Waugh Binge Recalled in Spectator Competition

Posted on June 25, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Jeremy Clarke, author of the Spectator’s “Low Life” column, is running a competition for the best description of “the drunkest I’ve ever been.” The winner will be announced at the launch party for the collection of Clarke’s columns to be held later this week. In the run up to the launch party, Clarke wrote a column that included a selection of similar descriptions from the past that might inspire punters to write for his competition. Among these is Waugh’s description of a visit to Athens:

We went straight to a nightclub kept by a one-legged Maltese who gave us cocktails made out of odd drugs and a spirit of his own distilling. Later the première danseuse of the cabaret came out and warned us on no account to touch the cocktails. Later still, I drove around the city in a taxi cab on I forget what errand, and then back to the nighclub. The taxi driver followed me back to our table. I had given him as a tip over ten pounds in drachma, my watch, my gloves and my spectacle case. It was too much, he protested. The rest of my visit was rather overshadowed by this introduction to Athenian life.

This is a quote from Waugh’s 1930 travel book Labels (p. 149). It relates to his first visit to Athens, when he was an undergraduate. The book also goes on to mention his second visit during the 1929 voyage that is the subject of the travel book. On that occasion, he also suffered from over indulgence following “a late night, drinking after a ball with some charming Norwegians.” He describes a “wholesome and accessible pick-me-up” offered by his friend Alastair Graham to provide relief. This consisted of a lump of sugar soaked in Angostura bitters and rolled in Cayenne pepper which is then dropped into a large glass of champagne:

Each bubble as it rises to the surface carries with it a grain of red 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. (Labels, p. 150)

Perhaps Mr. Clarke should suggest that the Spectator keep a supply of the ingredients for Alastair’s remedy on hand for the revelers at the launch party. Or maybe the participants can be assumed to be so experienced in these matters as to not require any help.

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Waugh in Sitcom Punchline

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest episode of the ITV sitcom Vicious, starring Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen as a elderly gay couple, Evelyn Waugh makes an appearance.  In this episode (No. 4 of the current series) the couple are contemplating marriage after being together for over 50 years. The wedding planner asks Stuart (played by Jacobi)  for his ideas about the scope of the event. Stuart responds that he is thinking, “Summer meets Evelyn Waugh meets Paris in the twenties,” no doubt having in mind the parties described in Vile Bodies, or perhaps in the early pages of Brideshead Revisited. Shortly thereafter (spoiler alert) Stuart learns that his companion Freddie (an actor played by McKellen) has failed to land an important part that would have produced the income needed to pay for an event that would have fulfilled Stuart’s Wavian expectations. The episode can be viewed online on itvPlayer.  A proxy server connection is needed outside the UK. The first series of this program was also broadcast in the U.S. by some PBS stations and was issued on DVD, so this current series may also become available from those sources.

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Candace Bushnell, Waugh Fan

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

U.S. novelist Candace Bushnell is the featured writer in this week’s By the Book column in  the New York Times Book Review. She is best known for Sex and the City which was a collection of her columns from The New York Observer and was made into a popular HBO TV series in 1998-2004.  The New York Times column involves a series of set questions, one of which is “If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?” This is Bushnell’s answer:

“A Handful of Dust,” by Evelyn Waugh, was a real game-changer for me. I read it for the first time when I was 12 and remember feeling like certain aspects of life suddenly clicked into place. It was my first encounter with irony, social satire and dark humor in literature, and it clarified the kind of writing I wanted to do.

Her favorite novelist is Flaubert but among the books she most rereads are P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels, among Waugh’s own favorites. Bushnell is interviewed by Rachel Cooke about her latest book in today’s Observer.

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Waugh Among the Bohemians

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC is currently running a cultural documentary entitled How to be a Bohemian. It is presented by Victoria Coren Mitchell and is broadcast on Monday nights over the BBC4 channel. The first episode traced the history of artistic “bohemians” from 19th century Parisians via Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley to England. In the second episode (transmitted on June 15), the early years of the 20th century were covered, beginning with the Bloomsbury Group and proceeding to the Bright Young People.

Waugh comes in not as a Bright Young Person (or “bohemian”) per se but as having operated on the margins of that group. He is said by Coren Mitchell to have used Stephen Tennant, a leading BYP, as the model for the character Miles Malpractice in his novel Vile Bodies. A clip from Stephen Fry’s film Bright Young Things, based on Waugh’s novel, is shown with Michael Sheen camping it up as Malpractice. Coren Mitchell’s attribution of Miles’ character to Tennant is somewhat questionable. That character (who also appears in Decline and Fall) is usually attributed to the equally camp BYP, Eddie Gathorne-Hardy. This is based on his having been named originally Martin Gathorne-Brodie in the first edition of Decline and Fall. Later printings reflected a change in the character’s name upon advice of counsel. Tennant may have contributed something to Malpractice but was not the exclusive source.

The BYP episode also contains an interview with Stephan Fry who explains their relationship to the historic category of bohemians. Unlike the earlier variety, BYPs tended to have money and were willing to display it to gain attention, but they were dedicated to behaving in a manner to shock their forebears, a classic bohemian trait. Fry offers the BYPs’ extravagant party-giving as one example of their bohemianism. The segment ends with Fry’s reading of the now perhaps overly familiar “party” paragraph from Vile Bodies (“Masked parties. Savage parties…” Penguin, p. 123).

The program will continue to be available on BBC iPlayer until about July 13 and can be watched online. A UK internet connection via a proxy server is needed outside of the UK. These are available on the internet. The final episode, bringing the subject up to the present day, will be broadcast next Monday (June 22) at 2100 BST and will be available on iPlayer thereafter.

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Robert Byron, Dangerous Lunatic

Posted on June 20, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest edition of the Australian Financial Review contains a story by Nick Hordern about Robert Byron, an outstanding British travel writer of the 1930s. The focus of the article is Byron’s book The Road to Oxiana which several critics have acclaimed the best travel book of the period. It recounts the 1933-34 travels of Byron and Christopher Sykes, later Waugh’s biographer, to various architectural monuments in Iran. Waugh knew Byron from Oxford, and they had several friends in common, such as Nancy Mitford, who appears in a photo with Byron that accompanies the article. But although Byron’s talent was recognized, he had a personality even more difficult than Waugh’s. In particular, he suffered anger management problems as were recounted by Harold Acton in an incident described in the article:

On the one hand he was recognised as a passionate advocate of unusual causes, such as the Byzantine influence on European art. On the other he was a contrarian, appallingly abrasive and opinionated to the point of violence. In his autobiography, Oxford contemporary Harold Acton recalled a 1936 incident where Byron ran amok at a dinner party in the British legation in Beijing, and had to be forcefully restrained by an embassy guard.

It was this very incident in Peking to which Waugh was referring in the quote which concludes the article, describing Byron as a “dangerous lunatic, better off dead.” This comes from a letter Waugh wrote to Acton in 1948, passing on his comments relating to Acton’s memoirs in which Byron’s bad behavior is described. The complete quote is somewhat less harsh than what appears in the article:

It is not yet the time to say so but I greatly disliked Robert in his last years & think he was a dangerous lunatic better dead. (Letters, p. 277)

Byron was safely dead when Waugh expressed this opinion, having been killed in 1941 when his ship was torpedoed.

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The Trout

Posted on June 13, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Earlier this week, the Daily Telegraph published a list of “the most beautiful pubs in England.” At the head of the list is The Trout in Oxford, as mentioned in Brideshead Revisited as well as the Inspector Morse TV series. This is the place where Sebastian suggests he and Charles leave Hardcastle’s motor-car on the way back from Charles’ first visit to Brideshead Castle. They will stop there for a drink after dinner in Godstow and walk back to their colleges (Penguin, p. 41). In another recent article on Waugh-related pubs, Duncan McLaren recommended The Crown that is located in the center of Oxford near Christ Church. This was the venue described in Waugh’s story “The Balance” where there began (according to McLaren) a pub-crawl

at the end of which Ernest Vaughan jumps into a car – a decrepit Ford – and drives down St Aldgates, mounts the kerb and crashes into a shop window.

 

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Funeral Directors Revisited

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s Spectator carries an article by Cressida Connolly (daughter of Waugh’s friend Cyril Connolly) urging that the negativity usually directed towards funeral directors be reassessed. They have a hard job to to that should be more appreciated. She traces the dismissive attitude toward the profession, at least in part, to the writings of Evelyn Waugh and Jessica Mitford who

thought it was funny and smart to jeer at undertakers. Their puny satires now seem snobbish and brittle. A self-avowed communist, Mitford was especially indignant that undertakers should profit from their labour, a bizarre notion that still lingers. No one thinks nurses or bin-men should work for nothing: why should funeral directors.

While it may be true that Mitford’s work (The American Way of Death) was a broadside attack on the bad practices she saw throughout the profession, Waugh’s targets were much smaller. He aimed in The Loved One at the over the top practices of the high-end and pretentious Forest Lawn as well the lower end but equally silly pet cemeteries which would seem to be a proper subject for satire, even today. And both were writing of practices in the U.S., not Britain where Connolly seeks redress. The article concludes with a reference to a current British novel where British funeral directors receive a more sympathetic treatment.

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The Loved One Among Top 10 Hollywood Novels

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

In the latest Publishers Weekly, The Loved One is named among the top 10 Hollywood novels. The list is made up by Michael Friedman whose own Hollywood novel, Martian Dawn (2006), has just been reprinted together with two previously unpublished novels, not apparently about Hollywood. Other novels on the list include such well known titles as The Last Tycoon and The Day of the Locust. There are also a few darker horses such as Children of Light by Robert Stone.

Friedman breaks down the Hollywood novel into six sub genres, including “Brits who have had enough of our philistine ways and ersatz culture and return home to civilization” into which he fits P.G. Wodehouse’s Laughing Gas (1936) as well as The Loved One.  Others in that group might have included Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Martin Amis’s Money. Amis’s book even comes with its own allusion to The Loved One–a character named Juanita del Pablo, who is featured in Friedman’s discussion.

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Another Brideshead Birthday Greeting

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

Today’s Daily Telegraph carries another article by Eleanor Doughty marking the 70th anniversary of Brideshead Revisited‘s publication on May 28, 1945. The article begins by discussing models used by Waugh for characters in the novel, breaking no new ground in that area. There are also interviews with several journalists who were Oxford students in the 1980s when Brideshead TV mania would have been at its height. None found much left over in their day of the Brideshead aura described by Waugh. Harry Mount does, however, recall “one guy who did, as a joke actually, on the night before his exams, eat lots of charcoal biscuits like Charles Ryder does.”

The article concludes with a brief discussion about how important it was to Waugh and his generation that they be able to amuse their friends. Derek Granger, producer of the 1980s Granada TV series, recalled from his earlier days as a journalist in the 1950s an interview of Waugh, asking “if we were to expect any more comic novels, [to which] Waugh reportedly replied: ‘Do you think it highly unbecoming for an elderly man like myself to continue in the vein of his youth?’” In a later entry in his diary, a few years before his death, Waugh wrote “We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.” (Diaries, p. 790) As Doughty notes in her conclusion, the amusement from Waugh’s writings has continued.

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Lord Marchmain and the 7th Earl

Posted on May 30, 2015 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian earlier this week ran a review of a book by Michael Bloch entitled Closet Queens. This is a history of homosexuals in English politics before 1967 when the criminality of homosexuality was ended. One of the lives considered is that of the 7th Earl Beauchamp whose portrait heads the review in the Guardian’s on-line edition. This is William Lygon, with some of whose children Waugh became friends. According to the review (by Chris Mullin):

Beauchamp, married with seven children, appears to have got away with leading a “hazardous, hedonistic life” for 40 years without encountering any serious trouble, all the while occupying some of the greatest positions in the land, including, ultimately, lord steward of the royal household. He came unstuck, however, in 1930, when his brother-in-law the Duke of Westminster launched a vendetta that led, at the insistence of King George V, to his having to disappear speedily into exile. In the best British tradition, the scandal was covered up, he was said to have gone abroad for health reasons, only resurfacing briefly towards the end of his life. Beauchamp was immortalised by Evelyn Waugh (a friend of the family) as Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited.

The same assertion is made in the Literary Review and the Independent. This is correct up to a point but needs a bit of context. Lord Marchmain voluntarily chose exile over life with his domineering, Uber-Catholic wife, prefering to live with his mistress in Venice. Unlike Lygon, he did not risk arrest or criminal penalty if he returned to England, only the wrath of Lady Marchmain. Waugh’s friend, novelist Anthony Powell, thought the story would have been better (or at least more believable) if there had been some scandalous secret covered up by Lord Marchmain’s exile, such as seems to be hinted by Anthony Blanche. Waugh probably chose a less controversial explanation to spare the feelings of the Lygon family.

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