Auberon Waugh “Celebrated” in New Book

Posted on January 13, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

A new book composed of writings by Auberon Waugh has been compiled by Naim Attallah and published by his Quartet Books as A Scribbler in Soho. This will be released in the UK on 24 January and is reviewed in the Daily Telegraph by Christopher Howse:

The central point [about Auberon Waugh] is the same one he made of his father, Evelyn, on his death in 1966. It was not that Evelyn Waugh was conservative, a class warrior or a Catholic. “It is simply that he was the funniest man of his generation,” he wrote. “He scarcely opened his mouth but to say something extremely funny. His house and life revolved around jokes.” This was equally true of Bron. […]  A new book, A Scribbler in Soho. [is a] “celebration of Auberon Waugh” [and] gives a version of his working life between extracts from his journalism in Private Eye and The Literary Review, which Waugh edited for 14 years under the proprietorship of Naim Attallah, whose idea the book was.

According to the publisher’s description:

This celebration of his work considers his time at Private Eye, and in particular, his Diaries (which he considered his masterwork); his editorship of the Literary Review and ends with an account of his co-founding the Academy Club. As is befitting in a tribute Festschrift, extensive examples of Waugh’s writings have been reproduced, including liberal amounts from his autobiographical texts previously published elsewhere. Of particular interest will be his monthly editorials written for the Literary Review, From the Pulpit, reprinted here in their entirety, providing a vivid commentary on the book trade, publishing and the personalities who hovered around Grub Street in the 70s and 80s. Above all else, however, readers can rediscover a unique writer whose tone, style and outlook are still sorely missed, especially in today’s political climate where his genius would have enthralled the nation in an unimaginable way.

The book is also reviewed in the Sunday Times by Prof John Carey. Meanwhile, The Oldie magazine, in what may be a related move, is republishing online copies of Auberon’s columns he wrote for them . Here’s a sample about the Monarchy.

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Martin D’Arcy, Art Collector

Posted on January 12, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The magazine America: The Jesuit Review has a feature article in its current issue about Waugh’s friend Martin D’Arcy, SJ. This is by Altair Brandon-Salmon and focuses on Fr D’Arcy’s art collecting talents as reflected in his several acquisitions displayed at Campion Hall, Oxford. The article explains how Fr D’Arcy used his knowledge of art to acquire pieces that would display England’s Roman Catholic past:

Catholicism, in a land that had repudiated the pope in Rome for nearly four centuries, was still seen as “a religion of dissidence and alterity,” as Jane Stevenson of Oxford University recently wrote. Father D’Arcy, a playful, well-connected figure, friends with a disparate series of people—from Evelyn Waugh to Kenneth Clark, Edith Sitwell and W. H. Auden—wanted to present a rival vision of Oxford, what it might have looked like had Britain stayed Catholic. Thus his regime of art collecting had a definitive sense of purpose: to assure his college’s social status in an intensely class-conscious university and to posit a Catholic vision that stressed the historical continuity of English Catholicism, with its links to continental Europe.

The article considers the art on display in the D’Arcy Room at Campion Hall as a case study of D’Arcy’s artistic tastes and collecting methods. This includes a detailed explanation of several of the art works on display in that room as well as some information relating to how Fr D’Arcy managed to acquire them, using his network of influential friends.

He also commissioned original artwork. This is exemplified in Campion Hall’s Lady Chapel:

Father D’Arcy funded the Lady Chapel using donations by Evelyn Waugh from the royalties for his biography of St. Edmund Campion, and D’Arcy had originally approached Stanley Spencer to complete the scheme, no doubt inspired by his work at Burghclere Chapel. However, the two men did not get on, D’Arcy dismissively describing Spencer thus: “So diminutive as to be almost a dwarf in labourer’s clothes with a dirty satchel containing all his belongings, he was no ordinary guest.” [Charles] Mahoney, a Royal Academician, was a safer pair of hands and experienced in mural painting (although much of his work was destroyed in the Blitz). Age and illness, though, prevented him from entirely finishing the Lady Chapel. One panel remains as a monochrome sketch, still waiting for the vitalizing application of color.

Fr D’Arcy probably also had a role in choosing Sir Edwin Lutyens, the leading British architect of the day, who designed the Lady Chapel as well as the Hall itself. It is a pity that Fr D’Arcy was unable to charm Stanley Spencer as he did so many other talented Englishmen of his generation. What could have become a major work of art is simply a quite good one.

Waugh describes a 1946 visit to Campion Hall in an article that appeared in the Tablet and is collected in his Essays, Articles and Reviews (“The Hospitality of Campion Hall”, p. 316). It is not clear to what extent Fr D’Arcy’s art collection had worked its magic on the place at that date, but Waugh was nevertheless well pleased with what he saw:

The building itself had a unique character, quintessentially of Oxford but without a counterpart. It was remarkable that the only house designed for religious [purposes?] in the University should appear less monastic than the secular colleges. […] The carpeted entrance hall, the broad staircase, the profusion of ornate furniture, the bedrooms with their tactful choice of  bedside books, the prodigality and accessibility of hot water, all had the air of a private house rather than of a college […]

Waugh goes on to mention retiring with other visitors to Micklem Hall where they occupy the Senior Common Room and the Stuart Parlour. Waugh is mostly focussed on the conversation of the group of visitors rather than the interior decorations of the room they occupied, except for the mention of a portrait of “Nell Gwynne smiling enigmatically from its walls …” (Idem., p. 318) That seems an unlikely choice of artwork by Fr D’Arcy; although perhaps not, if it was hanging in the Stuart Parlour.

 

 

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Nancy Cunard Story Published in TLS

Posted on January 11, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The TLS in this week’s issue has published for the first time a 1920’s story written by Nancy Cunard. She was one of the Bright Young People and went on to become something of a free-lance intellectual and left-wing political activist in Paris during the 1930s. She apparently wrote the story (her only known fiction) entitled “A Lost Night” while in a relationship with novelist Michael Arlen (best known for his novel The Green Hat) in 1920s London. As explained in the TLS article by Anna Girling introducing the story, its writing style reflects that of Arlen. Girling is a PhD student at Edinburgh University, and it was she who discovered the story among some papers left by Arlen’s daughter who died in 2011. Girling’s introduction opens with this:

[…] In her lifetime, Cunard’s prolific literary and political activity was overshadowed by her image as a perpetual Bright Young Thing, and she is now remembered, if at all, for her colourful personal life, multiple (male and female) sexual partners, flamboyant fashion sense, and her fictionalized appearance in a number of novels from and about the interwar period, the 1920s in particular. Characters apparently based on Cunard feature in works by Aldous Huxley, Richard Aldington, Michael Arlen, Wyndham Lewis and Evelyn Waugh. All but Waugh were one-time lovers of Cunard’s, and all depict her as voraciously over-sexed – “a lecherous octopus”, as Aldington put it. One can but speculate about the degree to which dented masculine pride contributed to the viciousness of these partial portraits, but Cunard is, for example, known to have compared sex with Huxley (who would go on to depict her as “a perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal”) to “being crawled over by slugs” […]

What characters in Waugh’s works were based on Nancy Cunard is not mentioned, but she could well be imagined as one of those in Vile Bodies. Waugh seems to have had more contact with Nancy’s mother Emerald (an American who married one of the shipping line heirs whose parties he attended during his social climbing days) than with Nancy herself.

Girling’s story goes on to describe Nancy’s experience as a publisher in 1930s Paris when her most notable effort was the publication of a door-stopper anthology entitled Negro. Its success in the book market was checkered, but according to Girling, it was recently reissued by a Parisian publisher in a facsimile edition of the original. Donat Gallagher also notes in his collection of Waugh’s journalism that it was Nancy who, together with Louis Aragon, canvassed writers in 1937 to determine which side they supported in the Spanish Civil War. Waugh was one of the few respondents who, if forced to choose, preferred Franco’s Fascists to his leftist opponents (EAR, p. 187).

Both Girling’s introduction and the story itself are available on the internet from the TLS website.

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Post-Holiday Roundup

Posted on January 8, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–Stephen Bush writing in The Times about the Labour Party’s dysfunctional position on Brexit opens with this:

Evelyn Waugh once complained that the Conservative Party, for all its efforts, had never even managed to “put the clock back a single second”. The Brideshead Revisited author would have made an unlikely Corbynite but on that basis if no other he might have been a fan of Jeremy Corbyn, who has successfully put Labour’s clock back four years: to 2014, when Ed Miliband was in charge…

–In much the same vein, the English-language paper Buenos Aires Times has an op-ed article about the new populist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, that begins:

Had he remained around long enough, Evelyn Waugh would surely have approved of Jair Bolsonaro, a man whose views on what is happening to the world are much the same as those that were memorably expressed in the ‘Sword of Honour trilogy’ by his fictitious hero Guy Crouchback who, in a dark moment when everything was going wrong, muttered to himself: ‘The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”  […]

Over half a century has gone by since Waugh […] started yelling stop. Since then, the trends [he] so eloquently deplored have rushed onwards, overwhelming all the obstacles placed in their path, but recently the causes [he] embraced with self-conscious quixotism have found new champions. The “populists,” whose mere existence is driving many “progressives” haywire, come in many shapes and sizes, but they all agree that the “modern age” is a dangerous aberration that must be done away with before it is too late.

–The Irish Times has published an interview of novelist Brian Moore recorded in 1973 but never published. This was conducted by Tony Kilgalin at Malibu while Moore was teaching at UCLA. Evelyn Waugh is cited at two points in the interview:

Q. So it’s like these Malibu waves: if you go with the wave you eventually don’t have to worry about them.
A. …I think I am more in the Joycean vein in that I don’t think in terms of this book being like my last book, or of repeating a success. The thing I am interested in doing is not writing the same book twice. Many people write the same book over and over again and they are very good books. I am not knocking that. Evelyn Waugh said that everyone has very few tunes to play. He’s right and he wrote a similar book over and over and it was always brilliant and you could read every one of them and enjoy them and each of them was done from a different point of view and was marvellous. In fact, he is probably the greatest English writer of the century, I think.[…]

One doesn’t fall in love with writing and books in quite the same way at 40 as one did at 19. Yet it is funny, if you read Waugh over again, if you liked Waugh, it is just as funny, the fourth or fifth time round. You begin to spot his bigotries, his snobberies and various things like that, but he still stands up remarkably well. I’ll still pick up most books by Greene or English writers of that period. You just sort of know that they write in some way that will hold your attention, which is getting back to the thing we were discussing. They all have a deep and abiding sense of what is funny, what is plot.

–Also in the Irish Times there is a review of a new collection of short stories by Mazen Maarouf entitled Jokes for the Gunmen.  This is described as “a debut collection that returns over and over again to the subject of humour as its characters try to make sense of life in a Lebanese warzone.” Here’s the opening paragraph of Sarah Gilmartin’s review:

Did you hear the one about the man trapped in a warzone where hundreds around him die every day? In real life, we don’t tell jokes about war but fiction can successfully combine the two. From Evelyn Waugh’s satirical journalism in Scoop, to the antics of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, to Milan Kundera post-war disillusionment in The Joke, to Jesse Armstrong’s recent novel Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals, the truth and absurdity of war can often be revealed by humour.

—Communio: The International Catholic Review has this article in its newly published Spring 2018 quarterly issue (#45.1):

R. V. Young, in “Literature in the Waste Land: Brideshead Revisited and Literary Education,” presents Evelyn Waugh’s novel as a model for fiction’s mission to represent concretely the form of human action. Young notes that critics of the novel have often failed to grasp its beauty because they assume that it serves an extrinsic end, such as Christian apologetics or a projection of the author’s own lifestyle and character. When we grasp that the work possesses its own integrity, however, a novel like Brideshead Revisited grants its readers the enjoyment of “an image of moral and spiritual reality . . . that nurtures our imaginations and enhances our understanding of the world of experience that we inhabit.”

The full article appears in the print edition only.

–Finally, blogger Edward Champion has posted a review of Scoop on his webpage “Reluctant Habits” as part of his effort to read and describe all 100+ books on the Modern Library List of the best 100 20th Century novels. Scoop is #75 of the list and he doesn’t much like it:

As much as I appreciate Scoop‘s considerable merits (particularly the fine and often hilarious satire when the book takes place on Waugh’s home turf), I cannot find it within me to endorse this novel’s abysmally tone-deaf observations on a fictitious Abyssinia — here, Ishmaelia.

He had previously posted an equally negative review of Brideshead Revisited which is #80 on the list:

It is safe to say that I did not shed a single tear for any of the assholes in Brideshead Revisited, although I was not without empathy. My salubrious contempt for people who bitch and moan when they have it all has been memorialized in several places, and I’m not likely to shake this quality anytime soon. It didn’t exactly enhance my reading experience when Charles Ryder, Waugh’s protagonist, was revealed to have the very exemplar of a free ride existence.

Champion is looking forward to rereading and reviewing A Handful of Dust, #34 on the list (he is reading from bottom to top), which he describes as:

…a legitimate masterpiece. So I will try to give Waugh a more generous hearing when we get there in a few years. For now, I’m trying to shake off his seductive spite as well as the few remaining dregs of my own.

 

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Mischief in Manchuria

Posted on January 6, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The South China Morning Post has a feature length article about a sensational kidnapping that took place in late 1932 and captured the attention of, inter alia, Evelyn Waugh. The story by Paul French is entitled “How Chinese bandits’ kidnapping of a blonde British bride and her pet dogs became a global news story”. It opens with this:

As temperatures began to drop and the winter of 1932 approached, the world was obsessed with just one news story – the kidnapping in northern China of 19-year-old Muriel “Tinko” Pawley and her dogs: German shepherds, Whisky and Rolf, and a pointer pup called Squiffy. When news reached London that Chinese bandits had threatened to cut off Pawley’s ears if a phenomenal ransom was not paid, there was an outcry from concerned newspaper readers in China’s treaty ports, Hong Kong, Europe, North America and Australia. “Tinko” Pawley was suddenly a household name and great copy.

Then at the height of his fame, having recently published his acclaimed novel Black Mischief, Evelyn Waugh could think of nothing else. He could not get the image of poor young Tinko out of his head – suffering in the Manchurian cold, starving, filthy, verminous, her dogs distraught. He bought every newspaper, scouring them for information on Tinko’s fate. He was far from alone. Theatre critic James Agate recorded the unfolding events of Tinko’s ordeal in captivity in his diary. Waugh eventually wrote a short story based on the kidnapping.

Waugh’s story was entitled “Incident in Azania” and appeared about a year later in Windsor Magazine. As explained by Ann Pasternak Slater, Waugh took the setting and several characters from Black Mischief and wove a story from the kidnapping that took place in China:

Waugh registered everything: the journalists’ affectation and concern (“the safe receipt of a woolen sweater by the captives has given a grain of comfort here”); their titillatory evocation of cruelty (“they were bound by thin ropes that went round the tops of their necks and their arms…”; above all, the jaunty letters of the captives themselves […] All these details were seized on and rationalized in Waugh’s masterly version of the story, where it is only very gradually intimated, from [the heroine’s] letters, that her ordeal is not exactly life-threatening. Introduction, pp. xxv-xxvi The Complete Short Stories: Everyman’s Library (Ann Pasternak Slater, ed.).

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Waugh at Campion College, Sydney

Posted on January 4, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Australian newspaper has posted an article based on the Occasional Address given by Dyson Heydon, a former High Court judge, at the recent graduation ceremony of Campion College in Sydney. He opens with this:

Campion College is a small liberal arts college covering key aspects of Western languages, literature, history, philosophy and theology, together with mathematics and science. It has a Catholic ethos. Naming it after Edmund Campion made a significant statement. Campion was born in 1540. He was executed in 1581. He was canonised in 1970. His biographer Evelyn Waugh said his career was that of scholar, priest, hero and martyr. He noted that Campion’s life was “a simple, perfectly true story of heroism and holiness”.

As a scholar — a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford — Campion was both a theologian and a scientist. He thus personified the long connection between the Jesuits and experimental science. Indeed, at 26 he achieved a brilliant success when, on Elizabeth I’s visit to Oxford in 1566, he addressed her on scientific subjects.

The quote comes from the Preface written by Waugh for the second edition of Edmund Campion: Scholar, Priest, Hero and Martyr (Boston, 1946). The article goes on to describe Edmund Campion’s career (probably based on Waugh’s biography) and the founding of Campion College in 2006. This is housed in a former monastery in the Sydney suburbs. The article also relates in some detail the distinctions between Campion College, which is devoted to the “liberal arts”, and other larger and more diverse colleges and universities and concludes:

… A small institution such as Campion can help ensure the development of a pluralistic tradition, independently of mega-institutions emanating from and parasitic on the modern state. A small body can develop and preserve qualities that giants may have forgotten, or, if they remember them, may seek to destroy. That is especially so when a small body is independent of the state, uninfected by the state, and nourished by sources of which the state knows nothing.

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Estate of Waugh

Posted on January 2, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

In this week’s New Statesman, lead book reviewer Leo Robson expands his horizons to consider the question of how literary estates have affected literary history. There are four books listed as the subject of the review, but these are barely mentioned in a wide-ranging consideration of the subject-matter. He begins with the estate of Tennyson as administered by the poet’s family to preserve his reputation as they preferred to see it. Also considered are the estates of TS Eliot, Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, JD Salinger, Jane Austin, Emily Dickinson and others. One of those mentioned is the Estate of Evelyn Waugh and its relations with Waugh’s biographer Martin Stannard:

At the height of “Brideshead fever”, sparked by the 1981 Granada TV production of Brideshead Revisited, the academic and would-be biographer Martin Stannard battled with Evelyn Waugh’s spiteful and forgetful son Auberon. As Stannard recalls in his superb essay “Estate Management”, also collected in the Companion, the younger Waugh charged extortionate permission fees for quoting from Waugh’s writing and papers, and then blocked Stannard from writing an introduction to The Loved One. “Do I take it that I shall never be allowed to ‘edit’ or to quote extensively from his writings?” Stannard asked at one point. “As a scholar who has devoted his entire professional life to the study of Evelyn Waugh, this would come as a mortal blow.”

Stannard is keen to emphasise the sheer vulnerability of anyone seeking the favour of a literary estate: “It remains, whatever anyone might proclaim about free speech and open scholarship, a relation between one in power and a supplicant. The privileges can be withdrawn at any moment, ‘access’ denied.”(Although archives are purchased for vast sums by institutions such as the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, there’s no guarantee that visiting scholars will receive clearance to quote their findings.)

The Companion is one of the books under review: A Companion to Literary Biography, edited by Richard Bradford. Unlike some examples mentioned, however, Stannard was able to complete his well-documented two-volume biography of Waugh, which remains the definitive biography after 25 years from its completion. In other cases, projected biographies and critical works had to be abandoned or curtailed due to interference by the estates in the works of a biographer or critic. Indeed, as Robson recognizes, the Stannard/Waugh experience has a happy ending: “Martin Stannard is currently overseeing a complete critical edition of Evelyn Waugh’s work.” It might also be mentioned, as does Prof Stannard at the end of his essay, that he is working on the project as Co-Executive Editor alongside Alexander Waugh, who is General Editor and currently the Executor of the Waugh Estate.

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J D Salinger Centenary Observed

Posted on January 1, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Today is the centenary of the birth of US novelist J D Salinger. This is marked in a retrospective article by Martin Chilton in today’s issue of The Independent that opens with this:

The Manhattan-born author notoriously went into suburban seclusion in the town of Cornish, New Hampshire, soon after the publication of his best-selling 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Throughout the following years he would utter the plea “why can’t my life be my own?”. He also complained bitterly to close friends about the “damn people” who sent him invitations to social events.

“My father hated birthdays, holidays, and pretty much any planned or culturally mandated celebrations, and he’d certainly hate this centennial,” Matt Salinger, the 58-year-old actor who appeared in Revenge of the Nerds and Captain America, told the Associated Press recently. He was commenting after the announcement that the New York Public Library will open a major exhibition in October featuring “manuscripts, letters, books and artefacts from Salinger’s archive”. Little, Brown Book Group are also staging events across America next year to mark the anniversary of the author’s birth on 1 January 1919.

Perhaps consistent with Salinger’s own wishes, there doesn’t seem to be much else on offer relating to the occasion. In addition to the NYPL’s planned exhibit, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has scheduled an evening event next Monday, and his publishers Little, Brown have reissued the four books published in Salinger’s lifetime in a uniform “centennial edition” of both individual volumes and a boxed set. There is so far no word of the publication of any of the writings he reportedly produced during his decades of seclusion, as described in the Independent article.

Another retrospective appeared last week in the Washington Post. This is by literary columnist Ron Charles and, after recognizing Catcher’s continuing popularity among teenagers, continues with this:

To read it again as an adult is to feel Holden’s pain lingering like a phantom limb. His righteous cynicism is adolescence distilled into a sweet liquor. But the novel also feels like revisiting your first house. The familiarity is enchanting but discombobulating. The story is smaller than you remember, and some details you had completely wrong. But what’s most striking is how common the novel’s tone has become over the intervening decades. Holden is Patient Zero for generations infected by his misanthropy. We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision.

Evelyn Waugh seems not to have been aware of the Salinger mania which swept the USA in the late 1950s and 1960s. There is no record of Waugh’s ever having reviewed anything by Salinger or mentioned him in letters, diaries or journalism. Salinger’s years of attention-attracting seclusion may well have provided a ripe subject for Auberon Waugh’s satire, but I was unable to find any reference. Auberon may have deemed a reclusive resident of Vermont a bit off his beat. For his part, Salinger left no record in any published essays or correspondence of writers whose work may have influenced him, although Hemingway and Fitzgerald are mentioned by other commenters.

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Something for the New Year

Posted on December 31, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Constable has announced the publication later in the new year of a book by D J Taylor entitled Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51:

Who were the Lost Girls? At least a dozen or so young women at large in Blitz-era London have a claim to this title. But Lost Girls concentrates on just four: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parlade. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, they cut a swathe through English literary and artistic life in the 1940s. Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt and was flogged by him on the steps of the Royal Palace. And all of them were associated with the decade’s most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon, and its charismatic editor Cyril Connolly.

Lys, Sonia, Barbara and Janetta had very different – and sometimes explosive personalities – but taken together they form a distinctive part of the war-time demographic: bright, beautiful, independent-minded women with tough upbringings behind them determined to make the most of their lives in a highly uncertain environment. Theirs was the world of the buzz bomb, the cocktail party behind blackout curtains, the severed hand seen on the pavement in the Bloomsbury square, the rustle of a telegram falling through the letter-box, the hasty farewell to another half who might not ever come back, a world of living for the moment and snatching at pleasure before it disappeared. But if their trail runs through vast acreages of war-time cultural life then, in the end, it returns to Connolly and his amorous web-spinning, in which all four of them regularly featured and which sometimes complicated their emotional lives to the point of meltdown.

The Lost Girls were the product of a highly artificial environment. After it came to an end – on Horizon‘s closure in 1950 – their careers wound on. Later they would have affairs with dukes, feature in celebrity divorce cases and make appearances in the novels of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford. The last of them – Janetta – died as recently as three months ago. However tiny their number, they are a genuine missing link between the first wave of newly-liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the Dionysiac free-for-all of the 1960s. Hectic, passionate and at times unexpectedly poignant, this is their story.

Waugh certainly mentioned all four of the “Lost Girls” in his letters and portrayed some, if not all, of them in his novel Unconditional Surrender. These were the four secretaries of Everard Spruce, editor of the wartime literary journal Survival (much like Cyril Connolly and Horizon). Two are named Frankie (frequently barefoot like Janetta Parlade) and Coney (who may be based on Sonia Brownell). The other two are not named but they are collectively described by Waugh in the novel:

The secretaries were dressed rather like [Everard Spruce in reclaimed clothing] but in commoner materials; they wore their hair long and enveloping, in a style which fifteen years later was to be associated by the newspapers with the King’s Road. One went bare-footed as though to emphasize her servile condition. They were sometimes spoken of as ‘Spruce’s veiled ladies’. They gave him their full devotion; also their rations of butter, meat, and sugar…When they were not engaged in domestic tasks–cooking, queuing, or darning–the four secretaries stoked the cultural beacon [Survival] which blazed from Iceland to Adelaide: here the girl who could type answered Spruce’s numerous ‘fan letters’ and the girl who could spell corrected proofs. Here it seemed some of them slept for there were divan beds covered with blankets only and a large, much undenticulated comb. (Penguin 1975, pp. 40,42)

Other Waugh-related events to be anticipated the new year include the 75th anniversary of the first (serialized) publication of Brideshead Revisited starting in November 1944 and the publication of more volumes of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (Put Out More Flags has been rumored to be the next novel), as well as presentations at Durham University, the Chipping Camden Literary Festival and Lancing College mentioned in previous posts.

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Boxing Day Roundup

Posted on December 26, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Guardian in its “Top Tens” books column this week features “books on booze”. The selection by Henry Jeffreys is explained as “not a collection of books about drunkenness or alcoholism, though both feature. Rather, it is a celebration of those who write well about alcoholic drinks. […] Most drink-soaked fiction – by Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton and others – ignores the nerdy stuff. It is the intersection between connoisseurship and drunkenness that interests me.” Among the books selected is Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

Brideshead is neither Waugh’s best book (I favour the Sword of Honour trilogy), nor his funniest (Scoop or The Loved One), but it is the best from a booze point of view. The scenes of drunkenness between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder include some of the funniest parodies of wine talk: “a little, shy wine like a gazelle”. There’s also the excellent cognac-off between Rex Mottram and Ryder, which is a masterclass in razor-sharp snobbery.

Other books by Waugh’s contemporaries on the Guardian list include, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis.

–This is a reminder that the 2008 film production of Brideshead Revisited will be rebroadcast in the UK this Friday, 28 December at 1425p on BBC2. It will be available thereafter on BBC iPlayer. A UK internet connection is required.

—BBC Radio 4, has reposted the 2013 episode of “In Our Time” relating to Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall:

David Bradshaw, John Bowen and Ann Pasternak Slater join Melvyn Bragg to discuss Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Decline and Fall. Set partly in a substandard boys’ public school, the novel is a vivid, often riotous portrait of 1920s Britain. Its themes, including modernity, religion and fashionable society, came to dominate Waugh’s later fiction, but its savage wit and economy of style were entirely new. Published when Waugh was 24, the book was immediately celebrated for its vicious satire and biting humour.

–The pop culture website PopMatters.com has reposted another earlier article about adaptations of Waugh’s novels. This latest article is from 2014 and relates to the 1960s adaptations of The Loved One and Decline and Fall. See previous posts.  The article by Michael Barrett appeared after the release of the two films on DVD (the second with the title Decline and Fall of a Birdwatcher). Barrett compares The Loved One to Christopher Isherwood’s more or less contemporaneous novel Prater Violet (about filmmaking in the UK) and discusses Diana Trilling’s reviews of that novel as well as those of The Loved One and Brideshead Revisited. Although not cited, Waugh also mentions Isherwood’s novel favorably in a 1946 letter. Barrett describes the film version of Decline and Fall as deserving a better reputation than it has heretofore enjoyed, stressing several technical elements of film production as worthy of praise as well as the acting of Robin Phillips in the role of Paul Pennyfeather.

–Finally, the journal Lapham’s Quarterly includes in its “Miscellany” column these two contrasting views of sunsets:

“Considering how seldom people think of looking for sunset at all and how seldom, if they do, they are in a position from which it can be fully seen,” it’s rare to witness an excellent one, John Ruskin argued in 1843. Evelyn Waugh saw a radiant pink sunset behind a shadow-gray Mount Etna in 1929. “Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature,” he wrote “was quite so revolting.”

 

 

 

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Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh, Film, Newspapers, Radio Programs, Scoop, Sword of Honour, The Loved One | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Boxing Day Roundup