Brideshead Floribundum

Posted on November 4, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Waugh’s most popular book Brideshead Revisited seems to be getting a lot of attention lately. Much, but not all of this is directed to prior and projected film and TV adaptations:

—The Spectator’s supplement Spectator Life several weeks ago posted an article about the BBC’s propensity to rely on remaking previous successful programs rather than trying something new. This is written by Steven Arnell. Among the remakes he considered was this one:

…this brings us to the upcoming Brideshead Revisited remake. After the original ITV series and the 2008 film, you would think the last thing Brideshead Revisited needed was more revisiting. Possibly the Corporation is still miffed that it was ITV (Granada) that made the 1981 series and that such a prestigious show really should have been a BBC production. This kind of logic appeared to be the reason for their resurrection of Upstairs Downstairs (2010-12) to steal some of Downton Abbey’s thunder, itself a show that some at the Beeb felt was more of a fit with BBC1.

In the case of Brideshead I can’t think of a show less desirous of a remake. If you recall, the cast of the original series was stellar: it included leads Jeremy Irons (Charles), Anthony Andrews (Sebastian) and Diana Quick (Julia), together with a supporting company featuring Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Claire Bloom, StĂ©phane Audran, John Le Mesurier, Kenneth Cranham and Jane Asher. Even today, it would be difficult to assemble a better ensemble of actors. The failed 2008 movie (which was also co-produced by BBC Films) should have proved the point conclusively.

The original Brideshead took two years to film and had a production budget of £10 million, then a vast sum, dwarfing all other UK drama series at the time and for a good few years afterwards. That is until BBC1’s dire biopic (Cecil) Rhodes in 1996, which cost a similar amount for five hours less screen time and was justly shunned by viewers.

If BBC Studios is devoting similar dedication to the new Brideshead adaptation, I’d wager that licence fee payers could be on the hook for at least £20 million, with streamers or the likes of HBO presumably making up the rest.  And all the while ITV’s entire 13-hour serialisation of Brideshead Revisited is currently available free to view on YouTube – yet another reason for the BBC to resist remaking the show.

If they do partner with a streamer, one can only hope that BBC negotiators don’t botch the deal in the way they did with the expensive fantasy drama Good Omens back in 2019. Co-producer Amazon Prime debuted the show in UK May that year, hoovering up all the publicity, whilst BBC2 scheduled it nine months later across Jan-Feb 2020, to a predictably lacklustre 1.48m average audience.

If the BBC really want to remake an Evelyn Waugh novel, I [wonder] why not the author’s Sword of Honour trilogy, which was last adapted in 2001 by Channel 4 in far too condensed mini-series format, with a badly miscast Daniel Craig, who was far too macho to play mopey toff Guy Crouchback? [Links in original]

— Waugh’s book became an issue (sort of) in the recent Virginia gubernatorial  election. The winning candidate (Glenn Youngkin, a Republican) had made an issue of the propriety of the books being recommended for reading by public school children. This was explained in a Washington Post opinion article before the election:

…you may remember the Glenn Youngkin commercial starring the mother who was trying to stop “Beloved” from being taught in her senior son’s AP English class on the grounds that he thought it was “disgusting and gross” and “gave up on it.” Anyway, he supported that kind of parental control over the curriculum, so we’ve had to tweak just a couple of things!

She then, in jest, offers several examples of how reading lists might have to change if Youngkin were elected (which he was). Here is an excerpt from her list of deletions:

“The Odyssey” mutilation and abuse of alcohol, blood drinking

“Brideshead Revisited” not sure what’s going on with that teddy bear; house named after something that should be saved for marriage

“The Handmaid’s Tale” everything about book was fine except its classification as ‘dystopia’

“The Catcher in the Rye” anti-Ronald Reagan somehow though we’re not sure how

“The Importance of Being Earnest” includes a disturbing scene where a baby is abandoned in a train station in a handbag and the people in the play regard this as the subject of mirth

“Candide” buttock cannibalism

“Don Quixote” makes fun of somebody for attacking a wind-or-solar-based energy source

“Great Expectations” convict presented sympathetically

“Les Miserables” see above

“King Lear” violence and it’s suggested that there are scenarios where parents actually do not know best

“The Sun Also Rises” offensive to flat-Earthers

“Death of a Salesman” features a White man to whom attention is not paid… etc.

–The Irish radio network RTÉ recently posted a recording of poet-broadcaster Karen J McDonnell’s remembrance of the original 1981 transmission of the Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead. You can hear this 5 minute broadcast from last Sunday (31 October) at this link.

–The TV streaming website pastemagazine.com recommends the 50 best shows available for streaming on Amazon Prime. Here is No 41 on their list:

It was almost 40 years ago when the BBC miniseries Brideshead Revisited captivated audiences with its portrayal of early 20th century British aristocracy and Catholic guilt. The 11-hour series earned an Emmy for the late Laurence Olivier and catapulted Jeremy Irons into a successful, Oscar-winning career. Based on the popular novel by Evelyn Waugh, when middle-class freshman and aspiring artist Charles (Irons) arrives to Oxford, he is befriended by the rich, spoiled party boy Sebastian (Anthony Andrews) who soon falls in love with Charles and introduces him to his severely dysfunctional upper-class family living in the grand estate of Brideshead. As their relationship grows so does Charles’ infatuation with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Diana Quick). But the real struggle comes from the siblings’ mother (Phoebe Nicholls) [sic] who is determined to guide her children into their proper places as Catholic royalty, much to the dismay of atheist Charles. A beautifully engrossing soap opera filled with a higher caste of desperate souls, Brideshead is always worth revisiting. —Tim Basham

Looks like an editorial slip-up made Phoebe Nicholls the actress that played Lady Marchmain. She of course was Cordelia, one of the siblings, while Claire Bloom played her mother.

–The Daily Mail asked writer Patricia Nicol to recommend the best books on universities as a new group of students is settling in. Here’s the beginning of her article:

Now that Freshers’ weeks are a blurry memory, I do hope this year’s intake of students is settling down to some sort of normal university life. In school, you are told that university will be the reward for hard work: The chance to pursue a vocation or study a subject you (hopefully) love among like-minded peers. There is an expectation that it will be fun, too.

But fun did not seem most students’ foremost experience of the past academic year. There were tales of kids who had only just left home being confined to halls of residence with inadequate food supplies. At many places, the provision of online lecturing sounded dire for £9,000-a-year fees.

Of course, the whole world was wrong-footed by Covid, and some universities have dealt with the challenges better than others. Young relatives of mine who started last autumn, hoping for a different freshers experience, do not regret going. It’s better than a year at home waiting for adult life to start.

Novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Sally Rooney’s Normal People highlight how university should be an exciting time.

Nicol is not the first person to link these two books. See previous post.  And then there’s this in the Daily Telegraph from an article by Boudicca Fox-Leonard:

As a teenager I immersed myself in the classics: Austen, Eliot, Waugh. As I thumbed through Brideshead Revisited, immersed in a world of which I had no connection or experience, I naturally assumed that one day I’d write my own novel of grand importance. It didn’t matter that I didn’t, and still don’t, have anything particularly penetrating to say (this article excepting), I just sort of assumed it would happen, because, what else was the point of being alive if not to set it alight? […] But at the age of 37 I recognise I am no Zadie Smith, or Jonathan Franzen. Heck, I’m not even Sally Rooney, who is making a career out of holding a mirror up to millennials’ obsession with their own uniqueness.

 

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“The Loved One” Features in Two Events

Posted on November 2, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The 1965 film adaptation of The Loved One will be presented next week at an event in New York City. The presenter is musician Fred Schneider, singer with a group called The B-52s. As described in The Asbury (NJ) Press:

…The film’s pitch-black humor is an antecedent to the iconic work from the likes of the Coen Brothers and John Waters.”I love that kind of humor,” Schneider said. “The Loved One” is part of the Queer|Art|Film fall season of screenings from Queer|Art, which works to support the professional and creative development of LGBTQ+ artists in New York City.

Schneider, who will be on hand to discuss the film, said its picture of mid-’60 America resonated with memories of his own youth. Take the scene where James Coburn, as an airport immigration officer, is suspicious of Morse’s shaggy-for-the-time “Beatle haircut. My father was angry that I came back from college with slightly long hair,” Schneider recounted. “And he told me, ‘Get a haircut’ or whatever, and I said, ‘I’m going back to Georgia.’ ” (It was in Athens, Georgia, that Schneider then co-founded The B-52’s in 1976.) […]

“Even Rod Steiger has such a gay overtone to his character, and I thought maybe John Waters had seen ‘The Loved One’ because she’s like falling out of the bed, eating a turkey,” Schneider said. “And well, hello, Liberace’s in it. And they have the Damon and Pythias section of the cemetery for those who want to be buried together. I just think people will just love it, especially the people who belong to the IFC.”

Much of “The Loved One” is communicated via wink-nudge implication, and seen today it’s a testament to just how far LGBTQ representation in media has come in the 56 years since its release.”They pushed whatever they could to the limit, whatever was allowable,” Schneider said. “Apparently people walked out from MGM before it was even over, but they still put it out. I don’t think it did that well, but I watched it with a friend and we were just howling. … They made just the most outrageous stuff seem normal.”

Here are the details:

“The Loved One,” presented by Fred Schneider as part of the Queer|Art|Film fall season curated by Adam Baran and Heather Lynn Johnson, 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, at the IFC Center, 323 6th Ave., New York, $17, $14 for children and seniors, ifccenter.com/films/the-loved-one.

In Los Angeles the Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale has also opened an exhibit that will be of interest to Waugh readers. According to a Los Angeles County Museum weblog:

Forest Lawn has been a subject for modern literature, film, and photography, from Evelyn Waugh to Garry Winogrand. You won’t find that in the current exhibition of the Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale, but you will encounter a parallel and no-less-unlikely tale. “Unveiling the Past: The Art & History of Forest Lawn” surveys the cemetery chain’s architectural, corporate, and art history. Some of the most compelling objects here are documentary photographs of Forest Lawn signage. The makers are uncredited, but the best images work as found Walker Evanses. Forest Lawn has often served as an advertisement for itself. Its campus hilltop once had its own “Hollywood Sign,” the words FOREST LAWN spelled out in 10-foot-high neon letters.

When a commissioned marble copy of Michelangelo’s Moses arrived from Florence in 1926, it was trucked to Forest Lawn in moving billboards. The management was apparently not over-concerned that yokels might confuse it for Michelangelo’s original. Stunts like this must have helped Forest Lawn (and Los Angeles) earn their place in the Grove Dictionary of Art. Look up “kitsch” and you’re told that “objects that adapt high art images from one medium to another are paradigmatically kitsch, for instance plastic or fibreglass sculptural renderings of DĂŒrer’s Study of Praying Hands, Leonardo’s Last Supper (1495–7; Milan, S Maria della Grazie) executed in tapestry, or stained glass, such as that at the Forest Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Los Angeles
”

Forest Lawn’s mid-century billboards were hand-painted pop ephemera, replaced frequently for maximum impact. They grapple unintentionally with the paradoxes of love, death, art, money, faith—and Los Angeles.

See this link for photos of several of the billboards that are on display.

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Hallowe’en Roundup

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–Giles Coren writing in The Times surveys the plight of the male novelist in today’s literary market. After describing the difficulties of getting published in a world where publishers and readers are mostly women as well as the lack of sufficient remuneration and recognition, he concludes with this:

Nor is the hope of remembrance after death any sort of enticement to write. Look at Dickens: wife-abuser. Defoe: racist apologist for colonialism. HG Wells: eugenicist. Evelyn Waugh: antisemite. Orwell: Old Etonian poverty tourist. Finished, the lot of them. And if there’s no money in novel writing any more, no power, no respect, no sex and no immortality, well then I say we leave it to the ladies. As long as we’ve got our HGV licences and our jazz mags, we’ll be fine.

–The Daily Telegraph has an article by Harry Mount about a rift in the National Trust that is expected to come to a head at this weekend’s AGM in Harrogate. A group known as Restore Trust wants the National Trust to go back to what it was intended to be–a keeper of estates and houses of national importance. According to Mount, who reveals himself to be a member of Restore Trust:

Why on earth has all this happened? No National Trust member ever asked for the houses to be taken over with illiterate campaigns. This internal cultural revolution was entirely a top-down manoeuvre.

Of course, the Trust must be allowed to make money out of its properties. The problem is that the hospitality industry is basically infantile and the Trust does nothing to rein in the infantilisation, peppering houses and grounds with signs in kiddy language. At Kingston Lacy, Dorset, a tree has a sign saying, “Don’t climb me. I’m old and fragile”. At Dunster Castle, a sign on the pantry door says “Don’t open me”.

A huge organisation like the National Trust, with its five-and-a-half million members, also spawns marketing, HR and strategy departments: full of people who talk gobbledygook and think the only people who matter are under-35s.

The mistakes, clunky prose and agitprop snow down, obscuring the beauty and obliterating the magic of our country houses – Britain’s greatest contribution to Western civilisation, as Evelyn Waugh called them.

Waugh would no doubt enjoy himself satirizing some of the practices described in the Telegraph’s article.

–The website of the religious and public policy journal First Things has posted an article about book collecting written by Steve Ayers who has spent a lot of time doing just that. Near his conclusion, he recalls several items he acquired from the library of literary critic and journalist Julian Jebb:

My favorite item from his library is a remarkable artifact, a record of a hilarious exchange between the 28-year-old Jebb and Evelyn Waugh. In April of 1962 Jebb interviewed Waugh for The Paris Review, one of the few cooperative interviews the often cantankerous writer would ever give. In the letter he wrote in advance, Jebb promised that he wouldn’t bring a tape-recorder, imagining from what Waugh had written in his highly autobiographical novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, that he had a phobia of tape-recorders. They met in the lobby of a London hotel, and the first thing Waugh asked was, “Where is your machine?” Jebb explained that he hadn’t brought one. Waugh proceeded to needle him as they headed toward the elevator: “Have you sold it?” Well yes he had, but three years earlier. “Do you have shorthand, then?” Jebb answered no. “Then it was foolhardy of you to sell your machine, wasn’t it?” The interview began after Waugh changed into pajamas, lit up a huge cigar, and got into bed. It turned out to be a brilliant, if short, interview, and it’s clear from Waugh’s letters and subsequent meetings that he was fond of Jebb. He later signed a copy (the copy in my collection) of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold for Jebb and inscribed it, “You sold your machine because of Gilbert! Too bad! Best wishes, Evelyn Waugh 10/11/63.”

Ayers’ article originally appeared in 2019 on another website sponsored by a religious school organization.

–Another religious website Aleteia has published a review of a collection of essays by Paul V Mankowski, SJ entitled Jesuit at Large. One of the essays relates to Evelyn Waugh:

Perhaps my favorite essay in this collection is “Waugh on the Merits,” a review of Philip Eade’s Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited. The enigmatic, curmudgeonly Waugh is captured in all of his literary genius (“He was all but incapable of writing a boring sentence.”) and his misanthropic tendencies (“His satire was subversive, and deliberately so.”) On Waugh’s shocking conversion and fidelity to the Catholic Church, Fr. Mankowski explains,

“Waugh does not deny that the Catholic Church has aesthetic splendor to offer; what he denies is that such splendors provide a reliable basis for accepting the Church’s claims as true
Rather it is the ordinary daily Mass, the opus operatum, performed and assisted at out of duty rather than desire, that points to the objective reality of a universal immutable faith: your preferences have not been considered.”

—The Economist has reviewed the new novel by Ferdinand Mount entitled Making Nice:

British novelists excel at capturing the cut and thrust of a newsroom in a genre perhaps best described as the hack picaresque. Evelyn Waugh is its standard-bearer. His novel of 1938, “Scoop”, follows a man of modest means mistaken for a foreign correspondent and sent to a fictional country in east Africa. The tale is an outstanding satire of the media’s mores and its insatiable hunger for titbits and gossip.

“Making Nice”, Ferdinand Mount’s new novel, is clearly indebted to “Scoop” but updates its setting to the modern information age. Here news stories are written about social-media posts. Any middle-aged old-school reporters who aren’t dreaming up clickbait for meagre salaries have been tossed onto the slag heap, along with their obsolete fax machines.

–The Wall Street Journal has posted a review of the new mystery novel by Evelyn Waugh’s grand daughter Daisy Waugh. As noted in previous posts, this is entitled In the Crypt with the Candlestick. As the WSJ describes it:

Winking references to her famous forebear’s works (and those of other authors) are sprinkled through her text: a madcap account of the mishaps and intrigues at Tode Hall, one of England’s grandest homes, in the wake of its 93-year-old owner’s demise…Ms. Waugh’s novel offers plenty of satire, several good laughs and many dark chuckles.

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Waugh’s 118th Birthday

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Yesterday, 28 October, was Evelyn Waugh’s 118th birthday. He was born on that date in 1903. This event was marked in several brief announcements (including one showing that  actress Elsa Lanchester was born on the same day, something the two of them once discussed at some length). There were at least two postings that offered more extensive comments. One was on the Roman Catholic website Church Militant which posted an article entitled “Waugh Contra Mundum”. It opened with this:

Perhaps best known for penning Brideshead Revisited, Waugh serves as an especial model for the laity, having faced and anticipated many of the difficulties Catholics grapple with today. Upon his conversion to Catholicism in 1930, he wrote, “The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.” The same is, sadly, still true today.

The article by Samuel McCarthy goes on to discuss Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and his defense of the Latin Mass as well as other elements of the pre- Vatican II traditions.

The other was posted by author, satirist and radio presenter Garrison Keillor on his website  The Writer’s Almanac:

…He came from a literary family: His father was the managing editor of an important British publishing house and his older brother was a distinguished writer. But Waugh didn’t do well in school and he left Oxford without receiving a degree. He tried working as a teacher but he got fired from three schools in two years. He said, “I was from the first an obvious dud.” He was seriously in debt, without a job, and had just been rejected by the girl he liked, so he decided to drown himself in the ocean. He wrote a suicide note and jumped in the sea, but before he got very far he was stung by a jellyfish. He scrambled back to shore, tore up his suicide note, and decided to give life a second chance.

He didn’t know what else to do so he wrote a novel about a young teacher at a private school where the other teachers are all drunks, child molesters, and escaped convicts; and the mother of one student is running an international prostitution ring. His publishers forced him to preface the book with a disclaimer that said, “Please bear in mind throughout that it is meant to be funny.” The novel, Decline and Fall, was published in 1928, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern satire.

 

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Roundup: Great Writers and Happy Danes

Posted on October 25, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

–A Korean language paper Seoul Ilbo recently published a background article on Denmark, explaining its reputation as the happiest country in the world. This appeared among its sources for the article:

Also, unlike other Nordics, Danes are known for being relatively sociable, friendly, and optimistic. In particular, the British novelist ‘Evelyn Waugh’ (1903-1966), [as he wrote] about the capital Copenhagen, rated Danes as the most cheerful people in Northern Europe.

출ìȘ : ì„œìšžìŒëłŽ(http://www.seoulilbo.com)

Waugh’s assessment probably comes from his 1947 Daily Telegraph article “The Scandinavian Capitals: Contrasted Post-War Moods” although the English word he used for the Danes was “exhilarating” (EAR, p. 341). The translation of the Korean language article is by Google.

–The Jesuit magazine America posts a review of a new novel by a Roman Catholic writer that opens with this:

Who is the greatest Catholic novelist in the English language? Is it Flannery O’Connor? Graham Greene? Walker Percy? Muriel Spark? Evelyn Waugh? Caroline Gordon? A quick survey of 112 years of America content shows that this magazine has spilled a trillion gallons of ink on the question, even though the obvious answer was and is and always will be J. F. Powers.

But what about in the generation after that? That question, too, has been asked every few years since the glory days of the early 1960s, when J. F. Powers won the 1962 National Book Award for Morte D’Urban, Edwin O’Connor the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Edge of Sadness and Walker Percy the 1963 National Book Award for The Moviegoer. Who in recent decades has joined those ranks as a great Catholic novelist? Mary Gordon? Ron Hansen? Alice McDermott? Jon Hassler? Toni Morrison?…

The article continues with a consideration of whether the book under review is written by a novelist who has recently joined the ranks of those aforementioned “Great Catholic Novelists”. This is Sally Rooney whose new book is entitled Beautiful World, Where Are You?

–A notice has been posted about an Oxford reading group on a related topic:

“The Golden Age”: English Catholic Authors of the 20th Century: With the aim of introducing participants to five outstanding Catholic writers: GK Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Green and JRR Tolkien. Each author will be treated in a stand-alone session and the assignment for each week will consist of a characteristic example of the author’s work.

This week:
Our author this week is Monsignor Ronald Knox, one of the first Catholic chaplains to be based at the Old Palace and a leading figure in English Catholic life from the 1920s to the 1950s. We will be looking at some of his conferences to Oxford students on theological questions. As these are not available online you will need a photocopy of the material if you want to do some reading in advance. Contact Fr William [Pearsall, SJ]. Or just come along to the session – there will be plenty of opportunity to learn!

The first meeting in this Wednesday, 27 October 2021, 2-3pm at the Oxford University Catholic Chaplaincy, Rose Street. Details are available at this link.

–Penguin Books has posted an interview of British chef and TV presenter Rick Stein on its promotional website Still Life. Stein was asked to discuss his own favorite books:

…I first discovered Brideshead Revisited in my early 20s when I was at Oxford University. It seems silly to say now, but I went there as a “mature” undergraduate – 22 or 23. I’d spent time travelling the world before that, getting involved in all kinds of bits and bobs, whereas everyone else was straight out of school. That made me feel rather inferior. It was so intensely competitive, intellectually, and I didn’t really fit into that. I spent a lot of time at parties not doing the right things, then took a bit of a dive after I left.

One of the reasons Evelyn Waugh was such an inspiration to me is that he didn’t fit at Oxford in some ways either; I left Oxford with quite a bad third-class degree, as indeed he did. I loved his early books, which are so funny and irreverent, but Brideshead was later on and much more thoughtful. He was very keen on being a converted Catholic. I liked all that thinking he did about religion…

–Finally, the New Republic has posted an article about a podcast by Lili Anolik relating to life at Bennington College in the 1980s. One of the students from those days was novelist Donna Tartt, and Anolik sees influence on her novel The Secret History from both college life and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

…At the time at Bennington, there was a notable association between avant-gardism, gay men, and particular styles of dressing that had a lot to do with the success of the television series of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, which aired on PBS in 1982 and also explains a lot of the particular cultural motifs that flow through The Secret History. […]  Struck by [Waugh’s] vision of campus life, men all over the Bennington campus—but a group of students, particularly students of Greek, […]—began dressing in an approximation of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the series, with long scarves and flannel trousers. […]

Anolik sees the influence of Evelyn Waugh as unlocking some hitherto unarticulated aspect of Donna Tartt’s art. “Costuming is a romantic way of giving shape to something previously inchoate inside you,” Anolik says, quoting Mary Gaitskill. Anolik told Page Six that her intention in the podcast was to show that “Donna Tartt wrote the American version of Brideshead Revisited, i.e., The Secret History, because she was living the American version of Brideshead Revisited.” In Tartt’s novel, a young man named Richard Papen goes off to college and falls under the spell of a glamorous group of Greek students, all more sophisticated than he—a tight group he joins before it ultimately dissolves amid acts of violence. Although the plot is very different  from Brideshead’s, both novels are narrated much later by the older, jaded version of the naĂŻve young man at the heart of its story. Both novels engage with the ways that ostensibly academic conversations, like the riverside chats that stud Brideshead or the Greek classes with Julian in The Secret History, can hold erotic subtexts whose meaning might elude the unenlightened eavesdropper…

 

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Mid-October Roundup

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times has posted an interview with actor Jack Whitehall in which he discusses his favorite books, films, TV and music. Here’s the opener:

My favourite author or book
Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall holds a special place in my heart because I was lucky enough to get to be a part of bringing it to television and it remains one of my favourite books. I also love Scoop, Brideshead Revisited — even lesser-known novels such as The Loved One are fantastic. In his early comic works I can’t get enough of his wicked sense of humour and deranged cast of characters.

The entry is followed by a copy of the Henry Lamb portrait of Waugh.

–Last week,  The Spectator posted an article in its Spectator World edition entitled “Why we should venerate Evelyn Waugh” This is by Chilton Williamson and opens with a warning that Waugh should not be viewed as a comic writer such as PG Wodehouse but as a serious writer in whose works comedy often manifests itself. He then briefly surveys Waugh’s entire catalogue:

His preoccupations as a novelist, a travel writer, and a critic are a series of oppositions: order vs chaos and anarchy, civilization vs barbarism, and civility vs incivility, all set in the 20th-century world. Due to his assured grasp on Western history, his extreme sensitivity to contemporary social and intellectual movements and — dominating all — his Catholic faith, Waugh was acutely aware of the fragile nature of civilization, which he saw as a man-made haven threatened by an aggressive encompassing wilderness relentless in its determination to take back its own.

He begins by mentioning two under-appreciated works. Robbery Under Law is

less a travel book than a sophisticated historical disquisition [in which] the concept of civilization under never-ending siege underlies all of his novels, which he succinctly described as ‘the creation of small independent systems of order.’ […]

He achieved many of his finest comic effects by juxtaposing differences (often superficial ones) in customs and manners between Europeans and barbarians. Yet it is not always the Europeans to whom he gives the advantage. Some of the most hilarious parts of Black Mischief, for instance, recount the efforts of Seth, Emperor of the island kingdom of Azania, to ‘modernize’ his country by aping European progressivism…

He then divides Waugh’s novels into two categories: Dionysian and Apollonian. All the early ones except Handful of Dust up to Put Out More Flags are in the former and the rest in the latter. He clearly prefers the former in which the comedy is more pronounced but his favorite is Handful, in a class by itself:

The incomparable achievement of A Handful of Dust results from its success in combining elements of his Dionysian and Apollonian phases. Its pitch-black comedy begins with acutely observed social climbing, continues into a description of an adulterous love affair and tragic death, and concludes with its protagonist captured by a madman who forces him to sit aloud reading the works of Dickens. It remains unique in Waugh’s canon, and in 20th-century English literature, in the readers’ never entirely knowing what their reaction should be to it. It is, and remains, inimitable.

The article concludes with brief considerations of Waugh’s travel books (not among the “finest” of that genre), his anti-American leanings, and his religious inclinations, and ends with this:

Still, the manner of his end became the man. Waugh died after hearing Mass on the afternoon of Easter Sunday, April 10, 1966, locked in the WC and seated on the toilet. His own black humor was never quite so black as that.

The article is attractively headed with a pencil rendering of a very late photograph of Waugh. No subscription seems necessary to open this Spectator World article.

–A new Spanish language novel with a Wavian theme is reviewed. This is Mientras Mi Mirada Te Busque (While my gaze looks for you) by Aranzaza Sumalla:

The narration focuses especially on the Jungman sisters, people belonging to the English gentry, daughters of the Dutch painter Nicolaas Wilhelm Jungmann, who were essential in that free lifestyle of England in the 1920s, that of the Bright Young Things, that era evoked with great fortune by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, a Writer who had a great relationship with the Jungman sisters, Zita and Teresa, and is said to have been deeply in love with Teresa […]

Sumalla emphasizes that period well but in reality what fascinated her about the fate of these two sisters is the way of life they chose after the war: they were Catholics, they went to live in Leixlip Castle, in Ireland, far from the madding crowd, both dying after reaching 100 in our XXI century. That is to say that fascination comes to Sumalla from the possibility of leading a way of life radically different from how the eyes of others judged us. In addition, the author may have noticed the Jungmans for certain elective affinities because the same could have been done with the Mitford sisters…

The review appears in nuevatribuna.es and is translated by Google.

—The Lady magazine has posted a list of books recommended for holiday reading. Among those in the classics section is this:

THE SWORD OF HONOUR TRILOGY by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin Classics, ÂŁ14.99)

This trilogy of novels spanning the Second World War is Waugh’s masterpiece: comedy, irony and tragedy. Look high-brow by the poolside. If you’ve read this, try: A Handful Of Dust

Why this summer reading list is only posted now is not explained.

–Finally, Byline Times, a newspaper for journalists, posts a story by Matthew Gwyther entitled “Journalism is Not a Profession”. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Journalism is not a profession – there are no qualification letters after our names. I’m not even sure if it’s a calling or even a trade. Sure there are many journalists on a mission like a priest preaching the gospel of Xi Jingping, but then so is a dog in search of a bone. One should, anyway, mistrust journalists on a mission – they tend to ignore inconvenient truths that refuse to fit in with their worldview.

The best journalists err towards scepticism rather than zealotry. For those remaining who are entirely economically reliant on journalism, however, it must be more than a pastime. It is what it is: telling stories for a living.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop the hacks aren’t terribly ‘professional’ but a mixed pack of feckless, unprincipled and cunning scribblers, hacks and ink-slingers. It’s a mark of their acknowledged lower standing – but not necessarily low self-esteem – that journalists often quite happily call themselves hacks which is defined as “a writer producing dull, unoriginal work”. Call a lawyer a hack and you’ll see him in court.

 

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AN Wilson Returns to Brideshead

Posted on October 15, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oldie joins the Spectator in commemorating this week’s 40th anniversary of the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. They send critic and novelist AN Wilson back to have another look. He begins by noting Waugh’s main themes: the decline of the upper classes with their stately homes and their salvation by the Roman Catholic Church. Wilson thinks Waugh got both these wrong. The upper classes continue to thrive and their stately homes with them, and Wilson notes Waugh’s recognition of that in his 1960 revised edition. The church has evolved in another  direction, however, unanticipated by Waugh. Wilson, thus, sees a different outcome for Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte under today’s Catholicsm:

The situation of Charles and Julia in today’s church would surely enable them to live together and to receive the sacraments. Julia, after all, married a man – Rex Mottram – who already had a wife living, and so, by the strict tenets of canon law she was not in fact married at all. She was quite free to marry Charles in a Catholic ceremony, were his first marriage to be annulled – as was Evelyn Waugh’s. Since, like Waugh, Charles had married before becoming a Catholic, and in circumstances which made it clear he did not have a Catholic view of the sacrament of marriage, he would surely today have been granted an annulment.

Wilson then considers Brideshead’s position in Waugh’s oeuvre, between: “the brittle comedies of his youth and young manhood, and the august achievement of the Sword of Honour trilogy, one of the undoubted works of literary genius, in any language, to emerge from the Second World War.” Wilson concludes that “Brideshead Revisited, lush, colour-splashed, romantic, comes between these two bodies of work. It is Waugh’s Antony and Cleopatra. It is his richest, and most passionate book: passionate about male love, about the love between men and women, about the centrality of beauty in human life.”

Wilson then considers the book’s plot and characters, offering several interesting and innovative insights on both. For example, in considering Charles’ career as a painter, Wilson inserts this factoid: “In the great ITV adaptation of the novel, in 1981, directed by Charles Sturridge, they used the paintings of the sublime Felix Kelly; but one senses that Ryder also owes something to Rex Whistler.” And here’s his take on the character of Sebastian:

It was a highwire act of prodigious skill not to make Sebastian as cloying as his malicious friend Anthony Blanche (“Antoine”) wants Charles to find him. The young Sebastian with Aloysius the teddy bear is adored by everyone – barbers, Oxford scouts, the jeunesse dorĂ©e. The ruined Sebastian in Morocco, seeking out an existence loosely attached to Catholic religious houses, could be equally annoying, since he possesses only what “Antoine” calls “the fatal English gift of charm” and, an even riskier quality to convey in a novel, holiness. But it would be a harsh reader who did not see why Charles loved him, just as it would be strange not to fall in love with Julia.

At the end of this discussion, Wilson reveals his own favorite among the characters, a somewhat surprising choice, as it turns out–Cara: “All Cara’s observations, about love, sex, and religious practice, deserve to be memorized. And she is that rarity in the Waugh oeuvre, a thoroughly decent sort.”

The article concludes with this:

Given the solemnity of the theme, “the operation of divine grace”, you might have expected Waugh’s humour to have failed him in this book, but even the hilarity of the early novels is outshone by the comic characters in this one. Charles’s father, Anthony Blanche, or the awful Samgrass take their place among the immortals with Dr Fagan and Captain Grimes. Even the figures whom Waugh and Ryder hate – Hooper and Mottram – are funny. And even non-Catholics have laughed at Cordelia’s hoodwinking Rex into believing that there are sacred monkeys in the Vatican.

I couldn’t agree more and have made that same point several times in the past since it is easy to overlook the book’s comedy. To be fair, I would have to add Cousin Jasper and Bridey to the list of memorable comic characters, perhaps because of their brilliant and memorable portrayals in the Granada adaptation.

Wilson doesn’t say much about the greatly anticipated BBC/HBO adaptation now in production. He does mention, however, that Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchette will be playing the Marchmains. The new producers will be hard put, however, to find the equals of the 1981 production for characters such as Anthony Blanche and Charles Ryder’s father.

UPDATE 18 October 2021: Reader Ryan Koopman noticed a typo in The Oldie’s AN Wilson article about Brideshead. The name of Lord Marchmain’s mistress is Cara, not Carla as was printed in The Oldie. The above post has been corrected accordingly.

UPDATE 27 October 2021: Thanks to anonymous reader for another correction to The Oldie’s text: jeunesse dorĂ©e.

 

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Granada TV Adaptation Celebrated in the Spectator

Posted on October 14, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator has published an article marking the 40th anniversary of the 1981 Granada TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. This is by literary critic Mark McGinness. It opens with a description of the state of mind of potential UK viewers in a cold and wet Autumn of Thatcherite Britain, who were being offered “659 minutes of romantic escapism.” After reciting the introductory trappings, McGinness embarks on a history of the “very difficult gestation” of the series over the previous two years. This included the scrapping of the original script by John Mortimer and, in the middle of production, a strike by TV crews. This in turn required a change in director, loss of a major actor (Jeremy Irons) for an extended period due to other commitments and loss of the original actor chosen as Cousin Jasper (Charles Dance) in similar circumstances. There were also some benefits, as the new shooting schedule meant that Lawrence Olivier was now available to play the role of Lord Marchmain. The delay also made it possible for the producer Derek Granger (who recently celebrated his own anniversary–in his case his 100th) to negotiate an increase in the originally planned 6 episodes to effectively twice as many (11 episodes, 13 hours).

On 12 October 1981 it was ready, and, as described by McGinness, it went down a treat. He cites ecstatic reviews by novelist Anthony Burgess, who thought it better than the original novel, as well as TV critics in the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Guardian. Clive James (probably in the Observer) wrote: “If Brideshead is not a great book, it’s so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.”

There were dissenting voices too. Kingsley Amis (who as a young writer had suffered from Waugh’s disdain) summed up his criticism in the title of his TLS article: “How I lived in a very big house and found God.” The Spectator assigned its reviewing to two of its contributors. According to McGinness, Richard Ingrams “thought it far too long, the characters not nearly strong enough to last the distance. He considered the narrative doleful and the music disastrous, ‘too many oboes and horns'”, and he thought the “gay element gratuitous”, citing a “quite unnecessary shot of naked bums on the Castle Howard roof.”

The other Spectator reviewer was Auberon Waugh, who also weighed in on “what he dubbed ‘the great Bottoms Debate'” and noted that his “family cheered at every bared bottom,” topping out at a “final bum count” of eight. Auberon concluded that the homosexual element was written “so artfully that it could be read in the drawing room as well as the smoking room.” The one thing he found disturbing, according to McGinness, was the love scene on board the ship. It was “‘not only distasteful but highly distressing’ to have to watch Charles Ryder mauling Diana Quick’s ‘perfectly formed’ nipple as the lovers were being tossed on board the RMS Constantia.” He thought that if there was a rerun, that scene should be cut (as it indeed was in the USA when PBS reran it).

The article concludes with a description of the program’s even greater success in the United States, where it was broadcast three months later, achieving “something approaching cult status”:

One wonders what the author himself would have thought of this great success. There is the story of the wife of an American theatre producer who told him that Brideshead Revisited was one of the best books she had ever read, to which he had some pleasure in recounting his reply: ‘I thought it was good myself, but now that I know that a vulgar, common American woman like yourself admires it, I am not so sure.’ He affected a similar distaste for television so perhaps, as the Critic’s Alexander Larman suggests, Waugh would have loathed it on principle.

For the rest of us, it remains the sine qua non of mini-series.

At the bottom of the story, following McGinness’s conclusion, this notice appears:

Luca Guadagnino’s new BBC/HBO adaptation of Brideshead Revisited will air next year.

 

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Columbus Day Roundup

Posted on October 9, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Independent newspaper collected from its readers book titles that played on the titles of older books. These were published in a recent article by John Rentoul. One of Waugh’s was selected:

8. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Piers Brendon, 2007. Nominated by Richard Vaughan. Evelyn Waugh took just Decline and Fall, 1928, from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, 1776-1789, pointed out Stephen Date, Cole Davis and Gavin Kelly.

Perhaps the best were those further down the list:

9. First Among Sequels, Jasper Fforde, 2007. The fifth book in the Thursday Next series. A reference to Jeffery Archer’s First Among Equals, 1984. Thanks to Peter Elliott.

10. A Tale of Two Kitties, Lord of the Fleas, For Whom the Ball Rolls and Fetch-22. All titles in the Dog Man series by Dav Pilkey, 2018-19. Thanks to Simmy Richman.

–The New York Public Library has announced an event in its digital great books series that may be of interest. On 21 October 2021 at 215p NY time, they will discuss Brideshead Revisited. It will be carried on zoom.com and registration is required. Information and registration are available at this link.

–The politically conservative news website American Greatness has posted an article on what its author Bruce Oliver Newsome calls “anti-woke science fiction”. It also serves as a review of a new example of the genre entitled Lethe by Joseph McKinnon:

Fashionable educators and publishers of “English literature” would leave you blind to “anti-woke science fiction.” I have coined the term as an update to a long tradition. Think of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins (1953). These works were anti-Marxist, before the failed Marxists recast themselves as “woke” by replacing economic justice with social justice.The literary elite doesn’t like to admit anti-Marxism as a motivation for great literature. Indeed, the elite shoves uninspiring writers down our throats just because they were Marxist—such as the ever overrated Ernest Hemingway. […]

Evelyn Waugh lamented Britain’s slide into authoritarian socialism during World War II, with several real-time war novels (including Brideshead Revisited in 1945), before writing his one and only science fiction novel. In Love Among the Ruins (1953), some “near future” British government keeps criminals in such luxury that they choose crime in order to return to prison, while “welfare weary” citizens seek official euthanasia.

Joseph MacKinnon’s Lethe combines the quest to escape state-prescribed happiness in Brave New World, the quest to escape surveillance and misinformation in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the quest to rediscover past knowledge in Anthem, and the quest to pair up and burn down in Love Among the Ruins. Further, Lethe reminds me of the quest to escape bureaucracy in Terry Gilliam’s film, “Brazil” (1985), and the quest to escape cyber mind-control in “The Matrix” (1999).

–Waugh biographer Duncan McLaren is interviewed on the literary website Flashbak.com. Here are some excerpts:

When did you first discover Evelyn Waugh‘s work? What did you like about it?

DM: I was seventeen. I’d been reading fairly widely, or at least as widely as the Penguins stocked in the local WH Smith (my family was living in Hemel Hempstead by this time) would let me. I was struck by the humour in Waugh, as I was later by the humour in Viz (equally male-centric). I realised that the author was using words in a very clever and subtle way to preserve his self esteem and his idea of himself. He seemed to be turning worldly failure into a personal success. Also, the covers of the paperbacks were fabulous. I think they were designed by someone of the glam rock generation. I would be lying on the brown beanbag in the lounge of my parents’ house, in that post-school-day slot, listening to David Bowie records while reading Evelyn Waugh novels. That remains a vision of teenage happiness for me. Living the dream before reality kicked in again, through work of one sort or another. […]

Where does Waugh stand in terms of literature?

DM: Well, I don’t know. I deliberately don’t think that way, as there are so many academics who go on from their English degrees thinking along these lines. But if you push me
 Joyce and Woolf are two of the most fashionable figures now, it seems to me. Waugh gained some familiarity with modernism then rejected it. But he didn’t revert to nineteenth century realism, rather jumped to his own version of post-modernism. In other words, I think he was ahead of his time. I have a feeling his reputation will go from strength to strength. Certainly, it will if I have anything to do wiith it. But that would mean that certain of his views (his Toryism, racism and misogyny) would have to be seen in perspective, and possibly forgiven. No sign of that in the present climate, which is perhaps as it should be as we continue to work on the moral framework of society. In other words, equality of opportunity and outcome is more important than the freedom to think and do what you like, which is what Waugh champions.

The interview allows Duncan to discuss Waugh’s books and is amply illustrated with dust jacket art. It is by no means limited, however, to the topic of his works on Evelyn Waugh but ranges extensively into his other interests and his own life story as well.

–Finally, the Wall Street Journal posts an interesting essay (“Finding Hope in Hardship”) based on A Handful of Dust. This is by Brenda Cronin, an associate editorial features editor. The essay opens with this:

‘The more I see of other people’s children, the less I dislike my own,” Evelyn Waugh wrote to his friend and fellow author Nancy Mitford. Waugh’s equal-opportunity dyspepsia—he disliked people of all ages, not just youngsters—propels his 1934 novel, “A Handful of Dust,” as it spirals down from a brittle comedy of manners to a nightmare of loss and abandonment.

The essay is very well written as newspaper articles go and, within its fairly brief compass, provides an excellent survey of the book and its place in Waugh’s oeuvre. For example, it makes an interesting point of the source of the book’s title in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land: “Waugh echoes the ravaged and lost world of Eliot’s poem in A Handful of Dust without heavy-handed sermons or apocalyptic foreboding.”

There is at least one point where the author seems to get the wrong end of the stick. She refers to Waugh’s “grim stint at boarding school” and “miserable boarding school years”. In the latter reference, she is discussing a source for Decline and Fall and not Handful, but I think the references are not consistent with Waugh’s own assessment of his boarding school years. While not, perhaps, idyllic, they were not particularly unhappy years nor was he unsuccessful. He may have been disappointed at not having achieved admission at Sherborne but otherwise had no lingering complaints about these years. Another small quibble in an otherwise accurate essay.  In his 1930s travels, he spent little time in the British West Indies, making only brief stops on the boat trip to British Guiana. And while he did hike into the Amazon Basin at Boa Vista, Brazil, he never achieved his goal of the river itself.

The essay concludes with this:

…in later works, such as “A Handful of Dust,” Waugh went beyond acid satire. Faith moves lives such as Tony’s, in Waugh’s books, beyond pointless blundering and pain. His conviction that amid death and depravity the soul alone abides elevates his novel above a dark-witted between-the-wars period piece. A life without meaning is a misery, he asserts, whether gadding around London or marooned in a mosquito-infested jungle. But the soul—no matter how well concealed in Waugh’s secular and solipsistic characters—can make any situation bearable by imbuing suffering with meaning.

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Robert Murray Davis (1934-2021) R.I.P.

Posted on October 4, 2021 by Jeffrey Manley

Robert Murray Davis, one of the leading academic scholars of Evelyn Waugh and his works, has died in Arizona on 11 September 2021 at the age of 87. The following obituary has appeared as well as a related story in the Boonville Daily News in Boonville, Missouri, his home town. Here are some excerpts from the newspaper article by Bert McClary as well as from the obituary:

When Bob Davis graduated in 1951 at age 16 as valedictorian from Ss. Peter and Paul High School, after having worked at the Cooper County Record with local newspaperman, historian and author E.J. Melton, he was not yet aware of his career goal, but he knew it would be something involving the use of words.  He also was not yet aware of his family ancestry including the 16th Century theologian and author William Whitaker, Master of St. John’s College of Divinity, Cambridge University, England, and William’s son, Alexander, lifetime missionary to Jamestown Colony, America and publisher in England of cultural sermons to his white congregants and the natives he converted.

Bobby Davis grew up on a 24 acre “place” within the city limits of Boonville with parents M.C. and Liz Davis, siblings Johnny and Mary Beth, and many chickens, cows, and hogs, where he learned the politics, culture and responsibilities of both city and country life.  He played all sports, but had a special interest in baseball.

After four years at Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Bob worked briefly as a reporter for a small Kansas newspaper.  Finding the routine unsatisfactory, he returned to academics and earned master’s and doctorate degrees in English literature at the University of Kansas and the University of Wisconsin.  The field of academics and scholarly writing proved more acceptable.

An academic career that followed included Loyola University, Chicago, the University of California, [Santa Barbara] and the University of Oklahoma, Norman.  At OU he served in many academic and administrative roles in the English department, including directing the graduate studies program. During more than 50 years Bob received numerous grants and awards for teaching, research and travel, taught at five American, two Canadian and two Hungarian universities and lectured in more than a dozen countries.

His academic and publishing area was modern English and American literature and creative writing, focusing on literary criticism and scholarship, literature of the American West and literature and culture of Central Europe.  He published more than 20 books and numerous scholarly articles between 1966 and 2014, and was one of the foremost authorities on the life and literature of the well-known modern English satirist Evelyn Waugh.

While Bob’s emphasis was primarily scholarly writing, of little interest to the general public, he wrote two volumes of poetry and several nonfiction books related to his life experiences.  His published books included creative nonfiction Mid-Lands: A Family Album, The Ornamental Hermit: People and Places of the New West, and Midlife Mojo: A Guide for the Newly Single Male; the cultural study The Literature of Post-Communist Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania; a collection of personal essays Born-Again Skeptic & Other Valedictions; and a collection of poems Live White Male.

Mid-Lands is both a memoir and social commentary, describing growing up as a Catholic in Boonville, and being a youth in white, small-town, post-war America.  Boonville is a town that he appreciates and is proud to be from …

The following excerpt appeared in the obituary:

…While in Wisconsin he met and married fellow PhD candidate Barbara Hillyer. Bob’s first teaching positions were at Loyola University in Chicago, and the University of California at [Santa Barbara].  Bob and Barbara continued their careers at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, where Barbara was director of the women’s studies program and Bob served in many academic and administrative roles in the English Department.  They adopted three children, and Bob was active with them in a local swim club, was a competitive adult swimmer, and continued his lifelong love of jazz and blues music.[…]

Bob retired from OU as Emeritus Professor of English and moved to Phoenix, where he met Elaine Brock, and they were life partners for 18 years.  He continued to work as an independent writer, lecturer, and consultant.

He was preceded in death by his parents and is survived by his partner Elaine of the home; brother John (Pat) Davis and sister Beth (Bert) McClary, both of Boonville; daughter Megan (Don) Dey and grandchildren Brendan and Mia of Phoenix; son John (Alex) Davis and grandchildren Mathew and Lucas of Seattle, Washington; daughter Jennifer Davis of Okarche, Oklahoma; and a number of nieces, nephews and cousins throughout the United States.

A memorial service will be held at a future date in Boonville.

UPDATE (6 October 2021): The stories above originally indicated that Robert Murray Davis taught for a time at the University of California, Davis. In his memoirs Levels of Incompetence, Davis wrote that he taught for several years starting in 1965 at University of California, Santa Barbara.

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