Scoop Hotel in Addis Reopens

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The South China Morning Post has a feature length article about the reopening of the  Taitu Hotel in Addis Ababa. This is written by Ian Gill who made a recent visit. His story opens with this:

The ghost of William Boot is back to haunt the resurrected Liberty Hotel. Addis Ababa’s Itegue Taitu Hotel, made famous as the Liberty in Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s acclaimed 1938 satire about sensation-seeking foreign corres­pondents, has been restored following severe fire damage in early 2015, more than a century after it was built. “It is a heritage building and has been repaired close to its original form,” acting manager Woineshet “Winy” Teshome says, as I wallow in literary nostalgia over curried chicken in Ethiopia’s oldest hotel.

The story goes on to discuss the journalists described in Waugh’s novel who stayed in the hotel, at the time the best available. According to Gill:

Today, compared with its many-starred rivals, the Taitu is modest in facilities and price; Lonely Planet describes it as offering “a cash-strapped overlander a classy experience for very little coin”. Outside, the bustling, noisy Addis Ababa develops at unceasing pace – largely financed by billions of dollars from China – but the Taitu remains an oasis of quietude and a unique window on more than 100 years of drama.

After a summary of the Addis depicted in Waugh’s novel, the article concludes:

The Taitu Hotel, however, wears its past lightly. The portraits of Menelik II and Taitu Betul hanging from the walls add atmos­phere, but are not accompanied by much explanatory text. Missing is any memento of Waugh. His absence could perhaps be explained because Scoop was unflattering to Abyssinia and Waugh, going against the popular outcry against Mussolini’s attack, supported the colonialist adventure, believing it might bring order and civilisa­tion to a barbarous land. Another factor might be that Ethiopia was long denied access to Western writers under a communist regime.

Since the author’s day, the hotel has instituted one important change. Witness this passage from Scoop: “Corker and William [Boot] sat down to luncheon. The menu did not vary at the Liberty; sardines, beef and chicken for luncheon; soup, beef and chicken for dinner; hard, homogeneous cubes of beef, sometimes with Worcester Sauce, sometimes with tomato ketchup; fibrous spindles of chicken with grey-green dented peas.” Today, the menu offers a variety of Ethiopian and Western fare. William Boot would be pleased.

It is perhaps not so surprising that there is no memento of Waugh at the Taitu. In the trip described in Scoop, Waugh himself stayed in a smaller venue called the Deutches Haus. As detailed in an earlier post, Waugh also mentions both hotels in Waugh in Abyssinia where he calls what is now the Taitu, the “Splendide” (pp. 66-78). This may well be the source of the hotel (or at least its name) which provided the setting for many skits and much laughter in the Benny Hill Show; it was there called the “Hotel Sordide”.

The online version of the article is accompanied by several contemporary photos of the interior and exterior of the refurbished hotel. Mr Gill also reported on his visit in a letter to the Evelyn Waugh Studies. This appears along with some of the same photographs in No. 49.1 (Spring 2018).

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Memory of Wartime Piers Court

Posted on August 9, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A letter reposted from the magazine This England recalls WWII schooldays at Piers Court. The magazine appears quarterly, and this letter is in its Autumn 2018 issue. This is from an evacuee who now lives in America. The letter is reposted in PressReader, but the name of the writer is unavailable in that source:

…When I started to attend school I was evacuated with nuns and girls from the Dominican Convent in Chingford, Essex. The author Sir Evelyn Waugh [sic] loaned his country house, Piers Court in Gloucestershire, to the convent for the duration. This was a wonderful place to be during those bad times. We could sometimes hear gunfire in the distance, but we happily played in the grounds and in the woods.

My mother visited from time to time and my father when he was home on leave from the RAF. We went home, when possible, by train from Stroud to Paddington Station. As I walked along the London streets with my mother I saw the devastation caused by the bombing.Terrible times, but we were resilient and survived. Winston Churchill is still my hero.

Another school with a Waugh association is mentioned on the website Muddy Stilettos: The Urban Guide to the Countryside in its Hertfordshire edition. This is Heath Mount School which Waugh attended in his youth. At that time it was in Hampstead but as explained on the school’s website it has moved north since then:

By the early 1930s, Hampstead had expanded rapidly and the New End site no longer met the needs of the school. The search for a new site outside London started in 1933 and Headmaster Rev Arthur Wells secured the lease of a beautiful Georgian country mansion on the Woodhall estate in Hertfordshire, Heath Mount School’s new home. The school, together with its 32 boys from Hampstead, moved to its current home in January 1934.

The school website also provides a fairly detailed list of illustrious alumni and among them are:

Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh who were pupils at the school from 1913 to 1916 and 1910-17 respectively. The main Reception room at Heath Mount is named the Beaton Room after this most talented photographer and designer. Evelyn Waugh refers to Heath Mount School in his diaries.

One would have thought that they might have named the school library for Waugh.

Finally, another bit of nostalgia attributed to Waugh opens a story appearing in the Otago Daily News. This is published in Dunedin, New Zealand, and is written by Joe Bennett who is anticipating the onset of springtime in that country:

EVELYN Waugh, best of all novelists, wrote that the smell of food cooking gave more pleasure than the meal itself. To him, the most wonderful of feasts would be a series of dishes brought from the kitchen, passed under the diner’s nose, held there a few moments, then taken away again.

Course could follow course – soup, meat, fish, cheese, dessert and back again, if you so wished, to soup, and all with whiffs of wine to match – without the diner ever being disappointed by satiety. He would merely be blessed with a constant sense of pleasure about to happen, the delightful tease of expectation. The thought applies not only to food. Sex, sport, parties: all are better in anticipation.

The food passage must refer to Vile Bodies (1965 ed., p. 64) where Adam is eating breakfast  This story is also reposted by PressReader.

UPDATE (9 August 2018): Thanks once again to reader Dave Lull who came up with the source for the reference in the Otago Daily News. This is now incorporated into the text.

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Another Waugh School Under Threat

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Last week, The Spectator reported the threat of closure faced by the Downside Abbey School. (See previous post). Now the Daily Mail has announced that another Waugh-related school is endangered, although there is no imminent threat to its continued existence. This is Lancing College. According to the Mail, Lancing:

… has gone to war with Ikea over its plans to build a huge store less than a mile from its famous Gothic spires. Lancing College said a giant furniture store would threaten the school’s future and put the ‘guardianship’ of its 550-acre estate at risk. Bursar Mark Milling claimed the increase in traffic caused by shoppers descending on the area would put parents off enrolling their children. The college, which was founded in 1849 and counts writer Evelyn Waugh among former pupils, is on a hill near Shoreham, West Sussex. It overlooks flat ground where developers want to build an Ikea store and 600 houses.

Although not entirely explained in the Mail’s story, the opening of the IKEA site will apparently require rerouting of traffic to/from the school. The Bursar:

… warned plans for a diversion for school visitors would lead to an annual 430,000-mile increase in local car journeys. Natural England and the Campaign to Protect Rural England are also opposing the plans because they involve building on flood plains and mud flats that are feeding and breeding grounds for rare wading birds. … Adur District Council’s planning committee voted to defer its decision because developers were unable to prove the project would enhance the environment. It said developers should meet Lancing College to discuss the proposal. Ikea’s Tim Farlam said: ‘We are disappointed with the decision as the proposal met all national and local planning guidelines … We will now discuss the decision with New Monks Farm Development to consider our next steps.’

The story does not explain why Lancing does not itself offer buy the parcel of land to preserve it or whether it could afford to do so.

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Roundup: From Australia to Europe via Mexico

Posted on August 4, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent issue of The Australian has an essay by Paul Monk entitled “Western Civilisation: A primer for willing readers.” This includes a broad consideration of liberal arts educational experiences over the years. Among those discussed are the Oxford years of Edward Gibbon and Evelyn Waugh:

… The young Edward Gibbon was an omnivorous reader from childhood; a habit, he wrote in his autobiography, that he would not have exchanged “for the treasures of India”. But when, in 1752, aged 15, he was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, he found the atmosphere stifling, describing the academics as “monks sunk in port and prejudice”. He was expelled for becoming a Catholic and was sent by his father to Lausanne to a private tutor, in 1753. The next five years of private tutoring were decisive in the formation of his mind and character. His stock of erudition was set in order by a plan of study. He mastered French and Latin and the rudiments of Greek. He ceased to be Catholic and even “English”, becoming instead a cosmopolitan European.

On his own grand tour, he vis­ited Rome in 1762, 24 years ahead of Goethe, and it was there that he discovered his vocation: writing the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire — out of an interest in its implications for the “European Republic” of his time. …. Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford, so memorably depicted in his novel Brideshead Revisited, was also stifling — 150 years after Gibbon. Waugh, too, left the university to pursue more creative ideals.

–On a related note, in the TLS for 20 July, the N B column (written that week by “A T”) has a section that begins with this:

Evelyn Waugh, as we know, left Oxford without a degree, but what about writers who had the opportunity to attend university but didn’t take it?

The first example is Gore Vidal who was accepted at Harvard but didn’t attend, serving in WWII instead. Also mentioned is Francoise Sagan who was admitted to the Sorbonne but dropped out after her first novel (Bonjour Tristesse) was published when she was 18.  There are also several other French writers mentioned who either failed or didn’t take the entrance exam (Baccalaureat): Emile Zola, Jean Cocteau, Andre Malraux and Apollinaire.

—Project MUSE has posted the abstract of an article by Alex Murray entitled “Decadence Revisited: Evelyn Waugh and the Afterlife of the 1890s.” It originally appeared in the academic journal Modernism/modernity for September 2015. The abstract (portions of which are quoted below) is taken from the opening pages of the article:

The young Evelyn Waugh’s first encounter with decadence came via his elder brother, Alec, in 1916: “He had a particular relish at that time for the English lyric poets of the nineties; their dying cadences were always the prelude to his departure.” Around the same time, Evelyn marked approvingly the lyrics of Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Richard Le Gallienne in his copy of The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1912). This early encounter with the 1890s inaugurated a lifelong relationship that was marked by both influence and antagonism. The shifts and changes in Waugh’s position on the literature of decadence offer a salutary reminder that the relationship between modernism and its literary forebears is never simple or stable. Much scholarship on Waugh’s work tends to flatten out his attitude, reducing it to either an endorsement or a rejection of the nineties. … The cumulative effect can be to paint Waugh as a neodecadent in a way that smooths over the complexities of literary history. …

In this article I outline the relationship between Waugh and the 1890s as part of the broader problem of charting the afterlives of decadence….Waugh’s response was idiosyncratic, but it also reflected broader cultural currents: he was drawn to the modish neodecadence of Ronald Firbank in the early 1920s and then satirized and dismissed the increasing popularity of Wilde in the late 1920s, before developing a fond, even nostalgic attitude towards 1890s aestheticism in Put Out More Flags (1942) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). These shifts reflect the broader cultural climate of the first half of the twentieth century, during which writers, artists, and critics went from rejecting to embracing the 1890s, producing a history that can help us to understand the ways in which we read decadence today. …

–The website Five Books has posted an interview of author Hugh Thomson who discusses five books he recommends about Mexico. One of these is Waugh’s Robbery Under Law:

This is a good one. There was a big fashion in the 1930s for making the most of the trip by writing both a novel and a travel book about Mexico, as Greene and Lawrence did, but Waugh only wrote a travel book. It is little known and should be more widely read. It may be little known because of its awful title. The book has an odd genesis – it was a commission from the Pearson family who had oil holdings in Mexico that had been expropriated by the revolutionary government. They were so outraged that they paid Waugh to write a book about how arbitrary and unjust this was.

So, it’s an odd, sponsored book and while Waugh fulfils the brief, he also ranges far and wide across Mexico. He sees that its history is not as simple as ‘noble Indians and brutal Europeans’ and thinks Mexicans should celebrate their post-Columbian inheritance as much as their Aztec history. There is a fair amount of ‘dog eat dog’ in the Mexico Waugh describes – it was a tough place to live and work, and Waugh shows this with no sentimentality.

Among the others recommended are Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and B Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, both novels.

–Finally, another review of the recent German translation of Remote People appears in the journal Junge Welt. The German title of the book’s slightly revised text is Expeditionen eines englischen Gentleman. Here’s an excerpt:

…After a long wait, came the coronation; none of the planned buildings finished in time. The workers had hardly received any wages, were slow and had to be forced. The imperial horses also went on strike, “reared up, climbed on top of one another, tore off the gilded front of the coach, and tore at the harness.” The brass band played the national anthem, and for a long time the psalm and prayer ceremony was held in the extinct church language Ge’ez. Other reporters had apparently missed these details, devoting themselves to wonderful parade, uniforms, and glamor, gold and silver….Evelyn Waugh’s unusual travelogue sometimes drifts into the satirical and captivates as an ingenious, contemporary observation of the reality of European imperialism.

The review is by Thomas Behlert and the translation is by Google, slightly edited. No attempt was made to conform quotes from the book into the original English version.

UPDATE (5 August 2018): After the original of the above was posted, a reader kindly sent a recent article from the TLS that was related to the essay in The Australian. This is now discussed in a newly added second roundup point.

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Delingpole on Sword of Honour

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Journalist and novelist James Delingpole has written a brief essay on Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. This appeared in the May 2018 print edition of The Conservative magazine and has now been posted online. He declares the book to be

if not the 20th century’s greatest novel, it almost certainly qualifies as its greatest conservative novel. Besides the obvious reasons–the reverence for tradition and suspicion of the novel–there’s Waugh’s relentless, unfashionable, clear-eyed contempt for the way his hero’s contemporaries and allies keep deluding themselves as to the evils of Communism.

The article does not start well. Delingpole cites the usual canards about the deficiencies of Waugh’s military career and Lord Lovat’s estimation that he could not lead troops in combat because they would have shot him. He seems to have written the essay without the benefit of having read Donat Gallagher and Carlos Villar Flor’s recent study debunking these myths, In the Picture. He also asserts that Waugh wrote the book in three parts and over a period of 13 years “so as to make him more money.” It was much more complicated than that. He almost stopped after volume two and wrote other books in the same period, including The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and his biography of Ronald Knox, as well as shorter works such as The Holy Places and Love Among the Ruins.

A brief and in itself quite amusing summary of the trilogy is provided; as described by Delingpole, it ranges:

… from broad comedy to sudden pathos; farce to tragedy; domesticity to Stuka attacks; fashionable London restaurants to dreary south coast training camps; laird’s dining halls to bombed-out Cretan villages; hallucinogenic sea voyages to grand Catholic funerals; literary pseuds, society hostesses, decent but stupid officers (poor “Fido” Hound), African witch-doctor abortionists, Jewish refugees… All human life is here, all drawn with an engagement and fluency and breadth of sympathy quite remarkable from such a crashing snob.

Some of the characters and events are preposterous. But, according to Delingpole, the book’s “preposterousness”

serves a deeper moral purpose. It’s there to tell you that war–at least in Waugh’s view–is the bleakest of black comedies in which no good deed goes unpunished but where shits, incompetents, cowards and even traitors too often prosper…it comes across as  quite outrageously, cynical, bitter and perverse as a judgement on Britain’s finest hour.

Delingpole declares, however, that what most distinguishes the book is

the sublime technique. Elegant, economical, never a word out of place, ever adept with the mot juste, Waugh’s prose is simply matchless. (As too is his dialogue, so authentic, honed, perfectly formed that he almost never needs to add adverbs to explain how it is spoken–or even needs to tell us who is speaking.)

The article concludes with this:

When I first read it in my early 20s, I was disappointed that there was so little combat in it. Now that I am older, I realise that this is part of its strength: it’s not really about war at all but something much bigger–about life itself and our quest for meaning in a world which makes so little sense. I cannot recommend reading–or rereading–it highly enough.

Delingpole is, according to his Wikipedia entry, a self-described “satirist” and “libertarian conservative”. He has also written several novels, including two comic novels set in WWII: Coward on the Beach (2007) and Coward at the Bridge (2009), featuring “World War II’s answer to Flashman, only much more honorable—Dick’s a Coward by name but not by nature—our hero has the uncanny knack of being in just the right place at just the wrong time.” A third volume (Coward in the Woods) was announced in 2012 but has mysteriously failed to appear. His latest book is Watermelons: How the Environmentalists are Killing the Planet... It should also perhaps be mentioned that he believes that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a myth.

 

 

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Downside’s Future Threatened (Updated)

Posted on August 2, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The current issue of The Spectator has an article about the future of the two remaining Benedictine order public schools in Britain. These are Ampleforth in North Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset. A combination of falling enrollments (Roman Catholics are now welcomed at public schools such as Eton that used to deny them entry), rising costs (as the number of Monks falls, lay personnel must replace them at higher costs), and difficulties complying with ever increasing government regulations to prevent child abuse is creating a perfect storm threatening their survival. Another Benedictine public school Douai in Berkshire closed 20 years ago.

Evelyn Waugh has a long association with Downside. This is partly recognized in the Spectator article:

There was a time, we pupils were often told, when the captain of the school’s 1st XV rugby team would consider joining the monastery. Those days, when Evelyn Waugh used to attend the Easter services, now seem very distant.

It went deeper than that, however. Evelyn frequently attended services and retreats at Downside throughout the year, not just at Easter. He also sent his oldest son Auberon to the Downside School, although Auberon himself has no particularly fond memories of that experience. Auberon sent his own children to day schools and they lived at home. Evelyn was also a close friend and correspondent of Dom Hubert van Zeller. Van Zeller was Ronald Knox’s confessor and helped Waugh as a source for his biography of Knox. He was also, according to Martin Stannard,  the subject of Waugh’s last published work which was a review of van Zeller’s autobiography One Foot in the Cradle. That article appeared in the Downside Review for April 1966. Downside also graciously and generously hosted a memorable conference of the Evelyn Waugh Society in 2011.

The Spectator article, by Will Heaven, a Downside alumnus, ends on a slightly more positive note:

What happens next? It’s possible that if the monks relinquish more control and hand over to experienced Catholic professionals, both schools will revive themselves and experience what Cardinal Newman called a ‘second spring’. Numbers may start to climb again, perhaps aided by pupils from overseas. Many parents are very loyal — understandably so, because they see their children doing well and they personally like the monks.

But some might feel differently. An old monk, I remember, once told me at a drinks party that he was relaxed about Downside closing one day. Sometimes it’s better for something to end with integrity, he argued, than change with the times too much.

Earlier this week, the Spectator’s USA edition published an article by Jacob Heilbrunn about the trial of Paul Manafort (former aide of Donald Trump) that was then about to begin. The article described a likely result of the trial to be :

A further spate of publicity about Trump’s Russian entanglements is sure to come tomorrow when his former campaign manager Manafort goes to trial — unless he cuts a last-minute deal with Mueller. It would probably take an Evelyn Waugh to chronicle Manafort’s exploits abroad, which sound like something out of Scoop.

No such last-minute deal was announced and the trial is ongoing as this is written.

UPDATE (9 August 2018): Milena Borden has kindly sent us an update to the story posted above. The report of an independent investigation into sexual abuse in the schools at Downside and Ampleforth has been issued. The Spectator story mentions the report’s pendency. It is not particularly helpful to the schools. According to the Guardian:

The true scale of sexual abuse at two of the UK’s leading Catholic independent schools over a period of 40 years is likely to have been far greater than has been proved in the courts, a report by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse has concluded. Ten people have been convicted or cautioned in relation to sexual offences at Ampleforth in North Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset. The schools “prioritised the monks and their own reputations over the protection of children … in order to avoid scandal”, says the 211-page report published by IICSA on Thursday after hearings last year. The monks avoided giving information to or cooperating with statutory authorities investigating abuse, it says. Their approach could be summarised as “a ‘tell them nothing’ attitude”.

The Guardian’s description of the report’s conclusion sounds much like that forseen in the Spectator:

The report recommends a strict separation between the governance of the two abbeys and the schools. It acknowledges that some steps have been taken but says neither school has formally established a comprehensive redress system and no public apology has been made. In April the Charities Commission stripped the charitable bodies that run Ampleforth of their safeguarding oversight and appointed an interim manager.

 

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Defining A Waugh Fanatic

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Conservative journalist Matthew Walther in the news magazine The Week has written an essay in which he defines what he considers to be a relatively new phenomenon: the Evelyn Waugh fanatic. (See previous posts.) It is worth noting that he considers himself to be one:

The Waughian wears tweed jackets, often if not always ill fitting. He smokes a pipe or one of the expensive additive-free brands of cigarette. He drinks gin and, partly out of spite for craft-beer nerds, Miller Lite. He is a Catholic but has vaguely romantic feelings about English church architecture and says “Holy Ghost” instead of “Holy Spirit.” He insists that the Church has been in a crisis since the Second Vatican Council and the introduction of the new liturgy….

And so forth for reasons that become increasingly amusing as he moves along.

The inspiration for this fanaticism stems from the recognition of Waugh’s position in the canon of English Literature:

When Waugh died on Easter Sunday in 1966, he was praised by contemporaries such as Graham Greene, who called him “the greatest author of my generation.” In death he has been rewarded with one of the most devoted, if not among the most sizable, followings in modern literature. Not one of his novels has ever gone out of print, and even his biographies and travel writings continue to sell tolerably well.

One might take issue with every novel remaining in print (particularly during WWII or in the 1950s before Penguin got all of them into its paperback editions) but the point is well taken. If any were ever out of print, it wasn’t for very long and it wasn’t due to lack of demand.

Walther also mentions the Oxford University Press project to issue annotated uniform editions of all of Waugh’s writings as another recognition of his greatness. While he has enjoyed reading the volumes issued so far, he nevertheless has reservations about the project:

As scholarship the new editions cannot be faulted. … Somehow, though, it all seems a bit soon. There is something to be said for the pleasure of reading books with no sense of obligation rather than as set texts. … The idea that instead of being harmlessly enjoyed by dorks in three-piece suits Scoop might be the sort of thing high-school sophomores get the SparkNotes for fills me with low-level dread. The best way to ruin a writer is to make him important or, even worse, essential.

…Like the Janeites before us, Waughians might well be able to carry on uneasily in the same world as the bored college students and the disinterested scholar-critics. But somehow I fear it will not be possible for us to appreciate our man in quite the same way ever again. Thus does that vague enemy, the modern world, claim another casualty.

The article is well worth reading in full. It manages to be consistently funny and entertaining while at the same time getting some serious points across–not entirely unlike the subject of the fanaticism.

UPDATE (2 August 2018): The Weekly Standard has selected Walther’s article to be featured in its “Prufrock” column. This week’s column is headed with a copy of the 1925 photo of Waugh and his chums on their trip to Lundy Island. The group (along with Waugh) includes the Plunket-Greenes (Richard, Olivia, Gwen and David), Terrence Greenidge and Elizabeth Russell (to whom one of the P-G’s was later married). Martin Stannard (v. 1). None of these people could ever have been described as “Waugh fanatics” (although Waugh was somewhat of an “Olivia fanatic” at that time) so the choice of this photo is a bit odd.

 

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Late July Roundup

Posted on July 30, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has another story about the sale of Piers Court containing some new and corrected information:

Piers Court at Stinchcombe occupies a remote corner of Gloucestershire. … It has views of the Welsh Hills and the Forest of Dean, and played a role in some of the most extraordinary episodes of British history. A grand Georgian facade was wrapped around the original Elizabethan shell that was ransacked by Parliamentarians in 1645 after the fall of Royalist-occupied Bristol. Cromwell’s soldiers turned over Piers Court searching for commander Prince Rupert, the nephew of King Charles I. A few hundred years later it became the home of Evelyn Waugh for 19 years, where he wrote Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Helena.

The correction removes Brideshead Revisited listed in previous reports as having been written at Piers Court. (See previous posts.) They could have listed The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) as having been written there (although published shortly after he moved). The novel’s description of Pinfold’s house (called Lychpole) probably wouldn’t attract any offers:

…this shabby old house which, over the years he had filled with books and furniture of the kind he relished…The central heating plant at Lychpole was ancient and voracious. It had not been used since the days of fuel shortage…Mr and Mrs Pinfold withdrew into two rooms, heaped the fires with such coal as they could procure and sheltered from draughts behind screens and sandbags. (C&H, 1973, pp. 122, 134)

–A Manchester online magazine, AboutManchester, has an article relating to a WWI exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North. It asks the question of whether this war should continue to be commemorated now that the centenary of its end has been reached. Waugh contributes this to the debate:

Then came the annual 11th November commemorations, the silence even back in 1919 atttracted criticism, Evelyn Waugh described it as a “disgusting idea of artificial nonsense and sentimentality, […] a disgraceful day of national hysteria.” Ninety eight years later Simon Jenkins would use the same language describing the 11th day of the 11th month which had become as a synthetic festival whose time had passed.

The quote comes from Waugh’s Diaries, p. 37 (11 November 1919). It omits language which, when taken in context, makes it somewhat less harsh: “If people have lost sons and fathers they should think of them whenever the grass is green or Shaftesbury Avenue brightly lighted, not for two minutes on the anniversary…”

–Robbie Millen in The Times  comments on this year’s Booker Prize longlist and complains that it reflects blandness and works not giving offense, or as he puts it “Pffft”, the sound made by a semi-deflated balloon. He thinks writers need to be more edgy:

It has also turned writing into a group activity. God help us, it has made writers more collegiate, more homogenised, blander, more self-congratulatory, more supportive — shudder — nicer. Groupthink is the death of thought-stirring writing.

Evelyn Waugh was never mistaken for a nice person (he said of Stephen Spender: “To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee”). Nor Virginia Woolf (on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”). Nor Gore Vidal (“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”). Nor Norman Mailer (on Vidal: “I’ve had to smell your works from time to time, and that has helped me to become an expert on intellectual pollution”).

We need such writers to look at the world through a cold, gimlet eye, willing to put down on paper that unpleasant, truthful thing. We want them to be awkward, to be rude, to chuck grenades. To say things that others won’t say. To be the cat that walks alone. I await the Booker book that has bad, subversive thoughts. The anti-pffft novel.

–The newsletter QInsider has an article entitled “The Write Way to Travel” in which it cites various writers to recommend to its readers ocean voyages on Cunard liners. Most prominent among those quoted is Evelyn Waugh:

What’s more romantic than a surprising avowal of love? Perhaps one delivered aboard a huge ship, during a storm in the Atlantic. Those are the circumstances in which Captain Charles Ryder, the narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 classic novel Brideshead Revisited, comes closest to living happily ever after.  Waugh could have based this passage in any one of the book’s settings: Brideshead Castle, an Oxford college, or in any of the members’ clubs of pre-war London. However, he, like so many great 19th and 20th century authors, chose that isolated, technical wonder, thepassenger ship, to carry this scene forward. …Waugh even returned to a nautical setting for his late 1957 sci-fi-inflected novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, a slightly unhinged, fantasy inspired by Waugh’s own hallucinations, brought on by the misuse of sedatives during a passage to Ceylon.

They might also have mentioned Waugh’s early travel book Labels which takes place on a Mediterraean cruise.

–The Irish Times in an opinion article about the ongoing Brexit negotiations likens them to dysfunctional families in works of fiction:

Sometimes it seems that contemporary Tories act like dysfunctional characters from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. A more modern take on the lives of the ruling classes and minor aristocrats is to be found in Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series of novels. These and other chroniclers of the the English elites explore – sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally – just what makes these people tick. They are devoid of the human connections that many of us take for granted. Narcissism and other clinical personality disorders are rampant; psychopathy and cruelty are common. Empathy is noticeable only by its absence.

–Finally, the website MercatorNet.com has compiled a list of the 101 books Millennials should read before they die. Waugh is included under the “Comedy and Satire” category:

Evelyn Waugh,The Loved One (1948)
Only Evelyn Waugh could write a side-splitting comedy about the work of morticians. The novel is set in California where Hollywood residents bury their beloved pets in the Happier Hunting Ground. The main character is an Englishman who is smitten by a rather dim mortician’s assistant and woos her by sending her famous English love poems under the pretence that he is the author.

Others in this category include P G Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning, and Flann O’Brien, The Dalkey Archive.

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Waugh Plaque Unveiled

Posted on July 29, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford Mail in a follow-up to its previous story, reports on the unveiling ceremony for the Evelyn Waugh Blue Plaque and the dinner that took place yesterday at the Abingdon Arms:

Speaking at the ceremony, organised by Beckley and Area Community Benefit Society, the author’s grandson Alexander Waugh described his grandfather’s writing as ‘absolutely magical’. He said: “There is nothing to compare with it.You turn a page and get a lovely paragraph that’s full of wit, absolute virtuosity and firework ability. It’s great to think that some of these fine books were written in this pub.”

Mr Waugh, who had not previously visited the pub, learned about its survival thanks to the community. He said: “I thought it was the most wonderful story, for the village to stand together to save their local. My grandfather would have approved. I think the plaque is extremely attractive and in exactly the right place. No one can come here and fail to learn that Evelyn Waugh stayed here”…

Research for the plaque was carried out by Beckley resident Tony Strong, who writes thriller books under several pseudonyms including JP Delaney. He said: “Older residents had always said their parents remembered a link with Evelyn Waugh. It was only when the Abingdon Arms was bought as a community asset in 2017 that we looked into it a bit deeper, and realised just how strong the connection was.”

Evelyn Waugh’s biographer, professor Martin Stannard of Leicester University, said: “There is no doubt of the significance of this pub for Waugh scholars. Relationships that played out here were central to his development as a writer.”

The story, by Sophie Grubb, is accompanied by a handsome photo gallery. This contains illustrations of the plaque and its setting as well as those gathered for the unveiling ceremony and at the feast that followed.

 

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Two Views of a Turning Point

Posted on July 29, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Perry Anderson in the second half of his long essay on Anthony Powell in the London Review of Books mentions Evelyn Waugh several times. Most notable is his comparison of the reaction of Powell’s narrator in Dance to the Music of Time to the announcement of the German attack on its former ally the Soviet Union in WWII with that of Guy Crouchback, the hero of Waugh’s Sword of Honour war trilogy:

… Powell was ‘caught up in a tidal swell’ of patriotic feeling, Spurling writes, losing his temper with friends who weren’t rising to the occasion. The fate of the country was at stake. After the Continent had fallen to Hitler, when British isolation was broken by the German invasion of Russia, his narrator’s reaction is the opposite of Waugh’s hero Guy Crouchback, who sees only dishonour in the alliance that lies ahead: ‘An immediate, overpowering, almost mystic sense of relief took shape within me. I felt suddenly sure everything was going to be all right.’

Nick Jenkins’ reaction to the breakup of the alliance (quoted by Anderson) is quite similar to Guy’s attitude expressed when he first learned of the German-Soviet nonagression pact at the beginning of the war. This is repeated in the passage where Guy learns of the break-up of the pact in 1941, after he has escaped from Crete, to which he has a quite different reaction:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he learned of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was in plain view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms.

Now that hallucination was dissolved, like the whales and turtles on the voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was blundering into dishonour. (Idem, p. 440).

In both novels, it soon turns out that everything was not immediately “all right” as Nick Jenkins thought. As noted by Anderson, Jenkins has soon to deal with the revelation of the murder of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest by Britain’s new Soviet allies, and Guy, for his part, is soon shipped to Yugoslavia where he witnesses Soviet treachery first hand. Other examples arise throughout the balance of the novel sequence. But Nick is more realistic in recognizing the most important thing: that the Soviets switching sides means that Britain is no longer fighting alone and can win. Guy sinks into the disillusion that overhangs Waugh’s whole trilogy, centering on the British attitude epitomized by the “Sword of Honour” they presented to the Soviets to commemorate their victory at Stalingrad.

Anderson goes on to summarize the reasons for Nick Jenkins’ position:

Anti-communist, of course, he was. But that was a conviction, not a passion. What defined his outlook was something else, his own brand of patriotism. Anchored in his family background, this was highly distinctive. Though he found his father personally impossible, the institution he represented commanded his unswerving respect from earliest childhood: at the age of eight or nine, Jenkins can already rattle off regiments and their colours to General Conyers. Though not much enjoying service in the field, the army was in Powell’s genes, as his nephew Ferdinand Mount has written. For him, patriotism was inseparable from the military record of the country, whose defining experience as he grew up was the First World War, in which his father was a decorated officer, at a time when Britain still headed the largest empire the world had ever seen.

Although not mentioned by Anderson, Waugh carried the added baggage of his religious beliefs in circumstances where he knew that his fellow Roman Catholics would be ruthlessly persecuted in the European satellites that were being ceded to the Soviets. Unlike Jenkins, Guy Crouchback does not appear in any extensive post war context. Waugh himself, however, was more open and active in his anticommunism than were Jenkins and Powell, singling out Marshall Tito in what often seemed a one-man press campaign of dedicated opposition.

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