Waugh Featured in Conservative Journal

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The American Conservative, a print magazine and online journal, has issued an article entitled: “Evelyn Waugh Predicted the Collapse of Catholic England: He saw Vatican II as an attempt by elites to foist changes on a laity that didn’t want them.” This cites the  correspondence published as A Bitter Trial in which Waugh made a case against the liturgical reforms that proceeded from the Second Vatican Council. After discussing the reforms of Vatican II and several of Waugh’s familiar objections to them, the article, by Casey Chalk, the magazine’s religious affairs corrspondent and a graduate student at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology of Christendom University, concludes that part of its discussion with this:

Waugh (and [Cardinal] Heenan) argued that the reform movement embraced a modernist paradigm that pitted traditionalists against intellectual progressives, the latter manipulating the media to both direct and narrow the conversation and silence alternative opinions. Heenan observed that the reform was driven by self-described “intellectuals” whose “constant nagging” and “tiresome letters to the press and articles in the Catholic papers may eventually disturb the faithful.” Moreover, Heenan noted, “the voice of the laity” was largely ignored by the media, as were conservative leaders in the Church, whom intellectuals painted as “mitred peasants.” Waugh argued, “the function of the Church in every age has been conservative—to transmit undiminished and uncontaminated the creed inherited from its predecessors. Not ‘is this fashionable notion one that we should accept?’” Indeed, what is “fashionable” is usually identifiable not with what the ordinary man on the street wants, but what elites desire.

The great irony of the liturgical reforms of 1960s Catholicism is that rather than bring new faces into the Church, they drove people away. During the 1930s, there were 12,000 English converts a year to Catholicism. Yet Church attendance among Catholics in Britain has been on a steady decline ever since Vatican II.

This seems to suggest that Waugh was motivated in his campaign against the reforms to protect the interests of what the article describes as “the ordinary man on the street.” Waugh had an objection to that concept dating back to at least a 1953 interview on the BBC where he was asked how he got on with “the man in the street”. His answer was “I’ve never met such a person” and this led to a persistent hectoring by the BBC interviewers to the end of the interview. Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, v. 19, pp. 557 ff. It is probably more accurate to say that Waugh included all Roman Catholics in his concern over their reactions to the Vatican II reforms and was not particularly focused on subcategories such as “the ordinary man” among them.

The post has engendered a lively discussion that is still open if anyone should wish to join. Several of the comments relate to Waugh’s position. Here’s a link.

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Waugh News from Oxford

Posted on April 30, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Oxford University has issued two announcements relating to Old Oxonian Evelyn Waugh. The first is from the Ashmolean Museum which has scheduled a lecture in its After Hours talk series. This is entitled “Beyond Brideshead: Queer Oxford, 1919-1945” and will be given by Ross Brooks, a Historian at the Oxford Brookes University:

On the eve of the Oxford Pride parade and event, Ross Brooks shares his research on the extraordinary queer culture of interwar Oxford. Immortalised in Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), the 1920s saw the flourishing of some of the twentieth-century’s queerest writers and artists at Oxford including John Betjeman, Robert Byron, and Emlyn Williams. Long-since styled the “Brideshead generation” by Humphrey Carpenter, Ross will reconstruct what we know of the flamboyant fashions and same-sex affairs of the set and revisit some of their favourite places including the ill-fated Hypocrites Club and the cruisy St. George’s cafĂ©.

The talk will also explore the increasing presence of female undergraduates at Oxford through the period and recover the experiences of trans students such as Michael Dillon and Jan Morris. Finally, Ross will chart the nosedive in attitudes towards queer people through the 1930s as a changing socio-political scene swept away the last remnants of Oxford’s earlier queer chic and drove the University’s queer aesthetes ever further into the shadows.

The talk will be given on Friday 31 May in the museum’s Lecture Theatre. Tickets are required and booking details are available here.

Worcester College, Oxford, and the Complete Works of Waugh project have announced the selection of the first David Bradshaw Creative Writing Residency. The recipient is Dr Robert M Francis. According to the Worcester College notice:

Robert is undertaking a full-time residency and dividing his time between writing studios at Worcester College and the Weston Library, Oxford. Robert will also be delivering a series of Evelyn Waugh-inspired creative writing workshops to members of Crisis Skylight Oxford.

Robert is a writer from Dudley, who recently completed his PhD at the University of Wolverhampton, where he is a lecturer on the Creative and Professional Writing degree course. He has written four poetry chapbooks: Transitions (The Black Light Engine Room Press, 2015); Orpheus (Lapwing Publications, 2016); Corvus’ Burnt-Wing Love Balm and Cure-All (Black Light Engine Room, 2018); and Lamella (Original Plus Press, 2019). Next year promises to be even busier for Robert as Smokestack Press is due to publish his first full collection and his debut novel will be released with Wild Pressed Books.

Read more about Robert and his work through his website

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Roundup: Autumn in Canberra

Posted on April 28, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–As Summer turns to Fall in the Southern Hemisphere, The Canberra Times is reminded of Evelyn Waugh. This is in an article written by Ian Warden who is not impressed by Autumnal colors:

As an aesthete who cares about the looks of everything, I find the colours of autumn leaves lurid and disgusting. As I write the city’s parks and streetscapes (those cursed with deciduous trees) are approaching peak gaudiness and Canberra fans of this ugliness are reaching peak gush.

His reaction reminds him of a description of nature by Evelyn Waugh:

I was helped out of this nature-is-always-perfect delusion (subconsciously I had always known it was nonsense) many years ago when I came across this liberating passage in Evelyn Waugh’s Labels, a book about his Mediterranean travels.

“I do not think,” he muses, “I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing at the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke, with the whole horizon radiant with pink light. Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.”

The first time one reads this passage one is lulled into thinking one is reading yet another gushing account of nature’s unimpeachable loveliness. Then, with that last very Waughian sentence, there is that refreshing Shock of the New, the new (and true) idea that nature can be revoltingly tasteless.

Inspired by Waugh, Warden likens Autumnal Canberra to a city wearing the “cheapest and nastiest Hawaiian shirt.”

–The Daily Mail interviews author and journalist Tanish Carey, who has written widely on childhood and parenting, what book she would take to a desert island. Here’s her answer:

I’d take The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. I wrote my dissertation on Waugh at university. I’m fascinated by how such a bilious personality must have masked a sensitive soul, considering he wrote a novel as insightful as Brideshead Revisited. He was versatile, too, with books ranging from satire to a description of his own nervous breakdown.

She may have to wait awhile before making the trip since only 5 of the 43 volumes have yet been published.

–A blogger on his website Nigeness has posted his latest review of Auberon Waugh’s novels:

Having read and written about Waugh’s first two novels, I move on, inevitably, to his third, Who Are the Violets Now? Published in 1965, this is, I’d say, just about the best of the three, and the funniest (if you like your comedy dark). Like his father, Waugh was particularly adept at cutting away extraneous connective tissue, and here he exercises that talent to brilliant effect. Who Are the Violets Now? is less ambitious than The Foxglove Saga, and the canvas is less crowded than Path of Dalliance. The result is a structural elegance that, most of the time, matches the characteristic elegance of Waugh’s prose.

Thanks to David Lull for sending this link.

–Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie has contributed an essay to a new online periodical called The Article:

Ever since the start of the year, I’ve been obsessed by two questions, and I keep finding myself asking them everywhere I go. At New Year, a friend asked, “Who, at your school or university, seemed most likely to succeed? And who ended up being the most successful?”

After considering several examples, mostly of seeming successes who ended up failures, he recalls this:

The same cautionary tale runs through Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in the form of another gilded Oxford undergrad, Lord Sebastian Flyte. So grand, so rich, so good-looking; and with the brand of fatal English charm that Anthony Blanche brilliantly dissects at dinner with Charles Ryder: “Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, Charles, it has killed you.”

When Waugh was writing Brideshead in 1944, he wrote to Coote Lygon, whose family – and family home, Madresfield Court in Worcestershire – inspired Brideshead Castle. He said: “I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high-born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons, sex and drink.”

–In the National Review, Senior Editor Jay Nordlinger writes a column called “Impromptus” in which he jots down seemingly random thoughts which sometimes lead from one to another. In the latest issue, he starts with Hong Kong’s drift away from democratic capitalism and the fire at Notre Dame and, before reaching a longer thought on Tiger Wood’s unlikely comeback, writes this:

‱ In an Evelyn Waugh novel, Brideshead Revisited, a character peruses the newspaper and sighs, “Another naughty Scoutmaster.” I thought of this when seeing a headline: “Boy Scouts could be hit with more sex abuse claims.” (Article here.) Will it ever end? Apparently not.

‱ Once, Bill Buckley couldn’t remember Evelyn Waugh’s name. He was just blanking, as we all do. He said to me, with annoyance, “Who is my hero, the author of Brideshead?”

The Brideshead reference comes from Book One, Chapter IV (1960 rev. ed. p. 99) and is something Sebastian found in the News of the World.

 

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Mexican View of ‘Robbery Under Law’

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Mexican newspaper El Universal has published a short essay on Waugh’s 1939 book Robbery Under Law. This is written by author and university administrator Ángel Gilberto Adame who has also written biographies of Spanish-language writers such as Octavio Paz. The article appears in the paper’s “Opinion” section and opens with a description of the book’s genesis:

In 1938, when [Waugh’s] career was breaking down, he accepted an employment proposal from the Pearson family –magnates from the oil industry–, which consisted of traveling to Mexico and writing a book opposing the oil expropriation. The Pearsons were among the businessmen harmed by the decision of President LĂĄzaro CĂĄrdenas, so Waugh’s goal was to expose the injustice and dangers that emanated from the progressive policies of the Mexican president, which, from the point of view of its detractors, were closer to fascism than the international left press supposed. Philip Eade reports that Waugh received a check for 989 pounds to cover his travel expenses and those of his second wife, Laura.

It’s not clear what Gilberto Adame means by Waugh’s career breaking down (“cuando su carrera despuntaba“) at the time he accepted the arrangement. As Philip Eade explains, in 1938 Waugh was doing quite well financially, based on the proceeds from Scoop. Eade describes the arrangement as more in the normal course of business–an opportunity for some easy money and expense-paid travel. The essay then goes on to describe the details of Waugh’s itinerary and quotes from two letters home (to writer Henry Green and his mother-in-law) about  his early impressions of Mexico as well as a quote from his “Foreword” to the book. Comments relating to the text of book itself, however, are limited to this, with which the essay concludes:

The introductory chapter showed more trenchant comments: “For many people Mexico has, in the past, had this lunar character. Lunar it still remain, but in no poetic sense. It is a waste land, part of a dead or, at any rate, a dying planet. Politics, everywhere destructive, have here dried up the place, frozen it, cracked it and powdered it to dust. Is civilization, like a leper, beginning to rot at its extremities? ” Beyond his political background, Waugh’s visit incorporated a much less literary vision than those of other compatriots of his and placed himself, regardless of the mythical past, in the inhospitable region of corruption on which our institutions are built.

The essay had previously made the point that Waugh had also produced works of fiction from his previous foreign trips. When describing his more limited literary vision from this one than those of his compatriots, Gilberto Adame probably has in mind Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry and D H Lawrence who wrote novels based on their Mexican visits. Waugh’s book on Mexico has been published in Spanish translation (Robo Al Amparo De La Ley) in two editions, in 1996 and 2008, in both Mexico City and Madrid (Source: World Cat). The translation of the essay is by Google with some edits, and Waugh’s original English has been substituted for the Spanish language quotation.

Waugh’s book on Mexico is also mentioned in a recent entry in the Oxford Reference Encyclopedia of Latin American History. This is entitled “Foreign Travelers’ Accounts and Fanny CalderĂłn de la Barca’s Life in Mexico” and is written by Lourdes Parra Lazcano. A subscription is required to see the full text, and if any of our readers has access, they may want to explain what she has to say in a comment posted below.

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Waughlandias

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Australian online journal Traveller.com has posted an article inspired by the latest (and final) series of Game of Thrones. That story is set in the imaginary Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, and the article’s author Ute Junker moves from that to discuss seven other mythical literary lands. The closest to Game of Thrones is Tolkien’s Middle Earth but another one was invented by Evelyn Waugh. This is:

… Ishmaelia, the African country which is the setting for Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop. In this classic satire, an internal crisis in this African country is fanned into a fully-fledged war in order to sell British newspapers. As Waugh tells it, the country of Ishmaelia had escaped colonisation thanks to the penchant of the locals for eating any European adventurers that crossed their borders: “some raw, others stewed and seasoned — according to local usage and the calendar (for the better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh, uncooked, in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop). It was not only the locals’ culinary habits that allowed Ishmaelia to escape the notice of the wider world for so long; Waugh also noted that European explorers were deterred by the inhospitable terrain found along its borders, which included “desert, forest, and swamp, frequented by furious nomads”.

Another such “Waughlandia” was Azania, located on an offshore African island and the setting of Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932). In that novel, a map of the country is provided and one scene goes so far as to describe the locals joining with the hero in a cannibal feast. Waugh used that location again a year later in his short story “Incident in Azania”. This is mentioned in a review in the New York Review of Books about two recent studies of the “business” (as opposed to the “crime”) of kidnapping. This is written by Anne Diebel who closes her review with this:

The history of modern kidnapping-for-ransom is dominated by cases involving high-profile victims; those of lesser standing are always likely to be overlooked. In 1932, the same year the Lindbergh baby was abducted, a nineteen-year-old, well-to-do English woman named Muriel “Tinko” Pawley was taken hostage, along with her three dogs, by bandits in northern China. Tinko had grown up mostly in China and married an Englishman who worked for the Asiatic Petroleum Company. The kidnappers demanded a huge sum of money and sundry supplies, and threatened that failure to comply would result in Tinko’s ears being cut off and her dogs killed.

This bizarre case—Tinko wrote to friends requesting lipstick and threatened the gang leader, in fluent Chinese, with both personal haunting and the transformation of his ancestors into turtles if she were killed, and was finally released in exchange for gold, opium, and some stylish brogues—was a sensation in the British press. Evelyn Waugh even wrote a short story based on it. But Tinko’s case was part of a vastly larger trend that affected many Westerners of modest means. In the preceding ten years, missionary families, salesmen, carriages of train passengers, and entire steamships had been captured, and those whose families were slow in paying did have their ears sliced off. When one of those trains was held up in Lincheng in 1923, two dozen foreigners were captured, and their safety became an international concern. Also captured were three hundred Chinese, whose fates were ignored by the press.

This is the second time in less than a year that Waugh’s seldom-mentioned story has featured in a major newspaper article about kidnapping. See earlier post.

One can also argue that Waugh created an imaginary land in which to set Brideshead Revisited. This would be Brideshead Castle, its environs and inhabitants. The site for the setting of the two film adaptations of the novel is Castle Howard which is selected by the Spectator as one of the top film locations to be visited in the UK:

The best-known adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is, of course, the TV version starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews, that was broadcast on ITV in 1981. Luckily for this list, a rather underwhelming film version was made in 2008, with the same location Castle Howard, near York, used to represent the fictional Brideshead. It sits amid a huge estate and offers plenty to explore over the course of a day. Brideshead fans will be in heaven […]

Finally, returning to Ishmaelia, a Gloucestershire news website has posted a reminder that the Chipping Campden Literary Festival will convene early next month (7-11 May) and “news” will be its “main theme”. Among the events is one devoted to Scoop, “arguably the best comic novel about journalism and [looked] at in terms of the life of its author Evelyn Waugh, one-time correspondent on the Daily Mail.” The discussion will feature Martin Stannard and Duncan McLaren. Details in earlier post.

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Pretty Penguins All in a Row

Posted on April 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has undertaken a new project. This will eventually be a collection of all Penguin covers of Waugh’s books to be posted on his website. He has already posted two and they are well worth a look. Since Penguin was producing the most widely read versions of Waugh’s books (or at least the fiction) from the 1930s until today, the covers both reflect and influenced the changes in popular taste over this period. In the beginning, all Pengiuns were created equal and, since Waugh’s books were fiction, their covers were orange. Where he has them, Duncan also includes copies of the back covers which sometimes are unrelated to Waugh but are also markers of the time of publication. For example wartime back covers were frequently advertisements.

The first Waugh Penguin published was Decline and Fall in 1937. It was Penguin #75. The following year Vile Bodies (#136) and Black Mischief (#179) were issued. A Handful of Dust was passed over and was not published in a Penguin edition until 1951 (#821). Scoop was published during the war in 1943 (#455), following an earlier batch that year that included Put Out More Flags (#423). The 1943 POMF is a particular rarity, much sought after by Penguin collectors. According to the Penguin Collectors Society, this is due to the small print runs, poor paper quality and the tendency to pass on or trade paperbacks during the war.

Duncan has included Decline and Fall and Scoop in his first postings. It is to be hoped that readers who possess their own copies of those issues that Duncan is missing will forward information to him to fill in the blanks–mostly relating to back covers. The copyright page is also of interest because Penguin was hopelessly inconsistent in keeping up with Waugh’s revisions to his books. Beginning in the late 1950’s Waugh revised his novels for publication in a uniform edition by C&H and usually included a preface briefly describing his changes. The first of these revisions was Brideshead Revisited published by C&H in 1960, and Penguin issued that version in 1962. Decline and Fall was revised in 1962 but that version was not published by Penguin until 2001 (as Duncan notes in his text). Intervening Penguin editions between those dates would have lacked Waugh’s preface and edits. Similarly, Scoop was revised in 1964 but that version appeared as a Penguin perhaps as late as 2001 or 2011. Penguin is usually good about recording the history of their publication on the copyright page.

UPDATE (29 April 2019): The reason for the scarcity otf the first Penguin edition of Put Out More Flags has been restated based on information provided by James Mackay of the Penguin Collectors Society.

 

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Waugh’s Visit to Vis

Posted on April 23, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Observer has published an interview of Croatian writer Srećko Horvat whose new book Poetry from the Future will be issued next week. The interviewer Andrew Anthony describes him as “one of the busiest leftwing political activists in Europe”, noting his friendship with such other activists as Julian Assange, Yanis Varoufakis (former Greek Finance Minister), and writer Slavoj ĆœiĆŸek. Srećko lives on the Croatian island of Vis where the Observer conducted most of the interview. A tour of the island is described and includes a report on its importance in the history of WWII and of Evelyn Waugh’s part in that history. As explained by the Observer’s interviewer:

… Horvat is keen to show me the island’s sights. There’s Tito’s cave, in which the Partisan hero was said to have hidden – Evelyn Waugh, on an army mission, actually flew out to meet him. There’s also an abandoned network of military bunkers and tunnels, and a secret submarine shelter. Before we see these delights we sit down for an interview.

The island is located off the Dalmatian coast south of Split and was the closest of the Dalmatian islands to Allied bases in Southern Italy. When Mussolini was deposed in September 1943, the Italians, who were occupying Vis, pulled out, and the island was taken over by the Partisans. Some time in late 1943-early 1944 the Partisans allowed the British to establish a base there. An airfield was built which provided a convenient access to mainland targets as well as a reliable relief station for damaged Allied aircraft unable to fly the distance to Italian bases. It also proved convenient when in late May 1944 the Germans attacked Partisan headquarters in Drvar, Bosnia, with the goal of kidnapping Tito. The Partisans managed to evacuate him out of harm’s way with the help of the British mission who flew him to Bari and from there to Vis where a new HQ was temporarily established in June.

Shortly thereafter, Waugh and Randolph Churchill were in Bari awaiting passage to a new British mission they were to operate in Topusko, Croatia. They were members of a party of Allied officials flown to Vis to meet Tito and prepare him for his scheduled meeting with General Maitland “Jumbo” Wilson (Supreme Allied Commander of the Mediterranean) at Caserta. Waugh recorded his impressions of Tito (Diaries, 10 July 1944, pp. 571-2):

He in brand new cap and uniform of Russian marshall with Jug badge. Hammers, sickles and Communist slogans everywhere. [A note explains that it was, in fact, a Partisan uniform.] Tito startled all by going back on his agreement to meet Jumbo Wilson at Caserta. […] Orphans singng and rolling tins. Partisan girls. Omladinas [young people]. […] Tito like lesbian.

While the Germans had never apparently shown any interest in occupying Vis, they had fortified the adjacent island of Brač. The British and Partisans tried to take that island, while the Germans were distracted by their Drvar operation, but without success. It was reported to have been the biggest Allied action in Yugoslavia during the entire war. The British forces had withdrawn from Brač shortly before Waugh and Randolph Churchill arrived in Vis, and Waugh ironically closed his comments on the day of arrival, as he described walking through the vineyards: “Jack Churchill piped ‘Will you no come back again ?’ to fleeing Marines.” A note explains that Jack Churchill (who was usually referred to as “Mad Jack” and was not related to Randolph) had been captured in the Brač raid and was last seen (or heard) playing the tune on the bagpipes before he was captured. He survived the war and died in 1996. Waugh returned to Bari on 12 July. Whether Waugh knew Jack Churchill from his service in the Marines is not mentioned. Tito ultimately did meet with Jumbo and later on, in August, with Winston Churchill himself. Waugh never forgot his impression of Tito as a lesbian.

 

 

 

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Conference to Consider War Correspondents Between the Wars

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A conference will be convened on 9-10 May at the University of Angers, France, to consider the history of war correspondents reporting during the period between the two world wars. The title of the conference is “Correspondants de guerre: aire latine 1918-1939” (“The War Correspondent in the Latin Countries: 1918-1939”). Among the topics to be considered will be the Spanish Civil War and the Italian War in Abyssinia. One of the papers to be presented on 9 May will relate to Evelyn Waugh’s reports from Abyssinia for the Daily Mail. Here is an English-language summary of that paper (it will apparently be presented in English at the conference):

Bastian Matteo Scianna
University of Potsdam
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Fellow at the London School of Economics 2018/19
« Formative Experiences: Foreign Correspondents in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-36) »

The distresses of objectivity in conflict reporting have not emerged during the wars in Vietnam or Iraq. The Spanish Civil War is usually taken as prime example of a clash of ideologies, which comprised many international journalists as active propagandists. This article highlights a prior conflagration of great importance: the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-36). It was a formative experience for a whole generation of correspondents who rose to eminence thereafter. Still, their role in this war has hitherto been neglected and their reporting has not been closer analysed. Therefore, the Abyssinian War should not be side-lined, but moved centre stage as defining experience of a generation of foreign correspondents. By doing so, this paper shows how the cases of ‘journalism of attachment’ during the Spanish Civil War often had their immediate precedent in Ethiopia, and offers a historian’s perspective on the troubles of uncritically relying on war reports as sources.
In order to shed more light on the reporting, the paper will first analyse the reporting of two journalists who covered the war from the Ethiopian side and whose writings had the strongest influence on the war’s perception: Evelyn Waugh and George L. Steer. Hereafter, two reporters employed on the Italian side will be looked at: Herbert L. Matthews and General John F. C. Fuller. This paper can only scrutinise a few eminent (Anglo-American) correspondents, thus it will exclude the up to 200 Italian journalists who reported the conflict and largely portrayed it as liberation for the Ethiopians and muted the countless Italian war. [sic] Likewise, details on the diplomatic and military aspects will have to be spared. The paper will argue that many claims regarding the Abyssinian War, based on journalists’ accounts, should be reconsidered and critical approaches, as adopted for the Spanish Civil War, finally applied to this important formative experience of a whole generation of correspondents.

George Steer’s career as related to Waugh’s was explored in an earlier post. More detailed information on the conference is available at (click to email).

 

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Easter Roundup

Posted on April 21, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Australian religious journal Catholic Weekly has posted an essay entitled “The Easter yearning”.  This is by Karl Schmude and begins with a discussion of the many ways Easter is misunderstood today. Among the examples is this from Evelyn Waugh:

It may seem that our age has produced a secular version of the Resurrection, treating the deceased person as if he were still physically alive. Evelyn Waugh, in his novel The Loved One, savagely satirises the presentation of death in American culture. He captures, in the cosmetician Aimee Thanatogenous, our illusions about death, and the tendency to satisfy spiritual longings with material deceits. […] Aimee’s work in the mortuary promotes the illusion of material survival – as a substitute for bodily resurrection and spiritual immortality.

After presenting his catalogue of error, the essayist turns for his conclusion to Georges Bernanos who wrote Diary of a Country Priest. That was a book also admired by Waugh who reviewed it for Night and Day in 1937 where he described it as a “really fine book.” EAR, p. 209-10.

See also UPDATE below.

–A booksblogger on JacquiWine’s Journal has recently finished Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and liked what she read:

Waugh uses dialogue to great effect in this novel, frequently moving the narrative along through a series of conversations – sometimes face-face, other times on the phone. The style is pin-sharp and pithy […] A Handful of Dust is an entertaining yet bittersweet romp, a story shot through with Waugh’s characteristically caustic wit. And yet there is an undercurrent of despair here too, a sense of hopelessness […] This is a tonally sophisticated novel with more to say than might appear at first sight.

The Guardian also addresses the film adaptation of this novel as part of its ranking,  in order of merit, of all the films in which Judi Dench appears:

8. A Handful of Dust (1988)
Dench is as mean and sharp as a carpet tack in this version of the Evelyn Waugh novel: she is the grasping mother of John Beaver, the slippery social climber who has an affair with Kristin Scott Thomas’s Brenda Last. It is this Mrs Beaver who is the driving force for John’s greedy demand for money in the divorce settlement.

It is worth noting that the adaptation of Handful was produced and directed by the same team that made the 1981 TV film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited: Derek Granger and Charles Sturridge. The number 1 ranking of Dench films goes to Notes on a Scandal (2006)

–A drinks blog (Master of Malt) in an article discussing its cocktail of the week called Martiki takes up the subject of the liqueur called kĂŒmmel, which is one of the cocktail’s ingredients. This somewhat forgotten liqueur is described in the article:

KĂŒmmel gets its peculiar taste from caraway seeds along with cumin, fennel and other spices. […] Despite its Baltic origins, kĂŒmmel used to be immensely popular among the British upper classes. There are mentions of it in Evelyn Waugh’s works. But the only places you will see kĂŒmmel drunk today are golf clubs and old-fashioned gentlemen’s clubs.

According to a Google Books search, kĂŒmmel is mentioned in at least four of Waugh’s novels: Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, Put Out More Flags (p. 67) and Officers and Gentlemen (p. 195).

–A religious weblog called The Virtue Blog has posted a podcast in which two scholars discuss Brideshead Revisited. Here’s a description of this episode:

In episode 10 of the Sacred and Profane Love podcast, host Jennifer A. Frey [Asst Prof of Philosophy at University of South Carolina] has a  conversation with scholar Paul Mankowski, SJ, about Evelyn Waugh’s popular novel, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. They discuss Charles Ryder’s experiences of love, freedom, grace, and redemption as he becomes erotically drawn into the rarefied world of Lord Sebastian and Lady Julia Flyte.

–A Catalan-language digital newspaper El Nacional.cat, based in Barcelona, has posted a review of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s 1978 book on Ethiopia The Emperor, now published in Catalan. The review explains that Kapuscinski was familiar with the country as well as Africa in general when he returned shortly after the 1974 coup that overthrew the Haile Selassie regime. Waugh’s writings on the country are also introduced into the discussion:

The mirror of Evelyn Waugh
One of the primordial works of journalistic literature [about Ethiopia] in the 1930s was Remote People by Evelyn Waugh, a work in which this English writer explained his attendance at the lavish coronation festivities of Haile Selassie as Negus, King of Kings. He did it with great literary talent and with a great sense of humor, but also with great doses of racism, classism and ethnocentrism. The emperor of KapuƛciƄski is, to a certain extent, icing on the story of Waugh. While the Englishman wrote about the beginning of the reign of Selassie, the Pole explains the evolution and the end. But while Waugh was always distant towards Africans, the Pole questions the Ethiopians and is interested in their interpretations. He interviews the courtiers and neither ridicules nor questions them, but reflects their positions. In spite of everything, in the few reflections of the journalist himself, [Kapuscinski] clearly leaves his sympathy towards the military coup participants. […]

The translation is by Google with a few edits.

–A Poland-based weblog (“Warszawa Jeziorki”) has posted an article about the strained correspondence between Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman in the late 1940s where Waugh tried to bully Betjeman into converting to Roman Catholicism. The article refers to the discussion in vol. 2 of Bevis Hillier’s biography: John Betjeman–New Fame, New Love where both sides of their conversation (as well as some interjections from John’s wife Penelope) can be found.   The blogger (Michael Dembinski) is reminded of the sort of debate that rages today between Englishmen on the question of EU membership:

But who was the Leaver and who the Remainer? Betjeman didn’t like ‘abroad’. He felt uncomfortable there, the natives didn’t speak English and the food tasted funny. Waugh was far more cosmopolitan, enjoyed foreign travel and promoted a supranational church. He was concerned about the fate of Roman Catholics abandoned, as he saw it, to Stalin at the end of WW2. Betjeman was more practical, concerned with the fate of his parishioners in Uffington should he and his wife renounce Anglicanism. The church there, wrote Betjeman to Waugh, was the village’s “only bulwark against complete paganism”. Betjeman bridled at Waugh’s suggestion that he chose Anglicanism for aesthetic reasons, saying that his relationship with religion was “a stern struggle”. I rather suspect that had they been alive today, both men, born in Edwardian England, would have been mildly in favour of Brexit. But then perhaps Waugh might have been tempted to stay in the EU with Roman Catholic countries like France, Italy, Spain and Poland.

Hillier writes (p. 307) that the two writers’ friendship was “somehow never the same again after the epistolary battering and Penelope’s conversion.” He had earlier explained that Waugh played no role in convincing Penelope to convert, but Betjeman may not have seen it that way.

–Finally, for those readers living in or near the Twin Cities, a conference has been announced for Sunday, 5 May on the topic “The Fact of the Cross: St. Helena & the Claim of Christ’s Victory”. This will be held in Minneapolis at the Church of the Holy Cross. Among the papers listed is this: Fr. Byron Hagan, Leaving Home for Lands Unknown: Evelyn Waugh’s Helena. This will be presented at 2pm in the opening session. Details of the conference are available here.

UPDATE (25 April 2019): A reader has kindly submitted an aditional link for the above roundup. This is the inclusion in an Easter article by Michael Sean Winters in the National Catholic Register of a reference to Brideshead Revisited. This relates to the final scene in which Charles Ryder describes his reactions to the Roman Catholic priest Fr McKay  performing last rites for Lord Marchmain. Thanks to Peter Comerford for providing this link.

 

 

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Posted in A Handful of Dust, Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Decline and Fall, Helena, Newspapers, Remote People, The Loved One | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

New Study of Decline and Fall Published

Posted on April 19, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A new article discussing class structure in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall has been published and posted by the Journal of English Literature and Cultural Studies. This is a peer-reviewed academic journal affiliated with the Eurasian Applied Linguistics Society in Istanbul. The paper is written by Assistant Professor of English Zachary Showers of Florida A&M University and entitled “Independent Systems of Ideology: Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall“. Here is an abstract:

Evelyn Waugh’s imaginary perfection involves defining Englishness as a monolithic code of morality and class structure, one that actually never exists universally and is mostly idyllic, but is nevertheless the standard to which society should be held. Invariably, Waugh’s Englishness is a hegemonic, stratified and rigid phenomenon; his novels belie a deep distrust of the ascendant lower-class. Englishness is what separates Waugh’s cultural compatriots—those that share his deeply conservative, moralistic and hegemonic ideology—from those Waugh derides as pretenders to the same. Waugh is doing much more than simply making fun of the wealthy and clueless; he is also blaming them for abandoning a more perfect past in favor of a shoddy future. The upper-class characters he portrays are often woefully out of touch, immoral, even reprobate, but their primary failing is an abandonment of tradition in favor of an unsatisfying modernity. Waugh is, as the title Decline and Fall suggests, watching the gradual disintegration of what he believes to be a great society, and showing it as beset on all sides by people who simply do not belong.

It appears that the full text may be accessed from the Journal’s website linked above.

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