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EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND
STUDIES |
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HRC
Revisited The second two words of
“The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center” are for me like the “under God”
in the Pledge of Allegiance: I have to draw a mental caret and insert them. Editor's note: Robert Murray Davis also published "Greene & Waugh in Texas" in the issue of Commonweal for 19 Nov. 2004. Prof. Davis would like to emphasize that he did not write the last sentence in the article. Free copies of the exhibition's keepsake booklet are available from Richard Oram (roram@mail.utexas.edu). |
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Strange
Bedfellows: Reading Evelyn Waugh and Frantz Fanon
During the interwar decade of the 1930s, the British author Evelyn Waugh
began making a name for himself through his travel books and fictional
accounts of trips to North Africa and the Middle East. I will offer
here an interpretation of two of Waugh’s early fictional works, Black
Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938), based in part on his travels in
the country of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), using the work of Frantz Fanon,
specifically his book Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon, an
Algerian who lived during the last decades of French control, obtained his degree
in psychoanalysis and used his studies to launch attacks on French colonial
rule. As Fanon was an outspoken critic of the colonialist enterprise,
it is questionable whether he would have found any common ground with
Waugh. In his travel books, written while he also worked on Black
Mischief and Scoop, Waugh seems personally uninterested in the
plight of colonial subjects, at times even overtly elitist and racist.
In Labels (1930), his first travel book, he saves most of his
direct criticism for the practitioners of Islam, who he believes have not
produced any “art, history, scholarship, or social, religious, or political
organization, to which we, as Christians, cannot look with unshaken pride of
race.”[1] Nevertheless, I believe that the revolutionary rhetoric of
Fanon is compatible with the piercing wit Waugh’s fictional work is famous
for. Notes: |
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“Orphans of the Storm” in Brideshead
Revisited In Brideshead Revisited (1945), during the
storm at sea, when almost all the other passengers are seasick, Julia asks,
“where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?” (Little, Brown,
261). The last phrase seems like a cliché, but a little research
indicates that Evelyn Waugh deliberately chose it to make several
suggestions. |
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Behind
the Scenes of Brideshead Revisited Recently, upon the advice of Paul Doyle,
editor emeritus of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, I obtained
copies of John Gielgud: The Authorized Biography (2002), by Sheridan
Morley, and Richard Mangan's edition, Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters
(2004), to see what light they might shed on Sir John's role as Edward Ryder,
the father of Charles Ryder, in the PBS presentation of Brideshead
Revisited (1981). |
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Reviews The First Scholar In Fathers and Sons, Alexander Waugh narrows his focus a bit from Time and God to study filial relationships in five generations of his
family in a book where piety is not always the main impulse. Even life-long
students of the life and work of Evelyn Waugh will learn a great deal about
the frequently odd, sometimes perverse, and always interesting males in the
Waugh family, ranging from the ancestor whose concoction cured Queen |
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Stalking
the Sources Fathers
and Sons is a work of family history rather than of literary
criticism--indeed, Editor's Note: Donat Gallagher, who published a review of Fathers and Sons in Australia, has suggested that the Newsletter hold a symposium devoted to the book. If you have comments on Fathers and Sons, or Prof. Davis's or Prof. Patey's reviews, please send them to the editor, jwilson3@lhup.edu. Alexander Waugh has kindly agreed to respond to readers' comments. |
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Not All That Vile |
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Questions
of Craftsmanship Ker seems to target the growing number of readers
ignorant of the atmosphere and culture of the Church that existed before the
Second Vatican Council—here, specifically, between Cardinal Newman’s
conversion and Evelyn Waugh’s last volume of the Sword of Honor war
trilogy. |
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Still Dancing
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In
New Dress
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New
Edition of Helena |
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Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest |
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Evelyn
Waugh Society |
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Piers
Court For Sale |
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The
Scarlet Woman on
Videotape |
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Waugh
and Snobbery Revisited |
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Belated
Birthday Cards |
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The
Diary of a Nobody |
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Kakutani,
Waugh, and Hollinghurst |
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Humphrey
Carpenter, 1946-2005 |
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Anthony Powell Centenary
Conference |
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End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter
and Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 |