Oxford Seminar of Pinfoldian Interest

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Oxford University has announced a seminar that may be of interest to Waugh scholars. It is open to current members of the university and is entitled “Laura Marcus Workshop: Autobiographical Fiction and the 1950s Telepathy Wave.” It will be led by Professor Marina Mackay (St. Peter’s College) and is scheduled for 10 May 2024, 10:30 (Friday, 3rd week, Trinity 2024). Here are the details:

Britain in the 1950s saw a widespread popular interest in the possibility of psychic communication across distance: from the 20-million-strong audiences for radio telepaths ‘The Piddingtons’ at the start of the decade to the widely publicised and puzzlingly inconclusive trial at the decade’s end of George de la Warr’s pseudo-scientific radionic box. Instructively, one of the best archives of this now-forgotten cultural phenomenon is the avowedly autobiographical fiction of an and about the period. In major 1950s novels by (for example) Rebecca West, Antonia White, Muriel Spark, and Evelyn Waugh, these half-believed-in, half-disbelieved psychic technologies of remote communication are used not merely as (sometimes comic, sometimes emphatically not) features of their plots, but also as means to reflect on the problem of transmitting one’s own experience across historical distances—distances that, for us as readers now, are only accentuated by the obvious ephemerality of such cultural-historical phenomena.

Please note that this event is ONLY open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first come, first served basis with priority given to members of the English Faculty. Places will be confirmed one week before the event.

Tea/coffee and cake will be served during the workshop.

This event will take place in the St Cross building on Manor Road. Attendees are advised to wear face coverings while indoors and to use an LFT prior to the event.

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May Day Roundup

Posted on April 30, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–In a recent report of the results of a football match between Manchester City and Real Madrid, the Guardian’s reporter Barney Ronay brings an Evelyn Waugh character into the discussion. Here’s the opening:

It turns out Pep Guardiola was right after all. Manchester City’s pursuit of the double-treble will now remain “a hypothetical dream”.  This was Pep’s own excellent phrase before [last] Wednesday’s second leg against Real Madrid, a formulation that suggests even Guardiola’s dreams are full of theory, algebra, hypotheticals, like a footballing version of Evelyn Waugh’s professor Silenus, the modernist architect who doesn’t sleep but instead lies in the dark for eight hours with his eyes shut doing high-speed calculations, before rising at dawn to design another machine-age masterpiece…

City lost in the second round of penalty shootouts. If you need more details, here’s a link.

–The Evening Standard has an article by Mary Lussiana about a wine tour through southern France. This is entitled “A FOODIE ROAD TRIP FROM SOUTHERN PORTUGAL TO FRANCE’S JURA MOUNTAINS.” Here’s an excerpt about a stop in Bordeaux:

…Rain followed us most of the way on our nine-hour journey to our next stop in Bordeaux. But as we drove in under the stone gateway to Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey, […] the sun cast its evening light onto the ancient mellow stone. Parts of the Château date back to the 13th century, and vines have been grown there since 1618. They had a cameo role in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, when Sebastian Flyte arrives to the Oxford college rooms of Charles Ryder saying, “I’ve got a motor car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey….It’s heaven with strawberries.”…

–The film website FamousFix.com has a published a list of the film/TV adaptations of Waugh’s novels. This is part of a series on British novel adaptations. This is fairly comprehensive and contains brief lists of characters, plot summaries and other production details. It is fairly complete and offers examples of both versions in some instances where there have been two, e.g., of Brideshead and Decline and Fall but misses in two other cases of multiple adaptations: Sword of Honour and Scoop. Oddly, no one has ever done a film/TV adaptation of Black Mischief, Put Out More Flags, Helena or The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Or if there were attempts at adapting these novels, they seem to have disappeared without a trace.

–In another posting with a TV connection, veteran TV presenter Alan Titchmarsh is asked to name his favorite musical compositions. Here’s his number 1 choice:

Geoffrey Burgon – Theme from Brideshead Revisited
This BAFTA-nominated score from John Mortimer’s 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel is a breathtakingly elegant piece. Wistful oboe and trumpet match with regal horns, conjuring up the pomp of Brideshead alongside the demise of Lord Marchmain and his family.

“A reminder of that dazzling original TV series, rich in mood and atmosphere,” Alan says. “I can still feel the agonies of unrequited love!”

For the complete list, see this link to the website classicfm.com.

–Finally, the Jesuit magazine America has reposted a 2013 article by Jon M Sweeney entitled “Waugh’s Head Revisited: A writer who deserves to be remembered.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) published 14 novels between 1928 and 1961. Another went unpublished and is counted among his juvenilia, and yet another was released only in a limited edition of several hundred copies. Of the 14, several were widely acclaimed bestsellers in their day, including Brideshead Revisited (1945), Scoop (1938) and A Handful of Dust (1934). He also wrote three volumes of biography (on Rossetti, Campion and Knox, all lesser figures today), eight mostly forgettable books of travel writing even by Waugh’s estimation, one volume of memoir (A Little Learning), short stories, diaries and letters and various essays and journalism, much of it written originally for the London Spectator.

Seventy-five years ago Waugh was one of the world’s most popular writers of fiction. A convert to Catholicism like his friend Graham Greene, Waugh had less aversion to the label “Catholic writer.” For Waugh, joining the church was the result of an investigation into truth; it also came immediately after his first marriage ended. For Greene, it was always more of a matter of coming to terms with evil and sin, his own and others, and originated in his desire to marry a Catholic woman as a young man. Waugh couldn’t sound less like Greene, for instance, when he writes to a friend in Sept. 1964: “Do you believe in the Incarnation & Redemption in the full historical sense in which you believe in the battle of El Alamein? That’s important. Faith is not a mood.”

Waugh’s longtime publishers on both sides of the Atlantic—including Little, Brown and Company here in the United States in December 2012—have spent the last two years rereleasing much of his oeuvre in hopes that interest in his writing will revive. Will it? I wonder. Does anyone read Evelyn Waugh anymore?

The historical books are not great history, and the travel books do not work well as travelogues. No matter, as these are not part of the reintroduction plan of Waugh’s U.S. publishers. Only the novels are still read today…

Here’s a link to the complete article.

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2023 Academic Papers

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The following academic papers with Evelyn Waugh in their titles appeared during calendar 2023. Abstracts have been included where available:

–Victoria Fernandez Ruiz, “Metaphorical value in the metaphor of conversion: The sacred and profane memories of Capt. Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh,” Church, communication and culture, 2023-10, Vol.8 (2), pp.167-183:

“Ordinary language has difficulty transmitting certain spiritual experiences, such as mystical ecstasy or the process of conversion. These experiences, which cannot be expressed in words, and which involve both the spiritual and the corporeal, are called ineffable. But the literary tradition is full of examples in which these incommunicable truths are expressed linguistically: from St. Augustine to C.S. Lewis, from St. John of the Cross to John Henry Newman, many authors have expressed their mystical or conversion experiences through metaphor. Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited presents the action of divine grace on the characters, as seen through the eyes of the narrator as he undergoes his conversion. The intention of this article is to discover how the use of metaphor succeeds in expressing the action of divine grace in a conversion, providing important insights into the way poetic language can communicate the ineffable experience of the intimate encounter with divinity. To this end, the article analyses three metaphors of novel, (the twitch upon the thread, the balking horse and the hut collapsing under the avalanche) taking into consideration literary theory and what it says about metaphor.”

 

–Allan Kilner-Johnson, “Intermodernism and Ethics of Lateness in Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton”, English Studies, 2023-01, v. 104 (1), pp.120-33.

“Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton had a deeply ambivalent relationship to the narrative of modernism, and their attempts to negotiate their position within the literary milieu of their own time clearly registers the tensions inherent in much of late modernist writing. Early modernism and high modernism were concerned with the nature of the ‘firstness’, of innovation and change, but as this article argues, intermodernism is best seen as an ethical mode that saw itself as increasingly removed from the organising attitudes of literary revolution. In their mid- and late-period writing, Acton and Waugh were concerned with structures of age-old history and prestige-notably Catholicism (Waugh) and China (Acton)-that they felt outweighed the innovations of modernism and made the modern aesthetic spirit seem clumsy, if not painfully late.”

–Marina Chiselita-Bimbirica, “Erasure of the Self: Evelyn Waugh’s New Man,” Romanian journal of artistic creativity, 2023-03, Vol.11 (1), p.97-116:

“The article addresses aspects of an individual’s identity molded by the State in a dystopian society in which conformity creates absurdities such as mass sterilization and mass euthanasia advertised as entertainment or as an antidote to boredom. Like its real counterpart, the totalitarian system imagined by Evelyn Waugh in Love Among the Ruins (1953) aims at reversing a democratic and common-sensical set of values. The State imposes a New World disconnected completely from the perennial and moral old one to make room for the social mighty project of the New Man.”

 

–Edward Short, “Evelyn Waugh’s Displaced Persons,” The Human Life Review, 2023-01, v 49(1), pp. 72-85:

This is an essay in what appears to be a series entitled “Abortion in Literature.” It explores Waugh’s description in his novel Sword of Honour of the efforts of Guy Crouchback’s wife Virginia to secure an abortion of her child with the unpleasant character Trimmer and the results of that effort. The article considers Virginia’s experiences and Guy’s reactions to them in the context of  Waugh’s understandings of the beliefs of the Roman Catholic church as they related to these matters. There is no abstract for this article but it may be viewed at this link.

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Roundup: Schoolmaster Novelists

Posted on April 20, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–Literary biographer Jeffrey Meyers writing in TheArticle.com describes the early 20th Century school teaching careers of four English novelists. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Aspiring writers have often tried their hand at teaching.  They have usually assumed that it would be an undemanding occupation for someone educated in the humanities, and would give them an income and even a place to live.  Between 1902 and 1932 four young English writers — D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell — became schoolmasters, with varying degrees of success.

In practice, all four were unsuited to the job. They found the prevailing culture of their schools intolerable and disliked the narrow-minded way they had to teach. They had recalcitrant and comatose students, witnessed bullying and homosexuality, and were still subject to the hazardous authority, rituals and whims of the headmaster.  They particularly hated to administer corporal punishment, then a commonly accepted form of discipline.

Lawrence and Orwell were lively and innovative teachers, Huxley and Waugh hopeless and hostile, but all four were bored with the traditional curriculum, and tired of struggling to maintain order in the classroom.  They loathed the schools that interfered with their writing and left as soon as possible to pursue their literary careers.  They later fictionalised and often satirised their teaching experiences: Lawrence in The Rainbow, Huxley in Antic Hay, Waugh in Decline and Fall and Orwell in A Clergyman’s Daughter…

Waugh’s description of his schoolmaster career in his autobiography A Little Learning, aptly named in this regard, might also have been mentioned. This book is duly noted and several times quoted later in Meyers’ text. After a well-written, accurate and entertaining discussion of each writer-schoolmaster’s career and its depiction in their fiction, Meyers concludes with this:

All four writers followed the same pattern of disappointed expectations.  They were inexperienced, mostly unqualified and had no other job possibilities, and had no idea how hard teaching would be.  They were required to cover a wide range of subjects for long hours and low pay, and regress to the harsh regimes of their childhood.  They loathed the snobbish, intellectually stifling atmosphere and the swindles of the greedy proprietors.  Lacking vocation and the right temperament, they became poor teachers who couldn’t control their classes. They got no support from oppressive headmasters and uncongenial colleagues, found it impossible both to discipline and encourage the boys, and hated themselves for beating the children.  Alienated, lonely and with no time to write, they were delighted to escape through incompetence, immorality or illness.  For many years afterward they had nightmares about being trapped in a school.  But they gained valuable experience from their degrading work and used it in their satirical fiction.

The complete article is available at this link.

—The American Spectator has posted an article about Waugh’s religious faith, outlining  three lessons that can be drawn from it. This is by S A McCarthy. Here are some excerpts:

…For Waugh, Catholicism represented order, in stark contrast to the political, philosophical, and social chaos of his age. He saw the Catholic Church not as some ideology that happened to align with his own sentiments, but as an institution of spiritual and moral order to which he would have to subject himself. Jesuit Fr. Martin D’Arcy, who oversaw Waugh’s conversion and became his spiritual mentor, wrote, “I have never myself met a convert who so strongly based his assents on truth.”

This is the first lesson we can learn from Waugh: endurance in faith. Like St. Thomas Aquinas some 700 years prior, Waugh believed the Catholic Church to be the ultimate force of logic and reason operative in the world. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Waugh admitted that the Church was, in fact, more reasonable than he, and thus submitted to her doctrines. When asked in an interview, 30 years after his conversion, if he had any doubts about God or the truth of Catholicism, a by-then aged and bloated Waugh bluntly responded, “No.”…

After several other examples of Waugh’s steadfast Roman Catholicism, we come to this:

The second lesson we may learn from Waugh is to never abandon the Church in her time of need. When Waugh converted in 1930, the Tridentine Mass was then the norm in the Church. He fell in love with the order, the majesty, and the symbolism of the Mass, finding there the link between the temporal order and the Kingdom of Heaven. In the 1960s, under Pope St. Paul VI and the “reforms” of the Second Vatican Council, the Tridentine Mass was reconsidered and revised, and Waugh began to fear that the solemn and sacred grandeur of the Mass which brought him to Rome might be diluted, damaged, or altogether discarded…

Again, several examples of Waugh’s problematic relationship to the reforms in the church are discussed. Finally we have this:

The final lesson we might learn from Waugh is to focus our attentions and our energies on that which really matters. Despite his commercial and critical successes and his relatively opulent lifestyle, Waugh’s chief focus was on eternity. …He thus built his treasure not on bookshelves nor in his (rather expansive) wardrobe, but in his family, the souls entrusted to his care.

In the final interview he granted before his death, Waugh was asked if he believed God put him on earth to be a writer. Waugh responded that he believed God had given him a particular talent or penchant for writing, but that writing was not his purpose. Instead, he explained, his literary talents were given to him as a means of supporting his true purpose: “My service is simply to bring up one family.”…

Today, Waugh is best remembered as a talented author, a grouchy reactionary, a vicious wit, and a devout Catholic. Perhaps that is not a bad legacy to leave behind.

The entire article is posted on the internet in written and spoken versions. See this link.

–In the Irish Examiner, TV presenter Olivia O’Leary describes the major cultural influences on her work and career. Among them is this:

I started to read Evelyn Waugh at a young age, including the great novel Scoop — that every journalist knows, the funniest novel ever written satirising the press — and others like his war trilogy. I knew he was probably a horrible person in terms of his general political views and the way he treated his kids, but there was a lot of self-knowledge in the books.

He understood what a reprobate he was, that came through, but he was a wonderful stylist. There’s hardly anybody to touch him. He’s an extraordinarily elegant and funny writer.

–The website evergreenpodcasts.com has posted a podcast discussion of Waugh’s novel The Loved One. Here’s their description:

In “The Loved One”, Evelyn Waugh tells the story of the British ex-patriot community in Los Angeles. Dennis Barlow, an English funeral worker at a pet crematorium, balances the social demands of his fellow ex-pats and the glitz and glamor of the Hollywood film industry, all the while providing elaborate funeral services for the pets of local Californians.

Special thanks to our readers, Elizabeth Flood & Katie Porcile, our Producer and Sound Designer Noah Foutz, our Engineer Gray Sienna Longfellow, and our executive producers Brigid Coyne and Joan Andrews.

Here’s to hoping you find yourself in a novel conversation!

This is part of a series entitled “Novel Conversations” and is presented by Frank Lavallo. It extends over about 28 minutes.  The podcast is dated from last September, but when it was posted on the internet is not stated. Here’s a link.

 

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Tax Day (U.S.) Roundup

Posted on April 13, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–A review of the recent Netflix film entitled Scoop appears in The Hollywood Reporter and several other papers. It is written by Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell and opens with this:

Scoop is a dramatized feature about the BBC’s Newsnight team scoring a sensationally revealing 2019 interview with Prince Andrew about his relationship with millionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. For a film about a journalistic exclusive, it has the most generic title possible. There are already at least four other movies out there called Scoop, including a rubbishy 2006 Woody Allen film and a 1987 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s peerless 1938 satirical novel, a twofer satire of both the press and the British aristocracy.

Sadly, this latest Scoop has none of Waugh’s acid wit or alkaline intelligence. Although serviceable as a retread of the events that led up to the royal interview conducted by Newsnight anchor Emily Maitlis … , an interview recreated for big chunks of the running time, it doesn’t significantly deepen or enrich our understanding of the personalities involved — let alone journalism, privilege, sexual exploitation or the price of fish.

—The Oldie has a review of a new book by Charles Spencer (Princess Diana’s brother) discussing his dramatically unhappy prep school experiences. This is entitled A Very Private School. Here’s an excerpt of the description of interview conducted by Hugo Vickers:

…Spencer gives us a devastating portrait of ‘Jack’ Porch (1926-2022), the headmaster, who presented one face to the parents, another to the boys. He was not only a sadist, but also a paedophile. According to an old boy of the school known to me, he was ‘a good educationalist’ and he certainly wrote sympathetic and perceptive school reports to the parents. […]

There was something sinister about those schoolmasters. If you seek horrific reminders of the type, Google ‘Nevill Holt School’, a similar institution, which was closed down in 1998, following rafts of accusations.

Evelyn Waugh said it all in Decline and Fall when young Paul Pennyfeather is unfairly sent down. He hands back his key to his porter who comments: ‘Very sorry I am to hear about it. I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.’ Many of the masters in Spencer’s day would have been damaged by the war, or by their avoidance of it. Today, many would be in prison.

–A list of 10 recommended biographies of “captivating writers” appears on the website Early Bird Books. This is compiled by Orrin Grey and includes this entry for the 2016 biography of Evelyn Waugh by Philip Eade:

Graham Greene once called Evelyn Waugh “the greatest novelist of my generation,” and yet this troubled and fractious figure has been veiled in enigma and scandal for decades. In this gripping new biography, drawn from a variety of first-hand sources, author Philip Eade aims to “re-examine some of the distortions and misconceptions that have come to surround this famously complex and much mythologized character.”

The result is a book that should delight both fans of Waugh’s many classic novels and newcomers to the author who are looking to learn more about one of literature’s most complicated figures.

–Michael Dirda has written in the Washington Post a thoughtful and entertaining review of Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography of Ian Fleming. The review is entitled: “How did Ian Fleming create James Bond? He looked in the mirror.”  Here’s an excerpt:

…Again and again, Shakespeare’s biography reminds us of what a tight little island Britain could be for those of its privileged class. If you’ve read any of the books about the Brideshead generation, you’ll find many of the same people cropping up in Fleming’s life, including the critic Cyril Connolly, a former Eton classmate, and Evelyn Waugh, whose novels Fleming would like to have written more than his own. He even counted the multitalented showman Noel Coward as a confidant and once shared a wealthy girlfriend with Roald Dahl, to whom he gave the idea for a famous story, “Lamb to the Slaughter.”

Then there was the socialite Ann O’Neill (nee Charteris), whose Etonian husband was killed in World War II while she was having an intense affair with the newspaper magnate Esmond Rothermere, whom she eventually married. Soon thereafter, Ann broke Rothermere’s heart by sleeping with their friend Ian Fleming. Against the advice of almost everyone he knew, Ian married Ann in 1952, having kept his mind off the upcoming nuptials by writing “Casino Royale.” It took him just a month. A son was soon born, but the new Mrs. Fleming loved dinner parties and house guests, while her new husband was at his happiest snorkeling and playing golf. Neither was faithful to the other.

As with his excellent biography of the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare has produced one of those books you can happily live in for weeks. It will deservedly become the standard life of Ian Fleming, replacing a fine one by Andrew Lycett that appeared almost 30 years ago. Bond devotees, however, should be aware that there are no close analyses of the novels, and the only films discussed are the early ones with which Fleming was involved. … [Links in original.]

Whether Shakespeare discusses to any meaningful extent Waugh’s long-standing  friendship and correspondence with Ann Fleming and, to a certain extent, her husband, isn’t mentioned. But given Shakespeare’s own connection to Waugh scholarship through his direction of the three-episode 1980s BBC Arena production that has come to be known as The Waugh Trilogy, it seems likely that he would have more to say about Waugh than is suggested by this review. For the record, Cyril Connolly is more likely to have been the Eton classmate of Ian’s older brother Peter than he would have been of Ian. Here’s a link to the review.

 

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Mark McGinness Notes Anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s Death

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The Australian literary critic Mark McGinness has published an article in The Oldie that commemorates the 58th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s death on 10 April 1966. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Twenty years ago, Alexander Waugh wrote a brilliant collective life of his family, Fathers and Sons (Hodder). So what better time to recall a remarkable literary dynasty than the anniversary of his grandfather Evelyn’s death on 10 April 1966? It was Easter Day and Evelyn, that master of prose, monstresacre, and devoted Catholic, had just attended Mass in the ancient Latin rite said by his favourite Jesuit, Fr Philip Caraman, SJ, and walked home, in a mood of contentment, with his family to Combe Florey, his Somerset seat. As his friend and first biographer, Christopher Sykes, delicately put it: He retired to the back part of the house. He was found dead a few hours later. He had had a heart attack. He was only 62. How sad – yet ironic – that he would meet his Maker on the most sacred day in the Christian calendar but on the lavatory – such a profane spot – just like Apthorpe who met his death when the thunder box exploded in Men In Arms. How much more tranquil had Waugh expired in his sanctuary, among his books in the library?

But back to Alexander. The old Oxford English Dictionary apparently defines Waugh, when an adjective, as “tasteless and insipid” and when a noun as “an exclamation indicating grief, indignation or the like. Now chiefly attributed to N. American Indians and other savages.” Alexander claims that JRR Tolkein told his father Auberon that ‘waugh’ was the singular of Wales and effectively meant a single Welsh person. “Papa gleefully told this story to Diana, Princess of Wales, but to his dismay she didn’t appear to understand it.”…

The full article is available on The Oldie’s weblog and can be viewed at this link. Just for the record, I think Apthorpe met his maker not in his thunder box but in his sickbed in a West Africa military hospital after Guy Crouchback unwisely gave him the present of a bottle of whiskey while he was recuperating from some jungle fever acquired while on leave “up country.” The explosion in the thunder box may well have contributed to his early demise, however (Men at Arms, London, 1952, pp. 305-06).

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75th Anniversary of “American Epoch” Commemorated

Posted on April 5, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Kenneth Craycraft writing in the religious journal Our Sunday Visitor notes that this year is the 75th anniversary of the publication of Waugh’s article in Life Magazine (19 September 1949) entitled “The American Epoch of the Catholic Church.” This followed Waugh’s three recent visits the United States, the last two of which included the research for the article and a lecture tour of Roman Catholic colleges and universities in the eastern states. Craycraft contrasts the “American Epoch” article with the satiric novella he wrote about America after the first trip in 1947. That was, of course, The Loved One. Here are some excerpts from Craycraft’s article:

…The literary product after this journey was more conciliatory and circumspect than the prior… This 75th anniversary year is an opportunity to reintroduce this classic essay, which can be found in a collection of Waugh’s non-fiction “The Essays, Articles and Reviews” (Little Brown & Co., 1984).

The “American Epoch” is a meditation on the paradoxical predicament of the Church in the U.S. The Catholic Church is by far the largest single religious organization in the country, but Catholics represent only about 25% of the American population. Moreover, Catholics have been viewed with suspicion in American public life.

These phenomena are related to the relatively late arrival of Catholics to the new world. Beginning in about the middle of the 19th century, large waves of Catholic immigrants started arriving from Europe. Other than (arguably), the Irish, these were predominantly non-English speaking migrants, from Italy, Germany, Poland, and other historically Catholic countries. Thus, Catholics arrived as both linguistic and religious alien

And they arrived in a country whose moral and political values are also foreign to a Catholic vision. As Waugh rightly notes, American moral sentiments are shaped by the political theory that forms the United States. America, he explains, “is a child of the late-eighteenth century ‘enlightenment.’” The liberal political theory at the heart of America “has persisted through all the changes of her history and penetrated into every part of her life.”…

…about 100 years after the antebellum immigration wave, Waugh observed that “Catholicism is not something alien and opposed to the American spirit but an essential part of it.” The desire to fit in has led to an “enervating toleration,” by which Catholic distinctiveness is dissolved into American vagueness. “Good citizenship,” he concludes, “has come to mean mere amenability to the demands of the government.” And it is considered the “highest virtue.”

Despite these tendencies, Waugh ends “The American Epoch” on a somewhat hopeful note. Yes, Americanism is corrosive of Catholic witness. The Catholic “knows that the history of the Church is one of conflict.” But, “the Catholic holds certain territories that he can never surrender to the temporal power.” Whether or not those territories had been surrendered in 1949, the 75th anniversary of the essay is an opportune time to revisit his observations as a measure of the present — to ask whether the time has been lost or redeemed.

“The American Epoch” was clearly Waugh’s major publication effort for 1949. In the previous years since Brideshead  in 1945 he managed to eke out at least one book a year, although two were novellas and one a collection of reprints. But he clearly took the time required to make “American Epoch” more noteworthy than his usual run of journalism.

As Craycraft notes, the entire article can be read in EAR. But it should also be noted that the version in EAR is not the one published in Life. It is a revised version written for publication two months later in The Month, a Roman Catholic magazine published in the UK. This reflects some changes by Waugh in Life’s version–e.g. at p. 152 of the Life version there is a photo and description of a visit Waugh made to a Catholic girls school in Cincinnati. This did not appear in the UK version. The school (after reviewing the draft) had requested Waugh to remove that material because it was inconsistent with its agreement to allow Waugh to stay in its facilities. They did not want the visit publicized. The Life editors either didn’t receive or chose to ignore that message. The full version of the Life version of the article, including photographs, can be viewed at this link to Google’s archive of the magazine. The article appears at pp. 135-55.

 

 

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Easter Roundup

Posted on March 30, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Jesuit journal America has an article by senior editor James T Keane entitled “The sometimes-savage perfection of Catholic parody.” In looking back over previous articles on this theme, he came up with one in 1958 where its author Joel Wells offered parodies of a simple sentence by four writers. Here’s the result for Waugh:

…The 1958 contribution was from Joel Wells, an accomplished author and the editor of The Critic, an edgy Catholic magazine out of Chicago. In “Death of a Dog,” Wells imagined how a brief news story (“ITEM: A dog was struck and killed by a car at 9:30 last night on the highway north of town, an unidentified boy reported to the police this morning.”) would be handled by four authors: Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Francois Mauriac…

How about Evelyn Waugh? Wells was savage:

“A promising petrol tanker was just settling into his sights when Lady Distraught gave one of her well-known screams and something struck the car’s right fender with a thud. “Clement Attlee!” swore His Lordship, sure that he had run up against one of those rural American types whose clothing is covered over with copper rivets and buttons, ‘that’s bound to have marred the finish’.”…

The results for Greene and Hemingway are equally amusing. Here’s a link to the article.

–The Los Angeles Review of Books has a review of Andrew Pettegree’s The Book at War. This is by Greg Barnhisel. Here’s an excerpt:

In this generous and often surprising study, Pettegree looks at how books and war intertwine from every angle imaginable: how soldiers use books and how books shape soldiers; how writers depict war, and how war created writers; how noncombatants turn to books for solace, and how these inexpensive, durable, and easily damaged objects seem to be everywhere a conflict is raging.

Although he nods to the strong 19th-century connection of war and books—Clausewitz, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the library at Sandhurst—Pettegree’s great subject is the 20th century, when mass literacy, public libraries, and a thriving publishing industry across the Western world put books everywhere, even in the trenches of World War I’s Western Front. National library associations and eventually the Red Cross ensured soldiers and prisoners of war had reading material. If World War I didn’t provide much time for relaxing reading, it did spawn authors like Siegfried Sassoon, Ernest Hemingway, and the doomed poet Wilfred Owen.

The beloved novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) was the product of the next war, as insubordinate and incompetent Royal Marines officer Evelyn Waugh received unpaid leave at its height to compose his masterpiece. As he told his commanding officer, “once an idea becomes fully formed in the author’s mind, it cannot be left unexploited without deterioration.” How the Allies could win the war with Waugh a noncombatant remains a mystery.

Here’s a link to the full review.

—The Spectator has an article by Robin Ashenden entitled “Where have the West’s liberal value’s gone?” This begins with his consideration of what those values were before they disappeared. Among them there is this:

…there was a hunger for Western culture. As a teacher I was proud, I realised, of so much of ours: the National Gallery lunchtime concerts during the Blitz, Henry Moore and his bomb-shelter drawings, Orwell’s bloody-minded willingness to speak his mind and upset all sides at once. Writers like Evelyn Waugh or John Osborne (and latterly Martin Amis) proved you didn’t have to be anything as dull as ‘likable’ to be a great writer, that you could be outrageous and even loathsome and yet be all the more readable for it.

The complete article is available at this link.

–A literary event from the US-Mexican border offers proof that things may not be as tense in that area as they may seem from constant negative news reports:

Welcome to The River Gull Journal’s First Issue Launch Party! Join us at Los Olvidados Coffee Shoppe & Gallery for an evening of celebration. Be the first to get your hands on the inaugural issue of the first student-led literature magazine at Texas A&M International University. This issue is filled with prose, poetry and stunning artwork from members of the local community. Meet our talented contributors, listen to their work first hand and get to know the talent our local literary scene has to offer. We can’t wait to see you there!

While no details are offered as to the new journal’s contents, the following item from the Q&A in the invitation may offer a hint:

Q. Is there a dress code for the event?
A. Our theme is parties in literature! We encourage all attending to dress in their best literary fashions, from the elaborate parties and balls of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
The launch party is scheduled to take place on Saturday, 6 April, 6-10pm at 309 Flores Ave, Laredo. My guess is that some one will turn up with a teddy bear.

 

–An editorial in the Bahamian newspaper The Tribune (published in Nassau) starts with this:

Many years ago when I was a student, I remember being very annoyed by a novel by Evelyn Waugh called “Black Mischief”. I was annoyed because I was of the opinion that the author used a fictional country to illustrate how he thought blacks misgoverned their countries. Now, I am angry that 50 years after Independence my country is being run by politicians who seem to have been schooled by Black Mischief…

Here’s a link.

—The Critic has posted a review of a new film by Alec Garland called Civil War. The review by Robert Hutton starts with this:

One of the jokes in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is that when it comes to the civil war in the East African state of Ishmaelia, the Daily Beast newspaper wants victories for the Patriots and defeats for the Rebels. This is more even-handed than it sounds, because both sides say they’re the Patriots. Alex Garland’s Civil War deploys a similar technique. It’s set in an America where the trivialities of a culture war have been replaced by the horrible seriousness of the shooting kind. A hectoring president given to rambling speeches is holed up in the White House having seized an unconstitutional third term, and armies from California and Texas are fighting to remove him…

 

 

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2022 Academic Papers

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Announcements of academic papers with Evelyn Waugh in their title for the calendar year 2022 are posted below. Where abstracts have been published with the title and source, these have been included:

–Guy Woodward, “Conducting his Own Campaigns: Evelyn Waugh and Propaganda”, The Review of English Studies, 2022-3, v. 73:

“This essay examines Evelyn Waugh as practitioner and critic in the field of wartime propaganda. In 1941, Waugh produced a fictitious account of a British Commando raid on German territory in North Africa for publication in Britain and the United States, an episode which reveals his skill as a propagandist, but also prompts scrutiny of his contacts with British propaganda agencies and agents and of the effect of propaganda on his writings. Waugh’s interwar fiction exhibits a sophisticated understanding of the evolving and growing power of modern propaganda, but the novels also anticipate the public relations and psychological warfare campaigns of the Second World War, specifically those carried out by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret service established in 1941 to produce and coordinate propaganda to enemy and occupied Europe. Waugh’s proximity to the PWE is suggested by a dense network of social and professional connections, and is further indicated by a series of references to the PWE and its work which I have uncovered in his fiction. Allusions to covert propaganda in Put Out More Flags and the Sword of Honour trilogy betray Waugh’s understanding of the PWE’s operations, but also provide a critique of the corrosive and unforeseen effects of information warfare waged by the secret state and offer a productive means of re-examining his much-noted anxieties regarding modernity and mid-century political change.”

–Paul McCallum, “Evelyn Waugh and the 18th Century: Satire and the Problem of Time,” The Midwest Quarterly (Pittsburgh), 2022-11, v. 64(1), pp. 74-94:

“The presence of … Enlightenment elements serves at least two main functions in Evelyn Waugh’s fiction. Most immediately, these relics serve as satirical counterpoint to the equivalents produced by the twentieth-century, an age of jazz, plastic, and Picasso. Moreover, they give Waugh’s characters and readers access to other times, other places, other present moments. They inscribe the past into the present, and in so doing establish a cultural, a civilizational continuity that in the early novels offsets the Alice-in-Wonderland-like mayhem, and in the later novels points up a condition of rapid, perhaps irreversible decline.”

–Martin Potter,”Transformations and Transfigurations:Britishness and Romanness across the epochs in Evelyn Waugh and David Jones,”  University of Bucharest Review: Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2022-2, v. XI/2009(2):

“For British twentieth-century Catholic-convert writers Evelyn Waugh and David Jones coming to terms with their place in a British identity was problematic, given the way that concepts of Britishness had been shaped with reference to Protestantism, and with an anti-Catholic slant, since the Reformation. Like other British Catholic writers they approached this difficulty creatively by looking into history and reintegrating older understandings of the culture of the island of Britain into their own sense of Britishness, understandings in which Catholicism was a formative element. In both cases their interest in early British times brought them to engage imaginatively with the phenomenon of the Roman Empire, and ideas of parallels between the Roman and British Empires, and between the Roman Empire and the Church, become important to them. Through consideration of Waugh’s novel Helena and his Sword of Honour trilogy, and David Jones’s volumes of poetic work In Parenthesis, The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments I shall discuss and compare the elements of durability and of transience in Britishness and Romanness as these writers understand them, and suggest that especially in the case of Romanness the transformation they show is also a transfiguration.”

–Naomi Milthorpe, “‘The Twilight of Language’: The Young Evelyn Waugh on’Catherine’ Mansfield,” Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, pp. 21-34.

–Victoria Bilge Yilmaz, “Evelyn Waugh and Black Mischief as a Narrative of Failure,” IBAD Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2022-8 (12), pp. 125-36:

“Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932) has been accepted as one of the satiric novels of the 20th century English literature. Being Waugh’s third novel, Black Mischief includes a high concentration of satire and criticism through which the writer expresses his ideas on colonialism and the modern man in general. The novel is about an unsuccessful attempt at establishing a country in the heart of the oriental world. Seth, the Oxford-graduate emperor of a fictional Azania, fails to establish a correlation between the English-like Azania in his aspirations with the real cannibal-oriented country and its half-naked inhabitants. This study will analyze Waugh’s Black Mischief in terms of Frantz Fanon’s essay “On National Culture” (1959). A political philosopher and an intellectual from Martinique, Frantz Fanon has become highly influential in the discourse on colonialism and post-colonialism. His writing titled “On National Culture” outlines the steps to embrace the notion of national identity and national consciousness. This study will outline to what degree Waugh’s protagonist Seth fits into Fanon’s category of an endeavor to establish national culture. The study will conclude that Seth’s failure to establish his country heavily depends on the contemporary human conditions in the psychologically devastated universe.”

–Julie Labay Morère, “‘Voices at Play’ in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters and Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold,” Etudes britannique contemporaines 2022-9, v. 30, p. 83:

“In The Comforters and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, both published in 1957, two writers, Caroline Rose and the eponymous Gilbert Pinfold, suffer from aural hallucinations, just as Spark and Waugh did. The two authors have acknowledged the surprising similarities and echoes that link their works, but few studies have actually tried to go deeper into the dialogic approach initiated by Waugh in his review of The Comforters published in The Spectator (22 February 1957). My analysis will show how the voices that haunt the characters become a central element in the artistic creation. Exploring the limits of the autobiographical genre in relation with madness, the narrative voice blends other genres, intertextual references and metafictional elements, thus intensifying the plurivocal structure of the novels and unveiling the mechanisms of the texts, prefiguring post-modern theories.”

–Carlos Sanchez Fernandez, “Evelyn Waugh and Brideshead Revisited: Sites of Memory and Tradition”, MiscelĂĄnea, Departamento de FilologĂ­a Inglesa y Alemana–Universidad de Zaragoza, 2022-o6, v. 65, pp. 87-103:

“In this article, it is my intention to analyse two theoretical notions related to space, namely Pierre Nora’s idea of the site of memory and Gaston Bachelard’s thoughts on space and the house, as applied to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). I base my analysis on the symbolic value of the English country house with regard to the interwar English aristocracy and upper classes as depicted in this novel; that is, as a site of memory. I consider the point of view of three characters: Charles Ryder, the novel’s first-person narrator, Lord Sebastian Flyte, Ryder’s intimate friend, and Lord Marchmain, Sebastian’s father, who triggers the novel’s sudden and unexpected ending through his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, his family’s creed. My conclusion links the decline of aristocratic and Christian ideals with the disappearance of communities of memory and their traditions after the Second World War.”  [Highlighting in original.]

Some of these papers may have been mentioned in previous posts where internet postings appeared at their time of publication. Anyone knowing of additional academic papers from 2022 with Waugh as a subject is invited to notify us by posting a comment.

 

 

 

 

 

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Spring Equinox Roundup

Posted on March 21, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New Criterion has posted a review of Simon Heffer’s new book on the interwar period. This is entitled Sing As We Go, and it is reviewed by Jeremy Black. The review is quite favorable and notes that Heffer’s depiction of the 1930s is much less bleak than many other studies of this period. Waugh gets a mention in the review:

The war itself was to help weaken, if not quite destroy, much of the fabric and practice of pre-war British society. Symbolically, Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) provided an account of how wartime road transport helped force through change:

“We laid the road through the trees joining it up with the main drive; unsightly but very practical; awful lot of transport comes in and out; cuts the place up, too. Look where one careless devil went smack through the box-hedge and carried away all that balustrade.”

Waugh himself is ably discussed by Heffer as part of a superb chapter, “The Twenties Roar,” which is an important as well as brilliantly observed account of society from sexuality to local government. We have the fashionable Kit-Cat Club raided in 1925 for serving drink after hours. The Prince of Wales had been there the previous night. The 43 Club and Chez Victor also feature in an account of Waugh’s earlier world of Bright Young Things.

The book is Heffer’s fourth and final volume discussing the history of Britain from the Victorian era until WWII (1838-1939). It was issued in the UK in September, and it seems to be for sale in the USA (at least it is listed for sale on Amazon). The first two volumes were published in the US by Pegasus Books, but I cannot find a US release date for this one on their internet site. The New Criterion’s reviewer refers to the UK edition (Hutchison/Heinemann), and that may be the one that Amazon.com is selling.

–The Daily Telegraph’s Parliamentary Sketchwriter, Madeline Grant, has written a column expressing her concern about the capabilities of the newly appointed actor who will take the role of James Bond in future film series. She calls up a similar reaction Evelyn Waugh expressed in a comparable situation:

Is that a puff of white smoke from the Eon Productions chimney? Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the star of Kick-Ass and noughties classic Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, has reportedly received a firm offer to be the next James Bond…

What I most want to see in a new Bond is someone with a deep appreciation of the franchise. Recent outings have unpicked the series to deadening effect. Charlie Higson’s Bond remake novel recasts the character as a dreary centrist dad who frets about diversity and his gut biome. Cary Fukunaga, who directed the cinematic sludge known as No Time to Die, branded Bond a rapist. Dr No Means No, apparently.

Witnessing a beloved series in the hands of people with nothing but contempt for it recalls Evelyn Waugh’s dismissal 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.” It is like when people who clearly loathe classical art are hired to curate iconic national exhibitions.

So forget the pecs and eye-watering stunts, here’s the multi-million pound question – does the new Bond actually like Bond?

Here’s a link.

–Writing in The Times newspaper Ben Dowell has an article in the TV section entitled “5 of the best Eighties TV dramas”. Top of the list is the Granada/ITV production Brideshead Revisited.

–A guide to G K Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man has recently been published. Several commentators have noted Evelyn Waugh’s interest in what many see as Chesterton’s masterpiece. Here’s the notice in the Chesterton Society’s website:

Among the many masterpieces of G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man is his crowning achievement. It was the book that set a young atheist named C.S. Lewis on the path toward Christianity. Evelyn Waugh called it “a permanent monument” that “needs no elucidation.” And its lively prose and compelling defense of Christianity have dazzled readers ever since.

But a little elucidation, it turns out, is needed. Chesterton’s presentation of the story of humanity and religion is filled with obscure literary, historical, mythological, philosophical, and theological references – most of which are largely lost on today’s readers. And Chesterton’s paradoxical and apparently wandering style proves, at times, disorienting to newcomers.

In this groundbreaking guide – the first of its kind – one of the world’s leading authorities on Chesterton walks readers through the entirety of this great apologist’s text. Complete with an introduction, footnotes, and running commentary, Dale Ahlquist’s tour through Chesterton’s classic will draw new readers into his literary world – and old readers even deeper into his literary genius.

Beautiful hardcover edition with a dust jacket.

The quote is taken from Waugh 1961 review of the biography of Chesterton by Gary Willis that appeared in the National Review and is reprinted in EAR 558, 560. The new book is available from Amazon.com at this link.

 

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