EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 37, No. 1
Spring 2006

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Something So Different
 by Kathryn S. Easter

      The literary gamut usually runs from the sublime to the ridiculous, but Evelyn Waugh developed in quite the reverse direction: from the ridiculous to the sublime.  Between his first novel and his last, Waugh clearly went through a profound paradigm shift easily detected in his themes.  The startling change recalls Monty Python’s stock transitional phrase, “and now for something completely different.”  Waugh’s view of the world was completely different by the time he wrote his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, for a singular reason: he had become a Roman Catholic.
     Waugh wrote in Decline and Fall, his first novel, that it “is meant to be funny” (Stannard 81), and it certainly is.  The absurdity of characters and the outrageousness of situations make for a terrific laugh-out-loud read.  The main character, Paul Pennyfeather, finds himself in a world of materialism, hypocrisy, treachery, and degeneracy, all given as dominant features of contemporary life.  Waugh presents this world with macabre and even grotesque hilarity.  At the same time, he anticipates Northrop Frye’s description of comedy: “Comedy is designed not to condemn evil, but to ridicule a lack of self-knowledge” (Frye 81).  This is what Waugh does so well in his first novel.  His characters are mean, selfish, and corrupt, but they are not evil—only ignorant.  They do not see themselves for who they truly are, and their blindness makes them tragic but at the same time hilarious.
     Comedy and tragedy are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are tightly linked.  Frye says that “tragedy is really implicit or uncompleted comedy” and “comedy contains a potential tragedy within itself” (84).  Despite all the laughs, Decline and Fall is not a happy story.  All along there lurks the potential tragedy that Paul may never recover from the misfortune that befalls him.  He does recover, in accord with Frye’s concept of comedy: “The essential comic resolution […] is an individual release which is also a social reconciliation” (81).  Paul, the singular straight-man in the bunch, achieves this release at the story’s end as he returns to theology studies at Oxford.  The final chapter of Decline and Fall is significantly titled “Resurrection.”  Such a title reveals Waugh’s own religious leanings and indicates how his art is illuminated by Frye’s theory of comedy and tragedy.  From a Christian viewpoint, tragedy is but “an episode in that larger scheme of redemption and resurrection to which Dante gave the name of commedia” (Frye 84).  Paul must die to himself, as he does in the second-to-last chapter, “The Passing of Paul Pennyfeather,” in order to be resurrected as a new man (“a very distant cousin”) who will soon become a clergyman.
     Fast-forward sixteen years past publication of Decline and Fall.  Waugh has converted, having become a devout Roman Catholic.  His magnum opus is written, and it radiates with Waugh’s religious convictions.  Whereas he had prefaced Decline and Fall with the warning that it was “meant to be funny,” this time he stated boldly, “Brideshead Revisited is not meant to be funny.”  He added that there are passages of buffoonery, but “the general theme is at once romantic and eschatological” (Stannard 236).  Waugh’s salient intention was to depict a pagan world similar to the one in Decline and Fall, but this time to explicitly trace the workings of the Divine Purpose, which ideally lead a wayward soul to Roman Catholicism.  Such a profound change in Waugh was incomprehensible even to his own family.  Alec, his brother, wrote after the conversion, “I cannot enter imaginatively into the mind of a person for whom religion is the dominant force in his life, for whom religion is a crusade, as it is with Evelyn” (Doyle 13). 
     Many of Waugh’s most enthusiastic fans were not prepared for such blatant Christianity.  They saw Waugh as Charles saw Sebastian: “Sebastian’s faith was an enigma to me […], but not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve.  I had no religion.  […]  The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth” (BR 85).  Edmund Wilson, who had enthusiastically praised Waugh’s earlier novels and maintained that Waugh was the greatest comic genius in the English language since George Bernard Shaw, turned viciously to attack Brideshead—primarily because he could not accept a novel that regarded religion as important in modern life (Doyle 26).
     Other readers who were willing to accept Waugh’s Christianity—even some who called themselves Catholic—charged that the lonely, depressed, even tragic fates of the Flytes mar the view of Christianity.  After publication of Brideshead Revisited in America, a Mr. McClose wrote to Waugh: “Your Brideshead Revisited is a strange way to show that Catholicism is an answer to anything.  Seems more like the kiss of Death to me” (Stannard 260).  By the novel’s end, the lovers are forced apart by a sense of sin; the house is deserted; the family is scattered; the only child that is born is dead.  Mr. McClose is right, Catholicism is a kiss of Death—one absolutely necessary for salvation; it is death to worldliness, selfishness, carnal baseness.  Death in this case is not tragic as the world understands tragedy, but comedic as Christianity understands comedy.  This commedia of Dante “enters drama with the miracle-play cycles, where such tragedies as the Fall and the Crucifixion are episodes of a dramatic scheme in which the divine comedy has the last word,” Frye explains, and that last word is of course Resurrection: “The sense of tragedy as a prelude to comedy is hardly separable from anything explicitly Christian” (84).  Brideshead is not only Christian; it is also explicitly Catholic.
     The distinction between Christianity and Roman Catholicism is important, mostly because many Protestant sects lack a developed theology regarding “death of self”—especially as it involves pain and suffering.  Catholics know that their religion is extremely difficult (impossible, in fact, without the help of God’s grace), and this difficulty becomes the theme of Brideshead Revisited. 
Sebastian bemoans the difficulty of his religion; Charles asks,

     “Does it make much difference to you?”
     "Of course.  All the time."
     “Well, I can’t say I’ve noticed it.  Are you struggling against temptation?  You don’t seem much more virtuous than me.”
     “I’m very, very much wickeder,” said Sebastian indignantly.
     “Well then?”
     “Who was it who used to pray, ‘Oh God, make me good, but not yet’?” 
     “I don’t know.  You, I should think.”
     “Why, yes, I do, every day. […]”
     “I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?”
     “Is it nonsense?  I wish it were.  It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.” (BR 86)   

Anthony Blanche recounts that Sebastian “used to spend such a time in the confessional, I used to wonder what he had to say, because he never did anything wrong; never quite; at least, he never got punished” (BR 51).  Sebastian’s struggle is incomprehensible to Anthony because it is spiritual; his faith is mysterious because the Faith is mysterious; his internal battle causes wonder in a worldly figure like Anthony because the Catholic Church is at war with secular culture.  In another exchange, Sebastian says, “I wish I liked Catholics more.”  Charles replies, “They seem just like other people,” but Sebastian insists that “that’s exactly what they’re not […]; everything they think important is different from other people” (BR 89). 
     The difference that Catholicism makes in one’s life contributes to the difficulty of it; it also contributes to the humor.  Catholic devotions and traditions appear strange and even absurd when juxtaposed with secularity.  Sebastian writes to Charles: “It is the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads” (BR 43-4).  Cordelia explains her charitable donation to missionary work involving orphaned babies in Africa: “I’ve got six black Cordelias already.  Isn’t it lovely?” (BR 94).  Rex Mottram makes a vain attempt at being catechized.  The priest speaks to Rex about papal infallibility and asks, “‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said “It’s going to rain,” would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’  He thought a moment and said, ‘I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it’” (BR 192). 
     Rex is the primary source of the “buffoonery” that Waugh mentions in his apologia.  Frederick L. Beaty wrote, “As the only significant character totally impervious to religion, Rex exists as a relic of Waugh’s earlier ironic world and as such is vulnerable to a satiric reduction” (163).  But by the end of the book, Charles is the buffoon who tries to understand the Last Rites; he is the odd man out.  The comedy of Rex and Charles sprouts from their misapprehension of Catholicism.  They do not accept that the supernatural is real—that it is even more real than the natural world, as Waugh believed.  Charles admits as much in the middle of the book: “‘I have left behind illusion,’ I said to myself.  ‘Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.’  I have since learned that there is no such world” (BR 169).
     Throughout Brideshead Revisited, the difference of Catholicism is not as funny as it is profound; this profundity exasperates Charles, the “poor agnostic,” as Cordelia calls him.  When he and the family discuss Sebastian’s downward spiral into alcoholism, Bridey says, “I believe God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people.”  Charles cries out, “For God’s sake, […] why bring God into everything?” (BR 145).  Later, Bridey makes a similar comment: “There’s nothing wrong with being a physical wreck, you know.”  He also mentions a “moral obligation,” and in frustration, Charles tells Bridey that he manages to “reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense” (BR 164).  But Bridey is quite right in terms of Catholic piety.  Drunkards and physical wrecks are more acutely aware of their weakness and dependence on God than are those who go from one shallow comfort to the next.
     Cordelia supports Bridey’s offhand remarks when Charles asks her, “How will it end?”  She responds, “I’ve seen others like [Sebastian], and I believe they are very near and dear to God” (BR 308).  She goes on to describe his daily struggles; Charles says, “I suppose he doesn’t suffer?” “Oh yes, I think he does,” Cordelia replies. “One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is—no dignity, no power of will.  No one is ever holy without suffering” (BR 309).  This is one of the great paradoxes of Christianity: suffering leads to holiness, holiness to eternal happiness. 
     Eternal happiness, not earthly happiness, is a key point in Brideshead Revisited.  The Marchmain family experiences this theological crux in different ways, as Sebastian explains to Charles: 

     “So you see we’re a mixed family religiously.  Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated—and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy.  Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want.…  I wish I liked Catholics more” (BR 89).

As his drinking increases, Sebastian joins the unhappy.  His mother notices that when Sebastian is drunk, there is “nothing happy about him” (BR 136).  Charles becomes increasingly distraught at the sorry situation.  He tells Bridey, “without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and a healthy man.”  Bridey nonchalantly replies, “It’s arguable” (BR 145).  Bridey’s matter-of-fact Catholicism is endlessly frustrating.  Bridey knows that health and happiness are unnecessary for holiness, which is why he is content to be “miserable,” as Sebastian observes.
     Charles shares more of his thoughts about the Flytes’ Catholicism when he speaks about Julia, Sebastian’s “half-heathen” counterpart.  Wherever she turns, “her religion [stands] as a barrier between herself and her natural goal” (BR 181).  The goal that Charles speaks of is carnal, unholy—adultery followed by divorce.  As a Catholic, Julia is called not to a “natural goal” but to a supernatural one, which requires death to her passions, her desires, her self.
     Charles explains Julia’s troublesome situation: “If she apostasized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, [and] live at peace with their world” (BR 181-2).  “Happy ignorance” may seem like a better way to spend one’s life, but it is not the Catholic way.  Because she has been brought up a Roman Catholic, Julia is not ignorant of the necessity of suffering, and she has a tremendous responsibility for the well-being of her own soul.
     The greatest saints of the Church knew that they must suffer for the love of God and embraced their trials wholeheartedly.  They were even given the grace to transform their suffering into happiness.  The two half-heathen Marchmain children and their excommunicated father resist this lofty idea in Brideshead Revisited.  Charles tells Lady Marchmain that Sebastian is “ashamed of being unhappy.”  He has become just like his father: unhappy, ashamed, running away.  Lady Marchmain concludes, “It’s too pitiful” (BR 136-7).  The attitude of the matriarch drives her son and her husband away.  Her pity is also God’s; it is God’s mercy.  Cordelia explains: “I sometimes think that when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy. […] she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint.  No one could really hate a saint, could they?  They can’t really hate God either.  When they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that” (BR 221).
     Lady Marchmain is perhaps the most complicated character in the entire book.  A reader once asked Waugh, “Are you or are you not on Lady Marchmain’s side?  I couldn’t make out.”  He responded, “No, I am not on her side, but God is, who suffers fools gladly” (Beaty 161).  She gives the Church to her family, though she also drives most of them away.  Destructive as her behavior may be, it is not sinful.  Lady Marchmain is as compulsive as her son, maimed like Sebastian, but less holy.  Sebastian is loveable; bound to the stake of his suffering—of his compulsions—he becomes saintly, like the martyr after whom he is named.  Lady Marchmain suffers too (in fact, Sebastian even relates her to an oleograph of the Seven Dolours), but she is not a saint, not loveable, not even adequately loving towards anyone other than God.  She is, however, ultimately more fruitful than her son, for she is the primary vehicle of Catholicism in the novel.  “The book,” wrote Waugh, “is about God,” and Lady Marchmain acts as His instrument despite her great and perhaps insuperable difficulty seeing His Son in His creatures (Myers 76).
     Lady Marchmain has somehow allowed the world to be too much with her—fallen secularity has infiltrated her sacred abode, and scandal after scandal (beginning with Lord Marchmain’s adultery and ending with Julia’s) has scarred the family’s honor.  She is nearly incapable of loving the un-Christ-like—she does not adhere to the Lord’s words in Scripture, “And if you love them that love you, what thanks are to you?  For sinners also love those that love them” (Luke 6:32).  Furthermore, she, her middle children, and her estranged husband do not transcend their self-loathing to lead truly pious lives.  The latter three cannot love Lady Marchmain, since she acts as a constant reminder of the way they ought to be living, in spite of their disordered attachments to the world.  Julia, Sebastian, and Lord Marchmain flee from their painfully difficult Catholic duty into shallow pleasures.  While these orphans run amuck, the agnostic outside the fold is drawn in.  Charles falls in love with the Marchmain family.  He is enchanted by Sebastian, enamored with Julia, charmed by Lady Marchmain, and moved by the experience of being at their home: “I […] believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead” (BR 79).  Charles says of Sebastian, “He was the forerunner,” and Julia replies: “That’s what you said in the storm.  I’ve thought since: perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.”  Charles reflects that

all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.  (BR 303)

Because man is made in the image of God, love of any person is a forerunner of the ultimate love of God.  Such is the drama of life—perseverance day in and day out through disappointment and sadness—all stemming from separation from the Creator. 
     It is a tragicomic war in Lord Marchmain’s soul as he lies quietly dying.  Charles looks at this man in bed—slowly breathing, slowly fading—and the poor agnostic fights against the imposition of the Last Rites.  In great distress, he asks Julia, “Can’t they even let him die in peace?”  Julia responds, “They mean something so different by ‘peace’” (BR 324).  Something entirely different, indeed: finite war with self on earth before infinite peace with God in Heaven.  Lord Marchmain must smite his stubborn pride and give in to Christ’s mercy.  Charles imagines that “All over the world people were on their knees before innumerable crosses, and here the drama was being played again by two men—by one man, rather, and he nearer death than life; the universal drama in which there is only one actor” (BR 338).
     Brideshead Revisited is a lush tapestry of drama; it is comedy and tragedy splendidly juxtaposed.  Many readers who did not like this book did not recognize this juxtaposition.  When observed with spirit and supernatural awareness, religion automatically blends the comic and the tragic.  Any religious view will see absurdities, paradoxes, and simple humor adjacent to the most serious truths.  When Julia rants in pain at the realization that she is “living in sin,” Charles says to her, “It’s like the setting of a comedy.” Julia is startled by Charles’s choice of the word “comedy.”  He answers, “Drama.  Tragedy.  Farce. What you will.  This is the reconciliation scene” (BR 291).  How perfectly right he is; Julia is finally being reconciled with herself, her faith, her God.  She has died in the same way that Paul Pennyfeather died in Decline and Fall, and like him, Julia is on the brink of resurrection. 
     After watching her father’s surrender to the love of Christ at his death, Julia knows that she cannot go on living in sin with Charles; instead, she must follow her father’s example.  At first, Charles is hurt and angry; he says to his lover, “I hope your heart may break” (BR 341).  In the story’s epilogue, Charles is a different man altogether, a Roman Catholic.  No longer is he sad and grim, poor and thwarted.  He prays before the tabernacle in the house that was his heaven and is at long last “cheerful” (BR 351).  He has accomplished what the saints have all accomplished: happiness through suffering.  This is the work of the Divine Purpose which drives Waugh’s novel.  As God’s Providence led a poor agnostic to supernatural reality through his love for a Catholic family, so too it may be God’s Providence that has led countless readers to the same supernatural reality through their love for this profoundly Catholic story. 

Works Cited
Beaty, Frederick L.  The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh.  DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,  1992.
Doyle, Paul A.  Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Essay.  Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1969.
Frye, Northrop.  “The Argument of Comedy.”  Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism.  Ed. Leonard Dean.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.  79-89.
Myers, William.  Evelyn Waugh and the Problem of Evil.  London: Faber, 1991.
Stannard, Martin, ed.  Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage.  London: Routledge, 1984.
Waugh, Evelyn.  Brideshead Revisited.  Boston: Little, 1945.
---.  Decline and Fall.  1928.  Boston: Little, 1956.

Editor's Note: Kathryn S. Easter won the First Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest with the above entry, which has been edited for publication.  Kathryn is in her junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, and she is majoring in Roman Catholic Studies, a program she designed herself.    

A Supplemental Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh, Part I
by Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma

     This is a supplement to A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh (1986), by Robert Murray Davis, Paul A. Doyle, Donat Gallagher, Charles E. Linck, and Winnifred M. Bogaards.  The numbers on the left correspond to the sequence introduced in the Bibliography.  If anyone can supply additional information about these or other publications, please send it to the editor of the Newsletter, jwilson3@lhup.edu.    

Add to “Books and Monographs”:

IV     Decline and Fall.  Add: Guild Publishing, 1979.

VII    Remote People.  Add: Methuen, 1991.

X       Ninety-Two Days.  Add: Methuen, 1991.

XIV   Waugh in Abyssinia.  Add: London: Methuen, 1984. 

XV    Scoop.  Add to Selections:  "Boot Magna."  The West Country Book, ed. J. C. Trewin.  Exeter: Webb and Bower, 1981.  Pp. 41‑47.

Add to “Section A: Primary Material”:

Mr. Wu and Mrs. Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper.  Ed. Artemis Cooper.  London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991.

The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper.  Ed. Artemis Cooper.  New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992.

 1948

Waugh, Alec.  These Would I Choose: A Personal Anthology.  London: Sampson Low.  "In Retrospect" (Brideshead Revisited), pp. 82‑85, and "Departure” (Black Mischief), pp. 111‑112. 

Add to “Section B: Secondary Material”:

 1957

1237a  "Gilbert Pinfold Bildniseines englischen romanciers im besten Mannesalter."  Der Monatt, October 1957, pp. 38‑43.  

 1963

1540    Add rpt. Die englische Satire, ed. Wolfgang Weiss.  Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlische Buches, 1982.  Pp. 391‑412.  [Alvin B. Kernan’s essay “The Wall and the Jungle: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh” (1963).] 

 1966

1718a  "Evelyn Waugh and 'The Scarlet Woman.'"  London Life, 19 March 1966, pp. 16‑17. 

1970

1956a  Maes‑Jelinek, Hena.  Criticism of Society in the English Novel between the Wars.  Paris: Societe d'Editions "Les Belles Lettres."  Universite de Liege.  "Evelyn Waugh," pp. 403‑448.  Also covers Ronald Firbank, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, Rex Warner, George Orwell, William Gerhardie, Aldous Huxley.  Originally numbered B1955.                        

1971

1999a  Brown, Richard K.  The Major Works of Evelyn  Waugh:  A Critical Commentary.  New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1971.

 1976

2472a  Waugh, Auberon.  Four Crowded Years:  The Diaries of Auberon Waugh 1972‑1976, ed. N. R. Galli.  London: Private Eye/Andre Deutsch.  Entries of 4 and 5 April 1973, mock horror at and parody of Observer excerpts from Diaries of Evelyn Waugh.

 1977

Henze, Paul B.  Ethiopian Journeys:  Travels in Ethiopia 1969‑1972.  London and Tonbridge: Ernest Benn Ltd.  Pp. 188, 191, 193.  Waugh's account of railway journey still accurate; Hotel Continental at Dirre-Dowa much worse than Waugh described it.

Wilson, Edmund.  Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912‑1972.  Ed. Elena Wilson.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  Pp. 428‑429 on Put Out More Flags, 10 March 1944; discussing Brideshead with Waugh, 4 July 1945.  P. 496, on Helena.

2558a. Jones, D. A. N.  Review of A Little Order, B2527.  Listener, 99 (1978), 186‑187. 

1978

2639a  Cadogan, Mary, and Patricia Craig.  Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars.  London: Victor Gollancz. 

2641a  Johnstone, Richard A.  “Fiction and Belief in the Nineteen‑Thirties: Studies in the Novels of Edward Upward, Rex Warner, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell.”  Unpubl. diss., Cambridge.

2648    Notes on Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" and "A Handful of Dust."  Add:  Compiled by G. Schlesinger.

2651a  Stannard, M. J.  "The Development of Evelyn Waugh's Literary Career, with Special Reference to His Aesthetic Principles, 1917‑1939."  Unpubl. diss., Oxford.

Harwood, Romadel, and John Selwyn Gilbert.  "A Sense of Loss:  The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh."  Listener, 100, pp. 528‑530.

 1979

2697a  Bozilov, Bozil.  "Edin uzasen coverk," in Razvejte oste znamena.  Sofia: Narodna Kultura.  Pp. 5‑9.  "A terrible man," introduction to Bulgarian translation of Put Out More Flags.

2703    Evelyn Waugh, "Decline and Fall."  Brodie's Notes Series.  Add: Compiled by Graham Handley and Stanley King.

2703a  Goffin, Magdalen.  Maria Pasqua.  London:  Oxford University Press.  Pp. xi, xiii.  Mentions Waugh's suggestions to Dom Aelred Watkin for an earlier version of this biography.  See Letters of Evelyn Waugh.

Greene, Graham.  "Remembering Evelyn Waugh." Listener, 102, pp. 482‑483.            

 1980

Amis, Kingsley.  "Fit to Kill."  New Statesman, 98, 384. 

Alberto, Manguel, and Gianni Guadalupi.  The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.  Expanded edition.  New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.  Lists Azanian Empire, pp. 28‑30; Ishmaelia, 180‑182.

2782a  Kuehn, Robert E.  Review of Letters, B2746.  Chicago Tribune Book World, 2 November, p. 3.

2787a  Mackworth, Cecily.  "La Correspondence d'Evelyn Waugh."  Europe (Paris), nos. 628‑629 (1981), pp. 198‑199.

2795a  Rosenthal, M.  Partisan Review, 50, ii (1983), 297‑300.

2805a  Demain, E. A. "Evelyn Waugh, Satire and Art."  Unpubl. diss., University of London.

2812    Add to S. R. Jamkhandi, “The Rhetoric of War: An Evaluation of Evelyn Waugh’s Military Novels.”  Unpubl. diss., Texas Christian University: Dissertation Abstracts International, 42 (1) (July 1981), 226A.

2817    Add to M. Morriss, “Prejudice and Partiality: Evelyn Waugh and His Critics 1928-1966.” Unpubl. diss., University of Toronto: Dissertation Abstracts International, 42 (1) (July 1981), 229A. 2827a  Ross, Mitchell S.  "Waugh Dusted off for the Ages."  Chicago Tribune Book World, 20 July, p. 2.  See B2875.

2829    Add: Rpt. as "The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel" in B. Bergonzi, The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature.  New York: St. Martin's, 1986. 

Edwards, A. S. G.  "Evelyn Waugh and the ‘New Statesman’: Addenda."  Book Collector, 229
(1980), 278.

 1981

2854a  Bunnell, W. S.  Notes on Evelyn Waugh's “Brideshead Revisited.”  London: Magnum Books.

Add to reviews of A Catalogue of the Evelyn Waugh Collection (1981), by R. M. Davis, B2855:

2857a  Fergusson, James.  "Waugh's Waste Paper."  Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, 10, no. 5(May 1983), 180‑181.

American Reference Book Annual, 14 (1983), 583. 

2859a  Rosenheim, Andrew.  Notes and Queries, 29 (1982), 470‑471.

2859b  Stannard, Martin.  Modern Language Review, 80, pt. 1, 136‑137. 

Add to reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Writer (1981), by R. M. Davis, B2860:

2855a  Blayac, Alain.  Etudes Anglaises, 38, i (1985), 98‑99.

2862a  Cushman, Keith.  Journal  of English and Germanic Philosophy, 82 (April 1983), pp. 267‑268.

2862a  De Vitis, A. A.  Western Humanities Review, 36, no. 4 (Winter 1982), 369‑370.

2865a  Stannard, Martin.  "Waugh at Work."  Essays in Criticism, 32 (October 1982), 384‑388.

2866a1 Deedes, William.  "Introduction."  Black Mischief.  London: Folio Society. 

Add to reviews of Evelyn Waugh (1981), by C. W. Lane, B2868:

2868a  Choice, 19 (September 1981), 80.

2868b  Doyle, Paul A.  Choice (September 1981), 218‑219. 

2869a  McCombie, F.  Notes and Queries, 30, iii (1983), 281‑282.

2869b  Murray, I.  Durham University Journal, 75, ii (1983), 145‑146.

McKerrell, A. "The Unstable Form of Satire: Studies in Five English Writers."  Unpubl. diss., Bristol.

2871a  McVeagh, John.  Tradeful Merchants: The Portrayal of the Capitalist in Literature.  London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.  Waugh mentioned in final chapter among many others.

Rauchbauer, Otto.  "The Presentation and Function of Space in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited."  In A Yearbook of Studies in English Language and Literature, Siegfried Korninger.  Wien: Braunmüller.  Pp. 61‑76.  Vol. 78 of Wiener Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie. 

2880a  MacSween, R. J.  "Evelyn Waugh's Ladies."  Antigonish Review, no. 46 (Spring 1981), pp. 43‑50.

2889a  Mortimer, John.  "Brideshead Revisited."  Vogue (April 1981), 188‑195. 

2937a  Sinha, B. K.  "The Sword of Honour."  Indian Journal of English Studies, 21 (1981‑82), pp. 87‑95.

1982

2938b  Andjaparidze, G[eorgy Andrezevich].  "Evelyn Waugh and the Modern Satirical Novel," trans. J. Butler.  In 20th Century English Literature: A  Soviet View.  Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982.  Pp. 336‑362.  (Only to p. 354 on Waugh.)

2937c  Bulow‑Moller, A. M.  "Speech and Interaction: A Study of the Twentieth Century Mannerist Novel."  Unpubl. diss., East Anglia.

Add to reviews of The Picturesque Prison (1982), by J. Heath, B2944:

2944a  Billingham, Rachel.  "Waugh's Way."  Financial Times, 26 June, p. 10.

2944b  Burgess, Anthony.  "On the Waugh‑path."  Observer, 20 June, p. 31.

2948a  Donaldson, George.  English Studies in Canada, 10, ii (1984), pp. 238‑240.

2948b  [correction of B2945] Doyle, Paul A.  Choice, 19 (July‑August), p. 1558.

2950a  Hawtree, Christopher.  London Magazine, 22 (August/September), pp. 136+.

2950b  "In Search of God."  Economist, 283 (26 June), pp. 101‑102.

2950c  Jones, Lewis.  "The Iron Mask."  New Statesman, 104 (6 August), pp. 21‑22.

2950d  McCartney, George P.  "At Waugh with Himself."  National Review, 34 (29 October), pp. 1356‑1358.

2950e  Magalaner, Marvin.  Modern Fiction Studies, 28 (Winter 1982‑83), pp. 649‑650.

2951a  Quinn, Joseph A.  University of  Windsor Review, 17 (Fall‑Winter), pp. 127‑129. 

2951b  Reynolds, Stanley.  "Phoney Waugh."  Punch, 282 (16 June), p. 994.

2951c  Stovel, Bruce.  Queen's Quarterly, 90, iv (1983), pp. 1188‑1191.

Books and Bookmen, August 1982, p. 27.

Observer, 20 June 1982, p. 31.           

Quill and Quire, 48 (May), p. 36. 

University of Toronto Quarterly, 52 (Summer 1983), pp. 445‑446.

Add to reviews of The Writings of Evelyn Waugh (1983), by I. Littlewood, B2943 [out of sequence p. 409]:

Blayac, Alain.  Etudes Anglaises, 37, iii (1984), p. 347. 

Choice, 20 (April 1983), p. 1139.

Craig, R.  Contemporary Literature 26, iii (1985), pp. 358‑361.

Davis, Robert Murray.  English Language Notes, 22 (December 1984), pp. 75‑78.

De Vitis, A. A.  Modern Fiction Studies, 29 (Summer 1983), 788‑789. 

Doyle, Paul A. Choice (June 1986), p. 228.   

Gallagher, D. S.  AUMLA, 63 (1985), pp. 65‑66.

Levi, Peter.  "Hooperisms."  Spectator, 250 (22 January 1983), p. 23.

Smith, Anne.  "Working on a Dummy."  New Statesman, 105 (11 February 1983), p. 26.       

Stannard, Martin.  Modern Language Review, 81, ii (1986), pp. 466‑467.

British Book News (April 1983), p. 258. 

2952b  McEwan, N., ed.  Notes on Waugh's “Decline and Fall.”  Harrow: York Notes‑Longman.

2953a  Spalding, J. C.  "The Novels of Evelyn Waugh: The Radical and Reactionary Spirit."  Unpubl. thesis, University of Edinburgh.

2953b  Ziegler, Philip.  Diana Cooper.  New York: Knopf.  3008    Add: This issue of Prose Studies also published as The Art of Travel: Essays on Travel Writing.  London and Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass.

2961a  Boyd, William.  "Back to Brideshead."  New Statesman, 1 January 1983, pp. 23‑24.

3015a  Waugh, Auberon.  "Scoop."  Folio (The Folio Society of London), Summer 1982, pp. 4‑9.

3030a  Brophy, Brigid.  "The Riskiest Way of Writing Novels."  Times Literary Supplement, 18 August 1982, p. 7. 

3051a  Champlin, Charles.  "A Novel Narrator Years before Brideshead."  Los Angeles Times Book Review, 3 October 1982, p. 3.

3055a  Doyle, Paul A.  Review of Charles Ryder’s Schooldays (1982), by E. Waugh.  Best Sellers. November 1982, p. 316.

3055b  Bell, Quentin.  "Visionary Vanity."  Times Literary Supplement, 12 November 1982, p. 1253.  Review of P.R.B. (reprint, 1982), by E. Waugh.

3055c  Cushman, Robert.  "Play of the Book."  Observer, 14 November 1982, p. 30.  Review of dramatic adaptation of Handful of Dust.3055d  Donaldson, Frances.  "Old Young Waugh."  New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1982, p. 25.

3055e  Broyard, Anatole.  Review of Charles Ryder’s Schooldays.  New York Times, 22 November 1982, p. 16.

3055f   Hobson, Harold. "From Worship to Destruction."  Times Literary Supplement, 26 November 1982, p. 1297.

3056a  O'Connor, John.  "The Year's Best Television."  New York Times, 26 December 1982, sec. 2, p. 25.  On TV Brideshead.

Editor's note:  The rest of the Supplemental Bibliography will appear in two parts in the next two issues of the Newsletter.  The Newsletter has not had a Bibliographical Editor since 1998.  If anyone is willing to undertake this task, please contact the editor: jwilson3@lhup.edu

Book Reviews

Reading a Rereading of Brideshead Revisited
"Revisiting Brideshead," by Evelyn Toynton, Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, ed. Anne Fadiman.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.  272 pp.  $22.00.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma

     In “Revisiting Brideshead,” Evelyn Toynton contrasts her youthful romantic view of the novel with her mature distaste for what she has come to see as Waugh’s “adolescent’s vision of love and innocence, even of suffering and redemption.  It was uniformly beautiful without being in any sense true.”  According to her, Charles Ryder’s ignoring his children (the second of whom almost certainly does not carry his DNA) and Waugh’s seeming approval shows “a tin ear for ordinary human decency,” and Catholicism seems in Waugh’s portrayal “wholly a matter of gorgeous rite and mystery.”  Furthermore, since Charles and Julia never quarrel, their relationship is totally unreal.  Furthermore, England is no longer like that, if it ever was—or, for that matter, the Catholic Church, though the passing of her youthful attraction to the faith prevents her from commenting on those changes.
     Since Toynton also thinks that it would be “unlike Waugh to have made a deliberate pun” on the name Flyte, although she mentions favorably A Handful of Dust (Todd, Messinger, Last, for God’s sake!), perhaps she is a less careful reader than she pretends to be or at any rate is unwilling, as D. H. Lawrence advised, to trust the tale rather than the teller, or for that matter to imagine that Waugh might have known what he was doing.
     In fact, as he told Lady Dorothy Lygon when he was well into the process, “I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons of sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays” (Letters of Evelyn Waugh 180) and later remarked that reverse snobbery made it as impossible to mention a lord as it would have been, in the Victorian era, to mention a prostitute.  A few years after the novel’s publication, he came to agree with Toynton and many others that the prose was often too lush and pared back some of it in the 1960 edition.
     None of this counters Toynton’s view that Charles Ryder (and by extension his creator) often acts like a snob and a shit.  Saving the parenthetical charge, I heartily agree.  But like many readers, Toynton ignores entirely the novel’s “Prologue” and “Epilogue” and the distinction between Ryder as character and narrator.  As I have argued in Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed (1990), in the “Prologue,” “Narrator-Ryder recognizes that the worldly myths have brought actor-Charles to a state of disillusionment,” but that in the course of the novel, “by consciously reconstructing his past [...] he comes to understand the way in which his worldly talents and earthly loves have brought him to the point at which he can go from the artistically appalling chapel not back into Brideshead, the refuge he had desired for so long, but into the modern, military world with a new spirit and a new hope.”
     There is further evidence that Toynton responds to parts, not to the whole. She was relieved to be able to enjoy the “wonderful” first book and Anthony Blanche’s judgment that Charles’s art and life have been destroyed by “creamy English charm.”  Seen in context, Blanche’s judgment, though partial, is accurate, and it undercuts the idyllic atmosphere of the whole of the second book which Toynton finds distasteful.
     Granted, Charles has had “an adolescent’s vision,” although I challenge her to point to a single passage describing “gorgeous rite.”  But she misses the point that Waugh knew that—and carefully structured his novel to convey that.  However, since many people have missed the same point, she is in a large if not distinguished company.

Evelyn Waugh and the History of Oxford
The History of the University of Oxford, Vol 8: The Twentieth Century, ed. Brian Harrison.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.  872 pp.  $240.00.  Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University 

     It comes as something of a surprise to see Evelyn Waugh treated as an authority on the history of Oxford University.  In this volume, devoted to Oxford in the twentieth century, Waugh is cited 22 times.  That may not seem like a lot in a volume of 872 pages.  In the “Index of Personal Names,” which runs to 34 pages and at least 1600 names, however, Waugh is cited more often than all but six others: Lord Nuffield (W. R. Morris), who built automobiles at Cowley, southeast of Oxford, and donated much of his fortune to the university (cited 34 times); Sir Douglas Veale, Registrar of the University for almost 30 years (32 times); Lord Cherwell (F. A. Lindemann), adviser to Winston Churchill (26 times); G. D. H. Cole, historian and socialist (23 times); Lord Lindsay, Master of Balliol College and Vice-Chancellor of the University (23 times); and Sir Maurice Bowra, Waugh’s friend, Warden of Wadham College, and also Vice-Chancellor (22 times).  Waugh’s prominence is the more remarkable because he spent only eight terms in Oxford; the others built their careers there.
     Waugh’s contemporaries receive much less attention.  Sir John Betjeman is cited nine times, Anthony Powell eight, Cyril Connolly and Graham Greene six apiece, Sir Harold Acton four, Tom Driberg (Lord Bradwell) and Henry Green (Henry Yorke) three each, and Richard Pares and Peter Quennell only once apiece.  C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, Waugh’s tutor and the Principal of Hertford College, is mentioned five times, but two of these are when “Waugh snipes at” him (782).
The History of the University of Oxford gives the impression that Waugh will be refuted: on the front inside flap, the first paragraph concludes that “the authors show how misleading is Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited as a guide to modern Oxford.”  Instead, Waugh is usually cited respectfully, with six references to Brideshead alone, and one more to the television series.  Three references to the novel appear in Brian Harrison’s essay, “College Life, 1918-1939”: Mr. Samgrass is like some college fellows who became tutors to aristocrats during vacations (92), Anthony Blanche is typical of the “self-conscious champions of art” (99), and “many […] contemporaries treasured what Evelyn Waugh described as the ‘cloistral hush […]’” of Oxford (102).
     Almost half of the references to Waugh pop up in Valentine Cunningham’s essay, “Literary Culture.”  It seems a hard fate for Waugh to be listed as part of the “Auden generation” (413), but Cunningham adds that Waugh labeled Auden a “public bore” (441).  Cunningham dismisses Brideshead as “Waugh’s dewy-eyed  upper-class romantic vision” (447), and he identifies the beginning of “Waugh’s long career as satirist and sick-humorist” in “Edward of Unique Achievement,” a “murderous black comedy in an Oxford college.”  Thus “Edward” introduces “the most characteristic form of Oxonian fiction, the Oxford detective story,” wherein “the remembered tutorial landscape of the writer’s youth is simply strewn with dead dons” (446).
     Waugh is cited twice in F. M. Turner’s essay, “Religion,” twice more in Harrison’s “Politics,” and twice more in J. G. Darwin’s “A World University.”  Darwin explains that St Antony’s College “owed its foundation to the generosity of Antonin Besse, a wealthy businessman based in Aden,” whose “personal charm is delightfully captured in Evelyn Waugh’s Remote People (1931)” (624), where Besse is given the name "Mr. Leblanc."
     Waugh helps to explain Oxford, but The History of the University of Oxford also helps to explain some of Waugh’s writing.  In Brideshead, Charles Ryder moves through “a world of piety” on Sunday morning and notices that “Four proud infidels alone proclaimed their dissent; four Indians from the gates of Balliol, […] and in their plump, brown hands bright cushions, a picnic basket, and the Unpleasant Plays of Bernard Shaw, making for the river” (Little, Brown 59).  This scene is set in 1923.  According to Harrison, “undergraduates of the 1930s frequently recall the response of cinema audiences, ‘well rowed, Balliol!’, when black men paddled a canoe in the film Sanders of the River [1935].”  Harrison adds that “For many undergraduates, oriental students were ‘black men’” (97), and he cites Waugh’s explanation of the phrase in A Little Learning.  Referring to Asians as “black men” may have “caused offence,” Waugh suggests, since some became “fiercely anti-British” (Little, Brown 184).  Drawn to Shaw’s exposure of British hypocrisy, Waugh’s Indians are more aesthetes than athletes, but the association between Balliol, Indians, and rowing had formed before Waugh actually wrote Brideshead in 1944.
     In The History of the University of Oxford, Waugh seems to have the last laugh on the dons he abused as an undergraduate (F. F. “Sligger” Urquhart, the Dean of Balliol College, is mentioned only twice).  Perhaps, though, Waugh’s desultory study of history had some effect.  Certainly his fiction became more and more historical, from Brideshead to Helena to Sword of Honour.  Waugh’s novels are cited respectfully in other historical scholarship, such as David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990).  Like Charles Ryder, Waugh considered an academic career, but he soon realized that he had a different vocation.  Fiction and scholarship can certainly support each other, but in the end, it seems, fiction is what people tend to remember.

A Handful of Dust Reconsidered
     Jonathan Greenberg's essay, "'Was Anyone Hurt?': The Ends of Satire in A Handful of Dust," originally published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction in Summer 2003, is now available at http://www.findarticles.com.
     Edward Lobb published "Waugh Among the Modernists: Allusion and Theme in A Handful of Dust" in Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 13.1-2 (2003-2004): 130-44.  The essay has not been posted online, but the Connotations website is http://www.connotations.de.

Father and Sons
     Alexander Waugh's documentary film based on his book, Fathers and Sons (2004), about five generations of men in his family, previewed at the 2006 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on 28 March 2006.  The film is scheduled to be broadcast on BBC Four in May 2006.  More information about the film and some video clips are available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/waughs.shtml.  More information about the festival is available at http://www.sundaytimes-oxfordliteraryfestival.co.uk.
     Alexander is also providing the music for a one-man play about his father, Auberon Waugh, to be written by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and to be titled Bron's Voyage!  The title is an allusion to Bon Voyage!, a musical comedy written by Alexander and his brother Nathan Waugh. 

Waugh in the Works
     Paula Byrne, author of Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (2004), is now working on a book about Evelyn Waugh's relationship with the Lygon family.
     There has been some discussion of a film based on The Loved One (1948), with Rupert Everett somehow involved.
     BBC Four is producing a television adaptation of "Mr Loveday's Little Outing" (1936) for broadcast in May 2006, along with Fathers and Sons, as part of a "Waugh season."  The actors include Andrew Sachs as Mr Loveday and Prunella Scales as Lady Moping.  Sachs and Scales became famous in the television series Fawlty Towers.  More information is available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4785566.stm

Zita James, 1903-2006
     Zita James passed away on 18 February 2006.  She was 102 years old.
     Zita Mary Jungman was born on 13 September 1903.  Her sister Teresa Jungman was born in 1907.
     The Jungman sisters were central figures in the Bright Young People, the 1920s social group and the subject of Evelyn Waugh's novel Vile Bodies (1930).
     Zita Jungman married Arthur James in 1929, and they were divorced in 1932.  There were no children.
     Evelyn Waugh proposed marriage to Teresa Jungman in October 1933 (Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 81).  Both sisters were devout Catholics, Waugh had divorced Evelyn Gardner, and Teresa refused his proposal.  Waugh often refers to Teresa as "Baby" or "the Dutch girl" in his letters and diaries.
     Teresa Jungman married Graham Cuthbertson in 1940, and they were divorced in 1945.  There were two children, Richard (1941-1964) and Penelope (b. 1943), who married Desmond Guinness.
     Until Zita's death, the Jungman sisters lived together in the Garden Cottage, Leixlip Castle, Co. Kildare, Ireland.  Zita James is survived by her sister Teresa.

Sybille Bedford, 1911-2006
     Sybille Bedford passed away on 17 February 2006.  She was 94 years old.
     Sybille Bedford's first novel, A Legacy (1956), won praise from Evelyn Waugh.  In a review entitled "A Remarkable Historical Novel," published in the Spectator for 13 April 1956,  Waugh described Bedford as "a new writer of remarkable accomplishment" and A Legacy as "a book of entirely delicious quality" (Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh 510-1).
     Sybille von Schoenebeck was born in Germany, but she became a British citizen through a short marriage to Walter Bedford in the 1930s.  She published many other books, including a two-part biography of Aldous Huxley in 1973.  Sybille Bedford left no survivors.

Dame Muriel Spark, 1918-2006
     Dame Muriel Spark passed away on 13 April 2006.  She was 88 years old.
     Muriel Sarah Camberg was born in the Edinburgh suburb of Morningside on 1 February 1918.  She married Sydney Oswald Spark (known as "SOS"), and they had one son, Robin, born in 1938.
     Muriel Spark converted to Roman Catholicism in 1954 and wrote her first novel, The Comforters (1957).  The novel caught the attention of Evelyn Waugh.  In a review entitled "Something Fresh," published in the Spectator for 22 February 1957, Waugh observed that the narrator "goes off her head.  The area of her mind which is composing the novel becomes separated from the area which is participating in it, so that, hallucinated, she believes that she is observant of, observed by, and in some degree under the control of, an unknown second person.  In fact, she is in the relation to herself of a fictitious character to a story-teller."  Waugh had just written The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), and he was "struck by how much more ambitious was Miss Spark's essay and how much better she had accomplished it" (Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh 519).
     Muriel Spark went on to write more than twenty other novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), along with poems, plays, stories, and children's books.
     Muriel Spark became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1993.  She is survived by her son.

Waugh Makes the Cut
     Four of Evelyn Waugh's novels are included in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, by Peter Boxall.  The book is published by Universe in the United States, where it sells for $34.95, and by Cassell in the United Kingdom, where it sells for £20.  Please look for a review in a forthcoming issue of the Newsletter. 

Evelyn Waugh Blog
     There is now an Evelyn Waugh Blog available at http://bootmagna.blogspot.com.  If you would like to post announcements or pictures, please send them to waughblog@gmail.com.  The Waugh Blog has an account at the image-hosting web site Photobucket (http://photobucket.com), where pictures can be uploaded and then posted on the blog.  It is not necessary to sign in on the Waugh Blog, and the blog should be accessible all over the world.

Evelyn Waugh Conference
     The Evelyn Waugh Conference scheduled for 19-21 October 2006 in Montpellier, France has had to be postponed until the second half of June 2007.  Alain Blayac, Professor of English and Director of International Relations at the University Paul Valéry-Montpellier, reports that his university's administration is paralyzed, classes are suspended, and election of the faculty senate is delayed.  He is confident, however, that the conference can be rescheduled.  The conference will be co-hosted by the University Paul Valéry-Montpellier and the Société d'Etudes Anglaises Contemporaines.  Further details on registration and how to propose a presentation will be forthcoming. 

Evelyn Waugh Society
     The Evelyn Waugh Society now has 50 members, who are reminded to renew their memberships after one year.  The Society's web site is available at http://www.lhup.edu/jwilson3/EWSociety.htm.  The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List, hosted by the Society and the Newsletter, now has 22 members.  The Discussion List is available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh.

Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest
     The deadline for entries in the Second Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest is 31 December 2006.  Please send entries to John H. Wilson, English Department, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA 17745, USA, or by e-mail to jwilson3@lhup.edu.  An anonymous patron has made it possible to offer a prize of $250.00.  The Newsletter's editorial board will choose the winning essay, to be announced next spring. 

Biography of William Deedes
Stephen Robinson of the Daily Telegraph is working on the authorized biography of William Deedes, who served as a foreign correspondent with Evelyn Waugh in Abyssinia in 1935, and who may have inspired William Boot in Scoop (1938).  Mr. Robinson is, however, puzzled by the absence of references to Lord Deedes in Waugh's diaries and letters.  He notes that there is no reference to Lord Deedes in the Waugh Collection at the University of Texas.  Mr. Robinson does not want to overlook any archive or other line of investigation.  If anyone can make any suggestions, please contact Stephen.Robinson@telegraph.co.uk

World Wide Waugh
     Ten essays related to Evelyn Waugh are available on the internet at http://web.onetel.com/~amygdala/essays/waugh/index.html. 

Baron Olivier as the Marquis of Marchmain
     In a review of Terry Coleman's biography Olivier, "And That's Him?" in the Times Literary Supplement for 31 March 2006, Alastair Macaulay describes the rivalry between Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud during production of Brideshead Revisited for television.  Macaulay observes that Olivier's portrayal of "Marchmain's slow death is the climax of the series" and that the biographer is "wrong to skate past the evidence of [Olivier's] performances" (6). 

Biography of Brian Howard
     Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster's edition of Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, originally published in 1968, was republished by Timewell Press in London in November 2005.  The book is available for £14.99. 

Live White Male
     Robert Murray Davis, one of the leading scholars of Evelyn Waugh, has an excerpt from his new chapbook, Live White Male and Other Poems, available at http://www.texturepress.org.  Professor Davis notes that "the title if nothing else is in the spirit of Evelyn Waugh." 

Forty Years On
The Newsletter observes the fortieth anniversary of the death of Evelyn Waugh on Easter, 10 April 1966.  Waugh himself could not have invented a better ending of his life.
     Interest in Evelyn Waugh peaked in 2003, the centenary of his birth, and there has been a noticeable decline since then.  Almost all of his books remain in print, however, and continuing interest in his work is evident in scholarship and film production. 
     In the United Kingdom, it seems, Waugh can hardly be mentioned without a gibe at his supposed snobbery or racism.  Perhaps such a fate is inevitable for a satirist who spent his last years detailing failures of the welfare state.  In any case, Waugh's writing continues to be admired by readers throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
     If you have other thoughts about Waugh's status forty years after his death, please send them to the editor, jwilson3@lhup.edu.  

End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1
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