Waugh at Campion College, Sydney

Posted on January 4, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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Estate of Waugh

Posted on January 2, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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J D Salinger Centenary Observed

Posted on January 1, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Something for the New Year

Posted on December 31, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Boxing Day Roundup

Posted on December 26, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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A Wavian Christmas, or Two

Posted on December 24, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Magnus Linklater begins his Christmas column in The Times by looking at how noted diarists from the past have marked the holiday:

Christmas does not always bring out the best in us — but did it ever? Diarists of the past found it, more often than not, a gloomy day. Sam Pepys, on Christmas Day 1661, noted mournfully: “Dined at home all alone, and taking occasion from some fault in the meat to complain of my maid’s sluttery, my wife and I fell out, and I up to my chamber in discontent.”

Evelyn Waugh, on December 25, 1919, wrote: “A poor Christmas Day . . . like birthdays, Christmas gets duller and duller. Soon it will be merely a day when the shops are most inconveniently shut.” He was 16 at the time, but did not grow much cheerier in later life: “Christmas Day always makes me feel a little sad . . . a dreary day.”

Harold Nicolson came close to despair in 1941 (but then who wouldn’t?): “Vita [his wife] gives me books and an alarm clock to wake me up. But it stops at once. I sit indoors all day, feeling rotten.” Sir Henry Channon, who relished the gossip and foibles of high society, was equally miserable that same year, as Christmas came and went. “I am profoundly unhappy and lonely, really,” is his diary entry. “My life is a mess.”

Waugh’s best-known description of Christmas is probably that (or those) in Brideshead Revisited. There are at least two at Brideshead Castle that I can recall (1960, rev. ed. pp. 139ff and 169ff), neither particularly joyful but reflecting some humor, mostly at the expense of Mr Samgrass. Later (p. 306), Charles describes the Ryder family Christmas Day celebration at the house of his uncle (Cousin Jasper’s father), where Charles joins his wife, Celia, and their children before he returns to Julia with whom he has been living at Brideshead Castle for the past two years:

…here among the holly and mistletoe and the cut spruce, the parlour games ritually performed, the brandy-butter and the Carlsbad plums, the village choir in the pitch-pine minstrels’ gallery, gold twine and sprigged wrapping-paper, [Celia] and I were accepted, whatever ugly rumours had been afloat in the past year, as man and wife.

 

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A Tale of Two Adaptations

Posted on December 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The popular culture criticism website PopMatters.com has reposted a 2006 review of the 1965 film adaptation of Waugh’s novel The Loved One. This review by Bill Gibon focuses more on the director Tony Richardson’s version than on Waugh’s story. He begins by noting that in the mid 1960s

…Richardson wanted to continue the cinematic revolution he started with Tom Jones‘ jumbled, jangled self-referential style. For The Loved One, he would incorporate everything he learned as a cutting-edge filmmaker in the UK. As a result, he purposefully mimicked fellow auteurs like Stanley Kubrick (along with borrowing Strangelove‘s look, he placed his comedic star, Jonathan Winters, in a diabolical dual role) and Orson Welles (playing with depth of field and focus). He would also take pot shots at several ‘–isms’ — racism, materialism, populism, commercialism — while keeping the more macabre elements about the recently deceased front and center. Thus we have the surreal story of a bad boy British poet who falls in love with a maudlin make-up girl at a ritzy, regal funeral home.

Gibon is apparently referring to the “noirish” black & white format of Kubrick’s film as well as Peters Sellers’ multiple roles. He then summarizes the plot, which I think from memory he gets a bit wrong when he has Dennis Barlow take up his job at the Happy Hunting Ground after the death and funeral of Francis Hinsley (although such a plot change may well have been included and would fit in with the film script’s many other wholesale alterations in Waugh’s story). He then continues:

While the film’s narrative barely resembled Waugh’s wicked work, The Loved One stands on its own as an eccentric celluloid experiment from the equally innovative mid-’60s. In many ways, it resembles a series of Monty Python sketches as directed by David Lynch, a decidedly deadpan farce that uses corpses instead of conceptualization as the source of its humor. While much of the original outrage will fall flat on audiences raised on our current post-modern sense of mockery, there is still a great deal to enjoy in this early attempt at directorial dadaism.[…]

Sadly, he didn’t have the support of a Godard or a Truffaut, meaning he often took on projects that dampened his anarchic approach. With The Loved One, however, he found a near perfect vehicle. Within the incredibly unusual setting, he could ridicule the Establishment (as illustrated by the racially selective Whispering Glade’s mortuary) while tweaking the counterculture for its lack of originality (Barlow’s poetry is all borrowed from the classics) and conviction (Aimee is a flower child who rather deal in death than reality). Indeed, it could be said that this monochrome masterwork is on par with other examples of stellar ’60s cinema, losing most of its warped wit, but easily retaining all its aesthetically appealing aspects…

In the decade since this review was posted, the film version has, indeed, come to be accepted as a classic, with several reruns as such on the TCM channel.

A more recent BBC TV adaptation of Decline and Fall has been the subject of an Australian architectural article. This appears on the website ArchitectureAU.com and is written by Patrick Hunn. The article offers several indoor activities (such as TV bingeing) that might appeal to its readers as the height of Antipodean summer approaches:

If you can bear the mid-century droning of the English upper classes, you might begin your indoor television holiday with Decline and Fall, a BBC adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh novel featuring one Otto Friedrich Silenus, an unkind but entertaining Le Corbusier surrogate and a well-engineered manifestation of all that is distressing about the modernist architect archetype.

“Only factories are beautiful,” he hisses in one scene from behind a pair of thick round glasses, before arguing that humans impose an unacceptable mess on the perfection of his designs by demanding staircases for accessing the upper storeys of a building. “The tragedy for architects is that they have to have clients.”

This is a character that played a part in fostering the rather nasty generational understanding of architects as strange and aloof, and modernism as a cold, synthetic and unfriendly school of design, but it’s such a highly accomplished assassination of both architects and modernism that you find yourself willing to go along with it.

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Waugh Lecture at Lancing

Posted on December 21, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Lancing College website has posted a report of last month’s Evelyn Waugh Lecture. This year’s speaker was OL Sir Tim Rice (1958-62) who recalled how events at Lancing had helped shape his career as a lyricist:

Tim admitted that […] good stories had always interested him (he first came across Eva Perón in his stamp collection as a young boy) and spells in Lancing’s Chapel nurtured the material for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar. He closed with these words, “I think the ethos, the liberal spirit of the school, the fact that even insensitive souls such as myself dimly realised that there was more to education than exams and discipline, was a good basis for life. Of course it was privileged, of course it was a bubble of security, but when I return now, it’s impossible to feel that my time here was wasted. I am still lying on a bank in the sun in 1961, half-watching the cricket XI, half-listening to Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’.”

Also present was Evelyn Waugh’s grandson Alexander Waugh. According to the website, this visit

coincided with his publication of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, Volume 30, Personal Writings 1903-1921 Precocious Waughs. Evelyn was at Lancing from 1917-1921 and his most prolific year of diary writing occurred in 1920. His housemaster, John F Roxburgh wrote to him in October 1921 congratulating him on the quality of the school magazine (Waugh was editor) and observed rather astutely, “If you use what the gods have given you, you will do as much as any single person I can think of to shape the course of your own generation”.

The Complete Works are published by Oxford University Press. Alexander is General Editor of the project and editor of the Personal Writings volumes. The first volume in that series was published late last year, and this was the first Waugh Lecture to convene since that event.

Finally, the website reports arrangements have already been made for next year’s lecture:

The 2019 Evelyn Waugh Lecture will revert to its usual timing at the beginning of the summer term, on Thursday 25 April.  We are honoured to have the author, William Boyd as our guest speaker and it will be his first visit to Lancing. Ardent fans will recall that Evelyn Waugh had a role in William Boyd’s novel Any Human Heart (2002) and that he has also adapted Scoop for television (1988) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (2001).

There are also several photographs of the event posted on the website. Those are available at this link.

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The Waugh Before Christmas

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Mail includes Waugh in a Christmas quiz set by humorist Craig Brown. Here’s the question:

10) Match the Christmas with the participant:

a) ‘The presents I got were — as always — far inferior in every way to the ones I gave, that is annoying. The parties I went to didn’t have any nice young ladies at them, and everybody had a much smaller brain than mine.’

b) ‘The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression. I do not see them until luncheon, as I have my breakfast alone in the library, and they are in fact well trained to avoid my part of the house; but I am aware of them from the moment I wake.’

c) ‘All my loathing of Christmas . . . poured over me during the walk home. All those ‘merry people’, windows open & awful noise of singing, and daft decorations everywhere & drunks and bad driving and just below the surface — the extreme rude bestiality.’

d) ‘Every year on Christmas day I like to tell my mother that I’m lesbian, even though I’m not. It just gets everything going.’

i) Jenny Eclair

ii) Kenneth Williams

iii) Kingsley Amis

iv) Evelyn Waugh

You will find the answer along with several other questions here.

–The Paris Review has an article by Katy Kelleher about the history and tradition surrounding the French liqueur Chartreuse and the color to which it has given a name. The potion was perfected in 1737 by a group of French monks who were given the recipe developed by an alchemist in the 16th century:

Over the years, they tweaked the recipe slightly, making it less alcoholic and more palatable to the general public. Then they began to sell it.  This worked fine for everyone involved until 1903, when the French government nationalized the Chartreuse distillery. They expelled the monks, who went to Spain and built a new distillery there. “The pre-expulsion stuff was much prized,” writes Henry Jeffreys for the Guardian. He was introduced to the drink by his “louche uncle.” As Jeffreys relays, the joys of the original version were sung in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. “There are five distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue,” Anthony Blanche, Waugh’s stuttering gentleman, says. “It’s like swallowing a sp-spectrum.”

Deborah Mitford in her memoirs Wait for Me remembers another Waugh connection with this particular libation. This occurred at her first meeting Waugh at a Christmas party of her friend Daphne Weymouth (later Fielding) in 1942:

One night he poured a bottle of Green Chartreuse over his head and, rubbing it into his hair, he intoned: “My hair is covered in gum; my hair is  covered in gum,” as the sticky mess ran down his neck. (p. 123)

Waugh, then stationed at Sherborne on a training course, wrote to his wife about the party. He mentions meeting Deborah Mitford but not the self-dousing with Chartreuse (Letters, 164). One can only wonder whether Waugh remembered that occasion when he wrote Anthony Blanche’s description 2 years later.

—THE has an interview with Tereza Topolovská, lecturer in Eng. Lang. & Lit. at Charles University in Prague. This is about her new book The Country House Revisited: Variations on a Theme from Forster to Hollinghurst in which she mentions Waugh’s contribution:

Your new book explores the theme of the country house in English literature. Which books spurred your interest in the theme?

Originally, I was drawn to the more generic theme of houses in English literature and therefore analysed mainly the works of John Galsworthy, E. M. Forster and Simon Mawer, where I approached the houses as symbols, settings and subject matters. After having read some of the must-reads of country-house fiction – Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust, Galsworthy’s The Country House, Forster’s Howards End – I noticed a repetitive pattern of a house embracing some aspects of a communal paradigm: the country house. I widened the scope of my study and included uncharacteristic examples of fictional houses, such as Shruff End in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. Last but not least, I was intrigued by the sumptuous evocation of the splendid ugliness of the houses in Ian McEwan’s Atonement or Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, and the aesthetic of inevitable decline in Sarah Waters’ gothic The Little Stranger.

–Finally, BBC has, according to an LGBT entertainment site, scheduled a Christmas treat (or not, as the case may be) for Waugh fans. This is a rebroadcast of the 2008 theatrical film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, co-produced by the BBC with Miramax and Ecosse Films. This will be transmitted by BBC2 on Friday, 28 December 2018, at 1425p London time.

 

 

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Pre-Christmas Roundup

Posted on December 16, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Financial Times has a review of a new book about country houses that opens with this reference to Evelyn Waugh who was something of an expert on the subject:

Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited in the early 1940s as a requiem for “the atmosphere of a better age”, one that celebrated the rituals of the English country house. In retrospect, Waugh realised that his lament was premature because the country house proved more resilient than he imagined. Indeed, great houses reinvented themselves in the second half of the 20th century, either by becoming more entrepreneurial, like Woburn and Longleat, or by being rescued through the efforts of the National Trust and the Heritage Lottery Fund, like Kedleston Hall and Calke Abbey.

The book is by  David Cannadine and Jeremy Musson and is entitled The Country House: Past, Present, Future,

In another reference to Brideshead, an article in Country Life magazine by Annunciata Elwes lists her 6 favorite nannies in literature. Among them is Nanny Hawkins:

‘Nanny did not particularly like to be talked to. She liked visitors best when they paid no attention to her and let her knit away, and watch their faces and think of them as she had known them as small children; their present goings-on did not signify much beside those early illnesses and crimes.’ Generally adored and sporadically visited in her quarters at Brideshead, this sweet figure is a symbol of lost innocence for the grown-up Flyte children of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

Others listed include Mary Poppins and Madame Doubtfire.

The Independent has a story by Martin Chilton on the rather unhappy background of the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The story begins with the book  on which the film was based:

In April 1961, Ian Fleming, who was a heavy smoker and drinker, had a heart attack at the age of 53 and was ordered to convalesce. It was around this time that his eight-year-old son Caspar told him: “Daddy, you love James Bond more than you love me!” The author decided to show his affection for his only child – whom he nicknamed “003-and-a-half” – by writing in longhand a series of children’s stories he first called The Magical Car.

Fleming’s tales were about a flying car restored by Caractacus Potts, an inventor and retired naval commander. The title was later changed to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, which was based on the real cars Chitty-Bang-Bang 1, 2, 3 and 4 built by the eccentric motor enthusiast Louis Zborowski in the 1920s.

Fleming suffered another heart attack on 11 August 1964, following a long lunch at Royal St George’s Golf Club in Kent. He died the next morning, on his son’s 12th birthday. Fleming never got to see the printed versions of his children’s stories, which came out in October that year.

The death affected his son deeply (“Caspar hates me and talks of little but matricide. What shall I do?” his mother Ann wrote to novelist Evelyn Waugh). On 2 October 1975, aged just 23, Caspar committed suicide, taking an overdose of barbiturates at his mother’s home in Chelsea. A forlorn note in his pyjama pocket read: “If it is not this time it will be the next.”

 

 

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