EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 39, No. 2
Autumn 2008

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Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess: Some Parallels as Catholic Writers
by John J. Stinson
SUNY Fredonia

     A brief essay of mine on the affinities between Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess was published in this newsletter in 1976 (Vol. 10, No. 3: 11-12).  Obviously, much has happened between then and now. Burgess died of lung cancer in London in November 1993, age 76, the author of some sixty-five to sixty-nine books, depending on how one counts.  Auberon Waugh was one of two eulogists (the other being the novelist William Boyd) at a memorial service held at St. Paul’s (Anglican) Church, Covent Garden (the “Actors’ Church”).  Auberon Waugh himself died in 2001; Graham Greene had passed in 1991. When Muriel Spark died in 2006, all four of the major English (Roman) Catholic novelists of the mid-to-late twentieth century were gone.  Interestingly, only one, Burgess, was a “cradle Catholic.”  This he often cited as a matter of pride, along with the claim that his was a recusant family who had successfully resisted Protestant conversion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
     Burgess identified himself as a traditional but also non-practicing Catholic.  The “traditional Catholic” writer classification allies the two men in the public mind and was undoubtedly one of the reasons Burgess was drawn to Waugh’s writing.  His only quarrel with Waugh’s brand of Catholicism had to do with the way Waugh characteristically represented it in association with the English aristocracy.  The Augustinian view of humankind that emphasizes our propensity to sinfulness because of the inheritance of original sin was heavily subscribed to by both writers and is easily detectable in their fictions[1].  Burgess highly regarded the work of the older writer, an admiration readily apparent in numerous essays, reviews and occasional pieces turned out over the years by the prodigiously prolific Burgess.  In fact, he brings into his very last creative work, the verse novel Byrne (published posthumously in 1994), the outstanding English Catholic novelists of Waugh’s time—Greene, Spark, and Waugh himself.  In this stanza, the narrative voice tells us about confessions once heard by Tim Byrne, a doubting priest:

He’d even, on a long-dead eve of Christmas,
Confessed the dubious Catholic Graham Greene.
He recognized him through his rhotacismus.[2]
The sins were quite conventionally unclean
Though glamourised by an exotic scene.
Evelyn Waugh’s transgressions though had been
Mere scruples, Tim was saddened to remark.
It was too late to hear the sins of Muriel Spark. (Byrne 93)

This is not the best stanza of the 600 ottava rima of Byronic style in this generally well-received novel, but since all male members of the Byrne family have definite quotients of Burgess himself in them, the author hopes to make absolutely sure, by placing himself alongside the other three in this scene, that he is remembered among those Catholic novelists that he thought most distinguished of the previous fifty years.  Because, though, of a falling out, Burgess denies his own esteem for the work of Greene, so we earlier have these lines:

In regions where mosquitoes bite, heat prickles,
Humidity is high and spirits low,
Concupiscence sporadically tickles,
And white men go to pieces, as we’ve seen
In overlauded trash by Graham Greene. (Byrne 39)

     Waugh and Greene are revealed in their correspondence as men who became friends largely because of their common faith and who, over time, developed real affection for each other even though the relationship was sometimes tested.  Burgess too came to know Greene, and a casual friendship developed but soured after a while.  Although the root cause of their public falling out remains unclear, Norman Sherry, in Vol. 3 of The Life of Graham Greene, devotes a whole chapter to the ensuing feud which he titles “Boxing with Burgess” (753-64).  No evidence exists that Burgess ever met Waugh or corresponded with him, but the two men, despite real and pronounced differences, did have much in common.  (The Harry Ransom Center lists 139 boxes of Burgess papers, but Evelyn Waugh is not in the index of correspondents.  Graham Greene is, though, as is Auberon Waugh.)  Both Waugh and Burgess condemned the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), especially those regarding the liturgy, particularly the demotion of the Tridentine Mass, the celebration of which soon came to require special ecclesiastical approval.  Waugh was equally fearful of what he saw as deep doctrinal changes affecting faith and morals being pushed by modernists at the Council.  Both men seemed to deplore these changes as part of a general leveling and vulgarization that they saw in twentieth-century society, a main thematic thrust in the oeuvre of both, inherited in part from the strong and provable influence that Eliot’s The Waste Land had on each of them.
     In the late summer and early autumn of 1962 Waugh learned about changes being proposed to the Council.  While he had been a liberal Catholic of outspoken views, he became an even more dedicated champion of conservatism who argued formidably and often, but more or less respectfully and succinctly, against what he saw as the catastrophic undermining of the Church by those now called progressives or modernists.  He wrote a cogent essay titled “The Same Again, Please,” which argues firmly, but concisely and with a tone of sharp-edged reasonableness, against the feared and impending changes (Essays 602-09).  The essay was published in the Spectator in England on November 23, 1962, and in America in National Review on December 4th of the same year (Essays 602).  Other tart polemics appeared in print, causing him, quite properly, to be regarded as one of the chief lay spokespersons for conservative Catholics.  Those who were in the habit of identifying the traditional Church with political and social reaction were inclined to find Waugh’s repositioning a logical development.  Waugh engaged in more vigorous argument at the beginning of the pontificate of Paul VI, who succeeded John XXIII upon his death in 1963.  As Douglas Lane Patey indicates, Waugh wrote a long letter to the editor of the Catholic Herald about matters before the Council, “Changes in the Church: Questions for the ‘Progressives’” (Essays 628-30), and replied in print seventeen times to opinions expressed by others (Patey 360).
     In the opening year or so of the Council Waugh’s arguments found favor with two English prelates who were quite active participants, Archbishop (later Cardinal) John Heenan, and Bishop George Dwyer of Leeds, consecrated Archbishop of Birmingham in 1965 (Patey 360).  Anthony Burgess, a “step-cousin,” as he puts it, of Dwyer, was present at the consecration of this extremely well-read and sophisticated bishop who engaged with him over the years in literary and theological conversation (You’ve Had Your Time 115-16).  Waugh’s disappointment grew as he began to see that he was defending a mostly lost cause.  He kept his anger in check, though, even when Cardinal Heenan and perhaps other prelates gave assurances that they agreed with him but later took a different line in the Council (Letters 624n).  If there were, though, ambivalences and seeming paradoxes in Heenan’s positions, there were also some in Waugh’s and even Pope John’s.
     In 1965 and 1966, Waugh’s letters to friends contain terse but heartfelt expressions of pain.  On March 9, 1966, just a month before his sudden death on Easter morning, April 10th, Waugh had written to his friend Diana (Mitford) Mosley that he “had become very old in the last two years….  The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me” (Letters 638).  He wrote to her again on March 30th that “Easter used to mean so much to me.  Before Pope John and his Council—they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy….  I now cling to the Faith doggedly without joy.  Church going is a pure duty parade.  I shall not live to see it restored” (Letters 639).
     Waugh’s feelings about Pope John appear to have been genuinely ambivalent.  Early in John’s pontificate Waugh, in writing to friends, mentioned that he had a “crush” on the new, very affable pope.  Waugh had a sense of grievance against John’s predecessor, Pius XII, because of alterations in the Holy Week liturgy, and he suspected that the already elderly John would not have a bent for innovation, even though he was known to be an ecumenist, which was not at all to Waugh’s taste.  Waugh was surprised at John’s calling of the Council, which Waugh felt was ill-advised and naïve; soon after he felt that forces of change in the Council were outmaneuvering or steamrollering the traditionalists, irrespective of where John stood himself.  When John died in 1963, the Saturday Evening Post commissioned a piece from Waugh; it was published as “An Appreciation of Pope John” in the July 27th issue of that year.  Waugh praises John for his “warmth,” his “spontaneous affability,” his “charity, prudence, and humility.”  He claims to have found him a “man of hope,” “youthful in mind” although nearly 77 at the beginning of his pontificate (Essays 614-18).  Waugh’s compliments seem sincere and generous enough unless we notice that he says nothing about John’s insight, wisdom, learning, judgment, or informed perspective.  Precise in almost all he wrote, Waugh is quite probably making a statement by his silences, damning with faint praise and innuendo in key places.
     Burgess attended both primary and secondary Catholic schools in his native Manchester, Bishop Bilsborough Memorial School and Xaverian College respectively.  At about the age of sixteen, having been exposed to the doubts of some of his teachers, who were, ironically, Xaverian brothers, Burgess began to lose his own faith (Aggeler 5).  Burgess, though, had deeply formed emotional and aesthetic associations with the Church.  His family’s parish was Holy Name, Manchester, where the famous “Carl Rosa Opera Company would sing a flamboyant high mass with orchestral accompaniment” (Little Wilson 50).  Music was to become important for Burgess (as it was for Joyce, his primary influence); in fact, Burgess wished to be as well known for his musical compositions as for his literary ones.
     In an interview in 1970 Burgess said that “I’m inclined to see the Catholic Church now as all Pelagian, and Pope John as the emissary of the Devil” (Page 22).  In 1980 Burgess assaulted the Second Vatican Council in earnest, a decade and a half after it had concluded.  Not enough evidence exists to determine if Burgess’s religious views were influenced at all by intermittent conversations with his step-mother’s close relative (apparently a nephew or cousin), Archbishop Dwyer, a prominent and conservative English presence at the Council, but it is interesting to note that when the Independent asked Burgess “to name his hero” in 1989, he nominated Dwyer, who “always understood precisely what my novels were about” (Biswell 277).  In 1980 Burgess said that with the changes in the Church brought about by John XXIII, “a whole area of my heart was cauterized” (Darling D9), and he made an unexpectedly simple and simplistic remark about Pope John: “I think he was a bad man.  I think he was dangerous” (Dudar 55).  John was commonly called "the good pope," and Burgess’s “bad man” may express his caustic disapproval of that designation.  Both interviews were given to promote Earthly Powers, his 1980 novel that he hoped would be regarded as his magnum opus, as it is regarded by some.  The novel is long, 607 pages in the Simon and Schuster hardback, and a plot summary would be out of place here.  Suffice to say that one of the main characters is an Italian priest, Carlo Campanati, who rises in the Church hierarchy and eventually becomes pope, succeeding Pius XII.  Quite soon thereafter, he convenes the Second Vatican Council, leaving us with no doubt that Burgess’s fictional character is based heavily on Pope John.  While not forgetting that all parts of the novel are situated within a sophisticated fictional structure, we might note the narrator’s (and probably Burgess’s own) nastily personal jabs, whether satirically or humorously intended: the John-like pope is seen as “a waddling banner for the deadly sin of gluttony” (Earthly Powers 164) and the possessor of “a big complicated nose [that is] a cornucopia of hairs unplucked” (EP 181); it is said that “Edward G. Robinson [is] about [his] height though not as ugly” (EP 323).  What is more, this same pope is symbolically linked to the devil himself.  Burgess may well seem ham-handed and adolescent in the above examples, evincing nothing of Waugh’s rapier-like wit.  A comparison of the styles of Waugh and Burgess would have to be part of a different essay. 

Notes
[1] For definitions and a brief discussion of Augustianism and Pelagianism, see Stinson, 21-22.
[2] "Rhotacismus" means difficulty in pronouncing the r sound.

Works Cited
     Aggeler, Geoffrey. Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1979.
     Biswell, Andrew.  The Real Life of Anthony Burgess.  Oxford: Picador, 2005.
     Boytinck, Paul. Anthony Burgess: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide. New York: Garland, 1985.
     Burgess, Anthony. Byrne. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995.
     ---. Earthly Powers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
     ---. Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Autobiography. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986.
     ---. You’ve Had Your Time: The Second Part of the Confessions. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
     Darling, Lynn. “The Haunted Exile of Novelist Anthony Burgess.” Washington Post 26 December 1980: D1+. Qtd. in Boytinck, #1769, 281.
     Dudar, Helen. “Burgess: A Nomad Pens a Big Book.” Los Angeles Times 28 December 1980: 55. Qtd. in Boytinck, #1770, 281.
     Page, Malcolm. “Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Performer.” West Coast Review 4 (January 1970): 21-24.
     Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
     Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Three: 1955-1991. New York: Viking, 2004.
     Stinson, John J. Anthony Burgess Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
     Waugh, Evelyn. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, 1983.
     ---. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1980.

Evelyn Waugh and The Varieties of Religious Experience
by John Howard Wilson
Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania

     On the day after Christmas in 1926, Evelyn Waugh found himself on a ship bound for Greece.  He was reading The Varieties of Religious Experience (Diaries 273), a volume of lectures by William James.  Michael Davie, editor of Waugh’s diaries, explains that Varieties is “a classic analysis, published 1902, of the psychology of conversion” (273n).  Davie’s description is a simplification: only two of James’s twenty lectures deal with conversion, while five deal with saintliness, two with mysticism, and individual lectures with various other topics.  In fact, James’s title, with its emphasis on varieties, is a better description of the book’s contents.  Martin Stannard nevertheless follows Davie: in the first volume of his biography of Waugh, Stannard writes that “William James’s book (1902) deals with the psychology of conversion” (130n).  The Varieties of Religious Experience is also mentioned in several other studies of Waugh, including Jeffrey Heath’s The Picturesque Prison (1982), Humphrey Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation (1990), Selina Hastings’s Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (1994), and Norman Page’s An Evelyn Waugh Chronology (1997).  None of these authors shows any more knowledge of James than Davie and Stannard do.
     It is hard to believe that Waugh enjoyed reading The Varieties of Religious Experience.  On a “greatly overheated” ship on “very rough” seas, Waugh alternated between dozing, reading, and drawing (Diaries 273).  James’s prose is Victorian rather than modern.  His style is ponderous and self-assured, the sort of writing Waugh liked to parody.  James is constantly summarizing what he has already said and adverting to what he will say later, in another lecture.  Vast generalizations are based on hypothetical examples.  For evidence, he relies mainly on lengthy quotations from tedious accounts of religious experiences.  James was also an American, and Waugh had little patience with citizens of the United States.  Two Americans were on the ship in 1926: one was, according to Waugh, “vulgar and boastful and blasphemous”; the other was “unbelievably ignorant and mean-minded” (Diaries 273-74).  None of those adjectives could be applied to William James, but Waugh never hesitated to generalize about nationalities on the basis of a little experience.  Many years later, Waugh developed a taste for the fiction of Henry James, William’s younger brother.  In 1946, Waugh wrote that it was “an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age” (Diaries 663).  Waugh seems not to have reread The Varieties of Religious Experience, nor to have mentioned the book after 1926.  It is not a part of his library at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.
     Why was he reading it?  The Varieties of Religious Experience remained popular in the 1920s: the book’s thirty-eighth impression was printed in 1935.  Carpenter suggests that the entry in Waugh’s diary may be “facetious” (218), but Waugh did read some heavyweights in the 1920s, including Plato’s Republic and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in 1925 (Diaries 221, 227), and I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism, for a second time, in 1926 (Diaries 263).  The same entry that mentions Varieties also refers to drawings for a book Waugh intended to write, “the Annals of Constitutional Monarchy” (Diaries 273).  That book was never written, and Stannard suggests that the title was “just a private joke to cheer his jaded spirits” (130).  By reading Varieties, Stannard observes, Waugh was “beginning to enquire seriously into mysticism as an alternative means of escape into that ‘third dimension’ beyond the harlequinade” described in his 1926 short story “The Balance” (130).  In January 1926, Waugh had read the letters of Catholic theologian Baron von Hügel to his niece, Gwen Plunket Greene, mother of Waugh’s friend Olivia.  Stannard notes that these letters “interested” Waugh (130), who then turned to Varieties.  When he returned to England early in 1927, Waugh discussed becoming a parson with Father Underhill, who did not encourage him (Diaries 281).
     Waugh went to Athens to see Alastair Graham, his friend and former lover.  Graham had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1924 (Diaries 178) and had left Waugh shortly thereafter.  They spent much of 1925 and 1926 together, but they quarreled on a trip to France in the summer of 1926 (Diaries 263), and Graham took a diplomatic post in Greece.  Perhaps Waugh thought that The Varieties of Religious Experience would offer insight into his friend’s character.  Graham shared a flat with Leonard Bower, an attaché at the British embassy (Stannard 130), and the flat was “usually full of dreadful Dago youths called by heroic names such as Miltiades and Agamemnon with blue chins and greasy clothes who sleep with the English colony for 25 drachmas a night” (Diaries 275).  Within five days, Waugh was looking into buying his return ticket, and two days later he left, “sorry that the Athenian adventure had been such a failure” (Diaries 275).  What had he hoped for?  Renewal of his intimacy with Graham?  If so, Varieties had been no help at all.
     I know of no evidence that The Varieties of Religious Experience influenced Waugh’s writing in any way.  He started to write his first novel within a year of reading Varieties, however, and Decline and Fall (1928) is notable for its varieties of religious experience.  The hero, Paul Pennyfeather, is preparing to be a clergyman, though he reads Dean Stanley’s Eastern Church (1861) instead of William James.  Once he is expelled from Oxford, Paul meets Captain Grimes, who explains his faith by quoting Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes (1841): “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world” (Decline 40).  James quotes the same lines to describe “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” (136), typical of those who find “wonderful inner paths to a supernatural kind of happiness” (78).  Grimes doesn’t believe that “one can ever be unhappy for long provided one does just exactly what one wants to and when one wants to” (Decline 40), and Paul eventually realizes that “Grimes … was of the immortals” (Decline 269).   Mr Prendergast, on the other hand, exemplifies what James calls “The Sick Soul,” who suffers from “the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning” (141).  Prendy’s ministry has been derailed by “Doubts,” and he can’t understand “why God had made the world at all” (Decline 38).  If he did have Varieties in mind while writing Decline and Fall, Waugh managed to distill James’s generalities into dialogue that is both funny and pithy.  Prendy is killed by a religious maniac who may have been inspired by James’s quotation from the journal of George Fox, founder of Quakerism.  In Lichfield in 1651, Fox thought he saw “a channel of blood running down the streets, and the market-place appeared like a pool of blood” (James 8).  The ex-carpenter who calls himself the “sword of Israel” and the “lion of the Lord’s elect” has a vision “all crimson and wet like blood.”  He sees “the whole prison as if it were carved of ruby, hard and glittering,” but “the ruby became soft and wet, like a great sponge soaked in wine, and it was dripping and melting into a great lake of scarlet” (Decline 240-41).
The Varieties of Religious Experience may also have had a slight influence on Waugh’s later life.  Through reading Varieties, Waugh became familiar with conversions accompanied by “tremendous emotional excitement or perturbation of the senses” (James 217).  When he himself converted in 1930, Waugh wrote afterward, he entered the Roman Catholic Church on “firm intellectual conviction but with little emotion” (Essays 368).  In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), Waugh wrote that his autobiographical hero had been “received into the Church—‘conversion’ suggests an event more sudden and emotional than the calm acceptance of the propositions of his faith” (9).  When read with Waugh in mind, one of James’s questions is especially striking.  Citing Ralph Waldo Emerson, James asks “Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of these spiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, might have been, if such poor grace as they have received had never touched them at all?” (239).  Nancy Mitford once asked Waugh “how he could show such gratuitous cruelty while at the same time proclaiming himself a believing Christian and a practising Catholic.”  Waugh’s explanation “became familiar to many of his friends.  ‘You have no idea […] how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.  Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being’” (Sykes 448).  Again, one of James’s ideas seems to lie behind Waugh’s concise expression.  James employs “the empirical method” to “decide that on the whole one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type condemned” (327).  St Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) received the revelation of the Sacred Heart, but judged by James’s “Protestant and modern education,” she seems “feeble of intellectual outlook,” and James feels only “indulgent pity” for her (345).  Waugh was not yet a Catholic when he read Varieties, but he came to detest Protestantism and modernism, as he came to believe in supernatural intervention.  James may also have contributed to Waugh’s distaste for psychology.
The Varieties of Religious Experience was certainly not Waugh’s favorite book, but there are intriguing echoes of its ideas throughout his life and work. 

Works Cited
     Carpenter, Humphrey. The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends. Boston: Houghton, 1990.
     Hastings, Selina. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. New York: Houghton, 1994.
     Heath, Jeffrey. The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing. 1982. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1983.
     James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. 1902. New York: Penguin, 1985.
     Page, Norman. An Evelyn Waugh Chronology. New York: St Martin’s, 1997.
     Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939. New York: Norton, 1987.
     Sykes, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. 1975. New York: Penguin, 1977.
     Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall. 1928. Boston: Little, 1956.
     ---. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Boston: Little, 1976.
     ---. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, 1983.
     ---. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece. 1957. Boston: Little, 1979.

Reviews

Brideshead Travestied
Brideshead Revisited, dir. Julian Jarrold.  Perf. Matthew Goode, Hayley Attwell, Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, and Michael Gambon.  Ecosse Films, 2008.  Reviewed by George McCartney, St. John’s University.     

     Well, it took seventy-four years but today a team of forward-looking British filmmakers can proudly announce they have caught up with Evelyn Waugh’s prophetic portrayal of their craft.
     Clearly, the people behind the new screen adaptation of Brideshead Revisited have been inspired by Waugh’s 1934 story, “Excursion in Reality.”  In this narrative, we meet the visionary studio chief, Sir James Macrae, a man determined to “remake” Hamlet “from an entirely new angle.”  How, Macrae asks rhetorically, “can you expect the public to enjoy Shakespeare when they can’t make head or tail of the dialogue.  D’you know I began reading a copy the other day and blessed if I could understand it.  At once I said, ‘What the public wants is Shakespeare with all his beauty of thought and character translated into the language of everyday life.’”
     To bring their Brideshead to the screen, director Julian Jarrold and scenarists Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock have taken Sir James’s exhortation to heart.  They’ve translated Waugh into the language and, what’s more, the assumptions of everyday life.  Here are some excerpts from the film’s press notes that somewhat ungrammatically explain how the filmmakers went about their task.

[They] drew on the themes that they felt chimed for our age – particularly the search for individual fulfillment in a world where religious fundamentalism and loyalty to one’s tribe seem likely to prevent the possibilities of such happiness. 

The strategy was always to draw on the themes that most resonated for a contemporary audience.  Tough choices had to be made about what to exclude.

Jeremy [Brock] felt the love story has much resonance today.  . . . [It deals] with … [class differences] in a way that is very true to the book but also tells a modern audience something about fundamentalism and about how difficult it is to grow beyond our roots, to live beyond what has formed us in our childhood.

And then, in case this is not enough to persuade the doltish fundamentalists, the publicist has added this bit of wisdom undoubtedly ripped from Macrae’s playbook: “Each new generation must engage with the classics and remake them for its own time.  That is what classics are for – in music, in theater, in literature.”  And to think I always wondered what classics were for!  Any day now we’ll be watching a production of Oedipus Rex in which the fated son and his mom get themselves straightened out with some timely therapeutic intervention.  Once properly enlightened, they’ll doubtlessly settle down to a lifetime of working healthily on their relationship through which each will attain individual fulfillment.
     But let’s come to the particulars of Waugh’s novel.  To call it a classic in need of updating begs two questions.  First, how can this idiosyncratic novel possibly come under this category?  A classic is defined as a work that addresses challenges fundamental to all human beings.  Brideshead doesn’t fit this bill.  It’s too peculiarly personal.  Divided between nostalgia for a lost past and defiance of an approaching future, the narrative reworks Waugh’s own private experiences and longings which are hardly representative of the general of run of humankind.  Besides, a sixty-four-year-old work of any kind is a bit young to be thought a classic.  Second question: Can an adapter thoroughly pervert an author’s intention and still claim to be presenting his work in any meaningful sense?  No. Brideshead is a troubled narrative that resolves its conflicts tendentiously with a specifically Catholic deus ex machina.  While powerfully rendered, its conclusion is bound to leave those unconverted to Rome unconvinced.  Waugh, of course, knew this but he defiantly insisted upon his ending nevertheless.  His very defiance of his audience’s modern expectations should have decided Jarrold’s course.  It certainly did screenwriter John Mortimer’s.  In his splendid scripting of the 1981 Granada Television serial dramatization of the novel, Mortimer hewed to Waugh’s work with honorable and admirable fidelity, despite having scant sympathy for its ideology.  Mortimer admired Waugh’s artistry and brought it to the screen without distortion, putting aside his own socialist and agnostic inclinations.
Brideshead is, frankly, an odd novel.  It’s a sumptuously ornate invocation of an aristocratic world receding ineluctably into a fabled past that gives many the shivers.  Some tingle with thwarted longing; others quake with class-conscious rage.  Neither response was what Waugh sought, but, then, he had only himself to blame.  When he wrote Brideshead in 1944, he was a captain in the British army and convinced that, however the war ended, the world in which he had grown up would be lost forever.  He wanted to recall what was best about this period without glossing over its deficiencies.  More than this, he wanted to reveal ''the operation of Divine Grace on a group of closely connected characters.''  The splendors of the life he had known among aristocratic friends between the wars was to be a distant second to his theological theme, but he often allowed himself to be carried away with heady descriptions of that charming world.  Its art, its architecture, its fascinatingly eccentric characters, its romantic longing all infuse the novel with a seductive glow.  It’s been known to drive staid young men into commercial streets in search of vested flannel suits and demure young women to their millenary for cloche hats.  It’s driven those less fashion conscious back to the barricades of an ever-resurgent class struggle.  Unsurprisingly, many of Waugh’s readers didn’t then and don’t now take him at his word regarding the novel’s religious theme.
     Misunderstanding, however, hasn’t afflicted Jarrold and company.  They must have grasped Waugh’s intentions well enough.  Otherwise they would not have been able to disregard them so decisively.  They have simply ignored the novel’s Dantesque struggle to strike a moral balance between the claims of this and the next world.  In its place, they’ve created a high-fashion soap opera tricked out with the patented clichés of romantic strife.  The New York Times film critic, A.O. Scott, got it right when he wrote that the film is lazy.  Indeed, it is, so lazy that it refuses to engage Waugh’s challenge to the modern world.  Jarrold, instead, emphasizes the characters’ longing for “individual fulfillment,” ignoring entirely Waugh’s thoughts on this peculiarly modern aspiration.  Waugh made his autobiographical narrator, Charles Ryder, an architectural painter just so he could have him say “I have always loved building, holding it to be not only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected, without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.”  For the Charles of the novel, individuals find their fulfillment to the degree they serve the cultural tradition that shelters them.  You’d never know this from watching Jarrold’s film.
     But let’s go to the horse’s mouth.  Here’s Waugh on the dust jacket of the original hard-bound edition published in 1944, explaining that his novel is    

an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of an English Catholic family, half paganized themselves, in the world of 1923-1939.  The story will be uncongenial alike to those who look back on that pagan world with unalloyed affection and to those who see it as transitory, insignificant and, already, hopefully passed.  Whom then can I hope to please?  Perhaps . . . those who look to the future with black forebodings and need more solid comfort than rosy memories.  To [them] I have given . . . a hope, not, indeed, that anything but disaster lies ahead, but that the human spirit, redeemed, can survive all disasters.

Waugh made his narrator, the middle-class Charles Ryder, in many respects his own voice.  Like Waugh, Charles is a memorialist of a dying tradition.  He makes his living by painting aristocratic homes usually on the eve of their demolition.  It seems all of England’s finest architecture is being razed to make room for efficient, modern housing and stream-lined flats.  Charles takes his specialty all the more seriously because he’s in love with one of the families of this passing age, the Flytes, whose roots are deeper than those of most other members of their aristocratic class.  On their mother’s side, the Flytes are members of an especially vulnerable group, the recusants, Roman Catholics who refused to surrender to Henry VIII when he established the English Catholic Church in 1534.
     Charles finds himself beguiled by the charming Flyte children, first Sebastian whom he meets while conspicuously not studying at Oxford, and then Sebastian’s sister Julia at the family estate, Brideshead Castle.  He comes to think of the feckless, self-destructive Sebastian as a forerunner, his boyish attraction to him a phase leading to his mature passion for Julia.  And then there’s the Castle.  It too inspires longing.  Charles would be a parvenu except that his devotion to the Flytes, their estate, and their ambiance stems from his aesthetic sensibility more than his economic acquisitiveness.  In short, the Flytes have bewitched the agnostic, solidly respectable, middle-class Charles, seducing him into their perilously exotic world.  He doesn’t realize until much later that the Flyte charm rests on a foundation inestimably deeper and darker than either their wealth or their aesthetic taste.  Their faith, even among the wavering younger family members, informs their being for better and, by the measure of this life, sometimes for the worse.  Jarrold is having none of this nonsense.  He insists that the Flytes’ faith deforms their characters by making them subject to an arcane set of superstitions or, as the press notes have it, fundamentalism.  And he’s not content with Charles’s agnosticism either.  He’s made him a good, stalwart atheist. 
     As for ''the operation of Divine Grace,” Jarrold hasn’t so much traced it as launched it like a wrecking ball.  Grace in his film demolishes whatever it touches.  This is first made unequivocally apparent when Sebastian takes Charles to meet Nanny Hawkins, the woman who oversaw his infancy and now the one adult he trusts.  As Charles talks with this aged woman, she drops the set of rosary beads she’s been holding.  The camera cuts to its black and silver crucifix hitting the floor in extreme close-up.  The soundtrack makes its impact sound as though an especially malevolent oak tree had fallen, fully intent on crushing whatever has been left beneath its clutching limbs.  Subtlety is not Jarrold’s stock in trade.
     Jarrold is jarringly intent on wrecking Waugh’s intentions wherever they have the nerve to pop up.  Using Castle Howard to stand for Brideshead Castle, he’s rendered its interiors in Stygian gloom.  The family dinners are conducted with a hushed, clammy formality.  Never mind that Waugh describes the castle’s interiors as ornately inviting and surprisingly warm.  As played by Emma Thompson, the family matriarch, Lady Marchmain, comes off as a frozen-faced gorgon incapable of expressing or receiving love.  In the novel, she’s a sick woman desperately if clumsily trying to ensure her children’s future.  Gone are the novel’s wonderful conversations between Charles and Lady Marchmain and her eldest son, Bridey, regarding “the Alice-in-Wonderland side of religion.”  In fact, Jarrold short-changes the novel’s comedy generally.  Charles’s father is reduced to a few glimpses, none of them remotely capturing his mad, acerbic wit.  Scanted also is the delightfully befuddled conversation about the nature and purpose of extreme unction at the deathbed of Lord Marchmain.  For reasons best known to himself, Jarrold has stripped the novel of most of its wit and humor.  He’s focused instead on its weakest element, its sentimentality, the one aspect that embarrassed Waugh after its first publication, driving him to revise the text in a subsequent edition.
     If this novel were only a bittersweet tribute to a passing aristocratic culture nestled in a thwarted love story, it would be little more than wistful exercise in pathetic nostalgia.  But Waugh took care to put paid to this notion, especially with his character Anthony Blanche, the homosexual aesthete, based on his friend Harold Acton.  It’s Blanche who contemptuously describes Charles’s paintings as charming.  He judges his work skillful, pretty, and pointless.  And Charles more than half agrees.  It seems Waugh was paralleling his own earlier novels with Charles’s architectural paintings.  He had come to think of them as well-made but lightweight, a judgment I do not share.  One reason Waugh came to this assessment seems to be that he recognized as a flaw the snobbery implicit in these fictions.  Tellingly, Jarrold uses Blanche but once or twice and then only to serve as part of the general atmosphere.
     Waugh had always recognized that his fondness for the aristocracy and their world was a shallow obsession.  This is why aristocrats are so roundly mocked in his pages.  And yet his awareness of the foibles, vanity, and iniquity of the upper class was always qualified.   He continued to believe there was a genuine cultural benefit in having an aristocracy.  There would always be some sort of ruling class, he reasoned, and whatever its sins, Europe’s had underwritten some of the world’s greatest art and architecture, and that, he thought, should be honored.  At the same time, he also understood that artistic achievement doesn’t absolutely require a hereditary noble class living luxuriously at the expense of the lower orders.  Most important, in light of his adopted faith (Waugh converted to Rome in 1930), he became convinced that as magnificent as European civilization undeniably was, it was not an end in itself.  This recognition ultimately guides Charles’s judgment after he loses Julia to her theological scruples and with her the Brideshead estate he so clearly covets.  Their affair had been adulterous and civil divorce was not an option for Catholics.
     It is Sebastian’s older brother, the comically orthodox Bridey, also largely missing in the film, who enables Charles to make peace with his fate, and he does so, oddly enough, on aesthetic grounds.  “You take art as a means not as an end,” Bridey remarks.  “That is strict theology, but it’s unusual to find an agnostic believing it.”  Charles doesn’t know how to respond to this observation from a man he considers to be a madly religious prig.  Until this moment, he had thought Bridey’s ideas were utterly without merit, but now he finds himself reconsidering.  The full point of Bridey’s comment comes triumphantly home at the end of the novel.  Looked at theologically, art, however culturally important, can never be regarded as self-sufficient.  Young Waugh had been drawn to the art for art’s sake argument, but by the time he was writing Brideshead, he had adopted Bridey’s unfashionable position that, ideally, art is a means through which we may come to apprehend a higher reality.  Further, the larger culture that nurtures art must be understood to play the same intermediary role.  Bridey, who seems such a klutz by worldly standards, puts his finger unerringly on what’s central to European Christian culture.  The things of this world, natural or human-made, are merely signs pointing to the next.  To put it another way, Waugh was profoundly convinced that the material world was sacramental, through and through.  Just as the official sacraments of the church are outward signs instituted by Christ to give grace, so, on a lesser level, are all existing things, especially human artifacts.  For those who can see it with the eyes of faith, the world is God’s ongoing revelation.
     So, at the novel’s end, Charles discovers the real purpose of the Brideshead estate.  Its ultimate importance is not as a home for the Flyte family nor for Julia and himself nor for any one group of individuals of whatever class.  It serves as a sign to different people in different ages.  In the novel’s closing pages, it’s 1942 and the army has requisitioned Brideshead.  The estate now shelters lower and middle-class English soldiers.  These men may not appreciate the history and culture behind Brideshead, they may discard their cigarettes and half-eaten sandwiches in its fountain, but they also attend mass at the estate’s chapel.  Charles finally recognizes Brideshead’s real mission.  Standing inside the chapel, he tells us, “I said a prayer, an ancient, newly learned form of words.”  He then reflects on the lamp that announces the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in the altar’s tabernacle. 

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame – a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home. 

This is Brideshead’s purpose.
      After these remarks, Charles goes on to tell us that his second-in-command finds him “looking unusually cheerful.”  By the standards of this world, Ryder has lost everything:  his wife and children to divorce and Julia and Brideshead to the intransigent tenets of Julia’s faith.  But he’s been more than recompensed spiritually.   He’s found his genuine self by entering the Church.
     Jarrold’s film has deliberately excised Waugh’s cultural and religious reflections.  There are no references to Charles’s architectural painting.  No sign that he’s become a Catholic.  In the last scene, he’s in the chapel alone.  There’s no indication the other soldiers ever seek spiritual refuge at its altar.  And rather than cheerful, Charles looks utterly inconsolable.  It’s just boo-hoo all over the place.  The end.
     The unworldly Bridey, who barely registers in the film, provides the basis for an infinitely more sensational closing to Waugh’s meditations.  By helping Charles recognize the sacramental nature of the material world, Bridey equips him to understand the corollary of the forerunner.  Ryder had suggested to Julia that Sebastian might be understood as a forerunner leading him to her.  Julia takes this a crucial step further.  “Perhaps,” she replies, “I am only a forerunner too.”  Addressing the reader, Charles reflects that “perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols.… perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”
     This is the theological conceit Dante Aligheri elaborated in The Divine Comedy: he imagined himself attracted to the beautiful Beatrice only to discover, step by arduous step, that Beatrice’s seductiveness is the beginning of his awakening to beauty in the world and in other human beings.  This finally leads him to contemplate the source of all beauty in God.  This is what Bridey meant by saying that art is a means, not an end.  True art leads us on until we arrive at our home in the divine plan.
     You’ll search in vain in Jarrold’s film for any sign of such beauty.  On the positive side, however, he and his film do perfectly confirm Waugh’s prediction that the modern world would be doing its best to stuff western civilization down the Orwellian memory hole.

Editor's note: A different version of this review appears in Chronicles for September 2008: 46-48.

The Bloodsucking Countess and the Talented Mr. Ryder
Brideshead Revisited, 2008.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

     According to the poster in the lobby of the Scottsdale, AZ, theater in which I saw Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited, it is “A thrilling, fearless adaptation.”  Having already seen the film in Nova Scotia, I thought that fear—certainly fear of the Lord of this version—should have been the beginning of wisdom.
     Since I’ve read Waugh’s novel several dozen times in perhaps a dozen variant versions and once spent several months analyzing it line by line, my reaction to the film can hardly be objective.  My companion at the first viewing hasn’t read the novel and thought the film quite good, as did the woman who helped me do my first collation of variant texts, on the grounds that a film doesn’t have to be like a novel.  My companion at the second viewing is a former Pentecostal preacher who, though he thought the part of Charles Ryder’s father somewhat over the top (in fact, it is subdued and quite well acted in the film), hated the fact that Lord Marchmain made the sign of the Cross on his deathbed because “The bad guys won.”  Another friend, a world-class anthropologist, asked “Was Waugh showing the mystery of belief or the cost of being a Catholic?”  Both, I answered—at least in the novel.
     There are things about the movie to praise.  The disintegration of Sebastian, necessarily foreshortened, is done superbly.  Emma Thompson gives a very strong performance as a Lady Marchmain who has almost nothing in common with the novel’s character.  Jonathan Cake, born in Sussex, is more American than any American could be as Rex Mottram.  The attention to detail is scrupulous, and the complex structure of the novel, back and forth in time, is more or less honored if not replicated.  The presentation of Catholicism may be technically accurate—Fr. Vladimir Feltsman served as “Catholic advisor,” though if his input went beyond verifying the text of the Latin absolution given to Lord Marchmain, he should probably be unfrocked.
     The problem both for admirers of the novel and of the Catholic faith is that the film shifts the emphasis from theology to psychology, economics, and references to other films, most notably Dracula and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
     Throughout the film, Lady Marchmain is shown as the devouring mother who metaphorically infects those around her.  The film cuts Anthony Blanche’s description of her keeping “a small gang of enslaved and emaciated prisoners for her exclusive enjoyment.  She sucks their blood (56; here and elsewhere, I cite the 1946 Little, Brown edition), but there are sufficient indications of her vampirism.  Like Dracula, she is identified with the castle she inhabits.  Brideshead is pictured as dark, cavernous, almost haunted by the presence of rows of statues even when not shrouded.  Sebastian refuses to return to Brideshead even after her impending death because “the place would still be full of her,” a sentiment on which Charles Ryder expands after Julia’s crisis of conscience about living in sin with him  (though not with Rex).  Like her counterpart in the novel, Julia refers to nursery teachings—but here as a way of returning to an infantile state because her mother implanted a voice in her head which insisted on her guilt.  Cara, Lord Marchmain’s mistress, says not, as in the novel, that Lady Marchmain “is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way” (103), but that she has “suffocated” her husband and children.  Her God has done that to her.”  Later, Charles says that “God is your invention. Whatever you ask, He does.”
     Throughout the film, Lady Marchmain is identified with images of Virgin and Child as bats are with Count Dracula.  On Charles’s first visit to Brideshead, Sebastian gazes at a painting of the pair and says, “I loathe that painting.”  Much later, Julia tells Charles that it was her father’s wedding gift to her mother. The chapel—not at all like the Art Nouveau one in the novel—contains a statue of Madonna and Child, and after prayers, the family gathers before it to sing “Salve Regina.”  When the film returns to the wartime frame, Charles enters the chapel and looks at a candle burning before the statue.  (The sanctuary lamp, crucial to the novel’s end, is never shown.)  He reaches out as if to snuff the flame but draws back.  Earlier, in the Venice sequence, Charles and Julia kiss in view of the outraged Sebastian; Julia flees to a chapel to escape the sexual feelings that have been awakened and kneels before another painting of Virgin and Child.  Sebastian enters, looks at the painting, and turns away in pain and disgust.
     With none of the charm of the novel’s character or even the talents of “a femme fatale” who “killed at a touch” (214), Lady Marchmain manipulates both her children and Charles quite coldly, the children because she has controlled them from their earliest years.  Bridey asserts that “it is our duty as Catholics to do all in our power to save those we love from themselves”—more coercive even than the theology I was taught before Vatican II.  This is clearly the influence of his mother, who denies that worldly happiness matters at all and enforces her will rigorously.  As Sebastian says of the plovers who in both versions lay early for Mummy, “You would too if you knew my mother.”  Lady Marchmain warns Charles that Julia is not for him because marriage is not a matter of choice but of faith, and Julia marries Rex partly because her mother approves of him as a Catholic convert (purely for opportunistic reasons) and says that she had “no choice.”  The fact that Rex might have unpleasant children and has no sense of noblesse oblige does not matter—perhaps because neither does anyone in the Flyte family.
     Far more obviously than in the novel, Lady Marchmain sees in Charles the kind of ambition she can use.  In the film, she suggests that Charles accompany Sebastian (and Julia—so that the filmmakers can establish an emotional if not clearly sexual triangle) to Venice because Sebastian needs “someone plausible” near him and because “you seem a reliable young man.”  The carrot: “Every ambitious young man should go to Venice.”  And she, rather than Cordelia, asks Charles to go to Morocco to bring Sebastian home.  Except on this occasion and on Charles’s return to report, Emma Thompson plays her with as little facial expression as Helen Mirren did Elizabeth II in The Queen.
     Throughout the film, far more is made of class differences than in the novel.  Cousin Jasper proclaims that though the family is not rich, we “are rich in striving of mind.”  Nanny Hawkins asks “What family are you from?” and Charles answers “No family.”  At dinner with the whole family—everyone but he dressed formally—Lady Marchmain asks where in London he lives.  “Paddington.”  Perhaps unconsciously echoing Lady Bracknell, she asks whether that gave him a great interest in trains.
     Charles is desperate to belong.  When he tells Sebastian that he doesn’t belong to his mother’s gang, Sebastian says, “You don’t belong to anybody’s gang.  That’s your problem.”  Rex accuses Charles of wanting to get Brideshead for himself (ignoring questions of primogeniture and such mundane matters), and offers to procure an annulment in exchange for two of Charles’s jungle paintings, though the parallel with Adam’s sale of Nina in Vile Bodies may not be conscious.  Julia overhears the bargaining and accuses him of buying her in order to get the house as well.  Charles confesses that there “is no humiliation I wouldn’t have endured” to be at Brideshead.
     As in the novel, the film’s action is framed by Ryder at Brideshead during wartime.  We first see the back of his head as he walks toward a door.  In voiceover, he asks “Who am I?”  He is unable to answer because he cannot say “whether these emotions are my own or stolen from those I wish to be.” Although he mentions “faith from which I am still in flight,” the guilt he feels is obviously not theological but psychological—asking too much, certainly from the Flyte family, possibly from the world.  Anthony Blanche, unaccountably become Charles’s conscience, says at Charles’s exhibition that he had thought Charles the lamb, but now, because of his affair with Julia, the Flytes are the hunted, adding “There’s no end to your hunger, is there, Charles?”  In his final soliloquy, Charles wonders “Did I want too much? Did my own hunger blind me to their faith?”  The film ends with a rear shot of his full figure, becoming more and more attenuated as he passes toward the light outside the castle and almost disappears.
     Given the portrayal of Catholicism in the film, the answer to Charles’s question about his blindness would have to be “Why not?”  The correspondent quoted in Waugh’s “Fan-Fare” felt that "Your Brideshead Revisited is a strange way to show that Catholicism is an answer to anything.  Seems more like the kiss of death."  Or as Charles says to Bridey, “if ever I felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured.  You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense” (164).  The film, unlike the novel, presents no argument to the contrary.
     Some incidental comments on specific elements of the film: none of the dialogue in the trailer is taken from the novel, and only scraps of Waugh’s language appear in the film.  What does is often banalized, as when Charles says to Julia on the ship, “You haven’t changed.”  She replies, “Neither have you,” whereas in the novel, Charles notes that Julia is softer and sadder and she that he is “So lean and grim, not at all the pretty boy Sebastian brought home with him” (239).  At the first film embrace on the ship, she says, “Tell me this is fate,” followed by the sound of a zipper.  For a change, Julia is not wearing a cross on her bosom; she does not remove the diamond necklace she is wearing.  This and much of the dialogue, especially that given to Lady Marchmain, is vulgar—not as Rex is, intentionally, in the film, but in the style of high-end soap opera.  Perhaps I was too hard on Michael Johnston’s Brideshead Regained: Continuing the Memoirs of Charles Ryder (Newsletter 34.3).  His dialogue isn’t noticeably worse than that created for the film.  However, the Waugh family apparently approved this script, perhaps because, as was not the case in Johnston’s book, there was money in it for the estate.

Editor's note: Other reviews of the film have not been enthusiastic.  In the Weekly Standard, Jonathan V. Last described the new Brideshead as a "cinematic bastardization six decades in the making" (30 June 2008).  In Slate, Troy Patterson referred to the "vomitous stupidity" of the film (25 July 2008).  In the Washington Post, Michael O'Sullivan described the movie as "manor house porn" (25 July 2008).  The Boston Globe dismissed the film as a "fruitless attempt to mine decorousness from spiritual suffering and movie romance from religion" (25 July 2008).  In the New York Times, A. O. Scott panned  Brideshead as "tedious, confused and banal" (25 July 2008).  The Times also ran Sarah Lyall's "Revisiting 'Brideshead Revisited,'" an article about the new film, on 20 July 2008, and Gina Bellafante's "Revisiting 'Brideshead,' With All the Signs of Its Times (and Beyond)," a consideration of the television production, on 24 July 2008.  And in Parade Magazine for 20 July 2008, Emma Thompson, who plays Lady Marchmain, said that she "loved Waugh's other stuff when I was at school … but I never read Brideshead until I got this role, and now I love it."  In Thompson's view, Lady Marchmain "can't relate to her children on a human level."  In five weeks of release in the USA through 31 August 2008, Brideshead Revisited generated just under $6 million in box office (Internet Movie Database). 

Missed Opportunities
The Spoken Word: Evelyn Waugh.  London: British Library, 2008.  66 mins.  £9.95.  Reviewed by Patrick Denman Flanery, University of Sheffield.

     The British Library’s release of surviving BBC recordings of Evelyn Waugh spans a twenty-five year period, from 1938 to 1963, or, as the liner notes put it, from a time when Waugh was ‘still enjoying his first decade of literary success’ to when he had become ‘a weary abhorrer of post-war society’.  The first of the recordings, ‘Up To London’, is the earliest known surviving recording of Waugh (there was at least one earlier recording for the BBC which does not survive in the BBC sound archive, Waugh’s radio talk, ‘To An Unknown Old Man,’ broadcast in 1932, the typescript for which is in the Harry Ransom Center).  ‘Up To London’ survives only as a seven-minute, 36-second fragment, half the length advertised in the Radio Times.  Dealing with the ‘coming out’ of debutantes and male gatecrashers at London parties, an extremely formal-sounding Waugh talks, clears his throat, and occasionally stumbles over his own words.  In terms of content, there is little remarkable:  ‘Generally speaking, the poorer the girl, the more expensive it is to set her going’; ‘for a girl who starts with few friends, a dance is necessary […] and however much they may bore her, to dances she must go’.  It is ephemeral Waugh, to be sure—more Pursuit of Love by way of Noel Coward than Vile Bodies, or even Put Out More Flags.
     The second track, excerpted from a program called Undergraduate Summer, has Waugh speaking in a 1939 debate at the Oxford Union, ‘against a motion congratulating the press on “keeping the home fires burning”’ (the program was broadcast on 10 August 1939, but the date of recording is not provided), in which he does little but casually and jokily interrogate the motion, offering the kinds of dry turns of phrase which to this day characterise the largely clubby and self-congratulatory tone of Oxford Union debates.  It is alarming to hear Waugh’s voice in these two early recordings, mostly because he sounds easily twenty years older than he was at the time—prematurely thickened, stuffy, and pronouncing those extraordinary vowels that are now heard almost exclusively on the stage in Britain, usually in parody.
     The gem of the collection, and perhaps the only excuse for acquiring it, is the notorious 1953 Frankly Speaking interview in which Waugh is subject to a series of po-faced, cod-psychoanalytical questions posed by Charles Wilmot, Jack Davies, and Stephen Black, to which he provides increasingly impatient and reactionary responses.  Presented in full, the interview includes such bizarre exchanges as the following (there is no way to tell the interviewers apart):

Interviewer: And were you happy at school?
Waugh: No.  No fault of the schools.  I think I shouldn’t have been happy at any school.
Interviewer: Why were you unhappy?
Waugh: Hated the boys so.
Interviewer: You didn’t like them at all, I mean, they had nothing in common with you?
Waugh: I didn’t discover it in the … years I was there.
Interviewer (incredulously): All the boys, did you really hate all the boys in the school?
Waugh (impatiently): Didn’t hate, but I just didn’t like their company….

The words alone do not begin to convey the strangeness of the exchange, which is fuelled by the combination of Waugh’s hauteur, impatience, and nonchalance, and the interviewers’ almost ecclesiastical breathiness and probingly sinister patience.
     Later, the interviewers want to know how Waugh writes: ‘with a pen?’  ‘Oh yes, Waugh says, ‘in the ordinary way’, ‘on foolscap paper’.  ‘Lined foolscap paper?’ the interviewer demands, in a series of ludicrously banal questions that might have driven a monk mad—we should remember that Frankly Speaking was on the BBC Home Service (today’s BBC Radio Four), which was, almost by definition, middlebrow.  As Burton Paulu suggested in 1961, the Home Service formed ‘the keystone—the broad middle strand—of British radio broadcasting, and offered the widest … range of the BBC’s domestic services’, carrying news and educational programs, children’s programming, ‘much serious music and some light and popular music; variety and other entertainment features; dramas; religious programs; and many talks and discussions’.[1]  The interviewers on Frankly Speaking seem to have been pandering to expectations of (or a mandate to represent the interests of) a barely educated, ‘man-on-the-street’ audience.  This kind of assumption seems also to lie behind one of the lines of questioning that most antagonises Waugh:  

Interviewer: Do you, generally speaking, like the human race?  Do you like crowds for example, or do you fly from them?
Waugh: Loathe crowds.  Liking the human race is a prerogative of God, not of a human being.  For a human being can’t know the human race.
Interviewer: Do you find it easy to get on with the man in the street?
Waugh: I’ve never met such a person.
Interviewer: Do you like people generally when you meet them in trains, or buses, or ships?Waugh (interrupting): I never travel in a bus.  I never address a stranger in a train.
Interviewer: When you meet people on board ship, for example, when travelling?
Waugh: I’ve never introduced myself or been introduced to anybody on board a ship. If I find friends on board, then I’m delighted.
Interviewer: But you can’t go about in a sort of Trappist condition.  You must meet people.  Do you ... enjoy meeting people?
Waugh: By the time one’s fifty one’s met a great number of people, and it’s always agreeable, if one has a sense of curiosity, to meet them again if they turn up on board a ship for example, as you suggest; it’s very amusing suddenly to find someone you haven’t seen for twenty years and to enquire what’s happened to him in the meantime.  The prospect of just being introduced to somebody as just a person, a man, as you might say, in the street, is entirely repugnant.

     In addition, the album includes Waugh’s clumsy recording of ‘Half in Love with Easeful Death’, broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme (now Radio 3, the network’s classical music station, and then its ‘highbrow’ arts station) on 8 May 1948.[2]  The liner notes explain that ‘[b]y the time of the recording a fictional version of the material had already appeared in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine as The Loved One’.  To describe the novel as a ‘fictional version’ of the essay’s topic seems, at best, inadequate, but this speaks to one of the album’s major shortcomings.
     While the British Library should certainly be commended for bringing out this title and others in the series (including BBC recordings of Shaw, Wells, Greene, Auden, and Beckett), there are, in this particular album, a number of missed opportunities.  The disc itself might have contained brief audio introductions to each track (there is ample room), and it seems strange that, particularly in the case of the Frankly Speaking interview, there was no extant original introductory material from the program (in the form of theme music, for instance).  Also, the liner notes say less in their four brief pages of introductory essay than one would have hoped.  Surely the five pages devoted to advertising the other titles in the series at the end of the sleeve booklet could have been put to better use.  There is no indication in the essay, for instance, of Waugh’s changeable attitudes towards the BBC—information readily available in the BBC Written Archive Centre.[3]  The album was of course licensed by the BBC, and there can be no excuse for not including here even a slightly fuller portrait of Waugh’s relations with the corporation.  This kind of information would go some way towards contextualising his awkward performances on tracks 1 and 3 (‘Up to London’ and ‘Half in Love with Easeful Death’), as well as his prickliness in the Frankly Speaking interview, in contrast with his comparatively relaxed and assured tone in the excerpt from the Union debate and the final track, his speech at the Royal Society of Literature in 1963.
     Instead, the liner notes provide a biographical-historical commentary, describing Waugh, inadequately, as ‘a venerable, yet modest, master of his craft’.  The balance of the introductory essay is divided between a hagiographic assessment of Waugh’s importance to twentieth-century literature (‘Waugh’s reputation rests most solidly on his mastery of satire and on his command of language: his assiduous concern for selecting the exact word and constructing the perfectly weighted sentence’; and Graham Greene’s assertion that Waugh ‘was the greatest novelist of [his] generation’), and a thin discussion of the recordings themselves.  While by no means essential for Waugh scholars or fans, this set of recordings does, if nothing else, give one some sense of Waugh as an individual encountering, engaging with, and resisting, one of the most important media of his time.

Notes
[1] Burton Paulu, British Broadcasting in Transition (London: Macmillan, 1961), 148.
[2] See Evelyn Waugh, ‘Half in Love with Easeful Death: An Examination of Californian Burial Customs’ in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (1983; Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 331-37.
[3] For extensive discussions of Waugh’s relations with the BBC, see Winnifred M. Bogaards’s ‘Evelyn Waugh and the BBC’, in Evelyn Waugh: New Directions, ed. Alain Blayac (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1992), 85-111, and Frederick L. Beaty’s ‘Evelyn Waugh and Lance Sieveking: New Light on Waugh’s Relations with the BBC’, in Papers on Language & Literature 25.2 (Spring 1989), 186-200.

Editor's Note: In 1944, Evelyn Waugh appeared on a BBC panel addressing the question "Is the Novel Dead?"  Other members of the panel were E. M. Forster, Desmond MacCarthy, Rose Macaulay, Graham Greene, and Philip Toynbee.

Lucidity, Force, and Ease
Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, by Lewis M. Dabney.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.  672 pp.  Paperback, $25. 

Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 1930s and Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 1940s, by Edmund Wilson.  New York: Library of America, 2007.  958 and 979 pp.  Hardcover, $40 each.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.    

     To do full justice to Edmund Wilson’s five-decade career as one of the premier men of letters in twentieth-century America or anywhere else, one would have to have both broad and deep knowledge of literary and political currents over two centuries, a half-dozen languages, and various disciplines. These, to adapt Henry Reed’s line in “Naming of Parts,” I have not got.
     However, Lewis M. Dabney has enough knowledge to satisfy even the most captious reader, and though at times he discards chronology to wander back and forth over a decade or more of Wilson’s wide and diverse intellectual and emotional entanglements, the general picture is almost always clear.  For example, in discussing Wilson’s eulogy of Paul Rosenfeld, written in the 1940s, Dabney cuts back to a letter written about Rosenfeld twenty years earlier to make a point about Wilson’s attempts to curb Rosenfeld’s tendency to “surplus metaphor, prophesy, Pythian rhapsody, outpourings about Stieglitz and nameless lymphatic humors.”
     If this sounds rather like Evelyn Waugh on Thomas Merton, it is only one of many possible comparisons between the two men.  Both were educated in the classics; Waugh would have subscribed to Wilson’s belief that prose should have “Lucidity, Force, and Ease,” a credo that Wilson learned from an Englishman, while Wilson would have endorsed the Waugh motto “Industria Ditat”; both had fathers whom they regarded as members of a generation unable to adapt to new circumstances; both, as they aged, turned increasingly to a vision of an idealized past, lost and corrupted in the present by radical theologians, metacritics like Ihab Hassan, and non-representational painting.
     On the personal level, they had even more striking similarities.  Both were short--about 5’6”--and unathletic.  Both were alcoholics, though Wilson was more prone to physical violence when drunk.  Both, mentally troubled, took paraldehyde, an effect of which, Dabney notes, is flatulence, which may have led to Waugh’s belief that he was becoming socially unacceptable.  Both tended to categorize people.  Both took up positions as country squires.  Both, as their fame grew, used printed postcards to decline requests for assistance, though Wilson’s had a series of tasks—reading manuscripts, offering advice about literary careers, and so on—from which to check the most appropriate, while Waugh’s merely said "Mr Evelyn Waugh deeply regrets that he is unable to do what is so kindly proposed."  This was about as polite as he got.  Both enjoyed the company of Fr. Martin D’Arcy—unusual for Wilson in view of his tendency to blow steam out his ears when confronted with Catholicism, most notably in Brideshead Revisited, which he seemed to regard as a betrayal of his earlier praise of Waugh as “the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw.”  Before Brideshead, even Waugh’s alliance with the upper classes in Put Out More Flags didn’t bother him because “his snobbery carries us with it” in a book where “everything is created … nothing is taken for granted.”  And although Wilson had little use for Waugh’s work of the 1950s, Dabney quotes him as saying in an interview that The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold was “the greatest Protestant allegory since Pilgrim’s Progress.”
     Both Dabney and Christopher Sykes trace some of Wilson’s animosity to his 1945 meeting with Waugh in London at which Waugh affected to think Wilson either from Boise, Idaho, or a Rhodes Scholar studying Henry James (shades of Tito as lesbian).  Warned not to mention the difficulties that Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County was having with the censors, Waugh mischievously asked about a new work and hoped for a novel.  Told that the publishers were withholding it because they feared charges of pornography, Waugh paused just long enough and said, “Mr. Wilson, in cases like yours, I always advise publication in Cairo.”
     Waugh was famous or infamous for straight-faced teasing, and in this case he may have been prompted by Wilson’s praise, the previous year, of Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave.  At any rate, he told A. D. Peters to get his own far less favorable review published in the USA, regardless of fee.
     Waugh owned a copy of Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow and, Sykes says, knew Axel’s Castle, and in reviewing George Orwell’s Critical Essays, he pointed to Orwell and Wilson as exemplifying a “new humanism” that countered the influence of Mandarins who for thirty years “have run wild and countenanced the cults of Picasso and Stein.”  Although probably unaware of Wilson’s debt to Taine’s historical criticism--Dabney points out the importance of “milieu and heritage” in Wilson’s approach to literature--Waugh argued that this kind of critic begins the “inquiry into a work of art by asking: ‘What kind of man wrote or painted this?  What were his motives, conscious or unconscious?  What sort of people like his work?  Why.’”  The danger, Waugh felt, was the blurring of distinctions between high and low art.  And almost twenty years later Waugh maintained that, in writing about Kipling, “Mr. Wilson is handicapped by his nationality in fully understanding the English character.  He is ignorant of our class system and of our education.”
     While that may have been true, Wilson was not ignorant on an enormous range of writers and subjects.  Readers of this newsletter can read most profitably the reviews and essays in Classics and Commercials written during a period in which, as Dabney says, Wilson “continued to sift the British tradition” with considerations of Waugh, Ronald Firbank, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Love Peacock and others in the comic-satiric tradition.  Some of his dicta are still valid, as in his link between a taste for tales of horror to “first, the longing for mystic experience which seems always to manifest itself in periods of social confusion … second, the instinct to inoculate ourselves against panic at the real horrors loose on the earth….”  Leatherface as preferable to anthrax or other terrorist attacks?
     Wilson’s value for me is both general and personal.  Interweaving his views with those of James Sanders, Dabney sees Wilson as “a ‘grand explainer’ who ‘better understands and expresses what the reader thinks,’ a ‘mirror’ insofar as one’s experience is refracted ‘through his sharper mind.’”  To put it another way, Wilson often makes the reader feel more intelligent and sophisticated than he or she can possibly be.
     My personal debt to Wilson stems not just from reading the essays on Waugh and Firbank which helped to validate my decision to study them but also from the antidote his style provided to the sober, sometimes leaden prose of scholarly articles and books we ingested in doctoral programs in the late 1950s.  (To do them justice, they were written, most of them, in recognizable English.)  Wilson, like Orwell and Dwight MacDonald, was not just useful but interesting, and I often read far more than the parts necessary to my work.
     Moreover, Wilson’s remorseless energy and intelligence gave some of us at least the glimmer of the idea that we did not have to be expert on everything to be able to write for readers who hadn’t gone through a Ph.D. program but could read a book or a discussion of it with profit and pleasure.
     The biography and the Library of America volumes don’t give us all of Wilson—his travel writing, his analysis of the literature of the American Civil War, Canada, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the iniquities of the Internal Revenue Service could not be included.  Nor could the letters or the augmented notebooks from five decades.  Nor, though there seems from what Dabney quotes little reason to regret this, could his plays, poetry, or fiction.  But even on this far from modest showing, Wilson’s industry, curiosity, and intelligence put him in the line of great critics from Samuel Johnson through Matthew Arnold.  We can only hope that he has successors.

Other Peoples’ Dyschronia
Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel, by John J. Su.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.  226 pp.  $80.  Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, Bennington College.         

     John J. Su’s admittedly diminished enterprise belies its grandiose title.  Convinced that nostalgia is now eschewed by liberal post-secularism as an essentialist “bête noire” (Jackson Lears; qtd. in Su 2), associated with fascism as of the first page, paling in comparison to the more overtly biased mnemotechnia of personal memory, he attempts to rehabilitate it as a key resource in the postcolonial oppressed’s access to “lost or imagined places of origin” (173), which is then coupled to “the impetus to struggle for a more utopian future” (88).  This methodology already leaves the book in the ungainly position of fending off potential critiques from more intellectually honest postmodernists, who would at least claim to have binned nostalgia’s apparatus some time ago, and from reactionaries who would prefer a coherent, openly constructed past and the establishment of a more rigorous ethics.  At the same time, Su simply and disingenuously reimposes the commonplace paradigm of revolutionary memory (dissatisfaction with the present = invented genealogy = reimposition of the primal origin of that genealogy in the present), while passing it off as something new, though it was and is arguably the only anamnetic paradigm modernity ever devised, regardless of politics.  On a similarly less than original note, much effort is expended in persuading the audience that the past can indeed affect the present, even if the past in question is nostalgic, and that even history is not synonymous with objective truth, which may become irksome to readers prepared to stipulate to the immediate relevance of fictionalized memory from the off.  In the absence of lengthier analysis of the history of ethics, Su becomes the product of his own recognition of our ruined, post-Enlightenment memory, enabling him to trawl through contemporary Anglophone literature, Levinas-driven morality in hand, gradually becoming the Edward Said of nostalgia, a counter-nostalgist if you will, merely finding examples of the aforementioned paradigm and lamenting its impasse without ever defining his own ethical ground or risking the suggestion of viable counter-projects.
     The front cover of the book is dominated by Bob Lescaux’s neo-surrealist oil painting, Cronos, in which a presumably bourgeois type in a suit has climbed a ladder through white, fluffy clouds in order to “fix” a clock.  This may be a commentary on displacement, on the artificiality of time, on its arbitrariness, and our devaluation of nostalgia.  My point is that we never discover exactly how or why it is being fixed.  In the examples that follow, my concern is not that these characters and often their authors are indeed the victims of fractured pasts that may only be reinterpreted through fragments of memory, that loss and yearning do define us, but rather their attitudinal reduction within the context of this book.  It is surely not the finding of such memories that counts, but rather the strategies employed to recall them, their content, that content’s effects on the present, and how we respond to those effects.  Even if we accept Su’s temporal modus operandi, the recollections remain dependent on our definition of the ethical, and his mediation of them, much like the painting, is too laissez faire. 
     The fetishized events in question include Beloved’s intermittent, shifting recalling of the Clearing, rewritten as if such shifting were an ethical end unto itself, Black Dogs’ rejection of child abuse that even Su characterizes as “rather uncontroversial” (39), The Unbelonging’s identification of a misappropriated, idealized Jamaica as a “primal place” (49), Wide Sargasso Sea’s imaginary reconciliation between Antoinette and Tia that allows Antoinette “to describe her experiences and relationships in ways she had previously been unable to do” (66), The Mimic Men’s “recognition of the ways in which fantasies are structured by colonial discourse” (70), The Chosen Place, The Timeless People’s yearly celebration of messianism, with Su deflating the potential of such content by confirming that “the novel does not even claim that the solidarity achieved during carnival has an enduring quality” (84), House Made of Dawn’s fixation on Rainy Mountain which Su again rejects as a possible “narrative of healing” (98), and the wholesale dismissal of Marxism since apparently it operates “without first rethinking and redefining how the past is experienced” (174), even though this is exactly what it does, through precisely the same paradigm of nostalgia that Su idolizes. 
     In this litany of fragmentation, now collected under the white, fluffy clouds and refashioned as a supposedly healthy moral solipsism of which the author of the study himself is barely persuaded, there are occasional glimpses of chinks in the paradigm, when instead of merely finding possible examples of a quasi-viable nostalgia, the material turns on itself.  Towards the end of Chapter 2, Jamaica Kincaid is enlisted to assert that, even if we assume it to be possible, “Such a strategy risks reinstating patriarchal ethical norms that preexist the influences of colonialism and discourses of Western modernity” (qtd. in Su 80), and the fifth and final chapter rehashes Wole Soyinka’s preexisting misgivings regarding Chinua Achebe’s use of  tactics similar to Su’s, though even Soyinka’s own imagined community in Season of Anomy is then subsequently critiqued, since “readers have fairly little concrete information on how the ethical values associated with the village shape its social organization” (169).  In the concluding pages we wind up with a vague, ambivalent endorsement of Salman Rushdie’s equally vague “set of universal ethical norms” (178).           
     Although several of the arguments and some of the vocabulary relating to disjointed times, sacred places, and lost traditions may be applied to Evelyn Waugh, Su’s general glossing morphs into synecdoche in the form of the stately home in Brideshead Revisited.  The chapter on Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro is, predictably, the counterpoint to the rest of the book, with Remains of the Day serving as a mild corrective to Brideshead Revisted’s naïve endorsement of “genuine Englishness” (122) even within that chapter.  It begins, alarmingly, as if some a priori decision were made to conflate the two that requires no further explanation, with an epigraph by Margaret Thatcher, extolling the “sterling qualities” (119) of Britain in the wake of the Falklands conflict, and proceeds to equate Thatcher’s nationalist, “Victorian values” (122) not only with Waugh the man but also with the novel.  In the midst of this continued reduction, Su “moves away from the tradition of reading Brideshead Revisited as a Catholic novel” (126), because of course if the Catholicism were not at the beck and call of the nationalism then all of a sudden he would have to confront simultaneous yet different complexities, not to mention a system of thought that does not conform to his own paradigm of nostalgia.  There may be a double standard here, in the sense that Thatcher’s own invented genealogy receives rougher treatment than those to the left of the political spectrum, but more significantly Waugh would no doubt have found this allusion to “Victorian values” distasteful at best, and at worst the novel renders it inaccurate.  Here, the drawing room and the fountain are symbols of past nationalism, substantiated by Charles Ryder’s reminiscence, and his “discovery of the chapel as the true heart of the estate allows him to merge Catholicism and Englishness” (127), to connect drawing room and chapel.  If we are to rely on the novel itself, however, as opposed to Su’s synopsis, the chapel is a rather tacky extension to the estate, “a monument of art nouveau” (32), and therefore less obviously representative of English essentialism, particularly of the Thatcherite variety.  The strategies, context, and effects of the memories are qualitatively different.  I first read Brideshead Revisited as one of Thatcher’s children, and far from interpreting it as government propaganda, it left me with a pervasive sense of defamiliarization.  Perhaps it’s such good propaganda it works by osmosis, or perhaps Su needs it to be.

Works Cited
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited.  1945.  New York: Knopf, 1993.

More Genius than Talent
Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist, by Lois Gordon.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.  447 pp.  $32.95.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.            

     Nancy Cunard was clearly all the things claimed by Lois Gordon’s subtitle and a good deal more—she had a great many of what are now called catch-and-release liaisons, a fair number with leading lights of modernist literature and art; she was a loud and often violent drunk; and she had paranoid fantasies, though to be fair she had sometimes been persecuted.
     Much of the book reads like an over-researched and over-crowded historical novel or like the overheated verse drama in Max Beerbohm’s “Savonarola Brown,” where, at the end of one scene,

Re-enter Guelfs and Ghibellines fighting.  SAV. and LUC. are arrested by Papal officers. Enter MICHAEL ANGELO.  ANDREA DEL SARTO appears for a moment at a window. PIPPA passes.  Brothers of the Misericordia go by, singing a Requiem for Francesca da Rimini.  Enter BOCCACCIO, BENVENUTO CELLINI, and many others, making remarks highly characteristic of themselves....

     The difference between parody and life—not always easy to discern in any age—is that in this case major writers like Eliot, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Louis Aragon, Pablo Neruda, Aldous Huxley, many minor ones, and dozens of non-literary types passed through Nancy Cunard’s life and bedroom, and many drew on her for fictional, poetic, and visual representation.  Students of Waugh should remember the passage in Unconditional Surrender/The End of the Battle in which, to give his assistants a sense of Virginia Troy/Blackhouse/Crouchback, Everard Spruce quotes the passage from Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay about Myra Viveash “placing her feet with a meticulous precision one after the other in the same straight line as though she were treading a knife edge between goodness only knew what invisible gulfs.”  Everard adds that “the type persisted—in books and in life. Virginia was the last of them—the exquisite, the doomed and the damning, with expiring voices....”  Gordon mentions Waugh’s novel, but apparently she does not realize that Waugh is humanizing, de-mystifying, and finally sanctifying Virginia.
     In 1955 Waugh looked back at Antic Hay and said that women of 25 seemed like moody children.  I’m older than Nancy Cunard was when she died, and one look at the cover photo and other illustrations would be enough to send me running in the opposite direction toward the values of my Midwestern upbringing.  Although I’m not that kind of doctor, she sounds as though she had bi-polar disorder. Friends thought her “talented, rich, energetic” and at the same time “relentless, melancholy, driven, wasted.”  She clearly had incredible energy.
     Cunard’s mother, Lady Maud (later Emerald) Cunard complained for years that her daughter needed purpose in her life, an outlet for that energy, and for once she was right.  Once Nancy got to work, she became not just a muse but a force.  Gordon does an excellent job in presenting Cunard’s ground-breaking work at Hours Press, publishing a range of authors from Arthur Symons to Samuel Beckett. (She shied away from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, unwilling to put on the street the kind of thing she did in the bedroom, perhaps because it would frighten the horses.)  Her anthology Negro was crucial in fostering Black transnationalism, and her work for the Scottsboro boys and for refugees from Franco’s Spain is rightly honored.
     Gordon praises her writing, but though some of the passages she quotes seem competent, some is shy-making.  As her first mentor (and perhaps her father) George Moore said, she had more genius than talent.  None of the poetry or imaginative prose that Gordon quotes should lead even the most dedicated feminist (which Cunard wasn’t) to seek out her creative work, though her biographies and the memoir of the Hours Press look interesting.
     Nancy Cunard gives a broad and fascinating look at many of the literary and political movements of the first half of the twentieth century, and Gordon has thoroughly examined primary materials by and about Nancy and secondary materials about broader issues.  One could wish that she had a stronger sense of chronology.  Early in the book, she jumps ahead two wars; she says, of the early 1920s, that Hemingway “had called” words like honor lies, although of course A Farewell to Arms was not published until the end of the decade.  And in general Gordon works by topic rather than by chronology, separating, for example, the London social scene from reactions to the horrors of World War I.
     I found only a few errors. Gordon misquotes Pound’s “an old bitch gone in the teeth” and says that “David Jones’s In Parenthesis became a best-seller” early in World War I.  It was first published in 1937.  Theodore Gumbril in Antic Hay is not an Oxford tutor, and either Gordon or Janet Flanner argues that “Nancy lacked a stabilizing significant other or the inner resources that allowed people like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to set themselves apart without additional emotional support.”  I suppose that it’s always compared to what—or whom.
     But the sometimes confusing chronology and the errors of fact and judgment are minor flaws.  Anyone seeking broad background for London and Paris from the Georgian period to World War II will find this book very useful.

Stimulating Company
A Gentle Jesuit: Philip Caraman, SJ, 1911-1998, by June Rockett.  Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2004.  356 pp.  £20.  Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania.              

     Evelyn Waugh is a surprisingly persistent presence in this biography of his friend: A Gentle Jesuit is Waugh’s phrase, and the book concludes with the panegyric preached by Father Caraman at Waugh’s requiem mass.  They met in 1948, as Caraman prepared to take over as editor of the Jesuit periodical The Month, and their friendship lasted until Waugh’s death in 1966.
     One senses why Waugh and Caraman were drawn to each other: both were born in Hampstead, and each grew up with an older brother and a distant father.  They knew some of the same people, such as Father Martin D’Arcy and Christopher Hollis, and they shared a “mischievous sense of humour” (151).  As writers, Waugh and Caraman “alternated between a longing for isolation and a need for stimulating company” (191), and both liked to travel.  Waugh helped Caraman to rejuvenate The Month, and Caraman assisted Waugh with background for Helena (1950) and Ronald Knox (1959).  The two men also took a dim view of the Second Vatican Council.
     Their friendship survived a scandal involving Waugh’s daughter Margaret, who worked for Caraman on canonization of the Forty Blessed Martyrs.  Caraman favored Margaret, or Meg, and someone in the office accused him of impropriety.  Though Waugh defended him, Caraman was dismissed as editor of The Month in 1963.  When Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939-1966 appeared in 1992, Caraman objected to Martin Stannard’s account of the affair.  He made detailed notes and gave them to Selina Hastings, though her biography of Waugh does not even mention the scandal.
     Waugh died after a Latin mass on Easter Sunday, and A Gentle Jesuit makes his death seem even more providential.  After leaving The Month, Caraman lived in Norway, and he briefly visited England for Easter 1966.  Caraman celebrated the Latin mass and gave Waugh conditional absolution, after he had collapsed at home.  That morning Waugh had completed one last bit of writing: it was, characteristically, a check for ten guineas payable to Caraman but never cashed and now preserved at Boston College.
     After Waugh’s death, Caraman remained a friend of the family.  When Meg was killed in an accident in 1986, Caraman installed a stained-glass window in her memory in the church of St Stanislaus in Dulverton, West Somerset.  The church had been founded by Mary Herbert, Meg’s grandmother and Waugh’s mother-in-law, and Caraman served there as parish priest for a decade at the end of his life. 
     June Rockett is primarily a journalist, and though her prose could profit from more stringent editing, A Gentle Jesuit is a creditable, substantial, and attractive book, illustrated with plenty of photographs.  Rockett had access to Caraman’s private papers, and she did research at Boston College, the British Library, and the Jesuit archives in London.  She provides extensive quotations from primary sources, including excerpts from several otherwise unpublished letters by Waugh.  A Gentle Jesuit will interest anyone who wishes to learn more about Waugh’s faith, friends, and later years.

More Interesting and Sympathetic
Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America, by Matthew Avery Sutton. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.  351 pp.  $26.95.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

     I must begin by advising anyone who expects to learn something about Evelyn Waugh or The Loved One to stop reading right now.  Obviously Waugh learned about McPherson during his 1947 visit to Los Angeles, since Aimée Thanatogenos is named for Aimee Semple McPherson and he mentions the Foursquare Gospel Temple (actually the Angelus Temple).  Since the building near Echo Park was a leading tourist attraction, he may even have seen it.  And the Reverend Errol Bartholomew advises Dennis Barlow that “You need buildings.  But the banks are usually ready to help.  Then, of course, what one aims at is a radio congregation.”  But McPherson died three years before Waugh’s visit, and by then other evangelists had followed McPherson’s lead into mass media.
     However, anyone curious about the rising influence, political as well as spiritual, of evangelical Christianity and its close relative Pentecostalism in the United States can learn a great deal from this book.  Sutton believes and often repeats (the book stems from a dissertation and shows its heritage) that McPherson as “The first religious celebrity of the mass media era … brought conservative Protestantism from the margins to the mainstream of American culture” and, by an unprecedented move for an evangelical, crossed into politics and “helped shape one of the twentieth century’s most explosive religious movements.”
     Sutton points to recent and current “Pentecostal activists” like Pat Robertson, Oliver North, James Watt, and John Ashcroft—not to mention, as he doesn’t, our born-again president, and to the general influence of the religious right.  Perhaps that has begun to wane, slightly, but Americans (and for that matter Iraqis) confront its works and pomps on a daily basis in controversies over abortion and homosexuality.
     As in many cases, the route Sutton takes to that conclusion is more interesting than the destination. He shows in some detail the reasons Los Angeles provided fertile ground for McPherson’s mission, including the early (and now ironic) advertising of the city as “the ideal Anglo-Saxon Protestant enclave, free from the racial, immigrant, and class conflicts troubling other regions”—largely as a result of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.  Los Angeles became a transportation hub, center of an oil boom, and, not long before McPherson arrived, the center of the film industry.  But when she dedicated the Temple in 1923, the area was dominated by white, conservative capitalists and heavily populated by immigrants from the Protestant Midwest.
     McPherson had begun her ministry as a Pentecostal, occasionally speaking in tongues as she toured America preaching sometimes in tents, sometimes from an automobile, to largely rural, lower-class, and, surprisingly, sometimes racially mixed audiences.  But after she became established in Los Angeles, she said “I bring spiritual consolation to middle classes, leaving those above to themselves and those below to the Salvation Army.”  Much of her success came from alliances, some temporary, with mainstream religious denominations, the Los Angeles power structure and even more suspect groups like the American Legion (at its most nativist) and the Ku Klux Klan.  After supporting Herbert Hoover’s campaign against the Catholic Al Smith in the 1928 Presidential election—though she did not, as so many of her co-religionists did, cross the line into anti-Catholic virulence—she welcomed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and thereafter, and she fervently supported America’s war effort after 1941.
     These connections with secular, political, and even military America distinguished McPherson from many of her evangelical colleagues.  She differed even more in her use not just of print media but also of radio and film to extend her influence far beyond Los Angeles and to draw large crowds of tourists.  Like many of her alliances, her theology was somewhat malleable, but she consistently rejected Hell-Fire sermons in favor of a vision of “a loving, benevolent, and immanent God who worked with humans in the twentieth century exactly as he had in the first to save souls.”  As the international situation darkened in the 1930s, however, she began to emphasize Apocalyptic end-time prophecies, with God and America allying to combat the Anti-Christ(s) of atheism, secularism, Darwinism, Communism, and—to her credit—Fascism.  She consistently transgressed gender norms, training numerous women (who comprised two-thirds of her first LIFE Bible college class), defending their and her right to preach, and gaining the support of many “flappers” and feminists.
     Sutton traces in detail her political involvement and the ups and downs of her reputation, especially of her mysterious disappearance (supposedly drowned), of her subsequent reappearance (with a thoroughly bogus kidnapping story), and of the media frenzy that makes reports of Anna Nicole Smith’s death look like a bottom-page notice of a tea party.  At least CNN and other outlets didn’t have reports of sea monsters or consult Ouija boards.  Her subsequent trial on various charges kept her in the public eye and damaged her far less than those who know nothing else about her subsequent life, as I had not, might suppose.
     In fact, McPherson remade herself physically by dieting, makeup, and attention to style, as photographs show, into a glamorous figure.  This didn’t always sit well with her followers, but in the 1930s her political and social influence grew, and the Temple’s soup kitchen and other social services during the Depression—when she ignored Los Angeles County ordinances against any aid to people who had not been in California for three years—were to some observers the high point of her career. Her multi-racial ministries—de-emphasized at opportune moments—allied her with the social gospel more often espoused by liberals and the Left.
     On the whole, then, McPherson turns out to be far more interesting and sympathetic than I had supposed—rare in modern biography, as we have seen in Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene, Martin Stannard’s of Waugh, and countless others.  Sutton’s account is not perfect, since I longed in vain for a Victorian-novel conclusion to announce the fates of various characters like Kenneth Ormiston, the man with whom she may have spent her brief sabbatical, her daughter, who left the movement, and her domineering mother, who managed the Temple’s finances, and whom apparently McPherson punched.  Nor does Sutton heed the advice, crucial in examining any organization, to “follow the money.”
     Sutton and his publisher support, tangentially, the argument about the growing influence of evangelicalism.  He is related to members of the Foursquare Gospel Church and, though he recognizes the ways politicians can co-opt believers and distort spiritual purposes to secular ends, he is obviously sympathetic to McPherson and her movement.  He did his graduate work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which I remember as a hotbed of surfing, marijuana and LSD use, and mid-sixties rebellion.  And Harvard University Press is hardly the venue one would expect for a study of evangelicalism.

Uncomfortable Transitions
Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement, ed. Kristi Siegel.  New York: Peter Lang, 2002.  303 pp.  Paperback, $32.95.  Reviewed by Susan M. Kroeg, Eastern Kentucky University.

     In Issues in Travel Writing, Kristi Siegel usefully collects eighteen essays that consider travel in its broadest physical and metaphysical senses, organized somewhat loosely around the themes of empire, spectacle, and displacement.  As Siegel notes in the introduction, “interest in travel and travel writing emerged as the result of an intellectual climate that is interrogating imperialism, colonialism/ postcolonialism, ethnography, diaspora, visual culture, and spectacle” (1); true to this spirit of interrogation, the collected essays draw on a range of texts and theories to create a new vocabulary and establish new ways of seeing and reading.  The five essays in the first section, subtitled “Reassessing Imperialist Travel Writing,” show the influence of postcolonial theory on the study of travel writing as they explore the ways the experience and discourse of travel records both the creation and deconstruction of an imperial identity, whether American (Edward Whitley on Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt), British (essays by Melanie Hunter, Adam Piette, and Andrea Feeser) or German (Cecilia Novero on contemporary German travel to Italy).  Travel as “a metaphor for religious and spiritual journeys”—journeys in which “the eye turns inward” (5)—constitutes the organizing principle of the second section, subtitled “Mapping Cultural and Spiritual Landscapes.”  The eight contributions range from analyses of the twelfth-century pilgrim’s guide, Mirabilia Urbis Romae (by Cynthia Ho) to the science-fiction novels of Kurt Vonnegut (by Donna Foran).  This section also includes Siegel and Toni B. Wulff’s sharp essay, “Travel as Spectacle: The Illusion of Knowledge and Sight,” perhaps the most overtly theoretical contribution to the collection, which questions the role of “seeing” in the traveler’s construction of knowledge.  The final section, subtitled “Situating Identity, Home, and Diaspora,” includes five essays, most relatively brief, on topics as diverse as "Australian Muslim Experiences of the Meccan Pilgrimage or Hajj" (by Katy Nebhan) and “(Re)-Visiting Der Heim” (by Andrew Palmer), on Eastern European Jews’ narratives of return.
     Readers of this newsletter will be particularly interested in Adam Piette’s contribution, “Travel Writing and the Imperial Subject in 1930s Prose: Waugh, Bowen, Smith, and Orwell” (53-65).  The essay draws useful parallels between the work of Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith, and George Orwell, organized around “the idea of the foreign in 1930s writing” (54).  For these writers, the foreign included both colonized cultures and the British working class; Piette argues that these authors’ travel texts reveal the extent to which “the ideas of England, Englishness, and English writing started to come under corrosive pressure from the under classes and subject territories that had underwritten their definition” (54).  Focusing largely on the travel writing collected in When the Going Was Good, Piette traces Waugh’s growing dissatisfaction with the experience of travel between the wars, as its shifts from “an initiation into the imperial ideal” to an inversion of the imperial center, as the “weaker races” (to use Waugh’s phrase) of the colonial periphery (re-)establish independent identities (55, 57).  Piette then explores a similar uncomfortable transition, from a sense of cultural confidence to one of anxiety and impotence, in works as diverse as Bowen’s To the North, Smith’s Over the Frontier, and Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, concluding that “travel writing became a distorted vision of war reportage written at the shifting borders between the political unconscious and a culture gearing itself up for total war” (63).  Piette’s inclusive definition of “travel writing,” one shared by most of the contributors to the volume, brings various genres and authors into useful juxtaposition around the notion of travel as physical, cultural, and psychological phenomenon.
     In the introduction, Siegel argues that “travel writing warrants our attention because it foregrounds many of the cultural and historical issues that currently dot our critical landscape”; “literal and figurative boundaries,” she notes, are under interrogation in our rapidly shrinking globe (8).  Our critical interest in travel writing shows little sign of slowing, and the work in this field is a model of interdisciplinarity.  Given the diversity of its contributions, few readers are likely to read this collection cover to cover.  Nevertheless, the essays provide myriad ways to read travel, and even those who do not consider themselves scholars of travel writing will find something of interest here.

Dinner with the Stravinskys
Down a Path of Wonder, by Robert Craft.  Redhill, Surrey: Naxos, 2006.  562 pp.  ₤19.99.  Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley.    

     This is a collection of memoirs, articles and other occasional pieces by Robert Craft, American conductor and writer on musical subjects, perhaps best known for acting as assistant to Igor Stravinsky for twenty-eight years, beginning in 1948.  Down a Path of Wonder includes the author’s memoir of Evelyn Waugh, consisting of a brief excerpt from Craft's diary and some added background relating to a meeting he arranged between Stravinsky, Waugh and their wives in February 1949.[1]
     Craft had introduced the Stravinskys to Waugh’s writings, and they admired his work.  Indeed, according to Craft, these readings “changed their lives.  After eight years in America, English began to supplant French.”  The Waughs were invited to attend the premiere of Stravinsky’s Mass in New York.  Waugh declined because he found “all music to be positively painful” and he would have left New York by then, but another date was set for dinner.
     The Stravinskys knew Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, and he warned them that Waugh could be “prickly, pompous, and downright unpleasant.”  Conversation was at first acrimonious: Laura Waugh was harshly reprimanded for insisting that Waugh's French was “very good.”  Waugh nattered on about U.S. burial customs, he refused Stravinsky’s offer of vodka and caviar (“I never take spirits before wine”), and he challenged Stravinsky for having taken U.S. citizenship, noting that he “deplored everything American, beginning with the Revolution.”  At dinner, however, Waugh’s mood improved when he discovered that the Stravinskys shared his attitude to religion and were familiar with his entire work, up to and including his latest publication, The Loved One.
     Craft records several communications with Waugh relating to expressions of thanks for the meeting.  Waugh sent him an inscribed copy of  P.R.B.  Craft inquired into the availability of the story “Antony, who sought things that were lost.”  Waugh replied, “It is jolly decent of you to be eager to disinter my early work, but my instinct is to suppress or destroy more and more early juvenilia.”  He also sent Craft an inscribed copy of the deluxe edition of The Loved One.
     The article concludes with the comment that, when Waugh died, Stravinsky pasted the obituary from The Times in a loose-leaf sketchbook he prepared for his Requiem Canticles. This became one among many items of a notorious and extended dispute between Craft and Stravinsky’s biographer, Stephen Walsh, which is briefly described in a footnote.  A copy of the cutting is included in the illustrations of Craft’s book. 
     Waugh appears to have left quite a favorable impression on Craft.  Unfortunately, Waugh leaves no description of this meeting, which occurred during a long gap in his diaries.  His published letters have not included any mention of it.

Note

[1] Much of the material from the memoir seems to have appeared previously in an article by Craft published in Harper’s Bazaar (December 1968), discussed by Martin Stannard in Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years (1992), 236-37.

Shaking and Straining
The Cinema of Tony Richardson: Essays and Interviews, ed. James M. Welsh and John C. Tibbetts. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.  297 pp.  $24.95.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

     Most Newsletter readers will be primarily interested in the half-chapter that Gene D. Phillips, SJ, devotes to Tony Richardson’s film of The Loved One.  (The other half deals with the adaptation of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary.)  Phillips provides a summary of the novel’s plot and points out similarities and differences in the adaptation for the movie.  Phillips had the advantage of an interview with Mrs. Laura Waugh about her husband’s horrified reaction to Richardson’s updating of the story; otherwise, he depends primarily on reviews, largely negative, of the film, on Terry Southern’s self-serving book about making the film; and on Richardson’s autobiography.  There is no discussion of cinematography or other technical issues.
     Clearly Phillips thinks little of the film, but his conclusion strains to find something positive in it and in Sanctuary, which earlier he has called “more to be admired than enjoyed”: “both films remain worthy of the discriminating moviegoers’ serious attention.”
     A quick scan of other essays in the collection shows that the various authors are trying to defend, or revive, Richardson’s reputation as a director.  This kind of straining suggests that it is shaky.
     For a longer look at the film of Waugh’s novel, though it says little or nothing about technical issues, see my Mischief in the Sun: The Making and Unmaking of The Loved One (Whitston, 1999).

Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism
by John Howard Wilson
Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania

     This is a continuation of the earlier checklists, published in Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies.  It includes books and articles published in 2004 and 2005.

     Abravanel, Genevieve.  "Atlantic Modernism: Americanization and English Literature in the Early Twentieth Century."  DAI 66.5A (2004): 1777.  Duke U, 2004.
     Baldick, Chris.  The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 10: 1910-1940: The Modern Movement.  New York: Oxford UP, 2004.  Reviewed by Patrick Query, “Having Read Widely and Uncommonly Well,” EWNS 38.3 (Winter 2008).
     Bassett, Donald.  “Felix Kelly and Brideshead.”  British Art Journal 6.2 (Autumn 2005): 52-57.
     Berberich, Christine.  “‘All gentlemen are now very old’: Waugh, Nostalgia, and the Image of the English Gentleman.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  45-57.
     Berberich, Christine.  “Two Lost Souls: Powell’s Charles Stringham and Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte—A Comparison.”  Anthony Powell and the Oxford of the 1920s: Proceedings of the Second Biennial Anthony Powell Conference 2003.  Ed. George Lilley, Stephen Holden & Keith C. Marshall.  Greenford, England: Powell Society, 2004.  214-26.
     Bittner, David.  “A Kinder, Gentler Look at Rex Mottram.”  EWNS 35.2 (Autumn 2004).
     Bittner, David.  “What of Bubbles?”  EWNS 36.2 (Autumn 2005).
     Bittner, David.  “What was Dial?”  EWNS 35.1 (Spring 2004).
     Blayac, Alain.  “Against Emotion in Literature: The Case of Evelyn Waugh.”  Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature.  Ed. Christine Reynier & Jean-Michel Ganteau.  Montpellier, France: Université Montpellier III, 2005.  119-27.
     Blayac, Alain.  “Ars Memoriae, Memoria Artis: Charles Ryder’s Case in Brideshead Revisited.”  Études britanniques contemporaines 28 (June 2005): 57-69.
     Blayac, Alain.  “Evelyn Waugh, Biographer.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  91-102.
     Boyd, William.  Bamboo.  London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005.  Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley, “Boyd on Waugh,” EWNS 37.2 (Autumn 2006).
     Bradshaw, David.  “Modern Life: Fiction and Satire.”  The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature.  Ed. Laura Marcus & Peter Nicholls.  Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2004.  218-31.
     Breeze, Ruth.  “Places of the Mind: Locating Brideshead Revisited.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  131-45.
     Brookhiser, Richard.  “Farewell to Evelyn Waugh: and leave the ‘happy darkie’ to the multiculturalists.”  National Review 19 Dec. 2005: 36.
     Carceller Guillamet, Ma. Eulàlia.  “Religion and Reconciliation in Helena.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  211-23.
     Colletta, Lisa.  “Powell, Waugh and Hollywood.”  Anthony Powell and the Oxford of the 1920s.   Ed. George Lilley, Stephen Holden & Keith C. Marshall.  Greenford, England: Powell Society, 2004.  227-36.
     Davis, Robert Murray.  “Evelyn Waugh, Plagiarist?”  EWNS 36.1 (Spring 2005).
     Davis, Robert Murray.  “Evelyn Waugh’s Audiences.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  71-90.
     Davis, Robert Murray.  “Greene & Waugh in Texas.”  Commonweal 19 Nov. 2004: 31.
     Davis, Robert Murray.  “HRC Revisited.”  EWNS 35.3 (Winter 2005).
     Davis, Robert Murray.  “Up to a Point, Mr. Foxwell: The Adaptation of Decline and Fall.”  EWNS 36.2 (Autumn 2005).
     DeVille, Adam A. J.  “In Defense of Christian ‘Snobbery’: The Case of Evelyn Waugh Reconsidered.”  Latin Mass Spring 2004.
     Díaz-Cuesta, José, and Mar Asensio Aróstegui.  “Fatherhood: A Way to Sanctity in Bill Anderson’s Adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  259-73.
     Dickinson, Patric.  “Effortless Superiority?: Some Social Comparisons between Powell and Waugh.”  Anthony Powell and the Oxford of the 1920s.  Ed. George Lilley, Stephen Holden & Keith C. Marshall.  Greenford, England: Powell Society, 2004.  185-94.
     Fiala, Nathan.  “Strange Bedfellows: Reading Evelyn Waugh and Frantz Fanon.”  EWNS 35.3 (Winter 2005).
     Flanery, Patrick Denman.  “Brideshead Re-Positioned: Re-Ma(r)king Text and Tone in Filmed Adaptation.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  193-210.
     Flores Moreno, Cristina.  “Dialogue Between E. Waugh and G. Greene: Two Different Approaches to Art and Religion in Brideshead Revisited and The End of the Affair.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  181-91.
     Gallagher, Donat.  “The Humanizing Factor: Waugh’s ‘Very Personal View of Providence.’”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  21-36.
     Gallagher, Donat.  “Stonor: Is it Broome?  A New Evelyn Waugh Review?”  EWNS 34.3 (Winter 2004).
     Greene, Donald.  The Selected Essays of Donald Greene.  Ed. John Lawrence Abbott.  Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2004.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, EWNS 36.1 (Spring 2005); Gloria Sybil Gross, Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.4 (Summer 2006): 577-78.
     Guerra, Christy.  “‘All Things to All People’: The Christ-Figure Present in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.”  Proceedings of the Northeast Region Annual Meeting, Conference on Christianity and Literature: Christ Plays in Ten-Thousand Places.  Ed. Brigid Brady & Patricia Verrone.  Caldwell, NJ: Caldwell College, 2005.  45-49.
     Hayes, Peter.  “A Note on Evelyn Waugh’s Book Review ‘Two Unquiet Lives.’”  EWNS 35.1 (Spring 2004).
     Holland, Christopher.  “Damned Reading and Damned Readers: Christopher Holland discusses the crucial role of reading in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.”  English Review 15.1 (Sept. 2004): 12+.
     Insausti, Gabriel.  “Fictionalising Memory: Waugh’s A Little Learning.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  275-87.
     Joksch, Konrad.  "Gehalte, Grenzen und widersprüche konservativer Kulturkritik im frühen Romanwerk Evelyn Waughs."  Diss., Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität zu Münster, 2005.
     Kostopulos, Dan S.  “Mexico Imagined: Robbery Under Law and the Lessons of Mexican Travel.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  115-29.
     Lázaro, Maria Luisa.  “Emma Bovary’s and Brenda Last’s Reception.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  103-13.
     Lindroth, James R.  “Love, Sacrifice, and Redemption in Brideshead Revisited.”  Proceedings of the Northeast Region Annual Meeting, Conference on Christianity and Literature.  Ed. Brigid Brady & Patricia Verrone.  Caldwell, NJ: Caldwell College, 2005.  38-41.
     Lobb, Edward.  “Waugh’s Conrad and Victorian Gothic.”  Connotations 15.1-3 (2005/2006): 171-76.
     Long, J. V.  “The Consolations of Exile: Evelyn Waugh and Catholicism.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  11-20.
     Lurcock, Tony.  “Evelyn Waugh, A. P. Herbert, and Divorce Reform.”  EWNS 35.2  (Autumn 2004).
     Mackean, Ian, ed.  The Essentials of Literature in English Post-1914.  London: Arnold, 2005.  Reviewed by K. J. Gilchrist, “Generally Speaking,” EWNS 36.3 (Winter 2006).
     Matravers, Matt.  "Happiness and Political Philosophy: The Case of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh."  Economics and Happiness: Framing the Analysis.  Ed. Luigino Bruni & Pier Luigi Porta.  New York: Oxford UP, 2005.  184-96.
     McCartney, George.  Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition.  1987.  London and New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004.  Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, “The World is Always Too Much,” EWNS 35.2 (Autumn 2004).
     McCartney, George.  “Helena in Room 101: The Sum of Truth in Waugh and Orwell.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  59-69.
     McCartney, George.  “Waugh on Television.”  EWNS 34.3 (Winter 2004).
     Meyers, Jeffrey.  “Colonel Fawcett and Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.”  Notes on Contemporary Literature 34.1 (Jan. 2004): 7-9.
     Miles, Peter.  “The Writer at the Takutu River: Nature, Art, and Modernist Discourse in Evelyn Waugh’s Travel Writing.”  Studies in Travel Writing 8.1 (March 2004): 65-87.
     Morton, Peter.  “‘The Funniest Book in the World’: Waugh and The Diary of a Nobody.” EWNS 36.1 (Spring 2005).
     Munton, Alan.  “Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour: The Invention of Disillusion.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  225-46.
     Oliver, Timothy J.  "Evelyn Waugh and the Cultural Counterrevolution in Great Britain in the Interwar Period."  MAI 44.2 (Apr. 2006): 646.  California State U, Dominguez Hills, 2005.
     Ottino, Mónica.  “Evelyn Waugh: El irritable humorista.”  Suplemento Cultura La Nación (Buenos Aires) 22 Feb. 2004: 2.
     Palmer, Alan.  Fictional Minds.  Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004.  Reviewed by Mary Clayton Coleman, “Conscious Fiction,” Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (April 2006): 299-309.
     Patey, Douglas Lane.  The Life of Evelyn Waugh (1998).  Reviewed by John Beaumont, "Waugh Revisited: Douglas Lane Patey's life of Evelyn Waugh," Downside Review 122.426 (2004): 64-74.
     Pearce, Joseph.  Literary Giants, Literary Catholics.  San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005.  Reviewed by John W. Osborne, “Christianity and Chaos,” EWNS 36.3 (Winter 2006).
     Peat, Alexandra.  "Secular Modernism and the Sacred Journey."  DAI 66.10A (2005): 3642.  U of Toronto, 2005.
     Platon, Mircea.  “Drama, Architecture, Art, and Grace: Evelyn Waugh’s Roman Catholicism.”  EWNS 34.3 (Winter 2004).
     Prescott, Lynda.  “Evelyn Waugh, Morris, and the Ideal of Craftsmanship.”  Journal of the William Morris Society 16.2-3 (Summer-Winter 2005): 80-91.
     Query, Patrick.  “Catholicism and Form from Hopkins to Waugh.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  37-44.
     Rossi, John P.  “Two Irascible Englishmen: Mr. Waugh and Mr. Orwell.”  Modern Age 47.2 (Spring 2005): 148-52.
     Salinsky, John.  “Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh.”  Medicine and Literature: The Doctor’s Companion to the Classics.  Vol. 2.  Oxford: Radcliffe Medical Press, 2004.  241-54. Reviewed by Howard M. Spiro, Annals of Internal Medicine 17 Aug. 2004: 328; Helen Lester, Family Practice 21.4 (2004): 474-75.
     Schweizer, Bernard.  “Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Other Late Novels.”  A Companion to the British and Irish Novel: 1945-2000.  Ed. Brian W. Shaffer.  Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.  254-65.  Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, “Late and Getting Later,” EWNS 37.3 (Winter 2007).
     Shupak, Greg.  “Decline and Fall as a Critique of Marxism.”  EWNS 36.2 (Autumn 2005).
     Sokolov, M.  “‘Amur i Psikheia’ Kanovy v ‘Liubvi sredi ruiny’ Ivlina Vo: K probleme chistoi formy v neoklassike i modernizme” [“Canova’s ‘Cupid and Psyche’ in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Love Among the Ruins’: Toward the Problem of Pure Form in Neoclassicism and Modernism”]. Voprosy Literatury (Questions of Literature, Moscow) 1 (Jan.-Feb. 2005): 111-23.
     Stannard, Martin.  “In Search of a City: Civilization, Humanism, and English Gothic in A Handful of Dust.”  Connotations 14.1-3 (2004/2005): 182-204.
     Toynton, Evelyn.  “Revisiting Brideshead” (1998).  Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love.  Ed. Anne Fadiman.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, “Reading a Rereading of Brideshead Revisited,” EWNS 37.1 (Spring 2006).
     Valdeón Garcia, Roberto A.  “The Spoken and the Unspoken: The Homosexual Theme in E. M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  155-79.
     Villar Flor, Carlos.  "Cruzada en solitario: la frustración del héroe romántico en la trilogia Sword of Honour de Evelyn Waugh."  Estudios de literatura en lengua inglesa de los siglos XX y XXI (7).  Ed. J. M. Barrio & P. Abad.  Universidad de Valladolid, 2004.  373-86.
     Villar Flor, Carlos.  “Textual Indicators of Characterisation: A Narratological Approach to Brideshead Revisited.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis. 147-54.
     Villar Flor, Carlos, and Robert Murray Davis, eds.  Waugh without End: New Trends in Evelyn Waugh Studies.  New York: Peter Lang, 2005.  Reviewed by Douglas Lane Patey, “‘All Gentlemen Are Now Very Old’ (‘Except Us!’ –Alain Blayac),” EWNS 37.3 (Winter 2007).
     Waugh, Alexander.  Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family.  London: Headline, 2004.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, “The First Scholar,” and Douglas Lane Patey, “Stalking the Sources,” EWNS 35.3 (Winter 2005).
     Waugh, Evelyn.  Helena.  Chicago: Loyola, 2005.  Reviewed by Patrick Query, “The Idea of Europe,” EWNS 36.2 (Autumn 2005).
     Waugh, Evelyn.  Two Lives (2001).  Reviewed by Patrick Query, “Past and Present,” EWNS 35.1 (Spring 2004).
     Weigel, George.  Introduction.  Helena, by Evelyn Waugh.  Chicago: Loyola, 2005.  ix-xviii.
     Weston, Elizabeth.  “Countering Loss through Narrative: Comedy, Death, and Mourning in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, and Graham Swift’s Last Orders.”  DAI 65.7A (2005): 2617.  U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2004.
     Williamson, Chilton, Jr.  "A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh."  The Conservative's Bookshelf: Essential Works that Impact Today's Conservative Thinkers.  New York: Citadel, 2004.  237-42.
     Wilson, John Howard.  Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography, 1924-1966 (2001).  Reviewed by Alain Blayac, Études Anglaises 58.4 (2005): 506-07.
     Wilson, John Howard.  “‘Not a Man for Whom I Ever Had Esteem’: Evelyn Waugh on Winston Churchill.”  Waugh without End.  Ed. Carlos Villar Flor & Robert Murray Davis.  247-57.
     Wilson, John Howard.  “‘Orphans of the Storm’ in Brideshead Revisited.”  EWNS 35.3 (Winter 2005).
     Wilson, John Howard.  “A Question of Influence and Experience: A Response to Edward Lobb.”  Connotations 14.1-3 (2004/2005): 205-12.
     Yamada, Mari.  Evelyn Waugh: The Intertextuality of A Handful of Dust.  Tokyo: Nihontosho Center, 2004.
     York, Richard.  “Evelyn Waugh’s Farewell to Heroism.”  Heroism and Passion in Literature: Studies in Honour of Moya Longstaffe.  Ed. Graham Gargett.  New York: Rodopi, 2004.  245-53.  Reviewed by Archie Loss, “Sword of Honour Revisited,” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008); W. Redfern, Journal of European Studies 36.1 (2006): 103-05; Jane Conroy, French Studies 60.3 (2006): 424-25.

In the Foot-Steps of Charles Ryder
Jeremy Houghton will mount an exhibition of original paintings at the Adam Street Gallery in London from 3 through 10 October 2008. Entitled "In the Foot-Steps of Charles Ryder," the exhibition consists of paintings inspired by places where Ryder went in Brideshead Revisited.  These include Oxford, Brideshead (based on Madresfield Court in Malvern), Venice, Morocco, and South America.  The exhibition coincides with the British opening of the Brideshead film.
     Jeremy Houghton lives in Worcestershire near Madresfield, and he feels very connected to the house and the family, the Lygons.  Brideshead Revisited is his favorite book, and he hopes that the exhibition will travel to Worcestershire and perhaps Madresfield itself.  Some of his work can be viewed at http://www.houghtonart.co.uk.    

The Art of Charles Ryder
     In the obituary of art critic John Russell, published in the New York Times on 24 August 2008, art historian John Richardson notes that Russell was "never mean-spirited, dismissive or brutal."  When asked to criticize the work of a "well-born but talentless English painter," Russell said, "We have all wondered what the painting of Charles Ryder in 'Brideshead Revisited' might have looked like, and now we know with absolute precision."

Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest
     Catherine Kelly won the third annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest with her essay entitled "Disengaging Desire: A Study of Evelyn Waugh's Fiction."  Part of Catherine's essay will appear in the Winter 2009 issue of the Newsletter.
     Entries in the fourth annual essay contest should be directed to Dr. John H. Wilson, Department of English, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA 17745, USA, or jwilson3@lhup.edu, by 31 December 2008.  

Evelyn Waugh Society
     The Evelyn Waugh Society now has 83 members.  Information on joining the society is available at the new web site, http://www.evelynwaughsociety.org.  The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List now has 51 members.  The list is available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh.

The Pinfold Interview
     On 18 April 2008, the Independent published "Scoop! When BBC hacks scented Evelyn Waugh's blood," a series of excerpts from his interview with the BBC's Home Service on 16 November 1953.

Brideshead Digested
John Crace published his digested read of Brideshead Revisited on 7 June 2008 in The Guardian.

The Real Brideshead
     The Daily Telegraph published two excerpts from Jane Mulvagh's book Madresfield: The Real Brideshead.  The first, entitled "Evelyn Waugh: a blueprint for Brideshead," appeared on 24 May 2008.  The second, entitled "The scandal that shook Brideshead," appeared on 1 June 2008.  Both are available at the Telegraph, along with an article, "Revisiting the reality of Brideshead's Sebastian" by Jasper Copping (18 May 2008) and a review, "Madresfield, a very private house" by Nicholas Shakespeare (31 May 2008). 

Selling Combe Florey (and Piers Court)
     Evelyn Waugh's last residence, Combe Florey House, was offered for sale on 1 May 2008 at a price of £2.25 million. 
     Evelyn's granddaughter Daisy Waugh published "Waugh home up for sale" in the Sunday Times on 13 April 2008.  The article is available at the TimesOnline.
     The Daily Telegraph published "Combe Florey House: All (literary) riff-raff welcome" on 19 April 2008.  The article is available at the Telegraph.
     Piers Court was once again on the market for £3.5 million. 

Reviews of The Same Man
     David Lebedoff's book, The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War (2008), has been widely reviewed.  Library Journal noted that "Lebedoff's unpretentious writing style … crackles with wit and playfulness as well as ardent advocacy for these embattled twin prophets" (15 June 2008).  Publishers Weekly described The Same Man as a "lean and urbane dual portrait" and a "breath of fresh air" (16 June 2008).  In Booklist, Ray Olson concluded that "Lebedoff's wonderfully sympathetic interpretation" of Orwell and Waugh makes The Same Man "a book those interested in either or both must read and will, most probably, love" (1 July 2008).  In the New York Sun, David Ormsby found that Lebedoff portrays Orwell and Waugh "in a new and sometimes surprising light" (30 July 2008).  In the Los Angeles Times, Allen Barra judged The Same Man "a refreshingly lean text" (4 August 2008).  In The Times, Cristina Odone noted that "Comparisons are riveting, but the conclusion is dire" (5 August 2008).  In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that "Mr. Lebedoff is adept at communicating his admiration for Orwell and Waugh's work and nimble and provocative when it comes to explicating their fiction" (15 August 2008).  The Economist described The Same Man as an "insightful, waspish book" (21 August 2008).  In the New York Times Book Review, Jim Holt called The Same Man "enjoyable and provocative" (31 August 2008).  In the New Criterion, David Pryce-Jones observed that "Lebedoff is on to something" when he argues that "rejection of moral relativism brings the writers together as two of a kind" (September 2008).    

An Evelyn Waugh Tribute
     In "He Triumphed Outside of the Mainstream," an interview by Ambrose Clancy that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on 17 May 1999, Ian McEwan said that "Amsterdam [1998] is an Evelyn Waugh tribute novel."  The remark is quoted by Brian Finney in "Briony's Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan's Atonement," Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004): 71.  Atonement has often been compared with Brideshead Revisited.

The Daily Beast
     According to an item in the New York Times for 24 August 2008, Tina Brown, the well-known editor, will be starting a media web site called The Daily Beast.  The name comes from a newspaper in Scoop (1938), the first of Evelyn Waugh's books to appear on the Times's best-seller list.  Seven others also appeared there; the most successful was Brideshead Revisited (1945), "which spent six months on the Times list in hardcover and more than a year on the list in paperback." 

End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2
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