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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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 café.

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 Lázaro Cárdenas, 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 Calderón 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 Žižek. 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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