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.

 

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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.

 

 

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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.

 

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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.]

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Compton Mackenzie Reconsidered

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

In the wake of the recent New Statesman essay seeking to revive an interest in JB Priestley, the latest New Criterion has published one seeking to create a renewed interest in another neglected novelist of the same period. This is Compton Mackenzie and the essay is by David Platzer. He opens with an introduction to Mackenzie’s work which will be unfamiliar to many of today’s readers:

Now remembered by many only as the humorist who wrote farces like Whisky Galore (1947), set on a mythical Scottish island, he began his life in London’s West Kensington. In the first phase of Mackenzie’s fame, Henry James praised him as a great hope of the English novel. His second novel, Carnival (1912), the tale of the doomed dancer Jenny Pearl and the dilettante Maurice Avery, made Mackenzie a cult novelist among the sophisticated young. Lady Diana Manners (later Cooper, the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s Mrs. Stitch) took Jenny Pearl’s phrase “there’s nothing wrong with this little girl” as her own, and she and her friends in the set they called the “Corrupt Coterie” loved repeating the cockney Jenny’s “don’t be soppy” and “I must have been potty.”

His most respected novel was probably his next, Sinister Street (1914). This became The Catcher in the Rye of Waugh’s generation. Waugh described Sinister Street as his favorite book in his student years and says we was “steeped” in it at Oxford. Others of his generation, partcularly George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, similarly venerated that book. In his sequels to Sinister Street, however, there was, according to Platzer,

[…] a shift from Mackenzie’s earlier “Edwardian” approach, luscious as a ripe peach, to the sparer, purely comic style that marked his post-war novels. Mackenzie attributed the trimmed-down style to the telegrams he wrote as an intelligence officer, where no unnecessary words were allowed. It was as if Waugh had started his career with Brideshead and followed it with Decline and Fall. […] Reviewers prefer authors they can pigeonhole; Mackenzie eluded them. Almost fifty years after his death, Mackenzie still deserves plaudits in his many seasons and facets. Meanwhile, his books continue to find readers, many of them delighted to encounter an author whose writing can chase clouds away.

In reviewing one of his later and now forgotten novels (Thin Ice) in 1956, Waugh took the occasion to consider his earlier career (EAR, p. 511):

For forty-five years, the full reading life of most of us, there has been an unbroken series of novels by Sir Compton Mackenzie. He has written much else, but it is primarily as a novelist of great versatility, ranging from high romance, through satire to farce, that we honour him. […] Everything he writes sets us an example of elegance and sound workmanship […]

Waugh goes on to praise the new novel (about a homosexual politician) which has disappeared without a critical trace and is unmentioned in the New Criterion article. But I think he would support Platzer’s plea for a revival.

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Roundup

Posted on February 23, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Two posts independently made the same point earlier this week relating to Jewish-American writer Chaim Potok. Potok wrote mostly of the Orthodox Hassidic Jewish community. The first notice appeared on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac:

When he was about 14 years old, Chaim Potok happened to pick up a copy of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, and it changed his life. He said, “I lived more deeply inside the world in that book than I lived inside my own world.” Potok went on to write about boys who were in conflict between religious community and mainstream, secular society in books such as The Chosen (1967) and The Promise (1969).

The second was on a French-language website devoted to Jewish news TribuneJuive.info:

As a boy, Chaim showed gifts for drawing and painting and dreamed of becoming an artist. This did not meet with favor at home. In the orthodox tradition, the arts are regarded with disdain as “narishkeit-yiddish” for “silly things” – as is any hobby that interferes with the study of Torah and Talmud. In addition, the visual arts constitute a violation of the Second Commandment taboo against the production of graven images.

He turned instead to literature. As a teenager, Chaim, like [one of his characters] Danny Saunders, devoured secular books in secret at the public library. The first title he took off the shelf, almost at random, was Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” followed shortly by James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” These two novels of Catholic writers Potok remembered later, would chart the course of his future.

Both notices were posted on the occasion of Potok’s birthday (17 February 1929) but are otherwise unrelated. In a way, the Hassidic community in America may bear a certain resemblance to the interwar Roman Catholic community in Britain. Both were relatively closed to outsiders and would have contained boys who were rebelling between their religion and secular society. The translation of the French article is by Google with a few edits.

–The BBC History Magazine’s website HistoryExtra.com has an article about Henry VI’s de facto sainthood. Although he was a failure as king–losing territory in France and causing the War of the Roses in England–he nevertheless became venerated as a saint after his death:

His cult became so popular that the abbots of Westminster and Chertsey both tried to secure possession of his body. Henry VII planned the great chapel that he built at Westminster as a shrine for his saintly kinsman, who would be reburied there when canonised. However, diplomatic problems with Rome blocked the canonisation. Until the day he died, Henry VIII venerated his great-uncle. In 1528, he asked that he should be canonised. Even after breaking with the papacy and ending pilgrimages to Windsor, he left instructions in his will for the tomb in St George’s Chapel to be made more imposing and for the banner of ‘King Henry the Saint’ to be carried at his funeral.

Recusant Catholics continued to venerate him, Alexander Pope referring to the ‘Martyr-King’ in his poem Windsor Forest. During the 1920s there were attempts to secure his canonisation and he became one of the author Evelyn Waugh’s favourite saints. The 1970s witnessed another, unsuccessful, campaign to have him canonised.

I’m not aware what authority there may be for Henry VI having been one of Waugh’s favorite saints. He is identified as the “St Henry” to whom Waugh refers in a somewhat cryptic letter to Christopher Sykes dated 10 April 1953: “I am sure that St Henry in heaven constantly prays for the rescue of the unhappy little victims of his perverted foundation, and that he is to be thanked for this triumph of his grace”(Letters, p. 399). The “perverted foundation” would probably be Eton College where one of Sykes’ sons may have resumed a recently interrupted education.

—The Times prints a story by veteran journalist Max Hastings reporting from a winter holiday in Malaysia. He has been asked by several of his friends if, given the present state of affairs in Britain, he ever intends to return. He concludes that at his age he has little alternative but thinks that younger Britons should be considering their options:

The words “emigrate” and “work abroad” […] have overwhelmingly positive connotations. “Exile” sounds uglier. It suggests a flight from bad things, rather than an embrace of better ones. Calais, Boulogne and Le Touquet in the 19th century hosted sad colonies of ruined Englishmen and their families, for a time including that of the young Anthony Trollope. Evelyn Waugh was merely the most contemptuous critic of WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood for bolting to America in 1939, to escape the unpleasantness of Hitler. […]  If I were young, however, I would gaze long and hard across the sea, not with thoughts of mere flight from things that seem wrong with our own country but because youth should display boldness, embrace novelty, seize opportunity.

If the British people insist upon pursuing a retreat towards a lost past, a quest for the rainbow’s end, I can imagine my grandchildren instead reaching out towards a sustainable future elsewhere. […] I hope that, a decade or two hence, our dear old country will still offer promise to a new generation. If not, then go west, young man — or east, or south. Do not risk stagnation in yesterday’s world.

Waugh’s condemnation of Auden, et al. for scarpering from Britain to America in the face of an expected German invasion was written in Put Out More Flags (1942) where he depicted them as Parsnip and Pimpernell. Waugh’s French publisher has just announced a new edition of that book: Hissez le grand pavois. Waugh was writing in that novel about what came to be called the “phoney war”. Maybe these early days of 2019 will come to be called the “phoney Brexit”, or not, as the case may be.

–A recent article in the Irish Times explains why country houses play a lesser role in Irish novels than they do in those with English settings:

The Big House has always been a popular theme in fiction. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, EM Forster’s Howards End and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca may not be at the top of everybody’s reading lists but the place these books hold in popular culture is undeniable. The place of the Big House in Ireland’s cultural psyche, and in our fiction, is a thornier issue. This is perhaps due to their use as a representation of more than simply the seats of the ruling classes but also as mirror-images of the fall from power of Anglo-Irish society.

Built by the ruling Protestant ascendancy classes who came to power after the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland, many of these houses were built in the first half of the 18th century. […] A combination of events brought an end to the indulgent lifestyles of the Anglo-Irish that played out in the houses. Successive land acts enabled Irish Catholics to purchase land. Many landlords had driven themselves into significant debt, having spent vast amounts of money upgrading and maintaining their houses. Without the income from vast swathes of land, and the labour of their former Catholic tenants to support their extravagance, the landed classes and their houses began to fall into decline. Added into the mix were the large number of houses that were burned or bombed during the Irish revolutionary period. By the mid-1920s many of the houses that had survived the War of Independence and the Civil War were sold or simply abandoned. Given their turbulent history and their place as symbols of our colonial past, it’s no surprise that Big Houses have not been celebrated in Irish fiction as they have in English.

Exceptions are novels by Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Bowen, and more recently the author of the article Antoinette Tyrrell has written one entitled Home to Cavendish.

 

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Winner Announced of 2018 John H. Wilson Jr. Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest

Posted on February 23, 2019 by Antony F. P. Vickery

The Evelyn Waugh Society is pleased to announce the winner of the fourteenth (2018) annual John H. Wilson Jr. Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest. Congratulations to Jacqueline Condon, whose essay “The Mystery of Grace: Brideshead Revisited as a Chestertonian Detective Story” was judged to be the best of those submitted. Ms. Condon is a senior at the University of Dallas majoring in English.

Ms. Condon’s winning submission will be printed in the next issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies, and also posted here.

The journal is already accepting entries for the 2019 Undergraduate Essay Contest.

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TLS: “When the Script Hits the Fan”

Posted on February 22, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

In this week’s “Freelance” column of the TLS, novelist/critic DJ Taylor takes up the issue of fan letters to writers. He starts by characterizing those he himself has received, extending from the extravagant praiser to the anti-fan via the mildly admonitory and quietly knowing. Sometimes the extravagant variety results in a romantic relationship, but not in Taylor’s case. He spends a good deal of time mining the fan mail of George Orwell (who avoided personal contacts) and William Makepeace Thackeray, both of whom have been the subjects of biographies by Taylor, as well as others such as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin.

He concludes the article with this analysis of the attitudes toward their fans of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh (each a fan of, and writer of fan letters to, the other):

Every so often comes evidence of an author who has thought seriously enough about the compact between writer and fan to approach the business structurally, make category distinctions and ponder the right (or wrong) kind of response. The three volumes of Journals compiled in old age by Anthony Powell contain occasional references to the “sorting” of fan mail, in which Powell notes the locations from which it is sent, casts an austere eye over the contents (top marks awarded to people who write in with genealogical questions) and chides the “dotty” but persistent admirer who follows up his letters with small-hours phone calls and is finally told by Powell’s wife, Lady Violet, that he ought to see a psychiatrist.

But Powell, it turns out, is a mere amateur compared to his friend Evelyn Waugh, who devotes an entire letter to Nancy Mitford from July 1952 to the question of fan mail and how to cope with it. Many of Waugh’s categories, though pejoratively framed, will be instantly recognizable to the modern writer: “Humble expressions of admiration . . . . Impudent criticism . . . . Bores who wish to tell me about themselves”. As for dealing with them, Waugh’s counsel is invariably hard-line: “Manuscript sent for advice. Return without comment”. In the case of “very impudent” letters from married women, “I write to the husband warning him that his wife is attempting to enter into correspondence with strange men”. At the other end of the scale, admiring nuns could be sure of a picture postcard of the author.

Meanwhile, Waugh informed Nancy Mitford, wealthy Americans deserved a polite letter back. “They are capable of buying 100 copies for Christmas presents.”

Taylor’s latest novel is about the popular music business, where fans also play an important role. This is Rock and Roll is Life, and fans are present on the margins of the book, particularly in the road trip chapters, although not much letter writing is involved.

While Taylor’s column doesn’t mention it, fans often outlive their idols in both literature and music. Their posthumous adulatory activities find an outlet, extending well beyond mere letter writing, in well-organized fan clubs and literary societies. Indeed, in some cases–e.g., Jane Austen–a literary society can take on many of the trappings of pop music fan clubs.

 

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Some Waugh-Themed Entertainments

Posted on February 21, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Merton College, Oxford and the Lennox Berkeley Society have announced an afternoon program of lecture and music: “To celebrate Lennox Berkeley’s four years as an undergraduate at Merton (1922–6), and to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death.” This will take place on Saturday, 2 March beginning at 130pm at Merton College. Among the items on the schedule is a talk by Selina Hastings:

Biographer of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and W Somerset Maugham, Hastings will talk about Lennox Berkeley and his Oxford contemporaries during the Brideshead years.

The talk will be followed by tea service and an organ recital of Berkeley’s music as well as Choral Evensong in the Merton College Chapel. The topic of greatest interest to our readers would be a discussion of what music Berkeley played or perhaps even composed for one of his earliest public performances in Oxford. This was the music he provided to accompany the premiere of the Evelyn Waugh-Terence Greenidge film The Scarlet Woman. This took place at the Oxford University Dramatic Society which sponsored the performance in December 1925. Berkeley was a contemporary of Waugh and Greenidge at Oxford, graduating in 1926 with a Fourth Class degree in Modern Languages.

Admission is free. Details are available here.

–And here’s a performance that slipped beneath the EWS News radar. On 6 October 2017 a play entitled Brideshead Obliterated was performed at an Off-Off-Broadway venue called Dixon Place. This is located on New York’s Lower East Side and is described as “An artistic incubator since 1986, a Bessie and Obie Award-winning non-profit institution committed to supporting the creative process by presenting original works of theater, dance, music, puppetry, circus arts, literature & visual art at all stages of development.”

The production was described  on the venue’s website:

A young artist becomes romantically entangled with a family of disgraced English aristocrats, and his life is never the same. Part literary deconstruction, part orgiastic karaoke party, this reimagining of the 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited interrogates assimilation, desire, and the longing to go home.

The script was by Elise LeBreton (“on the literary staff of Roundabout Theatre Company, a former Kennedy Center Dramaturgy Fellow, and a member of The Williams Project. Elise holds a BS in Theatre from University of Evansville and an MFA in Acting from Brown/Trinity Rep.”) The production was directed by Dan Rogers (” a 2015 Drama League Directing Fellow and holder of an MFA in Directing from Brown/Trinity.”)

Here’s a link to a short trailer posted on Vimeo.com. A search on the internet uncovered no reviews of this one-night performance. Anyone reading this who may have attended or participated in the performance is invited to comment as provided below.

 

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Crut(t)well Redux

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren continues his project of including on his website essays about Waugh’s close associates. In this latest entry he traces Waugh’s relationship with his history tutor and Dean of his college C R M F Cruttwell. The first half of the essay (from Oxford to 1934) is fairly familiar although this may be the first time Waugh’s satirical references to Cruttwell  in his novels and stories have been systematically gathered.

In 1935, Waugh changed the spelling and raised the volume. McLaren thinks this may have been in response Cruttwell’s apparent rise in the world, succeeding to the Prinicipalship of Hertford College and publishing a major history of WW1. McLaren gives pride of place to Waugh’s short story, published in 1935 as “Mr Crutwell’s Little Outing”. The reproduction of the drawings illustrating the UK publication of the story in Nash’s magazine are alone worth the price of admission to McLaren’s essay. One often forgets the contribution made to storytelling by these illustrations in the golden age of magazines, and they are seldom reproduced or mentioned in collected editions. As McLaren notes, the title of this story morphed into “Mr Loveday’s Little Outing” in future publications.

Finally, McLaren proceeds to his real contribution to Waugh studies in the final pages of this essay as Cruttwell continues to churn out WW1 scholarship and then suffers a decline in health which culminates in his retirement from the college and death in a Bath nursing home in 1941. He also mentions a brief study of Wellington I have not seen mentioned before. McLaren makes Cruttwell’s death seem a bit less sad than it probably was by adding his own contribution to the sickbed visitors as he did in the case of his recent George Orwell essay. I recommend the whole essay as another fine contribution to Waugh scholarship but however much of it you decide to read, do not skip over the second half (beginning with Part Six) most of which is new material.

In the Oxford section of the essay, McLaren poses the question: “I wonder when it was that Cruttwell took away Waugh’s History scholarship. Could it have been at the end of the second year?” The question may be rhetorical but it is answered in Barbara Cooke’s recent book Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford. She quotes the letter from Cruttwell to Waugh after his final exam resulted in a Third Class grade, announcing that his Scholarship would lapse next term. This was probably more a matter of normal practice rather than discretion. Indeed, Dr Cooke notes that Waugh, in the circumstances, actually owed Cruttwell a debt of gratitude: “For reasons best known to himself, Cruttwell refrained from sending Waugh down before he reached those disappointing final Schools. Perhaps he hoped that, against all evidence to the contrary, Waugh would realize his potential. If so, he was right; but he would live to regret it.” (Id., p. 102).

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