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EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES |
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The Three Bears
Aloysius, Archibald, Anonymous.
Anonymous, like Harry Lime, will be revealed later,
He was made much later than either Aloysius or Archie;
He cost 'seven guineas',
The character that bought it--
Speaking of which--Who would be most upper-crust of English Catholic novelists of
the last century?
His father the headmaster of a public school,
(His dreaming spires were the coal stacks around Bolton)
When we first meet Aloysius he is in a car; 'Sebastian's Teddy-bear sat
at the wheel.
'And for some reason best known to herself she would keep that teddy
bear on her knee.'
Anonymous is a big teddy bear in the film with Michael Caine,
it don't half bring it home to you what you are and what you have
done
Catholic novelists of the last century: Waugh, Greene, Muriel Spark then
Anthony Burgess.
'Anti-Catholic novelist' would seem a more appropriate epithet.
'It went flying through the air and she made a grab with her two hands
held upwards
'I'd forgot that it had this little squeak built in.'
Forgiving each other for what they have done.
What do you think--
Are we indulging in this fairy tale to the detriment of other real-world
scenarios?
Anonymous,
How he sustains the characterization of this loveable rogue with the
things he does--
How he manages to keep our sympathy with him
My theme isn't memory--
He wrote many plays staged on the the West End.
By the way Brideshead has recently been travestied in a new film,
As I say, this author, this Catholic author, right, slap, bang in the
middle of the Swinging Sixties,
He challenged the whole of England to take another look;
It is now time to speak of Archie. Aloysius wrote to him;
A cruel blow for Archie was when Lady Penelope converted,
A lot of teddy bears were made in Germany,
Aloysius was neglected at the end--
He looked terrible in his last television appearances;
On second thought maybe I’m being too harsh.
My brother met Peter Bull (the owner of Delicatessen).
Waugh pictured himself as a Teddy Boy in a response to a Priestley
attack.
Alfie is similar to Sebastian; attractive, funny, charming.
He is really more like Lady Celia--
Incidentally, Lady Celia was played by Jane Asher in the television
series.
Julia Foster was in the film.
Ruby was played by Shelley Winters.
So many connections;
So much to remember--
The development of Alfie's understanding
It never falters. It is more perfect than Brideshead
actually.
It is now time to speak of my own family.
John
Sebastian? That would be me of course. Not the 'arresting
beauty' I hasten to add.
Lady Julia; no that doesn't work because Mary's gone against the Church.
No, Barbara,
Mary's Cordelia instead,
They write similarly;
Alfie opines;
Gilda is like Lady Marchmain--
Ruby's flat is an exact description of the interior of the luxury liner.
Ruby's flat could almost be one of the penthouses Marchmain House was
turned into.
Both writers concern themselves with cellophane;
Alfie rejects his roses in cellophane (for Ruby)
So many connections; Alec Waugh lived here in Bangkok.
Now I find out, Aloysius is here! 'Evelyn Paugh' his new name.
The last memories; now remember it is not the original stage play
Maybe that is the reason why it has been overlooked.
If I could only slip between these two writers,
Catholic writer 'detestable term' according to Greene.
'plot is character'
I would put him on a par with Waugh for sheer artistic achievement.
The last broken sentence, |
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The “Red-Knee’d”
Officer: Ferdinand Mount has worked as a
journalist, a non-career civil servant, a political consultant to the
Conservative Party, and editor of the Times Literary Supplement.
He has also written seventeen books, including eleven novels. The
second novel is entitled The Man Who Rode Ampersand, published
in 1975. It is based on the life of his father, Robin Mount
(1907-1969), educated at Eton and Oxford (Magdalen) in the same
generation as Evelyn Waugh. Ferdinand is also the nephew of Anthony
Powell, who was married to the sister (Violet Pakenham) of Mount’s
mother (Julia Pakenham).
According to the small man, Pip Parrott “has been mentioned in
despatches again. Veronica is very much distressed. She said it was too boring
and why couldn’t they mention someone else for a change” (Ampersand 199).
Parrott is described as a “war hero, antique dealer, and last of the Bright
Young Things” (Ampersand 14). Parrott served in the Royal
Engineers: “despatches twice, wounded, prisoner of war, escaped.” He is also
said to have “stood out in a sappers’ mess” (Ampersand 23). Veronica is
a mystery in Mount’s novel; there is a character by that name in Waugh’s A
Handful of Dust. Alas, there were no scalps to be claimed, except our own. Ours was a freak show, a lusus naturae of the most extreme variety. Prodigies of cowardice and stupidity were performed, the enterprise was aborted as soon as conceived. The island should never have been attacked, if attacked not held, if held not left without reinforcements or air cover. Nothing, however, will be said. The villains will be propelled upstairs. The boobies will write their memoirs. It is clear to me now, if it had not been clear before, that the people who will do well out of this war will be not hard-faced men but soft-faced trimmers…. There is no place here for reckless misanthropes of the old school.When Harry asks if he considers himself a misanthrope, the small man responds, “I do not find it easy to be nice.” The interview is concluded by the medical officer, who tells Harry that he will be returned home on a hospital ship, the SS Cythera, which will proceed “the long way round” (Ampersand 200). The small man with red knees disappears from the story.[5] It seems unlikely that Harry would have encountered Waugh in the circumstances described in the novel. Why would Waugh make the trip to the hospital to deliver a book to another officer he doesn’t even know and has encountered only fleetingly in the desert? It seems odd that the little man with red knees should have even recognized Harry, but he also finds him in the hospital. On the other hand, Harry’s reading includes Jane Austen, Thackeray, Huxley,[6] and H. G. Wells, so he would almost certainly have been aware of Waugh’s novels, even if he hadn’t read them. Harry would surely have identified the rude little man with red knees, especially since Quill knew him to be a writer, even if he did get his name wrong. An acquaintance between Waugh and Harry’s model, Robin Mount, did exist, and meetings like those described in the novel may well have taken place in real life. The hospital visit to Harry’s original sounds very much like something Waugh might have done. In his memoirs Mount describes his father’s volunteering for “hazardous special duties,” just as Harry does in the novel. He describes the Commandos as “that motley crew of buccaneers, blowhards and three-bottle men who tumbled out of White’s Club and on to the night train.” In addition to Waugh, they included Randolph Churchill, Harry and John Stavordale, Robin Campbell and their commanding officer Robert Laycock (“although thirtyish like the rest of them … quieter and more thoughtful than the others.”) During training in Scotland, Robin Mount (contrary to orders) invited his wife to stay for a weekend in a local hotel, where the Colonel had also smuggled his mistress. Based on the timing, Ferdinand Mount attributes the conception of his sister to the presence of the Colonel’s mistress. His sister was born nine months later, during her father’s homeward journey (Cold Cream 119-20; see note 6). That episode sounds like Waugh’s recollections of training in his Diaries (487-89). The presence of officers’ wives during Commando training seems to have been commonplace, although Mrs. Waugh was not among them, since she was about to give birth to their third child. According to Waugh’s Diaries, he was in 8 Commando. Mount says that his father Robin was in 7 Commando. Both were under Laycock’s command. Waugh and Robin Mount traveled to Egypt on different ships (the Glenroy and the Glengyle, respectively) but nevertheless managed to meet each other. In his published letters, Waugh identifies Robin Mount as one of the persons he knows from the other ship and meets in port: “Robin is very gay & amusing. He has found his own level and now plays cards with me.”[7] Waugh’s Diaries include a brief encounter between Waugh and Ferdinand Mount. In 1961 Waugh and his wife visited Anthony and Violet Powell in Somerset, just after the death of Edward Longford, brother of both Ferdinand’s mother and Powell’s wife. Waugh feared that the family would be in mourning but instead found levity. Frank Longford was making phone calls trying to encourage attendance at his brother Edward’s funeral and was said by Waugh to have “roped in two hired mourners—Tristram Powell and young Mount, both from Oxford.” Waugh seems to have remembered Ferdinand’s father, Robin.[8] Although Waugh has been accused of being primarily interested in the “Honourables” and superior officers, he seems to have enjoyed Robin Mount’s company.[9] Ferdinand Mount doesn’t mention in his memoirs any meeting between his father or himself and Waugh.[10] However, Robin may have told his son of his acquaintance with a literary celebrity and passed on recollections of “a small, not entirely rude man with red knees.” Notes |
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Latin America:
Ignorance and Irony in The Loved One Aimée Thanatogenos “spoke the tongue of Los Angeles” (134), but not the tongue of the angels. That is the crux of The Loved One (1948), Evelyn Waugh’s satiric novella of American funerary customs. “With a name like that” (148), she is doomed from the beginning: she is the “death-spawned loved one,” but she is deaf to the European tongues in which her doom is pronounced. European names occur constantly in the novella—Heinkel, Bogolov, Medici—but those who bear them are cut off from their ancestral roots, “waifs and strays” (87-88) in a land of the lowest common denominator: “I’ve just found a Mr. Medici in my
office.” Like a knowledge of Italian pronunciation, Catholicism is not a common denominator, and its angelic tongue, Latin, is meaningless in the ears of good Americans. A grieving Mrs. Theodora Heinkel rings Dennis Barlow, the novella’s cynical British anti-hero, to arrange the funeral of her pet Sealyham. Her address is “207 Via Dolorosa” (17), on a street named for the “sorrowful way” Christ trod to crucifixion. Mrs. Heinkel grieves for her dog but not for her God, and she is deaf to the blasphemy of the white dove that will be released to symbolize her Sealyham’s soul “at the moment of committal” (21; cf. Matthew 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32). When Dennis collects the dog’s cadaver, he has to translate Latin into English for Mr. Heinkel: “I have our
brochure here setting out our service. Were you thinking of
interment or incineration? A little later, arranging the funeral of his self-strangulated mentor at Whispering Glades, the model for his pets’ cemetery, Dennis talks with a “Mortuary Hostess” to the strains of the “Hindu Love Song”: “Can I help you
in any way?” He has already heard a Mrs. Bogolov—Bog is the Russian word for
“God”—being informed that Wilbur Kenworthy, the fatuous “Dreamer” of
Whispering Glades, “does not approve of wreaths or crosses” (41).
Whispering Glades is an attempt to deny the dirt, ugliness and pain
that accompany death. The cross is a supreme symbol of death’s
horror for materialists like Kenworthy, who refuse to accept its
true significance. Hence the ironic double entendre of a
parenthesis in chapter five: “After consultation the Cricket Club’s
fine trophy in the shape of cross bats and wickets had been
admitted. Dr. Kenworthy had himself given judgement; the trophy
was essentially a reminder of life not of death; that was the crux”
(73). A crux is literally a cross, which for Christians is
essentially a reminder of life not of death. Blind to this
symbolism, deaf to the Christian message, Kenworthy’s disciple Aimée
seeks in vain for a solution to her wooing by the perfidious but
attractive Dennis and the ethical but un-athletic Mr. Joyboy,
Whispering Glades’ chief mortician and the “one mediating logos
between Dr. Kenworthy and common humanity” (143). The Guru Brahmin,
an agony uncle to whom she has repeatedly turned for advice, proves
as fake as everything else in her world. Works Cited Editor's Note: 0800006408 is also known as Stephen Whittle, a New Zealander held under an alleged immigration offense in Santa Ana Jail, Orange County, California. He passes his time reading, meditating, and searching his meals for pâté de foie gras. |
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Reviews Telling It Like It Wasn’tBrideshead Revisited, dir. Julian Jarrold. Writ. Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock. Ecosse Films, 2008. Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, James Cook University. In 1963 a kindly Professor of English ignored prevailing opinion that Waugh
was “too lightweight for serious study,” listened to my contention that Waugh’s
lightness plumbed interesting depths and approved my proposal to write a
dissertation on Brideshead Revisited. Some days later a normally
businesslike acquaintance asked about my topic; in return I asked whether she
had read the novel. Uneasy silence followed. Then, with un-businesslike shyness
she replied: “Thirty-seven times. I was an alcoholic, and I feel so close to
Sebastian that I can’t stop reading the book.”
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Travesty Not even the imagination, to find a new location. Castle Howard Revisited, I came upon it visiting the website, Anyway, a photograph of them sitting there, Usurpers. |
| Just About Right Scoop. BBC Radio 4, 15 & 22 February 2009. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley. Radio 4 broadcast a two-part, two-hour production of Scoop. The script was written by Jeremy Front, who has also written for
TV serials such as Monarch of the Glen and has to his credit a four-hour
BBC radio production of Brideshead Revisited broadcast in 2003.
Front’s script followed the story, especially the parts set in Africa, fairly
closely, although there were of necessity some omissions. Most omissions
related to portions set in England. These included some of Waugh’s best
comic dialogue, such as William Boot’s interviews with the rival Ishmaelite visa officers
and Mr. Salter’s arrival at the Boot Magna railroad halt and his cross-country
hike to the estate.
Much dialogue between denizens
of Boot Magna and between Lord Copper and his underlings was severely
edited, as was that involving John Boot and Julia Stitch. The
core of the story survived but lost much of Waugh’s satire. |
| The Inside Story of John Mortimer’s Brideshead Script Graham Lord, John Mortimer: The Devil's Advocate, the Unauthorized Biography. 2005. London: Orion, 2006. 400 pp. £8.99. Reviewed by Richard W. Walker. One of my favorite lines in the 1981 television version of Brideshead
Revisited occurs during the scene at Oxford that depicts Charles Ryder’s
inauspicious first meeting with aristocrat Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian and a
raucous band of Etonians in white tie tumble into the quad of Charles’s college
and spot the somber glow coming from his ground-floor rooms. One of them, Boy
Mulcaster (played by the late great Jeremy Sinden), staggers up to an open window
and peers into the smoke-filled room, where Charles and his circle of
young-fogey intellectuals are listening to Collins, the embryo don, read a paper
on the nature of chance. “It looks like a bloody prayer meeting to me,”
Mulcaster sneers. Then, of course, comes the denouement. A glassy-eyed Sebastian
leans well forward into the room and disgorges a mixture of wines that were too
various. |
| Homely Thoughts Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day, by Patrick Parrinder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 502 pp. $45. Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, Bennington College. With the exception of a reference to the University of Reading, Berkshire, the only county with a royal prefix, even paratextually, this book screams sedition. The back of the dust jacket promises to undermine national identity, a sentiment promptly followed by more of the same on its inside, hammered home by the cover’s detail of William Hogarth’s The March of the Guards to Finchley which was ultimately dedicated to Frederick II of Prussia after George II rejected the guards’ debauchery, and corroborated by Patrick Parrinder’s now mundane explanation of the popular, individual, vernacular, democratizing newness of the novel, a genre to correct that frightful Shakespearean habit of perceiving the nation “from the top down” (18): “Its status as private reading-matter gives it its unstable and potentially subversive function in relation to the family and the community at large” (13). Can this really be the English novel? Despite the stereotypical lack of interest in politics, the rather ambiguous nature of this literary history that is beyond annotation yet never quite matures into an ideological analysis of identity and is perhaps best described as glorified lit. crit., proleptically, Parrinder, author of The Failure of Theory, does manage to round up the usual refractory suspects, combining the polysemic, revolutionary literariness of Mikhail Bakhtin and Ian Watt with Fredric Jameson’s reductive version of the novel as “national allegory” (4), Benedict Andersen’s now commonplace rendering of the nation as social construct, and Edward Said’s earlier vandalizing of it. What, no camels then? There are, in fact, more sensibly, camels galore, but the only indication that the introductory pages are almost entirely irrelevant to the remaining three hundred or so, that we are about to spend several hours attempting to unearth sedition in the oddest of places, that apparently we must now sell everything via subversion, applicable or not, is the inclusion, over and above Parrinder’s acknowledgment that the English novel is epiphenomenal from beginning to end, its origins stemming from all sorts of foreign sources, of Sir Walter Scott, and the exclusion of Tayeb Salih, the favoring of insular tradition over counter-orientalism. Parrinder’s is not a tale of revolution, nor indeed of a tradition of revolution, but of a factitious palingenesis, a repetitive, elegiac gestalt founded on a very limited list of figures and themes, and a still briefer morphology of plotlines. It is a series of would-be King Arthurs (Guy Crouchback to name but one), Dick Whittingtons (Dickens’s Pip), and Robin Hoods (even Lawrence’s Mellors), of pilgrims, knights-errant, and loveable rogues "by whom it would be delightful to have been robbed" (136), of eventual, generally joyous alliances between Normans and Saxons, Cavaliers and Puritans, Jacobins and Jacobites, or Whigs and Tories, of the suffering of the Book of Job that will be rewarded “at the moment of narrative denouement rather than being reserved for a future state” (115), “the journey novel and male Bildungsroman, the novel of courtship, and the family saga and extended novel-sequence” (29), of a pluralistic, idealized country that is often anachronistic, as opposed to injurious to the super-structural social flux, before the novels in question are even published. Just pick a sturdy camel. The story is one that would not have been out of place in my traditional, ultra-Anglican, paramilitary boarding school but fifteen minutes from Reading, Royal Berks. More specifically, Robinson Crusoe is defined as a “whingeing pom and home-grown humbug” (81), Tom Jones’s gypsies form “an ideal commonwealth in subjection to an absolute monarch” (100), “the discourse about the English highwayman … in some respects simply placed an acceptable gloss on the [eighteenth] century’s actual experiences of plebeian violence” (143), Scott’s “English novels are comparatively superficial entertainments evoking the nation’s aristocratic and Royalist past” (153), “For all her [Elizabeth’s] claims to equality, the point of her marriage is that it is splendidly unequal, and it is this that, of all Austen’s novels, brings Pride and Prejudice closest to fairy tale” (193), North and South “Necessarily … concludes with a political marriage calculated to resolve the national divisions that the novel has so fully expounded” (212), an alarmingly pleasant Dickens is a purveyor of the “recognition-inheritance pattern” (217), with his protagonists aiming for “an untroubled, unambitious domestic happiness” (213), and Doctor Thorne’s Frank Gresham, “needless to say, … falls in love with, and finally marries, the one woman who can save his family’s bankrupt estate” (269). In Sybil, there is even a dog, Harold, playing the role of yet another agent of unification: “This pedigree pet with a royal Saxon name is the embodiment of true social instincts” (170). The pervasive, oneiric enantiodromia, in which the novel is a foundational influence, belatedly reflecting society rather than preempting it, is most obvious when its anodyne properties are used to correct the aforementioned foreign sources. The Gothic receives several sharp raps over the knuckles, and its “novels take place … outside England” (122), “Sexual desire in English fiction is famously muted” (31), the English pícaro is “decidedly more polite and wealthier” (47), “where Cervantes had introduced a democratic element into romance, Scott, writing for the prosaic bourgeoisie, had restored to romance its aristocratic element” (162), “For all their sympathies with the French Revolution, the English Jacobin novelists of the 1790s produced parables of a reformed aristocracy rather than visions of an aristocracy overthrown by the people” (181), “The Dickensian Bildungsroman … comes after the great French novelists, Stendhal and Balzac, yet it is closer to folk tale and fairy tale than to the masterpieces of French realism” (217), and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover is Lawrence’s attempt to defy the traditionally tragic outcome of the European novel of adultery” (308). Parrinder is adept with inter-text, in drawing conclusions across the novels and the ages, and the occasional hijacking of the reader is to be expected in a book of this length, but, as in the selection above, one of the dangers in recounting such plots, and in emphasizing their similarities, is of course that one’s own book becomes subject to the same repetition. The omnipresent sense of déjà vu, of an overriding filial, analeptic paradigm, however accurate, is wearisome, which is partly the point. Given the author’s ideological absence, at times the book seems to be simply confirming that at least a history of England is in fact charted in its novels, and such representations implicitly debunk the supposed sedition of the introductory pages. The tone grates, however, when in spite of his own mounting evidence, Parrinder is not prepared to give up on that introduction, intermittently and incongruously paying lip service to it, since “in every generation of English fiction there have been novelists who broke away” (34), or “In fiction the unorthodox individual is almost invariably vindicated” (331), when anyone reading Nation and Novel would have precisely the opposite impression. The novels that may shake such cultural ataraxia and allow some reprieve from an ill-suited theoretical apparatus seem few and far between. Tristram Shandy is limited to a couple of pages, Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminism is mentioned only in passing, Jane Eyre’s ending is at best ambivalent, there are hints of sedition in Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda offers a glimmer of “positive orientalism” (249) only to be dimmed by Adam Bede’s “gradual healing of a broken rural community” (274) and Felix Holt’s “fairy-tale ending” (276), even The Secret Agent’s bomber’s secular “roots are in provincial Puritanism of a recognizably English type” (257), Hardy empties paganism, nature, and Christianity, and yet Jude is structured via Job, Lawrence opts for “neo-pagan mysticism” (290), Forster (where the Englishness is now explicit, and thus potentially contains its own demise, since reminding oneself of one’s patriotism is surely a sign of its actual lack of significance) is skeptical, yet still manages a “mawkish attempt to turn back imperial development thanks to the recovery of an England capable of restoring the life of the body and holding the suburbs at bay” (302) in Howards End, Woolf’s Between the Acts is rife with “pastoral memory” (313), and 1984’s “rubbish-heap of details” (318) represents the cherished remnants of a more desirable past. In H. G. Wells’s words, “In the meantime the old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing still, sheltering strange tenants” (304). Remarkably, one of the strangest, in the only chapter on Empire that, at least literarily, is “nearly always kept in the background” (322), becomes a rehabilitated Kipling, filtered through Kim’s hybridity, but is Kipling as outsider really the closest the English novel comes to subversion? Well, no, for as the ur-narrative quickens towards its close, in the knowledge that the penultimate chapter will re-contextualize immigration back into the same series of paradigms so that rather than striking back the Empire attaches itself to preexistent novelesque themes, to solitude in a hostile London in Jean Rhys’s case, or to the ruins of “pastoral fantasy” (402) in V. S. Naipaul’s, and equally aware that the diluted conclusion, very much the product of the previous four hundred pages’ process, will focus on the retrograde Atonement with its smattering of camels and must, therefore, admit that the novel is now “a kind of palimpsest” (411), Waugh wreaks havoc. In the wake of a study of Woolf’s neo-Arthurian The Waves, which only succeeded in confirming her status as another reactionary, the now desperate lunges for implosion dismiss Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall in passing, their subject “a small upper-class clique living a virtually self-contained life in defiance of a wider, rapidly changing world” (342) that simply won’t do, a rejection substantiated by “the romantic unreality of Brideshead Revisited, a novel which (for all its fascination) is much inferior to the later Sword of Honour trilogy as a chronicle of aristocratic England’s decline and fall” (362). Exactly why it is inferior is never explained, of course, for its ontology must remain elusive here, scrapped in favor of an again brief nod to A Handful of Dust’s more appropriately nifty parodying of Arthur as a segue to Guy Crouchback’s ambivalence. Sword of Honour receives eight pages, compared with Jane Eyre’s six, because, despite Parrinder’s admission that Catholic readers may beg to differ, and with a modicum of assistance from Diana Cooper’s deflating analogy to “‘Mrs. Dale’s Diary’” (362) and Christopher Sykes’s account of Ludovic’s The Death Wish as “a send-up of Brideshead Revisited” (368), Crouchback may be re-inscribed as “equivocal” (368), his “knight-errantry … surrounded by ambiguities from beginning to end” (370), the victim of “a farcical discrepancy between [his] dream of belonging to a high company of warriors and the reality” (363). When coupled to the author’s “laconic style” (364) that “suggests a world of moral uncertainty” (364) in which “the work of discrimination is … left to the reader” (364), and given the dearth of other candidates in Parrinder’s homely version of his predecessors, one would be forgiven for thinking that a proto-postmodern Waugh had almost single-handedly destroyed not only the English novel, but with it the past. Works Cited Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions, 1962. |
| Exquisite Command The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, by Patrick French. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. 555 pp. Hardcover, $30. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma. Does this sound like anyone we know? A writer seeks to
invent himself so as to impose himself on a different stratum of society;
responds to criticism of his anti-post-colonial and other political views with
still more extreme and provocative statements; confesses happily to being a
snob; carefully keeps traces of himself out of his work; in travel books, where
he can define a whole society in a few paragraphs, expunges all mention of his
traveling companion; demands from his literary agent a variety of very
unliterary services; has recurring fears of being unable to write anything more;
and enjoys staying in hotels because he likes “the temporariness, the mercenary
services, the absence of responsibility, the anonymity, the scope for
complaint.” He even tries to commit suicide and is on the whole relieved when he
fails. Besides that, he has “an exquisite command of the English language.” |
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Disembodied Constructs Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War, by Sarah Cole. 2003. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 297 pp. $43.00. Reviewed by KJ Gilchrist, Iowa State University.
In this work rising out of her Ph.D. dissertation, Sarah Cole explores the
origins and nature of social constructs that governed relations between
soldiers of the Great War (with focus on soldiers en masse and less on
individuals). The twist of the work is how the intense connections that
soldiers formed among themselves stood in opposition to the Victorian and
Imperial constructs that society envisioned and prescribed for male friendship;
the failings of these ideals for male friendship become apparent through the
modernist works she considers. Soldiers, as they faced and emerged from the
unprecedented chaos of the First World War, found that their very bodies existed
as a “body” of constructs in a multitude of senses: “the body of aestheticist
dreams, the imperialist body as a repository for ideology … the smashed and
debilitated body at war … the body of the post-war years” when it becomes “a
trope for the physical and spiritual state of a war-scarred culture” (8). As I chart such movements, I shall suggest homologies with various features of literary modernism (the marginalized physical body an image of modern man; shared mutilation a sign of protest; the broken post-war body a figure for literary self-constructions), and I shall operate on the line between what we might call constructionism and essentialism. (8)Divisions within the book delve the Victorian and Imperial groundings from which constructs for male friendships grew (“Victorian dreams, modern realities: Forster’s classical imagination” and “Conradian alienation and imperial intimacy”), then uncover male relationships within the war itself (“'My killed friends are with me where I go': friendship and comradeship at war”), and, last, probes the nature of male connectedness in the postwar years (“'The violence of the nightmare': D. H. Lawrence and the aftermath of war”). Through these explorations, Cole successfully presents a modernism among whose many conversations remains a central discussion of male intimacy, a topic that “ripples across the literary landscape” (20). In treating Forster’s classical view of male connections, Cole surprises by exploring not merely multifarious images of male friendship, but the disconnections, the “disjunctive” nature of it that pervades his work and Forster’s ultimate rejection of Hellenism that the English public school modeled, a system that encouraged male friendship; ultimately it placed males within a “kind of psychic and cultural limbo.” Thus Cole recalls moments within Forster where characters face impossible relationships as constructed for the characters. Take the relationship between Aziz and Fielding in A Passage to India: the novel ends with wide and prohibitive comment from Forster’s narrator that male connections at any idealized level must ultimately devolve, only in part due to “the problem of failed institutions” (Cole 89), and that (as the novel’s last words echo) such idealized friendship can “not yet” exist. Similarly, when Cole unpacks the male alliances existing for Conrad’s characters—as, for instance, when “Marlow describes his relation with Kurtz not as a part of a system of male bonds” (106)—they are a joint venture both men share, but only as set against western systems that give rise to the previously unrealized horrors. The Victorian conventions and Imperialist ideals for male connections are thus explored in Conrad not for any connection they facilitate between men, but for their “inaccessibility” and their “debilitating” nature. In treating male friendships in war, Cole convincingly shows—here as elsewhere—that male friendship does not function as social or imperial dictates would prescribe. In the case of war, friendship was supposed to “sustain the solider, to provide for … heroic action [and] redeem the horrific suffering”; instead, it fails to realize these ideals and leaves soldiers “bewildered” and angry (139). Cole is insightful here, and we find ourselves applying these lines to works she doesn’t cover (Remarque’s The Road Back or Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, for instance), which show precisely how male friendship does not cover the horrors of war, and male friends are rather more isolated in their suffering than they are connected. The chapter turns on the ironic disparity within the quotation (used as the chapter’s title) from Siegfried Sassoon: “my killed friends are with me where I go.” High modernism would echo the sense of this line, Cole asserts, for fifty years beyond its utterance. Certainly besides Lawrence (explored in Cole’s next chapter), we can follow and affirm this assertion, not least in Hemingway (Jake Barnes), in Virginia Woolf (Septimus Warren Smith), in T. S. Eliot (the husband who thinks "we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones”), and in later modern works. When Cole moves to Lawrence, she traces the meanings of the soldier, the social icons of memorials, and the constructed significance of males returned (or not returned) from war. Rather, it is constructed insignificance: the returned soldier, often maimed, becomes marginalized even in remembrance ceremonies and remains within a realm of “injustice and irony” (218). Lawrence’s Women in Love contains one of the dominant visions of male friendship after war: Birkin expresses to Ursula his hopes for not merely her companionship but also “eternal union with a man, too: another kind of love,” which Ursula believes is “false, impossible” (235). Again, Cole reveals that the idealized constructions of male connectedness are impotent in producing the realities expected by society—not least as observed in the body of impotence reflected in Lord Chatterley, or observed in Lawrence himself who regards the devastation of the war in 1916 and proclaims “I am no longer an Englishman” but “an enemy of mankind” (236). Cole’s work, insightful, nuanced, and full of new starting points for further reading, may also perhaps inherit a complaint made against Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: that it is limited by its Anglo-centric perspective. I believe in both cases the authors are considering the dominant ideologies as governing ideas of and expectations for male friendship in western culture, in works from Tennyson to those modernist texts that begin to interrogate these ideals and show them to be defunct. I’ve said elsewhere that if the Great War did not kill the melioristic Victorian age, it at least placed the toe-tag upon its corpse. Cole has shown that it did the same to the body of Victorian constructs and prescripts for male friendship. Cole is currently at work on a further study of modernism and violence. |
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Abstracts of Japanese Essays on Evelyn Waugh, 1948-1959 S. Y. “Evelyn
Waugh no Ninki―Sekaibungakutsushin (Igirisu)” [“Popularity of Evelyn Waugh―World
Literary Correspondence (Britain)”]. Sekaibungaku [World Literature]
25 (1948): 24-25. Ueno, Naozo. “Aisuruhito Korewa Shinin no Daimeishi Desu―Evelyn Waugh no Fuushishousetu.”
Sekaijin 6 (1949): 20-26. Abstract: George Orwell satirizes communist revolution tactfully by using the form of an animal fable in Animal Farm. However, Waugh’s object of satire is individuals to the last. They share faults with the readers. The readers’ loud laughter sometimes turns into slight, wry smiles, and then cools down to barefaced self-mockery. Or readers brood with serious faces. Roughly speaking, Waugh’s satirical world includes such cynical laughter. Waugh can describe the upper class only. He cannot describe the poor or the bourgeoisie. The description of aristocrats’ lives is marvelous. It has sharp satire, but his satire reveals aristocrats’ corruption. His mind does not recognize social progress. From the start, he has no intention to criticize aristocratic society from the class viewpoint. In Brideshead Revisited, his excellent lampoonery suddenly declines. It’s not because he uses first-person narrative. As usual, he keeps his distance from the object. But he seems to feel deep love of the Marchmains. Satirical spirit doesn’t coexist with love. Satire is a kind of disclosure, and love is something to embrace. Saeki, Shoichi.
“Evelyn Waugh Ron― Niryu Sakka no Ikikata.” [“A Theory about Evelyn Waugh― The
Way of the Second-Rate Writer”]. Oberon 1.2 (1954): 37-56. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have the same religion and attended the same university. The impression we gain from them is quite different. It is the difference between the first-rate writer and the second-rate writer. To Greene, the modern world is hell. His passion is to describe the misery of humanity without God. Waugh doesn’t have such a desperate view of humanity. Mrs. Last is a Japanese translation of A Handful of Dust. Needless to say, the original title was taken from The Waste Land. However, the waste land is not expressed in this novel. This novel is rather ‘a novel of polite society.’ If one reads it with such a preconception, one will enjoy it. The English aristocracy and their polite society are well described. Mrs. Last might be suitable as the translated title. Mr. Todd’s cruelty is also interesting. The cruelty of capturing a nice, decent aristocrat, Tony Last, in the Amazon is beyond the readers’ expectation. Some critics say Waugh should corner his character in a cruel situation and then save him. That is doubtful, however. Hashimoto, Michiko.
“Evelyn Waugh--Brideshead Revisited ni Okeru.” Journal of the Society
of English and American Literature, Kansei Gakuin University 1.2 (1955):
77-94. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s comedy consists of farce, comedy of manners, and satire. What link these elements are two mythical patterns. One is loss of innocence and banishment from the eternal refuge. The other is regaining the lost paradise. These two different elements are united, which gives poetic fantasy to the plots of Waugh’s novels. The relationship of these elements is totally different in each novel. The first two novels emphasize the former pattern, and Brideshead Revisited and Helena the latter. A Handful of Dust has both. For satire, the former pattern is very effective. From Paul Pennyfeather to Guy Crouchback, all of Waugh’s protagonists are innocent. They live their lives gullibly. Waugh sees the cruelty and hypocrisy of this world in the treatment of these ingenuous protagonists. Remodeling great treasures like King’s Thursday, Brideshead, and Hetton Abbey into vulgar contemporary architecture with chromium and glass is an allegory of modern times. Most of the effects of Waugh’s burlesque are accomplished by destroying the Victorian setting that Waugh loves. |
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Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism
Bacchus, Michael. “Not a Bedspread, but a Counterpane: Under the Covers
with Gay Men and Aristocrats in Twentieth-Century British Literature.” DAI
58.5A (1997): 1718. U of Southern California, 1997. |
| Brideshead Revisited on DVD Miramax released Brideshead Revisited on DVD on 13 January 2009. The DVD includes the 100-minute film, deleted scenes, audio commentary, and a "featurette" entitled "The World of Brideshead." The retail price is $29.99. |
| Evelyn Waugh on CD Readings of several novels by Evelyn Waugh are available on CD from CSA Word. The novels include Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, and two versions of Brideshead Revisited, and several of these have been combined in The Best of Evelyn Waugh. For details, go to their web site: http://www.csaword.co.uk. |
| Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest Caity Logan of Smith College won the Fourth Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest for writing "Sword of Honour--Identity and Possession." An edited version of Caity's essay will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Newsletter. Entries in the Fifth Annual Evelyn Waugh Essay Contest can be submitted to Dr. John H. Wilson, Department of English, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA 17745, USA, or jwilson3@lhup.edu, through 31 December 2009. |
| Evelyn Waugh Society The Evelyn Waugh Society has 89 members. Information on becoming a member is available at the society's web site, http://www.evelynwaughsociety.org. The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List has 57 members. The list is available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh. |
| Mystery of the "Blood Book" Richard Oram published "'Victorian Blood Book' from the Library of Evelyn Waugh" in the February 2009 issue of e-News from the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. The article includes several illustrations from the book, described as a "decoupage … embellished with hand-colored drops of 'blood' and handwritten religious commentaries." John Bingley Garland gave the book to his daughter in 1854, but it is not known who did the work or how Waugh acquired it. The article and illustrations are available at http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/enews/2009/february/bloodbook.html. |
| A Dim View Ripping Yarns Bookshop in London recently sold a first-edition copy of Decline and Fall inscribed by Evelyn Waugh's father, Arthur, for Gilbert Upcott. Arthur wrote a little poem in December 1928:
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More and More Lists Visits to the lavatory, 14 March 2009: Sword of
Honour The Times followed suit with "10 spectacular second novels" by Luke Leitch on 17 March 2009. Vile Bodies is said to be "much funnier" than Decline and Fall. The list is available at The Times. |
| Waugh and the Marginal Catholics The Institut Catholique d'Etudes Supérieures is sponsoring an international colloquium entitled "Les Ecrivains Catholiques Marginaux" in La Rochue sur Yon, France on 29 and 30 April 2009. Benoit le Roux will be speaking on "Evelyn Waugh, catholique d'Angleterre et excentrique parmi les marginaux" at 3:30 pm on 29 April. For more information, please visit http://www.ices.fr. |
| Lecture on Waugh and Orwell David Lebedoff, author of The Same Man, appeared at "Lunch, Literature and Public Life: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh," sponsored by the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota on 27 January 2009. |
| Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1917-2008 Conor Cruise O'Brien passed away in December 2008. He was 91 years old. Under the pseudonym Donat O'Donnell, O'Brien viciously reviewed Brideshead Revisited for The Bell, an Irish monthly, in December 1946. The review provoked a defense by T. J. Barrington, published in The Bell in February 1947, followed by a response from O'Brien in March 1947, and finally a letter from Evelyn Waugh in July 1947. Suggesting that O'Brien had questioned the "good faith" of his conversion, Waugh admitted that he was a snob, or at least "happiest in the company of the European upper-classes." He did not, however, consider snobbishness "an offence against Charity, still less against Faith," and he did not think snobbishness influenced his writing. Brideshead includes, Waugh noted, "Rex Mottram, a millionaire, and Lady Celia Ryder, a lady of high birth. Why did my reverence for money and rank not sanctify those two?" The exchange in The Bell is reprinted in Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage, ed. Martin Stannard, 255-71. See also The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory, 255. O'Brien developed his review into an essay entitled "The Pieties of Evelyn Waugh," published in Donat O'Donnell, Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (1952), reprinted in Critical Essays on Evelyn Waugh, ed. James F. Carens. In a varied career reminiscent of Basil Seal's, O'Brien served as Irish representative to the United Nations, leader of a special UN mission to the Congo, vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, member of the Irish Parliament, and editor of The Observer. Conor Cruise O'Brien is survived by his wife, four children, and five grandchildren. His obituary is available at the New York Times. |
| Evelyn Waugh on Facebook Evelyn Waugh has a Facebook page that can be viewed at http://www.facebook.com. Over one thousand people have identified themselves as fans. There are pages for Fans of Evelyn Waugh, Intl. (689 members), the Auberon Waugh Appreciation Society (Incorporating the Dog Lovers' Party) (54 members), and the Alec Waugh Appreciation Society (22 members). Agatha Runcible also has her own page. |
| Songs for The Loved One Four rough cuts of songs for the musical version of The Loved One are available at http://www.myspace.com/thelovedonemusical. The book and lyrics are by Adria Lang, with music by Joey Altruda. |
| Vile Bodies Mug A company called Art Meets Matter is selling a mug that reproduces the design of a Penguin paperback edition of Vile Bodies. An espresso cup featuring Black Mischief appears on the web site but is described as out of stock. Images and details are available at the following site: http://www.artmeetsmatter.com/penguin-classics.php. |
| Literary History.com Literary History.com includes a page devoted to Evelyn Waugh. The page is "A selective list of literary criticism for Evelyn Waugh, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that comply with MLA guidelines." Please visit http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Waugh.htm. |
| Anthony Powell Conference The Anthony Powell Society's Fifth Biennial Conference will be held 10-12 September 2009 at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA. Details are available at www.anthonypowell.org or the Conference Office, Anthony Powell Society, 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford, Mddx, UB6 0JW, UK; phone: +44 (0)20 8864 4095; fax: +44 (0)20 8864 6109; e-mail: conference@anthonypowell.org. |
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End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies,
Vol. 40, No. 1 |