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Evelyn Waugh: New Directions EVELYN WAUGH: NEW DIRECTIONS Also by Alain Blayac EVELYN WAUGH, ROMANCIER CONTEMPORAIN (1903-1942) EVELYN WAUGH ET A HANDFUL OF DUST EVELYN WAUGH N e\V Directions Edited by Alain Blayac Professor of English University Paul Valery, Montpellier M MACMILLAN Selection, editorial matter and Chapter Six © Alain Blayacl992; Chapters I, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 © Macmillan Academlc and Professional Ltd 1992 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992 978-0-333-53839-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1992 Published by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Evelyn Waugh: New directions. 1. Blayac, Alain 823 ISBN 978-1-349-21805-9 ISBN 978-1-349-21803-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21803-5 To Ariane, Oaudie and Dorothee Contents Acknowledgements viii Notes on the Contributors ix Introduction xi 1 Black Mischief as a Comic Structure Leszek S. Kolek 1 2 Imagined Space in Brideshead Revisited Robert M. Davis 22 3 Arcadian Minutiae: Notes on Brideshead Revisited Jean-Louis Chevalier 35 4 Evelyn Waugh and Vatican Divorce Donat Gallagher 62 5 Evelyn Waugh and the BBC Winnifred M. Bogaards 85 6 Evelyn Waugh and Humour Alain Blayac 112 7 The Being and Becoming of Evelyn Waugh George McCartney 133 Select Bibliography 156 Index 158 vii Acknowledgements The editor and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material: the Written Archives Department of the BBC for the permission to quote from their material; P.A. Doyle for his permission to quote from the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter; Harman Grisewood for permis­ sion to quote from his correspondence; the Harry Ransom Hu­ manities Research Center and the Iconography Collection, University of Texas at Austin, for their permission to use material from their files; Rayner Heppenstall for his permission to quote from his Journals; Little, Brown and Co. (Boston) for the permission to quote from Brideshead Revisited; G. McCartney and Indiana University Press for permission to use material from Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition, (BlOOmington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987); the Peters, Fraser and Dunlop Group for permission to quote from the writings of Evelyn Waugh; Auberon Waugh on behalf of the Evelyn Waugh Trust and the Laura Waugh estate. viii Notes on the Contributors Alain Blay.c, President of ~~ d'Etudes Ang1aises Contempo­ raines (SEAq, wrote his doctoral thesis on Evelyn Waugh. He has published essays on Bennett, Waugh, Joyce, Lawrence and Valery in French, English and American magazines. His research cur­ rently focuses on British fiction, culture and mentalities. He teaches at the University Paul Valery, Montpellier. Winnifred M. Bogaards is a Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick in St John, Canada. One of the compilers of A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh (Whitston, 1986), her research interests are primarily in British and Canadian prose fiction. Jean-Louis Olevalier is a Professor of English at the University of Caen. After his doctoral thesis on Denton Welch, he specialised in nineteenth and twentieth century literature. He has published articles on Sterne, Dickens Virginia Woolf, Orwell and A.S. Byatt and has translated Arnold, Yeats, Katherine Raine and Iris Murdoch among others. Robert M. Davis is the author of Evelyn Waugh, Writer (Pilgrim, 1981), editor of Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice (Pilgrim, 1985) and author of seven other books on modem authors. He has written more than eighty critical and bibliographical essays. He is now Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Donat Gallagher has published numerous critical and biblio­ graphical essays on Waugh. One of the compilers of A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh (Whitston, 1986), he has also edited The EsSllYs, Reviews and Articles of Evelyn Waugh (Methuen, 1983). He teaches at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia. Leszek S. Kolek specialises in the theory and history of literature (British fiction, modes and genres, semiotic approaches to literary theory). His doctoral thesis was entitled 'Evelyn Waugh's Writ­ ings: From Joke to Comic Fiction'. He teaches at the Marie Curie- ix x Notes on Contributors Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, and currently works on semiotics and poetics. George McCartney teaches at St John's University in New York City. His articles ,have appeared in various publications, including the National Review and The American Scholar. Parts of his essay have been adapted from his book, Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987). Introduction I discovered long ago that the most satisfactory research - from a sentim~nta1 standpoint at least - must always link people sharing common ideas and principles. Several years of studying in France, England and America allowed me to meet a number of Waugh scholars, some of whom in the course of time became my friends. From then on it was not difficult to find collaborators for a project born of our admiration for Evelyn Waugh. We all shared the idea that such an enterprise should explore new directions and take into account recent critical trends. I then decided to juxtapose biographical essays on essential - but little-known or badly dis­ torted - aspects of the writer's private and professional life with more literary approaches. At the same time, I wanted to bring together critics from the whole international community of Waugh studies: Winnifred Bogaards (Canada), Donat Gallagher (Australia), Robert M. Davis and George McCartney (USA) for the 'New' continents, Leszek Kolek (Poland), J.L. Chevalier and myself (France) for the old. The team thus composed would make me think I've been true to my ambitions, were it not for the absence of a British contributor - the result of a last-minute (and much deplored) impediment - and for the obligation to leave aside so many eligible specialists. Bogaards and Gallagher proposed biographical essays, the rest of us decided on more literary articles. Professor Bogaards traces with her usual rigour the passionate, tempestuous - and barely known - relationship of Evelyn Waugh with the BBC. In the process she discloses scores of new elements of that venture and provides fresh insights into complicated deal­ ings that lasted for some thirty-odd years. Her expertise, her relentless pursuit of the facts, and the systematic use she made of all the sources available combine to present what is, in my view, the definitive account of this facet of Waugh's life. Her account offers us lively portraits of the writer, his interlocutors and of the developing BBC. Donat Gallagher, whose Essays, Reviews and Articles of Evelyn Waugh was a landmark in Waugh studies, delves into a subject which no one could disentangle better than he - Vatican legal xi xii Introduction procedures. His 'Evelyn Waugh and Vatican Divorce' exposes the cliches and misconceptions that still encumber this most contro­ versial issue. Written 'in the interests of accurate biography', it sets right the ungrounded arguments that the annulment was a 'Catholic legal fiction', clarifies the nature of a divorce often thought fishy and indissolubly linked with 'privilege' in people's minds. In the course of his demonstration, Gallagher analyses the arcana of Guglielmo Marconi's and the Duke of Marlborough's divorces, draws on a variety of testimonies, gives a detailed chron­ icle of the facts of the divorce and explains the complex rules of canon law. Gallagher concludes that Waugh was 'moderately lucky' to gain his decree of nullity. George McCartney situates Waugh in the intellectual and aes­ thetic contexts of his times. He relates the novelist's writings to the battle of ideas about Bergson's philosophy so heartily combated by Wyndham Lewis. He underlines Lewis's misreadings and demon­ strates that Waugh adhered to the ideas of Bergson for whom the ceaseless process of evolutionary growth (Becoming) is a reality while the timeless Being of the essentialist philosophers remains a pure fictional construct. According to Waugh, life eludes our static categories. McCartney's essay, starting from an analysis of Picabia's and Ernst's paintings as metaphors of the modem world, offers a stimulating approach to Waugh's writings, while a minute analysis of futurism is linked with his Christian commitment. It finally provides Helena with a new status, and pleads for Evelyn Waugh's place as a major thinker and aesthete of his time. Robert M. Davis's 'Imagined Space in Brideshead Revisited' bril­ liantly analyses the underlying structural unity of the novel. It examines Charles Ryder's position and contrasts the problem of a mature narrator who is sometimes uncharitable and often un­ pleasant with the immature and moving actor. The essay centers not only on the 'now and then', but also the 'here and there', space being for Charles divisible into circumscribed and mutually exclu­ sive areas. In the course of his study, Davis shows how Ryder has matured learning to see all places and actions in light of a larger purpose, eventually being able to 'fit together the tiny bits - artist, lover, soldier - into a whole, Captain Charles Ryder'. As I said before, I wished the volume to reflect the development of Waugh studies throughout the world and desired to include scholars from non-English-speaking countries whose works de­ served a wider audience.
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