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EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES |
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Waugh vs. Time
Magazine 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believed to be unpublished, is a recent addition to the Waugh papers at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. MEMORANDUM ON CERTAIN INACCURACIES IN TIME MAGAZINE, JULY 12, 1948 Evelyn Waugh 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 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 |
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Waugh and the Octopus 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. Notes |
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Waugh, Canova, and Cupid and Psyche 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.”
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.
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Book Reviews That Evelyn Waugh Mystery |
| 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. |
| 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 |
| 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.
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.” |
| 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. |
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Evelyn
Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism 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. |
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Chaim Potok, 1929-2002 Chaim Potok, best-selling
novelist, PhD in philosophy, and ordained rabbi, died in Merion,
Pennsylvania on 23 July 2002. |
| 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). |
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End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies,
Vol. 38, No. 3 |