Roundup: Fleabag and Brexit

Posted on March 30, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Last Orders at Mrs Roberts’

Posted on March 27, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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Literary Chagford

Posted on March 26, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Martin Green Reconsidered

Posted on March 24, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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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 Brontë, 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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