Armistice Day Roundup

Posted on November 9, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books has posted an episode from its ongoing podcast called Close Reads that may be of interest. This is in a series entitled “On Satire” that is conducted by Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell, both Fellows of All Souls, Oxford. The 32-minute podcast is available on YouTube and Apple Podcast. Here’s the description:

In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible. But before reaching that conclusion he had written several novels taking aim at his ‘crazy, sterile generation’ with a sparkling, acerbic and increasingly reactionary wit. In this episode, Colin and Clare look at A Handful of Dust (1934), a disturbingly modernist satire divorced from modernist ideas. They discuss the ways in which Waugh was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, with his belief in the artist as an agent of cultural change, and why he’s at his best when describing the fevered dream of a dying civilisation.

The YouTube link allowed me to listen to about half the podcast. You may have to register and/or pay a fee to hear the whole episode.

–Waugh’s friend Lord Berners is memorialized in an article appearing on a BBC website. The article by Geoff Brown relates to Berners’ music rather than his writing or painting. Here’s a summary from the introduction:

…Berners’s music changed in temper over the years, but the key ingredients, some contradictory, always remained: avant-garde grit meets traditional craftsmanship; cosmopolitan flamboyance runs alongside English reserve; stylistic satire is warmed by affection; and humour comes tinged with nostalgia, sometimes melancholy. If we cherish Satie, as we do, we should definitely cherish Lord Berners as well….

Since Waugh found listening to music physically painful, he is unlikely to have had extended discussions with Berners about his musical compositions. Indeed, Waugh once in 1947 declined an invitation from Stravinsky to attend the premiere of one of the latter’s compositions based on his inability to listen to it. See below. Waugh is mentioned briefly in Geoff Brown’s article and appears in at least one of the photos (of which there are many).

—Gentlemen’s Quarterly has posted a list of books prepared by Josiah Gogarty which it claims offer light or escapist reading to see one through the heavily political atmosphere of today’s recent election environment. Here’s one by humous journalist Craig Brown entitled One on One: 101 True Encounters (2012) in which Waugh’s 1947 declension of Stravinsky’s invitation noted above features prominently:

This book has a brilliant premise: it consists of 101 real-life encounters between historical figures from Elvis to Rasputin, with each one written in 1,001 words and forming a link with the stories either side (Alec Guinness meets Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Waugh meets Igor Stravinsky, Igor Stravinsky meets Walt Disney
). It’s an amazing technical accomplishment, but it’s also very fun – Craig Brown has a great knack for finding good dialogue and anecdotes. Forget the present day and start ping-ponging around the 20th century.

–Finally, the religious/political website The Imaginative Conservative has a brief article discussing:

…two great novels, one of which [Brideshead Revisited] is rightly considered a classic and the other of which [The Mass of Brother Michel (1942) by Michael Kent] is largely unknown, and then will conclude with Tolkien’s great prose epic, The Lord of the Rings…

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Music, Newspapers, Podcast | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Armistice Day Roundup

Three Views of Haile Selassie

Posted on November 4, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

The British magazine History Today has posted on the internet the full text of its 2015 feature-length article, now entitled “In The Court of Haile Selassie.” This is by literary biographer and critic Jeffrey Meyers and tells the story of the Abyssinian emperor as reflected in the works of three authors. An abbreviated version under a different title was mentioned briefly in a previous post upon first publication. Here is the opening paragraph:

Christian and never colonised, remote and mysterious Abyssinia has only occasionally impinged on the western consciousness during its centuries of isolation. Evelyn Waugh visited it in 1930 and satirised what he saw as a barbaric country and the splendiferous coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, who was to reign for 44 years, in Remote People (1931). He returned six years later to report and praise the Italian invasion in Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). Wilfred Thesiger, the son of a diplomat, was born in the mud buildings of the British legation in Addis Ababa, spent his childhood in Abyssinia and later explored unknown parts of the East African country. Serving in Orde Wingate’s Gideon Force during the Second World War, he helped drive out the Italian oppressors. He admired the traditional way of life and remained fiercely loyal to Selassie in his autobiography, The Life of My Choice (1987). The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski described the revolution of 1974 that overthrew Selassie in The Emperor (1978). In the books of these three writers Selassie appears in various guises: an exotic potentate, a victim of war and rebellion and an evil oriental despot…

Meyers then proceeds to describe in some detail how each of these writers manages to describe the life and career of same historic figure quite differently, starting from the same historic materials. I can’t speak for his discussion of the works of Thesiger and Kapucinski but his description of Waugh’s contribution is both accurate and eminently readable. My only quibble would be his assertion that Waugh had  “punned in the title of Waugh in Abyssinia.” That title was selected not by Waugh but (as I recall) by the publisher of the book Tom Burns. In fact, Waugh was on record preferring to call the book The Disappointing War, which was the title under which excerpts were published in the English Review. Patey, p. 141.

The article concludes with this summary of the three different descriptions of Selassie:

…All three authors wrote superbly but distorted the truth to justify their own points of view. Waugh vividly portrayed the plight of the country but he praised the barbaric Italian invasion of 1935, which he believed would civilise and improve Abyssinia. Thesiger admired almost everything that Waugh disliked: locked in his own reactionary views, he knew more but understood less than Waugh. He hated and fought against the Italians who had destroyed an ancient culture that he felt should have been allowed to survive without western interference. Dazzled by the primitive pageantry he held to the idea, not the reality, of Selassie and was blindly loyal to the colourful Abyssinians. He longed for the pristine past; loved the wild Danakil, Masai, Samburu, Bedouin and Marsh Arabs and saw Abyssinia as a kind of private theatre for his delight. He wanted the spectacle to last forever and did not really care what happened to the mass of suffering people. Conditions that were funny to Waugh were tragic to the left-wing Kapuscinski. But when he arrived in Abyssinia 40 years after Waugh and political and social conditions had not improved, he agreed with the right-wing Waugh rather than with the retrograde Thesiger and supported the disastrous revolution in 1974.

The article is now available in full at this link.

 

Share
Posted in Newspapers, Remote People, Waugh in Abyssinia | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Three Views of Haile Selassie

Waugh in Boston and Belgium

Posted on November 2, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Burns Library at Boston College has posted a photo of Evelyn Waugh that I have not previously seen. Here’s a link. Although there is no accompanying text, the photo must have been taken during Waugh’s short visit to Boston College in November 1948. This was in connection with his research for the Life magazine article “Catholics in America” which appeared in 1949. While he was visiting the college, he made a short presentation to a group of students. This was a sort of dry run for the lecture tour he planned to present at a number of eastern US Catholic colleges in early 1949. Here’s a  description of the visit from an article in EWS 43.3, Winter 2013 (footnotes omitted):

Waugh went to Boston on 15 November and stayed until the 18th. He visited his publisher, Little, Brown, and stopped at Boston College, where he attended a creative-writing class reported in the student newspaper, The Heights (19 November 1948, 1, 8). Waugh said he preferred to write by hand rather than typewriter, since that facilitated revision as he went along. He usually wrote two complete drafts before publication, made no advance plan, and simply sat down to write chapter by chapter. He emphasized that a writer should “know his language thoroughly 
 and be especially familiar with the ‘etymology of each word that he uses so that he will know its true derivation and meaning, rather than its colloquial shadings.’” The finished product should have words strung together to form a melodious pattern. In response to questions, Waugh explained that The Loved One originated in California’s modern paganism and people without roots. When asked why he withdrew Brideshead from the filming process, he explained that Hollywood producers were “horrified”that he should want the essence of the story kept intact. “The Marchmain family, I hope, represent a normal Catholic family facing the modern world. Cordelia is the good Catholic woman standing up against all obstacles; Sebastian is the youth assailed by temptation—in this case, alcoholism.”…

Here is another link to photos on the Burns Library website. This has a group photo that has appeared in other contexts as well as the one noted above where he is leaving the car. There is also a third photo posted separately below these first two. I think that one has also been posted or published before. The lecture tour is described in a three-part series of articles in the EWS archives: “Something Entirely Unique”: Evelyn Waugh’s 1948-49 Tours of North America. Thanks to Dave Lull for sending the Burns Library website link.

–The Dutch stage adaptation of Brideshead Revisited mentioned in a recent post has taken to the road. Here’s a description:

Brideshead Revisited comes to the Netherlands this week. Performances run 30 October – 11 December 2024 at De Warme Winkel. [The play] premiered at the Holland Festival in June 2023, playing to sold-out audiences for a month in the main hall of theatre hub De Sloot. Due to popular demand, the show is now embarking on a tour across the Netherlands and Belgium.

This masterpiece had a cult status among both queers and conservatives in the previous century, but nowadays, this novel seems to have been consigned to oblivion. Yet, perhaps, it remains the most romantic and Anglophile book literature has ever produced. After the success of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, De Warme Winkel brings another English literary classic to the theatre. Florian Myjer, together with Abke Haring, thrusts Brideshead Revisited into the 21st century.

The secretively autobiographical Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh tells the story of Charles Ryder, who, as a young student at Oxford in the early 20th Century, falls under the spell of the aristocratic Flyte family. One sultry summer long, he basks in their opulent life at the heavenly family country estate, where he falls in love with both the son Sebastian and daughter Julia Flyte. Yet, with the end of summer and the rise of fascism, adulthood also presents itself. No matter how much Charles would like it to, the freedom of those golden August days is not coming back. What had appeared to be the prelude to a radically honest and free-spirited life transpires to be the eve of a desperate and cynical existence.

Trapped in a bitter worldview himself, for Evelyn Waugh writing this novel was an attempt to recover the happiness of his younger years. Inspired by this soul-searching, De Warme Winkel exploits Brideshead Revisited as a vehicle for an autopsy of love and an unfolding of our (sexual) identity. With live music composed by Rik Elstgeest and the memories and fantasies of Florian and Abke as the beating heart, they finally resuscitate the epic love story Waugh so longed for.

The quoted story appeared this week online and in several Dutch and Belgian papers and was translated by Google. Schedule of performances and ticketing are available at this link.

 

 

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh Studies, Lectures, The Loved One, Theater | Tagged | Comments Off on Waugh in Boston and Belgium

Centenary of Waugh’s Coming of Age: 28 October 1924

Posted on October 28, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

Today marks the centenary of Evelyn Waugh’s coming of age on 28 October 1924, his 21st birthday. In Waugh’s diary entry for the following day, he begins: “Yesterday I became a man and put away childish things.” (Diaries, p. 182)  The preceding months had been quite eventful, not always in a positive sense. In the summer Waugh had taken his final exams at Oxford. He resumed his diary about the same time, in June 1924. This describes several weeks of undergraduate celebrations concluding with the news at the end of July that he had passed with a third class degree. One consequence of this is that he went down from Oxford (i.e., dropped out voluntarily) before completing the 9-term residency required for the award of a degree. The poor degree ended his scholarship, and his father refused to pay the bills for the final term. Waugh was at work on a book he calls The Temple of Thatch, which he continued after leaving Oxford but later binned when Harold Acton gave it a decidedly lukewarm report. In late July, Waugh and his Hertford College colleague Terrence Greenidge decided to produce a film, which in due course was completed as The Scarlet Woman. Much of it was filmed in the Waugh family back garden and adjacent portions of Hampstead Heath.

In late September, Waugh started art classes at Heatherley’s School of Fine Arts in London. He reports in his diary that he is pleased with the results in early days and was glad to see the last of Oxford. But then as his university comrades began to return, Waugh drifted toward Oxford on weekends and then for longer periods. In his diary entry, he concludes that “it is not possible to lead a gay life and to draw well.” (Diaries, p. 183) According to his autobiography, his coming of age on 28 October 1924 was observed at his home but “was not celebrated.” (ALL, p. 209) Waugh spent more and more time at Oxford and tried to learn printing nearby but in the end resorted to teaching posts in boarding schools as the source of a livelihood, starting in January 1925 at a school called Arnold House in Llanddulas, Wales.

Share
Posted in A Little Learning, Anniversaries, Diaries, Film: The Scarlet Woman, Hampstead, Oxford | Comments Off on Centenary of Waugh’s Coming of Age: 28 October 1924

Pre-Halloween Roundup

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–A copy of a 1938 passenger list for the SS Aquitania has been posted on Reddit. This contains the opening pages and then an excerpt showing passengers whose names begin with “W”. On that page are listed Evelyn Waugh and his wife. They were on their way to Mexico in July 1938 where he would collect information for the book that became Robbery Under Law. They stopped in New York and made a side trip to Washington, DC, before taking another ship from New York to Veracruz. On the return voyage in October 1938, they travelled by train from Mexico via Laredo, TX to New York where they caught a steamer back to England. Waugh had learned that the air conditioned US railroads were more comfortable (at least in first class) as well as more frequent and faster than ocean going steamers between the US and Mexico.

Another entry on the same page of the excerpted list names identifies as passengers Clifton Webb and his wife. One of the comments assumes this was the well known film actor of that name but another says that he was never married, which is confirmed by Wikipedia. It is possible that Mrs Webb refers to his mother with whom he shared accommodations  during her lifetime.  Here’s a copy of the passenger list as posted on the internet. 

–An interesting article on the “Hollywood novel” is posted in the current edition of the Berkeley-based magazine Dispatches. This is by Scott Saul and the subject is the 1959 novel by Gavin Lambert entitled The Slide Area. British born and Oxford educated, Lambert was a screenwriter and film critic as well as a novelist. He wrote three other novels with Hollywood themes including Inside Daisy Clover (1963) which was made into a film in 1965, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. He later wrote a biography of Wood. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Gavin Lambert struck an unusual tone—at once ironic and affirming—across The Slide Area (1959), his first novel and an unassuming masterpiece of Los Angeles fiction. Its narrator pairs a rare clarity of vision with an even rarer warmth of engagement: he manages to be sharp without being cutting, and sympathetic without being indulgent. If The Slide Area does not deliver the more familiar satisfactions of LA noir in its “scenes of Hollywood life” (as its subtitle has it), it is not because there are no crimes committed—there will be at least one murder, one case of statutory rape, and one case of fraud—but instead because Lambert’s interest lies elsewhere. As Gary Indiana has remarked of Lambert’s fiction more generally, it works to solve “mysteries of personality rather than crimes.”…

Saul mentions several other Hollywood novels in his discussion including this:

…Since we rarely gain insight into what the narrator [of The Slide Area] specifically wants or desires, the action of the novel seems to fill that vacuum: what he most desires, it appears, is simply to know these other people, and through them to understand the city that supports or fails them. He feels as reliable as a first-person narrator can be. While quick to catch and register ironic details in the scenes he dramatizes, as a character he largely acts as a sounding-board for the wide cast of dreamers he meets, his sympathy allowing them to make the best case for their aspirations, or to give voice to their doubts and qualms.

A brief summary of those aspirations suggests how easily they might have been mocked in the satirical manner of, say, Evelyn Waugh in his LA novel The Loved One. We meet a former British schoolmate, who desires only to sun himself on the beach and supports that lifestyle by living with a wealthy man he resents (“Nukuhiva!”); a blind and nearly deaf dowager-countess, still in love with the lost world of aristocratic Austro-Hungary and eager to go on one last Grand Tour, her declining senses and fortune be damned (“The End of the Line”); a middle-aged Hollywood star (based on Joan Crawford) seeking to revive her career through manipulation and force of will (“The Closed Set”); a fourteen-year-old midwestern runaway with a bottomless faith in her future stardom (“Dreaming Emma”); and a scion of a powerful Hollywood agent, erotically drawn to men and women, who drifts from one scrape to another (“Sometimes I’m Blue”). The novel’s main characters tend to be either creatures of ambition or creatures of pleasure, and in the loose structure of The Slide Area serve as foils of one another….

The full article is available on the Dispatches internet site and can be read at this link,

–A brief article has been posted in the political-religious journal The Imaginative Conservative entitled Crimes Against the Humanities: The Tragedy of Modernity. This is by literary journalist Joseph Pearce and opens with this:

One of the most heinous crimes against humanity that modernity has perpetrated is its war on the humanities. And let’s not forget that the humanities are thus called because they teach us about our own humanity. A failure to appreciate the humanities must inevitably lead to the dehumanizing of culture and a disastrous loss of the ability to see ourselves truthfully and objectively.

The follies and fallacies of modernity and their dehumanizing consequences have been critiqued by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century… Evelyn Waugh, in his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, a novel inspired by a line in one of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, lampoons the “hollow men” produced by modernity in his portrayal of the characters of Hooper and Rex Mottram. Hooper had “no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe”…

The complete text is available at this link.

 

 

Share
Posted in Newspapers, Robbery Under Law, The Loved One | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Pre-Halloween Roundup

Roundup: Cousins, Catholics, Allegories and Adaptations

Posted on October 19, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books has posted a review by Neal Acherson of the new biography of Claude Cockburn by his son Patrick.  This in mentioned in a previous post and is entitled “Believe Nothing Until It Has Been Officially Denied”. Here is an excerpt from Acherson’s review:

…Like George Orwell and several other establishment rebels, Claud Cockburn was born overseas, the son of Henry Cockburn, a senior diplomat in Beijing, and his wife, Elizabeth. Two years after his birth in 1904, he was sent back to Britain, soon followed by his parents: Henry had resigned on a complex matter of principle. They settled at Tring in Hertfordshire and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-war’. But the experiences that followed were what shaped his view of the world. His father was appointed to an international ‘clearing house’ supposed to make sense of Hungary’s hopeless finances. The family went to live in Budapest, and Cockburn was plunged into the chaos, misery and brutality of Central Europe, as new nation-states struggled out of the debris of three fallen empires. Hungary had been part of the Habsburg Empire, an enemy power in the war, and Cockburn, hardly out of school, was seized by passionate sympathy for the defeated nations – including Germany. The war, which had cost the lives of 230 Berkhamstead boys, had disillusioned him with patriotism.

At Oxford, he became close friends with his cousin Evelyn Waugh (both were great-grandsons of Lord Henry Cockburn, the brilliant and lovable judge whose memoirs are a late triumph of the Scottish Enlightenment). Their politics were about as far apart as imagination could stretch (Waugh thought his cousin’s obsession with comical foreign countries quite mad), but they made each other laugh. Both joined the Hypocrites club (‘a noisy, alcohol-soaked rat-warren’) where Cockburn fell in love with whisky (‘I got up fairly early... I would then drink a large sherry glass of neat whisky before breakfast and... drink heavily throughout the day’). Astonishingly, his drinking and his later consumption of several packets of Woodbines a day did him little harm…

The book was also reviewed in the Daily Telegraph by Roger Lewis who wrote:  “Cockburn was educated at Berkhamsted, where the headmaster was the father of Graham Greene, and at Keble College, Oxford, where he caroused with Evelyn Waugh. (“We enjoyed not only drink,” Waugh recalled, “but drunkenness.”) Waugh was Cockburn’s cousin: their mutual great-grandfather was Lord Henry Cockburn, solicitor general for Scotland in the 1830s.”

–The religious journal Commonweal Magazine, published in England, has an article by author and academic Phil Klay about Waugh’s claim that he would have been much nastier than he was if not for his Roman Catholicism. Here’s an excerpt:

…It’s a neat anecdote, one that transmutes Waugh’s rougher qualities into an appealing, rakish image. You can imagine him as living out life inside one of his own novels, a charming scoundrel like Basil Seal. Christopher Hitchens dismissed it as “a nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny.” And yet the story feels right, a fitting Waugh story in the tradition of great English writers making quips—Samuel Butler’s “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four,” or Oscar Wilde’s supposed last words: “Either those curtains go or I do.” There’s even something nicely flattering about it. “And you a Catholic!” suggests an era when Catholicism enjoyed higher expectations than it does now. But the story is, in a rather important way, a subtle lie.

…upon reflection I think what actually unsettled me was the way the story shifted my approach to Waugh. I like the Waugh of the quip, not only because he’s more fun to think about but also because he’s easier to dismiss in precisely the way that Hitchens did. I love Waugh’s novels, especially the ones without too much Catholicism in them. Brideshead Revisited stays with me far less than A Handful of Dust, which I first read in fits and snatches during officer candidate school, or the Sword of Honour trilogy, read after I’d been to Iraq and come back with more appreciation for military satire, or even Put Out More Flags, one of the most purely pleasurable novels ever written.

Waugh’s style, his humor, his joyful enthusiasm for puncturing modern delusions, I’ve gleefully gulped down, but his Catholicism—dovetailing as it did with his revulsion toward the modern world, his dismissal of jazz and modern art, his wish to have been born centuries earlier—I’ve held at a distance. I don’t lament being born into a secular age; the medieval world, with its murderous religious zeal, holds no appeal for me. And I look warily at my modern coreligionists who, sometimes with an edgy, Evelyn Waugh–inflected sense of humor, embrace the faith as a repudiation of the world we inhabit. “New York’s hottest club is the Catholic Church,” declared Julia Yost in the New York Times, before sketching out the reactionary subculture that features “Trump hats and ‘tradwife frocks,’ monarchist and anti-feminist sentiments” and whose “ultimate expression…is its embrace of Catholicism.”…

It is quite a thoughtful essay as these religious articles go. Here’s a link to the full text.

–Blackwell’s Books of Oxford has posted an offer for two letters from Evelyn Waugh to members of the Stathatos family. These are from July 1963 and relate to arrangements for John Stathatos, then a high school student in Greece on a summer holiday, to visit Waugh at his home in Somerset. The details of this visit are described in a recent article in Evelyn Waugh Studies (No, 52.2, Fall 2021). Here’s a link. The letters are on offer for ÂŁ450.00 each and may be viewed at this link. Information about a previous auction of what appears to have included these two letters is available here.

–The Spanish paper El Pais carries a story about Glaswegian actor James McAvoy. This relates to his new film Don’t Talk to Strangers. In discussing his career, this appears:

…at 18 [McAvoy] decided to change his life and joined the Royal Navy. And then, suddenly, another unexpected plot twist: just as he was about to become a sailor, he was offered a scholarship to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dramatic Art to study acting. McAvoy finished his studies in 2000 and the industry literally fell for his charms: he played a soldier in the series Band of Brothers (2001) and a high-society bandit in A Scandal with Class [sic] (2003) , an adaptation of Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. But, above all, he was Steve McBride in Shameless (2004/2005), a hugely popular British series set in a dangerous Manchester neighborhood.

Something may have been lost in translation here. There was a film adaptation of Vile Bodies about that time. It was written and directed by Stephen Fry and was entitled, in English, Bright Young Things. The film may have been called something else in Spanish and was retranslated under that title in El Pais. According to Wikipedia, McAvoy appeared in that film adaptation as the character Simon Balcairn. He was a suicidal gossip columnist in Vile Bodies, Ch, 6, not a high-society bandit.  Anyone with knowledge of these matters is invited to comment as provided below.

–Finally, a website called Allegory Explained has an unattributed article relating to Waugh’s novel The Loved One. The text and illustrations lead me to suspect that this may be an Artificial Intelligence production. Not sure what audience it is aimed at. Here’s an excerpt:

…Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One” has had a significant impact on literature, particularly on the genre of satire. The novel’s scathing critique of the American funeral industry and the shallow nature of American culture has influenced many writers in their own works.

One notable example is Tom Robbins’ “Jitterbug Perfume,” which also uses satire to comment on the human condition. Robbins’ novel shares with “The Loved One” a sense of irreverence and a willingness to take on taboo subjects.

Another author who has been influenced by “The Loved One” is Kurt Vonnegut. In his novel “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” Vonnegut uses satire to comment on the excesses of American capitalism. Like “The Loved One,” Vonnegut’s novel is a biting critique of American culture.

Finally, “The Loved One” has also influenced contemporary writers such as Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel “Fight Club” shares with Waugh’s work a sense of dark humor and a willingness to challenge societal norms.

The illustrated text is available here.

COMMENT: Our reader, Hartley Moorhouse,  offered the following helpful comment on the adaptations of Vile Bodies:

You’re quite right to suspect that something has been lost in translation with the article from El País. The film being referred to is indeed Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, which was released in Spain under the completely different title of Escándalo con Clase (it is common for English-language films to be given different, sometimes unrecognisable, titles in Spanish, a cause of much confusion). The phrase used in the article to describe the character of Simon Balcairn is ‘bandido de alta sociedad’; this can loosely be translated as ‘high-society reprobate’, which is perhaps slightly nearer the mark than ‘bandit’.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Auctions, Catholicism, Evelyn Waugh Studies, Letters, Newspapers, The Loved One, Translations, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Columbus Day Roundup

Posted on October 12, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Australian Financial Review carries the story of a new novel that may be of interest. It is written by Pam Sykes:

…Her latest novel, Wives Like Us, skewers the ultra-rich residents of the Cotswolds, a bucolic protected area of England that, incidentally, includes Gloucestershire and its surrounds. Sykes, 54, moved here 15 years ago from London with husband Toby Rowland, a tech entrepreneur and their daughters, Ursula and Tess. In that time, Sykes saw the area become more and more moneyed – and ever more ripe for the sharp end of her pen.

“I see life as a comedy of manners,” she says in a voice that matches her nickname (her parents, both now deceased, were dress designer Valerie Goad, and Mark Sykes, a financier who was convicted of fraud. They called her Victoria). “I see the joke in everything. I turn everything into a joke, however dreadful it is.” Growing up, she hoovered up the works of Nancy Mitford, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh, and at the University of Oxford in the late 1980s developed a taste for the American social observers of the time including Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. “And you know, Jane Austen, of course,” she adds. “I feel I’ve read Pride and Prejudice a million times.”

Sykes has always been a comic writer; her work at Vogue, where she began as an assistant in 1993 (in Britain), deftly married wit with glamour. With Wives Like Us, she took inspiration from her own life in the Cotswolds (where daily challenges include missing peacocks, a problem Sykes herself has contended with)…

The setting comes alive in Sykes’ book, with mentions of Daylesford, the up-market grocer, and other stores. Was she concerned about offending her neighbours, I wonder? Sykes takes a sip of her tea from a gold-lustre cup (she collects them and assures me “You can buy them for under a tenner on eBay”)…

–The website of the University of Minnesota Retirees Association has posted the conclusions of a meeting of its book club on 21 June 2024 at which it discussed Waugh’s novel Scoop. After a summary of the book, the UMRA concluded:

…UMRA Book club members had mixed reactions to the book. Some found it humorous, but many were concerned about the racism and sexism in the writing. Some found it hard to follow the plot, with the two different Boots and large number of characters.

Members also discussed journalistic ethics today, and recent concerns about the Washington Post potentially hiring an editor from England with a history of working on stories that appeared to be based on stolen records…

Here’s a link to the complete posting.

–The New Criterion has a review by David Platzer of an exhibit at the Pompidou Centre in Paris on Surrealism. The article is entitled “Go ask Alice.” Here is an excerpt:

…Surrealism came on the heels of the previous decade’s Dada movement and featured many of the same figures, including AndrĂ© Breton, Surrealism’s pope, famous for his arbitrary excommunications, and Louis Aragon, who eventually became an unrepenting communist but was also a leading poet and the author of the excellent novel AurĂ©lian, of which Evelyn Waugh was a fan…

I was surprised that Waugh would have been a fan of anything associated with Surrealism but was unable to find any reference to his expression of admiration for Aragon’s novel. Anyone knowing of such is invited to file a comment as provided below.

–An essay entitled “Lionel Shriver and the Resistance to Satire” is posted on the Action Institute website. This is by Lee Oser. Here is an excerpt:

… [Shriver] mentions in passing two satirists, Evelyn Waugh and John Kennedy Toole. I would note that Waugh and Toole are out of favor in elect circles, their reputations bobbing haplessly amid the rest of the civilizational debris, tossed overboard since the ship of state hoisted its shiny new flags, all signaling virtue. It is (as Shriver knows) countercultural to mention them. My main point is that the God-idea in Waugh and Toole licenses a good deal of play, connecting them, in their literary descent, to Cervantes and Shakespeare. Quixote and Bottom are the common ancestors of Guy Crouchback and Ignatius Reilly. Pearson does not really belong in their comical and physically exuberant company. She is too intellectually severe, too much the acolyte of her admired Dostoevsky. She is always on point.

“Pearson” is a reference to a character in Shriver’s new novel Mania which was recently reviewed in the New York Times and is the main subject of Oser’s article. This is Pearson Converse who teaches low level writing classes at UPenn. According to Oser, the novel is “a fierce satire of the progressive establishment.” The full article is available at this link.

Comments: Mark McGinness kindly sent the following comments about the Pam Sykes novel mentioned above:

I did enjoy your Columbus Day Round Up.
Plum Sykes, the author of “Wives Like Us”, is indeed the granddaughter of Waugh’s friend and biographer, Christopher Sykes.
Her father, Christopher’s son, Mark Sykes, was the subject of one of those eccentric lives that still occasionally appear in the obits pages of the London papers. The Times of 31 May 2022 described Mark as an “art dealer, gambler and wastrel” and in the context of his father’s friendship with Waugh ..”whose novels Mark appeared to regard as life manuals”
All best wishes, Mark McGinness

Share
Posted in Discussions, Newspapers, Scoop, Sword of Honour | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Early October Roundup

Posted on October 6, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has posted an article by Christopher Howse on “bed rotting”.  Here’s the opening section:

One of my favourite books, Illustrations of Madness by John Haslam (1810), tells of how the unfortunate James Tilly Matthews, plagued by a gang operating an Air Loom from a cellar under London Wall, was subjected to the miseries of lobster-cracking, knee-nailing, bomb-bursting and apoplexy-working-with-the-nutmeg-grater.

He did not mention bed rotting, which on TikTok has attracted 310 million views, though not mine. It must be dull viewing, for bed rotting is nothing more than a jokey name for staying in bed all day not doing much more than watching television and fiddling with a telephone. It’s very popular with people aged 12 to 27 (Gen Z) who feel burnt out, on account of lockdown and parental expectations.

It sounds to me very much like the life of bright young things in Evelyn Waugh, except that they were a trifle more gregarious. In Black Mischief, Sonia and Alastair are in bed during the day, each with a telephone and a goblet of black velvet, a backgammon board between them, and some other people in the room playing the gramophone or trying out Sonia’s make-up. It is clearly very boring. Then the dog makes a mess on the bed…

–Australian writer Nick Bhasin recently had an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he pines for the days when comic novels were widely available. The article opens with this:

I was at an event recently, talking about my novel. It’s a “comic novel” – as in, one that is meant to be funny. When someone asked me what it was similar to, I paused.

There are a lot of influences that inspired the humour but I couldn’t think of one book that would helpfully answer the question. “Is it like A Confederacy of Dunces?” someone else asked. “That’s the only book anyone mentions when people talk about funny novels. No one knows the names of any others.”

No one is writing stories designed to make people laugh any more.Credit: Aresna Villanueva

Could that be true? I wondered…

After ruminating about the relative lack if comic novels currently on offer, Bhasin recalls the 20th century golden age of that genre:

…As part of my research for my book, other than mining the depths of my soul for truth and justice, I looked into other comic novels, new and classic, especially satire. I came across a lot of the usual suspects – famous books I had already been familiar with, often because they had been adapted into movies or TV shows.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

Humour is never taken seriously, even though it is literally the only thing that matters in this short, brutal existence.

Certain authors consistently came up as writers of comic fiction: Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Nathanael West, Nora Ephron, Carl Hiaasen, Evelyn Waugh, Mark Twain, Steve Toltz, Marian Keyes. (A lot of white dudes on these lists, I know. But that’s a conversation for another time.)…

Bhasin’s comic novel is entitled I Look Forward To Hearing From You.  Here’s his description:

…my intention was to write a story designed to make people laugh. Now, the laughs are derived from very dark, very uncomfortable circumstances while exploring “serious” themes like grief, racism, male body dysmorphia and mental illness. But that’s what makes me laugh. I don’t know what to tell you.

So I filled my book with as many jokes as possible. It’s a satire of early 2000s Hollywood, so I made up hundreds of movie and TV-show titles, working very hard to balance the comedy with the sadness. But to me, if it makes people laugh, that’s the bigger achievement. As Judd Apatow has said, “It’s not hard to make people cry. Kill a dog.”…

It is currently for sale in Australia. Thanks to Nick for sharing this.

–A website called BookishBay.com has posted an entry on the life and writing of Evelyn Waugh.  It is very tidy and nicely presented but adds little to Waugh studies. Here’s an item from the opening summary:

Waugh’s contributions to literature remain impactful, with his works continuing to be studied for their wit, social commentary, and stylistic complexity.

The complete posting can be consulted here. No author is mentioned. Somehow, a contribution by AI is suspected.

–One of our readers has forwarded a YouTube posting relating to the recent death of Alexander Waugh. This consists of a well-produced 3-minute compilation of video and audio clips of Alexander relating to his work with the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Here’s the link. Many thanks to Dave Lull for sending it.

Share
Posted in Alexander Waugh, Black Mischief, Internet, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Early October Roundup

Roundup: Decline in Standards and Increase in Price

Posted on September 29, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times has published a sort of interview with William Boyd on the occasion of the publication of his latest novel, Gabriel’s Moon. Here’s an excerpt:

There is no point attempting to whitewash old attitudes. Trying to tidy up the bad behaviour of novelists of the past is misguided and fundamentally a waste of time. But you can certainly alert people that opinions expressed in these books are not opinions we have in polite society today. Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is full of racism. But you can’t possibly go back to Scoop, remove all that and represent it as Evelyn Waugh’s novel. You have to take the rough with the smooth.

The US edition will be published in December. The entire article can be viewed at this link.

—The Guardian has posted an article bemoaning the writing style of the Evening Standard’s new art critics and comparing them unfavorably with their predecessor, the late Brian Sewell:

Who knew the late art critic Brian Sewell was such a tediously cliched writer? Especially since some of the dead verbiage in the London Standard’s AI version of Sewell reviewing Van Gogh at the National Gallery has become common currency only since his death at 84 in 2015.

Give him credit, he had a voice. And it was a posh voice. Evidently the chatbot used by the Standard needs to be fed a lot more novels by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, some Latin perhaps, and a mouthful of plums before it can begin to resemble the public school-educated, Courtauld-trained Sewell, who started his career as the protege of the upper-class art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt…

I seem to be missing the point unless the Guardian thinks the new Standard’s art criticism comes out sounding like an AI production. Or can it be the case that it really is? Here’s a link.

—The Oldie has reposted on its blog an article from last October by A N Wilson in which he also pines for the superior literary criticism of the recent past. Here’s an excerpt:

..Merely to name Powell, Muggeridge and Orwell is to recall an era of literary and journalistic life which seems in every way more interesting than the present scene.

Horizon – between 1939 and 1950. The small-circulation journal was the first to publish Evelyn Waugh’s masterly account of American funerary customs, The Loved One.

Other contributors included AndrĂ© Gide, Rose Macaulay, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen, W H Auden and Kenneth Clark. BĂ©la BartĂłk wrote a piece for it, as did Barbara Hepworth. Distinguished as periodicals might have been in our day, we’ve surely not seen anything to match this?…

The entire article can be read here.

–The Catholic World Report has a story about the re-issuance of the writings of Waugh’s friend, the priest, Dom Hubert van Zeller. Here’s an excerpt:

…Another fascinating aspect of Van Zeller’s life is his close friendships with other much better known Catholic authors, most notably the spiritual writer, scholar, and Bible translator Fr Ronald Knox; the Dominican author Fr Bede Jerret; and the novelist Evelyn Waugh, whose Brideshead Revisited has become a Catholic classic and features in many courses on modern literature.

Zeller recounts Waugh’s reaction to his trip to America: asking Waugh what he thought of their mutual American acquaintance, who was to guide Zeller on his journey, Waugh responded: “[He’s] American. He can’t help it.” Of the same trip, Knox said, “You’ll hate it. They have meals out of heated cardboard boxes
” But van Zeller loved America, and his ministry there gave him a new energy—which was fortunate, since he had a rather melancholic personality. Into the 1970s and ‘80s, van Zeller continued to write, and obtained permission (as many English priests at the time did) to continue celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass.

–Henley booksellers Jonkers have on offer the copy of Waugh’s pre-publication gift version of Brideshead Revisited that belonged to Diana Cooper. Here’s an excerpt from the offer:

First edition. One of fifty pre-publication copies, printed for the author for distribution amongst his friends. Original blue wrappers with yapp edges, with printed labels to upper cover, title label printed in blue, limitation label printed in red. Author’s presentation copy inscribed for Lady Diana Cooper, “For Diana / Too little, but I hope not too late / with love from / Evelyn.” A fine copy, exceptionally so, with the wrappers clean and bright and only the most trivial creasing and wear to the oversized parts. Endpapers foxed as often, but otherwise very clean. A superb copy…

The asking price is £95,000.00!  I think that may be a record.  Does any one recall a higher one?

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Interviews, Miscellaneous, Newspapers, Scoop, The Loved One | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Roundup: Decline in Standards and Increase in Price

Autumnal Equinox Roundup

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–The political-economic online journal Compact has an article entitled “The End of the Churchill Myth.” This is by Nathan Pinkoski who describes how the principles on which Churchill based his war and postwar foreign policy (as adopted, amended and applied by the US) are now being proven to have been myths. The article concludes with this reference to and quote from Waugh’s 1950s novel Sword of Honour, where Waugh foresees this result:

The greatest literary work addressing World War II is Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor, written during the 1950s. The trilogy offers a blunt analysis of Britain’s fate. Yet it bends toward a surprising spiritual denouement. Following the career of Guy Crouchback as he enlists to fight against totalitarianism, the series begins with Waugh’s familiar satire, excoriating the failures of the British leadership class. This satire takes a dark turn in the second novel. Rather than recount the war’s victories, Waugh devoted most of the novel to the humiliating British withdrawal from Crete in 1941. The theme of imperial decline is obvious, but Waugh ultimately offered a more profound lesson. As a passage toward the end of the trilogy intimates, Waugh repudiated the moral myths of the war and gestured in a different, redemptive direction.

‘Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians—not very many perhaps—who felt this. Were there none in England?’

‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’

Here is a link to the entire article.

—The Observer quotes Waugh in an article by Anne McAvoy relating to the recent ownership sale of The Spectator magazine. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“Expect the unexpected” is the bland but pointed advice given by the evasive editor of the Daily Beast to the bemused William Boot, accidental protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s deathless Fleet Street satire, Scoop. This has turned out to be durable counsel when observing the ins and outs of newspaper proprietors: much that is solid has a tendency to melt.

So the Spectator (for which I worked in the late 1990s under the Telegraph Group ownership of Conrad Black) had a long period under the sway of the Barclay family, which has come to a debt-laden crashing close. The weekly magazine has been sold for a reassuringly high £100m to the hedge funder Sir Paul Marshall, after an Abu Dhabi-backed bid to buy it collapsed amid concerns that state-backed entities should not own UK news outlets.

The Daily Telegraph and its Sunday sister have attracted last-round bids from Marshall, a former Lib Dem and later Brexiter (though not at the same time) who has clearly decided that he is prepared to empty considerable pockets into UK media via his backing for the rightwing GB News channel and eclectic UnHerd website. In a donkey derby of remaining bidders, the recipe is ideological with a major injection of investment or private equity cash…

–Waugh’s novel on newspapers also features in a recent story in Financial Times. This is a report by Tim Hayward on a visit to the restaurant Sweetings, located in the City near the newspaper’s offices. It actually took two visits to compile the report. Here’s how the article opens:

This week, I thought I ought to do a business lunch or two. I’m a freelancer, so my relationship with my paper resembles that of William Boot and the Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Occasionally, I put on a suit and take the train down from The Country, to dine, bewildered, with my editor. So I asked her, “Where do you chaps go for your long, champagne-lubricated lunches?” and she seemed a little baffled. My image of the modern fourth estate may be askew. Nevertheless, she suggested Sweetings…

The visits resulted in a favorable and entertaining report which can be read at this link. You may have to register to read the story.

–A recent issue of The Oldie carries a story by Pierre Waugh relating to his experience as a pallbearer at the recent funeral service of his uncle, Alexander Waugh. This is entitled “The Absurd Waugh Family: Pierre Waugh salutes his uncle Alexander (1963-2024), grandfather Auberon and great grandfather Evelyn–and their war on seriousness.” Among other things, he tells us that his uncle Alexander was known within the family as “Pedro”. Pierre Waugh is a post graduate student at Durham University who is currently finishing his MA dissertation on the works of Aldous Huxley.  You may be able to read the entire article at this link, Thanks to reader David Lull for sending the link.

–Film-maker Luca Guadagnino was recently interviewed by the entertainment industry newspaper Deadline. The report on the interview by Baz Bamigboye opens with this:

Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) hopes to revive his dream project to make a mammoth 10-episode television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

Two years ago the director had assembled an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes, Andrew Garfield and Rooney Mara, to lead a 10-part prestige TV version of Waugh’s brilliant study of British upper-class decadence.

But the HBO and BBC production was shelved because of its cost. “It’s a very sad story,” Guadagnino told Deadline late on Sunday night, following a screening at the Telluride Film Festival of his latest film …

For those who are interested, the report includes further details about Guadagnino’s plans for the project. Here’s a link.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Newspapers, Observer, Scoop, Sword of Honour, Television, Waugh Family, World War II | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Autumnal Equinox Roundup