EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 38, No. 1
Spring 2007
 

Evelyn Waugh in Denmark
by Godfred Hartmann

Editor's note: The following passages have been translated by Anne Marie Køllgaard from the book I delfinens tegn (Under the Sign of the Dolphin), Copenhagen: Gyldendal,1996.  The dolphin is the emblem of Thaning & Appel, a small but active publishing house once directed by Niels Helweg-Larsen and Godfred Hartmann.  Thaning & Appel published Evelyn Waugh's work in Denmark.

     Foreign authors expect particular care--almost to be spoilt--when they visit their publishers.  Evelyn Waugh was far from an exception from this.  He preferred his Catholic bishop to the baroness at Rungstedlund [Karen Blixen, a.k.a. Isak Dinesen].  He kept those around him alert, and there was always quite a lot of disquiet following him, but Waugh did not care.  

“I do not want to be disturbed”
     Our windows had been opened up to the great wide world.  American best sellers made their entry, and now and then this caused quite a stir among publishers in this country.  Agreements with literary agents did not always hold.  Publishers who thought they had the rights to a real best seller suddenly heard that the book would soon be published by another publisher, and this caused endless debates in the Danish Publishers’ Association.  Arbitration was mentioned, and the chairman often had to reach for the heavy silver bell, and the company shook their heads in despair, for that is what Mr. Frimodt in the chairman’s seat did.
     However, nobody was to cross our path.  The brief skirmish with Gyldendal about Evelyn Waugh had been put away long ago, and nobody was thinking in earnest about Upton Sinclair, Eric Linklater, Scott Fitzgerald, not to mention Henry James.  They were, presumably, by many considered mummies, long since behind the times.
     In September 1947 Evelyn Waugh came to Copenhagen.
     One day there was a small blue envelope in our mail.  It was obvious that this letter was not from just anybody.  “Piers Court, Stinchcombe” was embossed in Prussian Blue on the flap.  The small letter from England oozed upper-class opulence.  We knew the handwriting from the signatures on our contracts. The letter was from Evelyn Waugh.
     He had been told by his literary agent in London, A. D. Peters, that a considerable fee was due to him, and since the Daily Telegraph intended sending him to Scandinavia in order for English readers to get an impression of life during the occupation in Norway and Denmark, he would like to draw on his due, since the per diems from the Daily Telegraph were not likely to cover all his needs.
     The letter was kind--long and formal--Dear Sir--and then followed a number of questions of a more practical nature: about the weather, currency, and especially about where he was to stay.  In a central location, if possible, but not too noisy.
     The hotel would be the most important.  We chose the d’Angleterre.  They had a good bar, and surely he would enjoy walking along Østergade [the most elegant part of the present pedestrian street] during the rush hour.
     The hotel inspector--a gentleman in morning dress--was quite enlivened at the prospect of such a prominent guest.  They had just the right thing for Mr. Waugh.  Lauritz Melchior and his wife Kleinchen had just left their suite, so this was free.
     With awe Helweg and I looked into something to which we were quite unused.  A diplomat’s desk of the kind which is found in Versailles, where you put your name to alliances or sign a peace treaty.  Heavy curtains and even heavier furniture from Lysberg, Hansen & Therp--a vast room with large French doors facing Kongens Nytorv, and as an opulent addition a bathroom with all the peculiar basins shaped after the body which certain rich people consider a necessity for their personal hygiene.
     We accepted but thought that something less grand would have sufficed.  Tactfully we had to tell our most likely underpaid bookkeeper that in the near future, he would be presented with bills of a size which it required more than ordinary imagination to envisage.
     Slightly hesitant we told him and our staff that we, too, had looked into an alien world.  But we had to emphasize more than once that this was money which our guest had earned for the benefit of himself and our little publishing house.  We felt we had to do something.
     At Kastrup Airport the press was numerously represented.  Photographers with flashes and journalists waited for Mr. Waugh who came by plane from Oslo.  The Daily Telegraph had informed the editors what day and by what plane he would arrive.  Helweg and I had bought flowers from Libertas; they looked like nothing in the high-ceilinged halls of the hotel, and the posh hired car awaited our prominent guest.  To meet him with our little grey Standard Eight would be absurd.  He came from the wealthy Swedish publishers, so the change ought not to be too abrupt.
     We were not in doubt.  This must be him.  A heavy, genuine bowler is lifted politely to the air hostess as farewell.  The walking stick and the umbrella are over his arm.  Behind a glass window we can see him talk, the photographers use their flashes.  A small, stout man who could have done with a couple of kilos less, with red, meaty cheeks and a couple of lively eyes which were likely to be looking for us, whom he did not know.  Heavy leather suitcases are carried out to the waiting car.  The meeting in the arrival hall has been formal without in any way touching on the cordial.
     We exchange polite phrases on our way to town and in the grand suite.  The flowers meant to be our welcome are dimly seen far away.  Mr. Waugh is pleased.  Unseen, he presses a button.  Waiters appear with white napkins and aprons as long as christening gowns.  He looks questioningly at us. “Whisky and soda?”
     Mr. Waugh is in town.  The metre has started running.
     On Louis XIV’s desk we had put a written message of welcome and hoped he would enjoy his stay. At any time he could count on us--and draw on what was due to him.  I think there was also a suggestion for excursions in classical North Zealand and greetings from Karen Blixen at Rungstedlund who looked forward to receiving him one day for tea.  They were sure to have many communal friends from Kenya.  In any case she looked forward to meeting him.
     His reaction was astonishing.  Already in 1947, Karen Blixen possessed a certain international fame, but it was as if the famous lady at Rungstedlund was of no importance whatever to him.  He looked unkindly at us, almost angrily.  All that business with Karen Blixen must be the second priority.  “I want to meet my bishop”.  This was plain talking.  Bishop Suhr at Farumgaard was far more important than tea with the baroness at Rungstedlund.
     It required a certain skill to manage to squeeze the chubby Waugh into the front seat of our small Standard Eight.
     We must have crossed the Amalienborg Castle square, passed the Little Mermaid, gone through the Hareskoven [forest] and have pointed excitedly to the Furesøen [lake].  He hardly turned his head.  The bowler hat was tightly glued to his round head, and he had his heavy walking stick between his legs.
     Since from his silence we understood that he was filled more by the meeting with Bishop Suhr than by the beauties of North Zealand, we became quiet as we got closer to the stronghold of the Ursuline sisters.
     Walking and on bicycles, nuns were flying about like village swallows round Farumgaard.  In groups they stood on the well-kept lawns and followed the small grey car with their eyes.
     Since we had no wish whatsoever to take part in the meeting between the primate of the Catholic Church and our silent guest, we withdrew and spent the waiting time at William’s Hotel in Farum, where we sweetened our much-needed break with an invigorating drink.
     It was quite obvious that before the meeting with his bishop he had had his own little quiet prayer, where our praises of nature can only have annoyed him.  Now he approached us smilingly--with a flock of Ursulines and clergy dressed in white following him.  Now he was looking forward to a good lunch at Store Kro [a fine hotel and restaurant in Fredensborg, town of the royal summer residence], and even the meeting with the baroness was mentioned in controlled, more optimistic words.  But at least it was mentioned.
     Although we had secured permission beforehand to drive into the castle yard, since Mr. Waugh did not walk so well, the castle seen from the outside was more than enough for him.  Being far from unacquainted with the architecture of Europe, neither Frederiksborg [castle] nor Fredensborg [castle] could bring him to express such admiration as we are now used to from tourists.  Now he was talking about Danish herrings, a glass of good beer and the cold, famous schnapps.  Mr. Waugh was mellowing. Well pleased Helweg and I watched his blushing cheeks--and unseen we hid the bill to be kept for our wondering bookkeeper.
     Kronborg [Hamlet’s castle at Elsinore] was something quite different from Frederiksborg, which at a quick glance reminded him of the railway station at Elsinore.
     We must have been on time, for Karen Blixen was standing in the door to greet us.
     There is something about particular situations.  Suddenly they are there, we have them in our inner eye, and they never leave us.  This is not a bad thing.  Perhaps he had had too much Port with his Stilton at lunch, perhaps the sudden arrival surprised him, when he had to get out of the small car.  It was as if he got stuck in a peculiar way while the hostess moved like an agile gazelle outside.  Perhaps he was annoyed by this.  She greeted him smilingly, kindly, he was grim and said little.  A terrier who now and then would look angrily at an elegant greyhound.
     The conversation touched on mutual acquaintances without really being of interest.  There was hot water in antique kettles, freshly baked buns and polite conversation about pictures of ancestors and old houses.  Africa was mentioned and there were polite questions about old friends back home in England, which were replied to briefly, and then silence.
     It was as if a change of scene was needed.  He was to see the garden, and he was to hear the birds sing.  Generally, he was to sense the particular mystique of this place, but it was as if she sensed that he would find this difficult.  The two of them went in advance along the wide garden path.  She in a trouser suit with a scarf round her head.  She made keen gestures, then stopped and looked at him with her deep, dark eyes.  He was heavy, leaning on his stick and with the heavy bowler hat on his head.  Was he surprised?  Perhaps a little overwhelmed, for on the way back to town he did not say anything.  Did he feel that he had been a loser?
     The press followed like bloodhounds in his tracks--and this suited him fine.  The Daily Telegraph was not likely to mind seeing results of his Odyssey in the Scandinavian countries.
     Following his return, in two articles he did not hide that he much preferred the smiling Stockholm to ghastly Oslo, although he found the Swedes “bloody dull”.  He is shaken by the architecture of the Stadshuset [the Stockholm town hall], and once the town hall of Oslo is finished, it will simply be the ugliest building in Europe!  Generally, he does not like anything in Oslo.  The men walk about in their shirtsleeves eating ice cream, and the meeting with Sigrid Undset is a complete failure.  She may be famous and long since have received the Nobel Prize, but Waugh is not impressed. “She did not say a word--drank a lot and looked like a vicious boarding house landlady”.
     It was better with Karen Blixen.  He is pleased to leave Oslo and travel to Copenhagen.
     On the occasion of his visit we had invited him for dinner.  All the stops were being pulled in our little house as regards the food and arrangements.  We had invited Kai Friis Møller, [Kjeld] Abell,  Svend Kragh-Jacobsen and a couple of other journalists--all of them accompanied by their wives.  Now we were going to show our guest that we might not be related to the Bonnier family on the Nedre Manilla[street in Stockholm], but at Hesselvangen no. 5 we were able to keep up.  There was an external cook and help with white headgear to shove the heavy platters in between the guests.
     But one thing we had not considered.  The thought had not even entered our heads.
     Evelyn Waugh had met the press in the afternoon, and this wrought havoc on our dinner party for him.  Everything suddenly threatened to collapse.  Perhaps we would have to eat our roast lamb alone.
     In an interview he gave a statement on the PEN Club.  He called the members of the PEN Club a gathering of confused communists whose company one simply could not keep.
     This could not have been worse.  Kai Friis Møller was chairman of this group of headstrong stray communists, and after what had been said, the two of them just could not be together--let alone sit at our festive table.  When the telephone went, I knew it would be Kai Friis Møller.
     With his soft, smirky voice he expressed his loathing for our guest of honour.  He refused to be with him, if I did not at once call Mr. Waugh and ask him to call back his statements through Ritzau’s Bureau [the leading Danish news agency].  If this did not take place, he and his wife must unfortunately refuse the invitation, roast lamb or not.  For once this did not matter to him.
     That I even considered such a mad thought just shows my deferential attitude towards Friis Møller and my fear for our dinner party being totally called off.
     I considered more than once.  Hesitantly I called Hotel d’Angleterre.  “Mr. Waugh does not want to be disturbed”.  But I was firm: This was a matter of life and death.  How could I make myself do this!
     I heard him fumble with the telephone among the fine sheets. “I do not want to be disturbed!”--and the receiver was slammed down.  I don’t think I managed to say a word--and this may have been just as well.  There was no choice.  At once, my wife and I drove to the Rådhuspladsen [the address of Politiken, a leading daily].  Now Kai Friis Møller had to behave like the gentleman he would like to be, in spite of his irritation.  But he was quite firm about it.  Smirkily and sweetly he put his case to two young people who did not understand his anger.
     The conversation must have been loud.  Suddenly Kai Skov appeared in the narrow office.  He was the reporter for church matters of Ekstra Bladet, which today may seem sensational.  Quietly he listened to the problem.  Then he turned to his friend Kai Friis Møller: “How can you think to behave like this, Kai.  Imagine putting a couple of young people in that situation. Shame on you!”
     If Friis Møller felt shame I could not say.  He and his wife came--and they brought flowers.  Under four eyes before dinner he and Evelyn Waugh had a conversation.  In order to loosen up the atmosphere they were given a carafe and a couple of glasses.  At the table, everything was pure idyll, and when we got to the cognac, the friendship was close on cordial.
     Evelyn Waugh had sent flowers from Libertas.  He looked about in wonder--no flowers.  I have a namesake.  His name is exactly like mine.  He had received all the flowers, and he kept them.  On the other hand I received all his wife’s milliner’s bills for a number of years.  I stared at them--and forthwith sent them on to my wealthy counterpart.
     The nasty remarks about the suspect members of the PEN Club, which indeed must have bothered the chairman, were quickly forgotten with new partying in sight.  The PEN Club laid on a dinner at the Skovriderkroen [a hostelry at the wealthy outskirts of Copenhagen]  in honour of Evelyn Waugh.  The chairman sat at the end of the table and had next to him Svend Kragh-Jacobsen, ageing graduate in law, and Sven Clausen the language purist.  Further Kjeld Abell and Tove Ditlevsen, who must have been included in order to at least have a youthful supplement to the quiet gathering where language difficulties
--especially in the case of Sven Clausen--hindered an easy conversation.
     This whole arrangement, in a cold separate room, was not festive, to put it mildly.  There was glaring light from one 100 Watt bulb in the middle.  Bottled beer on the table, paper napkins and food hardly worth remembering, let alone mentioning.  I only remember that the conversation did not go easily.  Abell worked hard, and Svend Kragh-Jacobsen, whom Waugh in his diary called “a literary jagger”, was at his peak.  The journalists were full of stories and wit, but were brought to be quiet for a moment when a peculiar man from outer space, an uninvited guest, entered with crash helmet and windproof clothing to match.  His Nimbus [motorcycle] was right outside.  Without much comment, let alone excuse, he took away Tove Ditlevsen.  Everyone was surprised, but nobody said anything.  The guest of honour wondered.  What sort of peculiar country had he come to?
     When the bill had to be paid, there was disquiet.  The chairman clapped his chest.  He dived into roomy but empty pockets.  Really, I have forgotten my wallet.  “Abell, what are we to do?”  There was general unrest and whispering.  Waugh was sitting silent, like an uninterested Sphinx.  Only Kjeld Abell behaved like the man of the world that he was.  He paid with a smile although he knew that this would be an outlay not to be paid back for quite some time.
     Sven Clausen thanked us politely for an evening which had not really been his.  The rest of us drove to my home at Hesselvangen.  We missed Tove Ditlevsen, but forgot both her and Sven Clausen when the strong stuff was on the table.
     No wonder that Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary for September 2: “I left Copenhagen with regret”.
     And he meant it.  The year after there was again a little blue letter in our mail.  This time he would like to show his wife Laura Copenhagen.  Normally she was driving a tractor, and she did all the work which he knew that he ought to do.  Were there performances at The Royal Opera opposite Hotel d’Angleterre--was he to wear evening dress when going to the theatre?  We were not  to misunderstand him, he was totally without sense of music, but he would like to do something for his worn-out wife.
     Suddenly we got to know a quite different Evelyn Waugh.  The lively, highly intelligent Waugh who only moves in the best circles suddenly became human.  For a couple of weeks, the Upper Class at their country houses and their hunting in pink coats were pushed into the background.  Evening dress was not necessary, a dinner jacket would do.  But a dark suit would be good enough.
     Since Helweg and the director of the theatre were relations, we succeeded in getting two tickets for The Marriage of Figaro, but we did mention that these seats were Henning Brøndstedt’s own.  Now that little snob would be impressed by us.  This could hardly do any harm.
     Laura Waugh was just delightful.  She must have had her problems with him.  From where I sat in the amphitheatre I could see them in the boss’s seats in the orchestra stalls.  Egisto Tango lifts his baton. When the first act is over, there is disquiet in the row.  It is Waugh leaving.  I take his empty seat.
     But he was the host after the performance in their suite at the d’Angleterre.  He sat in the middle of the grand salon and had an ice bucket at each side of his grand Queen Anne chair.  Champagne in one and Cherry Brandy in the other.
     He was human.  Suddenly he was charming, witty and full of British charm and an irresistible understatement in everything he said.
     After we published Helena in 1961, we went our separate ways.  That book--his “masterpiece”--was to be our last with him.  He wrote to Nancy Mitford, “Nobody is going to like it.  It will be a failure”.
     And so it was, but this was not the reason why we went our separate ways.  For us, it was most likely the unfortunate times.  Other publishers took over Evelyn Waugh.  I followed him at a distance. Many books have been written about him, and rightly so.
     He did not live to see Brideshead on the television.  He died an unhappy man--a tailor-made wreck. On April 10, 1966 he fell over with a dump sound in his library.  He is likely to have been spared much.
     It may have been at the end of the 1940s that Eric Linklater from Scotland came to Copenhagen.  He was of an easier mind and easier to be with than the stiletto-type Waugh.  He was just as witty, but his wit was kindly.

Editor's Note (from Donat Gallagher of James Cook University):  In “The Scandinavian Capitals: Contrasted Post-War Moods” (1947), Waugh wrote that "[The Danes] remain the most exhilarating people in Europe, for the reason that they are not obsessed by politics, national or international.  More civilized than the Norwegians, more humorous and imaginative than the Swedes, they are a people for whom the Englishman feels a spontaneous, reciprocated sympathy" (Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, 341).

Waugh's Nonexistent Evening Standard Article
by Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma

     Although I have cited in some of my work Somerset Maugham’s comment in Cakes and Ale (see A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh, B138) about a Waugh article condemning the “contemptible practice” of first-person narration in an Evening Standard article, no Waugh scholar has ever been able to find the article.  That’s because it was never written.  Ted Morgan writes that “When Alec Waugh visited Maugham in the summer of 1931, he pointed out that his brother had never written such an article. Maugham shrugged” (Maugham [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980], p. xx).
     Waugh’s review of Cakes and Ale (“The Books You Read,” Graphic, 11 October 1930, p. 74) does not mention Maugham’s false attribution.  He gives a competent plot summary and notes that Maugham’s control of his material is “both a triumph and a limitation,” for while there are no faults, there are no “sudden transcendent flashes of passion and beauty which less competent novelists occasionally attain.”

Le Mot Juste
Retour à Brideshead [Brideshead Revisited], translated by Georges Belmont.  Paris: Bibliothèque Pavillons / Robert Laffont, 2005.  606 pp.  €10.90.  Reviewed by David Bittner. 

     French is a beautiful, reasonable, and versatile language, and nowhere is this fact more evident than in Retour à Brideshead, the French translation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.  Made in 1945 by Parisian journalist Georges Belmont, who translated more than seventy books by such authors as Graham Greene, Henry James, and Henry Miller, Retour stands as a monument to the beauty and practicality of the French tongue, as this Anglophone-Francophile writer discovered.
     It is usual in American schools of journalism to emphasize that English benefits from having many short Anglo-Saxon words that are preferable to longer Latin equivalents.  But French has plenty of good short words of Latin derivation which are just as punchy.  For instance, Waugh's description of Mr. Samgrass as “someone of Mummy's” (Little, Brown, 109) becomes, in Retour à Brideshead, the charmingly succinct “un type de Maman” (183).  (“Type” in French means “guy” or “fellow.”)  The epilogue's reference to the Latin phrase “Quomodo sedet sola civitas” as “not even an apt word” (351) becomes “ni même le mot juste” (606), the well-known French phrase.  Some Gallo-Roman expressions are so quaint that they actually outclass anything English has to offer.  Charles Ryder's scout at Oxford takes Sebastian's flowers not just “home” (30) but to “faire profiter son foyer” (57; to “profit his vestibule”).  Lady Marchmain's accusation that Charles is “callously wicked” (168) takes on a new dimension in French as “Je ne comprends pas ... comment on peut pousser à ce point le manque de tact et la perversité” (291; “I don't understand how anyone could behave with such extreme lack of tact and perversity.”)
     In translating Brideshead, Belmont also made some of Waugh's expressions a little more precise or frank, and of course it is by adding to and enhancing what has already been achieved by an author that a translator makes his own name, earning a little footnote in literary history.  In Retour à Brideshead, Julia's view of hell goes beyond the skepticism of the original English (“I don't know that I believe in it for anything,” 197) to utter nonbelief: “L'enfer, je n'y crois pas” (342; “Hell, I don't believe in it”).  Belmont also seems to have been aware of the pitfalls of verbless “label heads” in journalism, rendering “Peer's Unusual Hobby” (280) as “Un pair se découvre un dada inusité” (486; “A peer discovers an unusual hobby”).
     Belmont sharpens Lady Marchmain's prejudiced view of Rex Mottram's “black blood.”  In English, Lady Marchmain's comment that “they always revert” (188) might be taken as a reference to Rex's boorishness and not necessarily to his “blackness.”  But in Belmont's translation the comment becomes “La race ressortira en eux,” (325; “The race will ‘come out’ in ‘them”), an unmistakable expression of Lady Marchmain's distaste for miscegenation.  There is not a lot of political correctness in Retour à Brideshead.  Anthony Blanche's self-hating slurs about Italians are converted into negative comments about “m-m-métis d'Indiens” (“half-breed” Indians), and Belmont omits one of the novel's few positive references to Jews, “The doctors were Jewish” (294), in Rex and his associates' discussion of the German war machine's deficiencies.  Belmont does keep the reference to “New York banks” (“Haute Banque new-yorkaise,” 510).  When he translates Bridey's question to Charles about Kurt's “vicious” relationship with Sebastian (216), Belmont chooses the word “douteux” (376, “doubtful”) and conveys Bridey's suspicious view of the menage.
     Puns and alliteration are often lost in translation, and this is a weakness of Retour à Brideshead.  Julia's gently mocking question to Bridey, “You're not marrying her for her matchboxes?” (284) becomes the straight line, “Vous ne l'épousez pas à cause de la collection?” (493; “You're not marrying her because of the collection?”).  Mrs. Muspratt's pun on Bridey's name, “I felt as though it was I who was leading in the bride” (320) is rather spoiled by the French “J'ai eu l'impression que c'était moi qui conduisais la mariée” (586; “I had the impression that it was I who was leading the bride”).  Belmont was perhaps relying on the sophistication of his readers to connect the equivalent words “bride” and “mariée” and appreciate Waugh's play on words.  In at least one place, Belmont goes beyond the call of duty and actually improves upon a Wavian rhyme.  Charles and Sebastian's taunt, “Samgrass green arse” (128), becomes “Vertes Fesses, Saimegraisse” (223).  “Graisse,” a French word for “fat,” adds to the characters’ humiliation of Mr. Samgrass.
     Retour à Brideshead also benefits from official French sanction for expressions that in English are only colloquial.  The French realize that on occasion subjective pronouns like “I” and “he” sound awkward and the objective case, “me” and “him,” seems more natural.  Expressions like “C'est moi,” “C'est lui,” and “Moi non plus” (“It's me,” “It's him,” and “Me neither”) are actually correct in French. The French also realize that grammatically these things don't really wash, so they invent a new grammatical category to cover them.  They call it the “disjunctive pronoun.”  Hence we have the impeccable Lady Marchmain saying, “Moi, je ne peux pas” (“Me, I can't,” 237) when she implores Charles to help her with Sebastian, and Julia telling Charles “Moi, je n'ai compris qu' aujourdhui” (590; "Me, I didn't understand till today") when the two admit the impossibility of their plans to marry.  It is also correct in French for proper names to precede sentences based on relative pronouns, an oddity in English, although people commonly speak that way.  Thus we have Edward Ryder asking Charles, “Hayter, vous a-t-il apporté les journaux du soir?” (114; “Hayter, did he bring you the evening paper?”) and Julia asking Bridey, “Papa, aurait-t-il par hasard l'intention de les liquider?” (491; “Papa, does he intend to ‘pop’ them? [Lady Marchmain's jewels]”).  Other examples of speech officially permitted in French but taboo in genteel English include the word “learn” as a transitive verb, when Cordelia “learns” (“apprend,” 337) Rex a thing or two about the faith, and all the double negatives that abound in the book, such as those Cordelia uses in her “convent chatter” (222): “Personne ne saurait avoir de la haine pour une sainte, vous ne croyez pas?” (384; “Nobody could hate a saint, could they?”).
     Belmont omits some English particulars that he apparently thought too esoteric for a French audience. Hence Julia does not refer to a tablet of Dial (287), but a generic “somnifère” (sleeping pill, 498).  Mrs. Muspratt's oldest boy just “goes off to college” (“vient d'entrer au collège,” 492), and the destination, Ampleforth (284), is not mentioned.  References to Gilbert and Sullivan (22) and Debrett (40, 301) are also out in Retour à Brideshead.  But Belmont knew he was translating for a fairly sophisticated audience, and he retains Bridey's reference to Macbeth (489) and the lines from The Waste Land quoted by Anthony Blanche, translated into French (61-2).  Belmont uses the charming French title for Alice in Wonderland, Alice au Pays des Merveillles (22; Alice in the Country of Marvels).
     Belmont also makes a few boo-boos.  He uses the French expression “petite bourgeoisie” (495; “lower middle class”) in his description of Mrs. Muspratt's “strict Catholic principle fortified by the prejudices of the middle class” (285), thus making her seem even frumpier than she is.  He also translates Charles Ryder's “beta minus” (106) as a “notation of assez bien” (185) on his essay.  The notation, generally abbreviated "AB" in French schools, means "pretty good" or “quite good.”  It has nothing to do with the letter grade “beta” or “B.”  Belmont's use of the phrase “adorablement fous” (69; “charmingly or adorably mad”) to describe the Flytes misses the point of Waugh's phrase “madly charming” (37). Waugh emphasized the Flytes' “charm,” the “great English blight,” as Anthony Blanche calls it (273). There is no suggestion that the Flytes are insane.
     Nevertheless, in Retour à Brideshead, Georges Belmont generally translated good English into good French.  

     Lancing College: A Portrait is a collection of photographs depicting the history of the college, its buildings, and its setting.  Jeremy Tomlinson, Lancing’s registrar, provides the text in a book compiled to mark the college’s 150^th anniversary.
     Evelyn Waugh is mentioned four times.  Tomlinson notes that college life has never been described “more vividly than in Evelyn Waugh’s Lancing Diaries and his late story ‘Charles Ryder’s Schooldays’” (40-1).  Waugh lived in the Head Master’s House, or Head’s, along with M. L. Grimes and R. G. Apthorpe (41), and Waugh used their names in Decline and Fall (1928) and Men at Arms (1952).  Though boarding at Lancing was a “bleak, cold, tough life,” Waugh was “on easy terms” with the Rev. Henry Bowlby, headmaster from 1909 to 1925 (41).
     Lancing may have given Waugh the name for another character.  Lawrence Clutterbuck was “lost in the river [Adur] after rescuing a fellow pupil from drowning” in June 1883.  Clutterbuck is “buried in Lancing Churchyard and there is a touching memorial in the Crypt” (16).  In Decline and Fall, Clutterbuck is Grimes’s favorite boy.
     Lancing Chapel was still being built in Waugh’s time, 1917 to 1921.  The Chapel is made of sandstone that had to be cut, and Rev. Bowlby “organised teams of boys to clear away the sand and level the Chapel terraces.”  Waugh “worked on the project and made some characteristically dry comments about it in his diary” (54).
     Tomlinson recalls that Waugh joined “Roger Fulford, Tom Driberg, Max Mallowan […] and other luminaries of Roxburgh’s sixth form of the 20’s” (93).  The only image of Waugh in Lancing College: A Portrait is in a group photo of the entire form with their form-master, J. F. Roxburgh. 
     Concluding his tour, Tomlinson notes that Waugh “once rode pillion on E. B. Gordon’s motorbike on the way to calligraphy lessons at Lychpole Farm” (127).  Gordon was “an outstanding athlete” who “returned as a Master in 1915” (23) and edited the “register of Old Boys” (61).  Gordon inspired the character of Graves in “Charles Ryder’s Schooldays.”  The calligraphy lessons were given by Francis Crease, described with Roxburgh in Waugh’s autobiography, A Little Learning (1964).
     Other contemporaries appear in Lancing College: A Portrait.  One friend, John Longe, is part of Lancing’s “long and distinguished history of athletic sports” (23).  One of Waugh’s favorite masters, W. B. (Dick) Harris, was “particularly popular” and “went on to be Headmaster of S. Ronan’s” (36).  Waugh describes conflicts with F. A. Woodard, “a grandson of the Founder, O. L. [Old Lancing], priest and housemaster who was unceremoniously forced to resign in the financial crisis of the 1930’s” (60).
     Lancing College: A Portrait provides information helpful in interpreting terms in Waugh’s diaries.  At one time “the most senior boys were allowed to sit on a high backed settle by the fire,” but “when the sixth form had studies of their own, the Settle became the Lancing word for those fifth formers who were set in authority over the new men” (42).  A grove of trees stood on the farm that became Lancing, and “Among those trees the first school lavatories were established, irrigated by a natural spring which flowed to the Ladywell.  All toilets at Lancing were known as ‘groves’ until the last of the old outdoor communal facilities was converted into a pottery” (91).  The Upper Quad had “the first individual day studies for senior boys,” but these were “mean and pokey rooms, […] understandably described as ‘pits’, a word which has stuck in the Lancing vocabulary, later dignified with a second t” (100).
     Waugh refers to other houses, such as Gibbs, Sanderson, and Olds.  Henry Martin Gibbs was “Lancing’s greatest benefactor,” and the house named in his honor had its “foundation stone […] laid in 1910” (109).  The Rev. Dr. Robert Edward Sanderson was headmaster from 1862 to 1889, and he “turned Lancing into a proper school” (95).  When Sanderson died in 1913, School House News was named for him.  School House Olds continued to be known as “Olds.”
     Tomlinson mentions sources for further reading, Basil Handford’s Lancing, A History (1932) and Lancing College: History and Memoirs (1986).  About one-seventh of Waugh’s diaries were written at Lancing, but those years have been neglected by scholarship.  More research might yield results.  If you are interested in obtaining a copy of Lancing College: A Portrait, please contact Jeremy Tomlinson at RJT@lancing.org.uk.

     Literary biographies have the almost insuperable dramatic problem that most writers—perhaps even more than most people—lead lives that grow less interesting as they grow older.  Their work may or may not get better, but they are boring to watch while they are doing it.  Once they’ve done it, the biographer often deals heavily in economics--how much was earned from how many copies sold collected with what degree of difficulty and acrimony—and psychology—how the writer felt about reviews and the difficulty of starting another book.
     Robert McCrum confronts a problem even greater than that of most biographers: P. G. Wodehouse was, as a person, neither very complex nor very interesting, and he did not become more so in ninety years.  His major topics of conversation were dogs (mostly Pekinese), writing, and the fortunes of his public school’s sports teams.  He was unfailingly amiable and even found Randolph Churchill a “very good chap,” an unusual if not unique response.  McCrum tries to discover why Wodehouse remained essentially a public school boy.  (He compared a German internment camp to Dulwich College, not unlike Paul Pennyfeather’s view that prison is like public school.  But Waugh was not talking about Nazis.)  McCrum stresses parental abandonment of Wodehouse and his brothers to a succession of caretakers and private schools, a fate shared by Rudyard Kipling, Saki, George Orwell, and many others, but that explanation seems too easy.
     The discussion of other aspects of Wodehouse’s life is not much more satisfactory.  McCrum speculates that Wodehouse was not much interested in sex, though he unearths a couple of possible romances.  His wife Ethel was certainly high maintenance, frequently selfish, and occasionally hysterical, but attempts to link her to various men come to very little.  There are no intimations of sex, violence, financial cupidity, or other interesting peccadilloes to liven the account.
     The most sustained and most dramatic section of the book deals with Wodehouse’s internment by and broadcasts for the Nazis in 1948.  Although he was soon defended by Orwell and almost twenty years later by Evelyn Waugh, he totally misjudged or did not judge at all the response of his audience because he did not and perhaps never had any understanding of how the war affected its members or, later, could never “grasp the historical dimensions of his offence.”  Although he charmed British interrogators after his release and although the English government never seriously considered prosecuting him for treason, they never shared that decision with him, so that he was effectively barred from returning to England until, weeks before his death, when he was too ill to travel, he was knighted.
     McCrum speaks eloquently if vaguely of the grace and ease of Wodehouse’s style and gives details about various literary borrowings (the comedian’s besetting sin), but to those not preternaturally interested in the fairly generalized details of the composition of books, song lyrics, film scripts, dramatic adaptations, and attempts (à la Henry James) to write a successful play, the book might seem interminable and sometimes almost intolerably dull.  It isn’t—because McCrum provides detailed information about the various contexts in which Wodehouse lived and wrote.  I’ve mentioned the situation of “colonial internees” who became writers, and McCrum is equally enlightening about the economics of writing for Edwardian magazines; about the tradition of literary cricketing that extended down through Alec Waugh and, on one disastrous occasion recorded in “The National Game” (Bibliography A118), to Evelyn; about the atmosphere in which Broadway musicals were produced in the mid-1910s through the 1920s; the use of radio propaganda by Nazis and Allies early in World War II; and dozens of other topics.
     Readers primarily interested in Evelyn Waugh may value McCrum’s book for the deep background information it provides about Edwardian England.  Otherwise, the fifteen mentions of Waugh in the text add little to our knowledge of his life or work.  However, those deeply immersed in offshoots of the canon will be startled and perhaps amused by information about the spiritualist writer H. Dennis Bradley, who, unless there is another of the same name, adapted Vile Bodies for the stage (Bibliography A326). Years ago I saw two different versions in print but lacked the sense to ignore the injunction against making photocopies.  Younger and more energetic Wavians may profit from tracking these down.

     This is a superbly edited and well-produced book of letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper to the connoisseur and critic, Bernard Berenson, whose art- and book-filled home near Florence was admired by the Oxford historian.  Their correspondence began after the two met in 1947 and continued until Berenson’s death at age 94 in 1959.  Berenson was almost fifty years older than Trevor-Roper, and both men possessed great intellectual curiosity and broad cultural interests.  Trevor-Roper had a view of history that was as wide as the European continent.  He detested narrow specialists and was inspired by Edward Gibbon and Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century Swiss historian of culture.  Trevor-Roper’s own books and articles reflect his convictions.
     Although Evelyn Waugh’s name appears only half a dozen times, the letters refer to people whom he knew and there is much interesting comment on British intellectual and cultural life.  From the standpoint of Waugh’s disagreement with Trevor-Roper, the letters shed light on the latter’s feelings about religion.
     Davenport-Hines’s introduction quotes Trevor-Roper on the subject: “I can feel both awe and devotion….  But theological doctrine and clerical discipline are both repellent to me: I reject all religious systems and positively hate the arrogance of theological claims … as they seem to me a standing violation of intellectual integrity” (xx).  Trevor-Roper’s antipathy toward the Roman Catholic Church is often expressed in his communications to Berenson, even when religion seems remote from the subject about which he is writing.  The gulf between Waugh and Trevor-Roper on the matter of religion was very wide.
     Nevertheless, these gossipy and often malicious letters are engrossing reading.  Clever, witty, perceptive, Trevor-Roper met the standards set by the letter writers of the Renaissance and eighteenth century.  For example, his description of Oxford intrigues and feuds are livelier and funnier than the C. P. Snow novels, which concern scheming and maneuvering in Cambridge.  And Trevor-Roper also has much of interest to say about weightier matters.

     Celia Marshik’s first book is a nicely focused study on “the censorship dialectic” (3).  That is, the aims, constructs, and contexts of “social purity” (12) and its effects upon writers central to British Modernism who attempt by representation to bring into public focus frank discussion of issues repressed in literature, art, and the theatre.  They are issues mainly but not always sexual.  Focusing upon D. G. Rossetti (writing before an organized purity movement), G. B. Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Jean Rhys (the latter writing after the concept of social purity loses force), Marshik illustrates that such writers build personae of being modernly forward—questioning and rejecting, testing and mocking purity measures as well as using irony, parody, and other indirect means to bring about awareness and reconsideration of existing moral strictures in the modern age.  Marshik shows that modern uses of irony and satire often “backfired” (9) on authors, taking on didactic purposes contrary not only to our suppositions regarding what is modern but also what the Moderns believed was modern.  Most interestingly, the study illustrates how authors, even while purportedly writing to counter social and political facilitators of the “purity movement,” are complicit in restricting their own writing—complicit, but not without reason.  Marshik traces authors working against implicit social perceptions and explicit, legally enforceable standards of purity.  Examining revisions of central works by each chosen author, she closely examines the impress of moral strictures upon modern artistic endeavors.
     As a precursor to Modernism, Rossetti worked within implicit contexts of social constraint rather than before the face of purity organizations, and even then worked by self-censorship.  In their “increasingly litigious” society amid the early stirrings of purity organizations as well as increasing government censorship, authors would find it better to “police themselves lest the real police” come calling (24).  Rossetti tended to circulate his more explicit work (“Jenny,” for instance) among private readers (including his mother and aunt), and to correspond with other writers on sensitive content.
     Due perhaps to his temperament, but working contrary to Rossetti’s personal and private self-censorship, Shaw’s works made discussion of representation and censorship openly public.  Examining Mrs. Warren’s Profession (censored in its first form), Marshik notes how Shaw’s consistent lean toward the didactic and his uses of irony and satire are not merely his way of making society aware of its hypocrisies regarding prostitution.  Rather, Shaw’s means of creation are directly related to his fight against censorship.  Contending with government censors through drama, he also fought by public debate, by writing tracts and letters to editors, and by writing articles advocating reforms in censorship.
     Woolf, like Shaw, was public in raising awareness that censorship and representation required frank treatment of human issues.  While she rejects Shaw’s didactic means for her novels, Woolf takes up irony and satire (“two of British modernism’s defenses against the social purity movement and government censorship” [86]) and humor as her primary means of indirect treatment of sensitive issues.  As Shaw worked beyond his drama, Woolf also worked outside fiction to educate society, “as a publisher and cultural critic,” on the moral and gendered strictures imposed upon artists, not least in  A Room of One’s Own, which is both “an anti-censorship—as well as feminist—manifesto” (121).
     Joyce is a unique figure to Marshik for his maneuvers in managing his own literary affairs and for working beyond the confines of Ireland and England to have his work published; France, where Ulysses first appeared, largely ignored U.S. and British restrictions on censorable literature as well as on prostitutes, and actually sent confiscated literature to the guillotine as one means of disposal (158).  While irony and humor exist in Joyce’s fiction, he works with opposition, using, for instance, the phrase “necessary evil” throughout his works, applying it evenly to binaries within “psychological and political” phenomena—to prostitutes and religious superiors, social outcasts and political entities.  Without these oppositions, both Stephen Dedalus and Joyce himself would be rebels without causes (129), and while superior entities in the fiction wish to retain as censors “the religious and national status quo,” silencing “dissenting literature and ideas,” Joyce’s reasoning indicates that Irish society (Marshik limits it to “Irish sexuality”) is “already fallen,” which makes “censorship unnecessary;” thus, the prostitute in Stephen Hero represents “a new moral, intellectual and aesthetic order” (137-8).  Considerations here evoke for the reader implications for other works: for instance, when Stephen encounters the girl standing on the beach who appears at a pivotal moment in Portrait of the Artist.  Joyce is unique among his “predecessors and contemporaries who chose self-censorship;” against moral strictures both social and governmental he declares “non serviam” (165).
     Moving to Rhys, Marshik points to the British government’s reluctance to prosecute authors of perceived obscene works, even revealing that in the 1930s, Home Office staff regarded the purity movement as a joke.  Nonetheless, Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, received few reviews and was seldom found in lending libraries.  Her silence over the next decades came in part because of the novel’s “commercial failure,” which itself came due to its challenges to the purity movement.  One is not quite convinced that Rhys had turned the table: that “purity texts can themselves function as agents of corruption” (198).  But the novel’s ironies pivot on this point.  It examines what could happen to a young woman who embraced the English and hygienic ideals for love, “stern” and “caught up with national identity” (198).  Here the purity books meant to prevent women’s moral lapses do not act as warning but as enticement to sexual experience, as with Sasha, its protagonist.  The novel ends with Sasha echoing Joyce’s Molly: “yes” and “yes” to a seducer.  She is closer to Joyce than to the other authors Marshik examines in that Rhys’s ironies indicate that reading can corrupt—one of “social purity’s most fundamental assumptions” (199).
     The force of Marshik’s study is resident in the evidence and unique approach; it serves to open not only these authors but also holds wide implications for other modern writers.  The work “illuminates the paradoxical outcome of our ongoing disputes over purity, impurity, and censorship […] that deform but also transform works of literature and art” (13); moreover, it offers a highly articulate and often delightful look at what E. M. Forster called in A Passage to India the curse of the British, “officialism,” and here as in Forster, its consequences.

End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1
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