Waugh’s Life of Ronald Knox Cited

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A nondenominational religious Blog has included a lengthy cite from Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox. This relates to Waugh’s discussion of Knox’s friendship with Guy Lawrence. The two became acquainted when Knox, then still an Anglican, was chaplain at Trinity College, Oxford, and Lawrence was an undergraduate. Lawrence became a member of one of the informal discussion groups that formed around Knox, who entertained them over tea in his college lodgings. The posting continues:

In his early adulthood, Knox developed a strong friendship with a young man named Guy Lawrence. As Waugh reflects on the place of this friendship in Knox’s life, he includes a lengthy quote from Fr. Bede Jarrett, which was originally addressed to a monk who was troubled by how intensely he had developed an affection for one specific friend.

A complete quote of the passage then follows. Fr. Bede Jarrett, described by Waugh as a “wise and holy Provincial of the English Dominicans,”  re-established that Order’s presence at Oxford where he became a friend and religious adviser to Graham Greene.

It might also be useful to know that Knox and Guy Lawrence remained friends after Lawrence left Oxford. Waugh goes on to explain that Lawrence was one of many (if not most) of Knox’s close friends from his school and college days who died in WWI.

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Another Waugh West Country Venue

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent Daily Beast article, several favorite drinking spots of famous writers are identified. One of these is the Barley Mow in Colehill north of Wimborne in Dorset:

Evelyn Waugh, distinguished author and godfather of this publication (which takes its name from his novel Scoop), was a master carouser. While the penman patronized plenty of pubs scattered across dear old England, The Barley Mow holds a special place for Waugh lovers. While living in this boarding house-cum-pub, Waugh wrote part of his first novel Decline and Fall. When he wasn’t writing, he spent plenty of time imbibing in the pub downstairs with visiting friends and his future wife, conveniently of the same name, Evelyn Gardner.

It is nor clear from their listing whether the current landlords still rent out the room over the pub where Waugh did his work, but it might be worth asking. Duncan McLaren has described his recent visit to this pub but he stayed in a nearly B&B. Evelyn! Rhapsody for an obsessive love.

Other watering holes still operating that were frequented by writers of Waugh’s generation include Sloppy Joe’s Saloon in Havana, made famous by Graham Greene and recently reopened after being shuttered for 50 years, the White Horse Tavern in New York’s West Village, where Dylan Thomas drank his last, and the Liguanea Club in Jamaica, where Ian Fleming hung out on his extended visits to that island (not a pub but a private club for expat whites).

 

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Waugh Letters Discovered at Maggs Bros

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The Financial Times reports the closure of Maggs Bros. bookstore in Berkeley Square where it has been located for about 80 years. The plan is to move to new premises yet to be located. One advantage of the move has been the discovery of letters from writers that have been lurking in their files. This includes one:

written by Joseph Conrad in 1922. “Would you care to take over either 50 copies of each for £200, or 60 copies of each for 200 guineas?” wrote the hard-up novelist. Maggs takes another letter from the file, this one written by Henry James in 1913 magisterially requesting to be taken off the firm’s mailing list: “I am chiefly interested in never again purchasing books; being very old and having already so many more than I can house or read.”
“We found dozens of letters in nooks and crannies we didn’t know existed,” says [manager of the firm Ed] Maggs as he shows me others from Evelyn Waugh and Harry Houdini.

The contents of the Waugh letters are not otherwise discussed nor are they listed in the store’s online catalogue. We can only hope for more details when they are, as seems likely, put up for sale.

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Waugh Venue to be Converted into Houses

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The Easton Court Hotel where Waugh wrote several books, including most of Brideshead Revisited, is being turned into two private houses according to the Western Morning News. The owners tried unsuccessfully to sell it as a hotel for 1 1/2 years and even reduced the price in their attempts to find new owners, but their efforts were unsuccessful. See earlier post. According to the Devon-based paper:

Owners Paul and Debra Witting have now requested planning permission to convert the property into two residential homes. The property consists of two main buildings, a 15th century longhouse and a 1920s build which served as the hotel. Easton Court Hotel has seen many famous guests over the years including John Betjeman, John Steinbeck, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Evelyn Waugh, who died in 1966.

It was Waugh who recommended the venue in the village of Chagford to Leigh Fermor and both attended the funeral of one of the previous owners, Carolyn Posthlewaite Cobb, an American.

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Simon Winchester, Waugh Reader

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s “By the Book” column in the New York Times features an interview of British journalist and author Simon Winchester. His most recent book is entitled Pacific, a nonfiction work about that area of the world. In answer to the question what books were in his book pile he gave the following answer:

A bit of dog’s breakfast, I’m afraid. Top of the pile is Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies,” as I like to go to sleep in good humor. Then there is Witold Rybczynski’s “One Good Turn,” the history of the screwdriver; and a classic Folio edition of Samuel Smiles’s “Lives of the Engineers.” I am on a Stefan Zweig bender just now, so I have “The Post-Office Girl” to hand. And Josephine Tey, “The Singing Sands”: I’m teasing this last one out, so I’m still not sure what happened to the dead man on the train.

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Brideshead Among Forerunners of Gay Lit Opening

Posted on December 8, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In today’s Independent, Boyd Tonkin identifies Patricia Highsmith’s novel on which the new film Carol is based as an early example of ground-breaking gay literature. The Lesbian romance was originally published in 1952 as The Price of Salt but under a pseudonym (Claire Morgan) to protect Highsmith’s then promising career that had begun a few years earlier with Strangers on a Train. According to Tonkin, the book sold relatively well despite the pseudonym.

Tonkin places the book’s publication into context with the then recent publication of books such as Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

In 1945, Evelyn Waugh could make Charles and Sebastian’s affair the fulcrum of Brideshead Revisited while leaving enough wriggle-room to make denials of physical intimacy just about plausible. From Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After (1952) to Iris Murdoch’s The Bell (1958), a succession of major novels opened the closet door, inch by inch. Lifelong bliss might have been in short supply (as for conventionally married couples in the era’s fiction). Still, plenty of protagonists managed to avoid either suicide or conversion.

Ironically, it was less the homoerotic theme than the adultery that caused controversy for Brideshead. This is explained in Robert Murray Davis’s book Mischief in the Sun (1999). When MGM considered filming the book in 1947, it was understood by Waugh that the homosexual themes would be toned down or in the case of Anthony Blanche written out of the story. But the studio also insisted that the adulterous relationships (especially of Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte) would also have to go. That was a change too far for Waugh who went home without a contract. By the time the novel was eventually filmed in 1981 these issues no longer troubled the filmmakers.

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Two Waugh Novels Make BBC’s Top 100 List

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC recently conducted a poll of literary critics outside the UK to determine their choices of the 100 greatest British novels. Novels written by Irish or other non-British authors were excluded. The poll included 82 critics who were each asked to name their top 10 British novels, with 10 points accorded to their number one choice. Two of Waugh’s novels make the list: No. 37 Decline and Fall and No. 84 Scoop. Other novelists of Waugh’s generation on the list include Virginia Woolf with four, Graham Greene with three, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Ford Maddox Ford with two each, and Anthony Powell, Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen and P.G. Wodehouse with one each. Books published as multiple separate volumes such as Parade’s End and Dance to the Music of Time count as one novel. The top 10 were (in reverse order):

10. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848)
9. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
8. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens, 1850)
7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
6. Bleak House (Charles Dickens, 1853)
5. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
4. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861)
3. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)
2. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)
1. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1874)

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Waugh Novel Recommended in Gift List

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A Waugh novel has been selected for a list of potential gifts to be given to “conservative gentlemen.” The list appears on the weblog The Imaginative Conservative. The criteria for inclusion provide that the gift must be “quality if not…costly” (avoiding ties, slippers, sweaters and pipes) and begin with the letter B, thereby making it a “B-list.” Other articles on the list include bourbon, beard balm and badger-hair shaving brushes.  The Waugh novel selected is:

Brideshead Re-Visited [sic]– Evelyn Waugh was, perhaps, the perfect fogey. A delightful curmudgeon, he crafted some of the most hilarious stories in modern English literature. He called Brideshead Re-Visited his “GEM—Great English Masterpiece” and so it is. The book needs to be read, but the award-winning 1981 English television series is one of the most faithful book-to-film adaptations available. To view the series is to step into a golden England which, even in Waugh’s time, was fading away. Don’t worry too much about the flamboyant “aestheticism” in the opening episodes. It is all resolved in the end with a satisfying “twitch on the thread.”

I’m not so sure Waugh ever referred to the novel as the “Great English Masterpiece” and even less so as the “GEM.” No source is cited. A Google search traces those terms back no further than 2014 to an article by Dwight Longenecker that appeared, inter alia, in this same conservative weblog. Waugh somewhat jokingly referred to the book several times in letters as his “Magnum Opus” or “M.O.”  Writing on 29 January 1945 (to his wife) and 17 January 1945 (to Nancy Mitford), he mentions what he describes as Mitford’s preferred reference to it as the “G.E.C. (Great English Classic)”.  Letters, pp. 182, 184, 189, 198-99; Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, pp. 14-15. But “masterpiece” may be a stretch.

 

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Waugh Included in “More Letters of Note”

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s 1942 letter to his wife recounting the disastrous results of his army unit’s attempt to remove a tree stump from the garden of a Scottish aristocrat has now been included in a collection entitled More Letters of Note, edited by Shaun Usher. It was previously read out at the Hay Festival in a performance called Letters Live and was then read by Geoffrey Palmer in an online video. See earlier post.  The book’s introduction to the letter explains that at the time it was written, Laura Waugh found herself:

Back home, in dire need of some light relief, holding fort whilst just weeks away from the birth of their fourth child, Margaret. Entertainment soon arrived in the form of a letter from her husband in which he expertly and with pitch-perfect comic timing told the story of a tree stump on the Earl of Glasgow’s estate.

Other letters in the collection from members of Waugh’s generation include one from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell in 1949 thanking him for a copy of 1984 and explaining how much better it would been if it had been written like Brave New World. There is also a 1937 letter to 19 year old Jessica Mitford written by her but as from a French friend with a coded explanation of Jessica’s elopement with Esmond Romilly to the Spanish Civil War. The subterfuge was good enough to provide cover until they were safely beyond the border.

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Waugh’s Pick-Me-Up Cocktail

Posted on December 5, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A New Zealand-based news website (Stuff.co.nz) has included a Waugh-sourced cocktail  in an article (“Three ways with…festive fizz“) recommending drinks for the holiday. This is called a “Firestarter,” and Waugh is cited as having introduced it in his writings. Waugh actually suggested it as a cure for a hangover, recommended to him by his friend Alistair Graham, rather than an aperitif as it it designated in the article. See earlier post. The drink is mentioned in Waugh’s 1930 travel book Labels  (retitled A Bachelor Abroad in the U.S.):

…I commend [this drink] to anyone in need of a wholesome and easily accessible pick-me-up. [Alistair] took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura Bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put unto [sic] a large glass which he filled with champagne. The sugar and Angostura enrich the wine and take away the slight acidity which renders even the best champagne slightly repugnant in the early morning. Each bubble as it rises to the surface carries with it a red grain of pepper, so that as one drinks one’s appetite is at once stimulated and gratified, heat and cold, fire and liquid, contending on one’s palate and alternating in the mastery of one’s sensations.

Waugh does not refer to the drink as a “Firestarter” so that appellation may derive from a different source. The recipe (for 6 drinks) provided in the article is as follows:

6 sugar cubes
3 teaspoons Angostura Bitters
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 x 750ml bottle sparkling wine (Lindauer Brut is perfect)

Put the sugar cubes in a small bowl and pour the bitters over them. Sprinkle over the cayenne pepper, turning the sugar cubes to ensure they are coated on all sides. To serve, put a sugar cube in a champagne flute, then top with the sparkling wine (go slowly, it will fizz like mad).

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