Waugh Featured in Spark Memoir

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Alan Taylor in his recently published memoir of Muriel Spark (Appointment in Arezzo) considers what writers most influenced Spark’s works. This was published in connection with Spark’s centenary next year and is included in what is apparently an excerpt from his book in the Glasgow Herald (now called HeraldScotland):

Critics have suggested that in the beginning she was influenced by the likes of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, sharing their adherence to Catholicism and their interest in metaphysics. Of the two, Waugh, with his deft comedic touch, seems to me the better fit. He loved Memento Mori and rarely failed to mention it in glowing terms whenever Muriel sent him her latest novel. But in truth it is hard to find other novelists, stylistically and tonally, not to mention their world view, whose books sit comfortably alongside Muriel’s. She was, as her companion Penelope Jardine has said, simply “sui generis”.

Momento Mori (1959) is not one of Spark’s books that Waugh reviewed, but he must have mentioned it in letters to her. The only one of her books mentioned in his collected Letters addressed to her is The Bachelors. In an October 1960 letter he thanked her for a copy of that book and described it as “the cleverest & most elegant of all your clever & elegant books.” He also offered her a blurb for the publisher if one was wanted: “I am dazzled by The Bachelors” and agreed to the use of “anything else in the foregoing homage” (Letters, p. 551). The publishers apparently took him up on his offer as his description of the book as quoted from the text of the letter still appears in the Amazon.com listing.

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Interview with The Loved One’s Scriptwriter

Posted on November 4, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The San Francisco Chronicle has reprinted an interview with scrptwriter Terry Southern from 28 October 1964. This would have been after he had finished the script for the film adaptation of The Loved One and perhaps while the film was still in production. The interview was reported by Judy Stone and begins with a discussion of how Southern changed the name of a dog belonging to Mrs Heinkel that was buried in The Happy Hunting Ground. In the book it was named Arthur; he changed it to Barry. He then launches into a history of the script:

Southern said that the Waugh novel, published in 1948, was a classic of that time. But four early drafts, including ones by Elaine May and Luis Bunuel, showed that it had to be brought up to date if it was to retain its impact. Christopher Isherwood, author of “Prater Violet” provided the basic structure of the new version.

“We’ve reduced the emphasis on the British writers’ colony and added the retirement cities. (“Resurrection … Now!” is their motto.) Jessica Mitford’s book caused renewed interest in the racket aspects of funerals. And we’ve brought in the religious cultists and the strange architectural thing in Southern California. I think that what will emerge in “The Loved One” will be a very strong comment on the charlatan aspect of the funeral business, smugness and hero worship. We even go after the military again, inasmuch as it falls within the scope of what we’re doing.” (A 10-year-old science prodigy designs a rocket with possibilities for private enterprise. It could be launched with the cooperation of Air Force Gen. Foster Brinkman to orbit human remains inexpensively and “get the stiffs out of the cemetery” and the land back on the real estate market.)

The story continues with a discussion of some of Southern’s other work and concludes with his thoughts on the importance of satire.

The Loved One also recently appeared in Entertainment Weekly where it was selected as among the 25 most irresistible novels about Hollywood:

A little Six Feet Under here, some Golden Age romanticizing there, and you’ve got Evelyn Waugh’s crackling The Loved One. A poet and pet mortician becomes enraptured by the golden gates and paradise aesthetic of Whispering Glades Memorial Park, located in the heart of Los Angeles, where he falls into a bizarre love triangle.

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Russian Article on Waugh Available Online

Posted on November 3, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh scholar Irina Kabanova has written an article entitled “Evelyn Waugh and the USA”. This was published in December 2016 in the Russian language journal Literatura Dvukh Amerik (Literature of the Two Americas). It is now available online at this link. The English language abstract is published below:

Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s critical reputation has soared today to that of the foremost British novelist of the XX century. Naturally he had to deal with one of the shaping factors of English XX-century culture, American influence. Waugh’s stance on the USA comes under scrutiny: the diaries and letters are used to recreate biographical context; American visits’ of 1946-1950 description is based on biographical and critical accounts. Simultaneously the American characters from the early travel writings and the novels are analyzed. «The Loved One» gets special attention as Waugh’s single fiction set in the USA, and among non-fiction works – the article «The American Epoch in the Catholic Church». Waugh’s general outlook (his vision of modernity as the age of decline of traditional values, absurd and chaos, loss of meaning, his political conservatism and misanthropy) is shown to predicate his negative attitude to the US as the triumph of democratic principle, which Waugh famously denounced as “the age of common man”. The evolution of Waugh’s opinions on the USA is traced from the slightly xenophobic prejudice, common in his circles, through a series of business interactions with American publishers and Waugh’s growing financial dependence on the US royalties, to his most anti-American work, «The Loved One», and somewhat unexpected repentance of its critique in the panegyric of the article, where he proclaimed America the future leader of the Catholic Church. That was Waugh’s form of acknowledgement of the post-1945 Pax Americana.

Kabanova teaches at the N G Chernyshevsky State University in Saratov, Russia. She presented a paper (“Sovereign Power in Waugh’s Edmund Campion and Helena”) at the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference at Hertford College, Oxford in 2003 that is available in A Handful of Mischief.

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Alexander Waugh to Chair Panel at Literary Leicester Festival

Posted on November 3, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A panel has been announced for the Literary Leicester Festival on the subject “Remembering Alexander Chancellor (1940-2017).” He was editor and contributor to several journals, including most notably The Spectator. The panel will he chaired by Alexander Waugh, his son-in-law and Evelyn Waugh’s grandson. The panelists will include journalists Ferdinand Mount, Craig Brown, and Geoffrey Wheatcroft and TV presenter Anne Robinson. According to an announcement in The Oldie it will consider the theme: “Editors are variously admired, hated, respected or held in contempt for their incompetence while being well-liked for their ability to buy rounds at the pub.”

The panel is scheduled to convene on Wednesday 15 November from 4-5:30pm. Entry is free and bookings may be made at this link. Thanks to Milena Borden for sending us this information.

UPDATE (17 November 2017): This report on the panel appears in The Oldie’s newsletter for today:

Ferdy described Alexander [Chancellor] with his cigarette in one hand and the metaphorical blue pencil in the other – often in a plume of his own smoke. They talked about his laid-back greatness and his contradictory nature, charming and brilliant; yet with a simmering streak of anarchism; as reflected by his regular recounting of his back-to-back sackings (never from The Oldie). Anne Robinson remembered that he even managed to charm the Guardian readership, despite occasional references to his privileged Eton schooling and Italian holiday home.

 

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Boris Johnson Wins “Pennyfeather Prize”

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Michael Deacon writing in the Daily Telegraph reports on Boris Johnson’s overblown responses to parliamentary questions:

…Virtually his every answer was a speech, lasting two, three, four minutes…Whether the committee found Mr Johnson’s views enlightening, I couldn’t say. But as he powered remorselessly on, I found myself recalling the scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, in which beleaguered schoolmaster [Paul Pennyfeather] attempts to set his unruly class to work by offering “a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit”. In that class, one suspects, Mr Johnson would have made a mint.

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Waughs Feature in Spectator Strip Cartoon

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon feature in this week’s strip cartoon in the Spectator’s “Title Stories” column. The cartoon is by Gary Dexter and is entitled “Writers’ Letters: Evelyn Waugh on Auberon Waugh.” The first panel shows an accurate representation of Waugh writing a letter. The strip takes as its subject a letter Waugh wrote on 11 February 1956 to Brian Franks, Managing Director of the Hyde Park Hotel and opens “My boy, aged 16, is very restless at school. He has not been sacked and he passes his various exams with credit but he is anxious to get away from school” (Letters, p. 463). In succeeding panels it explains that Auberon is interested in the hotel trade and concludes “He is taller and bettered mannered than his father. Do you think there is an opening for him?” That final panel has an exaggerated picture of thin, red-headed son hugely exceeding his pudgy father in height. The second panel, which shows a schoolboy crucified in a school yard, has a drawing of a building in the background that looks rather more like Eton than Downside, but it is a cartoon after all.

Elsewhere in the Spectator, the lead book review is by Alexander Waugh in which he considers a book by Reza Aslan entitled God, described as:

… a brief and lively history of the development of the God-like type over 12 millennia. Aslan writes in clear, concise and attractive English. He is intelligent and has an uncommon ability both to marshal and contextualise seemingly random facts, and is skilful at condensing complex ideas into short, effortless paragraphs. But despite his claims to high scholarship, he is at heart a popular historian. Even his end-notes are fun.

Although not mentioned, Alexander previously wrote a book of the same title and similar subject matter.

Finally, there is also an essay by Theo Hobson (“Martin Luther’s genius was to teach us that feeble faith is enough”) in which Evelyn Waugh is compared to Martin Luther. This is in particular connection with Waugh’s explanation to Edith Sitwell and Nancy Mitford that without his religion he would be an even worse person than he was.

UPDATE (3 November 2017): The two final paragraphs were added.

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Shakespeare’s Grave: Contrary Voices

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In a previous post, we reported the conclusions of Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, that William Shakespeare was buried in Westminster Abbey, not Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. It is not surprising that the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald has published differing views:

THE Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Holy Trinity Church have dismissed new suggestions that William Shakespeare is not buried in Stratford-upon-Avon. Paul Edmondson, the trust’s head of research and knowledge, said the claims by Alexander Waugh in two national newspapers as “fantasy”. The Reverend Patrick Taylor, vicar of Holy Trinity, said it was “an historical fact” that Shakespeare was buried there.

Edmondson further comments that Alexander “isn’t the grandson of the fiction writer and satirist Evelyn Waugh for nothing.”

Another contrary voice is raised in the “Prufrock” column of the Weekly Standard written by Micah Mattix. This is in a story entitled “Uncle Waugh is Talking about Shakespeare Again.” After a satirical and dismissive restatement of Alexander’s argument, the column concludes:

Mr. Waugh also said that he has identified the exact date of the second coming of Christ using the Shroud of Turin and a fragment of St. Peter’s femur. Details to follow.

UPDATE (7 November 2017): The lecture given by Alexander Waugh on 29 October at the Globe Theatre was sponsored by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust and is now available on YouTube. This relates to the burial place of William Shakespeare.

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Sheed and Ward and Waugh

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Catholic Register, based in Toronto, has published a background story on Frank Sheed, who was a founder of the publishing house Sheed and Ward, among whose authors was Evelyn Waugh. The story begins:

Born in Australia in 1897, Frank Sheed’s father was a Scottish Presbyterian, his mother an Irish Catholic. Fortunately for the Church, and for English literature, his mother won out and, at 16, Frank declared himself Catholic and never looked back. Sheed’s passion was Catholic polemics — or apologetics as it was then called — and he devoted himself to this pursuit from his late teens until his death at the age of 85. He specialized in conducting street missions on behalf of an organization called the Catholic Evidence Guild. Through the Guild he met another platform firebrand, Maisie Ward, who, Sheed insists, was more eloquent and convincing than he was. They met in 1924, married in 1926, and later that same year founded Sheed and Ward, a publishing house that over the next half century published the leading lights of Catholicism: writers like G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Dawson and Ronald Knox.

According to Wikipedia, Sheed and Ward moved their headquarters from London to New York in 1933, which is probably how they came to have published the first US edition of Waugh’s Edmund Campion in 1935. According to Waugh’s Bibliography (ed. RM Davis, et al.) that edition was marked “Printed in Great Britain” and collates with the Longmans UK first edition. Frank and Maisie’s son Wilfred Sheed (1930-2011) made something of a name for himself as a writer of satirical novels and memoirs as well as books on popular music and baseball.

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BBC Radio 4 Features Anthony Powell Biography

Posted on October 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Hilary Spurling’s new biography of Anthony Powell, novelist and contemporary of Evelyn Waugh (see previous posts), recently featured as the Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. It can be accessed worldwide on BBC iPlayer, and all of the five episodes are now available. Milena Borden reports that the program and book were mentioned (along with the friendship of Powell and Waugh) this morning on the Today program, also on BBC Radio 4 (1:30:50), and the program has been reviewed in The Times, prominently mentioning the connection between Powell and Evelyn Waugh:

Radio choice, by Catherine Nixey

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time
Radio 4, 1.45pm
He has not weathered well, Anthony Powell. His contemporaries — Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene et al — still sell by the barrel-load. But Powell has been lumbered with the reputation of a chilly aristo. Which, given that people still read Waugh (perhaps the iciest chronicler of all and a man for whom Greene’s comment about writers needing a splinter of ice in their hearts might have been invented), seems a bit tough. In her biography of him, Hilary Spurling has a bit of a shot at rehabilitation. Because for one thing, he wasn’t a toff at all. He was a bit weedy, not that wealthy and had a tough time of it at Eton (although he was, one should note, at Eton nonetheless. Not exactly a hedge school). Spurling looks at the events that inspired him. Read by Hattie Morahan.

UPDATE: More detail regarding the trailer on the Today program was inserted. Thanks again to Milena Borden.

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Muriel Spark Centenary to be Observed Next Year

Posted on October 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Next year on 1st February will be the centenary of novelist Muriel Spark’s birth. The papers are beginning to build up publicity for the event. Last week The National (Scotland) and The Times both ran articles mentioning the centenary. Both articles also mention the support given Spark’s early work by Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that she, like them, was a convert to Roman Catholicism. They each wrote positive reviews of Spark’s first novel The Comforters (1957) which was published when she was 39. Waugh’s review was in the Spectator and is collected in his Essays, Articles and Reviews. Waugh later reviewed her novels Voices at Play (1961), also in the Spectator, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) in Cosmopolitan. Miss Brodie was probably her most popular work and was made into both a film and TV series.

A Scottish publishing company Polygon has announced the republication of all her novels in a special centenary edition with introductions by leading writers such as William Boyd, Alexander McCall Smith, and Alan Massie. The first batch of four will be issued next month. A memoir by writer and critic Alan Taylor entitled Appointment in Arezzo has also been published. BBC Four and BBC Scotland will produce a TV documentary, and a series on BBC Radio 3 will feature fellow authors remembering her career. There will be a three-day centenary symposium convened at the University of Glasgow from 31 January-2 February 2018. Details are available here. An exhibition on the theme “The International Style of Muriel Spark” opens at the National Library of Scotland on 8 December and continues through 13 May 2018. It should be noted that her official biography was written by Martin Stannard who also wrote the two-volume biography of Evelyn Waugh, the most comprehensive to date, and is co-editor of his Complete Works.

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