Roundup: Lenten Love and Lots of Books

Posted on April 6, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the Church Life Journal published by University of Notre Dame, Patrick Tomassi has written an essay on the themes of love in Brideshead Revisited and their particular relevance to the observance of Lent. Here is a summary:

Sorting out our many possessive, grasping loves, and redirecting them towards God is the objective of Lent asceticism. Charles Ryder, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, is transformed by becoming friends with Sebastian Flyte. His love for Sebastian opens him up to a joy in life he has never known. Although their love is tinged with a possessiveness that eventually kills it, Charles is permanently changed. Their relationship raises a theological question: what is the nature of eros? Is it ultimately selfish and unworthy of a Christian, or is it the very soil without which grace cannot take root? In Charles’s spiritual journey, an answer is proposed through suffering and renunciation. It is through, and not in spite of his eros for Sebastian, and later for Sebastian’s sister Julia, that Charles is led to agape, self-gift, and so ultimately from agnosticism to the Catholic Church.

—The Palestine Chronicle reviews a book about Israeli labor policies toward Palestinian workers. The book is by Andrew Ross and is entitled Stone Men. The review begins with this:

There is a memorable passage from satirist Evelyn Waugh’s perhaps purposively unremembered political masterpiece “Black Mischief” (1932), in which Basil Seal, the chief Anglo architect of a modernization program in the fictional African island nation of Azania, passes a stark sentence on the democratically bereft principals of political modernity:

“You know,” he added reflectively, “we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral legislature, proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the press, referendums
”

“What is all that? ” asked the Emperor.

“Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.”

The review goes on to compare Basil’s program to that adopted by Israel.

–The Evening Standard reviews a book entitled History of the Bible: The Book and its Faiths by Oxford scholar John Barton. The review explains that the Bible is:

venerated mostly as English literature as the King James Bible but, as T S Eliot observed, this veneration is testimony to the Bible being moribund in more crucial respects. John Barton, the author of this magisterial account of the book and its history, is funny at the expense of admirers of the Authorised Version, who appear to admire it more than the Greek and Hebrew original texts; it is, after all a translation, though a more wonderful one than any modern equivalent.

Actually, given the nature of some Old Testament narrative — Barton, an Oxford scripture professor, uses the term interchangeably with Hebrew Bible without disrespect to Jews — ignorance may be preferable to that dangerous thing, a little knowledge. It’s hard not to sympathise with the exasperated Randolph Churchill who, bet by Evelyn Waugh that he couldn’t read the Bible cover to cover in a fortnight, kept “slapping his side and chortling: ‘God, isn’t God a shit!’” [Diaries, 591]

–The Daily News, a Sri Lankan newspaper, on April Fool’s Day, published a story entitled “Waugh and Humour”. This poses the question: “There is no doubt about it. In another forty years, one of our grandkids will ask us, ‘What on earth is a newspaper?’ We will probably fumble with our explanation […]”  The article goes on to suggest that the best solution might be to hand them a copy of Waugh’s Scoop, which it then proceeds to summarize, concluding with this:

The story is fictional, yes, but to us journalists, most everything about the novel will seem real, too real. This could be why in my eyes, Waugh who is mostly known for his more ambitious novels: ‘A Handful of Dust’ and ‘Brideshead Revisited’ is at his best in ‘Scoop.’ Besides, he is all laughter, too. Hence the warning: if you read the book in a public place your sudden bursts of laughter might earn you curious looks from passersby.

–The Guardian has a review by DJ Taylor of a book entitled Gilded Youth. This is by James Brooke-Smith and argues that “almost since the moment of their foundation, the country’s elite private schools have been a nursery for dissent and sedition, sometimes to the point of outright insurrection.” Examples of “the dandy aesthetes, whose art world precocity was a direct response to the late 19th century’s fixation on sporting prowess” include Old Etonians Harold Acton and Brian Howard who inspired Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. Alec Waugh’s writing of Loom of Youth also gets a mention but Taylor thinks him more of a reformer than a rebel. Taylor also thinks Brooke-Smith gets Orwell wrong by claiming that he rebelled against Eton:

This is a serious overstatement. After all, Orwell’s first reaction to the arrival of his adopted son in 1944 was to suggest that he be put down for his alma mater. His diaries reveal him to have been fixated on the Eton-Harrow cricket match, and one of the last reviews he ever wrote was of a book about Eton, where he praises “the tolerant and civilised atmosphere” that gives each boy a chance of developing his own individuality.

–Finally, another book has been published on Oxford in the WWI era. This is Gatsby’s Oxford by Prof. Christopher Snyder of Mississippi State University. In a story about a book signing on Friday in Starkville, the university website MSState.edu explained that:

The book chronicles the experiences of Americans in Oxford through the Great War and the years of recovery to 1929, the end of Prohibition and the beginning of the Great Depression. “This period is interpreted through the pages of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ producing a vivid cultural history,” Snyder said.[…] “Archival material covering the first American Rhodes Scholars who came to Oxford during Trinity Term 1919—when Jay Gatsby claims he studied at Oxford—enables the narrative to illuminate a detailed portrait of what a ‘historical Gatsby’ would have looked like, what he would have experienced at the postwar university, and who he would have encountered around Oxford—an impressive array of artists including Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Winston Churchill, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis,” Snyder said.

 

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The Art (and Power) of the Book Blurb

Posted on April 5, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

In the current issue of the TLS, DJ Taylor addresses in the “Freelance” column “blurb-writing” for book covers and promotional materials. He begins with a discussion of the various considerations brought to bear in composing a successful blurb. These are based on his own experience as well as the advice of book publishers such as Anthony Blond and Rupert Hart-Davis. Perhaps the best of the stories about blurb composition relates to Orwell’s 1984 where Taylor notes that one of the pitfalls:

is the copy hazarded by an enthusiastic editor which betrays in every line just how little he, or she, has understood the book. “As to the blurb, I really don’t think the approach in the draft you sent me is the right one”, an aggrieved-sounding George Orwell wrote from the island of Jura to Roger Senhouse, his editor at Secker & Warburg, in December 1948, six months before Nineteen Eighty-Four hit the shelves. “It makes the book sound as though it were a thriller mixed up with a love story, and I didn’t intend it to be either.” Orwell, keener on the “zones of influence” he had detected at the 1943 Tehran Conference and wanting “to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism”, eventually had his way.

Another case considers one of Waugh’s last books, A Tourist in Africa:

How have book blurbs changed over the years? One obvious answer is that they have grown marginally less sedate. How, you might wonder, did Evelyn Waugh react to the news that Chapman & Hall considered A Tourist in Africa (1961) “a very pleasant bedside book (which should induce sleep in all but the most stubborn insomniacs)”?

So far as appears from his correspondence with his agents AD Peters in this period, Waugh seems not to have made any comment or involved himself in the composition of that blurb. It was the concluding sentence in a one-paragraph description of the book on the inside front flap of the dust wrapper. The rear page of the dust wrapper is covered with favorable quotes from reviews in the British press of the Ronald Knox biography. In any event, Waugh had no reason to object to the modesty of the blurb as he was under no delusions as to the quality of A Tourist in Africa. He told his brother Alec in a letter dated 25 October 1960 that he had not sent him a copy because he was ashamed of it

Waugh was not reluctant to become actively engaged in blurb-writing when it suited his interest. He wrote favorable descriptions of two early Muriel Spark novels and sent one to her agent (for The Comforters) and one to her (for The Bachelors). Both of these quotes still appear on the front cover of the current UK editions of these books. On the other hand, he was no shrinking violet in turning down book publicists’ soliicitations. For example, when Nina Bourne of Simon & Schuster ask for a favorable comment on Joseph Heller’s book Catch-22, Waugh sent back a catalogue of perceived defects of the book: indelicacy, prolixity–should be cut by half, often repetitious, lacking in structure. He was, however, prepared to say that “Much of the dialogue is funny”. He offered his own rather verbose blurb should she choose to use it: “This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies” (Letters 417, 551, and 571-72).

Taylor’s musings over blurb-writing is in response to the need to compose one for his upcoming book which was mentioned in a previous post. Here’s a preview:

But where does this leave yours truly? To judge from these templates, it would saddle my own darling work with a paragraph that begins, “This is a book about some young women who worked on Cyril Connolly’s literary magazine Horizon in the 1940s and what they got up to in the black-out”. Somehow absorbing works of cultural reinvention and dazzling new lights seem the safer bet.

 

 

 

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Justin Cartwright (1943-2018): R.I.P.

Posted on April 4, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent issue of TLS, DJ Taylor reviews the works of South Africa-born British novelist Justin Cartwright who died late last year in London at 75. He wrote 17 novels (although, as Taylor notes, he disowned some early ones) starting in the 1970s. As his obituary in the Johannesburg Review of Books points out: “His writing was often compared to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and he himself named his influences as Saul Bellow, John Updike and Alan Paton.”  His obituary in the Guardian cites his most notable books:

Cartwright became a noted observer of the minutiae and absurdities of middle-class life, which he witnessed from the centre of the north London literary establishment. His acceptance was assured by a CV laden with awards, including the 1998 Whitbread best novel award for Leading the Cheers and the Hawthornden prize in 2005 for The Promise of Happiness. […] Cartwright was a rare bird in literary fiction, able to use comedy as a Trojan horse to confront readers with the tragedy of human existence. His most laugh-out-loud works, such as Other People’s Money (2011), a satire inspired by the global financial crisis, were underscored by an appreciation of the role of human frailty in driving historical events.

Although he attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he seems never to have written an “Oxford novel”, as such. He did, however, in 2008 write some recollections about Oxford entitled This Secret Garden: Oxford Revisited in which Cartwright recalled visiting an exhibit devoted to John Betjeman, reminding him of the inspiration of Sebastian’s teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited.  He goes on to describe Waugh’s book as “still in some minds the defining myth of Oxford [and] the greatest Oxford novel ever written” (p. 167).

DJ Taylor in his TLS retrospective, discusses Cartwright’s novels in terms of their characters which he describes as “Cartwright-man” and “Cartwright-woman” in various guises. The latter he summarizes as:

In her middle-aged-to-elderly guise, Cartwright-woman is safely yet peevishly anodyne, a spirited rearranger of Home Counties flowers, a clipper-out of fascinating articles about Evelyn Waugh’s first wife; but her younger prototype needs watching: […] at all times operating by private codes that Cartwright-man – as ripe for superannuation as Amis- man became in his later versions – has no chance of deciphering.

 

 

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Evelyn Waugh, Brexit and Prendergast’s Wig (More)

Posted on April 3, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A new magazine based in London and called The Fence has published its first issue which is declared a “Brexit Special”. It describes itself as featuring: “Haunting insights, ridiculous conceits, pulsating fiction and just straight up lies: The Fence is a bi-monthly magazine locked in on life in London.” One of the articles is by Saoirse Mulvey and is entitled “Evelyn Waugh, A Fictive Seer”. It opens with a quote from Sir Ambrose Abercrombie in The Loved One: “You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs — except in England of course.” This position is then described as emanating

from a familiar plane of the British psyche; despairing, embarrassed and freighted with delusions of its own grandeur, the post-war Brit reacts to his new predicament by mythologising former glories, and harking back to a rapidly departing past with an uneasy admixture of ironic nostalgia and barking self-pity. Some diseases of the soul are terminal. Others linger. Looking out on to an England still in fear of Tomorrow, looking back always to an ever-appreciating stock of Yesterdays, it’s hard not to look at the current government and infer that Abercrombie’s diagnosis belongs to the second class of things.

The article goes on to describe the present government’s Brexit strategy as less a Shakespearean tragedy than “a mottled rehashing of the careless over-reach depicted in Waugh’s less subtle works.” Among these is one from another novel, Decline and Fall in which Mr Prendergast:

 feels forced to continue wearing a wig, long after his students detect it as a ludicrous fake, [explains]:

‘I knew from the start that it was a mistake but once they had seen it, it was too late to go back. They make all sorts of jokes about it.’

‘Brexit is our wig’ came the droll assessment [in a letter to the Financial Times by], Mr Geoff Scargill. ‘After months of talks and posturing about independence we can see that we are thin on top. Everyone abroad knows it and is making jokes about us. But it is too late to go back’. [See earlier post.]

After noting that several leaders of the Tory party’s Brexit campaign are Waugh fans, the story hones on one of these, Jacob Rees-Mogg “who may as well have been summoned into being through a black mass held over Waugh’s collected works.” After elaborating on this point with several allusions to Waugh’s work, this discussion concludes:

Like in Waugh’s work, a fundamental complacency toward the vulnerable becomes, in practice, indistinguishable from nihilism. Those who suffer most from [Rees-Mogg’s] policies just need to know that he has a funny name, face and voice. His racial scaremongering, environmental catastrophism and sincere desire to uncouple millions from the protections of the welfare state, all become shrouded in a protective layer of pantomime ridiculousness that casts him not as the reptile he is, but just one more rogue in Waugh’s gallery of colourful bastards. Social reformer William Beveridge once told Waugh he took pleasure in life from ‘trying to leave the world a better place than I found it’. ‘I get mine spreading alarm and despondency’ replied Waugh, ‘and I get more satisfaction than you do’. The risk of The Tories’ Prendergast Wig is that it is the same class of despondent alarm, using the performative absurdities of its architects, to draw only the sort of laughter which begets bitter complacency.

This quote is taken from the 1953 autobiography (Born to Believe) by Waugh’s friend Frank Pakenham who invited both Beveridge and Waugh to a meal in 1942. The article could be read as suggesting that Waugh lived in what is now Rees-Mogg’s Parliamentary constituency of North-East Somerset, but Waugh’s home in Combe Florey is in the Taunton Deane constituency. Their MP is Rebecca Pow who, according to her Wikipedia entry, is also a Tory but who declared in favor of Remain in the 2016 referendum. It should also be noted that the constituency was Liberal Democrat before her election in 2015, which may explain her position on the EU. The article is well-written as these things go and the excerpts above do not do it full justice. It can be read in its entirety at this link.

 

 

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Waugh and Two Catholic Novelists

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Recent articles in the Roman Catholic literary press have linked Waugh to two largely neglected (in the English speaking world at least) Roman Catholic novelists. The first is an essay by Luca Fumagalli in the Italian-language online journal Radio Spada in which he argues that Waugh’s writing was influenced by the early 20th Century works of convert Robert Hugh Benson. He begins with a consideration of Waugh’s preface to a 1956 reprint of Benson’s 1905 novel Richard Raynal, Solitary:

Before [considering Benson] the novelist, Waugh first showed himself an admirer of Benson as a man and a priest: […]  In his eyes Benson was  “superficially very much an aesthete, but the Catholic Church made little aesthetic appeal to him …. What he sought and found in the Church was authority and catholicity “. Again: “He worked without thought of posterity, as though Doomsday were imminent, using all his talents lavishly to draw as many souls as possible among his immediate neighbors to their true end in God.”

The quotes are from Waugh’s preface, pp. ix, xii. The article leaves out Waugh’s recognition that Benson cared little about the style and quality of his writing. Fumagalli goes on to the heart of his essay, comparing Benson’s writings to those of Waugh:

From a purely literary point of view, influences and contaminations [cross-fertilization ?] abound. If, for example, Valentine Medd’s nanny in The Sentimentalists (1906) closely resembles Sebastian’s nurse  in Brideshead Revisited (1945), the dark novel A Winnowing (1910), anticipates in many respects the black humor of The Loved One (1948). Also in The Sentimentalists, with the figure of Mr. Rolls and the great residence of Oxburgh Hall – where former priests, failed actresses and all those who have made serious mistakes in finding a meaning in their existence are helped – Benson prepared the ground for Waugh , who would use such enthusiasm for the Catholic aristocracy and their homes as an inspiration for Brideshead Revisited. Also with regard to the eschatological, dystopic or utopian current, Waugh’s stories  “Love Among the Ruins” (1953) and “Out of Depth” (1933) boast several similarities, respectively, with The Lord of the World (1907) and The Dawn of All (1911) – in the latter case especially in the expedient of time travel. Finally, it seems that Waugh also returned to Benson’s historical novels before writing his own book on the English saint and martyr Edmund Campion (1935), and that the works of Benson’s Edwardian settings had the merit of reviving [Waugh’s] satirical flame.

Translation by Google with edits. Waugh’s links to Benson’s dystopias and time travel in his own stories have been noted elsewhere, but some of these other connections may be original and worth further consideration.

The other comparison comes from an article in the National Catholic Register about a 1950 novel by Henry Morton Robinson entitled The Cardinal.  This:

… tells the story of Stephen Fermoyle, a Catholic priest from Boston, between the years 1915 and 1939, when he, as a new cardinal, voted in the election of Pius XII. An immediate best-seller, the novel was translated into more than a dozen languages and turned into an award-winning 1963 film by Otto Preminger. Were it to be offered publishers today, I doubt the book would find a buyer in the secular press. It’s just too Catholic.

The novel inspired the author of the NCR article, K E Colombini, to seek out other writings about the Roman Catholic church in the period during which the novel’s fictional Cardinal thrived. Among the findings was an essay by Waugh:

The postwar period in which Robinson was writing his novel was a time when the Catholic Church was seeing great growth, and here I found myself reaching not for another book, but an essay by the British novelist Evelyn Waugh. This work, titled “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church” was published in Life magazine in September 1949. At the same time Robinson was crafting The Cardinal, Waugh was traveling around our country, talking to people and writing this report where he recognized, as did Robinson throughout the novel, that America was seen as a beacon of hope for the future of the Church.[…]

In his Life magazine essay, Waugh expresses this sort of optimism in a more complete way, setting a theme that one could say helps define Robinson’s novel. As Waugh put it, many of his contemporary Catholics are “turning their regard with hope and curiosity to the New World, where, it seems, Providence is schooling and strengthening a people for the historic destiny long borne by Europe.”

A copy of Waugh’s article as it appears in Life magazine can be seen at the link above or in a slightly different form in the Tablet as reprinted in A Little Order and Essays, Articles and Reviews.

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William Boyd to Lecture on Waugh

Posted on March 30, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Lancing College has issued the formal announcement and details of its annual Evelyn Waugh Lecture that was mentioned in an earlier post:

We are delighted to welcome William Boyd, author and screenwriter to Lancing for the first time to give our eleventh Evelyn Waugh Lecture on 25 April 2019. The title of his talk is ‘Evelyn Waugh: A Self Divided’.

William Boyd has published fifteen novels, five volumes of short stories and some seventeen of his screenplays have been filmed. Two of these films include adaptations of Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” and the “Sword of Honour” trilogy. Boyd has written widely on Waugh and his work, including the introduction to the Everyman edition of “A Handful of Dust“. Evelyn Waugh has even appeared — in a cameo role — in his novel “Any Human Heart“.  He admits to being something of a Waugh-obsessive.

This very special occasion is by invitation only and open to all members of the Lancing Foundation in recognition of their support for the College.

Although attendance is by invitation only, the college has previously indicated that it would entertain requests from members of the Evelyn Waugh Society which it would attempt to fill to the extent there is space available. Contact information and other details are available at this link.

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Roundup: Fleabag and Brexit

Posted on March 30, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times earlier this week carried a review of an ongoing BBC TV series called Fleabag, currently in its 2nd season. The review by Ann Marie Hourihane opens with this:

God is what you’ve got left when you’re done with sex; everybody knows that. That trajectory is interrupted only by children — otherwise it’s pretty much straight out of bed and into the Bible, and also the priests. Or priest.

This, as you may be aware, is the plot of the new series of Fleabag, written by a television genius, the universally praised Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Before that it was a seam enthusiastically mined by those English converts, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, who came to Catholicism as a sort of shelter from their own cleverness and despair.

She goes on to explain that in this latest series the heroine’s love interest is a Roman Catholic priest. In the four episodes aired thus far, her conquest has not yet been consummated. The author of the review is an Irish Catholic (as apparently is the priest in the story, although no accent is apparent).  She grew up in Ealing and writes about how the English Catholics managed to distinguish themselves from her variety:

English Catholicism always had the glamour of the minority about it. It has centuries of being misunderstood under its belt; Waugh has a lot to answer for. For obvious reasons it always had a hefty sprinkling of posh foreigners in its congregation, and those French girls certainly knew how to dress. In the Ealing of my childhood there was a big Polish congregation and a few Irish — we were very much at the lower end of the social scale. I suspect that English Catholicism contains within it a sort of whispered disdain for ordinary English life and English people. Waugh’s Lady Marchmain, who was both a secular saint and an appalling mother, would have fitted right in.

Episode 4 ended inconclusively, but there are two more yet to come.

–In a later issue of The Times, Patrick Kidd in his gossip column mentions that Waugh biographer Selina Hastings is now at work on a biography of novelist Sybille Bedford, who was a close friend of Aldous Huxley and his wife and wrote what is probably the definitive biography of Huxley.

–Speaking of whom, an article posted in installments on a New Zealand independent news website (scoop.co.nz) is considering Huxley’s first novel Crome Yellow (1921) which was a popular satirization of the group of writers and intellectuals who gathered in Ottoline Morrell’s salon at Garsington Manor near Oxford:

Huxley’s venomous portrait of the inter-war period is reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, who mined similar territory, but with even greater acerbity. Waugh briefly mentions Huxley’s second novel in Brideshead Revisited (1945) – “I had just bought a rather forbidding book called Antic Hay, which I knew I must read before going to Garsington on Sunday, because everyone was bound to talk about it, and it’s so banal saying you have not read the book of the moment, if you haven’t.” Wyndham Lewis (whose sardonic, incisive, and mordantly satirical The Apes of God (1930) revealed him, more than Waugh, to be the century’s real heir to Swift) sketched out a typical weekend gathering at Garsington in Blasting and Bombardiering (1935).

—The Times’ affiliated publication TLS earlier this month republished a 2002 review of Paul Theroux’s travel book Dark Star Safari. In this Theroux revisits the sites of his early novels set in Africa where he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1960s. While stationed in Malawi, where he was teaching, he got involved in local politics on the wrong side and was deported. In Dark Star Safari, he describes a journey back to Malawi for the first time since his expulsion. He crosses the frontier beyond Mbeya, Tanzania. This reminds the reviewer Giles Foden of another novelist-traveller in Africa:

[Theroux] finally enters Malawi from Tanzania, through the pleasant mountain town of Mbeya. In 1960, five years earlier than Theroux’s previous visit, Evelyn Waugh described Mbeya as “a little English garden suburb with no particular reason for existence”. Now it is “a ruined town of ramshackle houses and broken streets and paltry shops”, full of aid and development workers who refuse Theroux’s attempts at dialogue and so come in for some vintage Therouvian animus.

Waugh writing in A Tourist in Africa (1960) p. 112, likens the area around Mbeya to Kenya’s Happy Valley. It is located in what was then Tanganyika when Waugh visited, and Malawi, across the border to the south, would have still been Nyasaland which was part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Waugh was crossing to the west into Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) on his way to see his friends the Actons in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

–In another TLS issue, a new novel by Alba Arikha is reviewed. This is Where to Find Me, and it is reviewed by David Collard.  After summarizing the plot which involves the intersection in London of the lives of women from widely separated generations, Collard concludes with this praise of Arika’s writing:

Evelyn Waugh admiringly observed that Christopher Isherwood never struggled to avoid a clichĂ© because a clichĂ© would never occur to him in the first place, a compliment that can be applied to Arikha’s precise, economical prose.

Waugh’s reference to Isherwood occurs in his 1939 Spectator review of Journey to a War, reprinted in EAR, pp. 251-52. A few months later Waugh was less kind when he depicted  Isherwood in Put Out More Flags as one of the pair Parsnip and Pimpernel who scarpered off to America to avoid the war.

–Finally, in the New Yorker, Anthony Lane, usually their film critic, contributes an article (“Waiting for Brexit”) looking to find something different and humorous to say about Brexit. He begins his concluding section with this:

There might, of course, be no deal at all, although that void will itself constitute a sort of devil’s deal—an unthinkable prospect, for some, but it’s always worth recalling the tranquil words of Dr. Fagan, in Evelyn Waugh’s “Decline and Fall,” who admitted, “I look forward to each new fiasco with the utmost relish.”

He then describes several possible and chaotic conclusions worthy of Samuel Beckett.

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Last Orders at Mrs Roberts’

Posted on March 27, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail reports that a Waugh landmark in North Wales is about to disappear. This is the Fair View Inn in Llanddulas which was the model for the pub in Llanabba run by Mrs Roberts (but never otherwise identified or named). This was the preferred local for the staff of Llanabba School. According to the Mail:

A pub once frequented by novelist Evelyn Waugh which featured in his masterpiece ‘Decline and Fall’ will be developed for housing after a High Court ruling. Waugh taught at a prep school near the Fair View Inn in Llanddulas, North Wales, and it became the model for ‘Mrs Roberts’ Pub’ in his much-loved 1928 comic novel. Paul Pennyfeather […] drank there with fellow teachers when escaping from their duties at fictional school, Llanabba.

There are at least four visits to the pub recorded in Waugh’s novel and one of the illustrations drawn by Waugh himself depicts Pennyfeather and Grimes chatting over their pints next to the fireplace. The pub, which is down the hill from the school, is introduced by Grimes to the reader with this:

“Here’s the pub. Not such a bad little place in its way. Clutterbuck’s father makes all the beer round here. Not bad stuff, either. Two pints please, Mrs Roberts.” (Penguin Classics, 2011, pp. 30, 32)

In the Mail, photos of the pub’s most recent iteration show the signage of Marstons Brewery. The reasons for its demise are explained in the Mail’s story. After it fell on hard times and closed in 2017, it was acquired by a social housing developer to be turned into residential units (a 4BR house and 24 1&2BR flats). The locals complained, inter alia, that the loss of an important community amenity was inconsistent with applicable planning policy and argued against planning permission for the new build;  but this argument was rejected because there was another pub in the village called the Valentine. As reported by the Mail:

[…] council lawyers pointed out that the village still has one surviving pub and is also equipped with a community hall and a Royal British Legion Club. The purpose of the policy was to guard against the village being left with no pub at all, he said. And councillors were not obliged to compare the facilities on offer at the Valentine against those lost when the Fair View Inn closed.

In the novel, when the schoolmasters visit the pub after the sports day the members of the Llanabba Silver Band are arguing about the division of their earnings from performing at that event. Grimes declines to intervene and advises Paul: “Take my tip, old boy: never get involved in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn’t end in blows, like an Irish one, but goes on forever. They’ll still be discussing that three pounds at the end of term; just you see.” Several days (and pages of text) later, after Grimes’ ill-fated marriage, he and Pennyfeather retire to the pub for the last time: “‘Drinks are on me tonight,’ said Grimes. The Silver Band were still sitting with their heads together discussing the division of their earnings.” (Penguin Classics, pp. 112, 138)

 

 

 

 

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Literary Chagford

Posted on March 26, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The following paragraphs open a recent story in The Moorlander, a local Dartmoor area newspaper:

Chagword, Dartmoor’s Literary Festival, [was held last] weekend with big named authors coming to the festival in Chagford, but literary links go much further back, including to the 1940s to when Evelyn Waugh wrote ‘Brideshead Revisited’ at the Easton Court Hotel a mile outside of town. After that, many well-known literary figures stayed at the ‘Dartmoor writers hotel.’ Already a well-known novelist, Waugh was recuperating from a parachuting accident when he decided to pen ‘Brideshead Revisited’ at the hotel on Dartmoor.

During a short-lived posting to the Household Cavalry Waugh, a captain, had asked for extra time off to spend at Easton Court in Chagford. ‘I came to Chagford with the intention of starting on an ambitious novel tomorrow morning,’ he wrote in his diary at the end of January 1944. ‘I still have a cold and am low in spirits but I feel full of literary power which only this evening gives place to qualms of impotence.’ He wrote the first 3,000 words within two days. Reflecting his army experience, the opening line of the prologue is set during the Second World War.

The story by Karen Farrington is headed with a photo of the hotel’s library where Waugh did his writing when in residence.  Waugh wrote all or parts of several other books at the hotel, starting with Black Mischief. The article continues with a summary of Brideshead and closes with this:

Waugh, who died [53 years ago next month], was introduced to the remote hotel with its views of rugged Dartmoor years before by his brother Alec and had previously stayed at the hotel while he wrote two earlier novels. Assorted famous writers of the era headed there too, among them C P Snow, John Steinbeck and John Betjeman. Other names that appear in the guest book include actors Richard Widmark and John Gielgud.

Another well known literary guest was Patrick Leigh Fermor who recalls in a 1995 letter to Deborah Mitford attending the funeral of a former owner of the hotel named Caroline Cobb: “Norman [Webb, her partner] and Evelyn and Laura [Waugh] were almost the only ones there, in Chagford churchyard.” (In Tearing Haste: New York, 2008, p. 305).

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Martin Green Reconsidered

Posted on March 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Writing in the New Criterion, David Platzer reconsiders a 1976 book by Martin Green (1927-2010), late Professor at Tufts University. This is called Children of the Sun and is described by Platzer as a book about:

the remarkable literary generation, described by Green as dandies, that appeared in England after the First World War and included Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, Peter Quennell, Nancy Mitford, and others. To Green, such heroes of 1914 as Raymond Asquith and the Grenfell brothers, Julian and Billy, many of whom perished in the trenches, were “England’s last true Sonnenkinder . . . of which the post-war dandies were only the sharp-edged fragments.”

Green selected Old Etonian aesthetes Harold Acton and Brian Howard as the leaders of the dandies, also referred to as “decadents”. Acton who was still alive when the book was published was not particularly amused. Platzer continues:

To Green’s mind, the post-1918 dandies sought to be eternally young men living in a commedia dell’arte world of Pierrots, Harlequins, and Columbines, rather than responsible, mature fathers as their own fathers had been. He notes that his mentor at Cambridge, the stern critic F. R. Leavis, condemned P. G. Wodehouse, beloved of many a dandy and just about everyone else, for popularizing the avoidance of maturity. […]

According to Platzer, the book received a lot of attention when it was first published. Hilton Kramer in the New York Times:

[…] judged the book as “very important,” its author “a very fine critic indeed, exemplary in his intelligence as well as in his industry.” The book attracted more controversy in Britain, marked by a scorching review by Auberon Waugh in the September 1976 Books and Bookmen when the book was only available in America. Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh’s biographer and described by Green as “mediatory between the dandies and the gentlemen of the Establishment,” told me that Green had mixed up various Englishmen who had nothing to do with one another.[…] I, a young disciple of Acton and others of Green’s dandies, was inclined to agree with my spiritual uncles. While I saw Sykes’s point and relished Auberon Waugh’s review, I secretly lapped up the book. Time has proved the book “something of a classic,” as Bevis Hillier, the author of a monumental three-volume biography of Betjeman, observed in The Spectator in 2007, though it is clear to me that the book does suffer from an overreliance on Jungian mythologizing.[…]

After a detailed summary of many of Green’s references to the writings of the dandies (including several howlers for which Platzer is prepared to foregive him), the article concludes:

For Green, the real revelation was that a part of himself was a dandy and had been all along. At sixteen, he wrote a story that betrayed “a close kinship between my taste . . . and the comic nonsense that Harold Acton contributed to the Eton Candle . . .” Moreover, he saw, in the end, that most of the Englishmen he knew combined decency with a strong sense of humor that could be considered “dandy.” Though the tieless Green looks somewhat earnest in the American edition of his book, in the British version he is unashamedly dandyish wearing a coat, a smart tie, and the look of a cat who has swallowed a succulent canary. Through his exploration of Harold Acton’s world he had found that the Pierrot for whom he was searching was “a part, an important part, of my treasure, my England” that he had too long suppressed. He was now free to laugh. Even if Green’s suggestions sometimes need to be met with reservations, the book remains a rich treasure trove about the most interesting and talented literary circle of recent times.

Not mentioned by Platzer, about a decade later another book was published, seeming to cover much the same ground. This was Humphrey Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation (1989) in which Carpenter dismisses Green’s book in a footnote:

Martin Green treats Waugh and his circle exclusively as dandies, scarcely considering other aspects of their character and work. Though the book contains some sensible observations, it is overall a reductio ad absurdum of Connolly’s definition of the literary dandy, pressing home its thesis so ruthlessly as to distort the real character of many people whom Green discusses.

Platzer’s essay is recommended and is available in full from the New Criterion’s website. Green’s book is out of print in the UK but is widely available from second-hand dealers on Amazon.co.uk. A US paperback edition published in 2008 by Axios Press is available from Amazon.com.

UPDATE (27 March 2019): Amazon.com is selling directly a US paperback edition of Green’s book published in 2008 by Axios Press.

 

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