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EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 38, No. 2
Autumn 2007
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Sex, Death, and Art in
Hollywood: The Day of the Locust and The Loved One
by Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma
At first glance, Nathanael West and Evelyn
Waugh would seem to have little in common besides their birthdates: 1903.
At their respective universities, where neither was a spectacular academic
success, both were at least as well known as cartoonists as they were as
writers. West probably never read Waugh’s novels, not widely
circulated in the USA until six years after West died in 1940, but Waugh
at least owned a copy of West’s scarifying novel Miss Lonelyhearts.
And both looked at Hollywood with an eye very much like that of a
caricaturist in order to reveal the shadow of death that underlay the
artifice not only of the movies but of the whole region.
West’s vision was the darker, perhaps because his stay
in Hollywood was more extended and his circumstances far more exiguous
than Waugh’s. He came to Hollywood during the Depression after the
commercial failure of his first three novels—Miss Lonelyhearts
alone can be regarded as having entered the canon—to work as a
scriptwriter at fringe studios and live among those hanging on to a place
in the movie business. The Day of the Locust, published in
1939, is just as much of a legacy of the Depression as The Grapes
of Wrath is, although West depended far more than Steinbeck on his
imagination.
Waugh came to Hollywood in 1947 during the coldest
winter England had faced in decades, compounding the discomfort of the
Attlee government’s postwar rationing of food and clothing. He
arrived not as a refugee but as the author of the best-selling
Brideshead Revisited to negotiate sale of the film rights to MGM, then
the leading studio. California was a land of plentiful if not always
edible food, surprisingly good wine, and social life that was “gay and
refined.” Waugh lived in the best hotels, went to some of the best
parties, including one at Charlie Chaplin’s house for a private showing of
Monsieur Verdoux, and associated with members of the English
expatriate colony and wealthy Americans, some of whom took him to a pet
cemetery and to Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which he pronounced “the only
thing in California that is not a copy of something else. It is
wonderful literary raw material.” He added that the “morticians are
the only people worth knowing.”
Nothing is what it seems in either novel. In the
opening of West’s novel, the supposedly valiant army of Napoleon is
commanded not by an emperor but by “a little fat man, wearing a cork
sun-helmet, polo shirt, and knickers” shouting “Stage Nine—you bastards.”
The houses are a jumble of styles, but the narrator comments that “It is
hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless,
even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh.
Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.” The characters are
sometimes monstrous, always incongruous in their costumes and behavior. Some play roles—the movie cowboy, the vamp, the Latin lover—or, even
worse, have “come to California to die” and serve as a kind of malign,
silent chorus.
Waugh begins The Loved One with misdirection
similar to West’s with a scene that reads like a Maugham short story about
the tropics only to reveal, after several pages, that the setting is Los
Angeles. Later, his central character observes that while movie sets look
real, the office building at the cemetery, itself an imitation of “the
country seat of an Edwardian financier,” looks insubstantial.
Both writers chose to present their visions through
artists who are essentially outsiders in the Hollywood scene. In
The Day of the Locust, West uses Tod Hackett—his first name suggests
the German word for “death”—who is in the studio world but not exactly of
it. Waugh’s Dennis Barlow—the first name derived from Dionysius, the
second, perhaps, suggesting a low bar or standard—is a young and
successful English poet who has been brought to Hollywood after serving in
the RAF during World War II to write a script about the life of Shelley
but is discarded when his contract expires and happily works at a pet
cemetery, a job, two of his elders agree, that is pre-eminently one of
those "that an Englishman just doesn’t take."
Both men have guides to Hollywood, Virgils to their
Dantes. Tod’s is Claude Estee, a successful screenwriter who fakes
the role of a Southern colonel and belongs to a group that alternately
resents outsiders who mock the movie industry and “the illiterate mockies
that run it.” Dennis has two guides: Sir Francis Hinsley, Dennis’s
host and superannuated Georgian man of letters (in this respect like
Waugh’s father) reduced to creating spurious new identities for an actress
who has gone through several avatars, and Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, the
doyen of the British colony in Hollywood, whose pompous pukka sahib
advice barely conceals his concern that Dennis’s undignified job will hurt
the standing of all Englishmen in the eyes of the studios. Sir
Francis, who calls himself a memento mori, urges Dennis to learn
from his example and flee, for he has become like a severed head kept
artificially alive, “just capable of a few crude reactions,” kept happy at
the price of giving up all connection to the culture of his past.
In West’s novel, the failed vaudevillian Harry Greener
serves the same function, though less obviously. Harry has been
reduced to selling worthless silver polish door to door, trying to sustain
himself with stories from his past. In both novels, the only evidence
of past success comes from clippings—of a review praising Harry as a
“Bedraggled Harlequin” and an article by Sir Francis, forgotten in a
drawer, the one surviving example of his literary career. Sir
Francis, dismissed by the studio, hangs himself. Harry’s heart
fails. The funerals of the two men underscore the artificiality and
cultural confusion of Hollywood. Harry “looked like an interlocutor
in a minstrel show,” and at the rear of the chapel sit members of the
silent chorus who stare at Tod “with an expression of vicious, acrid
boredom that trembled on the edge of violence.”
Dennis goes to Whispering Glades to arrange Sir
Francis’s burial and encounters mongrelized corporate duckspeak designed
to conceal the grim reality of death, moving between pious description of
the deceased as “the loved one” who can be dressed in a costume adopted
from “the quick-change artists of vaudeville” and vulgar slang, as in “[we]
fixed that stiff … so he looked like
it was his wedding day”; a Caucasian is not from the Caucasus, as Dennis
supposes, but merely white; and the corpse can be given any of a variety
of facial expressions by the judicious employment of cardboard inserts and
makeup. In Dennis’s appalled view, Sir Francis hanged is preferable
to Sir Francis made up for burial, a "smirking obscene travesty by
comparison with which the devil-mask Dennis had found in the noose was a
festive adornment, a thing an uncle might don at a Christmas party."
Both men are drawn to women symptomatic of American
decay. Faye Greener—both names are obviously suggestive—has a beauty
“structural like a tree’s, not a quality of her mind or heart.” Her
“subtle half-smile uncontaminated by thought” and “gestures and
expressions … that … didn’t really illustrate what she was saying” compel
the attention of every male in the novel. She fantasizes about
becoming an actress and sorts through banal daydreams based on Hollywood
clichés in the vague hope that she can recycle them as scripts to the
studio—perhaps, like the character in Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty,
after Tod puts in “the commas and shit.” Like many young men, Tod
cannot believe that a beautiful package can be empty, and to try to get
her favors, he first begs, then thinks of buying them, then fantasizes
about using force. But he can never succeed because "she could only
love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her."
In this novel as well as in Miss Lonelyhearts,
sex, violence, and death are closely linked. Tod realizes that Fay’s
“invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to
murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like
throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a
scream.”
For Waugh, sex and death have a more subtle connection,
though the name Aimée Thanatogenos—the loved one born out of death, the
last name an inspiration that came to him half-way through his composition
of the novel—is more obviously symbolic than the merely suggestive Faye
Greener. In some ways, she seems to Dennis the standard issue
American girl, and nowhere in the novel does his attraction seem
specifically sexual. In fact, he wonders if “these uniform elegant
limbs, from the stocking-top down, [were] marketed in one cellophane
envelope at the neighbourhood-store? Did they clip by some labour-saving
device to the sterilized rubber privacies above? Did they come from
the same department as the light irrefragable plastic head? Did the
entire article come off the assembly-lines ready for immediate home
service?” Like Waugh, who claimed to prefer “the wistful,
Pre-Raphaelite, and difficult,” Dennis needs less tangible attractions,
and he is attracted to Aimée because, “sole Eve in a bustling hygienic
Eden, this girl was a decadent.” She does have aspirations toward
culture and spirituality—today she would probably study some pretentious
form of massage and be into crystals—and she is initially interested in
Dennis because he quotes Keats on being “half in love with easeful death”
and because he is a poet.
Both Tod and Dennis have rivals. Faye manages to
find first a handsome man and then a (relatively) rich one. She thinks the cowboy extra Earle Shoop
“criminally handsome” because, rather than in spite of, the fact that “He
had a two-dimensional face that a talented child might have drawn with a
ruler and a compass.” Then, in a scene whose raw sexuality drives
Tod to try to rape her if he could only catch her, she begins to move
towards Earl’s more sensual friend Miguel. She also attracts Homer
Simpson--no relation to the TV character--an uprooted Midwesterner who
seems to embody all of the qualities of those who “have come to California
to die” and at the same time serves as a complement to Tod. Faye
moves in with Homer, who never touches her because she seems talented,
virginal, and unapproachable. When he finds her in bed with Miguel,
he goes into a fugue that leads to his destruction and to the climax of
the novel.
Dennis’s rival is Mr. Joyboy, head embalmer at
Whispering Glades. Like other background characters in the novel, he
is both cartoonish and bland. Aimée reveres him because of his
position and “his moral earnestness and the compelling charm of his softly
resonant voice,” despite his looks: “a lack of shape in his head and body,
a lack of colour; he had scant eyebrows and invisible eyelashes.” He
woos Aimée with smiling corpses—his version of art—and an offer to train
her as the first female embalmer at Whispering Glades. Dennis, on
the other hand, is "younger, very much better looking," and he wears his "own
teeth." The decisive point is the poetry he sends her, and she much
prefers poems--unattributed--from anthologies to his own work. They
engage to marry—until Joyboy discovers the source of the poems and
arranges for her to see Dennis at work in the pet cemetery, a place she
regards as a blasphemous travesty of Whispering Glades.
Both Tod and Dennis embody their visions of Los Angeles
in art. West uses analogies from painters of the past and present as
analogues for people and places, and on several occasions Tod sublimates
his frustrated desire for Faye by planning or actually making sketches.
In this way he transforms his vision of the people who have come to
California to die and of the characters in the novel’s foreground into his
painting “The Burning of Los Angeles”—uncompleted when the novel ends but,
West notes on the third page, to be completed. At one
point, Tod wonders if the choric figures have the energy to burn a whole
city; “Maybe they were only the pick [changed in the next paragraph to
“cream”] of America’s madmen.” And though he tries to convince
himself that he is “an artist, not a prophet,” he hopes for an outbreak of
violence.
Dennis considers himself to be, like Tennyson’s
Tithonus, “at the quiet limit of the world” and works placidly on a poem
until Sir Francis’s death, when he can only use classic poetry to parody
the obscenity of the funeral and all its accoutrements, as in his
conversion of William Cory’s “Heraclitus” from The Oxford Book of
English Verse to
They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung
With red protruding eyeballs and black protruding tongue
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had laughed about Los Angeles and now 'tis here you’ll lie;
Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore
Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost nor gone before.
But after he
encounters Aimée and burrows deeper into the mysteries of Whispering
Glades, his imagination is stirred “In a zone of insecurity in the mind
where none but the artist dare trespass,” and, running parallel to his
courtship of Aimée, he hears the Muse’s “very long, complicated and
important message” that is about Whispering Glades and only indirectly
about Aimée. Although in the course of the novel Dennis does not seem to
be writing the poem, Waugh clearly implies that he will do so after he
returns to England.
West’s ending is far more violent than Waugh’s.
At a movie premiere, the restive crowd turns riotous when the almost
catatonic Homer kills the child actor Adore and is himself dragged down
and presumably killed. After Tod is swept into the crowd and
injured, he seeks escape by imagining himself painting, and at the end is
more hysterical than prophetic.
The end of Waugh’s novel is less violent but no less
macabre. As in Black Mischief, Waugh disposes of a silly girl
by killing her off—though here less savagely than at the cannibal feast
where the inaptly named Prudence is the main course. In The Loved
One, Waugh uses Aimée Thanatogenos’s Greek name and heritage to link
her, in a bravura passage, to tragic heroines, and her suicide, in
Joyboy’s work room, is like a sacrifice to a shadowy god.
Distraught, Joyboy needs Dennis’s help to avoid scandal, and, coolly and
on the surface callously, Dennis cremates her at the Happier Hunting
Ground and arranges a yearly note, according to cemetery policy, to be sent to Joyboy reminding him that “your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven
tonight, thinking of you.” Then, with money extorted directly from
Joyboy and indirectly from the English film colony, he prepares to depart
for England traveling, as he and his creator had arrived, first class.
The screenwriter Lenore Coffee said of the Hollywood
studios, “They pick your brains, break your heart, ruin your digestion—and
what do you get for it? Nothing but a lousy fortune.” West
managed to live by working on more than a dozen films, but though at the
time of his death he was getting better assignments, he hardly made a
fortune. Since Brideshead Revisited couldn’t satisfy the
Motion Picture Production Code’s standards, Waugh received only (very
lavish) living expenses for himself and his wife.
But both novelists got revenge on Hollywood. The
Day of the Locust is like “the small stone” that, in Tod’s plan for
the painting, he prepares “to throw before continuing his flight.”
Dennis’s vision is not specified, but he is tranquil enough to satisfy
Wordsworth well before he can begin to recollect. He leaves Los
Angeles not only unravished but enriched: "He was adding his bit [to the
wreckage]; something that had long irked him, his young heart," and was
"carrying back instead the artist’s load, a great, shapeless chunk of
experience." For that "moment of vision," a "lifetime is often too
short."
It was all too short for West, who like many of his
characters died violently—in a car crash a year after The Day of the
Locust appeared to such poor sales that Bennett Cerf, its publisher,
reportedly said that if he ever put out another book about Hollywood, it
would be Hedy Lamarr’s “My thirty-seven ways of making love.”
Like Dennis, Waugh returned to England with his burden
of American experience. Although he worried that The Loved One
might offend his new-found American readers, the book not only sold well
but restored his reputation among English critics upset by the lushness of
Brideshead Revisited. Eighteen years and four novels later,
he died of a heart attack after hearing a Latin Mass on Easter Sunday. |
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Additional Waugh Bibliography
by Donat Gallagher
James Cook University
Primary
Evelyn Waugh, “A Unique Friendship,” review of Recollections of Logan
Pearsall Smith: The Story of a Friendship, by Robert Gathorne-Hardy.
English Review Magazine, January 1950: 60-61.
More Reviews of Robbery under Law
Many aeons ago I confidently stated that, because World War II was
looming, Robbery under Law received few reviews. Later I
found more among cuttings in Frederick J. Stopp’s papers in the
Cambridge University Library. Most of the cuttings lacked page
numbers and other details, but all those listed here are traceable by
the information provided. (If someone living close to the British
Newspaper Library at Colindale were to look up the page numbers, how
grateful a future bibliographer would be.) A number of very brief
newspaper notices and reviews with too few details are not included
here.
Arthur Calder-Marshall,
“Mexico to Taste,” review of A History of Mexico, by H. B.
Parkes; RUL by EW; The Coming Struggle for Latin America,
by Carlton Beals. Time and Tide, 8 July 1939.
(Calder-Marshall also wrote a long review in Life and Letters,
listed in Robert Murray Davis, et al., A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh,
1986. The Time and Tide review emphasizes the threat
of a Nazi/Fascist coup in Mexico even more strongly than does Waugh.)
Douglas Goldring, “An
English Bookman’s Notebook,” comment on The Lawless Roads, by
Graham Greene and RUL by EW. BBC broadcast in the
Empire News Service. (Goldring dwells exclusively on comments
Waugh makes about the Spanish Civil War.)
C. C. Martindale,
“Waugh’s Robbery under Law: Fr. Martindale Criticizes Its
Critics.” Catholic Herald, 28 August 1939.
(Martindale controverts a “bewildering” review in the Listener
and Harold Nicolson’s notice in the Daily Telegraph.)
J. McConnell Sanders,
review of RUL by EW, Journal of the Institute of Petroleum,
August 1939. (A substantial, basically favourable review that applauds
the chapters on Oil and American influence on Mexican affairs. I
suspect Sanders was a senior member of the firm that commissioned RUL.)
Vincent W. Yorke, review
of RUL by EW. International Affairs. (A brief but
highly favourable review, e.g. “A brilliant piece of writing.”
Again, I suspect that the Yorke family had interests in Mexico.)
Anon., “Mexican
Glissade,” review of RUL by EW. Truth, 30 June
1939. (Substantial, extremely favourable review, e.g. “as a
commentary upon present internal conditions in Mexico and their
historical causes it is consummate.”)
Anon., “Robbery under
Law! The Mexican Object Lesson: Evelyn Waugh Believes It May Lead
to Change in Balance of Power,” review of RUL by EW. The
Petroleum Times, 15 July 1939: 70. (A favourable review that
usefully refers to other books on the same topic.)
Anon., review of RUL
by EW. The Empire Review (Auckland, NZ), January 1940.
(Ambivalent, refers to other writers and claims that Waugh understates
problems posed by the Catholic Church in Mexico.)
Anon., “Spain and
Mexico,” review of The Church and the Orders, by Alison Peers, and
RUL by EW. The National Review, September 1939.
(Very favourable to Peers’s and Waugh’s view of the Church in Spain and
Mexico: e.g. "the average Protestant Englishman sides too readily with
the enemies of the Church." Peers was Protestant.) |
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Recent Waugh Acquisitions
by Richard W. Oram
University of Texas at Austin
In 2006, the Harry Ransom Center of the
University of Texas at Austin acquired a number of significant items
from the library of Sam Radin. The most significant item, a gift
from Mr. Radin, is the suppressed pamphlet An Open Letter to His
Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster (1933). Waugh
wrote the booklet in reply to Catholic critics of Black Mischief.
At the time he was pursuing an ecclesiastical annulment of his first
marriage and was persuaded to withdraw the Open Letter from
circulation. Perhaps six copies survived; however, the pamphlet
became so scarce that in the 1950s Waugh found himself having to
purchase one for his own library. Today, this copy is the only one
known to exist. It now joins the original manuscript of the
pamphlet already at the Ransom Center[1]
The new arrival also completes the Center’s run of Waugh first editions.
Other items acquired from Radin’s library include
several letters by Waugh and proof copies of Waugh novels, including a
bound corrected proof of A Handful of Dust and galleys of the
American edition of Brideshead Revisited.
Note
[1] For a complete account of the
Open Letter, see Robert L. Montgomery, “The Case of ‘Black
Mischief’: Evelyn Waugh vs. ‘The Tablet’,” The Library Chronicle of
the University of Texas at Austin, n.s. 16 (1981): 43-63. |
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Cousin
Jasper: The Right Stuff
by David Bittner
The relationship between
close cousins is often thought of as a quintessentially English thing.
We see this in Shakespeare's plays, with their frequent use of the
diminutive term "coz," the novels of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte with
their many "cousined" characters, the famous nineteenth-century English
play Our American Cousin, and Chaim Bennant's 1972 book The
Cousinhood about the Anglo-Jewish aristocracy. It should
therefore come as no surprise that when Evelyn Waugh sought to create a
contemporary kinsman for the half-orphaned only child Charles Ryder in
Brideshead Revisited, he invented the character of Cousin Jasper, the
closest thing Charles has to a brother. Robert Murray Davis in
Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed (1990) suggests that Jasper
was drawn from Waugh's brother, the talented Alec, and compares Jasper
with Anthony Blanche and Collins.
In the Oxford flashback of Brideshead Revisited,
Jasper gives Charles a generous dose of advice about the way to become a
model undergraduate. Jasper obviously believes that "clothes make
the man": he advises Charles that suits are "in" while tweed and flannel
are "out," and that dress in college should resemble that in a country
house (Little, Brown 26). He knows the "right" clubs for Charles to
join--the Carlton and the Grid (26). He advises Charles to set his
sights realistically on either a "fourth" or a "first," and nothing in
between. Time spent on a "good second," he says, is "time thrown
away" (26). Jasper has also apparently imbibed the Ryder family's
hostility to religion, warning Charles that religious groups "do nothing
but harm" (26). In this capacity he serves to introduce the novel's
whole theme of conflict between religion and skepticism. A bit bossy
he may be, and admittedly a little self-interested out of a wish to spare
himself embarrassment (41), but otherwise, at least, Jasper is not a
hypocrite. He practices what he preaches. He is impeccably dressed, active in the Canning and Junior Common Room (26), and he takes a
first in Greats (106). The last, especially, is no mean feat.
Brains obviously run in the Ryder family, but no matter how
well-endowed one is, the university is difficult, as Waugh, the drop-out,
could himself attest.
Also to his credit, Jasper does not offer all his
advice too heavy-handedly. Considerately, when he explains his
"sense of responsibility," he avoids mentioning Charles's mother's death
in Serbia. As he is about to, he stops himself and says, "well,
since the war" (41), as he speaks of Edward Ryder's withdrawal from
reality since that sad occasion. As he chides Charles for going
"straight, hook, line, and sinker, into the very worst set in the
University" (41) and advises him to shake off some of these friends
(107), he concedes that Sebastian Flyte "may be all right," since he is
after all a legacy of Bridey's (41). Warning Charles against the
evils of alcohol, he makes an exception for social drinking on "certain
occasions" when men "ought" to get "tight" (43). As he remonstrates
with Charles regarding frivolous use of his allowance, such as to purchase
a human skull from the medical school, Jasper also introduces another
theme of Brideshead Revisited, "Et in Arcadia ego" (42).
Jasper does move the plot in quite a significant way, underlining the
potential danger of having ground-floor rooms in the front quad, lest
people "start dropping in" (27). Thus he makes Charles and
Sebastian's first meeting more believable. After Jasper graduates
and begins his life of "public mischief" in London, Charles misses Jasper,
both his capacity to be shocked and his "massive presence" (106).
Jasper tells Charles he offers his advice "like an uncle" (41), but he
does not really exceed the bounds of his cousinly role, since he writes to
his father, Charles's uncle, in despair on the subject of Charles's
"excesses" (43). Although Charles professes not to "consciously"
follow any of Jasper's advice (27), he actually does take some of it.
He modifies his dress to approximate that "suitable for country-house
visiting" (107) and he does shake off his first-year friends in his second
year. Charles may not wish to admit it, but Cousin Jasper was right
about a few things.
Stephen Moore as Cousin Jasper in the Granada
Television production of Brideshead Revisited does the character
perfect justice, every inch a real "John Bull" type. |
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Reviews
Theoretical Sophistication and Literary Insight
Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern
Englishness, by Peter Kalliney. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2006. 231 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Patrick Query,
United States Military Academy.
Brideshead
Revisited understandably receives most of the attention in
discussions of class and English demographics in Evelyn Waugh’s fiction,
but surely the short story “An Englishman’s Home” (1939) provides the
more concise introduction to the terms of those debates. With his
characteristic flair for the right detail, Waugh describes a group of
planners descending, well into “the days of property tax and imported
grain,” on the bucolic village of Much Malcock: “They bore urban,
purposeful black hats,” hats that symbolize the holdout aristocrats’
anxiety about their imperiled existence:
Build. It was so hideous that no one in Much Malcock dared
use it above a whisper. ‘Housing scheme,’ ‘Development,’ ‘Clearance,’
‘Council houses,’ ‘Planning’—these obscene words had been expunged
from the polite vocabulary of the district, only to be used now and
then, with the licence allowed to anthropologists, of the fierce
tribes beyond the parish boundary.
The fraught meetings of city and country, of middle class and gentry
in English fiction constitute the territory into which Peter Kalliney
steps in his book Cities of Affluence and Anger. His subject is
the way in which England’s shifting class boundaries in the twentieth
century, and the demographic shifts that accompany them, forms the
imaginative ground, previously occupied by imperialism, upon which
authors attempt to describe a modern English identity. Some of
Kalliney’s arguments resonate with those of Jed Esty’s notable recent
study A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England
and Marina MacKay’s even more recent Modernism and World War II.
Kalliney sets himself a much wider field, though, tracing his main ideas
from E. M. Forster’s Howards End to Salman Rushdie’s The
Satanic Verses.
In Kalliney’s own words, his book “is primarily
concerned with the complex relationship between class, the city, and the
literary production of modern Englishness. Its overarching goal is to
map the imaginative and material reordering of space in
twentieth-century England” (11). One hears in these lines the familiar
sound of the critical style du mode; there is, indeed, a lot of (re)negotiating,
(re)articulating, (re)thinking, (re)framing, and (re)mapping of
contested and discursive sites in Kalliney’s argument. One suspects
that this is the kind of thing Douglas Lane Patey had in mind in
Newsletter
37.3 when he criticized the tendency among young
Waugh scholars to place “theoretical sophistication (read: jargon)”
above “literary insight.” It is difficult to take all this
ostensible (re)positioning of the literary landscape very seriously when
the author makes certain glaring mistakes in describing that landscape
in the first place. He is not off to a good start when he writes that
Brideshead Revisited was “[w]ritten on the eve of World War II” (63). It was, of course, actually written in
1944, a detail of no small consequence in
situating the work within the pattern of English social change Kalliney
has chosen as his focus.
Kalliney employs his key term, class, with a far
greater flexibility and openness than more obviously Marx-inspired
critics who have seen in Brideshead Revisited, which he treats at
length, little more than an ode to a bygone era of rigid class
stratification or simply an English country-house novel several decades
out of date. Kalliney makes a concerted attempt to rescue Brideshead
from such critical clutches in a truly surprising way. In the
chapter “Broken Fences: Forster, Waugh, and the Garden Cities,” he makes
this provocative suggestion about Brideshead: “I read the novel’s
painfully empty narrative as an extremely skillful parody of high
modernist texts, like Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway, in which
nothing ‘happens’” (66):
[t]he novel’s lack of plot is a kind of
parodic imitation of high modernist texts. Even the theme of religious
conversion offers a play on modernist ‘epiphanies,’ a common climaxing
device in stream-of-consciousness narratives. Although it rejects the
linguistic and technical experimentation we find in such novels, it is a
plot-poor, satirically melodramatic pastiche of its self-consciously
experimental counterparts. (72)
Anyone familiar with the plot of Brideshead will no doubt have
trouble with the suggestion that it is a book in which “nothing
happens.” However, Kalliney’s claim refers specifically to the framing
Prologue and Epilogue (the syuzhet as opposed to the fabula),
to the novel as the story of one day in Charles Ryder’s life in which,
it is true, little happens and in which memory, a la Proust, takes the
place of present action.
The more important, and troubling, point, though, is
the one about the novel as a satire of the Woolfian-Joycean
day-in-the-life narrative. Kalliney’s argument is not at all
biographical, so there is no question of demonstrating that anything of
the kind was present to Waugh’s mind, but neither does Kalliney offer
any other evidence to support this reading of Brideshead, not
even any reference to Waugh’s reputation as a satirist established in
his early fiction. Furthermore, terms like “satire” and “parody” imply
a measure of authorial intention that Kalliney makes no attempt to
justify. The absence of anything tangible in the way of context to
suggest that Joyce, Woolf, or any other modernist “counterparts” are
deeply involved in Brideshead’s meaning has to be seen as
an evasion of one of the responsibilities of literary scholarship,
especially of the social-historical kind that Kalliney has chosen to
undertake.
Staying with the focus on Brideshead Revisited,
one puzzling omission is any discussion of the way London functions in
the novel. Given the title of Kalliney’s book, as well as its focus in
other chapters on city-country dynamics, one would expect London to loom
very large indeed in any discussion of Brideshead, but it appears
nowhere.[1] Given the author’s stated
focus on class issues, the failure even to mention Charles Ryder’s
experience of the General Strike seems a missed opportunity.
Nor do we hear of the fateful night out at the Old Hundredth,
Sebastian’s lost Christmas in the city, or Lady Marchmain’s rebuke:
“Charles, you know it isn’t possible. London’s the worst place. [ . . .
] No, London is impossible” (162-63). There would seem to be rich
material here for some productive “mapping” of English literary
geography, but, disappointingly, Kalliney limits his discussion of class
and geography in Brideshead Revisited to the country house
and leaves out not only London but also Oxford, Paris, Venice, and Fez.
The introduction, where the author lays out the
critical background to his argument and presses his own, is at times
exhilarating reading. Where there is smoke, unfortunately, there is not
necessarily fire. The book’s characteristic flaw lies in the fact that
the discussions of the primary texts themselves—of Howards End,
of Mrs. Dalloway, of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,
and others—where more than critical daring is required, generally offer
little of substance to underpin the author’s interpretative
flights. On the book’s back cover, one reviewer writes that “a strong
critical voice has emerged.” I am inclined to agree, even if the voice
is not particularly new, but the project would be far more satisfying if
the critic’s voice were matched by the scholar’s rigor.
Works Cited
Patey, Douglas Lane. “All Gentlemen Are Now Very
Old.” Rev. of Waugh Without End: New Trends in Evelyn Waugh
Studies. Evelyn
Waugh Newsletter and Studies
37.3 (Winter 2007).
Waugh, Evelyn. “An Englishman’s Home.” The
Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. 192-209.
---. Brideshead Revisited. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1945.
Note
[1] For just such a discussion of the
significance of London in Brideshead Revisited, see Ruth
Breeze’s “Places of the Mind: Locating Brideshead Revisited”
in Carlos Villar Flor and Robert Murray Davis, eds., Waugh
Without End (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 131-45.
|
Dramatic Reading
Mr. Loveday's Little Outing, by Evelyn Waugh.
BBC4. May 2006. Reviewed by Jeff Manley. BBC4 produced a 30-minute adaptation of Waugh’s 1935 short story “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing” which was telecast in conjunction with
Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons in May 2006.[1]
The production is in fact a “dramatic reading” of the unabridged text
of the story, so the writing credits go to Evelyn Waugh. The dialogue
is delivered by five actors playing the parts of Lady Moping (Prunella
Scales), Lord Moping (David Warner), Mr. Loveday (Andrew Sachs), Angela
Moping (Fenella Woolgar), and the doctor (Simon Day). The narrative is
delivered by a chorus of three inmates whose names are given in the
credits as Evelyn, Auberon and Arthur, as played by Martin Savage, Angus
Bennett and Richard Bremmer, respectively.
Since the action of the story would take very little
time to retell or re-enact, the dramatic reading of the text works very
well and avoids the inevitable carping at how the screenwriter mangled
Waugh’s text. There is very little tinkering with the story. Lord
Moping appears at his meeting with his wife and daughter wearing a
glittery black dress, adding a comic element missing from the story. In
some scenes that take place in the inmates' common room, there is a
gramophone (no doubt one of those repaired by Mr. Loveday) that is
operated by a bicycle, adding another layer to Mr. Loveday’s obsession
with that mode of transport.
The cast use both body language and dialogue to tell the story.
Especially when he explains
somewhat elliptically to Angela his aspirations outside of the asylum,
Andrew Sachs demonstrates his genius.
It is a reunion for two of the actors, since Prunella
Scales and Sachs appeared in the noted 1970s BBC TV production of
Fawlty Towers in the roles of Sybil Fawlty and Manuel. It is
perhaps not a coincidence that the actor playing the doctor, Simon Day,
bears more than a passing resemblance to John Cleese, who also wrote and
starred in that earlier comedy. Indeed, Day seems to be purposefully
made up and dressed to resemble Cleese. The film represents another
sort of reunion for Fenella Woolgar, who appeared as Agatha Runcible in
Stephen Fry’s recent remake of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, entitled
Bright Young Things.
The play was produced and directed by Sam Hobkinson,
who has a number of documentaries and docudramas to his credit. These
include two with the writer Peter Ackroyd: London and The
Romantics.
Dramatic reading has been applied in the past to
Waugh’s works, with notably less success. John Mortimer’s script for
Brideshead Revisited preserved much of Waugh’s dialogue and
narrative. But rather than relying on Waugh’s text, already hopelessly
overwritten, he puffed it up into something even more overblown,
extending over eleven hours of TV time. Here, in contrast, Waugh’s
unabridged text is allowed to determine the story and the dialogue:
stage directions for the actors, and a music track with popular tunes
of the 1920s, effectively move it along. And it works quite well.
Maybe the same approach would achieve similar success with other short
pieces such as The Loved One or Gilbert Pinfold.
Note
[1] The story originally appeared as
“Mr. Cruttwell’s Little Outing” in magazines in both the USA and
England. Waugh combined his favorite targets (Dean Cruttwell
of Hertford College, Oxford, and Arthur Waugh, his father) in one
short piece. Arthur shared with Mr. Loveday an obsession with young
ladies on bicycles. In 1936, Waugh published a volume of stories
with a title based on "Mr. Cruttwell's Little Outing," but the name
was changed to “Loveday” because, according to Alexander Waugh, “the
publishers got windy.” See Alexander Waugh, Fathers and Sons
(London: Headline, 2004), 179-80.
|
An Enviable Point
A Study in Greene: Graham Greene and the Art of the Novel, by
Bernard Bergonzi. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 197
pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.
Bernard Bergonzi has arrived, in his seventies, at the
enviable point in a critic’s life when he can draw openly upon his earlier
body of work; say frankly what he likes and doesn’t like in an author’s
work without worrying about how it will affect his own reputation; ignore
current critical fashions; with the privilege of age, at times wander off
into side issues and even irrelevancies; and even to confess to being
bored by and sometimes with his subject. Polite readers will refrain from
asking how I know this.
Without ignoring other critics of Greene—in fact, relying
for his major thesis on the work of Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris and
for many insights on that of David Lodge and of Roger Sharrock—Bergonzi
seeks a middle way between formal academic criticism and the kind of plot
summary that gets down on its knees and talks to the “general reader.” There is, inevitably, some plot summary, but it is balanced by critical
analysis.
Bergonzi denies that Greene is, judged by world standards,
a great novelist or even, in his best work—up to but not including The
End of the Affair—really a novelist at all. Allott and Farris early
characterized his work as more like poetic drama, and, drawing upon
Greene’s reviews of the 1930s and on British Dramatists, Bergonzi
goes through each novel and entertainment to find evidence of “satisfying
thickness of texture,” even in The Man Within, to support
this judgment. For example, It’s a Battlefield is “a poetic novel”
full of Dickensian “metaphorical energy.” Characters in this and other
1930s novels resemble the malcontents of Jacobean tragedy, where, in
Greene’s words, characters would “seem to have been lost in the dark night
of the soul if they had enough religious sense to feel despair: the world
is all there is, and the world is violent, mad, miserable and without
point.”
For Bergonzi, the poetic power in these novels excuses, if
it doesn’t always quite justify, absurdities of plot and overuse of type
characters (also, Bergonzi thinks, derived from earlier drama). All this
while “Greene saw himself as essentially a novelist of English life.” Well, as D. H. Lawrence said (and Bergonzi alludes to), “Trust the tale,
not the teller,” which, in examining Greene’s comments about his own work,
Bergonzi consistently does.
By the time that Greene finished The Ministry of Fear
(and Brighton Rock, discussed later as, in Bergonzi’s view,
Greene’s supreme achievement and the culmination of this phase), he was
ending “the first phase of [his] career, when his ideal was what he called
the poetic novel, rich in metaphor, often melodramatic, peopled by types
and archetypes, grotesques and humours rather than ‘rounded’ fictional
creations, which can be read like a poetic drama, or a dramatic poem.”
After that, except for The End of the Affair and
Our Man in Havana, Bergonzi thinks that Greene was pretty much on a
downhill slide. He thinks the characters in The Heart of the Matter
“a rather dull lot,” and Scobie’s affair “one of the most lugubrious
adulteries in fiction.” And although he thinks The End of the Affair
“one of Greene’s best novels,” “unlike anything else he wrote,” and the
first instance of new, plain style that dominated the rest of Greene’s
work, he believes that “in Greene plainer is not necessarily better.” He
does stick at the miracles, which he calculates at one and a half. (In
fact, there are three if one counts the result of Bendrix’s prayer to
Sarah to extricate him from an incipient liaison.)
Bendrix is the first full-blown exemplar of what Bergonzi
calls “the Greene Man,” world weary, cynical, experienced with women,
sexually jealous, who recurs in The Quiet American, A Burnt-Out
Case, The Comedians, and The Honorary Consul. The novels
get progressively weaker, and Bergonzi recognizes, as I did when I read
the first fifty pages of the last, that, in his phrase, it was “skillfully
put together from prefabricated elements,” though I could see where the
seams had not been sanded down.
Like Bergonzi, I find Aunt Augusta in Travels with My
Aunt “insufferably tedious,” but I agree that Our Man in Havana
“is splendidly funny, revealing new capacities in Greene.” The less said
about the last novels the better, and Bergonzi doesn’t say much. He does
worry, at the end, that this is a minority view, but, if it does him any
good, he has my support.
EWN readers will find nothing new about Waugh, but
Bergonzi does endorse his judgments, especially of The Heart of the
Matter, The End of the Affair, and the “harsh but precise
judgment” of A Burnt-Out Case. It is odd, but perhaps inevitable,
that two writers so different should serve as touchstones for each other,
rather like Dickens and Thackeray in the nineteenth century and Joyce and
Lawrence in the first half of the twentieth. I’m not immune, for the
speech I wrote for the 2007 Graham Greene festival (before I saw Bergonzi’s book) begins with a quote from The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.
Although Waugh enthusiasts can safely ignore Bergonzi’s
book, especially at this price, they and others can learn something from
this pleasant and clearly written work of rather old-fashioned criticism
with its consistently provocative generalizations about Greene and his
fiction. |
Caveat Lector
Will This Do? The First Fifty Years of Auberon Waugh, by Auberon
Waugh. London: Century, 1991. Paperback, New York: Carroll & Graf,
1998. 288 pp. $13.95. Reviewed by Simon Whitechapel. If the
Holocaust continues to increase its hold on the hearts and minds of all
right-thinking folk, it seems quite possible that Auberon Waugh’s body
will one day be dug up and put on trial for the disrespect shown by its
former occupant, before being ritually burnt and scattered to the four
winds. Unless, that is, other professional victims get their hands on
it first. AW told jokes about the most inappropriate subjects, from the
“three million years of persecution” suffered by the Jews to the graves
of stillborn West Indian infants, and remarked of himself that his “own
small gift” was for “making the comment, at any given time, which people
least wish to hear” (215). Contemplating his exercise of this gift and
“all the people I have insulted”, he later admits to being “mildly
surprised that I am still allowed to exist” (229).
But it is the august author of his existence
who will concern more readers, and certainly no aficionado of Evelyn Waugh can afford to
neglect the autobiography of his eldest son. Waugh père put on a
performance for the world and even for his friends, and this book is
rather like seeing behind the scenes at a play. Readers will see EW
from the wings, as it were, though they should always remember that AW
inherited his father’s love of fantasy as well as much of his literary
talent. Of one episode from his military service AW remarks “I have
told the story so often now that I honestly can’t remember whether it
started life as a lie” (105). This may also apply to the infamous
“three bananas” devoured with sugar and “almost unprocurable” cream by
his father under the “anguished eyes” of his children, to whom the
fabled fruit had been sent in the depths of post-war austerity (67). The story is a dramatic way of illustrating AW’s
judgment that EW’s “chief defect was his greed”, and of explaining why
AW “never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very
seriously” (67). It may be untrustworthy for that very reason.
It may also have been an act of posthumous revenge,
working off some of the resentment and even dislike AW felt for his
father before leaving home. In 1944, dragged away from his games to
meet EW, who was home on leave, AW “would gladly have swapped him for a
bosun’s whistle” (30); later, he faced the problem of living with a
father who set the emotional climate of the entire household:
The
dejection which was liable to seize him at any moment—sparked off by
little more than a bad joke, a banal sentiment, a lower-middle-class
epithet—made him awkward company at times. When he was in the grips of
a major depression, or melancholy as he called it, he was unendurable.
(36)
He was only a small man—scarcely five foot six in his socks—and only a
writer, after all, but I have seen generals and chancellors of the
exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore,
quail in front of him. When he laughed, everyone laughed; when he was
downcast, everyone tiptoed around trying to make as little noise as
possible. It was not wealth or power which created this effect,
merely the force of his personality. (43)
But he did not think his father could have been “pleased by the
effect he produced on other people”, and concluded that he “spent his
life seeking out men and women who were not frightened of him”—and then
usually getting drunk with them, “as a way out of the abominable problem
of human relations” (43). Their own relations were marked by “distinct
cordiality” (112) in the last five years of EW’s life, and after
suffering a near-fatal accident on National Service in Cyprus AW even
wrote “a maudlin, deeply embarrassing letter telling him how much I
admired him” and sent it to his bank to be released “in the event of my
predecease” (112). Despite this, EW’s death “lifted a great brooding
awareness not only from the house but from the whole of existence”
(186). That presence played encores, however, as when AW experienced
misgivings about his apostasy from Catholicism:
It is hard to believe that these kindergarten assemblies bear much
relation to the ancient institution of the Church as it survived
through the Renaissance. The new Mickey Mouse church […] is surely
not a reduction of the old religion. It has nothing to do with it,
being no more than an idle diversion for the communally minded. Or so
it seems to me. But whenever I have doubts, it is my father’s fury
rather than Divine Retribution which I dread. (187)
These passages will reinforce the image of EW readers bring to
the book; elsewhere, AW may contradict it. It is surprising to read of
how EW entertained the “Stinchcombe Silver Band” every Christmas at
Piers Court and got “great roars of laughter out of them as he ribbed
them about their tipsiness” (49). But AW claims that while the “common
touch was certainly not something he cultivated […] in rather a
surprising way, when he needed it, he had it”. He then defends EW
against the accusation, leveled by the real-life model for Trimmer of
the war trilogy, that EW had been “detested by the men who served under
him”. Not so: the reverse was true, according to correspondence AW
received after reviewing “Trimmer’s” autobiography for Books and
Bookmen.
The mischief-making apparent in that choice of reviewer is
something else that readers may find enlightening, because Will This
Do? describes a particular British class and culture. On his
National Service AW saw two Wykehamists rejected by their schoolfellows
after failing the War Office Selection Board. He noted “the ruthlessness
of the British establishment”, and the “cruelty” that “flourishes in the
law and wherever public school Englishmen are given power over each
other”. AW reveals the limitation of his perspective here, perhaps,
because ruthlessness and cruelty are not a monopoly of public school
Englishmen, but his readers’ understanding of his father’s novels may be
deepened by AW’s descriptions of public school ruthlessness and cruelty
in action, his own amongst them.
AW also offers insights into Catholic psychology, as when
he
reveals one of his father’s secrets and has to cover up his role after
it finds its way into the papers: “‘It was not I who sold you to them,
although I have a theory as to who did.’ Readers will observe how, with
typical Catholic casuistry, there is no actual untruth in this letter,
as I had not actually sold the information to Rose, merely told it to
him by way of passing the time of day” (127-28). And he muses on what
might have been had he taken a different degree:
My exhibition [scholarship examination] had been in English, but my
father advised me that this was a girl’s subject, unsuited to the
dignity of a male. Lord David Cecil had been rather upset when I told
him this, staying at Portofino before my first Oxford team [sic].
I had forgotten he was Professor of English at Oxford. […] Perhaps I
should have stayed the course in English, instead of finding myself
lumbered with this rubbishy PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics].
(148)
For the immediate future, however, the most significant passage in
the book may be a description from AW’s National Service during the
Cyprus emergency of 1958, when the island’s Greek inhabitants wanted
union with Greece and its Turkish inhabitants wanted secession. A party
of Greeks were “dropped on the Nicosia-Kyrenia main road” to make their
way home after “questioning and document-checking”. Unfortunately, they
were dropped near a village of Turks, who mistook them for a war-party:
“The Turks poured out of the village and quite literally hacked them to
pieces. It was a very messy business. Nine Greeks were killed and many
others mutilated. Hands and fingers were all over the place and one
officer wandered around, rather green in the face, holding a head and
asking if anyone had seen a body which might fit it” (103-04). EW ended
his preface to Alfred Duggan’s Count Bohemond (1964), set at the
time of the Crusades, with the claim that “It is highly appropriate that
this, his last work, should end with the triumph of Christian arms
against the infidel.” His own son saw the old conflict beginning again,
as predicted by Hilaire Belloc, the “terrifying old man with a huge
white beard” (16) AW met in extreme youth in his maternal grandmother’s
house at Pixton. Will AW’s adulthood prove to have fallen in the
sunlit patch between the shadows of the Second World War and serious
racial and religious conflict in Europe?
If it does, EW's shade may raise a shadowy
glass in Elysium. As Britons can see from its vigorous survival in
Northern Ireland, religion thrives on hatred and conflict and,
Machometo adiuvante, the Church may yet throw off the leaden cope of
the Second Vatican Council. Despite the despair such reforms
brought to his father before his death, AW's final, objective judgment is that “Evelyn Waugh
detested the modern world but did rather well out of it” (123). He
himself, blessed with a more equable temperament and unridden by the
demon of “melancholy”, could be said to have done even better but to
have left a less enduring mark. Nevertheless, one of the charms of
his autobiography is that it preserves some Evelynian ephemera: had they
not been recorded here, the handwritten Augustan prose instructing
visitors on the vagaries of a lavatory at Piers Court and the Yardley’s
Lavender Hair Tonic that EW put on his head when he changed for dinner
(43) might have dropped entirely out of history. EW writes in The
Loved One (1948) of how death strips “the thick pelt of mobility and
intelligence” from the body, leaving it “altogether smaller than
life-size”. Will This Do? preserves a few tufts of his own
pelt, and although as the years pass the book will, alas, be read
increasingly out of an interest in the father, not the son, AW had no
illusions about his own importance in the scheme of things. Even so, he
may have laid booby-traps of fantasy and exaggeration in the
stories he tells about his father, but what more appropriate rite of
filial
pietas could he have performed?
Editor's Note: Simon
Whitechapel has two chapbooks, Pearls & Pyramids and Temples &
Torments, available from Rainfall Books:
http://www.rainfallsite.com/Disciples5.html. A reviewer notes
that "More sensitive members of the anti-racist community won't even
make it past the first line." |
|
Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of
Criticism
by John Howard Wilson
Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania
This is a continuation of the
earlier checklists, published in Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and
Studies. It includes books and articles published in 1998 and
1999, as well as some items omitted from earlier lists.
Abildgren, Michael Padkjær.
“Forude har vi Brideshead … Om oversætterens rolle som kulturguide”
[“Approaching Brideshead … On the translator’s role as a cultural
guide”]. Oversættelse af litteratur, II. Ed Viggo Hjømager
Pedersen and Vibeke Appel. Copenhagen, Denmark: Center for
Oversættelsesvidenskab, 1999. 63-96.
Blayac, Alain. “Evelyn Waugh et l’art de la biographie.” La
Biographie littéraire en Angleterre (XVIIIe-XXe siècles):
Configurations, reconfigurations du soi artistique. Ed. Frédéric
Regard. Sainte-Etienne, France: Université de Sainte-Etienne, 1999.
179-97.
Bényei, Tamás. Acts of Attention: Figure and
Narrative in Postwar British Novels. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
Bényei, Tamás. “Brideshead Revisited: The Deferral of
Paradise.” B.A.S.: British and American Studies/Revista di Studii
Britanice si Americane (Romania) 4.1 (1999): 47-53.
Bittner, David. “Evelyn Waugh and the Jews.” Midstream
Dec. 1997: 30-32.
Bonadonna, Reed Robert. “‘Served This Soldiering
Through’: Language, Masculinity, and Virtue in the World War II
Soldier’s Novel.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A
59.6 (Dec. 1998): 2015. Boston Univ., 1999.
Bradbury, Oliver. “A Forgotten Speech at Woodchester
Park, Gloucestershire.” EWNS 32.2 (Autumn 1998): 1-5.
Burdett, Paul S., Jr. “Author Evelyn Waugh served honorably in
the British Army as an SAS Commando.” World War II 14.1 (May
1999): 16+.
Burstein, Jessica. “Prosthetic Fictions: Cold Modernism in
Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, and Evelyn Waugh.” Dissertation Abstracts
International, Section A 59.7 (Jan. 1999): 2517. Univ. of Chicago,
1998.
Calder, Angus. Introduction. Sword of Honour, by Evelyn
Waugh. London: Penguin, 1999.
Calder, Angus. “Mr Wu and the Colonials: The British Empire’s
Evacuation from Crete, 1941.” Time to Kill: The Soldier’s
Experience of War in the West, 1939-1945. Ed. Paul Addison and
Angus Calder. London: Pimlico, 1997. 129-46.
Clement, A. The Novels of Evelyn Waugh: A Study in the
Quest-Motif. New Delhi, India: Prestige, 1994.
Davis, Robert Murray. Mischief in the Sun: The Making and
Unmaking of The Loved One. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1999. Reviewed by
B. Douglas Russell, “License to Kill?”
EWNS 33.1 (Spring
2002).
Decker, James M., and Kenneth Womack. “Searching for Ethics in
the Celluloid Graveyard: Waugh, O’Flaherty, and the Hollywood Novel.”
Studies in the Humanities 25.1-2 (June-Dec. 1998): 53-65.
Donohue, John W. “Portrait of the Artist as a Christian
Wayfarer.” America 10 April 1993: 7+.
Dougill, John. Oxford in English Literature: The
Making, and Undoing, of ‘The English Athens.’ Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 1998. Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, “Rewriting a
Dream,”
EWNS 34.2 (Autumn
2003).
Gallagher, Donat. “Unlisted Reviews, Letters, and
Talks by Evelyn Waugh.” EWNS 32.3 (Winter 1998): 6-7.
Harrison, Brian, ed. The History of the University of Oxford,
Vol. 8: The Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, “Evelyn Waugh and the History of
Oxford,”
EWNS 37.1 (Spring
2006).
Hartmann, Godfred. I delfinens tegn [Under the
Sign of the Dolphin (Waugh’s Danish publishers)]. Copenhagen,
Denmark: Gyldendal, 1996.
Heiniman, David. “An Ethical Critique of Waugh’s Guy
Crouchback.” Renascence 46.3 (Spring 1994): 175-85.
Jacobs, Richard. Introduction. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold,
by Evelyn Waugh. London: Penguin, 1998.
Lodge, David. “Waugh’s Comic Waste Land.” New York Review of
Books 15 July 1999: 29+.
MacSween, R. J. “Evaluating Evelyn Waugh.” Antigonish Review
87-88 (Fall-Winter 1991): 160-65.
MacSween, R. J. “Helena: Waugh’s Failure.” Antigonish
Review 87-88 (Fall-Winter 1991): 201-04.
Mani, Jessy. Character and Environment in the Novels of
Evelyn Waugh. Jaipur, India: Bokra Prakashan, 1995.
Meckier, Jerome. “Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Birth Control
in Black Mischief.” Journal of Modern Literature 23.2
(Winter 1999/2000): 277-90.
Mosley, Charlotte, ed. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and
Evelyn Waugh (1996). Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, World
Literature Today 72.3 (Summer 1998): 627.
Oertling, Margaret. “A Response to Critics of Brideshead
Revisited.” Expositor (Trinity University) 2 (1990):
65-75.
Osborne, John W. “Waugh and The Miracle.” EWNS
32.2 (Autumn 1998): 6-7.
Page, Norman. An Evelyn Waugh Chronology (1997).
Reviewed by Reference & Research Book News 13 (Feb. 1998): 145.
Pasternak Slater, Ann. Introduction. The Complete Short
Stories and Selected Drawings, by Evelyn Waugh. London:
Everyman’s Library, 1998. xi-xliii.
Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh (1998).
Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, World Literature Today 72.4
(Autumn 1998): 841; Kenneth R. Craycraft, Jr., “Waugh Revisited,”
First Things June/July 1998: 43-48; Arthur Jones, “Why Waugh
Continues to be the Loved One,” National Catholic Reporter 5
Feb. 1999: 30; I. D. F. Callinan, “Brideshead Reconstructed,”
Quadrant April 1999: 78; Joseph Schwartz, Christianity and
Literature 49.1 (Autumn 1999): 147+; C. Rollyson, Choice 35.10
(June 1998): 1710; Sebastian Perry,
EWNS 33.1 (Spring 2002); Peter Parker, Times Literary
Supplement 29 May 1998: 17.
Phillips, Gene D. “Novelist versus Filmmaker: Richardson’s
Adaptations of Faulkner’s
Sanctuary
(1961) and Waugh’s Loved One (1965).” The Cinema of Tony
Richardson: Essays and Interviews. Ed. James M. Welsh and John C.
Tibbetts. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. 127-40.
Rajamäe, Pilvi. “Camelot Revised: The Arthurian Theme in Evelyn
Waugh’s Novel A Handful of Dust.” Interlitteraria
(Estonia) 3 (1998).
Rourke, Brian Russel. “Mexicos of the Mind: British Writers of
the 1930s in Mexico.”
Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A 60.4 (Oct. 1999): 1147. Stanford Univ.,
1999.
Schweizer, Bernard. “Ethiopia and Dystopia in Evelyn Waugh’s
African Books.” Journal of African Travel Writing 7 (1999):
17-34.
Stannard, Martin, ed. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage.
1984. London: Routledge, 1997.
Talwar, Urmil. Greene, Isherwood, Orwell and Waugh:
A Study of the Early Novel with Special Reference to Their Biography.
Jaipur, India: Sublime, 1997.
Tomlinson, Jeremy. Lancing College: A Portrait. Lancing,
England: Lancing College, 1998. Reviewed by John Howard Wilson,
“Evelyn Waugh’s Schooldays,”
EWNS 38.1 (Spring
2007).
Toynton, Evelyn. “Revisiting Brideshead.” American Scholar
67.4 (Autumn 1998): 134-37.
Walia, Shelley. Evelyn Waugh, Witness to Decline: A Study in
Ideas and History. New Delhi, India: Sterling, 1998.
Waugh, Auberon. Will This Do? The First Fifty Years of
Auberon Waugh: An Autobiography (1991). New York: Carroll &
Graf, 1998. Reviewed by Alberta Report 9 Nov. 1998: 37;
Forbes 4 May 1998: S140+; Diane Gardner Premo, Library Journal
15 June 1998: 80; Simon Whitechapel, EWNS 38.2 (2007 [above]).
Waugh, Evelyn. The Complete Short Stories and Selected
Drawings. Ed. Ann Pasternak Slater. London: Everyman’s Library,
1998. Reviewed by Oliver Reynolds, “The Catholic Who Grew Up,”
Times Literary Supplement 2 April 1999: 24; Martin Stannard,
Spectator 19 Dec. 1998: 75+; Lewis Gannett, “Traps of Life,”
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 8.2 (March 2001): 34; Lambda
Book Report 9.5 (Dec. 2000): 31.
Waugh, Evelyn. The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.
Boston: Little, 1998. Reviewed by Sybil Steinberg, Publishers
Weekly 16 Aug. 1999: 62; D. Quentin Miller, Review of
Contemporary Fiction 20.2 (Summer 2000): 183; Hudson Review
53.1 (Spring 2000): 136; Anthony Lane, “Waugh in Pieces,” New
Yorker 4 Oct. 1999: 98-106; Robert Murray Davis, “Few Scoops,”
Commonweal 14 Jan. 2000: 25+ and
EWNS 33.1 (Spring 2002); Algis Valiunas, “Always the Loved
One,” American Spectator Feb. 2000: 68+; Richard Eder, “Put Out
More Waugh,” New York Times Book Review 10 Oct. 1999: 14; Brad
Hooper, Booklist 1 Aug. 1999: 2030.
Weaver, Cora. A Short Guide to Charles Darwin and Evelyn
Waugh in Malvern (Life—and Death). Malvern, England: Cora Weaver,
1991.
Welton, Jude, ed. “Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies.” The
Great Writers: Their Lives, Works, and Inspiration 28.3
(1986-1987): 649-72.
Wilson, John Howard. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography,
1903-1924 (1996). Reviewed by Douglas Hewitt, Review of
English Studies 49.195 (Aug. 1998): 390+; Martin Stannard,
Yearbook of English Studies 1999: 320.
Wilson, John Howard. “John Wesley and Vile Bodies.”
EWNS 32.3 (Winter 1998): 1-3.
Wilson, John Howard. “Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask:
Brideshead Revisited?” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology
20.1-2 (March 1999): 22-32.
Wirth, Annette. The Loss of Traditional Values and the
Continuance of Faith in Evelyn Waugh’s Novels: A Handful of Dust,
Brideshead Revisited, and Sword of Honour. New York: Peter
Lang, 1990.
Wölk, Gerhard. “Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of
Criticism.” EWNS 32.2 (Autumn 1998): 5-6.
Wykes, David. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life.
Basingstoke, England: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s, 1999.
Reviewed by Diane Gardner Premo, Library Journal 1 Oct. 1999:
95; Bryce Christensen, Booklist 1 Aug. 1999: 2014; Richard
Eder, “Put Out More Waugh,” New York Times Book Review 10 Oct.
1999: 14; Douglas Lane Patey, Choice 37.7 (March 2000): 1304;
Publishers Weekly 23 Aug. 1999: 40; Reference & Research
Book News 15 (Feb. 2000): 167; Elizabeth Howells, English
Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 43.3 (Summer 2000): 383; K. J.
Gilchrist, “A Little Life,”
EWNS 34.1 (Spring
2003).
Zaganczyk, Marek. “Brideshead.” Zeszyty Literackie (Literary
Notebooks, Warsaw)16.4 (64) (Fall 1998): 134-37. |
Fathers and Sons in the USA
Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons:
The Autobiography of a Family appeared in the UK in 2004.
Now the book has been published in the United States by Nan A Talese/Doubleday.
Sir Harold Evans reviewed Fathers and Sons in the
Wall Street Journal. Reviews by Robert Murray Davis and Douglas Lane Patey are available in
Newsletter
35.3. |
Evelyn Waugh Conference
The Evelyn Waugh Conference will be held at the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, from 21
through 24 May 2008. The center will host a reception on 21 May, mount
an exhibition of Waviana from their collection, and provide tours of
Waugh's library. The theme is "Waugh in His World." To propose a
paper, please send a 250-word abstract to Professor Joseph V. Long,
Portland State University, UNST, P.O. Box 751, Portland OR 97207, USA,
or jlong@pdx.edu. To register for
the conference, please go to
Registration.
To look for lodgings, please go to
Accommodations.
In the issue for 11 June 2007, the New Yorker
focused on the Ransom Center in an article entitled "Final Destination:
Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas?" The
article is available at the
New Yorker. There is also a
slide show entitled "Tools of the Trade," including a picture of one
of Evelyn Waugh's pens (slide 6).
Richard Oram published "Cultural Record Keepers: The
Evelyn Waugh Library, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin" in Libraries & the Cultural Record
42.3 (2007): 325-28. |
Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest
Through the generosity of an anonymous patron, the Newsletter
is able to sponsor the third annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay
Contest. Submissions should be sent by 31 December 2007 to Dr. John H.
Wilson, Department of English, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA
17745, USA, or jwilson3@lhup.edu.
Entries will be judged by the Newsletter's editorial board. The prize
is $250. |
The Scarlet Woman on DVD
Charles Linck still has some copies of
Evelyn Waugh's undergraduate film, The Scarlet Woman (1925),
available on DVD. The price is US $20.00, and Charles can
process foreign checks. Please contact him at P. O. Box 3002 TAMU-C,
Commerce TX 75429, USA. Phone: 903-886-6473. E-mail:
linck@tamu-commerce.edu.
|
On the Origins of Broken Glass
In his Cautionary Tales for Children,
originally published in 1907, Hilaire Belloc writes:
John Vavasour de Quentin Jones
Was very fond of throwing stones …
Like many of the Upper Class
He liked the Sound of Broken Glass
(A line I stole with subtle daring
From Wing-Commander Maurice Baring.)
Baring was not given the honorary rank
of wing-commander until 1925, so Belloc presumably changed or added
the last couplet in a revised edition. P. J. O'Rourke, in
Modern Manners (1983), cites Baring as follows:
Members of the upper class
Love the sound of broken glass.
The Newsletter has not been able to identify the original poem by
Baring. If anyone has more information, please contact the
editor at jwilson3@lhup.edu.
In Decline and Fall (1928), Evelyn Waugh writes
that "A shriller note could now be heard rising from Sir Alastair's
rooms; any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection
of it; it is the sound of the English county families baying for
broken glass" (Little, Brown 2).
Robert Murray Davis recalls what John Dryden writes of
Ben Jonson in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668): "what would be
theft in other poets is only victory in him." |
A Photographer Calls
In an article entitled "Smile please, Evelyn. Oh,
never mind," published in the Times Online on 11 October
2003, Mark Gerson describes two visits to Combe Florey to photograph
Evelyn Waugh. The article is available at the
Times Online. |
The Demon Don and Wilfrid Evill
A eulogy of Lord Dacre of Glanton (Hugh
Trevor-Roper, 1914-2003) is included in Well Remembered Friends:
Eulogies of Celebrated Lives by Angela Huth (London: John Murray,
2004; paperback, 2006). According to his stepson, James
Howard-Johnston, Trevor-Roper's Bentley had "an encounter with a bus"
that "ended up on the far side of a hedge. Hugh was charged with
dangerous driving and advised to plead guilty by his solicitor, Evill."
Trevor-Roper decided to go to court instead, and he "applied all his
skills honed in Germany in the late months of 1945 [at the Nuremberg
trials] to cross-examining the bus's passengers. Naturally they
began contradicting each other and Hugh got off" (421-22).
Evelyn Waugh dubbed Trevor-Roper "the demon don" and
sent a series of letters to the New Statesman disputing
Trevor-Roper's claims in an article entitled "Sir Thomas More and the
English Lay Recusants" (Letters of Evelyn Waugh 641-47).
Waugh also employed Wilfrid Evill, who advised him to open a trust to
benefit Waugh's children. The trust was supposed to be tax-free,
but it turned out to be taxable. Donat Gallagher notes that
Waugh would have done well to ignore Evill's advice, as Trevor-Roper
had done. |
Bibliographical Detritus
The British Library holds an edition of
Decline and Fall (1928), by Evelyn Waugh, retold for children
by Clare West (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998). The illustrated edition
of 108 pages was expanded in 2000 in an illustrated edition of 120
pages.
The British Library also holds The Coronation of
Haile Selassie, by Evelyn Waugh (London: Penguin, 2005). The
edition of 56 pages consists of extracts from Remote People
(1931). |
Return of the Tridentine Mass
In an apostolic letter released on 7 July 2007,
Pope Benedict XVI relaxed restrictions on the Tridentine or Latin
Mass. The Second Vatican Council in the 1960s concluded that
masses should be celebrated in the vernacular languages, but
Benedict noted that this rule had caused division in the Roman
Catholic Church. Evelyn Waugh strongly preferred the Latin
Mass, and he did not believe he would "live to see it restored" (Letters
639). He died in 1966. |
John Heygate and Gilbert Pinfold
In an article entitled "Keep all on gooing" (sic:
a quotation from Ford Madox Ford), published in The Spectator
for 4 August 2007, Allan Massie makes two references to Evelyn
Waugh. Massie mentions that John Heygate is primarily known
today as the man who broke up Waugh's first marriage. Massie
also cites Waugh's opinion that most novelists are capable of
writing only a few books, and that the rest is "professional
trickery." Sometimes writers are fortunate, writes Massie,
as Waugh was when he had the unusual experience that led to The
Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). The article is
available at
The Spectator. |
Lord Deedes, 1913-2007
Lord Deedes passed away on 17 August
2007. He was 94 years old.
William Francis Deedes, usually known as "Bill," went
to Abyssinia in 1935 as a young reporter for the Morning Post.
He took a quarter ton of luggage and met Evelyn Waugh, who was in
Abyssinia to cover the war with Italy for the Daily Mail.
Deedes inspired the character of William Boot in Scoop
(1938), as noted in all of his obituaries. The Times
even quoted a passage from Scoop.
Deedes served as a major in the King's Royal Rifle
Corps and won the Military Cross during the Second World War.
He was elected Member of Parliament in 1950 and served until 1974,
when he was appointed editor of the Daily Telegraph.
That appointment ended in 1986, when Deedes was made a life peer.
He was also knighted in 1999.
Lord Deedes published At War with Waugh: The True
Story of Scoop in 2003. He is survived by one son and
three daughters. Obituaries are available at the
Daily Telegraph,
The Times, and
The Guardian. |
The Daily Beast
In an article entitled "Blair Compares News Media to
'Feral Beast' in Angry Parting Shot," published in the New York
Times on 13 June 2007, Alan Cowell opens with a reference to
Scoop. |
Homage to Scoop
In Nicholas Kulish's novel about the
Iraq War, Last One In (2007), the protagonist is named Jimmy
Stephens, but at one point he assumes the identity of Bill
Boot, a reference to William Boot in Scoop (1938). In
Kulish's novel, a gossip reporter is sent to cover the war. A
friend noticed that the plot is similar to that of Scoop,
Kulish said in an interview on National Public Radio on 11 July
2007, but he had never read Waugh's novel. Kulish waited until
he finished his first draft, read Scoop, liked it, and
decided to add an homage to Waugh. |
Waugh and the Empire
An essay by Rosa Flannery entitled "The Decline of
Empire: New Perspectives on Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust"
is available at
The Imperial Archive, a web site "dedicated to the study
of Literature, Imperialism, Postcolonialism." The essays
reflect work toward the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in
the School of English at Queen's University of Belfast. |
|