Score Settling Time

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In the 12 July 2018 issue of the New York Review of Books, Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, reviews Hilary Spurling’s biography of Anthony Powell. This is not scheduled to be published in the USA until the Fall, but Hastings seems more determined to settle old scores with Powell than to review the book. He was editor of the Telegraph in the 1980s when Powell was still the chief book reviewer after over 30 years. Powell resigned after Auberon Waugh in 1990 wrote a strongly negative review in the Sunday Telegraph of a collection of Powell’s Telegraph articles. (See previous post.) Hastings hasn’t forgotten that Powell made no secret of the fact that he thought Hastings bore responsibility for the publication of Auberon’s review and, more importantly, had taken the Telegraph downmarket under his stewardship.

The review opens with this:

Some decades ago, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell were widely regarded as Britain’s foremost novelists of the modern era. Today, Waugh reigns triumphant in the literary pantheon, one of the few twentieth-century British writers enthusiastically devoured by the young. Meanwhile Powell, if not forgotten, is scarcely read by people under sixty. His reputation, chiefly based upon his twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975, has slumped.

Hastings continues in the same vein, including several other references to his judgement that Waugh’s work is now universally deemed superior to that of Powell. He seems to suggest that Powell was engaged in some sort of underhand plot to secure the “top” position for himself but makes no comment on Spurling’s extensive argument that Powell in the late 1960s and 1970s was a lone voice from his generation speaking out in defence of Waugh’s stature as a writer. This was during a period that much of Waugh’s work had fallen out of print. Hastings also bears a grudge against Spurling for having undertaken to have the Telegraph commission a bust of Powell to display in their offices in recognition for his years of service and in atonement for Auberon’s review. Although he concludes in the end that Powell’s major work is still worth reading and that Spurling’s biography is well written, by that time he has already vented his spleen over three pages of invective.

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Take in One Flag, Put Out More

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A political dispute in Kansas inspired a reader of the Lawrence Journal-World to submit this letter citing Evelyn Waugh:

The governor’s response to the flag controversy — to put more flags on display around the Statehouse in Topeka — brings to mind Evelyn Waugh’s early novel of World War II, “Put Out More Flags.” Rich young men, seeing opportunities in government employment on the home front (certainly not on the battlefield), acquire a newfound spirit of patriotism. The governor has certainly done his bit, volunteering as a plastic surgeon in combat zones, but he is also a politician facing a tough election soon. Waugh’s title is from a proverb quoted by the Chinese writer Lin Yutang: “A drunk military man should order gallons [of alcohol] and put out more flags in order to increase his military splendor.”​

Richard Hardin

The letter refers to a report from earlier this month about remarks made by the Governor  with respect to flag displays at the University of Kansas which is located in Lawrence. According to the Journal (12 July 2018), this started with the outdoor display of an American flag on which an artist had painted black blotches and a striped stocking. This was one part of a larger display of objects from the collection of the university’s art museum. The Governor demanded, inter alia, the altered flag’s removal and destruction but at one point, he also suggested this:

Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer has ordered additional American flags flown outside the Statehouse in response to a university’s now-relocated public art display featuring an altered flag. Colyer spokesman Kendall Marr said the Republican governor ordered the 19 additional flags to go up Wednesday afternoon on the north and south sides of the Statehouse grounds.

There were apparently already a sufficient number of flagpoles installed around the statehouse to afford compliance with the Governor’s demand.

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Bastille Day Roundup

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

With the French celebrating their National Day and their World Cup victory this past weekend, our latest roundup is dedicated to them. Appropriately enough, our first entry relates to France.

–In the weblog Literary Hub, Emily Temple admits that most writers admire the work of Marcel Proust. To keep things in perspective, she collects several opinions that differ. One of these is Evelyn Waugh who wrote in 1948 to Nancy Mitford (who lived in France at the time and loved it there):

I am reading Proust for the first time—in English of course—and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely no sense of time. He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble & Francoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs-Elysees, Bloch takes him to a brothel. And as for the jokes—the boredom of Bloch and Cottard. [NMEW, p. 92]

Other anti-Proust writers in the LitHub’s collection include James Joyce, D H Lawrence and Anatole France who is supposed (apocryphally) to have said: “Life is too short and Proust is too long.”

–On his weblog Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp has reported that he is reading Helena, one of Waugh’s more negelcted books:

… I came across sentences spoken by Lactantius, the Christian convert who helps bring the title character to the true faith, that seem to express Waugh’s writerly credo:

“He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.”

…Waugh judged it his best book, which it is not, but Helena embodies his interest in “joinery,” “the construction of wooden furniture, fittings, etc.” (OED). Before Waugh resolved to be a writer, he considered devoting his life to painting, and then contemplated carpentry and printing. Writing, for him, is a species of making, not an emotional pressure valve. His books are usually funny, yes, but always exactingly crafted. In a 1953 interview with the BBC, when asked if he was conveying a “message” in his work, Waugh replied:

“No, I wish to make a pleasant object, I think any work of art is something exterior to oneself, it is the making of something, whether it’s a bed table or a book.”

–BBC Radio 3 on yesterday’s broadcast featured excerpts from the works of Evelyn Waugh in a special episode of Words and Music, which is subtitled “The News”. According to the BBC’s description, the program started with:

… the 19th century, when newspapers were seen as noble messengers, [and continued] to the 21st, with 24-hour rolling news on every screen. Comical newshounds in novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Trollope, populate the first half of the programme … Music, poetry and archive clips reflect key moments in history…We hear themes used for news programmes by Malcolm Arnold, John Williams and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and incidental music for plays and films, such as Samuel Barber’s School for Scandal and Bernard Herrmann’s score for Citizen Kane. Newsreader Kathy Clugston and Miles Jupp, host of BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz, are the readers for a special edition of Words and Music exploring the evolution of how we get our new.

The program can he heard on the internet over BBC iPlayer for approximately 4 weeks.

–The Countess of Carnarvon on her website discusses the past success of the TV series Downton Abbey that was filmed on Highclere estate in Berkshire where she lives with her family. She is posting in connection with last week’s announcement of a new production that will be a full length film based on the earlier story. As she ruminates over the past successes, her somewhat random thoughts turn to this:

Researching my book “Catherine” about the 6thcountess, I found [the 1920s] a fascinating time in British politics where the rise of the Labour party knocked against the hard edged glamour of Evelyn Waugh’s world of decadent aristocrats.  In fact, Evelyn Waugh married, in turn, two nieces of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon and I have to admit that “Brideshead Revisited” is one of my favourite books.

I wonder if she has in mind the introduction of a new character: a lately successful and upwardly mobile (if somewhat gauche) young novelist who falls in with one or more of the family’s younger female members. I can’t recall which of them remains unattached after the last episode but that doesn’t matter. It’s probably too much to hope for but maybe the Countess will have a word with Julian Fellowes.

–Finally, on the weblog Nigeness, the blogger “Nige” announces that he is undertaking a rereading of the novels of Auberon Waugh. This was inspired by his recent enjoyment of Auberon’s Private Eye Diaries. He mostly liked Auberon’s first novel The Foxglove Saga but was disappointed by the ending:

Again and again, Waugh sets up and executes brilliant comic set pieces involving these three and various authority figures and walk-on characters. Misunderstandings, confusion and crossed signals abound, and there are many laugh-aloud scenes and moments (which is a great deal more than you can say about many supposedly comic novels).  Up to somewhere near the end, The Foxglove Saga is a joy to read. Then, I think, something goes wrong with the tone, and the latent cruelty in Waugh’s (both Waughs’) comedy comes too near the surface…So, a novel full of promise, which for much of its length is brilliantly achieved and very funny, fails to carry through to the end. Never mind – the best bits are truly comparable to Waugh pere at his funniest, and suggest a great comic novelist in the making.  Bron, incredibly, was only twenty when he wrote this one. What happened next? Well, three years later, he published a second novel, Path of Dalliance. I have a copy, and am going to read it. I’ll be reporting back…

Thanks once again to Dave Lull for sending links to some of the stories reported above.

UPDATE (22 July 2018): The Sunday Times for today recommends the BBC Radio 3 programe described above:

This is a sequence without a presenter, beautifully, wittily, creatively crafted. Nobody tells you what you’ve heard. Part of the joy is guessing what you’re hearing. Last week’s theme was The News. The words came variously from Alvar Lidell, Anthony Trollope, Evelyn Waugh, Carol Ann Duffy and others. The music included Leroy Anderson, John Adams, Scott Joplin and a rainbow of news signature tunes. The readers were Miles Jupp (who presents Radio 4’s The News Quiz) and the Radio 4 newsreader Kathy Clugston; the producer was Helen Garrison. The result was intense pleasure.

 

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A Tale of Two Anthonys

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of the London Review of Books has an essay by Prof Perry Anderson on Anthony Powell.  This considers the recent biography of Powell by Hilary Spurling and morphs into a longer critical consideration of Powell’s works. It is Part 1 of what will be a two-part essay. Anderson notes at the beginning that Spurling’s supposedly official biography of Powell is considerably shorter than Martin Stannard’s work on Waugh as well as some of Spurling’s own biographies of other subjects; he also wonders about:

her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but, on the whole, in the warmth and grace of Spurling’s account there is a natural tact but little sign of inhibition. … Aesthetically speaking, at all events, the economy of her study is not out of keeping with its subject: Powell, a disciplined writer with a laconic streak of his own, would have appreciated it.

In the end, Anderson thinks Spurling gets it just about right. After an extended comparison of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time with Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time, Anderson compares Powell’s works with those of his English-language conetmporaries. This includes a comparison of Powell’s prewar novels with those of Evelyn Waugh:

The verdicts of Koyama Taichi, in The Novels of Anthony Powell: A Critical Study (2006), comparing them with Waugh’s output in the same [prewar] period, are brisk. Similarities abound – Decline and Fall: Afternoon Men (’the merry-go-round of manners’); Black Mischief: Venusberg (‘topsy-turvy in a foreign land’); Vile Bodies: Agents and Patients (‘satire of the fast set’); A Handful of Dust: From a View to a Death (‘the country house is falling down’); Scoop: What’s Become of Waring? (‘the dinginess of hacks’) – but Powell lacks the gusto of Waugh’s ‘wild, grotesque flights of the imagination’, his energy-saving variants yielding no more than a ‘light, prosperous disdain for the sordid affairs of the world’. That could be thought too harsh. But Koyama is perfectly correct in pointing out the most striking feature of the early novels. They contain, virtually without exception, only flat characters.

In an article in the Jesuit magazine America, the religious position of novelist Anthony Burgess is reconsidered by Christopher Sandford. The article provides this comparison with the approaches to religion of Burgess and Waugh :

Although [Burgess] proudly identified himself as an “unbeliever” from the age of 16, he continually returned to spiritual themes, whether in his novels, his poems or his screenwriting of the acclaimed 1977 miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth.” Burgess told me in 1987 that this aspect of his life was “an endlessly scratched itch.” Not that he ever for a moment identified with other prominent Roman Catholic authors of his generation (again shunning the lure of the club), telling The Paris Review in 1973 that he felt himself to be “quite alone…the novels I’ve written are really medieval Catholic in their thinking, and people don’t want that today.” Unlike him, Burgess continued, even the greatest of English Catholic writers “tend to be bemused by the Church’s glamour, and even look for more glamour than is actually there—like [Evelyn] Waugh, dreaming of an old English Catholic aristocracy, or [Graham] Greene, fascinated by sin in a very cold-blooded way…. I try to forget that Greene is a Catholic when I read him. Crouchback’s Catholicism weakens [Waugh’s] Sword of Honour in the sense that it sentimentalises the book. We need something that lies beneath religion.”

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Waugh and Brexit (more)

Posted on July 14, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh gets several mentions in the weeklies in connection with the Brexit debate. Two of these relate to Tory politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading proponent of Brexit. These are based on Dominic Green’s interview of Rees-Mogg for The Weekly Standard on which he also comments in The Spectator. In The Weekly Standard, Green reports:

There is much of P.G. Wodehouse in Rees-Mogg. When he canvassed door to door in his first, unsuccessful attempt to win a seat in parliament, nanny came too. When the papers reported that he was driving around in a Bentley, he objected that it was only a Mercedes. A contemporary of Rees-Mogg’s at Eton recalls how the pupils wagged him by humming the national anthem during class, so that young Jacob would jump out of his seat and stand to attention. But there is more of the serious comedy of Evelyn Waugh. Rees-Mogg’s anachronistic, almost theatrical overdressing; his posh, staunch, and fecund Catholicism, and his conviction that the old days and old ways were better all recall later Waugh. His constituency, North East Somerset, is in Waugh country.

He may mean that last phrase literally since the family of Arthur Waugh lived in Midsomer Norton (which is, indeed, in Rees-Mogg’s constituency), and Evelyn visited his aunts there many times as a child. In summarizing the interview for The Spectator, Green closes with this:

As I leave, I ask Rees-Mogg, a Catholic MP for a Somerset constituency, to name his favorite Evelyn Waugh novel. ‘Scoop,’ he says. ‘It’s such fun.’

American conservative journalist Roger Kimball, whose day job is publisher of The New Criterion magazine, also reports in The Spectator on Brexit in connection with this week’s visit of Donald Trump to Britain. He thinks Trump sees Brexit as a matter of sovereignity and closes his article with this quote from Evelyn Waugh:

The beautiful people who titter over the Baby Blimp and denounce President Trump’s policy of “America First” might take a page from Evelyn Waugh. “I believe in nationality,” he wrote in 1938 [sic], “not in terms of race or of divine commissions for world conquest, but simply this: mankind inevitably organises itself into communities according to it geographical distribution; these communities by sharing a common history common characteristics and inspire a local loyalty; the individual family develops most happily and fully when it accepts these limits. I do not think that British prosperity must necessarily be inimical to anyone else, but if, on occasions, it is, I want Britain to prosper and not her rivals.”

The quote is from Waugh’s book Robbery Under Law (1939) pp. 20-21 (Penguin, 2011 ed.).

UPDATE: Quote is from book published in 1939. Text is changed accordingly.

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Waugh: Letter and Portrait

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A letter from Evelyn Waugh to Hugh Heckstall-Smith was auctioned earlier this week. A copy is still posted on the internet. The year is missing from the date but it is sent from Combe Florey so would have been sent in the last decade of Waugh’s life. Here’s the excerpt:

ALS signed “E. Waugh,” one page, 6 x 8, Combe Florey House letterhead, September 11. Letter to Hugh Heckstall-Smith. In part: “Yes Spencer was my informant
His suicide, I now remember, was autumn 1941 at Hayling Island. I knew him only as a Marine but saw quite a lot of him. He was a keen officer but full of frustrated ambitions (I thought). As far as I know he was in no disciplinary trouble & his death came as a surprise to all in the Corps. I suspected him of Communist sympathies, perhaps quite wrongly.” Continuing, Waugh refers to J. F. Roxburgh, adding: “Did J. F. not appoint his own Masters? At Lancing they were chosen from the most suitable of the assistant Masters. J. F. never had any sexual or romantic interest in me
Looking back I see J. F. as a show-man in the best sense. Great style, but a dangerous model for the young. I hear his trusty tones in many voices.” In fine condition, with a few rusty staple holes to the upper left corner.

“Spencer” refers to a Capt Spencer mentioned by Waugh in letters to his wife. He was serving with Waugh in the Marines. Letters dated 22 January 1940 and [October] 1941. His suicide was reported in the latter (Letters, p. 156). Of what he was Waugh’s “informant” is unclear. J F Roxburgh taught at Lancing College. Hugh Heckstall-Smith was a school teacher and taught for a time at Gordonstoun. He is probably the author of A Doubtful School Master (1962). The British Library holdings of Waugh’s archives show a fairly active correspondence for a two-year period:

ff. 20-42v Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh, novelist: Hugh Heckstall-Smith: Letters to Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh from Hugh Heckstall-Smith: 1962-1964.

That would be 22 pages of incoming correspondence. If any of our readers has a copy of his book or knows more about Heckstall-Smith or the aforesaid correspondence, comments are invited below.

The Salisbury Museum is holding an exhibit of the paintings of Henry Lamb. This includes Lamb’s portrait of Waugh which was the cover illustration for Evelyn Waugh and His World. Here’s a description from the Persephone Post:

Henry Lamb’s famous portrait of Evelyn Waugh is in the Salisbury Museum exhibition. It’s 1930, Waugh was 27, and the painting is rather poignant because Waugh became such a grumpy old man, here all is before him.

The exhibit continues through September after which a smilar exhibit will be mounted in the Poole Museum. Details here.

UPDATE: According to BL files, the correspondence with Heckstall-Smith began in 1962, the year his book was published. The above text has been modified accordingly.

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Vile Parties

Posted on July 11, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The website Londonist has published an artcle on “6 Debauched Parties We Wish We’d Been Invited To”. These are all from the Bright Young People days that were described in Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies. There is one which involved Waugh directly:

4. The Bruno Hat exhibition party (23rd July 1929, Buckingham Street)

A mysterious art exhibition in July 1929 brought guests ranging from Lytton Strachey to Winston Churchill to a house in Buckingham Street, where the work of emerging artist Bruno Hat was celebrated at a cocktail party. Evelyn Waugh had written the catalogue for the exhibition and many guests spoke admiringly of the work on display. However, the next day revealed the truth: ‘Bruno Hat’ was a hoax dreamed up by Brian Howard, an ambitious member of the Bright Young Things who longed to throw his own legendary party. Waugh, Strachey and a number of other people were well aware of the charade. The event was described by the Daily Express as an “amazing hoax on art experts”, with the ‘artist’ at the party actually being Tom Mitford in disguise. We’ll level with you — we think some of the hoax art’s pretty good.

The story includes an interesting set of photos from The Graphic which illustrate some of the paintings as well as Mr Hat himself. Among others included in the Londonist’s selection are a Circus Party and Bath and Bottle Party. Both of these are among those listed by Waugh in the well known party paragraph of his novel which was published in January 1930 (CWEW, v2, p. 82).

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Unsung Waughs

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A posting by Ralph Berry on the weblog of the “paleoconservative” journal Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture cites one of Waugh’s least read novels:

I was lately in Exeter, hoping to see something of the Islamic Centre at the University. As it was a Sunday when I visited, I thought they might have been open for business. But the doors were locked and no access was possible. I did however read a massive plaque outside, which read in its entirety:

THIS BUILDING OWES EVERYTHING TO THE VISION AND GENEROSITY OF HIS HIGHNESS SHAIKH SULTAN BIN MOHAMMED AL-QASIMI  PhD (EXON) THE RULER OF SHARJAH 3 JULY 2001

I was put in mind of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, which opens with the Emperor Seth, ruler of Azania, and his titles. They include “TERROR OF THE SEAS” and “BACHELOR OF ARTS, OXFORD UNIVERSITY.” The ruler of Sharjah follows in the same tradition. But Evelyn Waugh is not mocked. There has never been a film or TV drama of Black Mischief, unlike Waugh’s other major novels. I expect the authorities found the title too incendiary.

Another neglected Waugh novel comes up in another post. This is by Sara Haslam, editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh edition of Helena. Waugh thought it his best novel and was probably the one to which he devoted the most time relative to its size. Dr Haslam, who is a Senior Lecturer of English Literature at the Open University, recently conducted some research on her edition in the Waugh Archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. She reports the results of her visit on the website of the University of Leicester. Here’s an excerpt:

Searches of the [A.D.] Peters papers turned up many useful documents and letters; for example, Waugh’s ‘Notes on Translating Helena’ that was thought lost. Waugh’s instructions for translators were on two sides of the same notepaper used and bound to make the Helena MS. One reason they may have been thought lost is that they seem to have been mis-filed. … Finally, on those kinds of discoveries that justify archive-fever, the collection holds an advance proof copy of Helena, which I hadn’t been able to tell from the catalogue. It’s this proof (and probably this copy of this proof) that Waugh (or someone) copied and then stuck into the back of the AMS for him to annotate, creating UK1’s version of the final lines of the novel.

I returned to the UK with a clearer and near-final version of the MDATV [Manuscript Development and Textual Variants], as well as many pointers for the Introduction. Taking images of covers was the one thing I struggled with. The lights in the HRC have, apparently, foxed many folk trying to do the same thing.

Finally, the death of a somewhat neglected actor is in the news. This is Tab Hunter whose death at the age of 86 was announced earlier this month. According to his obituary in the Guardian, his film career peaked in the 1950s when he played clean cut “beefcake” roles in several popular films. He was already past his peak when he appeared briefly as a guide at Whispering Glades in the 1965 film of The Loved One. He was one of several actors who landed cameo roles in that film. Others included Milton Berle, Liberace, and James Coburn. Although the Guardian describes something of a comeback linked to the John Waters’ film Polyester in 1981, he never returned to the level of popularity he achieved at the beginning of his career.

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Fence Mending at Castle Howard

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph reports that the family feud previousy noted at Castle Howard, the setting for both of the film adaptations of Brideshead Revisited, may be on the mend:

Simon Howard’s wife says despite being forced to move out of the iconic building, which was made famous by the TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, her husband still keeps in contact with Nicholas. “My husband has shown such grace and dignity – too much in my opinion – and still speaks to his brother,” Rebecca Howard told the Mail on Sunday’s You Magazine…Nicholas Howard, who is married to former HarperCollins boss Victoria Barnsley, made his younger brother step down from his roles as chief executive and chairman of the company that runs Castle Howard. The full details of how and why the eviction was orchestrated have never been revealed.

The family are reported to have been fully supportive of both film adaptations according to the film makers. Brideshead still features in the Castle Howard promotional efforts.

Meanwhile, another Waugh novel has been implicated in a first novel by Pakistani writer Nadia Akbar. Her novel entitled Goodbye Freddie Mercury concerns today’s Pakistani party goers. As she explains in an interview with a subcontinental website Scroll.in:

Q. I was intrigued by your author photo, which partially hides your face with a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Is there a story behind that?

A. Vile Bodies parallels our worlds in a strange way. I feel linked to Waugh in both subject and background in some ways – social class, his chosen literary subjects, social critique. Perhaps the style of the novel is also remotely connected. I love the idea of voices being shared in threads, the balance of truth and reality tipping and regaining balance. That is partly why I chose first person voices. I also love the irony of the photo. Are we vile or are we beautiful?

 

 

 

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Waugh and Religious Satire

Posted on July 8, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Prof Terry Lindvall of Virginia Wesleyan University has written a book entitled God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert. In his broad survey, he gives some time to a brief consideration of the satire of Evelyn Waugh. To begin with, however, he discusses in his Introduction the difference between the religious satire, which is his subject, and social satire. Waugh, along with many other of the book’s subjects, wrote both:

Secular satirists take on the corrupt state and the mores of the people. Religious satirists focus on the people of God, their own community of faith, and its hypocritical leaders…The umbrella of satire employed in this book distills two recurring characteristics. First, as satire is used to attack, it aims not just to slice and dice but to correct and reform…Second, satire employs wit and humor; it entertains. It is not always funny but it appeals to a recognition of the ridiculous.

As his title suggests, Prof Lindvall ranges back to the prophets of the Bible,  passing through several historic phases of satire such as Classical, Medieval, Reformation and Augustan. When he gets up to modern times, he considers satirists in Britain separately from those in America and on the Continent and then takes on the present day. In his lengthy Chapter 9 “Brtish Catholics and Curmudgeons” he considers British satirists from John Dryden and Alexander Pope to C S Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge. Within that chapter there are separate sections devoted to, for example, “Satirist Named Smith” (this is Sydney Smith who was vicar at the Anglican church in Combe Florey in the early years of the 19th century), “Victorian Wit” (Oscar Wilde), “ChesterBelloc” (they need no introduction), and finally “Hard Knox” (i.e., Ronald). It is in this last section that Waugh gets a look in. The section begins with a discussion of Knox’s writings on satire as well as his satirical writings in his books Essays in Satire and Let Dons Delight.

This brings the story to Evelyn Waugh, Knox’s literary executor and biographer. According to Prof Lindvall, Waugh

would revolt against modernity in all its plastic and superficial postures of progress…he rebelled against the modern wasteland. He rejected behaviors of the hollow men and women as inadequate, pompous and, to use one of hs favorite words, “bogus.”

As examples of Waugh’s use of satire in a religious context, Prof Lindvall cites the faux religious characters in Vile Bodies, Fr Rothschild and Mrs Melrose Ape. This was written before Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicsm. Afterwards he wrote Brideshead Revisited where his use of satire is exemplified by Rex Mottram’s conversion of convenience, which quotes at length Rex’s clueless conversation with the priest who is providing his instruction. Prof Lindvall also discusses Waugh’s use of the device from Chesterton of “the twitch upon the thread” which is applied to the characters in Brideshead. Some consideration of Waugh’s later satire in Love Among the Ruins might also have been useful.

The book concludes with a consideration of the latter day satirists on TV such as Monty Python, The Onion and Stephen Colbert, where religious themes were also brought within the scope of their comedy.

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