Waugh and Academia.edu

Posted on May 20, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

An article on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited has recently appeared on a website called academia.edu. This is by Dr Joanna Bratten and is entitled “From Arcadia to Ascesis: the necessary loss of pleasure in Brideshead Revisited”. Dr Bratten also presented a paper entitled “So Much for Infidelity: Evelyn Waugh, A P Herbert and the Hotel Bill Divorce” at the 2015 Evelyn Waugh Conference at the University of Leicester. She is currently head of the English department at St Paul’s School for Girls in Hammersmith, London W6. Here is the introduction to her article:

Charles Ryder claims that his ‘theme’, and therefore the theme of the novel he is narrating, ‘is memory’ (291). I would like to propose that Waugh’s theme is not, in fact, memory but rather the redemption that comes from sacrifice and loss. In the Epilogue, Charles describes himself to Hooper, with only a tiny dollop of irony, as being ‘child-less, home-less, middle-aged, love-less’ (450). This list of negations – loss of family, home, youth, love – neatly summarises what Charles has been stripped of throughout the novel. He loses everything – and is at fault himself for many of these losses. His love of art appears to have died; he never loved his wife or his child (children, if Caroline’s patronymic is to be trusted) so has lost them; his love of Sebastian is soured by bitter regret and fades to something that seems to exist only in a past tense; his love of Julia, questionable from the start, is ultimately sacrificed on the altar of her conscience; even the pleasures of eating and drinking recede – aided, in part, by the privations of wartime. And there is a reason for all of this, rooted entirely in Waugh’s theological vision for the novel: for Charles to be drawn to love of God he must, rather like Job, lose all other loves and pleasures that might distract him from the one love that he’s been led towards all along.

Waugh’s novel – particularly the section titled ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ – is famous for a kind of gluttonous romantic indulgence, lushly expressed in prose that was, in 1945, both praised and castigated. The New York Times admired the ‘almost romantic sense of wonder’1 that oozes from the writing, whilst Peter Quennell, writing for the Daily Mail, charged his old Oxford friend with ‘the major sin of romantic over-writing’.2 Although the ‘over-writing’ never fully recedes or gives way to a sparser, leaner style, I nevertheless I want to consider the way in which the narrative as a whole distances itself from indulgence and pleasure and moves towards ‘ascesis’ – that is, the state of one who follows an ascetic life, who practises self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.

The same website has also posted what appears to be the full version of the paper Dr Bratten presented at Leicester retitled: “Barbarians in the Waste Land: Evelyn Waugh and the civil and spiritual repercussions of adultery”. This relates primarily to the novels A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited.

These papers are both available on academia.edu and may be downloaded at no charge after completing the registration process. It should be noted that this website, despite its name, is not a charitable or stated-funded educational institution providing services to the academic community. Once you register, you will be emailed several notices offering upgrades and premium services available at a fee. The papers posted are not peer reviewed or edited by anyone at academia.edu. There are several other papers on Evelyn Waugh that may be of interest, but since these two were posted by a recognized scholar known to the Waugh Society, they come with some additional credibility. I have read both papers and can attest that they reflect a high level of research and are well-written. Anyone with knowledge of other relevant papers that have been posted on the website or willing to review one or more and comment on them is invited to do so as provided below.

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Abyssinian Roundup

Posted on May 19, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–A new study of the Italo-Ethiopian War examines charges that the Italian side systematically bombed hospitals. This is “Between Sovereignty and Race: The Bombardment of Hospitals in the Italo-Ethiopian War and the Colonial Imprint of International Law” appearing in the current edition of the State Crime Journal (2019, v. 8, issue 1, p. 104). It is written by Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon. According to the abstract:

Italy’s war crimes during the 1935–1936 invasion of Ethiopia have been broadly documented by different historians of Italian colonialism. However, its systematic bombardment of medical facilities operated by different Red Cross Societies is much less known. Relying on archival materials, we show how the fascist regime presented these attacks as legitimate reprisal; it was, the Italians claimed, the Ethiopian forces who had violated international law, particularly the principle of distinction, when they used medical facilities to hide…

The full text of the article remained unavailable on JSTOR and two other subscription services but, according to a Google search, there is apparently a reference to Waugh’s reporting of the war. My guess would be that this refers to his discussion of the Abyssinian government reports of the bombing of the hospital at Adowa. Waugh conveyed these allegations to the Daily Mail in which they duly appeared (4 October 1935; EAR, p. 183). The Abyssinian government also asserted that a Swedish or American nurse working at the hospital had been killed in the Italian bombardment. These reports made it into the foreign press. Waugh and his chums investigated the incident further and found no hard evidence of such a casualty and considerable evidence to the contrary. Cables soon arrived from home bases imploring: “Require earliest name life story photograph nurse upblown Adowa” to which Waugh & Co replied: “Nurse unupblown.” Waugh in Abyssinia, pp. 158-61. Perhaps the new article has now established that she was indeed upblown. Waugh, however, wrote that when he later visited Adowa, that city “was completely unscarred by the war and apparently thoroughly happy” (p. 250). He is not, however, an entirely reliable source. (See update below.)

–A blogger has read Waugh’s Remote People, which was based on his earlier trip to Abyssinia, and finds some of his conclusions worth reconsidering. This is D. Dalrymple on the weblog Idlings. The post begins by recalling stories of Halie Selassie visiting Disneyland in 1967 and wonders how he reacted to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Fantasyland with its dizzying ride on spinning teacups. That would have been about 8 years before Selassie’s death in 1975 (2 years after he was deposed) and shortly after Waugh’s in 1966.

The blogger then considers Waugh’s views on colonialism which prominently feature in that book:

By what pass for today’s standards, Waugh is defiantly unwoke. He makes no apologies. Along with his maleness and whiteness, that makes him a part of The Problem. I suppose I am too. History is full of appalling violence and the destruction of one group by another in endless rounds. But like Waugh, I consider it a misreading of human nature to hope for better, or to imagine that sin is the province of any one race or people. Waugh writes:

“There is one general principle which we may accept; that the whole of history, from the earliest times until today, has been determined by the movements of peoples about the earth’s surface; migratory tribes settled and adapted their cultures to new conditions; conquest, colonisation, commercial penetration, religious proselytizing, topographical changes, land becoming worked out, pastures disappearing, harbours silting up – have preserved a constant fluidity of population.”

He continues:

“It is useless to pretend that, suddenly, at the beginning of the Boer War, the foundation of the Third International, or at this or that time in recent history, the piano stopped and the musical chairs were over, the lava stream cooled and congealed, and the whole process was at an end, for no other reason than that the enlightened people of Northern Europe – having lost their belief in revealed religion and falling back helplessly for moral guidance on their own tender feelings – have decided that it is Wrong.”

Dalrymple concludes that, nothwithstanding the general weight of opinion, Waugh got it about right. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending this link.

–Another blogger (christopherbellew.com) on a perambulation around London ran across a memorial fountain next to St James’s, Piccadilly and wondered if it might have some connection to a character in Scoop. This is dedicated to:

Julius Salter Elias [who] rose from humble origins to be a newspaper proprietor and Labour politician. He was created Viscount Southwood and when he died in 1946 the title died with him. His ashes are buried beside the elegant fountain in the garden beside St James’s Piccadilly…

Seems a bit of a stretch.

–In another allusion to Scoop, the Spectator reposts a 2004 profile about Conrad Black on the occasion of his being pardoned by Donald Trump:

Black became the kind of newspaper proprietor whom Evelyn Waugh’s Lord Copper would have respected as a social and business equal. He had an undeniable physical presence, with hairy knuckles and paddle-like hands which he would use expressively. Conrad Black was always fond of the sound of his own voice, and with good reason: he often had interesting things to say.

I don’t think Waugh ever suggests that Lord Copper had his hand in the till but probably wouldn’t have put it past him. On the latest episode of BBC’s Have I Got News for You, panelist Ian Hislop wondered whether being pardoned by Donald Trump wasn’t the equivalent of being found guilty of the charge?

UPDATE (25 May 2019): A reader has sent a link to the full text of the academic journal article referred to in the post. In fact, it does not mention Waugh’s reporting about the bombing of the Adowa hospital but rather one at Dessye. This is discussed in a subsequent post.

 

 

 

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William Boyd’s A to Z of Evelyn Waugh

Posted on May 16, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Lancing College has posted a report of the talk at the college’s annual Evelyn Waugh Lecture given last month by novelist William Boyd. Here’s Lancing’s description of the event:

William Boyd, the master story teller, novelist and screenwriter delighted his Lancing audience with a revealing A-Z presentation on Evelyn Waugh. William told us that the idea for this approach was prompted by a conversation with [OL] David Hare, Field’s 1960-1964 and it worked to great effect. We were led skilfully through a wealth of knowledge about the subject, which began at the age of 14 and has become, as William admits, a ‘life-long obsession’. ‘C’ stood for comedy and we discovered that William thought this was Waugh’s true literary legacy, ‘E’ was naturally for Evelyn but actually it was Evelyn Gardner, Waugh’s first wife, known as ‘She-Evelyn’, ‘O’ was for Oxford, of course, where William lived, studied and taught for 8 years during which time the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was screened and ‘X’ was for X-rated because Waugh didn’t write very much about sex.

There is also a photo gallery of the lecture and related events.

The text of the talk is also linked and is available here. Many of Boyd’s points are familiar, but there are several mentioned for what may be the first time. For example, Boyd says (at V is for Vile Bodies) that, because of Waugh’s depression following the break up of his first marriage, he had difficulty writing and plagiarized parts of Vile Bodies from William Gerhardie’s Jazz and Jasper (1928). He is considering developing his argument in detail but makes no promises.  As the scriptwriter of the C4 series Sword of Honour, he was also responsible for securing the role of Guy Crouchback for Daniel Craig (in his pre 007 days) and explains what a difference that made to the drama (S is for Scoop and Sword of Honour). He also offers some interesting insights (I is for Ian) about Waugh’s friendship (or lack thereof) with Ian Fleming and mentions “an amicable literary-academic spat” he had based on a letter Waugh wrote to Fleming’s wife Ann about Waugh’s participation in the withdrawal from Crete (L is for Laycock). Boyd’s exchange was with

one of Waugh’s editors [who] profoundly disagreed [with Boyd]. Articles were written and we had a to and fro of forensic letters each advancing the other side of the argument. We eventually stopped, honours-even. But I still think Waugh’s over-the-top false outrage expressed to Ann Fleming is the great giveaway. There is more evidence in his journals. Waugh was both profoundly ashamed that he’d slipped away from Crete and too honest a writer not to deal with the issue some way in his fiction.

The editor was Prof Donat Gallagher who differs from Boyd on his interpretation of Waugh’s actions during the Crete withdrawal as well as he does from several other aspects of Waugh’s military career as presented by Boyd. Here is Prof Gallagher’s response on the Crete matter:

Professor Gallagher is grateful to William Boyd for the courteous way in which he recalls their encounter and fully understands how his argument arises. On the other hand he strongly disagrees with the argument. Of course Waugh was ‘profoundly ashamed’, but it was for ‘running away,’ or more politely  surrendering, not for having acted dishonourably or for flouting orders to remain. Having read the entire NZ war historian’s archive, which embraces British and Australian records, he is conscious that ‘shame’ was the signature word written and spoken by countless common soldiers and realistic officers after Crete. It is pure fantasy to suggest that Laycock and Waugh slipped off early and contrary to orders.  Every piece of evidence shows that they were on the beach to the end and were among the last to be taken on board a warship.

Boyd clearly knows his Waugh and says he’s read everything he published. He also told Lancing that he planned to post a recording of the lecture on a podcast. If so, he may want to check at least one assertion under the letter Z is for Zeller. There he states that: “Dom Hubert van Zeller, a Catholic priest, was Ronald Knox’s confessor. Ronald Knox was the priest who had instructed Waugh when he was being received into the Catholic church.” The first part of that statement is true, but Waugh was instructed for his conversion by Fr Martin D’Arcy, not Knox. Diaries, pp. 320 ff. He was received into the church by D’Arcy on 29 September 1930.

UPDATE (18 May 2019): Professor Gallagher has kindly pointed out that William Boyd did not describe their exchange over Crete as a “row”. The posting is corrected with Boyd’s exact words, and Professor Gallagher’s response is inserted in the text.

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Scoop in Chipping Campden

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has posted a report of his presentation on Waugh’s Scoop at last week’s literary festival in Chipping Campden. His talk took the lively audience through the novel with Waugh at their sides. It was supported with numerous relevant illustrations most of which are visible in Duncan’s report. As a bonus, Duncan provided insights into his own workspace, illustrated with photos of his writing shed and references to its neighboring hedgehog. Also mentioned at the festival was the expectation that there will be no new volumes of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh until next year when we can expect to see 6.  Here’s a link.

Scoop also features in a report posted in the weblog American Thinker by Taylor Lewis. This relates to an article in the New Republic in which a freelance journalist recites the difficulties facing his profession. According to Taylor, the journalist reflects the profession’s

contrived sense of importance, and the import of journalism, [that] gets in the way of his contentment.  The whole mewling missive is reminiscent of Corker, the journalist in Evelyn Waugh’s classic Scoop, who questions the value of hardworking hacks among the public.  “I ask myself are we known, loved and trusted and the answer comes back, ‘No, Corker, you are not.'”

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Radio Adaptation of Decline & Fall Rebroadcast

Posted on May 13, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 4 Extra will rebroadcast its two-episode adaptation of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall starting this Thursday. This adaptation by Jeremy Front was first transmitted in 2015, and this is apparently its first rebroadcast. Front has also adapted other Waugh novels for radio, including Sword of Honour, Scoop and Brideshead Revisited. See previous post. The first episode of this repeat will be this Thursday, May 16 at 10am with Episode 2 the next day (Friday, May 17) at the same time. Here’s a link.

In other broadcast news, the Daily Mail has announced some advance program details for the second series of the award-winning BBC comedy/thriller Killing Eve. Part of the story will take place in Oxford, and costume designer Charlotte Mitchell provided these insights of a Waugh connection to the Mail:

Our anti-heroine [Villanelle] is in Oxford for scenes in which a ‘Brideshead Revisited look’ was required. With Villanelle the subversive sort, Mitchell took that to mean she should play one of the male characters in the classic Evelyn Waugh novel. ‘The show said that would be fantastic — Villanelle should look like she’s dressing up to be quintessentially English. So we found a vintage shirt and tie, and put it with a pair of high-end trousers from Raey (the in-house brand of designer fashion retailer Matches).’ With Villanelle’s hair slicked back, a vintage cricket jumper draped over her shoulders completes the look.

The Mail’s story is accompanied by a photo of the character in Oxford costume.

While it’s a podcast, not a broadcast, Player.fm has posted recordings of talks delivered to the 2017 Evelyn Waugh Conference at the Huntington Library in California. These are available in individual files at this link.

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Mother’s Day Roundup

Posted on May 12, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Washington Post has an op-ed article by Anne Applebaum that opens with this comparison between Donald Trump and Lord Copper from Waugh’s novel Scoop:

“A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side and a colorful entry into the capital . . . We shall expect the first victory about the middle of July.”

Those immortal words of advice were given to William Boot, the accidental foreign correspondent who is the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Scoop.” They came from the fictional newspaper proprietor, Lord Copper, who wasn’t too worried about which side were really “patriots”; he just wanted a happy and rapid end. Waugh’s novel satirized the British press of the 1930s, their empty sensationalism and their disdain for reality. A similar spirit pervades the making of U.S. foreign policy today.

The columnist then offers several examples, starting with the recent apparent shift in Donald Trump’s policy on Venezuela.

–The New Zealand Herald features an interview with local writer Vincent O’Sullivan. When asked what things he has to be wrathful about, one of them is sloth:

Sloth might have got an upper hand if it hadn’t been for deadlines, so you might say it’s that long shadow of sloth that gives you the space actually to work in, because other people are constantly prodding you. I remember when I was a student in England, Evelyn Waugh writing in the Sunday papers about sloth but I seem to remember it was other people’s sloth that so enraged him, because he said everything from – say – sloppy proofreading to bad theologians was all the result of sloth and bore out the slide of civilised values. I’m not going that far. It’s just interesting the different ways you can come at it.

Waugh’s 1962 essay about Sloth appeared as part of a Sunday Times series on the Seven Daily Sins which was later published as a book. A copy is collected in EAR. O’Sullivan’s latest book is All This By Chance, a novel about the legacy in New Zealand of the WWII persecution of the Jews.

–The Catholic Herald has posted a profile of artist Rex Whistler, a contemporary of Waugh who admired much of Whistler’s work. Daniel Frampton, who wrote the story, compares Whistler’s career to two of Waugh’s characters:

Comparisons with the artist Charles Ryder, Evelyn Waugh’s protagonist in Brideshead Revisited, have been made before. Ryder, who paints similar scenes to Whistler, does eventually convert [to Roman Catholicism], of course. However, it seems safer to continue to view Whistler as an unrepentant romantic, albeit with Catholic sympathies, as opposed to a likely convert.

[…] When war came in 1939, Whistler, despite his age, was determined to serve in a frontline unit. In a way, he was similar to another of Waugh’s great characters, Guy Crouchback, in the Sword of Honour trilogy. Crouchback’s war experiences are largely based on Waugh’s own involvement, fighting in such places as Crete. Whistler had the “strong feeling that if anyone has to go and fight it is precisely people of my age, and not the young boys”.

Unlike Crouchback and Waugh, Whistler did not survive the war but was killed in action shortly after the D-Day landings. Frampton might also have mentioned that Whistler made the drawings that Waugh selected to illustrate his post-war booklet Wine in Peace and War.

–In an article posted on her weblog From the Archivist’s Notebook, Natalia Vogelkoff-Brogan discusses the life of the well-travelled Charlotte Eleanor Ferguson who taught at the American College for Girls in Greece after graduation from Mount Holyoke College.  A collection of her letters was recently published (A Learning Teacher’s Odessey) in which she makes remarks  disdainful of “tourists” less well-treveled than she. This reminds Vogelfoff-Brogan of another seasoned traveller:

A recurrent theme in Charlotte’s letters is her low opinion of tourists, especially those who toured the Mediterranean in cruise ships. She took special pleasure in writing that “one insisted on going to see the Acropolis when they had just come down from it” or “tourists are so funny –they know so little and say so much
” [pp. 183, 187].

Reading Charlotte’s comments, I remembered that a few years ago, when I was writing “ ‘All Aboard’: Cruising the Aegean in 1923,” I read an enjoyable description of tourists in Evelyn Waugh’s Labels, published about the same time, in 1929: ‘
 baffled, breathless, their heads singing with unfamiliar names, their bodies strained and bruised from scrambling in and out of motor charabancs, up and down staircases, and from trailing disconsolately through miles of gallery and museum at the heels of a facetious and contemptuous guide
 Must they go on to the very end? Are there more cathedrals, more beauty spots, more sites of historical events, more works of art? Is there no remission in this pitiless rite?”

–Waugh is cited in a review of two new books inspired by the works of P G Wodehouse. These novels in “homage” to Wodehouse were written by Ben Schott (Jeeves and the King of Clubs) and Sebastian Faulks (Jeeves and the Wedding Bells). The review is by Richard Rex and appears in the religion and public policy journal First Things:

It was Evelyn Waugh, in a radio broadcast of 1961, who put his finger on [the] central moral truth in the perennially delightful literary world created by P. G. Wodehouse through seven decades of unremitting authorial labor. It was, Waugh observed, an “idyllic world,” an innocent realm untouched by sex or death, and immune (unlike its creator) from the imperative to work—to all intents and purposes, a world without original or mortal sin. There is nothing to be gained by recapitulating Waugh’s penetrating analysis of a world in which all is fair in love, and there is no war; in which misdemeanors and felonies (assault, blackmail, burglary, fraud, identity theft, kidnapping, and unlawful detention) find their guilt washed away by the absolution and indulgence of the author.

Waugh’s broadcast on the BBC Home Service was published the next day in the Sunday Times (16 July 1961) and is collected in EAR, p. 561.

–Finally, in recognition of Mother’s Day, here’s an extract from the weblog Wonkette in which writer Rebecca Schoenkopf continues the list of things her mother (“Mi Mamacita Communista”) taught her. This portion of a much longer list  (quite funny in parts) deals with recommended reading matter:

* Read “Catch-22.” A good place to do this is on the sand at Hermosa Beach in 1966.

* Read “Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit.”

* Read Mother Jones and the Utne Reader.

* Read “A Prayer For Owen Meany.”

* Read Evelyn Waugh and the sainted Miss [Molly] Ivins.

* Erma Bombeck was funny too. No, really, she was!

* Read Eda LeShan, and take her childrearing tips to heart. Forgive yourself if you snap and smack your kid, but it’s a lot better to do it because you’re out of control than if it’s in-control and premeditated. Also, kiss your husband or wife before your kids when you get home from work, because the best thing you could possibly give your kids is parents who are happy and in love.

* Read e.e. cummings, Bukowski, and Thompson. The best way to do this is out loud at the dinner table. Also, the scene in “Tracks” where someone takes a shit on Louise Erdrich’s pillow.

* Reading trashy romance novels is giving me a skewed vision of life, and I will never marry and will always be sad.

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Waugh and Albatross

Posted on May 11, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Naomi Milthorpe, the editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh volume of Black Mischief, has posted a report of her research at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas). This is on the University of Leicester staffblog and relates to the publication of a paperback edition of Waugh’s novel for sales and distribution in Continental Europe shortly after the UK first edition was published in October 1932. Here’s an excerpt. (Detailed references to sources have been omitted):

Black Mischief was Waugh’s first novel to be sold to the European firm The Albatross Press for publication on the Continent. While individual novels of Waugh’s had been published in Europe, it wasn’t until Black Mischief that Waugh enjoyed an enduring reprint relationship with a Continental publishing house. The origins of this relationship are revealed in the HRC’s collection, […]

The Albatross Press was established in 1932 by John Holroyd-Reece and M.C. Wegner, and set about to rival Tauchnitz, then the major European reprint publisher. […] While for today’s readers the firm’s bird emblem and cheap but high-quality product recalls Penguin, Albatross is the older firm (Jaillant 109). […]

Albatross swooped on Waugh early in January 1932 – many months before Black Mischief was completed. Wegner wrote to Waugh’s agents offering to option Waugh’s next novel. […] Letters and postcards went back and forth between the agents and Albatross throughout 1932. Sometime in early October, [Waugh’s agent] sent Albatross an advance copy, and on October 25 Wegner wrote back to negotiate for the novel’s publication by Albatross in April 1933, saying he found the novel “delicious”.

The article goes on to discuss similarities between Albatross editions and those of Penguin Books which started up in the UK in 1935. There was also at least one feature of the Albatross business plan which differed from Penguin:

At the same time as Albatross published their books in affordable paperback, they also produced handsome presentation copies. This appealed to Waugh. In a letter to Wegner dated 19 June 1933, and written on Savile Club letterhead, Waugh wrote that he had returned from South America “to find waiting for me the charmingly bound copy of BLACK MISCHIEF. It is a great delight to me to be published by your firm, particularly when I see how admirably the edition is produced.” He surely would have been describing not the paperback, but their limited presentation edition on handmade paper, bound in green half-leather and cloth and limited to 12 copies. One copy Waugh made out to Nancy Mitford and inscribed as the “Waugh Emulation Prize” (a joke about Mitford’s Highland Fling, which had been compared by reviewers to Vile Bodies), is now housed in the Huntington Library’s Evelyn Waugh collection.

Dr Milthorpe also notes the existence of other Albatross editions in the HRC archive. According to the Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh, the arrangement continued in the 1930s with Albatross reprints of A Handful of Dust (1935) and Mr Loveday’s Little Outing (1937) but was apparently interrupted by the war.  No Albatross edition of Put Out More Flags or Scoop is recorded in the Bibliography. There was, however, an Albatross reprint of Brideshead Revisited in 1947.

Although well beyond the scope of Dr Milthorpe’s research, one can at least imagine that a Cambridge University student in the 1960s might well have picked up one of these or other Albatross editions on an outing to the Continent. Suppose that student was one of the several that later formed into the Monty Python group.  His handsome little book may then have contributed some inspiration to the group’s well-known 1970 TV skit, known as “Intermission”. This is where John Cleese, dressed as a cinema theatre ice-cream girl, is offering “Albatross! Albatross!” from his/her tray, on which a large dead bird is evident.

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“American Epoch” Revisited

Posted on May 10, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

In an article posted on the weblog, The Just Third Way, Michael Greaney discusses Waugh’s 1949 Life magazine article on the Roman Catholic Church in America. Greaney introduces the subject with a brief reference to several critics of the Church who saw a need for reform in the years before the Second Vatican Council. He then contrasts those views with Waugh’s discussion of that same period in his article “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church.”:

The essay first appeared in the September 19, 1949 issue of Life magazine. (Reprinted in Donat Gallagher, ed., The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh.  London: Penguin Books, 1983, 377-388.) Shocking those who generally miss whatever point Waugh was making, the caustic satirist presented a very positive view of the Church in America halfway through the twentieth century.[…]

Again startling many, Waugh credited the strength of the Catholic Church in America to separation of Church and State in a form that left determination of religious belief up to the individual.  Admittedly in practice even in the United States this has often developed into hostility against the Catholic Church and other faiths, but that was never the intent or meaning of America’s Founders.

In the final reckoning, at least at the time de Tocqueville wrote, the division of life into private and public aspects left individuals largely in control of their own destinies and restricted the State to a relatively minor role.  As Waugh commented, “The realm of ‘private life’ was large and inviolable.  And the division of Church and State is feasible only under those conditions.” (Ibid., 379-380.)

Nevertheless, Waugh saw a grave danger threatening the Church and the rest of civilization throughout the world as the role of the State continued to expand.  Having seen the direction Fabian socialism was taking Great Britain — which he would depict a few years later in his dystopian novella Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future (1953) — he was alert to what the related New Deal could do to Catholicism in the United States.  As he noted,

“As the State, whether it consist of the will of the majority or the power of a clique, usurps more and more of the individual’s “private life”, the more prominent become the discrepancies between the secular and the religious philosophies, for many things are convenient  to the ruler which are not healthy for the soul. ” (Ibid., 380.)

[…] Waugh thought the greater danger to the Church was that European Catholics would adopt the superficial aspects of American culture he had lampooned in, e.g., The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948), and drift away from what remained on the continent of the practice of the faith.  He did not foresee that Americans would adopt the European liberal version of democracy, “the tragic fate of Europe,” (ibid.) and undermine their own Christianity.  As he concluded his essay,

There is a purely American “way of life” led by every good American Christian that is point-for-point opposed to the publicized and largely fictitious “way of life” dreaded in Europe and Asia.  And that, by the grace of God, is the “way of life” that will prevail. (Ibid., 388.)

The article then concludes with  a discussion of Waugh’s disappointment in the results of the Second Vatican Council and his assessment of the career of Pope John XXIII.

 

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New Waugh-Themed Play in the Works

Posted on May 7, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The literary agency Curtis Brown has posted a notice regarding one of their clients who is working on a new theatrical play that will be of interest to our readers:

Sophie Swithinbank is a London based playwright. Her play, Bacon, won the 2018 Tony Craze Award, and she is currently developing the piece at Soho Theatre. Sophie is Writer In Residence at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, through the David Bradshaw Creative Writing programme, with whom she is commissioned to write a play (working title Arcadia) inspired by the works of Evelyn Waugh.

Sophie explains her project in more detail on her University of Leicester staffblog:

My premise is fairly simple. I plan to write a short play (working title Arcadia), that is based on the story of Brideshead Revisited, but is set in present day Oxford (much like how Pride and Prejudice joyously became Bridget Jones’ Diary, which went down pretty well, internationally). The pillar of this new piece of work, is that the central friendship will be between two young women, rather than two young men. […] Translating this story to 2019 means embracing the fact that Oxford now pullulates with deserving, respected and strong women, both within and beyond the University. Over the sunny bank-holiday weekend, I saw a millennial Oxford pullulating on Port Meadow with picnics, Kendrick, t-shirts worn over only one shoulder, marijuana cigarettes, bikes, top knots, dreadlocks, bikinis, beers, speakers, trainers, iPhones and half-cooked chicken on tin foil barbeques. The world in Arcadia, will embrace this sunny, and slightly doomed millennial Oxford.

The story at the centre of Brideshead Revisited is a potently timeless one of love, friendship, power and addiction, but the characters at the centre of the story are not timeless. Grown men with teddy-bears and servants, champagne and strawberries no longer exist here (apart from the odd few). I plan to prove that the modern women of Oxford can take up as much space as their male predecessors, Captain Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte.

She also offers this brief outline (very rough and subject to change) of her play: 

Charley is alone in Oxford. She gets a job. Sab is surrounded by money and friends and parties. She does not need a job. They meet by chance one afternoon on Port Meadow. They form an unexpected, intense and, at times, exhaustingly close friendship, that means everything to both of them. As the dry summer cracks onwards towards September, it becomes clear that Sab isn’t the happy, healthy, wealthy girl she seemed to be, but is grappling with some dark and toxic secrets. Charley makes it her mission to save Sab from these dark places, putting her own life and happiness in jeopardy.

As Sab’s outbursts wear Charley down, and the friendship becomes ever darker and saturated with addiction, Charley starts to wonder how she will ever break free of this intoxicating friendship.

 

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Cinco de Mayo Roundup

Posted on May 5, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Today is Cinco de Mayo which celebrates the victory of Mexico over the French Empire in 1862 at the Battle of Puebla. The Mexicans lost to the French about a year later but still mark this victory of their smaller army over the larger French forces. According to Wikipedia, the day is more celebrated in the United States, where it commemorates US-Mexican cultural connections, than in Mexico where the remembrance is more solemn and official.

–The conservative website (formerly newspaper) HumanEvents.com has posted an article by William Voegeli exploring what may be left of traditional (if that’s the right word) conservatism after Donald Trump’s Presidency. This considers several gradations of conservatism requiring specialized knowledge way above your correspondent’s pay grade. At one point, however, he does bring Evelyn Waugh into the analysis, citing a quote from 1964 written shortly before Waugh’s death in 1966:

The conservative is far less sanguine [than John Stuart Mill’s liberal] about progress being irreversible. Instead, he considers civilization to be something “laboriously achieved” but only “precariously defended,” as novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1964. (Twenty-five years earlier Waugh had warned that barbarism “is never finally defeated,” which means that civilization “is under constant assault,” requiring “most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all.”) The result of these ineradicable dangers, and liberalism’s blithe complacency about them, is that the conservative considers liberals “gullible and feeble,” in Waugh’s account, “believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.” Georges Clemenceau said that war is too important to be left to the generals; conservatives think liberty too important to be entrusted to liberals.

Appropriately for today’s roundup, the quote from 1939 can be found in Robbery Under Law, Waugh’s book about Mexico and his only truly political work; the 1964 statements come from a Sunday Times book review entitled “The Light that Did Not Entirely Fail” relating to two books about Rudyard Kipling. EAR, p. 625.

–Political commentator, Simon Heffer, in today’s Sunday Telegraph brings Waugh into his assessment of the Conservative Party, which he claims is “conservative ” in name only. Heffer harks back to the days of Margaret Thatcher:

who said that her brand of Conservatism “would best be described as ‘liberal’ in the old fashioned sense. And I mean the liberalism of Mr Gladstone, and not of the latter day collectivists.” It is a pity that Evelyn Waugh who once complained that “The Conservative Party have not put the clock back by a single second” did not live to see Gladstonian liberalism resurrected, with its belief in the individual, its distrust of the state, its confidence in Great Britain and (perhaps above all) its respect for the tenets of the British constitution. But today an almost socialist belief in the state, in its paternalistic and regulatory functions, is resurgent…

I’m not sure whether Evelyn Waugh ever expressed much confidence in the British constitution, as such, but he would probably be comfortable with the rest of the Gladstonian package.

–The JSTOR digital archive for academic articles published a notice regarding a review of Patrick Query’s book entitled Ritual and Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing. This appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Religion and Literature and was written by Paul Robichaud. Why the notice is posted now is not explained.  The third section of the book describes how three British Roman Catholic converts (Waugh, Graham Greene and David Jones) used that church’s ritual in their texts. In Waugh’s case the text analyzed is Robbery Under Law in which, according to the review, Query writes that:

Waugh mounted a spitited defense of the institutional church [in Mexico] as a safeguard of Indian rights against a rapacious state […] Query notes that Waugh’s position is that of the more, conservative, orthodox wing of the Church [and that] Catholic ritual acts as a bearer not only of Christianity, but also of European cultural particularity; this aspect of Catholic ritual is, for Waugh, a civilizing influence…

The other books discussed are Greene’s The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory (both of which also have Mexican settings) and Jones’s In Parenthesis.  JSTOR urges readers to access its site and read the review free of charge. I used a subscription from my public library but, despite linking through the JSTOR notice, I was still required to start a new search for the book review. There was however an unexpected bonus. By browsing the Spring 2015 Religion and Literature issue, I found that it also contained a review by the late John Howard Wilson of a book by Michael G. Brennan: Evelyn Waugh: Fiction, Faith and Family. Both Patrick Query and John Howard Wilson were editors of Evelyn Waugh Studies and officers of the Evelyn Waugh Society, of which John Wilson was the founder.

–The University of Texas (a region once part of Mexico and still located next door) this week issued the final version of its selection of 150 Highly Recommended Books. This began with a “Non-required Reading List” for undergraduates in the 1980s and has been under study by various committees since that time.  It includes books in all genres and in all languages (translated into English). Among the selections is Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

England of the 1920s recalled from the vantage point of the post-World War II era. The novel tracks the fortunes of an aristocratic Catholic family, but is famous above all for its description of an effete yet extravagant decadence among students at Oxford in the interwar years.

The balance of the entry describes Sword of Honour and mentions that novel’s debt to Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End. Other books by Waugh’s generation include Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Ernest Heimngway’s The Sun Also Rises. The booklet describing the list is available from the University of Texas, College of Liberal Arts.

–The food and travel website AtlasObscura.com posts an article about how Britain coped with the banana drought during WWII. In addition to rationing (indeed blocking shipments of bananas altogether), they developed recipes for mock bananas and banana substitutes which sound pretty awful. Inevitably, they include Auberon Waugh’s now apocryphal story of the first postwar banana shipment:

After the war, the first shipment of bananas called for a grand parade. Footage from the Ministry of Food shows five million bananas being lifted out of the ship’s hold, in 1945, by large conveyors at the Avonmouth dock. […] That first lot of bananas was meant only as a wartime treat for children. But the Ministry evidently underestimated the adult yearning for bananas. Auberon Waugh, son of the famed British author Evelyn Waugh, describes in his memoir, Will This Do?, how his father confiscated the first postwar bananas obtained for each of the Waugh children. “They were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three,” wrote Waugh. “[H]e was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment.”

–In the Guardian’s column “Book Clinic”, columnist Andrew Martin is asked to recommend books that will make a reader laugh out loud. Here’s one if his recommendations:

Evelyn Waugh is extremely funny (particularly in the first half of Decline and Fall), as are Nancy Mitford and Alan Bennett, but this is quite common knowledge.

He also recommends Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers but could have also included several of the early novels of Martin’s father Kingsley, such as Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling.

–Speaking of whom, Samuel Hux has written an article for the May issue of the New English Review mainly devoted to a reconsideration of Kingsley Amis’s little-read alternate history novel The Alteration. After considering that and several other related works  as well as digressing to some extent, Hux brings his article to a close with this:

And there’s another reason to remember and even to honor (?) Kingsley Amis, although perhaps this gets a little too personal and taste-dependent. I have a kind of ironic affection (perhaps this should be confessed rather shamefully) for the writer you would not want your sister or daughter to marry: let me call him the charming son of a bitch, although not charming in the princely sense but in the sense that unless you’re a stuffed shirt or strict in your liberal opinions you smile at the offensive.

Perhaps the champion CSOB was Evelyn Waugh. I doubt there’s an anthology of Waugh’s remarks but I wish there were one. The most famous is probably his answer to someone who asked how a professed Christian could be so nasty to other people—that without divine intervention he’d be absolutely impossible. My favorite, however, is not a confession of shortcomings, at which he was clever, but an insult of another, at which he was expert. When Randolph Churchill had a luckily benign tumor removed, Waugh called it a doubtful achievement of medical science to discover the one part of Randolph Churchill that was not malignant and to remove it.

There is indeed an anthology of Waugh’s memorable statements. This is The Sayings of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Donat Gallagher. The reference to Randolph is there (p. 45) but the one about nastiness and religion is probably not. I recall it coming from a restatement of Waugh’s remark by Nancy Mitford in a letter she wrote to some one else, but I believe it may have been reported elsewhere as well. See previous post.

–Finally, American anti-immigrant crusader Steve Sailer has posted a comment in The Unz Review on news stories about the population explosion in Nigeria:

It’s almost as if sub-Saharan Africa has a very different culture when it comes to fertility than the rest of the world, and we need more research and discussion of those differences. Evelyn Waugh vividly outlined how different were European and sub-Saharan attitudes regarding fertility limitation in his 1932 novel Black Mischief, but this diversity in outlook is almost forgotten in Western academic discourse today.

 

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Posted in Academia, Auberon Waugh, Black Mischief, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Robbery Under Law, Sword of Honour | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cinco de Mayo Roundup