If one were to consider the authors who might have provided literary inspiration for Evelyn Waugh, perhaps the least likely candidate would be Oscar Wilde. Waugh had little admiration for any of the decadents, with the exception of Ronald Firbank, whose stylistic and structural innovations he praised highly in his youth(1) and, as he later admitted, used in his own early novels, particularly Vile Bodies;(2) however, Waugh borrowed only those satiric techniques which set Firbank apart from his contemporaries, qualifying the decadence and sentimentalism of his fin de siècle inheritance. Waugh was not pleased, in the late twenties, to see a resurgence of interest in the aesthetes. In 1929 he complained of this contemporary vogue for the nineties, as epitomized in "the great booby figure of Oscar Wilde," that "overdressed, pompous, snobbish, sentimental and vain" poseur who wrote "competent" plays but achieved an undeserved reputation for wit through paradox and epigram, mere "monkey-tricks of the intellect." For Waugh this revival of Wilde and his circle was the height of bogosity, a last attempt of "the amateurs and dilettanti to persuade themselves that they are cultured."(3) Even in the forties, when escape from a war-torn environment was most appealing to Waugh himself, he firmly rejected the cult of art-for-art's-sake, practised by such latter-day aesthetes as Cedric Lynne and Ambrose Silk. The homosexual Ambrose may sit, like Oscar and Aubrey before him, in the Cafe Royal, planning to resurrect an Ivory Tower, but Put Out More Flags is designed to prove the futility of his efforts and the truth of the Chinese epigram with which it begins: "a great injustice in the world can be drowned only by the sword."
Despite Waugh's disparagement of Wilde's person and art, it appeared almost certain to this reader, over a year ago, that Waugh had based his short story "Bella Fleace Gave a Party" directly on one of the amusing anecdotes with which Wilde regaled his friends. I first encountered the story of Wilde's "Aunt Jane" in Hesketh Pearson's biography of the Irish wit. Since the anecdote was, according to Pearson,(4) well-known to Wilde's circle - one of those successful off-the-cuff inventions he retold frequently - Waugh might possibly have heard it at Oxford from some relic of the nineties who still survived there in the mid-twenties. However, it seemed far more likely that Waugh's source was the same as Pearson's - the first published account of the tale, as given by W. Graham Robertson in his memoir Time Was, which came out in September, 1931,(5) just over a year before Waugh's short story.(6)
In the light of recent correspondence in The Times Literary Supplement, this theory now seems untenable. John Bowen first noted the striking similarity in the two stories and wondered, like myself, if Waugh had borrowed from Wilde or, if the anecdote was part of that "rich oral tradition of tall stories … characteristic of the Irish People … in the public domain, to be re-fashioned by any literary gentleman."(7) Martin D'Arcy replied with the surprising information that he was the direct source of Waugh's story (as Waugh himself had acknowledged in a letter written after "Bella Fleace" was published), having passed on to Waugh a tale told him about his great grand-aunt by a distant Irish relative.(8)
While it may be that Wilde and D'Arcy shared the same forgetful Aunt (a riddle for genealogists), I am inclined to share W. Graham Robertson's view that the lady was apocryphal, concurring with Bowen's suggestion that Waugh and Wilde mined independently the same rich lode of Irish folklore. Certainly the remarkable correspondence in their basic plots supports that contention, yet a close comparison of "Bella Fleace" with Wilde's "Aunt Jane" also reveals notable alterations and subtle differences in emphasis which, while they may in part be attributable to their different sources, nevertheless provide a revealing glimpse of two writers' distinctive - and characteristic - shaping of fundamentally similar material.
Robertson gives the following word-far-word account of the Wilde anecdote:
'Poor Aunt Jane was very old and very, very proud, and she lived all alone in a splendid, desolate old house in County Tipperary. No neighbors ever called on Aunt Jane and, had they done so, she would not have been pleased to see them. She would not have liked them to see the grass grown drives of the demesne, the house with its faded chintzes and suites of shuttered rooms, and herself, no longer a toast and beauty, no more a power in the county-side, but a lonely old woman who had outlived her day.
'And from year to year she sat alone in her twilight, knowing nothing of what passed in the world without. But one winter, even Aunt Jane be came aware of a stir in the air, a wave of excitement sweeping over the neighbourhood. The New people were coming into the New house on the hill and were going to give a great Ball, the like of which had never been seen. The Ryans were enormously rich and - "Ryans?" said Aunt Jane. "I don't know the Ryans. Where do they come from?" Then the blow fell. The Ryans came from nowhere in particular and were reported on good authority to be "in business."
'"But," said Aunt Jane, "what are the poor creatures thinking of? Who will go to their Ball?" "Everybody will go," Aunt Jane was assured. "Everybody has accepted. It will be a wonderful affair."
'When Aunt Jane fully realised this her wrath was terrible. This is what things had come to in the neighborhood then - and it was her fault. It had been for her to lead; she had brooded in her tent when she should have been up and doing battle. And then Aunt Jane made her great resolve.
'She would give a Ball - a Ball the like of which had never been imagined: she would re-enter Society and show how a grande dame of the old school could entertain. If the County had so far forgotten itself, she herself would rescue it from these impertinent interlopers.
'And instantly she set to work. The old house was repainted, re-furnished, the grounds replanted; the supper and the band were ordered from London and an army of waiters engaged. Everything should be of the best - there should be no question of cost. All should be paid for; Aunt Jane would devote the rest of her life to the paying; but now money was as nothing - she spent with both hands.
'At last the great night arrived. The demesne was lit for two miles with coloured lamps, the hall and staircase were gorgeous with flowers, the dancing-floor smooth and shining as a mirror.
'The bandsmen were in their places and bowed deeply as Aunt Jane, in a splendid gown and blazing with diamonds, descended in state and stood at the ballroom door.
'There she waited. Time went on, the footmen in the hall, the waiters in the supper-room began to look at each other, the band tuned up two or three times to show its zeal, but no guests arrived.
'And Aunt Jane, in her beautiful gown, waited at the ballroom door. Eleven - twelve - half-past twelve.
'Aunt Jane swept a deep curtsy to the band. "Pray go and have your supper," she said. "No one is coming."
'Then she went upstairs and died. That is to say, she never again spoke a word and was dead in three days. And not for some considerable time after her death was it discovered that Aunt Jane had quite forgotten to send out any invitations.'
Wilde's intention in creating this tale, as in so many of his other works, was to lead his listeners toward a conclusion which could then be cleverly replaced by a surprising yet logical alternative. Every detail reinforces the supposed theme of class conflict between the decaying gentry and the nouveau rlche. Until the final line, one is quite sure, like Aunt Jane, that the guests have deliberately boycotted her ball, shifting their allegiance to the up-start Ryans. The unmailed invitations are, nevertheless, a quite plausible alternative explanation, when one remembers Aunt Jane's advanced age.
Waugh's version, whatever its source, incorporates this and almost all the other details of Wilde's story, but certain significant changes in descriptive emphasis and plot make it clear that his main interest is the theme of the decaying, soon-to-be-supplanted gentry, rather than in the surprise ending per se. This apocryphal Irish Aunt provides him with a ready-made illustration of a subject he had already made his own in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. His Bella Fleace of Fleacetown is but another Colonel Blount of Doubting Hall, a pillar of King's Thursday or Anchorage House, fighting again that losing rearguard action against the forces of modern degeneracy.
To make this point Waugh stresses much more than Wilde the decay of the family house. Aunt Jane's "grass-grown drives" become Bella's sparsely cultivated kitchen garden, largely "run to rot, thorned bushes barren of edible fruit spreading everywhere among weedy flowers reverting rankly to type. The hot-houses have been draughty skeletons for ten years. The great gates set in their Georgian arch are permanently padlocked, the lodges are derelict, and the line of the main drive is only just discernible through the meadows. Access to the house is half a mile further up through a farm gate, along a track befouled by cattle" (102). Wilde includes a brief reference to "faded chintzes and suites of shuttered rooms" which must be repainted and refurbished for the party; Waugh devotes a paragraph to the rotten moulding, worm-eaten mahogany, and gaping sockets of Fleacetown's interior. In order to emphasize further that Fleacetown's condition is a widespread rather than an unique phenomenon, he mockingly adds that the roof is intact, making it "unusually habitable" (102) by comparison with other country homes in the Irish Free State. Casual references to houses burned out in the "troubles," their owners murdered in their own drives, update Wilde's Irish setting to the point at which the peculiarly Irish persecution of the gentry began.
Bella herself is made a much more obvious symbol of her class's decline than was Aunt Jane. Waugh dwells on her physical and mental deterioration: "She was over eighty, very untidy and very red; streaky grey hair was twisted behind her head into a horsy bun, wisps hung round her cheeks; her nose was prominent and blue veined; her eyes pale blue blank and mad" (104). Three times in the final scene, as Bella awaits her guests, Waugh draws the reader's attention to those "blank," "mad" eyes and in the page-long review of her ancient, respectable family, inserted early in the story, he stresses that the Fleaces' decline in fortune has been accompanied by an equally noticeable decline in mental stability. Association of the gentry with marked eccentricity is, of course, characteristic of Waugh; one recalls Colonel Blount, John Plant's father, or the entire Boot clan. Here, however, the insistence on Bella's madness also supplies what was lacking in Wilde's story - a specific reason for those forgotten invitations, which become, as a result, not simply a surprise, but a vivid illustration of Waugh's central theme.
In Waugh's fiction the gentry are subject not only to internal decay, but also to many powerful external enemies. The only major differences between Waugh's and Wilde's plot reflect the former's desire to reveal how those enemies have multiplied and flourished in the twentieth century. Aunt Jane is motivated to give her ball when she learns that the County has agreed to go to the Ryans, those "New" people in the "New" house with their business wealth. The Ryans have their equivalent - and more - in Waugh's story, but they play a quite different role. The American Lady Gordon and Lady Mockstock, the draper's daughter, are first notable, like Margot Best-Chetwynde, for desecrating their ancient country seats by installing such modern gewgaws as electric light and central heating. However, their vulgarity and "push" are most effectively conveyed by a typical Waugh touch: they and they alone appear at Bella's party, although she has deliberately omitted them from her list.
But Americans and draper's daughters do not complete the twentieth century list of undesirables. To those impertinent interlopers who wish to infiltrate and renovate the old order Waugh has added others who value it not at all or at best for the wrong reasons. He gives Bella such a person as her heir. Archie Banks, a "very distant cousin" (105), regards Bella and her home as museum pieces, valuing the past only as the source of a "quick buck" easily gained by converting his quaint experiences at Fleacetown into a Spectator short story. In Waugh's version his mercenary interest in her first editions prompts Bella to thwart him by selling them off and her decision to use the profits for a magnificent ball is rather the after-thought of an old woman who still loves parties done in style. This considerable alteration in the motivation for the ball gives Waugh's story added subtlety. Bella's enormously costly evening is not merely a deliberate effort to outdo her neighbours at their own game; it is a pathetic but nevertheless spirited and instinctive rejection of the meanness of mind and pocket which characterize the Archie Banks of the new world; it is a monetary reassertion of the grand manner, of magnificence for its own sake, which Waugh always considered one of the raisons d'etre of the country gentry. Maintaining this emphasis, he allows Bella, unlike Aunt Jane, to thoroughly enjoy her solitary but sumptuous supper and imported band before the uninvited guests precipitate her death.
In the other details of Bella's extravagance Waugh's story is remarkably like Wilde's. The banks of flowers, the shining ballroom floor, Bella's splendid gown, the bandsmen, waiters, and supper imported for the occasion are incorporated in both. Only Aunt Jane's blazing diamonds have disappeared. Bella, looking through her jewel box, finds that several generations of diminishing wealth have left her no heirlooms of such value. Again Waugh uses a minor incident to heighten the impression of general decline interrupted only by a momentary burst of splendour.
Set side by side, these two translations of an apocryphal tale provide a near-perfect illustration of the surface similarity yet fundamental disparity between Wilde and Waugh. Both are temperamentally attracted to and appreciative of the kind of situation which stresses the incongruous, ironic element in human experience, but while Wilde values the irony for its own sake or, more accurately, the art of expressing that irony neatly, in a few swift strokes, Waugh seeks to give it meaning within a broad social and historical framework. What a pity Waugh never knew he had transformed Aunt Jane into Bella Fleace! He would have thoroughly enjoyed his unwitting subversion of the "great booby's" approach to art and life.
NOTES
1. "Ronald Firbank," Life and Letters, II (March 1929), 191-196.
2. Julian Jebb, "The Art of Fiction XXX: Evelyn Waugh," Paris Review, VIII (Summer-Fall 1963), 77, 81.
3. "Let us Return to the Nineties But not to Oscar Wilde," Harper's Bazaar, III (November 1930), 98.
4. The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1946), 213.
5. Time Was (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1931), 133-134.
6. Harper's Bazaar (London), VII (December 1932), 12-13, 100-101. Reprinted in Mr. Loveday's Little Outing and Other Sad Stories (London: Chapman and Hall, 1936) and in Work Suspended and Other Stories Written Before The Second World War (London: Chapman and Hall, 1949), 99-112. All page references to the story are taken from the more easily obtainable Work Suspended text.
7. The Times Literary Supplement, August 4, 1972, 918.
8. The Times Literary Supplement, August 11, 1972, 945.
Just as Aristotle observed that a bearable drama really ought to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, the 1972 harvest of Waugh studies properly begins, ends, and at least features in mid-summer Robert Murray Davis. If aware Waugh scholars feel this coincidence augurs well for the crop as a whole I've no wish to blight their hopes: 1972 has been rather a vintage year. For an aperitif I would apologize to Anthony Newnham. His "Evelyn Waugh's Library," Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, n.s. 1 (March, 1970), 24-29, overlooked by the marginal competence behind the previous "Year's Work," reveals among other matters that Waugh had "fine sets" of Sir Thomas Browne, Landor, Disraeli, George Eliot, Surtees, Addison, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Dickens, James, "the Thornton Bronte," and, a bit oddly, no Wodehouse at all.
Robert M. Davis, ed., Modern British Short Novels (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1972) reprints Love Among the Ruins with eight other works which explore the wreckage of the Victorian-Edwardian golden age in the wake of World War I. The short introductory essay, "The Imagination of Defeat," fits the selections as securely as the bark fits its tree, and each text is followed by a brief comment on its author. To reveal in the pages of EWN that the section on Waugh is the longest of the nine might suggest an unbecoming smugness; hence I shall mention only that it stresses Waugh's belief "that Western civilization was in an advanced state of decay," that this obsession is reasonably grounded in the twelve-year-old Waugh's leaving home for Lancing amidst war-time austerities, and that the mature man is granted the intelligence to realize the society he desired "never existed in history nor ever will." Also included is an un-'improved' text of Firbank's Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, which should interest Waugh scholars. One could wish all such anthologies to be as decent as this one is.
Joseph Hynes, in "Varieties of Death Wish: Evelyn Waugh's Central Theme," Criticism, 14 (Winter, 1972), 65-77, clearly separates death wish from despair by quoting Guy Crouchback's confession in Unconditional Surrender (p.220). Death wish thus signifies the fact that Waugh's "main characters are filled with loathing for others' ideas of life. . . They wish to die to, or out of, what they find all around them, but they avoid despair by gripping something other than the present. The real differences among these protagonists lie in the kinds of alternatives they grasp; in their various means of coping with the moment even as they resist trusting or becoming one with it." And this approach leads to sound, reasonable argument. The Paul Pennyfeather character retires into some version of the past, while the Basil Seal character "resists placing any value on the present by hurling himself indiscriminately at all of it." One is led through the romantic bogs of Brideshead by at least as plausible a path as anyone else has found, and the essay concludes with five solid pages on Sword of Honour which show how "Guy becomes his father."
D. Paul Farr's excellent "Waugh's Conservative Stance: Defending 'The Standards of Civilization,'" Philological Quarterly, 51 (April, 1972), 471-84, follows logically from his 1970 essay, "The Edwardian Golden Age and Nostalgic Truth." The abundant evidence, drawn exclusively from the non-fiction, should persuade anyone that "Waugh firmly belongs to the fine tradition of humanism, with its emphasis on reason, individuality, order, craftsmanship, and respect for the heritage of high moral and social values." And for all those to whom this much would be a tract to the converted there is plenty more. Mr. Farr shows how strong a role Waugh's conservatism must have played in his conversion, and how Waugh - quite reasonably - "on the secular plane, prefers the English upper classes and believes in inequality, but on the religious plane, believes in equality." Also, he argues, Waugh "goes to great pains to make a clear distinction between his use of 'civilization' and his use of 'culture,'" the latter always the particular racial or national component, good insofar as it partakes of, and contributes to, the discipline, tradition and international character of the former. This essay should be recommended reading for all comedians who think Waugh is essentially a comedian, required reading for anyone unable to discern implicit positive norms in the comic novels.
In context with the above works, L. E. Sissman's "Evelyn Waugh: The Height of His Powers," Atlantic Monthly, 229 (March, 1972), 24, 26, like an anchovy in an ice-cream soda, suggests that incongruity has its own attractions. The height specified is neither Sword of Honour ("subjective, even paranoid"), nor even A Handful of Dust (on par with Decline and Fall and Pinfold), but Put Out More Flags. This is certainly a better choice than either "The Balance" or "Edward of Unique Achievement" would have been; moreover, one so seldom hears much of anything about this novel that it is refreshing to have a chap come on so strongly for it. The main title of the column which contains this essay is "Innocent Bystander"; and further deponent sayeth not.
Richard Gill's Happy Rural Seat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972) I've not yet seen, but according to Cyril Connolly's review (The Sunday Times, December 10, 1972) its subject is "The English Country House and the Literary Imagination," and the author "is at his very best on Evelyn Waugh."
John Whale, in "Myth Prints of Fleet Street," The Sunday Times, August 20, 1972, p. 12, states that the BBC planned to televise a version of Scoop - "still the best and truest novel about newspaper-men" - last autumn. If they succeeded, Waugh's cabling his scoop of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia to the Daily Mail in Latin to foil his competitors should have been included. "The paper's foreign desk sent him a sharp rebuke for using an impenetrable code, and put his prose on the spike. They learnt of the invasion when everyone else did." And if this seems impossible, even for journalists, it at least ought to have happened.
What ought not to have happened occurs in a chatty letter to the editor by John Bowen, "Literary Debts," TLS, 3675, August 4, 1972, p. 918. Aside from a jolly good hit at American graduate schools - bloody funny to anyone who has to get on professionally with some of the twits turned out by the British system - Mr. Bowen suggests that Waugh may have plagiarized "Bella Fleace Gave a Party" from either W. Graham Robertson or Oscar Wilde (Mr. Bowen's prose makes it difficult to specify). His fears are assuaged the following week, TLS, 3676, August 11, 1972, p. 945, by Martin D'Arcy, who was Waugh's source for this story; and Waugh - cantankerous, curmudgeonly, carnivorous - seems not to have been, alas, a plagiarist.
That he really harbored no such traits is the raison d'etre of two brief but fine reminiscences by Dom Hubert Van Zeller. These were written shortly after Waugh's death and have surfaced only during the past year: "An Appreciation of Evelyn Waugh," Downside Review, 84 (July, 1966), 285-7; "Evelyn Waugh," The Month, 36 (July-August, 1966), 69-71. Both pieces, written from the vantage ground of a thirty-years' friendship, stress Waugh's traditionalism and personal courage.
David Lodge, "The Arrogance of Evelyn Waugh," The Critic, 30 (May-June, 1972), 62-70, also a defense and explanation of the man, will interest casual readers but not Waugh scholars. His sources are principally Mr. Pinfold and Frances Donaldson, and though one of these is critically acceptable it has been exploited previously. He retells the standoff at White's between Waugh and Alan Brien, courtesy of Randolph Churchill - who really should have known better than to introduce anyone suffering from boredom to Mr. Brien, of all people. He quotes Harold Acton's "prancing faun" flourish, explains that Wormwood Scrubs is a prison, and concludes that Waugh's public image was the mask of a bored but decent man who valued his privacy. There is nothing at all wrong with this essay, but there is nothing at all new in it either.
Probably the year's greatest contribution to all Waugh scholars is Evelyn Waugh: A Checklist of Primary and Secondary Material, by Robert Murray Davis, Paul A. Doyle, Heinz Kosok, and Charles E. Linck, Jr. (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Company, 1972). This book is the first comprehensive listing of materials by and about Waugh ever published, and it has been sorely needed for years. Its 2107 items bring together all previous lists and include new material, all of it presented under fifteen general headings. No such book on an author of Waugh's stature will either include everything or be entirely free from errors, but I can personally vouch for the usefulness of this one. It belongs in every library holding modern English fiction, and anyone seriously interested in Waugh will find it an excellent investment.
Peter E. Firchow, "In Search of A Handful of Dust: The Literary Background of Evelyn Waugh's Novel," Journal of Modern Literature, 2 (Third Issue, 1971-2), 406-16, explores Waugh's echoes of Eliot and Tennyson and, for good measure, adds a dash of H. Rider Haggard and a pinch of Proust. It is interesting, ingenious, very well written, but I seem unconvinced by the argument. The case rests entirely upon internal evidence: do we know that Waugh read Jessie Weston? And if he did, are we to believe he took this rot as seriously as Eliot apparently did? Also, the parallels are spelled out in such detail as to imply unavoidably a structural dimension, and the remainder of Waugh's canon hardly suggests a mind which conceived its works in such fashion. Must we equate Todd with the Fisher King to appreciate the full resonance of the novel? The image of the walled city, real or unreal, seems endemic to Waugh's works, for example, and if so one should be wary of overloading one use of it with meanings which the others are unable to bear. This essay doth protest too much. But given this caveat most readers will still find it worthwhile - even those who believe that all such borrowings and adaptations belong, as the title implies, to the background of the finished work of art.
Robert Murray Davis, "The Loved One: Text and Context," Texas Quarterly, 15 (Winter, 1972), 100-107, offers several fringe benefits: that Helena grew by fits and starts over a five-year period, that in 1945 Waugh began "Charles Ryder's Schooldays" as a third-person narrative based on his own diaries and abandoned it after twenty pages, that for a year prior to The Loved One he contemplated selling Piers Court and buying a castle in Ireland, and best of all that one of the sources for The Loved One was Ray E. Slocum's Embalming Techniques - which ought to be the perfect Boxing-day gift for one's in-laws. Mr. Davis argues that, after the surfeit of publicity occasioned by Brideshead, Waugh gave The Loved One to Horizon partly because its readers were "as far removed from the audience of the Book-of-the-Month Club as he could get." The important textual variations between the Horizon and American editions, and between the Horizon and British editions, are given; and the fact that the British revision of the ending "emphasizes more clearly Dennis's personal triumph" is presented, correctly, as "a new element not only in the novel but in any Waugh novel to date." All of this makes for good reading, an appropriate conclusion for a good year of Waugh studies.
This is a continuation of the earlier checklists, published in Evelyn Waugh Newsletter (EWN), II,i; III,i; IV,i; V,i; and VI,i. It includes books and articles published since 1971, as well as some items omitted from the previous lists.
Bergonzi, Bernard, The Situation of the Novel (London, 1970), pp. 104-118, 125-128, 211-213.
Blayac, Alain, "Technique and Meaning in Scoop: Is Scoop a Modern Fairy-Tale?", EWN, VI,iii (1972), 1-8.
Bloom, Edward A., "Sacramentum Militiae: The Dynamics of Religious Satire," Studies in the Literary Imagination, V,ii (1972), 119-142.
Churchill, Thomas, "An Interview with Anthony Burgess," Malahat Review, 17 (Jan. 1971), 103-127.
Davis, Robert Murray, "Title and Theme in A Handful of Dust," EWN, VI,ii (1972), l.
Davis, Robert Murray, Paul A. Doyle, Heinz Kosok, Charles E. Linck, Jr., Evelyn Waugh: A Checklist of Primary and Secondary Material (Troy, New York: Whitston, 1972).
Edwards, A.S.G., and J.D. O'Connell, "Waugh's Letters to John Betjeman," EWN, VI,ii (1972), 2-3.
Farr, D. Paul, "Waugh's Conservative Stance: Defending 'The Standards of Civilization'," Philological Quarterly, LI,ii (1972), 471-484.
Firchow, Peter E., "In Search of A Handful of Dust: The Literary Background of Evelyn Waugh's Novel," Journal of Modern Literature, II,iii (1971-1972), 406-416.
Friedmann, Thomas, "Decline and Fall and the Satirist's Responsibility," EWN, VI,ii (1972), 3-8.
Gallagher, D.S., "Pinfold Unfolded," EWN, VI,i (1972), 1-2.
Gribble, Thomas A., "Some New Waugh Bibliography," EWN, VI,ii (1972), 8-10.
Hoskins, Katharine Bail, Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War, (Austin and London: Univ. of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 31-35.
Hynes, Joseph, "Varieties of Death Wish: Evelyn Waugh's Central Theme," Criticism, XIV,i (1972), 65-77.
Karl, Frederick R., A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel, rev. and enlarged ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972).
LaFrance, Marston, "The Year's Work in Waugh Studies," EWN, VI,i (1972), 2-6.
Mahon, John W., "Charles Ryder and Evelyn Waugh," EWN, VI,i (1972), 2-3.
Mattson, Francis O., "Evelyn Waugh in the Berg Collection," EWN, VI,ii (1972), 2.
Mattson, Francis O., "Man the Exile," EWN, VI,iii (1972), 8-9
Mattson, Francis O., "Waugh's Mulled Claret," EWN, VI,iii (1972), 9.
Newnham, Anthony, "Evelyn Waugh's Library," Literary Chronicle of the University of Texas, N.S. I (1970), 25-29.
Nichols, James W., Insinuation: The Tactics of English Satire (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971).
Paul, Martin T., "The Comic-Romantic Hero in Eight Novels of Evelyn Waugh," Dissertation Abstracts International, XXX (1969), 288 A (Wis.).
Ulanov, Barry, "The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh," in: Melvin J. Friedman (ed.), The Vision Obscured: Perceptions of Some Twentieth-Century Catholic Novelists (New York:: Fordham U.P., 1970), pp. 79-93.
Van Zeller, Dom Hubert, "An Appreciation of Evelyn Waugh," Downside Review, 84 (July 1966), 285-287.
Weinkauf, Mary, "The God Figure in Dystopian Fiction," Riverside Quarterly, IV,iv (1971), 266-271.
The two letters which follow should interest readers of EWN. The first by Waugh, is written to his friend Patrick Balfour, with whom he was once a war correspondent in Ethiopia. The second, about Waugh, is by his friend Nancy Mitford.
December 5th 1959
Dear Patrick,
How very nice of you to send me your book on America. Had it come earlier I would have tried to convey my thanks in print, but I see that other reviewers are alive to its excellence. I have read, slowly and appreciatingly, up to the departure from Texas and look forward to a happy evening finishing it. You have seen a great deal more of America than I ever saw, and you have sharper eyes. I congratulate you.
Was it not in Baltimore that the ladies squatted on the pavement to protect it from concrete? Perhaps it is a national custom.
The version of the burning of Washington I prefer is: 'By Jove, did we? Never knew we caught the fellow.'
I look forward greatly to your dining with me at the Hyde Park Hotel on Tuesday 15th. I have asked no one else. If Joan Rayner is in London she would make a good fourth if you cared to bring her.
Do you remember this writing paper?(1)
Yours ever, Evelyn
Dear Mr. Heath,
One of the clues to Evelyn's strange nature is his love of teasing. I think - as with Voltaire, G.B.S., Bertrand Russell and many another, this trait is not taken enough into consideration.
Then you must remember he was a novelist, in other words a story teller. In his early and best novels I don't think he gave a thought to religion or morals - he was out to amuse and to épater.
He was the least logical person who ever lived. An example - he asked me, a Protestant, and not a very practising one at that, to be his daughter's godmother.
He loved to shock people - part of his love of teasing. Some people have a love of the macabre - not easy to know why.
He never retired from the world - he used to go to London and see his friends[;] he came here (to Paris) and he travelled. In the country he saw those neighbours whom he liked. He had a social nature but his dislikes were strong and latterly he took pains only to see people whom he liked. It amused him to project a picture of himself as an old bear in its den but it did not have much reality.
Yours sincerely,
Nancy Mitford
NOTE
1. The writing paper is headed: "From Mr. Evelyn Waugh, Ethiopia." Above this is an engraving of a heavily-laden banquet table. To the left is a fasces and to the right is an Ethiopian lion. The letter is still in Lord Kinross's possession.
D.S. Gallagher of James Cook University of North Queensland, who is well-known to EWN readers for some brilliant bibliographic investigations, has discovered a hitherto unrecorded Waugh letter to the editor by following up a clue in Alan Brien's "Permission to Speak..."
Evelyn Waugh, "Self-denial," Truth, October 15, 1954, p. 1729. Response to anonymous Profile: "Waugh Among the Ruins," Truth, October 8, 1954, pp. 1242-1243.
Gallagher observes that the author of the anonymous "Profile" appears to have been Alan Brien. His "Permission to Speak, Captain?" Spectator, CCXVI (April 15, 1966), 463 contains the following sentence: "My mind was packed with information I had laid in for my profile."
Gallagher notes that Truth was a London journal of comment which ceased publication around 1957. In his letter Waugh asserts that, contrary to the statement made in the "Profile," his home is not open to visits by the paying public.
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While doing some research on Conradiana, I consulted Ehrsam's bibliography of Conrad (Scarecrow Press) and saw Waugh's name listed under an article entitled "Conrad's Place and Rank in English Letters."
A Polish weekly paper, published in London, sent out a questionnaire asking a number of prominent English writers two questions about Conrad: "What do you believe to be his permanent place and rank in English letters?" and 2, whether "you detect in Conrad's work any oddity, eroticism and strangeness (of course, against the background of English literary tradition), and if so, do you attribute it to his Polish origin?"
Waugh replied: "In a democracy a 'permanent place in literature' means merely a place in the prescribed, necessary reading of students of literature in State institutions of education. I am confident that Conrad will retain this place. I do not, myself, read him often or with any great enjoyment." This quote is found in Wiadomosci, IV (10 Lipca 1949), 3. (PAD)
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EWN has seen some specimen pages of an extremely well-printed and illustrated volume, To the War with Waugh, a memoir by John St. John, to be published this Spring. To the War with Waugh will be published in a limited and signed edition of 600 copies at £5.25 cloth, £25 full leather binding, plus 30p surface bookpost, copies available from The Whittington Press, BCM-Whittington, London WCIV 6XX.
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, September, and December (Spring, Autumn, and Winter numbers). Subscription rate for libraries and interested individuals: $2.50 a year (£1.10p in England). Single copy 80 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.
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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) |