Pre-Halloween Roundup

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–A copy of a 1938 passenger list for the SS Aquitania has been posted on Reddit. This contains the opening pages and then an excerpt showing passengers whose names begin with “W”. On that page are listed Evelyn Waugh and his wife. They were on their way to Mexico in July 1938 where he would collect information for the book that became Robbery Under Law. They stopped in New York and made a side trip to Washington, DC, before taking another ship from New York to Veracruz. On the return voyage in October 1938, they travelled by train from Mexico via Laredo, TX to New York where they caught a steamer back to England. Waugh had learned that the air conditioned US railroads were more comfortable (at least in first class) as well as more frequent and faster than ocean going steamers between the US and Mexico.

Another entry on the same page of the excerpted list names identifies as passengers Clifton Webb and his wife. One of the comments assumes this was the well known film actor of that name but another says that he was never married, which is confirmed by Wikipedia. It is possible that Mrs Webb refers to his mother with whom he shared accommodations  during her lifetime.  Here’s a copy of the passenger list as posted on the internet. 

–An interesting article on the “Hollywood novel” is posted in the current edition of the Berkeley-based magazine Dispatches. This is by Scott Saul and the subject is the 1959 novel by Gavin Lambert entitled The Slide Area. British born and Oxford educated, Lambert was a screenwriter and film critic as well as a novelist. He wrote three other novels with Hollywood themes including Inside Daisy Clover (1963) which was made into a film in 1965, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. He later wrote a biography of Wood. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Gavin Lambert struck an unusual tone—at once ironic and affirming—across The Slide Area (1959), his first novel and an unassuming masterpiece of Los Angeles fiction. Its narrator pairs a rare clarity of vision with an even rarer warmth of engagement: he manages to be sharp without being cutting, and sympathetic without being indulgent. If The Slide Area does not deliver the more familiar satisfactions of LA noir in its “scenes of Hollywood life” (as its subtitle has it), it is not because there are no crimes committed—there will be at least one murder, one case of statutory rape, and one case of fraud—but instead because Lambert’s interest lies elsewhere. As Gary Indiana has remarked of Lambert’s fiction more generally, it works to solve “mysteries of personality rather than crimes.”…

Saul mentions several other Hollywood novels in his discussion including this:

…Since we rarely gain insight into what the narrator [of The Slide Area] specifically wants or desires, the action of the novel seems to fill that vacuum: what he most desires, it appears, is simply to know these other people, and through them to understand the city that supports or fails them. He feels as reliable as a first-person narrator can be. While quick to catch and register ironic details in the scenes he dramatizes, as a character he largely acts as a sounding-board for the wide cast of dreamers he meets, his sympathy allowing them to make the best case for their aspirations, or to give voice to their doubts and qualms.

A brief summary of those aspirations suggests how easily they might have been mocked in the satirical manner of, say, Evelyn Waugh in his LA novel The Loved One. We meet a former British schoolmate, who desires only to sun himself on the beach and supports that lifestyle by living with a wealthy man he resents (“Nukuhiva!”); a blind and nearly deaf dowager-countess, still in love with the lost world of aristocratic Austro-Hungary and eager to go on one last Grand Tour, her declining senses and fortune be damned (“The End of the Line”); a middle-aged Hollywood star (based on Joan Crawford) seeking to revive her career through manipulation and force of will (“The Closed Set”); a fourteen-year-old midwestern runaway with a bottomless faith in her future stardom (“Dreaming Emma”); and a scion of a powerful Hollywood agent, erotically drawn to men and women, who drifts from one scrape to another (“Sometimes I’m Blue”). The novel’s main characters tend to be either creatures of ambition or creatures of pleasure, and in the loose structure of The Slide Area serve as foils of one another….

The full article is available on the Dispatches internet site and can be read at this link,

–A brief article has been posted in the political-religious journal The Imaginative Conservative entitled Crimes Against the Humanities: The Tragedy of Modernity. This is by literary journalist Joseph Pearce and opens with this:

One of the most heinous crimes against humanity that modernity has perpetrated is its war on the humanities. And let’s not forget that the humanities are thus called because they teach us about our own humanity. A failure to appreciate the humanities must inevitably lead to the dehumanizing of culture and a disastrous loss of the ability to see ourselves truthfully and objectively.

The follies and fallacies of modernity and their dehumanizing consequences have been critiqued by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century… Evelyn Waugh, in his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, a novel inspired by a line in one of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, lampoons the “hollow men” produced by modernity in his portrayal of the characters of Hooper and Rex Mottram. Hooper had “no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe”…

The complete text is available at this link.

 

 

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Roundup: Cousins, Catholics, Allegories and Adaptations

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books has posted a review by Neal Acherson of the new biography of Claude Cockburn by his son Patrick.  This in mentioned in a previous post and is entitled “Believe Nothing Until It Has Been Officially Denied”. Here is an excerpt from Acherson’s review:

…Like George Orwell and several other establishment rebels, Claud Cockburn was born overseas, the son of Henry Cockburn, a senior diplomat in Beijing, and his wife, Elizabeth. Two years after his birth in 1904, he was sent back to Britain, soon followed by his parents: Henry had resigned on a complex matter of principle. They settled at Tring in Hertfordshire and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-war’. But the experiences that followed were what shaped his view of the world. His father was appointed to an international ‘clearing house’ supposed to make sense of Hungary’s hopeless finances. The family went to live in Budapest, and Cockburn was plunged into the chaos, misery and brutality of Central Europe, as new nation-states struggled out of the debris of three fallen empires. Hungary had been part of the Habsburg Empire, an enemy power in the war, and Cockburn, hardly out of school, was seized by passionate sympathy for the defeated nations – including Germany. The war, which had cost the lives of 230 Berkhamstead boys, had disillusioned him with patriotism.

At Oxford, he became close friends with his cousin Evelyn Waugh (both were great-grandsons of Lord Henry Cockburn, the brilliant and lovable judge whose memoirs are a late triumph of the Scottish Enlightenment). Their politics were about as far apart as imagination could stretch (Waugh thought his cousin’s obsession with comical foreign countries quite mad), but they made each other laugh. Both joined the Hypocrites club (‘a noisy, alcohol-soaked rat-warren’) where Cockburn fell in love with whisky (‘I got up fairly early... I would then drink a large sherry glass of neat whisky before breakfast and... drink heavily throughout the day’). Astonishingly, his drinking and his later consumption of several packets of Woodbines a day did him little harm…

The book was also reviewed in the Daily Telegraph by Roger Lewis who wrote:  “Cockburn was educated at Berkhamsted, where the headmaster was the father of Graham Greene, and at Keble College, Oxford, where he caroused with Evelyn Waugh. (“We enjoyed not only drink,” Waugh recalled, “but drunkenness.”) Waugh was Cockburn’s cousin: their mutual great-grandfather was Lord Henry Cockburn, solicitor general for Scotland in the 1830s.”

–The religious journal Commonweal Magazine, published in England, has an article by author and academic Phil Klay about Waugh’s claim that he would have been much nastier than he was if not for his Roman Catholicism. Here’s an excerpt:

…It’s a neat anecdote, one that transmutes Waugh’s rougher qualities into an appealing, rakish image. You can imagine him as living out life inside one of his own novels, a charming scoundrel like Basil Seal. Christopher Hitchens dismissed it as “a nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny.” And yet the story feels right, a fitting Waugh story in the tradition of great English writers making quips—Samuel Butler’s “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four,” or Oscar Wilde’s supposed last words: “Either those curtains go or I do.” There’s even something nicely flattering about it. “And you a Catholic!” suggests an era when Catholicism enjoyed higher expectations than it does now. But the story is, in a rather important way, a subtle lie.

…upon reflection I think what actually unsettled me was the way the story shifted my approach to Waugh. I like the Waugh of the quip, not only because he’s more fun to think about but also because he’s easier to dismiss in precisely the way that Hitchens did. I love Waugh’s novels, especially the ones without too much Catholicism in them. Brideshead Revisited stays with me far less than A Handful of Dust, which I first read in fits and snatches during officer candidate school, or the Sword of Honour trilogy, read after I’d been to Iraq and come back with more appreciation for military satire, or even Put Out More Flags, one of the most purely pleasurable novels ever written.

Waugh’s style, his humor, his joyful enthusiasm for puncturing modern delusions, I’ve gleefully gulped down, but his Catholicism—dovetailing as it did with his revulsion toward the modern world, his dismissal of jazz and modern art, his wish to have been born centuries earlier—I’ve held at a distance. I don’t lament being born into a secular age; the medieval world, with its murderous religious zeal, holds no appeal for me. And I look warily at my modern coreligionists who, sometimes with an edgy, Evelyn Waugh–inflected sense of humor, embrace the faith as a repudiation of the world we inhabit. “New York’s hottest club is the Catholic Church,” declared Julia Yost in the New York Times, before sketching out the reactionary subculture that features “Trump hats and ‘tradwife frocks,’ monarchist and anti-feminist sentiments” and whose “ultimate expression…is its embrace of Catholicism.”…

It is quite a thoughtful essay as these religious articles go. Here’s a link to the full text.

–Blackwell’s Books of Oxford has posted an offer for two letters from Evelyn Waugh to members of the Stathatos family. These are from July 1963 and relate to arrangements for John Stathatos, then a high school student in Greece on a summer holiday, to visit Waugh at his home in Somerset. The details of this visit are described in a recent article in Evelyn Waugh Studies (No, 52.2, Fall 2021). Here’s a link. The letters are on offer for ÂŁ450.00 each and may be viewed at this link. Information about a previous auction of what appears to have included these two letters is available here.

–The Spanish paper El Pais carries a story about Glaswegian actor James McAvoy. This relates to his new film Don’t Talk to Strangers. In discussing his career, this appears:

…at 18 [McAvoy] decided to change his life and joined the Royal Navy. And then, suddenly, another unexpected plot twist: just as he was about to become a sailor, he was offered a scholarship to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dramatic Art to study acting. McAvoy finished his studies in 2000 and the industry literally fell for his charms: he played a soldier in the series Band of Brothers (2001) and a high-society bandit in A Scandal with Class [sic] (2003) , an adaptation of Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. But, above all, he was Steve McBride in Shameless (2004/2005), a hugely popular British series set in a dangerous Manchester neighborhood.

Something may have been lost in translation here. There was a film adaptation of Vile Bodies about that time. It was written and directed by Stephen Fry and was entitled, in English, Bright Young Things. The film may have been called something else in Spanish and was retranslated under that title in El Pais. According to Wikipedia, McAvoy appeared in that film adaptation as the character Simon Balcairn. He was a suicidal gossip columnist in Vile Bodies, Ch, 6, not a high-society bandit.  Anyone with knowledge of these matters is invited to comment as provided below.

–Finally, a website called Allegory Explained has an unattributed article relating to Waugh’s novel The Loved One. The text and illustrations lead me to suspect that this may be an Artificial Intelligence production. Not sure what audience it is aimed at. Here’s an excerpt:

…Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One” has had a significant impact on literature, particularly on the genre of satire. The novel’s scathing critique of the American funeral industry and the shallow nature of American culture has influenced many writers in their own works.

One notable example is Tom Robbins’ “Jitterbug Perfume,” which also uses satire to comment on the human condition. Robbins’ novel shares with “The Loved One” a sense of irreverence and a willingness to take on taboo subjects.

Another author who has been influenced by “The Loved One” is Kurt Vonnegut. In his novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” Vonnegut uses satire to comment on the excesses of American capitalism. Like “The Loved One,” Vonnegut’s novel is a biting critique of American culture.

Finally, “The Loved One” has also influenced contemporary writers such as Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel “Fight Club” shares with Waugh’s work a sense of dark humor and a willingness to challenge societal norms.

The illustrated text is available here.

COMMENT: Our reader, Hartley Moorhouse,  offered the following helpful comment on the adaptations of Vile Bodies:

You’re quite right to suspect that something has been lost in translation with the article from El País. The film being referred to is indeed Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, which was released in Spain under the completely different title of Escándalo con Clase (it is common for English-language films to be given different, sometimes unrecognisable, titles in Spanish, a cause of much confusion). The phrase used in the article to describe the character of Simon Balcairn is ‘bandido de alta sociedad’; this can loosely be translated as ‘high-society reprobate’, which is perhaps slightly nearer the mark than ‘bandit’.

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Columbus Day Roundup

Posted on October 12, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Australian Financial Review carries the story of a new novel that may be of interest. It is written by Pam Sykes:

…Her latest novel, Wives Like Us, skewers the ultra-rich residents of the Cotswolds, a bucolic protected area of England that, incidentally, includes Gloucestershire and its surrounds. Sykes, 54, moved here 15 years ago from London with husband Toby Rowland, a tech entrepreneur and their daughters, Ursula and Tess. In that time, Sykes saw the area become more and more moneyed – and ever more ripe for the sharp end of her pen.

“I see life as a comedy of manners,” she says in a voice that matches her nickname (her parents, both now deceased, were dress designer Valerie Goad, and Mark Sykes, a financier who was convicted of fraud. They called her Victoria). “I see the joke in everything. I turn everything into a joke, however dreadful it is.” Growing up, she hoovered up the works of Nancy Mitford, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh, and at the University of Oxford in the late 1980s developed a taste for the American social observers of the time including Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. “And you know, Jane Austen, of course,” she adds. “I feel I’ve read Pride and Prejudice a million times.”

Sykes has always been a comic writer; her work at Vogue, where she began as an assistant in 1993 (in Britain), deftly married wit with glamour. With Wives Like Us, she took inspiration from her own life in the Cotswolds (where daily challenges include missing peacocks, a problem Sykes herself has contended with)…

The setting comes alive in Sykes’ book, with mentions of Daylesford, the up-market grocer, and other stores. Was she concerned about offending her neighbours, I wonder? Sykes takes a sip of her tea from a gold-lustre cup (she collects them and assures me “You can buy them for under a tenner on eBay”)…

–The website of the University of Minnesota Retirees Association has posted the conclusions of a meeting of its book club on 21 June 2024 at which it discussed Waugh’s novel Scoop. After a summary of the book, the UMRA concluded:

…UMRA Book club members had mixed reactions to the book. Some found it humorous, but many were concerned about the racism and sexism in the writing. Some found it hard to follow the plot, with the two different Boots and large number of characters.

Members also discussed journalistic ethics today, and recent concerns about the Washington Post potentially hiring an editor from England with a history of working on stories that appeared to be based on stolen records…

Here’s a link to the complete posting.

–The New Criterion has a review by David Platzer of an exhibit at the Pompidou Centre in Paris on Surrealism. The article is entitled “Go ask Alice.” Here is an excerpt:

…Surrealism came on the heels of the previous decade’s Dada movement and featured many of the same figures, including AndrĂ© Breton, Surrealism’s pope, famous for his arbitrary excommunications, and Louis Aragon, who eventually became an unrepenting communist but was also a leading poet and the author of the excellent novel AurĂ©lian, of which Evelyn Waugh was a fan…

I was surprised that Waugh would have been a fan of anything associated with Surrealism but was unable to find any reference to his expression of admiration for Aragon’s novel. Anyone knowing of such is invited to file a comment as provided below.

–An essay entitled “Lionel Shriver and the Resistance to Satire” is posted on the Action Institute website. This is by Lee Oser. Here is an excerpt:

… [Shriver] mentions in passing two satirists, Evelyn Waugh and John Kennedy Toole. I would note that Waugh and Toole are out of favor in elect circles, their reputations bobbing haplessly amid the rest of the civilizational debris, tossed overboard since the ship of state hoisted its shiny new flags, all signaling virtue. It is (as Shriver knows) countercultural to mention them. My main point is that the God-idea in Waugh and Toole licenses a good deal of play, connecting them, in their literary descent, to Cervantes and Shakespeare. Quixote and Bottom are the common ancestors of Guy Crouchback and Ignatius Reilly. Pearson does not really belong in their comical and physically exuberant company. She is too intellectually severe, too much the acolyte of her admired Dostoevsky. She is always on point.

“Pearson” is a reference to a character in Shriver’s new novel Mania which was recently reviewed in the New York Times and is the main subject of Oser’s article. This is Pearson Converse who teaches low level writing classes at UPenn. According to Oser, the novel is “a fierce satire of the progressive establishment.” The full article is available at this link.

Comments: Mark McGinness kindly sent the following comments about the Pam Sykes novel mentioned above:

I did enjoy your Columbus Day Round Up.
Plum Sykes, the author of “Wives Like Us”, is indeed the granddaughter of Waugh’s friend and biographer, Christopher Sykes.
Her father, Christopher’s son, Mark Sykes, was the subject of one of those eccentric lives that still occasionally appear in the obits pages of the London papers. The Times of 31 May 2022 described Mark as an “art dealer, gambler and wastrel” and in the context of his father’s friendship with Waugh ..”whose novels Mark appeared to regard as life manuals”
All best wishes, Mark McGinness

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Early October Roundup

Posted on October 6, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has posted an article by Christopher Howse on “bed rotting”.  Here’s the opening section:

One of my favourite books, Illustrations of Madness by John Haslam (1810), tells of how the unfortunate James Tilly Matthews, plagued by a gang operating an Air Loom from a cellar under London Wall, was subjected to the miseries of lobster-cracking, knee-nailing, bomb-bursting and apoplexy-working-with-the-nutmeg-grater.

He did not mention bed rotting, which on TikTok has attracted 310 million views, though not mine. It must be dull viewing, for bed rotting is nothing more than a jokey name for staying in bed all day not doing much more than watching television and fiddling with a telephone. It’s very popular with people aged 12 to 27 (Gen Z) who feel burnt out, on account of lockdown and parental expectations.

It sounds to me very much like the life of bright young things in Evelyn Waugh, except that they were a trifle more gregarious. In Black Mischief, Sonia and Alastair are in bed during the day, each with a telephone and a goblet of black velvet, a backgammon board between them, and some other people in the room playing the gramophone or trying out Sonia’s make-up. It is clearly very boring. Then the dog makes a mess on the bed…

–Australian writer Nick Bhasin recently had an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he pines for the days when comic novels were widely available. The article opens with this:

I was at an event recently, talking about my novel. It’s a “comic novel” – as in, one that is meant to be funny. When someone asked me what it was similar to, I paused.

There are a lot of influences that inspired the humour but I couldn’t think of one book that would helpfully answer the question. “Is it like A Confederacy of Dunces?” someone else asked. “That’s the only book anyone mentions when people talk about funny novels. No one knows the names of any others.”

No one is writing stories designed to make people laugh any more.Credit: Aresna Villanueva

Could that be true? I wondered…

After ruminating about the relative lack if comic novels currently on offer, Bhasin recalls the 20th century golden age of that genre:

…As part of my research for my book, other than mining the depths of my soul for truth and justice, I looked into other comic novels, new and classic, especially satire. I came across a lot of the usual suspects – famous books I had already been familiar with, often because they had been adapted into movies or TV shows.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

Humour is never taken seriously, even though it is literally the only thing that matters in this short, brutal existence.

Certain authors consistently came up as writers of comic fiction: Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Nathanael West, Nora Ephron, Carl Hiaasen, Evelyn Waugh, Mark Twain, Steve Toltz, Marian Keyes. (A lot of white dudes on these lists, I know. But that’s a conversation for another time.)…

Bhasin’s comic novel is entitled I Look Forward To Hearing From You.  Here’s his description:

…my intention was to write a story designed to make people laugh. Now, the laughs are derived from very dark, very uncomfortable circumstances while exploring “serious” themes like grief, racism, male body dysmorphia and mental illness. But that’s what makes me laugh. I don’t know what to tell you.

So I filled my book with as many jokes as possible. It’s a satire of early 2000s Hollywood, so I made up hundreds of movie and TV-show titles, working very hard to balance the comedy with the sadness. But to me, if it makes people laugh, that’s the bigger achievement. As Judd Apatow has said, “It’s not hard to make people cry. Kill a dog.”…

It is currently for sale in Australia. Thanks to Nick for sharing this.

–A website called BookishBay.com has posted an entry on the life and writing of Evelyn Waugh.  It is very tidy and nicely presented but adds little to Waugh studies. Here’s an item from the opening summary:

Waugh’s contributions to literature remain impactful, with his works continuing to be studied for their wit, social commentary, and stylistic complexity.

The complete posting can be consulted here. No author is mentioned. Somehow, a contribution by AI is suspected.

–One of our readers has forwarded a YouTube posting relating to the recent death of Alexander Waugh. This consists of a well-produced 3-minute compilation of video and audio clips of Alexander relating to his work with the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Here’s the link. Many thanks to Dave Lull for sending it.

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Roundup: Decline in Standards and Increase in Price

Posted on September 29, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times has published a sort of interview with William Boyd on the occasion of the publication of his latest novel, Gabriel’s Moon. Here’s an excerpt:

There is no point attempting to whitewash old attitudes. Trying to tidy up the bad behaviour of novelists of the past is misguided and fundamentally a waste of time. But you can certainly alert people that opinions expressed in these books are not opinions we have in polite society today. Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is full of racism. But you can’t possibly go back to Scoop, remove all that and represent it as Evelyn Waugh’s novel. You have to take the rough with the smooth.

The US edition will be published in December. The entire article can be viewed at this link.

—The Guardian has posted an article bemoaning the writing style of the Evening Standard’s new art critics and comparing them unfavorably with their predecessor, the late Brian Sewell:

Who knew the late art critic Brian Sewell was such a tediously cliched writer? Especially since some of the dead verbiage in the London Standard’s AI version of Sewell reviewing Van Gogh at the National Gallery has become common currency only since his death at 84 in 2015.

Give him credit, he had a voice. And it was a posh voice. Evidently the chatbot used by the Standard needs to be fed a lot more novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, some Latin perhaps, and a mouthful of plums before it can begin to resemble the public school-educated, Courtauld-trained Sewell, who started his career as the protege of the upper-class art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt…

I seem to be missing the point unless the Guardian thinks the new Standard’s art criticism comes out sounding like an AI production. Or can it be the case that it really is? Here’s a link.

—The Oldie has reposted on its blog an article from last October by A N Wilson in which he also pines for the superior literary criticism of the recent past. Here’s an excerpt:

..Merely to name Powell, Muggeridge and Orwell is to recall an era of literary and journalistic life which seems in every way more interesting than the present scene.

Horizon – between 1939 and 1950. The small-circulation journal was the first to publish Evelyn Waugh’s masterly account of American funerary customs, The Loved One.

Other contributors included AndrĂ© Gide, Rose Macaulay, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen, W H Auden and Kenneth Clark. BĂ©la BartĂłk wrote a piece for it, as did Barbara Hepworth. Distinguished as periodicals might have been in our day, we’ve surely not seen anything to match this?…

The entire article can be read here.

–The Catholic World Report has a story about the re-issuance of the writings of Waugh’s friend, the priest, Dom Hubert van Zeller. Here’s an excerpt:

…Another fascinating aspect of Van Zeller’s life is his close friendships with other much better known Catholic authors, most notably the spiritual writer, scholar, and Bible translator Fr Ronald Knox; the Dominican author Fr Bede Jerret; and the novelist Evelyn Waugh, whose Brideshead Revisited has become a Catholic classic and features in many courses on modern literature.

Zeller recounts Waugh’s reaction to his trip to America: asking Waugh what he thought of their mutual American acquaintance, who was to guide Zeller on his journey, Waugh responded: “[He’s] American. He can’t help it.” Of the same trip, Knox said, “You’ll hate it. They have meals out of heated cardboard boxes
” But van Zeller loved America, and his ministry there gave him a new energy—which was fortunate, since he had a rather melancholic personality. Into the 1970s and ‘80s, van Zeller continued to write, and obtained permission (as many English priests at the time did) to continue celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass.

–Henley booksellers Jonkers have on offer the copy of Waugh’s pre-publication gift version of Brideshead Revisited that belonged to Diana Cooper. Here’s an excerpt from the offer:

First edition. One of fifty pre-publication copies, printed for the author for distribution amongst his friends. Original blue wrappers with yapp edges, with printed labels to upper cover, title label printed in blue, limitation label printed in red. Author’s presentation copy inscribed for Lady Diana Cooper, “For Diana / Too little, but I hope not too late / with love from / Evelyn.” A fine copy, exceptionally so, with the wrappers clean and bright and only the most trivial creasing and wear to the oversized parts. Endpapers foxed as often, but otherwise very clean. A superb copy…

The asking price is £95,000.00!  I think that may be a record.  Does any one recall a higher one?

 

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Autumnal Equinox Roundup

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The political-economic online journal Compact has an article entitled “The End of the Churchill Myth.” This is by Nathan Pinkoski who describes how the principles on which Churchill based his war and postwar foreign policy (as adopted, amended and applied by the US) are now being proven to have been myths. The article concludes with this reference to and quote from Waugh’s 1950s novel Sword of Honour, where Waugh foresees this result:

The greatest literary work addressing World War II is Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor, written during the 1950s. The trilogy offers a blunt analysis of Britain’s fate. Yet it bends toward a surprising spiritual denouement. Following the career of Guy Crouchback as he enlists to fight against totalitarianism, the series begins with Waugh’s familiar satire, excoriating the failures of the British leadership class. This satire takes a dark turn in the second novel. Rather than recount the war’s victories, Waugh devoted most of the novel to the humiliating British withdrawal from Crete in 1941. The theme of imperial decline is obvious, but Waugh ultimately offered a more profound lesson. As a passage toward the end of the trilogy intimates, Waugh repudiated the moral myths of the war and gestured in a different, redemptive direction.

‘Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians—not very many perhaps—who felt this. Were there none in England?’

‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’

Here is a link to the entire article.

—The Observer quotes Waugh in an article by Anne McAvoy relating to the recent ownership sale of The Spectator magazine. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“Expect the unexpected” is the bland but pointed advice given by the evasive editor of the Daily Beast to the bemused William Boot, accidental protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s deathless Fleet Street satire, Scoop. This has turned out to be durable counsel when observing the ins and outs of newspaper proprietors: much that is solid has a tendency to melt.

So the Spectator (for which I worked in the late 1990s under the Telegraph Group ownership of Conrad Black) had a long period under the sway of the Barclay family, which has come to a debt-laden crashing close. The weekly magazine has been sold for a reassuringly high £100m to the hedge funder Sir Paul Marshall, after an Abu Dhabi-backed bid to buy it collapsed amid concerns that state-backed entities should not own UK news outlets.

The Daily Telegraph and its Sunday sister have attracted last-round bids from Marshall, a former Lib Dem and later Brexiter (though not at the same time) who has clearly decided that he is prepared to empty considerable pockets into UK media via his backing for the rightwing GB News channel and eclectic UnHerd website. In a donkey derby of remaining bidders, the recipe is ideological with a major injection of investment or private equity cash…

–Waugh’s novel on newspapers also features in a recent story in Financial Times. This is a report by Tim Hayward on a visit to the restaurant Sweetings, located in the City near the newspaper’s offices. It actually took two visits to compile the report. Here’s how the article opens:

This week, I thought I ought to do a business lunch or two. I’m a freelancer, so my relationship with my paper resembles that of William Boot and the Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Occasionally, I put on a suit and take the train down from The Country, to dine, bewildered, with my editor. So I asked her, “Where do you chaps go for your long, champagne-lubricated lunches?” and she seemed a little baffled. My image of the modern fourth estate may be askew. Nevertheless, she suggested Sweetings…

The visits resulted in a favorable and entertaining report which can be read at this link. You may have to register to read the story.

–A recent issue of The Oldie carries a story by Pierre Waugh relating to his experience as a pallbearer at the recent funeral service of his uncle, Alexander Waugh. This is entitled “The Absurd Waugh Family: Pierre Waugh salutes his uncle Alexander (1963-2024), grandfather Auberon and great grandfather Evelyn–and their war on seriousness.” Among other things, he tells us that his uncle Alexander was known within the family as “Pedro”. Pierre Waugh is a post graduate student at Durham University who is currently finishing his MA dissertation on the works of Aldous Huxley.  You may be able to read the entire article at this link, Thanks to reader David Lull for sending the link.

–Film-maker Luca Guadagnino was recently interviewed by the entertainment industry newspaper Deadline. The report on the interview by Baz Bamigboye opens with this:

Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) hopes to revive his dream project to make a mammoth 10-episode television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

Two years ago the director had assembled an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes, Andrew Garfield and Rooney Mara, to lead a 10-part prestige TV version of Waugh’s brilliant study of British upper-class decadence.

But the HBO and BBC production was shelved because of its cost. “It’s a very sad story,” Guadagnino told Deadline late on Sunday night, following a screening at the Telluride Film Festival of his latest film …

For those who are interested, the report includes further details about Guadagnino’s plans for the project. Here’s a link.

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Mid-September Roundup

Posted on September 14, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–A new biography of Claud Cockburn, friend and cousin of Evelyn Waugh has been published. This is entitled Believe in Nothing Until It is Officially Denied and is reviewed on the British political website conservativehome.com. The book by Patrick Cockburn is reviewed by Andrew Gimson . Here is an excerpt:

…[Claud] Cockburn’s youngest son, Patrick, has now written an excellent account of him, supplying much new or buried information about his two marriages, his long relationship with Jean Ross, on whom Christopher Isherwood modelled Sally Bowles, the files kept on him by MI5 etc.

This account also reminds us of things we perhaps knew but had forgotten. Soon after Cockburn arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1922, he was called on by his cousin Evelyn Waugh (they were great-grandsons of Lord Cockburn, celebrated Scottish judge). Waugh later wrote:

“I found a tall, spectacled young man with an air of Budapest rather than Berkhamsted [in Hertfordshire, where Cockburn was at school]. His father had been there for the last two years on diplomatic business and Claud was already captivated by the absurdities of Central Europe.”

Waugh’s letters and diaries confirm that for the next five years, he and Claud were constantly in each other’s company. We may think of Waugh as the highest of High Tories, but in his early novels he was an anarchist who set off a series of tremendous explosions under various ludicrous members of the Establishment…

A full copy of the review can be read at this link.

—The Times has posted an article by Ed Potton entitled “The 10 best Kristin Scott Thomas screen roles.” Heading the list is this one:

1. A Handful of Dust (1988)
After starting her career in bizarre style opposite Prince in Under the Cherry Moon, Scott Thomas delivered her breakthrough performance in this largely forgotten Evelyn Waugh adaptation. Her bored, restless Brenda Last won her the Evening Standard award for best newcomer.

Here’s a link to the entire list.

–The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Danny Heitman entitled “‘Scoop’: Evelyn Waugh’s Front-Page Parody”. Here’s the opening paragraph:

For those of us who practice it, journalism can be a comfortable perch for lambasting everyone else. But in 1938, British novelist and occasional newspaperman Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) turned the dagger deliciously inward with “Scoop,” a raucous lampoon of his fellow ink-stained wretches. Decades later, it remains a memorable insider takedown of the news business and its indulgence of rash certitude….

The remainder of the article is behind a paywall, but for those who have a subscription, here’s a link.

–We can now confirm that Oxford University Press has released in North America its edition of The Loved One in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. The book is available for sale from OUP and booksellers such as Amazon.com within normal shipping and delivery parameters. Why there was confusion about the release date (at least on the part of Amazon.com) is unexplained.

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Roundup: From Aston Clinton to Holkham Hall

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan Mclaren has expanded his discussion of Waugh’s school teaching career at Aston Clinton based on his newly available materials. The discussion has been posted on Duncan’s website. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to give you some idea of what he has added:

…On the face of it, the Welsh School, was uppermost in his mind. The physical layout of Llanabba Castle owes much to Arnold House, Denbighshire. Also, Mrs Roberts pub, where Paul Pennyfeather spent much of his non-teaching time, is an actual pub that can still be found in the streets of Llanddullas, and I drank there myself in 2011 in the footsteps of Evelyn Waugh circa 1925. Also, the extraordinary character Grimes is based entirely on a man called Young, who arrived at Arnold House at the beginning of Waugh’s second term there.

However, I hope to show that Waugh’s four terms at Aston Clinton were also important to the art of Decline and Fall. During School sports day, the arrival in a limousine of Margot Beste-Chetwynde was based on something that happened at Aston Clinton, located as it is between London and Oxford. Such exotic visitors were simply not going to turn up when Evelyn was exiled to the middle of nowhere, as Evelyn would have thought of his Welsh existence.

The photo album newly made available by Pat Grinling’s son and Sue Willis, nearly 100 years after it was put together, is going to be integral to my attempts to show how teaching at Aston Clinton contributed to Waugh’s artistry. The good news for you, dear reader, is that you don’t need to buy into my thesis. There is every chance that you will be just as intrigued and enchanted as I have been by the Pat Grinling photographs and the way they complement Evelyn Waugh’s vivid and outrageous diary entries of the time…

Here is a link to the additional material which includes at least one newly identified photograph of Evelyn Waugh. Many thanks again to Duncan for passing this along.

–The New Statesman has published a review of a new book entitled Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite. The book is by Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves and is reviewed by Nicholas Harris. It follows the lives of Francis Charteris and his descendants and is intended to illustrate the adaptation and survival of the British upper class. Here’s the conclusion of the review:

…The public schools and establishment universities might still be producing this elite, but only because they’ve adapted to the new age. Eton Rifles is out, replaced by advanced Stem and kindergarten computer science. And it’s fitting that elite British education is an export industry now, subsidised in particular by the scions of an East Asian super-rich. What they aim to produce is not so much a domestic ruling class but an international elite, fit to fill the rosters of global business. Any descendant of Francis Charteris might pass through the same institutional furnaces as their ancestor, but they’d be smelted and beaten into a very different alloy. These levelling trends are only set to continue. Most people admitted to Who’s Who are around 50. Who knows what the fintech elite of 2054 will list as their hobbies: Peloton and IQ testing?

Thanks to the propaganda of the period drama, our vision of our upper class is hopelessly anachronistic. The general public remains more familiar with marquises and under-butlers than it is with consultancy or corporate law. Amid such misconceptions, Born to Rule is an important attempt to take the measure of our new and evolved elite and… provides much-needed academic clarity.

Class has now returned to British politics, but class war is very difficult to wage…The modern elite doesn’t exhibit itself with old boys’ ties, let alone horse and carriage. It Ubers about London open-necked, free from political identification or scrutiny.

In Friedman and Reeves’s conclusion, they suggest several admirable policy decisions to loosen the stranglehold they identify. One (applying VAT to private-school fees) featured in Labour’s first King’s Speech. Others – reforming council tax, raising a wealth tax, a cap on private-school students attending Russell Group universities – likely exceed the political capital of this government. But beyond public policy, the achievement of this fascinating book should be to spark a broader reconsideration of our new ruling caste: no longer the seigneurial elite so beloved of Evelyn Waugh, but a successor class to Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe”.

I am not sure it is quite fair to say the the upper class were “beloved” by Waugh. Like Tom Wolfe did for his generation’s “masters of the universe”, Waugh satirized the upper classes as he knew them and was probably grateful to them for the material they provided him to inspire his writing.

–Several fashion websites have cited Waugh’s writings as an inspiration for a new men’s clothing line designed by Hedi Slimane. Here is a sample of the description:

There has been much talk about the return of Cool Britannia in recent months, between the Saltburn phenomenon and the Oasis reunion – but it was another aspect of English aesthetics that Hedi Slimane had in mind when he signed, filmed, and produced the new Celine SS25 collection, whose video-show was unexpectedly presented yesterday afternoon under the title The Bright Young. A single glance at college-style jackets, 1920s straw hats, and glimpses of young people lounging among green fields or rowing on a pond takes us back to Brideshead Revisited, a classic by Evelyn Waugh and one of the cornerstones of the most aristocratic queer English prose after that of Oscar Wilde. It is to Waugh, but to the book Vile Bodies, a kind of satire of the hedonistic England of the 1920s, that the epigraph accompanying the collection belongs. And Slimane has followed the self-imposed theme thoroughly: in the avenues of the stunning Holkham Hall in Norfolk, slender, very young dandy figures move as if they have just come from Eton with their uniforms still on, taking refuge in their family’s noble villa in a burst of high society signifiers, including heraldic crests. (Emphasis in original)

This is excerpted from a posting on NSS Magazine which is available here.

–The religious website WordsOnFire.com has a brief review by Dr Christopher Kaczor highly recommending Brideshead Revisited. After a brief description of the plot, the review concludes:

…These marital and familial conflicts come to a surprising conclusion at the culmination of the novel. More than one character is caught with “an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” I won’t spoil the ending. But have Kleenex handy.

 

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Labor Day Roundup

Posted on August 31, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

—Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington has announced a Fall schedule of literary podcasts and other activities. One of these features a four-hour discussion of Brideshead Revisited in two separate podcast episodes. Here is their description:

One of the most beloved and confounding works of 20th century British literature, Brideshead Revisited poses a unique challenge to today’s readers. Even the author himself, Evelyn Waugh, couldn’t decide whether the book was his masterpiece or a disaster. Is the book a nostalgic celebration of the aristocracy in decline or a poison-pen dissection of British classism? How does the book’s portrayal of the loving friendship between its two male protagonists come across read through a contemporary lens? The inspiration for a classic British miniseries as well as the recent instant cult classic film Saltburn, Brideshead Revisited won’t leave us alone. In this two-session course, we’ll dive into this lyrical and deeply affecting book together to unlock its mysteries.

Reading Schedule:

Session One: Please read the Prologue and Chapters 1-6

Session Two: Please read Chapter 7 to the end

Two Mondays: November 4 and 11 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. ET Online

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (9780316242103)

Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection titled The View from Stalin’s Head which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. He has also written three novels: Faith for Beginners, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, Nirvana is Here, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards, and Hotel Cuba, a finalist for the 2024 Bridge Book Awards. In 2023, he was awarded by Lambda Literary with the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Tablet, O, the Oprah Magazine, and many others. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program.

Booking, fees and other details are available at this link.

–The New Statesman has a review of the final volume of the late Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life columns from The Spectator. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

One passes by the graveyard so often that sooner or later one falls into it, says the Russian proverb. Jeremy Clarke wrote the “Low Life” column in the Spectator from 2001 until his death from cancer, aged 66, in May 2023.

The column had been created by Jeffrey Bernard, recruited to the Spectator in the 1970s by the then editor, Alexander Chancellor, who admired Bernard’s writing in the New Statesman and devised “Low Life” to complement the “High Life” offerings of the gossip columnist, Taki. Bernard, an alcoholic, diabetic and perpetual chancer, excelled in exquisitely poised accounts of his chaotic days, making what would be painful to encounter – his editor described him as a nightmare; his agent called him a little shit – hilarious to read.

That feat seemed to be wholly individual, yet the column didn’t perish with Bernard in 1997. There have been two great exponents of such derelict dandyism since: Nicholas Lezard, in “Down and Out” in this magazine, and Jeremy Clarke.

Jeffrey Bernard was a fallen nob. Jeremy Clarke, lower middle class, raised in Southend, left school with two O-levels and supported West Ham. His dedication to drink, drugs, sex, partying and general mayhem, resulting in a number of convictions, was supplemented by work as a bin man and an assistant in a psychiatric hospital. Yet he was profoundly literary, his great inspiration being early Evelyn Waugh, above all the relished anarchy of Decline and Fall…

The book is reviewed by David Sexton. Here’s a link.

–Frank McNally writing in the Irish Times ruminates on the correct adjectival form for the surname of the poet James Clarence Mangan. Here’s an excerpt:

…I suspect the previously standard adjective for Mangan, by the usual rule of these things, was “Manganesque”. But Manganese is so much better it will surely stick now. Besides which, I’m not sure there are any rules for such words, beyond what sounds right.

There is of course a Wikipedia page listing all the known eponymous adjectives. They typically involve just adding “an” (eg Wildean), “ic” (Homeric), “ist” (Stalinist) or “ite” (Thatcherite) to the end of the name.

But as with verbs, there are also a few irregular ones, mostly (it seems) to do with the inability of the dominant English accent to pronounce certain sounds.

At least I used to assume that was why the literary style of Evelyn Waugh – whose surname many English people would have us believe sounds exactly the same as “war” – has become known as “Wavian”.

Or similarly, that we must use “Shavian” to describe things pertaining to our own George Bernard Shaw. But then again, it seems it was Shaw who started this habit, and that it’s based on a Latin joke.

As Nicholas Grene explained in a letter to this page some years ago, Shaw told his early biographer Hesketh Pearson that the adjective arose when somebody found a medieval manuscript by another Shaw with the marginal comment: “Sic Shavius, sed inepte” (“thus Shaw, but badly”).

—The Spectator has a review of a new book entitled Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans. The review is by Amanda Craig and opens with this:

Books and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster?

All this might seem familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Hannah Rothschild and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. The mad relations living under one giant leaky roof, the shabby furnishings, brown tap water and discomforts of being cash-poor, snobbish and servantless are what render the subjects of class and property entertaining. But in the hands of Evans, one of our finest writers of literary entertainment, this all becomes more than an exercise in nostalgia. The second world war formed the background of her previous novels, including Their Finest (which was successfully filmed in 2016) and V for Victory. Here she shows how the war’s disruption to ordinary lives prepared the ground for everything in today’s Britain, from the welfare state to feminism. Soldiers are being demobbed and the age of Attlee has replaced that of Churchill, signalling change that will continue into our own time…

The full review is available here.

 

 

 

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Dog Days Roundup

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–BBC has announced the rebroadcast of a three-hour adaptation of Waugh’s wartime novel Put Out More Flags. This will air on BBC Radio 4 Extra over three successive days at 15:00p British time starting on Tuesday, 3 September 2024. Here’s the detail for the first episode:

As the Second World War looms, louche, upper class loafer Basil Seal considers his role in the unfolding events.

Evelyn Waugh’s sixth novel, first published in 1942.

The satire reprises characters found in previous novels such as ‘Decline and Fall’ and ‘Vile Bodies’.

Three-part dramatisation by Denys Hawthorne.

The part of Basil Seal will be played by actor Simon Cadell. Basil had appeared most prominently in Waugh’s third novel Black Mischief (1932). This adaptation was first broadcast in September 1990. A link to all three episodes is available here.

–Waugh’s war trilogy features in the opening paragraph of an article in the religious journal Crisis Magazine:

In the first volume of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, Guy Crouchback learns from a chance conversation that because he has a valid sacramental marriage with a wife who divorced him, civilly married and then divorced others, and has recently been having casual sex with nobody knows how many men, it is morally permissible for him, as her husband, to himself sleep with her. With that knowledge, he meets with her in a hotel room and is at the point of succeeding when his plans are derailed by a chance telephone call…

The article by James Baresel then goes on in some detail to consider the religious implications of Guy’s resumption of marital relations with his wife. Here’s a link. An audio version is also available at the same link.

–An online religious-political journal leads an article with a quote from Waugh’s novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe. The website is called The Imaginative Conservative. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh’s gently satirical Scott-King’s Modern  Europe follows the declining career of a classics teacher at Granchester, a fictional English public school. Granchester is “entirely respectable” but in need of a bit of modernizing, at least in the opinion of its pragmatic headmaster, who is attuned to consumer demands. The story ends with a poignant conversation between Scott-King and the headmaster:

“You know,” [the headmaster] said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”

“I thought that would be about the number.”

“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”

“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”

“I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn’t conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?”

“Oh yes. Often.”

“What I was going to suggest was—I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?”

“No, headmaster.”

“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”

And there ends the story of Scott-King’s misadventures in the modern world. Any teacher who has endured a similar conversation sympathizes instinctively with poor Scott-King. His dignified but stubborn resistance to the wickedness of making students fit for the modern world speaks to the heart of teachers who, like Scott-King, take the long view. It is to these teachers, then—and to like-minded students, parents, and administrators—that this anthology of classic writings on education is addressed…

The novella is included in a collection of writings entitled The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being. This is edited by Richard Gamble who also wrote the article which may be read in its entirety at this link.

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Posted in Adaptations, Black Mischief, Put Out More Flags, Radio, Scott-King's Modern Europe, Sword of Honour | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Dog Days Roundup