Pasternak Slater Book Now in Paperback

Posted on December 3, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Liverpool University Press has announced the issuance of the paperback edition of the book Evelyn Waugh (Writers and their Work). This is by Ann Pasternak Slater and was originally published in a hardback edition in 2016. It was then reviewed in Evelyn Waugh Studies 47.2 (Autumn 2016) by Chip Long where he described it as:

…a reader’s book. That is, it performs criticism as an act of companionship between its author and her audience that will not only be welcomed by new students of Waugh but also be compelling to those already familiar with his work. Readers and reading are taken seriously and encouraged. It is a book of deep yet unobtrusive learning and literary sensibility that makes nuanced use of other authors (Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, D.H. Lawrence) and other texts. Discussions are always grounded firmly in the fiction itself; APS concentrates on words and sentences with an intense clarity that makes her reader want to return to the source straightaway. (I mean this as a compliment: in response to her chapters on Decline and Fall and Black Mischief, I re-read the novels with new pleasure before moving on to the treatments of Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust respectively.) As with any salutary companion, it’s possible to maintain a leisurely pace in order to appreciate the conversation. And perhaps that’s the metaphor to explain the book’s success. I felt as if I was observing APS orchestrate a series of conversations – among Waugh’s books; between his biography and corollary texts (e.g., letters, diaries, and autograph manuscripts) and the fiction; between APS and other critics; and, most importantly between APS and her reader – designed to highlight “Waugh’s intellectual coherence” (73) and consistent moral seriousness.

The paperback is available from Amazon.com at this link for $29.95; it is temporarily out of stock but orders are now being taken. It will be available from the publisher in the UK later this month for £16.99.

UPDATE (1 January 2019): There is considerable confusion about the publication date for the paperback edition of this book. It is now listed on the OUP internet site as 1 February 2019. (OUP is the US distributor.) Further updates will be posted when matters clarify.

UPDATE 2 (30 January 2019): The OUP in the USA is now filling orders for the paperback edition of the book. No so, Amazon.com, however.

Share
Posted in Academia, Books about Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Waugh Society | Tagged , | Comments Off on Pasternak Slater Book Now in Paperback

Sunday Roundup: from Rails to Balls

Posted on December 2, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–The new railroad line from Djibouti to Addis Ababa is featured in a recent illustrated story in the Irish Times. This project was financed by the Chinese and was placed into full operation earlier this year. The service is now running on a regular basis and seems a far cry from the unreliable experience described by Evelyn Waugh in his 1930s writings about this region. According to the Irish Times:

…after leaving Addis Ababa, the author’s train arrived at each station roughly on time during its 12½-hour passage. Passenger satisfaction, however, is tempered by nostalgia for what has been lost in the bid for modernity. “It’s like being transported as cattle in a container: you’re sealed up at Addis Ababa before being deposited at your destination,” says […], a Dire Dawa businessman who used to take the old railway line that was constructed in the early 20th century and conveyed the novelist Evelyn Waugh when he came as a reporter for the Times to cover the 1936 coronation of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie.

The story gets the Waugh chronology a bit wrong. He first travelled the railway in 1930 on the way to cover the coronation for the Times. That story is told in Black Mischief and Remote People. In 1935 he used the railway again to cover the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy for the Daily Mail, immortalized in the novel Scoop, and he returned again in 1936 for some follow up research for his book Waugh in Abyssinia.

–The Catholic Herald has a story comparing the career of a recently deceased Roman Catholic bishop in Wisconsin with that of Edmund Campion as described by Evelyn Waugh in his 1935 biography. The story opens with this:

Early in his biography of Edmund Campion, Evelyn Waugh wonders why his subject spurned the smooth path that lay before him – accommodation with the nascent Anglican establishment, with all the comfort it afforded – and sought, instead, the way of the Cross. We like to imagine our saints facing starkly clear choices. But that wasn’t the case with the Oxford tutor who would go on to become the great Jesuit martyr; Campion had to find Calvary through a glass darkly. […]

So “why throw up so much that was excellent, in straining for a remote and perhaps unattainable perfection?” Waugh immediately answers his own question: “There was that in Campion that made him more than a decent person; an embryo in the womb of his being, maturing in darkness, invisible, barely stirring; the love of holiness, the need for sacrifice. He could not accept.” […] The Waugh passage came to my mind as I read news that Robert Morlino, the Bishop of Madison, Wisconsin, had died on Saturday from a “cardiac event”, per his diocese. The bishop’s memory will long endure as a defender of orthodoxy, at a time, not unlike Campion’s, when many otherwise decent men chose accommodation with corruption inside the Church and moral disorder in the world outside.

–The Daily Mail has been covering the story of the dilapidation and projected restoration of the Wentworth Woodhouse estate near Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Although it is described by the Mail as the largest country house in Britain and the largest private residence in Europe, Waugh had little connection with the house or the family that owned it, the Fitzwilliams. Waugh does however rate a mention in the Mail’s story thanks to his friendship with Kathleen Kennedy, JFK’s sister:

Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, a decorated war hero, and [Kathleen], whose husband, the Marquess of Hartington, had been killed in action in 1944, had [in 1948] been desperately in love for two years. Rumours swirled that, when they crashed [on 13 May 1948], they were on their way to the Vatican to obtain special dispensation from the Pope to marry, if Peter divorced his wife. The passionate affair was an open secret among their friends. […] No one will ever know for certain what Peter and Kick were planning when they took off from Croydon airport, with enough luggage for a world cruise – including dozens of outfits, a caseful of negligees and most of Kick’s jewels. Such was her love of clothes, all this might really have been packed for just a long weekend – or maybe, as friend Evelyn Waugh believed, the couple were actually eloping.

Waugh’s opinion on the reason for the trip is contained in a letter to Clarissa Eden, dated 6 September 1952, Letters, p. 382.

—BBC Radio 4 has reposted an episode of its Open Book program from 2016 in which Mariella Frostrup discusses Philip Eade’s biography of Evelyn Waugh with novelist and literary critic D J Taylor. See previous post. In addition, they have reposted a 2005 episode of Good Reads in which actors Hugh Dennis and Maria Aitken discuss Waugh’s A Handful of Dust with presenter Sue MacGregor. Books by Ian McKewen and Vladimir Nabokov are also discussed.

—The TLS has an article that consists of extracts from the commonplace book of Dwight Garner, book critic for the New York Times. These are grouped into “conversations with each other” on a common topic:

Never write “balls” with an indelible pencil on the margins of the books provided.

– Evelyn Waugh

Language is balls coming at you from every angle.

– Alan Bennett

I hear you . . . have finished a novel a hundred thousand words long consisting entirely of the word “balls” used in new groupings.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to Ernest Hemingway

Doesn’t this all sound balls? But it is not quite balls.

– Jean Rhys

The Waugh quote is from a 1946 letter to Mary Lygon (Letters, p. 240) advising her of proper behavior in the London Library which she had recently joined.

There is also this one from Auberon Waugh in a group about book reviews:

Have Anthony Powell’s reviews always been this bad, or has he had a stroke?

– Auberon Waugh, Diaries

That was from his Private Eye Diaries on the occasion of his having read Powell’s review of Evelyn’s Letters.

 

Share
Posted in Auberon Waugh, Black Mischief, Catholicism, Edmund Campion, Evelyn Waugh, Letters, Newspapers, Remote People, Scoop, Waugh in Abyssinia | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Sunday Roundup: from Rails to Balls

Waugh in Italy

Posted on November 30, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Milena Borden has kindly sent along this report of the recent Waugh seminar in Milan:

On 17 November, at the British Council in Milan, a seminar “A Waugh Fest” took place. It was sponsored by BookCity, Milan University and the British Council “to celebrate the editing of Waugh’s Complete Works, Oxford University Press and to discuss Waugh in Italy with British and Italian academics, and translators.“ This was preceded by an exhibition “Evelyn Waugh in Bompiani’s Catalogue: Italian translations of Waugh’s works published  by Bompiani during Waugh’s life.”

You walk into the second floor of the British Council offices on via Alessandro Manzoni 38, a stone’s throw away from the Teatro alla Scala, to find the Evelyn Waugh exhibition, displaying on a wall five photo panels of the front covers of Waugh’s Italian translations published during his lifetime and his correspondence with the publisher Valentino Bompiani (1898 – 1992). Curated with an evident attention to accuracy, the exhibit illustrates how and why Waugh was promoted in the Italian foreign fiction market after the Second World War. Bompiani was one of the major players in the field as demonstrated by the catalogue of the Waugh’s titles in translation and the names of the translators from 1948 to 1965. The correspondence between the writer and the publisher, who personally knew each other, consists of thirteen letters and three postcards including a telegram of condolence dated two days after Waugh died in 1966, all preserved in the Fondazione Corriere della Sera, Milan. The influential Italian literary critic Emilio Cecchi is noted as having been central to Waugh’s success in Italy. Also important seems to have been the choice of the modernist Milan artist Bruno Munari (1907-1998) to design the dust jackets for Corpi vili (Vile Bodies), Lady Margot (Decline and Fall), Spada e onore (Sword of Honour) and Misfatto negro (Black Mischief). It was not clearly indicated if he was also the dust jacket designer for Ritorno a Brideshead (Brideshead Revisited), which was the first of Waugh’s book published in Italy in 1948.  

The two-hour seminar was attended by about 60 people, mainly local regulars at the Council’s events. Following a short introduction by Giovanni Lamartino of the University of Milan, Professor Martin Stannard spoke about the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, which he claimed, at 43 volumes would be the largest edition of a British author. He explained that behind this ambitious idea was Alexander Waugh, the grandson of Evelyn Waugh, who regretfully was not able to attend the event. He described Alexander as a highly entertaining character, the absolute authority on Evelyn Waugh, a collector, researcher and an expert, a person of exceptional generosity who offered his archive free of charge to all scholars. The 23 editors of the CW have adopted a new and transformative approach to this project, becoming book historians rather than critics or interpreters of Waugh.

This was followed by Professor Simon James from Durham University who is the editor of Decline and Fall. He presented one page of the hand-written manuscript (1927) of the book as an illustration of how Waugh wrote 3, 000 words per day and then how he revised under the pressure of the publisher to soften the tone of his first comic novel. Further on, Dr. Rebecca Moore, who recently completed her PhD as part of the project, gave a presentation about Waugh as a visual artist, with his illustrations in the 1920s magazine The Oxford Broom in German expressionist style. She focused on his 1932 experience at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in Chelsea and then discussed Waugh’s short story “The Balance” (1926) as an autobiographical work. Moore argued that his visual education was reflected in his writing despite the fact that he was unsatisfied with it.  Dr. Sharon Ouditt,  of Nottingham Trent University, the editor of Labels, revealed how Waugh reluctantly worked on his first travel book which partly reflected his failed first marriage.

On the Italian side, Dr. Sarah Sullam addressed Waugh’s reception in Italy after Bompiani decided to commission the 1948 Italian translation of Brideshead Revisited. Bompiani promoted Waugh as a counterpoint to the experimental fiction of Virginia Woolf and  James Joyce. He was also able to promote him in the Catholic press because of Brideshead’s explicit religious theme. But even before this, the foremost Italian literary critic Emilio Cecchi had already praised the novel. Ottavio Fatica, the most recent Italian translator of Brideshead (Ritorno a Brideshead, Tascabili Bompiani 507, 2017) used particular textual examples to compare his work with previous translations in order to illustrate the challenges of translating Waugh into Italian.

“Why this interest in Waugh now?” was the first question from the audience, answered by Stannard who explained that the interest in Waugh had actually never subsided despite  hostile criticism by the liberal British press during the 1960s followed by the publication of his controversial Diaries (1976). “His politics were subversive in a time when most intellectuals were Marxist…But everything will change with the OUP publication.” Stannard also asserted that it is indeed possible for the editors to not be critics, responding to another question. I asked the last question about whether there was an Italian writer similar in style to Waugh. Ottavio Fatica’s answer was a definite “no”.

UPDATE (18 December 2018): An abbreviated version of this article with illustrations and slightly different content can be found on the University of Leicester’s website Waugh and Words.

Share
Posted in Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Complete Works, Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh, Labels, Lectures, Manuscripts, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Waugh in Italy

Gabbitas & Waugh

Posted on November 29, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The educational consultants known as Gabbitas have included the following historical description in their internet prospectus:

Gabbitas has been involved with Independent Education for over 145 years.

We have helped with the education of the British royal family, crowned heads of Europe, famous authors and composers such as Evelyn Waugh, Stephen Fry and Edward Elgar and many other outstanding figures in the arts and sciences.

Founded by Mr Gabbitas in 1873, today we are part of the Shaw Trust, a leading national charity that creates brighter futures for people through work, training and education.

They are presumably referring to their role in helping Evelyn Waugh secure his first job as a schoolmaster at the Arnold House school in North Wales. Waugh worked with the “scholastic agents” Truman & Knightley (Diaries, p. 191). That firm was acquired by what was then Gabbitas & Thring sometime around 1990 and then became Gabbitas, Truman & Thring. That was later at some point shortened to its present name.

Waugh fictionalized the firm as Church and Gargoyle in his first novel Decline and Fall. Mr Levy of that fictional firm explained its classification of schools to Paul Pennyfeather in a frequently quoted passage, most recently appearing an article by Adrian Wooldridge entitled “Hotels from Hell” in the current issue of The Economist’s 1843 magazine:

In Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, “Decline and Fall”, the hero, Paul Pennyfeather, is sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour. Desperate for any job he can get, he visits Church and Gargoyle, scholastic agents. “We class schools into four grades,” says the teaching agency’s boss: “Leading school, first-rate school, good school and school. Frankly, school is pretty bad.”

Much the same can be said of hotels. One of the oddities of a career in journalism is that you find yourself ricocheting between the equivalent of “leading schools” and “schools”. […]

Actor Kevin Eldon makes a proper meal of that scene as Mr Levy in the recent BBC adaptation of Waugh’s novel.

According to a 1996 article in the Spectator, Gabbitas might, with all fairness, have been even more aggressive in associating itself with major literary figures in its prospectus:

Some of the most illustrious names of the 20th century passed thorough the agency after university: Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, W.H. Auden, the scientist Barnes Wallis and the comedy actor Jimmy Edwards among them. There was a simple coding system to assess the social status of young graduates seeking employment. Those considered the least suitable were marked on a card as Good M and A — Good Manner and Appearance; only those in the firm knew that it really meant: impossible to place. This code was used in case the applicant ever saw the card. The highest accolade was: Thorough Gent, Very Good M and A.

Any young man wearing what used to be called library spectacles, with thick frames, had his card marked with a symbol. It indicated he couldn’t be a thorough gent but a left-wing intellectual. Evelyn Waugh, of course, immortalised Gabbitas and Thring in Decline and Fall, as did John Betjeman in Summoned by Bells. The agency found its way into a W.H. Auden poem Letter to Byron.

Gabbitas may also want to do some consulting with Russian language experts since it appears to be targeting Russian expatriates as potential clients. It lists as satisfied clients the “Three Serebryakovas” and “the Serebryakova’s”. They apparently mean the Serebryakov family or, less formally, the Three Serebryakovs (although if they are referring to three sisters of that family, “Three Serebryakovas” might be so understood, if nevertheless seeming somewhat eccentric to Russian speakers) .

Share
Posted in Academia, Decline and Fall, Diaries, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Gabbitas & Waugh

Midweek Roundup

Posted on November 28, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New York Times reviews a new book about Los Angeles. This is David Kipen’s anthology, Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018. According to the review this isn’t exactly a “rescue mission” for the much reviled city:

[Kipen] prints loads of contumely — mostly snobbish disapproval from Eastern visitors — about his hometown. But his book deepens and expands and flyspecks our view of Los Angeles. Consuming it’s a bit like watching an orange-scented, palm tree-lined, gin-soaked version of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour movie montage, “The Clock” […]

Evelyn Waugh complained about “lunch in wineless canteens.” He continued: “We have trained the waiters in the dining-room  not to give us iced water and our chauffeur not to ask us questions. There is here the exact opposite of the English custom by which the higher classes are ecpected to ask personal questions of the lower.”

This quote comes from Waugh’s Diaries (pp. 673-74) for 13 February 1947.

–Novelist and critic Allan Massie writing in the Catholic Herald tries to explain why there are no Roman Catholic characters in Anthony Powell’s novels Dance to the Music of Time:

For many, myself among them, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell were the outstanding English novelists of the middle decades of the 20th century, and I have been reading and re-reading them since I was a schoolboy more than 60 years ago. There aren’t many novelists one doesn’t tire of, but repeatedly returns to. […]

Waugh and Powell were friends, admiring each other’s novels, with more reservations on Powell’s part than Waugh’s. Powell disliked Greene’s novels, though insisting in his Journals that he had nothing against him as a man and would be quite happy to meet him again. I rather question this. Waugh and Greene, scarcely knowing each other at Oxford, became friends in middle life, when both were established as Catholic novelists. More of that, I hope, in a later article.

It is perhaps on account of writing this column that I have become aware of the strange absence of Catholic characters from the 12 volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time. The novel is not autobiographical, though it runs in parallel with Powell’s life, and it would be surprising if he hadn’t other Catholic friends besides Waugh. Indeed, his brother-in-law Frank Pakenham, Lord Longford, was a prominent Catholic (also a convert), so that Powell had Catholic nephews and nieces, among them Lady Antonia Fraser. Longford claimed to have been the model for two Powell characters – the Red peer, Erridge (brother of the narrator Nick Jenkins’s wife) and the appalling if irresistible Widmerpool. (“It’s ridiculous,” Powell said to me, “Frank can’t be both. He must make up his mind which he is.”)

Massie goes on to observe that Powell preferred to write about the occult (referred to in the article as “mumbo-jumbo”) more than about organized religion and populated his novel with characters from that spiritualist milieu; but Massie doesn’t think that Powell himself took it very seriously.

—The Catholic Thing weblog has an article recommending a 1960 novel by Waugh’s friend Alfred Duggan. The article begins with this:

As a brief respite from the turmoil in Church and State these days, I’ve been indulging myself with a very pleasant read through Alfred Duggan’s novel (1960) The Cunning of the Dove– a fictional re-creation of the turmoil in Church and State in the days of King Edward the Confessor (1042-1066). Some things, it seems, never really change.

Duggan was a friend of Evelyn Waugh’s, a conservative Catholic, a powerful yet graceful writer who deserves to be better known for a series of novels set in the Middle Ages. As Waugh wrote of him: “This century has been prolific in historical novels, many garish, some scholarly. I know of none which give the same sense of intimacy as Alfred’s – as though he were describing personal experiences and observations.”…

Duggan died in 1964 and the quote is from a memorial message that Waugh delivered on the BBC; the text was published in the Spectator and later that year in the US Jesuit journal America. It is collected in EAR, p, 625.

–The National Catholic Register recommends a list of 5 Catholic novels. Among them is Waugh’s Helena:

It might come as a surprise that I am recommending Evelyn Waugh’s Helena (1950), this great Catholic novelist’s sole historical work over what is, pretty much objectively, his greatest work, the magnificent Brideshead Revisited (1945). Well, my recommendation is based solely on my great love of Saint Helen, who was the patroness of the parish to which I was assigned as a newly ordained priest (and note that I was able to get a mention in of the more famous Brideshead, all the while introducing Helena!) It is stated that Waugh himself believed that this was his best novel. This is the story of Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, and her quest to find the relics of the Lord’s Cross. It is a social commentary with allegories to life in Britain at the time of Waugh’s writing of the novel, while at the same time offering us a pious life of the great Saint, Helena. And the character of Helena herself is wise and witty. Although not Waugh’s usual style, this is a true pleasure to read.

–The Sunday Times (South Africa) has published an interview of novelist Lucinda Riley. Here’a an excerpt:

What is your most treasured book?

When I received my first big advance, I bought myself a first edition copy of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

Riley’s latest novel is The Moon Sister. This seems to be part of a series celled The Seven Sisters of which this is Book 5.

Share
Posted in Catholicism, Diaries, Essays, Articles & Reviews, Evelyn Waugh, Helena, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Midweek Roundup

Thanksgiving Roundup

Posted on November 23, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–Author William Giraldi contributed an essay to Commonweal magazine as part of a series in which Roman Catholic intellectuals explain why they have left or remained in the church. A Catholic from birth, his article was posted on the magazine’s website earlier this week and is entitled “Why I left…and yet…” Here’s an excerpt from the conclusion:

…I am a Catholic—in culture, in imagination, in storytelling, in my specific grammar of understanding—because of Dante and Hopkins and Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and Simone Weil, because I can’t undo the determining effects their work had on my notion of what literature and thought should be. Nor can I undo my upbringing and the influence it still exerts on my sensibility. […]

When Orwell, writing about Waugh, remarked that one really can’t be Catholic and grown-up at the same time, he was getting at the wild implausibility at the hub of Christianity. But “God” and “Christ” are, above all, terms of poetry, of allegory and metaphor and myth. […]

My new regard for the artistic possibilities of my Catholic past coincided with my rising certainty that unless a novel sets out to confront the sublime, the sacred, the state of the soul—and I mean soul in both the sacral and the secular sense—the novelist is not firing on all eight cylinders. If fiction writers are content to fashion only worn simulacrums of reality, more domestic dramas—the marriage is shot, the bills are due—then they’re barring themselves from an inner cosmos it is art’s job to encounter. The clergy don’t have exclusive say over the sacred; it is the province of writers and poets too.

Giraldi’s novel Hold the Dark was recently made into a motion picture by Netflix.

The Catholic Herald also has an article on the same subject by Mathew Schmitz which contains this reference to Waugh’s letter dated 2 September 1952 to Clarissa Eden whom Waugh was rather persecuting for her marriage to Anthony Eden who was divorced (Letters, p. 381):

When a woman he loved decided to leave the Catholic Church, Evelyn Waugh inquired: “Did you never think how you were contributing to the loneliness of Calvary by your desertion?” Like so much of Waugh’s writing, this was unkind – and absolutely correct.

–Religious historian and blogger Stephanie Mann recommends Waugh’s Robbery Under Law as appropriate reading for the day of remembrance of the Roman Catholic martyr Miguel Pro:

On the memorial of Blessed Miguel Pro the Jesuit priest executed on November 23, 1927 in Mexico, it seems appropriate to remember how Evelyn Waugh, in the introduction to the second edition of his biography of then Blessed Edmund Campion, mentioned that the “Martyrdom of Father Pro in Mexico re-enacted Campion’s in faithful detail” and that the “haunted, trapped, murdered priest is our contemporary.”

She also includes several extended quotes from Robbery Under Law on the subject.

–The online literary magazine Literary Hub has posted a collection of antiquarian dust wrappers, among which is one created by Evelyn Waugh for one of his own novels. The collection was put together by Emily Temple who explains the dust wrapper as we know it today:

…didn’t even exist until the 1820s, and in the beginning they were usually plain, utilitarian things meant quite literally to prevent the books from gathering dust, and they were often discarded by booksellers before display, as much more effort was put into the cloth or cardboard bindings underneath. But beginning at the turn of the last century, publishers began producing decorated dust jackets and simpler bindings (for one thing, it was a lot cheaper), and by 1920 this was the norm.

So just for fun, and because it’s almost the holidays and we all need some Feel Good Content, I’ve collected 32 beautiful, interesting, or otherwise appealing dust jackets of classic works, mostly from the 1920s and 30s. NB that I left off a lot of classics whose covers would be familiar to contemporary readers—no one needs to see that same old covers of The Great Gatsby or Gone With the Wind on a list like this. You’ve seen them a million times already. But have you seen the first edition of Decline and Fall, designed by Evelyn Waugh himself? Either way, read on for some fine and utterly unproblematic book porn.

Readers may be interested to know that a copy of the Waugh dust wrapper illustrated in the article is available from Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC. They also have others available.

–Finally, Scoop features in two recent press reports. In Money Week, a UK-based financial magazine, Matthew Partridge sees in it a lesson for today’s investors who seem to be spooked by their perceptions of technology companies:

Early in the story, one of the old hands, Corker, gives Boot a crash course in journalism, relating the story of Wenlock Jakes, a “star” foreign correspondent whose reports are “syndicated all over America”. On one occasion Jakes accidentally goes to the wrong country, but his completely fictitious report about a revolution is then picked up by other journalists who repeat and embellish it. The result: “government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared”. “In less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way.” […]

The idea that perceptions help create the reality we believe we are merely observing, which then in turn determines our perceptions, is known as reflexivity. […] Technology firms, especially those that are in the early stages of development, are particularly dependent on investors keeping faith with them, because they may need several infusions of capital before they become profitable. The classic example is Amazon, which nearly went bankrupt in the immediate aftermath of the bursting of the dotcom bubble. It was only when the retailer showed that it could turn a profit that credit markets were reassured.

And in the Daily Express, BBC correspondent and program presenter Edward Stourton chooses Scoop as one of his six favorite books.

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Catholicism, Decline and Fall, Edmund Campion, Evelyn Waugh, Letters, Newspapers, Robbery Under Law, Scoop | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Thanksgiving Roundup

Update: Patrick Balfour Copies

Posted on November 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Bonhams has posted additional information regarding the sale of Patrick Balfour’s inscribed copies of several books by Evelyn Waugh. See previous post.:

• An author’s presentation copy of Waugh’s autobiography A Little Learning published in 1964. The book is accompanied by two postcards from the author acknowledging errors in the text that Balfour had identified. Estimate: ÂŁ1,500-2,000.
• A first edition, large paper copy printed on handmade paper and specially bound of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Waugh’s 1957 lightly fictionalized account of his experience of persecution mania caused by the chloral he took for his chronic insomnia. Estimate: ÂŁ1,000-1,500.
• A first edition author’s presentation copy of Men at Arms, the first of the three novels that make up the Sword of Honor trilogy. The inscription reads, “I say, why not send the copy you bought to ‘a friend in the forces’ instead of exchanging it. There are too many houses which lack one.” This may be a witty reference to Waugh’s concerns that the mixed reviews for the novel might affect sales. Estimate: ÂŁ800-1,200.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) and Patrick Balfour (1904-1976) first met at Oxford in the early 1920s, and later in that decade were members of the social set known as The Bright Young Things, satirized in Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies. In the book, Balfour serves as a model for Lord Balcairn – the gossip columnist on the fictitious Daily Excess, whose column, written under the name Mr Chatterbox, is taken over by the central character, Adam Fenwick-Symes. In real life, Balfour – who was heir to the Barony of Kinross – wrote a gossip column for the Evening Standard, and was one of a number of aristocratic young men employed by mass circulation newspapers to recount the exploits of their friends and relations. Waugh often teasingly referred to Balfour as ‘Mr Gossip’.

The two men got to know each other well as war correspondents in Abyssinia (part of present day Ethiopia) during the Second Italian-Abyssinian war of 1935-36. The war provided much of the material for Scoop, Waugh’s satire of the newspaper industry, published in 1938.

Waugh also drew on aspects of Balfour’s life for the character of Lord Kilbannock in the Sword of Honor Trilogy set over the course of the Second World War. In the novels, Ian Kilbannock is a former journalist, working for the military as a press liaison officer. He plays a recurring, and increasingly significant role, in the development of the plot. Balfour himself, who became Lord Kinross on the death of his father in 1939, worked as Director of the Publicity Department in the British Embassy in Cairo in the latter stages of the war, having previously served in naval intelligence […]

Bonhams Head of Fine Books, Matthew Haley, said: “In his fiction, Waugh often drew on aspects of his friends and acquaintances, and the events of his own life. He was too great a writer, though, to offer straight pen portraits, and while the allusions to Patrick Balfour in Sword of Honor are clear, they are artfully woven into the narrative and suffused with the affection Waugh felt for an old and cherished friend.

The sale of these books will occur next Tuesday, 27 November at Bonhams’ Knightsbridge premises.  Details are available here.

Share
Posted in Auctions, Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms, Scoop, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Vile Bodies | Tagged , | Comments Off on Update: Patrick Balfour Copies

Evelyn Waugh to Feature in Great Lives Series

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 4 has announced a new episode in its “Great Lives” series that will feature a panel discussion of Evelyn Waugh. Here is the announcement:

Comedian Russell Kane nominates the novelist Evelyn Waugh, with help from literary critic Ann Pasternak Slater. Chaired by Matthew Parris. One of the greatest prose stylists of 20th century literature, not to mention one of the funniest, novelist Evelyn Waugh also has a reputation for being a snob, a bully, and a dyed in the wool reactionary. How much of this was a self-parodying pose, and how much the underlying truth? Russell and Ann are unabashed Waugh fans – Russell calls him “a ninja master of banter” – but Matthew Parris says he can’t stand him.

Ann Pasternak Slater is a member of the Evelyn Waugh Society, author of Evelyn Waugh (Writers and their Work) and editor of the Short Fiction volumes of the forthcoming Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (volumes 5 and 6). Russell Kane is also well known to Waugh fans having won a Children-in-Need Mastermind Special with Waugh as his subject and presented a recent Radio 4 programme featuring Waugh in the Evil Genius series. See previous post. The Great Lives episode will be broadcast on Tuesday, 11 December 2018 at 16:30 London time and will be available on BBC iPlayer to hear on the internet thereafter.  Other broadcasts  in the current Great Lives series will include Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House on the Prairie) and Gertrude Stein. Here’s a link to the season schedule.

Share
Posted in Complete Works, Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Waugh Society, Radio Programs | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Bullying in the House?

Posted on November 19, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In the 1960 BBC interview of Evelyn Waugh in the Face to Face series, presenter John Freeman posed a series of questions about Waugh’s career at Oxford. Among them are these relating to his children:

Q. Are any of your children old enough now to be at Oxford?

A. One’s gone down, one’s up there now.

Q. Are either of them at your own college? –well, one’s a girl, I believe?

A. The girl’s gone down, she couldn’t go to Hertford, no. The boy’s at the House. (CWEW, v. 19, A Little Learning, p. 558)

Neither of them feels it necessary to explain that Waugh’s answer refers to his son Auberon’s recent matriculation at Christ Church. For the record, Freeman’s college was Brasenose.

The Guardian recently reported something of a scandal at todays’s Christ Church. The present Dean, who has sought to reform some of the college’s arcane procedures and practices, is being “investigated” in a proceeding started by what is described as a “formal complaint […] filed against the Very Rev Martyn Percy with the college’s governing body. Few people know details of what is being alleged, or who is behind the move. Even Percy is largely in the dark, according to his friends. The complaint is believed to centre on issues of governance; no one is suggesting improper personal conduct. It will be heard by a tribunal, which could dismiss Percy. A date for a hearing is yet to be set.”

To provide some context, the article, by Harriet Sherwood, opens with this description of the college:

It is a quintessential institution of the establishment, producing 13 British prime ministers, 10 chancellors of the exchequer and 17 archbishops. Among its former students are King Edward VII, Albert Einstein, Lewis Carroll and WH Auden. One fictional alumnus, Lord Sebastian Flyte, came to personify its privileges in the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

The Guardian, which seems to sympathize with the Dean in this case, questions whether he is being bullied by a cabal of insiders who want to stop his reforms.

Waugh’s placement of Sebastian at Christ Church was probably at one with his snobbish reference to his son’s college in the BBC interview. Sebastian’s primary models, Alastair Graham and Hugh Lygon, were at Brasenose and Pembroke, respectively. Waugh himself told John Freeman that his own first choice would have been New College where his father was a student.  But Christ Church was socially superior to any of those, in Waugh’s eyes at least. And it was the college of his friend Harold Acton, a contributor to the character of Anthony Blanche, who, in turn, recited The Waste Land from a Christ Church balcony.

Auberon in his 1991 autobiography Will This Do? (p. 137) explains that in June 1960 when his father was interviewed, he was unaware that Auberon would not be returning to the “House”, having failed his preliminary exams:

I had done no work and realized that I had no chance of passing. […] My father had generously said he would pay for the long vacation holiday on condition that I passed prelims. Since the results would not appear until the end of vacation, he had to accept my assurance that I would pass.

 

 

Share
Posted in A Little Learning, Academia, Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers, Oxford | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Bullying in the House?

Travel Writers and Catholic Writers

Posted on November 18, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In a long essay in The Smart Set (an online cultural magazine based in Philadelphia), Thomas Swick traces his career as a travel writer. In doing so, he also recounts the history of that literary genre in the 20th century. It flourished in the 20s and 30s. then died during and after the war only to pick up again in the 1970s.  Although he never mentions any of Waugh’s travel books as having particularly influenced him, Swick does mention Waugh in the context of the changes within the travel writng genre:

I had long been attracted to, which meant I was heavily influenced by, British writers, not just in the field of travel, where they excelled, but in the realm of succinct, subtle, dryly humorous prose. And this put me at odds with the American penchant for rambling, word-drunk, often overly earnest texts. The British tendency was to hold things back, while the American one – beginning long before the ’60s – was to let it all out. I much preferred the Latinate sentences of Evelyn Waugh to the overstuffed ones of Thomas – and now Tom – Wolfe. Of course, Fitzgerald had written beautifully measured lines, and Hemingway’s had had a revolutionary leanness, but our contemporary writers – from Mailer to Styron to Bellow to Irving – were all enamored of the sound of their own typing. In travel, Bruce Chatwin had a lapidary crispness that Paul Theroux, for all his Anglophilia, lacked. Instead of understatement, the Americans gave me gonzo.

After discussing his various attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to break into travel writing, Swick found his opportunity in the new wave of travel writing inspired by Paul Fussell’s Abroad and an issue of Granta devoted to travel writing as well as the success of Theroux and Chatwin:

Travel writers were no longer retreating from the scene in their books, letting the locals and their environs speak for themselves; they were the main characters in nonfictional picaresques. They took Evelyn Waugh’s first-person junkets to a higher, more plot-driven level. In Old Glory, published in 1981, the British writer Jonathan Raban sailed the length of the Mississippi River, capturing memorable people and moments but also telling of his personal journey – an adult, solitary, immigrant Huck Finn whose downriver progress was momentarily halted by an affair in St. Louis. Like Theroux, he was infusing and enriching the travel book with elements from the novel, not the least of which were narrative arc and engaging protagonist. Readers could eagerly follow the account of the author’s passage while, almost subliminally, learning about the lands he passed through.

Unlike Theroux, Raban brought a foreign eye to familiar places, which was also a feature of some of the new travel writing. In a world that was increasingly being visited by tourists, he went where the tourists lived, in this case, the small towns and prosaic cities along the Mississippi. And using his deft analytical skills – aided by a formidable knowledge of history and literature, geography and religion – he was able to make his readers see them anew. Interpreting a landscape, wresting out its meanings as opposed to simply describing its features, was another aspect of the new travel writing, one that was essential with the growing ubiquity of the camera.

Swick finally reached his goal of establishing himself as a travel writer and the results can be seen in his book The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them. Although not mentioned, there is a possible interesting connection between Waugh and Raban. Catherine Waugh, Evelyn’s mother, was from a family named Raban, a less common name even than Waugh. Jonathan Raban seems to be working on an autobiography of some sort, having recently published essays about his parents and childhood in recent LRB articles, but never seems to have explored this question of a relationship with those other novelist-travel writers, the Waughs.  Or perhaps he has and I missed it? Comments invited below.

The TLS in this week’s “NB” column includes a discussion by columnist J.C. of “Catholic scribes”. This was inspired, as are many of the discussions in his column, by the recent acquisition of a book from a bookstall during one of his “perambulations”. In this case it was

…Altar &Pew, edited by John Betjeman, a little anthology in the Pocket Poets series published by Vista Books in the 1950s […] (ÂŁ1 from a Charing Cross Road barrow). The topic is “Church of England verses”, but you won’t find any more of those nowadays than you will Catholic novels. […]

What happened to all the Catholic writers? Once, they were legion. Graham Greene is probably the most reputable, part of the attraction being that he gloried in the disreputable. Evelyn Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930, at the age of twenty-seven, explaining later that he had realized that life was “unintelligible and unendurable without God”. Muriel Spark, a protĂ©gĂ© of both Greene and Waugh, left behind her Jewish family background and Edinburgh’s Calvinist air, to embrace the Roman faith in the mid-1950s. These three were converts; Anthony Burgess was a cradle Catholic. Hilaire Belloc converted from having lapsed, if that makes theological sense. […] In our age of brutalist profanity, who will guide us through death’s dark vale? David Lodge and Piers Paul Read are perhaps the closest we have to inheritors of the Catholic strain in literature.[…] It is hard to imagine a successful contemporary writer saying, as Waugh did, that he or she found life unintelligible without God. Much more trendy to say the opposite: that life is unintelligible with Him. Betjeman’s anthology ends with Philip Larkin, the youngest writer in the book (thirty-seven at the time of publication). The poem is “Church Going”:
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Thanks to a reader for sending a link. The full article is behind a paywall.

Share
Posted in Evelyn Waugh, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Travel Writers and Catholic Writers