NEWSLETTER Volume 11, Number 1 Spring, 1977 MY MEETING WITH EVELYN WAUGH By Sister Therese Lentfoehr The occasion of my meeting with Evelyn Waugh was his coming to Marquette Univ.er­ sity, Sunday, March 13, 1949, to speak on "Chesterton, Knox and Graham Greene," a lecture sponsored ~Sigma Tau Delta, National Honorary English Fraternity, under th~ chairmanship of John Pick, the Hopkins' scholar, professor of English at the Univers1ty. It so happened that on that afternoon the r~i lwaukee Unit of the Catholic Poetry Society of America was holding its monthly meeting at ~1arquette, and the members had hoped that since Mr. Waugh was in the city, he might consent to be their guest. How­ ever, due to some limiting clause in his contract, this could not be arranged, which disappointed them greatly. But the eminently resourceful John Pick was not to be dis­ couraged, and a singular coincidence furthered his plan. After each meeting it was customary that a small 9roup would gather socially at the residence of one of the members; this Sunday it was to be at the lovely home of the \~illiam Brown's, ~1ary Ellen Place, Wauwautosa. Now Mr. Pick knew that a few months previously I had received as gift from Thomas Merton, the uncut manuscript of the Seven Storey Mountain; he also knew that Evelyn Waugh had recently comoleted the editing of the English edition, under title of Elected Silence (Hollis and Carter). Could the opportunity to discuss the un­ cut manuscript 1ure Mr. \•laugh to the party? It did, and we a 11 met at the Brown's. At the time I was engaged in putting together a silent movie film of important authors I had met on occasion of their lecturing at Marquette where I was teaching-­ ~1aritain, Gilson, Martin D'Arcy, J.F. Powers and others--and secretly hoped that I might add Mr. Waugh to the film. As the qroup assembled at the Brown residence I ap­ proached John Pick asking if he thought it presumptuous of me to ask Mr. Waugh to pose for a oicture? He said I might try (there seems to have been a taboo on pictures), suggesting that I make my request when being presented. We stood in line--a group of about 25 persons--before the large fireplace. When Dr. Pick presented me as the nun who owned the manuscript of the Seven Storey Mountain, Mr. Waugh was most gracious, and I took advantage of the moment to ask if I might have his picture for my film, add­ ing with some hesitation, that it would have to be taken out of doors. At this, Mr. Waugh responded enthusiastically, ''Let's go out at once," and he led the way into the spacious garden, leaving the receiving line waiting before the fireplace. But the so readily consented to filming of Mr. Waugh proved more complicated than I had anticipated. As I prepared the camera for the shot he stopped me, and insisted that 1 be in the picture with him. Hurriedly I went back to the house to call Charles Weishar, a pianist (and now a Commander in the U.S. Navy), whom I knew was familiar with the camera. As I stood beside Mr. Waugh for the picture, he had a sudden sugges­ tion--wouldn't I recite one of my poems for him while the camera was rolling? For this I was totally unprepared; though accustomed to occasional readings, I had never deliber ately set about to memorize any of my poems, and I quite frankly told ~im so. But he would not take a refusal. He knew of my collection Give Joan A Sword, with the Maritai preface, and demanded the title poem. There was nothing for me to do but haltingly try the first stanzas. He was pleased. The film process over, Mr. Waugh turned to me and asked, "Are you hungry?" Start­ led, I did not know what to reply, but without waiting for an answer he said, ''Come, Sister, let's get something to eat," and proceeded to the farther door which opened from the garden into the dining room where a buffet was spread. He took up a plate anc began filling it for me; embarrassed, I timidly suggested, "Shouldn't we wait for the hostess?" But seeing what was happening, Mrs. Brown soon appeared, followed by Mrs. Waugh (Laura), and the guests who had been waiting in the receiving line. What I had not realized at the time was that before we had arrived, Mr. Waugh had had a complete tour of the house and felt thoroughly at home in it. Mrs. Brown's daughter, then a - 2 - little girl of about six, still retains the unforgettable memory of Mr. Waugh's pickinq up a sandwich and exclaiming, "Oh, real meat!" And her little boy of four, overhearing Mr. Waugh mention Indians, rushed upstairs and put on his Indian headress to display be· fore the novelist, who was delighted. After the buffet, Mr. Waugh sought me out and began to ask questions about the Merton manuscript. We secluded ourselves in an alcove beside the stairway, later mavin~ into the living room with the other guests. His interest centered in the manuscript's' original length, and in the nature of the material that had been cut, either because of its length, or the censor's objections. Merton had told me that its length was ''im­ possible for any publisher." (Later I received permission from Merton and his Abbot to publish some of these sections, presenting them with a critical introduction; they ap­ peared in The Catholic World: December 1949, May 1950, September 1950; and in Rena­ scence, a Critical Journal of Letters, Spring 1951). Throughout the conversation-r-was constantly aware of Mr. Waugh's deep admiration for Thomas Merton and for the monastic life. He had visited him briefly in the fall of 1948, and spoke almost apologetically of his cuttings from the Mountain, mentioning, as I recall, the trips to the dentis·t, which he felt lacked good taste, and the frequent references to the Long Island Rail­ road, which he considered of interest to no one but New Yorkers. Then there were re­ petitions and irrelevancies. He spoke too of having sent Merton a copy of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. The title he had chosen for the English edition, Elected Silence (from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem. ''The Habit of Perfection''--which we found ourselves spontaneously reciting together) he found more suited to the autobio­ graphy of a Trappist monk than the Dantean symbolism of Merton's title, The Seven Store) Mountain. But he was deeply disappointed that he had not known of the existence of my manuscript in time to incorporate parts of the unpublished material in the English edi­ tion; it was now too late as the book was already with the printers. At the close of our discussion, which was in every way delightful, Mr. Waugh presented me with a little 'remembrance,' a so-called "rosary-aid" which he had picked up in a Church Good's store near Chicago, and with his small regard for "commercial religious gadgets," found it quite amusing. It consisted of a 1-1/2 inch square plastic mechanism to carry in the pocket, with a clicking device which recorded the Aves and Paters, together with a small leaflet explaining its use. He was taking some of them back with him to England, he said, and later referred to them in his article for Life on "American Catholicism." Our personal visit ended with mutual promises: ~to send me a copy of Elected Silence as soon as it was off the press, and I to send him the first printing (he ap­ parently had a copy of the third) of Give Joan a Sword. Throughout the afternoon Mr. Haugh collidnot have been more gracious and open to the assembled guests, a great number of whom were Marquette University faculty members, At a. distance of 27 years it is difficult to recall the turns of conversation or of re­ sponses to specific questions. When Victor Hamm, author and critic, asked, "What is th, nobility in England doing now?" Mr. Waugh replied crisply in one word, "Farming." A Jesuit philosopher wanted to know what schools his children attended? "Boarding schools," was the answer. Mrs. Waugh, quiet and reserved, at times joined in the conversation. My introduction to her was not without its moment of surprise, for she rose from her chair and curtsied. To Agnes Hamm, professor of speech, and a native of New Orleans, she spoke of that city's reputation as being darkly shadowed by Frances Parkinson Keyes'! Dinner at Antoine's, arid later warned her, "If you enjoy a writer, you shouldn't try to meet him--you' 11 always find he has feet of clay." But we found no feet of clay on Evelyn Waugh that day! As the party broke up and the Waughs prepared to leave, I asked--this time without any hesitation--if he and Mrs. Waugh would pose together for a picture. They happily agreed, and just before entering the car which was to take them back to the city they posed--he with his bowler hat, she with her charming smile--and waved goodby to th~ gathering of guests on the lawn. At the lecture that evening I could not be present, nor at the reception afterwar& (those were pre-aggiornamento days when nuns were not allowed to venture out after nightfall), but I engaged my faithful photographer to take my place. After telling Mr. Waugh that I had sent him, he posed once more for the film, this time in a large easy - 3 - chair, cigar in hand, and a charming smile. (I might remark that the film strip of these meetings, though very brief, turned out remarkably well.) In its March 17, 1949 issue, the Marquette Tribune gave a fine account of the lec­ ture, noting key descriptions of the authors on whom Waugh was speaking. Of Chesterton, Waugh remarked that though at the time his reputation was at its lowest ebb, ''he is vir­ tually a contemporary figure and cannot yet be properly appreciated." As a journalist, simplicity best characterized him--as a man whose life as "a continuous happy buQbling up of ideas." His work was self-explanatory. "One peculiar intellectual quality of the man was his apparently intuitive grasp of wisdom." Of Ronald Knox, son of an Anglican bishop, later a convert to the Roman church, and a close personal friend of Waugh, he remarked on his appealing "to the old-fashioned culture, the point of intellectual re­ ference which we have lost," and had it not been for his translation of the New Testa­ ment might have remained quite obscure. Waugh praised this work, and, singl1ng out the absence of a distinctive literary style, added, "Happily one does not, when reading his Bible, think,'How like old Ronnie!'' Of Graham Greene, who took as the central truth of his writing the most obvious truth of his age, the fall of man, he explained, "We are all, by nature, displaced persons, and while Greene had made much of this theme, the self-pity and empitness of Kafka and Sartre are nowhere in evidence." Waugh concluded that he felt that only in the Church "could three such different personalities find a common ground upon which to base their lives and work. An age that lacks intellectual unity offered them at least this vital center." Two letters which he sent me from Piers Court after his return to England follow: PIERS COURT, STINCHCOMBE GLOUSTERSHIRE Dursley 2150 2nd May Dear Sister Therese: . Thank you very much for sending me your book of poems. I shall treasure it as a souvenir of our delightful meeting, as well as a most elegant and delicate literary work. I am sending you a copy of the English edition of Thomas Merton's book. I don't know what you will make of my editing. It has all been cutting out. I wish I had had your original manuscript to work from so that I could do some putting in too. I would not describe Merton as at all odd looking. Indeed I rather expected some­ one older. Of course monastic barbers make the monks look different from laymen, bat differently dressed I could well imagine him as a social success in Bohemian New York. He looks intelligent rather than intellectual, and has a happy, humorous way of talking Quite humble, as one would expect, and not spoiled by success. Only wishing a little perhaps that the Rule allowed him more privacy--but I only guessed this. He made no hint ~f complaint. Your letter has only just reached me. Hence the great delay in my answer. Pray that I may become charitable and hopeful and industrious. Yours sincerely, Evelyn Waugh Piers Court 24th Sept. 49 Dear Sister M. Therese: Very many thanks for your kind letter and for sending me your poems. I am a poor judge of modern poetry--understanding nothing after Tennyson (a little before him)--but they seem to me typical of all that is best in modern poetry. Thank you very much for sending them. I have been reading Merton's Waters of Siloe--full of most interesting details of American history of which I know nothing.-Idollope that you are not C)Oing to lionize him too much. It won't hurt him, of course, but it will hurt his reputation in the world. One would like to think of him wrapped in silence, not typing out articles ever day. I must admit that I think the writing of Waters of Siloe rather inferior to his earlier work. I don't think it possible to combine a Trappist's life with that of a ------·--· --·· ~ ·-~-·----~~-----'-,_____;,______' ::.<_i::..:::!lli!;_.

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professional writer. Cheese and liquers are the proper products of the contemplati~ 1 i fe. Yours very sincerely, Evelyn Waugh How beautiful your handwriting is! How horrible mine! THE YEAR'S WORK IN WAUGH STUDIES By Jeffrey M. Heath The past year has produced a number of land-mark publications in the field of Waugh studies. Pre-eminent among them is Michael Davie's The Diaries of Evelyn Wau9f (: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), 814pp. The Diaries appeared in England in September and are due to be released this spring in the United States. Thanks to th1 1973 Observer series, which served all the best bits, and to the Sunday Times, whicli August 1976 dealt out the left-overs, this fat volume gives us little that is excit~l new. Despite the able preface and the useful introductions which precede each of th< seven sections (Boyhood, Lancing, Twenties, Thirties, Wartime, 1945-56 and ''Irregula~ Notes"), the diaries have been poorly edited. There are not enough footnotes, the is infuriating, and the token ''Appendix of Names'' is not free from error. Lady Pamd• Berry, for instance, must have been interested to know that she is the "daughter of first Earl of Birkenhead and brother of the second.'' These and other objections not­ withstanding, Michael Davie has given us the most definitive version of the diaries likely to appear in our time, a fascinating document which is now required reading~~ every Waugh scholar. In his preface, the pages of which he has declined to number, Davie tells us th" he has expunged about 10,000 words from the Lancing diary because they are "tedious"; ''occasional sentences'' are cut from the travel diaries, and the notes on Waugh's 19&h visit to British Guiana are omitted. In addition, Davie says, "in this edition, tweNI three libellous references have been altogether excised'' because of the English libel· laws, while "another twenty phrases" have been left out because they would be "i~tok~ ably offensive or distressing to living persons or to surviving relations''. MoreoVRA the Waugh estate has exercised its veto seven times, ''making cuts in entries that m~l otherwise have caused unnecessary distress". So far, perhaps, so good. But, Davie goes on to say, in some places "instead cf cutting out libellous or offensive passages altogether I have replaced a name with a dash." This generous tactic notwithstanding, no halyard, bowsprit, boom or keel sur­ vives the wreck of those many passages cut out ''altogether,'' with the result that the reader loses both the passages and any trace of their location. He would never know, for example, that in the Lancing diary Waugh records that a friend took dope; nor wool he know that in the thirties diary Waugh gives the reason why Cyril Connolly's mistres wa-s "lamed for life". He would be unaware that, on the brink of war, a former gossip columnist confessed that he was happier than he had been since the twenties. Nor wo~l he know that in the 1945-56 diary Waugh notes that a certain eminent man of justice's "only real pleasure in life is to be birched by a common prostitute. Perhaps his ar>e was at that moment smarting from the joys of the preceding evening." It may be argue~ that these and other omissions are not of cardinal importance, but since part of Waugh purpose in these diaries seems to be as brutal as possible, it seems a shame to thwart him. Davie draws the reader's attention to a different sort of deletion: those Waugh may have made himself. In the October 10, 1910 entry Waugh admits having torn out "all the first part of this diary" because it was "really too dangerous without being funny Davie then points out that in a letter to Carew Waugh admits destroying part of his Ox ford diary, and he goes on to imply that a similar fate befell entries dealing with th collapse of his first marriage and with his Pinfold hallucinations. While it is inde~ possible that a certain amount of destruction took place, we might remember Waugh's as sertion (albeit never published) that "in times of change and high excitement" he did not keep a diary (J. M. Heath, "A Note on the Waugh Diaries," EWN, 7, iii (Winter 1973. 7-8. Note also Waugh's comment on his 1926 return trip from Paris with Bill Silk: '"'T - 5 - journey was disgusting, and I think that I am so unlikely to forget it that I will not write about it at all'' (p.241). And this remark (p.lOO): ''What a futile thing this diary really is. I hardly record anything worth the trouble. Everything important I think had better be stored in my memory and it consists chiefly of 'shops in morning, cinema in afternoon.' I ought to try and make it more 1 but it becomes so daJi\ gerous." It is evident that some, and probably a large number, of ''disgusting'' or "im­ portant" matters were stored in Waugh's memory and thus never destroyed at a 11. What de we make of a man who is reticent to the point of keeping secrets from his own diary? And what of the diary itself? The early diaries are the most revealing. In them we watch Waugh change, from t~e precocious and censorious little boy who liked ''spiky" churches and hated trippers, inb a rebellious yet ambitious young prig who "kept his life in 'watertight' compartments. After the limited self-revelation of the Lancing diaries (which Waugh re-read in adult life "with unmixed shame" yet used as a basis for the unfinished "Charles Ryder's Schooldays"), the "mock-whimsical" and exaggeratedly objective style of the post-Oxford. diaries is a shock. Here the reader forfeits what little he had of the diarist's mind and soul and gets instead (with a few exceptions) a record of hangovers and flying lava­ tory seats, adversity and perversity. The reader remains in a world of surfaces throughout the laconic thirties until, quite suddenly, after the engrossing war en~rieS he runs into long, bleak pages of closely-reasoned moroseness. These are the pages which will shake and depress the reader as he witnesses alertness distort into irrita­ bility, individuality into solitude, and youth and grace into peevish infirmity: rheu­ matism, fibrositis, insomnia, deafness, failing memory, bad teeth, piles, hallucinations with idlesness as the ''dead fruit" of success. Except for a few trembling of the veil ("Am I developing a Beefsteak mind?" ... "What did I look like? ... Were they bored by me? Did they like it?" ... "Though I make believe to be detached from the world I find a day without post or newspapers strangely flat ... "), the reader seldom regains access to Waugh's innermost thoughts. What, one wonders, did Waugh think when, in 1925, he read The Brothers Karamazov and Plato? What did he feel when he fell in love with Evelyn Gardner? And what did he feel about the poor beings he deftly sliced into bundles of disconnected attributes? Here is an ac­ quaintance, Lady N--: ''She had a thick beard, a bald dog, a drunken husband and a pae­ derastic son." And another, called Wallace: "very tall and misshapen with jet-black shingled hair and wrinkles." And two other wretches: "a woman with a face like a pie" and "a low-born man with no legs and two daughters". Radically external, this is no ordinary diary, and Waugh himself defended it: ''Nobody wants to read other people's reflections on life and religion and politics, but the routine of their day, properly recorded, is always interesting, and will become more so as conditions change with the years'' (p.317). But the reader who disconsolately trac~s Waugh's later routine through ''the vicious spiral of boredom and lassitude'' might well disagree, for diaries as taciturn as these will not be to everyone's taste. Just Waugh's novels spring from a succession of poses, so, i~ seems to me, do the diaries. Contrary to expectation, the diaries are in many ways fiction. I do not mean simply th~ they are fallacious, although there are enough well-documented protests from outraged victims to suggest that this is often the case. I mean that the diarist is still to scm extent writing ''literature,'' complete with distancing devices and personas. In (p.l41), Waugh calls his schoolboy diary "a document replete with affectation. There is reason to suppose that, in their own ways, the other diaries are equally af­ fected. Waugh was an intensely melodramatic man--his whole vision of the decline andre· treat of civilisation is melodramatic--and the life-long facade which he presented tot~ public and to himself was composed of a series of striking poses (you can see him tryin~ on a new pose--and abandoning the attempt--in Work Suspended). The Evelyn Waugh of the Diaries is a product of his own literary art. Only in solitude could he cease to be a burlesque, for other people forced him to pretend. Like Pinfold, "when he ceased to be alone ... he left half of himself behind, and the other half swelled to fill its place." Did Waugh remain an unwilling actor to the end, forever condemned to throw down one.masK only in order to take up·another? Or did he finally, in some ultimate curlicue of soli­ tude, take possession of his real self? And--tantalizing question--what was that real self like? The Diaries of Evelvn Wauah do not tF>ll II<. - 6 - The reviewers liked the editor more than his subject. Alastair Forbes, in "All About Evelyn," Times Literary Supplement, September 3, 1976, pp.l074-75, says, "These diaries add nothing to Waugh's great and deserved reputation as a writer but neither do they take anything away from it." He adds that Mark Amory is editing Waugh's letters tc and Anne Fleming for publication next year. Michael Ratcliffe, in "Hopinc for Trouble,'' The Times, September 2, p.6, finds that the f~ll text gives us a ''riche~ · darker and far more formidable Waugh ... Out of the horrified disgust springs, when leas{ expected, pity." Frederic Raphael, in "Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Man," The Sunda) Times, September 5, 1976, p.27, says, ''His own favorite diarist was Mr. Pooter and in these pages he creates ... a ... parody of the memoirs of an English gentleman"; but he finds "the true vintage is elsewhere." Perry Anderson, in "Cold Waugh", Guardian, Sep­ tember 2, 1976, p.7, complains that ''as a diarist Waugh habitually avoided all subjects that were most intimate," and concludes that the diaries "lack the true note of solilo~ quy." Anthony Powell, in "Waugh's Unvarnished Self-Portrait," The Daily Telegraph," Sep­ tember 2, 1976, p. 10, finds the dairies "an extraordinary document"; that Waugh should have considered standing for parliament after World War II is an "example of his com­ plete lack of self-awareness regarding himself and his own behaviour." Malcolm Mugger­ idge, in a most perceptive review, ''Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh,'' The Observer Review, Sund~ September 5, 1976, p.24, finds that Waugh reverses the usual novelistic procedure: ''The Diaries are for the most part preoccupied with the facade he presented to the world, whereas in his books--explicitly, in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold but implicitly in t~c others--Waugh himself may be discovered as he was rather than as he wished to be." In "The Diary to End All Diaries," Punch (September 15, 1976), 442-43, Peter Quen­ nell says, ''Like Pepys, he parades his bad habits and chronicles his misdeeds; unlike Pepys, he seldom relates his moods of excess to his soberer thoughts and doings." John Kenneth Galbraith, in ''The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh,'' The New Republic (November 20, 1976), 37-8, finds that only the Catholic Church gets more attention than liquor, but admires the war and travel entries and says of Waugh as stylist, "There was not in our time, perhaps in our century, such a master of the craft." In a bizarre essay, "Entrie~ and Exits,'' Spectator, (September 4, 1976), 13-14, blasts Davie, Sykes, Peters and Forbes, names some names and grinds to a halt in a Private Eye--inspired fan· tasy. He claims, ''The decision to publish the diaries was taken long before anybody had seen the official biograrhy .... and the reasons behind the decision were, I gather, largely financial ... If I had been the editor ... I never dreamed when the appointment was made, that there would be so much money in it ... I would have cut (the Lancing sec­ tion) savagely." Margaret Drabble, in "A Tale of Gloom," Listener, (September 2, 1976), 283-84, complains, "Exaggerations are often funnier than the truth: but why tell them to oneself?'' Claire Tomalin, in ''Waugh to the Roots,'' Evening Standard, September 7, 1976, p.l9, finds in the diaries ''a man of many pieties, living in a world whose desola­ tionche fought to keep at bay'' through Church, family, house, garden, White's Club, gluttony and bad temper. Centered on and Brian Howard, but ram~ling as far afield as Los Alamol and the Manhattan Project, Martin Green's important Children of the Sun: A Narrative o "Decadence" in England after 1918 (New York: Basic Books, 1976 , 470 pp., devotes four sections to Waugh and locates him within "the twentieth-century dialectic, in which dan dyism was the cultural thesis and the antithesis was represented by Orwellism" (p.300). Although Waugh vacillated between the two, he chose dandyism. Waugh "was the man of greatest intelligence and force to get involved in the dandy enterprise" (p.l74). Bu~ Waugh chose incompletely: in Brideshead Green claims to find a statement, "in mythic form, about Waugh's failure as an artist. Charles Ryder, whore­ presents Waugh, fails as an artist because he turns away from Anthony Blanche (the figure derived from Acton and Howard, an international dandy-aesthete) to make a friend of Sebastian Flyte (who stands for the pre-war, purely English dandyism of the beautiful Etonian and Oxonian aristocrat). If Ryder had affil­ iated himself to Blanche ... he might have become a qreat artist. Instead, he chose charm, playfulness, quaintness and whimsy--and became the writer of ... Charles Ryder's wrong choice was the wrong choice of a whole generation of English writers, who preferred the purely playful dandy------· ------~---

- 7 - ism of English aristocrats to the dangerously experimental dandyism of international aestheticism." (p.l80). Hostile to Waugh, Green condemns "the blindnesses and fatuities to which British dandy ism finally led Waugh" (p.392). There are problems with this striking theory: the so iology is suspect; there is not enough separation between Ryder and his creator, who did not see himself as a failure; it is begging a large question to equate "great art" with "international aestheticism" either in fact or in the novel (what, after all, does Blanche create?); while it is true that by 1944 Waugh had given up his desire to be "a. man of the world'' he was not an ''English dandy''; the major choice in the novel i's not between Blanche and Sebastian but between Brideshead and the mystical Body of the Chu~~ There is no evidence in the novel that Ryder regrets Blanche, who sheds "a vivid, false light of eccentricity" on those around him. I should add that despite these objections I think Green misunderstands his subject in a stimulating way. Barry Wicker's excellent "Waugh and the Narrator as Dandy," The Story-Shaped Worl6l (London: Athlone Press, 1975), 151-68, has been treated with great clarity by David Dooley in "The Dandy and the Satirist," EWN 10, 3 (Winter 1976), 7-10. I emphatically agree with Dooley that through the use of!Christian allusions and meaningful juxtaposi­ tions Waugh ''writes satire as it is traditionally defined,'' and I agree that he did so from the start of his career. The Christian and the dandy may not be very far apart in some ways: they share a taste for tradition, artifice, elegance, form, ritual, reason, discernment, and have a profound sense of the uniqueness of the individual. In posing as a dandy, Waugh could often let on to be amoral without contradicting his deeper con­ victions. But Dooley is surely right in reminding us that the intelligence behind the dandy's quizzing-glass is Christian. The purpose of B. W. Wilson's '': the Last Crusade, ''English, 23 (Autumn 1974), 87-93, is to examine the metaphor of the chivalrous crusader. Wilson's use of the illuminating quotation from Ramon Lull and the allusions he detects show impressive research and sensitivity. D. Paul Farr's "The Novelist's Coup? Style as Satiric Norm in ;" Connecticut Review, 8 (April 1975), 42-54, is, surprisingly, the first extended stylistic analysis of a Waugh novel. ''Graceful, delightful, and humourou in itself, Scoop displays the norm of good style while satirically exposing the vulgarlt and deadness of the journalese which permeates the modern world." Alain Blayac's "Evel0 Waugh--A Supplementary Bibliography," The Book Collector (Spring 1976), 53-62, contains "more than eighty new titles ranging from 1929 to 1942." Blayac is to be commended fol" discovering these rare and useful items. Gerald F. Manning's "The Weight of Singul.arity Meaning and Structure in Put Out More Flags," English Studies in Canada, II, i i (Summer 1976), 227-34, performs a service by analyzing a neglected novel. Manning claims, ''Ba~ and Ambrose are linked by their singularity and they provide Waugh with an effective means of expressing the complexity of the problem of individuality." But he finds thar there is no satisfactory response to the problem in any character inside or outside the novel-. John 0. Rees, "What Price Dotheboys Hall?: Some Dickens Echoes in Waugh," Kansas Quarterly, 7, iv (Fall 1975), 14-18, shows that despite his expressed distaste fM Dickens, ''much of Waugh's fictional achievement seems rooted in the achievement of Dick­ ens, in ways which the explicit Dickensian tags .and allusions in Waugh's work only begi' to reveal.'' Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Prop~ gandist and Myth-maker (New York: Harcourt-Brace-Jovanovich, 1975, contains useful back ground for Scoop: Scoop is not a "brilliant parody" at _all; "what only the war corres­ pondents present at the time knew was that Scoop was actually a piece of straight repor­ tage, thinly disguised as a novel to protect the author from libel actions.'' In his unperceptive "Waugh and Heller," English Comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) 243-52, Alan Rodway claims that Waugh rejects Shavian and Wellsian optimisn "and nothing is put in its place." My own "Waugh and the Pinfold Manuscript," Journal of Modern Literature, 5, ii (April 1976), 331-36, is a comparison of some selected manu­ script passages and their first edition counterparts. In ''The Private Language of Evel~ Waugh," English Studies in Canada, II, iii (Fall 1976), 329-38, I show that by means of allusion and innuendo "Waugh is able to convey values and meaning through what appears fo be a prose of complete moral neutrality." It is therefore useful to regard Waugh's worJ( ''not simply as fiction but as persuasion.'' - 8 - Now for a brief look at memoirs and other items. There are valuable observations on Waugh in Peter Quennell, The Marble Foot: An Autobiography 1905-1938 (London: Col­ lins, 1976); in Anthony Powell, Infants of the Spring, volume one of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell (London: Heinemann, 1976); in Christopher. Hollis, Oxford in the Twenties (London, 1976), and in Malcolm Muggeridge, The Infernal Grove, volume two of Chronicles of Wasted Time (London: Collins, 1973). --In "Civil Waugh", Evening Standard, September 9, 1976, p.l9, David Malbert relates that in 1953 Waugh "advertised in The Times for someone who had been at Dunkirk to come and stay with him and retell his experiences as he planned to include Dunkirk in one of the trilogy. Waugh told Malbert about his volunteer: "He could not have been more helpful. He recalled his experiences in great detail. But it was useless. I should have realized that one cannot live other people's experiences. Dunkirk was abandoned from the books.'' In Sheridan Morley's ''A Swift Look at Alec Guinness, The Times, Octo­ ber 4, 1976, p.7, Guinness says he remembers crawling under chairs at Edith Sitwell 's reception into the Catholic Church, searching for an elderly lady's dropped bangles, and there encountering Waugh dressed (dandyishly?) "in a loud check suit, red tie and boater with ribbons." "Dear Diana ... What the Mitford Letters Say," The Sunday Times, November 21, 1976, pp.l-2, contains interesting information about 's part in the Unity Mitford publishing imbroglio: "I don't much care to be known as the man who married Waugh's first wife." And, to conclude, here's an account of the contents cf from a Soviet book trade magazine, as reported in The Times, Sep­ tember 24, 1976, p.l4: "This is a full, sharply-critical picture of British society an& its military-bureaucratic machine, a fierce satire on the upreparedness and military passive attitude of the English army in the Second World War. Artistically the author convincingly refutes the official propaganda which excessively inflates the role of Eng­ land in the war." Do svidaniia. Note l Davie says the word is heavily crossed out; nevertheless, it looks like ''pro­ found." In view of the extreme difficulty of Waugh's handwriting Davie has done well in his transcription; at the same time, he has provided enough cruces to elicit an answering hum. THE CHARACTER OF LANGUAGE IN By Jeanne Clayton Hunter (Nassau Community College, SUNY) In Decline and Fall Evelyn Waugh, whose consciousness of language has long been ac­ knowledged, deliberately uses language as a tool of separation. Verbal interaction is meaningless. Language is contiguous rather than unitive. Yet the relationship between reader and creator of the novel is a meaningful one as Waugh artfully communicates the disoriented and absurd world. of Paul Pennyfeather. And however hilarious any given sit­ uation may be the reader is painfully aware of Waugh's ironic use of language as an act of al~enation rather than one of social interaction. Because this is so, societal rela- tionships are abortive, verbal intercourse, sterile. , Language as non-communication becomes one of the salient absurdities of Paul Penny~ feather's world, and Waugh's mastery of such intent is best exemplified in the characte~ of the aristocratic Lady Circumference whose wealth and social prestige exempt her from proprieties of usage, from meaningful statement, and from any conversational coherency. In short, her comic fatuity enhanced by social standing exempts her from all reasonable verbal exchange. In her complete disregard for language' lies her complete disregard for humankind. As a minor character she is memorable; memorable for her depravity, if depr~­ vity is an applicable term for such a comic figure who can brush aside her and the Lord~ lateness to the Llanabba boys' school with "Sorry if we're late. Circumference ran over a fool of a boy"; and whose son's demise is a series of scattered inconsequential phrases well appropriate to her maternal attitude. She may love nature but hardly human nature. The striking down of a tree causes her pain; the death of little Tangent, only inconven­ ience (p.l76).* Because language is fundamental to the societal framework, the one vital, necessary phenomenon among men, Lady Circumference's disregard for its properties and proprieties is ever more blatant a transgression. (That the name, Circumference, as Dr. Fagan thinl's - 9 - adds "tone" to Llanabba school is a travesty of the very word.) Upon meeting Lady Cir­ cumference (aptly named for her girth and, ironically, for her worldliness) we are in­ stantly aware of her ignorance of, and disregard for, language. Her use of slang, her careless pronunciation (incomplete verbal endings), and her repeated use of "aint," structure a dialogue that makes little sense to begin with. In one short paragraph the Lady addresses two auditors, Paul and Dr. Fagan, on four different subjects: 'Nonsense' said Lady Circumference. 'The boy's a dunderhead. If he wasn't he wouldn•t be here. He wants beatin' and hittin' and knockin' about generally, and then he'll be no good. That grass is shock in' bad on the terrace, Doctor; you ought to sand it down and resow it, but you'll have to take that cedar down if you ever want it to grow properly at that side. I hate cuttin' down a tree-­ like losin' a tooth--but you have ~o choose, tree or grass; you can't keep both. What d'you pay your head man?' {p.Bl). Her very use of simile distorts definition, but shows her ineptitude at distinguishing between the two natures--physical and human. Because she is the authority on trivia sf,, engages in conversations about the appropriate color of a hideous gown, about how well the "calecolarias" should do, and about why the drive is wet. She cannot hold dialogic ground with Margot Beste-Chetwynde because Margot is richer than she {p.95). Because conversation at her end is quite shut out, language is short-circuited; logic does not exist. Dingy's observation about her speechmaking is ironically proper commentary on her habitual use of language: "She rather wanders from the point, doesn't she?" Lady Circumference's thinking is "just not logical" {p.lOl). · But illogic language is a common parlance among the characters in general. One hA' only to read any chapter to find such depravity of communication. In fact the first intelligent conversation that we come upon between Paul and Otto Silenus in the chapter Resurrection, ends with Silenus saying: "I think I shall have my meals alone in the future ... It makes me feel quite ill to talk so much.'' {p.245). Wise and logical lang­ uage has ill-effects on the speaker who tries to come to terms with a society which gives no quarter to language as the proper human endeavor toward love and understandin3, Such wisdom ends in isolation and silence. Our protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather, also must overcome such reality; not in silence but in resurrection to an "uneventful" but logical epilogue. *All quotations are from Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, rev. ed. (London: Chapman and Ha 11 , 1962) . BOOK REVIEWS Yvon Tosser, Le Sens de L'Absurde dans 1 'Oeuvre d'Evelyn Waugh, 432 pp. Reviewed by Alain Blayac. Tb those who consider a French Major Thesis as a cumbersome disquisition on eso­ teric aspects of literature, Y. Tosser's Le Sens de 1 'Absurde dans 1 'Oeuvre d'Evelyn Waugh will come both as a relief and a revelation. Dealing in succession with the themes and structur~s of Waugh's books in their re­ lation to the absurd, then examining the impact of such a stance on the writer's views of history and religion demonstrating its bearing on Waugh's art and style, Tosser's work is to be commended for its lucid, stimulating, and deep-probing approach to travel books and fiction alike. Tosser's aim is twofold: he first attempts to trace in the crises and disruption5 of Evelyn Waugh's private life the sources of the absurd as a major element of his fic­ tion, second to uncover the structures of Waugh's imaginary universe, to connect them with the quest for a new reading and finally to recapture behind masks and characters t~ personality of Evelyn Waugh himself. To that purpose he draws from three different do­ mains, namely social and cultural conditioning, parental and family environment, and the techniques of text production. One cannot but regret that no appreciation of Waugh's Diaries or assessment of Waugh's journalistic achievements have been included herein. One might also differ with Tosser as to his essentially focusing on the absurd as the central element of Waugh's philosophy. This appears to result from a rejection of the negative meaning of the satire. A number of Waugh readers will challenge such an - 10 - assumption and contend that Waugh's meaning depends--when all is said and done--not so much on the Non-sense as on an implied negative sense, especially at the level of the relations within the text and not only on a supposedly exterior philosophy. Such a judgment in itself is neither a denial of the absurd as the breaking of meaning, nor of the value of the analyses, but Tosser leaves the reader with the impression of Waugh's purpose being slightly warped. In any case, this detailed comprehensive study probes into hitherto unexplored areas. Such chapters as "The Absurd Games" or "The Absurd Discourse" are as distin- .. guished as anything written on Waugh. As a whole, no doubt Tosser's book will staMd as a major work on Evelyn, let alone the absurd. It will hopefully be made available to English-speaking readers in the near future. Dudley Carew, A Fragment of Friendship. London: Everest Books Ltd.,ot:l.75, 96 pages. Reviewed by P. A. Doyle. Carew was friendly with Wau.gh mainly during the Lancing years when they were schoolmates together, but their acquaintanceship lasted until 1931. This brief mono­ graph, subt it 1ed "A ~1emory of Evelyn Waugh When Young," is written to correct Waugh's gloomy impressions of the Lancing years as reflected in A Little Learning. In his auto· biography Waugh speaks slightingly of Carew (pp.l29-l30)~ but on the basis of extensive quotations from a diary kept at that time Carew demonstrates that Waugh was much more friendly and cozy with him than Evelyn was later to remember. It's eternally fascinat~ how one individual remembers certain aspects from the past while another focuses on scm thing else. Among the gems are several comments on Evelyn as a literary critic at age 17, a listing of several of his favorite poems at the time, and much about the school play "Conversion." When the definitive scholarly biography of Waugh comes to be writttr the author will have to use Carew's account to balance, and add to, Waugh's. BRIEF COMMENTS Rev. Martin D'Arcy, the Jesuit used as the basis for Father Rothschild in , died recently in England at the age of 88. The New York Times obituary notice appeared on Nov. 22, 1976 ... In a letter to EWN Thomas A. Gribble calls attention to t~e fact "that the black nationalist leaders in Africa today refer to southern Africa as A~· ani a" ... In a note published in The Armchair Detective: A uarterl Journal Devoted t<> Appreciation of Mystery, Detective and Suspense Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 4 October 1976 , p.297, J. W. Scheideman observes how Waugh uses No Orchids for Miss Blandish as "a sort of negative touchstone" in Officers and Gentlemen ... A second edition of the Whitston Checklist is in the planning stage. Users of the first edition are asked for suggestio~ about possible improvements in organization of divisions and subdivisions of material ,ai ternative arrangement of items, etc. Please send comments to Bob Davis at the Universir of Ok-1 ahoma. J

The Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, designed to stimulate research and conti~ue in~erest in the life and writings of Evelyn Waugh, is published three times a year 1n Apr1l, Sept., and December (Spring, Autumn, and Winter numbers). Subscription rate $2.50 .a year. Single copy 90 cents. Checks or money orders shp~ld be made payable to ~he Evelyn Waugh Newsletter. Not:s, brief essays, and news 1tems about ~augh and h1s work may be submitted, but manuscr1pts cannot be returned unless accompan1ed 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. ll530. Copy- right c P.A. Doyle. . . Editorial Board--Editor: P.A. Doyle; Associate Editors: Alfred W. Borrello (Klngs­ borough Community College); James F. Carens (Bucknell Univ.); Robert M. Davis- (Univ. oi Oklahoma); Heinz Kosak (Univ. of Wuppertal); Charles E. Linck, Jr. (East Texas State Univ.).