EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 40, No.1 Spring 2009
The Three Bears (or The Third Teddy Bear) by James Morris
Aloysius, Archibald, Anonymous. Aloysius was Sebastian's teddy bear as we know, Archibald John Betjeman's.
Anonymous, like Harry Lime, will be revealed later, He's the Third Teddy Bear, Bear with me.
He was made much later than either Aloysius or Archie; Right in the middle of the Swinging Sixties in fact, As a warning.
He cost 'seven guineas', That was because he was bought 'over the West' In an expensive shop.
The character that bought it-- Didn't care much for the up-market shop he bought it from, Because he had a keen sense of class difference, of 'one's station in life'.
Speaking of which-- Who would be the most upper-crust of the English Catholic novelists of the last century? Waugh was certainly the crustiest but what about Graham Greene?
His father the headmaster of a public school, Where does that place him--Upper Class or Upper Middle Class? My author was working-class; his father a coal-miner, his mother a seamstress.
(His dreaming spires were the coal stacks around Bolton) He spent much of his working life driving a lorry. He spent his childhood in absolute poverty.
When we first meet Aloysius he is in a car; 'Sebastian's Teddy-bear sat at the wheel. We put him between us--"Take care he's not sick"'. The last time we see Anonymous he is in a car too; (after an abortion)
'And for some reason best known to herself she would keep that teddy bear on her knee.' Charles and Sebastian just setting out in Hardcastle’s car, full of life, Lily going home after the abortion; her belly rent of life.
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Anonymous is a big teddy bear in the film with Michael Caine, Which is strange--because he represents a very tiny little thing, An aborted baby;
'it don't half bring it home to you what you are and what you have done when you see a helpless little thing like that lying in front of you in your own hands'
Catholic novelists of the last century: Waugh, Greene, Muriel Spark then Anthony Burgess. How does Anthony Burgess slip into this fourth position? He wasn’t thought a Catholic novelist in my days of youth.
'Anti-Catholic novelist' would seem a more appropriate epithet. Are the ideas in A Clockwork Orange and Brideshead Revisited in any way comparable? Why isn't my author on the list?
'It went flying through the air and she made a grab with her two hands held upwards as though she was catching a child'. 'Just then it let out a little squeak
I'd forgot that it had this little squeak built in.' 'So Lily turns to me and puts her face right up against my chest. Pressing it into me.' 'Forgiving you might say'.
Forgiving each other for what they have done. The teddy between them, Such a tender scene really.
What do you think-- Are we Catholic critics remiss in our lack of appreciation of this fine author? Are we just a little lost in the fairy tale of Brideshead?
Are we indulging in this fairy tale to the detriment of other real-world scenarios? Are we not just a little bit enamored of the glamour? Do we not bask in the glow?
Anonymous, The teddy with no name, 'No names', 'no names' the abortionist says.
How he sustains the characterization of this loveable rogue with the things he does-- Specifically procuring an abortion for a respectable woman he has made pregnant (his one concern to get the price down)--is masterful.
How he manages to keep our sympathy with him is literary work of the the highest standard, achieving parity with Waugh and much greater than anything in Graham Greene.
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My theme isn't memory-- But maybe Aloysius was the forebear of Anonymous. He must have read Waugh.
He wrote many plays staged on the the West End. I cannot find one critical appraisal of him, Not one.
By the way Brideshead has recently been travestied in a new film, The same with this author's work. The original film is held to be a classic.
As I say, this author, this Catholic author, right, slap, bang in the middle of the Swinging Sixties, puts forth this salutary story as a warning of the consequences of a relaxation of sexual mores. He took the central Catholic issue of abortion and put it at the centre of his book.
He challenged the whole of England to take another look; 'I'm your Dad', 'This is my son, and I'm one of them that has done this to him', ‘Christ, help me', 'You know what you did, Alfie, you murdered him' ‘Yes, mate, you set it all up and for thirty nicker and you had him done to death'
It is now time to speak of Archie. Aloysius wrote to him; 'All this about "waiting in God's good time" is intolerably wet' 'The true Church is unique, indivisible and there is nothing remotely like it' Aloysius was bald in his statements, Archie was bald but wooly-headed.
A cruel blow for Archie was when Lady Penelope converted, Archie remained an Anglican bear, Stubbornly so.
A lot of teddy bears were made in Germany, Archie was probably made in Germany, He so wanted to be English.
Aloysius was neglected at the end-- 'just thrown there'. Archie was neglected until Philip Larkin rehabilitated him.
He looked terrible in his last television appearances; Frayed at the edges, Falling apart.
On second thought maybe I’m being too harsh. He stood alone against Modernism in Architecture and Poetry in the 1940s, 1950s. He should be held in high esteem for that.
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My brother met Peter Bull (the owner of Delicatessen). He also met Auberon Waugh on a trip to Lourdes. More of him later.
Waugh pictured himself as a Teddy Boy in a response to a Priestley attack. Yes, I can seen him--brothel creepers on, bicycle chain in hand, Hair swept back.
Alfie is similar to Sebastian; attractive, funny, charming. There is a fundamental difference though; Sebastian--'all I want to be is happy'. Alfie; 'I just want to see everybody happy'.
He is really more like Lady Celia-- 'Why miss an opportunity to give pleasure'
Incidentally, Lady Celia was played by Jane Asher in the television series. She played Annie in the classic film version. She seems only to do cookery programmes now. Her farewell words to Alfie--'don’t let your custard spoil'.
Julia Foster was in the film. She made her name in Half-a-Sixpence, Gilda?
Ruby was played by Shelley Winters. She played Lolita's mum. Her final words to him--'he's younger than you are'.
So many connections; Eleanor Bron the doctor. Bron Waugh, Evelyn's son.
So much to remember-- His handling of sequential time is as sure-footed as Evelyn Waugh, The whole book moves towards the abortion scene climax.
The development of Alfie's understanding (his learning curve) is beautifully obviated to keep his character intact.
It never falters. It is more perfect than Brideshead actually. It's a masterpiece of story-telling, And plain truth-telling of Shakespearean intensity.
It is now time to speak of my own family. Like the Flyte family we were; equally spaced (two elder boys, two younger girls) the same traits.
John 1) Such a difficult relationship with my father. file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
2) He was a collector of Superman comics (Bridey's matchboxes?) 3) 'There was no spark of contemporary life about him', his fashion sense nil. 4) A preternatural understanding of the Faith from day one.
Sebastian? That would be me of course. Not the 'arresting beauty' I hasten to add. But certainly 'in love with his own childhood' and the running away. I said; 'I suffered a happy childhood in a close family' 'Suffered?' 'Yes' Bemused like Hooper.
Lady Julia; no that doesn't work because Mary's gone against the Church. Or rather--'I'm on my own spiritual journey' I once asked her--'but when are you going to arrive?'
No, Barbara, for her beauty and the sadness in her eyes 'the completion of her beauty' and the clinging to the Faith in crisis.
Mary's Cordelia instead, Practical like her (she's a nurse) I am waiting for a twitch upon the tread.
They write similarly; 'Sip, sip, sip, like a dowager all day long' 'I watched Annie scrub, scrub, scrub.'
Alfie opines; 'I do believe anything too cold paralyses the taste buds' Charles--'is the soda iced too?'
Gilda is like Lady Marchmain-- 'She had a funny way of smiling, and you could never tell if she was taking the mickey' See, it's the same sensibility.
Ruby's flat is an exact description of the interior of the luxury liner. The same vulgarity, Qualitatively.
Ruby's flat could almost be one of the penthouses Marchmain House was turned into. 'I wouldn't be at all surprised' Alfie adds (in my mind)
Both writers concern themselves with cellophane; ‘The roses in cellophanes’ Charles and Julia reminisce, Lady Celia--'caressed with her finger tips the cellophane'
Alfie rejects his roses in cellophane (for Ruby) Because 'that stuff always reminds me of funerals' The feel is the same.
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So many connections; Alec Waugh lived here in Bangkok. He wrote a book about it; The Story of a City.
Now I find out, Aloysius is here! 'Evelyn Paugh' his new name. In the possession of the King of Thailand. Well, that's only fair. He was always a very special teddy bear.
The last memories; now remember it is not the original stage play I am referring to here But the book produced after the popularity of the film.
Maybe that is the reason why it has been overlooked. It was published in 1966 The year of Waugh's death.
If I could only slip between these two writers, Squeeze between them like a teddy bear, Secure myself there as a Catholic writer.
Catholic writer 'detestable term' according to Greene. Well, I would love to be known a Catholic writer.
'plot is character' Shows Greene was never much interested in characterizing thought. Bill Naughton's characterization is of a deeper sort.
I would put him on a par with Waugh for sheer artistic achievement. He should be joint first on the list of Catholic novelists with Waugh. His work is of the same parity wisdom-wise.
The last broken sentence, Well, the penultimate sentence of his book; 'Alfie, you're a real little Punchinello'.
The “Red-Knee’d” Officer: Evelyn Waugh’s Cameo Appearance in Ferdinand Mount’s Novel, The Man Who Rode Ampersand (1975) by Jeffrey A. Manley
Ferdinand Mount has worked as a journalist, a non-career civil servant, a political consultant to the Conservative Party, and editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He has also written
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seventeen books, including eleven novels. The second novel is entitled The Man Who Rode Ampersand, published in 1975. It is based on the life of his father, Robin Mount (1907-1969), educated at Eton and Oxford (Magdalen) in the same generation as Evelyn Waugh. Ferdinand is also the nephew of Anthony Powell, who was married to the sister (Violet Pakenham) of Mount’s mother (Julia Pakenham). Ampersand is the narrative of the life of Harry Cotton by his son Aldous. The boyhood and early careers of Aldous and Harry sound very much like those of Ferdinand and his father Robin. Mount’s memoir, Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes (2008), is heavily influenced by Powell and Waugh, laden with ironic, gossipy comic narrative and dialogue. Secondary characters might have stepped out of the writings of Powell or Waugh. Mount has not sought to recreate their style, but he felt them looking over his shoulder as he wrote.[1] Ampersand includes chapters consisting of first-person narratives by Aldous describing his father’s adult life in roughly chronological order. These are interspersed with titled, un- numbered vignettes, more detailed third-person narratives describing incidents in his father’s life as written by Aldous. These subchapters begin with Harry’s life as a jockey in the 1920s and 1930s: he associates with jockeys, trainers, and touts, as well as wealthy horse owners and retainers who hang about the race tracks. Harry drifts into work as a barkeeper at a London venue known as the Pyjama Club (probably based on the Gargoyle Club) where he comes into contact with London’s bohemian culture. He enters the army at the beginning of World War II, the basis for the last series of vignettes, when he encounters Waugh. In the army, Harry starts as an officer in the Wessex Light Infantry. Brief descriptions of training are reminiscent of early chapters in the war novels of Waugh and Powell, where their own military training is recounted in fictional form. When a posting seeks volunteers for “special services,” Harry immediately signs on. He and Corporal Quill, a professional magician, are the only volunteers, and their eagerness to join the special services is treated with utter disdain by their commanding officer. Special service turns out to be the Commandos: Waugh and the hero of his war trilogy, Guy Crouchback, serve in the same organization. In his Diaries, Waugh refers to his unit as the “Special Service Battalion” (487). The vignette entitled “Mussolini’s Tits” opens with Harry and Cpl. Quill in North Africa making their way across the desert to report for duty. As they approach camp, a “small and rather fat soldier” sits on a jerry can and reads John Keats. Wearing a Panama hat, with the butt of a cigar between his teeth, he has “very red knees.” Harry sends Quill to see if the soldier needs a lift. Quill is told in a “precise and not unmelodious voice” to go away. He rejoins Harry, who remarks, "Rude fellow. Anyone we know?" Quill responds, “Wigg, Wogg, some name like that, sir. He writes books. I remember him from the training school.” “Before my time, I think,” says Harry (Ampersand 194).[2] Harry and Quill are sent to capture two small hills held by Italian soldiers, the source of the subchapter’s title. Harry and the corporal are assigned to separate groups. Harry’s succeeds in taking one of the hills, and he enjoys the elation of victory. His unit succeeds with negligible casualties, but then he sees the body of Quill, who died in action, and Harry immediately feels let down. As Harry is transported back to the British camp, he begins spitting up blood. Sent to an Army hospital, he is diagnosed with TB. This skirmish in the desert appears to be fictional. Mount’s memoirs identify Bardia as the only combat in which his father took part before TB caught up with him. The Bardia raid involved an amphibious landing on beaches, not a desert attack on two small hills. Robin Mount has left an interesting description of the Bardia raid, but it does not correspond to the action at Mussolini’s Tits, except that his troops escaped without a single casualty after destroying four enemy gun positions on the coast.[3] Waugh also took part in the raid on Bardia, which he describes as a fiasco.[4] The Bardia raid took place before the defense of Crete, in which Waugh also took part. By then, Harry was out of action. With no explanation, the “small man with red knees” visits Harry in the hospital. He offers Harry his volume of Keats: “I thought the gift appropriate for your condition, although I trust that your disease will not run the same unfortunate course as the poet’s.” He begins to report the gossip from London: file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
His talk animated a world which Harry knew mostly at second hand, whose edges he had barely touched: cocktails, plate-glass, titled transvestites, Roumanian exiles, Bugattis, suicides and religious conversions. It was hard and bright and bitter, very modern and very tragic…. Harry listened with delight to the stylish phrases, their old-fashioned syntax enlivened by twenties slang dropped into place by inverted commas as neat as pincers. The small man’s voice had the same quality; behind the public man opening a garden fête, there lurked a small boy pulling at his coat-tails and relieving himself into the flower-beds. (Ampersand 199)
According to the small man, Pip Parrott “has been mentioned in despatches again. Veronica is very much distressed. She said it was too boring and why couldn’t they mention someone else for a change” (Ampersand 199). Parrott is described as a “war hero, antique dealer, and last of the Bright Young Things” (Ampersand 14). Parrott served in the Royal Engineers: “despatches twice, wounded, prisoner of war, escaped.” He is also said to have “stood out in a sappers’ mess” (Ampersand 23). Veronica is a mystery in Mount’s novel; there is a character by that name in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. During his visit, the small man congratulates Harry on the success of his mission and urges him to claim the scalps he has collected: “It is in the claiming of scalps that the art of the war hero lies. His lines of communication run directly to the popular newspapers.” When Harry asks whether his own war exploits have met with success, the small man launches into a description of what is obviously the Crete debacle:
Alas, there were no scalps to be claimed, except our own. Ours was a freak show, a lusus naturae of the most extreme variety. Prodigies of cowardice and stupidity were performed, the enterprise was aborted as soon as conceived. The island should never have been attacked, if attacked not held, if held not left without reinforcements or air cover. Nothing, however, will be said. The villains will be propelled upstairs. The boobies will write their memoirs. It is clear to me now, if it had not been clear before, that the people who will do well out of this war will be not hard-faced men but soft-faced trimmers…. There is no place here for reckless misanthropes of the old school.
When Harry asks if he considers himself a misanthrope, the small man responds, “I do not find it easy to be nice.” The interview is concluded by the medical officer, who tells Harry that he will be returned home on a hospital ship, the SS Cythera, which will proceed “the long way round” (Ampersand 200). The small man with red knees disappears from the story.[5] It seems unlikely that Harry would have encountered Waugh in the circumstances described in the novel. Why would Waugh make the trip to the hospital to deliver a book to another officer he doesn’t even know and has encountered only fleetingly in the desert? It seems odd that the little man with red knees should have even recognized Harry, but he also finds him in the hospital. On the other hand, Harry’s reading includes Jane Austen, Thackeray, Huxley,[6] and H. G. Wells, so he would almost certainly have been aware of Waugh’s novels, even if he hadn’t read them. Harry would surely have identified the rude little man with red knees, especially since Quill knew him to be a writer, even if he did get his name wrong. An acquaintance between Waugh and Harry’s model, Robin Mount, did exist, and meetings like those described in the novel may well have taken place in real life. The hospital visit to Harry’s original sounds very much like something Waugh might have done. In his memoirs Mount describes his father’s volunteering for “hazardous special duties,” just as Harry does in the novel. He describes the Commandos as “that motley crew of buccaneers, blowhards and three-bottle men who tumbled out of White’s Club and on to the night train.” In addition to Waugh, they included Randolph Churchill, Harry and John Stavordale, Robin Campbell and their commanding officer Robert Laycock (“although thirtyish like the rest of them … quieter and more thoughtful than the others.”) During training in Scotland, Robin
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Mount (contrary to orders) invited his wife to stay for a weekend in a local hotel, where the Colonel had also smuggled his mistress. Based on the timing, Ferdinand Mount attributes the conception of his sister to the presence of the Colonel’s mistress. His sister was born nine months later, during her father’s homeward journey (Cold Cream 119-20; see note 6). That episode sounds like Waugh’s recollections of training in his Diaries (487-89). The presence of officers’ wives during Commando training seems to have been commonplace, although Mrs. Waugh was not among them, since she was about to give birth to their third child. According to Waugh’s Diaries, he was in 8 Commando. Mount says that his father Robin was in 7 Commando. Both were under Laycock’s command. Waugh and Robin Mount traveled to Egypt on different ships (the Glenroy and the Glengyle, respectively) but nevertheless managed to meet each other. In his published letters, Waugh identifies Robin Mount as one of the persons he knows from the other ship and meets in port: “Robin is very gay & amusing. He has found his own level and now plays cards with me.”[7] Waugh’s Diaries include a brief encounter between Waugh and Ferdinand Mount. In 1961 Waugh and his wife visited Anthony and Violet Powell in Somerset, just after the death of Edward Longford, brother of both Ferdinand’s mother and Powell’s wife. Waugh feared that the family would be in mourning but instead found levity. Frank Longford was making phone calls trying to encourage attendance at his brother Edward’s funeral and was said by Waugh to have “roped in two hired mourners—Tristram Powell and young Mount, both from Oxford.” Waugh seems to have remembered Ferdinand’s father, Robin.[8] Although Waugh has been accused of being primarily interested in the “Honourables” and superior officers, he seems to have enjoyed Robin Mount’s company.[9] Ferdinand Mount doesn’t mention in his memoirs any meeting between his father or himself and Waugh.[10] However, Robin may have told his son of his acquaintance with a literary celebrity and passed on recollections of “a small, not entirely rude man with red knees.”
Notes [1] Ampersand is the first of six novels recounting the life of Aldous (“Gus”) Cotton. Mount later named these A Chronicle of Modern Twilight after the much longer and more lugubrious novel cycle of Henry Williamson, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Only two of these novels (including Ampersand) seem to have found a publisher in the USA and many are now out of print. Waugh fans would find much to like in them. [2] Page references are to the London paperback reprint published in 2001. [3] R. F. Mount, letter to Mr. Burford, 13 February 1942, Papers of F. R. J. Nicholls 78/1/1, “Accounts of Commando Operations,” Imperial War Museum, London. Robin Mount describes their operation as having taken place “in a little cove—Sollum [which] to one side was held by Germans and on the other side were Germans and Italians investing Tobruk.” They climbed 300-foot cliffs and destroyed four gun emplacements “which had been troubling our Navy.” His troops gained their objective without casualties, as in the attack on Mussolini’s Tits. I am indebted to Donat Gallagher for this information about the Bardia raid. Robin Mount’s letter appears in the papers of Capt. Nicholls, who may be the “Nic” described by Ferdinand Mount as his father’s “best friend in the Army” (Cold Cream 119). He records his father’s description of Nic’s success in the Bardia raid and reports that he was later killed, though he is unaware of Nic’s full name (Cold Cream 123, 125). Capt. Nicholls performed well in the evacuation of Commandos from Crete and was later killed in action in Burma. [4] Diaries 495-96, 517; see also “Commando Raid on Bardia” (1941), reprinted in Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London, 1983) 263-68. [5] In a later novel, The Selkirk Strip (London, 1987) Mount imagines Waugh’s description of the fictitious British territory, the Selkirk Strip (“… this is a dreadful place. The mosquitoes live longer than the natives who are mostly sodomites.”) Descriptions by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene are also imagined (29). [6] Aldous is so named because Harry was reading Brave New World on the voyage home from the front when he received a telegram announcing his son’s birth (Ampersand 202-04). This incident is based on the naming of Ferdinand’s sister, Frances Leone. The telegram announcing file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
her birth reached Robin on the day his hospital ship from North Africa docked off Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1941 (Cold Cream 125). [7] Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (London, 1980), 150. Waugh may be referring to Robin Campbell rather than Robin Mount. See Letters 146-47, n. 9. The editor seems to have assumed that “Robin” is Mount. [8] Diaries 780-81. Waugh may also have met Ferdinand at Oxford where he was a friend of Waugh’s son Auberon. See Cold Cream 182-84 and Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? (London, 1991), 129-30, where each expresses fairly high regard for the other. [9] Robin Mount came from a family of “Honourables” but missed being a Baronet by a few years, the title having descended to his elder brother Sir William. Sir William had no male heirs, so upon his death, the title descended to Ferdinand. The large estate at Wasing Place, Berkshire, passed to the eldest of Sir William’s three daughters, Lady Dugdale, in 1994 and is now held in a family trust. [10] Waugh’s diaries were published in 1976 and his letters in 1980, after publication of Ampersand. In his memoirs Ferdinand recounts many meetings with celebrities, but he does not mention any encounter with Waugh.
Latin America: Ignorance and Irony in The Loved One by 0800006408
Aimée Thanatogenos “spoke the tongue of Los Angeles” (134), but not the tongue of the angels. That is the crux of The Loved One (1948), Evelyn Waugh’s satiric novella of American funerary customs. “With a name like that” (148), she is doomed from the beginning: she is the “death-spawned loved one,” but she is deaf to the European tongues in which her doom is pronounced. European names occur constantly in the novella—Heinkel, Bogolov, Medici—but those who bear them are cut off from their ancestral roots, “waifs and strays” (87-88) in a land of the lowest common denominator:
“I’ve just found a Mr. Medici in my office.” “Why, yes, Frank. Only he says it ‘Medissy,’ like that; how you said it kinda sounds like a wop …” (30)
Like a knowledge of Italian pronunciation, Catholicism is not a common denominator, and its angelic tongue, Latin, is meaningless in the ears of good Americans. A grieving Mrs. Theodora Heinkel rings Dennis Barlow, the novella’s cynical British anti-hero, to arrange the funeral of her pet Sealyham. Her address is “207 Via Dolorosa” (17), on a street named for the “sorrowful way” Christ trod to crucifixion. Mrs. Heinkel grieves for her dog but not for her God, and she is deaf to the blasphemy of the white dove that will be released to symbolize her Sealyham’s soul “at the moment of committal” (21; cf. Matthew 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32). When Dennis collects the dog’s cadaver, he has to translate Latin into English for Mr. Heinkel:
“I have our brochure here setting out our service. Were you thinking of interment or incineration? “Pardon me?” “Buried or burned?” “Burned, I guess.” (20)
A little later, arranging the funeral of his self-strangulated mentor at Whispering Glades, the model for his pets’ cemetery, Dennis talks with a “Mortuary Hostess” to the strains of the “Hindu Love Song”:
“Can I help you in any way?”
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“I came to arrange about a funeral.” “Is it for yourself?” “Certainly not. Do I look so moribund?” “Pardon me?” “Do I look as if I were about to die?” (42)
He has already heard a Mrs. Bogolov—Bog is the Russian word for “God”—being informed that Wilbur Kenworthy, the fatuous “Dreamer” of Whispering Glades, “does not approve of wreaths or crosses” (41). Whispering Glades is an attempt to deny the dirt, ugliness and pain that accompany death. The cross is a supreme symbol of death’s horror for materialists like Kenworthy, who refuse to accept its true significance. Hence the ironic double entendre of a parenthesis in chapter five: “After consultation the Cricket Club’s fine trophy in the shape of cross bats and wickets had been admitted. Dr. Kenworthy had himself given judgement; the trophy was essentially a reminder of life not of death; that was the crux” (73). A crux is literally a cross, which for Christians is essentially a reminder of life not of death. Blind to this symbolism, deaf to the Christian message, Kenworthy’s disciple Aimée seeks in vain for a solution to her wooing by the perfidious but attractive Dennis and the ethical but un-athletic Mr. Joyboy, Whispering Glades’ chief mortician and the “one mediating logos between Dr. Kenworthy and common humanity” (143). The Guru Brahmin, an agony uncle to whom she has repeatedly turned for advice, proves as fake as everything else in her world. The “Hindu Love Song” prefigures her first meeting with Dennis; the Hindu sage Mr. Slump drunkenly prompts her to seek the arms of “the deity she served” (150), whose name she has borne since birth. Aimée is self-slain on the altar of Thanatos and incinerated in an animals’ oven where Dennis has crushed the “horned skull” of a goat (104). This fall is foreseen by Dennis at their first meeting: “the girl who now entered was unique. Not indefinably; the appropriate distinguishing epithet leapt to Dennis’s mind the moment he saw her: sole Eve in a bustling hygienic Eden, this girl was a decadent” (54). A “decadent” is literally one who falls, and Aimée is thus a female counterpart of the doomed protagonist of A Handful of Dust (1934), Tony Last, whose parallel deafness and blindness are conveyed with the same etymologic irony. En route to South America and his hopeless quest for a lost city, Tony forgoes the chance to visit Trinidad—literally the island of the Trinity and christened by the same Catholic race who founded Los Angeles, city of the angels. Like A Handful of Dust, The Loved One describes a living nightmare from which there was nevertheless, in Waugh’s view, an ever-present means of escape: flight to “Latin America,” the asylum of Catholicism and its tongue of angels.
Works Cited Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One. 1948. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.
Editor's Note: 0800006408 is also known as Stephen Whittle, a New Zealander held under an alleged immigration offense in Santa Ana Jail, Orange County, California. He passes his time reading, meditating, and searching his meals for pâté de foie gras.
Reviews
Telling It Like It Wasn’t Brideshead Revisited, dir. Julian Jarrold. Writ. Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock. Ecosse Films, 2008. Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, James Cook University.
In 1963 a kindly Professor of English ignored prevailing opinion that Waugh was “too lightweight for serious study,” listened to my contention that Waugh’s lightness plumbed interesting depths and approved my proposal to write a dissertation on Brideshead Revisited. Some days later a normally businesslike acquaintance asked about my topic; in return I asked file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
whether she had read the novel. Uneasy silence followed. Then, with un-businesslike shyness she replied: “Thirty-seven times. I was an alcoholic, and I feel so close to Sebastian that I can’t stop reading the book.” Nor is the novel addictive only to alcoholics. With help from Gore Vidal, Sebastian became a cult figure among Gays, and Queer critics now regularly configure Gay Sebastian as the victim of Straight Charles’s ruthless heterosexuality, a viewpoint reflected in the new film of the novel. Many general readers become hooked on the “amor and glamour” of the high-life tale of adultery and passion. Some Catholics, who find the institutional Church unattractive but the faith it holds compelling, deeply empathize with Charles Ryder’s reluctant steps to belief. In short, like no other Waugh novel but like many bestsellers, Brideshead Revisited has a power to seize—and to repel—the imagination of widely different audiences. A hint of an explanation for this “daemonic” quality might be gained from the theory, once popular, now forgotten, that saw fiction as a symbolic expression of tensions within a writer’s life. In 1943 Waugh was a member of the Special Services Brigade HQ and suffered a deeply humiliating blow. His Brigadier, a close friend, left him behind (with a promise of being sent for) when the unit departed for the invasion of Italy. Then, in the Brigadier’s absence, his Deputy, Lord Lovat, a distinguished soldier but a notoriously vindictive prima donna, forced Waugh to resign “for the Brigade’s good.” Waugh then proved virtually unemployable. In the public sphere, Marxism seemed to pervade all areas of public policy, and the Russian Alliance was set to change the shape of Europe. In these deeply distressing circumstances Waugh obtained leave from the Army to write Brideshead Revisited. Reaction against personal and public pain (a more complex reaction than mere “wish fulfillment”) goes some way to account for the strange (to Waugh) “zest” that possessed him while writing; the consequent “gaudiness” of the romance; the “more-brilliant-than-reality” characters; the “rhetorical and ornamental” language; the plethora of extended poetic metaphors and descriptions of nature; and the mystique surrounding what Waugh then saw as the “doomed” English upper classes. Normally hyper-self critical, Waugh, as his letters show, was at first inordinately proud of Brideshead. But he soon fell out of love with it. Unconditional Surrender contains a description of Ludovic’s novel, The Death Wish, clearly meant to send up the “glitter” and “melancholy” of Waugh’s own Brideshead Revisited. Moreover, admirers of Ludovic’s/Waugh’s earlier work “would not have recognized the authorship of this book.” In 1959 Waugh published a recension of Brideshead that cut the more luxuriant passages and toned down many others. Without mentioning the personal distress that might have better accounted for it, the Preface explains the lushness of the novel as a reaction against various wartime privations, and it offers Brideshead Revisited as “a souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensibly deals.” If the daemonic qualities of Brideshead allow it to enthrall or repel a variety of audiences, and to inspire love that is sometimes followed by disgust, filmmakers must be allowed the freedom to dramatize whatever in the novel strikes them most forcefully. But does that mean that Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies, who created the recent film, were justified in producing the version they did? Many good judges think not. But it does not pay to be too precious about film versions of much-loved novels, as Evelyn Waugh, a supremely professional novelist and a film buff, would have been the first to point out. Believing silent film “the one vital art of the century,” Waugh made extensive use of its then revolutionary narrative techniques in his early novels. He also served for a time as a judge on the Daily Express’s Film Tribunal, which nominated the best film of the year; and the memoranda he wrote for the filmmakers of Scoop and Brideshead Revisited reveal a clear grasp of the differences between the art of the novel and the art of film. Waugh wrote to Graham Greene, who had been asked for a screenplay: “Please don’t try and get out of Brideshead. I am sure you can make a fine film of it. Don’t think I shall be cantankerous. I am cantankerous but not about that sort of thing—about cooking and theology and clothes and grammar and dogs.”
On the other hand, in “Why Hollywood is a Term of Disparagement,” Waugh savagely lampoons Hollywood studio writers for regularly “obliterating” every “individual quality, good or bad, that has made [a novel] remarkable.” Admittedly, he was extremely angry when he file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
wrote those words. MGM, on the advice of the Director of the Hollywood Production Code, Joseph Breen, had just ruled out a film of Brideshead because adultery and divorce were prominent in the plot and could not be removed without destroying the essence of the story. Waugh wrote to a friend, Douglas Woodruff: “The Catholic dominated board of censorship has forbidden the filming of ‘Brideshead’ … The letter from Mr Breen refusing a licence was very funny.” If I object to the current film titled Brideshead Revisited, it is primarily because the filmmakers’ intent was not to condense, cut and add so as to present in a short film an interpretation of what is explicit or implicit in a long novel. Rather, these filmmakers have retained the novel’s basic structure, characters and splendid scenes—Oxford, Castle Howard/Brideshead Castle, Venice—so there is still much to enjoy; but it overlays the bases with a view of Roman Catholicism and English society that they believe reverses Evelyn Waugh’s. As Andrew Davies, the original writer, frankly explains: “[The film] is written from the point of view of someone who does not believe in the religious themes as Waugh did. If God can be said to exist in my version, he would be the villain.” Davies should be delighted to hear of a conversation told me by a friend. His companion hated the dying Lord Marchmain crossing himself as a sign of reconciliation because it meant “the bad guys won.” The Brideshead Revisited filmmakers can correctly claim that they follow Waugh’s intentions (expressed in the memorandum he wrote for the guidance of MGM) in so far as they give the religious theme prominence. They also make a major feature of Lady Marchmain’s role in the destruction of her husband and children and her distress at their defection from their faith. In the Preface to the 1959 recension, Waugh “makes no apology” for the novel’s “presumptuously large theme,” which he describes as “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.” “Grace,” his memorandum on the proposed film explains, is “the act of love by which God calls souls to himself”; and, like many Catholic novelists of that time, Waugh was far more fascinated with the operation of divine grace on sinners than he was with its operation on the pious. Thus, the basic structure of the novel and the film sees the wayward Lord Marchmain, Sebastian and Julia abandoning their religion and later, each in a different way, being “called” back to it. Observing the effects of their religion on Sebastian and Julia, which entail painful consequences both for them and for himself, Charles learns that Christianity is not a set of “quaint observances” but the expression of a “coherent philosophic system and intransigent historical claims.” In the novel he becomes a Catholic and is cheered by the sanctuary lamp still burning at Brideshead Castle; the film leaves him painfully ambivalent. Part One of the novel and the film reveals Lady Marchmain’s inability to retain her husband, who has fled from her (and the religious demands she mediates) to live with a mistress in Venice. So, too, she loses Sebastian, who flees her (and the imperatives she represents) to live in a homosexual underworld. Julia’s role, however, is radically and inexplicably altered. In the novel, Julia defies her mother, her extended family and attendant clergy to marry the divorced and entirely unsuitable Rex Mottram outside the Church. In the film, in what seems to me an unjustifiable lapse from dramatic sanity, Julia marries Rex at her mother’s behest because he is a Catholic and not the “atheist” Charles Ryder. Nonetheless, Waugh’s summary holds: “The failure of Lady Marchmain is complete.” All through her life, she has had the sympathy of everyone “except those she loved”; and those she loved hated her. In Part Two of the novel, “grace” (a.k.a. “a twitch upon the thread”) brings all three “heathens” back to God after Lady Marchmain’s death. Sebastian becomes “very religious” and informally attached to a monastery; he is made “holy” by suffering. Lord Marchmain makes a death-bed repentance. And Julia, although divorced and longing to marry Charles as soon as he is free, refuses for reasons of conscience to marry him. So goes the novel. In the film, Emma Thompson gives a striking performance as Lady Marchmain, but, as she explained in an interview, she contrived a character strategically skewed from that in the novel. In Waugh’s novel, because of her great charm, the plovers, as Sebastian says, “always lay early for Mummy.” In the film, the plovers lay early because “You would too if you knew my mother.” Waugh’s Teresa Marchmain is a spider mother and femme fatale whose weapons are charm, tact and gentle irony. In the film she becomes a stony-faced enforcer, a cold bigot. file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
Cara, Lord Marchmain’s mistress, says of Lady Marchmain in the novel that she “is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way.” In the film Cara (superbly acted by Greta Scacchi) crudely says that Lady Marchmain has “suffocated her husband and children. Her God has done that to her.” In short, Andrew Davies’s and Emma Thompson’s Lady Marchmain is the principal human agent of the film’s real villain, viz. God. Her destructive power is formidable. The whimsically charming Sebastian, who craves only happiness and cannot sustain the demands of his religion (nor of Charles’s betrayal of their love), disintegrates through alcoholism and illness into something approaching an Oxford Street derelict. Julia’s downward path in the film is radically different from that in the novel. When she, Sebastian and Charles visit Venice, Charles falls in love with her and they are found out by Sebastian, with grave consequences for Sebastian. Later, she is compelled to marry the wildly unsuitable Rex “because he is a Catholic” and not an “atheist” like Charles. Then, on the point of divorcing Rex and marrying Charles, Julia is deterred, not by recalling the nursery teaching of Jesus suffering for sins or the burdens her mother carried to her grave, but by the strident voice of Mummy incessantly accusing “wicked little Julia.” The expansion of Julia’s role, and the changes to it, were apparently designed to demonstrate more forcefully the destruction wrought by religion on human happiness. Unhappily, the changes lead to inextricable confusion. Many years ago, Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote a sustained piece of invective seeking to demolish any credibility the politically incorrect Brideshead Revisited might have. A rhetorical (but not logical) masterpiece, the article averred that the novel was not about the love of God: the characters were really sanctified by birth and money. Later critics, some distinguished, expanded this notion, making Julia “not just the woman that Charles was in love with” but also the symbol “of Brideshead Castle and all its treasure”; that is to say, Charles really wants the house more than the woman. The film embraces this dubious theory and dramatizes it with a crudity that would make O’Brien wince. In the film, Charles Ryder appears as a “hungry” go- getter. Anthony Blanche, in the novel Charles’s artistic conscience and in the film his social mentor as well, had thought Charles the Flytes’ sacrificial lamb; now, the affair with Julia convinces him that it is Charles who is hunting the Flytes: “There’s no end to your hunger, is there, Charles?” In attempting “to settle things” with Julia’s husband Rex, Julia’s lover Charles is induced to “buy” Julia (and, if I heard right, “an annulment”) from Rex, the price being two of his “jungle pics.” This must be one of the silliest scenes in the history of film, perhaps designed only to prove that the writer knew Vile Bodies, in which stony-broke Adam sells Nina to Ginger for the price of a pressing hotel bill. A more plausible reason may be that, with Rex validly married to Julia in the eyes of the Catholic Church, some means of prizing her away from Rex other than civil divorce has to be found. Hence Rex’s “selling” Julia to Charles with an annulment thrown in; and, included in the package, Brideshead Castle, which Rex doesn’t own and which is still the inheritance of Bridey, Lord Marchmain’s eldest son. No matter how absurd, the scene convicts Charles of being so “hungry” for Brideshead Castle that he will endure any humiliation to get it. Allowing Julia to overhear the conversation diminishes Charles in her eyes and gives her a non-religious reason for not marrying him. The film is very much about class. In the novel, the first meeting between Charles and the grandly aristocratic Sebastian is a quiet lunch involving Anthony Blanche and three “mild, elegant, detached” and exquisitely “polite” Etonians. The film substitutes a party that includes the aristocratic Boy Mulcaster and other Rowdies, who snobbishly question Charles about his school, boorishly hector him about art and generally treat him as an outsider. This theme is developed in more extreme form when Charles first has dinner at Brideshead Castle. The only man in “flannels” instead of a dinner jacket, he is made uneasy on that account; and when he reveals that he lives at Paddington, he is offensively mocked about trains. Yet in the novel Charles comes from an educated middle-class family of substantial means (in the manuscript the Ryders are “quite rich” and in Debrett's, which Sebastian has looked up). Charles enjoys an allowance of £550 (not one hundred as in the film), double what is normal and much of it spent on Sebastian. Nor does he live in Paddington, as in the film, but in Hyde Park Gardens, which overlooks the Park and is in Bayswater; not a smart address, but a solidly comfortable one, a fitting locale for his father’s very valuable collection of antiquities. What conceivable purpose file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
does the film hope to serve by reducing Charles’s social standing? Depicting the Marchmains and their ilk as snobbish and rude and Charles as so poor and “hungry” that he is willing to endure any snub at their hands in order to secure the Castle is presumably meant to be a brave shot in the class war. Davies and his chums no doubt seek to prove to the legion of quality journalists, critics and academics who despise Brideshead Revisited and loathe Evelyn Waugh that the film is “not enamoured of all that Oxford snobbery” and knows how to put Waugh in his place. Non-residents of the British Isles tend to find a class war waged against a long defeated enemy rather puzzling. The class and religious wars are conducted in dialogue so banal as to be puzzling. The constant use of “atheist” to stigmatize Charles, a self-described “agnostic” but in reality a conventionally educated Englishman with no interest in religion, illustrates a policy of stating everything in crudely over-simplified terms. “It is our duty as Catholics to do all in our power to save those we love from themselves.” A Presbyterian might reject this as a call to a work of supererogation, but Catholics, no matter how old, will wonder why they have never heard of it. The real wonder is that, with countless talented writers in Britain who share the film’s point of view on class and religion, no one could be found to produce reasonably competent dialogue. A very black mark indeed must go to the “You-haven’t-changed-a-bit,” “Neither-have-you!” routine that debases the moment when a much grimmer Charles meets a much sadder Julia after many years apart. Would I have enjoyed this film if I’d not read the novel? It is difficult to speculate because, as in reading a translation, the echoes are always there. But I am happy to say that there is much to enjoy: a generally fine cast, some magnificent photography, much of Waugh’s story remaining and odd snatches of his original dialogue. Even the death-bed scene achieves genuine tension. Moreover, the difficulties of condensing Brideshead into a feature-length film are legion. It is a first-person narrative that does not tell the story of the observer-narrator Charles (as Robinson Crusoe tells the story of Robinson) but relates the history of a complex family and their friends. It therefore has to have a backwards-and-forwards chronology and multiple points of view that do not easily translate into a straightforward narrative. Moreover, multiple points of view mean that someone will inevitably say something somewhere supportive of almost any reading. What I object to is the systematic attempt to impose an alien point of view on an existing novel. The procedures of the Brideshead team (and that of course has been a very fluid entity) seem to me akin to that of a filmmaker declaring of George Orwell’s 1984: “I do not believe in liberal anti-authoritarian values as Orwell did. I shall therefore represent Winston Smith as a dangerous dissident and the authorities who suppress him as bravely defending the Revolution. The villain in the film will be the enemy of society, Liberalism.” While some people sincerely believe the political stance expressed here, I suggest that a film along those lines, however successful cinematically, will not be an adaptation of Orwell’s novel so much as a politically motivated attack on Orwell’s beliefs. So too with the current Brideshead. It seems that the Brideshead team decided to make a film out of a novel they despised in order to attack the opinions of an author they loathed; this led them to suppress Waugh’s point of view and substitute invented material expressing their own opinions and prejudices. How very like they are to Mr Joseph Breen, the Catholic censor, in suppressing material that they, no doubt sincerely, believe harmful to the general public. But how much less wise than Breen they are in failing to realize that eliminating elements integral to a story and substituting more “correct” opinions will obliterate the very qualities that made the novel remarkable in the first place.
Editor’s Note: A version of this review appeared in Quadrant.
Travesty by James Morris
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Oh, they filmed it there as well. Not even the imagination, to find a new location.
Castle Howard Revisited, by the cameras. Good for business anyway.
I came upon it visiting the website, I thought I might take a visit. Now I'm not so sure.
Anyway, a photograph of them sitting there, In one of the rooms, Charles and Sebastian as it were.
Usurpers.
Just About Right Scoop. BBC Radio 4, 15 & 22 February 2009. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley.
Radio 4 broadcast a two-part, two-hour production of Scoop. The script was written by Jeremy Front, who has also written for TV serials such as Monarch of the Glen and has to his credit a four-hour BBC radio production of Brideshead Revisited broadcast in 2003. Front’s script followed the story, especially the parts set in Africa, fairly closely, although there were of necessity some omissions. Most omissions related to portions set in England. These included some of Waugh’s best comic dialogue, such as William Boot’s interviews with the rival Ishmaelite visa officers and Mr. Salter’s arrival at the Boot Magna railroad halt and his cross- country hike to the estate. Much dialogue between denizens of Boot Magna and between Lord Copper and his underlings was severely edited, as was that involving John Boot and Julia Stitch. The core of the story survived but lost much of Waugh’s satire. A character named Evelyn Waugh was written into the script to read linking narratives between dramatized scenes. Unlike the dialogue, much of it lifted from Waugh’s novel with little or no editing, the narrative was largely rewritten to accommodate deletions of material for radio production. Why the reader of this material should be named Evelyn Waugh and not simply “The Narrator” is a bit puzzling, since little of Waugh’s original narration was preserved. The acting was of a high level (especially Rory Kinnear as William Boot with just the right public- schoolboy cluelessness). Some performers were alumni of previous dramatizations of Waugh’s works. Julia Stitch was played by Fenella Woolgar, who also played Agatha Runcible in Stephen Fry’s 2003 film production of Vile Bodies (released as Bright Young Things). Both she and David Warner (who played Lord Copper) also appeared in the 2006 BBC4 TV production of "Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing" (reviewed in EWNS 38.2, Autumn 2007). Tim McInnerny, who played the narrator Evelyn Waugh, also played the MP, Gerald Fedden, in the TV film A Line of Beauty, which is often compared with Brideshead Revisited. Some voices were too similar to distinguish characters: Pigge and Corker sounded very much alike, as I suppose they were meant to do. High marks were earned by Radio 4, which broadcast this production in its Classic Serial series. In last year’s messy production of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, they tried to cram twelve volumes into a four-hour series and rewrote much of the material. This time they got it just about right.
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The Inside Story of John Mortimer’s Brideshead Script Graham Lord, John Mortimer: The Devil's Advocate, the Unauthorized Biography. 2005. London: Orion, 2006. 400 pp. £8.99. Reviewed by Richard W. Walker.
One of my favorite lines in the 1981 television version of Brideshead Revisited occurs during the scene at Oxford that depicts Charles Ryder’s inauspicious first meeting with aristocrat Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian and a raucous band of Etonians in white tie tumble into the quad of Charles’s college and spot the somber glow coming from his ground-floor rooms. One of them, Boy Mulcaster (played by the late great Jeremy Sinden), staggers up to an open window and peers into the smoke-filled room, where Charles and his circle of young-fogey intellectuals are listening to Collins, the embryo don, read a paper on the nature of chance. “It looks like a bloody prayer meeting to me,” Mulcaster sneers. Then, of course, comes the denouement. A glassy-eyed Sebastian leans well forward into the room and disgorges a mixture of wines that were too various. That cleverly droll line about the prayer meeting isn’t in Waugh’s novel. I had always assumed that it was invented by John Mortimer, who was commissioned to write the script for the series. But it wasn’t. In fact, the producers of Granada Television’s 11-hour epic didn't use a single word of Mortimer's original script, according to author Graham Lord. Still, Mortimer, who died in January at 85, got credit for adapting it for reasons that Lord reveals in his biography, John Mortimer: The Devil’s Advocate. For years, Derek Granger, a Granada producer, had been trying to convince theatrical agent Anthony Jones of A. D. Peters, who represented Waugh’s estate, to let him make a lush, multi- part television series of Brideshead. Jones finally relented in 1977, though he and the estate retained control over the choice of a writer to adapt the novel and the right to approve the script, according to Lord. Jones hired Mortimer--novelist, dramatist, television writer, barrister, champagne socialist and creator of the inimitable Rumpole of the Bailey--to write the script after his first choice, playwright Alan Bennett, declined the project. But when Mortimer submitted his script in early 1978, Granger and other officials at Granada were deeply disappointed. They thought Mortimer got it all wrong. He discarded Waugh’s first- person narration and turned the novel into "a nice little telly play" that "dismantled the whole great engine" of the book, leaving it in "bits and pieces," Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the original director, told Lord. According to Granger, the script didn’t have “that elegiac, delicate, feathery quality of film nor the enormous detail that we wanted.” Lindsay-Hogg said, “Oh, to hell with it. Why don’t we just shoot the book?” So they scrapped Mortimer's material and set about writing a new script from scratch. Granger brought in Martin Thompson, a young writer from the BBC, and the two collaborated on the new script with input from Lindsay-Hogg, following the book "almost to the letter," according to Thompson. “I don’t think we used any of John’s original script,” Lindsay- Hogg said. “We certainly didn’t use the form.” Why didn’t they simply ask Mortimer to rewrite the script? Granger explained: “John was a very grand writer then … it would have been impossible to sack him or say we couldn’t use his script because under the contract the estate had script approval and they’d have withdrawn it. And I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of John: he can be absolutely ferocious if things go against him. He’s enormously self-admiring and can be very difficult and intimidating.” The producers never disclosed that Mortimer’s script had been dumped, and Mortimer received credit for adapting it. When Mortimer and Jones attended a special screening of Brideshead at a small theatre in Soho, Mortimer simply accepted what he had seen without any comment, according to Granger. “It’s very odd: he knows he didn’t write it,” he said. For more than 25 years Mortimer was “widely acclaimed as the writer of one of the most magnificent of all television series,” Lord writes in his book. He was even nominated for an Emmy award for outstanding writing in a limited series or special. Indeed, Mortimer was delighted to be showered with praise for a script he didn’t write. “He
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was interviewed endlessly when Brideshead was broadcast in 1981,” Granger told Lord. “And there was one moment when I was really stunned. [Broadcaster] Ludovic Kennedy was interviewing John on some television arts programme and he said, ‘Oh, the script, John, the feathery lightness of it, the shimmering feathery lightness of it,’ and John said, ‘Thank you,’ and I thought, Well, bugger! He could have given the rest of us credit for it but it didn’t occur to him.”
Homely Thoughts Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day, by Patrick Parrinder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 502 pp. $45. Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, Bennington College.
Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” (181)
With the exception of a reference to the University of Reading, Berkshire, the only county with a royal prefix, even paratextually, this book screams sedition. The back of the dust jacket promises to undermine national identity, a sentiment promptly followed by more of the same on its inside, hammered home by the cover’s detail of William Hogarth’s The March of the Guards to Finchley which was ultimately dedicated to Frederick II of Prussia after George II rejected the guards’ debauchery, and corroborated by Patrick Parrinder’s now mundane explanation of the popular, individual, vernacular, democratizing newness of the novel, a genre to correct that frightful Shakespearean habit of perceiving the nation “from the top down” (18): “Its status as private reading-matter gives it its unstable and potentially subversive function in relation to the family and the community at large” (13). Can this really be the English novel? Despite the stereotypical lack of interest in politics, the rather ambiguous nature of this literary history that is beyond annotation yet never quite matures into an ideological analysis of identity and is perhaps best described as glorified lit. crit., proleptically, Parrinder, author of The Failure of Theory, does manage to round up the usual refractory suspects, combining the polysemic, revolutionary literariness of Mikhail Bakhtin and Ian Watt with Fredric Jameson’s reductive version of the novel as “national allegory” (4), Benedict Andersen’s now commonplace rendering of the nation as social construct, and Edward Said’s earlier vandalizing of it. What, no camels then? There are, in fact, more sensibly, camels galore, but the only indication that the introductory pages are almost entirely irrelevant to the remaining three hundred or so, that we are about to spend several hours attempting to unearth sedition in the oddest of places, that apparently we must now sell everything via subversion, applicable or not, is the inclusion, over and above Parrinder’s acknowledgment that the English novel is epiphenomenal from beginning to end, its origins stemming from all sorts of foreign sources, of Sir Walter Scott, and the exclusion of Tayeb Salih, the favoring of insular tradition over counter-orientalism. Parrinder’s is not a tale of revolution, nor indeed of a tradition of revolution, but of a factitious palingenesis, a repetitive, elegiac gestalt founded on a very limited list of figures and themes, and a still briefer morphology of plotlines. It is a series of would-be King Arthurs (Guy Crouchback to name but one), Dick Whittingtons (Dickens’s Pip), and Robin Hoods (even Lawrence’s Mellors), of pilgrims, knights-errant, and loveable rogues "by whom it would be delightful to have been robbed" (136), of eventual, generally joyous alliances between Normans and Saxons, Cavaliers and Puritans, Jacobins and Jacobites, or Whigs and Tories, of the suffering of the Book of Job that will be rewarded “at the moment of narrative denouement rather than being reserved for a future state” (115), “the journey novel and male Bildungsroman, the novel of courtship, and the family saga and extended novel-sequence” (29), of a pluralistic,
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idealized country that is often anachronistic, as opposed to injurious to the super-structural social flux, before the novels in question are even published. Just pick a sturdy camel. The story is one that would not have been out of place in my traditional, ultra-Anglican, paramilitary boarding school but fifteen minutes from Reading, Royal Berks. More specifically, Robinson Crusoe is defined as a “whingeing pom and home- grown humbug” (81), Tom Jones’s gypsies form “an ideal commonwealth in subjection to an absolute monarch” (100), “the discourse about the English highwayman … in some respects simply placed an acceptable gloss on the [eighteenth] century’s actual experiences of plebeian violence” (143), Scott’s “English novels are comparatively superficial entertainments evoking the nation’s aristocratic and Royalist past” (153), “For all her [Elizabeth’s] claims to equality, the point of her marriage is that it is splendidly unequal, and it is this that, of all Austen’s novels, brings Pride and Prejudice closest to fairy tale” (193), North and South “Necessarily … concludes with a political marriage calculated to resolve the national divisions that the novel has so fully expounded” (212), an alarmingly pleasant Dickens is a purveyor of the “recognition- inheritance pattern” (217), with his protagonists aiming for “an untroubled, unambitious domestic happiness” (213), and Doctor Thorne’s Frank Gresham, “needless to say, … falls in love with, and finally marries, the one woman who can save his family’s bankrupt estate” (269). In Sybil, there is even a dog, Harold, playing the role of yet another agent of unification: “This pedigree pet with a royal Saxon name is the embodiment of true social instincts” (170). The pervasive, oneiric enantiodromia, in which the novel is a foundational influence, belatedly reflecting society rather than preempting it, is most obvious when its anodyne properties are used to correct the aforementioned foreign sources. The Gothic receives several sharp raps over the knuckles, and its “novels take place … outside England” (122), “Sexual desire in English fiction is famously muted” (31), the English pícaro is “decidedly more polite and wealthier” (47), “where Cervantes had introduced a democratic element into romance, Scott, writing for the prosaic bourgeoisie, had restored to romance its aristocratic element” (162), “For all their sympathies with the French Revolution, the English Jacobin novelists of the 1790s produced parables of a reformed aristocracy rather than visions of an aristocracy overthrown by the people” (181), “The Dickensian Bildungsroman … comes after the great French novelists, Stendhal and Balzac, yet it is closer to folk tale and fairy tale than to the masterpieces of French realism” (217), and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover is Lawrence’s attempt to defy the traditionally tragic outcome of the European novel of adultery” (308). Parrinder is adept with inter-text, in drawing conclusions across the novels and the ages, and the occasional hijacking of the reader is to be expected in a book of this length, but, as in the selection above, one of the dangers in recounting such plots, and in emphasizing their similarities, is of course that one’s own book becomes subject to the same repetition. The omnipresent sense of déjà vu, of an overriding filial, analeptic paradigm, however accurate, is wearisome, which is partly the point. Given the author’s ideological absence, at times the book seems to be simply confirming that at least a history of England is in fact charted in its novels, and such representations implicitly debunk the supposed sedition of the introductory pages. The tone grates, however, when in spite of his own mounting evidence, Parrinder is not prepared to give up on that introduction, intermittently and incongruously paying lip service to it, since “in every generation of English fiction there have been novelists who broke away” (34), or “In fiction the unorthodox individual is almost invariably vindicated” (331), when anyone reading Nation and Novel would have precisely the opposite impression. The novels that may shake such cultural ataraxia and allow some reprieve from an ill-suited theoretical apparatus seem few and far between. Tristram Shandy is limited to a couple of pages, Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto- feminism is mentioned only in passing, Jane Eyre’s ending is at best ambivalent, there are hints of sedition in Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda offers a glimmer of “positive orientalism” (249) only to be dimmed by Adam Bede’s “gradual healing of a broken rural community” (274) and Felix Holt’s “fairy-tale ending” (276), even The Secret Agent’s bomber’s secular “roots are in provincial Puritanism of a recognizably English type” (257), Hardy empties paganism, nature, and Christianity, and yet Jude is structured via Job, Lawrence opts for “neo-pagan mysticism” (290), Forster (where the Englishness is now explicit, and thus potentially contains its own file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
demise, since reminding oneself of one’s patriotism is surely a sign of its actual lack of significance) is skeptical, yet still manages a “mawkish attempt to turn back imperial development thanks to the recovery of an England capable of restoring the life of the body and holding the suburbs at bay” (302) in Howards End, Woolf’s Between the Acts is rife with “pastoral memory” (313), and 1984’s “rubbish-heap of details” (318) represents the cherished remnants of a more desirable past. In H. G. Wells’s words, “In the meantime the old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing still, sheltering strange tenants” (304). Remarkably, one of the strangest, in the only chapter on Empire that, at least literarily, is “nearly always kept in the background” (322), becomes a rehabilitated Kipling, filtered through Kim’s hybridity, but is Kipling as outsider really the closest the English novel comes to subversion? Well, no, for as the ur-narrative quickens towards its close, in the knowledge that the penultimate chapter will re-contextualize immigration back into the same series of paradigms so that rather than striking back the Empire attaches itself to preexistent novelesque themes, to solitude in a hostile London in Jean Rhys’s case, or to the ruins of “pastoral fantasy” (402) in V. S. Naipaul’s, and equally aware that the diluted conclusion, very much the product of the previous four hundred pages’ process, will focus on the retrograde Atonement with its smattering of camels and must, therefore, admit that the novel is now “a kind of palimpsest” (411), Waugh wreaks havoc. In the wake of a study of Woolf’s neo-Arthurian The Waves, which only succeeded in confirming her status as another reactionary, the now desperate lunges for implosion dismiss Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall in passing, their subject “a small upper- class clique living a virtually self-contained life in defiance of a wider, rapidly changing world” (342) that simply won’t do, a rejection substantiated by “the romantic unreality of Brideshead Revisited, a novel which (for all its fascination) is much inferior to the later Sword of Honour trilogy as a chronicle of aristocratic England’s decline and fall” (362). Exactly why it is inferior is never explained, of course, for its ontology must remain elusive here, scrapped in favor of an again brief nod to A Handful of Dust’s more appropriately nifty parodying of Arthur as a segue to Guy Crouchback’s ambivalence. Sword of Honour receives eight pages, compared with Jane Eyre’s six, because, despite Parrinder’s admission that Catholic readers may beg to differ, and with a modicum of assistance from Diana Cooper’s deflating analogy to “‘Mrs. Dale’s Diary’” (362) and Christopher Sykes’s account of Ludovic’s The Death Wish as “a send-up of Brideshead Revisited” (368), Crouchback may be re-inscribed as “equivocal” (368), his “knight- errantry … surrounded by ambiguities from beginning to end” (370), the victim of “a farcical discrepancy between [his] dream of belonging to a high company of warriors and the reality” (363). When coupled to the author’s “laconic style” (364) that “suggests a world of moral uncertainty” (364) in which “the work of discrimination is … left to the reader” (364), and given the dearth of other candidates in Parrinder’s homely version of his predecessors, one would be forgiven for thinking that a proto-postmodern Waugh had almost single-handedly destroyed not only the English novel, but with it the past.
Works Cited Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions, 1962.
Exquisite Command The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, by Patrick French. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. 555 pp. Hardcover, $30. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.
Does this sound like anyone we know? A writer seeks to invent himself so as to impose himself on a different stratum of society; responds to criticism of his anti-post-colonial and other
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political views with still more extreme and provocative statements; confesses happily to being a snob; carefully keeps traces of himself out of his work; in travel books, where he can define a whole society in a few paragraphs, expunges all mention of his traveling companion; demands from his literary agent a variety of very unliterary services; has recurring fears of being unable to write anything more; and enjoys staying in hotels because he likes “the temporariness, the mercenary services, the absence of responsibility, the anonymity, the scope for complaint.” He even tries to commit suicide and is on the whole relieved when he fails. Besides that, he has “an exquisite command of the English language.” The last words are Evelyn Waugh’s, and it and everything else in the paragraph describe V. S. Naipaul—who, at seventeen, began a novel heavily influenced by Waugh. As a person, however, Naipaul makes Waugh look like a fast-track candidate for canonization. Ernest Hemingway said that “it is a mistake to get to know a writer,” and his life demonstrated that it was an even bigger mistake, as Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, and Ford Madox Ford discovered, to help a writer. Naipaul used up the wife who gave him good literary advice and domestic service and discarded the mistress who gave him good rough sex; he cut most ties with relatives and friends, including friends who had helped him find lovers. Assuming the privileges of a Brahmin without accepting any of the attendant obligations, he refused to perform even the simplest tasks in taking care of himself, and he defended the most indefensible actions on the grounds that either the other person was at fault or that he just couldn’t do otherwise. Still, even if one is not interested in Naipaul’s life and work, Patrick French’s book is worth reading as a model of what a literary biography should be. As he says, this may be the last biography written from a completely paper archive, but he has used his resources far more efficiently and readably than, say, Norman Sherry in the three-volume biography of Graham Greene, where one often wishes that the correspondence with Catherine Walston had been burned. Instead, French will in a few paragraphs give the factual and emotional highlights of an extended correspondence. He is equally adept at weaving together quotations to indicate the reception of Naipaul’s many books. And incidentally he gives some juicy gossip, like Anthony Powell’s dislike of “the sentimentality, phoniness, and falseness of feeling with which [Graham Greene’s] works almost always abound” and Naipaul’s horror at evidence in Powell’s books of “vanity and lack of narrative skill: ‘It may be that the friendship lasted all this time because I had not examined his work.” French says that Powell’s Journals “lurched further into self- parody with each successive volume.” More important, French is very good at giving contexts—among many others, the ambience of Trinidad from which Naipaul emerged, of Oxford in which he developed, and of the BBC in which he began his career as a writer. French gives clear portraits of people besides his subject, especially of Naipaul’s wife Pat, whom he sees as both enabler and victim. French quotes comments like that describing Naipaul’s behavior as “nasty, and in character” without further comment and, like Naipaul’s elegant older sister Kamla, cuts through facades of self- justification and pure flummery in with lines such as “In innumerable interviews, each of them billed as ‘rare,’ he provided perfect copy to journalists seeking an original insight.” The biography ends—“Enough,” with a footnote adding “For the moment”—with Naipaul’s second wife scattering the ashes of the first while Naipaul, who had wanted to put them in the boot, leans against the car, weeping. One assumes, from all that has gone before, that he is weeping more for himself than for her. Goodness how sad!
Disembodied Constructs Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War, by Sarah Cole. 2003. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 297 pp. $43.00. Reviewed by KJ Gilchrist, Iowa State University.
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In this work rising out of her Ph.D. dissertation, Sarah Cole explores the origins and nature of social constructs that governed relations between soldiers of the Great War (with focus on soldiers en masse and less on individuals). The twist of the work is how the intense connections that soldiers formed among themselves stood in opposition to the Victorian and Imperial constructs that society envisioned and prescribed for male friendship; the failings of these ideals for male friendship become apparent through the modernist works she considers. Soldiers, as they faced and emerged from the unprecedented chaos of the First World War, found that their very bodies existed as a “body” of constructs in a multitude of senses: “the body of aestheticist dreams, the imperialist body as a repository for ideology … the smashed and debilitated body at war … the body of the post-war years” when it becomes “a trope for the physical and spiritual state of a war-scarred culture” (8). In an interesting and essential introduction, Cole defines her approach and parses her use of such terms as “Modern” and “Modernity.” However, one notes a less-than-individual voice throughout the work despite the quality of ideas, as this sentence, chosen at random, illustrates:
As I chart such movements, I shall suggest homologies with various features of literary modernism (the marginalized physical body an image of modern man; shared mutilation a sign of protest; the broken post-war body a figure for literary self-constructions), and I shall operate on the line between what we might call constructionism and essentialism. (8)
Divisions within the book delve the Victorian and Imperial groundings from which constructs for male friendships grew (“Victorian dreams, modern realities: Forster’s classical imagination” and “Conradian alienation and imperial intimacy”), then uncover male relationships within the war itself (“'My killed friends are with me where I go': friendship and comradeship at war”), and, last, probes the nature of male connectedness in the postwar years (“'The violence of the nightmare': D. H. Lawrence and the aftermath of war”). Through these explorations, Cole successfully presents a modernism among whose many conversations remains a central discussion of male intimacy, a topic that “ripples across the literary landscape” (20). In treating Forster’s classical view of male connections, Cole surprises by exploring not merely multifarious images of male friendship, but the disconnections, the “disjunctive” nature of it that pervades his work and Forster’s ultimate rejection of Hellenism that the English public school modeled, a system that encouraged male friendship; ultimately it placed males within a “kind of psychic and cultural limbo.” Thus Cole recalls moments within Forster where characters face impossible relationships as constructed for the characters. Take the relationship between Aziz and Fielding in A Passage to India: the novel ends with wide and prohibitive comment from Forster’s narrator that male connections at any idealized level must ultimately devolve, only in part due to “the problem of failed institutions” (Cole 89), and that (as the novel’s last words echo) such idealized friendship can “not yet” exist. Similarly, when Cole unpacks the male alliances existing for Conrad’s characters—as, for instance, when “Marlow describes his relation with Kurtz not as a part of a system of male bonds” (106)—they are a joint venture both men share, but only as set against western systems that give rise to the previously unrealized horrors. The Victorian conventions and Imperialist ideals for male connections are thus explored in Conrad not for any connection they facilitate between men, but for their “inaccessibility” and their “debilitating” nature. In treating male friendships in war, Cole convincingly shows—here as elsewhere—that male friendship does not function as social or imperial dictates would prescribe. In the case of war, friendship was supposed to “sustain the solider, to provide for … heroic action [and] redeem the horrific suffering”; instead, it fails to realize these ideals and leaves soldiers “bewildered” and angry (139). Cole is insightful here, and we find ourselves applying these lines to works she doesn’t cover (Remarque’s The Road Back or Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, for instance), which show precisely how male friendship does not cover the horrors of war, and male friends are rather more isolated in their suffering than they are connected. The chapter turns on the ironic disparity within the quotation (used as the chapter’s title) from Siegfried Sassoon: “my
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killed friends are with me where I go.” High modernism would echo the sense of this line, Cole asserts, for fifty years beyond its utterance. Certainly besides Lawrence (explored in Cole’s next chapter), we can follow and affirm this assertion, not least in Hemingway (Jake Barnes), in Virginia Woolf (Septimus Warren Smith), in T. S. Eliot (the husband who thinks "we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones”), and in later modern works. When Cole moves to Lawrence, she traces the meanings of the soldier, the social icons of memorials, and the constructed significance of males returned (or not returned) from war. Rather, it is constructed insignificance: the returned soldier, often maimed, becomes marginalized even in remembrance ceremonies and remains within a realm of “injustice and irony” (218). Lawrence’s Women in Love contains one of the dominant visions of male friendship after war: Birkin expresses to Ursula his hopes for not merely her companionship but also “eternal union with a man, too: another kind of love,” which Ursula believes is “false, impossible” (235). Again, Cole reveals that the idealized constructions of male connectedness are impotent in producing the realities expected by society—not least as observed in the body of impotence reflected in Lord Chatterley, or observed in Lawrence himself who regards the devastation of the war in 1916 and proclaims “I am no longer an Englishman” but “an enemy of mankind” (236). Cole’s work, insightful, nuanced, and full of new starting points for further reading, may also perhaps inherit a complaint made against Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: that it is limited by its Anglo-centric perspective. I believe in both cases the authors are considering the dominant ideologies as governing ideas of and expectations for male friendship in western culture, in works from Tennyson to those modernist texts that begin to interrogate these ideals and show them to be defunct. I’ve said elsewhere that if the Great War did not kill the melioristic Victorian age, it at least placed the toe-tag upon its corpse. Cole has shown that it did the same to the body of Victorian constructs and prescripts for male friendship. Cole is currently at work on a further study of modernism and violence.
Abstracts of Japanese Essays on Evelyn Waugh, 1948-1959 by Yoshiharu Usui
S. Y. “Evelyn Waugh no Ninki―Sekaibungakutushin (Igirisu)” [“Popularity of Evelyn Waugh―World Literary Correspondence (Britain)”]. Sekaibungaku [World Literature] 25 (1948): 24-25. Abstract: To say nothing of venerable authors such as Forster or Maugham, from central writers such as A. J. Cronin, Hilton Pritchett, and Graham Greene to rising writers such as Monica Dickens, Malcolm Lowry, Margery Sharp, and Elizabeth Gouge, the U.K. literary world is in full swing these days. But it is a central writer, Evelyn Waugh, 45 years old this year, who attracts the most attention in the world today. Waugh already had considerable popularity with Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. These works hardly attracted attention from critics, but he continued presenting ludicrous and satirical works one after another. A Handful of Dust lacked the cheerful color of the early novels, because in spite of the devilish destruction, he is an extreme conservative. Combining the ridicule of his comedy and a pious manner, Brideshead Revisited was a deeply impressive work. The Loved One and Scott-King’s Modern Europe followed. Waugh is in his prime and active in both Britain and the United States. His works will very much become a problem in future as one of the oddest satirists of the middle of the twentieth century.
Ueno, Naozo. “Aisuruhito [Korewa Shinin No Daimeishi Desu]―Evelyn Waugh no Fuushishousetu.” Sekaijin 6 (1949): 20-26. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel The Loved One, published last June, severely attacks American feelings about the English. However, Waugh’s most severe attack is aimed at the fraudulence of American culture. The attack is tactically veiled with humor. Readers are unable to decide whether they should laugh or be angry. This novel instantly became a
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bestseller because it is so much fun. The Loved One was based on Waugh’s experience in Hollywood while filming his Brideshead Revisited. Naturally Hollywood is the first target and inside facts are uncovered. But his cynical remarks about American death and love show his colossal talent. He points out the basic error of the American way of thinking about these two subjects. His satire, sharp wit and speed differ from the steadiness of Sinclair Lewis and the pessimism of Swift. Though it sharply attacks American culture, The Loved One is filled with the brightness of American life.
Nakanishi, Hidezo. “Evelyn Waugh no Fuushi―Fushiseishin wa Aijo to Ryouritu Shinai? ” [“Satire of Evelyn Waugh―Can the satirical spirit coexist with love?”]. Albion 24 (1954): 54- 57. Abstract: George Orwell satirizes communist revolution tactfully by using the form of an animal fable in Animal Farm. However, Waugh’s object of satire is individuals to the last. They share faults with the readers. The readers’ loud laughter sometimes turns into slight, wry smiles, and then cools down to barefaced self-mockery. Or readers brood with serious faces. Roughly speaking, Waugh’s satirical world includes such cynical laughter. Waugh can describe the upper class only. He cannot describe the poor or the bourgeoisie. The description of aristocrats’ lives is marvelous. It has sharp satire, but his satire reveals aristocrats’ corruption. His mind does not recognize social progress. From the start, he has no intention to criticize aristocratic society from the class viewpoint. In Brideshead Revisited, his excellent lampoonery suddenly declines. It’s not because he uses first-person narrative. As usual, he keeps his distance from the object. But he seems to feel deep love of the Marchmains. Satirical spirit doesn’t coexist with love. Satire is a kind of disclosure, and love is something to embrace.
Saeki, Shoichi. “Evelyn Waugh Ron― Niryu Sakka no Ikikata.” [“A Theory about Evelyn Waugh― The Way of the Second-Rate Writer”]. Oberon 1.2 (1954): 37-56. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh began as a writer just by learning basic ideas of Huxley and Eliot. He tried to find unique literal techniques to digest them, and that was his problem. He dilated a sentence of The Waste Land in a grotesque novel, and he increased the speed of Antic Hay. It was the work of the generation that came immediately after the senior writers, and it was the way the second-rate writer follows. Awareness of the achievements of senior writers brought Waugh success. He threw them into a merry-go-round in Luna Park and let things happen. He kept his distance from all materials, even from his inner sense as an aesthete. He succeeded in Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust. However, in Brideshead Revisited he couldn’t control his aesthetic sympathy for the religious life of the Catholic aristocrat and forgot to use that distance. This is the way of the second-rate writer.
Seo, Yu. “Evelyn Waugh Cho, Ninomiya & Yokoo Yaku Last Fujin” [“Mrs. Last, by Evelyn Waugh, trans. Yokō & Ninomiya”]. Kindai Bungaku [Modern Literature] 9.7 (1954): 46-49. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have the same religion and attended the same university. The impression we gain from them is quite different. It is the difference between the first-rate writer and the second-rate writer. To Greene, the modern world is hell. His passion is to describe the misery of humanity without God. Waugh doesn’t have such a desperate view of humanity. Mrs. Last is a Japanese translation of A Handful of Dust. Needless to say, the original title was taken from The Waste Land. However, the waste land is not expressed in this novel. This novel is rather ‘a novel of polite society.’ If one reads it with such a preconception, one will enjoy it. The English aristocracy and their polite society are well described. Mrs. Last might be suitable as the translated title. Mr. Todd’s cruelty is also interesting. The cruelty of capturing a nice, decent aristocrat, Tony Last, in the Amazon is beyond the readers’ expectation. Some critics say Waugh should corner his character in a cruel situation and then save him. That is doubtful, however.
Hashimoto, Michiko. “Evelyn Waugh--Brideshead Revisited ni Okeru.” Journal of the Society of English and American Literature, Kansei Gakuin University 1.2 (1955): 77-94.
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Abstract: In this novel, Waugh expresses the greatness of God’s absolute power that overwhelms humanity and the heaviness of tradition that restrains human nature. This tradition is presented in the form of a house. An architectural artist, Charles Ryder expresses Waugh’s notion that tradition is superior to human nature. He also recognizes unchanging Englishness as tradition, which kills human nature and art. At the same time it is a kind of charm (magical power), which attracts English people. Sebastian’s family’s charm as Catholics also ruins human nature and hints at their God’s magical power. The word tradition is connected with desire for the past. It is not coincidental that Waugh uses recollection to write this novel. He exposes his thought and sense that have been suppressed. This novel is ‘a new technical experiment.’ However, satire, humor, description of the upper class, architecture, poetic description, and Englishness are found in his earlier works. This novel does not reflect Waugh’s spiritual maturity but exposes things he has stored. I’d like to see how Waugh will adapt his faith to the present by making good use of first-rate satire and humor in his works in the future.
Kobayashi, Motoi. “Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh no Kigekiteki Sekai―Decline and Fall to Vile Bodies wo Chushin Toshite” [“The Comic World of Evelyn Waugh”]. Proceedings of the Faculty of Letters of Tokai University 2 (1959): A54-A60. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s comedy consists of farce, comedy of manners, and satire. What link these elements are two mythical patterns. One is loss of innocence and banishment from the eternal refuge. The other is regaining the lost paradise. These two different elements are united, which gives poetic fantasy to the plots of Waugh’s novels. The relationship of these elements is totally different in each novel. The first two novels emphasize the former pattern, and Brideshead Revisited and Helena the latter. A Handful of Dust has both. For satire, the former pattern is very effective. From Paul Pennyfeather to Guy Crouchback, all of Waugh’s protagonists are innocent. They live their lives gullibly. Waugh sees the cruelty and hypocrisy of this world in the treatment of these ingenuous protagonists. Remodeling great treasures like King’s Thursday, Brideshead, and Hetton Abbey into vulgar contemporary architecture with chromium and glass is an allegory of modern times. Most of the effects of Waugh’s burlesque are accomplished by destroying the Victorian setting that Waugh loves.
Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism by John Howard Wilson Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania
This is a continuation of the earlier checklists published in Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies. It includes books and articles published prior to 2005 and omitted from earlier lists.
Bacchus, Michael. “Not a Bedspread, but a Counterpane: Under the Covers with Gay Men and Aristocrats in Twentieth-Century British Literature.” DAI 58.5A (1997): 1718. U of Southern California, 1997. Banks, Sheryl Gail. “Limeys in the Orange Grove: The British Novel in Los Angeles.” DAI 47.11A (1986): 4087. U of Southern California, 1986. Berberich, Christine. “A Sense of Nostalgia? Englishness and the Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature.” DAI 67.2A (2004): 502. U of York, 2004. Blayac, Alain. “De la Littérature au cinema: le cas d’Evelyn Waugh.” Humoresques 6 (1995).
Brannigan, John. Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945-2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, "Ideological Struggles," EWNS 39.3 (Winter 2009). Brennan, Michael G. “Damnation and Divine Providence: The Consolations of Catholicism for Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.” Perceptions of Religious Faith in the Work of Graham Greene. Ed. William Thomas Hill. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 255-87. file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
Burke, Kathleen Michaela. “The Oxford Novel as ‘Bildungsroman’: An Analysis of the Works of Six Writers.” DAI 51.3A (1989): 858. U of Maryland, College Park, 1989. Carens, J. F. The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh (1966). Reviewed by Seiji Yamaguchi, Sofia [Sophia, Tokyo] 16.4 (1967): 106-08. Coates, Corey Harper. “Empires of the Historical Imagination.” DAI 60.10A (1999): 3663. U of Toronto, 1999. Colletta, Lisa. “The Triumph of Narcissism: Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel.” DAI 60.2A (1999): 431. Claremont Graduate U, 1999. Comer, Todd A. “A Latourian Critique of Modernity in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.” MAI 41.1 (2002): 48. Michigan State U, 2002. Deedes, W. F. At War with Waugh (2003). Reviewed by Byron Rogers, “Long ago and far away,” Spectator 14 June 2003; Keith B. Richburg, “Waughior,” National Interest Dec. 2003: 155-57. Deer, Patrick H. “‘Savage Warnings and Notations’: Wartime Visions, Cultural Blackouts and the Crisis of British Literature, 1939-1949.” DAI 61.9A (2000): 3579. Columbia U, 2000. Drijvers, Jan Willem. “Evelyn Waugh, Helena and the True Cross.” Classics Ireland 7 (2000): www.classicsireland.com/2000/drijvers.html Enkemann, Jürgen. “Die satirische Darstellung gesellschaftlicher Desintegration bei Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh und Angus Wilson: untersucht am Motiv der Party und an ähnlichen Gruppensituationen.” PhD diss., Technische Universität Berlin, 1969. Feuer, William E. “Producing Los Angeles: Contesting Cultures, Contrasting Genres.” DAI 60.12A (1999): 4422. U of Southern California, 1999. Graesser, John Cullen. “White on Black: Non-Black Literature about Africa since 1945.” DAI 50.9A (1989): 2892. U of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989. Griffin, Maureen K. “Evelyn Waugh: Evaluation in His Time Part 1: Decline and Fall.” Kawasaki Medical Welfare Journal 4.2 (1994): 177-80. Griffin, Maureen K. “Evelyn Waugh: Evaluation in His Time Part 2: A Handful of Dust.” Kawasaki Medical Welfare Journal 5.1 (1995): 211-14. Griffin, Maureen K. “Evelyn Waugh: Evaluation in His Time Part 3, The Loved One.” Kawasaki Journal of Medical Welfare 2.2 (1996): 97-101. Hashimoto, Michiko. "Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited ni Okeru." Journal of the Society of English & American Literature, Kansei Gakuin University 1.2 (1955): 77-94. Heintzelman, Patricia Lynn. “Writing in Symbolism: A Study of Three Works by Evelyn Waugh.” MAI 39.3 (2000): 675. Lamar U-Beaumont, 2000. Hopkins, Chris. “Comic Flexibility and the Flux of Modernity in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.” Humor (Berlin) 10.2 (1997): 207-18. Hopkins, Christopher Ian. “The Theme of Insignificance in Some English Novels of the 1930s.” 2 vols. DAI 53.9A (1990): 3221. U of Warwick, 1990. Horiuchi, Terumichi. “Evurin Wo no sekai” ["The World of Evelyn Waugh"]. Aichigakuin Daigaku Ronso [Aichigakuin University Journal, Liberal Arts and Sciences] 24.1 (1976): 69-81. Iseki, Tetsuya. “Evelyn Waugh: The Loved One, An Aspect of its Satire.” Kassui Review 34 (1991): 15-30. Johnston, Georgia. “Evelyn Waugh’s Narrative of History: Reading A Handful of Dust.” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 23.1 (1997): 39-52. Kalliney, Peter Joseph. “Cities of Affluence and Anger: Urbanism and Social Class in Twentieth-Century British Literature.” DAI 62.10A (2001): 3403. U of Michigan, 2001. Kiyota, Ikuo. "Evelyn Waugh no Warai ni Tsuite: Decline and Fall no Bawai" [“The Comic Elements in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall”]. Bulletin of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Nagasaki University 13 (1972): 93-102. Kiyota, Ikuo. “Evelyn Waugh: A Handful of Dust.” Bulletin of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Nagasaki University 15 (1975): 45-57. Kobayashi, Motoi. "Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh no Kigekiteki Sekai―Decline and Fall to Vile Bodies wo Chushin Toshite" [“The Comic World of Evelyn Waugh”]. Proceedings of the
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Faculty of Letters of Tokai University 2 (1959): A54-A60. Konuma, Takashi. “Evurin Wo Ron” [“A Theory on Evelyn Waugh”]. Yamagata Daigaku Eigo Eibun Kenkyu [Yamagata University Studies of English Language and Literature] 11 (1966): 13-23. Kröller, Eva-Marie. “‘Sur les rivages d’un autre âge’: Timothy Findley et Evelyn Waugh.” Études littéraires 27.1 (1994): 29-41. Kuchta, Todd. “Semi-Detached Empire: The Literature and Culture of Suburbia in Britain and the Colonies.” DAI 65.2A (2003): 528. Indiana U, 2003. Lirola, Manuel. “Waugh and Orwell: A Study of the Similarities in their Fictional Worlds.” DAI 58.7A (1997): 2670. U of South Carolina, 1997. Loeb, Kurt. “The Imperial Theme: A Study of Colonial Attitudes in English Novels Set in Africa.” DAI 46.5A (1984): 1211. U of Toronto, 1984. MacDonald, Barry. “Systems of Order: The Novels of Evelyn Waugh.” PhD diss., U of Ottawa, 1987. MacGregor, Catherine. “Writing Lives of Addiction: A Context for Literary Biography and Criticism.” DAI 64.1A (2000): 149. U of Ottawa, 2000. MacLeod, Lewis Francis. “‘The Way a Man Does Do Things’: Epic Masculinity, Grand Narrative and Ideological Discourse in Selected Twentieth-Century Novels.” DAI 63.10A (2002): 3550. Memorial U of Newfoundland, 2002. Miller, Kristine Anne. “‘We’re in the Front Line’: The Blitz on Identity in British Literature of the Second World War.” DAI 56.8A (1995): 3139. U of Michigan, 1995. Milward, Peter. “Evurin Wo no shini omou” [“To think of the death of Evelyn Waugh”]. Sofia [Sophia, Tokyo] 15.1 (1966): 61-65. Nakanishi, Hidezo. “Evelyn Waugh no Fuushi―Fushiseishin wa Aijo to Ryouritu Shinai? ” [“Satire of Evelyn Waugh―Can the satirical spirit coexist with love?”] Albion 24 (1954): 54- 57. Nakano, Ki. “Evurin Wo no Bungaku: Braizuhedo ni Itarumichi” [“Literature of Evelyn Waugh: The Road to Brideshead”]. Seiki [Century]161 (1963): 65-72. Nendai, Masataka. “On the Relation of the Characterization of Charles Ryder, the Narrator, to the Theme in Brideshead Revisited.” Research Reports of Akita National College of Technology 11 (1976): 121-27. Obayashi, Mikiaki. “Evurin Wo Oboegaki--Furaitoke to Kurauchibatsukuke” [“A Note on Evelyn Waugh--The Flytes and the Crouchbacks”]. Ferris Jogakuindaigaku Kiyo [Bulletin of Ferris University] 16 (1981): 41-58. Olson, Lucia Thomas. “‘This, this is England, but we only passed by’: Reclamations and Subversions of English National Identity in Works by Woolf, Waugh, Rhys and Naipaul.” DAI 59.11A (1998): 4153. U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998. Orwell, George. “Evelyn Waugh” [Unfinished essay, April (?) 1949]. The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 20: Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living, 1949-1950. Ed. Peter Davison. London: Secker & Warburg, 1998. 74-77. Orwell, George. “Notes for ‘Evelyn Waugh.’” The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 20: Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living, 1949-1950. Ed. Peter Davison. London: Secker & Warburg, 1998. 77-79. Pasternak Slater, Ann. “Evelyn Waugh’s Suspenders.” Women Voice Men: Gender in European Culture. Ed. Maya Slater. Exeter, UK: Intellect, 1997. 61-70. Polo, Higinio. “Evelyn Waugh en el África House.” El Viejo Topo (Madrid) Sept. 2003: 66- 73. Saeki, Shoichi. “Evelyn Waugh Ron― Niryu Sakka no Ikikata” [“A Theory about Evelyn Waugh― The Way of the Second-Rate Writer”]. Oberon 1.2 (1954): 37-56. Sai, Takanori. “About Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh.” Bulletin of Ohkagakuen College 4 (2002): 247-56. Salenius, Maria. “The ‘Invisible Line’: The Hidden Perspective in Evelyn Waugh’s Novel Brideshead Revisited.” Gothenburg Studies in English 84 (2003): 233-44. Schweizer, Bernard. “Political Travelers: The Ideological Functions of English Travel file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
Writing in the 1930s.” DAI 58.11A (1997): 4283. Duke U, 1997. Scott, James J. “Charles Ryder’s ‘Sacred Memories’ Viewed Profanely: Another Look at Brideshead Revisited.” Annals of Fitness and Sports Sciences (Kanoya, Japan) 5 (1990): 173- 76. Spender, Stephen. “Sozoteki Yoso” [“The World of Evelyn Waugh”]. Trans. Motohiro Fukase & Shiko Murakami. Chikuma Sosho [Chikuma Library] 35 (1965): 255-84. Stopp, F. J. Evelyn Waugh (1958). Reviewed by Fumio Toba, Sofia [Sophia, Tokyo] 9.2 (1960): 233-35. Sugiyama, Yoko. “Evelyn Waugh as Social Critic: Barbarism and the Modern World.” Journal of the Society of English & American Literature, Kansei Gakuin University 7.1 (1962): 12-30. Suzuki, Shigekazu. “Evurin Wo ni Okeru Kokkei to Fuushi” ["Absurdity and Satire in Evelyn Waugh"]. Simane Daigaku Bunrigakubu Kiyo [Memoirs of the Literature and Science Faculty of Simane University] 9 (1975): 145-63. Suzuki, Shigekazu. “Evurin Wo no Decline and Fall ni Tsuite” ["About Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall"]. Simane Daigaku Bunrigakubu Kiyo [Memoirs of the Faculty of Simane Literature and Science University] 11 (1977): 65-78. Swindon, Patrick. “Trespassers: Art and Reality in Swift, Waugh and Tony Benn.” Cambridge Quarterly 24.3 (1995): 189-208. S. Y. “Evelyn Waugh no Ninki―Sekaibungakutushin (Igirisu)” [“Popularity of Evelyn Waugh― World Literary Correspondence (Britain)”]. Sekaibungaku [World Literature] 25 (1948): 24-25. Takanori, Hitoshi. “Evelyn Waugh’s Novels: Two of the Difficulties.” Anglo-American Culture 28 (1998): 53-63. Tanaka, Ryozo. “Sakka Evurin Wo no Haikei ni Tsuite no Ichikousatu” ["A Study of the Background of Writer Evelyn Waugh"]. Keio Gijyuku Daigaku Hogaku Kenkyukai Kyouyouronsou [Bulletin of the Faculty of Law, Keio University] 44 (1976): 60-86. Torrente García de la Mata, Joaquin. “Las Cartas de Evelyn Waugh.” XX Siglos (Madrid) 7.28 (1996): 105-18. Ueda, Kazufumi. “Evurin Wo no Shoki Shousetu: ‘Shinen’ no Kyohi” ["The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh: A Refusal to Be ‘Profound’"]. Osaka Kogyo Daigaku Kiyo [Memoirs of the Osaka Institute of Technology] 13.1 (1969): 81-99. Ueno, Naozo. “Aisuruhito [Korewa Shinin no Daimeishi Desu]―Evelyn Waugh no Fuushishousetsu.” Sekaijin 6 (1949): 20-26. Usui, Yoshiharu. “Influences of Don Quixote on Evelyn Waugh’s Early Novels.” Seikei Humanities Research Journal 7 (1999): 65-76. Usui, Yoshiharu. “Influences of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End Tetralogy on Evelyn Waugh’s Novels.” Seikei Humanities Research Journal 8 (2000): 39-56. Usui, Yoshiharu. “A Study of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” Seikei Humanities Research Journal 9 (2001): 55-70. Usui, Yoshiharu. “A Study of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.” Seikei Humanities Research Journal 12 (2004): 47-56. Usui, Yoshiharu. “A Study of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.” Seikei Humanities Research Journal 11 (2003): 37-46. Usui, Yoshiharu. “A Study of Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.” Seikei Humanities Research Journal 10 (2002): 31-45. Usui, Yoshiharu. “A Study of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.” Seikei Humanities Research Journal 6 (1998): 71-87. Villar Flor, Carlos. “Added Dimensions and Missing Implications: A Look at Evelyn Waugh’s/ Charles Sturridge’s A Handful of Dust.” AEDEAN Select Papers in Language, Literature and Culture. Ed. J. Pérez Guerra. Vigo, Spain: AEDEAN, 2000. 305-08. Villar Flor, Carlos. “Caracterizacíon como producto y como proceso en las novelas de Evelyn Waugh.” DAI 58.3C (1994): 791. Colorado Technical U, 1994. Villar Flor, Carlos. “Cien años de Evelyn Waugh.” Fábula 13 (2003): 38-41. file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
Villar Flor, Carlos, ed. & trans. Hombres en armas [Men at Arms], by Evelyn Waugh. Madrid: Cátedra, 2003. Villar Flor, Carlos. “La influencia estilística de Ronald Firbank en Evelyn Waugh.” Studia Patriciae Shaw Oblata. Vol. 2. Servicio de Publicaciones Unversidad de Oviedo, 1991. Villar Flor, Carlos. “Objective and External Prose: Cinematographical Aspects in Evelyn Waugh’s Concept of Fiction.” Actas del XV Congreso AEDEAN. Ed. F. J. Ruiz de Mendoza & C. Cunchillos Jaime. Colegio Universitario de La Rioja. 465-71. Villar Flor, Carlos. “La paz de una conversión el testimonio del novelista Evelyn Waugh.” La paz posible. Actas del Congreso Universitario UNIV 92 (Fase Castilla-León). Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valladolid, 1992. 59-64. Villar Flor, Carlos. “Retratos Contemporáneos: La ordalía de Evelyn Waugh.” Atlántida 8 (Jan.-March 1992): 55-69. Villar Flor, Carlos. “La teoría literaria asistemática de Evelyn Waugh sobre caracterización.” Estudios de literatura inglesa del siglo XX (4). Ed. P. Abad, J. M. Barrio, & J. M. Ruiz. Universidad de Valladolid, 1998. 329-38. Villar Flor, Carlos. “Waugh Reviews Greene: The Heart of the Matter Revisited.” Estudios de literatura en lengua inglesa del siglo XX (6). Ed. J. M. Barrio, P. Abad, & J. M. Ruiz. Universidad de Valladolid, 2002. 307-16. Walls, Elizabeth MacLeod. “A Domestic Feminist: The New Woman and the Rhetoric of British Literary Modernism, 1880-1935.” DAI 62.2A (2001): 570. Texas Christian U, 2001. Waugh, Evelyn, A Tourist in Africa (1960), and In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (1961), by Graham Greene. Reviewed by Joseph Roggendorf, "Evurin Wo, Aru Africa Yuransha; Greamu Greene, Sakuchu Jinbutu o Motomete: Futatuno Africa Niki," Sofia [Sophia, Tokyo] 11.1 (1962): 89-96. Waugh, Evelyn. Last Fujin (Mrs. Last, Japanese trans. A Handful of Dust, 1954). Reviewed by Yu Seo, “Evelyn Waugh Cho, Ninomiya & Yokō Yaku Last Fujin” [trans. Yokō & Ninomiya.], Kindai Bungaku [Modern Literature] 9.7 (1954): 46-49. Waugh, Evelyn. Ronald Knox (1959). Reviewed by Toyohiko Tatsumi, “Evurin Wo Ronarudo Nokusu Den,” Sofia [Sophia, Tokyo] 9.4 (1960): 483-87. Welsh, James, and John C. Tibbetts, eds. The Cinema of Tony Richardson: Essays and Interviews. Albany: SUNY P, 1999. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, “Shaking and Straining,” EWNS 39.2 (Autumn 2008). Wessels, Johan Andries. “Decadence and Resilience: A Study of the Aristocratic Novel in English in the Twentieth Century.” DAI 66.8A (1992): 2942. U of South Africa, 1992. Yamasaki, Mayumi. “The Effect of Dickens on Evelyn Waugh.” Bulletin of Kobe Tokiwa College 24 (2003): 135. Yoshida, Seiichi. “Evurin Wo: Shoki no Nisaku no Sekai” ["Evelyn Waugh: The World of His First Two Novels"]. Yokohama Shiritsu Daigaku Ronso [Bulletin of Yokohama City University] 21.2-3 (1970): 1-22.
Brideshead Revisited on DVD Miramax released Brideshead Revisited on DVD on 13 January 2009. The DVD includes the 100-minute film, deleted scenes, audio commentary, and a "featurette" entitled "The World of Brideshead." The retail price is $29.99.
Evelyn Waugh on CD Readings of several novels by Evelyn Waugh are available on CD from CSA Word. The novels include Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, and two versions of Brideshead Revisited, and several of these have been combined in The Best of Evelyn file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
Waugh. For details, go to their web site: http://www.csaword.co.uk.
Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest Caity Logan of Smith College won the Fourth Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest for writing "Sword of Honour--Identity and Possession." An edited version of Caity's essay will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Newsletter. Entries in the Fifth Annual Evelyn Waugh Essay Contest can be submitted to Dr. John H. Wilson, Department of English, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA 17745, USA, or [email protected], through 31 December 2009.
Evelyn Waugh Society The Evelyn Waugh Society has 89 members. Information on becoming a member is available at the society's web site, http://www.evelynwaughsociety.org. The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List has 57 members. The list is available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh.
Mystery of the "Blood Book" Richard Oram published "'Victorian Blood Book' from the Library of Evelyn Waugh" in the February 2009 issue of e-News from the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. The article includes several illustrations from the book, described as a "decoupage … embellished with hand-colored drops of 'blood' and handwritten religious commentaries." John Bingley Garland gave the book to his daughter in 1854, but it is not known who did the work or how Waugh acquired it. The article and illustrations are available at http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/enews/2009/february/bloodbook.html.
A Dim View Ripping Yarns Bookshop in London recently sold a first-edition copy of Decline and Fall inscribed by Evelyn Waugh's father, Arthur, for Gilbert Upcott. Arthur wrote a little poem in December 1928:
The sons decline, the sons decline and fall: The fathers stand at gaze, deploring all. Say, are the daughters better? you who know; I doubt it, but I like to think it so.
More and More Lists On 16 January 2009, the Daily Telegraph published "100 novels everyone should read." Evelyn Waugh's Scoop appeared as number 18. The list is available at the Telegraph. Also in January 2009, The Guardian released a list of "1000 novels everyone must read." In "The best comedies about class," published on 19 January 2009, D. J. Taylor included Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust along with Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.1.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:59] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD
Simon Raven's Alms for Oblivion. The category for comedy, also released on 19 January, included Waugh's Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, Scoop, and The Loved One. The category for war and travel, released on 23 January, included Waugh's Put Out More Flags and Men at Arms. More information is available at The Guardian. The Guardian has also published a series of columns entitled "Ten of the Best." Evelyn Waugh has been mentioned in several:
Visits to the lavatory, 14 March 2009: Sword of Honour Prime ministers, 7 February 2009: Vile Bodies Episodes of drunkenness, 15 November 2008: Brideshead Revisited Acts of cannibalism, 18 October 2008: Black Mischief Mistaken identities, 11 October 2008: Scoop Examples of bad driving, 31 May 2008: Vile Bodies Smokes, 24 May 2008: Brideshead Revisited
The Times followed suit with "10 spectacular second novels" by Luke Leitch on 17 March 2009. Vile Bodies is said to be "much funnier" than Decline and Fall. The list is available at The Times.
Waugh and the Marginal Catholics The Institut Catholique d'Etudes Supérieures is sponsoring an international colloquium entitled "Les Ecrivains Catholiques Marginaux" in La Rochue sur Yon, France on 29 and 30 April 2009. Benoit le Roux will be speaking on "Evelyn Waugh, catholique d'Angleterre et excentrique parmi les marginaux" at 3:30 pm on 29 April. For more information, please visit http://www.ices.fr.
Lecture on Waugh and Orwell David Lebedoff, author of The Same Man, appeared at "Lunch, Literature and Public Life: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh," sponsored by the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota on 27 January 2009.
Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1917-2008 Conor Cruise O'Brien passed away in December 2008. He was 91 years old. Under the pseudonym Donat O'Donnell, O'Brien viciously reviewed Brideshead Revisited for The Bell, an Irish monthly, in December 1946. The review provoked a defense by T. J. Barrington, published in The Bell in February 1947, followed by a response from O'Brien in March 1947, and finally a letter from Evelyn Waugh in July 1947. Suggesting that O'Brien had questioned the "good faith" of his conversion, Waugh admitted that he was a snob, or at least "happiest in the company of the European upper-classes." He did not, however, consider snobbishness "an offence against Charity, still less against Faith," and he did not think snobbishness influenced his writing. Brideshead includes, Waugh noted, "Rex Mottram, a millionaire, and Lady Celia Ryder, a lady of high birth. Why did my reverence for money and rank not sanctify those two?" The exchange in The Bell is reprinted in Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage, ed. Martin Stannard, 255-71. See also The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory, 255. O'Brien
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developed his review into an essay entitled "The Pieties of Evelyn Waugh," published in Donat O'Donnell, Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Modern Catholic Writers (1952), reprinted in Critical Essays on Evelyn Waugh, ed. James F. Carens. In a varied career reminiscent of Basil Seal's, O'Brien served as Irish representative to the United Nations, leader of a special UN mission to the Congo, vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, member of the Irish Parliament, and editor of The Observer. Conor Cruise O'Brien is survived by his wife, four children, and five grandchildren. His obituary is available at the New York Times.
Evelyn Waugh on Facebook Evelyn Waugh has a Facebook page that can be viewed at http://www.facebook.com. Over one thousand people have identified themselves as fans. There are pages for Fans of Evelyn Waugh, Intl. (689 members), the Auberon Waugh Appreciation Society (Incorporating the Dog Lovers' Party) (54 members), and the Alec Waugh Appreciation Society (22 members). Agatha Runcible also has her own page.
Songs for The Loved One Four rough cuts of songs for the musical version of The Loved One are available at http://www.myspace.com/thelovedonemusical. The book and lyrics are by Adria Lang, with music by Joey Altruda.
Vile Bodies Mug A company called Art Meets Matter is selling a mug that reproduces the design of a Penguin paperback edition of Vile Bodies. An espresso cup featuring Black Mischief appears on the web site but is described as out of stock. Images and details are available at the following site: http://www.artmeetsmatter.com/penguin-classics.php.
Literary History.com Literary History.com includes a page devoted to Evelyn Waugh. The page is "A selective list of literary criticism for Evelyn Waugh, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that comply with MLA guidelines." Please visit http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Waugh.htm.
Anthony Powell Conference The Anthony Powell Society's Fifth Biennial Conference will be held 10-12 September 2009 at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA. Details are available at www.anthonypowell.org or the Conference Office, Anthony Powell Society, 76 Ennismore Avenue, Greenford, Mddx, UB6 0JW, UK; phone: +44 (0)20 8864 4095; fax: +44 (0)20 8864 6109; e-mail: [email protected].
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