Jeremy Front’s dramatization of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, broadcast in seven episodes on BBC Radio 4 last year, won Best Audio Drama (Adaptation) at the 2014 BBC Radio Drama Awards held yesterday in London.
A new blog, Waugh and Words, created by Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project at the University of Leicester, features an essay by research associate Barbara Cooke in which she describes her first visit to Alexander Waugh’s home and reflects on the relationship between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford.
Nancy was special. Evelyn did not idolise her, but loved her deeply and respected her as a fellow writer. They corresponded for more than thirty years, right up until Evelyn’s death on Easter Sunday, 1966. The bulk of their surviving letters dates from 1944, just before the publication of Brideshead Revisited. As their fame grew Nancy and Evelyn critiqued one another’s novels, failed to take one another’s advice, and retracted criticisms once presented by the other with the finished goods. Like Lady Diana, Nancy had her own ‘shining row’ of special editions. Evelyn also dedicated The Loved One to her, in typically tongue-in-cheek fashion. This acerbic tale about the American funeral trade was published with illustrations by Stuart Boyle, and an urn appears on the frontispiece bearing the legend ‘TO NANCY MITFORD’.
The Huntington Library in San Marino, California (12 miles west of Los Angeles) has announced the acquisition of a major collection of rare editions and manuscripts of Evelyn Waugh. The collection, consisting of some 250 books and 135 letters and manuscripts, is the gift of Loren and Frances Rothschild. Loren is a longtime book collector and member of the library’s board of trustees.
According to the Los Angeles Times, among the letters in the collection are a number relating to libel concerns about Waugh’s 1948 satire The Loved One, which was based on Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, just north of Los Angeles. Other interesting items include the manuscript of his 1934 travel book Ninety-Two Days which was dedicated to his friend Diana Cooper, a satiric journal he wrote at age 13, and a 1923 copy of The Broom, a short-lived Oxford publication that contains a story by Waugh. Waugh’s hand-corrected manuscript of his first novel Decline and Fall is included in the collection. Its title page contains several possible alternative titles, including Picaresque: The Making of an Englishman and Facing Facts: A Study in Discouragement, as well as various permutations of these suggestions. Waugh told his friend and fellow novelist Anthony Powell that another title he had considered was Untoward Incidents, based on a phrase used by the Duke of Wellington to describe the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino in a time of peace. The collection also contains a 17-page annotated typewritten manuscript of “The Hopeful Pontiff,” an essay about Pope John XXIII.
Professor John Wilson of Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, editor of Evelyn Waugh Studies and founder of the Evelyn Waugh Society, described the Rothschilds’ gift as establishing the Huntington Library as the second leading center of Waugh studies in the world. According to Professor Wilson, cited in the library’s press release, the Huntington’s collection is now surpassed only by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which acquired Waugh’s library and many of his possessions and manuscripts in several batches from 1961 to 1991. Other institutions with Waugh holdings include the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Georgetown University, Leeds University, Leicester University, and Notre Dame University.
A sample of the collection can be viewed in the slide show that accompanies the LA Times article.
Alexander Chancellor tries Waugh’s notorious ear trumpet, and is impressed:
On Christmas Day, in the Somerset home of my daughter Eliza, and her husband, Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, I was offered the novelist’s old ear trumpet to try. I am rather deaf, as he was, and I was interested to see how it worked. It is a charming object, made of tortoiseshell, very light, and compressible so as to fit in a pocket, which was once given to him by the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. And I am embarrassed to say that I think I heard rather better through Waugh’s ear trumpet than I do through my two state-of-the-art Swiss-made electronic hearing aids that cost me around £2,000 each a few years ago.
Update (Jan. 24): In a letter to The Spectator published the following week, a Mr. Tom Blackett of West Byfleet, Surrey, writes:
Alexander Chancellor writes of the efficiency of Evelyn Waugh’s tortoiseshell ear trumpet (Long life, 11 January). Waugh also had a brass model — clearly less efficient — which he once brandished at Ann Fleming, shouting: ‘What? What?’ This so enraged her that she took a pudding spoon and soundly rapped the horn, sending the great man’s head into a spin.”
In 1959 Malcolm Muggeridge reviewed Frederick J. Stopp’s biography of Evelyn Waugh
The last time I saw him was at a wedding. I am no expert on wedding attire, but his seemed unusual. A tall black top hat, I thought funereal in character, provided an additional bizarre touch. He made considerable play with an old-fashioned Victorian ear trumpet, though whether for use or ostentation I cannot say. Occasionally he seemed to head in my direction, almost to orbit round me, but no trace of recognition appeared on his large, rubicund countenance. I felt no particular desire to be recognized by him, but these strange gyrations struck me as odd. In any case, on the few occasions that I have been on speaking terms with Mr. Waugh, I have formed the impression that he does not like me.
Novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard died on January 2 in Suffolk. She was the last person to conduct a broadcast interview of Evelyn Waugh. This was for the BBC Monitor documentary series and was transmitted in February 1964. According to her memoirs, Waugh was willing to do a second TV interview after having appeared on BBC’s Face-to-Face series in June 196o. This time round, however, he wanted to write the questions himself and wished the interviewer to be either his friend Christopher Sykes or a woman who was familiar with his books. In the end, Howard got the nod (Slipstream: A Memoir
Howard says that there were two afternoon filming sessions in the BBC’s London studios. This was necessary, she explains, to produce enough material for a one-hour broadcast, although the final result, as it survives in the BBC archives, is approximately 20 minutes, probably a segment of a longer program. Prior to the recording sessions, Howard met for lunch with Waugh and the director, Christopher Burstall, to whom Waugh explained that “one used one’s knives and forks beginning from the outside.” She asked some of the questions from Waugh’s list, which she considered very “run-of-the-mill,” but managed to slip in a few of her own. During the filming, “Waugh was still playing games. During each interval when they reloaded the camera he asked things like, ‘When is Miss Howard going to take off all her clothes?'” She was also asked to amuse Waugh during the intervals and, when she explained her lack of a formal education, he “seemed to enjoy [it], or at least he remained benign throughout.” When she asked whether he preferred to be anxious or bored, he replied “Oh, bored every time is the answer.”
The Monitor interview is much less lively that the one on Face-To-Face in which Waugh was forced to ad lib and came off brilliantly. Waugh also appears to have aged considerably in the few years between the interviews. He referred to his 1964 performance as “a dreary exhibition I made of myself on the television.” (The Letters of Evelyn Waugh
Howard later became the second wife of novelist Kingsley Amis and step-mother of Martin Amis, whose obituary for EJH kindly credits her with having ensured that he received a proper education. Evelyn Waugh was among the authors on her suggested reading list. Howard is best remembered for her novel sequence The Cazalet Chronicles
The current issue of Standpoint reprints a 1986 letter of Hugh Trevor-Roper in which he attempts to explain why he and Evelyn Waugh were not, to put it mildly, close chums. HTR (1914-2003) was an academic who first came to public attention with his book The Last Days of Hitler
HTR explains that he tried to keep well clear of Waugh based on his reputation for “offensive” behavior and a desire on HTR’s part “not to be involved in disagreeable scenes.” The two, however, continued to lock horns in the press, most notably in a vituperative 1953-54 exchange (not mentioned by HTR in his letter) in the New Statesmen about obscure and seemingly unimportant points relating to the history of the Roman Catholic church in England. Both sides of the New Statesman exchange were published as an appendix to The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (pp. 641-47), to the credit of neither correspondent.
HTR felt that Waugh regarded him “as a particularly poisonous serpent who had slid into the garden of Brideshead and was corrupting its innocent Catholic inhabitants; which perhaps, to a certain extent, I was-or, as I would prefer to say, was provoked into being.” Indeed, HTR believed that a veritable cabal of Roman Catholics (mostly converts) centering on the Jesuit church in Farm Street were ganged up against him, with the goal of removing him from his position at Oxford. In addition to Waugh, the only members of this supposed group identified by HTR are Martin D’Arcy, Frank Pakenham and Graham Greene, although the latter two did not share the reactionary political views of Waugh and the others. According to HTR, the group was largely consigned to obscurity by the reforms of Vatican II, which caused Waugh “to sink into abject eccentric reaction,” but Waugh “remains a cult hero to a little band who live in an imaginary mini-Brideshead.”
The letter containing HTR’s memories of Waugh will appear in a collection entitled One Hundred Letters From Hugh Trevor-Roper
Thanks to Gwen Price-Evans for calling this item to our attention on the Evelyn Waugh email discussion list on Yahoo Groups.
The long-awaited publication of Lisa Colletta’s British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-1965: Travelers, Exiles, and Expats
Unlike other prominent novelists of his generation such as Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood (also subjects of the book), Waugh never intended to become an exile in Hollywood. In fact, he made no secret of his disdain for the place in his satiric novel The Loved One
In April 1962 Julian Jebb interviewed Evelyn Waugh for the Paris Review:
He showed me into a comfortable, soberly furnished room, with a fine view over the trees across Hyde Park. As he moved about the room he repeated twice under his breath, “The horrors of London life! The horrors of London life!”
“I hope you won’t mind if I go to bed,” he said, going into the bathroom. From there he gave me a number of comments and directions:
“Go and look out of the window. This is the only hotel with a civilized view left in London . . .. Do you see a brown-paper parcel? Open it, please.”
I did so.
“What do you find?”
“A box of cigars.”
“Do you smoke?”
“Yes. I am smoking a cigarette now.”
“I think cigarettes are rather squalid in the bedroom. Wouldn’t you rather smoke a cigar?”
He reentered, wearing a pair of white pajamas and metal-rimmed spectacles. He took a cigar, lit it, and got into bed.
The interview is illuminating. At one point Waugh states, “I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech, and events that interest me.” When asked if there were any books he would like to have written and found impossible, he replies, “I have done all I could. I have done my best.”
The deadline for the 2013 Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest is Dec. 31.
Essays by undergraduates on any aspect of the life or work of Evelyn Waugh are solicited for the contest, which will be judged by the editorial board of Evelyn Waugh Studies. The winner will receive $500.