Brexit, Cameron and Ivor Claire

Posted on October 23, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Dominic Green, who recently wrote an essay about Waugh’s military career (see previous post), has now written a report about the march of 700,000 people in London last weekend demanding a “People’s Vote” on Brexit. The story appears in the right-wing Weekly Standard, so it should be no surprise that it supports Brexit. But Green does concede that the original procedure for making the decision was flawed:

When David Cameron decided to pose the most important political question since 1945, he should have made it the central issue of a general election. That would have framed Brexit in a national framework, and it would have given the election’s outcome the force of law. But Cameron’s mistake was one element of a larger misjudgment. He expected that “Remain” would win, and thought a referendum would be a good way of permanently shutting up the Euroskeptics in the Conservative party. When “Leave” won. Cameron jumped ship in the worst display of public fecklessness from a man of upper-class background since the cowardice of Ivor Claire, the spineless soldier who abandons his troops in Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen. […]

How Cameron might have engineered a decisive vote on the issue in a general election when his own party was hopelessly split and the Labour party leadership were at best luke warm Remainers is not explained. Just as the Conservative Party’s inability to govern after the referendum was probably foreseen by Cameron, Ivor Claire saw equally clearly that to become a prisoner of the Germans was pointless. So no wonder they both did a bunk.

Dominic Green has also interviewed novelist and critic David Pryce-Jones in a recent  Spectator podcast. Most of the interview is devoted to history and politics as experienced by Pryce-Jones and recently described in his memoir Fault Lines. Evelyn Waugh is mentioned briefly when Pryce-Jones recounts an aborted visit to Combe Florey at the time both  he and Teresa Waugh were Oxford undergraduates. Arriving in Pryce-Jones’ small car, they were waved away by Waugh standing in his window. Teresa thought embarking on a weekend visit with her father in that state of mind would not be much fun, so they drove straight back to Oxford.

Waugh surfaces later in the 42-minute interview about half way through when Green turns the discussion to literature. Noting that in the mid 20th century, when Pryce-Jones came of age, the major British writers were George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Cyrill Connolly who were the masters of the essay, the novel and criticism, respectively. Green asks to what extent Pryce-Jones may have known each of them. Pryce-Jones answered that he never met Orwell but learned of him when he read a proof copy of 1984 sent to his father, Alan Pryce-Jones, who was then editor of the TLS. He had met Cyril Connolly during the war when his family were bombed out of their London residence and moved out to the Sumerhill estate of Henry d’Avigdor Goldsmid, where Connolly also was a frequent guest. Connolly was, according to Pryce-Jones, delightful company. The interview then, alas, switched back to politics and history before Pryce-Jones got to talk about his acquaintance (or lack thereof) with Waugh. If they had stayed on script, we might have learned how Pryce-Jones came to edit the ever-useful and entertaining 1973 collection of memoirs entitled Evelyn Waugh and his World and why Waugh so disliked his father.

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Waugh and the Buggers’ Baroque

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The current TLS has a review of a book by Jane Stevenson entitled Baroque Between the Wars: Alternative style in the arts, 1918–1939. The reviewer Michael Hall seems to have enjoyed the book because of its period and subject matter but thinks that the author has got her premise wrong. Stevenson argues that in the period under review, the modernist art movement created a counter-cultural backlash which she describes as a kind of baroque revival. To distinguish it from previous revivals of the styles of that period (as recently as the Edwardian years) it has sometimes been denoted as the Buggers’ or Decorators’ Baroque after the trade that promoted it and their sexual preferences.

The reviewer brings Waugh into the story at two junctures. First he cites Decline and Fall published in 1928. In that novel:

…Evelyn Waugh poked fun at the modern movement in the form of King’s Thursday, a country house designed for Margot Beste-Chetwynde in the style of a chewing-gum factory by Professor Otto Friedrich Silenus (an architect who rather surprisingly is not referred to in Baroque Between the Wars). Yet for most English people the buildings that first attracted attention as distinctively modern dated from the early 1930s and had little to do with Le Corbusier, Gropius, [cited by Stevenson] or Silenus. Most famously there were Charles Holden’s tube stations, from 1931 onwards, and Elisabeth Scott’s theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, completed in 1932. Scott’s design was indeed criticized but it can’t seriously be argued that any of these buildings provoked a counter-cultural reaction, and so Stevenson ignores them.

After arguing that Stevenson got it wrong about precisely what caused the reaction, the reviewer goes on to find fault with another cause that she ignores–WW1:

Although the argument that interwar baroque was a counter-cultural movement provoked by modernism is unconvincing, it is certainly plausible that it was reacting to something. Stevenson’s reluctance to deal with alternative interpretations of its origins may owe something to her strict observation of the book’s chronological boundaries, 1918–39. Although she points out early on that the first novel to feature a second world war is probably Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), she ignores the impact of memories of the First World War, or apprehensions about a second, on the culture of the 1920s and 30s. Another, and more fundamental, explanation for the rise of interwar baroque is not referred to until the book’s epilogue and then only in passing. In an analysis of Edith Sitwell’s collaboration with William Walton on Façade, Stevenson writes that “many of the poems feature Victorians in hell, type figures of an older generation who have reduced themselves to a set of mechanical responses and shibboleths – the pompous faded ghosts of nineteenth-century patriarchy”. Does this not sum up rather beautifully what it was that her baroque writers, artists and designers were in fact reacting against?

While he disagrees with the author’s premise on what caused the baroque reaction to modernism, the reviewer agrees that there was such a reaction and finds parts of the book that he enjoys and concurs with. For example:

Her chapter on religion – a subject ignored by [earlier books of the period] – concludes with a thoughtful account of Campion Hall, designed for the Jesuit community in Oxford by Edwin Lutyens and furnished by Fr Martin d’Arcy, its Master from 1933, as “a subtle exercise in imagining what England might have been like had it remained Catholic” […]

And other reviewers have also largely enjoyed the book–e.g. Literary Review and Times Higher Education . As noted in the latter’s review (by James Stevens Curl), the reaction against modernism was not confined to architecture but was reflected in literature as well and included:

[… ]Lord Berners’ multicoloured doves and his 1937 novel The Girls of Radcliff Hall (in which an all-male milieu is encapsulated in a girls’ school story); “hetties” and “nancies” in the “MacSpaunday” circle around the poets Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis; NoĂ«l Coward, Cecil Beaton et al […]

Given that the book appears to be a lively discussion of the artistic movements coinciding with the flowering of Evelyn Waugh’s early work, it seems likely that it would prove interesting and entertaining to many of our readers as well. Any one who has read it is invited to comment as provided below.

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Literary Criticism Gets Reviewed

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In the current issue of Commonweal magazine, novelist and critic William Giraldi is interviewed by the magazine’s book columnist Anthony Domestico. Giraldi’s collection of essays and criticism American Audacity was publshed earlier this year. After a wide- ranging discussion of the status of literary criticism today, the focus of the interview shifts to the 20th century, and Evelyn Waugh becomes a topic. According to Giraldi:

Near the middle of the last century, Cyril Connolly lamented “the sycophantic torpor of reviewers,” and we see a similar torpor today. But before we pivot to that, I want first to point out that Connolly’s age, like the late British nineteenth century, saw some eviscerating book criticism. Let me quote this savage bit by Evelyn Waugh on Stephen Spender:

“At his christening the fairy godparents showered on Mr. Spender all the fashionable neuroses but they quite forgot the gift of literary skill. At one stage of his life Mr. Spender took to painting and, he naively tells us, then learned the great lesson that “it is possible entirely to lack talent in an art where one believes oneself to have creative feeling.” It is odd that this never occurred to him while he was writing, for to see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a SĂšvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.”

Amazing, right? Waugh was a Tory Catholic who found Spender’s bohemian homosexuality repellent, so you can taste the personal acrimony in those lines, which of course is not aboveboard. But the other thing to remember is that Waugh was one of the best-read writers of his age, and that reading allotted him a supreme confidence in his own abilities and assessments. He’s being performative in that review, showcasing the depth of his literacy and the earned ferocity of his decisiveness, but he’s also measuring Spender against “the best that is known and thought in the world,” as Arnold has it: he’s measuring Spender against the vibrant complexities of the canon, employing what Arnold calls an “inflexible honesty, with due ability.” You see the same inflexible honesty and due ability in the best American criticism of the last century, from Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling to Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to James Baldwin and Susan Sontag, and you can see it today in our best critics, from Cynthia Ozick and Harold Bloom to Adam Kirsch and Katie Roiphe. And there’s strong American precedent there: just look at how Poe dismantled Longfellow or how Twain ravaged Fenimore Cooper.

The quote is from Waugh’s 1951 review of Spender’s memoir World Within World. It appeared in the Tablet and was reprinted in A Little Order and EAR.

The website Literary Hub, supported by a collective of publishers and booksellers, has undertaken a project of identifying the most important books (fiction, poetry and nonfiction) in each decade of the 20th century. A list of the top 10 books in each decade is compiled by Emily Temple, one of the website’s regular contributors. Temple provides this explanation of her selection methodology:

Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade—a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there’s no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I’ve simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade—both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I’ve limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I’ll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.

She has recently reached the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s when Evelyn Waugh was at his peak productivity. Given her American-centric methodology, it is perhaps not surprising that none of Waugh’s books make the top 10 lists.  Several are, however, included in the follow-on lists that contain the books considered close to the top in compiling the collection: Decline and Fall (1928), A Handful of Dust (1934); Scoop (1938) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). As an example of the scope of the selections, the 1930s Top 10s included the literary classics Brave New World, Nightwood and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as well as The Joy of Cooking, How to Win Friends and Influence People and Gone with the Wind. The list for the 1950s is awaited.

An interview of Francoise Gilot (not primarily known as a literary critic) was recently published in the New York Times. This was on the occasion of the publication of her Three Travel Sketchbooks. She was the lover of Pablo Picasso and mother of two of his children. Despite the unkind things said about Picasso by Evelyn Waugh, this interesting bit of information turns up in the interview, which took place in Gilot’s Upper West Side apartment:

Narrative has always been paramount to Ms. Gilot. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that line the walls of her apartment, which is just down the block from the Hotel des Artistes, are a testament to her literary mind. Visual monographs on Claude Monet, Francis Bacon and, yes, Picasso are shelved alongside volumes of T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare and Evelyn Waugh. She has published collections of her own verse, and even these sketchbooks contain full pages devoted solely to her handwritten text. “I was always good with poetry and letters,” she said.

UPDATE (26 October 2018): Literary Hub has now posted Emily Temple’s lists of books that made the 1950s and 1960s, and none of Waugh’s books are listed.

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Roundup: Foreign Press

Posted on October 20, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the German paper Die Welt, there is a short review of Brideshead Revisited (in German Wiedersehen mit Brideshead) by Denis Schenk. After quoting from the novel how Charles and Sebastian come to be acquainted, the article continues:

There is much to learn from this book – not just how to become a snob. Also, how to describe the downfall of a world empire and the slow damning of a social stratum that held power for more than a thousand years. First and foremost, how to cope with the experience of loss, of broken friendships, extinguished love, lost faith and faded youth – with life as an adult, then. Charles Ryder falls in love with Sebastian as a student at Oxford and at Brideshead Castle with his androgynous sister Julia, but almost all the more Charles falls in love with the lifestyle and outlook of these vile [“spleenigen”] Catholic noblemen, who know a bottle of ChĂąteau Peyraguey and strawberries as a perfect combination for a picnic, but not where it could be in a society that no longer needs it.  “Brideshead Revisited” was created during the Second World War and looks back on the twenties, the downfall of a world of yesterday, yes, on the expulsion from paradise. […] Can you feel nostalgia for a time you have never experienced? Apparently, because Brideshead Revisited has become the unrequited model of countless country house novels, films and TV series all the way to “Downton Abbey”.

–The Italian language Roman Catholic online journal Radio Spada has a recent article about the British factionalism during Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. British Catholics (with the notable exception of Graham Greene) largely supported Franco’s Nationalists because of Republican opposition to the Roman Catholic Church. The article is by Luca Fumagalli. He writes that, in the UK:

Among the most active “papist” polemicists in support of the Francoist cause was the journalist Douglas Francis Jerrold, a supporter of Italian fascism and a prominent member of the “Friends of National Spain” committee. Jerrold had been personally involved in the plans that would lead to the events of July 1936, when two British intelligence agents, his friend Hugh Pollard and Captain Cecil Bebb, transported Franco by air from the Canary Islands to Morocco, thus kicking off the coup d’etat.

Waugh himself went no further than remarking that the Nationalists were preferable to the Republicans. As Fumagalli puts it:

There was also Evelyn Waugh, although his enthusiasm for Franco was rather limited (the opening of credit towards Mussolini had already alienated the sympathies of many writer  friends, so it was useless to go too far) [… His] future sister-in-law, Miss Gabriel Herbert, on the other hand, represented the enthusiasm for the Francoist crusade that infected many young people of the time: she left for Spain and lent her help to the nationalists working on ambulances (like the Cordelia in Brideshead Revisited).

–The Spanish language Diario CĂłrdoba has a story featuring Waugh scholar and novelist Carlos Villar Flor. It opens with this:

Villar Flor is a professor of English literature at the University of La Rioja and director of the literary magazine Fåbula. He is also a novelist, short story writer, poet and translator (in this regard he highlights his translation of the trilogy Sword of Honor, by Evelyn Waugh). His last published book is his fourth novel. It is entitled Discover Why I Kill You (Descubre por qué te mato) and it is very different from the previous ones. In this case, it is essentially a crime novel. The plot begins with a death threat: a stranger tells the protagonist that he is going to kill him, that he will do it before a month goes by and that his only chance of saving himself is to discover why he wants to kill him

The article goes on to describe the novel (which is discussed in previous posts) in greater detail and concludes:

With a fluid style, Discover Why I Kill You has, in addition to mystery and surprises, other interesting ingredients. There is humor. It has references to literary works. Also to current issues, with a critical approach, such as job insecurity, the influence of the media and the presumption of innocence in trials. It contains reflections on death. In addition, it deals with another issue of concern: the vulnerability of those who carry out public work before a large and anonymous audience.

The translations are by Google with a few edits.

 

 

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Paula Byrne to Lecture at the NPG

Posted on October 16, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Jane Austen’s House Museum has announced a lecture that may be of interest to our readers. This is the  T Edward Carpenter Memorial Lecture: “Jane Austen and the English Comic Tradition” by Dr Paula Byrne at the National Portrait Gallery, London. As described in the Museum’s announcement:

Literary biographer and leading scholar of Jane Austen Dr Paula Byrne explores the novelist’s roots in the comic theatre, her own supreme comic gifts, and her influence on subsequent novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Barbara Pym.

In addition to her 2009 work Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, Dr Byrne has written widely on Jane Austen. In January 2013, to coincide with the bicentenary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice, she published an innovative biography called The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, which became a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. More recently, she published The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why she is a Hit in Hollywood (an expanded and updated revision of her first book). Dr Byrne’s debut novel, Look to your Wife, was published in April 2018. She has also lectured at conferences of the Evelyn Waugh Society in Downside Abbey and University of Leicester. The lecture to the Downside conference was notably delivered in a coach transporting the delegates between Downside Abbey and Combe Florey. Dr Byrne is a graduate of the University of Liverpool and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford University.

The lecture is sponsored by the Jane Austen’s House Museum, Chawton, in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery. It is scheduled for Friday, 2 November at 7:00pm in the Ondaatje Wing Theatre, National Portrait Gallery, London. Tickets: ÂŁ10 (ÂŁ8 concessions and NPG Supporters) are available here.

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Mid-October Roundup

Posted on October 15, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–The US cable channel Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has announced two broadcasts of The Loved One in November and December. They have also published what look like they may be expanded program notes (by Jeff Stafford) for the occasion:

In  [Tony] Richardson’s memoirs, The Long-Distance Runner, the director recalled that, “most of the actors entered the film with [a] sense of fun and pleasure. An exception was Robert Morley, who became a boorish prima donna. Terry Southern had written a very funny scene, an appearance by Morley in drag at a leather-bikers’ bar which was meant to be the key to the secret life of his character. Once he’d been shot in another scene and therefore knew he couldn’t be replaced, Morley refused to perform this, saying it would upset his children. Liberace, on the other hand, loved his role as the casket salesman so much that he wanted more.” […]

Richardson clashed with producer/cinematographer Wexler over the look of the film: “We had envisaged everything in high-contrast black and white. Haskell still subscribed to the absurd myth….that you couldn’t photograph pure black and white. Clothing next to the skin – shirts, blouses, etc. – had to be dipped in tea to give it a beige look. To come out black, paneling had to be brown. It was all rubbish, and their eyes should have told them so. We had converted the former mansion of the mining prospector turned oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny into the headquarters of Forest Lawn. Rouben (Ter-Aruntunian) had painted it a shiny glossy black. When we got to the set to shoot it, it was a muddy brown – Haskell had been in the night before and ordered a crew of painters, all on overnight overtime, to repaint it. I reordered it black, so there was no shooting that day. And that was how the production was run.” Under the circumstances, it was inevitable that The Loved One would end up a chaotic mess but it’s also a lot of fun and enjoys a better reputation now then when it was first released.

The film will air 13 November 1230a and 15 December 545p. Check local listings for correct times in your area.

–It has been reported in the The Times that a memorial stone for PG Wodehouse will be laid in Westminster Abbey. According to Patrick Kidd, this was announced at a meeting last week of the PG Wodehouse Society. No information as to where it will be placed has been issued, but Kidd hopes it will be next to Noel Coward. Kidd also quotes Waugh’s remark that he considered Wodehouse the “head of my profession.” A subsequent story in The Scotsman also quotes Waugh, referring to Wodehouse’s controversial broadcasts from Germany during WWII:

These days most would agree that the broadcasts were the act of an innocent abroad rather than a deliberate act of treachery. To Wodehouse lovers, the quality of his writing transcends his foolish mistake, while other great writers regard him as a master of his craft. “Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale,” said Evelyn Waugh. “He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”

–The Daily Mail as winter approaches has compiled two lists of TV series that it considers worth watching. The first contains 50 classic serials and at number 25 they have placed the 1981 Granada production of Brideshead Revisited:

It’s impossible to imagine Brideshead without seeing Anthony Andrews (above, with Jeremy Irons) as effete Sebastian Flyte, clutching his teddy bear Aloysius, one arm around Oxford chum Charles Ryder (Irons), who is seduced by the seemingly glamorous lives of a family of wealthy Catholics ensconced in a palatial country mansion. ITV’s 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s tale of yearning for a lost past, filmed at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, scooped multiple awards and helped pave the way for our love affair with Downton Abbey. DVD, 1 series

The other list contains current serial dramas and includes A Very English Scandal and Patrick Melrose (both mentioned here previously) but oddly ignores the excellent BBC adaptation of Waugh’s Decline and Fall.

–The books blog longreads.com contains an excerpt from a new book by Julia Boyd entitled Travellers in the Third Reich. This reports visits to Nazi Germany by foreign writers.  The reactions of two of Waugh’s contemporaries are included in the excerpt:

[John] Heygate, an old Etonian, had a few years earlier caused a scandal by absconding with Evelyn Waugh’s wife, whom he later married. As with many in his social circle, his political sympathies were well to the right. Consequently, although there was much to make fun of in the new uncouth Germany he also found much to admire. The flags fascinated him. Driving along village streets “roofed with swastikas,” he passed “like a modern knight beneath crusades of ruddy banners.” It occurred to him that it might be “fun” to fly his own Hakenkreuz so he had one fitted to his car by a delighted garage attendant. But the fun faded when, as he watched the tiny swastika beat “proudly” in the wind, he experienced a “sudden awe.” For a moment the flag seemed to him “much more than something to be waved and draped from windows. It was a fighting banner which went before and men followed after.” […]

Heygate’s contemporary, Robert Byron, moved in similar circles (they both knew the Mitfords) but reacted very differently. “I hardly know how to contain myself,” he wrote to his mother from Danzig, “when they say Heil Hitler to one another down the telephone. And that salute, when a couple of friends happen to part in a crowded bus, also has an hysterical effect, but I suppose I will get used to it.”

Waugh apparently never visited Germany during the Nazi period but he visited Fascist Italy frequently and left what are mostly favorable or ambivalent reports of that regime. He did visit Germany just after the war and reported on the Nuremberg trials in a letter to Randolph Churchill that was recently reproduced in Lara Feigel’s book The Bitter Taste of Victory. See previous post.

–Another books blog, Room of Joy, carries a review of Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop, in which his views on Mussolini’s Fascism are reflected. Here’s the conclusion:

I have two main things to say about Scoop, and they’re an uncomfortable pair: comedy and racism.  Which to address first: it’s really racist, but don’t worry, it’s also really funny?  Or, it’s genuinely funny but – watch out! More than a little racist.  And can you really have one with the other?  This moral dilemma aside, let me tell you a bit more about both. […]

Ultimately I realise that this novel was written in the 1930s, and it’s problematic to judge historic writing by today’s standards, but I don’t think we can call reasonable human representation of any African in the novel an excessively high bar.  The fact is that Waugh is very happy to take each and every passing swipe at the local black population.   So it’s a mixed picture – a truly hilarious read on management, journalism, reluctance, naivety, incompetence and charlatanism – but one that’s heavily compromised.  I recommend you read it – probably laugh a lot – and come to your own decision on how we should judge it today.

–A columnist in the Guyana Times International has been reporting on books written about trips into Guyana’s heartland. The books considered ths far have included Stan Brock (Jungle Cowboy) and Gerald Durrell (Three Singles to Adventure) as well as Zoo Quest to Guiana by David Attenborough. The story continues:  “I was unable to get my hands on Ninety-two Days by Evelyn Waugh (an account of his travels in Guyana and Brazil)” so the latest report is about Charles Waterton’s 1826 book entitled Wanderings in South America. The inability to acquire a copy of Waugh’s 1934 travel book is odd because it is available from the same source (Amazon.com) as the others in a 2007 paperback edition published by Serif.

UPDATE (18 October 2018): Reference to a story in The Scotsman about the Westminster Abbey plaque for PG Wodehouse was added.

 

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Incomplete Works

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford University Press commissioned a review of three early volumes of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh from its sister publication Essays in Criticism. A review of these volumes (Vile Bodies, Precocious Waughs, and Rossetti) has been ably written by Lisa Mullen of Worcester College, Oxford. Her review (entitled “And Who is Not Amused?”) takes up seven pages of the current issue (v. 68, no. 4, October 2018).

The review begins with the observation that in these early works, rather than expressing the conservative views with which he is so often associated, Waugh “seems tempted by revolution or at least the idea that his generation ought to break new ground […] These volumes reveal different aspects of Waugh’s youthful plasticity and show how his adult persona developed as he tested himself as a writer.” After explaining the mechanics of the Complete Works project, Dr Mullen examines Precocious Waughs and finds in the childish drawings it copiously reproduces one of that volume’s “greatest pleasures.” In the early diaries she discerns a reflection of Waugh’s “harsh self-assessment” of his somewhat exhuberant childish nature.

In her review of Rossetti, Dr Mullen notes with approval Michael Brennan’s assessment that Waugh was in this book “rehearsing profound questions about art, aesthetics and morality” that he would return to at greater length in his later books. His approach to Rossetti’s life is compared to the “insubordinate” biographical method of Lytton Strachey then in fashion. She sees in “Waugh’s recoil from ugliness the path that will lead him to Catholicism.” She also praises Brennan’s introduction for its description of the circumstances affecting Waugh’s life when he wrote the book.

She then provides her own linkage between the writing of Rossetti via Decline and Fall and Waugh’s composition of the next book under review, Vile Bodies. This is based to some extent on information provided in Martin Stannard’s introduction to that volume, explaining how Waugh’s marriage and divorce overshadowed the whole book, not just the second half. Dr Mullen provides a useful summary of Stannard’s introduction showing how a study of the manuscripts illustrates linkages between what Waugh was writing and the emotional stress he was experiencing in his life at the time. She concludes her review with this reference to a diary entry Waugh wrote at the age of 17:

“As sometimes walking in the middle of London one has a sudden impulse to run”, he writes, “I feel I must write prose or burst.” Unwittingly, he was summing up the very quality of creative energy which pulses unmistakably within these volumes–and stands as Waugh’s lasting retort to his father’s appeal to dullness.

Oddly, after taking the time, trouble and expense of securing this thoughtful and detailed review, the copy posted on the internet by Essays in Criticism (which is also published by OUP) has been put behind a paywall. It may make sense to encourage subscriptions by limiting the internet availability of essays and articles, but reviews are intended in major part to help readers decide whether or not to buy a book. OUP won’t shift many copies with a paywalled review.

Meanwhile, your correspondent has been advised by a reader in the UK that the copies of the Complete Works thus far published are not available consistently in all of the UK’s depository libraries. For instance, the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh lacked the Vile Bodies volume. The only deposit libraries with all five volumes are the British Library and the Bodleian. The other three deposit libraries that are entitled to them (Cambridge University Library, National Library of Wales, and Trinity College, Dublin) have either no copies or incomplete sets. Under the applicable statutes, only the BL receives copies automatically. The others must request copies and the publisher is obliged to provide them at no charge. Readers living near these other libraries might want to suggest to them that they should seek copies of all volumes from OUP as they are printed.

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Charm Offensive

Posted on October 12, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In the Wall Street Journal a review by Thomas Vinciguerra of Joseph Epstein’s new book Charm: The Elusive Enchantment begins with this:

There was no avoiding it. On page 26 of Joseph Epstein’s excursion into the nature of charm, there popped up the character of Anthony Blanche from “Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh (who, Mr. Epstein notes, was “as comically uncharming as possible”). And so the voice of Nicholas Grace, who played Blanche—the stuttering homosexual Oxford aesthete—in the epic 1981 Granada Television production of “Brideshead,” kept echoing in my head. As I recall, every other word that passed from his rouged lips was “charming”—pronounced, with maximum loucheness, CHAAH-ming.

The comment about Waugh is perhaps a bit misleading. He could turn on the charm when it was in his interest to do so but is remembered more for his irritability. One of our readers (Dave Lull) has posted a comment with additional context from Epstein’s book relating to his judgment regarding Waugh’s “uncharming” nature:

Christianity does not feature charm as one of its important qualities… [C]onsider Evelyn Waugh, a man who set himself up to be as comically uncharming as possible. When a woman he had offended upbraided him by saying that he was one of the rudest and most inconsiderate men she had ever met and, being so, how could he consider himself a Christian, Waugh responded: ‘Ah, yes, Madame, but just think what I might be like if I weren’t a Christian.’ Waugh said many charming things, but most of these were in the nature of put-downs, nicely laced with malice, more amusing to read or hear about than to witness firsthand and not at all amusing to be the target of. Evelyn Waugh was many things, but charming wasn’t among them. [Charm: The Elusive Enchantment, pp. 16-17]

From the rest of the review it sounds as if Epstein’s book relates primarily to charm among American entertainment and political celebrities. At least the reviewer mentions fewer British examples (Oscar Wilde notably excepted).

The Daily Mail also has an article about an English contemporary of Waugh noted for his charm. This opens with this header:

The middle-class gigolo for upper-crust women! That’s how an adventurer was described by a literary snob… but, as his gossipy letters reveal, there was a reason no woman could resist Patrick Leigh Fermor’s charms.

The article is by Adam Sisman based on his recently published second volume of Leigh Fermor’s letters More Dashing: Further Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor. The “literary snob” mentioned in the header is Somerset Maugham. His animus to Leigh Fermor was revealed in a 1956 letter from Ann Fleming to Evelyn Waugh, also quoted by Sisman:

‘Paddy was invited [to Somerset Maugham’s house in the South of France] for lunch and arrived with five cabin trunks, parcels of books and the manuscript of his unfinished work on Greece strapped in a bursting attachĂ© case,’ she writes. ‘Despite this inauspicious start, luncheon went like a marriage bell… so when coffee was finished I was not entirely surprised to hear Willie [Maugham] invite Paddy to stay and the minions carried in the trunks to a magnificent suite.

‘But, alas, that evening Mr and Mrs Frere of Heinemann came to dinner and Paddy, who never travels without a bottle of calvados, appeared more exuberant than one small martini could explain. The Freres left at ten o’clock. Willie saw them to the door, returned to the living room and said to Paddy, “Goodbye. You will have left before I am up in the morning.”

‘He then vanished like a primeval crab, leaving a slime of silence; it was broken by Paddy, who cried, “Oh what have I done, Oh Christ, what a fool I am” and slammed his whisky glass on the table. It broke to pieces, cutting his hand and showering the valuable carpet with blood and splinters.’

The quote unfortunately leaves out the story’s punch line. According to Fleming:

…it was the Feast of the Assumption…[While Maugham] haltingly complained of religious holidays Paddy broke in–“Darling Annie, when I was with Robin Fedden in the Louvre we saw the vast Mantegna painting of the Assumption and Robin said with that delightful stutter ‘that is a m-most un-un-warrantable assumption.'” (Ann Fleming Letters, p. 185).

Maugham was also notorious for his stammer and quite sensitive about it.  Leigh Fermor was a friend and correspondent of three of Waugh’s closest friends: Ann Fleming, Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford. Waugh had to tolerate Leigh Fermor but seldom mentions him.

Members of another group, known more for their bad behavior but probably capable of charm in the right situation, are also in the news. This is Oxford’s Bullingdon Club. According to a BBC report, its members have been banned from holding positions in the university’s Conservative Association:

Satirised over the years by writers ranging from Evelyn Waugh to Laura Wade, it has long been banned from holding events on university premises after repeated episodes of loutishness and vandalism.

The expanded ban presumably will not be recognized outside the bounds of the party’s university branch. Otherwise, members such as David Cameron and Boris Johnson would have to stand down. Waugh satirized it as the Bollinger Club in his novel Decline and Fall.

UPDATE (13 October 2018): Dave Lull has kindly sent an additional quote from Joseph Epstein’s book relating to his views about Waugh. This has been incorporated into the text as noted above.

 

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Literary Reputations in the Brexit Era

Posted on October 11, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator has a review by Rod Liddle of the play People Like Us at the Union Theater in South London. It is written by Julie Burchill and Jane Robins and relates to a North London book group that is divided by Brexit partisanship. Two Leavers are ask politely to exit the group:

There is some sharp, witty dialogue and the play does a good job of reflecting the febrile and histrionic responses to Brexit from a certan tranche of affluent Remainers. But the reviews in the mainstream media have been adverse. More than adverse–eviscerating, overflowing with bile and hatred. Now, whether you think a play is any good or not is a totally subjective thing (as the liberals would surely agree). George Bernard Shaw and Leo Tolstoy both believed William Shakespeare was crap, for example. Whereas I find Shaw boring and bombastic. Each to his own.

Liddle goes on to conclude that the reviewers were not reflecting their feelings about the play itself (which he describes as “hilarious”) but about the political views of the authors. Burchill and Robins are apparently well known as Leavers. Two un-named reviewers offered in support of their negative judgments of the play the fact that Liddle himself (also a Leaver?) was in the audience that night and and was heard to be “guffawing.” He came to the conclusion that the revewers were “chronically ill-read..and not used to witnessing stuff from people with different opinions to themselves.”

He recalled his formative years as a left-wing working-class lad in the 1970s (“a more enlightened time”) when “we devoured conservatives such as Evelyn Waugh and Thomas Carlyle and Edmund Burke, alongside the lefties: Sinclair Lewis, Jack Kerouac and Karl Marx.” He doesn’t mention that Waugh’s reputation was at its nadir in the 1970s, even among such literate conservatives as there were, and stayed there until a reversal following the publication of his diaries and letters and the popularity of the Granada TV Brideshead Revisited production in the early 1980s sent a new generation back to his books. It’s nice to know that there were small cells of working-class lads such as Liddle in the vanguard of that revival. Liddle was (and is) also an admirer of John Updike despite the latter’s unpopular support for the Vietnam War. He stresses that it is the writer’s works that should be important, not his political views. The negative reviews have not apparently hurt the play; Liddle writes that it is sold out through the end of the month.

 

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BBC: Waugh and Eliot

Posted on October 8, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

There will be a program on BBC4 tonight that may be of interest to our readers. This is “Return to TS Eliotland,” presented by A N Wilson. It will air at 9pm and will be available on BBC iPlayer thereafter. A UK internet connection is required. Here is the program description from the BBC website:

AN Wilson explores the life and work of TS Eliot. From the halls of Harvard University to a Somerset village, via a Margate promenade shelter, he follows the spiritual and psychological journey that Eliot took in his most iconic poems. From The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock to The Waste Land and from Ash Wednesday to Four Quartets, Wilson traces Eliot’s life story as it informs his greatest works.

Wilson travels to the places that inspired them, visiting Eliot’s family’s holiday home on the Massachusetts coast, following the poet to Oxford, where he met and married his first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, and on to London. He explores how Eliot’s realisation that he and Vivien were fundamentally incompatible influenced The Waste Land and examines how Eliot’s subsequent conversion to Anglicanism coloured his later works. Wilson concludes his journey by visiting some of the key locations around which the poet structured his final masterpiece, Four Quartets.

Eliot’s poetry is widely regarded as complex and difficult; it takes on weighty ideas of time, memory, faith and belief, themes which Wilson argues have as much relevance today as during the poet’s lifetime. And whilst hailing his genius, Wilson does not shy away from confronting the discomforting and dark side of his work – the poems now widely regarded as anti-Semitic.

Waugh admired Eliot’s work and used a quote from The Waste Land as the title for his novel A Handful of Dust.

In another allusion to the BBC, the Sunday Telegraph carried a story this week by James Innes-Smith about how irritable the English people are. It opened with this:

Asked to describe his worst character trait on the BBC’s Face to Face programme, Evelyn Waugh replied, quick as a flash, ‘irritability’, in his own uniquely irritable way. While Scots tend towards surliness, the Welsh fury and the Irish argumentativeness, the English excel at being mildly irritated by, well, pretty much everything.

Because we struggle to express our emotions, they tend to emerge in all kinds of skewed ways. Catch an Englishman’s eye as he boards a busy train or waits in line at the bank and you can almost feel the self-righteous indignation bursting from his neck veins. For us English, it’s the little things that set us off.

Other examples cited of notably irritable Englishmen appearing on BBC over the years include Basil Fawlty, Hyacinth Bucket and Victor Meldrew. In addition to the YouTube link, Waugh’s Face to Face interview is transcribed in v. 19 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: A Little Learning, p, 552.

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