NEWSLETTER

Volume 21, Number 1 Spring, 1987 ANOTHER WAUGH IDENTIFICATION: MRS. BEAVER By Donald Greene Mrs. Beaver, the indefatigable interior decorator in A Handful of Dust, is almost certainly based on Syrie, daughter of the philanthropist Dr. Barnardo, who established the Barnardo Homes for destitute children ("Barnardo case?" Tony Last asks Brenda sympathetically, when she returns from London depressed after having failed in her first pass at John Beaver). She first married (Sir) Henry Wellcome, the Wisconsin-born pharmaceutical magnate, who founded the great drug firm of Burroughs-Wellcome and the Well come Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and later became Mrs. Somerset Maugham. Between weddings she had numerous affairs, most notably with another Wisconsin-born magnate, Gordon Selfridge, builder of one of the largest department stores in London. By Maugham she had a daughter, Liza, named after the heroine of Maugham's first novel Liza of Lambeth. Though Maugham acknowledged his paternity, late in life he attempted to disinherit her on the grounds that when she was born, in 1915, Syrie was still Wellcome's wife, and therefore in law Liza was not Maugham's daughter but Wellcome's. Eventually Wellcome divorced Syrie, picking Maugham, among several other candidates, as co-respondent, and in 1917 Syrie and Maugham were married in, of all places, Jersey City. It was termed a "marriage of convenience," but it seems to have resulted in nothing but inconvenience for both parties. This squalid bit of biography would be of no interest to Waughians-apart from the light it sheds on the social milieu with which Wauth was familiar-except for the fact that after she and Maugham were (quickly) separated, Syrie started a small business in interior decoration and antiques at 85 Baker Street, London, which in the 1920s became a stunning success. She made her name by inaugurating a vogue for "white-on-white" decoration, and became (according to Ted Morgan's biography of Maugham, 1980, from which much of the information in this note is taken) "the first of the society shopkeepers." According to (Sir) Cecil Beaton (whom Waugh used to stick pins into when they were fellow pupils at Heath Mount School), himself a famous interior decorator, stage designer, and photographer-he is undoubtedly the original of David Lennox in - For the next decade, she bleached, pickled, or scraped every piece of furniture in sight. White sheepskin rugs were strewn on the eggshell surfaced floors, vast white sofas were flanked with crackled white incidental tables, white ostrich and peacock feathers were put in white vases against white walls. Her all-white drawing room in Chelsea became a place of pilgrimage among the intelligentsia. Readers of A Handful of Dust will recognize Mrs. Beaver's strategy for redecorating the morning room at Helton. She wished to find some treatment so definite that it carried the room, if you see what I mean ... supposing we covered the walls with white chromium plating and had natural sheepskin carpets. (Ill: 2) Her white chromium plating becomes an obsession with Tony during his delirium near the end of the novel. Those who empathize with Tony are pleased to find in later portions of the novel that Mrs. Beaver's improvements are being scrapped and the room is being restored to its earlier appearance. Maugham, then at the height of his fame, was understandably annoyed that his detested wife, by her own efforts, was gaining equal prominence to his, and applied all his malice and wit to putting her down. He spread the story that she had stolen her concept of interior decoration from the wife of a coal merchant, who, to counteract that background, had adopted all-white for her drawing room. Crossing the street so as to avoid passing Syrie's shop, he explained to a friend, "I could not bear to look through the window and see what my wife may be doing. She is almost certainly on her knees to an American millionairess trying to sell her a chamber pot." Mrs. Beaver's assiduous salesmanship with American, Canadian, and other naive visitors will be remembered. Waugh of course knew the Maughams. His father Arthur, at Chapman and Hall, published Maugham's early novel The Bishop's Apron, though Maugham grumbled at the financial arrange­ ments. But Waugh must have been immensely gratified when, only twenty-seven, he was mentioned in Maugham's best-selling (and conceivably best) novel, Cakes and Ale: "A little while ago I read in the Evening Standard an article by Mr. Evelyn Waugh in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice." protested to Maugham that his brother had not written such an article; Maugham only shrugged. Although he did write for the Standard, no such article seems to be listed in the huge bibliography of Evelyn Waugh's journalism, but perhaps it may yet turn up. It is true that a great deal of Maugham's fiction is written in the first person, but very little of Waugh's, and there are those who think that the -2- chief exceptions, Work Suspended and , do not contain his finest artistry. Perhaps it was by way of reciprocation for the compliment that Waugh gave Maugham's undistinguished novel Christmas Holiday a glowing review. · The literary detective would find it satisfying if he could identify a child of Syrie Maugham as the despicable John Beaver. She had a son by Well come, but he was mentally retarded and spent his life in seclusion. Liza, later Mrs. Vincent Paravicini and still later Lady John Hope and Lady Glendevon, charitably forgave her father's atrocious treatment of her-to be sure, he was senile at the time-and led the procession of mourners at his funeral in 1965. But novelists can pick and choose the originals for their characters as it suits them, and the leading candidate for Waugh's John Beaver is still John Heygate, who cuckolded him. Incidentally, the famous dramatic, not to say melodramatic, scene in A Handful of Dust, where Brenda, distressed at the news of the death of "John," thanks God when she learns that it was not her lover but her young son who had been killed, has an earlier parallel in Thackeray's Henry Esmond. There Rachel, Lady Castlewood faints on being told that "Harry" has been killed in a driving accident, thinking it to have been her protege (and future husband) Henry Esmond. The victim however (who had merely been stunned) was Henry, Lord Mohun. Lord Castlewood chooses to think that his wife's fainting is evidence of an affair between her and Mohun, challenges Mohun to a duel, and is killed himself. Waugh's debt to the great Victorian novelists should not be overlooked. In earlier notes in EWN I've called attention to the similarities between the Marquis of Marchmain and his family in Brideshead and the Marquis of Steyne and his family in Vanity Fair and between Father Rothschild in and Father Holt in Esmond. Waugh's intimate acquaintance with Dickens-whose publishers after all were Chapman and Hall-is made clear at the end of A Handful of Dust.

WAUGH'S : RESPONSES TO THE DREAM MACHINE PHILOSOPHY By Francis A. Williams Robert Barnard notes that both of the chief objects of satire in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Hollywood and Whispering Glades Memorial Park, deal with the presentation of illusion; "Life's dream factory is complemented and completed by Death's dream factory" (176). He refers to this operation as the "dream machine" and observes that, "on the whole the dream machine works its magic, and blurs the distinction between reality and illusion" (177). Vogel also comments on the number of references to false appearances, and suggests that the central theme of The Loved One is "illusion substituted for truth" (3). The concept of the "dream machine" in this novel bears further investigation, especially regarding the attitudes of the characters who come in contact with it. The dream machine is a philosophical system, and like all such systems, must attempt to resolve difficult, often unpleasant questions of existence, such as identity, aimlessness, desperation, and death. The weakness of the dream machine's approach to such issues is that it seeks to resolve them by denying that they exist. The machine allows itself a free hand in reshaping reality into palatable form through a process of "transformation." Unable to accept the reality of Baby Aaronson, the dream machine transforms her into Juanita del Pablo and, upon further consideration, into an Irish colleen. Unable to accept the reality of death, the dream machine temporalizes death and creates an earthbound version of Paradise in the Lake Island of lnnisfree, and fill Whispering Glades with practices which ostensibly deal with death but in reality deny its existence (for example, the substitution of the euphemism "loved one" for corpse). When none of Sir Francis Hinsley's works can be found to read at the funeral, Sir Ambrose Abercrombie blithely suggests that Dennis forge something. When suicide leaves Sir Francis's face horribly disfigured, Mr. Joyboy erases without a second thought the mask of death and gives the corpse a "radiant childhood" smile. Such is the purpose of the dream machine: replacing reality with an illusory "perfection." Yet the frayed edges of the machine's artifice can be detected by a discerning observer. The studio may turn Juanita del Pablo (nee Aaronson) into a colleen, but cannot erase the flamenco overtones in her singing voice. The Lake Island may be Paradise on earth, but Dennis discovers the tape recorder which reproduces the buzzing of bees, and knows that the bean plants are kept in permanent bloom by transplanting. Kaiser's Stoneless Peaches look rosy and flavorful, but taste like balls of damp cotton. The professional veneer of the Mortuary Hostess cracks momentarily when she refers to one of her charges as a "stiff." Mr. Joyboy, a romantic and unattainable figure at Whispering Glades, in reality lives in a seedy bungalow with his shrewish mother. The operation of the dream machine is the function of a civilization in philosophical decline, one which tries instead to masquerade problems instead of resolving them. Throughout the novel, -3- movement from east to west is symbolic of degeneration and rejection of solid cultural and philosophical values. Toward the west is the dream machine, symbolically situated in the Western­ most state of the U.S.; toward the east, the source of the new day, are the older civilizations which confront difficult issues. In the first scene of The Loved One, the "kindly light" of the setting sun disguises the shabbiness of Sir Francis's home, and Sir Francis and Dennis bask in the "brief illusory rehabilitation" (Waugh 7,8). Sir Ambrose Abercrombie relates the story of an Englishman who moved west, adopted the dream machine culture, and subsequently lost his money in a business swindle. Joyboy has moved from the East Coast to accept the position at Whispering Glades (and an important role in the operation of the dream machine), and his mother decries the move, dwelling on the superiority of the East. When The Dreamer turns eastward in search of art for Whispering Glades, he finds the Oxford Church of St. Peter-without-the-walls to be "dark" and "full of conventional and depressing memorials" (Waugh 93). When his replica is constructed, it is radically different from the original, having been "transformed" in accordance with the dictates of the dream machine. On the other hand, Aimee and Dennis, the two major characters who eventually reject the dream machine, do so in favor of an eastward reorientation, Aimee toward classical Greece and Dennis toward his native England. Appropriately, the decisions of both these characters are made in the morning, when the sun is in the east. Given its inability to deal directly with important issues and its subsequent inability to disguise its artifice, the continued existence of the dream machine as a philosophical system is dependent upon the unquestioning support of its adherents. The continuum of character reactions toward the dream machine covers a wide range, from complete acceptance to complete rejection, and reflects the beliefs of each character regarding the efficacy ofthe dream machine as a philosophical system. The simplest, and apparently most common, response toward the dream machine is to ignore its inadequacies and to continue supporting it, an attitude challenged by Vogel as "uncritical acceptance of an attractive falseness in place of truth" (3). This is the philosophical approach condoned by the system, and it entails a variety of component parts. It involves a disposition toward conformity, as evidenced by the standardization of American women noted by Dennis. It involves a rejection of spiritual values; in the culture of the dream machine, "Liturgy ... is the con­ cern of the Stage rather than of the Clergy" (Waugh 74). To avoid disturbing the system, com­ munication is kept on a superficial level. Sir Francis notes that the devotees of the dream machine "don't expect you to listen" (Waugh 9), and moments thereafter Sir Ambrose Abercrombie ignores Sir Francis's complaints by offering a brief endorsement of wholesome films. Ideally, relationships should be as lightly regarded as communication, since any relationship in depth might be in conflict with the system; consequently, Joy boy is able to dismiss with a chuckle his mother's outspoken disaffection with the dream machine. The existence of the Happier Hunting Ground is proof that this is a culture which can attach as much importance to the death of a terrier as to thafof a relative. Those who remain within the sphere of the dream machine are expected to place them­ selves at the disposal of the system to such an extent that Juanita's agent is able to raise legal and metaphysical questions as to her existence. All adherents are encouraged to emulate the dream machine's practice of proclaiming its own accomplishments. The celebratory signposts at Whispering Glades and the taped lectures at its "tourist attractions" all tout the dream machine's works, and Aimee describes the artwork of Whispering Glades as "an epitome of all that is finest in the American Way of Life" (Waugh 122). Above all, the individual is expected to contribute to the illusion if he is to continue to be acknowledged by the system. Those who do not contribute are ignored if not of sufficient importance, such as Mrs. Joyboy. Those of more consequence, like Sir Francis, are quietly expelled from the system as though they never existed. The epitome of the attitude encouraged by the dream machine is that of Mr. Joyboy. His questions regarding death go no deeper than what is required to present an acceptable show. The enigma posed for him by the simultaneous death of a mother and child resolves itself into a question of embalming techniques. His concern in establishing interpersonal relationships is equally superficial. When Aimee turns to him in her despair, he responds to her with baby-talk and optimistic precepts. Her problems have no place in the dream machine, and are consequently dismissed as inconsequential. Even when an unignorable crisis, Aimee·s death, sends him to his rival for asistance, his main concern seems to be avoiding professional disgrace. He is unable to deal with the reality of death in any context other than that sanctioned by the dream machine. A different philosophical response to the system is shown by Sir Ambrose Abercrombie. Despite his condescending attitude toward the dream machine, he is as firmly an advocate of it as is Joyboy. Although he professes the traditions of an older, more eastward culture, he has only adapted the precepts of the cult of illusion within the trappings of the older system. -4-

Sir Francis Hinsley's response to the dream machine is to embrace it and become firmly incorporated into it, and to destroy himself when it rejects him. Early in the book, he acknowledges the futility of the system he has adopted, as evidenced by his frustrations with the "transforma­ tion" of Juanita del Pablo. Yet he is so deeply enmeshed in the culture of illusion that he is unable to break free of his own will; by his own admission, he is "deep in thrall to the Dragon King" (Waugh 20). He has cut himself off from any eastward reorientation of his philosophy, even the illusory return represented by the Hollywood "English Colony". He refuses to read Dennis's poetry, a reminder of his literary origins in the older culture, and his refusal is the counterpart of that of the children's returned letters in "Where the Rainbow Ends." He finds an accurate metaphor for his life in " .. ·.a dog's head severed from its body ... It dribbles at the tongue when it smells a cat. That's what all of us are, you know, out here. The studios keep us going with a pump. We are still just capable of a few crude reactions-nothing more. If we ever got disconnected from our bottle, we should simply crumble" (Waugh 20). The image is a prophetic one. Like his suicidal colleague Leo, he is unable to continue in useful service to the system which he sonce supported. He declines by degrees until he is disconnected from the system. Death, a reality which the dream machine seeks to disguise, becomes his only alternative. Once dead, he is reassimilated into the machine in an "approved" role, that of "loved one" at his own tasteless funeral. The response of Aimee Thanatogenos takes a different direction from those previously discussed. Her last name is, appropriately, a juxtaposition of death and birth, and unlike Joyboy, who denies the reality of death in all but the most illusory forms, or Sir Francis, who turns to death in desperation, Aimee by her suicide rejects the dream machine and moves toward the east. She moves from faith in the dream machine system, through doubt, and finally into rejection as she embraces an.older, more realistic system. Denied the support of adequate parents and exposed at an early age to the hypocrisy of a religion which promises salvation and yet picks pockets, she has nonetheless remained confident in the ability of the rootless and illusory system around her to meet her needs. For Aimee, however, the system fails once too often to provide comfort. By Chapter 9, she has been shocked by the hypocrisy of her lover, and if she finds little admirable in Dennis's professed attitude toward the dream machine, she finds even less in the support she receives from the dream machine itself. Her appeal for aid to Joyboy is met with jingoism. From Slump, the bogus "spiritual guide" who, like Francis Hinsley, has been cast forth from the system, she receives only bitter rejection. Thus, in rapid succession, she is exposed to the potential for opportunism, blindness and bitterness in the system she has long upheld. On her last morning, she resolves to break faith with the dream machine and to reach back toward the east, toward the ancestral attitudes which must be "sought afar; not here in the musky orchards of the Hesperides, but in the mountain air of the dawn, in the eagle-haunted passes of Pel las" (156). She desires to return to the values of "her ancestors, the impious and haunted race who had deserted the altars of the old Gods, had taken ship and wandered, driven by what pursuing furies through what mean streets and among what barbarous tongues!" (Waugh 173). She attempts to return to a culture which embraced the uncertain, the uncontrollable, and the inevitable as a necessary part of life. Yet Aimee's path to these roots has degenerated, and her only connection with it is by an "umbilical cord of cafes and fruit shops, of ancestral shady businesses (fencing and pimping)" (Waugh 156-57). So great is the distance between Aimee's degraded culture and that of her ancestors that it can only be bridged by death. As Slump suggests, Aimee "takes a leap", but it is a leap of faith and a victory. The response of Dennis Barlow is similar to that of Aimee, but it is not necessary for him to make as drastic a commitment. As the novel begins, he is "between cultures". His roots are in "an earlier civilization with sharper needs" (Waugh 66). Yet his lack of experience in confronting the difficult philosophical problems of life make it impossible for him to participate fully in that earlier culture. He comes from "a generation which enjoys a vicarious intimacy with death", but has "lived his twenty-eight years at arm's length from violence" (Waugh 46). Although a veteran of World War II, he served in Air Priorities rather than in combat, and his first contact with a human corpse is his discovery of the hanged Francis Hinsley. Although he is aware of the issues which must be addressed in order to construct a tenable philosophy, these issues are so remote from his ex­ perience that he has not yet been forced to come to terms with them. Consequently, his "innocence" in these matters renders him capable of being drawn into the system of illusion. Consider the progress Dennis makes in the novel: in the opening chapter, he has rejected the dream machine in its guise of the movie industry, and has taken up residence on the fringes of the system. Yet even at the beginning of the novel, he is slowly being seduced into the dream machine via its doctrine of illusory immortality. He is fascinated by the theatrics of service at the -5-

Happier Hunting Ground, and he is attracted to the poem "Tithonus" (itself a treatise on illusory mortality), which he reads aloud to himself "as a monk will repeat a single pregnant text, over and over again in prayer" (Waugh 23). His discovery of death via Sir Francis's suicide only sends him deeper into the dream machine, to Whispering Glades, which strengthens his attraction to the glamorous illusion with which the dream machine shrouds death. Atthe funeral home he meets Aimee, and although it is to her "decadence" to which he reacts, his subsequent wooing of her is within the context of illusion. He presents poetry from the Oxford Book of English Verse as his own (significantly, the first incidence of this takes place on the Lake Island of lnnisfree). He hides from her his employment at the pet cemetery and initiates steps toward a career in the sterile ministry which passes for dream machine religion. Despite his professed cynicism, he moves ever closer toward embracing illusion. Aimee's suicide, in addition to being her salvation, is also his. Her death frees him from the growing bondage to the system of illusion. It brings to his life the direct experience of tragedy which will enable him to grow and to make his return to the east: the death of his "loved one", for whom he was prepared to discard his ties with a more realistic civilization. When Sir Ambrose offers to send him home, he accepts, although he has many times rejected the same advice from Sir Francis. When Sir Francis offered the advice, Dennis was not yet suitably experienced to realize the wisdom of it. Now he will return to the east a wiser man, carrying with him " ... a great, shapeless chunk of experience, the artist's load; bearing it home to his ancient and comfortless shore; to work on it hard and long, for God knew how long-it was the moment of vision for which a lifetime is often too short" (Waugh 190). Vogel notes that this is the artist's rejection of illusion (4). Yet it is also a philosophical rejection which goes deeper than his role as artist. He has finally been touched by actuality, and is ready to begin incorporating reality into his own life. Notes Barnard, Robert. "What the Whispering Glades Whispered: Dennis Barlow's Quest in The Loved One." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 17.2 (April 1979), 176-82. Vogel, Joseph F. "Waugh's The Loved One: The Artist in a Phony World." Evelyn Waugh News­ letter, 10.2 (Autumn 1976), 1-4. Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1968.

EVELYN PASSES THROUGH: BITS AND PIECES OF WAUGH IN RECENT BOOKS By Leonard H. Manheim If the publication in 1986 of three very interesting books is any indication, Evelyn Waugh seems to have been everywhere and known everyone worth knowing. Though quite different in literary quality, construction, aim and ultimate effect on the reader, these publications share several points. They were all written by members of the English upper crust, they have tremendous insight into significant events of the age, they are very aware of social class distinctions while being very sympathetic towards those less fortunate, particularly people facing ruin or death by war, or natural disasters, and they all mention Evelyn Waugh at different stages in his life and in many different places, commenting on Waugh as adventurer, writer, friend and proselytizing Catholic. The first of the three, A Stone's Throw: Travels from Africa in Six Decades (Hutchinson) is a journal kept by Lady Genesta Hamilton which begins before the First World War and ends in 1981, though Lady Hamilton is still alive and in her 80s. The most expansive of the three books, it offers the least about Waugh, his appearance confined to one page. Lady Hamilton appears to have been a person who "cannot rest from travel" including being in Spain during the Civil War and in Europe during Hitler's rise to power, though a great part of her life was spend on her farm in Kenya, much in the same way as her friend, lsak Dinesen. In an entry dated 1923 Lady Hamilton recounts a time a very young Waugh visited her in Kenya when they were led by Masai warriors to a tunnel which the tribe had built as a place of refuge from its enemies. Waugh insisted on being lowered by rope to a depth of 15· feet and exploring the tunnel which he found fascinating. Finally he was pulled to the surface showing "dauntless courage" in the face of physical challenge and impressing the Masai who admired him for his daring. The second of the three is a history by John Ure, the present British ambassador to Brazil, a work entitled Trespassers of the Amazon (Constable) an account of the invasion and exploitation by the English of the Amazon River. Although the book goes back to the time of Henry VIII, it concentrates mostly on the 20th century, discussing in depth the exploits among others of Peter Fleming in the 1930's. Here Waugh is given four pages which tell of his travels from British Guiana to the Amazon, the basis, according to Ure, of Waugh's A Handful of Dust and Ninety-Two Days. Mr. Ure tells us that Waugh was both "irritated and crotchety" by his journey to Brazil, far -6-

less enchanted with the romance of the trip as Peter Fleming had been and which he relates in his book Brazilian Adventure, which Waugh reviewed somewhat negatively in . The dangers and horrors of the trip appear to have been less of a problem to Waugh than the "horror of boredom," and Ure indicates here that this "boredom" may have influenced Waugh to write about Tony Last's confinement with a madman revealing Waugh's state of mind while facing the hazards of Amazon travel. The last of the three is a more conventional biography by Elizabeth Longford, well-known historical writer and wife of Frank Pakenham, the Earl of Longford. Her book entitled The Pebbled Shore, the Memoirs of Elizabeth Longford (Weidenfeld and Nicholson) concerns the author's life from her birth in 1906 until the publication of Wellington in 1969. Longford focuses on two specific areas with respect to Waugh, a longtime family friend: the years at Oxford during the late 1920's when she attended the university and fell under Waugh's influence and met many of his literary friends, and much later when her husband converted to Catholicism at Waugh's persistent suggestions. The Oxford years she reminds us led to the writing of Decline and Fall and she helps us to understand more about Waugh as she discusses his first broken marriage and his feelings of "menace and anger" which helped him when he wrote Vile Bodies and Black Mischief. Although she disliked the Bloomsbury group she continued with her fascination with the literary movements of the time. It is interesting to note that she did not know until much later that Waugh opposed her marriage to Packenham because he felt she wasn't good enough for him. These sentiments were finally revealed with the publication of Waugh's letters in 1980. But the most important statements about Waugh concern Longford's distress when she learned that Waugh had prompted her husband to convert in 1940 without her knowledge or consent. She relates that Waugh wrote a letter to Frank concerning Frank's "salvation" and managed to help Frank decide on his conversion. Indeed, Longford hints that Waugh's pressure continued over the years until everyone in the family converted. So strong was their relationship to Waugh that he became the godfather to Catherine, the first of their 8 children to be born a Catholic. Longford relates, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that Waugh once stated that he would like all of his children to enter religious orders, the girls becoming nuns, the boys, priests, all except his eldest son Auberon. From Longford's accounts Waugh appears to have been a model godfather and a good friend, flooding the family with letters and books and advice. Not only is this work the best of the three for its literary quality, it also gives us the most insight into Waugh and the intellectual life which helped mold him and his friends into the significant thinkers and writers they became. Longford tells us that Waugh became disenchanted late in his life with the writings of his contemporaries, particularly Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell, L. P. Hartley, and Graham Greene, whom he singles out the most with his displeasure. It has been recorded that Nancy Mitford once said that Evelyn Waugh was not very welcome as a guest because he complained too much. Longford's account echoes at times the same sentiment. And yet in each of these books, Waugh appears more complex than difficult, more than a mere curmudgeon, one who seems to have added greatly, though in diverse ways, to the lives and experiences of three important people of the English upper class who are still quite alive and who even now are contributing to the thoughts and ideas of our difficult age, helping at the same time to share a little "light on Waugh" along the way. ANSWERS TO "A WAUGH GEOGRAPHICAL QUIZ" By Donald Greene 1. Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire (Decline and Fall). 2. Arundel, Sussex (Vile Bodies). 3. Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire (Vile Bodies). 4. Euston Station, London (staring fixedly at a model engine) (Vile Bodies). 5. Euston Station, London (seated on a leaking crate of fish) (Put Out More Flags). 6. Brighton, Sussex (A Handful of Dust). 7. Pollock (or Pollok), a suburb of Glasgow. 8. Wiltshire (not Yorkshire, as Castle Howard is). 9. Colchester, Essex (named after her father "Old King Cole") (). 10. Exeter, Devonshire ("Love in the Slump"). 11. Aden, on the Red Sea (). 12. Trinidad (A Handful of Dust). 13. Pacific Palisades, California (The Loved One). 14. Montreal, Canada (Brideshead Revisited). 15. ZUrich, Switzerland (Brideshead Revisited). 16. Fez, Morocco (Work Suspended). -7-

17. Palestine (No. 64 Jewish Illicit Immigrants' Camp) (Scott-King's Modern Europe). 18. Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) (The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinto/d). 19. Alexandria, Egypt (). 20. Sari, Italy (Unconditional Surrender/The End of the Battle). BOOK REVIEWS Robert Murray Davis, Paul A. Doyle, Donat Gallagher, Charles E. Linck, Winnifred M. Bogaards, eds., A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh (Troy, New York 12181: The Whitston Publishing Co., P. 0. Box 958, 1986), $35.00, 473 p. Reviewed by Jerome Meckier, University of Kentucky. The quintet of editors describes its new Waugh bibliography as an update of the Checklist of Primary and Secondary Material that three of them (Davis, Doyle and Linck) and Heinz Kosok published in 1972. But this production is more than that; meticulously assembled, attractively printed, and reasonably priced, it is an eminently useful scholarly resource; it attests to the upsurge in Waugh studies during the 1970s and bodes well for the future. Besides picking up where the earlier bibliography left off, the editors have uncovered "240 new items by Waugh and more than 1,000 new items" about him that appeared between 1910 and 1972. The new cut-off date, un­ fortunately, is 1982, but one can still count 1,015 new listings of secondary material, bringing the number of additional entries since the Checklist to over 2,255. A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh is actually several books in one. The opening twenty-five pages supply pertinent information about the various editions of every book and monograph Waugh wrote, including his diaries, letters, and the fugitive pieces recently rounded up by Donat Gallagher and Robert Murray Davis. Section A, 121 pages devoted to primary materials, catalogues not only Waugh's articles, poems, stories, and reviews but also his drawings, radio broadcasts, interviews given, and even the debates he participated in at Lancing and Oxford. Grouped according to year and then presented chronologically, Waugh's output from 1910 to the work issued posthumously in the 1980s amounts to 1,040 performances as writer, orator, illustrator, and dust-jacket designer, a very busy academic and professional life. While the index restores the more traditional alphabetic and generic ordering, the decision to proceed by the calendar in the text itself makes this bibliography a sort of biography of Waugh's creative life; one can gauge his productivity from one decade to the next and speculate about his development. The secondary material comprising section B (275 pages, 3,097 listings or the bulk of the bibliography) amasses virtually every reference to Evelyn in print, from a first mention in the Lancing College Magazine (1917) to Stannard's volume in the Critical Heritage Series sixty-five years later. One finds a bonus embedded in this section: a running digest of the notes and essays in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, which, regrettably, does not appear as a separate entry in the Index. Items in sections A and Bare succinctly annotated, mostly in a line but occasionally in as many as five or six. Although the editors regret their ignorance of translations of Waugh, the resulting omission seems minor. If they can keep their promise of a subsequent edition with corrections and, more important, addenda, this bibliography's usefulness will increase in tandem with Waugh's reputation, to which it has already given a boost.

Leszek S. Kolek. Evelyn Waugh's Writings: From Joke to Comic Fiction. Lublin: Universytet Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej, Wydzial Humanistczny. 1985. 193 pp. No price given. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma. Leszek Kolek's dissertation is less a discussion of Waugh's fiction in itself than "a study in the phenomenon of semantic expansiveness." Most semanticists, he explains, move inward from large structures to their smallest elements; he moves outward from small structures to larger ones. His starting point is the joke. As he explains, the joke has an underlying pattern (Chapter I); this pattern may underlie a single narrative-a Boccaccio story, for example-or be combined with other patterns to create a semiotic, generative code as in "The Man Who Liked Dickens" (Chapter II); and these conflicting codes can generate a "rich semiotic hierarchy" in a novel like A Handful of Dust (Chapter Ill). Moreover, these patterns can be traced to even larger bodies of discourse, as in the corpus of Waugh's fiction (Chapter IV). Kolek stops at this point, but he argues that the method can be expanded to deal with "the poetics of a given epoch, literary tradition, historical or cultural documents," and so on. Those more interested in practical criticism than in theory may be relieved to discover that, however original his method, in application it amounts to very close reading for contrasts or conflicts in texture and tone, for authorial means of "manipulating the ordering of the data in such a way as to affect the reader's response," and for ways in which plot, style, and authorial commentary modify each other. Thus, Kolek is able to demonstrate that McMaster is transformed from rescuer to jailer in -8-

"The Man Who Liked Dickens," and when he turns to A Handful of Dust, he points up the contrast between Beaver's place and Helton and analyzes the ambiguity in the presentation of and response to Tony's attitude towards his Gothic world, to Mrs. Rattery's game of patience, and to the succes­ sion of Richard Last at Hetton. And Kolek finds in the body of Waugh's fiction these general patterns: the novels which prepare for A Handful of Oust, those which repeat its patterns, and those which, by overtly implying spiritual value, establish a deeper vertical hierarchy. At times Kolek's desire for pattern leads him to find too much, as when he sees Seth as "another variant of Chokey," which is not inaccurate but is untrue. (Perhaps one could say that so many conflicting codes have generated Seth that there is a qualitative difference between the two characters.) At times his desire to do justice to the text obscures or supercedes the revelation of the underlying joke patterns upon which his thesis depends. And perhaps even the sophisticated semiotician would be grateful for a clearer statement of the relationships between patterns, code, mode, and world as these terms fit into Kolek's hierarchy. Why, for example, are the passages about the three women's views of Basil in Put Out More Flags examples of joke structure rather than of worlds? For the most part, however, Kolek gives sensible and sensitive readings of individual passages and traces largely familiar patterns with a new kind of equipment. He does not, like Jeffrey Heath, use the text as a kind of Rorschach test, nor, like lan Littlewood, does he reduce it to a mere patina of style. As the Author's Note explains, the dissertation format obliged Kolek to omit a good deal of material. Students of Waugh should hope that Kolek can find other venues for expanded versions of this discussion. Even if he restates older insights in new theoretical form-and he often does more than that even in this truncated version-his method gives us a new way of attending to the work. If, in the process, readers of Waugh learn something about semiotics, this is perhaps only slightly less useful than having semioticians learn something about Waugh.

SCOOP ON TELEVISION Donald Greene reports from London that a two-hour television verson of Scoop is in produc­ tion. Michael Maloney will play William Boot, and Denholm Elliott, Herbert Lom, and Donald Pleasence will also have featured roles. Donald Greene wonders how Scoop can adequately be pre­ sented in just two hours, and this observation must be seconded by all Waughians.

TOURIST IN AFRICA REPRINTED Little, Brown has published an attractively printed 160 page edition of . The paperback version is priced at $7.95 while the cloth edition costs $15.95.

The Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 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 $6.00 a year. Single copy $2.50. Checks or money orders should be made payable to the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter. 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); James F. Carens (Bucknell Univ.); Robert M. Davis (Univ. of Oklahoma); Heinz Kosok (Univ. of Wuppertal); Charles E. Linck, Jr. (East Texas State Univ.)