·,- .:-;.;.::,._

EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Volume 28, Number 1 Spring, 1994

BROTHERS, WAR, AND SUCCESSION IN and By John Howard Wilson (Dakota Wesleyan University) Brideshead Revisited is obviously a turning point in the fiction of . Waugh used many of his old characters-Oxford undergraduates, Bright Young People, aristocrats-but he rendered them in a richer, more complicated style. Waugh also added new themes, such as memory and religion, enabling his characters to begin to believe in their own significance. Though in many ways the culmination of the first half, Brideshead was also preparation for the second half of Waugh's career. As he wrote Brides head, Waugh developed themes and characters he would be able to use again in later fiction. One such character is the brother killed in the First World War. In Brideshead, we read that "lady Marchmain was engaged in making a memorial book ... about her brother, Ned, the eldest of three legendary heroes all killed between Mons and Paschendaele" (1 09). It is a small detail, but Waugh comes back to it several times. In an interview with Charles Ryder, lady Marchmain says her brothers "were three splendid men; Ned was the best of them. He was the last to be killed, and when the telegram came, as I knew it would come, I thought: 'Now it's my son's turn to do what Ned can never do now.' I was alone then. He was just going to Eton.lfyou read Ned's book you'll understand" (137). lady Marchmain was alone because her husband had left her. As Charles's cousin Jasper says, lord March main "went off to France with his Yeomanry and just never came back. It was as if he'd been killed" (41). Waugh is emphasizing the great cost of the war, not only in terms of those killed, but also in terms of how the survivors changed. lord March main has lost interest in the forms of marriage, lordship, and fatherhood. His reaction to the war is a blow to the family, perhaps even greater than his death would have been. The children not only lose their father; they also gain an example of indifference to conventional obligation. lady Marchmain is worried that her son may take after his father. She has two sons, but she isn't talking about Bridey in her interview with Charles. If Ned, the last brother, was killed at Paschendaele, the year would have been 1917, the year Charles and Sebastian would have entered public school. It's not clear what lady Marchmain expects Sebastian to do in Ned's place, but she has some preconception about his future, and she uses the example of her brother to evaluate her son. Charles reads the book, and he begins to understand. lady March main was the first of three girls; "after the birth of the third daughter there had been pilgrimages and pious benefactions in request for a son, for theirs was a wide property and an ancient name; male heirs had come late and, when they came, in a profusion which at the time seemed to promise continuity to the line which, in the tragic event, ended abruptly with them.'' The First World War has finished a male line of succession that had survived hardship for centuries: "from Elizabeth's reign till Victoria's they lived sequestered lives among their tenantry and kinsmen, sending their sons to school abroad; often marrying there-inter-marrying, if not, with a score of families like themselves, debarred from all preferment; and learning, in those lost generations, lessons which could still be read in the lives of the last three men of the house.'' The years of endurance seem to have come to nothing. Even "in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead," lady Marchmain's brothers had been "seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice. These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe fort he travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures. I wondered, as the train carried me farther and farther from lady Marchmain, whether perhaps there was not on her, too, the same blaze, marking her and hers for destruction by other ways than war'' (139). The First World War amounts to a conspiracy to get rid of the aristocracy, an act of dispossession that allows the modern world to come into being. That world is, like the travelling salesman, weak, ugly, and insecure, in every way opposed to the aristocracy's strength, beauty, and confidence. This passage has been quoted as an example of Waugh's adulation of the nobility, his bias against the bourgeoisie, but actually it is Ryder's reflection, and we know that narrator and author are not identical. Viewed from another angle, the passage seems intended to stress the danger to Lady March main and her family. At this point in the novel, they are clearly doomed, and the shadow seems to fall most squarely on Sebastian, Uncle Ned's heir apparent. "Uncle Ned is the test, you know" (141 ), Sebastian says to Charles, and test he is, in more ways than one. Lady March main uses Ned to test Charles, trying to see whether or not he will help her to reform Sebastian. For Sebastian, Ned is also a test, a standard he is supposed to emulate, though -2- actually another torment driving Sebastian into alcoholic exile. Sebastian follows his father rather than his uncle, running away from family and responsibility. He runs away from Mr. Samgrass, who has acquired influence in the family by editing Ned's book. Sebastian runs away from Charles, too, eventually assuming responsibility for Kurt in Morocco. Left alone, without much of a family to flee from, Charles goesto Paris. He returns to England for the General Strike, having been "too young to fight in the war," trying to show "the dead chaps we can fight too" (205). The Strike proves uneventful, and Charles's attempt to assume responsibility becomes a parody of Uncle Ned's. Later Charles escapes his wife and children by going to South America, only to return, ready to take responsibility for Julia and Brideshead. Again his desires lead only to illusions. Charles nevertheless joins the army at the beginning of the Second World War, but by then another noble family seems to have reached the end of the line, Bridey's wife past childbearing, Julia divorced, Sebastian dead or dying, Cordelia still unmarried. Though several characters in Brides head choose between flight and responsibility, the end of the novel suggests that flight at most delays one's inevitable collision with responsibility. Each character is caught, as Father Brown says, "with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread" (220). This twitch is nothing less than God's grace, what Charles seems to sense in the novel's final scene: "Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time ...."The chapel has been reopened, and Charles sees that the lamp there "could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians ... " (351 ). Grace redeems tragedy, giving it purpose and meaning, but tragedy is also necessary in order to appreciate grace. Though they are quite minor characters, Lady March main's brothers are a few of the tragedians, and by the end of the novel, Charles can see in their deaths something other than senseless waste. Waugh is not explicit on this point, but it takes faith, hope, and charity to give up one's life for others, as the brothers have done. Charles has just begun to acquire these virtues, and though he has been denied the brothers' opportunity for self-sacrifice, perhaps he can see himself as having been spared until he could learn to believe. Short lives need not be meaningless if others can derive meaning from them. The brothers are also part of history, the unfolding of the divine plan and the process that makes the present possible. In'· historical terms, characterization of the brothers seems cluttered. The aristocracy might see them as garlanded victims, since sacrifice claims only a few of the very best, propitiating some deity that should then leave the others alone. If the brothers were sacrificed, their deaths should have made the modern world safe for the rest of their social class. This reading fails to jibe with other terms applied to the brothers. The middle and working classes might see them as aborigines, people who had long controlled land now being coveted by newcomers. Other classes might even see the brothers as vermin, pests to be gotten rid of. In either case, the commons would hardly be willing to accept a sacrifice intended to preserve the privileges of other aristocrats. Waugh may have meant that the Catholic aristocracy was being singled out for extermination, but then it is hard to see why a partly religious issue should be represented solely in terms of class, as it is in Brideshead. Waugh seems to have over-written this short passage, his fiction's first step toward acceptance of the First World War. Since the war has not quite wiped them out, Waugh's aristocrats are left with the problem of how to survive in the modern world. Bridey's wife has children by another marriage, but Lord March main prevents them from inheriting Brideshead. Julia or Cordelia might still produce an heir, but there is no sign of any at the end, the novel's prevailing sense of loss offset only by Charles's spark of hope. In 1951, seven years after finishing Brideshead, Waugh started Men at Arms, the first volume of his trilogy, Sword of Honour. Again he used three brothers, though they are more central in the trilogy, not just the relations of a secondary character. The youngest is Guy Crouchback, hero of the whole work. Waugh reduced the number killed in the First World War, from three in Brideshead to one in Sword of Honour. Guy's brother Gervase "had gone straight from Downside into the Irish Guards and was picked off by a sniper his first day in France, instantly, fresh and clean and unwearied, as he followed the duckboard across the mud, carrying his blackthorn stick, on his way to report to company headquarters" (15). The description is noticeably dispassionate, unlike the almost hysterical reaction to the death of Lady Marchmain's brothers in Brides head. Gervase's death was unremarkable, given what the war was, perhaps the result of naivete, but unrelated to the issue of class, certainly not the object of conspiracy. Gervase, the eldest son, stood to inherit his father's estate, but on his death, responsibility passed to the second son, Iva. Iva "was always odd. He grew much odder and finally when he was twenty-six disappeared from home. For months there was no news of him. Then he was found barricaded alone in a lodging in Cricklewood where he was starving himself to death. He was carried out emaciated and delirious and died a few days later stark mad. That was in 1931" (15). The year is -3- also that of Guy's divorce, without apparent connection to historical events, except perhaps for the Slump. lvo's age lacks apparent connection to any event in Waugh's life, except perhaps his divorce. Waugh may have thought it excessive to kill two brothers in the same war. Probably he wanted to suggest that the cause of lvo's death had been internal, not external, as in the war. Guy is next in line, and though he is "the youngest of them ... it seemed likely he would be the last" (15). Guy has been married, but his wife committed adultery, and they were divorced without any children. Guy's brother-in-law "thought it Guy's plain duty to marry again, preferably someone with money, and carry on his line" (17). Guy is Roman Catholic, however, and his father cannot imagine "that the continuance of his line was worth a tiff with the Church; that Guy should marry by civil law and beget an heir and settle things up later with the ecclesiastical authorities as other people seemed somehow to do. Family pride could not be served in dishonour" (40). Guy's sister Angela has a son named Tony, but he is unmarried, a soldier at the beginning of the Second World War. The disposition of characters raises a question: who will be left to inherit an estate that has "been held in uninterrupted male succession since the reign of Henry I" (16)? The Crouchbacks are in a plight similar to that of the Flytes in Brideshead, faced with the end of the family. In the trilogy, the problem is laid out at the beginning, not left for the end, as in Brideshead. Waugh could resolve this problem only by meeting two conditions. First, Guy had to survive the Second World War. It was easy enough to keep the hero alive, but Waugh made the story interesting by presenting Guy with several threats to his life. Though almost 36 years old, Guy joins the army at the beginning of the war, considering himself "natural fodder," "ready now for immediate consumption" (24). Even more ominously, Guy is following in his brother's footsteps. Guy's father gives him the religious medal Gervase was wearing when he was killed. Guy notes that "It didn't protect Gervase much" (41 ), but Mr. Crouch back tells how the medal prevented Gervase from going too far with a strange woman. Later Guy is also prevented from resuming sexual relations with his estranged wife, first through Apthorpe's repeated phone calls, then through Virginia's realization that she is "the only women in the whole world your priests would let you go to bed with" (178). The similar sexual experiences of Guy and Gervase suggestthattheirfates on the battlefield may also be similar. At the end of the novel Guy goes to French territory, in Africa rather than Europe. Guy lands on a beach, advances to find barbed wire, and receives his baptism of fire. He thinks it "rather likely that he would soon be killed" (314), in his first action, just like Gervase. A veteran of the First World War is wounded instead, Guy managing to rescue him and escape. He has survived an ordeal reminiscent of the one that killed his brother, but the war is far from over. The second volume, , opens with Guy exposed to another threat, an air raid in . The novel builds toward Guy's second combat experience, as his unit is ordered to cover the withdrawal of Allied forces from Crete. There Guy survives more bombing and an encounter with a German motorcyclist, only to suffer even more. After escaping in an open boat with other men, Guy manages to cross the Mediterranean, eventually landing in Egypt, emaciated and delirious. In the hospital, Guy recovers, but "he ate nothing" (313) and "wished to speak and could not" (314). He realizes that his condition resembles that of his brother lvo, who "had been silent, too, . . . in the time before he went away" (308). Though finally roused by Mrs. Stitch, Guy has nearly succumbed to the malady that killed his second brother. Similarities between Guy, lvo, and Gervase show that Waugh used the brothers to organize the trilogy, Guy emulating Gervase in the first volume, lvo in the second.' Waugh suggests that there are two prime threats to survival of the Catholic aristocracy in the twentieth century, one internal and one external, insanity and war. Guy has escaped so far, but he needs to meet a second condition before someone can succeed to his name and property. He needs to marry again and produce an heir. Guy tries to fulfill these duties in the third volume, The End of the Battle (Unconditional Surrender in the United Kingdom). First he has to survive another threat to his life. Ludovic has been promoted to major for his exploits escaping from Crete, but he suspects that Guy knows how criminal his actions were. Hoping to get Guy killed, Ludovic passes him fit for parachute jumping, though Guy is obviously too old. Guy gets posted to Yugoslavia, but before leaving he takes extraordinary action. As a Catholic, Guy cannot marry another woman as long as his divorced wife is living, but he can marry the same woman for the second time. Virginia is destitute, pregnant with the child of another man, and Guy marries her to prevent the child's being "born unwanted in 1944" (196). The father is a fraud named (or nicknamed) Trimmer, Waugh suggesting that the Catholic aristocracy can survive through a combination of grace and willingness to embrace "something most unwelcome" (195). This possibility is raised in Brides head, in Beryl's children, but the point is not made explicit, as it is in the trilogy. Guy has his heir, and providentially so, because his nephew Tony is to go "into a monastery" (319). Guy loses Virginia to a flying bomb, but her death frees him to marry Domenica Plessington. In the first published version of the novel, Guy and Domenica have children of their own. -4- Anthony Powell suggested that it would be more ironic if Guy's only heir were a bastard from the Second World War. Waugh agreed, but he explained his intention. He "thought it more ironical that there should be real heirs of the Blessed Gervase Crouchback dispossessed by Trimmer but I plainly failed to make that clear. So no nippers for Guy & Domenica in Penguin" (Letters 579). Both versions undercut concern with legitimacy and uninterrupted male succession, treated more seriously in Brideshead, Waugh uncharacteristically preferring love to pride in his last novel. In The End of the Battle, Guy also has to face his own death wish, Waugh again stressing that the Catholic aristocracy's problems are internal as well as external. After marrying Virginia, Guy confesses longing "to die ... Almost all the time" (222). Guy overcomes this final threat through another "positively unselfish action" (195), helping Jewish refugees escape Yugoslavia. One of the refugees explains that in 1939 there has been "a will to war, a death wish, everywhere" (305). Guy realizes that he had felt it too, freeing himself from temptation to follow Gervase and lvo.ln this way, Waugh resolves two questions he had raised in Brideshead, the meaning of deaths in the First World War and the survival of Catholic aristocracy in the twentieth century. The trilogy implies that losses were not as great as they appear to be in Brideshead, thatthey can be overcome in time. The trilogy is also less defensive about the aristocracy, less apologetic. It is more hopeful about the chances of their surviving, and more playful in suggesting some compromises survival may entail. In terms of brothers, war, and succession, Brideshead and Sword of Honour can be read as a virtual tetralogy, but the last three books are considerably more subtle, more balanced, and more complicated. In closing, I can't help asking why Waugh might have been interested in these two problems. Waugh was a commoner whose brother had not been killed in the First World War. He was interested in history and nobility, sufficient reasons, perhaps, to consider war's impact on his favorite social class. Then again, many British families had had men killed in the war, and Waugh came to know the relatives, even when he hadn't known the men. More personally, though, the trilogy seems to be resolving another old problem. Waugh's brother Alec had been captured in the German offensives in the spring of 1918, somewhat like Tony's being captured in the spring of 1940. It was not as if Alec had been killed, like Gervase, not as if he had run away, like Lord Marchmain, but Evelyn nevertheless thought that Alec had been fundamentally changed. Evelyn started to articulate the difference between himself and his brother in 'The Youngest Generation," an editorial for the Lancing College Magazine in 1921. Evelyn had been too young to serve, and he seems to have been embarrassed by Alec's opportunity to do something he couldn't. Evelyn seldom mentioned his brother or his service, making fun of Alec for most of his life. The relationship was more complicated, of course, but the trilogy sometimes gives the impression that Evelyn is making amends for mistreatment of Alec. If he was, the trilogy is affirmative in another way, suggesting that a younger brother could learn to appreciate an older brother's sacrifice in the war. As a child, Evelyn had wondered what would be left after Alec had inherited their father's house, but as an old man, he had perhaps learned to put aside his jealousy, seeing himself as heir to a legacy that had proved to be rich after all. Note 11 have argued this point at greater length in another essay, "The Brothers Crouchback: History and Structure in Sword of Honour." It is a bit long for EWNS, and I am trying to publish it elsewhere. Works Cited Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. 1945. Boston: Little, 1973. The End of the Battle. Boston: Little, 1961. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. 1980. New York: Penguin, 1982. Men at Arms. Boston: Little, 1952. Officers and Gentlemen. Boston: Little, 1955.

TONY AS HERO OF OR "LAST' BUT NOT LEAST By David Bittner Since reading A Handful of Dust several times, I have become acquainted with at least two varying ways of regarding the novel's main character, Tony Last. As an eminent Waugh authority wrote to me in a letter about a year ago, Tony was, in his view, "such a wimp!" I see now that he is not alone, since Martin Stannard admits a similar view of Tony is in currency: "He is a prig and a bore, an amiable half-baked schoolboy living in a world of arrested development" (361). Partly,! suppose, the implication of this is that Tony ends up with so much misfortune because he has asked for it through naive and unwise behavior. But James F. Carens presents a different way of looking atTony. The things that happen to Tony often do so "without rhyme or reason" because, he quotes Sean O'Faolain, the author of The -5- Vanishing Hero, the world we inhabit is one "without pattern" (47). This is not criticism of Tony but represents a point of view-call it randomness-that exempts us from having to consider that we are at mercy either of our own fatal flaws or any discernible plan of Divinity. Carens continues: while is is possible to explain the "passivity" of the Waugh heroes, like Tony, in terms of "ingenu satire," the anti-hero is more than a "satirical tactic" and "amounts to a comment on the nature of man in contemporary society"-particularly on the condition of man at a time marked by "disorder of social and moral values" (47). I find this fits in rather closely with Waugh's own view of A Handful of Dust, as he describes it in A Littie Order: the book is a "study of other sorts of savages at home" (i.e., not only the Pie-wies in the South American jungle) "and the civilized man's helpless plight among them" (qtd. in Littlewood 97). That the Indians are a "metaphorical extension" of man's essential savagery, as represented by Brenda, John Beaver, Mrs. Beaver, Polly Cockpurse and all of the other villains of the novel, is made clear by Waugh's remark to Henry Yorke: "You must remember that to me the savages come into the category of 'people one has met and may at any moment meet again'" (qtd. in Stannard 379). As Stannard said on the basis of this remark by Waugh to Yorke, "The obvious interpretation is to see Tony as the representative of high culture brutalized by Barbarians ... Much of the book's emotional tension derives from the spectacle of Last's exploitation" (380). I believe Tony is a hapless victim and that he is a good character. I have turned to the New Catholic Encyclopedia for a description of heroic virtue by which to assess Tony's acts. The brief article-one of many on the subject of virtue-says heroic virtue is based on "intensity of charity." Acts of charity need not be "perfect" but must be numerous in proportion to the opportunities for action, and "examples of heroicity must be shown in the exercise of different virtues" (14:709). The opportunities offered Tony for heroic conduct occur in the context of savagery of contemporary British society, including, as it does, his unfaithful wife, her gigolo lover, his own fickle bachelor friend, Jock Grant-Menzies, and Brenda's whole coterie of accomplices in Londori. From the moment of John Andrew's death, Tony expresses only thoughtfulness about what he imagines Brenda, the bereaved mother, must be going through. Assuming that she is as broken­ hearted as he is by the death of their son, Tony "understands" Brenda's need to be alone in the "center hall," while he finishes up some necessary correspondence (125). Call it naivete, but Brenda's request for a divorce takes Tony by surprise. It is Tony's "hard cheese" (66). Once Tony learns that Brenda wants to terminate their marriage because she is in love with John Beaver, he is willing to make her a generous settlement and even go through the sordid matter of taking the blame for the divorce on himself, in the bogus bedroom scene at Brighton with Milly. Punctiliously, he tries to accommodate the comfort and the "reputations" of Milly and her daughter, Winnie, listing the latter as his niece, Miss Smith, in the hotel registry (137). That Tony does finally draw a line between unrealistic consideration of Brenda and such treatment as she does really merit ought not to detract from his magnanimity. He may not respond "perfectly" to Brenda's greedy whim in seeking an exorbitant amount of alimony, but this should not necessarily be seen as an ungodly way to act on his part. After all, the Lord himself is "slow to anger" (Neh. 9:17), but that doesn't mean he doesn't sometimes. As a creature fashioned in God's image, Tony has the same prerogative. In Tony's world, loyalty to Hatton as a societal and familial ideal is surely understandable as a value which ultimately outweighs consideration for an unfaithful, greedy wife whose passions are ruled more than anything else by her simple boredom and lust. "Thank God," says Brenda, when she finally comprehends that the tragic death of which Jock Grant-Menzies speaks is not that of John Beaver but John Andrew (121). This goes hand in hand with Waugh's own attitude, in which some physical manifestation of the English historical ideal (as represented in Handful of Dust by Hatton Abbey) would surely deserve preservation over the object of a scheming, unfaithful wife, such as represented in his own life by Evelyn Gardner. At the end of the book, when Tony realizes his invitation by Mr. Todd is intended permanently, surely it is Tony's heroic faith which helps him accept his fate for the foreseeable future. I disagree with Carens when he says Charles Ryder and Guy Crouchback, as victims and anti-heroes, are characterized by attributes of faith which set them apart from Tony. He says, "Their courage, their stoic and silent endurance of suffering, their capacity for avoiding despair-all these go back to their religious commitment to Roman Catholicism" (154). Why the Church of England could not provide Tony with a similar spiritual reserve I do not see. Indeed, I believe Tony as "suffering servant" is exactly the impression of Tony with which Waugh wants to leave the reader of A Handful of Dust. (I an Littlewood points out that in an alternative ending written for American serialization of the novel, Tony returns to England and hires one of Mrs. Beaver's flats himself (97). But then that is a Tony who has "learned the law of the jungle" (98) as per the happily-ever-after ending, and not the authentic Tony.) -6- lt is not an accident that in the definitive version of the novel, Waugh makes Tony's Protestant faith the context in which Tony learns to accept his fate with hope and courage. Waugh himself was fond of quoting an old Protestant hymn that includes the verse, "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide" {Jebb 82). and in this connection I am indebted to D.J. Dooley, in his 1989 review of the film version of A Handful of Dust in EWNS, for quoting several "popular errors" regarding conversion to Catholicism pointed out by Waugh. I think Waugh's intent is clear when he says, "In the present phase of European history, the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos" {1 }. I can only add to the picture of Tony as a good character something based on my years of noting all the little anti-Semitic zingers in the Waugh novels. Robert Murray Davis says that in a short story called "The Seven Deadly Sins of Today" Waugh "chose the only sin to which he can never have felt the slightest temptation: tolerance"(70}. Now, Tony Last is one of the few characters is all of Waugh's novels who seem to challenge others' anti-Semitic putdowns. He shows great temperance of attitude in this "sin" which could just as easily be turned on its head, in the topsy-turvy game of heroism and anti-heroism, as a virtue. Tony deflects anti-Semitic comments made by Brenda, Milly, Milly's friend "Baby," and even John Andrew's remarks, learned from the horse-groom Ben. This suggests to me that Waugh sought from the start, in writing A Handful of Dust, to create a hero-or anti-hero­ whose virtue surpassed that of the authorial voice. He could not cast Tony is his own intolerant mold. To have tried to create an intolerant saint would have been to draw a character who was a contradiction in terms. As Christopher Sykes says, Waugh was using all his skill in making the victim Tony as hero {or anti-hero} "a person to betaken seriously" {139}. Part of that skill must have been to keep some important parts of his own personality from invading Tony's. Works Cited The Bible {King James Version}. Carens, James F. The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1966. Davis, Robert Murray. Evelyn Waugh, Writer. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1981. Dooley, D.J. "A Handful of Dust: The Missing Implications." Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies 23 {Autumn 1989}: 1-4. Jebb, Julian. "Evelyn Waugh The Art of Fiction." Paris Review 8 {Summer-Fall 1963}:73-85. Littlewood, ian. The Writing of Evelyn Waugh. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes, 1983. McDonald, William, Rev., eta/, eds. New Catholic Encyclopedia. 15 vols. New York: McGraw, 1967. Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh The Early Years 1903-1939. New York: Norton, 1986. Sykes, Christopher. Evelyn Waugh A Biography. London: Collins, 1975. Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust. New York: Dell, 1956.

EVELYN WAUGH AND A HANDFUL OF DUST By Sam·Marx [Editor's Note. Sam Marx and I intended to collaborate on a book about Waugh's trip to Hollywood in 1947, when he met Waugh, but in March, 1992, at the age of90, Sam died. The following material will be included in the volume of his reminiscences, Mythical Kingdoms, which I am editing. The visit to Piers Court is from a lecture he gave at the University of Oklahoma in 1979. The failure to make A Handful of Dust is taken from his handwritten notes. The material is reprinted with the permission of Sara Greene Marx. All rights are reserved. Robert Murray Davis] Evelyn Waugh came to Hollywood because he had sold MGM a book that he claimed was his favorite book, Brideshead Revisited. He wasn't quite that crazy about A Handful of Dust, but I wanted very much to make a movie of it and we talked about it He said that he appreciated my knowing the book so well, which I did. That's one reason why we got along. Still, I was a little terrified of him. When they brought him to Hollywood, he spent all his time out at Forest Lawn Cemetery, which he was fascinated with. In fact, I used to run into him at the Beverly Hills HoteL Later I was told that his wife was also in California, but I never saw her and he never mentioned her. He told me that the only two things he liked in Southern California were Forest Lawn and orange juice-mixed with champagne. And he sat around drinking orange juice and champagne, mostly at Forest Lawn, and then he went home and he wrote . And subsequently, strangely enough, sold it to MGM, which made the movie of The Loved One. A few years later, I went to see Waugh about the film at his home in the country. I took the train to this little town in Sussex and got off and saw this figure of a man wearing a big tweed coat standing there waiting for me. I knew he had seven children; and, being as polite as possible, I said, after introducing myself, "How are the children?" He said, "Very numerous, thank you." I never saw one of them. I stayed for the weekend. I never saw any of them. He never mentioned them again. Mrs. Waugh never mentioned them. " ' -7- This was 1950 or so, and England was still suffering from the Second World War and they were still rationing food, and the Waughs were putting out a pretty good Sunday lunch, complete with roasted chicken. And Waugh, when he got up to carve the chicken, turned to Mrs. Waugh and said, "Is this Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Jones?" I turned pale because I thought they had carved up one of their two chickens in honor of the visiting guest. He recognized the way I looked, and he laughed a little and said, "No, that's not the name of the chicken, that's the name of the farmer where we bought it." So I found him a very friendly, very pleasant man. But I never got to make the movie. 1 wrote a screenplay that he approved, and many players (including Judy Garland) wanted to be in it-even in bit parts. At various times I tried to get Trevor Howard and James Mason. In 1961 I made a deal with Waugh and was preparing the screenplay with him. David Niven and Peter Sellers were to star. Suddenly Niven accepted the lead in 55 Days at Peking, which meant more money for him and took six months to shoot. So that killed A Handful of Dust. However, Columbia wanted to talk about it in their New York office on 5th Avenue, near 59th Street. I grabbed breakfast in the Mayflower Coffee Shop and found myself at the counter next to Mike Frankovich, who had charge of Columbia's English productions. He said he would refuse took production, because he couldn't buy the coincidental way the son of Tony Last dies in the book or what develops out of it. "No coincidences!" he said. It was a coincidence, I told him, we were in the restaurant, next to each other. But I couldn't change his n-,ind. Years later, I wasatthe Friars Club in Beverly Hills. A male nurse led Frankovich to a table next to me. He didn't know me, is a dreadful victim of Alzheimer's Disease, a dying man apparently. Again the coincidence, but he didn't know me.

JEREMY IRONS AND BRIDESHEAD AGAIN Jeremy Irons has performed a rendition of Brideshead Revisited which is very favorably reviewed in the audio review section of the Wilson Library Bulletin (October 1993, pp. 114-115). Preston Hoffman, the reviewer, claims it is "much better than the TV series." A little later in his review, Preston remarks: "Irons is a much more disciplined actor than Anthony Andrews ... therefore in the audio book not only is his Charles Ryder excellent, but his Sebastian is less jejune and more believable. His interpretation of Lady March main is especially strong, and all the female characters are more than adequate." [Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited, Chivers Audio Books/Chivers North America, Inc. 10 cassettes. 11.37 hrs. $79.95. CAB 350].

BRIEF NOTES A well-known, witty British man-of-letters has observed that Martin Stannard's two volume biography of Waugh should have been entitled Hooper's Revenge .... Sir , aged 89, died February 27 at his magnificient village near Florence. The New York Times mentioned his attendance at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, "where his mother supplied him with plovers' eggs and he gained fame for declaiming T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland" through a megaphone from his study window to passing oarsmen." The obituary also observed what is very obvious to readers of BR: Acton was "in part the role model for the quintessential esthete, Anthony Blanche" ..... Angelus Press, which is the Kansas City publishing outlet for the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, had been issuing Waugh's Edmund Campion. They had hoped to produce a new printing of their sold out edition, but did not receive the necessary permission. As a consequence, they are now issuing Harold Gardiner's much less effective biography of Campion.

The Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies, designed to stimulate research and continue interest in the life and writings of Evelyn Waugh, is published three times a year in April, September and December (Spring, Autumn, and Winter numbers). Subscription rate $8.00 a year. Single copy $3.50. Checks and money orders should be made payable to the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter. Overseas subscriptions must be paid in US funds: MO, check, or cash. Notes, brief essays, and news items about Waugh and his work may be submitted, but manuscripts cannot be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Address all correspondence to Dr. P. A. Doyle, English Dept., Nassau Community College, State University of New York, Garden City, N.Y. 11530. Editorial Board-Editor: P. A. Doyle; Associate Editors: Winnifred M. Bogaards (University of New Brunswick); Alfred W. Borrello (Kingsborough Community College); Robert M. Davis (Univ. of Oklahoma); Heinz Kosok (Univ. of Wuppertal); Charles E. Linck, Jr. (East Texas State Univ.).