DOCSLIB.ORG

Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Stud

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Stud EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 40, No. 2 Autumn 2009 Court of Inquiry: Additional Waugh Bibliography by Donat Gallagher James Cook University Bibliographers have overlooked a review-with-reminiscences that contains intriguing information about Waugh's being the subject of a military Court of Inquiry: viz. Bernard Fergusson’s "Gentlemen at Arms,” a review of To the War with Waugh, by John St John, Sunday Times, 6 May 1973: 40. When Brigadier Fergusson became Military Director of Combined Operations in 1945, he came across "a Court of Inquiry into Evelyn's behaviour on a [training] manoeuvre in England some years before." Waugh had been accused by an umpire of "smoking a cigar and drinking claret in a house while the 'battle' was in full swing. He had denied both charges indignantly, but conceded in the end that he had been smoking a cheroot and drinking Burgundy." In the second volume of his biography, Martin Stannard describes Waugh, then the Intelligence Officer of a Royal Marine battalion, acting as "chief umpire" in a practice landing at Scapa Bay and "tramping about disconsolately … with no orders other than to follow Battalion HQ." This passage misreads Waugh's Diaries. Stannard conflates two distinct exercises: the first was a Battalion exercise on 28 August 1940, in which Waugh had a leading role as "chief umpire"; the second was a Brigade exercise on 30 August 1940, in which Waugh had no part. In fact, he "trotted along” with various other guests, having “seen no orders” and knowing “little of our objectives.” Stannard had read Fergusson’s review and was aware of a batman’s revelation that he had carried in his haversack to an exercise bottles of wine for Waugh. Concluding that Waugh took "excellent red wine" with him and was "discovered quietly toping in the safety of a house" during the Scapa Bay exercise, Stannard goes on to say that the matter "was eventually raised at a Court of Inquiry in 1945" (Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, New York: Norton, 1992, 16-17). Clearly this is a misreading of Fergusson, who says that the Inquiry had taken place "some years before" he found a record of it in 1945. Carping aside, Stannard quite reasonably placed the wine-cigar-house incident that led to the Court of Inquiry within the Scapa Bay exercise. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest another possibility, because Scapa Bay took place the day before the Marines sailed on the Dakar expedition, and because the actual time spent exercising ashore was quite short—4.15 am to 6.00 am—which gave little opportunity for silly games. When Lord Lovat was engineering Waugh's forced resignation from the Special Service Brigade in 1943, he told the Vice Chief of Combined Operations, General Charles Haydon, that Waugh had been "sent home for misconduct from an Exercise." If this were true, it would be a serious blot on Waugh’s copybook. In his memorandum to Lord Louis Mountbatten seeking an inquiry into his dismissal, Waugh protested that he had "only once in my life been given a bad report on an Exercise; this was exercise 'ALBION' commanded by Lt.-Col. Shaw." He attached a letter from Lt.-Col. Shaw making it clear that Waugh had not been sent home from the exercise. It would be useful to know more about Lt.-Col. Shaw and exercise “ALBION.” In the absence of that information, one can only suggest that the exercise during which Waugh was discovered smoking and drinking was “ALBION,” commanded by Lt.-Col. Shaw. On Waugh’s own admission, this exercise led to his being given a "bad report." And if, as he claims, this was the only “bad report” he received, then it seems very likely that “ALBION,” not Scapa Bay, saw the misconduct that occasioned a Court of Inquiry. file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:37] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD Ambrose Silk, The Yellow Book, and The Ivory Tower: Influence and Jamesian Aesthetics in Put Out More Flags by Allan Johnson Contemporary reviews of Waugh’s Put Out More Flags were hesitant to attribute to Ambrose Silk any role greater than that of buffoon. Kate O’Brien’s review in the Spectator, 3 April 1942, writes Ambrose off with one sentence: ‘And there is a new character, a whining pansy called Ambrose Silk, who has an absurd adventure.’[1] Alan Pryce-Jones made no mention at all of Ambrose in his 11 April 1942 review in the New Statesman.[2] Yet perhaps Ambrose is not to blame for this critical underestimation. The 1942 novel can be read as an apprehensive stylistic transition between Waugh’s early satirical technique and later eschatological mode, and if any middle style exists in Waugh’s corpus, POMF is one of few examples. There can be little surprise that Basil Seal, the more stylistically robust persona, has been customarily seen as the central concern of the narrative. But in undervaluing the parallel story, that of Ambrose Silk and his hopeless attempt to produce a re-imagined Yellow Book for mid-century, Waugh’s narrative is rendered as a wartime comedy of billeting and roguery. There can be no mistake that Ambrose’s Ivory Tower has been conceived as a double of its most obvious source, Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley’s infamous 1890s journal of decadence, The Yellow Book. Waugh alludes to the short-lived journal throughout his portrayal of Ambrose’s project: "The Café Royal, perhaps because of its distant associations with Oscar and Aubrey, was one of the places where Ambrose preened himself, spread his feathers and felt free to take wing. He had left his persecution mania downstairs with his hat and umbrella. He defied the universe."[3] Among Waugh’s dandy-aesthete figures, Ambrose is unusually self- conscious and insecure, but the lingering appeal of Wilde and Beardsley assuage his self- loathing. However, he is often hostile to the literature of the Yellow Nineties. When his publisher suggests that the Ivory Tower will be ‘a kind of new Yellow Book,’ Ambrose becomes upset. ‘Geoffrey,’ he whines, ‘How can you be so unkind?’ (POMF 111). Later, though, Ambrose is more resigned: ‘I wasn’t thinking of having advertisements. I thought of making it something like the old Yellow Book.’ 'Well, that was a failure,' said old Rampole triumphantly, ‘in the end.’ (POMF 184-85) Ambrose’s efforts to restore a decidedly late-Victorian aestheticism to English culture through publication of his Ivory Tower is obstructed by the loutish and shrewd Basil, who encourages Ambrose to make a large cut in the proofs. Conveniently for Basil, the cut turns the piece into pro-Nazi propaganda. Although his Ivory Tower is interpreted as political and social discourse disguised as a literary magazine, Ambrose’s political statements merely provide an excuse for the true centerpiece of the magazine, the fifty-page story called ‘Monument to a Spartan’ which ‘with great delicacy and precision’ memorializes Ambrose’s German lover, Hans, now imprisoned in a German concentration camp: ‘Monument to a Spartan’ described Hans, as Ambrose had loved him, in every mood; Hans immature, the provincial petit-bourgeois youth floundering and groping in the gloom of Teutonic adolescence, unsuccessful in his examinations, world- weary, brooding about suicide among the conifers, uncritical of direct authority, unreconciled to the order of the universe; Hans affectionate, sentimental, roughly sensual, guilty; above all Hans guilty, haunted by the taboos of the forest; Hans credulous, giving his simple and generous acceptance to all the nonsense of Nazi leaders; Hans reverent to those absurd instructors who harangued the youth camps, file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_40.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:37] EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD resentful at the injustices of man to man, at the plots of the Jews and the encirclement of his country…. (POMF 186-87) I read this précis of ‘Monument to a Spartan’ as a fascinating response to an earlier detail: while at Oxford, Ambrose recited Tennyson’s In Memoriam through a megaphone ‘to an accompaniment hummed on combs and tissue paper’ (POMF 43).[4] His recitation of Tennyson’s elegy to Arthur Henry Hallam anticipates his later elegy to Hans. Although we are led to believe that ‘Monument to a Spartan’ is a highly successful, carefully conceived work, Ambrose is persuaded by Basil to cut the ending of the story and contentiously leave ‘Hans still full of illusions, marching into Poland,’ so the story becomes a triumphant celebration of German military power (POMF 191). Basil has been promised a promotion for catching a collaborator. Clearly Basil’s control over the text, his influence over aesthetic history, instigates Ambrose’s decline and fall. Tennyson’s poem ends not with a military march, but with a tender appeal to God. When Ambrose’s story is cut short, not allowed to reach a gentle conclusion, he is left with no choice other than to flee the country to avoid arrest. There is, however, a further significant influence—that of Henry James. It is commonly believed that Waugh did not begin reading James until after the Second World War, and the first mention of James in Waugh’s diaries comes in October 1946.[5] On 17 November 1946, Waugh wrote, ‘What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age’ (Diaries 663). This fascination with James continued, for in June of the following year, Waugh records a Monday evening that included ‘a glass of burgundy, fruit juice and soda and a story by Henry James’ (Diaries 680).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • An Analysis on the Novels of Evelyn Waugh and Their Adaptations Evan J
    Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship 2016 The alueV of Attending University: An Analysis on the Novels of Evelyn Waugh and their Adaptations Evan J. Molineux Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Molineux, Evan J., "The alueV of Attending University: An Analysis on the Novels of Evelyn Waugh and their Adaptations" (2016). CMC Senior Theses. Paper 1407. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1407 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you by Scholarship@Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in this collection by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Claremont McKenna College The Value of Attending University: An Analysis on the Novels of Evelyn Waugh and their Adaptations submitted to Professor Kathryn Stergiopoulos by Evan Molineux for Senior Thesis Spring 2016 April 25, 2016 i Table of Contents Acknowledgements I. Introduction . 1 – 7 II. The Transformative Effects of Oxford in Brideshead Revisited . 8 - 30 III. Paul Pennyfeather’s Chaotic Journey through Decline and Fall . 31 - 55 IV. The Bright Young Things of Vile Bodies . 56 - 70 V. The Reaffirming Power of Evelyn Waugh Through Film and Television . 71 - 85 Works Cited ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Kathryn Stergiopoulos, for her patience, guidance, support, and constructive criticism over the past two semesters. Without her or her colloquiums, this thesis would not have been nearly as enjoyable to work on. I would also like to thank the rest of the literature department for helping to nurture my love for a subject that I have truly enjoyed studying over the past four years.
    [Show full text]
  • Intertextuality in Selected Works of Evelyn Waugh Janelle Lynn Ortega
    University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 6-9-2016 "I Heard the Same Thing Once Before": Intertextuality in Selected Works of Evelyn Waugh Janelle Lynn Ortega Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Ortega, Janelle Lynn. ""I Heard the Same Thing Once Before": Intertextuality in Selected Works of Evelyn Waugh." (2016). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/23 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Janelle Lynn Ortega Candidate Department of English Language and Literature Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Steve Benz, Chairperson Dr. Lynn Beene Dr. Anita Obermeier Dr. Mara Reisman ii “I Heard the Same Thing Once Before”: Intertextuality in Selected Works of Evelyn Waugh by Janelle Ortega B.A. in English, 2001 M.A. in English, 2005 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May 2016 Copyright © Janelle Ortega, 2016 iii Dedication For My Husband, “If ever two were one, then surely we.” and For Dr. John Howard Wilson, May Eternal Rest be Granted unto You. iv Acknowledgements I owe many people ten years of “thank you”s.
    [Show full text]
  • Displacement and Exile in Evelyn Waugh's Post-War Fiction
    Brno Studies in English Volume 42, No. 2, 2016 ISSN 0524-6881 DOI: 10.5817/BSE2016-2-6 Carlos Villar Flor Displacement and Exile in Evelyn Waugh’s Post-War Fiction Abstract Evelyn Waugh’s later fiction, especially his acclaimed trilogy known as Sword of Honour, is an indispensable source for a first-hand depiction of Britain’s in- volvement in the Second World War. Waugh’s millitary service in Croatia from 1944 to 1945 strengthened his concern for the predicament of the displaced per- sons and exiles he met there. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this new aware- ness is the privileged space that such characters find in these stories and the degree to which their suffering permeates the narratives they inhabit. My paper discuses Waugh’s treatment of displacement and exile in the final stages of the war trilogy and provides a historical background to his presentation of displaced persons, using Papastergiadis’s concept of deterritorialization as analytical tool. Keywords Evelyn Waugh; Sword of Honour; Scott-King’s Modern Europe; displacement; war refugees; World War II in literature For a first-hand depiction of Britain’s involvement in the Second World War, Evelyn Waugh’s later fiction is an indispensable source, especially his war trilogy known as Sword of Honour, which has received considerable critical acclaim.1 Very little, however, has been said about Waugh’s treatment of displacement and exile, even though these issues play a vital role in the final stages of the war tril- ogy. My paper sets out to fill this critical gap by providing a historical background to Waugh’s presentation of displaced persons, individuals removed from their na- tive country as refugees or prisoners who have managed to survive the slaughter but at the cost of becoming homeless, dispossessed and materially or spiritually humiliated.
    [Show full text]
  • EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol
    EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 48, No. 2 Fall 2017 CONTENTS Paul Pennyfeather and the Victorian Governess: 2 The Rejection of Nineteenth-Century Idealism in Decline and Fall Ellen O’Brien Put Out More Flags and Literary Tradition 13 Robert Murray Davis REVIEWS Fictional Counterparts 19 Commando General: The Life of Major General Sir Robert Laycock KCMG CB DSO, by Richard Mead. Reviewed by Donat Gallagher A Slow Build 25 Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: texts and Contexts, by Naomi Milthorpe. NEWS A Personal Note I Owe It All to Brideshead 29 David Bittner Evelyn Waugh Studies 2 Paul Pennyfeather and the Victorian Governess: The Rejection of Nineteenth-Century Idealism in Decline and Fall Ellen O’Brien Much has been written on the disputed use of satire in Evelyn Waugh’s first novel.1 While critics have offered various readings of the satirical elements in Decline and Fall (1928), the novel also invites discussion of the role of parody, farce, black humour, burlesque, the bildungsroman, the picaresque and the anti-hero in creating an amusing but damning representation of society between the wars. This difficulty identifying a clear style is possibly due to the elusive nature of Waugh’s moral critique, which is so subtle as to be “everywhere felt but nowhere expressed” (Heath 77). His satirical target has been variously described as the “the beastliness of undergraduate societies and the leniency of college authorities toward wealthy and aristocratic members… the morals and outlook of ‘smart’ society,” the mismanagement of private boarding schools, the prison system, and modern religion, (Nichols 51) and more broadly as “inconsistency, hypocrisy, cruelty and folly… a satirical engagement with contemporary anxieties about English cultural decline in the years following the Great War” (Milthorpe 2, 20).
    [Show full text]
  • Marston Lafrance SWORD of HONOUR
    Marston LaFrance SWORD OF HONOUR: THE IRONIST PLACATUS Sword of Honour offers plenty of critical problems quite sufficient unto themselves, but they are further complicated by the mere fact of the trilogy's place in the canon. Because it comes at the end of Waugh's long career the reader is bound to be influenced, more or less unavoidably, by his general view of the earlier work, by his overall conception of an author whom he has enjoyed- or resented- for almost four decades. At least three such general views seem to have emerged over the years, and a brief look at them will suggest that a fourth might prove useful. Those readers who consider Waugh "essentially a comedian", 1 for example, should find Men at Arms the most attractive part of the trilogy, and thus it should surprise no one that this book, the least important of the three, has been called "the best of Waugh's novels".2 Readers convinced that Waugh is the twentieth century's archetypal snob, and prejudiced champion of a defunct aristocracy, must find Officers and Gentlemen impossible and parts of Unconditional Surrend er difficult to accept. Those who view him as primarily a disgruntled Tory satirist- probably the majority, and the best of the lot- will find abundant grist for their aesthetic mills throughout the trilogy, but they will also encounter solid blocks of material which their machinery canno t easily accommodate. There is nothing conspicuously satiric about the relationship between Guy and his father,3 about the deaths of Gervase and lvo, Tony Box-Bender's becoming a monk, Guy's betrayal by Virgini a, Guy's devotion to the ideal represented by Sir Roger of Waybroke, Guy's escape from Crete, Mr.
    [Show full text]
  • Books and Articles by Evelyn Waugh Black Mischief (1930), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938
    BIBLIOGRAPHY Books and articles by Evelyn Waugh Black Mischief (1930), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. Decline and Fall (1928), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1937. Edmund Campion (1935), London: Cassell, 1987. A Little Learning, London: Chapman and Hall, 1964. Put Out More Flags (1942), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Scott-King’s Modern Europe, in Work Suspended and Other Stories (1947), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. The Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952, 1955, 1961), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Vile Bodies (1930), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. “Beau Brummells on £60 A Year”, Daily Express, 13 February 1929, 5. “Commando Raid on Bardia”, Life, 17 November 1941, 63-66, 71, 72, 74. “Failure of a Mission”, review of Miss Fire, by Jasper Rootham, The Tablet, 11 May 1946, 241. “Fan-Fare”, Life, 8 April 1946, 53, 54, 56, 58, 60. “Introduction”, to Christie Lawrence, Irregular Adventure, London: Faber and Faber, 1947, 11-13. “Marshal Tito’s Regime”, The Times, 23 May 1945, 5. “Marshal Tito’s Regime”, The Times, 5 June 1945, 5 [both under the pseudonym “A British Soldier Lately in Yugoslavia”]. “Marshal Tito’s Visit”, Spectator, 19 December 1952, 846. “Marshal Tito’s Visit”, Sunday Times, 1 February 1953, 6. “Mr Waugh Replies”, Sunday Express, 14 December 1952, 3. “Our Guest of Dishonour”, Sunday Express, 30 November 1952, 2. “President Tito’s Visit”, The Times, 24 March 1953, 9. “A Self-Made Myth”, review of Tito Speaks: His Self Portrait and Struggle with Stalin by Vladimir Dedijer, The Month NS 9 (April 1953), 240-45. 332 In the Picture “Tito and Stepinac”, New Statesman and Nation, 31 January 1953, 122.
    [Show full text]
  • Cannibals and Catholics: Reading the Reading of Evelyn Waugh
    Cannibals and Catholics: Reading the Reading of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief Jonathan Greenberg I Evelyn Waugh, even more than Wyndham Lewis, is probably the most enduring satirist among British modernists, even though he rejected both labels for his own work.1 Yet while Lewis’s reputation has undergone a triumphant rehabilitation in recent decades, Waugh still suffers from the preconception that his work is minor. Symptomatically, Fredric Jameson’s Fables of Aggression, a book in part responsible for Lewis’s soaring reputation, initiated its restorative project in 1978 precisely at Waugh’s expense: “At best, in Britain today, [Lewis] retains a kind of national celebrity and is read as a more scandalous and explosive Waugh.”2 In other words, Waugh is merely a less scandalous and explosive version of Lewis – a less scandalous and explosive version, moreover, of the “old,” misread, unreconstructed Lewis, of Lewis the eccentric gadfly rather than of Lewis the radical innovator and analyst of modernity who emerges in Jameson’s compelling, if feverish, study. Perhaps because his jokes are funnier than Lewis’s, his prose more burnished, and his extra-fictional writing less theoretically challenging, Waugh has yet to find a Jameson to champion his work and bring him into wider accounts of modernism.3 Located between the high and the low, he fits awkwardly into a narrative of the modernist “great divide”; conservative but not extremist, his politics, unlike those of Lewis or Marinetti, have rarely proved interesting to dialecticians.4 But it is precisely as a satirist, I maintain, that Waugh is important to accounts of modernism.
    [Show full text]
  • EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER and STUDIES Vol
    EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 36, No. 1 Spring 2005 “The Funniest Book in the World”: Waugh and The Diary of a Nobody by Peter Morton Flinders University Evelyn Waugh did not enjoy his Christmas of 1946. It was the second after the war and the national mood was somber. Troops were still being demobilized and the food rationing was worse than ever. As a Christmas “bonus” the government had allowed an extra eight pence worth of meat (half to be corned beef), but bread and potatoes were about to be rationed for the first time. To top it all, the weather was deteriorating and the winter 1946-7 would be the worst in living memory. Waugh, then in his early 40s, was en famille at Piers Court, and that was always a trial in itself. And he felt beleaguered. New houses were encroaching on his land, the socialist “grey lice” were in government, taxes were punitive and he was thinking of emigrating to Ireland. He tried to stay in fairly good humor on the day itself, for the sake of the children, but without much success. He was disgusted by his children’s shoddy presents and the general disorder. Their lunch was cold and ill-cooked. His wife had given him some caviar, but he had eaten that the week before. All in all, it was a “ghastly” day. He had already told his diary that he was looking forward to his forthcoming stay in hospital, for an operation on his hemorrhoids, to get away from them all.[1] The one bright spot of the day was his mother’s gift: a copy of George & Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, the seventh edition (J.
    [Show full text]
  • The World of Evelyn Waugh
    PERSPECTIVES The World of Evelyn Waugh The late Edmund Wilson, America's foremost critic, once hailed Britain's Evelyn Waugh as "the only first rate comic genius in English since George Bernard Shaw." Waugh's more serious work, including Brideshead Revisited and his war trilogy Sword of Honour, has steadily gained renown in this country. Yet until last fall, when they were re-issued here to coincide with the publication of his diary, Waugh's early comic novels were hard to find in America. Here, we present Kathleen Darman's profile of Waugh, followed by several excerpts from those penetratingly funny early books. by Kathleen Emmet Barman A comic, detached ambivalence lies cism. (Still, he found the Church's at the heart of Evelyn Waugh's work. Index of forbidden books a "conven- He immersed himself in the glitter- ient excuse for not reading Sartre.") ing, sordid swirl of prewar England He came out of a Victorian middle- but at the same time believed it class family but chose the high life would be "very wicked indeed to do among the titled rich, the merely anything to fit a boy for the modem rich, and the leisured indigent-most world." He could be generous, chari- of whom he both loved and deplored. table, and kind, but in his novels he His first published essay was a de- clearly, if genially, detests Ameri- fense of Cubism; but in the end, as he cans, blacks, peers, machines, Eng- conceded in his autobiographical lishmen, Jews, everything. He meted The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, "his out prejudice equitably, outrage- strongest tastes were negative.
    [Show full text]
  • ABSTRACT Evelyn Waugh and La Nouvelle Théologie Dan Reid
    ABSTRACT Evelyn Waugh and La Nouvelle Théologie Dan Reid Makowsky, Ph.D. Mentor: Ralph C. Wood, Ph.D. This dissertation seeks to provide a more profound study of Evelyn Waugh’s relation to twentieth-century Catholic theology than has yet been attempted. In doing so, it offers a radical revision of our understanding of Waugh’s relation to the Second Vatican Coucil. Waugh’s famous contempt for the liturgical reforms of the early 1960s, his self-described “intellectual” conversion, and his identification with the Council of Trent, have all contributed to a commonplace perception of Waugh as a reactionary Catholic stridently opposed to reform. However, careful attention to Waugh’s dynamic artistic concerns and the deeply sacramental theology implicit in his later fiction reveals a striking resemblance to the most important Catholic theological reform movement of the mid-twentieth century: la nouvelle théologie. By comparing Waugh’s artistic project to the theology of the Nouvelle theologians, who advocated the recovery of a fundamentally sacramental theology, this dissertation demonstrates that the two mirror one another in many of their basic concerns. This mirroring was no mere coincidence. Waugh’s long-time mentor Father Martin D’Arcy was steeped in many of the same sacramentally-minded thinkers as the Nouvelle theologians. Through D’Arcy’s theological influence as well as the deepening of Waugh’s own faith, he, too, developed a sacramental cast of mind. In reading some of the key works of Waugh’s later years, I will show how Waugh realized this sacramental outlook in his art. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Waugh’s main contribution to the renewal of sacramental thought within Catholicism lies in his portrayal of personal vocation as the remedy for acedia, or sloth, which he considered the “besetting sin” of the age.
    [Show full text]
  • Ebook Download Unconditional Surrender
    UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER: THE CONCLUSION OF MEN AT ARMS AND OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Evelyn Waugh | 240 pages | 12 Jul 2006 | Penguin Books Ltd | 9780141186870 | English | London, United Kingdom Unconditional Surrender: The Conclusion of Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen PDF Book On return Ritchie-Hook has transformed their headquarters and established a new disciplined order. Your Review. Any item may be returned within five days of receipt. They can be read separately, but their significance is far greater when considered as a whole. If the book has page numbers, please include the page number; otherwise please include a significant text string to help us to locate the error. This book did not disappoint. A well written and perhaps a more accurate depiction of WWII. Guy is dismissed from the Halberdiers and flown back to England along with the injured Ritchie-Hook. I overheard him the other day refer to these binoculars of his as his "opera glasses". Ask Seller a Question. Well, maybe! The chaotic situations described and the specifically British military jargon and acronyms used make the reading confusing. Download as PDF Printable version. I think most of this had to do with the situations Guy Crouchback found himself in: training, military transport, surrender, and being adrift at sea. Namespaces Article Talk. First editions of the three classic volumes in Waugh's fictionalized account, by turns keenly satirical and deeply moving, of his experiences in World War II, widely praised as some of the finest literature to emerge from the war—this set signed by Waugh on the title page of Unconditional Surrender.
    [Show full text]
  • THE CHARACTER of CORDELIA in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by John W
    EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Volume 29, Number 3 Winter, 1995 THE CHARACTER OF CORDELIA IN BRIDESHEAD REVISITED By John W. Osborne (Rutgers University) Cordelia is wise about religious matters as Cara is knowing about worldly affairs. Cordelia is the only person who understands Sebastian, and her love for her brother is demonstrated throughout the novel. This love is deep, and she shames Ryder when she speaks of their joint love for Sebastian in the present tense, long after Ryder ceased to care deeply about his friend (p. 308). Years before, Ryder's last sight of Sebastian was when he left the sick man in squalid circumstances in North Africa, noting that nothing more could be done. But Cordelia visits Sebastian in the late 1930's and grasps the fact that while he was lost to his ancestral home he had found a curious peace as a hanger on in a religious community. Cordelia notes that neither she nor her brother, Sebastian, fit into either the secular world or a monastic community (her spell in a convent did not work out) (p. 308). In her soliloquy she tells a confused Ryder that Sebastian is holy and close to God. The still secular Ryder immediately thinks of ''the joyful youth with the Teddy-bear under the flowering chestnuts," and confesses that he never anticipated Sebastian's fate (p. 309). The religious outlook of Cordelia had always been a mystery to Ryder. Both he and Julia referred to Cordelia as odd (p. 221 and p. 300). Ryder finally changes his mind as Cordelia's wisdom penetrates his skepticism (p.
    [Show full text]