EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol

Waugh on Television
by George McCartney
St. John's University

     In 1954 I saw a 26-minute teleplay entitled "The High Green Wall" on The General Electric Theater, a weekly dramatic series hosted by Ronald Reagan on the CBS network. I had no idea that it had been adapted from Evelyn Waugh's 1933 short story, "The Man Who Liked Dickens," which would become in substantially altered form the conclusion of A Handful of Dust in 1934. Even had this information been brought to my attention, it would not have meant anything to me. At twelve years of age, I had never heard of Waugh. Nor would I have been impressed to learn the drama had been scripted by Charles Jackson, a well-regarded television writer of the time, and directed by Nicholas Ray, who took on the project between making the two films for which he is best known today, Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). I only knew that this drama was unlike anything else I had seen on television.
     I was so impressed by "The High Green Wall" that when I came to read A Handful of Dust nearly twenty years later, I experienced an uncanny sense of déjà vu that made me wonder what I would think of the television adaptation were I to view it again. As far as I could discover, however, the teleplay had never made it into the rebroadcast circuit. I assumed it must have been discarded with so much else that had been produced for early television. This past spring, I learned otherwise.
     "The High Green Wall" was included in a retrospective of Ray's films being shown at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City this past April. So, forty-nine years later, I was to have my chance to see the film a second time. The experience was not what I expected.
     Like Waugh's other short stories, "The Man Who Liked Dickens" is not nearly as accomplished as his novels. To demonstrate this, we need only compare it with its transformation in A Handful of Dust, where it becomes one of Waugh's most trenchant portrayals of twentieth-century moral fecklessness. Waugh would later explain that once having written "The Man Who Liked Dickens," he decided to find out how its protagonist, Paul Henty, came to be trapped in the Amazon wilds, forced to read the collected works of Dickens to an illiterate savage. Doing so, he changed the barely formed character of Henty into the fatally decent Tony Last, the last gentleman in a society turned ferociously selfish. The novel became his indictment of the kind of civilized humanist who shies from making moral judgments of any kind lest he be thought intolerant. Waugh wanted to illustrate how thin a shield secular civilization provides against the threat of the shape-shifting barbarism that lurks barely below the threshold of our awareness, always ready to reassert its brutal priority in human affairs.
     Despite the odd decision to change the story's title, the Jackson-Ray adaptation follows Waugh's narrative quite closely, only omitting its opening few pages which are concerned with Henty and his unfaithful wife, characters who would become Tony and Brenda Last in Handful. As a boy, I had found the drama at once bizarre and fascinating.
     Now that I have seen the film again, I am forced to revise my youthful assessment. With the exception of some moderately effective acting, the production is astonishingly dull. Ray, a self-important and flamboyant filmmaker, must have been marking time between his theatrical projects. Here his direction is perfunctory at best. There can't be more than three camera set-ups and the players seem to have been instructed to stand as close together as possible lest they break the boundaries of the drama's cramped, low-budget set, wanly festooned with plastic fronds to suggest, however skimpily, the Amazon forest. The usually reliable Joseph Cotten plays Paul Henty, alternating almost indistinguishably between two expressions: wounded nobility and weary bewilderment. To be fair, the role as written doesn't afford many opportunities to do much else. The film comes to life fitfully when Thomas Gomez appears as Mr. McMaster, the illiterate village chieftain devoted to Dickens. Gomez creates a very credible obsessive with his unctuous smile and predatory eyes. He has an unnerving way of sidling up to Cotten at odd moments, his voice at once smarmy and wheedling like a particularly manipulative child who just happens to have a loaded shotgun under his arm. When he first speaks of his passion for Dickens, his eyes fairly bulge with anticipation. It's clear he will have his readings regardless of Paul's wishes. Unfortunately, the dramatization is so underwritten and its direction so indifferent, Gomez doesn't get to make good on these intimations of crazed villainy.
     So what held my attention in 1954? Piecing together my initial impressions, there seem to have been three reasons. First, there was the Dickens element. Brief as the teleplay is, a significant portion is taken up with Cotten reading Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities to an enraptured Gomez. Cotten's deeply resonant voice and measured delivery had a hypnotic effect on me. Perhaps I had a little of Mr. McMaster's mania myself. Then there was my family's fifteen-inch television screen. The cramped image made the drama's meager forest settings seem creepily claustrophobic to my susceptible imagination. This must have made the theme of entrapment all the more intense for me. Of course, on a full-size movie screen at the museum's theater, the film lost this accidental effect altogether. But, finally, it must have been the power of Waugh's premise more than anything else that held my attention. After seeing the film in 1954, I was troubled intermittently for days, if not weeks. It seemed to me desperately unfair that a man as decent as Paul should be held captive for the rest of his life by a primitive madman. I found Paul's resignation to his fate very nearly a torment. Of course, this is just the effect Waugh wanted to achieve, especially with Paul's transformation into Tony Last in A Handful of Dust. Quite early on in Handful, Waugh makes the reader want to grab and shake Tony. We want to rouse his anger so that he'll stand up to all the characters--most especially his wife--who take such scurrilous advantage of his decency. The Amazon episode is just the final and logical conclusion to which his frustrating passivity leads. My emotional response to the teleplay at twelve was not so very different from my reaction to the novel as an adult. If this reveals me to be deficient in literary sophistication, so much the better. Waugh wanted his readers to feel Tony's fate viscerally before analyzing its significance.
     Perhaps what is most remarkable about this film, then, is the degree to which Waugh's conception manages to survive its lackluster production. The audience I saw it with included a large number of young people, undoubtedly college and graduate students. The film's early scenes provoked them to quiet snickering. I couldn't blame them. Blown up to theater-screen proportions, the gimcrack scenery and central-casting Amazon Indians looked quite ridiculous. But as the narrative neared its conclusion, the audience's tittering died out. I suspect they felt as I did the horrible poignancy of Paul's fate, a fate aptly visualized with the teleplay's one undeniably effective shot. This appears just after Paul discovers McMaster has tricked the search party that has come to rescue him into believing he has died. With this revelation, the screen door to McMaster's bungalow shuts in Paul's face and we look at him in close-up standing behind its pale, nearly invisible mesh. Cotten stares out at us devastated.
     Whether intended or not, this image suggests Paul's lack of personal strength. It also points to the character he becomes in Handful, for Tony, more clearly than Paul, is a man who has allowed himself to be paralyzed by a flimsy code of manners, the gauzy remnants of the Christian tradition in which he no longer believes. Paul/Tony trapped by nothing more than a transparent screen perfectly expresses his failure of will to take this tradition seriously. He lacks the conviction that would have provided him with the strength to break through his gentlemanly code of decency and assert himself when occasion requires. In short, he has no faith and, consequently, nothing to stand for. When Mr. Todd asks him if he believes in God, he can only answer, "I suppose so. I never gave it much thought." Such a casually unreflective agnosticism, Waugh suggests, leads Tony ineluctably into a mapless moral wilderness. Long before his Amazon misadventure, Tony's lack of faith had prevented him from tearing away the screen of well-bred secular manners and combating the modern savagery that had invaded his life in England.
     This one visually evocative moment may not redeem the teleplay, but it does testify to Waugh's artistic strength. Even in careless hands, his radical vision cannot fail to unsettle us.

Edtor's Note: Another version of this essay appeared in the August 2003 issue of Chronicles Magazine, where George McCartney writes a regular column on film, "In the Dark." To read it, please visit Chronicles Magazine.

Drama, Architecture, Art, and Grace: Evelyn Waugh's Roman Catholicism
by Mircea Platon

     In Limbo: Deprived of an old-fashioned world in which he would have liked to remain and refusing to feel comfortable in the modern era, Evelyn Waugh dwelt for some time in between. From that limbo he sent away his books to check the modern world. His antebellum novels are like the antechamber in classical tragedies, where conversation is the spark between here and there, between the suffering of consequences and the taking of action.
     The lack of zest in his mature novels (Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy) that Christopher Hitchens points out is rather the abandonment of the above dichotomy, a re-absorption of meaning into the world of action, a healing of the paradox. The emergence of lyricism, the emotive quality that estranged critics from Waugh’s postwar novels, is not a sign of the decay of his genius, but a deeper spreading of his religious roots. Instead of a strict spiritual discipline, Roman Catholicism becomes, in the last novels, wisdom. In the beginning, Catholicism helped Waugh point sharply to the absence of God from the fabric of modern life and to foresee the consequences of ignoring Him. Maturity made him better feel the presence of God in this world. By finding Him where, in his youth, he merely had the faith that He should be, the antechamber of classical tragedy grows into a nave.
     Liturgical Drama: "I have never really been able to see any Catholic point of view in his novels. He might equally well, it seems to me, be just a Church of England Conservative. If I had not been told that he was a Catholic convert, I should never have known it from reading his books," wrote Edmund Wilson in 1944, offering us the best proof of the authenticity of Waugh’s Catholicism. By authenticity, I mean not only the sincerity of Waugh’s piety but also the nature of his faith. It was fibrous and antique, well matured in scholastic barrels, without any ideological flavor that could make it recognizable. The Protestant creeds are Christianity impoverished by contingent ideas, while Roman Catholicism is informed only by the Divine Person of Christ present in the Holy Sacrament. Due to the ideological hindrance, Protestants are archconservatives. They constantly need to refer to that human being (Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII) or historical moment that established their identity. It’s like a perpetual justification that, nailing you down, stops the pilgrim’s progress. Where Anglican writers are traditionalists in their aesthetic, Waugh’s prose is modernist because his point of reference is not historic, but meta-historic.
     From a theological point of view, the difference between Edmund Wilson and Evelyn Waugh is that between a “modern” and a pre-modern--or, better, a pre-historic! Wilson considered Roman Catholicism an ideology, and he expected it to be placarded in tendentious novels like those produced, at the top of the literary canon, by J.K. Huysmans or Georges Bernanos. Refusing this path, or that chosen by the luminaries of the Victorian Age who made religion one of the subjects of their novels, Waugh made Catholicism not the content or the canvass of his novels, but the only escape from them.
      Evelyn Waugh was aware that ideologies displace reality, abstracting, dividing, and leveling it. In contrast, traditional Christianity ripens it, emphasizing its spiritual texture and providential articulations. That’s why Waugh recognizes the full-blossomed reality of a world that is not introduced, generated or transcended but merely acknowledged by his literature. He is not, like too many of the modernists, a solipsist but a realist. Therefore he doesn’t pretend, with gnostic ambition, to make the world his work nor his work a world in itself. Instead of spraying in the air, like other modernists, sterile sepia and fecund pretensions, Waugh makes literature in natural order. He baptizes it in the centripetal flow of Creation. Accomplishing the ritual, he then waits for the Holy Ghost to descend.
     George Orwell, in his notes for a review of Brideshead Revisited, intended to “Note faults due to being written in first person. Studiously detached attitude. Not puritanical. Priests not superhuman,” another example of the difference between a progressive and a Christian. (It is true that there is even a so-called “progressive Christianity,” but this is more a feat of ideological taxidermy, which succeeds in giving some appearance of life to all sorts of rather stiff doctrines.) The priests from the novel are not superhuman? Why would somebody expect them to be? Or why is it extraordinary that a Catholic writer didn’t make them appear so? Are they like this in real life? Sometimes they are. But the orthodox Christian writer, unlike the progressive one, doesn’t have to distort reality. His is not the ambition to revolutionize, to repair cosmic injustices, to give birth to new worlds. He doesn’t wish to accomplish what only God could do. He is humble. As Waugh stated, “I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical, psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me.”
     Psychological analysis means to soliloquize for somebody else and, in the end, to put yourself in the Father’s place. Still, liturgy is drama in which man and God answer each other. The cast is manifold. There are stages or altars. There are mysteries, which in literature can become gothic, arcane, or ironic twists. Waugh doesn’t describe or prescribe what’s happening inside the soul of his characters, because he wanted his literature to be part of reality, not above it. Waugh's writing is serpentine, with moral flashes and mystic transparencies. In The Paterikon, in order to save his soul, one monk has to leave the hermitage while another one must remain in it. Ideologies can be precise and offer recipes, but Christianity does not, because it is not a technique but a direction, a pilgrim’s path on revelation’s mountain. Waugh’s novels, rather than analytically prescriptive, are dramatically invocatory, a texture of vectors whose result is God.
     Architecture: One of the clearest signs of this ritualistic (and thus non-Protestant and non-ideological) aesthetics is the frequent appearance of architectural problems. Architecture is one of the least mimetic, more vectorial arts.
     In Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, Work Suspended, Helena, and Brideshead Revisited, modern architecture is despicable because it annihilates man’s noble passions, memories and horizons. Again, ideology displaces reality and persons. "The problem of architecture as I see it," says the architect Silenus in Decline and Fall, “is the problem of all art--the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because it is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man.... Man is never beautiful, he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.” Later, thinking of the necessity to build a staircase in the house projected for Margot Beste-Chetwynde, Silenus asks, "Why can’t the creatures stay in one place? Up and down, in and out, round and round! Why can’t they sit still and work? Do dynamos require staircases? Do monkeys require houses? What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man!”
     Architecture is regarded as a static line, ad-hoc immanence without past or future. Waugh, like every orthodox Christian, is genealogical. His concern is not the rational-empiric sequence but the ontological consequence, the dynamic meaning. For him, history is not a succession of moments, but the moment a juxtaposition of histories (sacred, personal, familial, parochial). A Christian life doesn’t begin with birth or end with death. Through revelation, one lives both in the past and the future. One has the most decisive liberty: that of choosing between “yes” and “no.” This is the ascetic liberty of substance, not the aesthetic one of accident (the “how”) that is determined by tradition. The eccentric and amply ornamented anchorage in the past of even kitsch like the neo-gothic manor in A Handful of Dust is preferable to Brenda Last’s flat, so conducive to iconoclasm.
     Map and Grace: Architecture’s presence here signifies not abstraction, but emphasis on life’s context and structure, because Waugh is not abstract but sensorial. This fact is proven by the significance of maps in his novels. Usually maps are associated with a destructive activity, like that of the rackets in "An Englishman's Home." Two brothers buy some land in England’s picturesque villages and re-sell it, for a good profit, to inhabitants frightened that their refuge could become a nest of polluting factories: “Together the two brothers unfolded the inch ordnance map of Norfolk, spread it on the table of the Great Hall and began their preliminary, expert search for a likely, unspoilt, well-loved village.”
     The map, as a symbol of distance from reality, of utilitarian, ill-meaning transcendence, is also in Men at Arms:

First, the task was Calais. No secret was made of their destination. Maps of that terra incognita were issued and Guy studied the street names, the approaches, the surrounding topography of the town he had crossed countless times, settling down to an aperitif in the Gare Maritime, glancing idly at the passing roofs from the windows of the restaurant-car; windy town of Mary Tudor, and Beau Brummel, and Rodin’s Burghers; the most frequented, least known town in all the continent of Europe. There, perhaps, he would leave his bones.

The source and beneficiary of maps is the modern bureaucracy, the democratic institution. Noticing that in Black Mischief, Waugh oscillates between “order/civilization” and “anarchy/barbary,” between Basil Seal and Seth, Malcolm Bradbury writes: “The novel creates, but never finally resolves, a condition of equipoise between the progressive and modern and the barbarian and primitive. Our sympathies never go out wholly either to Seal or to Seth.” Further,

order is still untrue to experience, even when administered by the League of Nations mandate that governs Azania at the end, and worse it is dull, making the reader regret the loss of the exotic Azania of Seth’s rule. So again the world of comic anarchy is made attractive by the comparison with formal order, yet again Waugh stops short of full commitment to it, offering with rather more than usual attentiveness the recommendations of the serious and the dull.

     Maybe the solution of this impasse is a reformulation of the hypothesis. Maybe Waugh tries to show that moral categories are insufficient for a reality whose unseen axis is, in fact, Grace. Basil has all the human instincts but misapplies them, while Seth puts to work, for the benefit of others, his half-person. The contrast, then, is not between civilization and barbary. It is rather between modern innocence (Seth) and old-fashioned piracy (Basil), which are natural, and a supernatural order, which is unknown to both characters. More narrowly, the conflict is between sin (Basil) of fallen creation, of every man, and ideology (Seth) as an institutional molding of it. Waugh mistrusts the transition from person (Seth) to abstraction (League of Nations) because Christianity saves persons, not concepts. Seth was worth our sympathy because he was a human being (although the undigested western secular humanism depersonalized him somehow). Modern institutions are suprapersonal without being in any way closer to God. They lack traditional communities’ cohesion, the superior spontaneity of Azania’s blacks who crouched together during the night in order to exorcise their fear (a consequence of sin).
     Institutions augment sin through the vanity of efficiency, of organization: "The great weapons of modern war did not count in single lives... No one had anything against the individual; as long as he was alone he was safe and free; there’s danger in numbers; divided we stand, united we fall, thought Cedric, striding happily towards the enemy, shaking from his boots all the frustration of corporate life" (Put Out More Flags).
     Art: If a map is anthropocentric mimesis (for it concerns human point of view and needs), modern art is anthropocentric abstraction. Its sketches, instead of gracious sublimation, are products of individuals' lonely disorder. Only traditional religious art constitutes theocentric synthesis shaped by Grace.
     Unlike idealism (solipsist) or materialism (agnostic), Christian realism heals matter by movement and the world by spirit. Thus Waugh knows that architecture and the body exalt the miracle. He shows it to us in the following passage from Helena, where Bishop Macarius leads Empress Helena on Golgotha:

At their feet lay the flat waste space with its two little lumps, fenced and covered in sacking. All over the site the first beginnings of walls and piers, and beyond it and round it for many times its area stretched the outworks. There was the rubble and rock which had been cleared away; there was the building stone and the marble which had been assembled; there were brick kilns and lime kilns and concrete mixers; there were huge wooden cranes; wagons and handcarts; the stable of draught horses and the barracks of the labourers; field kitchens and latrines; drawing-office and book-keeper’s office; the guarded strong room where the pay was kept; there were the shells of houses evacuated and half-demolished and the shells of temporary houses under construction. There was a network of causeways and cuttings; there was a whole street of booths where hucksters had set up shop to catch the men on pay-days before they reached the market. All this had been brought into being by the words: ‘Let’s have a basilica.’
In time, no doubt, order and reverence would return, so Macarius thought, but as he stood beside the Empress and showed her what was being done, he merely said: ‘Do you really think that in all this you will be able to find a hole in the ground and a piece of wood?’ ‘Oh yes, I think so,’ said Helena cheerfully.

A shapeless reality: the world as it is, fallen, and God as the only possible restorer, the subject of Waugh’s art. Not the world sweetened by ideology, synthetically edenized, but a broken daylight that, even without our hope, has to be sanctified.

Editor's Note: Mircea Platon writes that he admires Evelyn Waugh because

he was one of the very few West-European writers to protest against the abandonment of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. The penalty was that we, in Romania, had only three of his works translated (Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust and The Loved One). They were published in editions carefully framed in Marxist forewords talking about 'the decline of capitalistic society'. It was the end of the '60s. Even T. S. Eliot was translated during that short period of liberalization ('65-'71). It is true that only his poems received such permission. Afterward, during my adolescence (late '80s), those books were available only on the black market. They had the savor of any forbidden fruit.

Scoops: Evelyn Waugh in the Press

     As his centenary on 28 October 2003 approached, Evelyn Waugh appeared in numerous articles in various publications. The following are some highlights. Web sites of the original publications have been provided, though most of the articles are available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/totalwaugh/
     To mark its 175th anniversary, The Spectator reprinted some of its best articles, including Evelyn Waugh's "Awake My Soul! It is a Lord" (1955). The Spectator also reprinted Auberon Waugh's "Wine and the Press Council" (1982). www.spectator.co.uk
     On 25 August 2003, the Daily Telegraph published "An Unhappy Retreat into a Happy Ending." Reviewing Stephen Fry's film Bright Young Things, based on Vile Bodies, Neil Darbyshire finds that "the ending is reworked to conform to a more comfortable cinematic formula." www.telegraph.co.uk
     On 31 August 2003, the New York Times published "Decline and Fall and Rise Again." Jim Holt identifies "Waugh's two distinctive gifts: his comic genius and his mastery of English, neither of which has been surpassed in the last 100 years." Further, Holt adds, "the more you read Waugh, the greater is the danger that you will come to share that narrowness; by the pure pleasure standard, other novels start to pale by comparison."   www.nytimes.com
     On 6 September 2003, The Independent published "A Week in Books: Waugh Revisited." Christina Patterson writes that the Centenary Conference was "clearly designed to appeal to an eclectic range of fans, from the (extremely) serious academic to the (much) more general enthusiast. In a strange blurring of fact and fiction, or at least fiction and telly, the conference begins with a private tour of Castle Howard, and a lecture on the house--punctuated, of course, by 'luncheon' and afternoon tea. However, anyone half hoping to find Anthony Andrews draped over a chaise longue, will also need to find the stamina for lectures on 'The Persistence of Waste Lands in Waugh's Fiction' or 'Modernity, Hybridity and Knowledge in Black Mischief.'" www.independent.co.uk
     On 25 September 2003, The Guardian published "The Artist in Philistia." According to Hywel Williams, "What has been lost is Waugh the aesthete." His "rejection of the whole 19th-century English portmanteau--in art, politics and religion--is the most impressively coherent achieved in the 20th century's first half." www.guardian.co.uk
     On 26 September 2003, Commonweal published "Waugh Revisited." Robert Murray Davis points out that Waugh's "style looks easy and natural," but the effect is "due as much to discipline as to talent, for almost every memorable line in his novels is the result of a second or third rewrite." www.commonwealmagazine.org
     On 4 October 2003, the Daily Telegraph published "Behind the Pose." William Boyd writes that "the spectacle of Evelyn Waugh guying or exploiting various forms of Englishness detracts serious attention from a fascinating and enduring body of work."   www.telegraph.co.uk
     On 4 October 2003, the Daily Telegraph also published "The Bright Young Things were as Ridiculous as the Rest of Us." Alexander Waugh observes that the theme of his grandfather's novels, "from Decline and Fall (1928) to Unconditional Surrender (1961), is of man's absurdity in the face of life's chaos." www.telegraph.co.uk
     On 18 October 2003, The Tablet published "Waugh the Catholic" by Ian Ker, tutor in theology at Campion Hall, Oxford. Father Ker observes that "When we think of the early Waugh of Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), we realise how much Waugh developed and matured over the years, in a way that his friend and fellow-convert Graham Greene never did to anything like the same extent."   www.thetablet.co.uk
     On 20 October 2003, The Scotsman published "Terror and the Laughter." Michael Pye asserts that readers have "entirely missed the terror that makes the man so edgily, alarmingly funny." www.news.scotsman.com
     On 24 October 2003, the Times Literary Supplement published "A Prophet without Honour: Evelyn Waugh's Reputation 100Years On." Geoffrey Wheatcroft observes that Waugh "may not have been politically correct, but he was politically acute." Further, "It is hard to think of any writer of his age who has left behind so much which has become part of our mental furniture," partly because Waugh "was not behind his time, but in so many ways far ahead of it." www.the-tls.co.uk
     On 24 October 2003, the National Catholic Reporter published "Cocktails with a Curmudgeon." Arthur Jones finds that Waugh should be remembered because "American Catholicism owes him a debt of gratitude." In his article for Life magazine, Waugh "made suspect American Catholics more American." www.natcath.com
     On 25 October 2003, The Guardian published "The Hapless Hack." Ann Pasternak Slater writes that "there is an indissoluble link between Waugh's life and art. No writer quarried his own experiences as thoroughly and imaginatively. What is fascinating is the absurd triviality of some of these experiences, and the dazzling invention with which they are selected, refashioned and set in order." www.guardian.co.uk
     On 25 October 2003, The Spectator published "Spoils of Waugh." W. F. Deedes declares that "Long after some of us have feasted off the Waugh harvest, have gone to dust and are forgotten, his books will be read and admired." www.spectator.co.uk
     On 26 October 2003, The Age (Australia) published "Oh What a Lovely Waugh." Owen Richardson writes that "It was Waugh's great gift in his novels from the '30s to combine an appalled and lucid apprehension of the modern collapse in values with a high-style comedy whose like had not been seen since Wilde's plays, and would not be seen again." www.theage.com.au
     On 26 October 2003, Scotland on Sunday published "Evelyn Waugh Topples Charlatans from their Pedestals." Gerald Warner writes that Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour "elevate Waugh from the ranks of good novelists to the status of the greatest English fiction writer of the twentieth century." www.news.scotsman.com
     On 28 October 2003, the Sydney Morning Herald published "Yes, We Have No Bananas." Michael Davie writes that "a Waugh centenary conference took place in Oxford, at his old dim college, Hertford. It emerged that the two principal centres of Waugh studies now are, first, Austin, Texas, at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas; and, second, James Cook University at Townsville, Queensland, where professor Donat Gallagher (who dug out and edited his essays 20 years ago) knows more about Waugh than anyone else in the world. What would Waugh make of that, one wonders?" www.smh.com.au
     On 28 October 2003, The Scotsman published "Waugh: What is He Good For? Absolutely Everything." Brian Morton observes that "Between 1928 and 1934, Waugh wrote a sequence of novels that establish him not just as a vicious satirist--his usual pigeonhole--but as a redoubtable moralist and one of the finest prose writers of his time." www.news.scotsman.com
     On 29 October 2003, The Guardian published "Our Post-Waugh Legacy." Stuart Jeffries writes that in Brideshead Revisited, the working class has "the inverse of the Midas touch: we turned gilded youth to dross, Arcadia to Philistia, aesthetic rapture into commerce. England had gone down the toilet and it was all our fault." www.guardian.co.uk

Impressions of Oxford
Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference
Hertford College, 24-27 September 2003

The Oxford Conference devoted to Waugh's Centenary was a very enjoyable event. Sadly, I could only attend the final day of the conference, although I made sure to arrive in time for the Conference Dinner the night before! The Dinner was a truly memorable evening in a stunning environment and with plenty of good cheer. The following day proved to be truly stimulating with very rewarding papers and discussions. Congratulations to John Wilson for organising the event! Hopefully, we will have regular Waugh meetings in the future--a biennial conference dedicated to the great man, maybe?
--Christine Berberich, University of Derby

As a "Shakespearean," I owe Dr. John Wilson, the indefatigable organizer of the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference, as well as its contributors, a debt of gratitude for giving me the opportunity to reconsider Waugh in an academic light rather than as a writer of satiric and humorous novels one simply enjoys for pleasure. Michael Johnston's sequel to Brideshead Revisited added an unexpected and fascinating aspect to the conference. The many first-rate papers presented during the three days of the meeting were refreshing in their multiple topics, approaches, and points of view. I was particularly interested in comparisons of Waugh's Catholicism with Greene's, Waugh as a writer on the international scene (Russia and the Mediterranean), and representations of Waugh on film. One of the non-Shakespearean courses I teach is on the Literature of Peace and War, focusing on World War I and World War II; however, I have never included the Sword of Honour trilogy. I shall correct that omission when I teach the course next spring.
As John Mortimer said recently when speaking of Waugh, "Now that the smart set is just as vacuous and the politicians are even more pompous, we need him more than ever."
--Joanna Montgomery Byles, University of Cyprus, Eastern Mediterranean

     Being both a great fan of Brideshead Revisited and a postgraduate student of Comparative Literature, I was very eager to register for the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference as soon as I saw the announcement on the internet.
     However, to tell the truth, I had my doubts too. I wondered whether all the other participants would turn out to be rigid Waugh scholars, claiming to hold the ultimate truth about Waugh and his work. I feared that in that case the panels could be as tiresome as Bridey's scholastic talks.
     Scarcely had I arrived at Oxford when I realized that my presumptions could not have been further from the reality of the international conference. The atmosphere was amazingly friendly, open-minded, lively, and relaxed. Varied views were accepted and even encouraged. The panels were witty, informative, and great fun too. I did learn a lot about Waugh's work and hopefully will be able to share my knowledge with students in the classroom. Apart from the gorgeous gala dinner, for me the highlight of the event was the excursion to Madresfield Court and Piers Court, which offered an interesting insight into English cultural and literary history.
     The conference even changed my view on Brideshead Revisited: even though I had always liked the book, I had had difficulties in understanding its sentimentality and nostalgia for the lost days at Oxford. For an apparent reason, I totally overcame that difficulty this autumn. In the middle of cold, dark, rainy November, it is in fact impossible to think about the beautiful days spent at Oxford without a sense of nostalgia. I do hope that I will be able to revisit Oxford sooner or later--preferably with other Waugh enthusiasts from all over the world, of course!
--Susanna Itäkare, University of Helsinki

Book Reviews

Four Novels for Everyman
Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, by Evelyn Waugh. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003. 622 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by John W. Osborne, Rutgers University.

     This handsome volume is an addition to Everyman’s Library. Founded in England by J. M. Dent, the son of a housepainter, Everyman’s Library was intended to be a means of self-improvement for ambitious workers whose formal education did not satisfy their quest for knowledge. Although Waugh’s novels are printed here without notes, Ann Pasternak Slater has written an introduction. There is a bibliography of books by and about Waugh as well as two useful chronologies, one dealing with events in Waugh’s life and the other with the historical background.
     Since neither A Handful of Dust, nor Brideshead Revisited, nor any of the Sword of Honour trilogy is included, new readers may remain unaware of the range of Waugh’s fiction. But three of the novels are very funny, and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold reveals aspects of his later life. Waugh’s flair for creating strange but not impossible plots, sly juxtapositions bordering on the absurd, and seemingly matter-of-fact statements which on examination seem zany, is well expressed in this selection.
     Waugh’s personal experiences are a factor in all four of these novels. Newspaper assignments allowed him to cover both the coronation of Haile Selassie as Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930 and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Black Mischief was a result of the first visit, and Scoop was influenced by the second. Good fortune also resulted from a six-week trip to Southern California in 1946, when he discovered a literary gold mine in the form of Forest Lawn Cemetery. The Loved One was written shortly afterward. Finally, Waugh’s use of both alcohol and barbiturates to control chronic insomnia helped form the plot of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.
     Waugh’s presence in Ethiopia during the 1935-1936 war did not make his on-the-scene reporting palatable to newspaper editors. He was not alone. Philip Knightley in The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, describes a period of fantasy journalism when editors in London and New York, naively enthusiastic about the Ethiopian cause, preferred Ethiopian government propaganda to stories filed by their own reporters. Frustrated reporters wrote accounts of battles that were never fought and other fiction that was printed as hard news, if it did not contradict preconceived editorial judgments. It is not surprising that the author of Black Mischief considered the Italian invasion to be an incursion of an imperfect civilization into a barbaric region. This view is also reflected in Scoop and in Waugh in Abyssinia, an account of his experiences as a correspondent. Far from Africa, readers expressed displeasure over Waugh’s lack of respect for the Ethiopian way of life.
     Waugh was not a Fascist, and his consideration of Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia was more nuanced than his critics allowed. In the 1930s, Waugh’s anti-communism, Roman Catholicism and intense individualism drew the ire of the Left. Since World War II there has been widespread acceptance of views that all cultures in the world are equally worthy and that differences between people are almost entirely due to environment. Waugh remains a tempting target for those who judge past opinions by contemporary values.
     When Scoop was published in the spring of 1938, reviewers welcomed the novel’s light-hearted scenes that were set in England. The European situation was tense. Following the Anschluss in March, Germany had begun to pressure Czechoslovakia to make concessions that would have meant dismemberment. For many readers, Boot Magna and its ménage offered an escape from the unwelcome evidence that Europe was drawing closer to war. Those who are introduced to Scoop by this Everyman’s Library edition may also find Waugh’s satire on 1930s press lords relevant to our world of media moguls.
     Although Waugh described The Loved One as “a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high-living of a brief visit to Hollywood,” this novel demonstrated the use a first-rate mind can make of a new experience. The Loved One is among his best comic novels, and its publication inspired a stream of books and articles about American funeral customs. Among these books was The American Way of Death, by Jessica Mitford. The Loved One was dedicated to Nancy Mitford, Jessica’s sister and Waugh’s friend. Christopher Sykes is probably correct in asserting that this book gained Waugh more American admirers than enemies, and the paperbound edition of The Loved One continues to sell in the United States. Pasternak Slater notes that the entire Hollywood environment was sham. Ironically, Waugh’s reason for going there was to discuss a possible film version of Brideshead Revisited, which he had described as “steeped in theology.” Perhaps the most amusing character in The Loved One is the amiable, self-confident, mindless Aimée Thanatogenos. But this fictional consequence of American higher education may seem uncomfortably realistic to many college and university faculty.
     The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is not one of the most popular writings of Evelyn Waugh. After its publication, some readers who knew Waugh reacted sympathetically; others thought that his fictional description of a personal problem was too frank. But his enemies were delighted at the opportunity to launch further attacks. Some regretted yielding to this temptation; in his ripostes Waugh demonstrated again his talent for delivering more punishment than he received. However, general readers may have thought that Pinfold was a depressing story.
     Almost one hundred years ago, J. M. Dent chose his favorite book, James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, to be the first publication of Everyman’s Library. From Boswell’s biography of the eighteenth-century lexicographer and sage to novels of Evelyn Waugh, there has been a considerable expansion of the publications list. But this Waugh is superior in format to early Everyman’s Library books, while the price remains affordable for the readers whom Dent hoped to attract.

Goodness How Sad
Brideshead Regained: Continuing the Memoirs of Charles Ryder, by Michael Johnston. Barnet, Herts: akanos (www.akanos.co.uk), 2003. $24.95, ₤14.95. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

     Since the first version of my Mischief in the Sun was a fictional account of Waugh’s trip to California in 1947, I wish I could be nicer about a book that I regard with such deep misgivings that I do not even want to verify quotations from Waugh’s masterfully constructed if sometimes overwritten novel until the memory of Johnston’s book has faded. In fact, I am rather in the position of someone who cannot look at the original Mona Lisa without remembering the version defaced by a moustache.
     Of course, if I did not know Waugh’s novel, I would not think this one all that bad, though it is not all that good. But I do know the real Brideshead, and obviously had it not existed, this one would not have been written. But just in case readers have forgotten the original, there are several lengthy recapitulations of the main events.
     To the plot: Cousin Jasper extracts Charles Ryder from the bivouac at Brideshead to become a War Artist, first in Algiers, where he paints de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Macmillan, and a thinly disguised and nude Diana Cooper, then in Tunis, where he paints with Churchill and discovers the dying Sebastian, wondering “what if” the two had had a sexual relationship. Then he goes to France, where he enters Paris with de Gaulle, who decorates him, and then to Germany, where he finds Anthony Blanche in Belsen, paints feverishly (both metaphorically and literally) the appalling scenes he has found, and returns to England and Nanny’s funeral, after which Rex rapes Julia, who once again disappears. Mr. Ryder is killed by a V-2 rocket. Cordelia is sexually aroused but not penetrated by a lieutenant in Palestine. Charles’s daughter Caroline is even more appalling than his ex-wife Celia, but his son John is sympathetic. Boy Mulcaster is as awful as ever.
     A very large part of this novel is about Ryder as a painter, down to the smallest detail of paper, palettes, colors and textures of oil paints, and, in the scene in which Ryder and Churchill go on a painting picnic, about clearing the sand of snakes and scorpions. Waugh was more impressionistic and has left a much stronger impression.
     These details are merely distracting. A much larger problem is Johnston’s conception of the characters. Talking about the issue of succession to Brideshead, Bridey says of Sebastian that “it would have been rather beyond the pale, so to speak, if the next marquis had been a maudlin monk.” This is completely out of character for the conventionally religious Bridey, as is (remember his refusal to join the government action against the General Strike) his rant about socialist programs. Sebastian’s analysis of his history and condition is close to psychobabble. Anthony Blanche falls in love with a German double agent posing as a Swede and is blackmailed into accompanying him to Berlin, information we gain from extensive quotations from his diary. Ryder meets a sympathetic and cultured American diplomat and has a very satisfying affair with a very nice American nurse, both, in view of his and his creator’s view of Americans, extremely unlikely. Ryder talks about getting “blotto” and non-denominationally prays without “making public acknowledgement of my belief. I did not attend church services and would have difficulty in knowing which church to attend.” This ignores clues in the original’s frame—Hooper’s remark that the chapel is “more in your line than mine,” Ryder’s formal prayer, “an ancient, newly learned form of words”—that Ryder has indeed converted. But Mr. Ryder and Mulcaster are done rather well.
     It is hard to criticize the style for being flatter than Waugh’s—whose isn’t?—but structure is a larger problem. “Et in Arcadia Ego” is so elaborately and carefully structured, like a series of Chinese boxes (as I have pointed out in Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed), that the flashbacks are barely noticeable. Johnston’s story is framed by a return for Nanny Hawkins’ funeral, but most of it is in straight chronological narrative, with flash-forwards, or back, depending on the very unstable vantage point, to Ryder’s illness and recovery, in a different type face, words repeated verbatim when the narrative straightens out.
     Johnston’s book is obviously a labor of love, but there is a fine line between love and stalking. The Waugh estate has obtained a modified Victim’s Protection Order, under the terms of which the book can only be sold by mail order and must carry a sticker indicating that the book does not have the approval of Waugh’s heirs and assigns. Those who want to read Brideshead Regained will have to expend considerable effort, first to acquire the book and then to get through it. Only the most dedicated—perhaps besotted is the better term—Brideshead fans will find the trip rewarding.
     Johnston is not without talent, and if he began with his own characters and situations, he might produce quite readable fiction.