EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 38, No. 3
Winter 2008

Waugh vs. Time Magazine
by Richard W. Oram
University of Texas at Austin

     On 12 July 1948, Time Magazine ran a long feature story on The Loved One and its author, Evelyn (“pronounced Evil in”) Waugh (“rhymes with raw”—in earlier Time stories the author’s surname had been helpfully rhymed with “waw” and “awe”).  Some six months later, Waugh responded to “A Knife in the Jocular Vein”[1] by sending Time a listing of biographical inaccuracies in the article.  This document, believed to be unpublished, is a recent addition to the Waugh papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.  It is published here courtesy of Peters, Fraser & Dunlop on behalf of the Waugh estate.
     It is not clear why Waugh waited so long to respond to the Time profile.  It had come to his attention by 10 August, when he wrote to Nancy Mitford about “a long article in an American paper (Time) saying how beastly I am—sound in principle no doubt but bang wrong in all facts, like all American journalism.”[2]  Interestingly, his 1948-49 American trip was sponsored by Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines.  Waugh proposed to write an article on Catholicism in America for Luce, who eagerly agreed to pay his expenses along with a generous fee of $5000.  Henry and Clare Booth Luce, a Catholic, shared Waugh’s general outlook on political and social issues, and welcomed him to New York by throwing a series of parties with New York notables.  Predictably, Waugh found that his opinions of America and Americans had changed little since his visit the year before and soon grew tired of playing the literary lion.  In November 1948, he managed to offend the top brass of Time-Life, Inc., who were annoyed by his behavior at a dinner given in his honor.[3]  One may justifiably regard the testy “Memorandum on Certain Inaccuracies in Time Magazine, July 12, 1948” as another prime example of Waugh biting the hand that fed him.  He must have known that Time would probably not publish his riposte six months after the fact and that his document might find its way to the publisher himself.  Waugh regarded his host as “ignorant and densely stupid,”[4] though he had a slightly higher opinion of Mrs. Luce.  Moreover, Waugh must have found very little to love in the magazine that inaugurated the telegraphic journalistic style known as “Timespeak” and which had once referred to him (in 1930!) as “young (in his 50s).”[5]
     Though the Memorandum adds relatively little to the biographical record, it is certainly acerbic in Waugh’s best way.  For the reader’s convenience, I have juxtaposed the relevant passage in the Time article (in italics) with Waugh’s responses.

MEMORANDUM ON CERTAIN INACCURACIES IN TIME MAGAZINE, JULY 12, 1948

Evelyn Waugh
December 16, 1948

Attached: cover memo from Emmet Hughes [6] to Edward R. Thompson: “Another of our impatient authors.”

DEDICATIONS

Says an equally cruel contemporary: "One can find Evelyn's biography in the dedications of his books, each displaying a further step in his social progress."  His first book, Rossetti; His Life and Works, was dedicated to Evelyn Gardner (fourth daughter of the first & last Baron Burghclere, and later Mrs. Evelyn Waugh No. 1).  The Loved One is dedicated to Nancy Mitford, sister of the late Unity Mitford. 

An examination of the dedications of my books in order of appearance will reveal a peculiar order of precedence; e.g., Lady Diana Cooper would come five places lower than Mrs. Woodruff.  In fact, if the compiler of the article had spent five minutes in examining the statement he quotes, he would not have thought it worth printing.

PLACE OF BIRTH

Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903, allegedly near London.  ("It's a great secret where I was born," Waugh said, when asked by TIME's London bureau, and hung up.)  His father, a journalist turned successful book publisher, was a man of solidly middle-class taste, who reared Evelyn and his elder brother Alec (The Loom of Youth, Going Their Own Ways) in the solidly middle-class London suburb of Finchley. 

There is no secret about my place of birth, but I refuse to answer impertinent questions on the telephone from unknown young women on Sunday evenings.  I was born and lived my childhood in Hampstead.  I have never lived or set foot in Finchley.  Hampstead is a small borough of great historic interest five miles from the center of London and now joined to it by recent housing developments.  So far from being “solidly middle-class,” it contained in my childhood such diverse characters as the Grand Duke Michael of Russia, Pavlova, the dancer, who lived immediately opposite, Lord Leverhulme, the millionaire soap-boiler, and Mr. Tooley, a yeoman dairy farmer, (probably the nearest farm that could be found to Charing Cross.)  My father was not a rich man.  He was never a journalist in the accepted sense of the term but was a poet and essayist.  So far from being a successful publisher, the firm in which he worked was reduced practically to bankruptcy by his efforts and now survives in name only as a subsidiary company.  He was a man of classical scholarship and the winner of the Newdigate Prize for verse at Oxford.  Had the compiler of the article spent five minutes in perusing his autobiography, “One’s Man’s Road,” he could have saved himself from such foolish misstatements.

OXFORD

After two years of undistinguished scholarship but steady social progress, Evelyn was sent down without his degree.

I was not sent down but left of my own accord without a degree with the hearty encouragement of the college authorities.

JOURNALISM

Then he spent a brief, unhappy term working for Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express—a career terminated by a typically Waughlike misunderstanding.  One day Editor Beverley Baxter saw Evelyn lolling in a chair in the reporters' room, and asked him his name.  "Waw," was the answer that reached Baxter's ears, and, thinking that the young man was making a rude noise, the editor fired him. 

My career on the “Daily Express” was extremely happy and lasted sixteen days.  The paper at the time was edited by a Mr. Baxter, who was a Canadian eager to make friends in London.  He knew very well who I was because the job had been obtained for me by Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell, whom Mr. Baxter was very eager to know.  The story of his meeting me in the reporters’ room has no word of truth in it.

FOX HUNTING

He took up fox hunting and began to give examples of a personal courage about which he is quite bland but which amazes his friends.  They still wince at the thought of the dauntless little pink-coated figure dashing at fences and ditches that would unnerve more experienced horsemen.

I never went well to hounds.  I never wore a pink coat, which in England is a sign that you have hunted regularly for some seasons with a single pack and owned horses in that country.  My fox hunting was on hirelings or on borrowed horses in various parts of the country.

BUTLER’S TROUSERS

Waugh lives at Piers Court….  There, more than three hours from Mayfair, Waugh leads a comfortable, orderly, reflective life.  An impeccable butler in striped trousers brings sherry and serves meals.

It is curious that their “impeccability” should be news.  Were they peccant I could more easily forgive the impudence of mentioning them.  If, however, Time Magazine is curious about these garments, they should realize that the man has two pairs of trousers, one striped and one black.  He wore the black trousers when he had the honour of waiting upon Time’s representative.

CATHOLICISM

Catholicism has given Waugh the unifying influence and the spiritualizing force whose workings are evident in Brideshead.  It has also given him something which is also clearly necessary to his nature—the chance to feel superior in partibus infidelium.

Humility is the virtue most highly prized in the Catholic Church.  To suggest that the faith can produce pride is blasphemous nonsense.

WAR RECORD

With Randolph Churchill and a group of British observers, he parachuted into Yugoslavia….

I did not parachute into Yugoslavia but landed there in a field in an aeroplane.

FRENCH

Noblesse oblige is not part of Waugh's concept of the conservative gentleman.

Noblesse oblige does not mean that noblemen are affable.  It means that the status of nobility imposes obligations, e.g., to tell the truth, protect the destitute and defend with arms the cause of justice.

CONCLUSION

No doubt the material for this article was found concealed in a pumpkin. [7]

Notes
[1] Time, 12 July 1948: 86, 88, 90-92.
[2] Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 281.  There are various echoes of the Memorandum in this letter.
[3] See Letters, 290.  Selina Hastings places the dinner in 1947 [Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 517].  Waugh’s correspondence with Life editor John Shaw Billings, now at the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, unfortunately doesn’t shed any light on the speech and its aftermath.
[4] Letters, 289.
[5] “Entertainer [Review of Vile Bodies],” Time, 10 March 1930: 78.
[6] Hughes, a Catholic, was Time’s Berlin correspondent and briefed Waugh on American Catholicism before his trip.
[7] An allusion to Whittaker Chambers, the Time editor who had recently claimed to discover the “pumpkin papers” implicating Alger Hiss.

 

Waugh and the Octopus
by Naomi Milthorpe

     In 1928 Evelyn Waugh published his first novel, Decline and Fall.  In the same year Clough Williams-Ellis, architect and writer, published a book with the singular title England and the Octopus.[1]  Williams-Ellis’s book deals with modern building and development; he writes with distaste of the destruction of the great house and its replacement with filling stations, villas and bungalows.  England and the Octopus is in the collection from Waugh’s personal library in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.[2]  Waugh’s bookplate is inside the front cover; his copy contains marginal markings in pencil that indicate the book was read with care.  Waugh met Williams-Ellis at a dinner party in 1930 and reported in his diary that the writer was “very jolly and chatty.  He kept producing little books from an attaché case and showing me underlined texts. ‘The Artist alone is the legislator’ – that sort of thing.”[3]  Waugh produced some underlining of his own in England and the Octopus; marginal markings reveal that the two writers had some common concerns.  The publication of England and the Octopus at least two months before the publication of Waugh’s first novel [4] suggests an intertext for one of Waugh’s oddest images, the captive octopus, which first appears in Decline and Fall, again ten years later in Scoop, and in Waugh’s sixth novel Put Out More Flags.[5]  England and the Octopus provides a valuable context for Waugh’s opinions on architecture.  There are, moreover, parallels between the book and Waugh’s essays which illuminate recurring concerns for Waugh: the negative consequences of liberty and the need for restraint in safeguarding civilization.
     England and the Octopus is intended as a cure for the aesthetic disease plaguing England.  The polemical foreword is couched in opposing dichotomies of attack and defence, pain and pleasure, disease and cure.  Williams-Ellis writes of causing “discomfort” for readers in order to “give warning of damage or ill-health” (viii).  The foreword mimics a standard apologia of satire, the use of punishment and pain to cure the plagues of society, and anticipates a passage in Waugh’s ‘The War and the Younger Generation’, published in 1929: “The muscles which encounter the most resistance in daily routine are those which become most highly developed and adapted.  It is thus that the restraint of a traditional culture tempers and directs creative impulses.  Freedom produces sterility.”[6]  Both Waugh and Williams-Ellis use anatomy to describe the need for restraint in aesthetics.  Restraint and its opposite, liberty, colour much of Waugh’s writing on aesthetics and society, and they suggest one reading of the octopus as a symbol in Decline and Fall.
     In 1938 Waugh published ‘A Call to the Orders’, a polemical essay on architecture and aesthetics.  The essay sets a programme for architecture and interior decoration, a system based on “the Orders” of classical design, with praise for Georgian “grace and decency” [7] and rejection of the “Corbusier plague” of post-war building: “the style of arterial highroads, the cinema studios, the face-cream factories, the tube stations of the farthest suburbs, the radio-ridden villas of the Sussex coast”  (EAR 216).
     This description of Corbusier’s influence on modern building is remarkably similar to language used in England and the Octopus.  Williams-Ellis speaks of “the malformation of the town by ‘tentacle growth’” of factories and filling stations (62), roadside advertisements and “pink asbestos bungalows” (16).  Bungalows especially are described as “England’s most disfiguring disease […] our premier epidemic” (141).  Like Waugh, Williams-Ellis sees the post-war period as one of significant and dangerous change: “England has changed violently and enormously within the last few decades.  Since the War, indeed, it had been changing with an acceleration that is catastrophic, thoroughly frightening the thoughtful amongst us” (15).  In ‘A Call to the Orders’ Waugh prescribes return to the restraint of classical architecture and praises the Orders as best able to produce beautiful and original design: “by being drilled in these until the mind was conditioned to move automatically in the golden proportions […] the designers were able to indulge the most exuberant fantasies” (EAR 218).  Set out in ‘The War and the Younger Generation’, Waugh’s theme of creativity tempered by restraint is repeated; the earlier essay’s emphasis on “restraint” and “resistance” is reiterated in “drilled” and “conditioned”.  Waugh imagines the houses designed through this conditioning “rebuking, in their measured Johnsonian diction”, the products of modern “degenerate” liberty.  There is a similar passage in England and the Octopus: Williams-Ellis describes the well-designed house as standing in “quiet dignity from the bastard brood” (115).  “Degenerate” in Waugh, modern designs are “misshapen” or “half-wits” in Williams-Ellis (115).  Without restraint of ‘the Orders’, suggests Waugh, an individual or a society can produce nothing of merit: “By studying ‘the Orders’ you can produce Chippendale Chinese; by studying Chippendale Chinese you will produce nothing but magazine covers” (EAR 218).  Indeed, aesthetic freedom from ‘the Orders’ produced nothing except sickness: the “post-war Corbusier plague” was, for Waugh, a “period of high fever and delirium, a long depression”, and England was left “scarred and pitted” with factories, arterial roads and villas, the “pest-mark” of modern design (EAR 216).
     Williams-Ellis called factories, roads, bungalows and villas “Urban Beastliness” (31).  Vile Bodies uses ‘beast’ with startling regularity, in two sections in particular.  The most arresting of these is the aerial view of suburban England that makes Nina physically ill: a vision of bungalows, factories, and arterial roads that is juxtaposed against Ginger’s evocation of a lost, paradisiacal England in his quotation of Richard II.[8]  The evocation of sickness anticipates the imagery of ‘A Call to the Orders’.  Less commented upon are the bungalows at Aylesbury.  When Adam goes to visit Doubting Hall he sees “bungalows and villas” and “a village in which every house seemed to be a garage and filling station”  (56).  Worse than their appearance is Colonel Blount’s enthusiasm for them, as the gentry abandons the architectural and cultural values they traditionally uphold: “Nice little red houses.  Bathroom and everything.  Quite cheap, too, and near the cinematographs” (59).  Waugh is clearly warning against the threat to the English countryside and its great houses posed by urban sprawl.[9]  The villas, bungalows, filling stations and cinemas of Vile Bodies are described by Williams-Ellis in the figure of the octopus’s “tentacle growth” (62).  Symbol of architectural monstrosity and the destruction of beauty, the octopus was used by Waugh in Decline and Fall.  Williams-Ellis’s use of the symbol provides a context for reading Waugh’s first, seemingly anarchic novel in fresh ways.  In Decline and Fall King’s Thursday has a “tank of octopuses” (158) among other items of interior decoration, including indiarubber fungi and a kaleidoscopic floor in the drawing room (158), and “the glass floor, and the porcelain ceiling, and the leather-hung walls” in the dining room (155).  These features are installed by Professor Silenus, the modernist architect hired by Margot Beste-Chetwynde to remake the “domestic Tudor” of King’s Thursday into “something clean and square” (130, 135).  The destruction and resurrection of King’s Thursday occupy the middle section of the novel and constitute one of its most important motifs: the great house as symbol of lost tradition and culture in flux. 
     The satirical intent of Decline and Fall is disputed.[10]  Waugh was not yet a Catholic when he wrote Decline and Fall, but critics have seen in this novel the germ of Catholic morality.[11]  In Waugh’s later writing English culture falls away from Catholicism and aristocracy and shows the barbarity of the modern age.  In 1930 Waugh published a defence of Catholicism, citing civilization and culture's dependence upon Christianity as one of his reasons for converting: “Civilization – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe – […] came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance.  The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a material, mechanized state.”[12]  In Decline and Fall, the “material, mechanized state” is represented in Otto Silenus.  The probable models for Silenus can be found in the Bauhaus architect-theorists of the early twentieth century and, in appearance at least, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier,[13] with whose work Waugh was familiar.  In 1929 Waugh reviewed Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme with sympathy, though he added a caveat: “How will M. le Corbusier’s houses look in a hundred years’ time when the patina of the concrete has weathered and the sharp angles have softened […]?  One cannot help feeling that iron furniture bent out of shape would be more offensive than worm-eaten wood, and discoloured concrete and rusted metal than mellowed brick and stone.”[14]  Waugh’s reservations about Corbusier’s designs are relevant to the reconstruction of King’s Thursday.  Though he is supposed to have disliked timbered Tudor architecture,[15] in ‘A Call to the Orders’ Waugh described it as debased by imitation, not as an inherently inferior style: “imitation, if extensive enough, really does debauch one’s taste for the genuine.  It is almost impossible now to take any real delight in Elizabethan half-timber – logical and honourable as it is – because we are so sickened with the miles of shoddy imitation with which we are surrounded” (EAR 217).  King’s Thursday’s is not an imitation: it has stood for “three centuries […] unmodified” (129), a genuine example of the “logical and honourable” Tudor house.  To Paul Pennyfeather, the estate seems to speak of “seed-time and harvest, the superb succession of the seasons, the harmonious interdependence of rich and poor, […] dignity, innocence, tradition” (140).  While the original house survived for three centuries, Silenus’s “new-born monster” fails to outlast a batik tie (153, 159).
     Decline and Fall presents a dichotomy between the Tudor King’s Thursday and the mechanical house designed by Silenus.  England and the Octopus expresses parallel nostalgia for the organic feudalism of the Middle Ages and disgust for the nineteenth-century industrial city.  In Waugh’s copy, in a passage marginally marked in pencil, Williams-Ellis writes: “As, in the Middle Ages, villages and towns grew up under the patronage and protection of the powerful abbeys and feudal castles, so in the nineteenth century did they spring up, bleakly, sombrely and formlessly, in the chill shadow of grim, Bastille-like factories” (25).  Professor Silenus, known only for the “rejected design for a chewing-gum factory”, declares against man: “The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men […] All ill comes from man” (136).  Silenus sympathizes with factories and machines rather than humans, and he advocates a mechanized modernity that threatens humanity.  His new design destroys “something enduring and serene” (140), the old King’s Thursday.  In place of rushlights and priest holes, there are modern innovations such as drinking-water taps and elevators, and decoration of the interior includes pneumatic rubber furniture (155), a bottle-green glass floor (140), and the tank of octopuses.  While these features can be dismissed as throwaway satire on modern decoration, the presence of Williams-Ellis’s book in Waugh’s library and its publication in the same year as Decline and Fall suggest that the octopus has symbolic function: Silenus and the new King’s Thursday stem from the problems expounded in England and the Octopus.
     The great house is one of Waugh’s recurring motifs.  For Waugh, architecture and aesthetics represented civilization, culture, and faith.  In Decline and Fall the original King’s Thursday, built in “the reign of Bloody Mary” (129), can be identified with that monarch’s reactionary Roman Catholicism.  The evocation of Bloody Mary and the counter-reformation suggests sympathy for “the restraint of a traditional culture” that “tempers and directs creative impulses” (EAR 62) well before Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism in 1930.  Decline and Fall suggests that repression of personal, cultural, and religious liberty is laudable.  The third Earl of Pastmaster’s wife is imprisoned for suggesting the repair of a fireplace (130).  The emancipation of slaves is regretted: Chokey prompts the vicar to remark that “the mistake was ever giving them their freedom […t]hey were far happier and better looked after before” (93).  Paul’s imprisonment at Blackstone Gaol produces a feeling not of confinement but of liberty: “It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meals, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free” (190).  At the end of the novel, Paul applauds repression of religious heterodoxy in the early Church, in the accounts of the Bishop of Bithynia (235) and the ascetic Ebionites (239).  Ranged against these examples of repression are Margot, Grimes and the Bollinger Club, representatives of liberty that, while seductively dynamic, is destructive and sterile. Decline and Fall is not a book of “faithless optimism, confident and aggressive”,[16] but rather a carnivalesque dirge for the “restraint of traditional culture”.
     Waugh's tank of octopuses is another symbol of perversity barely restrained.  The octopus has often been used in literature as a symbol of uncontrollable, inhuman destruction.  Oppian’s third-century natural history Halieutica describes the octopus as a creature fated to exhaustion from its destructive desire, a symbol that corresponds with Waugh’s conception that “[f]reedom produces sterility”.[17]  In The Toilers of the Sea Victor Hugo describes the octopus in terms that anticipate Williams-Ellis’s modern bungalows, as “a monstrous embodiment of disease.”[18]  In the ‘Circe’ section of Ulysses, the “End of the World” octopus represents disorder and destruction,[19] as do the Martians in The War of the Worlds with their “Gorgon groups of tentacles”.[20]
     Modern literature’s symbolic use of the octopus was appropriated by town planners to describe urban sprawl.  The creature was metaphorically transformed into an image of “the dynamic sense of disorder” produced by uncontrolled urban development; planners and preservationists imagined London as an octopus with “tentacles hatched as ever-extending feelers.”[21]  Williams-Ellis argues that such development is an “outrage” in light of the struggles of the Great War to defend England: “In the late War we were invited to preserve England.  We believed, we fought.  It may be well to preserve England, but better to have an England worth preserving.  We saved our country that we might ourselves destroy it” (20).  In Waugh’s copy, this passage is marked with a tick.  Waugh used the technique of metonymy to convey ideas about people and places without stating them.[22]  In Decline and Fall the captive octopus in a house designed by a modern architect is a metonym for disorder.
     The octopus is one of the oddest images in Waugh’s early satires.  While its appearance in Decline and Fall is brief, it is reincarnated in Scoop in Mr Baldwin’s description of his “little house at Antibes” (56) and in Angela Lyne’s memory of purchasing an octopus in a tank for her husband Cedric, a “dilettante architect” (30), in Put Out More Flags.  The image had more than transitory interest for Waugh, and it may have more than one symbolic signification.  In Put Out More Flags the octopus is enclosed in a tank, with a case “carved with dolphins and covered in silver leaf” (174), connected with Cedric’s collection of imported grottoes.  The octopus is also associated with international politics and the new imperialism of the League of Nations.  In Decline and Fall the octopus appears in a conversation about the League, and the cosmopolitan Mr Baldwin owns "the largest octopus in captivity" in Scoop (56).
     Decline and Fall, Scoop and Put Out More Flags all locate the octopus enclosed in a tank in a domestic setting rather than in its natural environment, the sea.  Waugh and Williams-Ellis were both more interested in the architectural rather than the political signification of the octopus.  The meaning of the symbol remains elusive, but England and the Octopus places Waugh’s octopodes in a complex tangle of literary, satirical, philosophical and architectural contexts.

Notes
[1] Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1928). 
[2] Evelyn Waugh Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.  I thank the Ransom Center for permission to consult this collection.
[3] The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (1976; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1979), 319.
[4] A review of England and the Octopus appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 19 July 1928.  Decline and Fall was published on 18 September 1928.  Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years (London: J. M. Dent, 1986), 158.
[5] Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928; London: Chapman & Hall, 1955), 158.  Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (1938; London: Penguin, 2003), 56.  Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags (1942; London: Chapman & Hall, 1951), 174. 
[6] Evelyn Waugh, ‘The War and the Younger Generation’, Spectator, 13 April 1929, in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 62.
[7] Evelyn Waugh, ‘A Call to the Orders’, Country Life, 26 February 1938, EAR, 215.
[8] Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930; London: Penguin, 1996), 168. 
[9] In its introductory paean to Georgian architecture, ‘A Call to the Orders’ evokes the figure of the “aged colonel [with] an obese retriever”, a ghost of Vile Bodies’ Colonel Blount.  EAR, 215.
[10] See George McCartney, Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years; Douglas Lane Patey, The Life of Evelyn Waugh (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
[11] Patey, Evelyn Waugh, 58-73.
[12] Evelyn Waugh, ‘Converted to Rome: Why it has happened to me’, Daily Express, 20 October 1930, EAR, 104.
[13] Patey, Evelyn Waugh, 68-70.
[14] Evelyn Waugh, review of The City of Tomorrow by Le Corbusier, Observer, 11 August 1929, EAR, 63-65.
[15] Stannard, Evelyn Waugh, 169.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Oppian, Halieutica, I, cited in D. T. Kinkhead, ‘An Iconographic Note on Raphael’s Galatea’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 315.
[18] Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea (London: Collins, n.d.), 372.
[19] James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (1922; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 477.
[20] H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, ed. M. Danahey (1898; Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003), 55.
[21] Frank Mort, ‘Fantasies of Metropolitan Life: Planning London in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies 43.1 (Jan 2004): 133-34.
[22] Frederick L. Beaty, The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 33.

 

Waugh, Canova, and Cupid and Psyche
by Jeffrey A. Manley

     M. Sokolov, a Russian art historian, has written an article on Evelyn Waugh’s use of Antonio Canova’s Cupid and Psyche sculptural grouping to illustrate his 1953 story, Love Among the Ruins.  The article was originally a paper presented at an April 2004 conference on the theme “Canova and His Age.”  An expanded version appeared later in the Russian journal Voprosy literatury [Questions of Literature] 1  (Jan./Feb. 2005): 111-23, entitled (in English translation) “Canova’s ‘Cupid and Psyche’ in Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins: Toward the problem of pure form in neoclassicism and modernism.”
     The article is written from the perspective of an art historian, whose other works cited in the article relate to art of the Renaissance.  Sokolov begins with a history of Canova’s Cupid and Psyche; it exists in two versions—one in the Hermitage from the collection of Prince N. B. Yusupov, who commissioned it, and an earlier version in the Louvre.  The article relates the two versions to the myth as told by Apuleius. 
     Drawn to Waugh because he was both a writer and an artist, Sokolov focuses on the illustration on the title page of the story as originally published: Waugh’s rendering of Canova’s sculpture.  In Waugh’s version, Cupid has lost his wings and Psyche is sporting a beard.  Sokolov sees the story’s main characters as representing the two figures in the drawing: Miles Plastic is Cupid, and Clara, the dancer who grows a beard as a result of a botched sterilization, is Psyche.  The other illustrations, most of which are also inspired by works of Canova, and some of which also show a female figure with a beard, are not discussed in the article.[1]
     Much of the article is given over to a description of Waugh’s artistic tastes and influences.  Sokolov cites Waugh’s works from his juvenilia through his first two books on the Pre-Raphaelites, his essays on artistic themes (including “A Call to the Orders,” “The Philistine Age of English Decoration,” and “The Death of Painting”), his illustrations and drawings and most of his works of fiction.  He traces Waugh’s artistic tastes from the somewhat modernist views of his youth to the conservatism of his mature years. The article seems intended to be a fairly wide-ranging review of Waugh’s artistic production as well as his writings on artistic themes.
     Somewhat odd, in an article primarily about Canova and Waugh, is Sokolov’s fairly lengthy discussion of Waugh’s artistic views of other artists and their works, while not addressing his other borrowings from Canova for the illustrations in Love Among the Ruins.  Given Waugh’s own attribution in some of his illustrations as well as the mention in his Diaries of his use of the Moses “drawings after Canova,” Sokolov can hardly have been unaware of this additional connection.  It is as if he wanted to suppress Canova’s association with the other illustrations in order to focus attention on his theme of “Cupid and Psyche.”[2]  For whatever reason, an opportunity was missed to discuss, at least briefly, this further use by Waugh of Canova’s work.

Notes
[1] Except for the illustration “Coalition,” stated in a Latin notation to have been drawn by Waugh himself, the other illustrations are collages made by Waugh from The Works of Antonio Canova in Sculpture and Modelling Engraved in Outline by Henry Moses (1824).  In his Diaries, Waugh refers to having made some collages for illustrating the story “from Moses’ engravings after Canova” (714).   For example, the illustration entitled “Exiles from Welfare,” set in the offices of the Department of Euthanasia where Miles is employed, contains a note at the bottom in Latin indicating that it comes from a work of Canova as drawn by Moses and redrawn by Waugh.  This is from the drawing in the Moses-Canova collection entitled “Socrates Sending Away His Family Before Drinking the Poison.”  Sokolov doesn’t mention these drawings by Moses in reference to the “Cupid and Psyche” illustration but refers to works by John Flaxman (1755-1826) as having probably been “used by” (pol’zuietsia) Waugh in some way (112-13), perhaps meaning that Waugh used the Canova works in the same way Flaxman had done to create other works.  In fact, Waugh’s “Cupid and Psyche” illustration is also taken from a drawing of that same title in the Moses-Canova collection.  Douglas Lane Patey also mentions Henry Moses (1782-1870) as the source of Waugh’s illustrations and says that the illustration from the hospital where Clara has an abortion is based on Canova’s Annunciation.  That would refer to Waugh’s illustration entitled “Tidings of Comfort and Joy” (The Life of Evelyn Waugh, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, 313, 403n. 43).  Waugh’s illustration “Experimental Surgery,” which shows the surgical removal of Clara’s beard, is from the Moses-Canova drawing “The Death of Socrates,” and “Parsnip ad Portas” is from the Moses-Canova “Charity.”  The remaining Waugh drawings are untitled but taken from the Moses-Canova “Venus Dancing with the Graces,” with beards added, where appropriate, by Waugh.  The Moses drawings based on other works of Canova would have been worth mentioning, if only in a footnote.  An 1846 edition of the book containing the Moses-Canova drawings is now on the internet, having been digitized by Google, and can be consulted by anyone wishing to compare those drawings with Waugh’s collages.
 [2] For example, Sokolov mentions (112) that the “Cupid and Psyche” drawing is “included alongside other, also neoclassical drawings” (in Russian, “nariadu prochimi, tozhe neoklassicheskimi risunkami”), so he must have been aware of the other drawings and their Canova originals.   Sokolov also mentions Waugh’s illustration entitled “Experimental Surgery” as being in neoclassical style (118).  But he fails in both cases to note that these other “neoclassical” illustrations are also based on works by Canova.

 

Book Reviews

That Evelyn Waugh Mystery
The Ventriloquist’s Tale, by Pauline Melville.  New York: Bloomsbury, 1997.  357 pp.  $23.95.  Reviewed by Charles E. Linck, Jr., Texas A & M University-Commerce

     Evelyn didn't say WHY he really didn't tell the extra tale of the Guiana trip when he told me that he went where he wanted to go and didn't need any other support for doing it (Letters of Evelyn Waugh 546).
     Surely he could have used another story for magazine sales?  The story he could have related had to wait for Ms. Melville's retailing in this longish novel, which uses Rosa Mendelson's "research" on Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days trip to the boonies as a frame.  Rosa, a writer, heard that Ms. Nancy Freeman, sort of a Peace Corps volunteer, knew of Evelyn's visit to Georgetown and had actually done some barbering for him during his visit to the interior … 
     This sends Ms. Rosa to Georgetown, in our modern age, to hunt up the McKinnons, the original, pioneering "remittance man's" family, the second, third and fourth generations, to "research" Evelyn's experiences in Guiana back in the 1930s.  A few of those half-breeds had the experience and several others know about "the White Man who arrived on a horse."
     No attempt is made to do Evelyn's whole tripping about the land of savannahs and rain forests as in Ninety-Two Days.  In Ms. Melville's novel, the whole country is traversed repeatedly, with place names but no map to show the circuitous traveling of Fr. Napier and others.  I guess one could try to follow Evelyn's map with the strange native place-names, but …
     Actually, the apparatus of "researching" gives the novel its justification for going into the untold story at great length.  We leave Ms. Rosa shacking up with a third (?) generation McKinnon, Chofy, in Georgetown, while Ms. Melville tells the history of the “remittance man,” the original McKinnon.  Evelyn isn't involved in that story at all.  He, via the "research," is the crutch that gets the tale going--that's all … 
     Young McKinnon gets into the boonies on purpose, sets up his plantation, "gets married" to a couple of natives sort of accidentally, expands his ranching operations, consorts with Georgetown operatives seasonally, and more or less helps the Jesuit missionary who arrives during the early days to minister to all the tribal folks in the savannahs and rain forests and mountains--a really hardy priest with a diligence of vocation that isn't much different from that of the priest Evelyn actually visited.  Fr. Napier's tripping from place to place and his annual visitations for follow-up services probably are intended to take us over the same grounds that Evelyn toured with similar trials and tribulations.  Fr. Napier is quite the operator, sending folks hither and thither at will, and McKinnon's "work" carries him far and wide too, so we get a lot of local geography …
     McKinnon's children from one wife rise to puberty, so that Beatrice and brother Danny get involved in a holistic sexual sequence unbeknownst to the family until one of them, Wifreda, step-sister, catches them, causing their "elopement," and eventually McKinnon aims to have Fr. Napier break up the "mortal sin," which happens.  Danny hunts up another marriage partner; Beatrice implores him to accept her as a "first wife," the practice their mothers have observed with McKinnon, but Danny has become overly influenced by Fr. Napier and refuses, which sets Beatrice into getting the scary shaman lady to supply some really potent black beans to kill Fr. Napier.  He nearly dies but lapses into horrendous insanity.  These crazy episodes could supply enough boonies mythology and physical phenomena for a dozen or so Hollywood scary movies.
     Fr. Napier ends up in an insane asylum (those are truly effective black beans), a real "Snake Pit" of increased horrors.  I guess he will finally die after excruciating pain.  Very sad.  McKinnon, who ultimately leaves the boonies himself, visits but makes no breakthroughs and retires to Scotland. 
     Before leaving Guiana, Ole Mac made some arrangements: he sent Beatrice to Canadian friends where she ultimately marries and has a family, forgetful of her earlier loves.  Sonny, her child by Danny, simply vanishes into what is probably a troglodyte's life in some remote jaguar cave observing the incestuous moon and sun's uninhibited sexual play.  This is good stuff for a folklorist!  Wifreda, very elderly with debilities, does tell Rosa a bit about Evelyn's arrival and stay, which rounds off that apparatus quietly.  I think Chofy and she wanted to retire to England but didn't, and I think Rosa writes her research report.  She has to justify the travel expenses, doesn't she?
     "Hard Cheese on Charles" that Evelyn couldn't have been a bit more loquacious about his tripping-- so sad that it was left to Ms. M. to supply what Evelyn left out of Ninety-Two Days.  I reckon we can wish Ms. M. happiness for doing The Ventriloquist’s Tale.  It could get mixed up with TRUTH, confuse some footnotes one day, and get out another dissertation or two …
     I wonder if I should just have barged in on Evelyn, despite his warning, back in 1961-1962, and  smarmed him into telling me all sorts of things?  Could I do it today, with all my diplomatic experience dealing with academia, and force him to be sociable?  I doubt it, as I wasn't ever very good with wine-bibbing, or tequila or jungle-juice, or whatever Evelyn enjoyed with Sonny that night at the McKinnon compound (just rum?).   
     Sonny would have been a better interview than Wifreda!

 

Dombey, Diaries, Days, and Dust
The Ventriloquist’s Tale, by Pauline Melville.  Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania.

     In the November 1995 issue of Harper’s, Katie Roiphe published “Making the Incest Scene: In novel after novel, writers grope for dark secrets.”  Roiphe considered Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride (1993).  Pauline Melville’s use of incest in The Ventriloquist’s Tale was not especially original, but the book won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1997.
     Born in Guiana in 1948, the novelist is a member of the well-known Melville clan, whose founder is described by Evelyn Waugh in Ninety-Two Days (Penguin 24-25).  In his diaries and again in Ninety-Two Days, Waugh often mentions being helped by Teddy Melville, who may have lent his name to Teddy Last in A Handful of Dust.  (Also, Jenny Abdul Akbar calls Tony “Teddy.”)  Pauline Melville wrote Shape-Shifter (1990), a collection of short stories that won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book).  In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, her family is renamed “McKinnon.”  She has published another collection of stories, Migration of Ghosts (1998), and she has appeared as an actress in films and on television.
     Lee M. Jenkins published “‘Revenge or Tribute’: Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale and Evelyn Waugh” in the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 10.2 (2003): 13-29.  As Jenkins puts it, “elements of A Handful of Dust … are reprised and reappropriated in Melville’s novel” (15).  Sons die in both novels: in A Handful of Dust, the death of John Andrew marks the end of Tony and Brenda’s marriage, but in The Ventriloquist’s Tale the death of Bla-Bla compels Chofy McKinnon to return to his wife Marietta.  Jenkins also suggests that “the fate of Father Napier, who descends into insanity…, is perhaps Melville’s own act of literary revenge upon the recent Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, who painted a saintly portrait in Ninety-Two Days of Father Mather” (21).  Melville’s Father Napier was perhaps inspired by Ninety-Two Days: Waugh refers to “the uncle of some friends of mine,” Father Carey-Elwes, “who had worked in this district as a missionary and retired to England as the result of a complete breakdown” (64).  As Jenkins points out, Father Napier also resembles the feverish Tony Last in A Handful of Dust (21).  In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, Chofy’s lover is Rosa Mendelson, perhaps named for the Indian woman in A Handful of Dust.
     Melville seems to have been primarily interested in The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, however.  In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, her character Rosa remembers having read them (47), and Melville quotes the diaries three times.  Waugh’s reference to a “dotty bastard nephew” was written at Hart’s Ranch in British Guiana on 22 January 1933 (Diaries 367).  Hart was married to Amy Melville, and in The Ventriloquist’s Tale the nephew becomes the offspring of an incestuous union between Danny and Beatrice McKinnon.  On 5 March 1933, Waugh returned to Hart’s Ranch, and he wrote that a shaman “Pretends to fly” (Diaries 375).  The shaman remained at the St Ignatius Mission, twenty miles to the south, but Melville brings her to Hart’s Ranch, where she mentions her flight to Waugh.  At Boa Vista on 12 February 1933, Waugh recorded that he “Wrote bad article yesterday but thought of plot for short story” (Diaries 371).  Melville adds “Could call it ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’” (289), the origin of A Handful of Dust.  In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, Waugh is inspired at Hart’s Ranch, whereas actually he had the idea three weeks earlier in Brazil.  In the novel, Waugh also articulates his idea, “The plight of a civilised man trapped amongst savages” (289), a version of what he wrote in “Fan-fare” in 1946: “eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them” (Essays, Articles and Reviews 303).
     This scene is embellished in other ways.  In his diaries, Waugh wrote that Hart’s “whole family and old Indian woman walked up and down in moonlight reciting Sorrowful Mysteries aloud” (375).  In Ninety-Two Days, Waugh observes that the experience “in normal surroundings would have paralysed me with shyness, but here it was not embarrassing, for the oddness of the company and the moonlit landscape made the occurrence half real and impersonal” (119).  In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, “Mr Waugh asked if he could join them, explaining that he was a recent convert.”  Asked what he is doing in Guiana, Waugh explains that his “marriage ended” and he prefers “not to talk about it” (287).  Waugh also reads aloud from Dombey and Son, like Tony in A Handful of Dust.  No such performance appears in Waugh’s diaries or Ninety-Two Days.
     In his Guiana diaries, Waugh does mention reading Dombey and Son (374) and Martin Chuzzlewit (375, 383).  In Ninety-Two Days, he refers to Chuzzlewit (153) and Nicholas Nickleby (116).  In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, Waugh reads only Dombey and Son, perhaps because of the son’s death, as Jenkins suggests (21).  All of these works by Dickens and more are of course included in Tony Last’s reading in A Handful of Dust.
     The Ventriloquist’s Tale is out of print in the USA, but it is still available in paperback in the UK.

 

Conscience and Consciousness
Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, by David Lodge.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.  320 pp.  $24.95 hardcover, $17.50 paperback.  Reviewed by Laura Mooneyham White, University of Nebraska.

     Why shouldn’t the eminent David Lodge be able to cobble together various essays and lectures, including his Richard Ellmann Lecture, originally given at Emory in 2001, into a book?  Harvard University Press was glad to publish the result, and I am glad to report that the book allows the reader convenient access to the ideas of one of our most tactful, insightful, and graceful author-critics as he works through the thorny question of consciousness and the novel.  If material is repeated (it is), and if the various essays have been reproduced without much effort to create a unified argument (they have), one must still be grateful for the volume as it stands.
     Evidently, Lodge has been much attracted to (and troubled by) the current assumption of cognitive scientists (Daniel Dennett, Stephen Pinker) that consciousness does not exist except as an epiphenomenon, and, further, that the humanist depiction of consciousness—with its qualia (sensory experiences), motives, moral judgments, emotions, and ideas—is nothing more than the unhappy inheritance of a discredited dualism.  If his extended discursus on this problem in the first essay were not enough, we have the evidence of Lodge’s recent novel, Thinks (2001), which fleshes out a thought-experiment: if a computer were to gain consciousness, and, with it, something of a soul, what would happen?  Lodge’s conscious computer ultimately commits suicide rather than live in the midst of human tragedy; Lodge’s judgment is that this novel “ends on a note of religious mysticism, negative theology, and something like Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism” (27).  Thus we know Lodge’s sympathies regarding the question of consciousness.  However, Lodge refuses to argue for the reality of consciousness or for dualism in these essays, either because he is too fair-minded and deferential a critic to do so, or because he is beset by the sense that such a defense just isn’t “done” in the face of the contemporary materialist consensus.  The closest we come to a judgment on the matter comes at the end of the first essay: “One must concede that the Western humanist concept of the autonomous individual self is not universal, eternally given, and valid for all time and all places, but is a product of history and culture.  This doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that it isn’t a good idea, or that its time has passed” (91).  This skirting of the issue (consciousness is a “good idea” at best) is of a piece with the attitude throughout.  Instead, Lodge does what he can do with greater success: marshal the examples of great novelists, who depict consciousness (still!) without troubling overmuch about the scientists’ disapproval.[1]
     Lodge’s pre-eminent strength as a critic is literary history and the history of ideas.  Even when he is working as a novelist this strength is apparent; the embedded lecture on the English industrial novel of the nineteenth century in Nice Work (1988) is a masterpiece of concision and insight.  I would recommend the last two-thirds of the opening essay to any student wanting a compact, elegant, and solid summary of the history of the novel in terms of its depiction of consciousness (42-91), from Defoe up to Nicholson Baker and the latest work of Philip Roth.
     The second essay, an examination of differing accounts of literary inspiration, also reworks the question of consciousness, setting Dennett’s materialist account against religious explanations.  The middle ground seems to be Lodge’s, though he does not explicitly claim it: “Somewhere between the two poles are those thinkers who reject the Ghost in the Machine but deny that the concept of mind can be equated with neurological brain activity, and suggest that consciousness will always be ultimately a mystery” (112-13).  Here the strategy of refusing to take sides seems more obvious and less successful.  
     The remaining pieces deal with single authors: Dickens, Forster, James, Waugh, Kingsley and Martin Amis, John Updike, Philip Roth, and David Lodge (“Kierkegaard for Special Purposes” is an examination of Lodge’s own Therapy [1995] in which we learn the central role Kierkegaard’s thought plays in the novel’s characters, plot, and moral vision, while “A Conversation About Thinks” is a republished interview).
     The best of these essays is the one on James.  Lodge’s subject is the perverse popularity of James’s novels for the screen.  How can James’s novels possibly be filmed in a way that does any kind of justice to Jamesian consciousness, with its diaphanous shifts of mood, motive, and self-deception?  Lodge’s careful and detailed survey of the many efforts on film to do so consistently makes the case that consciousness in the novel is too complex to be more than hinted at by screenwriters and directors; indirectly, Lodge seems to be arguing that consciousness itself has a natural home in fiction unlike any other genre, and that novelists have an insuperable advantage in depicting consciousness.  Curiously, however, Lodge’s own depiction of James’s consciousness (in his novel/biography of James, Author, Author [2004]) seems relatively stilted.  It is as if Lodge would be willing to create a full account of consciousness for a fictional character but is hesitant to make bold inferences about the consciousness of a real person.  Lodge’s best guess about James’s romantic life is that James himself was in a complete muddle about his own feelings—which, of course, he very well may have been.
     Of interest to the readers of this newsletter is the piece on Waugh.  It was originally published in the New York Review of Books in 1999 with the same title, “Waugh’s Comic Waste Land,” and the essay is unchanged, except that the book’s version drops the charming illustration provided originally, Waugh’s cartoon of himself on leaving America, 1949, dashed off on the notepaper of the Plaza.  Lodge is interested in how much consciousness can be inferred from the telegraphic style of Waugh’s dialogue.  Citing Vile Bodies at length, he notes chapter eleven, the last telephone conversation between Adam and Nina: “behind the clipped, banal phrases  there are depths of unspoken pain and betrayal.”  The inference seems to be that readers themselves read Vile Bodies inferentially, filling in assumptions about emotions, expectations, and thoughts for the characters.  I find interesting, however, that whenever we learn something directly about the thoughts of a character in Waugh’s early fiction, it turns out that the character is thinking less fully, more stereotypically, than we might have hoped he was.  For instance, in Decline and Fall, after learning the details of Paul Pennyfeather’s arrest, trial, and entrance to prison, we have our first internal view of Paul: “The loss of his personal possessions gave him a curiously agreeable sense of irresponsibility” (220).  The next view seems to register an equal shallowness: “'I suppose I shall learn to respect these people in time,' thought Paul.  ‘They all seem so much less awe-inspiring than any one I ever met’” (221).[2]  The Waugh essay moves in appreciation from work to work, with biographical reflections along the way; Lodge stops at Put Out More Flags, explaining that “his great work of fiction about the Second World War, the Sword of Honour trilogy, was still to come” (181).  About the novel in which Waugh makes the most extended effort to depict interiority—Brideshead Revisited—Lodge has nothing to say at all.   

Notes
[1] Lodge is capable of playing a certain sort of retributive game against scientists, however, for there’s a kind of implied malice in the fact that the very first novel he discusses at any length is one of C. P. Snow’s (of The Two Cultures’ fame).  This novel, The New Men (1954), turns out to be not very well-written, and not very scientific; instead, it offers a fairly realist depiction of consciousness such as one might get in the novels of Galsworthy.
[2] Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, 1928, Boston: Little, 1956.

 

Having Read Widely and Uncommonly Well
The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 10: 1910-1940: The Modern Movement, by Chris Baldick.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.  Paperback, 2005.  477 pp.  $39.95.  Reviewed by Patrick Query, United States Military Academy.

     Chris Baldick’s The Modern Movement is the most recent in the excellent Oxford English Literary History series, successor to the Oxford History of English Literature.  This volume strikes a superb balance between compiling literary-historical facts and providing an important critical reassessment of a period surely in need of one.
     Although his project is primarily historical, not critical, Baldick makes it clear from the outset that the picture he will paint of the period 1910-1940 will not be beholden to any of what he sees as the restrictive critical paradigms that have unfairly dominated our understanding of it.  The author’s prose style, clear, considered, and noticeably lacking in theoretical jargon, makes the critical judgments and interpretations he does make so much the more compelling: T. E. Lawrence is a wildly underrated Great War writer; P. G. Wodehouse is perhaps James Joyce’s equal; D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf are awful literary critics.  His main target, early and throughout, is modernism: 

 [I]f we allow our view of literature in this period to be engrossed by the heroism of a small band of modernist pioneers—James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf—then we lose sight not only of a wealth of creative work by their contemporaries but also, self-defeatingly, of the very distinctiveness of the leading “modernists” themselves, to appreciate which requires some awareness of the mainstream from which they diverged. […]  Modernism was in its own time a minority current. (3)

What is especially refreshing is that the “mainstream” he goes on to describe lacks nothing of the interest or excitement of the radical high modernist canon.  Indeed, the book as a whole delivers superbly on its early promise to present an image of the period’s true and spectacular heterogeneity.  If there is any complaint, it is that Baldick makes his case too well.  Because his argument against the dominant and disproportionate “modernist” reading of the period is so persuasive (and welcome, I will venture), when he strikes the same note in later stages of the book, he seems to be protesting too much.  The case has been made so well in the early chapters—indeed, in the first few pages—that it seems unnecessary to remind the reader on page 398, for instance, of the folly of “a particular trend or movement,” in this case modernism, “com[ing] to stand in for, and in effect to occlude, a whole literary period.”  He had us at “minority current.”
     Modernism is not the only model for reading the period that Baldick reveals to be inadequate.  The familiar “Thirties writing” idea, in which only four or five writers matter, predictably crumbles under his straightforward analysis.  Another brief but compelling section is devoted to showing how impoverished the accepted notions of Great War writing are in the face of the really diverse work the war produced.
     Along with clarity of style and purpose, structure is another of the book’s strengths.  The whole is divided into three sections: Elements, Forms, and Occasions.  In the first, comprised of thematic chapters on the modern literary market, modern authorship, and modern English usage, Baldick constructs a vivid backdrop for the discussion of poetry, drama, fiction, and other forms that will follow.  In the Elements section, he treats the reader to some of his most interesting and amusing observations.  We learn in the third chapter of the influence of both crossword puzzles and standard reference works such as the OED and Modern English Usage, of both the freely swearing “modern girl” and of the raft of neologisms by modern authors: scatological (Ford), sex-starved (Huxley), unscramble (Wodehouse), and sick-making (Waugh), not to mention Joyce’s compounds snotgreen and scrotumtightening.  In fact, every chapter of the book is prefaced by a brief list of “New Words, 1910-1940,” another technique that contributes to the reader’s sense of the vitality of the period’s language.
     A work of this kind inevitably involves a certain amount of cataloging.  The early chapters are full of lists like this one: “A leading author at this time was more likely to have a training in the sciences, like H. G. Wells, W. Somerset Maugham, Naomi Mitchison, Arthur Ransome, and David Garnett, or in music or fine art (Katherine Mansfield, Agatha Christie, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats) than in English Literature” (41).  There is also a table of poets’ appearances in anthologies from 1933-1941.  Two things, though, keep these lists from trying the reader’s patience too much.  First, in the early chapters where they dominate, they have the effect of surprising the reader with a sense of pure wideness and variety; those piles of names serve the author’s aim of expanding the playing field quite well.  Second, such lists disappear as the book progresses, replaced by more sustained readings of a smaller number of individual authors and works. 
     Given Evelyn Waugh’s great range, it is not surprising to find him appearing in several different places in the volume.  He figures most prominently in a chapter from the Forms section entitled “Modern Satire” but also appears in “Modern Essays, Biographies, Memoirs, and Travel Books” and the later thematic chapters “England and the English,” “Childhood and Youth,” and “Sex and Sexualities.”  A minor surprise is that he is not mentioned in “Modern Short Stories,” but the overall impression one gains of Waugh is of a writer keenly attuned to most of the period’s major literary trends and preoccupations and with a hand in most of its major forms of literary endeavor.
     The volume is equipped with the normal appurtenances of a sound reference work, including short Author Biographies (the author bibliography devoted to Waugh is adequate if a bit dated and curiously omits Donat Gallagher’s edition of Waugh's Essays, Articles and Reviews) and surprisingly detailed Suggestions for Further Reading, features that will add to its utility for new and even experienced scholars.  But the pleasure of reading The Modern Movement is far more than academic.  Baldick manages to give the sense of having read both extraordinarily widely and uncommonly well.  From the first page to the last, the reader has the sense of experiencing the real texture and variety of a period that has, as Baldick indicates, been all too often described according to prohibitively—and unjustifiably—narrow critical categories.  It will surely have the impact of sending readers out to read books they now can’t believe they’ve neglected.

 

Tactful, Accurate, Generous
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, edited by Richard Greene.  London: Little, Brown, 2007.  446 pp. £20.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

     Both in the choice of title and in the appendix, Richard Greene (obligatory explanation: no relation) challenges Norman Sherry, whom Graham Greene chose as his official biographer.  Richard Greene (hereafter mere Greene is Graham) has the advantage of being able to select only letters that illuminated various aspects of Greene’s life and work.  Readers should be grateful that he omitted a huge mass of material—Greene wrote about 2,000 letters a year—that he found “forbidding and essentially unreadable.”
     Sherry obviously felt no such compunction.  In 2003, Caroline Bourget, Greene’s daughter, called the hostile biographer Michael Selden “a viper” and added, “I don’t know what I’d call Norman Sherry.”  “How about a boa constrictor?” I suggested.  “He wraps himself about the material and swallows it whole.”  Greene began with the grossly mistaken assumption that Sherry would spend little time discussing his personal life, especially his sex life.
     Greene had many other disappointments related to sex, first in the belief that he could have a happy marriage with a woman who made no secret of the fact that she disliked sex, then in attempting to juggle several women at once—often, one must admit, with more success than seemed deserved.  It wasn’t only the Church, as Greene wrote in The Heart of the Matter, that “doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.”  His women seem from the outside as incomprehensible as he was.  Some of his letters to Vivien, his estranged wife, cannot be accounted for by any rhetorical strategy I am aware of, and he explains to Catherine Walston, a long-time mistress, that he took up with the Swedish actress Anita Björk because Walston couldn’t keep an appointment with him.  Well, Greene did recognize, in a letter to Vivien, that he was “profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life.”
     Although Richard Greene avoids making judgments in this and in most other cases, he does point out various instances in which Greene took contradictory positions and finds it difficult to defend some of them.  He believes—and includes enough letters to make a convincing case—that Greene suffered from bi-polar disorder, accounting for his frequently expressed wish to die, his feeling ashamed of feeling pleasure, and his frequently exhibited manic behavior, one result of which was his view that “there’s nothing like a fight to cure depression.”
     Readers of the Newsletter will be more interested in Greene’s views on writing, that of others as well as his own.  He thought Brideshead Revisited Waugh’s finest novel, preferred Conan Doyle to Virginia Woolf, explaining “I am not a literary man,” disliked most of George Orwell’s work and all of Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch, and did what he could to advance the reputations of R. K. Narayan and Muriel Spark.
     Readers familiar with Waugh’s Diaries and Letters, with Greene’s Ways of Escape, and with Sherry’s biography may not find much new about the relationship of the two men.  Their exchanges over The Heart of the Matter are very illuminating about ways of interpreting that novel psychologically as opposed to theologically.  Greene says some interesting things about A Burnt-Out Case, though they didn’t convince Waugh, and he gives a convincing explanation of Fowler’s motives and point of view in The Quiet American.  But the only real surprise comes in Greene’s letter to Auberon Waugh about a two-part review in Motor Sport which “deals only with the motor bicycles and cars mentioned in the Diaries and shows immense motoring scholarship in identifying them.”
     Richard Greene is very tactful in the apparatus, defending the reputations of some people whom Greene disliked, saying positive things about the mental capabilities of Yvonne Cloetta, Greene’s last mistress, and arguing that late and usually (I think rightly) neglected work like J’Accuse and The Captain and the Enemy are worthy of more attention than critics have been willing to give them.  On occasion he is even witty as well as accurate and generous, as in noting that “Scruples are, of course, an affliction of the devout, now thought to have been eradicated like polio.”  Those weary of multi-volume compendia and briefer character assassinations should be grateful for this account of what Greene called his “bizarre and on the whole not boring” life.  The only real fault I can find is that the book will not be available in the USA until the fall of 2008.

 

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 2000 and 2001, as well as some items omitted from earlier lists.

     Akiyama, Anzen.  "Waugh's Decline and Fall: The Original Handwritten Manuscript with its Emendations in the 1928 and 1962 Editions."  Bulletin of Nippon College of Physical Education 21.2 (1992): 191.
     Alder, Baron.  “Evelyn Waugh’s Immortal Souls.”  Quadrant July-August 2000: 78-79.
     Allen, Bruce.  “World-besotted Traveller.”  Current Sept. 2000: 36+.
     Allen, Bruce.  “‘World-besotted Traveller’: Evelyn Waugh’s Savage Indignation.”  World and I 15.5 (May 2000): 280.
     Ames, Christopher.  “Shakespeare’s Grave: The British Fiction of Hollywood.”  Twentieth Century Literature 47.3 (Autumn 2001): 407-30.
     Bradshaw, David.  Introduction.  Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh.  London: Penguin, 2001.
     Danchev, Alex.  “The Real Waugh.”  Diplomatic History 25.3 (Summer 2001): 473-89.
     Decoste, Damon Marcel.  “Waugh’s War and the Loop of History: From Put Out More Flags to Brideshead Revisited and Back Again.”  Style 34.3 (Fall 2000): 458-86.
     Deedes, Bill.  “Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia: Reflections and Recollections.”  Journalism Studies 2.1 (2001): 27-29.
     Dugan, Lawrence.  “An Introduction to Evelyn Waugh’s Helena.”  Modern Age 42.3 (Summer 2000): 317-21.
     Gallagher, Donat.  “Sir Robert Laycock, Antony Beevor and the Evacuation of Crete from Sphakia.”  Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 78 (2000): 38-55.
     Hastings, Selina.  Introduction.  Two Lives, by Evelyn Waugh.  London: Continuum, 2001.
     Hitchens, Christopher.  Introduction.  Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh.  London: Penguin, 2000.
     Inglis, Fred.  “Brideshead Revisited Revisited: Waugh to the Knife.”  The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen.  Ed. Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen.  Manchester, England: Manchester UP and New York: St Martin’s, 2000.  179-96.
     Jacobs, Richard.  Introduction.  Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh.  London: Penguin, 2000.
     Kostopulos, Dan Sotirios.  “Remote Places: Waugh, Travel, and Empire.”  Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A 62.1 (July 2001): 166.  U of Mississippi, 2000.
     Lively, Penelope.  “A Maverick Historian” (Sword of Honour).  Atlantic Monthly Feb. 2001: 128-30.
     Loss, Archie K.  "History and Myth in Waugh's Sword of Honour."  Postscript: Publication of the Philological Association of the Carolinas 6 (1989): 48-57.   
     McCulloch, Andrew.  “Satire and Satyr: Decline and Fall.”  English Review 11.4 (April
2001): 30.
     Mudford, Peter.  “‘Quantitative Judgements Don’t Apply’: The Fiction of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.”  The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival.  Ed. Rod Mengham and N. H. Reeve.  Basingstoke, England: Palgrave, 2001.  185-202.
     Pearce, Joseph.  “Evelyn Waugh: Ultramodern to Ultramontane.”  Lay Witness May 2001.  Available as “Evelyn Waugh,” http://www.catholicauthors.com/waugh.html 
     Pearce, Joseph.  Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Disbelief.  San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, EWNS 36.3 (Winter 2006); Adam Schwartz, "Swords of Honor: The Revival of Orthodox Christianity in Twentieth-Century Britain," Logos 4.1 (2001): 11-33.
     Pugh, Tison.  “Romantic Friendship, Homosexuality, and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.”  English Language Notes 38.4 (June 2001): 64-72.
     Salwen, Michael B.  “Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia: The Novelist as War Correspondent and Journalism Critic.”  Journalism Studies 2.1 (2001): 5-25.
     Salwen, Michael B.  Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia: The Story Behind Scoop.  Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2001.  Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, “Professor Salwen and the ‘Ignoble Fascist,’” EWNS 33.2 (Autumn 2002); Reference & Research Book News 17 (Feb. 2002): 217.
     Salwen, Michael B.  “Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: The Facts Behind the Fiction.”  Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78.1 (Spring 2001): 150-71.
     Schweizer, Bernard.  Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s.  Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001.  Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, “Déjà-Vu All Over Again,” EWNS 36.1 (Spring 2005). 
     Spivey, Nigel Jonathan.  Introduction.  Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh.  London: Penguin, 2000.
     Wilson, John Howard.  Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography, 1924-1966.  Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001.  Reviewed by Douglas Lane Patey, Choice 39.3 (Nov. 2001): 513; Jonathan Pitcher, “Et in Arcadia non Ego,” EWNS 35.1 (Spring 2004).
     Wilson, John Howard.  “Lancing College, the Woodard Schools, Evelyn Waugh, and Middle-Class Education.”  Nassau Review 8.1 (2000): 84-94.

 

Chaim Potok, 1929-2002
by Daniel Walden
Penn State University

     Chaim Potok, best-selling novelist, PhD in philosophy, and ordained rabbi, died in Merion, Pennsylvania on 23 July 2002. 
     Born in 1929 in the Bronx, New York, Potok grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood and attended a cheder (Hebrew school) and a yeshiva (academy).  One summer his yeshiva hired an art teacher to teach painting to the children.  It was his introduction to the Western world.  Potok had begun that journey inside the core of the Western tradition that conflicted with the Jewish tradition he inhabited.  While he was reading Ivanhoe and Treasure Island in high school, he was browsing in the public library and came across Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945).  He remembered asking himself "What did he do to me?  How do you do this kind of thing with words?"  Potok was so moved by this English Roman Catholic author, by his ability to write criticism from the inside, that, he recalled, his commitment to writing began.  Potok first came to prominence with publication of The Chosen (1967), which was on the New York Times best-seller list for six months.  It was the first novel to deal with the Orthodox and Hasidic worlds for a mass audience. 
     Chaim Potok endures and in my judgment will emerge as one of the major American writers of the twentieth century.  What he did will resonate increasingly in the years to come.      

 

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.

 

Evelyn Waugh Society
     The Evelyn Waugh Society now has 57 members.  Information on joining the society is available at http://www.lhup.edu/jwilson3/EWSociety.htm.  The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List now has 45 members.  The list is available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh. 

 

Combe Florey to Sell
     According to a column in the Daily Telegraph for 25 November 2007, Lady Teresa Waugh intends to sell Combe Florey, the last house where Evelyn Waugh lived.  Lady Teresa married Evelyn's son Auberon, who died in 2001.  Auberon's son Alexander notes that there is "no primogeniture in the Waugh family and none of us has the money to buy out the others."  The price is expected to be about £3 million.  Evelyn Waugh is buried on the property and may have to be disinterred.  The column is available at the Daily Telegraph.    

 

Typescript of Decline and Fall
     According to an article filed by Bloomberg on 25 April 2007, Annette Campbell-White planned to sell part of her collection, including the typescript of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall (1928).  The typescript was expected to sell for £30,000 at Sotheby's in London on 7 June 2007, and it was purchased by Loren Rothschild, a collector in California.  A description of the typescript is available in the Sold Lot Archive at Sotheby's.      

 

Waugh at War
     "A Late Leaf of Laurel for Evelyn Waugh," a memoir of Waugh's service in the Royal Marines by Morrice James (Lord St Brides), is available at http://www.manfamily.org/PDFs/Morrice_Waugh article.pdf.

 

Life Imitates Art
     In his obituary in the Daily Telegraph, Sir Alan Campbell (1919-2007), ambassador to the Court of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (1969-1972), is said to have "caught himself behaving uncannily like Sir Samson Courtenay, the British ambassador to the Empire of Azania in Evelyn Waugh's novel Black Mischief, indulging in little absurdities of opinion and pomposities of manner.  Campbell found Black Mischief--which was unmentionable in Ethiopia at the time--to be a very shrewdly observed satire."  Sir Alan's entire obituary can be read at the Daily Telegraph.

 

Extending a Finger
     In his memoir My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father (London: Faber, 2004), Hanif Kureishi mentions that his uncle Achoo lived "a few miles from Evelyn Waugh's house.  (Achoo met him once, locally, and offered him his hand; Waugh … offered not his hand but a finger.)"  Kureishi adds that Waugh is "a writer I still admire for his prose" (85-86). 

 

The Most Popular Church
     According to an article filed by Reuters on 23 December 2007, Catholicism is now "Britain's 'most popular' faith."  The article notes that in 2006 more people attended Catholic services than those of the Church of England.  Former prime minister Tony Blair recently converted to Catholicism, and the article mentions that Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene were also converts.  The article is available at Reuters.

 

The Fifty Greatest?
     On 5 January 2008, The Times published a list of "the 50 greatest postwar British writers."  Philip Larkin finished first, followed by George Orwell in second, Ian Fleming in fourteenth, Anthony Powell in twentieth, and J. K. Rowling in forty-second place.  Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene were not on the list, which is available at The Times.

 

From Orwell to Waugh
     In "'Martin Amis is no racist'" in The Guardian for 21 November 2007, Christopher Hitchens notes that he was criticized by Terry Eagleton for not "becoming the George Orwell of my generation.  I have instead, he snorts, become the Evelyn Waugh!  How is one to come to grips with a man so crude in his sneers that his idea of an insult is to compare me to one of the greatest novelists of the past century?"  The article is available at The Guardian.  

 

Food for Bush's Brain
   On 2 January 2008, the Washington Post mentioned that former White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove is a bibliophile whose favorite writers include Jorge Luis Borges, T. S. Eliot, and Evelyn Waugh.  Rove's reading is the subject of an article in Vanity Fair for February 2008. 

 

Two Questions
     Alan O'Brien raises two questions about The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957).  In the novel, the voices refer to Pinfold as "Peinfeld," a Jewish version of his name.  What name did the voices actually call Waugh?  The voices sing "Gilbert the Philbert" to Pinfold, but what song did they sing to Waugh?  If you can shed any light, or even hazard a guess, please contact the editor: jwilson3@lhup.edu.    

 

HighBeam Research
     HighBeam Research is an archive of magazine and newspaper articles with thousands of references to Evelyn Waugh.  There is a subscription fee, but HighBeam provides a free trial.  HighBeam is available at http://www.highbeam.com. 

 

Talent Dynasty
     Carlin Flora published an article entitled "Talent Dynasties" in Psychology Today for November-December 2007.  The article includes a section devoted to Alexander Waugh, "The Self-aware Heir."  Alexander says that "This may sound conceited, but I'd like to think I've done better than [my forebears] would have done had they tried to write the same books I've written" (86).

 

End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3
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