Roundup: Party Fiction and Personal Libraries

Posted on March 23, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–The National Review has published a symposium on the subject of personal libraries in which participants explain the pleasure and burden they impose. Here’s the contribution of American literary critic Terry Teachout:

My Manhattan apartment contains a thousand-odd books, but I don’t think of them as a “library.” Unwealthy New Yorkers can’t afford homes large enough to amass libraries, and while degenerate city collectors keep books in the oven, I’ve never been reduced to that pitiful extremity. […]

Because I keep books that I find rereadable, I usually own several books per author. One shelf is devoted to M. F. K. Fisher, John P. Marquand, and Anthony Powell, while another bulges with Evelyn Waugh and Max Beerbohm. My literary taste is moderately Anglophilic: Kingsley Amis, Somerset Maugham, Barbara Pym, and P. G. Wodehouse all take up plenty of space on the shelves, though so do Colette, Jon Hassler, François Mauriac, William Maxwell, and Dawn Powell. A few volumes are there in part for their own physical sake, including a shelf of art folios, and I also love my battered Viking Portable Fitzgerald and Hemingway, which are just the right size to be tucked into an overnight bag. But the rest were bought to read, not to ogle. […]

Other contributors, who one would expect to own several volumes of Waugh’s work, do not make separate mention of any: Joseph Epstein, David Pryce-Jones, Micah Mattix.

–The Paris Review has posted an essay by Elisa Gabbert entitled “On Classic Party Fiction” and it’s no surprise that Waugh is mentioned. But the discussion relates not to his party novel Vile Bodies but to A Handful of Dust. That section begins with a discussion of:

Making It, [Norman] Podhoretz’s memoir of his ascent to so-called fame in the fifties and sixties (he was the editor of Commentary, which earned him entry to the world of the literati) […] The passage of interest to me describes the parties: “One met most of the same people—the family—at all these parties, but there was usually enough variation in the crowd to breed other invitations to other parties.” Parties, like genes, exist to self-replicate. This partly explains why they all look the same. In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Brenda is pleased with a party because it is “exactly what she wished it to be, an accurate replica of all the best parties she had been to in the last year; the same band, the same supper and, above all, the same guests.”

A later discussion takes up the topic of parties in nonfiction, in which Gabbert finds that

…there are no parties qua parties. Even Podhoretz only mentions them in passing, as a way to drop some names. It must be that people don’t remember real parties well enough to re-create them with any accuracy. There’s too much missing information. Fictive parties evoke this sense of impaired time by impairing the narrative, with non sequitur, snippets of nonsense conversation, and continuity errors. It’s often suddenly 2 AM. Whole hours may go by in the space of a sentence, as in A Handful of Dust: “They drank a lot.” Those four words are one paragraph, and contain so much.

–Also in the Paris Review there is an announcement of possible interest to our readers:

On April 2, The Paris Review and its supporters will meet at Cipriani 42nd Street for the Spring Revel, an annual celebration of the magazine and the enduring power of literature. That evening, Elif Batuman will present the Terry Southern Prize for Humor to Benjamin Nugent for his story “Safe Spaces.” Terry Southern, the namesake of the award, was the novelist and screenwriter behind the success of, among other things, Easy Rider and Dr. Strangelove. He acted as a crucial influence in the early years of The Paris Review; “The Accident”—an excerpt from Southern’s debut novel, Flash and Filigree—appeared in the first issue. This week, Grove Atlantic will reissue Flash and Filigree with a new introduction by David L. Ulin.[…]

In the introduction, Ulin goes on to mention Southern’s friendship with novelist Henry Green, friend of Waugh from Oxford years, whom Southern interviewed for the Paris Review and concludes that:

Southern was a genius, can we just say that? He was a vivid mimic, a writer of outlandish set pieces; just think of the demonically twisted “Mrs. Joyboy” scene he wrote for the film The Loved One. He liked to start simply, in something close to believable reality. Then he would push the boundaries, until the whole world seemed to explode. […]

Even more outlandish were Southern’s changes in Waugh’s story that pushed the boundaries rather too far–the builder of Whispering Glades decides to launch into space the “loved ones” buried in the cemetery so that he can build retirement homes in their place. This added situations and characters to the story far beyond the capacity of Waugh’s plot. Thanks to reader Dave Lull for sending this link.

–Finally, Emily Temple on the website Literary Hub has made a study and comparison of the working lives of 80 well-known novelists:

One of the many measuring sticks we use to compare writers (and compare ourselves to them) is age. We celebrate the women who started late. We gawk at, envy, and revile wunderkinds. Regardless of when they appeared, we love to marvel at famous writers’ early efforts, because of the careers they portend. But recently I’ve been thinking not about the way (or the age) a literary career begins, but about its scope. Like any job, a writing career can last a lifetime—or less than a year.

In compiling these figures, I found it interesting to see how the length of a writer’s publishing career didn’t necessarily have any bearing on their current level of fame. Just look at the ten writers with the shortest number of years spent publishing: Shirley Jackson, Zora Neale Hurston, J.D. Salinger, Flannery O’Connor, Roberto Bolaño, Toni Cade Bambara, Jane Austen, Charlotte BrontĂ«, Sylvia Plath, Nella Larsen. You wouldn’t exactly call any of these people “minor” or “forgotten.”

Waugh was relatively young when his first book appeared in 1928 (24.5 vs average 29). Temple overstates Waugh’s first publication a bit by using Decline and Fall rather than Rossetti. And although Waugh’s life was relatively short (he was 62 when he died) his working life exceeded the average.  Temple also understates Waugh’s end-dates by using Unconditional Surrender (October, 1961) as his final work when in fact that was A Little Learning (September 1964); so his working life was 36 years (vs average 35) and age at last publication was 61 (vs average 65).

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Evelyn Waugh: The Restless Years

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has embarked on a new chapter in his online history of Waugh. This is the period of 1930-37 between the breakup of his first marriage and the celebration of his second. He has posted the first installment, as described in his introduction below as Cycle One:

When Evelyn went off to Africa in October 1930, it was the beginning of a two-year cycle that would repeat itself three times before he settled down again at Piers Court with his second wife, Laura. By and large, Waugh kept a diary when he was on the move but didn’t when he was back in England.

Cycle One
EW was in Africa for a few months. […] He came back to England, wrote up the travel book Remote People and then the novel Black Mischief, both of which drew heavily on his African ADVENTURE.

What had changed? Important things had not changed. He was still in unrequited love with Teresa Jungman. The ditching of Diana Guinness et al was consolidated, ditto Alastair Graham. But his new buddies were the Lygon girls of Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, Ladies Mary, Dorothy and Sibell.

Cycle Two
Off again in December 1932, this time to South America. […] Back in England he wrote up the travel book NInety-Two Days and then the novel A Handful of Dust, both of which drew heavily on his Amazonian ADVENTURE. […]

Cycle Three
[…] He got back on track by travelling to Abyssinia again in August 1935. He came back to England, wrote up the travel book Waugh in Abyssinia (this necessitated a third, shorter trip to Africa to tie up loose ends) and then the novel Scoop, both of which drew heavily on his African ADVENTURE.

While writing Scoop, Evelyn and Laura got married and moved to Piers Court and a complete change of lifestyle. Evelyn’s itinerant and romantic days were over. I’ve already told the story of his life at Piers Court in some detail. I’m now going to fill in what happened in the seven years outlined above.

As with the sections on ‘THE EVELYNS’ and ‘PIERS COURT PAPERS’, I’m going to dive in to certain places and events and attempt to do them justice. Maybe, in due course, the whole period will be covered equally, but that would require a sustained effort on top of specific intensive efforts and it remains to be seen whether I do that.

The first installment is devoted to the period Waugh spent at Madresfield. McLaren credits the book by Paula Byrne, Mad World for its valuable contribution to the knowledge of this period but also offers many new insights based on his own research. And as usual, he lapses into imaginary conversations involving Waugh and his acquaintances. Here’s a link to the new article which will also link you to related postings.

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Roundup: “The Death of a Modern Churchman”

Posted on March 18, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–A literary website that encourages new writers (Culturedvultures.com) has posted a list of the 10 most absurd deaths in classic fiction. Among those selected is the death of Mr Prendergast in Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall:

8. DEATH BY SAW AND BIBLE

Evelyn Waugh’s first novel Decline and Fall treats murder with cruel humour.

The homicide occurs while Paul Pennyfeather, the protagonist, is serving a prison sentence for traffic in prostitution (of which he isn’t guilty). Mr Prendergast, also known as Prendy, a previous acquaintance, acts as prison chaplain. He is the ‘modern churchman’, a species of clergy for whom religious belief is optional. Doubts are the scourge of his ineffectual existence.

One day Paul gets to know a fellow prisoner, a burly man with twitchy red hands. He’s a carpenter by profession and believes God has appointed him killer of sinners. Doubts never plague him. Divine visions have guided his murderous hand, hence his present abode. In his own words, he is the ‘the sword of Israel’ and the ‘lion of the Lord’s elect’. He describes a vision in which the prison is at first carved as if of ruby and then drips with blood.

When the elect insults a warder in colourful biblical language, the reform-mad Prison Governor diagnoses a case of frustrated creative urge. He prescribes self-expression. So the elect receives a work bench and carpenter’s tools. The way he gives way to his creativity is by sawing off poor Prendy’s head.

The prisoners sing the information to each other during the hymn in chapel. The warders approve of the choice of victim, rejoicing that it wasn’t one of them. The event leaves a minimal mark on the life of the prison. The killer is sent to Broadmoor, and the Governor softens his urge for reform.

Among others deaths listed are Leonard Bast’s death by bookcase in EM Forster’s Howards End and Mr Krook’s by spontaneous combustion in Dickens’ Bleak House.

–Two podcasts discussing Waugh’s works have recently been posted on PlayerFM. These are both by Joseph Pearce, editor of St Austin Review and author of several books about Christian writers:

The Catholic Literary Revival: The Waste Land Generation (Eliot, Waugh and Greene) 

St. Augustine and Evelyn Waugh’s “Confessions”

The second podcast also includes the participation of Elizabeth Klein.

–Gary Wills reviews Mary Gordon’s recent book On Thomas Merton in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine. The review is also an occasion for Wills to write an extended and interesting essay on Merton in the course of which he includes this discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s relations with Merton:

An early fan and promoter of The Seven Storey Mountain was Evelyn Waugh. Waugh’s favor made his British publisher ask Waugh to be an additional cutter and corrector of the book (Robert Giroux had edited the American edition thoroughly), which Waugh retitled Elected Silence for the En­glish market. The best-known aspect of Gethsemani was the fact that Cistercians of the Strict Observance (as the Trappists are formally named) maintain a prayerful silence with one another. Waugh, who admired this dedication to silence, was critical later on when he saw how publicly voluble Merton became with his flood of books. In his twenty-seven years at Gethsemani, he often published two or three books a year, while also writing articles, public statements, an expansive journal, ancillary diaries, and fifteen thousand letters (many to celebrities). In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton said that his writing was just doing the Lord’s work, like that of his brother monks milking cows or making cheese. When Waugh said that contemplative orders should stick to making cheese and liqueurs, Merton responded by telling Waugh to say the rosary every day (especially if he did not like doing it). Their warm mutual admiration coolly evanesced.

See earlier posts for other reviews of Gordon’s book.

 

 

 

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Norman Douglas: Forgotten Author?

Posted on March 14, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

An article about writer Norman Douglas (noted pedophile) has been inspired by the flurry of activity stirred up by a recent HBO documentary about the posthumous reputation of the singer Michael Jackson. This is by the author of a forthcoming biography of Douglas, Rachel Hope Cleves, and was posted on the website theconversation.com.  It has been reposted by several other publications including the San Francisco Chronicle. It opens with this:

There’s no question that Michael Jackson changed music history. But how will history remember Michael Jackson? […]There are other alleged child abusers who have died and whose works, once considered great, have faded into obscurity, in no small part because it is almost impossible to memorialize them without creating the impression of condoning their behavior. The writer Norman Douglas is a prime example.

Cleves describes the literary debate that raged in the early 1950s after Douglas’s death. This was lead on one side by critic Richard Aldington who condemned Douglas to obscurity and on the other by Graham Greene, who defended Douglas as a writer. Cleves concludes that discussion with this:

In the decades that followed many would-be biographers tried their hand at writing Douglas’ story; time and again they failed. Douglas simply could not be remembered as a great writer in the face of the allegations against him. Only one comprehensive biography, titled “Norman Douglas,” has ever been published about him. It came out in 1976, during a rare moment of sexual openness; even so, the publisher almost nixed the manuscript after 10 years of work by its author, Mark Holloway. Today Douglas is a forgotten writer. When the truth about his sexual relations with children was fully exposed after his death he became an impossible figure to memorialize.

Cleves may be correct that Douglas was forgotten as a person. But his writings could not be said to have been forgotten since his death. Indeed, his major works are still in print, some in both digital and paper editions; South Wind, Siren Land, Old Calabria, Alone, Some Limericks. Even some of his lesser known works are being made available in print on demand editions.

Waugh wrote a 1928 review of one of these lesser works. This was In the Beginning which Waugh reviewed in Vogue, where he described it as a “book to be deeply thankful for.” That book has itself recently been republished (see link). In the same review Waugh described South Wind as having been written with “superb faciilty” and the “only great satirical novel of his generation.” (EAR, pp. 40-41) As evidence of Waugh’s favorable views, Cleves notes in her article that:

When the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” arrives at Oxford after World War I, he brings with him only two novels, “South Wind” and Compton Mackenzie’s “Sinister Street.” […] Graham Greene recalled how his generation “was brought up on South Wind.”

When Douglas died, Waugh wrote to Graham Greene that he “began to reread South Wind and to my horror found it very heavy going. I am very sorry indeed never to have met him.” (Letters, p. 370)

The fact that Douglas has been ignored by biographers may have more to do with the fact that he was an unpleasant or, in the end, uninteresting person. That does not necessarily mean that readers or critics find his works less interesting because of his personal habits. Indeed, Evelyn Waugh’s personal habits leave much to be desired. Speaking for myself, I have always found the Douglas works I read somewhat over-rated, but I read them as background for trips to Southern Italy and for that purpose they were worthwhile.

On the subject of Southern Italy, the Spectator has posted an article about the rising reputation of wines grown around the base of Mount Etna. The article opens with this:

Until recently, my only knowledge of Mount Etna was Evelyn Waugh’s parodic description of it, when he visited in the Twenties:

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

These days Etna tends to be more associated with potential eruptions, given that it is the largest active volcano in Europe, but there is another far more interesting trait of the region
it is Ground Zero for the most exciting new wine in Italy.

The quote comes from Waugh’s travel book Labels (1930, p. 169).

 

 

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A Visit to the Disneyland of Death

Posted on March 13, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

An essay is posted on the website Hazlitt.net describing the visit of writer Larissa Diakiv to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, CA. The website is described as “a home for writers and artists to tell the best stories about the things that matter most to them […] be it art, sound, or text, fiction or non-fiction, humour or criticism […].” Forest Lawn is well known in this parish as Waugh’s Whispering Glades in The Loved One and due notice is given in Diakiv’s essay to Waugh’s writing on the subject as well as that of Aldous Huxley and, in more detail, Jessica Mitford.

Diakiv arrived at her destination, ususually for Los Angeles, by bus. What she describes is the setting more than its details. She accurately evokes the place without satirizing it, as Waugh did. She provides criticism where she finds it appropriate and gives a dispassionate summary of Forest Lawn’s history and antecedents. The title of the essay is “The Disneyland of Death.”

It turns out that she is something of an afficianado of graveyards, mentioning those she has visited in, for example, Guadalajara, Salem, and Montreal. One of the essay’s best passages relates to something not much mentioned by previous commentators such as Waugh–that is, the incongruity of Forest Lawn to its environment:

Glendale is in a chaparral ecosystem. It should be a landscape of coastal sage, drought tolerant yucca with pillars of dead flowers, silvery artemisia, Oak savannas, thickets of heathland, wildflowers. The cycle of the chaparral requires regular forest fires. Some plants need heat, smoke, or changes to the chemical composition of the soil to germinate. Some plants, called fire followers, like Phacelia, need the extra light after a canopy is burnt to grow. If you have seen Phacelia it would be hard to argue it isn’t magical. Iridescent blue whiskers poke out from clusters of bell-shaped flowers on a spiral stem. I have only seen photos. But these plants don’t fit into the nostalgic image of an imagined garden, a hegemonic Eden. California does not have the same climate as Cambridge or Milan. What did [founder Hubert] Eaton know about the ecology of the land he was building on? And where did he get his version of paradise? […]

To make a paradise grow in a semi arid state, massive amounts of water are needed. In 1985 the Los Angeles Times reported that Forest Lawn’s then 125 acres of grass, 10,000 trees and 100,000 shrubs required an estimated 195 million gallons of water a year. The city of Glendale negotiated a deal where the cemetery would use recycled water rather than potable water, promising to supply 200 million gallons per year for 20 years, and help in the construction of a pipeline to deliver the water from a treatment plant to the cemetery. It takes a lot of water to create an oasis in a desert.

Although Disneyland is in her title, she doesn’t mention that, prior to the opening of that theme park, Forest Lawn was the single most popular tourist attraction in Los Angeles.  That is no longer the case, as explained in a recent article in Evelyn Waugh Studies No. 49.2 (Autumn 2018): “Whispering Glades Seventy Years On.”.   Today, it is not even among the top 10. But this is no reason not to go there, and Diakiv’s essay should be read by any one contemplating such a visit. It is well written and also recommended reading for anyone who has been fascinated by Waugh’s descriptions of the place.

 

 

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Roundup: Laura Waugh’s Lent

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the Guardian, William Keegan compares the Brexit chaos to Waugh’s Decline and Fall:

In order to switch off from Brexit in the evenings, your correspondent has taken to re-reading his favourite novels. Yet there is no escape! At the start of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, we find the Oxford University Bollinger Club running riot and disrobing a fellow undergraduate, Paul Pennyfeather, who dashes across the quad stripped naked for the safety of his rooms. His fate is to fall into the hands of the college authorities and be “sent down” for indecent behaviour. Meanwhile, the perpetrators escape unscathed.

Now the Bollinger Club is obviously modelled on the notorious Bullingdon Club, to which David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne once belonged. And I cannot resist drawing the parallel between what the Bollinger Club do to Pennyfeather and what the Bullingdon trio have done to the country.

In the end both Cameron and Johnson got it wrong and were caught out when Brexit was approved by a small majority. The article concludes:

As that doyen of New York Times commentators, Roger Cohen, observes: “‘Fantasy Brexit’ was based on lies, like the imminent invasion of 80 million Turks 
 Now Britain has had a three-year crash course in ‘Reality Brexit.’ This government does not know what it is doing or where it is going. We are told there will be a “transition period”. But as [Bank of England’s governor Mark] Carney said to the Lords economic affairs committee last week: “Transition is knowing where you are headed, not wondering.’’

–Lapsed Roman Catholic Tom Utley writes about Lent in the Daily Mail:

For the remaining 44 days until Easter, Mrs U will let not a drop of alcohol nor a morsel of chocolate pass her lips — except on Sundays, when Christian tradition dating from the 4th century allows her to break her Lenten fast. Not for her any half-measures during Lent, like those adopted by Laura Waugh, second wife of the novelist Evelyn. Her son, the brilliant late journalist Auberon, once wrote that his mother restricted herself to one glass of Cyprus sherry per day in the weeks of fasting and abstinence before Easter. But he added: ‘She used a receptacle which others might have identified as a large flower vase.’ Apparently, she carried it with her from room to room, sipping away all day long.

–In this month’s Oldie there is a book review by Kate Kellaway of Auberon Waugh’s A Scribbler in Soho . She worked for a period with Auberon Waugh at the Literary Review and she relates:

One lunchtime, Bron asked me to ring Anthony Powell to ask him to review a book about cats. Innocent of the feud between the two men and a Powell devotee myself – I was doubtful whether this was a good idea. But I did as I was told and got an earful – what was I doing phoning at lunchtime? And no, he would not like to review a book about cats. I was mortified. Bron was greatly amused.

Thanks to Hugh Duncan for posting this on the Anthony Powell Society discussion page.

–Veteran Latin American reporter Alma Guillermoprieto is interviewed in the Columbia Journalism Review. In this exchange she explains how she got her start in 1978 when the Sandinistas overthrew President Somoza in Nicaragua and she covered the story for the Guardian:

Q. How was it to land in Nicaragua amid an armed conflict as a first-time reporter?

A. By the time I got there, which was a week into the insurrection, there was a lull, and I had a week to learn the ropes. There was a lot of press there, and they took me under their wing. They couldn’t believe that somebody so clueless [laughs] would suddenly show up. So I had a very quick training. A small war is always an excellent place to start becoming a journalist.

Q. How is that so?

A. If you read Scoop [by Evelyn Waugh, in 1938], which is the best novel about journalism ever written, it is just. . .  it is an opportunity for young journalists. Newspapers and the media in general tend to need more reporters, because it is a crisis situation. So even if you are young and inexperienced you can move right in.

–A Canadian book blogger has posted a review of Brideshead Revisited in which he concludes:

Loss and the nostalgia to which it gives rise is the central theme of Brideshead Revisited. And it’s loss on so many levels: a loss of physical and socio-cultural landscapes, a loss of youth, of relationships, of family, hope and of religious faith. It’s also believed that Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is autobiographical on a number of fronts–certainly in terms of religion, the author’s embrace of a rich tapestry of tradition that finds expression in England’s privileged classes and his own relationships during his student years at Oxford and beyond.

–Dave Wood’s column in a recent issue of the River Falls (WI) Journal is devoted to selections from The Writer’s Quotation Book (1980) by James Charlton.  The story concludes with this one:

Apparently the British snob Evelyn Waugh would not have approved of James Patterson and Bill Clinton’s recent successful collaboration because years ago he said, “I never could understand how two men can write a book together; to me that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.”

 

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New French Edition of POMF Reviewed

Posted on March 9, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Paris newspaper Liberation has published a detailed review of the new French edition of Put Out Out More Flags (Hissez le grand pavois; literally “Hoist the great bulwark”). This is by Philippe Garnier who begins by explaining that the new edition is part of the effort of Waugh’s French publisher to make all of the novels available in their Pocket Pavilions  collection:

When Black Mischief (Diablerie) in October and Gilbert Pinfold (2020) appear, the work will be done, a more laudable endeavor than it may seem. Because if Waugh is known in France for some of his works (often not the best, like the Cher Disparu [The Loved One], or even Brideshead, the author’s work is far from mainstream; nor is it appreciated at its true value, that is to say, as the best comic novelist of his century (even more than his master PG Wodehouse), and certainly as the best practitioner of the English language. Who would not be cut off at least one little finger for describing Hitler as “a creature of conifers”?

The review continues at some length to provide examples to French speakers of Waugh’s humor from POMF  and explains the derivation of several of the characters. He also places this novel in the framework of Waugh’s military career in WWII and goes on to give a further biographical sketch of the lengthy term of service that remained after POMF was written in 1941. It explains that, until he was stationed in Yugoslavia with Randolph Churchill, not much happened, although this gave him time to write Brideshead Revisited.

Unfortunately, the reviewer apparently relies on early biographies (probably those by Christopher Sykes and Martin Stannard) for information about Waugh’s military record and

[…] the problem he posed to his successive superiors: by his physical courage bordering on unconsciousness, he was a constant rebuke to his more cautious fellow officers. By his inadmissible conduct towards his subordinates, he had quickly become unemployable everywhere, so unpopular that one of his commanders had  once to post a guard at night to prevent misfortune to Captain Waugh, at the hands of his own men.

The review concludes with a discussion of Waugh’s posting to Yugoslavia:

After Crete, […] there will be mostly permissions. [Same word in French original; probably means leave.] Waugh had become like one of the Connolly children: the commanders were fanning him like scratchy hair. He was able to write Brideshead Revisited, and to become rich, by means of added holidays and brazen privileges. There was only one officer more hated by the army: the dedicatee of this novel. Randolph Churchill was not only drunk, loud and impossible, he was also untouchable. The High Command in Cairo thought it best to send the two undesirables to Yugoslavia as “liaison officers” with Tito and his followers.

The reviewer might have benefitted from consulting the recent book by Donat Gallagher (In the Picture) or the recent biography by Phillip Eade for a more balanced and accurate description of Waugh’s career in the Army. The translation is by Google with a few edits.

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Charles Ryder’s Van Gogh

Posted on March 8, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Laura Freeman writing in The Times previews an upcoming exhibit at the Tate Britain. This is Van Gogh in Britain and relates to that artist’s residence in England between 1873-1876.  He was not yet an artist at that time (this had to wait until the mid-1880s) but collected material (including books) that influenced his later artistic output. The exhibit includes his painting Prisoners Exercising, (after DorĂ©) (1890). According to Freeman:

It is the only fully realised painting he made that depicts London. Though, as [curator Carol] Jacobi observes: “Prisoners was intended as a more general painting about the state of imprisonment.” It was painted at the Saint-Paul asylum from a print of Doré’s Newgate: The Exercise Yard. Even the butterflies, fluttering towards freedom, reappear.

Freeman goes on to explain that the exhibit illustrates how Van Gogh’s greatest contribution to British art was the influence his work exercised over British painters:

Roger Fry established Van Gogh in the minds of British artists and the public. There were 27 Van Goghs in Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition in 1910. One was Van Gogh’s Sunflowers(1888), which fired the imaginations of British artists with hothouse promise. William Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Epstein, Matthew Smith and Frank Brangwyn all painted their own tournesols. This painting formed the tastes of a generation of young men. When Charles Ryder went up to Oxford in 1923 at the beginning of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, it is Van Gogh’s Sunflowers he hangs over the fire.

The exhibit at Tate Britain opens on 27 March and continues through 11 August.

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Waugh’s Ash Wednesday in New Orleans

Posted on March 7, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Blogger Amy Welborn, a free-lance writer of books on religious subjects, posted an interesting article yesterday (Ash Wednesday) about Evelyn Waugh’s trips to America in the 1940s. This is on her weblog “Charlotte was Both.” It begins with a quote from Waugh’s 1949  Life Magazine article about the Catholic Church in America. This consists of a description of Roman Catholic worshippers attending Ash Wednesday services in New Orleans in the wake of the Mardi Gras festival on the preceding days. Here is Ms Welborn’s introduction to the article:

Evelyn Waugh visited the United States a few times. His most extended visit came in 1948, on the dime of Henry Luce’s Life magazine. He traveled through a great deal of the country, giving lectures and meeting with Catholic figures like Merton and Dorothy Day (he had edited The Seven-Storey Mountain for the British market). He wrote an extended essay on the Church in the United States for Life. You can read it here via Google Books. 

There’s much to say about it, but for now, I’ll just post his brief description of what he observed in New Orleans on and around Ash Wednesday.

The Life article entitled “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church” is also collected at EAR, p. 377. Most of the attention to Waugh’s visits to America focuses on the 1947 trip to Los Angeles which resulted in several other Life articles as well as his novel The Loved One. It is therefor much welcome that Ms Welborn has chosen to discuss his largely ignored later visits. But she may have been confused by Waugh’s Catholics in America article into thinking that the Ash Wednesday description referred to events on that day in 1948. In fact, the 1948 visit sponsored by Life took place in November-December of that year. While he did visit New Orleans as well as several other cities on that trip in the course of researching the article for Life, the Ash Wednesday scenes were witnessed in March 1949 on a third visit. This was sponsored not by Life but by various Roman Catholic colleges and universities (including Loyola University in New Orleans) where (as noted in the blog post) Waugh gave lectures. Such confusion is not surprising as Waugh does not provide the details of that 1949 trip in the Life article or elsewhere. Indeed, where, as is the case of New Orleans, he stopped both in 1948 and 1949 tours, he conflates his description of the visits for simplicity. The two trips were back-to-back, with less than 2 months in between, so it is easy to confuse them. More detailed information on these trips, including dates and itineraries, is available in Evelyn Waugh Studies, Nos. 43.3, 44.1 and 44.2 (Winter, Spring and Autumn 2013)

Further confusion arises from another article linked in Ms Welborn’s article. This is from a 1966 issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine and was written by John Osborne who worked for Time-Life in the 1940s. Osborne also encountered Waugh on the 1948 trip at a dinner given by Time-Life in New York and gives an amusing description of that event. But he doesn’t mention the later lecture tour in 1949. This article, which I hadn’t seen before, raises several interesting points that will be considered in a future post.

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Upgrades at Two Waugh Venues

Posted on March 6, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Two of Waugh’s longstanding London-based venues (the Hyde Park Hotel and The Tablet magazine) have announced important upgrades:

–What Waugh knew as the Hyde Park Hotel in Knightsbridge has announced an extensive upgrade that will be fully opened next month. This now has the rather cumbersome name Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel and has posted this announcement:

If walls could talk this iconic hotel would have many stories to tell. The building was commissioned in the late 1880’s, however construction was initially delayed due to fears that its height would cast a shadow over the Serpentine. It finally opened in 1889 as an exclusive block of apartments for affluent bachelors, before opening as a hotel, with its own private Royal Entrance, in 1902. Since then, many honoured guests have passed through the hotel, and for several years after the Second World War it was the headquarters of the SAS. Glamorous parties and dance classes by the venerable Madame Vacani – who taught HRH Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret to dance – have been held in the ballroom. Sir Winston Churchill lived in the hotel for a while and was known to offer room service waiters two cigars in return for the delivery of an early breakfast. Evelyn Waugh was also a regular guest, and characterised some of his fellow guests after his many stays. Many of these momentous past events can be viewed in more detail in the newly created Historical Journey Exhibition on permanent display in the hotel from Monday 15 April 2019.

Waugh began using the hotel as his regular London stopping place after meeting the men who were its chairman (Basil Bennet) and manager (Brian Franks) in the army (Letters, 163-4). Both they and the hotel are frequently mentioned in Waugh’s correspondence, and he even once went so far as asking them if they could help Auberon secure employment in the hotel trade (Letters, 463-4).

–One of Waugh’s regular choices for UK publication of his articles was The Tablet. During Waugh’s days, the paper was edited by his friend from Oxford, Douglas Woodruff. According to Wikipedia, it was once owned by the Archbishop of Westminster who in 1935 sold it to a group of Catholic laymen. A recent announcement by a website designer explains that the magazine’s entire historic archives will now be available to its subscribers in exact copy format:

Available on Web, iOS and Android devices, this new feat of cultural preservation allows a seamless cross-platform browsing experience for institutions and individuals around the world. The advanced search function enables subscribers to search, share and cite every news piece, article and review from the publication. This intuitive interface rejuvenates old material, offering a window to discover the past and reflect upon the similarities and differences it bears to the current age.[…]

CEO Amanda Davison-Young commented: “There is an incredible amount of the Catholic Church’s history preserved within the digital pages of the archive; the invaluable content of 8,750 issues will be indispensable as a historical resource for individuals and institutions around the world.”

Managing Director of Exact Editions, Daryl Rayner, said: “The state-of-the-art platform allows users to easily navigate the archive, whether it’s the latest content or the very first issue from 16 May 1840. The comprehensive search functionalities also allow subscribers to locate specific articles and events of historical significance with ease.”

The Tablet is a Catholic weekly journal that has been published continually since 1840, making it the second-oldest surviving weekly journal in Britain.

 

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