Evelyn Waugh Annual Lecture: 2023

Lancing College has announced the details of their annual Evelyn Waugh Lecture to be convened next month at the college. Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

We are delighted to have Oliver Soden (Teme 2003–2008) [writer, broadcaster and OL] as the guest speaker for our Evelyn Waugh Lecture…

[His book] Michael Tippett: The Biography was hailed by Philip Pullman as a “delight to read”; by the Spectator as “an exceptional piece of work”; and by Gramophone as “nothing short of miraculous”. Book of the Year in the Spectator,Times Literary Supplement and Observer, it was read (by the author) for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, with Sir Derek Jacobi playing Tippett. The book won both a Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Storytelling; it was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown.

Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat, a semi-fictionalised biography of the cat who belonged to eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, was acclaimed as “inspired and original” by Hilary Mantel and as “the most beautiful and haunting book of recent times” by Alexander McCall Smith. Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, it was championed as “a little classic” by Dame Eileen Atkins on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read.

Masquerade, the first biography of Noël Coward in nearly thirty years, will be published on 16 March 2023.

Oliver’s writing – on art, music and literature – has appeared in the Guardian, Spectator, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and Literary Review; he is a frequent guest speaker on BBC Radio 3, and has been interviewed for the Six O’Clock News (BBC Radio 4) and for Times Radio and ABC Radio National. He is Chair of the Michael Tippett Musical Foundation and has worked on award-winning television documentaries such as Janet Baker: In Her Own Words and for BBC Radio 3’s long-running programme Private Passions. After Lancing Oliver went on to Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in English. Born in 1990, he grew up in Bath and Sussex, and lives in London.

This very special occasion is by invitation only and open to all members of the Lancing Foundation in recognition of their support for the College…

The lecture is scheduled for 20 April 2023 at 645p at the college.  It is not open to the public, although the college has on occasion in the past allowed individual members of the Evelyn Waugh Society to attend if they request permission and space is available. Contact Alexandra Friedman, Events Coordinator.

 

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Early March Roundup

–Valerie Grove writing in The Times reviews BBC’s recent rerun of John Betjeman’s program Metroland which was originally broadcast 50 years ago (1973).  Grove had interviewed Betjeman about then when she must have been a cub reporter at the Evening Standard, and she recalls visits with him to his boyhood home in Highgate as well as to Metroland itself where they looked in at Grim’s Dyke a large house which features in the film (“the half-timbered Norman Shaw house where WS Gilbert had lived. In Metro-land, Grim’s Dyke was Betjeman’s suburban prototype: tall brick chimneys, gabled windows, leaded lights, lawns and rhododendron walks.”) Here’s an excerpt from her article:

Metro-land was the best of Betjeman’s TV films, and a revelation. Between 1920 and 1940, the ancient villages, manors and farmlands in Middlesex and Hertfordshire had been seized on by the railway and Messrs Wates, Wimpey & co, to build “homes fit for heroes” — 1,500 a week in Greater London alone. In 1938 you could buy a £479 semi for a down-payment of 11s (55p), until expansion paused under the Green Belt Act.

From London’s hinterland sprang Michael Frayn, Julian Barnes (first novel, Metroland); also Elton John, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Mick Jagger. From one pair of suburban schools, Harrow County, came Michael Portillo, Diane Abbott and Clive Anderson.

But suburbia was always patronised. George Orwell wrote of “Ellesmere Road, West Bletchley”, identical to innumerable others with houses named “The Laurels, The Myrtles, The Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue”. Evelyn Waugh hated his first address in Golders Green. Kingsley Amis scorned the ersatz name of Norbury, his childhood suburb in south London. When Eleanor Bron returned from Cambridge to her parents’ semi in Edgware, she felt like Alice: she “could hardly squeeze through the door-jambs”. Claustrophobic, conventional, the suburbs were a place to escape from.

Betjeman understood this. He could fondly mock the pretensions of suburbia, the parades of little shops. But such was his boundless enthusiasm for architecture, he wanted to share with everyone the decorative details of ironwork, balustrades, stained-glass motifs of rising suns. Metro-land brilliantly captured that. Some suburbs were indeed “frankly hideous,” wrote James Richards, editor of the Architectural Review. But as JB Priestley had said, they made people moderately happy. Meanwhile, by the time of Betjeman’s film, drab blocks of grey concrete were already springing up all over Metroland. Now, they’re vandalised and graffitied. If he were here, Betjeman might murmur, echoing Christopher Wren: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

I would agree with her that this is the best of several films Betjeman made for the BBC.  It is still fresh and enjoyable.  BBC has it posted for streaming on BBC iPlayer until March 25.  Here’s a link. A British internet connection is required.

–Another article in an earlier issue of The Times features an opening paragraph that prominently refers to a  Waugh novel in connection with recent news about the Scottish Nationalist Party:

In Evelyn Waugh’s Second World War Sword of Honour trilogy, the Scottish nationalists are a tiny fringe group of anti-English plotters living on remote islands in draughty castles. They are dotty dreamers, high on romantic tales of Jacobitism and Bonnie Prince Charlie. There was a darker side to it in real life: the wartime nationalists also dreamt of a German invasion because it would mean Britain’s defeat and dissolution.

Waugh was writing about that period from the perspective of the 1950s. Scottish nationalism then was a twee tartan joke — and oh, how unionists laughed.

Until last [month] and the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, unionists hadn’t been doing much laughing for a while. From the 1960s, the SNP advanced steadily until it became, after the launch of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999, the official opposition and then the government north of the border…

–The Australian paper Toowoomba Chronicle published an interview with British author Alexander McCall Smith which included this exchange:

Q. What book do you reread?

A. There are two writers I re-read. I have re-read Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy many times. The story of Guy Crouchback and his experiences is, I think, Waugh’s greatest work. I also like to re-read E F Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels. These, in my opinion, are amongst the finest achievements in comic art in the English language.

–In its obituary of biographer Philip Ziegler, who died last month, The Daily Telegraph included this:

By [1980] he had completed a biography of Lady Diana Cooper, the beautiful, aristocratic socialite who had bewitched Evelyn Waugh in the 1920s – she was the inspiration for Waugh’s Mrs Stitch – the only book Ziegler published during the lifetime of its subject. “She had no doubt that it must be,” Ziegler explained in the foreword to Diana Cooper (1981), “and was indeed amazed that any other idea should have occurred to me.”

Even though “the wrong Lady Diana”, as she latterly styled herself, was possessed of total recall, Ziegler conceded that the enterprise had not been without difficulties, and pressed ahead pretending that the problem of a still-living subject did not exist, never asking himself what she would think when eventually she read the book.

–The Irish Times recently ran a story about the most frequently borrowed library books in Ireland.  This notice was near the end of the story:

A LGMA [Local Government Management Agency] spokesperson said many of the most borrowed ebook and audiobook titles reflected novels that had proven popular across special literary social media accounts like Bookstagram and Booktok including The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Waugh [sic] by Taylor Jenkins Reid; The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley; and the young adult title We Were Liars by E Lockhart.

A search on Amazon.co.uk produced the book’s correct title: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

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Waugh’s Ash Wednesdays

On this Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in the Western Christian Churches, the National Catholic Register has posted an article recounting how Evelyn Waugh and his colleague Fr Ronald Knox observed the occasion. Here’s the Waugh version:

He spoke about it flippantly when he was a dissolute and essentially pagan high school student.

“I think that I shall be forced into Lenten self-denial as my funds are rapidly decreasing and there is little prospect of more for a long time yet,” Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary.

He entered the Church 10 years later, in 1930, at the age of 27, and he may seem from appearances not to have gotten the idea of Lenten discipline even after years in the Church. I think he got it very well, though no priest would hold him up as an ideal of Lenten discipline.

“I have ‘given up’ wine and tobacco. Laura wine,” he wrote in his diary in 1948. “As a result we drank heavily on Sunday 15th. … My Lenten resolution to start work on Helena has not come to much.” (Laura is his wife and Helena his biography of the Emperor Constantine’s mother, said to have discovered the True Cross. The book appeared in 1950.) And then three weeks later: “A hangover from Sunday’s remission of Lenten abstinence. … When the hangover is over I shall work on Helena.”

Most famous now as the author of Brideshead Revisited, a romantic treatment of God’s work in people’s lives, he was one of the last century’s Catholic writers who was also a major writer in the wider world. G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene and J.R.R. Tolkien were others.

On Ash Wednesday 1953, he wrote that he had gotten his ashes and had resolved to give up opiates for Lent. He took the drugs for insomnia. A month later he reported that “Lent began well.”

In 1956, he “resolved to make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament daily during Lent and to eschew gin and paraldehyde,” the drug he then took for insomnia. Eight days after that, he notes “I have kept my Lenten resolution to eschew gin and visit the church daily,” but doesn’t mention the drugs.

Waugh didn’t, as far as I can find, write much more about Ash Wednesday and Lent. He wasn’t a great one for asceticism. He doesn’t mention either in his letters, and only once in his collected essays. But that once was beautiful.

After a review of Knox’s more subdued observances, the article returns to Waugh and concludes:

Given those drunken Lenten Sundays, Waugh may seem not to have gotten the idea of Lenten discipline. He did, even if like most of us he didn’t always observe it the way he should.

There is this, written in an essay titled “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church,” published in Life magazine in 1949. He described Ash Wednesday in New Orleans, the city looking “draggled” after Mardi Gras. Hungover tourists about to go home filled the hotel, and he wondered how many knew about Lent.

“But across the way the Jesuit Church was teeming with life all day long; a continuous, dense crowd of all colours and conditions moving up to the altar rails and returning with their foreheads signed with ash. And the old grim message was being repeated over each penitent: ‘Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.’”

He continues: “One grows parched for that straight style of speech in the desert of modern euphemisms. 
 Here it was, plainly stated, quietly accepted, and all that day, all over that light-hearted city, one encountered the little black smudge on the forehead which sealed us members of a great brotherhood who can both rejoice and recognize the limits of rejoicing.”

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Presidents’ Day Roundup

The London Magazine has posted two articles from its recent offerings that comment on Evelyn Waugh. The first is from an unsigned Poetry and Politics column:

Contemporary parliamentarians, in my experience, are not specially attuned to contemporary verse. There are significant exceptions. The former culture secretary, Chris Smith, presides over the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage, a venue for poets, and is an expert on the Romantics. Kenneth Baker, a former Home Secretary, has compiled fine anthologies for Faber. When in the 1970s and 1980s I worked in Parliament, many members had enjoyed, or suffered, a classical education. Enoch Powell was a full Professor of Greek at the age of 25. Quintin Hailsham, Lord Chancellor when I joined the Cabinet, knew reams of Greek and Latin poetry by heart. Denis Healey, still happily with us, was famous for his cultural hinterland. Of these three, Powell wrote and published a few poems. They are quite death-directed (he reminds me of Ludovic in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour war trilogy) and a bit creepy; certainly less well composed than his speeches…

The other reference is from an article entitled “And the Night Watchman Talks On” about the 20th Century writer W W Jacobs. According to the article, he is today remembered only for a short story entitled “The Monkey’s Paw”.  But in earlier times his writings were widely admired:

…Greene considered Jacobs, along with Wodehouse and George Birmingham, one of the top three English comic writers of the past century. Priestly called Jacobs ‘a most finished conscientious and delicate artist’. Pritchett said Jacobs was one of ‘the supreme craftsmen of the short story’ and praised his ‘pellucid economy’. Evelyn Waugh said Jacobs ‘developed an exquisite precision of narrative’. And Ian Hay wrote ‘
Jacobs was much more than a writer of amusing or creepy tales; he was one of the greatest masters of story construction, especially short story construction, in our language. Moreover, he invented an entirely new form of humorous narrative. Its outstanding characteristics were compression and understatement’…

Waugh’s opinion of W W Jacobs work is taken somewhat out of context.  It is not from a review of his work but  rather from an assessment of his family which had become well known and close to Waugh’s own as a result of his brother Alec’s engagement to Barbara Jacobs, one of the writer’s many children.  The quoted passage from Waugh’s autobiography continues:

…[W W Jacobs] was at the height of his power and reputation when I came to observe him, but I was not impressed. His stories had been read aloud at Heath Mount; I did not regard them as ‘literature’; they were ‘prep school’ stuff; nor did his children take any pride in his achievements. They were taught to see him as a niggardly breadwinner.  Lately [early 1960s] he has come to the notice of serious students of fiction. I doubt whether he often raises laughter among the young as he used.[…] He was a secular puritan, one of those ‘who have not got the faith and will not have the fun’, and all his opinions were those of Lord Northcliffe. But concealed behind this drab facade, invisible to my boyish eye, there lurked a pure artist. (A Little Learning, p. 118)

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending along this cite.

–London tabloid The Sun carries a story describing previous attempts by British candy and soft drink makers to offer new products that failed but might now be worth reviving. One of these was a chocolate bar named Flyte:

The Flyte was basically a two-pack of Flake-shaped Milky Way bars with a new wrapper… THE marketing department at Mars must have thought they were on to a winner when they imagineered these back in the mid-nineties. They seemed to promise so much – twin bars of whipped nougat covered in chocolate and with less fat, too. It was basically a two pack of Flake-shaped Milky Ways with a new wrapper. Still, it wasn’t exactly diet food. Maybe that was its undoing. The fact it shared its name with the tragic hero of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel Brideshead Revisited meant it was probably doomed to failure.

A color photo of a Flyte bar accompanies the story but does not appear to offer any incentive to try one.

–The New Statesman has a review of a new musical that opened at the Old Vic. This is called Sylvia and is based on the life of suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. Here’s an excerpt:

…Sylvia was an artist, newspaper editor and journalist – her diverse campaigning skills continue to resonate with today’s young. So does her work on maternal and universal healthcare, cost-price restaurants for the precariat, and committed vegetarianism. She went on to work with her erstwhile opponent Winston Churchill in raising the alarm about European fascism. She took up the Ethiopian cause against Mussolini’s invasion when the likes of Evelyn Waugh were writing in the Evening Standard that it was “a barbarous country”…

–An article in The Conversation reconsiders the present standing of the British aristocracy:

They don’t dominate parliament, they don’t own Twitter and they don’t star in big Hollywood movies. Yet the British aristocracy’s capacity to intrigue and enthral seems boundless.

The continuing popularity of the TV and film series Downton Abbey, Evelyn Waugh’s upper-crust novel Brideshead Revisited and Nancy Mitford’s autobiographical The Pursuit of Love underscore the popular appetite for all things aristocratic…This has intensified recently with a wave of biographies and memoirs (long predating Prince Harry’s royal hand grenade, Spare). A notable publishing phenomenon was 91-year-old Lady Glenconner’s 2019 autobiography, A Lady In Waiting which became a New York Times bestseller, and 2020’s well-received Diary of an MP’s Wife by Baroness Sasha Swire…

The attraction is peering inside aristocrats’ mysterious world, to feel its privilege and strangeness, its peculiarly gilded yet feudal lifestyle and wealth. Aristocrat biographies reveal the secrets behind the persistence of ancient privilege in modern Britain. But academic studies and fictional accounts of the British aristocracy have painted a glummer picture. Whether you read David Cannadine’s definitive history The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy or Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the message remains the same: like their grand estates, aristocrats have fallen into ruin. Which portrayal is correct? …

The Economist has printed a letter in reply to its recent article (previously noted) comparing Rishi Sunak’s career to that of Paul Pennyfeather in Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall:

The university of life

I disagree that “things only get worse” for Paul Pennyfeather in Evelyn Waugh’s “Decline and Fall” after he is sent down from the fictional Scone College in Oxford (“Rishi Pennyfeather”, January 28th). Pennyfeather’s adventures in a series of situations teach him far more about life than he would have learned from his schooldays, his university career, or his intended profession as a clergyman.

He meets and gets an understanding of the “preposterous inhabitants” of the private school where he works for a while as a teacher. He is initiated into sex by a beautiful and wealthy woman. He hears confessions from a series of vivid characters, among them a child abuser, a clergyman who is lacking faith, a criminal impostor, and a successful rags-to-riches politician. He undergoes the experience of prison, where, like anyone who has been through the public-school experience, he feels “comparatively at home”. He will in due course be ordained as a clergyman, but one endowed with a far deeper and richer acquaintance with human nature and life than would have been the case if he had never been debagged by the Bollinger (aka Bullingdon) Club.

Rishi Sunak, as you correctly say, “is surrounded by colleagues whose decisions cause him harm”. The effect on Paul Pennyfeather of the decisions made by others is, ultimately, to do him good.

simon jackson
Brighton

UPDATE (22 February 2023): The reference to Waugh’s discussion of W W Jacobs that appeared in The London Magazine has been updated to provide a fuller context.

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75th Anniversary of The Loved One

The Loved One appeared in print 75 years ago this month in the pages of Cyril Connolly’s  magazine Horizon. Waugh had begun writing it on 21 May 1947 shortly after his return to England from Los Angeles.  He finished a first written draft in early July, with final typescript revisions by 14 September. He offered it to Connolly on 16 September, and Connolly accepted subject to some revisions of his own to which Waugh agreed.  It was also offered to American magazines, with particular hope, on Waugh’s part, that the New Yorker would take it up; but they rejected it, deeming it (according to Selina Hastings) yet another “Hollywood novel” in the wake of those by Nathaniel West, Aldous Huxley, et al. One can’t help suspecting that Edmund Wilson may have a hand in that decision. By December 1947, a final version including all revisions had been prepared.

Waugh agreed to have it published for the price of his yearly Horizon subscription in  recognition that Connolly’s magazine was struggling to survive. In the introduction which Connolly wrote for the Horizon version, he quotes at length Waugh’s public explanation for the pre-book publication.  Waugh recognized that the subject matter was controversial and wanted to see what sort of reaction it would receive from sophisticated readers such as those who subscribed to Horizon.  Indeed, Waugh and his agent A D Peters had at first concluded that the book was too controversial for publication in the United States, and Peters feared that it would wreck the valuable American readership that had developed in response to the American publication of Brideshead Revisited in 1946.

Waugh said that he “anticipated ructions” from the book. As it turned out, these began even before the magazine appeared. Connolly faced considerable opposition from his Horizon publisher Peter Watson who found the book unacceptably bleak, negative and offensive. But Connolly prevailed, and the magazine containing The Loved One appeared in due course (about 17 February 1948). This was the full text of the book, not an abbreviated version and took up that entire 159-page edition of the magazine. It was sold out in a week. Book publication in the UK was postponed by C&H because they did not want it to interfere with sales of Scott King’s Modern Europe that had been published in the UK only a few weeks before in December 1947.

Little Brown had no such qualms since they had not yet published SKME and could postpone that book’s release to 1949. The Loved One therefore was published in America in June 1948 (probably about 22 June when the first newspaper reviews began to appear) and had warranted 4 additional printings by August 1948.  Indeed, according to Martin Stannard, it would have been published sooner, but Little Brown had to await legal opinion and make necessary revisions to avoid libel actions before it could be released.  This was the only occasion where US hardcover book publication of a Waugh novel preceded UK book version release.  Stannard wrote that the book received generally favorable reviews in the US. Time magazine, then an important arbiter of US taste, devoted six columns to The Loved One, something not done for any previous book.

UK book publication took place in November 1948. By then the 9,500 Horizon copies would have already circulated and, in at least one case, The Loved One had already been reviewed from that magazine edition. This was Peter Quennell who reviewed it in The Daily Mail, 21 February 1948, p. 2. Here are some excerpts:

“…brilliant short novel…among the finest things that he has ever written…Neatly and forcefully written by a novelist to whom the art of story-telling seems to come as second nature, it abounds in a dry, malicious wit and flashes with strokes of satirical observation; it made me laugh aloud again and again; and that alone, in February 1948, is something to be grateful for…”

When the hardcover book was published in November, the UK reviews were largely favorable —eg, TLS (anonymous: Marie Hannah), Manchester Guardian (Alistair Cooke) and Sunday Times (Desmond MacCarthy). Novelist Olivia Manning, reviewing it  pseudonymously in the New Statesman, was more reserved.

The book has probably remained in print without interruption in both the US and UK markets since its publication. A Penguin edition appeared in the UK in 1951, with Modern Library and Dell paperback editions in the US shortly thereafter. In 1965, a Hollywood film adaptation was made by MGM, the studio which had turned down Brideshead Revisited. This was written by Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern and directed by Tony Richardson. Although it was panned at the time of its release, the film continues to show up on classic movie channels and DVDs. The portions satirizing the British film colony are actually very well written (probably by Isherwood who would have followed the book) and performed (esp. John Gielgud and Robert Morley). But the insertion of a plot by Southern under which Whispering Glades will be emptied by rocketing the corpses into outer space and the land used for a retirement home simply doesn’t work. It isn’t funny despite the efforts of comedian Jonathan Winters who plays both the cemetery owner and his brother who plots the acquisition of the rockets from the military.

 

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Valentine’s Day Roundup

–David Mills writing in The Times takes another look at the novels of post-Waugh English satirist Simon Raven. He considers the 1969 novel The Rich Pay Late, the first of 10 in Ravens’s Alms for Oblivion series:

…Raven is astoundingly snobbish, despising any connection with business and adhering to values that were out of date by the 1860s. “Clean” money can only come “from wide and prudently managed acres”. Salinger [a character from The Rich Pay Late] is condescended to because he has bought his stately home himself, mixes with stockbrokers and holds the lavish ball to celebrate his wedding on a Saturday night, “typical of a parvenu”.

Such baroquely elaborate snobbery combined with a propensity for the sudden, heartless dispatch of characters to a grisly end often when least expected (“Miss Beatty was found in her flat this morning. Or rather, most of her was”) might seem reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, except Waugh’s novels always have a moral core, either Catholic or a passive innocence adrift in a wicked world.

There is no innocence in Raven. Everyone is self-interested and duplicitous, with a diverting sexual perversion to boot. The one possible exception in The Rich Pay Late is Peter Morrison, an MP out of the pages of Trollope, “a man of conscience and goodwill, a wealthy, landed young man who conceived it his duty to take part in a public life”. Yet even he, in sidestepping a wrong, turns it to his own advantage with surprising political calculation…

–Duncan McLaren has added a new discussion to his website. This is an analysis of Evelyn Waugh’s admiration for the writings of P G Wodehouse. It was inspired by Duncan’s receipt of an email from a Wodehouse fan who may play an equivalent role in Wodehouse studies as that of Duncan in the world of Waugh. One surprising revelation (to me at least) is that Wodehouse had a more critical opinion of Waugh’s writing than Waugh had of Wodehouse’s. Here’s a link.

–The website digital journal Literary Hub has an article entitled “An Unequal Partnership: On the Marriage of Kingsley Amis and Jane Howard”.  This is by Carmela Ciuraru who makes this interesting observation at the beginning of the article:

…Jane was well acquainted with men behaving badly, especially as she tried to assert her position among London’s male-dominated literary set. Once, while conducting what would be Evelyn Waugh’s final broadcast interview—for the BBC, in 1964—Jane endured his belittling comments (“Ah, Miss Howard—and have you had anything to do with literature?”) and dotty remarks to the camera crew: “When is Miss Howard going to take off all her clothes?” She was fond enough of men to overlook their more beastly moments, and for Kingsley she seemed to retain an infinite store of patience and forgiveness…

–John Self writing in the latest issue of The Critic reviews the career of American novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

…Ellis was launched into the dazzle of immediate success with his novel Less Than Zero (1985), which he began writing when still at school. Its opening line — “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles” — didn’t just introduce three of his recurring motifs (LA, cars, fear) but perfected out of the box his affectless style, even if Joan Didion had pioneered it 15 years earlier with Play It As It Lays. […]

Less Than Zero was received with the combination of admiration and horror that a good publicist can only dream of. “Mr Ellis clearly possesses talent, and the drive to do something with his gifts,” wrote the New York Times, adding that the book was “one of the most disturbing novels I’ve read in a long time.”

The book was frightening because it showed the world its author knew, and the blankness of the style meant its satirical intent wasn’t immediately clear. (The New York Times reviewer “read it with the worrying sense that it might all be true”.) Still, there’s no doubt that Ellis, like Evelyn Waugh before him, was half in love, or at least half-obsessed, with the world he was simultaneously mocking…

–An article in Public Discourse  the journal of the Witherspoon Institute considers a recent essay by a Roman Catholic clergyman on the Church’s inclusiveness (or lack thereof). The article is by Professor Christopher Tollefsen from the University of South Carolina and opens with this:

I was thinking about Julia Flyte as I read the recent essay by Cardinal Robert McElroy in America. Lady Julia is a central character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Married to a divorcĂ©, and living out of wedlock with Charles Ryder, she has a near breakdown late in the novel when her callous brother explains why he cannot bring his fiancĂ©e Beryl to Julia’s house: “It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin with Rex or Charles or both—I have always avoided enquiry into the details of your mĂ©nage—but in no case would Beryl consent to be your guest.”

Julia’s response is powerful for expressing her awareness that, as much of an ass as Bridey might be, “He’s quite right. . . . He means just what it says in black and white. Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing in it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it around, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it’s fretful.”

This confession anticipates her final conversion of heart as her father is dying, a conversion that Charles could see coming “all this year,” and portending the end of his relationship with Julia…

After several additional references to the novel as well as to Waugh’s 1947 memo to the MGM movie studio regarding its possible film adaptation, the article closes with this:

…Too often the Church has been Bridey, insensitive and cloddish in its pastoral care of sinners; Cardinal McElroy is correct to note the failures. But it has also failed, and now no less than in other times, to speak truthfully while resting assured, again quoting Waugh’s memo, in “how the Grace of God turns everything in the end to good.”

The Chattanoogan a local digital news site includes the following in a list of things to see in Los Angeles:

Forest Lawn Museum https://forestlawn.com/museum/ in Glendale is one of the leading cemeteries that have made L.A. a destination for those who want to visit the final resting places of the stars (after being given a tour, English novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote the bestselling novel The Loved One, a satire of the local funeral industry, which was turned into a classic film). Among those who called it their eternal home were Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers (staff won’t point out where they are, so check online sources). Founder Hubert Eaton made it essentially a vast museum of art celebrating religion and history, placing original statues and paintings, as well as reproductions of major works, around the grounds and in its churches and mausoleums (ask for the map). The largest is the painting “The Crucifixion” by Joan Styka, whose curtains measure 440’x50′. The Forest Lawn Museum itself has many notable works, including Frederic Remington’s bronze “The Bronco Buster,” Fletcher Ransom’s oil on canvas “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and even a small head from Easter Island. The biggest surprise is the exhibit on Bob Barker’s Marionette Theater, which in 1963 began putting on legendary shows with puppets controlled by string …

It is gratifying to see this recommendation, since Forest Lawn has fallen quite far from its status as a leading tourist destination in 1947 when Waugh made his visits.

 

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Roundup: Country Houses and Leisurely Lunches

–An essay entitled “‘The Ancient Lore’ of Brideshead Revisited” written by Ianto Fox has been posted on the internet. Here’s an excerpt from the author’s description of its content:

Nearly all commentary on Brideshead over the years has focused on the backdrop of Catholicism in the novel; the by-gone era of the English aristocracy; the homosexuality of Sebastian Flyte; the presence or lack of this in Charles Ryder, and nostalgia for the salad days of youth. As the full title of the novel suggests, “The Sacred and Profane Memories”. The story quite deliberately ends when Charles is about to turn forty years old…

Possibly because of the era in which I was born, the central theme of the novel never appeared to me to be the waning of Catholic influence in England, nor the struggles of those Catholic families, nor a by-gone time before television, computer and cell phone screens, when ladies and men wore extravagant hats and asked each other if they were “dining out”, and the delights of jazz clubs when that was the radical new music, although the latter nevertheless was one of the primary attractions of the book. To me, especially upon a second reading as one burrowed one’s way through one’s twenties, the central theme is that of a warning to those in their twenties and thirties, especially as they approach their fortieth birthday, like Charles Ryder is, when we meet him for the first time. Brideshead Revisited is a warning that, as one gets older, one must maintain past, present and future in equal measure in order to grow older successfully. One must keep one’s passions and great memories, but one must move forward and leave the past behind: otherwise, by trying to obtain what one had, or missed out on in one’s adolescence and young adulthood, one will decay in his thirties and forties and destroy the things he loves, as Oscar Wilde put it…

The entire text is available to read at this link.  Thanks to Ianto for sending us a copy.

–The latest issue of Esquire has an article entitled “Why You Should Make Your Lunch a Long One: Nothing says existential despair like an al desko sandwich”. This is written by Matthew Fort and opens with this:

“They were nearly an hour over luncheon. Course followed course in disconcerting abundance, while Colonel Blount ate and ate, turning the leaves of his book and chuckling frequently. They ate hare soup and boiled turbot and stewed sweetbreads and black Bradenham ham with Madeira sauce and roast pheasant and a rum omelette and toasted cheese and fruit. First they drank sherry, then claret, then port. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to have a little nap’,” says Colonel Blount in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

In less than an hour! Blimey. That’s going it a bit. Cramming that lot into less than several hours suggests a degree of vulgar excess. Lunch is to be loved. Lunch is to be lingered over. To lunch properly is to loiter with intent.

Waugh was writing about the tail-end of the greatest era for lunching, the reign of Edward VII, himself no nibbler. Sir Harold Nicolson, MP, diplomat, journalist, writer, husband to Vita Sackville-West, wrote eloquently of the dietary demands in that time of gastronomic exuberance (at least for the upper middle and upper classes), in his essay “The Edwardian Weekend”. He depicts it as a leisurely peregrination from one Lucullan blow-out to the next…

Fort goes on to describe what has been lost with the passing of the leisurely lunch tradition. Here’s a link.

–iUniverse, a self-publishing company, has announced the release of a book entitled Evelyn Waugh: The Novelist. The announcement explains that the author “Prof Jagdish Chandra Jha has done yeoman’s service to the scholar community of English literature by bringing into print his thesis on Evelyn Waugh, the great novelist, in fact one of the most famous authors of English literature.” A description of Prof. Jha’s career follows. The announcement, which also includes a summary of the book, as well as purchase instructions are available here. There is also an invitation to post a review of the book.

Country Life magazine invokes Waugh’s patronage as a selling point for a Dartmoor country house near the village of Chagford:

…Chagford … is an ancient and thriving Devon market town within the Dartmoor National Park, 20 miles west of the cathedral city of Exeter. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the town’s former Easton Court Hotel was a popular writers’ retreat, where Evelyn Waugh reputedly completed A Handful of Dust in 1933 and Brideshead Revisited in 1944…

The Gazette (Blackpool) announces the screenings of two films with local Lancashire themes one of which it believes may appeal to Evelyn Waugh fans:

…The short features are Granny, which celebrates the life of Lizzy Ashcroft, a star of the Preston-based Dick Kerr Ladies football in the early 20th century, and Flyte of Fancy, which was filmed at Lytham Hall last summer is set in the late 1930’s. It builds on the suggestion that Lytham squire Harry Clifton had been a friend and inspiration to Evelyn Waugh for the character of Sebastian Flyte in his book Brideshead Revisited. Waugh himself visited Lytham Hall on more than one occasion…

In Flyte of Fancy, a mysterious man claiming to be author Evelyn Waugh’s butler visits Lytham Hall, the home of Waugh’s friend from Oxford, Harry Clifton.  The lead is played by former Emmerdale actor Mathew Bose, who played Paul Lambert in the soap, supported by Lytham-born Martyn Coyne as Lomax and Anne Bouget as Violet Clifton. The screenplay was written by local playwright David Slattery-Christy, with significant research having been carried out through Oxford University. It was filmed and directed by local filmmaker Gillian Wood.

Sunday’s premiere screenings will be at The Pavilion in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens on Sunday, February 12 between 5.30pm and 6.45pm and Flyte of Fancy director Gillian Wood and Granny writer Michelle Crane, who is Blackpool-based, will be available afterwards for a question and answer session. It’s a Pay What You Can screening, with seats available for whatever you can afford to give. Details here.

 

 

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Groundhog Day Roundup

The Economist started the week with a story headed by this discussion of a Waugh novel:

Evelyn Waugh, a satirist of pre-war England and of the careless aristocrats who ran it, would have had a field day with the modern Conservative Party. Sometimes it feels as though he already has. Take the resemblance between Rishi Sunak, Britain’s current prime minister, and Paul Pennyfeather, the hapless protagonist of “Decline and Fall”, Waugh’s debut novel.

Pennyfeather is an earnest and unworldly theology student at Oxford, who returns to the fictional setting of Scone College one evening just as the Bollinger Club, an aristocratic drinking society, is embarking on a night of mayhem. Pennyfeather is stripped of his trousers and runs the length of the quadrangle. He is sent down the next day for indecency. From there, things only get worse.

Mr Sunak is no failure. All his life he has been top of the class, from Winchester to Oxford to Stanford and the City, putting scarcely a foot wrong nor a nose out of joint. But much of his agenda is inoffensively sensible. He is accident-prone. And he is surrounded by colleagues whose decisions cause him harm.

–The death earlier thus month of journalist Paul Johnson has been widely noted by his fellow journalists and others. Among them are Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion magazine. His wide ranging memoir includes this:

Paul, an accomplished watercolorist himself, had contemplated a career as a painter. His father, though he acknowledged Paul’s skill as a draftsman, put him off art as a career. “I can see bad times coming for art,” he told his son: “Frauds like Picasso will rule the roost for the next half-century. Do something else for a living.” Paul took the advice to heart in two senses. In his professional life, he exchanged paintbrush for pen (or typewriter), and he nurtured his father’s animus against Picasso. Many readers will recall that there was a period when Evelyn Waugh ended his letters with the cheery valedictory, “Death to Picasso!” Paul came from a kindred school, as the title of his 1996 collection To Hell with Picasso and Other Essays reminds us. In his book on the history of art, Picasso emerges as an archetype of what he called “fashion art, as opposed to fine art”—that is, art as a species of hucksterism.

Paul’s view of Picasso (who died, he tells us, “the richest artist in history”) is one of the things that furrowed the brows of his critics. But it is worth noting that while he was hostile to Picasso, he was not cavalier. Picasso, he acknowledged, raised unique problems in the history of art, so “it is important that everyone should make up [his] own mind about him.”

Paul’s rejection of Picasso had less to do with Picasso’s deplorable character—he was, quite simply, a swine—than with Picasso’s attitude towards his own art. Paul was quite tolerant about the foibles of artists, Picasso’s and others. What he objected to was not so much Picasso’s exploitation of people as his exploitation of his talent to gratify the demands of his ego (and that reliable appendage of ego, the pocketbook). If Paul was right, Picasso helped to license the attitude that Marshall McLuhan summed up when he said that “art is anything you can get away with”—the attitude that prevails in many of the most respected quarters of the art world today. In any event, I was pleased indeed that over the years Paul gave me several of his watercolors. At least two occupy honored spots on the walls chez Kimball.

–David Platzer in The Oldie recalls another noteworthy person Waugh brought into his writings:

Stuart Preston (1915-2005) was the New York Times art critic from 1949 to 1965 and wrote an excellent monograph on Édouard Vuillard (1972). But he’s most famous as ‘the Sarge’, renowned for the extraordinary social success he enjoyed in wartime London’s aristocratic bohemia 80 years ago. His nickname derived from his rank in the US Army as a sergeant…

Tall and elegant, he was blessed with good looks that reminded Cecil Beaton of Gary Cooper, and his boyish enthusiasm was matched by erudition. His part in the liberation of France won him a Croix de Guerre, proving him a hero as a well as a social lion.

Evelyn Waugh caricatured him as the Loot (short for Lieutenant Padfield) in Unconditional Surrender. Meeting him in New York in 1950, Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford, ‘Sergeant Preston is as bald as an egg and very watery-eyed. I suspect he drinks.’

–Patrick Cockburn in an iNews newsletter column finds the NATO countries’ decisions to send tanks to Ukraine may presage the end of Putin, at least if Evelyn Waugh was right about a similar situation in the 1930s.  This is where “Seth, emperor of Azania, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief responds on hearing that people in the bazaar are speaking of his army’s defeat.”  Although the quote is behind a paywall, Cockburn is probably referring to this passage:

Fools, what do they know. I am Seth the grandson of Amurath. Defeat is impossible. I have been to Europe. I know. We have the Tank. This is not a war of Seth against Seyid but of Progress against the Barbarians. And progress must prevail. I have seen the great tatoo of Aldershot, the Paris exhibition, the Oxford Union. I have read the modern books–Shaw, Arlen, Priestley. What do the gossips in the bazaar know about all this?,,, (Penguin 16-17).

–A review of Richard Bradford’s new biography of Norman Mailer (mentioned in last week’s Roundup) comes up with several pejorative quotes Mailer uttered against other writers:

There’s an adage to the effect that a biographer eventually comes around to admiring his subject. Whoever said that never met Richard Bradford.

Every insult directed to another writer is meticulously preserved:

— J.D Salinger, “The greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”

— Gore Vidal “is imprisoned in the recessive nuances of narcissistic explorations which do not go deep enough into himself, and so end as gestures and postures.”

— Saul Bellow, “I cannot take him seriously as a major novelist.”

— Of women writers who were his contemporaries, “I do not seem able to read them 
 the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goisy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid 
”

— Evelyn Waugh, “I hate to admit it, but the little fairy can write.” 

“Indeed,” writes Bradford, “it seemed almost an insult not to be insulted by Mailer.”

The full review is available in truthdig.com.

The Spectator’s columnist Bruce Anderson writes about the reading matter he managed to get through in a recent hospital visit:

Hospitals are places to think. I regret to inform readers that my thoughts led me in the direction of Anglo-Saxon philistinism, inspired by Dr Johnson and Evelyn Waugh’s Mr Prendergast. Johnson was asked how he could refute Bishop Berkeley’s denial of material substance. He saw a stone and gave it a hearty kick with his boot. ‘I refute it thus, sir.’ Mr Prendergast lost his faith because he could not see why God had troubled himself to create the world. A couple of theologically minded friends visited me. I am sure that they both thought I could have done better. But there it is: a coalition of two extremely unlikely characters, Johnson and Prendergast, ending in my case – though not in theirs – with eupeptic pessimism.

 

 

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Roundup

–Duncan McLaren sent over an interesting exchange relating to Waugh’s possible use of Peter Quennell as a model for characters in his novels. His an excerpt from the email that started it:

Dear Mr McLaren,

I am a reader of your Waugh web-blogs and very much enjoyed your book ‘Evelyn!’ I thought you might be interested in some thoughts on who might have been the inspiration for the character Arthur Potts in ‘Decline and Fall’.

I don’t know much about Waugh but have made a few discoveries about Graham Greene, including uncovering two early stories which, I believe, are likely his first published work. Greene also used his friends and enemies as models for his characters and he was caught out in ‘Stamboul Train’, when J.B Priestley identified himself as Q.C.Savory forcing Greene to adjust his text. But Greene did still manage to ‘smuggle’ another author into that book – Mr Kalebdjian a servile hotel manager in the last chapter of the book, is a dig at Dikran Kouyoumdjian, otherwise known as Michael Arlen, author of ‘The Green Hat’ and very famous at the time.

And it’s a ‘friend’ of both Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh who was, I’m fairly sure, the inspiration of Arthur Potts. Not Anthony Powell whom, I suppose, could be suggested by his initials, but someone else very well known in the Waugh world – Peter Quennell.

My identification of Quennell as an inspiration for Potts is based on two lines in the book.
“I bicycled over to St Magnus’s at Little Beckley and took some rubbings of the brasses there. I wished you had been with me.”…

If this whets your appetite for more, follow this link to Duncan’s website:  evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-43/index.html

–Kenneth Craycraft introduces a new column to appear in the religious news service OSV News.  Here’s the opening:

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war-time,” explains protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, “Brideshead Revisited.”

“These memories,” he continues, “which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me.”

This theme is so essential to “Brideshead” that the passage provides the subtitle of the book: “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.”

The account of Charles Ryder’s memories and the book in which the story is told are both examples of what we intend for this new column. It will be a monthly meditation on what it even means to possess memories, as considered through some cultural possession of the past. We will try to recapture and refine memories by revisiting classic stories, novels, plays, songs, and poems, as well as signal philosophical, theological, and literary essays…

The entire article is available at this link,

–The National Catholic Reporter has an article about how humility is reflected in the works of Roman Catholic writers in Britain. Here’s the portion dealing with Waugh:

The social media landscape doesn’t lend itself well to the practice of humility. At the height of its influence in the 20th century, the legacy press landscape also traded in the inflation of egos. Yet Catholic authors sometimes said or did things that pierced that bubble of ego — and often in jarring ways. At the height of their literary success, authors like Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor reflected on themselves as sinners in need of grace.

Evelyn Waugh

Waugh’s first marriage collapsed in 1929. This crisis left its mark on his satirical 1930 novel Vile Bodies, which he wrote as his own life unraveled. A year after his divorce, he was received into the Catholic Church. His conversion was an unsentimental affair. In Waugh’s estimation, the Catholic Church held the fullness of the truth, therefore it was reasonable to revere it — and that was that.

When Waugh (1903-1966) appeared in a 1960 BBC television interview, he told reporter John Freeman that in the late 1920s he was “as near an atheist as one could be.” Freeman asked Waugh to speak of the greatest gift he’d received from Catholicism. Was it tranquility or perhaps peace of mind? “It isn’t a lucky dip that you get something out of,” Waugh responded. “It’s simply admitting the existence of God or dependence on God or contact with God — the fact that everything good in the world depends on him. It isn’t a sort of added amenity of the welfare state that you say, ‘Well, to all this, having made a good income, now I’ll have a little icing on top of religion.’ It’s the essence of the whole thing.”

Waugh’s temperament was sometimes as extraordinary as his writing. He was often a cruel curmudgeon, a prickly snob; he dabbled in fascistic politics and he was mercurial. If there’s truth to the trope of upper-class British fathers preferring their pet dogs over their children, Waugh took pains to embody that truth. He wasn’t much better with adults. When novelist and friend Nancy Mitford introduced Waugh to her publisher in 1950, Waugh shocked them with his rude behavior. “How can you behave so badly — and you a Catholic,” Mitford exclaimed. “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,” Waugh responded. “Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

The sections on the other writers may be read at this link.

The Sunday Times invokes Waugh in an article about education:

“Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia,” reads the motto of the Waid Academy, the secondary school founded in 1886 by the philanthropist Lt Andrew Waid in the sleepy seaside village of Anstruther, in the highly desirable location of the East Neuk of Fife.

Many have indeed passed through but whether their knowledge has increased is a moot point. The Sunday Times school rankings put the Waid Academy at number 124 in Scotland, with 42 per cent of pupils passing five Highers.

In Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant satirical novel, Mr Levy of the scholastic agents Church and Gargoyle categorises the educational establishments on his books as “leading school; first-rate school; good school; and school. Frankly ‘school’ is pretty bad”, he tells the hapless Paul Pennyfeather.

These days, despite the plethora of league tables, HM inspectors’ reports and education policy documents, we don’t have a system quite as honest as that. But with more than 300 secondary schools in Scotland, Waid could justifiably argue it was a good school, going on first-rate, by Church and Gargoyle’s standards. It is a typical Scottish secondary and, apart from the occasional appearance in the Fife Free Press, exists below the radar.

–The religious philosophical journal Patheos has an article that takes another look at 1960s film adaptation of The Loved One and finds more to like than did the film’s critics  when it was first released. Here’s the conclusion:

The intensity of the humor strikes at the heart of our society (then and now). In [Mr Joyboy’s] mother, we have the externalization of mid-century consumer culture, a parody of patriotic citizen who prefers to salivate at ads than actually watch any programming. There is no death so long as there’s endless food and brain-massaging content. Her queer son’s slavish devotion masks an inability to escape the mutually assured destruction that is their relationship—a representation, perhaps, of the dark side of suburban family life or the lonely depths of the closet (writer Christopher Isherwood was gay; director Tony Richardson was bisexual, a fact the world only learned when he suddenly died of AIDS). The reverend is a good ole American confidence man, a whited sepulcher who uses the sacred to profit, conspiring Fat Leonard-style with military brass to blow up the dead and suck dry the living—in essence, the figure who has come to define this great land more than any other. AimĂ©e is a gullible simpleton who actually believes the cemetery owner’s lies. And Dennis—Dennis is an empty shell, the vacuousness of so much pretend youth rebellion of the sort that would emerge shortly thereafter (not that there wasn’t genuine sentiment there—but not every mod or hippy cared for easy living and peace). The gang’s all here.

While The Loved One may be uneven, it’s far from unfocused. Over-ambitious perhaps, the film’s hectic production shows; it is no Dr. Strangelove, even if the two movies share a writer and similar themes. But Kubrick’s horrifying black comedy is among the greatest films ever made. To fall short of that can still mean greatness. Though this Tony Richardson effort doesn’t land every jab, it laughs hard—and makes us laugh hard—in the face of nuclear apocalypse. It has a perspective, a vision, just a deeply cynical one in which we’re left with little to do but lampoon, lampoon, lampoon until the rocket explodes and we can lampoon no more. Waugh probably never saw it and he would have hated it for being so American. But its blithe rancor matches his own; I’d call that a success.

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Jonathan Raban 1942-2023: R.I.P.

The death earlier this week of Jonathan Raban has been announced. He was a well known British-born writer of travel books and novels, although according to several of his obituaries he objected to his works being labelled  “travel books”. The New York Times obit, for example, explained:

Mr. Raban’s literary narratives of the places he visited and the people he met combined travelogue, memoir, reportage and criticism. What he was not, he insisted, was a travel writer.

“Travel writing seems to me a too-big umbrella, full of holes to let the rain in,” he told Granta magazine in 2008. “Anyone commissioned by a newspaper to write up meals and hotels in foreign holiday resorts is a travel writer. Anyone who does a guidebook is a travel writer.”

He had an affinity for V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, whose books take the reader to places far and wide but transcend the travel genre.

“Chatwin and Sebald knew that ‘travel book’ and ‘travel writing’ were terms of literary abuse and did their best to rescue their books from the category,” Mr. Raban said in the interview. “I know that feeling.”

Waugh also distinguished his “travel books” such as Labels, Robbery Under Law and A Tourist in Africa, which were written to order under contracts with e.g. shipping companies, from his other travel writings such as Remote People, Ninety Two Days and Waugh in Abyssinia. While not disowning the former three commissioned works, he did take care to exclude excerpts of the first two from the 1946 collection When the Going Was Good.  No doubt, the later-published A Tourist in Africa would have suffered the same fate had it been written before the war.

The most detailed of the obituaries was that appearing in the Guardian. This also addresses the same issue discussed in the NY Times and goes on to discuss Raban’s less well-known fiction:

His first novel, Foreign Land (1985), follows an eccentric expat Englishman, George Grey, who leaves the Caribbean to return home, much to the consternation of his daughter, and sail a just-bought boat around Britain. Raban recapitulated the story himself in Coasting, in which he sails around the country, which, as the Falklands war erupts, seems an increasingly insular island nation. The book marks the perfecting of his classic English voice, that of the friendly faux-bumbler whose self-deprecation is itself a form of humble-brag, which has served British humour from Arthur Marshall to Bill Bryson; it made him a neutral sort of observer to Americans he met…

His 2003 novel, Waxwings, takes its butterfly title from Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure of the window pane.” Drawing on Bad Land, it is the story of an expat Hungarian-British man, in the dot.com boomtown that is Seattle, with an American wife, and an illegal Chinese immigrant worker who begins reconstructing his house. Raban was a distant relative of Evelyn Waugh, and the book recalls Waugh’s Men at Arms, where the social whirl does not stop for the newly launched war. My Holy War (2006), about the 9/11 attack and the US invasion of Iraq, was almost a companion piece.

In 2006 he published his third novel, Surveillance, in which a journalist tracks down a reclusive writer who has been kept hidden by his publisher lest he destroy the credibility of his Holocaust memoir. Its prime concern is the many-faceted ambiguity of liberty in the war on terror. “The world changed,” he said. “It didn’t change with 9/11. It changed with the Patriot Act, with the homeland security measures and the war on terror.”

The Daily Telegraph also contributes an interesting discussion.

Raban had settled in Seattle after a divorce from his third wife and helped to raise their daughter from that marriage who also lived there. His writing career was interrupted by a serious stroke in 2011. Although he continued to contribute book reviews and articles to literary journals (particularly the New York Review of Books), no new book has appeared since he suffered the stroke. Fortunately, this book drought is about to break with the appearance later this year of his autobiographical memoir to be entitled Father and Son.

 

 

 

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