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). James’s story ‘The Death of the Lion’ appeared in the first issue of The Yellow Book, and though Waugh was born after the James of the 1890s, he had almost certainly come across James prior to 1946. Reading Ambrose’s Ivory Tower next to James’s final unfinished novel The Ivory Tower is unusually informative. As Alan Hollinghurst noted in a recent introduction to James’s 1914 fragment, the phrase ‘ivory tower’ had entered the English language in a 1911 translation of Henri Bergson, but James’s text gave it wider currency.[6] While the title of Ambrose’s journal certainly alludes to the heights of aesthetic virtue, the reference to James’s swansong is too palpable to ignore. The ivory tower of James’s novel is an extraordinarily phallic tabletop cabinet in which Gray Fielder—the novel’s own aesthetic hero, recently returned from a long stay in Europe—places a decisive yet unopened letter. The description of the small round cabinet is especially lush:
It consisted really of a cabinet, of easily moveable size, seated in a circular socket of its own material and equipped with a bowed door, which dividing in the middle, after a minute gold key had been turned, showed a superposition of small drawers that went upwards diminishing in depth, so that the topmost was of least capacity. The high curiosity of the thing was in the fine work required for making and keeping it perfectly circular; an effect arrived at by the fitting together, apparently by tiny golden rivets, of numerous small curved plates of the rare substance, each of these, including those of the two wings of the exquisitely convex door, contributing to the artful, the total rotundity.[7]
Fielder may have been reading Bergson while living abroad: he expresses the poetic implications of placing the letter in a symbol, in value and name, of super-rich American industrialists: ‘Isn’t it an ivory tower, and doesn’t living in an ivory tower just mean the most distinguished retirement?’ (Ivory Tower 109). As Hollinghurst has argued, ‘the oddity here, as compared with The Golden Bowl, lies in turning a figure of speech into a piece of furniture’ (introduction, xv). After Eve Sedgwick’s ‘Is the Rectum Straight?’ opened up the profound anality of The Wings of the Dove and named Lionel Croy’s under-coded disgrace, we can hardly read James’s description of the ivory tower unknowingly. This extraordinary phallic worship— with a figurative Shiva linga of gold and ivory as object—not only criticizes America’s Gilded- Age patriarchs but also necessarily affects our reading of Ambrose’s Ivory Tower. James’s
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
turning a phrase into a piece of furniture is inverted by Waugh, and this phallic cabinet is turned back into the title of a text, to worship the absent Hans, a war-time In Memoriam. James abandoned work on the novel when the First World War broke out in 1914, and as Hollinghurst suggests, ‘The Ivory Tower was, in an unusual but significant sense, a casualty of the war’ (introduction, vii). In the original preface, Percy Lubbock stated that ‘with the outbreak of war Henry James found he could no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life,’ and perhaps Waugh drew upon this reading of the novel.[8] James’s final novel and Ambrose’s journal remain incomplete as a consequence of the First and Second World Wars. James’s novel also becomes a crucial tool in Waugh’s examination of mid-century aestheticism: both Ambrose and the Ivory Tower are tagged as heirs of British aestheticism, a community of the imagination, where intergenerational influence guides stylistic innovation.
Notes [1] Kate O’Brien, ‘Put Out More Flags,’ Spectator, 3 April 1942: 336. Rpt. in Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage, ed. Martin Stannard (London: Routledge, 1984), 213-14. [2] Alan Pryce-Jones, ‘Put Out More Flags,’ New Statesman, 11 April 1942: 245-46. Rpt. in Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage, 214-17. [3] Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags (1942; London: Penguin, 2000), 174. [4] Anthony Blanche recites Eliot’s The Waste Land in Brideshead Revisited (1945); Harold Acton gave a guerilla recitation of the poem at his Oxford college. [5] Evelyn Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), 659. [6] Alan Hollinghurst, introduction, The Ivory Tower (New York: NYRB, 2004), xv. [7] Henry James, The Ivory Tower (New York: NYRB, 2004), 110. [8] Percy Lubbock, preface, The Ivory Tower, xix.
Sword of Honour: Identity and Possession by Caity Logan
Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour details Guy Crouchback’s journey of self-discovery. Throughout the trilogy, the reader witnesses Guy’s growing understanding of identity, complemented by a developing sense of the use of possessions. By witnessing Guy’s gradual education in identity, Waugh suggests that a person’s individuality originates not from possessions but rather from discovering one’s vocation and giving of oneself. At the beginning of the first book, Men at Arms, Waugh defines the Crouchback family through Catholic faith as well as wealth. Guy lacks both attributes his ancestors were noted for. Guy also appears without identity. He fails to interact in society and instead remains alone, unknown and misunderstood. Joining the army becomes a quest for identity, for Guy realizes that war provides a place for him; the war will help him discover who he is. Upon entering the army, Guy gains a definition of who he is, namely a Halberdier. Guy no longer is the lone outcast. Instead, he gives up individuality and believes he can be defined by the Halberdiers. The history of the Halberdiers takes the place of Guy’s history, and he revels in their previous successes as if they were his own. Guy tries to make himself into a Halberdier by acquiring the right possessions. He grows a moustache and purchases a monocle, hoping that they will turn him into a soldier. When Guy attempts to seduce his ex-wife Virginia, he tries to possess something to prove his manhood and later confesses that his attempts were motivated by the Halberdiers. The Halberdiers give Guy an identity, but it is not his own. Identification with the Halberdiers is only a disguise, and Guy’s identity is compromised and even lost. At the lunch party, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook confuses Guy with Apthorpe.
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
Although Guy is bemused, Apthorpe is appalled. He accuses Guy of trying to impersonate him. Apthorpe believes that Guy has stolen his identity. Guy, in contrast, is amused that two identities are so easily interchangeable, suggesting that his true identity is malleable. It is not only Guy, however, whose identity goes unrecognized. Guy himself does not distinguish between friend and foe. Colonel Tickeridge says that some Halberdiers will be left behind, and he promises to attempt to protect their identity as Halberdiers. A new identity, not individual but shared with others, is not necessarily safe. Guy’s relation to possessions in the Halberdiers reflects his uncertain identity. Although Guy believes himself to be doing well in the army, he does not receive a promotion. Instead of getting a company, Guy is given a platoon, and this appointment fails to satisfy Guy’s desire to prove himself a true Halberdier. In addition, many of the Halberdiers come to Guy for money, and despite Guy’s misgivings, he extends multiple loans. He has little identity of his own, but he helps others to preserve what they see as their identity. Such is the case with Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. When Guy leads the supposed reconnaissance, he is enabling Ritchie-Hook to maintain his identity. Guy’s mission provides Ritchie-Hook with a chance to prove that he remains a valuable asset to the Halberdiers, still able to define himself as a soldier. On the raid, Ritchie-Hook acquires a head as a prize. It is fitting that Guy is put in charge of returning the head to Ritchie-Hook, since the possession represents the Brigadier’s identity as a soldier. Guy similarly helps Apthorpe, the most acquisitive person in Men at Arms, to protect both his property and his identity. For Apthorpe, identity is closely guarded, and he resents being confused with Guy. Identity for Apthorpe is almost limited to life in the military: he is the only person to approve of Guy’s moustache, because it links Guy to his role as Halberdier. Apart from military preoccupations, little is revealed about Apthorpe. The elusive Apthorpe becomes for Guy a mythical figure, never fully real and plausible. Apthorpe is indefinable, almost as if he exists outside the real world. Apthorpe, like Guy, seems to lack identity. Undefined by his past, Apthorpe becomes defined by his possessions. Apthorpe values his gear above almost everything else: he tells Guy it has taken years to collect, suggesting that these possessions take the place of most people’s memories. Some of Apthorpe’s last thoughts are of the future of his belongings, as he tells Guy how they should be distributed. Rather than composing personal messages, Apthorpe wants to ensure that his gear goes to someone who will properly use it. After establishing this obsession with property, Waugh introduces the thunder-box, which inspires a battle. By helping Apthorpe to maintain his possessions, Guy draws closer to Apthorpe as a person, and he is implicated in the overwhelming weight of Apthorpe’s belongings. Soon after Apthorpe loses his thunder-box, he loses the rest of his possessions. His death is caused by dipsomania, dependence on a material substance, suggesting that possession and consumption without restraint lead to self-destruction. Men at Arms ends before Guy gains a real sense of identity. Guy’s lack of identity is shown in two incidents. He sees a cabin boy struggling to explain himself to a Halberdier, showing a religious medal to prove he is Christian. Guy recognizes this boy’s Christianity through the similarity of their possessions. Yet Guy fails to reveal himself, to show unity through his own Lourdes medal. Instead, Guy pays the cabin boy, choosing materialism over an expression of faith. Following this failure, Guy gives Apthorpe whisky and inadvertently causes his death. Guy continues to be the source of possessions. He fails to identify Apthorpe as an alcoholic despite having witnessed his drunkenness multiple times; instead Guy dwells on material goods that satisfy Apthorpe. At the opening of Officers and Gentlemen, Guy is no closer to finding his true identity, having lost even his place in the Halberdiers. Without an identity, Guy begins his journey in the second novel trying to fulfill Apthorpe’s request regarding his gear, almost as a pilgrimage, suggesting that only distribution of possessions can put Apthorpe’s soul at peace. Guy’s first act of faithfulness devolves into a simple transfer of goods. While Guy himself is forced to become concerned with possessions, Waugh depicts the 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
army as more and more grasping. Guy witnesses officers at a club fighting over food, forswearing gentlemanly manners. In his new unit, upon hearing that someone has fallen, Guy is more concerned about getting the man's room. This continued struggle to claim your own reflects difficulty in understanding who each person is. As Charles Ryder puts it in Brideshead Revisited, “we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with … reflections and counterfeits of ourselves” (225-26). It is difficult to understand identity because we are constantly forced to play roles, often roles shared by others. Throughout this second novel, Guy strives to comprehend identity in a world where his understanding of officers and gentlemen has become compromised. Guy experiences multiple tests of identification. The first comes with Ivor Claire, who appears isolated like Guy, yet Ivor’s isolation is motivated by self-interest. He imagines himself the sole survivor of a disaster, differing from Guy, who thinks of himself as serving the final mass on earth. While Ivor’s vision suggests triumph over others, Guy’s emphasizes service. Guy fails to comprehend this difference and instead proclaims Ivor the quintessential Englishman. Guy bases this judgment not on military action, but rather on the memory of Ivor as a horseman. For Guy, mastery of a horse proves Ivor to be an English gentleman. As Ludovic later suggests, Guy likes to pretend this war is fought by gentlemen, so Guy pictures Ivor as the ideal English gentleman and, by extension, the ideal officer. The overthrow of Guy’s illusions comes on Crete. Ivor suggests that honor can change, and that even desertion may be honorable. Ivor follows through, deserting his men, more concerned about the safety of his Pekinese than the concept of honor. Yet Ivor’s remark suggests that he wants to be considered honorable, as if he had begun to define himself as an honorable man and fears loss of that identity. Upon learning of desertion, Guy rejects Ivor as an illusion, suggesting that without honor, Ivor ceases to exist. By losing this model of manhood, Guy also loses a standard to judge himself. Having failed to identify Ivor Claire, Guy is presented with another test that he again is unable to pass. Making his confession, he encounters a priest whom he believes to be a spy. When the priest begins to ask why he is there, Guy becomes suspicious, noting that both he and the priest change their identities, each reduced to a man in the midst of war. He suddenly understands that war can affect religion, just as earlier Guy had imposed religion on soldiering. As a penitent, Guy hopes to receive absolution for his sins, but as an investigating officer, Guy’s goal is to discover information. In both cases, Guy is seeking to acquire something, but there is a sharp contrast between identifying an enemy agent and obtaining God’s forgiveness. Although Guy is able to identify the priest as a spy, he fails to follow through. He casually mentions the experience and suggests that it is trivial. Later, because of his improper action, Guy is at first suspected of colluding with the priest. By failing to identify the priest, Guy’s own identity comes into question. He is given the opportunity to act, yet by following the example of Ivor Claire, Guy fails again. He relies on an outside party rather than his own impulses, suggesting that Guy’s uncertainty prevents him from taking proper action. One more test finally gives Guy the understanding of identity. He enters a village and discovers the body of a dead soldier. The sight prompts Guy to remember his faith, to attempt a corporal act of mercy by burying the dead. Unable to do so, Guy instead finds the soldier's identity disk, which indicates that he is Catholic. This object prompts Guy to pray for the dead. Guy does not know the soldier and never will, yet he is able to express brotherhood through prayer. Guy has been given a vocation, “a single peculiar act of service” (Essays 409). He must ensure that this soldier’s identity is preserved. With a better understanding of his place in the world, Guy is no longer pleased to be isolated. Guy is not meant to function alone but rather in relation to others. He attempts to latch onto the Halberdiers as he has done in the past, but Colonel Tickeridge clearly excludes Guy. After witnessing the dead soldier’s loss of identity, Guy realizes that he has not yet found a purpose in the world. While he continues to feel out of place, the discovery of the dead soldier leads Guy back to himself. Recovering from his experiences in Crete, Guy finds himself holding the soldier's identity disk. The disk has replaced a religious medal, and the unknown soldier’s identity has 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
taken the place of the medal that belonged to Guy's brother. The medal served as a memento of Guy’s family, and the identity disk serves a similar function, preserving this soldier in Guy’s memory. Although it has replaced the religious medal, the identity disk still leads Guy to pray. Guy breaks his silence to pray not just for the fallen soldier but also for himself. Although the disk represents another person’s identity, it links Guy to both of his roles, soldier and Catholic, helping Guy to understand himself. While Guy is gaining understanding of the individual, the world continues to destroy personal identity. Guy preserves the memory of a fallen soldier by returning the identity disk to someone capable of informing the man’s family. Yet by entrusting the disk to Julia Stitch, a woman of the world, his mission fails, for she disposes of the disk and thus obscures the man’s identity. The war is more concerned with appearances than actuality. In this world, there is no definite identity; people are not what they seem, and the great causes one is led to fight for dissolve into dishonor. Guy, at the end of Officers and Gentlemen, comes to the realization that “Personal honour alone remains” (485). This lesson enables Guy to embark on his final missions of vocation. Waugh wrote that the “determining character [of a human being is] that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose” (Essays 302). In the final book of the trilogy, Guy finally is able to discover his purpose in the world and his identity in relation to God. He begins alone, still seeking a place for himself in the army. Although the beginning of Unconditional Surrender is similar to those of the previous books, there is a shift in Guy’s understanding. In the first two books, the men that most influenced Guy, Apthorpe and Ivor Claire, were both misleading him. Opposed to these men is Guy’s father, representative of an older order, whose opinions about possessions lie in stark contrast to those of Guy’s other mentors. Unlike other characters in these novels, Mr. Crouchback does not rely on possessions to define him: rather he is able to understand himself as a Catholic and a servant of God. Mr. Crouchback is less concerned with protecting his own identity; instead he gives advice that will help Guy to understand himself. He tells Guy that “Quantitative judgments don’t apply’” (491), which becomes a guiding precept in Guy’s life. Guy has to realize that real worth lies not in possessions or reputation, but in giving oneself to God. Given this knowledge, he is able to finally understand himself and his mission. Guy’s father also helps Guy realize that his relationship with God has become faulty. Guy’s relations with God are similar to his relations with human beings. He doesn’t ask anything from them but is willing to do his small part to help them. God doesn’t need Guy, but Guy needs God, and God alone can give Guy’s life purpose. As Waugh states in “St. Helena Empress,” “[God] wants a different thing from each of us” (Essays 410). In desiring something specific from each individual, God gives each person his or her individuality in the form of a vocation. Following these revelations, Guy begins his vocational missions. First is Guy’s adoption of Virginia’s unborn child. While others criticize his chivalry, Guy recognizes an opportunity for change, and he moves outside the roles he has tried to adopt. He gains an opportunity to prove who he is, since only he can help. Guy’s adoption of the child sets him apart from the rest of society, with their concerns about legitimacy. In giving Virginia’s son the Crouchback name, he is sharing his family’s identity and preserving it. His re-marriage to Virginia helps Guy to realize his whole self, to heal his wounded heart and pride. Guy’s second mission is more comprehensive than his first. Guy is put in charge of distributing supplies, yet it is not enough to simply do the job he is given; he must instead take on a personal mission. After hearing about their needs, Guy dismisses the Jews but later identifies with their struggles. Guy is given a further mission, something that only he can do and that will define him. Through his mission to help, Guy becomes linked to the Jews, and when a signal says that they will be evacuated, he describes it as a birthday present. He has come to realize that possessions don’t define someone. Even though the gift does not directly benefit Guy, he still sees it as valuable. His actions on the Jews’ behalf also give Guy a better sense of his 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
identity, and he begins to see himself as a Moses figure. Guy not only identifies himself with others, but he also realizes his mission has roots in faith. The world again interferes with Guy’s mission. The relief supplies given to the Jews bring to the fore the continuing battle for property. Each group believes that they deserve possessions to reward their efforts. The Jews exist apart from the causes of war, certain of their cultural and religious identity, asking only that they be given a place in the world. The armies consist of men trying to prove themselves through destruction. Guy, once part of them, has become distinct, no longer trying to prove himself but instead giving of himself to help others. Although both of Guy’s missions end in personal loss, with the deaths of Virginia and the Kanyis, Guy nevertheless completes his vocation. He fully develops his identity. Through his adopted son, Guy protects his family’s identity and passes on the faith he has acquired. In addition, his relations with the Jews prepare Guy to interact with others, and he is last seen at a party, a happy family man with a group of friends. In giving of himself, Guy finally acquires his true identity. Throughout Sword of Honour, Guy Crouchback partakes in a quest to find his identity. Throughout this journey, Guy learns how possessions relate to identity. By tying these two concepts together, Waugh leads Guy to a realization: identity cannot be defined by what one acquires, but rather by living a vocation that requires self-sacrifice.
Works Cited Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. 1945. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. ---. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. ---. The Sword of Honour Trilogy. 1965. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1994.
Editor's Note: Caity Logan won the Fourth Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest with this essay. She majored in English at Smith College in Massachusetts and graduated in the spring of 2009. Caity is applying to medical school.
Boxes in Waugh by James Morris
Box-Bender, Apthorpe's 'Thunder Box' 'The Box' in Pinfold.
Lots of boxes (hats, dresses) In Brideshead. The box of paints Charles opens on his career.
(Stacked in boxes at Stinchcombe Ronald Knox's papers, Waiting to be collated)
Box-hedging Mentioned a lot.
A Jack-in-the-Box! With his literary shocks, Bombshells.
A Magic Box!
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
'That neat cabinet Where the ebony wand had its place'
The boxes for the silver foxes in A Handful of Dust. Well, they're not boxes really, cages, But box-shaped.
Evelyn Waugh was square; Boxed in by his religion, Boxed in by Catholicism.
But he thought outside the box? It would be generally agreed. That's the paradox;
He thought outside the box. Or better put; 'The truth will set you free'.
Charles Edward Linck, Jr., 1924-2009 by Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma
Charles Linck, who died on 21 August 2009, was a member of the pioneering generation in American Waugh studies. He was one of the first people chosen by Paul A. Doyle, the founder of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, to serve on the editorial board. He and Doyle compiled the first bibliographies of Waugh. Charles's was significant because, in doing research for his doctoral dissertation in England in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he discovered dozens of newspaper and other materials by and about Waugh and interviewed a number of Waugh’s contemporaries, notably Terence Greenidge. Greenidge gave Charles a copy of The Scarlet Woman, a film he, Waugh, and others had made, and Charles was instrumental in arranging for its showing and distribution, first on videotape and then on DVD. Charles came from a large German farming family in northeast Kansas. During the Depression, his family worked in various Western states. During World War II, Charles served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific Theater of Operations during the period of kamikaze attacks and after the war was aboard one of the ships used to observe atomic testing in the South Pacific. He received the B.A. from the College of St. Benedict in Atchison, Kansas, the M.A. from Kansas State University, and the Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. He spent most of his teaching career at East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas (now Texas A&M University-Commerce). With his wife, Dr. Ernestine Sewell Linck, he founded Cow Hill Press. Like the Woolfs, they acquired and learned to use printing equipment and published a number of books, most of them dealing with Texas folklore and literature. They were mainstays of the Texas Folklore Society well into their respective retirements. Charles was unfailingly generous to his many friends and could be rather sharp with others. I met him in 1955 as a raw M.A. candidate at KU, and he was a seasoned veteran not only of the war but of graduate school. We lost touch when I left KU before he did, but in 1965 our interest in Waugh connected us again, and we collaborated on several projects, including the Waugh Checklist and the subsequent Bibliography. His last public connection with Waugh studies was the 2008 conference in Austin, Texas, where he was named an honorary vice- president of the Evelyn Waugh Society. I think that he was pleased to be recognized by those who followed the path he had helped to trace and to meet members of the next scholarly generations. 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
Editor's Note: Donations in memory of Charles Linck can be made to the St Labre Indian School, 1000 Tongue River Road, Ashland Montana 59004, USA. Phone: 1-866-753-5496. Web site: http://www.stlabre.org/Giving/MainGiving.asp
Reviews
The Real Brideshead Madresfield: One House, One Family, One Thousand Years, by Jane Mulvagh. London: Doubleday, 2008. 383 pp. £20.00. Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Manley.
Anyone interested in the life and works of Evelyn Waugh will be attracted to this book because of his connection with the house of the title and the “one family” who lived there, the Lygons. The publishers have sought to make more of this connection than the author intended by inserting what looks like a subtitle, “The Real Brideshead,” on the dust wrapper below the title. On the title page, only the “One House” subtitle appears. In addition, the chapter (dealing with Waugh’s brief association with the house and family) is pulled out of chronological order and placed at the beginning of the text. Chapter 2 deals with the earliest days of the family in the Middle Ages, but for the sake of continuity it begins with the claim that “a great part of Madresfield’s appeal for Evelyn Waugh lay in its antiquity.” Waugh was, however, more interested in the faux antiquity of the nineteenth-century Gothic-Revival additions. As Mulvagh points out (27-28), Waugh used Madresfield as the model for the Victorian-Gothic Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust (1934), even in the frontispiece that accompanied early UK editions of that book.[1] While these editorial changes confuse and overstate the relatively small contribution Waugh makes to the story, they succeeded in promoting sales of the book, which had reached its third printing by the time I ordered my copy a few months after publication.[2] The 7th Earl Beauchamp, William Lygon, succeeded to the title in 1891 and provides the focal point of Mulvagh’s narrative, beginning with Chapter 10. William held many high positions in various governments and received numerous honors. He also commissioned masterpieces of the Arts-and-Crafts movement in the chapel and library at Madresfield and was a caring parent of seven children.[3] He was less fortunate in his choice of a wife. He married Lettice Grosvenor, who took little interest in her children and dangerously combined great wealth, great dimness and religious zealotry. Her brother, the Duke of Westminster, madly jealous of William’s accomplishments, threatened to expose William’s homosexual indiscretions and secured the agreement of his sister to separate from William. All of the children except the youngest, Dickie, strongly supported their father and effectively banished their mother from their lives. In 1931, a few months after William’s exile, Waugh enters the story. At Oxford in the 1920s, he had known Elmley, the oldest son, and his brother Hugh. If he had not muffed his exams, Waugh would have shared rooms with Hugh in his last term at Oxford. Mulvagh says that Waugh was “sent down” before his final term (15), but in fact he simply dropped out after qualifying for only a poor Third-Class degree. He was deeply in debt and his father refused to finance the final term of residency needed to qualify for the B.A.[4] Although Hugh contributed to the character of Sebastian in BR, he seems not to have invited Waugh to Madresfield during their Oxford days.[5] In fact, according to Mulvagh (14), Waugh’s first recorded visit took place at Christmas 1931, at the invitation of Dorothy Lygon, Hugh’s youngest sister. Mulvagh doesn’t explain how Dorothy met Waugh or became sufficiently acquainted to extend a formal invitation. According to Selina Hastings, Mary Lygon met Waugh at a party in London and invited him to accompany her to Madresfield because Waugh was about to go in that direction, having signed up for classes at a nearby riding school.[6] They apparently stopped at Madresfield on the way. The formal invitation must have been extended by Dorothy after that
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
brief introduction. Dorothy, Mary, and their older sister, Sibell, ranging in age from nineteen to twenty-four, were living at Madresfield after their mother and father had separately fled. Waugh was still recovering from domestic upheaval—his wife’s desertion in 1929. He was also failing in his courtship of Teresa Jungman, deeply in love but rejected (Hastings 257-58). Although Mulvagh does not explore Waugh’s motivations for taking refuge at Madresfield, it must have been a considerable consolation to enjoy the friendship of three playful and lively young women. He spent over seven weeks at Madresfield during 1932 and wrote much of Black Mischief there while enjoying their hospitality.[7] He dedicated that book to Mary and Dorothy upon publication in October 1932. Sibell’s relations with him were much cooler than those of her younger sisters (23-24), and this may explain her absence from the dedication.[8] Waugh maintained contact with the family after 1932 and accompanied Hugh on an ill-fated expedition to Spitsbergen in 1934. Hugh’s untimely death in 1936 ended the persecution of William Lygon. He was allowed to come home for the funeral, and shortly thereafter the warrant for his arrest was lifted. William was suffering from terminal cancer when his exile ended and died in 1938. According to Mulvagh, Waugh never met William Lygon (33), and he seems not to have met the countess, but the couple clearly contributed to the story of the Flytes in BR.[9] Anyone aware of the Lygon family scandal likely made the connection.[10] Although Roman Catholicism played no role in the Lygons’ story, and homosexuality did not precipitate Lord Marchmain’s exile, in both cases religious zealotry of the wife and mother contributed to family breakdown. Elmsley and Bridey have elements in common: obtuseness and marriage to older wives who bear no children and allow titles to lapse. The two houses share the chapel’s art- nouveau decorations, as Mulvagh notes (311), but the fictional Brideshead is Palladian with a dome and columns, whereas Madresfield is largely redbrick Gothic Revival, with a moat, turrets and steeples.[11] Dorothy Lygon recalls Waugh’s pointing out this critical difference to her before BR was published to emphasize that Madresfield was not Brideshead and the Lygons were not the Flytes.[12] Perhaps not, but they certainly contributed. The book concludes with a brief description of the rather sad lives of the three younger Lygon sisters after their father’s death. Waugh continued to take an interest in them in later years. He asked Mary to be godmother for his son Auberon in 1939. According to Martin Stannard, she accepted but was unable to attend the christening due to bad weather.[13] His wife told Waugh that Dorothy Lygon was “the nicest of all your friends,” and, Mulvagh concludes, most would agree (319). Madresfield has nothing new about Waugh, but it does detail his relations with the Lygon family and explain why the family was important. The book is well-written and adequately annotated. It also has a useful index and a simplified genealogy of the Lygon family. A floor plan of Madresfield showing the various stages of growth would have been useful, as would a map of the estate. The book is surprisingly well printed on high-quality paper and nicely bound, something you find less and less often these days.
Notes [1] Waugh ordered the artist to produce the “worst possible 1860 [style]” (Letters of Evelyn Waugh 88). With its redbrick walls, turrets and steeple, the drawing bears a resemblance to Madresfield. [2] Perhaps not coincidentally, the book was released at about the same time as marketing efforts began to promote a new filmed version of BR. The book was published in June 2008 and the film was released in July 2008 in the US and in September 2008 in the UK. [3] The chapel decorations were a wedding gift from his wife, but William himself chose the design and the artists (197-206). In BR the chapel was the wedding gift of Lord Marchmain to his wife. [4] Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London, 1994), 110-12. [5] The copy of HD at Madresfield is inscribed by Waugh “To Hughie to whom it should have been dedicated…” (313). Actually it was dedicated to no one. 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
[6] Hastings, 250. Martin Stannard suggests an earlier meeting while the girls were “in the schoolroom” but offers no details. See Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939 (New York, 1987), 276-77. He may be referring to Waugh’s earlier acquaintance with Elmsley and Hugh while their sisters were schoolgirls, but no trip to Madresfield in that period is recorded. Cf. Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (1975; Harmondsworth, 1977), 166-67. [7] Mulvagh suggests that Remote People was also largely written at Madresfield (11), but that had been completed in August 1931, before Waugh’s first visit at Christmas of that year. [8] Mulvagh describes an adventure of Mary and Sibell that provided the basis for a scene in VB (27). They were inadvertently locked out of their house in Belgrave Square and decided to seek refuge at 10 Downing Street where the Baldwins, friends and neighbors from Worcestershire, were in residence. [9] Dorothy Lygon says that Mary took Waugh to visit William while he was staying in Lord Berners’s house in Rome. See “Madresfield and Brideshead” in Evelyn Waugh and his World, ed. David Pryce-Jones (Boston, 1973), 53. No such visit has been recorded by any of Waugh’s biographers or by Waugh himself in published letters and diaries. He made several visits to Rome during William’s exile, including at least one to Lord Berners’s house in January 1936 when Diana Cooper was in residence. See Stannard, 415. It appears unlikely that William would have been there, having visited Berners at an earlier stage of exile, according to Mulvagh (296- 97). Since each of his children visited William in turn in Rome, Waugh may have only contemplated going with Mary. Dorothy also thought it unlikely that Waugh had ever met her mother. [10] Henry Channon, “Chips”: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (London, 1993), 403. Based on his reading of an advanced copy, Channon concluded on 25 April 1945 that the “mise-en- scène is Madresfield and the hero Hugh Lygon. In fact all the Beauchamp family figure in it….” [11] It is misguided to criticize the filmed versions of BR for choosing Castle Howard as their setting: except for the chapel, it meets Waugh’s fictional description of Brideshead more closely than does Madresfield. [12] Dorothy Lygon, 53-54. [13] Stannard, 503. Auberon recalls a 1945 childhood visit to his godmother after she married a rather seedy Russian prince. He was disappointed because Mary Lygon had been described as a Russian princess but “turned out to be no more than another upper-class English lady.” See Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? (London, 1991), 31-32.
The Brideshead Movie by James Morris
A production only this disgusting ghastly age, Could have made. Who allowed this outrage?
I tell you - For allowing the rights to be released, Maybe a public flogging in Farm Street?
Yes, by Jesuit priests, Clad in cowl and dark flowing robe, The justice of it pleases.
* * *
On their first visit to Brideshead (to see Nanny Hawkins) The supposed Sebastian says to the supposed Charles ‘keep up’
Only got time for one visit to Nanny, 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
No time to visit the Botanical Gardens, Only time for cursory visits to Charles’s father, Too rushed to relish his humour, No time for ‘that fucking teddy bear’ Can’t fit the wit of Anthony in, No time for the schoolgirl charm of Cordelia, No time for Bridey’s religious talk, No time to really examine Lady Marchmain, The visit to Morocco will have to be quick, Who cares why Sebastian is sick? No time for the storm on the ship, No time for the little red-haired man, Mr Kramm, No time for Julia and Julia’s hysteria, No time to ready for Lord Marchmain’s return.
Just enough time to get to Venice - Turn Cara into an amoral concubine, Sit Sebastian, Lord Marchmain, Julia together - In a preposterous tableaux of decadent living.
That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
Slogans and Attitudes The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia, by Christine Berberich. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 218 pp. $99.95. Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, Bennington College.
If disinterestedness is sociologically possible, it can be so only through the encounter between habitus predisposed to disinterestedness and the universes in which disinterestedness is rewarded. Pierre Bourdieu, “Is a Disinterested Act Possible?” (88)
Christine Berberich’s revisionary salvage operation forms part of a recent penchant for recognizing the continued existence of a series of atavistic structures -- Englishness, nostalgia, and chivalry among them -- an apparently unforgiving morphology that, however marcescent, will just not go away. The tone here is palliative as opposed to venomous, an act of epigonal rehabilitation rather than a coup de grâce, as the gentleman, through a definition of the term, his history, his literary history, and viable close readings of his survival in Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Kazuo Ishiguro, becomes the metonymic lens through which to view the contemporaneous English geist, the contiguities of national, class, and gender identity. Broadly, the analytical flux of each chapter moves from the gentleman’s inherited sense of privilege to cultural ataraxia to the equivocal nostalgia of the present. In Berberich’s words, “Whereas in the sixteenth century it was essential for a gentleman to have a coat of arms, the emphasis shifted in the eighteenth century to attitude and manners” (9), though it was “the nineteenth which saw the heyday of the ideal” (18) as “‘the Victorians … set up factories for gentlemen in their public schools’” (Philip Mason qtd. 18), and this sportier, denser, more bourgeois, “neo-Spartan” (22) version is henceforth compelled to deal with modern vagaries, no doubt lost in the local Asda, dreaming of jumpers for goalposts, lowing herds, leather on willow, and fistfuls of crumpets for tea. Initially, at least, the teleological process is perceived as non- revolutionary, announced by the choice of L. S. Lowry’s Gentleman Looking at Something on the cover, wherein the man in question, decked out in wellies and an overcoat that has surely 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
seen better days, seems drab, adrift, and confused, as if peering reluctantly into the void. The modest introductory pages rest entirely on debunking this abyss, on “Robin Gilmour’s 1981 comment that ‘the gentleman has faded from the literary landscape because he has been absorbed by democracy without being resurrected’” (11-12), for “It is the main aim of this book to contradict this statement and to show that the gentleman is still alive and well as a literary trope” (12). Much rests on our acceptance of Gilmour, therefore, and it is an odd premise, for if we always assumed, a priori, that some anemic semblance of the gentleman is indeed “still alive” (12), and that the real question is ethical, based on his wellness or lack thereof, then Berberich’s subsequent insistence on the mere accumulation of more modern exempla of the trope in the ensuing pages with only intermittent, attitudinal dabbling in ideology may seem increasingly jejune, if not disingenuous. The bulk of the argument becomes quantitative, and if we already knew that rumors of the trope’s demise were greatly exaggerated, then such quantity becomes progressively obsolete. In short, Berberich juxtaposes the boyish, pastoral idyll that dominates Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man with the few yet decisive pages on the First World War, thus rendering it as “a carefully constructed, almost modernist text” (51), a “fragmentation of the self” (65), the demystification of the gentlemanly ideal. Similar though more persistent aphanisis is available in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, where Nicholas Jenkins’s “old gentlemanly code” (77) is thrown into ever more anachronistic relief against the opportunism of Kenneth Widmerpool. The latter is defined as “a man of the present -- ambitious, hungry for power, ruthless” (84), “more adept at tackling problems” (84), a particularly malicious harbinger of the “healthier society to which we may look forward” (88), as he puts it, since rather than merely overhauling the system he succeeds in manipulating it for his own ends. Berberich even attempts to link such success to Powell’s fascination for Thatcherism, yet another neoteric form of interested gallantry. Waugh is everywhere, his repartee littered throughout, and he receives the longest, most panoramic chapter in the book, part of which appeared in Waugh without End. He is also a touchstone for Berberich’s lurking, iconoclastic ethical preferences, for the chapter opens with Brideshead being “rather too much for many readers” (95), emblematic of “the shortcomings of his later work” (96), its idolatry set against Decline and Fall’s “playful deconstruction and subversion of the idea of the gentleman” (114), with A Handful of Dust serving as the transition from “anarchic to apologetic” (115). Sword of Honour, of course, rife with perquisites and unrewarded supererogation, is just “a further retreat into a mythical Christian chivalry” (124), undercut by its author’s frequent bouts of less than gentlemanly behavior. This is all feasible literary criticism, though standard humanist stuff by now. Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is rapidly becoming the sine qua non for studies of the epiphenomenal unwellness of the trope, of its lingering, macabre status, and under the bleak title “A Pillar Upholding Nothing” Stevens is again re-inscribed as hopelessly introspective, with “no point of comparison beyond what he has seen in books” (137), the victim of an abusive lord who in turn is the victim of “the indoctrination of a nation obsessed with chivalry and fair play” (152). The account is “highly unreliable” (142), not least because “it is riddled with devious self-justification” (143) in the midst of a now bankrupt system, ultimately deflated by Stevens’s moment of peripeteia and Berberich’s condemnation of “his failure to recognize that the notion of dignity is itself mythical” (144), which seems to be the book’s thesis, parti pris. Perhaps it is less a thesis than a partiality. The wealth of quotation, particularly at the beginning, is so overbearing as to obscure more forthright arguments. The bibliography is more than a fifth of the length of the text, and although the investigation is laudably sedulous, at times it toys with becoming a reference book, tacitly staking out ideological ground under the guise of simple research. The oddly inverted, oscillatory title (Englishness and Nostalgia should surely appear before the colon) is indicative of such reticence, as if a grandiose theoretical schema is indeed waiting in the wings, a surprise chaser, hinted at but not fully disclosed or possibly not fully understood. The frequent gaps denoting internal subsections within chapters, literal caesurae, do not help with the philosophical relativism, since just as the evidence is sufficiently established and arguments are apparently ready to be prosecuted, we switch to the establishment of different evidence, thereby gradually hollowing out the book while its author’s opinions 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
become gradually more indiscrete. Although the pivotal modern dilemma is the shift from “Is it true?” to “Whose interest does it serve?” Berberich openly focuses on “Is the ideal dead?” (7) rather than “Was it worthy in the first place?” If we accept that “‘Englishness’ these days often appears tinged with nostalgia, evoking images of a traditional, tranquil, in some cases even mythical England, rather those of Blair’s Cool Britannia” (23), and we are intent on exposing this myth, are we also reading an endorsement of the Blair years? We are certainly reading, pace Stephen Greenblatt, an endorsement of self-fashioning, though “(… divorced from Greenblatt’s Renaissance background)” (16), and sadly from his measured ambivalence. As the gentleman’s telos fades, morphing into twentieth-century hubris, he increasingly becomes a “cultural construct” (43), a “social construct” (43), or a “social phenomenon” (43), which is not to say that Berberich argues for one particular set of constructions or phenomena over another, or suggests an alternative to the notion of constructedness, but rather revels in the newfound liberty of her subject’s deliberate self- definition. The final sentence of the book states that the image “has not only fashioned men throughout the decades but has itself proven to be -- in both meanings of the word -- a fashionable ideal” (164). While such carpe diem, subjective positivity is undoubtedly slick, I am less than convinced that Greenblatt’s version is quite so sanguine, for rather than accumulating a series of examples of Renaissance self-help, his book begins with an interrogation of our hermeneutics, and concludes, in his own words, “in a manner more tentative, more ironic than I had originally intended” (256), with at least the partial undermining of the ideal of self-fashioning itself. Such reduction is symptomatic of an aleatory, visceral approach to theory. In addition to Greenblatt, “Foucault’s ideas of power discourses cannot be left out of consideration” (39), yet they are all but omitted after this vow of obligation. Pierre Bourdieu is also enlisted into the procedural framework, though only vicariously, through Anna Bryson’s From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England, which means that Berberich misses the passages explicitly related to chivalry and interest in Bourdieu, and despite his apparent indispensability he is never even mentioned again. It may be that Foucault and Bourdieu are indeed essential to any study of the English gentleman, but rather than fleshing out the perpetuation of their schema in context, a vague though forceful allegiance to them is initially overstated, leaving us with innuendo, a Foucauldian-Bourdieuian veneer that ensures a lurking suspicion of all kinds of potentially monolithic, evil superstructures which is never justified and yet impossible to dispute precisely because of the lack of justification. Homoeroticism, or rather Emily Eells’s less physical Anglosexuality (40), fares marginally better, for although there is a void of over seventy pages between Berberich’s introduction of the term and its subsequent use, a number of examples are assembled via the novels, such as George Sherston’s surname offering “further proof of the underlying homoeroticism of the novel: Sherston in the Cotswolds was the area where he [Sassoon] had often ridden with Norman Loder, the real-life Denis Milden” (63). Again, however, if the book is to transcend the encyclopedic, then rather than simply assembling evidence and propaedeutically assuming that the reader will somehow convert it into meaning, the proof in question must become that of Berberich’s argument on homoeroticism, which is latent at best. The Ryder-Flyte relationship, touted twice before the chapter on Waugh, of course “ties in with Eells’s perceptions of Anglosexuality as a form of ‘sex and sensuality’” (118), yet such burgeoning substantiation is then deflated within the book’s train of thought -- “But the homoerotic element is not the crux of the story” (118) -- which begs the question of why we endured the substantiation in the first place. By Berberich’s own admission, these theories constitute the backbone of the book, and they do endow the twentieth-century gentleman with an aura of sophistication, but over time the treatment of them is so laissez-faire as to produce the opposite effect, ultimately throwing the supposed sophistication into doubt, and spurring the notion that perhaps these were never the most appropriate theories for the matter at hand, even as they surreptitiously over-determine their object. Given the subtitle, and the historical nature of the book, robust mnemotechnics would surely 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
be more in order. Instead, there is a quick doffing of the cap to Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, thus adding to the illusion that the latest in the series of supersessive layers of the past is in fact the most sophisticated, and a wholesale endorsement of Fred Davis’s three definitions of nostalgia:
simple nostalgia (which, simply and plainly, means that ‘things were better then’), reflexive nostalgia (a questioning [sic] whether the past was really better and, if so, why) and finally interpretative nostalgia (which analyzes and problematizes the feeling of nostalgia per se). (29)
I am less than convinced that this ever becomes more than a checklist here, a methodological hierarchy against which to measure the novels, rather than a vehicle to approach the content of memory, why we remember, or even how. There is surely an argument that the first variant could be more complex than the third depending on the quality of the “then” in question, with the third becoming the most superficial, yet rather than being problematized the definitions are instantly established as the all-encompassing, democratizing yardsticks of memory. Thus, in practice, and in the absence of a more differentiated paradigm, the post-transition Waugh is condemned to the simple, a fogey “closing his eyes to progress, and regressing into a mythologized past” (164), whereas Ishiguro “cunningly incorporates all three of Davis’s forms of nostalgia” (155) and is therefore perceived as more complex, even though the content of Waugh’s mythology, if considered, may prove less exoteric. In the wake of the above, via litotes and a series of understated preferences, Berberich seems to overestimate the reader’s affirmation of her tacit ideological spectrum. In the chapter on Waugh alone, she asserts that his “idea of the gentleman was a more traditional one, steeped in chivalry, and tainted by his increasingly religious stance” (99), without explaining such supposed contamination. Similarly, “Waugh’s later gentlemen are far removed from reality” (133) is an implicit rebuke, though again quite why an overt connection to his milieu is necessarily preferable to less immediate alternatives is never clarified. The lightning-bolt contention that “there is no sense in chivalry if no one else is being chivalrous” (114) was worthy of many of Bourdieu’s pages, for it negates altruism, and yet here it is simply taken for granted. Finally, in a series of examples that I have far from exhausted, the chapter dwells on Waugh’s biographical hypocrisy, since his “own manners do not conform to the high standard against which he measured everybody else; in other words, they do not match the behaviour of an ideal gentleman” (99), though I remain uncertain as to when it was decided, either within the covers of this book or for that matter in the history of ontology, that ideas are bad when we fail to live up to their strictures, or our own expectations, or when they disadvantage us in material terms, or when someone else thought of them, or when they were applied before our time. In contrast, the treatment of The Remains of the Day is softer, nay duplicitous: while Stevens is defined as “a caricature” (146), the hyperbolic embodiment of an ideal that Berberich was only too keen to point out in the case of Waugh, Ishiguro deconstructs the blindness of his servitude, and therefore the caricaturing seems to be forgiven. The defense stretches as far as “Stevens’ life has been based on the suppression and evasion of the truth” (143), as if truth, rather than mere interest, were suddenly a valid word now, though exactly what kind of truth is more nebulous, and the citing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for “Stevens neglects his dignity as an individual” (144), even though dignity has apparently been devalued over all of the preceding pages and Stevens is lambasted but one paragraph earlier for “his failure to recognize that the notion of dignity itself is mythical” (144). This germ of a thesis, or of at least a counter-argument, however puzzling, is left adrift, for we are whisked off into a rapid-fire conclusion, as Berberich opts to reenter the maelstrom of accumulation, proving once and for all that “the image of the English gentleman did not disappear in [W. G. Sebald’s] ‘just one awful second’” (163) as she rattles through another list of more contemporary exempla, including John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library, William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, Merchant Ivory, The Edwardian Country House, Bond films, Barbour, Burberry, Harry Potter, and even a winner
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
of Pop Idol, Will Young, who courageously stood up to the judges on the show. Yes, I realize that these examples are different in degree, in their Englishness and their nostalgia, and that we are no longer sure of how, why, or what we should be salvaging, but there are only a few lines on each, and I’m off, belatedly, to reward my disinterestedness with a pinch of Gawith and a cheeky Chablis.
Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre. “Is a Disinterested Act Possible?” Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 75-91. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Lowry, L. S. Gentleman Looking at Something. http://www.thelowry.com/Lowry_copyrighted_work/gentleman.html
Waugh and the Atheist The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. 2006. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 463 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by John Howard Wilson, Lock Haven University.
In the paperback edition of his bestselling book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins invokes the name of Evelyn Waugh three times. The God Delusion advocates atheism, so one might expect Dawkins to dismiss Waugh as a deluded Roman Catholic. Instead, Dawkins tries to enlist Waugh in his crusade against faith. This choice of an unlikely ally points to larger problems with The God Delusion. In his preface to the paperback edition, Dawkins mentions a humorous passage, an “incongruous mismatch between a subject that could have been stridently or vulgarly expressed, and the actual expression in a drawn-out list of Latinate or pseudo-scholarly words (‘filicidal’, ‘megalomaniacal’, ‘pestilential’).” Dawkins’s “model” was “one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century,” Evelyn Waugh (17). Needless to say, Dawkins never equals Waugh’s style and humor, his logic and precision. The God Delusion is rather flaccid, apparently based on lectures, with many digressions and few arguments brought to a satisfying conclusion. Dawkins refuses to believe in God, but he does believe in himself, and he repeatedly refers to his other books and his web site. Waugh also wrote about himself, but that is the only similarity between his prose and Dawkins’s. In Chapter 2, “The God Hypothesis,” Dawkins cites Waugh’s diary, specifically the bet that Randolph Churchill couldn’t read the Bible in a fortnight. Dawkins quotes Churchill saying “God, isn’t God a shit!” and describes his reaction as that of a “naïf blessed with the perspective of innocence.” According to Dawkins, Churchill had a “clearer perception” of God in the Old Testament, “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction” (51). Dawkins does not mention that Waugh believed in God and disagreed with Churchill, so this incident is distorted. In Chapter 10, “A Much Needed Gap?” Dawkins refers to Waugh’s hallucinations and the novel that he wrote about them, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Dawkins argues that “some time before 1000 BC people in general were unaware that … the Gilbert Pinfold voice came from within themselves. They thought the Pinfold voice was a god: Apollo, say, or Astarte or Yahweh” (392). Dawkins neglects to add that Waugh never seems to have imagined he was listening to a god. Also omitted is Waugh’s assumption that the voices came from outside himself—from the BBC, or psychologists operating at a distance, or, finally, demons. Using a case of bromide poisoning in the 1950s to interpret the history of humanity’s religious belief is a bit of a stretch. For a scientist, Dawkins is remarkably casual about evidence. In God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), Christopher Hitchens portrays Waugh as a great writer misled by faith. In The God Delusion, Dawkins uses Waugh’s evidence without mentioning his religion. Only a small part of a much larger case, Waugh nevertheless turns up in both books. Waugh wrote almost automatically about religion, but even atheists seem to find his work irresistible.
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
Music and Philosophy The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, by Alexander Waugh. New York: Doubleday, 2008. 333 pp. $28.95. Reviewed by John W. Osborne, Rutgers University.
Mention the name “Wittgenstein” and people will probably think of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose writings have perplexed many of his colleagues in that subtle discipline. Ludwig is acknowledged to be one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. But in this book Alexander Waugh focuses on Ludwig’s older brother, Paul, who has been referred to elsewhere as “the other Wittgenstein.” Paul was a soldier in World War I and suffered a wound that required amputation of his right arm. He learned to play the piano left handed and won praise from the demanding Viennese music critics. Although The House of Wittgenstein discusses dozens of members of this family, it is Paul’s picture that appears on the jacket. Karl Wittgenstein, the father of Paul and Ludwig, was an engineer turned entrepreneur who made a fortune in industrial metals. He also fathered three other sons and four daughters. He built a large house, the Palais Wittgenstein, in Vienna. It became a rendezvous for members of the Central European cultural elite. Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss performed in the music room, and a full-length portrait of one of Karl’s daughters was painted by Gustav Klimt. But there was almost constant tension behind the elegant façade of Palais Wittgenstein. Karl had a rigid personality and insisted that his sons immerse themselves in business careers unsuited for them. His children had loud and violent quarrels with each other. In addition to open animosity there were smoldering resentments and frustrations. Two of Karl’s sons committed suicide and another may have done so. The daughter who was painted by Klimt also consulted Sigmund Freud about her psychological problems. Before Karl died in 1912, he tried to protect his wealth by a complex pattern of investments in foreign banks and securities. With the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938, the privileged world of the Wittgenstein family was threatened. Three of four grandparents were considered Jews by the Nazis; thus all living Wittgensteins were in danger. Ludwig had already emigrated and resided primarily in England since the 1920s. He was indifferent to wealth, lived simply, and scorned the cultivated ambience that surrounded him during his years as Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. He became a British citizen in 1939 and spent World War II working as a hospital orderly and in war industries. When Ludwig died in 1951 he was recognized for his contributions to analytic philosophy. Paul reacted with shocked surprise upon learning that under Nazi racial laws his family were considered Jews, since all of Karl’s children had been brought up as Christians. He emigrated to the United States, but his sisters remained behind in Vienna. Paul’s persistent efforts on their behalf resulted in an order signed by Hitler himself stating that the Wittgenstein women be accorded mixed-race status, and they were spared the death camps. They continued to live in Vienna during World War II while the city and their beloved Palais Wittgenstein crumbled about them. The expense of Paul’s efforts consumed most of the family’s remaining assets. Paul spent his last years residing comfortably in a New York City suburb. In the United States he continued his career as a concert pianist and composer. He died in 1961, having outlived all of his siblings. Three sisters who had survived to adulthood died in Vienna during the 1950s. Relations between this generation of Wittgensteins remained stressful until the end. Karl’s descendants today are scattered. After World War II the remains of Palais Wittgenstein were leveled by developers and the site used for a housing complex. Alexander Waugh acknowledges that Paul’s reputation as a pianist has declined. This was partly because of quarrels with well-known composers, including Benjamin Britten and Maurice Ravel, but also due to recordings of Paul’s piano playing which the author frankly calls bad. On the other hand, Ludwig’s fame is greater now than it was when he died. His early and late writings are studied, analyzed, and discussed by intellectual historians as well as philosophers
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
and have become compulsory reading for philosophy undergraduates. As Waugh says, during their lifetime Paul’s reputation was higher than Ludwig’s; now it is the other way. Although Ludwig’s reputation has eclipsed Paul’s, their father, Karl, was the most influential person within the family. He insisted that all of his children play a musical instrument and be educated privately in their house. Later, he violently opposed his sons entering the music profession and pressured them to excel in business. The effects of Karl’s personality are evident in this book. Inflexibility and refusal to acknowledge reality were also behind Paul’s refusal to retire from the concert stage when it would have been prudent to do so. Ludwig’s uncompromising character was reflected in his austere life as well as in the intellectual honesty of his writings. All of Karl’s children found it difficult to forgive and forget personal resentments. Alexander Waugh’s family, marked by both ability and eccentricity, and his considerable achievements in the field of music surely assisted him in writing this book. Most of the narrative is melancholy. Yet a few of the photographs show members of the Wittgenstein family as relaxed, smiling and seemingly at ease with each other. In their civilized environment, mental stress and personal unhappiness were kept under the surface when the family was being publicly recorded. The House of Wittgenstein is an absorbing account of a wealthy, cultured and influential family unable to deal successfully with personal problems and finally overwhelmed by events beyond their control.
Informative but Entertaining What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist—the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England, by Daniel Pool. New York: Touchstone, 1993. 416 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma.
When, in my early teens just after World War II, I began to read English fiction, I was bewildered by the identification of a character as John Doe, M.P. What, I wondered, was a Military Policeman doing in rural England during what was obviously peacetime? Much later I realized, though I’m not sure how, that the author was talking about a Member of Parliament. I doubt that I was alone in my ignorance of terms and practices peculiar to the United Kingdom. Had my bewildered fellows and I had Daniel Pool’s marvelous reference book, much would have been illuminated. Pool covers everything from weights and measurements to the etiquette of mourning, which varied widely according to the closeness of relationship (husbands got two years, a first cousin six weeks). He deals with government and religious institutions, structures, and functions, domestic arrangements (including the very complicated precedence of various types of maids), what to expect at a country-house weekend, including tips (a matter of anxiety to John Beaver), farming, recycling (finally I know what a dustman collects), food, clothing, and shelter. Pool points out changes made over the course of the nineteenth century and in many clever touches is not only informative but entertaining, as when he notes that the official dress of upper servants tended to resemble that worn by the quality a generation or so earlier. To these and many other fascinating topics Pool devotes 255 pages. Another 135 present an alphabetical glossary, from “abigail—a lady’s maid” to “Your Worship—The correct form of address to a magistrate, e.g., a justice of the peace.” As the subtitle indicates, the book is aimed at readers of nineteenth-century literature— roughly Austen to Hardy. But enough applies to twentieth-century literature, especially that dealing with the kind of society portrayed in many Evelyn Waugh novels, to make it not only useful but indispensable.
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
Abstracts of Japanese Essays on Evelyn Waugh, 1955-1961 by Yoshiharu Usui
Uramatsu, Samitaro. “Shinku, Keiren, Gyouketsu: Evelyn Waugh, ‘Officers and Gentlemen,’ 1955 [Vacuum, convulsion, and coagulation: Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen (1955)].” Gakuto [Learning stirrups] (Tokyo) 52.12 (1955): 22-24. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s latest novel, Officers and Gentlemen, is a masterpiece. This novel is a sequel to Men at Arms but an independent work. In this novel Waugh depicts not stories of war but comedy of war. This time Waugh does not take up Catholicism. His style is not difficult but crisp and clear. He does not describe the inside of the characters or the scenery. In these ways, Officers and Gentlemen is quite different from Brideshead Revisited. This novel is constructed as a series of episodes. In this sense it is like a one-act play. The three words of this article’s title, vacuum, convulsion, and coagulation, come from the text. Waugh uses these three words to explain the structure of the army, its true nature and human relationships. This novel indicates the maturity of Evelyn Waugh as a satirical novelist.
Kuroda, Keiyu. “Shohyo, Evelyn Waugh: Officers and Gentlemen [Review of Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen].” Hiroshima Daigaku Eigo Eibungaku Kiyo [Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature, English Literary Association of Hiroshima University] 3.1 (1956): 93-94. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen is, like Men at Arms, a war novel based on his experience in the army during World War II. Waugh intended to write a trilogy. However, Waugh said he had completed his intention with the two volumes. He does not seem likely to write the third for the time being. Officers and Gentlemen is more pessimistic than Men at Arms. The pessimism is a criticism of war. The author eyes the weakness of men in war, rather than war itself. Though the satire and jests in this novel are not better than those in Men at Arms, they are still brilliant. The veil of illusion is tragically stripped off. Though the third volume is not written, the pilgrimage of Guy Crouchback should not be ended here.
Kuroda, Keiyu. “E. Waugh no Brideshead Revisited ni tsuite – Bungaku to Shukyo [On Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted: Literature and Religion].” Hiroshima Daigaku Eigo Eibungaku Kiyo [Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature, English Literary Association of Hiroshima University] 4.1 (1957): 26-36. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited depicts his own rediscovery of religious belief after his conversion to Catholicism. However, if Waugh had written about the torment of tragic figures, Sebastian and Lady Marchmain, the novel would have been more meaningful to the present age. Catholicism is one of Waugh’s basic inspirations. It bore magnificent fruit in The Loved One. Then, through religious belief, Waugh wrote the satirical novels Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen. Because these two works describe the pilgrimage of the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, they seem truthful to the reader. Brideshead Revisited is a laborious work that depicts the beauty of ruin, the loss of youth in Oxford, the protagonist’s passion, and the downfall of traditional culture at a grand country house.
Funatsu, Shigeteru. "Waugh no A Handful of Dust ni tsuite [On A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh]." Toyo Daigaku Kiyo [Journal of Toyo University] 12 (1958): 85-93. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh probably based A Handful of Dust on Voltaire’s Candide. Waugh’s ‘city’ is the wasteland that T. S. Eliot depicted. Eldorado in Candide is the utopia that people in the eighteenth century desired. In Eldorado, there are no wars, crimes, or laws. Science is respected and people are equal. They have simple religious faith. Property and wealth are evenly distributed. Inhabitants despise gold and wealth. They laugh at material desire and European taste. People in the 1930s had to live in a suffocating society. They feared war and faithlessness. It was the age of agitation. Pacifism had no effect. Tony’s exploration is one means of escape. Waugh contrasts the ‘city’ with Voltaire’s Eldorado. No utopia exists in the modern world. Finally Tony is given ‘fear in a handful of dust’, or fear of death.
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
Yoshikawa, Michio. “Hotokesama mairi―The Loved One kou [To visit the loved one―A Study of The Loved One].” Kanazawa English Studies 5 (1958): 105-15. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One ridicules irreligious modern man’s attitude toward death. Waugh criticizes making a business of death. That business deprives death of its sacredness. Death without sacredness is the same as an animal’s. Aimee’s cremation at the animal cemetery shows humanity’s loss of identity, as in Franz Kafka's “The Metamorphosis.” Death is important in Catholicism, but there is no Catholic graveyard in Whispering Glades. Waugh thinks the loss of individuality, the prevalence of materialism, and the degradation of man to animal comprise the Anglo-American tragedy. Not only Joyboy but also every other character is a protagonist of ‘Anglo–American tragedy’. Waugh also describes the superiority of the English to the Americans within the framework of Henry James: European experience and American innocence. It is traditional English snobbery that exemplifies Waugh’s devotion to the steady past. Waugh combines dislike of the present age with yearning for the past in this novel.
Abe, Hiroshi. “Evelyn Waugh no Brideshead Revisited ni tsuite [A Study of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited].” Tohoku Daigaku Bunkakiyo [Tohoku University Liberal Arts Review] 6 (1960): 118-27. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is a story of the pursuit of happiness. For Waugh, happiness cannot be separated from religion. However, he does not thoroughly discuss the problem of belief. He leaves interpretation to the reader. Waugh might think it useless to show the pattern of belief, because Satan and God co-habit this illogical world. Until this novel, Waugh depicted a world far from reality. In Brideshead, he went back to the real world. In this novel people try to find some reason to live. Waugh describes human life as something to be loved. Unlike his practice in early novels, Waugh does not try to escape from reality like Sebastian nor does he describe purposeless behavior through severe satire. Waugh opened his closed self. This novel is Waugh’s new start. Moreover, it is a splendid turnabout.
Shibata, Toshihiko. “Wo niokeru youjisei―‘Douke’ no bungaku wo megutte [Infantilism in Evelyn Waugh: its relation to his comic sprit].” Bungei to Shisou [Essays in Literature and Thought (Department of Literature, Fukuoka Women’s University)] 19 (1960): 90-103. Abstract: Snobbery is one of the interests of Waugh’s works. It originates in Waugh’s infantilism. Infantilism has a dual aspect: angelic and satanic nature. Waugh creates innocent characters like Paul Pennyfeather and Tony Last, but he also depicts a man who eats his lover; another character cremates his lover, who committed suicide in a pet cemetery. Waugh is good at creating characters like infants, who disregard ethics, manners, and the morality of adult society. Waugh is also good at describing the infantilism of adults, especially the upper class. Waugh’s comic novels are not satire but buffoonery, because he does not present readers with consistent visions or standpoints. Buffoonery is literature of nonsense. We have little tradition of such literature in Japan. Waugh was influenced by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, W. H. Auden, Charles Dickens, and Elizabethan farce. It is difficult to understand Waugh’s literature without understanding this nonsense.
Toba, Fumio. Review of Evelyn Waugh, by Frederick J. Stopp. Sofia 9.2 (1960): 233-35. Abstract: In the past thirty years a lot of literary criticism about Waugh and his works has been written, but a general monograph like this book has not appeared. A genius of comedy hasn’t appealed to literary critics, and Waugh didn’t hesitate to express views that challenged people. As the subtitle Portrait of an Artist indicates, this book is a critical biography of Waugh. It is divided into three parts. The first part is biographical description, based on the view that Waugh’s novels should not be separated from biography. The second part is a theory of Waugh’s works. Each work is analyzed chronologically. The third part is a theory of the writer. The analysis of each work is combined, and the criticism is worth reading. To readers and critics, Waugh is still the writer who wrote Brideshead Revisited, but Stopp argues that Helena represents the perfection of his skill. The novel has been ignored by critics, so it deserves the attention that this author devotes to it. 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
Tatsumi, Toyohiko. “Evurin Wo Ronarudo Nokusu Den [Review of The Life of Ronald Knox].” Sofia 9.4 (1960): 483-87. Abstract: There are three autobiographical documents of Knox: A Spiritual Aeneid (1918), The Whole Art of Chaplaincraft (1939), and On Englishing the Bible (1949). Waugh uses these three shrewdly. Knox was a genius who read Virgil and could discuss Xenophon when he was six. Even if readers are meeting Knox for the first time, Waugh makes them understand that Knox was very English and bashful. We should admire Waugh’s skill. Waugh also notes Knox’s virtue of humility and the diffidence behind his Englishness. He describes Knox’s life tragically and a little too dramatically. Waugh seems not to have understood enough about the world of the clergyman and spiritual problems. Though it is impossible to write a comprehensive biography, this book is a vivid masterpiece that does not disgrace the name of Waugh.
Abe, Hiroshi. “Evelyn Waugh ni okeru akutoku no mondai [“The Matter of Vice in Evelyn Waugh”]. Tohoku Daigaku Bunkakiyo [Tohoku University Liberal Arts Review] 8 (1961): 118- 127. Abstract: Evelyn Waugh depicts vice. Waugh describes how his naïve protagonists are easily contaminated. Waugh does not present vices like deception, greed, adultery, betrayal, and murder as serious problems. They make us laugh. However, his intention is to warn us, to divert us from absurdity, and to make us recover humanity. Waugh suggests that virtue and vice are back to back and that we all may manifest vice. Colorful lives that Waugh describes reveal an eerie abyss. In this sense his novels are not burlesque. World War I brought change in social order and the class system. Old things contended with new, and people sought the harmonious way. In those times especially, singling out vice had meaning. Waugh became an excellent critic of civilization by doing so. But then Waugh treats vice as material for story-telling. In Waugh’s novels everything is haphazard and incongruous; one learns always to expect the unusual and yet is always surprised.
French Collection Editions Robert Laffont in Paris are planning to include one volume of Evelyn Waugh in their "Collection Bouquins." The volume will include existing translations of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, and Brideshead Revisited, and Alain Blayac will provide a new translation of Ninety-Two Days. Publication is scheduled for 2011.
"Expenses" In conjunction with the scandal over expenses claimed by Members of Parliament, The Times published "Waugh on want," an excerpt from Scoop wherein Mr. Salter suggests that flowers can be described as "Information." See Times2, 14 May 2009: 3.
Stories Rebroadcast on BBC Two Evelyn Waugh stories have been rebroadcast on BBC Radio 7. "Cruise," originally aired on 9 November 2007, was rebroadcast on 30 August 2009. "On Guard," originally aired on 16 November 2007, was rebroadcast on 6 September 2009.
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
A Pair of Pier Glasses On 4 June 2009, Christie's sold a pair of late George II giltwood pier glasses for £151,250. Evelyn Waugh bought them on 1 May 1957 for £525. Details can be found at Christie's.
Mad World Paula Byrne's Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead was published in the UK by HarperCollins on 20 August 2009. On 9 August, The Times published an excerpt entitled "Sex scandal behind Brideshead Revisited." The American edition is scheduled to appear on 9 March 2010. Please look for a review in a forthcoming issue of the Newsletter.
The Rough Life On 15 July 2009, Andrew Shelden published "Evelyn Waugh in VQR" on the blog of Virginia Quarterly Review. The article links to the typescript of Waugh's essay "Debunking the Bush" and to the published version, "The Rough Life," which appeared in VQR in 1934.
Evelyn Waugh's Inkwell Suzy Banks published "The 'Write' Tool: Getting It Down on Paper" in the Spring 2009 issue of Ransom Edition, a publication of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The article includes some remarks by Evelyn Waugh regarding ink and a picture of his inkwell. The article is available at http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition/2009/spring/write_tool.html
Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest Entries in the Fifth Annual Evelyn Waugh Essay Contest should be submitted to Dr. John H. Wilson, Department of English, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA 17745, USA, or [email protected], by 31 December 2009.
Evelyn Waugh Society The Evelyn Waugh Society has 93 members. Information on becoming a member is available at the society's web site, http://www.evelynwaughsociety.org. The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List has 64 members. The list is available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh.
Waugh in Life Epicurean On 28 August 2009, Toni Kervina published "Evelyn Waugh: The Literary Essentials" in Life Epicurean, an online magazine. The article is available at http://www.lifeepicurean.com/? p=2614.
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
Development and Vitality On 3 June 2009 in the Spectator, Allan Massie published "Getting into Character." He questioned E. M. Forster's distinction between flat and round characters. Suggesting that vitality is more important than development, Massie referred to Anthony Blanche and Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Unlike one of Forster's round characters, Anthony never develops, but he is vital, whereas Julia remains "dead as mutton."
The Country-House Novel In a review entitled "Lore of the manor," published in the New Statesman on 4 June 2009, John O'Connell notes that "the country-house novel most notorious for its slack-jawed celebration of aristocratic values is Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited." He adds that "it is not fair to beat Waugh over the head without also mentioning other writers such as Christopher Isherwood … Elizabeth Bowen … and H G Wells."
Two More Lists On 13 May 2009, The Independent published David Nicholls's "The top ten best film adaptations," which included Brideshead Revisited (the television series). On 20 May 2009, The Guardian published "Adam Leith Gollner's top 10 fruit scenes," which included The Loved One (for stoneless peaches).
The Space Between An annual publishing "interdisciplinary scholarship on the period bracketed by the the two World Wars," The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945 is interested in "lesser- known writers and artists and understudied issues of the period, including literary and cultural responses to the First and Second World Wars." The journal has arranged a conference in Portland, Oregon, 17-19 June 2010.
End of Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2 Previous Issue Home Page and Back Issues Next Issue
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]