EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 39, No. 1
Spring 2008

“Beefsteak Mind” and “Greatest Sonneteer since Shakespeare”:
Evelyn Waugh, Marie Stopes and Lord Alfred Douglas
by Donat Gallagher
James Cook University

     On 25 May 1939, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Marie Stopes.[1]  Coming across a reference to his letter in a catalogue, I imagined a sharp missive about birth control or Black Mischief, for Waugh lampoons Stopes (the then leading advocate of birth control) in Black Mischief, and Stopes eagerly joined in The Tablet’s condemnation of the novel.  Some years later, in 1943, Stopes would attack, and Waugh defend, Catholic schools.  Imagine my surprise (as they say) when Waugh’s 1939 letter turned out to be a polite note agreeing to put his name to a petition organized by Stopes seeking a civil list pension for Lord Alfred Douglas, “Bosie” of Oscar Wilde fame.
     Stopes’s papers reveal that Lord Alfred had been living on a small allowance from a kinsman, which the kinsman could no longer afford.  Lord Alfred faced destitution.  Stopes, a woman of advanced views, was nevertheless a close friend and voluminous correspondent of Lord Alfred, a Catholic and conservative far to the Right of Evelyn Waugh.  Stopes believed that Lord Alfred’s contribution to English literature was such as to warrant a civil list pension, and she set about trying to persuade the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to provide one.  Part of the campaign involved enlisting eminent literary figures to testify to Lord Alfred’s outstanding contribution to English poetry.  At this period, as is well known, the dominant influences on English poetry were Eliot and Auden, whereas Lord Alfred’s sonnets were metrical, musical and nineteenth-century in theme; in short, highly unfashionable.  His principal literary admirers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, then Professor of English Literature at Oxford, came from the Men of Letters generation; but some Moderns, like Virginia Woolf, signed the petition.  The argument was that Lord Alfred’s poetry was a permanently valuable contribution to the national literature.  Much was made of the fact, if it is a fact, that he was the only English poet for a century whose entire corpus the French had thought worthwhile to translate.
     Waugh, though respectful of the early Eliot, did not like contemporary verse and famously pronounced poetry “one of the arts which has died in the last eighty years.  Poets now have as much connection with poetry as the Fishmongers’ Company has with fish.  They carry on the name and the banquets but have retired from trade generations ago.”[2]  So he might well have been sympathetic to Douglas’s traditional mode; but, as will emerge, he did not share the extravagant overestimates of his work held by some fellow petitioners.  In his letter to Stopes, Waugh does not mention poetry.  He is simply “sorry to hear of Lord Alfred Douglas’s distressed condition” and “glad” to do anything he could “to advance his claim to public recognition.”  He goes on to suggest an application to the Royal Literary Fund: “My brother … is a member of the Committee and would be sympathetic, I am sure, if you approached him.”  Waugh’s name was on the list of sixteen literary figures that went to the Prime Minister seeking the civil list pension.
     Chamberlain refused the request.  Lord Alfred took the refusal in good part and, when Chamberlain was later ousted by Churchill, wrote to Chamberlain lamenting that the Prime Ministership was no longer held by “a gentleman.”
     An echo of this incident may be heard in Waugh’s puzzling (to me) diary entry for 26 April 1946, about a year after Lord Alfred died.  Waugh says he had received a letter from Evan Tredegar (Evan Morgan 2^nd Viscount Tredegar, poet, occultist, eccentric and Papal Chamberlain) asking him “to join a committee consisting of [Tredegar], Marie Stopes and … ‘we hope Harold Nicolson’ to proclaim Alfred Douglas the greatest sonneteer since Shakespeare.”  To this Waugh replied that “considering Milton and Wordsworth I could not agree with the judgement and that anyway I thought Marie Stopes a preposterous person to propose it.”  Shortly afterwards, at the Beefsteak club, Waugh met Harold Nicolson, who had also refused Tredegar, using the very same words as had Waugh.  This level of conformity with a conventional literary figure seems to have shocked Waugh, who asked himself worriedly: “Am I developing a Beefsteak mind?”[3]

Abstracts of Essays on Waugh in Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation
by Yoshiharu Usui

     Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation is one of the leading literary journals in Japan.  The issue for November 2003 included eight essays in Japanese on Evelyn Waugh.  Below are abstracts for each essay.

Sasaki, Toru (Kyoto University).  “Dikenzu o yomu Uo” [“Waugh Reading Dickens”].  Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation 149.8 (Nov. 2003). 458-60.
     Abstract: Waugh’s view of Dickens in A Handful of Dust seems to be personal.  In Waugh’s mind, reading Dickens’s works is connected with his father.  Waugh’s father was good at reading aloud.  Even though Waugh is familiar with Dickens, the junior writer refuses to accept Dickens meekly.  Though he can find comedy in any circumstances and his sense of human grotesques was raised by Dickens, Waugh had to deny Dickens first, then cultivate a different sense of humor and eliminate sentiment from his works.  Most of Waugh’s descriptions of Dickens are sarcastic or negative.  There was only one surrender to Dickens’s magnetism, in Ninety-two Days.  Waugh writes that he hadn’t found time to read books for the last ten years, but at Father Mather’s residence, he read Nicholas Nickleby.  Waugh needs to go back to the spirit of boyhood to enjoy Dickens.  He couldn’t get that without entering the jungle in South America.

Koyama, Taichi (Wayo Women’s University).  “Ivurin Uo to komedi no kukan” [“Evelyn Waugh and the Space of Comedy”].  Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation 149.8 (Nov. 2003): 461-63.
     Abstract: The principal object of Decline and Fall seems to be to create autonomous comic spaces that are not ruled by time and where unrealistic characters live.  In Sword of Honour, absurd comedy, sad realism, melancholy and unhealed romanticism strangely mix.  Ritchie-Hook reminds us of hot-blooded, loose laughter in Decline and Fall, but the slapstick comedy is out of place in war, filled with stagnation, compromise and betrayal.  At the beginning, the trilogy has an Arcadian atmosphere and indecent laughter.  With the death of Apthorpe, the pleasure of Arcadian comedy diminishes.  A Handful of Dust is a key to analyzing the change.  The episode of Mr. Todd in A Handful of Dust is a stampede of comical imagination, but the characters don’t have limitless movement like the characters in Decline and Fall.  Waugh, a slapstick writer, was heading beyond reason.  Eyeing the boredom of the real world, Waugh etches the free vitality of comical academia with the acid of satire.  Waugh’s creation alternates between romantic conversion to the beautiful tradition of Charles Ryder and Guy Crouchback and pure comedy in Ritchie-Hook and Ludovic. 

Fujikawa, Yoshiyuki (Komazawa University).  “Uo, Wairudo, Fabanku: Biishiki no keisei.”
[“Waugh, Wilde, Firbank: The Form of Beauty”].  Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation 149.8 (Nov. 2003): 464-65.
     Abstract: ‘Let us return to the nineties but not to Oscar Wilde’ is an interesting essay for analyzing the sense of beauty Waugh formed when young.  He says we should ignore the intelligent snobbism of the upper class, who started the boom of the 1890s.  He does not reject Wilde’s comedy of manners, but he does reject the ‘overdressed, pompous, snobbish, sentimental and vain’ Wilde.  Waugh loved to read Firbank.  They treated almost the same materials, such as lives of wealthy, decadent people, with traditional cultures, grand operas, art galleries, and courts forming their background.  Waugh says that the newness of Firbank was a way of being released from nineteenth-century novels of manners.  Not ignoring the literary tradition or his readers, Firbank could write ‘modern’ novels without being bound by the chains of causal relations.  Though incidents seem to happen by chance, the functions are revealed as the story develops.  Firbank is a ‘structural’ writer.  Waugh says that Wilde is a sentimental person, and his wit is decorative.  He claims that Wilde is Rococo and Firbank is Baroque.  Waugh prefers Baroque to Rococo.  He must have been influenced by people with Baroque taste like Harold Acton and the Sitwells.  One more innovation of Firbank was the concise conversational technique.  Waugh says it affected Ernest Hemingway.  He especially liked Hemingway in American literature.

Hirose, Masahiro (late of Osaka University).  “Edomando Kyanpion: Shinko to dannen to” [“Edmund Campion: Faith and Resignation”].  Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation 149.8 (Nov. 2003): 466-67.
     Abstract: Waugh is a cruel writer.  Those who have different religious views he describes thoroughly cynically.  Campion has the same religion, and though the tone of Waugh’s satire is lowered, his description is also cruel.  Campion acts according to his belief, but he is blind to his future.  One can feel Waugh’s limitless sympathies with him.  At the same time the description of the process from his arrest to his execution is full of irony.  Waugh describes the life of people who try to establish themselves in the stream of time and ruins.  Their lives are told with limitless cruelty.  Sometimes they seem to be beautiful, or grotesque but sublime, because of their high resolution.  Whether the beauty depends on their religion or Waugh’s description is unknown.

Kato, Mitsuya (Tokyo Metropolitan University).  “Uo no kigekiteki jokyo” [“Waugh’s Comedic Situation”].  Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation 149.8 (Nov. 2003): 468-69.
     Abstract: Whenever one reads Waugh’s comedies, one feels they are new.  Characters not only fail to understand each other but also tend to reflect the comedic situation.  Waugh sometimes feels strong sympathy for outsiders.  In A Handful of Dust, Tony, Millie and her daughter Winnie go to Brighton to make up the fake alibi for his divorce.  The situation itself is very funny.  At the same time it is interesting that Tony seems to enjoy a brief pseudo-family life.  Those who are phony but show a little anxiety and consideration share a bond, something new that doesn't become antiquated.  There is a rich life, a raw touch that cannot be captured even with Julian Barnes’s fashionable wit, Graham Swift’s calm humor, or Martin Amis’s twisted sarcasm. 

Arai, Megumi (Chuo University).  “‘Oh, Bright Young People!’: Ivurin Uo no Igirisuzo” [“‘Oh, Bright Young People!’: Evelyn Waugh’s Symbol of Britain”].  Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation 149.8 (Nov. 2003): 470-72.
     Abstract: In Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and Put Out More Flags, Waugh described the British upper class as the antithesis of middle-class morality and respectability.  The upper-class young people whom Waugh associated with are the models for his novels.  In 1924 the mass media gave them the name the Bright Young People.  They give the impression that they have no ethics, no morality and even no feelings.  In Vile Bodies, because of economic reasons, Adam is unable to marry Nina and tells her so.  The conversation exemplifies the phlegm of the proud British.  To carry out their duties to their country and show their courage without being serious: that’s the British upper class that Waugh described.  Waugh himself basically found his identity in the middle class.  His conversion after having grown up was beyond the understanding of Nancy Mitford and his upper-class friends, but he always sought British identity in the aristocracy. 

Murayama, Toshikatsu (late of Seikei University).  “Sword of Honour to chiisana sekai” [“Sword of Honour and a Small World”].  Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation 149.8 (Nov. 2003): 473-75.
     Abstract: Sword of Honour is a story of imperialism and total war knocking against each other; both the world and travel are speeded up.  In Waugh’s world, the two issues naturally have class implications.  The good old British Empire is symbolized by upper-class officers like Claire.  Total war by the people is symbolized by Trimmer.  The ending of the trilogy, wherein the son of Trimmer and Virginia is raised as an heir of the Crouchback family, is the death sentence of the ancien regime.  The network of ruling-class people whose center is Bellamy’s is described as fair and dear, while communism and homosexuality are described like secret societies.  The conservative’s hatred of communists is likely to be tied to the hatred of homosexuals because they erase hierarchy and show us the nightmare of no difference among people.  Communism and homosexuality make the infinite world uniform in the British Empire.  Sword of Honour is an elegy to good old Great Britain beset by two enemies, total war and communism.  In other words, Waugh tries to hold on to the bourgeois novel of empire that expands by extending direct human relations.

Kawabata, Yasuo (Japan Women’s University).  “Uo to Oueru” [“Waugh and Orwell”].  Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation 149.8 (Nov. 2003): 476-78.
      Abstract: Because of differences in political views, the relation between Waugh and Orwell has not often received attention.  Both wrote critical essays on the other’s works and sent their own works and letters of thanks.  Waugh praised Orwell’s Critical Essays because of newness in the choice of materials, resisting the class hierarchy of literary criticism.  At the same time Waugh criticized Orwell’s anti-Catholicism.  In his critique of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Waugh said, “I think your metaphysics are wrong.”  Furthermore, he said the church disappeared in Orwell’s dystopian world, and for this reason his novels became “spurious.”  Their ideas of religion are totally different.  It might be surprising that Orwell tried to defend Waugh in an unfinished critical essay in his last years.  Orwell opposed criticizing writers based on their ideologies.  He praised Waugh because he described the total lives of characters without insisting on ideologies.  Moreover, Orwell praised Waugh as a satirist.  He said the themes of Waugh’s farces were basically serious, and Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies were sermons taking the form of farce.  In addition, both had common ground.  Although Waugh described traditional lives in the country and Orwell described the lower middle class, they had strong admiration for the past.

From Vile Bodies to Bright Young Things: Waugh and Adaptation
by Emily Shreve

     Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry’s recent adaptation of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, is problematic in a number of ways.  Like other heritage films, Bright Young Things idealizes an era of British history.  The bright world of the film is a stark contrast with the bleak, dark world of Waugh’s novel.  A closer examination of the contrasts between the novel and the film is necessary, not to prove the superiority of the novel, or of the film, but to examine how the changes produce a different vision and what the implications of that vision are.
     The England of Vile Bodies is an unhappy place.  It is always raining, there are always masses of people pushing in on the main characters, and the main characters themselves are a “cast of memorable monsters . . . all trailing clouds of depravity” (Carens 3).  Death happens without anyone pausing to mourn.  Rebecca West, in her review, compared the vision of the novel to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (Stannard, Early Years 196).  Stannard summarizes Waugh’s vision as a “manifesto of disillusionment, hilariously funny but bitter” (Early Years 203).  None of this darkness comes through in the film, however.
     To be fair to Fry, the deeper implications of the novel are not always apparent.  They certainly weren’t to the readers at the time of the novel’s publication.  Waugh was frustrated with the reception: “Too often his novel was lauded for the wrong reasons: because it was a sparkling evocation of the party world of the Bright Young Things; because it was a riotously funny piece of escapism; because it was ‘naughty’” (Stannard, Early Years 195).  Fry admits he misread it as a teenager: “I remember thinking the characters were role models” (Haun 22).  It is easy to see how certain elements of the book could be mistaken and then magnified in the film.  There is a certain amount of spectacle in the novel, although Waugh is using it in a different way than the film does—to make a point about the emptiness behind it. As is always the case with spectacle, it is easy to remain on the surface and to avoid looking any deeper.  Also, there are elements of nostalgia in the book.  Waugh was at one time at least a peripheral member of the Bright Young Things, and along with anger at the collapse of his marriage, there was also some sadness and regret.
     Fry, as screenwriter and director, is active in the creation of difference between the film and the book.  Through the obsessive striving for authenticity in the mise-en-scène and also in the overall beauty of the film, Fry glamorizes the period and creates nostalgia for a narrow conception of 1920s England.  Fry also creates sympathy for characters who, in the novel, are not very sympathetic at all.  Fry achieves this in two ways: by juxtaposing the Bright Young Things with characters who are much worse, thereby highlighting the essential innocence and harmlessness of the Bright Young Things, and by using the score and the movement of the camera to contradict the effect of Waugh’s neutral dialogue.
     The original score undermines the emotionless, rapid-fire speech of the characters.  There is a wistful theme that plays in the background of scenes between Adam (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Nina (Emily Mortimer), particularly in the “sentimental” moments (i.e., when the engagement is again being broken off, or when Nina reveals she is planning to marry Ginger).  In the novel, the true feelings of the pair are left ambiguous.  When Adam calls Nina at the beginning of the story to inform her he has returned to England, they discuss their engagement as if it were an afterthought:   

It was about now that Adam remembered he was engaged to be married.…
‘Oh, I say. Nina, there’s one thing—I don’t believe I shall be able to marry you after all.’
'Oh, Adam, you are a bore.  Why not?'
‘They burnt my book.’
‘Beasts. Who did?’
‘I’ll tell you about it to-night.’
‘Yes, do. Good-bye, darling.’
‘Good-bye, my sweet.’ (Waugh 33-34)

The dialogue does little to indicate their love for each other and suggests that they are simply bored; the attempts to marry are really just a new adventure, something to counteract their growing dissatisfaction with parties.  In the film, this conversation is presented in a much different light.  There are deep pauses between the lines, both of the actors look troubled, and Nina’s disappointment comes through, even as she tries to keep up her laissez-faire attitude.  Behind all of this is the soft, wistful music, which communicates to the audience that Adam and Nina truly love each other but cannot reveal their feelings, so they conceal emotions under light and easy banter.
     The music again rears its ugly head in the suicide scene of the gossip columnist/peer of the realm, Simon Balcairn (James McEvoy).  In the novel the scene is darkly comic.  After calling in a false and terribly libelous gossip column, Balcairn gasses himself in his oven.  The passage is quite mundane, emotionless, and matter-of-fact:

Inside [the oven] it was very black and dirty and smelled of meat.  He spread a sheet of newspaper on the lowest tray and lay down, resting his head on it.  Then he noticed that by some mischance he had chosen Vanburgh’s gossip-page [his rival columnist’s].…  He put in another sheet.  (There were crumbs on the floor.)  Then he turned on the gas.  It came surprisingly with a loud roar; the wind of it stirred his hair.…  At first he held his breath. Then he thought that was silly and gave a sniff.  The sniff made him cough, and coughing made him breathe, and breathing made him feel very ill; but soon he fell into a coma and presently died. (Waugh 106)

In the film, the suicide is quite different.  Balcairn is not matter-of-fact but noble and resigned.  He turns on the stove and lies down, almost with dignity.  The music is somber and sad as the camera slowly pans over all of Balcairn’s mementos.  There is none of the dark humor of Balcairn discovering that his head is resting on his rival’s column or noticing the crumbs on the floor.  Instead, the scene is mired in sentimentality and regret for the loss of Balcairn and the aristocracy.
     Fry also wins audience sympathy by painting the Bright Young Things as essentially harmless, although wild and maybe a little insensitive.  The libelous story that Balcairn phones in is changed.  In the book, Balcairn reports a false story of a religious revival; the Bright Young Things confess their sins, sing spirituals, and donate large sums of money to the revivalist Mrs. Ape.  Everyone sues.  What is shocking in the book is not that the Bright Young Things did something naughty, but that they did something good.  In the film, Balcairn describes the most “shocking orgy since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.” The innocence of the group is highlighted in the way the scene is filmed.  We watch the Bright Young Things in slow motion, dancing, laughing, and having innocent fun, while Balcairn’s report is given in voice-over, describing terrible debaucheries.  The viewer becomes an insider, seeing the reality that the outside world of the film does not see.  As insiders, we are to identify with the Bright Young Things, to feel that while the Bright Young Things are certainly not examples of moral fortitude, they are not really that bad.
     This point is emphasized again in the film through the treatment of Imogen Quest, Adam’s imaginary character for his gossip column.  Imogen, as the name connotes, is supposed to represent innocence and goodness.  In the book, what is striking about her, and what draws readers to Adam’s column, is Imogen’s virtue.  She is described as “a lovely harmony of contending virtues—she was witty and tender-hearted; passionate and serene, sensual and temperate, impulsive and discreet” (Waugh 115). Again in the book, what commands attention is her normality and goodness, qualities no one in the book is able to achieve.  In the film, however, Imogen is a wild drug addict.  The imaginary Imogen of the film is juxtaposed with the Bright Young Things to make them seem relatively mild.
     There are, of course, serious moments in the film which are meant to point out the shallowness of the Bright Young Things, but they fall flat and are never quite believable, besides being undermined by the beauty and spectacle of the film.  Tiger, Miles’s racing boyfriend, berates the Bright Young Things for their inattention to the feelings of others, after his car is driven off by a drunken Agatha: “You bloody people! Who the bloody hell do you think you are?”  Tiger’s speech does not carry enough bite, however, for he is shown to be as self-centered as the others,  concerned more about his car than about Agatha’s welfare.
     Adam also has an outburst expressing his frustration and disgust with all the parties and shallowness of the Bright Young Things.  In the book, this speech is one of the most serious and powerful moments, but it doesn’t come from Adam.  It is implied that Adam may have some dawning realization of the emptiness of their existence, but he is unable to articulate it.  He gets no further than, “Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties” (Waugh 123).  The speech then follows in parentheses, and it appears to be the narrator listing all the parties:

(…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.…  Those vile bodies…) (Waugh 123)

The narrative returns to Adam and Nina, and all Adam can do is lean his forehead on Nina’s arm; Nina, just as inarticulate as Adam, comes out with only “I know, darling” (Waugh 123-24).  In the film, however, Adam is much more eloquent; after visiting Agatha in the hospital and learning of Nina’s new engagement, Adam himself recites the speech.  Yet this moment of seriousness is so overdone, almost to the point of hysteria, and seems so out of place that it plays as just an awkward moment and does not carry any sort of emotional impact.
     Fry not only strives to create emotions in the viewer; he also bestows on the Bright Young Things a set of emotions that are entirely lacking in the novel.  In the film, the group appears as a tight set of friends who really care about each other—they comfort each other during hard times, they give each other advice, they mourn the loss of Agatha and Miles.  In the book, no one takes the time to comfort one another, no one notices when friends disappear, and almost no one attends Agatha’s funeral.
     The Bright Young Things of the book are also very willing to cash in on each other’s losses.  After Simon’s suicide, Adam accepts the job of Mr. Chatterbox with no compunctions.  When he loses it, Miles takes over without a thought.  In the film, however, Adam takes the column after Simon’s death only under pressure from his boss.  Adam, visibly upset at the suggestion he take over, says, “After this, sir, you’re going to have to shut the column down,” but his boss refuses, citing its huge popularity.  Adam tries again, with “He was my friend,” but reluctantly accepts the job.  Adam and the Bright Young Things are juxtaposed against a worse evil, the money-hungry Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd).
     Despite their wildness, the Bright Young Things are, on the whole, portrayed in a flattering light.  For example, when Adam finds the gold eagle pen of the King of Anatolia (Simon Callow), he returns it to the king, despite the fact that he badly needs money to marry Nina.  This incident does not advance the story in any way; it serves only to highlight Adam’s kindness (and the acting of Callow).  Adam’s selflessness is not at all present in the novel and is directly at odds with Waugh’s intentions: he believed he had “knocked the nonsense out of the attempts to sentimentalize [the younger generation]” (Gallagher 126).
     This overall switch in attitude toward the characters is highlighted by the title change.  Although Fry chose to change the title out of respect for the novel, the title also sets up the audience’s initial response to the characters.  The book’s title, Vile Bodies, highlights the worthlessness and corruption of the Bright Young Things.  Also, physical bodies are highlighted in the title, an image that runs throughout the novel. The book is stuffed with images of crowds, masses of people pushing up against each other.  The movie's title, on the other hand, is lighter and emphasizes the youth and brightness of the characters. They are glamorous and beautiful, the very opposite of vile.  “Things” removes any bodily corruption.
     Of course, it can be argued that it was necessary for Fry to make the characters sympathetic.  If the characters were entirely unsympathetic, no audience would want to watch the film.  Fry explains that he did make a conscious decision to make the characters, Nina especially, sympathetic.  He says in the commentary, when discussing the translation of the phone conversations, that:

In films, of course, you have the disadvantage that you have to show how people are feeling, or at least, actors and actresses reveal their feelings at some point … and obviously, this is the core of this film—as a love story—whether or not she’s upset or whether she’s genuinely flighty.  I don’t think you can follow a character in a film who is so unsympathetic as to not care whether or not she gets married … it stops being an issue.  

It is still an issue, however; it is not uncommon in a satirical film (for example, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, 1964) for the characters to be entirely unsympathetic.  This is accomplished by making the characters into caricatures.  Waugh uses this technique often (as do many other satirists), and in his novels terrible things, such as death or cannibalism, are portrayed without seriously disturbing the reader. The characters in Vile Bodies are caricatures; they have very little emotion or feeling.  Fry could have gone the opposite route; instead of sympathizing with the Bright Young Things and sentimentalizing them, he could have de-humanized them even further and made a successful black comedy.  The issue is why Fry chose sympathy rather than satire and what impact his decision has on the images in the film.
     The film attempts to create a comparison between the time of the Bright Young Things and today. This comparison is highlighted from the very beginning when the viewer sees the paparazzi camped out at a party.  The gossip columns, the attention to fashion, and the parties, while recreating a specific image of the past, are also meant to create ties to the present when gossip columns are ubiquitous, new fads and fashions are constantly being developed and analyzed, and celebrity parties are covered in detail by the press.  The movie’s tagline reinforces the comparison: “Sex … Scandal … Celebrity … Some Things Never Change.”
     The film does not portray the idea that “some things never change” as bad.  The film is certainly not a comment on the unchanging vagaries of human nature.  Rather, the film is a celebration of the fact that nothing has changed, despite the Second World War, the atomic bomb, and the Cold War.  The audience is supposed to connect with the characters.  This connection is a goal of most heritage films, steeped as they are in nostalgia.  Heritage films were supposed to lead the viewer to identify the Englishness of then with the Englishness of now.  The point was to create a sense of continuity, the belief that “some things never change.”  Thus, despite the disparity between the audience and those represented (aristocrats), the film works because of the viewer’s identification with the characters.
     The connection in Bright Young Things is not simply a sense of Englishness.  Rather, the film goes beyond nostalgia for a shared cultural heritage to focus on a shared moment in the history of each individual: youth.  What is being celebrated in the film is not the long-lasting fascination with celebrities, or the elaborate lifestyles of the rich and famous, but rather the extravagance and exuberance of youth. The film mourns the loss of youth and freedom that happens when the world intrudes on the young, as it does on the Bright Young Things when the war begins.  At the same time, the film accepts the necessity of moving on, since one cannot live a youthful life forever, and toward the end everything seems to fall apart: Agatha sick, Miles banished from England, Adam a soldier, Nina married to a man she does not love.  In the film, even if the war did not end the party of the Bright Young Things, they themselves would have brought it to an end (Adam’s speech about the parties seems to be an example of the change in attitude).  The Bright Young Things in the film, once they have overcome their youthful wildness, are able to settle down and be good spouses and parents, as Adam and Nina indicate.
     In Adam and Nina’s happy ending, Fry truly completes the process of identifying with the characters. If Fry had maintained the original ending, the audience would be inclined to see the Bright Young Things as confined to their specific time period, an effect achieved in the book.  In the novel, Adam ends up “on a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world,” and “like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return” (Waugh 220, 224).  It can be assumed that all of the Bright Young Things have died or will die: Agatha has already died, Miles is on the continent where the war is taking place, Adam is again about to engage in battle, and, although Nina is safe in London, the vision is so apocalyptic that the war will surely move to England soon.
     In the film, Adam returns from the war thinking Nina is dead, only to find his son and Nina alive and well.  He buys his family back from Ginger, and Nina and Adam embark on their new life together.  Not only are they both parents, but they have also grown as people.  Nina no longer cares that they have no money, and her focus is no longer on parties but on her job at the factory.  Adam has fought in a terrible war and has become a hero.  This new ending moves them beyond the strict boundary of the novel’s ending.  The audience sees a bigger picture: not just what happened to the lost generation of the 1920s, but what happens when wild youth of any period faces conflict and overcomes it to continue life as responsible citizens.  If it ended with the hopeless note of the novel, the film would seem to say that the wildness of youth cannot be overcome, that it is purposeless and destructive.  Fry sees this period not as meaningless but rather as a transition period that is necessary and normal for generations as well as individuals.
     This celebration of youth is not innocent, just as the Bright Young Things are not as innocent as they are presented in the film.  As the study of Bright Young Things shows, “heritage” no longer applies to a specific set of British films but can be used to study the ideologies of films that strive to create shared categories, such as youth, and the implications of this nostalgic, superficial connection.  In the original heritage films, a common English heritage is celebrated by ignoring the lower classes, colonized subjects, and others unable to share in upper-class life, and the celebration of youth also ignores reality.  Not everyone is able to celebrate youth, and youth can be a troubled time.  Some people never even experience youth; because of social conditions, they are forced to take on responsibilities that do not allow them the luxury of a carefree childhood.  Certainly not all the youths in Britain in the 1920s were able to live the life portrayed in the film.  Glorifying a “shared” youth glosses over life’s harsh reality.  The changes from novel to film are problematic not only because they misrepresent Waugh's vision, but also because the changes create an idealized vision of 1920s Britain and of youth.

Works Cited
Bright Young Things.  Dir. Stephen Fry.  Perf. Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, Miles
     Sheen, and Fenella Woolgar.  New Line Home Entertainment, 2003.
Carens, James F.  Critical Essays on Evelyn Waugh.  Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
Fry, Stephen.  Director’s Commentary.  Bright Young Things.  New Line Home Entertainment, 2003.
Gallagher, Donat, ed.  The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh.  Boston: Little, Brown,
     1984.
Haun, Harry.  “Fry Society: Bright Young Things Glitter in Waugh Adaptation.”  Film Journal
     International 107.8 (2004): 22-24. 
Stannard, Martin.  Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939.  New York: Norton, 1987.
Waugh, Evelyn.  Vile Bodies. 1930.  London: Penguin, 2003.

Editor's Note: Emily Shreve won the Second Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest with her honors thesis written at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.  The above essay is a condensation of her thesis.  Emily is studying for a master's degree in English at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

Some Problems with John Maxwell Hamilton's Introduction to Waugh in Abyssinia 
by Charles E. Linck, Jr.
Texas A & M University-Commerce

     First of all, despite the first note on page ix, Italy can't be getting coffee from Italy.  Maybe from Abyssinia?  On page xii, Hamilton says Scoop (1938) is a "classic" for foreign correspondents, but Nicholas Kulish, author of Last One In (2007), didn't know of it for his relevant anti-Bush novel until someone told him, so he put in an honorary reference after the fact.  Kulish made his hero tell lies that he was "Bill Boot" who worked for National Geographic to prevent some stranger Marines from finding out that he really was a gossip writer (which they'd have ridiculed).  As "Boot," he claims to be interested in an Iraqi 1/4" scorpion, which leads one to wonder if Kulish knew of the article in National Geographic (September 2007) on miniature scorpions (134-44).
     In his review in the Spring 2007 issue of the Newsletter, Donat Gallagher took issue with Hamilton, in an angry yet wishy-washy fashion.  Gallagher was especially irked by Hamilton's comments on Waugh's devotion to the journalistic trade and some mistaken notions about his reporting.  Gallagher also expressed admiration for other statements by Hamilton.
     Hamilton has found a bunch of books with bits and pieces about Waugh during both the coronation and the war trips to Addis Ababa, and Hamilton supplies good references in footnotes for passages from the books by other observers, a bibliography that ordinarily we of the Newsletter wouldn't have found.  Hamilton gives lots of reporters their chances to report on Waugh, and he notes wherein the passages can be found in footnotes, rightly.
     But there are places where he doesn't.  Hamilton, like a freshman using the internet in these days of magnificent opportunity for plagiarism, doesn't have references or proper footnotes for some goodies, which is irksome!
     On page xvii, he tells about Waugh's conducting a horse-riding school and a gin-and-vermouth picnic soak where a fruit salad was spiked enough to make a legation officer fall off his horse.  Apparently Waugh left that out of his account, so we didn't know about it, and Hamilton doesn't give us a reference or footnote either: how come he knows about it then?  Such an interesting bit of horseplay surely deserves an acknowledgement of who told whom about it?  I'd love to know who tattled about that one! And if everybody knows already, I still don't grant Hamilton license to write it up without proper documentation!  Surely it ought to be in Paul A. Doyle's A Reader’s Companion to the Novels and Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh (1989)!
     On page xxi, Hamilton says Waugh pretended to see the coronation banquet though he didn't--so how does Hamilton know that?  He could tell us!  On page xxiii, he says Waugh put "rocks and fish" in other correspondents' beds, and joked and quarreled too, but WHO TATTLED?  Hamilton doesn't say!  Page xxiv has several spots where footnotes or references would be scholarly.  Id est: a Ms. Esme tossed wine in EW's face--how so?  And apparently hothead Evelyn boxed with the writer who said Huxley was #1 and Waugh was #2, but no news on who reported this is visible….
     I don't care who other than me knows all about such things: I still want there to be a reference, a footnote, a book, a passage, a Wikipedia piece, something, anything, to assure me that this isn't just some fictional speculation that Hamilton puts out on his own authority!  I surely would dock a doctoral dissertation for being so loose about authentication!   I'd say "Hard Cheese" on Hamilton's potential for getting his PhD!
     Finally, a sweeter note: Donat Gallagher may be wishy-washy about Hamilton's holey treatise because Hamilton reveals therein that O. D. Gallagher was also a pretty clever foreign correspondent during those events (xxii).  Was this Donat's dad?  Was this the First Cause of Donat's expertise in these matters?  If so, GOOD!

O Would Some Power the Giftie Gie Us, to See Ourselves as Others See Us!
by Donat Gallagher
James Cook University

     Here I was, self-deluded, believing my review of Professor Hamilton’s Scoop was polite and informed, when “wop bang wallop,” as the song used to say, came the revelation, via Charles Linck, that what I had written was “angry yet wishy-washy.”  Like the heroine of The Awakening Conscience(though I lack her hair and beauty), I leapt up from the computer’s lap and resolved never to be wishy-washy or angry again.
     Where I made my mistake, as I now confess, was in thinking that new unpublished information would be of interest.  So when Professor Hamilton repeated the old chestnut about Waugh being a joke reporter because he (Waugh) couldn’t be bothered getting his coronation cable to The Times by the deadline, I countered with the opinion of the then editor of The Times, never previously published, who praised Waugh specifically for his diligence in keeping lines of communication open.  I also shared the fruits of much drudgery among the Contributors’ Marked Copies of The Times, and among other major newspapers on the relevant days.  My conclusion seemed to me clear and definite, viz. that the baby-faced reporter with the outsized cigar was not late with his coronation cable, and might actually have stolen a march on his grizzled old rivals.  And I might have added, which space forbade, that Waugh was quite clearly the second-best reporter in Addis Ababa covering the coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930.
     I now realize, of course, that all that is wishy-washy and I should have trenchantly attacked Professor Hamilton for his footnoting.  Had I been related to that intrepid and fluent war correspondent, O. D. Gallagher, I might have known better.  But sadly I am not, and I didn’t.

Sword of Honour Revisited
Heroism and Passion in Literature: Studies in Honour of Moya Longstaffe, ed. by Graham Gargett. Amsterdam-New York: Editions Rodopi, 2004.  282 pp.  $80.00.  Reviewed by Archie Loss, Penn State Erie. 

     In one essay of this broad-ranging Festschrift on the theme of heroism and passion, written in honor of scholar Moya Longstaffe, Richard York’s “Evelyn Waugh’s Farewell to Heroism” (245-253) revisits the Sword of Honour trilogy.  Using the final “Death-Wish” section as his beginning point, York posits the argument that, for Waugh as for Guy Crouchback, the pity of war in its modern context is that it provides so few opportunities for heroism.  Waugh’s treatment of war in the trilogy "is anti-heroic not just as a stylistic procedure, but as part of a complex reflection on what heroism is or can be" (246).
     Like Waugh himself, as we know from his letters and diaries, Guy joins the army with high hopes in its promise for heroism, only to find that rewards are not always won by those who deserve them and that the opportunities to behave in heroic fashion--assuming Guy is equal to them--can be few and far between.  Eccentrics like Brigadier Ritchie-Hook create their own opportunities, however misunderstood, but medals and other rewards go to uncommitted soldiers like de Souza and Ludovic, neither of whom, in origins or political sympathies, qualifies in Guy’s moral universe, or to self-serving ones like Trimmer, whose heroism is strictly incidental to his other aims.
     A large part of the problem lies in the “inability of modern society to provide a context for real heroism” (248), and this lack becomes a “major theme of the trilogy,” reflecting the larger theme, pervasive to Waugh’s work, of the “myth of decline” posited by David Lodge in a 1974 essay cited by York.  In Sword of Honour, Guy’s disillusionment is only confirmed and intensified by Ivor Claire’s demonstrated lack of heroism.  For Guy, Ivor fails to behave in accordance with the dictates of his class.  His willingness to abandon his men in Crete rather than face the possibility of imprisonment by the Germans is another instance of the failure of heroism in the modern world.  Guy is unable to excuse such a lapse in the behavior of a gentleman despite Ian’s willingness later to become re-involved in the war against the Japanese in Burma.
     In the end, Guy is able to find some form of redemption only in saving the lives of a group of Jews being victimized by Communist partisans and then (after a brief period of re-marriage to Virginia) in a second marriage in which he has children.  Like Roger of Waybroke, the knight whose tomb became the beginning point of his pilgrimage, Guy’s search for honor fails in the public sphere of war.
     This sums up the essential argument of York’s essay, none of which breaks any significantly new ground.  Indeed, his interpretation of the trilogy occurred to its earliest critics and has become by now standard.  In 1961, for instance, in a review of Unconditional Surrender, Christopher Derrick laid out the same ideas (see Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage, ed. Martin Stannard, London: Routledge, 1984, 427-30) and numerous others--some of whom are cited by York in his second note--have developed similar interpretations.  As well as it fits the theme of heroism and passion that informs and unifies the book of which it is part, the value of York’s essay for the reader of Waugh is its summation of the standard interpretation of the war trilogy.  Although it cites many relevant passages, in no way does it modify prevailing points of view or manage to become essential.

     This television documentary is based Alexander Waugh’s book, Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, reviewed in the Winter 2005 issue of the Newsletter.  The TV version follows the chronology of the book by tracing the father/son relationship through five (or six depending on how you count) generations of the Waugh family beginning with Dr. Alexander Waugh (“The Brute”) and continuing through the author’s young son Bron.  But the TV program opens up the book by having Alexander retell the story to his young son and discuss it with family members and friends in interviews set in various locations where the Waughs lived or were educated.  This structure works quite well and keeps the documentary flowing very nicely over its approximately 1½ hours.  The documentary is produced and directed by Fran Landsman, whose previous TV documentaries also relate to families and children.
     The Brute is covered during a visit to Midsomer Norton, his home now converted into offices where Alexander and his son find little to connect with their subject.  They also visit his grave, which young Bron appropriately desecrates by spitting, or at least trying to.  Arthur is discussed on a visit to his two North London houses at 11 Hillfield Road, West Hampstead, and at Underhill, the house Arthur had built to his specifications near Hampstead.   The discussion covers Arthur’s strangely obsessive favoring of Alec over Evelyn.  Alexander also mentions how Evelyn achieved payback through his satirical portrayal of Arthur in several books, including “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing,” dramatized by BBC4 and broadcast in May 2006.  Arthur shared with Mr. Loveday an obsession with young women on bicycles.  A brief discussion of Alec Waugh is filmed on location at Sherborne School, which Arthur and Alec attended but Evelyn did not.  Alexander is accompanied by Peter Waugh, Alec’s younger son, who remembers his father being rather distant, which is perhaps not surprising given his inveterate womanizing.
     Evelyn’s boarding-school education did not begin until he was fourteen, when he was sent away to Lancing College in Sussex.  Discussion of his life continues on location at Lancing in an interview with Evelyn’s youngest son, Alexander’s Uncle Septimus.  The two discuss schooling, with both expressing their disinclination to send their children to boarding schools.  Alexander points out that he was the only Waugh who did not go to the University of Oxford, but all (including Septimus) did badly.  In the Hertford College dining hall Alexander denigrates Dean Cruttwell before the latter’s portrait, musing that Cruttwell and Arthur both served as victims of Evelyn’s revenge.  Alexander next visits (apparently for the first time) Evelyn’s house at Piers Court in Gloucestershire, where his father was born.  He is accompanied by his uncle, James Waugh, who was Evelyn’s second son and apparently his least liked child (“dull as ditchwater”), Margaret being his favorite.  James says that, while he respected his father and was probably “fond” of him, he never felt that there was anything like “love” between them. 
     In a visit to Pixton Park in Somerset, Alexander interviews his father’s nanny, who says that Evelyn may have expected too much of his children, including Auberon, who spent much of his first six years there.  At Downside School, which Auberon attended, Alexander recounts many of Auberon’s challenges to the school’s hierarchy, a posture he continued to take with other hierarchies throughout his life as a journalist.  As a father, Auberon differed from his predecessors in that he dropped the tradition of paternal favoritism.  Alexander followed his father’s example, as shown in scenes at home with his wife Eliza and their three children (Mary and Sally, both older than Bron).
     The closing scene of the family odyssey takes place at Combe Florey in Somerset, where, according to Alexander, Auberon lived happily with his family for over thirty years.  His mother Teresa, also a writer, still lives there but does not appear in the program, which is to be regretted.  Alexander and young Bron visit Evelyn’s grave there, but it becomes evident that Alexander has not yet come to terms with the loss of his father.  His son visits Auberon’s grave in what looks like a churchyard, also apparently at Combe Florey, and Alexander explains that he is not yet able to accompany him.  He recalls that he was with his father when he died and that they found it unnecessary to exchange verbal endearments.  Although he cannot express it, his affection for his father evidently rose to the level that most would call love.
     In the concluding scenes at home, Alexander and his wife express their hope that the children will have happy lives, something previous generations were not always able to expect.  He concludes that that there is really no such thing as a “good” or “bad” father, but that fathers and sons just have to rub along together as best they can until both are dead.  He then reads to his son the “letter of explanation” that also serves as the conclusion of the book, dedicated to young Bron, who asks if he can “treasure” it and read it immediately, causing Alexander to smile at such ambition beyond his years. 

     Although Collecting the Imagination looks like a coffee-table book, it is rather frank in presenting some of the low as well as the high points of the growth of the massive archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.  Perhaps the last chapter, on the current regime, is a bit Panglossian, but on the whole it celebrates, accurately as far as I can judge, the people who founded, acquired, catalogued, and made available this wealth of material.  The roster includes not only directors and staff members but also patrons, donors, and book dealers.
     Anyone who has been to the Center and now anyone who reads this book will have some, though by no means a full, sense of the extent and depth of material about writers, major and minor, photographers, filmmakers, journalists, and all sorts of ancillary people associated with the written and graphic arts.  For example, the Center contains ten tons of material from Norman Mailer, twenty from David O. Selznick, Compton Mackenzie’s toilet cushion, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, not all of which seems to be on the digital catalogue.  In recent years, many authors have been pleased to see their files go to Texas not just because of the money—of which there is less than there was in the fat days of the 1960s and 1970s—but also because the mass of the collection as a whole has a gravitational force.
     Of course, most people go to the Center happily oblivious of its entire holdings and focus on the author whose works have drawn them there, but this book will give them the sense of a history beyond their narrow concerns.
     Speaking of narrow concerns, reading the book has been an odd experience for me because it covers a major part of my scholarly life.  I first went to the Center in 1966 in my early thirties; my last visit came just after I turned seventy.  Many of the staff members from the early and middle periods are not just names but very real people who became part of an alternative universe, entirely separate from everyday life of family and colleagues a day’s drive to the north.
     In 1966, and until 1971, the Center was housed on the fourth floor of the Academic Center, atop the undergraduate library.  I first went to examine its holdings of some Ronald Firbank notebooks.  Before I was admitted to the reading room, I was interviewed by Mary M. Hirth, who initially reminded me of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, rather gorgon-like and a “monster without being a myth, which is rather unfair.”  Reminded of my purpose, she announced that another scholar had looked at the materials and that he didn’t find them useful.  My response, “They’re useful if you know what you’re doing,” seemed to take her aback, and after that we got on well.  By the time I came back, at Warren Roberts’s invitation, to catalogue the recently acquired Waugh materials in the early 1970s, I was treated cordially and often, as many others have testified of their receptions, much better.
     In those early days, the reading room was almost idyllic.  As Richard W. Oram notes, between 1963 and 1972, “82% of manuscript users were from outside the University,” and when a friend from graduate school then on the UT faculty came to pick me up for lunch and saw none of his colleagues and hardly anyone else, he asked, indignantly, “Where is everybody?”  On one occasion I was happy to be almost alone.  Turning over letters and cards from Evelyn to Alec in order to describe them for the Catalogue, I read the message that read something like “Did H. G. Wells fuck Mrs. Jacobs?  I need to know.”  My howls were stifled into hiccups as I went into the hall to splash cold water on myself.  Then I read Alec’s annotation about his reply: as far as he knew, Wells had not succeeded in accomplishing his desires.  Another trip to the water fountain.  When I returned, I considered how I was going to annotate the entry, but by that time I was too weak to laugh.
     More somber was my meeting with Cyril Connolly, at Texas for the opening of the exhibit based on his list of important books of the modern movement.  As we passed a display case on our way back from lunch, an opened copy of his The Unquiet Grave caught his eye—annotated, in severe, almost contemptuous terms, by Evelyn Waugh.  Connolly had the copy brought upstairs to go through the whole book, and he was devastated.  I tried to console him by pointing out that Waugh was in Yugoslavia surrounded by Communists and drinking bad wine, but I obviously failed.  I did wonder why, since Waugh teased him mercilessly for decades, Connolly was surprised at this criticism.
     The Academic Center was a good place to work.  Many of the books, as opposed to manuscripts, by twentieth-century writers were shelved within easy reach of the desks, an arrangement that let me go down the shelves, opening one book after another, to see which of them contained Waugh’s annotations or to verify a reference.
     The new Humanities Research Center opened in 1971, and by that time my family had two cars, so that I could drive down and, when the Center was closed, see more of Austin than Guadalupe Street on the west side of the University—far more interesting and less sleazy than it was the last time I went there—including an early showing of Blazing Saddles in a theater south of the river.  The new reading room was more forbidding than the old one, though one still had to use number-2 pencils to take notes (I still have my box of them, many reduced to stubs) if one didn’t have a typewriter and, later, a computer to take into one of the enclosed studies.
     While the new building took a good deal of planning, not all of it was well considered.  In order to preserve manuscripts in case of a fire, the builders included a system that, water being out of the question, would flood the building with a noxious fire-suppressant, perhaps carbon monoxide, which would extinguish the fire—and all of the patrons and staff.  We were assured that the system had been disconnected.
     Without windows or ready access to materials—everything has to be requested by call slip, retrieved by staff, and brought to the user’s table, in some cases on a cart—scholars were confined to desks like rows of Dickens clerks.  I at least hated to leave when the reading room closed because I felt a purity of purpose in being able—not forced—to focus on a task that consumed me.  Sometimes it was almost overwhelmingly consuming, and I suffered from what one of the authors in this history calls “writer’s indigestion” when Warren Roberts informed me that the Center had acquired the files of A. D. Peters, Waugh’s literary agent, amounting to, I think, eighteen crammed file boxes.  Warren felt intestinal distress of another kind, backing out of publishing my catalogue because it had grown huge.  Later a junior staff member came to my desk and told me that another huge collection of Waugh material had arrived.  By that time, even I was surfeited—and delighted, when he took me back to view the material, to learn that it was Alec Waugh’s papers.
     A friend was happier to be allowed into an off-site storage area to try to track down a fugitive article that only he could possibly have known about.  He was less happy to emerge flea-bitten, without finding what he sought.  Perhaps the conservation programs and efforts to renovate the building have kept vermin out of the HRC itself—unless they came from some explorer’s kit and have had to be preserved, as was the case with a coffin full of sugar that had to be encased in plastic, sent to Gloria Swanson by an enemy.
     An unexpected benefit of going to the HRC over the years was contact with staff and other patrons.  I was able to see major scholars like Dan Laurence (Shaw) and Roberts (D. H. Lawrence) at work and to see how far I had to go.  And the presence of people at all stages of their careers working on a variety of projects gave me a sense that I was involved in a larger community and that I was doing something worth doing.  Not everyone felt that way: a colleague wondered at my faith in spending all that time on scholarship.  He seemed unconvinced by my reply that I had a three-year lead on everyone else in the field, and I didn’t bother to tell him that I enjoyed the process very much.  Later he gave up tenure to become a real-estate salesman.
     By the mid-1970s I had been at the HRC often enough that some of the younger staff regarded me as a fixture, and some older ones, like Lois Garcia and John Payne and many others, had become, if not exactly friends, people whom I was pleased to see each time I arrived and who went beyond the bounds of what a visitor might expect in helping me find and deal with material.  They weren’t exactly collaborators, but I don’t know what else to call them.
     I was also able to learn from mistakes.  One staff member, who shall remain nameless, confided that he had to go back and re-measure an entire collection of manuscripts because he had not noticed the small gap between the end of his ruler and the beginning of the measuring marks.  Since I was making up cataloguing procedures as I went along, I was mostly glad that it hadn’t happened to me.
     Other company arrived from abroad: Donat Gallagher and his family came from Australia to spend months in residence and offered good meals and pleasant company during my intermittent visits.  Martin Stannard from England did research on what I think was his dissertation and then his biography of Waugh.  Alain Blayac came from France to consult the archives.  On one memorable evening, we gathered to talk about our work and to get a sense, by then no means universal, of Waugh’s importance as a writer.  Once a drop-in visitor working on Waugh came to my desk, saw the bright blue cover of the Waugh Checklist, and said, “Oh, you’re that Robert Davis!” That was and has been a unique experience, so I may be forgiven for swelling a hat size or two.
     After I completed the Catalogue and Evelyn Waugh, Writer, I had less occasion to go back.  Once, on the way back from a spring trip to the Texas coast with my son, I stopped to show him where I had spent all that time.  He saw a manuscript page of Einstein’s writing and was much impressed—the only time I saw him express emotion during that early teen-age stoic Red-Indian phase.  He had to go to the fourth floor; after the recent renovation and expulsion of the art gallery on the lower floors, the Center is better able to display its wares to the public as well as to scholars, who have always been well-served by the force of Ransom’s injunction that the Center was to be “a working library, not a museum.”
     Over the years, my friends and associates at the Center resigned, retired, and otherwise moved on. When I went to the opening of the Greene-Waugh exhibit in 2004, the HRC, now named in honor of Harry Ransom, the prime mover in establishing and augmenting the collection, had been remodeled beyond easy recognition.  It is now slicker, sleeker, and in some ways more comfortable, though not more hospitable.  But a few of the old staff, now in very senior positions, remembered me; Selina Hastings, back to do research for a biography of Somerset Maugham, spoke kindly of my work on Waugh; and Thomas Staley, the new (to me) director was very cordial.  But the HRC was no longer home, nor did it seem, in the root sense, familiar.  I did feel some nostalgic connection with the place and cast a long backward glance at the young and progressively older scholar whom I had supplanted.  And I felt very grateful to all of the collectors, bookmen, scholars, and staff who had provided the conditions to help me make many of the important changes in my life and career.

     As can be deduced from its title, this book looks as if it will cover the same material already included in two previous works--Humphrey Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his Friends (1989) and Martin Green’s Children of the Sun: A Narrative of “Decadence”  in England after 1918 (1976).  To some extent it does.  Perhaps this generation is fated to be revisited every fifteen years or so.  Although Taylor’s book describes the lives and works of the same people as its predecessors (in particular Waugh, Brian Howard, Robert Byron, the Mitfords and others), it is more focused on the brief period when the Young People in question shone at their brightest (1924-30) and also includes more detailed description of several members who were on or outside the margins of the earlier books.[1]
     Taylor’s book concentrates on the group he defines as the Bright Young People (BYP) as a whole (although the definition is loose and seems to change from time to time).  After some introductory chapters, Taylor’s book begins in earnest with a much-publicized “treasure hunt” that took place in 1924.  Among the participants was Elizabeth Ponsonby, whom Taylor follows most closely through the BYP’s flowering and decline.  Others included by Taylor but largely ignored by earlier works include Eddie Gathorne-Hardy and Stephen Tennant. 
     Taylor gained access to the diaries of Elizabeth Ponsonby’s parents and an archive kept by Gathorne-Hardy’s family.  A 1990 biography of Stephen Tennant is the main source for his otherwise obscure life.[2]
     Taylor frequently refers to Waugh’s life and writings of this period.  If the index is used as a guide, there are more entries for Evelyn Waugh than for any other subject.  He is considered both a chronicler and a member of the BYP.  Decline and Fall (DF), Vile Bodies (VB), the story “Winner Takes All,” and Waugh's diaries and letters are mined for material.  Taylor cites Waugh’s acquaintance with Elizabeth Ponsonby as evidence of his acceptance by the BYP.[3]  Her prominence during the flourishing of the BYP contributed to a major character in Vile Bodies, the Hon. Agatha Runcible.
     Waugh also uses other BYPs as models for characters in his early novels.  Eddie Gathorne-Hardy [4] and Stephen Tennant contribute to Miles Malpractice and Brian Howard to Johnny Hoop, only to reappear later as Anthony Blanche (also based on Harold Acton) in Brideshead Revisited (BR).  Cecil Beaton, another BYP, is the model for David Lennox, the photographer and decorator, a character appearing in DF, VB and Put Out More Flags. 
     While much of the book tracks material already covered in the works of Carpenter and Green, as well as the many biographies of Waugh, Taylor manages to produce fresh analysis in several chapters by concentrating on a single theme.  In the chapter “Young Men on the Make,” he cites both Waugh and Beaton as middle-class boys who gained entry to the upper classes, in part through their associations with the BYP.  Whereas Beaton rose through calculated tuft-hunting and name-dropping beginning at Cambridge, Waugh did not get his own act together until several years after coming down from Oxford.  After art school and teaching in the early years of the BYP (1924-26), Waugh began to see his future as a writer in 1927, about the same time he gained admission to the BYP through his friends Richard and David Plunket Green and their sister Olivia, who introduced him to their cousin, Elizabeth Ponsonby.[5]
     Taylor uses the lives of two representative members of the BYP to illustrate a point about the group as a whole: one chapter compares the relative success of Robert Byron to the failure of Brian Howard, and another considers homosexuality among the BYP with Eddie Gathorne-Hardy and Stephen Tennant as subjects.  In addition, Taylor uses brief sketches or vignettes between chapters to offer what are effectively extended footnotes on subjects not lending themselves to more extended discussion.  These topics include Alan Pryce-Jones’s extensive connections with establishment figures among the BYP (contrasted with Waugh's and Beaton's lack of connections), the role played by Inez Holden on the margins of the BYP, the books never written by Brian Howard, and the sources of Robert Byron’s volcanic temper.  These vignettes offer welcome relief from the darker narrative, the negative attitudes of Elizabeth Ponsonby's parents toward the BYP, and the downward spiral of her life.
     Taylor’s book is worth reading for Waugh enthusiasts despite much repetition of earlier books covering Waugh’s life and works.  Because of the organization, it is easy for someone familiar with the material to skip around.  And because it concentrates on a brief period that coincides with what are probably the most formative years for Waugh’s career and personality, the book offers interesting new insights into Waugh’s life, his works, and his relationships with members of the BYP. 

     When Jessica Mitford died in 1996, her sister Deborah compiled from the obituaries a list of adjectives used to describe “the Mitford Girls”: “Famous Notorious Talented Glamorous Turbulent Unpredictable Celebrated Rebellious Colourful & Idiosyncratic.”  The list doesn’t really do them justice, but it’s a start.
     All but the most thorough readers of Waugh’s diaries and correspondence will see the Mitfords as bit players in his life—with the possible exception of Nancy, his most important epistolary foil,[1] and it is perhaps salutary to see him in a cameo role in the long and complicated story of the interaction between a close-knit and contentious family who were seldom out of the public eye from the 1930s until the end of the century and now, with this collection, beyond.  When Nancy published The Pursuit of Love in 1945, Mosley says, “almost for the first time the name ‘Mitford’ appeared in the press unattached to scandal.”
     Before that, Diana had left Bryan Guinness (Vile Bodies was dedicated to them) to become the mistress and later the wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, to whose ideas she remained faithful beyond his death; Jessica had eloped with Esmond Romilly and had become a Communist; Unity had moved to Germany to be near the “Poor sweet Führer,” gushed like a teenybopper when “He talked a lot about Jews, which was lovely,” and shot herself, not fatally, on the day that England declared war on Germany.  Pamela, who contracted polio in her youth, stayed out of the spotlight, remembered the menu of every meal she had ever eaten, and was regarded by her sisters as amusingly dotty.  Deborah, the youngest and the least damaged by dotty (father) and cold (mother) parents, became Duchess of Devonshire and is, unless something happened this morning, the last surviving sister.  Well before that she revealed herself to be a dowager duchess in training, and she restored Chatsworth and founded successful businesses to maintain it.  Regarded by Nancy as stuck at the age of nine, she seems to be the only really sane one of the lot even if she did become an Elvis Presley fan.
     Although Unity has been praised for her liveliness, no trace of wit shows through her letters.  Pamela was the cause of wit in others rather than witty herself.  Jessica was more acerbic than witty, and Diana more analytical.  Nancy was a famous gossip and detractor—the reason that she and Waugh got on well—but the real surprise is Deborah.  At the opening of Parliament, she encounters duchesses who smell bad—“Do you think they had rolled?  Surely not, I mean where could they have found anything to roll in?”  The Life Peeresses look as though “their wild grey hair had been specially tousled for the occasion, talk about dragged through a hedge backwards, but where did they find the hedge?”  The description of her husband’s investiture with the Order of the Garter is longer and just as funny.  (It’s on pp. 765-66—to follow the Mitford custom of giving page references to juicy parts to save the correspondent’s time.)
     Between them, they seemed to know almost everyone who was anyone in England, America, and France.  Debo, who seems to have gotten on with everyone, even all of her sisters, and traveled widely with her husband on official business, knew people nicknamed straight out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel—Fruity, Bobbity, Boofy, and so on—as well as Lady Bird Johnson, whom she liked, and Princess Diana, whom she thought mad, calculating, and manipulative.  Her description of her grandson’s twenty-firster makes the first chapter of Brideshead Revisited seem like one of the grimmer episodes in a George Gissing novel.  Jessica was involved with the American Left and Civil Rights Movement.  Diana was widely and wildly popular before she took up with Mosley and remained loyal to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.  Many of Waugh’s friends and acquaintances pop up in the letters and footnotes, including Peter Rodd, who was, like Basil Seal, drunk, impecunious, and “teaching” and who, at the beginning of World War II, “was offered a job in propaganda but says he must kill Germans.”
     Most readers will probably approach the book by way of the index—rightly.  Having read it through, I can say that it’s possible to have a little too much Mitford.  Diana admitted that “'the Mitfords' would madden ME if I didn’t chance to be one” and later says that “Perhaps we are [horrible], but we do at least all love each other” before backing out of a party for the publication of Nancy’s letters so as not to spoil it for Decca, with whom she had been at odds politically for decades.
     However many disappointments Diana had in life, she seems to have been lucky in her daughter-in-law, the editor of this volume.  Close enough to the family to understand the dynamics, yet distanced enough to be objective about her mother-in-law’s devotion to Mosley—not unaccountable, since she accounts for it—Charlotte Mosley has done an exemplary job of editing.  The introductory apparatus includes brief biographies of the six women, a genealogical tree, a list of nicknames (rather like the cast of characters before a Russian play—everyone seems to have at least three), and a clear explanation of what (less than five per cent of the total archive) she included and why.
     One question remains: why should we be interested in the Mitfords?  Not, I think, because of great talent.  Even Nancy’s novels (which I find unreadable) seem now to be a period curiosity.  Diana’s memoirs are read, if at all, because of whom she knew rather than inherent quality.  Deborah’s books about Chatsworth would seem to appeal to a particular kind of Anglophile.  Jessica is probably the best remembered in America for her muckraking journalism, and muckrakers are honored longer than they are read.
     The Mitfords are more symptomatic of an age than significant in it.  However, symptoms are useful in diagnosis and in post-mortems.  But the real reason—perhaps "excuse" is a better word—is that the letters give an extraordinary picture, pathetic, tragic, and mundane—of a family who approached the world with genuine wit and humor.