Brideshead Named Among Top 10 Literary Castles

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian has named Brideshead Castle among its list of Top 10 literary castles and country houses.  The list was put together by Helen Maslin as part of the Guardian’s ongoing series on Top 10 Children’s Books.  Others selected incude Nancy Mitford’s Hampton, home of Lady Montdore in Love in a Cold Climate, and P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle, seat of the 9th Earl of Emsworth (and his pigs).  More in keeping with the series’ stated theme, Hogwarts Castle from the Harry Potter series is also named.  Maslin recently published a children’s book entitled Darkmere.  Here’s an excerpt from her description of Waugh’s novel as a book for children (or perhaps young adults):

Brideshead Revisited was a battered favourite among boys I knew when I was in my teens. Although it was never the theological theme of the book that interested them – they, like Charles Ryder, had fallen under the spell of Brideshead Castle and the glamorous Flyte family […] Charles is already entranced with beautiful and charming Sebastian Flyte, when he’s taken to Brideshead […] and admits that although “rapt in the vision” he also felt an ominous chill at the words Sebastian used – not, “that is my house”, but “it’s where my family live”.

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Waugh Among Top “Conservative” Novelists

Posted on August 22, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Literary historian and professor of British literature at Ghent University, Kate Macdonald, has published in the Guardian a list of what she considers the top 10 “conservative” novels. This is based in part on her recent book Novelists Against Social Change published last month by Palgrave Macmillan. In that book she discusses the novels of John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Angela Thirkell as they represent a conservative point of view. She complains that today’s teachers of literature ignore these works because their characters oppose social change and support imperialism.

Ignoring fiction of a political colour that you don’t agree with is teaching with blinkers on. Literary history should function as a 360-degree panopticon.

In her Guardian list, she expands the field to include “conservative” novels by other writers such as Nancy Mitford’s The Blessing (1951), Ian Fleming’s Dr. No (1958) and Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night (1935). Also included is Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited about which Macdonald offers the following:

I’m sorry if this is a predictable choice, but Waugh is the most wonderful Tory writer, and this novel is a glorious elegy for the conservative life he could see disappearing after the second world war. It’s his most readable novel, and such a marvellous evocation of a vanishing prewar life of privilege. Waugh borrowed Thirkell’s obnoxious Captain Hooper from her novel Growing Up (1943) and put him in this novel to represent the ghastly new egalitarian world.

I wonder on what authority she has it that Waugh has read Thirkell’s 1943 novel or was sufficiently familiar with it to “borrow” a character?

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Waugh on Politics

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Athough Evelyn Waugh professed no interest in party politics and asserted that he never voted, he has been cited several times recently in political articles. In a Weekly Standard article earlier this month on the unfortunate politics of the British Royal family in the 1930s, Waugh’s assessment of George VI is quoted:

Evelyn Waugh called George VI’s reign “the most disastrous” since the Middle Ages: an empire lost, a country demolished by war, and socialists ruling the rubble.

Waugh is here quoted from a letter to Nancy Mitford, dated 15 February 1952 (Letters, pp. 368-69). The summary explanation is provided by the author of the article, rather than by Waugh. The article (“Fighting Siblings: The House of Windsor in uniform” by Dominic Green) concludes: “It could have been worse. What if Edward VIII had listened to his brothers in 1936 and been king in 1939?”

In an earlier article in the same journal, Joseph Epstein  was discussing English conservative Michael Oakeshott and had the occasion to compare the political philosophies of US and English conservatives:

England is (or at least was) a society aristocratic in spirit and based heavily on tradition. America is based on revolution. Americans, even ultra-conservative ones, have not given up on the idea of progress; English conservatives wish (or used to wish) to retard, even stop, progress. Evelyn Waugh once remarked that he would never again vote for the Tories: They had been in power for more than eight years and hadn’t turned back the clock one minute.

Waugh’s pronouncement on his disappointment with the Tories comes from Frances Donaldson, Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbor (1967), p. 15, and was made in response to her congratulating him on the victory of the Conservative Party in 1951. The actual quote is “The Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single second.” The reference to the party’s having “been in power for more than eight years” seems to have been added by another hand.

Finally, the Buffalo (NY) News recently cited Brideshead Revisted for a quote applied to Hillary Clinton’s present predicament caused by her somewhat unconventional attitude to e-mail security during her tenure as Secretary of State:

“A twitch upon a thread,” was the way English novelist Evelyn Waugh described how a person’s gravest decisions might be influenced by the actions of another. In his “Brideshead Revisited,” the persons being “twitched” were fallen-away Catholics. Tugging at the other end of the string was God.

In the ongoing soap opera of Hillary Rodham Clinton and her emails and the emails of those closest to her, the federal justice community is holding one end of the thread. On the business end, it could be the director of the FBI, or the attorney general or even President Obama himself.

In this instance the quoted language is that of G.K. Chesterton. The quote comes from one of his Father Brown stories (“The Queer Feet”) which Lady Marchmain reads to her children and guests as was her custom at a time of family tension (Penguin, pp. 128, 212). Chesterton, who was admired by Waugh, was more active in politics and political writing than was Waugh but this quote had nothing to do with politics.

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Radiohead Musician A Waugh Fan

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent Guardian interview, Radiohead lead guitarist Johnny Greenwood named Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour as his favorite audiobook. He says he was introduced to Waugh’s work by reading Clive James, who he credits with helping him complete his education which was interrupted by demands of the band. His favorite book is James’ Poetry Notebook.

Here’s what he says about Sword of Honour:

It’s the sardonic view of army life that appeals to me most – “was this the already advertised spirit of Dunkirk? He rather thought it was…” I secretly rate this trilogy higher than Brideshead, and of all of Waugh’s put-upon heroes, Guy Crouchback is my favourite, forever doing “the right thing” and getting nowhere. I’m confident that this is exactly what army life was like for many in the second world war: chaos masquerading as order, and everywhere hypocrisy and humbug.

The quote is from volume 1 (Men at Arms) in the scene where Guy has denied the request of one of his men for leave to attend a dance contest. The request was made at the time of the unit’s emergency assignment to defense duty in the wake of the evacuation from Dunkirk.

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Evelyn Waugh and Middle Age

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In a recent column in The Independent, D.J. Taylor describes the evolution of the concept of middle age. He invokes the writings of Evelyn Waugh to illustrate the attitude toward middle age of those bright young people who were young adults in the 1920s.

Waugh writing in January 1929 bemoans the “Peter Pans of middle age who block the way.” According to Taylor:

The people Waugh is complaining about, it transpires, all those “ex-captains and majors” from the Great War stymying the younger generation’s chances of preferment, are barely out of their thirties.

Waugh was writing in the Evening Standard in an article entitled “Too Young at Forty.” It is reproduced in Essays, Articles and Reviews at p. 45.

As Taylor explains, after WWII life expectancy and incomes increased and middle age expanded to include those well above the 40s. Within these years, the occurrences of the “mid-life crisis” and  “male menopause” were added. No doubt if he had lived beyond post-war middle age, Waugh would have also had something interesting to say about these concepts,

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Evelyn Waugh’s Old Neighborhood

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s Observer ran an article about the recent transformation of the borough of Islington from the London home of New Labour’s founder Tony Blair to a district that now seems to be exemplified by a movement to revert the Labour Party to its socialist roots. The latest upheaval is lead by Jeremy Corbyn. He is MP for Islington North and is also a resident.

The article also briefly summarizes Islington’s history as a haven for artists and intellectuals in earlier years. Among those mentioned are Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Charlie Chaplin, Vladimir Lenin, and Evelyn Waugh. In fact, when Waugh lived there briefly in the late 1920s, after his marriage to Evelyn Gardner, it was described as the sort of place where City gents rented spaces for their mistresses. The Waughs’ flat was in Canonbury Square, now heavily gentrified.  This was the only London residence Waugh ever called home as an adult, independent of his parents who lived further north in Hampstead. After his first marriage broke up, Waugh lived a rather nomadic existence until his second marriage to Laura Herbert in 1937 when they settled in Gloucestershire.

Another later resident of Canonbury Square was George Orwell who lived there in the 1940s and whose flat is marked by a plaque. Waugh’s Islington flat, unlike Orwell’s, is not marked by a plaque, but Waugh would probably prefer it that way, since the brief part of his existence that was lived there was not one he cared to remember.

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Evelyn=Basil and Audrey=Angela

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren, author of Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love, has given us the results of another of his ambitious research projects and much to think about. He follows the trajectory of the relationship between Waugh and Audrey Lucas, which goes from their North London childhoods to an affair that followed Waugh’s first marriage. He also plots Audrey’s life after the affair, when she became a novelist, leaving intriguing allusions to her life with Waugh in her published works. McLaren makes an interesting case that Audrey inspired the character of Angela Lyne in Black Mischief, playing the neglected woman in an affair with Basil Seal (who McLaren argues is heavily autobiographical).

McLaren concludes his article, published on his website, with a thoughtful assessment of Audrey’s impact on Waugh’s life and career:

Lucas’s importance, as far as Evelyn Waugh’s history is concerned, was in loving him in 1930 and in giving him the confidence to portray himself as Basil Seal in Black Mischief. Equally, I suspect it was the recovery of Evelyn’s self-confidence as a sexual being that allowed him to go on to write in depth and with maturity about the failed affair with She-Evelyn.

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Waugh Letter Read on Video by Geoffrey Palmer

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s 1942 letter to his wife recounting the Commando’s farcical attempt to remove a tree stump from the estate of an aristocrat near their training base in Scotland is read out to great humorous effect by TV actor Geoffrey Palmer. The letter was also recently read at the Hay Festival by another actor, Jude Law. See earlier post. Palmer is best known for his roles in TV series such as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and As Time Goes By. The video of his reading was posted last month by Letters Live, which also sponsored the Hay Festival reading.

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Evelyn Waugh in Country Life

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Country Life magazine has published a list of 60 things that make Britain great. No. 43 is the public school:

Ever since William of Wykeham set up his college for poor scholars in Winchester more than 600 years ago, these schools have been part of national life. Private schools only educate about 7% of the school-age population and annual fees are in excess of £30,000 a year for some. Nearly all, however, provide extensive academic, sports, music and arts scholarships and bursaries. They set a gold standard to which our universal education should aspire.

Each entry is accompanied by a representative photo of the subject and is followed by an appropriate quotation of a British writer. In the public school entry, the photo might be of Harrow and Evelyn Waugh provides the quote:

That’s the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

Country Life may not have fully appreciated the context of the quotation. It is from Decline and Fall (Part One, Chapter 3) where Captain Grimes is describing to Paul Pennyfeather his experiences as a public school teacher. He explains that he usually gets along all right at a school for about six weeks and “then I land up in the soup,” no doubt referring to some pederastic activity. But the system supports its own. Grimes recalls his days as a schoolboy when he “got the push after my sixteenth birthday” for what appears to have been similar activity. His housemaster, “a public school man [who] knew the system” nonetheless gave him a “corking good letter” which he still used to find new employment whenever he got the sack.

Another Waugh connection, unattributed, is in entry No. 21, the country house. The unidentified illustration for that subject is Mells Manor where Waugh was a frequent guest of his friend Katharine Asquith.

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Express TV Critic Rewatches Brideshead

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The 1980s TV series of Brideshead Revisited was recently rebroadcast by ITV Encore and is still available on an online “catch up” site which may require a subscription fee and UK internet connection. The Sunday Express TV critic, David Stephenson, chose that as one of the TV dramas to review this week. He seems to have watched only the last episode but was duly impressed:

The scale of the series was epic, in every sense, and parts of it were shot like a film, with long tracking shots in this episode of Jeremy Irons and Diana Quick walking through the woods discussing the “lack of entail”…You couldn’t accuse it of rushing a story either. Here was Evelyn Waugh’s evocative classic told in its entirety by John Mortimer. No messing, no reimagining, no updating, just how the original writer would have imagined it on the screen.

I’m not so sure he’s got it right about John Mortimer’s role in the production. Although Mortimer receives screen credit, those involved in the production have explained that his script was largely discarded in favor of Waugh’s original dialogue and narrative. Stephen-son concludes by offering this advice:

My message to drama commissioners now is to watch Brideshead to see where they have gone wrong for the past 34 years. Don’t give us another reheated version of Dickens, or Tolstoy (we’re to get War And Peace soon on the BBC); just do it straight and you will be rewarded with millions of viewers. But maybe don’t put it out over a barbecue summer.

 

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