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UGH NEWSLETTER Volume 4, Number 1 WAUGH's BOOK ,_.,.,, ' ... :.. ,-, EVELYN w;,UGH NEWSLETTER Volume 4, Number 1 Spring 1970 WAUGH'S BOOK REVIEWS FOR NIGHT AND DAY CalvinW. Lane (University of Hartford) Students of the work of Evelyn Waugh have long been aware of the immense amount of book­ reviewing that Waugh regularly engaged in over many years. This is attested to by the lengthy article listings in the bibliographies compiled by Doyle, Kozak and Linck. What is comparatively little known, however, is Waugh's association as book reviewer with the short-lived magazine, Night and Day, published from July to December, 1937 (a complete listing of the twenty-six review' that appeared under Waugh's by-line may be found in Charles Linck's "The Development of Evelyn -Naugh's Career: 1903-1939" (University Microfilms). Frederick J. Stapp makes brief reference to this periodical in Evelyn Waugh, Portrait of an Artist, but copies are now almost unobtainable. Fortunately, the London Library (St. James Square, London), possesses a full run. The magazine contains a rich trove of articles and creative material, the product of a staff numbering Evelyn Waugh on books, Elizabeth Bowen and Peter Fleming on theatre, Grahom Greene 0n films, Constance Lambert on music, and Osbert Lancaster on art. Occasional contributors included John Betjeman, Herbert Read, Christopher Hollis, Christopher Sykes, James Thurber, V\alcolm Muggeridge, and Anthony Powell. Although Night and Day was modelled after the New Yorker, it was not simply imitative and ~e·;eloped a distinctive tone during its short career. Generally, its social and political views ·.·;ere repre"entative of the conservative wing of British writers of the 30's antipathetic to the Auden­ lsherwood group, so acidly sketched in Pimpernel and Parsnip of Put Out More Flags. Both aesthetic and financial success seemed assured until the writing of a movie review by Graham Greene (October 28, 1937) of Wee Willie Winkle, starring Shirley Temple, in which Greene slyly suggested the child star's incipient sex aopeal ("in Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich"), and further noted that: Her admirers ---middle-aged men and clergymen ---respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body ... only because ~he safety curtain oi story and i.:liaiogue drops berNeen their intelli- gence and their desire. (p. 31) Rut 1037 was not 1969, and Greene's flippant remarks were enough to gain the magazine a libel ~~Jif: The court's decision, in finding For those who brought the suit, deal~ such a heavy financial to'ow that the magazine collapsed with the issue of December 23, 1937, never to be revived. Each week, Waugh reviewed several books, including memoirs of World 'Nar I, autobiogrcchie~ trc.r.tel accounts, histories, novels, and occasionally, works of the British Left calling For reform ::~f E>glish soc-iety--- the latter :.:ategory allowing lull ooportunity for \Vaugh·s ~art invective. t'v\ony ivr"I 1':!-'S reviewed have long since disappeared into the remoindered lists, but some, noteably W.H. Atr:~.~n, Louis ~ ..~ocNiece, Edith Sitwell, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, ,'Jnd Harold Nicolson, pro,,i:Jed V/augh with the occasion for trenchant, incisive evaluations that thirty-tv.,to years later o..r~ still fresh, and remarkably clear-headed in their judgment. As is often true of criticism, the revi•·ws frequently tell more .obout '/Iough than about !he book being reviewed. The catholicity af •h.e booh ;eviewed reminds us, 'JS the readers of \Vaugh's countless review~ in The Spectator I.L(,..., •. Jdy know, of\.Vaugh's vsuall1 fair, dispas~ionate treatment of those writen whose temperament - /. - and interests ran counter to his own, except when the political or religious views were totally op­ posed to those he held, or when a writer he admired demonstrated a clear falling off in taste. His review of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not !October 21, 1937) is an instance ~f his irascible displeasure with a writer whom he felt had betrayed the promise of his earlier ·nC>rk. He commences with a broadside against American writers in general, and then proceeds to lamooon Hemingway: Arrested development is the character of almost all American writers; too e>ften they are living and working at the stage of growth C>f prurient schoolgirls; Mr. Hemingway is,., clean, strapping lad, upper fifth (modern side), house colours for swimming, etc he writes in an ~/.uberant schoolboy slang and he deals with the topics which , . , interest little chaps of his age: pirates, smugglers, dagas, Chinks, plenty of bloodshed and above all the topic dearest to the heart of a healthy boy--- How does it work? (p,28) He continues in this vein for another half column, and summarizes in devastating fashion: It would be idle to say that one's de light is as keen as when, unawares, one first picked up The Sun Also Rises, but most of the qualities are there which made that book memorable. Perhaps the holidays have gone on too long; there is too much noise about the house; how many :Jays to the beginning of term? Well, give the boy a treat for his last day --a quart of Bacardi and a dago's spine to break, (p. 28) '(ears later, in reviewing Across the River and Into the Trees ("The Case of Mr. Hemingwa;," The Commonweal, Vol. 53 (November 3, 1950), 97-98), Waugh's attitude had mellowed, and ",e stoutly defended Hemingway against his detractors. But by 1950, Hemingway's "elementary sense of ::hivalry 11 and 11 !ove of honour 11 were soon ro become maior themes in rhf' Sword of Honour trilogy, perhaps accounting for the increased sense of literary kinship. Two reviews of work by Arthur Calder-Marshall are good examples of a shift in Waugh's \~inking from initial dislike to a quite temperate re-oppraisal. In the first review, "Peter ?an in Politics" (September 4, 1937), he writes: •. l He talks of proletarian fiction as though it were ~he -Jisc::ver; )f:::: rew of his friends, He does not seem to have learned that all •he great stories of the world are proletarian; has he ever heard of Piers Plowman or the Pi lgrim 1s Progress ? (;::;. 25) ,<1,1~ 3ut in another review only a week or so later ( 11 .A.rt from Anarchy," :'September 16, 1'?37)), he w·-i~es of Calder-Marshall 1 s A Date with a Duchess that l,aving been P.ager "to :Joint a ."Tlorai ogci:--st \.... doctrinaire students" he found instead: l . .. a book of fresh and vivid narratives, full ·Jf l:umor, ;Jenetro~;on Jnd acute observation. If this is Marxist fiction, I have no quar:-~1 Nith it.{::J. '1._!: H~·1ing revised his previous attitude, Naugh summari:.:es by reflecting on the limitotiom on creativity imposed by Marxism: I do not think rJny ·:F~ist, certainly no wri~er, -:on be a qenuin~ -')-auist, (or-a writer's motP.rial -r-ust be the individual soul r·,..,hich is the :~r~.-:onr::~:Jtior. of Christendom), -...... hi!e rhe Marxist con only think in :losses ~Jnrl -::Jtf!gorie~, ond even in classes abhors ·,1ariety. The disillusion~d Mar'<ist becofT"Ie'> 'J Fssr::i~t. the disillusioned onar::hi~t, cJ Christian. -4 ·obvst di<i.cJr.tent, Hhf:'rt-er it be with joint stoc:k bonkinCJ or th~ ',V'JrU, +h~ Flf~sh .Jnd Devil,:., ~ood for ·"1 - J- writer, and if that is all Mr. Calder-Marshall meant by his 'left' politics, I am sorry I grumbled about them. ( p. 25) In "Bloomsbury's Farthest North," Waugh elegantly dismisses W. H. Auden's and Louis MacNiece's Letters from Iceland (August 12, 1937) in such phrasing as" ... they wrote some rough Byronic verses of the kind that are turned aut in paper games at old-fashioned house-parties." (p. 25). He even manages a passing shot at Isherwood: "(Mr. Auden everywhere has difficulty N i th his rhymes. How I ucky that he did not take his former collaborator, Mr. Isherwood, on the jaunt)." (p. 25). When reviewing Aldous Huxley's Ends and lvleans, ("More Barren Leaves," December 23, 1937), Waugh argues against Huxley's thesis of the human mind's tendency "to ·~duce the diverse to the identical", and retorts, "Men and women are only types-- economic, :ohysiological, what you will-- until one knows them. The whole of thought and taste consists 1n distinguishing between simi Iars." (p. 24). Perhaps this way of looking at life anticipates the ·~pealed motif of the war novels: "Quantitative judgments don't apply." Despite his oft maligned right-.ving attitudes, his review of Vain Glory, memoirs of World Nor I, edited by Guy Chapman (July 29, 1937) indicates sharp awareness of what was going on in Nazi Germany in 1937: ... it is a book that is badly needed almost everywhere but in England. Germans will not be allowed to read it, and I think the editor has made a great mistake and severely impaired the usefulness of his own work by yiel.ding to the temptation to score points against the Nazi regime. We have no need in England to be reminded of the intolerable injustice of that regime ... there is again the appalling danger of a generation growing up who look upon it (war) as a glorius vocation to be followed for its own sake. (p. 24) In the same review he suggests, in an uncanny fashion, almost the entire range of Sword of Honour, Nhen he writes of Guy Chapman that: He is occupied primarily with the spiritual consequences, the pollution of truth, the deterioration of human character in :xolonged 'Jnnatural stress, ~he err1ergence of the bully and the cad, the obliteration of chivalry.
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