Oxford College Announces Waugh Thesis

Posted on January 27, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Linacre College, Oxford has announced a DPhil thesis by one of its students. The title is “Evelyn Waugh: Travel Writing and Politics” and its author is Roger Irwin, a postgraduate student. The college is a postwar foundation, and its students are all postgraduates working on advanced degrees. It is not clear from the announcement whether the thesis is at the beginning or end of its gestation, but it is probably the latter. Roger Irwin previously described his research in a 2016 posting on the Linacre College website in which the earlier stages of the project are described:

Linacre student, Roger Irwin, has just returned from a Leeds Hoban Huntington Exchange Fellowship. Researching Evelyn Waugh’s letters, journals and manuscripts held at the Huntington Library, California, Roger accessed many primary resources for his DPhil thesis on the politics of Waugh’s writing and, in particular, on his war novels and travel writing. […] Roger recommends the exchange: “As well housing great literary collections, the Huntington is an excellent place to think and work. I loved its gardens, museums and galleries and it has a lively intellectual community where I enjoyed chatting to fellow researchers at lunch every day. I was also fortunate enough to spare some time at the end of my stay to read the autograph manuscript of Decline and Fall (1928), which is Waugh’s first (and funniest) novel.”

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Roundup: Whigs, Scribblers, Converts and Teddy Bears

Posted on January 26, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–In a recent Wall Street Journal there is a review of a new book by Jeremy Black  entitled Charting the Past. This is a consideration of English history as described by historians of the 18th Century. It begins with this quote from Evelyn Waugh:

In Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust (1934), Lady Brenda Last remarks of her husband’s beloved ancestral home Hetton Abbey” “I detest it…at least I don’t mean that really but I do wish sometimes that it wasn’t all, every bit of it, so appallingly ugly.” Her husband, Tony Last, will do anything to keep up the old ways. Though lacking any semblance of religious feeling, he dutifully attends the village church every Sunday and sits in the pine pew that his great grandfather installed there generations ago. While Tony is fussing over his neo-Gothic pile, Brenda takes a flat in London “with limitless hot water and every transatlantic refinement.”

The reviewer (Benjamin Riley) explains that these two positions represent the “opposite strains” of the approach taken by the English to their history. Tony’s, a Tory view, looking backward, and Brenda’s the Whig version, forward looking.

–There are more reviews of the recent book of the collected writings of Auberon Waugh: A Scribbler in Soho. These are by Lewis Jones in last week’s Sunday Telegraph and William Cook in The Spectator. Both are pleased to see more of Auberon’s writings reproduced but both have reservations about Naim Attallah’s narrative. Jones writes:

This is an affectionate and admiring book, but an odd one. Attallah sets the Soho scene with generous excerpts from Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia in London (1907). […] There is a certain quaint and dusty charm to this, and even echoes of more recent times, but scant immediate relevance. Moving rapidly onwards to the Soho of the Fifties, with its dives and drinking clubs, Attallah recalls his stint as a bouncer in a nightclub off Charing Cross Road, and the occasion of his hospitalisation by a drunken Scotsman. And he gives a somewhat incoherent account of Waugh’s early career on Private Eye and The Spectator. […]

Attallah devotes 24 pages to a selection of the Private Eye Diaries, which is not nearly enough, and 59 to various deservedly forgotten libel cases (including, bizarrely, one between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Spain), which is far too many. There are warm recollections of the old Academy Club, a relaxed establishment with some eccentric rules, among them that “shoes must be worn”, and that members who have “the misfortune of being sent to prison may take up the unused part of their membership upon release”.

Cook, who also edited a collection of Auberon’s writing that appeared as Kiss Me, Chudleigh (2010), writes:

Like a eulogy at a funeral, Attallah’s adulation may be touching, but it leaves the riddle of Waugh’s split personality (a demon on the page and an angel off it) tantalisingly unresolved. Attallah makes some telling points about Waugh’s ‘radical fury’, but the deepest insights in the book come from other people, most notably Kathy O’Shaughnessy, Waugh’s sometime deputy editor at Literary Review. […] No matter. It would be very difficult to produce a bad or boring book about Auberon Waugh — and although Attallah sometimes threatens to have a jolly good go, Waugh rides to the rescue whenever the paean becomes too fulsome. Waugh was incredibly prolific (you could compile several books like this one and still not scratch the surface) and among these old favourites are many entertaining articles I’ve never seen before.

–Joseph Pearce, Roman Catholic literary critic and editor of the St Austin Review has an interesting article posted on the FaithandCulture.com website. This considers the religious conversions of Evelyn Waugh and T S Eliot:

What was most shocking to [Virginia] Woolf and her ilk was that Eliot and Waugh were “modern”. They were doing innovative and exciting things with poetry and fiction. They were the heralds of the new dawn of modernity. How could the most exciting and cutting-edge literary talent find its home in the Church? The fact is that Eliot and Waugh had experienced the secular fundamentalist “future” as a wasteland of barren emptiness. In the midst of this vacuity they had sought to fill modernity’s vacuum with traditional Christianity seeing it as “the essential and formative constituent of western culture”. This might have led to their being considered “dead” to the suicidal nihilism of Woolf and her fellow Bloomsburys, but it breathed astonishing literary life into their post-conversion work. Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is arguably the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and Eliot’s Four Quartets is indubitably the century’s finest poem.

–Finally, the teddy bear named Aloysius who appears in Brideshead Revisited is mentioned in two recent articles. The Guardian has a story in which it is noted that the:

…current vogue for animal-related fashion isn’t all down to Instagram and influencers. Sebastian Flyte’s teddy bear Aloysius, featured in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, suggests animal accessories were a thing decades ago. Aloysius, in turn, was based on a real life It-bear, Archibald Ormsby-Gore, owned by Waugh’s poet friend, John Betjeman. Betjeman died holding Archie – a classic teddy in smart waistcoat – in 1984. Fast-forward 35 years and animal accessories are a thing again – although admittedly in less highbrow company.

The Norwich Evening News considers the reasons children are so comforted by soft toys and security blankets and concludes with this:

Some famous teddy bears and blankets:

In Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, Linus has a “security and happiness blanket.”

Winnie the Pooh was the teddy bear owned by AA Milne’s son Christopher.

Aloysius accompanied Lord Sebastian Flyte to Oxford in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited – and is said to have been modelled on John Betjeman’s beloved bear Archibald Ormsby-Gore.

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Russell Baker 1925-2019

Posted on January 23, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Russell Baker, one of America’s leading journalists in the last half of the 20th Century, has died at the age of 93. He was best known as a reporter and columnist for the New York Times. But he got his start in journalism on the Baltimore Sun as a police reporter beginning the late 1940s. In what may have been his first assignment as a reporter on non-criminal matters, he was sent to interview Evelyn Waugh during Waugh’s stop in Baltimore on his 1949 tour where he lectured at Loyola College of Maryland. Baker wrote about this experience in his 1989 memoir The Good Times.

Waugh was interviewed by both the morning and evening Sun papers, which had separate editorial and news staffs in the 1940s. The interviews were conducted in the the house of Charles Reeves, a local lawyer and benefactor of Loyola College, who hosted Waugh and his wife on their Baltimore visit. The Baltimore Sun (the morning paper) was represented by Baker, who grew up in blue-collar south Baltimore. As explained in his memoir, Baker had been assigned on short notice with no opportunity to research Waugh’s background. He had never read anything by Waugh, and the assignment was not explained to him. He had no time to change clothes to suit the refined tastes of north Baltimore. When he arrived, the reporter for the rival Evening Sun was already there.

Baker noticed that Waugh was dressed in the tweedy north Baltimore style, only more so–as though in parody. He also 

looked like an extremely disagreeable man. The wide pink face did not quite scowl at me, but it was a face from which the smile seemed to have faded years ago. He had the eyes of an angry bird. As I introduced myself, I thought I saw pure hostility in those eyes, but this may have been my fevered imagination at work. Hostile or not, this was clearly a man not likely to be charmed by bumbling damn-fool questions from boy reporters. (The Good Times) 

Baker was further spooked by the Evening Sun reporter, James Bready, a brilliant and experienced feature writer. 

Searching his brain, Baker came up with one fact about Waugh—his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The interview took place just after reports that the Communist government of Hungary had imprisoned Cardinal Josef Mindszenty. In desperation, Baker asked Waugh how he felt about the Cardinal’s imprisonment. Although a how-do-you-feel question was, according to Baker, the sure sign of an amateur in the news business, it worked well on Waugh, who became animated and spoke his mind about what he considered an outrageous action.

Waugh’s reaction became the basis of Baker’s report of the interview in the Sun:

“I can say nothing but what the whole world says. It is pure martyrdom in an age of martyrs. Cardinal Spellman summed the whole thing up quite admirably, I think, in his sermon  Sunday. It shows quite clearly how low the prestige of the West has fallen.”

Mr Waugh, a short boyish-looking man with intense, inquiring eyes and a decisive way of speaking, went on to talk of the so-called “religious revival” in modern letters. “I see no reason to account for it,” he said. “Man is a religious animal. It is abnormal for him not to be religious.”

Baker also included some of Waugh’s responses to questions that may have been asked by Bready, who knew about Waugh’s recent trip to Hollywood. According to Waugh, Aldous Huxley was surrounded by a “bunch of loonies” involved in what they called mysticism: “Huxley is not an irreligious man. He’s just lost in a hopeless fog…. Mysticism implies contact with the supernatural and is a part of Christianity.” When asked about themes of The Loved One (which Bready had obviously read), Waugh responded: “Forest Lawn is the best ordered part of the cinema world. There, all the bodies are properly sorted and placed.” As to whether he would return to Hollywood, Waugh responded: “I’ve seen Hollywood. There’s no point in going back.”

The article concluded:

Asked whether his reputation as a writer of satire makes people expect to find him bitter, Mr Waugh replied, “I don’t know what they expect; but they’re certainly disappointed if they do.” Mr Waugh was right. He creates the impression of being a sober man of faith rather than a cynic.

Baker had his story printed, with no byline, on page 18: “Waugh, Novelist, Calls Trial of Cardinal ‘Martyrdom’” (Baltimore Sun, 8 Feb. 1949). The story is accompanied by a photo which looks as if it were taken for the occasion.

The foregoing account of Russell Baker’s interview of Evelyn Waugh appeared in slightly different form in “’Something Entirely Unique’: Evelyn Waugh’s 1948-49 Tours of North America, Part 3, Baltimore”,  by John McGinty and Jeffrey Manley. Evelyn Waugh Studies, No. 44.2, Autumn 2013.

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Roundup: Daleks and Poputchiks

Posted on January 22, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–The BBC has announced plans to issue a print version of a 1980s Dr Who episode that contains a plot line inspired by Waugh’s novel The Loved One. This is explained on a website that tracks this sort of thing (BleedingCool.com) which writes that there are:

… only two stories left from the show’s original run that haven’t gotten a novel adaptation – until now. That situation will be remedied this year when BBC Books publishes former script editor Eric Saward’s novelization of those stories […] Saward was the script editor of the show from 1982 to 1986, covering a large part of Peter Davison’s era as the Doctor and Colin Baker’s entire run. He also wrote Revelation of the Daleks [which features] a satire of the funeral business inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One. [See previous post.] Many fans regard Revelation of the Daleks to be the best script Saward wrote during his tenure on the show.

The novelized version of Revelation of the Daleks (Story 142) will appear in November and, according to Amazon.com, includes this as its major story line:

The Doctor and Peri land on the planet Necros to visit the funerary home Tranquil Repose – where the dead are interred and the near-dead placed in suspended animation until such time as their conditions can be cured.

–In the San Diego Reader (a free-distribution print newspaper) Matthew Lickona recalls several:

… instances when comedy has led me to culture though the back door, so that I know the funny reference before the serious referent. […] I only recently discovered the humor in novelist Evelyn Waugh’s use of “Change and decay in all around I see” as the darkly gleeful declaration of a ruined paterfamilias in Boot [sic]. I read that twenty years before learning that it’s part of a hymn: Change and decay in all around I see/ O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

Lickona remembered the quote from the hymn “Abide With Me” but confused the title of the novel Scoop with the name of its hero and his home in Somerset.

–The Guardian reports the death late last year of veteran actor Hugh Dickson (1927-2018). Among his early successes was an appearance in the BBC’s radio adaptation of a Waugh novel:

Regularly in demand for leading or major roles on radio, he will be remembered especially for his Guy Crouchback in the 1974 dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, Sunny Farebrother in Frederick Bradnum’s adaptation of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (four series, 1979-82) and as Elrond in Lord of the Rings (1981).

The 1974 adaptation was written for BBC by Barry Campbell and stretched over 11 episodes.  It had earlier been adapted in 1967 for BBC TV by Giles Cooper in a three-episode series starring Edward Woodward as Guy Crouchback.

–Finally, in yesterday’s round of the BBC’s University Challenge quiz program, the moderator Jeremy Paxman posed this question to the University of Warwick’s team: In a 1942 novel Evelyn Waugh used the phrase “horrible jargon” to apply to what two-word term based on the Russian word Попутчик (“Poputchik“) used from the 1920s to describe people who sympathized with the Communist Party but were not members? The Warwick team answered correctly “fellow traveller” for 5 points but lost to University of Bristol.

The reference comes from Put Out More Flags where Ambrose Silk refers to himself as what the Communists “call in their horrible jargon, a fellow traveller” (London, 1967 ed., p. 118). What the Russian word has to do with the derivation of the English term is not something Ambrose discussed or cared about. He was employed at the time by the Ministry of Information as “the representative of Atheism in the religious department” (p. 116). The BBC’s question writers probably picked up this attribution from John Ayto, Movers and Shakers: A Chronology of Words that Shaped our Age (New York: OUP, 1999) p. 93, where POMF is quoted in support of the meaning and origin of “Fellow Traveler” and dates its useage to 1936. Others attribute it to Leon Trotsky.

UPDATE (22 January 2019): Transliteration of Russian word Попутчик (Poputchik) meaning “Fellow Traveler” corrected. A reference to John Ayto book added.

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Mitford and Merton and Waugh

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

—The London Magazine has published on its website a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s 1960 review of Nancy Mitford’s last novel Don’t Tell Alfred:

While looking through our archive recently we came across this review by Evelyn Waugh of Nancy Mitford’s novel Don’t Tell Alfred from 1960. Displaying a characteristic mix of erudition and passion for story telling (alongside more than a hint of bitterness), we thought that it was a weird slice of literary history that needed to be shared once more. From The London Magazine December 1960, Volume 7, No. 12.

Waugh’s review was politely positive but with reservations. He especially praised Mitford for her recycling of characters who had proved successful in previous novels, but at the same time noted that some had to be recreated due to untimely demises. He makes other subtle references about how she might have modified the text, but he had long since given up trying to help her to improve her writing style. It is a rather long review but fun to read. TLM might have pointed out that, although the book sold well, its overall critical reception (especially from reviewers Nancy respected) was so negative that she did not attempt to write another novel.  She relied on biographical/historical works for the remainder of her career.

Unfortunately, the copy of Waugh’s review that TLM has posted is replete with typos. It is to be hoped that some one will point this out and the posted copy can be corrected. It is also available in Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 553.

–Novelist Mary Gordon has published a book entitled On Thomas Merton.  It is reviewed this week in America: The Jesuit Quarterly. This book grew out of a lecture Gordon was asked to give at the opening of an exhibition of Merton’s writings at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. This was on the occasion of the centenary of Merton’s birth which would have been 2015. Gordon says she was selected  because she was the only one on the Columbia campus (where she teaches at Barnard) who was known to be a practicing Roman Catholic. She opens her book with this:

If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would  never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never have heard of him.

In her opening chapter she considers what writers influenced Merton’s writing, or not as the case may be. And the first case considered is that of Evelyn Waugh. She draws on their correspondence in the late 1940s when Waugh had edited, deleted and rewritten material in the UK edition of The Seven Story Mountain, Merton’s most popular book. The abridged UK version was entitled Elected Silence. Waugh later wrote to urge Merton to write more carefully and pare down his prose, but Merton didn’t listen and Waugh lost interest. It might be noted in this regard, that Waugh’s revised edition of Merton’s major work is out of print, while the original version is still selling. The two Roman Catholic converts fell further apart after Vatican II reforms which Merton embraced and Waugh opposed. Gordon relies heavily in her discussion of their relations on the recent book by Mary Frances Coady, Merton & Waugh (2015), an early version of which was presented at the Evelyn Waugh Society’s 2012 conference at Loyola-Notre Dame Library in Baltimore.

–Waugh tried to influence the writing of both Mitford and Merton, sending them each copies of Fowler’s and his own suggestions on editing their works that he had reviewed in draft form. Neither paid him the least attention and went on writing and publishing in the marketplace of the 1950s-60 where their works continued to find buyers while Waugh’s sales struggled until they were rescued by the success of the 1981 Brideshead Revisited TV series, 15 years after his death.

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Waugh in Lithuania

Posted on January 19, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A Lithuanian online newspaper Bernardinai.lt has a review of the Lithuanian translation of Vile Bodies (Vargingi kūnai). This is an alternative online newspaper published by the Franciscan community in Vilnius but intended to be objective rather than primarily religious in its content. The book is translated by Rasa Drazdauskienė and is reviewed by Augminas Petronis. It was published in 2010 by Tyto Alba in Vilnius, as was a Lithuanian version of Brideshead Revisited (Sugrįžimas į Braidshedą) by the same translator. The review of Vile Bodies opens with this:

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” – Perhaps for anyone, this saying, literally understood, is never more suitable than in its application to the Lithuanian translations of Evelyn Waugh’s books. While the covers of both books […]  appear to be warnings that the works they decorate are third or fourth rate love novels, this impression would be extremely deceptive.

“Vile Bodies” is very satirical, very funny, sometimes fantastically magical, and at the same time extremely serious. It describes the environment where Waugh himself lived for years. […] Waugh did not intend to write just a funny and ironic novel. The comic surface of the story hides questions of meaning seriously considered. When I read the book, I often laughed to tears, but suddenly was forced  to stop and get drunk. Comic events in the book are tragic, and they are comic again, and this is taking place at an incredible pace. In the case of an absurd adventurer, a celebrity-looking journalist, you laughand can’t stop until you suddenly realize that you’re reading about a suicide. The book is always laughing, shocking, laughing again and shocking again. Apparently this is E. Waugh’s talent – writing ironically and at the same time extremely seriously, and closing his books remains a great desire to enjoy everyday life.

The translation is by Google with minor edits. The Lithuanian online bookseller linked above (knygos.lt), alas indicates that the translated editions are out of stock. On the other hand, this sell-out may presage additional translations.

 

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Auberon Waugh (More)

Posted on January 18, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Additional reviews of the new collection of Auberon Waugh’s writings (A Scribbler in Soho) are becoming available. The book was released earlier this week. Prof John Carey writing in the latest edition of the Sunday Times describes the contents as follows:

The anthology […] contains extracts from Waugh’s Private Eye diaries, and a longer selection of his editorials from the Literary Review. Between the two, [editor Naim Attallah] supplies an account of his friendship with Waugh, in which he curiously uses the third person, referring to himself as “Naim” to Waugh’s “Bron”.

Prof Carey complains the the book contains too much homophobia and anti-feminist material.

Attallah might justifiably reply that his duty was to give an accurate account of his friend, and that prejudice was part of his make-up, which is true. Prejudices were, in effect, Waugh’s substitute for thought. Thinking did not come easily to him. What, then, is there to celebrate? The answer is courage. […] He worked almost to the day of his death with prodigious energy, writing each week for several periodical [and] treated subordinates with courtesy and consideration, as their testimonies, printed by Attallah, bear out. The writer was detestable, but the man was not, and Attallah rightly celebrates him.

Roger Lewis, a former friend of Auberon, reviews the book in today’s issue of The Times. He agrees with Prof Carey that Auberon will be little known to today’s generation because journalists have a relatively short shelf life (“Who today has heard of Bernard Levin?” he asks).

Like his father, Evelyn Waugh, Bron lived in a state of permanent frustration — which is what happens once you have worked out that the universe is a silly and reprehensible joke, that to pretend otherwise is a falsehood, and that most people are pretty terrible. He failed to graduate from Oxford because he was “reluctant to believe anything he was taught”, and his scepticism and his considered animosities never abated. […] Indeed, as Naim Attallah says in this wonderful anthology, Waugh felt he had a bounden duty to “sharpen his focus on everything and everybody he found ridiculous and pretentious”. If I have a disagreement, it’s with the notion that Bron was a Soho scribbler. This demeans him. Easily his father’s equal as a prose master, Waugh as a satirist belongs with Swift and Sterne, and as a comedian he was like WC Fields — a dangerous curmudgeon.

After a discussion of Auberon’s writing career, Lewis concludes:

Evelyn Waugh did not envisage greatness for his son, whom he described in his diary as “a 15-year-old drunk being taken off a train and put in a police cell”. Attallah’s assessment is fairer: “When I look around, I see no one who comes close to possessing his gift with the pen . . . No contrarian spirit has arisen to match or replace him on the British literary scene.” […] The greatest paradox is that despite the imbecilities he witnessed, he always remained bright and cheerful, his prose growing in strength and character.

UPDATE (18 January 2019): Amazon.co.uk says Auberon’s book was published on 15 January 2019 and is now for sale.

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Latest Evelyn Waugh Studies Published

Posted on January 15, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Fall 2018 issue (Vol. 49 No. 2) of Evelyn Waugh Studies, the Society’s journal, has been published.

ARTICLES

Whispering Glades Seventy Years On, by Jeffrey Manley

Abstract: It was just over 70 years ago, in early 1947, that Evelyn Waugh was introduced to the wonders of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, a few miles east of Hollywood. At a point when his negotiations with MGM studios over film rights for Brideshead Revisited had more or less broken down, he met up with Sheila Milbanke at a dinner party. They knew each other from the bright young people days of the 1920s but met by chance in Los Angeles. She had just visited Forest Lawn and extolled its virtues to him over dinner. She offered to conduct him out to see it the next day; it’s a short drive from Hollywood by Los Angeles standards. Having time on his hands, he took her up on her offer.  What follows is a discussion of the results of that visit as reflected in the writings by Waugh that it inspired, and an exploration of the similarities and differences between Waugh’s inventions and their real-life counterparts. Finally, for those who want to visit these and other Waugh-related sites in Los Angeles to gain firsthand knowledge of the settings of Waugh’s writings, an update to the guide by Prof. Donald Greene is provided. 

REVIEWS

 “City of Aquatint”:  Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford, by Barbara Cooke. 
Reviewed by Eliza Murphy 

“The Forest for the Trees”:  The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Essays, Articles, and Reviews, 1922-1934, edited by Donat Gallagher. 
Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis 

NEWS

EWS editor Jonathan Pitcher includes an explanatory note at the beginning of this issue 49.2. Here is an excerpt:

Evelyn Waugh Studies 49.1 was the last number produced under the joint editorship of Patrick Query and Jonathan Pitcher. The latter wishes to thank the former for putting up with all manner of oddities, no doubt annoying jokes, vast reams of correspondence, and organizational quandaries over the past four years and eleven issues. I am indebted to his guidance, gravitas, intellect, perception, good sense, and bonhomie.

The issue includes additional information about the plans for organizing a trip to Crete to visit sites related to Waugh’s military service there, and a follow-up note on the “Liberty Hotel” in Addis Ababa.

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Wodehouse Exhibit Features Waugh Memorabilia

Posted on January 15, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The following report was prepared by Waugh Society member Milena Borden:

P G Wodehouse: The Man and His Work introduces the Wodehouse archive acquired by the British Library in 2016 on a loan from his step-grandson Sir Edward Cazalet. This includes personal letters, manuscripts and first editions and is displayed in four glass stands in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery. It underlines Wodehouse’s many successes as a novelist, screenwriter, diarist and a playwright.

At the heart of the Introduction, which defines him as a masterful humorist and an exquisite English language prose writer, is a quote from Evelyn Waugh: ‘In a life experiencing both personal sadness and joy, Wodehouse …has made a world for us to live in an and delight in.’ Wodehouse’s talent is further illustrated with glimpses into his glamorous Hollywood style of life in New York and the staging of his Broadway and West End musicals between the wars. Central place is also given to his most famous characters: Ukridge, Lord Elmsworth and Psmith.

The third stand displays the “Wodehouse Controversy”, which refers to his internment by the Germans during the Second World War (1940 – 41). There is an original page of his ‘camp diary’ and a typescript of one of his five “Berlin broadcasts”. There is also a letter from 1947 he wrote to Waugh thanking him “for his support and solidarity during the controversy”. The viewers are presented with a brief account of this episode in which Waugh became involved after the war. It is well documented in the Wodehouse Archive under a file “Cassandra and the Berlin Broadcast”.

At the outbreak of the war Wodehouse was living in Le Toquet when the Germans invaded France and interned him as an alien male. He then became a civilian prisoner of war in Upper Silesia. In 1940 the German Foreign Office used him, unknown to him, to write and record five humorous broadcasts about his time in prison, initially to be transmitted only to the USA. The Ministry of Propaganda under Goebbels hijacked them and also transmitted them to the UK. The affair in context and the transcripts of the broadcasts, which were made public in the 1950s, can be found at the P.G. Wodehouse Society’s website. 

On 15 July 1941 the journalist William Connor, who wrote under the nom de guerre Cassandra for the Daily Mirror, extracted a commission by the then Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, to broadcast from the BBC Home Service and the BBC North American Transmission an attack on Wodehouse as a national traitor. Although the BBC objected to this, Cooper ordered the BBC to go ahead with it, to the outrage of many. In this broadcast Wodehouse was described as being ‘on his knees’ to Dr. Goebbels and enjoying himself in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin while ‘fifty thousand of our countrymen are enslaved in Germany.’

Twenty years later, on the occasion of Wodehouse’s seventieth birthday, Waugh launched a counter attack in defense of Wodehouse on the BBC Home Service (15 July 1961) and also published it in the Sunday Times the next day under the title “An Act of Homage and Reparation to P. G. Wodehouse” (EAR, p. 561). His broadcast is preserved at the British Library Sound Archives with a short extract from it available to the public.

Waugh fiercely criticized the wartime involvement of politics in the media and lambasted Cassandra as an ill-informed journalist who not only wrongly accused Wodehouse but also pointed to the Bulgarian communist (Georgi) Dimitroff  in contrast to Wodehouse as a paragon of heroism, who the British public was supposed to admire. Dimitroff was wrongly accused, imprisoned, tried and released by the Nazis over the Reichstag fire in 1933 one month after Hitler came to power. He consequently became a symbol of the triumph of international communism and after the war grew to be the first Stalinist prime minister of Bulgaria (1946-49). Under his leadership, the People’s Courts tried 11,000 people and executed 1,046, including many writers and journalists. This was considered to be the most severe post-war retribution in any ex-Axis country.

Interestingly enough, William Connor-Cassandra and Wodehouse became friendly to each other when they met in New York many years after the controversy. Connor was knighted in 1966 and died the next year age 57. Wodehouse himself was also knighted in 1975, six weeks before he died at the age of 93. In 1980, he was fully exonerated in a government report.

The last item in the exhibition is Waugh’s handwritten letter on light blue paper from Piers Court, dated 29 December 1954, in which he addressed Wodehouse as “Dr. Wodehouse” referring to his Oxford degree. This is accompanied by the curator’s note: “Wodehouse’s library contained all of Waugh’s novels one of which was inscribed by Waugh ‘to the head of my profession’ and was one of Wodehouse’s most treasured possessions.”

Many thanks to Milena for sending this report. The exhibition runs until 24 February. See details here.

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Roundup: The Walrus and the Waugh Scholars

Posted on January 14, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan McLaren has added a new article to his Evelyn Waugh website relating to three of the first volumes of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Precocious Waughs (v.30), Essays, Articles and Reviews 1922-1934 (v.26), and A Little Learning (v.19). He is reviewing copies housed at the National Library of Scotland and offers photo clips from the contents where relevant to his discussion. He is generally impressed by the workmanship represented in the project. Here’s a sample of McLaren’s comments on the Precocious Waughs volume:

…this first volume is of special interest as it concerns Waugh’s writings when he was a child and teenager. The diary that he kept while at Lancing was largely reproduced in The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, published in 1976. But the revelation in this CWEW volume is the richness of the boyhood diaries pre-Lancing. Most of the pages include lively drawings and derision directed at unpopular teachers and fellow pupils.

As a bonus, McLaren offers a new version of Lewis Carroll’s poem the Walrus and the Carpenter that makes it even more worthwhile to read his article to the end.

And as a further bonus, unrelated to the CWEW review, McLaren has posted a brief article about Waugh’s attitude to his Scottish heritage as expressed in both his personal writings and fiction. This can be found here.

—The Tatler has an article about a new form of nostalgic entertainment booked for performances at the restaurant of the Ritz Hotel in London on Friday and Saturday evenings from 730pm. This is a jazz band (the London Dance Orchestra) that performs music redolent of the Bright Young People era, although whether the BYP gathered at the Ritz to enjoy it seems doubtful. As an example of the establishment’s clientele in the Jazz Age and after, the Tatler article offers this:

Bask in the restaurant where Evelyn Waugh’s characters from his 1940s novel Work Suspended fell in love over luncheon. […]

–The Catholic Herald asks a number of Roman Catholic writers what they think is the perfect Catholic cocktail. The first suggestion comes from Fr Michael Rennier, editor of the literary journal Dappled Things:

The Pink Gin. I like my dogma magisterial and my drinks strong. Although I’m breaking Hilaire Belloc’s hard-and-fast rule never to enjoy a drink invented after the Reformation, I dare say a Pink Gin is worth the risk. Composed of gin, bitters and a cocktail onion, this drink is positively triumphalist in its merciful embrace of both sinner and saint. (Gin itself is an alchemical miracle of the Middle Ages, and the proto-gins were largely monastic in origin.) Evelyn Waugh famously consumed it while he attempted to complete the crossword in his morning paper and the characters in his novels are constantly splashing about various clubs with them in hand. As a faithful son of Mother Church, can I do anything less than raise a glass in solidarity?

–An article by Carol Clark posted on the website Literary Hub discusses the difficulty of editing the works of Marcel Proust. Evelyn Waugh’s opinion on the question is quoted with respect one aspect of the problem:

In the case of Proust, […] editorial decisions are much more difficult to make than one might suppose. His composition is very rarely linear or chronological: most of the events described take place in a timeless or repetitive past indicated by the use of the imperfect tense. Only from time to time is an episode narrated in the past historic, indicating that it happened only once. (These alternative past tenses present a real problem to the translator.) In one paragraph the narrator can be years older than in the preceding one or, for that matter, younger. (Evelyn Waugh noticed this and facetiously complained to John Betjeman: “Well, the chap was plain barmy. He never tells you the age of the hero and on one page he is being taken to the W.C. in the Champs-Elysées by his nurse & the next page he is going to a brothel. Such a lot of nonsense” (letter, February 1948).)

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