EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES
Vol. 42, No. 2
Autumn 2011

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Art Criticism and Brideshead Revisited
Elyse Graham

     1.) Evelyn Waugh’s first literary vocation was not novelist but art critic. Upon deciding at the age of twenty-three to follow the family tradition of a life in letters, he prepared as his first work for independent publication a short pamphlet on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which his friend Alastair Graham commissioned for his private press in 1926. Waugh followed up two years later with a book-length biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1928). The choice of subjects was natural, for Waugh’s ambitions had been in the visual arts: a prolific illustrator of undergraduate magazines, he had been famous among his college friends as a talented draftsman rather than a budding poet.[1] His first published work of any kind emerged from an adolescence steeped in visits to galleries and readings on modern artists: a short essay, “In Defence of Cubism,” appeared in the journal Drawing and Design when he was fourteen years old. As the title hints, the essay expresses infatuation with the Formalist school of criticism led by Roger Fry—loyalties that Waugh would abandon by the time he began work on the Pre-Raphaelites. Eventually, Waugh allowed his painterly identity to slip behind the persona of the writer.[2]

     He continued writing art criticism under other guises. When Waugh revived college memories decades later, his great semi-autobiographical novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) represented a return to his origins in the visual arts. This novel acquired early fame as the portrait of an era, but its period atmosphere relies on detailed evocation of visual culture. In Brideshead, references to the avant-garde tradition from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Post-Impressionists abound: characters summon the art world in their gestures and dress, in the critical judgments they pass back and forth in conversation, in the murals and sculptures and decorated screens with which they illuminate their surroundings. The protagonist is himself a painter, and he navigates the business and politics of his profession. It is surprising that so few critics have given sustained attention to Brideshead as an art novel—a work of extended aesthetic self-reflection in the genre of Zola, Wilde, and Joyce, and close to favorite poets of Waugh’s, such as Browning, Morris, and Rossetti. Only a few studies have attended to the prominent role the novel accords the visual arts;[3] only one that I know of, a 1987 piece in the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, notes the novel’s specific focus on the art of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic schools.[4]

    While the author of the 1987 essay, William Going, usefully supplements our understanding of visual themes in Brideshead, he takes the novel’s abundant references to the Pre-Raphaelites to represent an uncritical endorsement of their aesthetic. A satisfactory reading of the novel, however, depends on seeing how far the truth is from this claim. Waugh writes as an ironist: the role of visual culture in Brideshead is not to exalt a pantheon or to provide mere detail, but rather to present, through wry examination of ascendant factions in art, a critique of the spurious bases of a supposed golden age. Critics have long noted the novel’s skeptical attitudes toward the pagan Arcadia in early scenes, but Waugh profoundly binds Brideshead to visual education, weaving the discourse of art criticism into settings and character studies. Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence, and Formalism become, in Brideshead, the gaudy lines of a manuscript illumination inked in by a skeptical hand: aesthetic terms define the foibles and vanities of an age, lend poignant perspective to the twilight of a ruling class, and, in a move that symbolically restores Waugh to the role of art critic, lay the grounds for a competing theory of art.

    2.) When Charles Ryder arrives as a freshman at Oxford, his first object is to deck out his rooms in a crowded anthology of Aesthetic and Formalist design. From the perspective of his older self, he laments that he did not fill his rooms with high-quality, old-fashioned work but rather leaped at the thrilling and modern:

On my first afternoon I proudly hung a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” over the fire and set up a screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provençal landscape…. I displayed also a poster by McKnight Kauffer and Rhyme Sheets from the Poetry Bookshop, and, most painful to recall, a porcelain figure of Polly Peachum which stood between black tapers on the chimney-piece. My books were meagre and commonplace—Roger Fry’s Vision and Design; the Medici Press edition of A Shropshire Lad; Eminent Victorians; some volumes of Georgian Poetry; Sinister Street; and South Wind….[5]

The older Charles finds his youthful taste disagreeable, but his earlier self has, relative to the period, nearly perfect pitch. His rooms broadcast many defining expressions of the Formalist and late Aesthetic movements: McKnight Kauffer, the poster designer who splashed cubism, futurism, and vorticism across the London Underground; the Poetry Bookshop, which enlisted Aesthetic paragons such as Burne-Jones to decorate pages of modern verse; and Van Gogh, who today seems well outside mere decorations, but whose early detractors complained that he reduced the world to filigree and mere form, treating skies and landscapes as “a decorator might a wall-paper.”[6] (Polly Peachum, a cupcake from The Threepenny Opera, provides the comic deflating note.) The books present a small canon of the contemporary avant-garde in literature, with emphasis on Roger Fry’s Bloomsbury. The college setting frames a story of education, but this careful set piece initiates a pedagogical arc that emphasizes aesthetic discourse, creating a gap between the reader’s enthusiastic appraisal of celebrated works and the mature perspective from which they seem inadequate and even embarrassing.

     As one might expect in an atmosphere where stylization is at a premium, Charles admits that his friends, “a small circle of college intellectuals, who maintained a middle course of culture between the flamboyant ‘aesthetes’ and the proletarian scholars,” fit as neatly as a pattern into the decorative scheme (27). They observe habits of gesture, dress, and speech familiar from the postures of Whistler and Wilde. Artistic topics dominate their conversation; indeed, at least one besides Charles, the ponderous Collins, goes on to a career in the arts. (The series of books that he writes on Byzantine art follows convention as well, for the Aesthetes often playfully identified themselves with Byzantine portraiture--gilded, angular, and otherworldly.) The most explicitly Wildean character is Anthony Blanche, whose effete mannerisms and flamboyant style are too well-known to need much rehearsal. As with Sebastian Flyte, whose habit of speaking in extremes (“I must have pillar-box red pajamas,” “I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne to-night!”) recalls parodies of Aesthetic hyperbole (“too utterly, utterly delightful!”), Anthony’s speech reflects Waugh’s attentiveness to Wildean phrasing and irony. “Where are the pictures?” he demands at Charles’s show: “Let me explain them to you” (269). Even better is his complaint about having to read a dull book “because everyone was bound to talk about it, and it’s so banal saying you have not read the book of the moment, if you haven’t” (48). The logic is boilerplate Wilde, implying that the thing to do is to read the book and pretend you haven’t.

     Nor does Charles himself escape allusive reference. Although Charles is not a great artist but rather an inspired draftsman, a sort of lower Ingres or Andrea del Sarto,[7] his career shares several sly connections with that key figure in Aesthetic and Wavian experience, Dante Rossetti. Recalling the Pre-Raphaelites’ mural in the Oxford Debating Hall, Julia mentions that Charles “went to Oxford to paint the picture they didn’t like” (278). Probably in reference to the lushly ethereal women on Rossetti’s canvases, Charles’s mistress, Lady Julia Flyte, is a dark beauty like Elizabeth Siddal. “She is one thing only, Renaissance tragedy,” Anthony Blanche declares: “A face of flawless Florentine Quattrocento beauty” (54). Reinforcing this connection, Charles later compares Julia’s face with the Aesthetic critic Walter Pater’s famous evocation of La Gioconda:

Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent smile of La Gioconda; the years had been more than “the sound of lyres and flutes,” and had saddened her. She seemed to say, “Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?” (239)

Like Pater’s Mona Lisa, who bears only a notional resemblance to the woman Leonardo painted, Julia reflects her era more than her Renaissance prototype. She too seems charged with bearing an overburdened erotic and mystical symbolism of the ripening and collapse of civilizations. It is symbolically appropriate, if unsettling, that her fiancé, Rex Mottram, pays her tribute with a gift that readers (although not the characters) recognize as an allusion to the famous Decadent novel Au Rebours: “a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamond in the living shell” (164). Yet Charles’s words also show how he understands Julia better than her suitor does. If she wears the outward features of Pater’s goddess, her response to what Pater called “the thoughts and experience of the world” is far different from pagan mirth. Pater gave his muse the indulgent smile of Leonardo’s Saint Anne; Waugh, foreshadowing the contrast between old dispensation and new, gives his the Christian sorrow of Saint Mary at the Pieta.

     3.) A wild creature refashioned as a luxurious domestic trinket, the jeweled tortoise represents an extension of a prominent Aesthetic motif: the extravagant decorative interior. Artists designed sumptuous interiors for their patrons, the most famous being Whistler’s Peacock Room in London; the arts-and-crafts circle of William Morris sought to make a high art of furnishing and decoration, prompting critics to deride their work as “the apotheosis of the teapot.” Charles elaborately outfits his rooms at Oxford, and later the reader encounters an older and more classical model of the high Aesthetic space, the chapel that Lord Marchmain commissioned for his wife:

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armor, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright color. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been molded in plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pockmarked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies. (38-39)

That the chapel contains an altar should not gull the reader into mistaking brilliance for light. Lord Marchmain is, in Waugh’s words, “a recent and half-hearted convert to Catholicism”; as Jeffrey Heath notes in his excellent discussion of church imagery in Brideshead, the décor reflects a heart occupied with temporal fashion rather than timeless spiritual truth, with the references to plasticine, hand-made patina, and artificial flowers underlining the falsity of the enterprise. (The altar still serves its intended purpose, since Waugh shows that, through the operations of grace, truth can make even falsehood serve its ends.)[8] In yet another use of interior decoration, Charles makes it a custom to paint murals in the garden-room during his visits to Brideshead (possibly another nod to Rossetti and the Oxford murals).

     Waugh’s reason for developing this motif is not merely to fill out the catalogue of the fin de siècle. Rather, by closely associating the golden world of the Brideshead years with what is traditionally a feminine domain—the women’s sphere of domesticity and adornment, in contrast to the public sphere of men’s work—he introduces a larger critique of disconnection from reality. For a few years of extended adolescence, Charles and his peers inhabit a feminine cocoon of petty amusements and epicurean tastes, exquisitely beautiful but also delicate, superficial, fragile, unsustainable. As the wider focus on art makes clear, around them the entire culture has been undergoing such a phase, from the posturing of Wilde to the superficial readings of Bell and Fry. Inevitably, the reality principle must return, perhaps violently after long delay.

     The gendered dynamics of interior decoration are most clearly articulated when Charles exits yet another art-nouveau interior:

I closed the door behind me, shutting out the bondieuserie, the low ceiling, the chintz, the lambskin bindings, the views of Florence, the bowls of hyacinth and pot-pourri, the petit point, the intimate feminine, modern world, and was back under the coved and coffered roof, the columns and entablature of the central hall, in the august, masculine atmosphere of a better age. (138)

Charles is feeling critical distance from his surroundings following an unsatisfying conversation with Lady Marchmain. Jeffrey Heath argues that Charles is simply misinterpreting the tender feminine piety of Sebastian’s mother (174), but there is something unsettling about Lady Marchmain and the soft power, insinuating and indirect, that she imposes on her clan. For a moment, Charles glimpses what it will take him years to fully realize.

     The novel’s central expression of the inevitability of change and decay does not refer to the coming war. Instead, in a more intimate reflection on destruction and creation, Charles receives his first commission as an artist and sets out on the path to Ryder’s English Homes. Bridey, suddenly revealing that Marchmain House will soon be pulled down, asks Charles to paint some pictures of the building as mementos. A turning point, and a point of origin for Charles, establishes a fundamental connection between art and loss. “That was my first commission,” Charles recalls; “I had to work against time, for the contractors were only waiting for the final signature to begin the work of destruction” (217).

     This lineage underlines the high value that Waugh assigns to “art-literature” (as Wilde called the genre of Browning and Ruskin, both of whom Waugh pointedly mentions) as a potential vehicle for elegy. Waugh associates his own writing with an elegiac literary tradition in passages such as Julia’s lament for her brother: “He’s like a character from Chekhov. One meets him sometimes coming out of the library or on the stairs—I never know when he’s at home—and now and then he suddenly comes in to dinner like a ghost quite unexpectedly” (258). The work most likely in the background is The Cherry Orchard, where Chekhov’s deracinated aristocrats aimlessly wander ancestral grounds as the social system fades into history. The heirs of Brideshead too find themselves unready to witness the twilight of a ruling class.

     To an extent, Brideshead Revisited is a Künstlerroman, depicting at once the education of an artist and a consequent theory of aesthetic origins. The novel’s generating impulse as a work of art is the loss of three worlds, flawed perhaps, yet wonderful, graceful, and effortless: adolescence in the individual life, the reign of art-for-art’s-sake in the culture, and the old world of the aristocratic elite.[9] “Poor Julia,” Cordelia says at one point, delivering the novel’s most explicit statement of theme. “Things have all come to an end very quickly, haven’t they?” (219).

     4.) In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh utilizes the Aesthetic tradition of art-for-art’s sake, which mistakes art for life and significant form for significance, as an ironic lens that shows how younger characters, far from inhabiting a golden age, perch on a bubble ready to burst. Charles suspects the superficiality of contemporary art culture, though he understands its full implications only decades later: while still at Oxford, he begins to shift away from former enthusiasms, with the help of his friend Sebastian:

Collins had exposed the fallacy of modern aesthetics to me: “…The whole argument from Significant Form stands or falls by volume. If you allow Cézanne to represent a third dimension on his two-dimensional canvas, then you must allow Landseer his gleam of loyalty in the spaniel’s eye”—but it was not until Sebastian, idly turning the page of Clive Bell’s Art, read: “‘Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?’ Yes. I do,” that my eyes were opened. (28)

Artistic representation invokes real meanings that arouse responses beyond a quarantined “aesthetic emotion.” The analysis recalls Waugh’s description of his encounter with Rossetti’s famous painting, Beata Beatrix (1863), which ended his early passion for Formalist theory. This work portrays a woman wearing a look of beatific rapture. “Anyone,” Waugh declared, “who, confronted with its sublime and pervasive sanctity, can speak of it coldly in terms of saturation, and planes and plastic values … has constricted his aesthetic perceptions to antlike narrowness.”[10]

     Despite his experience, Waugh does not employ Rossetti’s transcendent maiden to represent narrative content in art. Instead, he refers to a famous piece of Victorian kitsch: a maudlin picture, in the academic style, of a little dog sitting with his muzzle sadly perched atop a coffin. The title is The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (1837). The evidence tilts against the defense: by 1923, Cézanne was one of the gods of modern art; Wilde would have classified the Landseer picture as “more than usually revolting sentimentality.” Waugh’s purpose—aside from poking fun at the tedious Collins, who probably employs less irony than the author—is to refuse Cézanne the nobility that loftier company would affirm. Anyone can cite a painting that counters aesthetic fashion, but sentimentality is a common fault. Formalists are simply good at hiding sentimentalism, the desire for emotion without moral responsibility, under scientific rigor. Besides, within the novel’s critical frame, Collins, for all his tedium, is not wrong. There are ways to make the argument for meaning over form speciously easy; Waugh chooses to reverse the cheat, a sign of grand confidence that truths can weather even mockery.

     Two more references deepen our sense of the positive aesthetic values at play. The first is Robert Browning. If the novel’s numerous allusions to Rossetti seem in part a declaration of genre, with his efforts to mingle poetry and painting suggesting a model of art-literature to which Brideshead aspires, then Browning serves a similar purpose. In many works, especially the dramatic monologues that he assigns to Renaissance painters and patrons, Browning fashions a single braid of art criticism and literary art. The speaker of the monologue “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855), an incorrigible sensualist though a monk and a painter of church murals, argues in favor of realistic representation even of holy subjects—for an art that celebrates spirit and flesh alike. This is almost certainly the poem that Waugh had in mind when he wrote the heady reflection of Charles after an unusually good day of painting:

I had felt the brush take life in my hand this afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening—of Browning’s Renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

‘You’ll fall in love,’ I said. (222)

     The invocation of Browning leads by association to the words spoken aloud, a conjunction that Waugh uses to position Browning’s aesthetic against his own. The novel’s young characters, like the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic figures whose gestures they often borrow, seem to imagine themselves in a landscape derived from Byzantium, the Middle Ages, or the early Renaissance (at moments, all three); Waugh renders this posturing with irony (Collins’s book project), but he does not distance himself entirely from the use of the past. As elsewhere, the key is to use forms as vehicles for ideas rather than ends. One parallel setting that he finds sympathetic is the Renaissance of Browning’s poetry: hot-blooded, rich with metaphysical and amorous interest, where the shell of form is always splitting from the force of profane and divine love.

     After Fry, Bell, and Browning, the final art writer with whom Waugh sets himself to compete is John Ruskin. From Ruskin, Browning adopted the value of formal roughness and subjective emotion in art, as well as a tendency to read art in moral terms. As a tutelary spirit, Ruskin’s naturalist theories influenced the Pre-Raphaelites and prepared the public for their work.[11] Brideshead invokes Ruskin too. His presence shows how the novel deploys aesthetic references in service of larger themes. Some references to Ruskin are simple scene-setting: the former Slade Professor cast an inescapable shadow over young painters at Oxford in the early decades of the century. Charles takes painting classes at the Ruskin School of Art (as Waugh had), and he imagines himself back in college, gazing “through a window of Ruskin Gothic” (271). More significant are points where Waugh raises critical issues, for the mature narrator identifies Ruskin with the false aesthetic gods of his youth.

     In the first reference to Ruskin as critic, Charles describes his attraction to architecture, even during the years of Van Gogh’s sunflowers and Cézanne’s oranges: “though in opinion I had made that easy leap, characteristic of my generation, from the puritanism of Ruskin to the puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and medieval” (81-82). As a lightning critique of the critic, the thought is a little too clever; it resembles smart lines from another writer in the Catholic satirical tradition, G. K. Chesterton, who called Ruskin Puritanical for his apparent desire to erase the blemish of Papacy from the arts of Catholic Europe: “he set up and worshipped all the arts and trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the Church itself.”[12] Waugh’s larger purpose is to alert us to an ersatz medieval sensibility, a preference for outward show that this passage identifies with Ruskin, and to turn us toward the possibility of an art that expresses deeper commitments to the values it delineates.

     Who are the makers of such art? Another invocation of Ruskin, in the context of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, suggests the right direction. Late in the novel, in a doubled mise-en-scène, a passage of criticism that explicates a Pre-Raphaelite painting frames the plot in a brief moral tableau. Julia has just ended her adulterous relationship with Charles:

“Julia,” I said later when Brideshead had gone upstairs, “have you ever seen a picture of Holman Hunt’s called ‘The Awakened Conscience’?”[13]

“No.”

I had seen a copy of Pre-Raphaelitism in the library some days before; I found it again and read her Ruskin’s description. She laughed quite happily.

“You’re perfectly right. That’s exactly what I did feel.” (290)

Holman Hunt was the most intensely religious member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Waugh’s favorite painter of that school. The painting in question depicts a “kept” woman, sitting in the luxurious rooms her lover has provided, at the moment she realizes the sinfulness of her actions. Both Jeffrey Heath and Robert Garnett, who briefly mention this scene, take it for granted that the only significance of the allusion is the woman’s plight and her “stricken expression.”[14] But one dimension of the painting that critics have not yet discussed seems relevant to the question of why it attracted Waugh’s interest. Ruskin puts the setting at the center of his commentary: an overstuffed Victorian interior, enveloped in the most opulent nouveau-riche style. (The painting’s date is too early for the Arts and Crafts trend.) In his reading, Ruskin cites these details to emphasize the perils of a shallow appreciation for mere form, as well as the danger that attractive surfaces can mask the growth of corruption:

There is not a single object in all that room—common, modern, vulgar (in the vulgar sense, as it may be), but it becomes tragical, if rightly read. That furniture so carefully painted, even to the last vein of the rosewood—is there nothing to be learnt from that terrible lustre of it, from its fatal newness; nothing there that has the old thoughts of home upon it, or that is ever to become a part of home?[15]

The author’s decision to introduce a passage of art criticism into a heart-to-heart between lovers, although perhaps a bit strange, might be a simple allusion to another narrative that happens to be a painting. Yet Hunt’s painting also holds for Waugh a deeper atmospheric appeal: it resonates with his thematic interest in the feminine, decorative indoor world as a space of abdication from responsibility and reality. (That Waugh mentions Ruskin more favorably in this passage does not present a real contradiction. It might be better to speak of Ruskins; few other critics have been so divided into conflicting elements.) The reality that Charles and Julia have been trying to ignore is not politics or public affairs, but sin; as far as the novel is concerned, sin exists in individuality as well as in the wider world.

     The allure of surface is hard to resist, however. Soon after, Charles lightly compares the evening landscape with the backdrop for a play. Julia’s response this time is colder: “Why must you see everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a Pre-Raphaelite picture?” (291). Conversion is a continual process: even when he draws close to insight, with Ruskin’s text as assistance, Charles remains susceptible to the error of valuing life for the sake of art rather than life for the sake of art: a professional hazard of being an artist, perhaps. Brideshead is a sort of reverse Künstlerroman, the story of an artist’s gradual turn away from a false art, with the true only implied; Sebastian and Julia Flyte are not artists, yet at significant moments they correct Charles’s eye. Recall the wording when Sebastian turns Charles away from Clive Bell’s Art; “my eyes were opened” combines the imperative of visual education with echoes from Scripture.

Notes
[1] Douglas Lane Patey, The Life of Evelyn Waugh (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 4.
[2] Appropriately, as a young man Waugh designed jackets for the publisher Chapman & Hall, where his father was managing director. In 1929, he also helped friends stage a hoax exhibition, with an accompanying catalogue, of the works of the fictitious artist Bruno Hat, whose paintings carried titles such as Leda and the Swan but looked like meaningless squares and squiggles. Lytton Strachey bought one of the pieces.
[3] Jeffrey Heath, in The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1982), describes the events of Brideshead Revisited as a battle between religious and secular art: his predilection for secular subject-matter, such as old country houses or the jungle “world of change and decay” makes Charles Ryder a “second-rate artist” (170); only by learning to relinquish the secular art of Brideshead Castle, and to embrace the English remnant of the Catholic Church, does he realize his aesthetic potential and come into his vocation as a religious artist. Dominic Manganiello, in “The Beauty that Saves: Brideshead Revisited as a Counter-Portrait of the Artist,” Logos 9.2 (Spring 2006): 154-70, sees the novel as a narrative of artistic education which follows a trajectory reversing that in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Whereas Joyce’s artist defines his vocation in terms of servitude to “mortal beauty,” Waugh’s artist learns to move past the “types” of earthly beauty (including Julia, a romantic ideal that echoes Dante’s relationship with Beatrice) to a transcendent Archetype. Manganiello discusses the theme of art in both novels largely in abstract terms, although he mentions in passing that Waugh associated Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelitism with the theme of vanitas vanitatum (164).
[4] William T. Going, “Pre-Raphaelitism in Brideshead Revisited,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 7.2 (May 1987): 90-93.
[5] Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (New York: Little, Brown, 1973), 27. Hereafter cited by page numbers in the text.
[6] I. J., “Van Gogh,” The Artist: An Illustrated Monthly Record of Arts, Crafts, and Industries (June 1901): 42.
[7] Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford in 1945: “Well he was as bad at painting as Osbert [Sitwell] is at writing; for Christ's sake don't repeat the comparison to anyone.”
[8] Heath, Picturesque Prison, 173-74. Heath also quotes from Waugh’s memorandum for MGM regarding the film of Brideshead (164).
[9] See Robert Murray Davis, Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed (Boston: Twayne, 1990).
[10] Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (London: Duckworth, 1928), 130.
[11] Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Yale UP, 1998), 28.
[12] G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 63.
[13] In Rossetti, Waugh called this painting “singularly beautiful” (62).
[14] Heath, Picturesque Prison, 179; Robert R. Garnett, From Grimes to Brideshead: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh (London: Associated UP, 1990), 155.
[15] John Ruskin, letter to The Times, 25 May 1854. Quoted in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 12, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), 334.

Brideshead Revisited and The Double Helix
Richard W. Oram
University of Texas at Austin

     In a recent interview, James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, noted the literary influences on his memoir The Double Helix: “Watson said he had modeled the book's tone on fiction—primarily Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (which inspired Watson's original title for The Double Helix—"Honest Jim"), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.”[1] In his autobiography, Avoid Boring People, Watson has mentioned being “engrossed” in Waugh’s novel in 1951.[2] That this encounter remained in his memory after nearly sixty years suggests its importance. At first glance Brideshead and The Double Helix would seem to have little in common, apart from their appearance on many “best of the twentieth century” book lists. However, my belief is that Watson’s characterization and narrative technique both reflect the influence of Waugh.

     Watson has hinted more than once that he exaggerated personalities and situations in The Double Helix for intentional, novelistic effect. One of the “Remembered Lessons” of Avoid Boring People is that “Books, like plays or movies, succeed best when they exaggerate the truth. In communicating scientific fact to the non-specialist, there is a huge difference between simplifying for effect and misleading.”[3] Before he began work on a book about the “very human drama” of the discovery of DNA’s structure, Watson “saw in my future the writing of what Truman Capote would later call the ‘nonfiction novel.’”[4] No doubt Watson learned something from Waugh’s ability to heighten and transmute real-life originals, turning them into memorable fictional characters.

     As regards the influence of Brideshead on the narrative technique of The Double Helix, we can see that the relationship of the quintessentially American figure of “Honest” Jim Watson to the Cambridge intellectual environment is effectively the same as that of the middle-class, agnostic Charles Ryder to the aristocratic, Catholic Flyte family. In his introduction to The Double Helix, Watson tells us that “scientific discovery proceeds as a series of very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions [emphasis mine] play major roles.”[5] Indeed, the book’s “plot” centers on the “contradictory pulls of ambition and the sense of fair play”[6]—in other words, the tradition-bound English attitude toward research is contrasted with the American entrepreneurial spirit of Watson and Linus Pauling. As narrators, “Honest Jim” and Charles Ryder are cultural outsiders, in much the same way that Nick Carraway, the Midwestern narrator of The Great Gatsby (another influence cited by Watson), belongs neither to the world of Gatsby nor to that of Tom and Daisy Buchanan.  The outsider’s distinctive perspective thus supplies the narrative “tone” to which Watson refers.

     Since the appearance of The Double Helix, Watson has often been criticized for his lack of historical veracity and his tendency to exaggerate events for the sake of drama. If, however, we approach the work as a nonfiction novel with techniques influenced by several works of fiction (including Brideshead), we experience the work in quite a different manner.

Notes
[1] “For Whom the Nobel Tolls: An Evening Out with James Watson,” Scientific American, 12 January 2011: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=for-whom-the-nobel-tolls.
[2] Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (New York: Knopf, 2008), 88.
[3] Avoid Boring People, 170.
[4] Avoid Boring People, 214-15.
[5] The Double Helix, ed. Gunther S. Stent (New York: Norton, 1980), 3.
[6] Double Helix, xii.

Abstracts of Japanese Essays on Evelyn Waugh, 1960-2006
by Yoshiharu Usui

     Shibata, Toshihiko. “Wo ni okeru Yojisei: Doke no Bungaku wo Megutte [Infantilism in Evelyn Waugh: Its relation to his comic spirit].” Bungei to Shiso [Fukuoka Women’s University Studies in the Humanities] 19 (1960): 90-103.
Abstract: The interest of Waugh’s novels comes from his infantilism or spiritual immaturity. Because Waugh is cruel like a child, he can calmly describe dismal, funny murder scenes. Like a child, he has no logic or intelligence, so he cannot satirize sharply. He keenly perceives adults’ weak points, as a child does. He coolly lives in a world without ethics, where adults cannot survive. Waugh’s excellent characters are infants or infant-minded, like Cordelia and John Andrew. Waugh creates fine adult characters when he depicts their infantilism, especially the generosity of the upper class. Innocence means a state of mental blankness. Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and Dennis Barlow are not the opposite of fine citizens but innocents close to the ignorant. Waugh’s world is in the same dimension as “Little Red Riding Hood.” The difference is Waugh himself, and readers do not realize that they are in the world of children’s stories.   

     Tanaka, Ryouzo. “Mukyudo no Tenkai [Development of eternal movement]―Decline and Fall wo Chushin ni [Mainly on Decline and Fall]―Evelyn Waugh Kenkyu 1 [A Study of Evelyn Waugh 1].” Kyoyo Ronso [Bulletin of Keio University, Faculty of Law. Association for the Study of Law and Politics] 19 (1966): 37-48.
Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is written in the form of eternal movement, a picaresque technique. An anti-hero whom Waugh calls a shadow just witnesses extraordinary things that happen one after another. Waugh wanted to show the readers antipathy to the university’s formality, distrust of faculty, degeneration of public schools (caused by scarcity of goods and teachers during the Great War), avaricious humans’ lust (seen in rebuilding the manor house), and satire of new education. Moreover, the eternal movement is Waugh’s view of life itself. Waugh shows his own shadow, which tries to cling but is flung off the big wheel at Luna Park.

     Suzuki, Minoru. “Evelyn Waugh Saku Meiyo no Ken Kenkyu [A Study of Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh].” Shizuoka Daigaku Kyoyo Bu Kenkyu Hokoku, Jinbun Kagaku Hen [Research Report of Shizuoka University, Volume of Humanities] 3 (1967): 44-54.
Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour mentions Greek myths very often. Guy can be compared with Odysseus. Virginia can be Penelope rather than Helen because one theme of this trilogy seems to be reunion of a man and a wife. Men at Arms corresponds to The Iliad. Officers and Gentlemen corresponds to The Odyssey. Unconditional Surrender corresponds to The Telegoneia. James Joyce seeks classical order and wisdom in reality. Like Joyce, Waugh also seeks them in the disorder of World War II. Waugh regards the war as fought for ambition, human foolishness, like the Trojan War. Sword of Honour has all aspects of Waugh, such as picaresque comedy, satire, and religious belief. It shows his skills as a first-rate novelist, and it is a masterpiece of modern English novels.

     Tanaka, Ryouzo. “Evelyn Waugh Kenkyu 2 [A Study of Evelyn Waugh 2]--Adam to Nina [Adam and Nina]--Nijigenteki Ningenzo [Two-dimensional Images].” Kyoyo Ronso [Bulletin of Keio University, Faculty of Law. Association for the Study of Law and Politics] 25 (1969): 123-39.
     Abstract: Vile Bodies suffers from a lack of structure. For example, Father Rothschild disappears in the middle of the story. When he started, Waugh probably did not intend for Adam to sell Nina to Ginger and for Adam and Nina to go to her father’s house as husband and wife. Waugh’s last chapter, ‘Happy ending,’ is not a good conclusion. In short, this novel’s success comes from public interest in Bright Young People. In Decline and Fall, Waugh sees the BYP from the outside. However, in Vile Bodies, he sees them from the inside. Adam and Nina are not naïve like Paul Pennyfeather. Adam is a smooth and impudent fellow like Basil Seal in Black Mischief or Dennis Barlow in The Loved One. The characters have only vile bodies and are going to be ruined. They are not three-dimensional people who show sincerity, hope, and ideals. They are just animated shadows like amoebae. Only in Waugh’s ‘serious novels’ do readers see the two-dimensional characters change to three-dimensional ones.

     Tanaka, Ryouzo. “Tony to Brenda [Tony and Brenda]－A Handful of Dust Shiron [An Essay on A Handful of Dust] Evelyn Waugh Kenkyu 3[A Study of Evelyn Waugh 3].” Kyoyo Ronso [Bulletin of Keio University, Faculty of Law. Association for the Study of Law and Politics] 29 (1970): 1-6.
Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust is a tragicomedy. If Brenda existed in the real world, readers would be very angry at her for being inconstant and selfish. Brenda, like Beaver and Jock, is one of Waugh’s farcical two-dimensional characters, a relief to readers. For a divorce suit, Tony goes to a hotel in Brighton with a prostitute and two private detectives. The plan is ruined because the prostitute is foolish and the detectives are stupid. This entertainment is typical of Waugh. Tony is the first of Waugh’s three-dimensional characters. In this sense, A Handful of Dust is a transition to a three-dimensional novel, Brideshead Revisited. 

     Miyai, Bin. “Evelyn Waugh no Kuuso Shakai (1) [Evelyn Waugh’s Imaginative Societies (1)].” Doshisha Eigo Eibungaku Kenkyu [Doshisha University Studies in English] 2 (1971): 49-61.
Abstract: In Scott-King’s Modern Europe, by setting the story in a fictitious country of the Balkan Peninsula, Neutralia, Waugh satirizes inefficiency of bureaucracy, which is common to rising nations. However, satire is relevant when the nation is stable, when traditional values remain only in name, or when the old social organization is collapsing and the new one is being built. Satire does not apply when the revolution is under way or has just ended. The disorder of Neutralia was caused not by fatigue and nothingness but by groping for reconstruction of a new order. The energy of reconstruction repels ironic laughter. In this novel, only the author's escapist attitude is impressive. After all, Waugh experienced the old bureaucratic inefficiency and confusion in Spain just after the Second World War but projected them on Yugoslavia and created an imaginative society. The setting is not reasonable.

     Tanaka, Ryouzo. “Evelyn Waugh Kenkyu no Shinshiryou ni tsuite [About New Materials in Evelyn Waugh Studies].” Kyoyo Ronso [Bulletin of Keio University, Faculty of Law. Association for the Study of Law and Politics] 46 (1977): 53-73.　
Abstract: It has been about ten years since Evelyn Waugh died. Nevertheless, articles about Waugh, Waugh’s friends' reminiscences, and anthologies are published one after another. It is not just a boom. It shows that the interest of readers, including researchers, in Waugh has hardly faded in Britain. Recent publications include works by F. Donaldson, P. A. Doyle, D. Lodge, D. Pryce-Jones (ed.), J. St John, D. Carew, G. D. Phillips, C. Sykes, and M. Davie (ed.). Davie’s edition of Waugh’s diaries lacks important periods, such as when Waugh studied at Oxford, before and after Waugh’s brief first marriage, two months during his conversion, four years after Waugh moved to Combe Florey, and one year of his last days. However, one can get a glimpse of Waugh himself. St John’s book has a valuable Christopher Hollis introduction. Sykes ‘makes no pretensions to be more than a “real” footnote to Men at Arms’.  Sykes’s is not just a biography but a critical biography, including critique of Waugh’s works as well as explanations of the motives and circumstances of Waugh’s novels. It expresses love, respect, and trust in Waugh. Pryce-Jones’s book is evaluated by Sykes in his preface. Sykes says that Donaldson’s is the best portrait written by one author. Carew went to Lancing with Waugh. His book contains episodes and sketches, but it gives thin impressions and bitter aftertastes. Phillips analyzes Waugh’s novels and life by carefully quoting interviews with Waugh’s relatives and friends.

     Hatano, Yoko. “Fosuta to Wo no Sakuhin ni Miru Kantori Hausu Sinborizum [Remains of Country-House Symbolism in E. M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh]”. Tokyo Kasei Gakuin Tsukuba Tanki Daigaku Kiyo [Bulletin of Tokyo Kasei Gakuin Tsukuba Women’s University Junior College] 6 (1996): 137-49.
Abstract: In A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited, Waugh represents good old English traditional culture, which surrenders to impudent modern men, with country houses, which survive only with difficulty. Thus Waugh projects disillusion on modern times and wishes for an idealized past. In these two works, country-house symbolism is an elegy to a disappearing system. On the other hand, in Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End, country houses have power to save the human spirit. The country house as the symbol of traditional inheritance is alive. Country houses have positive meaning in Foster’s works. However, they have only negative meaning in Waugh’s. Medievalism, the reaction to the Industrial Revolution, combined with the mobility of classes, the child of the revolution, to influence Forster’s and Waugh’s works.

     Cull, Ian V. “Catholicism and Crisis in the Modern British Novel: With Specific Reference to the Writings of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.” Hosei Riron [Journal of Law and Politics] 30.3 (1998): 320-44. (This article is written in English.)
Abstract: In the Catholic novels of Greene and Waugh, man and woman are attracted to symbols of an inherited faith which are enlightening but also darkening. They are a constant reminder of the overwhelming power of a predetermined universe and the relative insignificance of man and his endeavours. Belief in innate evil is no guard against committing evil, as the character of Pinkie in Brighton Rock illustrates. Some try to live up to the teachings of the Church, though they also believe in mankind. A sin precipitates a painful crisis of spirit. Suicide, in Scobie’s case, compounds the sin but simultaneously challenges Catholic transcendence. The lone individual decides his destiny and buries fear of damnation in the promise of oblivion. The novel has effectively transformed dramatic conflicts of the Catholic universe into secular dramas that rotate upon a human axis. To their credit, Greene and Waugh never offered an all-embracing solution to the crisis of being Catholic. That would have suggested complacency. Instead, they searched for and studied the human factor, the ‘world of life’.

     Takayanagi, Shunichi. “Shohyo [book review]: George McCartney Cho, Evurin Wo to Modanizmu no Dento [George McCartney’s Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition].” Kirisutokyo Bunka・Shukyo Kenkyusho Kiyo [Institute of Christian Culture / Oriental Regions Bulletin] 23 (2004): 64-66. 
Abstract: McCartney says Waugh satirized not only upper-class children and dons of Oxford University but also foolishness of British imperial policy. Waugh also pointed to the lack of metaphysics in modern times and education. Waugh’s early novels have indirect religious themes. The author also says that Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence represented avant-garde modernism in the twentieth century, but Waugh tried to present his own modernism. In this sense, Waugh is close to T. S. Eliot. McCartney argues that Waugh tried to express the danger of selling Western cultural tradition bit by bit. Waugh accepted the old order based on tradition from the fall of the Roman Empire. This book has an unbalanced structure: McCartney analyses Waugh’s novels in his mature period only in the last brief chapter, but he assigns a chapter to each of Waugh’s main early works. I agree with McCartney, who argues that Waugh strongly opposed trying to substitute modern art for religion. 

     Seland, John. “Decline and Fall: Evelyn Waugh and Black Americans.” Academia [Journal of the Nanzan Academic Society] 79 (2006): 171-91. (This article is written in English. Abstract by the author.)
Abstract: In Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh portrays English society in the 1920s. The hero, Paul Pennyfeather, suffers at the hands of ruthless, egoistic characters, such as Margot Beste-Chetwynde, whose wealth comes from brothels. When Margot brings her consort, Sebastian “Chokey” Cholmondley, to a Sports Day at the school where Paul teaches, everyone is shocked, since he is a black man. The ensuing conversations show Chokey in a favorable light, while guests are satirized. This light treatment of Chokey and severe criticism of the guests is substantiated by Waugh’s clever use of the story “Little Black Sambo.” However, after the guests have departed, Waugh, feeling he portrayed Chokey too positively, begins to criticize him as well. David Bradshaw’s idea that Waugh’s satire is directed principally against whites is not the whole story. Waugh is more critical of Chokey, the representative Black, than the critic thinks.

Correction:
Suzuki, Shigenobu. “Kindai no fuushika Evurin Wo--Suibouki wo chuushi ni” [“On a Modern Satirist, Evelyn Waugh--A Study of Decline and Fall”].  Kyoto Sangiodaigaku Ronshu [Acta Humanitica et Scientifica Universitatis Sangio Kyotiensis] 11 (1984): 77-93.

In EWNS 41.2, the year of publication was reported to be 1982.

REVIEWS

The Strange Trove of Edensor
In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed. Charlotte Mosley. New York: New York Review Books, 2010. 390 pp. $30.00; originally published London: John Murray, 2008.
Wait for Me: Memoirs, by Deborah Devonshire. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010. 368 pp. $28.00; originally published as Wait for Me: Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister. London: John Murray, 2010.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley 

     Patrick Leigh Fermor and Deborah Mitford Devonshire were both known to Evelyn Waugh. Both were younger—Leigh Fermor by twelve and Deborah by seventeen years. Waugh visited and occasionally corresponded with Deborah, but contacts with Leigh Fermor seem to have been slight. In letters Leigh Fermor and Deborah wrote to each other, both correspondents often refer to Waugh and many of his closest friends. In Leigh Fermor’s case, these include Diana Cooper, whom he met at a party given by Emerald Cunard. After that, Lady Diana meant “never to lose the floodlight of his heart and mind” (Autobiography 647). Leigh Fermor was a close friend of Daphne Fielding, whom he knew through her marriage to Xan Fielding. He also corresponded frequently with Ann Fleming, particularly toward the end of her life. Through these contacts, Leigh Fermor appears in Waugh’s own correspondence. In a 1957 letter to Diana Cooper, Waugh recalls having read Leigh Fermor’s first book (The Traveller’s Tree, 1950, about the West Indies): it was not very “encouraging except that the niggers are papists and [Julian Asquith’s] house has an araucaria—is that a monkey puzzle?—planted by Edward VIII” (Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch 245).[1] 

     Waugh and Leigh Fermor reviewed the other’s books. Leigh Fermor reviewed Waugh’s The Holy Places (“Pilgrim’s Progress,” Sunday Times, 21 December 1952: 5); as he told Diana Cooper, Waugh considered it “very pretentious” (MWMS 156). Leigh Fermor criticizes Waugh for attributing the Great Schism in the Christian Church to actions of the Orthodox. He also claims that Waugh ignores the impact of the Fourth Crusade on the Orthodox Church’s attitude to Western Christendom. After spending well over half the review on these “minor points,” Leigh Fermor praises Waugh’s book as “admirable” and wishes there were more. Six months later, Waugh reviewed Leigh Fermor’s third book, A Time to Keep Silence (“Luxurious Editions and Austere Lives,” Time and Tide, 20 June 1953: 824) and praised it. The subject is Leigh Fermor’s visits to three monasteries, and Waugh finds his descriptions enjoyable, admirable, and well written. He does, however, criticize Leigh Fermor’s “cloying agnosticism,” which precludes adequate consideration of the monastic ideal.[2]

     Waugh knew Deborah Devonshire through friendship with her two sisters Diana Mitford Mosley and Nancy Mitford. He met Deborah for the first time in 1942 at the house of Daphne Fielding (then married to Henry Bath) at Sturford Mead on the Longleat Estate, which Waugh visited while stationed in nearby Sherborne. In her Memoirs, Deborah describes that meeting. She and her husband Andrew Cavendish were living in a cottage in Warminster, Andrew commuting to his military base. Deborah had married the year before, and her husband, a younger son, was not expected to inherit the estates or title of his father, the Duke of Devonshire. Deborah was impressed by the “phenomenal amount of drink that [Waugh] consumed, and as I was still shocked by drunkenness, I kept my distance.” She recalls that Waugh poured a bottle of Chartreuse over his head and walked about repeatedly intoning that his hair was covered in gum. Waugh could be charming early in the evening: “He wanted to be friends and was full of compliments, but they turned to insults before you knew where you were. The cleverness came through but so did the criticisms; everything was wrong including me” (115-16). In a letter to his wife, Waugh recalled the “great drunkenness” of the party at Sturford (Waugh Letters 165; see also Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh, 442-43). Deborah says that after the war Waugh made up for bad behavior at Sturford by buying her a hat in Paris.

     Leigh Fermor made a name for himself in Crete during World War II. With Xan Fielding, he took part in a guerrilla campaign against German occupiers after the British had evacuated. One action involved capturing a German general with whom Leigh Fermor recited Latin verse (Antony Beevor, Crete, 309). Such exploits became well known after production of a 1957 film entitled Ill Met by Moonlight, with Leigh Fermor played by Dirk Bogarde. His letters contain interesting discussions of how the film was made on location in the South of France. Leigh Fermor also wrote the script of another film (John Ford’s Roots of Heaven, 1958).[3] He is best known for two books about a trip in his late teens, on foot from Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Leigh Fermor had been expelled from the King’s School, Canterbury for holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter. His two volumes of reminiscences (A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water) were both critical and commercial successes. A third volume has been promised and was said to be on the way to the publisher. Leigh Fermor’s recent death in June 2011 raises concerns. In an interview in December 2010, Deborah said that Leigh Fermor was still working on the book, but she feared it might never be finished because of his perfectionism.[4]

     Deborah like her sisters had no formal education. She has made a career of being the Duchess of Devonshire. She made the Chatsworth estate into a thriving enterprise after her husband inherited it, his elder brother having died in World War II. After her marriage, Deborah and Leigh Fermor crossed paths during the war. They got to know each other when he visited the Cavendish estate in Ireland in 1956.[5] They corresponded because he was often moving around. Leigh Fermor married in 1968. Deborah has become a writer in later years, although many of her “books” sound suspiciously as if they were intended for sale in the Chatsworth gift shop. The Memoirs may be her most ambitious effort to date. 

     Leigh Fermor’s letters reflect the charm he has become known for. One can understand how he propelled himself across Europe in the 1930s with little more than smiles for potential hosts at “a series of minor Bridesheads.” He even managed to charm the German general he took prisoner in Crete. Deborah’s letters are more matter of fact. Like Waugh and his female correspondents, Leigh Fermor and Deborah engage in gossip about friends referred to by nicknames. Nancy Mitford’s husband Peter Rodd is “Basil Seal,” the Wavian character. Nancy is the “French Lady,” and her sister Pamela is simply “Woman.” In Waugh’s letters to Diana Cooper, Leigh Fermor is “Paddy the next best thing” or simply “the next best thing,” apparently a reference to a popular 1908 novel by Gertrude Page (later a play and film), although that “Paddy” was a woman (MWMS 156n. 2).[6]

     The best letters are long reminiscences by Leigh Fermor of his trip to Constantinople and his days in Crete, usually triggered by visits to these places. He describes how he swam the Hellespont on one such return, having failed to do so on the original trip. Descriptions of life at the house he and his wife built in rural Greece are also worth reading. Not to be missed are comic verses as well as word games, sometimes illustrated.

     Waugh is mentioned several times in letters and in Deborah’s Memoirs, but nothing new or important is revealed about his life and works. Deborah’s letters and Memoirs refer to Waugh’s 1957 visit to Edensor, where Deborah lived before moving to Chatsworth. Waugh complained that a chamber pot in his room had not been emptied. In his thank-you letter, he says he did not mention the “strange Trove of Edensor” to his other hosts, the Sitwells at Renishaw (Waugh Letters 493). In Memoirs, Deborah discusses that visit. She describes Waugh as a “difficult guest” who found fault with everything, including “the wine, his bedroom, the outlook and, judging by his behavior, the other guests too.” The full chamber pot was announced “with a look of triumph on his face.” Deborah never knew whether his claims were true, but she was doubtful because he “did not bring the evidence with him” (145). This visit was Waugh’s first to Deborah, at his request; it also seems to have been his last.[7] In 1962, Waugh wrote that he knew he was being a bore but had behaved badly “because [Deborah] had turned on the television at dinner.” Nancy Mitford had asked why Deborah felt Waugh had become her enemy (Mitford-Waugh Letters 447-50).

     In 1944, Waugh sent Deborah one of fifty copies of the limited pre-publication edition of Brideshead, which she says is still in the Chatsworth library, along with other works, usually inscribed in friendly terms. Waugh, knowing that Deborah was not a great reader, sent her a copy of his biography of Ronald Knox, assuring her in his inscription that Protestant sensibilities would not be offended.[8] After unwrapping the parcel, she found that the pages of the book were blank.[9] In a letter to Leigh Fermor, Deborah recalls that her mother suggested the title Our Vile Age for her sister Nancy’s first novel, but “Evie had just done Vile Bodies.” It was instead called Highland Fling.

     Several of Leigh Fermor’s letters are from the Easton Park Hotel in Chagford, Devon, where he lived while finishing one of his books. He seems to have occupied the “magical centre room with a blazing fire” where Waugh had also written. In a letter to Deborah, Leigh Fermor recalls the funeral of Carolyn Cobb, who owned and managed the hotel, in June 1960. The Waughs and her co-owner, Norman Webb, were among the few other mourners in attendance. I have been unable to find any record by Waugh of that or any other meeting with Leigh Fermor.

     The letters are well edited by Charlotte Mosley, Deborah’s niece by marriage to a son of Diana Mosley. Charlotte also edited the letters of Nancy Mitford, the Nancy Mitford-Waugh letters, and the letters of the Mitford sisters. The footnotes reflect her expertise and are often as entertaining and informative as the letters themselves. When a letter is not reprinted, Charlotte supplies information needed to complete the thoughts. The American edition published by the New York Review of Books is attractively printed and bound, and the publishers can be proud of it. After their spouses died in the mid-2000s, both correspondents continued to write to each other, and one can only hope for another volume, perhaps in conjunction with Leigh Fermor’s final volume about his trip across Europe.

     Deborah’s Memoirs were published two years after the UK publication of her correspondence with Leigh Fermor. She becomes the fourth Mitford sister to write an autobiography (considering Nancy’s novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate as autobiographical). Diana and Jessica also wrote memoirs. Early chapters relating to Mitford childhood in Oxfordshire have been told before, but Deborah’s version is entertaining in its own right. She is the youngest and seems to have been the best behaved. Perhaps the best chapters are on coming out and early years of marriage, which coincided with World War II. These offer a riveting description of a way of life disappearing literally page by page before your eyes. Her story continues through years of struggle to lift the debt imposed by crippling death duties on her husband Andrew’s inheritance. Andrew’s father arranged for ownership of the estate to be held by a land trust but died in 1950 a few weeks short of the time needed to allow transfer to be made tax free.

     Also interesting are descriptions of friendships with the Kennedys. Deborah met Kathleen Kennedy, President Kennedy’s sister, along with the rest of the family in 1938 during Joe Kennedy’s London tenure as U.S. Ambassador. Kathleen came out in the same season as Deborah, and they attended the same parties. Kathleen married William Cavendish (Andrew’s older brother and heir to the estate and title) in the later stages of the war despite much opposition from both families over religious differences. The church hierarchies agreed that male children would be Church of England and females Roman Catholic. William was killed in action while Kathleen was in the U.S. to attend the funeral of her brother Joe Jr., also killed in action. She returned to live in England and died in a 1948 plane crash while returning from the South of France with the man she hoped to make her second husband. Through the triumphs and tribulations of the Kennedys, Deborah and Andrew were accepted as members of the family, and they attended JFK’s inauguration and his and Robert’s funerals. The Kennedys were also frequent guests at Chatsworth, where Kathleen is buried.

     Readers will also be interested in Deborah’s recollections of a 1979 visit to the University of Texas Humanities Research Center in Austin, arranged by Lady Bird Johnson. Deborah was shown some of Waugh’s letters and recognized his “neat little hand writing.” Then she saw cartons marked “Jessica Mitford.” Unsorted items included Jessica’s random notes for dinner engagements and shopping lists. When asked, Jessica said she had been paid a huge sum for what she had been about to throw away (Memoirs 241).

     Deborah misses the opportunity to mention that she became involved in Waugh’s acquisition of an ear trumpet. He advertised for the device in December 1956, and she responded. Martin Stannard includes a photo of Deborah sitting next to Waugh with an ear trumpet at a Foyle’s launch party in July 1957, a few weeks before he visited Edensor (Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 390n. 121, and photo following 236). It is unclear whether the ear trumpet in the photograph is the one Deborah offered. The disastrous visit to Edensor may have overshadowed Deborah’s memories of the ear trumpet.

      Another disappointment in the Memoirs is that Deborah offers little discussion of John Betjeman, a frequent visitor at Chatsworth, the home of his long-time companion, Elizabeth Cavendish, Andrew’s sister. Conspicuously and unexpectedly absent is James Lees-Milne, mentioned only once. His visits to “Andrew and Debo” spread over dozens of pages of his diaries and assert their importance to him. Perhaps Deborah thought he had given these visits sufficient attention. It is also mildly disappointing that she does not explain why the dukedom of her husband’s family refers to Devonshire, though their land is primarily in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, West Sussex and Ireland, without a single parcel in the county of their title. Finally, why has no one told her not to wear designer clothes when she is photographed feeding her hens? These photos do not promote the rustic image.

     The Memoirs are well written and well organized, so a reader can select portions of interest and ignore others without losing the thread of a familiar story. The index is also excellent, and the photos are well chosen and well arranged, including one I had not seen before. Waugh stands and smokes a cigar (looking especially pleased with himself) while Deborah sits and attends her youngest child, Sophy. It was taken at Edensor in 1957, the date of his contretemps with the chamber pot. Just below is an undated photo of Deborah wearing the Parisian hat Waugh had given her in apology for bad behavior at Sturford in 1942. These might have had greater impact if referenced in the text.

Notes
[1] Julian Asquith was the son of Waugh’s and Diana Cooper’s close friend, Katharine Asquith, and had just been appointed Administrator of St. Lucia.
[2] Both books were published as collectors’ editions by the Queen Anne Press. Waugh commends this effort to reestablish high-quality publishing during postwar Austerity, and Leigh Fermor praises the “presentation” of Waugh’s book. Neither mentions his own involvement in this small press.
[3] As she wrote to Waugh, Diana Cooper considered traveling at the invitation of director John Huston to French Equatorial Africa (now Cameroon) where the film was being shot but decided she was too old to put up with all the inoculations required (MWMS 248). Notes to the Waugh-Cooper letters state that the film was abandoned after much trouble on location (248n. 1), but the Internet Movie Database indicates that it was released in 1958 and gives Leigh Fermor screenwriting credit, shared with Romain Gary, author of the novel it was based on.
[4] Interview at the Frick Collection, New York, posted on YouTube. Leigh Fermor’s biographer, Artemis Cooper, in an obituary in The Independent, says that the final volume remained “unfinished” at the time of death due to writer’s block caused by the critical success of the first two volumes. In another article, Patrick Reade said that he had seen the manuscript and that it was close to publication. According to an article in the Guardian, the book will be published in 2013.
[5] In her interview at the Frick Collection, Deborah recalled that she was dreading the initial visit of Leigh Fermor, known as an intellectual, because it closely followed a disastrous visit by Cyril Connolly, also a notorious highbrow. Connolly insisted on visiting neighboring estates on the pretext of being a potential buyer but left immediately when they didn’t meet his exacting standards. Leigh Fermor combined learning with charm.
[6] A note in MWMS says that the nickname was the title of an “old music-hall song,” but that is probably the song written for the 1933 Hollywood film, a musical comedy based on the novel. The play was not a musical, more West End/Broadway than music hall, with a long run at the Savoy Theatre on the Strand in the 1920s. Waugh and Cooper would have been aware of both the play and the film (and possibly the novel). The indexer of MWMS was apparently unaware of Leigh Fermor’s nickname, and many references to him are ignored.
[7] Deborah invited Waugh to visit on at least two other occasions: Letters from Deborah Mitford, Evelyn Waugh Papers, British Library, Add. 81063.
[8] Even after becoming a writer, Deborah confessed in the Frick Collection interview that she had not read any of Leigh Fermor’s books, although she insists that she did read all of his letters to her.
[9] Both the chamber-pot and blank-book incidents are recited with slightly different details in The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, 297-98, 319-20. The blank book appeared in a recent BBC2 TV series, My Life in Books, Episode 8, 2 March 2011. A review of that program is forthcoming in EWS.

The Curse of Longevity
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography, by Selina Hastings. New York: Random House, 2010 (published “in a slightly different form” in London: John Murray, 2009). 640 pp. $35.00.
Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma

     Unlike biographers with academic pretensions (Norman Sherry comes readily to mind), Selina Hastings makes the writing of biography look easy. Only when one looks at the discreetly concealed notes does one realize the breadth and depth of her research into the long and complicated life of William Somerset Maugham.

     Maugham said of Guy de Maupassant, an idol and model, that he had “a gift for telling a story clearly, straightforwardly and effectively.” The same can be said of Hastings’s book. Story is the key here: the narrative moves forward with only an occasional kink in chronology and the very occasional repetition. Hastings is particularly good in describing the appearance of characters and settings, notably but not exceptionally of Gerald Haxton and Alan Searle, successive secretaries and lovers, and of Villa Mauresque, Maugham’s show-place on Cap Ferrat.

     Without detailed comparison with Ted Morgan’s Maugham: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), it would be difficult to see how recent availability of Maugham’s correspondence has added to Hastings’s account. (I have not seen the 2004 biography by the indefatigable Jeffrey Meyers.) Morgan’s book has more and on the whole more interesting photographs and somewhat more critical discussion of Maugham’s style. But Hastings’s book is clearly worth reading.

     As Hastings’s title implies, her book deals more with Maugham’s life than with his art. Hastings notes Maugham’s ambivalence about his sexuality (after thinking he was three-quarters straight to one-quarter queer [his term], he reversed the proportions), about his desire for adventure against his desire for the appearance of conventionality, and, to anticipate the issue of his writing, about his conflicting assertions that he wrote for money and his regrets that his work did not receive critical praise.

     A recurrent theme is Maugham’s choice of partners. Like some women characters in his fiction and plays, he was attracted to charming, reckless, and worthless younger men, including the increasingly alcoholic and abusive Haxton and the hypochondriacal and devious Searle, skewered in the phrase “a podgy Iago.” But though often foolish, Maugham was until his dotage rarely a fool. These men served not just as sex partners but as secretaries, majordomos at the Villa, travel agents as well as companions, and, more outgoing than the reserved Maugham, as means of making contact with people who furnished the material, often little changed, of his plots.

     Joseph Conrad gave one of the first, most succinct, and most accurate pronouncements on Maugham’s whole body of work, saying of Liza of Lambeth, Maugham’s first novel: “There is any amount of good things in the story and no distinction of any kind. It will be fairly successful I believe, for it is a ‘genre’ picture without any atmosphere…. He just looks on—and that is just what the general reader prefers.” Maugham embraced rather than denied this conclusion, maintaining that “though I have had variety of invention … I have had small power of imagination. I have taken living people and put them into the situations, tragic or comic, that their characters suggested…. My fancy, never very strong, has been hampered by my sense of probability.”

     This limitation probably accounts for his great popularity with middle-brows and for the dismissive attitude of literary critics—or as B. A. Young put it in Punch, he was seen as “The rich man’s MARIE CORELLI, the poor man’s ANDRĖ GIDE.” Many honors came to him in old age, but they were not the highest, and they did not include the Order of Merit he wished to share with Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling.

     Maugham’s last years were disgraceful or depressing, depending on whether one regards him as mentally stable and on how far Alan Searle and Lord Beaverbrook pushed him into writing Looking Back, universally execrated by his friends and enemies in the world of letters.

     Students of Evelyn Waugh will find The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham not only immensely readable but valuable in casting sidelights on Waugh’s world and the people in it. For example, Bob Boothby, a friend in the 1930s, is described as “a slightly raffish, slightly renegade member of Parliament” (that’s mild—see the Wikipedia entry), and readers of Put Out More Flags will gain a better understanding of why Ambrose Silk is devastated at being compared with Godfrey Winn. There is also a useful description of the atmosphere in the Dorchester Hotel, one of Waugh’s haunts, during the early days of World War II. Finally, of more cautionary than documentary value, one is led to realize that there are worse things than dying of a coronary thrombosis at the age of sixty-two.

Parallel Lives
Lennox & Freda, by Tony Scotland. Wilby, Norwich: Michael Russell, 2010. 575 pp. £28.00.
Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University.

     I am not otherwise familiar with composer Lennox Berkeley and his wife, Freda Bernstein, but the story of their relationship is absorbing, partly because I found several parallels between Berkeley’s life and Evelyn Waugh’s.

     They were born in the same year, 1903. Both went to Oxford, Berkeley to Merton College and Waugh to Hertford. They had some mutual friends: Berkeley knew John Greenidge from school and later shared a London flat with him; Waugh disrupted Hertford with John’s younger brother Terence.  Probably the closest connection between Waugh and Berkeley occurred at the Oxford University Dramatic Society on 23 November 1925, the first night of The Scarlet Woman, the film Waugh wrote and acted in.  Berkeley handled the musical accompaniment. As Tony Scotland observes, “Nothing whatsoever is known of the music he provided, though he must have made notes about the characters and situations and timings, then improvised on the night” (93).

     Neither was a very good student: Waugh qualified for a third-class degree in history, and Berkeley completed a fourth-class degree in French. After Oxford, Berkeley went to Paris for several years to study composition. Waugh was never interested in music, but he had hoped to pursue painting in Paris, as Charles Ryder does in Brideshead Revisited.

     In France, Berkeley converted to Roman Catholicism in 1929, about one year before Waugh made the same move in England. Scotland likens Berkeley’s conversion to Waugh’s and quotes the composer on the “immutability of the Church’s doctrine and liturgy” (157). Like Waugh, Berkeley was “bewildered and dismayed that a consequence of the [Second Vatican] Council should be the brutal destruction of a liturgy which was at the core of his being,” and he was depressed by the “sheer banality and impermanence of the [English] texts” (447).

     Berkeley returned to England to live with Benjamin Britten in a refurbished mill in Suffolk. Waugh married and moved into Piers Court at about the same time. His interest in country houses and artistic retreats is also evident in Work Suspended and Brideshead, where Charles regrets losing the smell of the old barn remodeled by Celia.

     During the war, Berkeley served as an air-raid warden while Waugh trained with the Royal Marines. Completed in May 1942, Berkeley’s Symphony No. 1 has one movement of “Churchillian defiance” (330), like the “Churchillian renaissance” of Waugh’s Put Out More Flags, published at about the same time. Berkeley also wrote the score for The Sword of the Spirit, a film about the wartime contributions of British Catholics and a possible source for Waugh’s Sword of Honour. As gay men, Berkeley, Britten, and others were often the objects of prejudice, like Ambrose Silk in POMF, and they tried to support each other, perhaps contributing to the homosexual intrigues in Sword of Honour.

     Despite his inclinations, Berkeley impregnated Freda and married her in 1946. She was twenty years younger, whereas Laura was only thirteen years younger than Waugh. Each father produced three sons, though Waugh, with a head start, had four daughters by the time Berkeley married. His music became more religious, just as Waugh’s fiction began to explore faith in Brideshead.

     With accomplishment came recognition: Berkeley was awarded the CBE in 1957; Waugh refused the same decoration in 1959. In 1961, Lady Diana Cooper moved to Warwick Avenue in London, next door to the Berkeleys. She dropped Berkeley’s name twice in letters, but Waugh didn’t bite (Letters of Waugh and Cooper 280, 313). Waugh also ignored Berkeley in his autobiography and died in 1966. Pope Paul VI made Berkeley a knight of St Gregory in 1971 (Peregrine Crouchback is a knight of St John), and Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1974. He developed Alzheimer’s and died in 1989. Like Waugh, Berkeley had a Requiem Mass at Westminster Cathedral.

     Berkeley was the grandson of an earl, but his father was illegitimate, so the title went to the youngest brother, Berkeley’s uncle. Scotland includes an appendix on “The Berkeley Peerage Case,” first heard in 1811 and again in 1891. Waugh would have been interested, and similar questions of legitimacy pop up in his story “Period Piece” and Sword of Honour. Since Berkeley was a Catholic aristocrat, Waugh’s indifference is somewhat surprising.

     Lennox & Freda is a handsome book that includes dozens of illustrations. Tony Scotland is a former BBC announcer who has also published The Empty Throne: The Quest for an Imperial Heir in the People’s Republic of China (1993). For Lennox & Freda, he did extensive research in unpublished archives, and he smoothly conveys encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth-century music. Scotland was a friend of Berkeley and Freda, and their marriage forms the climax of the book. The composer receives much more attention than his wife does, and there is little about their lives together. Lennox & Freda starts as a conventional biography of Berkeley, with a dramatic moment in Spain in 1936 and a flashback to his ancestry, but somehow it morphs into a love story. A biography of Berkeley had already been published, so the double perspective is welcome. I was particularly interested in Freda’s origins among Jewish families who settled in Wales. More information is available at http://www.lennoxandfreda.com. 

Winnifred Bogaards, 1938-2011
Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma

     Winnifred Mary Fergusson Bogaards died of what apparently was a heart attack on 27 June 2011 at her home in Rothesay, New Brunswick.

     Before her retirement from the University of New Brunswick, Saint John, in 1998, where she had a devoted following of students, Win had done major work on Evelyn Waugh and on Canadian writers. She knew many of the younger writers because of a reading series she chaired for many years. She was instrumental in working with me in seeing A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh (Whitston, 1986) through the final stages of production and was particularly keen-eyed in proofreading at all stages.

     She was also convener of a session of the international conference on the Literature of Region and Nation. Besides her scholarly work, Win was a gourmet cook who sometimes refused invitations to dine out because she could eat better at home. She was also a wine connoisseur and a fanatical gardener, although the incursion of deer forced her to cut back to a few plants they found unpalatable.

     Although I had corresponded with Win for several years, I first met her in 1981 when she invited me to teach a summer session at UNBSJ, a time memorable for good food and good company. I did cause her some consternation when I swam out of her sight down the Kennebecasis River: she was afraid that if I drowned she would have to teach the course herself.

     On several other occasions during the 1980s and early 1990s she asked me to house-sit for her while she did research in England. It was of course a great personal sacrifice for me to leave the torrid summers of Oklahoma to stay in the cool and green Kennebecasis Valley.

     After retirement, Win continued to garden as much as the deer would allow, to work her way through the local library’s collection of mystery stories, to play bridge, and to enjoy the company of friends she had made over the years. She also followed professional tennis, curling, and the fortunes of the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League, representing the province in which she was born.

     Win’s enthusiasm for Waugh was at odds with her political views (New Democratic Party, about as left as Canadian parties get) and with her non-existent religious views, not to speak of her enthusiasm for Picasso. Perhaps it was a shared style of wit that led her to him. But like Waugh, she was a natural host, and friends lucky enough to sit at her table will remember her for that.

NEWS

Evelyn Waugh Conference
Loyola-Notre Dame Library in Baltimore will host an Evelyn Waugh Conference on 12 and 13 March 2012. Events will include a series of papers on Waugh’s 1949 lecture tour of the USA, his relationship with American writers Thomas Merton and J. F. Powers, adaptation of his novels Brideshead Revisited and The Loved One in films, and his commitment to Catholicism. Alexander Waugh will also deliver a lecture, and the Evelyn Waugh Society will try to hold a meeting. The library is mounting an exhibit of artifacts, documents, letters, and photographs from Waugh’s 1948 and 1949 trips to the USA. The exhibit is on display from 27 February through 7 April 2012.

Eight More Penguins
The last eight titles in Penguin’s new edition of the works of Evelyn Waugh were published on 1 December 2011. The titles are The Loved One, Helena, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox, A Tourist in Africa, Tactical Exercise and Other Late Stories, A Little Learning, and Sword of Honour. Sixteen other titles were published earlier in the year.

Review of the New Penguins
In “When the going got tough” in the Spectator for 16 July 2011, Paul Johnson reviewed the new Penguin edition of eight of Evelyn Waugh’s early works.

Correspondence with Olivia Plunket Greene
Evelyn Waugh was attracted to Olivia Plunket Greene in the 1920s, as described in A Little Learning. She died on 11 November 1958. The next day, 12 November, her mother Gwen wrote to Waugh, and her letter is now in the British Library. Gwen wrote that she had saved all of Waugh's letters to Olivia. She was hospitalized a few weeks after Olivia's death and died in 1959. Harman Grisewood wanted to write a biography of Gwen, and he wrote to her grandson, Alexander Plunket Greene. According to a letter written by Alexander on 21 June 1983, his father Richard Plunket Greene (a friend of Waugh’s) cleaned up after the deaths of Olivia and Gwen and got rid of everything to do with the family. Alexander told Grisewood that none of Gwen's correspondence survived, and that is probably also true of Olivia's, although Alexander did not comment directly. Presumably Waugh’s letters to Olivia are lost. Richard died in 1978 and Alexander in 1990. Alexander's letter is in the Harman Grisewood Papers, Part II, Georgetown University Library's Special Collections, along with several by Olivia and Gwen.

Hat Sale
Leicester Galleries recently sold a painting attributed to Bruno Hat, Still Life with Pears (1929), for £18,750. Hat was supposed to be a German artist, but the exhibition was a hoax. Evelyn Waugh wrote the introduction to the catalogue, “Approach to Hat.” The text appears on the web site of the Leicester Galleries, along with an image of the painting and an explanation of the hoax.

Horizon and Encounter
Complete runs of the periodicals Horizon and Encounter are available at http://www.unz.org, along with various other books, periodicals, videos, and films. Evelyn Waugh contributed to both periodicals, notably in February 1948, when Horizon devoted an entire issue to The Loved One, and in December 1955, when Encounter published “An Open Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Peter Rodd (Nancy Mitford).”

Online Catalog of Evelyn Waugh’s Library
The web site LibraryThing has posted an online catalog of 2752 works in Evelyn Waugh’s library.

Peter Waugh on Alec and Evelyn
In “My life as a Waugh,” published in The Guardian on 25 November 2011, Peter Waugh recalls his father, Alec, and his uncle, Evelyn.

Fathers & Sons on Video
The televised version of Alexander Waugh’s book Fathers & Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004) is available on YouTube, along with links to many other videos related to his grandfather, Evelyn.

The Quest for Alastair Graham
In “Nobody turns up,” published in The Spectator for 17 September 2011, Byron Rogers reviews How to Disappear by Duncan Fallowell. The book is partly about Fallowell’s quest to find Alastair Graham, the reclusive friend of Evelyn Waugh.

How to Disappear was also reviewed, along with the new Penguin edition of Waugh’s Labels, in “How to write about travel” by Toby Lichtig, published in the Times Literary Supplement on 7 December 2011.

Brideshead Day at Castle Howard
Sunday, 25 September 2011 was Brideshead Day at Castle Howard in Yorkshire. The occasion celebrated the 30th anniversary of production of the Granada Television series. The estate provided outdoor tours of locations, a house tour including some rooms not normally open to the public, and screenings of television and movie versions of Brideshead. Dr Christopher Ridgway, curator of Castle Howard, spoke about the filming of Brideshead and, on 27 September, lectured on “Castle Howard and Brideshead: Fact, Fiction and In-Between.” More information is available at http://www.castlehoward.co.uk/DB/Whats-On-View/Brideshead-Revisited---30th-Anniversary-Day.html. An article in the Yorkshire Post, “Three decades on, Brideshead revisited again by historic mansion,” appeared on 12 September.

Producer on TV Brideshead
Derek Granger discussed his production of Brideshead Revisited for Granada Television at the Rayne Theatre in Southgate, London on 27 October 2011. “Producer looks back at classic TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited,” by Mary McConnell, appeared on 26 October in North London Today.

Reviews of Brideshead on Stage
Two reviews of the student production of Brideshead Revisited at Oxford University appeared in Oxford Theatre Review in June 2011.

Boyle on Waugh
American author T. C. Boyle made the following statement:

The first of my heroes who comes to mind on this abundant and richly blooming February morning on the west coast of the U.S.A. is Evelyn Waugh. I initially came across his books as a disaffected, terminally skinny, proto-hippie undergraduate at SUNY Potsdam. I wasn't reading the coursework, but I was devouring what subversive geniuses like Mike Hubinsky were channeling me, and somehow, luckily, I picked up Waugh. It was probably in the college library, a place that smelled of the formaldehyde in the new carpets and the unassailable funk of wisdom concentrated in the ancient books in their new steel stacks. A Handful of Dust is the Waugh title I treasure most. It is very, very wicked--and wickedly funny. Great suffering, hardship, and humiliation descend in cruel waves upon our blameless hero, Tony (remember the chapter called "Hard Cheese on Tony"?), who, in one of the great endings in all literature, winds up the captive of an illiterate madman in the jungles of South America--a madman who insists that Tony read him the complete works of Dickens, over and over and over. And why does this appeal to me? Because it is exactly like real life.

The Best Novel about Journalists (Again)
In “Tom Rachman’s top ten journalist’s tales,” published in The Guardian on 27 July 2011, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh is listed in first place.

One of the Best Essays
“Harry Mount’s top ten essays,” published in The Guardian on 30 November 2011, includes Evelyn Waugh’s “A Call to the Orders” (1938).

Brideshead Regretted
In “Famous for the wrong book,” published in The Guardian for 19 July 2011, John Self argues that Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is inferior to A Handful of Dust. Self mentions several authors often associated with famous but flawed works.

The Value of a Day’s Hunting
“John Mullan’s ten of the best,” published in The Guardian on 2 December 2011, focused on the most memorable hunting scenes in literature and included Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

Not World Book Night
On World Book Night, 23 April 2012, one million copies of twenty-five books will be given away. Evelyn Waugh is not on the list, but according to “A different reading of World Book Night,” published in The Guardian on 28 October 2011, novelist Susan Hill has come up with an alternative list that includes Decline and Fall.

Portrait of Evelyn Waugh
A portrait of Evelyn Waugh can be viewed on the web site of artists Sara Hayward and Paul Powis: http://www.powishayward.co.uk/galleryexample.asp?pic=154&type=portrait&person=sarah

Evelyn Waugh’s Medals
Evelyn Waugh is wearing his medals in a photograph taken on 25 June 1963, when he became a Companion of Literature. The photograph is available at http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/image/398307.html. The medals have been tentatively identified as (right to left) the War Medal, the Defence Medal, the Italy Star, the Africa Star, and the 1939-45 Star. If anyone has more information about these decorations, please contact the editor, jwilson3@lhup.edu.  

St Paul’s, Portman Square
Photographs of the interior and exterior of St Paul’s, Portman Square, where Evelyn Waugh married Evelyn Gardner in 1928, are available at http://library.dts.edu/Pages/TL/Special/whgt.shtml. The photos appear as part of a page devoted to W. H. Griffith Thomas, Vicar of St Paul’s from 1896 to 1905. St Paul’s was torn down in 1970.

The Bright Young People
A gallery of images of the Bright Young People is available at http://thebrightyoungpeople.tumblr.com/archive.

Cecil Beaton Reconsidered
On the web site Culture Kiosque on 23 December 2011, Alan Behr published an article entitled “Cecil Beaton: The Artful Dodger Takes Manhattan.” A contemporary of Evelyn Waugh’s, Beaton is the subject of a new book, Cecil Beaton: The New York Years by Donald Albrecht, and an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York through 20 February 2012.

Plas Dulas Comes to an End
According to “Plas Dulas will make way for 15 homes,” an article by Ian Hughes published in the North Wales Weekly News on 10 November 2011, the building that inspired Llanabba Castle in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall will be demolished. Once known as Arnold House, where Waugh worked as a schoolmaster in the 1920s, Plas Dulas has fallen into disrepair. A photographic tour is available at Urbexforums.

Another Stately Home
Evelyn Waugh was mentioned on the first episode of a new BBC series, The Country House Revealed, which focused on South Wraxall Manor in Wiltshire. A member of the family recalled a visit by Waugh and a warning that he did not like children. The first broadcast was on 10 May 2011.

The episode broadcast on BBC One on 13 July 2011 is devoted to Clandeboye in County Down, Northern Ireland, formerly the seat of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Waugh visited in the early 1930s, and his signature is shown in the guest book.

The Country-House Novel
In a review of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Stranger’s Child, published as “The country house and the English novel” in The Guardian for 11 June 2011, Blake Morrison begins with a meditation on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

Downton Abbey and Highclere Castle
According to “Quiet on the Set! What it’s like to live at the real Downton Abbey” by William Lee Adams, published in Time on 16 January 2012 (52-54), the popular television series is filmed at Highclere Castle, the seat of the Earls of Carnarvon. Evelyn Waugh married two granddaughters of the 4th Earl, whose life seems to have influenced the story of Gervase and Hermione at the beginning of Men at Arms. In Waugh’s correspondence of the early 1930s, “Highclere” is the equivalent of excellent.

Article in The American Conservative
In “A Grief Unobserved,” published in The American Conservative on 18 November 2011, R. L. Stove asks if “Evelyn Waugh’s cruelty cost him his wife—and life?”

Novelists at Arms
In “Novelists at Arms,” published in Standpoint Magazine for January/February 2012, Paul Johnson comments on Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags, Brideshead Revisited, and Sword of Honour, among other works.

Shrewd, Observant, Savagely Judgmental
In “Touring the Ruins of the Old Economy,” a review of Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, published in the New York Times on 26 September 2011, Michiko Kakutani observes that author Michael Lewis “can sound a lot like Evelyn Waugh: shrewd, observant and savagely judgmental, dispensing crude generalizations about other countries, even as he pokes fun at himself as a disaster tourist.”

James Hall Bready, 1918-2011
James Hall Bready, a journalist who covered Evelyn Waugh’s trip to Baltimore in 1949, passed away on 29 October 2011.

Bready wrote “The Friends of Willie: William J. Wiscott’s Room Can Never Hold All of Those Who Wish to Do Him Honor” (Baltimore Sun, 18 November 1951), which describes a meeting between Waugh and Wiscott in 1949.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
Christopher Hitchens passed away on 15 December 2011. He was 62 years old.

A well-known author, Hitchens often referred to Evelyn Waugh. His essay “Evelyn Waugh: The Permanent Adolescent” originally appeared in The Atlantic in May 2003, and it was recently republished in Arguably: Essays (250-64).

Christopher Hitchens is survived by his wife, his ex-wife, two daughters, and one son. His obituary is available in the New York Times.

A Biography of the Demon Don
Adam Sisman has published An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper (Random House, 2011). Trevor-Roper and Evelyn Waugh argued about Church history in the New Statesman in 1953, and Waugh dubbed his opponent “the demon don” (Letters 415). A review of the biography, “The Last Days of Trevor-Roper,” is available at the Washington Monthly.

Evelyn Waugh Society
The Evelyn Waugh Society has 128 members. To join, please visit http://evelynwaughsociety.org.
The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List has 90 members. To join, please visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh.
The Evelyn Waugh Society is also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/evelynwaughsoc.
The Waugh Society is providing RSS feed: http://evelynwaughsociety.org/feed.
And the Waugh Society’s web site has added opportunities for threaded discussions:
http://evelynwaughsociety.org/forums/. 

Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest
The Eighth Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest is sponsored by Evelyn Waugh Studies. Undergraduates in any part of the world are eligible. The editorial board will judge submissions and award a prize of $250. Essays up to 5000 words on any aspect of the life or work of Evelyn Waugh should be submitted to Dr. John H. Wilson, preferably by e-mail at jwilson3@lhup.edu, or by post to Department of English, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA 17745, USA.  The deadline is 31 December 2012.

Intermodernism in Paperback
Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (2009), edited by Kristin Bluemel, has been published in paperback by Edinburgh University Press, and it is available from Columbia University Press for $35 per copy. For a review, see “Utopian Hopes,” by Laura Mooneyham White, EWNS 42.1 (Spring 2011).

Henley Literary Festival
Selina Hastings spoke about Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford at the Henley Literary Festival on 30 September 2011. Daisy Waugh, daughter of Auberon Waugh and granddaughter of Evelyn, spoke about her most recent novel, Last Dance with Valentino, on 2 October 2011.  For more information, see http://www.henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk/hlf_2011_sml.pdf.

Comedian’s Knowledge of Evelyn Waugh Wins Contest
Russell Kane chose the life and novels of Evelyn Waugh as his specialist subject and won BBC TV’s Mastermind on 11 November 2011.

Architecture of Downside Abbey
“Amazing grace,” Colin Amery’s review of Downside Abbey: An Architectural History, edited by Dom Aidan Bellenger, is available at The Spectator.

Inscribed Copy of Decline and Fall
Greyfriars Books of Colchester in England sold a rare copy of Decline and Fall, inscribed to Osbert Sitwell.

Seventieth Anniversary of Crete
Evelyn Waugh was cited in an article by Nigel Richardson, "Crete, Greece: Ghostly soldiers on the Battle of Crete anniversary," published in the Daily Telegraph on 18 May 2011.

Featured in Wikipedia
"Evelyn Waugh" was the featured article on the main page of Wikipedia on 26 May 2011.

Lord Onslow, 1938-2011
Michael William Coplestone Dillon Onslow, the seventh Earl of Onslow, passed away on 14 May 2011.

He was the brother of Lady Teresa Onslow, who became Evelyn Waugh's daughter-in-law by marrying Auberon Waugh in 1961.

Lord Onslow was, as Evelyn Waugh might have remarked, formidably eccentric. He once said "I don't know what Tory policy is on virtually anything. And I'd probably disagree with it even if I did."

His obituary in the New York Times is well worth reading.

Lord Onslow is survived by his sister, his wife, two daughters, and a son, the 8th Earl.

Two Out of One Hundred
Postcards from Penguin: One Hundred Book Covers in One Box ($25 or £14.99) includes two covers of novels by Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies and Black Mischief. Each cover is printed on a postcard.

Born-Again Skeptic
Robert Murray Davis, long-time editor of Waugh Studies, has written a new book of creative nonfiction, Born-Again Skeptic & Other Valedictions, available from Mongrel Empire Press in Norman, Oklahoma.

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End of Evelyn Waugh Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2

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