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понедельник, 16 мая 2011
"It's rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war."
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Hi, it’s Edward the silent blogger. I’m reading Madresfield: the Real Brideshead by Jane Mulvagh (btw, does anyone know how the surname is pronounced?) and getting more and more in love with the Lygon family.
The first thing I learnt from the book was that two Lygons fought in Napoleonic wars. One of them, Lt Colonel Edward Pyndar Lygon, commanded a regiment of Life Guards at Waterloo. Click to look at his sword (a single-edge broadsword in fact).
More to come, more to come.
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“I must point out that his name (Evelyn) isn’t pronounced the way we would pronounce a woman’s name in the U. S. It is pronounced (EVE-lin) or (E-vi-lin). In both cases, it begins with a long E sound as in the beginning of “evening.””
- Brit Lit Prof
- Brit Lit Prof
"I don’t think there’s any disagreement about the surname: I’ve never heard anyone in England..."
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“I don’t think there’s any disagreement about the surname: I’ve never heard anyone in England pronounce “Waugh” otherwise than “War”. But “St John” as a name is pronounced “Sinjun”, not “Saint John”.”
- mark etherton
- mark etherton
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Tuesday, 15 March 1994
Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner: born London 27 September 1903; married 1928 Evelyn Waugh (died 1966; marriage dissolved 1930), 1930 John Heygate (died 1976; marriage dissolved 1936), 1937 Ronald Nightingale (died 1977; one son, one daughter); died Ticehurst, East Sussex 11 March 1994.
EVELYN NIGHTINGALE is guaranteed a place in English literary history because she was Evelyn Waugh’s first wife, but she deserves to be remembered for more than that unhappy episode: she was a generous and warm-hearted person in her own right. By those who have written about Waugh she has usually been portrayed as a light- minded - even frivolous - figure. The breakdown of the marriage has been credited with releasing the black, despairing side of Waugh. Thus she paid the penalty of a brief connection with a subsequently famous novelist.
She was born Evelyn Gardner, in 1903; her father was the first Lord Burghclere, a successful Liberal politician, and her mother the eldest daughter of the fourth Earl of Carnarvon; Evelyn’s uncle, the fifth Earl, discovered the treasures of Tutankhamun. The young Waugh was not unimpressed by these connections.
She grew up intimidated by her formidable mother, and escaped as soon as she could to London, where she worked for the Evening News. Harold Acton described her as ‘a fauness, with a little snub nose’; Nancy Mitford, then her closest friend, said she looked like ‘a ravishing boy, a page’. She met Waugh in 1927 at a party given in Portland Place by the Ranee of Sarawak. He proposed over dinner at the Ritz six months later, and next day she accepted.
Waugh used a fatal phrase when he proposed: let’s get married, he said, ‘to see how it goes’. This gave Evelyn Gardner the impression, she explained later, that Waugh was not wholly committed to the marriage. Besides, her acceptance was partly influenced by her housing problem: her friend Lady Pansy Pakenham, with whom she shared lodgings, was about to marry the painter Henry Lamb, and Evelyn was reluctant to go back home.
From fear of parental disapproval, the marriage took place hurriedly, at St Paul’s, Portman Square, in June 1928. Harold Acton was best man; Robert Byron gave Evelyn away; Alec Waugh, the popular novelist and Waugh’s elder brother, and Pansy Pakenham were witnesses.
Before long, strains began to show. In February 1929, in the wake of his modest success with his first novel, Decline and Fall, Waugh was given free tickets for a Mediterranean cruise. She-Evelyn, as she was known to some of her friends, became ill; Waugh plied her with creme de menthe as a cure, and from Port Said, when she was taken to hospital with pneumonia, sent her sister a postcard saying that by the time it arrived She-Evelyn would probably be dead. These jokes, to She-Evelyn, did not seem particularly funny.
When they returned to London Waugh went off to the country to write his second novel, Vile Bodies; and while he was away She-Evelyn fell in love with John Heygate, a BBC news editor and son of an Eton housemaster. Divorce followed. She met Waugh only once thereafter, over lunch at the Ritz in connection with an annulment from the Catholic Church, which Waugh had by this time joined.
She-Evelyn married Heygate in 1930, divorced him in 1936, and next year married a civil servant, Ronald Nightingale. By him she had two children, the drama critic Benedict Nightingale and the landscape architect Virginia Nightingale.
She spent the latter part of her life, a widow, quietly in Sussex, devoted to her children and grandchildren. After the Waugh divorce, she was dropped by almost all the members of Waugh’s circle, except for the novelist Anthony Powell. This was an irony, since She-Evelyn had introduced Waugh to many of them. It is certainly true that Waugh was made deeply unhappy by the marriage’s collapse, but not everyone blamed She-Evelyn alone. The pair of them were sexually inexperienced and immature. Waugh’s publisher father said he would never speak to her again. But his brother Alec and his mother, who said that he had left his wife too much alone, were far more sympathetic - as, in later years, was his eldest son, Auberon.
She had scarcely spoken of her first marriage for 40 years when I asked her help while I was editing the Waugh diaries in the early 1970s. She still felt guilty, though she refused to take responsibility for propelling Waugh towards Rome, saying he had already been travelling in that direction before the marriage broke down. She was a much more substantial person as well as a much nicer one than the propaganda spread by Waugh’s circle had led me to expect.
The character of the casual and unserious adultress Brenda Last in what many people consider to be Waugh’s best novel, A Handful of Dust (1934), is said to reflect his verdict on She-Evelyn. If so, Waugh was being less than fair.
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Date: August 30, 1987, Sunday
By Edmund Morris;
Edmund Morris, the official biographer of President Reagan, won a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award in 1980 for ”The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.”
EVELYN WAUGH The Early Years 1903-1939. By Martin Stannard. Illustrated. 537 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
EVELYN WAUGH The Early Years 1903-1939. By Martin Stannard. Illustrated. 537 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
THE title ”Master,” applied in this century only to Henry James and (reverently by Evelyn Waugh) to P. G. Wodehouse, is beginning to glow like a nimbus about the head of Waugh himself. Early signs of sainthood are there. The University of Texas at Austin has purchased his library, Chippendale cabinets and all, and intends to rebuild it as a campus shrine. A collected edition of the novels is in print on both sides of the Atlantic, supplemented by fat anthologies, scrupulously annotated, of the letters, diaries, essays and reviews. Learned periodicals explore the significance of beech trees in his imagery. Even in France, where his name is all but unpronounceable, there is solemn discussion of ”Le Sens de l’Absurde Dans l’Oeuvre d’Evelyn Waugh.”
Now comes the necessary next step in Waugh’s canonization: the first volume of a definitive, two-part life by Martin Stannard, lecturer in English at the University of Leicester. Waugh has already been the subject of an authorized biography by Christopher Sykes (1975) and a number of delightful but slight memoirs, notably those of Frances Donaldson, Dudley Carew and the Earl of Birkenhead. The Sykes book, based on the author’s friendship with Waugh and his family, is long on anecdote but short on scholarship, and its overall tone is protective, particularly in matters of sex and religion. Mr. Stannard’s work, deeply researched and pondered, does Waugh greater service, by transcending hagiography and revealing for the first time the full range of his intellect.
Philosophically, the intellect was grounded in Spengler and Bergson, whence come the static/dynamic imagery of the novels, the identification of the individual with civilization and the crowd with barbarism, the search for balance and permanence in a world of shrieking chaos. Stylistically, Waugh’s mind and hand were trained by Donne, Addison, Macaulay, Newman, and Wodehouse - not to mention Francis Crease, an obscure book illuminator who taught him esthetics as a schoolboy.
This training, plus wide reading in European and classical history and a practical study of art, architecture, cabinetmaking, book production and wines, made Waugh a formidably erudite man. But learning alone does not account for his ability, say, to concoct the last chapter of ”Decline and Fall” out of a single two-hour visit to Corfu in 1927, or to transform a chance encounter with a hermit in British Guiana into a great short story (”The Man Who Loved Dickens”) and then into an even greater novel (”A Handful of Dust”).
Perhaps the only answer lies in the juxtaposed photographs of Evelyn and his brother Alec - also a best-selling writer - in this book.
The eyes on the right are dark with genius, those on the left are not.
Mr. Stannard, wisely, makes no attempt to analyze Waugh’s achingly funny humor. Nor does he quote too much of his subject’s own prose, lest an essentially somber portrait flash with distracting filigree, a la Gustav Klimt. This is a biography for the serious student of Waugh, who wants to learn as much as possible about the man and is keen to read everything he wrote. There is certainly no shortage of the latter. Mr. Stannard’s bibliography lists some 50 major works written in 40 years - a prodigious total, given Waugh’s lifelong tendency to dissipate his gifts in travel and pleasure (until his 34th year he had no regular home). In this volume, we find analyses of such lesser-known masterpieces as ”The Balance” (1926), an avant-garde novelette written in the form of a film scenario; two biographies, ”Rossetti, His Life and Works” (1928) and ”Edmund Campion” (1935), respectively amazing in their command of esthetics and religious philosophy; and ”Out of Depth” (1933), a chilling futuristic fantasy about patois-speaking savages living in the slime of what was once London, anticipating Russell Hoban’s ”Riddley Walker” by nearly 50 years. Mr. Stannard also discusses Waugh’s idiosyncratic line drawings (which anticipate the draftsmanship of A. B. Price), and he surveys enough of the essays and reviews to remind us that intellectual elegance and conservatism are not incompatible.
THERE are also, of course, chapters dealing with the five superb prewar novels - ”Decline and Fall” (1928), ”Vile Bodies” (1930), ”Black Mischief” (1932), ”A Handful of Dust” (1934) and ”Scoop” (1938). The book ends with a middle-aged Waugh abandoning ”Work Suspended,” that haunting, quasi-autobiographical fragment, and volunteering for military duty in 1939. As at all crisis points in his life, his purpose was artistic: he looked to the coming conflagration as a God-given replenishment of his imaginative store.
Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (how he exulted in that name when designing his own bookplate!) was born in London on Oct. 28, 1903, the son of a moderately prosperous publisher, Arthur Waugh. The facts of his early life are well known, having been told with honesty by himself in ”A Little Learning” (1964). Suffice it to say that Mr. Stannard gives us state-of-the-art scholarship in support of the basic story: Waugh’s bourgeois upbringing, his alienation from his father and brother and his early realization that he was an aristocrat manque.
His ”profound sense of his gentility” was sharpened, both at at Lancing School and at Oxford, by a sense of exclusion from the ranks of the rich and well-bred - the Hons. and Barts. and Miladies, with their Gainsborough profiles and drawling certainty of speech. Pudgy, unathletic, surprisingly small, Waugh used his wild wit to seduce them, and his brains to mobilize them to his advancement. But the time always came when they would retreat into their ”vast carelessness,” and he would suffer the agonies of a Gatsby, forever imprisoned on the wrong side of the bay.
Predictably, he married an Hon., and he was cuckolded within a year. Mr. Stannard suggests that Evelyn Gardner (whose identical first name and boy’s haircut made the union seem androgynous) was sexually unsatisfied by Waugh. If so, it could only make the pain of betrayal worse. In later life, he acidly referred to their time together as ”a form of marriage.” Friends learned never to speak of ”She-Evelyn” in his presence.
This may be the place to take up the question of Waugh’s sexuality. Mr. Stannard documents certain ”strong homosexual urges,” apparently controlled, at Lancing; and later on he states that Waugh fell in love with two young men at Oxford. It is ”far from certain,” in his view, ”that this love was ever physically expressed.” Waugh was free to consummate the relationships, for Oxford in the 1920’s was flagrantly given over to homosexuality. The evidence is that his romances, first with men and then with women, were idealistic rather than sensual - at least until after his divorce, when a decade of joyous heterosexual rogering began. Prostitutes in Paris, Rome and Fez enjoyed Waugh’s regular patronage, as did one or two refined Englishwomen. He remarried at the age of 33; six children can testify to his attraction to Laura Herbert, his second wife. ”Impotence and sodomy are socially O.K.,” he joked to Nancy Mitford, ”but birth control is flagrantly middle class.”
An appreciation of Waugh’s masculinity is necessary for us to follow Mr. Stannard’s thesis that he was a driving force, hard and unsentimental, from the outset of his career, in life as well as art. Nothing is more remarkable, as this narrative unfolds, than the leitmotifs of Waugh as self-promoter, Waugh as workman. He had to earn every shilling he spent, and the spending outran the earning. Out of necessity, not vanity, he cultivated the gossip columns and, between purgative bouts of drinking (three bottles of champagne and one of cognac in a single night), wrote with monkish application. ”The novel drags on at 10,000 words a week,” he complained of ”A Handful of Dust.” Most writers would be proud to write 10,000 such words in a lifetime.
Although Waugh’s divorce coincided with the publication of ”Vile Bodies” - that black, bitterly funny book, full of pain - it was only with ”A Handful of Dust,” four years later, that he became a man, literarily speaking. He was then 30, toughened by years of poverty and neglect. Youthful fantasies of becoming a cabinetmaker or a designer had matured into a passion for craft and design in prose. Every sliver of inlay had to fit precisely and be covered with sheen; every part had to relate to the whole in such a way that the whole was implied before being revealed. (A valuable feature of this book is its close scrutiny of Waugh’s manuscripts and proofs; we follow, as it were, the scratchings of his pen and can almost hear him groan as he writes.) The crucial step in Waugh’s maturity came when he realized that brilliant dandies like Harold Acton, whom he revered at Oxford, were of coarser clay than himself. His conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930 further disciplined his mind. Martin D’Arcy, S.J., said afterward that Waugh was the most objective pupil he ever instructed. Contrary to popular myth, he was not attracted to Rome for esthetic reasons. Loving the English liturgy of Cranmer and the glories of Anglican architecture, he had to brace himself for the leaden prose of the translation of the Vulgate, and the distinctly declasse ambience of Catholic churches in England. Yet, like his alter ego, Gilbert Pinfold, he felt only a ”calm acceptance” when the moment came. The world was ”unintelligible and unendurable without God”; the Catholic Church was the only church ”because it was true.”
Mr. Stannard covers Waugh’s career with a relentless roll of detail that tends at times to crush the narrative flat. Given his compulsion to describe all, he has to accompany the man everywhere -across the wilderness of British Guiana, for example, in 26 exhausting pages. He is not discouraged by the fact that Waugh has already told much of the story in ”Ninety-Two Days” (1934). But the detail pays off when we see how Waugh cut some of his brightest jewels from the raw rubble of experience.
This is not a pretty story; Waugh was constantly tormented by demons. He needed alcohol to escape an all-pervading sense of change and decay, and drugs to help him sleep. He behaved so piggishly, and indeed grew so porcine as he aged, that one wonders if the ”Basic Pig” in ”A Handful of Dust” was not a metaphor for himself, rather than for humanity as Mr. Stannard suggests. He liked to lampoon the unfortunate, and helped drive at least one person - his former tutor, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell -into the madhouse.”How could you be so wicked?” Nancy Mitford exploded, after he taunted someone to tears. ”I thought you were supposed to be religious.” ”You can’t imagine,” he answered, ”how much worse I should be if I were not religious.”
Yet this beastly little man was capable of exquisite humor and tenderness. His love for Laura, for art and for God are evident whenever he writes about them. And how bewitchingly he could write! One of the most vivid children in English literature - John Andrew in ”A Handful of Dust” - lives entirely in dialogue, without a word of description. One can only stand in awe of such gifts, and eagerly await the volume in which Mr. Stannard will show them come to fruition in ”Brideshead Revisited.” Sometimes Waugh was Nice to Nuns
Martin Stannard never met Evelyn Waugh, but he says that he was ”stunned” as an Oxford undergraduate when he read Waugh’s 1934 novel, ”A Handful of Dust,” which has been described as a terrifying vision of human goodness imprisoned in an amoral world.
Mr. Stannard earned his doctorate at Oxford writing about Waugh’s esthetics. Now 39 years old and a lecturer in English literature at the University of Leicester, he is at work on the second and final volume of his massive biography of Waugh. In fact, he is spending part of this summer burrowing in the Waugh correspondence in the manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.
Asked in a telephone interview at the library why he is devoting 10 years of his life to such a melancholy man, one Mr. Stannard himself has described as ”malicious,” the biographer replied: ”Waugh was a difficult man, no question about that. He was extremely snobbish, which makes it all the more amazing that people like him or, rather, his books, such as ‘Brideshead Revisited.’ He did have redeeming qualities within his own circle of friends, and he was generous to those he liked - priests and nuns and those involved in Catholic charities.
And there is no doubt that he was a major author. Among those I interviewed for the book was Graham Greene. He thought that Waugh was the best of his contemporaries. Greene said that he looked upon Waugh with the respect that one held for a commanding officer in the service.” Mr. Stannard said Waugh and Graham Greene, both Roman Catholics, were alike in more than their religion. ”They had something else in common - both earned a lot for their writings. Even at the end of his career, Waugh was paid $:3,000 by a newspaper for serializing one of his lesser short stories. Even though Waugh was a Tory and Greene a socialist, they had great respect for each other - as writers.”
Throughout the Stannard biography are meticulous analyses of all of Waugh’s works that provide a powerful impression of Waugh’s growth as a writer. Does Mr. Stannard have favorites? ”I still think ‘A Handful of Dust’ is his best,” he said, ”but everything he wrote deserves serious consideration.” - HERBERT MITGANG
"The key mistake of his [Evelyn Waugh’s] critics and biographers would be to assume that his..."
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“The key mistake of his [Evelyn Waugh’s] critics and biographers would be to assume that his later pose—as the old buffer, the crusty colonel—revealed his true self rather than originating as a comic impersonation of the type”
- Paula Byrne, Mad World
- Paula Byrne, Mad World
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”How did he do it?”
“Believe it or not, playing croquet. He lost his temper and tripped over a hoop. Not a very honourable scar.”
[…]
“You know, Father, Charles and I simply don’t know about cricket.”
You don’t mess with croquet
Americans frequently confuse the hoop game with cricket, regarding both as effete and archaic, but that ignores the former’s dark heart
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 June 2008 13.49 BST
They’ve played cricket at Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia since the 1850s. Today’s game - played in brilliant sunshine on a gently sloping field surrounded by stately oaks - is between the British Officers (who are for the most part Indian and Pakistani) and Montego Bay (who are mostly Jamaicans living in New Jersey).
Our host for the day is octogenarian British Officers Cricket Club president J Alfred Reeves.
Arthur shows us around Haverford’s amazing CC Morris cricket museum. Most astounding is a photo of the first English XI to visit the US in 1859. These salty, arrogant, muttonchop whiskered bastards look like they’ve stepped straight off some hell-bound pirate ship. They look like they’d gouge their own mother’s eyeballs out with a rusty cutlass for thruppence. And they probably did.
The reason the Flashmanesque meaty-thighs-akimbo insouciance of these louche cricketing thugs so startles is that in the US, cricket (once the national sport) is now regarded as symbolic as all that is effete, insipid and limp-upper-lipped about the British. In this respect it has only one rival - croquet. But that might be something to do with the horrible fact that a shockingly large number of Americans think cricket and croquet are the same game.
An American lady cruising past the boundary in an SUV slows to a stop and winds down her window.
“Excuse me, what’s this game they’re playing?”
“It’s cricket.”
“Really? So … is it like a special version?”
“No. Just cricket.”
“Oh? So where’s the hoops?”
The next day I tell this amusing anecdote to the editor who sent me to report on the ancient and flourishing cricket scene in Philadelphia. She stares at me. There’s an awkward pause.
“So cricket isn’t the one you play with hoops?” she says.
Last year the International Cricket Council’s brilliantly named Malcolm Speed gibbered excitedly about Twenty20 coming to the US and kicking baseball’s tired old ass. And well it might, being massively more exciting and more fun to watch. But first there is a huge obstacle to overcome: those Americans who don’t think the game is played with hoops, a ball and a mallet, think it’s played with a bent-over giant playing cards, hedgehogs and live flamingos.
In England, of course, everybody knows that cricket is robustly virile, while croquet is effete, decadent and soft. Thus when John Prescott was caught playing croquet in 2006, he was held up as the living symbol of Labour’s slide into limp-wristed bourgeois corruption.
But everybody is wrong. Croquet players are hard, bordering on barbarous. Mock them and they attack like rabid badgers. That’s what happened in 2003 to former English Cricket Board Chairman Lord MacLaurin when he warned that cricket was in danger of becoming, like croquet , “a summer sport that was”.
He might as well have shoved his head into a sack of ferrets. The Daily Telegraph described croquet as “one of the most self-serving, unsporting games ever played, requiring ruthless meanness and ungenerosity of spirit towards one’s opponents”. The Archdeacon of Oakham was quoted as saying it was “a vicious game”. And the inventor of “combat croquet” American publisher Herbert Swope, was exhumed to repeat his mantra: “The game gives release to all the evil in you. It makes you want to cheat and kill … it’s a good game.”
If push ever comes to shove between cricket and croquet, cricket is dead. One only needs to look at depictions of croquet in popular culture to realise that beneath its fusty, twee exterior lurks a monster bent on destruction.
In Tom and Jerry, in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, in Calvin and Hobbes and in movie after movie - Heathers, Savages, North by Northwest, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Nosferatu (no, really), The Avengers - croquet is the precursor to or the cause of violence, pain, death, horror and suffering.
A brief glance at the real history of croquet serves as confirmation that the sport is an in-heat wolverine in sheep’s clothing - just ask the officers who arrested Dion Athanasius Smallwood in 2001 for beating his girlfriend’s mother over the head with a croquet mallet and then burning her alive in her car. A flash in the pan? Tell that to Elizabeth Hein. Except you can’t. Because she was kicked to death by her husband after she made the mistake of beating him at croquet in Deptford Township, New Jersey in 1883.
The very roots of American croquet are dark, twisted and gnarled. In the 1890s croquet games on the Boston Common were attacked by clergymen as magnets for drunks, gamblers and the licentious. And while it might be an exaggeration to say that the history of America can be seen a non-stop carnival of croquet-related violence, it is certainly true that modern America is experiencing an explosion of mutant croquet monsterism, with the sport bursting out of its neatly pressed club-crested blazer like mild-mannered Dr Bruce Banner shredding his lab coat as he morphs into the incredible Hulk.
As you read this, young Americans are playing eXtreme croquet,
colossal croquet and mondo croquet (sledgehammer and bowling balls).
(The motto of the extreme Lakewood Croquet Club in Seattle is
“mallets plus morons equals mayhem.”)
While cricket and croquet continue their simmering feud in Blighty, North America seems set for a three way all-out sports-war war between newly energised Twenty20 cricket; stagnant, over-long and severely scandal-ridden baseball; and the savagely mutating outsider croquet.
Baseball and croquet have already come to blows - and baseball got its ridiculously trousered ass handed to it in a greasy doggy bag. In Calgary, Canada in 2002 a croquet game was attacked by softball* players who wielded their bats with a confidence that bordered on the arrogant. After a brutal brawl that only ended with the arrival of the police, three of the softballers ended in hospital, one needing surgery for a “life threatening” head injury.
Don’t mess with croquet.
* Please don’t write in saying that softball and baseball aren’t the same sport. They clearly are.
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пятница, 13 мая 2011
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Date: April 16, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Hugh Kenner;
EVELYN WAUGH A Biography. By Selina Hastings. Illustrated. 724 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $40.
OF Evelyn Waugh’s paternal grandfather (known in home circles as “the Brute”) it is related that once, when a wasp settled on his wife’s forehead, he “with cold deliberation leant forward and crushed it with the head of his cane, causing it to sting her.” Selina Hastings recounts this on the first page of “Evelyn Waugh: A Biography,” to hint at demons a-gibber in his family tree. His reputation, she affirms calmly, rests on two premises: “that he was one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century, and that as a man he was a monster.” Her calm is the structural secret of a long and remarkable book.
By “stylist” she does not mean an assembler of sonorous mannerisms; she is referring to Waugh’s gift for unspectacular accuracy, goings-on however incredible recounted as if for the police. Here is a glimpse Waugh reported from Paris: “He was a man of middle age and, to judge by his bowler hat and frock coat, of the official class, and his umbrella had caught alight. I do not know how this can have happened. I passed him in a taxicab, and saw him in the center of a small crowd, grasping it still by the handle and holding it at arm’s length so that the flames should not scorch him.”
As for “monster,” well, here is Evelyn Waugh, father of six, telling Lady Diana Cooper about life with the six:
“I abhor their company because I can only regard children as defective adults, hate their physical ineptitude, find their jokes flat and monotonous… . I do not see them until luncheon, as I have my breakfast alone in the library, and they are in fact well trained to avoid my part of the house; but I am aware of them from the moment I wake. Luncheon is very painful.”
And that’s a very mild specimen. Waugh also had a way of apprising people he had known for 20 minutes as to what cretins they were, or exploding in the face of someone he had known for years, then falling silent for the rest of the evening.
Reflect, though, that Waugh, the second of two sons, had enjoyed no sort of relationship with his own father, whose hopes and attentions were fixed on the elder brother, Alec, a fellow who grew up pretty much into his father’s sort of vacuous literariness.
As for Alec and Evelyn’s father, he was the Arthur Waugh whose frenetic response to a 1915 anthology has earned him a modest place in literary history. A poem like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” elicited a review with words like “anarchy” and “red ruin.” It even prompted Arthur to invoke the practice in ancient Greece of exhibiting a drunken slave so that the young might ponder a bad example. Such a poem as “Prufrock,” Arthur Waugh memorably said, resembled that slave.
As for “The Waste Land” of 1922, well, Arthur’s response can be guessed. Evelyn’s reaction was memorable. In 1934, at the age of 31, he published his first major novel, “A Handful of Dust,” still potent now, six decades later. Its title comes from “The Waste Land” (“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”). Four lines of “The Waste Land” are cited on its title page; moreover, its inventory of an Unreal City’s effects includes a fortuneteller arranging her cards (Eliot’s Madame Sosostris), a woman whose nerves are bad tonight, yes, bad, a “death by water,” a quest over stony ground and loose red pebbles, finally a Tiresias named Todd, who will permit Tony Last to live so long as Last will read aloud to him, day after day in the jungle, the novels of Dickens.
Waugh understood better than many of Eliot’s exegetes what Eliot meant by his sheafs of quotations: that when educated quoters had recourse to them they would become dead-end bits of desperation, slogans mouthed out of no vision of how to press forward. There is, alas, no indication that Eliot and Waugh ever met. Waugh, as Ms. Hastings does not spell out, took Eliot seriously enough to derive from him the framework of an irreplaceable novel. (In part, he was up to something he was happy to know his father would not comprehend. He was, indeed, driven by devils.)
That beautiful clear prose, and all those tantrums. One cannot venture to explain them; but they go very far back. Born in 1903 to a father who didn’t care for him, Waugh was shipped off to school in the English way, only to find school disrupted by World War I. And the postwar Oxford his “Brideshead Revisited” celebrates seems to have been largely a pederastic sink. Ms. Hastings has many lurid pages.
“With every major writer there is room for at least three biographies: the memoir written by a personal friend; the academic biography; and thirdly a more general account,” she writes. Acknowledging that previous biographies of Waugh written by Christopher Skyes and Martin Stannard fill the first two categories, respectively, Ms. Hastings, who also has written a biography of Nancy Mitford, declares that her book intends “to give as close an impression as possible of what it was like to know Evelyn Waugh.”
Sunken low, Waugh seems to have willed himself to die after Mass on Easter Sunday, 1966. The Second Vatican Council’s messing-up of the liturgy was a factor in his despair. And so he died, behind a locked door in the downstairs lavatory, where his obese body was found on the floor. Not a pretty death, but the kind of death Waugh had imagined in novels, and had recounted as precisely as Selina Hastings has recounted his.
четверг, 12 мая 2011
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“Betjeman, far from being a man of the people, was a climber and a bit of a snob, who preferred the company of the clever and the well-born. In this respect he resembled his friend and contemporary Evelyn Waugh, with whom he had a good deal else in common, apparently including Betjeman’s wife, whom Waugh claimed to have slept with in the process of converting her to Roman Catholicism.”
contra mundum
words & illustration by Jonathan Newdick.
Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder are motoring from Oxford to Brideshead. The year must be about 1920. Evelyn Waugh is not specific but he does tell us that it was ‘… a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fools’ parsley and meadowsweet and the air was heavy with all the scents of summer …’
Mr Waugh may be unfashionable today yet no-one writes better of the beauty of pathos or the futility of love. But Mr Waugh is possibly a poor botanist. When he mentions fools’ parsley he is probably thinking of cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris, also called Queen Anne’s lace. It is the ubiquitous plant of roadsides and is in bloom from April to June. Meadowsweet begins to flower in June so it could be seen together with Queen Anne’s lace but it is more usually associated, as its name suggests, with meadows than roadsides.
Had I been editing Brideshead Revisited, back in 1945, I would have the car passing through banks of Queen Anne’s lace and nothing else. It is a fine romantic name and one splashed with Catholic / Protestant conflict – what better floral motif for Brideshead could there be? But it’s all too late. We can only accept the missed opportunity of Waugh and his editor at Chapman and Hall. Some authorities have suggested that the name of this tall but delicate perennial is far older than the English Queen Anne. Geoffrey Grigson in his Englishman’s Flora suggests that the queen in question may be St. Anna, mother of the Virgin, but I have always assumed her to be, or, I suppose, wanted her to be, the Anne who became Queen of England in 1702 – the tragic Anne of seventeen pregnancies and only one child surviving infancy.
This beautiful plant with the beautiful name is the food plant of several species of moth including the single-dotted wave whose caterpillars feed on it from September to April – a good reason for allowing the stems to stand in the hedgerows long after flowering – and yet another reason why local councils’ obsessions with suburbanisation and tidiness should sometimes be challenged.