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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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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A Visit to Madresfield

Posted on October 2, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Our reader and EWS member Milena Borden has kindly sent the following report of her recent visit to Madresfield Court:

At Madresfield

A strikingly beautiful house appears a short distance after driving through Madresfield village and turning towards Madresfield Court. It is sitting at the foot of the Malvern Hills and is approached across a bridge over a moat. I arrived at noon on a balmy autumn day to see the real house of the Lygon family and get closer to their sensibilities, which inspired Waugh’s masterpiece novel Brideshead Revisited.

Inside this grand but very homely English country house, Tudor, Victorian Gothic and Arts and Crafts styles are all interwoven with a charming accumulation of Parisian, Dutch and Danish furniture, massive family and rare royal portraits, fake Holbeins, William Morrison fabrics, unusual artefacts and sculptures, marble fireplaces, valuable armoury, early-oak carved chests and antique travel trunks.

Waugh’s desk and chair have been moved from the upstairs nursery, where he stayed during his many visits to Madresfield (1931-1938), to the bay in the Long Gallery overlooking the Moat Garden. They seem to be the only uncomplicated items displayed on the otherwise highly ornamented first floor. Hugh Lygon, Waugh’s Oxford friend who famously contributed to the character of Sebastian Flyte, stares melancholically from a small modestly framed photograph tucked away in a corner of the dramatic top-lit, double-height staircase hall designed by his father, the seventh Earl Beauchamp who is the prototype of Lord Marchmain in Brideshead. Portraits of his sisters who adored Waugh and also found a place in the novel are spread across the wood panelled walls of many rooms and corridors. Waugh wrote his novel Black Mischief while staying at Madresfield in 1931 and a copy of the book dedicated to Mary and Dorothy together with other first editions are said to be kept in the Smoking Room but in the today’s Madresfield there is no public access to it. In the Library one can see shelves going all the way up to the high ceilings holding thousands of volumes including bibles, musical scores, dictionaries and albums.

The chapel seems unchanged since it was first seen by Waugh in 1931. It is decorated in the Arts and Crafts emblematic expression with idyllic pastoral scenes surrounding the portraits of the Lord and Lady Beauchamp as well as their seven children. There are beautiful murals, stained glass and candlesticks designed by Henry Payne. This is a Church of England chapel with some soft blue Italian Renaissance style colours. Although it does look a lot like the one in Brideshead, it also feels different from the strictly Catholic chapel given as a present to Lady Marchmain by her exiled husband.

In Brideshead Waugh seems to have immortalised just one episode of Madresfield’s almost one thousand years old life. But it is deeply convincing especially as shaped by his affectionately fictionalised romantic love for the Brideshead set. My two hours inside Madresfield was like stepping into an extraordinary still-life painting to meet its amazing inhabitants and to eat, drink, sleep, read, write and laugh with them.

26 September, Madresfield.

The house is open for tours on selected dates between April and September. This year’s tour season has ended, but tours will presumably be available next year during a similar period. Tours must be booked in advance. Details on open days and booking for next year will be available in due course at this site http://www.madresfieldestate.co.uk

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“The Waugh Effort” in The New Criterion

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Dominic Green has written an essay reviewing Evelyn Waugh’s military career. This is entitled “The Waugh effort” and appears in the current issue of The New Criterion. As one would expect, Green relies on Waugh’s Diaries, his novel Sword of Honour and the accounts of his experiences in writings of his biographers, as well as Antony Beevor and, more recently, Donat Gallagher. The essay opens with this:

“I have been in a serious battle and have decided I abominate military life,” Evelyn Waugh wrote to Laura, his second wife, from a camp in Egypt on June 2, 1941, after his evacuation from Crete on a Royal Navy destroyer. “It was tedious & futile & fatiguing. I found I was not at all frightened; only very bored & very weary.” Waugh’s weariness became a Weltschmerz, its literary expression his obituaries of Christian civilization, Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy. In a Life article of 1946 [“Fan-Fare”, EAR, p. 300] Waugh deployed a telling adjective for the war: “preposterous.” The reality of what came after (posterus) had mocked the ideals that had come before (prae). In 1939, Guy Crouchback, Sword of Honour’s protagonist, has eight years of “shame and loneliness” in self-exile at his family’s castello at Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, near Genoa. He has no heir, and his marriage has failed.

Green goes on to describe Guy Crouchback’s war and compare it to that of Waugh. This starts with Guy’s welcoming the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact so that he can now fight against what he sees as both the world’s principal evils. This section ends with Guy’s final expression of disillusionment when he parts with Mme Kanyi in Yugoslavia. What is omitted is the beginning of that disillusion when the Nazis break their pact by attacking the Soviet Union, leaving Guy and the British fighting alongside half of the evil forces he at first opposed. This occurs at the end of Officers and Gentlemen after what he sees as his own army’s disgrace in the Battle of Crete.

It is Green’s description of that battle, as seen by both Guy and Waugh, that takes up the balance of the essay. For the most part these are the same, but Green does note some points where Waugh’s account (recorded in a Memorandum reprinted with his Diaries, pp. 489 ff.) differs from that in the novel. According to Green:

The power of Waugh’s trilogy—and the Memorandum’s apparent corroboration of his tale of cowardice and betrayal—has encouraged historians and literary biographers to see Crouchback’s shame as Waugh’s reality. It is, in the sense that Waugh felt ashamed at the conduct of the British officers on Crete and unmanned and dishonorable for the manner of his escape. But new research by Donat Gallagher, an eminent Wavian, suggests that Waugh misunderstood the nature of his military position in his last hours on Crete, and afterwards too. Gallagher also strongly criticizes the standard account of the battle, Antony Beevor’s Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991), as well as Beevor’s literary followers, the Waugh biographers, Martin Stannard among them, who have repeated Beevor’s account of Waugh’s chaotic final night on Crete.

What follows as Green’s conclusion is a much abbreviated version of Prof Gallagher’s carefully researched account of the events. This was published as In the Picture (2014).

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Waugh: A Review and A Profile

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest issue of the Australian literary journal Quadrant, Mark McGinness reviews the first volume of Waugh’s collected journalism in v. 26 (Essays, Articles and Reviews 1922-1934) of OUP’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh edited by Prof Donat Gallagher. The review is entitled “Evelyn Waugh and the Fourth Estate”. It begins with a brief description of Waugh’s career and explains how his journalism fitted into it. Also noted are Prof Gallagher’s earlier collections. McGinness then samples several selections from the current volume, liberally quoting where that is helpful, from both Prof Gallagher and Waugh. He notes particularly an article from Isis where Waugh encapsulates Hamlet rather brilliantly, then moves on to his two newspaper articles on marriage and conversion to Roman Catholicism. Also noted, inter alia, are reviews of books by Vita Sackville-West, Somerset Maugham, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Dorothy Sayers and Thomas Hardy. It might have been mentioned that of that list, slightly more than half had been included in Prof Gallagher’s 1983 collection. He does however note helpfully, as I believe so also does Prof Gallagher, that of the 170 entries in this new volume, 110 have never been reprinted. McGinness then surveys the critical response to that earlier collection, quoting grudging respect for Waugh’s journalism by critics such as Julian Barnes, Philip Toynbee and CH Sissons. But then he wisely quotes back Prof Gallagher’s own response, which applies nicely to the present collection as well.

The review concludes with an assessment of OUP’s ambitious undertaking of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh:

This resurgence, this tsunami of Waviana, underplayed by its own publicists as “essentially an academic project”, is reminiscent of OUP’s launch in 2004 of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (the ODNB), the greatest feat in the history of publishing. The best studies, chambers, libraries and dens that already hold the ODNB’s sixty-one volumes of dark blue buckram should now make room over the next few years, for the forty-three tomes, in bottle-green, navy and maroon, by one of the Dictionary’s illustrious entrants, Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh. Such a tribute has been conferred on few–Shakespeare, of course; among more recent writers Oscar Wilde and Edith Wharton. And now this abiding enemy of both the Common Man and the Modern Age. Even committed Wavians may quail at the fulsomeness of it all–five done and thirty-eight to go–but the polish, the production. the quality and scholarship revealed so far deserve universal praise.

McGinness can find nothing to complain about, but then, upon reflection, neither can I. In terms of previous complete works projects, he might have mentioned those devoted to Waugh’s contemporaries DH Lawrence (Cambridge University Press) and George Orwell (Secker & Warburg), but that quibble relates to the review, not to the book itself.

The website of the magazine Anglotopia has posted a copy of a profile of Evelyn Waugh published last year in its print edition. The USA-based magazine and website are designed for people who consider themselves Anglophiles. The profile starts out quite well and goes through the early years in an entertaining, breezy style that conveys much of the detail without bogging down. It misses on a few points. Waugh did not go down from Oxford with a third-class degree. That was the grade he received on his exams but to receive the degree he needed another term in residence. (McGinness may have also got this wrong: “he went down with a low third-class.”). The Anglotopia profile also claims that Waugh was employed by the Shakespeare Head Press where his essay “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” was printed. It was, in fact, his friend Alastair Graham who was apprenticed to that firm at the time “PRB” was published. CWEW v.26 (EAR 1922-34), pp. 95-96.

Toward the end of the Anglotopia profile, however, the text becomes more problematic. For example. this is the total content of its description of Waugh’s war career:

With the outbreak of WWII Waugh was anxious to curb the spread of Nazi barbarism, despite his right-wing politics, and he talked his way into the Royal Marines. He proved a poor officer and was demoted from captain to intelligence officer, and in that capacity, he was involved in negotiations in Yugoslavia with General Tito. The war did, however, give him the material for some of his best work, the Sword of Honour trilogy, which was published over the next decade.

There are too many things wrong with that to warrant comment, although it might be noted briefly that Waugh was never himself engaged in negotiations with Marshall Tito. There’s nothing wrong with the concluding sentence.  It may well be the case that space constraints precluded the same depth of analysis for these later years as was devoted to the earlier period.

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Upcoming Lectures: Lancing, Leicester and Langport

Posted on September 29, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Several lectures have been announced that may be of interest to our readers in the UK:

—Lancing College has announced this year’s Evelyn Waugh lecturer:

The Evelyn Waugh Lecture was started in 2008 as a means of thanking all members of the Lancing Foundation and the 1848 Society for their loyalty and generosity to the College. …For the 2018 lecture we are delighted to welcome Sir Tim Rice OBE, Second’s 1958-1962, as our guest speaker. The evening [Tuesday, 27 November 2018] will begin with a drinks reception at 6.30pm, followed by the Lecture in Great School at 7.30pm and dinner in the Dining Hall afterwards. Please book your place by 19 November or contact the Foundation Office – (click to email) for further details.

This lecture is not normally open to the public but, in the past, Lancing has offered to consider requests from Evelyn Waugh Society members who identify themselves and request permission to attend.

–The Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society has named Prof Nigel Wood to deliver this year’s Presidential Address. This will take place next Monday, 1 October 2018 at 730pm in the New Walk Museum, Leicester:

Nigel Wood, Professor of Literature at the University of Loughborough will look in detail at some of W B Yeats’ poetry and also a number of Renaissance plays with a view to testing how helpful word searching might turn out to be. Recently, the analysis of texts has had to embrace a new dimension of approach. Machine-readable versions of the books we thought we knew well need alternative methods of “reading”, where the ability to draw up patterns of repeated words and phrases has now attracted our attention. At the press of a button, these new patterns emerge – but what are we to do with them? And how does this modify ideas of authorial intention? Is this a brave new world? Or a subtle nuance of an old one?  Professor Wood is at present editing a volume in the Oxford University Press “Complete Writings of Evelyn Waugh” project, “Put Out More Flags“…

Tickets are not required and admission is free. Details available here.

—The Somerset County Gazette has announced that Alexander Waugh will be giving a lecture next week on one of his favorite topics–authorship of Shakespeare’s works. According to Alexander, they were written by the Earl of Oxford:

“William Shakespeare never claimed to be a writer of any sort. And there’s no evidence during his lifetime he had any education. None of his daughters could write. The Earl of Oxford was a member of the nobility. Nobility would never publish a play and try to sell it, as plays were considered the lowest of the low. Shakespeare had a business arrangement with the Globe theatre and may have been an actor. It’s extremely likely Oxford would have been aware of him.”

The talk will be presented at The Seed Factory, Aller (near Langport) on Friday, October 5, at 7.30pm – tickets ÂŁ15 on the door.

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William Boyd, Winston Churchill and Evelyn Waugh

Posted on September 28, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Simon Kuper writing in the Financial Times reports an interview with novelist William Boyd. This is on the occasion of publication of Boyd’s latest novel Love is Blind:

Boyd draws a “binary division” between two kinds of novelist: autobiographers, such as Evelyn Waugh, who mine their own lives and societies; and those such as Graham Greene, who find their material elsewhere. Boyd is in the latter camp: “I will sit down and imagine narratives and conjure up a character in my mind. Some may be loosely based on real people but basically it’s an act of invention.”… Boyd can find ideas anywhere, which autobiographical novelists cannot. He says of Philip Roth, who retired from writing at 79: “I think he’d written himself out. He did write a lot of books about Philip Roth, essentially. I think Scott Fitzgerald and Waugh did [the same] as well. Evelyn Waugh said, ‘I’ve got one book left in me and that’s my Sword of Honour trilogy,’ which is effectively what he did in the war. Then he stopped because he was a totally autobiographical writer. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold came to him because he freaked out and went mad and said, ‘Ah, got a novel there.’ So I can see Philip Roth thinking, ‘I’m going to write another Zuckerman novel.’ ‘You’ve done 12 of them, mate,’ ” and Boyd stifles a pretend yawn.

In a review of Boyd’s new novel, The Economist describes his early books, such as A Good Man in Africa and An Ice-Cream War, as “inspired by Evelyn Waugh.” Boyd notes in the FT interview that he writes his endings first; he doesn’t mention that Waugh did that in the case of both A Handful of Dust (which the FT interviewer says Boyd had found deficient in some respects) and Sword of Honour. In Waugh’s case, he not only wrote the endings first but published them as stories (“The Man Who Liked Dickens” and “Compassion”) before incorporating them into his novels.

In the New Statesman, William Boyd reviews a new book that collects Winston Churchill’s letters to his mother. This is Darling Winston edited by David Lough. Boyd brings Evelyn Waugh into his discussion of the book:

Evelyn Waugh once said of Churchill that he was a man “always in the wrong”. These letters tend to bear that harsh judgement out – he was violently opposed to home rule for Ireland, for example – and one can see how imperial Britain’s might and sway completely shaped his attitude to “abroad”. And his single-mindedness, his sometimes overweening self-belief and conviction, can be seen as stemming from his absurdly entitled background – as the confidential, unguarded tone of these letters makes clear.

On another site promoting yet another book about Churchill (by Ashley Jackson) published a few years ago, that same quote appears at greater length:

Winston Churchill attracted far more criticism alive than he has since his death. He was, according to Evelyn Waugh, ‘always in the wrong, surrounded by crooks, a terrible father, a radio personality’.

The quote is from a letter Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming in January 1965 on the occasion of Churchill’s death (Letters, p. 630). Probably the best analysis of Waugh’s assessment of Churchill appears in an essay by John Howard Wilson collected in Waugh Without End: New Trends in Evelyn Waugh Studies (2005).

Finally, satirist P J O’Rourke writing in the Wall Street Journal chooses Waugh’s novel Black Mischief as one of his five favorite political satires (novels that “skewer the hypocricies of public life”):

The most bitter and excoriating of Waugh’s novels is also his most offensive. In just the first few pages, Waugh offends (by my count) three races, nine ethnicities, 11 religions and two sexual orientations. His language is hurtful, insensitive, privileged and exclusionary. We have progressed since Waugh’s time. All civilized people should condemn him. And being condemned by progress and civilization is what the book is about.

Other titles on the list include Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and Christopher Buckley’s Little Green Men.

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More from Duncan McLaren

Posted on September 25, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has recently added new postings about Waugh and his work to his website. The latest is entitled Men at War (2) and deals with the major portion of that novel that revolves around Guy Crouchback’s (and Waugh’s) early days in the Army. An earlier posting, Men at War (1), describes the very early pages of the novel where Guy is in Italy and returns to Engand at the very beginnng of the war. Those pages also describe Guy’s efforts to be accepted into the Army.

Much of the latest posting tracks the novel’s description of Guy’s military career against that of the author himself. McLaren determines that the very early Army chapters and those at the very end are heavily autobiographical, while those in the middle invovlve a  more fictional story as Apthorpe (a largely fictitious character) takes over the plot from Guy.

As in previous posts based on textual material, McLaren injects information that illustrates his discussions. This include copious photographs (both historic and present day) of the settings described in the novel as well as maps showing the locations (both factual and fictional) where the action takes place. The posting can be read (along with Men at War (1)) as an introduction to the novel or as a chapter by chapter guide to the novel’s action. I would suggest the latter or perhaps a combination of the two.

Another posting was made several weeks ago in the series McLaren has been writing on Waugh’s relationships with other artists. These have so far included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and painter, Charles Spencelayh. A fourth entry in this series (actually the third in order of writing and publication) is When Evelyn Met Orwell. An actual meeting did take place in this case, and this forms the focus of McLaren’s discussion.   McLaren in this instance starts with the consideration of the 2008 book by David Lebedoff entitled The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War.

But he soon goes off on his own with discussions based on the correspondence between the writers that began after publication of Animal Farm in 1945.  McLaren also uses reviews and articles each of them wrote about the other, including an unfinished essay Orwell was still writing about Waugh when he died. In addition, McLaren also brings in his own imagination to describe meetings between the two writers. In this case an actual meeting did take place when Waugh visited Orwell in a sanitarium in the Cotswolds at Cranham near where Waugh was living at Dursley. Although there was no transcript or other contemporary description of that meeting, McLaren inagines what might have been said. But before that an imaginary meeting takes place where Orwell stops by to find Waugh suffering a temporary writers block. As in other articles, McLaren uses maps and photos to illustrate his points. In this case he could find no photos of Orwell in the sanitarium or hospital but substitutes stills from a David Bowie film. A good idea up to a point but there were perhaps more of these than was called for.

Since both Orwell and Waugh were admirers of PG Wodehouse and his defenders against charges of treason, McLaren also brings him into the story. In addition, he uses an essay by John Howard Wilson, American Waugh scholar and founder of the EWS, in which Wilson argued that Orwell had been influenced by Brideshead Revisited when he wrote parts of 1984. McLaren cleverly weaves that essay into his text. McLaren also draws comparison between Waugh’s description of Guy’s wartime hospital visit to Apthorpe in Men at Arms and his own visit to Orwell in the sanitarium.  The posting concludes with McLaren’s imagining of what the two writers might have discussed when Waugh made his 1949 visit (or visits) to Orwell at Cranham Sanitarium (in one case with his neighbor Frances Donaldson). As with other essays in this series, this one is both entertaining and informative. I am wondering who is next–Betjeman, Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell?

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