NYPL Marks Waugh’s Birthday

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The New York Public Library has marked Evelyn Waugh’s upcoming birthday (28 October 1903) with an essay on The Loved One which also compares the Hollywood novels of other writers. The essay is by Meredith Mann who works in the library’s Collection Development division. Mann writes:

Waugh’s LA novel mocked Americans as vacuous, uncultured saps, easy marks for the nearest British expat. Its ending is classic Waugh dark comedy, doubtless the reason why Waugh called it his “most offensive work.” (Footnote omitted)

The essay goes on to discuss other novels, notably F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust and offers anecdotes from the Hollywood experiences of other writers such as Dorothy Parker and William Faulkner. The NYPL resources on film studies are also summarized.

 

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Rachel Cusk Envies Waugh’s Writing Life

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Rachel Cusk is featured in a recent issue of the Canadian magazine, Maclean’s. She was born in Canada but moved to England as a child with her British parents. She has recently been nominated for two Canadian literary awards for her latest novel Outline. In the article she is quoted as yearning for the sort of writing life exemplified by Evelyn Waugh:

…I’ve often yearned for the calm and orderly life suggested by a photograph I have of Evelyn Waugh in his study, sitting amongst his books at a great leather desk beside a roaring fire with his pen poised. Part of the piquancy of that image is its maleness, its freedom from domestic harassment, and so my yearning for it is absolutely ambivalent: not only is the writing life it suggests unavailable to me, my whole writing identity gets its purpose and radicalism from that unavailability. I think it is perhaps for that reason that I become forgetful and chaotic whenever the opportunity arises to “be” a writer. I couldn’t write what I write if that was what I was.

Although the photo to which she refers is not reprinted in the article, it is probably the one on the U.K. dust jacket of The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and his Writing by Jeffrey Heath, another Canadian. A photo of that dust jacket can be viewed here. Cusk’s early novels (Saving Agnes and The Country Life) are often compared to Waugh’s for their ironic humor.

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Tab Hunter and The Loved One

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A Houston blogger (Joe Leydon) has posted a story in which he explains how the career of veteran film star Tab Hunter (whom he met at at Houston conference earlier this year) was saved by a role in the film of Waugh’s novella The Loved One:

Hunter credits [Tony] Richardson… for tossing him a lifeline during a low point in his career during the early 1960s. As he notes in his autobiography:

“Just when it seemed I might never make another movie, Tony Richardson came to the rescue. He’d been hired to adapt Evelyn Waugh’s black comedy [novel] about the mortuary business, The Loved One. He stocked the cast with stars in cameo roles. Mine was only two days’ work, playing a cemetery tour guide…How oddly fitting, considering that my movie career was dead.”

A still illustrating Hunter’s appearance is featured in the blog. The blogger goes on to comment on the irony of the film’s having saved Hunter’s career when its critical and commercial failure had a negative impact on the careers of several other participants. In a further bit of irony, the film

has gained an admiring cult following over the years, and is periodically screened in classy venues like… well, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where it will be presented at 7 pm. Monday, Oct. 26.

 

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Waugh and Mr. Toad

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist Andrew Martin has written a column in the Financial Times in which he confesses to enjoy reading fiction about the very rich. His favorite hero is Mr. Toad

not because he was, as he characterised himself, “handsome” and “clever”, but because he thought he was. His overconfidence — fatally combined with the means to enact his every whim — was the wellspring of all the action, and the rich do have great utility in fiction, because they have the power of agency.

Other examples of those who have written successfully about the rich include Jane Austen, Alan Hollinghurst and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Evelyn Waugh. Martin continues:

This does not mean, I hope, that I am craven towards the rich, or that I want to live a rich life vicariously, like the downtrodden suburbanite picking up Tatler in the doctor’s waiting room. Such wistfulness can afflict authors as well as readers, and it’s detectable in Evelyn Waugh’s portrayal of the gilded Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited, as he later admitted in a letter to Graham Greene: “I re-read Brideshead and was appalled. I can find many excuses — that it was the product . . . of spam, Nissen huts, black-out — but it won’t do for peacetime.”

The letter was dated 27 March 1950 and went on to say “The plot seemed to me excellent.   I am going to spend the summer rewriting it.” (Letters, p. 322)

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Editor of “Evelyn Waugh and His World” Interviewed

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The podcast network of the conservative journal National Review has interviewed David Pryce-Jones, editor of the 1973 collection of memoirs and articles, Evelyn Waugh and His World. Pryce-Jones is a senior editor of National Review, and his recent autobiography and memoir Fault Lines is the subject of the interview. Although the internet summary promises Waugh will be among the topics discussed, this occupies only about 20 seconds of the 45 minute interview and consists of Pryce-Jones confirming William F. Buckley’s opinion that Waugh was the finest English prose stylist of his day. He also notes that he finds Waugh’s books are still easy to read. Unfortunately, the interviewer, Jay Nordlinger, doesn’t ask him about his experience in compiling the book on Waugh, which has remained a valuable asset for Waugh scholars. Whether that is a subject touched on in his memoirs could not be determined from this podcast.

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Whispering Glades and Tranquil Repose

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The Argonaut, a regional newspaper covering the west side of Los Angeles, has published an interview with art director Mike Salisbury who has worked in film, broadcast and print media and lives in Venice, CA. The interviewer gets a rise out of Salisbury when she mentions Waugh’s The Loved One:

Despite Salisbury’s reputation as a merry visual prankster, he wasn’t amused when I mentioned British author Evelyn Waugh’s devastating takedown of a Forest Lawn-like cemetery called Whispering Glades, depicting it as a travesty of English rural life in thrall to Hollywood values in his 1948 satiric novel, “The Loved One.”

“It’s a replication but it’s hardly a travesty, and I think they did a good job,” he said of the famous cemetery, later noting that he believes almost all of Southern California architecture and landscaping is “derivative of something else. Even Frank Lloyd Wright modeled his work here after Mayan architecture. Forest Lawn is just bigger.”

Waugh’s novel also gets mentioned in a  blog called Tardis Musings about the BBC’s long running series Dr. Who. The subject is Story 142 (from the 1980s) entitled Revelations of the Daleks in which there is

a vast funerary complex Tranquil Repose… Many of the people interred here are actually in cryogenic suspension – awaiting the day when cures have been developed for their illnesses. Some of the clients can have news and music piped into their tombs by an Earth-music obsessed DJ. Overseeing everything is the Great Healer, who is never seen in public… There is a subplot regarding some of the characters who work in Tranquil Repose. There’s the vain womanising mortician Mr Jobel, and the dowdy Tasambeker who carries an unrequited torch for him…That sub-plot about the goings-on in the funerary complex is obviously inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One… The book has a Mr Joyboy and Miss Thanatagenos – obvious sources for Jobel and Tasambeker.

 

 

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Spectator Reviews New Campion Book

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In this week’s Spectator there is a review of the new detailed book on the life of Edmund Campion which was mentioned in an earlier post. The reviewer (David Crane) agrees with the publisher’s press release in praising the book and giving credit to Waugh:

There must always be a temptation for a biographer to shape the life of any martyr with its end firmly in sight, but in showing just how little Campion sought that fate, or even how little of his life as a scholar and priest of European renown can have seemed a preparation for it, Gerard Kilroy has freed his subject from hagiography to produce the most historically convincing, powerful and humanly engaging portrait we have…Eighty years ago Evelyn Waugh called for a scholarly biography of Campion, and this is it.

 

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Review of The Loved One DVD

Posted on October 20, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A Connecticut-based newspaper weblog contains a feature-length article that is essentially a review of the DVD of the 1965 film based on Waugh’s novella, The Loved One (1948). The review concludes that the film begins well with the early scenes satirizing Hollywood and its British film colony but then falls apart when it tries to depict the love affair between Dennis Barlow and Aimee Thanatogenous. But where it really goes to pieces is in the story concocted by the scriptwriters in which the director of the Whispering Glades cemetery (played by comedian Jonathan Winters) adopts a project for reburying his clients in space to convert the graveyard into a real estate development. Sounds funny but it doesn’t work. A copy of the promotional poster for the film is attached to the article. If you look very closely indeed, you may see Waugh’s name in minute print below the name of Rod Steiger (who played Mr. Joyboy).

Thanks to Robert Murray Davis for calling this article to our attention. Those wanting to know more about how this film came about and Waugh’s reactions might want to consult Prof. Davis’s Mischief in the Sun: The Making and Un-Making of The Loved One (1999)

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Waugh’s Advice Quoted in Middle East Conflict

Posted on October 20, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Conservative internet news site Newsmax carries an article (“Russia’s Presence a Bad Sign for Israel”) in which it considers the impact on Israel of Russia’s active entry into the civil war in Syria. Their correspondent, Herbert London, cites Evelyn Waugh in this vexing context:

Israelis, realize what Evelyn Waugh once noted, that “barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity.” Israel has experienced those atrocities with knifings on the street, often from unexpected quarters.

The quote comes from the concluding paragraph of Waugh’s Robbery Under Law (1939; p. 279; in U.S. entitled Mexico: An Object Lesson). Waugh was concerned that the political system in Mexico (in which leftist elements had excluded other parties such as more conservative groups) had lead to actions such as expropriation of private property–e.g., the oil industry–and suppression of the Roman Catholic church. His conclusion continued with some more advice which might be also helpful to the Israelis in their present situation:

Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together in peace; there is only a margin of effort left over for experiment however beneficent.

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The African Epoch

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

A Georgetown University blogger (Paul Elie, Everything That Rises) was recently reminded of Waugh’s 1949 Life Magazine article “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church” (Essays, Articles and Reviews, p. 377). What called it to his mind was the story that Nigerian-American novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, had returned to the church in response to the teachings of Pope Francis. Elie explains that in his Life article Waugh had:

spelled out what might be called a geographic or tectonic account of the movements of religious faith in different eras: “It seems that, in every age some one branch of the Church, racial, cultural, or national, bears peculiar responsibilities toward the whole,” he declared, and went on to say that responsibilities had shifted away from Europe and toward the United States – taking Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton as two examples.

Adichie’s action suggests to Elie that another such shift has taken place. Given the problems that have roiled the Roman Catholic Church in the United States since Waugh’s visits, during what may have been its “Golden Age” in the 1940s, it may well be the case that Waugh would agree. Indeed, as was once suggested to me by the late John Howard Wilson, Waugh himself seems to have foreseen this shift in his 1933 story “Out of Depth”  (Complete Short Stories, p. 146).

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