EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 35, No. 3
Winter 2005

HRC Revisited
by Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma

     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.
     When I first went to the HRC in 1967 to examine some of Ronald Firbank’s notebooks, Harry Ransom was still president of the University of Texas and the driving force in securing funds for the collection that was large then and is still growing.  At that time, the HRC was located on the top floor of the Undergraduate Library (now renamed, it still contains some books, but it and the soon-to-be infamous Texas Tower, from which a sniper killed a number of students and faculty, have been mostly replaced by a Texas-shaped library building), and it stayed there until I had catalogued the vast body of materials that Warren Roberts had acquired from the Waugh estate in 1966 and met Cyril Connolly and, when he was devastated at seeing Waugh’s marginal annotations of The Unquiet Grave (1944), to console him by pointing out that when Waugh made these annotations, he was surrounded by monoglot Yugoslav communist partisans, drinking bad wine, and having to listen to Randolph Churchill and was therefore in an unusually captious mood even for him.
     By the time I thought I was finished with the catalogue and, with Charles Linck, Paul A. Doyle, and Heinz Kosok, Evelyn Waugh: A Checklist of Primary and Secondary Material (1972) and was working on what became Evelyn Waugh, Writer (1981) in the early 1970s, the new HRC building was completed and was being filled with additional material like the Waugh files from his literary agent, A. D. Peters, roughly another 1400 items by Waugh and uncounted (except perhaps by Donat Gallagher) others by Peters and members of his staff.  So that was months more of visits, annotations, and interaction with the staff, many of whom had a shorter tenure than I.  Austin became my second and increasingly more cordial home.  Other interaction took place with the growing number of people who came to examine the Waugh archive: Renée Siarnowski, Donat Gallagher, Martin Stannard, Alain Blayac, the last three overlapping with one of my visits.
     After finishing the major tasks, I made sporadic visits to the HRC to verify details and just to get out of Oklahoma.  But until October 2004, when I was invited to the opening of “Writing Among the Ruins: Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh,” the centennial exhibition curated by Richard Oram and John Kirkpatrick, I had not been there in years.
     Naturally, a good deal has changed. One no longer has to ride a heavily secured elevator to the fifth floor, where a system to protect the materials in case of fire by flooding the area with carbon dioxide or something similarly noxious had been disabled because of the belated recognition that doing so would kill all the patrons.  Well, as Waugh said when he worried more about the Blitz damaging his books than killing his children, he could always beget more children.  But the Texas authorities took a more sentimental view.
     Instead, the reading room is now located on the second floor.  It even, as Selina Hastings pointed out, has a window.  Warren Roberts has not been director for a long time.  Thomas Staley has replaced him, though not, I think, in immediate succession.
     But the mission, no matter how much the collection has expanded, remains the same: to provide not only books and manuscripts but all available material to help scholars account for the inception, growth, revision, and reputation of as many literary works by as many writers as possible.
     Most Newsletter readers will have some idea of what the Waugh collection contains.  Those who don’t can access a list of holdings at <http://www.hrc.utexas.edu> or, to get more detail, procure A Catalogue of the Evelyn Waugh Collection at the Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin (1981), which I think is still available from Whitston Publishing Company in Troy, NY, if you can get them, after much pleading, to sell you a copy.  The website also lists Greene holdings, which may be more accessible now that Norman Sherry has (more or less) finished the authorized biography and ended his stranglehold on archival materials.
     No exhibition can do justice to the breadth and richness of the holdings, and in the limited space the curators have chosen representative rather than comprehensive materials.  Separate cases are devoted to the early work of each writer.  Another case is devoted to Brideshead—the manuscript, the proof edition, ancillary letters about the book, and materials from the Granada Television production.  Waugh’s desk, the bust of him done in Yugoslavia during the war, a few of his books in special bindings, and the Rebecca Solomon paintings of virtuous and dissolute undergraduates—but not his bookcases or elephant’s foot wastebasket—rather sketchily represent his study.
     On display from the Greene archive are manuscripts, including a “dream diary,” a letter from his wife to Selina Hastings about some of her husband’s liaisons, a shooting script, and a very rare copy of Greene’s first book, Babbling April (1925).
     What one sees is not even the tip of the iceberg, for there are more than 1700 items by Waugh, not counting supporting material, and at least forty linear feet of material by and about Greene.  And by the time this appears, the lectures by Selina Hastings on Waugh and Shirley Hazzard on Greene and the panel on “The Catholicism of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh,” featuring Bishop John McCarthy and Harry Middleton, will be long past.
     However, the exhibit does not close until March 20, 2005, and what is on view, not to mention what can be examined by those who overcome minor obstacles to seeing other materials in the collection, will find a pilgrimage to the fount and origin of Waugh studies and an increasingly important locus of Greene studies very rewarding.  Visitors may not genuflect in front of the relics, as Don Gallagher and I did, simultaneously and spontaneously, before the wash-hand-stand featured in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) when we saw it at the Victoria and Albert in 1981.  But some sign of reverence might be acceptable.

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).

Strange Bedfellows: Reading Evelyn Waugh and Frantz Fanon
by Nathan Fiala

     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.
     I will focus here on two specific episodes from Black Mischief and Scoop, which I will call “The Two Embassies” and “Misdirected Rule” respectively.  These episodes gain new meaning when read with Fanon.  In many ways they fit very well within Fanon’s two most important psychological theses: the black native’s motivation to physically become white, and the complex impact of colonialism on the colonizers[2].  Black Mischief and Scoop suggest that Waugh had a complex view of native African populations.  I will try to address the question of why Waugh’s travel writing is so full of overtly imperialist language, while his fictional accounts are often sympathetic.  That is, how could an author create (and hold?) such separate views of colonialism at the same time?  The answer involves a clear demarcation between Waugh’s art and his personal opinions.
     The Two Embassies: Scoop begins as a story of mistaken identity.  The nature journalist William Boot is mistaken for the novelist John Boot and sent by his newspaper to cover a civil war in Ishmaelia (a fictional country that has a number of similarities to Ethiopia).  Before leaving England, he must pick up his reporter’s visa, so he goes to the two competing Ishmaelite embassies, each representing a different side in the civil war.
     The two Ishmaelite embassies reflect a dichotomy.  The first consulate identifies itself with the patriotic cause.  The consul-general, before dispensing the visa, regales William with “the cause of the coloured man and of the proletariat throughout the world,” quoting the “great Negro Karl Marx” and claiming “Africa for the African worker; Europe for the African worker; Asia, Oceania, America, Arctic, and Antarctic for the African worker.”[3]  In the second embassy, which prefers the fascist cause, William finds a swastika in the window and a consul-general who asserts that “the Jews of Geneva, subsidized by Russian gold, have spread the story that we are a black race….  As you will see for yourself, we are pure Aryans.”[4]  In the hands of Waugh, the Ishmaelites have become torn between a severely misplaced white-power movement and a kind of ultra Black Nationalism.
     Within this conflict we see a satirical prefiguring of Fanon’s metaphorical concept of the African with black skin seeking a white mask.  This idea is explained in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.  Due to the humiliating and objectifying nature of colonial rule, Africans became obsessed with lightening their appearance, as they associated success and power with white settlers.  Thus a social hierarchy was established, wherein lighter skin tones reflected higher positions, both socially and economically.
     Part of Waugh’s joke is that the fascist consul-general does not appear white to William at all.  The desire to become white in the colonies was strongly attached to the system of power, and it was not always necessary to physically change.  “One is white above a certain financial level,”[5] so one could become white by simply being successful.  The fascist consul-general is not simply blind to the physical realities; in fact he is very shrewd about power at the time.
     In opposition to this trend were black-power movements that trumpeted the success of historically black civilizations.  In his work, Fanon explained that the black man was not simply a man, but always a man in relation to whites.  That is, Fanon felt that he himself “was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.”[6]  The choice then becomes one of two extremes: either one is ashamed of one’s condition, or one fights back with all of one’s strength.  Under repressive white rule, either choice can lead to the neurotic climax we see in Waugh.
     Misdirected Rule: While his personal writings often seem to support imperialism, Waugh satirizes both the colonized and colonizers in Black Mischief and Scoop.  Europeans are not divine, inspiring conquerors; instead, they are foolish and prone to savagery themselves.  Waugh was not an egalitarian, but he did not often distinguish between a foolish native and a foolish European.
     In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argues that “the Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.”[7]  Colonization affects indigenous peoples, but Fanon was also interested in how colonization affects the imperial country and its citizens.  Following a critical approach inspired by Fanon, we can better understand the actions of Europeans within Scoop and Black Mischief.  The characters are not ridiculous and neurotic in isolation; their actions result from the colonial situation.
     This European neuroticism is best expressed in Black Mischief, specifically in how the emperor Seth, educated in Europe, is obsessed with the idea of modernization, even at the expense of the citizens of Azania (another fictional African country similar to Ethiopia).  Seth is too focused on museums and sterility programs to notice that the people need jobs and food.  Fanon would find Seth’s programs not simply irrelevant, but the expression of an uncontrollable urge, learned during his time in Europe, to bring a new civilization to people who are unwilling, or unable, to accept the changes.  Ultimately, Seth’s vision of a modern country cannot develop apart from modern life: he lies awake at night, “desperate with the acquired loneliness of civilization.”[8]  Always looking to Europe for guidance, he is unwilling, or unable, to achieve balanced growth.
     When Waugh was writing Black Mischief, Ethiopia had remained one of the few countries in Africa free from colonial rule.  By the time Scoop was published, Ethiopia had been defeated and occupied by Italy.  In contrast, Fanon’s work dealt almost exclusively with Algeria, a country with a long history of colonial rule.  We nevertheless see some of the same problems discussed by Fanon at work within an independent state.  Colonialism can control another country, but its rhetoric can also transcend boundaries and peoples.
     How do we reconcile Waugh’s seemingly sympathetic account of colonization with his travel writing? Waugh was perhaps not so sympathetic, but his wit was all the more piercing.  Waugh saw his travel writings as a way to fund his travels and devoted more time to his novels.  As he paid little attention to them, the travel books are not Waugh’s work at its most artistic and polished.  I believe Waugh’s artistic merit lies more in his wit, which is less evident, or completely lacking, in his travel writings.  He has admitted “I can only be funny when I am complaining about something,”[9] but his art is more than just complaining about the lack of Western conveniences.  If anything, it is a kind of dialogue with the objects that are supposed to bring convenience, but instead often act as a tool of enslavement.
     Waugh’s travel writings thus show a man, like most people living at the time, at some level unable to leave behind the comforts of European civilization.  While it is clear he did like to travel, his travel books are basically an extended meditation on the difficulties of travel and lack the subtlety of his fictional works.  In the comfort of his study, looking through his notebooks, Waugh seems to have become capable of separating himself from this need.  He saw more clearly the problems of both modern and non-modern societies.  It is, after all, easier to criticize when one is not confronted with reality.

Notes:
[1] Evelyn Waugh, Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writings (New York: Knopf, 2003), 95.
[2] This last point has also been discussed by Juan Francisco Elices Agudo in his paper “On the Pitfalls of National Consciousness: Colonialism and Modernity in Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief,” which was presented at the International Symposium: One Hundred Years of Evelyn Waugh, University of La Rioja, Logroño, Spain in May 2003.
[3] Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (New York: Knopf, 2003), 242-3.
[4] Ibid., 243-4.
[5] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 44.
[6] Ibid., 112.
[7] Ibid., 60.
[8] Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief, Scoop, Loved One, Gilbert Pinfold, 20.
[9] Qtd. in Nicholas Shakespeare, Introduction, Waugh Abroad, ix.

“Orphans of the Storm” in Brideshead Revisited
by John Howard Wilson
Lock Haven University

     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.
     In his thorough “Companion to Brideshead Revisited” on An Evelyn Waugh Website (www.abbotshill.freeserve.co.uk), David Cliffe notes that Julia’s question is a “wry joke about a famous movie,” D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm, “first shown in 1921.”  Cliffe adds that the story was “originally a French play, Les Deux Orphelines, written by Adolphe Philippe d’Ennery and Eugene Cormon and first performed in 1874.”  Presumably Waugh was familiar with the movie rather than the play.
     Orphans of the Storm centers on two female characters, Henriette and Louise (Lillian and Dorothy Gish).  Louise has been taken from her aristocratic family, abandoned, and adopted by Henriette’s family of commoners.  Henriette becomes an orphan when she loses her parents to the plague that also blinds Louise.  In search of a cure, the two girls travel to Paris and are separated.  Henriette is abducted by an aristocrat, and Louise is forced to beg for a living.  The “storm” is the French Revolution, which breaks out and eventually brings the two girls together, after Henriette is barely saved from the guillotine.
     Julia’s allusion suggests several comparisons between the film and the novel.  Orphans of the Storm concentrates on the relationship between two characters who regard each other as sisters; Brideshead is partly about the relationship between two sisters, Julia and Cordelia.  Julia alludes to the film in 1936, when she and Cordelia have been separated by another “storm,” the Spanish Civil War.  Julia is, moreover, spiritually blind at this point in the novel, having married Rex Mottram outside the Roman Catholic Church, and having pursued an affair in New York.
     Julia makes her remark to Charles Ryder, however.  Her allusion to the film implicitly feminizes Charles, associating him with one of the two female protagonists in Orphans.  Perhaps Julia has Charles’s relationship with her brother Sebastian in mind; they have discussed him a little earlier, when Charles explains that Sebastian was “the forerunner” (257).  Julia may also refer to the relationship between social classes: she is an aristocrat, like blind Louise in the film, while Charles is a commoner, like Henriette.
     In Orphans, Henriette wishes to marry the Chevalier de Vaudrey, an aristocrat, but his family objects.  Similarly in Brideshead, Charles wishes to marry Julia.  Her family does not object, but there are other impediments, specifically Julia’s marriage to Rex and Charles’s marriage to Lady Celia.  Perhaps Julia’s reference to Orphans is also a sly allusion to Charles’s marriage to an aristocrat.
     In Orphans, the aristocracy is persecuted during the French Revolution.  Similarly in Brideshead, Charles realizes that Lady Marchmain’s brothers were “vermin by right of law” (139), who have been killed in the First World War.
     In Orphans, Henriette prays to “the one who gave the Light” to be shown “what to do.”  The chevalier walks in, and the two are eventually able to marry.  In Brideshead, Julia wonders what “we orphans” will do in “fair weather.”  She seems to be anticipating her return to the Church, when she sees the light and refuses to marry Charles.  In Orphans, Louise regains her sight, and she approves Henriette’s marriage to the chevalier.  In Brideshead, Cordelia does not approve Julia’s marriage to Rex, or her plan to marry Charles, but the two sisters are reunited, like the “sisters” in Orphans, in Palestine toward the end of the Second World War (349).
     Julia has often been dismissed as a flat character, but her allusion to Orphans of the Storm is quite a complicated joke, involving references to siblings, religion, social class, marriage, sexuality, and history.  That such an incidental allusion can be explicated at some length attests to the density of Waugh’s writing, his ability to choose comparisons that are simultaneously relevant, meaningful, and humorous.  Brideshead is obviously intertextual, from “orphans of the storm” to “A Twitch upon the Thread,” but it is also a book whose “theme is memory” (225).  Julia’s allusion calls up a film that Waugh had probably seen at least twenty years before he wrote Brideshead, and it takes the characters back to the early 1920s, when the film was released and their relationship began.
     Now, does anyone care to explain why Julia, Charles, and Celia are like “Lear, Kent, Fool”—“Only each of us is all three of them” (248)?

     Behind the Scenes of Brideshead Revisited
by David Bittner

      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).
     "It is so nice now being asked to do so many little things," said Sir John, an eminent Shakespearean actor for decades, about his roles in the new "heritage" film industry of Britain in the early 1980s, including his parts in Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire (1981), and in popular films like The Human Factor (1979) and The Elephant Man (1980).  Though Sir John was never to play in any of the Merchant Ivory productions of the classic E. M. Forster novels, including A Passage to India (1985), A Room With a View (1986), and Howards End (1992), Sheridan Morley believed the success of these marvelous "heritage" films was made possible by the success of Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire, to which Gielgud contributed so much.
     It was Sir John's  friendly old rival, Laurence (Baron) Olivier, to whom the part of Edward Ryder was originally offered, Morley reveals in his book.  Offered his choice of playing either Mr. Ryder or Lord Marchmain, "Larry," as Sir John called Olivier, chose Lord Marchmain because he "was never one to refuse a good death scene."  Morley said both Sir John and Sir Laurence later came to realize that it was by far the "cranky, irritable" Mr. Ryder that was the better part, and that "in the whole series, the scenes between Jeremy Irons, as Charles Ryder, and Sir John, as his craggy, unrelenting, petulant, malicious father, are as good as it gets."  The critic Peter Ackroyd wrote in The Times that Gielgud played the part of Mr. Ryder "as if he had been doing it all his life, and perhaps he has--aloof and yet alert, calculating but dismissive.  He seems to have sprung onto the screen from the pages of Evelyn Waugh, without pausing to alter that wry, malevolent expression."  In another sense Gielgud is typecast in the role of Mr. Ryder.  Mr. Ryder was a cynic about religion who "did not go to church except on family occasions, and then with derision," and Sir John, although he could "always play expositions of belief," was an "unbeliever" who "did not personally believe in the resurrection of Christ, or anybody else," as Morley quotes critic Harold Hobson.
     Gielgud wrote to a friend, Elizabeth Jennings, that he was "of course pleased" about winning an Oscar for best supporting actor in Arthur (1981), but he told her, "Actually I was more pleased at the success of Brideshead in which I had such an amusing and original character to play.''  In a letter to Claire Bloom, whom he knew socially as well as professionally, Gielgud wrote that he was also happy that Jeremy Irons had become such an overnight sensation as Charles Ryder.  "He is such a dear boy," he said.  Gielgud was also pleased to be working on the same set with Mona Washbourne, as Nanny Hawkins, and Olivier and Bloom, as Lord and Lady Marchmain, although none of his scenes involved any of them.  But he had worked opposite them all before on the stage, and presumably he found it pleasant to socialize with them on the set of Brideshead Revisited.  (The first time he worked with Bloom, in a play called The Lady's Not For Burning [1948], he could not remember her name and would simply refer to her as "that nice little girl upstairs," a reference, says Morley, to the distance from the stage to her dressing room.  But by the time they both starred in Brideshead Revisited, this distance was no longer a problem.)
     In the same letter to Claire Bloom, Gielgud laughed off the charges of some critics that Brideshead Revisited was a "decadent book" and possibly even Communist propaganda.
     I would like to thank the Omaha Public Library for purchasing Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters especially because I requested it.

Reviews

The First Scholar
Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, by Alexander Waugh. London: Headline, 2004. (Available in paperback June 6, 2005 from amazon.com.)  472 pp.  ₤20.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma

    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 Victoria of farting, to Evelyn’s grandfather, “the Brute,” Alexander Waugh, down through his great-great-grandson of the same name, author of the book.
     Some of the information may even be true, but readers should be cautioned that the first Alexander’s son Arthur, his son Evelyn, his son Auberon, and his son Alexander were and are fantasists interested in creating personae and embellishing events by a rather free handling of the facts.
     One minor example: the author claims to have spoken on the black character of Evelyn’s tutor, Cruttwell, to 200 Waugh enthusiasts at the Waugh centennial conference in 2003.  I don’t remember that many, but perhaps my memory is defective.  And although the University of Texas undeniably bought Evelyn’s library, from the walls in, including manuscripts, paintings, and bookcases, I don’t know that Harry Ransom of the University of Texas ever wore a Stetson, and I doubt that, as president of the university, he would have gone to Combe Florey himself.  While I haven’t seen the bill of sale, I heard that Texas paid not $8500 but ₤90,000—a steal even at that price.  But both of Alexander’s versions make good stories.
     There was usually a grain of fact in the lustrous stories that Evelyn told about his contemporaries, but both Auberon’s father and his son acknowledged that Auberon was often very far from truthful.  Of the notorious banana episode, in which Evelyn ate all of the rare fruit before his grieving children, Alexander says that his father possibly exaggerated or invented the story, and in any case, Evelyn was perfectly right to eat the bananas.  Auberon’s diaries for Private Eye and not a little of his journalism put forth preposterous opinions and defamations of character which escaped prosecution for libel because they were so obviously fictitious that not even a hungry lawyer could take them seriously.  And occasional footnotes cite family members as denying the truth of some very juicy anecdotes.  In other cases, one wonders.  Did Evelyn’s brother-in-law, Alick Dru, really whip his pigs to make the flesh more tender? Or was it some darker impulse?  Or merely a family invention?
     Even if only half of the book can be verified, it is obvious that the Waughs are very odd and interesting, though judging from the few surviving documents from my forbears, no odder or more interesting than most families.  However, there are two differences.  First, the Waughs were and are exceptionally productive and in several cases exceptionally talented writers deeply involved in the literary and cultural history of their times.  Second, the family seems to have preserved almost every scrap of paper on which any of them ever wrote.  Alexander II regrets that only eighty of Evelyn’s letters to Auberon survive.  How many sons can boast of half, even a tenth, that many?  But “only eighty” seems reasonable when one considers the letters, many previously unpublished, from fathers, brothers, uncles, mothers, aunts, friends, schoolmasters, and enemies; the material excised for the publication of Evelyn’s Diaries; and a good many other documents inaccessible to most of us.  The bibliography alone provides a valuable starting place for those new to Waugh studies.  In fact, Alexander may be the first scholar in his family.
     He is far from performing a neo-Victorian whitewash of his ancestors.  Like Evelyn, he regards the first Alexander as a sadistic monster, going even further to speculate about other if not darker crimes. Like Evelyn, he considers Arthur incorrigibly sentimental and, as a result, a very flaccid writer.  He is more tolerant of the people he knew, sympathizing with Evelyn’s black depressions without excusing the resulting behavior, and he obviously reveres his father, whom he considers a more significant writer than his grandfather was.  He even has kind words to say of Alec, a minor writer by his own estimate, and a dedicated lecher.
     All of the fathers failed in various ways—Alexander I by his sadism; Arthur by doting on Alec and ignoring Evelyn; Alec by protracted absence while pursuing various erotic obsessions; Evelyn by being too obviously bored by and indifferent to his children (Alexander defends him on the grounds that he was merely more honest than most parents); Auberon—perhaps—by giving too little direction and encouragement.  But as Alexander says, “the relationship [between father and son] is not one that ever seems to work.”
     Of course, we read three of the five Waughs (Arthur and Alec are excused) not for their veracity or for their paternal skills but for their wit in person, which is stressed, as well as in their writing, which is not, since Alexander offers very little in the way of literary criticism or even commentary.  Auberon maintained that Evelyn was the funniest man he had ever known, no mean praise from one who cautioned his son about buggery with “My dear boy ... the anus was designed for the retention and expulsion of faecal matter, not for the reception of foreign organs, however lovingly placed there.”  Had he never written a word, that remark should assure his immortality, for, true or not, the diction and rhythm are impeccable.
     Alexander’s wit tends toward understatement, as when he quotes Alec’s passage describing a very convoluted lesbian encounter, “their breasts held apart by a confusion of knees and elbows,” and invites the reader to re-enact it, “although I think it may be impossible.”  Here and elsewhere in the book, sitting alone in the house, I laughed aloud as I have not done since I first read Decline and Fall.
     Sadly, the focus of the book precluded extended treatment of the women in the family.  Laura Waugh’s obsession with dairy cattle and her use of binder twine to belt her slacks are only two of her eccentricities.  Evelyn’s daughter Harriet, Auberon’s wife Teresa, and his daughter Daisy are all novelists.  Perhaps they will tell the story from the women’s point of view.  Meanwhile, we have a thorough, absorbing, and balanced account of five generations of unusual men.

Not All That Vile
Bright Young Things (2003), dir. Stephen Fry.  106 min.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma. 

     Having read Sebastian Perry’s reservations about Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, adapted (admittedly very loosely at times) from Waugh's Vile Bodies (1930), and having heard Selina Hastings’ casual condemnation of the film, I went to see it more from a sense of duty than in anticipation of pleasure.  What I—and a Saturday afternoon audience even more geriatric than I—saw was a rather good film of a rather poor novel.
     I agree with Waugh’s low opinion of Vile Bodies, expressed in his preface to the New Uniform Edition of 1965.  Structurally and stylistically, it is perhaps his weakest novel, with far too many windy pronouncements by the omniscient narrator.
     However, I can understand that Waugh buffs might have two major objections to the film.  First, the action is set in the 1930s rather than the 1920s, and as Charles Linck’s meticulous research shows in his dissertation, later adapted for his and my chapter in Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time (1989), the spirit, action, and characters are firmly rooted in the Twenties.  Adam’s first disaster, the confiscation of his manuscript, is specifically related to the activities of the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson Hicks.  And the Thirties are skimped: except for a back view of Mrs. Simpson, whom Lord Monomark attempts to persuade to return to America, the film makes no mention of other events, including Munich, leading up to the declaration of war on Germany.
     Second, purists might object to Fry’s ending as thoroughly bogus.  Adam returns from the battlefield with his belatedly collected race winnings, buys Nina and his son back from Ginger, who has to flee the country as a black marketer rather than succeeding in Whitehall, and Nina, who from the evidence of her letter in the novel, is as frivolous as ever, wears the most embarrassing trousers and braces to do serious war work.  Adam burns his recovered manuscript, titled “Bright Young Things,” and he and Nina dance, in a room filled with candles, as the film ends.  Goodness How Odd!
     To the first objection, I reply that Waugh ended Vile Bodies with a made-up war to resolve the action, rather as he had advocated in “Oxford and the Next War” (1924).  One can hardly blame Fry for not wanting to waste a perfectly good war, but to use it, he had to move the action to the Thirties.  I’m not an expert on the dress of the period, but the music, beginning with “Sing Sing Sing” and other swing tunes, was bang on.  And Fry’s Mrs. Ape’s hymn, “There Ain’t No Flies on the Lamb of God,” is perfectly awful in the strict sense of the words.
     To the second objection, I can offer excuses rather than defenses.  Waugh started the war, after all, and in Adam’s second return to England, Fry varies colors and blocking from the first.  Buying Nina back is rather a nice touch, especially since Fry made Ginger the person from whom Adam won the original ₤1,000, a nice bit of symmetry.  And, to paraphrase a line from Black Mischief, everyone has turned very serious.
     But then so has Fry.  Balcairn’s farewell scandalous story is much more lurid and hortatory than the novel’s version.  And just seeing the action and the characters’ responses makes things seem more serious.
     This is partly what Sebastian Perry means by noting the film’s “filling in the gaps” left by the novel, which has a great many.  The casting is brilliant.  Waugh says that Adam “looked exactly as young men like him do look,” and that is true not only of Stephen Campbell Moore in the part but of almost everyone else in the cast.  Dan Aykroyd looks a bit young as Lord Monomark, at least to the geriatric audience with whom I saw the film, but he is suitably pompous in dialogue added for the film.  Julia McKenzie is perfect as Lottie Crump, and Peter O’Toole is brilliant as Col. Blount.  The rest of the cast is almost as good, and while film cannot capture the style of the valedictory to Lord Balcairn, the pan-shots of the photos and invitations on the wall of his sordid flat are not an unworthy attempt to convey those rhythms.
     The Internet Movie Database, <us.imdb.com>, notes that the film got an R rating for “some drug use,” and presumably Fry has added cocaine because alcohol abuse is no longer shocking enough.  One nice touch was John Mills as an elderly man at Lady Margot Maitland’s (not Metroland’s for some reason) party who thinks he’s taking snuff and demands another sniff.
     Miles (Margot’s son in the film) is far campier than in the novel, but presumably Waugh had gone as far as he could.  More surprising is Fry’s soft-pedaling the novel’s lesbian theme by getting rid of Balcairn’s mother, Mrs. Panrast.
     The result?  The film is not the novel, and that’s not a bad thing.  If you didn’t know the novel, as was the case with a handsome woman of a certain age who left, with me, before the credits got to the caterers, you would think it “a kick.”
     Of course, if one doesn’t know the novel, one might wonder if the film has any real point. But that’s a question I can’t answer.

     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.
     Ker’s approach is not apologetic (except when he attributes the devaluation of Crashaw, Southwell, and Waugh to anti-Catholic sentiment).  Rather, he distinguishes between “revisionism” and “realization: that is, in the very Newmanian sense, of making real the extent to which Catholicism informed and shaped a considerable and impressive corpus of literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
     Of course, one might question whether six authors—five of them converts at that, educated in traditional English Protestant fashion—can be said to constitute a revival, and, further, whether no other specifically Catholic authors could be found to bolster his case.  Ker does mention some others and dismisses them on grounds so hard to evaluate that he seems to be leaving them out because he doesn’t want to bother.
     But the book should be judged on what it does, and most of what it does is not literary criticism in any sense that anyone trained since the Formalists would recognize.  The approach is largely biographical and thematic.  The chapter on Newman relies primarily on his letters and diaries and, though Ker makes claims for Newman’s literary stature, he never mentions style or form.
     The chapter on Gerard Manley Hopkins does draw from and expand upon critics who point to the effect of Catholic devotional practice, especially litanies, on Hopkins’ prosody, and Ker’s discussion of the recurrent topic of priestly ministry in the poems reinforces his thesis about the practical, even mundane, aspects of Catholicism to be found in all of the writers he discusses.
     This is certainly true of Hilaire Belloc, whom Ker rather breezes past without noting the influence of his Europe and the Faith on Waugh’s political views in the 1930s, and perhaps even more of G. K. Chesterton, whom Ker sees as the heir of Victorian Sages like Carlyle and Arnold but, from the evidence presented, sounds more like Whitman in his yawpiest mode or, in Charles Dickens, which Kerr thinks his best book, like the kind of critic who wishes to delve into the “soul” of the writer in the most general and gushing terms.  Throughout the book, Ker relies very heavily on quotation; in this chapter it becomes a minor pathology, like hiccups.  Example: “the peculiar note of modern secular philosophies…is their combination of ‘logical completeness’ with ‘spiritual contraction,’ a ‘narrow universality’ offering only ‘a small and cramped eternity,’ ‘an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense,’ a ‘thin explanation’ carried ‘very far,’ an ‘insane simplicity’ of ‘covering everything and…[Ker’s ellipsis] leaving everything out,’ a ‘cosmos’ which has ‘shrunk.’”  The previous paragraph contains two dozen quotes, ranging from a single word to four and a half lines.  Ker notes that most of these chapters are based on lectures “to various institutions and universities,” and anyone guilty of working in this genre will recognize a temptation insufficiently resisted.
     In discussing the fiction of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Ker quotes less because he can rely on thematic plot summary.  He argues with Greene’s later statement of his disbelief in Hell because that doctrine is essential to half of the four key elements—“evil, Catholicism, the cinema, the thriller”—that characterize his best novels, from Brighton Rock through The Heart of the Matter.  After that, “as his faith lessened, or at least became less real to him, so his creative inspiration began to flag.”  True, but perhaps post hoc reasoning.
     The chapter on Waugh, the longest, reveals Ker at his best and incidental worst—the latter because he has not read much secondary material and not all, or not well, some of the primary material he discusses.  Rossetti has more than “little literary merit,” as a casual reading will demonstrate.  In Decline and Fall, Philbrick does appear after the prison scenes, and, more important, Paul Pennyfeather ceases by the end of the novel to be one of the incompetent innocents whom Ker perceptively finds in most of Waugh’s novels, for he learns how to lie, to avoid going out during the Bollinger Club riot, and to attain a deeper sense of order, reading not Galsworthy but Dean Stanley’s Eastern Church.  However, Ker does emphasize the value that Waugh put on craftsmanship, on doing one’s job well, and the emphasis, if not the insight, is the most valuable thing in the chapter.
     (Of course, since consecration and absolution depend upon Divine action rather than the competence of the priest, questions of craftsmanship can be regarded as irrelevant, but Waugh and Ker don’t deal with this theological distinction.)
     Ker does not seem disposed to take any of these writers’ statements, except Greene’s, at less than face value, presenting no critique or analysis and very little context except, occasionally, as they relate to each other.  For example, he quotes Waugh’s view that Italian invasion of Abyssinia is justified because, in effect, the Italians are more efficient and better craftsmen.  He apparently did not see Waugh’s published diary entries that recognize that “wops appear to be in deep trouble” and that their slovenly hygiene will lead to grave problems in the tropics.  Nor does he seem troubled by any consideration of the doctrine of a just war—very odd for “a member of the theology faculty at Oxford University.”
     This failure to see the ramifications of ideas and attitudes is pervasive.  Almost at the end of the book, Kerr does allude to “the rigidities of the Tridentine Church,” but for the most part he sees the attitudes based on those rigidities as characterized by “health, humor, naturalness, sanity.”  These qualities were not prominent in my experience of the pre-Conciliar Church in America, but perhaps things were different in England.

     2003 was a great year for Waugh enthusiasts.  The centenary of his birth was celebrated with conferences, symposia and gatherings attended by academics and aficionados alike.  Academic publishers commissioned new book collections.  TV channels dedicated special programmes to him. And there were, and still are, persistent rumours of a new film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.
     2005 promises to be a similar year for Waugh’s close contemporary, colleague, one-time neighbour and friend Anthony Powell.  The first signs were already visible in 2004 with the publication of two critical works dedicated to the grand master of English letters whose most celebrated work, A Dance to the Music of Time, took over 20 years to write and contains over a million words.
     With Michael Barber’s Anthony Powell: A Life, the first comprehensive–albeit unauthorised– biography of Powell has been published.  Powell, who wrote prodigiously into old age, himself published several volumes of memoirs and journals during his lifetime.  For any biographer, consequently, there is a wealth of material–but there is also the difficulty of saying something new about a man who chronicled his own life so thoroughly.  Barber’s biography starts with the inevitable, a genealogical approach to Powell who was himself fascinated by–one might almost say obsessed with–genealogy.  The remainder of Barber’s book follows Powell’s life chronologically, with a strictness that can be irritating when the flow of the narration is interrupted with asides such as “More of this later” (121).  Barber is an intrusive narrator of Powell’s life and a constant presence in his own book.  While one could say that this adds to the generally chatty tone that makes the book an enjoyable read, it detracts from its academic merit.  This notion is reinforced in frequent vague expressions or admissions such as “could well have been written” (153), “I think” (174), “I do not know the exact figure” (185) or “I couldn’t possibly comment” (248).  There is also a name-dropping tendency of the “When [I was] lunching with [Kingsley] Amis” kind (210) which is irritating: after all, the reader wants to learn about Powell, not his biographer.  Barber’s book has positive aspects: it provides much information not only on Powell but also on many of his contemporaries such as Alan Pryce-Jones, John Heygate, Constant Lambert, Jocelyn Brooke and Waugh.  But it certainly does not succeed in liberating Powell from the false label of having been a snobbish author writing for an upper-class readership only.  Overall, Barber's biography seems to have been written much more with the genteel “fan” of Powell’s work than an academic readership in mind.
     For this latter market, the second publication will be an invaluable asset.  Nicholas Birns’ Understanding Anthony Powell is thoroughly researched, scholarly, critical–but at the same time conveys its author’s whole-hearted admiration of his subject.  Like other titles in the Understanding… series published by South Carolina University Press, Birns divides his book into a general introductory chapter–“Understanding Anthony Powell”–followed by chapters on Powell’s 1930s fiction, his epic Dance to the Music of Time, his fiction of the 1980s and, uniquely, his memoirs and journals which had not hitherto received critical attention.  The section on Dance is the weightiest with nearly 200 pages; it provides a careful, analytical close-reading of the 12-volume novel with surprising findings–such as linking Volume Two of the Dance sequence, A Buyer’s Market, to Joyce’s Ulysses.  Birns is, at all times, in control of his subject matter and successfully presents Powell’s work in the framework of world literature, which shows not only enthusiasm and scholarly dedication but also complete mastery of twentieth-century literary history.
     Two newly published monographs dedicated to Powell to start his centenary year: that bodes well, and, already, more activities have been announced, among them a Centenary Conference to be held at the Wallace Collection, London and a panel at the MLA conference in Washington, D.C.  Powell’s old publishers are also re-issuing Dance to the Music of Time in individual installments again and are even giving a new lease of life to the much-sought-after companion to Dance by Hilary Spurling, Handbook to Anthony Powell’s Music of Time.  And there are also rumours of another, and, this time, authorised, biography of Powell….
     Altogether, the signs are good that Powell’s centenary year will be as successful as Waugh’s.

     James Wood, quoting V. S. Pritchett, sets us an apt metaphor for British fiction as this collection of essays presents it: “When women put on something new, they look high and mighty, as if you had got to get to know them all over again” (19).  And so we may say of British literature after 1950; it is the fiction, as Leader puts it, presenting "a new dispensation: new writers, new issues, new forms, a new world" (2).  Indeed, Elaine Showalter reminisces that in editing the first issues of Granta, she had "no young British authors to put in" (66).  In a few years the runway would be decidedly crowded with new faces.        
     Such experiences as Showalter's are among the most valuable and appealing features of the book.  They are experiences from those who have been evaluating or creating modern British fiction.  In many cases contributors know one another or their authorial subjects personally and include academics, contemporary novelists, journalists, publishers, essayists, and critics—and notable figures like Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, and Elizabeth Jane Howard.  This diversity of perspective is a gift: it means that the volume is unhindered by the imposition of a single academic or critical approach.  Beyond stickier questions of "what is 'British'" and "what is 'modern,'" the essays are, simply, concerned with the most helpful questions of content, form, contexts, and individual authors' development and concerns.  But contributors have license to make tantalizing statements like Hitchens' "There's also little doubt [. . .] that Catholicism made Waugh more nasty rather than less [. . .] giving him a moral alibi for his cruelty" (49).
     And so the wardrobe of British fiction over the last 40-odd years is explored energetically, with nuance and anecdote; so are the sub-genres from detective fiction to translation of fictions into film.  Delightfully, lines that seem to collide in the exploration of the authors merge: while Angus Wilson's work presents "a scene of chaos, 'class' concepts having fallen into confusion" (21), the science fiction of Arthur Clarke, as Patrick Parrinder points out, may lend hope for the future, but then again may just be "implying that the futures we imagine [. . .] may be no more than some sort of deluded endgame" (233).  Iris Murdoch's "spiritual adventure stories" (159), explorations of the interrelation of flesh and the spirit not unlike Charles Williams' novels, are, as Valentine Cunningham shows, matters tied soundly to literary forms that those more traditionally considered "modern" novelists had themselves contemplated: Virginia Woolf, Henry James, or Italo Calvino.
     While many of the essays in this collection can sound quite academic in their tone and explorations (but offer nonetheless seasoned and surprising observations), other chapters present valuable memoirs or contain vignettes of authors.  P. N. Furbank reminisces on Angus Wilson's comic antics with their relation to his fiction.  Ian McEwan's chapter juxtaposes his inherited mother tongue—a dialect of working-class English inhibited by ever-chary self-consciousness—with his own mother's dialect.  As he traces how his language use stretched beyond his mother's (with annoyance and fear in making linguistic missteps before people whose English was "proper"), we suddenly realize the very clear look we are being given of underlying cultural features intruding upon an author's personal and professional development, a force shaping British fiction from the 1950s to today.
     McEwan's memoir is not unconnected to the experience of what other essayists explore, say, in V. S. Pritchett's comedies with a preoccupation of being "in the wrong set" (21), or in Rushdie's and Naipaul's explorations of what "home" can mean to the world citizen who lives in Britain.  Ralph Ellison, once asked if he thought the search for identity was an American theme, said it was the American theme.  For the many authors considered in the collection, the traditional lines of class, nationality, gender roles, and modes of understanding have faded, and one notices that their fictions have all along been testing lines upon which to establish identity.  Yet they remain somehow British by distinct degrees, in language, in comic sense, in the fear of nuclear events or of self, in the shared disorientation of the urban scene.
     This collection should become our touchstone for the study of recent and contemporary British fiction not least for providing what Oxford's 1963 volume Eight Modern Writers did not: breadth of authors, concerns, contexts, and media.  Leader's own evaluation of the collection is unequivocal: "fiction in Britain is in rude good health" (7) as well as in fine—if modern—dress.

Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest
     Through the generosity of an anonymous patron, Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies is pleased to announce the first annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest.  Undergraduates should submit essays to the editor: John H. Wilson, Department of English, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA 17745, USA.  The deadline is 31 December 2005.  Essays will be judged by the editorial board of the Newsletter, and a winner will be announced in the Spring issue of 2006.  The prize is $250.00.