EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 43, No. 1 Spring 2012

Waugh Revisited: A Reminiscence J. Franklin Murray, S.J.[1]

In the late forties the British novelist Evelyn Waugh came up with a best seller, Brideshead Revisited. He sold the movie rights to M.G.M., but later cancelled the contract when he could not accept their interpretation of the sexual acrobatics in the novel.[2] During the litigation he distracted himself by visiting Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, where he became fascinated with the peculiar variety of funeral rituals in practice there. In the summer of ’48 he gathered his observations into an outrageously funny little novel called The Loved One, which rocketed him into national attention.

On receiving notice that Waugh was available for a lecture tour of American Catholic colleges, I began negotiations to bring him to Spring Hill. He arrived in Mobile March 7, 1949,[3] for three days of lectures and conferences. I met him and his wife at the old L & N station in the early afternoon. His first remark was that his name was not pronounced “Ev-lyn,” but “Eve-lyn.” He was much shorter than I had expected and looked somewhat ridiculous under his bowler hat. His charming, aristocratic wife suffered from neglect and found it hard to keep up with his long strides.

Newspaper reporters were excited about Waugh’s visit to the city and had arranged for an interview with him at the Admiral Semmes Hotel. On the way to the hotel I asked Mr. Waugh to meet the press and got the curt answer that he would ignore all reporters except one from the Catholic paper. At the hotel three reporters were waiting for him. He brushed aside two of them and began a conversation with Mr. John Will of the Mobile Press Register, whom he judged to be the Catholic reporter. Waugh spent a good hour with Mr. Will and gave him his philosophy of life, his theory of government, and his opinion of American civilization. All of this appeared with a large picture on the front page of the Mobile Register the next day.[4] Waugh was immensely pleased by this publicity and commented that Mr. Will was one of the few intelligent and honest reporters he had ever met.

That evening Waugh and his wife were my guests at a dinner at Constantine’s, then on Royal Street. Mr. Fred McCaffrey, a young Jesuit English teacher, accompanied us to dinner. In a quiet, dark little booth in the rear of the restaurant, Waugh ordered an Old Fashioned and a cheese soufflé, noting that this was a day of fast and abstinence in Lent. The Old Fashioned arrived with ice and triggered Mr. Waugh into a vehement protest about the barbarous American custom of ruining drinks with ice. He asked the waitress for a “styner.” Puzzled at first, I told the waitress that Mr. Waugh wanted to strain the ice from his drink. She shrugged her shoulders and shortly returned with a warm drink. This round was followed by another. By this time the cheese soufflé had arrived. Waugh looked at it from several angles and asked the waitress what it was. She replied that it was the cheese soufflé he had ordered.

“Whatever resemblance this has to a cheese soufflé is minimal. The best restaurants of Paris would never recognize this as a cheese soufflé.” The embarrassed waitress was forced to call the manager to calm him down. After another insult or two, Waugh ordered a shrimp dish and a bottle of California burgundy. As the meal progressed, he made away with most of the wine, which he praised highly. He became quite animated in his description of the absurdities of Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood. His order of another bottle of burgundy frankly disturbed me. Since he was doing most of the drinking, I feared that his coming lecture on “Chesterton, Belloc, and Graham Greene” might wander far afield.[5] Meanwhile, he regaled us with short bursts of song, jests, and imitations of cockney, which I could not fully appreciate.

Looking nervously at my watch, I insisted that we should get underway to the auditorium although the time of the lecture was three-quarters of an hour off. He polished off the meal with a brandy while I paid the check. Mrs. Waugh left us to see a western at the old Saenger Theater.

Waugh’s lecture was to be given at the auditorium of Toolen High School. I spent half an hour driving around in various directions to kill time, hoping that the spring breezes would clear his head for a coherent lecture. In the lobby of the high school, Mr. Cameron Plummer, owner of the Haunted Book Shop,[6] had arranged a large display of Waugh’s novels. Mr. Plummer greeted us warmly at the door and asked Waugh to autograph some of the books on display. Waugh refused indignantly and mumbled a few expletives which I did not understand. Plummer protested, saying “I only want to help you sell your books.” Waugh retorted, “They will sell without your help.”

At this point a lady approached Waugh waving a copy of TIME in his face with the request that he autograph TIME’s review of The Loved One. Waugh brushed her aside rudely with the remark that TIME was an obnoxious little rag, incapable of reviewing anything objectively.[7] The lady retired somewhat abashed and flustered.

By this time the auditorium had filled up. I led Mr. Waugh out of the lobby and down the front steps to go around the building. A high school girl reporter tagged along behind us trying to get Waugh’s attention. He stopped suddenly and asked me what that remarkable perfume was. At first I thought he was alluding to “afternoon in Prichard”[8] which so often envelops Mobile. It was not that, but a whiff of magnolia frescati [frascati?], a flower with a strong banana oil odor. Waugh plucked some of the flowers from a shrub and stuck them in his pocket. Meanwhile, the young lady worked up enough courage to question Waugh. “Mr. Waugh, what do you think is the future of the Catholic novel in America?” “Brilliant, I would say. Brilliant! It has no pahst [sic] nor present. Therefore, it must have a future.” Somewhat crestfallen, the reporter fell behind us as we entered the rear of the building. Still concerned about which course the lecture would take, I adjusted the microphone, tested the PA system, and introduced Waugh briefly and nervously. The full house pleased me because it meant that Waugh’s fee would be met. I took a seat at the rear of the auditorium. Waugh’s lecture was incredibly sober. He commented brilliantly on the literary exploits of Chesterton and Belloc, but spent most of his time on Graham Greene, then popular because of his character “Scobie” in The Heart of the Matter. Waugh made much of the Catholicism of these three authors to the point of chauvinism. At times I shuddered at his comments about the Anglican establishment, fearing that our Episcopalian brethren would be offended, and they were. But at the end of the lecture the audience gave him a good hand, feeling perhaps that insults by a celebrity should be politely tolerated.

Waugh’s ardent admirers among Mobile literati had insisted on a reception for him at the Kirkbride Club. A friend of the college, Mrs. Leila Sauer, had agreed to serve as hostess, but was unhappy because the President of the college had vetoed alcoholic punch during Lent.[9] She made many delicate little sandwiches and prepared a large bowl of fruit punch.

“Waugh’s not going to like this. Englishmen like their liquor,” she said. How right she was! In the lobby of the club Waugh handed me his coat and headed for the punchbowl. As Mrs. Sauer was filling his glass, he commented that sandwiches were out of place among Catholics since this was Lent, a time of fast. She handed him the glass of punch without reply. He sipped it gingerly, made a horrible face, and spat it out in a potted plant on the window sill mumbling “Where can I find some Cutty Sark?” He disappeared into a patio lounge in the rear while his admirers were waiting to meet him in the front rooms of the club. I was unable to persuade him to leave the bar and greet his audience. Chattering among themselves in a half-hearted fashion, they left one by one. About eleven o’clock Waugh came out from the bar in the courtyard looking for me. “Where is my Jesuit chauffeur?” Mrs. Waugh joined us at this time, having just come in from the cinema. As soon as we got in the car, Waugh began reciting a poem in a high- pitched voice. I recognized it shortly as Chesterton’s poem “In Praise of Wine.”[10] At the entrance to the hotel Mr. McCaffrey and I waited for him to finish the poem, wondering what the next day would bring.

In the morning Waugh announced that he wanted to visit the old cemeteries in Mobile. The first on the list was the one behind the Mobile Public Library. Waugh took big strides from one grave to the next while Mrs. Waugh made chirping little remarks about the Anglo-Saxon names on the tombstones. I managed to get in a few remarks like calling attention to the location of the grave of Joe Cain, the founder of Mobile Mardi Gras. Walking through cemeteries is not my favorite pastime. By the time we had covered the Magnolia Cemetery on Virginia Street, I was tired of hearing Waugh’s running commentaries. At the Catholic Cemetery he stood strangely silent before the grave of Admiral Semmes, the naval hero of the Confederacy. Suddenly he blurted out, “How on earth do you put up with all of these Protestant sects?” “I hadn’t thought of putting up with them,” I said. “They are a major part of the American scene. We get along well enough together, and besides nearly all of them came from your 17th century England, didn’t they?” “Well, yes,” he said, “but we had nothing like these dreadful Christian Scientists and Mormons.”

Next in order was an excursion to Bellingrath Gardens, now at the height of its beauty. Visitors are usually enthusiastic about the great variety of camellia and azaleas there. Not so the Waughs. Not once during the two or three hours we spent in the Gardens did either of them comment on a single flower. Once Waugh went up to an old live oak tree and plucked some moss off the bark. He beckoned to his wife who went running to see what he had found. “My dear,” he said, “this reminds me of the forests in Abyssinia.”

As we walked by a flowing artesian well, Waugh asked me where we could find something to drink. I made the terrible mistake of leading him to a nearby coke stand. The lecture I received on the destructive qualities of Coca-Cola silenced me for a good many minutes. Waugh had no other choice but to drink water.[11]

As we walked along, I made bold to reopen the conversation. “How does this large lawn compare with some of the English gardens I have heard so much about?” Waugh looked at me intensely, batted his eyes several times, pulled his bowler hat down a little tighter on his head and walked about forty feet out on the lawn, ignoring the “Keep Off the Grass” sign. Then, to the amazement of the onlookers, he got down on all fours and crawled around, first in this direction and then in that. He plucked up blades of grass here and there and cast them aside. Then he got up and strode toward me. “It’s full of weeds,” he said. “My backyard at home is better than this.”

On the way back to the city Waugh asked to stop several places, one of them called the “Treasure House.” It had a number of museum pieces and objects of art in it. He looked them over carefully and remarked to me, “All of these are from Europe. Have you Americans nothing of your own?” By this time I had had about enough and was happy to leave the Waughs at their hotel to dine alone.

I returned to pick them up about 7:30 for a visit to the college. Waugh had promised to speak to the young Jesuit seminarians in their recreation room. Before we arrived, Waugh plied me with several questions. “Do American Catholics ever confess any sins except those against the sixth commandment?”[12] Taken aback, I replied, “Surely you must know that confessional matters are not open to discussion!” He went on commenting about the bad influence of Irish puritanism on American Catholics.

The better Waugh came out in his talk to the scholastics. He analyzed the themes of Brideshead Revisited. He called it a failure because he had tried to do too many things in it. “I tried to show how grace operates in the souls of different types of people. I collected these people all into one family, and that was a mistake,” he admitted. Waugh pleased the scholastics by praising three eminent Oxford Jesuits: Broderick, D’Arcy, and Martindale.[13] He attributed his conversion to them. For refreshments the scholastics served coke and cookies. After the talk, we toured the campus. Passing the old dining room in the Quadrangle, Waugh asked me “What do the students have to drink with their meals?” “Oh, a number of things,” I said. “They like milk and iced tea. For breakfast they have fruit juices and coffee.” And before I could catch myself, I added “coke” to the list. “You should never let them drink that vile stuff,” he said. “It will ruin their livers.” “I should think you would give them a spot of rum with their meals,” chirped Mrs. Waugh, “as they do in the British Navy.”

“I doubt whether their parents would approve a spot of rum with their meals,” I replied. “I should think that this repressive policy would drive them to the stews,” Waugh added. “Possibly,” I said, “but I am sure that those who want something stronger than milk or coke find ways of getting it off campus.”

At the library Waugh asked to see the archives and rare books. I apologized for our lack of a significant collection because of a fire in 1909, which destroyed the entire library. “Small wonder that you have all of these fires. You Americans overheat all of your buildings. I have been gasping for air ever since I’ve been here.” Waugh did not know that I had heard how he was evicted from the Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans because he threatened to put a chair through a window which would not open.

Next morning I arrived at the hotel a few minutes early to put our distinguished visitors on the train for St. Louis and got this unsolicited bit of advice from Mr. Waugh: “Promptness does not consist in arriving early or late. Promptness means arriving at the time specified.”

We drove off to the old GM&O railroad station where the Rebel was waiting on the tracks. Waugh tipped the porter lavishly and made up somewhat for his crusty and crotchety behavior by a gracious leave-taking. He even consented to autograph his photograph. Mrs. Waugh waved to me from the platform of the Pullman. Breathing a sigh of relief, I headed for home in deep meditation about the value of hobnobbing with celebrities.

Editors’ Notes [1] This essay appeared in The Motley, the literary publication of Spring Hill College, in the issue for Spring 1972, more than twenty years after the event. The Motley usually publishes the work of students, and it is rare for a piece by a faculty member to appear. The Rev. J. Franklin Murray was chairman of the English Department at Spring Hill during Waugh’s visit. He started the college’s program in communication arts, and an annual award is presented in his name. Thanks to Richard Weaver, Archivist of Spring Hill College, who provided Waugh Studies with a copy of Rev. Murray’s essay, along with a copy of John Will’s article in the Mobile Press Register, cited below. [2] Waugh did not sell film rights of Brideshead Revisited to MGM; rather he went to Hollywood, all expenses paid, to discuss the possible sale of rights. And, as clearly indicated in the correspondence between Joseph I. Breen of the Production Code office and Leon Gordon, who was exploring the possibilities of producing a film, the decision not to proceed was never Waugh’s to make. See Robert Murray Davis, Mischief in the Sun: The Making and Unmaking of The Loved One (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1999), 46-49. Waugh may have put about the story that he and the studio had agreed to disagree, but whatever its source, it is demonstrably false. [3] Actually, Waugh seems to have arrived on Friday, 4 March, the same day that he lectured. [4] John Will, “Author Doubts Democracy is ‘Ideal,’” Mobile Press Register, 5 March 1949: 1+. [5] Actually, the lecture focused on Chesterton, Greene, and Ronald Knox, not Hilaire Belloc. As Will reported, “Waugh’s lecture at Bishop Toolen High Auditorium Friday night was devoted to a discussion of three distinguished British authors—G. K. Chesterton, Msgr. Ronald A. Knox, and Graham Greene.” [6] Cameron Plummer opened the Haunted Book Shop, named for the novel by Christopher Morley (1919), with Adelaide Caroline Marston in 1941. The shop remained in business until 1991. [7] Waugh had recently written a “Memorandum on Certain Inaccuracies in Time Magazine, July 12, 1948.” The issue included a long story on The Loved One, and Waugh’s memo is dated 16 December 1948. See Richard W. Oram, “Waugh vs. Time Magazine,” EWNS 38.3 (Winter 2008). [8] Presumably from the paper mills that used to operate in Prichard, a suburb of Mobile. [9] W. Patrick Donnelly, SJ, President from 1946 to 1952. [10] Possibly Chesterton’s “The Song of Right and Wrong,” which Waugh recited at Notre Dame in February 1949, or Hilaire Belloc’s “Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine.” [11] The founder of Bellingrath Gardens, Walter Bellingrath, had been president of Mobile’s Coca-Cola bottling plant. [12] Thou shalt not commit adultery. [13] James Broderick (1891-1973) wrote The Origin of the Jesuits (1940), among other works. Martin D’Arcy (1888-1978) instructed Waugh prior to his conversion in 1930. C. C. Martindale (1879-1963) facetiously approved Waugh’s film The Scarlet Woman in 1925.

Evelyn Waugh and Dom Hubert van Zeller: A Particular Friendship J. V. Long Portland State University

During the course of his life Evelyn Waugh maintained a number of important friendships with Roman Catholic priests. His famous association with Father Martin D’Arcy, the sophisticated Jesuit who instructed Waugh and then received him into the Catholic Church, is well known. Waugh dedicated his elegant biography Edmund Campion to D’Arcy and kept the dedication page current – it changes from “Master” to “Sometime Master of Campion Hall Oxford” in later editions.

Waugh met Monsignor Ronald Knox in the 1930s. However, as Douglas Patey points out, the two came to know each other well “only during the War, after which the priest often visited Piers Court. Both men shared a love of verbal play and distaste for what Knox (who liked to say that the last really useful human invention was the toast-rack) called simply ‘this revolting age’” (Patey 341). A younger Jesuit priest, Philip Caraman, was a friend of Waugh and his family through the 1950s until Waugh’s death in 1966, at home, on Easter Sunday morning after assisting at Mass. Caraman had said that Mass, in Latin, because another old friend, Dom Hubert van Zeller, the English Benedictine writer and sculptor, was unable to receive his abbot’s permission to spend Easter with the Waughs.

This was a very tightly woven clerical network. D’Arcy, at Campion Hall, and Knox, in the Catholic Chaplaincy, were contemporaries at Oxford. Waugh writes of Knox, “In mind and taste he and Fr D’Arcy were widely different. Ronald took many problems, theological and personal, to Fr D’Arcy and, hearing them restated in Fr D’Arcy’s terms, found himself stimulated to solve them. Once when Ronald was allowing himself one of his rare expressions of discontent, he was asked: ‘Well, what would make you happier?’ After some consideration he answered: ‘If I could go for a walk every afternoon with Fr D’Arcy’” (Knox 245). D’Arcy preached at Knox’s requiem Mass.

Furthermore, Ronald Knox had introduced Hubert van Zeller to Waugh in 1937. Van Zeller describes the occasion in his autobiography, One Foot in the Cradle. Van Zeller and Knox were returning from Caldey Island off Pembrokeshire in Wales where they had been together on retreat:

changing trains at Bristol, Ronald introduced me to Mr Evelyn Waugh, who himself was changing trains. As we moved out of the station … Ronald said, ‘You hadn’t met him before then?’ I said I had seen him often years ago at Oxford and in the Cavendish but that I had never aspired. ‘I know my place,’ I said, ‘which is not the same place as Evelyn Waugh’s. (Cradle 172)

The friends who occupied Waugh’s world are on rich display in the diaries, letters, and biographies. They are memorialized in the gossip, the professional courtesy and competition, and all the social negotiations Waugh undertook in managing his career and his emotional life. And, in the midst of the glittering throng, there is this curious handful of clerics. Each is a singular personality; what drew Waugh to them? In late life they were able to commiserate with Waugh about the liturgical changes mandated by the Second Vatican Council, but their companionships were richer than those complaints. They were each quick, witty, literary, bookish, polished, disciplined, eccentric, and confident in their vocations. None was distracted by family obligations.

I wonder if the attraction for Waugh did not have a great deal to do with the phenomenon that Ian Ker calls attention to in his discussion of 92 Days, Waugh’s travelogue of his trip to British Guyana in 1933. In the course of this rigorous trip, Waugh spends time at a remote mission outpost with two Jesuit missionaries. One of them, Father Mather, is a particularly compelling character whom Waugh responds to as a fellow craftsman: “everything he does, from developing films to making saddles, is done with patient accuracy. Most of the simple furniture of the living-room was his work – firm, finely jointed and fitted, delicately finished.” This is the connection Ker emphasizes:

Where a craft or job is well done, there will be order (of a sort) in Waugh’s world, but there is nothing sinister about this order: not only is Father Mather an accomplished craftsman in doing thoroughly worthwhile practical jobs, but he is also a craftsman in his little church at the altar, punctiliously performing the job that (in Waugh’s view) is the highest of all jobs, which again not only involves using his hands at the crucial point of the consecration but proclaims meaning and order in a world created and redeemed by Christ. (169-70)

Like Father Mather, Hubert van Zeller’s craftsmanship embraced both the spiritual and the physical. +++ Waugh’s friendship with Hubert van Zeller has special resonance following the Evelyn Waugh Society’s 2011 Conference at Downside Abbey, which was Van Zeller’s home off and on from 1914, when he began in the Junior School, until his death, sixty years a monk, in 1984. They were contemporaries and traveled in circles that recognized each other – Van Zeller’s familiarity with Rosa Lewis’s Cavendish Hotel is telling. It’s significant that Van Zeller was a cradle Catholic rather than a convert. In addition, perhaps the fact they were almost contemporaries (Van Zeller was born in 1905), perhaps a sense of shared attitude, perhaps an affinity of one craftsman for another, but there is a distinctive character in Waugh’s relationship with Van Zeller that is different from anything one can infer about his connection to, for example, Martin D’Arcy.

D’Arcy was an indisputably important interlocutor for Waugh throughout his life. In his letters to (or about) Waugh that survive in Jesuit archives and the British Library, D’Arcy’s tone does not vary much. He is a bit prim and implicitly conscious of his importance. In fact, he was important. There’s little irony, and that compromises the intimacy that he was able to share with Waugh. All of Waugh’s letters begin “Dear Fr D’Arcy”; the replies are signed with a version of “M. A. D’Arcy.” Perhaps D’Arcy was most comfortable relying on the rhetorical distance of the teacher. In one way or another, Waugh was always under instruction, and in this instance it seemed to suit him.

The fullness of Van Zeller’s personality is much more in evidence because he undertook to describe himself overtly. One Foot in the Cradle is an interesting performance that describes a cosmopolitan upper-class upbringing that moved between Alexandria and London. Born Catholic, he was educated at Downside. Rather than going to university he worked for a year in Liverpool before entering Downside in 1924 to try his vocation as a Benedictine monk. As a boy he discovered an interest in and aptitude for sculpture; it was an interest he sustained throughout his life.

The sculptor handles a more obstinate medium than a writer, faces a more critical public than the painter whose meaning is more easily grasped, knows that he is in for a longer run than the actor whose talent is for the effect of the moment, makes less claim upon the emotions than the musician, has to battle with limitations imposed upon him by time, space, weight, and setting. It is not that these factors turn him into a serious person, but that unless he is serious about his undertaking he will never get anything done. (Cradle 45)

These sentences describe his attitude towards being a monk as clearly as they do his understanding of what a sculptor does.

Van Zeller’s monastic vocation was like a piece of his sculpture; he worked at it assiduously trying to get the shapes just right. One of his difficulties was an aspiration towards greater austerity than he felt was available at Downside. It led him at one juncture to leave the Benedictines to try his vocation with the Carthusians at Parkminster in Sussex. There he hoped to find an ideal ascetic practice. Carthusian monks lead more or less solitary lives. Time is spent mostly engaged in spiritual exercises in individual hermitages with a few breaks through the day for chanted prayer in church. The monks take a long walk together once a week; otherwise conversation is circumscribed. The irony of Van Zeller’s failure after several months with the Carthusians was that he found their solitude salutary and their modest community exercises onerous. The hermits turned him away. A passage in his autobiography clearly suggests the child is father to the man: “Though I had occasion to be lonely and bored, for I knew hardly any children of my own age either in Alexandria or in London, I have no recollection of loneliness or boredom at any time in my childhood. Only when I began to mix with people did I come to feel these things” (Cradle 8).

What is striking, and affecting, about Van Zeller is the combination within his religious sensibility of the strict idealism that made him itchy and sometimes unhappy at Downside together with an appreciation for the rougher edges of life. It’s an intuition that also arrived when he was young.

In 1915 Van Zeller had a serious bout of pneumonia. After time in the school infirmary he moved to be with relatives in Ireland in order to convalesce. There he relished the churches of Cork.

They reminded me of the churches we used to go to in Alexandria: the same smells, the same dirty water in the holy water stoups, the same candles standing crooked on the altar, the same flowers thrust anyhow into brass vases by hands which would for ever remain ignorant of Constance Spry, the same sense of the place being used as an extension of the living-room. Cork churches, like those in latitudes farther south, looked lived in. Church here was not just for Sundays. Or even just for Mass. To the poor in Cork it was for sitting down in, for yawning in, for meeting people in. It was home. (Cradle 68)

These sentences are important for what they expose about the imagination of a born Catholic. Van Zeller juxtaposes the lived-in feelings of the Church he experienced among the poor in both Egypt and Ireland with what he had felt worshipping in London at the Brompton Oratory and Farm Street and determines that in the poorer places “it was easier to think of our Lord” (Cradle 48). From very early on, in other words, Van Zeller wasn’t troubled by the intellectual complexity behind an assertion of faith: “If what the catechism said was true, why did not we Christians really live to know, love and serve God? … The religious issue confused me not in its postulate but in its application. What I have called the uncertainty lay not in relation to God, but in relation to us. There, roughly, it has remained ever since” (Cradle 32-3). His religion was not esoteric, and it provided Evelyn Waugh with a practical perspective, complementing D’Arcy’s nuanced, intellectual stance. Van Zeller’s was the disposition of a craftsman who excavated his vision by carving stone.

Van Zeller must have been sensitive to differences in the styles with which the Faith was lived. It had to have helped him to deal with Waugh. In some sense the terms are articulated in a letter Waugh wrote to Van Zeller in 1957, as Waugh began to prepare Ronald Knox’s biography. Knox and his friend Daphne Acton had apparently approached Van Zeller, who was Knox’s confessor, in the late 1930s in the hope of obtaining advice “about regulating their friendship” – whatever that means. Waugh continues his letter, “More than once Daphne refers to your [Van Zeller’s] opinion … that she was a good influence on Ronnie in making him ‘less intellectual’…. Did you simply mean that in a human, social way he was in danger of becoming donnish, or was their [sic] a spiritual sense in which his Faith was too much a matter of reason and that she helped give it life?” (Letters 495). Clearly, in Van Zeller’s eyes Daphne Acton’s effect was salutary. Waugh and the monk became friends. Martin Stannard notes that “Waugh clearly found the life of the artist-monk intensely sympathetic: another Merton figure but also something more” (495).

Van Zeller writes in his autobiography, “When he [Waugh] became a regular visitor to Downside, and particularly when he attended two of my retreats, I found in him much that I would not have looked for had I known him only from his books” (172). Indeed, Waugh was responsible for providing Van Zeller with a second spring: he proposed that Van Zeller lead a series of religious retreats in America, and Waugh helped to facilitate them.

The English monk fell in love with the United States and for the last third of his life spent extended periods in America lecturing, giving retreats, and serving as chaplain for a community of Benedictine nuns in Colorado. Long after Waugh’s death, Van Zeller wrote to Christopher Sykes,

In case you wonder what I am doing in Colorado I am back here for a year and enjoying every minute. Having what Americans call a ‘hang up’ about monasticism, I am acting chaplain to a Benedictine Community – enclosed and of the old observance. The changes at Downside distressed me more and more, so the Abbot was kind enough to let me return to St Walburga where the liturgy and timetable are roughly what they were at Downside when I took vows. I hope to be allowed to stop on when the year is up in February. My only connection now with England is Country Life, which a nice (and rich) American lady brings me at intervals.

Evelyn’s letters are receiving mixed reviews. I have put in for the book at the Boulder Library and am longing to read it. If it is as good as the diaries I shall spend a happy autumn.[1]

This is one of a number of interesting letters from Van Zeller to Sykes that discuss Waugh; the letters are in Sykes’s papers in the Georgetown University Library’s Special Collections. Sykes was a Downside Old Boy and he and his wife remained friends of the Abbey and some of the monks. He was a natural audience for some of Van Zeller’s distress and nostalgia:

The Downside which you and I knew, and, in retrospect anyway, loved is not there any more. (Mrs Shirley Williams said the same, I think of the Labour Party.) … It’s a far cry since the head of the school, James Mathew, rather drunk, explained to Minnie Cunningham the difference between the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception. Or when Morgie Duncan, as cadet officer at camp, announced that nobody in number two platoon (me) need apply to go up for the ten-minute flight in an army plane who was not in a state of grace.

Indeed, his memories and feelings of those very different times are touching and ironic. He had clearly lived with the unhappy necessity of change over time. In a note six years earlier, it’s hard to detach the sentiment from the irony: “There have been many changes lately at Downside and I feel like Newman leaning on the gate at wherever it was and looking at the fading roses in the evening light.” This sense of elegy evokes his strongest bond with Evelyn Waugh. +++ A number of Van Zeller’s letters to Waugh are in the Evelyn Waugh Papers in the British Library. In a 1964 letter to Waugh from the Benedictine Abbey in Wales (Talacre) where he was serving as chaplain, Van Zeller writes:

You would be surprised to discover how often you and your work had been in my mind lately. This has a lot to do with the death wish which appeared, all too briefly, in the most recent of your novels. With me it has become a settled habit – a security to be smuggled in – though the preachers would appear to be against it. I wonder if you know that line of Thoreau’s: ‘I am persuaded that fully two thirds of mankind live out their lives in the condition of quiet despair.’ That ‘quiet’ is so good.

One of the startling themes that runs through Van Zeller’s autobiography is his unambiguous descriptions of a death wish. He was able to recognize it early in life. In the wake of his recovery from the pneumonia that almost killed him as a schoolboy, he “began to wonder why I had not died” (Cradle 70).

It seemed to me that a chance had been missed. In this way I came to conceive a wish for death which superseded, and in intensity vastly outmatched, the wish to grow up. The attraction has remained with me ever since.… Nobody has been able to talk me out of it, or to persuade me that so to hope can be in any way wrong. Idle for people to tell me that life is something good: I know. Idle to tell me that life is God’s gift and must be lived fully, positively: I know. I am not, I think, a somber person. I doubt if my friends think of me as a melancholic. It is just that I do not much like living. Certainly at no time in my adult life have I so enjoyed being alive as not infinitely to prefer the prospect of being dead. A spiritual adviser once told me that to look forward to death in this way supposed some constitutional flaw. If flaw it is, I can at least be thankful to it for having carried me over the most difficult times of my life. (Cradle 70-1)

It’s a curious admission, and one wonders about the nature of the satisfaction he might have felt during the ceremony of his solemn profession of vows when the monk is covered by a funeral pall. Moreover, he had recourse to the same aspiration when chaplains were being recruited to serve during the Second World War. He recounts the interview with his abbot in which he was seeking permission to volunteer.

‘I would take to the army as easily as anything.’ ‘Don’t deceive yourself; you would be hopeless. What’s at the back of it? Are you asking to be relieved of the housemaster thing?’ ‘No.’ ‘Look, you are doing what you can for these boys in the school, you are turning out a book or two a year, and you are giving retreats during the holidays. You are working for souls as it is, so what is it you hope to gain by going off to the wars?’ ‘Death.’ ‘So that’s it,’ the Abbot said with a return of his quick smile; ‘well I’m afraid I can’t help you. Permission refused.’ (177)

These sentiments struck Evelyn Waugh acutely; he was particularly affected by the sentences he quotes, almost verbatim, to Ann Fleming early in 1966: “1965 was a bitter year for me. Many bereavements. No work. Feeble health. Those who love me tell me I am dying but professional opinion does not confirm them. Fr Hubert van Zeller … expresses beautifully what I feel. ‘Dying is just growing up. I am not unhappy. I just do not much like being alive’” (Letters 636).

By early 1966, Waugh’s own death wish was ascendant, and Van Zeller tried to ameliorate some of Waugh’s depression: “You sound awfully low. If there were a decent hotel near here and the weather were better – and if Wales were not such a stinking awful place anyway – I would urge you to pay me a visit. Since this Mass business, I feel we have more in common than ever. In cheering you up I might even cheer myself. But instead I’ll do as you ask and pray for you.”

During these weeks in January Waugh had read Van Zeller’s autobiography and had written “an appreciation” that appeared in the Downside Review’s April 1966 issue. In the piece Waugh approvingly quotes Van Zeller’s admission that he did “not much like living” and continues, “There will be many readers, quite lacking in Dom Hubert’s holiness, who will dimly understand and echo these words” (232). Van Zeller wrote to Waugh to acknowledge the latter’s kindness: “I wish the Downside Review had a wider circulation. Had I been given the choice of one quotation from the book, I would have plumped for that one about death.” The letter is dated 7 April 1966; Waugh died on 10 April. “He had wanted to die: ‘Don’t worry,’ Laura told Diana Cooper, ‘he is totally happy to be dead’” (Heath 270).

Both Stannard and Patey call attention to Waugh’s review of One Foot in the Cradle and the irony of its timing and praise. Clearly, the old friends shared an expectation of eventual blessing after this vale of tears. Whether or not Hubert van Zeller could make Evelyn Waugh’s transition to the next world any easier, it’s indisputable that Van Zeller offered the solid comfort of friendship in this one. “‘I hope you know,’ Msgr. Knox once said to me, ‘that you and I are the only two friends Evelyn has never quarreled with. A rare distinction to be treasured.’” (Van Zeller, Critic 38)

Note [1] I thank the Abbot of Downside, Dom Aidan Bellenger, for permission to quote archival material.

Works Cited Heath, Jeffrey M. The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing. Kingston: McGill- Queen's UP, 1982. Ker, Ian. The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2003. Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939-1966. London: Dent, 1992. Van Zeller, Hubert. “The Agreeable Mr. Waugh: A Reminiscence.” The Critic 35 (Fall 1976): 38. ---. Letter to Christopher Sykes. 7 July 1975. MS. Christopher Sykes Papers. Georgetown University Lib., Washington, D.C. ---. Letter to Christopher Sykes. 15 October 1980. MS. Christopher Sykes Papers. Georgetown University Lib., Washington, D.C. ---. Letter to Christopher Sykes. 25 May 1981. MS. Christopher Sykes Papers. Georgetown University Lib., Washington, D.C. ---. Letter to Evelyn Waugh. 18 January 1964. MS. Evelyn Waugh Papers, Add. 81072, British Library, London. ---. Letter to Evelyn Waugh. 20 January 1966. MS. Evelyn Waugh Papers, Add. 81072, British Library, London. ---. Letter to Evelyn Waugh. 7 April 1966. MS. Evelyn Waugh Papers, Add. 81072, British Library, London. ---. One Foot in the Cradle. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1965. Waugh, Evelyn. 92 Days: Travels in Guiana and Brazil. 1934. London: Serif, 2007. ---. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. ---. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1980. ---. Ronald Knox: A Biography. 1959. London: Cassell, 1988. ---. Rev. One Foot in the Cradle by Hubert Van Zeller. Downside Review 84 (Apr 1966): 231-32.

REVIEWS

Tried and True A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes. 3rd Expanded Edition, ed. Alcuin Reid. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011.123 pp. Paperback. US$15.00. Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, James Cook University

A Bitter Trial is a knowledgeably edited and well-produced little book that every Wavian will wish to own. At its heart is a cache of letters between Evelyn Waugh (four) and Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster (five). Professor Stannard published two of Cardinal Heenan’s letters and referred to others in No Abiding City 1939-1966 in 1992, but the Waugh letters have never before seen the light of day. The correspondence began when Cardinal Heenan wrote to Waugh in praise of ‘The Same Again, Please’, Waugh’s dramatic challenge (published in the secular press) to the Progressive programme put to the Second Vatican Council, and stating, by contrast, what in his view the ordinary Catholic might hope from it. Heenan was a Conservative, whose interventions in the Council debates had attracted criticism from the Liberal-Progressive lobby, and he found ‘nothing [in Waugh’s article] with which I don’t agree.’ Encouraged, Waugh sent him a copy of ‘Changes in the Church: Questions for the Progressives’, a long letter to the Catholic Herald written in his idiosyncratic fighting style (e.g., ‘Do they [the progressive priests] want to marry and beget other little progressives?’). Heenan invited Waugh to dinner, where he assured him that certain proposed changes would not be introduced. Inevitably the changes were introduced, because in a climate in which all innovation allegedly owed its origin to ‘the dynamism of the Holy Spirit’, no Archbishop could be allowed to deviate from what, sadly, had by then taken on some of the characteristics of a Party Line.

Heenan again invited Waugh to a ‘nice anti-progressive dinner’. Waugh’s reply ignored the invitation while pointedly noting: ‘The assurances you gave me when you very kindly invited me to see you in London have been disappointed’. In his diary for Easter 1965 he wrote: ‘Cardinal Heenan has been double-faced in the matter.’

This exchange of letters, while ending unhappily, gives an enlightening insight into the relationship between Archbishop and novelist. It was not a coldly formal encounter between a layman seeking an outcome and an Archbishop who could not, or would not, deliver it. On the contrary, it was a meeting of like minds initiated by the Archbishop. From my limited experience of hierarchs, Waugh was extremely fortunate to have had dealings with a bishop as frank, friendly and simpatico as Heenan.

A Bitter Trial assembles around the Waugh-Heenan letters a body of supporting works. From Waugh there is the signature article, ‘The Same Again, Please’; letters to the Catholic Herald and The Tablet; and extracts from his diaries and from correspondence with intimate friends. All of these pieces are currently available in Waugh’s published Letters, Diaries, and Essays, Articles and Reviews; but reading them in a collection where they are mutually illuminating is very helpful. From Cardinal Heenan there are two Pastoral Letters, an Intervention at the Council and a letter to the then Pope, all of which were new to me. I found them refreshingly open. The colourful convert, Joseph Pearce, provides a spirited Foreword; the Shakespeare scholar Clare Asquith, Countess of Oxford, provides a gracious and informative Afterword. Part of the panegyric by Waugh’s friend, Father Philip Caraman, SJ, is included, as is the list of ‘Distinguished Scholars and Artists’ (most non-Catholic) who successfully petitioned the Pope to ‘Spare the Traditional Latin Mass’ in England—Agatha Christie’s name among them is said to have moved the Pope, a fan, to grant the petition. I find it a little strange that the editor did not print even one of the anti-aggiornamento letters Waugh wrote to the American journal, Commonweal. And my instinct would have been to include ‘An Appreciation of Pope John’, a masterpiece of indirection in which Waugh conveys a warm feeling towards the lovable Conservative man and bishop while undercutting, by pointed omission, his reputation as a Reforming Pope.

WARNING: Liberal Catholic academics and members of diocesan school boards may suffer severe shock on encountering the Foreword to this book. They are advised to proceed to the next section. As addicts of vehement denunciation of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, they could become severely disoriented on reading Joseph Pearce’s paean of praise for them: ‘A spirit of restoration had been heralded in 1978 by the election of John Paul II…. Tradition began to show signs of resurrection…. Yet would the next Pope exercise his power to exorcise the darkness?… Faithful Catholics around the world leapt for joy when they heard the news that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had been elected Pope.’

Nobody can doubt that the changes to the Catholic Church around Vatican II and, even more, some of the extreme proposals that never came to fruition, caused Waugh intense anguish. Nor could anyone doubt the ‘nerve’ (as Clare Asquith so happily puts it) required for a layman in the 1960s publicly to challenge the institutional Church; or the strength of the conviction that drove Waugh, when ‘enfeebled’ (his word), to write three articles and thirteen letters to editors in opposition to aggiornamento—his longest press campaign. And yet, while sympathetic to Waugh’s position and supportive of retaining the Latin Mass for those who prefer it, I do have two tentative reservations.

The first reservation concerns this book’s unqualified lament for the loss of ‘splendour and mystery’ in the old Mass, which Clare Asquith calls a ‘beautiful human artefact comparable with the great cathedrals’. Having been privileged to witness the liturgy at its best, I sympathize with those who strive to preserve it: anthems like ‘Montes Gelboe’ or the alternative ninth lesson of Tenebrae are some of the most thrilling music ever written. But the experience of many Catholics from the 1930s to the 1950s, when this writer grew up, could be starkly different. In a busy city parish where Sunday Masses took place on the hour every hour from 6:00 am to 12:00 noon, there were always popular priests who said Mass, distributed 300 communions, gave a sermon, cried about money, and excoriated the boys in the back pews reading the Sporting Globe—all in thirty-five minutes. Those priests still had the rugged virtues that commanded the loyalty of ordinary working Catholics—but ‘splendour and mystery’? Waugh found it unimportant if he failed to ‘catch every word’ the priest uttered. But when Mass was rushed in the way described, all that could be heard was a frantic drone. Many Catholics found it unedifying—Protestants could be deeply shocked—when the ‘beautiful human artefact’, the Mass, which is designed as a communal ceremony with a role for laypeople, was so travestied. I suggest, contra Waugh et al., that it was not only ‘cranks’ and ‘archaeologists’ (and there were too many of those) who were dissatisfied with the status quo; so too were many ordinary folk who wanted something better.

The second reservation concerns the emphasis the book places on liturgy, which is inevitable because it deals with correspondence about ‘innovations’ (shades of Edmund Burke) in the Mass and retaining Latin. Nevertheless, the emphasis could give a wrong impression of Waugh’s main focus. Waugh’s fundamental objection to tinkering with the Mass was not, as he himself explained, ‘aesthetic’. It was rather a case of ‘Untune that string, and hark what discord follows.’ He feared that the proposed liturgical changes, ‘harmless in themselves’, were a symptom of ‘grave ill’, and to prove it he quoted recent Protestant and Catholic writings published in hitherto reputable sources that contradicted basic Christian belief. He was also at odds with popular thinking about the role of a Council. Most saw it as a chance for ‘updating’ the Church. As a proudly self-styled Conservative, Waugh argued fiercely that the primary role of the Council and of the Church itself was to ‘conserve’, i.e., to define and pass on revealed truth whole and uncorrupted. And the rhetoric became stronger: gradually it embraced the Church’s historic need to defend itself against ‘traitors from within’ as well as ‘enemies from without’ and came to encompass warnings against a ‘conspiracy’ and an ‘underground movement’ (i.e., a secret subversive organization) within the Church.

This was a very difficult time for Waugh, when his health was poor and his spirits low. Was the talk of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘underground’ the rambling of a paranoid reactionary? Perhaps, but some very strange developments gave Conservatives real cause for concern. The Progressive movement in the Church was at the time extremely well organized and surprisingly well funded. One facet of its structure and activities, if I may oversimplify hugely, was IDO-C (International Centre of Information and Documentation concerning the Conciliar Church), an incorporated body, independent of any religious organization, and extending into about thirty countries. Its brief included ‘horizontal’ communication within the Catholic Church and between the institutional Catholic Church and public opinion. Its real achievement in the United Kingdom— where it was relatively benign—was to capture almost all major journals (e.g., the formerly conservative Tablet) and publishers (e.g., Burns & Oates). It also made itself the principal voice of Catholicism for the mainstream media. Curiously, the fifteen members of the governing body of IDO-C in the UK included a leading Communist, Jack Dunman (1911-1972), a gifted organizer and tactician, who had lately taken up Marxist-Christian dialogue. The body also included four members of Slant, a Cambridge organization dedicated to reconciling Catholicism and left-wing politics, which was in close touch with the ‘Catholic’ Churches sponsored by Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. Naturally, Conservative Catholics—by then strictly marginalized and largely silenced—talked to each other about ‘conspiracy’. I suspect, but cannot prove, that Waugh was in touch with some of those groups; his language certainly parallels theirs. Whatever of that, the spread within the Catholic Church of theological notions well outside the parameters of Vatican II, a development against which Waugh had warned, was remarkably rapid.

Finally, Clare Asquith attributes to Waugh a statement that he surely did not make: ‘As Waugh pointed out, it was for the old rite rather than their Christian belief that the Elizabethan martyrs had died….’ With the greatest respect, Waugh nowhere says that; nor did he believe it. The Elizabethan martyr, Edmund Campion, explained his mission without a single reference to rite or Mass. His ‘charge’, as stated in his Brag, was ‘to preach the Gospel, to minister the sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors … foul vice and proud ignorance.’

Two small details. The commas in ‘Fides, Quaerens, Intellectum’ on page 82 are impossible. And in the quotation, ‘inimici hominis domestici scies’ on page 62, ‘scies’ must be wrongly transcribed. Matthew 10:36 in the Vulgate reads: ‘inimici hominis domestici eius’, i.e., ‘a man’s enemies will be members of his own household.’

From Drab Alleys to Odorous Gardens Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, by Alexandra Harris. London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2010. 320 pp. £19.95/$40.00. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

About a cultural movement in England between the wars, Romantic Moderns is based on its author’s dissertations, and it was the Guardian’s Best First Book of 2010. Alexandra Harris teaches English Literature at Liverpool University. Although primarily “art history” and focused on painters, Romantic Moderns includes architecture, photography, and literature (as well as food and gardening).

Harris identifies several twentieth-century English painters, primarily John Piper, who developed styles both “modern” and yet within established English traditions of landscape and other genres. They began careers with interest in modern movements on the Continent, such as abstraction and cubism, but moved on to explore their own idiosyncrasies. Harris describes traditional influences on these painters as “romantic.”

Harris also uses English writers (primarily Virginia Woolf but also Evelyn Waugh and others) to explain how and why English artists in various media altered styles during this period. Woolf began writing in an avant-garde style (stream of consciousness), but by her last novel, Between the Acts, she had adopted a more traditional approach. Hints of this change appeared in her 1928 novel Orlando, and in her biography of Roger Fry, who might be described as the father of English modernism. Waugh never embraced hard-core modernism in literature or art, though his first two novels did contain avant-garde elements, and his works refer to leading modernists such as T.S. Eliot. In Romantic Moderns, Harris argues that Waugh’s characters and stories reflect the “movement,” but she neglects his style.[1]

Harris cites Margot Beste-Chetwynde as an example of the change in tastes from Continental “modern” to English “romantic modern.” In Decline and Fall, Margot tears down her Tudor country house and replaces it with a glass and concrete structure designed by “her discovery,” the Continental modernist Otto Silenus. In Work Suspended, according to Harris, Margot “has abandoned her concrete palace” and visits the St. Johns Wood studio of the elderly Mr. Plant in search of paintings. Father of the novelist John Plant, Mr. Plant is a painter who had fallen out of favor, but his outdated style has come back into fashion. Harris might have mentioned that in Brideshead Revisited Margot gives a luncheon for Charles Ryder to celebrate exhibition of his Latin American paintings (Penguin, 1976, 254-55). Charles presumably paints in the style of the “Romantic Moderns” who are Harris’s subject, so Margot’s luncheon also reflects changing tastes. Moreover, Margot abandons her London residence, Pastmaster House, not the Bauhaus- style country house called King’s Thursday, in favor of the Ritz Hotel (POMF, Penguin, 1976, 116). Though she does not frequent King’s Thursday in later novels, I cannot find any reference to her abandoning it as she did Pastmaster House. Despite minor confusion over details, Harris’s point is well taken. By 1939, Margot’s tastes have changed from Bauhaus modern to Edwardian or Victorian retro.

As reflections of Waugh’s own artistic tastes, Harris cites his 1942 opposition to the removal of Victorian railings as scrap iron during the war, and his description of despoliation of the English countryside witnessed by Ginger Littlejohn in an airplane in Vile Bodies (Penguin, 1975, 199- 200). It is, however, Nina Blount, not Ginger, who describes the countryside, sickened by what she sees (although flying also contributes). Ginger, as Harris notes, is ironically reminded of Shakespeare’s “sceptre’d isle.” Nina’s reaction is closer to Waugh’s. Harris makes the connection between aerial photography and the landscapes of John Piper (25-29). She misses the opportunity to note that Waugh uses the same aerial perspective in writing.

Harris sees foreign travel as fashionable (and therefore “modern”) in the period between the wars.[2] Travel writing also became fashionable in this period, and Harris cites Paul Fussell’s Abroad (New York,1980). In Waugh’s writing and Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North, foreign travel fails to please and makes travelers long to be home in England. Harris says that Waugh and Bowen find the antithesis of aimless foreign travel in the settled life of an English country house, certainly true of Tony Last and William Boot.

The country house becomes the focus of concluding chapters. Rex Whistler, another Romantic Modernist painter, made his name decorating country houses such as Philip Sassoon’s Port Lympne in Kent and Lord Anglesey’s Plas Newydd in North Wales. John Piper devoted a considerable part of his career to painting, drawing, and photographing country houses. Harris notes that Piper’s path crossed Waugh’s in 1942 at Renishaw in Yorkshire. Waugh wrote to Laura: “There is an extremely charming artist called Piper staying here making a series of drawings of the house” (Letters 163). Harris postulates that Piper may have inspired Charles Ryder, or at least his occupation. She mentions the similarity of their progression from modern to romantic style and their reputations based on painting English country houses. Little in Piper’s personal life, however, suggests that Waugh used more than vocation. In Journals: 1982-86, Anthony Powell sees Rex Whistler as the basis of Ryder, since they were both painters and social climbers. Waugh met Whistler at least once, at a Christmas party given by Daphne Fielding in 1942 (Letters 165).[3]

Harris also brings Brideshead Revisited into consideration. She goes over the top in claiming that Castle Howard inspired Brideshead Castle and includes a photograph in support. It’s more complicated. Though he described Brideshead as a Baroque, domed, colonnaded house (Penguin 1976, 36, 78-79), Waugh intended to throw readers off the scent of Madresfield Court, obviously his inspiration for other elements of Brideshead. Madresfield’s residents disclaimed any relationship between themselves and the Flytes.[4] Certainly the Lygons of Madresfield inspired the Flyte family, as detailed in two recent books that must have been known to Harris.[5] The chapel in Brideshead Castle is, according to Sebastian, a “monument of art nouveau” (39-40), an accurate description of the chapel at Madresfield. The location of Brideshead Castle in Wiltshire is remote from Castle Howard in Yorkshire but not far from Madresfield Court in Worcestershire. In a recent book, Duncan Fallowell suggests that the home of Alastair Graham’s family (Barford House in Warwickshire) inspired Brideshead Castle. Although on a much smaller scale and Regency rather than Baroque in style, Barford House has a dome and columns; Waugh frequently visited his friend Graham, a model for Sebastian Flyte.[6]

Filmmakers’ images of Brideshead obliterated the ambiguity of Waugh’s inspiration, ironically helping the author to obscure his sources. Castle Howard fit Waugh’s description, but it was also suitable as a film set. Waugh described a generic English country house that incorporated Baroque style. He constructed fictional buildings just as he constructed many characters, combining experience with imagination.[7] Castle Howard contributed to Waugh’s fiction, but readers need more context than Harris offers.[8]

Art-history buffs will like Romantic Moderns more than the bookish (except perhaps Virginia Woolf fans). Novelists and poets whose works are considered include George Orwell (Coming Up for Air), Graham Greene (Brighton Rock), John Betjeman (who jointly edited the Shell Guides with Piper), Henry Green (Caught and Party Going), and Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca). None receives as much attention as Woolf or Waugh. Henry Green seems to be an own goal on Harris’s part, since he never really abandoned his aggressively modern style as her paradigm suggests he should have. A better choice would have been Anthony Powell, but Harris ignores his works. Powell’s fictional Edwardian artist, Edgar Deacon, enjoyed a dramatic posthumous comeback in A Dance to the Music of Time, much like that of Mr. Plant. While Mr. Plant collected Victorian bric-a-brac, Mr. Deacon sold it in his Fitzrovia antique shop. As Mr. Deacon returns to fashion in the 1960s, Powell closes his twelve-volume series and demonstrates that what goes around comes around. Harris takes pains to make the same point.[9]

Harris does not claim to write literary history; instead, she uses literature to support her thesis relating to a movement that cut across English culture in the interwar period. The primary examples--John Piper and Virginia Woolf--were special subjects of earlier dissertations, according to her webpage: http://www.alexandraharris.co.uk/about.[10] She may not grasp details of literary works, but Harris’s conclusions seem sound. It is interesting to see Waugh’s artistic tastes discussed in the context of contemporary painters and other artists. Whether or not Waugh would feel comfortable with “Romantic Modernists” is another question, but he would probably consider himself in good company (with the possible exception of Henry Green).

Notes [1] Harris might have made more of modernism in Waugh’s early novels if she had not introduced his 1928 biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a forerunner of Romantic Modernists. Waugh had, according to Harris, written an “energetic and emphatic study,” noting Rossetti’s strengths and weaknesses as a painter, despite his having fallen entirely out of favor for the previous twenty years (88). Waugh refers to Roger Fry’s modernist principles, notes Rossetti’s shortcomings, and praises certain features of Rossetti’s works. Waugh flirted with modernism but never fully embraced it, so he never experienced a “conversion” to Romantic Modernism such as Harris discerns in Woolf and Piper. [2] Harris cites James Joyce’s postscript to Ulysses, “Trieste-Zurich-Paris,” as an attempt to validate his modernism through international travel (246). She might have cited Waugh’s postscripts as a similar attempt to validate his romantic preference for the English countryside, notwithstanding his extensive foreign travels. Waugh signed BR “Chagford, February-June, 1944” and Edmund Campion “Mells-Belton-Newton Ferrers, October 1934-May 1935.” [3] Waugh’s artistic tastes are analyzed in more detail in “Art Criticism and Brideshead Revisited” by Elyse Graham in EWS 42.2 (Autumn 2011). Graham does not, however, address Romantic Moderns. Graham is writing her dissertation on “The Artist as Critic: Vision as a Medium in the Modernist Novel” at Yale University. [4] See Dorothy Lygon, “Madresfield and Brideshead,” Evelyn Waugh and His World, ed. David Pryce-Jones, (Boston, 1973), 53-54. [5] Paula Byrne, Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (London, 2009), and Jane Mulvagh, Madresfield: The Real Brideshead (London, 2008). It is of course equally misleading to claim that Madresfield Court was the “real Brideshead.” [6] Duncan Fallowell, How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits (London, 2011), 180, 190. [7] Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust resembles the “gothick” exterior of Madresfield Court. Waugh commissioned a drawing for the frontispiece: the similarity between Hetton and Madresfield is unmistakable. [8] Harris extends consideration of BR to include Waugh’s reassessment of the novel in the 1960s (276). According to Harris, Waugh revised the text to remove purple passages and imagined a “fictional version” of BR written by the egregious Ludovic in Sword of Honour. Waugh places Ludovic with post-war English novelists who turned “drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of a recent past.” Ludovic’s novel The Death Wish bears little resemblance to BR, however. Harris correctly identifies The Death Wish as a parody of BR’s success, but it is incorrect to claim (as Harris appears to do) that Ludovic wrote a book about a family like the Flytes, an artist like Charles Ryder, and a house like Brideshead Castle. Her argument is confusing, and it does not support her thesis. [9] Powell’s novels are populated with painters, including Ralph Barnby (sometimes linked with Rex Whistler) and Horace Isbister RA (of an older generation) in A Dance to the Music of Time, and Mr. Zouch (another Whistler-like painter) in From a View to a Death. Writers and musicians are also common in Powell’s novels, and Harris could have used them as examples of her cultural movement. [10] The same publisher has recently released a short book by Harris introducing the life and works of Virginia Woolf.

The Deserted Post The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann. New York: Random House, 2009. Paperback: Vintage Departures, 2010. 400 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University.

Anyone interested in Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days or A Handful of Dust is likely to enjoy The Lost City of Z. The book retells the story of Lt. Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for a lost city in the Amazon in 1925. Fawcett probably influenced Tony Last’s South American quest in A Handful of Dust.

On the staff of the New Yorker, David Grann is a competent writer, if not an impressive stylist. He interrupts the main narrative with the story of his own attempt to follow in Fawcett’s footsteps, as if he were writing a screenplay. Grann believes that his writing has “one common thread: obsession” (32), and The Lost City conveys that condition to the reader. I found myself compelled to keep reading, as I hurried through one chapter and anticipated the next. Commentary on A Handful of Dust gave me the impression that Fawcett had been a fool. As Grann explains, Fawcett was instead a man of action: stern, uncompromising, driven, even fanatical, but also knowledgeable and experienced. By the time he vanished, Fawcett had made seven mostly successful expeditions into the Amazon, and these make Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days seem like a walk in the park. Fawcett once disarmed himself under a volley of poisoned arrows to befriend hostile natives. He probably would have dismissed Waugh as a “pink-eyed weakling.”

Fawcett entered the Amazon from Bolivia to the south, whereas Waugh entered from Guiana to the north. Fawcett hacked his way through jungle, often on foot, whereas Waugh mostly rode through savannah. Though he suffered from insects, Waugh avoided many horrors endured by Fawcett, such as maggots under the skin, and Waugh’s route helped him to survive while parties searching for Fawcett went into the jungle and disappeared.

Fawcett was not a Christian but a Theosophist, a devotee of spiritualism, and he regarded the lost city as a center of mystical power. At the same time, the early 1920s, Waugh was dabbling in the occult at Oxford. By the time he wrote Ninety-Two Days and A Handful of Dust, Waugh had converted to Roman Catholicism, and the novel makes fun of casual Anglicanism. Perhaps Tony Last’s deluded search for a city is also a veiled reference to Fawcett’s unorthodox beliefs.

Fawcett seems never to have found his lost city, and Tony concludes that “There is no City.” As Grann indicates, however, contemporary archaeology has uncovered extensive urban complexes in the Amazon, so Fawcett was on to something after all. After native contact with Europeans, the cities fell into disuse, and Waugh eventually felt drawn to “the wild lands where man had deserted his post and the jungle was creeping back to its old strongholds” (Brideshead Revisited). Grann includes a note on sources, thirty-seven pages of endnotes, and fourteen pages of bibliography, and The Lost City of Z invites reevaluation of Waugh’s imaginative response to the Amazon.

A Genial Practice Kiss Me, Chudleigh: The World According to Auberon Waugh, ed. William Cook. London: Coronet, 2010. 366 pp. £19.99. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

This book tells the story of Auberon Waugh’s life (or at least his professional life) through his journalism. The editor, William Cook, also provides an insightful introduction and posits that Auberon was a “savage, eccentric … philosopher” rather than a journalist. His writing “was underpinned by logic … and his attitudes informed by his libertarian convictions, which he followed with academic rigour, even when they led him to the most incongruous conclusions.” Cook is a journalist who has written on British humorists, including Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Morecambe and Wise.

The collection is roughly chronological, but it is also arranged by subjects. This sounds confusing, but it works fairly well, despite uncertainty about Auberon’s progression from one publication to another. Cook introduces each chapter, and he links and explicates some articles. The title, Kiss Me, Chudleigh, comes from Auberon’s military service in Cyprus, as recounted in his autobiography, when he was severely wounded while trying to free a machine gun. Awaiting medical treatment, he alluded to Lord Nelson’s dying words at Trafalgar in a remark to an NCO. Corporal Chudleigh had no recollection of Auberon’s remark, but Auberon claimed that Chudleigh treated him “with some caution thereafter.” Even if he made the story up, Auberon concluded, he told it so many times “that I honestly can’t remember if it started as a lie.”

Auberon failed his first-year exams at Oxford, and his father claimed that the only careers open to him were schoolmaster or spy. Auberon ignored this advice and began writing. At first, he wrote both fiction and journalism. Unfortunately, there is no room in this collection for analysis of the five novels he wrote between 1960 and 1972. A short plot summary of each would have been helpful. After stints at Queen (as a photo researcher), the Daily Telegraph (as a gossip columnist), the Catholic Herald (as a columnist) and the Daily Mirror (as a dogs body), Auberon moved on to regular columns for the Spectator and the New Statesman. He found his niche in a weekly diary for Private Eye from 1972 to 1985, an impressive tenure. The Private Eye diaries have been published, and Auberon considered the second volume (A Turbulent Decade: 1976- 1985) to be his “masterpiece.” Kiss Me, Chudleigh tries to avoid the problem of diary entries related to contemporary matters and lacking satiric bite. Missing from the selection is Auberon’s brilliant use of running jokes, which went on for years: his mock crusade against Cyril Connolly, his misspelling of Harold Wilson’s name (“Wislon”) and his references to Edward Heath (“the grocer”). This trait may run in the family: his father repeatedly hectored Cruttwell in early novels and often insisted that Marshal Tito was a woman.[1]

After Private Eye, Auberon became editor of the Literary Review and contributed a signed leader, “From the Pulpit,” in each issue. He also wrote the “Way of the World” column for the Daily Telegraph until shortly before his death. In addition, he found time to contribute to Richard Ingrams’s Oldie. Selections from all these publications are included in Kiss Me, Chudleigh. Auberon also wrote book reviews for Books and Bookmen, the Evening Standard, the Spectator and virtually every other London newspaper (with the possible exception of the Sunday Times, which he abhorred, or at least pretended to). Oddly, there has never been a collection of his book reviews, though Cook believes Auberon’s literary criticism is among his best work and “will survive long after most of the books he reviewed have been forgotten.” The reviews are also likely to outlast most of his political and social satire.[2] Auberon’s reviews are certainly on a par those with those of Clive James and A. N. Wilson; theirs have been collected and published.

Book reviews selected by Cook include those of early novels by Martin Amis and Malcolm Bradbury (both of whom Auberon boosted) as well as works of established writers P. G. Wodehouse (vastly underrated, according to Auberon) and Marcel Proust (vastly overrated). Auberon preferred John Betjeman’s poetry to the modernist variety, one of his favorite targets. Included is one of his most notorious reviews, of Anthony Powell’s second collection of reviews, Miscellaneous Verdicts. This savage attack on Powell’s writing and character was published in the Sunday Telegraph in 1990 when Powell was lead reviewer for the Daily Telegraph. Infuriated, Powell resigned and precipitated the sacking of the paper’s deputy literary editor, Nicholas Shakespeare, who had commissioned Auberon’s review. Auberon thought it all good fun. He tended to divide his father’s friends into “those who were prepared to take a friendly interest in [Evelyn] Waugh’s bright-eyed son—like Graham Greene, John Betjeman, Harold Acton, John Sutro, David Cecil, Ann Fleming, Christopher Sykes—and those who conspicuously weren’t, like Anthony Powell, Maurice Bowra and Cyril Connolly” (Will This Do? 222-23). Auberon’s earlier reviews of Powell’s novels in A Dance to the Music of Time offered thoughtful criticism and favorable (if grudging) assessment. (See “Powell’s Last Caper,” review of Hearing Secret Harmonies, Evening Standard, 9 September 1975.) It is unfortunate that there was no room for one or more reviews of Powell’s works, or at least brief mention of their conclusions, to show that Auberon was able to separate literary judgment from personal vendettas. Just what set him against Powell (as well as Bowra and Connolly) I have never seen in print.[3] The first group exerted themselves to advance Auberon’s career while Powell and others did not. Auberon recalls favorable reviews of his first novel by Betjeman and Greene but nothing by Powell or Connolly, who were both reviewing fiction at the time.[4]

While Auberon gathered most reminiscences of his father in his 1991 autobiography, Kiss Me, Chudleigh contains prime material, such as the review of his father’s obituaries for the Spectator: “Death in the Family,” 6 May 1966. He challenges many who charged his father with snobbery: “The main point about my father … is simply that he was the funniest man of his generation. He scarcely opened his mouth but to say something extremely funny. His house and life revolved around jokes. It was his wit—coupled, of course, with supreme accuracy of expression, kindness, loyalty, bravery and intelligence—which endeared him to everyone who knew him or loved his books.” This article appears in the chapter entitled “HP Sauce,” which mainly deals with politics. According to Cook, the article so impressed Nigel Lawson, then editor of the Spectator, that he offered Auberon a regular position that led to his becoming political correspondent.

A chapter entitled “Waviana” contains a few more comments on his father from Books and Bookmen and the Literary Review, where he sometimes reviewed books about Evelyn.[5] As summarized by Cook, these excerpts provide “on the whole, the picture … of a reserved but loving man—remote and rather diffident yet mindful of his parental duties, and a supportive advocate of his son’s career.” In an article for Folio (Summer 1982), Auberon describes the foreign correspondents in Scoop as realistic, based on his own experiences. He disagrees with Christopher Sykes, who thought that Evelyn loathed the correspondents, and concludes that “The book would not be nearly so funny if there were real hatred of the characters behind it, rather than a robust enjoyment of their absurdity.”

A brief article from the Daily Telegraph describes Auberon’s role in the 1993 unveiling of a blue plaque on his father’s boyhood home on North End Road. He spoke to a “kind lady” who explained that the house’s address “used to be in Hampstead, and was officiously moved to Golders Green after the Waughs had left.” His father was supposed to climb the hill to Hampstead to secure an NW3 postmark and avoid the dreaded NW11 for Golders Green. I am not sure that the kind lady remembered correctly.[6] Auberon hoped that the plaque would “act as a beacon of hope to the people of [Golders Green], assuring them that with honest effort and application they too can end their days in a West Country manor house.” This chapter also contains articles on the deaths of his uncles, Auberon Herbert and Alec Waugh, and his sister Margaret.

Kiss Me, Chudleigh succeeds in telling the story of Auberon Waugh’s professional life. It leaves the reader wanting more, especially literary reviews and essays. In a concluding chapter (“The Last Word”), Cook allows Auberon to provide his own ending: “I have always maintained that the practice of journalism—and especially gossip journalism—is a genial one, adding to the gaiety of the nation rather than subtracting from it…. Journalists, in my experience, are generally easy-going, unpompous people whose chief concern is to unravel good stories from the tangled skein of everyday monotony and pass them on.” Auberon Waugh’s journalism certainly exemplifies these standards.

The book is well produced and printed on high-quality paper in an attractive type. A matrix would have helped to plot Auberon’s tenure at various publications as positions followed one another and sometimes overlapped. More care might have been taken to distinguish text by Auberon from narratives and links by Cook. A book of this nature should have warranted an index.

Notes [1] Auberon extended his father’s running jokes about Cruttwell and Tito in his Private Eye diaries. See 23 April and 9 May 1980 (Tito) and 1 July 1980 (Cruttwell). [2] Previous collections include political, social, and country articles from the Spectator (Brideshead Benighted, 1987, published in the UK as Another Voice, 1986), Daily Telegraph (Way of the World, several volumes, 1994-2001), and New Statesman (In the Lion’s Den: 50 Essays, 1978, as well as Country Topics, 1975). [3] In his biography of Powell, Michael Barber makes a few guesses but concludes that one might as well ask what song the sirens sang (298). [4] One chapter (“Other People”) contains interesting assessments of literary figures such as Graham Greene, Philip Dossé (publisher and editor of Books and Bookmen), Kenneth Tynan, John Betjeman, William Rushton, and Michael Wharton. [5] This chapter contains Auberon’s discussion of any advantage he enjoyed in journalism as the son of a famous author. Not much, he concludes, unless “you are someone who enjoys showing off, then you profit from it.” Cook’s citation in the notes reads, cryptically, “Bottom of Form” with no further information. [6] In his autobiography, Evelyn Waugh says that the postal address was Hampstead when the family moved to North End Road, but shortly after the Great War it changed to Golders Green. Both he and his father deplored the change but for different reasons, the father’s historical and the son’s social (A Little Learning, chapter 2, part 2). Evelyn Waugh’s use of the NW11 postal code (for Golders Green) in letters from 145 North End Road from 1924 to 1931 suggest, however, that stories about climbing the hill to post them in NW3 (Hampstead) are exaggerated.

Very Rarely Given Acts of Attention: Figure and Narrative in Postwar British Novels, by Tamás Bényei. Debrecener Studien zur Literature, Vol. 6. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999. 232 pp. $69.95. Reviewed by Patrick Query, U.S. Military Academy

Tamás Bényei, of the Department of English Literature at Kossuth University, Hungary, provides a collection of intelligent essays—“not built upon one coherent thesis,” according to the author—on novels by Evelyn Waugh, John Fowles, William Golding, Jeanette Winterson, and Ian McEwan. Bényei’s stated objective is “to turn to postwar English novels with the kind of sustained attention that, I think, they are very rarely given.” The first chapter explores the theme of nostalgia in Brideshead Revisited.

Desert Island Books My Life in Books, BBC2 TV. 21 February-4 March 2011. (10 episodes, 30 minutes each). Produced by Zoë Tait for BBC Scotland and presented by Anne Robinson. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC transmitted a series of programs devoted to books in the two-week run-up to World Book Night, 5 March 2011. This event promoted interest in books by giving away one million copies of twenty-five titles, mostly recent bestsellers. No book by Evelyn Waugh was included in the distribution list.

My Life in Books was part of this effort. It was presented by Anne Robinson, better known as quiz-mistress in the long-running The Weakest Link, also on BBC2. In each episode, two panelists choose five books that have been important in their lives. One is supposed to come from childhood; another is a book to read at the beach, or a “guilty pleasure”; at the end each panelist picks a favorite from those selected. The program ends up being “Desert Island Books” meets Oprah Winfrey or, in the U.K., Richard and Judy.

Most panelists seem to be TV actors. The most interesting panelists were, however, writers: novelists P. D. James, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Harris; art historian Sister Wendy Beckett; politician and author Alastair Campbell; and memoirist Deborah Devonshire. In the first episode, P. D. James (writer of detective fiction) selected A Handful of Dust. She was most impressed by Waugh's use of dialogue, as in the scene where Tony Last explains why his son should not have called Nanny a tart. She read that scene from her copy of the book, a well-thumbed 1970s Penguin edition on its way to disintegration. James also said that she admired Waugh’s ability vigorously to revise his writing until he got it right, a practice she follows, though not to the point of revising books already published, as Waugh did in some cases. When asked whether she had ever met Waugh, James (who is 91) said that she was thankful she had not: she thought him a difficult person. She also chose Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love as her “guilty pleasure,” and said that she kept the book by her bedside to read when awakened by a bad dream. She chose another satire, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as her favorite book and said she had first read it as a child.

In the sixth episode, the panelists were TV presenter Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and art historian Sister Wendy Beckett, who is also a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. Sister Wendy has written several books on art history and religion and has presented several TV series on art. Llewelyn-Bowen, who specializes in presenting programs on style and design, chose Brideshead Revisited. He read it when he was sixteen, before it was popularized by the Granada TV series. Unfortunately, he wasn’t given much of a chance to explain his choice. After showing a clip from the Granada series, Anne Robinson shifted the questions to Sister Wendy. She asked whether Waugh was a writer whom Sister Wendy, a Roman Catholic, admired and whether he was a convert to Catholicism. Sister Wendy answered simply: “Yes.” When asked to explain, she said that Waugh had been a convert, but she wished to withhold comment about his writing. When pressed, she said she considers him one of the wittiest and funniest writers she has read and believes that he deserves his reputation as a writer. She is, however, unable to share his “romantic” views. Sister Wendy described Waugh as “an enthusiastic Catholic of the old school” and felt he had trivialized religion in BR. Llewelyn-Bowen also felt that Waugh had made religion into rather a “style statement” in the novel, but if he ever explained why he liked Brideshead, that bit was cut from the final version.

In the eighth episode, the panelists were Deborah Devonshire (Dowager Duchess whose memoirs were recently published) and Elizabeth McGovern (U.S.-born actress who recently played Lady Cora in the ITV/PBS series Downton Abbey). After each had presented five books (none written by Waugh), Deborah said she had a surprise. She held up a copy of Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox which he had sent to her. This one was bound in an unprepossessing greenish cover with no dust jacket, but one could see the title embossed on the spine. A friend had shown her the inscription: “To Darling Debo, etc. You will not find a word in this to offend your protestant sympathies.” She found that all the pages were blank but considered it a nice gesture, probably because Waugh had spared her from having to read it. At that time, 1959, she was not considered much of a reader and had written nothing for publication. Her selections suggest that she prefers fare lighter than most of Waugh’s writings, though she claims to have read an English translation of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time in childhood. Other choices included a 1902 poem about the death of a race horse (“Rio Grande’s Last Race”), a memoir written from the point of view of a three-year-old girl (A Late Beginner by Priscilla Napier, named her favorite book), Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, and Struwwelpeter (a German children’s book).

In the fifth episode, British TV actress Rebecca Front chose The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, a book Waugh would probably have selected. In the final episode, novelist Robert Harris selected three books of interest to Waugh fans: Orwell’s 1984 (perhaps the most “important” novel ever written, according to Harris; it inspired Waugh to write his version of the near future in Love Among the Ruins); Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (Harris considers it Greene’s best book, but both he and the moderator think the religious themes implausible; Waugh wrote a favorable review and congratulated Greene on a “fresh achievement”); and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (which makes Harris laugh after multiple re- readings). Waugh in letters professed not to like Amis (“not a worthy man”). When Harris appeared on Desert Island Discs last November, he selected Waugh’s Scoop as the book he would take, but he did not mention it in this program.

Waugh was one of only three writers who had two books selected in the series—others were Jane Austen and U.S.-born novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. Waugh was also cited for his gift of a blank book. None of Waugh’s books was distributed on World Book Night, but BBC2 presented Brideshead Revisited, the 2008 film. BBC Films is one of the producers, and World Book Night seems to have been the U.K. premiere on broadcast TV.

NEWS

Commandos on BBC BBC2 produced a new program, Castle Commando, about training at Achnacarry in Scotland during the Second World War. The hour-long program was first broadcast on 31 January 2012. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh are quoted as evidence of early confusion and tough training.

Rereading Sword of Honour In “Rereading: authors reveal their literary addictions,” published in The Observer on 7 April 2012, novelist Hilary Mantel wrote that she had reread Sword of Honour in hospital in 2010. She realized that “the first book in particular, Men at Arms, offers a master class in structure. The three novels were much, much funnier than I remember from when I read them at 17,” and the trilogy “glowed like something living amid the grey beeping machines.”

New Evelyn Waugh Web Site A new web site is entitled Evelyn! Duncan McLaren’s Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love. Based on a manuscript, the site combines text with numerous stills from The Scarlet Woman, Evelyn Waugh’s undergraduate film.

Cited in the Journal Evelyn Waugh was quoted in a column by Terry Teachout, “When Criticism is No Laughing Matter,” published in the Wall Street Journal for 13 April 2012. Commenting on the death of art critic Hilton Kramer, Teachout quoted Waugh’s 1937 review, “Art from Anarchy,” published in Night and Day. Reacting to Arthur Calder-Marshall’s A Date with a Duchess, Waugh notes the difficulty of praising a work of art. See Essays, Articles and Reviews, 204.

Essay in Renascence “Human Tragedy, Divine Comedy: The Painfulness of Conversion in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited,” an essay by RoseMary C. Johnson, appeared in Renascence 64.2 (Winter 2012): 161-75.

Evelyn Waugh and Responsibility In the New Republic for 20 April 2012, John Gray refers to Evelyn Waugh and “individual moral responsibility” in his review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Evelyn Waugh Society The Evelyn Waugh Society has 132 members. To join, please visit http://evelynwaughsociety.org. The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List has 77 members. To join, please visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh. The Evelyn Waugh Society is also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/evelynwaughsoc. The Waugh Society is providing RSS feed: http://evelynwaughsociety.org/feed. And the Waugh Society’s web site has added opportunities for threaded discussions: http://evelynwaughsociety.org/forums/.

Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest Robert Sherron of the University of Dallas won the Seventh Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest. Robert is a junior with double majors in English and Theology and a concentration in Applied Physics. A version of Robert’s essay, “Guy’s Qualitative Journey towards True Vocation in Sword of Honour,” will appear in a future issue of Evelyn Waugh Studies.

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

Canonized In the film Damsels in Distress (2011), Evelyn Waugh’s name appears on the blackboard in a college English class, and the professor refers to Waugh and other twentieth-century writers.

Waugh Scholar and Novelist Patrick Denman Flanery, who has written several essays on Evelyn Waugh, has recently published a novel entitled Absolution. In the New Yorker for 30 April 2012, Philip Gourevitch wrote that “Patrick Flanery is an exceptionally gifted and intelligent novelist.”

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