EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Vol. 33, No. 2 Autumn 2002

Adam and Evelyn: "The Balance", The Temple at Thatch, and 666 by Simon Whitechapel

There are more and stronger parallels between the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) and Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) than some partisans of the latter may care to recognize, but one of the oddest is also, at first glance, one of the most innocent. De Sade and Waugh both wrote novels that are now, short of the invention of a chronoscope or -scoop, permanently lost to literature. Even the titles of these novels were oddly similar, for de Sade’s was called Les Journées à Florbelle, or The Days at Florbelle, and Waugh’s The Temple at Thatch. Their fates were even more similar, for they were both burnt in manuscript, de Sade’s by his own son in about 1814 and Waugh’s by the author himself in 1925. Which novel represents the greater loss to European literature is debatable, though personally I would plump for The Temple at Thatch. Les Journées à Florbelle was very likely just more of the sanguinary same from an author who had already been extensively published; The Temple at Thatch was Waugh’s very first novel.[1] Whether or not it matched the quality of his second novel, Decline and Fall, if it were still extant it could not fail to be of interest to both scholars and general readers, though neither scholars nor general readers have shown much interest in it as things stand. This is not only a pity but also a puzzle. Waugh’s first surviving book, the dull but worthy biography of a figure, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who is now probably much less famous than Waugh himself, sheds only indirect light on Waugh’s own life, but The Temple at Thatch was a novel and Waugh the novelist is much better described as transcriptive than creative:

[T]here was … urgent business … a hamper of fresh, rich experience — perishable goods.[2]

Waugh’s novels are almost invariably autobiographical: he unpacked hampers of "fresh, rich experience" for Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop (1938), Put Out More Flags (1942), and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), from which the above lines are taken, and hampers of slightly less fresh but still rich experience for Brideshead Revisited (1945) and The Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). Only The Loved One (1948) and Helena (1950) stand outside this autobiographical tradition, and even then not very far. Waugh wrote about what he experienced and that in itself should make The Temple at Thatch, on his own admission, of peculiar interest in the career of a writer who later became a partisan and some might even say bigoted Roman Catholic:

I also wrote some pages of a novel I had begun. I remember only that it was named The Temple At Thatch and concerned an undergraduate who inherited a property of which nothing was left except an eighteenth-century classical folly where he set up house and, I think, practised black magic.[3]

That was written in his public autobiography at a distance of nearly forty years, long after his conversion; this was written in a private letter at no distance at all, and some years before his conversion:

I am going to write a little novel … "The Temple At Thatch" … about madness and magic.[4]

His diary contains several entries referring to the "little novel" but the entry for "Monday 6 file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] October 1924" is perhaps the most interesting, because it offers a second valuable clue to the themes of The Temple at Thatch:

On Friday evening I read again and with vast delight Drummond of Hawthornden’s Cypress Grove. On Saturday I wrote more of The Temple at Thatch which I consider calling The Fabulous Paladins after a passage from a [sic] Cypress Grove.

Prima facie, a book that Waugh read with "vast delight" might seem unsuitable to supply a title for a book about "madness and magic". If you sample A Cypress Grove, however, you discover that his reaction not only offers a second valuable clue to the themes of The Temple at Thatch: it also offers a valuable insight into his state of mind at the time. A Cypress Grove, which was first published in 1623, is not a book many young men will read with "vast delight":

Thou art here, but as in an infected and leprous inn, plunged in a flood of humours, oppressed with cares, suppressed with ignorance, defiled and distained with vice, retrograde in the course of virtue; small things seem here great to thee, and great things small, folly appeareth wisdom and wisdom folly. … For the most wicked are Lords and Gods of this earth … and the virtuous and good are but forlorn castaways.[5]

Waugh’s delight in sentiments like those seems an obvious foreshadowing of the themes of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies and also, of course, of his attempted suicide in 1925. A Cypress Grove is described in one history of English literature as "the fullest exposition of Drummond’s Christian Platonism"[6] but it seems to me much more Stoic and pagan than Platonic or Christian, as in the passages just quoted and in the passage from which Waugh considered renaming The Temple at Thatch:

Death is the sad estranger of acquaintance, the eternal divorcer of marriage, the ravisher of children from their parents, the stealer of parents from the children, the interrer of fame, the sole cause of forgetfulness, by which the living talk of those gone away as of so many shadows, or fabulous Paladins. All strength by it is enfeebled, beauty turned in [sic] deformity and rottenness, honour in contempt, glory into baseness: it is the unreasonable breaker-off of all the actions of virtue; by which we enjoy no more the sweet pleasures on earth, neither contemplate the stately revolutions of the heavens. The sun perpetually setteth, stars never rise unto us.[7]

A Cypress Grove is about death, as its title suggests: like the yew in northern paganism, the cypress in southern paganism was a symbol of death and mourning. But William Drummond’s lapidary prose and book about death are much less famous than another seventeenth-century writer’s lapidary prose and book about death, and if Waugh was familiar with the former one would expect him to be familiar with the latter. He was, in fact, and the proof of that is another example of the autobiography in his writing. Waugh considered renaming The Temple at Thatch from a phrase in Drummond; in "The Balance" (1925), an early, experimental, and autobiographical short-story, he name-checked the other and much more famous seventeenth- century writer. Or rather, he did not, because the other writer is so famous that only the title of his book about death was needed. The story’s hero, Adam, has gone to an antiquarian bookseller to raise some money by selling his books:

An elderly man is at the moment engaged in investigating a heap of dusty volumes while Mr. Macassor bends longingly over the table engrossed in a treatise on Alchemy. Suddenly the adventurer’s back straightens; his search has been rewarded and he emerges into the light, bearing a tattered but unquestionably genuine copy of the first edition of "Hydr[i]otaphia." He asks Mr. Macassor the

file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] price. Mr. Macassor adjusts his spectacles and brushes some snuff from his waistcoat and, bearing the book to the door, examines it as if for the first time. "Ah, yes, a delightful work. Yes, yes, marvellous style," and he turns the pages fondly, "The large stations of the dead," what a noble phrase. He looks at the cover and wipes it with his sleeve. "Why, I had forgotten I had this copy. It used to belong to Horace Walpole, only someone has stolen the bookplate—the rascal. Still, it was only the Oxford one—the armorial one, you know. Well, well, sir, since you have found it I suppose you have the right to claim it. Five guineas, shall I say. But I hate to part with it."[8]

Hydriotaphia, or "Urn-Burial", was published in 1658 and written by Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), another soi disant Christian Platonist who seems to me much more Stoic and pagan than Platonist or Christian, although Plato does appear in the passage from which Mr. Macassor’s "noble phrase" is taken:

Plato’s historian of the other world lies twelve days incorrupted, while his soul was viewing the large stations of the dead. How to keep the corpse seven days from corruption by anointing and washing, without extenteration, were an hazardable piece of art, in our choicest practice. How they made distinct separation of bones and ashes from fiery admixture, hath found no historical solution; though they seemed to make a distinct collection and overlooked not Pyrrhus his toe.[9]

Waugh was perhaps mocking Browne’s fame and reputation through Mr. Macassor, but if he took "vast delight" in A Cypress Grove he seems likely to have taken some delight in Hydriotaphia too, and the way he wove what must have been his own reading into "The Balance" is another example of the autobiography in his writing. If he wrote about an undergraduate experiencing madness and magic in The Temple at Thatch, this and the evidence of all his other writing suggest that, as an undergraduate, he himself experienced madness and magic. In fact, we have proof that he experienced madness as an undergraduate:

I have been living very intensely the last three weeks. For the past fortnight I have been nearly insane … My diary for the period is destroyed … I may perhaps one day … tell you of some of the things that have happened. It will make strange reading in the biography.[10]

And The Temple at Thatch is not the only piece of strong if indirect evidence that he also experienced magic as an undergraduate. Publication of The Complete Short Stories has now introduced many readers for the first time not only to "The Balance" but also to "Unacademic Exercise: A Nature Story". It was published in 1923 in Oxford’s undergraduate magazine The Isis and describes how four undergraduates perform a ceremony to transform one of their number into a werewolf:

So the rites began. Billy was told to draw a circle around himself in the ground and he obeyed silently. Another potion was given to him. … Craine went on evenly: "And now comes a less pleasant part. I am afraid that you have to taste human blood," and then to us, like a conjurer borrowing a watch, "will either of you volunteer to lend some?"

The story is interesting for more than its theme: it ends prematurely with a note "The rest omitted owing to blind stupidity of editor and printer", which may suggest deliberate censorship, and the initials of three of the undergraduates cover the first four letters of the alphabet: Dick Anderson; Billy Donne; Craine. This leaves "E" for the unnamed narrator. Evelyn, perhaps? And is it stretching things too far to note that Craine, the disturbingly knowledgable primum mobile of the story, has a name rather like the French crâne, or skull? Perhaps it is, but it raises

file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] an echo from a much later work by Waugh also set in Oxford and describing the life of an undergraduate who at one point sits in a friend’s room reading a book about a form of lycanthropy:

He was out. I read the letters, none of them very revealing, that littered his writing table and scrutinized the invitation cards on his chimney-piece — there were no new additions. Then I read Lady Into Fox until he returned.[11]

Lady Into Fox (1922) was a popular novel by the writer David Garnett (1892-1981), and the undergraduate reading it is Charles Ryder in Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Earlier in the novel, when Cousin Jasper is engaged in his "Grand Remonstrance", a crâne or skull is among the litany of his complaints about Charles’s extravagance:

‘Is that paid for? … or that peculiarly noisome object?’ (a human skull lately purchased from the School of Medicine, which, resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the moment, the chief decoration of my table. It bore the mottoe ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ inscribed on its forehead.)[12]

This "mottoe" mentioned so fleetingly in parenthesis in fact gives its name to the entire first section of Brideshead and has been significant in mysticism and the occult for centuries. The French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), for example, used it in 1630 and 1640 for paintings of classical figures examining a mysterious tomb. The latter painting is also known as Les Bergers d’Arcadie, or The Shepherds of Arcadia, and the tomb it shows was traced, before its recent demolition, to those heterodox regions of southern France in which various popular works have located descendants of Jesus Christ and even his mummified corpse.[13] The Knights Templar are always involved in these theories about Christ and secret societies, and is it fanciful to see some reference to them in the title of Waugh’s lost novel? Probably it is, but Waugh certainly knew of Poussin at the time he was working on The Temple at Thatch:

Adam studying Poussin at the National Gallery. Close up of Adam studying Poussin.

These are lines from "The Balance", the early, experimental, and autobiographical short story that may now contain the best surviving clues to the locale of The Temple at Thatch. The story was written in 1925 shortly after Waugh burnt the manuscript of The Temple at Thatch and in some ways it anticipates Vile Bodies, which itself looks back to The Temple at Thatch in at least one important way. The hero of "The Balance" is called Adam Doure and has a beautiful girlfriend called Imogen Quest. The hero of Vile Bodies is called Adam Fenwick-Symes and during his work as a gossip-columnist he invents a beautiful girl called Imogen Quest:

But Adam’s most important creation was Mrs Andrew Quest. There was always a difficulty about introducing English people into his column as his readers had a way of verifying his references in Debrett … However, he put Imogen Quest down one day, quietly and decisively, as the most lovely and popular of the younger married set.[14]

If Imogen Quest were based on a real person, it is reasonable that she should have been single in 1925, when Waugh wrote "The Balance", and married by 1930, when he wrote Vile Bodies. Perhaps she also appeared in The Temple at Thatch, whose fate may have inspired the incident in Vile Bodies when Adam, returning from Paris, has the manuscript of his autobiography confiscated and burnt by customs officials at Dover:

‘[T]his here Purgatorio doesn’t look right to me, so that stays behind, pending enquiries. But as for this autobiography, that’s just downright dirt, and we burns file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] that straight away, see?’ ‘But, good heavens, there isn’t a word in the book — you must be misinterpreting it.’ ‘Not so much of it. I knows dirt when I sees it or I shouldn’t be where I am to- day.’ ‘But do you realize my whole livelihood depends on this book?’ ‘And my livelihood depends on me stopping works like this coming into the country. Now ’ook it quick if you don’t want a police court-case.’ [15]

The loss of the manuscript is as heavy a blow to Adam as Harold Acton’s "courteous but chilling" response to The Temple at Thatch had been to Waugh. In chapter nine of his autobiography A Little Learning (1964), entitled "In Which Our Hero’s Fortunes Sink Very Low", he wrote of how he burnt the manuscript after receiving Acton’s letter:

I did not then, nor do I now, dispute his judgment. I took the exercise book in which the chapters were written and consigned it to the furnace of the school boiler. Hard on this came a letter from Alec [Waugh, EW’s brother] saying that he had misunderstood Scott Moncrieff, who did not need and could not afford a secretary of any kind, least of all one with my deficiencies. ‘It is the end of the tether,’ I wrote in my diary.

Shortly afterwards he attempted suicide, like the hero of "The Balance". These links between Vile Bodies, The Temple at Thatch, and "The Balance" are strengthened by the way the short story mentions somewhere called Thatch several times. Adam Doure is told by his girlfriend Imogen Quest that her mother disapproves of their relationship:

"THAT’S WHY I’M BEING SENT OFF TO THATCH THIS AFTERNOON. And Lady R. is going to talk to you seriously tonight. She’s put Mary and Andrew off so that she can get you alone."

Later Adam visits Oxford, his alma mater:

MR. SWITHIN LANG’S ROOMS IN BEAUMONT STREET.

Furnished in white and green. Water colours by Mr. Lang of Wembley, Mentone and Thatch.

Finally, a party of young men and women arrive at Thatch for food and malicious gossip about Adam:

They have all come over to Thatch for the day; nine of them, three in Henry Quest’s Morris and the others in a huge and shabby car belonging to Richard Basingstoke.

From these references, Thatch seems to be a country house like Brideshead in Brideshead Revisited or Hetton in A Handful of Dust or even, as a place of exile for youngsters entangled in unsuitable love affairs, Blandings Castle in P.G. Wodehouse’s novels. This slightly contradicts what Waugh says of Thatch in A Little Learning: "a property of which nothing was left except an eighteenth-century classical folly". Then again Waugh also expressed a possibly factitious uncertainty about what the hero got up to in the folly, where "he set up house and, I think, practised black magic". If Thatch and what went on there were based on a real place and real activities, the devout Catholic Waugh who wrote A Little Learning in 1964 might have decided to disguise the former and express uncertainty about the latter. Nevertheless I have managed to find two places with the name near Oxford: a house named The Thatch at Frimley Stables near Didcot and a holiday cottage called Brambly Thatch at Whitchurch Hill near Pangbourne.[16] Perhaps Waugh had never heard of either but they do file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] prove that the name was used near Oxford, and if Waugh came across it he may have borrowed it in the same way as he borrowed the names of his contemporaries at Oxford. An undergraduate called Philbrick had beaten Waugh up there for Waugh’s imputing to him a taste for flagellation, and Waugh had worked off the grudge by using Philbrick’s name unaltered in his later writing, like that of his hated tutor of modern history, C.R.M.F Cruttwell. Accordingly, a character called Philbrick appears in "The Balance" as one would shortly appear in Decline and Fall. Waugh’s onomastics were, however, sometimes more subtle than that: at the end of A Handful of Dust Tony Last has been transported by Messinger to a kind of living death in the house of Mr Todd. Tod is the German for "death", which certainly seems deliberate, and Messinger in Greek is angelos, or "angel", which may also be deliberate. "Thatch" is a peculiarly English, indeed peculiarly Anglo-Saxon word, and could not exist in that particular form in any other major European language,[17] so translations of it are what may shed light on Waugh’s reasons for using it. Unfortunately, none of the translations I have been able to find suggest anything to me (see Appendix II), but besides Thatch "The Balance" also mentions werewolves, like "Unacademic Exercise", and black magic, like both "Unacademic Exercise" and The Temple at Thatch. Lycanthropy is induced by haematophagy in "Unacademic Exercise", and in "The Balance" the hero Adam Doure fears it will have the same effect on his girlfriend Imogen Quest:

"STEAK TARTARE—WHAT’S THAT?" The Cambridge voice explains, "Quite raw, you know, with olives and capers and vinegar and things." "My dear, you’ll turn into a werewolf." "I should love it if you did."

Black magic appears when Adam visits an unpopular acquaintance, Ernest Vaughan, at Oxford:

It has begun to rain again. Dinner is about to be served in Ernest’s College and the porch is crowded by a shabby array of gowned young men vacantly staring at the notice-boards. Here and there a glaring suit of "plus fours" proclaims the generosity of the Rhodes Trust. Adam and Ernest make their way through the cluster of men who mutter their disapproval like peasants at the passage of some black magician.

And remember that Mr. Macassor, the manipulative bookseller to whom Adam sells his small library, was reading "a treatise on Alchemy" when Adam called at his shop. This enforced sale of books was autobiographical too: when he fell into debt at Oxford Waugh had been forced to sell his library, as described by the historian of art (later Sir) Peter Quennell (1905-93) in his autobiography The Marble Foot (1976):

Evelyn’s rooms in Hertford were then pleasantly spacious and decoratively furnished, with Lovat Fraser prints and Nonesuch editions of the English classics. Later a dramatic change occurred. Finding himself in severe financial straits, he sold off all his most valuable possessions at a boisterous luncheon-party (where I bought his Nonesuch Donne), abandoned his former lodgings and retreated to the smallest and dingiest rooms that the college bursar could provide.[18]

Quennell was a close friend of Waugh’s at the time but later estranged him and became a target of his malicious gossip, perhaps because of an insufficiently enthusiastic review he wrote of Waugh’s biography of Rossetti. At Oxford, when the friendship still flourished, Waugh was presumably aware of Quennell’s interest in the occult:

I retained my interest in the study of magic throughout the first two or three terms I

file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] spent at Oxford, where I purchased a folio copy of Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia from an antiquarian bookshop, and passed unprofitable hours attempting to translate the author’s crabbed dog-Latin.[19]

These Oxonian experiences were all translated into "The Balance", as were his experiences after he graduated. Adam Doure is an alumnus of Oxford studying art at a college in London who contemplates a suicide glossed by a "mottoe" in malgrammatical Latin:

He goes to his desk and takes a small blue bottle from one of the pigeon holes. "What did I tell yer? Poison." "The ease with which persons in films contrive to provide themselves with the instruments of death…" He puts it down, and taking out a sheet of paper writes. "Last message to ’er. Gives ’er time to come and save ’im. You see." "AVE IMPERATRIX IMMORTALIS, MORITURUS TE SALUTANT."

The phrase is an adaptation of the gladiatorial salute to the emperor and literally translates as "Hail immortal Empress! The-one-about-to-die they-salute thee": moriturus is a singular masculine future particle but the verb salutant is plural. The Latin should probably read "AVE IMPERATRIX IMMORTALIS, MORITURUS TE SALUTAT", or "Hail immortal Empress! The-one-about-to-die salutes thee", and although the mistake was undoubtedly intentional and self-mocking it is so elementary as to strain verisimilitude. One therefore wonders whether the phrase has a hidden meaning, like Et in Arcadia Ego, which is an anagram of I! Tego Arcana Dei ("Begone! I guard the secrets of God").[20] Either way it is further proof that the story is autobiographical: Evelyn Waugh had studied art like Adam Doure and earlier in the year had attempted suicide off a Welsh beach, leaving behind him on the shore a scrap of paper bearing Euripides’ "The sea washes away all the ills of man".[21] He had been stung by jelly-fish, "sharply recalled to good sense", and had swum back to shore to tear up his "pretentious classical tag" and climb "the steep hill that led to all the years ahead".[22] The attempt at suicide was partly prompted by the burning of The Temple at Thatch, ostensibly because Harold Acton (1904-94) had thought little of it: "Too English for my exotic taste. Too much nid-nodding over port. It should be printed in a few elegant copies for the friends who love you".[23] The letter in which Acton allegedly wrote that is now lost like The Temple at Thatch itself and elsewhere I have suggested that this was because Acton remonstrated with Waugh for indiscretion. I then went on to examine all the other pieces of evidence I had come across casting possible light on Waugh’s involvement at Oxford in magic of one kind or another.[24] More recently, however, John H. Wilson, the editor of the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, has suggested another possible piece of evidence: a film that Waugh acted in for the Labour Social Club in "the summer term of 1924".[25] The film has apparently been lost for over thirty years and may not have been screened for well over twice as long as that, but its title alone is highly suggestive, because it is called simply 666. The number and its associations are taken from the Book of Revelation, and the relevant lines run like this in Ronald Knox’s somewhat stilted translation of the Vulgate:

Revelation 13:18. Here is room for discernment; let the reader, if he has the skill, cast up the sum of figures in the beast’s name, after our human fashion, and the number will be six hundred and sixty-six. (The Holy Bible: Knox Version, 1945/55)

The film would still seem of great interest to scholars of Waugh and may shed new light on the dabblings in the occult that certainly went on among the undergraduates of Waugh’s day and that Waugh himself may have been involved in. This might be true even if the film was a jeu d’esprit like the much more famous film The Scarlet Woman, which was about a plot to return England to the Catholic fold. Waugh wrote the script, whose tone was "akin to that of Decline

file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] and Fall",[26] and played "the villainous Dean of Balliol", who attempts to convert the Prince of Wales but is thwarted when the Prince falls in love with the Scarlet Woman of the film’s title, an evangelical nightclub singer played, in her first role, by Elsa Lanchester of Bride of Frankenstein fame. This plot was a sly satire on the real Dean of Balliol, "Sligger" Urquhart, who was Catholic, homosexual, and a snob and whom the undergraduate Waugh, rejected by Sligger as neither rich nor aristocratic, had regularly regaled with the lyrics "The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men", sung under his window to the tune of "Here we go gathering nuts in May". This film and its satire on Urquhart and Catholicism in general are still available to scholars of Waugh, but the sole surviving of 666’s two reels was last heard of in the possession of the Official Receivers in London in the late 1960s. Waugh’s old friend Terence Greenidge, in whose possession it had been, had written about it and related films in Oxford’s undergraduate magazine The Isis for Summer 1926, but preparations to retrieve from the Official Receivers were cut short by Greenidge’s death in 1969. If the reel still exists somewhere and could be retrieved, it might add another to the parallels that already exist between Waugh and the Marquis de Sade. Waugh certainly acted in 666, but perhaps he wrote its script too. If so, then it is a missing work of the master, like de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, which de Sade had kept hidden in the walls of his cell in the Bastille on a forty-foot manuscript shaped like a roll of lavatory paper. The manuscript was presumed lost when the Bastille was stormed by the mob in 1789, but in fact it passed into private hands, where it remained until it was retrieved in Germany by a psychiatrist called Iwan Bloch and published in 1904. The Temple at Thatch, like Les Journées à Florbelle, is now almost certainly lost for ever, but perhaps 666, like 120, will one day re-surface to shed new light on a fascinating but far from sane European writer with an abiding interest in cruelty, death, misogyny, and the Catholic church.

APPENDIX I

References to The Temple at Thatch in The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, edited Michael Davie:

Sunday 22 June 1924 I did not leave the house all day but read and pondered The Temple at Thatch.

Monday 21 July 1924 I began The Temple at Thatch and have written about a dozen pages of the first chapter. I think it is quite good.

Wednesday 3 September 1924 I have written some more of The Temple.

Saturday 6 September 1924 At work industriously on The Temple. I find it in serious danger of becoming dull.

Sunday 7 September 1924 Still at work on The Temple. A suspicion settles on me that it will never be finished.

Monday 6 October 1924 On Friday evening I read again and with vast delight Drummond of Hawthornden’s Cypress Grove. On Saturday I wrote more of The Temple at Thatch which I consider calling The Fabulous Paladins after a passage from a [sic] Cypress Grove.

Monday 15 December 1924 Today I await with growing impatience the replies of the private schoolmasters, attempting meanwhile to push on with The Temple.

Wednesday 17 December 1924 Still writing letters to private schools and still attempting to rewrite The Temple. file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] APPENDIX II: Translations of "thatch" in major European languages

In French "thatch" is chaume; in German Strohdach (literally "straw-roof": Dach itself is a cognate of "thatch" but means simply "roof"); in Spanish paja (literally "straw") or barda; in Italian the somewhat cumbersome copertura di paglia (literally "covering of straw"); in Latin stramentum; and in (modern) Greek, as in Italian, the cumbersome kalamine/akhyrine stege (literally "a reed/straw roof").

Notes 1.) Though there are a few pages of "A Fragment of a Novel" (1920) from his schooldays. 2.) The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), closing lines. 3.) A Little Learning (1964), ch. 9, "In Which Our Hero’s Fortunes Fall Very Low", p. 214 of the 223-page 1973 Sidgwick and Jackson paperback. 4.) See Christopher Sykes’ Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. 5.) Cypress Grove, Hawthornden Press, London, December 1919, pp. 56 & 59. 6.) Entry for "Drummond, William" in Reference Guide to English Literature, vol. 1, ed. D.L. Kirkpatrick, Chicago/London: St James Press, 1991. 7.) Ibid. 8.) See The Complete Short Stories. 9.) Hydriotaphia, ch. III 10.) The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, p. 12. 11.) Brideshead Revisited, Book I, "Et In Arcadia Ego", end of ch. 2, "Sunday Morning in Oxford". "Alopecanthropy" would be the technical term for transformation into a fox. 12.) Brideshead Revisited, Book I, "Et In Arcadia Ego", beginning of ch. 2, "My Cousin Jasper’s Grand Remonstrance". 13.) See, for example, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) and The Tomb of God (1996). 14.) Vile Bodies, ch. 7. 15.) Vile Bodies, ch. 2. 16.) See http://www.martex.co.uk/racehorsetrainers/ntf0523.htm 17.) Castilian Spanish has the opening and closing consonants but not the vowel, and the closing consonant does not close words in standard Spanish. 18.) Peter Quennell, The Marble Foot: An Autobiography 1905-1938, London: Collins, 1976, p. 117. 19.) Marble Foot, pp. 91-2. 20.) See The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. 21.) See A Little Learning; the line is from Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. 22.) See A Little Learning. 23.) See Christopher Sykes’ Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. 24.) See the articles on-line at www.geocities.com/aladgyma/articles/lit/waugh/index.htm 25.) Evelyn Waugh in Letters by Terence Greenidge, edited Charles Linck, Commerce, TX: Cow Hill Press, 1994, letter of March 4th, 1969. 26.) Evelyn Waugh in Letters by Terence Greenidge, edited Charles Linck.

The Scarlet Woman: An Appreciation by John Howard Wilson Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania

Though he was employed by director Alexander Korda, Evelyn Waugh wrote only one screenplay that turned into a film. The Scarlet Woman has received little attention, partly because it is an early, minor work, partly because the film has been rare. Recently Charles Linck made The Scarlet Woman available on videotape, so that I (and probably others) have been able to see it for the first time. The Scarlet Woman is no masterpiece, but it is well worth file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] watching, partly because it features Elsa Lanchester years before her unforgettable performance as the Bride of Frankenstein, but mostly because the story is by Evelyn Waugh. The Scarlet Woman belongs to a crucial period, 1924-25, when Waugh left Oxford to hone his talent as a writer. Recapitulating ideas introduced in Waugh’s juvenilia, The Scarlet Woman also anticipates themes developed in more mature fiction. The Scarlet Woman is, moreover, a reflection of Waugh’s thinking in the mid 1920s, an expression of opinion about everything from brother Alec to Evelyn’s own sexuality. As a production, The Scarlet Woman shows obvious weaknesses. Hairstyles and makeup are amateurish, sets are makeshift, and acting is uneven, from inspired to uncertain. Some problems stemmed from an extremely low budget. Terence Greenidge, one of the producers and actors, remembered that four people financed the picture through contributions of five pounds apiece (1), though Waugh’s diary indicates that the amount was six pounds, with additional expenses (170). Decisions made in production are aesthetically defensible, however. The Scarlet Woman’s subtitle is An Ecclesiastical Melodrama, the film not to be judged by standards of realism. Skewed wigs, phony beards, and improvised sets actually augment the absurdity of situations and characters. Waugh and Greenidge were also playing to their audience, their circle of friends at Oxford. Many of the actors are from the same circle, and they are supposed to be recognized, not to have their identities obscured by decent makeup and believable hair. Photography in The Scarlet Woman is, however, mixed in quality. Most shots are clear and coherent, but many taken out-of-doors seem to be underexposed. Editing and titles are often abrupt, largely because transfer to videotape increased the film’s speed. Greenidge explained that The Scarlet Woman’s speed is “16 ‘frames’ per second, as it is pre-talkie, and talkies demand 24 ‘frames’ per second. 16 per second should give a true-to-life presentation. 24 per second is hopeless, because the movements become jerky and mad, and all the fun disappears” (156).[1] Once one has noted all its shortcomings, The Scarlet Woman still seems surprisingly good, especially for a first film: more competent than one might expect, and entertaining as well. Thematically, in relation to Waugh’s other works, The Scarlet Woman is even more interesting. In the first few scenes, the Pope initiates “a gigantic attempt at the conversion of England.” His holiness summons Cardinal Montefiasco, played by John Sutro in a cassock and an extravagantly elongated hat. Sutro removes the hat to reveal a skullcap such as a cardinal might wear. In A Little Learning, Waugh mentions that Sutro was Jewish (194), and in this case the skullcap seems to be a yarmulke, an indication of Sutro’s ethnicity and ostensibly a means of amusing the audience at Oxford. Having been sent to England, the Cardinal says goodbye to his mother, played by Alec Waugh. Alec and Evelyn were never close, and one wonders why they collaborated on this project. Though he covers the mid 1920s in The Early Years of Alec Waugh and My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits, and though he describes Elsa Lanchester in Early Years, Alec doesn’t mention his brother’s film in either book. Evelyn shot much of The Scarlet Woman near the Waughs’ house, and he needed actors. The part of the mother may have been foisted upon Alec in order to make fun of him, again for the benefit of Evelyn’s Oxford friends. Alec’s character introduces two more themes of The Scarlet Woman, alcohol and love. The Cardinal’s mother is a heavy drinker and the object of the Pope’s affection, Evelyn as usual hinting at the strength of sexual appetite in the highest places. Both actors are male, so there is an undertone of homosexuality, an echo of the life Evelyn had led at Oxford. The Pope loves the Cardinal’s mother, but she loves only the bottle, Evelyn perhaps acknowledging the inconvenience of love and the insidiousness of alcohol. Both had hurt him at Oxford. Having arrived in England, Cardinal Montefiasco meets the Dean of Balliol College, “the leading Catholic layman of England.” The character is never named in the film, but in 1924 the Dean of Balliol was “Sligger” Urquhart. Earlier that year Urquhart had angered Waugh when he helped to close the Hypocrites’ Club, described in A Little Learning as “the stamping-ground of half my Oxford life” (181). Waugh also blamed Urquhart for having stolen the affections of Richard Pares, one of Waugh’s first friends at Oxford. The Scarlet Woman seems to have been written primarily to get revenge, and Urquhart is mercilessly parodied. Waugh himself played the Dean and wore a blond wig in imitation of Urquhart’s hair. In order to further the Pope’s file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] scheme, the Dean has befriended the Prince of Wales, played by John Greenidge, Terence’s brother. In Waugh’s interpretation, the Dean is an obvious homosexual who pets the Prince whenever possible. Waugh himself was going through a homosexual phase, but he was troubled by it, and he enjoyed stigmatizing homosexual tendencies of other men. Peter Quennell remembered him shouting “The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men!” (Pryce-Jones 37). Waugh’s Dean is also sycophantic, eager to please ecclesiastical authorities. Waugh himself was known as a social climber, especially at Oxford. Similarities suggest that in the character of the Dean, Waugh was denigrating aspects of himself. In The Scarlet Woman, the Dean is given a “vacation haunt” in Golders Green. Waugh himself lived in Golders Green, but he loathed the unfashionable suburb, associated with Jews (Greenidge 14). In A Little Learning, Waugh mentions that Golders Green “had somehow acquired a slightly comic connotation” (35), though he doesn’t specify what it was. Presumably his audience would have been amused by the Dean of Balliol’s meeting with a Jewish cardinal in Golders Green. There the Dean drinks lemonade, Waugh remembering an evening spent in Urquhart’s “sober salon” at Oxford (Learning 180). Tempted to convert, the Prince feels caught between friendship with the Dean and duty to his father, the King. The Prince’s position resembles that of Waugh himself, attracted to aestheticism of friends such as Harold Acton and Alastair Graham but conscious of his father’s more traditional conception of Oxford. The Dean introduces another ally, Father Murphy, S.J., played by Terence Greenidge. Father Murphy is “somewhat of a zany,” a description Waugh’s audience probably applied to Greenidge himself. In A Little Learning, Waugh notes that Greenidge “had certain eccentricities which separated him from the conventional elite” (176). In the film, Father Murphy is sent to steal the crown jewels in order to finance the Catholic scheme. The character’s assignment reflects the actor’s idiosyncrasy. Waugh writes that Greenidge “indulged a mild kleptomania, collecting from the O.U.D.S., the Union and other men’s rooms trifles which took his fancy—hair-brushes, keys, nail-scissors, ink-pots” (Learning 176). The connection between film and actor is now obscure, but it probably made the film funnier in its own days and in its own circle. Waugh plays a second part in The Scarlet Woman, that of Lord Borrowington, “a penniless peer, master of the Prince’s revels.” To counter the Dean’s influence on the Prince, Borrowington visits the flat of “Beatrice de Carolle, the cabaret-queen,” played by Elsa Lanchester. Lanchester really was a cabaret-queen in 1924, as she managed the Cave of Harmony in Soho (Stannard, Early Years 101). In the film, Beatrice lives in a “Bohemian flat,” Waugh having become familiar with such places. Beatrice is fond of cocaine, jokingly said to be one of Oxford’s problems in Labels, Waugh’s first travel book (1930). Beatrice is also overwhelmed with bills, ready to commit suicide. Aware of her trouble, Borrowington invites her to enjoy “real life at our dear Prince’s court,” to forget about “the melancholy grave.” She consents, and by now it is clear that The Scarlet Woman is Beatrice, as well as the Roman Catholic Church. The Prince immediately falls in love with Beatrice, much to the Dean’s chagrin. Waugh turns to the camera and admits to “a far, far deeper hurt than I have ever felt before.” Through the Dean, Waugh seems to be mocking his own homosexuality and pain that had come from it, referring to his failed relationship with Richard Pares and failing relationship with Alastair Graham. Probably his audience would have recognized at least one of the references. Waugh did not identify himself only with the Dean, as he split himself between two characters, the Dean and Lord Borrowington. Waugh had done something similar in earlier works, notably “The House: An Anti-Climax,” a story written at Lancing College in 1921. In The Scarlet Woman, the Dean and the Lord represent different aspects of Waugh himself, on one side a jilted homosexual, on the other an unscrupulous, impoverished, asexual aristocrat. Greenidge also played two roles in the film, and Lord Borrowington is a small part, perhaps insignificant. Waugh wrote the script and supervised most of the production, however. He clearly enjoyed playing the Dean, and if he had had no interest in playing Borrowington, Waugh could have taken another part or found another actor. The Dean of Balliol is a much larger part, Waugh not only venting spleen but also indicating the predominance of homosexuality, in his art as in his life at Oxford. file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] Father Murphy steals a royal ring, and the Dean orders him to plant it on Beatrice. She says “Even clergymen are naughty now and then,” but Father Murphy doesn’t seem to know what she means, as he cocks his head and gazes at her in the next shot, a close-up. Waugh seems to have been playing upon Oxford’s reputation as a “male community,” where few men had “any serious interest in women” (Learning 168-9). Presumably most of his friends would have been uninterested in anything “naughty,” as harmless as Father Murphy. A similar joke is in “The Balance,” Waugh’s short story of 1925. The men are not “quite the ‘marrying sort’ somehow” (Apprentice 185). The Scarlet Woman also exploits Oxford’s innocence of women, but Waugh’s discomfort with homosexuality may have led him to suggest the possibility of love between Greenidge’s character and Lanchester’s. When the Prince sees his father’s ring, he returns to his friends in the Church and leaves Beatrice to make her way home. After a sleepless night, she rises early and hurries to Hampstead Heath, pursued by Father Murphy, who has slept on her doorstep. Perhaps having heard of the stolen ring, two boys pelt her with pebbles. Beatrice decides to end it all, climbs onto the railing of a bridge, and intends to jump into a small, shallow-looking pond. Father Murphy dissuades her, but the character’s interest in suicide reflects Waugh’s own. He had contemplated suicide at Lancing in 1921 (Diaries 131), and he may have thought about it at Oxford in 1924, when he destroyed his diary (Letters 12). That year he wrote The Scarlet Woman and imagined Beatrice about to kill herself in two different scenes. In July 1925 Waugh attempted suicide, as he swam out to sea before being stung by jellyfish that forced him to return (Learning 230). Waugh finished “The Balance” shortly thereafter. His hero, Adam Doure, tries to poison himself, but he survives only to be drawn into conversation with his own reflection, another example of Waugh splitting himself between characters. Suicide certainly attracted Waugh in the early 1920s; perhaps objectification of suicide in stories helped him to suppress the death wish. The attempted suicide of Beatrice raises the question of relationship between Waugh and his character. Waugh was never given to creation of sympathetic heroines. Usually they are faithless, like Lady Elizabeth in “Antony, Who Sought Things That Were Lost,” a story written in 1923. Beatrice is irresponsible, like many of Waugh’s females, and she is not above calculation in her dealings with men. Beatrice is nevertheless appealing, a likeable scamp who anticipates Margot Beste-Chetwynde, Brenda Last, and Virginia Troy. Waugh does not often confer his own experiences on female characters, but he gives Beatrice his own temptation to commit suicide, an indication of his sympathy for the character and regard for Elsa Lanchester.[2] Father Murphy finally catches Beatrice and reveals the Catholic plot. He says that in honor of “Saint Bartholemew’s Day . . . all the leading Protestants of the country, and you are one of them, are to be cut down without remorse or pity.” Beatrice runs away, “the fate of a nation” dependent on her. She informs the King, earlier identified as “Defender of the Faith,” and his majesty imperturbably asks his courtiers to do what they did to the “Communist leaders.” Thinking they are about to have their way, the Catholics assemble for what is supposed to be a royal audience. The Dean is seated when the others come in, said to be early because of his “burning fanaticism.” Actually Waugh seems to have been seated because he could hardly walk, having broken his foot in a drunken fall (Diaries 232-3). Instead of achieving the conversion of England, the Dean and the Cardinal are poisoned, along with their convert, the Prince. Waugh vividly portrays the Dean’s death throes, his comic revenge against Urquhart. Killing a don is also imagined in “Edward of Unique Achievement,” a story written in 1923 and another expression of Waugh’s anger at his teachers. The Dean is also a reflection of Waugh himself, and killing the character may represent the author’s attempt to suppress the homosexual side of his own nature. The King orders the death of his son, in one of Waugh’s more shocking depictions of the older generation’s ruthlessness (or carelessness). The Cardinal’s mother is the only other parent in the film. When she learns of her son’s death, she simply reaches for another bottle. The other two major characters survive. Moving easily from one man to another, Beatrice accepts the love of the Lord Chamberlain, played by Viscount Elmley.[3] Because of his love file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] for Beatrice, perhaps because he has not been considered fit for a royal audience, Father Murphy avoids the fate suffered by his friends. In the film’s final scene, he is shown at “a little country orphanage,” there “by Royal permission.” In the last shot, children jump and shout, as they clearly enjoy the company of Father Murphy. The scene doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the film, but it makes more sense when we read that the actor, Greenidge, was “the orphan son of a don” (Learning 176). By ending the film in this way, Waugh may have been suggesting that some people are natural fathers, even if they are celibate. Father Murphy shows paternal care, a sharp contrast after the cruelty of the King and the indifference of the Cardinal’s mother. The final scene also seems hopeful, as if Waugh were imagining fatherhood, something he and his friends might attain if they could break free from the homosexual spell of Oxford. Waugh’s opinion of The Scarlet Woman seems to have changed over time. After they had been shooting for a week or two, he and Greenidge stopped and looked at the results in July or August 1924. Waugh was “quite disgusted with the badness of the film,” and he felt “no enthusiasm to finish it” (Diaries 170). The film remained incomplete for more than a year, finished in November 1925 and then shown at Oxford. The first night was “glorious” (Greenidge 2), but Waugh and his set were leaving the university, and The Scarlet Woman soon lost its audience. Greenidge preserved it and occasionally revived it. Christopher Sykes reports that Father C. C. Martindale heard of the film and asked Waugh to arrange a screening. Waugh was “embarrassed,” but Father Martindale “laughed till his tears flowed,” then issued “under his signature on the official form the imprimatur or official licence of the Roman Catholic Church that the work might be shown anywhere as it contained no matter dangerous to the faithful, or likely to lead them into error. The completed form was duly photographed by a motion camera and added to the work” (88-9). Sykes places this event in “the thirties” (88), but the form in the film is dated 22 October 1925. Sykes is inaccurate in summarizing the plot (87-8), half- remembering it, and one suspects that he has misdated Father Martindale’s approval. According to Greenidge, “Father Martindale was so pleased that my brother, without consultation, insisted on inserting a subtitle, Nihil Obstat—projiciatur—C C Martindale S J” (2). Greenidge doesn’t date the subtitle, but his paragraph suggests that it may have been 1925, his letter 1926. In 1930 Waugh mentioned The Scarlet Woman in the Daily Express, as he took “personal pride” in Elsa Lanchester because he “produced her first film” (Essays 69). Later that year he converted to Roman Catholicism. Years later Waugh asked Greenidge for some stills and included them in his autobiography. An “abridged version of The Scarlet Woman was shown on BBC/TV on Sept 10 [1964],” when A Little Learning was published. Greenidge reports that “Evelyn was a little disgruntled at a private film being ‘shown to the poor,’” but Waugh was “eager for a duplicate copy” (122-3). The autobiography says little about the film and describes it as “a fantasy of the attempts of Sligger Urquhart to convert the king to Roman Catholicism” (209). The Scarlet Woman was the last of such fantasies. Whatever grounds for resentment he may have once had, Waugh did not ridicule Urquhart as relentlessly as he ridiculed Cruttwell, his history tutor. When he came to write of Urquhart in the late 1950s, in his biography of Ronald Knox, Waugh was appreciative and deferential. Perhaps in 1924 Waugh and his friends had had another reason for spoofing Roman Catholicism. When Waugh was working on The Scarlet Woman, Alastair Graham was taking instructions from Father Martindale (Carpenter 139). Graham was received into the Roman Catholic Church in September 1924. The Scarlet Woman is only one example of Waugh’s interest in cinema. More comprehensive study might help to explain the effect cinema had on his life and work, especially in the late 1920s, when he learned to write partly by imitating cinematic techniques and incorporating them into a distinctive prose style.

Bibliography

Carpenter, Humphrey. The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his Friends. Boston: Houghton, 1990. “Film Clips.” Sight and Sound 36 (Summer 1967): 154-5.

file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] Greenidge, Terence. Evelyn Waugh in Letters. Ed. Charles Linck. Commerce, TX: Cow Hill, 1994. Linck, Charles. “Waugh-Greenidge Film.” Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 3.2 (1969): 1-2. Pryce-Jones, David, ed. Evelyn Waugh and his World. Boston: Little, 1973. Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939. New York: Norton, 1987. Sykes, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. 1975. New York: Penguin, 1977. Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Boston: Little, 1976. ---. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, 1983. ---. Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice: The Early Writings, 1910-1927. Ed. Robert Murray Davis. Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1985. ---. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. 1980. New York: Penguin, 1982. ---. A Little Learning. Boston: Little, 1964. ---. The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama. 1924. Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 3.2 (1969): 2-7. ---. The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama. Video Duplicating Services, 1993.

Notes

[1] Greenidge also said that the “running-time of the film is ¾ / three quarters of an hr.” (134), while the videotape runs only about 28 minutes. The videotape is almost fifty percent faster than the film, the result of increasing the speed from 16 to 24 frames per second.

[2] Christopher Sykes offers another explanation: the “pursuit sequence” was “manifestly based on an episode in that ancient classic Way Down East” (88), directed by D. W. Griffith and released in 1920.

[3] Lord Elmley used a pseudonym, Michael Murgatroyd, for fear of upsetting his father, the 7th Earl Beauchamp. See Greenidge, 1.

Evelyn Waugh's Immortal Souls by Baron Alder

Robbery Under Law, the product of Evelyn Waugh's two-month journey through Mexico, has perhaps suffered from its unavoidable comparison with Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads for, until its publication by the Akadine Press in 1999, the book had remained out of print since 1939. Originally commissioned by Clive Pearson, the son of the founder of the Mexican Eagle oil company, as an account of President Cardenas' nationalisation of the mostly American- and British-owned oil industry, Robbery Under Law has generally been dismissed as a transparently tendentious apologia prepared on behalf of American and British capital. Evelyn Waugh himself contributed to this perception--and to the book's obscurity--when he explained that the book "dealt little with travel and much with politics" and for this reason should be left in oblivion. Certainly, Robbery Under Law does contain observations about Mexican politics and society that appeared to contemporary critics as contrived and debatable. It also contains predictions about North American geo-politics that seem to have been groundless and have proved subsequently to be wildly inaccurate. Most notably, it contains the passage which has been reproduced by most of Waugh's biographers and referred to as Waugh's "conservative manifesto", a passage telling in its defensiveness. Robbery Under Law also contains, however, passing observations about modern and ancient systems of government, the origins and importance of good laws, the process of opinion making and the nature of sovereignty, all of which remain as relevant and insightful as anything by

file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] George Orwell from the same period. At this level, Robbery Under Law shows Waugh fundamentally opposed to collectivist forms of government and to transient or arbitrary laws. These are important points given the allegations of Waugh's fascistic sympathies. Robbery Under Law also examines the Mexican government's policies toward religion and in this context contains Waugh's fullest, most frank elucidation of his faith. It is this often overlooked aspect of the book that provides perhaps the most beneficial insight into Waugh's guiding philosophy. Unlike semi-autobiographical accounts such as Brideshead Revisited, it is an account unmitigated by literary licence, and one rendered more personal by the absence of splendid settings, largely invented Catholic heroes and idealised alter-egos. Most importantly, it is clear from Robbery Under Law that Waugh's religion was more than a refuge from the democratisation of society and mass culture and more than an ornamental manifestation of a Gothic idyll. John Carey argued in his controversial work The Intellectuals and the Masses that the modernist intellectualism of the early twentieth century was responsible for propagating the fiction of the "masses" with the result that, in much twentieth-century literature, the human status of the majority of the people is eliminated. The idea was, according to Carey, for the intelligentsia to construe its own superiority and to justify its own privileged position. Waugh was not, on balance, a modernist. Nor, as his satirical portrayals of the Isherwood- Auden set suggest, was he an intellectual in the conventional sense. It is not surprising, however, that Waugh features amongst those writers identified by Carey. Indeed, Carey was doing little more than restating the conventional analyses of Waugh according to which Waugh's preoccupations with nobility and large country houses and his concerns about barbarity and anarchy reflect an arch-elitism. Waugh's Catholicism is invariably implicated in these analyses: Carey's own view is that "Waugh seems frequently to confuse Catholicism with society distinction". Compared with Chesterton's outlook, Waugh's religiosity certainly does indicate a thoroughly depressing view of certain of those with whom he had been forced to share God's earth. Whereas Chesterton's Catholicism was the expression of an instinctive optimism, a "sense that experience must not be spoilt by presumption or despair", Waugh was possessed by the conviction that human nature was essentially "aboriginally corrupt". Waugh summarised the Catholic attitude in an essay explaining his conversion in the terms, "I am very far from good; therefore I go to church". The assumption is that Waugh's religion is a function--usually an affectation--of his elitism and is there to distinguish him from the sallow youths, the subalterns marked for ignominy and the travelling salesmen with fat, wet handshakes that appear throughout his novels: to distinguish him from what Carey saw as George Gissing's "ineducable masses" or Wyndham Lewis's "London bank clerk and his girl". For D. J. Taylor, for example, Guy Crouchback's Catholicism in the Sword of Honour trilogy "is not much more than the spiritual equivalent of White's Club". Waugh was, however, a Catholic with a clear comprehension of the fundamental orthodoxies to which a Catholic is obliged to subscribe. As a matter of logic, the fact that he was a convert suggests that he consciously and deliberately sought out and adopted such orthodoxies. Catholicism was for Waugh a profoundly philosophical ideology that he described in his biography of Edmund Campion as a "logical system", "absolutely satisfactory to the mind, enlisting all knowledge and reason in its cause". To this considerable extent then, Waugh's own worldview was contingent upon a belief in the existence of an individual soul. Most importantly, each human's soul was, for Christians, equal before God. It would have been heretical, as Conor Cruise O'Brien pointed out, to suggest that one man's soul is more valuable than another's and O'Brien, having read Robbery Under Law, is disingenuous when he suggests that this was Waugh's point in Brideshead Revisited. Despite O'Brien's suggestion to the contrary, Waugh was undoubtedly aware that "Catholicism in Catholic countries [was] not invariably associated with big houses, or the fate of the aristocracy". In Mexico, Waugh noticed, and was apparently delighted by, "the limitless variety of the Church": "it is a faith which, within its structure, allows a measureless diversity and this is a fact which those outside it find difficulty to realise". For Waugh, it was this variety file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] that admitted the opulence of Lady Marchmain as it recognised the sanctity of the ragged Indian. Furthermore, far from being a source of social distinction, Waugh saw the church's inclusiveness as historically the only means of Mexican national unity: even in times when the divisions of caste were most meticulously observed, the church was a reminder of the fundamental equality of the Indians and their conquerors. Waugh found objectionable, for example, the following description of the feast day in the village of Guadalupe he had read in a contemporary travel guide:

the unhygienic and ignorant Indians overrun the village to such an extent that the problem of preventing pestilence is a serious one to the authorities. The church is usually packed to suffocation: the devotees bring habits and an entomological congress as varied as they are astonishing, all the church decorations within reach are kissed to a high polish and thoroughly fumigated later, and all breathe freer when the frenzied shriners have returned to their different homes. Many of the pilgrims are wretchedly poor . . .

Much of the basis of Waugh's objection to this passage is that its author has denied the universality of God to humanity and has done so on the basis of wealth and caste: since the Indians are a "pestilential lot with whom no tourist cares to rub shoulders" it is "absurd to pretend that they are worshipping the same God as well-fed, expensively educated Americans and Europeans". For Waugh, the symbolism of the apparition at Guadalupe to an Indian in the sixteenth century is telling:

it came to teach the Spaniards that the Indians were men and women with souls, to teach the Indians that the Spaniards' god was the god of all humankind.

The modern, post-colonial mind might have some difficulty in digesting the paternalism which clearly informs this critique, as might the rational mind in digesting a critical explanation reliant upon miracles. The relevant factor is, however, Waugh's belief that all humans possess souls and that these souls are equal before God. It is this point that most readily distinguished Waugh's outlook from the outlooks of many of the other writers who appear in Carey's book. As Carey recognises, Nietzsche's view was that nothing had done more to undermine the natural hierarchy of humanity than the "poisonous Christian doctrine that all souls were equal before God", while D. H. Lawrence considered "most of mankind . . . soulless". For Waugh, there was no such thing as the "man in the street": there were "individual men and women each of whom has an individual and immortal soul, and such beings need to use the street from time to time".

Editor's Note: This essay originally appeared in the July-August 2000 issue of Quadrant (Australia), and it is reprinted by permission. Saint Juan Diego, the Mexican who witnessed four apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1531, was canonized on 31 July 2002.

Book Review

Professor Salwen and the "Ignoble Fascist" Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia: The Story Behind Scoop, by Michael B. Salwen. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2001. 339 pp. $119.95. Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, James Cook University.

Professor Salwen’s Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia: The Story Behind Scoop is a mine of information about journalists and journalism during the Italo-Ethiopia War (1935-36), and to that extent an excellent background to Waugh in Abyssinia and Scoop; but I must also say, sadly, that it is widely misleading about Waugh. Salwen’s aim is welcome: "My goal is to see that [Waugh] receives his proper place in journalism history" (vii). Waugh is also meant to serve as a "starting point" for discussions encompassing "literature, journalism, mass communication, history and political science" (vii). file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] But the forays into theory turn out to be barely integrated textbook fare that add little to understanding. An exception is the reference to Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, which brilliantly illuminates Waugh’s view of the way in which a "privately owned, laughably called a free press" subverts proper conduct of the world’s affairs. The focus of any review of this book must be its immediate objectives, which are stated as follows: (1) to analyse the Italo-Ethiopian war, and (2) to study Waugh in Abyssinia and Scoop with "their almost anthropological descriptions of the correspondents and their practices . . . during the Golden Age of war correspondence" (11). Salwen’s analysis of the Italo-Ethiopia war, in itself quite fair, is a prelude to repeatedly damning Waugh’s case as "cliché-ridden propaganda." The judgement is familiar, but is it correct? Any answer will be debatable, because the international politics surrounding the war were wildly confused, and anti-Italy opinion in the democracies, while hysterical, had a moral basis difficult to ignore. I well remember my mother--fervently Catholic, mainly conservative and in love with Italy--weeping at newsreels of the Emperor going into exile. In this climate, Waugh found it "fun," and a serious political imperative, to attack the opposition to Italy. Professor Salwen assumes that because Waugh thought the opponents of Italy wrong, he therefore thought Mussolini right. The truth is more boring. Waugh was in touch with Catholic intellectuals like Douglas Woodruff at The Tablet, Christopher Hollis, a politician, and Tom Burns, the publisher who commissioned Waugh in Abyssinia. All were conscious that since 1934 when Stalin did an about face and joined the League of Nations, his Comintern had promoted the Popular Front and Collective Security. They sensed that the opposition to Italy from this source was factitious, and motivated by hatred of Italy’s internal politics rather than by a wish to help Abyssinia. As things turned out, ineffectual opposition angered the Italians, and gave the Abyssinians false confidence to the point that what began as a minor attempt on Italy’s part to gain influence in Abyssinia’s outlying regions ended in a full-scale modern war of conquest. Abyssinia suffered bloody destruction and Italy financial ruin. This opened the door for Mussolini to ally himself to Hitler and withdraw his guarantee of Catholic Austria’s independence, to the Anschluss and the Axis. Salwen nevertheless claims that Waugh supported Italy because he was racist and colonialist and, giving a new twist to an old canard, because he had "become" a fascist (though allowing that he did not "join the party"). Of race and colonialism one can only say that while Remote People might have irritated Fabians, it would have annoyed Empire Loyalists and Conservative Party luminaries far more: "That sewer, Waugh!" Waugh in Abyssinia is another matter, because it criticizes Abyssinian imperialism quite sharply. On the other hand, in more recent times, Marxist revolutionaries have condemned Haile Selassie’s regime with a virulence that eclipses Waugh’s by many magnitudes. Abyssinia’s subject people have also rebelled, more than confirming Waugh’s view of Amharic rule as ramshackle and purely exploitative. If Waugh was unduly critical, it was because most journalists exaggerated in the other direction, routinely writing about Ethiopia as a unitary nation rapidly modernizing. As for fascism, this is a serious charge, and deserves a broader context than Salwen provides. In the first place, while Waugh, like all conservatives, believed in strong government, he also insisted that government interfere as little as possible in the lives of its citizens. Nothing could have been more abhorrent to him than a one-party state (especially one with socialist origins and a lower-middle class ethos) that dictated every aspect of living. See Scott-King’s Modern Europe. Confusion can legitimately arise, of course, because Waugh, while neither Fascist nor pro- Fascist, was openly hostile to "anti-Fascism," the dominant culture of liberal opinion in the 1930s. A parallel might be useful. During the Cold War, liberals who opposed the anti- Communism of Senator McCarthy were rarely pro-Communist, but were often called so by opponents. In reality they were "anti-anti-Communists." In the same sense Waugh opposed "anti-Fascism" but was not pro-Fascist, though opponents often said he was. He was "anti-anti- Fascist." Turning to happier subjects. Professor Salwen’s treatment of the journalists who covered the Italo-Ethiopia War and the practices they employed is wonderfully thorough. His reach extends file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] to all shades of opinion and to those who reported from the Italian as well as the Abyssinian sides of the front. The exposition may not be perfect, but the information is all there somewhere, if not in the text then in the excellent endnotes. The journalistic practices he outlines are not systematically matched to those revealed in Waugh in Abyssinia and Scoop, but they make a perfect backdrop. Of course, the revelations about journalists’ bad behaviour in Philip Knightley’s The First Casualty anticipate Salwen to some extent, but Salwen’s treatment is altogether deeper and more balanced. Unfortunately, some protest is required against this book’s continual, baseless denigration of Waugh. Very early in the book Salwen muses about the problem he faces in dealing with Waugh, who, he says, is "an ignoble, rather than a noble, character" and possibly a "scoundrel" (vii). Starting from the presumption of "ignobility," he compulsively interprets everything Waugh does or says as discreditable, often grievously misreading the evidence. Even Waugh’s criticism of journalists’ deceptions, later confirmed by Salwen himself, are deemed unworthy. One example of a misreading leading to a perverse judgment must suffice. George Steer was the most active and able British war correspondent working in Ethiopia, but, like all other correspondents, was prevented from going to the front and reporting the fighting. He made up the deficiency by inviting Colonel Konovaloff, the only European who saw the Emperor’s last battle, to write the story. In a review of Steer’s book, Caesar in Abyssinia, Waugh remarked: "It is not Mr Steer’s fault that the most valuable and exciting section has been contributed by another hand." Now, everyone knows that Waugh in Abyssinia is in two parts, the first about war correspondence in Addis Ababa before the Italian victory, the second (notoriously) about a trip to Abyssinia after the Italian occupation. Thus, there is no similarity or competition between Chapter XVIII of Steer’s book (fascinating military history, and probably the best piece of writing to come out of the war) and Waugh’s sad second section (Abyssinia under Italian occupation). Nevertheless, Salwen writes: "Waugh claimed that Steer lacked first-hand knowledge of what was the most important part of the book—events in Ethiopia since the Italian conquest." He then proceeds to judgement: "Left unstated, Waugh returned to Italian occupied Ethiopia after the war. Although Waugh did not overtly credit his own book with correcting this defect in the literature, he conceitedly added for those familiar with Waugh in Abyssinia, ‘It is not Mr Steer’s fault that the most valuable and exciting section has been contributed by another hand’" (68). Thus Salwen misreads Waugh’s review and, on that false basis, accuses him of conceit. The pattern repeats itself in all direct comments on Waugh. It is daunting to challenge the doyen of British journalism, but I must say that Sir William Deedes, adopted by Salwen as an authority, writes nonsense about Waugh and Haile Selassie’s coronation. When Waugh reported the coronation for The Times, the Express and the Graphic in 1930, he was far from being a joke reporter. Despite a famous rebuke from the Express, his coronation cable, like every other journalist’s, was not "late" but "delayed in transmission." After the coronation service on Sunday, the journalists found the cable office in Addis shut and could not file stories for Monday’s papers. (The Abyssinians even shut down battles on Sunday!) If Waugh had successfully "telephoned" his report of the coronation in time to catch the fourth edition of The Times on Monday, as Deedes and Salwen claim, then he would not have incompetently missed his deadline: he would have stolen a march on his professional rivals, none of whom had a genuine coronation story printed on Monday. But careful inspection of The Times’s Contributors’ Marked Copies and other files reveals no evidence of a coronation report from Waugh in any edition on Monday, leaving Waugh no better, and no worse, off than his professional colleagues. Salwen’s book is a treasure house of information about the journalists who covered the war in Abyssinia, their duties, opinions, routines, rivalries, deceptions and sharp practices. All of this information brings alive and adds weight to Waugh’s sober analyses of foreign correspondence in Remote People and Waugh in Abyssinia, and to the fantasy-reality of Scoop: A Novel about Journalists. I wish I could recommend other areas of the book as highly as this one.

file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] Seven Deadly Sins Republished The Seven Deadly Sins has been republished in a Common Reader Edition. Inspired by Ian Fleming, who also created James Bond, The Seven Deadly Sins appeared as a series in the Sunday Times in 1962. The series includes essays by various hands, including Evelyn Waugh on Sloth, Angus Wilson on Envy, Edith Sitwell on Pride, Cyril Connolly on Covetousness, Christopher Sykes on Lust, Patrick Leigh-Fermor on Gluttony, and W. H. Auden on Anger. These essays were collected in a book published in 1962, with a foreword by Ian Fleming and an introduction by Raymond Mortimer. Those pieces are included in the new edition, along with a new afterword by Alain de Botton. In a paperback edition of 93 pages, The Seven Deadly Sins is available for $16.95 from A Common Reader. "Sloth" was also republished in Donat Gallagher's edition of The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (1983).

Bright Young Things in Production Principal photography on Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's film version of Vile Bodies, began in November 2002. The production features Dan Aykroyd as Lord Monomark, Jim Broadbent as the drunken major, Dame Judi Dench as Lottie Crump, and Peter O'Toole as Colonel Blount. Bright Young Things is Fry's directorial debut; earlier reports had him appearing as Father Rothschild, but that role is said to have gone to Richard E. Grant. The film is set for release in 2003 or 2004.

Brideshead on the Big Screen According to an article in the Sunday Times on 1 December 2002, there are plans to produce Brideshead Revisited as a feature film. Andrew Davies is writing the script, partly as a reaction against the ITV production broadcast in 1981. Davies intends to place more emphasis on the novel's religious themes and to do without the narrator. The production is by Ecosse Films, a British company. The entire article may be read at Totalwaugh.

John H. D'Arms, 1934-2002 John H. D'Arms passed away on 22 January 2002. He was 67 years old. John D'Arms was the president of the American Council of Learned Societies. Readers of the Newsletter may remember that John D'Arms was also Evelyn Waugh's son-in-law. John D'Arms earned bachelor's degrees from Princeton and Oxford and a PhD from Harvard. He met Evelyn Waugh's eldest child, Teresa, and married her on 3 June 1961. John D'Arms became a professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan, chaired the department, and eventually served as dean of the university's Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. At Michigan in the late 1980s, while writing my dissertation on Waugh, I tried to elicit information from John D'Arms and his wife, but I did not succeed. My dissertation director suggested that the dean would wish to avoid any appearance of favoritism. In 1990, with my dissertation finished, I sent John D'Arms a draft of an essay entitled "A Distaste for Dons," later published in the Newsletter (Vol. 25, No. 2, Autumn 1991). I inquired about several comments in Waugh's diaries and letters, most of them apparently opposed to his daughter's marriage. In a letter dated 9 July 1990, John D'Arms wrote that he had "no objection whatever" to the inclusion of Waugh's remarks, and that he did not wish me "to withdraw or to change anything" that I believed "to be true (or even probable)." John D'Arms also provided the following perspective, which may interest readers of the Newsletter.

Two comments: first, as you recognize . . . , personal experience could change EW's attitudes (e.g., the portrait of ["Sligger"] Urquhart in the biography of his beloved Ronnie Knox), but such change would not be likely to lead him to retract or to file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_33.2.htm[04/12/2013 14:44:54] justify his previous behavior: "never apologize, never explain" was always a favorite adage.

Second, as regards my own relationship with my late father-in-law, I'm inclined to think that my having been a student of Classical languages reassured him slightly, compensating for the horror of losing his daughter to a "penniless American" (see what he says about Greek and Latin in A Little Learning). Between the time of our marriage in 1961 and EW's death in 1966 I, in fact, had great fun during my times at Combe Florey, enjoying his company and his jokes hugely. But what a formidable challenge for any would-be son-in-law!

John D'Arms is survived by his wife Teresa and two children, Justin (one of the grandchildren to whom A Little Learning is dedicated) and Helena. (JHW)

An Evelyn Waugh Website As promised, David Cliffe has completed "A Companion to Sword of Honour." The companion includes summaries of the trilogy's plot, background on Waugh's experience, editorial information, critical evaluation, and definitions of technical and topical terms, such as the difference between sunsets painted by John Martin and J. M. W. Turner. An Evelyn Waugh Website also includes "A Companion to Brideshead Revisited" and "Waugh in His Own Words," or excerpts from interviews. It's worth a visit: An Evelyn Waugh Website.

International Symposium on Evelyn Waugh An international symposium marking the first one hundred years of Evelyn Waugh will be held at the Universidad de la Rioja in Logroño, Spain from 15 to 17 May 2003. Organized by the university's Modern Languages Department, the conference's "aim is to gather as many specialists and researchers in Evelyn Waugh as possible in order to make contributions to the field and open new debates about the importance of Waugh's literary production." Plenary speakers include Robert Murray Davis, Valentine Cunningham, and Douglas Lane Patey. Further details on registration, program, and contacts can be found at the conference's web site, .

Graham Greene Festival Those planning to attend the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference may wish to consider visiting the Graham Greene Festival as well. The sixth annual festival has been scheduled for Thursday, 2 October through Sunday, 5 October 2003, only one week after the Waugh Centenary in Oxford, 24-27 September 2003. The Greene Festival will be held in Berkhamsted, not far from Oxford. More details are available from the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust.

I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia According to a notice in the New York Times on 6 March 2002, the Philadelphia Daily News has "introduced a service for animal lovers: death notices for pets. They cost $52 to include a picture and a few lines of text. They will appear once a month in the daily tabloid's classified section, under the heading 'A Fond Farewell to our Beloved Pet.'" The Daily News did not respond to a query. No word on how soon newspapers may offer to send a "card of remembrance" on "every anniversary," as in The Loved One: "Your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail" (21).

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