EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD

EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 38, No. 2
Autumn 2007

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 Society
The Evelyn Waugh Society now has 54 members. Information on joining the society is available at http://www.lhup.edu/jwilson3/EWSociety.htm. The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List now has 40 members. The list is available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh.

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.

End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, Vol. 38, No.2
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