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EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES |
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Decline and Fall
Editor's Note: Mike Stocks edits Anon, a poetry magazine that uses an anonymous submissions selection procedure. Known and unknown poets are welcome to submit work. |
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What was Dial? One of the most passionate speeches
in Brideshead Revisited is made by Julia after Brideshead
reproaches her for living in sin. I wondered, when Julia talked
about putting her sin to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial because it
was "fretful," what she was talking about. What, I wondered, was
"Dial"? |
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A Note on Evelyn Waugh's Book Review 'Two Unquiet
Lives' 'Two Unquiet Lives' (The
Tablet, 5 May 1951, 356-7), Waugh's double review of the
autobiographies of Stephen Spender and John Miller, is one of his most
characteristic articles; it certainly contains one of his most frequently
quoted barbs, the comparison of Spender's treatment of the English
language to a chimpanzee's handling of a Sèvres
vase. The second half of the review, devoted to Miller's book (Saints
and Parachutes, London: Constable & Co., 1951), is equally funny and
equally cruel, but a chance discovery raises the question of whether
something more than ordinary 'Waughspishness' lay behind it. |
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Reviews Past and PresentTwo Lives: Edmund Campion--Ronald Knox, by Evelyn Waugh. London: Continuum, 2001. 424 pp. £14.99. $41.95. Reviewed by Patrick Query. The publisher’s stated purpose in reissuing these two biographies by Waugh
in one volume is modest and relatively straightforward: the books “in
recent times…have been difficult to obtain…. The hope of the
publishers is that this edition will restore to the general reader two
works that are an essential part of the library of any admirer of Evelyn
Waugh.” If, in the anti-heroes of his fiction, Waugh showed what might have happened to him without the help of religion, biography showed examples of those he would have to emulate; biography changed him, made him a new man.The form of Knox indicates just how much Waugh was capable of changing as a biographer. This is the meticulous work, complete with the scholarly accouterments of footnotes, appendix, and bibliography. Still, it is superficial in an important sense that Waugh himself acknowledged. As if anticipating Graham Greene’s later objection that writing a biography of a priest is like describing an iceberg from the waterline up, Waugh outlined his authorial intention quite plainly: “to tell the story of [Knox’s] exterior life, not to give a conspectus of his thought; still less to measure his spiritual achievements” (133). His book has still not precipitated the “many weightier studies” of Knox that Waugh anticipated, but it remains as a surprisingly thorough introduction to the life of the priest with whom the author most identified. We can surely learn more of Knox the man from this biography than we can of Campion from Campion. In combination, though, the two books provide a fascinating frame through which to view the development of Waugh’s sensibility as a complete writer, and a demonstration of the reciprocity between present and past that quickens the best biographical writing. Two Lives is worth reading for either reason, but preferably for both.
Notes:
[1] I am indebted to Professor Blayac of University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3 for permission to quote from his symposium essay.
[2]
The U.S. cover is slightly different, but the effect is the
same. |
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Surprised by Cinema ‘But, good heavens, there isn’t a word in the book–you must be misinterpreting it.’ (Vile Bodies, ch. 2) As
Adam Fenwick-Symes learns to his cost, books have a habit of being
construed in ways the author never intended. Stephen Fry and Lisa
Colletta have put forward two very different interpretations of Vile
Bodies and I am not entirely confident that, like Customs officers
scouring for smut, they have not each merely found what they wanted to
find. For Colletta, Waugh’s novel is unsparingly brutal in its
satire but entirely devoid of didactic intent. The narrator ‘doesn’t
mock with a stable set of values, and the only constant is that he is
willing to make everything and everybody the butt of his joke’ (88).
Emotional involvement in the story is impossible because of the
‘relentless shallowness’ (91) of the characters: ‘We may feel sympathy for
the plight of Adam Fenwick-Symes…but we do not feel his pain’ (9).
The book offers no possibility of redemption from the chaotic world it
depicts, and the reader’s only solace is ‘to wrest from pain a momentary
victory in laughter’ (11). This is a lively and provocative study,
making use of work on humour by Freud and Bergson and applying it to an
unusual combination of novels–the others are Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,
Compton-Burnett’s A House and Its Head and Powell’s
Afternoon Men. Yet I wonder if Vile Bodies really belongs
in her theoretical framework, at least considering what we know about its
author. ‘It seems misguided,’ she insists, ‘to read the early novels
through the lens of his later conversion’ (82). But that conversion
took place only a matter of months after the publication of Vile Bodies
in 1930 (not 1929 as stated on p. 81) so it’s surely not fallacious to
assume that religious anxieties informed its composition. Colletta
believes that the book’s dark humour leaves the reader ‘with a certain
sense of victory’ (101), in spite of the unredeemed nihilism of the plot.
Personally I don’t get any feeling of triumph from reading the novel but,
more importantly, it’s clear that Waugh got none from writing it.
For him at least, laughing in the face of despair was no solution at all.
Notes: |
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Et in Arcadia Non Ego --Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (84-85) Although
John Howard Wilson rightly ventures that this book may be read
independently of his other work, it is the second part of an eventual
trilogy, and as such has a pre-existing context. The prequel,
spanning the years 1903 to 1924, was mentioned as a foil in Sebastian
Perry’s recent review of Douglas Lane Patey’s The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical
Biography: “While J. H. Wilson has dedicated an entire volume to
Waugh’s childhood, adolescence and undergraduate days, Patey (perhaps
sharing his subject’s scorn for the ‘Voodoo, Bog-magic’ of psychology)
allows that period only fifteen pages” (9). Whilst I have no a priori objection to the genre of
literary biography, particularly in the case of Waugh whose work assuredly
elicits this approach, it is a field that has fast become crowded,
requiring a sturdy pair of elbows. Christopher Sykes’ authorized
version suggested from the first that “other biographical studies could
and perhaps should be written” (ix), and indeed a slew of memoirs,
diaries, letters, satellitic books on the “Brideshead Set,” and
biographies (there is even Norman Page’s “day-planner” Chronology) have accepted the
invitation, Martin Stannard’s and Selina Hastings’ still most lengthily
among them. Sykes may be haphazardly anecdotal, and Hastings
obscures rather than exposes her subject via a penchant for luridness--her
premise from the opening page is to define the extent of Waugh’s
monstrosity and the book ends abruptly with a sentence notifying the
reader of Margaret Waugh’s death on the Chalk Farm Road, as if present
sensationalism would elucidate Waugh to his present audience--but neither
is devoid of literary criticism, of the life / fiction symbiosis.
One of Stannard’s explicit criteria, in addition to correcting Sykes’
occasional waywardness, is “to forge a relationship between the crucial
events of Waugh’s life and his developing aesthetic” (xviii). Wilson’s
intention, from the first volume, is to focus “on the delicate
relationship between Waugh’s life and his writing” (11), and though he
describes his three predecessors’ labors as “conventional” (11), a proleptic, compelling rationale for writing further biography, even
“literary” biography, is missing. Works Cited |
| Religion and Empire Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature, by Christopher Hodgkins. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. 290 pp. $37.50. Reviewed by Steven Trout, Fort Hays State University. Christopher
Hodgkins's central theme in Reforming Empire is immediately
suggested by the book's frontispiece, The Boyhood of Raleigh by the
Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Everett Millais. In the
painting, a young Walter Raleigh sits wearing a rapt expression while an
ear-ringed sailor, presumably in the midst of a yarn, points
seaward--toward the future course of empire. Indeed, the painting
pulls its viewer, irresistibly, toward the sailor's pointing finger,
placed level with the distant horizon. Yet, as Hodgkins observes,
this image of imperial promise also contains a subtle "memento mori": in
the bottom left-hand corner, far from the visual center of interest, a
"listing toy ship" rests on the sand, as if warning of the vanity of
colonial ambitions. |
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Not Grand and Far Madder The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary S. Lovell. New York: Norton, 2001. Norton Paperback, 2003. (Originally published in England under the title The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family). 611 pages. $18.95. Reviewed by Patrick Query. In 1945, while Nancy Mitford worked on her autobiographical novel, The Pursuit of Love, she worried that people might think she was copying the first-person model from Evelyn Waugh’s recent Brideshead Revisited. She wrote to Waugh, her close friend, to assure him that this was not her intention. Her book, she said, was “about my family, a very different cup of tea, not grand and far madder” (395). Indeed, there have been few families, even in fiction, capable of providing “madder” material than the Mitfords. And, while many of the locales and doings in Mary S. Lovell’s The Sisters are (as Debo Mitford might say) no end grand, this does little to diminish the madness of the saga, which at times reads with the hilarity of a comic novel by Waugh himself. Readers will enjoy Lovell’s remarkable book for at least two reasons. First, it tells a superb story, crafted with grace and lightness of touch. Second, it provides a handy socio-political introduction to the twentieth-century West, owing to its span (1894-2000) and its cast of minor and major characters, including the Kennedys, the Churchills, Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, and Queen Elizabeth. Although The Sisters stretches over a century, its central story is that of England and Europe entre deux guerres. Fully half the book focuses on the years 1919-1939. Diana, with whom Waugh was once in love, was a center in the world of infamous Bright Young People (immortalized in Waugh’s Vile Bodies), and Nancy befriended several of the Oxford aesthetes who would become known as the Brideshead generation. The Mitford girls’ real decade was the 1930s, which accounts for nearly forty percent of Lovell’s text. The family name becomes a household one when Unity falls in love with Hitler, Decca elopes with the nephew of Winston Churchill to civil-war Spain, Diana marries Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, Debo makes her society debut, and Nancy begins her writing career in earnest. This part of the book is dominated by Unity and Diana. Lovell is aware that history has been much kinder to Jessica, the Communist, than to these Fascists, but she sets out early on to establish her objectivity: “The reader is as capable as I am of forming his or her own opinions based on the evidence, and an individual social ideology” (3). One of the book’s primary shortcomings, though, is that the author’s resolve regularly withers under that burden of public sentiment, and she nervously insulates many of her references to fascism with invocations of hindsight. At least half a dozen times she says something along these lines: “[I]t is important to recognize that in 1928 Tom was speaking without the benefit of hindsight” (107) or “It is important to recall that at that time Fascism, as a political model, was unmarred by the horrors we now associate with Nazism” (137). Not only is this kind of handholding insulting to a reader’s intellect, but it also undercuts one of the central questions raised by the Mitford story: What about Fascism appealed to reasonable and intelligent people of the 1920s and 30s? Ironically, the model for a more honest and rewarding view of history is provided by Lovell’s subject. Diana said as recently as 2001 that “It is not a question of right or wrong, but the impressions of a young woman in the thirties. Of course it would be easy just to deny these, but it would not be very interesting, or true” (5). The wisdom of Waugh’s own inveighing against the “highly nervous and vocal party” who saw in fascism only a “bogy” is in the same spirit.[1] Lovell acknowledges that the politics of the 1930s are at the very heart of this book: “It was the opposing forces of Fascism and Communism that lit the tinder of the girls’ lives and set alight fires that propelled them from the ordinary to the extraordinary, and made them household names” (529). So it is a disservice to an otherwise impressive study that Lovell decides ultimately not to meet the reader honestly upon this most difficult, and important, issue. This unfortunate drawback, though, does not negate the overall delight of reading The Sisters, a book that has for good reason been highly acclaimed in both England and the United States. Note: [1] Letter in New Statesman & Nation, 5 March 1938. |
| Review of Brideshead Regained Michael Johnston writes:
Robert Murray Davis responds:
Robert Murray Davis's review of Michael Johnston's Brideshead Regained may be read in the Newsletter, Vol. 34, No. 3. |
| Fathers and Sons Alexander Waugh's book about several generations of men in his family, Fathers and Sons, is due to be published by Hodder Headline on 6 September 2004. For more information, please visit www.hodderheadline.co.uk. Please look for a review in a forthcoming issue of the Newsletter. |
| The Evelyn Waugh Society The Evelyn Waugh Society has started to form, with the object of advancing research and interest in Waugh's life and works. For more information, please read the Society's Constitution. To join, please visit the Newsletter's home page. The Waugh Society is an international body, and members may pay their annual fees in local currency in several countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Society would like to find a representative willing to accept memberships in the European Union. If interested, please contact the editor, jwilson3@lhup.edu. The Society has not yet received any nominations for offices. Under the constitution, officers are elected at the Society's conferences, and the next conference is tentatively scheduled to take place in 2006. Instead of waiting, we may do better to elect officers by mail and e-mail, so that they can plan the next conference. If you would like to nominate someone for office, please send that person's name to the editor at jwilson3@lhup.edu. Nominations must be received by 15 August 2004 in order to appear in the autumn issue of the Newsletter. |
| Suggestion for Waugh Society Jeff Manley suggests that the Evelyn Waugh Society might be able to make various video programs available for sale. Examples include Arena: The Waugh Trilogy, the series of interviews Waugh did with the BBC, and the 1967 production of Sword of Honour starring Edward Woodward. As Jeff points out, "DVDs are cheap to make and can be produced in a version which will work on any TV if the licensing agreement is done properly. Collections of previously uncollected works may also be feasible for a society even where they would not be commercially feasible. It will require getting permission from the copyright owners, but other literary societies seem to manage that. With the power of the internet, many such ventures are possible." If interested, please contact the editor, jwilson3@lhup.edu. |
| Waugh-Greene Exhibition The Ransom Center Galleries at The University of Texas at Austin will host the exhibition "Writing among the Ruins: Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh" from 5 October 2004 through 20 March 2005. The Center owns extensive archives relating to both novelists. Born within a year of each other, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh were both Catholic converts deeply engaged in the life of their time. The complex relationship between the novelists will be traced in examples of their correspondence and inscriptions in books. The Ransom Center owns the holographs of all but one of Waugh's novels, and the exhibition will include manuscripts of the authors' principal works, along with personal effects. The contents of Waugh's library are now at the Ransom Center, and the exhibition will display his desk, his books, and some of his paintings. The Center's galleries are open from Tuesday through Sunday, except for major holidays. Consult the Ransom Center's web page at www.hrc.utexas.edu or call 512-471-8944 for updated information on the exhibition. Editor's note: The Waugh-Greene Exhibition would be a good opportunity to hold an organizational meeting of the Evelyn Waugh Society. If interested, please contact the editor at jwilson3@lhup.edu. |
| Food for Thought The Los Angeles Times recently published a feature story on diets and mentioned Dr. William Howard Hay. In the 1920s, Dr. Hay promoted a "food-combining diet" as part of a "medical millennium." Dieters were advised not to combine starches, fruits, and proteins in the same meal. Robert Murray Davis points out that Dr. Hay's diet is probably the source of Tony and Brenda Last's "present system" in A Handful of Dust, where "they denied themselves the combination of protein and starch at the same meal" (Little, Brown, 27). |
| Evelyn Waugh in Tokyo There is a reference to Evelyn Waugh in the recent film Lost in Translation (2003), written and directed by Sofia Coppola. The film is set in Tokyo but focuses partly on an American couple, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and John (Giovanni Ribisi). John happens to run into an acquaintance named Kelly (Anna Faris), who says that she has registered at a hotel as Evelyn Waugh. Charlotte corrects Kelly's pronunciation and observes that Evelyn Waugh is a man's name. John accuses Charlotte of making other people seem stupid. The joke dates back to the beginning of Waugh's career, when a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement assumed that Rossetti (1928) had been written by "Miss Waugh." Lost in Translation has, however, won twelve awards for best screenplay, including an Academy Award. |
| Bright Young Things at Film
Festivals Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's film based on Vile Bodies, was screened three times at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on 23 and 24 January 2004. The film was also screened twice at the Portland International Film Festival on 13 and 15 February 2004, and twice more at the Philadelphia Film Festival on 13 and 17 April 2004. |
| Scoop on DVD The 1987 production of Scoop for television's Masterpiece Theatre is available on DVD for $19.98 from BFS Entertainment. For more information, please visit www.bfsent.com. |
| Sir Alexander Glen, 1912-2004 Sir Alexander Glen passed away on 6 March 2004. He was 91 years old. Readers of the Newsletter may remember that Glen led Evelyn Waugh and Hugh Lygon to Spitzbergen in 1934. Waugh described the adventure in "The First Time I Went to the North: Fiasco in the Arctic," originally published in an anthology edited by Theodora Benson, The First Time I . . . (London, 1935). Waugh's contribution was republished in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (144-9). Waugh referred to Glen as "G.," who "assured us that we should have a craving for fat as soon as we were on the ice. We did not find it so" (Essays 147). Glen gave his side of the story in Young Men in the Arctic: The Oxford University Arctic Expedition to Spitzbergen 1933 (London: Faber, 1935). Both Glen and Waugh served in the British military mission to Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia in the Second World War. Glen's obituary can be read in the Daily Telegraph or at Totalwaugh. |
| Suggestion for Newsletter Robert Murray Davis suggests that the Newsletter might consider publishing articles from past issues, or essays from other journals or out-of-print pamphlets and books. Members of the editorial board or others could make selections and write brief introductions explaining why the essays are important. Such a series of essays would give a sense of the history of Waugh studies. If you are interested in nominating an essay for publication, please e-mail the editor, jwilson3@lhup.edu. |
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End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies,
Vol. 35, No. 1 |