EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER

Volume 4 Number 2 - Autumn 1970

THE FILM WORLD OF VILE BODIES

Heinz Kosok (University of Marburg, Germany)

Waugh's interest in films and the world of film-making can be traced through various episodes in his novels and stories; it was emphasized by the recent publication, in EWN, of Waugh's scenario for The Scarlet Woman, which he and some friends actually filmed in 1924. Critics of Vile Bodies have apparently been content to accept the existence of the film chapter in this novel, in which the 'Wonderfilm Company of Great Britain' produces a disastrous Life of John Wesley (finally entitled A Brand from the Burning), as another proof of Waugh's fascination with the film industry. Such an interpretation, however, places this episode, though highly amusing, in a slightly off-center position, since it is conceived neither with the world of Mayfair nor, except by the thinnest of threads, with the story of Adam and Nina and their futile attempts to achieve permanence in a world of "radical instability." It is difficult to believe that Waugh, a highly skilled craftsman even in his early novels, should have included this episode for no other reason than for the sake of telling a funny story or, possibly, of parodying the film industry. It is my purpose to show that the Wesley film has an important structural function and can serve as a key to the interpretation of the novel.

In Vile Bodies, even more so than in Waugh's other books, the reader is told next to nothing about the characters' faces, and very little about their thoughts and feelings, while his attention is continually drawn to their clothing. In fact the reader has little else to distinguish them by except their clothes, which thus seem to take on the function of costumes worn by almost indistinguishable actors. There are also numerous references to real costumes and actors' trappings: Archie Schwert's guests appear disguised as savages, Mrs. Melrose-Ape's girls pose as angels, at the motor races Adam and his friends pretend to be mechanics and depot staff, Lord Balcairn wears a false beard and the order of St. Michael and St. George to obtain access to Lady Metroland's party, Father Rothschild carries a false beard in his borrowed suitcase. Moreover, there is a continuous interchange of roles: Agatha Runcible is taken for the spare driver, Lord Balcairn for a spy, Colonel Blount takes Adam by turns for a travelling salesman and for his son-in-law, and he signs a check with "Charlie Chaplin." If one considers that both the buildings and the scenery often appear like stage settings - there seems to be nothing behind the plywood fronts - the world of Vile Bodies shows indeed a distinct resemblance to the unreal world of a film. This is stressed by the film qualities of the narrative technique with its quick cuts, snatches of dialogue, and its stress on the visual aspects of the story.

As soon as the film quality of the novel as a whole has been noted, it is easier to observe the numerous parallels between the Wesley film on the one hand and the larger world of the novel on the other. In fact, A Brand from the Burning can in many respects be considered as an epitome of the novel as a whole. The scene in the film is Doubting Hall, which the taxi driver insists on referring to as "Doubting 'All." Vile Bodies does indeed show a world without a scheme of values where literally everything becomes doubtful. It is, perhaps, not without significance that the character through whose eyes the reader sees the filming of the life of Wesley is called "Adam." His first impressions of the events at Doubting Hall correspond exactly to the reader's first impressions of the world of Vile Bodies; it is a world of senseless cruelties and injustices where they are "shooting" Colonel Blount for no reason at all and where "they made a complete mess" of Miss La Touche when they "shot" her: "… we had the machine out and ran over all the bits carefully last night after dinner - you never saw such rotten little scraps - quite unrecognizable half of them. We didn't dare show them to her husband …" It is a great relief to Adam when he realizes that this is a description of a film under production, but the world to which he belongs contains just such cruelties; it is a world where a girl is killed at a dubious party without any action being taken by a corrupt police, where Lady Metroland appraises the girls entering her house "with an expert eye" and sends the suitable ones to her South American brothels, where Lord Balcairn is compelled to put his head into a gas oven, where racing drivers kill each other by throwing spanners.

Adam quickly learns several other important points about the film. Allegedly it deals with religion, but in reality the religious aspect is simply a means of making money since the Wesleyan population of the British Isles is considered big enough to ensure the success of the film. There is no need to point out the purely secular part that religion plays in the world of Mayfair and the places its inhabitants visit. Similarly, tradition as it is portrayed in the film has become entirely meaningless; it corresponds, for instance, to the equally empty Christmas traditions at Colonel Blount's house. Instead, the film relies on a succession of sensational and melodramatic events (battles, a duel, a love story, Red Indians, a narrow escape), just as Agatha Runcible and her friends have to convince themselves that they still exist by inventing an increasingly sensational way of life. Both worlds seem to be devoid of any logic of events; they consist of nothing more than an unpredictable sequence of unrelated scenes strung together by the thinnest of story lines.

One aspect of the film that is stressed repeatedly is the cheapness and shabbiness of everything connected with it. The company has been able to afford only four horses, the actors are third-rate and unpaid, the cameraman forgets to put in a new roll of film, and the director makes desperate attempts to sell the whole affair at any price. It is perhaps this more than anything else that relates the film to the world of the novel, which is not only a world without values but a world without value, dominated by pretence and tolerated through fake interest, fake enthusiasm and fake vitality. It is precisely the constant attempt to be original that produces the impression of tedious unimaginativeness. The effect this world has on its inhabitants is that of increasing, and irresistible, boredom, and this is just what Adam, Nina and the Rector experience when they are shown the film.

There is only one person who seems to enjoy the production of the film, namely Colonel Blount, who presides over Doubting 'AII and makes the film possible, both by permitting the company to use his premises and by putting his money into it. He, however, is an irresponsible eccentric without a memory, without the capacity for rational thinking, and with an almost inhuman predilection for absurd practical jokes. It is tempting to see in him the image of a deity that dominates the larger world of Vile Bodies, because the succession of chance events, accidents and inconsequential doings in the world of Mayfair seems to be engineered by just such an omnipotent figure who takes his lonely pleasure in manipulating his helpless victims, twisting their lives or suddenly untangling them in an unexpected stroke of luck.

When Colonel Blount shows the film to his patient visitors, "there occurred one of the mishaps from which the largest super-cinemas are not absolutely immune. There was a sudden crackling sound, a long blue spark, and the light was extinguished." Adam and Nina, jerked out of the adventurous life of John Wesley, find themselves in the dark, in a lonely country house surrounded by the desolation of a blizzard. Only a few hours later they learn that the lights have suddenly fused in the larger world too: war has been declared, and Adam is soon shown sitting on a "splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world." The super-cinema of his real world has proved to be not absolutely immune from the 'mishap' of catastrophe, and the film of Mayfair life has prematurely come to an unexpected end.

The Wesley film thus serves as a shorter version of and at the same time a scenic commentary on the events in Vile Bodies. It enables us to obtain a clearer understanding of the book and of the author's attitude toward the world he depicts. With these parallels in mind, one can no longer consider Vile Bodies (as some critics have done) as pure entertainment, and any interpretation that sees in it a loving description of a world with which the author ultimately identifies himself becomes equally untenable. If the above analysis is accepted, Vile Bodies presents itself as a bitter satire on a world dominated by sensationalism, cruelty, and injustice, a world devoid of meaning and hope, a world doomed to catastrophe.

THE FUNCTION OF GOSSIP, RUMOR, AND PUBLIC OPINION IN EVELYN WAUGH'S A HANDFUL OF DUST

Roger T. Burbridge (Carnegie-Mellon University)

Gossip, public opinion, and rumor are the instruments by which society establishes and maintains its standards of behavior. Through gossip the actions of its members are made generally known; public opinion approves or disapproves these actions as norms for society, and this exerts a controlling influence over future actions; rumor comes to the fore whenever the unembellished truth is insufficient or inappropriate to serve as an example of correct or incorrect behavior. Rumor is readily accepted as truth simply because it fulfills the function of reinforcing the beliefs of the group which propagates it.

Gossip and rumor become really important in a society whose values need constant reassertion because they are not in touch with reality. The London society that Waugh shows us in A Handful of Dust is a good example. This "in-group" of middle-and upper-class people is composed of parasites; whether they live off their estates, off each other, or, as in the case of Jock GrantMenzies, on a sinecure; none of them works for a living and in a very real sense none of them ever has to grow up. They are a society of children playing an elaborate game of shifting alliances, social one-upmanship, and "secrets," and the rules of the game allow them to live without having to face any deep truths about themselves or others. Nothing is to be taken seriously. It is unimportant to know what people are really like, and what is said about people behind their backs is for the group more "reliable" than face-to-face communication. It is interesting that so many of the characters in A Handful of Dust are introduced in the course of gossip, and they are thus introduced unreliably from our point-of-view; yet by the standards of the people who talk about them they are characterized neatly and precisely. When Mrs. Beaver remarks that Tony is a prig and that Brenda should be bored with him, we are seeing the Lasts' relationship quite accurately from the viewpoint of London society. The picture is only distorted when the observer does not quite "fit in" to society and is thus on inaccurate observer. This is the case with Jock, who regards the Lasts' marriage as ideal and describes Brenda as a "devoted wife;" Jock is not seeing clearly because he is characterizing an "in" member of society when he does not fully subscribe to society's values. Jock shows his imperfect command of those values whenever he thinks of marriage in connection with love or betrays a sense of responsibility to his constituents by asking about pigs. But people like Jock and Allan only emphasize the values of their group by their occasional aberrant behavior.

The chatter of society in A Handful of Dust is, as I have hinted, by no means idle. First of all, it reveals to us a very specific set of values, in which among other things it is expected that one have an occasional "proper affaire." We learn that, "with the exception of her sister's, opinion was greatly in favour of Brenda's adventure," (1) and it is plain that even Marjorie's disapproval is based less on moral grounds than on the fact that Beaver isn't the right man. (Marjorie herself has had an affair to which her husband dutifully turned a blind eye.) The game is accepted in the proper spirit by Brenda, whose marriage with Tony turns out to have been no more serious than a flirtation. Brenda's rapport with society is made clear by the casual way in which she enters on her affair with Beaver. She makes very little effort to cover up, not even taking the time to learn a few terms in economics ("bimetalism" has nothing to do with that subject), and she is surprised when Tony takes the whole thing seriously. She chides him for "brooding," and tries to "fix him up" with another girl as if she has no comprehension of his deep feeling for her. Brenda treats Tony, as she at first treats Beaver, al a child who has to be taught the rules of the game and reprimanded if he does not play along. Tony balks at playing the game and is censured for it by society; Beaver learns quickly and through his affair with Brenda gains ready acceptance in a group which has previously merely tolerated him. Brenda herself knows the rules thoroughly, and only comes to misfortune when she forgets them. She has, or seems to have, "poise" - a quality which occurs as a key word in Chapter Five and which is the ability to treat life as a game and emerge from it unscathed. We only learn at the end of the book what Tony suspects - that having "poise" does not consist in just thinking you have it, and that finally Brenda is not as poised as her friends.

The superficiality of society is constantly reaffirmed in its games of words. The fortune-teller, who gives the same message of romantic adventure to everybody, is on the same level of reality as are her customers, and her "readings" correspond very closely to the gossip of society. This is a make-believe world where appearances form a closed system of their own and words have no connection with real things. Even the testimony of witnesses in a divorce case is casually arranged for and the judge is not expected to look beneath the surface. The hotel servants and the detectives are outsiders hired to be part of the game, and their contrived evidence is merely a more substantial form of the rumors by means of which society establishes its own form of "reality." The fact that rumor and false evidence are taken seriously is shown in a number of ways. The hired detectives are aghast when Tony violates the rules by speaking to them; and he shakes the whole structure when he goes down to breakfast with Milly's little daughter. The lies which are fabricated about Tony's drunkenness and immorality with Princess Abdul Akbar immediately become established as fact, and even Brenda, who should know better, comes to regard Tony's behavior as dishonorable. The fact is that the set of values established by rumor and public opinion predetermine what can be "true" and what must be "not true" within the framework of society. When Allan, who fits very ill in society, tries to fix things up between Brenda and Tony by spreading rumors of his own, he is dismally unsuccessful because he is operating in the wrong value system. Allan believes that adultery is exceptional, and his effort to establish this as a truth in a society which regards adultery as normal is pathetic.

Where gossip and rumor play such an important role in gaining social acceptance, it is natural that people within society want to be talked about. Brenda shows this desire when she "tries to be confidential about Beaver" with Allan, who understands the importance she attaches to other people's interest. It is only by being talked about in the right way that people can know they are doing what is acceptable, and Brenda betrays her insecurity and her lack of values rooted in real experience by her concern for other people's opinions. By contrast, Jock and to a greater extent Allan are relatively uninterested in what people think of them, and the most uninterested of all are the characters who ore quite outside of society - the "impoverished Lasts." The impoverished Lasts are the only characters who are deeply rooted in concrete reality, for even Tony himself, though he is not a true member of society, lives to a great extent in a make-believe world of his own and plays his own word-game with the romantic room-names of his house. The impoverished Lasts are bound to the basics of life by economic necessity, and it is notable that they raise animals instead of hunting them. They are the only people in the novel, with the exception of Tony and possibly of Jock, who feel genuine grief at the death of John-Andrew:

The impoverished Lasts were stunned by the telegram. They lived on an extensive but unprofitable chicken farm near Great Missenden. It did not enter the heads of any of them that now, if anything happened, they were the heirs to Hetton. Had it done so, their grief would have been just as keen. (2)

Here we have the opposite extreme from the values of London society, and it is a kind of behavior with which we, the readers, morally approve, no matter how dull the Lasts seem to us. It is implied very strongly in the novel that what we accept as morally responsible behavior goes hand-in-hand with some kind of necessity, whether it be economic (as in the case of the impoverished Lasts), or the bond of love (as in Tony's case), or the weaker but still tangible ties of affection which we see between Tony and Jock. Children are similarly basic; their absence from society is noticeable as is Tony's defense of Milly's worth as a person on the grounds that she has a child. Love, friendship, economic necessity, and children all tend to impel people to positive and meaningful values. The values of society, on the other hand, are constructed out of air like Tony's dream city and collapse at the first touch of reality. Public opinion shrinks from genuine emotion, and this is dramatized forcefully when Brenda falls in love with Beaver. She is also short of money, and at the very moment when she experiences real emotion and economic need, society literally withdraws and leaves her stranded.

The final effect of gossip, rumor, and public opinion in the novel is to satirize society by revealing its superficiality; the picture we get of society is like the reflections from the chrome-plated walls of Mrs. Beaver: it dazzles but it is all surface. In contrast to this we get at the end the more substantial picture of the impoverished Lasts, who work and love and are impervious to what people think of them, whose life is, to use Tony's words from another context, "architecture harmonizing with local character … indigenous material employed throughout."(3)

NOTES

1. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934), p. 74.

2. Ibid., p. 165.

3. Ibid., p. 286.

EVELYN WAUGH AND BRIAN HOWARD

Robert Murray Davis (University of Oklahoma)

In A Little Learning, Evelyn Waugh announced that "the characters in my novels often wrongly identified with Harold Acton were to a great extent drawn from" Brian Howard, another would-be arbiter of society and art at Oxford and later in London (Boston, 1964, p. 204). With the publication of Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, edited by Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster (London: Anthony Blond, Ltd., 1968), Waugh's readers can now appreciate the extent to which Johnnie Hoop of Vile Bodies as well as Ambrose Silk of Put Out More Flags and "Basil Seal Rides Again" and Anthony Blanche of Brideshead Revisited were caricatures or portraits of Howard.

Because Howard was an inveterate social climber and self-styled leader of the Bright Young People, Waugh's first cut at him as Johnnie Hoop must have been felt most deeply. Hoop and Archie Schwert, another climber, are taken in by Adam's hoax in his "Mr. Chatterbox" column about block suede evening shoes, and Hoop's mother, like her son athirst for modernity and elegance, is one of those drawn to the tube station mentioned in the column as a fashionable literary haunt. Howard had painted the "Bruno Hatte" pictures used in the hoax which parallels Adam's imaginary sculptor Provna (See: Charles E. Linck and R.M. Davis, "The Bright Young People in Vile Bodies," Papers on Language and Literature, V (Winter 1969), 84), and it may seem odd that Mrs. Hoop announces that he is doing a bust of Johnnie. However, Waugh had already turned the joke against Howard in another way: soon after the hoax, "according to the Sunday Graphic, Evelyn Waugh showed his latent antagonism to Brian by painting a parody of Brian's parodies 'as a skit on the sort of atrocities which all would-be connoisseurs admired at the Bruno Hat exhibition.'" (Lancaster, p.275. The variant spellings run through press accounts of the time).

Still more scathing and probably the clearest key to Hoop's original for the contemporary audience is Waugh's description of Hoop's invitations to parties, adapted "from Blast and Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto. These had two columns of close print; in one was a list of alI the things Johnnie hated, and in the other all the things he thought he liked." (Vile Bodies, (London, 1930), p. 51n.). This is mischievously close to Howard's sixteen inch high invitation to "The Great Urban Dionysia," reproduced in the illustrations to Lancaster's book, with columns headed "J'accuse" and "J'adore." Except for a dislike of Gertrude Stein and an enthusiasm for Tennyson and other examples of high Victoriana (a taste he introduced and developed at Oxford), Howard's loves - intuition, Picasso, Cocteau, Lawrence, Spengler among them - and hates - Belloc, nationalism, Bright Young People, the Tatler, Sketch, Spectator, and Fortnightly Review, chic - are predictable enough. The fact that the dullness of Hoop's party was a fairly accurate reflection of its original - the Evening Standard called it "at moments definitely … sub-urban in its lack of excitement" (Lancaster, p. 269) - probably did nothing to soothe Howard's feelings, but he seems to have left no record of his reaction to the novel.

He did recognize and comment upon his portrayal as Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags twelve years later: he thought it a vicious attack, and he wrote to his German friend Toni that he too had been portrayed (as Hans, Ambrose's German lover). Many of Howard's mannerisms are reflected in Ambrose, but Howard's adventures as a plain-clothes "contact man" for M.I.5. are closer to Basil Seal's activities than they are to Ambrose's innocent diversions in the Atheist section of the Ministry's Religious Department. According to the memoir, Howard hated officers, clerics, and "failed gentlemen," and he seems to have pursued his contacts through a great many bars, making loud threats to denounce as fascists anyone who incurred his displeasure (pp. 427-433). His subsequent career as an Aircraftsman second class was far more entertaining and disreputable than Ambrose's damp Irish exile, but if Waugh knew of Howard's military career, he did not choose to convert it into fiction.

Ambrose reappears once more in "Basil Seal Rides Again" as the object of a testimonial banquet featuring Parsnip and Pimpernel, fellow ex-leftists. Basil's final point of boredom is reached as Parsnip is praising Ambrose for his silence as a writer, an attitude traceable, perhaps, of Stephen Spender's post-war comment to Howard, "How wise you were to wait" (Lancaster, p. 500). However, this scene is only a minor part of the story, serving primarily to link the aging Basil to characters from his youth.

Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited is Waugh's last major character drawn from Howard. Although the memoir furnishes no overt parallels between Howard's and Blanche's activities, quotations from Howard's letters and records of his conversation demonstrate that his style - arch, baroque, full of equally calculated outrageousness and mock-innocence - was the source for Blanche's. Examples would be tedious as well as inconclusive, but the use and placement of "my dear" is an obvious point of similarity, and Howard's description of himself costumed as a dowager is characteristic: "Willie Clarkson took an hour to make me up. My dear, in his hands my face suddenly became that of some bastard daughter with a dozen mothers. One mother lent me the aspects of a drug-fiend nun; another the quality of an early Sargent; another mother made me look a little like Mrs. Asquith. I was astounding. When I looked at myself in the glass I laughed so much that I blew all the champagne in my glass into my face. A mixture, au fin, of Lady Tree and an Eton dame. You can imagine me, thumping, rather top-heavy, up those stairs at Grosvenor Square. Statuesque, terrific. People waiting on the landing above recoiled." (pp. 169-170).

Judging from A Little Learning, Waugh was fascinated by Howard without approving of or much liking him, and in the twenties, the period when he seems to have known Howard best, he pilloried him. In later years, when Howard had grown increasingly impossible and Waugh, according to various accounts and to the evidence of his non-fiction, increasingly narrow, the characters based on Howard became more complex and, in the case of Ambrose Silk, among the most sympathetic in his novels. Critics who find the later novels unsympathetic and unsympathizing might consider more carefully Waugh's changing treatment of Brian Howard, from minor fool to major character.

THE CONCLUSION OF WAUGH'S TRILOGY: THREE VARIANTS

Winnifred M. Bogaards (University of Saskatchewan)

When Sword of Honour was published in 1965, a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement ("Wartime Revisited," March 17, 1966, 216) noted that the most important of the many changes Waugh had made in this final version of his three war novels was a small alteration on the last page. While Unconditional Surrender, gave Guy and his new Catholic wife two boys of their own, as well as the child of Virginia and Trimmer, Sword of Honour pointedly limited them to Trimmer's offspring.

This change is certainly significant, but it occurred much earlier than Sword of Honour. One finds Guy childless in the second Chapman and Hall edition of Unconditional Surrender, which, like the first, was published in 1961. However, in this second edition the description of Guy's barren state (by his brother-in-law Box-Bender) is slightly different from that found in Sword of Honour. There exist, then, three distinct versions of the ending, as the following textual comparison indicates (the Penguin edition of Unconditional Surrender (1964) follows the original Chapman and Hall text):

(The first and second editions of Little Brown's The End of the Battle are, in regard to this material, the same as the first and second editions of the Chapman and Hall volumes.)

That Waugh himself considered this alteration of particular consequence is indicated in a letter written to Randolph Churchill on August 28, 1962: "The second edition of Unconditional Surrender has an important change. The hero is allowed no children of his own" ("Evelyn Waugh: Letters (and Postcards) to Randolph Churchill," Encounter, XXXI, 1 (July 1968), 12.). Unfortunately, Waugh did not go on to specify the precise significance he attached to this change, and critical opinions inevitably vary. Considering only the US and SOH texts, the TLS reviewer saw Guy's childlessness as a denial of the "happy, lucky ending" which seriously altered Waugh's picture of divine providence. Given the three texts, the same reviewer might have felt his opinion even more justified since the final revision certainly seems less optimistic than the second. Guy is first given two children of his own, then denied them with the comment that their absence is "not always a disadvantage," and finally pitied for his sad fate.

Nevertheless, it seems unwise to interpret these passages as a sign of Waugh's increasing distrust in divine providence - rather the opposite. The comments, once must remember, are put in the mouth of Box-Bender, an object of satire throughout the trilogy, and, moreover, a man who has been greatly disappointed by his own son's decision to enter a monastery. They reflect, not Waugh's attitude toward Guy and fatherhood, but rather Waugh's changing presentation of Box-Bender's view's on the situation. In the second edition of Unconditional Surrender Waugh stresses Box-Bender's bitter feeling that it is not always an advantage to have children of one's own and his belief that Guy, with a son who will carry on his name, is luckier than himself. In Sword of Honour Waugh makes essentially the some point, but ironically, by changing Box-Bender's envy to pity which the reader must feel is unwarranted under the circumstances.

Guy is indeed luckier in the last two versions of the ending. Once he and Domenica are denied a family, little Trimmer takes on far greater significance as the means which divine providence, no respecter of rank or wealth, has chosen to provide an heir for a devout Catholic couple who would otherwise be barren. When Waugh arranges that the pious country squire tokes responsibility for a child who is a product of fashionable Mayfair and the common man - the two social groups who have been his sworn enemies throughout Waugh's fiction - and when he pointedly represents this child as a providential gift, surely he suggests that human compassion and charity, with God's help, can and should end the battle of the classes.

CHARLES E. LINCK'S BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WAUGH'S EARLY WORK, 1910 - 1930: SOME ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS

Marston LaFrance (Carleton University)

Compiling a bibliography will always rank highly among thankless scholarly tasks. After months of searching, checking the references - often at second hand because of impossible distances - and then bringing order out of a chaos of note cards, some amateur is sure to come along, sooner or later, with the inevitable corrections and additions. Professor Linck's bibliography, "Works of Evelyn Waugh, 1910-1930," appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, X (April, 1964), 19-25; and any scholar who finds that he actually needs the following corrections in order to make use of it really should be in some other line of work. Nevertheless, in the interests of accuracy, I offer them. Each item is given just as it appears in Professor Linck's bibliography; my correction appears within parentheses after the full stop which closes the entry.

Under 1921, Editorials and Editor's Notes:

"The Community Spirit," Lancing College Magazine, Nov., 1921, pp. 70-71. (p.70)

"The Youngest Generation," Lancing College Magazine, Dec. 1921, pp. 82-83. (p. 85)

Letter to the Editor (about his making the Lancing College Debating Society a "closed" society), Lancing College Magazine, Nove., 1921, pp. 82-83. (p.83)

Under 1923, Letter to the Editor:

"Rugger Night" (about brawling in London), The Isis, Feb. 7, 1923, p. 10 (p. 8)

Under 1924, Reviews of Cinema and a Book:

"Seen in the Dark" (Review of If Winter Comes), The Isis, Feb. 20, 1924, p. 5. (p. 28)

Under 1925, Cartoon:

"Music" (a column-head cartoon of a woman singing), The Cherwell, Nov. 7, 1925, p. 91, and after for several issues. (p. 93)

Under 1927, Short Story:

"The Tutor's Tale: A House of Gentlefolks, " in The New Decameron: The Fifth Day, edited by Hugh Chesterman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), pp. 101-106. (pp. 101-116)

Under 1929, Short Stories:

"The Tutor's Tale: Miss Runcible's Sunday Morning, An Episode in the History of Bright-Young People, in The New Decameron: Sixth Day, edited by Vivienne Dayrell (Mrs. Graham Greene). (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1929), pp. 165-176. (pp. 165-171)

A reasonably thorough search has revealed only one addition to this bibliography: one of Waugh's earliest cartoons at Oxford, "The Rag Regatta," The Isis, June 14, 1922, p. 9. This cartoon, a full column wide, some seven inches high, contains five separate sketches - including a "Lifeboat" with a sail advertising "SAVE YOU 1'. DROWN YOU 6D" - and is signed with Waugh's pseudonym, "Scaramel."

A few by-products of this search, however, items about Waugh, are worth noting. For example, according to the "Prize List, 1921" at Lancing, Waugh that year won both the prize for "English Verse" and one of two "Scarlyn-Wilson English Literature Prizes" (Lancing College Magazine, XV (February, 1922), 7). After Waugh left Lancing, his "Valete" entry summarized his career:

"E. A. St. J. Waugh - Entered Head's House, May '17; House Captain, May, '21; Editor of the Magazine, Sept., '21; President of the L.C.D.S., Sept., '21; Librarian, May, '21; School Certificate, August, '20; Higher Certificate, August, '21; House Colours for Swimming; Lce. Corporal in O.T.C.; Sixth Form; History Scholarship, to Hertford College, Oxford (Lancing College Magazine, XV (February 1922), 11).

As a recognized Old Boy he was mentioned in the annual "Oxford Letter" for 1922: 'Waugh is very busy, speaking at the Union, managing the business of the Oxford Fortnightly, and making witty remarks that some of his College fail to appreciate" (Lancing College Magazine, XV (December, 1922), 119); and again the following year: "Waugh is one of the ornaments of Oxford, a pillar of the 'Cherwell,' and the owner of a famous blue suit" (Lancing College Magazine, XVI (December, 1923), 126). The Oxford correspondent, alas, did not produce his letter during the next two years, but according to The Isis, January 21, 1925, p. 13, Waugh could have provided him with material: "Mr. Waugh, squatting savagely with a pet monkey, was noting the 'haughty incompetence of Mr. Scaife in a preposterous double-breasted jacket.' Mr. Waugh was the Thersites of modern Oxford. He delicately dipped his pen and (sic) venom and doled it out to all and sundry. No respector of persons, Mr. Waugh!" At Waugh's death the Lancing College Magazine (LlX, (Summer, 1966),58-60) printed an "In Memoriam" written by his old classmate, Mr. C.L. Chamberlin. A full-page photograph is tipped in between pp. 58 and 59, and the obituary is followed by a reprinting of the two editorials Waugh wrote for the Magazine back in 1921: "The Community Spirit" (pp. 60-61), and "The Youngest Generation" (p. 61).

BRIEF COMMENTS

Marston LaFrance, presently doing Waugh research in England, wrote EWN's editor about the Oxford Broom and "an ironic flick of fate that Waugh himself would have enjoyed." Professor LaFrance, who is a professor at Carleton University in Canada, wrote: "The fourth and final number, as you know, was incorporated in the Cherwell, and thus is readily available. I have spent hours and days trying to find the other three - not in the Bodleian, the B .M., not listed in any librarian: reference catalogue, not in the Oxford union, not in either Waugh's or Acton's colleges. I have run all over Oxford after these things. Finally, the librarian at Hertford took pity upon my wild-eyed appearance and began phoning some of the older dons about the city. The operation finally produced the only man in Oxford (so far as I know) who will even admit that the first three Brooms did exist: he had all three; two years ago he sold them to Blackwell's Antiquarian department. I left Hertford on the run for Blackwell's and there learned that all three numbers had been sold - for £60 - to the University of Victoria which, God help us, is back home in Canada on Vancouver Island."

The editor noticed in Books in Print that Waugh's first book, his study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, has been reprinted: Rossetti: His Life and Works, Folcroft Press, Box 182, Folcroft, Penna. 19032, $17.50. College and university libraries should have copies of this difficult-to-obtain book.

George Malcolm Cook, one of the younger English instructors at Nassau Community College, gave two final exam questions about Brideshead Revisited in his English Literature survey course. Both questions bring up-to-date relevancy into excellent use: 1. "Analyze any thematical aspects of Brideshead Revisited in reference to the following lyrics by Lennon and McCartney (which are identical thematically)." Here Mr. Cook printed the lyrics to "The Long and Winding Road" on the exam sheet. 2. "Analyze one of the Brideshead characters in reference to Lennon and McCartney's "Let It Be.'" The lyrics appeared on the exam paper. Although the EWN editor was unfamiliar with both songs, he was interested by the similar themes expounded in the lyrics. Mr. Cook noted that he received some excellent answers to the two questions.

Marston LaFrance identified the Mr. Matson mentioned in the Waugh letter (EWN, Spring 1970, p. 3) as Harold Matson, head of the American office of Waugh's agent, A.D. Peters. Further, Professor LaFrance wrote to Mr. Matson who could shed no light on the material supposedly sent to the Chicago Sun. Mr. Matson said there were no entries in Waugh's files relating to the matter in question. Bibliographers, however, might well be advised to search the 1946 issues of the Chicago Sun.

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). Single copy 90 cents. Check 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 Department, Nassau Community College, State University of New York, Garden City, New York 11530.