Weekend Roundup: From Germany to Mayfair

Posted on July 7, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s 1931 travel book Remote People is receivng more attention in Germany. This may be due to the issuance of a new edition of the full German translation that was originally published in 2007. In a Deutchlandfunk radio broadcast (or possibly podcast) dated 18 June 2018, the commenatator (Pieke Biermann) concludes a discussion of the book (for which a transcript has been posted) with this:

“Remote People” (In German, “Befremdliche Völker, seltsame Sitten“) is wonderful prose, as clear as it is atmospherically dense, as knowledgeable as it is thoughtful, and brilliantly translated by Matthias Fienbork. A highly political book, in defiance of all the good intentions of the author, who states soberly …. :

“I set off without any definite opinion on British colonial policy, nor did I intend to form an opinion, but the problems were so persistent that I had no choice but to deal with them.”

… In German, except for a 1949 collection, nothing of Waugh’s travel prose has yet been published. The Other Library has dug up a gem after 66 years…

Another German review of the same book by Vera Reusch has also been posted on another Deutschlandfunk website. On a German bookblog (Frau Lehmann liest), the blogger read the same book and, after a summary of the narrative, concluded:

In Karl May’s travelogues, as a teenager, I always skimmed through the endless landscape descriptions and went from adventure to adventure, even then with a big smile at the everlasting heroism of [Karl May characters] Old Shatterhand or Kara ben Nemsi. It would be horrible to think that these novels would have existed only from landscape descriptions! Waugh, however, would not be Waugh, if not from time to time brilliant tips would stand out from the rather boring sentence pulp, such as his small climb in Aden. All in all, though, I would advise you to take a closer look at his social studies and leave the adventures to Mr. May. He was sitting at a desk while Waugh was actually out and about.

The same bookblog also has a review of the new paperback edition of the German translations of Waugh’s short stories, Ausflug ins wirkliche Leben (Trip to Real Life):

Fifteen cold-sparkling diamonds, well-formed and usually provided with a rather black-humored punch line, will be found by the reader in this booklet. Most written in the thirties, almost [between] the author’s weddings. [There’s one] about an unusual honeymoon, others about the world of the movie, about the occasional strange behavior of the British upper classes, about the dangers of excessive author worship and so on. Of course, some such stories please one more than others, at least in my case, but all in all I can say that this selection gives a very good idea of ​​Evelyn Waugh’s style and preferred subject matter, and the level is consistently high. Personally, I am very pleased that the Diogenes Verlag is so lovingly dedicated to this author, who unfortunately is not well known in Germany. Lately, quite a few beautifully designed Waugh volumes have come out, which I wish [will have] many enthusiastic readers…

The translations ot the book reviews are by Google with some editing. Both of these translations were recently discussed in previous posts.

The Spectator is celebrating its 190th anniversary, and in its current issue, it recounts some of its achievements. Among these is this patagraph summarizing its coverage of literature:

The Spectator also made its name as an infamously stern critic of the arts: its independence of political party was matched by a disdain for pushy publishers. While George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad were hailed as heroes, the writings of Bulwer-Lytton were ‘baby-fancy’, Tennyson’s ‘namby-pamby’, Dickens’s ‘vulgar and detestable’ and Emily Brontë’s ‘too coarse’. To Charlotte BrontĂ«, a bad review in The Spectator was all the worse because of its influence. ‘Most future notices will in all likelihood have a reflection of The Spectator in them,’ she wrote, after one gentle trashing. But ‘if Jane Eyre has any solid worth in it, it ought to weather a gust of unfavourable wind’. Undaunted, however, many a literary lion has joined The Spectator pride – John Buchan (assistant editor), Graham Greene (film critic and literary editor), John Betjeman and Lionel Shriver (columnists). Among the infinite list of occasional literary contributors stand T.E. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Ian Fleming.

The Wall Street Journal has a story about the successful makeover of the Mayfair bookstore Heywood Hill. Evelyn Waugh was a patron as well as a supplier of product, especially during Nancy Mitford’s wartime tenure in the sales department. It also helped that the store was adjacent to his barber. The makeover was undertaken at the direction of Peregrine Cavendish, 12th Duke of Devonshire, after he inherited some shares. During the previous management, profitability had been allowed to slide, but now, the WSJ reports:

This year, the now-profitable landmark store on Curzon Street in London’s upscale Mayfair neighborhood, is expected to generate in excess of ÂŁ2 million ($2.64 million) in revenue, up from ÂŁ540,000 in 2011, says Nicky Dunne, chairman and the duke’s son-in-law…The secret sauce is its highly personalized subscription service based on interviews with its customers, either in person, online or via telephone. At a time when discounted books are as close as one’s cellphone or tablet, the Duke of Devonshire says the shop’s ability to predict what customers will want to read next based on past reading experiences is a crucial difference maker. Heywood Hill gets its share of casual walk-in customers, but more than half its revenue comes from assembling libraries for people or institutions. The rest comes from consumers in the U.K. and abroad willing to pay a bit more in exchange for books tailored to match their tastes. It’s a bit like having a favorite college English professor whispering in your ear, making recommendations.

Among the reportedly popular items in these subscription orders are the books of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford.

A Mayfair art gallery (Michael Werner, 22 Upper Brook St, W1) has announced an exhibit it calls “Vile Bodies”. According to this report in Time Out, however, the art on view seems to have little if any connection to Waugh’s novel:

‘Vile Bodies’ is best known as the title of Evelyn Waugh’s interwar novel about flapper era Londoners drinking their days, nights and fortunes away. But don’t expect to see any pictures of flamboyant 20s debutants at this exhibition. Bringing together paintings, sculptures and works on paper by 24 different artists, the show shines a light on how the human form (in all its wobbly, bumpy glory) has been recreated in art.

 

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Waugh and Modernism: Picasso

Posted on July 6, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has now added the second part of his posting relating to Waugh and Modernism. The first was posted several days ago and related to Waugh and Gertrude Stein. The new one deals with Waugh and Pablo Picasso. This is more of a challenge since Waugh for a period closed his letters with the catch phrase: “Death to Picasso !”

McLaren starts his essay with a discussion of Waugh’s visit to the 1945 exhibition of Picasso’s works at the V&A museum. He has found a catalogue of the exhibit and tracked down copies of several of the paintings exhibited. These were all from Picasso’s own collection and were painted during the war years–so this was something like an update of his career. To start his discussion, McLaren posts one of the paintings on show and then imagines how Waugh might have reacted to it. He then goes on to the next, and so on. It’s a bit like attending the exhibit with Waugh as your guide. In the second part he goes through Waugh’s several letters to his friends discussing his reaction to the exhibit. It should surprise no one that these are mostly negative. Among the letters included are those to Diana Cooper, Nancy Mitford, Robin Campbell, Penelope Betjeman, and Mary Lygon. The essay concludes:

So far in this piece I’ve managed to use over half of the 25 paintings that Waugh would have seen in the Picasso show at the V&A at the end of 1945. Let me finish with an extract from Brideshead Revisited, and with two pictures I’ve already reproduced above.

As I implied earlier, [one of the portraits] puts me in mind of Teresa, Evelyn and Laura’s seemingly prim daughter, who was destined for a career in the church as far as her facetious father was concerned. As seemed Cordelia Flyte in Brideshead. At one point, Cordelia earnestly consults Charles Ryder about something:

“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?”

“Great bosh.”

“Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn’t try and criticise what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.”

UPDATE (7 July 2018):I am pleased to report that this is not Duncan McLaren’s last posting on Waugh and Modernsm. He is already working on an additional entry on Picasso which will involve another exhibition Waugh visited.

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Exploding Scotland

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In a post on the website Catholicism.org, Dr Robert Hickson offers another in his series of annotated Evelyn Waugh passages. In this case he posts a copy of Waugh’s 1942 letter to his wife about the demolition of Lord Glasgow’s tree by Waugh’s Commando unit. See previous posts. The letter contains Dr Hickson’s bracketed explanations and highlighted passages to help Americans and those lacking military experience to understand the humor. Unfortunately, in this case this information rather spoils the humor by interfering with the flow of Waugh’s text. The information might better have been put in footnotes and the textual emphasis dispensed with to allow the text to speak for itself.

Dr Hickson goes to some length to explain the background of several people mentioned in the letter but offers no hint of the identity of “Miss Cowles”, mentioned at the beginning of the letter. This is probably Virginia Cowles [1910-1983] cited a few pages earlier and identified by the editor as “American journalist, married Aidan Crawley in 1945.” Letters, p. 154, n.9. She met Waugh again a few years later on his trips to the USA, but what she may have been doing in Scotland in 1942 remains a mystery. She was probably on assignment as a war correspondent (for which she received an OBE after the war). Why she should want to be “Colonel in chief of the commando” must have been a private joke between her and Waugh.

Another Scottish explosion during WWII and mentioned by Waugh goes unmentioned by Dr Hickson. This occurs in Officers and Gentlemen and is from a passage that is noted in another context in yesterday’s post. That story may even have been loosely inspired by Lord Glasgow’s desire to have his tree demolished. When Guy and Tommy Blackhouse visit the Laird of Mugg (referred to in the novel as “Mugg”) upon their arrival on the island, he repeatedly seeks their help in providing to him some explosives from their military stores. He needs these to carry out a project he has planned to remove some large rocks that are blocking the beach adjacent to a hotel on his property. This passage actually rivals in its humor the letter cited by Dr Hickson.

The theme of Mugg’s interest in explosives continues through to the end of the “Happy Warriors” section.  Guy is sent on another visit to Mugg, who reiterates his abiding interest in exlosives as a means of improving his property and points out the beach that is covered with granite boulders, apparently the result of an earlier demolition effort gone wrong. The Army does not comply with Mugg’s request for more explosives. When they embark for the Middle East, however, they must leave some of their sappers’ supplies behind. These are temporarily unguarded while a group of the sappers (also left behind) are off on a useless excercise. Before the remaining sappers return, “Mugg crept out to pilfer [their] stores” (O&G, Penguin, 1977, p. 105). In the original novel, that is where the story of the Laird and the explosives ends. But in compiling the one-volume recension of Sword of Honour, and apparently for avoidance of doubt, Waugh added this line: “The great explosion which killed Mugg and his niece was attributed to enemy action” (SoH, Penguin, 2001, p, 313).

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A Cold Reception

Posted on July 4, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spanish digital newspaper Diario Informacion, based in Alicante, has published a recent opinion article entitled “Football and Politics.” This is written by AndrĂ©s Castaño. The opening paragraph deals with Politics and starts with a reference to a Waugh novel:

Quim Torra as a host recalls the feckless Colonel Campbell, an  Evelyn Waugh character who greets guests in a gloomy dining room with a blocked fireplace where he gives his guests a meal of dried meat and sour claret while a loud bagpiper entertains insufferably. The dogs are also set on the diners as a Scottish joke that Torra has adapted to the late “seny” [?] by inciting the crowd with allusions to Bourbon perfidy and other delicacies of sovereignist pathology.

Quim Torra is a Catalan Nationalist and President of the separatist government who entertained the King of Spain on his recent visit to the province. Alicante is not located in Catalonia.  The Waugh reference is to the scene in Officers and Gentlemen where Guy and Tommy Blackhouse are, upon their arrival on the Isle of Mugg, treated to dinner by the local laird Colonel Campbell in his residence at “New Castle” (Penguin, 1977, pp. 59-68). There may be some additional relevance in Waugh’s text to the fact that Colonel Campbell’s eccentric niece, who is his permanent guest and also attends the dinner, is an ardent Scottish separatist. The translation is by Google and could use some help.

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Waugh in Croatia

Posted on July 1, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

As noted in a previous post, Brideshead Revisited was recently translated into Croatian and published there earlier this year as Povratak u Brideshead. That translation was reviewed last week in the daily newspaper Glas Slavonije published in Osijek. This is the principal city of the easternmost part of Croatia, called Slavonia, and is quite remote from the parts of the country along or near the coast where Waugh was stationed in WWII.

The review by Zlatek Kramaric is entitled “Ljudski je sumnjati i neke ‘istine’ stalno propitivati!“, translated as “It is humanly questionable and some ‘truths’ constantly questioned!” Unfortunately, the quality of the translation of the review is rather poor. It begins by explaining that Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism “after disclosure” (“poslije objelodanjivanja“) of the novel. Whether that is a mistranslation or a mistake is difficult to determine without a better understanding of Croatian than possessed by your correspondent.

It is evident that the major part of the relatively detailed review concentrates on discussions based around two scenes at the end of the novel, from which lengthy excerpts are quoted. These are the scenes involving the visitations of the priest to the dying Lord Marchmain (Book Three, Chapter v) and the reception at Brideshead for Rex’s political friends (Book Three, Chapter iii). These discussions are followed by a concluding paragraph “GUĆ TATI U ČITANJU” (translated as “The cold in reading” or perhaps “The dense in reading”) and by two appendices: one called Partisan Episode and the other Brideshead Film.

It is heartening that Waugh’s novel is receiving attention in foreign language markets. Possibly one of our readers may be able to offer a better understanding of this review in a comment as provided below.

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Midwinter Thoughts in Australia

Posted on June 30, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

This week was winter solstice in Australia and, in connection with that time of darkness and depression, the Sydney Morning Herald ran an article about suicide. The article, by David Astle, opened with this:

Evelyn Waugh walked down to the beach with “thoughts full of death”. He took off his clothes and entered the water. The novelist, in his early 20s, was determined to drown. Or semi-determined. As he’d later write, “I cannot tell you how much real despair and act of will, how much play-acting, prompted the excursion”.

Astle goes on to note that suicide is the leading cause of death in Australia for people under 40. After a discussion about a festival in Sydney, coinciding with the solstice, that aims to reduce those numbers by cheering people up, Astle closes with another reference to Waugh:

So what happened to Waugh? His saviours were jellyfish. “The placid waters were full of the creatures”, stinging the swimmer into a deeper awareness. He surfaced from his fugue to head back for shore. For want of towel he used his shirt, got dressed, and “climbed the sharp hill that led to all the years ahead”. …Winter Solstice, a ritual for any street or town, is a time to make time for those nearby who may be privately drowning, an evening to ground us all.

The quotes are from Waugh’s autobiography A Little Learning, recently released in the Complete Works collection. Waugh also wrote a fictional version of the incident in Decline and Fall where he describes the faux suicide of Captain Grimes.

Grimes shows up in another story in the dailies. The Guardian reviews a new critique of the public school system. This is in a book entitled Posh Boys: How the English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik:

Public schools are steeped in an oppressive culture of hierarchy and domination – the now obsolete practice of “fagging”, whereby senior pupils used younger ones as servants, persists in attenuated form in the prefect system – but the pay-off is substantial. As Evelyn Waugh’s Grimes puts it in Decline and Fall: “One goes through four or five years of perfect hell at an age when life is bound to be hell anyway, and after that the social system never lets one down.”

Finally, in The Times, another book review deals with the historic watershed year 0f 1948. This is  Crucible: 13 Months that Forged our World by Jonathan Fenby. The review by Gerald de Groot opens with this:

“China is probably the most unrestful spot in the world at present.” So wrote George Marshall, the American secretary of state, in January 1948. One wonders how he came to that conclusion given the ubiquity of problems back then. While China was embroiled in civil war, India was erupting in ethnic violence, Jews and Palestinians were fighting on the West Bank, Korea was splitting in two, France was brutally restoring imperialism in Madagascar and Vietnam, and the Soviet Union was blockading Berlin.

The world seemed to be heading for apocalypse. “I am quite simply frightened,” Nancy Mitford told her friend Evelyn Waugh. “I wake up in the night sometimes in a cold sweat. Thank goodness for having no children. I can take a pill and say goodbye.”

The quote is from Letters of Nancy Mitford & Evelyn Waugh, 2 March 1948, p. 92. Her fright was caused by fear of an imminent Russian invasion while she was living in France.

 

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Spring Issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies Available

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spring 2018 issue of the Society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies is now available. This is issue 49.1. The contents and abstracts of articles are set forth below. A complete copy of this issue is available here:

ARTICLES

Milena Borden, Waugh’s Yugoslav Mission: Politics and Religion

Abstract: In Evelyn Waugh’s only government Report, “Church and State in Liberated Croatia” (30 March, 1945), the novelist presented documentary evidence for his concerns about the alliance of Britain with the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito during the Second World War, recording the killing of 17 Catholic priests as human rights violations. In 2016, the National Archives of Croatia and the Institute for Croatian History in Zagreb confirmed, for the purpose of this article, the identities of these individuals. Their full details and what is known about their fates, as reported by these official bodies, are published here, in Appendices 1 and 2, for the first time. The article argues that Waugh’s views in his Report reflected his moral, religious beliefs and that they were vindicated by the post-Cold War history of Yugoslavia and Europe. In seeking to explain an understanding of Waugh’s political outlook, it discusses why and how he went beyond the aim of his military mission. The background research uses Waugh’s diaries, letters, political, polemical writings and biographies of him. The political and historical context rests on the history of the Second World War in Croatia, the activities of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Yugoslavia and the Vatican’s policy. It locates specific representations of this external context within two of his novels: Love among the Ruins and Unconditional Surrender, the third part of the trilogy Sword of Honour.

Toshiaki Onishi, “Just You Look at Yourselves:” Relativisation of the Authentic Image of Manliness in Vile Bodies 

Abstract: In a similar vein to Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies — originally titled “Bright Young People” — is the story of the extraordinary adventures of Adam Fenwick-Symes, who becomes panic-stricken in the unconventional world of the Bright Young Things. Critics have discussed Evelyn Waugh’s satirical portrayal of the unruly and flippant group, heavily influenced by avant-garde movements such as Futurism and Vorticism and the attack on Britain’s conventional value system during the inter-war era.  In the young man’s world, Adam, who has “nothing particularly remarkable about his appearance”  and is deprived of his autobiography by a censor when he returns from Paris, as if predicting his tragic end, resembles Paul Pennyfeather in his lack of subjectivity… However, does his superficial personality only reveal Waugh’s satirical viewpoint of his volatile generation? Unlike Paul, an outsider to this unstable society who has the opportunity to contrive his mock funeral and a “happy ending” to escape from his hardships and live again at Oxford, Waugh portrays Adam as one of its insiders, unable to escape the chaotic situation in the final chapter, “Happy Ending”. At the battlefront, weak-willed Adam, unconsciously following the discipline of manliness, is ironically heralded as a manly hero who could be awarded the Victoria Cross on the home front. In contrast to Decline and Fall, this ironical and rather eschatological ending indicates that the novel serves to foreground the deadly function of masculine ideology’s imposition on men.

 

REVIEWS

“In my beginning is my end:” A Little Learning. The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, v. 19. Edited by John Howard Wilson and Barbara Cooke. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

 

NEWS

News reports include a message from Ethiopia about the status of the Taitu Hotel; an invitation for submission of papers for the John Howard Wilson Jr Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest; a review of the recent London stage production The Happy Warriors; and a prospectus for Waugh-themed tours to Crete.

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Early Summer Roundup: Promotions and Lists

Posted on June 28, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Hertford College, Oxford, has prepared a gallery of its illustrious alumni for use on its promotional website. Waugh is the youngest of the 12 Old Hertfordians included. The unattributed entry is a well-presented summary of his writing career. It begins with this:

Evelyn Waugh was born in London and educated at Lancing School and Hertford College, Oxford. On his own admission he wasted his time at Oxford. After university he taught for a brief period in private schools and was dismissed from one of them for drunkenness. He worked for the Daily Express, and studied arts and crafts in a desultory way. His first work, privately printed when he was 13, was The World to Come: A Poem in Three Cantos (1916). The next, also privately printed, was PRB: An Essay on The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1847-1854 (1926). His first novel, Decline and Fall, was based on his experiences as a teacher and was published in 1928. In the same year came Rossetti: His Life and Works. Decline and Fall introduced a considerable comic novelist and Vile Bodies (1930) sealed his reputation and brought him financial success.

Other literary Hertfordians mentioned include John Donne, Thomas Hobbes and Dean Swift. Another Dean, by name of Cruttwell, frequently featured by Waugh in his books but is not mentioned.

After leaving Oxford, Waugh registered as a student at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. That institution still exists and also uses Waugh in its online promotional material:

Veronica Ricks, Principal of The Heatherley School of Fine Art, is describing the ethos of London’s oldest independent art school (it was founded in 1845). Distinguished former pupils include Rossetti, Burne Jones, Millais, Sickert, Evelyn Waugh, Franz Kline and Henry Moore and local resident Quentin Crisp was a regular life model.

Waugh’s influence on singer-songerwriter David Bowie has previously been mentioned. A detailed article by James Gent (“All the Way from Nashville”) tracing the composition and performances of Bowie’s 1973 Alladin Sane album was recently posted. This includes a reference to Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies and its context in that album:

First off, the title track. Rock music never did this before. How ballsy to sell a hit album to pop kids, those youthful acolytes, and hit them squarely with a title song that’s not only an askew homage to Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, and then slam them with a deranged, lengthy piano solo incorporating fragmented shards of everything from Tequila to Rhapsody In Blue…

The CondĂ© Nast Traveller magazine has an article entitled “10 Cool Things to Do in Marseille”. Here is number 6:

CHECK OUT THE MEAN STREETS

Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1926 that ‘Everyone in Marseille seemed most dishonest. They all tried to swindle me, mostly with success.’ The city has a chequered history but formerly rough neighbourhoods … have been spruced up and are worth a visit. I always felt safe in Marseille, even at night. In any event, many inhabitants believe the Notre-Dame basilica keeps a protective watch over them.

The quote is taken from Waugh’s Diaries for Christmas Day 1926.

On the website Open Culture there is a discussion by Colin Marshall of the outline used by Joseph Heller when he wrote his comic novel Catch-22. This implicates Evelyn Waugh’s dismissive attitude toward the book (Letters, pp. 571-72) :

When Catch-22 finally went into print, one of its advocates, an advertising manager named Nina Bourne, launched an aggressive one-woman campaign to get copies into the hands of all the influential readers of the day. “You are mistaken in calling it a novel,” replied Evelyn Waugh. “It is a collection of sketches — often repetitious — totally without structure.” But the book’s apparently free-form narrative, full of and often turning on puns and seemingly far-fetched associations, had actually come as the product of a deceptive compositional rigor. As one piece of evidence we have Heller’s handwritten outline above. (You can also find a more easily legible version here.)

An article on the London-based website The Conservative Woman considers an issue raised in Brideshead Revisited. The author, journalist Fionn Shiner, was “most interested in the figure of Lord Marchmain, the father of the Flytes, whose inexplicable hatred of their mother, and his adulterous ways, are a catalyst for the family’s tragic lives.” She goes on to discuss a Swiss study of the impact of this phenomenon within families. The website invites comments of which a considerable number seem to have been filed.

On the website Literary Hub, Emily Temple made a survey of the favorite books lists of famous authors to see what books were most popular among this rarified group. She explains her methodology:

I looked at 68 lists made by famous authors, from the classic …  to the contemporary …, and kept track of which books they recommended most often. The results were interesting—not particularly because of the most recommended books (many of them are pretty predictable) but because of the details—the groupings, the exclusions, the agreements between authors you wouldn’t necessarily think had similar taste.

Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust was among the most listed books, appearing on the lists of Tom Stoppard, Jay McInerney, Danzy Senna. He was also among the writers with multiple book mentions: A Handful of Dust (as above); Brideshead Revisited (Stephen King); Put Out More Flags (Alan Hollinghurst).

Finally, Roman Catholic literary journalist and critic Joseph Pearce has responded to requests by his readers that he publish his own Desert Island selections of books. He offers a list that is, not surprisingly, heavy with Catholic writers such as G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Waugh has a book included in his 10 selected novels: “Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh could not possibly be left behind.” The entire list that includes 10 each in poems, plays, nonfiction and great ideas is available on the National Catholic Register’s website.

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90th Anniversary of Waugh’s First Marriage

Posted on June 27, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh married Evelyn Gardner on 27 June 1928 at St Paul’s Church, Portman Square, London. Only a few friends of the bride and groom were present, including Alec Waugh and Pansy Pakenham (witnesses), Robert Byron and Harold Acton (best man). The marriage was short-lived and ended in divorce  in 1930.

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Abingdon Arms Announces Waugh Plaque Unveiling

Posted on June 27, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Abingdon Arms in Beckley, Oxon., has announced the details of its plans for the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the association of Evelyn Waugh with their premises. See previous posts. Here is the message from the organizer of the event:

Evelyn Waugh’s grandson Alexander will be the guest of honour at the unveiling of a blue plaque to the writer at the Abingdon Arms pub, Beckley, on Saturday July 28th from 6pm. Waugh regularly stayed with Alastair Graham in a caravan at the pub while a student, and later honeymooned there with his first wife. It was while working there on Vile Bodies that he received a letter from her telling him she had fallen in love with a mutual friend.

The plaque will say: ‘Evelyn Waugh, Author, wrote, drank and loved here 1924-1931.’ The unveiling will be held on a significant date for Waugh. On July 28th 1924 his diary records him being invited to ‘a big feast’ in the barn next to the pub, at which “until about 3 in the morning the whole village sat and ate and drank and danced and sang.” Early next morning, Waugh cycled into Oxford to attend his viva, at which he learned of his “certain third.” The following day he “rode back to Beckley where we drank champagne
 it was another very drunken night at the Abingdon Arms.”

Accordingly, the unveiling will be followed by a ‘big feast’ at which diners will enjoy a four-course menu, specially created by the Abingdon Arms’ acclaimed chef Joe Walton, based on dishes that Waugh records having eaten during his time at Beckley, including peaches soaked in burgundy and ale-braised beef with celery. The event culminates an extraordinary twelve months for the community-owned Abingdon Arms, which in June was named ‘Community Pub of the Year’ by Sawdays. Tickets for the Big Feast are available from The Abingdon Arms (+44) 1865 655667 (click to email) priced at £43 including canapes. The unveiling will be from 6pm; the feast follows at 7 for 7.30pm.

The pub is just over 7 miles northeast of Oxford station. Public transport information is not available from Google but a local transport site recommends a taxi.

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