EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER

Volume 1 Number 3 - Winter 1967

WAUGH LETTERS AT THE TEXAS ACADEMIC CENTER

Charles E. Linck, Jr. (East Texas State University)

The following letters, many of them of considerable biographical and literary value, form part of the Waugh materials now catalogued at the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas.

SOME IRISH AND ENGLISH WAUGH BIBLIOGRAPHY

William A. English (Limerick, Republic of Ireland}

Reviews of Frances Donaldson's Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pub. May 1967, 25 s :

Terence de Vere White, Irish Times, May 13, 1967
Norman Shrapnel, The Manchester Guardian, May 12 1967
Philip Toynbee, The Observer, May 14, 1967
Earl of Wicklow, Hibernia, June 1967

Earl of Wicklow, "Evelyn Waugh - An Appreciation, " Irish Times, April 21, 1966.
Evelyn Waugh, "Alfred Duggan" (on his death). Text of broadcast given on July 2,1964; published in The Spectator, July 10, 1964.
Evelyn Waugh, Review of Max by David Cecil and Letters to Reggie Turner by Max Beerbohm, Sunday Times, Nov. 8, 1964.
Moray McLaren, additional obituary in London Times, April 12, 1966.

• (The only gap in EWN's coverage of Waugh bibliography has been the difficulty of gathering references in newspapers (and in some magazines) in the British Isles. William A. English, a resident of Eire, has graciously volunteered to assist in covering this bibliographical area. EWN thanks him publicly and deeply appreciates references which otherwise might be unknown to Waughians.)

BOOK REVIEWS

Frances Donaldson, Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of A Country Neighbour : Reviewed by James F. Carens (Bucknell University)

Mrs. Donaldson's portrait of Evelyn Waugh as she saw him during the years at Piers Court, Gloucestershire, and later at Combe Florey, Somerset, cannot be said to contribute profoundly to our understanding of Waugh as artist or as man. Her book, I should note, is not without charm, for Mrs. Donaldson (who has produced, among other works, a biography of her father, the popular playwright "Freddy" Lonsdale) has some amusing anecdotes to tell; and she tells them well. She has also included a number of good photographs of Waugh, his family, and his remarkable houses. Yet this memoir is very slight and very personal: as Frances Donaldson herself confides, her "memories are slender." Though she is occasionally strikingly perceptive in her observations, she is too often attracted by purely trivial details.

This portrait of a country neighbor is at its best when that extraordinary neighbor is allowed to speak for himself. Then we are given flashes of Waugh's macabre wit. One wonders what Swift would have thought of Waugh's transformation of his modest proposal, when, issuing an invitation during England's post-war rationing, Waugh apologized for the inadequacy of the cuisine, adding: "But we can boil the baby.” And one wonders too just what the aging Lord Beaverbrook would have felt had he known Waugh's mordant comment on his lament that he was a man with a past but no future: "He's got a future.” The passages Frances Donaldson quotes from Waugh's own letters and notes to her and her husband do not support Nancy Mitford's claim that Evelyn Waugh's correspondence will rank him with Voltaire, but they are often delightful. When, for instance, Jack Donaldson sent a gift of a straw boater the novelist had wanted, Evelyn Waugh replied: "It is a lovely hat … not reasonable but I wear it with pyjamas in the first bitter half hour of the day and it cheers me up.” Surely this passage, with its pungent command of epithet and its self-mocking consciousness of the assumed mask confirms our notions of the satiric perspective and stance Waugh adopts in his fiction.

One can be grateful to Frances Donaldson for preserving such letters, even if one suspects that other correspondents among the fashionable women to whom Waugh was most devoted may have provoked letters that will more nearly justify Nancy Mitford's claim. And one can be grateful for another reason: Mrs. Donaldson is at her best when she assaults the false and "odious public image" of Evelyn Waugh built up by popular newspapers and magazines and even by some respectable reviewers. It is perfectly easy to understand her indignation - and that of Auberon Waugh - reacting to some of the obituary notices that dredged up dated anecdotes and presented a shabby stereotype of Evelyn Waugh, even when they did not seek to denigrate him. Mrs. Donaldson is particularly effective when she attacks the canard "that Evelyn had retired to the country to play the part of the 'squire,' thus cutting himself off from the 'literary life' of his time and neglecting to nourish his talent.” Dispelling this notion - one that has been repeated ad nauseam by contemporary group-thinkers - she points out that Waugh, a "reckless man,” lived in the country “as an act of self-preservation,” and she adds, persuasively, "Also it is to be said that in his house at one time or another we met Graham Greene, Henry Green, Ronald Knox, Anthony Powell, L. P. Hartley, Christopher Sykes, Cyril Connolly, Christopher Hollis; while I know from his conversation that he numbered among his friends or acquaintances practically every writer of his age."

Waugh, like so many modern writers, was a man in a mask. Mrs. Donaldson knows this very well. Indeed, more than once she observes that only Laura, his wife, knew "what he was really like behind the personality he had built for himself." But what troubles one about this memoir is that, while it rejects the vulgar notion of Waugh as reclusive "squire" and while it assumes the importance of mask to his life and craft, it tells us so little we have not already known, even guessed, about a gifted writer. When Frances Donaldson tells us that Waugh was full of contradictions, we know that he was just like the rest of us. When she tells us that he suffered from accidie but that he was also “ebullient and aggressive,” we know that Waugh himself has amply revealed these facts in fiction, accounts of travel, and autobiography. And when she tells us that he was afflicted with melancholia, that he was often ill, often so much in pain that he overdosed himself with chloral and bromide and caused himself hallucinations that he delighted to describe as madness, we have to observe that we have known much of this already, if we have not known it all; but that what we need to know is that which was unique about the melancholia, and the boredom, and the illness and furthermore, whether we are to see Waugh's final works solely in terms of this ennui, pain, and depression. (More specifically, one would like to know what happened when Waugh completed the first volume of his auto- biography and whether he ever wrote of his first traumatic marriage in what would have been a second volume. Did memory darken his last years of life?)

Perhaps it is unfair to press these issues, since "Frankie” Donaldson indicates that she was far less close to Waugh in the closing years of his life and since she has intended only a chatty little book of impressions. And yet this issue must be pressed when we consider that her book will probably serve - and against her intention - to convince simplistic biographical critics that Waugh’s melancholia and illness marred his later works - a somewhat more subtle notion than that his supposed “isolation” had cut him off from the life of his nation. (Pope was deformed, you know; and he, therefore, attacked those he envied. And Swift "went mad": so his satire was always excessive in its misanthropy. And Joyce was, as everyone who has been to Cornell knows, perverted: so Ulysses "does dirt" on life!) Moreover, when, in one of her rare and unfortunate literary judgements, Mrs. Donaldson suggests that Waugh wrote (as she sees them) his best books, The Loved One, Helena, and the first volume of the trilogy at Piers Court, where he was happiest, she herself seems to reflect such simplistic thought.

Given the color of Waugh’s personality, the prestige of his literary reputation, and the social brilliance of his friends, we can probably expect other memoirs, other anecdotes. One can only hope that these will not obscure, but rather illuminate, the only significant issue, an aesthetic one: whether Waugh managed to transform his experience and his suffering in his art. As Frances Donaldson herself observes, Waugh's books and his personality were the result of a violent “dislocation of spirit." One can hope too that Auberon Waugh - who has the materials, the craft, and the imagination, and who may struggle towards the necessary objectivity - will consider the possibility of a biography of his father that will probe beneath the surface of the mask and, at the same time, recognize the satiric artist's imaginative power to transmute and generalize the facts of personal experience.

DECLINE AND FALL, introd. by Christopher Hollis, London, Heinemann, 1966.

Before happening upon this school edition of Waugh’s first novel, I had seen only one other book in the hard-cover, compact, and well-printed Heinemann “Modern Novel Series,” viz., Joyce's Portrait of the Artist. The Joyce volume is a very worthy edition because of its extensive notes which explain uncommon allusions, obscure historical references, Clongowes Wood College slang, etc. The Heinemann Educational Edition of Decline and Fall, using the standard 1928 text, contains no notes whatsoever. Yet DF is filled with slang and Oxford jargon (Hollis could have clarified this data since he was at Oxford with Waugh), with allusions and references, e.g., Tranby Croft cut, Randall Cantuar, Ebionites, etc., which could helpfully be discussed. (Even the fuss about the hymn sung in prison bears attention.) American college students would find such aid indispensable, and, doubtless, the younger generation of British readers would also welcome useful supplementary information.

This serious deficiency in an Educational Edition could have perhaps been redeemed somewhat by an exceptional introductory essay. Hollis's monograph on Waugh In the British Council "Writers and Their Work" series is a splendid critique, but his introduction to this edition, while felicitously written, really adds nothing new to our knowledge. Hollis maintains that DF does not present the rich and aristocratic as especially admirable. He lauds the high spirits of the book and praises Waugh's devotion to style. Further, he finds the prison scenes unconvincing because Waugh had no first hand knowledge of life there. (This idea was perhaps borrowed from Waugh's own preface to the new uniform edition of DF.) All in all, this reader badly missed the kind of helpful annotations which make J. S. Atherton’s Heinemann edition of Joyce’s Portrait so meaningful. --- P.A. Doyle

BRIEF NEWS AND NOTES

Anthony Newnham has been working for fifteen years on a full scale Waugh bibliography, which will be published by the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. Mr. Newnham owns what is probably the largest collection of Waugh items in private hands and has had definitive correspondence with Evelyn regarding the many and varying issues of the complete works.

Variety reports that producer Ivan Foxwell is presently filming Decline and Fall with a cast drawn mainly “from the ranks of the National Theatre Co. and the Stratford Shakespeare group.”

On a card written to an unnamed correspondent, Waugh speaks of “a multitude of mistakes" in A Little Learning. He thanks his correspondent for the “Beggarstaff correction.” Can any of EWN's British readers explain the “Beggarstaff correction” and indicate any other errors In A Little Learning?

Professor Jackson Bryer, English Department, University of Maryland (College Park, Md. 20740) writes EWN that he is compiling a checklist of Waugh material to be published by the Nether Press in England. He is interested in hearing from persons who would have information which might help in compiling his checklist.

FORTHCOMING

Dr. Robert M. Davis will edit a “year's work in Waugh studies" section in the April issue of EWN, and Dr. Heinz Kosok will compile a yearly European bibliography of Waugh research for the April issue. Also in the April issue, some more unpublished Waugh letters will be described.

Several articles have been completed and await only space opportunities for publication in EWN. Among these are studies of the textual variants in Work Suspended (Davis), Put Out More Flags (Doyle) and Brideshead Revisited (1945 and 1960 eds.) - both Davis and Doyle have independently itemized these.

The Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, designed to stimulate research and continue interest in the life and writings of Evelyn Waugh, is published three times a year in April, October, and December (Spring, Autumn, and Winter numbers). Subscription rate for libraries and interested individuals: $1.00 a year (8s in England). Single copy 35 cents. Checks or money orders should be made payable to the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter. Notes, brief essays, and news items about Waugh and his work may be submitted but manuscripts cannot be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Address all correspondence to Dr. P.A. Doyle, c/o English Deportment, Nassau Community College, State University of New York, Garden City, New York 11530.