Waughlandias

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pretty Penguins All in a Row

Posted on April 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

 

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Waugh’s Visit to Vis

Posted on April 23, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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Conference to Consider War Correspondents Between the Wars

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

 

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Easter Roundup

Posted on April 21, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

See also UPDATE below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The translation is by Google with a few edits.

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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New Study of Decline and Fall Published

Posted on April 19, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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Bellamy’s Boosted

Posted on April 18, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Two London papers have this week profiled Bellamy’s restaurant on Bruton Place in Mayfair:

Ben McCormack in the Daily Telegraph on Monday (15 April) begins by making a meal (if you will excuse the expression) of the two visits by the Queen since the restaurant opened in 2004. He then tries to make his way through her menu choices but deviates after caviar and smoked eel mousse, substituting steak and frites for his main. He was persuaded against selection of her choice of Dover sole for his main by the plain looking example served with oil and lemon to an nearby table. The restaurant offers what McCormack calls “approachable exclusivity” and is described by its owners as “a club without a sub”. In his conclusion, he explains that “Bellamy’s name is a homage to the gentleman’s club in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy but also a pun on ‘bel ami’ French for ‘handsome friend.’. McCormack describes the restaurant as inspired as much by Parisian brasseries as London members’ clubs.

Later in the week, Tanya Gold described her meal at Bellamy’s eaten for The Spectator, possibly on the same night McCormack made his visit (Gold was there on a wet Tuesday). She goes into a bit more detail about the Waugh connection:

Bellamy’s is named for the club in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. That was probably its first mistake if it wants a large clientele now: the pool of Waugh-lovers fascinated by the decline of the aristocracy — a trend that has stalled, if it ever existed, which should give them comfort — has shrunk through heart attack, death and, likely, exile. The survivors call Bellamy’s ‘a club without a sub[scription]’. That is probably its second mistake. The name is also a pun on Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami, a novel about journalism. It is not my kind of journalism, or novel. Novels about journalism are usually as awful as novels by journalists. It is obviously designed for an older generation of British aristocrats during their mythical decline.

After rather exhausting the topic of the Queen’s association with the restaurant in a detailed comparison between its decor and that of the only room of Balmoral Castle open to the public, Gold concludes:

It may be the ideal restaurant of the mythical Spectator reader. It is less expensive than Wilton’s and less gaudy than Rules. It is, as Franco-Belgian brasseries in London go, perfect. The food is superb. […]

Both reporters mention a three-course prix fixe menu available for £29.50. I checked the menu on the internet and, indeed, what looks like a bargain for central London is available at both lunch and dinner. Alas, it does not stretch to the Queen’s selections, but those are available on the regular a la carte menu at what also seem reasonable prices for this location.

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Winter Evelyn Waugh Studies

Posted on April 17, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Winter 2018 issue (No. 49.3) of Evelyn Waugh Studies has been published. The contents are described below. A copy is posted on the EW Society website:

ARTICLES

Jacqueline Condon, “The Mystery of Grace: Brideshead Revisited as a Chestertonian Detective Story”

Introduction: G. K. Chesterton, famous both as a Catholic apologist and a mystery writer, proposed that, “The Ideal Detective Story
need not be superficial. In theory, though not commonly in practice, it is possible to write a subtle and creative novel, of deep philosophy and delicate psychology, and yet cast it in the form of a sensational shocker” (“The Ideal Detective Story” 178). While Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece Brideshead Revisited is hardly a penny dreadful of cloak and dagger intrigue, this paper will contend that it nevertheless answers Chesterton’s challenge by drawing on the tropes of detective fiction and applying them to serious moral and theological purposes. In particular, Waugh is responding to Chesterton’s metaphor of the Catholic Church as a merciful “divine detective” hunting down sinners in order to save them. The novel’s exemplars of staunch Catholicism, Lady Marchmain and Bridey, attempt to take on the role of investigators in order to uphold the family’s Catholic identity. However, their efforts backfire and only drive their prodigal family members further away. They are not true detectives but only inept sidekicks. The true “divine detective,” grace itself, is nevertheless able to triumph in a moment of dramatic revelation worthy of a mystery novel, bringing about the conversions not only of Sebastian and Julia, but Lord Marchmain and Charles as well. 

REVIEWS 

Azania, Rhode Island

Narrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfiction, by Kai Mikkonen. Reviewed by Nicholas Vincenzo Barney 

NEWS

John H. Wilson Jr. Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest

Peter Howell, The Debagging in Decline and Fall

Links

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Evelyn Waugh and the Notre Dame Fire

Posted on April 16, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

References to Evelyn Waugh have appeared in two stories relating to the destructive fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Posted in the Spectator, an article by Douglas Murray opens with this:

Civilization only ever hangs by a thread. On Monday one of those threads seems to have frayed, perhaps snapped. It is impossible to watch the footage coming out of Paris, all that can be done is to groan and turn away. It is not possible to watch the spire of Notre-Dame collapse. It is not possible to watch the great cathedral consumed by fire.

Evelyn Waugh once said that in the event of a fire in his house, if he was able only to save his children or his library, he would save his library because books were irreplaceable. Only at a moment such as this is it possible to concede the slightest truth in that remark. Almost anything could be borne rather than the loss of this building.

The reference to Evelyn Waugh is largely correct in restating Waugh’s priorities but is taken a bit out of context and somewhat overstated.  In a diary entry for 13 November 1943, he refers to announcements that the Germans are setting up “rocket guns” in France that will carry “vast explosive charges into London.” These are no doubt the V-1 and V-2 rockets the first of which were launched in June 1944, shortly after the Normandy landings. In anticipation of these attacks, Waugh had ordered the books he had been keeping at the Hyde Park Hotel to be returned to his library at Piers Court for safekeeping. His entry continues:

At the same time I have advocated my son coming to London. It would seem from this that I prefer my books to my son. I can argue that firemen rescue children and destroy books, but the truth is that a child is easily replaced while a book destroyed is utterly lost; also a child is eternal; but most that I have a sense of absolute possession over my library and not over my nursery. (Diaries, p. 555)

The Catholic World Report has an article about the fire in its “Dispatch” section. After restating the profound sense of loss caused by the fire, the article also sees some signs of hope:

One can readily see in the fire a metaphor for the state of the Faith in Europe in this increasingly secular age. But after the Cross comes Resurrection—and yesterday provided signs of hope.

The first sign came in the immediate concern expressed for the Blessed Sacrament. That the tabernacle was emptied and Our Lord’s Real Presence in the Eucharist was saved from harm is a consolation. The priests and firefighters who facilitated this reminded the world that the whole purpose for the construction of Notre-Dame in the first place was to be a worthy dwelling place for God. I am reminded of Cordelia’s conversation with Charles in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. She tells him about the closing of the chapel at their family estate after the funeral of her mother and explains having to watch the priest empty the tabernacle, leaving its golden [sic] door ajar. “I suppose none of this makes sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic.” she said. “I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel any more, just an oddly decorated room.”

The article by Fr SeĂĄn Connolly goes on to see other signs of hope in the rescue of the Crown of Thorns relic and the preservation of the cruciform stone walls of the structure. Having just read yesterday Ann Pasternak Slater’s essay on Brideshead in her insightful and entertaining book Evelyn Waugh: Writers and their Work, I was struck by one slight misstatement in the CWR article. Pasternak Slater makes a point, for various reasons, of the fact that the door of the tabernacle at Brideshead is bronze, not gold (1960, pp. 47-8). Indeed, she made this seemingly minor point so well, that I was immediately reminded of it when I read the CWR article.

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Roundup

Posted on April 14, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent post in the website Beforeitsnews.com announces that the Holy Stairs in Rome have recently been reopened after an extended period of restoration. The story cites Evelyn Waugh’s Helena for background:

The great Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh had a special devotion to St Helena, and in his fictionalized account of her life, gives a very funny explanation of how the Holy Stairs might have come to Rome in the first place. When St Helena arrives in Jerusalem, she is taken on a tour of the local governor’s palace, which he refers to, in the language of British Imperial administration, as “Government House.” (The book is filled with clever anachronisms of this sort.)

“Helena, alighting, seemed to regard the place critically. The major-domo 
 tried to put a good face on it by remarking that this was originally Pilate’s Praetorium. It might have been. No one was quite sure. On the whole most people thought that it was, though certainly much altered. Helena was plainly impressed. The major-domo went further. These marble steps, he explained, were the identical stairway which Our Lord had descended on his way to death. The effect was beyond his expectation. The aged empress knelt down, there and then in her travelling cloak, and painfully and prayerfully climbed the twenty-eight steps on her knees. 
 Next day she ordered her private cohort of sappers to take the whole staircase to pieces, number them, crate them and pack them on wagons. ‘I am sending it to Pope Sylvester,’ she said. ‘A thing like this ought to be in the Lateran. You clearly do not attach proper importance to it here.’

–Irish novelist Colm TĂłibĂ­n has written a journal describing his recent cancer treatment. This appears in the current issue of the London Review of Books. Toward the end, as he awaits release from the hospital after his latest treatment, he writes:

A rumour spread in the hospital that a doctor who knew about blood clots would visit me later in the day. Only he could decide whether I went home or not. He had the same name as a character in Wallace Stevens’s Notes towards a Supreme Fiction, who was also referred to as ‘major man’. By this time I was confronting the fact that I was slowly going mad, and that this wasn’t helped by the steroids and the lack of sleep and the general excitement about going home and seeing my boyfriend. In bed, I began to whisper ‘major man’ as Catholics in a similar state might call out the name of Jesus or his mother. I also prepared a joke to tell this doctor so that he might accept my urge to go home. Preparation was important, as I can’t really tell jokes. I just don’t know how. I can try to tell them, but they come out skewed and flat and somewhat sad.

When the doctor arrived, I worried, at first, that I had begun the joke too quickly. It was about Randolph Churchill having a tumour removed and the tumour turning out to be benign and Evelyn Waugh saying that they had removed the only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant. The doctor laughed. He seemed like a good-humoured guy. He checked that I would be able to inject myself in the stomach every night with some blood-thinning agent. He told me not to take any long-haul flights for the moment. He suggested I see him before Christmas. And then he told me I could go home.

–Interviewed in the New Statesman, veteran conservative political commentator Roger Scruton alludes to another well-worn Waugh quotation:

Evelyn Waugh once lamented that the Conservative Party had “never put the clock back a single second”. Does Scruton agree? “I think that’s his romanticism, of course it’s true. But it’s not entirely true. What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.”

–Literary journalist Lucy Freeman comments in her Gulf News column about the recent extension of the Brexit deadline. Noting that she generally opposes such postponements, she quotes Evelyn Waugh as an example of the importance of maintaining a schedule to work against:

On May 7, 1936, [sic] Evelyn Waugh, English writer of novels, biographies and travel books, and a prolific journalist, wrote in his diary: “Children have all returned to school. The weather is delicious, the house is silent, there is no reason for me not to work. I will try one day soon.” Eventually, he knuckles down. What quiet triumph there is in the line: “I did a little work.”

The correct date is May 7, 1956 (Diaries, p. 760).. In 1936 Waugh was unmarried and childless.

–Finally, in a publisher’s announcement of the reissue in paperback of Juan TazĂłn’s  The Life and Times of Thomas Stukeley, Waugh’s characterization of the subject in his Edmund Campion is quoted:

Described variously as picturesque, quixotic, cloudy minded, remarkable, and (by Evelyn Waugh) as a “preposterous and richly comic figure”, Stukeley remains a flamboyant and fascinating character in the imagination of succeeding generations.

Waugh goes on to explain that it was the discovery of Stukeley’s reckless offer to the King of Spain to seize Ireland for that country that required Campion to become a fugitive.

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