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Home , Alec Waugh, A Life of Contrasts, A Little Learning (book), Evelyn Waugh, Peter Quennell, Vile Bodies

NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 36, No. 1 Spring 2005

“The Funniest Book in the World”: Waugh and by Peter Morton Flinders University

Evelyn Waugh did not enjoy his Christmas of 1946. It was the second after the war and the national mood was somber. Troops were still being demobilized and the food rationing was worse than ever. As a Christmas “bonus” the government had allowed an extra eight pence worth of meat (half to be corned beef), but bread and potatoes were about to be rationed for the first time. To top it all, the weather was deteriorating and the winter 1946-7 would be the worst in living memory.

Waugh, then in his early 40s, was en famille at Piers Court, and that was always a trial in itself. And he felt beleaguered. New houses were encroaching on his land, the socialist “grey lice” were in government, taxes were punitive and he was thinking of emigrating to Ireland. He tried to stay in fairly good humor on the day itself, for the sake of the children, but without much success. He was disgusted by his children’s shoddy presents and the general disorder. Their lunch was cold and ill-cooked. His wife had given him some caviar, but he had eaten that the week before. All in all, it was a “ghastly” day. He had already told his diary that he was looking forward to his forthcoming stay in hospital, for an operation on his hemorrhoids, to get away from them all.[1]

The one bright spot of the day was his mother’s gift: a copy of George & Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, the seventh edition (J. W. Arrowsmith, 1924), with an introduction by Sir John Squire.[2] Why did she choose this particular book? We surmise that it was because of her son’s fond employment of the Diary in , published the year before. There he had made Sebastian Flyte’s mother, Lady Marchmain, read it out loud of an evening. With her “beautiful voice and great humour of expression” she solaces her family as they try to come to terms with Sebastian’s alcoholism. She reads from it “with great spirit until ten o’clock,” and continues on a later evening.[3]

Kate Waugh would surely have been touched by this scene, for it is a piece of reworked biography. Waugh had known the Diary since earliest childhood. It had figured among those theatrical reading sessions in Arthur Waugh’s study which were such a prominent part of the early imaginative lives of both the Waugh brothers. According to ’s account, these readings went on well into Evelyn’s teenage years. The latter’s own late account (censored of all anti-paternal feeling) says: “For some eight years of my life for some three or four evenings a week when we were at home, he read to me, my brother and to whatever friends might be in the house, for an hour or more from his own old favourites. … Often it was pure entertainment; Vice Versa or The Diary of a Nobody.”[4]

The influence of these sessions eventually went deep, but at the time the youthful Waugh reacted against them with growing embarrassment and disdain. Whether he initially found the Diary as amusing as his father did is questionable. Arthur Waugh may have found it truly comical, but the first reviews had ranged from the indifferent to the downright hostile. “A photographic representation of middle-class boredom and horseplay,” snarled the Athenaeum, accusing the Grossmiths of vulgarity, snobbishness and— unkindest cut of all—of being not funny enough.[5]

It is clear that the Diary was a “sleeper” which started to hit its stride among the wider public only about the time of the First World War, and it did so at first among people who were distinctly anti-Modernist in their sympathies. Admiring the Diary, even singing its praises excessively, made a convenient gesture of defiance. One might celebrate its charm while patronizing it too. The characteristic note is struck by the conservative essayist and journalist D. B. Wyndham Lewis, writing in the early 1920s. According to Lewis, admirers of the Diary at that time were the “salt of the earth,” by which he meant men of the legal and political Establishment; people like “Lord Rosebery, Mr Augustine Birrell, Mr Hilaire Belloc, one of H. M. Ambassadors, and at least one Abbot of Benedictines”: in short, middle-aged men of sentimental tastes who were nostalgic about the Diary’s values and possibly enjoyed a chuckle at the expense of the lower orders.[6] As the very type of the Georgian litterateur, Arthur Waugh fitted perfectly into such a group. According to his son he “always referred to himself as ‘incorrigibly Victorian’” even though he outlived the Victorian age by forty years. He regarded the emerging geniuses of with blank incomprehension. Eliot and his circle he regarded (again, according to his son) as absurd, and he spoke of D. H. Lawrence as a writer whose imaginative powers had been abandoned on a midden.[7]

Contemptuous though the young Evelyn Waugh was of such aesthetic conservatism, he did eventually come to share many of his father’s literary tastes, including his appreciation of the Diary. In 1930, when his career as a novelist was gathering pace, Waugh wrote a column on diaries as a literary form and made there his bold claim:

I still think that the funniest book in the world is Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody. If only people would really keep journals like that. Nobody wants to read other people’s reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting, and will become more so as conditions change with the years.[8]

This comment should be understood for what it was. Waugh was not engaging in serious critical debate; he was scribbling copy for the at the rate of £30 per 800-word column. He was being paid to air provocative opinions, not to make finely nuanced observations. But his judgment on the Diary was apparently sincere, and certainly he put his finger on one of its appeals, which makes it an important social document: it deals with the routines of lower-middle-class Victorian urban life in a way that ought to be boring but is actually funny and fascinating.

It is worth considering that Waugh learnt more from the Diary than that. At this time he was refining his early aesthetic goal, which was to pare down his narrative to the barest bones of dialogue and action. He would surely have been impressed by the Grossmiths’ ability to conjure up so economically episodes of sublime absurdity. A fictive diary is in its nature one of the sparsest kinds of narrative. It occludes the author to the limit, by removing most narrative exposition—or (very important to Waugh) any overt judgments. Furthermore, just like Pooter, Waugh’s early leading male characters—Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, William Boot—seem stranded in an earlier era, lost in some Victorian dream among predatory modern forces: they are simple, trusting, loving, innocent, and therefore blameworthy. (There is evidence that the Grossmiths too intended to pass a more severe criticism on their hero than the modern reader can easily perceive.) Take for example the scene where Pooter naively records his loved ones’ reaction to his literary pretensions:

Another thing which is disappointing to me is, that Carrie and Lupin take no interest whatever in my diary. I broached the subject at the breakfast-table to-day. I said: “I was in hopes that, if anything ever happened to me, the diary would be an endless source of pleasure to you both; to say nothing of the chance of the remuneration which may accrue from its being published.” Both Carrie and Lupin burst out laughing.[9]

Is there an echo of this, at least in tone, in (1934), where the hero-victim Tony Last, landowner and cuckold, returns on Sunday morning to his house and to his adulterous wife’s horrible female friends?

Tony left the church porch and made his accustomed way to the hot houses; a gardenia for himself; some almost black carnations for the ladies. When he reached the room where they were sitting there was a burst of laughter. He paused on the threshold, rather bewildered. “Come in, darling, it isn’t anything. It’s only we had a bet on what coloured buttonhole you’d be wearing and none of us won.” They still giggled a little as they pinned on the flowers he had brought them.… They left early, so as to reach London in time for dinner. In the car Daisy said, “Golly, what a house.” “Now you can see what I’ve been through all these years.” “My poor Brenda,” said Veronica, unpinning her carnation and throwing it from the window into the side of the road.[10]

Of course, Tony Last is miles removed socially from Charles Pooter, and the Grossmiths’ mode is comedy whereas Waugh’s is biting satire. But, as character types, the two do have one thing in common: we are invited to see both of them as nearly extinct beings, doomed to be supplanted by a new and pushy generation operating on quite different moral principles. And, as a very self-conscious literary artist, what Waugh surely took from the Diary and applied to his own ends is its severely disciplined style, its delicately modulated tone and timing, and the subtle tricks whereby characters can be made to expose themselves in monologue or self-reported dialogue.

It should also be noted that not all the Diary is couched in a lightly humorous mode. It cuts quite deeply in places. Some of the dreadful faux pas, more painful than comic, recorded so naively in its pages would not be out of place in one of Waugh’s satires. One thinks of the episode where Pooter reports that he has told the owner of a portrait drawing that there is “something about the expression of the face that was not quite pleasing. It looks pinched.” The mournful reply: “Yes, the face was done after death—my wife’s sister” (142). It is no accident that comedy based on such excruciating embarrassments as these first arose at the turn of the century, because it is essentially metropolitan comedy of the kind Waugh perfected himself: the comedy of a world where we are constantly involved in circumstances where incomplete knowledge makes it easy to misjudge or misinterpret.

So, sixteen years later, Waugh found his mother’s gift very acceptable, not only because he had long been an admirer of the Diary but also because it gave him an excuse to retreat to his library and give the little book some close attention. He did much more than re-read it, and to understand what he did do with it, it is necessary to look a little more closely at the origin of this comic masterpiece.

The Diary of a Nobody, the fictional diary of Charles Pooter, a clerk in late- Victorian London, first appeared anonymously in Punch, or the London Charivari. It consisted of 26 short episodes published intermittently in the issues between 26 May 1888 and 11 May 1889. Nothing is known about what Punch readers thought of the serial, but its reception must have been such as to persuade its creators to go further, for in July 1892 a longer version appeared as a book from the Bristol publisher J. W. Arrowsmith. The authors were now identified as the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith, famous as actors, song-writers and playwrights.

The book was different in many ways from the Punch serial. The Grossmiths divided the existing text into 17 chapters and then added seven new ones. The first entry of the new eighteenth chapter is dated “April 8,” or two and a half weeks after the last entry in Punch, to which it connects seamlessly. They also revised the existing Punch text, by adding, substituting and (rarely) deleting material. Finally they added the 32 witty pen and ink sketches by Weedon Grossmith, which in mood and style now seem so integral to the whole.[11]

What Waugh did with his present on that Christmas Day was to read it very carefully against the serial, presumably using the 1888/9 volumes of Punch from his library. As he went along, he annotated his copy with all the significant changes he could discover between the two versions. He added some marginal remarks, both to the text and to Squire’s introduction. Finally, at the end of the book on the flyleaf he added further comments as an aide memoire, some of them extraordinary in their attention to minutiae.[12] One example will suffice: it reads, cryptically, “Jackson frères Lupin’s introduction, not grocer’s brand, but slip later.” This refers to a scene where Lupin tells his parents he has secured them some quality champagne from an irreplaceable source. In the Punch version, it is identified as the highly dubious brand “Jackson Frères.” Yet the next time the same brand is mentioned, much later, we see it is freely available from the corner grocer. Trying to avoid the contradiction, and perhaps to mute the impression that Lupin is a liar, in their revision the Grossmiths removed the brand name in the first scene, but they left in the later phrase “the same as we had before.” This is the meaning of Waugh’s “slip later.”

Unlike many editors since, Waugh understands that the Grossmiths had been careful to ensure that the dates of the entries were real dates in the 1888/9 calendar, and that they had maintained these dates even when they revised and extended the text in 1892. So, against the editor, Squire’s, cozy (and wrong) remark that “The date is, shall we say, 1891; the site is Holloway,” Waugh puts a pained notation “1888” (8). He could not have thought much of Squire's accuracy, because he also picks him up over his claim that the character Mr. Padge is never allowed to say anything but “That's right.” Many commentators since have claimed the same, but Waugh remembers and notes that much later Padge says more: he drinks Carrie Pooter's health, “coupled, as he said, ‘with her worthy lord and master’” (134).

Waugh also spots that the entry which in Punch is dated, correctly, “Sunday, November 4” was accidentally re-dated “November 5, Sunday” in the book version, an error which caused the rest of the entries up to the end of the year to be one day out.[13] For example, the very next entry is “November 6,” which was a Tuesday in 1888, yet it is clearly intended to be a Monday, the day when Lupin attends Mr Perkupp’s office to find out about his job offer. Waugh recognizes this, because he writes in all the original and correct Punch dates to the following entries as far as the one for 19 November. The Grossmiths forced the dates back on track when they correctly labeled the entry for 30 December 1888 a Sunday. But they did not notice, nor does Waugh, that if 26 November is a Sunday, and it is so described, then 30 December cannot be one as well.

Waugh was conscientious and careful, but not infallible. In Punch, the Grossmiths had allowed the Pooters and their friends to play the game Consequences on successive Saturday and Sunday evenings (2-3 June 1888). Worse, the second time Gowing, typically, had “over-stepped the limits of good taste.” When they realized this, for the book they shifted the two occasions back a day, to the Friday and Saturday, but Waugh fails to pick this up. Then there is the question of whether Daisy Mutlar’s brother (he who has the useful skill of playing a tune on his cheek with a knife) is called Harry or Frank. In Punch, he is called “Harry” in the entry for 8 November and “Frank” after that. In Waugh’s edition the error is continued. In fact, it is perpetuated. For the book the Grossmiths again named “Harry Mutlar” as the “low comedy merchant” in a new passage with which they supplemented the original Punch entry for 15 November, but Waugh does not notice. Nor did any editor until well after Waugh’s death.

It was an odd way to spend Christmas, one might think, even for a misanthrope. Why did he do it? Waugh’s self-imposed task has two aspects: first, as a biographical detail, and second, as a careful enquiry by a technician of comedy. Under the first aspect, the task was both an act of piety and exorcism. For the Diary carried a powerful emotional charge for Waugh. Charles Pooter’s excruciatingly mundane transcript of his days surely reminded Waugh only too exactly of his own parents’ middle-class surburbanism, which it was the prime object of his early life to escape. According to Selina Hastings, “looking back years later Evelyn observed that his parents’ life reminded him of Diary of a Nobody, with Arthur and Kate as Mr and Mrs Pooter.” She adds that it was “undeniably true” that “there were Pooterish elements in the home life of the Waughs.”[14] Certainly the Waugh parents’ social life and domestic activities in Evelyn’s early years, as revealed in Kate Waugh’s diary (“Tried to make pastry. Very funny. Roasted pheasant”) do indeed bear an eerie resemblance to the fictional records of the Pooter ménage (“It does seem hard I cannot get good sausages for breakfast. They are either full of bread or spice, or are as red as beef.” [119]) So do Arthur’s poems about cycling. He had them printed privately as Legends of the Wheel, and they could easily have filled a column in the fictional Bicycle News, that gruesomely cheerful, pun-laden periodical of the Diary.

Further, we know that the dynamics of the relationships in the Diary, especially that of reckless young Lupin Pooter towards his elders, reminded Waugh of his own relation to his brother Alec and of his own position as an unappreciated younger son. It was a family joke that Evelyn was in his youth very much like Lupin Pooter. In his journal, Alec Waugh mentioned that he and his wife “roared over Lupin’s resemblance to my brother” when they read the Diary together in 1935.[15] Forty years later, in March 1976, Alec again commented that no one had pointed out the resemblances between Waugh and Lupin Pooter, adding that “we, as a family, were always aware of this, and I remember EW’s delight at his first reading of it. ‘But Lupin’s me,’ he cried.”[16]

Taken at face value, this implies that Evelyn recognized something of himself in Lupin even as a child. Certainly by the time he reached the age of Lupin in the story, he would have had more reason to do so. Lupin Pooter, at twenty, is the prodigal son, back at home after being sacked from his uncongenial job. He scorns his father’s suburban existence and seeks to escape from his class. “I am not going to rot away my life in the suburbs,” he cries (288). He is improvident and disrespectful. He smokes and drinks too much and drives too fast. His slang is impenetrable, his friends noisy and bohemian; he is attracted to older women with dubious reputations. But basically he is a shrewd social climber. He plans two means of escape from Holloway. The first, by making a career out of sailing pretty close to the wind as a share broker, or, as he calls it, “biz—good old biz!” was certainly not Waugh’s way. But the second is to escape into a higher social sphere and to marry an heiress, “Lillie Girl,” on whom ten thousand pounds have been settled.

Waugh surely identified particularly with the way Lupin is badly underestimated by his father, yet triumphs in the end. It is true that Lupin is the only son of the family, whereas Waugh as a teenager was caught up in a three-way tangle with his father and his elder brother Alec, the favorite. But in fact that is paralleled by the relationship of the brothers Grossmith themselves. George, the elder, was far more successful and creative than Weedon, especially in their early days. Weedon failed as an artist and only took to the theatre as an alternative career. The character of Lupin Pooter is based on that of the young Weedon. Some of the more laughable incidents, for example the one where Pooter delivers a stern reproof to his son and then catches his foot in the mat as he exits, actually happened to Weedon, who seems to have been something of a scapegrace compared with his perfectionist brother. All this was a matter of common knowledge. Both brothers, especially George, were household names in the years when Waugh was growing up, and both published volumes of autobiography: George in 1910 and Weedon in 1913.

Second, if Waugh had thought of the Diary as “the funniest book in the world” at the outset of his career, he might well have been keen, in 1946, to see if it still had any aesthetic lessons for him. Judging from the type and depth of his annotations it is conceivable that he had some creative purpose in mind. After all, the peculiar possibilities of the fictive diary are of perennial interest to comic writers. The Diary’s technique of ingenuous self-revelation was pushed further by Anita Loos in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925), and, of course, the Diary has been overtly imitated, with the same range of cultural reference and modish concerns, in Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole (1982) and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones (1996), not to mention Keith Waterhouse’s two clever pastiches, Mrs Pooter’s Diary (1983) and The Collected Letters of a Nobody (1986). For a century the Diary has been fertile ground which has germinated many seeds, so why not for Waugh? In 1946 he was in a restless mood. The triumph of Brideshead Revisited was behind him; was not yet on the horizon. For the moment his creative energies seemed to be flagging: he had written little recently that satisfied him. Did the Diary induce in him the feeling he would soon be ascribing to Dennis Barlow, in The Loved One?

His interest was no longer purely technical nor purely satiric. . . . In that zone of insecurity in the mind where none but the artist dare trespass, the tribes were mustering. Dennis, the frontiersman, could read the signs.[17]

Perhaps, briefly, during that Christmas, Waugh perused the Diary as a frontiersman and felt the tribes mustering. He told his friend Diana Cooper, “I spent Christmas studying Diary of a Nobody and comparing it with the original serialized version in Punch with some very interesting discoveries resulting.”[18] But what exactly he meant by the last phrase will never be known. The Diary was laid aside and the tribes dispersed, not to assemble again until Waugh arrived at the Forest Lawn cemetery in the following year.

Notes [1] Entry of 23 December 1946. Michael Davie, ed., The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1976), 668. [2] The history of the early book editions of the Diary is tangled, due to the unwillingness of the publisher to distinguish between an edition and an impression (reprint). The edition of 1910 was at first called the fifth, then the third, and finally the fourth. [3] Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945. London: Chapman & Hall, 1960), 149. [4] : The First Volume of an Autobiography (London: Chapman and Hall, 1964), 71. [5] Athenaeum, 13 August 1892: 223. The publishers tried to correct the reviewers’ judgments by printing in later editions a set of short commendations from public figures. [6] D. B. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Panegyric of a Hero’ in At the Sign of the Blue Moon (London: Andrew Melrose, 1924), 199. [7] A Little Learning, 64, 76-7. [8] “One Way to Immortality,” Daily Mail, 28 June 1930. Reprinted in Donat Gallagher, ed., The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (London: Methuen, 1983), 84-6. [9] The Diary of a Nobody (Bristol / London: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1924), 158- 9. Further citations from Waugh’s copy are in the text. [10] A Handful of Dust (1934. London: Penguin, 2000), 83-4. [11] Not all editions reproduce all of Weedon’s drawings. Waugh’s edition does not, as he noted at one point: “drawing of Pooter with umbrella?” This perhaps implies he checked his copy against another edition in his library. [12] The copy is now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, PR 6013 R795 D5 1924 HRC WAU Evelyn Waugh Collection. The dedication reads: “Evelyn with love from Mother Xmas 1946.” On the title page Waugh noted: “Text collated with original serial version in Punch 1888-89. E.W. Christmas 1946.” [13] Waugh’s is the first known record of this error. The first Diary editor to note it was Alan Pryce-Jones (Collins, 1968), but he did not explain how it had come about. [14] Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 12-13. Waugh’s observation explicitly comparing his parents’ life to the Pooters cannot be located now. Information from Selina Hastings, 3 Mar. 2005. [15] Cited by Hastings, 12. [16] Alec Waugh’s comment is in a MS page of corrections which he made to the Sykes biography of his brother. Information from , 19 Feb. 2005. [17] The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (London: Chapman & Hall, 1948), 68. [18] Writing from hospital on 17 Jan. 1947. Artemis Cooper, ed., Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper (London: Sceptre, 1992), 130-1. Italics added.

Evelyn Waugh, Plagiarist? by Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma

In the film Finding Neverland (2004), Gilbert Cannan wins the affection of James M. Barrie’s wife. Most Waugh students know him, if at all, from Alec Waugh’s chapter in My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits (1967), which out of curiosity I reread after some thirty years. Cannan was a novelist, and Alec thinks his best work is Mendel: A Story of Youth (1916), based on the life of the painter Mark Gertler, who was Jewish, had early success under the sponsorship of Edward Marsh, fell in love with Dora Carrington of the Bloomsbury Group, and committed suicide in 1939. A year or so after publication of Mendel, Evelyn Waugh and Barbara Jacobs “covered the walls of the former day-nursery with what we took to be cubist paintings” and showed them to Gertler: “Hard put to find an amiable comment, he remarked that there was originality in the way in which we had combined so many various pigments — enamel, oil paint, blacking and poster-paint” (A Little Learning, 121-2). I have not been able to find a copy of Mendel, but Alec’s description reminded me of Evelyn’s Lancing story, “Essay” (Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice and The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh), in which a successful Jewish painter describes his early struggles, his success as “a Society portrait painter,” his rebellion in favor of avant-garde art, and, after an unhappy love affair, his return “to the respectability and the Jews.” Someone who has access to Cannan’s novel might be able to discern the extent, if any, of Evelyn’s debt to the novel. In the early 1920s, Evelyn was aware of and to some extent still guided by his brother’s taste in modern literature — hardly advanced, but more so than their father’s. In fact, Evelyn’s debt to the work of writers now forgotten may repay further study. In “The Context of Waugh’s Early Novels” (Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time), I discussed parallels between his work and, among others, that of Beverley Nichols, Michael Arlen, and . A search of the catalogue of Waugh’s library at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, of published and unpublished letters and diaries, and some dumb luck may turn up other writers upon whose work Waugh drew and, in most cases, improved.

Addendum: Alexander Waugh has provided these excerpts from a letter dated 19 October 1916 and written by Arthur Waugh to his son Alec at school at Sherborne:

Alas my beloved son, I am afraid that "Mendel" is no book for me. I have no stomach for the sophistries by which the young men of today endeavor to justify their fornications and their infidelities. Their whole gospel is founded upon lies. It is NOT true that society outlaws the artist unless the artist asks for it by outraging the decencies. It is NOT true that a slender capacity for painting or writing excuses a man for treating women as the dogs in the gutter treat a bitch. It is NOT true that happiness lies in the gratification of one's own lusts and inclinations. The whole thing is a tissue of damned rubbish: and it is just the gospel of intolerable selfishness that has brought this war upon the world. The artists of our generation taught the virtues of self- restraint and unselfishness. They may not have been so clever as these young men but, by God, they were a better lot and they would be ashamed of their successors, if they were not happily at rest in their graves. ... You mustn't mind because I cannot have the same literary gods as you. No doubt it is the law of nature. But I wish I thought your Cannan was a little more of a man. I think he pronounced his own judgment when he gave his reasons for avoiding military service, when so many thousands of better men than he are giving their lives. Ever your loving Daddy. Book Reviews

The Selected Essays of Donald Greene. Ed. John Lawrence Abbott. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004. 355 pages. $57.50. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.

Although I have always longed to use the word “pertinacious,” the opportunity has not, until now, presented itself. Other adjectives could be used of Donald Greene’s scholarly style, including wide-ranging, learned, even formidable, certainly blunt. By the time he began to contribute to the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, he had mellowed somewhat. He did not accuse other Waugh scholars of wanton ignorance (though he corrected me on titles and precedence in the English peerage), of having “preposterous fantasies,” or of being “dilettantes and backwoods moralists,” as he did some of his predecessors in Eighteenth Century studies. Greene’s work on that period — which he denied was a period, held that even if it was it shouldn’t be, and worked hard to explode descriptions like “Age of Reason” and “Augustan Age” — is difficult for me to assess because most of the twelve essays in this collection appeared after I had finished course work and studying for my preliminary examinations or even after I was granted tenure. Therefore, I now read them as essays rather than as articles, and I was impressed by the clarity of the prose and line of argument as well as by Greene’s knowledge of the literature of other centuries and of disciplines, like theology, other than literature. Greene’s major project was to establish , , Jonathan Swift, and their contemporaries, ranging from 1660 to the French Revolution, as central to rather than aberrations. He uses parallel passages from earlier and later writers to show that major concerns had not changed; he shows that empiricism, not “reason,” and certainly not Aristotelian logic, was central from Bacon on; he relates traditional Christian concepts of pride to a series of writers, including Tolstoy and twentieth-century psychologists; he examines Boswell’s Life of Johnson by criteria for a good biography, finds it wanting, labels it “table talk,” and very good table talk at that, and tries to explode Boswell idolators who make the biographer more important than the prolific and versatile Johnson, “whose own ways of thinking and writing are utterly unlike anything that had ever been done before or was to be done afterwards.” Invoking Kierkegaard, he maintains that the proper label for the major writers of the period was “existentialist,” or, at least as provocatively, “modern” if not “modernist.” Greene certainly could provoke, as when he insisted, repeatedly, at some length, and with thoroughly specious reasoning that Charles Ryder becomes a good Anglican at the end of Brideshead Revisited. Not being a Johnsonian, I’m not sure whether he was serious in arguing that the good doctor’s dark secret was an addiction to masturbation, but he presents a good definition “in case the reader is vague about the practical signification of the term” and gives a history of the belief that it would cause blindness and insanity. He is also the cause of wit in other men, as when the editor notes that the practice “has had an almost universal appeal though no official cultural endorsement, then or now.” If, as Greene maintains, “much literary criticism ... is autobiographical,” each reader will have different favorites. Since I know something about theology, have written on Western literature, have reviewed a number of infuriating literary biographies, and have suffered the posturings of literary theorists, I find most satisfying “The Sin of Pride: A Sketch for a Literary Exploration,” for its clear definitions and range of knowledge; “Western Canadian Literature,” which finds three writers are who not too bad among a great many who are; "'Tis a Pretty Book, Mr. Boswell, But—," which debunks Boswell as biographer; and “Literature or Metaliterature? Thoughts on Traditional Literary Study,” which he finds far superior to work by those who ignore and even dislike literature. Greene’s work on the eighteenth century is more extensive and more important than his work on Waugh, represented in this volume by two short pieces, “The Great Long Beach Waugh Memorial” and “Evelyn Waugh’s Hollywood .” Both deal with factual backgrounds to a Waugh novel, and there is far too little of that in the study of Waugh or most other writers. But this is the stuff of handbooks — Greene, some other scholars, and I once thought briefly of doing one on Waugh — not of literary criticism. Since Greene regards Brideshead as “somewhat embarrassing” and the life of as a major mid-twentieth-century biography, perhaps it is just as well that he didn’t attempt to go further. Each of the essays is introduced by a head note; the illustrations are few but useful; and the index is an unusual feature, and unusually copious, for a collection of this type. Missing, unaccountably in a tribute to an important scholar, is a bibliography of Greene’s writings.

Déjà-Vu All Over Again Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s, by Bernard Schweizer. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 2001. 216 pp. $19.50. Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, Bennington College.

Travel in those days may have suggested the possibility of an escape from the cramped and tense conditions at home, but for the traveler it was conducive to a sense of déjà-vu: the uncanny feeling that one was returning to familiar social and political conditions, but displaced, in a foreign land. (Schweizer 145)

While the instilment of fear is not the exclusive domain of writing, writing does expand its region of influence. --Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (xi)

The second of the epigraphs appears in a book premised on the theory that every definitive Latin American novel quests after an always mythic, atemporal beginning while simultaneously dismantling its own historical, linguistic, archival apparatus. The fear instilled by the episteme of the Spanish Conquest is ultimately reflected back on the mendacity of the epistemology itself. The end is exclusive to the means, and this exclusion becomes the story, one of successive, literary dystopias. González Echevarría recognizes his own work as archival, as but another act of similarly vulnerable destruction, and the theory is indeed contentious, not least because of the reductive grandiosity of its paradigm. It is also, despite the relatively esoteric focus, available at your local mall. The book rapidly attained biblical status, not merely among Latin Americanists, but as a master-narrative of postcolonialism, of how to read or rescue any text from an appropriately postmodern stance. Although Bernard Schweizer does not mention González Echevarría, and his text begins with the claim that “this study resets the parameters for a critically productive, contextualized approach to travel writing” (2), with a comparison of travel and revolution, both substantiated by the dust-jacket blurb averring a more complicated postcolonialism, by 2001 he was treading familiar ground. The journeys, as is typical, are no longer outward but inward; quests for self. Success is determined by the degree of doubting (the more the better), by the self-criticism admitted by the authors when their preconceived ontological templates do not function abroad or, for that matter, at home. Schweizer attempts to rescue four authors three times, his means ranging from an initially standard literary criticism to more erratic use of neo-philosophy. In short, , whether in Africa or , is portrayed as a would-be primitivist plagued by a more latent “middle-class ethos” (149) and “the return of his repressed conservatism” (150). is described as a rejuvenator of Byzantine, Serbian nationalism, though her pursuit of this “life force” (137) is simultaneously undercut by Orthodox Christianity’s anti- nationalist discourse of sin and atonement: “It is West’s fear of giving in to the death wish herself, a fear that implies the return of a repressed desire, that constitutes the biggest anxiety” (170). , the most self-analytical and therefore the most sophisticated of the four, while nominally empathetic with the working class, never transcends his own sense of “ingrained class status” (163). Rather than a comrade-in-arms, here he is an anthropologist, an outsider mimicking an ever-exotic poverty, whether fetishizing Parisian street life or being betrayed by the totalitarian Left in Spain. Evelyn Waugh the traveler is depicted as a reactionary, never engaging in the primitivist pretence. He overwhelms the other three, but only as the least circumspect, the most bumbling. His work is defined as “noxious” (42), “naïve” (51), “monologic and didactic” (57), “profascist” (176) and “rather embarrassing” (176), manifesting a “straightforward conservatism” (37) (surely an oxymoron) and a “systematic racial bias” (41). He is compared to Belloc, Kipling, and W. H. Hudson. At first, Waugh the novelist fares little better. Both Black Mischief and are summarized as “reactionary wish- fulfillment fantas[ies]” (49; 53). He is only rehabilitated by Remote People’s London “Nightmare,” in which the metropolitan center outstrips Africa’s supposed barbarism, and by Tony Last, a self-doubter par excellence. Until the final third, the book is under-theorized, although given the repeated discursive oscillation between civilized spuriousness and the latter’s manifestation through primitivist experience, it is obvious that Freud is lurking in the wings. He becomes an unquestioned authority, fittingly accompanied by brief mentions of Dennis Porter’s Haunted Journeys, Ali Behdad’s Belated Journeys (both former deconstructions of the orientalist archive, of the foreign-made-home oscillation, now archived themselves), Homi Bahbha (the potential “menace” [67] of in-between spaces), and Pierre Bourdieu, who furthered Freudian suspicion in multi-relational contexts (the superstructural problem isn’t simply Mummy and Daddy, or the education system, but the bridge club, the rugby team etc.). At a mechanical level, there is the odd spelling hiccup, some difficulty with prepositions, occasional loss of a subject mid-way through a sentence, generally unwieldy prose, weak concluding sentences (see particularly 79, when Greene’s Catholic stance against the Mexican Revolution is vindicated after pages of abuse), and average remarks are often made with revelatory force: “One may want to add, though, that in Waugh’s case the experience of space was ideologically rather than socially constructed” (111) [emphasis definitely Schweizer’s], or “It all goes to show that political travel writing works in mysterious ways” (179). I am less than convinced, furthermore, with the possible exception of Orwell, that any of these writers were radical, nor would they wish to be, so Schweizer’s criterion is skewed from the off. Even if we accept this skewing, the book should be read backwards. Since the theory is artificially withheld, the opening pages seem pedestrian, expounding on Orwell’s liberal humanism or Waugh’s imperialism, both conventional, almost non-critical, positions. Bahbha’s “menace” (67), appears early, without any explanation of why such threatening in-betweenness is preferable to less fearsome, monadic, approaches. Much of the pre-theory opinion is ambiguous, arguably belonging either to Schweizer or the travelers: “It was this unrest and anxiety that constituted a major motivating force for English intellectuals of the 1930s to leave their country . . . in pursuit of the worst that can be imagined – the zero point of culture and society” (104). Is this the worst in the 1930s, or still the worst in 2001? Perhaps all such glitches are tacit, preemptive strikes against the book’s own episteme, thus thwarting the reader’s orderly expectations. Leaving aside the inherent limitations of any neo-Freudian technique, unless we are to remain trapped in the entropy of oscillation, between impossible myth and suspicion of our archive, the litmus test for any such study lies in its proposed alternatives. Ultimately, Radicals on the Road is less of a rescue operation than a negation, discarding its four authors over the last few pages in favor of the asserted historical accuracy and “straightforward political analyses” (180) of the mass media, Joan Didion, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Robert D. Kaplan. While Schweizer finally recognizes that there is “no politically innocent methodology” (185), Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts apparently offers the right kind of “fundamentally humanistic” (182) politics, for he “remains faithful to his American, liberal ideas of freedom” (184). In the 1990s, as Schweizer knows, President Clinton used Balkan Ghosts to define his policy of non-intervention in Bosnia. I shall allow the reader to decide whether to spend an afternoon reading the overtly dogmatic or watching “accurate” CNN, but most significantly, the debate has shifted here, from supposedly atrophied to competing forms of mediation, to different interpretations of the same archive. If this is Radicals’ point, then far too little is devoted to explaining how American liberalism is less mythic and indeed more viable than West’s version of Serbian nationalism, or Orwell’s democratic socialism. Jorge Luis Borges, one of González Echevarría’s many examples, once suggested that Don Quixote is now more real than the actual geography of Cervantine Spain. Although I am wary of disillusioning the disillusioners, Freud’s genealogy, from the primal horde on, is one man’s invention. It is certainly one of modernity’s most cherished, reality-shaping myths, but it is mythic nonetheless. It may be time for Schweizer, however fearfully, to self-reflect.

Works Consulted Borges, Jorge Luis. “Parábola de Cervantes y de Quijote.” El hacedor. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960. González Echevarría, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998.

A Sense of Loss and Desertion The Diaries of A. L. Rowse, by A. L. Rowse. Ed. Richard Ollard. London: Penguin, 2004. 480 pp. £10.99. Reviewed by Mircea Platon .

Born in 1903 to a working-class family in Cornwall, Alfred Leslie Rowse made his way up to thanks to a Douglas Jerrold Scholarship. He was to become a Fellow of the British Academy and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. An authority on the Elizabethan Age, a doctrinaire member of the Labor Party until the Suez Affair (when he resigned), an author of verses published by T. S. Eliot and read by Rebecca West and (if not by anybody else), a diarist and essayist full of bubbling acidity, he developed into a popular author of historical speculations (as in Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age and The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady) using his deep knowledge of all the back alleys of Renaissance and Baroque England.

In 2003, upon publication of the hardcover edition of Rowse’s Diaries, Stefan Collini deplored in Literary Supplement the “crankiness and venom” that made of Rowse’s later writing the “visible expression of a bad and rapidly worsening case of egocentrism.” Beginning with the 1960s, Rowse’s “imaginative immersion in the past,” notes Collini, becomes “wilful and vengeful.” Rowse (d. 1997) deplores the destruction of England by “the inhabitants of the fuck-hutches in millions.” What is worse in Collini’s view is that the Oxford historian transferred this spite to finance, his “absurd railing against income tax” amounting in the end to tax evasion settled by a lump payment to the Inland Revenue. But, as remarks David Cannadine, the grimness of post-war England made many writers, like Noel Coward, and Graham Greene, relocate in the natural and fiscal paradises of the Antipodes, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, , and the Caribbean, where they could live “free from English taxes, English weather and the ” (In Churchill’s Shadow, 270).

Rowse stayed put and ranted against those who “were stealing the fruits of his labour” for the “upkeep of the Idiot People’s children, their perambulators crowding the pavement wherever one goes.” Even if he did not want to live “anywhere other than Cornwall and Oxford,” Rowse ruminated on the possibility of becoming a citizen of the USA. After all, it was his annual American tour of conferences that provided him with the income sternly taxed by the British government. In the end he settled for an “inner exile.” He considered himself an outsider who did not have any obligation toward modern society: “I don’t want to have my money scalped off to maintain other people’s children. I don’t like other people; I particularly don’t like their children [...] I don’t want to pay for their fucking [...] It is their society, with their families, their children, their enjoyments, their pathetic ties” (381). As if to confirm that this “crankiness” placed Rowse in Evelyn Waugh’s family of spirits, it is at this point of anti-socialism that we find the first mention of Waugh in Rowse’s Diaries: “I agree with Evelyn Waugh, who in the end was maddened by the society we have lived into and which we detest (he couldn’t have detested it more than I do, after all he was a family man, rooted in it: I am not)” (20 January 1967, 381).

Later that same year, Rowse makes in his journal another two entries regarding Evelyn Waugh. The first one has as a source Hugh Molson, a friend of Waugh since Lancing days, who “used to stay in the house with the Waughs.” He told Rowse that “Evelyn had a nasty nature (though also charm when he chose),” and that “old Mr. Waugh was a caricature of a Victorian” whose “rhetorical, sentimental” discourses Evelyn “couldn’t bear [...] and made no bones about expressing it at table or in the presence of his parent.” This persecution made Arthur Waugh “complain to young Molson, asking for sympathy, wondering what he had done to deserve this treatment from his son.” Also, Molson told Rowse about “Richard Pares’s great love affair” with Evelyn Waugh: “What separated them was that Richard did not share Evelyn’s craze for drink. Hugh Molson did. But theirs was not a homo relationship.” This friendship ended when “Hugh confided his portentous political ambitions to Evelyn, who promptly made fun of them in the .” Molson, “always pompous” according to Rowse, broke with Waugh, telling “that Evelyn wasn’t ‘respectable.’” The next entry in the journal comes on 8 June 1967 (415-8), when Rowse visited . Even if the notations made on this visit were later concentrated by Rowse in the last two paragraphs of his chapter about “The Infantilism of Evelyn Waugh” in Glimpses of the Great (1985, 184-97), the whole entry reveals how firmly Rowse supported Waugh. Thus Waugh’s widow, Laura, “no beauty, inured to work and struggling with a family, has obviously had a hard life and been through a good deal.” For the ambitious and misanthropic Rowse, who wrote that “ordinary humans” need a partner “for their fulfillment in life,” while “we” the “remarkable men don’t” (413), Waugh’s homely surroundings seemed to confirm the superiority of his own way of life. From his homoerotic solitude, he could ponder with affectionate “condescendence” Waugh’s country-squire abode, “rather down-at-heel, a bit shabby,” with the “comfortable untidiness of a Catholic household, averse to money values.” Rowse notes with a mother-in-law’s eye that “the front parlour was dilapidated, smelt of drink, the table with drinks already liberally partaken of, so that, when offered sherry, there wasn’t a clean glass available.”

Rowse’s surgically melancholic outlook resembles Evelyn Waugh’s evocation of his own visit to a crumby, senile, post-war, tobacco-stained Hilaire Belloc. The parallel hasn’t escaped Rowse, who writes: “For all the money Evelyn made – 750,000 of Brideshead Revisited sold in America – he lived up to every penny of it, a largeish family, children to educate, nothing spared them, lashings of drink, generous entertaining. Like Belloc, model and mentor. (What a model, what a mentor!)” Even the admirable collection of books – “John Martin’s Illustrated Milton, landscape books with illustration by Turner, Daniel, Prout; the Pre-Raphaelite Tennyson” – could not cheer Rowse, ready to observe the Georgian house’s “fine hall, uglified by Victoriana,” the “large old-fashioned kitchen,” and the pantry, “where the cat had already got at the remains of the [steak-and-kidney] pie” cooked by Laura, herself a ghost: “I felt sadder and sadder for Laura, and made myself useful helping her with the waiting.”

Peering through Waugh’s then unpublished diaries, Rowse finds them “frank and candid, as one would expect.” Himself a public voice obsessed with the humbuggery of modern life, Rowse identifies again with Waugh: “Evelyn had to resist – as I have – the temptation to write a letter to The Times every day about some new folly.” Then the healthy, non-smoking (“I detest smoking – and Evelyn himself was a filthy cigar-smoker”), teetotaling Rowse swings back to his condescending tone: Waugh “complains that his memory is going – like his friend Molson, too much drink all through life, and (in Evelyn’s case) drugs. Molson told me of Evelyn’s anxiety to keep his homosexuality from his son, Auberon. But it is written across his work, written into Brideshead, and reappears in the voices he hears in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.” Rowse tied the knot between homosexuality (active then repressed), intoxication, and Gilbert Pinfold in “The Infantilism of Evelyn Waugh.” There he noted that “as an undergraduate Evelyn had three satisfying homo affairs.” Then he attributed Waugh’s “vicious attacks on homosexuals” to his having “gone off his head with drinks and drugs. That passage in his life he characteristically turned to good account with The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.” On leaving the house, Rowse noticed in the drawing room an imitation of a Great Exhibition carpet and exclaimed, with his own italics: “It had an odd effect to furnish so fine a Georgian house with Victorian carpets and furniture. My furniture would have looked better in the house.” And then came the final mournful ring: “The house made a deep impression on me – I was overwhelmed by the sense of loss and desertion, the glimpse into the life and mind of the man of genius who called it into being.”

Rowse noted bitterly in Glimpes of the Great that, while he was keenly following the cultural actuality, his fellow intellectuals were not paying due attention to his books. Indeed, judging by his familiarity with Waugh’s ideas and idiosyncrasies, he seems to have read Waugh’s works thoroughly. Rowse and Waugh were exact contemporaries at Oxford, where they both arrived in 1922 and had a lot of common friends. Michael Davie writes that Rowse, together with Graham Greene, and Peter Quennell, published poems in Public School Verse 1921-1922, where Waugh had also sent some unpublishable verses (Waugh, Diaries 114). But Rowse and Waugh met only once, in October 1959, at a luncheon that occasioned the only mention of “a reformed socialist fellow of All Souls named Rowse” in Waugh’s writings. Discussing this meeting, Rowse assured us that “Evelyn was on his best behaviour – he had better be – ear-trumpet and all” (Glimpses of the Great, 196).

Despite their differences, the two writers seem to have been kindred spirits. Rowse’s pages about Waugh, though not entirely flattering, stand as some of the most sympathetic accounts of the author of Brideshead Revisited. Waugh's ear-trumpet was all but entirely matched by Rowse’s historical telescope, which helped him to magnify the past while fatally ignoring the present:

I grew up with intense pride in England and her past, inspired by it, a strong motive always to do my best. It was an unquestioned assumption, the air one breathed, that England and the Empire were the greatest thing in the world. I came to maturity in a world where that has vanished at a touch. As a child, I grew up on the fringe, at the park-gate, shut out of the way of life of the gentry. Theirs was the life I always meant to share. When, by my own efforts, I arrived at the point of commanding such a life for myself, it was undermined or broken down. (279)

A Privileged Place Letters to a Young Catholic, by George Weigel. The Art of Mentoring. New York: Basic-Perseus, 2004. 251 pp. $22.50. Reviewed by Patrick Query.

In the past couple of years, modern Catholic experience has been identified with a “pilgrimage,” with a “revival,” and with an “imagination” in books by Paul Elie, Ian Ker, and Mark Bosco, S.J., respectively. In his latest book, Letters to a Young Catholic, George Weigel suggests that “while Catholicism is a body of beliefs and a way of life, Catholicism is also an optic, a way of seeing things, a distinctive perception of reality” (10, emphasis in original). The serial nature of Weigel’s description reflects the difficulty of the question he is addressing: What is Catholicism? Elie, Ker, and Bosco have confined their responses primarily to what is revealed in the literary works of Catholics. Weigel also looks at some Catholic literature (Chesterton, Waugh, Flannery O’Connor), but his book’s true focus is personal and geographical: “those parts of the Catholic world that have shaped my own understanding of the Church” (xii).

It is difficult to argue with Weigel’s conclusions because they are not really arguments but rather reflections of a deeply subjective kind. As he acknowledges early on, his interest is in “those dimensions of the Catholic experience that are matters of intuition and empathy and insight—experiences that can never be fully captured discursively” (xii). Maximizing the license afforded by this disclaimer, he goes on to paint some lovely pictures while making some very dubious discursive moves. A typical case is Chapter 7, devoted to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Each chapter of Letters is devoted to some place that has been important to Weigel’s formation as a Catholic (St. Peter’s, Chartres, the Sistine Chapel, Baltimore’s Old Cathedral, etc.). Brideshead is an imaginary place, however. No matter; he names the chapter “, , England: Brideshead Revisited and the Ladder of Love” and discourages the reader from paying any attention to the man behind the curtain who is busy scrubbing away the question of place altogether:

While it seems that this remarkable country estate was only one of several models for the fictional “Brideshead,” home to the aristocratic Flyte family, that really doesn’t matter. What counts is what happened in a place like this, in Evelyn Waugh’s deeply Catholic imagination (101-02).

Indeed, later we hear of “Castle Howard/Brideshead,” as though the physical place, the fictional place, and one of the BBC film’s locations were all happily melted into one Catholic “place” with a special lesson about faith. It is rarely clear which place the author is referring to (but remember, it doesn’t matter) or what exactly this place has to do with the lesson which, says Weigel, is about “climbing the ladder of love.” The things he praises about Castle Howard—lavish grounds, statuary, expensive furniture, works of art— certainly make it “a privileged place.” But a spiritual “Everyplace”? (Weigel calls it both). The author seems unconcerned with (or unaware of) the barrage of censure and accusations of snobbery that Waugh’s seeming reverence for places like this brought down on him and his novel. Nor does the question of Catholics-in-England (persecution and land laws, recusancy, the Counter- Reformation) enter into the discussion. Such worldly particulars have little hold over Weigel’s spiritual flights. In fairness, Weigel never claimed to be writing a scholarly book, but his commendable objective of anchoring the idea of a free-floating Catholic “optic” in concrete places is lost as he cuts the ties between his creative reflections and the real world.

For his reading of the novel itself, Weigel enjoys the able help of his friend, Waugh biographer Douglas Patey. Indeed, Patey is cited frequently as the source of some of the author’s best observations. Even with so capable a guide, Weigel somewhat irritatingly leaps between the novel, the film, the film’s soundtrack, other films (A Man for All Seasons), with his only sense of purpose in that notion of the ladder of love.

There are few if any Catholic public intellectuals as accomplished or respected as George Weigel. Any “young Catholics—and not-so-young Catholics, and indeed curious souls of any religious persuasion or none” would do well to consider what he has to tell them in Letters to a Young Catholic (xi). The social and literary questions the book misses seem fairly insignificant compared with the spiritual ones at its heart. Even so, incautiously mixing the two detracts from the book’s credibility on both fronts.

One Encouraging Figure : The Autobiography of Diana Mosley. 1977. London: Gibson Square Books, 2002. 280 pp. £8.99.

Diana Mosley, by Jan Dalley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. 336 pp. $27.50.

Diana Mosley, by Anne de Courcy. London: Chatto & Windus, 2003. 400 pp. £20.00. Reviewed by Christine Berberich, University of Derby.

The subtitle of Jan Dalley’s biography of Diana Mosley sums up the object of her book in a few words: “the glamorous Mitford sister who became Hitler’s friend and married the leader of Britain’s fascists.” Throughout her life, Diana Mosley, née Mitford, had been equally surrounded by admiration and controversy: glamorous society beauty or right-wing fanatic? Born the fourth child of Lord and Lady Redesdale in 1910, Diana grew up in a sheltered environment in the of her brother Tom and her five sisters, Nancy, Pam, Unity, Decca and Debo. The Mitford children later came to symbolise the politically divisive twentieth century – with Nancy becoming a socialist, Decca a communist, Tom a fascist sympathiser and Unity a fervent Hitler admirer and fanatic Nazi, with only Pam and Debo succeeding at maintaining a political neutrality.

After the rather uneventful years of childhood, Diana virtually exploded into society in early 1929 when, at the age of only 18, her marriage to the rich Bryan Guinness elevated her to the status of society hostess. Finally having escaped the stifling, countrified confines of her family home, Diana could freely indulge her wish to mingle with the of the time and become a patroness for writers, painters and other aspiring artists, making friends with, among many others, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh was besotted with her, writing to his friend Henry Greene in September 1929 “Do you and Dig share my admiration for Diana? She seems to me the one encouraging figure in this generation. ….”[1] Her new idyll was not to last. In 1932 she caused a scandal by leaving her young husband for Sir , leader of the newly founded British Union of Fascists, married and a notorious womaniser who had no intentions of leaving his wife for her. From then on, Diana’s life was dominated by her allegiance to ‘the Leader’, as she and his party supporters called him. The couple got secretly married in Berlin in 1938 – Mosley’s first wife Cimmie had died in 1933 – with Hitler and Goebbels in attendance. By then, Diana had already established herself as the link between Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and Hitler's Germany; together with her sister Unity she attended the Nazis’ notorious Parteitage at Nuremberg, often as Hitler’s personal guest. After the outbreak of the war, both Mosleys got arrested under Regulation 18B, Mosley first on 23 May 1940, and Diana on 29 June. They were to spend the next three and a half years in prison, first kept apart with Mosley at Brixton and Diana at Holloway, and later together in a disused house within the Holloway compound. The years in prison shaped both of them, both mentally and physically. Although Mosley tried to reinvigorate his campaign after the war, he never regained a political foothold. Diana’s post-war life was dedicated to her husband and her children, the two sons from her first marriage and the two boys she had with Mosley. After living as social pariahs for the first few years after the war, they soon left Britain and spent the rest of their lives in Ireland and France. Mosley died in December 1980. Diana, after serious health problems, continued her quiet existence in Paris, where she died on 11 August 2003.

It is no surprise that Diana, with her turbulent social and private life, attracts writers attempting to explain her life. Diana’s own memoirs, A Life of Contrasts, first published in 1977 and reissued in 2002 in a revised and expanded version, are more or less a celebration of her life with Mosley, which leaves no space for an honest assessment of her political activities. There is, in fact, not even the acknowledgement that her activities were political. The early chapters on her childhood and first years of marriage to Bryan are amusing and diverting accounts of a privileged upbringing and the exciting socialising of the Bright Young Things, who quickly accepted Diana into their midst as their acknowledged queen, thanks to her beauty and her sparkling wit. Her account becomes much more troublesome with the entrance of Mosley and her own conversion to fascism. There is no sense of regret at her own association with the Nazis, no horror at the Holocaust, but only a sense of ill-judged loyalty to former ‘friends’ and her own unquestioning approval of and support for Mosley’s work, both in the pre- and post-war years. The autobiography thus stands in an interesting contrast to the two biographies, published in quick succession in 1999 and 2003 and, one hopes, presenting Diana and especially her political involvement in a more objective manner.

If one hopes to catch a glimpse of the real Diana Mosley in Jan Dalley’s 1999 biography, however, one is bound to be disappointed. The book is a curious blend of quoted passages from Diana’s own memoirs and Dalley’s own interpretations. It covers Diana’s life only until 1945 in any detail, glossing over the post-war years, Mosley’s later political activities and Diana’s life after his death; in short, it skips over nearly sixty years of her life. Only one chapter, entitled ‘Aftermath’, is dedicated to the years 1947-2003: can six decades really be referred to as ‘aftermath’? The biography, with its hasty conclusion covering two-thirds of Diana’s life, reminds one of a student essay that has gone over the word limit. Obviously, such brevity cannot provide any detail. But, more crucially, it is also misleading, as a novice reader might infer that Diana’s post-war life was a tranquil one outside society and politics. Although Dalley’s book claims to be a biography of Diana, it provides lengthy sections that completely exclude her, dedicating whole chapters to her sister Unity, and especially to Mosley, his early marriage, his first tentative political footsteps and his conversion into the Leader of the British Fascists. Dalley, by trying to be thorough, is clearly biting off more than she can chew and, instead of providing us with a detailed biography of Diana’s life, rather offers a sketchy mixture of her formative years, Mosley’s life and British politics in the 1930s – clearly, too much to cover in just one book.

Anne de Courcy’s biography, by contrast, covers all of Diana’s life, and Diana’s life exclusively. She does provide background information on Mosley and also his first wife, Cimmie Curzon, but never loses sight of her own subject. The main difference between Dalley’s and de Courcy’s biographies is that de Courcy’s is the authorised account of Diana’s life and was consequently written with the biographée’s support. Diana, as de Courcy confirms repeatedly, dedicated much time and effort to collaborate with her biographer and provided her with personal letters and photos. Despite this, de Courcy provides her readers with a measured and, above all, critical account of Diana’s life. Diana’s one stipulation for cooperation with de Courcy had been that the book should be published only after her death – maybe that gave its author more freedom for a critical assessment of her ‘object’.

De Courcy’s biography is by far the more successful one for readers who want to get an idea of the character of Diana Mosley, who has too often been merely judged in sweeping superlatives of both the positive and negative kind: ‘the most beautiful woman of her generation’; ‘the real, evil influence behind Mosley’. Nevertheless, there are a few curious mistakes that mar the overall success of the book. Referring to Evelyn Waugh, one of Diana’s closest friends in the years of her marriage to Bryan Guinness, de Courcy refers to as “[Waugh’s] first success” (45), nonchalantly ignoring . In her chapters dedicated to Germany and the rise of the Nazis there are also several factual errors that more careful research or, simply, more thorough editing ought to have avoided. She consistently gets the name of the Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer, wrong and claims falsely that Hitler’s birthday was on April 21st when, in fact, it was on the 20th. Such seemingly insignificant errors belie the impression of careful research that the book is trying to convey. Direct comparison of the two biographies also show small factual discrepancies: in the account of Diana and Unity’s stay with the Goebbelses for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for example, de Courcy refers simply to their “lakeside villa at Schwanenwerder” (172), whereas Dalley writes about their “large and pretentious villa which had belonged to a Jewish family who had already left Germany” (216), certainly, if correct, a particularly poignant detail. Similarly, describing a bomb's direct hit on Holloway, Dalley writes about a “young Frenchwoman … [who] fell three floors from the blasted-away landing, breaking her leg” (270), while de Courcy has the same girl “[falling] from a landing and [breaking] her neck” (245). It is curious to see that two biographies, published within four years, differ not only in scope and interpretation, which should be expected, but also in facts and content.

Diana Mosley’s ideological beliefs will always jar uncomfortably with her image as celebrated and admired society beauty. She freely chose to live her life according to principles that turned out to be ill-judged, to say the least. For us as readers of her life story, it would be comforting to know whether or not she regretted her past. But neither of the books can offer us this comfort, and Diana Mosley will always remain an enigmatic figure.

Note [1] Evelyn Waugh, “Letter to Henry Yorke [September 1929],” in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (1980; London: Phoenix Books, 1995), 39. Waugh’s friendship with Diana was at its most intensive during Diana’s first pregnancy. Once the baby was born, Waugh felt left out and ended their friendship, after previously having dedicated both Vile Bodies and Labels to her and Brian Guinness, who had offered him shelter and support during the break-up of his marriage to She-Evelyn.

Evelyn Waugh Society The Evelyn Waugh Society now has 45 members. Founding memberships are available until the end of April 2005. Memberships should be renewed after one year. Our representative in the United Kingdom has had to resign for personal reasons, and we would like to find someone who is willing to serve as a replacement by keeping track of members in the UK. If interested, please contact the editor at [email protected]. The next Evelyn Waugh Conference has been moved back to late October or early November 2006. It was originally scheduled for late June 2006, but the host institution, the University of Montpellier in France, is not available at that time. More details will be forthcoming soon.

New Trends in Evelyn Waugh Studies Waugh without End: New Trends in Evelyn Waugh Studies, edited by Carlos Villar Flor and Robert Murray Davis, has been published by Peter Lang. The book is a collection of essays from the international symposium held in Logroño, Spain in May 2003. Please look for a review in a forthcoming issue of the Newsletter.

Bellamy's Open for Business According to an article in the Financial Times for 15 January 2005, a restaurant named Bellamy's has opened at 18 Bruton Mews in in London. The Financial Times notes that "Some may recognise the restaurant's name as inspired by the fictitious club Evelyn Waugh created in his trilogy." The prices "will pleasantly surprise," and "the wine list's mark-ups--or lack of them--will simply stun." Stuart Preston Stuart Preston passed away on 9 February 2005 in Paris. He was 89 years old. According to his obituary in the New York Times, Preston served in the Second World War on the "intelligence section of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff" and the "Arts and Monuments Commission, helping to identify works of art looted as war booty." In Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1939-1969 (1970), wrote that Preston was "mysterious" and "known simply as The Sergeant, since he held that rank in the U.S. army." Acton observed that Preston was "here, there and everywhere, society's latest darling" (138). In The End of the Battle (1961; Unconditional Surrender in the United Kingdom), Evelyn Waugh created a character named Lieutenant Padfield, also known as "the Loot," who was "a portent of the Grand Alliance" and "ubiquitous" (19-20). The Loot has "no apparent military function" (21), and he collects evidence that Mr. Troy needs to divorce Virginia. The Loot turns up in Italy "trying to get the opera going" (206), and he ends the novel as "Ludovic's general factotum" (318). Stuart Preston left no immediate survivors.

The Great Oxford Read To mark its 70th anniversary, Penguin is encouraging seven English cities to read seven books. The program in Oxford is called the Great Oxford Read, and the book is Brideshead Revisited. Events include appearances by , who wrote the screenplay for the televised series based on Brideshead, and Alexander Waugh, Evelyn's grandson. Reading started on 10 April 2005 (the anniversary of Evelyn Waugh's death, but also Penguin Readers Day at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival) and concludes by the end of May. Further information is available at www.penguin.co.uk/readers. Evelyn Waugh himself would have approved of reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll in Brighton; he might have had doubts about Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence in Nottingham.

Brideshead Revisited on Television BBC Four broadcast a program entitled Cast and Crew: Brideshead Revisited early in March 2005. , Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Phoebe Nicholls, Nickolas Grace, director , producer Derek Granger, and costume designer Jane Robinson looked back on production of the 1981 television series based on Evelyn Waugh's novel. They remembered problems including a technicians' strike, a change of director, and an "umbrella of panic." Now in production by a company called Free @ Last TV is a one-hour program about the television Brideshead to mark the 50th anniversary of ITV, known as Granada when they produced the famous series. The program will be broadcast in September 2005.

First Edition of Put Out More Flags James F. O'Neil, a bookseller, has acquired a copy of the first American edition of Put Out More Flags (1942). It is inscribed as follows: "Mrs. Victor Saville, You said you hadn't read Evelyn's latest so please accept this copy. Sincerely, Diana Waugh." Victor Saville was a British film director who worked in Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, perhaps best known as the producer of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). Further information about Mrs. Victor Saville or Diana Waugh would be most welcome. Please contact James O'Neil at [email protected]. Word from Rex Mottram The Newsletter was surprised and pleased to receive an e-mail from Rex Mottram, who is alive and well in Auckland, New Zealand. In his current incarnation, Rex is eighteen years old. When he asked his mother, she confirmed that he had been named after the character in Brideshead Revisited. If you would like to receive an e-mail from Rex, address correspondence to [email protected].

End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 Previous Issue Home Page and Back Issues Next Issue