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EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 44, No. 3 Winter 2014

Arthur Waugh’s Influence, Part II: Tradition and Change John Howard Wilson Lock Haven University

Arthur Waugh’s second collection of essays, Tradition and Change: Studies in Contemporary Literature, was published in 1919 and dedicated to his younger son, . Arthur’s first collection, Reticence in Literature (1915), had been dedicated to his elder son, Alec. Evelyn clearly absorbed the content, but Tradition and Change naturally had more of an effect on him. The book’s influence can be sorted into five categories: (1) writers reviewed by both Arthur and Evelyn; (2) ’s experience as a soldier, and Arthur’s and Evelyn’s reactions to the Great War; (3) religion, especially Roman Catholicism, and how to write about it; (4) art and how to produce it; and (5) subjects raised by Arthur and taken up by Evelyn in writing. Especially in youth, Evelyn scorned his father and disclaimed any influence, but Tradition and Change obviously gave him much food for thought. Sometimes Evelyn accepted Arthur’s ideas; sometimes he rejected them; most often, he worked with them as an important contribution to his own inimitable oeuvre. As a young man, Evelyn preferred change, but as he aged, he showed more and more esteem for tradition and thus moved closer to his father’s conservatism.

(1) Writers

Arthur refers to many writers, and Evelyn employs several of the same names in his own work. There are six examples in Tradition and Change: (1812-1870), Henry James (1843-1916), John Galsworthy (1867-1933), Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).

Arthur was the managing director of Chapman and Hall, publisher of Dickens. In an essay entitled “Dickens’s Lovers” (focusing on his characters), Arthur described the author as primarily “theatrical” (Tradition 158). In his autobiography, (1964), Evelyn wrote that his “father’s most obvious characteristic was theatricality” (69), and “all the more likeable of Dickens’s characters provided him with roles” (70). Evelyn grew weary of these impersonations, and in (1934) he consigned Tony Last to the peculiar fate of having to read Dickens aloud to Mr. Todd. Still, Dickens was an invaluable source of reference, used by Evelyn throughout his career.

Arthur wrote a review entitled “The Art of Henry James.” Many years later, in 1946, Evelyn exclaimed “What an enormous uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age” (Diaries 663). Both Arthur and Evelyn appreciated James, and in (1948), Evelyn explored the Jamesian “Anglo-American impasse” (Letters 265).

In another review, “Mr. John Galsworthy,” Arthur commented that the “spiritual assaults of the years of war have only served to strengthen in him that deep, humane creed which he urged upon us in the days of universal nonchalance” (Tradition 285). About this author Evelyn could not agree. As an indication of dullness, Paul Pennyfeather reads The Forsyte Saga at Scone College in (1928). Much later, Evelyn wrote a remarkably unenthusiastic introduction to The Man of Property: Galsworthy “was not read in England by the younger generation of writers,” and the new villa in the novel “does not ring true” (Essays 620-21).

In an essay entitled “The New Realism,” Arthur referred to the “enchanted pages” of Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (Tradition 213). Both novel and writer became important to Evelyn. Sinister Street (1913) is in Charles Ryder’s rooms at in (1945), though his early tastes fade when he meets Sebastian Flyte. In a review in 1956, Evelyn praised Mackenzie’s Thin Ice as a novel distinguished by “elegance and sound workmanship.” The hero is homosexual, and Evelyn had been through such affairs in the 1920s. Mackenzie was a Catholic convert, like Evelyn, who appreciated his fellow novelist’s emphasis on morality and his suggestion that “the characters improve with age” (Essays 511).

Arthur had no patience with D. H. Lawrence: “Lawrence’s art stands most desperately in need of … a shower-bath of vital ideas” (Tradition 137). Evelyn quoted the judgment in A Little Learning (77). In earlier years, Evelyn was ambivalent: Lawrence’s Assorted Articles amounted to “a bore” (Essays 71), and Collected Poems suggested that “Lawrence’s finest poetry is in his novels” (Essays 42). In (1939), Evelyn asserted that “Every traveler to must read The Plumed Serpent,” though it devolved into “one of the silliest stories in recent literature” (Waugh Abroad 725). Later in life, Evelyn seemed to accept his father’s dismissal: Lawrence “couldn’t write for toffee” (Letters 552).

Arthur felt the same way about T. S. Eliot, whom he compared to “a drunken slave among the sons of the household” (Tradition 39), also quoted in A Little Learning (78). Eliot responded in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919; Menand 81). Evelyn found Eliot’s poems “incredibly good” in 1926 (Diaries 242), he took the title A Handful of Dust from The Waste Land (1922), and the same poem inspires Anthony Blanche’s recitation in Brideshead. In A Little Learning, however, Evelyn belittled Eliot as “the future idol of the academies” (78). Arthur had conveyed his appreciation of , and Evelyn never thought of it “as a school subject … but as a source of natural joy” (Learning 72). He also enjoyed ridiculing professors.

On writers in general, Evelyn disagreed with Arthur in three cases (Dickens, Galsworthy, and Eliot) and agreed in three others (James, Mackenzie, and Lawrence). Arthur valued traditional writers (Dickens, Galsworthy, James, and Mackenzie), whereas Evelyn flirted with modernists (Eliot and Lawrence) before turning against them. After Arthur’s death in 1943, Evelyn went through a phase of James (an early modernist) and renewed a youthful fondness for Mackenzie. He never seems to have cared for Dickens or Galsworthy, perhaps because they were humanists (as were James, Lawrence, and Arthur Waugh), and Evelyn said he had finished with humanism in A Handful of Dust (Essays 304).

(2) Alec Waugh and the Great War

Another writer read by both Arthur and Evelyn was Alec Waugh. Arthur did not mention Alec in Tradition and Change, but he idealized his elder son and clearly had him in mind when describing Great Britain in 1919. In an essay entitled “Rupert Brooke and the War,” Arthur predicted that “the most self-centred generation in history is to be transformed into the most sympathetic and humane” (Tradition 153). Moreover, Arthur insisted in his review of Galsworthy, Great Britain must be “reborn to a nobler peace” in “a land worthy of the sons who gave their lives for her salvation…. Those who survive will be in bondage to the dead, to raise to their glory a memorial of the spirit” (291).

If Evelyn ever felt his father’s hopes, he did not entertain them for long. He admired Alec, who inspired a character in a fragment of a novel in 1920, but Evelyn’s circle at Oxford ridiculed Alec in the early 1920s. This attitude persisted, though Evelyn also wrote a generous article on Alec in 1930. Arthur dismissed Evelyn’s Catholicism as “perversion to Rome” ( 217), and Alec wrote that trying to understand Evelyn’s religion was like looking at the outside of a stained-glass window (218). When he wrote of his own experience in the Second World War, Evelyn reached a modest resolution, far short of what his father wanted from the First War. The Catholic hero of Evelyn’s war trilogy, Guy Crouchback, is not interested in national rebirth or spiritual memorials: he simply tries to preserve his own small family through newfound faith. Such faith seems to have been lacking in the other Waughs, and by converting to Rome, Evelyn embraced a tradition preceding his father’s Anglicanism.

(3) Roman Catholicism

Arthur was not well disposed toward Roman Catholics, but in Tradition and Change he showed some interest. In an essay on Lionel Johnson (1867-1902), Arthur notes that different writers have had different impressions of the Church. For Johnson, according to Arthur, the Church represented “an ordered habit of the mind, a discipline of the imagination, a seemly chain of tradition” (102), as it did for Evelyn after conversion in 1930. Arthur’s respect for Catholicism may have grown after Reticence, where literature was an alternative to religion. He conceded “that man cannot live by art alone” (Tradition 107). In an essay on “The Religious Novel,” however, Arthur accused R. H. Benson (1871-1914) of allowing “the preacher to overwhelm the novelist” in “vehement tracts, urging upon their readers a thousand and one arguments for enlisting in the Roman Catholic branch of the Christian Church” (229). Evelyn wrote a preface for an American edition of one of Benson’s novels, Richard Raynal, Solitary (1906, reprinted 1956), and he borrowed from another, Lord of the World (1907; see Patey). Criticism similar to Arthur’s has been repeatedly raised against Brideshead Revisited. Arthur believed that the religious novelist should be “detached in outlook, free from prejudice and the fever of partisanship. He must present a picture, not argue a cause” (Tradition 229). In these respects, critics generally hold, Evelyn’s early novels were more successful than Brideshead, (1950), and the war trilogy (1952-1961). The early novels satirized religion, especially Anglicanism, but they were not obviously polemical. Arthur never cared for them, and he would not have liked the Catholic novels Evelyn published after his father’s death.

(4) Art

In Tradition and Change, Arthur expressed several aesthetic principles, most of them carryovers from Reticence in Literature. He commended “instinctive and trained reticence” (Tradition 2), and he noted that the Victorian middle class was “terribly afraid of democracy,” since it seemed “the harbinger of anarchy in thought and life” (3). In his essay on “The New Poetry,” Arthur suggested that anarchy had arrived: “every individual’s claim is paramount,” and “art can represent nothing permanent since nothing permanent or stable exists within its survey to be represented” (14). The New Poetry, in Arthur’s view, threatened “to submerge old standards altogether” and “to hand over the sensitive art of verse to a general process of literary democratisation” (14). To Arthur, the New Poetry was based on “the defiance … of authority which attends all efforts to democratise society and art” (14). The arts might even reach “‘literary women,’ who bubble over the tea-cups” (254).

Arthur’s position was obviously limited and self-interested, but Evelyn accepted most of it. He was not a proponent of democracy, and he noted that poets had “largely abandoned metre,” so there was no longer any distinction between poetry and prose (Essays 478). English women, according to Evelyn, “wrote as though they were babbling down the telephone—often very prettily, like Miss ” (Essays 480). Perhaps having gleaned it from Matthew Arnold, Arthur bestowed on Evelyn a belief in the fragility of civilization. Evelyn often expressed this belief in religious terms, as in the choice “between Christianity and Chaos” (Essays 103), and it pervades much of his writing, notably Robbery under Law.

As he did in Reticence, Arthur emphasized that “all artistic technique must be largely controlled by the subject it pourtrays [sic]” (Tradition 21). For example, Arthur chose Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962), whose poem “The Bull” is in “direct harmony with its subject,” so that the “final effect appears artistically inevitable” (33). Again, Evelyn accepted Arthur’s idea, and he even used Hodgson as an illustration. In “Charles Ryder’s Schooldays” (set in 1919, the year Tradition was published), the young hero tries to inscribe Hodgson’s “The Bells of Heaven,” but the poem is “not perfectly suited to the compressed thirteenth-century script in which he had written it.” The work turns out to be “botched” (Complete 318-19). Like Arthur, Evelyn was impressed by workmanship and annoyed by slackness. Arthur asserted that “the true test of poetry must always be the test of reading aloud” (Tradition 64). Incorrigibly theatrical, Arthur loved to read aloud, his “precision of tone, authority and variety,” Evelyn thought, “excelled only by Sir ” (Little 71). Some of Evelyn’s characters, such as Tony Last and Lady Marchmain, read aloud. For Arthur, sincerity was also essential in good writing. He found “self-evident and open-hearted sincerity” in Galsworthy (Tradition 285), and he claimed that “native sincerity” is more important than “the ingenuity and cleverness of the artist” (268). Evelyn’s early novels are sly, knowing, and eccentric, so Arthur did not find them “sincere.” After Arthur died, Evelyn wrote a “sincere” novel, Brideshead Revisited, but then Arthur would have disliked the endorsement of Roman Catholicism.

(5) Writing

Perhaps the most interesting examples of Arthur’s influence are the many connections between Tradition and Change and what Evelyn wrote later in various works. In “The New Realism,” for instance, Arthur commented on the “youthful revolution” that seemed likely to change “the British novel, clearing away a vast burden of traditional cant, and establishing a fresh and decent relation between the essential facts of life and their artistic revelation” (204-05). Evelyn soon saw himself as one of the contributors. In 1920, the year after Tradition was published, he started to write a novel of school life but never finished. In a letter dedicating the novel to himself, Evelyn noted that he still had “high hopes and big ambitions,” and he had “not yet been crushed in the mill of professionalism” (Complete 484). In 1921, Evelyn predicted that his generation would be “very hard and analytical and unsympathetic” (Essays 11). After he had published his first novel, he became the spokesman for youth by writing “The War and the Younger Generation” (1929) and many other pieces on related subjects.

Later in the same essay, Arthur observed that “the tragedy of youth may be age” (Tradition 216). Within two years, Evelyn wrote Conversion: A Tragedy of Youth in Three Burlesques. The play was performed at in 1921.

In a review, Arthur noted that “the conspicuous vice of so much modern criticism is that, in an effort to revolt against platitude, it breaks out into the feverish excesses of forced originality,” and “it quarrels with established methods simply for the sake of quarreling” (Tradition 261). This tendency is evident in Evelyn’s early articles, perhaps most remarkably in “Was He Right to Free the Slaves?” (on William Wilberforce), published in the in 1933.

As in Reticence in Literature, Arthur alluded to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: he liked their freedom from “commercialism” (Tradition 193) and their “admiration for contemporaries.” D. G. Rossetti was, moreover, “the presiding genius of the circle” (197). In 1926, Evelyn wrote an essay on the PRB, and his first book was a biography of Rossetti (1928). The biography established Evelyn’s authority, and he reviewed books about the PRB for the rest of his life. Like Arthur, Evelyn respected the PRB’s devotion to art, but he dealt with their limitations more frankly than his father had. Evelyn was more interested in failure, a subject his father preferred to avoid.

In his essay “The Swinburne Letters,” Arthur claimed that “the whole-hearted admiration for its Great Figures … redeemed the Victorian Era from the taint of unalloyed materialism.” Modern thought leaned toward “the suppression of enthusiasm,” however, and even “mockery, that fume of little minds” (Tradition 201, misquoting Tennyson’s “Guinevere”: “For mockery is the fume of little hearts.”). Arthur was probably thinking of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), a book that also influenced Evelyn. In Rossetti, he observed that “the corpse has become a marionette. With bells on its fingers and wires on its toes it is jigged about to a ‘period dance’ of our own piping” (12). Arthur preferred “blind devotion” (Tradition 201); Evelyn was never blind, but he did write biographies in praise of two priests, (1935) and (1959).

In a review, Arthur mentioned that modern writers express “the prevailing restlessness with social and intellectual conditions, the itching dissatisfaction with the hindrances to life, and the eager aspiration towards some recompense withheld” (Tradition 269). That is a fairly good description of (1930) more than ten years before the novel was published.

In his essay on Dickens, Arthur observed that “there are two kinds of Love, Sacred and Profane” (Tradition 163). The subtitle of Evelyn’s Brideshead Revisited is The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. In a review, Arthur proclaimed that love is “the universal antidote to the suffering of the world” and “the supreme inspiration … from which all good things spring” (Tradition 274). In Brideshead, Cordelia tells Charles that suffering is “the spring of love” (309), and Douglas Lane Patey identifies love as the central theme of Evelyn’s later work. Their ideas of love are similar, but Evelyn’s phrasing is more memorable than his father’s, and he places more emphasis on grace and empathy.

Another possible connection with Brideshead is Arthur’s interest in charm. In a review entitled “The Charm of Stevenson,” Arthur described this quality as “irresistible,” “wistful,” and “companionable.” Stevenson was charming, Arthur suggested, because “the child survived, and triumphed in him” (Tradition 244-45). In Brideshead, Anthony Blanche warns Charles about the charm of Sebastian and detects charm in Charles’s South American paintings. For both Arthur and Evelyn, charm is a kind of arrested development.

In a review of ’s The Shadow Line (1917), Arthur noted that the hero gives in to “dissatisfaction, boredom, ‘green-sickness,’ familiar to all who know the ways of youth; and, unless it is speedily countered by a contesting purpose, it is likely to head straight for disaster” (Tradition 279). Evelyn suffered from the same syndrome, especially in the mid 1920s, when he drank heavily, went through a number of jobs, and contemplated suicide. Arthur bailed him out, but Evelyn seems to have expected more. Fathers are often missing or at best detached in his fiction, as in Brideshead, his first novel after Arthur’s death. Brideshead also portrays Sebastian, a wayward youth who succumbs to worldly “disaster” (141) but nevertheless finds his divine purpose.

Finally, in “The New Realism,” Arthur referred to school stories. He mentioned (1888-1974) and his “disconcerting counterblast to the sentiment of generations” (Tradition 212), a novel entitled The Harrovians (1913). Alec wrote The Loom of Youth (1917), a novel critical of , where he and Arthur had been. Evelyn tried to write a novel about school in 1920; he tried again in “Charles Ryder’s Schooldays” in 1945, but he could not complete it. He did produce Conversion, including a scene about “School, as we all know it really is,” and he fully described his schooldays in A Little Learning. Arthur wrote that Lunn’s account of school had exposed “the memory of many forgotten miseries” (Tradition 212); Evelyn’s did the same, though Arthur preferred to ignore unpleasantness depicted in realism.

Arthur’s ideas were often commonplace, and it is not surprising that Evelyn wrote about many of the same subjects. Taken as a whole, however, Arthur’s essays in Tradition and Change provide a remarkable number of precedents for subjects in Evelyn’s writing. Evelyn’s work is generally taken to be original and worthy of study, while Arthur’s is almost forgotten. Arthur may have been sentimental and reactionary, but Tradition and Change is a fitting title for a book dedicated to Evelyn. Initially attracted to innovations introduced by , Evelyn became more traditional, more like his father in aesthetics and politics. In religion, Evelyn went back even further and converted to Roman Catholicism. He lamented change when the Church abandoned traditional rites; fifty years earlier, his father had decried modernist attacks on traditional literature. While his father lived, Evelyn struggled to be different, but Arthur was thoroughly familiar with the literature of youth and waited patiently for change.

Works Cited Menand, Louis. “Practical Cat: How Eliot became Eliot.” New Yorker, 19 September 2011: 76- 83. Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Waugh, Alec. The Early Years of Alec Waugh. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1962. Waugh, Alexander. Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family. London: Hodder Headline, 2004. Waugh, Arthur. Tradition and Change: Studies in Contemporary Literature. London: Chapman & Hall, 1919. Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown, 1945. ---. The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. ---. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. ---. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. ---. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1980. ---. A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography. London: Chapman & Hall, 1964. ---. Rossetti: His Life and Works. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928. ---. Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003.

Everywhere Something Lovely: Evelyn Waugh and Mells, Part 1 Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh developed a deep and lasting association with the East village of Mells: it brought him back again and again, and he often considered settling there. This connection arose from friendships with several people who lived in or near the village.[1]

Mells is about twelve miles south of Bath and three miles west of . Waugh described it as “a small, ancient, irregular, rather extended, stone-built village once the property of the Abbots of Glastonbury … off the main roads and just clear of the coal-mining district of Radstock. Frome serves it as a market town and railway-station. The estate, once much larger, has been held by the Horner family since the dissolution of the monasteries” (The Life of Ronald Knox, 1959, 308).

Waugh made friends connected to Mells either at Oxford or through conversion to Roman Catholicism. The concentration of friends around Mells was, according to Waugh, largely coincidental. In a way, Waugh wrote, his friends exemplified the “social realism” of ’s A Dance to the Music of Time: the same people assemble, gossip, and advance the narrative (A Little Learning, 1964, 200-01). In 1952, Powell himself settled at Chantry, a village within walking distance of Mells.

Many of Waugh’s friends lived near Mells, but he had met them elsewhere. Waugh had met Conrad Russell, for instance, at a family wedding before they became more closely acquainted in Mells. Not far away is Midsomer Norton, where Waugh’s father was born and raised. Waugh made frequent visits as a child and stayed with his maiden aunts. These visits, he recalled, were wholly enjoyable, and he continued to stop there as an adult. Downside Abbey is between Midsomer Norton and Mells: Waugh went there frequently for religious retreats and befriended several monks.

Waugh’s earliest friend connected with Mells was (1902-77): they met at Oxford. Hollis became a teacher, writer, publisher, and politician. According to Waugh, Hollis “remained one of my closest friends” (Little 186). Anthony Powell wrote that “there was no friend to whom [Waugh] was more devoted throughout his life.”[2] In his memoir Oxford in the Twenties: Recollections of Five Friends (London, 1976), Hollis wondered whether he deserved these “extreme recommendations”: “certainly he was my most intimate companion during my closing terms at Oxford and, certainly, as was his habit with his old friends, he preserved until death that friendship without a single of those episodes of misunderstanding by which his life with others was so often marred” (73). Hollis wrote a brief survey of Waugh’s writings in the British Council’s Writers and Their Works series. In addition to works on religion, history, politics and economics, in the forties he wrote a series of novels about a character named Fossett. In a letter to , Waugh described himself as “greatly shocked” by these novels (Letters 275). He raised concerns in a “letter of reproof” to Hollis which was “not well received.” Hollis recounts this incident in his memoir The Seven Ages: Their Exits and Their Entrances (London, 1974, 231- 32). The dispute arose over religious belief: Hollis considered Waugh’s interpretation absurdly narrow and unreasonable, and Waugh expressed it in intemperate language. Hollis would hardly have tolerated such language from anyone else, but he knew that Waugh expressed such positions “scarcely himself knowing how much he meant it seriously.”

At Oxford, Hollis was, like Waugh, a religious skeptic, but in 1924 he became a Roman Catholic. According to Hollis, Waugh was the only one of his friends who urged him not to convert (Seven Ages 65). After Waugh’s conversion in 1930, he frequently visited Hollis while he taught at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit school in Lancashire. When Waugh was in England before his second marriage in 1937, Hollis claims, he often lived and wrote at Stonyhurst.[3] On one visit, Hollis became Waugh’s first Roman Catholic friend to urge him to pursue annulment of his first marriage.

After leaving Stonyhurst, Hollis became Visiting Professor of Economics at the in South Bend, . He needed a home in England for six months of the year and learned from Katharine Asquith that a house was available in Mells. Hollis’s father had been Principal of the Wells Theological Seminary, eleven miles from Mells. The three-storied house was known as Claveys.[4] It should have been the home farm for the estate known as Mells Park, but that land was farmed by Conrad Russell, who lived across the road in a smaller house, Little Claveys. After their children had grown and Russell had died, Hollis and his wife moved into Little Claveys, probably in the 1960s (Seven Ages 194).

In the 1930s, Waugh stayed with the Hollises or Mrs. Long, a Belgian governess and refugee, wife of the carpenter on the Mells estate; she rented lodgings in the village. During their engagement, Laura Herbert stayed with the Hollises, Waugh with Mrs. Long. Until the end of his life, Waugh visited Hollis at Mells and hosted him at (Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, Harmondsworth, 1977, 209-10, 573).

Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism created another link, Katharine Asquith (1885-1976). She was born Katharine Horner in Mells, where her family had lived since the sixteenth century. There are two large houses: Mells Park and Mells Manor. Katharine was born in Mells Park but moved to the Manor with her family in the early 1900s.[5] The nursery rhyme “Little Jack Horner” is said to refer to an ancestor and his success in acquiring properties upon the dissolution of the monasteries. The plum from his Christmas pie is supposed to be the land from Glastonbury Abbey, including that around Mells. The Horner family vigorously and convincingly denies any connection with the nursery rhyme: the founder of their dynasty was named Thomas, not Jack, and Jack Horner lived in Barnet in the fourteenth century, well before the dissolution of the monasteries. The family cannot deny connection with another rhyme mentioned by Hollis:

Paget, Popham, Horner and Thynne, When the monks came out, they came in.[6]

Katharine married , but he and her brother Edward died in the First World War. She and her three children continued to live in Mells Manor with her mother, Lady Horner. Katharine converted to Roman Catholicism in 1923, but Lady Horner did not. She discouraged Katharine from inviting Catholics such as Ronald Knox and , whom she considered religious bores. The Horners were strong supporters of the Church of England and the Liberal Party, and non-conformists (including Roman Catholics) had not been allowed to live in the village until the First World War. Christopher Hollis considers their stance strange for Liberals (On the Way to Frome 244).

Waugh met Katharine and two of her children in August 1933 on a Hellenic cruise. They booked following the recommendation of Fr. Martin D’Arcy, who had instructed Waugh in Roman Catholicism; he acted as a sort of Apostolic Delegate to the English upper classes.[7] Father D’Arcy hoped to introduce Waugh to the better sort of English Catholics. On the same tour was Gabriel Herbert, who lived at the other end of Somerset in , near ; with her mother and sisters, she had converted to Roman Catholicism. Waugh brought and tried to control his alcoholism. Christopher Hollis, his wife, and Father D’Arcy were also passengers. Waugh hit it off with the Asquiths and Herberts, but he struggled with others.[8] He made a lasting friendship with Katharine Asquith and met his second wife, Laura Herbert, Gabriel’s sister.

Waugh’s first visit to Mells Manor occurred a few months after the cruise.[9] Lady Horner was still in residence, so Waugh would have been told not to emphasize religion. The featured guest was J. M. Barrie: Katharine urged Waugh to make friends and encouraged Barrie to build up Waugh’s reputation as a writer. Both writers complied, and the visit went down with Lady Horner. Katharine asked what Waugh thought of Barrie, who had “bored his pants off” (Hastings 295).[10]

Waugh and Katharine started to correspond shortly after they met, and his letters to her differ from those sent to other female friends, such as the Lygon and Mitford sisters, Diana Cooper, and . A couple of early letters to Katharine include slang--his books Blackers and Remoters--and gossip about recent acquaintances--Laura Herbert, later his fiancée, is a “white mouse” (Letters 78-80).[11] Later letters are more serious. Waugh seemed to seek her approval of his work but was often disappointed. Katharine’s letters to him were friendly and informal, and she offered frank opinions of his work. A Handful of Dust made her “miserable,” and she disliked Brideshead Revisited and A Little Learning. She admired his style, but his characters were “worthless,” their actions unrealistic. Waugh defended himself, politely, and refrained from feuding. Waugh thought The Loved One was his most offensive book, and he was surprised that Katharine liked it. She advised him to give up fiction and apply his skill to something like history. They continued to correspond until Waugh’s death and avoided spats that often plagued Waugh’s relations with others. Waugh obviously respected Katharine, who recognized his talent and tried to nurture it.

Waugh’s visits to Mells peaked in the mid 1930s, when he wrote part of Edmund Campion and finished Waugh in Abyssinia as a lodger in Mrs. Long’s house, Poyntz Cottage.[12] He also started in those lodgings (Diaries 408-09). Katharine helped him to find accommodations in the village, and he once went up to Oxford with her son Julian to deliver a lecture to .[13] A physician in Frome, Dr. Longton, used to agree by saying “Definitely, Lady Horner!” Disagreement prompted “Up to a point, Lady Horner.” Waugh told Katharine that Dr. Longton was the source of these phrases in Scoop, and Katharine told her daughter Helen.[14]

After engagement to Laura Herbert, Waugh looked for a house with the help of Diana Cooper and Katharine; he found Whatley Rectory and Nunney Manor Farm, within a few miles of Mells Manor. He offered to buy Nunney Manor Farm, described in his Diaries as “enchanting … next to castle and farm buildings. Exquisite eighteenth century façade … could be made into one of the loveliest small houses in England” (406). Negotiations broke down because he was unwilling to take a leasehold.[15] Whatley Rectory he found “quite agreeable, but like a thousand other houses in England” (Diaries 406). Waugh settled on Piers Court in Gloucestershire, about forty-eight miles from Mells. After the war, when he decided to sell Piers Court, he again considered buying a house near Mells. Waugh described Southfield as a “very charming house in a friendly district,” Whatley (Diaries 628). According to Anthony Powell, Waugh was “very taken with Ston Easton,” a much larger estate and house just to the west of Midsomer Norton. It was quite run down. Waugh’s interest seemed like “megalomania,” and “wiser counsels prevailed” (Journals 1990-1992, London, 1997, 125). Waugh bought Combe Florey in West Somerset, about fifty miles from Mells.

During most of Waugh’s visits to Mells, Katharine lived in the Manor. Waugh admired the house and described it in the 1940s in his biography of Knox:

Inside, wherever the eye moves it lights on something lovely. The residue of the notable … collection of Italian Masters hangs beside Rossettis and Burne-Joneses and panels of Lady Horner’s needlework. Two libraries divide the leather-bound volumes inherited from Mells Park and Lady Horner’s own collection of all the chief publications of her lifetime, a great part of them a gift of the authors. Open Tudor fireplaces are discreetly reinforced by central-heating…. [Katharine] had added an oratory, a converted bothy, and hung over its altar one of her finest pictures, a crucifixion by Matteo di Giovanni. When Maurice Baring died she inherited the Stations of the Cross which Mrs. Arthur Pollen had painted for his chapel at Rottingdean. Plain oak benches completed the furniture. (309)

The exterior was, according to Waugh, subject to wartime’s “enforced neglect and misuse” when Knox moved in. James Lees-Milne, known for describing stately homes, visited the Manor in the 1970s. He found “a wonderful old Elizabethan house…. Moated Grange sort of garden surrounded by high grey walls, with apple trees, much ragged grass, a raised terrace which [Julian Asquith] assured me his mother Katharine Asquith remembers having two mounts, one at either end, when she was a child” (Ancient as the Hills: Diaries 1973-74, London, 2000, 75).

In the early 1960s, Katharine moved out of the Manor, which was leased to tenants during her son’s overseas assignments. She lived in the village in a house called Tynts Hill. Despite his declining health, Waugh continued to visit. Katharine’s grandson Raymond lived there from 1961 to 1967, when he was a boy attending school. Raymond, the present Lord Oxford, was Waugh’s godson: “Evelyn came there frequently.... I remember his visits well: he and my grandmother used to talk about literature, West Country gossip, religion in a relaxed and quiet way while I played under the piano with my toys. There could have been no more sweet tempered, interesting, engaged, ‘right’ sort of interlocutor in my memory than Evelyn.” Lord Oxford recalls that Waugh was a very generous godfather, always sending memorable gifts on appropriate occasions (e-mail, Sept. 2011).[16] Katharine died in 1976.

During his visits in the mid 1930s Waugh met Conrad Russell (1878-1947), a close friend of Katharine Asquith, Diana Cooper, and Christopher Hollis. He lived in a five-room cottage, Little Claveys, across the road from Hollis. Russell moved to Mells after farming in Sussex. His family included politicians and intellectuals, and his uncle, Lord John Russell, had been Prime Minister. Russell had been friends with Katharine’s husband at Oxford. After work in the City before , he served in the army with distinction, then took up farming. He had enough money to live independently. After her husband’s death, he proposed to Katharine, but she turned him down. They remained close friends, and he often wrote to her, to his two sisters, and to Diana Cooper, whom he had known since youth.[17]

Russell’s letters provide a vivid picture of social life at Mells when Waugh visited. Russell was not a Roman Catholic and criticized changes at Mells Manor after Lady Horner’s death in 1940. He noted that Katharine converted a servant’s bedroom into a chapel, and that priests were almost always present. He became better acquainted with Hilaire Belloc and Ronald Knox, welcome at Mells since Lady Horner’s demise. Knox appeared from time to time to help with the farm, at least during the war (Letters of Russell 202-04). Despite his agnosticism, Russell was a frequent guest at the Manor, but he was bored by endless discussions of minute details of Catholic dogma and ritual. He often wrote to Diana Cooper about these (Letters of Russell 280). Russell met Waugh at Mells, and Katharine and Diana Cooper encouraged them to be friends. Waugh’s letters and diaries refer to Russell as a friend, but Russell kept his distance. He considered Waugh a poseur, “not quite a gentleman.” Russell expressed this reservation after Waugh had said to Madeline Hollis, “What a pretty gardener you have” (Seven Ages 149). Russell in letters also takes Waugh down a peg for showing up unexpectedly and claiming that all his servants left Piers Court after he had criticized them for laughing (21 Sept. 1937). Waugh often asked to bring his manservant to Mells Manor: he knew Katharine would refuse and then whined about inconvenience (20 Aug. 1943). According to Selina Hastings, Waugh “was jealous of Russell’s privileged position, and found unbearably affected his self-consciously rustic role, retired from the world, happy among his cows, peaceably cultivating his garden” (317). Waugh seems well disposed toward Russell in letters to Diana Cooper and Katharine Asquith; neither would have welcomed negative comments. Russell got along with ; Waugh could not stand him.

In his Diaries, Waugh records several informal visits with Russell: he seems to have stopped at Little Claveys, sometimes for a meal. In 1936, Russell received his niece, Elizabeth Plunket Greene, wife of Waugh’s friend Richard Plunket Greene, the brother of Waugh’s former girlfriend, Olivia. Russell took the Plunket Greenes to visit Waugh, probably aware of their friendship, since Waugh had been best man at the wedding of Richard and Elizabeth. Russell also took the Plunket Greenes to see Katharine. Gwen Plunket Greene, mother of Richard and Olivia and a Roman Catholic convert, was in the party. It is not clear if Gwen, Olivia, and another brother, David, had moved into a cottage on the Longleat Estate (Letters of Russell 139).[18]

Russell considered Waugh amusing and enjoyed his earlier books, but he joined Katharine in disliking Brideshead. Fifty pre-publication presentation copies were distributed as Christmas presents in 1944, and Christopher Hollis loaned his to Russell, who commented in several letters to Diana Cooper.[19] He caught Waugh on a point of succession: should Bridey die without children, Waugh wrote, the barony would descend to Julia as eldest daughter. In fact, Russell wrote, it was extremely unlikely for a barony to have survived since Agincourt (as Waugh had written). Should the Marquess die without heirs, “the barony would fall into abeyance between the two sisters. Peerage law and the inheritance of baronies is an abstruse subject which Wu had better left alone. Shall we tell him? Or do you think it might kill him?” (Letters of Russell 236).[20] The deathbed scene of Lord Marchmain he found problematic. Russell could not “imagine why he made such a fuss about that old dying sinner having the sacrament. Lots of dying people have the sacrament. It’s in the prayer book as a protestant service…. He sees an old man cross himself on his deathbed and it converts him. A very bad reason I thought” (Letters of Russell 235-37).

These remarks about deathbed conversion are ironic. Two years later, after a prolonged illness, Russell was moved into Mells Manor. Without warning his family, he asked for a priest and became a Roman Catholic a few days before his death in April 1947. Katharine declared, “It was a miracle.” When his sister asked why he had done it, Russell replied, “I wanted to know if there was anyone at the other end of the telephone” (Letters of Russell 268). When Waugh learned of Russell’s death, he wrote to Diana Cooper: “you cannot share Katharine’s consolation that in his last lucid period he was received into the Church. I presume she has told you about it and how he said ‘I hope what I have done will give you pleasure but you must not suppose that I did it for that reason.’ He is being deeply mourned everywhere—a unique man” (letter dated 10 May 1947, Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh & Diana Cooper, ed. Artemis Cooper, London, 1991, 95). Diana Cooper seems not to have told Waugh about Russell’s reactions to Brideshead.[21] Russell’s deathbed conversion might have been more meaningful had she done so.

Notes [1] An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the conference of the Evelyn Waugh Society in August 2011 at Downside School in Somerset, UK. A tour of Mells was conducted by Raymond Asquith, the present Earl of Oxford. I am greatly indebted to Lord Oxford for valuable comments and corrections. Any errors are mine. [2] Anthony Powell, “Rightly Eccentric” (review of Hollis’s The Seven Ages), Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1974: 10. According to Martin Stannard, Hollis and Conrad Russell were not “intimate friends” of Waugh; Katharine Asquith was. See Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939 (New York, 1987), 440. [3] At the end of Black Mischief, Waugh wrote “Stonyhurst-Chagford-Madresfield, September 1931-May 1932.” [4] Hollis, On the Way to Frome (London, 1958), 168. Lord Oxford thinks the name probably comes from the owner of an eighteenth-century coach that operated between Frome and London. [5] According to Nikolaus Pevsner, Mells Park was “mostly rebuilt by Lutyens for Reginald McKenna, Chairman of the Midland Bank, in 1923.” Christopher Hollis explains that the original Mells Park House, designed by architect John Soane in the 1800s, had burned down in 1917 after the Horners had moved into Mells Manor. Pevsner writes that Mells Manor “seems externally Elizabethan though much restored by the Horners c. 1900.” See The Buildings of England: North Somerset and Bristol (Harmondsworth, 1958), 226. [6] On the Way to Frome, 241-43. Another version: “Horner, Popham, Wyndham and Thynne / When the abbot came out, they went in.” [7] Though Roman Catholic, Father D’Arcy was allowed to visit Mells Manor, apparently because he was charming. [8] According to Selina Hastings, Waugh did not get along with Laura Lovat. Her son Shimi Lovat kicked Waugh out of the in 1943. See Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London, 1994), 450-51. Waugh had to confront Laura Lovat again (at least in writing) in his biography of Ronald Knox. Her brother was Charles Lister, close friend of Knox at Eton and Balliol, and after marriage and conversion to Catholicism, Laura hosted Knox at Beaufort Castle, the Lovat family seat. Knox was close to other members of the family, including Shimi. Waugh describes the Lovats without a hint of acrimony (Knox, 195, 240n.). [9] The chronology of the visit and the cruise is confused. In Waugh’s Letters, an undated letter thanking Katharine for the visit precedes letters written on the cruise (78). This letter may have confused some of Waugh’s biographers (Sykes and Stannard), but Selina Hastings consulted Katharine Asquith’s diaries from the cruise, interviewed her son Julian, and clarified the timing (284-85). [10] Hastings quotes an interview with Julian Asquith, Katharine’s son. According to Lord Oxford, his father Julian maintained that Barrie bored Waugh’s socks off. [11] The first was sent after he had visited Mells, the second while traveling in Italy after the cruise. Both misspelled her name, “Catherine.” These letters should be reversed, since he visited Mells after he had met her on the cruise. [12] Waugh’s colophon for Edmund Campion is “Mells-Belton-Newton Ferrers, October 1934- May 1935.” Belton was the seat of Waugh’s friend Peregrine (“Perry”) Brownlow near Grantham, Lincs., and Newton Ferrers is the house near Plymouth in Devon where Robert and Diana Abdy lived. [13] Diaries 412; Letters 106. Waugh’s letter to Katharine about the Oxford trip is undated; editor Mark Amory guesses “June (?) 1936.” The Diaries date the trip 8-9 November 1936. [14] Christopher Hollis in a letter to Michael Davie, editor of Waugh’s Diaries, said that Major Elderton in the next village had been the source of “Up to a point.” Villagers used the phrase to defend themselves when the Major asked questions and fell into “an ungovernable rage” when they failed to give the right answers. Hollis identifies Lady Horner as the source; Major Elderton seemed only mildly eccentric. See Diaries 627-28, n. 1. [15] Nunney Manor Farm is called “Manor Farm House” by Nikolaus Pevsner (“a handsome five-bay farm house of two stories, dating from early c18 … NW of the castle”). See Pevsner, North Somerset, 239-40. A recent article, “Evelyn Waugh and Nunney,” provides more detail about his attempt to purchase the house. [16] Katharine was ’s godmother, the only one of four godparents to attend his baptism in November 1939, during bad weather (Diaries 452). [17] Letters of Conrad Russell 1897-1947, ed. Georgiana Blakiston (London, 1987). Russell’s brothers, Claud and Gilbert, had both been in love with Diana and wanted to marry her (120). Conrad became better acquainted with Diana Cooper in 1933 when she toured in a play entitled The Miracle. She visited Mells and took him back to the theatre in Cardiff where she performed (Letters of Russell 120-21). Their published correspondence begins after that visit and continues until Russell’s death. He also corresponded with Daphne Fielding after her marriage to Henry Thynne (later Marquess of Bath); they lived at Sturford Mead on the Longleat Estate just east of Frome. [18] Olivia’s brother David died in 1941 at age 36 (probably due to heroin addiction), and the family then lived on the Longleat Estate. [19] Russell wondered whether she had received a copy of the special edition--she had--and whether he would get one--apparently not (Letters of Russell 233). [20] In letters, Russell frequently refers to Waugh as “Woo” or “Wu,” following Diana Cooper. [21] Diana wrote on 18 January 1945 to thank Waugh for her advance copy of Brideshead Revisited. She says nothing about Russell’s comments (MW&MS 81), sent to her about 29 December 1944.

Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism John Howard Wilson Lock Haven University

This is a continuation of the earlier lists, published in Evelyn Waugh Studies. It contains books and articles published in 2012, as well as items omitted from previous lists.

Baldick, Chris. Literature of the 1920s: Writers Among the Ruins. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. Bényei, Tamás. Acts of Attention (1999). Rev. by Patrick Query, “Very Rarely Given,” EWS 43.1 (Spring 2012): 27. Birch, Dinah, and Katy Hooper. Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Blackburn, David. “The dishonour of the Second World War.” Spectator, 23 March 2012. Byrne, Paula. Mad World (2009). Rev. by Kevin J. Gardner, Religion and the Arts 16 (2012): 135-37. Cooper, Ric. “War of the Roses.” EWS 42.3 (Winter 2012): 6. Davis, Robert Murray. “Footnote on Waugh and Merton.” EWS 42.3 (Winter 2012): 6-7. Deer, Patrick. Culture in Camouflage (2009). Rev. by John Howard Wilson, “Dandies and Blackouts,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 19-21. Donaldson, Frances. Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour (1967). London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2012. Ermida, Isabel. The Language of Comic Narratives (2008). Rev. by Gayatri Devi, “The Principle of Cooperation in the Humorous ,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 23-26. Gallagher, Donat. “Captain Evelyn Waugh and the Special Operations Executive (SOE).” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 1-7. Gallagher, Donat. “Could Ivor Claire Be Lord Lovat? Could Diana Cooper Be Wrong?” EWS 42.3 (Winter 2012): 1-6. Gallagher, Donat. “Five Editions of Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion.” Book Collector 61.4 (Winter 2012). Gallagher, Donat. “Wanted: ‘A Sense of Loss.’” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 12. Gallagher, Donat, Ann Pasternak Slater, and John Howard Wilson, eds. “A Handful of Mischief” (2011). Rev. by Douglas Lane Patey, “Attending, Noticing, Detecting, Interpreting,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 12-15. Giles, Paul. Atlantic Republic (2006). Rev. by Jonathan Pitcher, “Emollient Schisms,” EWS 42.3 (Winter 2012): 12-15. Gilmour, Rachael, and Bill Schwarz, eds. End of Empire and the since 1945. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011. Rev. by Nick Bentley, Postcolonial Text 7.3 (2012); David James, Review of English Studies (2012). Grann, David. The Lost City of Z (2009). Rev. by John Howard Wilson, “The Deserted Post,” EWS 43.1 (Spring 2012): 22-23. Greenberg, Jonathan. Modernism, Satire, and the Novel (2011). Rev. by Kristin Bluemel, Twentieth Century Literature 58.3 (Fall 2012): 524-31. Griffiths, Richard. The Pen and the Cross (2010). Rev. by Patrick Query, “Conversing with the Past,” EWS 42.3 (Winter 2012): 15-17. Hansen, Regina. Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film (2011). Rev. by Anton Karl Kozlovic, Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 2.1 (2012): 229-34. Harris, Alexandra. Romantic Moderns (2010). Rev. by Jeffrey Manley, “From Drab Alleys to Odorous Gardens,” EWS 43.1 (Spring 2012): 18-22. Hendrix, Jenny. “The Lost, Unlovable Evelyn Waugh: Why are his later, Catholic novels so dismissed?” Slate Book Review, 30 November 2012. Hitchens, Christopher. Arguably (2011). Rev. by Jeffrey Manley, “Without a Hitch,” EWS 42.3 (Winter 2012): 17-23. Johnson, RoseMary C. “Human Tragedy, Divine Comedy: The Painfulness of Conversion in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” Renascence 64.2 (Winter 2012): 161-75. Joulié, Gérard. “Aristocratie et catholicisme. Evelyn Waugh." Choisir: revue culturelle 633 (2012): 34-37. Joyce, Simon. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007). Rev. by Nicole Burkholder- Mosco, “The Reluctant Victorianist,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 27-29. Karl, Alissa. “A Little Fiction is Good for You: Currency Crisis, the Nation State, and Waugh’s African Texts.” Modern Fiction Studies 58.2 (Summer 2012): 261-83. Kuper, Simon. “Eternal Music from a Literary Quartet.” Financial Times, 10 March 2012: 7. Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010). Rev. by Patrick Query, “Sharpness of Perception,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 26. Long, J. V. “Evelyn Waugh and Dom Hubert van Zeller: A Particular Friendship.” EWS 43.1 (Spring 2012): 6-14. Macari, Ileana Oana. “A Conversational Analysis of the Compulsion to Talk in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.” Analele Ştiinţifice ale Universitǎţii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iaşi (Serie Nouǎ): Supliment la Tomul 14 (2011): 425-33. Mason, Andrew, and Richard Gehrmann. “Filtered Nostalgia of the 1920s: Representations of the British University Ideal.” 2012: 415-27. McGregor, Steven. “Ending a war story.” Spectator, 22 March 2012. McLaren, Duncan. “Carry on, Grimes.” Evelyn! Duncan McLaren’s Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love. Miles, Andrew, and Mike Savage. “The Strange Survival Story of the English Gentleman, 1945-2010.” Cultural and Social History 9.4 (December 2012): 595-612. Miller, Veronica Marie. “‘Man without God is Less Than Man’: Political, Domestic and Intellectual Deracination in Evelyn Waugh's Early Novels.” PhD diss. U of Dallas, 2012. Murray, J. Franklin. “Waugh Revisited: A Reminiscence” (1972). EWS 43.1 (Spring 2012): 1- 6. My Life in Books (BBC2, 2011). Rev. by Jeffrey Manley, “Desert Island Books,” EWS 43.1 (Spring 2012): 27-29. Nicholls, Mark. Lost Objects of Desire: The Performances of . New York: Berghahn, 2012. O’Keefe, Emily. “The Things that Remain: People, Objects, and Anxiety in Thirties British Fiction.” PhD diss. Loyola U Chicago, 2012. Palmer, Alan. “1945—: Ontologies of Consciousness” (2011). Rev. by Laura Mooneyham White, “Cognitive Studies,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 15-18. Palmer, Alan. “Storyworlds and Groups” (2010). Rev. by Laura Mooneyham White, “Cognitive Studies,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 15-18. Payne, Rachel Lynn. “The Witness of the Saints: Literary Method and Theological Matter in the Hagiographical Novels of Evelyn Waugh, Frederick Buechner, and Walter Wangerin, Jr.” PhD diss. Baylor U, 2012. Pearce, Joseph. “Words on a Sword.” Saint Austin Review, 26 June 2012. Peat, Alexandra. Travel and Modernist Literature (2010). Rev. by David Farley, Modernism/Modernity 19.1 (January 2012): 216-18. Potter, Martin. “Catholic Approaches to Jerusalem: Fragmentation and Continuity of Identities—Evelyn Waugh’s Helena and ’s The Mandelbaum Gate.” Topodynamics of Arrival: Essays on Self and Pilgrimage. Ed. Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 115-38. Query, Patrick R. Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Reeve-Tucker, Alice. “Evelyn Waugh, and Catholicism: 1928-1939.” PhD diss. U of Birmingham, 2012. Řeháček, Petr. “Belief, Society and Change in World War II Britain in Evelyn Waugh’s Trilogy.” MA thesis. Masaryk U, 2012. Reid, Alcuin, ed. A Bitter Trial (2011). Rev. by Donat Gallagher, “Tried and True,” EWS 43.1 (Spring 2012): 14-18; Philip Blosser, “Undone by the ‘Permanent Workshop,’” New Oxford Review, June 2012. Ruiz Cecilia, Raúl, and Cristina Pérez Valverde. “Aproximación Lingüística, Sociocultural y Didáctica a ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing.” Alpha (Osorno) 35 (2012): 195-206. St. Pierre, Paul Matthew, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 352 (2010). Rev. by Jeffery Manley, “Redundancy and Confusion,” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 21-23. Sherron, Robert. “Guy’s Qualitative Journey towards True Vocation in Sword of Honour.” EWS 43.2 (Autumn 2012): 7-12. Soffer, Reba. “Intellectual History, Life and Fiction: The Case of Evelyn Waugh.” Britain and the World 5.1 (2012): 43-68. Sutherland, John. Lives of the Novelists (2011). Rev. by Florence King, “Tales of the Tellers,” , 14 May 2012: 48. Timasheva, O. V., and K. G. Shishkin. “Грэм Грин и Ивлин Во (Штрихи к портрету писателей в молодости)” [“Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh (Strokes to the Portrait of Writers in Youth)”]. Интеллигенция и мир [Intelligentsia and the World] 4 (2012): 90-101. Vinciguerra, Thomas. “30 Years Later, Revisiting ‘Brideshead.’” New York Times, 30 December 2011. Vishnoi, Parul. “Thematic Concerns and Patterns in the Fiction of Evelyn Waugh." PhD diss. Chaudhary Charan Singh U, 2012. Walter, Hugo G. Magnificent Houses in Twentieth-Century European Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Rev. in Reference & Research Book News, October 2012. Waugh, Auberon. Kiss Me, Chudleigh (2010). Rev. by Jeffrey Manley, “A Genial Practice,” EWS 43.1 (Spring 2012): 23-27. Waugh, Evelyn. The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox (1959). Rev. by Stephen Halliday, Times Higher Education, 17 May 2012. Waugh, Evelyn. Rendición incondicional. Edición de Carlos Villar Flor y Gabriel Insausti Herrero-Velarde. Traducción de Carlos Villar Flor y Gabriel Insausti. Madrid: Cátedra, 2011. Rev. by Lorena Silos, Estudios de Traducción 2 (2012): 206-07. Waugh, Evelyn. Rossetti: His Life and Works (1928). Rev. by Paul Johnson, Wall Street Journal, 19 October 2012. Waugh, Evelyn. Scoop (1938). Rev. by Amanda Smith, Wall Street Journal, 20 April 2012. Waugh, Evelyn. Sword of Honour (1965). Rev. by Anna Reid, World War II (May/June 2012): 14. Waugh, Evelyn. Vile Bodies (1930). Rev. by Claire Warden, Times Higher Education, 13 September 2012. Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. “‘In the Advance Guard’: Evelyn Waugh’s Reputation.” Yet More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture. Ed. William Roger Louis. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005. Wilson, John Howard. “Evelyn Waugh: A Supplementary Checklist of Criticism.” EWS 42.3 (Winter 2012): 7-12. Woudhuysen, H. R. “Punctuation and its Contents: Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh.” Essays in Criticism 62.3 (July 2012): 221-47.

Waugh 25th Anniversary Quiz (1952)

The Waugh-Russell Collection includes an unusual item in Box 1, Folder 23, Georgetown University Library Special Collections Research Center, Washington, DC. It is a Christmas card for 1952, signed by Jack McDougall of Chapman & Hall, though the envelope is addressed in Waugh’s hand to Leonard Russell, Literary Editor of .

The illustration is a reproduction of The Collected Works of Evelyn Waugh by Martin Battersby, “a trompe-l’œil panel presented to Mr. Evelyn Waugh to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of his first novel by Messrs Chapman & Hall.” The card includes a set of twenty-two quotations corresponding to objects in the painting and a carbon overlay identifying each object by number. The first person to identify the source of each quotation won “a set of Mr. Evelyn Waugh’s novels, signed by the author.”

Graham Greene received a similar card signed by Laura Waugh because Evelyn was in . The card includes the painting, but there are no clues and no overlay (Greene Papers: Box 8, Folder 52, Georgetown).

Waugh Studies is unable to reproduce the painting, but photographs of it can be found in Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966 by Martin Stannard, and in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, (a.k.a. Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch), ed. Artemis Cooper. Likewise, we are unable to offer a signed set of Waugh’s novels, but perhaps we can come up with a prize for the first correct set of identifications received after 1 January 2014. Editors of Waugh Studies are not eligible. The quotations from 1952 and descriptions of corresponding objects in the painting appear below.

Bonus Questions: who won the novels in 1953? And where are they now?

Quotation Object in Painting 1. He had not been abroad since 1939. Passport 2. A drunk military man should order gallons. Flags of UK, France, and [?] 3. Work. Just healthy toil. Night and Day, Spectator, Tablet, Month, Horizon 4. We can have some cloven for you. Cleft stick holding paper: “PRESS COLLECT” 5. Adapted by Mr. Pecksniff from one of his Hetton Abbey. The West Wing pupil’s designs for an orphanage. 6. ‘I’d like to eat you.’ Long fork inserted into blob ‘So you shall, my sweet.’ 7. Our standard first novel contract. An Agreement Chapman & Hall Swore not at all Mr. Chapman’s yea was yea And Mr. Hall’s nay was nay. 8. Oxford in those days was still a city of Radcliffe Camera aquatint. 9. Spectaculum facti sumus A reliquary 10. Esprit de corps would fall like blessed Four soldiers unction from above. 11. In a world of competition, people are taken “What America is Reading” at their face value. 12. The English Plunket-Bowse car, driven by Dust jacket of Vile Bodies Miss Agatha, has retired from the race. 13. A thousand times more beautiful than all Framed portrait of a flapper with cracked glass, Paul’s feverish recollections. signed “Margot” 14. They have even taken to calling me Dust jacket of Helena Empress. 15. We travelled as a matter of course. Light-green medallion at bottom of 13 (portrait) 16. And so an epoch, my epoch, came to an Manuscript with military figures end. 17. The pattern which they followed. IHS surrounded by rays 18. I had been there before. Drawing of domed house 19. A Stunner. Female nude above spectrum 20. Grimes was of the immortals. Drawing by Waugh 21. ΘΑΝΑΤΟΓΕΝΟΣ Half skull, half female face, eye closed 22. An Indian ape … rattled his gold chain on Portrait of the terrace.

Waugh by Friends and Colleagues: Christopher Hollis

For a program entitled A Profile of Evelyn Waugh, Canadian broadcaster Nathan Cohen interviewed a dozen people, either friends of Waugh or fellow writers. The program was broadcast on CBC Radio on Waugh’s birthday, 28 October 1969, three years after his death. David J. Dooley, co-author of Evelyn Waugh: A Reference Guide (1984), recorded the program and transcribed it. A copy passed into the hands of one of Dooley’s students, Jeffrey M. Heath, author of The Picturesque Prison (1982). That transcript is now in the Jeffrey M. Heath Fonds, Series 3, Box 6, File 1, E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria University in the University of Toronto.

In each of the next several issues, Waugh Studies intends to publish the comments of one person interviewed for the program. The first is Christopher Hollis, a friend of Waugh but also a prolific author:

The young all naturally think of Evelyn Waugh as a figure of the older generation, crusty, gnarled, obstinate in his misanthropy and his hostility to all progress. To us who are ourselves of that older generation, and who grew up with him, the picture is wryly amusing. We remember how forty years ago at Oxford Evelyn Waugh was the leader of those who defied university authority and the ways of our seniors, and how it was as the chronicler of the , as the less serious angry young beatniks of that day were called, that he first imposed himself on the world in the 1920s as the author of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. What then happened? Was it simply another instance of the all too familiar story of a progress from radical youth to reactionary old age? To some extent, but by no means completely. Evelyn Waugh was indeed in the 1920s the prophet of youth in revolt, but of even then a revolt with a difference. Even then his satire was something very different from that of the unqualified progressive who derides all venerable institutions just because they are venerable, and takes up with all new causes just because they are new. A world away as he was at that time from any acceptance of the Christian religion, or of the confessed traditions of society, he laid about him with his satiric wit, but his blows from the first fell impartially on right and left—indeed from the first fell a little more heavily on the left. It was those who professed new creeds whom he found particularly ridiculous. A perceptive reader, I think, even in those early days, might well have thought that it would not be impossible that Waugh would have found his final home, as of course he did, in the Roman . There were other ways in which his life in old age was much more of a piece with his life in youth than might at first sight be thought. It’s true enough that in his later days he became something of a recluse. He did not make himself easily available to his neighbours, and not at all available to casual visitors. But this misanthropy, if so it is to be called, must be set side by side with his quite extraordinary faithfulness and generosity to the old friends of his youth, to whom his abundant hospitality was ever at call (pp. 3-4).

REVIEWS

Old Wine in New Bottles Black Mischief, narrated by Michael Maloney. Hachette Audio. 420 min. $19.98. A Handful of Dust, narrated by Andrew Sachs. Hachette Audio. 390 min. $19.98. Brideshead Revisited, narrated by Jeremy Irons. Hachette Audio. 690 min. $19.98. The Loved One, narrated by Simon Prebble. Hachette Audio. 210 min. $19.98. Reviewed by Barbara Jemielity, Area Superintendent of Schools (ret.), Diocese of Fort Wayne- South Bend, IN

These four novels, recent releases from Hachette Audio, provide listeners with a decade and a half of Waugh’s fiction from Black Mischief (1932) to The Loved One (1948). In addition, the novels represent a fair sample of the range of his writing, both in subject matter and style. The books are available as downloadable audio.

The narrators selected for these works are admirably suited to the task. Michael Maloney and Andrew Sachs have appeared in films, plays, and television. To narrate Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust (1934), Maloney and Sachs draw on distinguished careers as actors for the BBC and other producers. Jeremy Irons is perhaps the best known, having created the role of Charles Ryder in the ITV presentation of Brideshead, a breakout role for the actor. Simon Prebble, narrating The Loved One, also has a long career as an actor, and he is well known to audio-book listeners, since he has recorded more than 450 titles.

To present the books to listeners, each narrator has to create and maintain a wide variety of voices. In Black Mischief, Maloney has to impersonate not only Seth, the leader of an independent African nation, but also the ambassador and the bishop, all the way to the man on the street back in England. He is convincing, moving seamlessly from voice to voice, including those of the butler, the upper class, and the Oxbridge educated. Maloney also conveys humor, essentially satirical and inherent in the work. Through his range, Maloney brings to life both the native ruler and the bright young things.

Andrew Sachs brings his long experience as actor and narrator to the characters of A Handful of Dust. From those working in the stable to the landed gentry, he presents Waugh’s characters in distinct and credible voices. Sachs’s narration effectively conveys the satire and the judgments in the novel.

In his interpretation of Charles Ryder, Jeremy Irons, narrator of Brideshead Revisited, sounds nostalgic for past events and failed relationships. By modulating his voice, Irons clearly distinguishes between characters, Sebastian and Julia, for instance, and between the Flytes and many minor characters, such as Jasper, who appear for only a short time.

Through Simon Prebble, British in Hollywood seem self-satisfied, avuncular, and patronizing toward young Barlow, poet and attendant at the pet funeral home, but Prebble also nails Americans who talk without expecting to be heard. Minor characters include wealthy and obnoxious owners in the farcical disposition of pets; some are also Hollywood moguls whose decisions are final and, in at least one case, fatal.

For those of us who first met these works in print on paper, the audio book and the e- book provide new ways to enjoy old favorites, all excellently done. And as we age and eyesight dims, the audio book offers perhaps the only way to reread old favorites and to explore new works. For younger readers, e-books and audio books on CD or MP3 discs, often downloaded to an iPod or similar device, have become the norm. Thanks to those who narrate with skill and understanding of both the work and the requirements of tone, voice, and pacing, these formats prove both pleasant and satisfying.

For those looking for Waugh or other writers in audio books, iTunes, Audible, Downpour, Audiobooks.com, and other vendors carry a wide variety at widely ranging prices. Many local libraries maintain collections of audio books and allow them to be downloaded to computer or iPod. The delivery system may be changing, but great reads remain great reads, even if they are read aloud by someone else.

Waughdio, Part 3 Sword of Honour. Hachette Audio. 1470 min. $29.98. Reviewed by Patrick Query, U. S. Military Academy

Hachette Audio has chosen to release recordings of both the individual novels in Waugh’s war trilogy—Men at Arms, , and Unconditional Surrender— and the single-volume Sword of Honour. If one had to choose between them—and I do not know that one does—Sword of Honour, read by Simon Prebble, might prove the more satisfying listening experience. I discussed the trilogy in EWS 44.2 (Autumn 2013), noting some minor misgivings about narrator Christian Rodska’s voice as the one to carry such a weight of text. The reading by Prebble, who also read Helena and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold for Hachette, occasioned no such misgivings. I preferred Prebble’s interpretation of virtually every character in the narrative. His differentiation of characters is perhaps not as great as Rodska’s, but in a single- voice audio recording—as opposed to a staged reading with multiple performers, sound effects, etc.—differentiation without extremity may actually be preferable to doing the police, as it were, in too many different voices. At least it is arguable that, in the writing of Waugh, retaining the cool reticence of the page best captures the wry effect of the humor.

There is a particular maneuver that serves Prebble well in a host of instances, but most notably with Guy Crouchback, whereby he adds a kind of schwa to the beginnings of words, so that, for instance, “No” sometimes becomes “uhNo,” and “Yes” “uhYes.” (Geoffrey Rush taught Colin Firth a similar trick, to a different end, in The King’s Speech. A linguist might easily be able to name it. Prothesis? Epenthesis?) When Apthorpe asks Guy, apropos of his thunder-box, “What do you think of it?” Prebble’s Guy replies “uhIt’s clearly been very well looked after,” rendering perfectly audible the truth of the preceding narrative statement “Guy was not sure of the proper terms in which to praise such an exhibit.” Prebble is master of countless such devices and deploys them without a trace of effort.

Requiring some effort, though, is the American character “the Loot,” who seems impossible for British narrators to pin down. Prebble’s Loot is only slightly more convincing than Rodska’s. Perhaps it is reasonable for such a shifty character to have an accent that slides between locales and registers, or perhaps a generic American accent is more elusive than an American listener imagines. It is hardly worth pointing out such a minor instance of Prebble at less than his most masterful, however. The production as a whole presents an ideal marriage of a work and a reader, and it is hard to imagine another version being necessary for the foreseeable future.

Yet Another Wide-Ranging Survey Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family, by Michael G. Brennan. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 192 pp. $120 cloth, $34.95 paper. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

This “wide-ranging survey” of Waugh’s literary career claims in the preface to “trace how elements of Catholic belief, theology and liturgy consistently provided Waugh with an inspiring choice of narrative creativity, intellectual skepticism and spiritual solace.” Earlier biographies and literary critiques also consider the effect of Waugh’s religion on his life and writing, and how this book differs is nowhere stated. In fact, Fictions, Faith and Family is not focused on religious influence; it is another survey of Waugh’s life and works.

Much of the text is devoted to plot summaries. In the chapter on Decline and Fall, Michael Brennan shows how the lack of faith affected a novel written before conversion. But there is no shortage of plot summaries in numerous other books. Biographical and literary analysis is heavily dependent on Waugh’s biographers, particularly Martin Stannard, Selina Hastings, and Douglas Patey. Footnotes are adequate, but Brennan accepts existing work without offering his own conclusions.

One wonders why Brennan bothered to write another survey in an already crowded field. He has obviously researched secondary sources. Contrary to the blurb on the cover, however, Fictions, Faith and Family shows no evidence of original insights from “unpublished draft manuscripts,” nor does Brennan cite unpublished correspondence or other archival materials.[1] Brennan does refer to neglected works of Alec Waugh and Auberon Waugh, but he summarizes instead of connecting them to religion and Evelyn Waugh.

Fictions, Faith and Family is well written, organized according to publication of each book. Labels is considered before Vile Bodies, though it was published several months later. Errors need attention if there is any reprinting. William Boot’s newspaper column is “Lush Places,” not “Lush Notes” (61-62); was the son of a schoolmaster, not a baronet (32), and inherited his title from an uncle; Waugh changed the ending of his war trilogy so that Guy and Domenica had no children of their own (130, 137). The book is nicely produced but overpriced at $34.95. The Kindle edition costs $15.01.

Note [1] There is a reference (32) to the manuscript of Vile Bodies in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. Brennan argues that Waugh’s writing changed when he learned of his wife’s infidelity. That is hardly an original discovery, however.

Whose Europe Is It Anyway? Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing, by Patrick R. Query. Burlington, VT and Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012. 268 pp. $104.95/£60. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma

Examining seven writers—Eliot, Yeats, Auden, D. H. Lawrence, Greene, Waugh, David Jones, plus a group involved in the Spanish Civil War—Patrick Query uses their works to explore various definitions, past and present, of Europe in light of three kinds of ritual: verse drama, bullfighting, and Catholicism, in the last case primarily the Mass. He reviews a prodigious body of material to define key terms and a good deal else to contextualize, at times perhaps hyper-contextualize, the ideas as well as the works of the authors. Those more expert than I can speak more authoritatively on the three major poet- dramatists, on Spanish Civil War writers, and on David Jones. Query admits that attempting to foster cultural cohesion through verse drama was ultimately unsuccessful, essentially ending in 1939 when all coherence seemed gone, and—though this is my judgment rather than his—the plays by the three poets are less successful than all but the feeblest of their poetry. This granted, however, Query’s discussion adds a good deal to understanding of the plays and their times.

The chapter on three of D. H. Lawrence’s works set in Mexico which involve bullfighting introduces that country as an extension of Europe and at the same time a critique of both Europe and Latin America. Much of the discussion of The Plumed Serpent concentrates on the first chapter “Beginnings of a Bull-Fight” and the way it prepares for the heroine’s responses to invented ritual and blood sacrifice later in a novel that ultimately fails to resolve personal and ideological conflicts “because it demands a tragic solution but cannot find one.” Query seems to be arguing that had Lawrence and then his heroine managed to stay to the end of the first bullfight they attended, had they seen the ritual completed, both the character and the novel might have been able to reconcile opposites. However, this argument ignores Lawrence’s tendency to end his novels irresolutely or even, as pointed out, to make the characters suddenly depart, like their creator, for another country. (Incidentally, Query passes over Evelyn Waugh, who calls the opening chapters “superb” before the novel turns into “one of the silliest stories in recent literature” and Lawrence “passes beyond Mexico into a world of stark nonsense.”)

Readers of Evelyn Waugh Studies will be most interested in the chapter on Greene and Waugh, perhaps the best discussion I have seen of the two men’s travel books about Mexico. Query quite rightly makes the distinction: Waugh sees the Church as “the framework for a civilization,” but Greene sees it “as an oppositional instrument.” While Waugh was, in Query’s terms, “a centripetal traveler” who consistently focused on Europe, Greene, though no less Eurocentric, was centrifugal, “content to let his experiences abroad spin him out into unexplored areas of mind.” Moreover, the books “suggest that English ideas of Mexico had important nuances to add to the idea of Europe being contested in Spain and about to swell into a world war.” Both writers accept the pre-Vatican II top-down, magisterial ecclesiastical structure, though, as Query suggests, Greene comes closer to anticipating the less authoritarian vision, soon to be quashed, of the 1960s.

Query finds Greene’s views on Mexico more sympathetic, but he is far from seconding the blanket and facile condemnations of Waugh advanced by Martin Stannard, Dan Kostopulos, and others, and he is surely correct in indicating that the two travel books are Greene’s and Waugh’s clearest statements about the Spanish Civil War.

Query’s book deserves more discussion and more praise than I can give, especially for his thorough examination of various ideas about the meaning and future of Europe. Most of my experience of Europe comes from Hungary and points east and south, where “Europe” is an aspiration rather than a concern, where even before the 1980s many people rejected the label “Eastern Europe” because of what they regarded as a cultural and political stigma, and where at the beginning of that century, in Hungary, progressive writers chose “Nyugat,” or West, as the title of the leading literary magazine and many good Romanians went to Paris rather than heaven. Eliot and others worried that Europe was disintegrating. Central and Southern Europeans clung, and in many cases still cling, to “Europe” as an ideal, and, in practical terms, rely on translation into major languages like English, German, and French to reach a wider audience. More to the point, Query shows the relevance of the debate about, or quest for, Europe in this century, citing the debate over Turkey’s potential membership in the European Union, the influx of Muslim and other non-European immigrants, and the threats of fracture by various ethnic groups in Belgium, Spain, and the Balkans. Questions of who and what is European, and why, will be with us for a long time.

This is Query’s first book, and I suspect that as he moves forward, he will learn to take the advice given by my dissertation director a half-century ago: “Put all the guff in the footnotes.” Most of what Query includes is not exactly guff, but some seems superfluous and slows development of his argument. Given his approach, he writes with admirable clarity and directness.

The book deserves a wider audience than it is likely to get, largely because of a price prohibitive for individual readers and all but the most affluent libraries. The book is good, but arguably not worth $100. Query is not, of course, responsible, but he and his generation of scholars need to find a way to make their work accessible to more than just fortunate reviewers. Perhaps, like EWS, the solution lies in digital publishing for a fit audience, however few, with of course careful peer review and persuasive arguments to administrators and tenure committees that serious scholarship can appear in new formats.

Kindred Spirits Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963, ed. Katherine A. Powers. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013. 480 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

This book is the story of the writer J. F. Powers in the first half of his career. His letters start just before marriage when imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II and end with his first novel, Morte d’Urban. The letters resemble the “novel of family life” he contemplated but never wrote.

Powers was a slow worker who never produced a large oeuvre. His two novels about Roman Catholic priests in the Upper Midwest had long gestation periods. He wrote a respectable body of stories, collected in three volumes during his life. His nonfiction has never been collected; it did not amount to much in the years covered in this volume. He never earned enough to support a wife and five children on writing alone.

Powers nevertheless found temporary positions at universities (Marquette and Michigan) and taught creative writing, though he had no degree. He might have found a permanent job, but that would have interfered with writing. His wife, Betty Wahl, was also a writer who produced several stories and one novel while raising five children on almost no income. Before marriage, Powers explained that he had no intention of wasting time on a job.

Powers’s talent was recognized. Many of his stories were published in the New Yorker and other magazines. His first novel was not a bestseller, but it won the National Book Award. He went to the Yaddo writers’ colony near Saratoga Springs, New York and met Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. Powers also corresponded with novelists Katherine Anne Porter and Jack Conroy. In Ireland, he befriended writers Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor.

With reservations, Powers admired Waugh’s writing. In his review of The Loved One, Powers described Waugh’s American diction as “faulty in spots … as though he received good advice in some chapters and bad in others.” Powers was enthusiastic, however. Waugh had returned to pre-Brideshead satire: “Mr. Waugh is himself again … and there is still no one like him.” Waugh, according to Powers, “sets a scene, starts his characters talking and thinking, but the reader gets a crisp digest. He realizes that he cannot go into everything, every reaction, without dulling the finish, losing his edge. He does not attempt the impossible to him, to his method, and so he is never caught trying too hard, the common fault of satirists. He realizes that he can turn just so much lead into gold, quicksilver rather” (“Waugh Out West,” Commonweal, 16 July 1948, 326-27).

Waugh reviewed Powers’s first collection of stories, Prince of Darkness, in the Month for March 1949. The publisher, John Lehmann, claimed that the stories avoided the “tough background and sentimental approach so characteristic of so much modern fiction.” Waugh cited examples of both and added that Lehmann overlooked the main point. As a Roman Catholic, Powers had the “brilliant and determining quality [of] a full philosophy with which to oppose the follies of his age and nation.” Waugh referred to two other young American Catholic writers, Thomas Merton and Harry Sylvester, but Powers was “unique in his country as a lay writer who is at ease in the Church; whose art, moreover, is everywhere directed and infused by his faith.” Waugh noted Powers’s “concern with the natural order as a pure story teller,” citing down-to- earth subjects such as baseball, usury, jazz, and Catholic priests’ daily rounds (“Pioneer! O Pioneer!” Essays 373-74).

Waugh wrote the review prior to his return to the USA in February 1949 for a lecture tour of Catholic universities. He made a last-minute change in schedule and added a lecture in Minnesota. Powers described the visit in a letter to Robert Lowell, 25 May 1949, included in this collection.[1] Powers comments on Waugh in letters to others. To Father Egan, he mentions Waugh’s 1949 Life magazine article on the American Catholic Church, which “has some good things to say but is cloudy at the end.” He criticizes the photograph of himself in the article, which makes him “look like a queer,” though that might boost his sales among homosexuals (149-50). According to Powers, O’Faolain and O’Connor thought Waugh had gone mad and had his servants dressed in livery. After visiting Waugh at Piers Court in 1952, Powers wrote that the Irish were wrong about Waugh, who had carried the dishes himself (169, 176). In 1956, Powers read that Waugh had sold Piers Court. To Betty, he confessed surprise, since Waugh seemed rooted there, and he wondered whether Waugh’s voices had led to the sale. Pinfold was not published until 1957: Waugh may have written to Powers about voices, or perhaps he heard about them from their mutual friend Anne Fremantle (237 and n1).

In another letter, Powers mentions a stop in Springfield, Illinois. He met the owner of Templegate Books, Hugh Garvey, who described an exchange during Waugh’s visit on his 1949 lecture tour:

Reporter: Is it true you don’t like American methods of heating?

Waugh: What makes you say that?

Reporter: Something I heard or read somewhere. Of course, I only know what I read in the papers, as Will Rogers used to say.

Waugh: Will Rogers? He’s dead, isn’t he?

Reporter: Yes.

Waugh: Now he knows better. (259-60)

Waugh favorably reviewed Powers’s second story collection, Presence of Grace (1956). After referring to the “delicate and original talent” of the first collection, Waugh noted that the later stories display “the same exquisite craftsmanship.” Waugh warned British readers that Powers’s settings are exotic, his American diction difficult to follow. He described two stories as “outstanding,” identified the title story as the best, and concluded that “Powers has the essential equipment of the artist, a firm philosophic position, a body of unique raw material of endless potentiality, a splendid skill in self- expression. He has shown himself impervious to the chief ills of his profession. I see no limit to his possible achievement” (“Scenes of Clerical Life,” Commonweal, 30 March 1956, 667-68). Powers thanked Waugh. He also wrote Father Egan: “I hadn’t realized that my diction was a difficulty. I had always thought I wrote without benefit of a private argot, not doing the sort of thing, say, that Algren, with his thieves’ language does” (220). Waugh and Powers corresponded until December 1963. Only one letter to Waugh is included. Waugh wrote a blurb praising Morte d’Urban and a letter to Powers, who replied (381- 82).

Suitable Accommodations is enjoyable as insight into the life of an unusual writer. The early chapters (1-6) are slow going, but one should persevere. These can be skipped by reading links supplied by the editor. The best letters are to other writers and to Father Egan, who resembles Father Urban in Powers’s first novel. The most tedious are to members of “the Movement,” Roman Catholic agrarians and artisans around St. John’s University and Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. Powers’s letters after moving to Ann Arbor in 1956 are more humorous.

Links by the editor are helpful; footnotes are useful and unobtrusive. Missing are almost all of Powers’s letters to Waugh. EWS will publish these in a future issue, thanks to Katherine Powers, who will edit them.

Notes [1] For more about Waugh’s visit with Powers in 1949, see Jeffrey Manley and John McGinty, “Something Entirely Unique,” EWS 43.3, 44.1, and 44.2 (Winter , Spring, and Fall 2013).

An American in Paris American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop, by Caroline de Margerie. Introduction by Frances Fitzgerald. Trans. from the French (American Lady: Une reporter en gants blancs [A White-Gloved Reporter], Paris, 2011) by Christopher Murray. New York: Viking, 2012. 232 pp. $26.95. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

This is a biography of a woman who made her reputation by having an affair with Duff Cooper and then marrying her second husband, noted Washington journalist Joseph Alsop. Her interest to EWS readers arises from her acquaintance with Evelyn Waugh.

After working at Vogue magazine, Susan Mary married William Patten in 1939. Patten became a reserve officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, thanks to a family connection. In 1944, he was posted to Paris.

When she arrived, Susan Mary was keen to help her husband succeed. Her biographer picks interesting details from published and archived sources, such as correspondence and diaries. The primary focus is Susan Mary’s affair with Duff Cooper, beginning shortly after her arrival, when he was British Ambassador in Paris, and continuing until his death. Her position as mistress was hardly exclusive, since he enjoyed the favors of other women, including those of his wife Diana, a close friend of Evelyn Waugh. Susan Mary gave birth to a son, William, fathered by Duff Cooper, and later a daughter, Anne, by her husband. After Cooper’s death in 1953, she had an affair with one of his successors in Paris, Gladwyn Jebb.

In Paris from 1945 until her husband’s death in 1960, Susan Mary met Evelyn Waugh through Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford. Although Waugh’s name appears in five indexed entries, American Lady mentions no direct contact with Susan Mary. Meetings did occur frequently, as recounted in Susan Mary’s published letters and Waugh’s correspondence and diaries.

In her memoirs, Susan Mary reports meeting Waugh in April 1946 with her husband; they “cannot decide what they feel about Waugh, who is a strange man. He is friendly to us and has come to the house and asked us to stay” (To Marietta from Paris 1945-1960, 1975, 73). In 1947, Waugh told Nancy Mitford about meeting Susan Mary’s husband, whom he described as a “well dressed yank called Paston, Paton, Patton, Patterne? who spoke of you with love” (Letters of Mitford and Waugh 81). In 1951, Waugh mentions dinner with the Pattens in Paris (“Very poor grub”) (LMW 230).

In 1953, Susan Mary took up Waugh’s invitation to visit Piers Court and stopped there after the coronation. Waugh told Nancy that the visit would be “nice for us.” As reported by Susan Mary in her memoirs, she was met by Laura with a leg in a cast; Laura assured her that she would be “all right for the party tonight.” Susan Mary expected no party and brought only a simple evening dress. Waugh had refused to attend the coronation and prohibited his children from watching it on TV, though he had a “God Save the Queen” banner over his driveway. Susan Mary went to dinner to find the Waugh children in their best clothes, Waugh in white tie and decorations and Laura in a ball dress and tiara. No servants were evident, and Laura struggled to get food on the table, “crutches, ball dress and all.” Waugh told his children that Susan Mary would give them a firsthand description of the coronation: “Mrs. Patten was in Westminster Abbey watching the Queen’s liege lords drop to one knee as they rendered homage to her.” In fact, as Waugh knew, she had viewed the procession from the and had been “nowhere near the Abbey.” Given the children’s rapt attention and high expectations, she described the ceremony as she had seen it on TV. She concluded, “I shall never know what the point of all this was.” The day after the coronation dinner, “another Evelyn emerged” as he accompanied her while touring the countryside (To Marietta 225-26). He escorted Susan Mary to , Stanway, and Stratford in a chauffeured limousine hired for the occasion (LMW 313- 15; Diaries 721). Waugh described her as “a tough & appreciative little guest on whom I spent great trouble & money. She enjoyed herself no end” (LMW 315). After Susan Mary’s return, Nancy wrote that news of Waugh’s “torturing” her was all over Paris, and the “poor little thing looks more like a Nazi victim than ever” (referring to her thinness) (LMW 314).

In 1954, Waugh met Susan Mary at Diana Cooper’s before Duff’s funeral. She wore red because “Diana has a thing about mourning” (Diaries 723). Waugh, Susan Mary, Diana, and her son John Julius Norwich went to Belvoir for burial, and Susan Mary described Waugh’s behavior as “delightful” (To Marietta 235).

In 1956, Susan Mary entertained Waugh and his daughter Margaret at a “fine dinner” and played charades afterwards (Letters of Waugh and Cooper 223-24; LMW 390).

These snippets of literary biography are not in American Lady, but there is an interesting reference to Susan Mary’s appearance as a character (Mildred Jungfleisch) in Nancy Mitford’s novels The Blessing (1951) and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960). A recent biography of Mitford and Gaston Palewski suggests that her unflattering depiction of Susan Mary may have been motivated by rumors of an affair with Palewski. See Lisa Hilton, The Horror of Love (2012), 201-03.

Susan Mary returned to Washington after her husband’s death in 1960 and married Joseph Alsop. The marriage lasted thirteen years. After she and Alsop broke up, she started to write. Of her four books published between 1975 and 1984, her first seems to have had the most success: an edition of letters written from Paris to her friend Marietta Tree and to her own family (To Marietta from Paris 1945-1960).

Her final years were not happy. She tried to remain a Washington hostess but became addicted to alcohol. At a rehabilitation clinic, she revealed to her son that Duff Cooper was his father. This news devastated her son, then age 47, and seems to have inspired a memoir: William S. Patten, My Three Fathers and the Elegant Deceptions of My Mother (2008). Much of American Lady is based on that memoir.

The most interesting parts of Susan Mary’s life were the fifteen years in Paris. But for her affair with Duff Cooper, she would be largely forgotten and American Lady would not have been written. More attention might have been paid to those years than to time in Washington. Readers of EWS might like to know what Susan Mary said about Evelyn Waugh (and perhaps Nancy Mitford and Diana Cooper) in letters to Duff Cooper. Duff also recorded conversations in his diary, and his family granted access to Caroline de Margerie.

The story of the years before and after Paris is largely rehash of her son’s memoir. This French biography may have been written without considering an English translation. American Lady contains little not already available in English, and little of interest to Waugh enthusiasts. Anyone interested in Susan Mary’s life would do better to read her son’s memoir and her own.

Unfinished Business Comment by Michael Barber, author of Brief Lives: Evelyn Waugh (2013), on “Up to a Point…,” review by Robert Murray Davis, EWS 44.2 (Autumn 2013): 26-27. Robert Murray Davis takes me and my publisher to task on several accounts, beginning with the ‘premise’ of the Brief Lives series. Wearing his mortarboard, Professor Davis says ‘a book of this kind damages rather than advances an academic career.’ I do not know where he got the idea that I was trying to climb the academic ladder – at my age it is a little late for that – but let me assure him that the last reader I had in mind was an Eng Lit don. With a nod to John Aubrey, each book in the series is meant to be informal, anecdotal, subjective and short: an appetizer rather than the four-course meal with trimmings Davis seems to be recommending. Yes, most (but not all) of my sources were easily accessible, but this does not make them any more ‘questionable’ than the texts Davis recommends. There can be no such thing as ‘the last word’ on any writer, particularly one as controversial as Waugh.

Davis accuses me of repeating Martin Stannard’s imputation of vanity in respect of Waugh’s piles. In fact I was guided by what Waugh himself wrote in his Diaries (25.1.47), about his wish, not granted, to be ‘absolutely well and free from ointments for Laura’s American treat’. It is true that I may have scanted what Donat Gallagher has to say about the annulment of Waugh’s first marriage; as a lapsed Anglican I am not very impressed by Catholic sophistry. But the point I make – that Waugh might get an annulment if he could persuade the Vatican that neither he nor his ex-wife had ever intended to take their marriage vows seriously – does not seem a million miles from the conclusions Gallagher reaches.

Davis also accuses me of ignoring Gallagher’s efforts to rehabilitate Waugh the soldier. I must admit that I have not read what Gallagher wrote in respect of the warrior chieftain Lord Lovat, who unlike Colonel Laycock et al. could not see the point of Waugh. But as Waugh admitted in his Diaries (27.8.42), even Laycock wearied of his drinking. I have, however, read Gallagher’s article (RUSI Journal, Feb. 2008) about the conduct of Waugh and his CO, Colonel Laycock, during the evacuation from . More importantly, I have also read Antony Beevor’s response to Gallagher’s criticisms of what he wrote in his book about the Cretan campaign (RUSI Journal, April 2008). And whilst I accept that, as someone suggested, Professor Gallagher probably knows more about Waugh than anyone else, when it comes to the in the Second World War, I defer to Mr Beevor.

Robert Murray Davis responds:

I questioned whether Mr. Barber's book would do to contribute to the understanding of Waugh's work. Since that does not seem to have been its purpose, I apologize for failing to grasp his intent.

Waugh, Mitford, and Wodehouse Enthusiasms, by Mark Girouard. London: Frances Lincoln, 2011. 192 pp. £12.99/$19.95. Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

Mark Girouard is an architectural historian best known for Life in the English Country House (1978), perhaps the definitive single-volume work. He has written other learned books on his special subject, but in Enthusiasms he tackles various subjects outside of his field. He writes well and shows a firm grasp of subjects that interest him.

For readers of EWS, the essay “How to Write a Bestseller” is of greatest interest. Girouard ruminates on Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He picked up the book at age 14 when an uncle had abandoned it and read it straight through. Like many readers at the time of publication, he was fascinated. Girouard was raised from age nine by his Aunt Evie, dowager Duchess of Devonshire, in various stately homes belonging to her late husband’s family, so he claims firsthand knowledge of Brideshead’s setting –perhaps superior to that of the author. As years passed, Girouard became less enthralled by the book, and he considers it “rather awful, if still intensely readable.”

Girouard believes that Waugh wanted to make BR a bestseller. He seizes upon a statement by Waugh in his letter to the War Office in 1944 seeking leave to write a novel. The novel would “eliminate the financial uncertainty of supporting a large family on the pay of a lieutenant.” Girouard thinks Waugh found inspiration in Daphne du Maurier’s middle-brow romantic novel Rebecca, in its twenty-ninth printing when Waugh began work on BR: “Rebecca presents a hero nobly named Max de Winter, a great house, which is a character in the novel as much as a setting for it; a sadder and wiser narrator who returns to it; … and dollops of the lush, over-charged but fast moving language which could be described as best-sellerese.” Aside from these coincidental similarities, Girouard offers no evidence that Waugh read Rebecca or expressed his opinion of it or his intention to use it as a model for his own country-house bestseller. As Girouard concedes, Waugh thought he had turned BR into a masterpiece by adding religious themes that would put off all but the most dedicated readers. Contrary to Waugh’s expectations, most readers overlooked the serious themes and preferred the story of upper-class life destroyed by two world wars and a depression. Many of the more discerning readers turned against it.

Girouard suggests models for characters and settings but little that is new, with two exceptions. The character of Sebastian does seem to be based on Alastair Graham, though Girouard quotes Georgia Sitwell’s description of Graham when assigned to the British Embassy in Athens: “an utterly spineless very affected lady-like young man … not at all amusing and full of airs.” Sitwell did not think Graham could have inspired Sebastian, but Girouard disliked Sitwell, and he rejects her interpretation.

For the other Flytes, Girouard believes, no convincing models have been identified. He suggests Lady Desborough as a model for Lady Marchmain. She produced a privately printed book about her two dead sons, Julian and Billy Grenfell. Waugh knew this book through friendships with the Herberts and the Asquiths, who had copies in their libraries at Pixton and Mells. Girouard thinks Lady Desborough possessed other attributes of Lady Marchmain, such as piety to cover killer instincts. Girouard alludes to Nicholas Mosley, perhaps thinking of his book Julian Grenfell: His Life and of his Death, 1888-1915 (London, 1976). Half the book describes Grenfell’s struggle to free himself from his mother.

The second part of “How to Write a Bestseller” relates to Nancy Mitford’s novels of upper-class life, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Girouard observes that Mitford’s two “enduring classics” follow several volumes of lighter efforts. Waugh, on the other hand, had already written two “masterpieces,” A Handful of Dust and Scoop, before writing a bestseller, not his best work. In Pursuit, written before BR, the Radlett family is based on Mitford’s own modestly grand family and their modest houses in Oxfordshire. Cold Climate was written after Mitford saw the great success of BR, so she sidelined the Radletts in favor of the grander Hamptons and their much grander house. The models for characters in Cold Climate are less obvious than those in Pursuit, but Girouard attempts to identify a few. The 1980 Thames TV series based on these two novels has recently been reissued in the UK.

In a brief note, Girouard comments on a 1955 entry in Waugh’s Diaries. Waugh describes the arrival at Piers Court of Thomas Pakenham, “brought by Dick Girouard’s son, Mark.” Waugh seems to describe Pakenham as a “handsome lad marred by spots.” That statement follows his reference to Girouard; Waugh adds that “Girouard outshone him [by] recognizing Burges’s wash-handstand as soon as he saw it, and exhibiting remarkable knowledge of English nineteenth- century art” (725). Girouard believes that he was the spotty one, not Pakenham. Waugh, however, seems to have contrasted the “awkward” Pakenham and the “remarkable” Girouard, so Girouard’s interpretation is questionable.

Other chapters will also interest Waugh fans. One dealing with Girouard’s Aunt Evie is touching. She accepted Girouard and his sisters into her home after their mother died in a car accident in 1940. The sister of their maternal grandmother, Aunt Evie lived in Ireland, so it was difficult for the children to continue their education in England. Aunt Evie was born Lady Evelyn FitzMaurice, daughter of the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, at one time Viceroy of India as well as a Cabinet Minister, but Girouard never says so. Girouard also describes his paternal grandfather, a French Canadian (presumably the source of Girouard’s Roman Catholicism) and a military railroad engineer in the Sudan and Boer wars. Girouard’s lengthy discussion of the South African branch of his family might have been more selective.

Several brief literary discussions are also of interest. The best relate to My Secret Life and P. G. Wodehouse. Girouard tries to locate the South London house of “Walter,” the pseudonymous author of My Secret Life but ultimately fails. He courageously declares that much of the work of P. G. Wodehouse is overrated. Girouard identifies “alpha Wodehouse” in a small portion of an extensive oeuvre. Prodded by praise from Waugh and others, I have tried Wodehouse several times but have never gotten far. Guided by Girouard, I intend to make one last attempt.

NEWS

The Tablet Archive The archive of , the international Catholic news weekly, is available online. Evelyn Waugh often wrote for The Tablet, and his work has often been reviewed in it. A search for “Evelyn Waugh” yielded 648 results.

Henry Green on Black Mischief Paul Rassam of Oxfordshire recently offered to sell (for £3500) an autograph letter signed by , dated 8 October 1932, and addressed to Evelyn Waugh regarding Black Mischief. Green was generally positive: the novel was “a very great improvement,” and he especially liked several individual characters, the “assembled colony taking refuge at the Embassy,” Waugh’s ability to convey “the essentials of London life,” and the “dazzling interview between Basil & the old boy who then goes to the club servant.” At the same time, Green did not understand why “the revolt was seen through the eyes of those 2 old English women,” since it would have been better “through the eyes of one or other of the principal actors.” Green also felt that the French characters were “unworthy” of Waugh, since he found “their skepticism & inaction funnier than that.”

Graham Greene, , and Ronald Knox Graham Greene reviewed Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Msgr. Ronald Knox in in October 1959. Waugh considered the review “jolly decent,” especially since Greene “did not revere him” (Letters 529). Greene sent a copy of his review to Edith Sitwell. She was, she wrote, “sure Monsignor Knox was a virtuous man, but his mixture of snobbery without any knowledge of that art, stupidity, insensitivity and flippancy, gets me down” (Greene Papers: Box 10, Folder 47, Georgetown University Library Special Collections Research Center, Washington, DC). Greene’s review was reprinted in Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage, ed. Martin Stannard (1984, 400-01).

Writers’ Libraries Richard Oram’s article “What Can You Learn about Writers from their Personal Libraries?” appeared in the Daily Beast for 17 September 2013. Oram is Associate Director and Hobby Foundation Librarian at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin, and he is working on a book about writers’ libraries. His article includes a photograph of some of Evelyn Waugh’s books. Evelyn Waugh by Cecil Beaton’s portrait of Evelyn Waugh at Chateau St Firmin, Chantilly, in April 1955 is available from Beetles + Huxley. The price is £1400.

BBC Sword of Honour Jeremy Front’s dramatization of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword Honour was broadcast in seven episodes on BBC Radio 4 from the end of September through mid November 2013. Information on the cast and several brief features are available at the BBC.

The Model for Margot Beste-Chetwynde In a new essay, “Margot, I Presume,” Duncan McLaren proposes a new model for the character of Margot Beste-Chetwynde in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall.

Favorite Novelists, Favorite Characters In “Donna Tartt: By the Book,” an interview in the New York Times Book Review posted online on 17 October 2013, the author of The Goldfinch and The Secret History identified Evelyn Waugh as one of five favorite novelists from the twentieth century. Asked which character she would like to be, Tartt noted that “Mrs. Stitch, from ‘Scoop,’ driving around madly in her tiny motorcar, looks like she’s having a lot of fun.”

Evelyn Waugh and Digital Humanities Martin Stannard and Barbara Cooke presented “Digital Humanities: The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh” at the University of Leicester on 21 November 2013. Dr. Cooke has been appointed Research Associate for the project.

Waugh’s Conservatism On 13 December 2013, Joe Carter posted “A Recommendation of Waughian Conservatism” on the Acton Institute Power Blog and quoted extensively from Mexico: An Object Lesson, a.k.a. Robbery under Law.

Catholic Fiction Michael D. Greaney, Director of Research at the Center for Economic and Social Justice in Arlington, Virginia, has published So Much Generosity: An Appreciation of the Fiction of Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (2013).

Evelyn Waugh Society The Waugh Society has 151 members. To join, please go to http://evelynwaughsociety.org/. The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List has 79 members. To join, please visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh. The Evelyn Waugh Society is also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/evelynwaughsoc. The Waugh Society is providing RSS feed: http://evelynwaughsociety.org/feed. And the Waugh Society’s web site has opportunities for threaded discussions: http://evelynwaughsociety.org/forums/.

End of Evelyn Waugh Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3 Home Page and Back Issues