EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 36, No. 3
Winter 2006

Brideshead Revista’d: Bacchus, Beelzebub and “the Botanical Gardens”
by Simon Whitechapel

     A fractal repeats its characteristic pattern on endlessly deeper levels.  The pattern may be very simple or very complex, and though to call Evelyn Waugh a “fractal novelist” in the latter sense is presently no more than a sophomoric conceit, there are undoubtedly genuine mathematical patterns to be uncovered in his work by future researchers.
     These researchers may discover that the “fractal” of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) repeats its pattern of meaning at deeper and deeper levels, and that the superficial level is contradicted by the deeper, and the deeper by the deeper still.  To see one possible example, seize and tug the thread of Sebastian’s Oxonian “ivy.”  After his first full meeting with the Protestant Charles Ryder, the Catholic Sebastian Flyte announces:

     “I must go to the Botanical Gardens.”
     “Why?”
     “To see the ivy.”
     It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him.  He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.
     “I've never been to the Botanical Gardens,” I said.
     “Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn!  There's a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed.  I don't know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens.”[1] 

What is the meaning of the ivy?  It seems an obvious symbol of Sebastian’s love of nature, but may also represent his flight into hedonistic paganism: it is closely associated with Bacchus, god of wine and revelry, who wore a wreath of ivy and bound his enmaddening wand, or thyrsos, with ivy and vine.  Bacchus is often portrayed as hermaphroditic,[2] and Waugh later describes how Sebastian’s beauty has foreshadowed that of his sister Julia: “She so much resembled Sebastian that, sitting beside her in the gathering dusk, I was confused by the double illusion of familiarity and strangeness.”[3]  And so Charles’s visit to the Botanical Gardens and its ivy may represent his initiation into the cult of hermaphroditic Bacchus and his break with his previous life and tastes.
     After the visit, Charles describes how, “When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me before. What was wrong?  Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be real.  Was it the screen?  I turned it face to the wall.  That was better.”[4]  The screen is “painted” with “a Provençal landscape” by the artist and critic Roger Fry (1866-1934), whose modernist trumpery Charles now sees through with eyes cleansed by ancient pagan wisdom.  Yet although Sebastian has tried to reject the Catholicism of his family and his pious mother, the paganism into which he initiates Charles may not be so alien to them as it seems.  Many references to the occult are attached to the Flytes in Brideshead, ranging from Lady Marchmain’s alleged blood-sucking “witchcraft” in Book One (Ch. 1, p. 56) through Julia’s “magic ring” and “fawning monster” in Book Two (Ch. 2, p. 173) to the “wand” Julia wields against Charles on a night of “full and high” moon in Book Three (Ch. 3, p. 277).
     But Waugh cut one of these references from the revised edition of the novel he published in 1960: in the older edition (which is still issued in the United States), Anthony Blanche, who has “practised black art” at Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema “in Cefalù” (Ch. 2, p. 47) says of the Flytes that they are “a subject for the poet – for the poet of the future who is also a psycho-analyst – and perhaps a diabolist too.”[5]  Poet, psycho-analyst, and diabolist are all gone in the revised edition, but Blanche’s insistent warnings against the Flytes’ charm are left untouched: “I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family.  Charm is the great English blight.”[6]  Someone as interested in etymology as Waugh almost certainly knew that “charm” was once an occult term: it meant a spell cast to control or
influence.[7]  It may also, as in one of the cryptic crosswords Waugh used with his friend and correspondent Diana Cooper,[8] be concealed in the Flytes’ other name: Marchmain.  This echoes mortmain, literally meaning “dead hand,”[9] and may hint at the impending loss of Brideshead by the Flytes, none of whom has any true heirs.  However, its first syllable is an anagram of “charm” – m-ar-ch <-> ch-ar-m – and “Charmmain” is very like the French charmant, or “charming.”  The Flytes are indeed charming, and perhaps Waugh is hinting that the originals on whom he based them were charming in more senses than one.
     Charles Ryder is expelled from their enchanted world by Julia’s decision to refuse his offer of marriage, and wanders in exile till chance brings him back to Brideshead, and back to ivy.  These are among the familiar details he sees again and describes at the beginning of the novel: “a Doric temple stood by the water’s edge, and an ivy-grown arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs.”[10]  This ivy-grown arch foreshadows the reader’s meeting with the “beautiful arch” and ivy of the Botanical Gardens at Oxford.  An arch is something one passes through, and Charles passed through the arch at the Botanical Gardens into paganism.  
     The later-seen, earlier-described arch may represent a second passage: into the Christianity Charles now accepts, where ivy is also a symbol.  It is an evergreen plant and so symbolizes everlasting life, and Waugh may also have used it to symbolize Christianity itself.  This is one detail of Charles’s earlier posting in Scotland: “ivy still supported part of what had once been the walls of a fruit garden.”[11]  Evergreen, everlasting Christianity overgrew classical civilization in the same way, and now supports its collapsing structure amid the resurgent barbarism of the Second World War.  This recurrent ivy may therefore be one of Waugh’s fractal details, echoing the larger themes and meanings of the novel on another level, and binding Charles Ryder’s paganism and Catholicism into a single contradictory but coherent whole.[12]

Notes
[1] Book One, "Et in Arcadia Ego," ch. 1, p. 35 of the 1984 Penguin paperback.  If one “interrogates the database” available through the Botanical Gardens’ website, one obtains 43 hits under “Hedera,” the scientific name of the genus to which ivy belongs.
[2] See for example the discussion of Dionysus (the Greek original of the more Roman Bacchus) in Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths.
[3] Book One, “Et In Arcadia Ego,” ch. 3, p. 74 of the 1984 Penguin paperback.  Later, as Charles prepares to become Julia’s lover on a trans-Atlantic liner, Julia remarks of Sebastian:

“You loved him, didn't you?”
“Oh yes. He was the forerunner.”
Julia understood.  (Book Three, “A Twitch upon the Thread,” ch. 1, p. 245)

[4] Book One, ch. 1, p. 35.  The “golden daffodils” may be a mistaken reference to a copy of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, earlier described by Charles as one of the objets d’art in his room.
[5] Ch. 2, p. 40 of the 1949 “Readers Union with Chapman and Hall” hardback.
[6] Book Three, “A Twitch upon the Thread,” ch. 2, p. 260 of the 1984 Penguin paperback.
[7] It comes ultimately from the Latin carmen, meaning “song.”
[8] See Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, ed. Artemis Cooper.
[9] Referring to land held under impersonal or institutional control by the Church.
[10] Prologue, pp. 21-2 of the 1984 Penguin paperback.
[11] Prologue, p. 9 of the 1984 Penguin paperback.
[12] Waugh’s character Basil Seal may embody similar pagan symbolism, representing a Dionysian “lordling of misrule” who in Put Out More Flags (1942) mockingly alters a picture of Aphrodite and introduces a lunatic with bombs into the War Office.

Editor’s Note: Simon Whitechapel’s self-published Tales of Silence & Sortilege, described by one made-up reviewer as “a work of reptilian coldness and callousness,” is now available as an e-text or printed book.

 

The Butler Did It: A View of Wilcox
by David Bittner

     One of the favorite stock characters in English fiction and drama is the butler, giving rise to the catchphrase, "The butler did it."  With that in mind, it is high time to deal with that genial and faithful servant of the Flyte family, Wilcox, who was so beautifully acted by Roger Milner in the Granada Television production of Brideshead Revisited (1981).
     There is no way of knowing for certain whether Wilcox was one of several Catholic servants introduced by Lady Marchmain, but he probably “prayed … among the Flyte tombs in the little grey church by the gates” (Waugh 85).  Waugh says that “Plender was not an original member of the Brideshead household,” the implication being that Wilcox was (312).  Wilcox may have been one of Lady Marchmain's Catholic servants or part of Lord Marchmain's retinue before he married Lady Marchmain.  After Lord Marchmain deserted his wife to live in sin with Cara in Venice, Wilcox stayed on with Lady Marchmain.
     Wilcox seems to have a soft spot for Julia, perhaps most of all of the family.  Sebastian suggests as much when he says to his sister, “Julia, do you think if you asked him, Wilcox would give us champagne to-night?” (77).  Wilcox trudges up the staircase to bring Julia bread and milk when she is hungry and delivers messages to her.  At various times, Wilcox informs Julia that he has shown Rex Mottram into the library, where he is waiting for her, that Bridey will be late for dinner and says not to wait for him, and that Lady Cordelia has just arrived in London (after serving for years as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War) and will arrive at Brideshead Castle after dinner.  “Wilcox, how lovely!” exclaims Julia in a tender moment (300).
     Wilcox welcomes Charles and Sebastian's interest in wine, expressing concern over the way Bridey and Lord and Lady Marchmain avoid ensuring the estate's supply of wine beyond another ten years
(83).  Alcohol is an important part of English households, and Wilcox takes this part of his job seriously.  He also acts in concert with Lady Marchmain to make sure Sebastian is not given the chance to indulge his excessive appetite for liquor.  Wilcox exchanges glances with Lady Marchmain when Sebastian asks for whiskey at dinner, correctly interpreting her “tiny, hardly perceptible nod” of permission, and places a decanter that is only half-full in front of Sebastian (155).  Upon her instructions, he hides the keys to the liquor cabinet from Sebastian, but Cordelia conveys whiskey to her brother.  Cordelia tells Charles in a letter that there was an “awful row” and that she is “in disgrace” (170).  Wilcox is a good and discreet servant, who knows his place in the household, carefully exercises his judgment, and shows sincere concern for the Flytes.
     Upon the master's return to Brideshead, Wilcox treats Lord Marchmain solicitously.  He also cheerfully shares his duties with Plender, Lord Marchmain's valet.  The two men fortunately take “a liking to one another” (313), as becomes clear in their cooperation in setting up the Queen's bed in the Chinese drawing room.  Plender asks about the room; Lord Marchmain specifies the Chinese drawing room but then tells Wilcox about the Queen's bed (315).  Lord Marchmain, in his wisdom, shows some consideration for his two faithful servants by involving both of them.  Similarly, Lord Marchmain instructs Wilcox  to put the silver basin and ewer that stood in the Cardinal's drawing room in the Chinese drawing room and then to send Plender and Gaston to him (318).
     Wilcox ends up in a retirement home in Melstead, but he visits Nanny twice a month at Brideshead, and Nanny observes that “Mr. Wilcox never liked Mr. Mottram's friends” (349).  Rex and his “curious accomplices” (199), as Julia once called them, have tried to make Hitler “feel very small,” and Nanny suggests that the household was “entertaining angels unawares” (349).  Although Wilcox told Nanny about his distaste for Rex, he judiciously told few, if any, others.  In the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, there is an added scene of Rex arriving at Brideshead to see Julia and politely inquiring after Wilcox's health.  Wilcox just as politely thanks Rex.
     Roger Milner is not only an actor but also a writer of screenplays, including the television specials Across the Lake (1988), Amy (1984), and The Queen's Guards (1961). His many other dramatic roles include the Vicar in A Handful of Dust (1988) as well as appearances in Middlemarch (1994) and Dombey and Son (1983).
     Nigel Rees, in Sayings of the Century (1984), quotes a correspondent who recalls hearing "The butler did it" at a cinema house circa 1916 but says the origin of the phrase has never been traced beyond this (45).

Works Cited
Rees, Nigel.  Sayings of the Century.  London: Allen and Unwin, 1984.  
Waugh, Evelyn.  Brideshead Revisited.  Boston: Little, Brown, 1945.

Editor's Note: David Bittner published an interview entitled "After Brideshead Revisited: Charles Ryder Turns 102" in the Nassau Review 9.1 (2005): 95-7.

 

Sidelights on Waugh's World
by Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma

     Evelyn Waugh has only a minor place in Anne de Courcy’s Diana Mosley: Mitford Beauty, British Fascist, Hitler’s Angel (London: Chatto & Windus; New York: Wm. Morrow, both 2003), and serious students of Waugh will recognize the references to him.  But the portraits of Diana Mitford (then Guinness, then Mosley), her family, her social circle, and especially of Sir Oswald Mosley provide a clearer sense of the social and political contexts in which many of Waugh’s friends lived.
     The book is also, in contrast to the lumpen school represented most recently and egregiously by Norman Sherry’s three volumes on Graham Greene, a model of what a biography should be.  It gives enough sense of the major and even some of the minor characters without choking off the narrative; it is clearly and entertainingly written; and it consistently tries to be fair to the people described, attempting to see them in historical context rather than in hindsight.
     Considering that two of the characters, Adolf Hitler and Sir Oswald Mosley, do not, to put it mildly, enjoy the best of reputations, this is a considerable feat.  But de Courcy is able to show why Hitler fascinated Diana and Unity Mitford.  It is less clear why Mosley fascinated Diana—his sexual prowess and his similarity to her dominating father are suggested—and led her to espouse even his wickedest ideas.
     I don’t know that anyone—certainly not de Courcy—has suggested that Mosley was a sociopath. He was certainly a cad—he conducted an affair with his late wife’s sister as well as Diana (et al.,
et seq.); he was miserly toward his children; he was not generally honest about money.  In short, he makes Basil Seal look like Mother Teresa.  But he was clearly charismatic, and his “intelligence, courtesy, and charm” swayed many, including, in his old age, men and women who had been bitter opponents.  Also, for a racist, he had a sense of humor.  Like Paul Pennyfeather, he remarked of his confinement in World War II that “after Winchester, prison was nothing.”  And he did, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, pronounce a judgment: “I’ve blown it all.”
     Diana was never able to see herself that clearly.  Although de Courcy praises her “high intelligence,” she presents no real evidence of it.  "Creamy English charm, playing tigers"?  Rather, playing with tigers.  And she is quite aware of Diana’s blind loyalty to Mosley and her refusal to face facts about the evils of Hitler’s regime.  And de Courcy does admit that beauty, charm, and aristocratic self-confidence, especially when combined with longevity, will get one a good deal of indulgence in Great Britain.

 

Book Reviews

Intense Conviction
Edmund Campion, by Evelyn Waugh.  San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005.  220 pp.  $19.95.  Reviewed by John W. Osborne, Rutgers University.

     This handsome republication, Waugh’s 1935 biography of Edmund Campion, is a welcome addition to the growing list of Ignatius Press books.  Waugh shows his usual mastery of telling words and phrases, motivated in this case by intense conviction and determination to make a point.  It seems appropriate that this biography of an early follower of St. Ignatius Loyola should be dedicated to Martin D’Arcy, the Jesuit scholar who led Waugh into the Catholic Church.  Waugh donated all royalties from this book to Campion Hall, the Jesuit college at Campion’s university, Oxford.
     The four chapters, “Scholar,” “Priest,” “Hero,” “Martyr,” trace Campion’s life from Oxford scholar to Catholic martyr.  Waugh acknowledged that Edmund Campion was not a work of scholarship.  He was indebted to Hilaire Belloc’s colorful, opinionated How the Reformation Happened (1928).  After Belloc was denied an opportunity to be an Oxford don, he was estranged from the historical establishment in England, and his books were often derided as superficial, inaccurate examples of Catholic apologetics.  This may have affected reception of Waugh’s book.  While the theme and argument of Edmund Campion show the influence of Belloc, the bibliography also lists books by G. E. Neale, A. F. Pollard, and the American Conyers Read.  All of these scholars viewed the Tudor period of English history from different perspectives than Waugh and Belloc did.
     In Waugh’s opinion, Queen Elizabeth and her chief advisor William Cecil (Lord Burghley after 1571) believed that time was on their side and were content to be patient.  Catholicism would become a memory and then vanish from England after their legislation made it illegal.  This was frustrated by Campion and men like him, who were determined to keep the Catholic faith alive.  Capture and gruesome execution was their worldly fate.  But as a result of their sacrifice, Catholicism endured among a minority of the English people.
     Reviews of Edmund Campion in the Catholic press were almost uniformly favorable, and criticism in secular journals and newspapers was often generous.  In 1936 the book was awarded the Hawthornden Prize, which was given annually for the best work of imaginative literature written by a British author under the age of forty-one.  Professional historians, however, were inclined to disparage Waugh’s historical grasp and objectivity.
     Over the last seventy years, the author of Edmund Campion has been confirmed as a major figure in modern English literature, and his writings have attracted the attention of biographers and scholars.  For example, Martin Stannard’s biography casts doubt on Waugh’s claim that the book was written to mark his joy over the rebuilding of Campion Hall and to express gratitude to Father D’Arcy.  Stannard asserts that Waugh was also motivated by world conditions, a desire to establish his religious orthodoxy, and love of Laura Herbert.[1]  No doubt events of the early 1930s, in addition to his growing maturity, shaped Waugh’s outlook.  But a facetious letter to Laura weakens the implication that Waugh wanted to curry favor with the pious teenage girl and her family by writing this book: “I’m pegging away at Campion.  Hope to arrest him this afternoon and rack him before I leave.  Then I will hang, draw and quarter him at Mells.”[2]  Another recent but more scholarly account is provided by Douglas Lane Patey, who concludes that Waugh outgrew Belloc’s historical analysis and belief that Europe and Catholicism are uniquely connected.[3]  But if Waugh were alive today, would he remain silent about efforts to write a constitution for a united Europe that did not acknowledge Christian contributions to its civilization?
     Waugh’s assertive defense of his church, coupled with an uncertain grasp of historical facts, aroused the antagonism of the erudite Hugh Trevor Roper.  In retrospect, their feud seems more humorous than acrimonious, and Trevor Roper paid a graceful tribute to Waugh’s care for the English language in his farewell lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.[4]  A more formidable obstacle to initial popular acceptance of Edmund Campion was the near dominance among English readers of the Whig interpretation of history, a Protestant, progressive view of historical change which saw the Reformation as a source of human progress and glorified Queen Elizabeth.  Thus people who had grown up reading T. B. Macaulay and G. M. Trevelyan found Waugh’s treatment of English history challenging and perhaps perverse.
     Since that time writings about the sixteenth century have changed.  Long before his deathbed conversion, the cultural historian Kenneth Clark doubted whether the magnificence of Baroque art and the religious vitality of the Counter Reformation were produced by negative factors.[5]  In 1935 Waugh considered Philip II of Spain to be “the Catholic Genghis Khan” for many of Campion’s contemporaries.  But Philip’s reign has won favorable reassessments from late twentieth-century scholars who are neither Catholic nor Spanish.
     Waugh claimed that the Catholic Church grew in numbers and influence in late nineteenth-century England.  Monumental evidence of this revival was London’s Westminster Cathedral.  This large, conspicuous church was built with the sacrifice of Campion and his colleagues in mind.  It was completed in 1903, the year of Waugh’s birth and 300 years after the death of Queen Elizabeth.

Notes
[1] Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939 (New York: Norton, 1987), 383-6.
[2] Evelyn Waugh, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (London: Penguin, 1982), 94.
[3] Douglas Lane Patey, The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), 124-32.
[4] Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden, eds., History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), 369.
[5] Kenneth Clark, Civilization (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), chapter 7.

 

Christianity and Chaos
Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, by Joseph Pearce.  San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005.  425 pp. $27.95.  Reviewed by John W. Osborne, Rutgers University.

     Joseph Pearce is a Roman Catholic traditionalist who believes his church has been undermined by “a new generation of modernists hell-bent, seemingly, on tampering with Catholicism’s timeless beauties and mysteries” (55).  But he is confident that the 2000-year-old Christian heritage will triumph over contemporary religious fads.  Literary Giants, Literary Catholics is a broad survey of faith and culture which is intended to support that conviction.    
     This is a book of collected essays, not scholarly articles.  Although there is a good index, it lacks footnotes and bibliography; the result is a large number of unattributed quotes.  Eighty-eight of the 408 pages focus on G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and ninety-eight on J. R. R. Tolkien.  Admirers of these authors should like what they read here.  The broad range of other writers discussed includes Dante, Shakespeare and Paul McCartney.  This book would be better if the choice of authors had been narrowed and articles such as the ones on Hollywood and Modern Art excluded, as well as comments about the Spanish Civil War and the atom bomb.
     Pearce emphasizes the civilizing role the Catholic Church has played in European history, agreeing with Evelyn Waugh that the modern world faces a choice between Christianity and chaos.  For both men, Catholicism represents the most complete and vital form of Christianity.  But again, Pearce’s argument is weakened by a too wide range of subjects, and a less rhetorical, more measured presentation would better serve his purpose.  Nevertheless he gives us some good discussions of major and minor Catholic writers.  One of the latter is Maurice Baring, whose autobiography, The Puppet Show of Memory (1922), provides a mental image of a cultivated and gentle way of English life that vanished during World War I.  Baring signed the register at Waugh’s wedding to Laura Herbert and represented a privileged milieu that fascinated Waugh.
     Although Waugh’s name appears frequently in this book, only two short pieces are devoted to him.  One is an article, “Evelyn Waugh: Ultramodern to Ultramontane,” and the other is a favorable review of Douglas Lane Patey’s Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography (1998).  It is not surprising that Pearce would consider Brideshead Revisited (1945) “undeniably one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century” (212).  As Pearce himself says, this assessment is not universally shared.  Pearce is correct in noting Waugh’s firm belief that Catholicism is central to the Western cultural tradition, and that the statement of Catholic values in Brideshead Revisited aroused hostility among critics who had high praise for Waugh’s earlier novels.  For Pearce, Waugh is only one of many British writers used to support a thesis, and one should not expect to find here an extended and nuanced discussion.
     Waugh’s views on culture are relevant to the current controversy over a constitution for Europe.  Readers who appreciate George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral (2005) should be interested in this aspect of Waugh’s thought.  The conflict between Waugh’s exposition of Christian culture and the secular opinions of many framers of a constitution for a united Europe seems worthy of further exploration.
     The whole of Literary Giants, Literary Catholics is better than the sum of its parts.  Despite the mélange of chapter subjects and weak scholarly engagement, the book has interesting information and argument.  It is a cultural critique which provides support for one of the many beliefs competing for our attention.

 

Last of a Dying  Breed?
Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief, by Joseph Pearce.  San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999.  Reprinted 2000.  452 pp.  $27.95.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

     Joseph Pearce has published books on C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, separate lives of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, and a broader book on Catholic writers as literary giants.  In Literary Converts he pulls together information on twentieth-century converts and some Anglicans to discuss “a potent Christian response to the age of unbelief” and to tell “the story of how these giants of literature exerted a profound influence on each other and on the age in which they lived.”
     This is clearly an important topic, if only because, as Belloc said, “Converts can hardly be ten per cent of the Catholic body; that eighty per cent of the first-rate writers ... come from this ten per cent seems to argue either a monstrous articulateness in the converts or a monstrous inarticulateness in the born Catholics.”  Pearce does not explore this paradox, but someone should.  Of course, some are more giant than others, and if many of the writers had not converted, few would think them worth mentioning.
     Pearce organizes the material more or less chronologically from 1901 more or less to the death of Graham Greene.  This principle leads to a good deal of interruption of individual stories, so that chapters 13 and 31 are devoted to Greene, who is given further scattered mentions.  Moreover, discussions of clearly minor figures are inserted to interrupt continuity.
     This being by a Brit, about Brits, much space is devoted to personal relationships and their influences, rather like a tightly wound game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or the dissertation on Waugh and many others by Neil Francis Brennan, in which everyone is connected to everyone else.  There clearly was a good deal of interweaving, but the reader may grow weary of seeing Chesterton, Knox, and lesser-known writers appearing again and again.  The desire to synthesize often leads to preposterous errors, as when Pearce includes Greene in a list of people who, as youths, had not yet encountered “the travails of later life” or Waugh in a list of people who thought Scobie a saint in The Heart of the Matter
(1948).  In discussing Orwell’s favorable view of Waugh, Pearce ignores Orwell’s belief that “One cannot really be Catholic & grown up” and that “Waugh is abt as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.”
     Only in the very broadest sense can this be called a work of literary criticism.  Much of the commentary is eulogy provided immediately after a writer’s death or gleanings from friendly biographies. The rare quotations—of Siegfried Sassoon’s poems, for example—do little to justify the generalized praise.  Elsewhere, and too often, Pearce simply asserts the importance of poems like Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) without saying why it is important or giving excerpts from which the reader can judge.
     Of course, the book is obviously a thinly veiled work of apologetics, and Pearce is primarily interested in the stages by which the writers became converts.  Motifs recur: rejection of modern chaos, fairly wide reading in Catholic philosophy and controversy, admiration of simple peasant or proletarian faith, recognition of the need for authority, belief that Catholicism is more rational than any other explanation of life.  Still, one may question the applicability of “ruthlessly reasoned analysis” to a late T. S. Eliot jeremiad about the collapse of European culture.
     Pearce sympathizes with the anti-Marxist distributist philosophy originally advocated by the Chesterton brothers and later by E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful (1973) and to some extent with the distress at the effects of Vatican II on the Mass and on other aspects of Catholic worship and possibly of later conservative support for Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (1968).  Like Ian Kerr in The Catholic Revival in English Literature (2003), Pearce is troubled by Graham Greene’s denial of Hell and his post-World War II tendency to make “God in his own image,” by “his increasingly bizarre treatment of religious issues,” and in one case “by a leap of fatuity.”
     Pearce ends the book by wondering whether new converts, whom he does not mention by name, are “the first of a new wave or the last of a dying breed,” concluding that “only time or eternity will tell.”  On the evidence he presents, no English convert of the stature of Waugh, Greene, or even Muriel Spark has emerged.  He might, though he does not, quite, argue that Vatican II has destroyed traditions besides the Latin Mass.

 

Generally Speaking
The Essentials of Literature in English Post-1914, edited by Ian Mackean.  London: Arnold, 2005. 391 pp.  Paperback.  $19.95.  Reviewed by K. J. Gilchrist, Iowa State University.

     This handbook to modern literature in English appears promising in its useful format, like that of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (6th ed., 2000).  The first section moves through major authors from around the world, placing weight on postcolonial and postmodern authors with a rather tight selection: E. M. Forster is absent; Anthony Powell is present. Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston are missing; Rohinton Mistry appears. A standardized list accompanying each author entry will be of use to a beginning researcher: references, with a list of selected primary works and works for further reading.
     Following the authors’ entries are surveys of the literature and critical approaches.  These have varied breadth.  In the mix is “A survey of modern American poetry and fiction,” with a later essay on Australian literature treating solely Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997).  The last pages sport helpful reference tools—a glossary, a list of literary award-winners, and a detailed time line.  Here issues show a slight undulation in detail.  For “Georgian Poets” in the glossary, Edward Marsh’s anthologies are not mentioned among the four authors cited as examples, but for “Dystopia/dystopian,” a helpful etymology of the word begins the entry that also lists two representative works.
     While the volume is purportedly only a general guide to “major” authors and themes, it appears uneven in the treatment of subjects.  This can be seen in the entry for Evelyn Waugh.  The entry is itself “based on an article by Petri Liukkonen,” who contributes other entries, but is written by the general editor, Ian Mackean.  One finds the entry ill informed on Waugh and catches a faint scent of an undergraduate student’s essay: “Vile Bodies (1930) depicts a world of sex and snobbish society and achieved success, as did most of Waugh’s books, despite criticism from Virginia Woolf that it lacked Realism.  Waugh, however, lived beyond his income and was always short of money” (153).  This entry provides some detail on less central points of Waugh’s life and work while skimming over other, more important aspects: his date of conversion to Catholicism is given and the fact that Brideshead Revisited (1945) contains a “Catholic theme” (154), but no understanding that Waugh’s Catholicism was increasingly important in his work.  A brief and obscure quotation from Scoop (1938) is set against lengthy quotation from George Orwell’s well-known and disparaging remarks on Brideshead.
     The entry on Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, is insightful and eloquent, employing terms the volume seeks to define while providing helpful, if general, senses of what to look for in Plath’s work:

She is interested in the transformation of the self and recontextualization of experience as moulded by poetic language.  The imagery of death and rebirth that informs the background of these poems reveals her yearning for regeneration, both artistically and emotionally. (124)

Not longer than the entry on Waugh, this on Plath provides greater direction in approaching her work.
     The volume certainly gains from the diversity of its contributors.  Some are from important universities in the United Kingdom, India, the United States, Turkey, and Spain, among others.  Some hold PhDs, hold posts at important universities, and have respectable publications.  Yet perhaps the unevenness and occasionally too general nature of this volume is due in part to the lesser experience of other contributors, some of whom are working towards an M.A. and have no publications.  The selection of some contributors is also a slightly inbred, many (I count ten) being students or instructors at Brigham Young University.
     While the work could be a generally helpful guide to lower-division undergraduates in, say, an introduction to literature course, the overall value of this guide does not fulfill what is proffered on the cover: “everything you need to know about modern literature in English.”

 

 

Tony Last's Real City
by Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma

     David Grann’s “The Lost City of Z” (New Yorker, 19 Sept. 2005, pp. 56-81) traces the search of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett for a lost civilization in the Amazon forest, his disappearance in 1925, and some of the expeditions that went in search for him.  One of these is described in Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure (1933) and is commemorated in A Handful of Dust (1934).  Grann did not find Fawcett or any of his successors, but he did encounter Michael Heckenberger, an archaeologist who has discovered moats and other evidence of large cities that clearly anticipate layouts and construction methods in twenty-first century Kuikuro villages.

 

Waugh in Translation
     Decline and Fall (1928) has been newly translated into Italian by Eva Kampmann.  The translation is entitled Lady Margot, and it was published by Guanda in Milan in 2005, with an introduction by Giuseppe Scaraffia.
     When the Going was Good (1946) has also been translated into Italian by David Mezzacappa.  The translation is entitled Quando viaggiare era un piacere, and it has been published by Adelphi Edizioni in Milan.
     Scoop (1938) will be published for the first time in Romanian by SC LEDA.  A Handful of Dust (1934), Brideshead Revisited (1945), and The Loved One (1948) were published in Romania in the 1960s.

 

Brideshead Revisited on DVD
     Granada Ventures released the Brideshead Revisited 25th Anniversary DVD Box Set on 19 September 2005.  The release commemorated the premiere of the television series on 12 October 1981.  The box set includes a 25-minute documentary at Castle Howard and commentaries by Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Nickolas Grace, and producer Derek Granger.
     The release is in region 2 (Europe, Japan, South Africa, and the Middle East), and there are no plans to make it available elsewhere.  In the United States and Canada, Brideshead Revisited has been available on videotape and DVD since June 2002.      

 

Brideshead Revisited on TV
     Revisiting Brideshead, a new documentary, was broadcast on ITV3 in the United Kingdom on 17 October 2005.  According to ITV's schedule, celebrities recalled "the impact of the classic 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's acclaimed novel."  The program included contributions from Paul Morley, Christina Odone, co-director Charles Sturridge, Jeremy Irons, Jane Asher, and Diana Quick.  Two hours of the 1981 adaptation followed the documentary, and ITV3 has since rebroadcast Revisiting Brideshead.

 

Boyd on Scoop and Brideshead
     William Boyd's recent collection of essays, Bamboo (2005), includes accounts of adapting Scoop for television and attending Oxford under the influence of Brideshead Revisited.  Selections from Bamboo were read on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in November 2005.

 

Felix Kelly and Brideshead
     Donald Bassett published an essay entitled "Felix Kelly and Brideshead" in the British Art Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Autumn 2005): 52-7.  The essay compares Charles Ryder to Felix Kelly (1914-1994), an artist who painted murals for the Garden Room at Castle Howard in 1982.  Castle Howard appeared in the television series based on Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the fee for using the location paid for Kelly's murals.   

 

Napoleonic Cyphers
     In the Autumn 2005 issue of the Newsletter, a reader inquired about the cognac served to Charles Ryder and Rex Mottram in Paris in Brideshead Revisited (1945), particularly Rex's reasons for refusing the first bottle.  Robert Murray Davis replies: "It seems obvious that Rex chooses by reputation or label rather than by substance, as he does with Julia.  The cognac he desires is old, therefore good, like, in his mind, the Marchmain lineage.  The modern bottle, without the image of Napoleon, and the seals, seems in his mind inferior.  To put it as briefly as possible, Rex has no taste." 
     David Bittner quotes a friend "who knows something about the culinary arts": "Cognac, as it ages in the cask, absorbs the flavor of the wood, so generally it becomes darker with age.  Some of the alcohol also tends to seep out of the cask and evaporates, making the brandy thicker and more concentrated (hence 'treacly').  The reference to Napoleon simply means that Rex prefers an older cognac that has been in a cask from around the time of Napoleon.  Currently many brandies are labeled 'Napoleon' as a gimmick.  They have nothing to do with Napoleon, nor are they aged more than six years or so.  They are often of inferior quality." 
     This matter has also attracted some attention on the Evelyn Waugh Discussion List.  Please refer to the thread that begins with message #21.  

 

Brideshead in Brief
     As an alert reader in the United Kingdom announced on the Evelyn Waugh Discussion List, David Bader's One Hundred Great Books in Haiku (Viking, 2005) contains one verse devoted to Brideshead Revisited (1945):

Gay Catholic toffs--
what else to expect from a
man named Evelyn?

     The poem did not impress participants in the discussion.
     One Hundred Great Books (published on 3 Nov. 2005 in the UK) is apparently not to be confused with Bader's Haiku U: From Aristotle to Zola, 100 Great Books in 17 Syllables (published by Gotham in the United States on 31 March 2005 and in the UK in April 2005).  One Hundred Great Books is available on Amazon.co.uk but not yet on Amazon.com.

 
Brideshead Reread
     Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, edited by Anne Fadiman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), includes an essay on Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Toynton.  Please look for a review in a forthcoming issue of the Newsletter.

 

Waugh on Ronald Knox
     The Ronald Knox Society of North America has posted Evelyn Waugh's "Msgr Knox at 4 A.M.," a review of Knox's The Hidden Stream (1952).  The review is available at www.ronaldknoxsociety.com.

 

Waugh in the Oxford Encyclopedia
     In the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, edited by David Scott Kastan (5 vols., New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), Evelyn Waugh appears in an entry of moderate length (about 4000 words), longer than that of Anthony Powell but shorter than that of Virginia Woolf.  The entry was written by John H. Wilson, editor of the Newsletter, who consulted Alexander Waugh, Evelyn's grandson.

 

Evelyn Waugh Conference
     The Evelyn Waugh Conference is still scheduled to be held in Montpellier, France, 19-22 October 2006.  The theme is "Waugh in His World."   If you wish to present a paper, please send a 250-word abstract to Professor Joseph V. Long, Portland State University, UNST, P.O. Box 751, Portland OR 97207, USA, or e-mail it to jlong@pdx.edu.  Further details are forthcoming.   

 

Evelyn Waugh Society
     The Evelyn Waugh Society now has 50 members.  Members are encouraged to renew their memberships after one year.

 

 
Evelyn Waugh Discussion List
     The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List now has 17 members, and 60 messages have been posted.  The messages can be read even if you choose not to join the list.  The Discussion List is available at  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh.

 

The Loved One: A Musical
     Adria Lang has written the book and lyrics and Joey Altruda has composed the music for a musical version of The Loved One (1948).  The production is supposed to include excerpts from the film of The Loved One (1965), but it is unclear when the musical might be staged.  Spamalot seems to work for Monty Python …

 

Luncheon in St. Firmin
     The February 2006 issue of Vanity Fair includes an article entitled "Camelot's Second Lady" by Susan Brandy.  The second lady was Susan Mary Alsop, a favorite of John F. Kennedy, who insisted on being seated next to her on many occasions.  A photograph is captioned "Susan Mary's photo of luncheon guests Ian Fleming, Evelyn Waugh and author Rupert Hart-Davis, St. Firmin, April 1953." 

 

Hitchens on Waugh's Journalists
     Christopher Hitchens published a review entitled "Fleet Street's Finest" in the Guardian for 3 December 2005.  Considering the depiction of journalists in British fiction, Hitchens refers to characters in several of Waugh's novels.  The review is available at http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1655516,00.html#article_continue.


 

Waugh Like Wine
     Adam Gopnik, in an article entitled "Metropolitan: William Dean Howells and the Novel of New York" in the New Yorker for 13-20 June 2005, wrote "Malice in prose is like the tannins in red wine: they can't guarantee its quality, but they do assure longevity--Waugh has lasted while Wells has not" (169).

 

Captive Readers
     An essay entitled "Captive Readers and Tellers of Tales" refers to Evelyn Waugh's travels in South America and their influence on A Handful of Dust (1934).  The essay is available at The Culture Cult, www.culturecult.com/art_notes.htm#captive%20readers

 

Immortality of a Sort
     An essay on Evelyn Waugh has joined the vast collection of term papers available on the internet.  "Analysis of the Narrative Techniques in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall" is a 25-page paper written by Gabriel Dorta Méndez at Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg in 2001.  It is available at www.grin.com/en/fulltext/anl/14892.html.  

 

Reactions to Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh
     Peter Hayes of Melbourne, Australia writes

     I thought it was the funniest book I had ever read.  Auberon Waugh probably gets the best line of the entire book, in response to the IRA's phone call (443).
     The footnote on page 408 seems unable to gloss "Forty-Martyrs" in relation to the Waugh family.  I'm sure this is widely known, but in case no one has pointed it out, this is a reference to Evelyn Waugh's daughter Margaret, who acted as secretary to the cause of the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.  This is mentioned in Christopher Sykes's biography.
     I was personally grateful for the footnote on page 341 correcting the published text of Evelyn Waugh's diaries: 'fathers' for 'fellows'.  I don't expect anyone to believe me, but I'd long suspected this was an error; it was obvious (to me) that Waugh had meant 'fathers' even if he had written 'fellows'.  It was a special pleasure to me to have this hunch confirmed.  But that was the least of the book's pleasures.

 

Lady Sibell Rowley, 1907-2005
     Lady Sibell Rowley passed away.  She was 98 years old.
     She was born Lady Sibell Lygon in 1907, second daughter of the 7th Earl Beauchamp.  Her brothers, Viscount Elmley (later the 8th and last Earl Beauchamp) and the Hon. Hugh Lygon, were at the University of Oxford, where they met Evelyn Waugh.  In the early 1930s, Waugh often visited the family's country estate, Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, as he became friends with Lady Sibell's younger sisters, Lady Mary (Maimie) and Lady Dorothy (Coote) Lygon.  Waugh wrote part of Black Mischief (1932) at Madresfield, and the novel is dedicated "with love to Mary and Dorothy Lygon."  Madresfield Court is much like Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust (1934), and the Lygons inspired the Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited (1945).  Madresfield has an art-nouveau chapel like that in Brideshead, and Lady Sibell is mentioned several times in Waugh's diaries and letters.
     Lady Sibell married Michael Rowley in 1939.  Like Rex Mottram in Brideshead, Rowley had married a German woman named Eleonore, and they had never been divorced.  Eventually the marriage was dissolved, and Lady Sibell married Rowley again in 1949.  He suffered from a brain tumor and died in 1952.  There were no children.
     Lady Sibell was buried at Madresfield Court, where her niece, Lady Morrison, now lives.

 

Michael Davie, 1924-2005
     Michael Davie passed away on 7 December 2005.  He was 81 years old.
     Michael was perhaps best known as a columnist, reporter, and editor at The Observer from 1950 to 1977, when it was at the height of its influence, and from 1981 to 1988.  While there, he edited The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976) and created wide publicity for them with a brilliantly illustrated and explicated series of excerpts in The Observer.  Michael was very successful in getting the family to agree to an almost unexpurgated text.  Very few matters were left unpublished except for legal reasons.  
     Michael also edited The Age (Melbourne) from 1977 to 1981 and published several excellent books, including Beaverbrook: A Life (co-authored by his wife, Anne Chisholm, 1992), and Anglo-Australian Attitudes (2000).
     Michael is survived by his wife, one son, and two daughters.  Every student of Evelyn Waugh should feel grateful for Michael’s immense work in identifying the hundreds of obscure people named and alluded to in Waugh’s diaries.  Michael's introductions to sections of the diaries are very informative and balanced, and he put many episodes in Waugh's life in meaningful settings.   
     Longer obituaries are available at The Times, The Guardian, The Observer, and The Age.    

 

In the Fold by Rachel Cusk
     Rachel Cusk's recent novel, In the Fold (2005), has been compared with the work of Evelyn Waugh, particularly Brideshead Revisited (1945).
     In The Observer for 18 September 2005, Louise France remarked that In the Fold is "part Evelyn Waugh, part Stella Gibbons."
     In the Boston Globe for 23 October 2005, Gail Caldwell claimed that "the lens through which [Cusk] views the world is pure Evelyn Waugh."
     In BookPage, in a review entitled "An Updated Visit to Brideshead," Robert Weibezahl compares Cusk with Muriel Spark, Bernice Rubens, and Beryl Bainbridge, "all literary descendants of Evelyn Waugh."  In In the Fold, Weibezahl writes, "Cusk's setup borrows openly from Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.  Like Charles Ryder, our narrator-hero, Michael, is a callow, middle-class young man who goes home for the weekend with Adam, a university friend, and is initially dazzled by all he meets."
     At Doubting Hall, John Porter noticed a similarity between Waugh's work and Cusk's earlier novel, The Country Life (1997).
     Excerpts from many reviews of In the Fold and links to several of them are available at Metacritic.com.      

 

End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3
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