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EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES |
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Evelyn Waugh’s Outfit 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. 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.
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. 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. 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 |
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Vile Bodies as Old Comedy 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. 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. "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. |
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Waugh Poems
Two Teddies
Aloysius was made of mohair; irritating to some.
Two Women
Not her scene;
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,
Legers everywhere, Picassos, The growth of plastic surgery Sterilization, contraception widespread, Love
among the Ruins 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). |
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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. 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. |
| 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.” |
| 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. |
| 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.
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.) |
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Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary
Checklist of Criticism Alder, Baron. “The Monotony of the New: Evelyn Waugh and Modernist Aesthetics.” Literature
& Aesthetics 16.1 (July 2006): 113-29. |
| 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. |
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End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies,
Vol. 39, No. 3 |