English Writers in Mexico

Posted on August 20, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A link to an article on English writers in Mexico has been posted on the internet by ProQuest. This was written by Simon Carnell and appeared in 2015 over several issues of the University of Manchester’s journal PN Review. It discusses the interwar works about Mexico written by D H Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene  as well as Malcolm Lowry’s postwar novel Under the Volcano. The discussion of Waugh’s Robbery Under Law is in the final installment (Part 3) appearing in vol. 41, #5 (May/June 2015) and entitled “Through ‘the literary-perception scrambler’? English writers in Mexico between the wars: Part 3. Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Lowry: Towards a ‘Machine that Works.'” Parts 1 and 2 dealing with Lawrence, Huxley and Greene appear in Nos. 3 and 4 of vol. 41.

The opening installment sets out the parameters of the discussion:

…All four writers self-consciously present not an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ but a deliberately English view of post-revolutionary Mexico: an English view partly established, to a degree which has not been noticed, by denigrating writings and perspectives issuing from north of Mexico’s border with the United States. All four also operate with a vaunting lack of circumspection which derives from an assumption of relative ignorance about things Mexican in their English audience; a tendency towards racial stereo-typing (and worse) which derives in obvious part from the colonial legacy shared with that audience, and an emphasis – most pronounced in Huxley and Greene but also present in Lawrence and Waugh – upon the value of personally observed, ‘telling’ detail. If there was a single figure who exerted a powerful and distorting influence upon English writers about Mexico in the period, as Lowry stands accused of influencing the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ writers subsequently, that figure was D.H. Lawrence.

The section relating to Robbery Under Law begins with a discussion of how Waugh addresses each of these themes and then concludes with this:

When Waugh made a collection of his travel writings in 1945, he uniquely omitted anything from his book on Mexico, remarking in the preface that he was content to leave it in oblivion, ‘for it dealt little with travel and much with political questions’. Dealt with them, too, Waugh must have realised from the perspective of 1945, with an embarrassing naivety unacknowledged by his dismissal of the book elsewhere as being written ‘in the style of a Times leader of the 1880s’. The Mexican travel books of Lawrence and Greene have remained in print ever since their original publication; The Power and the Glory is generally asserted to be Greene’s ‘masterpiece’, and The Plumed Serpent continues to engage readers and scholars. They are books which still, one suspects, find their way into the luggage of first-time Anglophone visitors to Mexico. Robbery Under Law fell immediately out of print and is Waugh’s least known work, though it is sometimes cited as having value as a comprehensive statement of its author’s conservativism, and even achieved an afterlife of sorts by being extracted for an anthology of conservative ‘thought’. With its reissue in 2011, though, it takes its place alongside the works of other English literary travellers to Mexico between the wars in which detailed reportage of ‘travel’ and ‘political questions’ were hardly mutually exclusive. Indeed it has value there as a kind of unwitting because guilelessly outspoken reductio ad absurdum of some of the attitudes, assumptions and tone de haut en bas permeating the writings about Mexico of Lawrence, Huxley and Greene.

A link to the article (or at least Part 1) has been posted by ProQuest but a subscription is required and finding Parts 2 and 3 can be a challenge.

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V S Naipaul (More)

Posted on August 19, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

More articles have come to light in which V S Naipaul’s attitude toward the writings of Evelyn Waugh is discussed:

In the online newspaper The Daily Beast there is a story by Alice McNearney about the accidental destruction of Naipaul’s papers from his early period (prior to 1970). He needed money and asked Paul Theroux in 1972 to find an academic institution in the USA to buy his manuscripts. He was willing to sell the collection for £40,000, but at that early stage of his career, no buyer was forthcoming. So he packed them up for storage at Ely’s warehouse in south London. In 1992 when his wife went to retrieve the files, she discovered they had been inadvertently destroyed. The warehouse had been directed to destroy some files of the Nitrate Corporation of Chile. These were labelled “NITRATE”. When those files were collected for destruction, the warehouse also included files labelled “NAIPAUL”. The story in the Beast describes some of what was lost:

Included in the collection were his personal reflections—diaries from his time at Oxford, his days as a budding journalist, his travels around Africa and India, and his reflections as he went about creating some of his early work. There were letters that he had received during his early years in England. He had copies of the scripts he had written while he was working for the BBC’s Caribbean Voices and copies of the pieces he had contributed to his “Letters from London” column in the Illustrated Weekly of India. And then there were the early manuscripts: two books that were never published, one written while he was living in Trinidad and the other called The Shadow’d Livery penned during his time at Oxford.

While Naipaul was enthusiastic about The Shadow’d Livery early on—a letter he wrote from Oxford called it his “magnum opus” and reported “the man at the Ashmolean Museum here, who has read the first 50,000 words, thinks it highly readable”—the book failed to sell and his opinion of it evolved. In an interview with the New York Times in 2000, he acknowledged “it was heavily dependent on Evelyn Waugh, but the idea was my own.”

The New York Times review (linked above) of the collection of letters where Naipaul mentioned The Shadow’d Livery contains this additional information:

At 18 he wrote his first novel, “The Shadow’d Livery.” “It was,” he said, […] “a kind of farce on an important subject,” a black man in Trinidad who tries to turn himself into a king. After the book was rejected by a publisher, it was jettisoned. He sank into a depression that lasted about a year.. Then he wrote a second novel, a “more personal, foolish book” — also unpublished.

From this it sounds as if the novel may have been written while he was still living in Trinidad, but that he tried, without success, to find a publisher after he had arrived at Oxford. That would be consistent with earlier reports that he was influenced as a teenager by Waugh’s writings.

One of our readers has also sent a reference from an interview of Naipaul that appeared in a 2006 issue of The Literary Review. In this, he was asked his assessment of English writers:

Q. Why do you exempt Dickens from your judgement on English writers? [Naipaul had earlier stated that 19th century English writers such as Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen “wrote for the English” but excepted Dickens.]

A. I read some of the very early essays a short time ago: Sketches by Boz– they were good. There’s so much rubbish in Dickens. Wordiness, too many words, repetitiveness. He was trying to do something, but by God the African never had a worse enemy.[….]

Q. Do you judge the British writers of the twentieth century in the same way?

A. That’s very interesting. It’s true of Waugh. The idea of an international readership doesn’t enter until quite late. H G Wells, writing his early short stories, is not writing for people outside. He is taking a lot of the clichés of imperialism and making the stories – good writer though he is. If you read the stories from the 1890s they have African voodoo and Indian priests, etc. He hasn’t been out of the country, he is just dealing in received ideas.

Thanks to Dave Lull for a link to this interview.

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Weekend Roundup: St Helena and Pick-me-ups

Posted on August 18, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s roundup starts with religious and moves on to secular issues:

–August 18th is the feast day of St Helena in the western church calendar. Blogger Amy Welborn has posted an article on Waugh’s novel about the Saint for the occasion:

It was his favorite of all of his novels. Some people hate it, but I love it. When I was working as editor of the Loyola Classics series, the book was amazingly out of copyright in the US, so we were able to publish it [in 2005] with an introduction by George Weigel.  I see that the copyright issue has gone another way, it seems, so the book is now published as part of a series of Waugh novels by Little, Brown.  You can get copies of the Loyola edition here, and the current edition here. Some, as I said, hate it because, they say, it’s basically the type of characters you find in Vile Bodies and Handful of Dust  –  1920’s British upperclass twits – plopped down in the 4th century.  Well, that’s part of the reason I like it. It’s entertaining in that way…

The post also includes an excerpt from George Weigel’s introduction to the Loyola edition.

–The National Review last week published a priest’s response to what he describes as the Roman Catholic Church’s “Summer of Shame”. The article was published on 11 August, so would have been written in advance of the the report of statewide clerical misbehavior in Pennsylvania. At the conclusion of the article, Fr Benedict Kiely (ordained in 1994) makes this reference to Evelyn Waugh:

So often it is the confirmation of the ecclesiastical Peter Principle, the theory that members of a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. Writing to the novelist Evelyn Waugh in the 1930s, the historian Hilaire Belloc described the English hierarchy as a “fog of mediocrity.” In both the U.S. and the U.K., much of the present crisis indicates that the fog has not yet cleared.

–In a letter to The Times earlier this week, a reader offered a Waugh quote relating to correspondence about depression-inducing statements in the paper:

PICK ME UP
Sir, Further to the letters about statements that have depressed your readers over the years, I’d like to offer an antidote by offering two words that lift my spirits every time I think of them. Evelyn Waugh once said that the best phrase in the English language was “cheque enclosed”.
Michael Dale
Glasgow

–Another Waugh “pick me up” called the Noon Day Reviver is mentioned in the food website EatOut,com.za:

A much toned down version of a drink referenced in the diaries of the great Evelyn Waugh, who wrote about this as a fool proof cure for a hangover, is The Evelyn Waugh Noon Day Reviver. Attributed to the author himself, infused with Hendrick’s Gin and the perfect dash of ginger beer and stout beer, this tipple is a perfect blend of flavours, to revive wit and character to those with curious minds…

Method: Carefully build in the following order: gin, ginger beer and beer. Enjoy!

–Waugh was reportedly mentioned in another Times article, that one about anti-semitism, but for unexplained reasons that article was later deleted. All that remains is this Google search report:

“Antisemitism in Britain: How prejudice towards Jews grew relentlessly…”  The Times–Aug 16, 2018. The caste of leaders confronted with the rise in British prejudice belonged to the decadent interwar generation satirised in works such as Evelyn Waugh’s Vile …”

I wonder if any of our readers managed to see the article before it was suppressed and might like to comment on the Waugh’reference.

–Waugh is included in the promotional material of a Cotswold hotel, the Lygon Arms, appearing in The Evening Standard’s “Escape” column. This in itself is not so surprising as is the the identities of the two other guests with whom his name was linked:

Established in the 12 century, this former coaching inn has an impressive history; its famous guests have included Charles I, Evelyn Waugh and Kylie Minogue.

–Charles Capel, reporter for The National, an Abu Dhabi paper, has contributed his selections to a series of favorite book recommendations:

I find the books that resonate with me the most are those that teach me something. Fiction or not, there’s no greater joy than finishing a book and feeling like you’ve learnt something new. All of these books have either inspired a love for, or taught me something about journalism…

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

Certainly not the first time this has been chosen, Scoop is considered a literary rite of passage for journalists. It follows an oblivious reporter thrust out of his depth when he is sent to an unfamiliar foreign country. I read this when I first arrived in Abu Dhabi; Waugh’s dry British wit helped dull any feelings of homesickness. Based in a fictional African country of Ishmaelia, rookie reporter John Boot would rather be writing about the British countryside, but in a case of mistaken identity is sent to report on a phony war.

–The Oldie has posted Auberon Waugh’s first column written for the magazine (“Oldies rule the country!”). It appeared in 1992 and is reproduced here.

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Visits with V S Naipaul

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Two recent stories following the death of V S Naipaul have Waugh connections. Most prominent are the reflections by Alexander Waugh of his several meetings with Naipaul dating back to his childhood when Sir Vidia came to visit his father. These appear in an “In Memoriam” article available in the online edition of Vanity Fair. The Waugh family theme opens near the article’s introduction where Alexander describes being summoned by Naipaul’s second wife to appear on one-day’s notice at the Naipaul residence in Wiltshire for an important but undisclosed matter. This was in 2002. Alexander writes:

He had been a friend of my father’s and had come to stay a few times in my youth when I had been allowed to peep at him in my pajamas from the top of the stairs as he crossed the hall for dinner. My grandfather, Evelyn Waugh, had publicly championed Sir Vidia’s “exquisite mastery of the English language” and my father, Auberon, had revered him above all others as a writer of incomparable and inimitable skill.

As a teenager I had read, but was rather bewildered by, two of his early novels set in his native Trinidad: The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr. Biswas. It wasn’t for a dec­ade that I came to appreciate the exceptional brilliance of his writing, the slow, regular pulse that emits from layers of disarmingly simple syntax; the humor, compassion, and despair that he conjures from the astute observation of quite ordinary behavior; and his unique ability to sustain an atmosphere, to portray character, to describe places, to illuminate the souls of whole continents…

After extensive preliminaries, causing Alexander considerable anxiety, it turned out that Naipaul had had learned that Alexander was writing the book which ultimately became Fathers and Sons (2004). Naipaul ask for the book’s opening sentence, which Alexander had to improvise since he had not yet begun to write it. After expressing his approval of the improvisation, Naipaul told him: “Your book must be a critical-loving memoir.”  Lunch was then served. That message was the whole purpose of the two-hour drive from West Somerset requiring Alexander to abandon some guests of his own.

When Naipaul later read the book, he was pleased with the results. According to Alexander:

His interest in Fathers and Sons was connected also to his friendship with “Bron,” my father. Perhaps he was worried that in my youthful ineptitude I might inadvertently traduce my father’s memory. He was pleased and relieved when eventually he read what I had written, later presenting me with a large, framed photograph inscribed on the back: “This photograph of Bron, great wit, great writer and good friend, from V. S. Naipaul on the occasion of Alexander’s visit to Salterton 13 March 2010.”

Alexander’s visits continued over the years, including one in 2010 when Naipaul’s portrait was being painted and novelist Vikram Seth (a neighbor) joined them for lunch. He also recalls a 2011 visit when he arrived just after a favorite cat had died and another later visit after the cat had been buried in the garden. But Alexander also recalls, from these accumulated visits, Naipaul’s thoughts about the life and writings of his grandfather:

Sir Vidia knew the Evelyn Waugh story well and seemed to have recognized in it reflections of his own. Both the Waughs and the Naipauls had risen from “apparent ordinariness,” as Naipaul put it, to positions of influence in the literary world. He saw how his own father, like Evelyn Waugh’s, had been a failed writer, one who lacked the necessary confidence to produce and who had consequently vested his life’s hopes and aspirations in advancing his son’s literary career. Years later I asked Sir Vidia if he had been conscious of all this. When he speaks his voice is sonorous and his words carefully weighed. “I suppose that was so,” he said.

Alexander also recounts his presence as an eyewitness at what was one of the critical moments in Naipaul’s later life. This took place at the Hay-on-Wye festival in 2011 where Alexander was introducing a talk by Naipaul. Just before that took place, there was a rather important encounter:

Before the interview began, as I walked Sir Vidia through the writers’ tent at Hay-on-Wye, we were suddenly sprung upon by the novelist Paul Theroux and what seemed like a pre-planned ambush of paparazzi. Theroux had been Sir Vidia’s friend of 30 years until they fell out over a woman and an inscribed book. Naipaul had accused Theroux of trying to seduce his first wife, and he had then put one of Theroux’s books, with its personal inscription from the author, up for sale for £1,500. When Theroux complained, Naipaul told him to “take it on the chin and move on.” Instead, Theroux wrote about the bust-up of the friendship in a memoir called Sir Vidia’s Shadow. They had not spoken for 15 years. I remember Paul Theroux coming to stay in the old days with my father—a smooth, handsome, dark-haired fellow who knocked back cocktails with strange slurping sounds in the kitchen—but he had changed over the years, and neither Sir Vidia nor I recognized him. The photographers flashed away, and all the next day’s papers ran with the story: an old literary hatchet had been finally buried. In point of fact, Sir Vidia was not at all sure to whom he was talking, believing only that he was mollifying some newly met, and possibly lunatic, fan. “I have missed you,” Theroux said. “And I have missed you too,” Sir Vidia replied. They shook hands, but the meeting between the two writers lasted only a minute, and when it was later explained to Sir Vidia who it was that had greeted him, he said only that he was glad, as he saw no point in feuds. Afterward, the two writers exchanged friendly letters.

Alexander’s memoir of his visits with Naipaul is an excellent antidote to several of the recent articles recalling the “great writer’s” difficult personality. Difficult he may have been, but he also had a softer, more humorous side.

Another article appearing in the current TLS recounts a 2007 visit to Naipaul’s Wiltshire cottage. The visitor is interviewing Naipaul, apparently for an article he (or she) plans to write. In the course of the interview Naipaul revealed his assessment of other writers:

Naipaul had come to Wiltshire from London but was always keen to stress his estrangement. Several times in our conversation he used the phrase “floating man”. He was not a figure like Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh, “who retired from city life, in order to become the Writer in the Country”. He returned to Powell and Waugh later in our conversation, when he passed out verdicts on other writers. His disobliging views on Jane Austen and E. M. Forster were by then well known. Brideshead Revisited was “a very, very bad book”, he said. Waugh wrote of the aristocracy “with a kind of feminine longing”. Powell was a friend, which made his reaction to A Dance to the Music of Time all the more embarrassing. “I was appalled.” There were other disappointments. Graham Greene’s protagonists were just “being moved from one seedy background to another. There was nothing for me in it”.

And so on for several lines, contributing more to Naipaul’s difficult side than the softer one depicted in Alexander’s article. The interviewer’s name is not revealed nor is the article that may have resulted from the visit. The account appears in the equally anonymous “N.B.” column of the TLS, this week compiled by J.C. Thanks to our readers for contributions to the above posting.

 

 

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Two Bloggers and a Librarian Reading Waughs

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Two bloggers have been posting comments on their readings of Waugh novels. One, on Brideshead Revisited, the other, on the novels of Auberon Waugh. A German librarian has also contributed a report on her reading of Put Out More Flags:

–Elliot has recently completed Brideshead on his weblog Elliot’s Reading, having noted his progress in several postings dating back to 5 August. Some of these are quite interesting, others not so much, but on the whole they are worth reading. They are available here. The series of comments concludes with this:

In the end, what is Waugh’s point, or point of view? Evidently he was a man of faith, but is it really credible that all will be well for a nasty character like Lord M if he passively accepts his last rites? Sure, Julia has a reaffirmation of her faith at the end, but that doesn’t lead her to any positive, charitable action. The hero to the extent there is one, for me, is youngest child Cordelia (the name is too significant) who has devoted her life to helping others at the cost of some sacrifice of her own potential happiness and comfort. The novel poignantly ends with the narrator, now in the British army, helping prepare the estate for troop occupation during the war – things have changed.

–Nige has started reading the novels of Auberon Waugh, having wondered why they were neglected. His first report (The Foxglove Saga) was posted earlier. He has recently posted his report on the second novel (The Path of Dalliance). This may be found on his website Nigeness, where you can presumably follow his progress. (Hat tip to Dave Lull.) It concludes:

As he blunders through Oxford, and for some while after, Jamey remains under the influence of Cleeve, sending regular reports to one of the Brothers – and of his monstrous, endlessly embarrassing mother, who is perhaps the strongest character in the book. By the end of the story Jamey is, perhaps, beginning to break free and grow up, but you wouldn’t want to bet on it. Path of Dalliance ends back at Cleeve with a reunion of old boys and others. It’s a satisfying and immensely enjoyable read, and surely deserves to be reprinted. My copy was reissued by Robin Clark, along with the other novels, in the Eighties – and that was a long time ago.

–In Greiz, Germany, one of the local librarians contributed a recommedation of Waugh’s Put Out More Flags (in German, Mit Wehenden Fahnen–literally “Waving Flags”) to the local newspaper Ostthüringer Zeitung’s series “Summertime/Reading time”:

The central theme of ‘Put Out More Flags’ by Evelyn Waugh is the outbreak of World War II. He wrote the novel in 1941 on his way home to England after two years of military service in the Middle East. Under these circumstances, one would have to assume that it is a serious or even sad story. But the book is hilarious. … The main character, Basil Seal  … is charming and an absolute Nichtsnutz; he has a  scandalous past and his father disinherited him on his deathbed. …When the war breaks out his mother is quite ready to make a sacrifice and send her disappointing son to the front. After all, the family had no major losses in the First World War. Even Basil’s married lover looks ahead to his heroic death. Meanwhile, his sister Barbara has to deal with the evacuees from the cities on her estate. Not all are easy to care for. When Basil finally finds a suitable position, his chance comes to become a hero. ‘Put out more flags’ is not a typical warrior novel, but rather a satirical social novel. He describes the British upper class between patriotism and opportunism. Waugh himself comes from this milieu. His characters are alive and iridescent, the situations precisely observed and pointed. If you like social satire and black British humor, I recommend this novel.

The German translation of the book was published in 2015 by Diogenes Verlag in Zurich. The translation of the article into English is by Google with very few edits. There seems to be no generally accepted English equivalent for Nichtsnutz, but good-for-nothing is one of the choices.

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Another Gerhardie Revival

Posted on August 14, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

According to an article by novelist Jonathan Coe in The Sunday Times, another attempt to revive the works of William Gerhardie is underway. There seems to be an ongoing competition between Gerhardie and Henry Green for who can be the most revived author from the interwar period. I have some evidence of a 1970s effort to produce a set of “revised definitive” editions. Gerhardie was still alive when this began and may have taken part in the revisions; Michael Holroyd wrote introductions. These were published in the USA by St Martin’s Press in handsome uniform editions which populated remainder shelves for serveral years thereafter. Some of these made it from there to my own shelves, but after starting 2 or 3, they all remained unread. A biography by Dido Davies was published in 1990 and was reviewed by John Bayley along with three of Gerhardie’s books in the London Review of Books. That review is collected in Bayley’s The Power of Delight.

Jonathan Coe is reviewing the latest reissuance of Gerhardie’s first novel Futility, originally published in 1922. He opens with this quote from Gerhardie’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Polyglot:

“Yesterday, at dinner, it suddenly occurred to me what a fine fellow I was. How modest I have been! How good! How unduly unassuming! Arnold Bennett once confided to me that it didn’t matter how you wrote: what mattered was whether you were a good fellow. How unerring that man’s instinct!”

Coe’s text then continues:

If you want to get the measure of what Gerhardie has to offer, I’m not sure that you need to read much more than that. The essence of his tone is there, and Gerhardie is all about tone. An affectation of conceit, done with a twinkle in the eye and a slightly arch mock-formality in the diction and the rhythms of the sentences…It can, in small doses, be enormously funny and engaging. This was the tone that prompted Edith Wharton to recommend Gerhardie’s first novel Futility to the reading public (“most of all for the laughter, the tears, the strong beat of life in it”) and Evelyn Waugh to declare, modestly and generously: “I have talent, but he has genius.”

Coe’s article in The Sunday Times also features that quote in its heading; the same quote also graces the front dustwrapper of the 1990 biography. Waugh was certainly an admirer of Gerhardie’s work and mentions him favorably in an essay on Firbank written in 1929. He also wrote him something of a fan letter in May 1949 relating to what appears to have been a radio talk about Waugh’s work given by Gerhardie:

Very many thanks for speaking about me & for sending me a copy of your address which I read with great interest. As no doubt you recognized I learned a great deal of my trade from your own novels. (Letters, p. 298)

When and where made Waugh made the quoted statement declaring Gerhardie’s genius was a mystery until reader Dave Lull came up with the answer. It actually comes from a letter written by Gerhardie to the TLS appearing in their 12 October 1967 edition (p. 961). It is headed “The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh” and begins with Gerhardie’s discussion of the importance of anecdotal information in the retrieval of what “has been written and spoken about Evelyn Waugh.” After several rather obscure examples offered to support his point, Gerhardie presents this example of Waugh’s “Proustian snobbery”:

…Of the friends we had in common two women stood out by their beauty–the late Hazel Lavery, wife of the portrait painter, and Wanda Baillie-Hamilton, who on her deathbed recalled Webster’s “cover her face: mine eyes dazzle; she died young.” In the thirties Hazel volunteered to drive me and Evelyn to a house in Piccadilly once occupied by Byron, where Catherine D’Erlanger had stayed with her Paul Morand and the Prince (last but one) of Monaco. We picked up Evelyn at the house of the Lygon sisters (his spiritual home) and on our drive back Hazel remarked: “I should’ve thought you two boys would have made more of the Prince.” At this Evelyn expostulated: “But he’s a Frenchman ! Now had he been, let us say, the Duke of Gloucester, that would’ve been a vastly different matter.”

“Proust”, I observed. “might well have pressed that Monte Carlo thorn to his own long-suffering nightengale breast, with cancerous proliferations of his literary undulations and intermittences of a self-centered heart.”

“Without doubt.”

“But since you two boys place writers above rulers, I might tell you, William, what Evelyn said of you the other day.”

“What ?”

“Picking up a novel of yours, he said: ‘I’m envious of that man. I know I have great talent. But he has genius. I shall never write as well as he.'”

“Great talent!”, I exclaimed. “Evelyn ! What unutterable conceit!”

Cross, he turned on Hazel: “I didn’t say it to you. I said it to Wanda.”

“But I was there”,  she said.

“Wanda told me this herself “, I  appeased his feelings of betrayal by, I hardly realized, a double betrayal.”…

So according to Gerhardie, the phrase was uttered by Waugh to two women, both of whom, separately, repeated it to him. Gehardie closes his letter by quoting Waugh’s 1949 “fan” letter to him also quoted above.

To return to the matter at hand, the latest Gerhardie revival may have been given a somewhat fitful start at the turn of the century. According to Coe, Gerhardie is today probably :

…best known through the work of a novelist from a different generation: William Boyd, who used him as the model for Logan Mountstuart, the protagonist of Any Human Heart (2002). Boyd conceived the writer-hero of that epic and masterly novel as “a minor talent but one who, through the rackety, roller-coaster life he led, would be somehow exemplary of the human condition, would be a true man of the 20th century”.

Coe’s article goes on to describe the plot of Futility and discuss its place in Gerhardie’s oeuvre and then concludes with this:

Was Gerhardie’s oblivion really his due? That, certainly, would be too harsh a verdict; but Boyd’s assessment of him as “a minor talent” feels just. Nonetheless, his voice (reminiscent at times of PG Wodehouse, but a strongly politicised Wodehouse) is unique in English literature. You could argue that everyone should read one Gerhardie novel, at least, and Futility is probably as good as any.

UPDATE: The information about the source of Waugh’s quote was added after its source was provided by Dave Lull.

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Faringdon Auction Includes Waugh Portrait (Update)

Posted on August 13, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In an earlier post, we described a portrait of Evelyn Waugh as a child that was the subject of an auction sale. This included several items from the Faringdon Estate, former home of Lord Berners and his heir Robert Heber-Percy. We have now received comments from the buyer of the portrait, Peter Ellis, who operates a bookstore at 18 Cecil Court, London WC2. He has researched several points raised in our post relating to the portrait’s attribution and subject matter and has kindly drafted the results as a comment. Unfortunately, because original story was dated 4 April 2018, the receipt of the comment was delayed by the spam filters that block comments on posts more than 60 days old. We regret any inconvenience to Mr Ellis that may have been caused by this delay:

As the current owner of lot 19 I would like to take issue with several points raised by Mr Manley. I have examined Frederick Etchells’ handwriting on papers held at King’s College, Cambridge, and can confirm that it resembles in all respects that on the front of the picture in question. ‘T. Chesell’ is not a ‘code’ for Etchells, it is a straightforward anagram (no ‘perhaps’ about it). Mr Manley states, ‘It is not obvious, however, why the inscription on the front (including the identification of the subject of the portrait) is entitled to any greater credibility than that on the reverse’. Why, one wonders, should the inscription be entitled to any lesser credibility? The picture is not, strictly speaking, a ‘portrait’ (Etchells calls it a ‘rendering’). It is a caricature and, as such , should not be expected to resemble any particular photos of Waugh ‘as a child (or adult for that matter)’. I can see that any member of the Waugh Society might feel aggrieved that Waugh should be subjected to what is, undoubtedly, a pretty cruel depiction, but that is no reason to doubt the artist’s word on the matter. Finally, I should like to point out that the Bloomsbury art dealers Austin Desmond currently have in stock a painting by Etchells, not a caricature but unmistakably similar in execution to the one we are discussing.

“Lot 19” was described in the sale catalogue as:

Portrait of Evelyn Waugh as a child, wearing a pale blue coat inscribed ‘Unfinished Rendering of/Evelyn Waugh at a/youthful age/T.C./ T. Chesell (upper left and right corners); inscribed on the reverse; pencil, watercolour, bodycolour and chalk on card.

 

 

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Roundup: Orphans and Entrecote

Posted on August 13, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s roundup relates mostly to books and book reviews:

–In reviewing the book Orphans: A History by Jeremy Seabrook in The Spectator, novelist Philip Hensher considers several eaxmples of how orphans have been treated in literature by various authors, including Evelyn Waugh:

Of course, frequently the figure of the orphan­ is used for heartbreaking ends: poor Eppie in George Eliot’s Silas Marner, or Jo in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. But there is also the question of the briskly sensible orphan, unsentime­ntal about their fate. Mildred, in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, assures the lachrymose Julian, sighing over his fiancee’s condition: “Well, of course, a lot of people over 30 are orphans. I am myself. In fact I was an orpha­n in my twenties.” Other novelists take a sharply cynical view of the condition, such as with the appalling Connoll­y children in Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags, for instance. When, in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, it becomes known that the millionaire Boffins are searching for a suitable orphan for adoption, excitement breaks out…

Now that the state of being an orphan is relatively rare in the West, we have a tendency to assume novelists were preoccupied with orphan­s for abstract, narrative reasons. But of course orphans were much more common in ages of high mortality. What to do with them, and how institutions could fulfil the duty of care that ought to fall to parents, became questions of public debate from the 16th century onwards.

Whether the Connolly children were technically “orphans” is unclear. When he introduced them into the novel, Waugh wrote that they had “no credentials” and that “nothing was ever discovered about their parentage.” (POMF, Penguin, 1976, pp. 79-80). They were put onto the evacuation train by an “Auntie” with whom they had been living, who absconded from her former residence without leaving a trace as soon as the train had left the station.

–The New Criterion in its “Critic’s Notebook” column, reposts a 2008 review of the book by David Lebedoff, entitled The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. The review is by David Pryce-Jones who also edited the 1973 collection of essays Evelyn Waugh and His World. Lebedoff’s book is brief and thought-provoking and Pryce-Jones is provoked accordingly to write what is a very entertaining and informative review. It ends with this:

Lebedoff concludes by arguing that rejection of moral relativism brings the writers together as two of a kind. Their moral absolutes might be different, but they nonetheless had a common belief that there is such a thing as a moral right and a moral wrong. Lebedoff is on to something there. Orwell and Waugh both saw clearly that what was coming would be worse than what was now, whether it was to be the Airstrip One of 1984, or the philistine vacuity of Hooper. In either case, the future would owe nothing to the past. Fortunately the worst did not happen and Soviet Communism is no more, but little enough is left of England as they knew and appreciated it, and their legacy has the haunting echo of the Last Post.

It is odd that neither Lebedoff nor Pryce-Jones took the opportunity to compare Waugh’s own dystopian novella Love Among the Ruins with 1984 even though it was printed only a few years after Orwell’s book. Lebedoff’s book is still in print and both it and Pryce-Jones’ review are worth reading.

—Tablet, a US-based magazine of Jewish news, ideas and culture (not to be confused with the British magazine The Tablet, containing similarly broad-based subject matter from the Roman Catholic perspective) in a recent “Bookworm” column by Alexander Aciman recommends books to take to the beach. These are described as books “that you can pick up and put down midparagraph when someone calls your name, ones you can finish in a day but still leave you longing for more, ones with stunning clear prose that mimic the foggy pace of your brain after a day in the salty heat.” Among the three recommended is Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh:

This book wears beach-read camouflage. It has almost all the characteristics: an easy story and a nostalgic narrator, flashbacks to a simpler time, syrupy prose that is somehow clear even when it rambles on a bit. A lightness of touch. You can picture yourself reading it aloud to someone on a hammock. But it’s all a trap. Brideshead Revisited is actually one of the most sophisticated English books written since WWII.

If it’s almost impossible to produce any meaningful spoilers about Brideshead Revisited it’s because even under the pretext of plot (which unfolds over many years), it’s a book about nothing. Somewhere in this story of romance and friendship and the English countryside is a much deeper, more compelling story about yearning, and specifically in that a subdued, English fashion. …[I]t’s widely acknowledged to be a gay love story even though nothing explicit ever really happens between the two friends. It’s easy to confuse English restraint for repression. In reality, however, this kind of restraint in craft is so precise and so focused that the product is overwhelmingly sensual. Reading this book makes you feel the kind of ache that belongs only to dreams. You feel suspended in the gray, dewy air of an English country morning…

Other books recommended are Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley.

–A weblog called MyDomaine.com has collected recommendations for books to read on long flights. This one includes a Waugh novel:

Half of my family lives in England. Whenever I visit them, I’m likely to re-read Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh or Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. … I do so because I am a chronic re-reader (you yourself are different from the last time you picked up the book, so why wouldn’t the book change as well?) and because there’s such humor, subtlety, and important social commentary in both books that end up serving as a refresher course on aspects of the culture I’m about to immerse myself in.

–The Daily Mail has an article about 4 writers taking nostalgic holidays. One of them is Daisy Waugh, daughter of Auberon, who recently went back to her family’s favorite holiday spot when she was a child:

It was my mother who discovered it. Directed to L’Entrecote in Toulouse by a distant French cousin, she took my older sister there in a carrycot. That was in 1962. My family has been going ever since.As the natives know (there’s a queue outside, seven days a week), this inexpensive, one-dish restaurant is the most delicious one in the world. My husband Peter and I recently returned to L’Entrecote for the first time in 21 years. Nothing had changed. Same yellow tablecloths, same tartan wallpaper, same brisk French service, same salade aux noix first course, same steak and chips with the same fameuse sauce secrete for main. The Parisian who opened the first L’Entrecote and created said sauce bequeathed its secrets to his children, who created near-identical chains…

The sauce is so exquisite that 50-odd years ago my parents used this restaurant as the fulcrum around which to search for a holiday house. They bought a ramshackle farmhouse a 40-minute drive away, and our trips to Toulouse, and L’Entrecote, three or four times each summer — to buy satchels for school, to celebrate exam results; any excuse, really — are a highlight of my childhood.

–Finally, The Sheen Center has announced an upcoming Great Books Series that may be of interest to our New York area readers. This series:

… will focus on three outstanding Catholic novels, beginning with Graham Greene’s masterpiece, The End of the Affair (1951), continuing with Evelyn Waugh’s classic, Brideshead Revisited (1945), and concluding with Walker Percy’s dystopian existential comedy, The Thanatos Syndrome(1987). The series will be taught by author and playwright James P. MacGuire. Jamie is the author of over ten books and two produced plays.

The Brideshead lecture is scheduled for 14 November at 7pm at The Sheen Center, 18 Bleeker Street, NY 10012. Tickets are available here.

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V S Naipaul (1932-2018) R.I.P.

Posted on August 12, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

V S Naipaul, writer of fiction and non-fiction, mostly about third world countries or their natives displaced to other lands, has died in England at the age of 85. His last notable action was to win the Nobel Prize in 2001 but he has written nothing of any particular note since then. This may be due to some extent to the death in 1996 of his first wife (Patricia) who, according to his biographer, Patrick French, had been his editor and collaborator on much of his earlier works.

Waugh was never a friend or even acquaintance of Naipaul. As he did, however, in the case of many young writers in whom he recognized talent, Waugh helped boost Naipaul’s early career. This was in a 1962 review of Naipaul’s first book-length non-fiction entitled The Middle Passage. His earlier fiction had mostly been comic or satirical portrayals of West Indians. Waugh began his review with a recognition that Naipaul was himself:

an ‘East’ Indian Trinidadian with an exquisite mastery of the English language which should put to shame his English contemporaries. He has shown in his stories–particularly in The Suffrage of Elvira–that he is free of the delusion about independence and representative government for his native land. Humour and compassion are the qualities inevitable and most justly predicted of him. (EAR, p. 601)

I doubt that there are many who would agree that Waugh was correct in his prediction of the path Naipaul’s work would take. The early humour and compassion gave way to  unsympathetic and ever darker treatment of his third-world themes. In a few cases, he seemed to be returning to the career Waugh has predicted, most notably in the 1987 novel The Enigma of Arrival which was set, for a change, in rural England. But he failed to follow through on the success of that novel.

In reviewing The Middle Passage, Waugh describes Naipaul’s conflicted attempts to depict his native Trinidad but felt he “was happier when he reached the mainland.” Here he was writing about something of which Waugh had first hand knowledge–Dr Jagan’s Guyana. Naipaul retraced much of Waugh’s journey described in Ninety-Two Days. Waugh himself had  returned a few months earlier from a reprisal of his own 1930s trip, this time in the company of his daughter Margaret. He found that Naipaul wrote about Guyana with “the artist’s eye and ear and his observations are sharply discerning.” According to Waugh, when Naipaul reached the end of his journey in Jamaica, he was “everywhere conscious that the history of the Caribbean is replete with atrocities. He offers little hope (as can no honest trevaller in  these lands) that a new era of hope and plenty is about to open” (EAR, p. 602).

At least one of the obituaries also quotes a letter Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford referring to Naipaul a few weeks after his review of Naipaul’s book appeared. This was dated 7 January 1963. The quote by Dwight Garner in the New York Times online edition includes only the sentence: “Oh to have a black face.” But this follows a rather more offensive sentence that the NYTimes, understandably, decided to paraphrase: “That clever nigger Naipaul has won another literary prize.” (Emphasis in original.) Dwight Garner comments in the NYTimes:

Naipaul was aware of this sort of racism. He once rewrote the racist slogan “Keep Britain White” by adding a comma: “Keep Britain, White.”

According to Charlotte Mosley’s editorial note (NMEW, p, 474, n. 2), Waugh’s mock envy refers to the 1963 Hawthornden Prize awarded to Naipaul. This is erroneous for two reasons. Waugh himself won the same prize in 1936 for Edmund Campion and would hardly be likely to feign envy of another writer who received that particular award. Moreover, Naipaul’s prize was awarded in 1964 for Mr Stone and the Knight’s Companion which had not even been published when Waugh wrote Nancy Mitford.

Some later articles have also mentioned the influence of Waugh’s writings on Naipaul. For example, a letter in the Stabroek News, a Guyana newspaper, said this:

The work of Naipaul will always be revered along the  work of great scholars: Tolstoy, Dickens and Conrad, etc.  However harsh his criticism, it should help a person or society grow and develop. … He wrote “Guyana has always been land of fantasy” based on the novel A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. This is the land of El Dorado that never fails to disappoint. Naipaul apart from being the third Nobel Laureate after Arthur Lewis and Derek Walcott has placed the Caribbean on the map of the world with his scholarship that touched every corner of the globe.

The Wall Street Journal in an obituary said something similar:

Mr Naipaul’s writing often blends menace and dark wit, a literary cocktail he discovered while a teenager in the work of Evelyn Waugh, the author of Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust and other novels. Although hopelessness pervades Mr Biswas’s existence, Mr Naipaul also exposes the humor in his character’s misfortune.

UPDATE: The obituary in the New York Times by Dwight Garner added a reference to a letter written by Waugh after his review of Naipaul’s book. The last paragraph was added to put that reference into context.

UPDATE 2 (15 August 2018): References to Waugh’s influence on Naipaul were added from later stories. Thanks to readers for calling these to our attention.

 

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Another Waugh Literary Debut

Posted on August 11, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail in Richard Eden’s gossip column, reports the literary debut of another descendent of Evelyn Waugh:

…Panda La Terriere, his great-granddaughter, has become the talk of the Edinburgh Fringe festival with a play she’s written about someone addicted to the internet Still only 20, Panda is the daughter of film producer Peter La Terriere and author Daisy Waugh…A student at Bristol University, Panda says her play, Isle of Muck, set on a remote Scottish island, is a reflection on the influence of social media on young people. ‘It’s a comedy, it’s a love story, it’s whimsical and goofy,’ says Panda … ‘It’s set in a rehabilitation centre for internet addicts.’… [H]er grandfather, newspaper columnist Auberon Waugh, whose writing was a haven of political incorrectness, had an acute sense of the absurd. She tells me: ‘I’d like to think he’d be proud of me.’

Here’s a description of the play from the Edinburgh Fringe ticket site:

Basil abandons university to join his Uncle January, an ageing party boy, on the sparsely populated Isle of Muck. He finds that his uncle, motivated by an irrational distrust for technology and the financial pressure of his castle’s upkeep, has set up a rehabilitation centre for internet addicts. Together they succeed in running a dysfunctional place of refuge that awkwardly combines January’s decadence with Basil’s meagre understanding of – but colossal admiration for – new-age spiritualism. That is, until the arrival of Maisie: a confusing patient who inadvertently throws everything into disarray.

One wonders what is Basil’s surname? Reviewing the play in the University of Bristol’s student newspaper, Naomi Adedokun wrote:

Isle of Muck thrives in its weirdness; the dialogue is snappy and thoughtful, the characters are weirdly wonderful and the story meanders somewhere between. Filing into the **space, the audience are greeted by three actors already on-stage, not interacting but certainly not still. They wait, appearing bored and antsy, pacing the floor and looking around. We’re left to anticipate what they’re anticipating, and the tension grows until the scene starts….The play would massively benefit by being longer and fleshing out more characters. …Overall, it’s a very fun time. I don’t want to spoil anything about the dance sequence near the end of the play, but that alone is worth the price of admission. ..We’ve only just started to consider internet addiction a real thing, and it’s refreshing to see a piece tackle that. The rehab centre is isolated on a tiny Scottish island (the eponymous Muck) and run by a veritable madman. The characters are over-exaggerated and the humour is eccentric. Slowly but surely the reality of the play becomes the normalised reality of the audience. We learn to love these people and their craziness – possibly because we recognise a bit of ourselves in them.

Other reviews are available at edfringereview.com. (Thanks to David Lull for that link.) The play opened on 3 August, and remaining performances are scheduled for 1715pm on 11, 13-18 August at the venue Greenside, 1b Royal Terrace–Jade Studio. Tickets are available here,

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