

On a lighter and concluding note, Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, has also joined the reportage by posting an article on The Oldie’s weblog about a 1983 trip he made to La Pietra with his family at age 11. They  were hosted by Harold Acton on a visit that was arranged by Mount’s great-uncle Anthony Powell, another friend of both Acton and Waugh:

…Acton had recited The Waste Land, from his window in Christ Church, Oxford, at passing rowers 60 years previously, as Blanche does in the book. In this same voice, according to John Betjeman, Acton said, while at Oxford, ‘My dears, I want to rush into the fields and slap raw meat with lilies.’ And in this voice, he asked my brother, sister and me, ‘Would you like some crisps?’ They were quite the most delicious crisps I’d ever had – bacon-flavoured, but with none of the coarse, bacony flavour of Frazzles, the bacon crisps popular in Britain at the time…

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A Waugh Pilgrimage in The Spectator

Posted on July 25, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s “Low Life” column in The Spectator describes a Waugh-themed literary/artistic pilgrimage in Wiltshire and Dorset. This is by Jeremy Clarke who starts with an Augustus John exhibit in Salisbury before proceeding to the Henry Lamb exhibit in Poole. This is where his first Waugh encounter takes place:

[Lamb’s] portrait of Waugh was three times larger than I thought it was. […] Waugh sat for Lamb at Lamb’s Poole studio in 1928. At the time Waugh had taken a room at the Barley Mow  pub on the Wimborne Road to finish his comic novel Untoward Incidents, named after the Duke of Wellington’s terse assessment of the annihilation of the Turkish fleet at Navarino. Chapman and Hall needed Waugh to pad out his virtuoso beginning to bring up the word count before publishing the funniest book in the world as Decline and Fall. Lamb spent boozy evenings with Waugh and their prospective fiancees at the Barley Mow. Eating a pilgrims lunch there would make a seamless transition from the painterly to the literary part of our tour. […] I imagined that at the Barley Mow, self-identifying Evelyn Waugh nuts on pilgrimages would be greeted by the landlord with a sly, highly civilised little smile. Perhaps their attention would be drawn to an old Windsor fireside chair or a brash little signature in the visitors’ book.

Alas, the stop at the Barley Mow does not end as expected when the pilgrims arrive a bit late for lunch. But the article concludes with a properly Wavian flourish.

Clarke mentions Waugh’s association with other watering holes such as the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford, Devon and the Abingdon Arms in Beckley, nr Oxford. In the course of that discussion the Evelyn Waugh Society is credited with the erection of the Blue Plaque commemorating Waugh’s association with the Abingdon Arms. The Society certainly supported that effort but credit for the plaque as well as celebratory events at the venue (perhaps “binges” does not strike quite the right note) must go to the pub and the residents of Beckley who took over the pub’s ownership and management when its commercial owners decided to close it.

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Late July Roundup

Posted on July 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–The latest issue of The Oldie has an article by David Horspool comparing the WWII novels of Lev Grossman (Stalingrad), recently published for the first time in a complete English translation, and Joseph Heller (Catch 22), recently adapted into a TV series. Both were written by novelists with first-hand experience of the combat and other events that they describe and both books were published several years after the events. In both cases according to Horspool

…we are reading about a genuine experience. But the ambition of these novels goes far beyond that, so that the fact of being an eyewitness is subsumed into a much larger ambition […] and their historical context would have informed their writing. The only contender the English novel can put up to the classics of witness by Grosman and Heller is Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Along with Put Out More Flags (1942), the trilogy made use of Waugh experiences in the Royal Marines and as a commando.”

Horspool goes on to mention the well-known classics War and Peace and The Red Badge of Courage as well as several lesser known British novels based on first-hand experience soon to be published by the Imperial War Museum, including one based on the homefront. This is Kathleen Hewitt’s Plenty under the Counter. In that connection, he might also have mentioned the recent republication of a novella and memoir about the homefront; this is called Blitz Writing by Waugh’s friend Inez Holden. See review in current issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

–A recent article in the Daily Telegraph has the title “Better four good friends, Ed Sheeran, than 100 you can never get rid of”. Sheeran is a British singer-songwriter who records albums with titles such as “+” and “÷”. The article, written by Jane Shilling refers to advice given to Charles Ryder by his Cousin Jasper in Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (London: 1945, p. 25) regarding friendships made as an undergraduate at Oxford: “You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first.”

–Journalist Patricia Nicol writing in the Mail-on-Sunday includes Brideshead Revisited among the books about summer holidays that her children should read in their own:

It is the summer of 1923 that features so memorably in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Charles Ryder is in hell in London with his remote father. Then summons arrive from his friend Sebastian Flyte, who has broken a leg and demands a holiday companion. Brideshead, then Venice, beckon.

–The weblog PublicationCoach.com last week chose as its word of the week “mésalliance”, offering this explanation:

Craig Brown’s book, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, is enormous fun, even for people who aren’t fans of the royals.

A kind of a meditation on the art — and limitations — of biography, the book turns the genre on its head by providing alternative scenarios and by debating which of several competing accounts of the same story might be true.

The book is not only splendidly written, it also gave me a word of the week, mesalliance. Here’s how Brown employed it, using a quotation from the noted English writer Evelyn Waugh:

Like all loyal subjects of the monarchy, I am appalled by the proposed mesalliance. […]

The quote comes from a letter Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming on 28 April 1960 (Letters, p. 537).

—The Spectator in its “Australian Notes” column has an item entitled “Superglued to the Greens”. The story opens with this reference to Evelyn Waugh:

The great satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh once catalogued a fictional, remote and newly-converted Christian sect who continued to engage in cannibalism but not during Lent and only with ‘special and costly dispensation from their bishop’. […]

Take this month’s superglue protests. Queenslanders gave emphatic support to the Adani mine at the recent Federal election, so two environmental activists thought the best response was to superglue themselves to Queen Street, holding up traffic in Brisbane’s CBD for three hours.

They were somewhat thoughtful in their preparation. Presumably expecting that three hours superglued to a hot, bitumen Brisbane street could be rather uncomfortable, the activists thoughtfully brought along their own yoga mats to comfort them through their ordeal.

The reference to the fastidious cannibals comes from Scoop, Book II, Chapter 1, “Stones £20”.

—Filmmaker Magazine has posted on the internet for the first time a 2000 interview with Mary Harron. This  involves her role as co-screenwriter and director of the contemporaneous film adaptation of the novel American Psycho. The novel was written by Bret Easton Ellis and published in 1991. According to Harron:

It is a black comedy/horror film. I am sure that this mix of genres will make some people uncomfortable, since it goes from being funny to unsettling without any transition […] When I first read the book, it reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s first novels, like Vile Bodies, a satire on the 1920s in London. It is a more benign book than American Psycho, but it has some of the same surreal black comedy — a comedy of manners of a decadent, crazy world of money and privilege.

Based on IMDB data, the film appears to have been successful. It was made for the relatively reasonable budget of $7 million and took in $34 million worldwide.

 

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New British PM Also a Novelist (And a Waugh Fan)

Posted on July 23, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The New York Times, in advance of Boris Johnson’s selection as new leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, wrote a profile of his literary career. His book about Winston Churchill sold well and is still in print, but less known is his novel Seventy-Two Virgins. According to Johnson, this was written while he was on holiday just to prove he could do it. It may also have had to do with the fact that both his father, Stanley, and his sister, Rachel, have published novels to their credit. In Rachel’s case her literary effort (Shire Hell) rated the Bad Sex in Fiction Award from the Literary Review in 2008.

According to the NYTimes, Boris’s novel, published in 2004

…which has sold more than 46,000 copies according to Nielsen Book Research, is a farce about a terrorist plot to assassinate America’s president during a state visit to Britain, featuring a contest reminiscent of reality television, much talk of buxom women and occasional mocking of Britain’s welfare policies. Reviewers called it everything from an “effortlessly brilliant page-turner” to “not quite a novel.”

The story (written by Alex Marshall) goes on to explain that:

While writing the book, Johnson was “terrified” that it would come across as a pale imitation of P.G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh, two of his favorite authors, he told The Sunday Business Post (other favorite authors include Chaucer, whom Johnson once praised for “his pricking of hypocrisy and his terrible puns,” and the crime writer Carl Hiaasen).

His Desert Island Disc book of choice was, however, Homer’s poetry printed on India paper in Greek to give himself something to translate. It was reported somewhere that the family used to speak amongst themselves in classical Greek. Did we mention that Boris has also published his own book of verse–The Perils of the Pushy Parents: A Cautionary Tale? And that he is currently at work on his next book (Riddle of Genius) which will be about Shakespeare and was scheduled, before his selection as PM, for publication next year ?

UPDATE (25 JULY 2019): Today’s issue of the Guardian carries another article which features not only Boris Johnson’s appearance in his own novel, but describes several appearances in other novels over the past few years. Before going there, however, the article, by John Dugdale, looks at past instances of appearances of characters who prefigured Boris:

Long before Boris Johnson began the game of putting himself in fiction, in his much-derided novel Seventy-Two Virgins in 2004, there were already shadowy echoes of him in literature. Recent profiles of the future prime minister have invoked […] Toad of Toad Hall (comparing the efforts of friends to rein him in to the ill-fated bid in The Wind in the Willows to make a “sensible Toad” of their manic chum). There’s William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, who rather like the young Boris is mistakenly hired as a reporter but copes by making things up. …

 

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Biography of Orwell’s 1984

Posted on July 21, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Today’s New York Times reviews what it describes as a biography of George Orwell’s novel 1984. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the novel’s publication on  8 June 1949 in London and a week later in New York. The book’s “biography” is entitled The Ministry of Truth and is written by Dorian Lynskey.

According to the NYT review written by Lev Mendes, Lynskey:

…believes that 1984–one of the 20th century’s most examined artifacts–is actually ‘more known about than truly known’ and sets about to reground it in Orwell’s personal and literary development.

The book briefly mentions Waugh’s contacts with Orwell in his final years. In fact, although not mentioned, Waugh had reviewed Orwell’s Critical Essays in a 1946 issue of The Tablet before they had met. That is collected in EAR. Orwell reviewed Waugh’s Scott-King’s Modern Europe in a 1949 issue of the New York Times (collected in Martin Stannard’s Critical Heritage volume) and was at work on a longer essay about Waugh when he died in 1950. Waugh did not review 1984 but wrote his opinion of it at some length in a letter to Orwell dated 17 July 1949 (Letters, p. 302). He visited Orwell on more than one occasion at the Gloucestershire sanitarium where Orwell was recuperating from TB, which wasn’t far from where Waugh lived near Dursley.

Finally, the book again mentions Waugh in connection with the stream of dystopian novels that appeared after 1984 in the period between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. These included Waugh’s 1953 novella Love Among the Ruins which was in some sense his  response to his own criticism of 1984 in his 1949 letter to Orwell. That novella is included in Waugh’s Complete Collected Stories. Others mentioned in the NY Times review include Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, LP Hartley’s Facial Justice and Ayn Rand’s Anthem.

 

 

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Study of A Handful of Dust Published

Posted on July 20, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

An academic study of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust has been published in the Ganziatep University Journal of Social Studies (01/2019, v18, n1). The university is a public institution located in Southeastern Turkey. The article is entitled “The Doomed Struggle of Tony Last with Society and the Individual in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.” It is written by Cemre Mimoza Bartu who teaches in the English Language Faculty of Haceteppe University in Ankara. Here’s the abstract of the article:

A Handful of Dust (1934), the fourth novel of Evelyn Waugh, deals with the struggles of the protagonist Tony Last in various stages of the twentieth century society. Waugh in this novel illustrates a dark picture of the twentieth century English society and its individuals with the aim of laying bare the “human selfishness and self-delusion” (Ward, 2008, p.679). In general sense, the author directs his criticism towards the various aspects of English social life indicating the pervading decadence in the soul of the individual and modern zeitgeist. Focusing on Tony Last’ marriage, social relationships and expedition to Brazil, Waugh delineates the portrait of an innocent man who values the past and its traditions. Yet, in order to survive in the society Tony embarks on a quest for self-identity but fails in each attempt. Coinciding with the time of the author’s own personal tragedies, the novel also revolves around some certain autobiographical parallelism that Waugh suffered from. As a means of critique of the society and its members, he juxtaposes himself with his character Tony Last to demonstrate their struggle. So as to illustrate Tony’s futile attempts in his struggle, Waugh writes two different endings for the novel, both of which end in utter failures. Therefore, by virtue of individual failures and socio-cultural corruption, the novel is concerned with the struggle of Tony Last who is surrounded by those individual, cultural and social adversities. In this study, the modernist theme of the quest of the individual will be analysed through Tony Last’s quest in social and personal spheres by also demonstrating Waugh’s critique of the modern times.

The full text of the article is available on the internet without a subscription at this link.

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80th Anniversary of Robbery Under Law

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

This year marks the 80th anniversary of EvelynWaugh’s book, Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object Lesson. This was published in the UK in June 1939 and an American edition followed in September under the title Mexico: An Object Lesson.  The book was subsidized by a grant of £1500 plus expenses (worth over £95,000 in buying power today) from the Pearson family whose oil production properties had recently been expropriated by the Mexican government. Because the government had also taken actions to close down the Roman Catholic Church and persecuted priests and parishioners, Waugh saw an opportunity to include that story as well.

Waugh took his wife with him on the trip in July-October 1938. When he returned, he worked diligently on the book so that he could begin writing on the idea of a novel he had conceived. The book first appeared in serial form in The Tablet beginning on 29 April 1939. According to Selina Hastings’ biography (376), the book consisted of three parts:

…a journalistic account of his experiences as a tourist; a cumbersomely documented essay describing the outrageous treatment of Pearson’s company by the Mexican government; and lastly, an impassioned history of the state’s persecution of the Church.

Hastings (379) goes on to describe the UK critical reception of the book (which had the working title Pickpocket Government) as one of “little more than polite interest”. The Guardian called it “admirably written” and an “ably” described view of Mexico while Harold Nicholson dismissed it in the Daily Telegraph as “dull” and “jejune”. Hastings writes that it received a “warmer response” in the USA where the New York Times described it as “outspoken” and “soberly conceived and wittily executed”. These reviews are all included in the Evelyn Waugh Critical Heritage volume edited by Martin Stannard. Hastings also notes that Waugh himself thought so little of it that he included no excerpt from it in his 1946 travel writing collection When the Going was Good, the only one of his pre-war travel books that was left out.

The book is largely ignored today except for occasional references in conservative political and Roman Catholic media. These sometimes mention the political credo Waugh included in the book, which Hastings also quotes (378-79), as well as his descriptions of religious persecution and martyrdom. It was never reprinted in Waugh’s lifetime (except for a 1940 Catholic Book Club edition in the UK). A Spanish translation was issued in Mexico in 1996 (Robo al amparo de la ley) and a US reprint was published in 1999 by Akadine Press, Pleasantview, NY.  It was also included in the 2003 Everyman Library collection edited by Nicholas Shakespeare, Waugh Abroad, and a Penguin hardback edition was published in the UK in 2011.

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