EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 33, No. 1
Spring 2002

My Father the Anarchist
by Alexander Waugh

     In his autobiography, Will This Do?, Auberon Waugh touched on the problem of writing about his father.  “I had thought, at one stage, of a short memoir of Evelyn Waugh but could not decide what to call him: Evelyn?  Unthinkable.  Papa?  Too sentimental.  Waugh?  I did not dare.  The problem remains unresolved . . . .”
     I face the same anxieties now.  To his face I called him Papa (pronounced “Pupper,” not “Puppah,” as he called Evelyn), but I blush to see that word in print.  From here on in, let us call him Edwidge.  He would not have minded in the least, for names were a constant confusion to him, even within the family.
     For the first eight or ten years of my life, he addressed me as “Fat Fool.”  I was very happy with this, even introducing myself at parties as “Fat Fool, pleased to meet you!” but someone earnest must have told him to desist and at some point, Fat Fool disappeared to be replaced with a string of names that weren’t mine: Timmy, Nidge, Roge, Jockey (once when he saw my flies were undone); every time it was different, but I don’t think he ever called me Alexander.  Perhaps the closest he got was “Arlex” in a satirical Scottish accent once or twice.  When my father-in-law (who is also called Alexander) came to stay, Edwidge threw up his hands in dismay.  “This is too confusing,” he said, “I shall have to call you Billy 1 and Billy 2.”  Faces were just as confusing to him as names.  He often upset people by failing to recognize them, but the problem was much graver than they realized.  He once sat next to one of my sisters on a train and talked to her for ten minutes, eventually inquiring “Do you have children of your own?”  Sophia was stunned.  “It’s me!” she cried.  “Ah, Sophia, how lovely to see you!”
     Edwidge was a workaholic, up at crack of dawn, writing till lunch time, back after lunch at his desk, there until supper, often retiring to the library after supper as well, all through the holidays, even on Christmas Day.  He could not live without his work and on the rare occasions that he rested would feel distinctly queer: “For a week I have done no work at all,” he wrote in his diary, “and marvel at the stamina of the English, who somehow manage to do none all their lives.  After a few days, I found myself in a state of nervous exhaustion and moral collapse.”
     But his workaholism somehow never excluded other passions.  He was a brilliant croquet player, loved bridge, collected polished stones and, as is well known, was an expert on wine and libel law, but ultimately he strove only for simple pleasures.  “I would be surprised,” he said, “if there is any greater happiness than that provided by a game of croquet played on an English lawn through a summer’s afternoon, after a good luncheon and with a reasonable prospect of a good dinner ahead.”  Inevitably, with his mind so much on his work, there was a detectable va et viens between the articles he was writing and the conversations we had at meal times.  When I was chucked by a school girlfriend and made a pimply speech to the whole family, he listened quietly as I squeaked and squealed “I never want another girlfriend as long as I live!” (hammering the table)  “Girls are odious!”  The next day Edwidge called me into the library for a talk—an extremely rare event that must have happened no more than three times in my life.  I was apprehensive and stood stiffly in front of his desk waiting for him to speak: “My dear boy,” he said, “the anus was designed for the retention and expulsion of faecal matter, not for the reception of foreign organs, however lovingly placed there.”  I left the room, clutching my sides with laughter and was not surprised to see the sentence repeated a few years later in an article he wrote for the Spectator.
     As a rule he hated bossing as much as he hated being bossed and so, as children, we were seldom if ever disciplined by him.  He believed that good behavior, particularly good manners, were taught by example and could never be learned by any system of punishment however subtly contrived.  If anyone tried to boss him, he would automatically do the reverse to that which the bosser had intended.  His pathological dislike of politicians was grounded in a belief that they only entered politics in the first place to satisfy craven power urges.  “The problem with democracy,” he wrote, “is that it is not democracy at all but a zealotocracy or rule by enthusiasts.  This is a polite way of saying that as many bossy people as possible get a chance to throw their weight around.  It may be lovely for bossy people who like deciding how the rest of us should live, but it is hell for those at the receiving end.”
     Walking into Westminster Cathedral for a memorial service a few years ago, he spotted a bright plastic sign stuck to its medieval doors, a circular traffic-style notice with a picture of an ice cream and a diagonal red line drawn across it.  “Fascists!” he said as he walked past.  If he had had the time, I am sure he would have doubled back to buy an ice cream and lick it noisily during the service.  When scootering by a river in France, he once saw a sign ordering an “INTERDICTION FORMELLE DE JETER DANS L’EAU ET SUR SES DEPENDANCES DES ANIMAUX MORTS (Volaille comprises) ET DES ORDURES < Decret du 6-2-32 ART. 56” and immediately set off to find a dead animal: “It had never occurred to me before that it might be fun to throw dead animals into the water,” he wrote, “but this notice, advertising a formal interdiction, could only be interpreted as an open invitation to join in what was presumably a traditional French sport.  It was beyond reasonable hope that I would find a dead chicken or duck, but I remembered seeing a dead hedgehog on the road some miles back.  Unfortunately, it proved inseparable from the tarmac of which it had already begun to form a part, and it was while I was trying to run over a green lizard, the size of a small crocodile, that I fell off my mobilette and suffered the sort of injuries which would cause any self-respecting British worker to draw sick benefit for a year, if not for the rest of his life.”
     During the course of his career, he made many enemies but seemed to enjoy them every bit as much as his friends; both reduced him to laughter in the same happy way.  He laughed too as he watched the news on television; not sneering, chuckling I should say, with genuine mirth as one politician after another held forth in lugubrious tones about health, the economy or whatever.
     The last time I saw Edwidge he was dead.  I do not propose to dwell on that here, but the time before, the last time we actually spoke, there was a brief exchange, till he lost consciousness.
     “Ah, a little bird has come to see me!  How delightful!”
     “No, Papa, it’s me!  I suppose you must have thought I was a bird because I was whistling as I came up the stairs!”
     “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” he remarked with a twinkle in his eye.  I could not be surprised that the last thing he said to me was intended as a joke, as I suspect his first words to me were funny too.  He was a quiet man who did not speak much and never held forth but reacted to other people always succinctly and always with a curious, clever or delightfully babyish take.
     As a father, Edwidge was inexhaustibly generous (as he was also to those outside the family); he was fair, affectionate, warm and doggedly loyal.  The bravery of his nepotism was stunning, and he would never pass an opportunity to plug his children in the press if he felt they had done something well.  It was no accident that in the last piece he ever wrote, only a month before his death, he publicly extolled Bon Voyage!, a musical farce that my brother Nathaniel and I had written, composed and produced at Notting Hill Gate.  “In the spirit of the times,” he wrote, “it may be found slightly rougher than anything that would have been encouraged at the Savoy Theatre under D’Oyly Carte, but the same humor is there, the memorable, even breathtaking tunes and above all the same assurance that there is an intelligent, skeptical England surviving under all the rubbish we see on television.  Bon Voyage! is a delight and joy, and I am proud to have fathered the two geniuses responsible for it.” 
     The truth is he was a delight and a joy to have as a father.  We were a lucky lot to have been his children and shall carry our pride with us, like medals pinned to our bosoms, till the day we drop.

Will this do?
Oh yes indeed.
You gave us
what we so sorely need.
For some, a swift kick in the arse.
For others, a violent belly laugh.
Few were spared your scrutinor's glass
as you deftly honed your craft.
And now you're gone.
To some, relief.
To others, a rippling sense of grief.
A void is left
where silence fell.
When it will cease
no one can tell.
You possessed what
the poseurs so desperately seek--
the courage to wield
a voice unique.

© 2001 by B. Douglas Russell

Post Mortem
by Sebastian Perry

     When Nancy Mitford reported Nicholas Nabokov's desire to turn The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold into an opera, Waugh's response was in the affirmative, "if I may sing in it & design the scenery."  Those entertained by the idea of Waugh on stage may be intrigued by the English Chamber Theatre's Dearest Nancy, Darling Evelyn, a dramatization of his lengthy correspondence with Mitford.  Fenella Fielding, who (if you recall as I do) literally smouldered in Carry on Screaming, plays Nancy to a corpulent Roger Hammond's Waugh.  Seeing the fourth-ever performance in Dorking, I was struck by the skill with which 600 pages of letters have been pruned and compressed into a dialogue of two 50-minute halves, without either figure being unduly misrepresented.  Jane McCulloch, who devised and directed the show, admits the process was a challenge, more so than her previous adaptation of the correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill.  While those men's letters were in the public domain, in this instance she had to seek the approval of the Mitford Estate, the Waugh Estate ("more difficult") and Charlotte Mosley, whose edition of the letters she was using.  "We finally arrived at a version that all three were happy with."
     Because Waugh and Mitford remained in contact until his death in 1966, the second half is unavoidably downbeat.  Waugh's failing health and waning interest in life make for a saddening diminuendo.  My only gripe is that, even in the first half, the play is frustratingly deficient in the mildest of histrionics.  Letter-writing is obviously a private and sedentary activity, but this is the first time I've been to a play where the audience was more active than the protagonists.  Even the narrator who occasionally interrupts their conversation spends most of his time in an armchair.  I'm not aware of an immediate way to circumvent this problem, though it might help if all three actors weren't reading from their scripts.  These objections aside, Dearest Nancy, Darling Evelyn is a production worth looking out for when it reappears this Autumn.  Its judicious selection of material, from bizarre anecdotes (like the one involving Graham Greene's genitals) to priceless examples of Waugh's overbearing pedagogy ("You do not understand the meaning of the word 'eke'"), successfully evokes the peculiar nature of their relationship and inspires the wish to read the whole thing.  It's also refreshing to find the sharp-tongued Waugh occasionally meeting his match.  "I can't agree that I must be debarred from ever mentioning anything to do with your creator," Nancy retorts after a rebuke from Waugh.  "Try & remember that he also created me."  As McCulloch warns us, "I don't think anyone should under-estimate her brilliance."

Editor's Note
A promotion can be viewed at www.tanorea-music.com/drama/11.html.  

Relative Values
by Simon Whitechapel

     Waugh once wrote of the poet Stephen Spender (1909-1995) that "to see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee" (Tablet, 5 May 1951).  This is not an emotion likely to be experienced by any reader of Waugh, who wrote more often like an angel than like an ape, but nevertheless his prose does have one great and puzzling flaw.  He did not avail himself of the full richness and delicacy of the English language, because he did not use its relative pronouns well.  In other words, he consistently used "which" when he should have used either "that" or nothing at all.  This is puzzling not only because he violates the genius of the language, but also because he would have been clearly warned against it by H.W. Fowler (1858-1933), to whom he professed great devotion and who wrote with his brother Frank (1871-1918) in The King's English (1906): 

'THAT' is evidently regarded by many writers as nothing more than an ornamental variation for 'who' and 'which', to be used, not indeed immoderately, but quite without discrimination.  This confusion is to be regretted; for although no distinction can be authoritatively drawn between the two relatives, an obvious one presents itself.  The few limitations on 'that' and 'who' about which every one is agreed all point to 'that' as the defining relative, 'who' or 'which' as the non-defining. (2nd ed., ch. 2, Syntax, Relatives)

      Waugh began his career using the relatives well, though a strict Fowlerian might demand no relative at all in these examples from the opening pages of Decline and Fall (1928): 

Little suspecting the incalculable consequences that the evening was to have for him, he bicycled happily back from a meeting of the League of Nations Union. 

Now it so happened that the tie of Paul's old school bore a marked resemblance to the pale blue and white of the Bollinger Club.  The difference of a quarter of an inch in the width of the stripes was not one that Lumsden of Strathdrummond was likely to appreciate.  ("Prelude")  

It is the pedantic Dr Fagan who uses "which" as a defining relative early in Decline and Fall: 

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.  ("Vocation")  

Later, Waugh himself succumbs too and uses what is otherwise a rare defining "which": 

It was called King's Thursday, and stood on the place which since the reign of Mary had been the seat of the Earls of Pastmaster.  ("King's Thursday")

     This mixture of forms, with defining "which" more and more prevalent, is found throughout Waugh's work.  In Work Suspended (1942), for example, he uses three forms of the defining relative in a couple of pages, two of them in contiguous lines: 

He was one of the very few people I corresponded with when I was away.  (Work Suspended and Other Stories, Penguin: 1982, ch. 5, p. 132) 

It was precisely this fear that had been working in my mind for days, the fear of making myself a sitting shot to the world.  It lay at the root of the problem of privacy; the choice which torments to the verge of mania.  (133) 

     There's a similar mixture in A Little Learning (1964):

 I longed for the loan of the Time Machine--a contraption with its saddle and quartz bars that was plainly a glorification of the bicycle.  ("Heredity," Sidgwick and Jackson: 1973, p.7)  

Sir Osbert Sitwell named his grand autobiography from the left hand, which by repute reveals the characteristics we inherit at birth.  (8) 

[A]ny face, beautiful or hideous, can be composed of a few elements that can be recognised piece-meal in family portraits.  (8) 

It was her change of religion which caused her sisters-in-law, when she remarried, to remove my grandfather from her keeping and take him into their care.  (9) 

It's difficult to see what principles Waugh is following, though rare occurrences of relative "that" in Sword of Honour (1952-61) seem to be triggered when the antecedent is governed by a preposition: 

He shifted his legs among the legs that crossed and crowded in the twilight.  (Men at Arms, 3-vol Penguin, Book I, ch. 5, p. 68 ) 

Claire looked at him.  'Angus who?' he asked with a distaste that was near malevolence. (Officers and Gentlemen, Book I, ch. 6,  231 ) 

It seems possible that Waugh used "that" by instinct more often than this, but miscorrected to "which" during revision by a depraved taste he had succumbed to more and more after writing Decline and Fall.  He was not a great innovator, but he was a great stylist, writing prose of a purity and limpidity that remain unsurpassed, and this flaw is both puzzling and worthy of further study.  

Book Reviews
The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, by Evelyn Waugh.  Boston: Little Brown, 1999.  536 pages.  $29.95.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis.  © 2000 Commonweal Foundation, reprinted with permission.  Commonweal Magazine

     In the 1980s, Auberon Waugh gave me permission, on the condition that the result was never to appear in England, to collect and publish what he called scraps from his father's wastebasket in Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice: The Early Writings, 1910-1927.  Now eighteen stories from that volume and twenty-one previously collected and more widely-known works of short fiction have been gathered in what the dust-jacket flap calls "a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius" that, as the publicity release maintains, shows that Waugh "was also a master of the short form."  
     While this is an extreme if not outrageous claim, one can agree that these stories are recognizably the work of Evelyn Waugh for, as the novelist-dramatist-essayist Frank Chin says of his own work, "It's all part of the same kit."  This is most noticeable in the names of the characters who inhabit what the earlier anthologist Charles Rolo called "the world of Evelyn Waugh."  Like an old-fashioned Hollywood studio magnate, Waugh had a repertory company, and he liked to keep them busy.  Alastair Trumpington and Margot Metroland appeared in Decline and Fall, the first novel of 1928, and intermittently, in character or cameo parts in the novels and some of these stories, until their farewell thirty-five years later in "Basil Seal Rides Again," which collects other characters from Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags. Three of the stories are spin-offs from the novels.  "By Special Request" is the ending for the serial version of A Handful of Dust, written because key parts of the original ending had already been sold in story form as "The Man Who Liked Dickens."  "Incident in Azania," though it uses the setting and some of the characters of Black Mischief, was not, from the evidence of the novel's manuscript, ever intended to be part of the novel but is a kind of jeu d'esprit based on a story about a faked kidnapping in China. "Charles Ryder's Schooldays," written and soon abandoned in Waugh's post-war slump and based on his own schoolboy diaries, is a prequel to Brideshead Revisited. 
     Some of the stories are linked to the novels in more subtle ways, for after the fact it is clear that they served as drafts, and sometimes parts-bins, for further and more substantial work to come.  The dissolute doctor who fakes a death certificate in Waugh's undergraduate story "Edward of Unique Achievement" is resuscitated for Decline and Fall, as is the charming, vacuous young woman from "On Guard" for "Lucy Simmonds."  "An Englishman's Home" satirizes the cult of the country, to which Waugh was himself rather quizzically subscribing in the late 1930s, but it also borrows some of the country dialect from Scoop and anticipates the naïve and complacent householders upon whom the awful refugee children are visited in Put Out More Flags.  "Compassion" was clearly a holding action to fix in Waugh's imagination the setting and theme for the climactic scene in the last volume of the war trilogy Sword of Honour, completed a dozen years later. 
     Perhaps the most interesting links are with A Handful of Dust.  The couple who drift into a low-key adulterous triangle in "Love in the Slump" anticipate the more serious issues confronted in that novel.  "The Man Who Liked Dickens" is so tightly connected to the novel that carbon-copy pages of the story dealing with the man who keeps the explorer captive to read to him, lightly edited, are part of the manuscript.  Waugh said that after he wrote the story, he "wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man's helpless plight among them."  Still, the differences between story and novel are more revealing than the similarities.  In the first, the explorer, lost and alone, "seemed anaesthetized and was chiefly embarrassed by the behaviour of the inhabitants who came out to meet him in footman's livery, carrying his dinner.  Many people who knew him in London appeared and ran round him with derisive cries, asking him questions to which he could not possibly know the answer.  His wife came, too, but she soon disappeared, like all the others."  Compare this with the lengthy passage which encapsulates characters and themes in the novel, the delusory vision of Hetton that ends with the butler's line, "The City is served."  The city, of course, turns out to be Mr. Todd's clearing--a reduction to the essentials of paternity and power of the sentimental Gothic world for which Tony longed. 
     This story is successful because more than two-thirds of it is presented.  Other ideas must have seemed to Waugh too good to throw away but not good enough to develop fully.  Or, to use one of his favorite analogies, good enough to use in the sauce but not good enough to cellar, age, and bring to the table for later delectation.  Sometimes he is shameless, as in "A House of Gentlefolks" (1927), when he interrupts the tale of an ingenuous young nobleman whose candor and taste undercut London pretensions with "sometimes Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel" and hurries toward the end.  One could forgive the impatience and poverty of a young writer, but Waugh did much the same thing twenty years later in "Scott-King's Modern Europe," where the omniscient author frequently intrudes to account for elisions and suppressions in the tale.  
     Sometimes Waugh could get away with summary instead of scene because, as his novels show, he could abstract and summarize character and situation very well indeed.  But in the novels, unlike even fairly successful stories like "On Guard" and "Winner Take All," summary was intermixed with dialogue and action to constitute an effective whole.  In the stories, summary too often has to do all the work. Still, the collection is worth reading for the prose, summary or not.  Like his character Ludovic, Waugh liked writing in different ways about different things, and he was a master of pastiche: from the debutante argot of "On Guard" through the geo-political metaphors of the Auden circle in "My Father's House" to the ripe, romantic strains of the opening paragraphs of "Love Among the Ruins."  Or, in some phrases and whole descriptions, of his own work, as in the description of Basil's young rival in "Basil Seal Rides Again," lifted from Black Mischief.  
     The real reason for publishing and for reading this collection is, of course, Waugh's style.  Whether in the early plain style or the enriched, ornate Mandarin found in the two Work Suspended chapters in this collection that was further elaborated in Brideshead Revisited, Waugh coined startling phrases that then seem inevitable, as in the description of paintings like "those vague assemblages of picnic litter which used to cover the walls of the Mansard Gallery in the early twenties."  As this phrase shows, style is not just a command of sound and rhythm but of the temper and time of a period.  And those qualities, and not these stories, ensure Waugh's place in the literature of our century.

Editor's Note
     The American edition is based on The Complete Short Stories and Selected Drawings, by Evelyn Waugh, ed. Ann Pasternak Slater.  London: Everyman's Library, 1998.  595 pp.  £10.99.  The English edition includes a select bibliography, a chronology (author's life, literary context, historical events), a textual note on sources, details of first publication, and a 33-page introduction by Pasternak Slater, a Fellow at St. Anne's College, Oxford.  As she concludes, "In this collection we are privileged to enter the studio of this scavenger and supreme craftsman, to watch him at work, and admire his array of polished, completed artefacts."  These artefacts include 47 drawings, woodcuts, dust jackets, and bookplates by Waugh, many unpublished since the 1920s.
     The American edition has recently gone on sale.  It is available for $7.95 from Edward R. Hamilton, Bookseller, or for $7.98 from Amazon.com.  

The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography, by Douglas Lane Patey.  Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.  448 pp.  $59.95.  Paperback, 2001.  $24.95.  Reviewed by Sebastian Perry.

     If Evelyn Waugh took active steps to encourage popular perception of him as snob and right-wing reactionary, he was in a sense only giving the public what it wanted.  When, in June 1960, he reluctantly agreed to participate in the BBC television series Face to Face, the questions posed by interviewer John Freeman were of a sort all too familiar.

To my literary and aesthetic tastes, to the problems of construction and style, to the places where I had travelled and the people I had met, to my habits of work, to all in fact which constitutes the literary life, he was indifferent.  (Patey 346)

What distinguishes Douglas Lane Patey's biography from previous efforts in the field is that it concentrates almost entirely on those aspects of his life that Waugh himself thought most important and, in the case of his artistic vocation and his religion, inextricable.  The result is a detailed and unexpectedly likeable portrait that complements rather than supersedes other recent studies.  While J. H. Wilson has dedicated an entire volume to Waugh's childhood, adolescence and undergraduate days,[1] Patey (perhaps sharing his subject's scorn for the "Voodoo, Bog-magic" of psychology[2]) allows that period only fifteen pages.  Nor does he wish to better Selina Hastings's vivid account of Waugh as socialite, soldier, cuckold and curmudgeon, choosing instead to compensate for her scant literary criticism and puzzling inattentiveness to Waugh's religious beliefs.[3]  Adopting a position akin to C. S. Lewis's on Milton (i.e., that Waugh without his theology is like "centipedes when free of their irrelevant legs, or Gothic architecture without the pointed arches"[4]), Patey examines the novels in the light of his spiritual concerns.  It is tempting to regard Waugh's Catholicism as a fait accompli, but in fact he spent a lifetime attempting to reconcile his creed with his artistic gifts.  His fiction, Patey argues, was where he gradually formulated his sense of an individual's ordained purpose sub specie aeternitatis, culminating in Sword of Honour's exempla, Guy Crouchback and his doppelgänger Ludovic.  Brideshead Revisited, which Patey calls "a masterpiece" (xvii), is lovingly and sensitively elaborated upon over a whole chapter; even the pietistic Helena is made to seem much more interesting than a first reading of it would suggest.  More startlingly, Patey propounds the thesis that, far from being works of frothy frivolity or nihilistically black humour (as has long been assumed), Waugh's pre-Brideshead, "comic" novels are serious and fundamentally Christian in their preoccupations and satiric intent--even those that pre-date his conversion.  Patey is a first-rate literary critic, but I cannot help feeling that his persuasive and exhaustive defence of this assertion constitutes something of a Pyrrhic victory.  If two generations of benighted critics have propagated the "tenacious myth" of these novels' playful secularism (58), Waugh must be held at least partly responsible for this persistent misunderstanding.  "All literature," wrote Waugh in 1961, "implies moral standards and criticisms--the less explicit the better"[5].  By explicating the mechanics of Waugh's didacticism so thoroughly, Patey risks inadvertently putting the reader off the very works whose virtues he is seeking to promote.
     Waugh left behind him a substantial corpus of non-fiction, including travel writing, biography and political journalism.  Patey gives this often neglected material merited consideration in his appraisal of the man.  Rarely (by his own admission) an original thinker, Waugh was nonetheless a serious one, and Patey does him justice by putting his opinions in their political and historical context.  The intellectual currents that Waugh swam in and against, as well as the events at home and abroad that affected his writing, are succinctly but lucidly explained.  That said, I would have liked to see more discussion of the Second Vatican Council: the two pages granted it hardly seem proportionate to the cataclysmically dispiriting effect it had on Waugh's final years.  Nevertheless, Patey has provided the layman and the devotee alike with an indispensable guide to the writer and the vagaries of his century.  I suspect The Life of Evelyn Waugh will be a well-thumbed reference tool for many years to come.

Notes
1.) Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography, 1903-1924 (1996).
2.) Marginalia in EW's copy of Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (Patey 36).
3.) Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (1994).  See p. 508 in the 1995 paperback, where she misleadingly suggests Waugh thought John Betjeman damned for being a member of the Church of England.
4.) C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942; Oxford UP, 1960), 65.
5.) Letter to the Spectator, October 1961.  Letters of Evelyn Waugh (1980; Phoenix, 1988), 574.

License to Kill?
Mischief in the Sun: The Making & Unmaking of The Loved One, by Robert Murray Davis.  Troy, NY: Whitston, 1999.  136 pp.  $18.50.  Reviewed by B. Douglas Russell.

     It has been said that a camel is a greyhound designed by a committee.  Anyone doubting that apothegm need only read this book and its credence will hit one squarely between the eyes with refulgent force.
            Robert Murray Davis, a scholar with some nine books either written or edited on Evelyn Waugh to his credit, has mined his thirty-plus years of research on Waugh along with a myriad of other prime source material to tell the story of the innervating and enervating circumstances surrounding the conception, gestation, deliverance, kidnapping and attempted murder of Waugh’s satirical masterpiece The Loved One.  The book spans the last twenty years of Waugh’s life (1946-1966).            
     The result is a success as an enjoyment on both biographical and historical terms: one is tempted to use the word “romp,” but one refrains.  The bizarre story unfolds in a manner worthy of Waugh, for it contains a veritable compost heap of satirical possibilities in terms of character and characters (some sublime, most ridiculous); plot twists; the inane, insane, unctuous and tendentious; the smarmy, crass and tasteless; the devious and demented; follies and foibles; abstemiousness and excess; narcissism and prostitution (professional, not sexual).  Of course, the majority of these possibilities were not lost on Waugh and were adeptly used in his journalism and, most notably, in The Loved One.  However, it is the episodes that surround the film adaptation (I use the term here loosely) of The Loved One, a process from which Waugh was maddeningly excluded, and which comprise the last frenetic chapter of Davis’s book that delivers some of the sauciest bite.  The reader is launched into the surreal world of Hollywood directors, writers, producers, actors, censors and studios.  It’s a bit like Brussels meets South Africa in Salvador Dali’s dustbin.  Truth is truly stranger than fiction.  Especially when one realizes that this was surely no isolated incident.             
     The first four chapters of Mischief in the Sun deal with the events that conspired to spark the gleam in Waugh’s eye where The Loved One is concerned.  We find Waugh in the midst of the bitterly cold winter of 1946 longing for flight from the loathsome “occupation” and privations of the Attlee government, facing a creative stalemate with his work and wanting to give Laura, his wife––who had endured the years of Waugh’s military service displaced to the home of her redoubtable mother, Mary Herbert, to raise her children, nanniless, alongside a brood of evacuee children from the cities––her first real holiday in seven long years.  As frequently occurred throughout their long association, Waugh’s agent, the ingenious A. D. Peters, pulled a very fat rabbit out of the hat and Waugh and his good lady were off to Hollywood via New York in very grand style on M-G-M’s tick.  Waugh asked Peters to arrange for “luxury not lionization”––which he accomplished in spades, though not without some grave misgivings.  The trip was to discuss the possibilities of making Brideshead Revisited into a major motion picture.  As Davis notes, Peters felt certain that if “Waugh went to Hollywood, the project was probably doomed.”  And so he did.  And so it was.
     Davis does an excellent job of limning dismal post-war Britain of the late 40s; Waugh’s restlessness, both professional and personal; his stilted gourmandism; the cruise; the annoying allure of a US that emerged from the same war as the British sans food shortages and ration books; the Waughs' time in New York; their trip by rail to California; the arrival in Hollywood with its attendant horrors, fascinations and frustrations; Waugh’s “dealings” with the studio and his introduction to Forest Lawn and the idée fixe that resulted, through the nifty use of agglomerated source material.  And he does so with a droll alacrity.  The book certainly has pace.  Of Waugh’s decision to have piles surgery three weeks prior to the American trip, Davis writes: “It seems at least as likely that he had the operation because, at loose ends and not knowing what to do about his career, he was at least taking some action.”  Indeed.
     Readers will be pleased to see that during Waugh’s sojourn in Hollywood, he crossed paths with the famous and infamous.  Randolph Churchill puts in an appearance (“a disgusting two days,” wrote Waugh), as does Simon “Pouncer” Elwes.  Waugh has tea with Anne Mae Wong (once his favorite actress), and spends some time with Merle Oberon, Nigel Bruce, Sir Charles Mendl, Louis B. Mayer, Iris Tree and Charlie Chaplin, amongst others. 
     Of special interest in the third chapter are excerpts from the Production Code Administration's (a powerful organization, under an Irish Catholic by the name of Joseph Ignatius Breen, to whom the studios turned “to protect them and their audiences from themselves”) guidelines on adultery, Waugh’s five-page memorandum (entirely reproduced) to “script-writers and all engaged in the production” of the film, and excerpts from Breen’s final judgment on both the novel and prospect of turning same into a film.  This last is particularly risible as compared to what happens almost twenty years later in terms of liberties taken with the The Loved One.
     The seeds for The Loved One were unwittingly planted along the way by Waugh’s own mercenary approach to the trip (“the European raiders who come for the spoils & if they are lucky make for home with them”), a headwaiter on the train (who is credited with telling Waugh: “We are all foreigners in this country”), a Mrs. Marquerite Cullman (a fellow passenger on the train, she recommended among other things that Waugh take in the pet cemetery), Lady Milbanke (who told Waugh about Forest Lawn and described it as “one of the most beautiful, artistic, and consoling places she had ever seen”), the studio executives, the Production Code Administration and the “guiltily sensitive” ex-pat community (further bolstered Waugh’s chauvinistic view of “the Anglo-American impasse”) and, of course, Death (memento mori).  Waugh alludes to all of the above in a letter to Cyril Connolly explaining the motives behind The Loved One: Connolly had agreed to publish the story, devoting the entire Christmas issue of Horizon to it, but apparently had some anxiety about doing so.  Waugh, uncharacteristically, asked for no fee, but rather that his subscription be renewed.
     Something he doesn't mention to Connolly, and which Davis points out, is the inspiration drawn from Henry James (a writer whom Waugh had discovered in middle age and considered “an enormous, uncovenanted blessing”) and possibly Aldous Huxley and Nathaniel West.  Davis asserts that in The Loved One, James’s “plots were replicated, a little askew, in the romance between the young American girl . . . and a charming, well-educated man who by any normal standards would have received James’s most delicate condemnation.” 
     Chapters five and six find Waugh back in England with “the spoils” and are devoted to the gestation and deliverance of the novel.  Despite hard labor and a breech birth, The Loved One is safely issued. Davis, again, makes the reader feel a part of the process.  Waugh was delighted with his product.  Peters was “appalled.”  Harold Matson, Peters’s American counterpart, couldn’t find any takers: Good Housekeeping called the story “gruesome” and “mad-making.”  Chapman and Hall in London and Little, Brown in Boston had coeval concerns, which primarily centered on marketing a story so short and fear of litigation––not necessarily in that order.  Davis lists a number of these worries.  Lawyers were consulted.  One of the chief issues was “whether a poet who was also English had ever been employed in a pets’ cemetery and . . . whether any employee of Forest Lawn had both a mother and a parrot.”  Waugh shared the cost (US$477.69) for that opinion, made some minor changes and agreed to write a “Warning” by way of introduction to those brave or misguided souls who happened to buy the book.  Waugh presaged that the book would greatly offend Americans: as before, he was wrong or, as Davis more diplomatically puts it, he “underestimated trans-Atlantic resilience.”  The first American edition went through some five printings before its counterpart was published in England.
     Chapter seven is simply amazing.  As mentioned, it involves the abduction and attempted murder of Waugh’s story by a stellar cast from the theatre of the absurd.  To get an idea of the fiasco Davis so deliciously serves up, imagine that the men who are credited with writing the various books of the Bible gather together and decide, ultra vires, that they are each going to rewrite the entire Book simultaneously and without the aid of divine inspiration or, for that matter, the input of the Creator, while at the same time dropping acid; once complete, the apostle Peter collects and compares notes, picks and chooses from what he thinks best in the original, while at the same time improving on and contemporizing the master.  This is precisely what director Tony Richardson and a slew of scriptwriters (including Hugo Butler and Luis Buñuel, Elaine May, Charles Eastman, Christopher Isherwood, Terry Southern and Richardson) attempted to do with Waugh’s novel.  Even Jessica Mitford consulted on the film.  Richardson is quoted as saying he would keep “the basic characters and situations,” but decided to “update and expand its satire to include everything from retirement villages to the California real estate boom.”  Waugh was not pleased.  Richardson defended his position by claiming he tried to “think of what Waugh himself might find to react to in contemporary Los Angeles, then use the book as a springboard to take off from [emphasis added].”  Odd he didn’t just ask Waugh.
     Davis gives the reader a very real sense of the hectic, confused and inevitably doomed process of bringing The Loved One to the screen through his use of the copious drafts of the script found in the Herrick Library.  The plethora of accretions to the original screenplay (by Butler and Buñuel), despite organization on the part of the library, must have been daunting.  One singularly pathetic margin note reads, “Rewrite and make funny.”
     It didn’t work.  Davis notes that “most of the people involved in making The Loved One––Southern a notable exception––were talented, and it took a great deal of very hard work to create what most critics agree is a very bad movie indeed.”  The finished product, peopled though it was with Liberace, Jonathan Winters, John Gielgud, Rod Steiger, Robert Morse and Robert Morley, was an unmitigated disaster.  Where was the Production Code Administration when they were needed?
     Stanley Kauffmann summed up the thought of most critics when he wrote, “the best that film-makers could have done with [the novel] was to leave it alone; but the difficulties of filming it do not excuse the barbarously botched version.”
     Interestingly, Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor all, at one time or another, expressed interest in being a part of a filmed version of The Loved One.
     Waugh, in a letter to Nancy Mitford, wrote that the film was “a great annoyance” to him.  About the best thing that came about from the film, which was released in 1965 (a year and a little before Waugh’s death), is that it returned the creation unequivocally to its creator, and in the process generated much positive discussion of Waugh, his talents, and praise for the novel.
     My only real complaints are niggardly, but nevertheless I include them.  There are a number of grammatical and typographical errors throughout the book: enough anyway to be irksome; especially as a Ms. Jeanette G. Harris is acknowledged for having read “the manuscript critically and carefully.”  There is also a strange double spacing employed at the end of sentences and sometimes between words. Another slight annoyance is that Davis has adapted for the purposes of this book previously published material.  While there is nothing wrong with that, there are a few instances where one comes across almost word-for-word repetitions.  It just strikes me that these redundancies could have been handled by Davis more seamlessly.  One hopes that if the book sees another printing, and one sincerely hopes it does, that Whitston and Davis will make the necessary corrections.  But these are really only mild irritants in what is otherwise both a captivating read and valuable record of “the making and unmaking of The Loved One.”

Two Stories by Travelman
     Two of Evelyn Waugh's stories have been republished in England.  "On Guard" and "Bella Fleace Gave a Party" appeared in an innovative format produced by Travelman Publishing in 1998.  The two stories are printed on either side of a single sheet that folds like a map.  Conveniently packaged for travel, the stories come in a plastic cover with a resealable flap.  The package includes an envelope so that one can send the stories to someone else.  Travelman publishes a large number of stories in various categories: Classics, Suspense, Adventure, Science Fiction, Comedy, Crime, and Romance.  ("On Guard" and "Bella Fleace" comprise Travelman Comedy No. 1.)  A complete list is available on Travelman's web site, www.travelman.co.uk.  Each publication costs only one pound in the United Kingdom; in the United States, Travelman publications cost $3.95 on Amazon.com.  Credit for the idea goes to Alexander Waugh, Evelyn's grandson.