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.

 

 

Share
Posted in The Loved One | Tagged , , | Comments Off on A Visit to the Disneyland of Death

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.”

 

Share
Posted in Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Decline and Fall, Scoop, Waugh Family | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Laura Waugh’s Lent

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.

Share
Posted in Newspapers, Put Out More Flags, World War II | Tagged , | Comments Off on New French Edition of POMF Reviewed

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.

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Brideshead Revisited, Events, London, Newspapers | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Charles Ryder’s Van Gogh

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.

Share
Posted in Catholicism, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Lectures | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Waugh’s Ash Wednesday in New Orleans

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.

 

Share
Posted in Evelyn Waugh, Letters, London, Newspapers | Tagged , | Comments Off on Upgrades at Two Waugh Venues

Early March Roundup

Posted on March 3, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Laura Freeman writing in the Daily Telegraph (27 February) surveys children’s books and discovers that one of her favorites has been rated as having a “really high difficulty level.” This is Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men series and she sees the difficulty level as a positive. According to Freeman, using the Mr Greedy book as an example:

The genius of the Hargreaves books is their sense of anarchic, irreverent glee. A young reader may stumble over “enormous gigantic colossal sausages”, but they’ll want to read on to find out just how Mr Greedy by name, Greedy by nature plans to tackle this delicious foody feast.

Hargreaves is never predictable. The moral of Mr Greedy isn’t “eat less”, it’s “beware of giants”. If you are weaned on Mr Men, you’ll grow up to love Saki, Evelyn Waugh and Edith Wharton. For who is Paul Pennyfeather if not Mr Muddle? And who Undine Spragg if not Little Miss Trouble?

The books play on our soft spot for stereotypes. Mr Mean is the colleague who never stands his round. Mr Strong is the gym-bro bore. We find Little Miss Shy peering at the bookcase at parties, and Mr Quiet eating nibbles on his own in the kitchen.

[…] What makes Hargreaves’s characters so enduringly popular – more than 100 million copies sold since Mr Tickle was published in 1971 – is that they unashamedly revel in their own bad habits. So what if you’re stubborn, vain, scary, dotty or a bit of a neat freak? That’s all right, chorus the Little Misses, you’re not the only one.

–The Oxford Times has reviewed the recent collection of Auberon Waugh’s writings called A Scribbler in Soho. The Times’ reviewer Christopher Gray makes the same point as several other reviewers that, upon reflection, Auberon’s best work was in his diaries written for Private Eye:

Witty as these monthly sermons [in the Scribbler collection] are, they are nothing in comparison with the hilarious, almost lunatic, style he brought to writing his diary in Private Eye between 1972 and 1985. He thought this his best work, and most readers would agree.[…]

When Margaret Thatcher became Tory leader in 1975, he opined: “I blame Denis Thatcher . . . for not keeping his wife under control. Anybody else whose wife [had ambitions to become prime minister] would shut her in her bedroom on bread and milk for a few days.”

Gray then proves his point by going up to his attic and searching out his collection of Private Eyes stored in plastic bags. The diaries from 1972-1985 were previously collected in two volumes in the UK that are currently selling at inflated prices (ÂŁ50-90) in the secondhand book market. It may be time for a new edition.

–The 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited has featured in several stories this week:

Literary Hub has named it the number one TV adaptation of a novel in a list of 50:

Controversial when it first aired (too much homoeroticism!), this sumptuous, dreamy 11-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful novel seems tame now, but no less wonderful: the best possible version of the period drama miniseries. More importantly, it’s faithful to the book but also creates and maintains its own lush magic, which makes it the ideal literary adaptation. And honestly, speaking of magic, it doesn’t get much better than young Jeremy Irons. “Perhaps no other television program or film has captured the experience of a place over time with such lyricism and sophistication,” scholar Mark Broughton told The New York Times. “This lyricism is, however, tempered with a sense that the beauty fetishized by the protagonist, Charles Ryder, is a facade. The historical, cultural and personal forces that wear away at Ryder are unveiled at the same time as his self-deception becomes apparent.”

Gay Star News, an online LGBT entertainment journal, has noted that the Granada/ITV adaptation will be among the initial offerings of the new BritBox TV streaming service soon to be available in the UK in a BBC-ITV joint venture. The service is already on offer in the USA and a full range of the ITV Brideshead series is available to American viewers.

Eastern Eye, the weekly British newspaper targeting the UK’s Asian market, has an article citing the diversity contributed to the recent Oscar awards by Olivia Coleman’s Indian ancestry and notes that she is the first of many in this category. Among others mentioned is Diana Quick who made her name playing Julia Flyte in the Granada adaptation. She had an Anglo-Indian grandfather. The Indian connection was hushed up by her family, however, until she  revealed it in her 2009 autobiography A Tug on the Thread.

–Novelist and critic Alan Massie reviews Tessa Hadley’s new novel (Late in the Day) in The Scotsman and notes a connection with Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. He describes Hadley’s book as a “Hampstead novel” and explains:

The characters do indeed live in or around that borough in North London, and they are comfortably off, engaged in the arts, occupied with personal relationships, while their marriages are more fragile than may at first seem likely. Well, all one can say is that such people are just as suitable subjects for fiction as anyone from a more edgy background. Reading this novel recalled two observations about the subject matter of fiction. First,way back in 1936, someone asked the novelist Rose Macaulay if she had read Evelyn Waugh’s new novel, A Handful of Dust. She replied that she hadn’t, remarking “adultery in Mayfair – not a very interesting subject.” Almost immediately she corrected herself: “that was a silly thing to say. The interest of a subject depends entirely on how it is treated.” Second, someone once told Kingsley Amis that the novelist Elizabeth Taylor, whose work Amis had been praising, wasn’t “important.” Kingsley replied: “Importance isn’t important. Good writing is important.”

–Finally, the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project is entertaining applications for a creative writing fellowship at Oxford:

The David Bradshaw Creative Writing Residency, Oxford, will give a writer the opportunity to be based in the city that inspired Evelyn Waugh, and to create a piece of writing evoked by or in response to that city, as experienced in 2019. The resident writer will develop relationships with the local Oxford community through the delivery of a series of creative writing workshops which will allow the writer to share and develop insights into a variety of experiences of the city.

Details are available here.

 

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Adaptations, Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Complete Works, Decline and Fall, Diaries, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Early March Roundup

Evelyn Waugh, Walter Gropius and Prof Otto Silenus

Posted on February 28, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Fiona MacCarthy, biographer and art historian, has written a biography of architect Walter Gropius. At least two reviewers have noted his contribution to the character of Prof Otto Silenus in Waugh’s debut novel Decline and Fall. Novelist Philip Hensher, writing in The Spectator, offers these comments:

The most important episode in his career, rightly given prominence in MacCarthy’s title, was his founding of the Bauhaus in 1919, unifying two Weimar institutions. In its short 14-year history, the school managed to draw an extraordinary range of aesthetic approaches into a unified project. There was a place in it, at different times, for mystics, poetic fantasists, hard Marxist ideologues, industrial fetishists and dedicated William Morris-type craftsmen. Gropius somehow kept it together, despite its incompatibilities, and in the face of bitter hostility from politicians and the public. After four years it had to move from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius created the single most persuasive argument for the Bauhaus idea. The school and the idyllic line of masters’ houses in a pine grove must be visited: they embody a compelling vision of a life where work, communal existence, private spaces, creativity and natural beauty can exist harmoniously and concisely.

Gropius left the Bauhaus after a reorganization in 1928 and moved to England before settling in America. In England, according to Hensher, “he formed connections with advanced opinion, including the founders of Dartington in Devon and the Isokon project of communal living in Belsize Park, and built a couple of important things.” Hensher goes on to describe how Waugh constructed a character out of Gropius, overcoming difficulties which defeated Hensher’s own attempts to do so in a recent novel inspired by the Bauhaus movement:

…Gropius, despite all MacCarthy’s care, remains an untextured sort of personality. When I wrote a novel about the Bauhaus, The Emperor Waltz, I could do nothing at all with him, and in the end left him out entirely. Most of the expressions of enthusiasm by friends for Gropius in person fall back on his undoubted greatness as an architect. His conduct in his romantic affairs was brisk and time-saving […]

The chilly rationality of this approach to romance makes you think that Evelyn Waugh got his caricature of Gropius as Professor Silenus in Decline and Fall exactly right. When Paul Pennyfeather asks him whether he doesn’t think Mrs Beste-Chetwynde the most wonderful woman in the world, the professor replies:

“If you compare her with other women of her age you will see that the particulars in which she differs from them are infinitesimal compared with the points of similarity. A few millimetres here and a few millimetres there, such variations are inevitable in the human reproductive system.”

Waugh also got right the fact that Gropius was clearly very attractive to women, for reasons beyond the excavations of any biographer.

Hensher’s 2014 novel on the Bauhaus movement (linked above) failed to receive the attention it deserved. It was never published in the US. It can only be hoped that interest inspired by the latest biography will rectify this.

The other review mentioning the Waugh connection is by Prof John Carey and appeared in this week’s Sunday Times:

Gropius, who had been harassed by the Gestapo, sought refuge in England, but complained that it was an inartistic country, with unsalted vegetables, bony women and freezing draughts. Not that he was well placed to judge, since he spoke no English and met no ordinary English people. Admirers lodged him in the Lawn Road Flats, a modernist haven for wealthy intellectuals in Belsize Park. His dislike of the English was reciprocated. Evelyn Waugh caricatured him as Professor Silenus in Decline and Fall, and Osbert Lancaster dismissed his beliefs as “Bauhaus balls”. So Gropius left for America and built a house in the Massachusetts countryside where he and Ise spent the war years.

The author of the book, Fiona MacCarthy, writing about it in the Guardian, offers this comment, which apparently reflects the book’s contents:

Another of the myths I’ve needed to demolish is that Gropius was humourlessly Germanic in his functionalist views. This grim view emanates from Evelyn Waugh’s satiric Professor Otto Friedrich Silenus in Decline and Fall (1928), the architect brought in to design for the fashionable Mrs Beste-Chetwynde “something clean and square”. For many English readers Silenus personified Gropius. This view of Gropius was patently unfair – he was someone who loved the unpredictable: Gropius is never quite what you expect.

As portrayed brilliantly by actor Anatole Taubman in the BBC’s recent adaptation of Waugh’s novel, Otto was one on the most memorable characters in that production. Based on the descriptions of Gropius in these articles, he (like Waugh) probably got Otto just about right, albeit (according to MacCarthy) perhaps a bit overstated.

UPDATE (1 March 2019): Reference to Fiona MacCarthy’s article in the Guardian was added.

 

 

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Biographies, Decline and Fall, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Evelyn Waugh, Walter Gropius and Prof Otto Silenus

Waugh in Kenya

Posted on February 27, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A French language weblog is in the process of posting a longer article entitled “The Happy Valley: Des Blancs au Kenya [Whites in Kenya]”. This contains, in part 2, a brief chapter on Evelyn Waugh’s contribution to the subject. The blogger, posting as “Le Comte Lanza” and referring to Waugh’s Remote People (1931), translated into French as Hiver africain [“African Winter”], writes that Waugh:

[…] is very little interested in blacks, but seems to have been seduced by the white community, at least some of whom belong to a particular social group, which he describes as: “a community of English squires established on the Equator”.

On several occasions, he puts it this way: he arrives in the middle of a meeting or a horse race and immediately the people, who do not know him, integrate him into their group; he joins with them in having a good time (we’re downing a lot of alcohol – which was Waugh’s weakness); at the end, someone says: do not believe that it always happens like that in Kenya, it is exceptional …

And, the last time Evelyn Waugh describes this scenario, he gets ahead of himself: I know what you are going to tell me, that it’s exceptional and that I do not have to believe that it always happens like that in Kenya! And (of course) his interlocutor, hilarious, replied: But on the contrary, it always happens like that in Kenya!

According to Waugh, the whites of Kenya spent their time at parties where there was nothing to displease him. As he wrote at a time when it was still fashionable not to make certain allusions in “mainstream” books, let alone give specific details, Evelyn Waugh refrained from talking about what was without doubt the main feature of the way of life of at least some of the white owners he had met, a free sex life, free of the “prejudice” that ran elsewhere. However, he seems to have been aware of this characteristic.

Nearly thirty years later, Waugh returned to Kenya for a brief stopover in 1960, shortly before independence, and notes that the gap had widened further between colonial administrators and settlers […]: the former wanting to rule the country like a Montessori school and the latter, […] like a league of feudal domains (A Tourist in Africa).

This was published in 1960 and was Waugh’s last travel book; it was apparently never translated into French (although a Spanish language edition in 1985 is recorded in WorldCat). The translation of the article is by Google with minor edits.

 

Share
Posted in A Tourist in Africa, Remote People | Tagged , | Comments Off on Waugh in Kenya

Brideshead Theme in Syfy TV Series

Posted on February 25, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The internet newspaper Vox.com has posted an article about a long-running TV series on the Syfy Channel. This is based on the fantasy novels of Lev Grossman called The Magicians Trilogy and is now in its fourth season on Syfy. The Vox article identifies a theme in the series which dates back to Brideshead Revisited. It was also confirmed by Grossman in an interview that predated the TV series:

This week on Syfy’s The Magicians, a long-established subtext, a subtext that has arguably been building since 1945, finally became text. I am talking, of course, about Quentin Coldwater declaring his love for Eliot Waugh.

The Magicians has only been airing since 2015, but Quentin/Eliot is a ship with a long legacy. Syfy’s TV show is based on a series of novels by Lev Grossman, and almost every time Grossman talks about his books, he talks about Brideshead Revisited, the barely subtextually queer novel by Evelyn Waugh. “I rely on most of my readers to never have read Brideshead Revisited, so they cannot see how much I am stealing from it,” Grossman told the A.V. Club in 2011. [See below.]

Grossman knows that Brideshead Revisited is a love story. He named it one of the most romantic books of all time in 2007, swooning over its “dream of love — of both the heterosexual and, more subtly, homosexual varieties — that lasts decades.” In Brideshead Revisited, protagonist Charles Ryder never quite says out loud that he’s in love with his best friend Sebastian Flyte, but the romance between the two is lingering just beneath the surface of the text. It’s not hard to spot. It’s veiled just enough to get by in 1945.

The first Magicians book came out in 2009, but the relationship in Grossman’s books that most clearly echoes Brideshead Revisited, the friendship between mostly straight protagonist Quentin Coldwater and the queer and tellingly named Eliot Waugh, follows Evelyn Waugh’s lead in keeping any potential romantic angles mostly subtextual. Only occasionally does the possibility of sex or romance between Quentin and Eliot emerge into text in The Magicians novels, and when it does, it is nearly always inflected with deep self-loathing.

This week, The Magicians TV show finally made the subtext text. It explicitly signposted Quentin and Eliot’s story as one of romantic love, one where they would kiss and express their love for each other and it wouldn’t be a weird self-destructive one-off. It made the slash canon.

In Grossman’s 2011 interview, excerpted in the Vox article, he explained in greater detail his debt to CS Lewis’s Narnia books as well as to Waugh and others:

LG: […] So for me, massively influential are obviously James Joyce, another reinterpreter of Homer, and Virginia Woolf. My prose comes more from the Americans, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, rather obviously. The other influence is Evelyn Waugh. I don’t even know if Waugh is a modernist. He was writing at the time, but in a different mode. Brideshead Revisted is always super, super present in my work. I rely on most of my readers to never have read Brideshead Revisited, so they cannot see how much I am stealing from it. But I do urge people to go out and read it. It’s a hugely important source text for the 20th century, and is also an incredibly fun novel to read.

AVC: What about that novel speaks to you?

LG: It’s another one of these books that looks at modernity, and what we have lost by becoming modern with this immensely profound sadness. It’s about this guy, and World War II, the death of the English country-house lifestyle and the English countryside, on which so much fantasy is based. The passing away of that, and what do you find to replace it with?

I feel that’s one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We’re still asking those questions in an urgent way. I think that focus is something I share with Waugh. Also, Waugh is pretty funny. So I’m always trying to bite his style, because he’s just so entertaining.

Season 4 of the series is currently available in the USA on Syfy.com. In the UK the first three seasons are available on Netflix.

A reference to the Brideshead scene in which Rex Mottram and Charles Ryder dine in a Parisian restaurant is used to open an article in the Daily Telegraph celebrating new attitudes to wine pairings:

“I remember the dinner well – soup of oseille, a sole… a caneton Ă  la presse, a lemon soufflĂ©… And for wine, a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck,  Clos de Beze of 1904”. Thus Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, bracing himself for dinner with the brash Canadian businessman, Rex Mottram. The pages of Evelyn Waugh’s novel are saturated in alcohol.

The article by Jane Shilling is entitled “Finally, the world is revolting against pompous food and wine pairings.”

The Lancashire Telegraph also mentions Brideshead in connection with an upcoming BBC Antiques Roadshow episode. This will be filmed at Lytham Hall in Lancashire on 11 June 2019 and presented by Fiona Bruce. As explained in the article:

Lytham Hall is an 18th-century Georgian country house with a fascinating history. Once owned by the ‘colourful’ Clifton family for over four centuries, whose antics inspired author Evelyn Waugh to write Brideshead Revisited. [See previous post.]

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Television Programs | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Brideshead Theme in Syfy TV Series