EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 44, No. 2 Autumn 2013

“Something Entirely Unique”: ’s 1948-49 Tours of North America, Part 3, Baltimore John McGinty, Loyola-Notre Dame Library Jeffrey Manley

Baltimore was a principal focus of Evelyn Waugh’s two visits to the USA in 1948 and 1949. His connections with the city began in 1947: he was offered and accepted in absentia an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Loyola College in Maryland (as it then was). The honorary degree morphed into the lecture tour and Life magazine article on American Catholicism; the story is told in two essays by Nicholas Varga, late educator, author, and Archivist of Loyola College, published in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 19.1 and 19.2 (Spring and Autumn 1985), and summarized in Part 1 of this essay in Evelyn Waugh Studies 43.3 (Winter 2013). Varga addressed Waugh’s visits to Baltimore in 1948 and 1949. What follows is a summary of Varga’s essays, updated with information not available to him.

Waugh was especially interested in Maryland and Louisiana, the only states with strong, continuous Catholic traditions. As Waugh indicated in “The American Epoch in the ,” Catholics founded Maryland to practice their religion in peace along with Protestants. Catholicism was never the established church in Maryland as in Louisiana; the peace with Protestants was broken and Catholics were persecuted, as in other colonies. The Church survived “and emerged at the Declaration of Independence in much the same temper as in at the Catholic Emancipation Act” (Waugh, Essays 382).

On his first visit, Waugh arrived in Baltimore on Friday, 19 November 1948, and stayed at the Sheraton-Belvedere Hotel. He spent a week in Baltimore, departing on Thursday, 25 November (Thanksgiving Day). He told Fr. Francis X. Talbot, SJ, President of Loyola College, that he did not seek publicity but wished to meet representatives of various Catholic institutions. Father Talbot set up meetings with Catholic clergy, Loyola faculty, and prominent Catholic lay people.

Waugh described these meetings in letters to his wife Laura, referring to “stuffy upper class dinner parties” and a buffet arranged by Father Talbot at the Jesuit House at the College. The leaders of the archdiocese were present. In another letter to his wife, Waugh described a “large, sumptuous clerical buffet supper … which was both boring & embarrassing.” Father Talbot also tried to arrange luncheon for Waugh and H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, on 24 November, but Mencken had a mild stroke the night before and had to cancel. According to Julius Rothman in “Waugh, H. L. Mencken and Fate,” this meeting was supposed to take place at the Maryland Club; it was scheduled at Waugh’s request, and it would have included a reporter from the Evening Sun, probably James Bready, who later interviewed Waugh on the lecture tour (Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 15.3 [Winter 1981])[1]. On the same day, Waugh told Laura that he had “played a game of pegotty [sic] with a pubescent negress in an admiring circle of black nuns” (Letters 293).[2] He later told Thomas Merton how “charming” these nuns had been.

Waugh also visited Jesuit missions in rural Southern Maryland, mentioned in his Life article:

The countryside round Leonardstown [sic] has the same tradition [as the old Catholic families of Lancashire] of Jesuit missionaries moving in disguise from family to family, celebrating Mass in remote plantations, inculcating the same austere devotional habits, the same tenacious, unobtrusive fidelity. That peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac is one of the most fascinating areas for the Catholic visitor, and one of the things which inspires him most is the heroic fidelity of the Negro Catholics…. Often they could only practise their religion at the cost of much humiliation. Some drifted from the Church to preposterous sects or reverted to paganism, but many families remained steadfast. Theirs was a sharper test than the white Catholics had earlier undergone, for here the persecutors were fellow-members in the Household of the Faith…. Today all this is fast changing … [but] honour must never be neglected to those thousands of coloured Catholics who so accurately traced their Master’s road amid insult and injury. (Essays 382-83)

During the visit, Father Talbot tutored Waugh on the Catholic system of higher education in America. Catholic colleges clearly made a strong impression, as Waugh expressed in Life:

It is a very great thing that young men who are going out to be dentists or salesmen should have a grounding of formal logic and Christian ethics. ‘Prove syllogistically that natural rights exist’: ‘Give the fundamental reason why usury is wrong’: ‘What is the difference between soul and mind?’: ‘Give and explain a definition of Sacrifice’: these are questions chosen almost at random from the examination papers of a Jesuit college…. [L]ater, when he is confronted with a problem, phrases from his college days will come into a man’s mind with sudden and vivid importance. (Essays 385)

At the end, Waugh wrote on 25 November what he would have called a “Collins” thanking Father Talbot for this first visit to Baltimore. He mentioned specially the dinner with clergy, described as “both sumptuous and deeply interesting.” This letter contradicts Waugh’s letter to his wife. Did either letter express what Waugh really thought, or did he simply tell his correspondents what he thought they wanted to hear?

After traveling to New Orleans via the Midwest, Waugh returned to New York and then back to England in late December 1948. At the end of January 1949, he returned to New York with his wife for the lecture tour that Father Talbot had suggested. In a letter to the tour organizer, Father Talbot urged that the first lecture be given in Baltimore. He also noted that Waugh had waived his fee for the Baltimore lecture to make a contribution as an honorary alumnus of Loyola College. Tour organization was out of Father Talbot’s hands, since he had decided that it was beyond the resources of the college, and the opening lecture was in New York at Town Hall on 2 February. Waugh arrived in Baltimore on 7 February. The date of the lecture was 8 February, and the venue changed from the Lyric Theater (originally proposed by Father Talbot) to the Maryland Casualty Co. Auditorium (later incorporated into the Rotunda Shopping Center, on West 40th Street near Johns Hopkins University).

Father Talbot arranged for Waugh to stay in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Reeves, who lived at 4406 Greenway near Loyola College in north Baltimore. Mr. Reeves was a prominent Baltimore civic leader and a member of Loyola’s Advisory Council. He also hosted a dinner party at home on the night of Waugh’s lecture. When Waugh learned that he and his wife were to stay with the family for three days, he asked Father Talbot if they might be getting more than they had bargained for. After consulting Mrs. Reeves, Father Talbot assured Waugh that she would be delighted to have him and his wife stay for the whole time.

One wonders about this arrangement, given Waugh’s reputation as a difficult guest. Father Talbot had spent several days with Waugh during his first visit. Perhaps the college hoped to squeeze more from the lecture by saving on Waugh’s hotel bill, which would have been considerable. Perhaps Waugh avoided paying for his own room by staying with the Reeves family. According to one of her stepsons, Mrs. Reeves was a favorite of Mencken’s, and she accompanied F. Scott Fitzgerald to parties at Princeton in his undergraduate days. She may have been keen to add another author to her collection. According to members of the Reeves family, the visit did not go well.

Mr. Reeves considered his wine cellar to be modestly impressive, and he provided Waugh with expensive bottles only to hear complaints about quality. In 1949, a modest U.S. wine cellar consisted almost exclusively of French wines, since American vineyards were not yet capable of producing much worth cellaring. Waugh probably made his usual complaint that the transatlantic voyage ruined French wines and made them undrinkable. Surprisingly, given his dislike for Americana, Waugh had developed a taste for wine (especially Paul Masson pinot noir) on his 1947 trip to Hollywood (Diaries 672).

Waugh’s reputation as a wine lover preceded him throughout his 1948-49 tours. As noted in Part 1, his hostess in Boston served an expensive bottle of sauternes with her homemade chicken dinner. A recent article reports a reminiscence of novelist J. F. Powers regarding Waugh’s visit to St. Paul (described in Part 2, EWS 44.1, Spring 2013). Powers and his wife were very nervous about entertaining Waugh in their tiny apartment. In 1949, wine connoisseurship had not penetrated into the Upper Midwest, so Powers had to scour the Twin Cities to find a bottle likely to please his guest. Waugh claimed to be very impressed with the wine and spared his host the quibbling suffered by Mr. Reeves.[3] Powers recalled the St. Paul meeting (and the wine) in a letter to Robert Lowell (25 May 1949): “Waugh was here in March. Said he came to Minnesota to see me and the Indian reservations. He is also interested in Father Divine. He was all right, and his wife, but it wasn’t anything like the bout I’d anticipated from his books. Suppose that’s life. Drank wine. Still don’t think I care for it, not dago red at ten in the morning.” This letter is included in a collection edited by his daughter, Katherine Powers, who kindly supplied a copy. The collection was published on 20 August 2013 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The title is Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963.

In the Reeves house, Waugh threw open the windows, even though in February it was still quite cold. This offended Mr. Reeves, who prided himself on keeping his house relatively cold, at least by American standards. According to one of Mr. Reeves’s sons, Waugh hit all of his father’s most sensitive spots. Mr. Reeves “cordially despised” Waugh as the “rudest, most ego-centric nut ever” and prepared to exile him to a Lombard Street rooming house. He put up with him, however, because Mrs. Waugh was charming (“a lamb and a love”). Waugh himself remained cantankerous (“a real pain”). This description comes from a letter by David Reeves to Russell Baker, dated 26 May 1989. Forty years later, David recalled that the visit had extended over ten days. It may have seemed that long, but the visit was really only three days. David’s brother Charles still lives on Greenway where the Waughs stayed, and he kindly invited participants in the March 2012 Evelyn Waugh Conference at Loyola-Notre Dame Library to his house. Charles considers David’s assessment a bit over the top. After the visit, Waugh sent the family a “carton” of his books, all inscribed, some probably first editions. Unfortunately, when Baker pointed out their value forty years later and asked for more details, he was told that they had all disappeared.

The lecture tour needed publicity to fill the halls. The college ensured that Waugh’s visit had high visibility in the Baltimore papers. The week before the lecture, the Baltimore Sun’s society page described a group of debutantes helping to organize and publicize the event (“Debs to Help at Evelyn Waugh Lecture,” 30 Jan. 1949, B12). These are probably the same debutantes mentioned in Varga’s essays: they distributed candy to the audience at the lecture. That was a tradition at Loyola College in the 1930s and 1940s, but it died out. The archdiocesan press also carried promotional stories in advance of the lecture, as did the Loyola College student newspaper, The Greyhound, announcing ticket prices ranging from $1.21 to $2.41 (“Evelyn Waugh to Give Talk,” 14 Jan. 1949, 1). After arrival, Waugh was interviewed by both the morning and evening Sun papers, which had separate editorial and news staffs. The interviews were conducted in the Reeves house. The Baltimore Sun (the morning paper) was represented by Russell Baker on what may have been his first assignment. He went on to become a leading columnist for the New York Times, to win two Pulitzer Prizes, and to host Masterpiece Theater on PBS. He leaves an account of the Waugh interview in his memoir The Good Times (1989).

Baker, who grew up in blue-collar south Baltimore, went on short notice with no opportunity to research Waugh’s background. He had never read anything by Waugh, and the assignment was not explained to him. He had no time to change clothes to suit the refined tastes of north Baltimore. When he arrived, the reporter for the rival Evening Sun was already there. Baker noticed that Waugh was dressed in the tweedy north Baltimore style, only more so--as though in parody. He also

looked like an extremely disagreeable man. The wide pink face did not quite scowl at me, but it was a face from which the smile seemed to have faded years ago. He had the eyes of an angry bird. As I introduced myself, I thought I saw pure hostility in those eyes, but this may have been my fevered imagination at work. Hostile or not, this was clearly a man not likely to be charmed by bumbling damn-fool questions from boy reporters. (Good Times)

Baker was further spooked by the Evening Sun reporter, James Bready, a brilliant and experienced feature writer.

Searching his brain, Baker came up with one fact about Waugh—his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The interview took place just after reports that the Communist government of Hungary had imprisoned Cardinal Josef Mindszenty. In desperation, Baker asked Waugh how he felt about the Cardinal’s imprisonment. Although a how-do-you-feel question was, according to Baker, the sure sign of an amateur in the news business, it worked well on Waugh, who became animated and spoke his mind about what he considered an outrageous action. Baker included some of Waugh’s responses to questions apparently asked by Bready, who knew about Waugh’s recent trip to Hollywood. According to Waugh, was surrounded by a “bunch of loonies” involved in what they called mysticism: “Huxley is not an irreligious man. He’s just lost in a hopeless fog…. Mysticism implies contact with the supernatural and is a part of Christianity.” When asked about themes of (which Bready had obviously read), Waugh responded: “Forest Lawn is the best ordered part of the cinema world. There, all the bodies are properly sorted and placed.” As to whether he would return to Hollywood, Waugh responded: “I’ve seen Hollywood. There’s no point in going back.” Baker had his story printed on page 18: “Waugh, Novelist, Calls Trial of Cardinal ‘Martyrdom’” (Baltimore Sun, 8 Feb. 1949).

In the Evening Sun story, under the headline “After ‘The Loved One,’ Waugh Ponders His Fate,” Bready drew Waugh on his campaign against the U.S. funeral industry. If he died in America, Waugh did not want to employ morticians, who might extract revenge through “exposure, possibly, to the vultures.” Waugh preferred having his body sewn into sailcloth and consigned to the sea beyond the three-mile limit, “with or without incantation.” When asked about future writing projects, Waugh mentioned far-off plans for a novel with the theme of “chivalry during World War II.” He would use his own experiences, including “Commando raids and crash-landing in occupied Yugoslavia” to serve in a mission to the Partisans led by Randolph Churchill (8 Feb. 1949, 21). This interview may be the first appearance in print of plans for . A shorter version appeared in the New York Times more than a month later.[4]

The lecture was delivered on the evening of 8 February. Quoting Russell Baker’s story, Father Talbot introduced Waugh, who gave “the impression of being a sober man of faith rather than a cynic.” On 9 February, the Sun printed a review (a summary, really) of the lecture under the headline “Waugh Sees Catholics as Only Readers of Bible in 50 Years” (30). According to The Greyhound, a “near capacity crowd attended the lecture” (“Crowd Hears Waugh Speak,” 11 Feb. 1949, 1).[5]

On the same day as the review, the Evening Sun carried an interview with Laura Waugh on the women’s pages. She was described as an attractive blonde, several years younger than her husband, and she thought Baltimore the “prettiest city” she had seen in America. When asked about Hollywood, she said she had found it warm, with good food, and “terribly amusing.” Her chief occupations were livestock and gardening at Piers Court, and keeping the children away from Evelyn when he was at work (Margaret Dempsey, “Baltimore Prettiest U.S. City, Mrs. Waugh Says,” 9 Feb. 1949, 36). The Baltimore News-Post, the Hearst paper, ran a brief story on 8 February about the English Speaking Union’s reception for Waugh. This story is remarkable because the Hearst press rarely covered literary stories.

The Waughs attended several dinner parties, described in Varga’s essays. According to Varga, one evening Waugh visited an “obscure gentleman whose eagerness to see him had been communicated by a Mrs. Robb.” This person may have been a Baltimore institution named Willie Wiscott who, despite being immobilized by rheumatoid arthritis, managed to live a useful life as a writer. In a 1951 story on Wiscott, James Bready mentions Waugh’s visit having taken place “three years ago,” instead of the aborted meeting with H. L. Mencken (“The Friends of Willie,” Baltimore Sun, 18 Nov. 1951, MG15). This visit may have taken place in 1948 (when Mencken had his stroke) or 1949 (after an unsuccessful attempt to reschedule a meeting with Mencken). Perhaps the “obscure gentleman” is someone else entirely. On Friday, 10 February, Waugh was driven to Washington, about forty-five miles south of Baltimore, where he was scheduled to lecture that evening at Gaston Hall, Georgetown University.

Once Waugh had departed, Father Talbot immediately sent a glowing assessment of his visit. Waugh answered with his own “Collins” while still in Washington:

Believe me, the gratitude is all on my side. You made our visit to Baltimore entirely delightful and memorable. Nothing could have been more imaginative than the arrangements you made for our entertainment. I feel I know Baltimore now as few foreigners have been allowed to know it—and I love it accordingly. In his essays, Nicholas Varga questions Waugh’s expressions of gratitude, including those for the 1947 honorary degree and the 1948 visit. Varga’s doubts are based on letters sent by Waugh to his wife and to his friends and : he appears to belittle the degree and the visits. These letters were published in 1980. Waugh realized that Loyola College was not Harvard, Princeton, or even Notre Dame. But he was grateful to Loyola, a Roman Catholic institution of higher education, for the honor of the degree. No other institution had given one to him. Indeed, Loyola may be the only institution ever to bestow an academic degree of any kind on Waugh; Oxford awarded no degree because he failed to fulfill residency requirements. His gratitude is evident in his donation of the page proofs for . By 1947, Brideshead had proven to be his most popular work, and the corrected proofs were valuable in the rare-book trade even then.

The remarks in letters were amusing and self-deprecating, typical of an Englishman of his class in connection with any public honor or success. If he had not thought the degree or the visits worthwhile, he would not have gone to Baltimore. Waugh was quite capable of being rude in person or in writing whenever he found his hosts boring or annoying. The Reeves family suffered from Waugh, but he did not ridicule them in letters. His comments were not intended for Americans who had hosted him, especially Catholics such as Father Talbot, who had expended so much effort.

Upon receiving Waugh’s 1949 letter of thanks, Father Talbot wrote the following to H. L. Mencken:

Last week, as you know, Evelyn Waugh was again in Baltimore for the purpose of delivering a lecture under our auspices. He was very eager to call on you but it was thought that his visit might disturb your tranquility. I may say that of all the people in Baltimore, you were the one especially that he wished to see. One of the first questions that people asked him was, “Have you seen Mencken?” We are hoping that he may return to Baltimore in March. If so, I would like to bring him down to see you even for a few minutes.

The 1949 meeting never took place. Waugh and Mencken were both opinionated, and they differed on religion, but they were also satirists, and their meeting might have been one of the highlights of Waugh’s tour.

Mencken never fully recovered from his stroke and died in 1956. Waugh completed his article for Life magazine, “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church,” published on 19 September 1949, but it never turned into the book he had proposed. Although well-written and informative, the article has nothing to satirize, so it lacks the humor of his best works. After struggling to write the article over several months, Waugh never tried to expand on what he had written. Nor did he use the 1948 and 1949 trips in fiction, as when he had turned his 1947 trip to California into The Loved One. Undertakers and the film industry were fair game, but not the Catholic Church—not until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

Notes [1] Rothman cites William Manchester’s biography of Mencken, Disturber of the Peace (1951). [2] Waugh probably played the Parker Brothers board game Peg’ity. [3] See Dave Woods, “Wood Working: Writer’s short stature powered a biting wit that spared no one,” River Falls Journal (Wisconsin), 11 April 2013. River Falls is the largest suburb of the Twin Cities in Wisconsin. This article should be treated with considerable caution. When Powers and his wife visited Combe Florey, Waugh is said to have insisted that Powers drink water with ice brought from at great trouble. In fact, according to Katherine Powers, her father visited Waugh only once, in 1952 at Piers Court, and his wife was not with him. Dave Woods seems to have confused the visit of Powers with that of another American, Paul Moor, as described by Martin Stannard, Later Years, 258. [4] See Harvey Breit, “An Interview with Evelyn Waugh,” New York Times Book Review, 13 March 1949, 23. See also Martin Stannard regarding the Breit interview: “In an unguarded moment, [Waugh] had let slip a considerable : the first public expression of his grand scheme for Sword of Honour, slowly germinating since the completion of ‘Compassion’” (Later Years 240). “Compassion,” a short story, was published in Atlantic Monthly as “The Major Intervenes” in July 1949, and in The Month in August. The story served as the basis for the conclusion of Unconditional Surrender (1961). As the Bready interview indicates, Waugh was willing to talk about his war trilogy in 1949. Contra Stannard, Waugh’s comments in the Breit interview were not given in an “unguarded moment,” they were not a “considerable scoop,” and they were not “the first public expression of his grand scheme for Sword of Honour.” Waugh had given more information to the Baltimore Evening Sun more than a month before the interview with the New York Times appeared. [5] Nicholas Varga put the paid attendance at 730 and the venue held 1200, so there may have been a substantial number of free admissions.

Acknowledgments

The essays about Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 and 1949 U.S. tours (published in Waugh Studies in three parts) were presented by the authors on 12 March 2012 in Baltimore, Maryland, at the Loyola-Notre Dame Library’s conference, Evelyn Waugh: An Englishman in Catholic America.

The articles could not have been written without the help of librarians and archivists, especially those at Roman Catholic schools, colleges, and universities in places visited by Waugh. In particular, we thank Paul Pearson at Bellarmine University (Louisville, Kentucky), Shelly Barber at Boston College, Nick Scheetz and Joseph Jeffs at Georgetown University, Ashley Howdeshell at Loyola University Chicago, Trish Nugent at Loyola University New Orleans, Michelle Sweetser and Matt Blessing at Marquette University, Angela Kindig at the University of Notre Dame, Roberta Stevens at Portsmouth Abbey School, John Waide at St. Louis University, Peggy Roske at St. John’s University (Collegeville, Minnesota), and Richard Weaver at Spring Hill College (Mobile, Alabama), as well as Carolyn Smith at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where records of the Harold Matson Company are archived.

In addition, Nancy Perlman and Margaret Feild of the Loyola-Notre Dame Library in Baltimore provided invaluable assistance for preparation of these papers as well as the conference and exhibit in March 2012. Last but by no means least, we thank the late Nicholas Varga.

Collections of the following libraries were also consulted: the British Library (Manuscripts Collection), the (Newspaper and Manuscripts Reading Rooms), the Bodleian Library, and the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

Numerous individuals also offered time and assistance; several but not all are mentioned in the essays. They include the Brady Family (Ellen Brady Finn, Sally Ryder Brady, and Susan Brady Pankowicz), Joseph Crowley, Prof. Robert Murray Davis, Prof. Donat Gallagher, Fr. John Garvey, Arthur Jones, Dom Damian Kearney, Katherine Powers, Prof. Patrick Query, Charles Reeves, , Capt. Charles Weishar, and Prof. John Howard Wilson.

Addenda to “‘Something Entirely Unique’: Evelyn Waugh’s 1948-49 Tours of North America, Parts 1 & 2” (EWS 43.2 & 44.1, Winter & Spring 2013) John McGinty, Loyola-Notre Dame Library Jeffrey Manley

Additional research at the British and Bodleian Libraries provided more information.

Part 1. Section 2. Planning. Correspondence between Robert Wilberforce and Evelyn Waugh seems to have been sent via the Foreign Office. This may have been necessary to secure the FO’s permission to travel. Perhaps Wilberforce and Waugh did not know each other. British Library, Evelyn Waugh Papers, Add. MS 81702 ff. 99-101.

Part 1. Section 4. Boston. In September1948, at the suggestion of Ronald Knox, Fr. William Leonard, SJ, asked Waugh to speak at Boston College’s annual Candlemas Lectures in December 1948. He offered a fee of $1500, including expenses. After he learned of Father Talbot’s plans for a more extensive lecture tour and a fee of $500 per lecture, Father Leonard withdrew his offer. He proposed that Waugh lecture at BC on the 1949 tour but insisted on two lectures for $500. He also insisted that BC retain publication rights for these lectures. Waugh’s response is not in the BL archives, nor have we found any record of a stop in Boston on the 1949 tour. Perhaps they discussed the matter in person when Waugh visited BC in November 1948. BL, Add. MS 81069 ff. 235-37.

Part 1. Section 5. Cincinnati. Lydwine van Kesberger wrote to Waugh from the Grailville school on 3 October 1949. She had learned that Waugh proposed to mention Grailville in Life magazine. Grailville understood that there would be no publicity regarding his visit. The school had sought legal advice in Cincinnati and had sent two staff members to New York (at an expense of $200) in an unsuccessful attempt to urge Life to delete references to the visit. Waugh’s response is not recorded, but this letter may explain the absence of references to Grailville in the version of the article in the British magazine The Month in November 1949. BL, Add. MS 81060 f. 63.

Part 1. Section 7. Departure and Interview. The earliest and most complete version of the departure interview appeared with unrelated stories in “The Londoner’s Diary” column of the Evening Standard newspaper for 30 December 1948 (p. 2). There is no dateline or byline. After Waugh’s complaints about American habits comes his cure: “Most Americans are in need of conversion. What the country needs is more religion.” Waugh also describes his pilgrimage to the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky, the “most wonderful place in the world … I have no vocation myself, but I like to think Trappist silence would be a fine anti-toxin to the American way of life.” He mentions his visit to a convent school where the girls were taught contemplative silence, which “makes them exemplary wives.” The column concludes by referring to Waugh’s return and lecture tour in 1949.

Part 2. St Paul. In a letter dated 17 February 1949, J. F. Powers invited Waugh to meet him in St. Paul. He wrote without any previous contact, on the basis of hearsay that Waugh intended to meet Powers. He expected Waugh to “turn north” after lectures in Chicago. On 20 February, Waugh wrote from Chicago accepting Powers’s invitation. It is clear that Waugh did not have a lecture date scheduled. On 24 February, Waugh wrote to Powers again from Chicago and asked him to get a hotel room for a visit on 8-9 March. Those dates must have been set after his first letter. On 25 February, Powers wrote that he had made reservations for the Waughs at the Commodore Hotel. While the Commodore was not quite downtown, it was not far away, near where Powers lived. F. Scott Fitzgerald had stayed there on visits to his hometown, though Powers imagined that Waugh would be the first writer since then. Powers neglects to mention that Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Fred Barker (son of gangsteress “Ma” Barker) also favored the Commodore. The building remains at 79 Western Avenue, no longer a hotel. Powers was apparently unaware that Waugh had scheduled a lecture in St. Paul, and he was prepared to entertain Waugh during his entire visit. Powers and his wife Betty hosted the Waughs in their apartment and served lobster Newburg. Probably for this dinner party Powers searched the Twin Cities for suitable wine. This correspondence confirms that St. Paul was a last-minute addition to the lecture tour. It suggests that Waugh added St. Paul to meet Powers rather than to lecture. BL, Add. MS 81068, ff. 138-9. Part 2. Springfield, Illinois. In a letter to Waugh dated 26 November 1951, Hugh Garvey describes the Campion Society, one sponsor of Waugh’s lecture, as “a small checking account … set up to finance your lecture here in Springfield.” BL, Add. MS 81057, f. 83.

Arthur Waugh’s Influence, Part I: Reticence in Literature John Howard Wilson Lock Haven University

As Harold Bloom memorably argued in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), the poet is inevitably affected by predecessors. Alec and Evelyn Waugh were not primarily poets, but they were writers, and they were influenced by predecessors, especially their father: Arthur Waugh. As Arthur’s great-grandson Alexander Waugh has persuasively demonstrated in Fathers and Sons (2004), Arthur exerted enormous influence on the writing of his offspring. In (1928), for instance, Evelyn mocks many of Arthur’s habits and expressions (Alexander Waugh 205-07). Evelyn affected to find his father tiresome, but Arthur inspired much more than aversion in his younger son. Reading Arthur’s Reticence in Literature (1915), Tradition and Change (1919), and One Man’s Road (1931) indicates that his influence was deep and abiding, and Evelyn never managed to kill it. This essay focuses on the earliest of these three works, Reticence in Literature. A child of the Victorian Age, Arthur tended to set up binary oppositions, such as tradition and change, and Evelyn took it upon himself to reconcile the two. Of course he succeeded. Evelyn Waugh is often portrayed as an isolated genius, but his brilliance stems from a rich environment created mostly by his father.

It is not easy to make a convincing case for influence. Writers show similarities, but these may be due to coincidence or the influence of unidentified writers. Arthur’s writing is often dismissed as commonplace and inferior to Evelyn’s, but Arthur had established himself as a professional writer years before Evelyn was born. As Evelyn grew up, Arthur’s style imposed itself, as Alec suggests, if only to be suppressed (166). Thus I believe a strong circumstantial case can be made for Arthur’s influence on Evelyn’s writing. This case consists of five elements. First, there are similarities in the vocabulary of Arthur and Evelyn. Second, Evelyn sometimes quotes from his father’s work, including Reticence in Literature. Third, Arthur and Evelyn write about some of the same subjects, and they adopt similar attitudes toward language and politics, though differences emerge when they address religion and literature. Fourth, Arthur and Evelyn were both critics who took similar positions on harmony and selection but differed on women and bookbinding. Fifth, Arthur set up binary oppositions between eccentricity and reticence, on one hand, and effeminacy and brutality, on the other. In fiction, Evelyn managed to reconcile these apparent opposites. Of course Evelyn never identifies Reticence as an influence: that would have given the game away. Still, the echoes are too numerous to ignore, and Arthur’s influence helps to explain Evelyn’s approach to criticism and fiction. Reticence in Literature and Other Papers was Arthur’s first collection of literary essays, published in 1915. As Arthur explains in a dedicatory letter, Alec (aged about sixteen) found a scrapbook of his father’s columns and thought they should be published as a book. Arthur must have had something similar in mind, but he gives all credit to his elder son. Evelyn was only about twelve at the time of publication, and it is not clear when or even if he read Reticence in Literature. In his last book and autobiography, (1964), Evelyn quotes from Reticence, but circumstantial evidence suggests that he read the book much earlier, shortly after publication, and that it affected his writing.

The influence of Reticence is evident even in vocabulary. Arthur describes his papers as “contributions to the fugitive press” (vii). Years later, in “Literary Style in England and America” (1955), Evelyn wrote that “the necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters” (Essays 478). Coincidence perhaps, but Evelyn has solved the problem that Arthur raises: the transitory nature of writing. Evelyn also is prone to use “reticence” in criticism. In 1937, he praises “decent reticence” in Netta Muskett’s Middle Mist (Essays 202), and in 1960, he refers to the reticence of the Pre- Raphaelites (Essays 552).

Beyond individual words are quotations from Arthur. In A Little Learning, Evelyn includes his fullest and fairest portrait of his father. He provides a number of quotations, several from Reticence in Literature.[1] Reflecting on the length of his father’s life, for instance, Evelyn quotes a quatrain by Edmund Gosse beginning with the line “Thank God, that while the nerves decay …” (Little 72). Perhaps he remembered it, but the quatrain can be found at the end of Arthur’s essay “George Birkbeck Hill” in Reticence (188); the wording is identical in the two versions, though punctuation is slightly different.

In an extended passage on his father’s house, Underhill, in , Evelyn introduces two lengthy quotations from “An Englishman’s Castle,” the final essay in Reticence. In the first, Arthur refers to feeling alienated in London, since he was “educated under the shadow of that golden Abbey in the West” (Reticence 202; Little 34). Neither Arthur nor Evelyn explains the reference: Arthur alludes to Sherborne School in Dorset, where he and Alec went. Sherborne Abbey is just to the south, golden because of the stone used to build it. In the second, Arthur mentions the “business of Balbus” and notes that “Balbus has built his wall” (Reticence 203; Little 34-35). [2] Again, Evelyn does not explain, and “Balbus” probably remains obscure to many readers. In Reticence, Arthur begins his essay by recalling “a certain green Latin exercise- book which started business with the pregnant sentence, … ‘Balbus was building a wall’” (198). Arthur observes that he has built his own wall in Hampstead, and he invites others to do the same, to construct “a hearth that cherishes green thoughts in a green shade” (Little 35). Arthur is of course quoting Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” perhaps inappropriately, since the greenness of the garden seems to have invaded the hearth. Evelyn misquoted his father, however, who wrote of “green thoughts by a green shade” (Reticence 203; my emphasis). Arthur’s variation is more sensible, but his allusion still seems forced, and such literariness is typical of his writing.

Arthur’s title, “An Englishman’s Castle,” seems to inspire the title of Evelyn’s story “An Englishman’s Home” (1939); both allude to the saying “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” Arthur extols the advantages of a home in the suburbs; Evelyn portrays villagers trying to preserve their rural way of life. The villagers pay confidence tricksters who practice the same scheme over and over again to preserve their own stately home. No wonder Arthur had a hard time swallowing Evelyn’s fiction. Arthur’s preoccupation with home at first drove Evelyn to write stories likely to shock his father’s generation. As Evelyn grew older, however, he began to portray characters in search of a home, as in Work Suspended (1942), Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the war trilogy (1952-1961). The persistence of this theme is another indication of Arthur’s influence.

In addition to particular passages, some of Arthur’s ideas took root in Evelyn’s mind. One was the defense of language. One of Arthur’s essays is entitled “The Abuse of the Superlative”: he argues that the “indiscriminate superlative” is marked by “insincerity and vulgarity, and the harm which such qualities must inevitably do to the public mind” (Reticence 28). For Arthur, using “words without measuring their meaning is literary insincerity, and that is one of the unpardonable sins” (29). When writers give in to such habits, “the language is gradually debased; and taste and proportion are slowly undermined” (29). General as these arguments are, Evelyn accepted them: throughout his career, he engaged in a conscientious battle against increasing slackness in language, as in his editing of books by Thomas Merton. At the end, in A Little Learning, Evelyn described his father as a “man of letters,” along with Edmund Gosse. They “enjoyed an easy command and reverence of the English language,” and “they did much to protect [it] from pollution and misuse” (72-73).

Arthur’s interpretation of “literary insincerity” as a “sin” is interesting. In Reticence, he makes literature into an alternate religion. In his introduction, for instance, Arthur claims that literature helps “every man” to create “a home of the soul, a citadel of the mind, … a sanctuary amid adversities,” and “a continuing city” (xv)—in other words, heaven. Books, moreover, provide “the highest form of fellowship” (xv). So much for the communion of the saints! To Arthur in his essay “The Particular Copy,” books of the famous seem like shrines that inspire “the mysteries of the book-lover” (107), and he imagines the particular copy (of a book) waiting for him on “the other side of death” (108). For all his fetishism, Arthur remained firmly in the Church of England. One passage from his essay on George Herbert provides a clear picture of Arthur’s religion:

When one thinks of the Church of England, quietly leavening the land through the gentle operation of the ages, one pictures, as it were, a broad stretch of meadowland, rich and mellow in the light of sunset, with here and there among its bowery hollows the heavenward-pointing spire of the village church, and, close beside the yew-trees in the grave-yard, the grey walls and open porch of the country parsonage. Here, as the cattle wind homeward in the evening light, the benign, white-haired parson stands at his gate to greet the cowherd, and the village chime calls the labourers to evensong. For these contented spirits, happily removed from the stress and din of conflicting creeds and clashing dogmas, the message of the gospel tells of divine approval for work well done, of light at eventide, of rest and refreshment for the weary. For them God is not in the earth-quake or in the fire, but in the still small voice (131).

Shades of the Reverend Tendril in (1934)? Actually, Arthur seems to have been recalling his grandfather, the Rev. James Hay Waugh, who had a parish at Corsley in Wiltshire. Evelyn notes that his father “detested controversy” (Little 66), so Arthur appreciated the Church’s distance from “conflicting creeds and clashing dogmas.” Evelyn of course used the “still small voice” (1 Kings 19) in Decline and Fall, when Paul Pennyfeather is in prison (“Nor Iron Bars a Cage”). Before he wrote his novels, however, Evelyn became quite pious in 1916, just after publication of Reticence. He may well have been disturbed by his father’s casual, bookish Christianity, as several passages in A Little Learning suggest. Alexander Waugh proposes that Evelyn took to religion “to establish a rapport with his father that would not be eclipsed by his older brother” (83). The attempt failed; perhaps it led to further discord. In 1930, after years of agnosticism, Evelyn converted to the Roman Catholic Church. As Evelyn recalls in A Little Learning, Arthur had in a way predicted the conversion of his younger son. In verse written when Evelyn was nine years old, Arthur perceived that “the Roman road invites,” but he enjoined Evelyn to “Remember, England still is best—Her heart, her soul, her Faith, her Rest!” (Little 68). In the 1960s, during the Second Vatican Council, Evelyn grew disenchanted with Roman Catholicism, but he never went back to the Church of England, in spite of his father’s suggestion.

Outside of religion, Arthur and Evelyn shared some common interests, mainly in literature. In a long essay on “Some Movements in Victorian Poetry” (nearly one-third of Reticence), Arthur describes the Pre-Raphaelites as “the salvation of English art” (71-72). Evelyn pursued the subject in P.R.B.: An Essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1847-1854 (1926) and in his first book, Rossetti (1928). Following Arthur, Evelyn wrote that the “transition from aristocracy to industrialism came very near to crushing out English Art altogether” (Rossetti 22). Always more critical than Arthur, Evelyn emphasized Rossetti’s limitations: he lacked the “essential rectitude that underlies all really great art,” and this failing amounted to “spiritual inadequacy” (Rossetti 226-27). The same with the Brotherhood: individuals dispersed in various directions (Essays 29), and in general “the Pre-Raphaelites knew too much about the Church to thrive outside it” (Essays 376). Arthur prefers to praise, and he alludes only to the Brotherhood’s “subsequent developments and side-issues” (Reticence 71).

When Reticence was published, Evelyn was about eleven years old. A schoolmaster remembered him saying “Terrible man my father. He likes Kipling” ( 169). In Reticence, however, Arthur was ambivalent: “No one can question Mr. Kipling’s talent,” but his “influence, if it were extended indefinitely, would not be altogether salutary to the progress of poetry.” Arthur listed his objections: Kipling’s “methods are elementary; his melodies jingle and jangle; he does not hesitate … ‘to play down’ … to all but the lowest of human impulses” (88). Ambivalence is also evident in Evelyn’s late review of two books about Kipling, “The Light That Did Not Wholly Fail” (1964). Like Arthur, Evelyn refers to Kipling’s “singular talents” (Essays 622). He dismisses, however, the critical distinction between “‘verse’ and ‘poetry’, ‘bad good poetry’ and ‘good bad poetry.’” Evelyn notes Kipling’s “disagreeable relish for cruelty,” but he finds it “negligible compared with many much-praised modern writers” (624). The writing is, in short, defensible; the problem, for Evelyn, is that “Kipling had no religion” (625). What seemed to Arthur literary faults are to Evelyn spiritual failings.

By then, Evelyn had written his autobiography, A Little Learning, and he recognized common ground: for Arthur, “the word was all,” and he did not object “to popery when it came to him through Crashaw” (67). In his essay “Richard Crashaw,” Arthur quotes three lines from “Wishes” and commends the poet’s “cumulative and haunting reiterations” (Reticence 128). Thirty years later, in 1946, Evelyn quoted the same three lines in an unpublished contribution to a series called Words To Live By. Arthur describes these lines as “secular” (128), but Evelyn of course considers them religious: “our tenure of the world is not by freehold but a precarious tenancy revocable by the Landlord from one hour to the next” (“Words”). Arthur and Evelyn both loved literature, but Arthur preferred to leave religion out of it, to avoid the “stress and din” outside the Church of England. After 1930, Evelyn saw little point in discussing literature apart from religion.

Though concerned about the “public mind,” Arthur does not seem to have believed in the People. According to Evelyn, his father had “no political principles” (Little 67), and Arthur worried about literary rather than social change. In his essay on Victorian poetry, for instance, Arthur refers to “that growing democratization of literature which some of us believe to be a dangerous menace to the future preservation of the literary spirit in England” (Reticence 70). In the same essay, Arthur notes that “the sudden rise of this infinitely larger and infinitely more insistent public has seriously overwhelmed the voices of literary taste and judgment, and the advantages of the wider appeal are naturally appreciated by the artist” (86). Many years later, Evelyn claimed that writers such as J. B. Priestley “went to great lengths to suck up to the lower classes” (Essays 528). Better, perhaps, to leave literary matters to men of letters, though by the early 1960s, the mandarins were, according to Evelyn, “almost extinct” (Little 72). In “Concerning Anthologies,” Arthur is equally direct: “the general taste is naturally vicious” (Reticence 119). Evelyn accepted this idea, though again he put it in religious terms. Viciousness followed from the Fall of Man, as in the “Conservative Manifesto” included in in 1939 (Essays 161). He noted the “proletarian sympathies” of the Angry Young Men (Essays 579), but unlike his father, Evelyn felt “no great cause for alarm.” In the past, “only a small part of the population … fostered the arts and graces,” and even in 1956 “the most acute and influential criticism is uttered in private conversation by people with no identifiable qualifications” (Essays 509). The elite survive! In this respect, Evelyn seems optimistic compared with his father. As for politics, Evelyn writes that Arthur “did not go to the polls” (Little 67), and he followed his father’s example. As he unequivocally puts it, “Great Britain is not a democracy. All authority emanates from the Crown” (Essays 537).

Arthur was naturally a critic, and though his younger son is known primarily for fiction, Evelyn also turned out hundreds of essays and reviews. Evelyn accepted a couple of Arthur’s precepts in Reticence in Literature, but he diverged from a couple of others.

In his essay on Victorian poetry, Arthur affirms that “the perfection of art lies in the harmony of subject and treatment, where beauty is so beautifully expressed that thought and expression seem inseparable” (Reticence 84). This relationship became for Evelyn a basic consideration. In an essay published in 1929, he claims that is “the first quite modern writer to solve for himself, quite unobtrusively and probably more or less unconsciously, the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction; to achieve … a new, balanced interrelation of subject and form” (Essays 57). Evelyn was also interested in solving aesthetic problems posed by his father in Reticence. Firbank began to publish novels in 1915, so he is not mentioned in Reticence in Literature; neither is he mentioned in Tradition and Change. As Robert Murray Davis suggests, reading Firbank would have given Arthur a heart attack.

On a related point, in an essay entitled “The Mood and the Book,” Arthur asserts that “All art is a matter of selection” (Reticence 109). In a piece for the Daily Mail in 1930, Evelyn expanded on his father’s principle: the novelist has to inspect the “vast, smouldering rubbish- heap of experience … scraping and delving” for a “few discarded valuables.” After that, the novelist has “to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them” (Essays 73). On the matter of selection, as on the matter of harmony, Evelyn agreed with his father.

On other matters, however, their differences are evident. Though he liked women, Arthur could be condescending. In an essay on Christina Rossetti, he proclaims that “women make unsatisfactory allies in any general concerted movement.” Furthermore, women almost always take “an external attitude” to art and ignore “intrinsic quality” (Reticence 150). Evelyn showed similar tendencies: some of his best friends were women, and he tried to correct what he took to be faults in Nancy Mitford’s style. On the other hand, he praised Mitford’s writing along with that of Sybille Bedford, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Muriel Spark. In fact, Evelyn described Spark’s The Comforters as “more ambitious” and “better … accomplished” than his own Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957; Essays 519). Evelyn is often reviled for conservatism, but with respect to women he seems much more progressive than Arthur was.

Another difference emerged from the matter of binding. Expressing fear of Zaehnsdorf and other expensive binders, Arthur argues that “the humble bookman … must make up in true affection what he lacks in opulence” (Reticence 103-04). A few years later, Evelyn faced the same constraints as a schoolboy at Lancing College: he thought that “an excellent binding could be made of half black morocco, and half cloth of gold,” but he had “only enough of it to do a very small book” (Diaries 23). When he could afford it, Evelyn had his manuscripts bound by Zaehnsdorf (Oram 29); he started with his father’s values, but he seldom settled for them.

The most interesting examples of Arthur’s influence are, however, two binary oppositions set up in Reticence in Literature. In his introduction, Arthur claims that “the test of literary excellence has begun to be confused with the test of popularity,” and under these conditions, “even eccentricity (one of the worst of literary vices) is exalted into a virtue…. Exaggeration, violence, vulgarity are [literature’s] deadliest banes; reticence, modesty, and shy beauty are its infallible qualities” (xiv). Evelyn’s novels are popular, partly because they are excellent. They also include a fair amount of eccentricity: perhaps the best example is Adam Fenwick-Symes’s series of columns on “Titled Eccentrics” in (1930). Exaggeration: Llanabba School in Decline and Fall, but also Otto Silenus’s design for a new King’s Thursday. Violence: the Lion of the Lord’s Elect saws off Mr. Prendergast’s head. Vulgarity: the Earl of Circumference is invited to meet the bandmaster’s sister-in-law. Clearly Evelyn questioned his father’s idea of literary merit, and he wrote fiction of outstanding quality while flouting most of Arthur’s precepts. He did something else as well. The scene may be vulgar, but one has to interpret Margot’s dress falling to the floor. Evelyn is, in other words, reticent: he refrains from comment and even withholds details. His fiction is often modest (“IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY”), and it sometimes shows shy beauty, as in “Interlude in Belgravia” (the scene between Paul Pennyfeather and Potts) or the Epilogue (Paul and Peter Pastmaster). Evelyn managed to reconcile eccentricity and reticence, qualities that Arthur considered to be opposites. Arthur never cared for Evelyn’s fiction, partly because he found it tasteless; perhaps Arthur also sensed that Evelyn was doing what had seemed impossible.

Similarly, in his essay “Reticence in Literature” (originally published in 1894), Arthur observes that realism leads to “two excesses into which frankness is inclined to fall; on the one hand, the excess prompted by effeminacy … by the want of restraint which starts from enervated sensation; and on the other, the excess which results from a certain brutal virility, which proceeds from coarse familiarity with indulgence” (Reticence 21). In Evelyn’s fiction, perhaps the best examples are Ambrose Silk (effeminacy) and Basil Seal (brutality) in Put Out More Flags (1942), or Anthony Blanche and Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited (1945). Evelyn does not settle for simple contrast, however, and the dominant trait of one character is usually present in the other. Effeminate Ambrose imagines stampeding the enemy herd, and brutal Basil adopts Ambrose’s crepe-de-Chine underwear. Likewise, effeminate Anthony brutally summarizes the faults of the Flytes. Brutal Rex never succumbs to effeminacy: he comes closest by giving Julia the jeweled tortoise. Arthur claims that effeminacy and brutality are both different from “that true frankness which springs from the artistic and moral temperament” (Reticence 21), but Evelyn’s fictions are nevertheless frank, artistic, and moral. Again, Arthur’s terms of reprobation turn into memorable characters and scenes in Evelyn’s novels. I am not suggesting that Evelyn’s novels are a series of attempts to score debating points against his father. No doubt he was more often exercising his imagination, reacting to people he had known, places he had seen, and events he had witnessed. Evelyn did, however, digest Arthur’s essays and used Arthur’s ideas as premises for his fiction. Evelyn went further than his father had, naturally, but if Arthur had not been a man of letters, Evelyn might not have written at all, and he certainly would not have produced such lasting and sophisticated works. Though Evelyn tended for many years to discount his father, Arthur’s influence on his younger son is obvious to anyone who cares to read Reticence in Literature.

Notes [1] Alexander Waugh points out that these and other quotations from Arthur may have come from Galaxy: A Table-Book of Prose Reflections for Every Day of the Year (1944), chosen and arranged by Elizabeth Myers, one of Arthur’ s protégés. Evelyn was “incredulous that anyone should wish to publish his father’s lame ruminations” (Alexander Waugh 262). Galaxy, Reticence, Tradition and Change, and One Man’s Road are all in Evelyn’s library in Texas: see LibraryThing. [2] Anthony Burgess also quoted this passage in a review of A Little Learning and emphasized the influence of father on son. See Evelyn Waugh, The Critical Heritage, ed. Martin Stannard (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 470-75. I agree with Burgess, but his points are necessarily general, and I want to be more specific.

Works Cited Burgess, Anthony. Rev. of A Little Learning. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Martin Stannard. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. 470-75. Oram, Richard. “Evelyn Waugh, Bookman.” A Handful of Mischief: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher, Ann Pasternak Slater, and John Howard Wilson. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2011. 21-32. Waugh, Alec. My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967. Waugh, Alexander. Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family. London: Hodder Headline, 2004. Waugh, Arthur. Reticence in Literature and Other Papers. London: J. G. Wilson, 1915. Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Boston: Little, 1976. ---. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. ---. Rossetti: His Life and Works. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928. ---. “Words To Live By.” 29 November 1946. A. D. Peters Collection. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and the Country-House Tradition Ellen O’Brien

In Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh made a marvellous contribution to country- house literature. Not limited to the celebration of architecture and landscaping, the country- house tradition characteristically deals with social expectations, moral values, hierarchy, family, ancestry and religion. Often nostalgia and elitism imbue the concept of the country house, in both real life and literature: estates seemed to exemplify a golden age with better values and morals, and they belonged exclusively to a certain class of people. In purely economical terms, a country estate was tangible proof of success, and “from the middle ages, anyone who had made money by any means, and was ambitious for himself and his family, automatically invested in a country estate” (Girouard 2). This foundation of wealth and superiority, this custom of proving worth, nobility and quality through land ownership, soon led to a culture of snobbery, selectiveness and exclusion: only the moneyed or titled could buy into the country-house scene, and the country estate became closely associated with genteel values and behaviour. Once a family became part of the country-house set, adherence to these values was paramount: as we see countless times in Brideshead Revisited, the world of the country house was difficult to enter-- and it was frighteningly easy to be cast out.

As “many a historic house has associations with some poet or novelist to whom it may have given birth or patronage” (Gill 6), art and literature often perpetuated ideals of privileged landowners and helped to propagate the culture of exclusivity. It is not likely that country-house literature actually influenced English society by enforcing the class divide: rather, country-house literature reflected deep-seated ideals already present in English society. Later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, authors including Waugh began to deconstruct the ideology of the country house. Social change ushered in by the First and Second World Wars meant that the “fate of the country house became more dubious than ever” (Gill xiv), and social mobility between the wars undermined snobbery, the mainstay of country-house philosophy. In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh explores the survival of a centuries-old tradition in an increasingly modern society. The old order at Brideshead contrasts strongly with the rest of the 1920s and 1930s, and through the thoughts and actions of characters, Waugh chronicles what he considered to be the final days of the English country house. As he wrote for the revised edition in 1960,

It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity. (Preface to Brideshead)

According to Richard Gill, Waugh “consistently employed the country house as a symbol” to explore social practices and expectations, and to reveal the absurdity of rigid traditional values in the modern world. The country houses in his novels are “often bizarrely redecorated in a style alien to the dignity of the original,” and they serve “a function absurdly incongruous with the grace and order of their past” (Gill 157), as in the renovated King’s Thursday in Decline and Fall. The fictional world of Brideshead Revisited certainly has more significance than social commentary, however: it is inspired by Waugh’s experiences with the Lygon family, detailed by Paula Byrne in her wonderful book, Mad World. Waugh explored social issues, but he also drew on his own experience to portray the effects of rigid social and religious expectations. The tone of Brideshead suggests that Waugh’s object was not to ridicule or reform traditional views: his message is more reflective and nostalgic. While the inhabitants of Brideshead eventually descend into the trivial and absurd, or break down under conflicting demands of religion and society, Waugh shows an old world giving way to social change: those who cling to the past do not survive, and ultimately, social pressure is the undoing of this great house.

Quite often, Waugh’s descriptions of the house depend on perspectives of his characters or contemporary attitudes toward country estates. For example, Waugh describes the Chinese bedroom, the setting for one of the most mysterious and pivotal scenes in the novel, and starkly contrasts deathbed reverence with wartime inventory.

The reverent description at the time of Lord Marchmain’s passing is a testament to the English country house. Waugh includes details about decorations and conveys a sense of lavish grandeur. He neatly sums up a peculiar English style, a mad incongruity, a “mixed and mongrel style” of Chippendale furniture with Chinese hangings (Ackroyd 230). There are also matters of inheritance: owners of country estates assumed that property would remain in the family for generations. Lord Marchmain is finally completing the cycle, coming back to die in the place he dreamed of inheriting as a child. Even as he slips away, Lord Marchmain reminisces about family history and finds reassurance in continuity. The words “they came the last and they’ll go the first” refer to titles, but they suggest that the family might not continue, that the world as Lord Marchmain remembers it is unravelling.

This deathbed scene may be an instance of Waugh piling it on, but it certainly creates a contrast between the house before the war and during the war. The quartering commandant compares the room to “one of the costlier knocking-shops, you know—‘Maison Japonaise’” (Brideshead 322). Such disregard for beauty and lack of sensibility pervaded the Second World War, according to Waugh. As the officer walks through the house, insensitive to its history, we recognise familiar rooms and recall scenes that took place in them; we feel saddened, even ashamed, of the fate of the English country house. The expectation of immortality that Waugh creates in early descriptions is undermined by wartime treatment of the house, littered with cigarettes and the remains of sandwiches. As Richard Gill concludes, “Charles Ryder closes with still another attempt, in the epilogue, to place the great house in the large changing context of England’s social and religious history” (212). Instead of describing the house in one lengthy paragraph, Waugh employs casual namedropping and family anecdotes to comment on architectural style. That gives Charles and Sebastian the opportunity to question fundamental country-house values.

“Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later.” “Oh Charles, don’t be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it’s pretty?” (Brideshead 72)

Sebastian is a member of the modern generation, not overly fond of his family and their house: “I’m sorry … Brideshead often has that effect on me” (Brideshead 33). His casual remark counters the traditional value of age and authenticity: it represents a modern aesthetic outlook that threatened the aristocratic sanctity of the country house. Recalling Aubrey Beardsley and the famous motto “art for art’s sake” (Leighton 75), the aesthetic movement favoured pure artistry over socio-political themes. Sebastian identifies quite strongly with the movement, foreshadowing the self-indulgence that leads to his death. Aestheticism was closely associated with decadence and sensuality, and at Oxford Sebastian values pleasure over morality: he is all style, not a lot of substance. Anthony Blanche, “the ‘aesthete’ par excellence” (Brideshead 27), observes that Sebastian “isn’t very well endowed in the Top Storey” (Brideshead 49). Sebastian describes the chapel as a “monument of art nouveau” (Brideshead 33), not as a travesty or abomination, and thus hints at his identification with the movement. Through Sebastian, Waugh suggests that the pursuit of aestheticism and superficiality is dangerous: with such shallow focus, it is impossible to address underlying problems. Sebastian’s refusal to identify and resolve problems with family and religion accelerate his illness, and the same could be said of the country-house tradition. It is one thing to appreciate the beauty of architecture but another entirely to understand the tradition, to realize that the English landscape was more than a source of beauty. As Richard Gill points out, “for centuries the social structure of England has been embodied in the very landscape” (3).

One recurring architectural motif in Brideshead is the fountain, which reappears in different guises “as a place of rendezvous and reconciliation” (Gill 214). Charles and Sebastian revel in their first summer together, “Sebastian supine on the sunny seat in the colonnade, … [Charles] … trying to draw the fountain.” Charles is just beginning his “aesthetic education”; life is full of promise and has yet to disappoint. Charles is describing a memory, as they “wandered alone together through that enchanted palace” (Brideshead 72), so there is an ominous undertone to this cheerful picture, a suggestion that Sebastian will decline, that their innocent happiness will not last. Sadly, Sebastian’s personal tragedy mirrors the fate of the country house.

History, family and authenticity were beginning to matter less and less in the twentieth century. People’s wealth, intelligence and beauty became more important than where they came from. Social mobility worked both ways: many country-house owners sent “their younger and sometimes even elder sons to the City” (to work), while “the new rich were setting up in country houses, being given titles and continuing to take the train to their offices” (Girouard 301). Brash, rich and Canadian, Rex embodies the new freedom and world of opportunities, but he soon discovers that the upper classes still maintain a strong culture of exclusion. Anyone not strictly “British,” (i.e., foreign), not “C of E,” or not from the right family finds himself imperceptibly but definitely cut out. Julia finally marries Rex only because “her religion stood as a barrier between her and her natural goal” (Brideshead 169): other English families did not want Catholic women marrying their sons, even though she was “the most popular debutante” of the season (Brideshead 31).

Brideshead contains a cast of outsiders marked as unsuitable for various reasons. Rex is tarnished by his shadowy past and new money. Anthony Blanche is a “nomad of no nationality” (Brideshead 40); his personal inclinations and outlandish flamboyancy close many doors. Charles Ryder, like Waugh, comes from a modest family and did not go to Eton or Rugby, apparently the only schools worth attending. The Flytes are marked by their religion and unconventional relationships. Renaissance families such as the Sidneys of Penshurst fame felt the need to establish their reputations by publicising their country houses; the Flytes are similarly conscious of their own standing amongst other English families. They are proud of their ancient origins, guilty of more than a little snobbery, as their family anecdotes demonstrate. Snobbery is a subtle part of Marchmain consciousness; it derives from a need to feel older, more established, and more English than other families.

The Flytes’ religion is the source of several contradictions throughout the novel. While Brideshead is presented as “the ancestral home of the Flyte family” (Heath 165), it is actually a new house, built 250 years before with stones from the old castle. Lord Marchmain’s family had lapsed from Catholicism, and his wife brought him back to the faith of his ancestors. The Flytes’ religious history seems comprised of contradiction, self-deception and delusion. Perhaps Waugh was indicating the hypocrisy apparent in the country-house tradition: it painted a picture of Protestant England, of entire households united under a single religion, but this view was nothing more than propaganda. Bridey emphasizes that Catholics in England are a minority, and Catholics tend to think in terms of “us” and “them.” Not everyone on the estate practises Catholicism, as Bridey notes, and they do not all pray together, so Brideshead fails to conform to country-house ideals. The chapel is a physical manifestation of the Flytes’ religion, so it should be used and appreciated by everyone on the estate. Admitting that the chapel will “have to go sooner or later,” Bridey recognises the inevitable fate of struggling for a few against the majority. It is difficult to pinpoint Waugh’s views of religion. Possibly he intended the reader to come to his or her own understanding; certainly he avoided characterization of God. God is a void given meaning only through Charles’s development and realisations.

It is easy to become preoccupied by religious pressures affecting inhabitants of Brideshead. Another aspect of the novel is Ryder’s , which speaks volumes about the plight of the country house. In Book Three, “A Twitch upon the Thread,” we have jumped forward nearly a decade, and Charles has built a career by immortalising English architecture. Describing Ryder’s career, Waugh’s language becomes heavy with nostalgia and resignation: “In such buildings England abounded, and, in the last decade of their grandeur, Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was taken for granted, and to salute their achievements at the moment of extinction” (Brideshead 212). Waugh believed that the country house was doomed, and that gives Ryder’s career special significance. Ryder has a vocation that enables us to view Brideshead through the critical eyes of an architect. Ryder is always critical, as an artist and as an outsider among the English aristocracy. Charles marries into that world, but we are always conscious of invisible social barriers. He lives in a rectory while Julia lives at Brideshead, and the owners of English country estates hire him like a glorified tradesman. As an architectural painter, Ryder draws attention to the plight of great houses, the disintegration of social barriers, and the religious, financial and social pressures that threatened the tradition.

The Second World War did not bode well for the country house: Waugh wrote when the country estate was in danger of dissolution, just like the monasteries of old. Not only bombs posed a threat, but also taxes and modernisation, which had begun to erode the country-house tradition. Much more than an estate, a country house was once a mark of quality, the stronghold of a man who commanded power and demanded respect. Land and family were, however, losing importance in the twentieth century. Elder sons of the aristocracy inherited country seats, but they needed money to maintain them, and that usually came from merchants or manufacturers who bought their property. Ostensibly a conversion story, Brideshead Revisited takes place in the country-house tradition; Waugh examines and even questions conventional ideology, including social expectations and class divisions. Rather than blindly flattering the upper classes, Waugh exposes their hypocrisy, impossible standards and cruelty, particularly toward anyone classified as “other.” While Brideshead’s outsiders express Waugh’s own insecurities, they also identify social boundaries that dictated the behaviour of England’s “best” families. Compared with earlier authors, Waugh and other twentieth-century writers present more realistic accounts of the effects that social and religious pressures exert.

Fortunately, Waugh’s fears of the 1940s were never realised: the has bought and restored over 300 historic buildings in the (“Houses”), and they are all open to the public. Country houses remain an icon of the English landscape, a testament to history, and people from all walks of life appreciate their beauty. Perhaps Evelyn Waugh’s emphasis on reflective preservation inspired a change: some great houses survive only in poems, but by happy chance England has inherited, in all their glory, many that were once the possessions of a privileged few.

Works Cited Ackroyd, Peter. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. London: Chatto & Windus, 2002. Print. Gill, Richard. Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination. London: Yale UP, 1972. Print. Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History. London: Yale UP, 1978. Print. Heath, Jeffrey. The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982. Print. “Houses & buildings.” National Trust. 21 May 2012. Web. Leighton, Angela. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. 1945. Melbourne, VIC: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Editor’s Note: Ellen O’Brien won the Eighth Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest with a longer version of this essay. She recently graduated from the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle, Western Australia, and she is pursuing an MA in Medieval Studies at Royal Holloway College, the University of London.

REVIEWS

Essence of Waugh Brief Lives: Evelyn Waugh, by Michael Barber. London: Hesperus Press, 2013. 135 pp. £8.99/$15.95 Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

This is the latest in a series of attractively produced and reasonably priced paperback biographies of major authors. Brief Lives has no identified general editor and has focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. Waugh is only the fourth twentieth-century novelist among twenty-four brief lives thus far produced, following Forster, Woolf, and Conrad.

Michael Barber is not attempting another fully researched study of Waugh’s life and work. Rather, he is combining the existing works with his own knowledge of Waugh as writer and personality. He succeeds in offering a well-written and carefully researched book that is also good reading even for those already familiar with Waugh and his works.

Barber is an experienced author, broadcaster, and journalist who has written biographies of novelists Simon Raven and . In both cases Barber was the first to write a biography and had to do an immense amount of original research. In the case of Powell, he produced a brilliantly written and well-documented work for both scholars and general readers, despite having been denied access to Powell’s papers.

Barber’s familiarity with Waugh’s life and works is amply illustrated in his book on Powell. The two writers were friends in 1920s Oxford and London, and Powell gave Waugh his first break in publishing: he introduced him to Duckworth’s, who commissioned Waugh’s biography of Rossetti. After Waugh’s 1930 divorce, Powell remained on good terms with She- Evelyn’s lover , but after the war Powell moved to the country and lived within range of Waugh.

Barber simplifies his text by citing sources at the end; his prose is not blocked with footnotes and textual references. This makes the book easier to read but sometimes causes annoyance. When Waugh went to cover Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, he worked for the Daily Mail, as Barber explains (49). Later Barber mentions Waugh’s novel Scoop, used to satirize his “erstwhile employer” Lord Beaverbrook (55), owner of the Daily Express. There is an explanation, but it is not offered. The character in the novel, William Boot, works for a paper like the Daily Express (the Daily Beast), owned by a character named Lord Copper (based on Beaverbrook). Beaverbrook was once (briefly) Waugh’s employer at the Daily Express (28), but not when he went to the war in Abyssinia. Barber occasionally provides footnotes (a total of eleven), and another one might have helped.

Barber’s chapter on Waugh’s military career is brilliantly written. Anyone who has read accounts knows that it was complex and controversial. Barber suggests both qualities without getting bogged down in confusing details. He hews closely to a precise chronology of events and accurately includes references to primary participants, along with enough description to place them in context. An example of Barber’s ability to simplify: when Bob Laycock wanted Waugh “for the new Commando Brigade he was forming, and when the marines refused to release him, [Laycock] arranged for him to be seconded to his own regiment, The Blues. So Evelyn had managed to achieve a notable civil and military double: membership in White’s and a commission in the Horse Guards” (69-70).

One small quibble: Waugh’s third child died shortly after birth in 1940, and Barber cites Waugh’s statement that the “poor little child … was not wanted” (66), as if Waugh did not want her. Both parents agreed that pregnancy came at an awkward time during the war.

Barber writes with ease and economy, and it is easy to overlook information missed in the past or forgotten. Here are a few examples:

 Waugh set fire to his father’s bookroom and destroyed many inscribed copies but showed little remorse (47). Barber contrasts this with Waugh’s attitude to his own library during the German rocket attacks (91).  Waugh seconded Cyril Connolly’s membership application at White’s club (57). Barber suggests that Waugh admired Connolly, albeit reluctantly. He allowed Connolly to publish The Loved One in Horizon in exchange for the cost of his subscription (86).  Lord Marchmain had to be a convert because no recusant family “however distinguished could have built a baroque pile like Brideshead” (81).  Waugh switched medication from chloral and bromide to paraldehyde after his Pinfold episode; he risked depression by combining it with alcohol. This may explain increasing melancholia in his final years (103).  Laura Waugh initiated the sale of Waugh’s library after his death by asking her American son-in-law to find a buyer; claimed that a man in a Stetson hat and cowboy boots had arrived unsolicited at the door with checkbook in hand (121).

Unlike some biographies, Barber’s book is balanced and fair. Waugh is neither a monster nor a perfect gentleman. Barber summarizes him quite well:

Evelyn Waugh [is] probably the most paradoxical figure in modern English literature. Waugh wrote some of the funniest passages in the English language, yet for the last twenty years of his life suffered from chronic melancholia. Again he gave large sums of money to Catholic charities and, unprompted, went out of his way to commend other writers whose work he admired; yet he was also a merciless bully, particularly of those who were not equipped to answer back. In later life he behaved like a country gentleman but spoilt the effect by dressing like a bookie in loud check suits and a grey bowler hat…. And so disillusioned did he become with his one-time favourite novel, that he mocked it in the final volume of his war trilogy, Sword of Honour.

In the 100+ pages that follow, Barber spins a story consistent with this summary, including both the naughty and nice. It is a refreshing take on Waugh, never marred by preconceived notions of the subject’s least appealing features.

The book is well edited, and Barber mentions all of Waugh’s published books. I found only two minor typos (97,114). One suggestion for a second printing: when the Waughs moved to Combe Florey near Taunton in West Somerset in 1956, they were no closer to Anthony and Violet Powell and Ronald Knox than they had been at Piers Court near Dursley in Gloucestershire (111-12). The Powells and Knox lived in or near the village of Mells in North Somerset, not quite fifty miles from each of Waugh’s country houses.

Up to a Point … Brief Lives: Evelyn Waugh, by Michael Barber. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma

Having seen Jeffrey Manley’s favorable review of Michael Barber’s book, I object not only to some of Manley’s praise but also to the premise of the whole series.

First, Barber comes short of, in Manley’s terms, “combining the existing works,” relying as he does on easily accessible and often questionable sources. Barber does not, for example, consider Donat Gallagher’s thoroughly researched and carefully documented refutations of previous accounts of the annulment of Waugh’s marriage to or, more culpably, Gallagher’s examination of War Office and other documents about the retreat from Crete, and his questioning of both the accuracy and the motives of Lord Lovat’s disparaging view of Waugh’s military service. And Barber takes on faith Martin Stannard’s imputation of vanity in Waugh’s decision to undergo an operation for piles instead of applying medication in front of his wife. While he might be right, Stannard offers no support for this or a number of other unflattering judgments.

Second, as Manley says, “Barber simplifies his text by citing sources at the end; his prose is not blocked with footnotes and textual references,” but even cursory examination reveals that Barber has not cited the source of important quotations. Barber does not even mention key articles and books, like Gallagher’s many corrections of the record—see EWNS 37.3 and 43.2 and A Handful of Mischief: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh, for example--and Douglas Lane Patey’s critical biography,.

This failing can be attributed less to what Waugh termed the prevailing vice of the English, sloth, than to the underlying premises on which Brief Lives and indeed many biographies are unnecessarily fashioned. First, these books have no pretensions to original scholarship—“distillation” is a good term, though the result, to continue the figure, does not attain a high level of proof. Having served on a university promotion and tenure committee, I can testify that a book of this kind damages rather than advances an academic career. Nor can it promise either publisher or author real financial return. Finally, a book like this, and specifically this book, offers no real insight into a writer’s considerable achievements as stylist or constructor of stories.

What we have, in the TLS reviewer’s summary, is a brief book “Rich in enjoyable anecdotes and with some snappy literary criticism” (5 July 2013). (Would that EW were alive to read this line.) Or, to put it less snappily, gossip about Waugh’s nastiness, his finances, and his social position. Given the premises, the result is not discreditable, merely superfluous. Pity that some of the energy and paper devoted to this series could not be channeled into a collection of Gallagher’s invaluable research.

Waughdio, Part 2 . Hachette Audio, 2012. 330 minutes. $19.98 The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Hachette Audio, 2012. 270 minutes. $19.98 Reviewed by Patrick Query, U.S. Military Academy

Simon Prebble, a veritable giant of audiobook narration, reads both The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and Helena for Hachette Audio. His is the ideal voice for Waugh’s later works, compounded as they tend to be of world-weariness, deep reflection, rich ironies, and the long view of life. A better choice of narrator for Pinfold is hard to imagine. Prebble’s Pinfold is jowly, decent, and wary. He is trying his best. Waugh writes: “[T]he part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously.” That is the note Prebble strikes impeccably. When he is not acting a part, Pinfold becomes sympathetic, and in these moments Prebble shines. The imperious Pinfold becomes a genuine victim, and Prebble has a knack for conveying the bewildered child behind the crotchety and complacent man of letters. Pinfold is essentially about hearing voices, and it contains many besides the main character’s (even if most originate in his head). Prebble differentiates nicely without overdoing any.

Prebble seems a good if less obvious choice to read Helena, which centers on the experience and outlook of a woman. Waugh favored this historical novel, and it features some impressive examples of his style, but it has long caused discomfort for critics. Prebble could likely read the menu at Denny’s and imbue it with the sound of dignity and hard-won wisdom. His is not by any means a one-note voice, but its sandy default seems better for late Waugh than for the manic early works. Young Helena’s voice harkens back to that early mode and rings a bit awkwardly on Prebble’s seasoned lips. “What a lark! What a sell! ... Oh, what sucks!” is less convincing than “‘This is a very modern song,’ said Coel; ‘it was written by the chief bard in my grandfather’s day to commemorate the annihilation of the IX Legion’; and, deep in the toga, which contrary to metropolitan fashion he always wore at table, the old king rumbled with amusement.”

Perhaps that is the way to put it: Prebble’s timbre is uniquely suited to Waugh’s words and characters when out of step with “metropolitan fashion.” He does the grizzled kings and emperors with effortless perfection—Coel, Constantius Chlorus, Constantine. Even Prebble’s voice, even with apparent effort, can do little to reduce the embarrassment of some erotic and sentimental passages: “Helena rode Pylades; she sat astride and the saddletree solaced her man- made hurt,” and so on; “Helena’s love, sprung of the mists and rain, grew tender and summer sweet while the new life ripened imperceptibly with her….” Still, Helena is an underrated novel: audio makes it more accessible for new readers, and perhaps more palatable for experienced ones.

Men at Arms. Hachette Audio, 2012. 480 minutes. $19.98 . Hachette Audio, 2012. 540 minutes. $19.98 Unconditional Surrender. Hachette Audio, 2012. 480 minutes. $19.98 Reviewed by Patrick Query, U.S. Military Academy

Listening to audio versions of novels one has already read brings home how much of the solitary reading experience is dependent on either (or both) the silence of the page or the creation of a narrating voice in the mind. As soon as the voice of the audio-book narrator begins speaking, all kinds of judgments get spontaneously made. The voice matches the one in the reader’s head or it does not. The differentiation of characters, the variation of accents, the modulation of pitch all square with, disappoint, or improve upon the silent voices supplied by the reader. A reasonable goal is that the listener and the production will quickly fall into a kind of accord. After a brief give-and-take, the listener’s judgments give way to accommodations and, hopefully, to inattention. It is more likely a comment on recorded books in general or my own limitations as a listener than on the narration of Christian Rodska that, even after 24-plus hours of listening to Hachette Audio’s recording of Evelyn Waugh’s war trilogy, the narrator’s voice never quite receded from my awareness. The production is flawless, and Rodska’s voice is not difficult to get used to, yet somehow I could never subjugate those automatic comparisons and judgments and just hear the novels themselves.

My impression upon hearing the first few lines of Men at Arms was that Rodska’s voice was too thin and reedy to carry (or, better, to match my aural imagination of) the saga of Guy Crouchback. By the time I began Officers and Gentlemen, this impression had softened somewhat. By Unconditional Surrender, I had decided that Rodska’s was actually an ideal voice for Guy’s story because it naturally conveys enervation, resignation, and gentle stupefaction. The Guy that stars in these audio-books is, well, boring, if not quite inert. I had never had this impression quite as strongly in reading the printed works. However, I am not sure it is a failure of Rodska’s approach; another feature of the trilogy—which is not, after all, narrated in the first person by Guy but is nevertheless imbued with his affect and manner—came through to the ear as never before to the eye: nothing much happens in the war trilogy. Obviously, tedium and the perpetual forestallment of the critical moment are central to Guy’s war experience (as they were to Waugh’s), but the maw of the uneventful yawns somehow wider when recited rather than silently read. Men at Arms stands out as easily the most eventful, brisk, and entertaining of the three books, the gallivanting Apthorpe and the luster of the new keeping things crackling along before the slow, disappointing months and years of the latter two novels set in. The slowness and the disappointment are, of course, key thematic elements of the trilogy, so it is no criticism of Rodska to say that they come through very well in this production. The trilogy itself is like an inhalation of breath followed by a long, long sigh (events in Crete, Mugg, and Dakar notwithstanding).

If there is little in the figure of Guy to enable Rodska to showcase his performative range, other characters in the trilogy provide him with good sport. Rodska’s Ritchie-Hook is maniacal, every utterance like the explosion of a grenade. Virginia (Troy) Crouchback is unctuous and disagreeable, as she should be. The elder Crouchback is just right, a more self-assured, serene version of Guy. “Loot,” the American Lieutenant, is something of an adventure. His accent meanders between Oklahoma, Vermont, and Northumberland.

It is interesting, as ever, to juxtapose the trilogy with Brideshead Revisited. For the young Charles Ryder, inactivity is a charmed garden opening onto a new world (“the languor of Youth … the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews”). For Ryder the soldier, inactivity has lost its sheen to Army drabness and is on its way, at the novel’s opening, to hardening into the deadening machine that it is later for Guy Crouchback. Yet both Brideshead and the trilogy demonstrate, in themselves and in the arc of their protagonists’ lives, that even years of apparently fruitless labor and lack of moment are redeemable. The difference in tone of the works’ respective final lines is a subtle measure of the different casts such redemption may wear. Of Ryder: “You’re looking unusually cheerful to-day.” Of Crouchback: “things have turned out very conveniently for Guy.” Perhaps Jeremy Irons, whose voice is permanently associated with Brideshead Revisited, benefited as narrator from the earlier book’s proximity to the magic and hopefulness of a younger world, while Rodska has only the long look back in which to work. That Waugh was able to get the obdurate material of his own war experience to glow with meaning, to build not one but two masterpieces of World War II fiction on a foundation of banality, boredom, and frustration, is a remarkable feat.

Nostalgia for Novelty The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction, by Stephen Kern. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 253 pp. $27.99 Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, Bennington College

Despite its subtitle, this book is a paean to modernism, and has even inherited certain traits from its object of study. Trenchantly protective, propped up by Freud, Bergson, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Bakhtin, Stephen Kern reasserts the impact of the “formal innovations” (1, 2, 7), individualism, becoming, “authenticity” (91), “skepticism about authorial command” (128), “unresolved endings” (147), “polyphony” (179), “heteroglossia” (185), “pluralism” (200), the “always now” (101) or “simply being there” (147) of all those “moments bienheureux” (103), and the inevitably thwarted quest for “the thing itself before it has been made anything” (172), adrift amidst the phantasmagoric cities with their ingenious science and “ontological discontinuity” (109). Exactly how latent such subversion is or was hitherto may be disputed, of course, but via a curiously hoary twist the movement is reduced to a rather short list of authors including Conrad, Proust, Ford, Stein, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, and Faulkner, and to the years 1900 to 1940 (1), which allows for a dichotomous critique of more manifest “artificial constructions” (92) or “master narratives” such as courtship, family, religion, imperialism, nationalism, and liberalism, and indeed of anyone writing outside of Kern’s aesthetic and temporal autarky, since such re-contextualization “compromises its status as a historically distinct period” (7) and would amount to “slighting works of exceptional quality” (7). Rubén Darío’s prior modernismo is never mentioned. Realism, repeatedly thrashed, is pegged from 1840 to 1900. Such viable precursors as Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Jacques the Fatalist, and Frankenstein are all binned in the opening pages, and there is precious little consideration of successors, for this is the politics of the literary velvet rope, and if you’re not “stunning” (109), “bewildering” (114), “bizarre” (144), “frightening” (148) or “daring” (158) enough, then your name’s not on the list and you’re not getting in. As Kern himself infers, pace Pound, “it did not matter what it was as long as it was new” (5), or as long as Dickens, the overbearing parent, “would have thought he had lost his mind” (3).

As a result of such parti pris barring of outsiders, the ontology, at least from within, is not only continuous, but self-perpetuating, almost impervious to criticism, and periodically sanctioned in perhaps overly consistent terms: “… human existence … endlessly moves away from its lost past and toward its uncertain future, always tempted to flee from the responsibility of endlessly defining itself that is required by its freedom” (24). This paradigmatic devaluing of linear time, of history, typical of all of modernity’s supposed ruptures, dictates “an endless search for origins in the erratically shifting stretches of the past” (139) which in turn ensures “a product of endless self-renewal” (41) in the present, “endlessly repeating past failures” (117) in an “ever-renewed circle” (60). The nature of the origin in question is deliberately vague, referenced as “a more primordial instinct” (117) or “some primal relation that had been suppressed in modern society” (145) or “darkness in the Congo” (197) as and when the need arises, since fleshing it out would imply the closure of the interminable cycles, an entelechy, when the repetition itself is now a virtue, if virtue were anything more than a meaningless cipher. On one of the few occasions when Kern is prompted to name a source, in the wake of Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon, he is in danger of providing a counter-history or master narrative to the ones now cyclically erased, and even of re-fetishizing the other: “Modernists saw African ‘primitivism’ as an exotic paradise of spontaneity and directness.… Demoiselles … celebrated the bold distortions, inventive contours, and directness of African aesthetics” (72). The fits of epiphanic amnesia also ensure “necessarily unimportant” (48) plots that fixate on “the trivia of existence” (56), and, again typically though more hyperbolically, a “democratization of politics and society” (56), which has long been one of the theory’s paradoxes, given that it tends to be paraded by the intelligentsia as a sophisticated process of unknowing, just as it is here, along with a bucolic aura of leveling, of transparency, while excluding any form of collective or indeed coherent memory. There are no doubt connections between the above and, say, reality TV shows, not least in the extent of either genre’s relationship to reality, but, as Kern often and quite viably points out, modernists “made readers work harder” (156), thus shoring up his high-end version against any future democratizing, lest it be superseded in kind.

More practically, such protestations of difference quickly become oppressive in the case of realism. The book’s modus operandi is to firm up a binary division between the two movements, generally in a rather simplistic tone that is more Roger Hargreaves than Marcel Proust: “Realist characters take different jobs but in so doing maintain their personal identity, while in modernist novels such changes can be symptomatic of a fundamental instability in character” (32). On a single page, we are told that “Realist urban space is continuous” (96), that “In the realist novel characters navigate urban space continuously” (96), and that “Buildings and cities in realist novels stay put” (96). All broadly true, perhaps, but such recurrent introductions or realignments happen over 150 times, thereby swallowing more than two-thirds of the book, and one would be forgiven for thinking that this is Kern’s primary contribution, that modernism was in fact not realism, which is at best captious and at worst something that the target audience would surely have some awareness of already, hence the different names. This unnecessarily eristic comparison, aside from limiting modernism’s purview to that of a reaction, also means that the argumentation must intermittently though increasingly morph, backtracking through a series of exceptions to include more nuanced readings, differences of degree rather than kind. As Kern knows in his less dogmatic moments, rather than randomly materializing from the void, “free indirect discourse … had been used by Goethe, Austen, Büchner, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Flaubert, and Zola” (85); “Realists experimented with stream of consciousness” (87), “varied chronology” (113), ironic distance (131), “multiple narrators” (179); according to Bakhtin, heteroglossia “is evident throughout the history of literature” (191); “Already in 1852, Flaubert registered his intention to resist strong plotting and write a novel ‘about nothing’” (66); Middlemarch (1872) interrogates “the values that establish meaning” (211), “acknowledging this uncertainty and the cultural fragmentation underlying it” (211); “George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) challenges … the possibility of a true beginning” (127); Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” (1884) is “a precursor of modernism” (46); and Woolf herself “celebrated the ‘inconclusive’ stories of Anton Chekhov” (139), all of which could have been incorporated without the immediate, censuring “buts” that are compelled to stress modernism’s more emphatic, superior manipulation of the above herein. Furthermore, if we take Kern at his word and assume that the pervasive “exceptional quality” (7) of his brand of modernism has indeed democratized our world, then the conventional notion that “Realist novels are more readily intelligible on the first reading” (130), presumably along with any and all less exceptional novels that are absent from the study (Waugh, predictably, given the ideology, goes unmentioned, though he is in both good and plentiful company), regurgitated here to the point of supererogation, should be upended, since our post-modernist sensibility would only find their speciously analeptic values more confusing.

The restoration on offer here, however, is merely a rather nebulous malaise, one tinged with melancholia in the majority of the novels and yet re-presented as a flailing positivity. Kern seems trapped between writing a vade mecum and a critique, which means that the broadly expository is sporadically overturned by moments of philosophical incision or political whimsy, as confirmed by such comments as “The depth of Freud’s psychoanalytic investigations is suggested by the sheer length of his long case histories” (108), as if that were enough, when one would hope that it would be corroborated by their actual depth. The quid pro quo for giving up on history as “remote and unavailable” (111), for “liberating the long-suppressed human spirit from oppression by familial, national, capitalist, and religious institutions” (168), not least among them “a slave morality that started with the Jews and culminated in Christianity” (203) but stretching to “feminist campaigning for political and economic rights” (166), is to receive Freud’s aforementioned length, Nietzsche’s “lightning bolts that say Yes and laugh Yes” (105), an “increasing estrangement from the world” (200), art (particularly collage [176-78]), “Hierarchies of creative accomplishment” (77), a war that “secularized life at the highest levels of power” (19) and a period when “Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia moved against conventional religious institutions” (19). That’s the best-case scenario, if we accept that modernism was successful in its “reworking of the master narratives that attempted to hold that society together with such single authoritative voices as a paterfamilias, mayor, judge, corporate head, president, king, or god” (195), yet are these not at least some of the same, very real authorities today? As Kern himself counsels, modernism’s “purpose is to transcend codes rather than negate them” (38), which means that rather than condemning the purportedly artificial constructions to the abyss, the latter was simply transcended by the constructions themselves, which leaves modernism in a netherworld, betwixt and between, an unruly, carping teenager who can nonetheless be handled by the parental system, and may even be unwittingly contributing to its future. World War I “killed [Wyndham] Lewis’ inclination to produce abstract literature as well as art” (170), and although “Woolf detested the politicians who fumbled into the war, the bureaucrats who financed it, and the officers who waged it, … she still acknowledged, at least for her protagonist Clarissa Dalloway and a group of Londoners, the deep need to restore national wholeness in the postwar period, symbolized by monarchs back on their thrones” (207). There is no point in resenting the continued existence of liberalism as a “‘New Liberalism’ sustained by economic interests such as free trade and urban consumers and committed to the expansion of the regulatory and welfare state” (18), when its ontology resembles and has out- subverted your own. Yes, “Master narratives make sense of experience for large numbers of people” (9), and perhaps Kern’s recommended erasure is “an undertaking that most people fail to engage in” (25), but despite the implication the majority is not inherently wrong purely by dint of its majority. In other words, along with Cambridge University Press and Ohio State, modernism both was and is very much part of a master narrative, regardless of which any attempt to rehabilitate novelty as novelty seems contradictory from the off.

Illustrator of Wine in Peace and War In Search of Rex Whistler: His Life & His Work (1905-44), by Hugh and Mirabel Cecil. London and New York: Frances Lincoln Ltd, 2012. 272 pp. £40/$60 Reviewed by Jeffrey Manley

Rex Whistler was a painter, decorator, and stage designer. He was Evelyn Waugh’s contemporary, and their careers are comparable. Both were upper-middle-class boys who went to minor public schools. At Oxford and the Slade School, Waugh and Whistler met upper-class friends, and both used connections to climb, Whistler perhaps more successfully. Whistler made no attempt to write professionally, but Waugh illustrated some of his own books. Whistler was an accomplished illustrator of Gulliver’s Travels and Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Like Waugh, he also designed dust wrappers.

Waugh and Whistler met at least once, in 1942 at a drunken Christmas party on the Longleat Estate in Wiltshire. Waugh mentions this meeting in his Letters (164-65); if Whistler left any record, it has not been noticed by his biographers. Both were friends with Duff and Diana Cooper. Whistler produced a bookplate for them in 1931 and decorated their London house in Gower Street in 1935. Whistler painted Diana’s cottage, West House, near Bognor Regis, where in 1933 Waugh wrote Ninety-Two Days. In 1959 Diana gave the panels Whistler had painted for Gower Street to University College London. Waugh hardly knew Whistler: “How I loved him for asking, ‘What has victory to do with it?’ It was the question one longed to hear asked in the last years of the war. It is the theme of my own little trilogy” (Letters of Cooper and Waugh 273, 281). Whistler was also a close friend of , and both Whistler and Waugh were friends of the Sitwells.

Whistler suffered through two unrequited love affairs with daughters of upper-class clients. The first was Penelope Dudley Ward, whose mother commissioned Whistler’s double portrait of her two daughters. Freda Dudley Ward was the mistress of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) in 1933 and 1934, and her marriage disintegrated. At nineteen, Penelope was nine years younger than Whistler. She soon grew bored, became an actress, and married film director Carol Reed. On the rebound, Whistler tried her sister Angela, but she married Robert Laycock, Waugh’s commanding officer. The double portrait was an early success. Whistler includes himself in the painting, a satyr carved into a fountain behind the two girls.

Whistler’s second affair involved Lady Caroline Paget, daughter of the Marquess of . Whistler had been hired to decorate his house at Plas Newydd in North Wales. Caroline was the niece of Diana Cooper, whose sister was Marchioness of Anglesey. The passion seemed more on Whistler’s side. Caroline may have been more interested in women, though she married in 1949. Whistler’s murals at Plas Newydd are his masterpiece in that genre; he also painted a striking portrait of Caroline in the nude (ignored by his biographers) and portraits of her and her sister (Liz) fully clothed.

Waugh also suffered rejections from Olivia Plunket Greene, Teresa Jungman, and his first wife, Evelyn Gardner. Unlike Whistler, he found an upper-class partner in Laura Herbert.

Whistler’s career is supposed to have inspired Waugh’s Charles Ryder. The Cecils conclude, however, that “there was no connection between the fiction and the reality” (166). Both Whistler and Ryder painted and decorated country houses, and both fell in love with the residents. There was no Sebastian at Plas Newydd, though Whistler befriended Henry, Caroline’s brother).[1]

Whistler and Waugh were also attached to women old enough to be their mothers. Waugh confided in Katharine Asquith, a war widow. Whistler befriended , spinster daughter of a country clergyman. Her large cottage on the grounds of Wilton House near Salisbury became Whistler’s refuge from London. The Cecils drew much information about Whistler from Edith Olivier’s memoirs. As Waugh did with Katharine Asquith, Whistler sought Edith’s opinion about work in progress. Like Whistler in Wilton Park, Waugh often returned to the village of Mells in North Somerset, where Katharine lived. The military careers of Whistler and Waugh bear striking similarities, and the authors compare Whistler to Guy Crouchback. Both Whistler and Waugh were keen to join the Army, though Waugh sought inspiration, whereas Whistler felt obliged. Both struggled because of age and pulled strings to secure commissions. Both continued to work: Waugh wrote Put Out More Flags and Brideshead, while Whistler painted his best portraits and designed stage sets. Whistler was popular with senior officers and troops; Waugh put too many people off. Both preferred action to desk jobs. Whistler was killed on his first day of combat in Northern in August 1944.

One connection between Waugh and Whistler goes unmentioned by the biographers. Whistler posthumously provided “decorations” for Waugh’s 1947 booklet Wine in Peace and War, published by wine merchants Saccone & Speed. In a letter dated 14 September 1948 and published in EWN 12.1 (Spring 1978), a director of the firm, Bernard Ellis, explains that celebration of its centenary in 1939 had to be postponed due to war. After the war, someone proposed a booklet to be written by Waugh, one of their customers. Part was devoted to the history of the firm. Founded in Gibraltar, Saccone & Speed served as wine merchants to the Royal Navy, with shops and warehouses in ports throughout the empire. Waugh may have become a customer during service in the Royal Marines, a branch of the Navy.

Waugh made arrangements for the book on 22 March 1946, started writing by 15 May, and wrote as much as he could by 8 June. He received twelve bottles of champagne for 1000 words. He spent three days in London in September to complete the project, presumably in the firm’s archives, and he drank large quantities of champagne (Diaries 644, 650, 659). In letters, Waugh mentions a cash payment to cover A. D. Peters’s commission. Waugh communicated through Prince Vsevolode, husband of Mary Lygon, but Vsevolode was “not very coherent” (R. M. Davis, Catalogue of Evelyn Waugh Collection E471, E487, E502). Perhaps Vsevolode recommended Waugh—the book is dedicated to him. According to Waugh, Vsevolode was “very excited” about introducing him to one of the firm’s directors. Waugh owned the copyright, since Saccone & Speed sought permission to reprint an excerpt in House & Garden (Catalogue E574, E581).[2]

Waugh explains Whistler’s involvement in Wine in Peace and War: “The exquisite decorations by Rex Whistler which grace the pages of this monograph were the frames which that loved and lamented artist used to draw round the writing paper when he made appeal for wine to Prince Vsevolode of Russia, now a member of the firm of Saccone & Speed” (31-32). During the war, according to Waugh, wine merchants rationed short supplies but charged prewar prices to retain customers once wine became available again (31-33). Illustrations include a wine barrel, Bacchus, and mortals affected by drink. Letters with elaborate frames are included in In Search of Rex Whistler. One letter appears in an artist’s palette, another in a Baroque shield.

Aside from a second printing by Saccone & Speed in 1948 (letter of Bernard Ellis, 14 September 1948), Wine in Peace and War has apparently never been reprinted in its entirety. As noted by Douglas Lane Patey, Waugh’s booklet contains an “engaging anecdotal history of Saccone and Speed” as well as “mature thoughts on the varieties of wine (including especially heavy varieties like port, then going out of fashion), each considered in a larger intellectual context” (Life of Evelyn Waugh, 1998, 395 n22). Wine is a “charming pamphlet,” according to Patey (258), and it should reappear, along with Whistler’s decorations, in the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh to be published by .

In Search of Rex Whistler improves upon the biography by his brother Laurence (1985). The text is more tightly written and edited, more objective. Reproductions of art are well chosen, superior to those in the earlier book because of larger pages. In Search of Rex Whistler fails to develop links between Whistler and Waugh, but it will appeal to those interested in the arts between the wars.

Notes [1] An art historian suggests that Charles Ryder was based on John Piper. See Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns (2010), reviewed in EWS 43.1 (“From Drab Alleys to Odorous Gardens”). Piper did little social climbing and did not pursue upper-class young women. His first wife was an artist, and after divorce, he married Myfanwy Evans, an Oxford graduate descended from nonconformist clergymen. See Frances Spalding, John Piper/Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (2009). [2] R. M. Davis, et al., A Bibliography of Evelyn Waugh (1986), note that Waugh’s text appeared in the House & Garden Wine Book (1954) and the Pan Book of Wine (1964). The excerpts are identical, approximately four pages from Part 2 of Wine in Peace and War. The excerpts do not seem to have appeared in House & Garden (the magazine).

NEWS

Evelyn Waugh Colloquium at Leicester A colloquium on The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, to be published by Oxford University Press in forty-two volumes, took place at the University of Leicester, 5-7 July 2013. In six sessions, thirty scholars discussed the scope of the project and the editing of individual works.

The Arts & Humanities Research Council in the UK has allocated over £800,000 to support the project. Martin Stannard, Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester, was largely responsible for writing the successful proposal. The grant provides funding for five years.

Publication of Waugh’s edited and annotated works will be divided into two tranches. The first group of twenty-seven volumes will appear in 2016 and 2017; the second group of fifteen volumes will be published from 2018 to 2022. Several partners will support the project with events related to Waugh’s life and work. These include the following:

International Conference on Textual Editing, focused on Waugh’s complete works and open to the public, University of Leicester, 23-26 April 2015

Exhibition of Waugh Manuscripts, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Easter 2016. Panel Discussion with Alexander Waugh, Martin Stannard, and David Bradshaw

Waugh Exhibition, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Easter 2016

Waugh Exhibition at a museum in London, Autumn 2016

Literary Leicester, panel with Waugh, Stannard, and Bradshaw, November 2016

Exhibition of Waugh’s Incoming Correspondence, British Library, London, Easter 2017

Exhibition of Waugh’s Oxford Experience, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Autumn 2017

Exhibition of Waugh’s Italian Translations, University of Milan, Easter 2018

To keep track of events, Oxford University Press will create a web site for the public.

Love Letters In “Lost Evelyn Waugh letters reveal thwarted love for ‘bright young thing,’” published in the Observer for 20 July 2013, Dalya Alberge describes the discovery of Waugh’s letters to Teresa Jungman and the plans to publish them.

BBC Radio 4 Adaptation of Sword of Honour In September 2013, BBC Radio 4 will broadcast seven one-hour episodes of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. The radio version was written by Jeremy Front, who also dramatized Brideshead Revisited in 2007.

Something Old, Something New Bloomsbury Publishing has brought out Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family by Michael G. Brennan (2013, 192 pp., $120 hardback, $34.95 paperback, $30.99 eBook). More information is available at Bloomsbury.

Micah Mattix’s review of Professor Brennan’s book, entitled “Evelyn Waugh, Catholic Optimist,” appeared in the National Review for 22 April 2013.

Bloomsbury has also published Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour by Frances Donaldson (2012, $13.99 paperback, $9.99 eBook). Donaldson’s memoir was originally published in 1967. More information is available at Bloomsbury. Spectator Archive Online has placed its archive from 1828 to 2008 online. A search for Evelyn Waugh yielded 640 results.

Waugh in the Windsor Daily Star “Red Threat Not Fully Realized: Evelyn Waugh Says Real Menace Not Understood in U.S.,” by Pat Whealen, appeared in the Windsor (Ontario) Daily Star on 16 February 1949. The story includes several quotations from Waugh and a photograph of him lighting a cigar. It was Waugh’s only visit to Canada. The article, near the bottom of page 3, is available at http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=4b- LE5UluQcC&dat=19490216&printsec=frontpage&hl=en.

The Waugh Brothers Divide the World On 11 January 2013, WNYC in New York posted “Alec Waugh’s Martinique, and a Brotherly Deed to the World,” a twenty-minute audio recording of Alec explaining the origins of his bestselling novel Island in the Sun (1955). Alec also describes how he came to divide the world with his brother Evelyn, so that they would not write about the same subjects.

Hastings Biography Welcomed in London Several events marked the reissue of Selina Hastings’s biography Evelyn Waugh (Capuchin Classics). Belgravia Books in Ebury Street organized an evening with the author on 9 May 2013. The Last Tuesday Society met with her in Mare Street on 15 May. The author also appeared at the Primrose Hill Community Library on 20 May. Russell Kane’s review of the book, “Love him or loathe him,” appeared in the Spectator on 13 April.

Discount on Hastings Biography For readers of Evelyn Waugh Studies, Capuchin Classics is graciously offering a 15% discount on their reissue of Selina Hastings’s Evelyn Waugh. The book will be available in the USA in November 2013, and Studies will provide contact information and a discount code. The book was released in the UK in March; readers there can contact Patrick Query, Secretary of the Waugh Society, for ordering information: [email protected]

Waugh on The Fertile Fact Selina Hastings selected five things Evelyn Waugh would have liked and posted them, “No room for the present”: Evelyn Waugh (Part One), on a web site known as The Fertile Fact during the first week of June 2013. Michael Barber selected five things Waugh would not have liked, along with one he would like, and posted them the following week: “A common experience”: Evelyn Waugh (Part Two).

Heywood Hill One Hundred Evelyn Waugh used to buy books at Heywood Hill’s shop in Curzon Street in London. Heywood Hill recently compiled a list of one hundred books that have meant the most to customers since 1936, when the shop opened. They include Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (recommended by Sir Michael Parkinson), Brideshead Revisited (recommended by Mrs. Algy Cluff, Michael Salisbury, and Nigel Morgan), and Sword of Honour (recommended by Lord Fellowes, General Sir David Richards, Major General Charles Vyvyan, and Sir Michael Howard, OM).

Evelyn Waugh and His Work Ann Pasternak-Slater, Associate Editor of EWS and Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, has finished writing Evelyn Waugh for the Writers and Their Work series published by Northcote House. Due to appear in March 2014, Evelyn Waugh will be 128 pages long, in hardback for £40.00, paperback for £12.99.

Waugh and the Latin Mass “Shades of Evelyn Waugh: An Update on the Latin Mass in England & Wales” appeared in Regina Magazine for 31 July 2013. Joseph Shaw, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England & Wales, explains Waugh’s role in founding the society and recent developments.

Mistakes in the TLS In the TLS Blog for 3 July 2013, entitled “Miss Evelyn Waugh,” Michael Caines retells the familiar story of the TLS reviewer who took the author of Rossetti to be female. He adds that the TLS did not review Vile Bodies, so the publisher, Chapman & Hall, took out a large advertisement attributing the novel to Evelyn’s elder brother, Alec Waugh.

Inscribed Copy of Vile Bodies Yvonne Whiteman offers for sale a copy of the first pocket edition of Vile Bodies (1932), inscribed by Evelyn Waugh to Theodora Fitzgibbon (1916-1991), who became known as a writer on cookery. Please contact [email protected].

New Essay on Vile Bodies Damon Marcel DeCoste published “‘(AND YOU GET FAR TOO MUCH PUBLICITY ALREADY WHOEVER YOU ARE)’: Gossip, Celebrity, and Modernist Authorship in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies,” Papers on Language & Literature 49.1 (Winter 2013): 3-36.

The Gilded Tortoise Christopher Chilton published “The Gilded Tortoise in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and J.-K. Huysmanns’s À Rebours,” Explicator (Jan.-Mar. 2013): 18-21.

POMF and the Trilogy In “The Second World Waugh,” posted on 17 April 2013, Peter Hitchens provides “some thoughts on ‘Put Out More Flags’ and the ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy.” Please visit Hitchens’s blog at the Mail Online.

Evelyn Waugh Lecture at Lancing In “Lancing College remembers Brideshead Revisited with two of its creators,” an article posted in Sussex Living for 25 April 2013, Suzi Reeve refers to Derek Granger, producer of the 1981 television series, and Anthony Andrews, who played Sebastian Flyte. Both appeared at the annual Evelyn Waugh Lecture and Dinner.

F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture H. R. Woudhuysen, now Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, gave the F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on 25 April 2012. His title was “Punctuation and its Contents: Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh.” The lecture was published in Essays in Criticism 62.3 (July 2012): 221-47.

Rereading Evelyn Waugh In “Clive James: By the Book,” an interview in the New York Times Book Review for 11 April 2013, James says that he recently “reread all of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, and was pleased to find that he was almost as thoughtful as, say, Olivia Manning, although his snobbery sometimes grates.”

Barford and Aston Clinton Revisited Duncan McLaren keeps adding to his essays on Evelyn Waugh. These include “Barford Revisited,” based on a visit to Barford House, where Waugh’s friend Alastair Graham lived. As usual, Duncan’s essay is illustrated with photographs of the place, including three of Evelyn Waugh there eighty-five years ago. Please visit http://www.evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled- 22/index.html. Duncan has also written another series, “Evelyn at Aston Clinton,” available at the same address. Waugh taught at Aston Clinton in the mid 1920s.

Evelyn Waugh and Nunney “Evelyn Waugh and Nunney,” an article posted on the VisitNunney web site on 16 July 2013, reviews Waugh’s attempt to buy the Manor House Farm in 1936.

Four out of Five Hundred On 1 and 2 June 2013, the Telegraph published a list of “500 must-read books.” These include four books by Evelyn Waugh: Sword of Honour under “War and History,” and Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One under “Comedy.”

Coming-of-Age Novels Kate Clanchy, author of the recently published novel Meeting the English, listed her top-ten coming-of-age novels in for 22 May 2013. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh was on the list.

War Novels In “Simon Mawer: five best war novels,” published in the Telegraph for 17 June 2013, the author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2012) includes Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh.

The Favorite Asked for his favorite novelist in the New York Times on 3 July 2013, Christopher Buckley answered “Evelyn Waugh, hands down.” The print version appeared in the Book Review on Sunday, 7 July.

Fiction Inspired by Waugh In “Gentleman Who Finds Terror Amusing,” published in the New York Times for 26 March 2012, Michiko Kakutani described The New Republic by Lionel Shriver as an “Evelyn Waugh- inspired satire” that seemed “very unfunny.”

In “The Fun Side of Terror,” published in for 17 June 2012, Adam Lively described The New Republic as a “satirical novel about terrorism, with nods to Evelyn Waugh.”

In “Journalism, Old and New, Entangled on the Web,” published in the New York Times for 28 May 2012, The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee reminded Michiko Kakutani of Scoop with the hero replaced by a “perky Bridget Jones gal.”

Poetry Inspired by Waugh James Morris, who published many poems in Waugh Studies, republished some and introduced many more on his Facebook page. Some are available under “Notes.”

Brideshead Blog A blog called Brideshead Castle is available on Tumblr.

Evelyn and Gender On 15 April 2013, the Telegraph published a “Good grammar test.” One question involves the gender of someone named Evelyn.

Novel #2 Patrick Flanery, sometime scholar of Evelyn Waugh, has published his second novel, Fallen Land (2013). His first, Absolution (2012), was enthusiastically reviewed.

Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest For the Ninth Annual Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest, sponsored by Evelyn Waugh Studies, students in any part of the world are eligible. The editorial board will judge submissions and award a prize of $250. Essays up to 5000 words on any aspect of the life or work of Evelyn Waugh should be submitted to Dr. John H. Wilson, preferably by e-mail at [email protected], or by post to Department of English, Lock Haven University, Lock Haven PA 17745, USA. The deadline is 31 December 2013.

Evelyn Waugh Society The Waugh Society has 146 members. To join, please go to http://evelynwaughsociety.org/. The Evelyn Waugh Discussion List has 81 members. To join, please visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Evelyn_Waugh. The Evelyn Waugh Society is also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/evelynwaughsoc. The Waugh Society is providing RSS feed: http://evelynwaughsociety.org/feed. And the Waugh Society’s web site has opportunities for threaded discussions: http://evelynwaughsociety.org/forums/.

End of Evelyn Waugh Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2 Home Page and Back Issues