Students of the work of Evelyn Waugh have long been aware of the immense amount of book-reviewing that Waugh regularly engaged in over many years. This is attested to by the lengthy article listings in the bibliographies compiled by Doyle, Kosok and Linck. What is comparatively little known, however, is Waugh's association as book reviewer with the short-lived magazine, Night and Day, published from July to December, 1937 (a complete listing of the twenty-six reviews that appeared under Waugh's by-line may be found in Charles Linck's "The Development of Evelyn Waugh's Career: 1903-1939" (University Microfilms). Frederick J. Stopp makes brief reference to this periodical in Evelyn Waugh, Portrait of an Artist, but copies are now almost unobtainable. Fortunately, the London Library (St. James Square, London), possesses a full run.
The magazine contains a rich trove of articles and creative material, the product of a staff numbering Evelyn Waugh on books, Elizabeth Bowen and Peter Fleming on theatre, Graham Greene on films, Constance Lambert on music, and Osbert Lancaster on art. Occasional contributors included John Betjeman, Herbert Read, Christopher Hollis, Christopher Sykes, James Thurber, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Anthony Powell.
Although Night and Day was modelled after the New Yorker, it was not simply imitative and developed a distinctive tone during its short career. Generally, its social and political views were representative of the conservative wing of British writers of the 30's antipathetic to the Auden-Isherwood group, so acidly sketched in Pimpernel and Parsnip of Put Out More Flags.
Both aesthetic and financial success seemed assured until the writing of a movie review by Graham Greene (October 28, 1937) of Wee Willie Winkie, starring Shirley Temple, in which Greene slyly suggested the chiId star's incipient sex appeal ("in Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich"), and further noted that:
Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body … only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire. (p. 31)
But 1937 was not 1969, and Greene's flippant remarks were enough to gain the magazine a libel suit. The court's decision, in finding for those who brought the suit, dealt such a heavy financial blow that the magazine collapsed with the issue of December 23, 1937, never to be revived.
Each week, Waugh reviewed several books, including memoirs of World War I, autobiographies, travel accounts, histories, novels, and occasionally, works of the British Left calling for reform of English society - the latter category allowing full opportunity for Waugh's tart invective. Many writers reviewed have long since disappeared into the remaindered lists, but some, notably W.H. Auden, Louis MacNiece, Edith Sitwell, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, and Harold Nicolson, provided Waugh with the occasion for trenchant, incisive evaluations that thirty-two years later are still fresh, and remarkably clear-headed in their judgment. As is often true of criticism, the reviews frequently tell more about Waugh than about the book being reviewed. The catholicity of the books reviewed reminds us, as the readers of Waugh's countless reviews in The Spectator already know, of Waugh's usually fair, dispassionate treatment of those writers whose temperament and interests ran counter to his own, except when the political or religious views were totally opposed to those he held, or when a writer he admired demonstrated a clear falling off in taste.
His review of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (October 21, 1937) is an instance of his irascible displeasure with a writer whom he felt had betrayed the promise of his earlier work. He commences with a broadside against American writers in general, and then proceeds to lampoon Hemingway:
Arrested development is the character of almost all American writers; too often they are living and working at the stage of growth of prurient schoolgirls; Mr. Hemingway is a clean, strapping lad, upper fifth (modern side), house colours for swimming, etc. … he writes in an exuberant schoolboy slang and he deals with the topics which … interest little chops of his age: pirates, smugglers, dagos, Chinks, plenty of bloodshed and above all the topic dearest to the heart of a healthy boy - How does it work? (p.28)
He continues in this vein for another half column, and summarizes in devastating fashion:
It would be idle to say that one's delight is as keen as when, unawares, one first picked up The Sun Also Rises, but most of the qualities are there which made that book memorable. Perhaps the holidays have gone on too long; there is too much noise about the house; how many days to the beginning of term? Well, give the boy a treat for his last day -- a quart of Bacardi and a dago's spine to break. (p. 28)
Years later, in reviewing Across the River and Into the Trees ("The Case of Mr. Hemingway," The Commonweal, Vol. 53 (November 3, 1950), 97-98), Waugh's attitude had mellowed, and he stoutly defended Hemingway against his detractors. But by 1950, Hemingway's "elementary sense of chivalry" and "love of honour" were soon to become major themes in the Sword of Honour trilogy, perhaps accounting for the increased sense of literary kinship.
Two reviews of work by Arthur Calder-Marshall are good examples of a shift in Waugh's thinking from initial dislike to a quite temperate re-appraisal. In the first review, "Peter Pan in Politics" (September 4, 1937), he writes:
He talks of proletarian fiction as though it were the discovery of a few of his friends. He does not seem to have learned that all the great stories of the world are proletarian; has he ever heard of Piers Plowman or the Pilgrim's Progress. .? (p. 25)
But in another review only a week or so later ("Art from Anarchy," (September 16, 1937)), he writes of Calder-Marshall's A Date with a Duchess that having been eager "to point a moral against doctrinaire students" he found instead:
… a book of fresh and vivid narratives, full of humour, penetration and acute observation. If this is Marxist fiction, I have no quarrel with it. (p. 24)
Having revised his previous attitude, Waugh summarizes by reflecting on the limitations on creativity imposed by Marxism:
I do not think any artist, certainly no writer, can be a genuine Marxist, for a writer's material must be the individual soul (which is the preconception of Christendom), while the Marxist can only think in classes and categories, and even in classes abhors variety. The disillusioned Marxist becomes a Fascist; the disillusioned anarchist, a Christian. A robust discontent, whether it be with joint stock banking or the World, the Flesh and Devil, is good for a writer, and if that is all Mr. Calder-Marshall meant by his 'left' politics, I am sorry I grumbled about them. (p. 25)
In "Bloomsbury's Farthest North," Waugh elegantly dismisses W. H. Auden's and Louis MacNiece's Letters from Iceland (August 12, 1937) in such phrasing as "… they wrote some rough Byronic verses of the kind that are turned out in paper games at old-fashioned house-parties." (p. 25). He even manages a passing shot at Isherwood: "(Mr. Auden everywhere has difficulty with his rhymes. How lucky that he did not take his former collaborator, Mr. Isherwood, on the jaunt)." (p. 25). When reviewing Aldous Huxley's Ends and Means, ("More Barren Leaves," December 23, 1937), Waugh argues against Huxley's thesis of the human mind's tendency "to reduce the diverse to the identical", and retorts, "Men and women are only types - economic, physiological, what you will - until one knows them. The whole of thought and taste consists in distinguishing between similars." (p. 24). Perhaps this way of looking at life anticipates the repeated motif of the war novels: "Quantitative judgments don't apply."
Despite his oft maligned right-wing attitudes, his review of Vain Glory, memoirs of World War I, edited by Guy Chapman (July 29, 1937) indicates sharp awareness of what was going on in Nazi Germany in 1937:
… it is a book that is badly needed almost everywhere but in England. Germans will not be allowed to read it, and I think the editor has made a great mistake and severely impaired the usefulness of his own work by yielding to the temptation to score points against the Nazi regime. We have no need in England to be reminded of the intolerable injustice of that regime … there is again the appalling danger of a generation growing up who look upon it (war) as a glorious vocation to be followed for its own sake. (p. 24)
In the same review he suggests, in an uncanny fashion, almost the entire range of Sword of Honour, when he writes of Guy Chapman that:
He is occupied primarily with the spiritual consequences, the pollution of truth, the deterioration of human character in prolonged unnatural stress, the emergence of the bully and the cad, the obliteration of chivalry. (p. 24)
Strong-minded, illuminating, occasionally dogmatic, and rather Johnsonian in their vigor, these reviews increase our knowledge of Waugh's lively interest in the work of other professionals and provide further evidence of a clearly defined critical taste and expression entirely consistent with attitudes developed in Waugh's fiction.
The portrait of Evelyn Waugh that we find in C. M. Bowra's Memories 1898-1939 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, 67)* is substantial enough to hold its own in the dazzling gallery of Bowra's friends, colleagues, and associates. Waugh was, Bowra writes, "like the Betjemans in the strength of his personality and the originality of his genius" but "more formidable and complex.'" A number of items that appeared during the past year do suggest something of the complexity of the man, Evelyn Waugh. To be sure, "Temporary Officers and Gentlemen (including 2nd Lt. E. Waugh)," an article by John St. John in the Sunday Times, September 7, 1960, gives us the public Waugh with whom we are most familiar. St. John who served with Waugh during World War II suggests that the novelist adopted a pose of snobbery as a shield against his surroundings, but he adds nothing really new to our knowledge of Waugh's character. He does, however, mention a superb question with which Waugh startled a "visiting brasshat": Is it true that "in the Rumanian army no one beneath the rank of major was permitted to use lipstick." In Bowra's far more searching analysis of Waugh's character, the writer is described as "observant," "appreciative," "scholarly," and "generous"; and Bowra sees him as "comedian," "satirist," and "moralist" whose demon converted his apprehensions into "preposterous fancy." ("… if you told him some lurid piece of news, he would say 'Horrible, horrible. You couldn't please me more.")
The series of five letters from Waugh to the late Thomas Merton that appeared in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter (Spring, 1969) surely bear the stomp of the generosity Bowra ascribes to Waugh. They reveal integrity and exquisite tact as well. In these letters, Waugh manages to be critically honest ("Is there not a slight hint of bustle and salesmanship about the way you want to scoop us all into a higher grade than we are fit for?") and gracefully critical ("I know you have no personal pride in your work, but you do not want … hostile critics to be able to say: '… A promising man ruined by being turned on to make money for the monastery'.") Readers of this Newsletter must have appreciated Paul Doyle's description of certain Waugh items in the Fales Collection of New York University, the promise of a forthcoming Newsletter epitomizing letters from Evelyn to Alec Waugh now in the Boston University Library, and Winnifred M. Bogaard's bibliography, "Waugh's Letters to The Times: 1936-64". But the Merton letters are the most interesting Waugh correspondence we have seen to date. Also drawing on Waugh correspondence to suggest the complexity of the man's attitudes, Paul Doyle cited letters to The Tablet and at least one letter to an English priest in an article, "Evelyn Waugh's Attitude toward Ecumenism" (Twin Circle, July 27, 1969, 1, 11-12.) In his article, Paul Doyle attempts to clarify Waugh's attitude toward changes in the Roman Catholic Church's relation to other religious groups and to explain his criticism of the vernacular Mass: in short, to distinguish Waugh's subtle traditionalism from reaction.
The sub-titles of the Waugh-Greenidge silent film, The Scarlet Woman (1924), with parenthetical descriptions of the frames by Charles E. Linck (EWN, Autumn, 1969), appear to illuminate both the psyche of its scenarist-producer and aspects of his work. A parody of the happy inconsequence of early film melodrama, the story's fantastic conceits - a papal plot, an attempted homosexual seduction - suggest both Corvo and Firbank; and its underlying myth, even to one who finds most psychoanalytic criticism crude, may indicate a conflict in the depths of Waugh's being and in the circle of his Oxford friends - a conflict he would later consciously exploit in Brideshead and in Pinfold. Both biographers and critics must attend to this first significant product of Waugh's imagination.
The most interesting passage in the St. John Times article is the one in which he comments on the first volume of the trilogy. Waugh, he says, "got the mood of those early months dead right.' And he indicates that Ritchie-Hook, Apthorpe, Trimmer, the Garibaldi restaurant, the Isle of Mugg episode, the fiasco in West Africa, are all based on fact. Similarly, in "The Bright Young People In Vile Bodies," Charles Linck and Robert Davis - Papers on Language and Literature, V (Winter 1969), 80-90 - explore the social reality behind Waugh's second novel. Their method is that of scholarship rather than of reminiscence, of course, and their examination of the gossip columns and social news of English papers between 1927 and 1929 amply demonstrates the reportorial element in the work. Yet Linck and Davis point out that Vile Bodies is not only "commentary" and "social comedy" but also "prophecy" and "moral satire." Margot Beste-Chetwynde's jazz musician lover may indeed have been based upon the fact of a famous American baritone and actor, but Waugh's selectiveness, his technical disposition of exaggerated detail, his original and ironic sense of things are what finally give meaning to the character, as they do to the characters and incidents of Officers and Gentlemen.
The investigation of textual problems resulting from Waugh's frequent revisions and multiple editions continues to bear fruit. In English Language Notes, March 1969, 200-201, assuming that he had located a proof-reading error in the Crouchback trilogy, Joseph F. Mattingly misread Waugh's work and the comments of at least two critics. Then in the issue of December, 1969, Robert Davis pointed out (pp. 127-129) that the English Unconditional Surrender differs from the American The End of the Battle and also from the recension, Sword of Honour. So for as I know no one has argued that Crouchback ends by accepting "modern mores," but he does accept a wife and at least three boy-children in Unconditional Surrender. Responding to Mattingly's argument that Guy's childlessness in the recension is crucial and indicates Waugh's conviction that the English Catholic Aristocracy is finished, Robert Davis argued that "whether or not Guy has children of his own is irrelevant to the central themes of the novel: the acceptance of moral responsibility … and of the Christian duty of Charity in place of personal egotism" and that the final revisions served to strengthen those themes. In "The Serial Version of Brideshead Revisited," Twentieth Century Literature, April, 1969, 35-43, Davis had also dealt with textual matters, demonstrating that there are at least five separate stages of the text of Brideshead and three different versions of the division into Books. By comparing the serial version published in Town and Country with the first English edition, he analyzed Waugh's creative process, his means of enriching and controlling character, motive, scene, and theme. To Davis's five variant stages, Alan Clodd added another (EWN, Spring, 1969): "the 'Author's edition' of which an unknown number of copies were made in advance (presumably) of the Chapman and Hall printing." And more recently (EWN, Winter, 1969), Clodd and Paul Doyle have demonstrated such marked differences between the English and American editions of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold that it is possible to speak of two distinct Pinfolds. The situation is further complicated by the fact that "In some places, one version is superior" while at others "the opposing edition is preferable" and by the fact that into the Penguin paperback Waugh introduced additional changes. One can only conclude that while many of the textual variants that have been uncovered are of minor importance, many others are highly significant. As Davis commented in the December, 1969, English Language Notes, "Waugh was capable of altering not only details but important thematic elements." As one who prefers the first Chapman and Hall editions of the separate novels to the recension, I must also agree with his conclusion that "a full study of the textual history" of Waugh's novels would be "rewarding" and is now "essential."
A paperback volume in The Christian Critic Series, edited by Robert Murray Davis, titled Evelyn Waugh, and containing essays by seven critics and scholars who wrote and nearly all published between 1959 and 1967 was issued this year. The essays vary considerably in their particular concerns and cover the Waugh canon quite well.
There is great variety also in the past year's essays that treat particular works or the general canon. Indeed, the diversity of opinion might tempt one to conclude that just as one might speak of a British Pinfold and an American Pinfold one might speak of a Smith Waugh, a Jones Waugh, a Murphy Waugh, etc. Patrick Costello's "An Idea of Comedy and Waugh's Sword of Honour," Kansas Quarterly, I (Summer, 1969), 41-50, erects an elaborate superstructure derived from a religious modification of Suzanne Langer's definition of comedy but is uninspired in analysis. William J. Cook Jr., writing in Mission, II (June, 1969) 21-24, argues that Waugh's last three novels are a final and critical evaluation of his Church and that the conclusion of the Crouchback novels gives "testimony to … the validity of a simple Christ-like religion." In The Theological Novel of Modern Europe (Ungar, 1969) Kurt F. Reinhardt devotes a chapter to "Evelyn Waugh: Christian Gentleman." He surveys the novels and the career, summarizes the "story" of Brideshead, and concludes that it was Waugh's highest achievement: "He never reached this height again." More interesting are recent essays by Robert Davis and Herbert Howarth. Davis's "The Shrinking Garden and-New Exits: The Comic-Satiric Novel in the Twentieth Century" (Kansas Quarterly, I (Summer, 1969), 5-16, distinguishes among three stages of the comic-satiric novel: "The novel of ideas, represented by (Norman) Douglas and (Aldous) Huxley; the externalist novel, represented by Ronald Firbank and Evelyn Waugh …; and modern absurdist comedy and satire …" According to Davis, who selects his examples of this third stage from American fiction, whereas Waugh's protagonists had lost control of their destinies, the existential protagonists of the new absurdist fiction - Yossarian in Catch-22, for instance - assert "the energies of the self." Last but surely not least among these recent essays, I must speak of Herbert Howarth's "Quelling the Riot: Evelyn Waugh's Progress," which appeared in The Shapeless God : Essays on Modern Fiction, edited by Harry J. Mooney and Thomas F. Staley (Pittsburg, 1969). The piece, an appreciation in the best sense, has so much manner and so much style one is tempted to ignore its critical perceptions, which are very real. Tracing the progress of the satiric pilgrim, Howarth leads us to his essay's climax with a comment about the positive side of Waugh's depiction, in Sword of Honour, of national moral collapse: "When the establishment says "Hush," he's damned if he'll hush." And his witty concluding remark about the trilogy deserves quotation too: "on the evidence of the trilogy we must say at the very least, that if he (Waugh) was too much of a snob to adopt redbrick England like a gentleman … he was religious enough to take it as his cross."
*Heinz Kosok's "Supplementary Checklist of Criticism" (EWN, Spring, 1969) lists the American edition of this book, which has not hitherto been reviewed in these pages.
This is a continuation of the earlier checklists, published in Evelyn Waugh Newsletter (EWN), II, i, and III, i. It includes books and articles published since 1968, as well as some items omitted from the previous lists.
Anon., "The Beauty of His Malice: Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)", Time (Apr. 22,1966), 84.
Auden, W.H., "As It Seemed To Us", New Yorker (Apr. 3,1965), 159-192.
Blumenberg, Hans, "Eschatologische Ironie: Über die Romane Evelyn Waughs," in: Karlheinz Schmidthüs (ed.), Lob der Schöpfung und Ärgernis der Zeit: Moderne christliche Dictung in Kritik und Deutung (Freiburg, 1959), pp. 159-170.
Bodelsen, C.A., "Evelyn Waugh," in: Sven M. Kristensen (ed.), Fremmede digtere i det 20 århundrede, vol. III (Copenhagen, 1968), pp. 185-198.
Bogaards, Winnifred M., "Waugh's Letters to The Times", EWN, III, iii (1969), 5-6.
Bogaards, Winnifred M., "Ideas and Values in the Work of Evelyn Waugh", Unpub. Doct. Diss. (University of Saskatchewan, 1969).
Buckley, William F., "Evelyn Waugh, R.I.P.", National Review, XVIII (1966), 400-401.
Cameron J.M., "A Post-Waugh Insight", Commonweal, LXXXIII (1965), 114-115.
Clinton, Farley, "Evelyn Waugh, R.I.P.", National Review, XVIII (1966), 416-417.
Clodd, Alan, "Some Textual Variants in Brideshead", EWN, III, i (1969), 5-6.
Costello, Patrick, "An Idea of Comedy and Waugh's Sword of Honour," Kansas Quarterly, I (Summer, 1969), 41-50.
Davis, Robert Murray (ed.), Evelyn Waugh, The Christian Critic Series (St. Louis, 1969).
Davis, Robert Murray, "Guy Crouchback's Children - A Reply," English Language Notes, VII (December 1969), 127-129.
Davis, Robert Murray, "Harper's Bazaar and A Handful of Dust," Philological Quarterly, XLVIII (October 1969), 508-516.
Davis, Robert Murray, "The Serial Version of Brideshead Revisited," Twentieth Century Literature, XV (April 1969), 35-43.
Davis, Robert Murray, "The Shrinking Garden and New Exits: The Comic-Satiric Novel in the Twentieth Century," Kansas Quarterly, I (Summer 1969), 5-16.
Davis, Robert Murray, "Textual Problems in the Novels of Evelyn Waugh," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, LXIII, i (1969), 41-46.
Doyle, Paul A., Evelyn Waugh, Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective Series (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1969).
Doyle, Paul A., "Evelyn Waugh's Attitude Toward Ecumenism," Twin Circle, III (July 27, 1969), 1, 11-12.
Doyle, Paul A., "The Year's Work in Waugh Studies," EWN, III, i (1969), 6-8.
Doyle, Paul A., "Waugh Correspondence in the Fales Collection, NYU," EWN, III, ii (1969), 7-9.
Doyle, Paul A. and Alan Clodd, "A British Pinfold and an American Pinfold", EWN, III, iii (1969), 1-5.
Fielding, Gabriel, "Evelyn Waugh and the Cross of Satire," The Critic, XXIII (Feb.-Mar., 1965), 52-56.
Harty, E.R., "Brideshead Re-read: A Discussion of Some of the Themes of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited," Unisa English Studies, III (1967), 66-74.
Howarth, Herbert, "Quelling the Riot: Evelyn Waugh's Progress," The Shapeless God: Essays on Modern Fiction, ed. Henry J. Mooney, Jr. and Thomas F. Staley (Pittsburgh, 1968), pp. 67-89.
Jervis, Steven Alexander, "The Novels of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Study," Unpub. Doct. Diss. (Stanford University, 1966).
Kearful, Frank J., "Tony Last and Ike McCaslin: The Loss of a Usable Past," University of Windsor Review, III, ii (1968), 45-52.
Kenner, Hugh, "Evelyn Waugh: In Memoriam," National Review, XVIII (1966), 418.
Lambotte, Charles, "Un humoriste: Evelyn Waugh," in: F. Lelotte (ed.), Convertis du XXe siècle, vol. II (Paris, Bruxelles, 1958), pp. 71-86.
Linck, Charles E., Jr. and Robert Murray Davis, "The Bright Young People in Vile Bodies," Papers on Language and Literature, V (Winter, 1969), 80-90.
Linck, Charles E., Jr. (ed.) "Waugh-Greenidge Film - The Scarlet Woman," EWN, III, ii (1969), 1-7.
Mattingly, Joseph F., "Guy Crouchback's 'Children'," English Language Notes, VI (March 1969), 200-201.
Muggeridge, Malcolm, "Evelyn Waugh, Esq.," The Critic, XXIV (June-July, 1966), 56-58.
Muggeridge, Malcolm, "Evelyn Waugh," Observer (April 17, 1966), 26.
Nichols, Beverley, "Interlude with Evelyn Waugh," The Sun in My Eyes (London, 1969).
Osborne, John, "Evelyn Waugh Faces 'Life' and Vice Versa," Atlantic Monthly, CCXVIII (Dec., 1966), 114-115.
Pritchett, V.S., "Evelyn Waugh," New Statesman, (April 15, 1966), 547.
Quennell, Peter, "Evelyn Waugh," New York Times Book Review (May 8, 1966), 2, 33.
Reinhardt, Kurt F., "Evelyn Waugh: Christian Gentleman," The Theological Novel of Modern Europe (New York, 1969).
Rutherford, Andrew, "Waugh's Sword of Honour," in: Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (eds.), Imagined Worlds: Essays on some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt (London, 1968), pp. 441-460.
Schlüter, Kurt, Kuriose Welt im modernen englischen Roman: Dargestellt an ausgewählten Werken von Evelyn Waugh und Angus Wilson (Berlin, 1969).
Semple, H.E., "Evelyn Waugh's Modern Crusade," English Studies in Africa, XI (1968), 47-59.
St. John, John, "Temporary Officers and Gentlemen," Sunday Times, (September 7, 1969), p. 10.
Sykes, Christopher, "Evelyn," Sunday Times, (April 17, 1966), 12.
Sykes, Christopher, et al. "A Critique of Waugh," Listener, LXXVIII (1967), 267-269.
Thérèse, Sister M. (ed.), "Waugh's Letters to Thomas Merton," EWN, III, i (1969), 1-4.
Wheeler, Gordon, "Waugh on Knox: An Appraisal," Dublin Review, no. 482 (Winter, 1959/60), 346-352.
Wooton, Carl W., "Responses to the Modern World: A Study of Evelyn Waugh's Novels", Unpub. Doct. Diss. (Oregon, 1968).
ALS. 1p. Piers Court, Stinchcombe, Glos., Nov. 9, n.y. (postmarked Chicago, Nov. 18, 1946). To John William Rogers.
Dear Sir,
I am at a loss to explain Mr.Matson's extraordinary behaviour. I can only suppose his mind has given way. My letter for your paper was written many weeks ago and should be in your hands. I deeply regret the inconvenience that has caused (sic?) you and the discourtesy of my agent.
Yours faithfully,
Evelyn Waugh
At the period in question, John William Rogers was on editor of the Chicago Sun. This epistle suggests that Waugh wrote on item, a letter to the editor, possibly, which appeared in the Sun. If so, no Waugh bibliographer has yet turned up this reference. Waugh scholars would also welcome definite information about the identity of Mr. Matson, conceivably an employee of Waugh's literary agent.
Yvon Tosser (Paris-Nanterre University)
Albérès, R.M., L'aventure intellectuelle du XXeme siècle. Paris, Albin Michel, 1959, pp. 212, 238, 240, 261, 273, 280, 281, 306, 307, 319, 351.
Bory, Jean-Louis, "Lorsque le diable pince sans rire: l'épreuve de Gilbert Pinfold", Paris, L'Express, 10.2.1959, pp. 28-29.
Cassen, Bernard, "Evelyn Waugh: la nostalgie d'un ordre qui n'a jamais été," Paris, Le Monde, 27.4.1968, p. IV-V.
Chaigne, Louis, Edmond Campion, martyr (a review of), Paris, Les Nouvelles Litteraires, 10.6.1954, p. 3.
Chauveau, Paul, Diablerie (A review of Black Mischief), Les Nouvelles Litteraires, 19.3.1938, p. 5.
Chauveau, Paul, Une poignée de cendre (a review of A Handful of Dust), Les Nouvelles Litteraires, 24.5.1945, p. 3.
Edwards, John D., "Fleurs blanches et ours en peluche," Paris, Le Monde, 27.4.1968, p. IV.
Elsen, Claude, "A preface to the French translation of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold," Paris, Stock 1957, 5 pages.
Giraudoux, Jean, "A preface to the French translation of Black Mischief," Paris, Grosset, 1938, 9 pages.
Lalou, René, A review of Brideshead Revisited. Paris, Les Nouvelles Litteraires, 29.5.1947.
id. A review of The Loved One. id. 29.9.49.
id. A review of Men at Arms. id. 11.3.54
id. A review of Officers and Gentlemen. id. 31.5.56.
id. A review of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. id. 20.11.58.
Las Vergnas, Raymond, "Avec notre meilleur souvenir. A review of A Little Learning," Paris, Les Nouvelles Litteraires, 27.6.1968
Maurois, André, "A preface to the French translation of Edmund Campion," Chambéry, Amiot Dumont, 1953, 4 pages.
Monod, Sylvère, "Satire ou invective?," Paris, Le Monde, 27.4.68. p. IV-V.
X., "Whiskies-soda sous !es bombes." A review of Officers and Gentlemen. Paris, L'Express, 20.7.1956, p.16.
Evelyn Waugh, ed. Robert Murray Davis, "The Christian Critic Series," B. Herder Book Co., 314 North Jefferson, St. Louis, Missouri 63103, 1969, $1.25. Reviewed by James Carens (Bucknell University).
Within its defined limits, Robert Davis's selection of pieces on Waugh is a very useful one. We can learn something - or have an argument with something - in almost every one of the essays or excerpts. Alvin Kernan, Charles Linck, Patricia Corr, D.J. Dooley, Marston La France, Bernard Bergonzi, and Robert Murray Davis are represented, and it is good to have their essays in this convenient form. Not all of the essays, however, are of the same excellence. Alvin Kernan's "The Wall and the Jungle: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh" and Bernard Bergonzi's "Evelyn Waugh's Gentlemen" seem to me exceptional. Kernan's exploration of "circularity" in the pattern or design of the early novels and Bergonzi's perception of the conflict between myth and reality in the later Waugh justify inclusion of their essays among the choicest items of Waugh criticism. On the other hand, Patricia Corr's "Evelyn Waugh: Sanity and Catholicism" seems to me to demonstrate all the faults of doctrinaire criticism. Waugh "rather timid handling … his Catholic material in Brideshead Revisited"! "Catholicism. . . a coherent philosophy" in his later novels! At such moments I hurry off in search of some curmudgeonly atheist, orthodox or reformed Jew, suffering existentialist, or free-thinking supernaturalist!
Robert Davis's introduction is brief but good. And it was a real pleasure to read a footnote in which he makes a point that needs making: "Even now the disclosures of the Philby spy case in England are putting into new perspective Waugh's accusations (implications?) of Communist conspiracy in Sword of Honour. What had seemed a disgruntled Tory version of McCarthyism is now shown to have some basis in fact."
Southern Illinois University Press in Carbondale calls our attention to the Spring publication of a new book by Vida E. Markovic, The Changing Face: Disintegration of Personality in the Twentieth Century British Novel, 1900-1950. Among the fictional characters studied is Tony Last.
Robert Murray Davis is scheduled to organize a listing of the Waugh manuscripts at the University of Texas library.
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: $2.50 a year (22 shillings in England). A single issue 90 cents. Check or money order 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 Department, Nassau Community College, State University of New York, Garden City, New York 11530.
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| Editorial Board | |
| Editor: | P.A. Doyle |
| Associate Editors: | Alfred W. Borrello (Kingsborough Community College) |
| James F. Carens (Bucknell University) | |
| Robert M. Davis (University of Oklahoma) | |
| Heinz Kosok (University of Marburg) | |
| Charles E. Linck, Jr. (East Texas State University) |