EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER Volume 13, Number 1 Spring, 1979

THE YEAR'S WORK IN WAUGH STUDIES By Jeffrey M. Heath University of Toronto "Quantitative judgments don't apply," says Mr. Crouchback, and so must we in considering this year's small but distinguished collection of Waugh material. Waugh scholars produced barely a score of items in 1978, but they took great pains in doing so: not only are this year's standards very high, but the degree of insight de­ monstrated in certain papers indicates that scholarship is homing in at last on important truths about Waugh. First, a book which I did not have the pleasure of reviewing last year. It is Donat Gallagher's Evelyn Waugh: A Little Order (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), 192 p. Handsomely produced and unobtrusively edited, this pleasing volume "provides a conspectus of Waugh ism; of the opinions, attitudes, interests and styles most representative of the full range of his journalism." A succinct introduction of "basic information" precedes five sections de\}oted to Waugh and four of his major personalities: Myself, Aesthete, Man of Letters, Conservative, Catholic; and before each of these subsections there stands a brief preface which helps impose thematic unity on the articles grouped therein. Waugh divided his journalism into "essays" and "beastly little articles"; the former were written for intelligent people, the latter for money. Although Waugh derogated his early work, Gallagher does not suppress it, for "even his most frankly mercenary journalism is likely to contain glimmers of real interest." Gallagher divides Waugh's career into three parts. The first runs from 1928 to 1945, when Waugh wrote mainly for money and evinced an interest in food, wines, clothes and amusements, which he invested with "an importance comparable to the mystique Hemingway found in sport." A second period commences after the success of Brides­ Head in 1945; now Waugh could write essays without money as his prime concern. Religion and travel were now major topics, and a richer style developed. Between the second and the third periods "no clear dividing line" is evident, but by 1958 Waugh had grown poorer, and was ready to try his hand at subjects he had scorned not long before. His notoriety as "a snob and a reactionary" made him a marketable commodity, and he could now be re­ lied upon for offensive remarks on art, politics, and religion. Waugh planned to edit his own essays for publication. Would he have chosen the essays Gallagher chooses? Probably not; the early,livelier material would almost certainly have been ignored, whil'e the tendentious later stuff would hardly have made just compensation. It is well, therefore, that a more impartial judge has made the selection. In view of the fact that the Whitston Waugh checklist contains well over 400 items from which to' choose (more have been unearthed since). Gallagher had his work cut out for him, and the choice could not have been easy. Is Gallagher's edition truly "representative of the full range of [Waugh's] jourl)alism?" Certainly each reader will have his own reservations. Where, for example, are "Kicking Against the Goad," "Machiavelli and Utopia," "The Heart's Own Reasons," and "Bioscope?" And surely, useful as it is, an essay like "Come In" is not strictly speaking journalism. And, curiously, in a book which purports to be "a selection from his journalism," there is not a single example of the work Waugh did when he was really a journalist in Abyssinia. I have some other misgivings. Don't many of the articles look rather lonely without those they were written to confute? And what of the arrangement? Surely Waugh had many other personalities or aspects than the five Gallagher uses as thematic headings, and these should not be passed over in silence. He wrote, for example, as a "Man at Arms" too. Moverover, isn't it too simple to state that the war "made him look at life in a new way" and made him devote himself "wholeheartedly to religion for the first time?" After all, Waugh had a religious temperament from the beginning, and the battle that raged in him between the artist and the man of action was lifelong and did not end with the war. But despite these quibbles, A Little Order is a .welcome book. It groups central material into useful cate­ gories, and it introduces more than a little order into the chaos of our dog-eared xeroxes. In The Modes of Modern Writing, (ithaca: Cornell, 1977), David Lodge reserves a few pages for Waugh. He is, Lodge says, "an indisputably major writer" whose work differs from most modernist writing. Why? Be­ cause "he was a kind of conservative anarchist, and more sympathetic, therefore, than his left-wing contemporar­ ies to the pessimism, and despair of secular 'progress' that underlay so much modernist writing." He parted com­ pany from the "great Modernists" in renouncing their 'subjectivity'." He makes his presence felt "as much by his abstinence from comment as by what he actually says." Lodge gives only a sketch of Waugh here; those interested in details should see his Evelyn Waugh. -2-

Now to the journals. In her excellent "Language and Charm in Brideshead Revisited," Dutch Quarterly Review, 6, 1V (Autumn 1976), 291-303, Susan Ganis Auty notes that despite his regret for his earlier linguistic "gluttony" Waugh did not expunge the ornamental passages from Brideshead because they were "an essential part of the book." Auty shows why they are essential: the ornate language contains "all the ambivalence of Waugh's simultaneous celebration and rejection of the world's charm." But, she says, Waugh by no means rejects charm out of hand: "It is Charles's susceptibility to charm, revealed in his romantic descriptions, that shows him to be capable of religious fulfillment, capable of a deep appreciation of eternal beauty." I fully agree with both of these assertions; the novel's imagery shows that Ganis is right, and she analyzes that imagery with insight and sensitivity. Through example after example she shows that Brideshead is an ornate falsehood, a repository of the charm that bamboozles Charles throughout his early life. Without faith, Brideshead is simply "a false refuge" (Ganis is especially good here) and remains that way "until conscience has been awakened." Once that happens, the force of the romantic imagery is seen to be reciprocal: "The novel is not simply exploring the conflict be· tween charm and faith; it is affirming the youthful flight into romanticism as a means to making an engagement of the spirit and thereby discovering the fulfillment of an enduring faith." Although Ganis could have taken her insight much farther, her article now stands as the most intelligent piece yet written on Brideshead. There is one curious lapse, however: surely Charles's "final salvation" does not occur in the "Epilogue," as Ganis implies, but at some unspecified moment after the end of the last chapter and before the "Epilogue." As Charles kneels in the art nouveau chapel, he has already accepted the Faith; thus his "sudden appreciation" of the flame and his "new-found sense of eternity" are not nearly as fresh as Ganis would seem to think. But her oversight is not a howler and it does not diminish this distinguished piece of work. JohnJ. Riley's "TheTwoWaughsatWar," EWN, 12, ii (Autumn 1978),3-7, and EWN, 12, iii (Winter 1978), 3-9, is an insightful discussion, in two parts, of two conflicting sides of Waugh's personality. Part I con­ sists of a discussion of POMF: "the novel's major conflict as externalized by Ambrose Silk and Basil Seal is really between the two forces of Waugh: the aesthetic-artistic" and the "man of action." And Part II concerns Brideshead, which is "not of the BS of Waugh but of the AS" -the aesthete. According to Riley, Brideshead is "a self-purgation of the artist ... an attempt to ... efface all that has gone before except that one justification for life itself, his conversion to Catholicism." Although Riley should glance at Auty's article to complete his picture of "self-purgation," there can be no question that he is right about Waugh's deeply-cleft nature; indeed, the split he diagnoses was evident in Waugh as early as his Heath Mount days and can be seen again in his attrac­ tion to Crease and Roxburgh at Lancing. Waugh repeatedly adverts to this crucial rift in his personality, and there is good reason for supposing that he never resolved it. In "Scott-King's Modern Europe: A Textual History," EWN, 12, iii (Winter 1978), 1-3, R.M. Davis states that Waugh never regarded the story as "more than a jeu d'esprit," but that the story's textual history deserves attention because it provides a microcosmic view of the process by which Waugh attained meaning in all 'of his novels. By means of a comparison of three texts Davis shows how carefully Waugh laboured over even such a slight piece as Scott-King; the ending in particular shows significant reworking and for the first time, Davis says, Waugh presents a secular hero making an affirmative rejection of the world. In "Big Screen, Little Screen: Adaptations of Evelyn Waugh's Fiction," Literature/Film Quarterly 6 (Spring 1978), 162-70, Gene D. Phillips comments on adaptations of Waugh material forcinema and television. Drawing our attention first to Waugh's scorn for films based on books, Phillips undertakes to "survey briefly how Waugh's fiction has been dealt with in both the cinema and on television in order to see which medium has been more faithful to the spirit of his work." He begins with Tony Richardson's The Loved One and vividly describes the scabrous absurdity that it became when Terry Southern's imagination got the better of his good taste: "Ad­ ditions to the story include a sex orgy among the caskets in the mortuary, presided over by a homosexual host ( Liberace), and a scene in which the obscenely fat mother of one of the morticians is shown having an orgasm over a series of food commercials on television." (The grossness of Southern's misunderstanding is astounding.­ the film becomes precisely the kind of thing the novel attacks.) When he saw what had happened, Waugh wanted his name removed from the credits, but alas, it was too late. Ivan Foxwell's adaptation of Decline and Fall was better, though the clarifying phrase, "Of a Birdwatcher" was a blunder (it was added, can you believe it, so that people wouldn't think they were watching a dramatization of Gibbon). According to Phillips, director "John Krish caught the satirically solemn tone of the Waugh novel perfectly." The Llannabba scenes are best, and the updated scenes at the new King's Thursday are the worst because "they are a little too opulent to be amusing" and fai I to evoke the twenties. · -3-

On the small screen, playwright Peter Nichols "stayed very close to Waugh's original story" in mak­ ing a "quite successful" adaptation of 'Winner Takes All-" But like the teleplays of Vile Bodies and POMF, Phillips says, 'Winner" emphasized Waugh's farce at the expense of its underlying seriousness (surely, however, it is not Vile Bodies that is 'Waugh's spoof on British colonialism"). Of all the screen adaptations, Sword of Honour was the best. Phillips is unstinting in his praise of the "economy" of the late Giles Cooper's "literate TV script.'' and gives examples of how he overcame the considerable obstacles in translating the Trilogy to the tube. Under Donald McWhinnie's direction, "the roguish Apthorpe" steals the show in part one, Virginia and dear old Peregrine in part two, and the Mme. Kanyi episode in part three: "All in all, Sword of Honour as presented by BBC TV is the finest single example of the adapta­ tion of Waugh's fiction to the screen, whether big or little," and should "serve as a model for further adaptations" of Waugh's work. Even Waugh, says Phillips, would have been impressed (surprised too, one imagines - he liked to refer to television men as "the electricians"). In "'Bella Fleace Gave a Party' or, the Archetypal Image of Waugh's Sense of Decay.'' Studies in Short Fiction, 15, i (Winter, 1978), 69-73, Alain Blayac makes a large claim for a small work- and a claim which is not strictly correct in any sense of the word "archetypal," since there's lots of decay in other Waugh material of earlier date. "'Bella.'" he says, "remains not only an essential link between Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, but also an archetypal illustration of Evelyn Waugh's embittered human and religious stances ..." If the modern world at Bella's doorstep is decadent, Bella is even worse: she sins against the "Spirit of the Past" by selling her old books and by distorting the communal significance of her party, and she is pun­ ished accordingly. Thus, "Bella" is a "terse but forcible statement of Evelyn Waugh's personal philosophy," the "central archetype of Waugh's earlier fiction - that of the decline and fall of man in these, our modern times." One of the year's best articles masquerades as a review. It is "Evelyn Waugh.'' Contemporary Litera­ ture, 18, i (Winter 1977), 98-109; in it, Jerome Meckier uses Sykes's biography as a springboard into his own rewarding discussion of Waugh. He begins by letting us know that Waugh "was not easy to like": he "did more than anyone since Swift to substantiate the stereotype of the satirist as a congenital S.O.S." But by the end of his article, Meckier has argued himself into a better frame of mind: the many examples of Waugh's unflinching sanity "make it impossible not to love him a little." Meckier calls Sykes's book a "sur­ passingly frank, steadily interesting, yet ultimately inadequate biography"; although Sykes is candid and earn­ est, his book is "bland fare," all mirror and no lamp, fundamentally evasive. Moreover, he seems handcuffed by his own "unlimited resources" - he gives many facts but few "imaginative insights." His ventures into literary criticism are belletristic and off-target; too often Sykes "makes a practice of finding blemishes, as if novels had complexions and critics were dermatologists." Especially deplorable is Sykes's lack of insight into Apthorpe and his thunderbox. In the final analysis, Evelyn Waugh is valuable as a "compendium of vital dates ... and ... a starting point for more exciting interpretations." It is redeemed by "the incomparable presence of Waugh himself." Sykes fails to make Waugh lovable or, worse still, understandable: there is no organizing thesis in his book. As an overview, Meckier offers the "semitragic view of Waugh as an Apollonian or rationalist in an in­ creasingly Dionysian or irrational and disorderly world." This is incontrovertible, and it is even harder to doubt the accuracy of Meckier's views about the religious basis of the early satires: Waugh "knew precisely why the world was falling apart. Having lost its religious framework, the fraudulent modern world was now strictly a perverse secular parody not merely of more civilized eras, but, ultimately, of the City of God." Meckier speaks of the "Apollonian Christianity" which underlies even Waugh's darkest comedy and of "the Catholicism latent in the early fiction." I agree completely. At a time when many readers still like to think of the early Waugh as an amoral zany, it is well to be reminded once again that he was from the beginning a Christian (which for him of course meant a Catholic) novelist with an unshakeable reverence for the classi­ cal values. . Duckworth's republication in 1975 of Rossetti (1928) and Labels (1930) is celebrated by Donat Gallagher in "Early Waugh Fare," Southern Review, 10, i (1977), 92-96. Both books "still make interesting and stimulating reading" and they "do much to illuminate [Waugh's] novels, which extreme economy and an allusive technique render a good deal less clear than they seem." Gallagher gives a history of the composition and publication of Rossetti and commends Waugh's "striking ability to translate visual impressions into words." One point of disagreement: according to Gallagher, editor John Bryson is quite wrong to claim that Waugh thought Rossetti was an "old fraud." Yet surely Rossetti shows precisely that: Waugh spends page --4-

after page showing that Rossetti's paintings were derivative, his emotions second-hand, and his father a free­ thinker. Rossetti had an apostate father (see opening pages) and no "essential rectitude" (see conclusion), and for those reasons was a second-rate artist, an old fraud who occasionally and unexpectedly rose to the heights of genius despite his limitations (see the discussion of Beata Seatrix). Gallagher finds Kingsley Amis's introduction to the new Labels delightful but uninformative, and is surely right to remark upon the oddity of his assertion that Waugh's absorption with architecture is "weary­ ing." The book, after all, is about art and architecture, and the "outstanding aesthetic passage in Labels is the long, affectionately derisive essay ___ on Gaudi." Gallagher justly concludes, "Labels reveals more of Waugh's mind than any memoir yet published and is essential reading for anyone wishing to learn the stand­ ards implicit in his novels." In a curious review of the Diaries, Vernon Young, "Declarations of Waugh," Hudson Review, 31 (Autumn, 197B), 500-06, maintains that Waugh is "all there" in his very first diary entry: "the child is a blueprint to the man." Young remarks upon Waugh's disdain, snobbery, cruelty, intolerance, adverbs, ad­ jectives and gerunds, and, notably, his boredom: "a form of stupendous dey~ vu, as if he knew the conse­ quences of everything in advance, yet not sufficiently in advance to avoid them." According to Young, the diaries do not disclose states of mind not inferrable by the fiction; they "fill in the gaps" between books; they are "pregnant with history being made." Young believes that Waugh really did have a "love affair with the army" and that this "was more than likely a gesture of unresolved homosexuality" (one sees the same sort of thing, he says, in T.E. Lawrence, another "fastidious mind" that "voluntarily associated itself with uncongenial people"). Were Waugh's "grueling efforts to excel" at athletics, exploration and war "over­ compensations for feelings of sexual guilt?" Was he searching for a heart of darkness in Brazil and Abys- sinia? When he equated the jungles of Brazil and Mayfair, "he did not ___ believe in his own metaphor," for "he behaved ___ as if correct standards were supplied by his own social structure and by the premises of its education." Two reviews, one of the Diaries and one of Sykes, go together. The thorny question they raise is this: what is the right way of regarding Mr. Evelyn Waugh? Was he a villain or an erring sinner? Not Win­ terbourne contemplating Daisy Miller nor Lily Briscoe meditating on Mrs. Ramsay had a tougher chore. In a scorching review of the Diaries, Richard Jones finds the school diaries "tedious and unmemorable," the travel notes superfluous, and many other pages "mere social chit-chat": so obscure are the people mentioned that "the effect is like that of reading the time-table for a disused railway." The burning question for Jones is whether Waugh "was big enough as a man and as a writer to be thought of as a tragic case or was he, des­ pite wonderful gifts, merely pathetic?" The options Jones offers necessarily restrict the field of his enquiry, which can be found in Virginia Quarterly Review, 54 (Summer, 197B), 503-17. Jones finds the Diaries "sad" but "essential reading for connoisseurs of a certain kind of English eccentricity"; they "merely strengthen the impression that behind the writer of capriccios and romantic elegies there lurked a monster, whose rages were only partly softened by the teachings of the Church." There's a lot that Jones doesn't like about Waugh. He doesn't like his ill-natured treatment of family and friends, his lack of "natural kindness and adult tact," his refusal to concede to the spirit of his times, his black-and-white political thought, his aristocratic persona and his "sick and vulgar romanticism." This same romanticism, says Jones, "became a breeding-ground for almost irrational prejudices" against various racial groups. Worse still is "the ugliest of Waugh's prejudices: the ques­ tion of how much his own homosexual affairs ... coloured Waugh's attitude to other homosexuals." Jones assures us, "once he had become the father of a large family, Waugh's homophile tendencies modified into a hostile vigilance for other homosexuals." This closely-reasoned abuse is at least stylish, but the review is not the most insightful I've seen. R.J. MacSween, "Evaluating Evelyn Waugh," Antigonish Review, 25 (Spring 1976). 41-50, would not likely agree with Jones, for he indignantly finds even the sympathetic Sykes too brutal: "With the publica­ tion of Christopher Sykes's Evelyn Waugh ... the attack has been renewed, as if it were not enough to des'­ troy him once and for all, but as if his disinterred body must suffer further mutilation." It is MacSween who makes the question explicit: 'What kind of man was Waugh? W

not having a sufficient sense of humour. In order to correct Sykes, he quotes a number of flattering passages from Frances Donaldson, but after all the apologetics the reader is inclined to conclude that this line of en· quiry is futile, and smacks too much of special pleading. We sail in the end between the Scylla and Charyb· dis of these two reviews, for the impish Waugh is in himself an exercise in point of view: even though he was pleased to see the world in absolute terms, there is no absolute way of seeing him. David Wykes reviews Sykes's biography in Dutch Quarterly Review, 6, iv (Autumn, 1976). 334-41. There he asserts that that unhappy book's flaws stem from the fact that not enough of Waugh's seniors and contemporaries were dead when Sykes wrote it. "The biographer must balance his literary self-respect against the feelings of survivors and keep a prudent eye on the laws of libel," Wykes says, and opines that on balance Sykes does "reasonably well." Nevertheless, he detects a few imperfections. He regrets, for example, that Sykes apparently made no attempt to include She-Evelyn's views about the collapse of that strange first marriage (be this as it may, Mrs. Nightingale stated in 1969 that her information was for Sykes's ears alone). Wykes also regrets Sykes's refusal to "hazard a plunge" into Waugh's second marriage and his failure to pre­ sent Laura as a "a character of positive strengths." In addition, the book's structure is weak and Sykes, a weak critic, focuses on faults at the expense of virtues. (On this point the critics are unanimous-Sykes is a miser· able literary critic. He once wrote, "The notion that, when writing the life of a writer, biography and criti­ cism can be neatly separated seems to me to rest on a wholly false discrimination." Agreed, but after that one has to be competent at criticism, and Sykes most emphatically is not.) I agree with Wykes when he suggests that Sykes "could have pointed out how much more agreeable than the man the novelist could be"; in Waugh's case personal abuse too often masquerades as informed literary opinion. But in the end Wykes is too easy on Sykes: had he read the Davis and Gallagher reviews of Evelyn Waugh, he'd have seen that the "one error in fact" that he mentions·is but a drop in the bucket. In Notes and Queries, 222 (October 1977), 457, T.D. Rogers of the Bodleian Library writes that Waugh's remarks about preserving Oxford through "a very small expediture on dynamite" still exist. Originally reported by "Mr. Gossip" in "Preservation of Oxford- Evelyn Waugh suggests dynamite," Daily Sketch, February 23, 1930, p.5, Waugh's actual remarks are "contained in a letter he contributed to the souvenir pro­ gramme of the Oxford Preservation Trust matinee at the New Theatre, Oxford, on 28 February 1930." Rogers's note contains a transcript of the letter. We turn now to the newspapers. In "The Loved One as a Headstone for a Dead Civilisation," Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1978, p.3, Walter Wells reflects upon The Loved One on its thirtieth birthday. He enshrines it in the tradition of "the Hollywood novel," then claims that Waugh internationalized the tradition. If Fitzgerald, West, and Horace McCoy used Hollywood as a metaphor for the collapse of the "American Dream," Waugh "expanded the Hollywood metaphor to embrace the fate of all western civilisation." Linking barbarous Hollywood with barbarous Germany, Wells finds that Mr. Schulz of the Happier Hunting Ground, with his oven, is the "surviving voice of German character" which now has become American: "Germany, the cultural Barbary of the 1930's, had been destroyed, but its malignant spirit had passed on to Hollywood." Having cemented that brick in place, Wells then joins the arch: Scott-King clarifies The Loved One. "The books are paired reflections, flip sides of the postwar Western condition." Hollywood and Neutralia are "sister metaphors," opposite sides of the same coin." With qualification, this sounds all right, but why stop at Neutralia? By extension, Satellite City, London, Debra Dowa, Jacksonville or any of _the false "cities of Man" that pepper Waugh's fiction would also be "sister-metaphors" of Hollywood. But the truth of the mat­ ter, surely, is that Wells has got things turned around. The Loved One doesn't belong to "the Hollywood novel" tradition, Hollywood belongs to The Loved One tradition: it is an American version of the city of Man, which parodies the City of God by attempting to do away with pain, death and mutability. Waugh's diagnosis of Hollywood's ills is entirely distinct from those offered by Fitzgerald and West (and, I suppose, McCoy). Commenting on the BBC TV Waugh documentary that appeared in the week of October 23, 1978, Alan Watkins says that the programme was "both interesting and inelegant," for the actors impersonating Waugh could not match the real Waugh who appeared in clips from the 1960 Freeman interview. One "dotty old lady" asserted that Waugh had misrepresented the boys at "Liannabba" who were "exceptionally decorous, having a deserved reputation for showing respect to war memorials." Fagan, she said, was not a bit like Mr. Vanhomrigh/Banks; but this, says Watkins, is because Fagan is based on J.F. Roxburgh of Lancing. Watkins goes on to claim that Trimmer is based on "Waugh's Army superior, Lord Lovat, with whom he did not get on." He recounts an anecdote: "Lord Lovat once asked Waugh to deliver a letter marked "secret," "confi· dential" or something like that. Once out of his superior's office, Waugh opened the envelope, as was his practice. Inside was a note saying: 'If you keep opening my personal correspondence in this way you will get the sack.' And so he did.'' Watkins's remarks appear in the Observer, 29 October 1978, p.48. One quaint news item, "Absolutely the Last Possible Word on Tut," appears opposite the editorial page in the New York Times, December 20, 1978. It is an excerpt from Labels, in which Waugh scorns elab­ orate archeological debate and points to an unnoticed fact: "The sum of the world's beautiful things had sud· denly been enormously enriched." A delightful reminiscence appears in Harvard Magazine, 80 (January-February 1978), 94-96. In "Vile Bodies," Howard E. Hugo remembers that when Maurice Bowra was Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard, Waugh came to visit him. Invited for sherry, Hugo entered to find the two Englishmen drinking brandy and discussing "Lady Something'or-Other": '"She has now taken to absinthe, drugs and small black boys.' Waugh was saying with solemnity. This occasioned antiphonal exchanges between them: 'How too, too depraved, how sick-making, how utterly too much, now really."' Some time after adjourning to the local Rexall drug­ store for some of the "delicious fried egg sandwiches" that Waugh loved, the deadly duo reappeared in the dining hall, peering as they swept past at the contents of the undergraduates' plastic trays, and saying, 'How revolting! How depraved! How sick-making!"' Several recent memoirs and biographies contain useful references to Waugh. They are: Beverly Nichols, The Unforgiving Minute; An Autobiography (London: W.H. Allen, 1978); John Pearson, Facades: Edith, Osbert and Sachevere/1 Sitwe/1 (London: MacMillan, 1978); Peter Gunn, The Actons: Remarkable People (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978); Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions. Perhaps the most noteworthy is March Past: A Memoir (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978). Here Lord Lovat makes some "identifications" (Basil Seal is Basil Dufferin, or possibly Auberon Herbert; Ritchie-Hook is Carton de Wiart, alias "Old Flamer"), and he tries to even the score on Waugh for old injuries (after all, even if Lovat is not the original of Trimmer, as Watkins claims, there is every likelihood that he is the original of lvor Claire, as Lady Diana Cooper claims). Lovat says that Waugh was "a greedy little man -a eunuch in appearance" who always appeared "in shit order" when he wasn't in protective custody. Lovat's account of Waugh's catclysmic dismissal from the Royal Marines in 1943 differs significantly from Waugh's. In what may have been a spin-off from the BBC documentary mentioned earlier, Kevin Burns presented from London, "A Report on Evelyn Waugh" for CBC "Nightcap," November 9, 1978. The programme con­ tains a few remarks by Kingsley Amis and a lengthier commentary by John Betjeman, who finds "a funda­ mental compassion" in Waugh's work which, together with Waugh's underlying seriousness, revolutionized farce. Of special note is part of a Waugh interview with novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, in which Waugh crisply maintains that Gertrude Stein "wrote absolute gibberish" and that James Joyce "wrote absolute rot.'' You could watch Joyce going mad sentence by sentence, Waugh says, until the Americans hired him to write Finnegans Wake, "which is only fit for examinations at Cambridge." John Montgomery, a former junior part­ ner at A.D. Peters', recalls how "greatly respected" Waugh was in Whites' and the Ritz: "They always made a fuss of him wherever he went." On one occasion the headwaiter at the Ritz began to butter Waugh up by ostentatiously offering him a nice central table, but Waugh, who, Montgomery says, "disliked being patronized,' presented his ear-trumpet and made the waiter shout at top volume, to the amusement of all present. Then he quietly requested the secluded table in the corner. Once there, he said loudly, "I'm very interested in one subject." "What's that?" asked Montgomery. "Buggery.'' replied Waugh, with gratifying results upon their smart auditors. Montgomery gives a generous testimonial to Waugh, with which it will be well to end. The diaries, he says, were never meant to be published and give a false impression of the man; Waugh "would have hated that.'' As for Sykes's biography: "He missed the boat. He didn't get under the skin of the man. Also he didn't quite show what a very warm-hearted and human person Evelyn was. And so there are almost no jokes at all in the book and yet the man was one of the wittiest and funniest people in the literary. world."

TWO SMALL NOTES By Donald Greene 1. Dear Abby's Villanova correspondent (EWN, Winter, 1978) fairly accurately reproduces Christo­ pher Sykes's account (Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, p. 287) of Waugh's rude reply to an American lady's gushing praise of "his most recent novel.'' Sykes identifies the novel as Brideshead Revisited, and says that Mary Lygon told him the story. -7-

He further identifies the unfortunate lady as the wife of "a well-known American theatrical producer." It's only speculation, but Garson Kanin, certainly one of the best known of American Theatrical producers, moved much in English literary circles at the-time. (See his Remembering Mr. Maugham, who could deliver snubs quite as ferocious as Mr. Waugh's.) A quick thumbing through of the various volumes of reminiscence by Kanin and his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, revealed no mention of Waugh-but of course if they were the victims, one would hardly expect it to. Perhaps some intrepid Waugh scholar may some day get up enough chutzpah to put the question to Mr. Kanin or Miss Gordon-or Lady Mary Lygon or Mr. Sykes. Unpleasant as the rebuke was, it was perhaps no worse than Samuel Jphnson's reply on a similar oc­ casion: "He once bade a very celebrated lady, who praised him with too much zeal, or perhaps too strong an emphasis (which always offended him), consider what her flattery was worth, before she choked him with it." That at least is Mrs. Thrale's version; other accounts soften the language somewhat, but not much. Dutiful Johnson scholars later pinpointed the recipient of the rebuke as the saintly Hannah More, who seems not to have been in the least disturbed by it but blithely went on to offend in the same way on a second occasion. 2. I've lately seen several references lately to Parsnip and Pimpernel! as representing Auden and Spen­ der. Waugh certainly had no high opinion of Spender, as a classic putdown in his review of Spender's auto­ biography (reprinted in Donat Gallagher's volume} testifies. But Spender did not emigrate to America on the eve of the Second World War, as did Pimpernel! and Christopher Isherwood. Moreover, it is a tribute to Waugh's fine ear that not only does "Parsnip and Pimpernel!," like "Auden and Isherwood," form a jaunty dactylic dimeter, but both pairs of names alliterate according the rules of Old English alliterative verse, much practised by Auden.

BIBLIOGRAPHY NEEDS Assistance with the following matters would be much appreciated. Needed are the page numbers of articles Waugh wrote for these issues of the Daily Mail during 1935 - Aug. 29, Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 16, Sept. 26, Oct. 2, Oct. 3, Nov. 8, Nov. 26, Nov. 30, as well as the correct title for Waugh's article in the April 5 issue. Required too are the months and day dates-if possible-when Chapman and Hall first published the following: POMF, WS, BR, and all subsequent Waugh books.

EVELYN WAUGH: A SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY By Margaret Morriss This bibliography, a supplement to the Whitston Checklist, does not include those references already published in: Thomas A. Gribble, "Some New Waugh Bibliography," EWN, 6 (Autumn 1972), 8-10. Alain Blayac, "Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Bibliography," The Book Collector, 25 (Spring 1976), 53-62 Donat Gallagher gave some interesting references in his review of the Checklist for the Southern Review (Ade­ laide), 7(1974), 86-92, but these materials have not been included either. Of course, the items listed in the Annual Checklist in EWN have been omitted here as well.

Articles by Evelyn Waugh "Such Appalling Manners!," Daily Mail, 14 June 1930, 10. "A Gambling Holiday," Daily Mail, 19 July 1930, 10. "The Old Familiar Faces," Daily Mail, 2 August 1930, 8. "Schoolboys Who Do Not Grow Up," Daily Mail, 30 August, 1930, 8. "The Shadow Frontier Line," Daily Mail, 12 May 1933, 10. "Sir Thomas More," New Statesman and Natipn, 47 (16 Jan., 1954), 70. Continuation of Checklist 613 and 714; debate with H.R. Trevor-Roper over his review of books.dealing with Catholics during the English Reformation. "Sahibs and Soldiers," Observer, 6 April 1958, 15. Review of lan Hay, the First Hundred Thousand. "Wilful Monk," Sunday Telegraph, 27 August 1961, 6. Review of John Osborne, Luther. "Love, Loyalty and Little Girls," Cosmopolitan (February 1962), 38. Review of Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. -8-

Articles About Evelyn Waugh Acton, Harold. "The Artist," Adam, Nos. 301·303 (1966). 9·14. Am is, Kingsley. "Laughter's to be Taken Seriously," New York Times Book Review, 7 July 1957, 1, 13. Churchill, Randolph. "Captain Evelyn Waugh," Book-of-the-Month Club News, December 1945, 4-5. "Cassandra on a Row Revived," Daily Mirror, 17 July 1961, 8-9. Deals with BBC attack on P. G. Wodehouse in 1941. Cleave, Maureen, Interview with Harriet Waugh, Evening Standard, 1.7 April 1969, 11. D'Arcy Martin, "Literary Debts," Times Literary Supplement, 11 August 1972, 945. About the source for "Balla Fleace Gave a Party." "Evelyn Waugh," Books and Bookmen, 7 (March 1962), 3. "Evelyn Waugh," Christian Science Monitor, 12 April 1966, El. "Never Apologize, Never Explain," published 13 April 1966, El. "Evelyn Waugh," New York Times, 16 April 1966, 32. "Evelyn Waugh and Daily Express," Daily Express, 5 April 1957. "Evelyn Waugh, Satirical Novelist, is Dead at 62," New York Times, 11 April 1966, 1, 35. "Evelyn Waugh-Writer of Protest," Guardian Weekly, 14 April 1966, 14. "First Impressions of Literary People; Evelyn Waugh: The Writer Who is Both Very Young and Very Old," Books of Today, May 1948, 6-7. Fuller, E. "Evelyn Waugh and the Sun Children," Wall Street Journal, 2 March 1976, 22. Review of Martin Green, Children of the Sun, and the Sykes biography. Galbraith, John Kenneth "Evelyn Waugh's Mean, Sad Life ... and Great Comic Novels," Washington Post Book World, 20 November 1977, El. Gervais, Liam. "More laughter in Books," Duckett's Register, 6 (December 1951), 167-168. Hern, Anthony. "Rebecca West Attacks Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene," Daily Express, 16 October 1956. Review of The Meaning of Treason, where West argues that Waugh and Greene have contributed to an atmosphere of moral confusion in which the traitor flourishes. lgoe, W.J. "Young Man in the Wasteland," Duckett's Register, 6 (June 1951 ), 81-82. Levidova, lnna. "At an Englishman's Home," Soviet Literature, No. II (1974). 156-158. "Lower the Flag," Newsweek (25 April 1966), 92. Marsh, D'Arcy. "When Evelyn Waugh Thrusts, World Cries 'Touche'", Saturday Night, 12 April 1949, 16-17. Mayberry, George. "Isherwood and Waugh to Date," New Republic, 114 (21 January 1946), 96-97. Muggeridge, Malcolm. "A Waugh Memorial," Esquire, August 1966, 77. Nettall, Stephanie. Interview with Auberon Waugh, Books and Bookmen, 9 (January 1964), 9-11. Noel-Buxton, Lord. "Men at Waugh," Spectator, 195 (15 July 1955, 94; (29 July 1955), 166. Re- sponses to Waugh's "Awake My Soul! It is a Lord," Spectator, 195 (8 July 1955), 36-37. Oldmeadow, Earnest, "News and Notes," Tablet, 166 (12 October 1935), 450. Appears a week before Checklist 1143; Oldmeadow does not refer to Waugh by name, but as the correspondent in Abyssinia for the Daily Mail; comments on his "unchivalrous" reporting and his "immoral" novels. "Portrait Gallery: "Evelyn Waugh," Sunday Times, 7 January 1951. "Profile: Evelyn Waugh," Observer, 31 July 1955. Rosten, Leo. "How I Met Evelyn Waugh," Saturday Review/World, 2 (21 September 1974), 35; (5 October 1974), 39. Sardonic Squire." Books and Bookmen, 2 (July 1957), 5. "Scribe of the Dark Age," Time, 47 (8 April 1946), 26-27. Notes Waugh's article, "Fan-Fare" for Life magazine. . Sutro, John. "The Friend," Adam, Nos. 301-303 (1966). 14-18. "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," The Times, 4 September 1957. Comment on the Waugh-Priestley Ex­ change about The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinto/d. "War of the Writers," Newsweek, 11 March 1957, 108. Comment on Waugh and the Daily Express law suits. Waugh, Auberon. "Father and Son," Books and Bookmen, 19 (October 1973), 110-111. -9-

"Waugh Locks up his Lambs as His 'Public' Tours His Treasures," Sunday Express, 15 August 1952. Woodruff, Douglas. "The Works of Evelyn Waugh," Penguin's Progress, 13 (1951 ), 13·18.

Reviews of Rossetti: His Life and Works Briggs, Asa. Books and Bookmen, 21 (December 1975), pp. 22·23; English Review, 47 (July 1928), pp. 116·117. Jones, D.A.N. Listener, 94 (20 November 1975), 683·684.

Reviews of Decline and Fall English Review, 47 (November 1928), p. 614. Saturday Review (N.Y.), 6 ( 16 March 1929), 790. Sugrue, Thomas. Saturday Review (N.Y.), 72 (19 June 1943), 29. Sunday Times, 4 November 1928, 11. Truth, 10 October 1928, 658. New York Sun, 23 March 192g, 8.

Reviews of Vile Bodies Mayberry, Geo. New Republic, 108 (31 May 1943), 738. Prothero, J.K. G.K. 's Weekly, No. 374 (14 May 1932), p. 156. Roberts, R. Ellis. "A Comedy of Masks," New Statesman and Nation, NS (17 October 1931), p. 478. Smith, C. Time and Tide, 10 (24 January 1930), 116. Straus, R. Sunday Times, (19 January 1930), 9. Time, 15 (10 March 1930), 78. Truth, (12 February 1930), 285.

Reviews of Labels Barnes, Julian. New Statesman and Nation, 90 (5 December 1975), 723·4. Waugh, Alec. Week End Review, 4 October 1930, 460, 462.

Reviews of Remote People Kingsmill, Hugh. English Review, 53 (December 1931), pp. 859·860. Pryce-Jones, Alan. Week End Review, 28 November 1931, 696.

The Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, designed to stimulate research and continue interest in the life and writings of Evelyn Waugh, is published three times a year in April, Sept., and December (Spring, Autumn, and Winter num­ bers). Subscription rate $3.00 a year, $3.50 overseas. Single copy $1.25. Checks or money orders should be made payable to the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter. Notes, brief essays, and news items about Waugh and his work may be submitted, but manuscripts cannot be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Address all correspondence to Dr. P.A. Doyle, English Dept., Nassau Community College, State University of New York, Garden City, N.Y. 11530. Copyright© P.A. Doyle. Editorial Board - Editor: P.A. Doyle; Associate Editors: Alfred W. Borrello (Kingsborough Community College); James F. Carens (Bucknell Univ.); Robert M. Davis (Univ. of Oklahoma); Heinz Kosok (Univ. of Wup­ pertal); Charles E. Linck, Jr. (East Texas State Univ.).