Folio Society Issues New Brideshead Edition

Posted on September 6, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Folio Society has issued a new illustrated edition of Brideshead Revisited in its Autumn collection. This is a 344-page hardback book in a slipcase, with an introduction by novelist and critic A N Wilson. According to the Society’s online announcement:

To illustrate one of the greatest literary masterpieces of the 20th century, we worked with woodcut specialist Harry Brockway. His work will be well known to Folio readers, with recent commissions including the Maigret collection. Here, he has created stylised scenes that take us straight back to Brideshead and its characters’ devil-may-care lives. Brockway also designed the striking binding art – an evocative portrait for the front and subtle motifs of swirling cigarette smoke on the back. Award-winning novelist A. N. Wilson writes of Waugh’s skill for crafting memorable characters in the newly commissioned introduction to this edition.

The book is priced at £34.95 and is available at the link above. Other Folio Society editions available from its backlist include Vile Bodies, introduced by David Lodge (President of the EWS) and illustrated by Kay Baylay; The Loved One, illustrated by Beryl Cook and introduced by Christopher Sykes; and Black Mischief, illustrated by Quentin Blake.

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Labor Day Roundup

Posted on September 3, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Spy writer Ben Macintyre was recently interviewed by the New York Times. To the question which book by another author do you wish you had written, he answered:

I would love to have written “Scoop,” by Evelyn Waugh, that vicious but affectionate satire of journalism, exposing our trade in all its insane competitiveness, bravery, inefficiency and strange nobility. I must have read it a dozen times, and it still makes me snort. I would give anything to have written his parody of overstrained journalistic writing: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.”

In an article about Boris Johnson’s ambition to take over the Tory party leadership, Chronicles, a conservative American magazine, cited the same passage:

…Boris, who is out of Government and is ungovernable, can say what he likes. Last week, to general surprise, he chose to write on otters, who have been seen on the increase after years of falling numbers. Was Boris taking his cue from Evelyn Waugh? In Scoop comes this great spoof line: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.”

Australian sports journalist and author Rupert Guinness interviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald also cited Scoop:

I read this in my second-last year at school. A satirical portal into journalism, Scoop gave me a romantic sense of adventure that I believed a foreign correspondent experienced. In Scoop, William Boot is sent by the Daily Beast (albeit, under a mistaken identity) to the fictional state of “Ishmaelia” in East Africa. It helped firm my belief that anything can happen when in the right place and time – or, wrong place and time.

Surf Europe magazine asked surf writer Chas Smith to discuss his favorite books. Among them, he named this one by Evelyn Waugh:

“The funniest book I’ve ever read has to be Black Mischief by old Evelyn Waugh. I imagine someone writing something like that today, something that plays on racial stereotypes and tropes… Evelyn Waugh wrote with such a wonderful light touch that it feels like he could almost write anything, even grossly inappropriate things — obviously as parody — and get away with it. He was such a good writer that even in the era of social outrage he could write something like Black Mischief — I mean, he could write about NFL players taking the knee before football games — and probably still get away with it.

Tim Congdon, writing in Standpoint magazine about trade deficits and trade wars, and Donald Trump’s responses, was reminded of a Waugh character:

In 2017 the US had a deficit on trade in goods of $568.4 billion (about 3 per cent of output) and a deficit on current account transactions of $449.1 billion. In Trump’s view, both numbers are bad and something must be done. As Brigadier Ritchie-Hook explained in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, foreigners are there to be biffed. Tariff increases constitute the weapons in the “war” Trump is now conducting. Their purpose is to make foreign goods more expensive in the US, so that higher prices reduce the amount that Americans buy, payments to foreigners fall and the deficits become surpluses. Victory can be declared when the US’s surpluses on its international payments are well-established and consistent.

Congdon goes on to explain that this will not be the likely outcome of the Trump tariffs.

Finally, Kathleen Burk in the Guardian considers books in which the British and Americans try to understand one another:

The British have always been fascinated by the US, and over the centuries have written countless novels, stories, reflections and books of reportage on America. In the 19th century at least 200 travellers’ tales were published, a notable example being Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, it confirmed suspicions in Britain of the awfulness of some Americans…In the 20th century, there was plenty of evidence of cynicism and dislike. Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948), set in Los Angeles, displays contempt for both self-deluding English expats and the even more bizarre Americans. David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), in which academics from Birmingham and Berkeley exchange jobs, is more understanding, as well as funny.

 

 

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BBC Radio 4 to Rebroadcast Four-Part Brideshead

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The four-part dramatization of Brideshead Revisited will be rebroadcast starting next Monday, 4 September on BBC Radio 4 Extra.  This is based on the adaptation of Jeremy Front first transmitted in 2007. It had been repeated several times since then, most recently in 2016. The series features Ben Miles as Charles Ryder, Jamie Bamber as Sebastian Flyte and Anne-Marie Duff as Julia. Toby Jones plays Brideshead. It will be broadcast over four successive days at 10am UK time and can be heard worldwide after each transmission on BBC iPlayer at this link.

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Roundup: Hat Trick in The Spectator

Posted on August 24, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

There is a diverse assortment of cites to Waugh’s works this week, with The Spectator scoring a hat trick in its various editions:

—The Spectator has a review of a new book that attacks “modernist” architecture. The book is entitled Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism and is written by James Stevens Curl. In his review, Stephen Bayley attacks the book on its writing style, scholarship, production standards and timeliness. He brings Evelyn Waugh into it on the side that is being defended by the author: anti-modernism:

Curl’s ambition is to compose the critique of all critiques, joining a tradition of anti-modern alarm which has included E.M. Forster, Orwell, Vonnegut and Prince Charles. And, of course, Evelyn Waugh. In Decline and Fall, Margot Beste-Chetwynde commissions a new ‘clean and square’ house from Professor Otto Silenus. Dismayed by the result, she soon has it demolished, saying: ‘Nothing I have ever done has caused me so much disgust.’

Needless to say, based on the position taken by the reviewer, the article concludes that Curl fails in his ambition.

–In another Spectator article, Tim Dawson undertakes a defense of the English Public School. He also turns to the same Waugh novel to help make his point:

There is much the state sector could learn from private education. Structured days; proper, engaged pastoral care; and discipline. Evelyn Waugh famously jokes in Decline and Fall that any man who has been to public school would be quite at home in prison. Old Etonian Jonathan Aitken quipped similarly when he was sent down for perjury. The archaeologist Osbert Crawford compared them to prisoner of war camps. Well, perhaps; but POW camps with better cricketing facilities.

–The USA edition of The Spectator in an article by Benjamin Riley cites Waugh as an authority on the basis for the popularity of Chippendale style furniture:

It all began with the orders. In the preface to his Gentleman and Cabinet-maker’s Director (1754), Thomas Chippendale started with ‘an explanation of the five Orders’ — those foundations of all architecture, the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. ‘Without an acquaintance with this science,’ he continued, ‘the cabinet-maker cannot make the designs of his work intelligible.’ Nearly two hundred years later, Evelyn Waugh said much the same thing. Writing in 1938 in Country Life, Waugh noted that by learning the orders of architecture, ‘you can produce Chippendale Chinese; by studying Chippendale Chinese, you will produce nothing but magazine covers.’. One sees Waugh’s point — to practice architecture, or design of any kind, effectively, a return to first principles is necessary…

The article is written in connection with an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled “Chippendale’s Director: The Designs and Legacy of a Furniture Maker”. This will run through January 27, 2019. The quote is from Waugh’s article “A Call to the Orders” reproduced in Essays, Articles and Reviews and A Little Order. Thanks to reader David Lull for sending a link to this article.

–Harry Mount, author and editor of The Oldie magazine, waxes nostalgic after a recent visit he made to what might be called a Waugh heritage site. This is in his Diary column in the Catholic Herald:

Over the weekend, I made a pilgrimage to Combe Florey, the Somerset village and house where Evelyn, and then Auberon, Waugh, lived. As a child, I went there several times – my parents were friends of the Waughs. Seeing the charming classical house made me think what Bron would have thought of today’s political climate. He would find a Britain utterly changed since his death 17 years ago – a Britain that’s largely lost its sense of humour.

The widespread attacks on Boris Johnson for his burka article are the tip of the humourless iceberg. Bron specialised in shocking to amuse – and Boris’s little barbs were nothing compared to Bron in full flow. Several decades of virtue-signalling, disapproval of bad behaviour and priggish attacks on funny writers have removed the necessary elements of humour: to be contrary and outspoken; to exaggerate, play down, or to be just straightforwardly rude. MeToo is the icing on the cake, removing bawdiness from jokes – an essential element of humour since time began.

–Finally, a books blog called the “ANZ LitLover” has posted an article about Waugh’s novel Helena. This is noteworthy for its photographs of many sites relevant to the novel, such as two arches to Trajan in the unlikely locations of Ancona and Benevento, Constantine’s arch in Rome and his statue outside York Minster and a mosaic of Sts Constantine and Helen from St Isaac’s Cathedral in St Petersburg. There is also a commentary on the text:

What makes this a worthwhile book to read? Well, for a start, it’s always a good thing to have the role of women acknowledged in history, even belatedly.  And secondly, loosely based on the vaguest of historical fact, it allows Waugh full reign to create a most interesting story, enabling a critique of the excesses of the age which counters versions of Imperial Rome that focus more on murder and mayhem than the problem of political corruption and governance. And it’s often droll, with surprisingly sensitive portraits of women in an era when men have so successfully hogged the limelight….

 

 

 

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Times Story on Wartime Antisemitism in Britain is Released

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

We reported about a week ago that a Times story dated 16 August was withdrawn after publication. See earlier post. This has now apparently been republished with the dateline 23 August under the title “How Antisemitism in Britain is Rooted in the Second World War”. It is written by Dominic Kennedy. See this link. The story is based on government reports recently released to The Times regarding antisemitic activity in Britain before, during and after the war. As explained in the introduction:

… archive papers released to The Times show that Churchill’s bastion of propaganda and censorship [in the Ministry of Information] harboured one of the most disturbing secrets of the Second World War: throughout the struggle against Hitler, British prejudice towards Jews grew relentlessly.The discovery will revive nagging doubts about whether, had the Nazis invaded, Britons would have betrayed or rescued their Jewish neighbours. A long withheld file, called Antisemitism in Great Britain and disclosed by the National Archives, shows that officials confronted by reports of rising prejudice decided that Jews themselves were to blame.

Several of Waugh’s friends are implicated in the story. Duff Cooper was for a short time head of the MoI but had a fairly rough ride. On the other hand, he is shown to have been sympathetic to the Jewish plight and is not charged with fostering antisemitism as were others in the Ministry.The article tells this story:

Cooper was alert to antisemitism. In the final years of peace, he warned Chamberlain’s secretary of state for war, the Jewish politician Leslie Hore-Belisha (who introduced the eponymous beacons as transport minister) of impending bigotry. ….Hore-Belisha, who became lifelong friends with Cooper and Lady Diana, wrote in his diary that Cooper predicted that “the military element might be very unyielding and they might try to make it hard for me as a Jew”.

Once war broke out Chamberlain indeed sacked Hore-Belisha because “there was a prejudice against him”. Hore-Belisha was then vetoed as a potential minister of information by the Foreign Office, whose attitude was summed up by the undersecretary Sir Alexander Cadogan: “Jew control of our propaganda would be a major disaster.”

Cooper was selected as Minister of Information after Churchill replaced Chamberlain as PM. Cooper was soon replaced, in turn, by Brendan Bracken who was not a close friend of Waugh but did help him with his military career. Bracken contributes little to the story except for this:

Bracken inspired the character of Rex Mottram, the vacuous colonial adventurer satirised in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited who, after complaining that he could not taste brandy served in what he derided as a “thimble”, was brought “a balloon the size of his head”.

It is also later suggested that George Orwell may have named a character in 1984 Big Brother because his initials matched those of Bracken.

How Bracken relates to the theme of antisemitism is a bit of a mystery. Similarly, Waugh is not cited for antisemitic behavior but does provide a lead into the section where Cooper and Bracken at the MoI are discussed:

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 Bodies “walking into the jaws of destruction again”.

Again, as with the reference to Rex Mottram, Vile Bodies seems somewhat off the point. It is possible that major editing was undertaken after the story was withdrawn, and this may have left some references a bit stranded.

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TLS Reviews Early CWEW Volumes

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest issue of TLS, Paula Byrne reviews the first five volumes of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. These were published over several months late last year and early this. Byrne is the author, inter alia, of what she calls a partial biography: Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (2009).

She comments on each volume but most of her analysis is devoted to volume 30 called Precocious Waughs: Personal Writings 1905-1921. Here she points out some interesting facts about the source material for these Personal Writings volumes which I don’t think are discussed in the text:

Alexander Waugh’s hugely ambitious project builds on the work undertaken by the late librarian and scholar Alan Bell, who obtained from Mark Amory copies of 1,500 transcripts of letters that had been omitted from the earlier edition. He collated these with his own set of typed transcripts of Waugh’s incoming correspondence, then set about gathering further
collections of letters and other materials for a prospective biography. This was never written, but Bell’s collection was sold to the biographer Selina Hastings, who made ample use of it in the writing of her fine biography published in 1994, after which she donated the Bell collection and her own papers to Alexander Waugh, forming the basis of his own extensive archive, which has now grown to more than 10,000 transcribed items.

Byrne also discusses how relaxation of the strictures on inclusion of what may be deemed by some as salacious materials has made for better results, reminding readers that she was refused permission to use in her partial biography the photo of a naked Alastair Graham  that has now been included in two recent books (although not part of the Complete Works):

…relaxation on the part of the Waugh estate is apparent in the restoration of passages omitted in Davie’s selections from the diaries and Amory’s from the letters. So, for example, it is revealed in Precocious Waughs that a close school friend, Hugh Molson, later an MP and then Baron Molson, asked Davie to remove an entry that admitted his youthful dope habit – this confession has been reinstated. The editor’s notes to the new volume of early letters and diaries are not only extremely thorough and informative, but also, as one might expect from the grandson of EvelynWaugh, very witty. Alexander Waugh’s note for Cruttwell, Evelyn’s Oxford tutor and bête noire, is a case in point: “CRMF Cruttwell, historian, academic and misogynist”.

Byrne several times comments on the geographic breadth of scholarship called in to complete this work, noting at one point, for example, that it is a transatlantic effort, and at another the importance of the large number of Americans at work on it. She also praises the efforts of Donat Gallagher for his enlargement of the journalism volume in this first batch, to be followed by three more, but seems not to realize that he is from Australia, not the USA.  Another editor from that part of the world has also recently joined the group: Naomi Milthorpe from the University of Tasmania who will be editing Black Mischief.

The review also singles out Martin Stannard’s contributions to the volume incorporating Vile Bodies as well as to the overall project:

Waugh scholarship has been led by the Americans, but Martin Stannard’s voluminous double-decker biography still remains definitive. It was Stannard who obtained the grant of more than £800,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which has made Alexander Waugh’s whole extraordinary project possible. Stannard’s personal contribution to this first batch of volumes is an astonishingly rigorous edition of Vile Bodies that is of particular fascination for the specialist as it shows a “rare example of [Waugh’s] working on a rough draft of a pre-war novel”. It includes a 130-page appendix listing “Manuscript Developments and Textual Variants”.

The review concludes:

If these initial offerings (Volumes two, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-six and thirty) are an indicator of things to come, then the edition will justify its grandiose claim to “revolutionize Waugh studies”… It is annoying that these new editions of Vile Bodies, Rossetti and A Little Learning have line numbers (at the excessive frequency of every five lines) in the margins. Though this helps with the textual notes, it raises, as does the price, a question mark over whether this edition is genuinely offered “for the delight of the general reader”. There is no doubt, however, of its value as a work “for the inquiring scholar”. It will indeed become one of the great monuments of twenty-first-century literary scholarship.

This is the first review to attempt a detailed analysis of all five initial volumes in a single article, and Byrne lives up to the challenge. The society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies has plans to review each volume, but these are appearing separately. The complete TLS review is available online here.

UPDATE (24 August 2018): A link to the TLS article which is now available online was added.

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Waugh’s University Challenge

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s University Challenge quiz on the BBC featured Clare College, Cambridge against Hertford College, Oxford. In his introductory remarks. presenter Jeremy Paxman mentioned among Hertford’s best known alumni John Donne, Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh. He went on to note that Waugh claimed that as a student he avoided work and never attended chapel. Paxman went on, however, to credit Waugh with writing “one of the most enduring images of student life” in Brideshead Revisited where Charles Ryder is a student at Hertford and meets Sebastian Flyte when the latter vomits into Charles’ rooms.

This is episode 5 of the current series. Clare won the round 160-150, but Hertford, which was ahead for most of the action and lost on the last question, may be back in the later rounds based on their score. The program remains available to watch on BBC iPlayer with a UK internet connection.

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Waugh in Japan

Posted on August 21, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

ProQuest has published another link on the internet to an academic study relating to Evelyn Waugh. This is an article by the late John Howard Wilson entitled “The Origins of Japanese Interest in Evelyn Waugh 1948-1963” and was published in Southern Illinois University’s journal Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 50, no. 1, Winter 2014. John Wilson was, as many of our readers know, founder of the Evelyn Waugh Society and for many years editor of its journal, Evelyn Waugh Studies. This article would have been one of the last things he published before his untimely death in December 2014. The subject of article is summarized in these extracts from its opening paragraphs:

The A. D. Peters Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin, is well known as an extensive repository of correspondence between a literary agent and clients including Arthur Koestler and Terence Rattigan. Arguably the most important member of Peters’s stable was Evelyn Waugh, and their correspondence has been thoroughly combed by biographers, critics, and editors. Waugh’s British publishers, Chapman & Hall, handled his books within the Empire and left serial rights and foreign affairs to Peters. … During his life, almost all foreign interest in Waugh came from Europe, or at least countries that employed European languages, such as Argentina. The only exception was Japan. In the collection, inquiries from Japan and responses from Peters and Waugh extend over fifteen years in an unusually well-documented case of a British writer’s reception in a non-western country.

… The 1930s and early 1940s were hardly propitious for Japanese reception of a British writer. [After Japan’s 1945 defeat] by Allied forces, [it was] occupied for almost seven years. To understand the conquerors, Japanese people increasingly studied the English language, and some chose Evelyn Waugh as an instructor. …. Pressured by the Cold War, American authorities … purged the “Reds,” and rehabilitated the establishment. In this increasingly conservative atmosphere, Japanese publishers and scholars began to show interest in Waugh, a reactionary English satirist.

Two problems mitigated Waugh’s popularity in Japan, however; one was domestic, the other foreign. First was the division between Japanese scholarly and popular tastes. Many translators of Waugh were Japanese professors of English, and what they found interesting did not necessarily attract large audiences. Thanks to Yoshiharu Usui, a recent PhD from Seikei University, abstracts of Japanese essays on Waugh have recently become available in English, and these can to some extent be correlated with the Peters correspondence. The second problem was the British tendency to assume superiority, along with the Japanese tendency, when confronted with such an attitude, to turn away. Both tendencies are evident in the Peters correspondence and the Japanese scholarship on Waugh. These difficulties prevented Waugh from reaching a larger audience in Japan, where he has never achieved the popularity of his contemporary Graham Greene…).

The abstracts of Japanese articles mentioned above have been translated into English by Yoshiharu Usui and appear in Evelyn Waugh Studies over several issues beginning with No. 40.1 (Spring 2009). The link to John Wilson’s article is posted on the internet and is available here. A subscription will be needed to open the paper, but these are usually available from research libraries.

Also posted is a ProQuest link from a later issue of the same journal to a review of Marcel DeCoste’s 2015 study, The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh. This is reviewed by Naomi Milthorpe and appears in the Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 52, no. 4 (Fall 2016). Dr Milthorpe describes the book as

… a welcome renewal of long-form scholarship dedicated to Waugh’s themes and style. It is appropriate that DeCoste, as one of the most nuanced and sympathetic of Waugh’s twentyfirst-century readers, should be the first of these new Wavians…The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh is timely, but also of its time, illustrative of recent general trends in Waugh studies: dealing with faith as a central theme and reading lesser-known texts. The book is energetic, attentive to narrative details as much as to broad themes. Most importantly, thanks to his attention to long-neglected texts, DeCoste demonstrates the importance of the later fiction in understanding Waugh’s art.

UPDATE: A reference was added to a later article in the same journal.

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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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