EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 43, No. 3 Winter 2013

“Something Entirely Unique”: Evelyn Waugh’s 1948-49 Tours of North America, Part 1, Planning and Fact-finding Jeffrey Manley John McGinty, Loyola-Notre Dame Library

1. Introduction

After World War II, Evelyn Waugh became a fairly frequent traveler to the United States. In some respects these trips were escapes from the bleak austerity of postwar England. But these travels, like those of the 1930s, also made meaningful contributions to Waugh’s writings.

The first trip in 1947 is the best known, described by Robert Murray Davis in Mischief in the Sun: The Making and Unmaking of The Loved One (1999). That trip did not achieve its goal, the filming of Brideshead Revisited. It did, however, result in Waugh’s articles on the U.S. film and funeral industries as well as The Loved One. The final trip in autumn 1950 was brief (eighteen days) and was sponsored by his U.S. publisher to promote the release of Helena.[1]

The two tours in between, one at the end of 1948 and the other early in 1949, were the most extensive made by Waugh in the USA. Together they totaled about four months including transatlantic passages. Both tours involved research for a projected article (and possibly a book) on Roman Catholicism in America. The commissioning of that article as well as the sponsorship of the tours is frequently attributed to the Time-Life Corporation. But the original inspiration for the tours came from correspondence between Waugh and Father Francis X. Talbot, SJ, the President of what was then Loyola College in Baltimore. Waugh himself came up with the idea of the article based on the tours.[2]

2. Planning: Waugh-Talbot Correspondence

Fr. Talbot came to Loyola after World War II with an impressive record of literary achievement in New York and U.S. Roman Catholic literary circles in the 1920s and 1930s. He had edited the Jesuit intellectual quarterly America, had organized the Catholic Book Club, had founded the Catholic Poetry Society, and had written several books of his own, including histories of Jesuit missionaries to American Indians.

Fr. Talbot’s correspondence with Waugh began by proposing an honorary degree from Loyola. Fr. Talbot had long fought censorship by Roman Catholic critics and publications. He preferred free circulation of writings that some considered offensive to Catholic beliefs, and he thought intelligent believers could decide on their merits. Fr. Talbot felt that Loyola’s award of an honorary degree to a controversial writer would send a message to the obscurantist wing of the Catholic Church in the USA.

Fr. Talbot’s selection of Waugh may have been influenced by friendship with Robert Wilberforce, a British official he had met in New York before 1944. Wilberforce was then the director-librarian of the British Information Service in New York.[3] An Oxford graduate and Roman Catholic, he had held diplomatic positions, including attaché in the British Legation to the Vatican. He apparently knew Waugh well enough to pass on Fr. Talbot’s proposal of an honorary degree.

In response to Wilberforce, Waugh wrote to Fr. Talbot on 29 October 1947 and agreed to accept the honorary degree subject to two caveats. Under austerity measures then in force, Waugh would be unable to travel in person to collect the degree to be awarded in December 1947 in conjunction with Fr. Talbot’s installation as President. In his second reservation, Waugh hit upon the very reason Fr. Talbot had chosen him:

Secondly, I am in some doubt about the propriety of my acceptance. Would not the rank of Doctor of Loyola give me and my work an official status which we are far from deserving? I am essentially a lay writer and a writer for a strictly limited type of reader. I do not seek to address all the faithful and though, pray God, I shall never say anything contrary to Faith or Morals, I am bound I think from time to time to cause offense to certain Catholics. How far would you feel yourself compromised or your trust betrayed if one day there was an outcry about something I wrote and critics could say: ‘He is a Doctor of Loyola College’? To take a concrete case I have a story appearing shortly which is bound to shock numbers of good people. It deals with the lives of morticians in a Los Angeles mortuary in a gruesome way. It points no moral. The theme is to put in a macabre and fantastic setting the Anglo-American cultural impasse. Would a work of this kind become a Doctor of Loyola? I leave the verdict to you.[4]

Fr. Talbot replied almost as soon as Waugh’s letter arrived. He assured Waugh that he had no problem with the content of Waugh’s novels: in fact, Fr. Talbot had invited Waugh because of what he had written. The honorary degree was reaffirmation of “the right of a Catholic writer to express himself as his inspiration demanded; the only limitation on a Catholic writer was that of Faith and Morals…. Your writing may have been censured and criticized. We at Loyola wish to give testimony to the Catholicism we find in them.” Concerning Waugh’s reservations about The Loved One, Fr. Talbot noted that he had read Waugh’s Life magazine article about Forest Lawn cemetery; rather than finding anything objectionable, he deemed it useful criticism of “vicious paganism” (letter of 7 November 1947). Later he obtained an advance copy of The Loved One and came to the same conclusion (letter of 14 May 1948). As for Waugh’s travel problems, Fr. Talbot offered two alternatives. Permission might be given for Waugh to deliver a series of lectures arranged by Loyola in the USA. If that was not agreeable, the degree could be accepted by proxy. Waugh responded by cable agreeing to the proxy. As for the lecture tour, he wrote immediately after the cable and reserved judgment (letter of 13 November 1947):

It is most thoughtful of you to suggest my lecturing. Hitherto I have refused invitations fearing I have nothing to say which could interest a miscellaneous audience. A specifically Catholic and educated audience would be another matter. Perhaps in the new year I might be able to visit the Eastern States which I do not, & should much like to, know.

Waugh enclosed a “small token” of appreciation for the honorary degree: the corrected page proofs of Brideshead Revisited.

Fr. Talbot’s installation ceremony went forward in December 1947 with the conferring of the honorary degree. Waugh was represented by Fr. Martin D’Arcy, his spiritual instructor prior to conversion in 1930. In March 1948, Fr. Talbot returned to the proposed lecture tour and offered help to organize it. Two weeks later Waugh made a more specific proposal (letter of 10 April 1948):

I would very much like to visit the United States in the autumn and could, I think, compose two lectures which might interest educated Catholics–one on the rather special position of the Church in England where our problems are different in many ways from those in the rest of Europe, and a rather more provocative one on the functions of the Catholic writer, applying Newman’s principles enunciated in his “Idea of a University” to modern conditions. As I wrote originally my aim will not be to make money but simply to cover comfortable living expenses for myself and if possible for my wife also. By our rather odd laws I am not permitted to spend the royalties earned there by my books but I am allowed to spend what I earn by lecturing.

Fr. Talbot got to work with contacts in Catholic intellectual circles to arrange Waugh’s lecture tour. In a letter to Waugh a little over a month later, he proposed twelve lectures with a total fee of $3000 to be paid in advance--$300 per lecture or $500 for two lectures at the same venue. Loyola College could organize the tour or turn it over to a professional agency. Of Waugh’s two proposed topics, Fr. Talbot preferred the Catholic writer in the modern world. The Church in England compared with that in Europe might interest some but would be too narrow to appeal to a general audience. Fr. Talbot suggested that the literary lecture not be limited to Catholic writers to attract non-Catholics as well. While Waugh accepted his recommendation to drop the first topic, he ignored Fr. Talbot’s suggestion to include non-Catholic writers. The subject of the lecture was “Three Catholic Writers: Graham Greene, Ronald Knox and G. K. Chesterton,” all of whom were, like Waugh, English converts to Roman Catholicism.[5]

In a letter dated 17 June 1948, Waugh replied with a more specific proposal for travel arrangements based on Fr. Talbot’s advice:

I have had several highly remunerative offers to give general lectures in America. That is not what I want at all. I don’t seek to make any money. Nor do I want publicity. What I want to do is to get to know American Catholics. It is plain that for the next few centuries the history of the Church is going to depend, under God, on your country. As you well know the Church in any country shows certain national characteristics. So it is very important that European Catholics shall understand the particular characteristics of American Catholicism. I am coming to the United States to learn, not to teach. But I wish to pay my way by telling you something about us and our particular qualities. I shall explain also that by long and deplorable habit my “way” is a luxurious one. I don’t want to take a penny out of America but I want to travel and live there in fat style. I think that defines the aim.

Waugh added that his time in the USA should be about two months, and that the territory would be roughly restricted to that between Boston and New Orleans. He wanted to spend at least three days at each stop to learn and listen, and he preferred an audience of six rather than 600, since his aim was not to earn money.

After a month, Fr. Talbot responded that the best course was to speak at a number of Catholic colleges. Audiences of 1000 were needed to cover Waugh’s expenses. By that point (13 July 1948), Fr. Talbot said, it was too late to organize a tour in the autumn. In response, Waugh agreed to lecture in February-March 1949 before larger audiences at Catholic institutions (thinking it daunting to try to interest 1000 listeners). He stressed his intention to speak exclusively about Catholic writers (mentioning Graham Greene and Georges Bernanos) unless Fr. Talbot thought that might be too abstruse.

3. Arrival in 1948

Waugh had begun to talk to Life magazine about sponsorship of a separate fact-finding tour to research an article about the Roman Catholic Church in America. Waugh first mentions this trip in a letter to a Life editor dated 3 September 1948, but he apparently arranged for Randolph Churchill to propose this project to Clare Boothe Luce. Mrs. Luce, unlike her husband, the chairman and founder of Time-Life, was a Roman Catholic convert. Randolph knew the Luces through work on his father’s memoirs, serialized in Life beginning in April 1948. He may have been in New York to work on that very project. Once Waugh learned from Fr. Talbot that the lecture tour would be postponed to 1949, he started to plan for the fact-finding mission at Life’s expense.

The 1948 trip took place in November and December. Waugh arrived in New York on 6 November. He traveled by himself, and he left a record in letters home, as he did not in 1949, when accompanied by his wife.[6] He spent most of his time in New York but made several excursions from his base at the Plaza Hotel. Waugh had a busy schedule. He was entertained by the Luces, lunched with a young Irish-American Catholic novelist, Harry Sylvester, and Catholic social worker Dorothy Day, and dined at the “railroad flat” of Anne Fremantle in Lower Manhattan, where he met for the first time and rather liked W. H. Auden. He also met his brother Alec, who was living in New York. Edith and Osbert Sitwell were in New York, as were Stuart Preston and Cecil Beaton, and Waugh seems to have had contact with them as well, although he professed in a letter to have tried to avoid the Sitwells. He also met W. Colston Leigh, a professional lecture agent; Fr. Talbot had decided that management of the tour was beyond Loyola College.[7]

4. Boston

Waugh went to Boston on 15 November and stayed until the 18th. He visited his publisher, Little, Brown, and stopped at Boston College, where he attended a creative-writing class reported in the student newspaper, The Heights (19 November 1948, 1, 8).[8] Waugh said he preferred to write by hand rather than typewriter, since that facilitated revision as he went along. He usually wrote two complete drafts before publication, made no advance plan, and simply sat down to write chapter by chapter. He emphasized that a writer should “know his language thoroughly … and be especially familiar with the ‘etymology of each word that he uses so that he will know its true derivation and meaning, rather than its colloquial shadings.’” The finished product should have words strung together to form a melodious pattern. In response to questions, Waugh explained that The Loved One originated in California’s modern paganism and people without roots. When asked why he withdrew Brideshead from the filming process, he explained that Hollywood producers were

‘horrified’ that he should want the essence of the story kept intact. ‘The Marchmain family, I hope, represent a normal Catholic family facing the modern world. Cordelia is the good Catholic woman standing up against all obstacles; Sebastian is the youth assailed by temptation—in this case, alcoholism.’[9]

Anne Ford, Little, Brown’s head of public relations, helped Waugh with arrangements and described the Boston visit several years later on the occasion of Waugh’s death.[10] Her brother, a priest at BC, gave Waugh a tour of the college. At Waugh’s request, Anne Ford organized a meeting in Cambridge with Fr. Leonard Feeney, an eccentric Roman Catholic priest. She warned Waugh that Feeney, an old friend of her family, seemed not quite himself. One of Feeney’s disciples told her that the meeting was “explosive”: Feeney declared that Ronald Knox’s The Mass in Slow Motion was “obscene.”[11]

After Fr. Feeney, Waugh met Maurice Bowra for lunch at Eliot House, an undergraduate residence at Harvard; Bowra was a visiting professor. Bowra invited two graduate students and Eliot House tutors, Howard E. Hugo and John Conway, to join him and Waugh in his rooms for drinks before lunch. Waugh had expressed interest in talking with “younger academicians, as yet uncorrupted by the system.” Both students recalled the meeting twenty-five years later in Harvard Magazine. According to Hugo, they discussed Waugh’s assessment of Fr. Feeney and consumed a bottle of brandy and a bottle of sherry. Waugh could not face lunch in the Eliot House dining hall and preferred to retire to a drugstore lunch counter, “where they make those delicious fried egg sandwiches.” The two Englishmen proceeded up Dunster Street. Although Bowra had warned the tutors of Waugh’s potential rudeness and had told them to leave immediately if he turned nasty, Conway recalled that the meeting

couldn’t have been pleasanter. They were in fact putting on an act for two young tutors who, although experienced in the ways of the world, had not reached the shores of depravity that Bowra and Waugh explored or invented. They did their act superbly. It was like seeing Gielgud and Richardson do an impromptu. Or, to use another image, like watching two Baroque fountains sparkling and playing on a summer day.[12]

Waugh and Bowra explored the sights of Boston’s North Shore, in a hired car with driver arranged by Anne Ford at the expense of Little, Brown (Letters 292). Ford describes a dinner party for Waugh at her home in suburban Brookline, where she lived with her mother. Before dinner, Waugh spotted an autographed Red Sox baseball bat in a corner and exclaimed, “Good God, one could strike a lethal blow with that. Whatever is it for?” After an explanation, he hefted the bat and shook his head. In preparation, Ford’s mother had started to read The Loved One but could not finish it. During the meal, she blurted out “Whatever made you write that dreadful book…? I’ve started it and it frightens me.” Looking distressed, Waugh said, “Please Mrs. Ford, promise me you won’t finish it.” She agreed and asked that he write a “good Catholic book.” According to Ford, “he promised then and there he’d write one,” probably with Helena in mind.

Mrs. Ford was an Irish immigrant who had no experience with wine, and Anne had told her to order the best white wine available. They were having chicken, and Waugh was a connoisseur. S. S. Pierce (the Fortnum and Mason of Boston in those days) sent two bottles of Chateau d’Yquem, the “best” or at least the most expensive white wine (although perhaps a bit sweet for an ordinary chicken dinner). Waugh professed to enjoy it (correctly identifying vineyard and vintage) and promised to reciprocate with the same wine when Mrs. Ford visited him. A few years later at Piers Court, she and Anne enjoyed Waugh’s Chateau d’Yquem. Mrs. Ford’s expertise in wine inspired ironic comments from Waugh in correspondence with Anne Ford. Ford also describes dinner with Waugh in a Boston restaurant and a visit to the Cambridge home of John and Mary Ryan (later mentioned in Life magazine with a photograph of the family).[13] At both he was on his best behavior. At the restaurant, he wanted the music to be turned off, but Ford pointed out that others enjoyed it. She advised him to take cigars to the Ryans, who were unlikely to have any. Waugh had already decided not to smoke, since Mrs. Ryan was pregnant. The meeting with the Ryans was “homely and cozy”; similarly, the dinner party at Ford’s home was “like a gathering of family and friends during a holiday season, [where] he seemed just like one of the family, regaling us with stories of his children.” Ford’s relationship with Waugh continued for several years, and she “never observed … any of the didoes the press used to make so much of, often cruelly and uncharitably.”[14]

5. Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, and New Orleans

From Boston, Waugh traveled to Baltimore, where he met Fr. Talbot and connected with Catholic institutions (19-24 November). The details of that visit as well as his second Baltimore visit on the lecture tour are discussed in a separate paper.

Waugh’s next stop was Cincinnati, where he visited the Catholic women’s school, Grailville, in nearby Loveland on 25-26 November. He includes a detailed discussion of this institution in “American Epoch.” Grailville accepted women from ages twenty to thirty. Groups of thirty or so

from widely differing social origins are … intensively trained in the ‘lay apostolate’…. Strenuous rural pursuits, periods of silence, plain dressing, liturgical devotion prepare them for life in the world as wives or workers. Their number is minute…. It is seldom in gigantic rallies and conventions that great ends are achieved. There are the mustard seeds of the parable.[15]

Grailville was patterned on similar institutions in Holland and cost $400-$700 per year in tuition. It survives as a conference center, but the women’s school seems to have disappeared.

Waugh proceeded to Louisville, where he visited Thomas Merton, a monk at the nearby Abbey of Gethsemani, 27-28 November.[16] How he traveled is not clear. Waugh said that a Life functionary had arranged travel from Cincinnati to Louisville via Washington, DC. That must have been a flight.[17] Waugh arrived at night after everyone had gone to bed. In the morning, Merton noticed how short Waugh was and how he complained about the heat in the house where he was staying. Merton recalled an elaborate scheme to deliver Waugh to an airport at the end of his visit, presumably in Louisville.

After Merton, Waugh flew to New Orleans. Waugh was interested in Louisiana and Maryland, where Catholics were the original European settlers. According to Merton, Waugh should have arrived in New Orleans by air from Louisville on 29 November. As Waugh wrote to Laura, however, a flight was cancelled, and he was stuck overnight in a “beastly town” (presumably Louisville or perhaps some intermediate point) until another flight could be found. Waugh probably did not arrive in New Orleans until 30 November. He threatened to break (or actually broke) the windows in his room at the Pontchartrain Hotel. He was asked to move to a different hotel, and on 1 December 1948, he wrote letters on the stationery of the Roosevelt Hotel.[18] Waugh told his wife that he was not enjoying the trip, “tho I have had some amusing experiences notably staying with Grail maidens (most embarrassing) and Trappist monks. I had a long talk with Thomas Merton.”[19] He had made a great effort to see the best-selling novelist and Catholic convert Frances Parkinson Keyes, who was “absolutely lionized [?]” in New Orleans. Waugh sent Laura the autograph of Mrs. Keyes, her favorite novelist.[20] In a letter to Waugh dated 5 December 1948, Keyes regretted her inability to see him due to illness. Whether Waugh met Keyes before he left New Orleans is not known, but the autograph for Laura may well be that on Keyes’s letter.[21]

6. New York

Waugh was back in New York in early December; he probably arrived on the 8th. In a letter dated 10 December, he told Laura he would visit the “ancestral seat” of the Vincent Astors (next door to Mrs. Roosevelt) on the 11th. This is probably the Ferncliff estate near Rhinebeck, NY. Waugh described staying in a pavilion near the site of a stately house that had been pulled down. The “pavilion” would be the Ferncliff Casino, a 40,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts structure designed by Stanford White and built in 1904 to resemble the Grand Trianon Palace at Versailles. Waugh complained that Vincent Astor seemed not to like him, but Astor’s second wife, “Minnie,” explained that her husband had been despondent since his dog had died.[22]

On 19-20 December, Waugh made a side trip to Philadelphia, stopping in Princeton to see Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain. He was driven by an old friend from Oxford days, Anne Fremantle (nee Jackson): he had re-established contact upon his initial arrival in New York with information furnished by Martin D’Arcy.[23] In her memoir, Fremantle says she arranged the meeting with Maritain but it did not go well. The only thing Maritain and Waugh had in common was religion, and they got into the politics of the Spanish Civil War and strongly disagreed. Waugh and Fremantle continued from Princeton to Philadelphia through a snowstorm. They stayed in Radnor with Henry Clifford, a friend of Fremantle. Clifford (1904-1974) was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as a collector of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. By the morning after their arrival, nineteen and a half inches of snow had accumulated. His host offered Waugh rubber galoshes to keep his feet dry, but Waugh expected someone to sweep the snow off the walks.[24]

During his long stay in New York, Waugh used the extensive research facilities of Time, Inc. to prepare to write “American Epoch.” The Life staffer in charge of satisfying Waugh’s demands was Jeanne Perkins Harman. She wrote her memoirs (Such is Life, 1956), and her recollections of Waugh are overwhelmingly positive. Waugh was unable to exhaust his generous expense account, so he asked if she would like “a little something from Cartier’s.” As the high point of his New York visit, Time-Life held a dinner in Waugh’s honor. After the meal, he addressed the high brass and asked who was in charge: “Which one of you fires the other?” According to Harman, “as soon as elemental good manners would allow, one tycoon after another beat his retreat. I understand some sort of record for an early adjournment was made.” Waugh was “anything but unpleasant…. If the truth be known, he wasn’t even difficult very often.” After some initial teasing of the staff assigned to him, “Mr. Waugh subsided into what I’m sure he would hate most being called—a thoroughly nice, thoughtful gentleman.” Harman recalls only one matter of irritation, when Waugh was denied access to the dossier kept on him in Time-Life files. He succeeded in circumventing the refusal, and after reading his file “emerged from his office sputtering: ‘What utter nonsense! What rubbish! Where did you get this stuff? Out of a pumpkin?’” He was referring, not for the last time, to stories about microfilm copies of espionage records secreted in a pumpkin by Whittaker Chambers, a former senior editor of Time Magazine. It was sensitive to mention a disgraced employee of Time-Life: “to hear it booming out in the halls was the equivalent of swearing in the middle of a sermon…. All breathed easier when Waugh sailed back to England…. Contrary to predictions, Mr. Waugh did not bring out a book about Time, Inc., done in the style of The Loved One, although he may still” (Harman 4-6).

When Waugh completed the article and sent it to Life, he wrote to Clare Boothe Luce. He hoped it would not “disappoint the editors because they were so generous to me—I don’t mean simply in paying handsomely, though they did that too, but in their welcome and support in the whole tour, even to the supply of medical aid when I was ill.”[25] Waugh refers to treatment he received from Time-Life medical staff for a boil he suffered shortly after arrival in 1948.

7. Departure and Interview

Waugh’s departure for England was delayed by a dock strike in New York. He departed on 22 December, so he missed Christmas at home. He had too many presents to travel by plane and was unwilling to arrive empty-handed. In a letter dated 21 December, he told Laura he would arrive in England on the 28th and asked her to have the Christmas tree ready to be trimmed on New Year’s Day, the custom in Scotland.[26]

On this 1948 trip, Waugh wanted to avoid publicity and to concentrate on researching the Catholic Church in America. Few reporters covered his U.S. travels. Unfortunately for Waugh, however, at the very end, he agreed to be interviewed. He described the reporter as a “very young lady,” and she seems to have represented one of the London papers, possibly the Evening Standard, since their story appeared on 30 December 1948 and seems to predate others.[27] Waugh recalled mostly lecturing her about monasticism; the reporter seems to have ignored his main subject. Picked up from wire services, the story appeared in New York papers on 31 December 1948 under a London dateline. It started with a quote from Waugh: “it is almost impossible for a man to live the good life” in America. Waugh said he would return in the new year to deliver a series of lectures at $550 each (over $5200 in 2012 dollars). He is quoted as complaining that Americans “heat their rooms to 75 degrees, then they nail their windows down so that you suffocate. They have colored bubble gum. Their radios are on all day. And they talk too much” (New York Times, 31 December 1948). A few days later, the down-market but more popular New York Daily News, having at first passed on the story, published an editorial chastising Waugh for unfair criticism. Repeating the quote that had appeared in the Times, the Daily News concluded:

Evelyn Waugh, who looks like an indignant White Leghorn … has got his name in the papers [again] by reviving that old pre-Marshall Plan tradition, whereby British novelists were obliged to take our filthy Ameddican money, and then sail back to England and announce what revolting heels we provincials are.

…[A]s we see it, if Evelyn wants to insult us, he’ll have to do better than that. Every one of those bitter indictments is moderately true—but it just isn’t news. If you want our good clubladies [sic] to attend your next lecture, Evie boy, you’ll have to get up a new song and dance that’s brighter and much funnier.[28]

8. Piers Court Interlude

At home in England, Waugh wrote an article that appeared in the U.S. Roman Catholic fortnightly lay journal Commonweal and tried to explain this interview: “It so happens that I like visiting America, love and respect countless Americans, and, knowing their particular sensitiveness, take pains not to make the kind of criticisms of them that I would make of any other nation, most of all my own.”[29] By the time his apology appeared in the 11 March 1949 issue, however, the lecture tour was almost over, and it was too late to do much good. The quotes from the 1948 interview (especially about overheated rooms) were to follow him around the USA, reappearing in various local papers wherever he lectured. Although Waugh may have been embarrassed by his remarks, wide circulation of the story promoted the sale of tickets to lectures more effectively than all the public relations of the agency and sponsors. There is no such thing as bad publicity for a celebrity tour.

Waugh spent January 1949 mostly at Piers Court. He wrote a favorable review of a collection of short stories by the young American writer J. F. Powers. This review was published in the UK Catholic periodical the Month in March 1949. Waugh mentioned the works of other Catholic writers he had met on his 1948 tour, Thomas Merton and Harry Sylvester.[30] He was to meet Powers on the lecture tour that was about to begin.

9. Arrival in 1949

The Waughs arrived in New York on 24 January 1949.[31] Waugh left no record of the 1949 trip in letters, diary, or travel writing. When he left for the 1948 fact-finding tour, he stopped keeping his diary and did not take it up again until 1952. Laura was with him in 1949, so there were no letters home. If he wrote letters to friends or family, they have not been published. Why Waugh never wrote a nonfiction, book-length account of his U.S. travels is a mystery. His multiple trips to the USA were inspired to some extent by those of earlier English novelists, Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. These predecessors both left extensive memoirs and fiction describing their travels.[32] Waugh did write The Loved One and several articles based on U.S. trips. Moreover, works written after his U.S. travels describe characters and actions informed by experience. The Time-Life publication Fortune is one of the American magazines given to Mme. Kanyi in “Compassion,” with disastrous consequences.[33] Waugh also refers to clothes acquired in America, and he places Parsnip and Pimpernell in the Twin Cities in Basil Seal Rides Again.

It is nevertheless odd that Waugh never collected material from his trips (which altogether took nearly six months between 1947 and 1950) in a travel book, as he did after other extended travels. He was anxious about money in the early 1950s, as royalties on Brideshead and The Loved One began to run out. Waugh suggested that research on the Catholic Church in America might be expanded into a book but never seems to have started one.[34] Even the text of the lecture was never turned into a published essay. All that survives are two sets of notes in his papers at the University of Texas.[35] The lectures predated portable tape recorders and smart phones, and, so far as we have been able to determine, no one ever made a sound recording or transcription, although there was an unsigned summary of a lecture in the April 1949 issue of Books on Trial.[36] Today a video is often posted on YouTube before a celebrity leaves the lectern.

Perhaps because Waugh left few details of his 1949 journey, biographers have not been able to assemble an accurate, detailed account.[37] Martin Stannard made an effort but, lacking any formal itinerary or travel diary, he inevitably leaves details out and sometimes assembles what he managed to collect in the wrong order. Stannard says the tour began with two lectures in New York, whereas we have found only one scheduled at the beginning, with the second toward the end; he says that Waugh visited Thomas Merton on the 1949 as well as the 1948 tour, but Merton’s letters and diaries indicate that the only visit took place in 1948; he asserts that Waugh traveled directly from Milwaukee to New Orleans, whereas it was the other way around via several stops. Stannard also leaves out the lectures in Washington, South Bend, Mobile, Springfield, Providence, and St. Paul. Selina Hastings gets similarly confused about his itinerary (536). Both biographers refer to anecdotes about visits to Windsor, Ontario and Milwaukee, typical descriptions of Waugh’s bad behavior at some stops. Both biographers leave the impression that Waugh adopted a scorched-earth policy of indelible rudeness on his progress through eastern America. In fact, those who met him usually found his behavior perfectly acceptable, if not impeccable, and in some cases enjoyable.

Our research, with the help of librarians and archivists at universities and colleges where Waugh lectured, is intended to fill the gaps in biographies and to offset descriptions of Waugh’s appalling behavior. We have turned up sixteen lectures in thirteen cities between 2 February and 20 March 1949. That is an average of one lecture every three days, consistent with Waugh’s proposal. Gaps of more than three days occur at several points on the trip. There may be other lectures that have not turned up. We will keep looking and hope that our readers will do likewise. The stops on the 1949 tour are described in Part 2 of this paper.

Notes [1] Waugh also stopped in New York and Washington on the way to Mexico in 1938 to research Robbery Under Law (in the USA, Mexico, An Object Lesson). He complained about heat in New York City and remarked that the train might have been better than the ship he took from New York to Mexico: we have found no other record of his impressions of the USA from 1938. [2] What follows relating to Fr. Talbot and his role in Waugh’s lecture tour is largely summary of “Evelyn Waugh in Baltimore: 1948 and 1949” by Nicholas Varga, late archivist of Loyola- Notre Dame Library, Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 19.1 and 19.2 (Spring and Autumn 1985). Varga drew on correspondence between Talbot and Waugh in the Loyola-Notre Dame Library archives as well as his own research, experience, and contacts in Baltimore; we make no claim to original scholarship regarding plans for the tours. Quotes from correspondence between Waugh and Fr. Talbot are from Varga’s essays. [3] Robert Francis Wilberforce (1887-1988) was chief religious propagandist and librarian at the British Information Service in New York’s Rockefeller Center in the early 1940s. He is said to have supervised Isaiah Berlin at the BIS before Berlin moved to the British Embassy in Washington during World War II. [4] Full texts of the letters between Waugh and Fr. Talbot are in Varga’s essays in EWN. [5] The title of the lecture varies from place to place, but the subject was always the same. [6] Eight letters from Waugh to his wife, dated from 4 November to 21 December 1948, are archived in the Evelyn Waugh Papers at the British Library: Manuscripts, Add. 81708. [7] Leigh died in 1992, but the Leigh Bureau continues to provide services for celebrity lecture tours. Unfortunately, they do not preserve records from 1949 and could not provide details of Waugh’s tour. [8] In a letter to his wife, 20 November 1948, Waugh mistakenly places this session at Loyola College, Baltimore, not at BC. Letters, 290. [9] Waugh may have believed that he vetoed the movie, but Professor Davis shows that the studio decided independently not to proceed (Mischief in the Sun, 30-55). [10] “Evelyn Waugh: The Loved One Revisited,” Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, 26 June 1966: 11-16. [11] Waugh’s own description of the meeting is in his Letters (292-93). [12] Howard E. Hugo, “Harvardiana: Vile Bodies,” Harvard Magazine, January-February, 1978, 94, and letter of John Conway, March-April, 1978, 93. Jeffrey Heath in The Picturesque Prison (1982) refers to the article about Harvard, mentioning Hugo’s recollection of “antiphonal exchanges” between Waugh and Bowra, such as “How too, too depraved, how sick-making, how utterly too much, now really” (49). Heath interprets this example as Waugh’s love of “witty, allusive conversation and … endless (but stylish) gossip.” As remarked, however, in the next issue of the magazine, it seems unlikely that Waugh would have spoken in this 1920s fashion in 1948. Hugo recalled that Waugh had preferred lunch in “one of those splendid apothecary shops,” but Conway insisted that Waugh had used the term “drug store.” [13] “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church,” Life, 19 September 1949, 150. [14] One would not expect negative comments about Waugh’s behavior from his publisher’s public-relations director. Ford does, however, describe Waugh’s clothes as suitable for a race- track tout. Her brother was unable immediately to open the door of the unfamiliar college-owned car he used to drive Waugh from the BC campus to his hotel in Back Bay. Her brother’s slight hesitation “caused Waugh to bang violently at the window with his malacca cane and cry to the doorman: ‘I say, come and release me!’” [15] “American Epoch,” 152. A photograph of Grailville is included in the Life version. Waugh’s description of Grailville is omitted without comment from the UK version in the Month, collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews. [16] Waugh and Merton had exchanged letters for several months. Waugh was editing Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain for publication in England (entitled Elected Silence). Merton leaves vivid descriptions of Waugh’s visit in Entering the Silence: Journals Vol. 2 (1941-52) (1996), 245-46, and The Courage for Truth: The Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers (1993), 20-21. [17] Flights from Cincinnati to Louisville via Washington would certainly have taken longer in 1948 than the three-hour train on the L&N railway. Perhaps Time-Life had agreed to pay for Waugh to travel by air. The circuitous journey may explain Merton’s belated reception of information about Waugh’s arrival. [18] This incident is mentioned by Fr. Murray of Spring Hill College in his 1972 memoir of Waugh’s visit (reprinted in EWS 43.1, Spring 2012) and by Selina Hastings in her biography (536), but neither gives a source. The incident does not appear in the archives of the Times- Picayune newspaper. Whether Waugh spent the night of 30 November at the Pontchartrain is not known. [19] Evelyn Waugh Papers, BL, Add. 81078, quoted in part in Hastings, 536. [20] In 1949 on the lecture tour, Laura said that she found New Orleans’s reputation darkly shadowed by Keyes’s 1948 novel Dinner at Antoine’s. See Sr. Therese Lentfoehr, “My Meeting with Evelyn Waugh,” EWN 11.1 (Spring 1977). [21] Evelyn Waugh Papers, BL, letter from Waugh to his wife, 10 December 1948, Add. 81078; letter from Frances Parkinson Keyes to Waugh, 5 December 1948, Add. 81060 f.64. [22] Undated letter in Evelyn Waugh Papers, BL, Add. 81078. This letter would have been written during the week of 12 December 1948. [23] Fremantle was a writer who left a memoir of Waugh’s visits to New York. It was published twelve years later as an article entitled “Waugh in America” in Vogue, 15 November 1960. As noted by Martin Stannard, who quotes extensively from Fremantle, she seems to conflate the 1948 and 1949 trips and thinks that Laura accompanied Waugh on both occasions. See Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years (New York, 1992), 227 n. 5. Ten years later, she included a version of the Vogue article in her memoirs and made matters worse by placing her meetings with Waugh in 1950. See Three-Cornered Heart (1971), 186-92. Although she met him again on his brief 1950 trip, most if not all of the events in her article took place in 1948 and 1949. [24] Fremantle says that they stopped at Maritain’s house in Princeton on the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 7 December. But the large snowstorm in New York and Philadelphia took place on 19 December. (It coincided with the National Football League championship game in Philadelphia between the Eagles and the Chicago Cardinals.) Moreover, Waugh told Laura that he would not arrive in New York until 8 December, so he could not have met Maritain on 7 December. Letter, 1 December 1948, Evelyn Waugh Papers, BL, Add. 81078. [25] Letter, 15 June 1949, Clare Boothe Luce Papers, Library of Congress, Box 176. [26] Evelyn Waugh Papers, BL, Add. 81078. More detailed accounts of some portions of the 1948 trip are available in Stannard, Later Years, 226-32, and Fremantle, “Waugh,” 54+. [27] See Robert Murray Davis, et al., A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh (1986), 101, A676. Waugh places the interview on the “last day of a recent, happy visit to the U.S.” (EAR 371). Stannard says it happened just as he was “stepping on to the boat” (Later Years, 232), but that was on 22 December, over a week before the story appeared. Waugh arrived in Southampton on 28 December 1948, and it seems possible that he was accosted by the reporter there. Waugh says she “cabled her story” back to London, which she would have done from New York; from Southampton, she would have phoned it in or carried it back on the train. The story broke after he had arrived home. As his source, Waugh cites U.S. reaction in a Daily Mail gossip column that appeared on 12 January 1949. The time and place of the interview are hard to pin down. [28] “Oh, Hear, Hear, Evelyn!” New York Daily News, 3 January 1949: 21. Clare Boothe Luce refers to this editorial in a 6 January 1949 letter to Randolph Churchill: “the Daily News’ fulmination about our mutual friend … I hope I am here and you are here when he returns. I really do like him so awfully, as that wretched expression goes, ‘underneath it all.’” Carbon copy, Clare Boothe Luce Papers, Library of Congress, Box 165. [29] “Kicking Against the Goad,” EAR, 371-73. [30] “Pioneer! O Pioneer!” is a review of Powers’s Prince of Darkness, a book published in England by John Lehman. EAR, 373-74. [31] Waugh originally booked on the S.S. America, which departed Southampton on 20 January and arrived in New York about 25-26 January. The booking changed to the Queen Mary, which left Southampton on 18 January and arrived in New York on 24 January. Letter from ticket agent to Miss M. Stephens, 5 January 1949, and telegram from A. D. Peters to Harold Matson, 21 January 1949, A. D. Peters Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. [32] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), and Anthony Trollope, North America (1862) and The Way We Live Now (1875). [33] In Unconditional Surrender, they are generically described as “illustrated American magazines.” [34] Stannard mentions a 1950 advance of $1500 from Waugh’s U.S. publisher for a book to be written on the “American Scene” (Later Years, 269 n. 128). There is a contract dated 31 January 1949, and an advance was paid in October 1950. Nothing seems to have come of it. If there was no book by February 1954, the agreed expenses (up to $6500) would be charged against Waugh’s account. Carbon copy of letter from Little, Brown & Co. to Evelyn Waugh, 27 October 1950, Peters Collection, HRC, UTA. [35] The lecture notes will be published in the complete works of Evelyn Waugh being prepared by Oxford University Press. See also Robert Murray Davis, A Catalogue of the Evelyn Waugh Collection at the Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin (1981), 170, E622. On 4 May 1949, Waugh responded to a request for the text of the lecture at the Waldorf- Astoria on 16 March 1949. He explained that he had spoken from half a page of notes and had no manuscript. [36] Books on Trial was a literary magazine published by the Thomas More Association in Chicago. The summary may have been written by someone from the Association who attended one of the Chicago lectures. A copy will appear in the OUP’s Complete Works. [37] In a letter dated 6 January 1949 in the Peters Collection at Texas, Waugh’s U.S. agent, Harold Matson Co., informs his U.K. agent (Peters) of the lectures booked as of that date by W. Colston Leigh and the fees ($2800). The letter identifies only six of at least sixteen lectures. The HRC files for the rest of 1949 and 1950 do not indicate any other lecture dates. Columbia University has the archives of the Harold Matson Co. but no correspondence relating to Evelyn Waugh, W. Colston Leigh, or A. D. Peters for 1949 or 1950.

Evelyn Waugh Fact-finding Tour, November–December 1948: An Itinerary Jeffrey Manley John McGinty, Loyola-Notre Dame Library

Arrived New York City, 6 November 1948

New York City: Plaza Hotel, 6-14 November 1948

Boston: Copley Plaza Hotel, 15-18 November 1948

Baltimore: Hotel Sheraton-Belvedere/Hotel Stafford, 19-24 November 1948

Cincinnati: Grailville School, Loveland, Ohio, 25-26 November 1948

Louisville: Gethsemani Abbey, Trappist, Kentucky, 27-28 November 1948

New Orleans: Pontchartrain Hotel and Roosevelt Hotel, 30 November-7 December 1948

New York City: Plaza Hotel, 8-21 December 1948

Side trip to Vincent Astor estate, Rhinebeck, NY, 11-12 December 1948

Side trip to Princeton, New Jersey/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19-20 December 1948 Departed New York City, 22 December 1948

The Evelyn Waugh Legacy Library Naomi Milthorpe Australian National University

In late 2011, LibraryThing -- a ‘cataloging and social networking site for book lovers’ -- announced the completion of the Evelyn Waugh Legacy Library, an online catalogue of Evelyn Waugh’s personal library held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The Evelyn Waugh Legacy Library contains 2752 ‘separate, individual titles’, according to the project’s main cataloguer, John Burlinson (‘Evelyn Waugh’); ‘separate, individual’ includes multi-volume works, and Waugh owned many. LibraryThing’s ‘speculated total’ of discrete volumes in Waugh’s library is around 3200, bringing it in line with estimations from Richard Oram (21), among others. News of the project was posted on the Evelyn Waugh Society’s website on 14 December 2011 (Vickery). While I am privileged to have some experience with Waugh’s personal library, having conducted a short-term research project on a Ransom Center Fellowship in 2009, I am by no means familiar with the entire contents of Waugh’s massive collection. Although the University of Texas Library lists all works in the HRC Waugh library, the catalogue is dense and not particularly accessible. (To get to it, you need to search for Waugh under ‘Former Owners’ and then make individual keyword searches. Browsing is tiresome.) After reading LibraryThing’s announcement, I spent a few months touring the virtual library to see what it shows about Waugh’s reading.

We know, from Robert Murray Davis’s work, that Waugh’s writing was deeply informed by his reading. In the landmark works Evelyn Waugh, Writer and Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time, Davis demonstrates that Waugh’s reading of contemporary novels, history, poetry, and works on the Pre-Raphaelites explicitly or obliquely appears in his fiction. Thus reading is vitally important in understanding Waugh’s life and work. Richard Oram’s excellent essay in the recent collection A Handful of Mischief emphasizes Waugh’s material experience of books; as Oram suggests, Waugh’s library was a kind of ‘sanctuary’, while physical books themselves were reassuring, offering ‘a sense of protective order’ in a world in many ways chaotic (25-26).

While there are studies of Waugh’s reading of particular books, with insights into his notorious treatment of Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave (Bell), and his approving annotation of The Diary of a Nobody (Morton), Oram’s is the only holistic account of Waugh’s library. As the Waugh Legacy Library shows, Waugh consumed books: he read them, preserved them, and wrote about them. Indeed, Waugh the bibliophile is an important case in the study of what Myers, Harris, and Mandelbrote describe as ‘the role of the reader in the cultural and creative process’. Waugh was not merely a writer with strong and individual opinions; he was a passionate lifelong collector interested in the materiality of books and in their place in contemporary culture. With the completion of LibraryThing’s Evelyn Waugh Legacy Library, scholars and general readers can better understand how Waugh used and valued books.

LibraryThing’s Legacy Libraries are ‘libraries of historical people (as well as a few institutions), entered into LibraryThing by dedicated members working from a variety of sources, including published bibliographies, auction catalogs, library holdings, manuscript lists, wills and probate inventories, and personal inspection of extant copies’ (Legacy Libraries). In the case of the Waugh library, the project was driven by Austin-based LibraryThing member John Burlinson, who has contributed to legacy libraries for ‘Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and e. e. cummings’, among others. Burlinson is a lay member of the Ransom Center, not a staff member, and he drew most of his information from the UT Library Catalogue. He also spent time viewing Waugh’s books on ‘book decoration and illumination’ and his editions from the Golden Cockerell and the Chiswick Press (Burlinson).

Of particular interest to the scholar is the Legacy Library’s usefulness as a tool to explore the kinds of books Waugh read. As a social-media site, LibraryThing maintains a tag system that allows user-friendly, intuitive searching. Tags are ‘a simple way to categorize books according to how you think of them, not how some library official does’; they organise books according to markers chosen by LibraryThing’s users (Concepts). Tags are then collated into the tag cloud, which allows the researcher to look not simply at the micro level of Waugh’s individual books, but also at the macro level, the genres and topics that recur. For the Waugh specialist, many tags are to be expected: architecture, interior decoration, ‘Great Britain – Social Life and Customs’, Pre-Raphaelitism, and Catholicism. Waugh is not known as a poetry aficionado, but his novels frequently quote the Romantics, the Victorians, and even the modernist T. S. Eliot. Poetry is the second largest generic tag cluster, with 220 titles (approximately ten per cent of the library), second only to the catch-all ‘English Literature’.

The Legacy Library allows creative exploration of Waugh’s admirably diverse library. Rather surprisingly, Waugh owned three books of crochet samplers: The Royal Victoria Crochet Book, produced in the nineteenth century; Frances Lambert’s My crochet sampler (1846); and Eléonore Riego de la Branchardière’s mid-nineteenth-century The Crochet Book. As the UT catalogue shows, all three books have the Evelyn Waugh bookplate pasted in. Another unexpected work is George Coleman’s The Rodiad, concerned with flagellation. Burlinson expressed surprise at the number of children’s books in the collection, ‘over 50 of [which] were inscribed by Mary Martineau’. She is the author of Wag: A Tale for Children, which Waugh owned. Waugh’s possession of such books is often explained in letters and archives. In correspondence with bookseller Handasyde Buchanan, Waugh frequently requests books for children in his life. He was keen on the Orlando the Marmalade Cat series, and he ordered one to be sent ‘with […] love to Viscount Asquith’ for his fourth birthday in 1956.[1] These popular books were written and illustrated by Kathleen Hale, the artist who would design the frontispiece for Basil Seal Rides Again. The LibraryThing tag cloud is not, however, infallible. For example, Waugh was enthusiastic about the art and design of Eric Gill, and he owned many books illustrated by Gill. The main tag cloud brings up, however, only one work by Gill (his Autobiography). This result might mislead novices, since Gill appears as secondary author (or illustrator) in many volumes, including The Devil’s Devices. This book is listed by its text-author H. D. C. Pepler, with Gill as secondary author, though Gill’s artistic contribution may have attracted Waugh. The ‘Eric Gill’ tag misrepresents his significance in the Waugh Library, at least when one limits browsing to the Tag Cloud.

If the user turns to the Waugh Library Author Tag Cloud, with tags showing all authors represented in Waugh’s library, Gill’s importance becomes more visible (Author Cloud). Here the Eric Gill tag is attached to thirteen of Gill’s works (though not, strangely, The Devil’s Devices).[2] Only a basic search finds all twenty-seven works authored or illustrated by Gill in Waugh’s library. This is but one example of digital tools complicating research on Waugh’s book ownership.

LibraryThing cannot identify the dates when Waugh purchased books. The best resources are the Diaries, the letters in Mark Amory’s 1980 edition and in the HRC, and the correspondence Waugh sent to Handasyde Buchanan, held in Special Collections at Georgetown University. The Diaries have been well mined by researchers including Oram (23) and John Howard Wilson, who have both noted Waugh’s major purchases at Oxford and afterward. References to book-buying are sparse given the size of Waugh’s library, though he is often precise about publication and cost, reflecting his interest in books as collectibles. On 3 October 1943, for example, he records the purchase of ‘Owen Jones’s Victorian Psalter for £1 and Wicks's Spires and Towers with the supplementary volume for 37s 6d’ (Diaries 551).

The Waugh-Buchanan collection comprises 110 letters and postcards from Waugh to Buchanan, dating from 1946 to his death in 1966, and it offers tangible evidence of Waugh’s purchases.[3] For example, in March-April 1950 Waugh wanted a nineteenth-century copy of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk; he instructed Buchanan that a ‘shabby’ copy would be ‘ok’.[4] With very little difficulty (and no travel), we can turn to the Legacy Library catalogue; the entry shows that the copy in Waugh’s library was the Wood, Vernon, and Walker edition dated 1815. Another example: in 1963 Waugh asked Buchanan to send ‘reprint of Kilvert’.[5] The book in question is Kilvert's diary: selections from the diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, a Victorian publication; Waugh owned the 1961 edition. The LibraryThing tag cloud for Kilvert includes terms such as ‘1870s’, ‘autobiography’, ‘Christianity’, ‘clergy’, ‘nature’, ‘non-fiction’, ‘rural life’, and ‘Wales’; these help readers to place Kilvert in categories that reflect Waugh’s interests.

One aspect of the Legacy Library which appeals to my sense of humour is the Random Books sidebar on the right-hand side of the Evelyn Waugh profile page. When I last accessed it, the random selection included King Edward VII by Philip Magnus, a book of engravings of Gothic furniture from designs by Pugin, the letters of Christina Rossetti, Religio poetæ, etc. by Coventry Patmore, Rustic elegies by Edith Sitwell, Suppressed plates, wood engravings, &c. by George Somes Layard, and English books 1475-1900: a signpost for collectors by Charles J. Sawyer. Waugh’s catholicity is admirable, and scholars interested in taste, influence, and contexts can find highly amusing paths for investigation in the Legacy Library.

The Waugh Legacy Library’s statistics page is likewise a boon for those interested in the metadata of Waugh’s reading, dates of publication in particular. LibraryThing informs us that that the average date of publication is 1896 (edition date, mind you, not original publication). Of the 2752 ‘books’ in the LibraryThing catalogue, 575 have a publication date in the range 1850- 1899, confirming Waugh’s passion for Victoriana. Surprisingly, LibraryThing lists 203 books published from 1960 to 1969. Waugh died in 1966, but he was still collecting. Strangely, one book was published in the 1970s, the1949 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, reprinted in 1970. Searching the UT catalogue for Waugh as former owner discloses no such edition in his library. LibraryThing is obviously not a scholarly resource but a social-networking site, primarily intended for generalist readers. Yet the accessibility of this tool should attract scholars interested in Waugh’s reading. It is particularly appealing to those unable to visit the HRC. Errors may create difficulties in researching Waugh’s library, but the UT catalogue can verify information obtained from LibraryThing.

Notes [1] Waugh to Buchanan, ACS, 2 August 1956, the Waugh-Buchanan Collection, Box 1, Folder 41. [2] Incidentally, Evelyn Waugh’s library contains the largest number of Gill’s works of any library on LibraryThing. [3] I am grateful to Georgetown University Library’s Special Collections Research Center for permission to consult the collection, and to the Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship fund for financial assistance in conducting research in the United States. [4] Waugh to Buchanan, ACS, 31 March 1950, Waugh-Buchanan Collection, Box 1, Folder 20. [5] Waugh to Buchanan, ACS, 18 July 1963, Waugh-Buchanan Collection, Box 1, Folder 74. The whole postcard, typical of Waugh’s late communications with Buchanan, reads: ‘Yes, please, send reprint of Kilvert. / Didn’t know there was one. / E’

Works Cited Bell, Alan. ‘Waugh Drops the Pilot.’ Spectator, 7 March 1987, 27-31. Print. Burlinson, John. E-mail to author. 11 March 2012. Davis, Robert Murray. Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time. Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 1989. Print. ---. Evelyn Waugh, Writer. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1981. Print. ‘Evelyn Waugh complete.’ LibraryThing.com. 6 December 2011. Web. Morton, Peter. ‘“The funniest book in the world”: Waugh and The Diary of a Nobody .’ Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies 36.1 (Spring 2005). Web. Myers, Robin, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds. Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading. London: British Library, 2005. Print. Oram, Richard. ‘Evelyn Waugh, Bookman.’ A Handful of Mischief: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher, Ann Pasternak Slater, and John Howard Wilson. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2011. 21-32. Print. Vickery, Antony. ‘LibraryThing completes online catalog of Evelyn Waugh’s library.’ Evelyn Waugh Society. December 14, 2011. Web. Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Print. ---. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980. Print. ---. Letters to Handasyde Buchanan. The Waugh-Buchanan Collection. Georgetown University Library Special Collections Research Center. Washington, DC. Wilson, John Howard. ‘A Walking Tour of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford.’ A Handful of Mischief: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher, Ann Pasternak Slater, and John Howard Wilson. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2011. 34-61. Print.

The Curate who Married the Evelyns: W. H. Aldis (1871-1948) John Howard Wilson Lock Haven University

On 27 June 1928 at St Paul’s Church, Portman Square in London, Evelyn Waugh married Evelyn Gardner. The young couple chose the curate, who charged three guineas, rather than the vicar, Dr J. Stuart Holden, who wanted five.[1] According to Selina Hastings, She-Evelyn giggled at the curate’s mustache, heavy black boots, and Cockney accent (176). The identity of the curate has remained obscure, but recently Peter Dewey of Wales obtained, from the National Archives at Kew, the file for the Evelyns’ divorce. The file contains a Certified Copy of an Entry of Marriage with the name of the curate: W. H. Aldis. He turns out to have been a fairly prominent man.

According to his biography, William Henry Aldis was born in 1871, the son of a confidential clerk in Reading. Though he felt the “handicap of not having been to a public school or university” (MacBeath 18), and though he took elocution lessons while at St Paul’s (MacBeath 94), Aldis was no Cockney, and his family was well educated. His great-grandfather had been a Baptist pastor, his grandfather had been pastor of a chapel in Reading, and three of his uncles won honors in mathematics as Wranglers at Cambridge University.

Aldis himself prepared to become a surveyor, but in the summer of 1897 he attended the Keswick Convention, an annual meeting of Evangelicals in the Lake District. Despite his Nonconformist background, he committed himself to the Church of England. He decided to join the China Inland Mission (CIM) and left England in October. It was hazardous duty: Aldis was aboard two boats that were wrecked in the Yangtze River, and he twice had shots fired into his home in China. He reached his station, Paoning in Szechwan, in 1898, but the Boxer Rebellion broke out in 1900, and missionaries had to be recalled to Shanghai.

In Shanghai, Aldis was ordained a deacon in 1900, and he met Lottie H. Carver of Norwich. They married in Paoning in 1902, three days after Aldis’s ordination as priest. The Aldises lost an infant daughter to smallpox in 1904, but the first of three sons, Gordon, was born in 1905. At the end of 1906, the family departed China for furlough in England; they returned for a second tour from 1908 to 1916.

Back in England, Rev Aldis intended to return to China, but his wife’s health would not allow it. Dr Holden was Home Director of the CIM, and Rev Aldis became Secretary of the Youth Department in 1919. Dr Holden was also vicar of St Paul’s, Portman Square, and Rev Aldis became the curate. The position helped Rev Aldis to provide a “satisfactory education for his sons” (MacBeath 82).

Rev Aldis also became active in the Keswick Convention. He first appeared on the platform in 1924, and three of his meditations are included in The Keswick Week, 1925: “When the Comforter is Come” on the evening of 21 July (104-08), “The Wretched Man and His Deliverances” on the morning of 23 July (141-44), and “Anointed for Kingship” on the morning of 24 July (162-66). Rev Aldis became the leader of the missionaries’ morning-prayer meetings, then Chairman of the Missionary Meeting, and finally Chairman of the Keswick Council, which organized the conventions. Rev Aldis chaired the conventions from 1936 to 1939 and again from 1946 to 1947.

Rev Aldis was a late bloomer: his biographer notes that Aldis was “well into his fifties before the full stature showed” (MacBeath 79). At this time he came into contact with the Evelyns, who found him ridiculous. Others liked him. According to his biographer, “Young people found [Rev Aldis] warm and understanding … admiring too” (MacBeath 49). An Australian missionary described Aldis as “a middle-aged clergyman of medium height and robust build with a quick, brisk step, a warm handshake, and a smiling face which fairly radiated health and goodwill” (MacBeath 54).

Shortly after the Evelyns married in 1928, Dr Holden resigned as Home Director of the CIM and Rev Aldis replaced him. In 1929, Rev Aldis called for 200 missionaries in two years, and they came forward by 1931. His son Gordon left for China in September 1931, just days before the Japanese moved into Manchuria.[2] Rev Aldis wrote Hints for Furlough, vol. 1 (1938), advising missionaries “how to spend time whilst in ‘homeland’.”

Indeed, Rev Aldis was a writer as well. He contributed forewords to The Message of Keswick and Its Meaning (1939), Phyllis Thompson’s They Seek a City (1940), and Mrs. Howard Taylor’s Sirs, Be of Good Cheer (1941). He wrote articles entitled “These Amazing Days” for China’s Millions (1940) and “Christian Certitudes” for the Inter-Varsity Magazine (1941). His second son, Dr Arnold S. Aldis, had become a surgeon and President of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship. In 1947, Rev Aldis spoke on “The Neglected Vineyard,” and his text appears in Keswick’s Authentic Voice: Sixty-five Dynamic Addresses Delivered at the Keswick Convention 1875-1957 (91-96). According to his biographer, Rev Aldis often addressed “the natural sluggishness of mankind and the human proneness to inertia” (MacBeath 68). Evelyn Waugh might have sympathized.

In 1943, in his early seventies, Rev Aldis resigned as Home Director of the CIM. He was busy on another project, and through his “indomitable faith and unwearied persistence … the London Bible College came into being” (MacBeath 74).[3] Rev Aldis served as President, and as President of the Missionary School of Medicine for thirteen years. Founded in 1903, the School tried “to provide a background of medical knowledge to missionaries who might be working considerable distances from professional medical care” (“Medical Services”). [4] During the Second World War, Rev Aldis advised his third son, Brian (who also went into ministry), “to be ready for death in these days” (MacBeath 90). Waugh explored a similar idea, “The Death Wish,” in Unconditional Surrender (1961). In the judgment of his biographer, however, Rev Aldis was “too sane and wholesome to be ‘half in love with easeful death’” (MacBeath 64).

Rev Aldis passed away on 16 June 1948; the Evangelicals described it as his “Homecall.” There was a memorial service at St Paul’s, Portman Square, on 29 June, twenty years and two days after Rev Aldis married the Evelyns. He was eulogized in The Keswick Week, 1948: Rev Aldis “gave himself without stint, and always with joy and enrichment to those who worked with him” (16). A photograph is available online (scroll down to page 16). A biography appeared in 1949: Rev Aldis was said to have been “the best known and most loved man in Evangelical Christendom” (MacBeath 12).

The Evelyns’ marriage lasted only a year. Without the break-up, Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934), and probably other novels would have been different. Waugh was not quick to forgive: he wrote to the Daily Express to criticize Dr Holden and St Paul’s, Portman Square.[5] Many years later, he thought he had been “as near an atheist as one could be … at that time” (Face to Face), but he converted to Roman Catholicism in the following year, 1930. Waugh belittled the Church of England, but like Rev Aldis he came to believe in prayer, missionary work, and theological study. One wonders if Waugh followed Rev Aldis’s career after 1928. In 1956, seven years after publication of W. H. Aldis, Waugh wrote that “the Sunday Times critics are occupied with less interesting books,” including “biographies of Anglican clergymen” (Essays 507).

Notes [1] For more information on the wedding, see John Howard Wilson, “A Neglected Address: 25 Adam Street,” EWNS 41.2 (Autumn 2010). [2] Waugh’s best man, Harold Acton, went to China in 1932 and spent several years there, interested in aesthetic experience rather than religious conversion. [3] Now the London School of Theology in suburban Northwood. [4] The School became Medical Services Ministries in 1992. [5] For the letter, see Wilson, “A Neglected Address,” EWNS 41.2.

Works Cited Face to Face, with John Freeman. BBC TV. 26 June 1960. Web. Hastings, Selina. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Print. The Keswick Week, 1925. London: Marshall Brothers. Web. The Keswick Week, 1948. London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott. Web. MacBeath, Andrew. W. H. Aldis. London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1949. Print. “Medical Services Ministries.” Mundus: Gateway to missionary collections in the United Kingdom. 15 May 2000. Web. The Message of Keswick and Its Meaning. 1939. Web. Stevenson, Herbert F., ed. Keswick’s Authentic Voice: Sixty-five Dynamic Addresses Delivered at the Keswick Convention 1875-1957. Web. Waugh, Evelyn. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. Print. Waugh v. Waugh. Ref. J77/2692 C497026. National Archives at Kew. Print.

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

This is a continuation of the earlier lists, published in Evelyn Waugh Studies. It contains books and articles published in 2011 as well as items omitted from previous lists.

Adcock, Patrick. “Evelyn Waugh—That’s What’s Wrong with England.” Online. Alder, Baron. “Violence, Duplicity, and Frequent Malversation: Robbery under Law and Evelyn Waugh’s Political Critique.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 128-36. Barkham, Patrick. “My life as a Waugh.” Guardian, 25 November 2011. Begam, Richard, and Michael Valdez Moses. Modernism and Colonialism (2007). Rev. by Elleke Boehmer, Modern Philology 109.1 (August 2011): E55-E58. Biedermann, Malte. “Moral Decline and the Bankruptcy of Victorian Humanism in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.” U of Cologne, 2011. Bluemel, Kristin, ed. Intermodernism (2009). Rev. by Laura Mooneyham White, “Utopian Hopes,” EWNS 42.1 (Spring 2011); Patrick Bixby, “British Culture at Mid-Century: Wartime Writing and Intermodernism,” Studies in the Novel 43.2 (Summer 2011): 258-59. Byrne, Paula. Mad World (2009). Rev. by Patrick Madigan, Heythrop Journal 52.6 (Nov. 2011): 1070. Christensen, Peter G. “Homosexuality in Brideshead Revisited: ‘Something quite remote from anything the [builder] intended.’” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 137-59. Clewell, Tammy. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Rev. by Wren Sidhe, Mortality 16.4 (2011): 395-96. Davis, Robert Murray. “Hardcastle’s Malleable Morris Cowley.” EWNS 42.1 (Spring 2011). Davis, Robert Murray. “Inside and Outside: Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.” Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene: Journeys with Saints and Sinners. Ed. Dermot Gilvary and Darren J. N. Middleton. New York: Continuum, 2011. 193-209. Davis, Robert Murray. Introduction. “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 13-18. DeCoste, Damon Marcel. "Temptations of the Craftsman in Middle Age: Diabolical Art and Christian Vocation in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold." Renascence 63.3 (Spring 2011): 189-209. DeCoste, Marcel. “The World’s Anachronism: The Timelessness of the Secular in Evelyn Waugh’s Helena.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 160- 71. Deer, Patrick. Culture in Camouflage (2009). Rev. by Mark Rawlinson, Review of English Studies 62.253 (2011): 158-60; Patrick Bixby, “British Culture at Mid-Century: Wartime Writing and Intermodernism,” Studies in the Novel 43.2 (Summer 2011): 258-59; John Howard Wilson, “Dandies and Blackouts,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012). Delasandro, Erica. “National History and the Novel in 1930s Britain.” PhD diss. Washington U in St Louis, 2011. Devonshire, Deborah. Wait for Me: Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister. London: John Murray, 2010. Wait for Me: Memoirs. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010. Rev. by Jeffrey Manley, “The Strange Trove of Edensor,” EWS 42.2 (Autumn 2011). Eastham, Andrew. “Aristocracies of Mourning: The Reconsecration of Aestheticism in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” Aesthetic Afterlives: Irony, Literary Modernity and the Ends of Beauty. London: Continuum, 2011. 152-72. Edwards, Brian. “Waugh’s Intuition: An FST Approach to Brideshead Revisited.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 13.1-2 (Fall 2011): 1-18. Fallowell, Duncan. How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits. London: Ditto, 2011. Rev. by Toby Lichtig, “How to write about travel,” TLS, 7 December 2011; Jeffrey A. Manley, “The Quest for Alastair Graham,” EWS 43.3 (Winter 2013)--below. Faulstick, Dustin. “A Pilgrimage to Passion: Charles Ryder’s Emotional Conversion in Brideshead Revisited.” Religion and the Arts 15.1-2 (2011): 172-92. Feenstra, Robin Edward. “Modern Noise: Bowen, Waugh, Orwell.” DAI-A 71.12 (June 2011): 4389-90. McGill U, 2009. Flanery, Patrick Denman. “The BBC Brideshead, 1956, or Whatever Happened to Celia, Sex, and Syphilis?” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 220-31. Gallagher, Donat. “1066 and All That? History in Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion.” EWNS 42.1 (Spring 2011). Gallagher, Donat. "Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion and 'Lady Southwell's Letter.'" Connotations 20.1 (2010/2011): 80-107. Gallagher, Donat. “Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh” (2009). Rpt. Chesterton Review 36.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 261-65. Gallagher, Donat. “Guy Crouchback’s Disillusion: Crete, Beevor, and the Soviet Alliance in Sword of Honour.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 172- 219. Gallagher, Donat. “Was Evelyn Waugh in Danger of Being Shot by His Men?” EWNS 41.3 (Winter 2011). Gallagher, Donat, Ann Pasternak Slater, and John Howard Wilson, eds. “A Handful of Mischief”: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2011. Rev. by Douglas Lane Patey, “Attending, Noticing, Detecting, Interpreting,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012). Graham, Elyse. “Art Criticism and Brideshead Revisited.” EWS 42.2 (Autumn 2011). Greenberg, Jonathan. Modernism, Satire, and the Novel. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Greene, Donald. “Evelyn Waugh’s Central London: A Gazetteer.” EWNS 41.3 (Winter 2011). Gross, John, ed. The Oxford Book of Parodies (2010). Rev. by Jeffrey A. Manley, “Waugh the Parodist,” EWNS 41.3 (Winter 2011). Hastings, Selina. The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography. London: John Murray, 2009. New York: Random House, 2010. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, “The Curse of Longevity,” EWS 42.2 (Autumn 2011). Hawcroft, Frank. “In Victory, Defeat: Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant Trilogies and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.” MA thesis. Victoria U of Wellington, 2011. Hentea, Marius. “Late Modernist Debuts: Publishing and Professionalizing Young Novelists in 1920s England.” Book History 14 (2011): 167-86. Janes, Daniel. “TV: Brideshead Regurgitated.” Cambridge Student, 23 March 2011. Kabanova, Irina. “Sovereign Power in Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion and Helena.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 87-95. Kalliney, Peter J. Cities of Affluence and Anger (2006). Rev. by Robin E. Feenstra, Modern Fiction Studies 57.4 (Winter 2011): 795-97. Ker, Ian. The Catholic Revival in English Literature (2003). Rev. by Julie Heldt, Chesterton Review 30.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2004): 102-06; Dermot Quinn, “Reaching for Something Beyond,” Modern Age 48.1 (Winter 2006): 68-71. Kostopulos, Dan S. “Eyes Reopened: A Tourist in Africa.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 232-42. Leah, Gordon. “The Unseen Hook and the Invisible Line: Tradition, Faith and Commitment in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Subsequent Novels.” Heythrop Journal 52.6 (Nov. 2011): 962-75. Lothian, James R. The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950 (2009). Rev. by Robert Murray Davis, “Unobtrusive Clarity,” EWNS 41.3 (Winter 2011). MacLeod, Lewis. “‘That Glittering, Intangible Western Culture’: ‘Civilizing’ Missions and the Crisis of Tradition in Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 77-86. Mahon, John W. “‘A Later Development’: Evelyn Waugh and Conversion.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 62-76. McConnell, Mary. “Producer looks back at classic TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.” North London Today, 26 October 2011. MacKay, Marina. Modernism and World War II (2007). Rev. by Phyllis Lassner, The Space Between 5.1 (2009). Milthorpe, Naomi. “Evelyn Waugh his book.” Script & Print 35.4 (Dec. 2011): 219-23. Milthorpe, Naomi. “The Rake’s Regress: Evelyn Waugh’s Return to Satire in Basil Seal Rides Again.” Papers in Language & Literature 47.4 (Fall 2011): 430-42. Mosley, Charlotte, ed. In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor. London: John Murray, 2008. New York: New York Review Books, 2010. Rev. by Jeffrey Manley, “The Strange Trove of Edensor,” EWS 42.2 (Autumn 2011). Mosley, Charlotte, ed. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996). Rev. by Isobel Murray, Chesterton Review 24.1-2 (Feb./May 1998): 118-20. Mosley, Diana. The Pursuit of Laughter (2009). Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley, “A Perfect Friend,” EWNS 41.3 (Winter 2011). Oram, Richard W. “Brideshead Revisited and The Double Helix.” EWS 42.2 (Autumn 2011). Oram, Richard W. “Evelyn Waugh, Bookman.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 21-32. Palmer, Alan. “1945--: Ontologies of Consciousness.” The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Ed. David Herman. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. 273-97. Rev. by Laura Mooneyham White, “Cognitive Studies,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012). Pasternak Slater, Ann. “Waffle Scramble: Waugh’s Art in Scoop.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 96-127. Peat, Alexandra. Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys. New York: Routledge, 2010. Rev. by Nathan Waddell, Studies in Travel Writing 15.3 (2011): 333-36; Melissa Dinsman, Modern Fiction Studies 57.4 (Winter 2011): 810-12. Platt, Len, ed. Modernism and Race. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Pomeroy, Krista M. “Evelyn Waugh: An Oxonian Life Parallels Brideshead Revisited.” BS honors thesis. Ball State U, 2000. Poole, Adrian, ed. The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists (2009). Rev. by Jeffrey A. Manley, “Unnecessary Confusion,” EWNS 42.1 (Spring 2011). Reid, Alcuin, ed. A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes (1996). Expanded ed. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2011. Rev. by Isobel Murray, Chesterton Review 24.1-2 (Feb./May 1998): 118-20; Donat Gallagher, “Tried and True,” EWS 43.1 (Spring 2012); Philip Blosser, “Undone by the ‘Permanent Workshop,’” New Oxford Review, June 2012. Reeve-Tucker, Alice. “Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh and Inter-War British Youth: Conflict and Infantilism.” Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity. Ed. Andrzej Gasiorek, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011. 163-82. Rogers, Blythe J. “News Flash: A Comparison of Journalists in Fiction and Non-Fiction.” BS honors thesis. Ball State U, 2000. Saward, John, John Morrill, and Michael Tomko, eds. Firmly I Believe and Truly: The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Scotland, Tony. Lennox & Freda. Wilby, Norwich: Michael Russell, 2010. Rev. by John Howard Wilson, “Parallel Lives,” EWNS 42.2 (Autumn 2011). Self, John. “Famous for the wrong book” (Brideshead). Guardian, 19 July 2011. Showers, Zachary E. “Thou Art Unreal, My Ideal: Nostalgia as Ideology in the Novels of Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell.” DAI-A 71.11 (May 2011): 4034. U of Alabama, 2010. Stove, R. J. “A Grief Unobserved.” American Conservative, 18 November 2011. Stovel, Bruce. “The Genesis of Evelyn Waugh’s Comic Vision.” Jane Austen & Company: Collected Essays. Ed. Nora Foster Stovel. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2011. 181-202. Sudlow, Brian. “The Ball and the Cross, the Fleur de Lys and the English Rose: Notes toward a Comparison of the French and English Catholic Literary Revivals.” Chesterton Review 33.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2007): 609-21. Sutherland, John. Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives. London: Profile, 2011. Taylor, Elspeth Anne. “Disruption and Disappointment: Relationships of Children and Nostalgia in British Interwar Fiction.” MA thesis, U of Iowa, 2011. Tripp, Ronja. “‘The Balance’ of Mobile Imaging and Moving Viewpoints: Evelyn Waugh’s Visual Imagination and Reception Aesthetics.” Moving Images—Mobile Viewers. 20th Century Visuality. Ed. Renate Brosch. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2009. 173-93. Trogdon, R. L. “‘I Am Not I’: Sebastian and Julia’s Crisis of Identity in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” Senior honors thesis. Appalachian State U, 2011. Urda, Kathleen E. “House of Horrors: Brideshead Revisited at the Movies.” Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film: Essays on Belief, Spectacle, Ritual and Imagery. Ed. Regina Hansen. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 126-39. Rev. by Robert Murray Davis, “Monstrous Catholicism,” EWS 43.3 (Winter 2013)—below. Usui, Yoshiharu. “Abstracts of Japanese Essays on Evelyn Waugh, 1991-1998.” EWNS 41.3 (Winter 2011). Usui, Yoshiharu. “Abstracts of Japanese Essays on Evelyn Waugh, 1998-2010.” EWNS 42.1 (Spring 2011). Usui, Yoshiharu. “Abstracts of Japanese Essays on Evelyn Waugh, 1960-2006.” EWS 42.2 (Autumn 2011). Villar Flor, Carlos. “Spanish Translations of Works by Evelyn Waugh: 1943-2011.” EWNS 42.1 (Spring 2011). Waugh, Alexander. “Additional Waugh Bibliography: Reviews of Brideshead Revisited.” EWNS 42.1 (Spring 2011). Waugh, Evelyn. Labels (1930). Rev. by Toby Lichtig, “How to write about travel,” TLS, 7 December 2011. Wilson, John Howard. “Brideshead Revisited in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Evelyn Waugh's Influence on George Orwell.” Papers in Language & Literature 47.1 (Winter 2011): 3-25. Wilson, John Howard. “Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism.” EWNS 41.3 (Winter 2011). Wilson, John Howard. “A Walking Tour of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford.” “A Handful of Mischief.” Ed. Gallagher, Pasternak Slater, and Wilson. 33-61. Wolf, Joseph. “Struggling for an Answer to Capitalism: Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell’s Pessimistic Approach.” Proceedings of GREAT Day (2011): 157-60. Wolfe, Gregory. “The Operation of Grace.” Image: Art, Faith, Mystery 70 (Summer 2011): 3- 5. Yamaguchi, Norio. “The Figure of the Aesthete in the Writings of Evelyn Waugh.” Reading 32 (2011): 76-90. Ziino, Jabe. “Waugh Revisited: Destabilizing Language and Structure in Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, and Brideshead Revisited.” SB thesis. MIT, 2011.

REVIEWS

Monstrous Catholicism Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film: Essays on Belief, Spectacle, Ritual and Imagery, ed. Regina Hansen. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2011. 304 pp. $45.00. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

This volume intends “to posit Catholicism as one of the central elements of fantastic narrative in North American and European film,” and groups the essays under three categories: “Marvelous Catholicism,” “Uncanny Catholicism,” and “Ridiculous and Monstrous Catholicism.” A good deal of attention is devoted to gothic and horror films and to exorcism, which may interest some readers more than it does me because I am of an age to be more frightened by a nursing home than by a dungeon.

The one essay relevant to all readers of Brideshead Revisited is Kathleen E. Urda’s “House of Horrors: Brideshead Revisited at the Movies,” which argues that Julian Jarrold’s film “grapples with Catholicism by essentially transforming Brideshead Revisited into a horror story in the English Gothic tradition with Lady Marchmain, the matriarch of Brideshead, Brideshead itself, and the Catholic Church as the monstrous villains of the piece.” Although, drawing on Anthony Blanche’s characterization in the novel, I saw Lady Marchmain as a vampire (“The Bloodsucking Countess and the Talented Mr. Ryder,” EWNS 39.2, Autumn 2008), Urda’s view seems quite reasonable, as does her supporting evidence.

Urda demonstrates the ways Jarrold has flattened nuance and distorted outright to make sure that the audience believes, as a former Pentecostal minister said, that “the bad guys won.” She is particularly acute on the recurring visual reference to the painting of the Virgin and Child, in the film Lord Marchmain’s wedding gift to his wife and the focus of the chapel, unlike the novel’s sanctuary lamp.

A link to the essay can be found at http://bcc-cuny.academia.edu/KathleenUrda. Her critical work so far seems to have dealt primarily with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiction, but I hope that she will make further contributions to Waugh studies.

The Quest for Alastair Graham How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits, by Duncan Fallowell. London: Ditto Press, 2011. 242 pp. £14.99. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley

How to Disappear is a very amusing book but hard to categorize, by a writer equally difficult to pin down. The book consists of three long articles on “misfits” with whom the author became fascinated. These are sandwiched between two shorter articles, one about Gozo (next to Malta) and the other on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Fallowell is described in Wikipedia as a “cultural commentator.” He has written several novels and travel books, and his work has appeared in The Spectator and Prospect magazine.

The first long article morphs into Fallowell’s quest for a misfit named Bapsy Pavra, a social-climbing Indian, discovered by chance in a book bought at a jumble sale. After a brief marriage to the Marquess of Winchester, she left her papers to the City of Winchester in the mistaken belief that she owed something to the place. Fallowell found that the archive consisted almost entirely of letters rejecting her attempts to gain invitations to royal or state events.

In the second article, Fallowell travels to the Isle of Eigg off the coast of Scotland to interview another misfit, Maruma, an enigmatic German artist who purchased Eigg and the responsibilities of landlord to numerous tenants. Again, Fallowell makes an interesting meal of sparse ingredients.

The third misfit is Alastair Graham, Evelyn Waugh’s friend and lover from Oxford days. The story began in 1979 with Fallowell’s trip to another out-of-the-way destination, the remote Welsh fishing village of New Quay (not to be confused with the Cornish holiday resort of Newquay). In a local pub, he conversed with an older gentleman. Fallowell was struck by his fastidious attire and perfectly manicured fingernails. Fallowell said that he was rereading Evelyn Waugh’s early novels and that the more serious Waugh became, the worse he wrote, though he had been well-endowed as a writer. The elderly gent “uttered an extraordinary remark. ‘He wasn’t well-endowed in the other sense, I’m afraid.’” Fallowell, a bisexual, wondered if the gentleman was making a pass. When he pursued that possibility, the old gent mumbled, politely excused himself, shook hands and said goodbye to the landlord, who called him “Mr. Graham.”

Months later, Fallowell met a friend who had in youth visited New Quay. When he mentioned the old gentleman, his friend explained that his father had warned him to keep clear of Alastair Graham. There had been rumors of a fling with a New Quay postman.

Two years later, in early 1981, Fallowell chatted with Charles Sturridge in London. Sturridge was directing the Granada TV Brideshead series and remarked that the model for Sebastian Flyte remained a mystery. Alastair Graham “had suddenly vanished from the scene in the Thirties. We don’t know where and we don’t know why.” Fallowell failed to make the connection, given the “disparity between the two images—young radiant Lord Sebastian Flyte and the jittery old codger in the pub.” The penny dropped a week later: Fallowell knew where Sebastian’s model was, but not why he was there. Thus began another quest for a misfit.

Fallowell told Sturridge about his find, and Sturridge assembled what was known about Graham, with much from Waugh’s diaries. Born in 1904, Graham failed exams at Oxford in 1923, moved in with his American-born mother at Barford House near Stratford-on-Avon, became an apprentice at Shakespeare Head Press (which printed Waugh’s first book, P.R.B., in 1926), went into the Diplomatic Service in 1928, served in several posts until 1933, and then disappeared. Fallowell determined that Graham’s father had died in 1921 just before Alastair entered Oxford, that his mother came from a wealthy Savannah family named Low and died in 1934, and that he had one sister, Sybil, who survived childhood, married, and moved to Africa. Fallowell wanted to know why Graham dropped out and returned to New Quay.

In October 1981, Fallowell and his friend asked about Graham’s house and invited him to a meal. This move turned out to be a mistake. Asked if he would like to talk, Graham “started to flap like a cornered bird and became quite desperate.” He said: “I can’t go out. I’m not fit to be seen. I had a stroke last year, I’m an invalid, I can’t think at all, everything was so long ago—he was older than me you know.”

Fallowell leaves critical information out of his narrative. The Brideshead TV series was transmitted beginning on 12 October 1981. Was his visit before or after? Graham was hounded by the press after the series became popular; eventually he had to move into a nursing home, and he died of cancer in hospital in October 1982, about one year after Fallowell’s visit. Was Graham’s refusal to be drawn the first of many, or simply one of the bunch? And did the press know of Graham’s whereabouts due to Fallowell’s having told Sturridge, or were they able to work it out independently?

After Graham’s death, Fallowell renewed his quest in New Quay in 1990. Some sources (such as Graham’s housekeeper) were willing to talk. He also visited Barford House, searched Foreign Office records, and contacted friends of Graham (Claud Cockburn, Anthony Powell, and Harold Acton) and members of Graham’s family (including a niece in Africa, daughter of Graham’s sister Sybil). The niece had Graham’s papers from the house in New Quay. FO documents suggested that Graham had been asked to leave due to homosexual scandal, but one letter requested that he return to a post, indicating that he did well in the Diplomatic Service. He may have been forced to leave London due to threat of prosecution for homosexuality or some problem involving jewelry, but neither is confirmed.

It seems likely that Graham moved due to his own personality, his mother’s death in 1934, and his inheritance. Fallowell says that Graham’s mother was domineering and pushed him into a career, that Graham was shy and withdrawn, and that most liquid investments went to his sister Sybil, whereas he inherited Barford House. Graham sold the house and in1938 bought a comparable country estate, Wern Newydd near New Quay. He lived there with a small staff of servants, mainly from Barford, with no need for employment or income. His inheritance went further in New Quay than in London.

During the war, Graham served in volunteer groups and acquired a yacht. He met Dylan Thomas during the poet’s residence in New Quay in 1944 and 1945. Graham was present when a distraught ex-serviceman took several shots at Thomas’s house. Thomas may have used Graham as the model for Lord Cut-Glass in his play Under Milk Wood.

After the war, Graham moved to a smaller house in town. Fallowell attributes this move to the financial strain of Wern Newydd. Graham kept his head down, though he was briefly called to London for consultations during the Suez crisis.

Most of what Fallowell says about Waugh’s relationship with Graham is already known. He describes Waugh as a frequent visitor to Barford House even after Graham joined the Diplomatic Service. Waugh got along well with Mrs. Graham, perhaps better than Graham himself did. Mrs. Graham was cross when her son loaned Waugh money and, on at least one occasion, guaranteed Waugh’s overdraft. She fell out with Waugh after he had removed a page from a valuable atlas. Fallowell points to similarities between Barford House and Brideshead Castle: columns and a cupola. Next to a main road and backed by only a few acres, however, Barford lacks the grandeur of the house in the novel.

After Waugh married, Graham visited the Evelyns in Egypt on their Mediterranean cruise, and they followed Graham back to Athens. Waugh took his bride to Barford House, and they enjoyed the gardens, according to Mrs. Graham’s diary. Fallowell thinks Graham may have been dropped after 1930 because Waugh began social climbing. He concedes that relationships are difficult after an affair has ended.

Fallowell is disappointed in the shift in sexual orientation that ended Waugh’s affair with Graham. Suppression of bisexuality led to unhappiness:

The later rejection of so much of himself—of that generosity of spirit and large capacity for life represented by his bisexuality—and his recourse to caricatured forms of religion and social image, were disastrous. Existence for him became ever more loathsome, his days ever more alcoholic and miserable. Which would not be so objectionable had this state of affairs been beneficial to his art. But alas it was disastrous for that too. The books go terribly down hill. Whole tracts of them become nothing more than posey propaganda. The lightness went out of his work because it went out of his life.[1]

That is a bit harsh. Repression may have helped Waugh’s work, since most of the best followed 1930. In Brideshead Revisited, the homosexuality is unaffected by religious propaganda. As Fallowell perceives, Anthony Blanche “is one of the book’s star features,” its “artistic conscience.” Waugh satirized Blanche’s campiness, but he is nevertheless a sympathetic character. Moreover, Fallowell believes that the relationship between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte is based on Waugh and Graham’s. Waugh would hardly have used Graham as a model for Sebastian if he had been trying to conceal their relationship. The focus of Fallowell’s book is Graham, and he has not done any original research on Waugh. The only contribution Fallowell makes to Waugh scholarship is Graham’s reference to Waugh’s private parts.[2]

Even that is problematic. Once you have read all Fallowell has discovered about Graham, you wonder why a shy person who hid his homosexuality would describe the size of a noted writer’s genitalia to a total stranger. The same doubt occurs to Fallowell, but only as he concludes:

‘wasn’t well endowed in the other sense.’ I could well in my vulgar way have jumped to the wrong conclusion. Perhaps Graham was simply saying that Evelyn was poor, had no money, and Graham was remembering the onetime dearest and then ungrateful friend who had cadged off him, whose overdraft Graham had guaranteed, and who ended up drunkenly bellowing in White’s club about buggers and pansies. (200)

Even Fallowell’s alternative interpretation seems unlikely.

How to Disappear is well written and well organized, if one accepts the facts as Fallowell discovers them, not as they occurred. The stories would lose momentum without that structure. Fallowell seems incapable of writing a bad sentence. The book is also striking in appearance. There is no dust wrapper (at least on the review copy), and the covers and spine include black- and-white geometrical designs. Inside, similar designs appear on the opening pages of each of the five chapters and the front and back endpapers, but in iridescent pastel. How to Disappear is printed on quality paper and nicely bound. The type face (Plantin Rounded) is also striking. I opened this strange book as soon as it arrived, started reading out of curiosity, and could not put it down. Waugh enthusiasts may be irritated, but they will also experience pleasure.

If there is a paperback edition, a few suggestions for revision:

Diana Mitford had already been married to Bryan Guinness for six months before Waugh met her. He never knew her as Diana Mitford. It is misleading to say that Waugh broke off their friendship “because she had become, as Diana Guinness, very rich, and one of the most glamorous women in Europe [and] Waugh couldn’t cope” (190). Fallowell is probably trying to paraphrase a description of their estrangement in an introduction to interviews of Diana in her collected writings, The Pursuit of Laughter (London, 2009), 567, but he has left too much out.

The “Prayer Books” that Graham discarded when he moved out of Wern Newydd would surely have been Anglican, since they date from before his 1924 conversion to Roman Catholicism. They are not evidence of his having “ditched the roaring Catholicism” Claud Cockburn said he practiced after conversion (201).

Is the first name of Mrs. Davidson Jane (206, 216) or Joan (215), and what disposition has been made of the papers of Alastair Graham she inherited?

Notes [1] Waugh’s friend from schooldays, Tom Driberg, also argued that repression of Waugh’s bisexual nature caused problems. Driberg, an indiscreet homosexual, thought that repression contributed to the mental breakdown described in Pinfold, not deterioration in his writing. See Driberg, Ruling Passions (New York, 1979), 49. Fallowell quotes voices accusing Pinfold of homosexuality and asking what he was doing in Egypt in 1929 (when Graham visited Waugh during his wife’s illness). [2] Fallowell quotes a letter from Graham to Waugh about drinking Burgundy with a peach, which reminds him of the outing in BR, when Sebastian introduces Charles to rare wine. Fallowell obtained the letter from Auberon Waugh. Some letters have been publicly available at the British Library since about 1990. There are nine pages of letters from Graham written between 1922 and 1925 in the BL catalogue (Manuscripts Add. 81057 ff. 146-154v). A photograph, “Alastair standing naked on a rock with what appears to be a waterfall in the background,” accompanied the letter, but it is not in BL’s online catalogue. Fallowell’s reference to the letter and photograph is something of an own goal, since he is trying to prove how heartless Waugh was to Graham. As Fallowell notes, Waugh kept little correspondence prior to his divorce. Since Waugh saved letters from Graham as well as the photograph, he seems to have held Graham in great esteem. Mrs. Davidson told Fallowell that she inherited no letters from Waugh to Graham.

The Funniest Book in the World The Diary of a Nobody, by George & Weedon Grossmith. 1892. Ed. Peter Morton. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009. 259 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University

Constant readers may remember “‘The Funniest Book in the World’: Waugh and The Diary of a Nobody,” by Peter Morton, EWNS 36.1 (Spring 2005). That essay stemmed from a scholarly edition of the Diary, published a few years later. Professor Morton provides an introduction, a chronology, a note on the text, extensive annotations, six appendices of related documents, and ten pages of Works Cited and Recommended Reading. All of these help to restore the lost context of the Diary, and Morton’s scholarship is just as interesting as the Grossmiths’ narrative. This edition also includes thirty-three illustrations from the original book. A sturdy and attractive paperback, Morton’s Diary is useful for scholars who wish to understand Evelyn Waugh’s taste in reading, and for those who teach courses in Victorian literature, satire, and diaries.

Waugh the Anarchist The Strange Case of Tory Anarchism, by Peter Wilkin. Faringdon, Oxon.: Libri Publishing, 2010. 240 pp. £12.00/$15.00 paperback. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley

Tory Anarchism charts a previously undefined (and heretofore largely unremarked) movement in English cultural history, a group of writers and humorists who find comfort in the past but oppose the growth of the state, even though it forms part of the history they long to preserve. The founding fathers were Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, and those included were generally unaware of their “membership.” The movement flowered from 1960 to 1989, and it continues to this day. Whether Peter Wilkin distills a coherent movement from this amorphous group is open to question, but his argument is well presented, and the book is enjoyable even if it falls short of its goal.

Defining the movement proves difficult because of its contradictory nature. Wilkin says that George Orwell invented the concept, applied it to himself, and considered it a tradition dating from Jonathan Swift. Tory Anarchism involves being both a radical and a traditionalist. It is not a philosophy or theory but an opposition to norms. Politically, Tory Anarchists criticize all politicians, though they may support a few. Economically, they are hostile to commerce. Morally, they dislike collective responsibility that absolves the individual. Aesthetically, they flout public opinion. For example, Wilkin quotes a passage from Brideshead Revisited: Bridey and Charles discuss whether the chapel can be considered “Good Art” (Penguin, 89-90).

Tory Anarchists express views in satire in various forms: silliness, surrealism, empiricism, and irony. To illustrate “silliness,” Wilkin uses Waugh’s early novels Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. Another example is Waugh’s labeling Marshal Tito a woman. Waugh’s empiricism (as well as Orwell’s) is evident in writing precisely and clearly. His irony is exemplified in the fate of Tony Last. While no example of Waugh’s surrealism is offered by Wilkin, passages of VB and Black Mischief surely qualify. Tory Anarchists see religion as a guide through a chaotic and nihilistic world (although this tendency seems stronger in Waugh than Orwell). While they satirize the class system, Tory Anarchists value the Royal Family. They prefer the countryside to the metropolis but satirize the country as well (e.g., Boot Magna in Scoop). Wilkin ends his chapter on “Britain Past” with Nina Blount’s reaction to the ugliness of the modern British landscape, feeling that she is about to be sick (VB, Penguin, 199-200).

The outlook of Waugh and Orwell and their postwar successors was, according to Wilkin, “profoundly” affected by the decline of empire. Both Waugh and Orwell were educated at public schools, breeding grounds for administrators of the empire. They both left satirical descriptions of schooldays. Waugh went on to university, Orwell to the colonial service, and these also became targets. Waugh in travel writing described the civilizing influence of the empire but also saw weaknesses. The opportunistic Basil Seal and the incompetent British legation in Azania, according to Wilkin, show flaws that doomed the empire.

Waugh and Orwell were patriotic during World War II, but each could see what was coming. They wrote BR and 1984 as predictions of things to come. Waugh later wrote Love Among the Ruins to peer even further into the future. Wilkin describes Waugh’s future as a “world where all manner of progressive ideas often backed by scientific research have turned Britain into a kind of soft totalitarianism.” What really took hold was less dire, the Nanny State, a subject of satire for Tory Anarchists of the next generation. Waugh lived long enough to be appalled by Welfare. Wilkin quotes Waugh’s 1959 “letter” explaining why he did not vote in parliamentary elections. His position is reminiscent of the 1980s U.S. bumper sticker: “Don’t vote. It only encourages them.” Waugh concludes: “I do not aspire to advise my sovereign on her choice of servants.”[1]

The postwar generation of Tory Anarchists led the Golden Age of British satire, the 1960s and 1970s. Spike Milligan wrote scripts for The Goon Show on BBC radio, Peter Cook developed Beyond the Fringe, Private Eye appeared, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuted on television. Kingsley Amis gets left out. Auberon Waugh is among the leading Tory Anarchists of this period. He wrote political satire for Private Eye, founded by Tory Anarchists Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook, and later for the Daily Telegraph, where Michael Wharton (another Tory Anarchist) also wrote satirical columns. Their generation has been replaced by current Tory Anarchists, such as Chris Morris in his Channel 4 TV productions Brass Eye and Nathan Barley, and his satire of Islamic terrorism and the state’s response in the film Four Lions.[2]

In “Epitaph,” Wilkins summarizes what Tory Anarchists stood for and what they accomplished. He admits that summary cannot succeed because they never decided what they stood for, or whether they were “complicit in the emerging and deepening of the things they appear to oppose.” Wilkin attempts to summarize Waugh’s writings, but he focuses on political views: “Ultimately the ideals that Waugh stood for were lost beneath the enduring image he had chosen to cultivate, that of the reactionary bigot. The fact that this image was simplistic and limited is as much his fault as it is that of his critics…. Waugh the fascist fellow traveler is the antithesis of the man who espoused lifelong support for the individual and hostility to the state in all its guises.” Perhaps, but Waugh was essentially apolitical, as the tag of anarchist in Wilkin’s book implies. Why charge him for being milder on fascism than communism? He fought against both.

Despite ending on a low note, Tory Anarchism should be enjoyable for readers of Waugh Studies. It is well written even when arguments are contradictory. Wilkin offers extensive quotes and citations for positions that seem over the top.[3] The reader is unlikely to agree with all of his conclusions, but the book is interesting nonetheless. It offers a refreshing discussion of Waugh’s writings and beliefs instead of rehashing his personal life, as many critics do. There is nothing particularly new, but Tory Anarchism has an original slant. The book is unsatisfactory in explaining why Tory Anarchists flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, continued in the 1980s, and then declined. We are left with only Chris Morris and the periodicals the Chap and the Idler. Wilkin might have made more of the links between Orwell and Waugh, as in David Lebedoff’s book, The Same Man. While that book is mentioned several times, Wilkin does not evaluate Lebedoff’s conclusions.[4]

Notes [1] Although Wilkin attributes this quote to a “letter,” it was collected in Waugh’s Essays as “Aspirations of a Mugwump,” part of a symposium in the Spectator on a general election. Wilkin’s citations are a bit eccentric. [2] Wilkin excludes British satirists such as Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It) and Craig Brown (The Lost Diaries). Their satire may fall outside his fluid definition of Tory Anarchism. [3] One problem: when Wilkin cites an article, review, or letter, he sometimes mentions only the collection where it was published. The reader familiar with Waugh may have difficulty putting the quote in context or even finding it, if the same edition is unavailable. [4] Wilkin compares the two men’s writings, whereas Lebedoff concentrates on their lives. Wilkin relies on Love Among the Ruins to represent Waugh’s bleak view of the future while Lebedoff reaches the same conclusions without even citing that work.

NEWS

New American Editions of Evelyn Waugh Back Bay Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, published new hardcover, paperback, and Kindle editions of Evelyn Waugh’s fiction on 11 December 2012. An associated company, Hachette Audio, released audio versions of the same books on the same day. Titles include Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, Put Out More Flags, Brideshead Revisited (revised edition), The Loved One, Helena, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Unconditional Surrender [sic], Sword of Honor [sic], and The Complete Stories.

Evelyn Waugh Society The Waugh Society has 144 members. To join, please go to http://evelynwaughsociety.org/. The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List has 80 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 opportunities for threaded discussions: http://evelynwaughsociety.org/forums/.

Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest Four entries have been received and are being judged in the Eighth Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest, sponsored by Evelyn Waugh Studies. For the Ninth Annual Contest, 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 [email protected], or by post to Department of English, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA 17745, USA. The deadline is 31 December 2013.

The Later Work In the Slate Book Review for 30 November 2012, Jenny Hendrix published “The Lost, Unlovable Evelyn Waugh: Why are his later, Catholic novels so dismissed?”

Parody of the Liturgy In “DJ Taylor’s top 10 literary parodies,” published in the Guardian on 17 October 2012, the novelist includes Evelyn Waugh on the Catholic liturgy, specifically his vernacular version of Hail Mary, “Hiya Moll, you’re the tops …,” from his Diaries in September 1962 (785).

Childhood in Hampstead In “Novelist Evelyn Waugh’s adventures in Hampstead’s ‘pleasure garden,’” an article published in Ham & High for 12 January 2013, Adam Sonin reviews some of Waugh’s early experiences. Waugh and Greene In “A heady mix of vice and voodoo,” a review of Bernard Diederich’s Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene’s Adventures in Haiti and Central America, published in the Spectator on 1 December 2012, Ian Thomson observes that “Among Catholic writers, perhaps only Waugh won Greene’s unstinting admiration and love; his death in 1966 was devastating to Greene.”

Teaching Decline and Fall On 8 July 2012, BookRags published a Kindle edition of Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh Lesson Plans, which includes thirty daily lessons, twenty “fun activities,” 180 multiple-choice questions, sixty short-essay questions, twenty essay questions, quizzes, homework assignments, and more.

Waugh Blog on Tumblr An Evelyn Waugh blog, including photographs, videos, art and quotations, is available at http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/evelyn%20waugh.

Small Demons Small Demons is a website that searches books for references to authors such as Evelyn Waugh (162 hits) and novels such as A Handful of Dust (seven hits). The address is http://www.smalldemons.com.

Research through Mendeley Mendeley is a research service available on the internet. Searching for Evelyn Waugh identifies eight papers that mention his name: http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/?query=%22Evelyn+Waugh%22.

The Condemned Playground A conference entitled “The Condemned Playground: Aldous Huxley and his Contemporaries” will be held at Balliol College, Oxford, 1-4 September 2013. The conference may include a presentation on the edition of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and an address by Evelyn’s grandson Alexander Waugh. For more information, please visit http://www.huxleyconference.org.

Anthony Powell Conference The Anthony Powell Society has announced its Seventh Biennial Conference. The subject is "Anthony Powell in the 20s and 30s." The conference will be held at Eton College, Windsor, Berkshire, England, 27-29 September 2013. For details, email [email protected].

The Pursuit of Happiness In “Candace Bushnell’s Fantasy World, Starring Candace Bushnell,” an article by Edith Zimmerman in the New York Times Magazine for 18 January 2013, the author of Sex and the City among other novels is quoted: “I always wanted to write novels. I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.”

Waugh on “The Master” Christopher Buckley quotes Evelyn Waugh in “Yours Ever, Plum: The Life and Letters of P. G. Wodehouse,” a review of P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters, ed. Sophie Ratcliffe (New York: Norton, 2013). The review appeared in Newsweek and the Daily Beast on 28 January 2013. Wodehouse was published in the UK in 2011.

End of Evelyn Waugh Studies, Vol. 43, No. 3 Home Page and Back Issues