EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD

EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES
Vol. 40, No. 3
Winter 2010

The Complete Evelyn Waugh
Alexander Waugh has reached an agreement with Oxford University Press to publish the complete works of his grandfather Evelyn in forty-seven volumes. Alexander will serve as general editor and edit several volumes of diaries and letters. Editors with scholarly qualifications are needed to edit various volumes of fiction, travel, biography, and journalism.

Paul A. Doyle

     Paul A. Doyle, founder and editor emeritus of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, passed away on 22 July 2009. He was 83 years old.
     Paul Doyle earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Scranton and master’s and doctor's degrees from Fordham University. He taught at Fordham and St John’s University before moving to Nassau Community College, where he taught for over forty years. He won the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and was planning to teach this past autumn.
     Paul Doyle wrote or edited eighteen books, including Evelyn Waugh (1969), Evelyn Waugh: A Checklist of Primary and Secondary Material (with R. M. Davis, C. E. Linck & H. Kosok, 1972), A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh (with R. M. Davis, D. Gallagher, C. E. Linck & W. M. Bogaards, 1986), and A Reader’s Companion to the Novels and Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh (1989).
     Paul Doyle also founded the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter in 1967 and edited it through 1998, when health finally forced him to stop. He supported revival of the Newsletter in 2002 and sometimes contributed.
     Paul Doyle is survived by two sons.
     The Executive Committee of the Evelyn Waugh Society passed a motion expressing condolence to the family of Paul Doyle and appreciation for all of his contributions to Waugh scholarship.
     Below are comments from people who knew and worked with Paul.

Robert Murray Davis (Sun Lakes, Arizona)
   Although Paul Doyle and I corresponded for years, we met only once at his home in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, while I was on my way to Maritime Canada. It was difficult to find his house, which had belonged to his parents and which he used in the summer, but I did. When I got out of the car, he was waiting at the curb. He said, "My God, you look like a tight end." All I could think was that standards for tight ends must be considerably lower than they were at the University of Oklahoma. He showed me his collection of railway memorabilia, and I was pleased to be able to tell him that I'd stayed one night at the terminus of the Snyder, Roscoe, and Pacific Railway--a new one to him. But mostly we talked about Waugh.
     I had planned to visit him in the spring of 1967 when I was doing research at New York University, but a predicted light rain turned into eighteen inches of snow, cancelling my visit and imperiling the health of local weatherpersons.
     He was tolerant of my organizing principle for the two editions of the Waugh bibliography, but he did complain that every time I reviewed a book for him, I cost him a subscriber. He forgave that, but he never forgot my (highly qualified) praise of Ian Littlewood's book.
     One question I never asked and could never answer from inference was whether he thought that Waugh was funny. How odd to think of that question.
     I had hoped to entice him to the Austin Waugh meeting, but apparently he regarded airplanes as a dangerous innovation like computers and, as far as I could tell, correcting Selectric typewriters.

N. N. Newaliya (Meerut, India)
Paul Doyle was a doyen in Waugh studies who was totally devoted to his mission. I fondly remember his kindness in sending me Xeroxed copies of some articles published in the Waugh Newsletter which I required when I was engaged in my M Phil dissertation on Waugh's travel-inspired novels. May his soul rest in peace.

Donat Gallagher (Townsville, Australia)
Though we never met, I developed a great respect and affection for him.

Sylvia Koleva (Sofia, Bulgaria)
I'm very sorry that Paul Doyle--such a charming and capable and exceptional man--is dead. I never knew him, but I can imagine what a wonderful life he had. I dare hope that perhaps he will meet Waugh! Requiescam in pacem.

Alain Blayac (Montpellier, France)
How sad I feel at Paul's demise! I never met him although I tried a couple of times while in New York. He was such a shy man, but answered all letters and queries punctiliously. He very frankly advised me on a couple of hot-blooded reflections I had on published judgments about my contributions and I still feel thankful to him for his sensibly helping me in tricky situations. No doubt he was the real federator of the Waugh Newsletter and its numerous subscribers. As such he was to my mind the most important Waugh scholar both in his editor's capacity and in his creation of the network.

Winnifred Bogaards (New Brunswick, Canada)
I shall always remember how much Paul helped me when I was doing my PhD on Waugh, which included an extensive bibliography. Many of the items I found were in libraries where you could only copy the material in pencil, as he did to help me out. It was then in the mid-sixties that he began publishing the findings of myself and others, particularly Robert Murray Davis, in the Newsletter, leading to the first and second published Waugh bibliographies. He was a devoted Waugh scholar and a cherished friend.

Yoshiharu Usui (Tokyo, Japan)
I came to know of the Newsletter when I prepared an MA thesis in 1996. I didn’t use e-mail, so I made a phone call to the community college where Paul Doyle was working to learn how to subscribe. He asked me to give him my name and address and to send the fee. I always sent it in cash covered with tissue paper in an ordinary envelope. When he could not continue to edit the Newsletter, he returned the balance, a five-dollar bill. I was impressed with his integrity. I pray his soul may rest in peace.

John H. Wilson (Lock Haven, Pennsylvania)
My first submission to the Waugh Newsletter was totally inappropriate, much too long, but instead of rejecting it, Paul Doyle patiently edited it, and it became my first scholarly publication. I was always impressed that Paul carefully wrote by hand all of the 200 addresses for each issue of the Newsletter. When I took over as editor, Paul sent me all his Newsletter correspondence for thirty-five years, so I was able to contact the subscribers. He also sent me his store of back issues, so I am able to satisfy people's requests for old articles. When Evelyn Waugh died, Graham Greene said that it was like losing one's commanding officer. I know what he meant.

David Bittner (Omaha, Nebraska)
     My initial acquaintance with Dr. Paul Doyle occurred 22 years ago, when I was looking for a home for two articles I’d written about Brideshead Revisited. Ulrich’s Periodical Directory listed Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Paul Doyle as editor.
     I sent my work. In a letter dated June 2, 1987, Dr. Doyle informed me that he was “most pleased” to accept both submissions. One was a defense of Lady Marchmain as the heroine of Brideshead. Dr. Doyle said he agreed with this assessment of the character, even though it might represent the “minority opinion,” and had scheduled it for publication in the fall. In the following weeks, I conferred with Dr. Doyle a number of times about editing changes, and I always identified myself as “David Bittner, Lady Marchmain’s friend in Florida.” With all the contributors to keep track of, and all his students, my unfamiliar name needed help to ring a bell with such a busy man.
     It marked the beginning of one of the most valued friendships of my life, even though I met Dr. Doyle face to face only once, in 1994, when business brought me to New York. I thought of it as an avuncular relationship, compensating for my father’s withering remarks about my interest in the Brideshead set, whom he termed a “bunch of upper-class English degenerates.” I had to laugh a few years ago, going through my parents’ photos of their travels, when I found a picture of my father visiting the grave of Winston Churchill!
     I wrote eleven articles for the Newsletter before Dr. Doyle retired as editor in 1998, and another nine after John Wilson revived it in electronic form in 2002. I always sent Dr. Doyle a copy of the latest Newsletter after Prof. Wilson took over, and if the new issue carried an article by me, he always acknowledged it with a nice note. The most positive comment any of my Waugh pieces elicited from my father: “To me all that stuff looks like trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” When Dad passed away in 2002, two years after my return home from Florida, my mother was deluged with sympathy cards. I, with few old or new friends in town and most of my Florida friends as yet uninformed, received a total of four. One was from Dr. Doyle. His touch of class or gentlemanliness from a bygone era always makes me think of Tonio Kroger’s father, the “Consul,” “fastidious,” with “thoughtful blue eyes,” and “always a wild flower in his buttonhole.”
     I’ve always been puzzled by Waugh’s description of Harold Acton as a man he “did not greatly like but was proud to know.” As a journalist I’ve had to deal with quite a few VIPs, and most of them were nice, but some were the kind of people the late syndicated columnist Mike Royko used to call “old crabs.” That sort never inspired any pride in having made their acquaintance. I am much more likely to tell someone about the time I interviewed Pierre Salinger or Arlo Guthrie, both genial men, than to describe my meetings with Albert Sabin or Nuremberg counsel for the prosecution Telford Taylor, both “old crabs,” despite their reputation as humanitarians. I like people who are humanitarian in every sense of the word. They’re the kind of people I’m proud to claim as friends, and of that sort there was surely never a finer example than Dr. Doyle. Over the years, to encourage me, he told me about some challenges in his life and how he dealt with them. For the past year I have been the confirmation sponsor of the teenage son of friends. My responsibilities included some “journaling,” and I was asked to give Kevin, my charge, an example of someone whose Christian conduct had inspired me. I told Kevin about Dr. Doyle, who was also a major influence – mostly by the example he set - on my decision to join the Catholic Church eight years ago. Kevin’s parents, Paul and Susan, also read what I wrote about Dr. Doyle and said they were touched by it. In recent weeks I finished a long article for the Journal of Religion and Health, to be published online in January 2010 and between covers in the spring. I told the editor that I would like to dedicate my article to the memory of Dr. Doyle. My reasons are the same that Antoine de Saint Exupéry gave for dedicating The Little Prince to his friend Léon Werth: “He is the best friend I have in the world,” and he “understands everything.” Need I say more?

Poems from Brideshead
by James Morris

Saint Sebastian

Kurt.

Sebastian's search
For Sanctity,

Under the bed,
For Kurt's cigarettes,

'It's my job'.

Brideshead the TV Series

How I love Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick,
The whole cast... The Holy Spirit was definitely in it,
(He played an important part),

The music, the credits, everything about it indeed,
Especially the Moroccan scenes;
Sebastian staring up at The Sacred Heart.

Preface

I tell you reader–
Though you're not a consideration of the first importance,

I wrote these poems from Waugh,
With a zest that was quite strange to me,

Now, on an empty stomach,
I find them quite tasteful,

These morsels.

PETTY Officer

'It is your Commanding officer's wish'
'A few snips'
Not too short.

'Oh, no hard feelings',
'I can take a bit of sport'

Hooper's ok.

Dressing Down

Cousin Jasper (in subfusc suit)
Deplores the extravagance of Charles's lifestyle,
The lifestyle of the dissolute.

In plus-fours,
He had hoped,
For something more.

Anthony Blanche

Gracefully played
By Nicholas Grace.

A fine actor,
From a fine tradition of acting,
That 'doesn't exist outside of these damp islands'.

The Elder Mr. Ryder

Perfectly cast–

Like a cold blast of winter,
From hearty kindness,
To pure malice,
An expert,

Honed doing Pinter.

The Belgian Futurist

Jean de Brissac la Motte–

Was hit on the head by a flower pot,
Dropped from a top floor window,
By an elderly widow.

A pot of ferns it was,
For Jean.

Grizel

'Would you very much mind not doing that...'

Having her wrist pawed,
By a love-sick columnist,
Overawed.

'I don't happen enjoy it'

Beryl

Beryl at Brideshead–
Her Ladyship,
In charge of the household?

Oh no,
That wouldn't be appropriate,
Lady Julia–'much more suitable'.

Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead revisited–
The question of Art:
'[He] began again on our discussion'

Brideshead revisited–
The question of getting a priest for Lord Marchmain:
'[the subject] flamed up again'

Brideshead visited with Beryl,
His father in Rome,
'Anywhere but Rome'

Beryl Again

Bridget Bardot at Brideshead,
Marilyn Monroe?

Well,
Julia said she was 'voluptuous',

Bridey's Bombshell.

Fine Acting Again

In the TV adaptation of Brideshead,
Lord Marchmain,
We know who we mean.

Maybe his finest performance,
Especially the final scene;
Lying in state in The Queen's Bed,

He looked so dead.

Lady Marchmain

With Mr Samgrass–
That ‘intellectual-on-the-make'
She made a mistake.

Sending Sebastian to Monsignor Bell,
That wouldn't have worked out well,
Another mistake.

The cherished memory of Uncle Ned,
'He’s the test you know' Sebastian said,
Another burden he couldn't take.

The Death-Bed

His first commission;
Marchmain House,
The London home of the Flytes.

'This is all t-t-terrible t-t-tripe'
Anthony's assessment,
Of his South American pictures.

He 'never tired' of painting Julia,
And, of course,
The fountain.

One picture he didn't do;
'The Death-Bed'
Suggested by Lord Marchmain.

Could he have captured–
The grandeur,
Of the Queen's Bed, that 'vast velvet tent'?

Could he have rendered–
The splendour of the Chinese drawing-room,
The 'porcelain and lacquer and painted hangings'?

Could he have caught–
The curtain of the temple rent from top to bottom,
At Lord Marchmain's passing?

Difficult, I think.

Mr. Samgrass

This Polymath lies too long in the bath,
This Scholar too clean about the collar,
This Sage ‘too often bathed’
This Sophisticate always at his toilet.

This Genealogist now rising from the bath in mist,
This Legitimist now pairing his fingertips,
This ‘foil to Lady Marchmain's charms’ now scenting his underarms,
This ‘intellectual-on-the-make’ all shipshape and still oily.

Cordelia's Clangers

Rex's Christmas present to Julia,
The diamond-encrusted tortoise,
how beastly she blurts out quite innocently.

When Sebastian doesn't come down for dinner–
'He’s very drunk' she blurts again,
Unaware of what's really at stake.

When he doesn't return from the hunt–
'He's in disgrace'
Her child's voice; 'like a bell tolling'.

Cordelia’s Wisdom

The last mass at Brideshead–‘as though it would always be Good Friday’
What the Jews must have felt Quomodo sola sedet civitas
Whether she has a vocation or not.

The very deep things she understands,
The mature wisdom she displays,
Especially when she says;

‘I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?’

Moralist

The diamond-encrusted tortoise,
Rex’s Christmas present to Julia,
Buried itself,
According to Cordelia,
With the diamonds still attached!
‘there goes a packet’ Rex tells her.

Maybe Sebastian could come back,
And dig it up,
But he was never very happy there.

So it lies hidden somewhere,
Somewhere in Brideshead,
Through ‘the low door in the wall’
I say,
That's where the treasure is,
That’s where the treasure lies.

Rex's Christmas Present

Reminiscent of one my sister got,
From her prospective husband,
That first Christmas she brought him up:
An electronic cat.

Round and round it goes, a twirling effect.
My mother: (Lady Marchmain)
'Have you given it a name?
I don't think O'Malley* is impressed'

Getting stuck on the carpet though...
Finally, it broke.
Upturned among the wrapping paper,
The wheels on show...

He didn't care for party games, 'No'
Charades? A Sing-Along?? 'No'
We all went off to Midnight Mass,
Left him there holding the remote.

* our real cat

Rex

'I've got a lot to talk about'

He doesn’t want to wait for the meal’s completion,
‘For the hour of toleration and repletion’
He wants to speak immediately,
Before the blini, before the sole,
Before the meal’s been properly digested,
He wants his story out; divested; whole.

The Little Red-Haired Man

Who dabs the drop of water
From the ice swan,
Doesn't wait round very long,
'I must skedaddle'

He’s taken off the ship later on,
‘By two plainclothes policemen’
'The little red-haired man',
So says Lady Celia.

Played by Ronald Fraser: 'The Misfit'
A television series of the late sixties,
About The Permissive Society,
And how he doesn't fit in it.

He doesn't wait round very long,
I think I know the reason why–
He doesn't want to pay Charles his gambling debt (a tanner),
For three to the minute.

With All the Charitable Feeling I Can Muster

Introduced by Celia,
Mr Kramm,
From International Films,
Doesn't distinguish himself,
With his conversational skills,
'Well, well, well,'
'Well, well, well,'

He hurts his arm later on (we hear),
Relates the story of what took place–
(He slipped on the bathroom floor),
So maybe he wasn't such an absolute bore.

Minor Character

She sews,
Says,
'Sebastian is in love with his own childhood'

She sews,
Sighs,
'It is good to sit in the shade and talk of love'

'They hate something in themselves'
She says,
'Innocence, God, hope'
She sews.

She sews the main ideas into the fabric of the novel.

Radar

'A bat's squeak of sexuality'
I could never see how it fitted,
The metaphor,
'A bat's squeak of sexuality'
It was off my radar.

'A bat's squeak' is transmitted
From one bat to another–
A barely perceptible signal,
As he passes the cigarette to her,
In the car.

I can see it now.

Lear, Kent, Fool

We are fooled in our loves,
Lear is fooled.

But we remain loyal nevertheless,
Kent is foolishly loyal.

We are aware of this,
Fool is no fool.

Mystery solved.

The Vision Thing

'Perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience'
'Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols...'

All our earthly experiences, loves,
Are foreshadowings of heavenly experience, heavenly love.

It’s ‘Now we see through a glass darkly; then we shall see face to face’.

Comparison

A fractious childlike king,
'Alex, you were very naughty'

A rambling reverie on the heath,
'In the waste hollows of Castle Hill'

The division of his kingdom almost a caprice,
'Who shall I leave it to?' 'Quis?'

'And the little men who live without breathing'
'And thou no breath at all'.

Destiny

Don’t worry about us - we’re all happy here,
Living it up in Bangkok!

Aloysius picking up bad habits,
From the Thai teddies.

Kurt - ‘it is good for us here I think maybe’
(It was a false report - he survived)

And here I am in Old Siam -
Happy to be here - among these happy childlike people.

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

This is a continuation of the earlier lists, published in Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies. It includes books and articles published in 2008, as well as some items omitted from previous lists.

     Arai, Toshiko. "An Observation of the Religious Structure in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh." Kagoshima Junshin Joshi Daigaku Kokusai Ningengakubu Kiyo (Faculty of International Human Studies of Kagoshima Immaculate Heart University) 14 (2008): 15-40.
     Begam, Richard, and Michael Valdez Moses, eds. Modernism and Colonialism (2007). Reviewed by Timothy J. Sutton, “Modernist Aesthetic & Political Realities,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 52.1 (2009): 108-11.
     Bonadonna, Reed R. “Doing Military Ethics with War Literature.” Journal of Military Ethics 7.3 (November 2008): 231-42.
     Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Reviewed by KJ Gilchrist, “The View from Here,” EWNS 39.3 (Winter 2009).
     Brennan, Thomas J. “Evelyn Waugh’s Liturgical Discontent: Two Late Unpublished Letters from Martin D’Arcy to Waugh and One to D’Arcy from Philip Caraman.” Notes & Queries March 2008: 74-75.
     Brideshead Revisited, dir. Julian Jarrold, 2008. Reviewed by James Wolcott, “Brideshead Re-revisited,” Vanity Fair, March 2008: 394; Jonathan V. Last, “‘Brideshead Revisited’ Revisited,” Weekly Standard, 30 June 2008; Kyle Buchanan, “Back to school,” Advocate, 15 July 2008: 56+; Dennis Harvey, “Waugh’s Brit-lit classic is to the manor reborn,” Variety, 21 July 2008: 19+; Gina Bellafante, “Revisiting ‘Brideshead,’” New York Times, 24 July 2008: 3; Dany Margolies, Back Stage West, 24 July 2008: 14; Michael O’Sullivan, “From the Manor Shorn: A Trim ‘Brideshead Revisited,’” Washington Post, 25 July 2008; A. O. Scott, “Bright Young Things in Love and Pain,” New York Times, 25 July 2008; “New take puts movie romance at the heart of ‘Brideshead,’ Boston Globe, 25 July 2008; Lynn Hirschberg, “A Rogue’s Progress,” New York Times Magazine, 27 July 2008: 48; Mollie Wilson O’Reilly, “Bare Ruined Choir,” Commonweal, 15 August 2008: 20+; Kevin Doherty, “Brideshead revisited again,” National Catholic Reporter, 22 August 2008: 17; Steve Sailer, “Good Film, Bad Waugh,” American Conservative, 25 August 2008: 28; Brian McFarlane, “Adaptation and Raised Expectations: Brideshead Revisited—Again,” Screen Education 52 (Summer 2008): 6-17; Susan Welsh, “Revisiting Brideshead,” W, August 2008: 144; George McCartney, “Brideshead Travestied,” EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008) and “Reconsidered Darkly,” Chronicles, September 2008: 46-48; Robert Murray Davis, “The Bloodsucking Countess and the Talented Mr. Ryder,” EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008); Ross Douthat, “Tales of Waugh,” National Review, 1 September 2008: 53; Steve Vineberg, Christian Century, 23 September 2008: 51; Daniel Mendelsohn, “Evelyn Waugh Revisited,” New York Review of Books, 9 October 2008: 18-21; Henry K. Miller, “Brideshead Reloaded,” Sight and Sound, October 2008: 34-38; Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Terms of Disparagement,” Times Literary Supplement, 10 October 2008: 17; Oliver Pattenden, Cineaste 34.1 (Winter 2008): 57-59; Donat Gallagher, “Telling It Like It Wasn’t,” EWNS 40.1 (Spring 2009); James Morris, “Travesty,” EWNS 40.1 (Spring 2009) and “The Brideshead Movie,” EWNS 40.2 (Autumn 2009).
     Carnochan, W. B. Golden Legends: Images of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson to Bob Marley. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008.
     Chappel, James. “Ronald Knox: A Bibliographic Essay.” Theological Librarianship 1.2 (December 2008): 49-53.
     Ermida, Isabel. The Language of Comic Narratives: Humor Construction in Short Stories. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008.
     Gallagher, Donat. “‘Beefsteak Mind’ and ‘Greatest Sonneteer since Shakespeare’: Evelyn Waugh, Marie Stopes and Lord Alfred Douglas.” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008).
     Gallagher, Donat. “O Would Some Power the Giftie Gie Us, to See Ourselves as Others See Us!” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008).
     Hahn, Daniel, & Nicholas Robins, eds. The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain & Ireland. 3^rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, “A Bowl of Cashew Nuts,” EWNS 39.3 (Winter 2009).
     Hepburn, Allan, ed. Troubled Legacies (2007). Reviewed by James Eli Adams, Victorian Studies 50.4 (Summer 2008): 709-11.
     Kalliney, Peter. Cities of Affluence and Anger (2007). Reviewed by Judy Suh, The Space Between 4.1 (2008): 160-62.
     Kemp, Philip. “Interview: Julian Jarrold.” Sight and Sound, October 2008: 37.
     Korte, Barbara. Represented Reporters: Images of War Correspondents in Memoirs and Fiction. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2008.
     Laitinen, Sirkka. “Happiness Doesn’t Seem to Have Much to Do With It—The Catholic Faith in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” Pro Gradu Thesis, U of Tampere, 2008.
     Lebdoff, David. The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. New York: Random House, 2008. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, “Contra Mundum,” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008); Charles C. Nash, Library Journal, 15 June 2008: 69; Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2008: 105; Publishers Weekly, 16 June 2008: 42-43; Ray Olson, Booklist, 1 July 2008: 27; Eric Ormsby, “Against the Day,” New York Sun, 30 July 2008; John Leonard, Harper’s, August 2008: 73-74; Michiko Kakutani, “Literary Soul Mates or Authors Who Were Polar Opposites?” New York Times, 15 August 2008; Cristina Odone, “What would Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell think?” The Times, 5 August 2008; Allen Barra, Los Angeles Times, 4 August 2008; “Fighting against the future,” Economist, 21 August 2008; Jim Holt, “Two of a Kind,” New York Times Book Review, 31 August 2008; David Pryce-Jones, “The Visions of Orwell & Waugh,” New Criterion, September 2008; Alan Saunders, “Authors out of context,” Australian 6 September 2008; Alexandra Coghlan, “Unlikely (big) brothers in arms,” Eureka Street, 26 September 2008: 30-31; Baron Alder, “Odd couple more equal than others,” Australian Literary Review, 1 October 2008: 22; R. J. Stove, “Men at Arms,” American Conservative, 20 October 2008: 31; Sharon Locy, “Common fear, shared vision,” America, 27 October 2008: 30+.
     Linck, Charles E., Jr. “Some Problems with John Maxwell Hamilton’s Introduction to Waugh in Abyssinia.” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008).
     MacKay, Marina. Modernism and World War II (2007). Reviewed by Turgay Bayindir, Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (Summer 2008): 445-48.
     Manley, Jeffrey A. “Waugh, Canova, and Cupid and Psyche.” EWNS 38.3 (Winter 2008).
     Milthorpe, Naomi. “Waugh and the Octopus.” EWNS 38.3 (Winter 2008).
     Mulvagh, Jane. Madresfield: The Real Brideshead. London: Doubleday, 2008. Reviewed by D. J. Taylor, Independent, 1 June 2008; Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2008; Paula Byrne, Spectator, 4 June 2008; Lewis Jones, “Why Waugh Went Mad,” New Statesman, 30 June 2008: 57+; Isabel Quigley, “The walls have years,” The Tablet, 12 July 2008; Patrick Skene Catling, “The epicentre of ‘Brideshead,’” Irish Times, 9 August 2008; Jeffrey A. Manley, “The Real Brideshead,” EWNS 40.2 (Autumn 2009).
     Okuma, Taryn L. “Literary Non-Combatants: Contemporary British Fiction and the New War Novel.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A 69.9 (2008): 3541. U of Wisconsin-Madison, 2008.
     Prescott, Lynda. “Greene, Waugh, and the Lure of Travel.” Books Without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture. Ed. Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 147-58.
     Raban, Jonathan. “Hitler’s Coming: Time for Cocktails and Gossip” (POMF). All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 1 July 2008.
     Robinson, Stephen. The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes. London: Little, Brown, 2008. Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, “What’s that you say, Mr. Robinson?” EWNS 39.3 (Winter 2009).
     Nace, Michael Thomas. “Comic Aesthetics and the Effect of Realism on the Novel (Steinbeck, Waugh, Joyce).” Masters Abstracts International 46.5 (2008): 2415. Villanova U, 2008.
     Oram, Richard W. “Waugh vs. Time Magazine.” EWNS 38.3 (Winter 2008).
     Rockett, June. A Gentle Jesuit (2004). Reviewed by David Rooney, Catholic Historical Review 94.4 (October 2008): 842-44.
     Seo, Helen. “Evelyn Waugh: ‘Change and decay in all around I see.’” Masters Abstracts International 46.5 (2008): 2436. Long Island U, 2008.
     Shreve, Emily. “From Vile Bodies to Bright Young Things: Waugh and Adaptation.” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008).
     Siegel, Kristi, ed. Issues in Travel Writing (2002). Reviewed by Susan M. Kroeg, “Uncomfortable Transitions,” EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008).
     Srebro, Nancy Saet Byul. “Adjusting the Focus: The Modern British Novel and the Rise of American Film.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A 68.11 (2007): 4719-20. U of Pennsylvania, 2007.
     Stinson, John J. “Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess: Some Parallels as Catholic Writers.” EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008).
     Taylor, D. J. Bright Young People (2007). Reviewed by Michael Barber, “A Good Time Everywhere,” Hudson Review 61.3 (Fall 2008): 563-68.
     Usui, Yoshiharu. “Abstracts of Essays on Waugh in Eigo Seinen/Rising Generation.” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008).
     Wallart, Kerry-Jane. “Einstein, Evelyn Waugh and the Wapisiana Indians: Ventriloquism and Eclipses in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 31.1 (Autumn 2008): 36-47.
     Ward, Jean. “The Waste Sad Time: Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.” English Studies 89.6 (Dec. 2008): 679-95.
     Waugh, Alexander. Fathers and Sons (2007). Reviewed by Kevin J. Gardner, “Milk and Honey, Hope and Glory: Anti-Modernism, Nostalgia, and Englishness in Twentieth-Century Britain,” Religion and the Arts 12.4 (Sept. 2008): 569-84.
     Waugh, Evelyn. Ninety-Two Days (1934). Reviewed by Adrian Tahourdin, Times Literary Supplement, 2 May 2008: 32.
     Waugh, Evelyn. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). Reviewed by Alexandra Pitman, British Medical Journal, 13 December 2008: 1421.
     Waugh, Evelyn. The Spoken Word: Evelyn Waugh. London: British Library, 2008. Reviewed by Patrick Denman Flanery, “Missed Opportunities,” EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008); “Wiseguys,” Times Literary Supplement, 25 April 2008: 36.
     Weiss, Michael. “Waugh Contra Mundum: The Problem Catholicism of Brideshead Revisited.” Weekly Standard, 21 August 2008.
     Wilson, John Howard. “Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism.” EWNS 38.3 (Winter 2008).
     Wilson, John Howard. “Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism.” EWNS 39.1 (Spring 2008).
     Wilson, John Howard. “Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism.” EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008).
     Wilson, John Howard. “Evelyn Waugh and The Varieties of Religious Experience.” EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008).
     Wilson, John Howard. “Quantitative Judgments and Individual Salvation in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.” Renascence 60.4 (Summer 2008): 325-39.
     Wlaschin, Ken, and Stephen Bottomore. “Moving Picture Fiction of the Silent Era, 1895-1928.” Film History 20.2 (April 2008): 217-60.

Abstracts of Japanese Essays on Evelyn Waugh, 1950-1969
by Yoshiharu Usui

Waugh, Evelyn. “Katorikku Kyokai ni okeru Amerikateki Jidai [The American Epoch in the Catholic Church]”. Katorikku Daigesuto [Catholic Digest] (Tokyo) 3.2 (1950): 39-48.
Abstract: This is a Japanese translation of “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church” by Evelyn Waugh in Life.

Kuroda, Keiyu. “Evelyn Waugh Shiron [An Essay on Evelyn Waugh].” Gaikoku Bungaku Kenkyu Hiroshima Daigaku Kyoyoubu Kiyo [Studies in Foreign Languages and Literature, Memoirs of the Faculty of General Education, Hiroshima University] 2 (1955): 63-77.
Abstract: Evelyn Waugh is a satirical writer. With Huxley and Orwell, he is directly descended from Swift. Though his writing has been serious since Brideshead Revisited, his recent works also have the irony, jeu d’esprit, humor and satire of his early novels. These camouflage his personal themes: affirmation of God’s rule and aristocracy as the protector of Country Houses. Thus his early works are important for analyzing his later, serious works. The problem of man’s immaturity is also an important theme. In spite of his satirical character, Waugh’s religious faith affects all of his works.

Roggendorf, Joseph. "Evurin Wo, Aru Africa Yuransha; Greamu Greene, Sakuchu Jinbutu O Motomete: Futatuno Africa Niki" [Review of Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa, and Graham Greene, In Search of a Character: Two African Journals]. Sofia [Sophia] 11.1 (1962): 89-96.
Abstract: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene visited Africa at the beginning of 1959. Their journals enlighten us on the similarities and differences in their characters and views of the world. Waugh’s opinions suggest the personal prejudice of a middle-aged conservative Englishman rather than a Catholic. It is rare that Waugh’s opinions conflict with Catholic doctrine. However, they are not appropriate expressions of Catholic doctrine because they are full of coldness. Different from Greene, Waugh is not so much an emotional writer as an intellectual writer. He describes Catholic opinions more appropriately than Greene in fiction such as Brideshead Revisited. Greene is partial to unpleasant, ridiculous, dirty, and unhealthy things. In his gloomy atmosphere, all outlines tend to become dim. These journals prove that strong novelists with outstanding subjectivity follow their own personalities in their works rather than religious opinions.

Sugiyama, Yoko. “Evelyn Waugh as Social Critic: Barbarism and the Modern World.” Journal of the Society of English and American Literature, Kansei Gakuin University 7.1 (1962): 12-30.
Abstract: A comic spirit is a critical spirit. Waugh is relentless in his satire of society, especially in early novels such as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. His satire, however, does not simply stay within the bounds of British upper-class society; he is also a critic of civilization and culture, as seen in his books containing foreign scenes--the products of his many travels. Waugh the artist as well as social critic is definitely present in The Loved One. Through his traveler’s tales, we can trace Waugh the social satirist who laughs at man’s cruelty with cruel laughter, as he grows from a writer of funny stories to a more serious and effective critic of the modern age whose concern is fundamentally with the problem of humanism.

Nakano, Ki. “Evurin Wo no Bungaku--Buraizuhedo ni Itarumichi” [“Literature of Evelyn Waugh--The Road to Brideshead”]. Seiki [Century] 161 (1963): 65-72.　　
Abstract: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene are two great Catholic writers. However, Waugh’s popularity does not exceed Greene’s in Japan. Greene asks how people should live, while Waugh recognizes how people do live. Japanese readers prefer the former because they unconsciously try to find the meaning of life through novels. Waugh completed group novels. Greene reduces one human heart to brutality or pity or love: he searches human nature. Waugh was not satisfied with personal images, because he couldn’t describe humanity, the image of God, to people who broke from God. A Catholic writer, he wanted to draw human figures in relation to God. That’s why Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited. Waugh confessed that he wanted to describe the influence that grace has on various people. On the other hand, Greene let individual protagonists oppose God. Elizabeth Bowen said the elements of novels were plot, characters, and human relations. Waugh added relationship with God to those three traditional elements. This was a revolution in the concept of novels.

Spender, Stephen. “Sozoteki yoso” (“The World of Evelyn Waugh”). Trans. Motohiro Fukase and Shiko Murakami. Chikuma sosho [Chikuma Library] 35 (1965): 255-84.
Abstract: The Japanese translation of Stephen Spender’s essay “The World of Evelyn Waugh,” originally published in The Creative Element: A Study of Vision, Despair, and Orthodoxy among Some Modern Writers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 159-75.

Konuma, Takashi. “Evurin Wo Ron” [“A Theory on Evelyn Waugh”]. Yamagata Daigaku Eigo Eibun Kenkyu [Yamagata University Study of English Language and Literature] 11 (1966): 13-23.
Abstract: Evelyn Waugh does not have a clear attitude that prevents readers from misunderstanding the intention of the author. His appearance and way of life contrast with those of George Orwell. Unlike George Meredith, Waugh lacks the moral purpose to uncover falsehood and crooked characters and to expel them to protect the harmonious spirit. Because he does not warn the public, he is not a satirist in the true sense. He is not a moralist. To him, everything is the object of farce. The Catholic Church is no exception. His comedy is reminiscent of William Congreve’s comedy of manners. Waugh transforms or twists reality and lets the complicated comic world appear. His comedy has original ideas, fast dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and moving viewpoints, but it does not have the tight construction and coherent plot that Henry Fielding’s works had. Waugh is not a great writer. However, his novels make British people laugh with his first-rate art. In this field, Kingsley Amis and Muriel Spark are the only active young writers.

Milward, Peter. “Evurin Wo no shini omou” [“To think of the death of Evelyn Waugh”]. Sofia [Sophia] 15.1 (1966): 61-65.
Abstract: There is no Catholic novel. The author is a Catholic by chance. The work of art is separate from the artist, and it must be evaluated by itself. That was Waugh’s theory. T. S. Eliot shared the same idea. Eliot and Waugh resisted the shallow progressivism of the present age. Eliot felt nostalgia for the seventeenth century, but Waugh felt it for the Middle Ages. Medieval taste may be the influence of G. K. Chesterton. Both Chesterton and Waugh were agnostics at first. They threw away The Waste Land and converted from the Anglo-Catholicism of Eliot to Roman Catholicism. Critics seek difference in the works written before and after Waugh converted. However, even his early novels have Catholic tendencies. Waugh’s works have Catholic realism. He has exceptionally observant eyes, equal to Graham Greene’s in accuracy and superior in calmness. Waugh’s skill of characterization could be compared with that of Dickens or Shakespeare. After Latin mass on Easter, Waugh came home and left on the eternal journey. Waugh’s death ended an epoch in English literature and the Catholic Church.

Yamaguchi, Seiji. “Shohyo, F. Donarudoson, Evurin Wo: Inaka no Rinjin no Shouzo [Review of Frances Donaldson’s Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour].” Sofia [Sophia] 16.4 (1967): 104-06.
Abstract: Frances Donaldson was Evelyn Waugh’s neighbour in Gloucestershire for ten years after 1947. In spite of different political and religious notions, she was Waugh’s close friend. Donaldson and her husband often visited the Waughs and traveled to Europe with them. Waugh even modeled a character after her. Donaldson deplored the hesitation of the British press to praise Waugh after his death. She decided to describe her neighbour as she saw him. Donaldson conveys Waugh’s virtues without idealizing them. She also describes his shortcomings without hesitation. The process of writing The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is minutely and concretely depicted. Because Waugh’s autobiography is not complete, this book is all the more valuable. Donaldson testifies that friends retain Waugh’s letters, so their publication is awaited. 　

Yamaguchi, Seiji. “J. F. Karenzu, Evurin Wo no Fusui Bungaku” [Review of James F. Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966)]. Sofia [Sophia] 16.4 (1967): 106-08.　　
Abstract: It is a year and a half since Evelyn Waugh died. His literary position will be decided in the future. However, he was highly regarded as a satirical writer before his death. Carens analyzes Waugh’s novels to reveal his motifs, satirical techniques, and development as a satirical writer. There is a dispute over how satirical his works are. Carens suggests that satire is not a genre in modern literature, but an attitude toward humanity and society. Carens examines techniques such as counterpoint (typical of Firbank), the anti-hero, the naïf, infantile gestures, and the symbolic meaning of the manor house. Carens discusses the outlook on civilization in the 1920s, the return of the intellectual to the traditional church, the reaction to fascism, the regeneration of Britain under Churchill’s regime during World War II, and the menace of postwar totalitarianism. This book also has a substantial bibliography on Evelyn Waugh.

Ueda, Kazufumi. "Evurin Wo no shoki shousetu: ‘Shinen’ no kyohi" ["The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh: A Refusal to Be ‘Profound’"]. Osaka Kogyo Daigaku Kiyo [Memoirs of the Osaka Institute of Technology] 13.1 (1969): 81-99.
Abstract: Evelyn Waugh might be considered both a sardonic social satirist and an established Catholic novelist. Each of his earlier novels is, however, primarily a comic achievement with refined pattern and style. Waugh has a bitter belief that the modern world is a waste land pervaded by chaos, incoherence, and absurdity. His comic, grotesque situations reflect his sense of disorder. But the reader as well as the author is not disgusted so much as pleased with them. Waugh’s laughter is satiric. The aesthetic implication is that laughter itself is enjoyable. Waugh can turn Oxford, Mayfair or Ethiopia into fairylands or fantastic worlds. His comedy moves past characters and avoids ‘profundity’, the matter of human existence. Profundity confronts absurdity, love and death, the subject and the other; it deals with madness and tortured states of mind, and it is prevalent in current literature.

Reviews

Mr. Samgrass Rides Again, or The Warden’s Regress
Maurice Bowra: A Life, by Leslie Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 385 pp. $50.00. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley.

     Although Maurice Bowra has been dead for nearly forty years and most of his books are out of print, he has never been out of sight as a result of many writings mentioning him. Continuing interest in Bowra is not due to his written work or his many years as de facto leader of Oxford University; it is, instead, due to the influence he had on many leading members of a remarkable generation of English writers, scholars and politicians who came within his orbit. The writers included Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, and Henry Green; other luminaries were Hugh Gaitskell, Kenneth Clark, Roy Harrod, Isaiah Berlin, and John Sparrow.
     Bowra is well served by this biography written by another Oxford don, Leslie Mitchell, who was acquainted with Bowra.[1] Rather than proceeding chronologically through Bowra’s life, Mitchell focuses on intellectual and academic achievements. After a brief discussion of early life in China as a child of colonial officialdom, school years at Cheltenham, service in France as an artillery officer in World War I, and education at New College, Mitchell discusses the subjects that attracted Bowra’s intellect--Greek history and literature and the poetry of many languages--and his idiosyncratic sexuality. The core of the book concentrates on Bowra’s career at Oxford, his post as Warden of Wadham College, and the friendships he made, including his fraught relationship with Evelyn Waugh. A brief conclusion describes Bowra’s difficult later years, when deafness limited his ability to communicate, a serious problem for a man perhaps best known for conversation.
     Mitchell explains how Bowra developed close associations with undergraduates of promise who became known as “Bowristas.” Entry to the group was open to undergraduates who demonstrated intellectual ability and determination to develop their talents through hard work. Entry was limited to those he deemed loyal to him, to each other, and to Oxford in their pursuit of achievement at the university and in later life.
     While he concedes that Waugh did not gravitate into Bowra’s inner circle while an undergraduate, Mitchell doesn’t clearly explain how they became friends after Waugh left Oxford. Indeed, Bowra and Waugh differed on how they came to know each other. Waugh was not a Bowrista. He claims in A Little Learning that he came to Bowra’s notice only after he had “attracted some attention as a novelist” (204). Bowra seems to have taken umbrage at Waugh’s accusation of “tuft hunting” and wrote a letter of protest to which Waugh sent a placatory reply:

There is no reason why I should have made any impression on you. When sober I was inconspicuous, when drunk I avoided senior members of the university. In fact we did meet several times and as our ways from Balliol led together to the corner of the Broad we walked back together, but I am sure there was nothing I said to attract your notice. (Letters of Evelyn Waugh 625)

In Memories (1966), Bowra seems to accept this version, noting that he hardly knew Waugh as an undergraduate and “did not really become a friend of his until he had already published Decline and Fall” (172).
     Mitchell asserts that Bowra avoided Waugh at Oxford because of Waugh’s association with Harold Acton and Brian Howard (125). This conclusion is based on interviews with Bowra and an unpublished letter from him to Waugh. Bowra disliked Acton and Howard, “posturing aesthetes who squandered their talents and produced nothing of value.” Their “baleful influence” was deemed by Bowra to have “nearly ruined Evelyn Waugh,” who was “drunk the whole time” in their company (160, n. 63).[2] Bowra’s perception may have failed him, since Acton and Howard can hardly be blamed for Waugh’s drinking, and they were not predominant among Waugh’s undergraduate friends. Bowra’s real reason for disliking these two Etonian aesthetes may have been their open homosexuality and general campiness. Bowra, a more discreet homosexual, avoided Acton and Howard like the plague and barred them from admission to the Bowristas (125). Waugh was excluded from Bowra’s inner circle at least partly because, as an undergraduate, he failed to show prospects of academic or literary achievement, not only because he befriended campy aesthetes. Perhaps Bowra blamed Waugh’s exclusion from the inner circle on Acton and Howard to cover up his own failure to recognize Waugh’s genius.
     Waugh revisited Oxford after his student days and became more closely acquainted with Bowra after publication of Decline and Fall in 1928. Their friendship began to flourish after the breakup of Waugh’s first marriage in the summer of 1929. Mitchell claims that Bowra’s friendship cooled after Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, causing an extended period of estrangement. He fails to substantiate this estrangement by reference to correspondence or other evidence. Waugh’s conversion took place in September 1930, barely a year after his marriage failed, which doesn’t leave much time for the friendship to have flourished. Bowra says that in the “next few years I saw quite a lot of him, and even after he married again I found no difference in his friendliness” (Memories 173).[3] That hardly suggests estrangement during the 1930s, nor does Waugh mention one. Mitchell may be positing estrangement because he finds Bowra generally unsympathetic to Roman Catholics.[4] There was always ambivalence in their relationship, evidenced in Waugh’s diaries and letters, partly because of Bowra’s longer friendship with Cyril Connolly.[5]
     The most overt example of this ambivalence was Waugh’s use of Bowra as the model for Mr. Samgrass in Brideshead Revisited. Mitchell concludes that Waugh’s portrait is unfair and unconvincing, but he misses the point. There can be no question that Waugh intended Samgrass to look like Bowra: “a short, plump man, dapper in dress, with sparse hair brushed flat on an over-large head, neat hands, small feet, and the general appearance of being too often bathed” (Penguin 106). This is quite similar to Anthony Powell’s description of Bowra in his memoirs: “noticeably small … lack of stature emphasized by massive head and tiny feet … habitually wore a hat and suit … very neat” (Infants of the Spring, 1976, 178).
     Beyond physical similarity, however, Samgrass and Bowra have little in common. Bowra would hardly have taken an interest in Sebastian Flyte, who shows little promise of academic achievement. Mitchell thinks Waugh was trying to irritate Bowra by showing how the “oleaginous” Samgrass wormed his way into Lady Marchmain’s good graces. Mitchell notes that Bowra sought entrée into great houses in pursuit of intellectual contacts, not social advancement, as is the case with Samgrass (191-92). Having made sure that Bowra would notice his connection with this unpleasant character, Waugh gave Samgrass a fictional life of his own quite independent of his lookalike. Waugh did not set out to make Samgrass a carbon copy of Bowra, contrary to Mitchell’s assumption.[6]
     Bowra may have been irritated but didn’t take the bait. After reading Brideshead, he sent Waugh a letter (quoted by Mitchell) effectively damning the novel with faint praise, and then pre-empted the Samgrass issue by saying to others “I hope you spotted me. What a piece of artistry that is—best thing in the whole book” (190). According to Mitchell, “Waugh’s poisoned dart missed its target” because friends realized that “Samgrass was not clever enough, nor witty enough, nor independent enough to be the Bowra they knew” (190-91). Mitchell says that “Waugh was unhappy with [Bowra’s] reponse,” but he offers no evidence.
     Bowra wrote a considerable collection of comic verses that satirized his close friends. These circulated among Bowra’s friends during his lifetime and would have been well known to Waugh. They were published posthumously in New Bats in Old Belfries (Oxford, 2005), and many are quoted at length by Mitchell. Waugh is not mentioned in any of these verses, though Betjeman and Connolly were frequent targets. Bowra may have preferred to let Samgrass rest rather than try to get his own back in a poem and risk the rupture of a valuable friendship. Mitchell does not record what Bowra said about Samgrass to correspondents other than Waugh.
     Though they kept each other at arm’s length, Waugh and Bowra visited each other’s homes and frequently corresponded. Mitchell recounts one of Waugh’s visits to Wadham College:

Once an undergraduate was requested to report to the [Warden’s] Lodgings to answer on a point of discipline. To his surprise, the door was opened by Evelyn Waugh, who demanded his company while the Warden dealt with an emergency. The student in question did his best to keep Waugh amused. As a reward for undertaking such a difficult task, all disciplinary considerations were forgotten. Instead he was invited to lunch. (250-51)

In Memories, Bowra includes a description of Waugh’s house, Piers Court in Gloucestershire, which indicates he made multiple visits (176).
Although older than Waugh, Bowra survived him by five years. His memoirs were published shortly after Waugh’s death, and he gives a positive assessment of their relationship and of Waugh as both artist and man: “The better I knew him, the more I appreciated his rich character and his quite outstanding gifts. He was the best company in the world, not only devastatingly observant but appreciative, scholarly and generous” (Memories 172-76). Mitchell doesn’t cite this eulogy but mentions two letters in which Bowra expresses sincere regret at the passing of his “sparring partner” (301). Bowra realized that Waugh was capable of “being beastly about us behind our backs … I suppose there is a great deal of his unpublished records—the thought makes the blood run cold.” This letter to Cyril Connolly was written in 1971, before Waugh’s diaries and letters had been published. Despite his prescience, Bowra didn’t try to settle any scores in his published writings, and it is unfortunate that Mitchell has tried to do so on Bowra’s behalf.
The book is well written, well organized and well researched, although it would have been easier to read if the annotations (none of which contain much more than brief citations) had been placed on the bottom of each page rather than at the end. Mitchell is not well served by his editors. He has a penchant for noting the least error in quotes from sources, mostly his subject’s own writings. This is not only annoying but also embarrassing in a book that contains typos and other errors.

Notes
[1] Mitchell interviewed Bowra, so his biography has had quite a long gestation period, Bowra having died in 1971.
[2] Mitchell also relies on Waugh’s letter to Bowra quoted above, which is dated Michaelmas 1964, but cites the source as Bowra MSS rather than the published edition of Waugh’s Letters.
[3] In Waugh’s published correspondence there are no letters to Bowra prior to 1946, although Waugh mentioned meeting Bowra in a December 1929 letter to Henry Green. In his Diaries on 29 May 1930, Waugh hopes “to get Maurice up from Oxford,” apparently to visit him at his parents’ house on North End Road in London. The next indexed entry is April 1945, a visit by Waugh to Bowra’s garden at Wadham College. Any more detailed sources Mitchell researched are not revealed. The index to the U.S. edition of the Diaries is much better than that of the English hardcover edition.
[4] Mitchell ignores Bowra’s apparent acceptance of Waugh’s conversion. Based on his “strong sense of right and wrong, [Waugh’s] adherence to the Roman Catholic Church in 1930 was inevitable,” according to Bowra; he concluded that Waugh found in Roman Catholicism’s orthodoxy the “consolation” he needed from the “agonizing distress” caused by the breakup of his first marriage (Memories 173-74).
[5] Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (Penguin), 463-5, 542-3.
[6] Mitchell gives several examples of Bowra’s appearance as a character in the fiction of his friends, including works by Cecil Day-Lewis, Lord Berners, Cyril Connolly, and Elizabeth Bowen (180-82). Mitchell fails to mention the Oxford don, Sillery, who appears prominently in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Sillery is perhaps most notable for picking undergraduates who show promise of success in later life and may prove useful to him. He is interested in their potential to secure positions of power in government and business, endeavors that Bowra thought a waste of talent. Sillery chooses Charles Stringham, often compared with Sebastian Flyte, as worthy of patronage. Powell initially denied that Sillery was based on Bowra, but in later life, upon rereading his own novels, he conceded that there was a certain resemblance. See Powell, Journals: 1987-89, (1996), 163.

Laughing Up or Laughing Down?
Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction, by Michael L. Ross. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006. 309 pp. $95.00. Reviewed by Lewis MacLeod, Trent University.

     In Race Riots, Michael L. Ross traces the nature of racial and ethnic jokes and humour in twentieth-century British letters. Here, I would like to first address the general approach of Ross’s book, before focusing on his chapter on Evelyn Waugh, which will of course be of special interest to readers of the Newsletter.
     The introductory chapter is very interesting, outlining various theories of humour and the insider/outsider dynamic that often lies beneath not just racial humour, but many more benign kinds of comedy, not least irony itself, which must assume a separation between an “obvious” meaning, available to all, and a more subtle one which some select group perceives. The countervailing, dissembling nature of the ironic statement is derived from this disjunction. In the introduction, Ross’s research is compelling and his argumentative framework is both clear and workable. If anybody is looking for a crash course on the very interesting discourse surrounding the production and reception of comedy, this is the place to look. Every page offers a new insight or two, and I have been using ideas and quotations from this introduction in my teaching and writing with regularity since I finished reading this book.
     Early on, Ross notes, though he doesn’t really criticize, the current ascendancy of a programmatic “progressive” discourse within academic criticism. Rightly, he acknowledges that this approach has made humour (with its often divisive, often elitist, often offensive qualities) an unattractive object of inquiry for those intent on being politically correct. In general terms, the self-seriousness of contemporary academic discourse, coupled with the anti-foundational, pluralist impulses of cultural relativism/multiculturalism, has created a context incapable of acknowledging, let alone seriously discussing, the missile-launching, space-claiming impulses of many kinds of comedy. This is the reticence Malcolm Bradbury describes when he writes that “in the age of new solemnities, laughter isn’t what it was. The comic is improper and partial. It displays prejudices, personal and cultural” (qtd. in Ross 13). In Bradbury’s construction, prejudice is fundamental to comedy, and the effort to stamp out partiality and bias is simultaneously the effort to stamp out laughter. Bluntly, we may yet create a world where we can all live together in peace and harmony, but we won’t laugh very much.
     At stake here for Ross and several others, then, is nothing less than the fundamental politics of comedy itself. Is the undeniable shock of a good joke anarchic and revolutionary, or regressive and disciplinary? George Orwell thought the former, while Ross cites Wylie Sypher as an example of the opposite position: “in middle-class societies […] the comic artist often reassures the majority that its standards are impregnable or that other standards are not ‘normal’ or ‘sane’” (qtd. in Ross 3). Comedy, then, might work either to upend or reinforce the status quo. The problem, from a self-consciously political perspective, is figuring out which is which. How do we learn to laugh at the right thing in the right way? In Ross’s terms, the question is whether the laughter is hegemonic, “laughing down” at some cultural/racial inferior, or “laughing up,” and challenging established authority, etc. Laughing down is politically regressive; laughing up is politically progressive. Fairly early on, and reasonably, Ross settles the question of the directedness of laughing as it applies to racial jokes. He recognizes that stereotyping of the primitive “other” for the amusement of presumably white middle-class audiences both had and has a damaging effect on the construction of both whiteness and non-whiteness. The “literary homogenizing of the ‘primitive’ encourages a tendency that will surface repeatedly in […] the wholesale caricaturing of colonials […] as more or less interchangeable cultureless buffoons” (8).
     Still, laughter is not a straightforward matter of direction, and different jokes work in different ways at different times. Many jokes figure a clear direction or destination at which laughter is pointed (the end-point, the “butt” of the joke), but the impact of the joke is influenced by a variety of factors beyond any intrinsic qualities an utterance or a gesture might possess. Ross rightly notes that comedy has no absolute value, recognizing its “contingent, situational nature […] its dependence for its effect on the context in which it takes place” (16).   A “nigger” joke doesn’t work the same way when uttered by a black comedian as it does when uttered by a white comedian, nor does it work the same way for black, white, and “mixed” audiences. Quoting Paul Lewis, Ross reframes the question of comedic value as follows: “If we ask, ‘Are these jokes funny?’ we are asking the wrong question. Funny to whom? And why? How do these jokes embody or reinforce value systems; how do they serve psychic, social, cultural, or political objectives” (qtd. in Ross 18). From here, Ross is able to imagine racially infused comedy in a variety of contexts, ranging from the overtly hostile and xenophobic, through conflicted and complicated zones, then on to the kinds of celebratory, boundary-breaking, carnivalesque identities of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and others. Ross’s explicit intention in all of this is to situate racial comedy and leave readers with “a fuller sense of laughter’s power, both to harm and to mend” (22).
     After the impressive opening, the book gets a lot more predictable and, as a result, less interesting. After successfully highlighting the unproductive polarities of over and under-politicizing comedy, Ross operates largely inside the context of Bradbury’s new solemnities. After taking care to delineate the complex contextual factors that underlie comedic invocations of race, he basically provides readers with three broad and rigid types: the really bad, the getting better, and the good. The body of the book is structured in three main sections with multiple sub-chapters. The first, “Punch Lines,” surveys a variety of Caliban constructions, deals with the racialized cartoons and texts of Punch, and addresses Waugh and Joyce Cary. The second, “Passages to Elsewhere,” deals with E. M. Forster, Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, and Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that Elizabeth Taylor!). The third, “The Empire Laughs Back,” focuses on Samuel Selvon, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Matthew Kneale. You don’t have to be especially perceptive to pick up the trajectory of the argument. Part One shows humour’s power to harm, part two the modification/rehabilitation of Part One’s risible project, Part Three the triumphant redeployment of humour as both an instrument for progressive cultural change and a mending force in society. Part One’s narrowly masculinist and racist certitudes give way to Part Three’s pluralist, multicultural, anti-hierarchical celebration. So, the writers in Part One “insistently link racial difference with deformity and stunted growth” (37). The “essential clownishness” of Cary’s Mister Johnson, for example, is seen to reflect “the always implicit power imbalance between the European ‘natural’ master and the non-European ‘natural’ underling” (101). In the second part, Ross writes that, although Forster was “inescapably English, it does not automatically follow that he wrote as a champion […] of British Imperialism” (115). Similarly, Spark is figured as a “nonconformist” (139), working her way outside the morally defective discourse of Part One, ultimately aiming towards “a generous empathy […] through liberating, disinterested laughter” (145). In Part Three, a non-white, Trinidadian writer such as Selvon “revers[es] the pattern of the old colonial novel” (Mark Looker qtd. in Ross 181) by asserting the immigrants’ rights to both presence and comic articulation in England. Rushdie, meanwhile, "provocatively destabilizes the normally accepted boundary between the heroic and the mock-heroic" (219) and in so doing simultaneously destabilizes atrophied categories of both citizenship and racial identity. I take these examples more or less at random. There are several others, but the pattern is clear.
     I’m not an expert on all, or even most, of the writers Ross addresses, but I know Waugh, Forster, Spark, Selvon and Rushdie, and the more I know, the less persuasive Ross’s analysis becomes. Early on, he treats some, to me, perfectly valid readings of Cary and Waugh as agonized apologies for racism; by the end, he treats reasonable critiques of Rushdie’s broad-stroke characterizations (not especially different from those of, say, Martin Amis--a figure I can only imagine Ross loathes) as off-target or beside the point in Rushdie’s heroic project. In short, while Ross starts off rebuking misinformed apologists, he might end up being one.
     The chapter on Waugh won’t make happy reading for most people who read this Newsletter. It sees Waugh, to borrow from Christopher Hitchens’s introduction to Scoop, as “a by-word for port-sodden blimpery” (v), a fat, rich, white-male marker of retrograde assumptions and values. After briefly acknowledging that, in private, Waugh’s “personal attitudes toward issues of race appear to have been more open-minded” (76) than those of many Englishmen of his period, Ross goes on to claim that Waugh’s fiction depends upon a winking appeal to an insularly white, affluent English readership. I am no fan of Waugh’s politics and don’t dispute the charge that he sometimes resorts to too-gleeful racialized construction. This much, I think, is a matter of fact. The troubling emphasis on “big black lips” and “woolly” heads that persists from Black Mischief to Sword of Honour can’t be erased or explained away, but it can be contextualized, and this is what Ross, despite his specific emphasis on context, fails or refuses to do. Ross rejects David Lodge’s position that, despite Waugh’s casual, of-the-period racism, Black Mischief is “even-handed” in its depiction of “the clash of different cultures” (qtd. in Ross 75), and goes on to argue that the novel is marked by “Waugh’s aggressively racialized treatment of […] African characters” (76). For example, he reads Emperor Seth’s absurdist dinner menu (which misuses the term “vitamin” for comic effect) as evidence of a conviction that Africans “need to have much done for them by their cultural and racial betters” (79). Later, he claims that, in Black Mischief, “lunacy […] is inseparable from […] blackness” (79). Such a reading, of course, overlooks the pervasive lunacy in all of Waugh’s books and in almost all of his characters, regardless of their race, nationality or gender (is the lunacy of Decline and Fall inseparable from Welshness?). Of course, it isn’t possible to overlook the racial dimension in Waugh’s construction of General Connolly’s wife as “Black Bitch,” but the matter-of-fact deadpan handling of the General’s spousal abuse is in no way different from the deadpan handling of Simon Balcairn’s suicide in Vile Bodies, or the demise of Dr Messinger in A Handful of Dust, to select just two examples. When Ross claims that Connolly’s treatment of his wife “has repellent racial overtones: the bitch, because black, requires […] taming” (83), he lapses into the precise kind of self-conscious, squeamish humourlessness he ably situates in his introduction. This is not to suggest that racism and spousal abuse are laughing matters, but that a very situation-specific contextual backdrop is in place here, that Waugh has created a world in which a multitude of things that ought not to be funny (suicide, bankruptcy, loneliness, accidental death, madness, military disaster, etc.) are rendered as such (is there a repellent journalistic overtone to Simon Balcairn’s suicide: Simon, because bad journalist, must die?). To de-contextualize the racial dimension of Waugh’s “chromium callousness” and treat it as singularly motivated and aggressively xenophobic is to miss the point of his much more sweeping and pervasive attacks, not least upon the morally bankrupt, faddish English culture that produces characters such as Basil Seal. Ross rejects the argument that Black Mischief can be read as a critique of European, not African, values, claiming that such positions involve an effort “to wilfully disregard the cumulative force of the book’s cunningly contrived [racist] imagery and action” (85). I’m not sure if Ross’s disregard for the novel’s manifold non-racialized procedures is wilful or not. I suspect he’s very sincere, but his conclusion that Waugh’s humour has a “limited shelf life” and is unfit for people “raised on […] egalitarian attitudes” (91) amounts to the kind of accusatory stereotyping he generally seems to oppose. It clearly delineates his sense of what good, decent, normal reading looks like and sets it up against its bad, deficient, abnormal nightmare antithesis. Not to put too fine a point on it, Ross claims that to appreciate Black Mischief is to support, or at least be complicit with, racist values.
     His point about the limited shelf life of Waugh’s humour is more easily if only anecdotally disproven in my classroom, where student enthusiasm has been increasing in recent years. I would never touch Black Mischief, though, precisely because of the hegemony of the kind of reading practice Ross forwards here. The defence I would have to mount against these kinds of arguments would be too laborious; the fear of being labelled a racist would be too great.
     These are bound to be sensitive issues. When the shock of an outrageous joke reaches us, we’re compelled to declare our positional in ways we’re not often asked to do. Do we “go with” and at least entertain the joke, or do we “stand against it” and dismiss it? To “go with” the joke is to risk endorsing its dubious content (as opposed to just the jolt of its articulation); to stand against it to risk appearing a prude. Nobody wants to be a racist and nobody wants to be a prude (or, in the specifically academic context, a self-serious ideologue), and so whatever position we do adopt to politically/racially charged humour had better be the right one. This necessarily entails that those who react differently are wrong. Ross does a lot of interesting things in this book, but he never gets beyond this construction. And, just as Rushdie’s various pleas for tolerance take place amidst broadside and partisan attacks on his unambiguous enemies (think of his construction of Thatcher as “Maggie the Bitch,” etc.), Ross’s idea of “mending” humour seems to involve a simultaneous and pronounced effort to belittle and discredit those who think, and laugh, differently than he does.

Making the Modern Tolerable
Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, by Clive James. New York: Norton, 2007. 876 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley.

     This is in effect a commonplace book kept by Clive James over his life as a writer during the last forty years. In his introduction, he says that he made notes in the margins and endpapers of books he read, some of which turned into essays, articles and reviews. Others were mined for this hefty book.
     Selections lean toward Continental (especially German, Russian and Austrian) writers and thinkers rather than those in English-speaking countries. Of the 107 entries, fewer than ten relate to novelists or essayists who wrote in English. Among those are Evelyn Waugh, G. K. Chesterton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer and Beatrix Potter.
     James’s entry on Waugh (797-800) opens, as do those for others, with a brief life. Waugh is discussed in conjunction with the decline of English grammar over James’s lifetime. James concludes that Waugh was the “supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century.”
     James uses Waugh, however, to illustrate his point that even a master of English grammar may sometimes get it wrong. As an example he gives the following sentence from Waugh’s A Little Learning (1964): “A little later, very hard up and seeking a commission to write a book, it was Tony who introduced me to my first publisher.” This refers to Anthony Powell, who arranged for publication of Waugh’s first book, Rossetti (1928), by Duckworth.
     The sentence makes it seem that Powell rather than Waugh was hard up. Waugh was trapped into this construction, according to James, by trying to connect to the preceding sentence describing Powell. When rewritten to correct the dangling participle, the sentence becomes awkward and loses flow: “A little later, very hard up and seeking a commission to write a book, I was introduced by Tony Powell to my first publisher.” James concludes that “it was Waugh’s sense of coherence that led him into error. With bad writers it is often the way. In their heads, it all ties up, and they don’t grasp the necessity of laying it out for the reader. Even good writers occasionally succumb. Waugh, who was as good as they get, hardly ever did: but this time he did.”
     James also notes that Waugh’s dangling participle is “more delicious” because of reference to Powell, who was, according to James, “the arch-perpetrator of the dangling modifier.” It seems possible that Waugh, with his keen sense of humor and irony, might have dangled in this case (and let it stand after proofing) as a dig at Powell’s writing.
     Indeed, James seems obsessed with Waugh’s error. He has been making a meal of it since at least 1976, when he cited this “flagrantly pendulous specimen” of a misplaced participle in a review of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. James emphasizes that the dangle is perpetrated only a few pages after Waugh “asserts that nobody without a classical education will ever write correct English.”[1] James was able to find only this one example over more than thirty years of reading and writing about Waugh, though he must have looked hungrily for another. One wonders how many participles James himself dangled over that same period.
     A video of James reading from his brief essay on Waugh, with appropriate illustrations, can be viewed at Times Online (19 May 2007).
     Several other references to Waugh are scattered through the book. On the importance of selecting an appropriate title, James cites Waugh’s use of A Handful of Dust (1934) from Eliot’s The Waste Land just before that poem passed into the canon (82). On the influence of one writer on another, James notes that Waugh was perhaps the first to notice Ernest Hemingway’s trick of arranging dialogue based on the writing of Ronald Firbank (213). With respect to memory, James asks in which of Waugh’s books Mrs. Stitch drives down the steps of a men’s lavatory and what kind of car it is (499)[2]. James argues that Waugh opposed the vernacular Roman Catholic liturgy because he considered religion a refuge from the modern world; liturgical reform tried to make Roman Catholicism more accessible (490).
     In a review of Waugh’s Letters, James wrote at length on Waugh’s retreat from the modern world and innovations such as Vatican II. James argues that if Waugh “had not so hated the telephone, he might have talked away” many of the letters that were collected and published to the great enjoyment of readers. Waugh’s rejection of recent history “is the main reason why his books seem so fresh. Since he never fell for any transient political belief, he never dates…. Waugh, the arch conservative, still sounds contemporary. As an artist he was not moulded by his times and hence neither failed to see them clearly nor vanished with them.” According to James, Waugh’s opposition to modern developments delayed appreciation of his work: “many critics were rightly proud of the Welfare State and regarded Waugh’s hatred of it as mean-minded. He was paid out for his rancour by his own unhappiness. For the happiness he can still give us it is difficult to know how to reward him, beyond saying that he helped make tolerable the modern age he so abominated.”[3]

Notes
[1] Clive James, “They Like It Here,” New Review 3 (1976): 53. See also Clive James, From the Land of the Shadows (London, 1982), 161, describing the same participle as “so firmly attached to the wrong subject that there is no prising it loose.”
[2] The answer is Scoop (1938) in a little black car small enough to be lifted out of the lavatory stairwell by six men.
[3] Clive James, “Waugh’s Last Stand,” NYRB, 4 December 1980, collected in From the Land of the Shadows (London, 1982), 120, and As of This Writing (New York, 2003), 427.

The End of Llanabba?
On 7 October 2009, the Wales News published an article by Darren Devine entitled "Couple go to Waugh over future of historic mansion." James and Caroline Burt offered £250,000 for "run-down Victorian folly Plas Dulas, in Llandulas, Conwy." Owner Alex Davies is, however, "demanding around £1m for a property he paid £190,000 for in 2002." Davies is planning "to demolish Plas Dulas … and use the land for a new residential development potentially worth around £3m." The Burts claim that "the house has significant architectural merit and important literary associations."
Evelyn Waugh taught at Plas Dulas, then known as Arnold House, in the 1920s, and it inspired Llanabba School in Decline and Fall. The story is available at WalesOnline.

Altachiara: For Sale
Altachiara ("Highclere" in English) in Portofino is for sale for 34 million euros. Evelyn Waugh spent his honeymoon there in 1937 and used it as the basis of the Castello Crouchback in Sword of Honour. Waugh's brother-in-law Auberon Herbert sold the outlying farms in the 1970s. More information is available at http://www.duttondirect.com/news/March-09/Villa-Altachiara-for-sale.aspx.

"No" to Lancing
On his blog The Buddha Diaries, Peter Clothier reports that he and a friend at Lancing College once asked Evelyn Waugh to contribute to the literary magazine. Waugh refused, because "he had learned little at … school other than to be lazy and unhappy." Clothier's friend asked if Waugh would allow his response to be published and if he would promise never to write for the Lancing magazine. Waugh's reply: "Yes to both questions." Clothier is in his early seventies, so this correspondence would have occurred in the early 1950s.