EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 39, No. 3
Winter 2009

---

Evelyn Waugh’s Outfit
by Yoshiharu Usui    

     Evelyn Waugh had keen interest in clothes.  He was a customer of Anderson & Sheppard on Savile Row.  Unfortunately, Evelyn Waugh’s Address Card is missing, but that of his elder brother, Capt. Alec Waugh, still exists (Figs. 1a & 1b). 

Figs. 1a & 1b: Capt. Alec Waugh's Address Card at Anderson & Sheppard, Savile Row, London.

On the card, there are a lot of addresses, which shows that Alec moved frequently, and one can trace his moves.  Recommendations included Evelyn Waugh, Richard Connell, A. D. Peters, A. A. Waugh, Auberon Waugh, and C. A. G. Keeling, Alec's son-in-law Christopher, who married Veronica Waugh. Evelyn Waugh’s reference was Alec Waugh.  In those days, one needed a reference when ordering suits, because there were no credit cards.  Normally fathers introduce their sons to tailors.  Perhaps relations between Evelyn and his father Arthur precluded such an introduction.
     Evelyn Waugh first came to A & S on 5 October 1926.  In his diaries, he wrote that he "ordered a suit that is to cost 15 guineas" (267).  The A & S Price List of January 1925 includes a "Lounge Suit of White Imperial" for £10, a lounge suit of "Drill" for £9.10, and a lounge suit "Lined Silk Althrough" for £17.17.  That was a big investment, because Waugh was earning only £120 per year as a schoolmaster.  He had ordered a suit at Hall Bros. in Oxford in February (Diaries 247), so he was changing to a London tailor.  In Brideshead Revisited (1945), Jasper advises Charles to "go to a London tailor; you get better cut and longer credit" (26).  On 7 October 1926, Waugh wrote that he was "a little disappointed" in the A & S suit, since it made him look "distressingly 'dapper.'"  On 23 October, however, he thought it was "going to be good" (Diaries 267).  On 4 November, he tried the suit on again (Diaries 269), and on 21 November, he wore his "new suit from Anderson & Sheppard and for the first time did not feel the worst-dressed person in every room" (Diaries 271). 
     A & S is famous for its “limp look” of softly tailored jackets (Sherwood 32).  Evelyn might have liked their soft construction.  Evelyn’s Measure Book is still available (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Evelyn Waugh's measurements at Anderson & Sheppard, Savile Row, London.

A & S believe that Waugh signed his name (Rowland).  His first "Country Address" was Aston Clinton House, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where he taught school.  As of 10 March 1930, his Country Address changed to Pool Place in Sussex, a house that belonged to Bryan and Diana Guinness.  Waugh's original "Town Address" seems to have been 25 Adam Street, Portman Square, W1.  On 26 April 1928, it changed to 17A Canonbury Square, where he briefly lived with She-Evelyn.  His parents' address, 145 North End Road in Hampstead, was used after 4 October 1929.
     When ordering one’s first suit at a firm, the cutter measures the client.  A & S take twenty-seven measurements for the jacket and seven for the trousers.  After they measure, they make a paper pattern, the basis for any kind of coat: lounge suit, tweed suit, dinner suit, or overcoat, whether they are single breasted or double breasted.  They change the paper pattern if the customer’s figure changes, but the very first measurement is kept.  According to it, Waugh’s measurement from the neck to the ground was 58 inches.  Judging from the paper pattern, A & S estimate Waugh's height to have been 5 feet, 10 inches.  His height is usually given as 5' 7", but A & S rely on a measurement called "The Gentlemen's Height," a "more elegant way of taking a record of height than asking the customer or taking a measurement from his head to the floor" (Rowland).  Waugh's waist was 30 inches, his hips 40 inches, his knees 21 inches, and his ankles 17-1/2 inches.  The cutter said he had a slim waist and large hips.  I saw the silhouette based on the measurements.  With ample space around the thighs, the silhouette was very narrow from the knee to the ankles.  It seemed to be designed for writing.
     A & S say that Waugh preferred bold tweeds, window-paned and checked.  In the 1950s, his checks became bolder and bolder.  He even ordered an overcoat with the same cloth used by the Household Cavalry.  Christopher Sykes says that "Evelyn made tailoring history" by ordering a suit in this cloth.  It had a "light reddish-brown background" with "a bright red check about three inches square."  The suit "surpassed the wildest extravagances of an old-fashioned music-hall comedian," and it had a "weird touch of obscenity," as a "bright red line from the checks ran down the fly buttons."  Waugh "enjoyed the farce … especially as it increased the sourness of his critics" (Sykes 397).
     A & S also had a lot of famous people as clients, such as Fred Astaire, Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, and Charlie Chaplin (Sherwood 32).  Evelyn Waugh liked movies, and that might have been one reason he chose A & S.  Now a two-piece suit is priced from £2,750.  Anderson & Sheppard can be visited through their web site, http://www.anderson-sheppard.co.uk.
     In his diaries, Waugh mentions having fittings in Albemarle Street in 1955 (725).  There have been no tailors on the street, but there used to be two famous firms on Dover Street.  They were Kilgour, French & Stanbury and Ted Watson’s.  The former firm had a lot of film stars as clients, such as Cary Grant.  It moved to Savile Row and still exists, but its management has changed and their name has changed to Kilgour.  They no longer have any old records.  Ted Watson used to be a valet of Lord Mountbatten and turned into a successful tailor.  His company had a lot of upper-class clients.  Albemarle Street and Dover Street are back to back.  A famous hotel, Brown’s, has entrances facing both streets.  Because of the firms' locations, there is a strong possibility that Waugh was one of their clients.  Unfortunately, there is no way to confirm it so far.
     Waugh continued to be interested in tailoring.  In 1957, he advised his son Auberon in Florence to "return in time to have a gentleman's suit of clothes made for your interview with the colonel of the regiment."  Auberon was going into the army, and Evelyn thought other graduates of Downside School were "most improperly dressed."  As Auberon prepared for Oxford in 1959, Evelyn promised to "settle [his] current tailors' bills."  In 1961, Auberon visited his tailors, presumably Anderson & Sheppard, and they showed him "a very handsome blue and brown suit of clothes they were making for [Evelyn]."  The tailor said, "I do hope Mr Waugh is not colour-blind, because it seemed to me that as he left the shop he thought he had been trying on a black and white one.  I did not know whether I ought to tell him."  Auberon thought the suit was "extremely beautiful."  Evelyn explained that the suit was "a symptom of rejuvescence … that may well be an embarrassment to my adoring family" (Alexander Waugh).    
     Waugh seems to have gone to Turnbull & Asser for shirts.  Alec did too, so Evelyn seems to have followed his brother to the same tailor and shirt-maker.  In 1926, Alec enrolled as a special constable to fight the General Strike; to Evelyn, Alec's action showed "the same rigid orthodoxy which sends him to Jermyn Street for his shirts and Paris for his fornication" (Diaries 252).  Turnbull & Asser are still in Jermyn Street.  In July 1947, Evelyn went there for a stiff evening shirt after his butler had forgotten to pack one for a London ball (Diaries 683).  Unfortunately, Turnbull & Asser do not preserve old records.
     Evelyn Waugh was a customer of the hatters James Lock & Co. on St. James’s Street.  He was also a member of the St. James’s Club and White’s Club.  Lock & Co. is very close to both clubs.  The ledger says that he ordered a Coke Hat on16 July 1947 (Fig. 3).  

Fig. 3: Evelyn Waugh's order for a Coke Hat  at James Lock & Co. on 16 July 1947.

Sykes recalls wearing a grey bowler to White's one day after the Second World War.  Waugh saw the hat and wanted Sykes to give it to him.  Sykes refused and suggested that Waugh order one like it at Lock & Co.  According to Sykes, Waugh went to the shop on the same day.  Sykes notes that Waugh wore the hat "frequently from then on, not only in summer, for which such hats are designed, but at all seasons" (397).  In his autobiography, Waugh's son Auberon remembers that his father was "very proud" of a "grey bowler hat" that he called his "drab Coke" (64).

Figs. 4 & 5: Lock & Co.'s Coke Hat, and a top hat.

     Here is the firm’s explanation of the Coke Hat (Fig. 4).

In 1850 Lock & Co. was commissioned by William Coke, a relative of the Earls of Leicester of Holkham Hall, Norfolk to produce the first coke or bowler hat ever made.  The new hat was designed for his gamekeepers to wear, it was low crowned, small brimmed, hard and protective and was destined to replace their headwear of top hats [Fig. 5].  The top hats with their tall crown were easily knocked off the gamekeepers’ heads by low-hanging branches and chance encounters with poachers.  A gamekeeper’s life was an eventful one added to which there were the ongoing costs of replacing damaged top hats. A prototype of Mr Coke’s design was produced by Lock & Co. and he visited St James’s Street to inspect his new hat.  He was presented with a very rigid hat, constructed of layers of muslin and stiffened with shellac (varnish derived from an Indian beetle).  Mr Coke took it out of the shop and placed it on the pavement, and then jumped up and down on it.  The hat withstood the test and as was customary at Lock & Co. was called the coke after the customer for whom it was made.  Although the coke hat started life as a protective working man’s country hat, it replaced its tall-crowned cousin the top hat and migrated from the country to the cities.  The hat became the uniform headwear of city stockbrokers, barristers and civil servants at Westminster.

     Evelyn Waugh was photographed in a top hat on his way to Auberon's wedding in July 1961.  Lock & Co. no longer make silk top hats, but they will repair your old one.

Figs. 6 & 7:  Evelyn Waugh's head shape at Lock & Co., and the Conformateur.

     Lock & Co. still preserve Evelyn Waugh’s head shape (Fig. 6) and the ledger ordering the Coke Hat.  The head shape was taken by a machine called the Conformateur.  　

At Lock & Co. some wearers found the hard hats -- the bowler and top hats are hard hats -- so harsh upon the brow that it became necessary to find a method of shaping these hats to produce a more comfortable fit.  An ingenious Frenchman, M Maillard, produced the answer, when in the 1850’s he designed and patented the head-measuring machine the conformateur [Fig. 7].  The conformateur is applied to the head, displacing the spokes of the machine and producing a card head shape which exactly maps (in one-sixth life size) the customer’s head.  An adjustable wooden block [Fig. 8] is then made up around the card template to produce a block of the actual life size of the customer’s head.  The hard hat can be moulded to fit perfectly, and the card filed for future reference.  The conformateur remains in daily use to this day, as it continues to be the very best system for fitting hard hats.  The conformateur has been used to take the head shape of Her Majesty the Queen, to assist with the fitting of the crown jewels for her coronation.  Prince Akihito attended the coronation of Her Majesty and visited Lock & Co. where his head was measured with the conformateur and a top hat supplied.  The conformateur has also been used by the space agency NASA to produce well-fitted helmets for long-term use in space.  Head shapes on display at Lock & Co. show a small selection of the many well-known customers of Lock & Co. including Sir Laurence Olivier, Cecil Beaton, General de Gaulle, Evelyn Waugh, and the Duke of Windsor (Edward & Mrs Simpson).  Lock & Co.’s four centuries of customers are recorded in our handwritten ledgers and read like the pages of Who’s Who.  Admiral Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, dandy Beau Brummell, mad bad and dangerous to know Lord Byron, artists Sargent, Joseph Beuys, writers Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, performers Frank Sinatra, Rudolf Valentino, heads of states including Sir Winston Churchill were all Locks men.  Cards produced by the conformateur have established that American heads are slightly larger and longer than British heads.  Head sizes are on the increase and over the last fifty years the average size has increased by at least three-eighths of an inch.

Fig. 8: Adjustable block for making a model of a client's head at Lock & Co.

     Waugh’s head was 7-1/8 inches.  I own a felt hat from the same firm.  Coincidentally his size is the same as mine.  I am about six feet tall, so Waugh’s head was large for his height.  James Lock & Co. can also be visited through their web site, http://www.lockhatters.co.uk.

Works Cited
Rowland, Anda. E-mail to the author, 23 September 2008.
Sherwood, James. The London Cut: Savile Row Bespoke Tailoring. Venice: Marsilio, 2007.
Sykes, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. 1975. New York: Penguin, 1977.
     Waugh, Alexander. E-mail to the editor, 25 September 2008.
     Waugh, Auberon. Will This Do? The First Fifty Years of Auberon Waugh: An Autobiography.  1991. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998. 
     Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown, 1945.
     ---.  The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.

Vile Bodies as Old Comedy
by Letitia Henville            

     A young man unable to afford the luxuries he loves, an older generation with no wise words for their grown children, a godless society, and an ironic chorus of heavenly beings: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, or Aristophanes’ Clouds?  This cursory gloss could be used to describe both Waugh’s 1930 novel and the play that preceded it by about 2400 years.  The two texts share more than these superficial similarities, however; in Waugh’s novels, and in Vile Bodies especially, the echoes of Greek Old Comedy--including its characteristic linear plot-line, unique chorus, and animalistic and masked characters--resound.  In both style and structure, Waugh’s novel reflects this classical genre.
     The Ancient Greek genre of comedy was first introduced at Athenian Dionysian festivals in 487 BC. Classicists divide comedy into Old and New traditions, marking the end of Old Comedy with the death of Aristophanes.  New Comedy is the form most similar to what we would recognize in the comedies of today: New Comedies have logical plot-lines without much irreverent interjection, and conclude with happy endings usually in the form of a marriage or love-match.  They tends toward “cyclical” structures, “teleological action [that] moves toward the new life or reborn society of the final scene” (Frye 155). New Comedies are circular because their conclusions are also new beginnings for their characters.  Old Comedies, on the other hand, are the “drama of unchained being” (Frye 152).  Old Comedies feature linear plots that move their characters ever further from their starting points, from absurdity into further absurdity.
     Like an Old Comedy, the plot of Vile Bodies moves in a line.  This linear progression is literalized by the hallucinating Agatha Runcible, who, lying in her hospital bed, imagines a “black road ... unroll[ing] like a length of cinema film ... Faster ... faster” (Waugh 200).  Agatha’s life and the lives of her friends have broken from the circular track and speed ever further from the starting line.  The Bright Young People shift from party to party, including of course “Greek parties” (123), and end up eventually “skidding all over the place” (200), unable to contain or control the absurdity of their existence.  Unlike Waugh’s earlier Decline and Fall, where the final scene directly parallels the opening, the conclusion of Vile Bodies resists the telos of circular plot structure.  Its ending is no “happily ever after” resolution; it provides only a linear, “dialectical” progression into the absurdity of war (Frye 150).  Indeed, the novel’s closing scene could be read as a parody of New Comedy’s love-match ending, as, instead of marriage between Adam and Nina, the reader is presented with an image of the hero falling asleep, “oblivious to all the happy emotion pulsing” between the ironically named Chastity and the drunk Major (now General) (Waugh 224).  The love-match is between a couple who have just met, rather than the hero we have followed through the text.  It is a “Happy Ending” in title only (220).  In Vile Bodies’ linear structure, therefore, the echoes of Old Comedy resound.
     Another parallel between Vile Bodies and the work of Aristophanes lies in the attributes of the chorus unique to Old Comedy.  In Old Comedy, the chorus was an “integral element” (Lever 110), and plays were named after the chorus--examples include Frogs, Clouds, Wasps, and Birds.  Besides conforming to the tragic characteristics of the chorus, the chorus of Old Comedy had two unique attributes: first, the members of the chorus could interrupt the flow of the plot with a form of irrelevant interjection known as parabasis, and, second, they often were portrayed as animals.  The parabasis-- literally, “a stepping-aside”--saw the main characters leave the chorus alone on-stage to perform a “fairly long passage” that only “sometimes relate[d] to the plot of the play” (McLeish 91).  Neither the tragedies that preceded Old Comedy nor the New Comedy that followed it featured animalistic choruses or parabasis; these two features are unique to Old Comedy.
     In Vile Bodies, the peripheral, flat characters whose voices interrupt the text function like an Aristophanic chorus.  Vile Bodies is noisy with the near-constant chatter of characters not central to the story-line: the novel titters with the “Oh, oh, oh” of the Bright Young People (14), the banter of Kitty Blackwater and Fanny Throbbing (12, 98, 109, etc), and the overheard exclamations of newspaper readers (89), socialites (115), and race-car mechanics (170).  The novel’s servants, members of the public, and groups of superficial friends cannot “be distinguished from one another by any individualizing characteristics” (Wirth 37).  Like a chorus, they speak as if with a single voice.
     To illustrate: Adam twice overhears women’s reactions to antics of his friends publicized in newspapers.  The “indignant old woman” at the Underground station defends Agatha Runcible (35), but later two other women condemn the young socialite with the same vigor (66).  The women’s irreverent banter, quickness to judge, and penchant for relating their lives to those of figures in newspapers unites them as part of a single group.  Both sets of women act as if personally offended by the content of the columns they read--“Disgraceful, I calls it” (35); “Such a terrible example” (66).  They describe the newspaper as if it is confirmation of their opinions, rather than the other way around--“And quite right, too, I says” (35); “Exactly what I think” (66).  They also proceed to compare the activities of the society lady to their own daughters--“our Sarah ...” (35); “There’s our Agnes now ...” (66).  Although their accents differ, the structure of their speech and its content unite the two sets of ladies as a single group.
     Likewise, the letter-writers who provide feedback to Mr. Chatterbox are virtually indistinguishable, except that one mentions being deaf while the other has “abnormally large ears” (111).  Thus juxtaposed, the two letter-writers are opposites; superficially, their ears set them apart.  Brief quotations from their letters highlight the similarities between the two writers above all else, however.  Both letter-writers read the gossip column, both interact with the newspaper, and both draw parallels between themselves and the aristocracy.  They are very much like the chatty women who take public transport with Adam. Provided with only scraps of their conversation, these voices blend into one, as in the ellipses that unite the “[s]craps of highly technical conversation” overheard by the Bright Young People as they arrive at the racetrack (158).  Assigned to the novel’s periphery, and united in voice, perspective and action, this group of flat characters forms a comedic chorus.
     The chorus interacts with the plot through the filter of newspapers; in other instances, the chorus witnesses action first-hand, without mediation.  Like a classical chorus, they reflect on what they have seen, interpreting the action of the play.  For example, choral figures debate the social status of  Mrs Ape’s angels--“Angels are certainly not guests, ... and I don’t think they are deputations” (93).  While a classical chorus is meant to observe and interpret the main characters’ actions from the “standpoint of traditional wisdom” (Oxford), the analyses of this chorus tend rather toward the inane and unwise.  Instead of a break from the classical tradition, the banality of the chorus reflects its inane and unwise society.  The chorus’s interpretations are inane because these characters draw on the tradition of superficiality.  Ironically, in being unwise, the chorus accurately reflects its society’s “traditional wisdom,” and thus conforms to the conventions of a chorus of Old Comedy.
     Although the chorus’s comments usually relate to the story, there is, in keeping with the tradition of Old Comedy, one instance of choral parabasis in Vile Bodies.  It occurs when Adam is on the train to Doubting Hall for the second time and either he or perhaps only the narrator overhears two women chatting.  The progress of the story is interrupted as the women speak in extended monologues on inane topics: “And there’s Mrs Hemingway with her son next door who left school eighteen months ago, and there he is kicking his heels about the house all day and doing nothing ...” (138).  Although their topic is “the Younger Generation” (137), the women aren’t discussing the Bright Young People central to the text.  Instead, the women’s conversation concerns their children, friends, neighbours and husbands--characters whose lives do not intersect with the plot of the novel at any other point.  Rather than Adam, Nina, Ginger, and Agatha, these women talk about Alfred, Bob, Betty, Lily, and “that young Anderson boy who’s in the wireless business” (139).  Like the parabasis of Old Comedy, the central characters are off-stage during the course of this conversation.
     Even the women’s speaking style mimics the pnigos, “the choke” ("Comedy"), the part of the parabasis in which “a few lines [are] supposed to be recited in one breath” (Lever 111).  The ladies’ speech is full of long, run-on sentences:

And I did think at one time that perhaps Bob was thinking of Betty Rylands, you know Mrs Rylands’ girl at the Laurels, such nice people, and they used to play tennis together and people remarked how much they were about, but now he never seems to pay any attention to her, it’s all his hockey friends, and I said one Saturday, “Wouldn’t you like to ask Betty over to tea?” and he said, “Well, you can if you like”, and she came over looking ever so sweet, and, would you believe it, Bob went out and didn’t come in at all until supper-time. (139)

Lengthy sentences such as this one echo the lengthy pnigos that was standard in Aristophanes.  In both subject and style, the women’s extended, overheard conversation resembles a parabasis of Old Comedy.
     Like the chorus in Aristophanes’ play Clouds, Vile Bodies’ chorus includes a number of heavenly creatures: Mrs Ape’s angels.  The angels sing vulgar songs, as did the choruses of Old Comedy; their vulgarity, however, tends towards spirituality--one of their most famous songs is “There ain’t no flies on the Lamb of God” (16)--as opposed to the sexuality of Aristophanes.  Like the vaporous clouds, the angels’ heavenly status is ironic, as the girls’ constant gossip, “pinches and slaps” reveal their names to be purely superficial (93).  Unlike the clouds, however, the angels form only part of the chorus, rather than assuming its role entirely.  They do not provide the same comedy as some of the other peripheral characters; moreover, they are not sufficiently differentiated from the other peripheral characters to render them a chorus by themselves.  How different is the voice of Creative Endeavour from Miss Mouse?  They are not that different at all; they speak with a single voice, and, together, they all form the chorus.
     The influence of Old Comedy also helps to explain the prevalence of animal names, nicknames and attributes assigned to peripheral characters in Vile Bodies.  The choruses of Aristophanes were often depicted as animals--wasps, birds, and frogs, to name three--and likewise in Vile Bodies the peripheral characters are named after animals.  We meet Mrs Ape, Kitty Blackwater, Miss Mouse and her family of Mice; at one point, a bearded Simon Balcairn is referred to as a “beaver” (97), and, later, Chastity finds herself being called “Bunny” (223).  Moreover, members of this mixed lot frequently find themselves congregating at Lottie Crump’s hotel, “Shepheard’s” (31), an appropriate place for a gathering of beasts.  Thus, the peripheral characters in Vile Bodies display qualities like those specific to an Old Comedic chorus.
     Another alignment of Vile Bodies and Aristophanic tradition lies in masking.  Although the elements and functions of costumes in Old Comedy--and Ancient Greek theatre generally--are still hotly contested, it is generally accepted that exaggeratedly large masks would have been worn by actors in performances of Old Comedy.  Based on the evidence of vase paintings, these masks used varying colours and quantities of facial and scalp hair to indicate gender and age.  The basic “Mature Man” mask, for example, would have a “dark beard and hair” (Marshall 191).  These masks likely enhanced the absurdist comedy.
     In Vile Bodies, Waugh plays with the classical tradition of masking, presenting characters both masked and unmasked.  Father Rothschild carries, but does not wear, a “false beard” (9); Johnnie Hoop gets in trouble for wearing “a mask and black gloves that represented the Maharanee of Pukkapore” to a party that the Maharajah also attends (53); Simon Balcairn disguises himself with a beard in order to attend Lady Metroland’s party, but is caught and made to remove it (102).  Caught up in an “orgy of litigation” that recollects Aristophanes’ Wasps, Lady Throbbing remarks that there is “something sympathique” about the wigs worn in court (109); earlier, Lady Throbbing is accused of wearing a wig herself (103).  These masks symbolize the interchangeability of character, a quality also demonstrated in Lottie Crump’s continual reduction of names to nonsense words like “Thingummy” and “What’s-his-name” (38), not to mention the number of different people who get to be Mr. Chatterbox.  The masking and especially its hairiness suggest further affinity between Old Comedy and Waugh’s work.
Vile Bodies is not the only Waugh novel that reflects the conventions of Old Comedy.  In Decline and Fall, Captain Grimes uses a false beard to disguise himself from his wife, and Prendergast wears an obvious wig.  In A Handful of Dust, the comments of the chorus are often placed within parentheses, separated by punctuation from the story’s central focus.  The peripheral Pigge of Scoop recalls the puns on pig-names in The Acharnians, while Whelper’s name is an extension of an archaic term for puppy, “whelp.” In The Loved One, the circular plot structure is abandoned in favour of Old Comedic linearity, and the parallels between humans and animals are emphasized.  In Officers and Gentlemen, Major Hound assumes the diminutive nickname Fido.  There are traces of Aristophanes, in varying degrees, peppered throughout Waugh’s oeuvre.
     The structure and conventions of the Ancient Greek genre of Old Comedy are evident in Waugh’s novels, most notably in Vile Bodies.  Indeed, some confusing elements of this novel--the tendency of the plot to devolve into absurdity, the frequent interjections of flat characters, the alignment of people and animals, and the surprising number of false beards and other masks--suggest the influence of Aristophanes.  Waugh’s novel echoes the structure and motifs of Greek Old Comedy.

Works Cited
"Comedy." The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Eds. M. C. Howatson and Ian Chilvers. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. University of Toronto Libraries. 6 May 2007 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/>.
     Frye, Northrop. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1976.
     Lever, Katherine. The Art of Greek Comedy. London: Methuen, 1956.
     Marshall, C. W. “Some Fifth-Century Masking Conventions.” Greece & Rome 46.2 (October 1999): 188-202.
     McLeish, Kenneth. The Theatre of Aristophanes. London: Thames & Hudson, 1980.
     Waugh, Evelyn. Vile Bodies. 1930. London: Penguin, 2003.
     Wirth, Annette. The Loss of Traditional Values and Continuance of Faith in Evelyn Waugh's Novels: A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990.

Waugh Poems
by James Morris

Two Teddies

Archibald Ormsby-Gore
was a big soft cuddly bear on television.
Aloysius was a pompous old bear;
he didn’t like to appear.

Aloysius was made of mohair; irritating to some.
Archie was a smooth bear,
everybody liked him.

Two Women

Claire Rayner, Saint Helena,
She wouldn’t entertain her,
I conjecture…

Not her scene;
The Empress Dowager,
The mother of Constantine.

Brideshead the TV Series

Under the bed for Kurt’s cigarettes;

Sebastian’s search for sanctity;
‘it’s my job’

How I love Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick,
everything about it indeed, the music.
The Holy Spirit was definitely in it.

How I love upper-class English Catholicism,
The Characters in Brideshead
And the bog Irish have the same sensibility.

The scene with Kurt hurts.

Recommended Reading

Televisions, televisions, televisions,
Stately homes
turned into prisons.

Legers everywhere, Picassos,
Politicians in casual wear--
Tony Blair?

The growth of plastic surgery
with Clara’s mask,
A woman with a beard, well, that’s old hat. 

Sterilization, contraception widespread,
‘The Ministry of Euthanasia’
Well, not yet. 

Love among the Ruins
Evelyn Waugh,
Much more prophetically accurate than 1984.


Review

The new Brideshead movie--
They left out the two most important characters;
Aloysius and God.

Editor's note: Archibald Ormsby-Gore was John Betjeman's teddy bear.  Among other accomplishments, Claire Rayner is the author of many historical novels, including the Performers series (12 vols., 1973-1988), the Poppy Chronicles (6 vols., 1987-1988), and the Quentin Quartet (2 vols., 1994-1995).

Book Reviews

What’s that you say, Mr. Robinson?
The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes, by Stephen Robinson.  London: Little, Brown, 2008.  480 pp.  £20.  Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, James Cook University.

     Stephen Robinson’s The Remarkable Lives of W. F. Deedes is a sound biography, indispensable for anyone interested in Bill Deedes—journalist, soldier, parliamentarian, editor, cabinet minister, peer and amazingly long-lived roving reporter.  It also sheds interesting light on twentieth-century newspaper history, the earliest use of television for political purposes and post-war Conservative Party politics.  Two weak chapters irrelevantly pillory Evelyn Waugh.
     Born in 1913, W. F. (Bill) Lord Deedes was still working when he died in 2007, aged 94.  By then he was a household name, widely admired as the epitome of a good journalist, a secular saint working with the likes of Princess Diana on anti-landmines crusades.  Robinson declares his book The Authorised Biography, but it offers much personal information that tempers the public myth.  Deedes emerges as spectacularly averse from normal contact with his wife and children, a shallow thinker with a Vicar-of-Bray-like capacity for emerging on the winning side following newspaper closures and hostile takeovers—his “subaltern’s mind” making him respectful of even the most repellent authority.  Deedes and Waugh shared some traits, such as dressing well and keeping their English reserve; both were proud of their “trade,” whether as “working journalist” or “writer,” but in most respects they were opposites.
     Deedes was born into an old aristocratic family in the last stages of financial ruin.  His father, virtually deranged by service in the Boer War and bullied by his mother, squandered a large sum re-installing the family, with its “numerous old retainers and dependants,” in the ancestral castle; and some facets of life in that dilapidated pile, as Robinson points out, might have provided material for Boot Magna in Scoop. Deedes went to Harrow, then plagued by homosexual and heterosexual scandals among both students and staff.  (Is this why Grimes is an Old Harrovian?)  After his father lost the last of the family money on the stock exchange, Deedes had to leave school, and an uncle secured him a job on the Morning Post. Four years later, in 1935, Deedes travelled to Abyssinia as a war correspondent, where he shared quarters with Waugh.  Later, when the Morning Post was absorbed by the Daily Telegraph, Deedes emerged with his job intact; and, with the exception of the war years when he served with distinction in the King’s Royal Rifles, he stayed with the paper until death.  Having entered parliament as a member for the family seat of Ashford, Deedes became a junior minister under Macmillan (starring in the earliest political television broadcasts) and later an undistinguished member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, from which he was allowed to “resign” and take up a peerage.  Famously, Bill’s friendship with Denis Thatcher led to the Private Eye spoof, in which an outrageously silly Denis writes to “Dear Bill.”  Robinson makes clear the somewhat ignominious way in which Deedes, who was a Tory “wet,” accommodated himself to the “dry” Thatcher regime and his “culpable” role in forcing the resignation of a colleague, Thomas Galbraith, who had been falsely accused of complicity with the spy John Vassal.  Despite promises, Robinson has little to say about “the great events of the twentieth century” that Deedes’s “career spanned”; he is at his best with incidents such as the Profumo scandal and with Deedes’s private relationships.  His two Waugh chapters are baffling.
     In so far as Chapter 4, “Out of Town Job,” deals with Deedes’s coverage of the war in Abyssinia, it is good.  Robinson’s professional assessment of his despatches identifies some that were coups and many that merely repeated press releases and were “fairly witless propaganda.”  Though an innocent 22-year-old, Deedes shared quarters with Evelyn Waugh, then 32 and a fashionable novelist with significant experience of Africa.  The mountain of luggage Deedes brought to Addis Ababa, which contrasted with Waugh’s single suitcase, has led to speculation that Deedes was Waugh’s model for William Boot.  Robinson sensibly points out that in 1935 Deedes was not a naïve cub reporter, having already had four years' experience on the Morning Post.  One might add that no “model” was needed for William Boot, because he is a figure of fantasy, a Candide, to whom the simplest journalistic conventions have to be explained, and through whose eyes the folly of the conventions becomes evident.
     Since Deedes lived and travelled with Waugh, their joint activities and personal relationship were obvious matter for the biographer.  But unhappily Robinson abandons his true subject and gratuitously  launches into several pages of personal abuse of Waugh.  Do readers of this book really want to know whether Evelyn Waugh “fucked” Penelope Betjeman?  However, one point that Robinson repeatedly makes—that Waugh wrote Scoop to “revenge” himself on Sir Percival Phillips—does raise issues worth discussing.
     Notoriously, a mysterious Francis Rickett travelled to Addis Ababa with Waugh; and Waugh, suspicious of his reasons for visiting Abyssinia, began enquiries.  But, unable to wait for a development, Waugh went to Harar in pursuit of another lead, and when he was away the biggest story of the war broke: Rickett turned out to be a financier representing the African Exploitation and Development Corporation who had secured oil and mineral concessions over a large part of Ethiopia.  This gave the British and American governments a reason to warn off Italy; instead, they repudiated Rickett.
     The name of Waugh stirs Robinson, like so many British journalists, into a moral fervour of dredging up, exaggerating and denouncing faults that, even when real, would go unnoticed in another writer.  It would not occur to Robinson to blame his idol, George Steer of The Times, for travelling to the Ogaden and missing the Rickett scoop.  But he can find “no excuse” for an “insufficiently assiduous” Waugh who “failed” to get the story.  Robinson also contrasts Waugh’s imagined lack of zeal with the “dogged work” of Sir Percival Phillips, the doyen of the press corps, who “picked up scraps” of information, joined the dots and scooped his rivals.  This is most improbable.
     Phillips had covered the coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930 as the Emperor’s “guest,” and the Emperor had entrusted to him alone a “special message for the people of the British Empire,” later complimenting him “for the fullest and most accurate descriptions of the coronation.”  In 1935, Phillips was in Addis Ababa representing the Daily Telegraph, a paper that fully supported Abyssinia.  It seems altogether likely, therefore, that when the Emperor and his advisers struck their financial-propaganda deal with Rickett, they ensured maximum publicity by giving the story to Phillips (his reports hint that he witnessed the signing).  Why would they give it as an “exclusive” to Waugh, who represented the hostile Daily Mail?  Or to George Steer who, though personally friendly, represented The Times, which was sceptical?  Only Phillips had the stature and the connections to make the Abyssinia-Rickett deal an immediate world-wide sensation.  I can therefore see no merit in Robinson’s repeated assertion that a “resentful” Waugh wrote Scoop to “revenge” himself on Phillips.  More importantly, attributing Scoop to a personal motive deguts this funny but serious exposé of journalistic practice.
     Waugh’s interest in invented news began with the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie.  Phillips’s coronation cable (which was in a stratosphere above anyone else’s) appeared in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday under the rubric “Delayed in transmission.”  That was because the coronation took place on a Sunday, when the cable office was closed.  No genuine coronation stories could, therefore, appear in Europe or the USA before Tuesday.  Waugh’s cable for The Times was also “Delayed in transmission.” On the strength of his having worked with Waugh in 1935, Deedes appointed himself the expert on Waugh at the 1930 coronation, and he published some appalling nonsense (much of which is corrected in At Waugh with Waugh: The True Story of Scoop).  Unaware of the delay to all cables, Deedes created a fantasy of The Times editors anxiously awaiting the coronation despatch that their joke correspondent had failed to send in time.  In reality, The Times was very pleased with Waugh’s work, but Deedes’s fantasy has nevertheless been widely believed.
     I recall this minor matter because, in the absence of genuine reports, many editors splashed wildly fictitious and nonsensical “news” stories about the coronation in Monday’s papers.  This prompted Waugh in Remote People to analyse the philosophy of news and the harm done by a press which preferred to be “first with the news and the pictures” rather than factual or even interesting.  Robinson professes respect for Philip Knightley’s The First Casualty, which describes Scoop, not as a “parody” of the antics of the journalists in Addis Ababa, but as “straight reportage, thinly disguised as a novel.”  But Robinson seems inclined to condone the brazen inventions and dishonesties of the journalists, apparently on the grounds that their job required them to send something to their papers, and that they belonged to a “privileged calling” that it was disloyal to criticize.  Unwilling or perhaps unable, therefore, to comprehend that Waugh was in earnest about his criticisms of the press in Waugh in Abyssinia and Scoop, Robinson attributes them to "snobbery," or “contempt for journalists,” or “jealousy” of rivals.  But even if Waugh was “snobbish” about the “grunts” of the press corps—Robinson hugely exaggerates this: Waugh enjoyed a lively news story—it would be a peripheral issue, far outweighed by the importance of what he had to say.  Throughout his life Waugh argued that the consequences of irresponsible journalism—and of publishing and broadcasting as well—were the corruption of communication and a restless public opinion, lurching from extreme to extreme, that undermined the possibility of effective government.
     In Chapter Five, “At War with Waugh,” Robinson attacks the one area of Waugh in Abyssinia that is not vulnerable and, in an oddly obsessive passage, features Deedes’s “real” opinion of Waugh.
     Many readers find Waugh in Abyssinia too shrill, too partisan, too fulsome (in the closing chapter) or simply on the morally wrong side.  But even on this level of justifiable reservation, some balance is needed.  While Waugh angrily describes the Abyssinian rulers of their conquered territories as “dirty, idle and domineering, burning the timber, devouring the crops,” it might be remembered that the reports of the British Consul who lived among the Gallas and witnessed Abyssinian imperial rule firsthand described the “despotic Tafari regime” in language more forceful than Waugh’s.  Moreover, George Steer, whom Robinson idolizes, on a single page describes Italian soldiers as “great Wops … fat mutton-headed runaways … bullies and thieves … the surfacing scum of modern Italy.”  At the other extreme, Robinson gushes about Ethiopia as a “blameless and primitive native culture,” when in fact it was a complex of subject peoples ruthlessly exploited by the four Abyssinian kingdoms.  Incidentally, Waugh did not object to Abyssinia’s “primitive culture”: he disliked the large body of Europeanized young men surrounding the Emperor, the “civil servants” charged with destroying the old and creating the new Ethiopia.
     Despite all the scholarly work of recent years, Robinson is still stuck at the level of Rose Macaulay’s 1946 description of Waugh in Abyssinia as a “Fascist tract.”  Not only does he adopt as axiomatic the arguable point that Mussolini’s defiance of the League of Nations paved the way for Spain and World War II, but he also makes the astonishing claim that “In none of his writing—fiction or non-fiction—is there any evidence that Waugh understood the wider moral or strategic significance of Abyssinia.”  Robinson goes on, “If Waugh appreciated that Mussolini’s aggression in Africa would eventually have consequences for the security of Europe, he chose not to convey this insight.”  This reverses the truth.  In fact, the “moral and strategic consequences” of the war are central to Waugh’s long opening chapter in Waugh in Abyssinia and to his many related articles, letters to editors and reviews.
     In 1935 Italy was still thought formidable—no one could then foresee that the Italian fleet would be sunk on its first engagement in World War II, or that the Italian Army would disintegrate so quickly in North Africa—and Britain and France were anxious to preserve their Great-War alliance with her.  At the time, Mussolini was perceived, not as an ally of Hitler, who was still emerging, but as a counterweight.  Austria in particular trusted Mussolini to guarantee its independence against Germany.  Moreover, in 1924 Britain had indicated that it regarded Abyssinia as within Italy’s “sphere of influence” and encouraged her ally’s “legitimate aspirations.”  But when in 1935 Russia did an about-face and joined the League of Nations, the Popular Front very successfully aroused public opinion against Italy.  Britain and the League then responded to public opinion and, though they delivered not one jot of material assistance, conveyed the impression that they would help Abyssinia resist Italian aggression.
     From Waugh’s perspective the false impression created by Britain and the League, coupled with sanctions, encouraged Abyssinia to fight a war it could not win and drove Italy to mount a cruelly destructive invasion at a cost beyond any benefit to be gained.  He blamed the inconsistent policies of Britain for escalating the conflict and for the avoidable "slaughter and terror on one side, the crippling expenditure on the other"; and he warned—despite Robinson’s denial—that “the ultimate consequences would be of world wide effect”: Mussolini would be driven into the arms of Hitler, creating a fatal shift in the balance of power.  Thus Robinson’s assertion that Waugh failed to understand “the strategic significance of Abyssinia … for the security of Europe” could not be more wrong.
     Robinson (as do many others) damns Waugh as “pro-Italian and pro-Fascist” and can, of course, cite passages to support the claim.  But the totality of evidence shows that Waugh’s primary focus was to attack the opposition to Italy—which is not the same as saying Mussolini was right.  For a time, in George Bernard Shaw mode, Waugh enjoyed the furore created by defying the massive anti-war majority.  The euphoria quickly evaporated after Italy became Goliath.
     Returning to Deedes and Waugh, The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes contains perhaps the oddest personal attack on Waugh yet published.  For reasons that can only be guessed at, Robinson was determined to worm out of Deedes—who had already written intelligently about Waugh in At Waugh with Waugh and in his autobiography, Dear Bill—what he “really” thought of Evelyn Waugh. He persisted until the old man “eventually conceded”:

Waugh was a natural shit.  It is true that I never wrote of his deep inner contempt for everyone.  Scoop shows his contempt for journalism and for the lower classes.  He knew he was a pig, he knew of his awfulness, which is why he clung to his Roman Catholicism as if it was something he hoped would redeem him.

Now for a student of Deedes, it must be interesting to know that Deedes published one thing about Waugh while privately thinking another.  But at this point Robinson’s focus is not Deedes but Waugh, and he presents Deedes’s effusion about Waugh as though it were a revelation.
     At Waugh with Waugh is a good book precisely because Deedes, a good reporter, confined himself to what he saw and heard and to the conclusions flowing from his observations.  Thus the book, though no paean of praise for Waugh, is permanently important because it relates words and actions and indicates what they reveal, for example, about Waugh’s leadership qualities or habit of listening closely to what people said in conversation.  Deedes understood the basics of his trade, one of which is that motives are unknowable and therefore, while amusing to chat or correspond about, not matter for print.  Robinson belongs to a newer school that freely attributes motives, no matter how improbable.  Thus, for one of many glaring examples of attributing motives without a hint of evidence, he damns Waugh, not for disputing George Steer’s politics and writings, but for being “jealous” of Steer because Steer went to Winchester and Christ Church, while Waugh went to the “minor” Lancing and Hertford.  Waugh was also supposedly “jealous” because Steer was “working for The Times … which was the sort of paper his [Waugh’s] friends read,” and because Deedes was working for the Morning Post, “the paper for the upper classes,” which paid a “good salary with good expenses.”  Waugh had a Johnsonian attitude to writing, and we may be confident that, despite differences in Abyssinia, he preferred working for the then immensely rich Daily Mail because it paid far more than did the stingy Times or the cash-strapped Morning Post. Robinson’s notion that Waugh longed to be employed by the tweedy Morning Post shows how far he is out of touch with Waugh’s world.  Waugh and his contemporaries had a love-hate relationship with the “popular” press, viz. the Daily Express and Daily Mail, feeling free to chastise it (as in Scoop) while welcoming the huge rewards it offered in pay and publicity.
     The statement extorted from Deedes—on the evidence of his book, Robinson will not get this—is part nonsense, part rehashed gossip.  Deedes could not possibly have known that Waugh “had a deep inner contempt for everyone,” and it was a foolish thing to say because Waugh often showed a capacity for very generous admiration.  Even Waugh in Abyssinia, his most cantankerous book, contains a glowing tribute to the British Consul at Harar (Chapman Andrews) who, incidentally, was staunchly pro-Emperor.  Nor could Deedes personally know that Waugh was “a pig, [who] knew of his awfulness [and] clung to his Roman Catholicism [to] redeem him.”  While this claim distantly reflects some things Waugh said about himself, Deedes is merely repeating gossip-column pabulum.  So why feature the passage so prominently in the book and use it as the teaser in the Telegraph and online?
     Waugh was always polite to and about Deedes—“we were very civil, never a cross word [in] three months together,” says Deedes; and Waugh made no funny or disparaging remarks about Deedes in anything he published, presumably because he liked and respected the agreeable young man, so personal hurt cannot be the motive.  That Waugh was not “anti-Fascist” (code for a cluster of then left-wing opinions), and that, being excluded from news sources and shocked by the conventions governing news, he resorted to the old trick of making the media the story may explain something.  Robinson accepts the anti-Fascist line on the war as axiomatic, feels journalism to be a “privileged calling” and resents the attack on journalists in Scoop. Moreover, he blames Waugh for failing to be “part of the gang.”  But none of this accounts for Robinson’s mind-boggling attempt to tar Waugh and stick on him every scrap of malicious gossip he can remember.  Not only was Waugh a “shit” and a “pig” and a “snob” and “jealous,” but he was also “crypto Fascist,” “ridiculous and grotesque,” “shriekingly vulgar,” “preposterous,” a “conspicuous failure,” “common,” “never at ease with people posher than him” [sic], a “silly little suburban sod,” “not truthful,” and a loud-mouth who “noisily aired his pro-Italian, pro-Fascist views at the breakfast table.”  And to cap it all, so lacking in “openness” to his fellow journalists was Waugh, that, even when drunk, he failed “to discuss” with young Deedes the pending “annulment of [Waugh’s] marriage to his unfaithful first wife.”  Words fail me.   

From Oxford to Hollywood
Proceedings of the Anthony Powell Centenary Conference: Third Biennial Anthony Powell Conference, 2005, ed. George Lilley & Keith C. Marshall.  Greenford, UK: Anthony Powell Society, 2007.  256 pp.  £15.

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, UK: Anthony Powell Society, 2004.  249 pp.  Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley.  

     In recognition of the close relationship, both personal and literary, between Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, the Anthony Powell Society devoted substantial time at its Second Biennial Conference to the subject of “Powell, Waugh and Oxford.”  This took place in April 2003, a few months prior to the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference at Hertford College.
     Patric Dickinson of the College of Arms, London, led off with a social comparisons between Waugh and Powell and their experiences of Oxford.  He notes the claim to superiority made by Balliol College at least during the Mastership of Benjamin Jowett.  Although that Golden Age had passed by the 1920s when Powell was in residence, Balliol was also the college of other literary notables such as Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, and Peter Quennell.  Waugh’s college, Hertford, was much more humble, having established its present foundation only in 1874.  This doesn’t seem to have made Waugh’s Oxford career any less jolly, nor did Powell’s stay at Balliol make his career any less melancholy.  Indeed, Dickinson points out that the Oxford described by Powell in A Question of Upbringing (QU) is a “fairly bleak and joyless establishment.”  In comparison, the Oxford described by Waugh in Brideshead Revisited (BR) is altogether more exuberant, even if his narrator was outside the class of persons he found so delightful.  Powell was already of that world, having come up from Eton, whereas Waugh attended the dimmer Lancing College.  Waugh made an effort at Oxford to climb into this higher level, while for Powell it was socially more of the same.  Oddly, none of the panelists mention that neither Powell nor Waugh distinguished himself academically, both taking third-class degrees.
     The second paper, by Catherine Hoffmann of the University of Le Havre, France, explains the differences between the two writers’ Oxford careers based on their writings.  Both writers were influenced before their arrival by the romantic “dreaming spires” of Oxford in the poems of Matthew Arnold and the novels of Max Beerbohm and Compton Mackenzie.  Waugh in BR and in his autobiography suggests that Oxford lived up to its reputation.  Indeed, Hoffmann suggests that Waugh took the title for his autobiography from Mackenzie’s Sinister Street: “it seemed to him that he began to love Oxford for the first time with a truly intense passion and that a little learning was the least tribute he could offer in esteem.”  By contrast, Powell in QU limits his Oxford years to a single chapter and exhibits none of the romantic nostalgia that characterizes Book One of BR.  While Waugh celebrates undergraduate drinking, Powell refers to the “ascetic fare of tea and stale rock buns offered at Sillery’s.”  Waugh’s narrator took advantage of Oxford to move into the grander world of Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche.  Powell's Nick Jenkins meets the lugubrious Quiggin, and his narrative revolves around the visits of Peter Templer from the commercial world and Charles Stringham, who finds Oxford a crashing bore.  Stringham’s early departure from Oxford and his passing out of Jenkins’s world add to the melancholy that permeates the Oxford years.  Unlike Charles Ryder, Jenkins effectively stands still at Oxford.
     The third paper (“Two Lost Souls”) by Christine Berberich of the University of Derby compares the lives of Charles Stringham and Sebastian Flyte.  Her thesis is that both Waugh and Powell used these characters to illustrate the decline of the gentleman in modern British society.  Both characters live in the shadow of family tradition that weighs them down because they fear that they cannot live up to expectations.  Both succumb to alcohol and are effectively locked up at their mothers’ orders to avoid embarrassment.  Both characters ultimately escape the clutches of their families and find fulfillment in independent ways.  Sebastian ends up in North Africa taking care of the parasitic German, Kurt, but enjoying “a responsibility he has never known before … for the first time in his life giving him a feeling of being needed.”  Stringham joins the Other Ranks in the army, giving him responsibility comparable to what Sebastian finds in caring for Kurt.  Berberich hints at but does not develop a basic difference between Sebastian and Stringham: the former is from a long-established aristocratic family who have retained much of their wealth; Stringham’s social position is more tenuous.  His mother inherited some wealth from her South African mining family and a life estate in a country house from her first husband, Lord Warrington.  Stringham’s father is a penniless sportsman-planter in Kenya.  Sebastian does not feel any danger of losing status but is nevertheless oppressed by it, whereas Stringham feels his status threatened by new men such as Widmerpool, who he fears will ultimately replace his class.  Ultimately, Stringham is destroyed by Widmerpool, who removes him from his own command and orders him to the Far East, where he dies in a POW camp.  His mother, at the time of her death, is living in greatly reduced circumstances.
     The final paper on Waugh and Powell at the 2003 conference was given by Lisa Colletta of Babson College and compares the careers of both writers in Hollywood.  They each had experience as script or treatment writers in the British film industry, Waugh for Alexander Korda and Powell for Teddington Studios.  Neither wrote anything that resulted in a film.  Both made another attempt in Hollywood, however.  Powell spent part of a year seeking entry to the scriptwriting fraternity to work on a movie called A Yank at Oxford, but when he arrived at the studio, he found that F. Scott Fitzgerald was already on the job.  Indeed, his meetings with Fitzgerald may have been the only valuable experience he obtained from his American journey, because he never turned it to useful effect in his fiction.  Waugh traveled to California after the war, ostensibly to negotiate the rights for a production of BR by MGM Studios.  No terms were ever agreed, although Waugh used his time there to explore the English expatriate community and Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which he put to work in one of his best satires, The Loved One. Colletta is expanding this treatment in a forthcoming book, Voluntary Exiles: British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-65. 
     Colletta also offered a brief paper (“Too, Too Bogus”) at the Powell Society’s Centenary Conference in 2005 comparing early novels of Waugh and Powell, Vile Bodies and Afternoon Men.   She notes that both novels call upon the writers’ experiences among the Bright Young People of the 1920s as described in Humphrey Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation (1989).  Powell’s novel portrays a group of young people whose “party-going never looks anything like fun” and whose “repartee is some of the most bored and boring in literature.”  The parties in Waugh’s novel are more ambitious than those in Powell’s but are likewise essentially boring.  Nevertheless, his novel is more “darkly funny” than Powell’s: “Unlike the frenzied futility presented in Vile Bodies, Afternoon Men is marked by a crushing sense of despondency and dolor, and if Waugh’s work is characterized by breathless, meaningless activity, Powell exemplifies a jaded weariness and deals in nuances of boredom, seediness and squalor.  His satire of London life lacks any of the glamour that might be found in Waugh’s colorful parties.”  Unfortunately, Colletta was just beginning to offer interesting insights into these two books when her time ran out.  More discussion of both books can be found in her Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel (2003).   

A Bowl of Cashew Nuts
The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain & Ireland.  Ed. Daniel Hahn and Nicholas Robins.  3rd ed.  Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.  370 pp.  $60/£30.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

     In dealing with this sort of book, it is tempting to scan Waugh’s review of Who’s Who 1961 and change nouns as needed.  Particularly appropriate is the opening sentence: “I must not pretend to have read every work of this book,” for, as Samuel Johnson said of Clarissa, “Why sir, if you read it for the plot, you would hang yourself.”
     However, people with attention-deficit disorder will love the book, since the subject changes every few inches.  Entries on each place mention literary associations, and the diligent user can pass from the index of authors (some 300) to the index of places.  Those who prefer to thumb through to encounter unexpected delights will find—fortuitously, since the table of contents does not list them—eleven short essays by experts on the relationship between best-known authors and specific places (e.g., Wordsworth and the Lake Country, Jane Austen and Bath, James Joyce and Dublin), hand-drawn maps of places like Dublin, London, Oxford (Hertford College is outside the margin, as Waugh might agree), and so on.
     Small photos and drawings of authors and places accompany some of the entries, as in the photo of Waugh at Piers Court looking rotund and prosperous.  There are also a number of full-page photographs in color, apparently placed for the convenience of the printers rather than the reader.  The one of the Botanic Garden at Oxford is placed opposite the entry on Southampton; those of the Martello Tower, setting of the opening scene of Ulysses, and Ben Bulben are placed in the section on Scotland.
     Ten entries are associated with Waugh, from Hillfield Road, Hampstead, where he was born, to Combe Florey, where he died, with various places where he lived or wrote.  Notably absent are Madresfield, where he worked on Black Mischief; his father’s house, either in Hampstead or Golders Green; Campion Hall; and important London settings in Vile Bodies.
     The editors provide rough directions to each of the sites, but they do not provide maps either of England and Ireland as a whole or to the geographical regions into which the book is divided.  However, the entries are like a bowl of cashew nuts—it is impossible to look only at one or even those devoted to a favorite author.  In my case, Waugh led to Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Christopher Isherwood, and Ronald Firbank, and I am sure that on a slow day I will browse further.

Ideological Struggles
Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945-2000, by John Brannigan.  Transitions Series.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.  244 pp.  $32.95.  Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania.     

     It is gratifying to see the works of Evelyn Waugh afforded extensive consideration in surveys of literary periods.  It is, however, disappointing to see his works interpreted in reductive and even misleading ways.    
     In his chapter entitled “‘Small Disturbances’: England in 1945,” John Brannigan argues that the “politics of the immediate postwar years … registered and helped to shape a conservative conception of English national community, crystallized in sentimental celebrations of communal resilience in the blitz as well as the familiar marshalling of the English pastoral” (16).  One example is Brideshead Revisited.  Brannigan describes Charles Ryder as an “architectural writer” rather than a painter (29), and his reading seems careless in other ways as well.  Brideshead is “not simply a ‘Catholic’ novel,” he claims, “for Catholicism is made to bear symbolic weight in an ideological struggle between tradition and modernity.…  Catholicism in Brideshead … signifies the restoration or continuation of some sense of aesthetic or cultural tradition” (28).  Well, yes.  Brannigan’s major interest in the novel is political, however: “Brideshead was [Waugh’s] desperate thrust at the democratic ideologies he opposed,” a “counter to the modernizing, democratic rhetoric of the national coalition in wartime England” (28-29).  Perhaps, but political conflict is certainly not the central concern in the novel, nor was it Waugh’s main motive for writing.  No matter: according to Brannigan, the flame in Brideshead’s chapel at the end of the novel “cheers Ryder only to the degree that it causes him to remember the great traditions and foundations of the house,” and “Ryder is left with nothing but memories of nobility, grandeur and order” (30).  To the contrary, Ryder is left with nothing but faith, which renders nobility, grandeur and order irrelevant.    
     Brannigan is no better on Sword of Honour.  In a chapter entitled “‘After History’: time and memory in postwar writing,” Brannigan argues that “contemporary literature registers a profound shift in England’s sense of historical identity, at the same time as it reflects on history as a narrative construct” (40).  Again, Brannigan shows that he has not read Waugh very carefully: “a wayward unit of soldiers, including Guy, bound for an uninhabited island near Jersey, ended up briefly and fearfully in France” (46) though Guy is in Egypt during Trimmer’s raid.  The Second World War “has been constructed historically as one of the most tumultuous and decisive events in human history,” Brannigan observes, and he is justified (though unoriginal) in describing Waugh’s version as “a pointless, dishonourable muddle” (48).  Sword of Honour may even be, as Brannigan puts it, “an act of historical vandalism” against “the national memory of the war” (50).  Brannigan is simply wrong about Guy Crouchback, who supposedly sees the war as “the end of his way of life, the end of all his beliefs” (48).  Guy clings to his faith throughout the war, and eventually Catholicism reveals his sacred purpose.  For whatever reason, Brannigan remains blind to Waugh’s moral and thus misrepresents Waugh’s interpretation of the war.  According to Brannigan, Waugh sees the Second World War as “the point at which history became inhuman, and war became merely a matter of systematic destruction and systematic deception.  This is not tragic for Waugh, merely contemptible” (50).  Not at all: for Waugh, history could never become inhuman, since God lies behind it all.  History is not merely destruction and deception, since evil provides the opportunity to show charity.  Guy helps to save Virginia’s son and the Jews, and his actions are admirable rather than contemptible.
     Perhaps cheered by Waugh’s endings, one can hope that critics will give up on ideological struggles and concentrate on the literature they are supposed to interpret. 

The View from Here
The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction, by Richard Bradford.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.  259 pp.  $29.95.  Reviewed by KJ Gilchrist, Iowa State University.

     Books set on tracing developments within a genre can leave one with a sense of having been randomly island hopping (with very little time spent on any particular island) and may also deliver very little understanding of cultural or other connections between the islands.  Not so this volume from Bradford: it is keenly aware and neatly arranged in examining individual authors and their unique qualities while also tracing connecting threads within the many works of the British novel.  Bradford, who has published widely on anything from literary theory to individual writers—on Milton and Larkin, for instance—also establishes deep contexts for his work and the works he examines.
     While Bradford examines British fiction widely, Irish fiction has been “excluded” unless it has treated something of events in Northern Ireland during the last thirty years—this because the rest of Ireland has “matured into confident separateness” (vi).  Bradford, thus, includes the contributions of modernist writers like Joyce and Beckett in the first section, “Before Now,” and presents a lengthy chapter on “The Troubles.”  In contrast to the exclusion of Irish literature, Bradford spends an entire chapter on Scottish literature and a (short) chapter on Wales.
     Divided into four parts, the study moves from novels written before the 1970s that exert the most significant influences on contemporary fiction.  Part 1 looks at fiction of the three decades before the millennium, tracing the wavering lines between modernism and realism and providing deep contexts of influence on the novel within British society and politics (much time given to the Thatcher era).  Part 2 explores the historical novel and contains a welcome inclusion of crime and spy fiction, which may now be given more esteem than Bradford’s estimation that these sub-genres still reside in a tenuous region “between mainstream and popular writing” (vii), as writers like P. D. James and Ian Rankin readily show.  Parts 3 and 4 delineate between cultural ideals and identities and their permeable boundaries: gender, sex, and the senses of both nationality and place.
     Notes handily exist in the text, but the index proves occasionally erroneous and incomplete.  Some discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s influence is not listed, for instance, and the pages for Ian Rankin.  Beyond such minor bumps, the work shows breadth in and astute awareness of the subject.
     As to Bradford’s approach, Martin Amis (who is mentioned too often, this perhaps the work’s point of imbalance) termed it “unillusioned.”  Articulated at the closing pages is Bradford’s dismay and iconoclastic parody in addressing academia’s “hidebound theoretical obsessions” and its marked detachment from the novel, now part of a “transparent public discourse” (247).  And with that approach he takes us into his subjects: building contexts but also tearing down oversimplified or over-constructed appraisals of authors and works.
     One such instance occurs in the chapter, “Women,” where he picks up Gilbert and Gubar’s assertion (1979) that women writers were required to remain detached from the narrative voice; Bradford springs from this board to show that, in the same period women writers were doing no such thing.  He points to Lynn Reid Banks, Margaret Drabble, and Nell Dunn to illustrate that women’s writing, here in a realist mode, was centering not on male issues and “patriarchal prejudices” but on distinctly women’s concerns and visions of a world having emerged from beneath the “two-dimensional cultural fabric” of predominantly male society (117-18).
     Similar revisionist treatment typifies his chapters on “Men,” “Gay Fiction,” “Nation, Race, and Place,” “The Question of Elsewhere,” and “the New Postmodernists,” among other points visited.  In “Elsewhere,” one will find the contexts of marginalization from which authors such as Caryl Phillips (born in St. Kitts), Kazuo Ishiguro (born in Japan) and Salman Rushdie emerged and found prominence.  In these and other writers Bradford explores, questions of Britishness and identity are, of course, central, but so are issues of unconvention, disjunction, paradox, and the bizarre in the novelistic fabrics these figures weave.
     Upon reaching the “Epilogue,” one finds (as the title suggests), that one has indeed been reading not a text of criticism but a narrative about the creation of fiction.  Here Bradford makes his comment on the “State of the Novel” and is convincing by example as well as in his reasoning—not least in a passage that is typically bright where he explains why literary theory has failed the reading public:

First, the language of theory has become as reflexive and self-referential, as immune from the routines of ordinary exchange, as that of the texts it tends to idolize.  Secondly, the absorption of theory into academic criticism has all but immunized the latter from that most contentious, subjective feature of talking and writing about literature: an inclination to offer an opinion of whether or not the novel or the author are any good. (246)

More is wittily articulated on this point, but all is to say that such criticism is no longer useful for its being needlessly opaque.  This book, even in discussing its multitude of authors, works, techniques, and influences, stands not only as delightfully prescient but also as most useful, bringing (as Bradford doubts criticism will ever again do) enjoyment to reading about fiction.

Judicious Choices
Lonely without God: Graham Greene’s Quixotic Journey of Faith, ed. William Thomas Hill. Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2007.  254 pp.  $74.95.  Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

     The eleven essays in this volume represent half of the presentations at the Graham Greene Centennial Conference: Walking in the Footsteps of Monsignor Quixote in May 2004, and if my memory of a very pleasant if peripatetic tour is accurate, the editorial committee has chosen judiciously.  (Disclosure: I spoke at the conference but did not submit a paper.)
     As William Thomas Hill points out in the introduction, many of the essays deal, naturally enough, with Monsignor Quixote, a late and often neglected novel, but even some of these range more widely.  Perhaps the most interesting essays all but ignore that book.  Among the established scholars included in the volume, Cedric Watts examines the parallels between the careers and styles of Joseph Conrad and Greene, and he points out that retrospective influence can, for example, affect our re-reading of The Secret Agent in light of Greene’s It’s a Battlefield.  His other contribution deals with Greene’s debt to John Dunne’s An Experiment with Time for his use of dreams, carefully classified, in his novels and other works and especially in the experimental and much-neglected story The Bear Fell Free.  Both of these essays bear the mark of the lecture hall and are no worse for that.
     Somewhat more dense and in many ways more provocative are essays by younger scholars, several of them currently or recently enrolled in graduate programs.  Brian Lindsay Thomson’s ingeniously and tightly argued “Blue Greene: A Maiden’s Prayer and the Metaphor of Cinema” begins by defining the “Greene novel” up to Stamboul Train/Orient Express as “a curious blend of romance and psychological contortion, a mode of character presentation derived in equal measure from Stevenson and James, and a prevailing mood of gloomy, solipsistic introspection” (59-60).  Many have come to the same general conclusion; no one has expressed it that well.  Thomson regards “auteur theory,” applied to Greene by way of the cinema, as a way of imposing a fixed “horizon of expectations” (70) which interposes Greene’s supposed intentions between the reader and the text—the Intentional Fallacy in new clothing.  On the other hand, in the course of examining changes in Greene’s critical reputation, Thomson shows that the increasingly respectable view of cinema “had a profound impact on the reputation of an ostensibly ‘cinematic’ writer” (67).
     Debanjan Chakrabarti’s “Miss Warren’s Profession: Thriller Meets Romance in Stamboul Train” notes, as the title indicates, the generic shifts between these two forms, the central importance of Mabel Warren’s behavior as a tabloid journalist in pursuit of a story (and two women), her implied rivalry with the popular novelist Quin Savory, and the key images by which she is established and judged. Chakrabarti substituted for his conference presentation the dissertation chapter from which it was drawn. By far the longest contribution, it suffers only a little from the kind of thoroughness, including repetition, which is seemingly endemic to the form.
     Several of the essays deal directly with theology.  Patrick Query links Greene’s “sacramental aesthetic”--using concrete objects to embody higher meanings--to the hardboiled novel.  Perhaps he is more eloquent than convincing in his arguments, but his general point deserves and will undoubtedly receive elaboration.  Mark Bosco, SJ, in an essay obviously drawn from and now superseded by his Greene’s Catholic Imagination (2005), sees The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote as embodying the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.  The first grounds “political belief in the personal commitment to others and in an evolutionary union of humanity with God, emphasizing the pilgrim nature of the Church, the humanity of Christ, the priesthood of all people, and love as the transcendent signifier that keeps human action focused on correct practice” (214-15).  In the second, “Greene locates the divine reality in the encounter—the communion—of love between Quixote and Sancho” (219).
     Tamas Dobozy’s “A Devout Life: Reading Graham Greene through St. Frances de Sales” is perhaps the most rewarding in the collection because it extends the positions of Query and Bosco to discuss Greene’s view, primarily in A Burnt-Out Case, that faith is “never a settled matter” but always a process.  Moreover, Dobozy provides a broader theological context for this view.  Greene and St. Francis, he argues, create “texts adequate to the way in which faith is tested and galvanized and undone by daily life—texts, in other words, very aware of the way in which the stability of the written word is frequently inadequate to a decidedly unstable, and ever-shifting, reality” (223-24).  Had Evelyn Waugh been able to read Dobozy’s essay, he might have been less disturbed by Greene’s novel.  He certainly would have understood St. Francis’s view that "'true friendships,' of the human sort, should aspire toward divine love, while realizing that they will, at best, only approximate it" (240).
     Unhappily, the collection may not get the attention it deserves.  The price puts it beyond the reach of most scholars and, in the days of shrinking academic budgets, of all but the most comprehensive libraries.  Perhaps copies which do reach the shelves will accumulate frequent-flyer miles via interlibrary loan.

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 2006 and 2007.     

     Alder, Baron. “The Monotony of the New: Evelyn Waugh and Modernist Aesthetics.” Literature & Aesthetics 16.1 (July 2006): 113-29.
     Asquith, Mark. “Decline and Fall: Mark Asquith considers Evelyn Waugh’s novel as a satire of its time.” English Review 17.1 (Sept. 2006): 16+.
     Baldwin, Dean. "Gluttony? Food and Wine in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited."  CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English Association 69.1-2 (Fall-Winter 2006-2007): 34-42. 
     Barnard, Rita. “‘A tangle of modernism and barbarity’: Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief.” Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939. Ed. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2007. 162-82.
     Berberich, Christine. The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia. Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
     Bergonzi, Bernard. “The Catholic Novel.” Commonweal 4 May 2007: 10-12.
     Bittner, David. “The Butler Did It: A View of Wilcox.” EWNS 36.3 (Winter 2006).
     Bittner, David. “Cousin Jasper: The Right Stuff.” EWNS 38.2 (Autumn 2007).
     Cesare, Nicole. “An African in Paris … and New York and Rome: Bernard Dadie and the Postcolonial Travel Narrative.” Masters Abstracts International 46.1 (2007): 95. Villanova U, 2007.
     Coffey, Laura. “Evelyn Waugh’s Country House Trinity: Memory, History and Catholicism in Brideshead Revisited.” Literature & History (third series) 15.1 (Spring 2006): 59-73.
     Colletta, Lisa. “Too, Too Bogus: The London Social Scene in the Early Novels of Powell and Waugh.” Proceedings of the Anthony Powell Centenary Conference: Third Biennial Anthony Powell Conference, 2005. Ed. George Lilley & Keith C. Marshall. Greenford, England: Powell Society, 2007. 18-24. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley, "From Oxford to Hollywood," EWNS 39.3 (Winter 2009; above).
     Craft, Robert. Down a Path of Wonder. Redhill, Surrey: Naxos, 2006. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley, "Dinner with the Stravinskys," EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008). 
     Dale, Alan. “To Crie Alarme Spiritual: Evelyn Waugh and the Ironic Community.” Modernist Cultures 2.2 (Winter 2006): 102-14.
     Dalrymple, Theodore. “The Casualties of Waugh” (“Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing”). British Medical Journal 16 June 2007: 1277.
     Davis, Robert Murray. “Sex, Death, and Art in Hollywood: The Day of the Locust and The Loved One.” EWNS 38.2 (Autumn 2007).
     Davis, Robert Murray. "Sidelights on Waugh's World." EWNS 36.3 (Winter 2006).
     Davis, Robert Murray. “A Supplemental Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh, Part I.” EWNS 37.1 (Spring 2006).
     Davis, Robert Murray. “A Supplemental Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh, Part II.” EWNS 37.2 (Autumn 2006).
     Davis, Robert Murray. “A Supplemental Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh, Part III.” EWNS 37.3 (Winter 2007).
     Davis, Robert Murray. “Tony Last’s Real City.” EWNS 36.3 (Winter 2006).
     Davis, Robert Murray. “Waugh’s Nonexistent Evening Standard Article.” EWNS 38.1 (Spring 2007).
     DeCoste, Damon Marcel. “The Plasticity of the Merely Human: Secular Perfection and the Limits of Aesthetics in Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins.” Renascence 60.1 (Fall 2007): 33-52.
     Dooley, David. “Waughs in Decline.” Catholic Insight 15.1 (Jan. 2007): 37+.
     Easter, Kathryn S. “Something So Different.” EWNS 37.1 (Spring 2006).
     Edwards, A. S. G. “Waugh’s Handful of Dust and Malory.” Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 2006 158 (2[243]): 104-09.
     Ellis, Sarah. "Evelyn and Me." Horn Book Magazine 83.5 (Sept./Oct. 2007): 547.
     Falcoff, Mark. “Waugh’s Postcolonial Studies.” New Criterion Sept. 2006: 84-87.
     Flanery, Patrick Denman. “Race of Ghosts” (Put Out More Flags).  Slightly Foxed 9 (Spring 2006): 77-81. 
     Flanery, Patrick Denman. “Re-Making Waugh: The Textual Cultures of Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, and Brideshead Revisited.” DPhil diss., St Cross College, Oxford, 2006.
     Gallagher, Donat. “Additional Waugh Bibliography.” EWNS 38.2 (Autumn 2007).
     Gallagher, Donat. “Inventing Invention: Alan Munton, Sword of Honour and the Invention of Disillusion.” EWNS 37.3 (Winter 2007).
     Gopinath, Praseeda. “‘Scarecrows of Chivalry’: The Literature of Post-Imperial English Masculinity.” DAI 67.7A (2006): 2590. U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.
     Greenberg, Jonathan. “Cannibals and Catholics: Reading the Reading of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief.” Modernist Cultures 2.2 (Winter 2006): 115-37.
     Hamilton, John Maxwell. Introduction. Waugh in Abyssinia, by Evelyn Waugh. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007.
     Hartmann, Godfred. “Evelyn Waugh in Denmark.” Trans. Anne Marie Køllgaard. EWNS 38.1 (Spring 2007).
     Hepburn, Allan. “Good Graces: Inheritance and Social Climbing in Brideshead Revisited.” Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance. Ed. Allan Hepburn. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. 239-64.
     Hitchens, Christopher. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2007.  
     Hopkins, Chris. English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History. New York: Continuum, 2006.
     James, Clive. “Evelyn Waugh.” Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. New York: Norton, 2007. 797-800.
     Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
     Kalliney, Peter J. Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness.  Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007. Reviewed by Patrick Query, “Theoretical Sophistication and Literary Insight,” EWNS 38.2 (Autumn 2007).
     Labay-Morère, Julie. “‘Voices at Play’ in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters and Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.” Études britanniques contemporaines 30 (June 2006): 83-93.
     Lewis, Monica Catherine. “Anthony Trollope among the Moderns: Reading Aloud in Britain, 1850-1960.”  DAI 67.12A (2006): 4549.  Harvard U, 2006.
     Lothian, James R. “‘God and the Good Republic’: The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950.” DAI 67.9A (2006): 3547. U of Chicago, 2006.
     The Loved One, dir. Tony Richardson, 1965. DVD, 2006. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, “Unlovely to Look At,” EWNS 38.1 (Spring 2007); Stephanie Zacharek, New York Times 7 May 2006: 16.
     MacKay, Marina. “‘Doing Business with Totalitaria’: British Late Modernism and the Politics of Reputation.” ELH 73.3 (Fall 2006): 729-53.
     MacKay, Marina. Modernism and World War II. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Reviewed by Patrick Query, “A Familiar Indictment,” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008).
     Manganiello, Dominic. “The Beauty that Saves: Brideshead Revisited as a Counter-Portrait of the Artist.” Logos 9.2 (Spring 2006): 154-70.
Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing, dir. Simon Hobkinson, BBC4, May 2006. Reviewed by Jeff Manley, “Dramatic Reading,” EWNS 38.2 (Autumn 2007).
     Ness, Robert. "'Not his sort of story': Evelyn Waugh and Pauline Melville in Guyana." Ariel 38.4 (Oct. 2007): 51-68.
     Oram, Richard W. “Cultural Record Keepers: The Evelyn Waugh Library, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.” Libraries & the Cultural Record 42.3 (2007): 325-28.
     Oram, Richard W. “Recent Waugh Acquisitions.” EWNS 38.2 (Autumn 2007).
     Parrinder, Patrick. Nation & Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
     Query, Patrick. “The Idea of Europe in Ritual and Writing, 1919-1939.” PhD diss., Loyola U Chicago, 2006.
     Rockett, June. A Gentle Jesuit: Philip Caraman, SJ, 1911-1998. Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2004. Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, "Stimulating Company," EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008).
     Ross, Michael L. Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006.
     Sutton, Timothy James. “The Roots that Clutch: English Catholicism, Nationalism, and Modernism.”  PhD diss., U of Miami, 2007.
     Sword of Honour, dir. Bill Anderson, 2001. DVD, 2006. Reviewed by Marcel DeCoste, “An Honourable Waugh,” EWNS 38.1 (Spring 2007); Karen Plummer, Library Journal 15 March 2007: 99.
     Taylor, D. J. Bright Young People—The Rise and Fall of a Generation: 1918-1940. London: Chatto & Windus, 2007. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley, “Back to the Treasure Hunt,” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008).  
     Twohig, Patrick J. Evelyn Waugh: Brief History of a Genius. Ballincollig, Co. Cork: Tower, 2006. Reviewed by Paul A. Doyle, “A Refreshing Aura,” EWNS 37.2 (Autumn 2006); Robert Murray Davis, “Waugh’s View of Irish Priests Justified?” EWNS 37.3 (Winter 2007).
     Villar, Flor, Carlos, and Noelia Dominguez Carballo. “Lewisian Footprints in Evelyn Waugh’s Early Satires.” Wyndham Lewis the Radical: Essays on Literature and Modernity. Ed. Carmelo Cunchillos. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 187-218.
     Waugh, Alexander. Fathers and Sons. BBC4. May 2006. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley, “Taking the Show on the Road,” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008). 
     Waugh, Alexander. Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family.  2004. New York: Nan Talese/Doubleday, 2007. Reviewed by Kirkus Reviews, 1 April 2007; Robert Kelly, Library Journal 1 May 2007: 82; Publishers Weekly 26 March 2007: 82; Michiko Kakutani, “A Literary Dynasty, Warts and All,” New York Times 19 June 2007; Roger K. Miller, “Analysis, great gossip from 4th-generation Waugh,” Philadelphia Inquirer 17 June 2007; Joan Acocella, “Waugh Stories,” New Yorker 2 July 2007: 66-72; Evelyn Toynton, “Waugh vs. Waugh,” Harper’s August 2007: 89-94.
     Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976). Reviewed by Michael Barber, "If Lucky Jim Could See Him Now," Hudson Review 60.3 (Fall 2007): 509-16.
     Waugh, Evelyn. Edmund Campion (2005). Reviewed by John W. Osborne, “Intense Conviction,” EWNS 36.3 (Winter 2006).
     Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One (1948). Reviewed by Dana Goodyear, "Fiction in Review," Yale Review 94.2 (April 2006): 176-81.
     Waugh, Evelyn.  Sword of Honour (1965).  Reviewed by Ian Callinan, The Bulletin with Newsweek 19 June 2007: 62.
     Waugh, Evelyn. Waugh in Abyssinia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007. Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, “Not Bad at All!” EWNS 38.1 (Spring 2007); Cameron McWhirter, “Foreign Correspondence: old practices inform new realities,” Nieman Reports 61.3 (Fall 2007): 92-93; Stephen Bates, “Scoop to Conquer,” Wilson Quarterly 31.4 (Autumn 2007): 12+.
     White, Laura. “The Rejection of Beauty in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” Renascence 58.3 (Spring 2006): 181-94.
     Whitechapel, Simon. “Brideshead Revista’d: Bacchus, Beelzebub and the Botanical Garden,” EWNS 36.3 (Winter 2006).
     Wilson, Edmund. Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 1930s and Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1940s & 1950s. New York: Library of America, 2007. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, "Lucidity, Force, and Ease," EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008).
     Wilson, John Howard. “Elijah and the Beginning of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms.” Papers in Language and Literature 43.3 (2007): 417-25.
     Wilson, John Howard. “Evelyn Waugh.” Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Vol. 5. Ed. David Scott Kastan. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. 248-53.
     Wilson, John Howard. “Evelyn Waugh and Cole Porter.” EWNS 37.2 (Autumn 2006).
     Wilson, John Howard. “Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism.” EWNS 38.2 (Autumn 2007).
     Yamasaki, Mayumi. “A Comparative Study of Decline and Fall and Nicholas Nickleby.” Bulletin of Kobe Tokiwa College 28 (2007): 1-9.
     Yamasaki, Mayumi. “In Search of a Transfigured Hetton Abbey: The World of Tony Last in A Handful of Dust.” Bulletin of Kobe Tokiwa College 27 (2006): 9-18.

Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest
     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 85 members.  Information on joining the society is available at the new web site, http://www.evelynwaughsociety.org.  Evelyn Waugh's eldest child, Teresa D'Arms, has consented to be our Patron, and David Lodge, the novelist, has agreed to be our Honorary President.  The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List now has 52 members.  The list is available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh.

An Interview with Evelyn Waugh
     Picador republished The Paris Review Interviews, III on 28 October 2008.  The collection includes the 1963 interview with Evelyn Waugh, and the retail price is $16.00 in the USA.

Evelyn Waugh Revisited
     Daniel Mendelsohn published "Evelyn Waugh Revisited," a reaction to the recent film based on Brideshead Revisited, in the New York Review of Books for 9 October 2008.  The Spectator published "Allan Massie dips into Brideshead Revisited," also inspired by the film, on 15 October 2008.

Reading Evelyn Waugh in Tokyo
     Atsuko Mizobe, Shingo Morikawa, Masaaki Uno, Yoshiharu Usui, and Mari Yamada formed a reading circle devoted to Evelyn Waugh in September 2008.  They met at Meiji University in Tokyo and started with A Handful of Dust.

Cheltenham Big Read
Brideshead Revisited was the text in the Cheltenham Big Read 2008.  At The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, 10-19 October 2008, three sessions were devoted to Brideshead.  Alexander Waugh and Selina Hastings discussed the novel and its creator on 12 October, Jane Mulvagh explained its connection with the Lygon family of Madresfield Court on 16 October, and Alyson Rudd led another discussion on 19 October.

Waughs and Wittgensteins
Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn, has published another book, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).  In "All family life is tragic," by Susan Rustin, Alexander expresses some interesting views of his grandfather.  The article is available in the Guardian.  The House of Wittgenstein will be published by Doubleday in the USA on 24 February 2009.

More Waugh on CD
     The British Library has released a three-CD set entitled British Writers--The Spoken Word.  The set includes recordings of thirty writers, and Evelyn Waugh is represented in an excerpt from the Face to Face interview in 1960.  The three CD's have 214 minutes of material and sell for £19.95.  British Writers is available from the British Library Shop.

The Daily Beast
     On her new web site, The Daily Beast, Tina Brown explains that the name comes from "the newspaper in Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's hilarious satire of Fleet Street, which happens to be my favorite novel of all time."  Tina Brown was also on good terms with Evelyn's son Auberon.  When asked about a prominent review of his autobiography, Will This Do? in the New Yorker in 1998, Auberon Waugh answered, "Oh, that was Tina Brown." 

Edward Sheehan
     The author of "A Weekend with Waugh," a memorable article in the Cornhill (Summer 1960), Edward R. F. Sheehan passed away on 3 November 2008.  He was 78 years old, and his obituary appears in the New York Times.

End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3
Previous Issue
Home Page and Back Issues
Next Issue