EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 33, No. 3
Winter 2003

 

Wights Errant: Suffixal Sound Symbolism in the Novels of Evelyn Waugh
by Simon Whitechapel

     He who hesitates is lost.  Particularly in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, where little serves to damn a character as readily as hesitation and uncertainty.  In the prologue to Brideshead Revisited (1945), for example, Charles Ryder accompanies his C.O. on an inspection of the camp:

     ‘Look at that,’ said the commanding officer.  ‘Fine impression that gives to the regiment taking over from us.’
     ‘That’s bad,’ I said.
     ‘It’s a disgrace.  See that everything there is burned before you leave camp.’
     ‘Very good, sir.  Sergeant-major, send over to the carrier-platoon and tell Captain Brown that the C.O. wants this ditch cleared up.’
     I wondered whether the colonel would take this rebuff; so did he.  He stood irresolutely prodding the muck in the ditch, then he turned on his heel and strode away.1

     The C.O. is never named, perhaps because Waugh had already bestowed his favorite suffix of contempt on another character in the prologue, Hooper, who accordingly joins Beaver, Trimmer, Atwater, Dr Messinger, Mulcaster, Corker, Salter, Lord Copper, Peter Pastmaster, Box-Bender, Pennyfeather, and Ryder among what might be called Waugh’s wights errant.  The last two characters, who are partly autobiographical, prove that Waugh did not spare himself: Paul Pennyfeather, the hero of Decline and Fall (1928), suffers misfortune after misfortune because he is too trusting and unassertive, and Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead, though perhaps partly shielded by his patrician “y”, is still worthy of serious blame for his behavior.  After months away painting “unhealthy pictures” in South America, he returns home to continue a love-affair he has begun in mid-Atlantic with Julia Mottram of the aristocratic family who own Brideshead:

     ‘I’m going there tonight.’
     ‘Not tonight, Charles; you can’t go there tonight.  You’re expected at home.  You promised, as soon as the exhibition was ready, you’d come home.  Johnjohn and Nanny have made a banner with “Welcome” on it.  And you haven’t seen Caroline yet.’2

     Caroline is Ryder’s own new-born daughter and Ryder, not yet a convert to Catholicism, is condemning himself out of his own mouth.  This is why he is not an exception to the rule that, in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, characters whose surnames end in “-er” are never positive ones: there is always something contemptible or ridiculous or in some way blameworthy about them.  If the critic Cyril Connolly (1903-74) had recognized this he would have avoided a bad mistake in his review of Men at Arms (1952), the first volume of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, when he confused Apthorpe with Atwater.  Apthorpe, though ridiculous, is nevertheless strangely dignified and is not one of Waugh’s villains; Atwater, from the never-completed novel Work Suspended (1942), is both ridiculous and undignified and is certainly one of Waugh’s villains.  Atwater, indeed, belongs to the great triumvirate of Waugh’s contemptibles, which is completed by Beaver, from A Handful of Dust (1934), and Trimmer, from Sword of Honour (1952-61).
     Atwater’s surname could be read as the urinary equivalent of “at stool”; Trimmer’s is a reference to his career as a ladies’ hairdresser; and Beaver’s is American slang for “vulva” and may be an ironic reminder of the phrase “busy as a beaver”, which is something Beaver himself never is.  However, the suffix that ends their surnames can also be read as a symbol of hesitation and uncertainty.  “Er” and its labialized equivalent “um” mark pauses for thought in standard British English and both use what is technically known as a mid central vowel; that is, one formed by the tongue in roughly the middle and center of the mouth.  In this way it physically symbolizes hesitation and uncertainty, because it is roughly equidistant from the other English vowels, which are formed at varying heights at the back or front of the mouth.  And so Arthur Atwater, like the vowel that ends both his names, is hesitant and uncertain.3 He drifts rather than drives:

     ‘... I’ve thought everything out.  I’ve got a pal who went out to Rhodesia; I think it was Rhodesia.  Somewhere in Africa, anyway.  He’ll give me a shakedown till I get on my feet. Won’t he be surprised when I walk in on him!  All I need is my passage money -- third class, I don’t care. ...’4

     Then the narrator, John Plant, meets Atwater again at London Zoo and listens as he muses on the animals there:

     ‘... Think what they’ve seen -- forests and rivers, places probably where no white man’s ever been.  It makes you long to get away, doesn’t it?  Think of paddling your canoe upstream in undiscovered country ... hanging your hammock in the open at night and starting off the morning with no one to worry you, living off fish and fruit -- that’s life,’ said Atwater.  Once again I felt compelled to correct his misconceptions of colonial life.  ‘If you are still thinking of settling in Rhodesia,’ I said, ‘I must warn you you will find conditions there very different from those you describe.’
     ‘Rhodesia’s off,’ said Atwater.  ‘I’ve other plans.’5

     But his “other plans” are equally vague and equally impossible of realization.  Beaver is the same: he drifts through life as both a metaphorical and a literal parasite: the word comes from the Greek para, “beside”, and sitos, “food”, and originally meant one who exchanged sycophancy for meals.  Beaver, with little money and little inclination to earn any, lives by making up the numbers at lunch and dinner-parties and by forcing himself on other people’s hospitality on the strength of vague invitations. This is how he meets Brenda Last and why she, bored in the country with her “madly feudal” husband Tony, pursues him for the excitement of an affair.  Like that of Beaver’s surname, the suffix of Brenda’s Christian name might be significant: it uses the same vowel but perhaps in her case it can read as appropriately vague and uncertain.  He who hesitates is lost. That’s Beaver. She who hesitates is scheming.  That’s Brenda.  But there is another important difference between the suffixes of these two names.  Beside marking pauses for thought, “er” in English is also an agentive suffix: butcher, baker, candlestick-maker.  Perhaps that is part of why Waugh uses it as he does: it’s appropriate for those who have to work (or, in Beaver’s case, grub) for a living.  Atwater is a commercial traveller; Trimmer was a ladies’ hairdresser; Charles Ryder is a painter.  Ryder’s surname is also close to “writer”, Waugh’s own profession (and in American English, it’s very close or identical).
     The suffix of Brenda’s name, on the other hand, is not agentive, it’s feminine: it marks her not as one who has to work for a living, like Trimmer, but as one who is female.  So do the suffixes in the Christian names of Julia Mottram, from Brideshead, Julia Stitch, from various novels, and Virginia Troy, from Sword of Honour.  Virginia is clearly a villainess: she is promiscuous and selfish and at one point in the trilogy goes looking, in vain, for an abortion.  Julia Mottram is an apostate for much of Brideshead and Julia Stitch, although based on Waugh’s great friend Diana Cooper (1892-1986), in some ways has the same empty life as Beaver: she is constantly searching for ways to fill her time and get herself into the newspapers:

William walked to Hyde Park.  A black man, on a little rostrum, was explaining to a small audience why the Ishmaelite patriots were right and the traitors were wrong.  William turned away.  He noticed with surprise that a tiny black car was bowling across the grass; it sped on, dextrously swerving between the lovers; he raised his hat but the driver was intent upon her business.  Mrs Stitch had just learned that a baboon, escaped from the Zoo, was up a tree in Kensington Gardens and she was out to catch it.6

     But lack of direction and purpose are much less reprehensible in women and perhaps this is yet another condemnation of the erring men, because in one sense their names are feminine too:

M[ale] & masculine, female & feminine, are used to distinguish rhymes & line-endings having a final accented syllable (m[ale] or masculine: Now is the winter of our disconte'nt) from those in which an unaccented syllable follows the last accented one (female or feminine: To be or not to be, that is the que'stion).7

     Trimmer, Beaver, Hooper, and Atwater are all feminine rhymes.  So are Mulcaster, from Brideshead, Peter Pastmaster, from Put Out More Flags (1942),8 and Corker, Lord Copper, and Salter, all from Scoop (1938).  Trimmer’s lack of manly resolution and decision is very plain here in Officers and Gentlemen (1955):

     ‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Trimmer.  ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
     ‘You’re in command, old boy.  In your place I’d just push on.’
     ‘Would you?’
     ‘Certainly.’
     ‘But you’re drunk.’
     ‘Exactly.  If I was in your place I’d be drunk too.’
     ‘Oh God.  I wish I knew what to do.’9

     Beaver, in A Handful of Dust, allows his mother to control his actions and his lover to supply his idioms:

     ‘John, I think it’s time you had a holiday.’
     ‘A holiday from what, mumsy?’
     ‘A change... I’m going to California in July.  To the Fischbaums -- Mrs Arnold Fischbaum, not the one who lives in Paris.  I think it would do you good to come with me.’
     ‘Yes, mumsy.’
     ‘You would like it, wouldn’t you?’
     ‘Me?  Yes, I’d like it.’
     ‘You’ve picked up that way of talking from Brenda. It sounds ridiculous in a man.’
     ‘Sorry, mumsy.’
     ‘All right then, that’s settled.’10

     Hooper, in Brideshead Revisited, does not even rise to the dignity of effeminacy, being more like an ape than a man:

So far as he had changed at all, he was less soldierly now than when he had arrived from his OCTU [Officer Cadets Training Unit].  This morning, laden with full equipment, he looked scarcely human.  He came to attention with a kind of shuffling dance-step and spread a wool-gloved hand across his forehead. ... Hooper came sidling up and greeted me with his much-imitated but inimitable salute.  His face was grey from his night’s vigil and he had not yet shaved.11

     Mulcaster, appearing later in Brideshead, is aristocratic but absurd, and he too is often uncertain about what to do:

     ‘Do you think,’ asked Mulcaster, when our hostess had left us, ‘that it might be witty to give the fire alarm?’
     ‘Yes, Boy, run away and ring it.’
     ‘Might cheer things up, I mean.’
     ‘Exactly.’
     So Mulcaster left us in search of the telephone.12

     Peter Pastmaster, in Put Out More Flags, is also aristocratic, but lacks perception and is easily outmanœuvred by one of the girls his mother has told him to put on trial for marriage:

     ‘Really, Molly, I don’t understand you a bit tonight.’
     ‘Oh but you must, really you must, Peter.  I’m sure you were a fascinating little boy.’
     ‘Come to think of it, I believe I was.’
     ‘You mustn’t ever try playing the old rip again, Peter.  Not with me, at any rate.  Now don’t pretend you don’t understand that.  I like you puzzled, Peter, but not absolutely cretinous.  You know, I nearly despaired of you tonight.  You would go bucking on about what a gay old dog you’d been.  I thought I could never go through with it.’
     ‘Through with what?’
     ‘Marrying you.  Mother’s frightfully keen that I should, though I can’t think why.  I should have thought from her point of view you were about the end.  But no, nothing else would do but that I must marry you. ...’
     ‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘I suppose as long as you’re satisfied...’
     ‘Yes, I think “satisfied” is the word.  You’ll do.  And Sarah and Betty’ll be as sick as cats.’13

     Corker, in Scoop, is brash and decisive, but often decisively foolish:

The steward offered him the fish; he examined its still unbroken ornaments and helped himself.  ‘If you ask me,’ he said cheerfully, his mouth full, ‘I’d say it was a spot off colour, but I never do care much for French cooking.  Hi, you, Alphonse, comprenenez pint of bitter?’14

     Later in the day:

...Corker began to wriggle his shoulders restlessly, to dive his hand into his bosom and scratch his chest, to roll up his sleeve and stare fixedly at a forearm which was rapidly becoming mottled and inflamed.
     It was the fish.15

     And he is, of course, uncouth and common.  Lord Copper, from the same novel, is a Lord, but he had greatness thrust upon him rather than being born to it.  Consequently, he is often ridiculous and sometimes he is hesitant and uncertain too:

He began to draw a little cow on his writing pad.  Four legs with a cloven hoof, a ropy tail, swelling udder and modestly diminished teats, a chest and head like an Elgin marble -- all this was straightforward stuff.  Then came the problem -- which was the higher, horns or ears?  He tried it one way, he tried it the other[,] he tried different types of ear. ... Soon the paper before him was covered like the hall of a hunter with freakish heads.  None looked right.  He brooded over them and found no satisfaction.16

     And Salter, Lord Copper’s factotum, is quite out of his depth in the country when he negotiates with a “cretinous native youth” for transport to Boot Magna:

     ‘I say.’
     ‘Ur.’
     ‘Do you happen to know if Mr Boot has sent a car for me?’
     ‘Ur.’
     ‘He has?’
     ‘Noa.  She’ve a taken of the harse.’17

     The youth is unnamed, but his first two replies to Salter’s questions are very similar to the suffix being examined here and he is in fact accompanied by another of Waugh’s wights errant:

     ‘... Wouldn’t it be better for your friend Bert Tyler to drive?’
     ‘Noa. He can’t see for to drive, Bert Tyler can’t.  Don’t e be afeared.  I can see all right.  It be the corners that do for I.’
     ‘And are there many corners between here and the house?’
     ‘Tidy few.’
     Mr Salter, who had had his foot on the hub of the wheel preparatory to mounting, now drew back.  His nerve, never strong, had been severely tried that afternoon; now it failed him.
     ‘I’ll walk,’ he said. ... ‘If... if by any chance you get to the house before me, will you tell Mr Boot that I wanted a little exercise after the journey?’
     The learner driver looked at Mr Salter with undisguised contempt.  ‘I’ll tell e as you was afeared to ride along of me and Bert Tyler.’18

     The final syllable of Bert Tyler’s name will be delivered in a strong West Country accent, of course. It is as though the learner driver is foreshadowing the retribution that overtakes him for his uncertainty at corners.  Having begun his journey with “rapid, uncertain steps”, Mr Salter reaches Boot Magna to discover that he cannot have immediate access to his luggage:

     ‘I regret to say, sir, that your luggage is not yet available.  Three of the outside men are delving for it at the moment.’
     ‘Delving?’
     ‘Assiduously, sir.  It was inundated with slag at the time of the accident.’
     ‘Accident?’
     ‘Yes, sir, there has been a misadventure to the farm lorry that was conveying it from the station; we attribute it to the driver’s inexperience.  He overturned the vehicle in the back drive.’
     ‘Was he hurt?’
     ‘Oh, yes, sir; gravely.  Here is your room, sir.’19

     Something similar, but even graver, happens to a character who is explicitly suffixed with an “-er” of foolishness: Dr Messinger in A Handful of Dust.  The naïf protagonist of the novel, Tony Last, has been deserted by his wife and the “whole Gothic world” of his life in England has “come to grief”.  He accordingly goes in search of a new Gothic world overseas, joining Dr Messinger on an expedition in search of a fabled lost city of the Incas in the Amazon jungle.  Dr Messinger’s credulity and incompetence are apparent in faint discords from the beginning of their acquaintance, and his pretensions are finally and fatally exposed when he tries to retain the services of their Indian guides:

     ‘It’s no good,’ said Dr Messinger after half an hour’s fruitless negotiation.  ‘We shall have to try with the mice.  I wanted to keep them till we reached the Pie-Wies.  It’s a pity. But they’ll fall for the mice, you see.  I know the Indian mind.’20

     The mice -- mechanical ones, “conspicuously painted in spots of green and white” -- in fact drive the Indians off for good, leaving Dr Messinger and Tony alone in the jungle in a situation that Dr Messinger diagnoses as “grave”, but “not desperate”.  Tony then comes down with fever and Dr Messinger sets off for help in their canoe.  He hears a “low monotone” of falling water ahead, tries to steer to the bank, and ends up in the river being carried downstream to the falls:

They were unspectacular as falls go in that country -- a drop of ten feet or less -- but they were enough for Dr Messinger.  At their foot the foam subsided into a great pool, almost still, and strewn with blossom from the forest trees that encircled it.  Dr Messinger’s hat floated very slowly towards the Amazon and the water closed over his bald head.21

     Tony Last, who was even more foolish to entrust himself to Dr Messinger’s care, is punished even more, suffering not a quick death but a lingering one, imprisoned without hope of rescue in the house of the insane Mr Todd, whose name is German for “death”.  Yet Tony Last’s fate is tragic, Dr Messinger’s tragicomic, and perhaps that is why the two of them have the surnames they do: a monosyllable, like that of Waugh’s own name, and a polysyllable suffixed with “-er”.
     But both “Todd” and a name suffixed with “-er” occur elsewhere in Waugh’s work, where they serve to test the theory being put forward here.  In Put Out More Flags Basil Seal finally grows careless in his exploitation of the three grotesque Connolly children, refugees from Birmingham whom he has been using to blackmail the refined middle-class inhabitants of his sister’s country district.  Anyone on whom the Connollys are lodged is soon willing to pay a large bribe for them to be taken away, and Basil tries to lodge them on a young man with “ginger hair and a ginger moustache and malevolent pinkish eyes”, who, eating a late breakfast of “kidneys and eggs and sausages”, looks like a “drawing by Leach for a book by Surtees”.  He is called Mr Todhunter.  Basil delivers the first part of his well-practised “recitation”, describing the “compulsory powers” he possesses to lodge these admittedly difficult children and to level a fine in case of refusal. He is then invited to describe the fine:

Basil embarked on the second part of his recitation. ‘... official allowance barely covered cost of food... serious hardship to poor families... poor families valued their household gods even more than the rich... possible to find a cottage where a few pounds would make all the difference between dead loss and a small and welcome profit.’
     Mr Todhunter heard him in silence.  At last he said, ‘So that’s how you do it.  Thank you.  That was most instructive, very instructive indeed.  I liked the bit about the household gods.’
     Basil began to realize he was dealing with a fellow of broad and rather dangerous sympathies; someone like himself.  ‘In more cultured circles I say lares et penates.’
     ‘Household gods is good enough.  Household gods is very good indeed.  What d’you generally reckon on raising?’22

     Plainly, although he is out of uniform because of a “game leg” acquired in a “motor race”, Mr Todhunter is no fool, and that is further confirmed when Basil departs his house alone, having sold him the Connollys at “five pounds a leg”.  Mr Todhunter, in other words, is not one of Waugh’s wights errant.  So what is going on in his surname?  An example of the interest Waugh took in the mechanics of the English language; in this case, in etymology.  In his biography of Waugh Christopher Sykes describes Waugh’s delight on learning how the word “gas”, though derived from the Greek chaos, takes the form it does because it comes to us through Dutch, where the “g” has the same value as the Greek “ch”.
     The name of this minor character in Put Out More Flags reflects the same interest in etymology. Remember that Mr Todhunter has “ginger hair” and looks like a “drawing by Leach for a book by Surtees”.  R.S. Surtees (1803-64) was a sporting writer best-known for his tales of the foxhunting Mr Jorrocks, and John Leech (1817-64) -- the name was misspelt by Waugh or his editors -- was his most famous illustrator.  The theme is that of the fox: like a fox, Mr Todhunter has ginger hair, and the first syllable of his name, “Tod”, is in fact northern dialect for “fox”.  But the color of his hair is ironic: as his full name shows, he is not a fox himself, but a hunter of foxes, and that is why he defeats Basil.  His surname therefore does not challenge the onomastic theory outlined above, though the surname of another of Waugh’s minor characters does, at first glance. Furthermore, this minor character is much less minor, because he appears over many pages in Officers and Gentlemen (1955), the second volume of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy.
     He is anonymous and indeed faceless when first introduced, appearing as a “large khaki behind” bent over a solitary game of billiards when Guy Crouchback, the protagonist of the trilogy, returns to barracks in London after the African débâcle described in Men at Arms.  He rebukes Guy mildly for disturbing him, and as Guy leaves the billiard room he looks back and sees him cheat himself by adjusting an uncongenial lie.  Soon afterwards his name and more of his character are revealed:

‘Jumbo’ Trotter, as his nickname suggested, was both ponderous and popular; he retired with the rank of full colonel in 1936.  Within an hour of the declaration of war he was back in barracks and there he had sat ever since.  No one cared to question his presence.  His age and rank rendered him valueless for barrack duties.  He dozed over the newspapers, lumbered round the billiard room, beamed on his juniors’ scrimmages on Guest Nights, and regularly attended Church Parade.  Now and then he expressed a wish to ‘have a go at the Jerries’.  Mostly he slept. ... Once or twice the Captain-Commandant, in his new role of martinet, resolved to have a word with Jumbo, but the word was never spoken.  He had served under Jumbo in Flanders and there learned to revere him for his sublime imperturbability in many dangerous and disgusting circumstances.23

     He is not one of Waugh’s villains, but he is directionless and selfish, always looking to his own comforts, and he suffers the rebuke of fate when the Commando force to which he temporarily and irregularly attaches himself sails without him to the Near East.  That is a very mild rebuke by Waugh’s standards, but Jumbo is a mild character and that seems to be why his surname is barely used: after he is introduced he is called Jumbo, not Trotter, in sharp distinction to two other characters in the trilogy, Trimmer and Box-Bender, Guy’s foolish parliamentary brother-in-law, who are called by their surnames throughout.24  All of Waugh’s characters are flawed in some way, but some are decidedly more flawed than others and it seems undeniable that there is something significant in the suffix given to the most flawed of them all: the shiftless and contemptible Beaver, Atwater, Hooper, and Trimmer.  He who hesitates, at corners and elsewhere, is lost, and he who hesitates in the novels of Evelyn Waugh is often errant by name as well as by nature.

Notes

1. Op. cit., pp. 16-7 of the 1984 Penguin paperback.  Note that the man on whom Waugh based the C.O. may have been a Col. Cutler: see The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 1 Feb. 1944.
2. Op. cit., Book Three, “A Twitch on the Thread”, ch. 2, p. 253 of the 1984 Penguin paperback.
3. The vowel that ends “Atwater” is technically known as schwa and is not strictly speaking identical to the vowel of pause-marking “er”, though both are mid central vowels.
4. Op. cit., part 1, sec. 5, pp. 137-8 of the 1967 Penguin paperback Work Suspended and Other Stories.
5. Op. cit., part 2, sec. 3, p. 181 of the 1967 Penguin paperback Work Suspended and Other Stories.
6. Scoop, Book One, “The Stitch Service”, end of Four, i, p. 48 of the 1985 Penguin paperback.
7. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, entry for “Male (2)”.
8. He also appears in Decline and Fall.
9. Op. cit., Book Two, “In The Picture”, ch. 2, p. 307 of the one-volume Penguin paperback. Trimmer’s “Oh God” is important too, of course: it’s meaningless on his lips, but that is part of why, in Waugh’s eyes, he is less than fully human.
10. Op. cit., ch. v, “In Search of a City”, sec. iii, p. 182 of the 1978 Penguin paperback.
11. Op. cit., Prologue, pp. 15 and 22 of the 1984 Penguin paperback.
12. Op. cit., Book 2, “Brideshead Deserted”, ch. 3, “Mulcaster and I in Defence of Our Country”, p. 197 of the 1984 Penguin paperback.
13. Op. cit., ch. iii, “Spring”, sec. 3, pp. 157-8 of the 1975 Penguin paperback.
14. Op. cit., Book One, “The Stitch Service”, ch. 5, part 1, p. 62 of the 1985 Penguin paperback.
15. Op. cit., Book One, “The Stitch Service”, end of ch. 5, part 1, p. 67 of the 1985 Penguin paperback.
16. Op. cit., Part III, “Banquet”, ch. 1, pp. 179-180 of the 1985 Penguin paperback.
17. Op. cit., Part III, “Banquet”, near end of ch. 2, part 2, p. 197 of the 1985 Penguin paperback.
18. Op. cit., Part III, “Banquet”, near end of ch. 2, part 2, pp. 199-200 of the 1985 Penguin paperback.
19. Op. cit., Part III, “Banquet”, near end of ch. 2, part 2, pp. 202-203 of the 1985 Penguin paperback.
20. Op. cit., ch. v, “In Search of a City”, iii, p. 188 of the 1978 Penguin paperback.
21. Op. cit., ch. v, “In Search of a City”, sec. iv, p. 197 of the 1978 Penguin paperback.
22. Op. cit., ch. iii, “Spring”, sec. 1, p. 139 of the 1975 Penguin paperback.
23. Op. cit., Book One, “Happy Warriors”, sec. 4, p. 215 of the 1984 one-volume Penguin Sword of Honour Trilogy.
24. The trilogy also contains a character called “Chatty” Corner, a friend of Apthorpe’s who is comic but not villainous.

Editor's Note: Simon Whitechapel has also recently written Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada & the Spanish Inquisition.  For further details, please visit
http://holyoffice.users.btopenworld.com/index.htm

 

The Audience is Part of the Story Backstage: An Appreciation of Brideshead Revisited
by Sylvia Koleva
"All essays written on the subject would be simply nothing compared to the novel.”

      If there were a book to be chosen between all books, it would be Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.  If there is a fire at home, it will be the only book to be taken away.  No one can go through the novel only once: the act is going to be repeated as many times as the reader is alive spiritually, just as Charles Ryder revisits Brideshead.  Some goings-on there are reality, some are a constant dream, luggage of a charmed and wounded heart, so lots of comings back are to be done all through life.  That’s destiny.  Perhaps secretly Evelyn Waugh hoped to make the reader an eternal prisoner of his story.
     What is so attractive?  Every little detail.  There are no mistakes.  There is just a unique originality.  That’s the way for a book to be thought, composed and finally written.  But to begin with, it should be lived – first as a personal experience, and second as a creative visit to oneself past, to make it an adventure.  There is no decoration, nothing but the truth, and soft or bitter humor.  That’s why Charles Ryder is so loved and his history so romantic, being at the same time so real.  That’s why it is so touching to look at Sebastian Flyte when he is in high spirits and to be so sorry for him when he is ashamed of being unhappy, running always away from home and hunting happiness in a most strange and desperate way.  All characters are unforgettable, some of them nice and kind like Charles or Sebastian, some disgusting but with charm like Lady Marchmain or Bridey, some monumental figures in themselves or of the time, exceptions to common sense.  Look at Charles Ryder’s father or Lord Marchmain or even Rex Mottram.  England of Waugh is “the circle of Brideshead.”
     What about the style?  It is the personality of the author, unique and so simply magnificent, like a tender blow of wind in a sleepless night, a quiet rumor in London society, a friendly smile at breakfast on the last Sunday of the year, an honest pleasure to be in Oxford ("Et in Arcadia Ego”), a sad whisper of loneliness at the departure of Sebastian (contra mundum).  There are also great times in visiting great places: holidays at Brideshead Castle and in London, painting in Paris, New York or the jungle of South America.  The intellectual print of Waugh is so remarkable that no one could imitate it: there is everything in every word and every sentence – the trinity of time, place and action.
     We do not read the novel, we simply feel and live the story as if we were put suddenly amongst a surprisingly real décor of human life.  We are to stay there day and night (and ever) with open mind and mouth admiring every minute and every picture, all characters and all places visited by their bodies and their souls.  We are no more ourselves: we become a part of the story, the audience with amazed eyes backstage.  The silence is eloquent.  We are not taken in just for the performance; we are slaves of the story for life.
     It is not a huge book so far as the volume is concerned.  It is a large human panorama inhabited and ghosted by sometimes happy and sometimes miserable people (often both at the same time), people of high intelligence and high natural extravagance.  I have never seen such a touching struggle for happiness before, a hard battle that so resembles my own.
     There is no point of endeavoring to be at Brideshead because we have been there from the first page, fixed on the plot and watching over it.  We listen without effort and laugh heartily at the speeches of Charles Ryder’s father and catch the solemnity easily at the first interview of Charles with Lord Marchmain in Venice.  There is a start of despair from the moment Lady Marchmain invades the life of Sebastian and Charles; there is a pleasant thrill at the internal life of Charles on the ship the day he re-meets Julia.  No dead years any more for both of them, or at least they are expecting as much at the moment they’re so close together.  This time the tempest is welcome (see all associations connected to King Lear).
     Waugh is Shakespeare (the connoisseurs would remember that Sebastian is called the “forerunner” of Ryder’s love for Julia, like the brother of Viola, Sebastian, is in Twelfth Night).  Perhaps the choice of the name is to be looked for there.  Waugh is also all the English tradition in writing – well and for good, being more and more capable than his predecessors.  Or perhaps understanding completely the modern times and making them an event, he is to be in future a writer of all times, an important part of the creative chain.  There is so much talent in Brideshead that we cannot call it by any other name than genius, a most  generous gift of God.
     Brideshead Revisited is not a book against Catholicism but a book against everything that could provoke unhappiness.  There is an evident paradox, Evelyn Waugh being a Roman Catholic himself from 1930 (the novel appears in 1945) made nevertheless a negative image of religion, mocking every kind.  “There are some Catholics with much chic in Europe,” says Rex during his celebrated dinner in Paris with Charles, so abundant with eating and talking (plenty of comments on the past and plans for the future).  That’s the only thing positive Waugh writes on the subject, except for Cordelia’s acts of heroism in Spain.  Lord Marchmain is not reconverted in religion when he dies: he makes it up out of respect for God.  Ryder is not converted to Catholicism at the end of the novel, as some critics think. He is converted to a baroque faith of beauty (as he has been since his first visit to Brideshead) and is endlessly devoted to the souvenirs.  No past tenses of the verb “love,” neither for Waugh nor for the cast of the novel.
     Waugh knew he had written a masterpiece. He didn’t know he had composed something more than that – a paradise for readers by giving them the unbelievable ability to touch the perfect.
     Main Characters in alphabetic order in more or less a one-sentence portrait:
     Anthony Blanche is the foreteller of destiny, Cassandra of the novel plus psychoanalyst.  Critic of Art and Life.
     Boy Mulcaster is the Nothing of the novel.
     Bridey is the hard and heartless Catholic, the failed monk in society, who becomes voluptuous.
     Cara – Еh bien!  In public opinion, the sinner.  In reality, she is the woman who just kept Lord Marchmain far away from Lady Marchmain because he was afraid of Intelligence, and rather an analytical person about people and events.
     Celia Ryder is the woman of the empty years of Charles, being at the same time a perfect mother of two children and the ideal wife of the artist.
     Charles Ryder is a part of Waugh as much as the other characters are, the most important piece of the puzzle.
     Charles Ryder’s father is perhaps the most original character, living in an easy manner in all centuries except in his own.
     Cordelia  is the fanatic youth of religion but rather human in moods and acts.
     Julia Flyte would be the perfect woman of Modern Society except for her avoiding religion and aspiring too.
     Lady Marchmain is apparently the nice face of Catholicism, not a bad but unhappy mother because of the hypocrisy and damage caused by her education.  “She killed at a touch,” says Sebastian to Charles during their interview in Morocco.  La femme fatale.
     Lord Marchmain is the rebel, the strong personality, the most intelligent and extravagant character of Waugh, sensual and bored in a moderate way.
     Mr. Samgrass is poverty in service of the rich world, an intellectual  guy and a spy, a man without dignity for a little money, free travels and influence.
     Nurse [Nanny]--there is always a nurse in the works of Shakespeare, and here she is – faithful (reliable) and unchangeable like Catholicism.
     Rex  Mottram is the other name of success between World War I and World War II, a young scoundrel, a useful friend, a first-rate man who drinks and gambles reasonably, “Тhe Ideal Husband” after Oscar Wilde, except for the lack of his wife’s love and forgiveness.
     Sebastian Flyte is the victim of destruction, provoked by Catholicism and his family; every other impediment would make him unhappy.
     Wilcox is the ideal servant after the English tradition in real life and literature.
     I read the book in Bulgarian thanks to the wonderful translation of Mrs. Aglika Markova.  I hardly believe that somewhere in the world someone could add such a perfect touch to the novel, a second masterpiece.  I first read the book in 1982 and never stopped since . . .

 

Book Reviews

God in the Image of Waugh
God: The Biography, by Alexander Waugh.  London: Review, 2002.  350 pp.  £18.99.  Paperback, £7.99.  Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, James Cook University.

      “Can an [omnipotent god] make a spherical cube . . .?  If the answer is ‘no’ then he cannot be omnipotent, can he?”  So asks Alexander Waugh on (randomly chosen) page 273 of his beautifully produced treatise, God.  The answer is typical of assertions made on every page of the book in being bright, assured--and wrong.  And wrong in a puzzling way.  Mr Waugh surely knows, and expects readers to know that he knows, that the names of shapes, like the names of numbers, contain their own definition: the reason that 2 + 2 can never equal 5 is that 2 + 2 MEANS 4.  So too the meanings of “spherical” and “cube” are mutually exclusive and, when predicated one of the other, create non-sense. Being unable to “make a spherical cube” consequently says nothing about omnipotence, or about anything else. 
     God abounds in glaring non-sequiturs, strained misreadings and brazen oversimplifications of matters that have troubled the world’s finest minds for millennia, all on a par with the argument about spheres, cubes and omnipotence.  Could they be genuine lapses in reasoning, or are they playful?  And if the latter, what’s the game?
     God is brightly subversive of almost everything ever said about the deity within the Jewish, Christian and Moslem traditions.  It prints passages from the scriptures of the ancient Hebrews and their near neighbours, from Rabbinical writings, Christian texts and Apocrypha, the Koran and the Book of Mormon; and from the writings of theologians, anti-God crusaders, philosophers, mystics and cranks.
     The passages are chronologically/thematically arranged in sections titled after the Seven Ages of Man.  Thus “Muling and Puking” begins the book by asking sceptical questions about the human need for the divine and the role of Word/Logos in creation.  The following sections cover the main periods of Hebrew history, highlighting Yahweh’s worst and most irrational behaviour.  Later sections mock philosophical attempts to prove God’s existence and define His attributes.  “Sans Everything” concludes, and perhaps summarizes, the book, arguing that it is impossible to apprehend the essence of God.
      The aim of the study is stated boldly, but differently in different places.  On page 2 it is “an investigation into the nature and being of God [the God who created Adam and Eve],” which sounds like an exploration of a reality, or at least of an ideal.  By page 5 the emphasis has shifted to “blitzing” the myriad ways in which God has been perceived: because “God principally exists in the minds of millions . . . the best thing for it is to seek him out . . . from the broadest range of thought, vision, opinion, sudden intuition.”  Even more ambitious is the plan to “peel away the layers of scholarship that disunited God from himself” and then "stick him back together as ‘One’ again" (6).
     Regrettably, for me, none of the aims is fulfilled.  The type of subject matter does of course change over the course of the book, and something like a resolution of ideas occurs at the end of the first section.  But the overwhelming impression God makes has nothing to do with “investigations” into “nature” or “perceptions,” but everything to do with ridicule.  Mr Waugh has a heckler’s talent for making the excerpts he prints look silly.  Sometimes he is brash Mark Twain exploding the Book of Mormon; sometimes the refined philosophe sneering at the Schoolman’s barbarous logic; sometimes Monty Python fantasticating solemn nonsense into even more solemn nonsense; often  a nineteenth-century English admirer of clever German Higher Criticism, naughtily alleging errors and inconsistencies in the Bible to the thunderous disapproval of Scottish divines named Waugh.  Binding everything together is the joke of anthropomorphizing and using raffish argot: “I [God] fixed Abraham’s wife’s fertility problem; I made her laugh and spiced up her sex-life when she was ninety years old.”
     The problem with the scripture commentary--if it is intended to be read as serious criticism--is that it analyses all texts as though they were a homogeneous contemporary work.  But the Old Testament is a compilation of documents written over many centuries, in a language that has no abstracts and therefore relies hugely on metaphor and symbol, that employs genres ranging from apocalyptic vision to codes for hygiene.  It is a record of sinners, betrayers and evildoers, and their denunciation by prophets, tempered with accounts of sublime heroism and humanity.  It is too easy to show up differences in  detail as self-contradictory when consistency was never intended, and to make jokes based on distortion and exaggeration: “Jeremiah, who loathed being a prophet more than anything, felt that he had been raped by God (Jer. 20:7) and consequently staggered about like a broken-hearted drunk (Jer. 23:9).”
     At times the assertions made provoke serious thought.  For example, on (randomly chosen) page 247 Mr Waugh asks, “Is it really possible to be both eternal and timeless?”  “But Alexander,” one splutters, “‘eternal’ means ‘timeless.’  Surely you don’t think that, in the context of your book, ‘eternal’ means ‘lasting a long time’?”  We all say that the bus took an eternity to arrive; and the preacher tells us that eternity will merely be starting when the touch of a sparrow’s wing brushing an earth-sized brass ball once every thousand years has worn the ball down to nothing.  But philosophers, unlike preachers, for the last thousand years have defined eternity as "tota simul . . . " that is, “everything at once.”  The preacher’s flight of fancy aims to give an inkling of a state beyond human experience, but in serious discussion eternity means time-less, a state in which  time no longer exists.
     Why read this book?  In the first place it is compellingly funny and irreverent. It also prints an impressive range of writings about God--including most well-known arguments about His existence and nature--from which I (at least) learned a great deal.  Read as a whole, the funny irreverence defamiliarizes the subject, with salutary results.  In theory we believe what the philosophers tell us, that God is incomprehensible to those bound by the categories of space and time.  In practice, the metaphors and symbols and narratives of the Bible, and the structured arguments of the philosophers, engender an illusion of knowledge.  Mr Waugh’s relentless assaults on every writer, prophet, theologian, philosopher (except Nietzsche), mystic and crank who comes within his range dispel that illusion.  Yes, Mr Waugh, if we were tempted to think we could grasp the essence of God, even negatively, now we know we can’t.  Thank you.
     On the other hand, the individual arguments, as pointed out above, are a tease.  Are they lapses in logic or jeux d’esprit?  And if the latter, what’s the game?  Mr Waugh is a clever debater who has all the fun of showing up his opponents’ inconsistencies and barbarous morality--while never having to account for the universal longing for transcendence or the restless itch to find an explanation for existence.  He is so tirelessly inventive in picking holes—in everything--that one wonders whether God is a Monty-Pythonesque Life of Yahweh or a double-take that mocks irrational mockers.  More seriously, could it be that God is what Shelley calls “such raillery / As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn / The thoughts it would extinguish”?

Editor's note: Alexander Waugh's next project is a book about four generations of fathers and sons in his own family.  Beginning with Arthur Waugh, the book will move through the generation of Arthur's son Evelyn, then the generation of Evelyn's son Auberon, and finally the generation of Auberon's son Alexander, the author.  Alexander has unearthed three unpublished letters of Evelyn Waugh, and he probably has even more surprises in store for us.           

 

Irregular Notes
The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor.  Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000.  Revised paperback, 2002.  686 pp.  $21.00.  Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania.

     Evelyn Waugh appears frequently in these selections from diaries, with a total of 28 entries.  Just for comparison, Virginia Woolf has 38 entries, Samuel Pepys 32, Leo Tolstoy 22, Sir Walter Scott 16, Lord Byron 11, and Anthony Powell only four.  The average number of entries per contributor is about 10.5.
     Waugh also appears in the section headed "Biographies," along with 171 other contributors.  Waugh is described as "one of the foremost English novelists of his generation" and "a dyspeptic wit whose unvarnished self is revealed in his letters and diary" (664).  His photograph appears on the cover, placed between Woolf and Noël Coward.
     I had hoped to find anecdotes of Waugh in others' diaries, but I discovered only two references.  Playwright Joe Orton recorded "an Evelyn Waugh touch" in 1967 (317).  In her fictional diaries of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend resorted to the old joke about reading a novel "by a woman called Evelyn Waugh" in 1982 (181).
     Waugh is mentioned in an otherwise unremarkable introduction.  He is described as "one of the greatest twentieth-century diarists," and we get an additional entry about the "irregular notes" that Waugh resumed taking in 1960.  The editors observe that Waugh "seemed to want to keep his diary to himself.  Why, no one knows" (xv).
     That is the first sign of trouble.  When Michael Davie edited Waugh's diaries for publication, he had to delete certain names for fear of libel.  When the diaries were published in 1976, ten years after the author's death, many readers nevertheless found them offensive.  The editors of The Assassin's Cloak realize that Waugh kept diaries "as a source of material for his novels and autobiography" (xv).  They don't seem to realize that Waugh had good reason to conceal his sources as long as he lived.
     The selection of entries suggests only casual acquaintance with Waugh's diaries.  Six entries are from a single year, 1924, with four entries from 1947 and four from 1955.  Thus half the entries come from only three years in Waugh's life.  The Assassin's Cloak seems to have started as columns in Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman, and the editors may have lacked the leisure to digest all of their sources.
     Some of Waugh's entries are well-chosen: his response to a letter from an American Catholic woman (6 March 1946), his "deep weariness and depression" as children come home for the holidays (23 Dec. 1946), and the perception that his life is "too empty for a diarist" (12 July 1955).  Others are oddly trivial: a run in sea mist at Lancing College (3 Dec. 1919), a visit to Sezincote (21 June 1930), and a mix-up in the change from Summer Time (2 Oct. 1955).
     All readers of Waugh's diaries probably have favorite entries, but allow me to suggest only two.  The Assassin's Cloak contains only one entry from Waugh's extensive wartime diary, the reaction to a soldier's suicide (1 June 1940).  Why not instead the entry about looking in the mirror while drunk and seeing "how I shall look when I die" (Oct. 1942)?  Or how about the entry in the middle of the war, when Waugh wanted only "to do my work as an artist" (10 Aug. 1943)?  One suspects that the demands of a column sometimes made the date more important than the content of entries.
     Waugh's entries nevertheless read well when compared with those of the illustrious company included in the anthology.  His only competition comes from Coward (25 entries) and Sir Harold Nicolson (24).  It is gratifying to see Waugh recognized for his nonfiction.

 

Evelyn Paugh: A Relative of Aloysius?
by Paul A. Doyle
Nassau Community College

     A friend recently loaned me an elaborately illustrated, 66-page booklet entitled Toys at the London Toy & Model Museum.  The museum houses a considerable number of toys, and one section is devoted to a teddy-bear retrospective.  On page 16, there is a photo of an oversized teddy named "Evelyn Paugh."  The bear is dressed in an all-red coat and described only as "a large contemporary English bear named Evelyn Paugh."  The bear sits in a ¼-scale 1916 Cadillac presented by General Motors to the King of Thailand.  The king gave this car to his nephew, and it is now on loan to the museum from its current owner.
     The booklet is undated, but it lists several awards the museum has received through the years, the most recent being the "1986 Museum of the Year (Best museum in the South, overall runner-up in the UK)."  We can assume a mid-to-late 1980s publication date.
     Did a company in England manufacture a group of teddies named "Evelyn Paugh," or was this just one bear named for the popularity of the television production of Brideshead Revisited?
     Perhaps someone in England can give us more information on this amusing tidbit.  After all, very few authors have had a toy named after them!    

 

Taking a Stroll down Tobacco Road
by David Bittner

     When I took a course in Jane Austen in college, my professor said literary research had reached the heights of triviality in such topics as pipes in Dickens.  This recently started me thinking that it might be good for a laugh to consider Brideshead Revisited, one of my favorite novels, in terms of smoking paraphernalia.  I watched the PBS presentation all the way through and counted how many times each of the characters lit pipes, cigars, and cigarettes. 
     As may be no surprise, Charles Ryder set the record as the most habitual smoker.  He smoked 41 cigarettes and 10 cigars and lit pipes 13 times.  He was followed by Sebastian Flyte, who smoked 25 cigarettes and six cigars.  Julia lit four cigarettes, Rex smoked one cigarette and six cigars, Boy Mulcaster smoked a cigar, Brenda Champion smoked two cigarettes, Ma Mayfield smoked a cigarette, Mr. Samgrass smoked a cigar, Sebastian's French doctor smoked a cigarette, Celia smoked two cigarettes, and even the pious Father Mowbray smoked a cigarette, not to be outdone by the equally pious Bridey, who smoked a pipe once. 
     It's interesting that three scenes in the novel involve smoking materials in some rather substantial way.  The first occurs as Charles watches the blue-grey smoke rising from Sebastian's fat Turkish cigarette to the blue-green shadows of foliage and smells the "sweet scents" around them.  The second occurs when Charles lights a cigarette for Julia and catches a "thin bat's squeak of sexuality."  The third occurs after Sebastian's automobile accident as Rex tries to bribe a police officer by giving him a cigar. 
     One wonders how the Flytes and their friends and relatives could live such religious lives, yet live so dangerously as to be constantly polluting their lungs, to say nothing of drinking alcoholic beverages almost ritually too.  So, if the family that prays together stays together--at least in spirit, and with a twitch upon the thread--I suppose it is just as true that the family that soaks together smokes together. 

 

Centenary Conference Update
     Plans are proceeding for the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference, 24-27 September 2003, at Hertford College, Oxford.  Twenty-one registrations have been received from professors, students, and enthusiasts in Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  Ten presentations have been proposed, with the possibility of several more, and there will be a panel of three presentations on Gender in Brideshead Revisited.  A visit to Castle Howard, shooting location for the television production of Brideshead, has been tentatively scheduled for Monday, 22 September.  Look for the rest of the conference schedule in the next issue of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies.   

 

BBC Marks Waugh Centenary
     The BBC's Radio 4 broadcast a serial version of Brideshead Revisited on Sundays from 9 to 30 March 2003.
     From 3 through 6 March, Radio 4 broadcast five of Waugh's short stories: "Portrait of Young Man with Career," "The Sympathetic Passenger," "Cruise," "The Manager of 'The Kremlin,'" and "On Guard."
     The week of Waugh concluded on 7 March with "Saint Graham and Saint Evelyn--Pray for Us," a play by Catholic journalist Mark Lawson.  The play is described as a "literary comedy" wherein "the Vatican decides to canonise either Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene.  As priests explore the two writers (who were opposites in everything except friendship) their very different attitudes toward life, sex and Catholicism emerge."
     Lawson observes that Waugh "would've particularly disliked modern television comedy," but he adds that "many great British sitcoms involve a man doing a job for which he's entirely unsuitable."  Thus Fawlty Towers is one of many "variations on the plot of Scoop."  Waugh's "influence is strongest" in television, where audiences "particularly enjoy laughing at nasty things--at seeing people viciously embarrassed," and where writers have "learned Waugh's lesson that it's possible for light comedy to become very dark in places."
     More details are available at Totalwaugh.  Lawson's article entitled "Catholic Tastes," on Greene and Waugh, published in the Guardian on 1 March 2003, is also available at Totalwaugh. 

 

Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, 1914-2003
     Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, passed away on 26 January 2003.  He was 89 years old.
     Trevor-Roper was one of the leading historians in England in the twentieth century, but he was biased against Catholicism, and Evelyn Waugh protested.  In 1947, Waugh wrote to The Tablet to criticize Trevor-Roper's book The Last Days of Hitler.  In 1953, Trevor-Roper used Waugh as an example of Catholicism's "snob appeal."  Waugh dubbed Trevor-Roper "the demon don" (Letters 415) and wrote to the New Statesman to expose the historian's errors.  Trevor-Roper conceded that he had been wrong about the date of St. John Fisher's execution, but he refused to budge on Fisher's title (bishop or cardinal) and the meaning of the word "recusant."  Waugh replied that Trevor-Roper's only "honourable course" would be to "change his name and seek a livelihood at Cambridge."  The correspondence extended through January 1954, and it has been published in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (641-7).
     In 1956, Trevor-Roper claimed that "convert-novelists" obscured the treason involved in Catholic missions to Protestant England.  Waugh wrote three more letters of protest (D. L. Patey, Life of Evelyn Waugh, 405-6). 
     In 1957, Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, appointed Trevor-Roper Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford.  In 1959, in a contribution to the Spectator, Waugh wrote that he had "never voted in a parliamentary election. . . .  If I voted for the Conservative Party and they were elected, I should feel that I was morally inculpated in their follies--such as their choice of Regius professors."  In a letter to his daughter Margaret, Waugh wrote that he found it "funny to hold up Trevor-Roper as Macmillan's great folly instead of Suez or Cyprus" (Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, 537).
     In 1979, Trevor-Roper was created Lord Dacre.  In 1980, he became Master of Peterhouse at Cambridge.  Auberon Waugh noted that Trevor-Roper had finally followed the advice Evelyn Waugh had given him in 1954. 
     Hugh Trevor-Roper is survived by three stepchildren.  His obituary from the Guardian can be read at Totalwaugh.      

 

Gerhard Wölk
     Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies regrets to inform readers that Gerhard Wölk passed away on 19 December 1999.  Wölk was a professor at the University of Wuppertal in Germany and bibliographical editor of the Newsletter until publication ceased in 1998.  For many years, Wölk compiled "Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism," a regular feature in the Newsletter.  The checklists were comprehensive guides to publications in the previous year or two, and they alerted many readers to sources that might otherwise have been missed. 

 

Brideshead Rewritten
     Doubts about the screenwriter chosen for the film version of Brideshead Revisited have been expressed in the United Kingdom.  In an article entitled "Mainstay of the Corset Drama," available online from the Telegraph, Andrew Davies is described as "Britain's most successful adapter of classic texts, and certainly the most prolific."  Davies has written scripts for television productions of Othello, Moll Flanders, Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, The Way We Live Now, and Doctor Zhivago.  Though the productions have been popular, there have been "rumblings of discontent," including the suggestion that Davies' "Zhivago is demeaned by 'gratuitous nudity.'"  Davies has been quoted as saying that "all novels can be boiled down to two basic themes: sex and death."  Recently he has admitted "a third theme, which is money."  Davies has also said that his primary responsibility is "to put the best drama on television," and that "might mean not being absolutely faithful to the letter of the book."  Regarding Brideshead, Davies said, "I don't know how I'll play it.  It's supposed to be so wonderful in Oxford, but they're just hanging around and getting drunk and saying the silliest things.  And that fucking teddy bear!"  It may be time to buy an ivory-backed, stiff-bristled hair brush and threaten someone with a spanking.      

 

Bright Young Things in the Can
     Principal photography has been completed on Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's film version of Vile Bodies.  Dame Judi Dench seems to have left the cast, but the production still has plenty of firepower, with Dan Aykroyd, Jim Broadbent, Simon Callow, Stockard Channing, Richard E. Grant, Hugh Laurie, and Peter O'Toole.  Stephen Campbell Moore has been cast as Adam Symes, and Emily Mortimer will appear as Nina Blount.  The film is set for release in late October 2003, around the time of Evelyn Waugh's centenary.  A good photograph of Fry and Broadbent on location is available at Doubting Hall.  

 

Waugh at the MoMA
      In a retrospective entitled "Nicholas Ray, Writ Large," the Museum of Modern Art in New York has scheduled screenings of the director's works.  These include "High Green Wall," a production based on Evelyn Waugh's short story, "The Man Who Liked Dickens."  "High Green Wall" was broadcast on television in 1954 as an episode of General Electric Theater on CBS.  According to MoMA's electronic catalog, the teleplay is by Charles Jackson, and the production stars Joseph Cotten and Thomas Gomez: "Fleeing 'the jungle of the civilized world' to explore a real jungle, Henry (Cotten) collapses and is saved by McMaster (Gomez), born of an American father and Indian mother.  Henry soon finds himself imprisoned within the jungle's 'high green wall,' and forced by McMaster to give daily readings of Dickens novels.  Adapted from a story that Waugh would later incorporate into his novel A Handful of Dust, Ray's film is a gripping exploration of culture, madness, violence, and despair.  26 min."  "High Green Wall" will be shown on 3 April 2003 at 5:45 p.m. and 11 April 2003 at 3:00 p.m.  More information on the Ray retrospective is available at MoMA.   

 

Three Novels on MP3
     A company called Worldtainment has recorded three of Evelyn Waugh's novels on MP3.  In case you didn't know (as I didn't), an MP3 works like a compact disc, except that the MP3 stores much more data, several hours instead of only one or two.  Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and Black Mischief are available on MP3 for $14.95 each.  The recordings vary from six to seven hours in length.  Since these are Waugh's first three novels, there may well be more to come: Worldtainment.com     

 

Waugh on Tape
     Books on Tape offers all the major novels (except Helena), plus Rossetti, Edmund Campion, When the Going was Good, Tactical Exercise, A Tourist in Africa, A Little Learning, and Charles Ryder's Schooldays and Other Stories.  Individual titles are recorded on sets of four to nine tapes, and prices range from $10.00 to $36.00.  Tapes may also be rented for 30 days for prices ranging from $10.95 to $14.95: Booksontape.com        

 

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