Favorable If Grudging Assessment of Waugh's Accomplishments. at The

Evelyn Waugh Studies 37 favorable if grudging assessment of Waugh’s accomplishments. At the end of his memoirs, before he published his journals, Powell’s judgment of Waugh seems more balanced. Waugh seems never to have written an unkind word about Powell; he never forgot that Powell gave him his first break in publishing, at the lowest point in his career. Though he lived in Gloucestershire and West Somerset, Waugh formed a lasting attachment to East Somerset around Mells. As Frances Donaldson explains in her memoir Portrait of a Country Neighbour (London, 1967), Waugh was not comfortable with casual, neighborly relations. His friendship with the Donaldsons, who lived near Piers Court, was exceptional.[41] Laura Waugh told her that “it was an embarrassment to her not to be able to ask her neighbors to the house in the ordinary way, but it had been more of an embarrassment when she had done so. The last time she had asked some people to tea, she said Evelyn had risen at five o’clock in the afternoon and saying a formal good-bye had said that he must go and take a bath” (Portrait 13). Around Mells, he enjoyed old friends with whom he could relax. This neighborhood began to form after his meeting with Katharine Asquith in 1933. She was joined a few years later by Christopher Hollis, his friend from Oxford. Through Katharine and Hollis, Waugh met Conrad Russell, Hollis’s neighbor. From the 1920s, he knew Daphne Fielding and Olivia Plunket Greene, who landed at nearby Longleat. Anthony Powell, familiar from Oxford, moved to a village next to Mells in 1951. Waugh knew Ronald Knox from visits to Oxford in the 1930s. Waugh’s longest visits to Mells were in the middle 1930s prior to his second marriage. He became a semi-resident and wrote parts of three books there. Even after marriage, during the war, visits continued. These increased after the war and the arrival of Ronald Knox and Anthony Powell. Waugh visited the monks at nearby Downside Abbey, where he also had friends. Mells was the neighborhood he failed to find in other parts of the country, including London. After the 1920s, London meant primarily clubs and literary business. At Mells Waugh found relaxation and peace. Notes [22] Knox dedicated Enthusiasm (1950) to Waugh, who declared it the “greatest work of literary art of the century” (Hastings 586; Waugh, Essays 479). [23] Knox moved to Mells when the Actons settled on a farm in Rhodesia. Waugh describes a 1958 visit in A Tourist in Africa (1960). [24] After Knox’s death, Powell wrote to Waugh. During his short but enjoyable acquaintance with Knox, he was never conscious of stiffness and reserve mentioned in obituaries, and he “always found him extraordinarily charming and easy to get on with.” Powell would have enjoyed learning about sides of Knox described in Waugh’s biography. Letters, 24 Oct. 1957 and 12 Oct. 1959, Evelyn Waugh Papers, British Library, Manuscripts Department, Add. 81068. [25] Powell probably refers to the electric carillon programmed to play hymns. In Knox, Waugh comments that the neighboring bell tower filled the garden with sound “rather too often for .

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