EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 43, No. 2 Autumn 2012

Captain Evelyn Waugh and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) by Donat Gallagher James Cook University

“There was something in him . . . of the sort of subaltern who was disliked in his regiment and got himself posted to S.O.E.”[1]

Early in the Second War the British Government set up a highly secret Special Operations Executive (SOE). Its many tasks included sabotage, espionage, and aiding resistance movements in nations occupied by the Axis; in Winston Churchill’s words, its mission was “to set Europe ablaze.” It had many auxiliary units, one of which might interest United States readers while suggesting the flavour of the organization. This was British Security Coordination (BSC) in the Rockefeller Center in New York, whose history (unlike that of most other such units) survived shredding through the enterprise of some of its members. Led by a Canadian tycoon, William Stephenson, its brief from Churchill was to “do all that was not being done and could not be done by overt means” to “drag America into the war.” Before Pearl Harbour, BSC sabotaged United States firms dealing with Germany and undermined isolationist groups like America First and the pro-Nazi Bund. This they did by blackmail and assassination and by running a “rumour mill” against opponents of the war with information obtained from wire taps and burgled safes. They also bought a news agency to plant untrue stories in obscure papers; friendly columnists like Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson then picked them up. BSC faked incidents to influence American public opinion, the most famous being the forging and planting of a “secret Nazi map” and the “Belmonte letter.” The “secret map” showed South America divided into five Nazi states, one of which included the Panama Canal, while the “Belmonte letter” outlined a Nazi plot to overthrow the Bolivian Government. When the letter and map were “discovered,” President Roosevelt furiously denounced them as proof of German designs on the United States, probably knowing them to be forgeries.[2]

In short, SOE (a.k.a. the “Baker Street Irregulars” and the "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare") was a clandestine organization. It was also intensely political, mirroring the differences that split most Resistance Movements. At one extreme were Communists, who tried to use the war to create a socialist society after the conflict; at the other were those who merely wished to defeat Germany. The SOE section located in Cairo (MO4) with responsibility for Yugoslavia contained a very strong Communist element, which cruelly sabotaged the trickle of help being given to General Mihailovic’s Chetniks. After waiting for nights in bitter cold and deadly peril, the Chetniks might receive a parachute drop of nothing but toilet paper, or bales of Italian-Occupied-Ethiopia paper money. SOE did most to install Marshall Tito’s Communist Partisans as the sole Yugoslav resistance movement recognized by the Allies, the situation that obtained when Waugh arrived in Yugoslavia in July 1944 and to which he was so strongly opposed.

But SOE also ran prosaic facilities, such as parachute-training centres. And it was in one of these secret centres that our hero, Captain Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh, first came into contact with SOE. Later, when Waugh was ordered to serve in Yugoslavia, he was mistakenly posted to SOE and remained incongruously on their books for five months, although, when the error was rectified, the correction was backdated.

To understand why Waugh came to be on a parachute course under SOE auspices, it is necessary to return to July 1943. At the beginning of that month, Captain Waugh of the Royal Horse Guards was an Intelligence Officer (GSO3) within the Headquarters Unit of the Special Service Brigade. But since early April he had been appointed the Brigade’s Liaison Officer to Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ). Now, at the beginning of July, he was booked on “D. + 42 Convoy” leaving in early August to join his Commanding Officer, Brigadier Robert (Bob) Laycock in “Operation Husky,” the Allied invasion of Sicily. Waugh had his Brigadier’s explicit orders to remain at his post in COHQ until he sailed. But by 17 July, at the unscrupulous instigation of Laycock’s Deputy, Lt Colonel Lord “Shimi” Lovat, who was determined that Waugh would not be posted to Italy, and through the agency of General Charles Haydon, Vice- Chief of Combined Operations, Waugh had been dismissed from COHQ and forced to resign from the Special Service Brigade.[3]

(As an aside, I have spelled out Waugh’s status in the Headquarters Unit of the Special Service Brigade and his posting to COHQ because Christopher Sykes is so shockingly misleading about the subject. He writes: “By the end of 1941 No. 8 Commando were back in England and their Battalion Headquarters were in Sherborne in Dorset. There Evelyn remained with them…. In July 1943 Colonel Laycock was ordered to take No. 8 Commando to Italy.”[4] This, despite the fact that No. 8 Commando had been disbanded in 1941, and despite the fact that Waugh’s career at this point is unintelligible without knowing the unit in which he was serving and his attachment to COHQ. The moral is that Sykes is reliable only when he writes memoir about incidents in which he personally participated, and even then he can stray. When a subject needs enquiry, he writes from vague memory, often stating nonsense as fact.)

After his forced resignation from the Special Service Brigade, a deeply despondent Waugh retired to the training establishment of the Royal Horse Guards at Windsor to await other employment (Diaries 547-48). As Humphrey Carpenter eloquently puts it, he was “immeasurably hurt … the Army’s rejection of him was a blow comparable to his [first] wife’s unfaithfulness.”[5] But Waugh was determined to justify himself and he found precarious—and severely interrupted—employment from 25 September 1943 to 8 July 1944 with Lt Colonel William (Bill) Stirling, then trying, against powerful opposition, to create the 2 Special Air Service Regiment (2 SAS). When it seemed that Stirling might succeed, Waugh hoped to “make good” as a soldier and confound General Haydon: Bill has fixed luncheon with the Prime Minister to discuss the future of SAS. I hope to get appointed G2 [i.e., Major; he was G3, Captain], though, war weary, I dread the prospect of organization and training and a hundred new acquaintances. But after my treatment by Haydon I must ‘make good’ as a soldier. Nothing can upset him more than to find me promoted as a result of his intemperance. (Diaries 551). Lt Colonel Stirling, while admirably brave and visionary, was no administrator. Waugh’s “employment” remained informal until 25 October, when he “was able to drag [Stirling] to adjutant-general’s office and fix my posting” (Diaries 553). We next hear of Waugh on the point of sailing to North Africa to join Stirling and the 2 SAS troops already there. Waugh is having “difficulty [on account of something held up in an office] with the draft I was to take to North Africa”; but he “straightens out” the difficulty and “gets the party sent on leave” (Diaries 555). On 8 November1943 the “draft” was on the point of departure for North Africa. Laura had come to “see off” Evelyn. But the following day produced a shock reversal: “came a cable from Allied Force HQ [in the Middle East] cancelling our journey,” presumably because the war was moving on from the Mediterranean to Europe, and because parts of the Army were hostile to the SAS (Field Marshal Montgomery’s attack on Bill’s brother, David Stirling, founder of the original SAS, has passed into legend). And here the plot thickens. Waugh’s thwarted draft was first ordered “to await Bill’s return.” But four days later, “on 13 November, came a further order sending us back to our units.” The orders to return to their units, however, conflicted with orders left by Bill Stirling. Waugh writes: “we have no one in this country responsible for us and SAS is in process of absorption by Airborne Corps with, I think, the elimination of Bill [Stirling]. Randolph [Churchill] has flown away and I have no status from which to negotiate. Bill’s signal required preparations to be made for return of SAS, but no one acts.” The draft, with one exception, did not go back to their units. And while they were in Army Limbo, Waugh, “with Phil’s [Philip Dunne’s] help … was able to arrange a parachute course at the secret house near Ringway kept by SO(E).” The words “was able to arrange” cover many mysteries. Gaining access to SOE parachute training without the written orders of the Commanding Officer of 2 SAS—who had left only verbal instructions about mounting such a course with Christopher Sykes before departing for North Africa—was a difficult task. Waugh acknowledges the help of Captain Philip Dunne MC, a former Member of Parliament and of leading regiments, with influence far beyond that of a normal Captain. Oddly, Christopher Sykes also claims credit for organizing the course, citing a signature he obtained from Major-General Bob Laycock, now Chief of Combined Operations; he also claims to have tamed a Staff Officer who had screamed abuse on separate occasions at both Waugh and Sykes and ordered them back to their regiments (316–17). The truth seems to be that Waugh and Sykes each contributed to setting up the parachute course. Their accounts are certainly complementary. For example, Waugh says that the course was arranged for Ringway, close to Manchester, the base for No.1 Parachute Training School RAF. Sykes says that the course took place at Tatton Park. Both were right because Tatton Park was part of the Ringway training complex. The parachute course took place in late November, the trainees having previously passed the “medical exam” (Diaries 555-56). Perhaps because influenza prevented him from attending some early training sessions, Waugh’s second jump, on 26 November 1943, ended with a “vertical fissure fracture” below the left knee. The routine Court of Inquiry into the accident held on 20 December 1943 (which certified Waugh’s “physical fitness”) decided that neither he nor anyone else was to blame for the injury as it was caused by a “slight oscillation” in the parachute before landing. His instructor wrote: “Captain Waugh … proved satisfactory on his ground training and … competent to make parachute descents.”[6] Following convalescence, Waugh found no useful employment. His fellow trainees had completed their parachute courses and gone off to interesting jobs with 2 SAS. “In a vicious spiral of lassitude and boredom” (Diaries 557), on that fateful day 24 January 1944, Waugh applied to the Royal Horse Guards for three months’ leave to write Brideshead Revisited. This request was at first emphatically and repeatedly turned down, then reluctantly agreed to, with conditions;[7] then, as the Diaries relate, it was interrupted at various points; and finally it was extended by Lt Colonel Stirling, Commanding Officer of 2 SAS, and by his successor, Major Brian Franks. The novel was completed on 16 June 1944 and Waugh returned to service with 2 SAS at Ardchullery in Scotland on 22 June (Diaries 557-68). But only six days later, on 28 June, in circumstances related by Christopher Sykes (330-31), Randolph Churchill noisily and urgently applied for Waugh to join him in his mission to Yugoslavia. British assistance to Marshall Tito’s Partisans was complex and controversial. In the briefest of oversimplifications, early in the war SOE Cairo (among other tasks) provided limited support for Yugoslav resistance. Then Winston Churchill commissioned Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, a former diplomat and member of SAS, to take the support to a much higher level. By mid-1944, when Waugh arrived in Italy, Maclean had effectively supplanted SOE and, with his own direct links to the Commander in Chief Mediterranean and to the Minister of State (representing the Foreign Office), had brought the Yugoslav resistance within mainstream Army and Foreign Office structures. By July 1944, the overriding organization for supporting resistance in Yugoslavia was the Balkans Air Force (unusual as it was for the RAF to take the lead role in an operation). Under BAF came two organizations. One was a part of SOE, with only a supply function. The other was Brigadier Maclean’s 37 Military Mission (a.k.a. MacMis, Maclean Mission, etc.), which had acquired effective control over all aspects of the Allied- Yugoslav relationship: policy, strategy and military liaison. It had under its command many subordinate missions in the field, such as that at Topusco, to which Randolph Churchill, with Waugh on his staff, was heading. The suddenness of Randolph Churchill’s request for Waugh on 28 June created confusion about his posting. A “Loose Minute” of 29 June from the War Office to SOE (London) under its cover name “MO I (S.P.),” requires “urgent action” to issue orders to “T/y Capt. A. E. St J. Waugh, R.H.G. (attd 2 S. A. S. Regt.)” to report to Major Randolph Churchill at the Dorchester Hotel, who would arrange air transport “in the near future.” Addressing this Minute to SOE (London) was a mistake; it should have been directed to the Army, to which Maclean’s 37 Military Mission belonged, and of which Churchill was a part. But having received the Minute, SOE posted Waugh to a body called “ME 66 CMF.” (“CMF” means “Central Mediterranean Forces,” but I am unable to trace “ME 66”; I can only assume that it was an SOE umbrella body in the Middle East.)[8] Churchill and Waugh left England on 4 July 1944, and, after business in Algiers, Italy and the island of Vis, attempted to “infiltrate” Croatia from Bari on 16 July 1944. The plane crashed on landing, but Waugh and Churchill, burned and injured, survived and went into 98 General Hospital on 19 July. On 20 July, perhaps alerted by anomalies encountered while admitting Waugh to hospital, doubts arose about Waugh’s posting. SOE at Bari (“FORCE 399 C.M. F.”) wrote to their higher formation, SPECIAL OPERATIONS (MEDITERRANEAN), or “SO (M)”: “The position of [Capt. A. E. WAUGH, Royal Horse Gds] appears to be vague as, from the Minute [quoted above], it is not clear to whom it is intended he should be posted. Captain WAUGH is at present in 98 General Hospital recovering from his attempt to infiltrate.” With less than lightning speed, the “vagueness” of Waugh’s posting began to be clarified on 23 December 1944. “SO (M)” wrote to “Rear H.Q. 37 Military Mission”: 1. [Lt (T/Capt) A. E. WAUGH (97833) R.H.G.] was recruited in London for operational employment with the mission under your command [37 Military Mission]. … 3. It is proposed to ask Allied Forces Headquarters [AFHQ] to post this officer from M.E. 66 to the unit under your command [with effect from] 11 Aug. 44 to regularize his present position. A series of letters followed between 37 Military Mission agreeing to SO (M) proposals, between SO (M) requesting AFHQ to regularize each of Waugh’s postings—from 2 SAS to ME 66 and from ME 66 to 37 Military Mission—and to backdate the corrections. AFHQ confirmed on 6 January 1945 that the posting had been made as requested. The upshot of the correspondence was that Waugh, who had been wrongly posted from 2 SAS to “M.E. 66,” was now correctly posted to 37 Military Mission with effect from 11 August 1944. Two more notations, the last in 31 January 1946 long after the war ended, cannot be taken seriously. In any case, they have no bearing on the actual outcome. Waugh’s SOE “Record of Service” consists mainly of blank pages and sets out only the barest details about their new recruit. One entry is ludicrous: Waugh’s “Civilian Occupation” is given as “Officer R.H.G. [Royal Horse Guards].” But the “Chronological Record of Service with S.O.E.” accurately sums up Waugh’s backdated postings: (1) “8 Jul. 44. Posted from U.K. (2 S.A.S. Regt, Airborne Forces, Scottish Command) to ME 66 CMF.” (2) “11 Aug. 44. Posted from ME 66 CMF to 37 Military Mission.” (3) “11. 9. 44 – 21. 7. 45; 37 M[ilitary] M[ission] Infiltrated Croatia on operation ‘FUNGUS.’” (This 11 September infiltration was very smooth, unlike the crash landing on 16 July.) On the backdated figures, the only time Waugh spent in SOE was from 8 July 1944 to 11 August 1944. But Waugh’s actual posting to SOE stretched from 8 July 1944 to the end of December 1944. I wonder whether Waugh knew anything about the curious paper trail his Yugoslavia adventure had engendered. Perhaps he did. After his crash landing on first entering Croatia, Waugh, back in Italy injured and with all of his gear lost, notes: “Force 399 [i.e. SOE] absolutely useless in giving us any help; Air Force excellent; Foreign Office (Philip Broad) excellent” (Diaries 575). Was SOE’s refusal to help Waugh owing to its belated discovery that, despite his formal posting, he was not really one of its bodies? Notes [1] Evelyn Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece, 1957, in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Tactical Exercise, Love Among the Ruins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 67. [2] The most accessible book on this subject is Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (2008). The focus of Conant’s story is Roald Dahl—now best known as a children’s writer but then a handsome, invalided fighter pilot appointed “Air Attaché” in Washington, his hectic social life being a cover for spying. Through Dahl, Conant presents a fairly full picture of British covert activity in the USA 1940-45. The bibliography of this covert activity is complex. William Stevenson’s (not to be confused with master mind William Stephenson) A Man Called Intrepid is exciting but incomplete. An “official history” was surreptitiously written based on documents that had been ordered to be destroyed. It was a closely guarded secret until 1998: British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-45 (London: St Ermin’s Press). Those with a taste for fiction based on real events will enjoy William Boyd’s gripping novel, Restless (2006), which brings alive the “huge extent and the minutiae” of British activities in the USA 1939-1942. To place all of this in context I recommend two works by a first-rate scholar, David Stafford: Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (1999), and Camp X (1987). Camp X, in Canada, trained agents, such as Ian Fleming, for work in the USA. [3] The substance of Waugh’s career from April to July 1943 is told in Evelyn Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), 534-45, although Waugh’s jottings often make sense only when read in conjunction with the documentary record. [4] Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Collins, 1975), 331-32. Rev. Ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 276. This revised edition contains significant new material. [5] Humphrey Carpenter, The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 35. [6] See “Report on Injuries Other than Wounds Received in Action,” 20 Dec. 1943, and “Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry Investigating the Circumstances in which Captain Waugh sustained injuries at Tatton Park on 26 Nov. 1943,” 20 Dec. 1943. These documents are lodged in Waugh’s personal Army file. [7] Correspondence between Waugh and the Royal Horse Guards, and between several senior officers considering the request, is contained in Waugh’s personal Army file. I am grateful to Alexander Waugh for making it available to me. [8] This Minute, the “S.O.E. RECORD OF SERVICE: Capt A. E. WAUGH, R.H.G.” and the associated correspondence from the National Archives (Kew) were kindly supplied to me by Alexander Waugh and Peter Dewey.

Guy's Qualitative Journey towards True Vocation in Sword of Honour by Robert Sherron

Guy Crouchback undergoes two journeys throughout the Sword of Honour trilogy. The first is his disillusionment with both his country and his martial career. The second is the healing of the relationship with his ex-wife. To talk of one journey in isolation, however, would be incomplete; they are intrinsically linked, as to a devout Catholic like Evelyn Waugh or Guy Crouchback, these would be merely aspects of a larger, more complex vocational journey, from vocation frustrated to vocation fulfilled. It is a journey intimately connected with a sacramental view of vocation, with Guy Crouchback's historical place in England, and with the vocations of his father and ex-wife.

It is first necessary briefly to define the Catholic conception of sacrament and vocation. A simple definition of sacrament may be found in the Catechism: “the sacraments are perceptible signs ... [that] make present efficaciously the grace that they signify” (1084). Vocations themselves are sacramental in nature: they are perceptible roles in this world that are in some way connected to the grace they indicate. Thus the church administers matrimony as a sacrament. Also important for a trilogy concerned with the relationship between public and private life, the sacrament of marriage is communal in nature; the covenantal ceremony is most appropriately held in the subjects' community. Guy's marriage is more than human union; it is even more than a permanent union that, Virginia believes, the priests prevent him from absolving; it is intimately connected with divine, eternal grace, with Guy's final end. Typically, when speaking of vocation in the Catholic sense, one refers merely to the vocational sacraments. However, this connection to the final end, for Waugh, means that the idea of sacramental vocation transcends the divide between laymen and religious; vocation, especially in its communal aspect, includes the way one lives one's life, as soldier, aristocrat, author, etc., while still founded in the sacramental sign theology. It is “the divine call to a specific work in life ... to that singular something that would ... provide the means of sanctification” (Weigel xii-xiii). Waugh himself wrote that vocation is a calling that “only we can do and for which we were created” (“St. Helena Empress” 184). The novel begins with the tale of Guy's grandparents' honeymoon, how the “sad gap” of their unconsummated marriage was, finally, “joyfully completed” (Waugh, SoH 7). Castello Crouchback owes its name to this vocational consummation. It might appear strange that Guy's inhabiting this place is such a negative; after suffering divorce, his tenure has been “eight years of shame and loneliness” (10). Waugh was almost obsessed in his work with architectural parallels, and one might expect such a place to heal rather than isolate. Rather, Guy's exile reveals how twisted his own conceptions of vocation are, as perhaps they have always been. By fleeing alone, a bachelor, to the familial honeymoon-resort, he literally attempts to live within a symbol of marital vocation. Without the actual sacrament, however, it is an empty sign--there is no grace at Castello Crouchback. There are hints that this twisted conception existed even before he was cuckolded. Though Guy did honeymoon at the Castello, as did his parents and grandparents, he abandoned the traditional family estate at Broome for an adventure in Kenya, thus forsaking the communal aspect of marriage and his dynastic duties.

Forsaking the Castello should be a step forward in Guy's vocational journey, but instead it is a step towards greater confusion. Guy compares his leaving Italy to Gervase and Hermione's arrival: “for him, as for them, frustrated love had found its first satisfaction. He was ... already back to his own country to serve his King” (9). Guy has replaced his wife with the Army, as his relationship with the military is compared to marriage throughout the trilogy. Before Guy can hope to achieve vocational renewal, he must realize how unfitting it is to replace his higher calling, so most of the trilogy concerns growing disillusionment with his new spouse. By the end of the second book, after experiencing the worst incompetence the army can achieve, Guy realizes how poor a choice he has made. This realization is enough to begin his proper journey, but it does not yet go quite far enough; Guy cannot complete his journey until he realizes that his problems lay not only with the incompetence of the army, but also with chasing after the army in the first place. At the climax of the trilogy, in an observation by the soon-to-be executed Mme. Kanyi, Guy is chastised for the malevolent ignorance of his choice, with death, rather than life, as its object: “It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy” (702). Guy's response is the proper one, as he rejects this death-vocation before returning to England to realize true vocation: “God forgive me” (702).

The first major step forward in his proper journey is achieved through the intercession of his father. Guy, now open to exterior grace, reads what becomes the focus of his thought over the course of the last novel: “Quantitative judgements don't apply. If only one soul was saved that is full compensation for any amount of loss of 'face'” (491). This mantra pertains only to final redemption, and “Guy's only interest is in salvation” (Wilson 330), but even that ultimate goal is insufficient. Guy does not live a faith of dualism; the Catholic Church emphasizes virtuous life rather than just a redeemed life: Guy is called not just to salvation in the next world, but also to excellence in this one. The drive to live a life founded on qualitative rather than quantitative judgments becomes intimately connected with Guy's vocation. When directed into marital vocation, it results in success, as he saves the life of little Trimmer. When directed into a martial career, the results are mixed, as no matter what success he achieves in the Jewish cause, he still finds Mme. Kanyi and her husband executed, leaving Guy and his efforts frustrated.

The vocations of Mr. Crouchback and Virginia shed further light on Guy's. Mr. Crouchback is unique in that he seems to be the only exemplum of true holiness, a man who leads a truly good life, in Waugh's fictional canon. His example undermines critics who argue that the struggle in Sword of Honour is merely to hide from the world, since traditional Christian values are “unwanted remnants of a supplanted and discredited system that has lost any claim to cultural legitimacy” (MacLeod 68). Mr. Crouchback's values may indeed be supplanted, but the idea that they are discredited is merely a post-colonialist presumption. He and Guy both retreat from public life; Mr. Crouchback lives in a hotel since he can no longer engage in the “elaborate regime” of aristocratic local government (546). Guy himself does not “ever [come] to London” (709). These retreats from public affairs, however, are in no way akin to Guy’s Italian exile; Guy's former retreat is one of shame and vanity. His later withdrawal is instead like Mr. Crouchback's, who, removed from the public sphere, still serves whatever function he can: squire, patron, schoolteacher, and father. The later Guy and Mr. Crouchback both do their duty. They simply do it in private. Only when he models himself on his father’s principles does Guy, like his father, achieve great good in private and domestic life: “It was to that image he [Guy] had prayed that morning” (546), the man at Matchet, and through that image Guy progresses spiritually. Removal from society has produced sanctity in previous Crouchback generations; Blessed Gervase was himself a recusant Catholic. The present-day Gervase Crouchback, as Guy finds out after his death, continued in private to maintain his vocational responsibilities to Broome; he continued payments to both individuals and institutions, and his leasing of the large house enabled him to maintain for his progeny a Crouchback estate of some kind (544). Mr. Crouchback virtuously answered the call to his vocation as squire, father, and husband, as his actions support both dependents and his son even beyond the grave.

In Virginia one finds a journey towards redemption, though not excellence or virtue, via vocation. Her death is marked as fortunate--as Guy's future mother-in-law remarks, “there is a special providence in the fall of a bomb ... she was killed at the one time in her life when she could be sure of heaven” (672). This salvation results from Virginia's conversion, not only in religion but also in life. This conversion was born out of neither necessity nor despair, as it occurs only after remarriage to Guy. Remarriage is, of course, not enough; it is not the end of her journey, but the new beginning, the correction of vocation corrupted throughout her life of cyclical marriage-divorce. She moves from attempted manipulation of Guy to honest “tenderness” (667). Even more dramatic is her growth as a mother. From conception Virginia attempts to rid herself of Trimmer 2.0, and after his birth refuses to call him by name. In her last act, however, she sends him away, maybe dooming herself (given her seemingly preternatural knowledge of death, as she wonders with each bomb “Is that the one that's coming here?”). Virginia preserves her child and, more importantly, recognizes him by name when she says “I really think it's the best thing for--for Gervase” (662). So much emotion, struggle, and progress are conveyed in that one dash. Once she has acknowledged her son by name, she overcomes her repulsion, accepts her role as wife and mother, and merits her blessed death.

Through Virginia's acceptance of her marital role, Guy himself is able to proceed in his vocational journey. During their “brief cohabitation,”

Without passion or sentiment but in a friendly, cosy way they had resumed the pleasures of marriage and in the weeks while his knee mended the deep old wound in Guy's heart and pride healed also.... When Guy was passed fit for active service and his move-order was issued, he had felt as though he were leaving a hospital where he had been skilfully treated. (667)

The action of consummating their remarriage does not bring about healing--if so, Guy's previous attempt at seducing Virginia might have been helpful. The problem is that Guy was “driven by lust rather than love” (Wilson 331). The physical reality of renewed marital life and the transcendent virtue of love undo the harm of Guy's past and reunite him with a truly sacramental reality.

This would seem to be the end of his journey. However, Guy has another problem. His marital wounds might be healed, but the additional step of seeking absolution for his inappropriate crusade, his pledge to war, remains to be taken. Soldiering as a vocation is problematic, in that devotion to the army cannot replace sacramental calling. The trilogy includes two prominent swords, and the anticlimactic death of an almost Platonic soldier, Ritchie-Hook. The two swords are not at all honorable. Guy dedicates himself to the first, that of a faux saint and failed crusader who died “far from Jerusalem,” in one of medieval Italy's many petty disputes (11). The second is the sword forged for Stalin by Great Britain. This essay does not address the political message of Sword of Honour; Waugh loathed Stalin, and he considered communism an evil force equivalent to Nazism. The Sword for this Satanic neo-Diocletian was inspired by the martial career of Guy's fellow Halberdier, the lying Trimmer. To suggest it is Satanic is not hyperbole. As Colman O'Hare states, “all this scene's bogus religion--the candles, the counterfeit altar, the sword counterfeiting a cross--underscores the fact that self-deception is integral to war and propaganda.... This sword is no such symbol at all, and Guy's 'crusade' is a fraud and a farce from the start” (305). Ritchie-Hook, a paragon of bravery and courage, stands in stark contrast to the idiotic, incompetent military bureaucracy, but he has “a great deal in common” with Trimmer (693). His death, exemplifying the virtues he had in life, accomplishes nothing but ensures American aid to Yugoslavian communists. According to his servant, Ritchie- Hook remarked, “I wish those bastards would shoot better. I don't want to go home” (694). His soldier-vocation grants him the death that many characters seem to desire in this last novel. Waugh is not preaching pacifism; Ritchie-Hook's martial virtues are considerable, and his actions in the First World War are never portrayed as pointless, as his actions in the second war seem. Being a soldier is not evil in itself, but embracing it as a vocation is a destructive error.

Guy does indeed repent of his error and returns home. The results of Guy's past have not been erased, as he lives with the fact that Trimmer's son will inherit Broome; regardless, Guy in the epilogue lives not just the sinless life, but the genuinely good life. His farm is productive. His shyness has faded; he spends time with the most likable of his surviving acquaintances: Bertie, Tommy Blackhouse, and a semi-redeemed Ivor Claire. Most importantly, he has taken up residence in Broome's Lesser House. The reader knows two important details: “it was here his father had suggested that Guy should end his days,” and it has “a stucco facade and porch masking the much older structure” (542). Guy has now followed the path of his father, the best example of proper vocation and virtuous life in Waugh's oeuvre. Guy has accepted his duties as a Crouchback instead of forsaking them. Guy is the new master of Broome, but his position is merely the continuation of a much older structure. Guy's journey, after a false start, leads him to heal, to repent, and ultimately to answer his call in his proper life. Guy thus truly achieves excellence and virtue by living his vocation.

A critic states that “[t]he contemporary academy will note, with varying degrees of distaste, Waugh’s ... sense of 'the modern world' as a wildly unstable entity that has become, in some essential way, detached from any notion of truth or reason” (MacLeod 61). Waugh would, of course, view the contemporary academy with disgust, a subject ripe for satire. Waugh does indeed believe not only in truth, but also in goodness that might be lived in this world. As in Sword of Honour, the entire world might fall into a state so horrible that “The chaotic vies with the psychotic” (Danchev 477). But the individual may still achieve excellence. He may remove himself from that hellish existence and strive on his own, through an individual, vocational call, towards heaven.

Works Cited Catechism of the Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Print. Danchev, Alex. "The Real Waugh." Diplomatic History 25.3 (2001): 473-89. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Dec. 2011. MacLeod, Lewis. "‘They Just Won't Do, You Know’: Postcolonial Discourse and Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour." LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 21.2 (2010): 61- 80. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Dec. 2011. O'Hare, Colman. "The Sacred and Profane Memories of Evelyn Waugh's Men At War." Papers on Language & Literature 20.3 (1984): 301-11. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Dec. 2011.| Waugh, Evelyn. “St. Helena, Empress.” A Little Order: Selected Journalism. Ed. Donat Gallagher. 1977. New York: Penguin, 2000. 180-83. Waugh, Evelyn. The Sword of Honour Trilogy. 1965. New York: Everyman's Library, 1994. Weigel, George. Introduction. Helena. By Evelyn Waugh. 1950. Chicago: Loyola Classics, 2005. Wilson, John Howard. "Quantitative Judgments and Individual Salvation in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour." Renascence 60.4 (2008): 325-339. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Dec. 2011.

Editor’s Note: Robert Sherron is a senior undergraduate at the University of Dallas double majoring in English and Theology, with a concentration in applied physics. A version of this essay won the Seventh Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest.

Wanted: “A Sense of Loss” by Donat Gallagher James Cook University

I have just been reading a short newspaper article, “Irritating, all this woe about Waugh” (Daily Express [London], 23 October 1978, p. 29). The article begins: “I had a sense of loss watching ‘A Sense of Loss’ in BBC2’s Lively Arts profile of the late Evelyn Waugh last night.” The writer “pictures the Waugh [who] wrote hilarious comic books like Scoop and caustically charted the foibles of the upper classes.” He laments that there wasn’t much of that “in the Freudian probings of literary gent Ronald Harwood [the presenter of the programme] who obsessively dug into the gloomier side of Waugh’s nature.” The writer of the article is sceptical about Harwood’s contention that “Waugh was unable to love and so he was unable to be loved.”

Ronald Harwood, trying to prove that novels like Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited were autobiographical, visited some of the country houses Waugh frequented and interviewed some of his friends. Two of those were Lady Mary Lygon and Gwendoline Sparkes (who was on the Pinfold ship with Waugh).

Lady Mary said that there was only one character from life she identified in a Waugh book: “It was a Pekinese dog we used to have.” Gwendoline Sparkes appears in Selina Hastings’s biography of Waugh, but her story in this article is more graphic: “Waugh kept banging on her cabin door and asking for a Miss Margaret Black who did not exist. ‘I kept the door locked until he went away,’ said Miss Sparkes. ‘Then one night he appeared at the top of a staircase and I’ll swear his eyes were bright red that night. He threw a stool at me but I nipped into my cabin.’”

I would very much like to hear from anyone who has a transcript of this profile.

REVIEWS

Attending, Noticing, Detecting, Interpreting "A Handful of Mischief": New Essays on Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher, Ann Pasternak Slater, and John Howard Wilson. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield for Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011. 254 pp. $70.00. Reviewed by Douglas Lane Patey, Smith College

The papers printed here were presented at the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference held 24-27 September 2003 at Hertford College, Oxford. Participants were treated to visits to Piers Court, Castle Howard, and Madresfield Court (home of the Lygons and site of an art-nouveau chapel) and dinner at the Spread Eagle at Thame. Some sessions took place beneath a portrait of Waugh's tutor, nemesis, and butt C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, who would surely be surprised to find that the young man he once wrote off as a "silly little suburban sod" has achieved the status of Major British Author.

Much of the best criticism, as we tell students, grows first of all from simple acts of attention: from noticing, for instance, repetitions, be they words, syntactic structures, or larger elements of design. (We rarely add the discouraging news that such noticing requires eyes and ears already well trained, as well as a capacious memory.) The three best (and longest) essays here, by the volume's editors, start with just such active attention.

John Wilson and Ann Pasternak Slater must be especially favored by the goddess Mnemosyne. Wilson's "Walking Tour of Evelyn Waugh's Oxford" is a mnemonic tour de force: passing among Oxford's streets as through a memory theater, Wilson identifies colleges, monuments, and shops; friends and acquaintances associated with each; and the moments when each enters Waugh's writing (in which Oxford provides more detailed settings than does any other locale). The exercise is doubly impressive for there being no concordance with which Wilson could have fortified his remarkable memory for detail, and the more enlightening for his effort to add less well known information to the more familiar. (One example among many: carved into a staircase at New College, Waugh saw the names Best and Chetwynd--apparently the inspiration for Margot's superb name in Decline and Fall.)

Noting that Waugh's stylistic mastery is more often celebrated than analyzed, Ann Pasternak Slater in "Waffle Scramble" takes the example of Scoop (appropriately, since of all Waugh's novels this one takes style as an explicit subject) to inventory the formal features that contribute to the novel's remarkably tight architecture. The devices she finds most in evidence are "anagram and metathesis," "reversal," and "mistaken identity"--really, all in their different ways variations on reversal, of which she assembles a full catalogue, from the "biting-cold mid- June morning" with which the novel opens to the "warm land" that "lay white as frost" at the end. Most readers will be familiar with Waugh's procedure of reversal in general, but Pasternak Slater usefully explores the many ways reversal can play out, and relates the literary procedure to Waugh's own real-life experiences in Abyssinia (including even the typographical errors he produced while trying to compose on a typewriter). By the end, she succeeds in convincing us that the novel's many framing devices--for instance, references to castles (the ruined castle on Mrs. Stitch's ceiling; the "Aircastle School of Journalism")—and even the twin alliterations of (at the beginning) "Pip and Pop, the Bedtime Pets" and (later on) "Popotakis Ping-Pong Parlor" are deliberate and meaningful.

Other gifted noticers are Irina Kabanova and Dan Kostopulos. Kabanova (appropriately for a Russian scholar, as Robert Murray Davis notes in his introduction to this volume) explores the phenomenon of "power without grace," especially in Edmund Campion and Helena. She finds that Waugh's imagination characteristically portrays graceless sovereigns as "manikins" or "dummies," described as if "upholstered" or "stuffed"--impressive, but empty. Kostopulos explores Waugh's last travel book, A Tourist in Africa, and finds a work of far greater judgment and nuance than did its initial detractors. It is remarkable to find Waugh's scrupulously delimited observations treated alongside theorists of imperialism such as Edward Said and Franz Fanon, company in which, Kostopulos argues, Waugh holds his own.

Another traditional source of literary scholarship is of course determined detective work, and there is no one who has labored so hard and successfully, over so many years, to clarify the knottiest events in Waugh's life as Donat Gallagher. In "Guy Crouchback's Disillusion: Crete, Beevor, and the Soviet Alliance in Sword of Honour," Gallagher presents the fruit of years of research into military records to show that a widely received view of Waugh's departure from Crete on the last day of the Allies' disastrous attempt in 1941 to deny the island to the Nazis is wrong.[1] That view--pioneered by the historian Antony Beevor, and uncritically followed by biographers and critics including Selina Hastings and (alas) myself--would have it that Waugh's superior in the Commandos, Robert Laycock, disobeyed orders by jumping the queue and evacuating before completing his mission, and that Laycock persuaded Waugh to falsify the official war diary concerning these events--adding, the story goes, a very personal grief to the shame Waugh (like so many others) felt at the Allied defeat. Painstakingly recreating events from myriad, often obscure military records, Gallagher persuasively shows that this received view cannot stand: that Laycock had explicit orders to evacuate, that he completed his mission (as best one could in the circumstances), and that Waugh's war diary is accurate on key points. (Gallagher does not speculate about what led so distinguished a historian as Beevor to get matters so wrong; had he some personal grudge?) And once we abandon Beevor's story of malfeasance, we must abandon as well the idea that there might be some buried parallel such as Ann Fleming suggested (though she later recanted) between Laycock and Officers and Gentlemen's Ivor Claire.

I plead wholly guilty to having accepted Beevor's account, and am happy to be proved wrong. And yet, and yet--one sentence in Officers and Gentlemen still puzzles. At dawn on Guy Crouchback's last day on Crete, just before Guy makes off in the small boat that also contains Ludovic, Waugh as narrator interposes a haunting sentence: "He had no clear apprehension that this was a fatal morning, that he was that day to resign an immeasurable piece of his manhood."[2] What can this sentence mean--what shame does it refer to? By this point in the story, it's already clear that the battle has been lost; Guy has received explicit permission to escape rather than surrender, could he find a boat; and news of the Russian alliance is many days in the future. In a Beevorish account, the sentence could be read as a projection of Waugh's own guilt; now it seems to have no justification at all. (Waugh removed it in assembling the one- volume recension, Sword of Honour.)

Of the remaining essays in Handful of Mischief, the one readers may find themselves thinking hardest about is Peter Christensen's on "Homosexuality in Brideshead Revisited." Christensen helpfully reviews the range of positions taken by earlier readers and adds many thoughtful suggestions of his own. It's hard to disagree that Waugh means us to see Sebastian Flyte as fundamentally gay in a way that Charles Ryder is not. But for all his good sense, Christensen seems to me to come close to making the mistake of treating literary characters as if they were real people. Can we really infer from the novel that Lady Marchmain explicitly understands that Sebastian and indeed also Mr. Samgrass are homosexual? Does Waugh really mean us to feel that in his affair with Julia (as compared to his early pleasure with Sebastian) Charles "falls into a dreary heterosexual pattern"? (To Christensen, Charles "believes" that Sebastian pointed the way to Julia--with the strong implication that this is merely Charles's belief, probably mistaken, rather than a message of the novel itself.)

At a deeper level, this essay seeks to make Waugh's novel more politically correct--more "gay-friendly"--than many have found it to be. According to Christensen, Brideshead "pits two versions of Roman Catholicism against each other, the generous and the dogmatic, and the generous version prevails." (Rex Mottram's shallow conversion, we're told, is a send-up of "the stupidity of dogmatic, catechizing Catholicism.") Julia's speech about "setting up a rival good to God's" is for Christensen a prime instance of "mean-spirited Catholicism," which "instills self- loathing" in those who pursue relationships "not approved by the hierarchy." "Generous" Catholicism (whatever Charles may say about naughtinesses "high in the catalogue of grave sins") has room for gay relationships: to Christensen, Sebastian and Charles's relationship "does not seem corrupt at all," and if Sebastian falls into melancholy, the cause is not religious guilt but his "feeling of isolation as a young gay man." I can well understand wishing that Waugh had written the novel Christensen describes, but I am far from sure that he did. On the other hand, Waugh's extraordinary delicacy in Brideshead leaves us lots of room for interpretation.

Notes [1] Gallagher presented an earlier version of his case in "Sir Robert Laycock, Antony Beevor and the Evacuation of Crete from Sphakia," Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 78, no. 313 (Spring 2000): 218-55. [2] Chapman & Hall, 1955, 296.

Cognitive Studies “Storyworlds and Groups,” by Alan Palmer. In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 176-92. $70.00 hardcover, $35.00 paperback.

“1945--: Ontologies of Consciousness,” by Alan Palmer. In The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, ed. David Herman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 273-98. $35.00 paperback.

Reviewed by Laura Mooneyham White, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

In the decades since the waning of New Criticism, English professors have moved as systematic poachers from discipline to discipline, with uneven success (for instance, those in the 1950s who practiced “myth criticism” by way of comparative anthropology found a good deal of wisdom to bestow; later practitioners, dallying with physics’ chaos theory in the 1980s, generated mostly blather). Cognitive science, a branch of psychology, is one of the most recent fields to be penetrated by literary theorists. As she sets the stage for her edited volume Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, Lisa Zunshine notes that the study of literature and culture conceivably benefits from “insights from neuroscience, discursive psychology, cognitive evolutionary psychology and anthropology, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of mind” (1). And the profession of English has caught on to these possibilities: Zunshine points to the fact that membership in the U.S. Modern Language Association discussion group on cognitive approaches to literature grew in the decade of 1999 to 2009 from 250 to 1,221 members (1).

Fortunately for Waugh scholars, one of the leading voices of this new attention to cognition is also an astute reader of Waugh: Alan Palmer. Palmer wrote the important Fictional Minds (2004), a work that undertook to integrate and explain how fictional minds are created in literary texts through (primarily) the representation of speech and thought, processes that allow the reader to infer minds in characters which have some basic correspondences with the reader’s own mental operations and sense of personal identity. In two recent collections of essays concerned with literary cognitive studies, Palmer’s contributions take Waugh as their starting point. The first, “1945--: Ontologies of Consciousness,” in The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, is an exercise in cognitive historicism, one of cognitive studies’ subfields. Cognitive historicism can be generally described as an attempt to track the interaction between cognitive universals (such as facial micro- expressions) and cultural change (including the obsessive attempt to document the inner psyche in many modernist novels). When cognitive historicism meets literary history, as in this essay, the focus is on how texts express states of mind, and how those expressions alter as history unfolds.

“1945--: Ontologies of Consciousness” attempts to chart a change in basic presumptions about consciousness from the modernist through the postmodernist novel, using four examples: Waugh’s Men at Arms (1952), Martin Amis’s Success (1978), Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (written in 1940, first published in 1967), and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001). This essay is more interesting about the last three of these books than it is about Men at Arms, largely because Men at Arms functions here as the stable ground that will be broken in the other, more experimental depictions of mind. Palmer tells us that “the antimodernist/neorealist Men at Arms raises neither epistemological nor ontological concerns” (280). Narratologists would already know that the novel is “a heterodiegetic narrative told by an omniscient narrator and focalized through Crouchback.” And Waugh scholars will find a delicious understatement in Palmer’s note that “throughout, mental causation conforms to the models of the workings of the mind that were in general circulation in his world” and that “within this single, stable storyworld, perception and cognition are generally understandable” (280). As we know, even Waugh’s fictionalized depiction of his own mental breakdown in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) presumes that sanity is normative. If Palmer added to his understanding of Waugh’s depiction of mind something of Waugh’s Christian presumptions about the universals of human mentality (including, say, sin, vanity, and self-delusion), he would be even further along. As it is, Waugh’s novel makes a reasonable contrast by which to see more exactly the deformations in ontology and epistemology that mark the “inward turn” of most modernist and postmodernist fiction. The radical unreliability Palmer traces in Success, The Third Policeman, and (especially) Atonement reminded me of my gratitude to Waugh. After all, the drive to understand our own moral and spiritual state by way of reading about the fictional states of others presumes that there are reliable things to know about morality and spirituality; that texts such as Atonement claim reality for any number of counter-factuals—counter-factuals as established by the text itself—makes one wonder what the novel is worth except as a depiction of the inexhaustible wells of our desire to excuse ourselves for even the worst of our behavior. Never mind: if Atonement does a good job of the latter, that may be enough.

The second essay, “Storyworlds and Groups,” advances our knowledge of Waugh more precisely. Palmer gives an extended close reading of the early scene in Men at Arms in which Guy, leaving Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, reflects on the puzzle that is his relationship to the town, observing that of all the foreign residents, he is the least “simpatico” even though the others are guilty of many social crimes (e.g., they leave bills unpaid, don’t bother to learn Italian, are boring). The passage under review ends: “Guy alone, whom they had known from infancy, who spoke their language and conformed to their religion, who was open-handed in all his dealings and scrupulously respectful of all their ways, whose grandfather built their school, whose mother had given a set of vestments embroidered by the Royal School of Needlework for the annual procession of St. Dulcina’s bones—Guy alone was a stranger among them.” Palmer’s analysis reminds us first of the masterful creation of fictional world the passage represents. Part of this creation relies on the reader’s inferential skills to know, for instance, what Waugh means when he tells us that “Guy’s uncle, Peregrine, a bore of international repute [had a] dreaded presence [which] could empty the room in any centre of civilization” (that is, Peregrine “empties the room” because when he enters it any ambulatory person leaves it). Part follows from real- world knowledge of the time (just before World War II), place (Italian village), and things of the depicted world (Palmer notes that the passage, fewer than three hundred words long, refers to some thirty-odd entities: “taxis, households, towns, butlers, fishermen and fishing nets, octopuses, houses, cats, uncles, bores, pleasure resorts, funds, parties, clothes, bills, tradesmen, rocks, holidays, arrest warrants, language, religion, ways of doing things, grandfathers, schools, mothers, vestments, processions, bones, and strangers” (180).

Palmer’s real interest lies, however, not with the depiction of the fictional world but with the depiction of fictional mind in the passage, and not just of Guy’s but of the town’s, which in this case seems to have a collective unanimity about who is and who is not simpatico. Palmer calls this depiction of the town’s mind “intermental,” a term he developed in Fictional Minds; “intermental” describes the mental operations of groups, and it is the kind of consciousness that Guy recognizes when he says of the more favored though irresponsible Wilmots that “[b]etter than this, they had lost a son bathing from the rocks,” an extraordinary statement unless understood as a depiction of community thought. Palmer has a list for us: “1. The reader understands 2. how the narrator presents 3. how Guy experiences 4. how the town experiences 5. how the Wilmot family experiences 6. the fact that the son experienced a fatal accident” (184). Palmer argues that fictions depict intermental minds as real, “that within the storyworld the town actually and literally does have a mind of its own,” not a mind exactly like an individual’s but a mind nonetheless (186), and moreover, that intermental mind has an important unconscious element, as can be seen in Waugh’s passage. Guy does not understand why he is disliked, and the individual members of the town would be hard-pressed, presumably, to explain its attitude in words—in fact, given the state of things, any town member might feel called upon to say that he or she does like Guy. Nonetheless, unconsciously, the town has registered his anomie, his lack of zest, and has passed judgment, dismissing as less important his charity, his long-held place in their world, and his cultural sensitivity, the factors Guy believes should win their favor. Palmer thus explains the seeming paradoxes of the passage as a way to understand all the better Guy’s later relationship with the army (in which a similar lack of communal acceptance will be the rule, and where the army’s intermental mind will play a significant role).

Palmer concludes his essay with a charming note that could be appended to any work of literary criticism that tries to apply a theoretical view: “This chapter will have succeeded if, having read it, you think to yourself: I have discovered a lot about that piece of writing that I would not have done had a cognitive approach not been applied to it. The chapter will have failed in its purpose if, having read it, you think to yourself: it told me nothing that I would not have thought of by myself” (192). On the whole, Palmer’s analysis passed this test for me. I wonder how his analysis would change, if at all, were he to recognize the autobiographical substrate of Men at Arms and of the Sword of Honour trilogy more generally. Certainly, the whole question of Guy’s world as a construction of putative mental states and actions is shifted by our knowing that Waugh felt many of the same motives as Guy felt and was in many respects similarly situated, particularly as an outsider within the army. At any rate, Palmer may one day write more fully about the intermental mind of the army in the Sword of Honour trilogy; I would expect to be illuminated.

Dandies and Blackouts Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature, by Patrick Deer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 329 pp. $125.00. Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University

Culture in Camouflage is certainly an interesting book: based on extensive research, it ranges widely over the literature and culture of Great Britain from the First World War through the Second. Patrick Deer traces “the emergence of modern war culture” (2) and argues that “war writers challenged the dominant narratives and imaginaries projected by an enormously powerful and persuasive mass media and culture industry” (3). Thus the culture went into camouflage to fight the wars, and the writers camouflaged their questions about the war culture. This thesis is appropriately paradoxical, and Professor Deer persuasively applies it to the work of many writers: Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Lawrence, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, among others.

I found two problems with Culture in Camouflage. One is in composition, the other in content, especially in regard to Evelyn Waugh.

In terms of composition, Culture in Camouflage reads like a series of discrete chapters, essays, and even paragraphs. Deer tends to use the same quotations over and over, and the reader senses déjà vu rather than forward movement. To give one example, Deer several times invokes Elizabeth Bowen’s suggestion that second-war authors engaged in “resistance writing.” Deer quotes four sentences from Bowen’s “Postscript” to The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1952) and then comments:

As we have seen this typically nuanced account of the crushing effects of media and propaganda machines geared to total war gives a complex picture of the writer’s situation. Bowen’s use of ‘facilities’, rather than ‘faculties’, suggests the vast disproportion between the material and mental resources available to a writer like Churchill placed in the heart of the war machine, and the everyday struggle to ‘know, think and check up’. (171)

This point seemed familiar. I turned back to the introduction, where Deer quotes the same four sentences by Bowen and comments in the same two sentences, almost word for word (10). I may be old-fashioned, but I think that a writer should show control over the whole book, save space, and avoid repetition.

In terms of content, the treatment of Evelyn Waugh is radically simplified. Waugh receives a fair amount of attention (6 pages out of 242), but Ford, Lawrence, Woolf, Greene, Bowen, and Orwell receive two or three times as much. Though he tends to dismiss Waugh as “nostalgic, elitist, and reactionary,” Deer does credit him and Cyril Connolly with an “untimely insistence on the need for aesthetic autonomy during wartime,” opposed to “the attenuation of British culture by austerity, propaganda, and the demands of the war machine” (218). Waugh’s wartime writing, moreover, “shows a remarkably complex and ironic engagement with the contradictory claims of the official culture” (219).

The section on Waugh appears in a chapter entitled, ironically, “Simplify Me When I’m Dead” (from a Keith Douglas poem), and that is just what Deer does with Waugh. The section is entitled “Total Waugh: Dandies and Queer Aesthetes on the Home Front.” The pun is misleading, since Deer focuses on Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags and Basil Seal Rides Again, Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, and Ludovic and Ivor Claire in Sword of Honour. According to Deer, Waugh is “clearly drawn to the transgressive power of the aesthete” (221), but this claim is not exactly new, and Waugh wrote about so much more.

Here is Deer’s judgment on the ending of POMF: “Waugh gestures in the patriotic direction by sending the effete upper class aesthete Cedric Lyne to a hero’s death in Norway, but neither his old-fashioned death, nor Seal’s cynical triumph over a working-class family of evacuees, can fill the gulf left by Ambrose Silk’s banishment” (222). Ambrose does leave a gulf, but is Cedric’s death really heroic? It seems pointless and anticlimactic. Patriotism is more strongly expressed by Basil, intent on killing Germans. Does Basil “triumph over” the Connollies or enter into a tactical alliance with them, directed against an aesthetic couple? Basil’s work for British counter-intelligence is summarized in a sentence, though Deer makes much of surveillance in the writing of Bowen and Greene.

As for Brideshead, Deer concludes that Blanche is “not allowed to survive into the novel’s wartime present” (223). Perhaps not—his presence at Brideshead would be an absurd coincidence—but Ryder certainly remembers Blanche and his critique of charm. To his credit, Deer notes the “perverse” suggestion of Brideshead’s Prologue: “the war has halted ‘progress’ and suspended the destruction wrought by the peace” (220). He misses, however, at least three major themes raised in the Prologue and Epilogue: the rise of Hooper, the threat to the country house, and the conversion to Roman Catholicism. Deer emphasizes wartime blackouts due to “official secrecy and censorship” (110), but he has blacked out several aspects of Waugh’s work.

Sword of Honour is beyond Deer’s purview, since he ends his analysis in 1949. He nevertheless follows two “dandies,” Ludovic and Claire, through the trilogy. Both are secondary characters, so it seems a bit strong to claim that Waugh was “rewriting history from the dandy’s point of view” (223). Blacked out are Waugh’s anatomy of training, his description of battle, and his commitment to Roman Catholicism, to name only a few of the trilogy’s more obvious features.

Deer describes Basil Seal Rides Again as an “obituary for the queer dandy aesthetes of wartime” (224). Again, he concentrates on Ambrose Silk and ignores Basil Seal, the ex-soldier incapacitated in a training accident and the sly dog who claims to have fathered his daughter’s fiancé in wartime.

Culture in Camouflage is better than I have indicated. It includes twelve well-chosen illustrations inserted at appropriate points in the text. I learned from sections on wartime radio and film, on the prosecution of spiritualists under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, and on lesser- known writers, such as Rex Warner, James Hanley, and Alexander Baron. The author eschews the jargon that mars so much literary criticism. As Deer concludes, “the experience of Britain during the Second World War reveals that modern war culture is self-perpetuating and self- replicating: it normalizes and naturalizes a state of war.” Thus “the ‘resistance writing’ of the 1940s takes on a particular relevance and urgency” (242).

Redundancy and Confusion Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 352: Twentieth-Century British Humorists, ed. Paul Matthew St. Pierre. Detroit: Gale, 2010. 450 pp. $300 or £198. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley

This is another volume in a growing series of reference books on specialized topics of world literature. The present volume limits itself to twentieth-century British “literary humorists and writers of scenario humor.” These include “comic novelists, storytellers, poets, journalists, and writers for the stage, radio, movies, and television.” The editor explains that some writers in this volume, such as Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis, are “also major literary figures in their own right” (xviii). There are entries for Waugh in at least three other volumes in this series (15, Twentieth Century British Novelists, 1930-1959 ; 162, British Short Fiction Writers, 1915-1945; and 195, British Travel Writers, 1910-1939), and in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography 6: Modern Writers, 1914-1945.

Entries on Waugh’s writing in the other three DLB volumes focus narrowly on the assigned subject. Paul Doyle (founding editor of this journal) wrote the articles on Waugh in the volumes on novels and short fiction, and each is limited to Waugh’s works in those categories without wandering into other writings. Waugh’s life is discussed as it relates to these works. The article on travel writing by Linda Strahan also sticks to the subject. The problem with British Humorists: there is little that has not already been covered in earlier volumes.

British Humorists might have focused on how Waugh used humor and how his humor differed from that of other writers; the volume might have explained which of Waugh’s works exemplify his humor. Instead, one reads a brief biography of Waugh and summaries of some works, with little effort to emphasize texts where his humor is most pronounced, to trace the development of his humor, to explain how his humor worked, or to compare his humor with that of his peers. Written by Ira B. Nadel of the University of British Columbia, this entry could be a summary of Waugh’s life and works, already available in earlier volumes.

The article does not offer anything original. Many judgments of Waugh’s works come from secondary sources, such as articles by William Boyd and Geoffrey Wheatcroft. As a reference work, British Humorists seems to be (at the very least) unreliable. The bibliography of Waugh’s books misses the first U.S. edition of his last novel but employs its title (The End of the Battle) in the description of Sword of Honour. This is very confusing and should have been eliminated in editing a reference book. The reference works at the end of the article do not mention any of the three bibliographical volumes on Waugh compiled by Robert Murray Davis and other Waugh scholars (although all three are mentioned in the 1998 DLB volume on travel writing). In the reference section under “Letters,” the 1980 collection edited by Mark Amory is listed but not the two subsequent collections containing correspondence between Waugh and Diana Cooper (1991) and Nancy Mitford (1996). The archives of Waugh materials at the University of Texas and the New York Public Library are mentioned, but not the Evelyn Waugh Papers at the British Library.

The text relating to Waugh’s life and works needs closer attention. It sounds as if Waugh matriculated at the same Oxford college as his father (264), whereas he went to Hertford, his father to the grander New College. The chronology suggests that Waugh made the trip described in Labels after publication of Vile Bodies (269), whereas he had already returned before VB was even written, let alone published. To confuse things further, the bibliography puts Labels ahead of VB. While both were published in 1930, VB appeared in January and Labels in September. The Flyte family’s Catholicism is even more confusing than in the text of Brideshead Revisited: “Originally Catholic, then Anglican, the Flytes were made Catholic by Lord Marchmain’s marriage into a traditional Catholic family and his somewhat questionable conversion for the sake of his wife” (272). All English Christians were, of course, “originally Catholic” before the Reformation, and it seems odd to stipulate that the Flytes had “become Anglican” in these circumstances. Lord Marchmain was the only Flyte “made Catholic” by his conversion.

One has to question why Waugh was included in this volume at all. The space devoted to material that duplicates earlier volumes could have been given to discussion of humorous writings by his son, Auberon Waugh. The DLB’s only previous entry on Auberon’s works is limited to novels. In terms of humor, however, Auberon will be best remembered for journalism, particularly the diaries in Private Eye and his Way of the World column in the Daily Telegraph. Other humorous journalists, including Michael Wharton (writing as Peter Simple), Auberon’s predecessor on the Way of the World column, appear in British Humorists, and an article on Auberon’s journalism would not be out of place.

The selection of humorists for this volume seems eccentric. Peter Cook, one of the seminal humorists in postwar Britain, is not accorded an entry. His involvement in writing and producing Beyond the Fringe and editing Private Eye in its early years is mentioned briefly in a chaotic entry devoted to Private Eye, but there is no biographical material on Cook and no attempt to describe the whole of his work. Meanwhile, Jessica Mitford, more muckraking social reformer than humorist, is afforded a full article. Nick Hornby, born in 1957 and author of comic novels, is given an entry while Craig Brown, born in the same year, is not.

When the authors discuss the lives and works of writers whose output was largely humorous, the entries are more in keeping with the editors’ announced purpose. Spike Milligan may have tried his hand at fiction, but he will always be better known for scripts of The Goon Show and other theatrical comedies, and for his memoirs. The entry for Milligan provides a creditable review of his life and works. Articles on other writers whose careers resemble Milligan’s (Barry Humphries, Harry Secombe, Michael Palin, and Eric Idle) are also more focused and likely to be more valuable to literary scholarship than the redundant and confusing entry on Evelyn Waugh.

The Principle of Cooperation in the Humorous Short Story The Language of Comic Narratives: Humor Construction in Short Stories, by Isabel Ermida. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008. 261 pp. $161.00. Reviewed by Gayatri Devi, Lock Haven University

Since its humble beginnings in western literary criticism as “Aristotle’s missing definition,” comedy and its serious study have fared well with scholars attempting to define, categorize, explicate and complicate the term from multiple disciplinary directions: literature, linguistics, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies, to name a few. Since humor is so singular and varied even in its limited western canon, humor theoreticians preach to the choir with few bridges built between varying disciplinary approaches. Isabel Ermida’s The Language of Comic Narratives is an impressive addition to one self-contained mode of enquiry: the linguistic school of humor research. Starting with linguist and humor theorist Victor Raskin, who supervised Ermida’s doctoral dissertation on humor, and his Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH), primarily “script opposition,” Ermida adds foundational notions from discourse analysis, pragmatics, and speech-act theory, particularly the Gricean principle of conversational maxims, presuppositions, and implicatures. Ermida proposes a “hybrid” analytical model to describe how the longer comic text works—her corpus is the comic short story—in both its illocutionary form as well as its perlocutionary effect, though the latter is not the true focus of her study. The result is a valuable addition to humor research, particularly in Ermida’s thorough efforts to describe and collate the ways that seemingly idiosyncratic postulations in the serious study of humor actually complement each other.

The first four chapters of this seven-chapter study are devoted to explicating the very notion of humor, and discussing in depth the various competing linguistic theories that explain what happens when we write, read, listen to, or interact with a humor text. I enjoyed Ermida’s discussion of taxonomic overlaps between humor and various humor-related phenomena such as laughter, wit, and irony in the first chapter. I also enjoyed Ermida’s fine exposition, in the second chapter, of the humor potential of structural constituents of language: the sound, the word, the sentence, the meaning. In these early chapters, Ermida reviews the classical theories of humor, broadly divided into disparagement theories, release theories, and incongruity theories, and she explains the linguistic strategies of humor, from sound to sentence and the syntactic/semantic unit of the joke. In rigorously examined steps, her exposition is aimed at systematically leading us towards humor as text and communicative act.

In Chapter 3, Ermida moves from the humor potential of structural constituents to the discursive, cognitive, and communicative contexts of the longer humor text, the “joke.” Ermida identifies three broad theoretical approaches to linguistic analysis of a joke, the one humor text consistently studied by scholars: Raskin’s Semantic Script Theory of Humor with its necessary conditions of semantic script overlap and script opposition; the adaptation and expansion of this model in Raskin and Attardo’s General Verbal Theory of Humor (GVTH), which studies the degree of variation between jokes through examination of “knowledge resources” (90); and Rachel Giora’s Cognitive Joke model that borrows from cognitive psychology and pragmatics to describe the “well-formedness” of jokes based on the sociolinguistic concept of “markedness,” or the ability of jokes to “surprise” us. While Ermida finds much that is useful in these three models, and she bases her own analytical model on them, she also finds limitations in their ability to explain the illocutionary intent and perlocutionary effects of longer humor texts. Ermida finds the following Raskin and Attardo GTVH postulation too reductive to describe the humor potential of complex narratives: “The study of humorous texts reduces then to the location of all lines (jab and punch) along the text vector (sic) i.e. its linear presentation” (109). The Language of Comic Narratives is Ermida’s corrective to this theoretical shortcoming:

Although a linear approach along Attardo’s lines helps to uncover some specificities of the humorous narrative … it is essential that a supra-sequential approach be applied, so as not to reduce the text to a succession of autonomous joke-like structures. In this sense, the narrative text ought to be understood at a structural (vertical and horizontal) level, but also at a pragmatic one … (111).

While the humor text as a coherent instance of pragmatic interaction is the focus of Chapter 5, Ermida elucidates these discursive mechanisms only after careful consideration and rejection of the structuralist paradigm that informs many contemporary narratological theories applied to longer literary texts. Despite the usefulness of elucidating the micro and macrostructures of the narrative texts, Ermida’s specific reservation revolves around the normative rigidity of structuralist analysis in matters of ambiguity, which rules humor texts.

Context appears to be the remedy for structural rigidity, and in Chapter 5, “Pragmatics of the humorous narrative,” Ermida studies the pragmatic context of humor narratives: the sender (the narrator), the receiver (the reader), the message, the presuppositions and implicatures, the norms and conventions, and the flouting of norms and conventions that rule the conversational and discursive practice of reading a comic text, where “writing choices and reading processes function dialogically” (169). Ermida argues “both at a linguistic and pragmatic level, then, literary humor lies in the gap that separates the rule-abiding recipient from the rule-infringing sender” (142.). This chapter splendidly applies Grice’s conversational maxims and the Cooperative Principle of conversational discourse to what happens between the humor text and its interlocutor:

If, at first sight, humor is a phenomenon that seems not to obey the principles of truth that rule over bona fide communication – and it does so by infringing norms, subverting values and ignoring conventions – it is clear that this is not gratuitous, but targeted at specific communicative objectives. Actually, producing ambiguity, confounding the recipient and provoking error are intentional strategies that aim at producing comic effects. (167)

The experience of “humor” as a cooperative construction between the narrator/sender and the receiver/reader based on pragmatic presuppositions, implicatures, cognitive informativeness, and markedness underlies Ermida’s hybrid model entitled “Hypothesis.” The Hypothesis operates on five principles:

1. The Principle of Script Opposition and Shadow-scripts

2. The Principle of Hierarchy of Scripts (supra-scripts and infra-scripts)

3. The Principle of Recurrence of the supra-script by the infra-scripts along the textual axis

4. The Principle of Informativeness: an abrupt and unexpected supra-script inversion creates the humorous effect

5. The Principle of Cooperation: the sender’s comical intent

Ermida demonstrates operation of the five principles in extended analysis of Woody Allen’s comic short story “A Lunatic’s Tale,” as well as a small corpus of other selections from humorists: Corey Ford’s “The Norris Plan,” Evelyn Waugh’s “On Guard,” Dorothy Parker’s “You Were Perfectly Fine,” Graham Greene’s “A Shocking Accident,” and David Lodge’s “Hotel des Boobs.” In Waugh’s “On Guard,” the supra-script oppositions, ENGAGEMENT and INFIDELITY, recur through the tightly plotted story’s infra-scripts: they not only create false expectations that are eventually toppled, leading to humorous effect, but also validate the principle of cooperation that extends the comic contract between narrator and reader through shared presuppositions and unsaid implicatures. Ermida’s monograph is a valuable contribution to humor research, particularly to humor in longer narratives, but one wonders about the claim of universality for Ermida’s Hypothesis model. Beyond an optimum length, would her five principles cease to produce the necessary comic cohesion and interaction? Does a comic short story have a critical duration? Equally important, how confidently can we say that humorists are aware of such principles when they write stories? Another important question that goes to the heart of Ermida’s (and Raskin’s and Attardo’s) model is the conceptual and theoretical similarity that semantic terms, such as “script overlap,” “super-scripts” and “infra-scripts,” bear to the structuralist, Saussurean concept of a “paragram,” later adapted and reconceptualized as a “hypogram” by French literary theorist Michel Riffaterre in his discussion of a structuralist poetics of text production. Riffaterre argued that a poetic text is structured with a necessary recurrence of the same invariant, which gives the text its exemplary character. He called this invariant the semantic nucleus of the text, or the hypogram, which recurs by overdetermining itself through conversions and expansions. Perhaps Ermida’s claim of universal applicability rests on the existence of such a hypogram for humor in a text as much as it does on semantic-pragmatic conditions.

Sharpness of Perception Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, by Pericles Lewis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 246 pp. $85.00. Reviewed by Patrick Query, U.S. Military Academy.

Evelyn Waugh receives only an aside in Pericles Lewis’s new book, and rightly so. Early on, Lewis writes that “works by the … authors of the Catholic revival of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Georges Bernanos, and Francois Mauriac, bear an uneasy relation to the term ‘modernism’—their protagonists contemplate theological issues of sin and redemption in the context of fairly conventional novels of manners or genres such as detective fiction” (18). Marina MacKay makes no such distinction in her Modernism and World War II (2007)—ironically, also from Cambridge UP—and its coherence suffers as a result. Lewis focuses on writers who bear a much more perceptible relation to the term “modernism”: James, Proust, Kafka, and Woolf, with Eliot and Joyce hovering around the edges of the discussion. He also prefers writers who, like himself and like modernism itself, bear an uneasy relation, or none, to conventional religious belief. All of which is to say that the parameters of Lewis’s study are well and fairly defined, and the analysis is both coherent and cogent. Whatever Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel loses—which is not nothing—owing to its author’s admitted position as religiously “unmusical,” it gains in sharpness of perception and a kind of earnest openness to the movements of forms and ideas. The sixth chapter (of seven), “Virginia Woolf and the disenchantment of the world,” provides an especially welcome new approach to longstanding debates on modernism and religion, but every chapter contains bracing insights for contemporary readers—of both modernist and Wavian novels.

The Reluctant Victorianist The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, by Simon Joyce. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. 211 pp. $49.95. (Paperback, $24.95). Reviewed by Nicole Burkholder-Mosco, Lock Haven University

The fascination with Victorian history, including texts, styles, culture, morals, and ideals, has, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, turned into a bona-fide field of study. The online journal Neo-Victorian Studies (active since Autumn 2008) examines the re-visioning of the nineteenth century, college courses focus on the subject, and books address writing or studying in neo-Victorian context. Most studies try to determine what it means to be a Victorian and how our contemporary world interprets that identity. Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror never claims to be a study of neo-Victorianism. However, this book does work within neo-Victorian constructs, critiquing some of the most well-known and discussed neo- Victorian texts of the last several decades, including Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. Joyce seems reluctant to place his work in the larger movement of post-Victorian studies, and this may be a fair departure; he examines twentieth-century texts that do not interpret the nineteenth century, but these are still, as he claims, influenced by the past. It seems odd not to situate his work within the context of post-Victorian studies. In this book, Joyce considers, through rather disparate topics, the legacy of the Victorians and how they have been interpreted and re-interpreted since the close of the Victorian era. The question is whether or not the book, with its divergent concentrations, amounts to a cohesive whole.

Early in the book, Joyce sets up his multi-branched argument by outlining the debate about when the Victorian era closed. While different voices throughout the twentieth century have argued about when the attitudes and customs of Victorian England actually changed, Joyce takes a unique approach, examining essays, novels, and films that, while not always set in the nineteenth century (or even the long nineteenth century), nostalgically or critically look back to the Victorian era. As Joyce explains in his introduction, pinpointing the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of nostalgia for it is difficult, if not impossible. He admits that it is “tempting to infer [from early twenty-first-century interest in the Victorians] a kind of Victorian vampire that has suddenly reawakened to haunt Britain after a century’s rest—except that such positings of an essential and unbroken connection with the past appeared throughout the twentieth century as well” (3). While trying to draw a “definitive line in the sand,” he goes on to say that the Victorians have “attracted as much as repulsed those that have come afterwards” (3). Thus Joyce expands his definition of the Victorian, conflating at times what is Victorian and what is neo- Victorian.

Though Joyce agrees that swift currents against Victorian modes were already well under way even before the death of Queen Victoria, his real analysis begins with the Bloomsbury Modernists and their stinging reactions to all things Victorian. He provides an interesting close reading of several texts that he identifies as “Bloomsbury anti-Victorianism,” including Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924) and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). Reading these texts at a distance, it is easier to accept Joyce’s notion that “a writer paradoxically might appear less dated as time continues to pass and be relegated to the recesses of history” (30); he uses this premise as he moves into discussion of two texts—Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). He emphasizes the presence of the English country house and how it becomes the key character in each novel.

The chapters covering Waugh include some of the most lucid insights in the book. It seems reductive to generalize about how twentieth-century writers interpreted the Victorian influence by looking at only two texts written thirty-five years apart; nevertheless, Joyce clearly demonstrates how the country house, in fiction and reality, embodies ambivalent nostalgia towards the previous century and simultaneously draws on the contemporary world. Similarly, Joyce concludes that Waugh (and Forster, to a lesser extent) exhibits a deep bipolarity towards the legacy of the nineteenth century, that he is “having it both ways” (62) by criticizing the past yet finding it preferable to the present and future. Through two examples—architecture in Waugh’s work and the revival of Victorian manner and thought among the social and artistic elites centered on Waugh at Oxford—Joyce demonstrates that Waugh’s writing (and presumably that of others) is haunted by the spirit of the previous century. In his preface to the 1960 revised edition of Brideshead, Waugh admits that the novel is “infused with a kind of gluttony … for the splendours of the recent past.” Waugh adds that he finds this gluttony “distasteful.” Joyce emphasizes this ambivalence in Waugh and sees the country house as “the anchor of … traditional social order” (59), a transitional space for both nostalgia and reproach.

More time is spent with Brideshead through discussion of heritage cinema—films that nostalgically recreate the past. Here would be a fine place to make a distinction: texts that re- vision the past with kinder eyes in celebration of history, on one hand, and the more common neo-Victorian adaptation or appropriation, which has altogether different goals, on the other. Joyce does not develop that contrast, though he does consider additional films, such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), reducing their methods to what he calls “Metacinematic Heritage,” and claiming that these “period films” have “resisted the attraction of heritage aesthetics” (102). That is somewhat understated, since films such as the 1981 serialization of Brideshead have objectives different from those of intentionally neo- Victorian adaptations. Although Joyce’s analyses are strong, covering these films in one chapter seems coarse, superimposing one theme on two genres with separate motivations. Notable, though, is that Joyce also introduces clever historical and political readings of the neo- conservative movement (in England and America) and goes into depth on liberal and conservative recollections of Victorian England; both sides use their own agendas, often erroneously, to advance political and social reforms. Joyce’s final chapters consider contemporary neo-Victorian writers, though he limits discussion to the neo-Dickensian novel. He is particularly astute in tracing Dickens’s influence on Waters’s Fingersmith; even while claiming that his novels confronted harsh realities, Dickens wrote, in fact, sanitized versions of the real Victorian London that contemporary novelists attempt to re-cast more accurately. Joyce ends the book with a short epilogue that considers post- colonials and how they have come to terms with legacies from the Victorian world.

One strength of Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is that Joyce explores the elusive questions of when the Victorian era ended and how those who came after interpret the past. He expands the notion of “Victorian,” considering a series of writers and texts that span more than a century and cover disparate concerns. Yet this approach is a weakness of the book as well. Joyce admits that the book consists of essays written over the span of his academic career, and it often seems that different subjects are being forced into a single package. Many topics are well- conceived, enlightening, and intuitive—so much so that I was anticipating further development of several ideas. The vogue of Victoriana (the retro-fetish with Victorian artifacts) seemed prematurely terminated without addressing the now-popular steampunk culture. Likewise, there are germs for several other book-length studies to be fleshed out. Ultimately, while the book does not completely achieve cohesion, some parts still work well within a larger context of post- Victorian studies. Simon Joyce warns his reader on the first page of “Acknowledgements” that he considers himself a “reluctant Victorianist” and that the book is an attempt to “work through [his] reservations about the nineteenth century” (ix). However, in refusing to fit his work neatly into an established field and, instead, stitching together distinct material from different periods in his professional life, he may be thinking like a Victorianist and reflecting only a fractured and distorted vision of the Victorian era.

Collections and Coteries Collecting as Modernist Practice, by Jeremy Braddock. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 336 pp. $39.95. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma

Jeremy Braddock makes an extended case that the poetic anthology, like those edited by Ezra Pound and others, from the second decade of the previous century has many parallels, even a homology, with collections of modernist art, notably those of Duncan Phillips at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, recently moved to a new location. In the penultimate chapter he traces the efforts of Alain Locke and others to collect Negro (their term) cultural productions to enable them to “function as an instrument of aesthetic intervention and collective self-intervention,” structurally not very different from previous editors’ attempts to impose authorial control over materials they had assembled. All of these efforts helped in the “imperative domestication of modernism,” shifting it from a revolutionary state of mind to canonical status, now embodied in archives like the Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale. These and other archives represent “a new category of late modernism” and enable writers to “devise a version of the economy from which modernist painters had benefited for so long,” an “economy of rarity.”

The book presents an impressive amount of research, in breadth as well as depth, and an acute sensitivity to the context, including the “bibliographic code” of individual books. In dealing with art, however, Braddock is handicapped by his publisher’s bibliographic code, which presents all illustrations in small black and white photographs. Still, cultural historians will be grateful for the way he traces aesthetic and political principles behind these collections and in lesser but more entertaining fashion the eccentricities of the collectors.

However, the relationship of this book to Evelyn Waugh is extremely tenuous. He is mentioned in a footnote because a copy of Black Mischief is housed at Yale. (Is it an association copy? Waugh met Carl Van Vechten, the founder of and principal donor to that collection, at least twice in June 1930.) Otherwise, readers must draw upon their knowledge of Waugh as food for meditation.

In fact, most of the book is counter-Waugh. Regarding Braddock’s propensity to repeat himself, Waugh would be no happier than he was with Thomas Merton. Like Mr. Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, Waugh would reject “critics and their horrible jargon,” as in the discussion of “The New Negro, which attempted both to articulate a New Negro episteme and to interpellate its artists as the constituents of a movement”—a mild example but mercifully short. The thought of Waugh being interpellated or included in a coterie (in Braddock’s terms, interventionist) anthology should cheer us up for weeks, given his attitude towards the Auden group, international conferences, coteries of any kind, and anthologies directed towards anything but profit.

More fruitful, perhaps, would be considerations of Waugh’s connection to modernism, from “In Defence of Cubism” (1917, and Picasso, long before he called for his death in post- World War II correspondence) through his fascination with The Waste Land and apparently ending in the late 1920s with his praise of Picabia, Ernst, and Malliol in contrast to a wire head by Cocteau, “the apotheosis of bogosity.”

Still, Waugh might, as he did in Labels, have praised the sense of period reflected in Braddock’s book. And he should have been grateful for the rise of literary archives, since he did a considerable amount of self-curation of his manuscripts and other papers and hoped, in a letter of 1965 to his brother Alec, to sell them to Texas to provide for his old age. That did not work out, but North American Waugh scholars, at least, must be grateful for his forethought.

His Best Heresy Born-Again Skeptic & Other Valedictions, by Robert Murray Davis. Norman, OK: Mongrel Empire Press, 2011. Reviewed by Richard Greene, University of Toronto

“I began as Paul Pennyfeather … and ended … as the peripatetic Basil Seal, of whom it’s said ‘No one minds him being rude, but he’s so teaching.’” So says the highly educational Robert Murray Davis in his new collection of essays, which doubles as an autobiography. Now, most readers of Waugh Studies will know Bob Davis personally or professionally. I certainly do, and must declare that I am under an obligation to him–he has twice reviewed my work and, better still, he has approved of it. And it did not cost me a nickel in bribes.

Davis was once told that he had an “irony deficiency,” but readers will rejoice to discover that he is most certainly cured. Apart from his scholarly work, he is a poet and novelist. He has learned to write a polished, economical prose, which offers deceptive vistas of smooth water–there is a rip-tide of bemused ferocity under most of these pages.

Nothing could be more certain to kill conversation than to say you are an academic. Ask me--I know. But Davis tells the story of a life spent mostly at universities–he studied at three and taught at nine. He is perfectly content to talk about an existence most people find boring. In a sense, he is rappelling down the side of the ivory tower. However, not everyone wants to hear about the life and opinions of an English prof. Or as one woman put it to him, “You people are warped! Graduate school warped you people.”

There is doubtless some truth in that, but Davis stands his ground as a critic, a reader and a writer: “Past seventy and still active, that’s not what I do. It’s who I am.”

The first section of the book looks at Davis’s early years in Kansas and Missouri, his growth into an intellectual good ol’ boy and then, as awareness rippled outward, something more impressive still and not quite categorizable. Davis credits his entertaining and adventurous mother for instilling self-confidence in him, and one can see that she cut no corners there. He thinks that she would have been disappointed by the failure of his marriage, his departure from the Catholic Church, and his refusal ever to read David Copperfield. His father was a quieter figure, conservative and somewhat melancholy. Davis says that his father managed to teach him by example that he was not the best card player in the world, and so “Saved me a lot of money and trouble.”

A section on “Recoveries” takes us through his quarrels with the bottle, the wife, the Church, and the bookshelf. He presents himself, with equal measures of sorrow and whimsy, as an addictive personality: “moderation doesn’t seem to work for me or my family, all of whom seem to have only two switch positions: ‘off’ and ‘test to destruction.’” He is, of course, speaking chiefly about booze, but it reminded me that for all his wisdom on many subjects, Bob Davis is not equipped to talk about religion. After long years of Jesuit piety, the switch flipped, and now he is agin’ it. However, in one of the drollest essays, he talks about the accumulation of books as if it were an eating disorder, culminating in “bibliographical love handles.”

My favourite essay is on his involvement in “masters swimming”–for which, think of Mark Spitz with a knee replacement. It is the sort of thing you take up when the corporeal love handles keep pace with the bibliographical ones. He describes friendships imbued with a curious mix of competition and sympathetic encouragement. But is this Davis’s element? A casual swimmer wanders into his lane and they collide: “I reared up and said ‘Jesus Christ’ in a loud voice and prepared to go on. ‘Don’t be angry,’ she said, and I thought, ‘If I wasn’t angry, I couldn’t do this to myself.’” And there are more problems: “two other members of our relay team got divorced since our last Nationals, so there may be a correlation between a failing marriage and dedication to masters swimming.” Here, we are in the deep end of sadness.

Throughout this book, Davis reflects on what it means to write well. For over a generation, scholars have been encouraged to prattle in polysyllabic codes. Davis thinks of himself not as an academic (he rejoices in his emeritus-ness), but as a writer in the same trade as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, or John Steinbeck–whose names come back again and again in these pages. In a certain way, prose style is Robert Murray Davis’s best heresy. In this amusing, thoughtful, self-revealing book, he is driving nails into a door, and we should honor him for it.

Alec Guinness and Igor Stravinsky One on One: 101 True Encounters, by Craig Brown. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. 400 pp. £16.99. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

Humorist Craig Brown has written a collection of essays describing encounters between celebrities and intellectuals stretching from an 1876 meeting between Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky to the present day. Brown does not parody or otherwise spoof what may have been said or done: he writes factual narratives based on written accounts by the two participants or others. There are 101 encounters, each narrated in 1001 words. Each encounter is linked to the next, and the book begins and ends with Adolf Hitler, who met Old Etonian John Scott-Ellis and finally the Duchess of Windsor.

Evelyn Waugh is involved in encounters16 and 17. The first is entitled “Alec Guinness crawls with Evelyn Waugh.” Guinness was involved in the previous encounter with film star James Dean. The Waugh-Guinness meeting took place on 4 August 1955 at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, where they attended Edith Sitwell’s reception into the Roman Catholic Church. According to Brown, Guinness was the only worshipper present when Waugh arrived, and he introduced himself. A deaf lady on walking sticks slipped as she tried to sit down, and two armfuls of bracelets fell to the floor. Guinness and Waugh knelt down to pick up her bracelets and observed that she must be Orthodox or Eastern Rite Catholic: she crossed herself backwards (from right to left). The second encounter, entitled “Evelyn Waugh wrong foots Igor Stravinsky,” took place at New York’s Ambassador Hotel during Waugh’s lecture tour of the USA in February 1949. Stravinsky’s second encounter was with Walt Disney.

Both Waugh narratives are documented in the book’s bibliography. That with Guinness is based on Waugh’s diaries and letters as well as the biography and memoirs of Guinness and a biography of Edith Sitwell. The Stravinsky encounter is based on the composer’s biography and the memoirs of Robert Craft, Ann Fleming, Frances Donaldson, Tom Driberg, and Penelope Fitzgerald. Comparable documentation is offered for each of the other ninety-nine encounters.

Other contemporaries of Waugh involved in encounters include T. S. Eliot (with Groucho Marx and the Queen Mother), Tom Driberg (with Christopher Hitchens and Mick Jagger), and Cecil Beaton (with Mick Jagger and Harold Nicolson). Brown’s fans have enjoyed his parodies and other humorous writings over the years, but they should not expect the same level of comedy in these 101 encounters. Nor are Waugh fans likely to learn much. One on One is entertainment, and the book conveys no pretense of scholarship. It does manage to avoid the usual celebrity- book puffery. Although the shtick of random linkages and the same number of words can seem too clever by half, One on One might well cheer up the dreary days of English winter. The book has not found its way into the U.S. market.

NEWS

Face to Face Evelyn Waugh’s interview with John Freeman on BBC TV’s Face to Face, recorded in 1960, is available on YouTube.

Too Close for Comfort Evelyn Waugh was interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a program called Close-Up in the late 1950s. Charles Templeton includes an account in An Anecdotal Memoir (1982), which has been posted online. See the chapter entitled “Inside Television: CBS & CBC.” The interview did not go well.

Kindle Editions of Evelyn Waugh Kindle released editions of most of Evelyn Waugh’s books on 31 May 2012. These editions are available only to customers in the United Kingdom.

Drawings of Evelyn Waugh Colin Spencer’s drawing of Evelyn Waugh, completed in 1959, appears in “Breakfast with Betjeman, sherry with Waugh,” an article by Thea Lenarduzzi, published in the TLS blog for 8 June 2012. Another version of the drawing appears on the artist’s web site, colinspencer.co.uk. Top Ten Doorstoppers Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh made Stephen King’s list of top ten books over 1000 pages.

The Question of Inheritance Alexander Waugh’s lecture “Evelyn Waugh and the Question of Inheritance,” given at Georgetown University on 19 March 2012, is available on YouTube.

Order of Australia Donat Gallagher, Associate Editor of Evelyn Waugh Studies, was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia on 26 January 2012 “for service to the arts, to education, and to the community of Townsville.”

Paul Fussell, 1924-2012 Paul Fussell passed away on 23 May 2012. He is best known for his book The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). He also wrote a couple of essays on Evelyn Waugh: “A Hero of Verbal Culture,” New York Times, 2 November 1980, republished as “Waugh in His Letters” in The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations (1982); and “Evelyn Waugh’s Moral Entertainments,” in Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980). Poet Robert Pinsky remembered Fussell as a “great teacher” at Rutgers University. Fussell is survived by his wife, two children, and four stepchildren. His obituary is available at the New York Times.

Top Ten Titles from T. S. Eliot In “John Mullan’s 10 of the best: TS Eliot quotes as titles,” published in the Guardian on 8 June 2012, the first entry is Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.

Word of the Day On Dictionary.com, the Word of the Day for 19 June 2012 was pensée. The first example came from Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh: “He rose from his deep chair and at his desk entered on the first page of a new notebook a pensee: The penalty of sloth is longevity.”

Clive James on Scoop In “I’m not dead yet!” in the Telegraph on 22 June 2012, Clive James expresses his “growing awareness that Waugh wasn’t exaggerating when he made every journalist in [Scoop] a confidence man.”

The Sin of Self-Indulgence? In “Words on a Sword,” published in the Saint Austin Review for 26 June 2012, Joseph Pearce expresses disappointment in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour: “I found Waugh's Sword somewhat blunted by the sin of self-indulgence.” Review of Bitter Trial In “Undone by the ‘Permanent Workshop,’” Philip Blosser reviews A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes in the New Oxford Review for June 2012.

Sir John Keegan, 1934-2012 Sir John Keegan passed away on 1 August 2012. He was 78 years old. Sir John was a distinguished military historian, author of more than twenty books, including his most famous, The Face of Battle (1976), but also A History of Warfare (1993), The First World War (1999), and The Second World War (1990). He was knighted in 2000. In 2001, Sir John described Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour as “the greatest English novel of the Second World War.” Sir John taught for twenty-five years at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He recognized “every one of [Waugh’s] characters” and testified “to the truthfulness of his depictions.” Sir John is survived by his wife and four children. His obituary is available at the Telegraph.

Two Out of 1001 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2008) lists Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

Bulgarian Helena Helena by Evelyn Waugh has been translated into Bulgarian by Boriana Djenabetska, published as Elena by Ednorog in 2012.

Discussion of Brideshead Revisited On 7 September 2012, Joseph Pearce discussed Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited with William Fahey, President of Thomas More College in Merrimack, New Hampshire, for two hours before the entire student body. For more details on the subjects, please go to the St Austin Review.

Llanddulas Revisited Duncan McLaren’s illustrated essay, “Llanabba cum Llanddulas,” has been posted at http://www.evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-14/index.html. McLaren describes his visit to North Wales, where Waugh taught school in 1925, and speculates about Waugh’s relationship with his colleague, Dick Young.

Evelyn Waugh Society The Evelyn Waugh Society has 132 members. To join, please visit http://evelynwaughsociety.org. The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List has 76 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 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.

End of Evelyn Waugh Studies, Vol. 43, No, 2 Home Page and Back Issues