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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Blunted Sword

Posted on October 7, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A review of Waugh’s Sword of Honour appears in the latest issue of the journal of the Augustine Institute Faith & Culture. This is by Joseph Pearce who is also editor of the Saint Austin Review. Here are some excerpts:

…The truth is that I found Waugh’s Sword somewhat blunted by the sin of self-indulgence, in which far too many unnecessary and uninteresting characters are introduced into the mix without any obvious point from the perspective of the overall plot. The novel would have been far better had it been half the length and had half its characters been harmlessly excised. One thing’s for sure, it is not “Waugh’s masterpiece” as a reviewer in Time had claimed. …  In Brideshead Revisited, which, pace Time, is indubitably Waugh’s real masterpiece, there are relatively few characters, each of whom has a real personality and serves a real purpose to the plot.

Sword of Honour does contain elements of Waugh’s genius, such as the delightfully immoral and ironically named Virginia and the delightfully psychopathic Ben Ritchie Hook. There’s also the scathing satire on the vacuity of modernity, which is a recurring feature of Waugh’s oeuvre, and a sardonically satirical exposĂ© of the sheer nastiness of communism. With regard to the latter, Waugh’s Sword has a real cutting edge in its treatment of the communist partisans in Yugoslavia during the war, combining the acerbic realism of Solzhenitsyn, the grimness of Orwell, and the dexterous lightness and humour of Wodehouse. …

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Lord Ottercove Redux

Posted on October 6, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The pages of the TLS  have been the scene for the reappearance of a character named Lord Ottercove who first surfaced (or not) in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and William Gerhardie. This discussion started with Paula Byrne’s review of the CWEW edition of Vile Bodies in the 24-31 August issue where she noted that Waugh had originally named a character Lord Ottercove (based on Lord Beaverbrook) in his 1930 novel. Byrne explained that, upon advice of counsel, Waugh changed that character’s name to Lord Monomark.

A correspondent (Thomas Frick of Los Angeles), then wrote a letter to the TLS noting that William Gerhardie later picked up that same name for a character in his 1934 novel Resurrection.  As described by Gerhardie:

Lord Ottercove had a prodigious, an infectious capacity for enjoying himself; where he was there, everyone felt, was enjoyment and people involuntarily foregathered round the spot occupied by Lord Ottercove out of the natural wish to enjoy themselves–in reality only to see Lord Ottercove enjoying himself. The difference, having regard to the complicated  reflexes of our natures, being hardly distinguishable.

Mr Frick wondered in conclusion whether other writers had used that name.

In the current issue of TLS, novelist William Boyd answers that question. It turns out that it was not Waugh who invented the name. According to Boyd:

…Waugh lifted the name from Gerhardie’s novel Jazz and Jasper (1928) where Ottercove appears as a thin disguise of Beaverbrook. Beaverbrook was something of a champion and support of Gerhardie, as it happens. And Vile Bodies was heavily influenced by Jazz and Jasper in all manner of ways.

How much of this is revealed in the CWEW edition of Vile Bodies is difficult to say because it has no index. (See pp. 166, 254: line 67.538.) It might be noted that Waugh later had occasion to invent a character named Lord Copper in his novel Scoop who also resembled Lord Beaverbrook, at least up to a point.

In another recent TLS issue, novelist and critic D J Taylor in his “Freelance” column discusses the issues raised by censorship in today’s more open publishing environment:

Not long ago, I was commissioned to write a piece for the Guardian about a forthcoming television dramatization of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall. One of the fascinations of this adaptation, I proposed, would be to see how the producers dealt with the scene at which Mrs Beste-Chetwynde arrives at the Llanabba school sports day accompanied by her friend Mr Sebastian Cholmondley, otherwise known as “Chokey”, whereupon Philbrick, the school butler, remarks “What price the coon?”

It was not possible, the section editor said apologetically, to print the word “coon” in the Guardian. In the end we had to settle for a bromide or two about “casually racist remarks”. In fact, Waugh’s attitude to racial issues in Decline and Fall is double-edged, and while he may very well be poking fun at some of Mr Cholmondley’s cultural pretensions (“I read Shakespeare”, he tells the school’s headmaster. “Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear. Ever read them?”), he is also satirizing the well-attested late 1920s phenomenon of fashionable society women taking up black men as sexual playthings. It is difficult to convey much of this if you are not allowed to reproduce the language he used.

Thanks to reader Peggy Troupin for sending links.

 

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Political Roundup

Posted on October 6, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s novel Scoop tops the list of those works cited in this week’s political press:

–Tina Brown writes on the 10th anniversary of her news website The Daily Beast and recalls the selection of its name:

A vexing problem in the spring of 2008 was what to name the new site. I kept coming back to one that nobody in America would understand unless that is, they happened to have read Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s antic 1938 novel about Fleet Street in which the all-powerful broadsheet that employs the hapless hero, William Boot, is named the Daily Beast. I stubbornly clung to this name. It felt warm-blooded, feral, human, friendly but sometimes dangerous—everything you want a news site to be. And its comic roots to anyone who happened to know its derivation also announced we did not take ourselves too seriously, a critical aspect of the Beast’s emerging DNA.

–In the online news magazine International Policy Digest, a report about the parlous state of journalism in Australia, faced with government interference and regulation, begins with this:

Journalism is getting something of a battering in Australia. At the parliamentary level, laws have passed that would be inimical to any tradition versed in the bill of rights. (Australia, not having such a restraining instrument on political zeal, can only rely on the bumbling wisdom of its representatives.) At the executive level, deals have been brokered between Canberra and various regional states to ensure minimum coverage over the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Secrecy is all fashion. Adding to this is the triumph of a certain breed of lazy, compliant journalist. The image of the ragtag journo long lost in the speculative tripe of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop has been replaced by a tedious, technocratic lout who should, time permitting, be put out to a distant pasture. We are now dealing with compromised dispatches, press releases that yoke the reasoning and analysis that would barely pass muster in the lower grades of a half credible primary. The investigative journalist has, for the most part, disappeared, leaving a few brave scribblers to toil in the wilderness.

The same journal in a story from a few days earlier carries a report from Ethiopia, the setting of Waugh’s novel. This describes a ride on a light rail train line recently opened in Addis Ababa:

As the train rolls along I begin to count the number of unfinished, half finished, or almost finished buildings. In the 1930s, British writer Evelyn Waugh described the city, then still a relatively new place having been founded in 1886, as being “in a rudimentary state of construction” with “half-finished buildings at every corner.” Almost a century later Waugh’s description still holds. On my first round trip I counted over fifty, and those were just the buildings adjacent to the rail line. Most are 8 to 12 stories high with wooden pole scaffolding and huge torn shards of protective blue or green plastic sheeting that are supposed to prevent dust and debris from falling on the street below. These buildings are a testament to bad planning, bad lending practices, a corrupt permitting system and in general, greed. As the money runs out, the construction stops dead, the thousands of poorly paid workers who were bustling about when the construction began may well be the ones on the street today shining shoes.

This quote comes not from Scoop but from Waugh’s book Remote People (1931, p. 34) where he reported on the earlier trip which inspired his novel Black Mischief. (See previous post.)

–Writing in The Times, David Aaronovitch considers the implications of Teresa May’s proposal for a grand festival on the occasion of Brexit. This reminds him of such earlier events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Britain in 1951:

The historian Asa Briggs wrote of the Great Exhibition that “there was no more vigorous assertion of national confidence than the internationalism of 1851”. Writing about the 1951 Festival of Britain, Michael Frayn characterised it as being organised by the “herbivores” — do-gooders and the BBC — in the teeth of opposition from the “carnivores” — “the readers of the Daily Express, the Evelyn Waughs”. Carnivores can do a great coronation (or, in extreme cases, a March on Rome) but they’re not so good at festivals celebrating internationalism. They don’t want to spend the money and they will keep talking about the war. Above all, whoever backs it, a festival needs a theme that the whole nation can understand. One that people don’t feel coerced by. The idea that we are “better off alone” — the inevitable sub-theme of the proposed 2022 event — is not just unappealing, to many it is anathema. What are we celebrating? Six years of political paralysis? A schism that has divided generations and regions? Long queues at airports?

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Posted in Black Mischief, Festivals, Newspapers, Remote People, Scoop | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Political Roundup

Roundup: Football, Ocean Liners and Bankers

Posted on October 3, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–In the sports weblog Onside View, a blogger compares Waugh’s opening chapters of his 1930 travel book Labels to the situation facing Arsenal FC’s new manager:

 … Waugh travelled, and one of his earlier writings on such subject, Labels, saw him leave the UK for parts that he himself knew were becoming well-trampled by the well-heeled, with the traditional ‘Grand Tour’ locations no longer on the itinerary….The British thirst for knowledge, for art and for antiquity ensured that museums in these far-flung places were well-attended by visitors, even if they weren’t always sure what they were seeing. Waugh might not have been the typical travel writer, but his appreciation of quality was respectable – this is a man who condemned the nightclubs of Paris for their mediocre Champagne, remember – and he noted the difficulty of being exposed to this new culture. Having been brought up in Western culture, with all that entails in terms of artistic movements, and progression; that of the Renaissance, of modernism, being exposed to Eastern art, with its repetition of shape, colour and pattern, Waugh found it impossible to judge its quality. It is an immutable truth that one is unable to judge how good something is when there is no frame of reference, or little frame of reference, to work from.

The blog post continues by applying this same need to apply gradual understanding of something new into the professional sports world. Specifically, it urges that  “Unai Emery be given a berth of understanding as Arsenal coach.”

–In the art and design magazine Frieze, Emily Labarge has an essay on how ocean liners have been treated in literature. In this passage she links the names of fictional steamships to themes in the books where they appear:

Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), which marks Clarissa Dalloway’s first appearance, is an Edwardian satire that takes place on the Euphrosyne; Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley evades murder charges by sailing to Greece on the Hellenes, where he stands at the bow and envisions his rich new life in Athens; Evelyn Waugh’s Gilbert Pinfold loses his mind on the Caliban, imagining he is tormented by a family of tyrants who accost him via the ship’s electrical systems: voices in the ether, telling him to commit suicide – full fathom five.

–A Q&A in the Daily Mail asks whether Waugh had supported the Fascist government of Mussolini in the 1935 Abyssinian War. Here’s the answer (from Frank Jones in Coventry):

Waugh did, indeed, support Mussolini. According to biographer Philip Eade, Waugh was hired by the Mail as a correspondent to cover the Abyssinian crisis in 1935 and was ‘an unflinching advocate’ of the Italian invasion. He saw Abyssinia as a barbarous country, ruled by a violent government, and believed that Mussolini would be the most effective barrier against Hitler. ‘ In the matter of practical politics, it is certain that their [the Italian] government would be for the benefit of the Ethiopian Empire and for the rest of Africa,’ he concluded.

In later years, Waugh changed his tune. Eade quotes a letter in which he says: ‘ I am sick of Abyssinia and of my book about it. It was fun being pro-Italian when it was an unpopular and (I thought) losing cause.’

–On the website recode.net, former Google VP Jessica Powell is interviewed about her new novel The Big Disruption. This is about how Arsyen Aimo applies for a job as janitor in a Silicon Valley company and begins a rise through management. Here’s an excerpt:

Q. … We’ve been introduced to a janitor who then becomes something else. 

A. Yeah, so Arsyen the janitor has just crashed the management team meeting and we’re about to meet the management team.

Q. Because they don’t know who he is.

A. Right.

Q. He gets a job he’s not …

A. He’s not qualified to do.

Q. Yeah, it’s like “Being There” with Peter Sellers.

A. Yeah. Or a little bit like … or “Scoop.” Scoop, something like that.

Q. Scoop is better, yeah.

–In the River Falls (WI) Journal, columnist Dave Wood contributes an article about those instances when you wish you’d said something as clever as some one else you later remembered:

When novelist Evelyn Waugh died in 1966, photographer Cecil Beaton surmised that “He died of snobbery.” Critic Edmund Wilson summed up Waugh’s prose style: “His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.”

Waugh probably had it coming. When he heard that his friend Randolph Churchill (Winston’s son) was in the hospital to have a lung removed after which doctors discovered that it was benign, the sharp-witted satirist opined that “Randolph’s operation signifies what’s wrong with modern medicine. The doctors removed from Randolph the only part of his body that was not diseased.”

That’s an often repeated quote, but in this case it is not quite what Waugh had written. In a diary entry dated March 1964, Waugh wrote:

Randolph Churchill went into hospital… to have a lung removed. It was announced that the trouble was not ‘malignant’. Seeing Ed Stanley in White’s, on my way to Rome, I remarked that it was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it. (Diaries, p. 792).

–The Australian Financial Review has an article about a recent Royal Commission Report on banking malpractice. The reporter Joe Aston enjoyed ploughing through its three volumes over the weekend if only because its author Kenneth Haynes sprinkled it with cites to relevant literary works. These included Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, George Eliot and most especially Charles Dickens. But there was one allusion that the reporter thought Mr Haynes had missed. This was from Bleak House (with which the article concludes):

In it, Dickens characterises a late member of the Smallwood family as “a horny-skinned, two-legged species of spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies and retired into holes until they were entrapped. The name of this old pagan’s god was Compound Interest. He lived for it, married it, died of it. Meeting with a heavy loss in an honest little enterprise in which all the loss was intended to be on the other side, he broke something–something necessary to his existence–therefore it couldn’t have been his heart–and made an end of his career.” Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece A Handful of Dust ends with his protagonist enslaved by a madman in the jungle, forced to read him Bleak House for the rest of his days.

In those days there were no microphones to drop. So, The End.

Well, not quite. In Waugh’s novel the endless reading of Dickens was not confined to Bleak House, although if one had to choose a single volume, it would probably be that one.

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Posted in A Handful of Dust, Diaries, Labels, Newspapers, Scoop, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Football, Ocean Liners and Bankers