Evelyn Waugh tells us in his autobiography that as a small boy he wrote stories modelled on the worst of his reading rather than on the classics and that a bit later he wrote "a deplorable poem" emulating Newman's Dream of Gerontius.(1) By the time he was a young man he was prepared to challenge comparison with some of the most famous passages in literature, having sharpened his craft into a hilariously effective instrument. A few examples illustrate his technique.
In The Merchant of Venice (III, i, 61 ff.) Shakespeare gave Shylock a dignified defense of his position as a Jew.
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
In Decline and Fall Waugh gives Margot Beste-Chetwynde's Negro lover "Chokey" a similar apology, with Shylock in the background.
"You folks all think the colored man hasn't got a soul. Any thing's good enough for the poor colored man. Beat him; put him in chains; load him with burdens … But all the time that poor colored man has a soul same as you have. Don't he breathe the same as you? don't he eat and drink? Don't he love Shakespeare and cathedrals and the paintings of the old masters same as you? Isn't he just asking for your love and help to raise him from the servitude into which your fore-fathers plunged him? Oh, say, white folks, why don't you stretch out a helping hand to the poor colored man, that's as good as you are, if you'll only let him be?"(2)
Whereas spectators have been known to weep at the pathos of Shylock's position, Lady Circumference responds with a glitter in her eye when Chokey refers to the beatings, chains, and burdens that the white man has inflicted on the black. Ironically, Chokey attributes to the white folks present a love of traditional literature, architecture, and art that they do not evidence.
One of Walter Pater's most respected criticisms in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance is descriptive of Leonardo's La Gioconda. In The Critic as Artist Oscar Wilde perversely considered the criticism superior to the painting, and W. B. Yeats introduced his Oxford Book of Modern Verse with Pater's prose passage arranged on the page like poetry.
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself. all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
Waugh borrows the most famous prose ever written about the most famous portrait ever painted and adapts it to Captain Grimes -- a white slaver, a bigamist, and a shameless deviate. At first one laughs at the juxtaposition.
Paul knew that Grimes was not dead. Lord Tangent was dead; Mr. Prendergast was dead; the time would even come for Paul Pennyfeather; but Grimes, Paul at last realized, was of the immortals. He was a life force. Sentenced to death in Flanders, he popped up in Wales; drowned in Wales, he emerged in South America; engulfed in the dark mystery of Egdon Mire, he would rise again somewhere at some time, shaking from his limbs the musty integuments of the tomb. Surely he had followed in the Bacchic train of distant Arcady, and played on the reeds of myth by forgotten streams, and taught the childish satyrs the art of love? Had he not suffered unscathed the fearful dooms of all the offended gods of all the histories, fire, brimstone, and yawning earthquakes, plague and pestilence? Had he not stood, like the Pompeian sentry, while the Citadels of the Plain fell to ruin about his ears? Had he not, like some grease-caked Channel swimmer, breasted the waves of the Deluge? Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered the waters? (pp. 401-2)
The passage rewards scrutiny, from the staccato declaratives in the beginning to the sustained interrogations at the end. Resemblances to Pater intensify the differences between the lady and the captain, the eternal feminine and the other. If the lady is older than the rocks, the captain operated before there was light. If the lady was present in Lacedaemon, Jerusalem, and Troy, the captain survived in Flanders, Wales, South America, Arcady, Sodom, and Gomorrah. Both writers evoke the Christian, Hebraic, and Hellenic traditions of the West - as did Milton in "Lycidas" and Browning in "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" - but Waugh's evocation is in a new key and resounds with a staggeringly different resonance. The juxtaposition of the classic and its parody adds a textural dimension integral to Waugh's strategy.
Speculation as to the nature of man is perhaps as old as literature itself. "What is man," the Psalmist asked of his Creator, "that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor" (Psalm 8:4-5). Shakespeare echoed the Psalmist in Hamlet (II, ii, 315 ff.), a play that T. S. Eliot considered "the Mona Lisa of literature."
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
Waugh assigns his parody of Elizabethan prose to Professor Silenus, cinema producer and mad architect, who replaces the finest Tudor manor house in England with a contemporary square box that is monstrously vulgar.
"What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of this biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!" (p. 330)
In "Shakespeherian rag," man is neither the "paragon of animals" nor "a little lower than the angels," as he had been in the chain of being of a former religious age and of a later humanist one. Nor, though we hear Darwinian and Hegelian undertones, is man's status as high even as that granted him by nineteenth-century thought. Nor is "his little stage" as broad as the one he played on in The Tempest. The timbered Tudor architecture, bulldozed to make way for the ferro concrete and aluminum of contemporary domestic, functions after the manner of montage in photography and like the passage from Hamlet, to underscore the madness of the new. The parody was written, one may note, decades before cinema producer Andy Warhol expressed the sincere desire to be a machine.
Other passages invite attention. When St. John the Divine was in prison on the island of Patmos, an angel appeared to him in a vision with the message transmitted to us in the Apocalypse or Book of Revelation. In the prison that harbors Paul Pennyfeather, his walking companion is a mystical homicide who also has visions and receives messages from an angel. These latter-day messages are transmitted not in the beauties of seventeenth-century diction but in a "curious blend of cockney and Biblical English" (p. 382).
Again, in his long disquisition on the horrors of marriage, Captain Grimes says, "Our life is lived between two homes. We emerge for a little into the light, and then the front door closes" (p. 313). Reading the passage, one thinks of Matthew Arnold's "wandering between two worlds" ("Grande Chartreuse," xv) and The Waste Land's "between two lives" (1. 218), as well as the "interval," "the short day," the "awful brevity," "the sentence of death" that Pater assigns men in the "Conclusion" to his Renaissance. But especially one thinks of Bede's Ecclesiastical History (II, xiii):
Such, a King, seems to me the present life of men on earth, in comparison with that time which to us is uncertain, as if when on a winter's night you sit feasting with your ealdormen and thegns - a single sparrow should fly swiftly into the hall, and coming in at one door, instantly fly out through another. In that time in which it is indoors it is indeed not touched by the fury of the winter, but yet, this smallest space of calmness being passed almost in a flash, from winter going into winter again, it is lost to your eyes. Somewhat like this appears the life of man.
Examples abound. Both the station master (pp. 279 & 295) and Shakespeare's Fluellen (Henry V, III, ii) are Welsh and disputatious and punctuate outrageous syntax with "look you's." Sir Solomon Philbrick and the creator of Baron Munchausen dote irrationally on gems and tall tales. Prendy's confession of his sudden "doubts" and loss of faith (p. 249) reverse St. Paul's equally sudden conversion to Christianity (Acts 9:1-19).
Sir Humphrey Maltravers' story of his rise from the slums to the Ministry of Transportation (p. 339) and beyond (not untinged with corruption) compares well with Samuel Smiles' Self Help, the preposterous book about success that the prison chaplain lends to Captain Grimes (p. 394). The description of Paul as a "well conducted young man" (p. 331) improves when placed beside Newman's "Definition of a Gentleman." Grimes's statement that public schools "may kick you out, but they never let you down" (p. 245) is made against a backdrop of the Salvation Army. Readers familiar with the literature of education, prison reform, and art criticism (especially Ruskin's) will find their bibles turned inside out by Dr. Fagan, Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, and Professor Silenus.
One more example is emphatically pertinent because of the title Waugh chose for his novel. Otto Silenus finds life analogous to the horizontal big wheel at Luna Park in Paris (pp. 409 ff.). In Religio Medici (I, xvii) Sir Thomas Browne has found life analogous to a vertical Circle.
For the lives, not only of men, but of Commonwealths, and the whole World, run not upon an Helix that still enlargeth; but on a Circle, where arriving to their Meridian, they decline in obscurity, and fall under the Horizon again.
Evelyn Waugh is employing in this novel one of the techniques of Eliot's Waste Land, the summoning of the past by allusion to a masterpiece and the exploitation of the grand manner of the masterpiece to clothe some shocking up-to-the-minute material. Eliot wrenches the reader from the lovely eighteenth-century woman who stopped to folly (l. 253) to the sordid typist with her glands and gramophone. Waugh wrenches us from Shylock to Chokey, from Lady Lisa to Captain Grimes, from St. John the Divine to the homicidal prisoner, from Hamlet to Professor Silenus. The parallels in the prose and the contrasts in the content heighten and magnify the absurdity.
The device is especially appropriate in this novel, because Decline and Fall is a prose Waste Land. In the manner of James Joyce commenting on Samuel Beckett, both Eliot and Waugh say, "This is a world without morals, orthodoxy, tradition, or inherited culture. Just look at it! Look also at what it replaces!" This is what our age has done to what Matthew Arnold called "the best that has been known and thought in the world." "Boy Scout honor" (p. 391) and ideals professed at Oxford (p. 232) unfit Paul for survival in the contemporary world. He is sent down from Oxford like a lamb that has fallen among wolves. After an interval with modern reality among the titles and the sonorously hyphenated names, he returns to Oxford (where his companions are surnamed with monosyllables) and to approval of the abandoned orthodoxy that long ago condemned a bishop in Bithynia (p. 413) and suppressed ascetic Ebionites (p. 416) for heresy and ritual that appear but mildly naughty beside the codes and mores of Margot and her set. Laugh though we may, Decline and Fall is not only a prose Waste Land but a contemporary Past and Present, the past being especially present in the parodies of literary masterpieces familiar to the informed reader. The book is concerned both in style and substance with the decline and fall of the British empire, its morals, and its inheritance.
NOTES
1. A Little Learning. Boston: 1964, p. 62 & p. 93.
2. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust and Decline and Fall. New York: Dell,1970, pp. 293-4. Subsequent quotes from the novel are parenthesized in the text.
3. Had he wished, Waugh could have appended impressive source notes comparable to those of The Waste Land.
The first Waugh books translated into Italian and published in Italy by the firm of Bompiani (Milan) were Brideshead Revisited (1948) and The Loved One (1949). The appearance of A Handful of Dust, Put Out More Flags, and Scoop soon followed. After initial interest, Waugh's favor with the Italian reading public began to decline; nevertheless, his books continued to be translated. A total of thirteen Waugh books have appeared. including Amore Tra Le Ravine e altri Racconti (comprising Love Among the Ruins, Scott-King's Modern Europe, Work Suspended, Cruise, Incident in Azania, etc.).
A short time before Waugh's death in 1966, his name again attracted the Italian public when Tony Richardson's film version of The Loved One reached the screen and proved successful.
Today, however, his writings are known primarily by the elite. Brideshead Revisited and Scoop have appeared in several printings, but the most popular of his works is Il caro estinto (The Loved One). Waugh's irony is difficult to grasp and often too subtle for many people. Waugh's literary appeal in my country is also handicapped by the fact that the society of which he writes is far different from that of Italy; not only are British customs different but also the humor.
In 1966 the Senate House Library at the University of London acquired a first edition of Waugh's Rossetti: His Life and Works (London: Duckworth, 1928). In the flyleaf is the pencilled inscription, "Subject of a quarrel with Bruce Richardson, T.L.S. Papa thought the author was a young woman." Immediately below, in the hand of the library's former chief cataloguer, is the inscription, "This volume formerly belonged to T. Sturge Moore." But was T. Sturge Moore the "Papa" who "thought the author was a young woman"? Undoubtedly, for according to Moore's daughter Riette, the inscription is in the hand of her brother Daniel. In the rear of the book there are pencilled notations comparing Rossetti's "conscision" [sic] to the "bell-like fulness of his great namesake's best lines" and claiming that his "incomparable sonnets" rival the best in the Fleurs du Mal. These notations are in T. Sturge Moore's own handwriting.(1)
Unquestionably, then, Moore wrote the well-known and ill-starred review of Rossetti which appeared in T.L.S. (May 10, 1928), p. 341. Moore refers to the author as "Miss Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti's latest biographer," and concludes, in classic reviewer's jargon, "Her mental eye is slightly astigmatic, but she is never tedious." Little guessing the horrors which lay in wait for him the following week, Moore plunges on to seal his fate: "Miss Waugh approaches the "squalid" Rossetti like some dainty Miss of the sixties bringing the Italian organ-grinder a penny, merciless in spite of the best intentions."
On May 17 Waugh replied crisply, "My Christian name, I know, is occasionally regarded by people of limited social experience as belonging exclusively to one or other sex … surely some … investigation might in merest courtesy have been taken before your reviewer tumbled into print …" Furthermore, says Waugh, he never applied the word "squalid" to Rossetti.
Waugh's interest in Rossetti dates back to at least 1926 when his Oxford friend Alastair Graham, in search of copy for his printing-press, published Waugh's rather mediocre essay, P.R.B.: An Essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1847-54. In later life Waugh considered himself an authority on the Pre-Raphaelites and wrote a number of articles on Rossetti. His library, now at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, is filled with large Victorian folios on painting and architecture and bulky inquiries into the nature of nineteenth-century art. Extensive marginalia in several volumes show that a certain amount of research went into Rossetti. There is at the same time a substantial amount of borrowing from Holman-Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
In 1960 Waugh described Rossetti to A.D. Peters, his literary agent, as "this deplorable work." But he was clearly very proud of it in 1928. Neatly bound following the manuscript, which is also at Texas, there is a series of reviews and letters; these show that the young author was very conscious of his public. Moore's article comes first, followed by a congratulatory letter from Rebecca West, who says she has read both the book and the resulting correspondence with appreciation and amusement. According to her, Waugh's poise and deportment in each had been admirable. Next come reviews by Arnold Whitredge, J.C. Squire, and John Drinkwater, all favourable. Following these there is an urbane communication from Harold Acton, impressed by the maturity of Waugh's mental powers and pleased that Waugh plans to dedicate Decline and Fall to him. He warns that Peter Quennell tried to prejudice him against Rossetti. Immediately following is Quennell's lukewarm review and next is a letter from Quennell himself, expressing the hope that he and Waugh can avoid anything so silly as an outright quarrel. Two pages of lesser notices follow.
Despite its manifest imperfections, Moore's review is the best of the lot; indeed, it contains more than a grain of truth. As early as Rossetti, Waugh's "mental eye" was in fact assuming the "astigmatic" cast which was later to inform his novels. This astigmatism, if such it is, consists of a perspective on the Reformation which is the inverse of the schoolroom version: the opinion that instead of clarifying English history, the Reformation ruined it; the idea that cultural excellence is at base theological excellence and that right theology died with the Tudors. In such a view, what is "valid" and "essential" is pre-Reformation insofar as it exists in history. For Waugh. post-Reformation English history consists of an increasingly enfeebled sequence of attempts to materially duplicate a "lost" spiritual dimension.
Given such a perspective (and Waugh had it years before his conversion in 1930) it is hard to see how he could regard the neo-feudal Rossetti as anything but degenerate. It is doubtful that Waugh even had the "best intentions" towards Rossetti which Moore imputes to him. While it is true, as Waugh claims, that he does not actually use the word "squalid" of Rossetti, certain scenes are in themselves squalid - for example, the macabre episode in which Rossetti recovers his worm-eaten manuscript from its resting-place against the cheek of Elizabeth Siddal, dead seven years, and then works the contents up into the successful "House of Life."
For Waugh the amazing thing about Rossetti was that given his shabby morals and his interest in second-hand medievalism, he could still produce something so effective as Beata Beatrix. Through Rossetti Waugh attacks those who find more pleasure in longing for the past than in the past itself, those who cultivate a goal the beauty of which depends precisely on its inaccessibility. For Waugh the essential past was not inaccessible; Rossetti could have recovered it at any time he chose by rejoining the Church which his father had repudiated. But in the end Rossetti chose to revel in his longing rather than to transcend it. There is something perverse in Rossetti's constantly aroused yet intentionally thwarted desire, and Waugh condemns Rossetti for it: "There was fatally lacking in him that essential rectitude that underlies the serenity of all really great art … There is a spiritual inadequacy, a sense of ill-organization about all that he did" (pp. 226-227). Rossetti's response to the past was not spiritual but picturesque and self-indulgent: "It is this insistence on the picturesque that divides, though rather uncertainly, the mystical from the romantic habit of mind" (p. 52).
Waugh was not, as Moore supposed, a "dainty Miss of the sixties." Confronted by the glaring example of the "romantic" Rossetti, he was already moving towards the "mystical," an allegiance which he formalized in 1930 after his first, excessively romantic marriage failed. Together with the "astigmatic" vision discerned by Moore, the tension between the "romantic" and the "mystical" shapes the entire course of Waugh's fiction.
NOTE
1. Identification by Joan Gibbs, Paleography Room, Senate House Library, University of London.
Reader Chester Sullivan (EWN, Spring 1969) asked about the kingfisher image in Chapter 7 of Brideshead. The same image struck me as provocative when I first encountered it. It is my feeling that Waugh employs "profane" imagery to convey a "sacred" meaning throughout that novel. This process is especially evident in what appears to be the sudden and unconnected metaphor of the "bluebird" which becomes a "kingfisher" and is bafflingly associated with Julia.
As Lady Marchmain said of other animal imagery located in Christian tradition: "It's all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side of religion." I suggest that the following paragraph, which can be found in Charles Swainson, The Folk Lore and Provincial Names of British Birds (London: Elliot Stock, 1886, p. 105), may help to make clear the pertinence of the kingfisher image in Brideshead:
In the neighbourhood of Metz the kingfisher is called the "blue bird", and the following legend is narrated of it. After Noah had despatched the dove from the ark he caught the blue bird, saying, "At any rate you will not be afraid of the waters, as you are no stranger to them; so take wing and see if the earth is visible." Day was just about to dawn as she departed, and she had hardly left the shelter of the ark when such a tremendous storm came on that, to avoid being dashed into the waves, she flew directly heavenwards. For months had her wings been at rest, so she was fresh and vigorous, and rose so quickly that she soon came to the blue ether, into which she dashed unhesitatingly. And with what result? That her plumage, once a sober grey, became a shining, brilliant azure! Higher and higher she flew, till at last the sun began to rise beneath her; and, unable to resist the attraction of seeing it when close at hand, she turned downwards. But the nearer she approached the greater became the heat, till before long her breast feathers began to be scorched by the blaze. This made her retrace her flight towards the earth, in order to quench the smouldering flame in the waters with which it was covered. After having enjoyed several refreshing dips she remembered her errand, but alas! the ark was nowhere to be seen. In fact, during her absence the dove had returned with the olive leaf, and then the ark, driven hither and thither by the storm, had grounded on Mount Ararat, and Noah had broken it up, intending to build a house out of the materials with which it was constructed. Whereupon the bluebird, seeing nothing, uttered shrill cries, calling for her master, but all in vain. And so, even to this day, you may see her flying along the river banks and looking for the ark or for some of its remains; so too, even to this day, you may see, reflected in her upper plumage, the azure of the celestial blue, while her breast still flames with fiery red from her imprudence in approaching the sun.
Michael Davie's recent edition of the Waugh diaries must be regarded as an event of the utmost importance for students of Waugh's work and period. While it is true that one might have hoped for a more scholarly format than eight instalments of excerpts in a Sunday magazine, it is likely that the Observer's series has the advantage of a far larger readership than any hard cover edition could have achieved. Within the limits of legibility and libel, Mr. Davie has done an exceptionally good job of transcription and annotation. He includes much, but by no means all of what is worth preserving; the photographs which he has assembled are delightful; his devastating thumbnail sketches of the diaries' dramatis personae are amusing and, to say the least. informative.
Public reaction to Waugh's diaries varied from disappointment and disapproval to admiration. To these responses I should like to add Waugh's own opinion of his prowess as a diarist. Waugh's comment appears in the manuscript version of A Little Learning, Chapter Two, which begins as follows:
My memory is not much stimulated by the diaries which I kept off and on from the age of seven until the end of the Second World War. ... I can only write unselfconsciously when I am trying to write formally, and lack the spirit to confide in a second self on paper. Not mine the unstudied effusion of private hopes and despairs; I seek in writing to construct an extraneous object - a novel, an essay, a biography (and, I hope, an autobiography) - to perform a literary task imposing its own firm conditions. Only in adolescence, during my last years at school and again from June 1924 to September 1926 when I was, it seemed, stagnating, did I write a diary with any candour and completeness. In times of change and high excitement, such as my years at the university and the whole decade of the 1930's I was too active and dissipated to pause and make a note. Of other periods I have intermittent chronicles of events; they serve as a source of names and dates but would not bear transcription.
… There are those, I have heard say, who fall asleep to the sound of their own voices dictating into a machine their fleeting impressions and opinions of the day. Others, every morning before they open their letters or newspapers sit down to compose a polished literary account of yesterday. They aspire to posthumous fame a century hence when their papers, entrusted to the British Museum, are delivered to editors and annotators. If posterity proves to be illiterate, they will have wasted time and talent. I lack the art and ambition of the diarist and must resort to a memory which, alas, has proved more retentive of pain than pleasure. The anecdotes that come most readily to my mind are those that it would be most ill-natured to publish.
Those of us who have enjoyed Waugh's diaries can be grateful that Waugh found the time "to pause and make a note" as often as he did, and that he did not confine himself strictly to "private hopes and despairs." Despite Waugh's disclaimer - which after all he never printed - his diaries do indeed "bear transcription." However, it is probably true that Waugh lacked "the art and ambition of the diarist," and it is even likely that in many ways Waugh's diaries are less biographically relevant than his novels.
One of the few variants introduced in the New Uniform Edition of Black Mischief is the substitution of "West" for "North" as the location of Basil Seal's parliamentary constituency, which he resigned after a five-day party with the Trumpingtons and Peter Pastmaster. (New Uniform Edition, Chapman and Hall, 1962, p. 74; Uniform Edition, Chapman and Hall, 1948, p. 69.) The most obvious explanation for the change is that, in the interest of accuracy, Waugh restored a hint about a real situation and that the original reading was a mis-direction for the purpose of stirring up memories of a recent and painful situation.
Randolph Churchill's autobiography, Twenty-One Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), provides evidence to support this assumption. In mid-1930 - Churchill is consistently vague about dates - Brendan Bracken induced Churchill to accompany him and "Charlie Baillie-Hamilton and his beautiful exotic-looking wife Wanda" to Baillie-Hamilton's constituency in Bath. In order to enable Churchill to return to Oxford on time, Bracken hoaxed the Baillie-Hamiltons to return to London, causing them to miss an important meeting. The result, Churchill reports, was that "He got into terrible trouble with his constituents, which culminated when Wanda in a hilarious moment threw a bun in a playful fashion at the Mayor of Bath. After this Charlie decided to abandon his political career!" (p. 104).
Basil's visit was far more violent than Baillie-Hamilton's, but at least one incident is based on reality: Lady Seal's catalogue of Basil's disreputable acts and associates includes "... Sonia Trumpington threw it at the mayor ..." (New Uniform Edition. p. 85; Uniform Edition, pp. 79-80). In this as in so many other instances, one finds that Waugh's fantasy had a very solid basis and that, by indirection as well as exaggeration, he made the bald incident fit into the fabric of his world.
John St. John's limited edition of To the War with Waugh (reviewed in the last issue of EWN) is now out of print. L.C. Randle, director of The Whittington Press, reports, however, that Leo Cooper Ltd. (192 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2) will be issuing a trade edition early in 1974. We note further that in its current circular the firm of Richard Abel Bookseller Inc. (18700 N.W. Walker Road. Beaverton, Oregon 97005) is advertising copies of this book for $15
A shortened version of the Observer's excerpts from Waugh's private diaries appeared in the September 1973 issue of Esquire, pp. 77-88, 190, 192, 194-202.
Francis O. Mattson's note on "Waugh's Mulled Claret" reprints Waugh's recipes as of 1950 for the instruction of those who wish to follow Charles Ryder's example in Brideshead Revisited. Purists may, however, prefer to follow the slightly different, spicier, and more economical version found in Waugh's "Old-Fashioned Drinks," Daily Express, 21 Dec. 1928, p. 5. (Also included is a recipe for Rum Punch.)
Among the drinks that Waugh lists as "far more fun to make than cocktails" is
"mulled claret, a drink very rarely found outside country houses and university towns. Every really sound butler and college steward has his own secret about this, but one of the best recipes is the following: -
Mix in a large bowl, that can be heated over the fire, in the following proportions and in quantity according to the tastes of your guests: two bottles of claret or burgundy; a flagon of Australian burgundy does admirably; it has the necessary body and the spices hide its slightly crude taste. Quarter of a bottle of brandy and quarter of a bottle of orange curacao, a pint of water, an orange stuck with cloves, several sticks of cinnamon, a grated nutmeg, and a port glass full of essence of ginger.
Keep the mixture covered and simmering for half an hour, adding the water gradually. Serve through a strainer and drink hot."
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 Wuppertal) | |
| Charles E. Linck, Jr. (East Texas State University) |