Evelyn Waugh's 1948-49 Tours of North America
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EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 44, No. 2 Autumn 2013 “Something Entirely Unique”: Evelyn Waugh’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 Catholic Church,” 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 England 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 California 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.